While I admire the pithy and correct minimalism of your "we are our brain" statement, it doesn't go very far towards explaining the nature of consciousness or illusion of free will, so I think I'll stick to my lengthier explanation.
Also, "We are our brain" would be true whether consciousness is some bizarre large scale quantum phenomena as the book (& Penrose) claim, or whether it's in fact architecuraly based sitting on top of the pyramid of conventional physics.
Maybe if you ever feel like taking up writing for a living you could write a book "The universe explained".... I'd suggest you make it a one-liner: "It's all superstrings".
This books sounds rather like Roger Penrose's "The Emporer's New Mind", minus the (provably wrong) computability claims.
I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone, especially a scientist(!), would try to look for a quantum explanation of consciousness unless, like Penrose, that was their initial goal - that they *wanted* to reject the more prosaic explanations.
Nature and evolution work on many different emergent levels. Quantum physics gives rise to chemistry which in turn begats physics and biology. Cellular biology begats neurology, which in turn should be the basis for any higher level abstractions of brain architecture such as the cortical minicolumns.
The rational place to look for explanations of consciousness is at the level of higher level brain architecture. Much can be learned about brain architecture from studying those with various types of brain damage, and phenomena such as "blind sight" indicate that consciousness is indeed a function that can be disrupted by architectural damage.
Personally I would assert that consciousness is simply put an inward looking sense - one which monitors some (but not all) of the brains own functioning, as opposed to external senses wich monitor externally derived stimulii. The experience of consciousness is explicable in the same way as other sensory "quales" - it's got to feel like *something*, and there's nothing more mysterious about the way it does feel to be conscious than the way green appears as a color.
Free will is really unrelated to consciousness, although easily confused with it. The real question is whether we can control nature, not whether we can consciously do so. The simple answer to this is "no", although that really depends on what you identify as "I". With "I" correctly identified as the center of narrative experience (i.e. the fabricated entity to which our internal narrative attributes our actions), then "I" is in control, but it's really just our neural circuitry executing according to the inescapable laws of physics (conventional physics at that, not another parallel quantum realm). We perceive ourselves to have free will simply because the entity we attribute it to ("I"/ourselves) is our internal causal *explanation* for our actions.
Free will works like this: Our neural circuitry, part born out of genetics, part out of experience, generates some motor action (perhaps as a result of some external stimulii, perhaps as a result of some internal one), and we see both the resultant action and the internal precursor signals (via consciousness feedback), and though associativity attribute the action to the precursor signals and hence the high level construct "I". We therefore percieve/believe that "I" *decided* to take the action, when in fact really the action was taken by our neural circuitry, and the causal association is a high level phenomenon that has arisen though evolution due to the benefit of being able to predict things by both subconsiously and consciously modelling causal relationships.
Given the myth of free will we could *try* to abdicate all responsibility and just do whatever we want, but the illusion is too strong to be overcome by intellectual beliefs, and almost all people will sensibly continue to live their lives according to the feeling that they're actively making decisions.
So with Gate's worth around $100B, I guess it seems quite reasonable to you that he should give away $6B (" a fraction of his wealth") to buy computers for all the kids who don't have them. How generous of you.
So what are *YOU* worth Katz? Middle age, reasonably successful... I'd guess you're worth at least $250K, probablt more... So 6/100 of your wealth would be a measly $15,000. How much do you give to charity, I wonder....
Last time I read anything about Gates, his charitable contributions were in the Billions, not 100's of Millions. He seems to prefer humanitarian causes than getting America wired. More power to him. He's still runs a company that produces shit, but at least give him some credit where due.
My point is that it's a crime not just a bit of mischief. Yahoo's financial losses at being down for that time are figured in the millions. What if they hit E*TRADE next, and you personally suffered financially - would you still be feeling so philosophical about it then?
The law already has ways of handling juveniles and first time offenders that may have "fallen astray", and certainly those should be applied if applicable - no difference because it's a cyber-crime. Similarly, though, cyber-crimes need to be treated in *all* ways the same as any other... we're talking disruption of inter-state commerce here, as well as causing millions of dollars of losses.... not exactly kids play.
