There's no need to teach "information filtering"--it automatically falls out when you teach "critical thinking". Teach kids to examine assumptions, check the facts, do back of the envelope calculations and find common fallacies. Then teach the kids about scenarios and simulation, projection and extrapolation. This will filter out about 99% of the Internet.
I've often fantasized about becoming a teacher just so I could start such a class. You can't teach it at a high school level--too late. You can't teach it in elementary school (except as a foundation to prepare the soil--nice mixed metaphor there)--too early. Probably the ideal age is junior high (for non-US this is around 10-13). This is when kids start playing with ideas (think of when you started playing with, and in particular programming, a computer...it's also the age I found and ravenously consumed a book on logic)
The only problem is that as soon as the townspeople find out you are breeding dissidents out come the pitchforks and torches. --
...this book has already been written. The Light Of Other Days by Clarke and Baxter. Pretty good book, although the end is lame with a capital "suck".
Short synopsis for the lazy: Tech breakthrough allows cheap devices to create wormholes that into any location at any time. So you can spy on what your neighbor is doing or what your husband said yesterday. --
Consider: Corporations now make money using data that belongs to you (phone number, ssn, number of children, etc). They either make this money directly (by selling it to advertisers) or indirectly (by using it themselves in "targetted advertising", etc). Privacy laws stop them from making this money.
But it gets worse than that: Really STRICT privacy laws actually COST them money. They'd have to have compliance officers, regulatory reports, privacy consultants, policy creators/enforcers, etc.
Imagine YOU were a company that was making, say, $1,000,000/year on private information. Then a law is passed and you are looking at paying OUT $100,000/year instead. You'd be pretty pissed, wouldn't you?
NOTE I'm not saying that we should just bend over and let the corps give us the shaft, however. I'm just saying that anyone who didn't see this coming must have fallen off the turnip truck recently. The only antidote to lobbying is MORE lobbying. Call or write you congresscritters and tell them how YOU (not your cable or phone company) feel about privacy. It would probably also help to call the companies in question, but that should be a second step, not a first one. --
"The reason this would not work if you wanted to trick someone into doing is that everyone would have to run that worm within a few minutes of each other..."
Not necessarily. Let's say you sent a link to 100,000 of your closest friends. 1% check the link each minute for the next 100 minutes. That's 1000 hits/minute for 1 hour and 40 minutes duration. Not much for Yahoo, but a TON for dinky little me on a DSL line.
Also consider that the S in DoS is "service"--it doesn't have to eat up your bandwidth, it could eat something else. For instance, 10,000 fake orders would eat up service personnel time and don't have to be submitted simultaneously. 65,635 orders can also be placed at any time to overflow an INT in a poorly designed database. --
This would actually be really easy to implement on Windows. Just make it editable by Word. The user tries to "hack it" (i.e. open the file)--immediately AutoCorrect jumps in and "corrects" the spelling of everything so that it is largely illegible, meanwhile AutoGrammarNazi underlines anything not found in a Dr Seuss book. Then 30 seconds later AutoSave activates and saves the document, destroying it utterly. --
"How un-Slashdot to see Gates bracketed up there with Woz, Jobs and Linus!"
And for that matter, what's Jobs doing in the list at all? The original list was of "technical innovators" which neither Gates nor Jobs is (or was). Gates at least has the distinction of running a highly successful technology company. Whatever you think of Apple, "highly successful" is not really applicable ("limping along" and "fits and starts" both leap to mind). --
Back in MY day, kids utilized the muscles present in larger organisms known as "parents". The powerhouses could easily tow a small child in a wagon or even lift the child off the ground to a height of around 5 feet. Of course, this presented some safety hazards so the practice has been discontinued. --
Ummm...I don't want to "simply stream all audio data off the net". I want my audio data here in my hands (or in my drawer, or on my harddisk). That's the whole point of this whole Napster thing (which I'm pretty sure you've heard about, since it's all we talk about anymore). It isn't about "We want to be able to download"--it's about "We want to be able to do what we want with the stuff we own (which includes downloading)".
I mean, what if www.riaa.com started offering downloadable SDMI (or similarly encrypted) music files tomorrow provided that you could only listen to the stream, not save it or time-shift it or anything. Thanks but no thanks. I don't want a specific medium, I want a choice of mediums.
