Re:VS sucks
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Having had the misfortune of being stuck with a PICK BASIC application running inside Universe (GEAC Advance), I think the reason is that no one really writes software. Companies buy software and patch it ad infinitum. Think about why a crufty old property like WordPerfect was passed from hand to hand, when if you want a decent WP it was obvious it would be better to write one from scratch (something that's been done many times by others). Part of it is brand name, but you can retain that without having to taint yourself with code. The reason is that it's perceived as safer to buy something that works, or worked in the past - however badly - and patch it up. This is why software developers laugh at duct tape jokes.
At least Universe is generally sitting on some reasonable Unix box. Pity the people who ran PICK on native hardware.
Two characteristics seem to govern all of Gates's "philanthropy":
1. Charitable exercises always follow bad press for Microsoft and/or Gates (his first penny was given away immediately following the release of his abysmal videotaped testimony for the antitrust hearings) 2. Charitable exercises always contain significant strings that benefit Microsoft, Gates, or the ideological institutions that made him a rich and powerful man (granted that this is true of the work of nearly all "philanthropists".
It's actually the last point that worries me the most. There is *always* ideological pressure from corporate funding to education. With what sort of balanced worldview do people come out of the Microsoft school?
Philanthropy in general is a weird, weird thing. It's essentially like saying "well, I'm sure rich - I must have taken a whole lot more money than I deserved from the rest of you folks, so here's 10% of it back - just out of the goodness of my heart! Get it? I'm rich *and* I'm a sweet guy!". Wouldn't it be better simply not to overpay these individuals to such an amazing degree? Are we that married to our Horatio Alger lottery mentality?
Maybe that's because cleverness is highly overrated. You're not paid for it because it's not worth anything, and only the legal bubble created by centuries of lobbying makes anyone think otherwise.
It's been said over and over that good ideas are a dime a dozen (a fair wage, btw) - it's implementation that's hard. Without IP laws, companies would compete based on their ability to produce and serve. Doing that better naturally incorporates the development of new ideas. Frankly we're the sort of clever monkeys that can't *not* churn out ideas, so I have little fear that less IP law would stifle innovation. It might instead create a renewed interest in quality, which would be welcome.
Even the most breathtaking new idea isn't really new. Everything is based on the environment of ideas built from what came before. If even Isaac Newton (the egotistical snot) could admit that, surely the rest of us can take a step back from our hubris.
I actually wonder when we'll get to the point where this is the only reasonable course. In the epilogue to the Marathon series, the rampant A.I. Leela infects a multi-planetary network, and the race using it resigns themselves to the fact that they'll never be able to get her out so they'll just have to live with her there.
At some point there'll be malware running worldwide that it just won't make economic sense to remove. In a sense that's already the case - computers are pretty unreliable anyway, and happy malware just makes them somewhat less so. You can try and root it all out, or just overdesign so that you can live with it. That seems a direction we've already begun moving in.
I think that Gandhi's comment about the murdered Jewish people in Nazi Germany needs to be taken in after-the-fact context; he knew at that point that they had already died, and was willing to think in terms of what else could have been accomplished by those deaths. Remember that he was also a staunch Hindu (something which also led to another distasteful part of his legacy, his unwillingness to condemn the caste system for fear it would undermine Hinduism as a whole) - for him, death was not eternal and could be considered alongside other elements of the cycle of life.
Thanks for the link; I'm always newly astounded by the clarity and force of Orwell's essay writing.
3ivx has always handled Divx-encoded movies, at least on the Mac. The only thing I use the Divx codec for is the AVI importer, which fixes a Quicktime issue in playing back AVIs with MP3 soundtracks. But 3ivx does the actual video decoding. The only thing it doesn't do quite as well as the Divx codec is scale some older Divx-3 movies. To accomplish this setup I simply have both the 3ivx and Divx components installed. 3ivx catches all the content, presumably because it comes alphabetically first, and it's registered for all the same encoding types.
The Windows media architecture is a bit different from Quicktime so it might not work there, but you can always try doing the same thing - either install both, or just install 3ivx.
btw ffmpeg is another codec that can handle much of the same content as Divx. I don't use it much any more, but not because there's actually anything wrong with it. I think it might be what's built in to VLC for this type of media, and the playback quality there is the same as from the Quicktime codec(s).
If I am selling winter coats, for instance, I don't show you how warm you will be, I show you how good you might look, how others are impressed with your good taste in clothes, and maybe, just maybe, girls will flock to you because you are now so cool. I didn't say anything about how warm it makes you, so if the wind cuts through it like a hot knife through butter, then I have not lied.
