Chaos and quantum mechanics are more or less orthogonal. In particular, you can get chaotic behavior from completely classical systems. Indeed, this is one way in which you can get nondeterministic behavior out of a classical system that is at its lowest level subject to deterministic physical laws. It seems to me that this is a necessary condition for free will and consciousness. Whether it is a sufficient condition I can't say with any certainty.
I don't understand why you think brains are subject to quantum effects, but digital circuits are not, since both produce outputs that are, in essence, step functions of their inputs (with the location of the step being the threshold for firing/not firing). Why is one subject to quantum effects and not the other? Furthermore, you seem to be confusing statistical fluctuations with "quantum effects". The mere fact that a statistical fluctuation can carry a neuron over (or under) its threshold does not mean that the system is behaving quantum mechanically; you would still see statistical effects even if electrons behaved clasically (i.e. like tiny ball bearings). In any case, for macroscopic systems these fluctuations are small, and so they have an effect only if you are poised on the cusp of the threshold. Contrast this with the randomness introduced by quantum mechanics, in which any superposition state can collapse into one a random eigenstate with finite probabality. To give an example, consider a hypothetical neuron. Let "off" (i.e. not firing) be represented by 0 and "on" (i.e. firing) be represented by 1, and let the neuron have a threshold of 0.5. Then consider an input of 0.25 (i.e. halfway to the threshold). Now, if these numbers represent potentials typical in a brain (say, a few millivolts), then statistical fluctuations will be far too small to bump that 0.25 all the way up to 0.5. Result, the neuron will not fire (output == 0) essentially 100% of the time.
Now, consider an analogous quantum system. There are two eigenstates |0> and |1>. An equal mixture of the two states: 1/sqrt(2) |0> + 1/sqrt(2) |1> will result in a superposition state that has equal probability of collapsing into either eigenstate. This is the analog of the threshold. Now, consider the analog of an input of 0.25. It would be something like sqrt(3)/2 |0> + 1/2 |1>. When observed, this state will collapse into |0> 3/4 of the time and into |1> 1/4 of the time. Notice that a state fairly distant from the "threshold" (if you can even call it that) still has a significant chance of going the "wrong" way. This is quantum mechanical behavior, and it is very different from that of garden-variety statistical fluctuations, and it is very unlikely to be relevant to how a brain works.
Having said all that, I'm not convinced that even mundane statistical fluctuations are essential to developing free will or consciousness. I think it is entirely possible for a collection of completely deterministic neurons to develop traits that we would recognize as consciousness. The argument is fairly involved, and I doubt I could do it justice here, so I will refer you to the books by Hofstadter that I mentioned earlier in the thread.
Finally, I think there is an important flaw in your argument for why brains probably exploit quantum effects. You focus on the perceived benefits of quantum brains, but you say nothing of the costs. This is like saying, "humans probably have wings because being able to fly would be a huge evolutionary advantage over being stuck on land." That is a true statement, but it ignores the detail that providing enough lift for a human to fly would take a huge amount of energy; our poor winged human would never be able to eat enough to keep himself airborne. Similarly, if quantum brains require a radically different design than the ones we actually have (and I suspect they do), then there could be any number of evolutionary drawbacks to quantum brains. For instance quantum neurons might be more delicate than the regular sort, or maybe they are not as space efficient. Basically, your argument only holds if there is a way to make regular brains do double duty as quantum brains, and I think that assumption is suspect.
Yes, it is odd. I believe the Parliament has a publication similar to the Congressional Record that is accessible from the Parliament web site. It might be worth digging through it to see if there is any mention of what they were thinking. One possibility is that they were concerned about a possible "I destroyed the key" defense, so this gives them the opportunity to respond with, "Well, just give us the plaintext, then." There is a little logic there, since it would be hard to whip up a believable bogus plaintext on a moment's notice if you didn't already have one prepared. However, competent criminals will realize this, and they will just prepare their alternate plaintext in advance. Criminals have been using a similar tactic with accounting books for decades, so I don't imagine they will have much trouble adapting the practice to email correspondence.
This is the Earth. (It's where you keep your stuff.) Now, imagine it. . . GONE!
Ok, the Tick was good fun. What made it such fun was that it was completely over the top. The Tick getting punched into orbit (and going on an existential journey within his mind), clones made entirely of snot, and armies of corn soldiers ("We're colonels!") and things of that sort were what made the Tick worth watching. Am I the only one that thinks that this is going to be hard to capture in live-action? A lot of the stuff that happened on the Tick was pretty improbable. I have my doubts about the show's ability to pull off effects like talking monkey geniuses on a weekly basis. It seems like either they won't try, and the show will be dull because of it, or they will try, and the cheesy effects will get in the way, and even if they manage to make the effects passable, I have my doubts about the actors' ability to play something that over the top without coming off as hammy.
I don't mean to sound like I'm dumping on it before it even gets off the ground (although I suppose I am), but I am very skeptical. Seems like a better choice would be to revive the animated series. That's what I would prefer, at least. Still, the ways of Hollywood are, at best, bizarre and inscrutable.
I wouldn't say that you "have no idea what [you're] talking about." It's just that the popular portrayal of quantum mechanics is very misleading. The truth is that in quantum mechanics a lot of strange (meaning counter to our classically derived physical intuition) things happen, and this strangeness has been heavily mysticised and used to justify all manner of kooky philosophy. However, macroscopic systems are made out of vast collections of quantum systems, and the statistical properties of the quantum systems ensure that those macroscopic systems will behave classically. So, you see, it is entirely possible for the "higher-level determinism" you speak of to emerge from huge collections nondeterministic low-level systems. Oh, certainly there is theoretically a nonzero chance that quantum effects will cause a macroscopic system to do something nondeterministic; that ball could pass right through your racquet by quantum tunnelling. However, the probability of this happening is so unspeakably low that you could watch for the entire lifetime of the universe and not see it happen even once. If that doesn't count as determinism, then I don't know what does.
So, I think it's pretty ludicrous to ascribe consciousness and free will to quantum effects in the brain. As far as I know, individual neurons do behave deterministically; they fire if and only if their inputs exceed a certain threshold, and that threshold involves a macroscopic flow of charge. That means that the quantum effects will all wash out statistically. Now, does the determinism of individual neurons rule out free will? I don't know the answer to that. I suspect that it does not, because I certainly feel like I have free will; however, I confess that I cannot prove that rigorously. For a particularly lucid discussion of how free will might (or might not) emerge from deterministic systems, I recommend Douglas Hofstadter's books. Both Godel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas have sections that talk about these issues. The Mind's I probably does too, but I haven't read that one (yet).
