Not to mention this guy seems to be a little "out there". Have a look at their philosophy page.
It's not that far "out there". A sophmoric rehash of Objectivism and Libertarian Capitalism, yes, but for net.politics the notions that altrusim is bad and property ownership should be the basis all rights (rather than one of several means of defining and protecting them) are pretty mainstream. Foolish, but mainsteam.
(Which doesn't mean that the conclusion - censorship is evil - isn't correct, just that the arguments used here to support it are full of holes.)
You're going to see true direct input about the same time neuroscience solves the strong AI problem (give or take a few decades).
Actually, a very primitive direct input system already exists. Electrodes were implanted into the brain of a man who had been totally paralyzed by stroke, and allowed him to move a cursor to select messages from a list. It doesn't use the speech centers, though; motor impulses are used to control it.
For most of us, I suspect some sort of combination of subvocalization pickup, EEG reading (for selection - a "that's it!" event, as per a previous/. story), and eyeglasses-like heads-up display with pupil tracking will eventually be the norm for wearable computing. It'll be a long time before implants are used as input devices by the mainstream of people.
I prefer the idea of the Quinkey chording keyboard, which has been around since the mid 80s at least, where each finger (or thumb) stays on one of 5 home keys, and input depends on chords. I've never bothered to learn such a thing...
Well, that's the problem, isn't it? With a one-key-per-letter keyboard - fitaly, qwerty or whatever - you can take a new user and let them hunt and peck, so the system is usable (even if slowly) by a novice. How do you hunt-and-peck on a chording keyboard?
The learning curve is just too steep for average casual users.
Sorry, but "gender" refering to the maleness or femaleness of persons (or other things, like electrical connectors)is a well-established usage dating from at least the 1950s. And "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is an emerging standard, IMHO much better than continually using "he or she". (It seems to me not unlike the use of the plural second person as a polite or formal pronoun, like the German Sie or French vous.)
Anyone who can seriously entertain the notion that "he" is gender neutral needs a whack with the feminist clue stick.
Natural languages aren't like programming languges. They evolve. Correct grammar and usage is whatever is used by educated native speakers, not what self-appointed grammar cops decide. Deal with it.
And speaking of standards, when the fuck did question marks replace single quotes? Oh, I get it - you must be using some non-standard HTML.
Exactly. More and more people are getting this wrong.
Sorry, but the meanings of words change. Gender's meaning of "male or female" is well-established - that's why we've referred to the gender of a cable connector for years, and phrases like "gender roles" and "gender bender" are common usage.
My 1956 dictionary (an interesting reference for language changes over the past few decades) has "gender... 2. Colloq. Sex, male or female 3. Gram. Form of a noun..." So even 44 years ago, the male/female meaning was listed before the grammar meaning, even if it was marked colloquial.
A more recent dictionary has the grammar definition first, but drops the "colloquial" note.
So, all you self-righteous gits who like to recite cute things like "words have gender, people have sex": shut up already. The usage is not ambiguous, misleading, or mistaken. When a word is used in a certain way by the majority of educated native speakers, self-appointed grammar cops should learn to deal with it.
And the mojority want their McDonalds and their C+M and their cheap clothes and planned obscelence.And then Along come some intellectuals. Who think _they_ know what the people really want, and what is best for the "people."
You've got it backwards. First came some intellectuals in the corporate/government complex, who decided that the majority should want planned obsolesence and the other halmarks of conspicuous consumption, and programed the culture (via the media and the educational system) accordingly. There have been various counter-movements since, led by other groups of intellectuals who have been resistant to the programming.
That's the big flaw in market worship - the idea that what the majority wants must be best, or at least has some relationship to fulfilling people's genuine wants and needs. The majority wants what they're told to want.
Holding a microphone near the speaker wouldn't be an acceptable option as it would degrade the sound quality too much.
No it wouldn't. Consider - amps are miked all the time, for PA systems or for recording.
Yeah, it might not be great with my Shure SM57 and Labtec computer speakers, but someone will get high-quality speakers and microphones, and build a sound-insulating box around the whole thing, record it and bam! that "secure music" is now zooming around in MP3 format on the web. The speaker-to-microphone degradation would be lost in the degradation you get in MP3 compression.
Anyway, its unlikely that truly "tamperproof" speaker enclosures could be make for the consumer market in a cost-effective manner, so all I have to do is break open the box and put my D/A converter probes in the speaker terminals; degradation there would be miniscule.
