The DeCSS fiasco really overstepped the mark, broke the rules, and people are now paying for it.
First of all, nobody is paying for it (yet). Spending half a day being questioned by police is unpleasant, but hardly earth-shattering. And I know of no (non-moral) harm to anybody in the US.
Second, playing by the rules is fine as long as the opposition does not change them as the game goes along, and this is exactly what has happened. Allow me to recap.
Some time ago (late 60s?) the Congress adopted a copyright law that tried to set a balance between the copyright holders and the users. Specifically, users were given "fair use" rights, but these rights were offset by harsh penalties for "non-fair" use of copyrighted works. Fine. Everybody got used to this state of affairs and now considers it "natural".
Fast-forward to the end of the 90s. DMCA comes in and, basically, takes away fair use. Make no mistake, that is the real thrust of DMCA. If the copyright holder bothers to put in any device to control access to the copyrighted work, you fair-use rights go out of the window. Yes, you can still make copies for personal use, but, unfortunately, it so happens that it is illegal to access the material in order to make copies. Oops. Fair use? What fair use? That all theft and highway robbery!
Did you notice how the old balance of fair use versus harsh penalties just lost one whole side? Do you still want to be a good boy and say "well, if that's the rules, so that's the rules"?
Now, DMCA is (IMHO) a baaaad law. The way bad laws are overturned is by courts throwing them out. The courts throw them out by hearing cases that fall under this law. Clearly it's very important for the "right" sort of case to be the test case for the law. I think that the DeCSS case is not that bad for this purpose, given that there is actually a legitimate purpose for DeCSS.
I think our goal should be overturning of DMCA, because even if the DeCSS issue goes away (e.g. the case is dropped), DMCA is still there and is still hanging over any attempt to get "normal" access to copyrighted works.
By the way, it would help if somebody did produce a Linux DVD player based on DeCSS code. I think that the fact the code runs only under Windows does hurt the credibility of the defence a lot.
No amount of hedging is going to help when the market crashes
And why not, pray tell me? Have you heard of things called "market-neutral portfolios" by any chance?
and it will inevitably crash
Do you have a direct line to God, or, perhaps, the planets' alignment told you this?
if it is day trading, go to Vegas and be honest about what you want!
There's day-trading and day-trading. Firms like Madoff or D.E.Shaw have been day-trading for a long time and making good (and stable) money off it.
Because a hedging strategy only works as long as the system remains stable: no major government collapses, no large-scale wars, and no general stock corrections
This is utter bullshit. There are many, many possible hedging strategies (even assuming you are long stocks to keep things simple). Some will fail in some conditions, some will not.
To give you a very simple example, let's say I am long Viacom stock class A shares (VIA/A). I am afraid that the market will go down, so I short Viacom class B shares (VIA/B) which generally track VIA/A pretty well. I am now hedged and do not really care about government collapses and market crashes.
Next time get a clue as to what you are talking about.
If it's random, then there is not choice involved.
Randomness is a very complicated non-trivial concept. But in any case, let me give you an example. Let's say that I don't have much of a preference in ice-cream: I eat vanilla, and strawberry, and chocholate, and... We both walk by an ice-cream place and I decide to buy myself one. The seller says "Which one?" I say "Um... cherry, please". Is my choice random? Well, yes, to some extent. It is random to you since you cannot predict it. It is still a choice? Sure is.
Sorry, but the physical universe is not bound by our notions of ethics, justice, and accountability.
As I pointed out in another post, I am not talking about the way our universe works. My point is that people who accept that there is no free will should face up to several inescapable consequences from this statement. This discussion is not about physics, but about philosophy, theology and morality.
Ideas of "punishment" and "justice" miss the mark. A killer is a threat to others, therefore we cage him. If we can rehabilitate him such that he is no longer a threat, then we can release him. The question of whether he is "accountable" is not meaningful
You are putting forward a utilitarian viewpoint. This is certainly a feasible viewpoint, but there are some problems with it. Any textbook on Criminal Law should introduce you very interesting discussion revolving around these issues.
Consider a guy caught for shoplifting. He serves his, say, year in jail. You look at him after a year, and he is not reformed at all. Do you advocate keeping in jail until he reforms? Life sentence for shoplifting?
I helped send a mentally ill man to prison just a few days ago, because he was stalking my housemate.... [snip] Was he "accountable" for his actions? The question seems irrelevent, and possibly meaningless.
No, not at all. The answer would determine whether he should go to jail, or to a mental hospital.
For example, let's say that he has a brain tumor which affects his brain. If you consider him accountable for his actions, he should go to jail and serve his term. If he is NOT accountable, he should be free to go as soon as an operation removes the tumor and he is certified as psychologically normal. See the difference?
You know, if people like you would take the time to consider that maybe, just maybe, your own opinions and views aren't necessarily the correct ones, nor shared by everyone else...
I *have* taken the time. How else do you think Kaa's law was born?;)
Try this: Put a ``in my opinion'' in front of statements like that, and maybe you won't be viewed as a self-righteous, narrowminded individual.
First, everything I say is my opinion and nothing more. I have never ever claimed to preach the "truth", whatever your favorite definition of truth may be. Consider "IMAO" prepended to all statements of mine.
