When the printing press was invented, no longer did some monk have to write out the bible word by word in shorthand... you could crank out hundreds of them in a week.
No, you couldn't. Because the government wouldn't let you.
Soon after Gutenberg pressed the first book (it was the Bible), governments sought a firm control on the written word. Where a monarchy didn't exist to firmly control printing presses, guilds sprang up to limit the ability to publish to a chosen few. They knew how much power freedom of information had. In a few decades, protestants -- who now had bibles they could read -- rebelled against catholic power and new nations were created. All because the common man now had the ability to print books.
When the industrial revolution came around, steam and electrical power gave everybody the ability to run a printing press. Small publishers sprang up and started printing inexpensive books for the masses. But the big publishers, out of greed, lobbied the government to pass laws limiting reprints of anything but very old texts. Thus the copyright law we have today.
Now, with the internet, we're at a third plateau of publishing possibilities for the common man. And it's time we decided how much free speech we really want. If we really believe speech should be free, then copyright law has to be changed or erased, and a lot of big businesses are going down. The only other option is to accept less-than-free speech. Will the populace allow that? Time will tell.
But don't tell me that it is natural for information to be considered protected property, because it isn't. IP is an unnatural phenomenon that was created by business owners in the past few hundreds of years. It's a legal construct, and like all legal constructs it is subject to review and change. Hopefully we'll begin to look at what is best for humanity, and not what is best for any one person's pockets.
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This post is a rehash of opinions from people better than I. Particularly one column at 2k journal. And finally, an example of speech that is truly humanitarian and free: Project Gutenberg.
Looks pretty hypocritical, doesn't it? America often looks like a hypocrite; that's because a vocal minority can get their way over the quieter objections of a minority.
A few years ago, someone in congress stated that they were going to 'change health care whether or not the american people wanted it'. Luckily that statement was inflammatory enough that he was slapped down before anything was done. But that same attitude is seen every day in our elected representatives -- they do things they know the public doesn't want them to do. They assume that they're smarter and better informed than the public...so why listen to the masses? The masses aren't even important in elections anymore; pandering to corporate interests is the way to win an election. Screw what Americans want -- we're the *Government*!
Yes, this egomania in our government is really, really infuriating. Yes, something should be done about it. No, I can't point to any signs that it'll get better anytime soon.:/
a five-year lease package cost for the robot, griddle and steamer is $150,000.
I don't know how much a restaurant-quality griddle and steamer costs, but it sounds almost competitive to me. The real question is whether or not the griddle can be used by human beings if the robot goes off-line.
I was working with a young hotshot techie last year, and we were discussing various obscure physical constants. Until the subject of burning paper came up. "Oh, and you know that paper burns at Fahrenheit 451, of course," I said to him.
"Of course," he replied. "Fahrenheit 451. I remember because Jon Bon Jovi wrote a song about that."
I stopped breathing for a few seconds, then quizzed him on whether he knew who Ray Bradbury was. He didn't. Quickly, I got up and left the room, muttering, "...must resist...urge to kill..."
So remember -- no matter how important your contribution to modern culture, pop culture can still assimilate, digest, and distort your entire life's work.:-)
Freenet, Gnutella -- no centralized server on which to shut things down. Freenet even intentionally hides users' identity. Throw 'em all in jail.
Anonymous NFS -- It's file sharing. 'Nuff said. Throw 'em all in jail.
Anonymous FTP -- More file sharing. Is the scheme of 'enter email address as password' good enough? Nope. Close all the anon FTP sites, they might be used for piracy.
Anonymous PVCS -- Oh, you want to distribute your source code freely so that everyone can look at and modify it? Sorry, you can be required to collect information on each and every would-be OSS developer that looks at your code. After all, they might try to slip a Metallica lyric into a comment line somewhere. Throw 'em all in jail.
Open news/mail servers -- Not a lot of these exist anymore because of security concerns, but there's a few still out there. Can't use them anymore unless they know who you are, sorry.
IRC -- Your handle on IRC can be easily spoofed, there's no central information server (files are DCC'ed between individuals). IRC will only survive if servers A.) Remove DCC capability, and B.) Require lengthy identification surveys when you connect to the system. This is where piracy used to be (and still is) carried out, remember...they'll go after those IRC kiddies if they get a chance. Throw 'em all in jail.
Anonymous Remailers -- anon.penet.fi is gone (and sorely missed), but there's still a few remailers out there that allow people to mail and post anonymously when they feel they have to. It's a vital service; if you don't believe that, then read alt.abuse.recovery sometime. Sorry, the government doesn't recognize that sometimes a person is too scared or shamed to speak publically. They've got to unmask, or we'll throw 'em all in jail.
The DMCA provision for common carrier applies to all ISPs and services on which traffic passes through the net. Forcing all carriers to have information on every message they handle is insane; it will destroy any hope of anonymity and privacy, and make illegal a lot of innocent software. Don't frame this as a Napster issue. Napster is a small part of the big picture to which this debate belongs. Although Napster may be suicidally reckless, the remedies proposed to discipline them may have horrifying effects on the rest of the internet unless we educate our legislature NOW.
I've been seeing Terminus hyped alongside MMORPGs for so long, and the game site itself is a bit vague on specifics, so I was under the delusion Terminus was another MMORPG. My bad. My only defense is that I'm following the development of over a dozen games, and they do blend together after a time.
Still, I will be playing Terminus. As a physicist, I have to check out your realistic space combat model.:-)
For those of you who don't know what Terminus is about (and are too lazy to look it up yourself)...it's a Massively Multiplayer On-line RPG (MMORPG) set in our solar system. You've heard of Everquest -- the now premiere MMORPG -- but Terminus is sci-fi, not fantasy. It's mostly designed around space combat and exploration, and you can choose to be a merchant, pirate, or fighter jockey defending earth. It looks like more of a spaceship game than a character RPG, but still it looks pretty cool.
