If electromagnetic energy can't escape a black hole, what can? I had an odd thought -- gravity. Would it be possible to devise some sort of complicated machinery to answer, say, a yes/no question about life inside the event horizon, and by way of an answer produce some sort of gravitational "ripple"(ie produce some sort of critical mass/density)? If we can get gravity out of a black hole, there's hope that we could eventually get some answers about the nature of the beast.
The fight over CSS is due to the fact that if you don't buy an "approved" player, you can't use products *that you paid for*. DeCSS is not about piracy, no matter what the MPAA wants us to believe. Don't add more confusion by trying to link DeCSS and Napster--they're different ends of the spectrum.
If you don't like the laws that are being made, buy your own, or start a lobby group, or vote Nader, or do anything except claim that your desire to get music for free is some sort of noble cause.
You make a very good point on the mingling issue(being your own bridge) but I disagree with your take on language. While it is possible to communicate with someone in person(via gestures, facial expressions, or whatnot), when text is your only medium you'd better be speaking the same language or you won't get much done. Of course, this brings up the question of non-textual forms of communication on the net. I personally like ease and privacy of text communication, but I can see where another form of communication could come into play.
The whole world won't become a village until we all speak the same language. On the scale of human population, cities are fairly small-scale. It's easy to hook up with your neighbors in a city. On the internet, you generally meet a few people who have common interests. These are your intellectual "neighbors." The internet seems to be shaping up to be a model of the current world -- many isolated "settlements" of people who share common interests.
With the development of DWDM, terabit switches, and other high-end networking technology, who's to say that by the time we all have 100Mbit connections, the backbone won't be up in the terabit+ range? It's not like technology is just sitting still for everyone else. Remember, the whole Net used to run at 56k.
As for what happens in the meantime, you can see this already. I'm sitting on a 10Mbit network connected to an OC-3. Sometimes I get 500kbps+, but usually I get closer to DSL speed - 100kpbs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but having a 100Mbit link merely means that you *can* get that kind of bandwidth - not that you *will*. What's to keep the routers from just dividing the available bandwidth evenly among all users?
It doesn't matter whether or not the RIAA is bad--and I'll be right there with you saying that they are. The problem is that whether you like it or not, the music shared on Napster is someone else's property. And taking that property makes you a thief.
If I write a piece of software that I want to sell commercially, I don't want the l33t skr1pt k1dd33z spreading it all over the net. I want my money's worth. Sound greedy, immoral, and ineffective? Think of it another way.
If I write a piece of software that I want to distribute under the GPL, I don't want Microsoft to take, modify, and resell it as proprietary software. I want the users to get their freedom.
If you're going to argue against rights to control your own media, then you're going to have to get rid of the good as well as the bad. You can't have it any other way.
to buy the games that are out now. Until a Linux game makes a serious sales impact, gaming companies(which are often living from milestone to milestone) won't see much benefit in porting their product.
He has a point, though. It would be nice if there was some way to ensure that the people on the net respect the net. If you have to have a license for hunting, fishing, and driving, why not for I2? Admittedly, the above examples are threats to life, limb, and environment, but there's no reason we shouldn't try to protect our information sources too. If net access was seen as a privilege rather than a right...
Whether for better or for worse(and IMHO it's worse), people often see taking responsibility for their actions as some form of admitting defeat. Think about it: how many flame wars do you see that go something like this:
Flamer1: Product X has foo. Therefore it rules!
Flamer2: But foo has problems with bar!
Flamer1: You suck!
The key is that the flamer cannot handle being *wrong*. If we look back at the hunter-gatherer tribes of ten thousand years ago[1], such an admission of wrongness could quite possibly result in an alpha male being pulled down by some ambitious member of the pack(the same holds for animals--make a mistake and you pay). Of course, more intelligent people will realize that you can only truly correct a mistake when you admit a mistake has been made. Then again, human nature usually doesn't go down without a fight.
Unfortunately, there has been little effort in our culture as of late to really embed personal responsibility into society. I hope this changes soon; we'll all be better off for it.