Besides "in my opinion" usually means "I haven't had the time to think about it, but I'll spout whatever happens to be inside my head at the moment".
Second, I'd much rather have a flamefest than try to hedge and weasel my opinions with expressions like "in my humble opinion", "I am not sure, but it is possible that", "of course you're correct, but it seems to me", etc. In short, Slashdot is not polite company. I'd much rather say something arrogant than something stupid (though both occur with alarming regularity).
The mark of a good journalist is that he can insight people to think. Katz has never made any pretense that he could code. Sometimes he gets technical issues wrong, but that is where we set him straight.
The problem with Katz isn't that he is technically clueless (sometimes to an amazing degree, though), and even not that he is quite clueless in general. The problem with Katz is that he cannot think cleanly and/or clearly, and he cannot write. What he posts to Slashdot is confused ramblings full of ridiculous exaggerations and passionate outbursts on silly topics.
It's painful to read Katz because he cannot organize either his thoughs or his writing. It looks like content-free stream-of-consciousness writing from some middle-schooler who thinks that nobody will take him seriously unless he inserts a sufficient number of "unprecedented", "once in a lifetime", "the most important since...", "earthshaking", "civilization-changing", etc. etc.
Basically, Katz says stupid things and he says them badly.
We probably would agree on a lot of stuff once we sync our terminology, but one major thing just came up:
When you punish evil behavior, you are punishing evil people. Crime reflects a defect in character which will likely result in crime in the future, unless something is done to alter the criminal's nature.
and later on
They aren't evil, they just chose evil, and thus punishing them is unjust, it robs them of the chance to choose good in the future.
Nope. No way. Read any into textbook on Criminal Law and you'll see discussions on whether we should punish actions or people and why all contemporary criminal law punishes bad behavior, not the state of being a bad person. Think about mad people (who do not understand what they are doing) and sleepwalkers, think about preventive incarceration of "evil" people because they are likely to commit evil acts later, think about whether any criminal (e.g. caught for shoplifting) should ever be let out of jail until the judge is sure that his character has sufficiently changed.
And as to punishing people because they chose evil as opposed to because they are evil, I think that that's exactly what justice should be doing.
On the macro scale, Newtonian physics still applies perfectly.
Since we were talking about humans, do you want to apply Newtonian physics to human thoughts, human morality and human free will?? Must be, since we sure didn't discuss the problems of human bodies. Be my guest, it should be fun to watch.
You are basically asserting that any choice which is not random is not a choice.
Nope, that is not my position. My statement is that any choice that is completely predetermined is not a choice (and no, I don't have any problems with partially determined choices). Besides, since we are throwing the word "random" around quite a bit, please consider for a moment what exactly does it signify.
If that is the case, and human behavior is actually inherently unpredictable (read: random), than how can we hold anyone responsible for anything?
Because people act by making more or less free choices and are thus accountable for their choices. Again, I invite you to think on the meaning of the word "random".
"a benevolent, omnipresent, omnisicent, omnipotent human-like consciousness who cares about you"
Nah, it's only Jesus who loves you. God the Father, judging by the Old Testament accounts, was quite a nasty fellow, and God the Spirit doesn't seem to give a damn either way.
What do you mean, "it turned out"? Nobody has ever actually performed this experiment,
Learn to read first, and then post. "It turned out" that neither universe nor humans behave in deterministic Newtonian fashion.
The actual structure of the universe is not dictated by human concepts of morality or "accountability": you cannot argue that free will must exist because you find the alternative disturbing
I am not arguing that free will must exist. I am arguing that if you accept that there is no free will, there are certain inescapable conclusions from that which you might want to think about. In any case, the original point that I was arguing with stated that predictability is necessary for free will -- again, nothing about the "true" nature of the universe.
If I could accuse you of not only simply killing someone, but of being the sort of person who would ALWAYS kill someone under the right circumstances, that strikes me as all the more reason to put you in an electric chair.
You are talking efficiency, I am talking justice. From a utilitarian point of view you are correct, just the same as it makes utilitarian sense to kill severely malformed children at birth. From a morality point of view, however, there is that big problem of choice. Could it be just to punish a man for doing something that he had no choice about? Any difference from punishing a tile that happened to fall from a roof onto somebody's head?
To me, no, but I'm a Christian and therefore that logic doesn't apply.
That's your logic!
That particular logic is for athiests, who believe that there exists nothing outside of a given finite set of beings, and yet also insist there is no supreme being. I'm merely trying to point out that there is a falacy there - you can't have an unbounded, finite, linear set.
You've lost me here. Even leaving aside the issue of linearity (what does it have to do with God or bounded sets?), I don't see your point.
For the sake of argument let's assume that universe is finite (although there is nothing in atheism that states that this must be so). I agree that it means that it is bounded. And yes, it has furthest extent. So what? How does the concept of a God arise from these statements?
If you want a "logical" argument for religion, though, we live in a finite Universe. Therefore, there is a finite number of concious beings within that Universe. Thus, on any given scale you care to use, there -is-, indeed, a being that you could call supreme, at least within that respect.