There are dozens of MMORPGs in development right now, after the success of Everquest. Not many will be finished, and even fewer will be successful. Terminus has an advantage in that it's the first sci-fi MMORPG (to my knowledge) and it's coming out before the 'second wave' of MMORPGs that will hit sometime around December of this year. For a list of RPGs coming out (a good percentage of which are MMORPGs), check out The Gamer's Alliance List.
The next big MMORPG title for Linux gamers? Atriarch. Watch for it.
This game doesn't look like it's going to get off the ground. It's incredibly amateurish...and more than half of the well-produced professional games don't make it to market. MMORPGs are big projects. There's a flood of them being made, but only a few are going to actually get created...and even fewer will succeed.
If you're looking for a MMORPG to sink your teeth into, check out Atriarch. A spherical world, sci-fi alien universe, run on a Beowulf server, with a planned Linux release of the client software. *That* is a MMORPG to watch and get ready for.
I understand a bit of the problems, here, being involved in a shared-universe creative writing group (http://www.devilbunnies.org, if you want to know the secret of The Evil That Fluffs.) We create our own characters, thank you...but fanfic has all the problems of a maintained shared universe.
Anne Rice is a poor example of the tug-o-war between content creators and fanfic writers. Anne Rice is the sole owner and creator of her characters, and her goal is to turn out works of art. Star Trek (for example) is owned and controlled by Paramount...and their goal is to use the characters to maximize profits. (Some will argue this is the reason the Star Trek series' are doing so poorly these days.)
Writing a fanfic with characters owned by a single person strikes me as bad taste. At the least, permission should be given. The original artist may have plans to use those characters again. At the very least the characters inhabit a world that the artist has carefully constructed, and very cautious and skilled writing is required to maintain suspension of disbelief of that world for the readers. Someone else's story can introduce concepts that ruin the original work; the Mona Lisa wouldn't be as admired if one of Da Vinci's comtemporaries had painted her a harlot's torso.
But corporations use characters to make money, and they make decisions involving those characters that often are counter to the proper evolution of plot and characterization. They don't care if the story is well-constructed enough to be considered art; they just want it done well enough and cheaply enough to make money. Fanfic of corporate works strike me as an embellishment of a neglected universe, taking art-for-profit and turning it into art-for-artistic-value.
I just don't understand 'slash', though. That strikes me as being written by people with way too much time on their hands.:)
The concept of the technological Singularity, as put forth by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, is this: Once a computer is invented that is smarter than a human being, it will be able to upgrade itself faster than human beings could, and invent new technologies at a similarly expanding rate. Eventually such a computer will cause the rate of technological change to shoot towards infinity...with rather drastic consequences for the world at large. Depending upon how smart the first super-human AI is, such a singularity could happen within months of its first awakening.
What do you think of the concept of the technological singularity? Do you think it's a real possibility? Is there anything we can do to prevent it, and should we?
Lessig is very astute, in noticing that regulation can be used to either promote or restrict innovation, depending on how it is applied. He argues that since the most successful network models we have use regulation that promote innovation, any future networks should promote it as well. Only open access networks (where access is *regulated* to be open) have what it takes to survive in the free market.
Here's one way of looking at it -- Regulation is like Cholesterol. There's Good Cholesterol and Bad Cholesterol. Too much of either will kill you, but if you have a lot of the good and very little of the bad, you're in good shape.
And that's bad news for broadband networks. If they truly do put into place regulations that stifle innovation and give power to rich corporations, then the broadband networks will be severely hobbled when it comes time for them to compete in the free market. Yes, it'll have incredible throughput rates, but if I can't use telnet to a shell account through it, I will never use broadband service. Other hobbles may be placed on the broadband networks by the companies who own them (ISPs collecting personal data? Auto-Net-Nanny monitoring? Geographic limitations on what web pages you can visit? Restrictions on what brands of software are allowed to send packets through the net?).
These shortsighted companies may make broadband access painful for the consumer, to the point where dialup access is more attractive. I guarantee that they'll push the limit of what they can get away with -- such is the nature of corporations. So broadband's bandwidth advantage will be handicapped by add-ons. Will this handicapping be so extreme that the free market chooses to stick with dialup access? Broadband will evolve very slowly, as innovation on it will be restricted. Will some innovation in dialup access (or other access) cause broadband to fall behind? Will it ultimately be forced to evolve into something more open or die? Only time will tell.
Unless, as Lessig suggests, we start right now and have the government mandate that broadband use open access and other innovation-promoting regulations. Then we can jump onto broadband access right away, without fear, and see what it's truly capable of.
I read a book by Reich, if I recall correctly. In it he stated the Orgone energy theory, which involved some invisible energy emitted from human beings' eyes and fingers, and that energy could be used (among other things) to dissipate clouds. The author went on to claim that there were invisible, ephemeral beings that looked like gigantic jellyfish living high in earth's atmosphere, feeding on clouds and the orgone energy within them.
I'm sorry, but these claims not only trip the crackpot alarm, they peg the meter.:-) Having ones books and papers seized does not mean one is correct (especially back in 1957, which is about the time that McCarthy gave the first amendment a serious beating.)
If I've misrepresented Orgone Energy or Reich's claims, then I apologize. If it's the research I remember, however, then it's several steps more ridiculous than antigravity or Tesla's tricks, and well deserves its reputation as a crank theory.
The point is that we can move so fast and so far forward that by the time they can say a program this community created is in violation of patent X we've already likely devised a completely new system that makes that system antiquidated!
Except that while you're using your new system, MegaCorps are keeping you in court over the violation they claim against your previous system. They want your company, your wages, and your house as punitive damages. Anything you have left over, they'll get next year when they patent your new system.
Meanwhile, people are patenting business models...so after you invent your new gizmo, you'll have to invent a new way of selling it. Sure, you're a master techie, but are you also a master economist, ergonomist, and graphic designer?
And some kooks are patenting speculative things that they could not possibly have built (FTL communications, anyone?), but as soon as you invent it for them they'll own it. Expect them to thank you with a subpoena: They'll want your company, your wages, and your house, too.
