for the review. I had forgotten about Tad Williams as I have been doing other things for a while. This will stimulate me to go out and catch up. Great to see well-written reviews on/.
Crush.
Re:Scaling and physical limits
on
RNA Computer
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· Score: 1
I'm glad it's not just my lab that thinks that. Sighs of distress are heaved whenever she puts a trendy "biocomputing" spin on things. When you say they wouldn't be able to solve NP-hard problems are you implying that they could possibly solve non-hard problems?
OK, I'll stay in touch with you on this thread. My background is evolutionary biology and programming. The idea actually orginally came up because of the irritation a few of us had with exchanging diagrams as email attachments or else making horrible ascii diagrams in emacs.
Regards
Crush.
Re:This could get really complicated...
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 1
I think it's an interesting idea. But I think that there would be practical problems running it: there's a lot of error in living systems, they mutate a lot, they operate a lot by random diffusion and stochastic processes. They survive mostly through massive redundancies. They're slow compared to electronic computers.
Then there's the question of scalability - what would be the volumes and masses of reactants that you would need to solve particular problems? The great promise of the approaches being tried by Adleman et al is that they offer massive parallelism, but exactly because of that the scaling problem comes in as several posters have pointed out.
Someone somewhere in the thread mentioned Occam's Razor and I think that they and you were correct. There is no need to come up with any other explanation for how evolution works. The "theory" is purporting to explain a problem whose existence is dubious. All that said I sort of feel that this stuff is nearly inappropriate for/. (I'm trying to use the slash code together an alternative site that will have a heavier science focus, I think that would be a nice thing to replace molbio.evol and might draw in more people with the advantage that graphics can be shared and everyone knows how to use a web browser. I've got a couple of other molbio people interested in this - interested?)
Regards
Crush
Scaling and physical limits
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 2
So does anyone have an idea about how this will scale in terms of the volume and mass of the reactants required to solve problems that conventional computers are struggling with? IIRC the last estimates for large-scale Hamiltonian network problems that were done after the Adleman stuff came out indicated that there would have to be more DNA mass than the earth to solve problems involving more than 20 nodes. Is there not a similar problem here?
Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift).
I am surprised that you are not worried by the idea of directed mutation and I think that the amount of flak that Hall received when he talked about it is testimony to the fact that it is controversial. Suppose it were called Teleological Mutation - would that not be something that you would react against? I think most evolutionary biologists would explode at that.
Your equating of (what I presume to be Zahavis work?) good-genes models with a kind of directional mutagenesis:-) is at best misleading. There is no directional mutation going on in these models at all! That is part of their point, they are some of the intricatte theories worked out to show how selection of exisiting variation can tend towards certain results given certain parameters.
The problem with slashdot is that the audience has a low number of evolutionary biologists in it - otherwise the original article wouldn't get much of an airing.
I agree that it can be irritating to have non-experts quoted as authorities in fields that they are not, but I don't think that we should attack them on an authoritarian basis: dismissing someone's ideas just because they are not in the field doesn't actually address what the problems are with their theories and leaves one open to the charge of closed-mindedness. As I see it these are some of the problems with what the article says (and I suspect that you are correct about a clueless journalist making this into more than it might be):
At the macroscopic level, we see patterns and order, while at the molecular level there is only chaos. This statement is unclear. One sees for example much order in crystals, lipid-bilayers (like micelles that form spontaneously) or indeed, one could even argue at the sub-atomic level:the number of neutrons and protons in every atom of a particular element is always the same, physicists are busy identifying exotic particles that are of types and in my book that counts as order. Finally there are the molecules of life itself - without any starting prejudice, we see them as ordered - doesn't this new theory start off by presupposing that we must not accept this?
