"nothing evil about porn" That depends on what "porn" is, and what "evil" is. If you are talking about the pictures and movies, than I agree - information is never evil and no one should stop the free flow if true information. Filters on OLPC laptops is laughable and wrong to me. For me, the only "evil" starts from denial. All else falls into a moral sliding scale that is more of less acceptible behavior depending on circumstances and who you ask for judgment.
However, much of the behavior of the people who make porn is evil. Most people who make US-oriented porn refuse to see that their actions degrade women and teach men unhealthy and ultimately unsatisfying habits for how to relate sexually to other people. Unfortuantely, electronic filters can't distinguish healthy behaviors in erotic material from unhealthy behaviors. It can't disinguish art from teaching domination or aggression.
For these things you need healthy communities of people who talk to one another, face to face and teach by example the best ways to interact.
So, I've struggled with the issue of the really large numbers in game AI problems. In go, for example, there are about 10^170 possible legal board layouts for the 19x19 board.
There are (esitmiated) only about 10^81 atoms in the universe.
Do all of the 10^170 positions exist in any meaningful way? It is impossible to count, enumerate, or articulate them all?
Getting the point back to chess, these folks have done a similar thing - it seems they articulated 1/10000th or so of the legal boards and used it to "prove" something about the whole space. (I have not yet read the original paper...) This seems mostly bollucks, as most real players make all kinds of mistakes - so the games do not flow into the "important" game positions they follow. After about 3-5 moves in their java applet, I found moves that could make sense that there not in their "legal" moves database.
information vs things
on
Patents Don't Pay
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
google started the trend: information is the most valuable thing in the world. a close second are the people who control and can quickly assess and manage information (as a group) are the second most valuable thing.
No longer are the widgets and doohickeys manufactured in large plants the items of value - and the concomitant world of patents to protect them. Frankly we have way too much stuff already, and mostly the need for more physical stuff is artificially manufactured by ads and more-pompous-than-thou one-upmanship insecurity. It's bags o bits, and bags o water that are the future, my boy.
Any discussion about US copyright must start with the fact that these folks have paid lawmakers to subvert copyright to make it effectively infinite: 70years + life of the author, or 95/120 years depending on circumstances. These terms are completely absurd and they change the reasons for ALL the behavior in the marketplace of copyright-protected IP.
There is no rational discussion that can occur about "fair", "legal", "right or wrong", until this time scale for copyright is corrected. It is my opinion that the term should be about 20 years max regardless of circumstances.
Maybe this was just a troll, but I don't think so. It sounds that you really believe you are in the right. Do you think that preventing people from sharing information with legal action is the correct way for corporations to maintain their profit margins? Please do elaborate.
And that "hippie dust" you smell, that is called compassion and balance, and it is fueled by what many call "web 2.0" - a revolution in human norms with several billion people all awakening to the gross and ridiculous activities of many wealthy corporations of the world. You really should live it up while you still can karma will catch you.
Your attempt at a pejorative dig shows how intolerant and ignorant you are of what is happening outside of the TV-drivel-eating masses in the US-centric, capitalist, English-speaking money-worship isolated culture you espouse.
Nice cherry-pick on your retort too. The OP was written after I RTFA and your bolding of one phrase to support your argument is, well, powerful in it's own way.
Somebody lets the cat out of the bag about the crap and value within a company product suite, and they go back to DMCA and takedowns.
We are reaching the middle of the sigmoid on information exchange - until now many have still been in the old model, and moving forward there will be more activity in the new (open free information exchange) model. Old-style enterprises are pissed off by the new model. How DARE they tattle on where they make some extra money at te expense of their cusotmers. This will only increase and radically change the nature of business activity for the better, so long as people really can continue to exchange information and know who each other really are.
The whole idea of property, even for the physical things, is just a convention.
We all (soft or) agree that there is a mapping between things and people and we call that mapping property.
Nothing says that this "mapping" is real or tangible or even agreed to by everyone. Mostly, it exists originally from physical threats used to hold onto a thing - "grab this and I attack you" that has evolved with human society into a more civilized understanding that we can "hold onto" certain things. This is extended by our laws and the creation of widely accepted money. Some religious extremists argue divine right or natural order to support property, but that is rare.
