Anyway, if it's handy I would like to know what he was talking about.
Ok, here is abstract from the Rutgers mathematics department colloquium:
Sept. 24: Craig Benham, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
The Emergence of Mathematical Biology - New Opportunities and Old Pitfalls
ABSTRACT: Biology is unique among the sciences in that it periodically reinvents itself through the development of unanticipated new methodologies and perspectives. The discovery by Watson and Crick of the linear encoding of genetic information in the DNA molecule has caused a revolutionary paradigm shift, in which the fundamental determinants of many important biological phenomena are now realized to be encoded in molecular sequences, structures and interactions. This has brought biology into the realm of the traditional "hard" sciences - physics, chemistry and mathematics. Because few biologists are trained in mathematics, unprecedented opportunities are becoming available for mathematicians to contribute to, and in some substantial measure create, the biology of the 21st century. This talk will describe one point of view on the opportunities and pitfalls facing a mathematician who wishes to work on new biological problems. If one wishes to make a useful contribution to biology one must first understand biologists - what problems they regard as important, and what contributions they view as useful. So the cultural perspective from which biologists view their domain will be described. Then several new directions in biology will be described that provide unique opportunities for mathematicians. Commonly, these are situations where a complete list of the components of a biological system are known, but where there is little understanding of how these work together to make the system dynamically stable yet rapidly adaptive to change. The mathematical and numerical analysis of the governing dynamical systems provide the means by which the global organization of many biological systems will be understood. Examples of this type will be described from areas such as genetics, cellular biology and neurobiology. By developing effective ways to treat specific situations such as these, mathematicians will create a methodology that will be at the heart of 21st century biology. Finally, if time permits a brief history will be sketched of this investigator's research on mathematical aspects of DNA structure and function. This will show how cascades of mathematically tractable yet biologically important problems can be developed from apparently naive initial insights.
Disclaimer: I am a math person and not a biology person, but someone gave a coloquim recently tring to talk lots of us math type into getting interested in math biology problems.
As to the idea that this was only conclusively demonstrated 10 years ago - I really don't know about that. If you are dismissing all the other "inconclusive", yet highly consistent, evidence that cohered with the idea that it was a double-helix then I don't know what you would accept as reasonable evidence. What was the conclusive demonstration?
I really do not know that much about it, but I do know that they ultimatly found that it is sometimes not a double helix (the story we got was that it can twist back and forth instead of arround).. and the impress I got from the speaker was that it still satisfies the old arguments for a double helix when it dose this, but that some newer more convincing arguments showed that DNA was a double helix most of the time.
I would go look up the speakers name from last symesters coloquim list for you, but I do not think it was his main line of research (it was really a look the scientific method can be a lot of fun just like the mathemaical method statment) so it probable would not help you find papaers. It would probable be better to look for papers directly related to the structure of DNA.
I donno.. as they say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing..:)
Do you feel that science in general is to critical of new ideas.
Contrary to popular beleive science dose contain something like ``dogma.''
Example 1: Biology only reacently (10 years) showed that DNA really is a double helix, but most biologists and the public believed this almost blindly long before it was really shown to be true. They concluded it was a double helix from scatering experiments which showed it had a ``shadow'' consistant with a double helix and a double helix seemed like a good idea for other inconclusive reasons. (Biologits even call this the central dogma)
Example 2: The evidence we are all given as children for the big bang is that most of the stars are moving away from us.. which is compleat rubish.. just because objects are roughly moving away now dose not mean that there trajectories necissarily run back a single point! Now, I believe there is good evidence for the big bang in the scatering of elements and the make up of back ground radiation (I've never really looked).
The thing that you need to understand about this ``dogma'' is that some amount of it is necissary for advancing the science.
Example: There are large cardinal axioms in mathematics which people spend there whole livesworking on, but we can proove (via Goodle) that these axioms can not be proven consistent with ZFC (the basic axioms).
I've noticed that anything that doesn't agree with mainstream thought is flamed
Normally these non-mainstream ideas are crap (Examples: anything Mulder on the X-files would like, perpetual motion machines, anything with the words creation or christian, etc.). Scientists can not really be expected to spend there time debunking all of these myths and whatnot.. there are just too many of them. (I suggest you look at Caral Sagan's A Daemon Haunted World)
Occasionally there is represion of a correct idea (Example: Cocain is physically to large to pass through the uterus wall, but reputable journals refused to publish this fact because it was not politically correct to challenge anything related to crack babies.. nevermind that knowing that the damage caused to these babies is all induced by changes to ther mother's normal system might actually help them). This dose not happen much, but it is soemthing we should be careful about.. which brings me to my question for the interview:
What can we do to educate people about the REAL scientiic method.. maybe focusing on the historical development of science instead of the results? I'm in graduate school in mathematics, but I would not say I really understood the scientific method until I learned some of the basics and history of quantum mechanics.
