Is it a good idea to regulate the distribution of child pornography on the internet? For this the answer is universally yes.
If so, why is there any child pornography on the net in the first place? If everyone thought it was a bad idea, no one would post any, and there would be no need to regulate it. It appears that somebody thinks it's a good idea, and would disagree with (and in so doing, disprove) your statement that the answer is "universally yes."
The whole problem is of course that what obviously needs regulation according to some people should just as obviously be left unregulated according to others. The whole concept of "regulation" hinges on the fact that we don't have universal agreement, so some people decide to control the behaviour of others. Welcome to the real world of "cultural diversity."
From the article: The station's viability also depends on developing a commercially practical way of transporting space tourists. Bigelow's company is not involved in that effort, but other companies are.
This sounds like an advertising stunt to me; eventually, they will be told "no" by someone, or they will get everything ready and be "waiting for transportation to become available"...in the meantime, cheap advertising for the real hotels down here.
Planning and scheduling are hard AI problems and way way more complex than IP routing or print spooling
These are all the same problem, if you consider them in their full glory; a really good print spooler that respects job priorities, printer statuses, patterns of use, etc. etc. might wind up printing three-lower priority jobs over one high priority job, or split a high priority job between printers (and proceed each piece with a cover sheet giving directions on how to re-assemble the job). Or it could detect a paper out condition and move the rest of the job to another printer. Or, in fact, make use of any sort of fancy planning / scheduling trick you care to think of. It's all the same problem.
And yes, it is a hard (NP complete, runs into the frame problem, etc.) problem. But that doesn't mean that any attack on it is AI! This is a classic (and too often revisited) logic error. You have a goal (AI). If you could obtain that goal, it would have some consequence (you could presumably write good scheduling software). You obtain the consequent, and announce that you have reached the goal!
To see that this is fallacious, consider: You have a goal (go to Scottland); it would have a consequence (you could try haggis). So then someone in your home town feeds you haggis, and you mistakenly announce that you have been to Scotland!
These problems are AI in the sense that (a) no known tractable engineering solution exists and (b) they are tasks that lie squarely in the province of (talented and capable) human beings.
This statement argues for my side, since they evidently have (a) found a tractable engineering solution and (b) it doesn't involve sending talented and capable human beings with each mission. Therefore it must not be AI.
--MarkusQ
P.S. (I invite you to try writing serious planning/scheduling software if you doubt me.)
I'm afraid I didn't wait for your invitation. Been there, done that. Many times.
What makes this "AI"? Or to turn the question around, why aren't routers and print spoolers considered AI if this is? Artificial Intelegence is a big problem; it's solution isn't hastened by using the term as a synonym for "we picked a better algorithm than you might have expected us to."
I'm sorry, I don't see how this differs from what I said. The original article stated
Participants at the 3rd Canadian Space Exploration Workshop (CSEW) [...] were among the first to hear that Canada wants to go to Mars [...]attendees were given the program's catch phrase ("Allons-y! Let's go to Mars"), and then charged with drawing up a wish list of objectives for a Canadian Mars mission
My statement was (in opposition to the popular interpretation that they had announced that they were going to Mars):
The way I read it, they didn't announce that they are going to Mars; they said they'd like to and then they asked a bunch of people at a workshop to play "what if" and "plan" a mission to Mars.
To which you replied (as if disagreeing):
No, it was a workshop they attended. At this workshop they unveiled the desire for Canada to reach Mars.
If you are making some subtle distinction here, I am missing it. Except for the word "No" it sounds as if you are saying the same thing I did.
The way I read it, they didn't announce that they are going to Mars; they said they'd like to and then they asked a bunch of people at a workshop to play "what if" and "plan" a mission to Mars.
If you've ever been to these sort of workshops, you know what that means. A lot of people got to talk to other, mostly interesting people, and share a their enthusiasm for space, Canada, and (let's see, not Apple Pie, so probably hockey). I'll pet people wrote key points on over-sized post-it-notes. At the end they read their notes to each other, and clapped. I doubt if anyone did any math (or, if someone did, they did it quietly in a corner, while shaking their head).