You cannot hide from patent problems behind the Open Source movement. Corporations will sue and destroy your leaders and coders when they establish patents on your previous work. They will try to outflank you and patent things and procedures you haven't invented yet. Plus they're making money off of your creative genius, and they will beat you into submission to keep your legitimate claims from upsetting their profit margins. If none of this bothers you, you're the most terminally mellow techie I've ever seen.
The processor sees its environment as a stream of histograms regarding the location and velocity of objects. Those objects could be the white lines on a highway, the football in a televised game or the annotated movement of enemy ground forces from satellite telemetry.
This system does not see the same way that humans do, nor is there any mention in the article that you could actually get a picture out of one. It's designed to locate movement within its field of vision...nothing more. It doesn't notice, and probably can't 'see', things that do not move. I wouldn't want to replace my eyes with these things. I'd be able to see the animated banner ads, but not read the rest of a static web page!
Banks -- love him or hate him.
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Iain Banks is one of those science fiction authors that people either love or hate.
I fall in the 'hate' category, myself. I read his acclaimed book 'Feersum Endjinn' to see what he was like. It was a torture test for me. The book contained no new ideas, soft 'space opera' type science explanations, and one third of it was written as if by an illiterate child, making it painfully hard to read.
After finishing Feesum Endjinn, I thought that maybe it was just an unusual Banks novel, and he deserved a second chance. So I bought 'Against a Dark Background'. It was much better written, and actually enjoyable in places...but the plot was slow, had no discernable direction, and the ending was unsatisfying and just plain *bad*.
Iain Banks strikes me as someone learning to write. He tries many different writing styles in his books, some of them quite experimental and odd, as if he's testing each style to see what fits best. If you like quirky writing you may enjoy his books. But from what I've read of him, the man has no clue about how to tell a good story, and zero scientific knowledge. I may try his 'literary' offerings someday...but I will never buy a science fiction book by Iain Banks again.
Most of the plotlines that involve people dying in real life when they die in a video game involve heart attacks from the excitement and mental shock. I think that was the method they used in the X-Files last night -- it *was* a boring episode, and I was surfing at the time. The neat bit they added were the armor plates with electroshock wired in to keep 'dead' people from reentering the game -- yeah, people are gonna play *that* -- and the fake bloody wounds the armor would create with electric stimulus. But for all that, it was just a Laser Tag game, and nobody without a cardiac problem should be dying from the excitement of it.
The Matrix had a different angle. Humans were tied into the Matrix via wires jacked into their brainstem. I can see an overload of data there frying a few braincells that are important to the autonomic nervous system. Gibson killed people in his cyberpunk books the same way -- too much juice to the temporal lobe makes johnny go flatline.
I think Snow Crash is a better model, myself. Someone cuts off your arms, legs, and head? Darn, now you have to reboot to reinitialize your system back to your default avatar. By which time, of course, the bad guys have delivered their crypto nuke...
Folks, forget trying to correct the media when they call criminals 'hackers'. The term has stuck, and popular culture is going to keep using it in spite any attempts to educate them. I suggest that you pressure the media to call them 'criminal hackers', to distinguish them from the law-abiding people who prefer to wear the 'hacker' label.
The Ikonos satellite is a terrific platform for remote sensing. But you're not going to get pictures of Area 51 out of it.:) The US government has shutter control over the satellite, meaning that they can veto acquisition requests that go over their bases or troops in the field. Scientists do not like these restrictions, obviously.
Some URLs talking about the Ikonos Shutter Control:
http://www.spie.org/web/oer/may/may99/cover1.htm l http://www.worldlink.co.uk/articles/080919991117 56/17.htm
Getting back to processors, now that we have one designed for long term portability, we need to get away from the dinosaur that is the personal computer.
Why?
I like having my personal computer as an appliance in my home. I like being able to walk away from it when I need a break. I like being able to control just how much technology I have to deal with at any one time.
The personal computer is the best model for a processing machine for the general public. Some rare geeks may use portables as their main machine, but they will not drive the market. The market will be driven by personal computers on desks and in entertainment centers...where we do not need a super-portable chip.
Crusoe should aim towards a different market -- transparent technology. Putting chips inside my vacuum cleaner, my car, and my dog is fine, as long as those things work the way I expect them to. This is not a chip that will be used much in general-purpose computers; it's only useful in specialized-purpose gadgets that work in ways transparent to the consumer.
Bricks do not produce Hawking Radiation. It's that quantum effect that makes this experiment exciting and unusual.
Hawking radiation originates in the background of virtual particles in the universe -- particles that appear spontaneously from nothing along with their antiparticles, then collide and exterminate themselves. This background energy is a vital part of our models of the universe.
Stephen Hawking theorized that near a black hole some these virtual particles would be sucked into the black hole while their antiparticles would remain free. Thus, some virtual particles become permanent and real particles, and the black hole effectively radiates them into space. Conservation of mass states that the black hole must then be shrinking slowly in size...but that's not important here, with the laboratory optical black hole.
The optical black hole will have the same effect as a real one; virtual particles will be trapped within it, and their antiparticles will fly free. (Note that the trapped particles may be either matter or antimatter -- the radiated particles will be the opposite of the ones trapped.) Scientists will then be able to measure this Hawking Radiation and test some very central theories of cosmology and quantum physics.
Theoretically (and there's a point at which the theory is so remote, it's only fantasy...but here goes), an optical black hole *might* be configured to collect the radiated antiparticles as a bose condensate themselves. Then the optical black hole serves a purpose -- it's an antimatter generator. But that's really, really far beyond what they're trying to do now.
... Remus Shepherd Yes, I am a physicist. Yes, I do play one on Usenet.
The buzzword of games these days is 'Massively Multiplayer' -- games that include hundreds of players in a persistant, online world. There's a few neat aspects of games like this:
1. Companies can often charge monthly fees to the players. 2. They are patched automatically everytime you play. 3. Technical support is available online while playing. 4. All player's clients must be functionally equivalent.
Point 1 above is why we're going to see more MMGs in the market -- as gaming becomes bigger and bigger business, the game companies are going to want steady dedicated income.