The further extension of the convention of property to ideas is done through laws alone. This extension is NOT agreed to by everyone the way it is done now. It is tenuous at best, ridiculous at worst. At this point I flatly reject all arguments about enforcing current laws until copyright is fixed to balance the social good with the private rights. The situation is so far out of balance now, it is completely obvious why people pirate: copyright is effectively infinite.
At every point in our technical development, the most functional machines are always compared to humans. Now, the closest machine that can emulate actions similar to our own is the mini(personal) computer and connected devices. This analogy will continue, as machines get more and more functional.
For purely technical reasons, we have a convention now that a person's thoughts are private. We have no technical way of reading a person's active thoughts or dreams trolling their memories. We have different levels of social responsibility for a person's thoughts and actions.
Aside from the technical issues of volatility, this issue is central to what information is public and what information is private. Taking a copy of a computer's RAM, which is technically possible in a running computer using, say and external hard drive, by order of a court, is a very real possibility, and one that has extremely deep implications for what information society deems as "discoverable".
I think the real issue here - the one that would be fascinating to discuss - is for senescent beings (and computers are marching that way closer and closer), is there a line that we should not cross and allow other beings (humans, computers when we agree they are sentient) to have truly private thoughts? According to the mentality of this ruling, no any information you can grab is fair game. It bodes very poorly for future generations with highly advanced MRI devices that can read thoughts.
HRRMMRM, So now we have people with the intelligence of "a series of tubes" having extremely complex scientific, ethical, and social arguements to determine the legal practices that develp our food. Scary.
Bluntly: the typical politician is an idiot. Partly because of their age, partly because of their profession, and partly because of the type of people who succeed in politics.
I think the world would be a lot better off with broadly-scoped laws regarding science, and have ethics committees, empowered by those lows, staffed by scientists and ethicists (without industry ties or lobbyists) who create rules with the power of law to affect the bleeding edge science and technology. How it is used, who gets to apply it, and under what circumstances. Science simply moves too fast now for the existing legislative structures to keep up with the implications and developments.
I am sadly disappointed in the support that apple has given the open source community. there are a LOT of free applications that do work well on mac osx, but apple does not seem to care. there is almost no official support for integrating open source applications. dports, fink, etc. - none of them really work well. you walk into an apple store and they say "if you are typing into a shell, we don't want to (read:can't) talk to you," literally. selecting and promoting open source software would be a way for apple to take a commanding lead in the os market, but they don't.
apple should have a marketing campaign like: "set yourself free" or something like that and let people choose them as a real windows alternative.
I have an image of thousands of Chineese computer specialists, working tirelessly in huge warehouses of cubicles. I can hear them mumbling now... "Collect metal, collect wood, collect magic talisman of sharpness, rrrun to forge, use skill +5 "Weapon Craft" with added +2 ring-of-the-crafter proficiency." Bingo! a new Shadow Axe of Sharpness, sold for 350 RMB on Ebay. Rinse and repeat.
This looks interesting, great. But as long as we're in the "what is better than what" game, how is this any better than one-time pad?
If you're going to go to the work of putting down a single, dedicated wire with two fixed endpoints - it would seem a lot easier for Alice and Bob to just meet, generate 2 identical random pads (with current disks, 1TB is easy) an then Alice and Bob communicate securely until they meet next. Done.
Seriously, what keeps an attacker from just cutting the wire? Poof! no more channel.
In OTP, losing the pad is always a problem, but in this case, the two-resistor fixed endpoint has to be secure too, as this is always where the messages are decrypted. The same level of security at the endpoint is required for both systems.
Silly Ad exectutives, this just goes to show just how fake things are that are "typically" on TV and other ad mediums.
<start bitter rant>
Go walk down the street and look inside someone's home and you don't see the Better Homes version of a living space, or anything like what is shown on ads.
Take a close-up face photo of 10 people on the street, and you see that the image we've been sold by ads is completely fake. People simply do not look like they do on tv and in magazines. Lately this has gotten worse with the fsck-doll 23yo models reading the news on cnn and fox.
The whole image and world these ad-oriented people live in is fake - their whole career is about overtly lying to people to get them to buy stuff they don't want or need. "Boo hoo, the real world won't sell our red-colored corn syrup mixture with processed tomato paste..." yes, boo hoo.
