we are overloaded by information about information overload.
You have him in a bit of a logical bind there. Any discussion of information overload will be to some degree self-refferential.
The instruction 'less is more' does itself add a little bit more.
The proverb 'silence is golden' does itself break the silence.
Total silence will not solve the problem. Spam will not vanish if we simply stop talking about spam.
"If programmers are allowed to crack eBook encryption,the next Napster-style trading system will be exchanging copies of "Moby Dick" instead of songs by Moby,
You know, that's a damned good idea. Gentlemen, Herman Mellville's masterpeice
Moby Dick
provided for your reading pleasure by project Gutenberg.
Speaking of Asimov and benevolent AI, I think it's interesting to take his laws of robotics and see how they play out throughout his Robot and Foundation serieses. From the 3 laws of robotics (do not harm a human by action or inaction, obey humans, self preservation) robots (Daneel and Giskard) derive a 4th law, the zeroth law of robotics, not to harm humanity by action or inaction. So they become protectors of all of humanity. But to understand how to help humanity, they need to be able to predict that their actions will help reather than hurt humanity. The tool of this prediction is the laws of humanics, later developed by hari seldon into psychohistory. But even a society scientifically designed for the greatest good of all (the Foundation) is still imperfect. Not everything can be predicted, not everything can be known, people still suffer. Daneel's solution is Gaia - he reengineers humans to obey the laws of robotics, and integrates them into one whole living organism. (for a much grimmer view of the giant living comunity organism, read Hellstroms Hive by Frank Herbert).
In any case, I find Asimov's conclusions to be deeply disturbing. Robots roboticize humanity in order to perfectly serve them.
I had a CD from 1990 that exhibited the same thing.
Here's a question for somebody who has had one of these 'protected' CD's for a while. I speculated the other day in the discussion of the macrovision protection that the inclusion of bogus data coupled with the scratches and smudges of normal wear and tear would be too much for the CD player's error correction sooner, that the addition of garbage data would effectively shorten the playlife of the CD. Does somebody have a 'protected' CD that has been around for a while and has seen heavy use? If so, can they confirm a reduced playlife?
Here's an idea that I've been tossing around. Maybe it will be feasible with a grid installed. What about paying for internet access with clock cycles? I could certainly use perpetual 'free' net access more than I could use a supercomputer on my desk. I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Speaking of defective, as I understand it, these 'protected' CD's deliberately introduce imperfections that the CD player's built in error correction will be able to deal with. The article mentions that this is the same way that the CD player deals with scratches and smudges on the CD and laser misreads. (I know, elementary, but bear with me). These 'protected' CD's may play fine when they are brand new, but what about after a couple of months when the CD player has to deal with scratches, smudges AND slightly corrupt data. I'd be willing to bet that this protection method will significantly reduce the playlife of the CD's. But do these jerks care? No - they just push the consequences of their actions into the future, and somebody else will have to deal with it later. These kind of 'fire and forget' tactics really tick me off. It's kind of like selling snake oil in my opinion. I hope these guys get it right in the ass.
If this is a FUD campaign, it could be a part of the old political strategem - "Create the problem. Let people suffer. Attack a scapegoat, and offer a solution that happens to fortify your postion." Who who would better know how to exploit an M$ security hole . ..M$!
Greetings:
The guy at Del Taco that sold us food at 3am to allow us to perform this research. The guy who left the warm "Code Red" Mountain Dew in the eEye lab.
William Burroughs:" Word is Image. Image is Virus".
Code Red is actually a mind virus. Because of it's physical components, it is now on the brains and tongues of the computer literate, the government and the media. It was designed by the Pepsi Corporation to embed the idea of Mountain Dew into minds, and thereby increase sales. I refuse to buy Code Red Mountain Dew. I will not be brain hacked.
This immideatly reminded me of all the "Big Brother is Watching" posters plastered everywhere in the Orwellian society.
