IMO, Specs are much more important than source. Nobody (except Be) is going to seriously do anything with the highly optimised, very complicated BeOS source anyway.
Just like no one but Linus Torvolds is ever going to do anything with the Linux kernel source?
Source lets people outside the devlopment team fix bugs and add new drivers.
Public hearings will be held in Washington, DC on May 2-4, 2000 and in Stanford, CA, on May 18--19, 2000. Requests to testify must be received in the Office of the General Counsel of the Copyright Office by 5:00 p.m. E.S.T. on April 14, 2000.
So - who speaks for the geeks? We've got about two weeks to get folks on the list.
(I'd volunteer, but I doubt the ravings of a longhaired zenarchist freak would help much.)
Should I pick-and-choose the laws I want to follow?
Of course you should! The fact that the state does or does not want me to take certain actions has nothing at all to do with whether the action is right. I've chosen to break dozens of laws in my life, laws that want to restrict my speech (in Maryland blasphemy laws are still on the books), my sex life (many consensual acts are illegal), my control over my body (drug laws, including drinking age laws), and more. But none of my "crimes" has ever hurt, or threatened to hurt, another person.
Anyone who thinks all laws should be enforced or obeyed all the time would have made a fine fugitive slave catcher. One must exercise critical thinking, not simply be a law-abiding sheep.
To get down to cases: making a copy of some piece of data is an act that harms no one, therefore there's no way that it should ever be regarded as a criminal offense.
Yes, under our current system, some creators eek out a living on the scraps thrown them by the corporate controllers of state-created "intellectual property"; but that doesn't mean that there isn't a better way. Especially now that technology has made it wholly impractical for government guns to prevent copying.
Let's bust up the distribution rackets - the MPAA, the RIAA, and the like - and let artists share their work directly with their audiences. Let's recognize that people always have and always will share data with each other, and this should never be seen as a crime. (Selling that data, OTOH, may require that a royalty be paid, just as performance royalties are paid on for-profit musical performances today. I think the performance royalty setup is a good place to start for a new model.)
Artists and authors will still find plenty of support - if Red Hat can sell CDs that can be freely copied, why can't your favorite band? And when they get the full price of the CD, not the pennnies on the dollar that trickles down from the corporate bastards now, they'll still be ahead even if they only sell 10% of the volume they do today.
Re:We should create a non-profit to do this throug
on
Protesting DMCA
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· Score: 2
We should create a similar group for Geeks. Then when something comes along like the DMCA we can use our collective voice to combat the legislation.
The point is that it is rather impossible with thinking people in a democracy to create such an organization.
Um, right. A democracy like the Weimar Republic could never be taken over by the Nazis. A democracy (ok, constitutional democratic republic) like the US could never force members of certain ethnic groups into concentration camps, or drag members of certain political parties before Congress to inquire "Are you know, or have you ever been..."
You see there are things called laws.
There's nothing magic about laws. Criminals and governments break them all the time.
A pep club is a long way from the hitler youth movement and social clensing.
True enough, but in addition to the obvious suicides depression does have very real negative physical consequences. It can decrease appetite and lead to malnutrition (which can then re-enforce the depression) and it can also decrease the likelyhood of someone seeking out help for a physical illness or injury, or even just taking basic steps to maintain health. Depressed people also often try to self-medicate, which when combined with our incredibly stupid and immoral drug prohibition laws can mean taking impure drugs.
While hiding the code may made the MPAA's job harder, it doesn't make the distribution of such code any more legal.
When I'm engaged in one or more of my multitudinous crimes of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and thoughtcrime, I'm not concerned with whether it's legal; I'm concerned with whether or not armed agents of the state are going to catch and cage me. A crime, after all, is just an act that the state doesn't like, and "legal" has no relationship to "right". (With apologies to Frank Z: Force is not law. Law is not justice. Justice is not ethics. Ethics is not compassion. Compassion is the best.)
So the question becomes, how can I not get caught? Spreading information via covert channels (the technical term for this sort of communication) makes it very hard for said agents to even suspect my actions, and to gather evidence for a conviction.
(Note to my fans in domestic surveillance: only kidding, everyone knows I'm a good law-abiding American.)
