If it's not worth $10 to you, why are you making a copy? What possible value could that copy have to you?
Clearly, less than $10, but more than nothing. But if I have already decided not to pay for a copy of the software, then logically no action on my part can possibly lose the firm in question a sale. This is self-evidently true. Of course, it depends on whether I would have bought a copy if I was unable to make a copy illegally.
I bet you go to car dealerships and drive cars off the lot that are 'too expensive' for you too.
An imbecilic analogy. If someone steals a car, someone loses a car: a zero-sum game. If, however, someone copies information, the original copy still exists.
Whatever. I thought Adam Waring was funnier anyway.
A shower is a lot of people's choice for when they're trying to solve a hard problem (myself included.) My theory as to why it works is that it a) makes you more relaxed, allowing you a better interface to your subconscious, and b) the "white noise" of the water acts as a random number seed for your brain.
Re:How to make this work.
on
e-Denounce
·
· Score: 2
Er, how exactly can anyone be "contractually bound" when they haven't signed a contract?
They're not. But a simple way around it would be to charge people a pound/dollar per site they report. Then, if the site is what FAST is looking for, they reimburse the cash plus whatever they're paying (which might be quite a bit higher than the "deposit"), whereas if it's not they keep the cash.
If you participate in that kind of infantile behavoir, telemarketers will put you down as 'not home' and you'll be called again and again and again until you bother to act like an adult.
And that's adult behaviour?
Nope, sorry, I'm just bloody-minded. If someone tries to inconvenience me I'm going to try and piss them off as much as possible. Same principle as stopping a cheque if someone is trying to steal from you even if it costs you more to stop it than you would lose otherwise.
And be nice to the HUMAN on the other side of the phone. They're just trying to make a living.
Trying to make a living by stealing my time, not by providing a service or creating a product. They're parasites. They contribute as much to society as fleas. And I'll make their job as difficult as possible.
An interesting idea. Does any wm do this currently? I can see that it would be useful for consoles; not sure about other apps. File managers possibly.
One-click tabs for each emacs buffer would be nice. I find one of the few times using emacs where I have to use conscious thought just to use it is when I'm trying to think which buffers I have open/what their names are.
There's no reason why cats don't think of us in terms of parents sometimes and offspring at other times. I wouldn't bestow upon them such a consistent mental model. I don't think generally kittens bring prey back to their parents either.
OK, fine, but how come I can barely see the guy's right eye in the picture [nwsource.com]? There's not much point in a transparent screen if the surrounding equipment is not tranparent. Maybe if it was off-axis it would be more useful.
Hmm. Couldn't you have a camera on the front of the device and project the field of view the device is obscuring onto the retina, making it invisible?
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 1
Taking your points in reverse order...
The genome:computer program analogy is bad, and no number of pop science books is going to change that
A cheap shot:) I only quoted Ridley because I wanted to demonstrate that a geneticist agreed with me. I expect that finding a paper comparing genomes with computer programs from the mountain of non-online biology literature would be a bit of a task.
A human being and a donut are topologically equivalent (donut hole:mouth->anus), but I'm not aware of any analogy based on that fact that most people would call "good."
Oddly enough I remember a biology lesson in school where a teacher used exactly that analogy. I found it useful as a way of understanding that the alimentary canal was a tube through the body and not actually "inside" the body.
The problem is that this argument can be extrapolated all the way out to any deterministic system, and almost anything can be analogous to a computer program.
To counter that statement properly would probably require moving into the realms of information theory and lots of statements about entropy. I don't think I'm up to that, but IMHO there are plenty of similarities between the two that few other systems would share; a finite alphabet, a modular structure, variables, mechanisms to alter their interpretation. Both are linear, abstract lists of instructions that can repeatably influence the macroscopic world when encapsulated in the right medium.
So what is the point of the analogy?
An analogy doesn't have to have a point. It can just be a similarity between two things. (Look up the definition.) But if you mean what use is it, then I can think of two:
Generating ideas in computer science; creating programs as new structures in ways inspired by genomic ones, looking at programming in different ways, improving evolutionary computing etc. It works for me.
Helping to understand biological genomes; directly through comparing their action to a computer program, attempting to replicate them bottom-up through computer code etc.
Going back to the original thread, I was listening to a speaker today about how he was developing artificial immune systems to counter (computer) viruses. Another example where a biological analogy helps.
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 2
In your example, the genome is NOT analogous to a computer program, but to data ACCESSED BY a program. This might seem like a subtle distinction, but it's really not.