You know, this reminded me of 1984 too, but a different aspect of it. It reminded me of the way that words and identities of things got turned around and affixed to their opposites. You know, "war is peace" "slavery is freedom". That kind of thing. I could imagine these letters coming straight out of the "ministry of love". I mean come on - who in their right mind could mistake this this threatening fear offensive for a truce!?
Then you should be arguing for shorter copyright terms
You know, I've been thinking about this as well. the 95 year limit is from an age where information moves more slowly. Considering the rate at which all things digital become obsolete, I think that there ought to be a totally revamped system of digital copyrighting. I'm thinking around the area of 5 years. After that it's all public domain.
You know, maybe this isn't such a bad idea. All the stuff that these guys are griping about is primarily a b2b affair. I suppose they could set up their online shopping malls up in internet3 as well, so when somebody was actually getting online to buy something (loging on to internet3) that would be the obvious time to advertise to them. So, maybe we can get all those idiotic animations and popups and sponsor messages off of internet1 (where they are eating up bandwidth) and onto internet3 where they belong.
But let's go one further. Businesses using internet3 should pay taxes to support internet1 so that everything on internet1 is free. Why? Why it's that Intellectual Property they keep talking about. I seem to remember that e-commerce was a johnny-come-lately to the scene, which means that the internet was someone else's idea
I think we should definitely get a manned mission to Mars as soon as possible.
I'm with this guy. It is my belief that without inspiration, people become bitter and societies lose their cohesion. Well, this kind of stuff certainly inspires me, and I think to a certain extend it inspires people all over the globe. "If we can put a man on the moon . .." has become a figure of speech everywhere. Everyone that I have met has the image of a man on the moon burned into their brains, and takes it as evidence of what mankind (properley motivated) is capable of. I think we need more of that.
the most drastically trimmed down . . . mission . . . would cost 30 billion dollars.
OK, lets work on that 30 billion number.
Consider this "immediate tax relief" that GW got for the US. I imagine that due to one circumstance or another, individual tax payers are on an average going to get about half of the max payment of $300 (I personally have been informed by the IRS that they are going to give me $39 - whoopee). But multiply that average $150 by 250 million and you are in the right ballpark 37+ billion. I'd much rather have a man on mars than tax releif. Also, it might make economic sense - 37 billion invested in R&D and heavy industry is going to have a major ripple effect and numerous spinnoff technologies.
I agree. There's a great line (I think it's from The Two Jakes with Jack Nicholson) that if you want to figure out what's going on, just follow the money. Don't listen to what they say, just watch the money, and see if they are scamming you, if they are lying, if they are profiteering. In this case they are, and by their own actions, they discredit themselves.
Why on earth isn't US Energy Policy pushing hard for the development of fusion based technology?
This is probably a troll, but I think that it bears saying nonetheless. A major reason that the US won't push hard for fusion research is vested interest. This country is run (at least in part) by oilmen. I'm going to include excerps of research I did into the wealth of the cabinet, because a good number of them had heavy backgrounds in fossil fuels. I think that these guys are going to give kickback after kickback to fossil fuel corporations. And I don't put them above personal greed either.
President George W Bush: Former CEO of Harken Energy, a failure of a texas oil company which was used as a tax haven by all of his texas billionaire buddies. It was bought out, and GW proffited around 1 million dollars. Later he made 800,000 dollars in insider trading (capitalizing on information from the secret service while his father was in power) dumping stocks in his company which was doing a deal in Oman, I believe just before Desert Storm hit, and the bottom fell out of the stock price. His big heist came when he was governor of Texas. He organized a consortium of texas billionaires to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team. He used his powers of emminent domain to condemn a large tract of land which they wanted to build a new stadium, so that the consortium could pick it up for dirt cheap. He raised the sales tax in the state by half a percent to pay for construction of the stadium. After sitting on it for 6 years, he sold his share in the consortium for 15 million dollars, a return of 2600%. He reported an income of 900,000 dollars in 2000; income from interest comprised 500,000 of that.
