I was thrilled to see Mononoke distributed in the United States and voiced by pro actors like Bill Thornton and Claire Danes.
However, I took it with a grain of salt because of the nature of corporat culture.
Consider a big company that makes cars, like Ford. It will sometimes innovate and sometimes fall back to basics, depending on the lemming-like groupthink patterns of middle management.
Sometimes the lemmings will follow a rogue vp or engineer and make something new and brilliant, reaching out to a market of people in a different culture.
Sometimes they will return to some archivally determined basic, conservative operations in an attempt to bring back the good old days.
This cyclical pattern applies to media as well. If one accepts this dynamic, then it may be better for Miyazaki to produce independently, as he would have to conform to a corporate renaissance of classical Disney production standards to continue producing there.
I'd rather he stayed independent than turn into a lemming.
economic slowdown
on
The New Athlons
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
My goodness.. this is all like rearranging chairs on the Titanic. This is a serious global recession here, folks. Do you think athlon is going to be supporting these chips or continuing development in two years?
The weakest companies in chip manufacture ar going to be weeded out. There will be a few competitors, or maybe only one, in each tech-industry subcategory.
I would not say that Intel makes better technology, but it has better political-action-committee hires and better schmoozing skills, and will likely come under the protection of the United States when the real economic shcink-back begins and we revive the ancient pracitice of protecting our old industries.
AMD, athlon, etc. are unlikely to merit this protection.
Of course, those of you who change your technology several times a year at investments of hundreds of dollars a pop might not care. I've owned the same computer since I was 14 and not 'cause I am 1337 either, it's cause I've not been able to scrape up the cash for a new one that's worth buying.
THE PURPLE BOOK "contained the hardware schematics for the IBM PC as well as the code listings for the ROM BIOS," Dave Bradley, one of the machine's 12 original designers, later explained to me. "It contained just about everything you'd want to know if you were going to build a device that would plug into the IBM PC."
In the Purple Book, as Bradley said during the panel, "We told all the PC secrets."
IBM wasn't the first personal computer maker to spill its guts. Apple published the source code for its Apple II. Atari and Commodore also offered similarly extensive documentations. But for Big Blue, a company that built a dynasty on proprietary products, the Purple Book represented a break with tradition as almost as radical as Martin Luther's breach with the Holy Mother Church.
WHY DID IBM SO WILLINGLY bare the soul of its new machine? Bradley again: IBM wanted to "make it as simple as possible to design hardware and software that would work with the PC."
"We wanted the software and hardware industry to participate."
Participate they did. What's more, the Purple Book made the IBM PC easy to copy, and thus, in came the clones. The result: A de facto standard was born, and that standard made way for the widespread deployment and use of PCs. The rest, as they say, is history.
The historical significance is the parallel that exists between the Purple Book of yesterday and the open-source movement of today. The comparison isn't a perfect one. The Purple Book did not constitute a license for use; IBM retained intellectual property rights.
Whatever! The retaining of intellectual property rights is ther whole point. What they did is what everyone else who had attempted to put out a PC would have to do in that era. The subset of technicians working on these technologies was quite small- small enough that a collegial flow of information was necessary even to drum upo interest in one's hardware.
So what IBM was doing was trying to raise itself to a playing field which Apple and Commodore had already delineated; to break into a technological community which was already occupied with other hardwares, it had to disseminate technical information.
There is a parallel today; Geron, the company which licensed the technology to extract stem cells from blastocyst-stage embryos, dissseminated the technology, advice and support to institutions of learning, retains commercial rights to any salable products that come out of these laboratories - or even the precursors of those products.
Then and now, such a technique is to take advantage of an academic desire for learning, or a desire to help the sick, and commercialize its output.
There is really no choice for software developers in the Microsoft world, or for stem cell scientists outside the apron of federal approval, except to sell their first-born breakthroughs to loan sharks.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; capitalist systems cannot sustain innovative energy or scientific responsibility.
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce? Faced with such an adversary, does a plain webserver stand a chance, much less one that is virtually stagnant? True, the dramatic drop in Apache's market share comes from just two large ISPs, but will they be the only ones to switch?
I don't know about you, but I think this guy is a shill for the.net people. You know, the people over at MS that think we want to plug in our websites like our TV sets, pay metered fees to a webservices provider, and pretend we are actually running a business.
I'd rather run my own shit web-server wise, and then have someone like Loudcloud style business model advise me on the e-commerce and user interface and stuff like that - then do it myself.
So many companies are going bust these days, outsourcing the very marketing and user interface of one's e-business is like getting one's automotive steel supply from a steelmaker that is 40% likely to go bankrupt in the next year.
Linux et al is for the radical libertarian survivors out there. Like the Ford corporation, which was one of the first vertical integration innovators, with control of its supply chain, you should know from mouth to anus what your company, and industry, is up to at any given moment.
You can always control and update your own software, and pay for technical advice when needed instead of metered-cost tushy wiping from a big e-services provider that's going to give you shitty tech support anyway.
Basically you are penetrating an already 0wned computer, but this still exposes you to liabilities. It's a precipitation of the libertarian or wild wild west version of the Internet. The thing to do is to get a respected authority, such as the FBI or the police, to notify the 0wned, hence saving yourself from accusations of propagating Code Red or being a cracker yourself.