Few physicists doubt that as the technology advances, bigger and more complex systems will be shown to inhabit the quantum world. This is similar to the arguments of Penrose about consciousness in "The Emperor's New Mind" - a claim that because something is composed of elements that behave at a sub-atomic level in a different manner does not invalidate the fact that they behave in a non-quantum, Newtonian manner at this level. Billiard balls still roll around on predictable courses. Just because DNA is composed of atoms which are composed of more fundamental particles that do weird things doesn't mean that it is going to wink in and out of existence
Most physicists agree that systems enter quantum states when they become isolated from their environment and pop out of the multiverse when they exchange significant amounts of energy with their environment, an interaction that is termed "quantum measurement." Cells may enter quantum states when they are unable to divide and replicate and become isolated -- perhaps they can?t utilize a particular foodstuff in their environment. They may collapse out of the multiverse when their DNA superposition includes a mutation that allows the mutant to grow and replicate once more. From our viewpoint, inhabiting only one universe, the cell appears to "choose" certain mutations. The cell is manifestly NOT isolated from its environment just because it has no food in it. There is probably a terminology problem here with mol.bio using a different use of environment to quantum physics. Anyway, the cell is in contact with its environment which is hostile to it in this scencario containing no resources. That's its environment and its going to die unless by some chance/random/fluke something happens that allows it to metabolize something new or some food pops in to the environment
hat cells may be able to choose advantageous mutations is heresy for Darwinian dogma. But experiments performed with bacteria demonstrate that under some circumstances, that is precisely what they do. Although these experiments are still controversial, they pose a real problem for Darwinian evolutionary theory. Yes, Directed Mutation is controversial, it presuppose that there is some mechanism which allows cells to teleologically influence the mutations that they encounter. The standard model is that mutation is random and that the cells either get lucky or that they don't. The data to show that directed mutation happens is not convincing to many in the field. However this warrants further work and this theory could explain it. But there are others that rely on more prosaic ideas - for instance that a starving cell's machinery is not repaired as well as a healthy one thus that more mutations are introduced and thus there is a greater chance that one that allows new food to be metabolized will crop up. Pretty prosaic compared to DNA winking out of the multiverse
ut even the simplest living cells are extraordinarily complex, far too complex to have arisen by chance alone. Unsupported claim. Many of the building block of life seem to be out there, there are huge amounts of Valine, Arginine and some other amino acid just floating about in space. Miller and Urey demonstrated how some of the molecules arise "naturally".
Quantum mechanics allows us an escape from this gloomy outlook. Sure, but it's not necessary unless one accepts all the premises of the article. Is it all that gloomy anyway?
This is reminiscent of physicist Roger Penrose's "theory" of consciousness, popularized in his book The Emperor's New Mind.
Those two books were the first things that popped into my mind as I read that article. It's just another attempt to push evolution into an area that it is hard to argue that facts in because we don't have reasonable consensus in them. The sad thing is that there's no reason to do this - even given an overly simplistic Newtonian universe I have no difficulty believing that evolution could have produced life over the billions of years and vast size of the universe. Stuff like Behe and this guy are starting from the premise that it is too improbable that life or its precursor could happen once, randomly. If you buy that and you want to believe in evolution then you go with McFadden and if you want to believe in God you go with Behe.
I think that you've always got to compromise -- I have to go to work everyday, but i have the freedom to go to france on vacation. Am i more or less free than someone without a job who never gets to leave downtown hartford 'cause he's broke? That's a tough call, but your failure to recognize that there are competing freedoms here, where software is only one, is i think the source of our disagreement.
Ok *grin* , so let's have a compromise where I win instead of you? The answer to your question is that it depends on choice. If the bloke in Hartford has chosen a system that means that he has the choice between working and going to France and not-working and staying broke and if he then chooses not to work, well then he's totally free. The reverse obviously applies. Compromise is a great and useful thing that makes it possible for us to get along socially. It's important to seek consensus and understanding. It's also important not to dilute down essential principles until you have in fact given them up (I think).
I think you're being simultaneously both overly paranoid and naive. The real scam going on here is that their cheating you out of your airmailes bonus points! Think about it - instead of having to offer you an incentive to provide information as you do when swiping the grocery card every time you buy kitty-litter the marketing moguls now have direct access to it for Free(TM). But even there I think that this will be a good thing. It will let companies know "What People Really Want" and they can be responsive to our needs and this is a good thing and isn't that what democracy is really all about being able to have the things we want to buy made available for us and aren't we all happy to live in an information age millenium technological forward looking society........choke.
Your original note had more of a 'scare tactic' voice with "do you trust this software" and "this proprietary software will take over the world" voice, which I don't think is appropriate in this case.
Well, then you are being more charitable with me than I deserve. I believe that software that is adopted by the Free software community should be Free. This precludes the use of hidden libraries. I don't care if it's called GPL or OSS or X11 or new BSD. I only care if the result of adoption of a piece of software is to discourage the production of free software. Your persistent attempts to misdirect this discussion would seem to be an attempt to use a 'soothing tactic' voice with 'don't worry about non-Free software' , 'this proprietary software won't limint your Freedom' which I don't believe to appropriate in any case.
