> if we had such a machine built in 1970 and it was still around today, it would almost certainly be almost useless, due to culture shifts, scientific/medical knowledge, mass changes in opinion on moral and ethical issues
Not necessarily -- if it actually worked it would still be extremely useful. Because society today would be just like it was in the 1970's.
Where do you get that a user has to submit a key? My understanding was that there would be key defined in the chip that would be automaticaly used. If I were a big, consumer-oriented corporation that'd be the way I'd do it -- anything else would involve a lot of things like user education & convincing programers to go to a lot more work to implement it (e.g., instead of calling a routine to grab the public key or encrypt something, call a widget to grab key info from the user). Frankly, if this is in fact public-key stuff, then the public key itself serves as a unique identifier no matter how you slice it.
Don't get me wrong, you may be right -- I just don't know.
First of all, I found the article to be a bit scant on detail, so for all I know we're all misinterpreting this. But assuming that there is a unique id sort of thing in the hardware, as with the pIII:
The thing about this is that if it works and becomes ubiquitous having the source to your OS won't help. You'll start noticing that web sites require you to submit this ID, and that software have access to it in order to take advantage of certain "features". So, in order to make sure that linux/oss software can take advantage of these "features" support for this ID will be programed in. Sure, you can choose not to use it, but when everybody else is using it it could quickly become impossible to get by without it.
You might be able to spoof it, but people that write the web pages (or whatever) that use it will find ways around this. They could restrict page views to 100x per ID, for instance, so people couldn't all use the same ID. (I know, so make it random -- that might work. But then things devolve into a hack war, like the aol/m$ instant messanging war.)
> I've got to admit I'm having a hard time > considering machines as anything other than > machines.
Personaly, I think *that's* the interesting problem. Someone else alluded to the fact that we have no solid philosophical basis for thinking that other people are "anything other than machines" -- which makes machines that can pass the turring test just like people, for all intents and purposes. Untill we can point to something and say "This is the seat of rational thought" we can't say "and computers don't have it."
I think the most pressing angle on AI is human rights -- for the AI's. I personaly have a lot of trouble with the idea that a computer program could actually be sentient, but I have to admit that the same dificulties that apply to programs apply to people.
> we cannot change humans' capabilities, so they > will remain as they are.
What do you mean we can't change human's abilities? What do you want to improve? Memory? Creativity? Ability to perform calculations? All of these things can be improved for a particular individual w/ practice & education. And by learning how to better practice & educate, we can improve them for humanity as a whole. Of course, that doesn't begin to touch on what is, IMNSHO, the most important capacity of all, which is to understand[1]. But frankly, we haven't got an f'ing clue what it means to understand, so we certainly don't know how to measure it, or even whether it even makes sense to talk about a capacity for understanding in a concrete, rigorous way.
> however, computers are only a tool that process > information, no emotion and such.
Here again, while I'd personaly agree with you, this is hardly settled. Many people would argue that they could, or perhaps even do. Even I would have to go along w/ Turing & say that if we can't actualy point out the difference, we're morally obligated to assume that computers *can* feel emotion, etc.
[1] Yes, I'm being deliberately ambiguous here. I'm not going to say whether I'm talking about emotional understanding or technical/abstract understanding, because I don't know. I don't think there's really any significant difference in fact, but that's another issue....
His description is certainly idealized -- not that I'm trashing Katz or anything (I like reading his stuff) but his articles are often unrealistic & idealized. Nonetheless, imagine what would happen if a candidate put up a page describing his campaign strategy & had a page for suggestions/discussion? Or maybe a policy Q&A online where, as questions were answered, they were put in a faq? I'm not ready to hope for a candidate who would actualy take some of the positions Katz described, but even if one did it would simply mean that gaining the support of the net constituency was important to his/her strategy.
Something tells me they aint living much longer -- unless the treatment can restore the brain after it's been cut open & examined.
Re:not necessarily a good idea
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 2
Ok. So your hammer (you're not a proffesional carpenter are you?) will protect you from hitting your thumb? And keep you from bending nails as you hammer them in? Or mabe it refuses to hammer in nails at all, for fear you'll hammer them all the way through into the floor.
Making things simple to use is great. And having a good, clean, secure base setup is extremely important.
