You're right, everyone in this discussion is missing the point of the legal argument. Here's a rough outline:
- Copyright law provides the music industry a monopoly over their copyrighted works,
- but only as long as the copyright owner is fair with the property in terms of allowing other legitimate businesses to compete in a market (in this case, electronic distribution of music)!
- 'Fairness' is decided by a judge who has to determine if business practices are anti-competitive
- Kazaa is trying to license RIAA's music to sell on Altnet
- Kazaa is either claiming that the RIAA will not license their music to them (anti-competitive) or that the RIAA is asking an anti-competitve price so that the RIAA can be the sole electronic distributor of music.
- Essentially, Kazaa is arguing that since the RIAA holds copyrights on the music that makes up nearly 100% of music revenue, they are obligated under US law to license that music to electronic retailers at competitive prices!
- Under US law, anti-trust can be enforced by revoking or refusing to recognize the copyrights that are being used to stifle competition, however the RIAA IS NOT GOING TO LOSE THEIR COPYRIGHTS. If Kazaa wins, it will be because the judge says something like this:
"RIAA, either license your music at competitive prices to Kazaa, or your copyrights will no longer be enforcable. "
Then the RIAA will license their music to Kazaa/Altnet. However, this will not change the legality of Kazaa's free file sharing network. The only thing Kazaa will gain is REVENUE FROM SELLING THE RIAA'S MUSIC. The RIAA will still be free to pursue legal avenues to shut down Kazaa's free file sharing network.
It appears that winning this case will provide Kazaa a way out, so that if indeed their free file sharing network is finally shut down or crippled by RIAA hacker goons, they can switch their millions of users over to Altnet and make a few bucks before people find a better way to share files.
Geez, I don't know what's more sad, that music industry representatives may have paid you to write that, or that you might actually believe it. If you don't have a career in PR already you should consider it, few people are capable of producing propaganda with such vigor and sincerity.
Just in case there are people reading this that still don't understand: The imminent collapse of the music 'industry' will be the best thing to happen to music in the last 20 years. Anyone who thinks the shrink-wrapped, injection-molded music produced by studio executives today is art is liable to mistake a fucking vodka billboard for a Van Gogh.
Great post expect for one major issue: Whenever laypeople use the word 'irresponsible', they are expressing their ignorant technophobia. Example: "You irresponsible scientists and your anti-biotics are going to DESTROY THE WORLD!". Whenever legitimate researchers use the word 'irresponsible', they are expressing their fear that they will be killed by a mob of the aforementioned Luddites.
The word 'irresponsible' doesn't really have any meaning by itself in the context of scientific research, it's just a reference to the "Technology will destroy our world!" mentality.
Cripes on toast, if I hear another fruitcake talk about "SOULS" in a discussion on cloning, I'm going to puke. WTF does that even mean?!
He's a news flash for you from the mid 19th century: Your consciousness exists in a electrical circuit called a "BRAIN", inside your thick skull. The "soul" is a baseless concept created by ignorant people before they understood human biology. We're all fortunate enough now to live at a time where this kind of information is available to us, however there are still an amazing number of people who choose ignorance and tripe over truth.
>>Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on. Personally I'm not sure I like that a whole lot. It might be nice to know that my personality will go on, but it still is not me.
I think you're wrong. You're talking about the difference between, say, ghosting a hard drvie from one computer to another verses physically removing the hard drive from one computer and putting it in the other. Warcraft is still going to run the same either way.
Let's consider the following scenario. Forget about bodies and all that messy stuff. Assume that the current 'state' of your brain can be copied. You go to a labratory and are rendered unconscious. You wake up later. You know that one of two things may have occured; either your brain was physically moved from one body to another and the old body was destroyed, or the structure of the old brain was copied and a new brain was created that mimics that structure perfectly and the old body/brain was destroyed. How could you possibly tell the difference? You wouldn't be able to.
This kind of thought experiment illustrates something that most people won't accept: There is no such thing as the Ego outside of the physical structure and 'state' of the brain. If a perfect copy of a brain were made, but the old brain was NOT destroyed, there would then be two different _instances_ of the same mind waking up and both thinking they were the original. People who believe in 'souls' and 'afterlife' will never be able to accept that your entire consciousness is just a big circuit inside your head, and our concept of Self is just an illusion.
Cute, but most of the 'features' they list are just gimmicks, a list of reasons a guy can use to justify the purchase to his wife. "But honey, it'll, uh, protect the children! From terrorists!" The Roomba, on the other hand, has a practical application. I'll probably get a second generation one assuming some good improvements are made.
These people aren't trying to make anything useful, they're trying to make an expensive toy similar to the the robot dogs. A robot that was self-sufficient and could learn things (like how to operate my refrigerator door) would be worth the price. And no, I don't want my robot to look like some kind of astronaut. Have you seen Honda's asimo bot? If I was sitting by myself at night and turned around to see that thing I'd probably piss myself, it looks like an evil midget in a space suit, or HAL 9000 with legs... creepy.
Just give me a robot with enough memory and the right software to learn things, I'll do the teaching myself. "Robut, fill the humidifier." "Robut, take out the trash." "Robut, clean the toilet."
And another thing, who wants their robot to have 'emotions'? There's only one emotion I need from it; humble servitude. I don't need another expensive and emotional toy, I already have a girlfriend. (Ba dum, ching!)
What about artists from around the world collaborating on a virtual sculpture?
Sounds pretty... lame. MIT is stretching pretty far to justify their toy research. As far as 'remote surgery', I don't know anyone crazy enough to allow surgery to be performed on them over the internet. "OK, the bad news is, we had some packet loss. The good news is, our robo-arm is covered with $10M in malpractice insurace, so you could practically buy yourself a new brain!"
I toured the MIT lab where this was in development. This was about 9 years ago, and at the time what they had was a metal "glove" that did force-feedback, and a screen that displayed a multi-colored cube bouncing around. According to the researcher giving the tour, you could put your hand in the glove and 'play with' the cube on the screen, and the force-feedback would make it feel real. It was behind locked doors though so I couldn't play with it.
