Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
Wrong answer private. Animals do the same thing. They want their offspring to have better chances to survive than other animals. Its the law of nature. Survival. Members of the feline family have been known to eat offspring of other prides to ensure sufficent resources for their own progeny. Do they deserve to live? Its survival of fittest, and always has been. Do my kids "deserve" to survive more than yours? I dont know, thats a moral question. But I will do whatever it takes to make sure my kids will survive, hopefully NOT at the expense of others. However I would be remiss as a parent *NOT* to give them whatever advantages I can.
Yes, animals do the same thing. No need to go as far as the feline family -- primates have been observed killing the children of their competitors in their tribe. It's natural to compete against your own race, to use any means necessary to make sure your genes live on and theirs dies out.
But we're not animals any more. Animals can't alter themselves and their progeny with precision and imagination. Individual animals can't destroy their entire race, or the entire planet, with short-sighted competition and greed.
If we continue acting like animals, determined to get any advantage we can get over our fellows, then there's a good chance we'll all perish -- in designer plagues, in unforseen genetic damage, or in good old fashioned caste warfare. Aren't just just as remiss as a parent if your meddling insures that they and their world die in a bloody conflict?
Okay, so we fought the Nazis for the right to have a capitalist society whose successful members strive to do everything the Nazis wanted to do to the human race. I could, but won't, argue with you on that. I just find it very amusing logic.:)
Why is giving your children an advantage bad? Why is successsful capitalism a threat to anyone? Let's put it this way.
Capitalism run amok is threatening individual privacy and freedom. You have a choice -- capitalism or freedom. What would you choose? A rich slave, or a poor but liberated man?
Genetic manipulation run amok will allow certain people to be decidedly superior than other people. You have a choice -- genomics or equality. What would you choose? Do you really think that you'll be in the top tier of humanity? What happens when someone else emerges as decidedly (and legally) better than you?
History has shown that when a group of people are oppressed and their liberties threatened, it presages turmoil and bloody conflict. Things that threaten our liberty must be applied with caution and monitored closely, because if they become a dominant force we may no longer be able to stop them, short of a total revolution. Genetic manipulation invites caste systems and prejudice. If it is not applied cautiously and equally to the entire race, it will be a precursor to hatred and war.
You have a choice -- advance into the future at full speed and invite conflict and armageddon, or take it more cautiously and let morality guide our tech. What would you choose?
The gap between the rich and the poor sucks. Welcome to a Capitalist society. We killed millions of people in WWI and WWII so we could have a capitalist system.
No. We killed millions of people so that we could have a Democratic system, rather than a fascist one. Democracy was supposed to insure freedom. Now capitalism has evolved to the point where it is threatening that freedom, and people are beginning to realize that run-away capitalism is not mandated by our Constitution.
I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
We need to stop thinking about what is best for individuals or for their progeny, and start thinking about what is best for the race as a whole. There are too many things looming on the horizon that can destroy us in toto for us to be squabbling about advantages for the individual.
Heh. Do a search on Slashdot, Zigurd -- I've been active in conversations for over a year using this name. Do a web or usenet search and you'll see that I've kept the same name (and email address!) for six years. Yes, the name's corny. But it has always identified me.
I am no troll. Although I use a psuedonym, I have always taken responsibility for the words that I write. A pseudonym is a nice middleground; it allows me to act freely on the internet without fear, yet I remain accountable for my opinions.
If everyone's lives were out in the open, who would attack you for being a zoophile? Only people whose personal lives were deemed to be much "cleaner" than yours.
And to avoid being attacked, people would be driven into living "cleaner" lives; thus a homogenized society is created via peer pressure.
Now obviously, this is a rather idealized notion that involves people being nicer to each other than they are now. However, the vindictiveness of people stems not from an innate property, but from society, a society that encourages people to hide any deviant behavior away and pretend that everyone is perfectly normal. Having a less private society is the first step away from this kind of nonsense.
No. Human vindictiveness stems from a very basic fear of the unknown. Things that are different or outside of one's experience are frightening, and there is a strong tendency to avoid and condemn them. In a less private society, people are forced to avoid deviancy, or face condemnation -- which has real and painful consequences. Those that cannot avoid being deviant (drug use is addictive; sexual deviancies can be both addictive and incurable) will become second-class citizens, able to be ostracized at the whim of any 'normal' person. There is no defense against being truly ostracized from society. It's no comfort that you are able to commiserate with others of similar deviancy, when you are all sleeping in the street and unable to get any employment because of your abnormalities.
Remember, there are people out there who have *no* deviancies. They may even be a majority -- the moralists today certainly *act* like they are a majority, with a very prominent attitude that the rest of society should be just like they are. These people don't live in glass houses, and they love throwing stones. A Transparent Society would be a tool for this type of busybody majority to prey upon and ostracize any minority they wish.
