a large stone wheel with a patent number inscribed in it
That's probably the best idea in terms of the symbolism, since the wheel is the canonical simple, universally-known invention, as in the phrase "re-invent the wheel", though I don't know how well it could be rendered in a small icon-sized image.
Another idea might be someone representing the US Patent and Trademark Office wearing a dunce cap, or just a dunce cap labelled with the letters "USPTO".
I guess there are really two somewhat separate issues that we tend to have with patents in general: one is the patenting of truly simple, obvious techniques that really don't deserve to be called "technology" so as to extort licensing fees from everyone else, e.g., the "one-click shopping" patent that they discussed. The other is people being tyrannical or otherwise butt-headed about licensing for patents on things that really were innovative but are now in such widespread use that the restrictions are harmful, e.g., the LZW algorithm for GIFs (which Slashdot still seems to be using -- even though they skipped "Burn All GIFs Day", the patent icon when they add it should really not be a GIF) and Fraunhoffer's (sp?) MP3 algorithm.
The "patenting the wheel" icon would ideally symbolize the first issue, but not so much the second. My "USPTO dunce cap" idea would be symbolic more of the problems with the whole IP system, and specifically the incompetence of the USPTO to handle the issues properly. That's sort of a third issue, but it relates to both of the ones above.
Someone (Taco, if I've figured out the voices correctly) asked which patent is dumber: one-click shopping or human DNA, and Hemos (?) said it was DNA. I'm not sure I agree: the idea of DNA patents is worse morally (i.e., the second issue), but at least genetic engineering is truly high-tech stuff, so it makes some sense to talk about its products as scientific accomplishments. One-click shopping is such a simple idea that I find it offensive to even call it "technology", let alone think it worthy of a patent (i.e., the first issue), so it's the "dumber" one.
[...] _Enders Game_, where children have to wear "monitors" to track their activities and actions. Ender puts up with the bullying when people are watching (i.e. the monitor is on) but when it is removed ends up killing his tormentor.
If I remember the beginning of Ender's Game correctly (I happened to re-read it a few months ago, but I could still be fuzzy on this), your summary is not quite right.
I believe it was only the children who were considered to be good candidates for military training (Battle School) who wore the monitors. I don't think it was completely clear how this was determined: it was probably based on some sort of earlier screening process, though I guess it could have been that everyone had them until they were disqualified. In Ender's case the earlier performance of his older siblings was also a good predictor. The monitor itself was not a "Big Brother"-type thing so much as a screening process for finding good potential soldiers (and humanity was at the time fighting for its existence -- it was necessary).
It was not so much that Ender "put up with" the bullying because he was being watched, and then cut loose as soon as he was free. Rather, Stilson and the other bullies left him alone (relatively) while he had the monitor, because they knew that they could not hurt him without getting caught, though at the same time they grew to dislike him even more him because of it. Then, when it was removed, they knew they could attack him with impunity. They did so, and he fought back. Hard. His philosophy of "hurt your attacker so bad that he won't ever hurt you again" is exactly what the military was looking for, and it's what made him so good at what he had to do, even though he didn't like it.
Well, the music is better -- kinda strange, but pretty cool, and definitely better. Whatever that was last time from 00:15 to 00:22 was scary.
Pentium III IDs
Does it really matter how much the NSA and FBI were involved in creating the IDs? What matters is how they can be used, regardless of whose idea they were, right?
People at Comdex [...] What is Slash...Dot? [...] If you don't know, we won't tell you [...] everyone else trying to sell stuff [...] sitting there reading e-mail
That really is funny, since, like you said, every trade show booths anyone's ever seen was full of people waiting to pounce on anyone who shows the slightest interest in them. You guys must really scare the average show-goer -- walking by, and even lingering for a minute, only to be completely ignored by a bunch of guys staring at their laptops must make them wonder when they entered the Twilight Zone. It was the same at the last couple of LinuxWorld Expos in San Jose, when it was all I could do to get your attention long enough to buy a pair of T-shirts.
200-millionth page load
Yeah, but how many of those were Greg reloading the front page, trying to get a "first"?
Wow, I never realized that was how SkyNet got built.
Not to flame you too hard, but how could you possibly have missed that? It was almost the entire point of the movie. Or did you only see Terminator and not Terminator 2: Judgement Day?
As I recall, it wasn't stated in the first movie -- it wasn't even known to the characters at the time, except for it being "some kind of defense computer network gone wild", and the entire goal was to save Sarah Connor's life, so John could be born and lead humanity to win the war against the robots, while the Terminator tried to kill her and prevent the above.
The second movie wouldn't have been very interesting, though, if it had just been a repeat of the same "one time traveler protects key person from other time traveler who is trying to change history" plot. It was much more, though: they tried to prevent SkyNet from ever existing, by taking out Dyson (its inventor). He reveals that they were making breakthroughs that they "would never have thought of" based on analyzing a brain chip salvaged from the first Terminator, so they go to blow up his entire company, destroying the chip, the lab, the research, etc.
To the other replies:
Try not to think about it too much. That's the best advice I have.
Come on! That's the most interesting part! Even if it makes your head hurt, you've got to want to think about these things.
It is only alluded to but if true does create a really foul time paradox.
I thought it was much more than "alluded to". I'll grant that they didn't really think through the paradoxes, but the fact that SkyNet was made possible by the brain chip was central to the reasons why they had to blow up the lab, and why Schwartzenegger had to be fried at the end (to destroy the last existing brain chip).
It's true that the paradoxes get pretty nasty: first, the premise has the problem that, if SkyNet's invention was only made possible by analysis of the Terminator's brain chip, then where did the technology "come from" in "the first place", i.e., how can a technology exist without ever having been invented?
Then, if you grant that it is somehow possible for SkyNet and the Terminators to have "created themselves" spontaneously, you get another problem: if they destroyed all the chips, preventing SkyNet from being created, then none of it could ever have happened -- Sarah Connor's life should just go back to the way it was before, with Kyle Reese and the first Terminator never even showing up (and, incidentally, John never being born). But then, if SkyNet is not actively prevented from creating itself, wouldn't it do so again...?
The thing is, these paradoxes sort of cancel each other out: if you reject the idea of SkyNet being a figment of its own imagination, i.e., conclude that, despite what Dyson and the second Terminator said[1], it would have been invented anyway as a result of good ole' human ingenuity, then their efforts to prevent it would have been in vain and everything would still happen exactly as Kyle Reese described it. That seems to be the only way for them to have their memories of the events, or for the events to have occurred at all. This is the "Red Queen's Race" (an Asimov story that refers to the bit in Alice in Wonderland where you run as fast as you can just to stay where you are) view on time travel, which is also the theme of 12 Monkeys -- you can't change history through time travel because anything you do "already happened", and was thus "taken into account", making your version of history a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another problem is that their trying to prevent it all may not have been a very good idea, given how unpredictable the effects would be. In short, you don't mess with a winner. At least in Kyle Reese's version of the story, humanity won in the end, but if they changed things the wrong way, the war night have still happened but without the happy ending.
Or, for a sort of eerie reality tie-in, you could use the multiple time-lines view, where, up to the end, the movie occurred in a time-line where they succeeded in keeping John Connor alive, but failed to prevent the war, and that time-line branched off when they destroyed the chips, allowing our time-line (the real world) to exist with no Terminators at all.
-- [1] Maybe Skynet created false records indicating that Dyson was the inventor, when in fact it was someone else working independently, so that they would blow up the wrong lab.
I can't *wait* until The Gap changes their marketing strategy
I can't wait until Pepsi-Co changes their marketing strategy for Mountain Dew from showing people doing extreme-sports-type things to showing a bunch of geeks eating pizza, drinking Dew, and hacking kernel code at five A.M. on the fourth day of a hundred-hour coding session, since we know who the poeple are who really "do the Dew". As a backdrop, they could use something that looks like my cubicle, with nearly a thousand empty Mountain Dew cans stacked up. (Once they were piled five high on my shelf, I decided to glue them together so they wouldn't fall on the head of the marketing guy across the wall; I've also made a Borg cube, several versions of SGI's old cube logo, the five Platonic solids, and a throne for Tux to sit on. They could profile me and talk about Mountain Dew art, etc.)
It was done a few years ago, with (I think) the Volkswagen Jetta: they did a commercial with a gang of hackers who were writing a driving game and using their car for inspiration, It showed them piling into the car while eating pizza, drinking soda, and generally being weird, and it made them look pretty cool. That might have actually marked the beginning of the mainstream glamorization of geekhood.
First of all, a completely speech-based interface has its own problems, even if the speech recognition could be "perfect" and the interface extremely well-designed. That last part is probably harder than you think: for it to be a really good interface, you'd probably want it to "understand" you as clearly as another person would, which, even leaving out philosophical questions about whether it would really be conscious, is an AI-complete/Turing-Test sort of task.
A less ambitious version might be a speech-to-text layer built over a command line, but that would be really bad. It would not be much faster than typing, and it would be very hard to disambiguate your commands, since shell commands do not consist entirely of real words. For example, I for one pronounce "/usr/bin" as "user bin", not "slash U S R slash bin", but how is it supposed to know that? It can't just replace "usr" with "user", because I could also have a directory called "user", and that's just one word -- how is it supposed to be able to guess where to insert slashes, etc.? A lot of letters sound like words; multiple words can be separate tokens or run together, capitalization is nto always consistent, etc. I would certainly not be willing to spell everything out clearly enough for a reasonable system to recognize, because it would probably end up being slower than typing. If I ever need to work faster, I'll learn to touch-type [1].
Even if such an interface could be made to work really well, it seems that it would be pretty distracting to have an office full of people talking to their computers, let alone trying to use a laptop in a public place.
Even ignoring that, a speech-based interface would still be lacking: Back to dictating shell commands: have you ever tried to dictate a session of shell commands to the person at the keyboard while looking over his shoulder? Even an AI-complete, Turing-test-passing agent (i.e., an actual human) cannot perfectly interpret your spoken shell commands. Telling someone where to click in a GUI can be even worse. In either case, you tend to end up wanting to grab the keyboard and/or mouse from him and do it yourself. That suggests that the keyboard/mouse is better than speech for giving commands. In fact, when talking someone through a GUI, you probably end up pointing at the screen and saying "click here" a lot, i.e., your first reaction is to improvise a "pointer" because you need to point at something.
I suggest that the need to point at things is a fundmental part of any interface. What you really want is to be able to just think at it, but failing that, you'll probably find that putting what you want into words is actually harder than pointing/typing. The only thing I've used that I might like better than the mouse is the stylus on a Palm Pilot. This is a special case with respect to pen mouse devices because the interface is also different -- you tap controls with it, which combines the actions of pointing and clicking. This is a big difference, since you don't have to move an onscreen widget to the control. What I think would be good is to have a camera set up to track your eye movements, so you could just look at something on the screen and squint to tap it. Eye movements are the easiest, fastest and most accurate muscular actions that we are capable of, so it would be good to harness their information-carrying capacity.
"Computer: tea, earl grey, hot."
It's a cool line, but after a while I started wondering why Picard didn't set up a macro so he could just say "Tea" and get his default preference. Maybe if he had occasionally asked for iced tea, or darjeeling or something instead...
[1] I currently do a sort of hybrid "hunt-and-touch" thing, where at least five or six fingers are moving, and they "know" where the keys are, but I have to be looking at the keyboard while doing it; I can get up around forty to fifty words per minute, so it's not much of a problemIt would be nice not to have to take my eyes off the screen, but it's never seemed worth the trouble.
My only problem with this announcement is that the industry's "permitting" this use of MP3s implies that it's their decision, when in fact (well, in my opinion, anyway, which is the same thing) they don't have any authority whatsoever even knowing or caring about it in the first place, let alone permitting or forbidding it. Where would they even have gotten the idea in the first place, let alone how would they justify it, to think that this would be illegal?
But DJ's don't own the songs, they own a round piece of plastic.
IANAL, but this is my understanding: they own two things: the round piece of plastic, i.e., a physical medium containing a copy of the copyrighted work, and a license that permits them to use the work in a particular commercial setting. Does the license actually specify the physical process by which the work can be used? I.e., does it say "You may use the song in live performances by placing this and only this particular disc in a CD player and pressing 'Play'.", or does it say "You may use the song in live performances."? I can't imagine that it would be the former. I mean, why, except for them being typically heavy-handed? Even for them, this seems ridiculous.
Here's a similar case: what if a DJ is at a party and someone requests a particular song. The DJ says, "Yeah, I have that," but then he looks through his pile of CDs and finds that, while it's true that he owns the disc and has a live-performance license for it, he has forgotten that particular one at home. Then the host interjects, "Wait, I have that album." He owns a CD of the album but he does not have a live-performance license for it. The question is, if the host lends his physical disc to the DJ, could the DJ then, under his live-performance license, use that disc to perform the song, even though it's not the same particular disc that he owns? I think the answer should be an obvious "Yes". Perhaps the industry sees thing differently, but I can't imagine what they could object to about this situation. Also, what if the DJ's disc is lost or destroyed? Does he have to pay for the license again, or just buy a new copy of the disc? What about the "for archival purposes" fair-use doctrine? (I realize that Canada != USA, so maybe the "fair use" thing is different.)