[1]: You can understand a great deal about human nature by looking at how various characteristics fits into the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer tribesman of ten thousand years ago. Humans haven't evolved that much:)
It never ceases to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people allow themselves to seize up when confronted with unfamiliar technology. The same people who can get a medical degree just don't want to even give technology a try. Funny.
It's not just that people don't know about technology, it's that they gloat about their ignorance. The only other field I've noticed receiving such "attention" is math. Normal course of nature, or frightening trend?
45402 * 46656 = 2118275712 total domain names using one English word as the domain and one three letter gTLD.
Even if(as you point out) all three-letter gTLDs are not desirable, that's still well over a billion of the simplest addresses. Add in company names, foreign words, ccTLDs, etc, and it seems to me like there's more than enough domain names to go around(at least for several decades, anyway).
The distributed nature of DNS makes some sort of hierarchial system necessary(assuming you want to keep DNS), but the problem with the current system is not so much a fault of the system itself but a fault with its users. As soon as domain names because "valuable" and subject to IP laws and such, some sort of collapse was almost guaranteed. Better to add a few TLDs and enforce the current system better: absolute first come first served except in cases of crystal clear abuse, no cross-TLD registration, and a limited number of domains per commercial organization.
A problem with using trademarks in domain name disputes:
IANAL, but IIRC(enough I's for ya?) trademarks only extend through one commercial domain. So, for example, I could start up a company called Ford's Musical Instruments, Inc. and not be breaking trademark law. However, an attempt to start up a Ford Car Company would result in a nasty lawsuit that I would most likely lose.
So who gets the domain name ford.com? Ford Motor Company? Ford Musical Instruments? Betty Ford? Joe Ford, the guy down the street? Why should the one with the most money have any intrinsic right to the name? The internet's not just about commerce for big corporations.
I feel that a decent way to address the problem is to actually hold register-ers to the purpose of the various top level domains. No more corporations in.edu, please! Maybe then other groups and people will be on an equal footing
On the other hand, binary distributions of *old* ROMs really don't hurt anybody(except possibly in the legal sense). As far as I can tell, the only damage that might be done to Sega by trading of old Genesis and SMS ROMs is the weakening of their trademarks, which, IIRC, must be enforced to retain their strength.
It is unfortunate that Sega and other such companies feel that they cannot support free distribution of such abandonware, as many of the old school games are a lot better than what usually comes along today. If they really want to make money off of those games, they should consider releasing them as collections for the newer platforms(how many old Sega games do you think could fit on a DC?). That way you could still have something close to the original experience while at the same time protecting trademarks and copyrights.
While I agree that the government needs to be able to monitor suspected criminals(with a warrant of course), I'm not sure that arbitrary filtering criteria is the way to go. What would they use? Keyword searches? TCP/IP headers? What's to prevent the FBI from picking up whole usenet threads or the actions of people reading Slashdot? If I post a response to Joe Child Molester on Slashdot will I come under FBI scrutiny just for mentioning his name? What about the people who quote my(and his) message? Admittedly, these are public forums, but it seems like a huge waste of time to have to scan through all of the fluff that will inevitably be produced. And heaven forbid there should be another person on the ISP with the same name.
Why not just snoop at the (modem/DSLAM/etc) server? If packet sniffing were more like a literal wiretap, I would be a lot more comfortable and I'm sure the FBI would be able to get a lot more work done. It shouldn't be that hard to get only one user's packets.
I have to wonder if all of this hype about the ever-growing size of the internet is just blind optimism. Growth doesn't seem to have brought very much of any good. For every Slashdot or Linux kernel there's a thousand new pr0n or warez sites, a thousand badly designed web pages...
Corporations patenting obvious ideas left and right to try to gain some control over the network. So-called "intellectual property concerns" become dominant features in internet policy making. Commercialism seems more dominant than community. What happened to it all? Is there any hope for a populist revival to restore more of the old community feel?