He makes the excellent point that, though we may enjoy the metaphor, life is not a game.
Oh really? How exactly does he assert and support this? There have been thousands of years of philosphy about why we are here, and, in my reading on the subject, there is no conclusive resolution to the discussion. We don't know more than our collective experience. In fact, some have made very reasoned arguments about how and why this experience may be a simulation. This explanation of reality resolves many conundrums in logic, philosophy, and science... and if you fully go down the philosophical reasoning that our minds are simply consciousness engines in training in the 3rd of many dimensions, life starts getting really fun. One can unattach from almost everything!
Things are much simpler than you describe. It is only a set of common assumptions that make things so complex.
Underlying your writing is an artificial separation into classes of positive behavior that, when a person takes mores seriously, simply does not exist. Rather there is a continuum of bahavior that has to weight the me against the "not-me". Unfortunately, a vast mojority of "normal" everyday human behavior would stop if this view were understood and believed by most people, so it will take some time before we mature enough as a species to get back there.
The only reason the governement gives people "rights" is within a context where there are a lot of wrongs going around. In a world where people were healthy (emotionally and physically), the population was stable, and new children were a blessing raised by a whole tribe, to be healthy (like it was for the first ~ 850,000 years of human evolution) then people could live happily on 2-3 hours of work each day and never worry about laws. We'll get back there... hopefully in my lifetime.
This is yet another example of a serious, growing problem with the American mentality.
We can not legislate all aspects of human behavior. It simply won't work.
Healthy societies have both laws and mores to shape human behavior. Laws derive from a logical/thinking framework, and mores are primarily from an emotional/feeling framework. All people have the ability to use both thinking and feeling in making decisions about what is right or wrong. But in American society, and more generally in a capitalist mentality, laws and money interests have so completely dominated that people have forgotten about the mores.
Mores are like laws, but enforced by society feedback, typically emotional feedback. People frown at Bob if he acts like an ass, and he understands that he should stop acting like that, because Bob doesn't like it when people frown at him. That is because Bob is healthy and likes to have healthy happy people around him. Note, nowhere in here are we able to legislate that Bob "acting like an ass" is illegal in a logical way.
We can that the Bush administration as the PRIMARY promoter of this mentality: "If it is not illegal, than I can get away with it." As such shining examples leading the USA today, more and more people (like Enron) are saying, "Hell, why not me too?"
This problem will not stop unless and until people start giving strong emotional feedback (disapproval, and eventually ostracizing people) for bad behavior.
We can not legislate all aspects of human behavior. It simply does not work.
American society has devolved to "if I can get away with it, I can do it" - many thanks to the prevailing governing administration for promoting this point during the final years of our society. "Required" is now only meaningful in the face of lawsuits to prevent or punish. Healthy societies have both laws AND mores that shape people's behaviors. In this case simple mores for treating people with respect and decency would have stopped this kid, had their parents had the time or understanding to raise their child correctly.
Recording other people is a very dicey issue. Typically recording people in public areas is OK without permission, although recording ocnversations when privacy is reasonably expected is not. Laws vary in different states. I have an interst in this, though I'm not an expert or a lawyer.
In this case, they are in a public institution, and although it was not a public space, there is really no expectation of privacy. Standing up in front of a class of people is exactly the kind of step that can remove the "expectation of privacy".
So who gets to say what is a bank? Do I get to start a bank for my wooden nickel collection? What about the Albanians, or the Panamanians? What about Linden Labs, do they get to have a bank? What about a sperm bank? What about Liberty Dollars backed with Silver - do people who trade in them get to start a bank? Do the Americans, who basically control the Internet now get to say who can be a bank or not? Beyond the obvious, socially accepted, current definitions of a major "bank" you quickly fall into a grey quagmire of people fighting over what different people are allowed to do with a "bank", and what people are allowed to do in general with resources and money. That fight is not the place for TLDs.
Top-level domains should either be very open (any 3 or 4 letter character might be nice), or they should be generic, as they are now. Tying TLD to the function or responsibility of a domain that owns it will inevitable lead to systematic thought control.
Slashdot Mirror
However, much of the behavior of the people who make porn is evil. Most people who make US-oriented porn refuse to see that their actions degrade women and teach men unhealthy and ultimately unsatisfying habits for how to relate sexually to other people. Unfortuantely, electronic filters can't distinguish healthy behaviors in erotic material from unhealthy behaviors. It can't disinguish art from teaching domination or aggression.
