Re:Leftist Propaganda **SPOILERS**
on
Minority Report
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· Score: 2
I thought the reason the system was shut down was not just because it had been proven to be imperfect. It was because the precogs turned out to be people.
Early in the movie they are treated like machines, like vegetative humans who are used only for their skills. "It's better not to think of them as human," Cruise's character says in disgust. But as the movie went on we began to see that they were actually human beings. Once freed from their vat and exposed to the world, they gradually start to seem more and more human to us. Under the circumstances, turning them back into mind-controlled slaves would be completely unacceptable.
I thought the ending was incredibly touching, showing the precogs enjoying the quiet house in the country, kept apart from the world so that their burdensome "talent" no longer torments them. They have become people, they are living a thoughtful, contemplative life.
The transformation of the precogs from tools to human beings is one of the main story arcs in the movie. It is the real reason why Precrime cannot exist.
Re:What needs to happen...
on
ICANN Updates
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· Score: 2
To access a web site, type its IP address. If you don't like typing IP addresses, build a database. If you don't have the time/inclination to build your own database, subscribe to one.
So what do you use for links on your web pages? IP addresses, which will go bad as soon as the destination site reorganizes; or DNS names, which won't work for any users who subscribe to a different database?
Just to point out the obvious, in releasing the software under the GPL, the original creator grants you, the recipient, a license to copy, modify and redistribute the software. If he has a patent on techniques used in that software then he is thereby giving you a license to utilize the patent in those specific ways.
He, the creator, is the only one who has the power to do that. And if he puts a notice in the software saying that it is released under the GPL, thereby granting you the rights to copy, modify and distribute it, he can't sue you later if you take him at his word.
PDAs, graphing calculators, and the like are effectively intelligence amplifiers. The key is to learn to use them well. Rather than forbidding kids from using technology tools, there should be classes just on how to use the tools properly. Same with the net, of course. A kid who can find data on the net has got a huge advantage in being successful over one who just blunders around.
There will come a time when an average human with the technology of the day will do better on almost any kind of test than a genius from 100 years ago. We should work to bring that future closer, not fight it.
and it will never go flat a long as your arms work!
Actually, I have a Freeplay radio, and while it works pretty well - you wind it up and then it plays for up to 30 minutes - it has one problem. While you're actually winding it there is no charging to the batteries and they die. Once you finish winding, which takes half a minute or so, then it starts generating power again and the radio works.
So if the cell phone charger works like this, then it will "go flat" occasionally, until you can wind it up again.
In the future, our present-day garbage dumps will be gold mines of resources. With nanotech we will be able to recycle and recover all the resources that are there - metals, hydrocarbons, polymers. All can be converted to useful form, in many cases in higher concentrations than played-out natural ore veins.
It's pointless to spend expensive resources today on conservation when in a few decades we will have infinitely more powerful and cheaper abilities to fix the problems. Better to divert our efforts into speeding the progress of the advanced technologies which will let us re-green the earth cheaply and easily.
Is the universe a computer? The answer depends both on the meaning of 'computer' and the meaning of 'is'. On the one hand, the universe is certainly
not a digital computer running Linux or Windows. (Or at any rate, not yet.)
Ultimately we may turn all of the universe into computronium. That is probably a more efficient substrate for thought and love than inefficient biological brains. The universe as computer is the ideal medium for life.
What OS will it run? It's an important question. Our current OS wars may presage the battle for ultimate control of the substructure of the entire universe.
BTW he is only talking about the observable universe in considering its computational capacity. For all we know the entire universe is infinite, but we can only see a finite bubble about 13 billion light years in radius. That's the part Lloyd is considering.
The problem with the idea of unlimited spectrum is that while it is true that there is no interference between EM waves in free space, that is not true once they hit your antenna. Then all the different waves on a particular frequency will interfere like crazy.
