"This week, according to the New York Times, Microsoft will unveil a broad campaign to counter the open source and free software movements, arguing that it undermines the intellectual property of nations and businesses. The campaign, says John Markoff in the Times, is part of Microsoft's new effort to raise questions about the limits of innovation in open-source approach, to advance the idea that companies who embrace open source are putting their intellectual property at risk."
The above initiative seems to be based on the premise that freedom to innovate threatens companies and nations, and is therefore bad. This kind of works against the 'Freedom to Innovate' position Microsoft took during the antitrust trial.
"The government should continue to exercise great restraint in regulating this industry, which has brought such remarkable advances to consumers and such unprecedented benefits to the economy. Congress should likewise resist the efforts of companies that seek unfair advantage through the political process to counter legitimate competition in the marketplace."
It seems that Microsoft's policy on fundamental issues is based by the biggest threat against its monopoly at any given moment. Kevin Fox
--
What I'd really like to see is 'bbsmates.com', modeled after clasmates.com. You could look up your old BBS haunts (or add them if they're not there already), register your handle on the BBS, and see who else has signed up. This would be a great way to find those people you lost when you went to college, ditched the BBS for the net, or when the BBS was unexpectedly shut down because dad needed his dedicated fax line back.
I'd love to se where some of my teen geek friends wound up after the net explosion.
And you thought handwriting recognition was bad. Just wait until your 'thoughtputer' starts misreading your thought patterns, or worse yet, picks up on the thoughts you don't want anyone, even your PDA, to know about.
How long would it be before someone wrote a 'keystroke recorder' for the neural interface, and emailed transcripts of your every thought to someone else. Bye-bye last vestage of privacy...
You'd bill overtime rates even if you didn't actually work 40 hours? My understanding (IANAL) is that overtime kicks in when actual hours of labor exceeds 40/week or 8/day (depending on local law), irrespective of your flat hour rate.
Is this a money grab? Or do you think you deserve time and a half after working 8 hours in a week?
Read in full context, the term 'all user connection logs' can easily (and quite possibly correctly) be interpreted as the connection logs of all users logged into the system to other computers.
This does not constitute a web server log, unless the machine is acting as a proxy server.
That's odd. It doesn't look like they're going after server logs at all. It looks like they're trying to get all connection data for a dialup gateway server. They never ask for basic info like pages visited or referrer links, but they do ask for things like connection method (SLIP, PPP, Shell), disconnect time, the remote IPs and methods (telnet, ftp, http) to which the user connected, and so forth.
Again, this doesn't look like they're going after server logs at all, but rather they're trying to track people who used the IP in question (216.213.32.98) as a dialup connection point.
I'm surprised the RIAA hasn't filed an injunction against educating people how to data munge with Perl. After all, data munging is a known method of removing SDMI encryption^H^H^H^H^H^H^H protection...
Sure, ten or even five years ago, media size was really important, but as bandwidth increases the information bottleneck is the cost of data storage, and the speed of data transmission.
A terabyte ina sugarcube is terriffic, but not because I'll be able to put a box that can read it on my desktop in 10 years, it's because I'll be able to control a couple hundred gigs on a server somewhere, or even better, everywhere (like OceanStore), because the cost of the hardware is distributed, much like the internet compared to dialup BBSes of the '80s.
One of the supercool things about the net is that I'm using the latest expensive hardware every day when my packets are routed through gigabit routers and fiber-optic backbones. I don't have to pay for it like I did the long-distance copper wire when I called BBSes across the country.
Storage will continue to follow the same trend, where the terabyte and exabyte drive complexes will serve my storage needs, and not some primitive box I plug into my computer and have to upgrade every year or two.
First a decryptor is a circumvention device, then a program that makes a decryptor is a corcumvention device, then a paper detailing techniques that could be used to create such a program is a circumvention device.
How much further would it have to go before the RIAA declared the human brain to be a 'circumvention device'?
Everyone with an IQ above 120, please report to either the lobotomy room or the courtroom.