Just as serial killers are often caught by their patterns rather than the details of any one crime, I'm sure these distributed DOS attacks have their own fingerprints too. Given that a lot of these attacks use the same unwitting hosts, there's also opportunity to trace these back to the originator from that angle. Or just go after the guys who're writing these distributed DOS programs in the first place.
A DOS attack is just as bad as creating a destructive virus, since it can cause serious financial losses for the site/company attacked. It'd be good to see the government (FBI hopefully, since it'd likely be inter-state) go after one of these jerks and hang them up to dry. Too bad if it's a script kiddie - an example needs to be set.
I'd expect there might be a great opportunity for some company to create tools/services for tracking DOS attacks... someone like Cisco would obviously be in a good position to track coordinated attacks.
Who knows whether Katz really believes his articles actually contribute anything by way of fresh opinion; my take on it is that that is not really important to him. He's using Slashdot for self publicity and helping to sell his books, and it's a symbiotic relationship since his articles usually attract huge numbers if readers/responses, which is what a commercial site wants/needs.
The reason I dislike Katz' articles myself isn't because of his flakey opinions, but rather because I don't think there's anything genuine about them. His goal is publicity, and he achieves this by picking what he knows are hot topics, and then taking hype-ridden extremist flamebaity positions/opinions on them that he knows most slashdotters will feel compelled to respond to.
Microsoft have been claiming for well over a year (closer to two?) that they'll have a media player for Linux. The version they have available won't even play uncompressed.avi's, and has never been updated.
I'd read Microsoft's comments as trying to discourage anyone else from trying to compete, rather than any honest intention to support Linux themselves.
xanim supports at least one variant of H.263, but I think that right now there are a couple of variants on the file format. There's also H.263+.
As far as using H.263 in a streaming context rather than in an.avi, I think (but won't swear to it!) that vic (one of the mbone tools) supports it also.
It's an open standard, there are at least two open source implementations that I know of, and the quality/compression appears to be about the same as MPEG-4.
You're right that rhe API needs to be in place before we can expect CODECs, whether binary or open source, to become available.
However, there *is* already a standard emerging for Linux - the "Video for Linux 2" (V4L2) API. This isn't in the release kernels yet (V4L is), but it is available, and there are drivers for it for most cards including the popular Bt848 based ones.
One of the significant improvements in V4L2 is that it does support a CODEC API.
Mark Podlipec had had some success in getting companies to release propietary CODECs for xanim, given the standard he has established there, and I expect that an OS level API like V4L2 would with a bit of encouragement get a fuller set of CODECs released. Don't expect open source though, since the better CODECs represent significant intellectual property value for the commercial companties that developed them. But with the infrastructure in place, it'll be possible for an open source CODEC to emerge if people are interested in working on it.
..if quality of and restrictions on internet access and coputer usage soon do become an issue in choosing schools. Apparently appartment buildings in some cities are getting wired for broadband internet, and this is a deciding factor for some tenants.
In related news...
I just found out that I can get ADSL at home. Currently I'm getting about 26Kbps out of my 56K modem due to being so far from the CO, but it seems I'm just under the 17,500 feet limit for ADSL, and the local telco has just started offering the service. 1.5M max/384K guaranteed down and 128K up for $39.95/mo, plus $10/mo for my ISP. Not bad.:-)
If you want to use a streaming video standard that is supported on Linux, then consider using RealNetwork's RealProducer - the RealPlayer client is available for Linux.
For a Linux video editor you should try Broadcast2000. I'd imagine that RealProducer can import.avi or.mpg videos.
I just realized I had a brain fart and this review wasn't even written by Hemos, it was written by Erin, whose review interestingly enough resides over at thepope.org
A more intereting question would therefore be what's the deal with the slashdot guys and thepope, since that names seems to come up from time to time...
It sounds like an interesting book, and I'm sure many poeple would be able to relate to parts of it, but what I'm curious about is why it struck such a chord with you?