The next month there was a writeup in the PopSci What's New section on it. So the 'single player' version is not exactly new technology... but multiplayer sounds like it would be fun.
This looks like another one of those things that is a cool idea, but doesn't have a whole lot of practical applicability.
Ok, before we dive into anecdotal evidence and theories like "eating green food will protect you from cancer", let's check the facts.
Cancer and heart disease are the biggest killers in the Western world. People die from them simply because most other common diseases are easily treated with modern medicine. Cancer and heart disease, however, are artifacts of the basic problems with the design of animal life.
Here's how cancer works: Whenever a cell divides, there is a percentage chance that the genes of one of the 'child' cells will be distorted/mutated in such a way that the mechanisms that normally keep a cell from trying to divide as often as possible and take over the food supply are broken. This is understandable because a very large percentage of the history of our genome was spent in single-celled organisms, and it was important for cells to look out for themselves. In mutli-cellular organisms those genetic, cellular instincts from prehistory are not only unnecessary, they're deadly.
Since there are tens of trillions of cells in your body, most of them dividing at a regular pace, the chances for one of them having this mutation is actually quite high. In fact, according to theory every animal experiences these mutations regularly. Every so many hours you are likely to have a newly divided cell start trying its best to create a tumor inside you. Fortunately for us each of our cells have suicide mechanisms that are instructed to switch on whenever cell division gets out of control. So most of these problem cells quietly kill themselves. Every now and then, however, a mutation turns these suicide mechanisms off, or the genome is simply too decayed to deal with the rogue cell effectively (the genome degrades during each cell division, which contirbutes to aging). Then a tumor forms.
Given a long enough life-span, cancer WILL kill you. No amount of green vegetables are going to save you from cancer. The only thing that will prevent you from dying of cancer is dying of something else first. Without a 'cure', cancer is a statistical inevitability. Alcohol, smoking, asbestos, etc do not cause cancer; mutations during the division of cells causes cancer. Most 'cancer-causing' agents do nothing but create wear and tear on cells, causing them to age faster and increasing their chance of mutation.
'Cure for Cancer' is a misnomer, we were all born with the propensity for cancer in our genes. The only true cure for it would be to 'fix' every cell in our bodies and remove the possibility they could go AWOL. What most researchers are looking for today is an effective treatment for cancer, that we can take whenever we grow a tumor.
Finding an effective treatment for cancer would be the greatest benefit to human lifespan since antibiotics. And no, it doesn't just affect alcoholics and chain-smokers, it affects everyone and everything with animal genes in their body. 1.2 Million cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the US this year, 1500 people die of it each day in the US alone. 1 of every 4 deaths is from cancer. The only reason it isn't 4 out of 4 is because the other three die of something else first.
From what Carmack is saying, we're about two generations of graphics card technology away from being done.
It's disappointing to see an industry leader make such short-sighted statements. Graphics technology will not be 'done' until we can't visually tell the difference between real-life and a game.
In real life, I can cut through an orange with a knife at any angle and see the internal structure of the orange in the cross section I created. In real life, I can use a magnifying glass to view an object/texture at 10x its normal size, with no loss of clarity, no pixel artifacts.
Carmack is talking about two more generations of vertex/triangle/bit-map based graphics cards. What about raytracing? What about voxels?
The 'ideal' graphics card would be able to render a world comprised of billions of voxels/atoms, each with their own properties and physics, and with raytraced photons creating the light. Suggesting that we'll be 'done' in 2 generations is just silly. It would require a totally new knid of PC architecture just to deal with the memory bandwidth requirements of an 'ideal' graphics processor.
Funny, I thought MS created the XBOX to move gaming away from PCs. Turns out that PC games are keeping the XBOX alive.
Developers that only make console games will always make games for the PS2 because of the bigger market. Developers that make PC games however, will rarely make PS2 games, because the hardware is different and its difficult/impossible to port. PC games like Doom III and Morrowind will keep the XBOX alive simply because they aren't/won't be available on PS2.
It looks like MS's only hope of growing their market share to compete with Sony is to cozy up with the PC game developers. How ironic.
I can't say that I totally agree with that, there are a lot of general skills that can find many applications in 'real life'.
For example, my first full time job was in tech support, where I developed my troubleshooting skills. Very general troubleshooting concepts like eliminating variables to establish the source of the problem are useful in all kinds of tasks, from fixing a car to figuring out what you ate today that made you feel sick.
Similarly, decision-making skills learned in certain types of games have real world applications. Playing a game of deathmatch may only hone your hand-eye coordination, but playing a team-based game like Counter-Strike certainly forces you to utilize your cooperation skills. If you don't work with your teammates effectively you die, and I know I've learned a thing or two about the importance of crossfire and efficient communication from such games.
Similarly, any type of strategy game forces a player to balance macromanagement with micromanagement, and make decisions about where to focus available resources and how to prioritize problems.
IMO, decision-making skills are the most important skills a person can have. Every aspect of business is dependent on people with good decision-making skills. No, playing Civilization doesn't qualify you to lead a country, but that doesn't mean you don't learn anything from it. Maybe if more people played strategy games there would be fewer debt-ridden people out there who don't understand the concept of investing in assets instead of liabilities.
Granted, there is a huge gradient in terms of how 'arcade' a game is. I agree that arcade games like Quake don't really involve the mind so much as the nerves, but those are the games of the past. Games are slowly moving toward more complex gameplay, which provides a greater level of mental involvement and teaching potential. Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's bad for you.
Reactionists would have us believe that everything non-traditional comes at a deadly price. REEFER MADNESS! I'm really hoping most of those people are very old and will be comatose or dead or in nusring homes soon.
