I'm sure you're suffering massively from the 15-20 visitors a day my server gets (on a port other than 80). Tell me where to send the Red Cross trauma team.
My cable had gone down Saturday morning, and I was prepared to spend a couple weeks suffering through dialup access. But I woke up Monday morning to find my cable modem back in business. I had to fire up a DHCP client to get a valid address. No more static IP address for now, it looks like; I think I'll give AT&T a couple weeks to finish moving everyone else over, then get in touch with them about a static address.
Or maybe not. Once I realized my static address was gone, I went and signed up with DynDNS.org and changed my DNS records so that my home machine has a CNAME pointing to its name on dyndns.org rather than an A with its old static address. Then I downloaded a dynamic DNS client (lots available for Linux and Windows and others) and set it to send an update to dyndns.org's servers whenever my address changes.
My assumption is that this will allow me to keep serving up my Web pages with no more than an occasional brief glitch if my IP address changes. And the lease times are pretty long (5 days), so even those glitches should be vanishingly rare, assuming they happen at all; I'm betting I'll be able to just keep renewing my initial address indefinitely.
So the only real downside to being on AT&T's network is that my downloads appear to be capped at 1.5Mbps. Boo hoo, $50/month for T1-speed downloads, don't everyone offer me a hankie at once. Still a fantastic deal, even if it's not as sweet as it was a week ago.
Way to go AT&T. One mostly-satisfied customer here. (No downtime would have been better, but I had longer outages than this on my old DSL line even without the provider going bankrupt, so it'd be churlish to complain.)
I find Searle's "refutation" to be more of an affirmation. (And I notice that the first URL you provided is pretty anti-Searle once you get into it.) For those who don't want to cut and paste those URLs, the condensed version of his argument is that if you lock an English speaker in a room with a bunch of sophisticated rules about which Chinese characters to write when presented with particular Chinese characters as input, the person's replies could pass a Turing test administered by a Chinese speaker, but that doesn't mean the person in the room speaks Chinese.
One of the classic refutations of the Chinese room experiment is the systems argument: it's true that the person doesn't understand Chinese, but the system made of the person plus the stacks of instructions does. Searle's response to that is to say, "Okay, then suppose the person memorizes the instructions" -- the fact that everything now happens in the person's head still doesn't cause them to understand Chinese.
To me this misses the point of the systems argument; the argument isn't about where the understanding is stored, but whether it exists. If you look at consciousness as a multi-layered entity, in this case the consciousness of the person is one layer below that of the person-plus-instructions. This additional consciousness uses the person in the same way that the person's uses brain cells: the cells can't be said to understand anything, but they make up a larger whole that exists as an emergent property above and beyond the sum of its parts.
Searle's argument also assumes that "understanding" is an almost mystical property that can't be reduced to a fixed set of rules. Which to me is just ridiculous unless you assume the existence of a noncorporeal soul; if the brain is really the seat of consciousness then consciousness does reduce to a fixed set of rules (laws of physics and chemistry) applied to an extremely complex system. His response to that argument (something about water pipes, if I recall) again misses the point by such a huge margin that it's barely worth mentioning.
I have no problem with the possibility that what I think of as "me" is simply a byproduct of a complex physical process, and that similar byproducts can exist in other complex systems. Doesn't mean we'll be able to detect them or communicate with them any more than a cluster of six brain cells can communicate with us.
Between those two sites you can easily accumulate 6500 legitimate MP3s without ever touching a CD. Well, "easily" if you have a broadband connection, anyway. And that's not counting all the garage band home pages across the net with MP3s they want you to distribute widely so they get name recognition.
As for buying CDs, I've been doing that on eBay a lot recently. If you don't require the latest releases you can easily stock up on CDs for less than half what you'd pay at a retail store. Again, all perfectly legal, though if your goal is to make sure the artists get their $.002 from the record label for each album sold, it's not so hot.
If memories and knowledge exist outside the body, why do people suffer memory loss and personality shifts after severe brain injuries?
If it's because the soul is connected to the body in some way, who's to say the connection has anything to do with physical location? Your vaporous, non-matter soul might transcend time and space, and the fact that its shell is suddenly over there instead of over here might make no difference.
