I was a little disappointed by this and other quotes, which are kind of humorous but also sound somewhat more like marketing-speak than the statements of a dedicated scientist at the cusp of serious medical and ethical issues. "Going weak in the knees", "disease called death", "fountain of youth", "missing link/final piece"... these are all rather flamboyant statements, and in some cases rather hard to substantiate. What has been achieved does sound very impressive, but the article leaves me wondering about whether there is a lot of hype in this case for the purpose of obtaining further funding, getting lucrative contracts, or perhaps even self-gratification?
Why should broadband be exempt from similar controls
A few partially formed thoughts that might lead to an answer with a bit more work:
One position could be that internet access should be conceived of the way air is conceived of for individuals: we breath as much or as little of it as we need, and we don't measure individual lung capacity or exercise habits when deciding how much of the ozone protection costs people dole out.
The phone company bills most consumers extra for the purpose of subsidizing phone access for people who can't afford it. This is because phone access has been deemed something that people must have. In a way the ISP cap proposal is pushing the opposite philosophy: instead of increasing access for those who can't afford it, the proposal would reduce access for those who can.
They don't have to worry about losing credibility either. Even if you put in some kind of a co-operative moderation system, they can use those 10 000 P2P nodes to moderate each other up.
This is the kind of challenge that Google solves, by sensing self-referential sectors of the net and nullifiying their weights. This IS an emminently solveable problem.
This may spur the next level of one-upsmanship: "trust" metrics being manually or automatically integrated into the p2p experience.
For example: there could spring up various independent directories of MD5 checksums for songs known to be either good or bad. Various individuals could maintain these by hand, or P2P clients could allow the users to collaborate on such a shared directory by allowing users to simply click a button to associate a "trusted" or "untrusted" score for an individual file. File scores could then end up being aggregated into a reputation for a given person. Someone impugned a lot would get a bad reputation for sharing bad files, but allowing meta-level moderation (not unlike that in slashdot) could make this work both ways: someone who repeatedly impugns someone who actually deserves a good reputation would themselves lose reputation points.
and the only advantage is carrying around 1 less gadget. all you end up with is a tiny PDA and a huge cell phone.
The integration of cellphones with PDAs also brings another downside which I haven't seen discussed anywhere: suddenly, your personal data is in a device that has an OS that you don't control, and which has the hardware capable of allowing remote access. I think this is a serious issue. The device makers may be playing nice now because they're trying to achieve market penetration, but once they're entrenched what's to stop them from gradually introducing terms of service regarding automatic OS upgrades, data transfers, etc? Tivo is an example of a company that played nice at first, but increasingly is doing disruptive things like spamming consumers with contests and shows they didn't want. You heard it here first: even in the emerging phone/PDA combo market, non-Free OS + remote communication hardare = tremendous possibility for abuse.
1)the GPL only required that the source code be freely available, not that the product be freely available, and
2) the reason most (all?) linux distros are freely downloadable was simply a hedge against someone else compiling the freely available code into an "official" release of that code.
Am I wrong? Does the GPL specify that the product above and beyond the source code must be free? If so, does it further specify that being online is a requirement (as opposed to, say, being able to purchase a cd for shipping cost)?
Among the added expenses as more customers use more of the network's capacity are the boxes that route Internet information to individual users and the costs of buying more bandwidth from Internet "backbone" providers such as AT&T Corp. and Sprint PCS Group, which charge Comcast on a volume basis to ship data over long distances.
Of these two factors, one rather makes sense as a reason to reduce bandwidth: the cost from backbone providers based directly on volume. The other of these factors does not serve as a good basis: the cost of routers.
the females are as large as humans and look like a mixture of humans (lower half) and beetles (upper half)
This would have made Chip from Futurama happy. I'm thinking of the Futurama episode where Chip falls in love with a mermaid. After a great romancing phase, the passion derails when they get into bed and Chip suddenly comprehends that he will never again have sex as long as he is in a relationship with a mermaid. As he sprints in terror from her house he wonders "...why oh why couldn't she have been the opposite, with the human part down below and the fish part on top?!?"
A CEO is more likely to instigate layoffs than to get fired, and usually get fired only after thousands of others have been fired in an attempt to make the CEO look good.