I can't believe all the "This is old news! I'm a 1334/. oldschooler!" posts for this topic. Were you people around 9 months ago when an international organization funded a multi-million dollar massacre? How many thousands of militant US-haters dream about carrying a block of uranium to the roof of a building in Manhattan and blowing themselves up? If a kid could irradiate his backyard with a few hundred dollars in supplies, how easy would it be to get such materials in countries that are 50 years behind the US in hazardous materials regulations?
Sigh. George Lucas you talentless, skirt-wearing valley girl. I hope you have an accident in a meat processing factory so everyone can see you're actually a robot, built to replace the real Lucas when he died in 1984.
Goddamnit. If Spain had been a republic in 1492, the senate would have banned intercontinental exploration. If the ignorant, church-educated masses had been present when Thomas Edison played the first phonograph recording, they would've had that devil-machine destroyed and burned Edison as the heretic he was. Bush would've denounced Alexander Bell's original telephone call as "morally wrong", a dangerous technology that could destroy the transportation industry and turn us into a nation of faceless voices. And a big FUCK YOU goes out to every news media corporation that finds the need to quote THE VATICAN on scientific issues. I always love to hear from the biggest contributor to overpopulation, poverty, and starvation on Earth, their opinions on technology that will someday save my live are completely valid. If the Pope had his way, we'd still be stuck in medieval Europe, dying of the plague, praying to one of his gods to save us.
This is not about embryos dying, or human organ factories, or even cloning. This is about the technology of life, the most powerful tool humans will ever wield. This is about cheap housing 'grown' from spores. This is about an end to all disease, discomfort, and hunger. This is about a manufacturing method so cheap it will be an antidote to the great ratrace/commercialism parasite. This is about living in a perfect, healthy, happy body, the greatest gift a person could ever receive. This is the harbinger of a revolution in the way we live forever. The government should be working to educate people on this technology, they should be helping to make it safe, and guide/regulate it where necessary. Instead they're scrambling to create a roadblock. If the USGov prevented auto manufacturers from installing airbags in vehicles, and your spouse's neck was snapped in a car accident, would you be pissed? Thank you Bush, for allowing me the likely possibility of dying of heart disease or cancer. Thank you, religious people, for promoting death universally. Not only have you managed to kill thousands of people at once in the biggest terrorist attack ever, you've managed to kill millions in the past and the future through your staunch resistance to technology, the enemy of all self-righteous know-nothings. I hope you all die first.
... Rebel forces struggled against an evil Empire. These rebels, who were willing to die to relieve their people from opression, did not have the military strength to face the Empire head-on. During episode IV, the rebels executed a successfull sneak-attack on the symbolic center of the Empire's power: the Death Star (the Pentagon), killing millions and millions of people in the space station who were just there to do their jobs and get paid. Undoubtedly, the Empire branded these attacks as 'cowardly', and a 'crime against humanity'. In Episode V, "The Empire (The Americans) Strike Back", rebel troops are decimated by the renlentless fury of Imperial forces and driven into hiding.
People love to cheer for the militant, murderous rebels in a movie. But when the tables are turned, it seems that nobody in the great Empire can see any validity to rebel attacks. The ignorance, arrogance, and self-righteousness of the American public pisses me off.
On April 19, 1993, the US attorney general ended a standoff near Waco, TX with one of the worst outcomes possible. US Gov action taken during the standoff is universally denounced as reactionary and far from ideal. Forces surrounded a compound of religious extremists for an expensive standoff, during which both sides suffered severe casualties. In 2001, US forces will again surround a group of religious extremists for an expensive conflict, from which nothing will be accomplished other than slaughter and the incitement of millions of similar extremists. The slaughter and enemy-making will be justified by the increased approval rating US politicians will receive as their angry redneck constituents watch people die on television.
No matter how powerful and frightening the US military is, US citizens will never be free from "terrorism" by radicals. As long as an establishment exists, there will be extremist rebels that will attempt to thwart the establishment through violence. Just as the sun creates shadows, authority and power will always create opposition and rebellion. Violent, religion-based exremeists (quite willing to die for their cause) will only grow stronger as their opposition (the authority and power of the US goverment) is exercised.
If there are any/. readers out there with historical knowledge of the American Revolution, it would be interesting to know what kind of "terrorist acts" the rebels performed on the British Empire to help gain their freedom. Muslims that support Osama (and there are many more of them than a few Palenstinians and Afghanis) see themselves the same way American rebels viewed themselves, as victims of an evil empire's imperialistic policies.
Osama Bin Laden - Not Guilty
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Consider this: You are an instructor for a firearms class. One of your students uses the knowledge gained to assasinate the president. You are arrested for teaching the student a skill that was used for an illegal activity.
Granted, Osama does have violent intentions toward the US. But the way his organization works is that wanna-be terrorists go to his camp to be trained and become part of the community. They meet each other and develop their own terrorist plans, completely independent of central leadership. If Osama Bin Laden thinks that US citizens should die, then yes, he is guilty... of THOUGHTCRIME. The first ammendment would protect him until it was proven that he was somehow part of the planning for the specific incident. The US Gov has yet to produce any evidence that would prove this beyond reasonable doubt.
Bush has turned this man into a scapegoat, a punching bag for 300 million angry americans to get their agression out on. Bush has asked for the death of this man, without fair trial. How long will it take for us to lose our freedom and rights as Osama Bin Laden has? If he is guilty of planning the WTC incident, he should be punished. But the Bush administration could not allow him to be 'innocent', they would have to admit that this attack was actually performed by 18 individuals who hate the US as a direct result of Bush administration policies in the middle east!
As far as I know, the culprits are already dead, they were on the planes. There's nobody left to kill. It wasn't a 'declaration of war', it was a group of angry individuals doing what they thought was best for their people. The US cannot 'avenge' the dead innocents by killing more. Go home, take your anti-islamic rhetoric off your pickup trucks, and ask your leaders for a more sane approach to the situation.