Note that in the previous post, an almost-flame about not using the technology unless you understand it, his italics didn't work. Instead we see "", etc.
I had looked at using Rebol for a project a few years back, and wound up passing on it specifically because they were unable to point me to a definition of the language; their ultimate answer to all questions of semantics was "ask Rebol--it does what it does, and it works the same on all platforms." Not only was the implementation closed but (respecting the distinction between a language and its implementation) the language itself was unpublished. (They may have gotten further in the last few years; I haven't had a chance to check back.)
I might have gone with a closed-but-published language, but without a language (i.e., a definition of what is supposed to happen when I type "xyzzy foo") I would be a fool to choose it. Which was a shame, because I liked what I saw. Suppose, though, I got some distance into the project and discovered that something wasn't working the way I expected. How could I distinguish between:
1. A failure in my understanding of the language
2. A bug in my code
3. A bug in REBOL
without some definition of what how each construct is expected to behave? Any assumption I make leads to trouble, especially if I expect to be able to upgrade to a later implementation of the language (which may, for example, fix a bug that was the same on all platforms to work correctly on all platforms). I have great respect for Carl, and liked what I was able to infer about his language by looking at his implementation of it. But that wasn't enough to risk the project on.
Bottom line: there may be a future for closed source implementations of languages but I don't hold out much hope for languages with unpublished, proprietary definitions.
Re:Selling but not demanding payment
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 1
Just don't forget that all this freedom ( and means) to enjoy your small utopian world is brought to you courtesy of commercial IT industry where most of us go to earn our living.
I beg to differ. At least when I started, it was a profession, not an industry (if you wish to use radiojargon dating to gauge when this was, we had "Personell" instead of "Human Resources") and we got along just fine. I think converting to an industry (as with health care and music) has benefited a lot of ancillary players at the cost of the practitioners.
I have no objection to biting the hand that tries to steal my lunch, no matter how hard it tries to pretend that it is feeding me.
-- MarkusQ
UID magnitude as a veracity test
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 1
AC asks: Why should I listen to someone who has a UID over 400,000?
Good question. Of course, it begs generalization. Why should I listen to someone born after 1920?
Hardly. Open Source is a very savvy capitalistic move in a chess game between the centralists (e.g. Microsoft) and the individualists (John Galt, RMS, and a lot of/.); the net effect of this move is to forestall the collective from locking us out of our chosen profession. Both sides are playing to win, just like all good capitalists. They were willing to risk our stake to assure their gain. Rather than whining like marxists, we countered with an offer to put their stakes at risk to protect our livelihoods.
Very few programers make mounds of cash selling software. But we do make a nice living in a world where there is lots of source code. Open Source tilts the scales in our favour.
Sounds a heck of a lot like enlightened self-interest to me!
--MarkusQ
Re:Selling but not demanding payment
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 2
It is a purely academic distinction.
True, but many of us (including RMS, myself, and a few hundred thousand other nerds out there) have built quite a structure on such distinctions. It's what technocrates do; or at least, it's what I do: In a very real sense, I pick nits for a living.
Honestly, people simply DON"T pay for GPLed software.
Again true, though they do pay for handy CDs, and for customization, and troubleshooting, and so forth. The key is that the FSF doesn't object to us making money aiding the spread of GPLed software, but doesn't want anyone to profit by restricting its spread.
-- MarkusQ
Selling but not demanding payment
on
GPL FAQ
·
· Score: 3
It's not quite as silly as it may sound. You may say
"I will send you a copy of program X for N units of currency;"
you may not say
"Hey, I see you got a copy of program X from somewhere--you now owe me N units of currency."
-- MarkusQ
Re:Lack of faith in NASA or understanding of gravi
on
Continents on Titan?
·
· Score: 1
From the article:..which will then parachute through the atmosphere and presumably land several hours later.
I'm not entirely sure if this is a dig at NASA's recent space upsets, or just someone unsure about the effects of gravity...
