One of the hosts in the seednodes.ini is 'katcher.2y.net'. I think that was one of the seed hosts for Konspire too.
I liked Konspire. Got bored with it after a while but it was a really cool idea.
The trouble with P2P networks is that, like instant messaging systems, their usefulness is their technical quality multiplied by their popularity. A lame but widespread P2P network is gonna be more useful than a very cool but unpopular P2P network.
Rohrer seems to be good at publicity. He had Adam Curry geeked about Konspire, and Oliver Willis had a Konspire channel. Now he's got Slashdot and InfoAnarchy all gaga over MUTE. Hope it gets more momentum than Konspire.:)
The trick is that by requesting the key, the person is actually propagating the material.
If you request a key and my node hands you that file, there is no way for you to tell whether I had that file on my machine already and just sent it to you in response to your request, or whether my node went out and got that file from ANOTHER NODE in response to your request, and then passed it on to you, caching it on my node in case of further requests.
In other words, by trying to 'police' freenet in this fashion, you are thwarting your own goals, and making sure that your file is widely propagated across a large number of nodes, only a small fraction of whose IP addresses will be known to you (you only know the IP address of the last node that delivered the file to you) -- and those IP addresses are likely to be those of people who did not even have the file before you requested it!
BT was designed to carry legitimate content; it was not designed for anonymity or uncensorability or anything like that. BT's creator never intended it to be useful for pirates to distribute "hot" content, so it's not surprising that people who try to use it that way find themselves in trouble. Wrong tool for the wrong job. For uncensorability and anonymity, go to Freenet. Supposedly they just released a new version that's ever more efficient.
I'm liking Konspire, by the way. I'm currently distributing a bunch of perfectly legitimate content through it, with the consent of the content creator (mc frontalot, if you're curious) -- drop a line or reply if you're interested in picking up on it. It's the Nerdcore Hiphop channel.
Konspire is designed to maximize bandwidth in a way similar to BT (and there are endless hissy fights about which really is better at it) -- but if you did want to distribute something shifty, it's not nearly as vulnerable to takedowns as something like BT.
A long time ago there was an obscure little roleplaying game called 'Talislanta' which was inspired by the Dying Earth series, and which was even given kudos by Jack Vance. It was shoofed around from publisher to publisher and finally is coming out this year in a new and hoopy edition.
How appropriate that both that and the Dying Earth Tales are back out in the world.:)
If one had read anything by RMS one would expect him to take this extremely hardline position. It's what he does. It's what he believes.
It sounds like Jorrit might merely have wanted some very technical advice on what is appropriate with licensing, but he phrased it as a "What do you think about this, RMS?" kind of question, and we all know what RMS thinks of anything which is not Free Software -- it is Bad. Morally wrong. OK, you can agree or disagree but don't be confused or surprised. That's what he stands for.
I think Jorrit might have been better off doing some homework on what RMS is all about, and if he didn't want to get into a huge discussion of Larger Issues, he should have asked only very very tightly focused questions.
This extreme idealism is why the GPL exists, and if you don't like it, don't use the GPL.
I use Opera for just about everything. Once in a great while you get broken pages, but that's more a matter of people not writing their HTML to standard than a lack of features on Opera's part.
I use it at home on my ancient 486/20 meg win95 box, and I use it at work on my Pentium 400/128 meg NT box. I just like the speed, control, simplicity, and stability.
And it *is* tweakable. You can control just about everything about the presentation and security -- including imposing your own CSS's on really offensively colored/formatted pages, if you feel like it. (Boss is coming! Quick, make the page look like a boring Word document! that's Control-G. Quick, make all the images disappear! That's the plain old G key.)
The only major "tweakability" feature missing is that you can only turn cookies on and off, not accept/reject them individually, and they promise to fix that in a future release.
It sounds like what they're talking about is the Self-Organized Criticality model. (Do a Google search on Self-Organized Criticality -- you'll get tons of references.)
The difference between this and the gaussian model is that with the gaussian you are merely dealing with the summed behavior of a large number of independent variables. With the SOC model you are dealing with a particular pattern -- the frequency of changes as a function of their magnitude is described by a power law. It's not just a bunch of stuff happening randomly, it's a particular state in which the rarity of a change is correlated in a precise way to its magnitude. If I'm correct and that *is* what they're talking about, this isn't all THAT new. I have a neuroscientist friend who's been working on applying the SOC model to brain function with some success for a couple years now.
But the article is vague enough that it's not totally clear that's what they're talking about.
Great idea! Not the part about subscribing them to porn lists. That's not playing fair. But you may be able to win while playing fair. Hit the people in authority first. Hit the big time suits; hit the HR people who started the witch hunt.