Point 2, 3 and 4 are why Linux isn't going to be used for MMGs, at least not in the foreseeable future. The game companies need to provide real-time technical support, self-patching code, and a standard non-hackable interface regardless of the underlying OS. It's inefficient to do any of these for more than one OS...which is why the game companies will continue to bring out their products for Windows. Add to this the reputation Linux has for difficulty in providing tech support, and fact that an open OS will be a tool for hackers who wish to cheat at these games, and it's pretty plain that there's zero interest in coding MMG games for Linux. And MMG games are the future.
I will consider Linux gaming to have gotten off the ground when I see the following games available for Linux:
Ultima Online Everquest Shadowrun (upcoming; will be big) Sovereign (upcoming; may be huge)
I think the Linux community should settle for being one or two generations behind in game technology. Play Zork and Doom; it'll be years before the OS is ready to play cutting edge games.
Any unauthorised copying, editing, exhibition, renting, exchanging, hiring, lending, public performances and/or broadcasts of this digital video disc or any part thereof is strictly prohibited.
There's where you lose the right to view your DVDs on your Linux machine. The CCA licenses the right to play DVDs to several manufacturers, none of whom produce a product for Linux. LiViD is not licensed by the CCA, therefore using it breaks your DVD purchase agreement.
The CCA has no copyright case, they have no trade secret case, and they have no piracy case. But they may have a case if they claim that using a non-licensed player to play DVDs is unauthorized use. I doubt they'll make that case unless they have to, because then it's them versus Linux, as opposed to them versus 'DVD pirates'...and Linux is well-respected by the public, lately.
What the CCA wants us to do is to purchase a license from them, then make a player. The problem is that a grassroots engineering effort like the Linux community cannot come up with the hundred thousand dollars it takes to license their tech. Because of how we do things, we can't do it their way -- and they're too greedy and too hidebound to realize that.
Just another big clash between the Old Way of doing things and the New Way of doing things, folks. There'll be more like this.
Technological progress is increasing at an exponential pace, and that pace has now outstripped the average man's ability to adapt. That's Future Shock as Alvin Toffler described it, and that's the underlying problem that is causing so many symptoms we only barely understand -- Corporatism being among them.
Corporations are in turmoil these days. The stodgy old businesses are struggling to adapt or die, while new businesses are leaping ahead, able to evolve more quickly and survive. If corporations were species, this would be a time of grand extinction, where most fail and disappear while a few well-adapted types are able to assert their new dominance. Future shock kills corporations who cannot handle it.
Except corporations have a survival mechanism that organic species do not -- the merger. Gargantuan megacorporations can survive in a changing climate by having some pieces that are adaptable and strong to support other pieces that are failing. Right now many corporations are choosing the merger as their defense against the increasing pace of change.
And so we have Citizen Case. A man who has proved himself adaptable in today's world, and who built a healthy company in the midst of change. It is no surprise that he -- or the media -- would choose highlight his mundane and normal side. Because that's what the people who give him power want to see. The average man cannot comprehend the pace of change today, cannot handle this future shock. He wants someone he can trust and understand to steer him through this confusing world. Everyman depends upon Steve Case, and the corporations.
To paraphrase what Morpheus said in the Matrix, all those people out there are your enemy, because they support the system. Normal people cannot handle Future Shock, and so in defense they willingly give ever-increasing amounts of power to corporations, who they see as able to handle increasing change. Even more disturbing, the corporations are beginning to see this as their due; they are beginning to believe that people should trust their decisions implicitly, and they are baffled and threatened by anyone who does not share their worldview of globalism and profit. They've lost the concept of ethics and honesty; in such turblent times, they have come to believe in the adage that might makes right.
But there are people besides the corporations who can adapt...some of whom can adapt better than the corporations themselves. Kevin Mitnick is a prime example. I don't like the guy (my credit card was one of the ones he stole from Netcom), but I have to admire his ability to assimilate and understand technology so thoroughly and so quickly. Mitnick and those like him are the individuals who will survive Future Shock the longest. And because they understand the world better than the corporations, the Uber-Hackers have the ability to disrupt corporate plans. DeCSS has caused a lot of heartburn in several corporations, and it has the potential to destroy an industry unless that industry adapts to it. The corporations know that the only thing that can harm them is even faster change, and the Uber-Hackers have the ability to speed the rate of technological progress.
Perhaps the Megacorporations know subconsciously that they will eventually not be able to adapt. When technological progress escalates to a rate their organization cannot handle, the megacorps will have to divest into smaller more adaptable portions or die. Right now mergers are a valid response to change, but eventually they will be counterproductive. The organizations will not be able to adapt when the climate shifts, and the public -- the average man -- will latch onto a different company as more adaptable, more trustable and safe. Until the next climate shift occurs.
So what can be done to stop corporatism? One answer is to be patient. Coporate greed ignites technological progress which eventually leads to their own doom. Although today's corporations are larger and more powerful than any in the past, they are also more short lived. We're not seeing any more 200 year old Lloyd's of London being created; the lifespan of Microsoft will be measured in decades, not centuries.
Another response is to hasten tech progress. The Open Source Movement, as the largest collection of donated ingenuity ever assembled, may be the most adaptable organization humankind has ever known. It may be the most adaptable organization that humans are capable of creating. Contributing to OSS is a denial of corporatism in one sense...and an evolution of it in another, as future corporations will have to assimilate aspects of Open Source organization in order to become adaptable enough to survive. That's already begun. The next Time-Warner will rely on intellectual property that is donated, and as limitless as humanity.
That's a danger, though, for when Uber-Geeks support a corporation they begin to turn into the normal man that powers globalism. So be careful what you support, and always think about the consequences. You Are A Power Source. The Matrix really hit on some subconscious principles of today's society.
If you're lucky, the projects you support will grow into new corporations; ones able to handle rapid change, and ones who know how to survive while remaining ethical. The Uber-Geek -- the Adaptable Man -- must guide the world through an evolution that most of humanity cannot grasp. Corporations will seek to provide that guidance with the principles of greed and implied trust. We need to show the world how to adapt while retaining our souls. And hey, we can do it.