(*smile*) In the context, I suspect the quibble is that it can't "land" if there's no "land" on which to, well, land--it might "ocean" instead.
But hey, we can do Faster Cheaper Better (pick two) missions now - they carry very few instruments and none are worth fighting over, see? There's progress for you.
"Faster Cheaper Better" has gotten a bum rap. The whole point of the program was that some missions would fail but that, rather than bundling them so that the failure of one jeopardize the lot, the failures would be relatively inconsequential. Thus less time/money/effort would be waisted trying to prefect each component, and many more successes could be had for the same budget. Yes, there would be more failures, but that shouldn't matter to anyone; the goal is more successes for less money.
Sadly, the press (and the public?) love to dissect the failures more than they love to laud the successes, so from the PR perspective (and only from that perspective) Faster Cheaper Better has been a failure.
Presumably, once Clipper was deployed, the use of any other encryption would have been outlawed.
Then of course, as a law abiding malcontent I wouldn't use encryption. But I might start sending my friends pictures of my TV (I'd have to buy one first of course) with nothing but static on the screen--or audio recordings of my rock tumbler--or a thousand other "why, officer, that's just white noise" wrappers.
The only thing to stop people from communicating securely, with or without Clipper, is lack of motivation.
What everyone seems to have forgotten was that Clipper wouldn't have worked (at least, not as intended, and provided the "bad guys" were reasonably smart). You can embed hardware encryption with as many built in backdoors as you like in every device I use--then I just send software encrypted message over the channel just as I would with a regular phone line. When you tap the line and do your sneaky best, what you wind up with is still encrypted.
They were called canals because people thought that there were martians who were building them.
Actually, they were called canali by Schiaparelli ("canali" is the Italian for "channels," with no implication of manufacture--c.f. "the English channel"). They were generally acceped as natural until canali was (incorrectly) translated to "canal," thus originating the supposition that they were artificial.
I thought this was the most cogent post in the thread (apart, perhaps, from the person who asked about peer review, and/or the one which pointed out that the original article had the news density of "You can die from drinking too much water").
The objection that this post alludes to "The powers that be" and "the forces opposing them" in a manner that could be taken as U.S. centric can easily be countered by pointing out that the fossil fuel industry at least is clearly multi-national.
If we're going to be giving advice to the moderators, I'd give his post a ten; it has a nice beat, and I can dance to it...
--MarkusQ
The only thing holding me back from moving to a Linux only desktop is a way to move my Outlook 2k data (60+mb file) into something I can use under Linux
I have had good luck porting data from Outlook PST files (mostly pre-2k, but I don't think the format/API has changed enough to break things) using:
ArchivER ("Archive Outlook data as individual files, preserving the Outlook folder structure.")
...and...
Message Vault
("Archive Outlook/Exchange messages to a separate encrypted, compressed, searchable archive store. The store can also export messages to standard RFC 822 format.")
a perfect processor that would release absolutly no heat
Not quite. Any non-reversible operation increases entropy and thus produces some heat. Changing a 1 to a 0 (by draining a charge to ground, say) will produce heat. You could sure reduce it below where we are now, and there are some interesting designs around for almost-reversible-process-computers, but even they have to do something irreversible (e.g. tell you the answer) to really qualify as "computers".
Slashdot Mirror
If so, why is there any child pornography on the net in the first place? If everyone thought it was a bad idea, no one would post any, and there would be no need to regulate it. It appears that somebody thinks it's a good idea, and would disagree with (and in so doing, disprove) your statement that the answer is "universally yes."
The whole problem is of course that what obviously needs regulation according to some people should just as obviously be left unregulated according to others. The whole concept of "regulation" hinges on the fact that we don't have universal agreement, so some people decide to control the behaviour of others. Welcome to the real world of "cultural diversity."
-- MarkusQ
The station's viability also depends on developing a commercially practical way of transporting space tourists. Bigelow's company is not involved in that effort, but other companies are.
This sounds like an advertising stunt to me; eventually, they will be told "no" by someone, or they will get everything ready and be "waiting for transportation to become available"...in the meantime, cheap advertising for the real hotels down here.