Copy protection doesn't work. Never has, never will.
I hope that some day (hopefully soon), we will see machine-friendly TV listings and recipe listings. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to make this terribly commercially attractive, but it could happen.
Also, perhaps if solar cells soak up the energy that the ground and atmosphere would have otherwise soaked up, perhaps we'll provide some global cooling to offset the global warming?
They don't "soak it up" any more than the ground and atmosphere do. It still all ends up as heat; photovoltaics just let you does something with it first. Instead of heating up a patch of ground, photons become electric potential which runs down a wire and flips a bit in your CPU, then turns into heat.
The primary reason the internet is working is due to its LACK of regulation and government involvment.
Uh, right. No government involvement in the ARPANET, or NSFNET, that started it all, no sir.
Megacorps are no friends of freedom either - their vison of the net is essentially TV with a "buy" button.
Neither the state nor the multinational corporation is your friend. Our best hope is to keep them busy fighting each other so they won't have much energy left to fsck us over.
When they write about 12 songs to go on a CD, they probably love everyone of them and they would want everyone to have all of those 12 songs. Therefore they would probably get pissed off if people only want three of their songs.
Nah. Every artist knows that some of their works will be loved and adored more than others. Every album has its singles and it deep cuts; books of poetry have good pieces and filler. The interesting thing it, the artist often can't tell which pieces will really work - I'm often surprised by which of my poems the audience seems to appreciate.
We've got to do better than making art disposable and hope some rich guy picks up the trash. I am thinking that a connection between PayPal and Napster... might go a long way to making us honest again and keeping music afloat.
I've been playing with the idea for a more general version of this, that would allow voluntary sponsorship of websites (and thus any activity, since a band or artist could just set this up on their website). The idea is that you could pay to put a sponsored link on someone's website, and you'd pay what it was worth to you. On every page view in someone's browser, a link would be selected from the pool based on how much the sponsor paid for it - if you paid $10 and other people paid a total of $990 for the month, your link would have a 1% chance of coming up for that page view.
I think that such a democratic form of patronage will work better than the "pay-per-copy" model that dominates music, or the corporate sponsorship model that dominates web sites.
I'm calling this a "sponsorpool", for lack of a better name, and I'm going to be working on it over the summer. (I'm quitting my "day job" to work on some side projects for at least a few months.) For the prototype, I'm using PayPal to handle payments. (I'm faking the web interface with Curl.) If anyone's interested in more info, drop me a line and I'll update you when I've got something worth sharing.
Never benchmarked them for speed or noise, but I've had no reliability problems with them whatsoever. And the one time my father's Seagate drive went up on him, they replaced it free of charge - with one that was several times the capacity. I heard bad reports in the early or mid 90's, but before and after that no worries. YMMV, of course.
I do have a certain sentimental attachment to Seagate - I remember the Christmas when my dad got me a 30 Meg Seagate HD and an RLL controller card for my PC clone, which I was running with dual floppies at the time. That hard disk saw me through college and grad school. (Of course, most of the interesting stuff was kept on the Unix servers at school, and my PC was just a terminal most of the time.)
or do you go to someone like Seagate for the piece of mind afforded by the name brand?
Maybe so, but when did you last see a tee-shirt or billboard with a Seagate logo on it? Do others geeks envy you because you bought an Seagate drive? Will 31337 h4X0rs rob you at gunpoint because they've be ad-programmed to think that having a Seagate drive is worth killing over?
It's one thing to have a reputation and stand by it. It's another to relentlessly brainwash the populace.
Thank you. Another example of the worthlessness of copy protection - it stops the clueless, but has little effect upon those with technical know-how.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemed to repeat it. It would seem that software publishers like M$ and Adobe fall squarely into that category - sucky copy protection schemes sucked in the 80's, they suck now, they will forever suck. (Because they're the suckiest bunck of sucks that ever sucked.) This will end up as a huge boost for free software.
You must be one of the few novelists in history ever to have a background in computer programming.
Vernor Vinge leaps to mind...who else? Surely most of the physicists who've written SF (Brin, Sagan, Benford, et. al.) probably at least cobbled together a few lines of FORTRAN over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
(Which doesn't mean that the conclusion - censorship is evil - isn't correct, just that the arguments used here to support it are full of holes.)
For most of us, I suspect some sort of combination of subvocalization pickup, EEG reading (for selection - a "that's it!" event, as per a previous /. story), and eyeglasses-like heads-up display with pupil tracking will eventually be the norm for wearable computing. It'll be a long time before implants are used as input devices by the mainstream of people.