As it is, in the process of performing it, the information passes through any number of intermediate formats as it is processed by various pieces of equipment, e.g., (note that I don't really know anything about professional sound equipment) bits get read by the CD player and converted to an analog signal and this goes through all sorts of mixers, equalizers, amps, etc., before going to the speaker, where the analog signal is converted from an electrical carrier to an acoustic one. Does the industry presume to have any authority whatsoever over exactly what steps the information goes through on its path from the DJ's round piece of plastic to the audience's ears? Of course not, as long as the DJ has paid for a live-performance license and no durable copies are given to anyone else. What's the difference of the bits make an extra stop (i.e., being compressed by Fraunhoffer's (sp?) algorithm and stored on a more convenient physical medium) along the way, all the while remaining in the DJ's possession and not being given to anyone else in a durable form? It sounds like they are just trying to continue to brand anything associated with MP3 as "illegal", while appearing magnanimous in this obviously-trivial case.
From the article:
DJs can buy a license giving them the right to burn their own compilation CDs of "useable tracks," instead of having to cart their whole CD collections around to their gigs.
I don't see how this could possibly not be considered to fall under "fair use" (though, again Canada != USA), or why it would require a special license.
Under Canadian law, a DJ convicted of making unlicensed reproductions with any technology could face serious fines and the confiscation of his equipment. Though there haven't been any such cases lately, Heindl points out that Canadian authorities have made examples of offenders in the past.
I could see it if the concern were over such copies being passed around, but two points: first, why would it be any different for a DJ than for any person making bootleg (don't call it "Piracy") copies of normally-purchased albums. Second, here it is again: why are they so obsessed with how many copies exist, as long as they are all in his possession and not performed in any unlicensed fashion? What seems to matter is whether he has the right to possess and perform the song at all. The closest thing that seems reasonable to me would be if we were talking about DJs using songs off of albums that they just bought at the record store, without paying for a performance license, or, better yet, completely bootlegged copies that they downloaded or got from friends. of course that would be illegal, but nobody's talking about that.
Although the record companies will welcome the license fees, the small amount of revenue they will generate isn't the point at all, Robertson said.
"It's more a question of copyright control than generating revenues," he said. "It's important to keep things like copyright above board like this."
Ah, here it is! They are still trying to perpetuate the illusion that they should rightfully have complete control over the proliferation of physical copies of the data, and the perception of themselves as the one and only legitimate source for anything related to it. This is a very nasty tool that they use consistently in their propaganda: the equivocation between the concepts of licensing rights to information and the physical act of duplicating it. The two concepts are very different, but these guys jump back and forth at will, using each to "refute" arguments that are really about the other. The difference was not so important back when physical duplication was difficult and expensive, since they had an almost-but-maybe-not-quite monopoly on the ability to create copies. It was a service that they provided, along with granting licenses. Now, though, it's very easy to copy things, and there is no reason why people should need that service from them. They have absolutely no grounds for objecting to other people performing the physical copying as desired, as long as their licenses are respected.
They're acting as if they have both a patent on "a physical medium storing, in machine-readable form, the digital stream 0x6549cb5a67890f8460d..., or any data that represents the same audio signal", and a copyright on the song (both the composition and the performance) that is represented thereby. The patent would entitle them to control the creation of copies, and the copyright would entitle them to control the use of same. My sense is that they have the copyright but not the patent.
David Gould
Re:Consumers need a new fair-use "bill of rights"
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Copyright!
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If a copy of a newspaper falls off the back of a delivery truck, and I find to the newsstand to buy a copy, is it stealing for me to pick it up and read it instead?
This is fascinating, because I've essentially grown up on this nonsense and I actually *would* think twice about this. And I consider myself to be a fairly independent thinker. I wonder how brainwashed the rest of my generation is..;-)
You seem to have gotten my point and agreed with it, even though now that I look back at what I wrote it may not seem quite as obvious as I had hoped, so I want to expand a bit. The newspaper example is a bit different because the object in question is a physical medium that is owned by the publisher until I buy it, so maybe there really is some sort of stealing going on. However, it's a copy that they had lost and that otherwise would not benefit anyone, so I think the situation is pretty similar to a broadcast. Medium aside, the question is over the "theft" of the information. Of course the information is still copyrighted, so selling copies or re-publishing it as my own work would still be just as wrong as ever -- the way I acquired it does not change that -- but I just can't make myself see the copyright as meaning that nobody is entitled to possess the information at all without having paid for it.
Seeing the brainwashing for what it is is tricky. Some background: this argument about process vs. end result, and the specific example of the satellite TV decoder, was first presented to me by a guy on my floor in the dorm my first year at Berkeley ('94-5). He didn't present it all that convincingly, or maybe I just refused to listen, but either way, I didn't buy it. I thought he was just being glib and ignoring the "end result".
However, in the past year or so, I've come to see that he was right. To me, the most compelling case is that of cryptography. How can it be illegal to make up a bunch of random numbers? To multiply some numbers together modulo some other number? To transmit the result to a friend? The fact that this may happen to conceal a secret message doesn't change my right to perform those actions. They could be used to hide illegal activity, but I don't think that's relevant. The activity in question is already illegal -- using cryptography to hide it doesn't make it any more or less wrong; it just makes it harder to catch people at it, but that's not my problem (There's nothing illegal in my secret messages -- honest!). The law enforcement agencies are just going to have to come up with some other way to catch the real criminals without being able to read all their messages.
There's a common thread in these things, which I suspect is the reason they resonate so strongly on Slashdot: because knowledge is so precious to the geek/hacker mentality, the withholding of knowledge is deeply offensive (hence the Free Software movement), but, even worse, hardly anything is more offensive than being forbidden to apply knowledge that I already have, e.g., using a cryptosystem that I know how to implement, or figuring out how to decode a signal.
Here's a point that I guess I didn't make explicit before: the comment to which I originally replied was about the right to record broadcasts. To me, when a signal is being processed by some piece of equipment of mine (e.g., a radio, TV, or satellite dish), I consider myself to be in possession of that information (not ownership -- it's still copyrighted, but I possess a copy). Therefore, I feel that I have every right to use any capabilities of any of my equipment to manipulate that information in any way that I choose, including recording it. I think of my equipment's memory as an extension of my own, and I was already given permission to view the signal; there is no provision that I have to forget what I saw immediately after seeing it, and recording it would simply be facilitating my ability to recall it later. That's why I consider it to fall under fair use, i.e., the rights that I was implicitly granted when I was given the copy in the first place.
Compare and contrast the following actions. I guess they skirt the line between legal and illegal, and there are at least a few that "they" would like us to believe are wrong, but that I don't think really are:
-reading a newspaper and hence learning the information it contains -saving clipping from the newspaper for future reference -making photocopies of the newspaper clippings for backup, as the higher-quality paper will last longer -reading a news article on a web site. -printing the article from the web site for future reference -watching a program on TV and remembering its contents -recording the program on a videocassette for future reference -copying the videocassette for backup -telling a friend about the newspaper article, relating the information in your own words -telling a friend the volume number so he can look up the newspaper article in a library archive -lending a friend the newspaper clipping or photocopy thereof -telling a friend about the article on the web site in your own words -telling a friend the URL of the article so he can look it up. -lending a friend the printout of the article -telling a friend about the TV program in your own words -telling a friend the time and channel when the program will be re-run, so he can watch it -lending a friend the videocassette of the program
----- Maybe the solution to the copyright problem will not be the elimination of copyright but the readjustment of human values to exclude anything that might possibly endanger it such as sharing (I'm also more careful about sharing stuff than a lot of people, hmmm) and accidentally finding things you don't "have permission" to access. */me shudders*...
Re:Consumers need a new fair-use "bill of rights"
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Copyright!
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(5) The RIGHT to record *unowned* copyrighted broadcast material (including Satellite and cable as well as over the air) for time-shift-viewing purposes. e.g., legally record a movie from your subscribed HBO channel while you're at work for viewing later that night or on the weekend.
The concept of "unowned" is unclear here. Does "broadcast" cover what you're trying to do here, or are there other circumstances where this might apply?
I'm not sure if this is what the original poster meant, but the way I figure, nobody owns airwaves. Hence, if somebody broadcasts something, I have every right to view it, record it, or whatever. If it happens to be a copyrighted work, then I am not allowed to go around selling copies, but if they didn't want me to have a copy, they shouldn't have broadcast it. They've already "given" me a copy by broadcasting it in a format that I'm capable of interpreting, and they have no right to dictate what personal use I make of that copy (e.g., to say that I can only watch it once, synchronously with the broadcast).
In similar contexts, I've argued along these lines (analyzing the process by which an activity is performed, e.g., "You can't ban cryptography because it's just arithmetic.") The counter-argument has been that the end result is what matters, namely the fact that I am acquiring an unauthorized copy of a work, and that the process by which it occurs is irrelevant to that end result. This is wrong. The process does matter. If each step of the process falls under my rights, then restricting it based on the "end result" would by necessity entail restricting my rights to perform those individual actions, and is therefore unacceptable. If they don't like the end result, that's their problem.
Consider satellite TV broadcasts: if I look up in the sky, I see a satellite. If I could see into the appropriate part of the spectrum, I'd see that it's a very bright object. If my perception were fast enough, I'd see that its color and intensity are modulating very quickly in various patterns. If I knew the protocol, I'd be able to interpret those patterns as streams of bits. If I knew the encryption key, I'd be able to decipher those bits into an MPEG (?) stream. If I could decode the MPEG stream, I'd be able to see a TV broabcast.
If I pointed a radio telescope (which is, after all, exactly what a satellite dish is) at the satellite, it could allow me to see the relevant part of the spectrum. If I fed the telescope's output into a computer, it could interpret the signal into a bit stream for me. If someone told me the encryption key, or I cracked it myself, I could instruct the computer to convert the bits to the MPEG stream. If the computer had an MPEG decoder, it could allow me to watch the TV broadcast.
All this would be without my subscribing to the satellite TV service, and the broadcasters would like us to believe that I would be "stealing", but would I? If a copy of a newspaper falls off the back of a delivery truck, and I find it lying by the side of the road as I'm on my way to the newsstand to buy a copy, is it stealing for me to pick it up and read it instead? My contention is that these are all inalienable rights. They don't own the light that radiates from their satellite; anyone, anywhere has the right to look at it, which includes using such apparatus as a radio telescope and a computer to enhance their vision. The encryption key is (obviously) a trade secret, but it's still just a number -- they can't own it. Obtaining it via some sort of illegal activities (i.e., industrial espionage) is already illegal, but cracking it independently is just math. They have the right to try to make it hard, but not to prevent people from trying (or succeeding, except by making it too hard).
The "end result" is that I would be in possession of an unauthorized copy of their broadcast. As I said above, it is still a copyrighted work, so I couldn't go around selling copies, but they cannot restrict my rights to do what I have just described. They're the ones bombarding my body and my property with radiation that happens to contain the copyrighted information. That radiation does not belong to anyone (or, better yet, when it enters my property, it becomes my property). The way I see it, it's a game between us -- they want to broadcast the information so that their subscribers can retrieve it but I can't. To that end, they are entitled to make as strong a copy-protection mechanism as they want, but once the radiation is in the air, it's fair game for anyone to try to decipher it. If deciphering it is more trouble than it's worth, then they win, but if I can figure out how to do it, then I win.
[What's with] the changing slashdot colors? First the FreeBSD article and now this. I hardly find it becoming.
How hard is it to figure out? "Your Rights Online" is a relatively-newly-created "section" on Slashdot. Recently, some categories of stories have been pulled off the front page into separate sections, to cut down on the volume of the front page, and some of these sections are color-coded for clarity. For example, "Ask Slashdot" is in gray, "Slashdot radio" is in black, BSD is in red, and "Your Rights Online" is in this strange orange/brown. Our beloved "#006666" green is still Slashdot's standard color.
First, don't take this the wrong way, but I have to wonder, how do you manage to lose episodes? I can see screwing up on any of the various post-processing stages, especially with all the "new-fangled equipment", but I would think that you wouldn't delete the copy from each earlier stage, at least until you've verified the next one. Is the problem that they haven't been getting recorded in the first place? How hard is it to press "Record" at the beginning, whatever "new-fangled equipment" you're using?
----- Re: Spam:
From: Subject: Your college degree. ([1]) Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 21:20:43 -0400 (EDT) MIME-Version: 1.0
Increase your personal prestige and money- earning power through an advanced university degree.
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Degree granted based on your present knowledge and experience. No further effort necessary on your part.