But the computer *is* a tool. And you have to know how to use any tool or you can't use it effectively. That's the flip side of this dumbing down business -- it discourages users from ever learning to use their computer effectively. This idea that you can have a powerful tool without risk is ridiculous. That users expect this is a mistake on their part. That system designers who should know better cater to this mistake is idiotic and shortsighted. You expect this sort of thing with comercial OS's, but OSS is supposed to be able to take the longer view.
> Marx lived in an age in which all economics were > based on the economics of scarcity. The second > half of the little equation implied the use of > force.
I don't know that this is true. One of the things that Marx said would have to happen before his apocolyptic "uprising of the proletariat" (besides instantanious, world-wide communication & workers barely able to live on their income) was that the level of production per amount of work must go up -- i.e., that scarcity must cease being (as much of) an issue. And hey, it's concievable yet that this might happen. Imagine a world out of Asimov where everyone has thousands of personal robots to do their work for them.
So it's not surprising that people who don't really understand OSS would compare it to communism -- it does have some very strong, albeit superficial, resemblances. And what's more, it definitely does bring up the issue of (lack of) scarcity, which according to my understanding of marxism, is essential to communism. Not, I think, that things are really going in the direction Marx predicted.
BTW, it's been a few years since I've read Marx, so I could be wrong in my interpretation....
It seems to me that technology isn't *replacing* media, or the goal of media -- it's simply allowing media to run unchecked in a way it hasn't been able to do before. Media as a whole, unlike some small-time pundits, has never given two whits for things like "truth" and "culture," or any of the other things people might be concerned with. When fashionable, lip service is paid, but the goal always has been to get readers.
Technology comes along and (arguably) gives the media a way to dress sensationalism respectably & convincingly, and it's no surprise that the media is running wild with it.
Sure, technology is involved. But I'd argue that it's only removed certain established checks & balances, to use an overused term. Maybe this will backlash, and the pendulum could swing the other way. Who knows.
> Are Linux folks really interested in free software?"
And I think the answer is "No!", sad as that may be. Despite all the emphasis on "Don't argue, just code," all the code in the world wouldn't amount to a hill of beans if it weren't for the tradition of free software. The idea and tradition of Free Software, and the GPL, are the reason people can work together openly like this, and use each other's code. It's the glue that holds the whole thing together, and yet people seem to be forgetting that, and attributing the things that have happened to great code, which is simply wrong.
Not to belittle the role that Linus & others have played, my impression is that most of these people are just that, coders, and that isn't enough. It's important to realize that what we're looking for isn't just good code -- we need a situation in which we *can* code, and code effectively. And for that, IMHO, we absolutely need people like RMS.
That's why I'm a bit sceptical of privacy efforts. We may catch some of what the government does to keep track of us, but there's no way we're going to catch it all unless access to the techniques used to collect this sort of info is freely available. And unfortunately, I suspect that pro-privacy efforts are going to discourage that, making it more difficult to protect privacy when it counts.
Frankly, I prefer writing like that to a lot of modern stuff where you have to plow through loads of fluf to get to the point. You can accuse some philosophical texts of being written in a difficult-to-read way, but this wasn't one of them.
I'm not going to disagree w/ your interpretation of the summit (I wasn't there), but corruption doesn't happen because someone is holding a sledge hammer over your head. It happens because someone (the corruptor) has something someone else (the corruptee) wants. That the suits can't do what the hackers can do (avoiding the issue of the validity of the terms) isn't relevant. If more & more hackers start to be motivated by suitly concerns, they've corrupted us.
Not to say that trying to get OSS accepted by suits is a bad thing, I don't think it is. But its certainly a gamble on our part. We can't say how this will turn out.
If your code is GPL'd, you're going to have the same access to the code they produce from your code as they do to the code *you* produce. And, if you don't like that, you can always go with something like the NPL, and require that you get first crack at modifications (not that I'm advocating the NPL here).
The point is that if other people take advantage of your code that benefits you as well, through the bug fixes & feature add-ons that they produce. Sure, you're no longer selling IP, but then, it sounds as if you never really were. You're selling the expertise of your programmers. The key is to make sure your customers understand that, and that's a marketting issue. Since the most important thing here (other than the skill of your programmers) is mindshare, wider distribution of your software can only help.