If it proves that Win2k and BSD can cooperate in the same environment, even temporarily. Think about it. All along we've been trying to convince businesses to introduce Linux/BSD into their computing environments. What better ammunition to use on them than this?
"But boss, Microsoft is doing it..."
The solution is not another special interest group
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 2
The solution to the problem of bad politics is not a "geek" special interest group. It does not lie in gathering influence to protect our interests. If we do that, then we're no better than the RIAA or the tobacco industry.
The solution is to promote a society in which *everyone*, not just corporations or lobby groups, takes an interest in politics. If each and every individual(or at least a commanding majority) watched the actions of their elected representatives and made their voice heard, there would be no need for endless lawsuits to overturn unjust laws. There would be no midnight-hour amendments to unrelated laws, because the first politician to do so would drown in angry mail from a hundred million people. This is what democracy requires to function--an active citizen oversight process.
Now you, yes *you*, can have your very own copy of the Backstreet Boy of your choice(Britney Spears models coming soon!). Choose the best Boy as a model for your child based on such characteristics as fashion sense and skill at producing a pouty face! Buy today, and be the first on your block(but not the last) to turn the world's children into shallow, mindless, Seventeen-magazine-fearing proponents of the New Corporate World Order!
On your website, you mention quite often the need for web site developers to design interfaces that can be understood almost immediately. At what point do you feel that the need for power outweighs the need for usability? I speak specifically about operating systems. As an operating system is something that remains relatively constant over long periods of time, should users expect to put in more work to get the full benefit of their system, ie is it that bad to have to descend into a command line occaisonally to get some work done?
Slashdot Mirror
If electromagnetic energy can't escape a black hole, what can? I had an odd thought -- gravity. Would it be possible to devise some sort of complicated machinery to answer, say, a yes/no question about life inside the event horizon, and by way of an answer produce some sort of gravitational "ripple"(ie produce some sort of critical mass/density)? If we can get gravity out of a black hole, there's hope that we could eventually get some answers about the nature of the beast.
The fight over CSS is due to the fact that if you don't buy an "approved" player, you can't use products *that you paid for*. DeCSS is not about piracy, no matter what the MPAA wants us to believe. Don't add more confusion by trying to link DeCSS and Napster--they're different ends of the spectrum.
If you don't like the laws that are being made, buy your own, or start a lobby group, or vote Nader, or do anything except claim that your desire to get music for free is some sort of noble cause.
You make a very good point on the mingling issue(being your own bridge) but I disagree with your take on language. While it is possible to communicate with someone in person(via gestures, facial expressions, or whatnot), when text is your only medium you'd better be speaking the same language or you won't get much done. Of course, this brings up the question of non-textual forms of communication on the net. I personally like ease and privacy of text communication, but I can see where another form of communication could come into play.
The whole world won't become a village until we all speak the same language. On the scale of human population, cities are fairly small-scale. It's easy to hook up with your neighbors in a city. On the internet, you generally meet a few people who have common interests. These are your intellectual "neighbors." The internet seems to be shaping up to be a model of the current world -- many isolated "settlements" of people who share common interests.
Oops. Guess I didn't read that as closely as I thought :).
With the development of DWDM, terabit switches, and other high-end networking technology, who's to say that by the time we all have 100Mbit connections, the backbone won't be up in the terabit+ range? It's not like technology is just sitting still for everyone else. Remember, the whole Net used to run at 56k.
As for what happens in the meantime, you can see this already. I'm sitting on a 10Mbit network connected to an OC-3. Sometimes I get 500kbps+, but usually I get closer to DSL speed - 100kpbs. Correct me if I'm wrong, but having a 100Mbit link merely means that you *can* get that kind of bandwidth - not that you *will*. What's to keep the routers from just dividing the available bandwidth evenly among all users?
How exactly did the Mesopotamians figure out that:
a. Matter is composed of atoms
and
b. Those atoms are composed of charged particles?