Even well before the Andover deal, you guys must have been aware that Slashdot was a big deal, and that you we're likely to do very well out of it. Apart from the money, I would have imagined that it would have also kept you very busy, and been a lot of fun too (hopefully still is)... So if this is true, then how come when you're rolling merrily along with things looking so rosy, would you be so doubtful of the future?
Which companies do you see as good investment pportunities to take advantage of GSM/GPRS in the states? How do you see GSM/GPRS competing with CDMA/CPCD?
Do you have any idea what kind of licencing fees Gemstar look to collect for this patent? Tivo's stock is *way* down today based on this news, and it looks like a massive overreaction to me. I've even got to wonder if they couldn't successfully get the patent overturned on the grounds of being obvious. I know Scientific Atlanta are fighting Gemstar on this too
The Athlon is a fine CPU, but it's advantages over PIII are not huge (reletivly speaking).
I guess that depends on what you mean by "relatively speaking"...
The Crusoe certainly would appear to have a huge edge over the Pentium in terms of cost and power consumption, which will particularly give it an edge in mobile and low cost applications. It's real competition in the non-x86 arena is probably the ARM.
However, in it's own domain - high end systems - the Athlon *does* have quite an edge over the PIII. It has 3 integer execution units compared to the PIII's 2, plus 3 floating point execution units again compared to 2 for the PIII. Just as importantly, unlike the PIII the Athlon actually has the unrestricted ability to simultaneously issue the instructions to keep those execution units busy.
There's a full PIII vs Athlon comparison over on Ars.
Well strictly speaking you're of course right, but I wonder how many e-bay sales actually get reported... probably about as many as out-of-state purchases get reported, I expect!;-)
Slashdot Mirror
While I admire the pithy and correct minimalism of your "we are our brain" statement, it doesn't go very far towards explaining the nature of consciousness or illusion of free will, so I think I'll stick to my lengthier explanation.
Also, "We are our brain" would be true whether consciousness is some bizarre large scale quantum phenomena as the book (& Penrose) claim, or whether it's in fact architecuraly based sitting on top of the pyramid of conventional physics.
Maybe if you ever feel like taking up writing for a living you could write a book "The universe explained".... I'd suggest you make it a one-liner: "It's all superstrings".
This books sounds rather like Roger Penrose's "The Emporer's New Mind", minus the (provably wrong) computability claims.
I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone, especially a scientist(!), would try to look for a quantum explanation of consciousness unless, like Penrose, that was their initial goal - that they *wanted* to reject the more prosaic explanations.
Nature and evolution work on many different emergent levels. Quantum physics gives rise to chemistry which in turn begats physics and biology. Cellular biology begats neurology, which in turn should be the basis for any higher level abstractions of brain architecture such as the cortical minicolumns.
The rational place to look for explanations of consciousness is at the level of higher level brain architecture. Much can be learned about brain architecture from studying those with various types of brain damage, and phenomena such as "blind sight" indicate that consciousness is indeed a function that can be disrupted by architectural damage.
Personally I would assert that consciousness is simply put an inward looking sense - one which monitors some (but not all) of the brains own functioning, as opposed to external senses wich monitor externally derived stimulii. The experience of consciousness is explicable in the same way as other sensory "quales" - it's got to feel like *something*, and there's nothing more mysterious about the way it does feel to be conscious than the way green appears as a color.
Free will is really unrelated to consciousness, although easily confused with it. The real question is whether we can control nature, not whether we can consciously do so. The simple answer to this is "no", although that really depends on what you identify as "I". With "I" correctly identified as the center of narrative experience (i.e. the fabricated entity to which our internal narrative attributes our actions), then "I" is in control, but it's really just our neural circuitry executing according to the inescapable laws of physics (conventional physics at that, not another parallel quantum realm). We perceive ourselves to have free will simply because the entity we attribute it to ("I"/ourselves) is our internal causal *explanation* for our actions.