For these things you need healthy communities of people who talk to one another, face to face and teach by example the best ways to interact.
So, I've struggled with the issue of the really large numbers in game AI problems. In go, for example, there are about 10^170 possible legal board layouts for the 19x19 board.
There are (esitmiated) only about 10^81 atoms in the universe.
Do all of the 10^170 positions exist in any meaningful way? It is impossible to count, enumerate, or articulate them all?
Getting the point back to chess, these folks have done a similar thing - it seems they articulated 1/10000th or so of the legal boards and used it to "prove" something about the whole space. (I have not yet read the original paper...) This seems mostly bollucks, as most real players make all kinds of mistakes - so the games do not flow into the "important" game positions they follow. After about 3-5 moves in their java applet, I found moves that could make sense that there not in their "legal" moves database.
google started the trend: information is the most valuable thing in the world. a close second are the people who control and can quickly assess and manage information (as a group) are the second most valuable thing.
No longer are the widgets and doohickeys manufactured in large plants the items of value - and the concomitant world of patents to protect them. Frankly we have way too much stuff already, and mostly the need for more physical stuff is artificially manufactured by ads and more-pompous-than-thou one-upmanship insecurity. It's bags o bits, and bags o water that are the future, my boy.
In short: "Well, duh."
Any discussion about US copyright must start with the fact that these folks have paid lawmakers to subvert copyright to make it effectively infinite: 70years + life of the author, or 95/120 years depending on circumstances. These terms are completely absurd and they change the reasons for ALL the behavior in the marketplace of copyright-protected IP.
There is no rational discussion that can occur about "fair", "legal", "right or wrong", until this time scale for copyright is corrected. It is my opinion that the term should be about 20 years max regardless of circumstances.
Sounds just like what many people do with alcohol and cigarettes now without therapy, for years. Hopefully this one will have less hangover.
Maybe this was just a troll, but I don't think so. It sounds that you really believe you are in the right. Do you think that preventing people from sharing information with legal action is the correct way for corporations to maintain their profit margins? Please do elaborate.
And that "hippie dust" you smell, that is called compassion and balance, and it is fueled by what many call "web 2.0" - a revolution in human norms with several billion people all awakening to the gross and ridiculous activities of many wealthy corporations of the world. You really should live it up while you still can karma will catch you.
Your attempt at a pejorative dig shows how intolerant and ignorant you are of what is happening outside of the TV-drivel-eating masses in the US-centric, capitalist, English-speaking money-worship isolated culture you espouse.
Nice cherry-pick on your retort too. The OP was written after I RTFA and your bolding of one phrase to support your argument is, well, powerful in it's own way.
yes, hence the "and".
Oh the Tragedy!
Somebody lets the cat out of the bag about the crap and value within a company product suite, and they go back to DMCA and takedowns.
We are reaching the middle of the sigmoid on information exchange - until now many have still been in the old model, and moving forward there will be more activity in the new (open free information exchange) model. Old-style enterprises are pissed off by the new model. How DARE they tattle on where they make some extra money at te expense of their cusotmers. This will only increase and radically change the nature of business activity for the better, so long as people really can continue to exchange information and know who each other really are.
The whole idea of property, even for the physical things, is just a convention.
We all (soft or) agree that there is a mapping between things and people and we call that mapping property.
Nothing says that this "mapping" is real or tangible or even agreed to by everyone. Mostly, it exists originally from physical threats used to hold onto a thing - "grab this and I attack you" that has evolved with human society into a more civilized understanding that we can "hold onto" certain things. This is extended by our laws and the creation of widely accepted money. Some religious extremists argue divine right or natural order to support property, but that is rare.
The further extension of the convention of property to ideas is done through laws alone. This extension is NOT agreed to by everyone the way it is done now. It is tenuous at best, ridiculous at worst. At this point I flatly reject all arguments about enforcing current laws until copyright is fixed to balance the social good with the private rights. The situation is so far out of balance now, it is completely obvious why people pirate: copyright is effectively infinite.
At every point in our technical development, the most functional machines are always compared to humans. Now, the closest machine that can emulate actions similar to our own is the mini(personal) computer and connected devices. This analogy will continue, as machines get more and more functional.