Amen, brother! Well written. My only addition to your comments would be that while I certainly support the exploration of alternative energy sources, the existing oil market could be easily controlled through economic pressure, sans military presence. We have leverage on several economic fronts; Threatening to expand drilling efforts in the North Sea and Alaska is one barganing tool, increased efforts to move to the alternative energy sources you've described is another. Just as OPEC forms a union of oil dealers, the industrialized nations of the west could form a union of consumers, creating stability in the market without the use or threat of force. The oil-dealing countries of the middle-east have been built on the profits from this industry, and they are much more willing to approach the bargaining table over economic pressure than violence.
Don't forget, this resource we've spent billions upon billions to secure (and indirectly caused the loss of 5 thousand American lives and countless Arabs in the process) is finite. One day the wells will start to dry up and our investment will be useless.
As for Israel, if they're unable to defend their borders without considerable 3rd party intervention (they are not), they need to figure out their own solution that doesn't involve my tax dollars, and doesn't involve inciting Arabs to the point that they will suicide bomb my country.
Down with globalization and poorly-disguised imperialism! Up with (un)common sense!
I just read that US Military action will start in 3 days if Osama Bin Laden is not delivered. Has the whole world gone mad? Let's consider the possible outcomes to this course:
Option 1 - Osama Bin Laden is captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
Step 1: Bin Laden (described by Muslim scholars as a "Holy Man") dies, a martyr for every jew/christian/american hating Muslim.
Step 2: Tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Muslims and Arabs who were previously content only to intellectually oppose US interference in the middle east, become galvanized against the "Great Satan" to the point they are willing to actively support terrorist activities against the US.
Step 3: The war escalates, more lives are lost needlessly, and this time the US government doesn't a Bin Laden to pin it on.
Option 2 - The US campaigns a full, balls-out war against Afghanistan. This war cannot be won, for two reasons:
Reason 1: THERE'S NOTHING TO WIN! Afghanistan's 'government' (and I use this term loosely) is so pitiful it can only pretend to control the 'nation'. Afghanistan is actually about a dozen tribes, which have been engaged in a nearly continual war for the last 250 years. Farming and livestock are Afghanistan's only real industry. The majority of the population lives on these farms in rural areas, and has loyalty only to their tribes. There are no economic or political targets for the US Military to capture or destroy in the entire country. Even if the Taliban 'government' (the Pashtoon tribe) was completely wiped out, the other tribes would continue to fight and attempt to establish their own militant, extremist, racist, Muslim governments. Fighting Afghanistan would be like punching a bowl of dough, any change affected would be unnoticable within a short period of time.
Reason 2: This is a war of ideals and culture. Fundamentalist Muslims believe that the Jews (and possibly Christians, having originally been a Jewish sect) must be fought and defeated before their prophicies can be fulfilled. This requires eliminating the US presence in the middle east, and preventing the US from supporting Israel. Nothing the US Military can do in Afghanistan will change that. They can destroy equipment and kill people, but violence can never conquer a person's religious convictions, it can only strengthen them.
If the WTC was "this generation's Pearl Harbor", Afghanistan will be this generation's Vietnam. Why does the US have to be the most arrogant country in the world? The Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of Meddling and Agression. PULL OUT OF SAUDI ARABIA, STOP SUPPORTING ISRAEL, AND MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS, AMERICA! I'm sure we'd all be amazed at how quickly the extremist Muslim groups would lose interest in the US if we weren't smearing our military and economic power in their faces every day.
After listening to the call-ins on local radio yesterday, I was afraid this country was populated only by ignorant housewives and angry rednecks, hellbent on seeing the US military blow something up. Precious few people I've spoken to can understand how Islamic fundamentalists view the 'innocents' in the WTC towers: as cogs in the most powerful and evil machine on the planet, a machine of blood and money. I feel emotion for the loss, I've cried over it. But I want to thank foxnews.com for publishing these bold words on cowardice, a label the US government is all too happy to slap on any unapproved act of violence. As the sabre-rattling and reactionary rhetoric continues, it's good to know not everyone is crazy.
The real enemy of freedom in this attack is the narrow-minded delusions both Christians and Muslims willingly indulge in; the fundamentalist Muslim delusions just happen to be more immediately violent. Bush's reading of Psalm 23 during his 9/11 Oval Office speech is so ironic it's laughable. Consider: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I fear no evil, for you are with me" roughly equates to "I'm not afraid of death because God is on my side. God is on my side which means I'm right, and my enemies are evil. I am so right, I'm ready to die over it."
Quoting Christian martyr-making propaganda as part of a rant denouncing Islamic martyrs?!? I know the speech-writers were pressed for time, but come on! Could they possibly milk the situation for any more sentimentalist, inflammatory remarks? Was that a Presidential Address or the dramtic climax of a made-for-TV movie?
A whole country of the fattest, most spoiled, and most self-righteous people on the planet are filled with indignant fury, and the country's leaders (elected by popular vote) know that all they need to do for their approval ratings to shoot through the roof is FAN THE FLAMES OF WAR. Loose them doggies! "The people are hungry for blood, let them gather in the colosseum (their living rooms) to watch the lions (the US Military) tear apart the evil and insurgent Christians (Muslims)! Maybe afterwards we can go cruxify Jesus (Bin Laden)! Yee ha!"
Scotty, beam me up quick! This planet is so stupid it might be contagious!
Crikey! Did John Harrison read any of the books, or just the cliffnotes? Just glancing through the gallery on scifi.com, it appears Princess Irulan is not a blonde bombshell, Stilgar and Otheym are beardless (a beardless Fremen???), and the blue within blue eyes of spice addiction seem to glow in the dark freakishly. Granted these are relatively minor incongruities, but they bode poorly for the rest of the miniseries. And I must say, as much as I hated the David Lynch movie, the new Feyd looks like a goofy frat-boy in comparison to Sting. At least this time around we won't see Maud'Dib teaching his Fremen to bust up rocks with sonic brain power... I hope.