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Re:Try to catch me ...
on
KaZaA Collapses
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· Score: 2, Funny
The Web site and the software behind it are now owned by a privately held firm called Sharman Networks, based in Vanuatu, an island in the Pacific.
Yes, it's subjective, but so are most things not processed by a computer.
The interesting question is to what degree a given issue is subjective.
Oh, and seeing as it's the job of the Supreme Court to decide what is and is not constitutional (and not we bunch of 'blog posters that can't be bothered to stand behind our words by admitting who we really are), the Miller standard is by definition constitutional.
Conceded... but pedantic. Many things are by definition legal or constitutional, but these definitions shouldn't be allowed to obscure the ongoing discussion of what deserves to be legal or constitutional.
This is the philosophy shaping the very process we are discussing. If including a Miller-style test made the COPA constitutional by definition, then it is doubtful the case would have found its way into the supreme court, or that the ruling would not have been unanimous.
It appears that neither the article nor the text of the ruling nor the COPA itself contain the word "Miller". If there is a similarity between the standard used by COPA and the Miller case, it did not seem evident from these documents.
"Free market" is touted way too often these days. There are numerous assumptions required for a free market to be an operational model, including unlimited resources, low entry barriers, no corruption, etc. The number of situations in which the concept of free market applies poorly if at all is enormous.
...it doesn't mean that they agree with what you're saying, it means that each community gets to decide for themselves what is legal and what's not, instead of having Big Brother force it down their throats. The liberals get to be liberals, and the conservatives can be conservatives. If you disagree with the standards of the community in which you leave, you're free to move, but don't expect the government to create laws to pamper your beliefs at the expense of others'.
So the interesting question is: what does this law maintain is the boundary or scope of a community? Is the nation a community? The attendees of a given church? One city block? One city?
If you actually read the law, you'll notice that it uses a Miller-style test for determining "harmful to minors", which requires that a work "taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors".
Hence, picture of the nude Statue of David -- fine. Print of Venus de Milo: fine. Bestiality pictures on basketballs inside a fishtank: hmmm, no.
I don't know who Miller is but the above still runs afoul of the constitution as pointed out by the parent post. To use as a standard that something "lacks serious value" is as thoroughly subjective and vague a standard as one can have... and therefore, unconstitutional.
Copyrighted music was already protected under copyright law. Fair use was already protected under other laws. Why do we keep writing and amending and rewriting laws that do the SAME THING as previous laws?
The hopscotch played by the DMCA is that it doesn't attempt to directly legislate away the core concept of fair use, BUT it prevents the technological means to enact fair use. It's like deciding to do an end run around the NRA by making a law that bullets are illegal; guns are fine, you just can't use them. The loophole that the DMCA takes advantage of is that while fair use has been deemed legal, no given vendor is required to supply the means of exercising this legal activity. The DMCA perverts this even a bit further by making it illegal to try to get around direct attempts by vendors to prevent fair use. I don't think legislation by Boucher should necessarily have to re-state the legality of fair use; more the the point, it should probably state a requirement that fair use be provided for by vendors.
Actually, that's what worries me... there are millions of security cameras in North America now, and if they were all hooked together to some sort of network with facial recognition, that would be one killer tracking system. And the government wouldn't even need to get involved... a private company could do it, and offer it as a service to stores.
I'll bet that we'll see an upswing in the popularity of those novelty glasses with big noses and eyebrows.
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
Hysterical! If this person was even remotely in touch with technology, they'd know that nobody spends anything remotely close to $1000 on a hard drive.
It's hard to request that friends use encryption when (a) it's extra work for them, and (b) their email clients don't generally support encryption. This means that in my workplace, I have to assume that all of my POP mail may be read by IT co-workers (and given the draconian terms of employment foisted on me and others, I find the scenario probable). However, there is a solution to this situation: a POP client, in combination with a bit of supporting software on my mail server, that encrypts mail as I receive it on the server and decrypts it only when it reaches my machine (and does the reverse when sending). This solution will prevent anyone at my workplace from knowing the contents of my private email, and will not require that I educate and equip any of my friends with encryption software.
By the way, if there is existing related work then please mention it.