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For details, call 713-866-6515
You can call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including Sundays and holidays. ************** [1]
[1] Each time I get this, it has different numeric codes in these places. Maybe these are just attempts to fool spam-filters, but just in case it's some kind of tracking thing, I'm deleting them.
I also started saving spam a while back, and I have two copies of the above. I also have about half a dozen of the "Bullseye Gold Marketing" one on my home machine, which I would have posted but I don't have it here on my 'Book.
----- Re: Wolfenstein
A few months ago, a friend and I were bored enough to pull up the old version of Wolfenstein 3D on my G3. Even with the speed governor on, it was just too fast. It was playable, but it felt weird -- it was almost too smooth! As he pointed out, though, the old games are a lot of fun, and not just for nostalgia: Since they didn't have all the extraneous detail of the newer games, it is like "main-lining" pure action. With the speed governor off, of course, it was just insane. Like you said, 150 frames per second. The problem is, I guess it treats each frame as a constant interval of game time, instead of rendering more intermediate states. As a result, the brown guys' pistol sounded like a chaingun, and it was impossible to maneuver, since tapping the turn key made you do at least a full circle and tapping forward bumped you into a wall instantly.
----- Re: distributed computing projects
I, too, am sticking with my RC5-64 until it is finished. After that, I was considering SETI@Home, and maybe I'll do it if the problem you mentioned (more processors than data available) changes, but more likely I'll switch to the OGR (Optimal Golomb Ruler) project, since that one is actually doing something useful -- I don't know all the math, but Golomb Rulers have lots of practical applications, and finding optimal ones is incredibly compute-intensive, so this project could actually contribute useful results to various scientific fields.
As for putting your laptop in "suspend", I leave mine on around the clock. But then, maybe yours has one of those overheating Intel chips. I try to put my 'Book on something that'll dissipate heat reasonably well, but as long as I do that, it's cool.
----- Re: muppets
I already voted for CowboyNeal the day the poll went up. You wouldn't want me to cheat and vote again (though I'm on a dynamic IP, so I could), would you? Basically, this was one of the few times that I've just had to go with the fake answer, because I just couldn't make myself care enough about the actual question.
----- Re: music
What is that?! Please, just stick with the GiS:SR theme from the first fifteen seconds.
This may be out of character in light of my posting history on the subject of Slashdot registration (which, relevantly enough, you can look up if interested), but I don't mind Slashdot's posting-history. I figure everything I say on Slashdot is completely public; if I didn't want people to know what I think, I wouldn't post it in a public forum, or at least not under my own name. The users.pl page just collects all the comments into a handy location, which I find very useful for keeping track of replies to my comments, etc. I just wish it went further back, keeping links into the archived stories. If someone wants to keep track of what I say, he could just as well do it by scanning all the stories for my name.
The reason I don't mind this is that it is not required. I choose to post under my real name because I consider what I say here to be public, and I choose what to say with that in mind. If I wanted to say something that I didn't want my name attached to, I'd post it anonymously (and, being paranoid, I'd probably log out and zap my cookie instead of just using this little "Post Anonymously" checkbox).
I believe it's very important for people to be able to post anonymously if they so choose, for, among other, the same reasons that concern you, but I don't insist on doing so myself. I also am very much against the discrimination that people get when they do so: defaulting to a lower score is arguable, but insulting them by labelling them as "cowards" is unnecessarily confrontational and much of the hostility that is directed toward them is unwarranted -- a lot of people seem to think "anonymous posts" and "bad posts" are the same thing, when I see only (at best) a weak correlation.
I am definitely bothered by the "to serve you better, we track you" thing that so many sites do, especially when they don't offer any special services that inherently depend on tracking, but just collect the data, presumably to improve their own operations through some sort of decision-support database, or else to sell it to other marketers. In the first case, that information is mine, dammit, and if they ask nicely, I might be willing to sell it to them, but they can't have it for free. Improving the overall quality of service that they can offer does not count as paying me. The second case is even worse -- they have no right to do that without my permission, which they will never get.
About the NYT registration thing, I just never read any story of theirs, as a matter of policy, because the privilege of reading a story (and looking at an ad banner) is not something for which I'm willing to sell my information. I used "cypherpunks/cypherpunks" a couple of times (way back), but then I decided that I don't like that. I'm just not interested enough in anything they have to say to register, or to resort to trickery, which would be supporting them with the ad banner anyway.
As for Slashdot posting links to the NYT, I don't have a problem with that -- people who don't mind it can use it, and people who feel as I do can decline to do so. There's no need for Slashdot to boycott them, even if some of us decide to do so. What I don't like is when it's the only link given for a story. I guess, sometimes at least, it's the only one available, but it's better when another link can be provided, like this time. Before long, someone usually finds the same story on another site and posts the link in a comment, anyway.
I also commented that black was not a good color to use, and I suggested orange, like "#bb4400". I was joking! I thought they should change it, but I didn't actually mean for them to use orange! Now I see this page in an orange/brown "#663300", which is pretty close to what I said. Actually, it turns out that "#bb4400" is not a "web color", the closest one looks worse, and "#663300" is the next one down, according to Apple's HTML color picker. If this is my fault, I'm sorry.
Actually, on second thought, it doesn't look so bad. I even kind of like it, and I definitely think color-coding the sections like this is a good idea. However, I see that the "Geeks in Space" section is still in black, and the Slashdot logo images are still in the standard "#006666" Slashdot green. Especially here in YRO, I think the logos should be changed to match, since the brown and green look kind of painful together.
2. The toolbars aren't necessarily extraneous at all. Many toolbar buttons provide useful visual feedback. For example, in Microsoft Word, one can easily tell whether the current insertion point is in "bold" mode by glancing at the "B" button on the style toolbar, and checking if it's depressed or not.
Not only that, but having toolbars flash in and out is just a horrible UI idea anyway, for at least the following reasons:
For myself at least, the proceedure for using a toolbar item is: stop typing; simultaneously look at the toolbar to identify the icon I need and take my hand off the keyboard to reach for the mouse; move the mouse around a bit to see where it is; move it to the icon and click. The point is that I need to have the target in my sights when I start moving the mouse, or else I'd have to waste some time (~0.5 - 1 second) looking for it. With the toolbar constantly visible, I can pipeline these operations by locking on to the icon while moving my hand to the mouse, but if the toolbar doesn't appear until I touch the mouse, this wouldn't work.
If there's even a slight delay in the toolbar appearing, then the problem above is exacerbated by exactly that amount. By the way, whose idea were those ridiculous sideways-rolling menus in Win98 or the disappearing taskbar? However, if the toolbar pops up instantly instead of gradually, it would be at least a slight shock. Think of a bad movie where someone jumps out of the shadows -- even when you are expecting something to happen, a sudden change in your visual field is startling. Either way, it takes a little while for your eyes/mind to process the new image, which is more time lost, as well as breaking your concentration from what you were doing in the first place (even more so than having to stop typing to use the mouse in the first place, as if that weren't bad enough).
Where are the toolbars relative to the windows? Are they supposed to positioned so that when the toolbar is visible, it obscures part of the window's content area? That seems to be the only possible benefit of having the toolbar disappear, since it would allow the window to be bigger, using screen real estate more efficiently when the toolbar is hidden, but I still think it's bad to obscure the content area, even part of the time. What if the relevant content happens to be under it? I know -- you shouldn't do that; scroll it to the middle first. But if you're not "allowed" to use that real estate, or at least not as a first-class citizen, then what good is it? Plus, it's just another thing to have to keep in mind while working, especially since the lack of visual cues means you have to remember where the boundary is. Or, if thy are still not supposed to overlap, then what's the point? Even worse, could it be that the window is supposed to automatically move and resize itself? That's absolutely horrifying, since all the content would move! Even if it could do it without flickering, it would be extremely disorienting. Even Micros~1 probably knows better than that, but then, with their "because we can" approach to UI design, who knows?
Finally, I belive that, as a rule of thumb, unnecessary motion onscreen is generally bad. Whenever something pops up, flashes, dances, jumps out at you, or otherwise calls attention to itself in response to an unrelated event, it is distracting. (Exhibit A: the dancing paperclip.) A good fraction of the time, when I stop typing to reach for the mouse, it's not to use the toolbar -- more often, it's to, e.g., move the insertion point, select something, drag-and-drop something, switch windows, or use a menu item. In these cases, having the toolbar suddenly appear, even if it did not cause any delay in the system's responsiveness, would break my concentration, as I said above, and t would make the problem of covering content even worse.
I can see that they're trying to improve on some of the shortcomings of the original WIMP (Window/Icon/Menu/Pointer) interface, but most of what they've done is merely adding bells and whistles with no improvement and, often, making it yuckier. Now, if we could replace the mouse with a camera that could watch your eyes move and determine what you're looking at, or something like that, we'd be talking about real improvements.
Maybe, but I think that may be a bit optimistic. They didn't explain it at all, even to say something like "On Slashdot, anyone can paticipate in the discussions, but to have your name appear, you have to create a free account. Otherwise, you are given the (somewhat judgemental) default name of 'Anonymous Coward'." Since the unquoted phrase fits grammatically in the sentences where they used it, the only hints that it is a quote and not the writer's own editorializing are the facts that it is capitalized, and quoted in one of the two places where it is printed. That's a bit on the subtle side, considering that it takes a lot of people a while to figure out that "Anonymous Coward" isn't somebody's name. (At least they didn't get that wrong.)
Mainly, I was bothered by this because when I read it, at first scan, it seemed that the writer was also branding the anonymous posters as "cowards", even though I do understand the actual origin. It seems that he either understands and agrees with the judgement or saw it, concluded that it is our judgement, and echoed it in an attempt to seem more "in". Either way, the effect is to propagate it, which I don't like because, as I've said (repeatedly), I strongly disagree with this label. Also, I do believe that it detracts fron the impression Slashdot will make on people.
By the way, I don't see what they thought was the significance of the posts being anonymous -- the subtitle "'Anonymous Cowards' speak out" seems to imply that that fact is somehow especially interesting, when all it means is that the speakers in question declined to identify themselves.
BTW, whoever posted "November 5, 1999, The Duh heard round the world," is probably kicking themselves now for doing it anonymously (what a coward!).
Yeah, I guess so. Or maybe it wouldn't have been quoted otherwise, if they were looking to emphasize "AC"s.
------------------------------------------- I found eternal happiness! Whoops, I just lost it.
I'm so sorry. Eternity ain't what it used to be, huh?
No, I don't mean that the "AC" comments they quoted were poor representatives of our discussions (that too, though). If I meant that, I wouldn't have quoted "Anonymous Coward" in my subject line. Instead, I mean that the label itself detracts from the respectability of the quotes.
I guess that's the whole point, but I've always been opposed to this: the label is (or should be) simply a default value put in place of a name to indicate that the poster did not identify himself. It should simply say "Anonymous" -- there is absolutely no need to make it a value judgement. There is at best a weak correlation between anonymous posts and bad posts, yet a lot of people talk as if the two are one and the same. Those who believe that anonymous posters are inherently cowards are free to make that judgement for themselves, but the site should not automatically label them as such. All that does is create antagonism, making the "AC"s more likely to want to post flamage because they are given such an unnecessarily insulting label.
This has been argued before, and is not particularly on-topic here, but now it takes on a new significance. The MacWeek article, at least, tended to make us seem like a chat room full of immature geeks spouting mindless Micros~1-bashing. I guess I have to be honest enough to acknowledge that that's not too far off, but they didn't really convey the fact that there's a lot more to it. Now, you might say that the problem is that they were quoting "AC"s instead of "real" slashdotters, but that only shows how thoroughly you fail to see the fallacy of "AC"-bashing. Not all the bad quotes were from "AC"s. I keep trying to point out that logging in doesn't magically prevent people from posting garbage; the fact is that there will always be at least some dumb posts on Slashdot. The point here is that if journalists wants to make Slashdot look dumb, they will always be able to find some of those posts to quote. That's a separate issue. However, they also emphasized the label itself, which, I think is harmful to the overall effect:
'Anonymous Cowards' speak "November 5, 1999, The Duh heard round the world," one Anonymous Coward posted. (Actually, I thought that was a pretty good comment -- both funny and insightful. I'd missed it on the actual discussion.)
All they did was repeat the label that the site itself attaches to anonymous posts, but in effect this passes the judgement on, making it sound like it is their opinion too that anonymous posters are cowards, and, by extension, the entire site loses some respectability. This made Slahsdot look even worse than it would have if it had been:
Anonymous users speak "November 5, 1999, The Duh heard round the world," someone posted anonymously.
I thought, and I was going to say to you, that the actual "Burn all GIFs Day" had not happened yet (the 8th came to mind as the official date), which would have been a reasonable excuse for not having done it yet. However, I just checked and I was wrong -- it was the 5th, which was yesterday, so you're right. What's up? I guess it's still possible that they just haven't gotten around to it yet; after all, it's only the next morning, and a weekend at that.