I'm kind of a connoisseur of free email sites. M&N.com does so many cool things, like the SSL layer, no tags on your email, full POP access... But the web interface is pretty slow and clunky, and there are unexpected holes in the functionality (you shouldn't have to wait five seconds for a new page to show up so you can select a name out of your address book, for example...) But there is no perfect free email address...:)
Like many states, Kansas has statewide competency tests to determine whether you *really* learned anything in high school. Evolution will not be on those tests. It's still considered a violation of church/state separation to teach "Creationism" in public schools. This is from the story in the Chicago Tribune.
The mail sent to the admins used to be a lot more verbose, but I believe Julian changed it as a result of feedback from admins themselves. Now it's short but full of links to places on spamcop.net where you can get more info on the situation.
No, they changed that. You have to give one now, and they verify it. It can still be "blowme@hotmail.com" if you want, but it's gotta be a valid email address.
One of the best things about SpamCop is the forum. Julian's always there, always listening to people, replying; he'll answer any question you have and he is always making improvements to the site.
RE: "oh, and anyone that says this is not a popular book ought to read "uber formal unentscheidbare shatze der principia mathematica und verwandter systeme" and tell me what they think of that."
Tried. Had no freaking clue. Point granted: this is a book of popular science.
Hofstadter is so bloody intelligent that it's easy to be blown away by it and just say, "Oh, Mr. Hofstadter, you're so right, I had NEVER noticed that! I think I'll sit around and make recursive acronyms and ambigrams now!" Pshaw.
Hofstadter's a lot better than many AI researchers on this score, but he *STILL* underestimates the degree to which bodies are bound up together with minds. His insistence that perception is bound up with cognition is a step in the right direction but he still falls into the old "mind is software and portable; body is hardware and dispensible" schtick that has plagued AI research since its inception -- in short, the tendency to literalize the "mind as computer" metaphor.
Read him and try to follow everything he is saying and then don't just sit back and accept; *argue* with him; read, for example, the work of George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson on the embodiment of the mind, or Gilles Fauconnier on analogies and mental spaces, to get some further, less intricately and elegantly expressed, but in some ways more important perspectives on these issues.
To be specific, read GEB and then pick up George Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_ for a less hip but equally mind-expanding trip through cognitive science.
I had an opti mouse on my old Amiga, and I could draw with that thing as well as I can with a Wacom pad. I'll probably buy one of these just out of nostalgia for the glories of optical mousehood.
Slashdot Mirror
Just tried it; can't connect to any hosts.
:)
One of the hosts in the seednodes.ini is 'katcher.2y.net'. I think that was one of the seed hosts for Konspire too.
I liked Konspire. Got bored with it after a while but it was a really cool idea.
The trouble with P2P networks is that, like instant messaging systems, their usefulness is their technical quality multiplied by their popularity. A lame but widespread P2P network is gonna be more useful than a very cool but unpopular P2P network.
Rohrer seems to be good at publicity. He had Adam Curry geeked about Konspire, and Oliver Willis had a Konspire channel. Now he's got Slashdot and InfoAnarchy all gaga over MUTE. Hope it gets more momentum than Konspire.
The trick is that by requesting the key, the person is actually propagating the material.
If you request a key and my node hands you that file, there is no way for you to tell whether I had that file on my machine already and just sent it to you in response to your request, or whether my node went out and got that file from ANOTHER NODE in response to your request, and then passed it on to you, caching it on my node in case of further requests.
In other words, by trying to 'police' freenet in this fashion, you are thwarting your own goals, and making sure that your file is widely propagated across a large number of nodes, only a small fraction of whose IP addresses will be known to you (you only know the IP address of the last node that delivered the file to you) -- and those IP addresses are likely to be those of people who did not even have the file before you requested it!
BT was designed to carry legitimate content; it was not designed for anonymity or uncensorability or anything like that. BT's creator never intended it to be useful for pirates to distribute "hot" content, so it's not surprising that people who try to use it that way find themselves in trouble. Wrong tool for the wrong job. For uncensorability and anonymity, go to Freenet. Supposedly they just released a new version that's ever more efficient.
:)
I'm liking Konspire, by the way. I'm currently distributing a bunch of perfectly legitimate content through it, with the consent of the content creator (mc frontalot, if you're curious) -- drop a line or reply if you're interested in picking up on it. It's the Nerdcore Hiphop channel.
Konspire is designed to maximize bandwidth in a way similar to BT (and there are endless hissy fights about which really is better at it) -- but if you did want to distribute something shifty, it's not nearly as vulnerable to takedowns as something like BT.
