I am elated to finally find a paper that so clearly elucidates my position and observations. I am also saddened to realise that people who would benefit the most from it are also the least likely to read it and understand it.
3) That subjective experience either doesn't exist, or is unimportant because it is some sort of ambient or peripheral effect.
Item 3 in particular hit home; I have had the exact same conversation and thought process ("Perhaps the person I'm talking with doesn't have a subjective experience?"), for the last five years. The last time I had it was a few days ago while talking with a fellow engineer here at LithTech.
Subjective experience is not an easy problem; in fact, it is a very hard problem, but there is something in too many scientist's minds that makes them want to treat the subject as a superstitious topic, and treat those who find subjective experience difficult to fit within a computational framework as religious or spiritual zealots. Larson has correctly identified the currently popular model of the world, "Cybernetic Totalism."
By the way; Not understanding his paper is not something to be proud of. Ignorance about *anything* is not something to be proud of. Use a dictionary or a search engine, whatever it takes, and understand these words.
That's interesting; I've only received nothing but the kindest of service from SpeakEasy.
SpeakEasy is the most politically aware and open network, having made an explicit commitment to freedoms in their mission statement and terms of service. I had to turn down several ISP's (such as InternetConnect) because of their draconian TOS (which included that they can charge me $1,000 if I potentially infringe on IP). SpeakEasy is the only ISP I trust.
Just recently, Nader spoke at the SpeakEasy cafe off 2nd and Bell, downtown Seattle. SpeakEasy has lent the back room to Free Radio Seattle as well. If SpeakEasy isn't a safe ISP, I don't know who is.
I'm terribly enthusiastic about OpenSource Educational Material.
Open Publications can provide us with much more than merely free and improved literature. We can apply groupware concepts to online education and build a very modular and exacting approach to education. Knowledge requirements for particular subjects can be made explicit and linked to. Community systems (such as ArsDigita's) can be applied in order to permit annotation, both textual and graphical, chat rooms (the largest study group in history), and other assistants to understanding material. Multiple explanations of the same subject can be given side-by-side. Methods of explaining can be analyzed and optimized.
OpenContent books such as Havoc's book Gnome/GTK+ Application Developmentappear to be doing well on the shelves. I haven't witnessed price wars yet; most Open Publication books are only being published by one publisher, even though there is nothing to preventing republishing. Indeed, it makes me wonder why more books are not published under free licenses.
Publishers' roles (and living) will not disappear until book compilers are commonplace, even though content may be liberated; I, and several others, severally annotate our books. (My copy of House Of Leaves has a lot more in blue than just the word "House".)
If fetchmail and Linux were not run as bazaar projects, what would a true bazaar project look like? A real bazaar software development method would proceed as follows.
Someone creates a minimal working version of the software. (This follows Raymond's advice to start with a "plausible promise.")
>
The originator releases the working program, a description of how to use it, and all the source code to an appropriate forum such as a newsgroup or public web site. From this point forward, the originator becomes just another member of the user community, with no special status.
Anyone may download the program and source, try it out, look for bugs, and suggest fixes and enhancements. These ideas are communicated to the entire user community through the forum.
Anyone at any time, or multiple people at the same time, may decide to create a new version of the program. They do so by using ideas and code from the user community, along with their own contributions. They post the new version to the user forum.
Most likely, the code "forks" as several people create new releases at the same time. This is part of the bazaar process.
The user community attempts to settle on the best fork to follow, by trying all available versions and focusing their attention on the best version. No single person or small committee manages this process. Perhaps the best fork is widely recognized and quickly selected, perhaps not.
Several forks may live in parallel for quite a while. If so, it is the decision of the user community no one fork is the clear winner. When the community tires of parallel forks, they will select one to follow.
Development continues in this dynamic, organic method. Leaders emerge briefly, as they create a new release or argue for one fork over another, but they then become equal community members again. All decisions about features, design, bug fixes, etc. are made in this way.
Hmm; doesn't this sound suspiciosly similar to the way distrobutions work?
Red Hat Linux puts together a distribution.
They make it public and tell us how to use it. At this point, they become just another distrobution.
Anyone can try it out and change it. (Mandrake does.) I'm not sure where SUSE got it's roots from, but needless to say, there's a lot of inbreeding as well as new code floating about.
New distributions are posted.
The distributions fork! (Surprise!) Again: The user community attempts to settle on the best fork to follow, by trying all available versions and focusing their attention on the best version. No single person or small committee manages this process. Perhaps the best fork is widely recognized and quickly selected, perhaps not. Perfect description.
Coding continues to occur. Distro's come, distro's go.
(The article did have some interesting notes though.)
Models are necessary to think; Without a Model, you cannot think. Thinking involves manipulation. Unless your thoughts physically manipulate the world in real time, (in which case the world is in your mind, and could be considered to be... "only a model"), your thoughts manipulate a model in your head.
Consider that you wake up in the morning and you'd like to sneak off to eat a sandwitch. But, you're disoriented; your model in your head of how your house is layed out and where you are with respect to it is incorrect. But then you check yourself with the world, and align yourself correctly; you make your model and the world align correctly. Ah, now we can go on to get that sandwitch.
Similarly, if you are manipulating a program, you have a certain model in your head about how the program works. Sometimes we keep it in a hash in our heads (A->B, B->C, C->E, E->D, A->E as well), and sometimes we keep it as a planar graph. This is analygous to playing quake in two ways: One, you run ahead until you get to an intersection. At the intersection, you've memorized the response that you should turn right. This is good for quick response, but bad for cognizing a strategy. The other way, you keep an overhead map in your mind, and then consider your location on the map. This is better for formulating a strategy, but not good for running around in the maze quickly.