Consider all the clinical idiots at your local mental hospital. On any given scale you care to use there is, indeed, one of them that you could call supreme, at least within that respect.
Intuatively, you can not have a 50% dead cat, nor a 50% decayed atom. Mathematically that is exactly what you have.
Uh, no. That's just the Copenhagen interpretation of the math. Multiple-universe theories interpret exactly the same math and they come to quite a different conclusion, viz. that the universe forked and one branch contains a 100% alive cat and the other contains a 100% dead cat.
WHat I am saying is that we should expect a conciouss neing to act in a predictable way
Granted. The issue is the degree of predictability. 90-95% predictability is perfectly fine for free will to exist (from a philosophical/theological point of view). The problem is that assuming an omniscient being (as Christianity, etc. does) necessitates full, absolute, 100% predictability and that's where free will disappears.
As for accountability I fail to see why predictability would ruin accountability
I'll spell it out. Predictability (again, deterministic predictability, not statistical predictability) means that the person does not have a choice in acting the way he does. Since he does not have a choice, it is unjust to punish him. That's exactly the reason why mentally ill people who committed crimes are put into mental hospitals and not into jails.
by definition it is your nature it may still be a wrong act and you can still be punished for it.
So I am being punished for my own nature?? But what about my conscious choice?
Zen has some big problems with the concept of a God, especially God as understood in the Western judeo-christian-islamic tradition. In general, defining God is a very hard thing to do. Something on the lines of "an omnipresent omniscient being who created the universe" (standard lay Christian understanding) doesn't cut it for various reasons, free will among them. Zen, when presented with such definition would of course say that there is no such thing.
If materialism is true, then everything that exists at this moment is the result of an extremely long chain of physical events spanning back to the big bang.
No. You are confusing materialism with believing in a deterministic Newtonian universe. This is basically a XIX-century argument against materialism and it wasn't very successful even then.
Since it is generally accepted that our universe is neither Newtonian, nor deterministic, your position is rather untenable.
If materialism is true, then the cause of every thought that you or I have can be traced back to the big bang.
See? You are doing it again. This is Newtonian determinism, not materialism.
why should I believe my own thoughts to be true? Why should I trust my own thoughts?
There is no good answer to that question which does not have anything to do with materialism or randomess. If fact, it is usually used to argue *against* materialism: why should I believe my senses that the physical universe exists? It's nothing but sensations is a purely spiritual/mental/non-material world and you cannot prove otherwise. And actually yes, you cannot, though you can make some good arguments why this is not likely to be the case.
So, the random path of a random atom at Big Bang caused you to make a fool out of yourself on Slashdot...
[if placed in exactly the same situation] I contend that if YOU are really making a choice here (instaed of following some random principle) you would do exactly the same thing. In fact free will seems to require at least some minor form of predictability.
No. Free will is the opposite of predictability, not the opposite of randomness. Your point basically says that in a Newtonian universe all systems are deterministic: reconstruct the initial state and you can generate exactly the same behavior. Unfortunately, it turned out that neither universe nor humans behave in this way. Randomness is a very important component and is part of free will.
I think you are trying to say that the same person making a conscious decision would make the same decision in similar circumstances. That is true at, say, 90-95% level of probability. However the remaining 5-10% are very important and no, you cannot ever make a 100% guaranteed forecast (because of universe's inherent randomness).
Rather if we realize that you must fufil your fate *because* it is determined by who you are we run into no problem.
Well, maybe you don't run into problems, but I do. The basic problem with free will (or absence of it) is accountability. Essentially, if there is no free will, then humans cannot be held accountable for their behavior (with all the nasty concepts for the concepts of justice, effort, etc.) Let's say that there is no free will because what you are determines (always! 100%!) what you do. Well, even leaving aside the question of why you are what you are (and who made you this way -- God?) there is still no accountability.
"Your Honor, I killed this guy because that's what I am and what I do -- I cannot change this. I submit that there is no justice in punishing me: I cannot be changed".
I had the initial thought that the Feds might plant a trojan horse in the detector, but then I realized that would actually do them more harm than good.
You are assuming an unusual amount of intelligence for a government agency.
Your points are somewhat valid except for the first one (anybody around here trusts the FBI? Anyone? Anybody?), but again you assume that the Feds have no more important hidden goals that you know nothing about.
I would still not run it and would not recommend to people to run it. Besides, it is not that hard to check, e.g., standard trin00 ports with other tools.
The DMCA was designed to prohibit "black-boxes" (as several legislators refered to them). It is not supposed to apply to source code.
Intentions of legislators (provided they had any or bothered to think about them) are interesting, but do not have much relevance. It has been known for the courts to try to gauge the Congress' intent while trying to sort out murky laws, but the letter of law as passed is much, much more important. In the case of DMCA, it talks about circumventing devices used to control access to the copyrighted material and that is the rub. It does not talk about copying, it talks about access. This is exactly why DeCSS falls under DMCA.
And yes, DMCA guts fair use, regardless of what the congresscritters said in floor debates. The courts could revive the fair use, but that would necessitate some violence to the language of DMCA (and yes, courts can perfectly well do this).