This is a very interesting observation, because it suggests a mechanism by which advertising influences product quality. I interpret that since a testable objective claim is legally less safe than a highly subjective or untestable one, advertisers will concentrate more on what I previously termed "nebulous glop". But this will naturally put pressure on the design of products, so they'll be made with marketability in mind rather than suitability for real applications. Though there has to be a balancing point somewhere, it's easy to see how the presence of and reliance upon advertising itself will reduce the quality of products across the spectrum of available choice.
Another way of putting that is that advertising changes the entire nature of the market; instead of producing goods for end use, they have to be produced for sale, which may or may not actually coincide with the needs of customers. Again, I think this puts serious constraints on the power of customers to choose - it's virtually impossible not to support advertising while buying the goods and services one needs to merely survive, let alone participate meaningfully in society. Once the system of commerce gets into that tail-eating state, it's hard to get out.
All this is probably obvious, but for some reason I never envisioned that specific feedback loop before. I'd be fascinated if I wasn't mortified.;)
I would agree, but in the event that the product is good enough to encourage positive remarks from its users, advertising it would simply be a waste of (those customers') money. I suppose you might argue that a small initial dose of advertising is still necessary, but in a world where advertising and marketing are widespread enough to become professions in themselves, that won't often be the case. The main users of advertising are in fact advertisers, selling the idea that advertising works to those with actual products and services to sell (I don't particularly believe that advertising *does* work, but that's another topic altogether). Spam is actually a good case study, where the initial victims of spam are those who buy the software and address lists, and the majority immediately lose their investment; the successful ones then pass on the cost to plain folk.
Advertising wants to sell a message, not a product. Eventually the product becomes a peripheral concern, the "message" becomes intellectual property, and hilarious absurdity ensues.;) I suppose the distinction with word-of-mouth is that it remains connected to the product or service - people mostly wouldn't bother repeating the message for its own sake, because no one's paying them to do so. This is also why their message might be considered more accurate - simply put, they have no conflict of interest to obscure the truth. A paid or paying advertiser always will.
Essentially, yeah. Open diffuse communication is clearly at odds with centrally coordinated marketing. It's not just true of movie studios, but of all advertising. Even if one were making actual claims about a product it would be muddied by random comments from the peanut gallery (read: you and me). Since real advertising hasn't contained those sorts of claims for years, instead relying on embodiments of lifestyle or similar nebulous glop, real information can only be an unwelcome competitor. It's easy to see how defamation laws might be adapted to prevent people from making comments that contradict the expensive marketing line (which those same people paid for). Indeed this has already happened in some cases, as with SLAPP.
Advertising is the enemy of information and communication. In a world ruled through corporate centralisation, censorship is a logical extension of that fact.
If he's really making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in gross revenue, do you really think he's going to stop because some people are annoyed at him? Would you, honestly? Let alone if you were someone willing to begin the activity in the first place?
Also, given that his business consists of netting suckers with semi-fraudulent claims (carefully not reproduced on the actual product), do you think he'd have a single qualm that would prevent him from lying about whether he's going to quit?
In order to have a change of heart, one would have to have a heart to begin with. It may make some people feel better to harass this guy, albeit in a nasty-minded sort of way. It's not going to make one iota of difference.
I think the parent poster's point was that recompressing under the same codec (sans DRM) is more likely to subtract similar information to that which was originally glossed out and introduce similar artifacts, instead of a new set. MP3 artifacts are somewhat different from AAC. There's no perfect solution, but it might be a better choice than transcoding (though note that any form of digital quantisation, like CD-audio, is itself a lossy coding - when you convert to AIFF or burn to CD, you're introducing new quantisation error and loss that may not be symmetrical with the original sample).
With reasonable quality settings it's not going to matter to nearly everyone, as others have noted. Playing music through wires is a fudge anyway; if you want real sound, eschew reproduction and support live music near you.;) Personally that's been my answer to the RIAA's paranoia lately.
The one thing that might make airline safer today is the attitude of the passengers. Before the trade center attacks, I think most people felt that they should sit back, stay calm, and let the negotiators take care of it. Now the feeling I get from people is that if you're being hijacked, it is worth attempting to resist.
Which may work out well if the intent of the attackers is to turn the plane into a missile (though note that the outcome in the only known case of passenger resistance still involved the death of everyone aboard). If it's your plain old garden-variety hijacking where someone wants to make a political point or (gasp) actually be transported somewhere, then passenger intervention is probably the last thing you want, same as it always was.
The fourth plane in the Sept. 11th attacks makes a great, Hollywood-esque heroic story. That doesn't mean it has any applicability to anything else. If someone does try to crash another airliner, they'll be smarter too, and ready for passenger resistance.
And note that if you join Apple's service (or any other where you pay for the right to burn tracks to CD), you'll be paying the record company twice.
IMO the blank CD-R media levy gives me the right to download and burn any MP3 I like. And that's not even considering the dozens I've paid for and used only for data I made myself (pictures, for instance).