No, I have to disagree. There is no difference philosophically between a computer program and the data accessed by a computer program. Any interpreted code, for example, (Perl scripts etc.) are data that are processed by a program. A Turing machine doesn't make the distinction on its infinite roll of tape.
Neurons and muscle cells have the same "program," but the "computer" is different.
The computer is exactly the same in both cases. The genome is interpreted differently in muscle cells and neurons because the genome itself turns on or off parts of itself in different places in the body.
Or, more precisely, the transcriptional machinery the previous poster mentioned, in addition to signal transduction networks in the cytoplasm, epigenetic influences, and a few other things are part of the computer that runs the program of the genome. But where are these things in the digital computer implementation you speak of? They're in SOFTWARE.
All that transcriptional machinery is built up from instructions in the genome: ie in SOFTWARE.
The geneticists you've been talking to almost certainly know better and should be more careful what they say.
I haven't got time to try and find a quote from someone authoritative on it, but Matt Ridley in Genome which seems to be looked upon favourably by most geneticists calls the program/genome comparison something like a perfect analogy.
Obviously the structure of a program and a biological genome are typically very different, but I think from an abstract sense a program is very similar to a genome.
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 1
With regards to DNA - the fact is, is that DNA->RNA->protein expression is an INFIN[i]TELY more complex and less understood system
It's not infinitely more complex. Ignoring computational power, I see nothing there that can't be reproduced in code. Just because the code we usually write is quite straightforward doesn't mean it has to be. Self-modifying code, code based on chaotic equations, etc. are all possible. In fact I'm working on a research project at the moment looking at how programs can be evolved in similar representations to biological genomes.
Incidentally, if it was infinitely less understood, or infinitely complex then we wouldn't be able to understand any of it. Perhaps the mathematicians should take you to task for mangling their terminology?
The former has an insanely complex web of interactions with promoters, enhancer regions, transposons, developmental effects, odd things like RNAs which can code for proteins as well as act as the catalytic subunits of enzyme systems themselves!
So? Just because the systems are complex doesn't make your argument better. It certainly didn't warrant an exclamation mark. Try interpreting Windows XP in binary sometime. Besides, I think most (or all) of the things you mentioned have been used in GAs/GP.
Interestingly, I have heard more than one geneticist call the genome 'essentially a computer program'.
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm tired of the comprarison of viruses to computer viruses, as well as DNA to computer code.
Excuse me? Surely both examples you give are excellent analogies of each other. Viruses parasitically use the machinery of their hosts to spread themselves... and so do computer viruses (well, worms at least.)
And DNA is a digital series of instructions that are interpreted to express something... and so is computer code. Has anyone proved you can build a Turing machine in DNA yet? Admittedly, DNA is processed in a rather more analogue fashion than most computer code, but as an an analogy, it's better than most; (for example) the old one about breaking computer systems/ breaking into a house.
I despair on ever having a standard for keyboard shortcuts - the legacies are too long and people too used to them (I'd like C-s, to fit with emacs, but that's common for saving a file.)
However: shouldn't it be possible to have some sort of user-definable GUI-wide setting for each shortcut? Instead of adding C-s in the code of an app as a shortcut, bind the action to the standard "save-document" keystroke and have the app notified when it occurs. Allow the user to override the action for certain apps. It's surely not beyond the reach of human ingenuity.
Wow, finally someone manages to explain on/. how Left != Authoritarian and doesn't get modded down.
For those of you who are interested in the Spanish Civil War (or even if you're not) tehn read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. As well as an interesting first-person view of war, you get to see the differences between living in an anarchist and Communist society, and how the anarchists and socialists were eventually betrayed by the Communists.
Entirely true. It's not a perfect analogy, but I don't pay some corporation to force me to read a chapter from a series of books before I decide what I want to read. Instead, I read reviews, take advice, scan through friends' books, etc.
If I wanted to read something differently occasionally, why wouldn't I just download some random stuff?
What!? That's ludicrous. Why would 'Linux' ever do that?
The obvious point here is that Linux is software and the Xbox is hardware. And rather than stopping MS software running on Linux systems the community is actively developing software to allow it (think WINE.)
Or if you were talking about locking out hardware... what!? MS hardware has got quite a good reputation, and rather than lauding such a move, there would be lots of pissed-off Linux users with useless hardware.
I think you're just karma-whoring with the flamebait comment as a bit of reverse psychology.