The learning curve is just too steep for average casual users.
Sorry, but "gender" refering to the maleness or femaleness of persons (or other things, like electrical connectors)is a well-established usage dating from at least the 1950s. And "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun is an emerging standard, IMHO much better than continually using "he or she". (It seems to me not unlike the use of the plural second person as a polite or formal pronoun, like the German Sie or French vous.)
Anyone who can seriously entertain the notion that "he" is gender neutral needs a whack with the feminist clue stick.
Natural languages aren't like programming languges. They evolve. Correct grammar and usage is whatever is used by educated native speakers, not what self-appointed grammar cops decide. Deal with it.
And speaking of standards, when the fuck did question marks replace single quotes? Oh, I get it - you must be using some non-standard HTML.
My 1956 dictionary (an interesting reference for language changes over the past few decades) has "gender... 2. Colloq. Sex, male or female 3. Gram. Form of a noun..." So even 44 years ago, the male/female meaning was listed before the grammar meaning, even if it was marked colloquial.
A more recent dictionary has the grammar definition first, but drops the "colloquial" note.
So, all you self-righteous gits who like to recite cute things like "words have gender, people have sex": shut up already. The usage is not ambiguous, misleading, or mistaken. When a word is used in a certain way by the majority of educated native speakers, self-appointed grammar cops should learn to deal with it.
-1, offtopic. Sorry.
That's the big flaw in market worship - the idea that what the majority wants must be best, or at least has some relationship to fulfilling people's genuine wants and needs. The majority wants what they're told to want.
Yeah, it might not be great with my Shure SM57 and Labtec computer speakers, but someone will get high-quality speakers and microphones, and build a sound-insulating box around the whole thing, record it and bam! that "secure music" is now zooming around in MP3 format on the web. The speaker-to-microphone degradation would be lost in the degradation you get in MP3 compression.
Anyway, its unlikely that truly "tamperproof" speaker enclosures could be make for the consumer market in a cost-effective manner, so all I have to do is break open the box and put my D/A converter probes in the speaker terminals; degradation there would be miniscule.
Copy protection doesn't work. Never has, never will.
Megacorps are no friends of freedom either - their vison of the net is essentially TV with a "buy" button.
Neither the state nor the multinational corporation is your friend. Our best hope is to keep them busy fighting each other so they won't have much energy left to fsck us over.
I think that such a democratic form of patronage will work better than the "pay-per-copy" model that dominates music, or the corporate sponsorship model that dominates web sites.
I'm calling this a "sponsorpool", for lack of a better name, and I'm going to be working on it over the summer. (I'm quitting my "day job" to work on some side projects for at least a few months.) For the prototype, I'm using PayPal to handle payments. (I'm faking the web interface with Curl.) If anyone's interested in more info, drop me a line and I'll update you when I've got something worth sharing.
Watching a disaster, even an artistic one, has a certain perverse draw.
Never benchmarked them for speed or noise, but I've had no reliability problems with them whatsoever. And the one time my father's Seagate drive went up on him, they replaced it free of charge - with one that was several times the capacity. I heard bad reports in the early or mid 90's, but before and after that no worries. YMMV, of course.
I do have a certain sentimental attachment to Seagate - I remember the Christmas when my dad got me a 30 Meg Seagate HD and an RLL controller card for my PC clone, which I was running with dual floppies at the time. That hard disk saw me through college and grad school. (Of course, most of the interesting stuff was kept on the Unix servers at school, and my PC was just a terminal most of the time.)
-1, offtopic. Sorry.
It's one thing to have a reputation and stand by it. It's another to relentlessly brainwash the populace.
Those who do not learn from the past are condemed to repeat it. It would seem that software publishers like M$ and Adobe fall squarely into that category - sucky copy protection schemes sucked in the 80's, they suck now, they will forever suck. (Because they're the suckiest bunck of sucks that ever sucked.) This will end up as a huge boost for free software.
I can't bear to throw out books, so I just hid it somewhere in the back of the house.
Would be even more fun if I got to administer the clue-by-four to the spammer personally, though...the criminal justice system is so impersonal.
From the interview:
Vernor Vinge leaps to mind...who else? Surely most of the physicists who've written SF (Brin, Sagan, Benford, et. al.) probably at least cobbled together a few lines of FORTRAN over the years.