IDRM will not pursue research into the legal and social issues of DRM. IDRM is concerned with legal and social issues only to the extent that they affect or constrain DRM technology. As the IDRM RG intends to focus on technical issues, it will address technologies that promote both copy-protection and fair-use copying of digital objects. IDRM will pursue research into DRM technology with a focus on the end-to-end and IP network infrastructure issues of DRM.
What the heck? I don't think that someone who views legal and social issues as a constraint on technology should be developing the technology.
The people who develop technologies deeply rooted in the social context have truly achieved their dreams; as these technologies gain widespread use, they transform society and enrich their creators.
In the case of copy protections and other forms of rights management, these technologists are inventing far away from the wishes of society.
If the mainstream press has understood antyhing, it is that people want to widely share and download music, to create their own unique musical soundtracks and archives, and to share music for free.
If digital rights management becomes widespread, it will only be because the influence of money, and not that of a vast social trend, caused it to happen.
The technologists who make it won't ever be able to rest, they will be in a permanent arms race with those who try to crack the technology. They'll be foot soldiers in a war between money and a social trend.
I doubt that rights management, an algorithmic, bureaucratic process, can win against fair use, a social and organic process. I think the people who live and love the science of copy protection should look in the long term, and use their talents in the interests of people, rather than money.
"If you look at an encyclopedia, you'll see a great deal of knowledge of the world represented in the form of articles. Common sense is exactly not this knowledge. Common sense is the complement of this knowledge. It is the white space behind the words. It is all of the knowledge that the article writer assumed all of his/her readers would already have prior to reading the article -- knowledge that could be put to use in order to understand the article. Cyc is about representing and automating the white space." (I love that answer.)
Common sense is about representing and automating the white space?
I think these AI researchers need to talk to a few more sociologists. Human common sense is extremely culturally divergent and goes far beyond the simple, textbook logic cases that certain engineers in this field would probably cite. "Reading between the lines" involves not some native common sense that is wedded to intelligence, but a collectively evolved cultural contextualization. When we read an article in an encyclopedia, a lot of other stuff other than intelligence comes into play: x years of public school education, idiomatic constructs, varying by geographic location, that may or may not enhance or obscure meaning, and, of course, the double meanings and entendres inserted by bored or biased encyclopedia writers.
The entire postmodern project of literary criticism has been aimed at proving this point- at proving that there is no such thing as a standardized set of meanings, and that every meaning is contextualized. The Modernists wanted to rationalize and bureacratize speech, to restrict the number of meanings, and to leave what is unsaid in a narrow, predictable whitespace of a unified "common sense."
Of course, there is a language like this, developed in the first half of this century. It takes away as many English words as possible to restrict the meanings that we are able to THINK, let alone say. Of course, this language is called Newspeak.
The society we live in has put a higher premium on the mental skills, that's what is going on.
To grok this we need to go back to the original Greco-Roman games. The games were feats of athletic skill and battle strategy, which were definitely essential survival skills during those days.
Today, while these skills are still important, the mental aspect of strategy and tactics has become far more important.
When a panoply of technologies can deter even the largest crowd (audio detterence technology, microwaves meant to temporarily blind people mounted on tanks are all part of the "nonlethal" arsenal) the controllers of these technologies are at the crux of social decisions.
The Int'l Olympic Committee is supposed to consider the social relationships of the Games, their deeper meaning, etc. along with all the cash and entertainment values of the Games. Perhaps, by adding chess, this social value is their primary consideration.
(It certainly won't add any entertainment or monetary value to the Games!)
The creation of a false geek culture is at hand. There are many things, such as science fiction like Dune, that merit the slavering worship of Slashdotters. Dune for instance brings up many pressing scientific and ethical issues.
This coffee pot does not.
It's rather a fetish, a symbol for religious worship in the attempt to create community. It is supposed to radiate defiance and humor, but it doesn't. It's rather empty in fact.
It's not the first webcam, the coffee pot is the object of observation of the first webcam. It glorified a culture of work, actually, business culture in geekdom before it existed; people would drink the coffee, and as the pot emptied and refilled it was a metaphor for productivity.
It's like selling the dust that someone scraped up from the NASA lab when they were testing a Mars camera. It's not the dust from Mars, but an adjunct to the technical process in developing a Mars camera. Its meaning is borrowed and tenuous.
The actual web cam would be a better auction item, at least it would have some interesting technical value. This coffee pot can't even make coffee- it leaks water, according to the EBAY ad. In fact, it may not even be the real Trojan coffee pot, unless you are one of those geeks who has some snapshots of the motherfucker on your hard drive somewhere, in which case you are the exact sort of geek I am decrying against here. You are fetishizing the meaningless and debasing the real meaning all the while.
Geeks are supposed to be separate from the self-referentialism, fake romance, and vapidity of the modern age. Act like it.