Exactly my thought - it's a test market. Companies sometimes do the same thing in Canada, introducing a product here first to a population that resembles the US, but at a tenth the size. I suppose it require less initial capital investment to tool up for, plus if it flops it's not as big a deal in the media ("Is that near Alaska?").
I think you'd be surprised by the percentage of hackers & power users on the Mac, though - it's a LOT higher than on Windows. It's actually part of the reason for the vaunted easier tech support of Macs. This was true even before OS X, because it's partly a consequence of the better user interface and hardware design, where people gain confidence with use (and whereas they tend to plateau quickly and stagnate on Windows - the typical Windows user sees themself as a victim). And partly it just comes from the different user culture and a slight garrison mentality.
Nice links. The reporter's (or I should say unwitting correspondent's) reaction is a good indictment, of course, of any online discussion forum. Wasted "community" indeed.
But here's the thing: I already know I'm pissing away time here, and one day I'll just stop. Usenet and MetaFilter and Slashdot are near-complete failures - no argument. But telling an addict to go out and get straight has never been effective, and I think Garrett knows that. Look at the minutes it will take me to compose this reply - and for what? It all just feeds the addiction.
And here's the other thing: I really enjoyed reading that letter. Yes, it was a slight invasion of privacy (though it wasn't particularly personal, and if it had been I'd have quit reading), but I feel like it lent me insight into what a WEF summit is in ways that Garrett's presumably carefully-crafted official piece just won't. Why isn't that kind of writing the norm? What the heck are we afraid of if it were? I already knew that all those "world leaders" and "captains of industry" were jes' folks, with all the attendant fears and irrationality, but it was nice to see such a candid (and not uncharitable) description. And for some other reader that same insight might be both novel and very useful. It might just be the thing that gets them out the door and doing something real to change the world for the better. Garrett has nothing to be embarrassed about.
Uh, even if you credit the notion of some testable state called "psychopathy" (or sociopathy, same thing, different POV), it demonstrably doesn't predict violent behaviour. People who score high on the PCL (say) aren't any more violent than those who don't - possibly less so as they tend to be pretty good at getting what they want through social engineering. They don't give a damn about anyone, but they're not dumb either (even if amazingly blind to many things).
I don't actually believe in psychopathy as currently (ill-)defined, but your "with a few exceptions" comment rubbed me the wrong way. Same with DSM labels like "antisocial personality disorder" - even if they're useful, they're not useful to predict the sort of violence we're talking about here.
In my opinion the people who do these mass murders aren't even disordered at all - they're pretty much pursuing what society told them to. There's a little bit of that in everyone growing up in the current media environment and using the impoverished social tools they're given. They were just the visible tip of a very large iceberg.
Re:Alex should have just waited
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 0, Troll
In fact, giving someone in that situation a good makes a lot more effective statement. I'm surprised people around here don't understand the "genial wage enslavement" principle of capitalism. You don't show your status and exert social control by being mean to people, but by making them think you're being nice (though never nice enough to actually improve their lives or the world as a whole).
Not that I think any of this stuck-in-high-school stuff is worth a damn - if anything it's telling me why I really shouldn't read slashdot any more.
Looks like you got it, though I interpret that the grand prize requirement is arbitrary audiovisual input rather than ASCII art. Pretty steep.
Whalen has some invaluable musings and observations on the contest and his second entry. I remember the generalist strategy from the Alice CHAT simulation in the early nineties (linked in the grandparent post), and it doesn't look like that was really the problem - Wientraub's winning entry end-runs it with smooth non-sequiturs. In many ways that does point out the weakness in the contest, and even in the Turing test itself (weak versions anyway). Whalen's work with CHAT and TIPS has always been geared to actually delivering information (ie. being useful instead of merely clever), so I'm not surprised he didn't use that same strategy.
You can chat with Whalen's entries at the telnet site.
Very interesting - I don't suppose you could summarise how Loebner changed the rules after that?
I imagine Whalen's entry was based on CHAT, which I played with an older version of back in the early nineties when I was a psych undergrad at Carleton and was fortunate to know co-creator Andrew Patrick through the NCF. CHAT was/is a project at the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada. You could reach it in those days from Hypertelnet (I think I was the first person to escape Maur the dragon alive;).
Personally I think that natural language systems are a very important research area, both for regular human-machine interaction and AI (in fact, I believe these define a spectrum, but that's a WHOLE 'nuther discussion). Say you do manage to establish a Friendly AI along the lines of Lem's Golem (thanks to other posters for the links). How do you begin to communicate with it if you haven't already put work into natural language comprehension and Turing-like blackbox human seeming expression? It can't be infinitely intelligent, after all, and to start with it'll be more like (some barely imaginable Friendly AI version of) a child. It seems like people assume anything smart enough to be called "AI" will automatically understand how to make itself known to us. I don't see it that way.
