Well, no, we still ended up net losers on the deal.
War, as I have to keep pointing out, is NOT good for the economy.
Yes, GDP goes up, but the war-products we made in WWII:
1) Killed human beings. 2) Blew up, stuck in things, or sank in the ocean. 3) Created a depression in Europe that made the Great Depression look like a royal wedding.
Peaceful economy is always better overall than war economy, though pockets of profit attract attention from the gross disaster. America, being unscathed by destruction, appeared to have reversed the effects of the Depression. In fact we lost all we made in war materiel, plus tens of thousands of lives, and went deep into a debt that we've never paid off. It's a terrible ruse.
Nope. There was one goal. You could even reduce it from a few bytes to one bit, since "We Lose" is the binary opposite of "We Win".
VJ is a more complicated question because it receives savings from the repurposing of economics already in place fighting for VE day.
If you're going to quibble with context, then just how much is the premise worth? A login name and password are a few bytes, but in context they represent several GB of data (persistent and historical) and several man-years of gameplay. I think the premise implies that context is essential, but the few bytes are the good being sold, so you can't dismiss it.
And it occurs to me then that a thousand bucks for a top-notch EQ login would be a screaming deal, compared with the cost of the work put into it. I don't see anyone making a living creating them. (I don't see anyone caring enough about a few extra hit points to pay a thousand bucks for one, but hey, the world is full of baffling products and obsessed consumers.)
There are specific prohibitions on misusing those other means of gathering intelligence.
Your email, as mentioned before, is publicly broadcast, just as the noise you make at a ballgame. It's not even as secure as a postcard, which remains in the custody of the USPS from posting to delivery.
Your email goes through several servers that may be secured but only by private entities with no governmental authority, over whom there are no constitutional or legislated restrictions as to the security of your email. If one of those servers happens to be an innocuous node owned and run by the FBI in the basement of UUNET, then all your email are belong to them, and the 4th Amendment don't enter into it, because, as I keep saying, there's no presumption of privacy in email.
--Blair "Unless something's been passed that I don't know about."
The point is, email is and always has been the equivalent of doing your business in a loud shout on a public streetcorner.
The "GOVERNMENT" has always had legal access to it.
You either knew that, and were clueful, or did not, and were not. From your paranoid reaction, I'm guessing the latter.
And if you want to blame anyone for the need to increase the intelligence community's nearness to your stash, blame Al Quaeda, or better yet, join the Army and go kill them.
Whining on internet message boards from the comfort of your bedroom about losing rights you mistakenly believed you had is effecting no positive result.
The net is ad hoc. Your email is not and never was secure. You were told that when you signed up for your service or hooked up to your peer. Pretending it's an outrage for anyone to be reading it now is shedding crocodile tears.
Self-awareness is more than a lexical parsing. "I" know I exist whether or not the word "I" exists, and Descartes knew he existed before he proved it logically.
I can discover things about myself and my place in the world without being told, altering my way of thinking as necessary. Cyc can't. It follows given rules and eliminates connections based on those rules. Cyc can deduce, but it can't illate, even though its job is to help you to illate, by suggesting things Cyc knows that you don't.
Human consciousness isn't special; many other mammals clearly have a similar awareness of self, if not the capacity to philosophize about it. But Cyc has less actual consciousness than a fly or a cockroach, even though it clearly has more complexity.
Cyc is a pocket calculator that's been taught some semantic tricks (which apparently fool those who were already fooled into thinking the Turing Test rules define consciousness).
That's not some sort of paranoid prejudice on my part. I think it'd be really cool if someone had cracked the barrier. But it's really uncool that the story as written implies that they have when they haven't.
--Blair
P.S. Despite Descartes, human consciousness isn't a logical thing. In addition to the part we reason with (commonly called the "ego", though that brings up Freud, who was IMO something of a crackpot), it includes a logical sub-conscious that we access only indirectly (the most direct way is by thinking of one thing and suddenly having an association to another; this is the part Cyc mimicks), and a chemical/hormonal/emotional component that can be controlled internally and externally. That's the really strange part: Inject a chemical, and you can create modes of thought, from tranquility against all horrors, to suicidal and homocidal tendencies in a perfectly calm environment; and it works the other way, as your logic creates hormonal release; and can be part of feedback loops (e.g., panic, love, hunger, courage). That's not necessary for Cyc's self-awareness, but it's something beyond simple mental capacity that controls the real human form of self.