For purely technical reasons, we have a convention now that a person's thoughts are private. We have no technical way of reading a person's active thoughts or dreams trolling their memories. We have different levels of social responsibility for a person's thoughts and actions.
Aside from the technical issues of volatility, this issue is central to what information is public and what information is private. Taking a copy of a computer's RAM, which is technically possible in a running computer using, say and external hard drive, by order of a court, is a very real possibility, and one that has extremely deep implications for what information society deems as "discoverable".
I think the real issue here - the one that would be fascinating to discuss - is for senescent beings (and computers are marching that way closer and closer), is there a line that we should not cross and allow other beings (humans, computers when we agree they are sentient) to have truly private thoughts? According to the mentality of this ruling, no any information you can grab is fair game. It bodes very poorly for future generations with highly advanced MRI devices that can read thoughts.
HRRMMRM, So now we have people with the intelligence of "a series of tubes" having extremely complex scientific, ethical, and social arguements to determine the legal practices that develp our food. Scary.
Bluntly: the typical politician is an idiot. Partly because of their age, partly because of their profession, and partly because of the type of people who succeed in politics.
I think the world would be a lot better off with broadly-scoped laws regarding science, and have ethics committees, empowered by those lows, staffed by scientists and ethicists (without industry ties or lobbyists) who create rules with the power of law to affect the bleeding edge science and technology. How it is used, who gets to apply it, and under what circumstances. Science simply moves too fast now for the existing legislative structures to keep up with the implications and developments.
I am now Windows free for 3 years, loving OSX.
I am sadly disappointed in the support that apple has given the open source community. there are a LOT of free applications that do work well on mac osx, but apple does not seem to care. there is almost no official support for integrating open source applications. dports, fink, etc. - none of them really work well. you walk into an apple store and they say "if you are typing into a shell, we don't want to (read:can't) talk to you," literally. selecting and promoting open source software would be a way for apple to take a commanding lead in the os market, but they don't.
apple should have a marketing campaign like: "set yourself free" or something like that and let people choose them as a real windows alternative.
And with a Slashdot story, TimeStomp just migrated down from hobby to script-kiddie. Ahhh, you gotta just love free open information exchange.
I have an image of thousands of Chineese computer specialists, working tirelessly in huge warehouses of cubicles. I can hear them mumbling now... "Collect metal, collect wood, collect magic talisman of sharpness, rrrun to forge, use skill +5 "Weapon Craft" with added +2 ring-of-the-crafter proficiency." Bingo! a new Shadow Axe of Sharpness, sold for 350 RMB on Ebay. Rinse and repeat.
This looks interesting, great. But as long as we're in the "what is better than what" game, how is this any better than one-time pad?
If you're going to go to the work of putting down a single, dedicated wire with two fixed endpoints - it would seem a lot easier for Alice and Bob to just meet, generate 2 identical random pads (with current disks, 1TB is easy) an then Alice and Bob communicate securely until they meet next. Done.
Seriously, what keeps an attacker from just cutting the wire? Poof! no more channel.
In OTP, losing the pad is always a problem, but in this case, the two-resistor fixed endpoint has to be secure too, as this is always where the messages are decrypted. The same level of security at the endpoint is required for both systems.
Silly Ad exectutives, this just goes to show just how fake things are that are "typically" on TV and other ad mediums.
<start bitter rant>
Go walk down the street and look inside someone's home and you don't see the Better Homes version of a living space, or anything like what is shown on ads.
Take a close-up face photo of 10 people on the street, and you see that the image we've been sold by ads is completely fake. People simply do not look like they do on tv and in magazines. Lately this has gotten worse with the fsck-doll 23yo models reading the news on cnn and fox.
The whole image and world these ad-oriented people live in is fake - their whole career is about overtly lying to people to get them to buy stuff they don't want or need. "Boo hoo, the real world won't sell our red-colored corn syrup mixture with processed tomato paste..." yes, boo hoo.
</rant>
this situation is exactly why link aggregators are back.
focused on one topic, and finding content across multiple different sources
like this one on election 2008 videos
http://www.vid08.org/ (yes, a shameless plug)
this is a perfect example of why a .museum top-level domain (TLD) is a bad idea unless we open up the TLD space to any word
http://british.museum/
He makes the excellent point that, though we may enjoy the metaphor, life is not a game.
