The iPhone suffers less from being a closed system and more from a poor cellular partner
Well, it suffers from being a closed system that allows a poor cellular partner to enforce a lot of customer-hostile bullshit. You can tether phones with AT&T (I'm tethering my bog-standard Sony Ericsson phone with AT&T quite happily), unless the manufacturer of the phone has decided to limit what the customer can do based on AT&T's whims.
Nonsense. Sculptures are works of art, and thus uncontroversially subject to copyright. Clothes, doors, and carpets are functional objects, and thus not, in general, subject to copyright. If this story were about the designer of a chair asserting copyright over photos of that chair, that might represent a significant increase in the restrictions imposed by copyright law; but that's not the case here.
I'm pretty sure that's not right - photographing something doesn't magically remove any copyright in that thing. There is a specific exemption for architecture, and copyright in architectural works doesn't prevent people from photographing them. For every other type of copyright work, though, a photograph of it is a derivative work.
You have all the rights granted under the GPL. What you can't do is connect to their servers with a client that doesn't conform to their policies.
It's a little unclear. The intro to the policy does look a little more onerous: they write "we require users of Third-Party Viewers and those who develop or distribute them (“Developers”) to comply with this Policy," which looks like an attempt to limit any distribution of clients that don't conform to the policy. When it lists the consequences of failing to comply with the policy, it's mostly that they will revoke the client's right to access their servers, they may remove it from their viewer directory, and ban anyone who does use the client, none of which are particularly unreasonable. But they also write (section 8c):
You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation.
I'm not entirely sure how to parse that, but one way of reading it suggests they think they can require developers of non-policy-compliant viewers to either disable the client's ability to connect to Linden's servers, or even perhaps to stop distributing the client altogether.
I think this is likely a case of some slightly overreaching language in the policy, rather than an evil attempt to get around the GPL; but it would be nice if their policy was clearly not attempting to take away people's GPL rights, rather than being, as it currently is, rather unclear.
Are you sure? The linked policy says, "This Policy governs access to Second Life and our technical platform that supports Second Life by any Third-Party Viewer or any third-party software client that logs into our servers." It looks like it's only section 6 that applies to "a Developer with a Third-Party Viewer that you would like to list in our Viewer Directory"; the rest seems to be a condition on any client that accesses Linden's servers.
That being said, I'm not sure that this is as egregious as the summary makes it sound. It seems mostly to amount to, "if you use a client to connect to our servers, that client must abide by our policies." Which doesn't seem all that unreasonable (Linden have the right to place conditions of use on access to their servers, even if some of the conditions are kind of wack), and certainly doesn't "all but erases the freedoms granted under the GPL." First, there are plenty of modifications that could still be made without contravening Linden's terms of use; second, if you use their GPLed code to produce something that doesn't connect to their servers, you don't have to follow this policy at all. The only slightly dubious thing is that they do seem to want to restrict distribution of clients that could connect to their servers, even if they could also be used in other ways.
A secret URL is essentially a password - so attempting lots of funny URLs can be like trying lots of ssh logins.
Well, if they had used an intentionally hard-to-guess URL (like, say, the ones Google uses for shared calendars) you might have a point. But, from the article, they simply used the URL which would become the public URL once announced, nswtransportblueprint.com.au . They didn't have to try lots of URLs to defeat any kind of secrecy; they simply accessed an obvious, public URL, that the government hadn't yet officially announced.
The depressing thing is, the US does choose to spend tax money on healthcare; the US actually has higher government spending on healthcare than Canada or the UK do. It's just that the US healthcare system is so massively broken that this vast expenditure only covers 30% of the population, where in most other developed countries, an equal or smaller government expenditure covers the majority of the health costs of the entire population.
So, presumably, whenever you quote prices for health insurance in the US, you add on the $2,368 per person that the US government spends on healthcare? Given that Canadian government spending on healthcare is less than US government spending on healthcare, comparing this $100 figure with insurance costs in the US actually exaggerates how expensive Canadian coverage is.
Every developed country spends a significant amount of taxpayers' money on healthcare, and this is going to be implicit in any discussion of healthcare costs. The difference is, in most Western countries, in return for their tax money, everyone gets healthcare for little or no additional cost; in the US, on the other hand, we have to pay taxes for healthcare, and then we have to spend a huge amount of money on insurance or out-of-pocket costs, as well.
I'm not sure "Insightful" is the mod I'd give the parent, but I suppose there's no "Delusional" mod, so you've got to go with what you're given.
Seriously, though "Ten years ago, when the big banks started requiring fingerprints for everything." Except, they didn't. No bank requires fingerprints for regular services, like opening an account or depositing or withdrawing money.