PVRs and computerized audio recording are going to eliminate any need for "Prime Time", or for any sort of scheduled broadcast entertainment.
Time shifting will give control of life-scheduling back to the public.
If the machines skip commercials, then broadcast entertainment may be doomed, unless something like the British television-licensing model comes into play. Cable rates would have to jump by a hundred dollars per month to keep the same revenues going into the system.
P2P won't make so great a dent as to obviate copyright. Mass-market bandwidth is too low, and it's too easy to recognize the traffic signature of illegal file traders. The Xerox machine didn't kill publishing, and Napster didn't kill the RIAA.
Triangle Boy was originally part of the old Safeweb secure-http proxy service.
That incarnation of Safeweb appears to be dead, replaced by a spook-box maker.
When Safeweb was starting to have problems--overload and outages--I offered them a dollar for their business model. I guess I should have known their real business model was intelligence collection.
The article may be sparking metaphysical debate, but it should be sparking metajournalistic debate.
Implying through these cute facts that Cyc is becoming self-aware is misleading. "Is Cyc human?" has syntactic and semantic ambiguities. The person who wrote the code to create that sentence from the database* of objects and linkages would understand implicitly what the question means, and might not fall into the trap of thinking that the running program just understood itself. Many/. readers apparently aren't that perspicacious.
It could as easily know it's the football in the "Is a football a gourd?" question, which is to say it could not.
I suspect if you ask Cyc "Do you..." it won't know where to go to figure out who "you" is and parsing it as "I". But maybe someone programmed that identity inversion in, and it's mimicking self-awareness even more insidiously than I suspect.
--Blair
* - it's a database. All data in computation is a database. "Database" categorizes all means of storing information, not just rectangular arrays.
1. "I wonder if it was trying to figure out where to catalogue itself". It may not know that Cyc is "itself", only that Cyc is a computer program for making correct associations.
2. Cyc makes categorizations, and asks questions to figure out about otherwise untested associations. Again, it could have asked if Cyc was human right after asking if a football is a gourd. The programmers could be prejudicing the program into encoding anthropomorphic characteristics. Or they could have told it that it had feet (on the computer it's in). Any slight connection that it needs more information on, it could ask questions about, to fill in the links.
Why is Cyc asking if it is Human any more significant than Cyc asking if it is Lettuce, or asking if a football is a gourd?
Its artificial self-awareness may be prejudiced by the programmers to imitate self-awareness, or in this case merely be a surprising juxtaposition of semantics amid otherwise ordinary pairings, rather than implementing self-awareness.
In other words, it may now know that Cyc is not human, but it likely has no idea that it is Cyc.
Your mom has the right idea. Ice makers are made of cheap parts. But look under the fridge. There's a motor, gearing or a belt and pulley, electronics, and a compressor head, plus a couple dozen yards of tubing. It'll turn on and off twenty times a day for fifty years if you don't screw with them. And there are still ten companies that make money off of them. But CSCO doesn't care. They want high margins for cheap crap and a software paradigm invented by the same guy that gave us colonoscopy.
MTBF is far too short for crummy, overpriced little hardware boxes, and diagnostics still aren't automatic.
With the trillions of dollars that have flowed through the industry, network equipment should be less trouble than a refrigerator by now, but certain (CSCO) companies (CSCO) have had a vested interest (CSCO) in keeping the system unstable (CSCO) and difficult to maintain (CSCO).
That Edison license is still perfectly valid, except for the price fixing, which is now illegal. The part about people not copying it is now a well-known matter of law, so records just come with a little bug in tiny print on the back that says who owns the copyright, and that part isn't even required by law, any more.
It's as likely to go the other way. Silly things that manufacturers now put in EULAs could become the law of the land. In a world where money talks through legislators and bullshit walks around in a circle outside, don't expect corporate interest to lose due to simple technological circumvention.
Killing isn't legal just because guns make it safe and easy and hard to track down.