The only way to allow multiple use is with exotic directional antenna concepts like phased arrays. Sure, with a perfect directional antenna you can have as many transmitters as you want on one frequency; you just aim perfectly at the one you want to listen to. But of course directional antennas are unworkable for a mobile solution, and they are complicated and expensive to set up for a stationary one.
Really that earlier article was just an attempt to bash the FCC with some theoretical results that don't have much to do with the real world.
I realize this is all very technical and maybe it can't be explained in layman's terms, but:
What was the reasoning behind the earlier Circuit Court decision? Why would the fact that amendments occured during the patent process have anything to do with the later scope of the patent, once issued?
It sounds analogous to saying that a contract which went through more than one draft during negotions would be enforced differently than one which happened to be signed in its original form. What difference does it make whether some revision was necessary during drafting, for either a contract or a patent? Why would that make a huge difference in how the final instrument is enforced?
Can anyone explain this seemingly bizarre distinction?
So what would happen if someone managed to maintain a DDOS attack from say 10 million compromised systems against the root name servers? Would all the caches eventually go bad and get wiped, so nobody could connect to any hosts and the net was dead? Or would the cached data stick around, so that people could still connect to existing systems, but updates would no longer propagate? Or something else? Thanks!
Check out Matt Groves' visionary ideas for augmented reality in the future, including Virtual Gifts, personalized street signs, new sporting events, and my favorite, getting attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man as you're heading home from work.
Vernor Vinge's Hugo-nominated short story, Fast Times at Fairmont High, shows a our society becoming dominated by AR, 25 years in the future. People change their clothes, housing, decor just by updating the shared database. Kids even cover up their zits with AR rather than Clearasil. There are no more computer monitors because you can conjure up a virtual monitor and attach it to any surface or just let it hang in mid-air. It's an astonishing technology in Vinge's hands. (...more on the story's use of AR )
Then take a look at some current work in the field, with videos showing a small CG clock tower superimposed on a piece of cardboard being waved around. It jitters a little but overall it looks pretty good.
"...never any real danger of it escaping..."
on
Google Experiments
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· Score: 2
Google Labs now has a disclaimer explaining what has gone wrong:
Thanks for your interest in Google Labs.
The lab is temporarily closed as we deal with an experiment that got slightly out of hand. Nothing to be concerned about, really. All of our engineers are perfectly safe and there was never any real danger of it escaping into the wild.
Please check back in a few hours. Everything should be back to normal then and science will march on once again. We appreciate your patience.
Good to know that there was no real danger! Sounds like a close call, though.
John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, recently summarized in the NYRB the sharply conflicting
assessments of Stephen Jay Gould: "Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the preeminent
evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose
ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on
our side against the creationists." (NYRB, Nov. 30th 1995, p. 46). No one can take any pleasure in the evident pain Gould is experiencing
now that his actual standing within the community of professional evolutionary biologists is finally becoming more widely known. If
what was a stake was solely one man's self-regard, common decency would preclude comment.
But as Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary
theory" -- or as Ernst Mayr says of Gould and his small group of allies -- they "quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of
[biology's] leading spokesmen."[1] Indeed, although Gould characterizes his critics as "anonymous" and "a tiny coterie," nearly every
major evolutionary biologist of our era has weighed in in a vain attempt to correct the tangle of confusions that the higher profile
Gould has inundated the intellectual world with.[2] The point is not that Gould is the object of some criticism -- so properly are we all
-- it is that his reputation as a credible and balanced authority about evolutionary biology is non-existent among those who are in a
professional position to know.
And goes on to close,
Now, given the foregoing, one is left with the puzzle of why Gould so customarily reverses the truth in his writing. We suggest that the
best way to grasp the nature of Gould's writings is to recognize them as one of the most formidable bodies of fiction to be produced in
recent American letters. Gould brilliantly works a number of literary devices to construct a fictional "Gould" as the protagonist of his
essays and to construct a world of "evolutionary biology" every bit as imaginary and plausible as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
Most of the elements of Gould's writing make no sense if they are interpreted as an honest attempt to communicate about science
(e.g., why would he characterize so many researchers as saying the opposite of what they actually do) but come sharply into focus
when understood as necessary components of a world constructed for the fictional "Gould" to have heroic fantasy adventures in --
adventures during which the admirable character of "Gould" can be slowly revealed.