To be honest I'm not sure that I get this discussion (the whole thing, not just your thread) at all. I've only relied on the/. report which says that the program is GPL'ed but there is a closed-source library. I'm assuming that their not talking about a "music" library but a programming library. Am I totally incorrect in this?
If I am then it seem to me that you're making a sort of leveraging argument - we can use tools that possibly threaten and undermine our free-software to get access to free music?
in spite of the not-completely-open status of a particular piece of software, any piece, that software can still provide the means for an advancement of access to certain other, distinct type of information. In this case, the contents of any such hidden proprietary functionality is far less interesting to me than the contents of the mp3s themselves
But is it? It doesn't seem like it is if all I can do is stream it from mp3.com across the net. In fact I have a hell of a lot less freedom there than if I make my own mp3s. So, I'm not getting increased Freedom!
Am I totally nuts for thinking like this? I understand that everyones happy that theres a Linux player and we're popular and being catered to and that this is new media etc.... but what are we really getting? Let's look right-down this gift-horse's mouth and then go around and check the other end too.
First, one point. What 'hidden Windows API' are you now comparing this to? The thing the Beam-It authenticator uses (the CD-ID) seems to be a well-defined part of the standard for creating audio CDs. Until I understand that half of your question, I don't think I could provide an answer.
Welllll, it seems to me that you're nitpicking trivialities. But I'll answer you anyway. I should have said the "hidden code of the Windows API", obviously I can actually write to the API which is it's purpose.
So now that we've cleared up that obvious and trivial point. Let's address the problem. The question is whether or not a program which depends for its functionality on a library which I cannot access/modify/control/re-distribute myself is a piece of "Free" software. I don't think that it is. To take the extreme example what happens if I write a library, provide an API to it. This library contains one call, "RunProgram". I've published the API, you can stick whatever interface you like on it, you can GPL it you can feel that you've got freedom. I don't think that you have. Are you worried about it? Frankly your personal feelings are irrelevant. The point is whether or not this is Free.
I agree with you. I really don't understand why it is that people complain when core functionality is hidden. It's very like all that complaining that people did about TrollTech not so long ago. I mean, God, there giving us something free!!! Now we can spend more money on beer. The people that go on about needing access to information remind me of that Stallman guy....what is it that he says? something like:
Since the purpose of GNU is to be free, every single component in the GNU system has to be free software. They don't all have to be copylefted, however; any kind of free software is legally suitable to include if it helps meet technical goals. We can and do use non-copylefted free software such as the X Window System.
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a Unix license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.
Schools will be able to provide a much more educational environment by encouraging all students to study and improve the system code.
Maybe that's why people are whining. They want what they are using to be free. It is manifestly NOT, if the library is hidden, otherwise, as I pointed out in a previously down-moderated post, there is no difference between this program being GPL'ed and me modifiying it and me modifying a program written to the windows API.
This is a shallow attempt to get the kudos of being free. Actually, I should rephrase that to allow for another possibility: this is either cynical or else half-assed.
If you can't see that a program that depends on a hidden library is a problem then maybe you should check out this discussion of library licenses:
LGPL, but in case you don't feel like reading it here's a quote about libraries:
Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection. For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising "more users for this library" if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all.
Don't you think that your line of argument will result in boosting the popularity of a non-free library?
Sorry, I'm not sure if I'm getting this correctly:
you can listen to them in streaming MP3 and RealAudio format -- no file transfer is required, so you can "beam" a CD instantly.
When you say no file transfer is required I'm not sure what you mean. Is the mp3 not being streamed from Mp3.Com across the web?
I can see that this is sort of neat, but it sounds like a nightmare to me in terms of centralized control of information. I'd much rather not have mp3.com knowing what I buy and how often I listen to it across the web. I'd rather make my own mp3s from CDs and send them to my box at work.
Also what about the bandwidth problems that this will cause? Are mp3.com going to be responsible for all the sluggish transfers? I can see how it is great for them to use the net for their private gain, hopefully they'll be charged some whacking great fee proportional to the traffic that they inflict on this shared resource.
he recording industry already has a monopoly on the artists most people want to hear. They can reap even more rapacious profits on CDs sold electronically without the overhead of distribution, packaging, store promotion, and other brick and mortar costs.