Even though contests like the Loebner prize may not lead to "real" AI, they help develop useful adjuncts to it, as well as tools for more immediately useful machine interfaces. People get all amped about speech interfaces and such even for regular old computers; where do you think that work is going to magically spring from? It's a long hard incremental path.
and most are either politically neutral or liberal leaning.
I don't believe this is true. The reason most conservatives think the media leans left and most liberals think it leans right is simple Psych 100 observer bias. Stuff within your comfort zone makes less of an impact on your awareness than that which offends you a wee bit (or a lot). Insofar as anything can be said to be "right" or "left" wing (or "liberal" vs. "conservative") anymore, Salon was somewhat left of centre (and for whatever reason, intentional or otherwise, most of the rightish commentary was by real raving loons like Sullivan or Horowitz). But there is as much right-wing commentary (and as many sites) on the web as left-wing, simply because those factions are rather balanced in society at the moment. People will argue about the 2000 US presidential election for all time, but the whole reason there's an argument is that it was so close. The real distribution on the web closely mirrors the constituency. At the moment I'd actually say that leans a bit right because of the
still-popular terrorism stuff, but it'll swing back to the centre (probably as a result of backlash against the Robespierre-like terror of terror warnings).
You could even make an argument that everything will eventually swing back and forth 'til it reaches neutrality, if only because neutrality is constantly redefined and thus drifts itself to the current 50% mark. The entire concept of left and right wing is largely a product of media creation of target demographics. You have to align people first before you can sell them subscriptions in a world with such diverse opinions. There are still lots of right-wing people who are essentially 19th century conservatives (especially of late), and they're weirdly in bed with libertarians largely because of the convenient spectrum the media has defined. And the media very consciously does this, because each publication needs a large enough readership to stay in business. The trick is that if you waffle too much and actually try and be balanced - which for a short time Salon seemed to be doing - you offend everybody and you're toast. It's the biggest irony of political journalism.
So people generally want to read stuff they mostly agree with, but because that doesn't challenge them, they rarely remember it much. The media really is pretty balanced, and even when it isn't, equilibrium forces push it back that way.
Or so I believe. You may of course wish to write me off as a raving lefty academic postmodern deconstructing RELATIVIST, the worst of all equivocators.;) But you will still have to account for observer bias (yours, mine, and everyone's), a phenomenon which is practically always one step more powerful than one thinks it is.
No, it really didn't. It seems that way to many people because they started on BBSes, then moved to dialup shell account access and eventually SLIP and PPP access. But on the actual network side of things, there's little connection between BBSes and the Internet. Some big multiline boards became small ISPs, but that's really more like repurposing old equipment. The only real connection I can think of is between Waffle boards and other UUCP systems, and those notably weren't really ever part of the BBS scene - precisely because they were leaf nodes to the Internet instead. There were FIDONet gateways and such in the early nineties, but rather than evolving they mostly just did out as cheap, real net access came along and the sysops lost interest.
The relationship of the BBS scene to the ARPAnet/Internet is really one of parallel evolution or microcomputer imitation of what the real iron had already been doing for a decade. It didn't evolve into anything - it died out, as many parallel evolution strains do. I'm not dissing it exactly (you can probably tell I was right into BBSes) but it was the toy version, and the people involved basically outgrew it and left it behind.
Unfortunately you won't see many more Metro/Swift/Justy type little fuel-efficient cars in North America anytime soon. Since Reagan repealed the fleet efficiency requirements on product lines at the end of his terms, the trend has been bigger and worse, with the subcompacts steadily falling off the bottom, as people buy the SUVs and minivans they think will protect them from this harsh modern world they think they live in. You know, the one they're afraid to walk through at the fast-food or bank machine drivethru. The cars are still made and sold in other slightly saner parts of the world, of course, but here in the free markets of the US and Canada you don't need that choice, because, you're, um, so free. Surely we can't all be that obsese yet.
On the subject of FUD-based car marketing, I saw an ad for some sort of Canyonero the other day where the automaker had licenced Gary Numan's eighties song "Cars". You know the one:
Here in my car I feel safest of all I can lock all my doors...
Never mind that the visual makes it clear that the marketroid merely saw the title of the song and heard the catchy tune, missing the fact that it's a prescient satire of the fearful survivalists in their little civilian tanks. It's sad on so many levels, and yet it's the closest they could have come to an honest ad. Without the cognitive dissonance of knowing it of course.
"At times, you'll have the urge to regret the past (er, future - you know) and wonder what you could have done differently, what you might have told yourself to change the way things went. Ignore that urge. What matters is what you're about to do next, regardless of where you're currently hanging on the thread of your life. Focus on that instead of pointless second-guessing like 'what would I tell my 6 year-old self?'"