In the course of these engaging tales, Gould the author introduces us to a gallery of vivid villains and ethnicities, such as
"adaptationists," "Dawkins" and the soulless "hyperreductionists" with their vivisectionist appetites, "Wilson" and the sinister
"sociobiologists", "biological determinists," and most recently, the holy-rolling "Darwinian fundamentalists," including "Maynard
Smith" with his "simplistic dogmatism," "Dennett," "evolutionary psychologists," and "Robert Wright." "Gould" the protagonist is a
much loved character (and not just in our household) who reveals himself to be learned, subtle, open-minded, tolerant, funny, gracious
to his opponents, a tireless adversary of cultural prejudice, able to swim upstream against popular opinion with unflinching moral
courage, able to pierce the surface appearances that capture others, and indeed to be not only the most brilliant innovator in biology
since Darwin, but more importantly to be the voice of humane reason against the forces of ignorance, passion, incuriousity, and
injustice. The author Gould, not least because he labors to beguile his audience into confusing his fictional targets with actual people
and fields, is sadly none of these things.
Anyone in Gould's position is bound to attract criticism, but lay people may not be aware of the tremendous divisions within the evolutionary community which produced such negative responses to Gould.
Nature withdrew the article not because of anonymous or pseudonymous rabble-rousing, but because the article itself was flawed. A number of well known and fully identified scientists launched scathing criticisms which convinced the editor of Nature to take this unusual step. The use of PCR alone, which is known to be prone to false positives, means that the results are unconfirmed and highly questionable. Additional tests are needed to check PCR results, and the authors apparently neglected those steps.
In the end, the interests of truth and scientific accuracy were served by the withdrawal of the article based on peer review and scientific criticism. If some secret PR intervention was involved, then the only lesson we can draw from this story is that it is a positive force in the world and should be applauded.
If this is an unpalatable conclusion, then consider the alternative: that this is an attempt by anti-biotech forces to spin the embarrassing withdrawal of their story from Nature by focusing on the sins of the other camp. They are trying to distract attention from the inadequacies of the original paper, frantically pointing to misdeeds by the corporate PR forces. In short this article is nothing but competing PR itself, an attempt to re-spin the spinners. Hopefully we can be clear headed enough to know when we are being manipulated.
As others have noted, laws to shut down file sharing can't work without destroying the usefulness of computers. This is an enormous cost to society.
If the concern is that copyright holders aren't making money when their goods are pirated, and that becomes a real economic issue, then it needs to be solved in those terms. Piracy can't be stopped. But copyright owners can still be paid.
The solution is that the government would have to take over paying the copyright owners. It would be a giant, ongoing, permanent bailout of the music industry and other affected businesses. This would be costly, but the costs would be visible. Everyone would see how much the government was paying, every year. This is unlike regulations and anti-piracy measures, which have huge costs but they are hidden because each person is silently harmed. It is best for costs to be visible so society can judge whether the rewards are worth it.
There would have to be some way of monitoring how much each song is pirated. This would depend on the nature of song distribution in the future. Maybe some kind of monitoring programs could sit on the gnutella network and count requests. Or maybe people could vote for their favorite artists and the funds could be dispersed that way. Whatever method was found would have to be immunized against technological trickery, e.g. download daemons to drive up the "score" of a particular artist.
In the long run we may need something like this if piracy starts really cutting into the revenues of the content companies. It is a way for people to get paid even when their work is available for free. Perhaps it is not too early for the government to begin studying this kind of technology. They could set up some committees and study groups. That would be a step towards a long term solution.
All these fights over copyrights and laws are distracting us from the real problem, which is staring us in the face:
If information products can be shared for free via the net, it will be very difficult for the creators to make a profit. And that means that there won't be many people making new music, movies, books and other information goods.