On the surface, the Dune books are an imaginative tale... but the real meat of the Dune story is in the concepts it presents about everything from religion to government to drugs. Can we really expect anything more than lipservice to these ideas from a condensed, mass market venture like this miniseries? Mmmm... Commercialization...
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You're right, everyone in this discussion is missing the point of the legal argument. Here's a rough outline:
- Copyright law provides the music industry a monopoly over their copyrighted works,
- but only as long as the copyright owner is fair with the property in terms of allowing other legitimate businesses to compete in a market (in this case, electronic distribution of music)!
- 'Fairness' is decided by a judge who has to determine if business practices are anti-competitive
- Kazaa is trying to license RIAA's music to sell on Altnet
- Kazaa is either claiming that the RIAA will not license their music to them (anti-competitive) or that the RIAA is asking an anti-competitve price so that the RIAA can be the sole electronic distributor of music.
- Essentially, Kazaa is arguing that since the RIAA holds copyrights on the music that makes up nearly 100% of music revenue, they are obligated under US law to license that music to electronic retailers at competitive prices!
- Under US law, anti-trust can be enforced by revoking or refusing to recognize the copyrights that are being used to stifle competition, however the RIAA IS NOT GOING TO LOSE THEIR COPYRIGHTS. If Kazaa wins, it will be because the judge says something like this:
"RIAA, either license your music at competitive prices to Kazaa, or your copyrights will no longer be enforcable. "
Then the RIAA will license their music to Kazaa/Altnet. However, this will not change the legality of Kazaa's free file sharing network. The only thing Kazaa will gain is REVENUE FROM SELLING THE RIAA'S MUSIC. The RIAA will still be free to pursue legal avenues to shut down Kazaa's free file sharing network.
It appears that winning this case will provide Kazaa a way out, so that if indeed their free file sharing network is finally shut down or crippled by RIAA hacker goons, they can switch their millions of users over to Altnet and make a few bucks before people find a better way to share files.
Geez, I don't know what's more sad, that music industry representatives may have paid you to write that, or that you might actually believe it. If you don't have a career in PR already you should consider it, few people are capable of producing propaganda with such vigor and sincerity.
Just in case there are people reading this that still don't understand: The imminent collapse of the music 'industry' will be the best thing to happen to music in the last 20 years. Anyone who thinks the shrink-wrapped, injection-molded music produced by studio executives today is art is liable to mistake a fucking vodka billboard for a Van Gogh.
Great post expect for one major issue: Whenever laypeople use the word 'irresponsible', they are expressing their ignorant technophobia. Example: "You irresponsible scientists and your anti-biotics are going to DESTROY THE WORLD!". Whenever legitimate researchers use the word 'irresponsible', they are expressing their fear that they will be killed by a mob of the aforementioned Luddites.
The word 'irresponsible' doesn't really have any meaning by itself in the context of scientific research, it's just a reference to the "Technology will destroy our world!" mentality.
Cripes on toast, if I hear another fruitcake talk about "SOULS" in a discussion on cloning, I'm going to puke. WTF does that even mean?!
He's a news flash for you from the mid 19th century: Your consciousness exists in a electrical circuit called a "BRAIN", inside your thick skull. The "soul" is a baseless concept created by ignorant people before they understood human biology. We're all fortunate enough now to live at a time where this kind of information is available to us, however there are still an amazing number of people who choose ignorance and tripe over truth.
>>Here's the catch, the original still dies. Meaning you still die, but a backup lives on. Personally I'm not sure I like that a whole lot. It might be nice to know that my personality will go on, but it still is not me.
I think you're wrong. You're talking about the difference between, say, ghosting a hard drvie from one computer to another verses physically removing the hard drive from one computer and putting it in the other. Warcraft is still going to run the same either way.
Let's consider the following scenario. Forget about bodies and all that messy stuff. Assume that the current 'state' of your brain can be copied. You go to a labratory and are rendered unconscious. You wake up later. You know that one of two things may have occured; either your brain was physically moved from one body to another and the old body was destroyed, or the structure of the old brain was copied and a new brain was created that mimics that structure perfectly and the old body/brain was destroyed. How could you possibly tell the difference? You wouldn't be able to.
This kind of thought experiment illustrates something that most people won't accept: There is no such thing as the Ego outside of the physical structure and 'state' of the brain. If a perfect copy of a brain were made, but the old brain was NOT destroyed, there would then be two different _instances_ of the same mind waking up and both thinking they were the original. People who believe in 'souls' and 'afterlife' will never be able to accept that your entire consciousness is just a big circuit inside your head, and our concept of Self is just an illusion.
"Is this the RIAA? / / / /
Or is this the MPAA?
Or is this the DMCA?
I thought it was the USA
Or just
another
country"
Cute, but most of the 'features' they list are just gimmicks, a list of reasons a guy can use to justify the purchase to his wife. "But honey, it'll, uh, protect the children! From terrorists!" The Roomba, on the other hand, has a practical application. I'll probably get a second generation one assuming some good improvements are made.
These people aren't trying to make anything useful, they're trying to make an expensive toy similar to the the robot dogs. A robot that was self-sufficient and could learn things (like how to operate my refrigerator door) would be worth the price. And no, I don't want my robot to look like some kind of astronaut. Have you seen Honda's asimo bot? If I was sitting by myself at night and turned around to see that thing I'd probably piss myself, it looks like an evil midget in a space suit, or HAL 9000 with legs... creepy.
Just give me a robot with enough memory and the right software to learn things, I'll do the teaching myself. "Robut, fill the humidifier." "Robut, take out the trash." "Robut, clean the toilet."
And another thing, who wants their robot to have 'emotions'? There's only one emotion I need from it; humble servitude. I don't need another expensive and emotional toy, I already have a girlfriend. (Ba dum, ching!)
What about artists from around the world collaborating on a virtual sculpture?
Sounds pretty... lame. MIT is stretching pretty far to justify their toy research. As far as 'remote surgery', I don't know anyone crazy enough to allow surgery to be performed on them over the internet. "OK, the bad news is, we had some packet loss. The good news is, our robo-arm is covered with $10M in malpractice insurace, so you could practically buy yourself a new brain!"