"Oh hell, just memorise the names of these stocks..."
On another note, I've heard (someone please verify) that the military uses explosives to take care of old hard drives and storage media.
Close...they use old hard drives, floppies and CD-Rs, and obsolete computing equipment as ballast to dampen the explosion as they dispose of old expired ordinance.
Slashdot Mirror
Having had the misfortune of being stuck with a PICK BASIC application running inside Universe (GEAC Advance), I think the reason is that no one really writes software. Companies buy software and patch it ad infinitum. Think about why a crufty old property like WordPerfect was passed from hand to hand, when if you want a decent WP it was obvious it would be better to write one from scratch (something that's been done many times by others). Part of it is brand name, but you can retain that without having to taint yourself with code. The reason is that it's perceived as safer to buy something that works, or worked in the past - however badly - and patch it up. This is why software developers laugh at duct tape jokes.
At least Universe is generally sitting on some reasonable Unix box. Pity the people who ran PICK on native hardware.
Good link; thank you.
Two characteristics seem to govern all of Gates's "philanthropy":
1. Charitable exercises always follow bad press for Microsoft and/or Gates (his first penny was given away immediately following the release of his abysmal videotaped testimony for the antitrust hearings)
2. Charitable exercises always contain significant strings that benefit Microsoft, Gates, or the ideological institutions that made him a rich and powerful man (granted that this is true of the work of nearly all "philanthropists".
It's actually the last point that worries me the most. There is *always* ideological pressure from corporate funding to education. With what sort of balanced worldview do people come out of the Microsoft school?
Philanthropy in general is a weird, weird thing. It's essentially like saying "well, I'm sure rich - I must have taken a whole lot more money than I deserved from the rest of you folks, so here's 10% of it back - just out of the goodness of my heart! Get it? I'm rich *and* I'm a sweet guy!". Wouldn't it be better simply not to overpay these individuals to such an amazing degree? Are we that married to our Horatio Alger lottery mentality?
Maybe that's because cleverness is highly overrated. You're not paid for it because it's not worth anything, and only the legal bubble created by centuries of lobbying makes anyone think otherwise.
It's been said over and over that good ideas are a dime a dozen (a fair wage, btw) - it's implementation that's hard. Without IP laws, companies would compete based on their ability to produce and serve. Doing that better naturally incorporates the development of new ideas. Frankly we're the sort of clever monkeys that can't *not* churn out ideas, so I have little fear that less IP law would stifle innovation. It might instead create a renewed interest in quality, which would be welcome.
Even the most breathtaking new idea isn't really new. Everything is based on the environment of ideas built from what came before. If even Isaac Newton (the egotistical snot) could admit that, surely the rest of us can take a step back from our hubris.
I actually wonder when we'll get to the point where this is the only reasonable course. In the epilogue to the Marathon series, the rampant A.I. Leela infects a multi-planetary network, and the race using it resigns themselves to the fact that they'll never be able to get her out so they'll just have to live with her there.
At some point there'll be malware running worldwide that it just won't make economic sense to remove. In a sense that's already the case - computers are pretty unreliable anyway, and happy malware just makes them somewhat less so. You can try and root it all out, or just overdesign so that you can live with it. That seems a direction we've already begun moving in.
I think that Gandhi's comment about the murdered Jewish people in Nazi Germany needs to be taken in after-the-fact context; he knew at that point that they had already died, and was willing to think in terms of what else could have been accomplished by those deaths. Remember that he was also a staunch Hindu (something which also led to another distasteful part of his legacy, his unwillingness to condemn the caste system for fear it would undermine Hinduism as a whole) - for him, death was not eternal and could be considered alongside other elements of the cycle of life.
Thanks for the link; I'm always newly astounded by the clarity and force of Orwell's essay writing.
3ivx has always handled Divx-encoded movies, at least on the Mac. The only thing I use the Divx codec for is the AVI importer, which fixes a Quicktime issue in playing back AVIs with MP3 soundtracks. But 3ivx does the actual video decoding. The only thing it doesn't do quite as well as the Divx codec is scale some older Divx-3 movies. To accomplish this setup I simply have both the 3ivx and Divx components installed. 3ivx catches all the content, presumably because it comes alphabetically first, and it's registered for all the same encoding types.
The Windows media architecture is a bit different from Quicktime so it might not work there, but you can always try doing the same thing - either install both, or just install 3ivx.
btw ffmpeg is another codec that can handle much of the same content as Divx. I don't use it much any more, but not because there's actually anything wrong with it. I think it might be what's built in to VLC for this type of media, and the playback quality there is the same as from the Quicktime codec(s).