All of your second point assumes that source code is speech for the First Amendment purposes. This is hotly debated and is in no way an accepted statement. Regardless of your personal preferences both sides have a reasonable argument.
His conclusions of harm to the MPAA are founded on the lie that DeCSS is a piracy tool. It's not - it's a playback tool that will actually EXPAND the market for DVD's.
Oh, I see. Do you, then, claim that there is no harm whatsoever to MPAA from DeCSS and we are just trying to put some money into their pocket while they are running away screaming "Get that weirdo away from me!!!!"? It's all just a little misunderstanding, right?
To restate, you seem to think that DMCA is an OK law that was misinterpreted by a dumb judge. I think that DMCA is a terrible law and the judge just applied it. You are horrified at the result and think that it was misapplied -- I think that the problem is with the law, not with its misinterpretation.
[being arrested for viewing one's own DVDs] This has not yet been upheld in any court. There are some, including the MPAA, who believe that this is the case, but so far no one has been arrested for that
So what if nobody's been arrested yet? The US has a law on the books which quite explicitly states the conditions under which viewing one's own DVDs is a crime. Perhaps you are arguing that this is hard to enforce, but that does not change the fact that such a law has been enacted and could be enforced on a whim.
we've had one brain-dead moron of a district court judge rule against DeCSS
IANAL, but most reasonable people seem to agree that under DMCA the judge's ruling is correct. I don't have an opinion on the judge's IQ, but it seems that the DMCA is the problem, not this particular judge.
No business of any kind, even evil insensitive IP wielding conglomerates, can tell you what you can or can't do in your own home
And, pray tell me, why not? Most often they do this by lobbying for laws to be passed. For example, you cannot (legally, that is) use an illicit cable descrambler box -- in your own home! Besides, do you read the small print of all contracts that you sign?
the MPAA is not against people watching DVDs.
Nobody suggests they are. The problem with MPAA (as well as with RIAA) is that they want to control what people watch.
I'm sorry, but no corporation controls me. No corporation possibly could. You are mistaking money for power. The only thing that can take away your freedom is government, because only they have the force necessary to do it.
Hear, hear! I've been pushing this idea on Slashdot for a long time. Governments are intrinsically more dangerous and untrustworthy than corporations. Give me a choice between big government and big corporations and I'll pick corporations every time.
Going after the MPAA is like taking aspirin for a hangover. Government is the booze, the MPAA is the hangover
Bad metaphor, keeping in mind that MPAA was instrumental in formulating and passing of DMCA.
Wrong. Let's say a CPU is hotter than the air around it by 20 degrees: a Pentium needs a fan to do it, but a Crusoe can do it without a fan. So? If the air is 100 degree F, your processor will be 120 degrees -- in one case with a fan, in the other case without. I don't see higher tolerance of heat anywhere here.
2) Run from within a totally air tight sealed metal box... (3) Run in isolated environments...
None of these is a desktop. These are industrial applications. The requirements for them are weird and varied, but have little to do with desktops. It may well be that Crusoe will do well in some industrial applications, but that doesn't mean anything about it being a "desktop CPU".
Your PDA would become a simple X client to your P.C. at home.
And, pray tell me, how are you going to do useful stuff in an X environment on a keyboardless mouseless machine with, say, 3x4 inch screen?
Besides, I thought the point of the article was that PDA could/should have significant local processing power, not that they become dumb terminals to home servers.
I think the basic issue is misstated. PDAs are different from desktop PCs not because they have less powerful CPUs. They are different because of size: they have small screens and they must have non-keyboard non-mouse user interface. This makes all the difference in the world from the user's point of view.
Let's say that we can now put a 800Mhz processor (with a proper MMU and all the supporting chipset) into a Palm. Would it mean that it's a good idea to run Linux on a Palm? No -- a keyboardless computer with a what? 4x3 inch? screen cannot usefully run a desktop-oriented interface (be it CLI or a windownng environment). Remember, our state-of-the-art user interface (WIMP: windows, icons, menus, pointer) was developed in the 70s at PARC. There has been no major advances since that time.
The only thing where processing power might make a difference is in speech recognition. Speech interface to PDAs is a promising area and you do want to have a powerful processor for it. But this detail nonwithstanding, I would argue that for the PDAs to realize their potential we need a user interface breakthrough much more than we need a processor breakthrough (and Crusoe isn't it anyway).
I am not the poster you are answering, but I'll give it a try. Stephenson writes very cool, highly entertaining plot-and-software/technical-gadgets-driven fiction. I like Stephenson very much. Gibson, however, writes high literature as opposed to just fiction. He writes imagery, mood, concepts and feelings that are not expressable in three-word sentences. The genres are different -- you can like both (I do), but Gibson is much more classy.
Gibson seems to do a Katz
Oh-oh. If you don't understand the difference between Gibson and Katz, it's going to be hard to have a meaningful conversation with you. Read both. Think. Reread. Repeat as necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
The DeCSS fiasco really overstepped the mark, broke the rules, and people are now paying for it.
First of all, nobody is paying for it (yet). Spending half a day being questioned by police is unpleasant, but hardly earth-shattering. And I know of no (non-moral) harm to anybody in the US.