From what I remember of Meso. history, it seems a bit beyond the technology of the time. Please enlighten me, I'm very interested to hear this.
It doesn't matter whether or not the RIAA is bad--and I'll be right there with you saying that they are. The problem is that whether you like it or not, the music shared on Napster is someone else's property. And taking that property makes you a thief.
If I write a piece of software that I want to sell commercially, I don't want the l33t skr1pt k1dd33z spreading it all over the net. I want my money's worth. Sound greedy, immoral, and ineffective? Think of it another way.
If I write a piece of software that I want to distribute under the GPL, I don't want Microsoft to take, modify, and resell it as proprietary software. I want the users to get their freedom.
If you're going to argue against rights to control your own media, then you're going to have to get rid of the good as well as the bad. You can't have it any other way.
to buy the games that are out now. Until a Linux game makes a serious sales impact, gaming companies(which are often living from milestone to milestone) won't see much benefit in porting their product.
He has a point, though. It would be nice if there was some way to ensure that the people on the net respect the net. If you have to have a license for hunting, fishing, and driving, why not for I2? Admittedly, the above examples are threats to life, limb, and environment, but there's no reason we shouldn't try to protect our information sources too. If net access was seen as a privilege rather than a right...
Just a few random thoughts.
Whether for better or for worse(and IMHO it's worse), people often see taking responsibility for their actions as some form of admitting defeat. Think about it: how many flame wars do you see that go something like this:
:)
Flamer1: Product X has foo. Therefore it rules!
Flamer2: But foo has problems with bar!
Flamer1: You suck!
The key is that the flamer cannot handle being *wrong*. If we look back at the hunter-gatherer tribes of ten thousand years ago[1], such an admission of wrongness could quite possibly result in an alpha male being pulled down by some ambitious member of the pack(the same holds for animals--make a mistake and you pay). Of course, more intelligent people will realize that you can only truly correct a mistake when you admit a mistake has been made. Then again, human nature usually doesn't go down without a fight.
Unfortunately, there has been little effort in our culture as of late to really embed personal responsibility into society. I hope this changes soon; we'll all be better off for it.
[1]: You can understand a great deal about human nature by looking at how various characteristics fits into the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer tribesman of ten thousand years ago. Humans haven't evolved that much
Put an LCD under the transparent skin in your hand. Put a Linux system in your stomach. Now you're a walking open-source machine!
It never ceases to amaze me how many otherwise intelligent people allow themselves to seize up when confronted with unfamiliar technology. The same people who can get a medical degree just don't want to even give technology a try. Funny.
It's not just that people don't know about technology, it's that they gloat about their ignorance. The only other field I've noticed receiving such "attention" is math. Normal course of nature, or frightening trend?
" Oh, I don't know anything about *that*..."
Of course it won't succeed. How could any platform succeed without Final Fantasy XIII/XIV/XV :-)?
How many domain names do we need?
/usr/dict/words
/usr/dict/words
$ wc
45402 45402 409048
so, with 49402 words in English alone...
45402 * 46656 = 2118275712 total domain names using one English word as the domain and one three letter gTLD.
Even if(as you point out) all three-letter gTLDs are not desirable, that's still well over a billion of the simplest addresses. Add in company names, foreign words, ccTLDs, etc, and it seems to me like there's more than enough domain names to go around(at least for several decades, anyway).
The distributed nature of DNS makes some sort of hierarchial system necessary(assuming you want to keep DNS), but the problem with the current system is not so much a fault of the system itself but a fault with its users. As soon as domain names because "valuable" and subject to IP laws and such, some sort of collapse was almost guaranteed. Better to add a few TLDs and enforce the current system better: absolute first come first served except in cases of crystal clear abuse, no cross-TLD registration, and a limited number of domains per commercial organization.
A problem with using trademarks in domain name disputes:
.edu, please! Maybe then other groups and people will be on an equal footing
IANAL, but IIRC(enough I's for ya?) trademarks only extend through one commercial domain. So, for example, I could start up a company called Ford's Musical Instruments, Inc. and not be breaking trademark law. However, an attempt to start up a Ford Car Company would result in a nasty lawsuit that I would most likely lose.