Perhaps you should try out the software you're bashing before you criticize it.
In general this would be a good idea, but I don't want to get a username and password for mp3.com. I accept you correction, I should have read the article more carefully. So, let me restate the question which you carefully avoided , and which is after all really the meat of my post, do you think that there is any difference between using a
"Open Source" CD Authenticator written to work with the hidden Windows API and a "GPL'ed" CD Authenticator written to work with a hidden proprietary library. ?
So, how do you feel about using a program whose core functionality is hidden from you? It seems to me that there is very little difference between the approach of releasing an "Open Source" player written to work with the hidden Windows API and releasing a "GPL'ed" player written to work with a hidden proprietary library. It means you have no control, you can't do what you want with it. I would not describe this as "Freedom Fighting". It's a shallow attempt to wrap themselves in the flag of freedom.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit
I fear so. They're about as progressive as wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt if they continue down this road.
We don't pay for television program viewing per show. Advertisers pay to interrupt the show every 7-10 minutes to let us know about their great products.
That's not true in the UK. Everyone pays a license fee to the British Broadcasting Corporation for possesion of a T.V. reception apparatus. And I've got to say that T.V. in the U.K. is way than in the U.S. I actually bothered to watch it when I was there because it would hold my attention span. I fucking hate being interrupted with advertising all the time and I considered the #40 or so pounds pretty reasonable for commercial free TV which also produced original drama.
By using product placement in movies, e.g. a close up of a bag of Brand X Potato Chips, advertising costs can be used to defray the production costs associated with video.
There's already a lot of that in the movies and funnily enough the movies with the most of it are the ones that suck - they're commercial, whoring to the ad-execs and the big companies.
Audio, however, presents a slightly more difficult problem. Product placement doesn't fit in very well,
I can just hear the Dead Kennedys or RATM popping in soundbites for Ford Explorers.
I totally agree with your last 2 paragraphs - they've got to offer attractive packaging. Although I have the opportunity to burn my own audio CD's I like to buy them if they have good sleeve notes or artwork, I also collect vinyl for exactly the same reason. Companies have to learn to sell good physical products, not information.
The difference between the library and digitally encoded music smashes the parallel that the article tries to draw between them:
Libraries effectively created a mass-market of literate potential book-purchasers. The reason that they would purchase books when they had enough money to do so was that although it is great to be able to trundle down to the library and borrow things that you don't really know if you like, or can't afford, ultimately if it's a great book and you've got the cash it is much handier to be able to buy it than keep on borrowing it, having it recalled by other users, having to pay fines.
Now, when books and music and films are potentially storable at home on the comfort of one's own PC the incentive is to trundle out to the library, copy the ones you want and keep them and never buy the dead-tree version.
It may be that there would be enough revenue stream from advertising giving away free information, but the are the companies that are doing the advertising (of physical products presumably) the same ones that are potentially going to lose the revenue gained through selling information?
If they are (and if the links between companies are all that they are claimed to be they probably are) then that is a possible model.
However I bet there are plenty of companies that just produce information and are going to hang on tooth and claw to their sole revenue stream come what may.
Actually these posts are apparently censored some way. Even if you look for them at -1 they're not visible. Note, I don't necessarily say that/. is not within their rights to censor them, just that that's what's happening.
OK, so by now I've sort of figured out that there are posts that I can't see at -1 and that basically/. is being attacked by some ACs that are posting comments that automatically redirect when viewed.
Obviously they've figured out how to do this after getting access to the source code which Rob and co. so generously released.
Rob, I'm sorry this happened and you must be tearing your hair at the moment, but on the other hand this may be good - no security through obscurity after all. (Easy for me to say as I'm not the one being targetted like this).
Slashdot Mirror
Crush
Crush.
I'm glad it's not just my lab that thinks that. Sighs of distress are heaved whenever she puts a trendy "biocomputing" spin on things. When you say they wouldn't be able to solve NP-hard problems are you implying that they could possibly solve non-hard problems?
Regards
Crush.
Then there's the question of scalability - what would be the volumes and masses of reactants that you would need to solve particular problems? The great promise of the approaches being tried by Adleman et al is that they offer massive parallelism, but exactly because of that the scaling problem comes in as several posters have pointed out.