--
Let's say Taco has an MP3 of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, called nem.mp3. He ripped the MP3 from a CD he owns and uploads it to some server inside the US. I (also in the US) download it.
Question 1: Who has broken the law? Taco, the server owner or me? The RIAA has gone after the server owner, but that's largely pragmatics (not to mention PR).
Now let's imagine a mythical, ideal offshore server location. Call it Luna (see my other post). Let's say Taco has an MP3 of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, called nem.mp3. He ripped the MP3 from a CD he owns and uploads it to Luna. I (also in the US) download it.
Now the RIAA is unable (hypothetically) to get the server owner, right? Taco does a "magic upload" and I do a "magic download". But if your answer to Q1 was either "Taco" or "Me" (or both) then answer this question:
Question 2: How is the mythical, Luna server with the "magic" ul/dl any different than a strictly peer-to-peer, decentralized system that has NO server where Taco just sends the file right to me?
My contention is that it's not. Instead of figuring out where to PUT the server, we should be figuring out how to ELIMINATE the server. This would especially be the case if your answer to Q1 was "the server"--because then the system would even be legal. Bonus! --
...is Man or Wyoh to put a good word in with Mike. Then we can have "offshore" hosting in Luna Free State. Only problem is the time-delay. On the plus side, I'd love to see a big rock dropped on the RIAA... --
"If I were to tell you that I created a potato in a computer, and then invited you to eat it, you'd laugh at me."
But if you invited a computer intelligence to eat it, he would (after cooking it on his stove, using his electricity). You are making a category error.
Consider a counter-example: When I write notes down and then play them on a piano, they make music. What if the computer writes the notes down and I play them on a piano? Is it still music or is it "simulated music"? What if the sound comes out the computers speakers? What if the sound is inaudible to you and me, but goes in the simulated ears of a simulated intelligence?
A potato can't cross levels from inside to outside because a potato is a physical object. Music (and intelligence) CAN cross levels because it is just a pattern of information.
"You cannot pefectly simulate a real system - the only perfect simulation is the original system itself."
And what's wrong with that? When I copy MS Word to another computer, isn't that a "perfect simulation" of the original? What about when I reimplement a program to read Word files? And when I reimplement a program to behave exactly like me? Sure, you can't simulate a system in another medium that is less complex. But that leaves it up to you to prove that computers are less complex than brains. --
I remember a lot of talk from a couple years ago about how they were adding 20 million lines to NT to get W2k, bringing the total up to something like 150 million lines.
find/usr/src/linux/ -type f -name *.[ch] -exec wc -l {} \; | awk '{sum+=$1;} END {print sum}'
1504406
(I'm not going to claim that was the easiest or fastest way to do that....)
So W2k has two orders of magnitude more code, at least one order of magnitude (if not two or even three) fewer eyeballs and no way to FIX found bugs other than the same old "we'll put it on our list". Yeah, that's productive. --
...instead of whatever Hemos is writing in, here's a quote from the link that makes the story more intelligible:
"Xpdf is a free (GPLed) PDF reader which respects Adobe's lame "copy-protection" bits in PDFs where the reader refuses to allow printing or copying etc.
I've written a patch to uncripple xpdf, should Debian apply it?"
Now, on to what I think.
1) The creator of xpdf (assuming he's not an Adobe employee) has no obligation to emulate Adobe's product exactly.
2) Similarly, the creator has no obligation to enforce a third-party's copyright.
3) OTOH, if the patch is applied, PDF creators may be incensed enough to ask Adobe to "fix it, Mommy". Adobe could then change the format such that xpdf can no longer read it or, worse, put the arm on xpdf somehow.
Therefore, my suggestion is this. Apply the patch, but make it a commandline option that is off by default. That way, the protection is there as a "reminder" but not as an obstacle. --
...but what about The Incredible Machine? Now THERE'S a classic, quality Sierra game. TIM and Civ are the only games I've every actually purchased. I can run Civ on Linux (two ways, counting FreeCiv). How I wish TIM was on Linux....
(Yes, I know there was a project to recreate it on Linux, but alas it appears dead) --
I'm 28, so I remember "pre-Internet" days pretty well (pre-popular-Internet, anyway). Trust me, this is MUCH different.