How is this viewed generally in terms of Web development. It seems to be something that was designed specifically for this intercompatability. i would like to know what has been compromised in terms of other functionalities for CURL, in order to be all things to all people? Especially since as a plugin, it will be something that people can try and remove quickly if they don't like it. As has been discussed in previous posts there has not been a lot of interest thus far. If it were kickass, it would be a little more popular now 'cause everyone can use it with their existing work on the web, right?
Furthermore, I have always believed that a universal standard is not always a good thing for its own sake. Consider the commercial applications of sites on the Web that are only readable through a particular technology, and translator programs do not capture the full glory of the site. Yes you can translate but it's like dewatermarking a copyrighted music file, it sounds and looks like shit. For visual media on the Net, like maybe sitcoms or whatever that want to broadcast there rather than on TV, it would probably be a good idea to write in a language that's isolated from others commonly used on the Web. I could even see rules that make the.tv domains specifically restricted to sites in such isolative languages, in order to support TV-appliance technology using the Web and other peripheral economies.
when computers and machines do humanlike tasks such as basic sorting of real world objects...
and they don't get all hot and bothered when they do non-machine like tasks, such as lifting big cars and things?
Robots that walk like people, human facial expressions on computer-graphics simulation.. they all generate so much interest among technical people.
Perhaps, not being a technical person, I am more interested in the great alienness of machines. I am interested in earth movers at mines; the Big Dig in Boston; construction cranes; auto assembly lines; mainframes; enterprise-class servers; billion dollar electronic fund transfers.
The replacement of humans in industrial processes with machines has always been an object of industrial design. The assembly line replaced the guild style craft. Instead of creating little portable machines that aided the watchmaker and the bootmaker in their old craft methodologies, inventors remade the ways of creating goods; those guild methods were replaced by roboticized methods of manufacture.
I would rather see a chip in the head of the watch maker that gives him eagle eye vision, or an augmentation of intelligence or emotional sales skills in a salesperson, than something that would eliminate these people from their industries.
I really want a PDA and I don't have any money for one yet, but I am thinking now that maybe I shouldn't get one. I am thinking back to Johnny Mnemonic, in which a person is used as a mule for sensitive information. Spies et al have done this for centuries but PDAs and laptops simply institutionalize the process in the corporate world.
Insofar as most digitally stored information is carried on an Internet that ends in computers with plugs attaching them to walls, most of this mule stuff won't happen. People may still be yoked to information by their company from time to time..but with PDAs and laptops, companies can upgrade their security for confidential information yet still maintain it in a digital, transferable format.
There are some of you right now, I am sure, who are forced to ride planes with dumb, dull, angry bodyguards all the time because you are the only person with the information who can explain it to other people who need the information and your company doesn't want to send it over the Net.
I have no clue what can be done about this tendency, but the PDA-ification of our society makes it more likely. I am all for the human potential of portable information, but we have to smash the corporations and states that would like to make info-drug mules out of us before we can fully embrace this portability.
Linux fetish and mediated slashdot
on
Joy of Linux
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· Score: 3
Yet another book for the outsiders. But is it really for the outsiders, are are most of the slashdotters actually outsiders?
I bet most people on this site are like me- an amateur sociologist on IE or AOL.
Slashdot hereby further encourages the Linux fetish without any depth or discussion..and I am concluding that slashdot is not for Linux users at all but is meant to humanize them to the outside world.
Here's why..there is too much cultural stuff on this website for it to be anything other than a love letter to the Windows users of the world. I originally started reading it for discussion among linux users that wasn't quite so audience conscious, i.e. discussion without the filtering of marketroids. I was working on a sociology paper that involved "geeks" as it were, and I wanted to read something nonmediated to get a sense of their culture. But I have seen, over the year or so that I have been reading this site, many introductory books about Linux and very few discussions beyond that level.
This is good for many people like the teenagers who are just getting into technology, etc. and yes, I know that this isn't the kernel-developemnt mailing list or anything. But perhaps we should abandon our pretensions and seriously discuss how many of us actually are using linux or have any interest in using linux, and how many of us are just trying to be cooler than thou.
This is the age of Dell computers and that annoying little blond boy who tries to talk parents in to selling his neighbors Dell computers.
Why does the dell sell?
well, 'cause the thing is packaged in a way that an average american consumer can understand.
This Amiga box on the other hand, to whose website I dutifully ventured, has very little information about stuff that I care about. Like how it compares to other newest systems on the market and how much it costs, etc. etc. Instead I am reading a misspelled, non-edited, geekly comparison of the latest thing to the previous Amiga creations.
Slashdot, you are brilliant in many ways but you are a throwback in so many others. From vintage pinball machines to brand name fetishes (Amiga, AMD, etc.), you look back to the Good Old Days of computing and actively help maintain the cachet of brand names that bloody don't well deserve it.
I think it is mucho "leet" to have a $799, fully pre-programmed, fully tech-supported, reasonably configurable and powerful Dell or Gateway box for the average dolt in Peoria, Illinois to buy and set up in his or her home. Steep learning curves are not a priori cool. Hence I am bypassing your latest consumer plug for the Amiga brand..thanks anyway, though.
We live on a water based planet and have a water based economy.. this was not necessarily clear when water was plentiful enuf to be free, but now as it becomes scarce we see how much of our society is undergirded by it.
