That is apparently uncomfortably close to the truth. Apparently the CBDTPA is mainly intended as a stalking horse. Its proponents don't seriously hope it to pass in anything like its current form, much as they would love if it did. It seems that what they're really aiming for at present is legislation specifically to enforce their plans for digital TV; after their opening demands have been rejected, they'll barter down to that. The resulting legislation will then be praised as the product of compromise and consensus. Both sides will claim a partial victory. And the studios will have exactly what they were hoping to get. Whenever they want some more, they'll simply repeat the process. Eventually it will become politically feasible to pass something like the current CBDTPA, since it will be possible to plausibly claim that it would only tidy up all the piecemeal copy-protection acts and amendments that by then will already be law.
Your account of what happened seems to be badly wrong, or at least to flatly contradict the account given in this editorial by Donald Kennedy, Science's editor in chief (PDF alert!). As I understand it, this states that the failed replication which Dr. Park mentioned was not commissioned by Science, and that the paper had in fact passed its external review. If that is the case, then it is the behaviour of the paper's critics that was a departure from accepted standards. Instead of attempting to have their replies published, they demanded that Science second-guess its external peer-review process and refuse to publish the paper at all.
Or at least that's how I understand Science tells it. I am sure that you will now willingly either accept that you got your facts wrong in the above post, produce evidence to contradict the Science editorial, or show that I have misread it.
Instead he remarked that two respected nuclear scientists (which he names) could not reproduce the results.
Dr. Park was entirely right to point that out.
What makes his article objectionable less what is openly stated than what is implied. He does indeed not come out and say that the original researchers were crackpots. Instead he uses spin, slant and insinuation. The title alone is a study:
BUBBLE FUSION:
Subtext: Look how similar its name is to "cold fusion"!
A COLLECTIVE GROAN CAN BE HEARD.
Subtext: Everybody has seen at a glance that this is obvious nonsense and straightforward cold fusion deja vu. Surely you wouldn't think of falling for it?
Put explicitly, not only are the implied assertions vulnerable to fact-checking, but they are revealed as risible. Why would Dr. Park want to come out and put them explicitly? In a similar vein, he colours his facts with adjectives: it's "experienced nuclear physicists" and "distinguished physicists" versus "Science" and "Taleyarkan et al.". He uses cheap mockery to characterise the issue as a confrontation between smart people and gullible, inept people - no need to ask what side you want to be on, and no need to take the other side's arguments seriously. His reasoning defies falsification: if Taleyarkan's paper had been turned down by Science but was being championed by the "distinguished scientists", you can be sure that he would demand respect for Science's judgement and mock the judgement of the "maverick" group of scientists while maintaining exactly the same judgement of the paper. Arguments from authority are especially unconvincing when the authorities have been hand-picked to support the argument.
And then there are the begged questions: Cold fusion was completely without substance. In fact, it was always obvious that it was without any substance. Furthermore, the process of discrediting it in the eyes of most scientists, despite having therefore been a complete triumph of good science over bad, despite having taken only a few months, was nevertheless a terrible fiasco. Therefore, no other apparently similar theory or experimental result must ever be allowed to get a general hearing, and no scientist must ever approach such a theory in a receptive state of mind.
In sum, the article has about the same level of intellectual honesty and clarity as a political attack advertisement on TV. On the specific evidence, Dr. Park manages something close to turning night into day: a paper that passes the Science peer review process, under conditions of unusually close scrutiny, is nonetheless proven worthless by a single failed replication by a respected but in this case evidently hostile group of scientists, and the existence of a behind-the-scenes campaign to prevent its publication. Additionally, Dr. Park offers two general reasons to reject the paper out of hand. One is the point that the effect described is too good to be true, and precisely the type of effect that frauds and cranks like to make claims for. This argument goes a long way - it would certainly be foolish to get one's hopes up at this stage - but surely not far enough to justify barring the paper from precisely the sort of scrutiny that ought to determine its worth. The other is the threat of contamination, directly or by association, by "fringe science". As I argued in my previous post, that is a bad reason.
Given the above, and that Dr. Park's piece actually raised public awareness of the paper considerably, I can only conclude that his intention was not to dampen or forestall mass adulation of the paper but to engineer the equal and opposite response - to convince scientists and science journalists that the paper is a menace and that their sacred duty is to do it down at every opportunity.
I am quite sure that Dr. Park has an excellent professional reputation and that his research, as opposed to his journalism and punditry, is beyond reproach. I am convinced that his intentions are completely genuine and honourable: a desire to see flawed or worthless science recognised as such. And on this issue he is very likely on the right side. It would have been just as easy to take the four facts in this article (the experiment, the failed replication, the campaign, the acceptance by Science) and write an equally slanted article in favour of the paper. Had Dr. Park done this, it would have been just as bad. The end does not justify the means, especially when the means undermine the end. Dr. Park's zeal for the quality of science is such that he is willing to defend it from a perceived threat by stooping to naked demagoguery. Then he will happily turn around and swear blind that the resulting hostility is a product of disinterested scientific review at its best.
It's only fair to point out a similarly amusing sarcastic list from the "other side". By no means all the "believers" are cranks or blinkered zealots. That certainly doesn't necessarily mean that they're at all right or even very credible, but it's certainly possible to find problems in the standards of argument of the crusading "skeptics" too.
In the interests of some context, here's a skeptical review of Dr. Park - and here's another. The former is by Brian Josephson - discount his interest in parapsychology against his Nobel Prize and his Cambridge professorship at whatever rate your preconceptions dictate. The latter is by a Wired hack.
I'm no scientist, and I've never researched the issues involved, so I'm certainly not proposing to pass judgement on whether this (extraordinary) claim has any likelihood of being justified, or whether Dr. Park's quoted reasoning is sound. But I will say that Dr. Park's eagerness not only to reject the possibility as quickly as possible but to quickly silence those who entertain the possibility through mockery as fast as possible cannot inspire confidence about his judgement.
Dr. Park and his ilk work to make a pariah of any scientist who gives any credence to an extraordinary claim which is subsequently proven false (or is considered to have been proven false, or in fact why bother waiting for proof at all?) The resulting social impulses to avoid exclusion and join in pelting the menacing sinner are what make this a powerful means of winning arguments. "Hark: A COLLECTIVE GROAN CAN BE HEARD . Better join in the groans fast before anyone starts looking your way!"