Are you absolutely positive that there are only half a dozen companies that can take advantage of your software? Narowly construed, perhaps, but I suspect that if your software were available you'd find a lot of applications that your code could be put to that wouldn't require much modification.
I both agree & disagree with the idea behind this....
On the one hand, yeah, of course there are social constructs controlling the way OSS works. It's certainly not possible to equate gift culture with individual control or anything like that.
But this kind of thing has been going on forever -- cultures aren't individuals, they never have been and never will. Which also means that it's thouroughly wrong-headed to think that just because technology controls aspects of our lives that we've lost something. We might have, but that remains to be shown. My feeling is that what's necessary is responsiveness. If the culture (or in this case, technology) is responsive to the needs and desires of individuals in some reasonable proportion to the degree to which it controls the individuals (and it always will control individuals, though it can be very hard to decide how & to what degree), that's a good thing. Frankly, OSS seems to me to be more likely to be responsive in this way than more proprietary models.
The fact that proprietary software is going to cause non-geeks to feel out of control is something that hadn't occured to me. The same thing that we feel in our gut -- that sofware that we can get into the innards of & tweek & manipulate is the only good software, is going to be felt by non-geeks as well. But it's probably not going to be felt in the same way. I imagine they'd feel out of control, because they have a collection of black boxes arrayed around them controlling their lives.
In a way, this is the strongest argument I've come accross for the idea that proprietary software is immoral, rather than simply practical (as ESR seems to argue).
As true as this article is, Slashdot wrong forum
on
Why Work Sucks
·
· Score: 1
I have to disagree with you here -- if/. is only younger males then it *should* get this sort of thing.
A younger male myself (24), my reaction was "Yeah, there's probably some truth to that, but so what -- what's new?" Personaly, I don't think things are as bad as Katz is saying, and I also think that much of what is bad isn't so much systemic as it is a result of the fact that we're going through a period of change. I get frustrated sometimes, but I also got a relatively nice job (try carrying hod -- now there's an unpleasant job) by studying philosophy in college. That's quite a trick, if you want my opinion.
But I realize that my experience in the job market is limited, and if you have a different perspective, I'd like to hear it, and hear why you feel that way, don't just tell us we're being arrogant.
Slashdot Mirror
> if we had such a machine built in 1970 and it was still around today, it would almost certainly be almost useless, due to culture shifts, scientific/medical knowledge, mass changes in opinion on moral and ethical issues
Not necessarily -- if it actually worked it would still be extremely useful. Because society today would be just like it was in the 1970's.
Where do you get that a user has to submit a key? My understanding was that there would be key defined in the chip that would be automaticaly used. If I were a big, consumer-oriented corporation that'd be the way I'd do it -- anything else would involve a lot of things like user education & convincing programers to go to a lot more work to implement it (e.g., instead of calling a routine to grab the public key or encrypt something, call a widget to grab key info from the user). Frankly, if this is in fact public-key stuff, then the public key itself serves as a unique identifier no matter how you slice it.
Don't get me wrong, you may be right -- I just don't know.
First of all, I found the article to be a bit scant on detail, so for all I know we're all misinterpreting this. But assuming that there is a unique id sort of thing in the hardware, as with the pIII:
The thing about this is that if it works and becomes ubiquitous having the source to your OS won't help. You'll start noticing that web sites require you to submit this ID, and that software have access to it in order to take advantage of certain "features". So, in order to make sure that linux/oss software can take advantage of these "features" support for this ID will be programed in. Sure, you can choose not to use it, but when everybody else is using it it could quickly become impossible to get by without it.
You might be able to spoof it, but people that write the web pages (or whatever) that use it will find ways around this. They could restrict page views to 100x per ID, for instance, so people couldn't all use the same ID. (I know, so make it random -- that might work. But then things devolve into a hack war, like the aol/m$ instant messanging war.)
> I've got to admit I'm having a hard time
> considering machines as anything other than
> machines.
Personaly, I think *that's* the interesting problem. Someone else alluded to the fact that we have no solid philosophical basis for thinking that other people are "anything other than machines" -- which makes machines that can pass the turring test just like people, for all intents and purposes. Untill we can point to something and say "This is the seat of rational thought" we can't say "and computers don't have it."