Anonymous coward wrote (albeit in unexpurgated form): "I f*** farm animals"
Interesting that you should write that in a discussion on privacy. Personally, I do f*** farm animals. I am a zoophile, an ex-FAQ-keeper of alt.sex.bestiality, and it's not much of a secret to anyone who knows me. (Why did you think I was using a psuedonym?)
And my situation is a good example of why David Brin's Transparent Society will never work. My personal life harms no one, and in my state of residence it's perfectly legal. But I guarantee you that if my personal life were revealed to everyone, I would have problems with my employer, not to mention my coworkers and possibly with over-zealous law enforcement who aren't familiar with the (lack of) sodomy laws in this state.
It's happened to me already, you see. A usenet.kook hired a private detective to ferret out information on me, then wrote to my previous employer. Although I broke no law, my career was nearly destroyed because of a private behaviour outside the mainstream, found by someone who was able to snoop on me too easily. I'm a little harder to find, now...although I have no illusions that I'm completely unfindable.
The premise behind Brin's Transparent Society is that we can catch corporations and governments doing illegal things also. But how many people have money to pay for investigation of every corporation or government agency they suspect of wrongdoing? Are corporations held responsible for legal-but-frowned-upon behaviour, or do they just ignore outcries until they affect their profits? And of course, any corporation has the funds to research the individuals opposing them, and destroy their lives if they can.
The Transparent Society will shift power away from individuals and towards those who have the resources to mine and act upon information. It will create a homogenized society, and threaten everyone whose lives differ from the mainstream by any minor behaviour or percieved difference from 'normal'. It's a dangerous concept, and I believe a very evil future for Brin (who I otherwise respect) to be promoting.
I would point out that, until recently, Claremont was the writer of Fantastic Four (ending an almost 2-year run on that title) and is, in fact, back writing both X-Men and Uncanny X-Men.
Really? I did not know that! I quit reading the X-Men and Excalibur soon after Claremont left those titles for a career writing (so-so) novels. If he's back to comics again, I might have to pick up some issues.:)
I just wish Chris was getting more credit. I see Stan Lee written in bold letters everywhere, but Stan Lee is not the person who made the X-Men great.
Although Stan Lee was co-creator of the first X-men, most of the popular X-men (as well as the comic book's overall theme and flavor) was created by Chris Claremont. Chris created Wolverine, Storm (his dream gal) and Rogue, as well as other second-generation X-men (are Kitty Pryde, Colossus, or Nightcrawler in the movie?) Claremont also invented Senator Kelly, Gyrich, and the whole intolerance-towards-mutants plotline.
Stan Lee's a genius whose talents were tuned to the 1960's. Chris Claremont, although seemingly shunned by the comic book companies these days, is just as much a genius with a more contemporary talent.
I *want* this sword. But since I'll never be able to afford it, maybe I can get the next best thing -- at the very end of the article, they say they may make a line of Dragonslayer golf clubs using this technology.
I don't see how a nine-iron could really hurt a dragon, but I'll willing to put on my armor and spar with it for a while to see if it's an effective weapon.;)
So a news organization that links to a MP3 site is not illegal, but a hacker group who links to a MP3 site is illegal, because of their different intents? Even though the functional value of what they do is exactly the same, and the news site might even get a hundred times the readership? Sorry, that makes no sense. If the law truly reads that way, it's a law that can and will be flagrantly ignored. Do we need more laws as ignorable as speed limits?
If RIAA wins this case, it jeopardizes the freedom of speech of anyone who links to any original site for any reason.
Personally, I don't believe that linking to an illegal site is aiding and abetting a crime. Linking is a form of directions; it is a passive, not an active act. An analogy might be if your friend asks you where he can buy illegal drugs. If you tell him on the corner of 8th and Main and he goes down there himself, you are *not* legally aiding him, if I recall correctly. If you drive him down there then you are legally abetting his crime.
Providing information should *never* be illegal -- only actions should be cause for punishment.
I will share with you some words of wisdom that I received when I got married.
When I announced my marriage to my family, my uncle Bob looked me straight in the eye and said in a quiet voice: "Just remember -- you can always blow your own brains out."
These words have carried me through many years and the subsequent messy divorce. I hope they are equally as inspiring to you.:)
Pseudonyms -- true anonymity on the net.
on
Pretty Poor Privacy
·
· Score: 3
The internet is as anonymous as you want to make it...because we still have the option of lying to those who ask us for information. Look at me. Did you think my real name was 'Remus Shepherd'? No -- it's a psuedonym, a lie.