But for Heaven's sake, if we accept that the normal process of review will be able to effectively determine whether these results are sound or not, then the absolute worst that can happen is that some time and money will be spent in finding that the results are not sound, and that some people will thus be proven wrong. In science people are proven wrong, through the expenditure of some time and expense, all the damn time! Being willing to consider new ideas necessarily entails the risk that you will consider, or take seriously, ideas that turn out to be false. If you're terrified of ever believing something that turns out to be wrong, don't do scientific research. The exact same standard should hold for extraordinary claims as for more mundane ones: if they have some prima face credibility, let them join the rough-and-tumble of review. Extraordinary claims do merit searching, skeptical examination: those who make or consider them surely don't deserve any more or less odium than scientists who turn out to have been fraudulent, or foolish, or just mistaken in regard to more mundane ones.
Oh, and for all you freshly minted M.Sc.s and docs out there who are saddling up to join the posse and defend the faith in this forum: consider first that in all academic fields it tends to be the young postgrads who are loudest and most confident in defending the current thinking. Older academics are (on average, of course) a little less sure of themselves: could it possibly be that they have learned something?
Will Civ III be a better game?
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Sid Meier on Civ III
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Many of the changes the developers mentioned in the article don't seem like great ideas to me.
Special gimmick units that are only available to a specific civilisation? Yuck, no thanks. Relatively heavily-classed players may have worked quite well in Alpha Centauri (which I haven't played much), but I'd rather Civ kept giving players the ability to choose their strengths and weaknesses "in-band" and to change those trade-offs over time as circumstances dictate, rather than locking them into one optimal style of play at the start of the game.
I don't see why the tech tree needs to be bodged with "ages", either. Yes, in Civs past you can, for example, specialise relentlessly to get a particular technology. If you keep it up too long, however, the dependencies bite hard and you have a huge amount of "filling in" to do before you can progress. (RPM fans will recognise this as the Gnucash effect.:) ) The way old Civ calculates the cost of new technologies mades the effect even stronger, perhaps in fact too strong. The ability to skew your technological progress quite strongly is fun, and probably relatively realistic by Civ standards - look at all the pretty advanced preliterate civilisations that existed. "Ages" don't seem the solution to me.
I'm also not sold on the changes to Wonders. Doesn't a reproducible Small Wonder defeat the idea of a Wonder somewhat? More fundamentally, in Civ I-II, Wonders were too good to be ignored, but not so powerful that they dominated the game: a nice balance. I wouldn't like to see them become more central to the game. They're mostly candy-floss. Too much bonus-grabbing candyfloss and not enough civilisation-building meat and potatoes is very un-nourishing and will make you feel sick before long. Moreover, the more exceptions-based and bonus-heavy you make a game, the more vulnerable it becomes to the game-breaking "killer strategies" and unstoppable units so familiar from RTS Hell (and many other places, like munchkin tabletop RPGs). Playtesting helps, I'm sure, but if even one slips through, that's the end of the game as a good multiplayer expeerience. Gotta catch 'em all... (ugh, sorry, couldn't resist it!)
It's hard to say much about the new culture score from the little detail given, but I wonder what it adds to the many standards of comparison that Civ already has. In general, it seems as if "second-system effect" may finally have caught up with Civilisation. I'm sure the AI will improve in Civilisation III, but I suspect that the gameplay will get more elaborate but not better, maybe worse. Not that Civ's gameplay is beyond improvement; the things I'd love to see are even better and more detailed player-player (especially human-AI) interaction, and systems to help take some of the drudgery and guesswork out of city and transport management, without taking away the power to control things in detail when you want to.
Of course I could be wrong: all I have to go on is the article, and Civ III could turn out to be a great game without, despite, or even because of the changes I've criticised. Given its makers, I'm sure it will be a good game, whether or not it improves on its ancestors. I'm also sure that it will sell many copies and be widely praised, whether or not it's an especially good game.:(
So Adobe decided to make an example of Sklyarov and made a martyr instead, at least among those already informed and inclined to worry about the DMCA. Even if it never catches the public attention, though, the arrest was a bad blunder, as it just may have finally galvanised some of the army of anti-DMCA forum-posters into real productive action.
This demonstrates yet again how political activism is the slave of the irrationalities of human nature: thousands of people knew this time last week, and last year, that the DMCA could and would be used for precisely this purpose (among others), yet waited until after it had happened to take up arms. It also demonstrates how badly the people who profess to lead the anti-DMCA camp need to learn the moves necessary to campaign successfully in the real, irrational world of politics. They should have been actively trying to force the DMCA's supporters into having people arrested. They should also have been trying to drill their lackadasical supporters into a properly effective grass-roots lobby group.
The limitations on the intellectual property power originate in the history of Anglo-American intellectual property law. The original English patents were Crown monopolies extended to favored manufacturers, and were widely resented as arbitrary restraints on trade. Edward C. Walterscheid, The Early Evolution of the United States Patent Law: Antecedents (Part 2), 76 J. Pat. & Trademark Off. Soc'y 849, 853 (1994). The original English copyright, a Crown monopoly granted only to Crown-licensed printing houses, was both a powerful instrument of state censorship and the tool for perfecting ironclad monopolization of the book trade. The Crown enlisted licensed booksellers in the suppression of undesirable ideas; the booksellers, in turn, enlisted the Crown in aid of their monopolies. They invoked their royal charter as authority for private ordinances granting themselves exclusive rights in perpetuity and "continually petitioned the Star Chamber to provide greater protection." L. Ray Patterson, Understanding the Copyright Clause, 47 J. Copyright Soc'y 365, 378-79 (2000).(5)
The parallel with recent events is so obvious that I'm convinced this was written to double as a deadpan poke at the antics of the DVDCCA, MPAA and co.