Now what we need is a site that provides searchability on Google's repository of takedown letters and related links! Shouldn't be too hard, and it seems legal given my understanding of the issues.
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Re:The best he can build is a disintegration chamb
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 1
anyone or anything sent into the past create some sort of parallel universe. Which means we will never see any evidence that the time machine works. At best he'll be able to create an effect where you toss something in and it disappears.
Ok... but wouldn't this directly contradict the professor's hypothesis that he'll be able to observe a subatomic particle doubling because it's visiting itself from the future?
It doesn't take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a new melody.
Neither does it take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a software product.
There's no real cost to innovating in music or art.
Disagreed, I think Stallman's analogy is a good one. Just as computers cost money, instruments cost money. Then there is the time for training: just as one can't sit a monkey in front of a computer and expect working code, one can't place a guitar in a random person's hands and expect even competent chord playing, let alone what we'd consider musical innovation.
Your attempt to cast the matter in terms of billions of dollars makes me think you're confusing innovation with branding and market development. That is the wrong spectrum to try to see innovation in.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a little disappointed by this and other quotes, which are kind of humorous but also sound somewhat more like marketing-speak than the statements of a dedicated scientist at the cusp of serious medical and ethical issues. "Going weak in the knees", "disease called death", "fountain of youth", "missing link/final piece"... these are all rather flamboyant statements, and in some cases rather hard to substantiate. What has been achieved does sound very impressive, but the article leaves me wondering about whether there is a lot of hype in this case for the purpose of obtaining further funding, getting lucrative contracts, or perhaps even self-gratification?
A few partially formed thoughts that might lead to an answer with a bit more work:
One position could be that internet access should be conceived of the way air is conceived of for individuals: we breath as much or as little of it as we need, and we don't measure individual lung capacity or exercise habits when deciding how much of the ozone protection costs people dole out.
The phone company bills most consumers extra for the purpose of subsidizing phone access for people who can't afford it. This is because phone access has been deemed something that people must have. In a way the ISP cap proposal is pushing the opposite philosophy: instead of increasing access for those who can't afford it, the proposal would reduce access for those who can.
This is the kind of challenge that Google solves, by sensing self-referential sectors of the net and nullifiying their weights. This IS an emminently solveable problem.
For example: there could spring up various independent directories of MD5 checksums for songs known to be either good or bad. Various individuals could maintain these by hand, or P2P clients could allow the users to collaborate on such a shared directory by allowing users to simply click a button to associate a "trusted" or "untrusted" score for an individual file. File scores could then end up being aggregated into a reputation for a given person. Someone impugned a lot would get a bad reputation for sharing bad files, but allowing meta-level moderation (not unlike that in slashdot) could make this work both ways: someone who repeatedly impugns someone who actually deserves a good reputation would themselves lose reputation points.
An example of a trust metric can be found here.
The integration of cellphones with PDAs also brings another downside which I haven't seen discussed anywhere: suddenly, your personal data is in a device that has an OS that you don't control, and which has the hardware capable of allowing remote access. I think this is a serious issue. The device makers may be playing nice now because they're trying to achieve market penetration, but once they're entrenched what's to stop them from gradually introducing terms of service regarding automatic OS upgrades, data transfers, etc? Tivo is an example of a company that played nice at first, but increasingly is doing disruptive things like spamming consumers with contests and shows they didn't want. You heard it here first: even in the emerging phone/PDA combo market, non-Free OS + remote communication hardare = tremendous possibility for abuse.
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I thought that:
1)the GPL only required that the source code be freely available, not that the product be freely available, and
2) the reason most (all?) linux distros are freely downloadable was simply a hedge against someone else compiling the freely available code into an "official" release of that code.
Am I wrong? Does the GPL specify that the product above and beyond the source code must be free? If so, does it further specify that being online is a requirement (as opposed to, say, being able to purchase a cd for shipping cost)?
.
Of these two factors, one rather makes sense as a reason to reduce bandwidth: the cost from backbone providers based directly on volume. The other of these factors does not serve as a good basis: the cost of routers.
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Something that would end such intrusions overnight AND banish subscription fees:
1) figure out the precise file format in which tivo stores its downloaded program guide
2) on a website, supply such a file which is maintained as up-to-date either by an automated parser or by volunteers
3) document a way to get this file onto a tivo
Any reason this wouldn't work? Anything similar been done?