Until the next wave of Future Shock hits. But no sense worrying about that before we can even imagine what it will bring.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you couldn't. Because the government wouldn't let you.
Soon after Gutenberg pressed the first book (it was the Bible), governments sought a firm control on the written word. Where a monarchy didn't exist to firmly control printing presses, guilds sprang up to limit the ability to publish to a chosen few. They knew how much power freedom of information had. In a few decades, protestants -- who now had bibles they could read -- rebelled against catholic power and new nations were created. All because the common man now had the ability to print books.
When the industrial revolution came around, steam and electrical power gave everybody the ability to run a printing press. Small publishers sprang up and started printing inexpensive books for the masses. But the big publishers, out of greed, lobbied the government to pass laws limiting reprints of anything but very old texts. Thus the copyright law we have today.
Now, with the internet, we're at a third plateau of publishing possibilities for the common man. And it's time we decided how much free speech we really want. If we really believe speech should be free, then copyright law has to be changed or erased, and a lot of big businesses are going down. The only other option is to accept less-than-free speech. Will the populace allow that? Time will tell.
But don't tell me that it is natural for information to be considered protected property, because it isn't. IP is an unnatural phenomenon that was created by business owners in the past few hundreds of years. It's a legal construct, and like all legal constructs it is subject to review and change. Hopefully we'll begin to look at what is best for humanity, and not what is best for any one person's pockets.
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This post is a rehash of opinions from people better than I. Particularly one column at 2k journal.
And finally, an example of speech that is truly humanitarian and free: Project Gutenberg.
The Kavachi volcano formed the Kavachi seamount, and so probably when it breaks the surface of the water it'll be known as the Kavachi island.
Looks pretty hypocritical, doesn't it? America often looks like a hypocrite; that's because a vocal minority can get their way over the quieter objections of a minority.
:/
A few years ago, someone in congress stated that they were going to 'change health care whether or not the american people wanted it'. Luckily that statement was inflammatory enough that he was slapped down before anything was done. But that same attitude is seen every day in our elected representatives -- they do things they know the public doesn't want them to do. They assume that they're smarter and better informed than the public...so why listen to the masses? The masses aren't even important in elections anymore; pandering to corporate interests is the way to win an election. Screw what Americans want -- we're the *Government*!
Yes, this egomania in our government is really, really infuriating. Yes, something should be done about it. No, I can't point to any signs that it'll get better anytime soon.
a five-year lease package cost for the robot, griddle and steamer is $150,000.
I don't know how much a restaurant-quality griddle and steamer costs, but it sounds almost competitive to me. The real question is whether or not the griddle can be used by human beings if the robot goes off-line.
I was working with a young hotshot techie last year, and we were discussing various obscure physical constants. Until the subject of burning paper came up. "Oh, and you know that paper burns at Fahrenheit 451, of course," I said to him.
:-)
"Of course," he replied. "Fahrenheit 451. I remember because Jon Bon Jovi wrote a song about that."
I stopped breathing for a few seconds, then quizzed him on whether he knew who Ray Bradbury was. He didn't. Quickly, I got up and left the room, muttering, "...must resist...urge to kill..."
So remember -- no matter how important your contribution to modern culture, pop culture can still assimilate, digest, and distort your entire life's work.
Freenet, Gnutella -- no centralized server on which to shut things down. Freenet even intentionally hides users' identity. Throw 'em all in jail.
Anonymous NFS -- It's file sharing. 'Nuff said. Throw 'em all in jail.
Anonymous FTP -- More file sharing. Is the scheme of 'enter email address as password' good enough? Nope. Close all the anon FTP sites, they might be used for piracy.
Anonymous PVCS -- Oh, you want to distribute your source code freely so that everyone can look at and modify it? Sorry, you can be required to collect information on each and every would-be OSS developer that looks at your code. After all, they might try to slip a Metallica lyric into a comment line somewhere. Throw 'em all in jail.
Open news/mail servers -- Not a lot of these exist anymore because of security concerns, but there's a few still out there. Can't use them anymore unless they know who you are, sorry.
IRC -- Your handle on IRC can be easily spoofed, there's no central information server (files are DCC'ed between individuals). IRC will only survive if servers A.) Remove DCC capability, and B.) Require lengthy identification surveys when you connect to the system. This is where piracy used to be (and still is) carried out, remember...they'll go after those IRC kiddies if they get a chance. Throw 'em all in jail.
Anonymous Remailers -- anon.penet.fi is gone (and sorely missed), but there's still a few remailers out there that allow people to mail and post anonymously when they feel they have to. It's a vital service; if you don't believe that, then read alt.abuse.recovery sometime. Sorry, the government doesn't recognize that sometimes a person is too scared or shamed to speak publically. They've got to unmask, or we'll throw 'em all in jail.
The DMCA provision for common carrier applies to all ISPs and services on which traffic passes through the net. Forcing all carriers to have information on every message they handle is insane; it will destroy any hope of anonymity and privacy, and make illegal a lot of innocent software. Don't frame this as a Napster issue. Napster is a small part of the big picture to which this debate belongs. Although Napster may be suicidally reckless, the remedies proposed to discipline them may have horrifying effects on the rest of the internet unless we educate our legislature NOW.
I've been seeing Terminus hyped alongside MMORPGs for so long, and the game site itself is a bit vague on specifics, so I was under the delusion Terminus was another MMORPG. My bad. My only defense is that I'm following the development of over a dozen games, and they do blend together after a time.
:-)
Still, I will be playing Terminus. As a physicist, I have to check out your realistic space combat model.
For those of you who don't know what Terminus is about (and are too lazy to look it up yourself)...it's a Massively Multiplayer On-line RPG (MMORPG) set in our solar system. You've heard of Everquest -- the now premiere MMORPG -- but Terminus is sci-fi, not fantasy. It's mostly designed around space combat and exploration, and you can choose to be a merchant, pirate, or fighter jockey defending earth. It looks like more of a spaceship game than a character RPG, but still it looks pretty cool.