For that matter, who's to say it couldn't attach itself to both copies of you, or even split into two copies of itself, if you were duplicated? Since it's undefinable and immeasurable, any assertions about what it can and can't do are unfounded. To my knowledge no religious texts address the issue of teleportation. Unless you count Star Trek as a religion.:)
It did? The CDA passed Congress and was signed by President Clinton and worked its way through the court system before it was (partially) struck down on First Amendment grounds. Which part of that was due to site blackouts?
Not saying it's a bad idea, but the historical evidence that it'd do any good is less than overwhelming.
DScaler, a deinterlacer/scaler for TV tuner cards, is probably the most collaborative free software I've ever worked on. As with any project, there are a few people who contribute most of the changes. But the project administrator is very open (maybe even a little too open, truth be told) about accepting contributions from anyone, and I often see new people sending in patches which make it into the final release. Considering the relatively small size of the code base and the limited audience, there is a huge number of contributors.
Seems to work pretty well for the most part, though once in a while stuff gets checked into the main branch that in my opinion ought to have been sent around to the developers' mailing list for more sanity-checking first.
Anyway, yes, open collaboration does exist out there and is producing good results. DScaler is often favorably reviewed versus $10K+ commercial alternatives.
I think one result of this sad event will be an examination of ways to make hijacking airplanes more difficult. Obviously a lot will be said about tightening up airport security; I expect boarding a US commercial airliner will become a lot more like boarding an Israeli plane (when I visited there several years ago, they not only made me turn on the handheld videogame I was carrying, they actually took it apart to make sure it wasn't a transmitter or an explosive device).
But it seems to me there are also some things that can be done to the planes to make hijackings of this sort all but impossible.
First of all, make it impossible to get from the main cabin to the cockpit. Put a separate outside door on the cockpit and give the cockpit area a dedicated restroom and food storage area. If there's no physical access to the cockpit from the passenger area, it becomes impossible to point a gun at the pilot's head (though one could still take the passengers hostage, of course).
Barring that -- or in addition to that -- all commercial planes should be equipped with live cockpit video feeds from multiple angles, no "off" switch, to allow ground controllers to instantly see if something is going wrong. That alone doesn't prevent hijackings, but it means you'll instantly be able to see which passenger is responsible, and potentially deploy military aircraft to force the plane down before it reaches its destination. It's also useful in non-terrorist situations.
Live video of the passenger cabin is more problematic from a privacy point of view, but again gives you an early warning that something is wrong. It can prevent someone from being able to pop unnoticed into the restroom to disguise themselves (and thus make themselves harder to trace back to terrorist HQ) before taking a hostage or breaking into the cockpit. Personally, I don't really consider myself to be in a private space when I'm on a plane and would have few qualms with video surveillance, especially if it was of the wide-angle, over-the-seattops variety. Hell, you could even subsidize it by adding a couple extra cameras and letting businesspeople hold video conferences.
None of this stops someone from wanting to take over a plane and use it as a missile, which is the real root cause here. But I hope there'll be some consideration of relatively simple preventive measures like these in addition to the calls for strip-searching everyone who gets on a plane.
I wasn't aware that I was required to pirate music or video in order to contribute to an open-source program. Or vice versa. Must have missed that part of the GPL. If only I'd known that when I started writing free software, I could've saved myself thousands of bucks on CDs and DVDs! Silly me.
(Hint: It's possible to believe that it's only okay to freely copy information whose author intended it to be freely copied.)
I dunno, I've spent enough time over the years referring people to my FAQs for the same questions, over and over again, that I think I'd rather release my next free-software project anonymously.
I've been introduced to people as "the guy who did X" (err, that's a wildcard, not a reference to the window system) and it makes me really uncomfortable.
I do it 'cause it's fun and it seems like the right thing to do.
Besides, look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?
Well, actually, yes -- a couple months ago I went to Junkbusters and sent out all the "take me off your mailing list" requests their site will generate for you. It has cut my paper junk mail volume way down. Not completely to zero, but now I rarely get any junk mail from businesses I'm not already dealing with.
Which will probably be never. Though the claims in the article are so vague as to be impossible to evaluate meaningfully. What does "excellent picture quality" mean, really? Are we talking "looks better than a crappy antenna on a 13-inch set," or "you could play it on a 10-foot screen and people would think you had a movie projector?" How about "CD-quality audio?" To some people, a 64kbps MP3 qualifies; others claim any existing lossy audio compression sounds unacceptably bad to them.