It also has a nice comprehensible user interface.
Consider it hyped and advocated.
A long time ago there was an obscure little roleplaying game called 'Talislanta' which was inspired by the Dying Earth series, and which was even given kudos by Jack Vance. It was shoofed around from publisher to publisher and finally is coming out this year in a new and hoopy edition.
:)
How appropriate that both that and the Dying Earth Tales are back out in the world.
If one had read anything by RMS one would expect him to take this extremely hardline position. It's what he does. It's what he believes.
It sounds like Jorrit might merely have wanted some very technical advice on what is appropriate with licensing, but he phrased it as a "What do you think about this, RMS?" kind of question, and we all know what RMS thinks of anything which is not Free Software -- it is Bad. Morally wrong. OK, you can agree or disagree but don't be confused or surprised. That's what he stands for.
I think Jorrit might have been better off doing some homework on what RMS is all about, and if he didn't want to get into a huge discussion of Larger Issues, he should have asked only very very tightly focused questions.
This extreme idealism is why the GPL exists, and if you don't like it, don't use the GPL.
I use it at home on my ancient 486/20 meg win95 box, and I use it at work on my Pentium 400/128 meg NT box. I just like the speed, control, simplicity, and stability.
And it *is* tweakable. You can control just about everything about the presentation and security -- including imposing your own CSS's on really offensively colored/formatted pages, if you feel like it. (Boss is coming! Quick, make the page look like a boring Word document! that's Control-G. Quick, make all the images disappear! That's the plain old G key.)
The only major "tweakability" feature missing is that you can only turn cookies on and off, not accept/reject them individually, and they promise to fix that in a future release.
The difference between this and the gaussian model is that with the gaussian you are merely dealing with the summed behavior of a large number of independent variables. With the SOC model you are dealing with a particular pattern -- the frequency of changes as a function of their magnitude is described by a power law. It's not just a bunch of stuff happening randomly, it's a particular state in which the rarity of a change is correlated in a precise way to its magnitude.
If I'm correct and that *is* what they're talking about, this isn't all THAT new. I have a neuroscientist friend who's been working on applying the SOC model to brain function with some success for a couple years now.
But the article is vague enough that it's not totally clear that's what they're talking about.
Great idea! Not the part about subscribing them to porn lists. That's not playing fair. But you may be able to win while playing fair. Hit the people in authority first. Hit the big time suits; hit the HR people who started the witch hunt.
I'm kind of a connoisseur of free email sites. M&N.com does so many cool things, like the SSL layer, no tags on your email, full POP access... But the web interface is pretty slow and clunky, and there are unexpected holes in the functionality (you shouldn't have to wait five seconds for a new page to show up so you can select a name out of your address book, for example...) But there is no perfect free email address... :)
Like many states, Kansas has statewide competency tests to determine whether you *really* learned anything in high school. Evolution will not be on those tests. It's still considered a violation of church/state separation to teach "Creationism" in public schools. This is from the story in the Chicago Tribune.
The mail sent to the admins used to be a lot more verbose, but I believe Julian changed it as a result of feedback from admins themselves. Now it's short but full of links to places on spamcop.net where you can get more info on the situation.
No, they changed that. You have to give one now, and they verify it. It can still be "blowme@hotmail.com" if you want, but it's gotta be a valid email address.
One of the best things about SpamCop is the forum. Julian's always there, always listening to people, replying; he'll answer any question you have and he is always making improvements to the site.
Tried. Had no freaking clue. Point granted: this is a book of popular science.
Hofstadter's a lot better than many AI researchers on this score, but he *STILL* underestimates the degree to which bodies are bound up together with minds. His insistence that perception is bound up with cognition is a step in the right direction but he still falls into the old "mind is software and portable; body is hardware and dispensible" schtick that has plagued AI research since its inception -- in short, the tendency to literalize the "mind as computer" metaphor.
Read him and try to follow everything he is saying and then don't just sit back and accept; *argue* with him; read, for example, the work of George Lakoff, Mark Turner, and Mark Johnson on the embodiment of the mind, or Gilles Fauconnier on analogies and mental spaces, to get some further, less intricately and elegantly expressed, but in some ways more important perspectives on these issues.
To be specific, read GEB and then pick up George Lakoff's _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_ for a less hip but equally mind-expanding trip through cognitive science.
I don't care if it needs a special pad or not.
I had an opti mouse on my old Amiga, and I could draw with that thing as well as I can with a Wacom pad. I'll probably buy one of these just out of nostalgia for the glories of optical mousehood.