I think most people, deep down inside, understand this, but they don't like the consequences. They try to think of ways that artists could make money, like selling T shirts, or by private donations, but these can produce only tiny revenues. Or people distract themselves by demonizing the record companies, or the MPAA, or Hilary Rosen. It's more fun to hiss at a villain than to try to do something about the train that's bearing down on you.
We are heading for a very bad situation. The tremendous production we have enjoyed of information goods is mortally threatened. I don't claim to know the solution, but I don't pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Please, pull your heads out of the sand, and face the issue squarely. The problem is not the Hollings bill or the DMCA or the record companies. The problem is that the net may make it impossible to make money producing information goods. That's going to have a huge impact on society in the next few years, probably a very bad one no matter what the outcome. Let's face this reality squarely.
One of the people to whom Lucky Green attributes the calculation that Bernstein's machine is practical is cryptographer Ian Goldberg. Ian is well known in the crypto community and has broken a number of publicly fielded cryptosystems.
However, in a follow-up post to the cypherpunks mailing list, Ian said that he did not agree with the calculations.
In fact he says that the physical properties of the factoring machine seem "implausible", and that there is no reason to believe that the result applies to "real" key lengths like 1024 bit keys.
PFIR's Declaration of Principles is FNW's proposed guiding framework for the replacement of ICANN. Most of them sound good to me (except for restrictions on anonymity). But do we really need and want an international organization which takes on all these areas? Regulation always sounds great if you think that all the decisions are going your way. But if this powerful body starts making decisions that you don't agree with, watch out. You've created a monster.
Take a look at some of the areas covered by this Declaration: financial privacy; medical privacy; technological aid to the developing world; monitoring and tracking of internet access by governments or industry; content filtering; spam; electronic signatures; electronic voting; DOS attacks; penalties for computer crimes; restrictions on anonymity; program installation dialogs; framing of web pages; web linking; encryption; national jurisdiction; DMCA and copyright issues; patents.
Now, by and large PFIR takes reasonable positions on these issues that most of us would support. But do we really want a body that includes all these topics in its area of responsibility? That would be an enormous concentration of power! And we all know what happens to regulatory agencies which have too much power. They get corrupted and influenced by the deep pockets businesses they are supposed to be regulating.
Creating the super-powerful replacement for the ICANN that PFIR calls for would be a big mistake. We should stick to an agency which has a very limited mandate to deal with Internet infrastructure like DNS. I don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan to fix ICANN, but following PFIR's ideas would be terribly risky.
This is a good analysis, but you've missed one vitally important point.
You're 100% right about the money supply growing primary due to bank loans. What you have missed is that, by volume, the great majority of bank loans are secured by real assets.
Most bank loans (by volume) are in the form of mortages and commercial lending. These loans are secured by claims on the underlying assets. When the bank gives you a mortgage to buy a home, the bank is in effect a partial owner of the home. Only once you pay off the mortgage do you have the title free and clear.
Let's suppose you build a home and get a bank loan on it in the form of a mortage. You borrow $200,000 and put $20,000 of your own money into it, and in the end you have a home worth $220,000. The money supply has been increased by $200,000, but the bank also gained an asset, the claim on your new home, worth $200,000. And further, society has gained a new asset worth approximately $200,000.
The point is that to a close approximation, bank loans increase the money supply only when society creates new property to buy and sell with that money. The increase in the money supply is not inflationary, because the total value of all goods increases along with the money.
This is not just hypothetical; check the Statistical Abstract of the United States and you will see that the total value of mortgages is very close to the total money supply.
Almost all the money created by bank loans is backed by real assets. These loans are not inflationary and are based on the increased value of the goods created by society.
Readers should be aware that John Gilmore is not just a clueless know-nothing who refuses to close his mail server out of ignorance.