But the outfit's complete unwillingness to do anything but canned demos is what really makes me think the guy in charge is doing more than just feeling like a snake-oil salesman.
If it's for real, they'll file for patent protection and we'll all get to see how it works. And if it's for real, they deserve a nice solid patent or three, but my guess is it's just a scam.
In 1993, the population of the net was a small fraction of what it is today. Analyzing shifts in usage by looking at percentages is misleading (not that the article even analyzes any shifts, since it only cites present-day usage statistics). If on day 1 there are 100 people on the net and 80% of them browse small ad-free private sites, and on day 2 there are 1000 people on the net and 30% of them browse those same sites, that's a huge increase in usage of those independent sites.
In 1993, today's top commercial sites didn't exist, or were radically different than they are today, and there weren't really any equivalents. So of course people weren't using them then.
Related to the first point, the demographics of Web users are very different today than a decade ago. It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows a thing about book purchase patterns or musical tastes or TV viewing habits that people in the net's initial demographic of college-educated techie types enjoy different things than people who aren't in that group. Now the initial users are vastly outnumbered by the newcomers. Big deal. Doesn't necessarily mean those initial users have changed their habits (though some doubtless have). It was never a realistic expectation that people with vastly different interests and backgrounds would log onto the net and instantly become just like the uber-nerds who were already there.
From where I sit -- just look at Memepool -- the democratic, chaotic net is still alive and well. And my ad-free site from '93 is still around and still has no ads, even if 10 others have sprung up nearby.
If this is a trend and not just a brief hiccup, it has a number of
interesting implications:
Free software that governments use will probably quickly become very
thoroughly internationalizable and will be localized for all sorts of
oddball little niche languages in places where a commercial outfit
couldn't commercially justify the translation effort. It will become
the case that availability in the local language makes free software
more attractive, even leaving aside cost and source-access
issues, than commercial equivalents for non-government users in
those regions.
This blows one of Microsoft's (spurious) anti-free-software arguments
out of the water: "There's no viable business model in free software."
Irrelevant to a government. Not that it's relevant or even true here
either; IBM seems convinced there's money to be made in Linux.
Brazil has recently shown its willingness to assert what amounts to
eminent domain over foreigners' intellectual property with its AIDS
drug decision. Will other governments similarly decide to ignore
US and European IP laws when those laws stand in the way
of developing some required piece of functionality? To put that in
more vivid terms, imagine if Sklyarov had been an employee of the
Russian government instead of some no-name software firm, and his
decryption software had been written as part of his government job.
Arresting him might well have caused a huge international incident.
On a more abstract level, this represents the "information wants to
be free" side's first big guns in the war over the nature, even the
conceptual validity, of intellectual property. I think anyone who
doesn't see that this war is shaping up to be one of the major cultural
pivot points of our lifetimes isn't paying much attention. This is
one more step down the slippery slope of the global Internet rendering
massively profitable business models impractical.
If everyone in China starts running Linux, will their software piracy
rates drop below those of countries in the West, even without any
change in their software-copying behavior? The Software Publishers
Association will probably try to claim that Linux is being pirated
just to keep their statistics as inflated as possible; they excel at
pulling meaningless but impressive numbers out of their asses so this
would just be business as usual for them.
I'd rather have the compiler be faster and the code somewhat slower 90% of the time, since most of my compiles are part of compile-debug-tweak cycles, not released to endusers. In that case performance of the compiled code is typically not as critical as fast turnaround time. I imagine most developers similarly compile their code a lot more often than they release it.
Obviously the compiler still needs to produce really fast code when I tell it to, though.
Macrovision is almost certainly enabled on whatever output device is involved. You'd have to disable (circumvent) this protection technology.
I don't think TV-out ports on video cards do Macrovision. Certainly not all of them do.
But your second point is where the question gets sticky -- at what point are you creating a device rather than using an existing, legal one? From a strictly technical point of view, hooking two existing devices together is in some sense creating a new device. But I think you'd find very few people who would describe hooking a VCR up to their TV to be creating a new "VCR+TV" device.
As you say, though, I wouldn't want to be the test case.