I've lived in smallish towns all my life--not much in the way of good libraries or even bookstores. Yet I keep up with all the latest advances (Linux, Java, XML, etc). How? The Internet.
My wife and I are voracious consumers of information--$10/mo for a 56k line has saved us thousands in purchased (and upgraded) reference books and the like.
Only have Toys R DamnExpensive in your area? Shop online. Get voting info online. Participate in special interest groups (like Slashdot) online.
The world (at least MY world) is nothing like it would have been 20 years ago. --
1) This is not a book review. We heard nothing about the contents of the book except that they were "mind-bending". So bend our minds a little with some excerpts or paraphrases or something.
2) You twice compare the author to God (including one comparison that compares the book to something God would write)...yet you only give it an 8.5. Surely it would be newsworthy to explain how "God went wrong" and lost 1.5 points. --
This is the first I've heard of something call "The Open Source Software License". My understanding has always been that "Open Source" software can be one of several licenses, including:
Public Domain
BSD
GPL
Public Domain, obviously, has no possibility of violation. I know next to nothing about BSD. The GPL has never been tested in court, but there HAVE been violations corrected through "non-legal" means. --
Instead of building an elaborate "landing zone" let's implement a much simpler and more effective system (for RUF *and* for regular off-ramps). When you hit the end of the ramp, a pleasant contralto voice starts counting down from ten. If it gets to zero before the car accelerates beyond the end of the ramp, a magnetic junk-yard-style arm comes out, picks the car up and dumps it in a heap off to the side. The piteous cries of people formerly "engaged in coitus" will be a deterrent to further slowpokes. We save money AND clean up the gene pool. A double bonus! --
Slashdot Mirror
There's no need to teach "information filtering"--it automatically falls out when you teach "critical thinking". Teach kids to examine assumptions, check the facts, do back of the envelope calculations and find common fallacies. Then teach the kids about scenarios and simulation, projection and extrapolation. This will filter out about 99% of the Internet.
I've often fantasized about becoming a teacher just so I could start such a class. You can't teach it at a high school level--too late. You can't teach it in elementary school (except as a foundation to prepare the soil--nice mixed metaphor there)--too early. Probably the ideal age is junior high (for non-US this is around 10-13). This is when kids start playing with ideas (think of when you started playing with, and in particular programming, a computer...it's also the age I found and ravenously consumed a book on logic)
The only problem is that as soon as the townspeople find out you are breeding dissidents out come the pitchforks and torches.
--
Ho. Ly. Crap.
This was THE best interview Slashdot has every done. This guy is my new god. Where do I send the virgins and white bulls for sacrifice?
--
...this book has already been written. The Light Of Other Days by Clarke and Baxter. Pretty good book, although the end is lame with a capital "suck".
Short synopsis for the lazy: Tech breakthrough allows cheap devices to create wormholes that into any location at any time. So you can spy on what your neighbor is doing or what your husband said yesterday.
--
...for THEM.
Consider: Corporations now make money using data that belongs to you (phone number, ssn, number of children, etc). They either make this money directly (by selling it to advertisers) or indirectly (by using it themselves in "targetted advertising", etc). Privacy laws stop them from making this money.
But it gets worse than that: Really STRICT privacy laws actually COST them money. They'd have to have compliance officers, regulatory reports, privacy consultants, policy creators/enforcers, etc.
Imagine YOU were a company that was making, say, $1,000,000/year on private information. Then a law is passed and you are looking at paying OUT $100,000/year instead. You'd be pretty pissed, wouldn't you?
NOTE I'm not saying that we should just bend over and let the corps give us the shaft, however. I'm just saying that anyone who didn't see this coming must have fallen off the turnip truck recently. The only antidote to lobbying is MORE lobbying. Call or write you congresscritters and tell them how YOU (not your cable or phone company) feel about privacy. It would probably also help to call the companies in question, but that should be a second step, not a first one.
--
"The reason this would not work if you wanted to trick someone into doing is that everyone would have to run that worm within a few minutes of each other..."