Gilmore is a true Internet pioneer and activist, a dedicated supporter of free speech. A short list of his accomplishments is available here, including being one of the first employees at Sun and helping found the EFF. In addition he was an early activist in getting the Usenet alt. groups going as an alternative to the rest of the hierarchy where tight controls were in place. He has been active in supporting free access to cryptography, helping found the Cypherpunks and participating in a number of law suits and FOIA actions to get the government to reduce restrictions on crypto. He has funded the FreeSwan effort to build transparent point to point crypto into the Linux kernel.
He also founded Cygnus Support, probably the first company to prove that you could make money off of open source software. The company was sold to Red Hat in 1999 for $674 million.
John Gilmore was fighting for free speech and the right to communicate before most of us had ever heard of the Internet. If his actions seem out of step with an increasingly paranoid and closed Internet community, I suggest that we not be so quick to assume that everyone else is right and Gilmore is wrong. History has shown him to be a far sighted thinker who has been on the right side of virtually every issue.
Seems like a good point by homerj at 16:41 in the chat. Posters give slashdot permission to publish their comments, but it's not a blanket grant. Slashdot can't put the comments in a book and sell the book, for example.
By the same reasoning, wouldn't there be some limits on what slashdot can do to the site and still carry the implied permission by the author? Changing to a for-pay model means that slashdot is now profiting from the site in a way that was not the case when the author posted. Maybe he would not have been willing to use slashdot to publish if he had known that there was money coming in as a pay service, without getting a cut of that money himself.
Seems to me that slashdot may be stepping over the line in charging for content which was submitted with the understanding that it would be published for no charge. Any lawyers care to comment?
I am a co-author of RFC 2440, the OpenPGP standard. It's important to put this result into perspective.
Dan Bernstein is the first to say that it is too early to tell whether his design for a factoring machine would be practical for keys of the size in commmon use today. See for example this recent Usenet posting, where he says,
Protecting against the http://cr.yp.to/papers.html#nfscircuit speedup
means switching from n-bit keys to f(n)-bit keys. I'd like to emphasize that, at this point, very little is known about the function f. It's clear that f(n) is approximately (3.009...)n for _very large_ sizes n, but I don't know whether f(n) is larger than n for _useful_ sizes n.
Bernstein's paper is excerpted from a grant proposal where he is requesting funds to answer the question of whether the design is applicable to useful key sizes. At this point it is far too early to assume that 1024 to 2048 bit keys can be attacked by his proposed machine more efficiently than with known methods.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the reason the system was shut down was not just because it had been proven to be imperfect. It was because the precogs turned out to be people.
Early in the movie they are treated like machines, like vegetative humans who are used only for their skills. "It's better not to think of them as human," Cruise's character says in disgust. But as the movie went on we began to see that they were actually human beings. Once freed from their vat and exposed to the world, they gradually start to seem more and more human to us. Under the circumstances, turning them back into mind-controlled slaves would be completely unacceptable.
I thought the ending was incredibly touching, showing the precogs enjoying the quiet house in the country, kept apart from the world so that their burdensome "talent" no longer torments them. They have become people, they are living a thoughtful, contemplative life.
The transformation of the precogs from tools to human beings is one of the main story arcs in the movie. It is the real reason why Precrime cannot exist.
So what do you use for links on your web pages? IP addresses, which will go bad as soon as the destination site reorganizes; or DNS names, which won't work for any users who subscribe to a different database?
Just to point out the obvious, in releasing the software under the GPL, the original creator grants you, the recipient, a license to copy, modify and redistribute the software. If he has a patent on techniques used in that software then he is thereby giving you a license to utilize the patent in those specific ways.
He, the creator, is the only one who has the power to do that. And if he puts a notice in the software saying that it is released under the GPL, thereby granting you the rights to copy, modify and distribute it, he can't sue you later if you take him at his word.
PDAs, graphing calculators, and the like are effectively intelligence amplifiers. The key is to learn to use them well. Rather than forbidding kids from using technology tools, there should be classes just on how to use the tools properly. Same with the net, of course. A kid who can find data on the net has got a huge advantage in being successful over one who just blunders around.
