Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
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· Score: 2
You have to admit, though, the analogies are getting better. The brain is definitely more like a computer than a steam engine.
Okay, I'll bite. I don't think that's the case at all. Steam engines take in stored energy, release it , and move down a track. So do humans. The cells taken in ATP, release it, and move down some track. We don't know much about how these turn into decisions about whom to marry, which beer to drink, or how to mix the two together, but we know that energy is going in, and decisions are coming out.
A computer, on the other hand, is filled with logical gates that make straight-forward, well-defined decisions like AND, OR, or NOR. I hate to remind you, but there are many people that don't seem to have any connection with logic. They're really out to lunch. But they do take in energy and move down some track.
So just for the sake of argument, I think that the computer metaphor is moving in the wrong direction. Your track isn't pointed in the right way. You took in that energy, but it's not helping us at all.
Here's another great link
on
Digital Biology
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why stop with the GPL? Do you realize that the soup kitchen down the street is giving away soup? I bet the homeless aren't paying sales tax on it. The volunteers behind the counter are probably a bunch of scurvy tax pirates just donating their time. They won't be paying income tax on their labor. Scum. All of them are scum.
The government also benefits from the GPL. They may not get taxes from the revenues, but they don't have to pay huge fees to MS or others to use the software. They also get the stuff FREE too. I bet they get a better deal-- especially given how corporations use the tax law to avoid paying taxes.
Enron paid hardly any taxes over the last five years. It skipped taxes all together in several of those years. I wonder how much MS pays in taxes a year? They've got better lawyers and better lobbyists than Enron. I wonder how many copies of Windows it would take to recover the lost revenues? Mundie may be a fool to open up the question of taxes given the rampant loopholes available to big corporations.
The article is good, but it misses some points. First, Los Alamos is a far cry from a university. They develop atomic weapons there and those are classified.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code. The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.
I suppose it could be getting worse, but I don't know if it is as bad as the author suggests.
Does this mean I can get a free subscription if I just edit the cookie file of a friend and grab the cookie?
Why not put a wheel on the back?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
I love computers. It's cool when they can do things like keep us balanced. But why not just put a simple wheel on the back? A three-wheeled device doesn't need 10 microprocessors and five gyroscopes.
CDR blanks cost about $.20. CDs cost $.50-$.90 in smallish quantities. (5000) The only problem is sitting there feeding in the damn blanks. Luckily, they're making robots for doing that now.
This is a nice effort, but I don't know where they come up with the $100 million price tag. Most of the work is already done by professors who want to save themselves the hassle of making sure students get all of the handouts, problem sets, answers, etc. MIT doesn't block access to that stuff now and I guess they won't in the future.
My guess is the $100 million figure was dreamed up to shake some cash out of alumni. They're probably hoping that someone will come forward and endow the effort. Perhaps they're targeting Michael Saylor, the MIT graduate who once talked about starting a free university with the cash he was making from MicroStrategy. The dot bomb crash has slowed that dream and perhaps MIT's as well.
Of course, I don't mean to denigrate the entire idea. It just seems like they're taking credit for something they already do. Did I mention that each week, I take out the trash? That's keeping the world cleaner! Call me Mr. Environmentalist!
I'm full of horseshit. I think that words grow as people add annotations and interpretation. But it's not the same fucking thinking as reinterpreting music because I'm stupid. Changing things on the sentence level lets me change meaning.
Let text be text. If you want to write annotations, they're separate. They're something new and different. Changing the text itself makes us poorer because we don't know who wrote what. Knowing who wrote code doesn't really matter if you want to use it.
The guy who wrote Free for All had a long explanation about why the book wasn't free. He points out that text and opinions are best copyrighted because copyright doesn't affect the facts themselves. If you want to reuse the facts, you're free to do so. You just can't reuse the exact form.
But music is kind of different. Songs do grow as other people add stanzas, verses and what not. So I can see the advantages of the OAL. This guy is complaining too much. Sure, you give up some rights when you use it, but you gain others. What's the big deal? Everything in life has tradeoffs.
The article sure does make it seem like steganography is the work of the devil. But watermarking documents and sound files is endorsed by such fine members of the establishment as the RIAA and SDMI. So is steganography evil or good? It's just neutral, despite what the article says.
This guy should still be afraid of violating the DMCA. If he tries to detect steganographic images in a sound file, he might run afoul of the RIAA. He shouldn't even think about publishing his research.
Actually, no. I'm a non-smoker and big opponent to second hand smoke, but I'm a big fan of the smoking community. Once the forces of good get done with the tobacco companies, they're coming after my vices: fat delivery devices like hamburgers, brain cell killing pablum like "Beverly Hills 90210", and time wasting endeavors like chatting on Slashdot.