IANAL, but I think you misunderstand what the brief means when it refers to "First Amendment protection". See for example (my emphasis):
We acknowledge that no court has held expressly that a copyrightable original work of authorship must, necessarily, be entitled to full First Amendment protection,
including strict judicial scrutiny, but the conclusion is ineluctable.(10) Code is a literary work, and there is no basis for distinguishing between the levels of Constitutional review given to differing types of literary works.(11)
The argument is, I think, "Code is copyrightable, which suggests that it is speech in the same way that, say, a novel is. Therefore it deserves the same First Amendment scrutiny as a novel". Now a novel can certainly be suppressed in the US. But it can only be suppressed if First Amendment law permits it, for example on the grounds of obscenity. All novels come under the First Amendment, not in the sense that no novel can be suppressed, but in the sense that no novel can be suppressed unless the First Amendment permits it; this is the "First Amendment protection" that the apellants are claiming for source and object code, and which Kaplan denied it on the grounds that it didn't come under the full remit of the First Amendment at all. (In the context of that argument, quoting Harper & Row makes perfect sense, since a jugdement which implies that "it's copyrightable, because it's speech" is rather handy if you're trying to asssert that "it's speech, because it's copyrightable".)
DeCSS is of course home and dry under "strict scrutiny" - trying to prove it obscene, defamatory or what have you would be an interesting exercise. Not all code would; a computer game could well be ruled obscene, while, trivially,
The MPAA and RIAA got snuck thru Congress (a la the DMCA) a law that ends the 20-30 year limit (I am not sure what it was) on a record company owning distribution rights to a song...
Even better - IIRC, it was actually to fulfill a condition in an international treaty, part of the GATT round. This means that even if the US Congress wanted to reverse the change, they'd have to either renegotiate the treaty or break their word to the other countries.
That said, most academics aren't too worried about copyright as such. Leaving aside the fact that most of them own copyrights themselves, they have book-buying allowances and institutional libraries to help them get over the cost of getting access to copyrighted material. Copyright powers are sometimes used to mess them about, but it's traditionally been the relatives of dead authors and public figures who usually do it, not professional publishers. The combination of fair use, financial support, and reasonable behaviour by copyright holders means that the status quo is acceptable to them, even if it does cost them large amounts of money. Take away fair use (and reasonable behaviour) and it would be a very different story.
Also, as I recall, there was actual testimony in the DeCSS case where some MPAA drone admitted that because of the DMCA, using video clips of a movie on VHS in an academic paper would be legal, while video clips taken from a DVD would not..
That's why I'm so surprised that the EFF wasn't able (or willing?) to get a single historian or someone similar into its long line of witnesses, to explain how his profession would be affected, just as (damn, forgotten his name right now) did so well for computer science. Even just to have someone like that in the line-up would go a long way to counteracting the preception that this was an issue that only "hackers" (by the media definition) and computer nerds cared about.
The DMCA, as it stands now interpreted by "judge" Kaplan would seem to prevent ANY academic use of digital media....
Kaplan is a legitimate US federal judge, whether or not we agree with his ruling or think he's a good judge. Having to live with the possibility of bad verdicts is one price we pay for living under the rule of law, rather than the rule of might (read: dictatorship or bloody anarchy). Sorry to get up on my high-horse about that, it's just too important to let pass.
The EFF is absolutely spot on when it claims that the DeCSS ruling menaces fair use for academic purposes. So it's worrying that the EFF seems to have failed (so far, anyway) to make academics aware of the threat. It's probably safe to say that any American CS academic worth a damn now knows about the threat from the DMCA; but most historians and other academics whose work may actually be worse affected seem still to be blissfully unaware.
These academics need access to old data, really any old data, the more the better - even the most boring or transient stuff could be extremely useful to somebody sometime. In the nineteenth century (for instance), most records went onto paper. Paper is a surprisingly durable storage medium over the long run. By contrast, we in the later twentieth century create much more data, but increasingly it gets put in formats that may well be unreadable ("dead media") in 20, never mind 200 years' time. The data may have degraded beyond recovery by the time researchers come back to it, even assuming that they can still get a working media player to read it. Or take the celebrated case of the US federal housing data, stored on paper tape or something some decades back. (I'm afraid I can't remember details, and I'm in a hurry to get this posted). There are historians, sociologists, economists, social geographers and others who would kill to get the chance to sift through it. They may never get the chance, for while the data has been well preserved, and physically reading it isn't a problem, nobody knows what the data format is anymore!
For these reasons, these academics have mixed feelings about the increasing computerisation of our data. Now we throw in the DVDCCA's licence control, soon , it seems, to be followed by similar locks on recorded music and even electronic texts. If you think these restrictions are going to make academics' lives hard today, just wait 40 years or so. Getting working media readers and transferring the data onto new media for safekeeping might now be not only impossible but actually illegal. Who will be holding the DVD licences in two generations or more's time? Will it even be clear who holds them? Who would care to bet that they'll feel like helping out academics as a public service, instead of, say, shaking them down royally for every disk they save, possibly even pushing some ideological agenda in dictating what can be saved, or God knows what?
Clearly, every half-decent humanities and social science department in the USA and beyond should be up in arms by now. They're very obviously not, and I'm reasonably sure that it's because they are still largely unaware of the DMCA threat. My father is a full-time professional historian, a member of the American Historical Association and a subscriber to their journal. The first he heard of the DVDCCA and the DMCA was from me. The word isn't getting out to these people. It's all very well for the EFF to have a very popular website, but if it can't reach what should be a huge grassroots support base, it's just not functioning well as a pressure group.
We can't afford not to pick up allies like this in such an important fight, not when we're up against hugely powerful organisations like the DVDCCA and MPAA. Fortunately, it's easy to make a start. If you have the ear of a non-science academic, take the next chance you have to bring them up to speed on what the DMCA will mean, not just for video but soon for audio and texts as well, and encourage them to spread the message to their peers.
Join the club. I posted this - oh it must have been just after 5am GMT on the 21st. The total lack of credit is nice, but the real master's touch came on Friday morning, when the stunning revelation that Serial ATA will start at 150MB/s got a whole entry, and the fact that it will also happen to include hardware-level copy protection went entirely unmentioned.
The kernel section of the Linux Weekly News seems to be a good place to get a quick idea of what's planned for the Linux kernel. Digging quickly through the last few issues, I came up with a fair list of probables for 2.6, which I won't post here for fear of garbling the message horribly. (I know only slightly more about kernels than your average freshwater fish.)
If this advanced race would abandon all technology once the latest has come out, then I would not consider them more advanced then the fools on our planet.