I toured the MIT lab where this was in development. This was about 9 years ago, and at the time what they had was a metal "glove" that did force-feedback, and a screen that displayed a multi-colored cube bouncing around. According to the researcher giving the tour, you could put your hand in the glove and 'play with' the cube on the screen, and the force-feedback would make it feel real. It was behind locked doors though so I couldn't play with it.
The next month there was a writeup in the PopSci What's New section on it. So the 'single player' version is not exactly new technology... but multiplayer sounds like it would be fun.
This looks like another one of those things that is a cool idea, but doesn't have a whole lot of practical applicability.
Ok, before we dive into anecdotal evidence and theories like "eating green food will protect you from cancer", let's check the facts.
Cancer and heart disease are the biggest killers in the Western world. People die from them simply because most other common diseases are easily treated with modern medicine. Cancer and heart disease, however, are artifacts of the basic problems with the design of animal life.
Here's how cancer works: Whenever a cell divides, there is a percentage chance that the genes of one of the 'child' cells will be distorted/mutated in such a way that the mechanisms that normally keep a cell from trying to divide as often as possible and take over the food supply are broken. This is understandable because a very large percentage of the history of our genome was spent in single-celled organisms, and it was important for cells to look out for themselves. In mutli-cellular organisms those genetic, cellular instincts from prehistory are not only unnecessary, they're deadly.
Since there are tens of trillions of cells in your body, most of them dividing at a regular pace, the chances for one of them having this mutation is actually quite high. In fact, according to theory every animal experiences these mutations regularly. Every so many hours you are likely to have a newly divided cell start trying its best to create a tumor inside you. Fortunately for us each of our cells have suicide mechanisms that are instructed to switch on whenever cell division gets out of control. So most of these problem cells quietly kill themselves. Every now and then, however, a mutation turns these suicide mechanisms off, or the genome is simply too decayed to deal with the rogue cell effectively (the genome degrades during each cell division, which contirbutes to aging). Then a tumor forms.
Given a long enough life-span, cancer WILL kill you. No amount of green vegetables are going to save you from cancer. The only thing that will prevent you from dying of cancer is dying of something else first. Without a 'cure', cancer is a statistical inevitability. Alcohol, smoking, asbestos, etc do not cause cancer; mutations during the division of cells causes cancer. Most 'cancer-causing' agents do nothing but create wear and tear on cells, causing them to age faster and increasing their chance of mutation.
'Cure for Cancer' is a misnomer, we were all born with the propensity for cancer in our genes. The only true cure for it would be to 'fix' every cell in our bodies and remove the possibility they could go AWOL. What most researchers are looking for today is an effective treatment for cancer, that we can take whenever we grow a tumor.
Finding an effective treatment for cancer would be the greatest benefit to human lifespan since antibiotics. And no, it doesn't just affect alcoholics and chain-smokers, it affects everyone and everything with animal genes in their body. 1.2 Million cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the US this year, 1500 people die of it each day in the US alone. 1 of every 4 deaths is from cancer. The only reason it isn't 4 out of 4 is because the other three die of something else first.
From what Carmack is saying, we're about two generations of graphics card technology away from being done.
It's disappointing to see an industry leader make such short-sighted statements. Graphics technology will not be 'done' until we can't visually tell the difference between real-life and a game.
In real life, I can cut through an orange with a knife at any angle and see the internal structure of the orange in the cross section I created. In real life, I can use a magnifying glass to view an object/texture at 10x its normal size, with no loss of clarity, no pixel artifacts.
Carmack is talking about two more generations of vertex/triangle/bit-map based graphics cards. What about raytracing? What about voxels?
The 'ideal' graphics card would be able to render a world comprised of billions of voxels/atoms, each with their own properties and physics, and with raytraced photons creating the light. Suggesting that we'll be 'done' in 2 generations is just silly. It would require a totally new knid of PC architecture just to deal with the memory bandwidth requirements of an 'ideal' graphics processor.
Funny, I thought MS created the XBOX to move gaming away from PCs. Turns out that PC games are keeping the XBOX alive.
Developers that only make console games will always make games for the PS2 because of the bigger market. Developers that make PC games however, will rarely make PS2 games, because the hardware is different and its difficult/impossible to port. PC games like Doom III and Morrowind will keep the XBOX alive simply because they aren't/won't be available on PS2.
It looks like MS's only hope of growing their market share to compete with Sony is to cozy up with the PC game developers. How ironic.
I can't say that I totally agree with that, there are a lot of general skills that can find many applications in 'real life'.
For example, my first full time job was in tech support, where I developed my troubleshooting skills. Very general troubleshooting concepts like eliminating variables to establish the source of the problem are useful in all kinds of tasks, from fixing a car to figuring out what you ate today that made you feel sick.
Similarly, decision-making skills learned in certain types of games have real world applications. Playing a game of deathmatch may only hone your hand-eye coordination, but playing a team-based game like Counter-Strike certainly forces you to utilize your cooperation skills. If you don't work with your teammates effectively you die, and I know I've learned a thing or two about the importance of crossfire and efficient communication from such games.
Similarly, any type of strategy game forces a player to balance macromanagement with micromanagement, and make decisions about where to focus available resources and how to prioritize problems.
IMO, decision-making skills are the most important skills a person can have. Every aspect of business is dependent on people with good decision-making skills. No, playing Civilization doesn't qualify you to lead a country, but that doesn't mean you don't learn anything from it. Maybe if more people played strategy games there would be fewer debt-ridden people out there who don't understand the concept of investing in assets instead of liabilities.
Granted, there is a huge gradient in terms of how 'arcade' a game is. I agree that arcade games like Quake don't really involve the mind so much as the nerves, but those are the games of the past. Games are slowly moving toward more complex gameplay, which provides a greater level of mental involvement and teaching potential. Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's bad for you.