Second, playing by the rules is fine as long as the opposition does not change them as the game goes along, and this is exactly what has happened. Allow me to recap.
Some time ago (late 60s?) the Congress adopted a copyright law that tried to set a balance between the copyright holders and the users. Specifically, users were given "fair use" rights, but these rights were offset by harsh penalties for "non-fair" use of copyrighted works. Fine. Everybody got used to this state of affairs and now considers it "natural".
Fast-forward to the end of the 90s. DMCA comes in and, basically, takes away fair use. Make no mistake, that is the real thrust of DMCA. If the copyright holder bothers to put in any device to control access to the copyrighted work, you fair-use rights go out of the window. Yes, you can still make copies for personal use, but, unfortunately, it so happens that it is illegal to access the material in order to make copies. Oops. Fair use? What fair use? That all theft and highway robbery!
Did you notice how the old balance of fair use versus harsh penalties just lost one whole side? Do you still want to be a good boy and say "well, if that's the rules, so that's the rules"?
Now, DMCA is (IMHO) a baaaad law. The way bad laws are overturned is by courts throwing them out. The courts throw them out by hearing cases that fall under this law. Clearly it's very important for the "right" sort of case to be the test case for the law. I think that the DeCSS case is not that bad for this purpose, given that there is actually a legitimate purpose for DeCSS.
I think our goal should be overturning of DMCA, because even if the DeCSS issue goes away (e.g. the case is dropped), DMCA is still there and is still hanging over any attempt to get "normal" access to copyrighted works.
By the way, it would help if somebody did produce a Linux DVD player based on DeCSS code. I think that the fact the code runs only under Windows does hurt the credibility of the defence a lot.
Kaa
No amount of hedging is going to help when the market crashes
And why not, pray tell me? Have you heard of things called "market-neutral portfolios" by any chance?
and it will inevitably crash
Do you have a direct line to God, or, perhaps, the planets' alignment told you this?
if it is day trading, go to Vegas and be honest about what you want!
There's day-trading and day-trading. Firms like Madoff or D.E.Shaw have been day-trading for a long time and making good (and stable) money off it.
Because a hedging strategy only works as long as the system remains stable: no major government collapses, no large-scale wars, and no general stock corrections
This is utter bullshit. There are many, many possible hedging strategies (even assuming you are long stocks to keep things simple). Some will fail in some conditions, some will not.
To give you a very simple example, let's say I am long Viacom stock class A shares (VIA/A). I am afraid that the market will go down, so I short Viacom class B shares (VIA/B) which generally track VIA/A pretty well. I am now hedged and do not really care about government collapses and market crashes.
Next time get a clue as to what you are talking about.
Kaa
If it's random, then there is not choice involved.
... We both walk by an ice-cream place and I decide to buy myself one. The seller says "Which one?" I say "Um... cherry, please". Is my choice random? Well, yes, to some extent. It is random to you since you cannot predict it. It is still a choice? Sure is.
Randomness is a very complicated non-trivial concept. But in any case, let me give you an example. Let's say that I don't have much of a preference in ice-cream: I eat vanilla, and strawberry, and chocholate, and
Sorry, but the physical universe is not bound by our notions of ethics, justice, and accountability.
As I pointed out in another post, I am not talking about the way our universe works. My point is that people who accept that there is no free will should face up to several inescapable consequences from this statement. This discussion is not about physics, but about philosophy, theology and morality.
Ideas of "punishment" and "justice" miss the mark. A killer is a threat to others, therefore we cage him. If we can rehabilitate him such that he is no longer a threat, then we can release him. The question of whether he is "accountable" is not meaningful
You are putting forward a utilitarian viewpoint. This is certainly a feasible viewpoint, but there are some problems with it. Any textbook on Criminal Law should introduce you very interesting discussion revolving around these issues.
Consider a guy caught for shoplifting. He serves his, say, year in jail. You look at him after a year, and he is not reformed at all. Do you advocate keeping in jail until he reforms? Life sentence for shoplifting?
I helped send a mentally ill man to prison just a few days ago, because he was stalking my housemate.... [snip] Was he "accountable" for his actions? The question seems irrelevent, and possibly meaningless.
No, not at all. The answer would determine whether he should go to jail, or to a mental hospital.
For example, let's say that he has a brain tumor which affects his brain. If you consider him accountable for his actions, he should go to jail and serve his term. If he is NOT accountable, he should be free to go as soon as an operation removes the tumor and he is certified as psychologically normal. See the difference?
Kaa
You know, if people like you would take the time to consider that maybe, just maybe, your own opinions and views aren't necessarily the correct ones, nor shared by everyone else...
;)
I *have* taken the time. How else do you think Kaa's law was born?
Try this: Put a ``in my opinion'' in front of statements like that, and maybe you won't be viewed as a self-righteous, narrowminded individual.
First, everything I say is my opinion and nothing more. I have never ever claimed to preach the "truth", whatever your favorite definition of truth may be. Consider "IMAO" prepended to all statements of mine.
Besides "in my opinion" usually means "I haven't had the time to think about it, but I'll spout whatever happens to be inside my head at the moment".