But let's assume that you've found some example that should send horror through my veins. Should I care? Nah. Protesting is about expressing your self-interest. If a million moms go down to DC to protest something, it's bound to be something that is hard to change. All of the easy fixes are finished.
I think it's good when journalists disclose relationships. But I don't think message boards are journalism--they're a mixture of opinions and debate. So if the editor wants to post under a different pseudonym, more power to him.
I wonder if CmdrTaco posts under a different name from time to time. That would be kind of cool and probably necessary. If he posted under his own name, people might think it was something close to the official opinion of Slashdot. Another name just makes sense if he wants to mouth off.
This is a fair point, but I think it is ultimately unmanageable. Many people own MS stock but don't work there any more. Should they disclose this in each and every posting they make? What about people who own a mutual fund that invests in MS? The list goes on and on. What about people who just have MSCE standing? If MS tanks, so does their skill set. That's a significant amount of money. Should they disclose that too? What if their spouse works for a company? What if they just want to wrange a date from someone who works there? The list goes on and on and on.
I think it's better for people to read what they see with a critical eye. Even the best news sources like the New York Times have unintentional biases. If you ask a NYT reporter, they might not think that they're coverage of the last Presidential race was biased. But if you ask the Republicans, well, you'll get a different opinion.
There's nothing wrong with biases. Everyone has them. Just because someone doesn't work for a company doesn't mean that they don't have blind love for everything the company does. Just ask any Macintosh user.
If it's consistency you're after, then why is this a problem? It sounds like everything that came out under a particular name was consistent. The stuff under the editorial names said one thing and the stuff under the various pseudonyms said something else. It's not like he was using the same name to celebrate MS one day and trash it the next.
What you're really asking for is accountability. You want everything a person does to be listed under the same name. I say this only adds to confusion and prevents people from trying on other ideas on for size.
Let's say I want to argue MS's point, perhaps as devil's advocate. If I'm posting under this name I need to go through all of this rhetorical BS. I need to say, "I know in the past I said this, but..." It's tiresome.
I think we should all have multiple personalities on-line. It hurts no one.
This is an on-line discussion board. Practically everyone, from "CmdrTaco" to "Hemos" is using a pseudonym. So what. And so what if they have multiple pseudonyms so they can get in debates with themselves. The words and the ideas are the most important thing. The name is not important at all.
Peter Wayner, the author of Free for All , Disappearing Cryptography and other nerd books is selling a short book or long article on the war between DirecTV and the hackers. All you need to do it send cash with paypal.
Of course I wonder if the article will be pirated too.:-0
I use Adobe's PDF format and its Acrobat software to publish texts. If I can't get independent review of the software from noted scholars, then I'm going to be trusting my "very valuable" intellectual property to potentially bad software. That sounds bad for writers and artists everywhere.
I also hate the copy protection mechanisms because they gum up the works in my office.
In the cases involving the Corvair, Silent Spring, and the Firestone tires/Ford Explorers, the corporate world did attempt to silence the
whistler blower. However, their attempts failed because each involved risks (i.e., death, injury) to the general public.
The current application of the DMCA may not cause direct death, but who knows about the future. Cars and chemicals can be copyrighted. The law certainly applys to attempts to circumvent them too.
And so what if someone isn't dying directly because of the DMCA? Fair use is a pretty neat thing too. It may not be as tragic as Corvair crash, but it still hurts.
I see no big clamor for Congressional hearings, the DMCA does not involve public safety, and it's
nice to have powerful friends who believe in your cause.
You have a pretty deep belief in the power of Congressional hearings. There were hearings when the bill was passed. Security officials did testify. There's even a so-called "loophole" protecting the kind of research presented at Defcon. But he was still arrested! A bunch of guys skipping out early from a meeting in the Rayburn office building isn't going to make a darn bit of difference. The only thing that will matter is if the public begins to realize the stakes. The boycott frightened Adobe, not Congress.
Imagine if IBM had arrested
the people who cloned BIOS. What an amazing change the world has gone through in just
a few short years.
Imagine if General Motors arrested Ralph Nader for prying into the Corvair, presumably with the intent of reverse engineering the car and cloning it.
Imagine if the chemical companies arrested Rachel Carson for trying to reverse engineer DDT...
Imagine if the tire companies arrested the activists who noticed the correlation between Firestone tires, Ford Explorers and tragic roll-over deaths...
Imagine if the Pentagon arrested the NYT for printing the papers with the true death counts in Vietnam....
I just bought a copy of the MacGIMP CD-ROM . This supports the one major competitor for Photoshop. I hope to make this a permanent transition. Adobe's gone too far for me.
Now, if we could start raising a bounty to fund development of CMKY color support for GIMP....
Odd. I was thinking of this company today. They've always resisted selling their basestation modems to third parties who wanted to use them. I would take the plans, license the base stations and let a network self-organize. People are already doing this with 802.11 stuff and if my instincts are right, the Metricom stuff is cooler. It's designed to self-organize and link up.