When your friend bought his copy of the record, he received certain licenses to do things one normally does with one copy of a work of art.
Showing it to friends is one. Giving it to someone else is another, wherupon the license transfers. (Foisting it on poor rap-hating souls 20 feet down the beach is your own problem, pencil-neck.)
Copying it so others can hear it is not one. Recently the law has been clarified to allow copying for purposes of preserving your rights should one copy be destroyed accidentally. But copying it, and either giving the original or the copy away is notlegal. It's the most basic violation of copyright.
Notice how computers work with information. A copy is retained in memory (disk) on the server. You access that copy, make a copy of your own, transferred byte by byte (packet by packet) to your computer, and display it.
There was some discussion a few years ago as to how to treat the fact that just displaying your own information from your own hard drive to your own display involved physically copying the information from the hard disk to RAM in your computer, and then other places. It's a minor point with innocuous ramifications, but it came up, and I'm sure it's been nailed down in yards of careful legalese and bound in law calf somewhere.
My viewpoint is not "one that's on the far end of the spectrum of things". My viewpoint is that I know something about the law and why it is the way it is. Your viewpoint is so far off the other end that you don't see that you're trying to change existing law to allow things that are currently illegal; or just to ignore the law because it's too "hard" to enforce.
Lending libraries almost didn't get the right to exist. Publishers were furious, authors divided. It took court cases to keep them open. That's now part of the normal rights of the owner of a copy of the work. It may be the correct interpretation (as another respondant pointed out) when a server is careful not to permit more than one connection per owned copy at a time, and not to permit viewed copies to be copied themselves.
The RIAA and MPAA are monopolists, colluding in proxy for the companies that formed them. They should not exist. The companies should be responsible for protecting their own rights, and the law should otherwise be sufficient. RIAA and MPAA overstep their rights on occasion, but mostly they are within their rights to stop P2P "sharing" (which is really mostly illegal copying).
And no, I don't engage in P2P piracy of copyrighted works.
4-8 channel sound is a combination of the two main channels and some mixing and layering. The two front main speakers still carry most of the sound, minus some of the center channel sound. The rear speakers and subwoofer carry only a small portion of the sound, and don't need to have the same tonal quality as main sound.
Multimedia and movie sound are far too fake, processed, and noisy for anyone to care.
So you're not going to use pure stereo for anything other than audiophile music.
The fact that this tube circuit is also there for movies is just a bonus point.
One last thing: THX is a measure of minimal quality, albeit a necessary one in a world in which minimizing quality cuts costs and improves profits. They've already defined THX-Ultra to create a standard for low-to-moderate-but-loud quality. Expect THX-hyperultrasooperdooper before you see real audiophile quality, but again, the compressed, cut-up, foleyed, looped sound they put on movies (especially the shrieking, groaning, grinding crap Lucas considers sound) will waste the value of that kind of equipment.
What the copyright owner is deprived of is his right to collect money from you for the privilege of seeing, reading, or hearing his work for the first time.
Or any time, really, but novelty and curiosity are powerful motivators. Something novel and curious is valuable. The right to exhibit it is concentrated value that only its creator has the right to sell.
You don't own the right to see it until a rightful owner or his licensee sells or grants a viewing license to you, whether individually or as part of a broadcast audience.
When you watch movies from Film88 that they stole, you are paying a thief for a license to view the art that he stole. Frankly, I couldn't tell you if what you're doing is a crime, since you could reasonably believe they were within their rights, but what they are doing is illegal, not just in the U.S. but in all contries that signed the Berne Convention in 1988, and in most that didn't (which means their copyright laws are just different).
Knowingly abetting illegal acts is illegal. Failing to report or prevent illegal acts is immoral, and sometimes illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, no, we still ended up net losers on the deal.
War, as I have to keep pointing out, is NOT good for the economy.
Yes, GDP goes up, but the war-products we made in WWII:
1) Killed human beings.
2) Blew up, stuck in things, or sank in the ocean.
3) Created a depression in Europe that made the Great Depression look like a royal wedding.
Peaceful economy is always better overall than war economy, though pockets of profit attract attention from the gross disaster. America, being unscathed by destruction, appeared to have reversed the effects of the Depression. In fact we lost all we made in war materiel, plus tens of thousands of lives, and went deep into a debt that we've never paid off. It's a terrible ruse.