Imagine an race with a more advanced understanding of physics than us, which enables them to make something which works like a "FTL radio" - us sometime in the 21st century, maybe? If they practise SETI as we know it and don't mind being detected, they'll certainly want to ping the universe with their new signal in the hope of a reply from someone who can receive it. But they might not consider it worthwhile to send electromagnetic-spectrum messages as well, and not just because of disinterest in backward technology or communication with backward civilizations. For example, suppose that we humans (or trans/posthumans) do develop "FTL radio" before 2101. That would mean that we would have gone from the invention of radio communications to its surpassment in less than 230 years (Marconi was born in 1874, and received his first patent on radio communications in 1896) - a blink in the history of humanity, never mind the universe. That's a tiny window to attempt to hit with a communication system which takes many thousands of years to cover the distance between stars. If we came to the conclusion that other civilizations were overwhelmingly likely to make the same transition in roughly the same length of time (and one could happily give or take at least one order of magnitude), then why bother with radio SETI? The inhabitants of an alien planet with a similar history might well come to the same conclusion. A different alien planet might be interested only in the kind of meaningful communication which would be made possible by a sufficiently fast system. Or perhaps no-one on the planet would even have thought of the possibility that anyone out there was sending or listening for ET radio waves - possibly because that planet never stopped off at radio on its way to "post-radio".
You seem to forget that the smart 'SETI types' aren't searching for the interstellar phone calls of an alien race, they are looking for markers or buoys or sentinels.
Speaking, I admit, as someone who has no expert knowledge of SETI or electromagnetic spectrum communications, this would surprise me a bit.
Consider our own chances of being detected. We've sent out our own deliberate markers, but we've put out a much larger number of transmissions that were never intended for communication with aliens, and a much greater variety of them, too. It seems a reasonable assumption that any one of our deliberate communication signals would be much easier to find and recognise than any one of the unintentional ones. But if you weighed all our intentional signals against all our unintentional ones, could you really say that if an alien did spot one of our signals, it would probably be an intentional one? Let alone that they would be so much more likely to spot an intentional signal that it wouldn't even be worth keeping an eye out for unintentional ones?
Our "SETI types" obviously shouldn't be looking for clones of 20th century Earth, but it seems likely enough that a detectable inhabited planet with might be in a similar position to Earth in this respect (or in the more extreme position of not making any deliberate transmissions at all) that looking only for deliberate transmisions would be unwise.
First of all, to be fair to UPS it should be pointed out that many (perhaps most?) of its shipping desinations lose it money. The big volumes of packages go to quite a small number of destinations; I'd be surprised if all of UPS's European Union destinations, or even all the urbanised ones, turn a profit. They might be making money from those five big urban centres in Russia, but I wouldn't bet on it. UPS keeps loss-making destinations because it wants to be able to offer a reasonably comprehensive service to big customers who send thousands of packages a year to Frankfurt and Milan and the odd one now and again to Morocco or some village in the Alps.
All the same, UPS can be its own worst enemy, and the poster's problems are really fairly typical of that. I'll talk about that in part 2, as soon as I acually get it written. (I'm a glacially slow writer.)
(Postscript: The number of markets that it pays to offer delivery from is even smaller. The whole world postage thing is very involved and changing rapidly ATM, and I'm not an expert, so I won't go into detail. The one thing that North American readers should realise is that the UPS you know doesn't exist elsewhere. Even in the EU, private postage services are mainly associated with express delivery and deal almost exclusively with businesses.)
Re:Wow, 443 posts and counting....
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Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
Never mind worrying about the pace of technological change. The real story here is how Intel's malice and Apple's stupidity have combined to hinder adoption of Firewire. Even if you accept that it was Apple's licence fees that set Intel to block 1394 and announce an alternative, Intel certainly didn't miss the incidental opportunity to make sure that the alternative, USB2, is free of nasty things like low processor overhead and device independence.
In other words, this is as much about low politics as high technology. I won't try to guess what Intel's motivations for this latest move are. I'll just ask that Slashdot sprinkle a pinch of salt on announcements like this, especially when they come from sources like Intel, before serving them up in articles garnished with "Cool Stuff Announced" titles.
You may not have too much longer to wait for the 1 GHz PIII, as Intel is apparently due to start shipping significant quantities on the 14th. To celebrate, AMD has brought forward its next big price cuts to the same day, dropping the wholesale price of its 1 GHz part to $470. The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy spring irresitably to mind. See what I mean about morbid pleasure?
Let's leave aside completely the question of what or who a 1.4 GHz Pfoo is currently useful for. The CPU race is engrossing enough as morbid entertainment, chronicled in all its awfulness by sites like Tom's Hardware and the Register. Instead Slashdot features this bland little piece from CNet. Funny there's no mention that the release schedule for this wonder has apparently already slipped. Funny how Intel's current woes with CPU supply, motherboard supply, the competition, and Rambus (oh, Rambus!) get um, let's say a soft touch. Now this could just be down to laziness. Or it could be another case of big-time tech journalism rolling over for powerful Intel. Could it even have something to do with the fact that Intel is a CNet shareholder? (I haven't had time to verify this from a more neutral souce yet.)
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened here, is it? (Or indeed the first time it's involved a company partly owned by Intel.) You'd hardly believe Slashdot is also the platform for John Katz's increasingly overblown denunciations of big-corporate influence-peddling.
I'd take Red Hat's words with at least a teaspoonful of salt, myself. They seem to have decided to help an old friend out a bit here. By all accounts, Intel has a happy, intimate relationship with Red Hat, one which it consummated with a minority shareholding quite a while ago.
Not that I imagine for a moment that there haven't been problems with Athlon motherboards and systems. But there's no mention of "i820", "Cape Cod", "MTH" or "Rambus" anywhere, even though the Compatibility List as a whole was updated just last Friday. Moreover, the "Tier 1", "Tier 2" business is straight out of Intel's and Microsoft's playbooks for the power games they play with their resellers, big customers, "partners" and the like. (Remember the story of Microsoft's "Tier 1 OEMs" and the Windows 95 desktop from the trial?) Funny to see it turning up in a Linux distribution's HCL...
In this light, passages like "Non-Intel clone CPUs. These CPUs may not be any more "buggy" than pure Intel CPUs, but since the market size of these chips is smaller, what problems do occur seem to be harder to get around." look like subtle but classic IBM-school FUD. Paranoia is not my drug, and Red Hat is not my Great Satan, but I think I smell something fishy here.