Hence we are going to Mars with water technology.. water as the base for hydrogen fuel and oxygen for a manned mission. And we wish to terraform Mars, taking hundreds of years and quadrillions of dollars to conform a planet to our needs.
Why don't we do the quicker thing and conform ourselves to the planet's needs?
Consider that we have broken through cloning technology, genetic engineering, etc. before having solved the long distance space transport problem to the degree that would suit the human biology. In other words, it's historically and technologically easier to adapt *ourselves* to Mars, rather than vice versa.
We should engineer carbon-breathing people, able to breathe rarefied Mars air and survive under cold and heat and low gravity..although this would necessitate a fundamental revision of the ATP cycle and other biological processes, in generational terms it may be easier than basing everything on water, which is very rare in the universe. We may benefit here on Earth by reformatting our biology, as we have been steadily destroying the ecology that created us.
Around 10:00 UTC in the morning of July 19th, 2001 a random seed variant of the Code-Red worm (CRv2) began to infect hosts running unpatched versions of Microsoft's IIS webserver.
If I were an insurance adjuster trying to insure peoples' information technology assets, I would have my own experts supervising everyone who was on the insurance plan to ensure that they patched their fucking software.
Or I would make it against the law not to patch one's software, similar to the laws ensuring the vaccination of children, and for the same reasons; such an epidemic, viral or virtual, delivers a powerful blow to our economy and is a matter of national security.
Have you ever heard the story of the old baseball, when the fields were huge and irregular, people wore little to no padding, and most importantly there were not ten zillion geeks roaming like ants over the fields of sports medicine and sports technology in order to ramp up everything to the conceivable maximum?
You know, we draw the line on steroids and such for some reason, but allow other drugs; we outlaw aluminum bats for Little Leaguers but we let people invest millions in designing a better nutrient regimen for sports teams.
The bigger baseball biz gets, the more home run races we will want to see and the farther and farther science will push baseball from the sport that you can see played each weekend at Little League and weekender team fields around the world.
I don't think that a computer can do any thing except put coaches into comeptition with each other for the best equipment and force pitching, hitting and coaching into a computer-determined standardization.
NASA is and has always been somewhat of a supporting agency to US armed forces, so stuff about its budgeting should be considered along with military budgeting issues.
Remember that Bush is demanding accurate accounting from the Pentagon now about its needs for the year- it won't budget deliberately expecting supplementary spending bills in the middle of the year. Every agency, including NASA, will have to have tight budgets from here on in.
This is a manner of managerial control; without secret expenditures, there can be no secret activity with government money. The same applies to NASA
Nasa's unprecedented reporting of its true budgetary situation fits clearly into political context here. It's jumping the gun with full financial disclosure as well as pressuring congresspeople and scientists who support it to raise more money for next fiscal year, even if it has to function under a tighter accounting.
Of course, this may be the start of more privatization of space. NASA can do much more with private money than it can with public money. Remember a lot of the funds in Iran-contra affair were originally private money.
Dont send all that stuff to Mars with these people, folks..really.
We have two ways of developing Mars- tourist method and productive method. In the tourist method, the luxuries from Earth are imported to hermetically sealed hotels, and, like "ecotourists," those who are on Mars are enjoying it for its pristine nature.
The productive method is prefarable; through grueling work over centuries, Mars is terraformed to bring a less exotic but more profound benefit to all humanity.
We should be sending Marines there and oil rig miners- people who are used to very extreme conditions and will relish the hardship and use it as an incentive to change the red planet to something habitable for human life.
We shouldnt be sending people who'll need their booze and blowup dolls by any means.
Of course, a Spartan existence for Mars colonists may encourage a nascent nationalism among them- even a desire for eventual independence from Earth. That's why Earth will want them as dependent on luxuries as possible- to affect their deep politics and character.
Dont think their aren't sci fi hacks who couldnt get published sitting at CIA analyst desks right now thinking about this stuff.
Okay.. so here we have a media, television. It is only being recognized recently as a profound mode of expression, for instance by the archiving of TV that will be going on in massive scale at The Internet Archive
Constitutionally speaking, the right to collect, index and archive TV information any way you want to is equivalent to your right to read any book in a public library (which isn't always the case but that's another story...)
A lot of the time, there is something in a fleeting news broadcast or a commercial that is important in a future investigation. That's why lots of groups and people release information on TV that they want to have a short lifespan.
We have to keep this information. The internet is nowhere near as influential a news source as the television medium, especially in countries where computer ownership is less prevalent. By putting a charge on recording, TiVo seriously compromises our right to free speech.
Slashdot Mirror
I was thrilled to see Mononoke distributed in the United States and voiced by pro actors like Bill Thornton and Claire Danes.
However, I took it with a grain of salt because of the nature of corporat culture.
Consider a big company that makes cars, like Ford. It will sometimes innovate and sometimes fall back to basics, depending on the lemming-like groupthink patterns of middle management.
Sometimes the lemmings will follow a rogue vp or engineer and make something new and brilliant, reaching out to a market of people in a different culture.
Sometimes they will return to some archivally determined basic, conservative operations in an attempt to bring back the good old days.