Or "the legal fraud of the Federal Reserve system." What is this even supposed to mean? "Hand out million-dollar mortgages to illegal immigrants with no incomes"? Again, something that has never happened.
I remember a group of internet anarchists set up something very much along these lines to coincide with the WTO protests in Seattle back in 1999. They made a good point which I think goes along with your idea that this is "digital equivalent of peasants throwing rocks." Like peasants throwing rocks this kind of simple DDOS can only work if it has the participation of a fairly large number of people. It's very much the internet equivalent of classic protest tactics like picket lines or sit-ins.
your Google Reader comments are by default visible to your followers
Is that the case, even if you've previously set your Reader comments to be visible only to specific people (as the blogger in this case apparently had)?
Asimov in the later Foundation series had the robots take the First Law to extremes and let it justify micromanaging humanity for its own good.
Well, sort of. But in the later robot novels, the robots use this micromanagement to favor of the non-robot society of the Settlers, in the process destroying the robot-based society of the Spacers. In these books, Asimov does portray human dependence on robots as a bad thing, although in a subtler way than the film does.
About the only thing the book had in common with the movie was the title.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book); a mystery based on trying to predict how these laws will play out in unusual circumstances (the point of the other half of the stories in the book); a society shaped by dependence on robots, and the problems this might cause (the subject of a number of Asimov's later robot books). Sure, there's a lot more running around and shooting and Will Smith being a badass in the film than there is in the book, but there's some definite common threads, too.
I'm beginning to think that people who claim the book and film of I, Robot have nothing in common simply don't have a very strong grasp on what Asimov actually wrote.
"It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real."
Really? I'm having trouble thinking of anything in Foundation that couldn't have been filmed using the technology available back when the stories were originally written. It's a story about ideas, not an exercise in world-building or aesthetic splendor.
I Robot is a pretty decent film, and is true to a lot of Asimov's themes (particularly, the effect of widespread dependence on robots on human society, as explored in the Elijah Baley novels).
Searle's dualism (which he claims isn't dualism, but it totally is) is ridiculous, I agree, but functionalism is also a dead dog. For better criticisms of functionalism, look at Putnam's recent work. As Putnam was one of the main inventors of functionalism in the first place, his rejection of the position involves significant familiarity with functionalism, and is pretty compelling.
The problem is, this isn't a survey of "AI experts," it's a survey of participants in the Artificial General Intelligence conference. As far as I can see, this is a conference populated by the few remaining holdouts who believe that creating human-like, or human-equivalent, AIs, is a tractable or interesting problem; most AI research now is oriented towards much more specific aspects of intelligence. So this is a poll of a subset of AI researchers who have self-selected along the lines that they think human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future; it's hardly surprising, then, that the results show that many of them do in fact believe human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future.
I would be much more interested in a wider poll of AI researchers; I highly doubt anything like as many would predict nobel-prize-winning AIs in 10-20 years, or even ever. TFA itself reports a survey of AI researchers in 2006, in which 41% said they thought human-equivalent AI would never be produces, and another 41% said they thought it would take 50 years to produce such a thing.
The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.
Of course, anything hypothetically could be patented; but HTML5 is at least in the position that there are no known patent restrictions on implementing it.
It sounds like it freezes due to the change in charge, not because the water warms up.
But when the water warms up, that causes the charge on the surface to change, thereby causing the water to freeze; so the water warming up, and it freezing, are causally linked. It seems more like a neat trick than anything else, but "freeze water by warming it" is a more-or-less accurate summary of what's happening.
If you try to deconstruct that sentence, it really has no definite meaning. You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.
No, it has a perfectly definite meaning, because it's a perfectly grammatical sentence in Black Vernacular English. "Be" is used to construct the habitual present tense. This isn't discarding verb conjugation, it's using an additional conjugation that you don't happen to have in your own dialect. Note that if you replace this particular construct with what you think is a "reasonable conjugation" (say, changing "I be working" to "I am working") you'll misunderstand the sentence.
You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote.
Well, that makes sense to me. You need the artist to produce the concept materials to get people to invest the money so that you can employ an engineering team and produce something solid.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone suffers less from being a closed system and more from a poor cellular partner
Well, it suffers from being a closed system that allows a poor cellular partner to enforce a lot of customer-hostile bullshit. You can tether phones with AT&T (I'm tethering my bog-standard Sony Ericsson phone with AT&T quite happily), unless the manufacturer of the phone has decided to limit what the customer can do based on AT&T's whims.
Actually, GTK+ and the other GLib libraries that GNOME is based on are object-oriented.