Free will works like this: Our neural circuitry, part born out of genetics, part out of experience, generates some motor action (perhaps as a result of some external stimulii, perhaps as a result of some internal one), and we see both the resultant action and the internal precursor signals (via consciousness feedback), and though associativity attribute the action to the precursor signals and hence the high level construct "I". We therefore percieve/believe that "I" *decided* to take the action, when in fact really the action was taken by our neural circuitry, and the causal association is a high level phenomenon that has arisen though evolution due to the benefit of being able to predict things by both subconsiously and consciously modelling causal relationships.
Given the myth of free will we could *try* to abdicate all responsibility and just do whatever we want, but the illusion is too strong to be overcome by intellectual beliefs, and almost all people will sensibly continue to live their lives according to the feeling that they're actively making decisions.
Fuck you, you rude bastard.
Maybe if you took the time to *think* about what you're reading, you wouldn't waste my time reading your worthless drivel. Asshole.
Don't miss this - according to the story there's an upcoming documentary on the the who inside Netscape Mozilla coding scene from '98....
PBS documentary
So with Gate's worth around $100B, I guess it seems quite reasonable to you that he should give away $6B (" a fraction of his wealth") to buy computers for all the kids who don't have them. How generous of you.
So what are *YOU* worth Katz? Middle age, reasonably successful... I'd guess you're worth at least $250K, probablt more... So 6/100 of your wealth would be a measly $15,000. How much do you give to charity, I wonder....
Last time I read anything about Gates, his charitable contributions were in the Billions, not 100's of Millions. He seems to prefer humanitarian causes than getting America wired. More power to him. He's still runs a company that produces shit, but at least give him some credit where due.
My point is that it's a crime not just a bit of mischief. Yahoo's financial losses at being down for that time are figured in the millions. What if they hit E*TRADE next, and you personally suffered financially - would you still be feeling so philosophical about it then?
The law already has ways of handling juveniles and first time offenders that may have "fallen astray", and certainly those should be applied if applicable - no difference because it's a cyber-crime. Similarly, though, cyber-crimes need to be treated in *all* ways the same as any other... we're talking disruption of inter-state commerce here, as well as causing millions of dollars of losses.... not exactly kids play.
Just as serial killers are often caught by their patterns rather than the details of any one crime, I'm sure these distributed DOS attacks have their own fingerprints too. Given that a lot of these attacks use the same unwitting hosts, there's also opportunity to trace these back to the originator from that angle. Or just go after the guys who're writing these distributed DOS programs in the first place.
A DOS attack is just as bad as creating a destructive virus, since it can cause serious financial losses for the site/company attacked. It'd be good to see the government (FBI hopefully, since it'd likely be inter-state) go after one of these jerks and hang them up to dry. Too bad if it's a script kiddie - an example needs to be set.
I'd expect there might be a great opportunity for some company to create tools/services for tracking DOS attacks... someone like Cisco would obviously be in a good position to track coordinated attacks.
Who knows whether Katz really believes his articles actually contribute anything by way of fresh opinion; my take on it is that that is not really important to him. He's using Slashdot for self publicity and helping to sell his books, and it's a symbiotic relationship since his articles usually attract huge numbers if readers/responses, which is what a commercial site wants/needs.
The reason I dislike Katz' articles myself isn't because of his flakey opinions, but rather because I don't think there's anything genuine about them. His goal is publicity, and he achieves this by picking what he knows are hot topics, and then taking hype-ridden extremist flamebaity positions/opinions on them that he knows most slashdotters will feel compelled to respond to.
Microsoft have been claiming for well over a year (closer to two?) that they'll have a media player for Linux. The version they have available won't even play uncompressed .avi's, and has never been updated.
I'd read Microsoft's comments as trying to discourage anyone else from trying to compete, rather than any honest intention to support Linux themselves.
xanim supports at least one variant of H.263, but I think that right now there are a couple of variants on the file format. There's also H.263+.
.avi, I think (but won't swear to it!) that vic (one of the mbone tools) supports it also.
As far as using H.263 in a streaming context rather than in an
It's an open standard, there are at least two open source implementations that I know of, and the quality/compression appears to be about the same as MPEG-4.
You're right that rhe API needs to be in place before we can expect CODECs, whether binary or open source, to become available.