This cyclical pattern applies to media as well. If one accepts this dynamic, then it may be better for Miyazaki to produce independently, as he would have to conform to a corporate renaissance of classical Disney production standards to continue producing there.
I'd rather he stayed independent than turn into a lemming.
My goodness.. this is all like rearranging chairs on the Titanic. This is a serious global recession here, folks. Do you think athlon is going to be supporting these chips or continuing development in two years?
The weakest companies in chip manufacture ar going to be weeded out. There will be a few competitors, or maybe only one, in each tech-industry subcategory.
I would not say that Intel makes better technology, but it has better political-action-committee hires and better schmoozing skills, and will likely come under the protection of the United States when the real economic shcink-back begins and we revive the ancient pracitice of protecting our old industries.
AMD, athlon, etc. are unlikely to merit this protection.
Of course, those of you who change your technology several times a year at investments of hundreds of dollars a pop might not care. I've owned the same computer since I was 14 and not 'cause I am 1337 either, it's cause I've not been able to scrape up the cash for a new one that's worth buying.
THE PURPLE BOOK "contained the hardware schematics for the IBM PC as well as the code listings for the ROM BIOS," Dave Bradley, one of the machine's 12 original designers, later explained to me. "It contained just about everything you'd want to know if you were going to build a device that would plug into the IBM PC."
In the Purple Book, as Bradley said during the panel, "We told all the PC secrets."
IBM wasn't the first personal computer maker to spill its guts. Apple published the source code for its Apple II. Atari and Commodore also offered similarly extensive documentations. But for Big Blue, a company that built a dynasty on proprietary products, the Purple Book represented a break with tradition as almost as radical as Martin Luther's breach with the Holy Mother Church.
WHY DID IBM SO WILLINGLY bare the soul of its new machine? Bradley again: IBM wanted to "make it as simple as possible to design hardware and software that would work with the PC."
"We wanted the software and hardware industry to participate."
Participate they did. What's more, the Purple Book made the IBM PC easy to copy, and thus, in came the clones. The result: A de facto standard was born, and that standard made way for the widespread deployment and use of PCs. The rest, as they say, is history.
The historical significance is the parallel that exists between the Purple Book of yesterday and the open-source movement of today. The comparison isn't a perfect one. The Purple Book did not constitute a license for use; IBM retained intellectual property rights.
Whatever! The retaining of intellectual property rights is ther whole point. What they did is what everyone else who had attempted to put out a PC would have to do in that era. The subset of technicians working on these technologies was quite small- small enough that a collegial flow of information was necessary even to drum upo interest in one's hardware.
So what IBM was doing was trying to raise itself to a playing field which Apple and Commodore had already delineated; to break into a technological community which was already occupied with other hardwares, it had to disseminate technical information.
There is a parallel today; Geron, the company which licensed the technology to extract stem cells from blastocyst-stage embryos, dissseminated the technology, advice and support to institutions of learning, retains commercial rights to any salable products that come out of these laboratories - or even the precursors of those products.
Then and now, such a technique is to take advantage of an academic desire for learning, or a desire to help the sick, and commercialize its output.
There is really no choice for software developers in the Microsoft world, or for stem cell scientists outside the apron of federal approval, except to sell their first-born breakthroughs to loan sharks.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; capitalist systems cannot sustain innovative energy or scientific responsibility.
and I saw it in its notebooky glory. Oh well, hope whatever problems you're having are resolved quickly and with minimum bullshit.
What would a user rather have -- a free server that does plain webserving, or a moderately priced one that does webserving plus e-commerce? Faced with such an adversary, does a plain webserver stand a chance, much less one that is virtually stagnant? True, the dramatic drop in Apache's market share comes from just two large ISPs, but will they be the only ones to switch?
.net people. You know, the people over at MS that think we want to plug in our websites like our TV sets, pay metered fees to a webservices provider, and pretend we are actually running a business.
I don't know about you, but I think this guy is a shill for the
I'd rather run my own shit web-server wise, and then have someone like Loudcloud style business model advise me on the e-commerce and user interface and stuff like that - then do it myself.
So many companies are going bust these days, outsourcing the very marketing and user interface of one's e-business is like getting one's automotive steel supply from a steelmaker that is 40% likely to go bankrupt in the next year.
Linux et al is for the radical libertarian survivors out there. Like the Ford corporation, which was one of the first vertical integration innovators, with control of its supply chain, you should know from mouth to anus what your company, and industry, is up to at any given moment.
You can always control and update your own software, and pay for technical advice when needed instead of metered-cost tushy wiping from a big e-services provider that's going to give you shitty tech support anyway.
See the Kuro5hin.org story on this issue..here
Basically you are penetrating an already 0wned computer, but this still exposes you to liabilities. It's a precipitation of the libertarian or wild wild west version of the Internet. The thing to do is to get a respected authority, such as the FBI or the police, to notify the 0wned, hence saving yourself from accusations of propagating Code Red or being a cracker yourself.
What a nice visual impact that sheet of writing paper has.
:)
Real writing paper, real script. It looks like a picture, and when the link highlights I get a grin on my face.
All in all very tastefully done and quite creative.