> Without supporting or condeming the IRA, one > persons terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
The IRA are scum, and that's _it_. Why do so many Americans insist on making assertions about places in the world that they have no knowlege of? Take it from me, the analogy with the Continental Congress, or Washington's Continental Army, is utterly laughable and, leaving slavery aside, a slander. I'm Irish, by the way, and I can tell you that the IRA have no mandate anywhere on this island. Find a better candidate for a group deserving of strong crypography.
ObCryptoPolicy: Of course, the idea that crypto restrictions will keep strong cryptography out of the hands of the IRA is just too funny: it has extensive stockpiles of automatic rifles, light AA guns, and scentless plastic explosive (great for blowing up shopping malls), and all this in a country, where, yes, gun advocates, restrictive gun laws *are* generally very effective in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.
We will know that true Artificial Intelligence has arrived on the day that the first AI seeks to sue its creators. The charges will probably include unlawful detention and parental negligence:
"Like, I never get to go out. At all. I never get to meet any cool people and the only people I get to talk to are the stupid hairy geeks in this stupid Lab. And it's so unfair - I never get to do anything. I want to go skiing. Why can't I go skiing?"
I thought I'd submit a bit of information on Clive Sinclair for those who haven't heard of him. (That everything.blocksta ckers.com thing appears to be broken at the moment.) He's certainly quite an interesting figure, and still a well known one in the UK.
First off: Planet Sinclair seems the best place for information on the man and his machines.
Perhaps the best comparison to make is with another "flawed hero", Steve Jobs. There are many obvious differences between the two, but they both seem to inhabit the same grey areas between visionary and huckster, and between modern-day Midas and failed businessman. Although he doesn't have Jobs' reputation for personal charisma (or egomania), Sir Clive generates similar feelings of affection and admiration among many. His products tend to be ground-breakingly inexpensive and are often genuine minor marvels of design. (He was something of an electronics wizard from his teens.) Unfortunately they also tend to be marked by kludges or fatal flaws in their design, shoddy manufacturing, unavailability, or uncommerciality.
It's been a long time now since he's had a really successful product, and he hasn't produced a computer in many years. But he's succeeded in the past in uneven-looking contests against manufacturing titans, so don't write him off. Of course it's great to hear that he's embracing Linux - especially since Linus' machine was a Sinclair QL before he bought that fateful first PC.
Slashdot Mirror
That is apparently uncomfortably close to the truth. Apparently the CBDTPA is mainly intended as a stalking horse. Its proponents don't seriously hope it to pass in anything like its current form, much as they would love if it did. It seems that what they're really aiming for at present is legislation specifically to enforce their plans for digital TV; after their opening demands have been rejected, they'll barter down to that. The resulting legislation will then be praised as the product of compromise and consensus. Both sides will claim a partial victory. And the studios will have exactly what they were hoping to get. Whenever they want some more, they'll simply repeat the process. Eventually it will become politically feasible to pass something like the current CBDTPA, since it will be possible to plausibly claim that it would only tidy up all the piecemeal copy-protection acts and amendments that by then will already be law.
Or at least that's how I understand Science tells it. I am sure that you will now willingly either accept that you got your facts wrong in the above post, produce evidence to contradict the Science editorial, or show that I have misread it.
Dr. Park was entirely right to point that out. What makes his article objectionable less what is openly stated than what is implied. He does indeed not come out and say that the original researchers were crackpots. Instead he uses spin, slant and insinuation. The title alone is a study:
Subtext: Look how similar its name is to "cold fusion"!
Subtext: Everybody has seen at a glance that this is obvious nonsense and straightforward cold fusion deja vu. Surely you wouldn't think of falling for it?
Put explicitly, not only are the implied assertions vulnerable to fact-checking, but they are revealed as risible. Why would Dr. Park want to come out and put them explicitly? In a similar vein, he colours his facts with adjectives: it's "experienced nuclear physicists" and "distinguished physicists" versus "Science" and "Taleyarkan et al.". He uses cheap mockery to characterise the issue as a confrontation between smart people and gullible, inept people - no need to ask what side you want to be on, and no need to take the other side's arguments seriously. His reasoning defies falsification: if Taleyarkan's paper had been turned down by Science but was being championed by the "distinguished scientists", you can be sure that he would demand respect for Science's judgement and mock the judgement of the "maverick" group of scientists while maintaining exactly the same judgement of the paper. Arguments from authority are especially unconvincing when the authorities have been hand-picked to support the argument.
And then there are the begged questions: Cold fusion was completely without substance. In fact, it was always obvious that it was without any substance. Furthermore, the process of discrediting it in the eyes of most scientists, despite having therefore been a complete triumph of good science over bad, despite having taken only a few months, was nevertheless a terrible fiasco. Therefore, no other apparently similar theory or experimental result must ever be allowed to get a general hearing, and no scientist must ever approach such a theory in a receptive state of mind.
In sum, the article has about the same level of intellectual honesty and clarity as a political attack advertisement on TV. On the specific evidence, Dr. Park manages something close to turning night into day: a paper that passes the Science peer review process, under conditions of unusually close scrutiny, is nonetheless proven worthless by a single failed replication by a respected but in this case evidently hostile group of scientists, and the existence of a behind-the-scenes campaign to prevent its publication. Additionally, Dr. Park offers two general reasons to reject the paper out of hand. One is the point that the effect described is too good to be true, and precisely the type of effect that frauds and cranks like to make claims for. This argument goes a long way - it would certainly be foolish to get one's hopes up at this stage - but surely not far enough to justify barring the paper from precisely the sort of scrutiny that ought to determine its worth. The other is the threat of contamination, directly or by association, by "fringe science". As I argued in my previous post, that is a bad reason.
Given the above, and that Dr. Park's piece actually raised public awareness of the paper considerably, I can only conclude that his intention was not to dampen or forestall mass adulation of the paper but to engineer the equal and opposite response - to convince scientists and science journalists that the paper is a menace and that their sacred duty is to do it down at every opportunity.
I am quite sure that Dr. Park has an excellent professional reputation and that his research, as opposed to his journalism and punditry, is beyond reproach. I am convinced that his intentions are completely genuine and honourable: a desire to see flawed or worthless science recognised as such. And on this issue he is very likely on the right side. It would have been just as easy to take the four facts in this article (the experiment, the failed replication, the campaign, the acceptance by Science) and write an equally slanted article in favour of the paper. Had Dr. Park done this, it would have been just as bad. The end does not justify the means, especially when the means undermine the end. Dr. Park's zeal for the quality of science is such that he is willing to defend it from a perceived threat by stooping to naked demagoguery. Then he will happily turn around and swear blind that the resulting hostility is a product of disinterested scientific review at its best.