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This would have made Chip from Futurama happy. I'm thinking of the Futurama episode where Chip falls in love with a mermaid. After a great romancing phase, the passion derails when they get into bed and Chip suddenly comprehends that he will never again have sex as long as he is in a relationship with a mermaid. As he sprints in terror from her house he wonders "...why oh why couldn't she have been the opposite, with the human part down below and the fish part on top?!?"
.
A CEO is more likely to instigate layoffs than to get fired, and usually get fired only after thousands of others have been fired in an attempt to make the CEO look good.
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RIAA, please don't squeeze the Sharman...
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The interesting question is to what degree a given issue is subjective.
Conceded... but pedantic. Many things are by definition legal or constitutional, but these definitions shouldn't be allowed to obscure the ongoing discussion of what deserves to be legal or constitutional.
This is the philosophy shaping the very process we are discussing. If including a Miller-style test made the COPA constitutional by definition, then it is doubtful the case would have found its way into the supreme court, or that the ruling would not have been unanimous.
It appears that neither the article nor the text of the ruling nor the COPA itself contain the word "Miller". If there is a similarity between the standard used by COPA and the Miller case, it did not seem evident from these documents.
.
"Free market" is touted way too often these days. There are numerous assumptions required for a free market to be an operational model, including unlimited resources, low entry barriers, no corruption, etc. The number of situations in which the concept of free market applies poorly if at all is enormous.
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So the interesting question is: what does this law maintain is the boundary or scope of a community? Is the nation a community? The attendees of a given church? One city block? One city?
.
I don't know who Miller is but the above still runs afoul of the constitution as pointed out by the parent post. To use as a standard that something "lacks serious value" is as thoroughly subjective and vague a standard as one can have... and therefore, unconstitutional.
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The hopscotch played by the DMCA is that it doesn't attempt to directly legislate away the core concept of fair use, BUT it prevents the technological means to enact fair use. It's like deciding to do an end run around the NRA by making a law that bullets are illegal; guns are fine, you just can't use them. The loophole that the DMCA takes advantage of is that while fair use has been deemed legal, no given vendor is required to supply the means of exercising this legal activity. The DMCA perverts this even a bit further by making it illegal to try to get around direct attempts by vendors to prevent fair use. I don't think legislation by Boucher should necessarily have to re-state the legality of fair use; more the the point, it should probably state a requirement that fair use be provided for by vendors.
.
I'll bet that we'll see an upswing in the popularity of those novelty glasses with big noses and eyebrows.
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Hysterical! If this person was even remotely in touch with technology, they'd know that nobody spends anything remotely close to $1000 on a hard drive.
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It's hard to request that friends use encryption when (a) it's extra work for them, and (b) their email clients don't generally support encryption. This means that in my workplace, I have to assume that all of my POP mail may be read by IT co-workers (and given the draconian terms of employment foisted on me and others, I find the scenario probable). However, there is a solution to this situation: a POP client, in combination with a bit of supporting software on my mail server, that encrypts mail as I receive it on the server and decrypts it only when it reaches my machine (and does the reverse when sending). This solution will prevent anyone at my workplace from knowing the contents of my private email, and will not require that I educate and equip any of my friends with encryption software.
By the way, if there is existing related work then please mention it.
Now what we need is a site that provides searchability on Google's repository of takedown letters and related links! Shouldn't be too hard, and it seems legal given my understanding of the issues.
.
Ok... but wouldn't this directly contradict the professor's hypothesis that he'll be able to observe a subatomic particle doubling because it's visiting itself from the future?
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Hop-On popped!
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Imitation is the sincerest form of copyright infringement. ;)
Neither does it take ten years and three billion dollars to come up with a software product.
Disagreed, I think Stallman's analogy is a good one. Just as computers cost money, instruments cost money. Then there is the time for training: just as one can't sit a monkey in front of a computer and expect working code, one can't place a guitar in a random person's hands and expect even competent chord playing, let alone what we'd consider musical innovation.
Your attempt to cast the matter in terms of billions of dollars makes me think you're confusing innovation with branding and market development. That is the wrong spectrum to try to see innovation in.