Then again, they could have decided not to participate. I seem to recall some people bringing what they claimed was a voice of sanity to the discussion, e.g., pointing out that Unisys is not shaking down everyone who uses GIFs, but only those using GIFs created with unlicensed-LZW-algorithm-using software. I guess that's a good point, but the issue is still over the format/algorithm's non-freeness. I'm not knowledgeable enough about such things to have an opinion of my own, so I just believe whoever on Slashdot makes his argument sound the most sarcastically witty.
You know how "Ask Slashdot" stories are in gray? Same thing. Some catagories of stories have been pulled out into separate sections to decrease the sheer number of items that hit the front page, and some of the sections are color-coded to indicate their status.
By the way, it looks kind of funny with the Slashdot logo on top in the standard "#006666" green and the rest of the page in black. Taco and co. might want to consider making separate versions of the Slashdot logo images to match each color-coded section. Of course, in this case, it wouldn't work against the black background -- maybe black isn't the best color to code a section. I nominate orange, like "#bb4400".
I was thinking that this one wasn't as funny as the last few, but then you did the verbal "M-x spook" while talking about Echelon. The Dr. Strangelove reference didn't quite work as an Echelon keyword, but it knocked me off my chair anyway. ROTFLMAO.
Also, I can't quite believe you did that "Linux Business Expo" ad at the beginning, though I guess it was a respectable sponsor, and you did read it with a sufficiently comical tone that we can still take you as seriously as we always have. I don't suppose you'd tell us what 40 seconds of "Geeks in Space" air-time costs?
Moving on: the sound quality is improved, though I'm not so sure about the new intro music. I think I like the longer episode -- basically, the more, the better. One might have worried that it would get tired when you went past the usual 10 minutes, but I don't think it did, even at 20 minutes, though it still might if you go much past that. There's always more to talk about than there is time, so you can just cover more, and not have to rush. However, some parts were a bit on the dull side. I know, we've been asking for more serious analysis and less joking around, and now that you've done so, I'm (predictably enough) criticizing again, but I like the jokes, and I think you went just a bit past "perfect" and toward "too serious". Just back up a little bit toward "too silly" and you should hit "perfect" again somewhere in the middle.
What, did you decide that it was "content-free" just because they said so? Lighten up. My impression is that they were saying it in a humorously self-deprecating sense. That doesn't make it true. Nor have they ever claimed that GiS was anything more than a bunch of geeks sitting around yakking pointlessly and cracking jokes. I think "content-free" as an insult only applies to things that are supposed to be meaningful, but fail.
As far as I can tell, GiS is just meant to be entertaining, and, in my opinion, it is, very much so, and I for one like it. It has improved a lot since the first couple of episodes, when it sounded a lot like they were just reading down that day's Slashdot front page.
They still discuss items that have been on Slashdot lately, but that's how it should be. In fact, it would almost have to be, since if they thought something was worth talking about, they should have posted it, so what else could they talk about? The difference is that, the first couple of times, they really didn't add much to what had been posted on the front page. Now, they pick a few of te more interesting items and talk about them in more depth (so it sounds more like they're reading off one of the discussion pages).
The advantage is that this adds new "content" (albeit more joking than serious analysis) that was not in the posting. I guess you could say that they're not necessarily any more "special" than any of the other people who comment on the discussion pages, so there is no qualitative difference between their comments and those on the site, but they are the guys who run the site, after all, and I think this is cool in that it adds a more personal touch to what they do. Plus, it expands the discussion into a new medium.
A couple of suggestions: Maybe they could add some interactivity by taking a few minutes to read out and respond to some selected comments from the previous episode's discussion, or anywhere on the site. Also, it would be nice if the http://slashdot.org/index.pl?section=radio page had a box with direct links to download the mp3 files for all past episodes (including the current one) -- this would save the trouble of having to go through two or three of TheSync's pages for the archives when we miss an episode (TheSync, annoyingly enough, does not have the current episode on the archive page, so there is no sigle page that has them all).
Oh, I don't know. I was really just trying to come up with some examples of reasonable compromises.
Let me get this straight: You say that I cannot look at my own genes if my parents applied some patented patch?
You're right, that does sound kind of unreasonable. Maybe look at it, but not pass around copies (again, except by conventional means). Your point is still good, though, since any such restrictions would be kind of offensive, especially since you didn't have a choice in the deal. On the other hand, you did inherit a gene that your parents had licensed, and you get to benefit from whatever cool trait it carries, so there is some sense to saying that you should inherit their obligations under the license. The problem is that if the patent expired at the first generation, someone would just have a kid immediately after receiving the patch, and the patent wouldn't even last a year. When the gene has been inherited naturally from someone who also had it naturally seems like a good time to consider it to have entered the gene pool, and to be in the public domain.
I was trying to come up with a good compromise. Even so, I can see a plot element for some weird science fiction, e.g., the company's competitors bribing the recipient to have a kid as soon as biologically possible, so they could get their hands on the gene, etc.
Also, you clearly do not understand the patent system, as anything patented is disclosed to the public. There cannot be an NDA on patented genes.
Right, I got those confused. I guess that means that there's not even any need to restrict what you could do with your inherited artificial gene. However, reproduction of that gene in another organism by artifical means would be an infringement, whether the knowledge of the gene sequence came from independent invention, industrial espionage, the company's own publication of the information, or study of your tissues. The way I figure, your copy is a "naturally-occurring counterpart" because it was created by normal procreation, but that doesn't change the fact that any artificially-created instance would still fall under the patent. Owning a naturally-occurring copy entitles you to have it, to benefit from the cool trait, and to pass it on through procreation, but it doesn't give you any special rights to infringe their patent on artificial versions. True, this would be restricting what you can do with your own DNA, but how is that worse than restricting what you can do with knowledge contained in your own brain (not that I'm very fond of that, either)?
I think the best way to handle this is for Linus and the head kernel hackers to sit down with peoples at TurboLinux and try to come up with a solution. Turbolinux should at least give the hackers time to look at their code and evaluate it.
You make it sound like there's some sort of confrontation going on, with Linus refusing the patches and them "threatening" to go ahead and do their own thing anyway, forking if necessary, etc. I don't see anything like that in the article, though. The only real news that I see is that they have made a modified kernel with improvements for high-availability clustering. The rest seems to be at most speculation that if Linus were to reject the patches, then a fork would be created. Are you sure you aren't trying to resolve a non-existent situation?
This is sort of an extension of the article's own cluelessness, such as where it says
But what really stands out about TurboLinux's approach to the market is its effort to provide high-end software that alters the Linux operating system itself.
as if nobody else has ever submitted a kernel patch before. I'm no authority, but it seems that at most, the difference here is the magnitude of the modifications they have made, which would be only a quantitative difference, not qualitative one. I also don't see how this is taking Linux in a "new direction" -- it's just new pwople doing it.
...as do I, obviously, since we are both posting with logins, unless there's a way that I'm not aware of to have a single-session, cookie-free Slashdot login (if there is, I'd appreciate being let in on the secret, and if not, there really should be). That's probably the only reason my cookies are still enabled.
I remember that the cookie issue came up in a big way when Slashdot first created logins, and again as a tangent whenever people would start debating anonymous posting (which I strongly support, even though I eventually decided to log in myself). A lot of people don't seem to get the point that "whether or not Slashdot should require cookies" is a whole different issue from "whether or not cookies are bad". That is, someone would say, I don't want to log in because I don't want to enable cookies", and someone would reply "You idiot! There's nothing wrong with cookies." In that context, I just kept wishing people would realize that that's not the point: the first guy doesn't want to enable cookies -- whether or not his reasons are valid has very little to do with whether or not Slashdot should force him to do so. Even ignoring that, though, I should hope that when something like this comes up, it would make people re-evaluate the question.
Anyway, this story inspired me to take a look at my own cookie file, and it was a real eye-opener. The Mac version of Netscape calls it "MagicCookie" instead of "cookie.txt", and its type code is 'COOK', which I had to use ResEdit to change to 'TEXT' before it would open in a text editor (I assume Netscape will still be able to use it), though it is a perfectly normal text file. I didn't see anything but normal readable text, or anything that could be references to locations within the file -- just some comments and then a lot of line entries, so I assume I can ignore the comment "# This is a generated file! Do not edit.", as long as I don't screw up the format by corrupting any entries. I removed everything except slashdot.org and a few work-related entries.
slashdot.org has made some interesting entries in addition to my login info, though, that really don't seem to belong there. Here are the entry names, minus all the other values:
www.slashdot.org... user slashdot.org... religion slashdot.org... income_bracket slashdot.org... high_school_gpa slashdot.org... iq slashdot.org... sexual_orientation slashdot.org... soc_sec_num slashdot.org... visa_num slashdot.org... last_time_you_brushed_teeth slashdot.org... mothers_maiden_name slashdot.org... user slashdot.org... user
Some of those could be records of my poll-votes, to prevent repeat-voting, but I'm pretty sure in most cases that I'd remember if we'd ever had those polls. No, it doesn't have actual values for these, or at least not readable ones, though the values could be codes of some kind. More likely, it's someone's idea of a joke, i.e., messing with the more paranoid minds; I guess I could be sort of falling for a trawl here -- in that case, for the record, I see it and I'm not really falling for it.
This really bothers me (the whole cookie thing, not Slashdot). I for one am very much wanting a browser feature to specify in advance the list of cookies to allow. Do I remember correctly that this is in the works for Mozilla?
That argument could be extended to say that everything is nature, so nothing can be patented: Mankind is a species of animal that evolved naturally, so our existence, and all its consequences, i.e., everything we do, are naturally-occurring phenomena. Try this: aren't microchips part of nature? They're made out of sand, after all, even though it takes all sorts of machines to turn the sand into the microchips, but then the machines are made by people, who are in turn part of nature, right?
This is vacuous, of course, because when a term is defined so broadly it loses its meaning. If you say that all phenomena are natural, because there is no other kind, then the distinction between something being a "natural phenomenon", an "artificial phenomenon", or just a plain "phenomenon" disappears. While this is technically true, it does not accomplish anything -- the point of the term is to distinguish between those phenomena that occur without the intervention of mankind / technology and those that only occur when we cause them. Quibbling over whether or not our causing them makes them any less "natural" is beside the point.
Now, I definitely agree that patenting genes is an extremely problematic area, but I'm not sure the "Aren't genes nature?" argument is much help. Also, I am very skeptical of the USPTO's competence, in view of all the recent messes with software patents, but I am encouraged by this passage from the post above yours (emphasis added):
3.In order for DNA sequences to be distinguished from their naturally occurring counterparts, which cannot be patented, the patent application must state that the invention has been purified or isolated or is part of a recombinant molecule or is now part of a vector.
Assuming it really works this way, this should take care of problems with the companies claiming that their patents apply to people. I don't have much of a problem with companies owning genes that they really did invent, as long as there is a very sharp distinction between these and "naturally-occurring" (see above) genes. At least this would seem to prevent the equivalent of a "QuickSort patent", e.g., someone patenting blue eyes and claiming that I owe them royalties.
Supposing that they could make a "patch" that could be applied to your genes, e.g., to change your eye color, then it would be reasonable for them to demand a one-time royalty when you buy the modification, provided that then you would fully own that copy, with no "this license may be terminated..." clause. Passing the gene on to your own offspring in the conventional manner would have to be considered "fair use", as would cloning oneself, though reverse-engineering it from a tissue sample through technological means would not.
A natural duration of gene patents would be one full generation, i.e., until a person has been born possessing the gene naturally, to parents also possessed it from birth. Then a reasonable compromise would be for the license to prohibit reverse-engineering while the patent was valid, after which time it would enter the public domain (so to speak).
By the way, when I first submitted the above, I was returned to the Preview, with the message "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted." I can only assume this means Taco has achieves Strong AI and his code knows how lame it is.
Seriously, this is not a "troll"; I have the deepest respect and appreciation for the work that has been done to create Slashdot, but right now I'm kind of pissed about having a perfectly good post censored for no reason. This is not offtopic, either; it's partly a meta-comment, but it also adds a clarification and draws an interesting parallel.
I cut the two blocks of "mystery text" into 40-character lines instead of giving them each as one big long word, and it accepted it. Presumably the filter detected words over some cutoff length and concluded that I was one of those jackasses who make huge garbage posts to waste bandwidth and vertical space. It's a noble goal, but the implementation is faulty. In my opinion, false positives are worse than false negatives in something like this, and this seems pretty vulnerable to both.
Anyway, I broke them up, with the result that the post now takes about 50% more vertical space than it would have, and anyone interested in my cryptographic challenge might be thrown on a wild goose chase by the line lengths. Let me assure you, the lengths are irrelevant; the original contained no whitespace at all.
Something else that struck me: how weird is it that, on a story about the "spooks" scanning people's communications, I should discover that Slashdot itself has a mechanism that scans the text of comments for certain undesirable content before allowing them to be posted? Not to mention that I was wrongly victimized by it, in sort of the way that we're all afraid of having happen for real. Could it be? Is Rob... one of Them?