But both the hash and the map (cartography, not mathematics) are models in our mind; just different forms.
There really is no way to think without a model.
Now, as for the nature of these models, what do we need from these models?
They are like any tools; Speed of execution, accuracy, reliability, and cost of formation are all consderations.
Visual models are generally the best model for cognitive processing; Aural models are generally the best model for direction processing.
Visual models have two primary advantages over aural models:
Visual models are 2 dimensional. Aural models, if they can be called models, are one dimensional streams of syllables. For example, mathematical computation (1.00794*2 + 15.9994) on paper is significantly easier than mathematical computation through a tape recorder. This is because the visual image. Visual models can tunnel through an Audio stream, but this is generally not as efficient as resorting to the visual models in their pure form, and using the aural form only for the elements that it excels at, such as conveying experience, which is fundamentally tied to temporality. For example, consider music, a song, or even the song, "5 'n' 8's 13." (It *is* a song.)
Visual models persist. Aural models disappear as soon as the syllables pass through the mind, and are thus terrible for cognitive analysis. Again, consider a piece of paper vs. a sample on a tape player. It is trivial to to remove the 2D element and make the argument orthogonal. Now, the visual model can be shaped, manipulated, moved about. You can take your scissors, either physical or mental, and can move things about with ease. Now, let's consider the audio model. To manipulate it, we need to replay over and over, either on a tape player or in our mind, and reposition information slowly, tediously. While we are replaying, we have no queue's to our location other than the song stream that is going through us. This is what I mean when I say that sound does not persist, but images do.
Sound is good at conveying linear instructions, because they require step by step temporal guidance. Light is a little worse, because you have to consider your "current temporal location" on the instruction guide, and navigate your map. This is a small price, but it is a price. Do remember that it's easy to correct for missed steps by indexing back on a visual track, rather than with an aural track.
Excellent examples of visual description are comic books (in which authors have finer control over their communication patterns), manuals for repairing cars with diagrams of the pieces of the car (also a comic), airplane guides for what to do in the event of an emergency (also a comic), and the Illustrated TCP/IP volumes I-III (Stephens; almost a comic).
I'd like to add that there is no such thing as 3 dimensional vision; the illusion of 3 dimensions derives completely from...
the passage of time
blurring of distant objects
overlapping semi-transparent representation of objects
This lends to the primary reason that I believe that 3-D OS's are generally a bad idea: The essence of 3d is that something must be hidden in order for something else to be revealed (through turning, or whatever). There are many cases where this is actually a good thing (task bars), but generally, there is an equally good, or better, mechanism on recognized two dimensional surfaces.
Yes, this is still entirely on-topic; desktops are one of the models that we use extensively. Note that icons and cartoons are the best depictions of our folders and files (rather than, say, physical pictures), since it better reflects the icons in our mind (and by extention, our model). For a better understanding of this principle and a better depiction of the argument, read Scott McClouds's "Understanding Comics". Stated briefly: If you see a cartoon picture of a knife and fork, you wouldn't be surprised if they started talking and dancing around; but if it was drawn realistically or photographically, the effect is quite different. One is an icon, and thus a symbol living in the mind, the other is a picture, and thus a depiction of something dropped in the world.
Some day, I plan to write a more elegant, cohesive, and comprehensive description of these ideas, but I am not there yet; this is just some Sunday morning Slashdot. Don't bother checking out taoriver.net just yet; I just moved, and DSL won't be up for another month.
Let me finish with a general association of mine: Light is for knowledge, understanding, and the mind. Sound is for experience, awareness, and life.
There is certainly a connection between scientists and mystics; Mystics are scientists.
Consider the following questions:
How do things work?
How does consciousness work?
Does consciousness ever work differently?
How is it that we are aware?
These are questions that scientists and other technically minded people ask, and they are questions that mystics ask as well.
Note that the word "Gnostic", used in this Slashdot intro, means "Understanding".
If you can explain the universe, but can't explain how it is that you're even aware of it in the first place, you may have just as well just explained a very nice and very neat little dream. Universes are probably a dime a dozen.
Let me put it a completely different way:
If you were a computer programmer, electronics enthusiast, or some other kind of tinkerer, and you come across these concepts of awareness, something called "God", different dimensions, and this mystery of light and sound, which of the following would appeal most to you:
Get a book telling you what the truth is, and then say, "Oh, okay; I'll just go along with what this says here."
Give up, and say that the problems too hard for you; let someone else bother with such things.
We shouldn't be too surprised; Web Pages are already like this.
I remember the surprise that a friend of mine showed when I showed her "Apache Logs".
Her first reply was, "HOW CAN I MAKE IT NOT DO THAT?!?"
(This is a particularly paranoid friend of mine.)
General rule of thumb: If you're doing something on the Internet, you're being logged.
Do something useful: read "Transparent Society" and/or work on making yourself a more tolerant person, rather than fretting about your "privacy" (unaccountability).
I've been doing a lot of thinking about intellectual property recently. What I have synthesized is that the government should protect agreements and trusts ("He said he wouldn't copy this, he did; He's breaking the law") related to intellectual constructions (works of art, inventions), rather than treating intellectual constructions as property (single owner, police can kick out intruders).
I think that it is a good thing that we are able to legally enforce a trust: We can say, "I'll show this technology/image/report/whatever to you on the grounds that you promise not to copy it for anyone else." If you break one of these trusts, there should be a legal punishment/compensation system.
I think it's a terrible and shameful thing that we say, "Nobody else can think up this idea as well." (Patents)
This way, we can simultaneously protect and capitalize on our investments by using licenses. Artists and Inventors can exchange a license (which forbids reproduction and/or retelling) for money, and make a living.
But no one else is prohibited from inventing on their own.