99% of the websites I visit and do business with know me by an IP address and maybe the name Remus Shepherd. The other 1% are those that require real information and whom I've decided to give that information to. But most advertisers and databases out there know me as Remus, with no connection to my real name. They can't get a credit history on Remus Shepherd. Mailing address? None known. Bombard Remus Shepherd with 'targetted' ads all you like -- they're easy for my mailfilter to trash, while the few trusted sites that know my real name are allowed through.
The net may evolve into a communication medium where people have screen names and True Names (thanks again, Vernor Vinge). I think it's a simple and effective response to commercial invasion of privacy.
Gnutella wasn't designed so that downloads were anonymous. It's as easy to find a user there as on Napster.
What Gnutella *does* provide is a decentralized structure. So if you find 300,000 people pirating your music, you can't sue Gnutella's creators to stop them -- they're not serving the data, they have nothing to do with it, and putting them out of business won't affect the user transfers. To enforce your copyright on Gnutella users you will be forced to sue them all individually. *That* is what scares the RIAA.
And although others may have mentioned it, Freenet is the next step beyond Gnutella. Not only is Freenet decentralized, but users on it *are* anonymized.
The president of Seagrams, in a story posted a week or so ago on Slashdot, said that he wanted to eliminate anonymity. RIAA's latest legal briefs talk about the dangers of any peer-to-peer data sharing system.
Sounds like they're declaring war upon the internet to me.
You missed one of the most important quotes in the article:
Monish Bhatia, the publisher of Washington, D.C.-based Macintosh News Network, said no one sent the publication information about Adobe's Photoshop 6.0 and ImageReady 3.0. "That particular document was accessible in the public domain," Bhatia said.
If they got their information from public domain documents, what exactly is Adobe suing about??
Anyone remember the game BotWars? It was simple; using assembler language in a protected and limited memory space, write a bot that will kill any other bots on the system. Most bots sprayed memory with nulls or JMP commands to corrupt and kill everything else on the system. But one very powerful bot was known as the Five Musketeers.
The Five Musketeers bot looked for copies of itself in memory, and if it didn't find them, it created up to four copies. Each copy then kept checking on the health of the other four, and if one copy became corrupted it was rewritten. Thus, the Five Musketeers were cooperatively immortal, and payloads could be added to them to spray memory or any other offensive attack you wished.
Sound anything like Sandia's bot yet?
I'm not sure I like the idea of the internet turning into a playfield for agents like those in BotWars. It could rapidly turn into a wasteland, with all the bandwidth going to automatic attacks and defenses.:/
Because of the 'electrostatic' adhesion of their feet, Geckos do have traction in low gravity. They also have traction in total vacuum (apparently someone put a gecko in a vacuum to test this.:/ ). A geckobot might be ideal for extra-vehicular work in orbit.
Then again...if the geckos' feet are electrostatic in nature, a charge applied to the surface they're walking on might cause them to repel away from the surface. So they wouldn't be much use in solar storms like the one we're currently having...
CNet has all of the simple domain names because they got them first. CNet was grabbing domain names before the net became commercial and crowded. They were simply first.
Some would say that CNet's domain names are the main reason they've succeeded on the web. Their competition has addresses as simple as www.cnn.com, but they have addresses even simpler to find -- www.news.com.
In answer to my question, Scott replied that there were sites available that provided voting records for candidates. I disagree...or at least, I find the sites available are practically useless.
USA Democracy lists bills in the current session of Congress and how legislators voted on each bill. They don't appear to have old records, so you can't look 8 years in the past to see if a candidate's vote has been consistent. They allow you to vote on bills and compare your vote to your representatives' vote...but you cannot compare your representatives to their election opponents, nor can you look at presidential candidates or politicians in another district. Nice setup, but nearly worthless to me.
THOMAS is similar to USA Democracy but with an archive, so you can look at past votes. Still, it gives information only on federal officeholders, and you have to look through the bill history to collate information about a candidate. Yuck.
Project Vote-Smart is a bit closer to what I'd like to see: It lists candidates, not just incumbents, although it only has voting record for federal incumbents. Thus, there are no records at all for George W. Bush (no info on state bills and positions) and the latest records for Al Gore are from 1992 when he was a senator. A dribble of info on this site, nothing more.
I want information on a candidate from *before* he became a senator. I want information on what he claims to support cross-referenced to how he's actually voted. I want to see the state legislature voting records...what the hell has George W. Bush been doing in Texas? And I want to compare candidates side-by-side on the same page.
I am a registered independant, and I am shopping for a vote. The candidates are products to me -- I want the same kind of shopping experience I get when comparing hardware on a retailer's site. Full info and directly comparable data, nothing less will do.
I hope Scott's Democracy Project has what I'm looking for. Oh, well, if it doesn't, I can always compete with him by putting up my own site in 2004.