There are too many unknowns for me to have a meaningful opinion about this. There's a good chance it'll stink for all the reasons everyone will no doubt post about. But the two big unknowns are video quality and pricing. If the video quality is good and you can rent a movie for a third of what it costs for a three-day video rental from Blockbuster, I'd be hard-pressed to get annoyed about it.
If, on the other hand, they follow the example of DirecTV pay-per-view, with a higher price point than most video stores, or if the video quality is no better than a typical 1-CD DiVX rip, it probably won't do so well.
The key difference between this and DiVX, in my mind, is the 30-day hard expiration date. That makes this proposition seem a lot less slimy and risky to me. With a DiVX disc, the theory was you'd be able to buy the disc and wait a year before activating it, which obviously was no good when DiVX Inc. went out of business in the meantime. But in this case, from what I can tell from the article, it's more like a one-day rental from a video store; you go into it expecting to not have the movie any more after a particular time. If they fold, it has no impact on movies you downloaded more than a month prior.
I imagine there'll be people who find this new proposal distasteful but aren't bothered by one-day videotape rentals (which similarly limit you to a 24-hour viewing window, unless you want to rack up late fees). I'll be curious to hear what makes one business model more acceptable than the other, if anyone wants to take that question up.
On another note, I wonder what the legal issues would be if you rented a movie and dumped it to videotape using your computer's TV output, then erased the tape within the 30-day rental window. Would that be considered the same thing as taping a TV show (protected by the Supreme Court) or would it be like renting a video, copying it, and returning the original? It might not be a DMCA issue in this case, since you wouldn't be using a protection-circumvention technology.
Great, now we'll have a bunch of movies with the pay-per-view nonsense of DiVX and the low video quality of DiVX;-). Anyone want to start a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called DiVX:-P so we can add slow, unreliable downloads to the mix?
Sounds like a browser deficiency to me -- the "do you want this cookie?" popup should give you the option of suppressing future instances of itself. I know Opera does; there's a button for "make my accept/refuse choice apply to all cookies from this site." I'm sure one of the open-source browsers out there either already does something similar or could be made to do so without Herculean effort.
It's not the site that's putting cookie popups in your face, after all; it's your browser (and your chosen configuration of your browser, at that).
And how are you going to burn those DVDs? DVD-R drives are still priced out of reach of most people. CD-R has enough market penetration, and is available cheaply enough, to make a portable player a viable product. Adding DVD reading capability would drive up the price of the unit for no benefit to any significant number of people.
No, wait, it's not a coincidence the parent is posted in this thread! This is how we can communicate with the inhabitants of these new planets -- post our messages to them on Slashdot and by the time we hit "submit" the aliens' response will already be on its way back to us.
Slashdot Mirror
That's such good advice, I started following it six months ago. Fair enough?
Thanks for the inventive new curse word, though.
My cable had gone down Saturday morning, and I was prepared to spend a couple weeks suffering through dialup access. But I woke up Monday morning to find my cable modem back in business. I had to fire up a DHCP client to get a valid address. No more static IP address for now, it looks like; I think I'll give AT&T a couple weeks to finish moving everyone else over, then get in touch with them about a static address. Or maybe not. Once I realized my static address was gone, I went and signed up with DynDNS.org and changed my DNS records so that my home machine has a CNAME pointing to its name on dyndns.org rather than an A with its old static address. Then I downloaded a dynamic DNS client (lots available for Linux and Windows and others) and set it to send an update to dyndns.org's servers whenever my address changes. My assumption is that this will allow me to keep serving up my Web pages with no more than an occasional brief glitch if my IP address changes. And the lease times are pretty long (5 days), so even those glitches should be vanishingly rare, assuming they happen at all; I'm betting I'll be able to just keep renewing my initial address indefinitely. So the only real downside to being on AT&T's network is that my downloads appear to be capped at 1.5Mbps. Boo hoo, $50/month for T1-speed downloads, don't everyone offer me a hankie at once. Still a fantastic deal, even if it's not as sweet as it was a week ago. Way to go AT&T. One mostly-satisfied customer here. (No downtime would have been better, but I had longer outages than this on my old DSL line even without the provider going bankrupt, so it'd be churlish to complain.)