This is a very interesting observation, because it suggests a mechanism by which advertising influences product quality. I interpret that since a testable objective claim is legally less safe than a highly subjective or untestable one, advertisers will concentrate more on what I previously termed "nebulous glop". But this will naturally put pressure on the design of products, so they'll be made with marketability in mind rather than suitability for real applications. Though there has to be a balancing point somewhere, it's easy to see how the presence of and reliance upon advertising itself will reduce the quality of products across the spectrum of available choice.
Another way of putting that is that advertising changes the entire nature of the market; instead of producing goods for end use, they have to be produced for sale, which may or may not actually coincide with the needs of customers. Again, I think this puts serious constraints on the power of customers to choose - it's virtually impossible not to support advertising while buying the goods and services one needs to merely survive, let alone participate meaningfully in society. Once the system of commerce gets into that tail-eating state, it's hard to get out.
All this is probably obvious, but for some reason I never envisioned that specific feedback loop before. I'd be fascinated if I wasn't mortified. ;)
I would agree, but in the event that the product is good enough to encourage positive remarks from its users, advertising it would simply be a waste of (those customers') money. I suppose you might argue that a small initial dose of advertising is still necessary, but in a world where advertising and marketing are widespread enough to become professions in themselves, that won't often be the case. The main users of advertising are in fact advertisers, selling the idea that advertising works to those with actual products and services to sell (I don't particularly believe that advertising *does* work, but that's another topic altogether). Spam is actually a good case study, where the initial victims of spam are those who buy the software and address lists, and the majority immediately lose their investment; the successful ones then pass on the cost to plain folk.
;) I suppose the distinction with word-of-mouth is that it remains connected to the product or service - people mostly wouldn't bother repeating the message for its own sake, because no one's paying them to do so. This is also why their message might be considered more accurate - simply put, they have no conflict of interest to obscure the truth. A paid or paying advertiser always will.
Advertising wants to sell a message, not a product. Eventually the product becomes a peripheral concern, the "message" becomes intellectual property, and hilarious absurdity ensues.
Essentially, yeah. Open diffuse communication is clearly at odds with centrally coordinated marketing. It's not just true of movie studios, but of all advertising. Even if one were making actual claims about a product it would be muddied by random comments from the peanut gallery (read: you and me). Since real advertising hasn't contained those sorts of claims for years, instead relying on embodiments of lifestyle or similar nebulous glop, real information can only be an unwelcome competitor. It's easy to see how defamation laws might be adapted to prevent people from making comments that contradict the expensive marketing line (which those same people paid for). Indeed this has already happened in some cases, as with SLAPP.
Advertising is the enemy of information and communication. In a world ruled through corporate centralisation, censorship is a logical extension of that fact.
If he's really making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in gross revenue, do you really think he's going to stop because some people are annoyed at him? Would you, honestly? Let alone if you were someone willing to begin the activity in the first place?
Also, given that his business consists of netting suckers with semi-fraudulent claims (carefully not reproduced on the actual product), do you think he'd have a single qualm that would prevent him from lying about whether he's going to quit?
In order to have a change of heart, one would have to have a heart to begin with. It may make some people feel better to harass this guy, albeit in a nasty-minded sort of way. It's not going to make one iota of difference.
I think the parent poster's point was that recompressing under the same codec (sans DRM) is more likely to subtract similar information to that which was originally glossed out and introduce similar artifacts, instead of a new set. MP3 artifacts are somewhat different from AAC. There's no perfect solution, but it might be a better choice than transcoding (though note that any form of digital quantisation, like CD-audio, is itself a lossy coding - when you convert to AIFF or burn to CD, you're introducing new quantisation error and loss that may not be symmetrical with the original sample).
;) Personally that's been my answer to the RIAA's paranoia lately.
With reasonable quality settings it's not going to matter to nearly everyone, as others have noted. Playing music through wires is a fudge anyway; if you want real sound, eschew reproduction and support live music near you.
Which may work out well if the intent of the attackers is to turn the plane into a missile (though note that the outcome in the only known case of passenger resistance still involved the death of everyone aboard). If it's your plain old garden-variety hijacking where someone wants to make a political point or (gasp) actually be transported somewhere, then passenger intervention is probably the last thing you want, same as it always was.
The fourth plane in the Sept. 11th attacks makes a great, Hollywood-esque heroic story. That doesn't mean it has any applicability to anything else. If someone does try to crash another airliner, they'll be smarter too, and ready for passenger resistance.
And note that if you join Apple's service (or any other where you pay for the right to burn tracks to CD), you'll be paying the record company twice.
IMO the blank CD-R media levy gives me the right to download and burn any MP3 I like. And that's not even considering the dozens I've paid for and used only for data I made myself (pictures, for instance).
Exactly my thought - it's a test market. Companies sometimes do the same thing in Canada, introducing a product here first to a population that resembles the US, but at a tenth the size. I suppose it require less initial capital investment to tool up for, plus if it flops it's not as big a deal in the media ("Is that near Alaska?").