So lets say I invent a compression algorithm and put it in a program. Anyone who uses it is placed under a legal trust not to tell anyone else about it/misuse it/reverse engineer it/etc.,. But the GNU foundation is *NOT* prohibited from thinking it up on their own, since they never agreed to/partook of the license in the first place.
Now there is the question: What about worked sprayed onto the public? For example, Mickey Mouse is placed all over the place by Disney, but they never received my consent; I never agreed that I wouldn't copy Mickey Mouse on my own, or agreed that I wouldn't make Mickey Mouse hats. In that case, we make a general public trust that we all agree to: You may put something into the public space, but at the cost of *FORFEITING YOUR CONTROL* of it w/in 5 years. That's the price you pay for distribution without collecting signatures/signing agreements/breaking seals.
This is my synthesis so far. In some ways, it is stricter (gives the license writers more controls) than what we have now, in many ways it is looser (you *must* aquire consent; and you are not granted a monopoly) than what we have now.
Several things need to be said (and then moderated up), because no one else is saying them.
Be grateful for the support that companies are giving us. Because we really need it. I know, I know, it's not in fashion to have the assistance of companies; but really, we can use the help. The IBM Linux commercial even admits it: Linux has found an ally from an unexpected source.
StarOffice doesn't cut it! It's practically it's own little gated desktop system. It can't operate outside of it's bounds. It will be very difficult to communicate with StarOffice from programs outside of StarOffice. Do you think that you are going to be able to write your own application, and then embed a StarOffice doc within it? Yeah; right. Here's what you need: Bonobo. Trying to avoid it is like trying to engineer a system without shared libraries. Bonobo is a system fundamental.
Where are the figures behind claims that GNOME is bloated? Are you talking about when you used Enlightenment as your window manager? What?
Window Managers, BTW, are not desktops. They never were, and they never shall be. Window Managers, are Window Managers.
GTK+ code is beautiful. The C API is a little awekward because it partitions off it's own name space. GTK+ 2.0 is making it a little nicer. In the mean time, I refer you to the Python code to construct a window:
from gtk import *
win = GtkWindow()
win.set_title( "Hello, World" )
win.show()
win.connect( "destroy", mainquit )
mainloop()
Go ahead, try it right now. Oh yes, another thing; the GTK+ library is LGPL'ed. As in Unambiguously Free Software.
If you are using KDE, you are on legal shaky ground. Have you been paying attention? KDE is a hodge-podge of licenses, sometimes in ways that make no sense. Does this attract business support? (Oh, that's right, you don't need business' sopport. You don't want any help. You want to stay within your 3133+ crew of Hax0rs. Whatever.)
It's a Good thing that your grandmother can use your system. It's a Good thing that AOL is being ported to Linux. These are Good things; these are what we have been working so very hard for. At least I am.
Okay, I'm done ranting here. But again; these things need to be said. It's sad to look at the list of Score: 5's, and they all essentially communicate to companies: "We don't need your kind around here..."
Shimmering Fantasy (or, "What Alex Guinness Said")
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Sir Alec Guinness Dies
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· Score: 1
Now, I hear a lot of bantering on Slashdot about Alex Guinness and just how much he hated Star Wars.
Well now; Let me tell you what just happened.
Alex Guinness just approached me, and he wanted me to tell you something veeery interesting!
He said, "Lion,... I want you to tell them, that I've changed my mind a little bit. That stuff about the Force and what not. Well, you know... I've had a little change of heart. And I really liked that movie too. I want you to tell everyone in Slashdot that."
I swear. He was just floating up in the middle of my living room (perhaps he showed up on my webcam), and he was semi-transparent, and he was talking with me.
Yah,... Shimmering Blue Light and everything. MmHmm. Just like in Star Wars Episode 5. I'm not kidding.
So,.. there it is.
Oh, and his last words were, "May the Code be With you," and then, "Goodnight," very politely.
I've mirrored some of the images. (They are quite impressive; Note that as you zoom in on a text file, you can actually read the text within the file..!)
KiKi's Delivery Service, by Miyazaki (a creative genius) is about this kind of bloc. You might want to rent it, and listen to it. Many people here have given the advice it gives, but I think that you will find that the animated answer is portrayed much more eloquently.
You have an opportunity for a lot of growth as a programmer right now, so don't stop programming as a career and as an artistic effort.
First, rent KiKi's Delivery Service. You will see that you need some time to reflect and relax. Everything will be fine, it just needs a little time right now.
After a period of reflection, get ready to go back to work. Read The Mythical Man-Month. In particular, read what it has to say about Iterative Development. The real strength of iterative development is that it is very action-oriented, and it sounds like you are suffering from a severe lack of activity. Programming iteratively will assist you in getting back up to speed.
After you have learned to code iteratively, you will have another tool in your toolchest, and will be a better programmer for it. Design and Iterative processes both have their time and place. The books that you have been reading are stressing Design. We need to get some Iteration in you.
...it's too bad I can't get a graph of how much money King has received, and how much more will be required for the next installment to be published.
It's also too bad I can't contribute more; I'd love to pay $5.00 towards the cost, if it'll make it that much more likely that everyone can have a piece of it for free.
BTW, while I respect the prisoner's dilemma, I don't think charities would hold too well inside of it. It also doesn't account for the "It's just 1 friggin' dollar, cheapskate" factor.
Whoever wrote the article probably never tips. (How does tipping hold up in the prisoner's dilemma?)
Acknowledging this, we must predict that the world is going to become a bit more exposed. Cases such as the one involving the man at the university, fired for viewing porn on the school internet, will become more common.
I would hope that we, an increasingly online global community, would seek to make ourselves beacons of tolerance and acceptance towards others, rather than desperately clinging to our privacy, out of fear of what others may do to us.