-perdida
Rights management? that's an oxymoron.
IDRM will not pursue research into the legal and social issues of DRM. IDRM is concerned with legal and social issues only to the extent that they affect or constrain DRM technology. As the IDRM RG intends to focus on technical issues, it will address technologies that promote both copy-protection and fair-use copying of digital objects. IDRM will pursue research into DRM technology with a focus on the end-to-end and IP network infrastructure issues of DRM.
What the heck? I don't think that someone who views legal and social issues as a constraint on technology should be developing the technology.
The people who develop technologies deeply rooted in the social context have truly achieved their dreams; as these technologies gain widespread use, they transform society and enrich their creators.
In the case of copy protections and other forms of rights management, these technologists are inventing far away from the wishes of society.
If the mainstream press has understood antyhing, it is that people want to widely share and download music, to create their own unique musical soundtracks and archives, and to share music for free.
If digital rights management becomes widespread, it will only be because the influence of money, and not that of a vast social trend, caused it to happen.
The technologists who make it won't ever be able to rest, they will be in a permanent arms race with those who try to crack the technology. They'll be foot soldiers in a war between money and a social trend.
I doubt that rights management, an algorithmic, bureaucratic process, can win against fair use, a social and organic process. I think the people who live and love the science of copy protection should look in the long term, and use their talents in the interests of people, rather than money.
"If you look at an encyclopedia, you'll see a great deal of knowledge of the world represented in the form of articles. Common sense is exactly not this knowledge. Common sense is the complement of this knowledge. It is the white space behind the words. It is all of the knowledge that the article writer assumed all of his/her readers would already have prior to reading the article -- knowledge that could be put to use in order to understand the article. Cyc is about representing and automating the white space." (I love that answer.)
Common sense is about representing and automating the white space?
I think these AI researchers need to talk to a few more sociologists. Human common sense is extremely culturally divergent and goes far beyond the simple, textbook logic cases that certain engineers in this field would probably cite. "Reading between the lines" involves not some native common sense that is wedded to intelligence, but a collectively evolved cultural contextualization. When we read an article in an encyclopedia, a lot of other stuff other than intelligence comes into play: x years of public school education, idiomatic constructs, varying by geographic location, that may or may not enhance or obscure meaning, and, of course, the double meanings and entendres inserted by bored or biased encyclopedia writers.
The entire postmodern project of literary criticism has been aimed at proving this point- at proving that there is no such thing as a standardized set of meanings, and that every meaning is contextualized. The Modernists wanted to rationalize and bureacratize speech, to restrict the number of meanings, and to leave what is unsaid in a narrow, predictable whitespace of a unified "common sense."
Of course, there is a language like this, developed in the first half of this century. It takes away as many English words as possible to restrict the meanings that we are able to THINK, let alone say. Of course, this language is called Newspeak.
The society we live in has put a higher premium on the mental skills, that's what is going on.
To grok this we need to go back to the original Greco-Roman games. The games were feats of athletic skill and battle strategy, which were definitely essential survival skills during those days.
Today, while these skills are still important, the mental aspect of strategy and tactics has become far more important.
When a panoply of technologies can deter even the largest crowd (audio detterence technology, microwaves meant to temporarily blind people mounted on tanks are all part of the "nonlethal" arsenal) the controllers of these technologies are at the crux of social decisions.
The Int'l Olympic Committee is supposed to consider the social relationships of the Games, their deeper meaning, etc. along with all the cash and entertainment values of the Games. Perhaps, by adding chess, this social value is their primary consideration.
(It certainly won't add any entertainment or monetary value to the Games!)
The creation of a false geek culture is at hand. There are many things, such as science fiction like Dune, that merit the slavering worship of Slashdotters. Dune for instance brings up many pressing scientific and ethical issues.
This coffee pot does not.
It's rather a fetish, a symbol for religious worship in the attempt to create community. It is supposed to radiate defiance and humor, but it doesn't. It's rather empty in fact.
It's not the first webcam, the coffee pot is the object of observation of the first webcam. It glorified a culture of work, actually, business culture in geekdom before it existed; people would drink the coffee, and as the pot emptied and refilled it was a metaphor for productivity.
It's like selling the dust that someone scraped up from the NASA lab when they were testing a Mars camera. It's not the dust from Mars, but an adjunct to the technical process in developing a Mars camera. Its meaning is borrowed and tenuous.
The actual web cam would be a better auction item, at least it would have some interesting technical value. This coffee pot can't even make coffee- it leaks water, according to the EBAY ad. In fact, it may not even be the real Trojan coffee pot, unless you are one of those geeks who has some snapshots of the motherfucker on your hard drive somewhere, in which case you are the exact sort of geek I am decrying against here. You are fetishizing the meaningless and debasing the real meaning all the while.
Geeks are supposed to be separate from the self-referentialism, fake romance, and vapidity of the modern age. Act like it.
and will they be making a profit from taxpayer dollars licensing them to the research institutions that will use federal funds to work on them now?
do any drug companies own the blastocyst lines? did any companies who developed the lines give any money to bush?
remember these are all PRIVATELY held and funded blastocyst lines that Bush has just let get funded.