This is based on the premise that, given access to the information, people will gather that information and make an informed decision. I don't think that premise is accurate. I don't believe that it's valid to equate the availability of information with acquisition and understanding of that information, and I don't believe that the 'informed decision' model stands up to more complex issues like narcotic, neurological addiction. I have enough friends who state time and time again that they would like this cigarette to be their last, but they fail at quitting time and time again, and it's crap to say they fail because they're making an "informed decision."
More to the point though (and to forestall the flames about totalitarian governments deciding what's best for the populace) my primary concern is when someone else is given the opportunity to make an informed decision about something that can impact me.
They know that guns kill, and they buy them,though that gun can kill me. They know that driving drunk is dangerous, but they do it, even though they might hit me.
It's funny that there have been so many replies to my post spelling out the evils of the drug war, and the benefits of drugs, and how I'm stupid for what I said.
I'll say it again though, so people can understand: Rob's post shouldn't be a slashdot story. It certainly isn't 'news for nerds', it's editorializing at best, and isn't even a new idea at that (see the 'Cyberdiversion Movement' at Heat.net).
I'm not going to jump into the holy war justifying or debunking the drug war or US policy narcotics, as so many here are eager to do. I will spell out what I think makes a good slashdot story though, and I don't think "Rob coming up with a nifty, half-joking idea" cuts it.
If that post were in a moderated environment it would be modded to -1 for troll. It's hardly worthy of a Slashdot story.
If anything needs revamping it's the US Durg Schedules stating 'how bad' each drug is. This is a political document, fueling most of the problems in the drug war.
While I'd agree that several items on the list need to be examined (marijuana for one) and several not on the list (tobacco) should be considered in an environment not tainted by politics or economics, I'm under no illusion that drugs like cocaine, heroin, and PCP are extremely dangerous, and should be kept out of the hands of children.
Also, to everyone who's saying "Drugs kill? Funny, I'm still alive." Well, those that have died can't very well speak out, can they? It's the same game that big tobacco plays so well.
Oh dear god, the flashbacks... Thanks for the Monday grin. Kevin Fox
--
Re:Hydroelectric as a non-renewable resource.
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 2
"There's on the order of 1.0e30-1.0e31 joules of energy stored in the Earth's rotation. That gives us around 30 billion terawatt-years.
"I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon."
Check this shit out:
The planet used an estimated 415.6 Billion BTUs in 2000. This translates to 121.8 trillion kilowatt-hours, whick boils down to 121800 terawatt-hours, or 13.9 terawatt-years.
Now, mind you, global energy-consumption is increasing at around 2.2% per year (ibid). So, the first year we'd only lose 0.015 seconds. No big deal.
To see how this would all work out in the longer run, I wrote a little script.
After 100 years we'd only have to adjust our clocks 5 seconds slower every year. In the year 2360 the Earth's rotation would exactly match that of Mars, with a 24 hour, 36 minute day. By 2540 the calendar would only have 364.25 days in it, and just 30 years later another day is lost.
In 2693 we've lost December entirely, and days are 26.2 hours long. By 2773 things have kicked into serious gear and we're down to a year of 182 days that are each 48 hours long.
Assuming that in the interveining 800 years we find a way to overcome the logarithmic problem of sucking the energy at a constant rate from a slowing source, we can take out the last of the rotational power in the Earth by the year 2812.
Pretty early on people would have to rewrite timing code that was based on the assumption of a constant number of days in a year and seconds in a day. And geosynchronous satellites would have to have ion drives constantly pushing them gently away from the earth into higher and higher orbits to match the slowing rotation.
Of course, the biggest problem here is clearly that we can't use DirectTV after 2812 because the geosynchronous satellites can't stay in non-orbit.
"Well something like this is going to be necessary as our population continues to explode. Life once again imitates Simcity. When are we going to put Maxis in charge of city planning here in the US?"
This is pretty silly. We'll run out of food resources long before we had so much population as to need these kinds of buildings for space.
Not that they buildings won't be built, and not that they wouldn't be useful, but their use wouldn't be because people are running out of space...
Warning: I lost my sense of humor after taking a linguistics course with George Lakoff, so I may just be missing the Maxis humor...
Kevin Fox
--
Hydroelectric as a non-renewable resource.