Slashdot Mirror
a large stone wheel with a patent number inscribed in it
That's probably the best idea in terms of the symbolism, since the wheel is the canonical simple, universally-known invention, as in the phrase "re-invent the wheel", though I don't know how well it could be rendered in a small icon-sized image.
Another idea might be someone representing the US Patent and Trademark Office wearing a dunce cap, or just a dunce cap labelled with the letters "USPTO".
I guess there are really two somewhat separate issues that we tend to have with patents in general: one is the patenting of truly simple, obvious techniques that really don't deserve to be called "technology" so as to extort licensing fees from everyone else, e.g., the "one-click shopping" patent that they discussed. The other is people being tyrannical or otherwise butt-headed about licensing for patents on things that really were innovative but are now in such widespread use that the restrictions are harmful, e.g., the LZW algorithm for GIFs (which Slashdot still seems to be using -- even though they skipped "Burn All GIFs Day", the patent icon when they add it should really not be a GIF) and Fraunhoffer's (sp?) MP3 algorithm.
The "patenting the wheel" icon would ideally symbolize the first issue, but not so much the second. My "USPTO dunce cap" idea would be symbolic more of the problems with the whole IP system, and specifically the incompetence of the USPTO to handle the issues properly. That's sort of a third issue, but it relates to both of the ones above.
Someone (Taco, if I've figured out the voices correctly) asked which patent is dumber: one-click shopping or human DNA, and Hemos (?) said it was DNA. I'm not sure I agree: the idea of DNA patents is worse morally (i.e., the second issue), but at least genetic engineering is truly high-tech stuff, so it makes some sense to talk about its products as scientific accomplishments. One-click shopping is such a simple idea that I find it offensive to even call it "technology", let alone think it worthy of a patent (i.e., the first issue), so it's the "dumber" one.
David Gould
[...] _Enders Game_, where children have to wear "monitors" to track their activities and actions. Ender puts up with the bullying when people are watching (i.e. the monitor is on) but when it is removed ends up killing his tormentor.
If I remember the beginning of Ender's Game correctly (I happened to re-read it a few months ago, but I could still be fuzzy on this), your summary is not quite right.
I believe it was only the children who were considered to be good candidates for military training (Battle School) who wore the monitors. I don't think it was completely clear how this was determined: it was probably based on some sort of earlier screening process, though I guess it could have been that everyone had them until they were disqualified. In Ender's case the earlier performance of his older siblings was also a good predictor. The monitor itself was not a "Big Brother"-type thing so much as a screening process for finding good potential soldiers (and humanity was at the time fighting for its existence -- it was necessary).
It was not so much that Ender "put up with" the bullying because he was being watched, and then cut loose as soon as he was free. Rather, Stilson and the other bullies left him alone (relatively) while he had the monitor, because they knew that they could not hurt him without getting caught, though at the same time they grew to dislike him even more him because of it. Then, when it was removed, they knew they could attack him with impunity. They did so, and he fought back. Hard. His philosophy of "hurt your attacker so bad that he won't ever hurt you again" is exactly what the military was looking for, and it's what made him so good at what he had to do, even though he didn't like it.
David Gould
Well, the music is better -- kinda strange, but pretty cool, and definitely better. Whatever that was last time from 00:15 to 00:22 was scary.
Pentium III IDs
Does it really matter how much the NSA and FBI were involved in creating the IDs? What matters is how they can be used, regardless of whose idea they were, right?
People at Comdex [...] What is Slash...Dot? [...] If you don't know, we won't tell you [...] everyone else trying to sell stuff [...] sitting there reading e-mail
That really is funny, since, like you said, every trade show booths anyone's ever seen was full of people waiting to pounce on anyone who shows the slightest interest in them. You guys must really scare the average show-goer -- walking by, and even lingering for a minute, only to be completely ignored by a bunch of guys staring at their laptops must make them wonder when they entered the Twilight Zone. It was the same at the last couple of LinuxWorld Expos in San Jose, when it was all I could do to get your attention long enough to buy a pair of T-shirts.
200-millionth page load
Yeah, but how many of those were Greg reloading the front page, trying to get a "first"?
David Gould
Wow, I never realized that was how SkyNet got built.
Not to flame you too hard, but how could you possibly have missed that? It was almost the entire point of the movie. Or did you only see Terminator and not Terminator 2: Judgement Day?
As I recall, it wasn't stated in the first movie -- it wasn't even known to the characters at the time, except for it being "some kind of defense computer network gone wild", and the entire goal was to save Sarah Connor's life, so John could be born and lead humanity to win the war against the robots, while the Terminator tried to kill her and prevent the above.
The second movie wouldn't have been very interesting, though, if it had just been a repeat of the same "one time traveler protects key person from other time traveler who is trying to change history" plot. It was much more, though: they tried to prevent SkyNet from ever existing, by taking out Dyson (its inventor). He reveals that they were making breakthroughs that they "would never have thought of" based on analyzing a brain chip salvaged from the first Terminator, so they go to blow up his entire company, destroying the chip, the lab, the research, etc.
To the other replies:
Try not to think about it too much. That's the best advice I have.
Come on! That's the most interesting part! Even if it makes your head hurt, you've got to want to think about these things.
It is only alluded to but if true does create a really foul time paradox.
I thought it was much more than "alluded to". I'll grant that they didn't really think through the paradoxes, but the fact that SkyNet was made possible by the brain chip was central to the reasons why they had to blow up the lab, and why Schwartzenegger had to be fried at the end (to destroy the last existing brain chip).
It's true that the paradoxes get pretty nasty: first, the premise has the problem that, if SkyNet's invention was only made possible by analysis of the Terminator's brain chip, then where did the technology "come from" in "the first place", i.e., how can a technology exist without ever having been invented?
Then, if you grant that it is somehow possible for SkyNet and the Terminators to have "created themselves" spontaneously, you get another problem: if they destroyed all the chips, preventing SkyNet from being created, then none of it could ever have happened -- Sarah Connor's life should just go back to the way it was before, with Kyle Reese and the first Terminator never even showing up (and, incidentally, John never being born). But then, if SkyNet is not actively prevented from creating itself, wouldn't it do so again...?
The thing is, these paradoxes sort of cancel each other out: if you reject the idea of SkyNet being a figment of its own imagination, i.e., conclude that, despite what Dyson and the second Terminator said[1], it would have been invented anyway as a result of good ole' human ingenuity, then their efforts to prevent it would have been in vain and everything would still happen exactly as Kyle Reese described it. That seems to be the only way for them to have their memories of the events, or for the events to have occurred at all. This is the "Red Queen's Race" (an Asimov story that refers to the bit in Alice in Wonderland where you run as fast as you can just to stay where you are) view on time travel, which is also the theme of 12 Monkeys -- you can't change history through time travel because anything you do "already happened", and was thus "taken into account", making your version of history a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Another problem is that their trying to prevent it all may not have been a very good idea, given how unpredictable the effects would be. In short, you don't mess with a winner. At least in Kyle Reese's version of the story, humanity won in the end, but if they changed things the wrong way, the war night have still happened but without the happy ending.
Or, for a sort of eerie reality tie-in, you could use the multiple time-lines view, where, up to the end, the movie occurred in a time-line where they succeeded in keeping John Connor alive, but failed to prevent the war, and that time-line branched off when they destroyed the chips, allowing our time-line (the real world) to exist with no Terminators at all.
--
[1] Maybe Skynet created false records indicating that Dyson was the inventor, when in fact it was someone else working independently, so that they would blow up the wrong lab.
David Gould
I can't *wait* until The Gap changes their marketing strategy
I can't wait until Pepsi-Co changes their marketing strategy for Mountain Dew from showing people doing extreme-sports-type things to showing a bunch of geeks eating pizza, drinking Dew, and hacking kernel code at five A.M. on the fourth day of a hundred-hour coding session, since we know who the poeple are who really "do the Dew". As a backdrop, they could use something that looks like my cubicle, with nearly a thousand empty Mountain Dew cans stacked up. (Once they were piled five high on my shelf, I decided to glue them together so they wouldn't fall on the head of the marketing guy across the wall; I've also made a Borg cube, several versions of SGI's old cube logo, the five Platonic solids, and a throne for Tux to sit on. They could profile me and talk about Mountain Dew art, etc.)
It was done a few years ago, with (I think) the Volkswagen Jetta: they did a commercial with a gang of hackers who were writing a driving game and using their car for inspiration, It showed them piling into the car while eating pizza, drinking soda, and generally being weird, and it made them look pretty cool. That might have actually marked the beginning of the mainstream glamorization of geekhood.
David Gould
First of all, a completely speech-based interface has its own problems, even if the speech recognition could be "perfect" and the interface extremely well-designed. That last part is probably harder than you think: for it to be a really good interface, you'd probably want it to "understand" you as clearly as another person would, which, even leaving out philosophical questions about whether it would really be conscious, is an AI-complete/Turing-Test sort of task.
A less ambitious version might be a speech-to-text layer built over a command line, but that would be really bad. It would not be much faster than typing, and it would be very hard to disambiguate your commands, since shell commands do not consist entirely of real words. For example, I for one pronounce "/usr/bin" as "user bin", not "slash U S R slash bin", but how is it supposed to know that? It can't just replace "usr" with "user", because I could also have a directory called "user", and that's just one word -- how is it supposed to be able to guess where to insert slashes, etc.? A lot of letters sound like words; multiple words can be separate tokens or run together, capitalization is nto always consistent, etc. I would certainly not be willing to spell everything out clearly enough for a reasonable system to recognize, because it would probably end up being slower than typing. If I ever need to work faster, I'll learn to touch-type [1].
Even if such an interface could be made to work really well, it seems that it would be pretty distracting to have an office full of people talking to their computers, let alone trying to use a laptop in a public place.
Even ignoring that, a speech-based interface would still be lacking: Back to dictating shell commands: have you ever tried to dictate a session of shell commands to the person at the keyboard while looking over his shoulder? Even an AI-complete, Turing-test-passing agent (i.e., an actual human) cannot perfectly interpret your spoken shell commands. Telling someone where to click in a GUI can be even worse. In either case, you tend to end up wanting to grab the keyboard and/or mouse from him and do it yourself. That suggests that the keyboard/mouse is better than speech for giving commands. In fact, when talking someone through a GUI, you probably end up pointing at the screen and saying "click here" a lot, i.e., your first reaction is to improvise a "pointer" because you need to point at something.
I suggest that the need to point at things is a fundmental part of any interface. What you really want is to be able to just think at it, but failing that, you'll probably find that putting what you want into words is actually harder than pointing/typing. The only thing I've used that I might like better than the mouse is the stylus on a Palm Pilot. This is a special case with respect to pen mouse devices because the interface is also different -- you tap controls with it, which combines the actions of pointing and clicking. This is a big difference, since you don't have to move an onscreen widget to the control. What I think would be good is to have a camera set up to track your eye movements, so you could just look at something on the screen and squint to tap it. Eye movements are the easiest, fastest and most accurate muscular actions that we are capable of, so it would be good to harness their information-carrying capacity.
"Computer: tea, earl grey, hot."
It's a cool line, but after a while I started wondering why Picard didn't set up a macro so he could just say "Tea" and get his default preference. Maybe if he had occasionally asked for iced tea, or darjeeling or something instead...
[1] I currently do a sort of hybrid "hunt-and-touch" thing, where at least five or six fingers are moving, and they "know" where the keys are, but I have to be looking at the keyboard while doing it; I can get up around forty to fifty words per minute, so it's not much of a problemIt would be nice not to have to take my eyes off the screen, but it's never seemed worth the trouble.
David Gould
My only problem with this announcement is that the industry's "permitting" this use of MP3s implies that it's their decision, when in fact (well, in my opinion, anyway, which is the same thing) they don't have any authority whatsoever even knowing or caring about it in the first place, let alone permitting or forbidding it. Where would they even have gotten the idea in the first place, let alone how would they justify it, to think that this would be illegal?
But DJ's don't own the songs, they own a round piece of plastic.
IANAL, but this is my understanding: they own two things: the round piece of plastic, i.e., a physical medium containing a copy of the copyrighted work, and a license that permits them to use the work in a particular commercial setting. Does the license actually specify the physical process by which the work can be used? I.e., does it say "You may use the song in live performances by placing this and only this particular disc in a CD player and pressing 'Play'.", or does it say "You may use the song in live performances."? I can't imagine that it would be the former. I mean, why, except for them being typically heavy-handed? Even for them, this seems ridiculous.