Reactionists would have us believe that everything non-traditional comes at a deadly price. REEFER MADNESS! I'm really hoping most of those people are very old and will be comatose or dead or in nusring homes soon.
I can't believe all the "This is old news! I'm a 1334 /. oldschooler!" posts for this topic. Were you people around 9 months ago when an international organization funded a multi-million dollar massacre? How many thousands of militant US-haters dream about carrying a block of uranium to the roof of a building in Manhattan and blowing themselves up? If a kid could irradiate his backyard with a few hundred dollars in supplies, how easy would it be to get such materials in countries that are 50 years behind the US in hazardous materials regulations?
Everyone got their lead suits on?
Sigh. George Lucas you talentless, skirt-wearing valley girl. I hope you have an accident in a meat processing factory so everyone can see you're actually a robot, built to replace the real Lucas when he died in 1984.
Goddamnit. If Spain had been a republic in 1492, the senate would have banned intercontinental exploration. If the ignorant, church-educated masses had been present when Thomas Edison played the first phonograph recording, they would've had that devil-machine destroyed and burned Edison as the heretic he was. Bush would've denounced Alexander Bell's original telephone call as "morally wrong", a dangerous technology that could destroy the transportation industry and turn us into a nation of faceless voices. And a big FUCK YOU goes out to every news media corporation that finds the need to quote THE VATICAN on scientific issues. I always love to hear from the biggest contributor to overpopulation, poverty, and starvation on Earth, their opinions on technology that will someday save my live are completely valid. If the Pope had his way, we'd still be stuck in medieval Europe, dying of the plague, praying to one of his gods to save us.
This is not about embryos dying, or human organ factories, or even cloning. This is about the technology of life, the most powerful tool humans will ever wield. This is about cheap housing 'grown' from spores. This is about an end to all disease, discomfort, and hunger. This is about a manufacturing method so cheap it will be an antidote to the great ratrace/commercialism parasite. This is about living in a perfect, healthy, happy body, the greatest gift a person could ever receive. This is the harbinger of a revolution in the way we live forever. The government should be working to educate people on this technology, they should be helping to make it safe, and guide/regulate it where necessary. Instead they're scrambling to create a roadblock. If the USGov prevented auto manufacturers from installing airbags in vehicles, and your spouse's neck was snapped in a car accident, would you be pissed? Thank you Bush, for allowing me the likely possibility of dying of heart disease or cancer. Thank you, religious people, for promoting death universally. Not only have you managed to kill thousands of people at once in the biggest terrorist attack ever, you've managed to kill millions in the past and the future through your staunch resistance to technology, the enemy of all self-righteous know-nothings. I hope you all die first.
... Rebel forces struggled against an evil Empire. These rebels, who were willing to die to relieve their people from opression, did not have the military strength to face the Empire head-on. During episode IV, the rebels executed a successfull sneak-attack on the symbolic center of the Empire's power: the Death Star (the Pentagon), killing millions and millions of people in the space station who were just there to do their jobs and get paid. Undoubtedly, the Empire branded these attacks as 'cowardly', and a 'crime against humanity'. In Episode V, "The Empire (The Americans) Strike Back", rebel troops are decimated by the renlentless fury of Imperial forces and driven into hiding.
People love to cheer for the militant, murderous rebels in a movie. But when the tables are turned, it seems that nobody in the great Empire can see any validity to rebel attacks. The ignorance, arrogance, and self-righteousness of the American public pisses me off.
On April 19, 1993, the US attorney general ended a standoff near Waco, TX with one of the worst outcomes possible. US Gov action taken during the standoff is universally denounced as reactionary and far from ideal. Forces surrounded a compound of religious extremists for an expensive standoff, during which both sides suffered severe casualties. In 2001, US forces will again surround a group of religious extremists for an expensive conflict, from which nothing will be accomplished other than slaughter and the incitement of millions of similar extremists. The slaughter and enemy-making will be justified by the increased approval rating US politicians will receive as their angry redneck constituents watch people die on television.
/. readers out there with historical knowledge of the American Revolution, it would be interesting to know what kind of "terrorist acts" the rebels performed on the British Empire to help gain their freedom. Muslims that support Osama (and there are many more of them than a few Palenstinians and Afghanis) see themselves the same way American rebels viewed themselves, as victims of an evil empire's imperialistic policies.
No matter how powerful and frightening the US military is, US citizens will never be free from "terrorism" by radicals. As long as an establishment exists, there will be extremist rebels that will attempt to thwart the establishment through violence. Just as the sun creates shadows, authority and power will always create opposition and rebellion. Violent, religion-based exremeists (quite willing to die for their cause) will only grow stronger as their opposition (the authority and power of the US goverment) is exercised.
If there are any
Consider this: You are an instructor for a firearms class. One of your students uses the knowledge gained to assasinate the president. You are arrested for teaching the student a skill that was used for an illegal activity.
Granted, Osama does have violent intentions toward the US. But the way his organization works is that wanna-be terrorists go to his camp to be trained and become part of the community. They meet each other and develop their own terrorist plans, completely independent of central leadership. If Osama Bin Laden thinks that US citizens should die, then yes, he is guilty... of THOUGHTCRIME. The first ammendment would protect him until it was proven that he was somehow part of the planning for the specific incident. The US Gov has yet to produce any evidence that would prove this beyond reasonable doubt.
Bush has turned this man into a scapegoat, a punching bag for 300 million angry americans to get their agression out on. Bush has asked for the death of this man, without fair trial. How long will it take for us to lose our freedom and rights as Osama Bin Laden has? If he is guilty of planning the WTC incident, he should be punished. But the Bush administration could not allow him to be 'innocent', they would have to admit that this attack was actually performed by 18 individuals who hate the US as a direct result of Bush administration policies in the middle east!