Slashdot Mirror
You have to admit, though, the analogies are getting better. The brain is definitely more like a computer than a steam engine.
Okay, I'll bite. I don't think that's the case at all. Steam engines take in stored energy, release it , and move down a track. So do humans. The cells taken in ATP, release it, and move down some track. We don't know much about how these turn into decisions about whom to marry, which beer to drink, or how to mix the two together, but we know that energy is going in, and decisions are coming out.
A computer, on the other hand, is filled with logical gates that make straight-forward, well-defined decisions like AND, OR, or NOR. I hate to remind you, but there are many people that don't seem to have any connection with logic. They're really out to lunch. But they do take in energy and move down some track.
So just for the sake of argument, I think that the computer metaphor is moving in the wrong direction. Your track isn't pointed in the right way. You took in that energy, but it's not helping us at all.
http://www.digitalbiology.com/
Plenty of good stuff. Anyone have other good links?
Why stop with the GPL? Do you realize that the soup kitchen down the street is giving away soup? I bet the homeless aren't paying sales tax on it. The volunteers behind the counter are probably a bunch of scurvy tax pirates just donating their time. They won't be paying income tax on their labor. Scum. All of them are scum.
The government also benefits from the GPL. They may not get taxes from the revenues, but they don't have to pay huge fees to MS or others to use the software. They also get the stuff FREE too. I bet they get a better deal-- especially given how corporations use the tax law to avoid paying taxes.
Enron paid hardly any taxes over the last five years. It skipped taxes all together in several of those years. I wonder how much MS pays in taxes a year? They've got better lawyers and better lobbyists than Enron. I wonder how many copies of Windows it would take to recover the lost revenues? Mundie may be a fool to open up the question of taxes given the rampant loopholes available to big corporations.
During the keynote, Jobs mentioned that the optical drives run slower if they're vertical. So he wants to keep them flat. Thus the blob on the desk.
The article is good, but it misses some points. First, Los Alamos is a far cry from a university. They develop atomic weapons there and those are classified.
Second, many government research contracts force the professors to share their code. The Mach kernel, for instance, began life at Carnagie Mellon thanks to government money. Rick Rashid, one of the project's leaders, released it with a very open BSD-like license. He says that work developed with the public money deserves to be as free as possible. This has been going on for some time.
I suppose it could be getting worse, but I don't know if it is as bad as the author suggests.
Does this mean I can get a free subscription if I just edit the cookie file of a friend and grab the cookie?
I love computers. It's cool when they can do things like keep us balanced. But why not just put a simple wheel on the back? A three-wheeled device doesn't need 10 microprocessors and five gyroscopes.
CDR blanks cost about $.20. CDs cost $.50-$.90 in smallish quantities. (5000) The only problem is sitting there feeding in the damn blanks. Luckily, they're making robots for doing that now.
This is a nice effort, but I don't know where they come up with the $100 million price tag. Most of the work is already done by professors who want to save themselves the hassle of making sure students get all of the handouts, problem sets, answers, etc. MIT doesn't block access to that stuff now and I guess they won't in the future.
My guess is the $100 million figure was dreamed up to shake some cash out of alumni. They're probably hoping that someone will come forward and endow the effort. Perhaps they're targeting Michael Saylor, the MIT graduate who once talked about starting a free university with the cash he was making from MicroStrategy. The dot bomb crash has slowed that dream and perhaps MIT's as well.
Of course, I don't mean to denigrate the entire idea. It just seems like they're taking credit for something they already do. Did I mention that each week, I take out the trash? That's keeping the world cleaner! Call me Mr. Environmentalist!
Let me apply the GPL to your words:
I'm full of horseshit. I think that words grow as people add annotations and interpretation. But it's not the same fucking thinking as reinterpreting music because I'm stupid. Changing things on the sentence level lets me change meaning.
Let text be text. If you want to write annotations, they're separate. They're something new and different. Changing the text itself makes us poorer because we don't know who wrote what. Knowing who wrote code doesn't really matter if you want to use it.
Sigh.
The guy who wrote Free for All had a long explanation about why the book wasn't free. He points out that text and opinions are best copyrighted because copyright doesn't affect the facts themselves. If you want to reuse the facts, you're free to do so. You just can't reuse the exact form.
But music is kind of different. Songs do grow as other people add stanzas, verses and what not. So I can see the advantages of the OAL. This guy is complaining too much. Sure, you give up some rights when you use it, but you gain others. What's the big deal? Everything in life has tradeoffs.
I hope this new standard has a compressed version like DisplayPostscript. XML is nice, but all of those chew up bandwidth.