The investigators may know your public key, but that doesn't do them much good; in order to verify the ciphertext they need the session key for the symmetric cipher used to encrypt the message. Maybe they could declare this key the "plaintext" for purposes of the law. It's hard to say. In any case, all of this presumes that your public key is truly public, which need not be the case. If you truly were worried about this law you could always secretly exchange "public" keys with the people with whom you intend to communicate.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more peculiar the clause about plaintext seems. Any putative plaintext that comes from the hand of the person being investigated is untrustworthy, and therefore unhelpful at best. Seeing this clause in the legislation makes one doubt whether the lawmakers truly understand the issues involved here. Viewed in that light, this law should at least provide a useful counterargument the next time someone claims that the US has a monopoly on clueless government (which, judging from recent Slashdot posts, should be sometime within the next 24 hours.)
Say, you wouldn't happen to remember who did the calculations for the galaxy merger demo you saw, would you? One of my colleagues at Indiana University, Bob Berrington, made a demo like that from his merger calculations, and I believe the IU CAVEmen took it to a few conferences. I'm wondering if the one you saw was the same one.
The CAVE works well for visualizing N-body calculations, like galaxy mergers, because the particles can be represented by simple shapes like spheres, and because you can pare down the particles to a reasonable number without losing too much information. Unfortunately, we had less success visualizing computational fluid dynamics calculations because the number of polygons required to represent the complicated surfaces made the whole business prohibitively sluggish. That was too bad because I had had these visions of the protostellar disk models swirling in midair in front of me like the accretion disks in ``The Black Hole'' (a cheesy sci-fi movie, for those not familiar with it). Oh, well, someday.
The rigorous explanation for why materials are or are not transparent is a little hairy, but here's an explanation that, while a little oversimplified, captures the flavor of what's happening
Imagine you have a lump of some material. The electrons circling the atoms or molecules of the material have some characteristic structure that depends on the elements involved, how the electrons are shared in any molecular bonds in the material, and how the atoms or molecules are arranged in the bulk material (proximity of other atoms or molecules distorts the energy levels for orbiting electrons). This latter factor, by the way, is the difference between coal and diamond.
Now, along comes an electromagnetic wave, which is really just an electric field oscillating with a magnetic field. The electrons in the material are going to feel a force due to the E field (in this naive treatment we'll ignore the magnetic field). What's more, that force will want to drive the electrons to oscillate, but those oscillations will be resisted by forces that depend on the factors I mentioned above. The punchline is that the more the electrons are free to respond to the electric field's driving force, the more energy they will dissipate, the more the incoming light will be attenuated, and hence the more opaque the material will appear. Conversely, if the electrons are not free to respond, the light is not attenuated (much) and the material appears transparent. As you might expect, for any given material the response of the electrons varies greatly with frequency (just like the case of mechanical resonators). This gives rise to all sorts of phenomena, which you can find described in any good optics text.
Now, in the case of conductors (like metals) the electrons are very free to move around (that's what gives them their conductivity), and hence you would expect them to quickly dissipate any electromagnetic waves incident on them, and that is generally the case. Typically the ``skin depth'' for metals is about 1/6 of a wavelength. However, as you go to higher frequency, things get complicated again, because the conductivity has a wavelength dependence. Generally that dependence takes the form of a strong drop off in conductivity above some characteristic frequency. Evidently, this characteristic frequency is well above visible light frequencies for naturally occurring metals.
Another poster mentioned that DARPA is working on transparent metals. Presumably, then, their line of attack is to try to find some alloy with a crystalline structure that makes that alloy's characteristic frequency lower than visible light frequencies. If and when they succeed, it will be interesting to see what that does to the metal's other characteristics like malleability and ductility.
Hope that helps (and I hope I didn't post it too late for you to get back around to reading it at some point).
As to the poster who talked about "one-way" contracts: the problem is you need a license to use software.
Could you explain why this is? If I don't need a license to read a book I have purchased, why do I need one to use software that I have purchased? Where do music recordings fall; do I need a license to listen to them? I guess what I'm asking is, in a nutshell, why do software producers feel they are entitled to rights beyond what is normally granted by copyright? For that matter, why is the license game restricted to intellectual property? Why cannot car manufacturers, for instance, get in on the action with their own license agreements when you buy their products?
Also, what terms can they put in these licenses? What about these examples? As the purchaser you agree:
not to resell the software to anyone else (not even if you delete all your backups first).
not to write a piece of software that could be used instead of this software.
not to write a piece of software that can communicate using this software's proprietary network protocol.
not to install any of our competitor's products on your computer and to uninstall any of the competitor's products that you may already have.
not to tune the software to improve its performance.
to allow the producer of this software periodically to inspect your hard disk.
I'm pretty sure I have seen (1) in EULAs before. Is it enforcable? I bet music companies would love to have this right. Do they, and it's just that nobody ever thought of "licensing" CDs before? Should any copyright holder have the right to say you can't sell a product secondhand when you're done with it?
Number (5) also appears routinely in EULAs; it was the crux of the flap over converting NT Workstation, in effect, to NT Server by changing a registry key. Why is it that if I buy a car I can make whatever modifications I want, but if I buy software I'm not allowed to make any modifications whatsoever? If Chrysler wanted to include a "license agreement" with any cars it sold that forbade any unauthorized modification, could they? Would it hold up?
What about number (2)? Presumably that isn't legal, right? But (3) routinely appears in EULAs as a "thou shalt not reverse engineer" clause. If a protocol or file format is proprietary, doesn't (3) amount to (2) in effect?
Anyhow, I hope one of the more legally versed among the readership will take a few minutes to explain some of these issues because from where I'm sitting it looks an awful lot like a case of "what's ours is ours, and what's yours is ours too," but I'm sure it can't be that because big business would never do that to us, right?
As far as I can tell, what it boils down to is that copyright holders (with software manufacturers in the vanguard) are increasingly trying to control not just distribution of their products, but also the use of their products. As a mere citizen, I no longer pretend to understand the law well enough to say whether they can get away with it. (Had I but known it would come to this, I would have studied law instead of science, simply as a matter of self-preservation.), but, at least to a legal outsider, it seems like copyright shouldn't convey the right to dictate terms of use. The lawyer-priests may tell us that it should, and I guess that makes it so, but that doesn't mean we have to like it, and and it doesn't mean that we can't resist with all of our meager powers. I doubt it will do any good unless the lawyer-priests have a change of heart and decide to champion our cause, but it will at least give us something to do while we wait for the next round of buggy patches to all of our duly licensed software to download.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. I don't doubt that the effects on photons look similar to the effects of Kerr black holes on photons. However, the authors mention studying Hawking radiation in the laboratory as a possible application of the effect. That's not going to happen unless the system also affects matter the way a black hole would, which in fact it does not. There is a shallow analogy between the two in that the equations of motion for photons are similar, but the authors suggest that the analogy goes much deeper than that, and I doubt very much that it does.