Powerpuff Girls...the only anime worth watching.
on
Essential Anime
·
· Score: 2
In general, I don't like anime. It's mostly adolescent fantasy and/or angst, with few examples of literary merit. I do admit to being curious about Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke, but most of the anime I've actually sat through -- Fists of the North Star, Nausicaa, Lensman, Gundam, Robotech, Vampire Hunter D, etc -- left me bored and puzzled about why the hell my friends liked this stuff.
Therefore I postulate that the only anime worth watching is anime that makes fun of anime. And as a result, I have become hooked on the Powerpuff Girls. They poke fun at every superhero genre but make extra effort to ridicule anime, and the end result leaves me howling with laughter. The powerpuff Mecha episode alone -- where it takes almost a full minute to reveal the missles popping out of every possible surface on the mechanoid -- is a stinging slap across the face to the japanese animation industry.:) I heartily recommend it.
You talk about what the political parties should do to improve their websites, but don't mention what people outside political circles can accomplish. The websites you list in your article do *not* have what everyone says they want: An unbiased checklist of issues referenced to the candidates and their voting record.
Forget the political parties for a moment, as I don't believe they'll ever report unbiased information. That leaves us, the people.
Do you think there is room for a grassroots organization to collect the voting histories of candidates and publicize their records? If so, why doesn't such an organization already exist? Could such an organization thrive, or would it be besieged by political candidates who don't want their true voting histories known?
1) and 2): The peak of the pulse does arrive in the minkowskian past, yes. I'm a bit fuzzy on the geometry of the experiment, though...how long are those light pulses? Would the leading edge of the pulse have reached the other side of the chamber when the new pulse peak is created? If so, then it's a sort of optical gzip chamber -- you've packed all the information of the pulse into just the leading bit, while not actually sending it superliminally, because the leading edge would have traveled that distance anyway. I don't know...need a more detailed description of the experiment.
3) If I recall correctly (and I'm not sure I do), the uncertainty principle is used to explain how phases can propagate in a wave faster than the wave's actual speed of propagation...at the expense of energy. I'm not sure that it applies here at all. I was just throwing it out as a possible explanation of why some people expect to not get FTL communications out of this thing. dEnergy x dTime is conserved, so if you screw around with the time you screw around with the energy, and lose your information.
I think it's more likely that the "leading edge" is recreated, and as the incoming pulse is being "fed" into the cesium tube, more and more of the "pulse" is reproduced. A whole pulse is reproduced when the incoming pulse has been entirely absorbed.
Nope. From the article, "the outgoing pulse had already traveled about 60 feet from the chamber before the incoming pulse had reached the chamber's near side." The pulse was recreated in its entirety from just the initial leading edge.
I am a physicist, but not an optical physicist, so take the following with a grain of salt.
Wish I had a whiteboard. Let's try doing this with ASCII art.
Just before the pulse hits the chamber, things look like this:
/#####\-> |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Pulse Cesium chamber
Note that the pulse has a 'leading edge' -- a rise time before its maximum intensity. Once that leading edge hits the cesium, the cesium recreates the entire pulse on the other side:
/#####|\->~~~~~~~~~~~~~/|#####\->
So the pulse appears to have gone faster than light through the cesium. Another way to look at it is that the cesium, using nothing more than the leading edge of the pulse, spontaneously created a new pulse. Actually, it created two new pulses, as you can see after a little more time:
|~/#####\->~~~~~~~<-/#####\~|/#####\->
The two pulses within the chamber are moving towards each other, and they'll deconstructively interfere, cancelling each other out. (Actually, they cancel out as soon as the original pulse is completely in the chamber, but it's easier to draw this way.) Meanwhile the pulse outside the chamber is moving away from it and towards your measuring equipment.
So the pulse is not travelling backwards in time. The pulse isn't travelling far at all; it's being annihilated, really, but a copy of it is generated . It just happens to be generated some distance away.
Note that my drawings are flawed; the light pulse was probably longer than the cesium chamber. So the original pulse was already half-destroyed by the time the new pulse emerged from the other end. That would have been difficult to draw.
Why can't we use this to send information faster than light? Read the article again -- they're not really sure that you can't. One person is arguing that the information is packed into the leading edge of the pulse (sort of an optical gzip) and so you're compressing information but not sending it superluminally. Other people (Dr. Nimtz, third paragraph from the bottom) say that they really are sending information faster than light.