Estimated Personal Wealth: 20 million dollars
Vice President Dick Chaney: Former CEO and chairman of Texas based Haliburton oil development comglomerate. Worked on the board of directors of Union Pacific, Procter & Gamble, EDS. 30 year carrer politician. Worked under the then Economics Opportunity director Donald Rumsveld in the Nixon era. Worked as deputy assistand to the then Cheif of Staff Donald Rumsveld under Ford. Worked as secretary of defense under Bush Sr. Worked as senior fellow in American Enterprise Institute a conservitive think tank 1993-1995. Reported income in 2000 of 34 million dollars.
Estimated Personal wealth: 19 to 82 million dollars
Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans: Owned 5-25 million dollars worth of stock in Tom Brown Inc. an oil and gas exploration company.
Estimated Personal Wealth: 15 million dollars
US Trade Representative Robert Zoelick: Worked under then Secretary of State James Baker in Bush Sr's administration. 1993-2000? executive vice president of Fannie Mae. Board member of Alliance Capital, Said Holings, and Jones Intercable. Served on the Advisory council of Enron Corporation (energy)
Estimated Personal Wealth: 3.3 to 13 million dollars (By Wall Street Journal)
Just how keen do you think these guys are going to be to fund something that threatens the way people like them become millionaires? Who do you think bought their offices anyway? I'm starting to see some connections with why Bush is so keen to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, and why Chaney has stated in response to the California blackouts that conservation doesn't mean to much and that the future of America is fossil fuels.
I don't have a source for this, but I read somewhere that there was a proposed plan to use fusion power to liquefy metal, and then run it through a circuit (I don't know how this was supposed to be done). As the liquid metal moved, it would generate a strong moving magnetic feild, which intersected static wire coils, generating electricity. It was supposed to be an order of magnitude higher than heat+water=turbine power. Anybody got some more dirt on this?
Could you guys enlighten me as to what kind of ratios of matter we are talking about here? How much hydrogen would be fused in a (theoretical) fully operational fusion plant, as oposed to the amount of hydrogen fused in say, a 100 kiloton H-bomb?
Open source software creates greater dangers of security risks,
wait, remind me - How many viruses spread through ms outlook? software instability
the ms software I use crashes at least once a day
and incompatibility
so ms omnicompatibility will mean I will have no problem porting legacy 16 bit msDOS apps to win 2k professional, right?
and could force valuable corporate intellectual property into public hands, Mundie said.
I for one find it ridiculous that this corporate tyrant can say things this full of holes and patently self serving and be taken seriously. As to Mundie's warnings that Open Source is detrimental to the electronic economy and market forces, I think we should remind ourselves who is in the middle of a landmark Anti-trust case.
You won't hear me crying for a billion dollar behemoth.
I think the problem really comes down to mass distribution being (essentially) free for email. The ammount of physical junk mail you get presumably has limits based on the fact that it actually costs these people something (even if it's small) to send it to you. I think the trick is to use email for person to person communications, and avoid mass distribution entirely. I get about 3 email messages a day. None of it is spam.
Slashdot Mirror
You have him in a bit of a logical bind there. Any discussion of information overload will be to some degree self-refferential.
The instruction 'less is more' does itself add a little bit more.
The proverb 'silence is golden' does itself break the silence.
Total silence will not solve the problem. Spam will not vanish if we simply stop talking about spam.
You know, that's a damned good idea. Gentlemen, Herman Mellville's masterpeice Moby Dick provided for your reading pleasure by project Gutenberg.
In any case, I find Asimov's conclusions to be deeply disturbing. Robots roboticize humanity in order to perfectly serve them.
Here's a question for somebody who has had one of these 'protected' CD's for a while. I speculated the other day in the discussion of the macrovision protection that the inclusion of bogus data coupled with the scratches and smudges of normal wear and tear would be too much for the CD player's error correction sooner, that the addition of garbage data would effectively shorten the playlife of the CD. Does somebody have a 'protected' CD that has been around for a while and has seen heavy use? If so, can they confirm a reduced playlife?