There are dozens of MMORPGs in development right now, after the success of Everquest. Not many will be finished, and even fewer will be successful. Terminus has an advantage in that it's the first sci-fi MMORPG (to my knowledge) and it's coming out before the 'second wave' of MMORPGs that will hit sometime around December of this year. For a list of RPGs coming out (a good percentage of which are MMORPGs), check out The Gamer's Alliance List.
The next big MMORPG title for Linux gamers? Atriarch. Watch for it.
If you're looking for a MMORPG to sink your teeth into, check out Atriarch. A spherical world, sci-fi alien universe, run on a Beowulf server, with a planned Linux release of the client software. *That* is a MMORPG to watch and get ready for.
I understand a bit of the problems, here, being involved in a shared-universe creative writing group (http://www.devilbunnies.org, if you want to know the secret of The Evil That Fluffs.) We create our own characters, thank you...but fanfic has all the problems of a maintained shared universe.
:)
Anne Rice is a poor example of the tug-o-war between content creators and fanfic writers. Anne Rice is the sole owner and creator of her characters, and her goal is to turn out works of art. Star Trek (for example) is owned and controlled by Paramount...and their goal is to use the characters to maximize profits. (Some will argue this is the reason the Star Trek series' are doing so poorly these days.)
Writing a fanfic with characters owned by a single person strikes me as bad taste. At the least, permission should be given. The original artist may have plans to use those characters again. At the very least the characters inhabit a world that the artist has carefully constructed, and very cautious and skilled writing is required to maintain suspension of disbelief of that world for the readers. Someone else's story can introduce concepts that ruin the original work; the Mona Lisa wouldn't be as admired if one of Da Vinci's comtemporaries had painted her a harlot's torso.
But corporations use characters to make money, and they make decisions involving those characters that often are counter to the proper evolution of plot and characterization. They don't care if the story is well-constructed enough to be considered art; they just want it done well enough and cheaply enough to make money. Fanfic of corporate works strike me as an embellishment of a neglected universe, taking art-for-profit and turning it into art-for-artistic-value.
I just don't understand 'slash', though. That strikes me as being written by people with way too much time on their hands.
The concept of the technological Singularity, as put forth by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, is this: Once a computer is invented that is smarter than a human being, it will be able to upgrade itself faster than human beings could, and invent new technologies at a similarly expanding rate. Eventually such a computer will cause the rate of technological change to shoot towards infinity...with rather drastic consequences for the world at large. Depending upon how smart the first super-human AI is, such a singularity could happen within months of its first awakening.
What do you think of the concept of the technological singularity? Do you think it's a real possibility? Is there anything we can do to prevent it, and should we?
Lessig is very astute, in noticing that regulation can be used to either promote or restrict innovation, depending on how it is applied. He argues that since the most successful network models we have use regulation that promote innovation, any future networks should promote it as well. Only open access networks (where access is *regulated* to be open) have what it takes to survive in the free market.
Here's one way of looking at it -- Regulation is like Cholesterol. There's Good Cholesterol and Bad Cholesterol. Too much of either will kill you, but if you have a lot of the good and very little of the bad, you're in good shape.
And that's bad news for broadband networks. If they truly do put into place regulations that stifle innovation and give power to rich corporations, then the broadband networks will be severely hobbled when it comes time for them to compete in the free market. Yes, it'll have incredible throughput rates, but if I can't use telnet to a shell account through it, I will never use broadband service. Other hobbles may be placed on the broadband networks by the companies who own them (ISPs collecting personal data? Auto-Net-Nanny monitoring? Geographic limitations on what web pages you can visit? Restrictions on what brands of software are allowed to send packets through the net?).
These shortsighted companies may make broadband access painful for the consumer, to the point where dialup access is more attractive. I guarantee that they'll push the limit of what they can get away with -- such is the nature of corporations. So broadband's bandwidth advantage will be handicapped by add-ons. Will this handicapping be so extreme that the free market chooses to stick with dialup access? Broadband will evolve very slowly, as innovation on it will be restricted. Will some innovation in dialup access (or other access) cause broadband to fall behind? Will it ultimately be forced to evolve into something more open or die? Only time will tell.
Unless, as Lessig suggests, we start right now and have the government mandate that broadband use open access and other innovation-promoting regulations. Then we can jump onto broadband access right away, without fear, and see what it's truly capable of.
I read a book by Reich, if I recall correctly. In it he stated the Orgone energy theory, which involved some invisible energy emitted from human beings' eyes and fingers, and that energy could be used (among other things) to dissipate clouds. The author went on to claim that there were invisible, ephemeral beings that looked like gigantic jellyfish living high in earth's atmosphere, feeding on clouds and the orgone energy within them.
:-) Having ones books and papers seized does not mean one is correct (especially back in 1957, which is about the time that McCarthy gave the first amendment a serious beating.)
I'm sorry, but these claims not only trip the crackpot alarm, they peg the meter.
If I've misrepresented Orgone Energy or Reich's claims, then I apologize. If it's the research I remember, however, then it's several steps more ridiculous than antigravity or Tesla's tricks, and well deserves its reputation as a crank theory.
The point is that we can move so fast and so far forward that by the time they can say a program this community created is in violation of patent X we've already likely devised a completely new system that makes that system antiquidated!
Except that while you're using your new system, MegaCorps are keeping you in court over the violation they claim against your previous system. They want your company, your wages, and your house as punitive damages. Anything you have left over, they'll get next year when they patent your new system.
Meanwhile, people are patenting business models...so after you invent your new gizmo, you'll have to invent a new way of selling it. Sure, you're a master techie, but are you also a master economist, ergonomist, and graphic designer?
And some kooks are patenting speculative things that they could not possibly have built (FTL communications, anyone?), but as soon as you invent it for them they'll own it. Expect them to thank you with a subpoena: They'll want your company, your wages, and your house, too.