The authors appear to think that the salient property of a black hole is the pop science description that "not even light can escape its pull." Thus, they reason, if light cannot escape, it must be a black hole. This just isn't the case. Indeed, the authors' own text hints at this: "The concerned reader should note that optical black holes are safe. They would attract only light..." This property is, of course, fundamentally different from what you expect of a true (that is, astrophysical) black hole, and so we should be skeptical of any further analogies between these "light traps" and black holes. In particular, I see no reason that these things should emit Hawking radiation. Certainly the "virtual particle trapped inside the event horizon" interpretation of Hawking radiation fails because there is no event horizon.
What's more, from the standpoint of General Relativity these constructs don't look anything like a black hole. The stress-energy tensor (the relativistic analog of mass density) is virtually unchanged by the modest rotational flows light traps made from Bose-Einstein condensate would require, meaning that these constructs should have exactly the gravitational properties you would expect of a static body of liquid in the laboratory (i.e. none to speak of). That means no space-time curvature, no ergosphere or frame dragging, no gravitational redshift, and no time dilation. For example, if they directed a stream of muons through these things they should find the muons' decay lifetime basically unchanged from what it would be if they sent the muons through the same liquid while it wasn't rotating.
I believe the authors make an important mistake when they say "... a moving dielectric medium acts on light as an effective gravitational field." That is clearly not true because this putative "gravitational field" does not obey the equivalence principle; viz. it accelerates light but not matter. The mistake is comparable to saying, "A charged pith ball in an accelerating train car will experience an `effective electric field' which will tend to accelerate it." and proceeding to compute the electromagnetic properties of this moving field. The analogy falls flat because the acceleration is not caused by an electric field, and so it can't be expected to act like one when you study its influence on anything else in the train car. Similarly, although you can compute a gravitational field that would trap light in the same way as these constructs, that doesn't mean that there is actually a gravitational field present, nor does it mean that other effects that would be present for the gravitational field you calculated will actually show up in your apparatus.
None of that means that this isn't interesting research, of course, but as far as I can tell the connection to black holes and astrophysics is nonexistent.
Light is *not* a constant speed, it is only a constant for a given energy density of space.
This is not quite correct. The speed of light in a dielectric depends on the index of refraction, n, of the medium; n is in turn a function of the magnetic permeability, mu, and dielectric constant, epsilon of the material. At the root of it all mu and epsilon are functions of the molecular and electronic structure of the medium, as well as the frequency of the light itself. Thus, two materials with similar densities but very different dielectric constants will have very different indices of refraction, and hence light will propogate within them at different speeds. What's more, even for a single material, n (and hence the speed of light) will in general vary with wavelength. This is called "dispersion", and it is responsible for such diverse phenomena as rainbows, prisms, and smearing of pulses from pulsars.
The important thing to remember is that only the speed of light in vacuo functions as an absolute "speed limit". Particles can and do exceed the speeds of light in dielectric media, causing them to emit Cerenkov radiation in the process.
The optical black hole will have the same effect as a real one; virtual particles will be trapped within it, and their antiparticles will fly free.
I am skeptical that these "optical black holes" will trap particles as well as they trap light. Particles have no problem traveling faster than the speed of light within the dielectric, so long as they do not exceed the speed of light in vacuo. Thus, particles should be able to escape these things, even if light cannot. In other words, these beasts have no true event horizon, and so any analogy to astrophysical black holes is suspect.
Robert Link
Also a physicist. Gave up on Usenet a long time ago.
I was thinking of something more like recording a DVD directly onto VHS, but your point is well taken; DeCSS lowers the barrier to distributing ripped DVDs over the network. However, the fact remains that anyone who wants to build a DVD player needs a way of decrypting DVDs. If DeCSS is squashed, then the legal precedent so set will ensure that nobody will ever try to reverse-engineer CSS again, and the door will forever be shut on independent DVD players. Thus, I still think it ludicrous to say that ripping DVDs is the primary use of DeCSS.
Let me be clear. Giving control over DVD to an oligopoly (for that's what the DVD consortium is) will allow them basically to destroy fair use rights for any information distributed by DVD. We cannot afford to allow free use rights to wither and die, not even for something as trivial as the crap that Hollywood turns out. If we allow it here we set a precedent that will open the door to ending fair use rights everywhere. In my mind, to overcome the evil of allowing CSS to remain closed the consortium must show that an evil of equal or greater magnitude would result from allowing DeCSS to open it up. In particular, I would like to see some proof that DVD sales have dropped measurably since the release of DeCSS. If they have not, then I have to conclude that the piracy that DeCSS has enabled is not significant, certainly not a threat to the industry, and, therefore, not a valid excuse to allow the consortium to maintain its stranglehold on the format.
DeCSS makes it much easier than what? Capturing the video stream, encoding that and sending it out (or recording it onto another medium)? It's hard to imagine it getting much easier than that. Perhaps I should have said it DeCSS doesn't make perfect copies of DVDs feasible, and imperfect copies were already possible through other means.
Do you honestly think that DeCSS is going to stimulate piracy significantly? If so, how? Why would someone who didn't copy DVDs before suddenly decide to start just because DeCSS came out? Honestly, that doesn't make any sense to me. How can you advocate outlawing a technology (DeCSS) because it provides one more way for people to do something they could already have done using other means? And what of the original claim that piracy will be what DeCSS "will really be used for"? How do you support that?
I think that in the population at large, #1 is the most likely explanation. However, I wonder if among slashdot posters there might be another force at work. Many of us are scientists and engineers. We work with laws of physics for which there is no appeal process. In physics the rules are the rules, and you just learn to cope. The same is true to a lesser extent in programming, where the rules are at least manmade, but the possibility of an individual getting, say, the C language standard changed to make a particular project easier are basically nil, so again, you just learn to work within the rules.
Then, too, some people seem to view all of this as a game; that is, a set of rules that you must work within to achieve a desired objective. That is not a bad description, but if you take the analogy too far then you find yourself reasoning that changing the rules in the middle of the "game" is unsportsmanlike, and hence should be avoided.
Just some idle musings while I wait for some code to run. Make of them what you will.