Recently, on Slashdot, I have read that because my anime watching friends and I thought that Lime and Cherry in Saber Marionette J are cute (yes, they are young, and yes, they are sexual), that we must therefor be child molesting pedofiles, and that we should be prohibited from watching anime, at least in the Western hemisphere. This would be very amusing, if people just weren't so serious about it.
But I refuse to hide behind a wall of privacy (one that will be as effective as copyright law at that), and distribute Aa Megamisama and Ranma 1/2 episodes to my friends under the digital table.
I think it would be better to promote tolerance and acceptance in this world.
I believe that there is lots of hope for our society, and by extension, me and you. American Beauty was voted as the most popular film last year. This movie is about many of these issues: Tolerance, Acceptance, and even Privacy. Because people liked that movie, I believe that we will be able to become a more tolerant society.
Please consider re-considering privacy, and please consider promoting tolerance and acceptance.
Internet Cafes, my friend, Internet Cafes. At least that's worked for me. I started teaching UNIX at the Speakeasy Cafe. There are lots of terminals, and people of all types from all backgrounds frequently go to the cafes. I've got 40 and 50 year olds, all the way to a 16 year old high school dropout. They are an excellent group of people.
If you are someone living in Seattle who would like to learn about UNIX and programming UNIX, you are more than welcome to come to the free classes I give downtown on Wednesday nights. The details are on the web page, but in brief, we go at it every Wednesday night, starting around 7:00pm, at the Speakeasy cafe. There are people of all ages at the class, so do not worry that you might be too young or too old. If you need help with rides, they can be arranged; people drive from quite a ways to attend. Currently, we are going over Python and GTK+, but we make our rounds through several topics.
(Just for the record; one of the students is a high-school dropout...)
Whenever a conflict arises between privacy and accountability, people demand the former for themselves and the latter for everybody else. -
Brin, Transparent Society
The article implied that privacy was an issue of Freedom, which it isn't. You can still send e-mails out to whomever you like.
I also recall reading in the article that people didn't like it that when they went to check out a loan, the bank looked over their medical records to make sure that they didn't have a fatal cancer.
Hm. Why should that concern you?
Do you want to check out a bunch of cash from the bank, before you make your final check out from life, and now, this is going to spoil your plans? I can understand how a bank might want to know that sort of thing... (Ack! The terrible maw of accountability is upon us!)
What we really want is to not get into a "Big Brother is Watching You". We don't want our boss, or our leaders, or some police force, to be able to spy on us, and to be able to abuse their power...
There are other ways, than desperately clinging to our privacy at every turn. Time for another Brin quote:
Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny, our secrets laid open, if in return we get flashlights of our own that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm--even the arrogant and strong?
If we could also check out our employers emails, suddenly the picture becomes a lot clearer. Email becomes a style of broadcast speech.
The key thing is, you have to make it so that whatever one person can see, everyone can see. You have to help shape laws with your opinion, and you have to make it so that whenever there is monitoring going on, that it applies equally to the monitors. We absolutely cannot afford to have unmonitored monitors.
Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even the cost of surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?
What can you do today?
Sniff Packets on your company Intranet.
Sniff Packets just outside your company Intranet. If your boss can legally justify scanning emails, so can you!
In our Seattle Weekly, the headlines read "But who will watch the cops?"
In the Weekly, a Citizen Review Board was discussed. The initiative described would require paid citizens on a board to watch over sections of the police....so much effort, so many laws required. Then you have to delegate what the citizens can and cannot do, what authority they have, and on and on... It's a big hassle.
All you need is cameras connected to the Internet. You can be sure that at least 10 people out there will be archiving everything that happens on those cameras; you don't even need the state to pay for the disk space. Just wire up some cameras, state clearly that they are not to be interrupted, and wha-lah; immediate accountable police force.
I am disheartened to read that attention is not being paid to the GIMP UI.
The GIMP has 1st class, state of the art capabilities, but it's user interface is terrible.
Believe me; I Love the GIMP, but I just had my first fight ever with my girlfriend of 3-months; it started when she said, "I don't ever use the GIMP; I will only use Corel Photoworks (or whatever it was). The $500 I paid for it was worth every penny." After sitting down with my girlfriend for about an hour with the GIMP, I had to agree that the UI was bad.
Unfortunately, I cannot "just go into the GIMP source code and fix it", the problem is larger than one lone volunteer can solve.
The UI is a traditional Achilles Heel of Free and Open Source Software. Fortunately, there is a traditional solution to the problem as well, namely embedded scripting languages and extensive customizability.
The GIMP will take off when the UI is fully customizable; Making the UI maximally customizable should become the GIMPs next great goal.
Artists are craftsmen and want to be able to get their tools just right. They want their particular brush, their particular colours, their particular keystrokes, their particular default layout, just right. I don't know how many times I have heard artists say, "I wish it was just organized like this," or, "Why did they put that there?"
A subset of artists will have coding abilities, and the time to work with the GIMP. After the programmers have made it easy for the artists to easily customize things, the artists will be able to customize the work environment to be usable.
The artists will customize the GIMP in many ways and upload their customizations to themes.org. The good customizations will float to the top, the bad ones will sink to the bottom. Great customizations will be included with the GIMP.
This is how to fix the UI for the GIMP.
This is how ALL OpenSource UIs have been fixed- By giving the users an easy way to customize their environment.
Okay, that's enough for now... =^_^= . o O ( Phew! )
Will average citizens share, along with the mighty, the right to access these universal monitors? Will common folk have, and exercise, a sovereign power to watch the watchers?
Can we stand living exposed to scrutiny, our secrets laid open, if in return we get flashlights of our own that we can shine on anyone who might do us harm--even the arrogant and strong?