As far as I know, the culprits are already dead, they were on the planes. There's nobody left to kill. It wasn't a 'declaration of war', it was a group of angry individuals doing what they thought was best for their people. The US cannot 'avenge' the dead innocents by killing more. Go home, take your anti-islamic rhetoric off your pickup trucks, and ask your leaders for a more sane approach to the situation.
Amen, brother! Well written. My only addition to your comments would be that while I certainly support the exploration of alternative energy sources, the existing oil market could be easily controlled through economic pressure, sans military presence. We have leverage on several economic fronts; Threatening to expand drilling efforts in the North Sea and Alaska is one barganing tool, increased efforts to move to the alternative energy sources you've described is another. Just as OPEC forms a union of oil dealers, the industrialized nations of the west could form a union of consumers, creating stability in the market without the use or threat of force. The oil-dealing countries of the middle-east have been built on the profits from this industry, and they are much more willing to approach the bargaining table over economic pressure than violence.
Don't forget, this resource we've spent billions upon billions to secure (and indirectly caused the loss of 5 thousand American lives and countless Arabs in the process) is finite. One day the wells will start to dry up and our investment will be useless.
As for Israel, if they're unable to defend their borders without considerable 3rd party intervention (they are not), they need to figure out their own solution that doesn't involve my tax dollars, and doesn't involve inciting Arabs to the point that they will suicide bomb my country.
Down with globalization and poorly-disguised imperialism! Up with (un)common sense!
I just read that US Military action will start in 3 days if Osama Bin Laden is not delivered. Has the whole world gone mad? Let's consider the possible outcomes to this course:
Option 1 - Osama Bin Laden is captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
Step 1: Bin Laden (described by Muslim scholars as a "Holy Man") dies, a martyr for every jew/christian/american hating Muslim.
Step 2: Tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Muslims and Arabs who were previously content only to intellectually oppose US interference in the middle east, become galvanized against the "Great Satan" to the point they are willing to actively support terrorist activities against the US.
Step 3: The war escalates, more lives are lost needlessly, and this time the US government doesn't a Bin Laden to pin it on.
Option 2 - The US campaigns a full, balls-out war against Afghanistan. This war cannot be won, for two reasons:
Reason 1: THERE'S NOTHING TO WIN! Afghanistan's 'government' (and I use this term loosely) is so pitiful it can only pretend to control the 'nation'. Afghanistan is actually about a dozen tribes, which have been engaged in a nearly continual war for the last 250 years. Farming and livestock are Afghanistan's only real industry. The majority of the population lives on these farms in rural areas, and has loyalty only to their tribes. There are no economic or political targets for the US Military to capture or destroy in the entire country. Even if the Taliban 'government' (the Pashtoon tribe) was completely wiped out, the other tribes would continue to fight and attempt to establish their own militant, extremist, racist, Muslim governments. Fighting Afghanistan would be like punching a bowl of dough, any change affected would be unnoticable within a short period of time.
Reason 2: This is a war of ideals and culture. Fundamentalist Muslims believe that the Jews (and possibly Christians, having originally been a Jewish sect) must be fought and defeated before their prophicies can be fulfilled. This requires eliminating the US presence in the middle east, and preventing the US from supporting Israel. Nothing the US Military can do in Afghanistan will change that. They can destroy equipment and kill people, but violence can never conquer a person's religious convictions, it can only strengthen them.
If the WTC was "this generation's Pearl Harbor", Afghanistan will be this generation's Vietnam. Why does the US have to be the most arrogant country in the world? The Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of Meddling and Agression. PULL OUT OF SAUDI ARABIA, STOP SUPPORTING ISRAEL, AND MIND YOUR OWN FUCKING BUSINESS, AMERICA! I'm sure we'd all be amazed at how quickly the extremist Muslim groups would lose interest in the US if we weren't smearing our military and economic power in their faces every day.
The real enemy of freedom in this attack is the narrow-minded delusions both Christians and Muslims willingly indulge in; the fundamentalist Muslim delusions just happen to be more immediately violent. Bush's reading of Psalm 23 during his 9/11 Oval Office speech is so ironic it's laughable. Consider: "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, I fear no evil, for you are with me" roughly equates to "I'm not afraid of death because God is on my side. God is on my side which means I'm right, and my enemies are evil. I am so right, I'm ready to die over it."
Quoting Christian martyr-making propaganda as part of a rant denouncing Islamic martyrs?!? I know the speech-writers were pressed for time, but come on! Could they possibly milk the situation for any more sentimentalist, inflammatory remarks? Was that a Presidential Address or the dramtic climax of a made-for-TV movie?
A whole country of the fattest, most spoiled, and most self-righteous people on the planet are filled with indignant fury, and the country's leaders (elected by popular vote) know that all they need to do for their approval ratings to shoot through the roof is FAN THE FLAMES OF WAR. Loose them doggies! "The people are hungry for blood, let them gather in the colosseum (their living rooms) to watch the lions (the US Military) tear apart the evil and insurgent Christians (Muslims)! Maybe afterwards we can go cruxify Jesus (Bin Laden)! Yee ha!"
Scotty, beam me up quick! This planet is so stupid it might be contagious!
Amen, brother!
Crikey! Did John Harrison read any of the books, or just the cliffnotes? Just glancing through the gallery on scifi.com, it appears Princess Irulan is not a blonde bombshell, Stilgar and Otheym are beardless (a beardless Fremen???), and the blue within blue eyes of spice addiction seem to glow in the dark freakishly. Granted these are relatively minor incongruities, but they bode poorly for the rest of the miniseries. And I must say, as much as I hated the David Lynch movie, the new Feyd looks like a goofy frat-boy in comparison to Sting. At least this time around we won't see Maud'Dib teaching his Fremen to bust up rocks with sonic brain power... I hope.
On the surface, the Dune books are an imaginative tale... but the real meat of the Dune story is in the concepts it presents about everything from religion to government to drugs. Can we really expect anything more than lipservice to these ideas from a condensed, mass market venture like this miniseries? Mmmm... Commercialization...