Here's a similar case: what if a DJ is at a party and someone requests a particular song. The DJ says, "Yeah, I have that," but then he looks through his pile of CDs and finds that, while it's true that he owns the disc and has a live-performance license for it, he has forgotten that particular one at home. Then the host interjects, "Wait, I have that album." He owns a CD of the album but he does not have a live-performance license for it. The question is, if the host lends his physical disc to the DJ, could the DJ then, under his live-performance license, use that disc to perform the song, even though it's not the same particular disc that he owns? I think the answer should be an obvious "Yes". Perhaps the industry sees thing differently, but I can't imagine what they could object to about this situation. Also, what if the DJ's disc is lost or destroyed? Does he have to pay for the license again, or just buy a new copy of the disc? What about the "for archival purposes" fair-use doctrine? (I realize that Canada != USA, so maybe the "fair use" thing is different.)
As it is, in the process of performing it, the information passes through any number of intermediate formats as it is processed by various pieces of equipment, e.g., (note that I don't really know anything about professional sound equipment) bits get read by the CD player and converted to an analog signal and this goes through all sorts of mixers, equalizers, amps, etc., before going to the speaker, where the analog signal is converted from an electrical carrier to an acoustic one. Does the industry presume to have any authority whatsoever over exactly what steps the information goes through on its path from the DJ's round piece of plastic to the audience's ears? Of course not, as long as the DJ has paid for a live-performance license and no durable copies are given to anyone else. What's the difference of the bits make an extra stop (i.e., being compressed by Fraunhoffer's (sp?) algorithm and stored on a more convenient physical medium) along the way, all the while remaining in the DJ's possession and not being given to anyone else in a durable form? It sounds like they are just trying to continue to brand anything associated with MP3 as "illegal", while appearing magnanimous in this obviously-trivial case.
From the article:
DJs can buy a license giving them the right to burn their own compilation CDs of "useable tracks," instead of having to cart their whole CD collections around to their gigs.
I don't see how this could possibly not be considered to fall under "fair use" (though, again Canada != USA), or why it would require a special license.
Under Canadian law, a DJ convicted of making unlicensed reproductions with any technology could face serious fines and the confiscation of his equipment. Though there haven't been any such cases lately, Heindl points out that Canadian authorities have made examples of offenders in the past.
I could see it if the concern were over such copies being passed around, but two points: first, why would it be any different for a DJ than for any person making bootleg (don't call it "Piracy") copies of normally-purchased albums. Second, here it is again: why are they so obsessed with how many copies exist, as long as they are all in his possession and not performed in any unlicensed fashion? What seems to matter is whether he has the right to possess and perform the song at all. The closest thing that seems reasonable to me would be if we were talking about DJs using songs off of albums that they just bought at the record store, without paying for a performance license, or, better yet, completely bootlegged copies that they downloaded or got from friends. of course that would be illegal, but nobody's talking about that.
Although the record companies will welcome the license fees, the small amount of revenue they will generate isn't the point at all, Robertson said.
"It's more a question of copyright control than generating revenues," he said. "It's important to keep things like copyright above board like this."
Ah, here it is! They are still trying to perpetuate the illusion that they should rightfully have complete control over the proliferation of physical copies of the data, and the perception of themselves as the one and only legitimate source for anything related to it. This is a very nasty tool that they use consistently in their propaganda: the equivocation between the concepts of licensing rights to information and the physical act of duplicating it. The two concepts are very different, but these guys jump back and forth at will, using each to "refute" arguments that are really about the other. The difference was not so important back when physical duplication was difficult and expensive, since they had an almost-but-maybe-not-quite monopoly on the ability to create copies. It was a service that they provided, along with granting licenses. Now, though, it's very easy to copy things, and there is no reason why people should need that service from them. They have absolutely no grounds for objecting to other people performing the physical copying as desired, as long as their licenses are respected.
They're acting as if they have both a patent on "a physical medium storing, in machine-readable form, the digital stream 0x6549cb5a67890f8460d..., or any data that represents the same audio signal", and a copyright on the song (both the composition and the performance) that is represented thereby. The patent would entitle them to control the creation of copies, and the copyright would entitle them to control the use of same. My sense is that they have the copyright but not the patent.
David Gould
You seem to have gotten my point and agreed with it, even though now that I look back at what I wrote it may not seem quite as obvious as I had hoped, so I want to expand a bit. The newspaper example is a bit different because the object in question is a physical medium that is owned by the publisher until I buy it, so maybe there really is some sort of stealing going on. However, it's a copy that they had lost and that otherwise would not benefit anyone, so I think the situation is pretty similar to a broadcast. Medium aside, the question is over the "theft" of the information. Of course the information is still copyrighted, so selling copies or re-publishing it as my own work would still be just as wrong as ever -- the way I acquired it does not change that -- but I just can't make myself see the copyright as meaning that nobody is entitled to possess the information at all without having paid for it.
Seeing the brainwashing for what it is is tricky. Some background: this argument about process vs. end result, and the specific example of the satellite TV decoder, was first presented to me by a guy on my floor in the dorm my first year at Berkeley ('94-5). He didn't present it all that convincingly, or maybe I just refused to listen, but either way, I didn't buy it. I thought he was just being glib and ignoring the "end result".
However, in the past year or so, I've come to see that he was right. To me, the most compelling case is that of cryptography. How can it be illegal to make up a bunch of random numbers? To multiply some numbers together modulo some other number? To transmit the result to a friend? The fact that this may happen to conceal a secret message doesn't change my right to perform those actions. They could be used to hide illegal activity, but I don't think that's relevant. The activity in question is already illegal -- using cryptography to hide it doesn't make it any more or less wrong; it just makes it harder to catch people at it, but that's not my problem (There's nothing illegal in my secret messages -- honest!). The law enforcement agencies are just going to have to come up with some other way to catch the real criminals without being able to read all their messages.
There's a common thread in these things, which I suspect is the reason they resonate so strongly on Slashdot: because knowledge is so precious to the geek/hacker mentality, the withholding of knowledge is deeply offensive (hence the Free Software movement), but, even worse, hardly anything is more offensive than being forbidden to apply knowledge that I already have, e.g., using a cryptosystem that I know how to implement, or figuring out how to decode a signal.
Here's a point that I guess I didn't make explicit before: the comment to which I originally replied was about the right to record broadcasts. To me, when a signal is being processed by some piece of equipment of mine (e.g., a radio, TV, or satellite dish), I consider myself to be in possession of that information (not ownership -- it's still copyrighted, but I possess a copy). Therefore, I feel that I have every right to use any capabilities of any of my equipment to manipulate that information in any way that I choose, including recording it. I think of my equipment's memory as an extension of my own, and I was already given permission to view the signal; there is no provision that I have to forget what I saw immediately after seeing it, and recording it would simply be facilitating my ability to recall it later. That's why I consider it to fall under fair use, i.e., the rights that I was implicitly granted when I was given the copy in the first place.
Compare and contrast the following actions. I guess they skirt the line between legal and illegal, and there are at least a few that "they" would like us to believe are wrong, but that I don't think really are:
-reading a newspaper and hence learning the information it contains
-saving clipping from the newspaper for future reference
-making photocopies of the newspaper clippings for backup, as the higher-quality paper will last longer
-reading a news article on a web site.
-printing the article from the web site for future reference
-watching a program on TV and remembering its contents
-recording the program on a videocassette for future reference
-copying the videocassette for backup
-telling a friend about the newspaper article, relating the information in your own words
-telling a friend the volume number so he can look up the newspaper article in a library archive
-lending a friend the newspaper clipping or photocopy thereof
-telling a friend about the article on the web site in your own words
-telling a friend the URL of the article so he can look it up.
-lending a friend the printout of the article
-telling a friend about the TV program in your own words
-telling a friend the time and channel when the program will be re-run, so he can watch it
-lending a friend the videocassette of the program
-----
Maybe the solution to the copyright problem will not be the elimination of copyright but the readjustment of human values to exclude anything that might possibly endanger it such as sharing (I'm also more careful about sharing stuff than a lot of people, hmmm) and accidentally finding things you don't "have permission" to access. */me shudders*...
Have you read Richard Stallman's piece The Right to Read?
David Gould
(5) The RIGHT to record *unowned* copyrighted broadcast material (including Satellite and cable as well as over the air) for time-shift-viewing purposes. e.g., legally record a movie from your subscribed HBO channel while you're at work for viewing later that night or on the weekend.
The concept of "unowned" is unclear here. Does "broadcast" cover what you're trying to do here, or are there other circumstances where this might apply?
I'm not sure if this is what the original poster meant, but the way I figure, nobody owns airwaves. Hence, if somebody broadcasts something, I have every right to view it, record it, or whatever. If it happens to be a copyrighted work, then I am not allowed to go around selling copies, but if they didn't want me to have a copy, they shouldn't have broadcast it. They've already "given" me a copy by broadcasting it in a format that I'm capable of interpreting, and they have no right to dictate what personal use I make of that copy (e.g., to say that I can only watch it once, synchronously with the broadcast).
In similar contexts, I've argued along these lines (analyzing the process by which an activity is performed, e.g., "You can't ban cryptography because it's just arithmetic.") The counter-argument has been that the end result is what matters, namely the fact that I am acquiring an unauthorized copy of a work, and that the process by which it occurs is irrelevant to that end result. This is wrong. The process does matter. If each step of the process falls under my rights, then restricting it based on the "end result" would by necessity entail restricting my rights to perform those individual actions, and is therefore unacceptable. If they don't like the end result, that's their problem.
Consider satellite TV broadcasts: if I look up in the sky, I see a satellite. If I could see into the appropriate part of the spectrum, I'd see that it's a very bright object. If my perception were fast enough, I'd see that its color and intensity are modulating very quickly in various patterns. If I knew the protocol, I'd be able to interpret those patterns as streams of bits. If I knew the encryption key, I'd be able to decipher those bits into an MPEG (?) stream. If I could decode the MPEG stream, I'd be able to see a TV broabcast.
If I pointed a radio telescope (which is, after all, exactly what a satellite dish is) at the satellite, it could allow me to see the relevant part of the spectrum. If I fed the telescope's output into a computer, it could interpret the signal into a bit stream for me. If someone told me the encryption key, or I cracked it myself, I could instruct the computer to convert the bits to the MPEG stream. If the computer had an MPEG decoder, it could allow me to watch the TV broadcast.
All this would be without my subscribing to the satellite TV service, and the broadcasters would like us to believe that I would be "stealing", but would I? If a copy of a newspaper falls off the back of a delivery truck, and I find it lying by the side of the road as I'm on my way to the newsstand to buy a copy, is it stealing for me to pick it up and read it instead? My contention is that these are all inalienable rights. They don't own the light that radiates from their satellite; anyone, anywhere has the right to look at it, which includes using such apparatus as a radio telescope and a computer to enhance their vision. The encryption key is (obviously) a trade secret, but it's still just a number -- they can't own it. Obtaining it via some sort of illegal activities (i.e., industrial espionage) is already illegal, but cracking it independently is just math. They have the right to try to make it hard, but not to prevent people from trying (or succeeding, except by making it too hard).
The "end result" is that I would be in possession of an unauthorized copy of their broadcast. As I said above, it is still a copyrighted work, so I couldn't go around selling copies, but they cannot restrict my rights to do what I have just described. They're the ones bombarding my body and my property with radiation that happens to contain the copyrighted information. That radiation does not belong to anyone (or, better yet, when it enters my property, it becomes my property). The way I see it, it's a game between us -- they want to broadcast the information so that their subscribers can retrieve it but I can't. To that end, they are entitled to make as strong a copy-protection mechanism as they want, but once the radiation is in the air, it's fair game for anyone to try to decipher it. If deciphering it is more trouble than it's worth, then they win, but if I can figure out how to do it, then I win.
David Gould
[What's with] the changing slashdot colors? First the FreeBSD article and now this. I hardly find it becoming.
How hard is it to figure out? "Your Rights Online" is a relatively-newly-created "section" on Slashdot. Recently, some categories of stories have been pulled off the front page into separate sections, to cut down on the volume of the front page, and some of these sections are color-coded for clarity. For example, "Ask Slashdot" is in gray, "Slashdot radio" is in black, BSD is in red, and "Your Rights Online" is in this strange orange/brown. Our beloved "#006666" green is still Slashdot's standard color.
Or is it that you understand about the color-coding and you're just disagreeing with the particular colors chosen? I commented on this before, when I first saw the new "Your Rights Online" colors. It might be partly my fault, since I had jokingly nominated orange as a possible color. Sorry.
David Gould
-----
Re: lost episodes
First, don't take this the wrong way, but I have to wonder, how do you manage to lose episodes? I can see screwing up on any of the various post-processing stages, especially with all the "new-fangled equipment", but I would think that you wouldn't delete the copy from each earlier stage, at least until you've verified the next one. Is the problem that they haven't been getting recorded in the first place? How hard is it to press "Record" at the beginning, whatever "new-fangled equipment" you're using?
-----
Re: Spam:
From:
Subject: Your college degree. ([1])
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 21:20:43 -0400 (EDT)
MIME-Version: 1.0
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[1]
[1] Each time I get this, it has different numeric codes in these places. Maybe these are just attempts to fool spam-filters, but just in case it's some kind of tracking thing, I'm deleting them.