Or is an illusion of privacy worth any price, even the cost of surrendering our own right to pierce the schemes of the powerful?
I wish there were more screenshots of the support for WebDAV; I'm very happy to see something like this built into Nautilus..!
Here's some Microsoft PR (Yes, I know, sorry), on the PUBLIC STANDARD, WebDAV. It's relevance to Free Software developers should be immediately apparent.
ISPs will also be initial adopters, since WebDAV provides a standard way to support authoring of Web pages by their customers. The big benefit for an ISP is the lower support cost that comes from not having to explain how to use FTP, and a shell account. Just hand out a password and a URL for an area where people can make their Web pages.
Once the versioning standard has been completed, I expect to see a lot of WebDAV support show up in software development tools. It has long been a goal of many development tools to better support geographically dispersed teams of developers. WebDAV is a standard which allows teams of developers, even ones which are using different sets of tools, to collaboratively develop software across the Internet.
What's wrong with information?
on
The Regulon
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· Score: 2
With so many Web sites, Web logs, mailing lists, networks, magazines, instant messages, conferences, shows, gasbags, lobbyists, experts, scholars, junk mail and politicians bombarding us that we really have no idea what might or might not be true. The public is beseiged to the point of stalemate, a possible explanation of the dead tie in the presidential election.
As it was, it is now, and always shall be.
I really don't see what the problem is here...
If a slime mold covers up the world, it's bad because everything else dies, incapable of receiving light. That's really bad.
But information (in itself) isn't harming people.
So, I'm going to give Jon Katz the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is joining the party of Internet intellectuals (such as the recently mentioned Caleb Carr), that is fond of saying, "People are getting information, but they aren't forming a framework out of that information." (Caleb's solution was to put a "truth rating" on every web tidbit...)
It is true; If you are into the advancement of mind, this is indeed a great obstacle. But I don't think it's a new thing. Perhaps I should complain, "People are learning things on the net, but they aren't learning that these are things that have always been true, and will be true in the future."
Sometimes I read these Internet Pundits, and it just sounds like they are shouting this remarkably arrogant, "Just Get Smarter!"
People have lives, jobs, family, emotions, issues that they are sorting out, mystic quests and sagas, dramas, vengences, whatever. There's a lot more than just this mental churning going on out there. People don't necessarily want a coherent mental framework. Personally, I think it's really important, and a good thing. Consistency and clarity are nice. But I wouldn't go around saying, "Morasses of information are falling on these poor rubes who can't figure out how to seperate the wheat from the chaff" as if the sky was falling.
Slashdot Mirror
I am elated to finally find a paper that so clearly elucidates my position and observations. I am also saddened to realise that people who would benefit the most from it are also the least likely to read it and understand it.
Item 3 in particular hit home; I have had the exact same conversation and thought process ("Perhaps the person I'm talking with doesn't have a subjective experience?"), for the last five years. The last time I had it was a few days ago while talking with a fellow engineer here at LithTech.
Subjective experience is not an easy problem; in fact, it is a very hard problem, but there is something in too many scientist's minds that makes them want to treat the subject as a superstitious topic, and treat those who find subjective experience difficult to fit within a computational framework as religious or spiritual zealots. Larson has correctly identified the currently popular model of the world, "Cybernetic Totalism."
By the way; Not understanding his paper is not something to be proud of. Ignorance about *anything* is not something to be proud of. Use a dictionary or a search engine, whatever it takes, and understand these words.
That's interesting; I've only received nothing but the kindest of service from SpeakEasy.
SpeakEasy is the most politically aware and open network, having made an explicit commitment to freedoms in their mission statement and terms of service. I had to turn down several ISP's (such as InternetConnect) because of their draconian TOS (which included that they can charge me $1,000 if I potentially infringe on IP). SpeakEasy is the only ISP I trust.
Just recently, Nader spoke at the SpeakEasy cafe off 2nd and Bell, downtown Seattle. SpeakEasy has lent the back room to Free Radio Seattle as well. If SpeakEasy isn't a safe ISP, I don't know who is.
I'm terribly enthusiastic about OpenSource Educational Material.
Open Publications can provide us with much more than merely free and improved literature. We can apply groupware concepts to online education and build a very modular and exacting approach to education. Knowledge requirements for particular subjects can be made explicit and linked to. Community systems (such as ArsDigita's) can be applied in order to permit annotation, both textual and graphical, chat rooms (the largest study group in history), and other assistants to understanding material. Multiple explanations of the same subject can be given side-by-side. Methods of explaining can be analyzed and optimized.
OpenContent books such as Havoc's book Gnome/GTK+ Application Developmentappear to be doing well on the shelves. I haven't witnessed price wars yet; most Open Publication books are only being published by one publisher, even though there is nothing to preventing republishing. Indeed, it makes me wonder why more books are not published under free licenses.
Publishers' roles (and living) will not disappear until book compilers are commonplace, even though content may be liberated; I, and several others, severally annotate our books. (My copy of House Of Leaves has a lot more in blue than just the word "House".)
If fetchmail and Linux were not run as bazaar projects, what would a true bazaar project look like? A real bazaar software development method would proceed as follows.
Hmm; doesn't this sound suspiciosly similar to the way distrobutions work?
(The article did have some interesting notes though.)
Models are necessary to think; Without a Model, you cannot think. Thinking involves manipulation. Unless your thoughts physically manipulate the world in real time, (in which case the world is in your mind, and could be considered to be... "only a model"), your thoughts manipulate a model in your head.
Consider that you wake up in the morning and you'd like to sneak off to eat a sandwitch. But, you're disoriented; your model in your head of how your house is layed out and where you are with respect to it is incorrect. But then you check yourself with the world, and align yourself correctly; you make your model and the world align correctly. Ah, now we can go on to get that sandwitch.