--MarkusQ
These are all the same problem, if you consider them in their full glory; a really good print spooler that respects job priorities, printer statuses, patterns of use, etc. etc. might wind up printing three-lower priority jobs over one high priority job, or split a high priority job between printers (and proceed each piece with a cover sheet giving directions on how to re-assemble the job). Or it could detect a paper out condition and move the rest of the job to another printer. Or, in fact, make use of any sort of fancy planning / scheduling trick you care to think of. It's all the same problem.
And yes, it is a hard (NP complete, runs into the frame problem, etc.) problem. But that doesn't mean that any attack on it is AI! This is a classic (and too often revisited) logic error. You have a goal (AI). If you could obtain that goal, it would have some consequence (you could presumably write good scheduling software). You obtain the consequent, and announce that you have reached the goal!
To see that this is fallacious, consider: You have a goal (go to Scottland); it would have a consequence (you could try haggis). So then someone in your home town feeds you haggis, and you mistakenly announce that you have been to Scotland!
These problems are AI in the sense that (a) no known tractable engineering solution exists and (b) they are tasks that lie squarely in the province of (talented and capable) human beings.
This statement argues for my side, since they evidently have (a) found a tractable engineering solution and (b) it doesn't involve sending talented and capable human beings with each mission. Therefore it must not be AI.
--MarkusQ
P.S. (I invite you to try writing serious planning/scheduling software if you doubt me.)
I'm afraid I didn't wait for your invitation. Been there, done that. Many times.
What makes this "AI"? Or to turn the question around, why aren't routers and print spoolers considered AI if this is? Artificial Intelegence is a big problem; it's solution isn't hastened by using the term as a synonym for "we picked a better algorithm than you might have expected us to."
*grump*
-- MarkusQ
Participants at the 3rd Canadian Space Exploration Workshop (CSEW) [...] were among the first to hear that Canada wants to go to Mars [...]attendees were given the program's catch phrase ("Allons-y! Let's go to Mars"), and then charged with drawing up a wish list of objectives for a Canadian Mars mission
My statement was (in opposition to the popular interpretation that they had announced that they were going to Mars):
The way I read it, they didn't announce that they are going to Mars; they said they'd like to and then they asked a bunch of people at a workshop to play "what if" and "plan" a mission to Mars.
To which you replied (as if disagreeing):
No, it was a workshop they attended. At this workshop they unveiled the desire for Canada to reach Mars.
If you are making some subtle distinction here, I am missing it. Except for the word "No" it sounds as if you are saying the same thing I did.
-- MarkusQ
If you've ever been to these sort of workshops, you know what that means. A lot of people got to talk to other, mostly interesting people, and share a their enthusiasm for space, Canada, and (let's see, not Apple Pie, so probably hockey). I'll pet people wrote key points on over-sized post-it-notes. At the end they read their notes to each other, and clapped. I doubt if anyone did any math (or, if someone did, they did it quietly in a corner, while shaking their head).
-- MarkusQ
I'm not sure why, but I am sure it's amusing.
--MarkusQ
I might have gone with a closed-but-published language, but without a language (i.e., a definition of what is supposed to happen when I type "xyzzy foo") I would be a fool to choose it. Which was a shame, because I liked what I saw. Suppose, though, I got some distance into the project and discovered that something wasn't working the way I expected. How could I distinguish between:
1. A failure in my understanding of the language
2. A bug in my code
3. A bug in REBOL
without some definition of what how each construct is expected to behave? Any assumption I make leads to trouble, especially if I expect to be able to upgrade to a later implementation of the language (which may, for example, fix a bug that was the same on all platforms to work correctly on all platforms). I have great respect for Carl, and liked what I was able to infer about his language by looking at his implementation of it. But that wasn't enough to risk the project on.
Bottom line: there may be a future for closed source implementations of languages but I don't hold out much hope for languages with unpublished, proprietary definitions.