One of the classic refutations of the Chinese room experiment is the systems argument: it's true that the person doesn't understand Chinese, but the system made of the person plus the stacks of instructions does. Searle's response to that is to say, "Okay, then suppose the person memorizes the instructions" -- the fact that everything now happens in the person's head still doesn't cause them to understand Chinese.
To me this misses the point of the systems argument; the argument isn't about where the understanding is stored, but whether it exists. If you look at consciousness as a multi-layered entity, in this case the consciousness of the person is one layer below that of the person-plus-instructions. This additional consciousness uses the person in the same way that the person's uses brain cells: the cells can't be said to understand anything, but they make up a larger whole that exists as an emergent property above and beyond the sum of its parts.
Searle's argument also assumes that "understanding" is an almost mystical property that can't be reduced to a fixed set of rules. Which to me is just ridiculous unless you assume the existence of a noncorporeal soul; if the brain is really the seat of consciousness then consciousness does reduce to a fixed set of rules (laws of physics and chemistry) applied to an extremely complex system. His response to that argument (something about water pipes, if I recall) again misses the point by such a huge margin that it's barely worth mentioning.
I have no problem with the possibility that what I think of as "me" is simply a byproduct of a complex physical process, and that similar byproducts can exist in other complex systems. Doesn't mean we'll be able to detect them or communicate with them any more than a cluster of six brain cells can communicate with us.
emusic.com
Between those two sites you can easily accumulate 6500 legitimate MP3s without ever touching a CD. Well, "easily" if you have a broadband connection, anyway. And that's not counting all the garage band home pages across the net with MP3s they want you to distribute widely so they get name recognition.
As for buying CDs, I've been doing that on eBay a lot recently. If you don't require the latest releases you can easily stock up on CDs for less than half what you'd pay at a retail store. Again, all perfectly legal, though if your goal is to make sure the artists get their $.002 from the record label for each album sold, it's not so hot.
7.95MPH faster and a bolt of lightning, and we'll see the world's first time-travelling bicycle!
He said "lifetime subscription" -- no recurring cost.
If it's because the soul is connected to the body in some way, who's to say the connection has anything to do with physical location? Your vaporous, non-matter soul might transcend time and space, and the fact that its shell is suddenly over there instead of over here might make no difference.
For that matter, who's to say it couldn't attach itself to both copies of you, or even split into two copies of itself, if you were duplicated? Since it's undefinable and immeasurable, any assertions about what it can and can't do are unfounded. To my knowledge no religious texts address the issue of teleportation. Unless you count Star Trek as a religion. :)
It did? The CDA passed Congress and was signed by President Clinton and worked its way through the court system before it was (partially) struck down on First Amendment grounds. Which part of that was due to site blackouts?
Not saying it's a bad idea, but the historical evidence that it'd do any good is less than overwhelming.
Seems to work pretty well for the most part, though once in a while stuff gets checked into the main branch that in my opinion ought to have been sent around to the developers' mailing list for more sanity-checking first.
Anyway, yes, open collaboration does exist out there and is producing good results. DScaler is often favorably reviewed versus $10K+ commercial alternatives.
But it seems to me there are also some things that can be done to the planes to make hijackings of this sort all but impossible.
First of all, make it impossible to get from the main cabin to the cockpit. Put a separate outside door on the cockpit and give the cockpit area a dedicated restroom and food storage area. If there's no physical access to the cockpit from the passenger area, it becomes impossible to point a gun at the pilot's head (though one could still take the passengers hostage, of course).
Barring that -- or in addition to that -- all commercial planes should be equipped with live cockpit video feeds from multiple angles, no "off" switch, to allow ground controllers to instantly see if something is going wrong. That alone doesn't prevent hijackings, but it means you'll instantly be able to see which passenger is responsible, and potentially deploy military aircraft to force the plane down before it reaches its destination. It's also useful in non-terrorist situations.
Live video of the passenger cabin is more problematic from a privacy point of view, but again gives you an early warning that something is wrong. It can prevent someone from being able to pop unnoticed into the restroom to disguise themselves (and thus make themselves harder to trace back to terrorist HQ) before taking a hostage or breaking into the cockpit. Personally, I don't really consider myself to be in a private space when I'm on a plane and would have few qualms with video surveillance, especially if it was of the wide-angle, over-the-seattops variety. Hell, you could even subsidize it by adding a couple extra cameras and letting businesspeople hold video conferences.