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 3
Trivial as it may seem, energy gained by tidal power is, erg for erg, slowing down the rotation of the Earth. True right now the results are inconsequential, but if massive projects were undertaken to supply 30% of the Earth's onging power needs with tidal forces, over the long run it could have an impact, and it's not exactly like we have a way to repair the damage by speeding up the Earth's rotation...
At least clean fission only eats up matter which, though not a renewable resource either, is constantly being replenished on the order of tons a day from micrometeorites.
"As recently as 1999, most games devoted only.1% of the CPU's resources to running the AI."
...snip...
"According to a recent article on the game development site Gamasutra, an average of 250% more of a computer's resources are now devoted to AI."
So... A whopping 0.25% is now devoted to game AI? Step back.
Seriously though, processing power is a really weak way of assessing the sophistication of an AI. It's really easy to max out a chip on a neural net that ends up going almost nowhere, and a well-programmed behavior engine could create an extremely realistic AI on a Palm. Like most anything, it's all about the coders. It's great to see that more attention is being given to cognitive realism (Sims, B&W, etc.) instead of/in addition to kinematic realism (Trespasser, <insert latest FPS here>, etc.).
I can't wait until this kind of dedication to learned and adaptive behavior makes its way to War/Star/foo-craft... Or Microsoft Bob...
Slashdot Mirror
Funny? I suppose, but if you'd like a slightly harsher review, here you go.
Kevin Fox
--
So it's time for RMS to start using "GNU/GNU/Linux".
That would be GNG/Linux (Gnu's not GNU/Linux).
Kevin Fox
--
"This week, according to the New York Times, Microsoft will unveil a broad campaign to counter the open source and free software movements, arguing that it undermines the intellectual property of nations and businesses. The campaign, says John Markoff in the Times, is part of Microsoft's new effort to raise questions about the limits of innovation in open-source approach, to advance the idea that companies who embrace open source are putting their intellectual property at risk."
The above initiative seems to be based on the premise that freedom to innovate threatens companies and nations, and is therefore bad. This kind of works against the 'Freedom to Innovate' position Microsoft took during the antitrust trial.
To quote from Microsoft's Freedom to Innovate policy sheet:
"The government should continue to exercise great restraint in regulating this industry, which has brought such remarkable advances to consumers and such unprecedented benefits to the economy. Congress should likewise resist the efforts of companies that seek unfair advantage through the political process to counter legitimate competition in the marketplace."
It seems that Microsoft's policy on fundamental issues is based by the biggest threat against its monopoly at any given moment.
Kevin Fox
--
What I'd really like to see is 'bbsmates.com', modeled after clasmates.com. You could look up your old BBS haunts (or add them if they're not there already), register your handle on the BBS, and see who else has signed up. This would be a great way to find those people you lost when you went to college, ditched the BBS for the net, or when the BBS was unexpectedly shut down because dad needed his dedicated fax line back.
I'd love to se where some of my teen geek friends wound up after the net explosion.
Kevin Fox
--
And you thought handwriting recognition was bad. Just wait until your 'thoughtputer' starts misreading your thought patterns, or worse yet, picks up on the thoughts you don't want anyone, even your PDA, to know about.
How long would it be before someone wrote a 'keystroke recorder' for the neural interface, and emailed transcripts of your every thought to someone else. Bye-bye last vestage of privacy...
Kevin Fox
--
I guess that makes me a funny (6), overrated (4) troll (1)?
Kevin Fox
--
You'd bill overtime rates even if you didn't actually work 40 hours? My understanding (IANAL) is that overtime kicks in when actual hours of labor exceeds 40/week or 8/day (depending on local law), irrespective of your flat hour rate.
Is this a money grab? Or do you think you deserve time and a half after working 8 hours in a week?
Kevin Fox
--
1) They don't lose contact with it
2) They converted all their metric units correctly
3) It does not burn up in the atmosphere on approach
4) It doesn't accidentally ram and bring down any foreign fighters flanking it.
Kevin Fox
--
Read in full context, the term 'all user connection logs' can easily (and quite possibly correctly) be interpreted as the connection logs of all users logged into the system to other computers.