He DID create an industry and he DID restrict the source for that industry. Sneaky, huh?
Games have been shown, and I am sure you all have anecdotal evidence to prove it, to improve productivity at IT firms.
Are shareholders at Dynamix aware of the effect that this will have on the technology sector as a whole?
The ongoing demoralization of people at these firms can only be complicated by this development.
How is this viewed generally in terms of Web development. It seems to be something that was designed specifically for this intercompatability. i would like to know what has been compromised in terms of other functionalities for CURL, in order to be all things to all people? Especially since as a plugin, it will be something that people can try and remove quickly if they don't like it. As has been discussed in previous posts there has not been a lot of interest thus far. If it were kickass, it would be a little more popular now 'cause everyone can use it with their existing work on the web, right?
.tv domains specifically restricted to sites in such isolative languages, in order to support TV-appliance technology using the Web and other peripheral economies.
Furthermore, I have always believed that a universal standard is not always a good thing for its own sake. Consider the commercial applications of sites on the Web that are only readable through a particular technology, and translator programs do not capture the full glory of the site. Yes you can translate but it's like dewatermarking a copyrighted music file, it sounds and looks like shit. For visual media on the Net, like maybe sitcoms or whatever that want to broadcast there rather than on TV, it would probably be a good idea to write in a language that's isolated from others commonly used on the Web. I could even see rules that make the
when computers and machines do humanlike tasks such as basic sorting of real world objects...
and they don't get all hot and bothered when they do non-machine like tasks, such as lifting big cars and things?
Robots that walk like people, human facial expressions on computer-graphics simulation.. they all generate so much interest among technical people.
Perhaps, not being a technical person, I am more interested in the great alienness of machines. I am interested in earth movers at mines; the Big Dig in Boston; construction cranes; auto assembly lines; mainframes; enterprise-class servers; billion dollar electronic fund transfers.
The replacement of humans in industrial processes with machines has always been an object of industrial design. The assembly line replaced the guild style craft. Instead of creating little portable machines that aided the watchmaker and the bootmaker in their old craft methodologies, inventors remade the ways of creating goods; those guild methods were replaced by roboticized methods of manufacture.
I would rather see a chip in the head of the watch maker that gives him eagle eye vision, or an augmentation of intelligence or emotional sales skills in a salesperson, than something that would eliminate these people from their industries.
I really want a PDA and I don't have any money for one yet, but I am thinking now that maybe I shouldn't get one. I am thinking back to Johnny Mnemonic, in which a person is used as a mule for sensitive information. Spies et al have done this for centuries but PDAs and laptops simply institutionalize the process in the corporate world.
Insofar as most digitally stored information is carried on an Internet that ends in computers with plugs attaching them to walls, most of this mule stuff won't happen. People may still be yoked to information by their company from time to time..but with PDAs and laptops, companies can upgrade their security for confidential information yet still maintain it in a digital, transferable format.
There are some of you right now, I am sure, who are forced to ride planes with dumb, dull, angry bodyguards all the time because you are the only person with the information who can explain it to other people who need the information and your company doesn't want to send it over the Net.
I have no clue what can be done about this tendency, but the PDA-ification of our society makes it more likely. I am all for the human potential of portable information, but we have to smash the corporations and states that would like to make info-drug mules out of us before we can fully embrace this portability.
Yet another book for the outsiders. But is it really for the outsiders, are are most of the slashdotters actually outsiders?
I bet most people on this site are like me- an amateur sociologist on IE or AOL.
Slashdot hereby further encourages the Linux fetish without any depth or discussion..and I am concluding that slashdot is not for Linux users at all but is meant to humanize them to the outside world.
Here's why..there is too much cultural stuff on this website for it to be anything other than a love letter to the Windows users of the world. I originally started reading it for discussion among linux users that wasn't quite so audience conscious, i.e. discussion without the filtering of marketroids. I was working on a sociology paper that involved "geeks" as it were, and I wanted to read something nonmediated to get a sense of their culture. But I have seen, over the year or so that I have been reading this site, many introductory books about Linux and very few discussions beyond that level.
This is good for many people like the teenagers who are just getting into technology, etc. and yes, I know that this isn't the kernel-developemnt mailing list or anything. But perhaps we should abandon our pretensions and seriously discuss how many of us actually are using linux or have any interest in using linux, and how many of us are just trying to be cooler than thou.
:)
Amiga that is.
Get OVER it!
This is the age of Dell computers and that annoying little blond boy who tries to talk parents in to selling his neighbors Dell computers.
Why does the dell sell?
well, 'cause the thing is packaged in a way that an average american consumer can understand.
This Amiga box on the other hand, to whose website I dutifully ventured, has very little information about stuff that I care about. Like how it compares to other newest systems on the market and how much it costs, etc. etc. Instead I am reading a misspelled, non-edited, geekly comparison of the latest thing to the previous Amiga creations.
Slashdot, you are brilliant in many ways but you are a throwback in so many others. From vintage pinball machines to brand name fetishes (Amiga, AMD, etc.), you look back to the Good Old Days of computing and actively help maintain the cachet of brand names that bloody don't well deserve it.