However, there *is* already a standard emerging for Linux - the "Video for Linux 2" (V4L2) API. This isn't in the release kernels yet (V4L is), but it is available, and there are drivers for it for most cards including the popular Bt848 based ones.
V4L2
One of the significant improvements in V4L2 is that it does support a CODEC API.
Mark Podlipec had had some success in getting companies to release propietary CODECs for xanim, given the standard he has established there, and I expect that an OS level API like V4L2 would with a bit of encouragement get a fuller set of CODECs released. Don't expect open source though, since the better CODECs represent significant intellectual property value for the commercial companties that developed them. But with the infrastructure in place, it'll be possible for an open source CODEC to emerge if people are interested in working on it.
..if quality of and restrictions on internet access and coputer usage soon do become an issue in choosing schools. Apparently appartment buildings in some cities are getting wired for broadband internet, and this is a deciding factor for some tenants.
:-)
In related news...
I just found out that I can get ADSL at home. Currently I'm getting about 26Kbps out of my 56K modem due to being so far from the CO, but it seems I'm just under the 17,500 feet limit for ADSL, and the local telco has just started offering the service. 1.5M max/384K guaranteed down and 128K up for $39.95/mo, plus $10/mo for my ISP. Not bad.
If you want to use a streaming video standard that is supported on Linux, then consider using RealNetwork's RealProducer - the RealPlayer client is available for Linux.
.avi or .mpg videos.
For a Linux video editor you should try Broadcast2000. I'd imagine that RealProducer can import
I just realized I had a brain fart and this review wasn't even written by Hemos, it was written by Erin, whose review interestingly enough resides over at thepope.org
A more intereting question would therefore be what's the deal with the slashdot guys and thepope, since that names seems to come up from time to time...
It sounds like an interesting book, and I'm sure many poeple would be able to relate to parts of it, but what I'm curious about is why it struck such a chord with you?
Even well before the Andover deal, you guys must have been aware that Slashdot was a big deal, and that you we're likely to do very well out of it. Apart from the money, I would have imagined that it would have also kept you very busy, and been a lot of fun too (hopefully still is)... So if this is true, then how come when you're rolling merrily along with things looking so rosy, would you be so doubtful of the future?
Yeah, but you get a tax credit for taxes paid in the UK, so it should have been pretty much a wash.
Brain download is nice, but what would be really useful would be upload capability too.
That way I can download Elizabeth Shue's brain into my computer, fix the defective bit that makes her unwilling to date me, and upload it back again!
Chris DiBona?
Are NeTTwerk, Hormes and Kevin geek celebrities that I should know?
Which companies do you see as good investment pportunities to take advantage of GSM/GPRS in the states? How do you see GSM/GPRS competing with CDMA/CPCD?
What companies (investment opportunities!) are involved in building and operating the GSM/GPRS infrastructure in the US?
Do you have any idea what kind of licencing fees Gemstar look to collect for this patent? Tivo's stock is *way* down today based on this news, and it looks like a massive overreaction to me. I've even got to wonder if they couldn't successfully get the patent overturned on the grounds of being obvious. I know Scientific Atlanta are fighting Gemstar on this too
The Athlon is a fine CPU, but it's advantages over PIII are not huge (reletivly speaking).
I guess that depends on what you mean by "relatively speaking"...
The Crusoe certainly would appear to have a huge edge over the Pentium in terms of cost and power consumption, which will particularly give it an edge in mobile and low cost applications. It's real competition in the non-x86 arena is probably the ARM.
However, in it's own domain - high end systems - the Athlon *does* have quite an edge over the PIII. It has 3 integer execution units compared to the PIII's 2, plus 3 floating point execution units again compared to 2 for the PIII. Just as importantly, unlike the PIII the Athlon actually has the unrestricted ability to simultaneously issue the instructions to keep those execution units busy.
There's a full PIII vs Athlon comparison over on Ars.
Well strictly speaking you're of course right, but I wonder how many e-bay sales actually get reported... probably about as many as out-of-state purchases get reported, I expect! ;-)