May I ask where you achieved your great insight that illegal copying is "what [DeCSS] is going to be used for"? This is not at all obvious to me, and given your deeply flawed dictionary analogy (Let's see a show of hands: who has used a dictionary in the last week? Who used it to look up a dirty word? I thought so.) I find it highly suspect. It has been shown again and again that decrypting and copying DVDs for purposes of piracy just isn't feasible right now, and it probably won't be for some time. It is much easier (and cheaper) to intercept the video output and make an analog copy. No, I think the likely first use of DeCSS will be for some electronics company that is not part of the DVD consortium will make a player that ignores zone restrictions.
Still don't believe me? Let's make a wager. If illegal copies of DVDs increase 5-fold from what they were pre-DeCSS before some company markets a no zone-restriction DVD player (which could be implemented in either hardware or software), then you win. If vice-versa, then I win. Naturally, if DeCSS is squashed by the courts, then the wager is off. What do you say? Do we have a bet?
I am not sure I buy this line of argument. Copyright gives the holder the right to dictate who can or cannot distribute copies, but the rights it gives to dictate how a legally acquired copy is used are very limited. In particular you cannot dictate where or how often people use their (legally acquired) copies. Now, do you really think the lawmakers intended for this law to be circumventable by a mere "license agreement"? If so, then why didn't they just write into the law that copyright holders could place whatever restrictions they wanted on use of their material? I mean, when is it not advantageous for a copyright holder to put extra restrictions in the "license agreement"? Add to that the fact that quite a few legal scholars have expressed doubts about the validity of making a license agreement a precondition to a mass market purchase, and I think you have to agree that this argument is on shaky ground at best. Here's a philosophical question for you, based on a real situation. When I was living in Bloomington, IN and shopping for a new car, I found that I could get a much better deal by going to a dealer in Louisville[1]. In other words, Louisville was a "cheap" area for new cars, while Bloomington was an "expensive" area. Suppose the auto manufacturer wanted to force me to buy from the more expensive dealer by forcing me to sign a "license agreement" when I bought the car in Kentucky saying that I would not operate the car in Indiana. Should the manufacturer be allowed to impose this restriction? If so, from whence do you believe they derive the right to tell me where I can or cannot drive a car that I have legally purchased? If not, then how is this situation different from the DVD situation you have described? Finally, one more philosophical question. You describe the DVD zone restrictions as "entirely immoral". Even presuming them to be legal, why, then, do you defend them? Time was when people protested laws that were unjust, let alone "entirely immoral". What has happened to us? Have we forgotten that the power of those laws derives from our consent? -r [1] Note that I am not referring to the difference in state sales tax. Louisville dealers were just cheaper in general, probably owing to having more competition.
China isn't too worried about people using the Internet to spread "the truth" about Chinese communism. The people of China already know they're living under a totalitarian regime. You'd have to be blind, deaf, and stupid not to know it. That's why Jiang was perfectly content to let Clinton address the Chinese people on television about a year and a half ago. Clinton wasn't going to tell them anything they didn't already know, so let him prattle on all he wants, if that's what it takes to make the Americans feel warm and fuzzy.
No, the Chinese government is more worried about the Internet fostering activism. When each dissenter has to stand up to the government alone, it's easy to frighten everyone into submission. But let people get organized, let the dissenters know they are not alone, and before too long you can't frighten anyone into submission. That's what the Chinese government fears, and that's what it is trying to crack down on with these measures.
The name "Trojan" was picked because the first several asteroids found trapped in the Jupiter-Sun Lagrange points were named after heroes from Homer's Iliad. For that reason I would argue that "Trojan" should apply only to objects in the Jupiter-Sun Lagrange points, although the analogy to other Lagrange point objects is obviously pretty strong.
Note also that there is a difference between "equilibrium" and "stability". Equilibrium just means that there exists a static solution to the equations of motion (albeit static in a rotating frame of reference in this case). Stable means that the static solution, if perturbed, will return to the equilibrium instead of drifting off into some dynamic orbit. The L1-L3 points are stable to perturbations in one direction (the tangential, if I recall), but they are unstable to perturbations in the other direction. Consequently, one doesn't expect to find long-lived orbits at these locations. The L4 and L5 equilibria are stable against all perturbations, so one might expect to find objects in long lived orbits at these locations, like the Trojan asteroids, for instance.
The original poster's confusion arose because the earth has two sets of Lagrange points associated with it. One comes from the earth-moon system (in which the earth is M1 and the moon is M2), and the other comes from the earth-sun system (M1==sun, M2==earth). An object at L4 or L5 in the earth-moon system would appear to orbit the earth in synch with the moon, while an object at an earth-sun lagrange point would appear to orbit the sun in synch with the earth. So, it's a little far-fetched to call an object at the earth-sun Lagrange points a "second moon", although such an object is in some sense more deeply associated with the earth than an object in some random solar orbit.
Finally, one should remember that the Lagrange points are solutions of the restricted 3-body problem which presumes that there are only three bodies in the system. Obviously, that isn't the case in our solar system. For instance, I've seen people argue that the earth-moon L4 and L5 points aren't really stable because of the sun's influence. Similarly, the lagrange points between the sun and most of the outer planets are thought to be disrupted by Jupiter's gravity. Consequently, I wouldn't be surprised if Venus' gravity had a tendency to destabilize the earth-sun Lagrange points, resulting in objects trapped there eventually escaping into regular solar orbits.
Gates has been in it for the money from the very begining. He doesn't care about innovating anything, except ways to part you with your money!
You speak as though the desire to advance technology is incompatible with the desire to make money. I think you would be hard pressed to defend that statement rigorously, whether in its general form, or applied to Bill Gates specifically.
Take me for example; I'm an astrophysicist. If it turns out that I can't make money doing astrophysics, I will do something else. Does that mean that I don't care about astrophysics, that I'm just in it for the money? Of course not. It does mean that I have to eat and pay my rent, and on top of that doing first-class work in itself requires resources. If I can't at least cover those costs, then I can't do astrophysics.
It seems probable to me that some of these things were going through Gates' mind when he wrote his "Open Letter to Hobbyists". It's also easy to understand why he might feel that something he had put a lot of work into was "his", and that he was entitled a royalty whenever someone copied it. After all, aren't authors of books entitled to the same privilege? There are some problems with software licensing terms, to be sure, but I don't think the root of those problems is that people like Bill Gates want to get paid for the software they produce. We may not agree with their position, but that position is not so unreasonable that we should not at least respect it.