My idea was to have a single site that would centralize "geek conscience" issues such as the DVD boycott, the Amazon boycott, the etoy/eToys debacle, etc, etc.
I've been considering putting up a general "corporate misbehavior" discussion site that would cover these and other corporate crimes - sweatshops, pollution, corruption, and the like. I've even registered the domain "corporatebastards.com" to use for the site.
But I haven't come up with the copious spare time to do much with it. (Although I'll probably use the PHP discussion code I've been developing for my unreasonable.org site, so maybe in the big picture there is some progress.)
but it turned out that English is highly "digital friendly." Foreign sites such as Chinese or Japanese are always at a disadvantage in terms of growth, due to the way their language is written out.
What you're talking about here is not English vs. everything else but alphabetic versus pictographic languages. German, Russian, or Hewbrew could be encoded into digital codes just as readily as English, so that has little to do with it.
Some people have tried to argue that the human brain is strictly more powerful than Turing machines...
FWIW, the arguments I've seen along these line have been pretty bogus. Unless quantum effects play a significant role in the operation of neurons, you could simulate a brain to the necessary exactitude with a TM. (Even if QM plays a role, it most likely randomizes certain interactions and you'd just need a TM with a/dev/random hooked up to, say, diode noise.) Douglas Hofstadter takes this to an interesting conclusion in "A Conversation With Einstein's Brain", which can be found in The Mind's I (highly recommended reading). (I think "A Conversation..." was originally in Godel, Escher, Bach, but I haven't gotten through that yet - maybe I'll make it my summer project.)
Is there any light on this issue with quantum computers? Is it "strictly more powerful" than Turing machine, or is it just a faster and smaller (no matter how faster and smaller) version of what we already have now?
I would think that the theoretical version of a quantum computer would be a Turing machine with nondeterminism, which doesn't buy you anything over a vanilla TM in terms of computability.
Anyway, Christian Fantasy is fairly well represented, but this is the only novel of Christian Science Fiction I've ever seen.
When I was a young Catholic lad (I'm much better now, thank you) I read C.S. Lewis' trilogy that starts with Out of the Silent Planet. (I was given the boxed set by my great aunt, a nun.) Much of Cordwainer Smith's work also incorporates Xianity into SF. So you can either seek these out or avoid them, as suits your taste.
Of course, there are many SF stories that feature Xianity in some way without being Xian, like (IIRC) Clarke's The Star.
IMHO We (Linux geeks) have a real opportunity to be the first to define and develop some useful GNU remote groupware tools.
Maybe I'm just an old school Unix curmudgeon (at the grand old age of 30, yet), but I think that 90+% of organizations would be better served by the intelligent application of standard, open, well-known tools - some local news groups, e-mail, a web server, an NFS or SAMBA server for file sharing, and maybe talk/IRC - than with the proprietary junkware that infects most companies today. I think we should focus more on better tools for these protocols than on new "groupware" tools.
As broadband access becomes more common, audio and video conferecing over IP will surely become more important for linking team members, but the text-based protocol have the large advantage of creating a "document trail". Indeed, I think that's one advantage of working remotely - more things get actually documented somehow, rather than just being passed on by oral tradition.
I MISS PEOPLE. There's a lot to be said for human interaction during the day
Sure, but why should it have to be with the people you work with? I'd rather have my human interaction with the folks at my dojo, or get lunch with a friend, or go hang out at a bar and catch some music in the evening. While I get along ok with people at work, they're not socially irreplaceable by any means.
I telecommuted for about six months while working on a contract for a company in Northern Virginia (I'm near Baltimore and refuse to commute 3 hours a day). Worked great: I was very productive and happy, the dogs were glad to have me around, I worked the weird schedule I like (hack a little, play a little, hack a little, play a little, hack a little).
I hope to find a similar arrangement the next time I change jobs. (Looking for a good Unix/Internet geek to work off-site? Resume's on the web, drop me a line!)
The NEA contributed $1,853,390 during that same cycle...
A little perspective:
First, you cite a figure of "over 2.2 million members" for the NEA. That works out to a whopping 84 cents per member, hardly the mark of inordinate political influence.
Second, for comparion, the telephone utilities have made $2,787,569 in contributions so far during the 2000 election cycle. the NEA so has made only $271,667 and the AFT $510,700 (according to opensecrets.org, thanks for the pointer).