So who gets the domain name ford.com? Ford Motor Company? Ford Musical Instruments? Betty Ford? Joe Ford, the guy down the street? Why should the one with the most money have any intrinsic right to the name? The internet's not just about commerce for big corporations.
I feel that a decent way to address the problem is to actually hold register-ers to the purpose of the various top level domains. No more corporations in
On the other hand, binary distributions of *old* ROMs really don't hurt anybody(except possibly in the legal sense). As far as I can tell, the only damage that might be done to Sega by trading of old Genesis and SMS ROMs is the weakening of their trademarks, which, IIRC, must be enforced to retain their strength.
It is unfortunate that Sega and other such companies feel that they cannot support free distribution of such abandonware, as many of the old school games are a lot better than what usually comes along today. If they really want to make money off of those games, they should consider releasing them as collections for the newer platforms(how many old Sega games do you think could fit on a DC?). That way you could still have something close to the original experience while at the same time protecting trademarks and copyrights.
While I agree that the government needs to be able to monitor suspected criminals(with a warrant of course), I'm not sure that arbitrary filtering criteria is the way to go. What would they use? Keyword searches? TCP/IP headers? What's to prevent the FBI from picking up whole usenet threads or the actions of people reading Slashdot? If I post a response to Joe Child Molester on Slashdot will I come under FBI scrutiny just for mentioning his name? What about the people who quote my(and his) message? Admittedly, these are public forums, but it seems like a huge waste of time to have to scan through all of the fluff that will inevitably be produced. And heaven forbid there should be another person on the ISP with the same name.
Why not just snoop at the (modem/DSLAM/etc) server? If packet sniffing were more like a literal wiretap, I would be a lot more comfortable and I'm sure the FBI would be able to get a lot more work done. It shouldn't be that hard to get only one user's packets.
I have to wonder if all of this hype about the ever-growing size of the internet is just blind optimism. Growth doesn't seem to have brought very much of any good. For every Slashdot or Linux kernel there's a thousand new pr0n or warez sites, a thousand badly designed web pages...
Corporations patenting obvious ideas left and right to try to gain some control over the network. So-called "intellectual property concerns" become dominant features in internet policy making. Commercialism seems more dominant than community. What happened to it all? Is there any hope for a populist revival to restore more of the old community feel?
If it proves that Win2k and BSD can cooperate in the same environment, even temporarily. Think about it. All along we've been trying to convince businesses to introduce Linux/BSD into their computing environments. What better ammunition to use on them than this?
"But boss, Microsoft is doing it..."
The solution to the problem of bad politics is not a "geek" special interest group. It does not lie in gathering influence to protect our interests. If we do that, then we're no better than the RIAA or the tobacco industry.
The solution is to promote a society in which *everyone*, not just corporations or lobby groups, takes an interest in politics. If each and every individual(or at least a commanding majority) watched the actions of their elected representatives and made their voice heard, there would be no need for endless lawsuits to overturn unjust laws. There would be no midnight-hour amendments to unrelated laws, because the first politician to do so would drown in angry mail from a hundred million people. This is what democracy requires to function--an active citizen oversight process.
Now you, yes *you*, can have your very own copy of the Backstreet Boy of your choice(Britney Spears models coming soon!). Choose the best Boy as a model for your child based on such characteristics as fashion sense and skill at producing a pouty face! Buy today, and be the first on your block(but not the last) to turn the world's children into shallow, mindless, Seventeen-magazine-fearing proponents of the New Corporate World Order!
On your website, you mention quite often the need
for web site developers to design interfaces that
can be understood almost immediately. At what point do you feel that the need for power outweighs the need for usability? I speak specifically about operating systems. As an operating system is something that remains relatively constant over long periods of time, should users expect to put in more work to get the full benefit of their system, ie is it that bad to have to descend into a command line occaisonally to get some work done?