We only have about 100 years worth of weather data. HOW IN THE WORLD CAN YOU SAY HUMANS CAUSE THIS WITH THIS DATA!
We have thousands of years' worth of weather data. Dendochronology, ice cores, sediment patterns, historical records, etc.
The opinions on global warming on Slashdot is about as scientific as creation scientists. 99% of the world's climatologists agree that global warming is occuring. Even president Bush.
Look, I realise that arguing this is pointless, but given that I'm not going to buy a piece of music, how I am conceivably hurting anyone by possessing a copy? You can't even ascertain whether I have a copy unless you search my music collection.
So you steal to punish the wrong-doers of the world. How very noble of you.
No, because you miss the point: no one is affected by me having a copy of the music. There is no punishment because no one is losing money.
If you weren't going to buy a copy, why would you *want* a copy?
That's not even an argument. There are lots of things that I want but that I don't need enough to bother buying (certainly at the price they try to charge.)
But there are other reasons why I might not be willing to pay for a copy - such as I might find the behaviour of the publisher or artist unethical, so I would not give them money whether I could have the music free or not. Or I might feel urged (I don't BTW) to keep up with popular culture which they constructed themselves with their advertising campaigns by listening to their music.
Seems to me you can justify your theft by simply saying that you weren't going to buy it anyway, so its fine and noone loses out.
Remove 'theft' from that statement and that seems reasonable - it's not theft simply because *you* say so. Anyway, my other point was that I don't need to justify my copying music.
Your logic is internally inconsistent. You start off making a good point, that of the division between copying and transferring property and then create a stupid analogy about stealing a car to illustrate why copying is wrong!
I'm clear that when I copy music, I am doing something that is both legally and _morally_ wrong. It's not clear to me. If I wasn't going to buy the music anyway, then no one loses anything by me having a copy. Not getting a copy under those circumstances, i.e. no one is hurt by my actions and I (mildly) feel like listening to a song seems logically ludicrous to me.
Regardless, it's only going to become easier for me to get copies of music anonymously and freely so I don't need to even consider your opinion.
I bought a Psion Revo Plus last September. I managed to break it, and for the last three months have ben trying to get it repaired. Emails to Psion's technical support section, then webmaster, etc., just get ignored. They seem to have nothing but contempt for their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's not worth $10 to you, why are you making a copy? What possible value could that copy have to you?
Clearly, less than $10, but more than nothing. But if I have already decided not to pay for a copy of the software, then logically no action on my part can possibly lose the firm in question a sale. This is self-evidently true. Of course, it depends on whether I would have bought a copy if I was unable to make a copy illegally.
I bet you go to car dealerships and drive cars off the lot that are 'too expensive' for you too.
An imbecilic analogy. If someone steals a car, someone loses a car: a zero-sum game. If, however, someone copies information, the original copy still exists.
Whatever. I thought Adam Waring was funnier anyway.
A shower is a lot of people's choice for when they're trying to solve a hard problem (myself included.) My theory as to why it works is that it a) makes you more relaxed, allowing you a better interface to your subconscious, and b) the "white noise" of the water acts as a random number seed for your brain.
Er, how exactly can anyone be "contractually bound" when they haven't signed a contract?
They're not. But a simple way around it would be to charge people a pound/dollar per site they report. Then, if the site is what FAST is looking for, they reimburse the cash plus whatever they're paying (which might be quite a bit higher than the "deposit"), whereas if it's not they keep the cash.
Of course, it hinges on people trusting FAST.
If you participate in that kind of infantile behavoir, telemarketers will put you down as 'not home' and you'll be called again and again and again until you bother to act like an adult.
And that's adult behaviour?
Nope, sorry, I'm just bloody-minded. If someone tries to inconvenience me I'm going to try and piss them off as much as possible. Same principle as stopping a cheque if someone is trying to steal from you even if it costs you more to stop it than you would lose otherwise.
And be nice to the HUMAN on the other side of the phone. They're just trying to make a living.
Trying to make a living by stealing my time, not by providing a service or creating a product. They're parasites. They contribute as much to society as fleas. And I'll make their job as difficult as possible.
An interesting idea. Does any wm do this currently? I can see that it would be useful for consoles; not sure about other apps. File managers possibly.
One-click tabs for each emacs buffer would be nice. I find one of the few times using emacs where I have to use conscious thought just to use it is when I'm trying to think which buffers I have open/what their names are.