I think the most pressing angle on AI is human rights -- for the AI's. I personaly have a lot of trouble with the idea that a computer program could actually be sentient, but I have to admit that the same dificulties that apply to programs apply to people.
> we cannot change humans' capabilities, so they
> will remain as they are.
What do you mean we can't change human's abilities? What do you want to improve? Memory? Creativity? Ability to perform calculations? All of these things can be improved for a particular individual w/ practice & education. And by learning how to better practice & educate, we can improve them for humanity as a whole. Of course, that doesn't begin to touch on what is, IMNSHO, the most important capacity of all, which is to understand[1]. But frankly, we haven't got an f'ing clue what it means to understand, so we certainly don't know how to measure it, or even whether it even makes sense to talk about a capacity for understanding in a concrete, rigorous way.
> however, computers are only a tool that process
> information, no emotion and such.
Here again, while I'd personaly agree with you, this is hardly settled. Many people would argue that they could, or perhaps even do. Even I would have to go along w/ Turing & say that if we can't actualy point out the difference, we're morally obligated to assume that computers *can* feel emotion, etc.
[1] Yes, I'm being deliberately ambiguous here. I'm not going to say whether I'm talking about emotional understanding or technical/abstract understanding, because I don't know. I don't think there's really any significant difference in fact, but that's another issue....
His description is certainly idealized -- not that I'm trashing Katz or anything (I like reading his stuff) but his articles are often unrealistic & idealized. Nonetheless, imagine what would happen if a candidate put up a page describing his campaign strategy & had a page for suggestions/discussion? Or maybe a policy Q&A online where, as questions were answered, they were put in a faq? I'm not ready to hope for a candidate who would actualy take some of the positions Katz described, but even if one did it would simply mean that gaining the support of the net constituency was important to his/her strategy.
Something tells me they aint living much longer -- unless the treatment can restore the brain after it's been cut open & examined.
Ok. So your hammer (you're not a proffesional carpenter are you?) will protect you from hitting your thumb? And keep you from bending nails as you hammer them in? Or mabe it refuses to hammer in nails at all, for fear you'll hammer them all the way through into the floor.
Making things simple to use is great. And having a good, clean, secure base setup is extremely important.
But the computer *is* a tool. And you have to know how to use any tool or you can't use it effectively. That's the flip side of this dumbing down business -- it discourages users from ever learning to use their computer effectively. This idea that you can have a powerful tool without risk is ridiculous. That users expect this is a mistake on their part. That system designers who should know better cater to this mistake is idiotic and shortsighted. You expect this sort of thing with comercial OS's, but OSS is supposed to be able to take the longer view.
> Marx lived in an age in which all economics were
> based on the economics of scarcity. The second
> half of the little equation implied the use of
> force.
I don't know that this is true. One of the things that Marx said would have to happen before his apocolyptic "uprising of the proletariat" (besides instantanious, world-wide communication & workers barely able to live on their income) was that the level of production per amount of work must go up -- i.e., that scarcity must cease being (as much of) an issue. And hey, it's concievable yet that this might happen. Imagine a world out of Asimov where everyone has thousands of personal robots to do their work for them.
So it's not surprising that people who don't really understand OSS would compare it to communism -- it does have some very strong, albeit superficial, resemblances. And what's more, it definitely does bring up the issue of (lack of) scarcity, which according to my understanding of marxism, is essential to communism. Not, I think, that things are really going in the direction Marx predicted.
BTW, it's been a few years since I've read Marx, so I could be wrong in my interpretation....
It seems to me that technology isn't *replacing* media, or the goal of media -- it's simply allowing media to run unchecked in a way it hasn't been able to do before. Media as a whole, unlike some small-time pundits, has never given two whits for things like "truth" and "culture," or any of the other things people might be concerned with. When fashionable, lip service is paid, but the goal always has been to get readers.
Technology comes along and (arguably) gives the media a way to dress sensationalism respectably & convincingly, and it's no surprise that the media is running wild with it.
Sure, technology is involved. But I'd argue that it's only removed certain established checks & balances, to use an overused term. Maybe this will backlash, and the pendulum could swing the other way. Who knows.
> Are Linux folks really interested in free software?"