Personal opinion: This looks like some kind of wave phase propagation trick to me. We've always known that you can cause a phase shift in a beam of light to propagate superluminally, but the problem is that you can't encapsulate information in phase shifts adequately, due to (IIRC) the uncertainty principle. Not to say that this isn't an exciting experiment, but it doesn't appear to have a practical use. Now, the microwave experiment that travelled at 1.05 c excites me...I'd like to see if they can extend it to interstellar distances and through vacuum.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
Wrong answer private. Animals do the same thing. They want their offspring to have better chances to survive than other animals. Its the law of nature. Survival. Members of the feline family have been known to eat offspring of other prides to ensure sufficent resources for their own progeny. Do they deserve to live? Its survival of fittest, and always has been. Do my kids "deserve" to survive more than yours? I dont know, thats a moral question. But I will do whatever it takes to make sure my kids will survive, hopefully NOT at the expense of others. However I would be remiss as a parent *NOT* to give them whatever advantages I can.
Yes, animals do the same thing. No need to go as far as the feline family -- primates have been observed killing the children of their competitors in their tribe. It's natural to compete against your own race, to use any means necessary to make sure your genes live on and theirs dies out.
But we're not animals any more. Animals can't alter themselves and their progeny with precision and imagination. Individual animals can't destroy their entire race, or the entire planet, with short-sighted competition and greed.
If we continue acting like animals, determined to get any advantage we can get over our fellows, then there's a good chance we'll all perish -- in designer plagues, in unforseen genetic damage, or in good old fashioned caste warfare. Aren't just just as remiss as a parent if your meddling insures that they and their world die in a bloody conflict?
Okay, so we fought the Nazis for the right to have a capitalist society whose successful members strive to do everything the Nazis wanted to do to the human race. I could, but won't, argue with you on that. I just find it very amusing logic. :)
Why is giving your children an advantage bad? Why is successsful capitalism a threat to anyone? Let's put it this way.
Capitalism run amok is threatening individual privacy and freedom. You have a choice -- capitalism or freedom. What would you choose? A rich slave, or a poor but liberated man?
Genetic manipulation run amok will allow certain people to be decidedly superior than other people. You have a choice -- genomics or equality. What would you choose? Do you really think that you'll be in the top tier of humanity? What happens when someone else emerges as decidedly (and legally) better than you?
History has shown that when a group of people are oppressed and their liberties threatened, it presages turmoil and bloody conflict. Things that threaten our liberty must be applied with caution and monitored closely, because if they become a dominant force we may no longer be able to stop them, short of a total revolution. Genetic manipulation invites caste systems and prejudice. If it is not applied cautiously and equally to the entire race, it will be a precursor to hatred and war.
You have a choice -- advance into the future at full speed and invite conflict and armageddon, or take it more cautiously and let morality guide our tech. What would you choose?
The gap between the rich and the poor sucks. Welcome to a Capitalist society. We killed millions of people in WWI and WWII so we could have a capitalist system.
No. We killed millions of people so that we could have a Democratic system, rather than a fascist one. Democracy was supposed to insure freedom. Now capitalism has evolved to the point where it is threatening that freedom, and people are beginning to realize that run-away capitalism is not mandated by our Constitution.
I'll spend my money and make my kids smarter, better, and quicker. This is the way it is, has always been, and always will be. You're kidding youself if you think otherwise. It just so happens that genetic engineering is the ultimate expression of this phenonomon. We've got lots of problems in society as is; This isn't the biggest. Might it be 100 years from now? Maybe. But I'll make sure my offspring have every advantage I can give them in that world, the same as my parents did for me, and the same as their parents did for them.
Selfishness and greed. Makes one wonder if the human race deserves to survive.
We need to stop thinking about what is best for individuals or for their progeny, and start thinking about what is best for the race as a whole. There are too many things looming on the horizon that can destroy us in toto for us to be squabbling about advantages for the individual.
Heh. Do a search on Slashdot, Zigurd -- I've been active in conversations for over a year using this name. Do a web or usenet search and you'll see that I've kept the same name (and email address!) for six years. Yes, the name's corny. But it has always identified me.
I am no troll. Although I use a psuedonym, I have always taken responsibility for the words that I write. A pseudonym is a nice middleground; it allows me to act freely on the internet without fear, yet I remain accountable for my opinions.
If everyone's lives were out in the open, who would attack you for being a zoophile? Only people whose personal lives were deemed to be much "cleaner" than yours.
And to avoid being attacked, people would be driven into living "cleaner" lives; thus a homogenized society is created via peer pressure.
Now obviously, this is a rather idealized notion that involves people being nicer to each other than they are now. However, the vindictiveness of people stems not from an innate property, but from society, a society that encourages people to hide any deviant behavior away and pretend that everyone is perfectly normal. Having a less private society is the first step away from this kind of nonsense.