--Blair
Nope. There was one goal. You could even reduce it from a few bytes to one bit, since "We Lose" is the binary opposite of "We Win".
VJ is a more complicated question because it receives savings from the repurposing of economics already in place fighting for VE day.
If you're going to quibble with context, then just how much is the premise worth? A login name and password are a few bytes, but in context they represent several GB of data (persistent and historical) and several man-years of gameplay. I think the premise implies that context is essential, but the few bytes are the good being sold, so you can't dismiss it.
And it occurs to me then that a thousand bucks for a top-notch EQ login would be a screaming deal, compared with the cost of the work put into it. I don't see anyone making a living creating them. (I don't see anyone caring enough about a few extra hit points to pay a thousand bucks for one, but hey, the world is full of baffling products and obsessed consumers.)
--Blair
There are specific prohibitions on misusing those other means of gathering intelligence.
Your email, as mentioned before, is publicly broadcast, just as the noise you make at a ballgame. It's not even as secure as a postcard, which remains in the custody of the USPS from posting to delivery.
Your email goes through several servers that may be secured but only by private entities with no governmental authority, over whom there are no constitutional or legislated restrictions as to the security of your email. If one of those servers happens to be an innocuous node owned and run by the FBI in the basement of UUNET, then all your email are belong to them, and the 4th Amendment don't enter into it, because, as I keep saying, there's no presumption of privacy in email.
--Blair
"Unless something's been passed that I don't know about."
"We win" -- VE Day, 5/8/1945
Calculate the cost of that.
--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."
You seem to be mixing up what's illegal and what has yet to be made illegal.
The point is, email is and always has been the equivalent of doing your business in a loud shout on a public streetcorner.
The "GOVERNMENT" has always had legal access to it.
You either knew that, and were clueful, or did not, and were not. From your paranoid reaction, I'm guessing the latter.
And if you want to blame anyone for the need to increase the intelligence community's nearness to your stash, blame Al Quaeda, or better yet, join the Army and go kill them.
Whining on internet message boards from the comfort of your bedroom about losing rights you mistakenly believed you had is effecting no positive result.
--Blair
The net is ad hoc. Your email is not and never was secure. You were told that when you signed up for your service or hooked up to your peer. Pretending it's an outrage for anyone to be reading it now is shedding crocodile tears.
--Blair
Self-awareness is more than a lexical parsing. "I" know I exist whether or not the word "I" exists, and Descartes knew he existed before he proved it logically.
I can discover things about myself and my place in the world without being told, altering my way of thinking as necessary. Cyc can't. It follows given rules and eliminates connections based on those rules. Cyc can deduce, but it can't illate, even though its job is to help you to illate, by suggesting things Cyc knows that you don't.
Human consciousness isn't special; many other mammals clearly have a similar awareness of self, if not the capacity to philosophize about it. But Cyc has less actual consciousness than a fly or a cockroach, even though it clearly has more complexity.
Cyc is a pocket calculator that's been taught some semantic tricks (which apparently fool those who were already fooled into thinking the Turing Test rules define consciousness).
That's not some sort of paranoid prejudice on my part. I think it'd be really cool if someone had cracked the barrier. But it's really uncool that the story as written implies that they have when they haven't.
--Blair
P.S. Despite Descartes, human consciousness isn't a logical thing. In addition to the part we reason with (commonly called the "ego", though that brings up Freud, who was IMO something of a crackpot), it includes a logical sub-conscious that we access only indirectly (the most direct way is by thinking of one thing and suddenly having an association to another; this is the part Cyc mimicks), and a chemical/hormonal/emotional component that can be controlled internally and externally. That's the really strange part: Inject a chemical, and you can create modes of thought, from tranquility against all horrors, to suicidal and homocidal tendencies in a perfectly calm environment; and it works the other way, as your logic creates hormonal release; and can be part of feedback loops (e.g., panic, love, hunger, courage). That's not necessary for Cyc's self-awareness, but it's something beyond simple mental capacity that controls the real human form of self.