There will come a time when an average human with the technology of the day will do better on almost any kind of test than a genius from 100 years ago. We should work to bring that future closer, not fight it.
Actually, I have a Freeplay radio, and while it works pretty well - you wind it up and then it plays for up to 30 minutes - it has one problem. While you're actually winding it there is no charging to the batteries and they die. Once you finish winding, which takes half a minute or so, then it starts generating power again and the radio works.
So if the cell phone charger works like this, then it will "go flat" occasionally, until you can wind it up again.
In the future, our present-day garbage dumps will be gold mines of resources. With nanotech we will be able to recycle and recover all the resources that are there - metals, hydrocarbons, polymers. All can be converted to useful form, in many cases in higher concentrations than played-out natural ore veins.
It's pointless to spend expensive resources today on conservation when in a few decades we will have infinitely more powerful and cheaper abilities to fix the problems. Better to divert our efforts into speeding the progress of the advanced technologies which will let us re-green the earth cheaply and easily.
What OS will it run? It's an important question. Our current OS wars may presage the battle for ultimate control of the substructure of the entire universe.
BTW he is only talking about the observable universe in considering its computational capacity. For all we know the entire universe is infinite, but we can only see a finite bubble about 13 billion light years in radius. That's the part Lloyd is considering.
The problem with the idea of unlimited spectrum is that while it is true that there is no interference between EM waves in free space, that is not true once they hit your antenna. Then all the different waves on a particular frequency will interfere like crazy.
The only way to allow multiple use is with exotic directional antenna concepts like phased arrays. Sure, with a perfect directional antenna you can have as many transmitters as you want on one frequency; you just aim perfectly at the one you want to listen to. But of course directional antennas are unworkable for a mobile solution, and they are complicated and expensive to set up for a stationary one.
Really that earlier article was just an attempt to bash the FCC with some theoretical results that don't have much to do with the real world.
I realize this is all very technical and maybe it can't be explained in layman's terms, but:
What was the reasoning behind the earlier Circuit Court decision? Why would the fact that amendments occured during the patent process have anything to do with the later scope of the patent, once issued?
It sounds analogous to saying that a contract which went through more than one draft during negotions would be enforced differently than one which happened to be signed in its original form. What difference does it make whether some revision was necessary during drafting, for either a contract or a patent? Why would that make a huge difference in how the final instrument is enforced?
Can anyone explain this seemingly bizarre distinction?
So what would happen if someone managed to maintain a DDOS attack from say 10 million compromised systems against the root name servers? Would all the caches eventually go bad and get wiped, so nobody could connect to any hosts and the net was dead? Or would the cached data stick around, so that people could still connect to existing systems, but updates would no longer propagate? Or something else? Thanks!
Vernor Vinge's Hugo-nominated short story, Fast Times at Fairmont High, shows a our society becoming dominated by AR, 25 years in the future. People change their clothes, housing, decor just by updating the shared database. Kids even cover up their zits with AR rather than Clearasil. There are no more computer monitors because you can conjure up a virtual monitor and attach it to any surface or just let it hang in mid-air. It's an astonishing technology in Vinge's hands. (...more on the story's use of AR )
Then take a look at some current work in the field, with videos showing a small CG clock tower superimposed on a piece of cardboard being waved around. It jitters a little but overall it looks pretty good.
A letter in the New York Review of Books by two researchers at the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology begins:
And goes on to close,
Anyone in Gould's position is bound to attract criticism, but lay people may not be aware of the tremendous divisions within the evolutionary community which produced such negative responses to Gould.
Nature withdrew the article not because of anonymous or pseudonymous rabble-rousing, but because the article itself was flawed. A number of well known and fully identified scientists launched scathing criticisms which convinced the editor of Nature to take this unusual step. The use of PCR alone, which is known to be prone to false positives, means that the results are unconfirmed and highly questionable. Additional tests are needed to check PCR results, and the authors apparently neglected those steps.