Please don't claim that teachers do not have clout.
I challenge you to explain why, if they have such clout, teachers remain underpaid and undersupported.
All of his arguments depend upon humanity being limited to a single ecosphere with no limits on transference of both physical and informational objects. Nanotech, in addition to it's effects directly upon humans, could easily create materials strong enough for space elevators and conductors effective enough for cheap mass drivers. Robots can have habitats witing for our arrival. Opening space up allows humanity to create one of the finest safety nets a species can have; not having all your eggs in one basket.
The grey goo could very easily eat us before we could get any real foothold on Luna or Mars. A GE plauge could easily be made dormant enough to spread to space colonies. And while a few thousand people off-planet would be a safety net for the survival of the species, it wouldn't stop the billions still here from dying of grey goo/plauge/killer robots (though I'm not really worried about the last).
The only real threat Joy raises is the gray goo problem. However, I think the risks here are matched by the potential benefits. Immortality is a tempting payoff, after all. Without new advances, I'm going to be goo in seventy years anyway, so maybe I'll take that gamble. (Sorry to the future generations who get gooed. Should have been born earlier.)
But it's not just your life your gambling with - it's mine, too. That tends to make me a bit pesky, pesky enough that I might make goo out of you before you get to play with the possibility of making goo out of me.
I'd like to live forever too, or at least have a thousand years or so to think it over. But we can't risk gooing everyone else to do so. (At least, and not expect violent resistance.)
When we subscribe to the anti-theistic philosophical core provided by evolution--which provides us with a necessarily amoral outlook--we are stuck without hope.
Atheism is not necessarily amoral. Kantian rationalism and utilitarianism are moral theories compatible with atheism.
Nor does atheism leave us without hope. Unlike the Christian, Jew, or Muslim, the atheist does not see man as a creature fallen from grace and kicked out of Eden, but a creature arisen by his own efforts up from the dust, with the potential to rise higher.
It has been said if if gods did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. I say this: that gods do not exist, and that it is therefore necessary that we become them. We are just now starting to have the tools to do so; but we still lack wisdom.
Our understanding of what to do lags behind our understanding of how to do, and the main thing that's help us back in this regard is the wide-spread belief that some father figure in the sky has all the answers. Sorry, it's not that simple. We need to work it out for ourselves.
Putting the tools of the gods into the hands of the superstitious seems a prescription for disaster. Let's hope we grow up quick.
Two things are different now: it's happening much faster and we're in control of it.
The concern is that we'll lose control of it, that we'll do the sorcerer's apprentice bit. We're at that stage now with genetic engineering of crops; our "engineering" of genes is to splice the code we want into random spots in the genome and hope for the results we want. Imagine writing a program that way! This is not control. We have very little fscking idea what we're doing and we're releasing these plants into the biosphere. This is extraordinarily dumb, but there's potential profit to be made so ahead we charge.
Admittedly, we're not neccessarily smart or wise enough to do a good job at directing evolution, but it's not so far fetched to believe that we can do better than the more or less completely random process that has dominated the history of our planet.
It's also not far-fetched to believe that we'll screw it up. When you're teaching yourself to use a dangerous tool, it behooves you to behave with extreme caution and progress very very slowly. It is not smart to learn just enough to turn on a chainsaw, and decide based on that that you have sufficent expertise to juggle them.
And will they truly replace us or merge with us to form something different?
My bet's on merge. (I figure to live about another 100 to 150 years in my original body (assuming that the grey goo doesn't eat us all) with a little help from nanotech and tissue engineering, then get my consciousness transferred/absorbed into a more durable and capable substrate and leave the planet.)
(ethics, sadly, do not matter: have we ever created a weapon that we did not at least try to use?).
Thermonuclear and neutron bombs?
Someday, we will be replaced. It may happen slowly and impercetibly, or swiftly and dramatically, but it will happen. It may happen in the 21st century, it may happen in the 12th millenium. As long as we have a legacy, does it matter what form it takes?
I think the point is that if we're not careful, we may not have a legacy at all. We might, for example, all trade in our meat bodies for plastic ones only to have a genetically engineered bacterium we developed to clean up oil spills mutate and develop a taste for plastic.