-r
Re:And great opportunity for the spin doctors!
on
Total Lunar Eclipse
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· Score: 2
Whether we do or do not dump too much pollution into the atmosphere is irrelevant to the original point, which was that the moon's red color during an eclipse is not caused by pollution. Preindustrial lunar eclipses were also red. Prehistoric lunar eclipses were also red. Do you see why it is disingenuous to claim that pollution causes the eclipse's color? It gives the impression that man-made pollutants now make up a substantial fraction of the total composition of the atmosphere. In other words, it vastly overstates the magnitude of the pollution problem. It is very subtle fearmongering, but it is fearmongering nonetheless.
Now, we could easily get rid of all polution overnight. Just turn off all the factories, power plants, and automobiles, and, poof, no more pollution. That's not going to happen, of course, because the result would be widespread devastation. The point is that rational public policy demands a balance between protecting our environment, on the one hand, and protecting our economy on the other. Ridiculous overstatements about the amount of pollution (even if they are probably based more in ignorance than in malice, which I think is likely here) do not further the cause of rational policymaking, and the original poster was right to condemn them.
Finally, just out of curiousity:
How about polution checks on the shit people spout through their mouths?? *grin*
I'm confused. Is the "*grin*" supposed to cause this not to be a rude comment? If so, it doesn't work, in my opinion.
The Internet is in most respects genderless. I have no idea whether any of the posters on Slashdot are female, or if they are white or black or Asian. How can I discriminate when I don't have anything at all to go upon?
You may not know the race, sex, or creed of the other readers of a forum you participate in, but the readers themselves certainly know, and if a large enough fraction of the posts in the forum are posts bashing a particular reader's sex, race, or whatever, that reader will simply leave. Nobody likes to be insulted, even if the insults are directed at a class, rather than a specific individual. So, you see, you do not need to know who is or is not an X in order to exclude all Xes from a forum; you just need to be loudly and pervasively offensive to Xes, and they will oblige you by removing themselves.
Now, you say that you want to hear "EVERYTHING that EVERYONE has to say" about a topic (a dubious sentiment in light of Sturgeon's Law, but certainly your privilege), so I put it to you: is it right for a minority of the participants in a forum to use persistent insults and offensive remarks to drive away a segment of the readers of the forum, and so to deny the rest of us the opportunity to hear their viewpoints? This is the topic Katz is trying to address. Whether he does so effectively is open to debate; his article is certainly noticably short on practicable solutions. However, burying your head in the sand isn't going to make the problem go away.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that one of the things I like about slashdot is that its moderation system does a pretty good job (most of the time) at filtering out the flamage and hostility. That's a rarity among internet fora (at least among those that allow open participation), however, and it's the thing that keeps me coming back here long after I've discarded most other similar fora as useless. It's kind of interesting to note that apparently when you remove the moderation (as would be the case, for instance, in email feedback to slashdot columnists), a lot of the civility is lost.
I'm a little fuzzy on what the various corporate officials actually do. (I've spent too much time in academe, I suppose). Can someone in the know explain the difference between the president, CEO, and chairman of the board? Which one is really in charge of the company? Basically, what responsibilities is Gates actually shucking off in this move?
Suppose Microsoft does release the next version of Office with encrypted file formats. Well, people still have to be able to read and write their own documents, so the encryption key has to be somewhere accessible to the user's copy of office, which means that a determined user could still get at it. As far as I know, there's no way around this. Encryption works great for keeping something secret from someone who isn't supposed to read it; it's not so good for keeping something secret from someone who is supposed to read it.
The same argument applies to DeCSS. The DVD consortium's crypto gaffes made life easier for the authors from DeCSS, by my impression from the discussion surrounding the event was that it would have happened eventually anyhow because the DVD player itself has to contain all the information necessary to decrypt a disk. (The tacit assumption is that truly tamper-proof hardware is impossible, but for software even that is not an issue.)
There was a slashdot article a few months ago about just such an application. The principal advantage is that intercepting one of the bits and retransmitting it will spoil it so that it can't be used, making a man in the middle attack impossible. The principal disadvantage is that intercepting one of the bits and retransmitting it will spoil it so that it can't be used, making most schemes for transmission over long distances impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why you think brains are subject to quantum effects, but digital circuits are not, since both produce outputs that are, in essence, step functions of their inputs (with the location of the step being the threshold for firing/not firing). Why is one subject to quantum effects and not the other? Furthermore, you seem to be confusing statistical fluctuations with "quantum effects". The mere fact that a statistical fluctuation can carry a neuron over (or under) its threshold does not mean that the system is behaving quantum mechanically; you would still see statistical effects even if electrons behaved clasically (i.e. like tiny ball bearings). In any case, for macroscopic systems these fluctuations are small, and so they have an effect only if you are poised on the cusp of the threshold. Contrast this with the randomness introduced by quantum mechanics, in which any superposition state can collapse into one a random eigenstate with finite probabality. To give an example, consider a hypothetical neuron. Let "off" (i.e. not firing) be represented by 0 and "on" (i.e. firing) be represented by 1, and let the neuron have a threshold of 0.5. Then consider an input of 0.25 (i.e. halfway to the threshold). Now, if these numbers represent potentials typical in a brain (say, a few millivolts), then statistical fluctuations will be far too small to bump that 0.25 all the way up to 0.5. Result, the neuron will not fire (output == 0) essentially 100% of the time.
Now, consider an analogous quantum system. There are two eigenstates |0> and |1>. An equal mixture of the two states: 1/sqrt(2) |0> + 1/sqrt(2) |1> will result in a superposition state that has equal probability of collapsing into either eigenstate. This is the analog of the threshold. Now, consider the analog of an input of 0.25. It would be something like sqrt(3)/2 |0> + 1/2 |1>. When observed, this state will collapse into |0> 3/4 of the time and into |1> 1/4 of the time. Notice that a state fairly distant from the "threshold" (if you can even call it that) still has a significant chance of going the "wrong" way. This is quantum mechanical behavior, and it is very different from that of garden-variety statistical fluctuations, and it is very unlikely to be relevant to how a brain works.
Having said all that, I'm not convinced that even mundane statistical fluctuations are essential to developing free will or consciousness. I think it is entirely possible for a collection of completely deterministic neurons to develop traits that we would recognize as consciousness. The argument is fairly involved, and I doubt I could do it justice here, so I will refer you to the books by Hofstadter that I mentioned earlier in the thread.