Similarly, if you are manipulating a program, you have a certain model in your head about how the program works. Sometimes we keep it in a hash in our heads (A->B, B->C, C->E, E->D, A->E as well), and sometimes we keep it as a planar graph. This is analygous to playing quake in two ways: One, you run ahead until you get to an intersection. At the intersection, you've memorized the response that you should turn right. This is good for quick response, but bad for cognizing a strategy. The other way, you keep an overhead map in your mind, and then consider your location on the map. This is better for formulating a strategy, but not good for running around in the maze quickly.
But both the hash and the map (cartography, not mathematics) are models in our mind; just different forms.
There really is no way to think without a model.
Now, as for the nature of these models, what do we need from these models?
They are like any tools; Speed of execution, accuracy, reliability, and cost of formation are all consderations.
Visual models are generally the best model for cognitive processing; Aural models are generally the best model for direction processing.
Visual models have two primary advantages over aural models:
- Visual models are 2 dimensional. Aural models, if they can be called models, are one dimensional streams of syllables. For example, mathematical computation (1.00794*2 + 15.9994) on paper is significantly easier than mathematical computation through a tape recorder. This is because the visual image. Visual models can tunnel through an Audio stream, but this is generally not as efficient as resorting to the visual models in their pure form, and using the aural form only for the elements that it excels at, such as conveying experience, which is fundamentally tied to temporality. For example, consider music, a song, or even the song, "5 'n' 8's 13." (It *is* a song.)
- Visual models persist. Aural models disappear as soon as the syllables pass through the mind, and are thus terrible for cognitive analysis. Again, consider a piece of paper vs. a sample on a tape player. It is trivial to to remove the 2D element and make the argument orthogonal. Now, the visual model can be shaped, manipulated, moved about. You can take your scissors, either physical or mental, and can move things about with ease. Now, let's consider the audio model. To manipulate it, we need to replay over and over, either on a tape player or in our mind, and reposition information slowly, tediously. While we are replaying, we have no queue's to our location other than the song stream that is going through us. This is what I mean when I say that sound does not persist, but images do.
Sound is good at conveying linear instructions, because they require step by step temporal guidance. Light is a little worse, because you have to consider your "current temporal location" on the instruction guide, and navigate your map. This is a small price, but it is a price. Do remember that it's easy to correct for missed steps by indexing back on a visual track, rather than with an aural track.Excellent examples of visual description are comic books (in which authors have finer control over their communication patterns), manuals for repairing cars with diagrams of the pieces of the car (also a comic), airplane guides for what to do in the event of an emergency (also a comic), and the Illustrated TCP/IP volumes I-III (Stephens; almost a comic).
I'd like to add that there is no such thing as 3 dimensional vision; the illusion of 3 dimensions derives completely from...
- the passage of time
- blurring of distant objects
- overlapping semi-transparent representation of objects
This lends to the primary reason that I believe that 3-D OS's are generally a bad idea: The essence of 3d is that something must be hidden in order for something else to be revealed (through turning, or whatever). There are many cases where this is actually a good thing (task bars), but generally, there is an equally good, or better, mechanism on recognized two dimensional surfaces.Yes, this is still entirely on-topic; desktops are one of the models that we use extensively. Note that icons and cartoons are the best depictions of our folders and files (rather than, say, physical pictures), since it better reflects the icons in our mind (and by extention, our model). For a better understanding of this principle and a better depiction of the argument, read Scott McClouds's "Understanding Comics". Stated briefly: If you see a cartoon picture of a knife and fork, you wouldn't be surprised if they started talking and dancing around; but if it was drawn realistically or photographically, the effect is quite different. One is an icon, and thus a symbol living in the mind, the other is a picture, and thus a depiction of something dropped in the world.
Some day, I plan to write a more elegant, cohesive, and comprehensive description of these ideas, but I am not there yet; this is just some Sunday morning Slashdot. Don't bother checking out taoriver.net just yet; I just moved, and DSL won't be up for another month.
Let me finish with a general association of mine: Light is for knowledge, understanding, and the mind. Sound is for experience, awareness, and life.
There is certainly a connection between scientists and mystics; Mystics are scientists.
Consider the following questions:
These are questions that scientists and other technically minded people ask, and they are questions that mystics ask as well. Note that the word "Gnostic", used in this Slashdot intro, means "Understanding".
Of all religious devotees, Mystics are the most scientific, since they constantly try to find the truth through observation, trial, and error. Mystics generally find that the the written word takes second place to first hand repeatable experiments, usually in the form of meditation.
If there is any one thing that would make a mystic out of a scientifically minded person (assuming that the scientist hasn't already taking Socrates' advice to heart and studying their own awareness), it would have to be the hard problem of consciousness, which is essentially, the problem of how we are ever aware of anything at all; why it is that there is something like to be a person (or a butterfly).
If you can explain the universe, but can't explain how it is that you're even aware of it in the first place, you may have just as well just explained a very nice and very neat little dream. Universes are probably a dime a dozen.
Let me put it a completely different way:
If you were a computer programmer, electronics enthusiast, or some other kind of tinkerer, and you come across these concepts of awareness, something called "God", different dimensions, and this mystery of light and sound, which of the following would appeal most to you:
(Necessary plug: Personally, I practice Surat Shabda Yoga).
We shouldn't be too surprised; Web Pages are already like this.
I remember the surprise that a friend of mine showed when I showed her "Apache Logs".
Her first reply was, "HOW CAN I MAKE IT NOT DO THAT?!?"
(This is a particularly paranoid friend of mine.)
General rule of thumb: If you're doing something on the Internet, you're being logged.