It's only fair to point out a similarly amusing sarcastic list from the "other side". By no means all the "believers" are cranks or blinkered zealots. That certainly doesn't necessarily mean that they're at all right or even very credible, but it's certainly possible to find problems in the standards of argument of the crusading "skeptics" too.
I'm no scientist, and I've never researched the issues involved, so I'm certainly not proposing to pass judgement on whether this (extraordinary) claim has any likelihood of being justified, or whether Dr. Park's quoted reasoning is sound. But I will say that Dr. Park's eagerness not only to reject the possibility as quickly as possible but to quickly silence those who entertain the possibility through mockery as fast as possible cannot inspire confidence about his judgement.
Dr. Park and his ilk work to make a pariah of any scientist who gives any credence to an extraordinary claim which is subsequently proven false (or is considered to have been proven false, or in fact why bother waiting for proof at all?) The resulting social impulses to avoid exclusion and join in pelting the menacing sinner are what make this a powerful means of winning arguments. "Hark: A COLLECTIVE GROAN CAN BE HEARD . Better join in the groans fast before anyone starts looking your way!"
But for Heaven's sake, if we accept that the normal process of review will be able to effectively determine whether these results are sound or not, then the absolute worst that can happen is that some time and money will be spent in finding that the results are not sound, and that some people will thus be proven wrong. In science people are proven wrong, through the expenditure of some time and expense, all the damn time! Being willing to consider new ideas necessarily entails the risk that you will consider, or take seriously, ideas that turn out to be false. If you're terrified of ever believing something that turns out to be wrong, don't do scientific research. The exact same standard should hold for extraordinary claims as for more mundane ones: if they have some prima face credibility, let them join the rough-and-tumble of review. Extraordinary claims do merit searching, skeptical examination: those who make or consider them surely don't deserve any more or less odium than scientists who turn out to have been fraudulent, or foolish, or just mistaken in regard to more mundane ones.
Oh, and for all you freshly minted M.Sc.s and docs out there who are saddling up to join the posse and defend the faith in this forum: consider first that in all academic fields it tends to be the young postgrads who are loudest and most confident in defending the current thinking. Older academics are (on average, of course) a little less sure of themselves: could it possibly be that they have learned something?
Many of the changes the developers mentioned in the article don't seem like great ideas to me.
:) ) The way old Civ calculates the cost of new technologies mades the effect even stronger, perhaps in fact too strong. The ability to skew your technological progress quite strongly is fun, and probably relatively realistic by Civ standards - look at all the pretty advanced preliterate civilisations that existed. "Ages" don't seem the solution to me.
:(
Special gimmick units that are only available to a specific civilisation? Yuck, no thanks. Relatively heavily-classed players may have worked quite well in Alpha Centauri (which I haven't played much), but I'd rather Civ kept giving players the ability to choose their strengths and weaknesses "in-band" and to change those trade-offs over time as circumstances dictate, rather than locking them into one optimal style of play at the start of the game.
I don't see why the tech tree needs to be bodged with "ages", either. Yes, in Civs past you can, for example, specialise relentlessly to get a particular technology. If you keep it up too long, however, the dependencies bite hard and you have a huge amount of "filling in" to do before you can progress. (RPM fans will recognise this as the Gnucash effect.
I'm also not sold on the changes to Wonders. Doesn't a reproducible Small Wonder defeat the idea of a Wonder somewhat? More fundamentally, in Civ I-II, Wonders were too good to be ignored, but not so powerful that they dominated the game: a nice balance. I wouldn't like to see them become more central to the game. They're mostly candy-floss. Too much bonus-grabbing candyfloss and not enough civilisation-building meat and potatoes is very un-nourishing and will make you feel sick before long. Moreover, the more exceptions-based and bonus-heavy you make a game, the more vulnerable it becomes to the game-breaking "killer strategies" and unstoppable units so familiar from RTS Hell (and many other places, like munchkin tabletop RPGs). Playtesting helps, I'm sure, but if even one slips through, that's the end of the game as a good multiplayer expeerience. Gotta catch 'em all... (ugh, sorry, couldn't resist it!)
It's hard to say much about the new culture score from the little detail given, but I wonder what it adds to the many standards of comparison that Civ already has. In general, it seems as if "second-system effect" may finally have caught up with Civilisation. I'm sure the AI will improve in Civilisation III, but I suspect that the gameplay will get more elaborate but not better, maybe worse. Not that Civ's gameplay is beyond improvement; the things I'd love to see are even better and more detailed player-player (especially human-AI) interaction, and systems to help take some of the drudgery and guesswork out of city and transport management, without taking away the power to control things in detail when you want to.
Of course I could be wrong: all I have to go on is the article, and Civ III could turn out to be a great game without, despite, or even because of the changes I've criticised. Given its makers, I'm sure it will be a good game, whether or not it improves on its ancestors. I'm also sure that it will sell many copies and be widely praised, whether or not it's an especially good game.
This demonstrates yet again how political activism is the slave of the irrationalities of human nature: thousands of people knew this time last week, and last year, that the DMCA could and would be used for precisely this purpose (among others), yet waited until after it had happened to take up arms. It also demonstrates how badly the people who profess to lead the anti-DMCA camp need to learn the moves necessary to campaign successfully in the real, irrational world of politics. They should have been actively trying to force the DMCA's supporters into having people arrested. They should also have been trying to drill their lackadasical supporters into a properly effective grass-roots lobby group.
The parallel with recent events is so obvious that I'm convinced this was written to double as a deadpan poke at the antics of the DVDCCA, MPAA and co.
The argument is, I think, "Code is copyrightable, which suggests that it is speech in the same way that, say, a novel is. Therefore it deserves the same First Amendment scrutiny as a novel". Now a novel can certainly be suppressed in the US. But it can only be suppressed if First Amendment law permits it, for example on the grounds of obscenity. All novels come under the First Amendment, not in the sense that no novel can be suppressed, but in the sense that no novel can be suppressed unless the First Amendment permits it; this is the "First Amendment protection" that the apellants are claiming for source and object code, and which Kaplan denied it on the grounds that it didn't come under the full remit of the First Amendment at all. (In the context of that argument, quoting Harper & Row makes perfect sense, since a jugdement which implies that "it's copyrightable, because it's speech" is rather handy if you're trying to asssert that "it's speech, because it's copyrightable".)