You cannot hide from patent problems behind the Open Source movement. Corporations will sue and destroy your leaders and coders when they establish patents on your previous work. They will try to outflank you and patent things and procedures you haven't invented yet. Plus they're making money off of your creative genius, and they will beat you into submission to keep your legitimate claims from upsetting their profit margins. If none of this bothers you, you're the most terminally mellow techie I've ever seen.
This system does not see the same way that humans do, nor is there any mention in the article that you could actually get a picture out of one. It's designed to locate movement within its field of vision...nothing more. It doesn't notice, and probably can't 'see', things that do not move.
I wouldn't want to replace my eyes with these things. I'd be able to see the animated banner ads, but not read the rest of a static web page!
Iain Banks is one of those science fiction authors that people either love or hate.
I fall in the 'hate' category, myself. I read his acclaimed book 'Feersum Endjinn' to see what he was like. It was a torture test for me. The book contained no new ideas, soft 'space opera' type science explanations, and one third of it was written as if by an illiterate child, making it painfully hard to read.
After finishing Feesum Endjinn, I thought that maybe it was just an unusual Banks novel, and he deserved a second chance. So I bought 'Against a Dark Background'. It was much better written, and actually enjoyable in places...but the plot was slow, had no discernable direction, and the ending was unsatisfying and just plain *bad*.
Iain Banks strikes me as someone learning to write. He tries many different writing styles in his books, some of them quite experimental and odd, as if he's testing each style to see what fits best. If you like quirky writing you may enjoy his books. But from what I've read of him, the man has no clue about how to tell a good story, and zero scientific knowledge. I may try his 'literary' offerings someday...but I will never buy a science fiction book by Iain Banks again.
Most of the plotlines that involve people dying in real life when they die in a video game involve heart attacks from the excitement and mental shock. I think that was the method they used in the X-Files last night -- it *was* a boring episode, and I was surfing at the time. The neat bit they added were the armor plates with electroshock wired in to keep 'dead' people from reentering the game -- yeah, people are gonna play *that* -- and the fake bloody wounds the armor would create with electric stimulus. But for all that, it was just a Laser Tag game, and nobody without a cardiac problem should be dying from the excitement of it.
The Matrix had a different angle. Humans were tied into the Matrix via wires jacked into their brainstem. I can see an overload of data there frying a few braincells that are important to the autonomic nervous system. Gibson killed people in his cyberpunk books the same way -- too much juice to the temporal lobe makes johnny go flatline.
I think Snow Crash is a better model, myself. Someone cuts off your arms, legs, and head? Darn, now you have to reboot to reinitialize your system back to your default avatar. By which time, of course, the bad guys have delivered their crypto nuke...
Folks, forget trying to correct the media when they call criminals 'hackers'. The term has stuck, and popular culture is going to keep using it in spite any attempts to educate them. I suggest that you pressure the media to call them 'criminal hackers', to distinguish them from the law-abiding people who prefer to wear the 'hacker' label.
The Ikonos satellite is a terrific platform for remote sensing. But you're not going to get pictures of Area 51 out of it. :) The US government has shutter control over the satellite, meaning that they can veto acquisition requests that go over their bases or troops in the field. Scientists do not like these restrictions, obviously.
m l 7 56/17.htm
Some URLs talking about the Ikonos Shutter Control:
http://www.spie.org/web/oer/may/may99/cover1.ht
http://www.worldlink.co.uk/articles/08091999111
Getting back to processors, now that we have one designed for long term portability, we need to get away from the dinosaur that is the personal computer.
Why?
I like having my personal computer as an appliance in my home. I like being able to walk away from it when I need a break. I like being able to control just how much technology I have to deal with at any one time.
The personal computer is the best model for a processing machine for the general public. Some rare geeks may use portables as their main machine, but they will not drive the market. The market will be driven by personal computers on desks and in entertainment centers...where we do not need a super-portable chip.
Crusoe should aim towards a different market -- transparent technology. Putting chips inside my vacuum cleaner, my car, and my dog is fine, as long as those things work the way I expect them to. This is not a chip that will be used much in general-purpose computers; it's only useful in specialized-purpose gadgets that work in ways transparent to the consumer.
Bricks do not produce Hawking Radiation. It's that quantum effect that makes this experiment exciting and unusual.
Hawking radiation originates in the background of virtual particles in the universe -- particles that appear spontaneously from nothing along with their antiparticles, then collide and exterminate themselves. This background energy is a vital part of our models of the universe.
Stephen Hawking theorized that near a black hole some these virtual particles would be sucked into the black hole while their antiparticles would remain free. Thus, some virtual particles become permanent and real particles, and the black hole effectively radiates them into space. Conservation of mass states that the black hole must then be shrinking slowly in size...but that's not important here, with the laboratory optical black hole.
The optical black hole will have the same effect as a real one; virtual particles will be trapped within it, and their antiparticles will fly free. (Note that the trapped particles may be either matter or antimatter -- the radiated particles will be the opposite of the ones trapped.) Scientists will then be able to measure this Hawking Radiation and test some very central theories of cosmology and quantum physics.
Theoretically (and there's a point at which the theory is so remote, it's only fantasy...but here goes), an optical black hole *might* be configured to collect the radiated antiparticles as a bose condensate themselves. Then the optical black hole serves a purpose -- it's an antimatter generator. But that's really, really far beyond what they're trying to do now.
...
Remus Shepherd
Yes, I am a physicist. Yes, I do play one on Usenet.
The buzzword of games these days is 'Massively Multiplayer' -- games that include hundreds of players in a persistant, online world. There's a few neat aspects of games like this:
1. Companies can often charge monthly fees to the players.
2. They are patched automatically everytime you play.
3. Technical support is available online while playing.
4. All player's clients must be functionally equivalent.
Point 1 above is why we're going to see more MMGs in the market -- as gaming becomes bigger and bigger business, the game companies are going to want steady dedicated income.