Do something useful: read "Transparent Society" and/or work on making yourself a more tolerant person, rather than fretting about your "privacy" (unaccountability).
Right; I understand "that no one cares whetehr you ever saw the other invention" with patents, I just don't happen to agree with the principle.
Do you?
I've been doing a lot of thinking about intellectual property recently. What I have synthesized is that the government should protect agreements and trusts ("He said he wouldn't copy this, he did; He's breaking the law") related to intellectual constructions (works of art, inventions), rather than treating intellectual constructions as property (single owner, police can kick out intruders).
I think that it is a good thing that we are able to legally enforce a trust: We can say, "I'll show this technology/image/report/whatever to you on the grounds that you promise not to copy it for anyone else." If you break one of these trusts, there should be a legal punishment/compensation system.
I think it's a terrible and shameful thing that we say, "Nobody else can think up this idea as well." (Patents)
This way, we can simultaneously protect and capitalize on our investments by using licenses. Artists and Inventors can exchange a license (which forbids reproduction and/or retelling) for money, and make a living.
But no one else is prohibited from inventing on their own.
So lets say I invent a compression algorithm and put it in a program. Anyone who uses it is placed under a legal trust not to tell anyone else about it/misuse it/reverse engineer it/etc.,. But the GNU foundation is *NOT* prohibited from thinking it up on their own, since they never agreed to/partook of the license in the first place.
Now there is the question: What about worked sprayed onto the public? For example, Mickey Mouse is placed all over the place by Disney, but they never received my consent; I never agreed that I wouldn't copy Mickey Mouse on my own, or agreed that I wouldn't make Mickey Mouse hats. In that case, we make a general public trust that we all agree to: You may put something into the public space, but at the cost of *FORFEITING YOUR CONTROL* of it w/in 5 years. That's the price you pay for distribution without collecting signatures/signing agreements/breaking seals.
This is my synthesis so far. In some ways, it is stricter (gives the license writers more controls) than what we have now, in many ways it is looser (you *must* aquire consent; and you are not granted a monopoly) than what we have now.
What do you all think?
Several things need to be said (and then moderated up), because no one else is saying them.
- from gtk import *
- win = GtkWindow()
- win.set_title( "Hello, World" )
- win.show()
- win.connect( "destroy", mainquit )
- mainloop()
Go ahead, try it right now. Oh yes, another thing; the GTK+ library is LGPL'ed. As in Unambiguously Free Software.Now, I hear a lot of bantering on Slashdot about Alex Guinness and just how much he hated Star Wars.
Well now; Let me tell you what just happened.
Alex Guinness just approached me, and he wanted me to tell you something veeery interesting!
He said, "Lion,... I want you to tell them, that I've changed my mind a little bit. That stuff about the Force and what not. Well, you know... I've had a little change of heart. And I really liked that movie too. I want you to tell everyone in Slashdot that."
I swear. He was just floating up in the middle of my living room (perhaps he showed up on my webcam), and he was semi-transparent, and he was talking with me.
Yah,... Shimmering Blue Light and everything. MmHmm. Just like in Star Wars Episode 5. I'm not kidding.
So,.. there it is.
Oh, and his last words were, "May the Code be With you," and then, "Goodnight," very politely.
I've mirrored some of the images. (They are quite impressive; Note that as you zoom in on a text file, you can actually read the text within the file..!)
Consider it an experiment in Slashdotting.
KiKi's Delivery Service, by Miyazaki (a creative genius) is about this kind of bloc. You might want to rent it, and listen to it. Many people here have given the advice it gives, but I think that you will find that the animated answer is portrayed much more eloquently.
You have an opportunity for a lot of growth as a programmer right now, so don't stop programming as a career and as an artistic effort.
First, rent KiKi's Delivery Service. You will see that you need some time to reflect and relax. Everything will be fine, it just needs a little time right now.
After a period of reflection, get ready to go back to work. Read The Mythical Man-Month. In particular, read what it has to say about Iterative Development. The real strength of iterative development is that it is very action-oriented, and it sounds like you are suffering from a severe lack of activity. Programming iteratively will assist you in getting back up to speed.
After you have learned to code iteratively, you will have another tool in your toolchest, and will be a better programmer for it. Design and Iterative processes both have their time and place. The books that you have been reading are stressing Design. We need to get some Iteration in you.
Then code again.
May the Code be with you.
It's also too bad I can't contribute more; I'd love to pay $5.00 towards the cost, if it'll make it that much more likely that everyone can have a piece of it for free.
BTW, while I respect the prisoner's dilemma, I don't think charities would hold too well inside of it. It also doesn't account for the "It's just 1 friggin' dollar, cheapskate" factor.
Whoever wrote the article probably never tips. (How does tipping hold up in the prisoner's dilemma?)
Looking for a technology to preserve privacy is about as ineffective as looking for a technology to enforce copyright laws.
Increasingly, our privacy is disappearing, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Acknowledging this, we must predict that the world is going to become a bit more exposed. Cases such as the one involving the man at the university, fired for viewing porn on the school internet, will become more common.
I would hope that we, an increasingly online global community, would seek to make ourselves beacons of tolerance and acceptance towards others, rather than desperately clinging to our privacy, out of fear of what others may do to us.
Recently, on Slashdot, I have read that because my anime watching friends and I thought that Lime and Cherry in Saber Marionette J are cute (yes, they are young, and yes, they are sexual), that we must therefor be child molesting pedofiles, and that we should be prohibited from watching anime, at least in the Western hemisphere. This would be very amusing, if people just weren't so serious about it.
But I refuse to hide behind a wall of privacy (one that will be as effective as copyright law at that), and distribute Aa Megamisama and Ranma 1/2 episodes to my friends under the digital table.