I also started saving spam a while back, and I have two copies of the above. I also have about half a dozen of the "Bullseye Gold Marketing" one on my home machine, which I would have posted but I don't have it here on my 'Book.
-----
Re: Wolfenstein
A few months ago, a friend and I were bored enough to pull up the old version of Wolfenstein 3D on my G3. Even with the speed governor on, it was just too fast. It was playable, but it felt weird -- it was almost too smooth! As he pointed out, though, the old games are a lot of fun, and not just for nostalgia: Since they didn't have all the extraneous detail of the newer games, it is like "main-lining" pure action. With the speed governor off, of course, it was just insane. Like you said, 150 frames per second. The problem is, I guess it treats each frame as a constant interval of game time, instead of rendering more intermediate states. As a result, the brown guys' pistol sounded like a chaingun, and it was impossible to maneuver, since tapping the turn key made you do at least a full circle and tapping forward bumped you into a wall instantly.
-----
Re: distributed computing projects
I, too, am sticking with my RC5-64 until it is finished. After that, I was considering SETI@Home, and maybe I'll do it if the problem you mentioned (more processors than data available) changes, but more likely I'll switch to the OGR (Optimal Golomb Ruler) project, since that one is actually doing something useful -- I don't know all the math, but Golomb Rulers have lots of practical applications, and finding optimal ones is incredibly compute-intensive, so this project could actually contribute useful results to various scientific fields.
As for putting your laptop in "suspend", I leave mine on around the clock. But then, maybe yours has one of those overheating Intel chips. I try to put my 'Book on something that'll dissipate heat reasonably well, but as long as I do that, it's cool.
-----
Re: muppets
I already voted for CowboyNeal the day the poll went up. You wouldn't want me to cheat and vote again (though I'm on a dynamic IP, so I could), would you? Basically, this was one of the few times that I've just had to go with the fake answer, because I just couldn't make myself care enough about the actual question.
-----
Re: music
What is that?! Please, just stick with the GiS:SR theme from the first fifteen seconds.
David Gould
This may be out of character in light of my posting history on the subject of Slashdot registration (which, relevantly enough, you can look up if interested), but I don't mind Slashdot's posting-history. I figure everything I say on Slashdot is completely public; if I didn't want people to know what I think, I wouldn't post it in a public forum, or at least not under my own name. The users.pl page just collects all the comments into a handy location, which I find very useful for keeping track of replies to my comments, etc. I just wish it went further back, keeping links into the archived stories. If someone wants to keep track of what I say, he could just as well do it by scanning all the stories for my name.
The reason I don't mind this is that it is not required. I choose to post under my real name because I consider what I say here to be public, and I choose what to say with that in mind. If I wanted to say something that I didn't want my name attached to, I'd post it anonymously (and, being paranoid, I'd probably log out and zap my cookie instead of just using this little "Post Anonymously" checkbox).
I believe it's very important for people to be able to post anonymously if they so choose, for, among other, the same reasons that concern you, but I don't insist on doing so myself. I also am very much against the discrimination that people get when they do so: defaulting to a lower score is arguable, but insulting them by labelling them as "cowards" is unnecessarily confrontational and much of the hostility that is directed toward them is unwarranted -- a lot of people seem to think "anonymous posts" and "bad posts" are the same thing, when I see only (at best) a weak correlation.
I am definitely bothered by the "to serve you better, we track you" thing that so many sites do, especially when they don't offer any special services that inherently depend on tracking, but just collect the data, presumably to improve their own operations through some sort of decision-support database, or else to sell it to other marketers. In the first case, that information is mine, dammit, and if they ask nicely, I might be willing to sell it to them, but they can't have it for free. Improving the overall quality of service that they can offer does not count as paying me. The second case is even worse -- they have no right to do that without my permission, which they will never get.
About the NYT registration thing, I just never read any story of theirs, as a matter of policy, because the privilege of reading a story (and looking at an ad banner) is not something for which I'm willing to sell my information. I used "cypherpunks/cypherpunks" a couple of times (way back), but then I decided that I don't like that. I'm just not interested enough in anything they have to say to register, or to resort to trickery, which would be supporting them with the ad banner anyway.
As for Slashdot posting links to the NYT, I don't have a problem with that -- people who don't mind it can use it, and people who feel as I do can decline to do so. There's no need for Slashdot to boycott them, even if some of us decide to do so. What I don't like is when it's the only link given for a story. I guess, sometimes at least, it's the only one available, but it's better when another link can be provided, like this time. Before long, someone usually finds the same story on another site and posts the link in a comment, anyway.
David Gould
On the last "Geeks in Space" page, someone asked about the colors, and I hazarded a guess that it was to distinguish the different Slashdot "sections".
I also commented that black was not a good color to use, and I suggested orange, like "#bb4400". I was joking! I thought they should change it, but I didn't actually mean for them to use orange! Now I see this page in an orange/brown "#663300", which is pretty close to what I said. Actually, it turns out that "#bb4400" is not a "web color", the closest one looks worse, and "#663300" is the next one down, according to Apple's HTML color picker. If this is my fault, I'm sorry.
Actually, on second thought, it doesn't look so bad. I even kind of like it, and I definitely think color-coding the sections like this is a good idea. However, I see that the "Geeks in Space" section is still in black, and the Slashdot logo images are still in the standard "#006666" Slashdot green. Especially here in YRO, I think the logos should be changed to match, since the brown and green look kind of painful together.
David Gould
2. The toolbars aren't necessarily extraneous at all. Many toolbar buttons provide useful visual feedback. For example, in Microsoft Word, one can easily tell whether the current insertion point is in "bold" mode by glancing at the "B" button on the style toolbar, and checking if it's depressed or not.
Not only that, but having toolbars flash in and out is just a horrible UI idea anyway, for at least the following reasons:
For myself at least, the proceedure for using a toolbar item is: stop typing; simultaneously look at the toolbar to identify the icon I need and take my hand off the keyboard to reach for the mouse; move the mouse around a bit to see where it is; move it to the icon and click. The point is that I need to have the target in my sights when I start moving the mouse, or else I'd have to waste some time (~0.5 - 1 second) looking for it. With the toolbar constantly visible, I can pipeline these operations by locking on to the icon while moving my hand to the mouse, but if the toolbar doesn't appear until I touch the mouse, this wouldn't work.
If there's even a slight delay in the toolbar appearing, then the problem above is exacerbated by exactly that amount. By the way, whose idea were those ridiculous sideways-rolling menus in Win98 or the disappearing taskbar? However, if the toolbar pops up instantly instead of gradually, it would be at least a slight shock. Think of a bad movie where someone jumps out of the shadows -- even when you are expecting something to happen, a sudden change in your visual field is startling. Either way, it takes a little while for your eyes/mind to process the new image, which is more time lost, as well as breaking your concentration from what you were doing in the first place (even more so than having to stop typing to use the mouse in the first place, as if that weren't bad enough).
Where are the toolbars relative to the windows? Are they supposed to positioned so that when the toolbar is visible, it obscures part of the window's content area? That seems to be the only possible benefit of having the toolbar disappear, since it would allow the window to be bigger, using screen real estate more efficiently when the toolbar is hidden, but I still think it's bad to obscure the content area, even part of the time. What if the relevant content happens to be under it? I know -- you shouldn't do that; scroll it to the middle first. But if you're not "allowed" to use that real estate, or at least not as a first-class citizen, then what good is it? Plus, it's just another thing to have to keep in mind while working, especially since the lack of visual cues means you have to remember where the boundary is. Or, if thy are still not supposed to overlap, then what's the point? Even worse, could it be that the window is supposed to automatically move and resize itself? That's absolutely horrifying, since all the content would move! Even if it could do it without flickering, it would be extremely disorienting. Even Micros~1 probably knows better than that, but then, with their "because we can" approach to UI design, who knows?
Finally, I belive that, as a rule of thumb, unnecessary motion onscreen is generally bad. Whenever something pops up, flashes, dances, jumps out at you, or otherwise calls attention to itself in response to an unrelated event, it is distracting. (Exhibit A: the dancing paperclip.) A good fraction of the time, when I stop typing to reach for the mouse, it's not to use the toolbar -- more often, it's to, e.g., move the insertion point, select something, drag-and-drop something, switch windows, or use a menu item. In these cases, having the toolbar suddenly appear, even if it did not cause any delay in the system's responsiveness, would break my concentration, as I said above, and t would make the problem of covering content even worse.
I can see that they're trying to improve on some of the shortcomings of the original WIMP (Window/Icon/Menu/Pointer) interface, but most of what they've done is merely adding bells and whistles with no improvement and, often, making it yuckier. Now, if we could replace the mouse with a camera that could watch your eyes move and determine what you're looking at, or something like that, we'd be talking about real improvements.
David Gould
Maybe, but I think that may be a bit optimistic. They didn't explain it at all, even to say something like "On Slashdot, anyone can paticipate in the discussions, but to have your name appear, you have to create a free account. Otherwise, you are given the (somewhat judgemental) default name of 'Anonymous Coward'." Since the unquoted phrase fits grammatically in the sentences where they used it, the only hints that it is a quote and not the writer's own editorializing are the facts that it is capitalized, and quoted in one of the two places where it is printed. That's a bit on the subtle side, considering that it takes a lot of people a while to figure out that "Anonymous Coward" isn't somebody's name. (At least they didn't get that wrong.)
Mainly, I was bothered by this because when I read it, at first scan, it seemed that the writer was also branding the anonymous posters as "cowards", even though I do understand the actual origin. It seems that he either understands and agrees with the judgement or saw it, concluded that it is our judgement, and echoed it in an attempt to seem more "in". Either way, the effect is to propagate it, which I don't like because, as I've said (repeatedly), I strongly disagree with this label. Also, I do believe that it detracts fron the impression Slashdot will make on people.
By the way, I don't see what they thought was the significance of the posts being anonymous -- the subtitle "'Anonymous Cowards' speak out" seems to imply that that fact is somehow especially interesting, when all it means is that the speakers in question declined to identify themselves.
BTW, whoever posted "November 5, 1999, The Duh heard round the world," is probably kicking themselves now for doing it anonymously (what a coward!).
Yeah, I guess so. Or maybe it wouldn't have been quoted otherwise, if they were looking to emphasize "AC"s.
-------------------------------------------
I found eternal happiness! Whoops, I just lost it.
I'm so sorry. Eternity ain't what it used to be, huh?
David Gould
No, I don't mean that the "AC" comments they quoted were poor representatives of our discussions (that too, though). If I meant that, I wouldn't have quoted "Anonymous Coward" in my subject line. Instead, I mean that the label itself detracts from the respectability of the quotes.
I guess that's the whole point, but I've always been opposed to this: the label is (or should be) simply a default value put in place of a name to indicate that the poster did not identify himself. It should simply say "Anonymous" -- there is absolutely no need to make it a value judgement. There is at best a weak correlation between anonymous posts and bad posts, yet a lot of people talk as if the two are one and the same. Those who believe that anonymous posters are inherently cowards are free to make that judgement for themselves, but the site should not automatically label them as such. All that does is create antagonism, making the "AC"s more likely to want to post flamage because they are given such an unnecessarily insulting label.
This has been argued before, and is not particularly on-topic here, but now it takes on a new significance. The MacWeek article, at least, tended to make us seem like a chat room full of immature geeks spouting mindless Micros~1-bashing. I guess I have to be honest enough to acknowledge that that's not too far off, but they didn't really convey the fact that there's a lot more to it. Now, you might say that the problem is that they were quoting "AC"s instead of "real" slashdotters, but that only shows how thoroughly you fail to see the fallacy of "AC"-bashing. Not all the bad quotes were from "AC"s. I keep trying to point out that logging in doesn't magically prevent people from posting garbage; the fact is that there will always be at least some dumb posts on Slashdot. The point here is that if journalists wants to make Slashdot look dumb, they will always be able to find some of those posts to quote. That's a separate issue. However, they also emphasized the label itself, which, I think is harmful to the overall effect:
'Anonymous Cowards' speak
"November 5, 1999, The Duh heard round the world," one Anonymous Coward posted.
(Actually, I thought that was a pretty good comment -- both funny and insightful. I'd missed it on the actual discussion.)
All they did was repeat the label that the site itself attaches to anonymous posts, but in effect this passes the judgement on, making it sound like it is their opinion too that anonymous posters are cowards, and, by extension, the entire site loses some respectability. This made Slahsdot look even worse than it would have if it had been:
Anonymous users speak
"November 5, 1999, The Duh heard round the world," someone posted anonymously.
David Gould
I thought, and I was going to say to you, that the actual "Burn all GIFs Day" had not happened yet (the 8th came to mind as the official date), which would have been a reasonable excuse for not having done it yet. However, I just checked and I was wrong -- it was the 5th, which was yesterday, so you're right. What's up? I guess it's still possible that they just haven't gotten around to it yet; after all, it's only the next morning, and a weekend at that.