And I think the answer is "No!", sad as that may be. Despite all the emphasis on "Don't argue, just code," all the code in the world wouldn't amount to a hill of beans if it weren't for the tradition of free software. The idea and tradition of Free Software, and the GPL, are the reason people can work together openly like this, and use each other's code. It's the glue that holds the whole thing together, and yet people seem to be forgetting that, and attributing the things that have happened to great code, which is simply wrong.
Not to belittle the role that Linus & others have played, my impression is that most of these people are just that, coders, and that isn't enough. It's important to realize that what we're looking for isn't just good code -- we need a situation in which we *can* code, and code effectively. And for that, IMHO, we absolutely need people like RMS.
Gr. Enough rant, I guess.
That's why I'm a bit sceptical of privacy efforts. We may catch some of what the government does to keep track of us, but there's no way we're going to catch it all unless access to the techniques used to collect this sort of info is freely available. And unfortunately, I suspect that pro-privacy efforts are going to discourage that, making it more difficult to protect privacy when it counts.
Frankly, I prefer writing like that to a lot of modern stuff where you have to plow through loads of fluf to get to the point. You can accuse some philosophical texts of being written in a difficult-to-read way, but this wasn't one of them.
I'm not going to disagree w/ your interpretation of the summit (I wasn't there), but corruption doesn't happen because someone is holding a sledge hammer over your head. It happens because someone (the corruptor) has something someone else (the corruptee) wants. That the suits can't do what the hackers can do (avoiding the issue of the validity of the terms) isn't relevant. If more & more hackers start to be motivated by suitly concerns, they've corrupted us.
Not to say that trying to get OSS accepted by suits is a bad thing, I don't think it is. But its certainly a gamble on our part. We can't say how this will turn out.
If your code is GPL'd, you're going to have the same access to the code they produce from your code as they do to the code *you* produce. And, if you don't like that, you can always go with something like the NPL, and require that you get first crack at modifications (not that I'm advocating the NPL here).
The point is that if other people take advantage of your code that benefits you as well, through the bug fixes & feature add-ons that they produce. Sure, you're no longer selling IP, but then, it sounds as if you never really were. You're selling the expertise of your programmers. The key is to make sure your customers understand that, and that's a marketting issue. Since the most important thing here (other than the skill of your programmers) is mindshare, wider distribution of your software can only help.
Are you absolutely positive that there are only half a dozen companies that can take advantage of your software? Narowly construed, perhaps, but I suspect that if your software were available you'd find a lot of applications that your code could be put to that wouldn't require much modification.
I both agree & disagree with the idea behind this....
On the one hand, yeah, of course there are social constructs controlling the way OSS works. It's certainly not possible to equate gift culture with individual control or anything like that.
But this kind of thing has been going on forever -- cultures aren't individuals, they never have been and never will. Which also means that it's thouroughly wrong-headed to think that just because technology controls aspects of our lives that we've lost something. We might have, but that remains to be shown. My feeling is that what's necessary is responsiveness. If the culture (or in this case, technology) is responsive to the needs and desires of individuals in some reasonable proportion to the degree to which it controls the individuals (and it always will control individuals, though it can be very hard to decide how & to what degree), that's a good thing. Frankly, OSS seems to me to be more likely to be responsive in this way than more proprietary models.
The fact that proprietary software is going to cause non-geeks to feel out of control is something that hadn't occured to me. The same thing that we feel in our gut -- that sofware that we can get into the innards of & tweek & manipulate is the only good software, is going to be felt by non-geeks as well. But it's probably not going to be felt in the same way. I imagine they'd feel out of control, because they have a collection of black boxes arrayed around them controlling their lives.
In a way, this is the strongest argument I've come accross for the idea that proprietary software is immoral, rather than simply practical (as ESR seems to argue).
I have to disagree with you here -- if /. is only younger males then it *should* get this sort of thing.
A younger male myself (24), my reaction was "Yeah, there's probably some truth to that, but so what -- what's new?" Personaly, I don't think things are as bad as Katz is saying, and I also think that much of what is bad isn't so much systemic as it is a result of the fact that we're going through a period of change. I get frustrated sometimes, but I also got a relatively nice job (try carrying hod -- now there's an unpleasant job) by studying philosophy in college. That's quite a trick, if you want my opinion.
But I realize that my experience in the job market is limited, and if you have a different perspective, I'd like to hear it, and hear why you feel that way, don't just tell us we're being arrogant.