Here's an idea that I've been tossing around. Maybe it will be feasible with a grid installed. What about paying for internet access with clock cycles? I could certainly use perpetual 'free' net access more than I could use a supercomputer on my desk. I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Speaking of defective, as I understand it, these 'protected' CD's deliberately introduce imperfections that the CD player's built in error correction will be able to deal with. The article mentions that this is the same way that the CD player deals with scratches and smudges on the CD and laser misreads. (I know, elementary, but bear with me). These 'protected' CD's may play fine when they are brand new, but what about after a couple of months when the CD player has to deal with scratches, smudges AND slightly corrupt data. I'd be willing to bet that this protection method will significantly reduce the playlife of the CD's. But do these jerks care? No - they just push the consequences of their actions into the future, and somebody else will have to deal with it later. These kind of 'fire and forget' tactics really tick me off. It's kind of like selling snake oil in my opinion. I hope these guys get it right in the ass.
If this is a FUD campaign, it could be a part of the old political strategem - "Create the problem. Let people suffer. Attack a scapegoat, and offer a solution that happens to fortify your postion." Who who would better know how to exploit an M$ security hole . . .M$!
William Burroughs:" Word is Image. Image is Virus".
Code Red is actually a mind virus. Because of it's physical components, it is now on the brains and tongues of the computer literate, the government and the media. It was designed by the Pepsi Corporation to embed the idea of Mountain Dew into minds, and thereby increase sales. I refuse to buy Code Red Mountain Dew. I will not be brain hacked.
You know, this reminded me of 1984 too, but a different aspect of it. It reminded me of the way that words and identities of things got turned around and affixed to their opposites. You know, "war is peace" "slavery is freedom". That kind of thing. I could imagine these letters coming straight out of the "ministry of love". I mean come on - who in their right mind could mistake this this threatening fear offensive for a truce!?
You know, I've been thinking about this as well. the 95 year limit is from an age where information moves more slowly. Considering the rate at which all things digital become obsolete, I think that there ought to be a totally revamped system of digital copyrighting. I'm thinking around the area of 5 years. After that it's all public domain.
You know, maybe this isn't such a bad idea. All the stuff that these guys are griping about is primarily a b2b affair. I suppose they could set up their online shopping malls up in internet3 as well, so when somebody was actually getting online to buy something (loging on to internet3) that would be the obvious time to advertise to them. So, maybe we can get all those idiotic animations and popups and sponsor messages off of internet1 (where they are eating up bandwidth) and onto internet3 where they belong.
But let's go one further. Businesses using internet3 should pay taxes to support internet1 so that everything on internet1 is free. Why? Why it's that Intellectual Property they keep talking about. I seem to remember that e-commerce was a johnny-come-lately to the scene, which means that the internet was someone else's idea
I'm with this guy. It is my belief that without inspiration, people become bitter and societies lose their cohesion. Well, this kind of stuff certainly inspires me, and I think to a certain extend it inspires people all over the globe. "If we can put a man on the moon . . ." has become a figure of speech everywhere. Everyone that I have met has the image of a man on the moon burned into their brains, and takes it as evidence of what mankind (properley motivated) is capable of. I think we need more of that.
OK, lets work on that 30 billion number.
Consider this "immediate tax relief" that GW got for the US. I imagine that due to one circumstance or another, individual tax payers are on an average going to get about half of the max payment of $300 (I personally have been informed by the IRS that they are going to give me $39 - whoopee). But multiply that average $150 by 250 million and you are in the right ballpark 37+ billion. I'd much rather have a man on mars than tax releif. Also, it might make economic sense - 37 billion invested in R&D and heavy industry is going to have a major ripple effect and numerous spinnoff technologies.
I agree. There's a great line (I think it's from The Two Jakes with Jack Nicholson) that if you want to figure out what's going on, just follow the money. Don't listen to what they say, just watch the money, and see if they are scamming you, if they are lying, if they are profiteering. In this case they are, and by their own actions, they discredit themselves.
This is probably a troll, but I think that it bears saying nonetheless. A major reason that the US won't push hard for fusion research is vested interest. This country is run (at least in part) by oilmen. I'm going to include excerps of research I did into the wealth of the cabinet, because a good number of them had heavy backgrounds in fossil fuels. I think that these guys are going to give kickback after kickback to fossil fuel corporations. And I don't put them above personal greed either.