Point 2, 3 and 4 are why Linux isn't going to be used for MMGs, at least not in the foreseeable future. The game companies need to provide real-time technical support, self-patching code, and a standard non-hackable interface regardless of the underlying OS. It's inefficient to do any of these for more than one OS...which is why the game companies will continue to bring out their products for Windows. Add to this the reputation Linux has for difficulty in providing tech support, and fact that an open OS will be a tool for hackers who wish to cheat at these games, and it's pretty plain that there's zero interest in coding MMG games for Linux. And MMG games are the future.
I will consider Linux gaming to have gotten off the ground when I see the following games available for Linux:
Ultima Online
Everquest
Shadowrun (upcoming; will be big)
Sovereign (upcoming; may be huge)
I think the Linux community should settle for being one or two generations behind in game technology. Play Zork and Doom; it'll be years before the OS is ready to play cutting edge games.
I disagree. I think that private viewing may fall into the categories of either exhibition or broadcast. Interesting question...should look into that.
There's where you lose the right to view your DVDs on your Linux machine. The CCA licenses the right to play DVDs to several manufacturers, none of whom produce a product for Linux. LiViD is not licensed by the CCA, therefore using it breaks your DVD purchase agreement.
The CCA has no copyright case, they have no trade secret case, and they have no piracy case. But they may have a case if they claim that using a non-licensed player to play DVDs is unauthorized use. I doubt they'll make that case unless they have to, because then it's them versus Linux, as opposed to them versus 'DVD pirates'...and Linux is well-respected by the public, lately.
What the CCA wants us to do is to purchase a license from them, then make a player. The problem is that a grassroots engineering effort like the Linux community cannot come up with the hundred thousand dollars it takes to license their tech. Because of how we do things, we can't do it their way -- and they're too greedy and too hidebound to realize that.
Just another big clash between the Old Way of doing things and the New Way of doing things, folks. There'll be more like this.
Technological progress is increasing at an exponential pace, and that pace has now outstripped the average man's ability to adapt. That's Future Shock as Alvin Toffler described it, and that's the underlying problem that is causing so many symptoms we only barely understand -- Corporatism being among them.
Corporations are in turmoil these days. The stodgy old businesses are struggling to adapt or die, while new businesses are leaping ahead, able to evolve more quickly and survive. If corporations were species, this would be a time of grand extinction, where most fail and disappear while a few well-adapted types are able to assert their new dominance. Future shock kills corporations who cannot handle it.
Except corporations have a survival mechanism that organic species do not -- the merger. Gargantuan megacorporations can survive in a changing climate by having some pieces that are adaptable and strong to support other pieces that are failing. Right now many corporations are choosing the merger as their defense against the increasing pace of change.
And so we have Citizen Case. A man who has proved himself adaptable in today's world, and who built a healthy company in the midst of change. It is no surprise that he -- or the media -- would choose highlight his mundane and normal side. Because that's what the people who give him power want to see. The average man cannot comprehend the pace of change today, cannot handle this future shock. He wants someone he can trust and understand to steer him through this confusing world. Everyman depends upon Steve Case, and the corporations.
To paraphrase what Morpheus said in the Matrix, all those people out there are your enemy, because they support the system. Normal people cannot handle Future Shock, and so in defense they willingly give ever-increasing amounts of power to corporations, who they see as able to handle increasing change. Even more disturbing, the corporations are beginning to see this as their due; they are beginning to believe that people should trust their decisions implicitly, and they are baffled and threatened by anyone who does not share their worldview of globalism and profit. They've lost the concept of ethics and honesty; in such turblent times, they have come to believe in the adage that might makes right.
But there are people besides the corporations who can adapt...some of whom can adapt better than the corporations themselves. Kevin Mitnick is a prime example. I don't like the guy (my credit card was one of the ones he stole from Netcom), but I have to admire his ability to assimilate and understand technology so thoroughly and so quickly. Mitnick and those like him are the individuals who will survive Future Shock the longest. And because they understand the world better than the corporations, the Uber-Hackers have the ability to disrupt corporate plans. DeCSS has caused a lot of heartburn in several corporations, and it has the potential to destroy an industry unless that industry adapts to it. The corporations know that the only thing that can harm them is even faster change, and the Uber-Hackers have the ability to speed the rate of technological progress.
Perhaps the Megacorporations know subconsciously that they will eventually not be able to adapt. When technological progress escalates to a rate their organization cannot handle, the megacorps will have to divest into smaller more adaptable portions or die. Right now mergers are a valid response to change, but eventually they will be counterproductive. The organizations will not be able to adapt when the climate shifts, and the public -- the average man -- will latch onto a different company as more adaptable, more trustable and safe. Until the next climate shift occurs.
So what can be done to stop corporatism? One answer is to be patient. Coporate greed ignites technological progress which eventually leads to their own doom. Although today's corporations are larger and more powerful than any in the past, they are also more short lived. We're not seeing any more 200 year old Lloyd's of London being created; the lifespan of Microsoft will be measured in decades, not centuries.
Another response is to hasten tech progress. The Open Source Movement, as the largest collection of donated ingenuity ever assembled, may be the most adaptable organization humankind has ever known. It may be the most adaptable organization that humans are capable of creating. Contributing to OSS is a denial of corporatism in one sense...and an evolution of it in another, as future corporations will have to assimilate aspects of Open Source organization in order to become adaptable enough to survive. That's already begun. The next Time-Warner will rely on intellectual property that is donated, and as limitless as humanity.
That's a danger, though, for when Uber-Geeks support a corporation they begin to turn into the normal man that powers globalism. So be careful what you support, and always think about the consequences. You Are A Power Source. The Matrix really hit on some subconscious principles of today's society.
If you're lucky, the projects you support will grow into new corporations; ones able to handle rapid change, and ones who know how to survive while remaining ethical. The Uber-Geek -- the Adaptable Man -- must guide the world through an evolution that most of humanity cannot grasp. Corporations will seek to provide that guidance with the principles of greed and implied trust. We need to show the world how to adapt while retaining our souls. And hey, we can do it.
Until the next wave of Future Shock hits. But no sense worrying about that before we can even imagine what it will bring.