I think it is mucho "leet" to have a $799, fully pre-programmed, fully tech-supported, reasonably configurable and powerful Dell or Gateway box for the average dolt in Peoria, Illinois to buy and set up in his or her home. Steep learning curves are not a priori cool. Hence I am bypassing your latest consumer plug for the Amiga brand..thanks anyway, though.
I smell an economic bottleneck.
We live on a water based planet and have a water based economy.. this was not necessarily clear when water was plentiful enuf to be free, but now as it becomes scarce we see how much of our society is undergirded by it.
Hence we are going to Mars with water technology.. water as the base for hydrogen fuel and oxygen for a manned mission. And we wish to terraform Mars, taking hundreds of years and quadrillions of dollars to conform a planet to our needs.
Why don't we do the quicker thing and conform ourselves to the planet's needs?
Consider that we have broken through cloning technology, genetic engineering, etc. before having solved the long distance space transport problem to the degree that would suit the human biology. In other words, it's historically and technologically easier to adapt *ourselves* to Mars, rather than vice versa.
We should engineer carbon-breathing people, able to breathe rarefied Mars air and survive under cold and heat and low gravity..although this would necessitate a fundamental revision of the ATP cycle and other biological processes, in generational terms it may be easier than basing everything on water, which is very rare in the universe. We may benefit here on Earth by reformatting our biology, as we have been steadily destroying the ecology that created us.
Around 10:00 UTC in the morning of July 19th, 2001 a random seed variant of the Code-Red worm (CRv2) began to infect hosts running unpatched versions of Microsoft's IIS webserver.
If I were an insurance adjuster trying to insure peoples' information technology assets, I would have my own experts supervising everyone who was on the insurance plan to ensure that they patched their fucking software.
Or I would make it against the law not to patch one's software, similar to the laws ensuring the vaccination of children, and for the same reasons; such an epidemic, viral or virtual, delivers a powerful blow to our economy and is a matter of national security.
Have you ever heard the story of the old baseball, when the fields were huge and irregular, people wore little to no padding, and most importantly there were not ten zillion geeks roaming like ants over the fields of sports medicine and sports technology in order to ramp up everything to the conceivable maximum?
You know, we draw the line on steroids and such for some reason, but allow other drugs; we outlaw aluminum bats for Little Leaguers but we let people invest millions in designing a better nutrient regimen for sports teams.
The bigger baseball biz gets, the more home run races we will want to see and the farther and farther science will push baseball from the sport that you can see played each weekend at Little League and weekender team fields around the world.
I don't think that a computer can do any thing except put coaches into comeptition with each other for the best equipment and force pitching, hitting and coaching into a computer-determined standardization.
Fuck a bunch of that.
P.S. GO RED SOX!
NASA is and has always been somewhat of a supporting agency to US armed forces, so stuff about its budgeting should be considered along with military budgeting issues.
Remember that Bush is demanding accurate accounting from the Pentagon now about its needs for the year- it won't budget deliberately expecting supplementary spending bills in the middle of the year. Every agency, including NASA, will have to have tight budgets from here on in.
This is a manner of managerial control; without secret expenditures, there can be no secret activity with government money. The same applies to NASA
Nasa's unprecedented reporting of its true budgetary situation fits clearly into political context here. It's jumping the gun with full financial disclosure as well as pressuring congresspeople and scientists who support it to raise more money for next fiscal year, even if it has to function under a tighter accounting.
Of course, this may be the start of more privatization of space. NASA can do much more with private money than it can with public money. Remember a lot of the funds in Iran-contra affair were originally private money.
Dont send all that stuff to Mars with these people, folks..really.
We have two ways of developing Mars- tourist method and productive method. In the tourist method, the luxuries from Earth are imported to hermetically sealed hotels, and, like "ecotourists," those who are on Mars are enjoying it for its pristine nature.
The productive method is prefarable; through grueling work over centuries, Mars is terraformed to bring a less exotic but more profound benefit to all humanity.
We should be sending Marines there and oil rig miners- people who are used to very extreme conditions and will relish the hardship and use it as an incentive to change the red planet to something habitable for human life.
We shouldnt be sending people who'll need their booze and blowup dolls by any means.
Of course, a Spartan existence for Mars colonists may encourage a nascent nationalism among them- even a desire for eventual independence from Earth. That's why Earth will want them as dependent on luxuries as possible- to affect their deep politics and character.
Dont think their aren't sci fi hacks who couldnt get published sitting at CIA analyst desks right now thinking about this stuff.
Okay.. so here we have a media, television. It is only being recognized recently as a profound mode of expression, for instance by the archiving of TV that will be going on in massive scale at The Internet Archive
Constitutionally speaking, the right to collect, index and archive TV information any way you want to is equivalent to your right to read any book in a public library (which isn't always the case but that's another story...)
A lot of the time, there is something in a fleeting news broadcast or a commercial that is important in a future investigation. That's why lots of groups and people release information on TV that they want to have a short lifespan.
We have to keep this information. The internet is nowhere near as influential a news source as the television medium, especially in countries where computer ownership is less prevalent. By putting a charge on recording, TiVo seriously compromises our right to free speech.