This does not constitute a web server log, unless the machine is acting as a proxy server.
Think before you call people wrong, and be sure.
Kevin Fox
--
That's odd. It doesn't look like they're going after server logs at all. It looks like they're trying to get all connection data for a dialup gateway server. They never ask for basic info like pages visited or referrer links, but they do ask for things like connection method (SLIP, PPP, Shell), disconnect time, the remote IPs and methods (telnet, ftp, http) to which the user connected, and so forth.
Again, this doesn't look like they're going after server logs at all, but rather they're trying to track people who used the IP in question (216.213.32.98) as a dialup connection point.
This seems to be a completely different story.
Kevin Fox
--
Put another way:
It's not the size, it's the frequency?
(let's not take 'megahertz' too literally now...)
Kevin Fox
--
I'm surprised the RIAA hasn't filed an injunction against educating people how to data munge with Perl. After all, data munging is a known method of removing SDMI encryption^H^H^H^H^H^H^H protection...
Kevin Fox
--
Sure, ten or even five years ago, media size was really important, but as bandwidth increases the information bottleneck is the cost of data storage, and the speed of data transmission.
A terabyte ina sugarcube is terriffic, but not because I'll be able to put a box that can read it on my desktop in 10 years, it's because I'll be able to control a couple hundred gigs on a server somewhere, or even better, everywhere (like OceanStore), because the cost of the hardware is distributed, much like the internet compared to dialup BBSes of the '80s.
One of the supercool things about the net is that I'm using the latest expensive hardware every day when my packets are routed through gigabit routers and fiber-optic backbones. I don't have to pay for it like I did the long-distance copper wire when I called BBSes across the country.
Storage will continue to follow the same trend, where the terabyte and exabyte drive complexes will serve my storage needs, and not some primitive box I plug into my computer and have to upgrade every year or two.
Kevin Fox
--
First a decryptor is a circumvention device, then a program that makes a decryptor is a corcumvention device, then a paper detailing techniques that could be used to create such a program is a circumvention device.
How much further would it have to go before the RIAA declared the human brain to be a 'circumvention device'?
Everyone with an IQ above 120, please report to either the lobotomy room or the courtroom.
Kevin Fox
--
Perhaps it was a Mir sympathy crash...
Space Stations of the World, Unite!
Kevin Fox
--
Yeah, but they can also raise a lot of dough...
Kevin Fox
--
You know the earlier attempt is still sitting in a hangar, waiting for its compliment of lemon-soaked napkins...
Kevin Fox
--
This is based on the premise that, given access to the information, people will gather that information and make an informed decision. I don't think that premise is accurate. I don't believe that it's valid to equate the availability of information with acquisition and understanding of that information, and I don't believe that the 'informed decision' model stands up to more complex issues like narcotic, neurological addiction. I have enough friends who state time and time again that they would like this cigarette to be their last, but they fail at quitting time and time again, and it's crap to say they fail because they're making an "informed decision."
More to the point though (and to forestall the flames about totalitarian governments deciding what's best for the populace) my primary concern is when someone else is given the opportunity to make an informed decision about something that can impact me.
They know that guns kill, and they buy them,though that gun can kill me. They know that driving drunk is dangerous, but they do it, even though they might hit me.
Where's my informed decision-making ability?
Kevin Fox
--
It's funny that there have been so many replies to my post spelling out the evils of the drug war, and the benefits of drugs, and how I'm stupid for what I said.
I'll say it again though, so people can understand: Rob's post shouldn't be a slashdot story. It certainly isn't 'news for nerds', it's editorializing at best, and isn't even a new idea at that (see the 'Cyberdiversion Movement' at Heat.net).
I'm not going to jump into the holy war justifying or debunking the drug war or US policy narcotics, as so many here are eager to do. I will spell out what I think makes a good slashdot story though, and I don't think "Rob coming up with a nifty, half-joking idea" cuts it.
Kevin Fox
--
If that post were in a moderated environment it would be modded to -1 for troll. It's hardly worthy of a Slashdot story.