There's no reason why cats don't think of us in terms of parents sometimes and offspring at other times. I wouldn't bestow upon them such a consistent mental model. I don't think generally kittens bring prey back to their parents either.
OK, fine, but how come I can barely see the guy's right eye in the picture [nwsource.com]? There's not much point in a transparent screen if the surrounding equipment is not tranparent. Maybe if it was off-axis it would be more useful.
Hmm. Couldn't you have a camera on the front of the device and project the field of view the device is obscuring onto the retina, making it invisible?
The genome:computer program analogy is bad, and no number of pop science books is going to change that
A cheap shot
A human being and a donut are topologically equivalent (donut hole:mouth->anus), but I'm not aware of any analogy based on that fact that most people would call "good."
Oddly enough I remember a biology lesson in school where a teacher used exactly that analogy. I found it useful as a way of understanding that the alimentary canal was a tube through the body and not actually "inside" the body.
The problem is that this argument can be extrapolated all the way out to any deterministic system, and almost anything can be analogous to a computer program.
To counter that statement properly would probably require moving into the realms of information theory and lots of statements about entropy. I don't think I'm up to that, but IMHO there are plenty of similarities between the two that few other systems would share; a finite alphabet, a modular structure, variables, mechanisms to alter their interpretation. Both are linear, abstract lists of instructions that can repeatably influence the macroscopic world when encapsulated in the right medium.
So what is the point of the analogy?
An analogy doesn't have to have a point. It can just be a similarity between two things. (Look up the definition.) But if you mean what use is it, then I can think of two:
Going back to the original thread, I was listening to a speaker today about how he was developing artificial immune systems to counter (computer) viruses. Another example where a biological analogy helps.
In your example, the genome is NOT analogous to a computer program, but to data ACCESSED BY a program. This might seem like a subtle distinction, but it's really not.
No, I have to disagree. There is no difference philosophically between a computer program and the data accessed by a computer program. Any interpreted code, for example, (Perl scripts etc.) are data that are processed by a program. A Turing machine doesn't make the distinction on its infinite roll of tape.
Neurons and muscle cells have the same "program," but the "computer" is different.
The computer is exactly the same in both cases. The genome is interpreted differently in muscle cells and neurons because the genome itself turns on or off parts of itself in different places in the body.
Or, more precisely, the transcriptional machinery the previous poster mentioned, in addition to signal transduction networks in the cytoplasm, epigenetic influences, and a few other things are part of the computer that runs the program of the genome. But where are these things in the digital computer implementation you speak of? They're in SOFTWARE.
All that transcriptional machinery is built up from instructions in the genome: ie in SOFTWARE.
The geneticists you've been talking to almost certainly know better and should be more careful what they say.
I haven't got time to try and find a quote from someone authoritative on it, but Matt Ridley in Genome which seems to be looked upon favourably by most geneticists calls the program/genome comparison something like a perfect analogy.
Obviously the structure of a program and a biological genome are typically very different, but I think from an abstract sense a program is very similar to a genome.
With regards to DNA - the fact is, is that DNA->RNA->protein expression is an INFIN[i]TELY more complex and less understood system
It's not infinitely more complex. Ignoring computational power, I see nothing there that can't be reproduced in code. Just because the code we usually write is quite straightforward doesn't mean it has to be. Self-modifying code, code based on chaotic equations, etc. are all possible. In fact I'm working on a research project at the moment looking at how programs can be evolved in similar representations to biological genomes.
Incidentally, if it was infinitely less understood, or infinitely complex then we wouldn't be able to understand any of it. Perhaps the mathematicians should take you to task for mangling their terminology?
The former has an insanely complex web of interactions with promoters, enhancer regions, transposons, developmental effects, odd things like RNAs which can code for proteins as well as act as the catalytic subunits of enzyme systems themselves!
So? Just because the systems are complex doesn't make your argument better. It certainly didn't warrant an exclamation mark. Try interpreting Windows XP in binary sometime. Besides, I think most (or all) of the things you mentioned have been used in GAs/GP.
Interestingly, I have heard more than one geneticist call the genome 'essentially a computer program'.
I'm tired of the comprarison of viruses to computer viruses, as well as DNA to computer code.
Excuse me? Surely both examples you give are excellent analogies of each other. Viruses parasitically use the machinery of their hosts to spread themselves... and so do computer viruses (well, worms at least.)