Second, I'd much rather have a flamefest than try to hedge and weasel my opinions with expressions like "in my humble opinion", "I am not sure, but it is possible that", "of course you're correct, but it seems to me", etc. In short, Slashdot is not polite company. I'd much rather say something arrogant than something stupid (though both occur with alarming regularity).
Kaa
The mark of a good journalist is that he can insight people to think. Katz has never made any pretense that he could code. Sometimes he gets technical issues wrong, but that is where we set him straight.
...", "earthshaking", "civilization-changing", etc. etc.
The problem with Katz isn't that he is technically clueless (sometimes to an amazing degree, though), and even not that he is quite clueless in general. The problem with Katz is that he cannot think cleanly and/or clearly, and he cannot write. What he posts to Slashdot is confused ramblings full of ridiculous exaggerations and passionate outbursts on silly topics.
It's painful to read Katz because he cannot organize either his thoughs or his writing. It looks like content-free stream-of-consciousness writing from some middle-schooler who thinks that nobody will take him seriously unless he inserts a sufficient number of "unprecedented", "once in a lifetime", "the most important since
Basically, Katz says stupid things and he says them badly.
Kaa
We probably would agree on a lot of stuff once we sync our terminology, but one major thing just came up:
When you punish evil behavior, you are punishing evil people. Crime reflects a defect in character which will likely result in crime in the future, unless something is done to alter the criminal's nature.
and later on
They aren't evil, they just chose evil, and thus punishing them is unjust, it robs them of the chance to choose good in the future.
Nope. No way. Read any into textbook on Criminal Law and you'll see discussions on whether we should punish actions or people and why all contemporary criminal law punishes bad behavior, not the state of being a bad person. Think about mad people (who do not understand what they are doing) and sleepwalkers, think about preventive incarceration of "evil" people because they are likely to commit evil acts later, think about whether any criminal (e.g. caught for shoplifting) should ever be let out of jail until the judge is sure that his character has sufficiently changed.
And as to punishing people because they chose evil as opposed to because they are evil, I think that that's exactly what justice should be doing.
Kaa
On the macro scale, Newtonian physics still applies perfectly.
Since we were talking about humans, do you want to apply Newtonian physics to human thoughts, human morality and human free will?? Must be, since we sure didn't discuss the problems of human bodies. Be my guest, it should be fun to watch.
You are basically asserting that any choice which is not random is not a choice.
Nope, that is not my position. My statement is that any choice that is completely predetermined is not a choice (and no, I don't have any problems with partially determined choices). Besides, since we are throwing the word "random" around quite a bit, please consider for a moment what exactly does it signify.
If that is the case, and human behavior is actually inherently unpredictable (read: random), than how can we hold anyone responsible for anything?
Because people act by making more or less free choices and are thus accountable for their choices. Again, I invite you to think on the meaning of the word "random".
Kaa
"a benevolent, omnipresent, omnisicent, omnipotent human-like consciousness who cares about you"
Nah, it's only Jesus who loves you. God the Father, judging by the Old Testament accounts, was quite a nasty fellow, and God the Spirit doesn't seem to give a damn either way.
Kaa
What do you mean, "it turned out"? Nobody has ever actually performed this experiment,
Learn to read first, and then post. "It turned out" that neither universe nor humans behave in deterministic Newtonian fashion.
The actual structure of the universe is not dictated by human concepts of morality or "accountability": you cannot argue that free will must exist because you find the alternative disturbing
I am not arguing that free will must exist. I am arguing that if you accept that there is no free will, there are certain inescapable conclusions from that which you might want to think about. In any case, the original point that I was arguing with stated that predictability is necessary for free will -- again, nothing about the "true" nature of the universe.
If I could accuse you of not only simply killing someone, but of being the sort of person who would ALWAYS kill someone under the right circumstances, that strikes me as all the more reason to put you in an electric chair.
You are talking efficiency, I am talking justice. From a utilitarian point of view you are correct, just the same as it makes utilitarian sense to kill severely malformed children at birth. From a morality point of view, however, there is that big problem of choice. Could it be just to punish a man for doing something that he had no choice about? Any difference from punishing a tile that happened to fall from a roof onto somebody's head?
Kaa
To me, no, but I'm a Christian and therefore that logic doesn't apply.
That's your logic!
That particular logic is for athiests, who believe that there exists nothing outside of a given finite set of beings, and yet also insist there is no supreme being. I'm merely trying to point out that there is a falacy there - you can't have an unbounded, finite, linear set.
You've lost me here. Even leaving aside the issue of linearity (what does it have to do with God or bounded sets?), I don't see your point.
For the sake of argument let's assume that universe is finite (although there is nothing in atheism that states that this must be so). I agree that it means that it is bounded. And yes, it has furthest extent. So what? How does the concept of a God arise from these statements?
Kaa
If you want a "logical" argument for religion, though, we live in a finite Universe. Therefore, there is a finite number of concious beings within that Universe. Thus, on any given scale you care to use, there -is-, indeed, a being that you could call supreme, at least within that respect.
Consider all the clinical idiots at your local mental hospital. On any given scale you care to use there is, indeed, one of them that you could call supreme, at least within that respect.
Is he God?
Kaa
Intuatively, you can not have a 50% dead cat, nor a 50% decayed atom. Mathematically that is exactly what you have.