I think you'd be surprised by the percentage of hackers & power users on the Mac, though - it's a LOT higher than on Windows. It's actually part of the reason for the vaunted easier tech support of Macs. This was true even before OS X, because it's partly a consequence of the better user interface and hardware design, where people gain confidence with use (and whereas they tend to plateau quickly and stagnate on Windows - the typical Windows user sees themself as a victim). And partly it just comes from the different user culture and a slight garrison mentality.
Nice links. The reporter's (or I should say unwitting correspondent's) reaction is a good indictment, of course, of any online discussion forum. Wasted "community" indeed.
But here's the thing: I already know I'm pissing away time here, and one day I'll just stop. Usenet and MetaFilter and Slashdot are near-complete failures - no argument. But telling an addict to go out and get straight has never been effective, and I think Garrett knows that. Look at the minutes it will take me to compose this reply - and for what? It all just feeds the addiction.
And here's the other thing: I really enjoyed reading that letter. Yes, it was a slight invasion of privacy (though it wasn't particularly personal, and if it had been I'd have quit reading), but I feel like it lent me insight into what a WEF summit is in ways that Garrett's presumably carefully-crafted official piece just won't. Why isn't that kind of writing the norm? What the heck are we afraid of if it were? I already knew that all those "world leaders" and "captains of industry" were jes' folks, with all the attendant fears and irrationality, but it was nice to see such a candid (and not uncharitable) description. And for some other reader that same insight might be both novel and very useful. It might just be the thing that gets them out the door and doing something real to change the world for the better. Garrett has nothing to be embarrassed about.
Uh, even if you credit the notion of some testable state called "psychopathy" (or sociopathy, same thing, different POV), it demonstrably doesn't predict violent behaviour. People who score high on the PCL (say) aren't any more violent than those who don't - possibly less so as they tend to be pretty good at getting what they want through social engineering. They don't give a damn about anyone, but they're not dumb either (even if amazingly blind to many things).
I don't actually believe in psychopathy as currently (ill-)defined, but your "with a few exceptions" comment rubbed me the wrong way. Same with DSM labels like "antisocial personality disorder" - even if they're useful, they're not useful to predict the sort of violence we're talking about here.
In my opinion the people who do these mass murders aren't even disordered at all - they're pretty much pursuing what society told them to. There's a little bit of that in everyone growing up in the current media environment and using the impoverished social tools they're given. They were just the visible tip of a very large iceberg.
In fact, giving someone in that situation a good makes a lot more effective statement. I'm surprised people around here don't understand the "genial wage enslavement" principle of capitalism. You don't show your status and exert social control by being mean to people, but by making them think you're being nice (though never nice enough to actually improve their lives or the world as a whole).
Not that I think any of this stuck-in-high-school stuff is worth a damn - if anything it's telling me why I really shouldn't read slashdot any more.
Looks like you got it, though I interpret that the grand prize requirement is arbitrary audiovisual input rather than ASCII art. Pretty steep.
Whalen has some invaluable musings and observations on the contest and his second entry. I remember the generalist strategy from the Alice CHAT simulation in the early nineties (linked in the grandparent post), and it doesn't look like that was really the problem - Wientraub's winning entry end-runs it with smooth non-sequiturs. In many ways that does point out the weakness in the contest, and even in the Turing test itself (weak versions anyway). Whalen's work with CHAT and TIPS has always been geared to actually delivering information (ie. being useful instead of merely clever), so I'm not surprised he didn't use that same strategy.
You can chat with Whalen's entries at the telnet site.
Very interesting - I don't suppose you could summarise how Loebner changed the rules after that?
I imagine Whalen's entry was based on CHAT, which I played with an older version of back in the early nineties when I was a psych undergrad at Carleton and was fortunate to know co-creator Andrew Patrick through the NCF. CHAT was/is a project at the Communications Research Centre of Industry Canada. You could reach it in those days from Hypertelnet (I think I was the first person to escape Maur the dragon alive ;).
Personally I think that natural language systems are a very important research area, both for regular human-machine interaction and AI (in fact, I believe these define a spectrum, but that's a WHOLE 'nuther discussion). Say you do manage to establish a Friendly AI along the lines of Lem's Golem (thanks to other posters for the links). How do you begin to communicate with it if you haven't already put work into natural language comprehension and Turing-like blackbox human seeming expression? It can't be infinitely intelligent, after all, and to start with it'll be more like (some barely imaginable Friendly AI version of) a child. It seems like people assume anything smart enough to be called "AI" will automatically understand how to make itself known to us. I don't see it that way.
Even though contests like the Loebner prize may not lead to "real" AI, they help develop useful adjuncts to it, as well as tools for more immediately useful machine interfaces. People get all amped about speech interfaces and such even for regular old computers; where do you think that work is going to magically spring from? It's a long hard incremental path.