Finally, I think there is an important flaw in your argument for why brains probably exploit quantum effects. You focus on the perceived benefits of quantum brains, but you say nothing of the costs. This is like saying, "humans probably have wings because being able to fly would be a huge evolutionary advantage over being stuck on land." That is a true statement, but it ignores the detail that providing enough lift for a human to fly would take a huge amount of energy; our poor winged human would never be able to eat enough to keep himself airborne. Similarly, if quantum brains require a radically different design than the ones we actually have (and I suspect they do), then there could be any number of evolutionary drawbacks to quantum brains. For instance quantum neurons might be more delicate than the regular sort, or maybe they are not as space efficient. Basically, your argument only holds if there is a way to make regular brains do double duty as quantum brains, and I think that assumption is suspect.
-r
Yes, it is odd. I believe the Parliament has a publication similar to the Congressional Record that is accessible from the Parliament web site. It might be worth digging through it to see if there is any mention of what they were thinking. One possibility is that they were concerned about a possible "I destroyed the key" defense, so this gives them the opportunity to respond with, "Well, just give us the plaintext, then." There is a little logic there, since it would be hard to whip up a believable bogus plaintext on a moment's notice if you didn't already have one prepared. However, competent criminals will realize this, and they will just prepare their alternate plaintext in advance. Criminals have been using a similar tactic with accounting books for decades, so I don't imagine they will have much trouble adapting the practice to email correspondence.
Ok, the Tick was good fun. What made it such fun was that it was completely over the top. The Tick getting punched into orbit (and going on an existential journey within his mind), clones made entirely of snot, and armies of corn soldiers ("We're colonels!") and things of that sort were what made the Tick worth watching. Am I the only one that thinks that this is going to be hard to capture in live-action? A lot of the stuff that happened on the Tick was pretty improbable. I have my doubts about the show's ability to pull off effects like talking monkey geniuses on a weekly basis. It seems like either they won't try, and the show will be dull because of it, or they will try, and the cheesy effects will get in the way, and even if they manage to make the effects passable, I have my doubts about the actors' ability to play something that over the top without coming off as hammy.
I don't mean to sound like I'm dumping on it before it even gets off the ground (although I suppose I am), but I am very skeptical. Seems like a better choice would be to revive the animated series. That's what I would prefer, at least. Still, the ways of Hollywood are, at best, bizarre and inscrutable.
-r
So, I think it's pretty ludicrous to ascribe consciousness and free will to quantum effects in the brain. As far as I know, individual neurons do behave deterministically; they fire if and only if their inputs exceed a certain threshold, and that threshold involves a macroscopic flow of charge. That means that the quantum effects will all wash out statistically. Now, does the determinism of individual neurons rule out free will? I don't know the answer to that. I suspect that it does not, because I certainly feel like I have free will; however, I confess that I cannot prove that rigorously. For a particularly lucid discussion of how free will might (or might not) emerge from deterministic systems, I recommend Douglas Hofstadter's books. Both Godel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas have sections that talk about these issues. The Mind's I probably does too, but I haven't read that one (yet).
-r
Actually, the more I think about it, the more peculiar the clause about plaintext seems. Any putative plaintext that comes from the hand of the person being investigated is untrustworthy, and therefore unhelpful at best. Seeing this clause in the legislation makes one doubt whether the lawmakers truly understand the issues involved here. Viewed in that light, this law should at least provide a useful counterargument the next time someone claims that the US has a monopoly on clueless government (which, judging from recent Slashdot posts, should be sometime within the next 24 hours.)
-r
The CAVE works well for visualizing N-body calculations, like galaxy mergers, because the particles can be represented by simple shapes like spheres, and because you can pare down the particles to a reasonable number without losing too much information. Unfortunately, we had less success visualizing computational fluid dynamics calculations because the number of polygons required to represent the complicated surfaces made the whole business prohibitively sluggish. That was too bad because I had had these visions of the protostellar disk models swirling in midair in front of me like the accretion disks in ``The Black Hole'' (a cheesy sci-fi movie, for those not familiar with it). Oh, well, someday.
-r
Imagine you have a lump of some material. The electrons circling the atoms or molecules of the material have some characteristic structure that depends on the elements involved, how the electrons are shared in any molecular bonds in the material, and how the atoms or molecules are arranged in the bulk material (proximity of other atoms or molecules distorts the energy levels for orbiting electrons). This latter factor, by the way, is the difference between coal and diamond.
Now, along comes an electromagnetic wave, which is really just an electric field oscillating with a magnetic field. The electrons in the material are going to feel a force due to the E field (in this naive treatment we'll ignore the magnetic field). What's more, that force will want to drive the electrons to oscillate, but those oscillations will be resisted by forces that depend on the factors I mentioned above. The punchline is that the more the electrons are free to respond to the electric field's driving force, the more energy they will dissipate, the more the incoming light will be attenuated, and hence the more opaque the material will appear. Conversely, if the electrons are not free to respond, the light is not attenuated (much) and the material appears transparent. As you might expect, for any given material the response of the electrons varies greatly with frequency (just like the case of mechanical resonators). This gives rise to all sorts of phenomena, which you can find described in any good optics text.
Now, in the case of conductors (like metals) the electrons are very free to move around (that's what gives them their conductivity), and hence you would expect them to quickly dissipate any electromagnetic waves incident on them, and that is generally the case. Typically the ``skin depth'' for metals is about 1/6 of a wavelength. However, as you go to higher frequency, things get complicated again, because the conductivity has a wavelength dependence. Generally that dependence takes the form of a strong drop off in conductivity above some characteristic frequency. Evidently, this characteristic frequency is well above visible light frequencies for naturally occurring metals.
Another poster mentioned that DARPA is working on transparent metals. Presumably, then, their line of attack is to try to find some alloy with a crystalline structure that makes that alloy's characteristic frequency lower than visible light frequencies. If and when they succeed, it will be interesting to see what that does to the metal's other characteristics like malleability and ductility.
Hope that helps (and I hope I didn't post it too late for you to get back around to reading it at some point).
-r
Could you explain why this is? If I don't need a license to read a book I have purchased, why do I need one to use software that I have purchased? Where do music recordings fall; do I need a license to listen to them? I guess what I'm asking is, in a nutshell, why do software producers feel they are entitled to rights beyond what is normally granted by copyright? For that matter, why is the license game restricted to intellectual property? Why cannot car manufacturers, for instance, get in on the action with their own license agreements when you buy their products?
Also, what terms can they put in these licenses? What about these examples? As the purchaser you agree:
I'm pretty sure I have seen (1) in EULAs before. Is it enforcable? I bet music companies would love to have this right. Do they, and it's just that nobody ever thought of "licensing" CDs before? Should any copyright holder have the right to say you can't sell a product secondhand when you're done with it?