Then again, they could have decided not to participate. I seem to recall some people bringing what they claimed was a voice of sanity to the discussion, e.g., pointing out that Unisys is not shaking down everyone who uses GIFs, but only those using GIFs created with unlicensed-LZW-algorithm-using software. I guess that's a good point, but the issue is still over the format/algorithm's non-freeness. I'm not knowledgeable enough about such things to have an opinion of my own, so I just believe whoever on Slashdot makes his argument sound the most sarcastically witty.
David Gould
You know how "Ask Slashdot" stories are in gray? Same thing. Some catagories of stories have been pulled out into separate sections to decrease the sheer number of items that hit the front page, and some of the sections are color-coded to indicate their status.
By the way, it looks kind of funny with the Slashdot logo on top in the standard "#006666" green and the rest of the page in black. Taco and co. might want to consider making separate versions of the Slashdot logo images to match each color-coded section. Of course, in this case, it wouldn't work against the black background -- maybe black isn't the best color to code a section. I nominate orange, like "#bb4400".
David Gould
I was thinking that this one wasn't as funny as the last few, but then you did the verbal "M-x spook" while talking about Echelon. The Dr. Strangelove reference didn't quite work as an Echelon keyword, but it knocked me off my chair anyway. ROTFLMAO.
Also, I can't quite believe you did that "Linux Business Expo" ad at the beginning, though I guess it was a respectable sponsor, and you did read it with a sufficiently comical tone that we can still take you as seriously as we always have. I don't suppose you'd tell us what 40 seconds of "Geeks in Space" air-time costs?
Moving on: the sound quality is improved, though I'm not so sure about the new intro music. I think I like the longer episode -- basically, the more, the better. One might have worried that it would get tired when you went past the usual 10 minutes, but I don't think it did, even at 20 minutes, though it still might if you go much past that. There's always more to talk about than there is time, so you can just cover more, and not have to rush. However, some parts were a bit on the dull side. I know, we've been asking for more serious analysis and less joking around, and now that you've done so, I'm (predictably enough) criticizing again, but I like the jokes, and I think you went just a bit past "perfect" and toward "too serious". Just back up a little bit toward "too silly" and you should hit "perfect" again somewhere in the middle.
David Gould
What, did you decide that it was "content-free" just because they said so? Lighten up. My impression is that they were saying it in a humorously self-deprecating sense. That doesn't make it true. Nor have they ever claimed that GiS was anything more than a bunch of geeks sitting around yakking pointlessly and cracking jokes. I think "content-free" as an insult only applies to things that are supposed to be meaningful, but fail.
As far as I can tell, GiS is just meant to be entertaining, and, in my opinion, it is, very much so, and I for one like it. It has improved a lot since the first couple of episodes, when it sounded a lot like they were just reading down that day's Slashdot front page.
They still discuss items that have been on Slashdot lately, but that's how it should be. In fact, it would almost have to be, since if they thought something was worth talking about, they should have posted it, so what else could they talk about? The difference is that, the first couple of times, they really didn't add much to what had been posted on the front page. Now, they pick a few of te more interesting items and talk about them in more depth (so it sounds more like they're reading off one of the discussion pages).
The advantage is that this adds new "content" (albeit more joking than serious analysis) that was not in the posting. I guess you could say that they're not necessarily any more "special" than any of the other people who comment on the discussion pages, so there is no qualitative difference between their comments and those on the site, but they are the guys who run the site, after all, and I think this is cool in that it adds a more personal touch to what they do. Plus, it expands the discussion into a new medium.
A couple of suggestions: Maybe they could add some interactivity by taking a few minutes to read out and respond to some selected comments from the previous episode's discussion, or anywhere on the site. Also, it would be nice if the http://slashdot.org/index.pl?section=radio page had a box with direct links to download the mp3 files for all past episodes (including the current one) -- this would save the trouble of having to go through two or three of TheSync's pages for the archives when we miss an episode (TheSync, annoyingly enough, does not have the current episode on the archive page, so there is no sigle page that has them all).
David Gould
Oh, I don't know. I was really just trying to come up with some examples of reasonable compromises.
Let me get this straight: You say that I cannot look at my own genes if my parents applied some patented patch?
You're right, that does sound kind of unreasonable. Maybe look at it, but not pass around copies (again, except by conventional means). Your point is still good, though, since any such restrictions would be kind of offensive, especially since you didn't have a choice in the deal. On the other hand, you did inherit a gene that your parents had licensed, and you get to benefit from whatever cool trait it carries, so there is some sense to saying that you should inherit their obligations under the license. The problem is that if the patent expired at the first generation, someone would just have a kid immediately after receiving the patch, and the patent wouldn't even last a year. When the gene has been inherited naturally from someone who also had it naturally seems like a good time to consider it to have entered the gene pool, and to be in the public domain.
I was trying to come up with a good compromise. Even so, I can see a plot element for some weird science fiction, e.g., the company's competitors bribing the recipient to have a kid as soon as biologically possible, so they could get their hands on the gene, etc.
Also, you clearly do not understand the patent system, as anything patented is disclosed to the public. There cannot be an NDA on patented genes.
Right, I got those confused. I guess that means that there's not even any need to restrict what you could do with your inherited artificial gene. However, reproduction of that gene in another organism by artifical means would be an infringement, whether the knowledge of the gene sequence came from independent invention, industrial espionage, the company's own publication of the information, or study of your tissues. The way I figure, your copy is a "naturally-occurring counterpart" because it was created by normal procreation, but that doesn't change the fact that any artificially-created instance would still fall under the patent. Owning a naturally-occurring copy entitles you to have it, to benefit from the cool trait, and to pass it on through procreation, but it doesn't give you any special rights to infringe their patent on artificial versions. True, this would be restricting what you can do with your own DNA, but how is that worse than restricting what you can do with knowledge contained in your own brain (not that I'm very fond of that, either)?
David Gould
I think the best way to handle this is for Linus and the head kernel hackers to sit down with peoples at TurboLinux and try to come up with a solution. Turbolinux should at least give the hackers time to look at their code and evaluate it.
You make it sound like there's some sort of confrontation going on, with Linus refusing the patches and them "threatening" to go ahead and do their own thing anyway, forking if necessary, etc. I don't see anything like that in the article, though. The only real news that I see is that they have made a modified kernel with improvements for high-availability clustering. The rest seems to be at most speculation that if Linus were to reject the patches, then a fork would be created. Are you sure you aren't trying to resolve a non-existent situation?
This is sort of an extension of the article's own cluelessness, such as where it says
But what really stands out about TurboLinux's approach to the market is its effort to provide high-end software that alters the Linux operating system itself.
as if nobody else has ever submitted a kernel patch before. I'm no authority, but it seems that at most, the difference here is the magnitude of the modifications they have made, which would be only a quantitative difference, not qualitative one. I also don't see how this is taking Linux in a "new direction" -- it's just new pwople doing it.
David Gould
...as do I, obviously, since we are both posting with logins, unless there's a way that I'm not aware of to have a single-session, cookie-free Slashdot login (if there is, I'd appreciate being let in on the secret, and if not, there really should be). That's probably the only reason my cookies are still enabled.
I remember that the cookie issue came up in a big way when Slashdot first created logins, and again as a tangent whenever people would start debating anonymous posting (which I strongly support, even though I eventually decided to log in myself). A lot of people don't seem to get the point that "whether or not Slashdot should require cookies" is a whole different issue from "whether or not cookies are bad". That is, someone would say, I don't want to log in because I don't want to enable cookies", and someone would reply "You idiot! There's nothing wrong with cookies." In that context, I just kept wishing people would realize that that's not the point: the first guy doesn't want to enable cookies -- whether or not his reasons are valid has very little to do with whether or not Slashdot should force him to do so. Even ignoring that, though, I should hope that when something like this comes up, it would make people re-evaluate the question.
Anyway, this story inspired me to take a look at my own cookie file, and it was a real eye-opener. The Mac version of Netscape calls it "MagicCookie" instead of "cookie.txt", and its type code is 'COOK', which I had to use ResEdit to change to 'TEXT' before it would open in a text editor (I assume Netscape will still be able to use it), though it is a perfectly normal text file. I didn't see anything but normal readable text, or anything that could be references to locations within the file -- just some comments and then a lot of line entries, so I assume I can ignore the comment "# This is a generated file! Do not edit.", as long as I don't screw up the format by corrupting any entries. I removed everything except slashdot.org and a few work-related entries.
slashdot.org has made some interesting entries in addition to my login info, though, that really don't seem to belong there. Here are the entry names, minus all the other values:
www.slashdot.org... user
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
slashdot.org
Some of those could be records of my poll-votes, to prevent repeat-voting, but I'm pretty sure in most cases that I'd remember if we'd ever had those polls. No, it doesn't have actual values for these, or at least not readable ones, though the values could be codes of some kind. More likely, it's someone's idea of a joke, i.e., messing with the more paranoid minds; I guess I could be sort of falling for a trawl here -- in that case, for the record, I see it and I'm not really falling for it.
This really bothers me (the whole cookie thing, not Slashdot). I for one am very much wanting a browser feature to specify in advance the list of cookies to allow. Do I remember correctly that this is in the works for Mozilla?
David Gould
That argument could be extended to say that everything is nature, so nothing can be patented: Mankind is a species of animal that evolved naturally, so our existence, and all its consequences, i.e., everything we do, are naturally-occurring phenomena. Try this: aren't microchips part of nature? They're made out of sand, after all, even though it takes all sorts of machines to turn the sand into the microchips, but then the machines are made by people, who are in turn part of nature, right?
This is vacuous, of course, because when a term is defined so broadly it loses its meaning. If you say that all phenomena are natural, because there is no other kind, then the distinction between something being a "natural phenomenon", an "artificial phenomenon", or just a plain "phenomenon" disappears. While this is technically true, it does not accomplish anything -- the point of the term is to distinguish between those phenomena that occur without the intervention of mankind / technology and those that only occur when we cause them. Quibbling over whether or not our causing them makes them any less "natural" is beside the point.
Now, I definitely agree that patenting genes is an extremely problematic area, but I'm not sure the "Aren't genes nature?" argument is much help. Also, I am very skeptical of the USPTO's competence, in view of all the recent messes with software patents, but I am encouraged by this passage from the post above yours (emphasis added):
3.In order for DNA sequences to be distinguished from their naturally occurring counterparts, which cannot be patented, the patent application must state that the invention has been purified or isolated or is part of a recombinant molecule or is now part of a vector.
Assuming it really works this way, this should take care of problems with the companies claiming that their patents apply to people. I don't have much of a problem with companies owning genes that they really did invent, as long as there is a very sharp distinction between these and "naturally-occurring" (see above) genes. At least this would seem to prevent the equivalent of a "QuickSort patent", e.g., someone patenting blue eyes and claiming that I owe them royalties.
Supposing that they could make a "patch" that could be applied to your genes, e.g., to change your eye color, then it would be reasonable for them to demand a one-time royalty when you buy the modification, provided that then you would fully own that copy, with no "this license may be terminated..." clause. Passing the gene on to your own offspring in the conventional manner would have to be considered "fair use", as would cloning oneself, though reverse-engineering it from a tissue sample through technological means would not.
A natural duration of gene patents would be one full generation, i.e., until a person has been born possessing the gene naturally, to parents also possessed it from birth. Then a reasonable compromise would be for the license to prohibit reverse-engineering while the patent was valid, after which time it would enter the public domain (so to speak).
David Gould
By the way, when I first submitted the above, I was returned to the Preview, with the message "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted." I can only assume this means Taco has achieves Strong AI and his code knows how lame it is.
Seriously, this is not a "troll"; I have the deepest respect and appreciation for the work that has been done to create Slashdot, but right now I'm kind of pissed about having a perfectly good post censored for no reason. This is not offtopic, either; it's partly a meta-comment, but it also adds a clarification and draws an interesting parallel.
I cut the two blocks of "mystery text" into 40-character lines instead of giving them each as one big long word, and it accepted it. Presumably the filter detected words over some cutoff length and concluded that I was one of those jackasses who make huge garbage posts to waste bandwidth and vertical space. It's a noble goal, but the implementation is faulty. In my opinion, false positives are worse than false negatives in something like this, and this seems pretty vulnerable to both.
Anyway, I broke them up, with the result that the post now takes about 50% more vertical space than it would have, and anyone interested in my cryptographic challenge might be thrown on a wild goose chase by the line lengths. Let me assure you, the lengths are irrelevant; the original contained no whitespace at all.
Something else that struck me: how weird is it that, on a story about the "spooks" scanning people's communications, I should discover that Slashdot itself has a mechanism that scans the text of comments for certain undesirable content before allowing them to be posted? Not to mention that I was wrongly victimized by it, in sort of the way that we're all afraid of having happen for real. Could it be? Is Rob... one of Them?
David Gould