That being said, I have a hard time getting too worried about this. People have been crying about the end of (life|humanity|civilization) for centuries. We're still here.
An extremely dangerous attitude. "Yeah, I know that people have been shooting at us for a while, but nobody's hit us yet. Yeah, there's a new sniper over there, but so what, we're not in any dan-" bang!thud
Or think of it this way: the fact the we survive one crisis through a combination of luck and skill, not a good reason to fail to avoid another crisis.
After all, one day the doomsayers will be right and it will be the end of the world. Maybe that won't be until the sun burns out. (Or until the Milky Way hits Andromeda. Joy's article was the first I've heard of this - any links the futher info? I figured we has four to five billion years to get out of the system, but if we've only got three, and many planetary systems may be destroyed, we'd better get cracking.)
We have to keep in mind that "thinking computers" already exist. They're made out of meat. We call them "brains".
... with an ethical curiousity would probably end up psychotic. Without the ability to lose concentration and forget things it would be stuck in one endless loop after another.
How can you have one endless loop after another?
Certainly, if I were an artifical intelligence, I'd just fork off a low-priority background task for such questions. (Yes, I know that it's doubtful that an AI would run Unix...)
In fact, it often seems that something like a low-priority background task does exist in our brains. Most of us have had that sudden insight into a problem that we weren't consciously thinking about, as if our "subconscious" had been working on the problem the whole time.
I actually pretty much agree, and don't use (t)csh for "real" scripting. (For "do this, then that, then the other", it doesn't matter.) But for my typical command line, I prefer (t)csh; love that "foreach x (*.txt) mv $x $x:r.html end", that "setenv" rather than "export", and so on. Of course, that prefererence might be largely inertia.
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Just like no one but Linus Torvolds is ever going to do anything with the Linux kernel source?
Source lets people outside the devlopment team fix bugs and add new drivers.
(I'd volunteer, but I doubt the ravings of a longhaired zenarchist freak would help much.)
Of course you should! The fact that the state does or does not want me to take certain actions has nothing at all to do with whether the action is right. I've chosen to break dozens of laws in my life, laws that want to restrict my speech (in Maryland blasphemy laws are still on the books), my sex life (many consensual acts are illegal), my control over my body (drug laws, including drinking age laws), and more. But none of my "crimes" has ever hurt, or threatened to hurt, another person.
Anyone who thinks all laws should be enforced or obeyed all the time would have made a fine fugitive slave catcher. One must exercise critical thinking, not simply be a law-abiding sheep.
To get down to cases: making a copy of some piece of data is an act that harms no one, therefore there's no way that it should ever be regarded as a criminal offense.
Yes, under our current system, some creators eek out a living on the scraps thrown them by the corporate controllers of state-created "intellectual property"; but that doesn't mean that there isn't a better way. Especially now that technology has made it wholly impractical for government guns to prevent copying.
Let's bust up the distribution rackets - the MPAA, the RIAA, and the like - and let artists share their work directly with their audiences. Let's recognize that people always have and always will share data with each other, and this should never be seen as a crime. (Selling that data, OTOH, may require that a royalty be paid, just as performance royalties are paid on for-profit musical performances today. I think the performance royalty setup is a good place to start for a new model.)
Artists and authors will still find plenty of support - if Red Hat can sell CDs that can be freely copied, why can't your favorite band? And when they get the full price of the CD, not the pennnies on the dollar that trickles down from the corporate bastards now, they'll still be ahead even if they only sell 10% of the volume they do today.
Successful fascism starts in culture, not in politics.
It's not all in your head.
So the question becomes, how can I not get caught? Spreading information via covert channels (the technical term for this sort of communication) makes it very hard for said agents to even suspect my actions, and to gather evidence for a conviction.
(Note to my fans in domestic surveillance: only kidding, everyone knows I'm a good law-abiding American.)
But I haven't come up with the copious spare time to do much with it. (Although I'll probably use the PHP discussion code I've been developing for my unreasonable.org site, so maybe in the big picture there is some progress.)