In the end, the interests of truth and scientific accuracy were served by the withdrawal of the article based on peer review and scientific criticism. If some secret PR intervention was involved, then the only lesson we can draw from this story is that it is a positive force in the world and should be applauded.
If this is an unpalatable conclusion, then consider the alternative: that this is an attempt by anti-biotech forces to spin the embarrassing withdrawal of their story from Nature by focusing on the sins of the other camp. They are trying to distract attention from the inadequacies of the original paper, frantically pointing to misdeeds by the corporate PR forces. In short this article is nothing but competing PR itself, an attempt to re-spin the spinners. Hopefully we can be clear headed enough to know when we are being manipulated.
I liked the movie, but I didn't hear many sarcastic wisecracks. Maybe I'm spoiled by Buffy?
As others have noted, laws to shut down file sharing can't work without destroying the usefulness of computers. This is an enormous cost to society.
If the concern is that copyright holders aren't making money when their goods are pirated, and that becomes a real economic issue, then it needs to be solved in those terms. Piracy can't be stopped. But copyright owners can still be paid.
The solution is that the government would have to take over paying the copyright owners. It would be a giant, ongoing, permanent bailout of the music industry and other affected businesses. This would be costly, but the costs would be visible. Everyone would see how much the government was paying, every year. This is unlike regulations and anti-piracy measures, which have huge costs but they are hidden because each person is silently harmed. It is best for costs to be visible so society can judge whether the rewards are worth it.
There would have to be some way of monitoring how much each song is pirated. This would depend on the nature of song distribution in the future. Maybe some kind of monitoring programs could sit on the gnutella network and count requests. Or maybe people could vote for their favorite artists and the funds could be dispersed that way. Whatever method was found would have to be immunized against technological trickery, e.g. download daemons to drive up the "score" of a particular artist.
In the long run we may need something like this if piracy starts really cutting into the revenues of the content companies. It is a way for people to get paid even when their work is available for free. Perhaps it is not too early for the government to begin studying this kind of technology. They could set up some committees and study groups. That would be a step towards a long term solution.
Here is a cool picture of Mallett. He's got a little time machine model right there.
All these fights over copyrights and laws are distracting us from the real problem, which is staring us in the face:
If information products can be shared for free via the net, it will be very difficult for the creators to make a profit. And that means that there won't be many people making new music, movies, books and other information goods.
I think most people, deep down inside, understand this, but they don't like the consequences. They try to think of ways that artists could make money, like selling T shirts, or by private donations, but these can produce only tiny revenues. Or people distract themselves by demonizing the record companies, or the MPAA, or Hilary Rosen. It's more fun to hiss at a villain than to try to do something about the train that's bearing down on you.
We are heading for a very bad situation. The tremendous production we have enjoyed of information goods is mortally threatened. I don't claim to know the solution, but I don't pretend the problem doesn't exist.
Please, pull your heads out of the sand, and face the issue squarely. The problem is not the Hollings bill or the DMCA or the record companies. The problem is that the net may make it impossible to make money producing information goods. That's going to have a huge impact on society in the next few years, probably a very bad one no matter what the outcome. Let's face this reality squarely.
However, in a follow-up post to the cypherpunks mailing list, Ian said that he did not agree with the calculations.
In fact he says that the physical properties of the factoring machine seem "implausible", and that there is no reason to believe that the result applies to "real" key lengths like 1024 bit keys.
Take a look at some of the areas covered by this Declaration: financial privacy; medical privacy; technological aid to the developing world; monitoring and tracking of internet access by governments or industry; content filtering; spam; electronic signatures; electronic voting; DOS attacks; penalties for computer crimes; restrictions on anonymity; program installation dialogs; framing of web pages; web linking; encryption; national jurisdiction; DMCA and copyright issues; patents.