Number (5) also appears routinely in EULAs; it was the crux of the flap over converting NT Workstation, in effect, to NT Server by changing a registry key. Why is it that if I buy a car I can make whatever modifications I want, but if I buy software I'm not allowed to make any modifications whatsoever? If Chrysler wanted to include a "license agreement" with any cars it sold that forbade any unauthorized modification, could they? Would it hold up?
What about number (2)? Presumably that isn't legal, right? But (3) routinely appears in EULAs as a "thou shalt not reverse engineer" clause. If a protocol or file format is proprietary, doesn't (3) amount to (2) in effect?
Anyhow, I hope one of the more legally versed among the readership will take a few minutes to explain some of these issues because from where I'm sitting it looks an awful lot like a case of "what's ours is ours, and what's yours is ours too," but I'm sure it can't be that because big business would never do that to us, right?
As far as I can tell, what it boils down to is that copyright holders (with software manufacturers in the vanguard) are increasingly trying to control not just distribution of their products, but also the use of their products. As a mere citizen, I no longer pretend to understand the law well enough to say whether they can get away with it. (Had I but known it would come to this, I would have studied law instead of science, simply as a matter of self-preservation.), but, at least to a legal outsider, it seems like copyright shouldn't convey the right to dictate terms of use. The lawyer-priests may tell us that it should, and I guess that makes it so, but that doesn't mean we have to like it, and and it doesn't mean that we can't resist with all of our meager powers. I doubt it will do any good unless the lawyer-priests have a change of heart and decide to champion our cause, but it will at least give us something to do while we wait for the next round of buggy patches to all of our duly licensed software to download.
Sincerely yours,
Cynical in Charlottesville
-r
What's more, from the standpoint of General Relativity these constructs don't look anything like a black hole. The stress-energy tensor (the relativistic analog of mass density) is virtually unchanged by the modest rotational flows light traps made from Bose-Einstein condensate would require, meaning that these constructs should have exactly the gravitational properties you would expect of a static body of liquid in the laboratory (i.e. none to speak of). That means no space-time curvature, no ergosphere or frame dragging, no gravitational redshift, and no time dilation. For example, if they directed a stream of muons through these things they should find the muons' decay lifetime basically unchanged from what it would be if they sent the muons through the same liquid while it wasn't rotating.
I believe the authors make an important mistake when they say "... a moving dielectric medium acts on light as an effective gravitational field." That is clearly not true because this putative "gravitational field" does not obey the equivalence principle; viz. it accelerates light but not matter. The mistake is comparable to saying, "A charged pith ball in an accelerating train car will experience an `effective electric field' which will tend to accelerate it." and proceeding to compute the electromagnetic properties of this moving field. The analogy falls flat because the acceleration is not caused by an electric field, and so it can't be expected to act like one when you study its influence on anything else in the train car. Similarly, although you can compute a gravitational field that would trap light in the same way as these constructs, that doesn't mean that there is actually a gravitational field present, nor does it mean that other effects that would be present for the gravitational field you calculated will actually show up in your apparatus.
None of that means that this isn't interesting research, of course, but as far as I can tell the connection to black holes and astrophysics is nonexistent.
-r
This is not quite correct. The speed of light in a dielectric depends on the index of refraction, n, of the medium; n is in turn a function of the magnetic permeability, mu, and dielectric constant, epsilon of the material. At the root of it all mu and epsilon are functions of the molecular and electronic structure of the medium, as well as the frequency of the light itself. Thus, two materials with similar densities but very different dielectric constants will have very different indices of refraction, and hence light will propogate within them at different speeds. What's more, even for a single material, n (and hence the speed of light) will in general vary with wavelength. This is called "dispersion", and it is responsible for such diverse phenomena as rainbows, prisms, and smearing of pulses from pulsars.
The important thing to remember is that only the speed of light in vacuo functions as an absolute "speed limit". Particles can and do exceed the speeds of light in dielectric media, causing them to emit Cerenkov radiation in the process.
-r
I am skeptical that these "optical black holes" will trap particles as well as they trap light. Particles have no problem traveling faster than the speed of light within the dielectric, so long as they do not exceed the speed of light in vacuo. Thus, particles should be able to escape these things, even if light cannot. In other words, these beasts have no true event horizon, and so any analogy to astrophysical black holes is suspect.
Robert Link
Also a physicist. Gave up on Usenet a long time ago.
Let me be clear. Giving control over DVD to an oligopoly (for that's what the DVD consortium is) will allow them basically to destroy fair use rights for any information distributed by DVD. We cannot afford to allow free use rights to wither and die, not even for something as trivial as the crap that Hollywood turns out. If we allow it here we set a precedent that will open the door to ending fair use rights everywhere. In my mind, to overcome the evil of allowing CSS to remain closed the consortium must show that an evil of equal or greater magnitude would result from allowing DeCSS to open it up. In particular, I would like to see some proof that DVD sales have dropped measurably since the release of DeCSS. If they have not, then I have to conclude that the piracy that DeCSS has enabled is not significant, certainly not a threat to the industry, and, therefore, not a valid excuse to allow the consortium to maintain its stranglehold on the format.
-r
Do you honestly think that DeCSS is going to stimulate piracy significantly? If so, how? Why would someone who didn't copy DVDs before suddenly decide to start just because DeCSS came out? Honestly, that doesn't make any sense to me. How can you advocate outlawing a technology (DeCSS) because it provides one more way for people to do something they could already have done using other means? And what of the original claim that piracy will be what DeCSS "will really be used for"? How do you support that?
-r
Then, too, some people seem to view all of this as a game; that is, a set of rules that you must work within to achieve a desired objective. That is not a bad description, but if you take the analogy too far then you find yourself reasoning that changing the rules in the middle of the "game" is unsportsmanlike, and hence should be avoided.
Just some idle musings while I wait for some code to run. Make of them what you will.
-r
Still don't believe me? Let's make a wager. If illegal copies of DVDs increase 5-fold from what they were pre-DeCSS before some company markets a no zone-restriction DVD player (which could be implemented in either hardware or software), then you win. If vice-versa, then I win. Naturally, if DeCSS is squashed by the courts, then the wager is off. What do you say? Do we have a bet?
-r
I am not sure I buy this line of argument. Copyright gives the holder the right to dictate who can or cannot distribute copies, but the rights it gives to dictate how a legally acquired copy is used are very limited. In particular you cannot dictate where or how often people use their (legally acquired) copies. Now, do you really think the lawmakers intended for this law to be circumventable by a mere "license agreement"? If so, then why didn't they just write into the law that copyright holders could place whatever restrictions they wanted on use of their material? I mean, when is it not advantageous for a copyright holder to put extra restrictions in the "license agreement"? Add to that the fact that quite a few legal scholars have expressed doubts about the validity of making a license agreement a precondition to a mass market purchase, and I think you have to agree that this argument is on shaky ground at best.