Dreaming is cool.
Regards
Crush
So does anyone have an idea about how this will scale in terms of the volume and mass of the reactants required to solve problems that conventional computers are struggling with? IIRC the last estimates for large-scale Hamiltonian network problems that were done after the Adleman stuff came out indicated that there would have to be more DNA mass than the earth to solve problems involving more than 20 nodes. Is there not a similar problem here?
Nevertheless, I do not see anything controversial about directed mutations: after all, the driving force of evolution will still be the natural selection coupled to other evolutionary mechanisms (like genetic drift).
I am surprised that you are not worried by the idea of directed mutation and I think that the amount of flak that Hall received when he talked about it is testimony to the fact that it is controversial. Suppose it were called Teleological Mutation - would that not be something that you would react against? I think most evolutionary biologists would explode at that.
Your equating of (what I presume to be Zahavis work?) good-genes models with a kind of directional mutagenesis :-) is at best misleading. There is no directional mutation going on in these models at all! That is part of their point, they are some of the intricatte theories worked out to show how selection of exisiting variation can tend towards certain results given certain parameters.
The problem with slashdot is that the audience has a low number of evolutionary biologists in it - otherwise the original article wouldn't get much of an airing.
I agree that it can be irritating to have non-experts quoted as authorities in fields that they are not, but I don't think that we should attack them on an authoritarian basis: dismissing someone's ideas just because they are not in the field doesn't actually address what the problems are with their theories and leaves one open to the charge of closed-mindedness. As I see it these are some of the problems with what the article says (and I suspect that you are correct about a clueless journalist making this into more than it might be):
This statement is unclear. One sees for example much order in crystals, lipid-bilayers (like micelles that form spontaneously) or indeed, one could even argue at the sub-atomic level:the number of neutrons and protons in every atom of a particular element is always the same, physicists are busy identifying exotic particles that are of types and in my book that counts as order. Finally there are the molecules of life itself - without any starting prejudice, we see them as ordered - doesn't this new theory start off by presupposing that we must not accept this?
This is similar to the arguments of Penrose about consciousness in "The Emperor's New Mind" - a claim that because something is composed of elements that behave at a sub-atomic level in a different manner does not invalidate the fact that they behave in a non-quantum, Newtonian manner at this level. Billiard balls still roll around on predictable courses. Just because DNA is composed of atoms which are composed of more fundamental particles that do weird things doesn't mean that it is going to wink in and out of existence
Yes, Directed Mutation is controversial, it presuppose that there is some mechanism which allows cells to teleologically influence the mutations that they encounter. The standard model is that mutation is random and that the cells either get lucky or that they don't. The data to show that directed mutation happens is not convincing to many in the field. However this warrants further work and this theory could explain it. But there are others that rely on more prosaic ideas - for instance that a starving cell's machinery is not repaired as well as a healthy one thus that more mutations are introduced and thus there is a greater chance that one that allows new food to be metabolized will crop up. Pretty prosaic compared to DNA winking out of the multiverse
Unsupported claim. Many of the building block of life seem to be out there, there are huge amounts of Valine, Arginine and some other amino acid just floating about in space. Miller and Urey demonstrated how some of the molecules arise "naturally".
Sure, but it's not necessary unless one accepts all the premises of the article. Is it all that gloomy anyway?
This is reminiscent of physicist Roger Penrose's "theory" of consciousness, popularized in his book The Emperor's New Mind.
Those two books were the first things that popped into my mind as I read that article. It's just another attempt to push evolution into an area that it is hard to argue that facts in because we don't have reasonable consensus in them. The sad thing is that there's no reason to do this - even given an overly simplistic Newtonian universe I have no difficulty believing that evolution could have produced life over the billions of years and vast size of the universe. Stuff like Behe and this guy are starting from the premise that it is too improbable that life or its precursor could happen once, randomly. If you buy that and you want to believe in evolution then you go with McFadden and if you want to believe in God you go with Behe.
I've enjoyed it too. It's nice to talk to someone rational and civil.
Regards
Crush
I think that you've always got to compromise -- I have to go to work everyday, but i have the freedom to go to france on vacation. Am i more or less free than someone without a job who never gets to leave downtown hartford 'cause he's broke? That's a tough call, but your failure to recognize that there are competing freedoms here, where software is only one, is i think the source of our disagreement.