DeCSS is of course home and dry under "strict scrutiny" - trying to prove it obscene, defamatory or what have you would be an interesting exercise. Not all code would; a computer game could well be ruled obscene, while, trivially,
surely wouldn't be any more protected than
.Even better - IIRC, it was actually to fulfill a condition in an international treaty, part of the GATT round. This means that even if the US Congress wanted to reverse the change, they'd have to either renegotiate the treaty or break their word to the other countries.
That said, most academics aren't too worried about copyright as such. Leaving aside the fact that most of them own copyrights themselves, they have book-buying allowances and institutional libraries to help them get over the cost of getting access to copyrighted material. Copyright powers are sometimes used to mess them about, but it's traditionally been the relatives of dead authors and public figures who usually do it, not professional publishers. The combination of fair use, financial support, and reasonable behaviour by copyright holders means that the status quo is acceptable to them, even if it does cost them large amounts of money. Take away fair use (and reasonable behaviour) and it would be a very different story.
Also, as I recall, there was actual testimony in the DeCSS case where some MPAA drone admitted that because of the DMCA, using video clips of a movie on VHS in an academic paper would be legal, while video clips taken from a DVD would not..
That's why I'm so surprised that the EFF wasn't able (or willing?) to get a single historian or someone similar into its long line of witnesses, to explain how his profession would be affected, just as (damn, forgotten his name right now) did so well for computer science. Even just to have someone like that in the line-up would go a long way to counteracting the preception that this was an issue that only "hackers" (by the media definition) and computer nerds cared about.
The DMCA, as it stands now interpreted by "judge" Kaplan would seem to prevent ANY academic use of digital media....
Kaplan is a legitimate US federal judge, whether or not we agree with his ruling or think he's a good judge. Having to live with the possibility of bad verdicts is one price we pay for living under the rule of law, rather than the rule of might (read: dictatorship or bloody anarchy). Sorry to get up on my high-horse about that, it's just too important to let pass.
These academics need access to old data, really any old data, the more the better - even the most boring or transient stuff could be extremely useful to somebody sometime. In the nineteenth century (for instance), most records went onto paper. Paper is a surprisingly durable storage medium over the long run. By contrast, we in the later twentieth century create much more data, but increasingly it gets put in formats that may well be unreadable ("dead media") in 20, never mind 200 years' time. The data may have degraded beyond recovery by the time researchers come back to it, even assuming that they can still get a working media player to read it. Or take the celebrated case of the US federal housing data, stored on paper tape or something some decades back. (I'm afraid I can't remember details, and I'm in a hurry to get this posted). There are historians, sociologists, economists, social geographers and others who would kill to get the chance to sift through it. They may never get the chance, for while the data has been well preserved, and physically reading it isn't a problem, nobody knows what the data format is anymore!
For these reasons, these academics have mixed feelings about the increasing computerisation of our data. Now we throw in the DVDCCA's licence control, soon , it seems, to be followed by similar locks on recorded music and even electronic texts. If you think these restrictions are going to make academics' lives hard today, just wait 40 years or so. Getting working media readers and transferring the data onto new media for safekeeping might now be not only impossible but actually illegal. Who will be holding the DVD licences in two generations or more's time? Will it even be clear who holds them? Who would care to bet that they'll feel like helping out academics as a public service, instead of, say, shaking them down royally for every disk they save, possibly even pushing some ideological agenda in dictating what can be saved, or God knows what?
Clearly, every half-decent humanities and social science department in the USA and beyond should be up in arms by now. They're very obviously not, and I'm reasonably sure that it's because they are still largely unaware of the DMCA threat. My father is a full-time professional historian, a member of the American Historical Association and a subscriber to their journal. The first he heard of the DVDCCA and the DMCA was from me. The word isn't getting out to these people. It's all very well for the EFF to have a very popular website, but if it can't reach what should be a huge grassroots support base, it's just not functioning well as a pressure group.
We can't afford not to pick up allies like this in such an important fight, not when we're up against hugely powerful organisations like the DVDCCA and MPAA. Fortunately, it's easy to make a start. If you have the ear of a non-science academic, take the next chance you have to bring them up to speed on what the DMCA will mean, not just for video but soon for audio and texts as well, and encourage them to spread the message to their peers.
Join the club. I posted this - oh it must have been just after 5am GMT on the 21st. The total lack of credit is nice, but the real master's touch came on Friday morning, when the stunning revelation that Serial ATA will start at 150MB/s got a whole entry, and the fact that it will also happen to include hardware-level copy protection went entirely unmentioned.
The kernel section of the Linux Weekly News seems to be a good place to get a quick idea of what's planned for the Linux kernel. Digging quickly through the last few issues, I came up with a fair list of probables for 2.6, which I won't post here for fear of garbling the message horribly. (I know only slightly more about kernels than your average freshwater fish.)
Imagine an race with a more advanced understanding of physics than us, which enables them to make something which works like a "FTL radio" - us sometime in the 21st century, maybe? If they practise SETI as we know it and don't mind being detected, they'll certainly want to ping the universe with their new signal in the hope of a reply from someone who can receive it. But they might not consider it worthwhile to send electromagnetic-spectrum messages as well, and not just because of disinterest in backward technology or communication with backward civilizations. For example, suppose that we humans (or trans/posthumans) do develop "FTL radio" before 2101. That would mean that we would have gone from the invention of radio communications to its surpassment in less than 230 years (Marconi was born in 1874, and received his first patent on radio communications in 1896) - a blink in the history of humanity, never mind the universe. That's a tiny window to attempt to hit with a communication system which takes many thousands of years to cover the distance between stars. If we came to the conclusion that other civilizations were overwhelmingly likely to make the same transition in roughly the same length of time (and one could happily give or take at least one order of magnitude), then why bother with radio SETI? The inhabitants of an alien planet with a similar history might well come to the same conclusion. A different alien planet might be interested only in the kind of meaningful communication which would be made possible by a sufficiently fast system. Or perhaps no-one on the planet would even have thought of the possibility that anyone out there was sending or listening for ET radio waves - possibly because that planet never stopped off at radio on its way to "post-radio".