And DNA is a digital series of instructions that are interpreted to express something... and so is computer code. Has anyone proved you can build a Turing machine in DNA yet? Admittedly, DNA is processed in a rather more analogue fashion than most computer code, but as an an analogy, it's better than most; (for example) the old one about breaking computer systems/ breaking into a house.
I despair on ever having a standard for keyboard shortcuts - the legacies are too long and people too used to them (I'd like C-s, to fit with emacs, but that's common for saving a file.)
However: shouldn't it be possible to have some sort of user-definable GUI-wide setting for each shortcut? Instead of adding C-s in the code of an app as a shortcut, bind the action to the standard "save-document" keystroke and have the app notified when it occurs. Allow the user to override the action for certain apps. It's surely not beyond the reach of human ingenuity.
Seems reasonable. Wow - disagreement ends in consensus on /. :)
Wow, finally someone manages to explain on /. how Left != Authoritarian and doesn't get modded down.
For those of you who are interested in the Spanish Civil War (or even if you're not) tehn read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. As well as an interesting first-person view of war, you get to see the differences between living in an anarchist and Communist society, and how the anarchists and socialists were eventually betrayed by the Communists.
Entirely true. It's not a perfect analogy, but I don't pay some corporation to force me to read a chapter from a series of books before I decide what I want to read. Instead, I read reviews, take advice, scan through friends' books, etc.
If I wanted to read something differently occasionally, why wouldn't I just download some random stuff?
What!? That's ludicrous. Why would 'Linux' ever do that?
The obvious point here is that Linux is software and the Xbox is hardware. And rather than stopping MS software running on Linux systems the community is actively developing software to allow it (think WINE.)
Or if you were talking about locking out hardware... what!? MS hardware has got quite a good reputation, and rather than lauding such a move, there would be lots of pissed-off Linux users with useless hardware.
I think you're just karma-whoring with the flamebait comment as a bit of reverse psychology.
I didn't mean Bush is a climatologist of course! Just realised my post reads a bit strangely.
We only have about 100 years worth of weather data. HOW IN THE WORLD CAN YOU SAY HUMANS CAUSE THIS WITH THIS DATA!
We have thousands of years' worth of weather data. Dendochronology, ice cores, sediment patterns, historical records, etc.
The opinions on global warming on Slashdot is about as scientific as creation scientists. 99% of the world's climatologists agree that global warming is occuring. Even president Bush.
Please tell me you were trolling.
Yep - much more original.
Unlike me:
Congratulations
Look, I realise that arguing this is pointless, but given that I'm not going to buy a piece of music, how I am conceivably hurting anyone by possessing a copy? You can't even ascertain whether I have a copy unless you search my music collection.
So you steal to punish the wrong-doers of the world. How very noble of you.
No, because you miss the point: no one is affected by me having a copy of the music. There is no punishment because no one is losing money.
If you weren't going to buy a copy, why would you *want* a copy?
That's not even an argument. There are lots of things that I want but that I don't need enough to bother buying (certainly at the price they try to charge.)
But there are other reasons why I might not be willing to pay for a copy - such as I might find the behaviour of the publisher or artist unethical, so I would not give them money whether I could have the music free or not. Or I might feel urged (I don't BTW) to keep up with popular culture which they constructed themselves with their advertising campaigns by listening to their music.
Seems to me you can justify your theft by simply saying that you weren't going to buy it anyway, so its fine and noone loses out.
Remove 'theft' from that statement and that seems reasonable - it's not theft simply because *you* say so. Anyway, my other point was that I don't need to justify my copying music.
Your logic is internally inconsistent. You start off making a good point, that of the division between copying and transferring property and then create a stupid analogy about stealing a car to illustrate why copying is wrong!
I'm clear that when I copy music, I am doing something that is both legally and _morally_ wrong.
It's not clear to me. If I wasn't going to buy the music anyway, then no one loses anything by me having a copy. Not getting a copy under those circumstances, i.e. no one is hurt by my actions and I (mildly) feel like listening to a song seems logically ludicrous to me.
Regardless, it's only going to become easier for me to get copies of music anonymously and freely so I don't need to even consider your opinion.
Thanks for that. I'll consider them.
I bought a Psion Revo Plus last September. I managed to break it, and for the last three months have ben trying to get it repaired. Emails to Psion's technical support section, then webmaster, etc., just get ignored. They seem to have nothing but contempt for their customers.
Nice hardware, shame about the company.
Or maybe ©-- would be more appropriate, since it's a weakening of copyright.