No. Human vindictiveness stems from a very basic fear of the unknown. Things that are different or outside of one's experience are frightening, and there is a strong tendency to avoid and condemn them. In a less private society, people are forced to avoid deviancy, or face condemnation -- which has real and painful consequences. Those that cannot avoid being deviant (drug use is addictive; sexual deviancies can be both addictive and incurable) will become second-class citizens, able to be ostracized at the whim of any 'normal' person. There is no defense against being truly ostracized from society. It's no comfort that you are able to commiserate with others of similar deviancy, when you are all sleeping in the street and unable to get any employment because of your abnormalities.
Remember, there are people out there who have *no* deviancies. They may even be a majority -- the moralists today certainly *act* like they are a majority, with a very prominent attitude that the rest of society should be just like they are. These people don't live in glass houses, and they love throwing stones. A Transparent Society would be a tool for this type of busybody majority to prey upon and ostracize any minority they wish.
"I f*** farm animals"
Interesting that you should write that in a discussion on privacy. Personally, I do f*** farm animals. I am a zoophile, an ex-FAQ-keeper of alt.sex.bestiality, and it's not much of a secret to anyone who knows me. (Why did you think I was using a psuedonym?)
And my situation is a good example of why David Brin's Transparent Society will never work. My personal life harms no one, and in my state of residence it's perfectly legal. But I guarantee you that if my personal life were revealed to everyone, I would have problems with my employer, not to mention my coworkers and possibly with over-zealous law enforcement who aren't familiar with the (lack of) sodomy laws in this state.
It's happened to me already, you see. A usenet.kook hired a private detective to ferret out information on me, then wrote to my previous employer. Although I broke no law, my career was nearly destroyed because of a private behaviour outside the mainstream, found by someone who was able to snoop on me too easily. I'm a little harder to find, now...although I have no illusions that I'm completely unfindable.
The premise behind Brin's Transparent Society is that we can catch corporations and governments doing illegal things also. But how many people have money to pay for investigation of every corporation or government agency they suspect of wrongdoing? Are corporations held responsible for legal-but-frowned-upon behaviour, or do they just ignore outcries until they affect their profits? And of course, any corporation has the funds to research the individuals opposing them, and destroy their lives if they can.
The Transparent Society will shift power away from individuals and towards those who have the resources to mine and act upon information. It will create a homogenized society, and threaten everyone whose lives differ from the mainstream by any minor behaviour or percieved difference from 'normal'. It's a dangerous concept, and I believe a very evil future for Brin (who I otherwise respect) to be promoting.
Really? I did not know that! I quit reading the X-Men and Excalibur soon after Claremont left those titles for a career writing (so-so) novels. If he's back to comics again, I might have to pick up some issues. :)
I just wish Chris was getting more credit. I see Stan Lee written in bold letters everywhere, but Stan Lee is not the person who made the X-Men great.
Although Stan Lee was co-creator of the first X-men, most of the popular X-men (as well as the comic book's overall theme and flavor) was created by Chris Claremont. Chris created Wolverine, Storm (his dream gal) and Rogue, as well as other second-generation X-men (are Kitty Pryde, Colossus, or Nightcrawler in the movie?) Claremont also invented Senator Kelly, Gyrich, and the whole intolerance-towards-mutants plotline.
Stan Lee's a genius whose talents were tuned to the 1960's. Chris Claremont, although seemingly shunned by the comic book companies these days, is just as much a genius with a more contemporary talent.
Good idea! Where can I get some molecularly perfect Titleists made of meteoric iron? ;)
I *want* this sword. But since I'll never be able to afford it, maybe I can get the next best thing -- at the very end of the article, they say they may make a line of Dragonslayer golf clubs using this technology.
;)
I don't see how a nine-iron could really hurt a dragon, but I'll willing to put on my armor and spar with it for a while to see if it's an effective weapon.
So a news organization that links to a MP3 site is not illegal, but a hacker group who links to a MP3 site is illegal, because of their different intents? Even though the functional value of what they do is exactly the same, and the news site might even get a hundred times the readership? Sorry, that makes no sense. If the law truly reads that way, it's a law that can and will be flagrantly ignored. Do we need more laws as ignorable as speed limits?
If RIAA wins this case, it jeopardizes the freedom of speech of anyone who links to any original site for any reason.
Personally, I don't believe that linking to an illegal site is aiding and abetting a crime. Linking is a form of directions; it is a passive, not an active act. An analogy might be if your friend asks you where he can buy illegal drugs. If you tell him on the corner of 8th and Main and he goes down there himself, you are *not* legally aiding him, if I recall correctly. If you drive him down there then you are legally abetting his crime.
Providing information should *never* be illegal -- only actions should be cause for punishment.
I will share with you some words of wisdom that I received when I got married.
:)
When I announced my marriage to my family, my uncle Bob looked me straight in the eye and said in a quiet voice: "Just remember -- you can always blow your own brains out."