--MarkusQ
--MarkusQ
I beg to differ. At least when I started, it was a profession, not an industry (if you wish to use radiojargon dating to gauge when this was, we had "Personell" instead of "Human Resources") and we got along just fine. I think converting to an industry (as with health care and music) has benefited a lot of ancillary players at the cost of the practitioners.
I have no objection to biting the hand that tries to steal my lunch, no matter how hard it tries to pretend that it is feeding me.
-- MarkusQ
Good question. Of course, it begs generalization. Why should I listen to someone born after 1920?
-- MarkusQ
Very few programers make mounds of cash selling software. But we do make a nice living in a world where there is lots of source code. Open Source tilts the scales in our favour.
Sounds a heck of a lot like enlightened self-interest to me!
--MarkusQ
True, but many of us (including RMS, myself, and a few hundred thousand other nerds out there) have built quite a structure on such distinctions. It's what technocrates do; or at least, it's what I do: In a very real sense, I pick nits for a living.
Honestly, people simply DON"T pay for GPLed software.
Again true, though they do pay for handy CDs, and for customization, and troubleshooting, and so forth. The key is that the FSF doesn't object to us making money aiding the spread of GPLed software, but doesn't want anyone to profit by restricting its spread.
-- MarkusQ
"I will send you a copy of program X for N units of currency;"
you may not say
"Hey, I see you got a copy of program X from somewhere--you now owe me N units of currency."
-- MarkusQ
(*smile*) In the context, I suspect the quibble is that it can't "land" if there's no "land" on which to, well, land--it might "ocean" instead.
-- MarkusQ
"Faster Cheaper Better" has gotten a bum rap. The whole point of the program was that some missions would fail but that, rather than bundling them so that the failure of one jeopardize the lot, the failures would be relatively inconsequential. Thus less time/money/effort would be waisted trying to prefect each component, and many more successes could be had for the same budget. Yes, there would be more failures, but that shouldn't matter to anyone; the goal is more successes for less money.
Sadly, the press (and the public?) love to dissect the failures more than they love to laud the successes, so from the PR perspective (and only from that perspective) Faster Cheaper Better has been a failure.
-- MarkusQ
Then of course, as a law abiding malcontent I wouldn't use encryption. But I might start sending my friends pictures of my TV (I'd have to buy one first of course) with nothing but static on the screen--or audio recordings of my rock tumbler--or a thousand other "why, officer, that's just white noise" wrappers.
The only thing to stop people from communicating securely, with or without Clipper, is lack of motivation.
-- MarkusQ
Is this some strange definition of news with which I am not familiar? They ran essentially the same story back in 1998. -- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
Actually, they were called canali by Schiaparelli ("canali" is the Italian for "channels," with no implication of manufacture--c.f. "the English channel"). They were generally acceped as natural until canali was (incorrectly) translated to "canal," thus originating the supposition that they were artificial.
-- MarkusQ
The objection that this post alludes to "The powers that be" and "the forces opposing them" in a manner that could be taken as U.S. centric can easily be countered by pointing out that the fossil fuel industry at least is clearly multi-national.
If we're going to be giving advice to the moderators, I'd give his post a ten; it has a nice beat, and I can dance to it... --MarkusQ
If your house is too hot, will opening the refrigerator door help, hurt, or have no impact?
-- MarkusQ
I have had good luck porting data from Outlook PST files (mostly pre-2k, but I don't think the format/API has changed enough to break things) using:
ArchivER ("Archive Outlook data as individual files, preserving the Outlook folder structure.")
Message Vault ("Archive Outlook/Exchange messages to a separate encrypted, compressed, searchable archive store. The store can also export messages to standard RFC 822 format.")
I use both because there are minor annoyances with each of them and I want to be sure I get everything.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. The "Export to Comma Delimited Text" from within Outlook looses lots of data.
Not quite. Any non-reversible operation increases entropy and thus produces some heat. Changing a 1 to a 0 (by draining a charge to ground, say) will produce heat. You could sure reduce it below where we are now, and there are some interesting designs around for almost-reversible-process-computers, but even they have to do something irreversible (e.g. tell you the answer) to really qualify as "computers".