If anything needs revamping it's the US Durg Schedules stating 'how bad' each drug is. This is a political document, fueling most of the problems in the drug war.
While I'd agree that several items on the list need to be examined (marijuana for one) and several not on the list (tobacco) should be considered in an environment not tainted by politics or economics, I'm under no illusion that drugs like cocaine, heroin, and PCP are extremely dangerous, and should be kept out of the hands of children.
Also, to everyone who's saying "Drugs kill? Funny, I'm still alive." Well, those that have died can't very well speak out, can they? It's the same game that big tobacco plays so well.
Kevin Fox
--
Oh dear god, the flashbacks... Thanks for the Monday grin.
Kevin Fox
--
"There's on the order of 1.0e30-1.0e31 joules of energy stored in the Earth's rotation. That gives us around 30 billion terawatt-years.
"I don't think we're in danger of draining it soon."
Check this shit out:
The planet used an estimated 415.6 Billion BTUs in 2000. This translates to 121.8 trillion kilowatt-hours, whick boils down to 121800 terawatt-hours, or 13.9 terawatt-years.
Now, mind you, global energy-consumption is increasing at around 2.2% per year (ibid). So, the first year we'd only lose 0.015 seconds. No big deal.
To see how this would all work out in the longer run, I wrote a little script.
After 100 years we'd only have to adjust our clocks 5 seconds slower every year. In the year 2360 the Earth's rotation would exactly match that of Mars, with a 24 hour, 36 minute day. By 2540 the calendar would only have 364.25 days in it, and just 30 years later another day is lost.
In 2693 we've lost December entirely, and days are 26.2 hours long. By 2773 things have kicked into serious gear and we're down to a year of 182 days that are each 48 hours long.
Assuming that in the interveining 800 years we find a way to overcome the logarithmic problem of sucking the energy at a constant rate from a slowing source, we can take out the last of the rotational power in the Earth by the year 2812.
Pretty early on people would have to rewrite timing code that was based on the assumption of a constant number of days in a year and seconds in a day. And geosynchronous satellites would have to have ion drives constantly pushing them gently away from the earth into higher and higher orbits to match the slowing rotation.
Of course, the biggest problem here is clearly that we can't use DirectTV after 2812 because the geosynchronous satellites can't stay in non-orbit.
Kevin Fox
--
"Well something like this is going to be necessary as our population continues to explode. Life once again imitates Simcity. When are we going to put Maxis in charge of city planning here in the US?"
This is pretty silly. We'll run out of food resources long before we had so much population as to need these kinds of buildings for space.
Not that they buildings won't be built, and not that they wouldn't be useful, but their use wouldn't be because people are running out of space...
Warning: I lost my sense of humor after taking a linguistics course with George Lakoff, so I may just be missing the Maxis humor...
Kevin Fox
--
Trivial as it may seem, energy gained by tidal power is, erg for erg, slowing down the rotation of the Earth. True right now the results are inconsequential, but if massive projects were undertaken to supply 30% of the Earth's onging power needs with tidal forces, over the long run it could have an impact, and it's not exactly like we have a way to repair the damage by speeding up the Earth's rotation...
At least clean fission only eats up matter which, though not a renewable resource either, is constantly being replenished on the order of tons a day from micrometeorites.
Kevin Fox
--
"As recently as 1999, most games devoted only .1% of the CPU's resources to running the AI."
...snip...
"According to a recent article on the game development site Gamasutra, an average of 250% more of a computer's resources are now devoted to AI."
So... A whopping 0.25% is now devoted to game AI? Step back.
Seriously though, processing power is a really weak way of assessing the sophistication of an AI. It's really easy to max out a chip on a neural net that ends up going almost nowhere, and a well-programmed behavior engine could create an extremely realistic AI on a Palm. Like most anything, it's all about the coders. It's great to see that more attention is being given to cognitive realism (Sims, B&W, etc.) instead of/in addition to kinematic realism (Trespasser, <insert latest FPS here>, etc.).
I can't wait until this kind of dedication to learned and adaptive behavior makes its way to War/Star/foo-craft... Or Microsoft Bob...
Kevin Fox
--