PVRs and computerized audio recording are going to eliminate any need for "Prime Time", or for any sort of scheduled broadcast entertainment.
Time shifting will give control of life-scheduling back to the public.
If the machines skip commercials, then broadcast entertainment may be doomed, unless something like the British television-licensing model comes into play. Cable rates would have to jump by a hundred dollars per month to keep the same revenues going into the system.
P2P won't make so great a dent as to obviate copyright. Mass-market bandwidth is too low, and it's too easy to recognize the traffic signature of illegal file traders. The Xerox machine didn't kill publishing, and Napster didn't kill the RIAA.
--Blair
Triangle Boy was originally part of the old Safeweb secure-http proxy service.
That incarnation of Safeweb appears to be dead, replaced by a spook-box maker.
When Safeweb was starting to have problems--overload and outages--I offered them a dollar for their business model. I guess I should have known their real business model was intelligence collection.
--Blair
The article may be sparking metaphysical debate, but it should be sparking metajournalistic debate.
/. readers apparently aren't that perspicacious.
Implying through these cute facts that Cyc is becoming self-aware is misleading. "Is Cyc human?" has syntactic and semantic ambiguities. The person who wrote the code to create that sentence from the database* of objects and linkages would understand implicitly what the question means, and might not fall into the trap of thinking that the running program just understood itself. Many
It could as easily know it's the football in the "Is a football a gourd?" question, which is to say it could not.
I suspect if you ask Cyc "Do you..." it won't know where to go to figure out who "you" is and parsing it as "I". But maybe someone programmed that identity inversion in, and it's mimicking self-awareness even more insidiously than I suspect.
--Blair
* - it's a database. All data in computation is a database. "Database" categorizes all means of storing information, not just rectangular arrays.
Two points in your response illustrate my point.
1. "I wonder if it was trying to figure out where to catalogue itself". It may not know that Cyc is "itself", only that Cyc is a computer program for making correct associations.
2. Cyc makes categorizations, and asks questions to figure out about otherwise untested associations. Again, it could have asked if Cyc was human right after asking if a football is a gourd. The programmers could be prejudicing the program into encoding anthropomorphic characteristics. Or they could have told it that it had feet (on the computer it's in). Any slight connection that it needs more information on, it could ask questions about, to fill in the links.
--Blair
Why is Cyc asking if it is Human any more significant than Cyc asking if it is Lettuce, or asking if a football is a gourd?
Its artificial self-awareness may be prejudiced by the programmers to imitate self-awareness, or in this case merely be a surprising juxtaposition of semantics amid otherwise ordinary pairings, rather than implementing self-awareness.
In other words, it may now know that Cyc is not human, but it likely has no idea that it is Cyc.
--Blair
IHNJH, IJLS "I took undergrad Physics from Bob Park."
--Blair
"I did."
Your mom has the right idea. Ice makers are made of cheap parts. But look under the fridge. There's a motor, gearing or a belt and pulley, electronics, and a compressor head, plus a couple dozen yards of tubing. It'll turn on and off twenty times a day for fifty years if you don't screw with them. And there are still ten companies that make money off of them. But CSCO doesn't care. They want high margins for cheap crap and a software paradigm invented by the same guy that gave us colonoscopy.
Which points up the problem.
MTBF is far too short for crummy, overpriced little hardware boxes, and diagnostics still aren't automatic.
With the trillions of dollars that have flowed through the industry, network equipment should be less trouble than a refrigerator by now, but certain (CSCO) companies (CSCO) have had a vested interest (CSCO) in keeping the system unstable (CSCO) and difficult to maintain (CSCO).
--Blair
The pencil-neck remark was bathos.
(Look it up.)
That Edison license is still perfectly valid, except for the price fixing, which is now illegal. The part about people not copying it is now a well-known matter of law, so records just come with a little bug in tiny print on the back that says who owns the copyright, and that part isn't even required by law, any more.
It's as likely to go the other way. Silly things that manufacturers now put in EULAs could become the law of the land. In a world where money talks through legislators and bullshit walks around in a circle outside, don't expect corporate interest to lose due to simple technological circumvention.
Killing isn't legal just because guns make it safe and easy and hard to track down.
--Blair
Modded down by a criminal, no doubt.