FWIW, the arguments I've seen along these line have been pretty bogus. Unless quantum effects play a significant role in the operation of neurons, you could simulate a brain to the necessary exactitude with a TM. (Even if QM plays a role, it most likely randomizes certain interactions and you'd just need a TM with a /dev/random hooked up to, say, diode noise.) Douglas Hofstadter takes this to an interesting conclusion in "A Conversation With Einstein's Brain", which can be found in The Mind's I (highly recommended reading). (I think "A Conversation..." was originally in Godel, Escher, Bach, but I haven't gotten through that yet - maybe I'll make it my summer project.)
I would think that the theoretical version of a quantum computer would be a Turing machine with nondeterminism, which doesn't buy you anything over a vanilla TM in terms of computability.
Of course, there are many SF stories that feature Xianity in some way without being Xian, like (IIRC) Clarke's The Star.
As broadband access becomes more common, audio and video conferecing over IP will surely become more important for linking team members, but the text-based protocol have the large advantage of creating a "document trail". Indeed, I think that's one advantage of working remotely - more things get actually documented somehow, rather than just being passed on by oral tradition.
I telecommuted for about six months while working on a contract for a company in Northern Virginia (I'm near Baltimore and refuse to commute 3 hours a day). Worked great: I was very productive and happy, the dogs were glad to have me around, I worked the weird schedule I like (hack a little, play a little, hack a little, play a little, hack a little).
I hope to find a similar arrangement the next time I change jobs. (Looking for a good Unix/Internet geek to work off-site? Resume's on the web, drop me a line!)
First, you cite a figure of "over 2.2 million members" for the NEA. That works out to a whopping 84 cents per member, hardly the mark of inordinate political influence.
Second, for comparion, the telephone utilities have made $2,787,569 in contributions so far during the 2000 election cycle. the NEA so has made only $271,667 and the AFT $510,700 (according to opensecrets.org, thanks for the pointer).
I challenge you to explain why, if they have such clout, teachers remain underpaid and undersupported.The grey goo could very easily eat us before we could get any real foothold on Luna or Mars. A GE plauge could easily be made dormant enough to spread to space colonies. And while a few thousand people off-planet would be a safety net for the survival of the species, it wouldn't stop the billions still here from dying of grey goo/plauge/killer robots (though I'm not really worried about the last).
I'd like to live forever too, or at least have a thousand years or so to think it over. But we can't risk gooing everyone else to do so. (At least, and not expect violent resistance.)
Atheism is not necessarily amoral. Kantian rationalism and utilitarianism are moral theories compatible with atheism.
Nor does atheism leave us without hope. Unlike the Christian, Jew, or Muslim, the atheist does not see man as a creature fallen from grace and kicked out of Eden, but a creature arisen by his own efforts up from the dust, with the potential to rise higher.
It has been said if if gods did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them. I say this: that gods do not exist, and that it is therefore necessary that we become them. We are just now starting to have the tools to do so; but we still lack wisdom.
Our understanding of what to do lags behind our understanding of how to do, and the main thing that's help us back in this regard is the wide-spread belief that some father figure in the sky has all the answers. Sorry, it's not that simple. We need to work it out for ourselves.
Putting the tools of the gods into the hands of the superstitious seems a prescription for disaster. Let's hope we grow up quick.
Or think of it this way: the fact the we survive one crisis through a combination of luck and skill, not a good reason to fail to avoid another crisis.
After all, one day the doomsayers will be right and it will be the end of the world. Maybe that won't be until the sun burns out. (Or until the Milky Way hits Andromeda. Joy's article was the first I've heard of this - any links the futher info? I figured we has four to five billion years to get out of the system, but if we've only got three, and many planetary systems may be destroyed, we'd better get cracking.)
Certainly, if I were an artifical intelligence, I'd just fork off a low-priority background task for such questions. (Yes, I know that it's doubtful that an AI would run Unix...)
In fact, it often seems that something like a low-priority background task does exist in our brains. Most of us have had that sudden insight into a problem that we weren't consciously thinking about, as if our "subconscious" had been working on the problem the whole time.
Apparently this is a new usage of the phrase "enormous clout" with which I was not previously familiar.
I actually pretty much agree, and don't use (t)csh for "real" scripting. (For "do this, then that, then the other", it doesn't matter.) But for my typical command line, I prefer (t)csh; love that "foreach x (*.txt) mv $x $x:r.html end", that "setenv" rather than "export", and so on. Of course, that prefererence might be largely inertia.