Not necessarily. Let's say you sent a link to 100,000 of your closest friends. 1% check the link each minute for the next 100 minutes. That's 1000 hits/minute for 1 hour and 40 minutes duration. Not much for Yahoo, but a TON for dinky little me on a DSL line.
Also consider that the S in DoS is "service"--it doesn't have to eat up your bandwidth, it could eat something else. For instance, 10,000 fake orders would eat up service personnel time and don't have to be submitted simultaneously. 65,635 orders can also be placed at any time to overflow an INT in a poorly designed database.
--
"We had to destroy the copy to protect it."
This would actually be really easy to implement on Windows. Just make it editable by Word. The user tries to "hack it" (i.e. open the file)--immediately AutoCorrect jumps in and "corrects" the spelling of everything so that it is largely illegible, meanwhile AutoGrammarNazi underlines anything not found in a Dr Seuss book. Then 30 seconds later AutoSave activates and saves the document, destroying it utterly.
--
But what if I'm not online? (or not online in a way they like, like I have a home network running Linux)
Or worse, what if I don't buy a PS2? How'm I gonna get my PS2 games authenticated unless I buy a PS2? It just won't work, I'm telling you!
I think I'll just go play on the Yardwork Simulator--trees and grass have UIDs, but nobody has thought of authenticating them yet.
--
"How un-Slashdot to see Gates bracketed up there with Woz, Jobs and Linus!"
And for that matter, what's Jobs doing in the list at all? The original list was of "technical innovators" which neither Gates nor Jobs is (or was). Gates at least has the distinction of running a highly successful technology company. Whatever you think of Apple, "highly successful" is not really applicable ("limping along" and "fits and starts" both leap to mind).
--
Back in MY day, kids utilized the muscles present in larger organisms known as "parents". The powerhouses could easily tow a small child in a wagon or even lift the child off the ground to a height of around 5 feet. Of course, this presented some safety hazards so the practice has been discontinued.
--
Ummm...I don't want to "simply stream all audio data off the net". I want my audio data here in my hands (or in my drawer, or on my harddisk). That's the whole point of this whole Napster thing (which I'm pretty sure you've heard about, since it's all we talk about anymore). It isn't about "We want to be able to download"--it's about "We want to be able to do what we want with the stuff we own (which includes downloading)".
I mean, what if www.riaa.com started offering downloadable SDMI (or similarly encrypted) music files tomorrow provided that you could only listen to the stream, not save it or time-shift it or anything. Thanks but no thanks. I don't want a specific medium, I want a choice of mediums.
--
Let's say Taco has an MP3 of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, called nem.mp3. He ripped the MP3 from a CD he owns and uploads it to some server inside the US. I (also in the US) download it.
Question 1: Who has broken the law? Taco, the server owner or me? The RIAA has gone after the server owner, but that's largely pragmatics (not to mention PR).
Now let's imagine a mythical, ideal offshore server location. Call it Luna (see my other post). Let's say Taco has an MP3 of "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica, called nem.mp3. He ripped the MP3 from a CD he owns and uploads it to Luna. I (also in the US) download it.
Now the RIAA is unable (hypothetically) to get the server owner, right? Taco does a "magic upload" and I do a "magic download". But if your answer to Q1 was either "Taco" or "Me" (or both) then answer this question:
Question 2: How is the mythical, Luna server with the "magic" ul/dl any different than a strictly peer-to-peer, decentralized system that has NO server where Taco just sends the file right to me?
My contention is that it's not. Instead of figuring out where to PUT the server, we should be figuring out how to ELIMINATE the server. This would especially be the case if your answer to Q1 was "the server"--because then the system would even be legal. Bonus!
--
...is Man or Wyoh to put a good word in with Mike. Then we can have "offshore" hosting in Luna Free State. Only problem is the time-delay. On the plus side, I'd love to see a big rock dropped on the RIAA...
--
"If I were to tell you that I created a potato in a computer, and then invited you to eat it, you'd laugh at me."
But if you invited a computer intelligence to eat it, he would (after cooking it on his stove, using his electricity). You are making a category error.
Consider a counter-example: When I write notes down and then play them on a piano, they make music. What if the computer writes the notes down and I play them on a piano? Is it still music or is it "simulated music"? What if the sound comes out the computers speakers? What if the sound is inaudible to you and me, but goes in the simulated ears of a simulated intelligence?