I think it would be better to promote tolerance and acceptance in this world.
I believe that there is lots of hope for our society, and by extension, me and you. American Beauty was voted as the most popular film last year. This movie is about many of these issues: Tolerance, Acceptance, and even Privacy. Because people liked that movie, I believe that we will be able to become a more tolerant society.
Please consider re-considering privacy, and please consider promoting tolerance and acceptance.
Internet Cafes, my friend, Internet Cafes. At least that's worked for me. I started teaching UNIX at the Speakeasy Cafe. There are lots of terminals, and people of all types from all backgrounds frequently go to the cafes. I've got 40 and 50 year olds, all the way to a 16 year old high school dropout. They are an excellent group of people.
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If you are someone living in Seattle who would like to learn about UNIX and programming UNIX, you are more than welcome to come to the free classes I give downtown on Wednesday nights. The details are on the web page, but in brief, we go at it every Wednesday night, starting around 7:00pm, at the Speakeasy cafe. There are people of all ages at the class, so do not worry that you might be too young or too old. If you need help with rides, they can be arranged; people drive from quite a ways to attend. Currently, we are going over Python and GTK+, but we make our rounds through several topics.
(Just for the record; one of the students is a high-school dropout...)
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The article implied that privacy was an issue of Freedom, which it isn't. You can still send e-mails out to whomever you like.
I also recall reading in the article that people didn't like it that when they went to check out a loan, the bank looked over their medical records to make sure that they didn't have a fatal cancer.
Hm. Why should that concern you?
Do you want to check out a bunch of cash from the bank, before you make your final check out from life, and now, this is going to spoil your plans? I can understand how a bank might want to know that sort of thing... (Ack! The terrible maw of accountability is upon us!)
What we really want is to not get into a "Big Brother is Watching You". We don't want our boss, or our leaders, or some police force, to be able to spy on us, and to be able to abuse their power...
There are other ways, than desperately clinging to our privacy at every turn. Time for another Brin quote:
If we could also check out our employers emails, suddenly the picture becomes a lot clearer. Email becomes a style of broadcast speech.
The key thing is, you have to make it so that whatever one person can see, everyone can see. You have to help shape laws with your opinion, and you have to make it so that whenever there is monitoring going on, that it applies equally to the monitors. We absolutely cannot afford to have unmonitored monitors.
What can you do today?
In our Seattle Weekly, the headlines read "But who will watch the cops?"
In the Weekly, a Citizen Review Board was discussed. The initiative described would require paid citizens on a board to watch over sections of the police. ...so much effort, so many laws required. Then you have to delegate what the citizens can and cannot do, what authority they have, and on and on... It's a big hassle.
All you need is cameras connected to the Internet. You can be sure that at least 10 people out there will be archiving everything that happens on those cameras; you don't even need the state to pay for the disk space. Just wire up some cameras, state clearly that they are not to be interrupted, and wha-lah; immediate accountable police force.
Read: -Brin's home page, or Transparent Society for more details.
I am disheartened to read that attention is not being paid to the GIMP UI.
The GIMP has 1st class, state of the art capabilities, but it's user interface is terrible.
Believe me; I Love the GIMP, but I just had my first fight ever with my girlfriend of 3-months; it started when she said, "I don't ever use the GIMP; I will only use Corel Photoworks (or whatever it was). The $500 I paid for it was worth every penny." After sitting down with my girlfriend for about an hour with the GIMP, I had to agree that the UI was bad.
Unfortunately, I cannot "just go into the GIMP source code and fix it", the problem is larger than one lone volunteer can solve.
The UI is a traditional Achilles Heel of Free and Open Source Software. Fortunately, there is a traditional solution to the problem as well, namely embedded scripting languages and extensive customizability.
The GIMP will take off when the UI is fully customizable; Making the UI maximally customizable should become the GIMPs next great goal.
This is how to fix the UI for the GIMP.
This is how ALL OpenSource UIs have been fixed- By giving the users an easy way to customize their environment.
Okay, that's enough for now... =^_^= . o O ( Phew! )
If we could easily see into records pertaining to ourselves, this problem would never occur.
Read The Transparent Society Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin for a well thought out map of the root problem, and a solution to it.
Here are some of the questions it poses:
I wish there were more screenshots of the support for WebDAV; I'm very happy to see something like this built into Nautilus..!
Here's some Microsoft PR (Yes, I know, sorry), on the PUBLIC STANDARD, WebDAV. It's relevance to Free Software developers should be immediately apparent.
As it was, it is now, and always shall be.
I really don't see what the problem is here...
If a slime mold covers up the world, it's bad because everything else dies, incapable of receiving light. That's really bad.
But information (in itself) isn't harming people.
So, I'm going to give Jon Katz the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is joining the party of Internet intellectuals (such as the recently mentioned Caleb Carr), that is fond of saying, "People are getting information, but they aren't forming a framework out of that information." (Caleb's solution was to put a "truth rating" on every web tidbit...)
It is true; If you are into the advancement of mind, this is indeed a great obstacle. But I don't think it's a new thing. Perhaps I should complain, "People are learning things on the net, but they aren't learning that these are things that have always been true, and will be true in the future."
Sometimes I read these Internet Pundits, and it just sounds like they are shouting this remarkably arrogant, "Just Get Smarter!"
People have lives, jobs, family, emotions, issues that they are sorting out, mystic quests and sagas, dramas, vengences, whatever. There's a lot more than just this mental churning going on out there. People don't necessarily want a coherent mental framework. Personally, I think it's really important, and a good thing. Consistency and clarity are nice. But I wouldn't go around saying, "Morasses of information are falling on these poor rubes who can't figure out how to seperate the wheat from the chaff" as if the sky was falling.
A particularly odd post by JonKatz.