Ok *grin* , so let's have a compromise where I win instead of you? The answer to your question is that it depends on choice. If the bloke in Hartford has chosen a system that means that he has the choice between working and going to France and not-working and staying broke and if he then chooses not to work, well then he's totally free. The reverse obviously applies. Compromise is a great and useful thing that makes it possible for us to get along socially. It's important to seek consensus and understanding. It's also important not to dilute down essential principles until you have in fact given them up (I think).
I think you're being simultaneously both overly paranoid and naive. The real scam going on here is that their cheating you out of your airmailes bonus points! Think about it - instead of having to offer you an incentive to provide information as you do when swiping the grocery card every time you buy kitty-litter the marketing moguls now have direct access to it for Free(TM). But even there I think that this will be a good thing. It will let companies know "What People Really Want" and they can be responsive to our needs and this is a good thing and isn't that what democracy is really all about being able to have the things we want to buy made available for us and aren't we all happy to live in an information age millenium technological forward looking society........choke.
Yup, I understand you. I guess we just disagree. Thanks for the civil clarification.
Crush
Your original note had more of a 'scare tactic' voice with "do you trust this software" and "this proprietary software will take over the world" voice, which I don't think is appropriate in this case.
Well, then you are being more charitable with me than I deserve. I believe that software that is adopted by the Free software community should be Free. This precludes the use of hidden libraries. I don't care if it's called GPL or OSS or X11 or new BSD. I only care if the result of adoption of a piece of software is to discourage the production of free software. Your persistent attempts to misdirect this discussion would seem to be an attempt to use a 'soothing tactic' voice with 'don't worry about non-Free software' , 'this proprietary software won't limint your Freedom' which I don't believe to appropriate in any case.
If I am then it seem to me that you're making a sort of leveraging argument - we can use tools that possibly threaten and undermine our free-software to get access to free music?
in spite of the not-completely-open status of a particular piece of software, any piece, that software can still provide the means for an advancement of access to certain other, distinct type of information. In this case, the contents of any such hidden proprietary functionality is far less interesting to me than the contents of the mp3s themselves
But is it? It doesn't seem like it is if all I can do is stream it from mp3.com across the net. In fact I have a hell of a lot less freedom there than if I make my own mp3s. So, I'm not getting increased Freedom!
Am I totally nuts for thinking like this? I understand that everyones happy that theres a Linux player and we're popular and being catered to and that this is new media etc.... but what are we really getting? Let's look right-down this gift-horse's mouth and then go around and check the other end too.
First, one point. What 'hidden Windows API' are you now comparing this to? The thing the Beam-It authenticator uses (the CD-ID) seems to be a well-defined part of the standard for creating audio CDs. Until I understand that half of your question, I don't think I could provide an answer.
Welllll, it seems to me that you're nitpicking trivialities. But I'll answer you anyway. I should have said the "hidden code of the Windows API", obviously I can actually write to the API which is it's purpose.
So now that we've cleared up that obvious and trivial point. Let's address the problem. The question is whether or not a program which depends for its functionality on a library which I cannot access/modify/control/re-distribute myself is a piece of "Free" software. I don't think that it is. To take the extreme example what happens if I write a library, provide an API to it. This library contains one call, "RunProgram". I've published the API, you can stick whatever interface you like on it, you can GPL it you can feel that you've got freedom. I don't think that you have. Are you worried about it? Frankly your personal feelings are irrelevant. The point is whether or not this is Free.
Since the purpose of GNU is to be free, every single component in the GNU system has to be free software. They don't all have to be copylefted, however; any kind of free software is legally suitable to include if it helps meet technical goals. We can and do use non-copylefted free software such as the X Window System.
This means much more than just saving everyone the price of a Unix license. It means that much wasteful duplication of system programming effort will be avoided. This effort can go instead into advancing the state of the art.
Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.
Schools will be able to provide a much more educational environment by encouraging all students to study and improve the system code.
Maybe that's why people are whining. They want what they are using to be free. It is manifestly NOT, if the library is hidden, otherwise, as I pointed out in a previously down-moderated post, there is no difference between this program being GPL'ed and me modifiying it and me modifying a program written to the windows API.
This is a shallow attempt to get the kudos of being free. Actually, I should rephrase that to allow for another possibility: this is either cynical or else half-assed.