President George W Bush: Former CEO of Harken Energy, a failure of a texas oil company which was used as a tax haven by all of his texas billionaire buddies. It was bought out, and GW proffited around 1 million dollars. Later he made 800,000 dollars in insider trading (capitalizing on information from the secret service while his father was in power) dumping stocks in his company which was doing a deal in Oman, I believe just before Desert Storm hit, and the bottom fell out of the stock price. His big heist came when he was governor of Texas. He organized a consortium of texas billionaires to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team. He used his powers of emminent domain to condemn a large tract of land which they wanted to build a new stadium, so that the consortium could pick it up for dirt cheap. He raised the sales tax in the state by half a percent to pay for construction of the stadium. After sitting on it for 6 years, he sold his share in the consortium for 15 million dollars, a return of 2600%. He reported an income of 900,000 dollars in 2000; income from interest comprised 500,000 of that. Estimated Personal Wealth: 20 million dollars
Vice President Dick Chaney: Former CEO and chairman of Texas based Haliburton oil development comglomerate. Worked on the board of directors of Union Pacific, Procter & Gamble, EDS. 30 year carrer politician. Worked under the then Economics Opportunity director Donald Rumsveld in the Nixon era. Worked as deputy assistand to the then Cheif of Staff Donald Rumsveld under Ford. Worked as secretary of defense under Bush Sr. Worked as senior fellow in American Enterprise Institute a conservitive think tank 1993-1995. Reported income in 2000 of 34 million dollars. Estimated Personal wealth: 19 to 82 million dollars
Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans: Owned 5-25 million dollars worth of stock in Tom Brown Inc. an oil and gas exploration company. Estimated Personal Wealth: 15 million dollars
US Trade Representative Robert Zoelick: Worked under then Secretary of State James Baker in Bush Sr's administration. 1993-2000? executive vice president of Fannie Mae. Board member of Alliance Capital, Said Holings, and Jones Intercable. Served on the Advisory council of Enron Corporation (energy) Estimated Personal Wealth: 3.3 to 13 million dollars (By Wall Street Journal)
Just how keen do you think these guys are going to be to fund something that threatens the way people like them become millionaires? Who do you think bought their offices anyway? I'm starting to see some connections with why Bush is so keen to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, and why Chaney has stated in response to the California blackouts that conservation doesn't mean to much and that the future of America is fossil fuels.
I don't have a source for this, but I read somewhere that there was a proposed plan to use fusion power to liquefy metal, and then run it through a circuit (I don't know how this was supposed to be done). As the liquid metal moved, it would generate a strong moving magnetic feild, which intersected static wire coils, generating electricity. It was supposed to be an order of magnitude higher than heat+water=turbine power. Anybody got some more dirt on this?
Could you guys enlighten me as to what kind of ratios of matter we are talking about here? How much hydrogen would be fused in a (theoretical) fully operational fusion plant, as oposed to the amount of hydrogen fused in say, a 100 kiloton H-bomb?
Open source software creates greater dangers of security risks,
wait, remind me - How many viruses spread through ms outlook?
software instability
the ms software I use crashes at least once a day
and incompatibility
so ms omnicompatibility will mean I will have no problem porting legacy 16 bit msDOS apps to win 2k professional, right?
and could force valuable corporate intellectual property into public hands, Mundie said.
I for one find it ridiculous that this corporate tyrant can say things this full of holes and patently self serving and be taken seriously. As to Mundie's warnings that Open Source is detrimental to the electronic economy and market forces, I think we should remind ourselves who is in the middle of a landmark Anti-trust case. You won't hear me crying for a billion dollar behemoth.
I think the problem really comes down to mass distribution being (essentially) free for email. The ammount of physical junk mail you get presumably has limits based on the fact that it actually costs these people something (even if it's small) to send it to you. I think the trick is to use email for person to person communications, and avoid mass distribution entirely. I get about 3 email messages a day. None of it is spam.