Sure, force me to cope with the cognitive dissonance of having a Rush subcriber as a /. fan. ;)
I don't believe this is true. The reason most conservatives think the media leans left and most liberals think it leans right is simple Psych 100 observer bias. Stuff within your comfort zone makes less of an impact on your awareness than that which offends you a wee bit (or a lot). Insofar as anything can be said to be "right" or "left" wing (or "liberal" vs. "conservative") anymore, Salon was somewhat left of centre (and for whatever reason, intentional or otherwise, most of the rightish commentary was by real raving loons like Sullivan or Horowitz). But there is as much right-wing commentary (and as many sites) on the web as left-wing, simply because those factions are rather balanced in society at the moment. People will argue about the 2000 US presidential election for all time, but the whole reason there's an argument is that it was so close. The real distribution on the web closely mirrors the constituency. At the moment I'd actually say that leans a bit right because of the still-popular terrorism stuff, but it'll swing back to the centre (probably as a result of backlash against the Robespierre-like terror of terror warnings).
You could even make an argument that everything will eventually swing back and forth 'til it reaches neutrality, if only because neutrality is constantly redefined and thus drifts itself to the current 50% mark. The entire concept of left and right wing is largely a product of media creation of target demographics. You have to align people first before you can sell them subscriptions in a world with such diverse opinions. There are still lots of right-wing people who are essentially 19th century conservatives (especially of late), and they're weirdly in bed with libertarians largely because of the convenient spectrum the media has defined. And the media very consciously does this, because each publication needs a large enough readership to stay in business. The trick is that if you waffle too much and actually try and be balanced - which for a short time Salon seemed to be doing - you offend everybody and you're toast. It's the biggest irony of political journalism.
So people generally want to read stuff they mostly agree with, but because that doesn't challenge them, they rarely remember it much. The media really is pretty balanced, and even when it isn't, equilibrium forces push it back that way.
Or so I believe. You may of course wish to write me off as a raving lefty academic postmodern deconstructing RELATIVIST, the worst of all equivocators. ;) But you will still have to account for observer bias (yours, mine, and everyone's), a phenomenon which is practically always one step more powerful than one thinks it is.
No, it really didn't. It seems that way to many people because they started on BBSes, then moved to dialup shell account access and eventually SLIP and PPP access. But on the actual network side of things, there's little connection between BBSes and the Internet. Some big multiline boards became small ISPs, but that's really more like repurposing old equipment. The only real connection I can think of is between Waffle boards and other UUCP systems, and those notably weren't really ever part of the BBS scene - precisely because they were leaf nodes to the Internet instead. There were FIDONet gateways and such in the early nineties, but rather than evolving they mostly just did out as cheap, real net access came along and the sysops lost interest.
The relationship of the BBS scene to the ARPAnet/Internet is really one of parallel evolution or microcomputer imitation of what the real iron had already been doing for a decade. It didn't evolve into anything - it died out, as many parallel evolution strains do. I'm not dissing it exactly (you can probably tell I was right into BBSes) but it was the toy version, and the people involved basically outgrew it and left it behind.
Unfortunately you won't see many more Metro/Swift/Justy type little fuel-efficient cars in North America anytime soon. Since Reagan repealed the fleet efficiency requirements on product lines at the end of his terms, the trend has been bigger and worse, with the subcompacts steadily falling off the bottom, as people buy the SUVs and minivans they think will protect them from this harsh modern world they think they live in. You know, the one they're afraid to walk through at the fast-food or bank machine drivethru. The cars are still made and sold in other slightly saner parts of the world, of course, but here in the free markets of the US and Canada you don't need that choice, because, you're, um, so free. Surely we can't all be that obsese yet.
On the subject of FUD-based car marketing, I saw an ad for some sort of Canyonero the other day where the automaker had licenced Gary Numan's eighties song "Cars". You know the one:
Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors...
Never mind that the visual makes it clear that the marketroid merely saw the title of the song and heard the catchy tune, missing the fact that it's a prescient satire of the fearful survivalists in their little civilian tanks. It's sad on so many levels, and yet it's the closest they could have come to an honest ad. Without the cognitive dissonance of knowing it of course.
"At times, you'll have the urge to regret the past (er, future - you know) and wonder what you could have done differently, what you might have told yourself to change the way things went. Ignore that urge. What matters is what you're about to do next, regardless of where you're currently hanging on the thread of your life. Focus on that instead of pointless second-guessing like 'what would I tell my 6 year-old self?'"
"Oh hell, just memorise the names of these stocks..."
Close...they use old hard drives, floppies and CD-Rs, and obsolete computing equipment as ballast to dampen the explosion as they dispose of old expired ordinance.
;)