They're a search engine giant - they can just change the search engine to make the name search-engine friendly.
If this decision holds, that's about to change.
Nonsense. Sculptures are works of art, and thus uncontroversially subject to copyright. Clothes, doors, and carpets are functional objects, and thus not, in general, subject to copyright. If this story were about the designer of a chair asserting copyright over photos of that chair, that might represent a significant increase in the restrictions imposed by copyright law; but that's not the case here.
I'm pretty sure that's not right - photographing something doesn't magically remove any copyright in that thing. There is a specific exemption for architecture, and copyright in architectural works doesn't prevent people from photographing them. For every other type of copyright work, though, a photograph of it is a derivative work.
There's a great deal of evidence to suggest...
And yet you don't include any reference to this supposed evidence.
Wikileaks has offered to host Cryptome via their twitter feed.
Hosting 140 characters at a time?
You have all the rights granted under the GPL. What you can't do is connect to their servers with a client that doesn't conform to their policies.
It's a little unclear. The intro to the policy does look a little more onerous: they write "we require users of Third-Party Viewers and those who develop or distribute them (“Developers”) to comply with this Policy," which looks like an attempt to limit any distribution of clients that don't conform to the policy. When it lists the consequences of failing to comply with the policy, it's mostly that they will revoke the client's right to access their servers, they may remove it from their viewer directory, and ban anyone who does use the client, none of which are particularly unreasonable. But they also write (section 8c):
You acknowledge and agree that we may require you to stop using or distributing a Third-Party Viewer for accessing Second Life if we determine that there is a violation.
I'm not entirely sure how to parse that, but one way of reading it suggests they think they can require developers of non-policy-compliant viewers to either disable the client's ability to connect to Linden's servers, or even perhaps to stop distributing the client altogether.
I think this is likely a case of some slightly overreaching language in the policy, rather than an evil attempt to get around the GPL; but it would be nice if their policy was clearly not attempting to take away people's GPL rights, rather than being, as it currently is, rather unclear.
Are you sure? The linked policy says, "This Policy governs access to Second Life and our technical platform that supports Second Life by any Third-Party Viewer or any third-party software client that logs into our servers." It looks like it's only section 6 that applies to "a Developer with a Third-Party Viewer that you would like to list in our Viewer Directory"; the rest seems to be a condition on any client that accesses Linden's servers.
That being said, I'm not sure that this is as egregious as the summary makes it sound. It seems mostly to amount to, "if you use a client to connect to our servers, that client must abide by our policies." Which doesn't seem all that unreasonable (Linden have the right to place conditions of use on access to their servers, even if some of the conditions are kind of wack), and certainly doesn't "all but erases the freedoms granted under the GPL." First, there are plenty of modifications that could still be made without contravening Linden's terms of use; second, if you use their GPLed code to produce something that doesn't connect to their servers, you don't have to follow this policy at all. The only slightly dubious thing is that they do seem to want to restrict distribution of clients that could connect to their servers, even if they could also be used in other ways.
A secret URL is essentially a password - so attempting lots of funny URLs can be like trying lots of ssh logins.
Well, if they had used an intentionally hard-to-guess URL (like, say, the ones Google uses for shared calendars) you might have a point. But, from the article, they simply used the URL which would become the public URL once announced, nswtransportblueprint.com.au . They didn't have to try lots of URLs to defeat any kind of secrecy; they simply accessed an obvious, public URL, that the government hadn't yet officially announced.
The depressing thing is, the US does choose to spend tax money on healthcare; the US actually has higher government spending on healthcare than Canada or the UK do. It's just that the US healthcare system is so massively broken that this vast expenditure only covers 30% of the population, where in most other developed countries, an equal or smaller government expenditure covers the majority of the health costs of the entire population.
So, presumably, whenever you quote prices for health insurance in the US, you add on the $2,368 per person that the US government spends on healthcare? Given that Canadian government spending on healthcare is less than US government spending on healthcare, comparing this $100 figure with insurance costs in the US actually exaggerates how expensive Canadian coverage is.
Every developed country spends a significant amount of taxpayers' money on healthcare, and this is going to be implicit in any discussion of healthcare costs. The difference is, in most Western countries, in return for their tax money, everyone gets healthcare for little or no additional cost; in the US, on the other hand, we have to pay taxes for healthcare, and then we have to spend a huge amount of money on insurance or out-of-pocket costs, as well.
I'm not sure "Insightful" is the mod I'd give the parent, but I suppose there's no "Delusional" mod, so you've got to go with what you're given.