--Blair
When your friend bought his copy of the record, he received certain licenses to do things one normally does with one copy of a work of art.
Showing it to friends is one. Giving it to someone else is another, wherupon the license transfers. (Foisting it on poor rap-hating souls 20 feet down the beach is your own problem, pencil-neck.)
Copying it so others can hear it is not one. Recently the law has been clarified to allow copying for purposes of preserving your rights should one copy be destroyed accidentally. But copying it, and either giving the original or the copy away is notlegal. It's the most basic violation of copyright.
Notice how computers work with information. A copy is retained in memory (disk) on the server. You access that copy, make a copy of your own, transferred byte by byte (packet by packet) to your computer, and display it.
There was some discussion a few years ago as to how to treat the fact that just displaying your own information from your own hard drive to your own display involved physically copying the information from the hard disk to RAM in your computer, and then other places. It's a minor point with innocuous ramifications, but it came up, and I'm sure it's been nailed down in yards of careful legalese and bound in law calf somewhere.
My viewpoint is not "one that's on the far end of the spectrum of things". My viewpoint is that I know something about the law and why it is the way it is. Your viewpoint is so far off the other end that you don't see that you're trying to change existing law to allow things that are currently illegal; or just to ignore the law because it's too "hard" to enforce.
Lending libraries almost didn't get the right to exist. Publishers were furious, authors divided. It took court cases to keep them open. That's now part of the normal rights of the owner of a copy of the work. It may be the correct interpretation (as another respondant pointed out) when a server is careful not to permit more than one connection per owned copy at a time, and not to permit viewed copies to be copied themselves.
The RIAA and MPAA are monopolists, colluding in proxy for the companies that formed them. They should not exist. The companies should be responsible for protecting their own rights, and the law should otherwise be sufficient. RIAA and MPAA overstep their rights on occasion, but mostly they are within their rights to stop P2P "sharing" (which is really mostly illegal copying).
And no, I don't engage in P2P piracy of copyrighted works.
--Blair
Hence submarines, deep-sea recovery gear, and a chisel.
--Blair
And how could they be caught, if someone didn't do the science and show them the truth?
--Blair
"Science isn't tyranny. Prove otherwise."
2 tubes, main stereo signal.
4-8 channel sound is a combination of the two main channels and some mixing and layering. The two front main speakers still carry most of the sound, minus some of the center channel sound. The rear speakers and subwoofer carry only a small portion of the sound, and don't need to have the same tonal quality as main sound.
Multimedia and movie sound are far too fake, processed, and noisy for anyone to care.
So you're not going to use pure stereo for anything other than audiophile music.
The fact that this tube circuit is also there for movies is just a bonus point.
One last thing: THX is a measure of minimal quality, albeit a necessary one in a world in which minimizing quality cuts costs and improves profits. They've already defined THX-Ultra to create a standard for low-to-moderate-but-loud quality. Expect THX-hyperultrasooperdooper before you see real audiophile quality, but again, the compressed, cut-up, foleyed, looped sound they put on movies (especially the shrieking, groaning, grinding crap Lucas considers sound) will waste the value of that kind of equipment.
--Blair
What the copyright owner is deprived of is his right to collect money from you for the privilege of seeing, reading, or hearing his work for the first time.
Or any time, really, but novelty and curiosity are powerful motivators. Something novel and curious is valuable. The right to exhibit it is concentrated value that only its creator has the right to sell.
You don't own the right to see it until a rightful owner or his licensee sells or grants a viewing license to you, whether individually or as part of a broadcast audience.
When you watch movies from Film88 that they stole, you are paying a thief for a license to view the art that he stole. Frankly, I couldn't tell you if what you're doing is a crime, since you could reasonably believe they were within their rights, but what they are doing is illegal, not just in the U.S. but in all contries that signed the Berne Convention in 1988, and in most that didn't (which means their copyright laws are just different).
Knowingly abetting illegal acts is illegal. Failing to report or prevent illegal acts is immoral, and sometimes illegal.
--Blair
"IANAL, IJLS 'hereinafter'."
Tapping fiber is easy, if you can get to it.
--Blair
What would a per-seat GPL look like, anyway?
--Blair