These words have carried me through many years and the subsequent messy divorce. I hope they are equally as inspiring to you.
The internet is as anonymous as you want to make it...because we still have the option of lying to those who ask us for information. Look at me. Did you think my real name was 'Remus Shepherd'? No -- it's a psuedonym, a lie.
99% of the websites I visit and do business with know me by an IP address and maybe the name Remus Shepherd. The other 1% are those that require real information and whom I've decided to give that information to. But most advertisers and databases out there know me as Remus, with no connection to my real name. They can't get a credit history on Remus Shepherd. Mailing address? None known. Bombard Remus Shepherd with 'targetted' ads all you like -- they're easy for my mailfilter to trash, while the few trusted sites that know my real name are allowed through.
The net may evolve into a communication medium where people have screen names and True Names (thanks again, Vernor Vinge). I think it's a simple and effective response to commercial invasion of privacy.
Gnutella wasn't designed so that downloads were anonymous. It's as easy to find a user there as on Napster.
What Gnutella *does* provide is a decentralized structure. So if you find 300,000 people pirating your music, you can't sue Gnutella's creators to stop them -- they're not serving the data, they have nothing to do with it, and putting them out of business won't affect the user transfers. To enforce your copyright on Gnutella users you will be forced to sue them all individually. *That* is what scares the RIAA.
And although others may have mentioned it, Freenet is the next step beyond Gnutella. Not only is Freenet decentralized, but users on it *are* anonymized.
The president of Seagrams, in a story posted a week or so ago on Slashdot, said that he wanted to eliminate anonymity. RIAA's latest legal briefs talk about the dangers of any peer-to-peer data sharing system.
Sounds like they're declaring war upon the internet to me.
Monish Bhatia, the publisher of Washington, D.C.-based Macintosh News Network, said no one sent the publication information about Adobe's Photoshop 6.0 and ImageReady 3.0. "That particular document was accessible in the public domain," Bhatia said.
If they got their information from public domain documents, what exactly is Adobe suing about??
Anyone remember the game BotWars? It was simple; using assembler language in a protected and limited memory space, write a bot that will kill any other bots on the system. Most bots sprayed memory with nulls or JMP commands to corrupt and kill everything else on the system. But one very powerful bot was known as the Five Musketeers.
:/
The Five Musketeers bot looked for copies of itself in memory, and if it didn't find them, it created up to four copies. Each copy then kept checking on the health of the other four, and if one copy became corrupted it was rewritten. Thus, the Five Musketeers were cooperatively immortal, and payloads could be added to them to spray memory or any other offensive attack you wished.
Sound anything like Sandia's bot yet?
I'm not sure I like the idea of the internet turning into a playfield for agents like those in BotWars. It could rapidly turn into a wasteland, with all the bandwidth going to automatic attacks and defenses.
Because of the 'electrostatic' adhesion of their feet, Geckos do have traction in low gravity. They also have traction in total vacuum (apparently someone put a gecko in a vacuum to test this. :/ ). A geckobot might be ideal for extra-vehicular work in orbit.
Then again...if the geckos' feet are electrostatic in nature, a charge applied to the surface they're walking on might cause them to repel away from the surface. So they wouldn't be much use in solar storms like the one we're currently having...
CNet has all of the simple domain names because they got them first. CNet was grabbing domain names before the net became commercial and crowded. They were simply first.
Some would say that CNet's domain names are the main reason they've succeeded on the web. Their competition has addresses as simple as www.cnn.com, but they have addresses even simpler to find -- www.news.com.
USA Democracy lists bills in the current session of Congress and how legislators voted on each bill. They don't appear to have old records, so you can't look 8 years in the past to see if a candidate's vote has been consistent. They allow you to vote on bills and compare your vote to your representatives' vote...but you cannot compare your representatives to their election opponents, nor can you look at presidential candidates or politicians in another district. Nice setup, but nearly worthless to me.
THOMAS is similar to USA Democracy but with an archive, so you can look at past votes. Still, it gives information only on federal officeholders, and you have to look through the bill history to collate information about a candidate. Yuck.
Project Vote-Smart is a bit closer to what I'd like to see: It lists candidates, not just incumbents, although it only has voting record for federal incumbents. Thus, there are no records at all for George W. Bush (no info on state bills and positions) and the latest records for Al Gore are from 1992 when he was a senator. A dribble of info on this site, nothing more.
I want information on a candidate from *before* he became a senator. I want information on what he claims to support cross-referenced to how he's actually voted. I want to see the state legislature voting records...what the hell has George W. Bush been doing in Texas? And I want to compare candidates side-by-side on the same page.
I am a registered independant, and I am shopping for a vote. The candidates are products to me -- I want the same kind of shopping experience I get when comparing hardware on a retailer's site. Full info and directly comparable data, nothing less will do.