None of this stops someone from wanting to take over a plane and use it as a missile, which is the real root cause here. But I hope there'll be some consideration of relatively simple preventive measures like these in addition to the calls for strip-searching everyone who gets on a plane.
(Hint: It's possible to believe that it's only okay to freely copy information whose author intended it to be freely copied.)
I dunno, I've spent enough time over the years referring people to my FAQs for the same questions, over and over again, that I think I'd rather release my next free-software project anonymously. I've been introduced to people as "the guy who did X" (err, that's a wildcard, not a reference to the window system) and it makes me really uncomfortable. I do it 'cause it's fun and it seems like the right thing to do.
Well, actually, yes -- a couple months ago I went to Junkbusters and sent out all the "take me off your mailing list" requests their site will generate for you. It has cut my paper junk mail volume way down. Not completely to zero, but now I rarely get any junk mail from businesses I'm not already dealing with.
But the outfit's complete unwillingness to do anything but canned demos is what really makes me think the guy in charge is doing more than just feeling like a snake-oil salesman.
If it's for real, they'll file for patent protection and we'll all get to see how it works. And if it's for real, they deserve a nice solid patent or three, but my guess is it's just a scam.
From where I sit -- just look at Memepool -- the democratic, chaotic net is still alive and well. And my ad-free site from '93 is still around and still has no ads, even if 10 others have sprung up nearby.
If this is a trend and not just a brief hiccup, it has a number of interesting implications:
It'll be interesting to see how this continues.
Obviously the compiler still needs to produce really fast code when I tell it to, though.
I don't think TV-out ports on video cards do Macrovision. Certainly not all of them do.
But your second point is where the question gets sticky -- at what point are you creating a device rather than using an existing, legal one? From a strictly technical point of view, hooking two existing devices together is in some sense creating a new device. But I think you'd find very few people who would describe hooking a VCR up to their TV to be creating a new "VCR+TV" device.
As you say, though, I wouldn't want to be the test case.
If, on the other hand, they follow the example of DirecTV pay-per-view, with a higher price point than most video stores, or if the video quality is no better than a typical 1-CD DiVX rip, it probably won't do so well.
The key difference between this and DiVX, in my mind, is the 30-day hard expiration date. That makes this proposition seem a lot less slimy and risky to me. With a DiVX disc, the theory was you'd be able to buy the disc and wait a year before activating it, which obviously was no good when DiVX Inc. went out of business in the meantime. But in this case, from what I can tell from the article, it's more like a one-day rental from a video store; you go into it expecting to not have the movie any more after a particular time. If they fold, it has no impact on movies you downloaded more than a month prior.
I imagine there'll be people who find this new proposal distasteful but aren't bothered by one-day videotape rentals (which similarly limit you to a 24-hour viewing window, unless you want to rack up late fees). I'll be curious to hear what makes one business model more acceptable than the other, if anyone wants to take that question up.
On another note, I wonder what the legal issues would be if you rented a movie and dumped it to videotape using your computer's TV output, then erased the tape within the 30-day rental window. Would that be considered the same thing as taping a TV show (protected by the Supreme Court) or would it be like renting a video, copying it, and returning the original? It might not be a DMCA issue in this case, since you wouldn't be using a protection-circumvention technology.
Great, now we'll have a bunch of movies with the pay-per-view nonsense of DiVX and the low video quality of DiVX ;-). Anyone want to start a peer-to-peer file-sharing service called DiVX :-P so we can add slow, unreliable downloads to the mix?
It's not the site that's putting cookie popups in your face, after all; it's your browser (and your chosen configuration of your browser, at that).
And how are you going to burn those DVDs? DVD-R drives are still priced out of reach of most people. CD-R has enough market penetration, and is available cheaply enough, to make a portable player a viable product. Adding DVD reading capability would drive up the price of the unit for no benefit to any significant number of people.
"Hi" (45yrs)
"Oh, so THAT'S where we left our science project." (90yrs)
No, wait, it's not a coincidence the parent is posted in this thread! This is how we can communicate with the inhabitants of these new planets -- post our messages to them on Slashdot and by the time we hit "submit" the aliens' response will already be on its way back to us.