Here's a philosophical question for you, based on a real situation. When I was living in Bloomington, IN and shopping for a new car, I found that I could get a much better deal by going to a dealer in Louisville[1]. In other words, Louisville was a "cheap" area for new cars, while Bloomington was an "expensive" area. Suppose the auto manufacturer wanted to force me to buy from the more expensive dealer by forcing me to sign a "license agreement" when I bought the car in Kentucky saying that I would not operate the car in Indiana. Should the manufacturer be allowed to impose this restriction? If so, from whence do you believe they derive the right to tell me where I can or cannot drive a car that I have legally purchased? If not, then how is this situation different from the DVD situation you have described?
Finally, one more philosophical question. You describe the DVD zone restrictions as "entirely immoral". Even presuming them to be legal, why, then, do you defend them? Time was when people protested laws that were unjust, let alone "entirely immoral". What has happened to us? Have we forgotten that the power of those laws derives from our consent?
-r
[1] Note that I am not referring to the difference in state sales tax. Louisville dealers were just cheaper in general, probably owing to having more competition.
No, the Chinese government is more worried about the Internet fostering activism. When each dissenter has to stand up to the government alone, it's easy to frighten everyone into submission. But let people get organized, let the dissenters know they are not alone, and before too long you can't frighten anyone into submission. That's what the Chinese government fears, and that's what it is trying to crack down on with these measures.
-r
Note also that there is a difference between "equilibrium" and "stability". Equilibrium just means that there exists a static solution to the equations of motion (albeit static in a rotating frame of reference in this case). Stable means that the static solution, if perturbed, will return to the equilibrium instead of drifting off into some dynamic orbit. The L1-L3 points are stable to perturbations in one direction (the tangential, if I recall), but they are unstable to perturbations in the other direction. Consequently, one doesn't expect to find long-lived orbits at these locations. The L4 and L5 equilibria are stable against all perturbations, so one might expect to find objects in long lived orbits at these locations, like the Trojan asteroids, for instance.
The original poster's confusion arose because the earth has two sets of Lagrange points associated with it. One comes from the earth-moon system (in which the earth is M1 and the moon is M2), and the other comes from the earth-sun system (M1==sun, M2==earth). An object at L4 or L5 in the earth-moon system would appear to orbit the earth in synch with the moon, while an object at an earth-sun lagrange point would appear to orbit the sun in synch with the earth. So, it's a little far-fetched to call an object at the earth-sun Lagrange points a "second moon", although such an object is in some sense more deeply associated with the earth than an object in some random solar orbit.
Finally, one should remember that the Lagrange points are solutions of the restricted 3-body problem which presumes that there are only three bodies in the system. Obviously, that isn't the case in our solar system. For instance, I've seen people argue that the earth-moon L4 and L5 points aren't really stable because of the sun's influence. Similarly, the lagrange points between the sun and most of the outer planets are thought to be disrupted by Jupiter's gravity. Consequently, I wouldn't be surprised if Venus' gravity had a tendency to destabilize the earth-sun Lagrange points, resulting in objects trapped there eventually escaping into regular solar orbits.
-r
You speak as though the desire to advance technology is incompatible with the desire to make money. I think you would be hard pressed to defend that statement rigorously, whether in its general form, or applied to Bill Gates specifically.
Take me for example; I'm an astrophysicist. If it turns out that I can't make money doing astrophysics, I will do something else. Does that mean that I don't care about astrophysics, that I'm just in it for the money? Of course not. It does mean that I have to eat and pay my rent, and on top of that doing first-class work in itself requires resources. If I can't at least cover those costs, then I can't do astrophysics.
It seems probable to me that some of these things were going through Gates' mind when he wrote his "Open Letter to Hobbyists". It's also easy to understand why he might feel that something he had put a lot of work into was "his", and that he was entitled a royalty whenever someone copied it. After all, aren't authors of books entitled to the same privilege? There are some problems with software licensing terms, to be sure, but I don't think the root of those problems is that people like Bill Gates want to get paid for the software they produce. We may not agree with their position, but that position is not so unreasonable that we should not at least respect it.
-r
Now, we could easily get rid of all polution overnight. Just turn off all the factories, power plants, and automobiles, and, poof, no more pollution. That's not going to happen, of course, because the result would be widespread devastation. The point is that rational public policy demands a balance between protecting our environment, on the one hand, and protecting our economy on the other. Ridiculous overstatements about the amount of pollution (even if they are probably based more in ignorance than in malice, which I think is likely here) do not further the cause of rational policymaking, and the original poster was right to condemn them.
Finally, just out of curiousity:
I'm confused. Is the "*grin*" supposed to cause this not to be a rude comment? If so, it doesn't work, in my opinion.
-r
You may not know the race, sex, or creed of the other readers of a forum you participate in, but the readers themselves certainly know, and if a large enough fraction of the posts in the forum are posts bashing a particular reader's sex, race, or whatever, that reader will simply leave. Nobody likes to be insulted, even if the insults are directed at a class, rather than a specific individual. So, you see, you do not need to know who is or is not an X in order to exclude all Xes from a forum; you just need to be loudly and pervasively offensive to Xes, and they will oblige you by removing themselves.
Now, you say that you want to hear "EVERYTHING that EVERYONE has to say" about a topic (a dubious sentiment in light of Sturgeon's Law, but certainly your privilege), so I put it to you: is it right for a minority of the participants in a forum to use persistent insults and offensive remarks to drive away a segment of the readers of the forum, and so to deny the rest of us the opportunity to hear their viewpoints? This is the topic Katz is trying to address. Whether he does so effectively is open to debate; his article is certainly noticably short on practicable solutions. However, burying your head in the sand isn't going to make the problem go away.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that one of the things I like about slashdot is that its moderation system does a pretty good job (most of the time) at filtering out the flamage and hostility. That's a rarity among internet fora (at least among those that allow open participation), however, and it's the thing that keeps me coming back here long after I've discarded most other similar fora as useless. It's kind of interesting to note that apparently when you remove the moderation (as would be the case, for instance, in email feedback to slashdot columnists), a lot of the civility is lost.
-r
-r
The same argument applies to DeCSS. The DVD consortium's crypto gaffes made life easier for the authors from DeCSS, by my impression from the discussion surrounding the event was that it would have happened eventually anyhow because the DVD player itself has to contain all the information necessary to decrypt a disk. (The tacit assumption is that truly tamper-proof hardware is impossible, but for software even that is not an issue.)
-r
-r