I hope Scott's Democracy Project has what I'm looking for. Oh, well, if it doesn't, I can always compete with him by putting up my own site in 2004.
In general, I don't like anime. It's mostly adolescent fantasy and/or angst, with few examples of literary merit. I do admit to being curious about Ghost in the Shell and Princess Mononoke, but most of the anime I've actually sat through -- Fists of the North Star, Nausicaa, Lensman, Gundam, Robotech, Vampire Hunter D, etc -- left me bored and puzzled about why the hell my friends liked this stuff.
:) I heartily recommend it.
Therefore I postulate that the only anime worth watching is anime that makes fun of anime. And as a result, I have become hooked on the Powerpuff Girls. They poke fun at every superhero genre but make extra effort to ridicule anime, and the end result leaves me howling with laughter. The powerpuff Mecha episode alone -- where it takes almost a full minute to reveal the missles popping out of every possible surface on the mechanoid -- is a stinging slap across the face to the japanese animation industry.
You talk about what the political parties should do to improve their websites, but don't mention what people outside political circles can accomplish. The websites you list in your article do *not* have what everyone says they want: An unbiased checklist of issues referenced to the candidates and their voting record.
Forget the political parties for a moment, as I don't believe they'll ever report unbiased information. That leaves us, the people.
Do you think there is room for a grassroots organization to collect the voting histories of candidates and publicize their records? If so, why doesn't such an organization already exist? Could such an organization thrive, or would it be besieged by political candidates who don't want their true voting histories known?
1) and 2): The peak of the pulse does arrive in the minkowskian past, yes. I'm a bit fuzzy on the geometry of the experiment, though...how long are those light pulses? Would the leading edge of the pulse have reached the other side of the chamber when the new pulse peak is created? If so, then it's a sort of optical gzip chamber -- you've packed all the information of the pulse into just the leading bit, while not actually sending it superliminally, because the leading edge would have traveled that distance anyway. I don't know...need a more detailed description of the experiment.
:)
3) If I recall correctly (and I'm not sure I do), the uncertainty principle is used to explain how phases can propagate in a wave faster than the wave's actual speed of propagation...at the expense of energy. I'm not sure that it applies here at all. I was just throwing it out as a possible explanation of why some people expect to not get FTL communications out of this thing. dEnergy x dTime is conserved, so if you screw around with the time you screw around with the energy, and lose your information.
Th-th-that's all I know.
Nope. From the article, "the outgoing pulse had already traveled about 60 feet from the chamber before the incoming pulse had reached the chamber's near side." The pulse was recreated in its entirety from just the initial leading edge.
Still sounds like an optical gzip to me.
Wish I had a whiteboard. Let's try doing this with ASCII art.
Just before the pulse hits the chamber, things look like this:
Pulse Cesium chamber
Note that the pulse has a 'leading edge' -- a rise time before its maximum intensity. Once that leading edge hits the cesium, the cesium recreates the entire pulse on the other side:
So the pulse appears to have gone faster than light through the cesium. Another way to look at it is that the cesium, using nothing more than the leading edge of the pulse, spontaneously created a new pulse. Actually, it created two new pulses, as you can see after a little more time:
|~/#####\->~~~~~~~<-/#####\~| /#####\->
The two pulses within the chamber are moving towards each other, and they'll deconstructively interfere, cancelling each other out. (Actually, they cancel out as soon as the original pulse is completely in the chamber, but it's easier to draw this way.) Meanwhile the pulse outside the chamber is moving away from it and towards your measuring equipment.
So the pulse is not travelling backwards in time. The pulse isn't travelling far at all; it's being annihilated, really, but a copy of it is generated . It just happens to be generated some distance away.
Note that my drawings are flawed; the light pulse was probably longer than the cesium chamber. So the original pulse was already half-destroyed by the time the new pulse emerged from the other end. That would have been difficult to draw.
Why can't we use this to send information faster than light? Read the article again -- they're not really sure that you can't. One person is arguing that the information is packed into the leading edge of the pulse (sort of an optical gzip) and so you're compressing information but not sending it superluminally. Other people (Dr. Nimtz, third paragraph from the bottom) say that they really are sending information faster than light.
Personal opinion: This looks like some kind of wave phase propagation trick to me. We've always known that you can cause a phase shift in a beam of light to propagate superluminally, but the problem is that you can't encapsulate information in phase shifts adequately, due to (IIRC) the uncertainty principle. Not to say that this isn't an exciting experiment, but it doesn't appear to have a practical use. Now, the microwave experiment that travelled at 1.05 c excites me...I'd like to see if they can extend it to interstellar distances and through vacuum. :)