Seriously, though "Ten years ago, when the big banks started requiring fingerprints for everything." Except, they didn't. No bank requires fingerprints for regular services, like opening an account or depositing or withdrawing money.
Or "the legal fraud of the Federal Reserve system." What is this even supposed to mean? "Hand out million-dollar mortgages to illegal immigrants with no incomes"? Again, something that has never happened.
I remember a group of internet anarchists set up something very much along these lines to coincide with the WTO protests in Seattle back in 1999. They made a good point which I think goes along with your idea that this is "digital equivalent of peasants throwing rocks." Like peasants throwing rocks this kind of simple DDOS can only work if it has the participation of a fairly large number of people. It's very much the internet equivalent of classic protest tactics like picket lines or sit-ins.
your Google Reader comments are by default visible to your followers
Is that the case, even if you've previously set your Reader comments to be visible only to specific people (as the blogger in this case apparently had)?
Asimov in the later Foundation series had the robots take the First Law to extremes and let it justify micromanaging humanity for its own good.
Well, sort of. But in the later robot novels, the robots use this micromanagement to favor of the non-robot society of the Settlers, in the process destroying the robot-based society of the Spacers. In these books, Asimov does portray human dependence on robots as a bad thing, although in a subtler way than the film does.
About the only thing the book had in common with the movie was the title.
And the themes: The three laws; the ways in which these laws can be, unexpectedly, harmful (the point of about half of the stories in the book); a mystery based on trying to predict how these laws will play out in unusual circumstances (the point of the other half of the stories in the book); a society shaped by dependence on robots, and the problems this might cause (the subject of a number of Asimov's later robot books). Sure, there's a lot more running around and shooting and Will Smith being a badass in the film than there is in the book, but there's some definite common threads, too.
I'm beginning to think that people who claim the book and film of I, Robot have nothing in common simply don't have a very strong grasp on what Asimov actually wrote.
"It has to be done all CG because I would not know how to shoot this thing in real."
Really? I'm having trouble thinking of anything in Foundation that couldn't have been filmed using the technology available back when the stories were originally written. It's a story about ideas, not an exercise in world-building or aesthetic splendor.
I Robot is a pretty decent film, and is true to a lot of Asimov's themes (particularly, the effect of widespread dependence on robots on human society, as explored in the Elijah Baley novels).
Searle's dualism (which he claims isn't dualism, but it totally is) is ridiculous, I agree, but functionalism is also a dead dog. For better criticisms of functionalism, look at Putnam's recent work. As Putnam was one of the main inventors of functionalism in the first place, his rejection of the position involves significant familiarity with functionalism, and is pretty compelling.
The problem is, this isn't a survey of "AI experts," it's a survey of participants in the Artificial General Intelligence conference. As far as I can see, this is a conference populated by the few remaining holdouts who believe that creating human-like, or human-equivalent, AIs, is a tractable or interesting problem; most AI research now is oriented towards much more specific aspects of intelligence. So this is a poll of a subset of AI researchers who have self-selected along the lines that they think human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future; it's hardly surprising, then, that the results show that many of them do in fact believe human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future.
I would be much more interested in a wider poll of AI researchers; I highly doubt anything like as many would predict nobel-prize-winning AIs in 10-20 years, or even ever. TFA itself reports a survey of AI researchers in 2006, in which 41% said they thought human-equivalent AI would never be produces, and another 41% said they thought it would take 50 years to produce such a thing.
What patents and licenses? From the W3C's patent policy:
The goal of this policy is to assure that Recommendations produced under this policy can be implemented on a Royalty-Free (RF) basis.
Of course, anything hypothetically could be patented; but HTML5 is at least in the position that there are no known patent restrictions on implementing it.
It sounds like it freezes due to the change in charge, not because the water warms up.
But when the water warms up, that causes the charge on the surface to change, thereby causing the water to freeze; so the water warming up, and it freezing, are causally linked. It seems more like a neat trick than anything else, but "freeze water by warming it" is a more-or-less accurate summary of what's happening.
If you try to deconstruct that sentence, it really has no definite meaning. You're using the infinitive form of the verb, which means you really haven't defined a definite time for the statement.
No, it has a perfectly definite meaning, because it's a perfectly grammatical sentence in Black Vernacular English. "Be" is used to construct the habitual present tense. This isn't discarding verb conjugation, it's using an additional conjugation that you don't happen to have in your own dialect. Note that if you replace this particular construct with what you think is a "reasonable conjugation" (say, changing "I be working" to "I am working") you'll misunderstand the sentence.
You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote.
Well, that makes sense to me. You need the artist to produce the concept materials to get people to invest the money so that you can employ an engineering team and produce something solid.