Uh, no. That's just the Copenhagen interpretation of the math. Multiple-universe theories interpret exactly the same math and they come to quite a different conclusion, viz. that the universe forked and one branch contains a 100% alive cat and the other contains a 100% dead cat.
Kaa
WHat I am saying is that we should expect a conciouss neing to act in a predictable way
Granted. The issue is the degree of predictability. 90-95% predictability is perfectly fine for free will to exist (from a philosophical/theological point of view). The problem is that assuming an omniscient being (as Christianity, etc. does) necessitates full, absolute, 100% predictability and that's where free will disappears.
As for accountability I fail to see why predictability would ruin accountability
I'll spell it out. Predictability (again, deterministic predictability, not statistical predictability) means that the person does not have a choice in acting the way he does. Since he does not have a choice, it is unjust to punish him. That's exactly the reason why mentally ill people who committed crimes are put into mental hospitals and not into jails.
by definition it is your nature it may still be a wrong act and you can still be punished for it.
So I am being punished for my own nature?? But what about my conscious choice?
Kaa
Zen has some big problems with the concept of a God, especially God as understood in the Western judeo-christian-islamic tradition. In general, defining God is a very hard thing to do. Something on the lines of "an omnipresent omniscient being who created the universe" (standard lay Christian understanding) doesn't cut it for various reasons, free will among them. Zen, when presented with such definition would of course say that there is no such thing.
Kaa
If materialism is true, then everything that exists at this moment is the result of an extremely long chain of physical events spanning back to the big bang.
No. You are confusing materialism with believing in a deterministic Newtonian universe. This is basically a XIX-century argument against materialism and it wasn't very successful even then.
Since it is generally accepted that our universe is neither Newtonian, nor deterministic, your position is rather untenable.
If materialism is true, then the cause of every thought that you or I have can be traced back to the big bang.
See? You are doing it again. This is Newtonian determinism, not materialism.
why should I believe my own thoughts to be true? Why should I trust my own thoughts?
There is no good answer to that question which does not have anything to do with materialism or randomess. If fact, it is usually used to argue *against* materialism: why should I believe my senses that the physical universe exists? It's nothing but sensations is a purely spiritual/mental/non-material world and you cannot prove otherwise. And actually yes, you cannot, though you can make some good arguments why this is not likely to be the case.
So, the random path of a random atom at Big Bang caused you to make a fool out of yourself on Slashdot...
Kaa
[if placed in exactly the same situation] I contend that if YOU are really making a choice here (instaed of following some random principle) you would do exactly the same thing. In fact free will seems to require at least some minor form of predictability.
No. Free will is the opposite of predictability, not the opposite of randomness. Your point basically says that in a Newtonian universe all systems are deterministic: reconstruct the initial state and you can generate exactly the same behavior. Unfortunately, it turned out that neither universe nor humans behave in this way. Randomness is a very important component and is part of free will.
I think you are trying to say that the same person making a conscious decision would make the same decision in similar circumstances. That is true at, say, 90-95% level of probability. However the remaining 5-10% are very important and no, you cannot ever make a 100% guaranteed forecast (because of universe's inherent randomness).
Rather if we realize that you must fufil your fate *because* it is determined by who you are we run into no problem.
Well, maybe you don't run into problems, but I do. The basic problem with free will (or absence of it) is accountability. Essentially, if there is no free will, then humans cannot be held accountable for their behavior (with all the nasty concepts for the concepts of justice, effort, etc.) Let's say that there is no free will because what you are determines (always! 100%!) what you do. Well, even leaving aside the question of why you are what you are (and who made you this way -- God?) there is still no accountability.
"Your Honor, I killed this guy because that's what I am and what I do -- I cannot change this. I submit that there is no justice in punishing me: I cannot be changed".
Kaa
I had the initial thought that the Feds might plant a trojan horse in the detector, but then I realized that would actually do them more harm than good.
You are assuming an unusual amount of intelligence for a government agency.
Your points are somewhat valid except for the first one (anybody around here trusts the FBI? Anyone? Anybody?), but again you assume that the Feds have no more important hidden goals that you know nothing about.
I would still not run it and would not recommend to people to run it. Besides, it is not that hard to check, e.g., standard trin00 ports with other tools.
Kaa
The DMCA was designed to prohibit "black-boxes" (as several legislators refered to them). It is not supposed to apply to source code.
Intentions of legislators (provided they had any or bothered to think about them) are interesting, but do not have much relevance. It has been known for the courts to try to gauge the Congress' intent while trying to sort out murky laws, but the letter of law as passed is much, much more important. In the case of DMCA, it talks about circumventing devices used to control access to the copyrighted material and that is the rub. It does not talk about copying, it talks about access. This is exactly why DeCSS falls under DMCA.
And yes, DMCA guts fair use, regardless of what the congresscritters said in floor debates. The courts could revive the fair use, but that would necessitate some violence to the language of DMCA (and yes, courts can perfectly well do this).
All of your second point assumes that source code is speech for the First Amendment purposes. This is hotly debated and is in no way an accepted statement. Regardless of your personal preferences both sides have a reasonable argument.