A potato can't cross levels from inside to outside because a potato is a physical object. Music (and intelligence) CAN cross levels because it is just a pattern of information.
"You cannot pefectly simulate a real system - the only perfect simulation is the original system itself."
And what's wrong with that? When I copy MS Word to another computer, isn't that a "perfect simulation" of the original? What about when I reimplement a program to read Word files? And when I reimplement a program to behave exactly like me? Sure, you can't simulate a system in another medium that is less complex. But that leaves it up to you to prove that computers are less complex than brains.
--
I remember a lot of talk from a couple years ago about how they were adding 20 million lines to NT to get W2k, bringing the total up to something like 150 million lines.
/usr/src/linux/ -type f -name *.[ch] -exec wc -l {} \; | awk '{sum+=$1;} END {print sum}'
find
1504406
(I'm not going to claim that was the easiest or fastest way to do that....)
So W2k has two orders of magnitude more code, at least one order of magnitude (if not two or even three) fewer eyeballs and no way to FIX found bugs other than the same old "we'll put it on our list". Yeah, that's productive.
--
...instead of whatever Hemos is writing in, here's a quote from the link that makes the story more intelligible:
"Xpdf is a free (GPLed) PDF reader which respects Adobe's lame "copy-protection" bits in PDFs where the reader refuses to allow printing or copying etc.
I've written a patch to uncripple xpdf, should Debian apply it?"
Now, on to what I think.
1) The creator of xpdf (assuming he's not an Adobe employee) has no obligation to emulate Adobe's product exactly.
2) Similarly, the creator has no obligation to enforce a third-party's copyright.
3) OTOH, if the patch is applied, PDF creators may be incensed enough to ask Adobe to "fix it, Mommy". Adobe could then change the format such that xpdf can no longer read it or, worse, put the arm on xpdf somehow.
Therefore, my suggestion is this. Apply the patch, but make it a commandline option that is off by default. That way, the protection is there as a "reminder" but not as an obstacle.
--
...but what about The Incredible Machine? Now THERE'S a classic, quality Sierra game. TIM and Civ are the only games I've every actually purchased. I can run Civ on Linux (two ways, counting FreeCiv). How I wish TIM was on Linux....
(Yes, I know there was a project to recreate it on Linux, but alas it appears dead)
--
I'm 28, so I remember "pre-Internet" days pretty well (pre-popular-Internet, anyway). Trust me, this is MUCH different.
I've lived in smallish towns all my life--not much in the way of good libraries or even bookstores. Yet I keep up with all the latest advances (Linux, Java, XML, etc). How? The Internet.
My wife and I are voracious consumers of information--$10/mo for a 56k line has saved us thousands in purchased (and upgraded) reference books and the like.
Only have Toys R DamnExpensive in your area? Shop online. Get voting info online. Participate in special interest groups (like Slashdot) online.
The world (at least MY world) is nothing like it would have been 20 years ago.
--
Please give me a definition of "life" that includes humans, cats and bacteria but excludes thermostats.
--
1) This is not a book review. We heard nothing about the contents of the book except that they were "mind-bending". So bend our minds a little with some excerpts or paraphrases or something.
2) You twice compare the author to God (including one comparison that compares the book to something God would write)...yet you only give it an 8.5. Surely it would be newsworthy to explain how "God went wrong" and lost 1.5 points.
--
This is the first I've heard of something call "The Open Source Software License". My understanding has always been that "Open Source" software can be one of several licenses, including:
Public Domain
BSD
GPL
Public Domain, obviously, has no possibility of violation. I know next to nothing about BSD. The GPL has never been tested in court, but there HAVE been violations corrected through "non-legal" means.
--
Instead of building an elaborate "landing zone" let's implement a much simpler and more effective system (for RUF *and* for regular off-ramps). When you hit the end of the ramp, a pleasant contralto voice starts counting down from ten. If it gets to zero before the car accelerates beyond the end of the ramp, a magnetic junk-yard-style arm comes out, picks the car up and dumps it in a heap off to the side. The piteous cries of people formerly "engaged in coitus" will be a deterrent to further slowpokes. We save money AND clean up the gene pool. A double bonus!
--