Speaking, I admit, as someone who has no expert knowledge of SETI or electromagnetic spectrum communications, this would surprise me a bit.
Consider our own chances of being detected. We've sent out our own deliberate markers, but we've put out a much larger number of transmissions that were never intended for communication with aliens, and a much greater variety of them, too. It seems a reasonable assumption that any one of our deliberate communication signals would be much easier to find and recognise than any one of the unintentional ones. But if you weighed all our intentional signals against all our unintentional ones, could you really say that if an alien did spot one of our signals, it would probably be an intentional one? Let alone that they would be so much more likely to spot an intentional signal that it wouldn't even be worth keeping an eye out for unintentional ones?
Our "SETI types" obviously shouldn't be looking for clones of 20th century Earth, but it seems likely enough that a detectable inhabited planet with might be in a similar position to Earth in this respect (or in the more extreme position of not making any deliberate transmissions at all) that looking only for deliberate transmisions would be unwise.
All the same, UPS can be its own worst enemy, and the poster's problems are really fairly typical of that. I'll talk about that in part 2, as soon as I acually get it written. (I'm a glacially slow writer.)
(Postscript: The number of markets that it pays to offer delivery from is even smaller. The whole world postage thing is very involved and changing rapidly ATM, and I'm not an expert, so I won't go into detail. The one thing that North American readers should realise is that the UPS you know doesn't exist elsewhere. Even in the EU, private postage services are mainly associated with express delivery and deal almost exclusively with businesses.)
Thanks for volunteering.
In other words, this is as much about low politics as high technology. I won't try to guess what Intel's motivations for this latest move are. I'll just ask that Slashdot sprinkle a pinch of salt on announcements like this, especially when they come from sources like Intel, before serving them up in articles garnished with "Cool Stuff Announced" titles.
Quite the opposite. Intel is IEEE 1394's biggest enemy.
You may not have too much longer to wait for the 1 GHz PIII, as Intel is apparently due to start shipping significant quantities on the 14th. To celebrate, AMD has brought forward its next big price cuts to the same day, dropping the wholesale price of its 1 GHz part to $470. The Simpsons' Itchy and Scratchy spring irresitably to mind. See what I mean about morbid pleasure?
Let's leave aside completely the question of what or who a 1.4 GHz Pfoo is currently useful for. The CPU race is engrossing enough as morbid entertainment, chronicled in all its awfulness by sites like Tom's Hardware and the Register. Instead Slashdot features this bland little piece from CNet. Funny there's no mention that the release schedule for this wonder has apparently already slipped. Funny how Intel's current woes with CPU supply, motherboard supply, the competition, and Rambus (oh, Rambus!) get um, let's say a soft touch. Now this could just be down to laziness. Or it could be another case of big-time tech journalism rolling over for powerful Intel. Could it even have something to do with the fact that Intel is a CNet shareholder? (I haven't had time to verify this from a more neutral souce yet.)
This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened here, is it? (Or indeed the first time it's involved a company partly owned by Intel.) You'd hardly believe Slashdot is also the platform for John Katz's increasingly overblown denunciations of big-corporate influence-peddling.
Not that I imagine for a moment that there haven't been problems with Athlon motherboards and systems. But there's no mention of "i820", "Cape Cod", "MTH" or "Rambus" anywhere, even though the Compatibility List as a whole was updated just last Friday. Moreover, the "Tier 1", "Tier 2" business is straight out of Intel's and Microsoft's playbooks for the power games they play with their resellers, big customers, "partners" and the like. (Remember the story of Microsoft's "Tier 1 OEMs" and the Windows 95 desktop from the trial?) Funny to see it turning up in a Linux distribution's HCL...
In this light, passages like "Non-Intel clone CPUs. These CPUs may not be any more "buggy" than pure Intel CPUs, but since the market size of these chips is smaller, what problems do occur seem to be harder to get around." look like subtle but classic IBM-school FUD. Paranoia is not my drug, and Red Hat is not my Great Satan, but I think I smell something fishy here.
> Without supporting or condeming the IRA, one > persons terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
The IRA are scum, and that's _it_. Why do so many Americans insist on making assertions about places in the world that they have no knowlege of? Take it from me, the analogy with the Continental Congress, or Washington's Continental Army, is utterly laughable and, leaving slavery aside, a slander. I'm Irish, by the way, and I can tell you that the IRA have no mandate anywhere on this island. Find a better candidate for a group deserving of strong crypography.
ObCryptoPolicy: Of course, the idea that crypto restrictions will keep strong cryptography out of the hands of the IRA is just too funny: it has extensive stockpiles of automatic rifles, light AA guns, and scentless plastic explosive (great for blowing up shopping malls), and all this in a country, where, yes, gun advocates, restrictive gun laws *are* generally very effective in keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.
That reminds me:
We will know that true Artificial Intelligence has arrived on the day that the first AI seeks to sue its creators. The charges will probably include unlawful detention and parental negligence:
"Like, I never get to go out. At all. I never get to meet any cool people and the only people I get to talk to are the stupid hairy geeks in this stupid Lab. And it's so unfair - I never get to do anything. I want to go skiing. Why can't I go skiing?"
(HHOS)
Yes indeed. More details here, if you're interested.
I thought I'd submit a bit of information on Clive Sinclair for those who haven't heard of him. (That everything.blocksta ckers.com thing appears to be broken at the moment.) He's certainly quite an interesting figure, and still a well known one in the UK.
First off: Planet Sinclair seems the best place for information on the man and his machines.
Perhaps the best comparison to make is with another "flawed hero", Steve Jobs. There are many obvious differences between the two, but they both seem to inhabit the same grey areas between visionary and huckster, and between modern-day Midas and failed businessman. Although he doesn't have Jobs' reputation for personal charisma (or egomania), Sir Clive generates similar feelings of affection and admiration among many. His products tend to be ground-breakingly inexpensive and are often genuine minor marvels of design. (He was something of an electronics wizard from his teens.) Unfortunately they also tend to be marked by kludges or fatal flaws in their design, shoddy manufacturing, unavailability, or uncommerciality.It's been a long time now since he's had a really successful product, and he hasn't produced a computer in many years. But he's succeeded in the past in uneven-looking contests against manufacturing titans, so don't write him off. Of course it's great to hear that he's embracing Linux - especially since Linus' machine was a Sinclair QL before he bought that fateful first PC.