If you can't see that a program that depends on a hidden library is a problem then maybe you should check out this discussion of library licenses:
LGPL, but in case you don't feel like reading it here's a quote about libraries:
Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection. For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising "more users for this library" if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all.
Don't you think that your line of argument will result in boosting the popularity of a non-free library?
you can listen to them in streaming MP3 and RealAudio format -- no file transfer is required, so you can "beam" a CD instantly.
When you say no file transfer is required I'm not sure what you mean. Is the mp3 not being streamed from Mp3.Com across the web?
I can see that this is sort of neat, but it sounds like a nightmare to me in terms of centralized control of information. I'd much rather not have mp3.com knowing what I buy and how often I listen to it across the web. I'd rather make my own mp3s from CDs and send them to my box at work.
Also what about the bandwidth problems that this will cause? Are mp3.com going to be responsible for all the sluggish transfers? I can see how it is great for them to use the net for their private gain, hopefully they'll be charged some whacking great fee proportional to the traffic that they inflict on this shared resource.
he recording industry already has a monopoly on the artists most people want to hear. They can reap even more rapacious profits on CDs sold electronically without the overhead of distribution, packaging, store promotion, and other brick and mortar costs.
Even better.
Perhaps you should try out the software you're bashing before you criticize it.
In general this would be a good idea, but I don't want to get a username and password for mp3.com. I accept you correction, I should have read the article more carefully. So, let me restate the question which you carefully avoided , and which is after all really the meat of my post, do you think that there is any difference between using a
"Open Source" CD Authenticator written to work with the hidden Windows API and a "GPL'ed" CD Authenticator written to work with a hidden proprietary library. ?
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit
I fear so. They're about as progressive as wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt if they continue down this road.
We don't pay for television program viewing per show. Advertisers pay to interrupt the show every 7-10 minutes to let us know about their great products.
That's not true in the UK. Everyone pays a license fee to the British Broadcasting Corporation for possesion of a T.V. reception apparatus. And I've got to say that T.V. in the U.K. is way than in the U.S. I actually bothered to watch it when I was there because it would hold my attention span. I fucking hate being interrupted with advertising all the time and I considered the #40 or so pounds pretty reasonable for commercial free TV which also produced original drama.
By using product placement in movies, e.g. a close up of a bag of Brand X Potato Chips, advertising costs can be used to defray the production costs associated with video.
There's already a lot of that in the movies and funnily enough the movies with the most of it are the ones that suck - they're commercial, whoring to the ad-execs and the big companies.
Audio, however, presents a slightly more difficult problem. Product placement doesn't fit in very well,
I can just hear the Dead Kennedys or RATM popping in soundbites for Ford Explorers.
I totally agree with your last 2 paragraphs - they've got to offer attractive packaging. Although I have the opportunity to burn my own audio CD's I like to buy them if they have good sleeve notes or artwork, I also collect vinyl for exactly the same reason. Companies have to learn to sell good physical products, not information.
Libraries effectively created a mass-market of literate potential book-purchasers. The reason that they would purchase books when they had enough money to do so was that although it is great to be able to trundle down to the library and borrow things that you don't really know if you like, or can't afford, ultimately if it's a great book and you've got the cash it is much handier to be able to buy it than keep on borrowing it, having it recalled by other users, having to pay fines.
Now, when books and music and films are potentially storable at home on the comfort of one's own PC the incentive is to trundle out to the library, copy the ones you want and keep them and never buy the dead-tree version.
It may be that there would be enough revenue stream from advertising giving away free information, but the are the companies that are doing the advertising (of physical products presumably) the same ones that are potentially going to lose the revenue gained through selling information?
If they are (and if the links between companies are all that they are claimed to be they probably are) then that is a possible model.
However I bet there are plenty of companies that just produce information and are going to hang on tooth and claw to their sole revenue stream come what may.
OK, I see how to do it. You can look at the posts by changing the threshold in the location bar to a low number and then view source.
Actually these posts are apparently censored some way. Even if you look for them at -1 they're not visible. Note, I don't necessarily say that /. is not within their rights to censor them, just that that's what's happening.
Obviously they've figured out how to do this after getting access to the source code which Rob and co. so generously released.
Rob, I'm sorry this happened and you must be tearing your hair at the moment, but on the other hand this may be good - no security through obscurity after all. (Easy for me to say as I'm not the one being targetted like this).