Now, by and large PFIR takes reasonable positions on these issues that most of us would support. But do we really want a body that includes all these topics in its area of responsibility? That would be an enormous concentration of power! And we all know what happens to regulatory agencies which have too much power. They get corrupted and influenced by the deep pockets businesses they are supposed to be regulating.
Creating the super-powerful replacement for the ICANN that PFIR calls for would be a big mistake. We should stick to an agency which has a very limited mandate to deal with Internet infrastructure like DNS. I don't know enough to be able to come up with a plan to fix ICANN, but following PFIR's ideas would be terribly risky.
This is a good analysis, but you've missed one vitally important point.
You're 100% right about the money supply growing primary due to bank loans. What you have missed is that, by volume, the great majority of bank loans are secured by real assets.
Most bank loans (by volume) are in the form of mortages and commercial lending. These loans are secured by claims on the underlying assets. When the bank gives you a mortgage to buy a home, the bank is in effect a partial owner of the home. Only once you pay off the mortgage do you have the title free and clear.
Let's suppose you build a home and get a bank loan on it in the form of a mortage. You borrow $200,000 and put $20,000 of your own money into it, and in the end you have a home worth $220,000. The money supply has been increased by $200,000, but the bank also gained an asset, the claim on your new home, worth $200,000. And further, society has gained a new asset worth approximately $200,000.
The point is that to a close approximation, bank loans increase the money supply only when society creates new property to buy and sell with that money. The increase in the money supply is not inflationary, because the total value of all goods increases along with the money.
This is not just hypothetical; check the Statistical Abstract of the United States and you will see that the total value of mortgages is very close to the total money supply.
Almost all the money created by bank loans is backed by real assets. These loans are not inflationary and are based on the increased value of the goods created by society.
Gilmore is a true Internet pioneer and activist, a dedicated supporter of free speech. A short list of his accomplishments is available here, including being one of the first employees at Sun and helping found the EFF. In addition he was an early activist in getting the Usenet alt. groups going as an alternative to the rest of the hierarchy where tight controls were in place. He has been active in supporting free access to cryptography, helping found the Cypherpunks and participating in a number of law suits and FOIA actions to get the government to reduce restrictions on crypto. He has funded the FreeSwan effort to build transparent point to point crypto into the Linux kernel.
He also founded Cygnus Support, probably the first company to prove that you could make money off of open source software. The company was sold to Red Hat in 1999 for $674 million.
John Gilmore was fighting for free speech and the right to communicate before most of us had ever heard of the Internet. If his actions seem out of step with an increasingly paranoid and closed Internet community, I suggest that we not be so quick to assume that everyone else is right and Gilmore is wrong. History has shown him to be a far sighted thinker who has been on the right side of virtually every issue.
Seems like a good point by homerj at 16:41 in the chat. Posters give slashdot permission to publish their comments, but it's not a blanket grant. Slashdot can't put the comments in a book and sell the book, for example.
By the same reasoning, wouldn't there be some limits on what slashdot can do to the site and still carry the implied permission by the author? Changing to a for-pay model means that slashdot is now profiting from the site in a way that was not the case when the author posted. Maybe he would not have been willing to use slashdot to publish if he had known that there was money coming in as a pay service, without getting a cut of that money himself.
Seems to me that slashdot may be stepping over the line in charging for content which was submitted with the understanding that it would be published for no charge. Any lawyers care to comment?
Protecting against the http://cr.yp.to/papers.html#nfscircuit speedup means switching from n-bit keys to f(n)-bit keys. I'd like to emphasize that, at this point, very little is known about the function f. It's clear that f(n) is approximately (3.009...)n for _very large_ sizes n, but I don't know whether f(n) is larger than n for _useful_ sizes n.
Bernstein's paper is excerpted from a grant proposal where he is requesting funds to answer the question of whether the design is applicable to useful key sizes. At this point it is far too early to assume that 1024 to 2048 bit keys can be attacked by his proposed machine more efficiently than with known methods.