Oh really? How exactly does he assert and support this? There have been thousands of years of philosphy about why we are here, and, in my reading on the subject, there is no conclusive resolution to the discussion. We don't know more than our collective experience. In fact, some have made very reasoned arguments about how and why this experience may be a simulation. This explanation of reality resolves many conundrums in logic, philosophy, and science... and if you fully go down the philosophical reasoning that our minds are simply consciousness engines in training in the 3rd of many dimensions, life starts getting really fun. One can unattach from almost everything!
Things are much simpler than you describe. It is only a set of common assumptions that make things so complex.
Underlying your writing is an artificial separation into classes of positive behavior that, when a person takes mores seriously, simply does not exist. Rather there is a continuum of bahavior that has to weight the me against the "not-me". Unfortunately, a vast mojority of "normal" everyday human behavior would stop if this view were understood and believed by most people, so it will take some time before we mature enough as a species to get back there.
The only reason the governement gives people "rights" is within a context where there are a lot of wrongs going around. In a world where people were healthy (emotionally and physically), the population was stable, and new children were a blessing raised by a whole tribe, to be healthy (like it was for the first ~ 850,000 years of human evolution) then people could live happily on 2-3 hours of work each day and never worry about laws. We'll get back there... hopefully in my lifetime.
This is yet another example of a serious, growing problem with the American mentality.
We can not legislate all aspects of human behavior. It simply won't work.
Healthy societies have both laws and mores to shape human behavior. Laws derive from a logical/thinking framework, and mores are primarily from an emotional/feeling framework. All people have the ability to use both thinking and feeling in making decisions about what is right or wrong. But in American society, and more generally in a capitalist mentality, laws and money interests have so completely dominated that people have forgotten about the mores.
Mores are like laws, but enforced by society feedback, typically emotional feedback. People frown at Bob if he acts like an ass, and he understands that he should stop acting like that, because Bob doesn't like it when people frown at him. That is because Bob is healthy and likes to have healthy happy people around him. Note, nowhere in here are we able to legislate that Bob "acting like an ass" is illegal in a logical way.
We can that the Bush administration as the PRIMARY promoter of this mentality: "If it is not illegal, than I can get away with it." As such shining examples leading the USA today, more and more people (like Enron) are saying, "Hell, why not me too?"
This problem will not stop unless and until people start giving strong emotional feedback (disapproval, and eventually ostracizing people) for bad behavior.
We can not legislate all aspects of human behavior. It simply does not work.
American society has devolved to "if I can get away with it, I can do it" - many thanks to the prevailing governing administration for promoting this point during the final years of our society. "Required" is now only meaningful in the face of lawsuits to prevent or punish. Healthy societies have both laws AND mores that shape people's behaviors. In this case simple mores for treating people with respect and decency would have stopped this kid, had their parents had the time or understanding to raise their child correctly.
Recording other people is a very dicey issue. Typically recording people in public areas is OK without permission, although recording ocnversations when privacy is reasonably expected is not. Laws vary in different states. I have an interst in this, though I'm not an expert or a lawyer.
In this case, they are in a public institution, and although it was not a public space, there is really no expectation of privacy. Standing up in front of a class of people is exactly the kind of step that can remove the "expectation of privacy".
yet another reason to stop keeping conscious creatures locked up for the viewing pleasure of curious, callous humans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
He did not address my concerns, posted here
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233869&cid
here they are again:
So who gets to say what is a bank? Do I get to start a bank for my wooden nickel collection? What about the Albanians, or the Panamanians? What about Linden Labs, do they get to have a bank? What about a sperm bank? What about Liberty Dollars backed with Silver - do people who trade in them get to start a bank? Do the Americans, who basically control the Internet now get to say who can be a bank or not? Beyond the obvious, socially accepted, current definitions of a major "bank" you quickly fall into a grey quagmire of people fighting over what different people are allowed to do with a "bank", and what people are allowed to do in general with resources and money. That fight is not the place for TLDs.
Top-level domains should either be very open (any 3 or 4 letter character might be nice), or they should be generic, as they are now. Tying TLD to the function or responsibility of a domain that owns it will inevitable lead to systematic thought control.