The article sure does make it seem like steganography is the work of the devil. But watermarking documents and sound files is endorsed by such fine members of the establishment as the RIAA and SDMI. So is steganography evil or good? It's just neutral, despite what the article says.
This guy should still be afraid of violating the DMCA. If he tries to detect steganographic images in a sound file, he might run afoul of the RIAA. He shouldn't even think about publishing his research.
This is funny. Just like SpamMimic.com , a program that hides secret messages as spam.
You could hook up two bots to talk to each other secretly.
Actually, no. I'm a non-smoker and big opponent to second hand smoke, but I'm a big fan of the smoking community. Once the forces of good get done with the tobacco companies, they're coming after my vices: fat delivery devices like hamburgers, brain cell killing pablum like "Beverly Hills 90210", and time wasting endeavors like chatting on Slashdot.
But let's assume that you've found some example that should send horror through my veins. Should I care? Nah. Protesting is about expressing your self-interest. If a million moms go down to DC to protest something, it's bound to be something that is hard to change. All of the easy fixes are finished.
I think it's good when journalists disclose relationships. But I don't think message boards are journalism--they're a mixture of opinions and debate. So if the editor wants to post under a different pseudonym, more power to him.
I wonder if CmdrTaco posts under a different name from time to time. That would be kind of cool and probably necessary. If he posted under his own name, people might think it was something close to the official opinion of Slashdot. Another name just makes sense if he wants to mouth off.
This is a fair point, but I think it is ultimately unmanageable. Many people own MS stock but don't work there any more. Should they disclose this in each and every posting they make? What about people who own a mutual fund that invests in MS? The list goes on and on. What about people who just have MSCE standing? If MS tanks, so does their skill set. That's a significant amount of money. Should they disclose that too? What if their spouse works for a company? What if they just want to wrange a date from someone who works there? The list goes on and on and on.
I think it's better for people to read what they see with a critical eye. Even the best news sources like the New York Times have unintentional biases. If you ask a NYT reporter, they might not think that they're coverage of the last Presidential race was biased. But if you ask the Republicans, well, you'll get a different opinion.
There's nothing wrong with biases. Everyone has them. Just because someone doesn't work for a company doesn't mean that they don't have blind love for everything the company does. Just ask any Macintosh user.
If it's consistency you're after, then why is this a problem? It sounds like everything that came out under a particular name was consistent. The stuff under the editorial names said one thing and the stuff under the various pseudonyms said something else. It's not like he was using the same name to celebrate MS one day and trash it the next.
What you're really asking for is accountability. You want everything a person does to be listed under the same name. I say this only adds to confusion and prevents people from trying on other ideas on for size.
Let's say I want to argue MS's point, perhaps as devil's advocate. If I'm posting under this name I need to go through all of this rhetorical BS. I need to say, "I know in the past I said this, but..." It's tiresome.
I think we should all have multiple personalities on-line. It hurts no one.
This is an on-line discussion board. Practically everyone, from "CmdrTaco" to "Hemos" is using a pseudonym. So what. And so what if they have multiple pseudonyms so they can get in debates with themselves. The words and the ideas are the most important thing. The name is not important at all.
Of course I wonder if the article will be pirated too. :-0
I use Adobe's PDF format and its Acrobat software to publish texts. If I can't get independent review of the software from noted scholars, then I'm going to be trusting my "very valuable" intellectual property to potentially bad software. That sounds bad for writers and artists everywhere. I also hate the copy protection mechanisms because they gum up the works in my office.
In the cases involving the Corvair, Silent Spring, and the Firestone tires/Ford Explorers, the corporate world did attempt to silence the whistler blower. However, their attempts failed because each involved risks (i.e., death, injury) to the general public.
The current application of the DMCA may not cause direct death, but who knows about the future. Cars and chemicals can be copyrighted. The law certainly applys to attempts to circumvent them too.
And so what if someone isn't dying directly because of the DMCA? Fair use is a pretty neat thing too. It may not be as tragic as Corvair crash, but it still hurts.
I see no big clamor for Congressional hearings, the DMCA does not involve public safety, and it's nice to have powerful friends who believe in your cause.
You have a pretty deep belief in the power of Congressional hearings. There were hearings when the bill was passed. Security officials did testify. There's even a so-called "loophole" protecting the kind of research presented at Defcon. But he was still arrested! A bunch of guys skipping out early from a meeting in the Rayburn office building isn't going to make a darn bit of difference. The only thing that will matter is if the public begins to realize the stakes. The boycott frightened Adobe, not Congress.
The list goes on...
I just bought a copy of the MacGIMP CD-ROM . This supports the one major competitor for Photoshop. I hope to make this a permanent transition. Adobe's gone too far for me. ...
Now, if we could start raising a bounty to fund development of CMKY color support for GIMP.
That would be the cool thing to do.
So when will the other three books becoming out? I've only read the first two?