His conclusions of harm to the MPAA are founded on the lie that DeCSS is a piracy tool. It's not - it's a playback tool that will actually EXPAND the market for DVD's.
Oh, I see. Do you, then, claim that there is no harm whatsoever to MPAA from DeCSS and we are just trying to put some money into their pocket while they are running away screaming "Get that weirdo away from me!!!!"? It's all just a little misunderstanding, right?
To restate, you seem to think that DMCA is an OK law that was misinterpreted by a dumb judge. I think that DMCA is a terrible law and the judge just applied it. You are horrified at the result and think that it was misapplied -- I think that the problem is with the law, not with its misinterpretation.
Kaa
[being arrested for viewing one's own DVDs] This has not yet been upheld in any court. There are some, including the MPAA, who believe that this is the case, but so far no one has been arrested for that
So what if nobody's been arrested yet? The US has a law on the books which quite explicitly states the conditions under which viewing one's own DVDs is a crime. Perhaps you are arguing that this is hard to enforce, but that does not change the fact that such a law has been enacted and could be enforced on a whim.
we've had one brain-dead moron of a district court judge rule against DeCSS
IANAL, but most reasonable people seem to agree that under DMCA the judge's ruling is correct. I don't have an opinion on the judge's IQ, but it seems that the DMCA is the problem, not this particular judge.
No business of any kind, even evil insensitive IP wielding conglomerates, can tell you what you can or can't do in your own home
And, pray tell me, why not? Most often they do this by lobbying for laws to be passed. For example, you cannot (legally, that is) use an illicit cable descrambler box -- in your own home! Besides, do you read the small print of all contracts that you sign?
the MPAA is not against people watching DVDs.
Nobody suggests they are. The problem with MPAA (as well as with RIAA) is that they want to control what people watch.
I'm sorry, but no corporation controls me. No corporation possibly could. You are mistaking money for power. The only thing that can take away your freedom is government, because only they have the force necessary to do it.
Hear, hear! I've been pushing this idea on Slashdot for a long time. Governments are intrinsically more dangerous and untrustworthy than corporations. Give me a choice between big government and big corporations and I'll pick corporations every time.
Going after the MPAA is like taking aspirin for a hangover. Government is the booze, the MPAA is the hangover
Bad metaphor, keeping in mind that MPAA was instrumental in formulating and passing of DMCA.
Kaa
500 words per minute,
But can you think 500 words per minute?
Kaa
(1) Run in hotter environments
...
Wrong. Let's say a CPU is hotter than the air around it by 20 degrees: a Pentium needs a fan to do it, but a Crusoe can do it without a fan. So? If the air is 100 degree F, your processor will be 120 degrees -- in one case with a fan, in the other case without. I don't see higher tolerance of heat anywhere here.
2) Run from within a totally air tight sealed metal box
(3) Run in isolated environments...
None of these is a desktop. These are industrial applications. The requirements for them are weird and varied, but have little to do with desktops. It may well be that Crusoe will do well in some industrial applications, but that doesn't mean anything about it being a "desktop CPU".
Kaa
Imagine being on a plane full of people whispering into black boxes . . . yeecch.
If that's your only problem with voice recognition, I think we can live with it. Besides some of those boxes will be in fruity neon colors.
Kaa
Your PDA would become a simple X client to your P.C. at home.
And, pray tell me, how are you going to do useful stuff in an X environment on a keyboardless mouseless machine with, say, 3x4 inch screen?
Besides, I thought the point of the article was that PDA could/should have significant local processing power, not that they become dumb terminals to home servers.
Kaa
I think the basic issue is misstated. PDAs are different from desktop PCs not because they have less powerful CPUs. They are different because of size: they have small screens and they must have non-keyboard non-mouse user interface. This makes all the difference in the world from the user's point of view.
Let's say that we can now put a 800Mhz processor (with a proper MMU and all the supporting chipset) into a Palm. Would it mean that it's a good idea to run Linux on a Palm? No -- a keyboardless computer with a what? 4x3 inch? screen cannot usefully run a desktop-oriented interface (be it CLI or a windownng environment). Remember, our state-of-the-art user interface (WIMP: windows, icons, menus, pointer) was developed in the 70s at PARC. There has been no major advances since that time.
The only thing where processing power might make a difference is in speech recognition. Speech interface to PDAs is a promising area and you do want to have a powerful processor for it. But this detail nonwithstanding, I would argue that for the PDAs to realize their potential we need a user interface breakthrough much more than we need a processor breakthrough (and Crusoe isn't it anyway).
Kaa
So WHY do you prefer Gibson?
I am not the poster you are answering, but I'll give it a try. Stephenson writes very cool, highly entertaining plot-and-software/technical-gadgets-driven fiction. I like Stephenson very much. Gibson, however, writes high literature as opposed to just fiction. He writes imagery, mood, concepts and feelings that are not expressable in three-word sentences. The genres are different -- you can like both (I do), but Gibson is much more classy.
Gibson seems to do a Katz
Oh-oh. If you don't understand the difference between Gibson and Katz, it's going to be hard to have a meaningful conversation with you. Read both. Think. Reread. Repeat as necessary.
Kaa