This is the best post I have seen so far and it has only a fraction of the moderation that the obsurd aregument over who asked the "do you believe in god" question first.
Now, I think we should adjust the slashdot interview policy to give the person we are interviewing more choice in the questions, i.e. take a higher percentage of upwardly moderated posts (killing repeats) and incurage them to only answer the questions they want to answer. I think we would see a lot more interesting responce to the interviews.. the person we are interviewing generally seems to know a lot more about why they are interesting then we do.
As opposed to cases in which, say, the university claims all rights
Hmm.. How do most universities handle this now? I would assume that they had some restrictions, but it would seem that the OPL would be in-line with these restrictions---it would seem to be in the mission of the university. Are there problems here or are universities a good place to market the OPL?
I can see broadly what they're saying on a general level, but, to use a technical term from mathematics... there seems to be a lot of arm waving going on. Can someone help me out here?
Unfortunatly, most of the web page is in consultant speak too, but it appears that they are talking about (1) making it easy for people to search for information and (2) figure out what the hell it is saing. I assume that there are some indexing ideas for (1) and some ideas based on linking for (2). I did not see any specific mention of Artificial Intelegence to assist in the process of indexing or paraphrasing (Wow! That is a cool though a world full of humans who can not understand each others execpt through there computer paraphrtasors.. that would make a good short story). There dose not appear to be any math here. They may also be talking about orginisational stuff, but I donno.
I think it is clear that what they are tring to do is a good idea and Englebart may have some deep insights into the ``ergonomics of information'' (i think that keeps it from sounding like consultant speak). It is woth mentioning that there have been a lot of snake-oil salesmen who did not realize they were snake-oil salesmen (Freud, early medicin, all religious leaders, etc.), but some of them have actually inspired people to create soemthing great (Feurd bullshit and bleading people did sorta pave the way for modern medicin and psychology). I am not really qualified to judge this one, but whenever you strik out for the frengis of science and the applicable experemental method you run the risk of fathering a field of blabering idots. Example: Psychology has turned into a science which actually gets results while Scosiology has turned into who knows what.
My opinion is that Engelbert dose know what he is talking about, but that he may have made a mistake in tring to apply the computer interface ergonomics we know him for to the social world. I personally REALLY want to see information ergonomics developed (paraphrasing and autolinking via AI's and user interfaces which make these things easy), but it may be unrealistic to develop it in the context of creating social changes.. who knows.. I hope it works. We could use a little more intelegence in our public decission making processes.. and maybe a little understanding is all that is required.
Information ergonomics (I keep saing this I know what it means.. and I am not confident that I know exactly what bootstrapping is) should be very useful to science, but I do not know that it would be as useful as just creating more brilliant people via good psychological research into education and critical thinking skills. Translation: Englebart says the data buss is too slow, but I'm point out that just adding more processors might help as much in the short term.:)
Regardless, the talk should be inspiring if you want to make the world a better place..:)
Jeff
BTW> I also have a sneeking suspission that information ergonomics is part of the door into real intelegent AI, but that is just wild speculation.
I would rather the researchers own the patents themselves, and merely license them under the OPL. If someone wants to use the patent other than as the Open Patent License allows, they can go to the patent holder, in this case the researcher or perhaps the university, to negotiate terms.
This would be much better if it is finatially realistic. I was under the impression (from things RMS has said) that patents were really too expencive for the researchers to obtain and defend.. which is why I suggested using a holding orginisation.
The other problem I see is the researchers time. I am a graduate student in mathematics and I could very well see getting myself into the situation where I discovered things which were relevent, but I did not have the time to do the patent grunt work.. which to me includes actually figuring out what it might really be applicable to in addition to all the patent paper work.
It might make sence to have a non-profit orginisation which did some of the research into the applicability of the research and actually applied for the patents in exchange for partial onership. I'm realy thinking of something where I can give them some realy raw shit and they will sorta check off a list of things that it could apply to and go patent them, i.e. use exactly the tactics which the big nasty co.s use, but since anyone can use it via the OPL we are the good guys.
Hell, you could even implement it as start up headed for an IPO.. with partial onership in a crapload of patents and after winning some big lawsuits you could make yourself a lot of money.. and make the world safe for OSS in the process. There isn't really any reason to restrict it to patents relevent to software either.. do drugs patents and all sorts of other things.. just refuse to let drug co.s who wont OPL there patent use any of them without paying.
I realize there is a little conflict of intrest here since this org. would need to descided between pushing a co. to OPL or just letting them pay up and use it, but the orginator of the idea would still own most of it and would have a lot of say in the process. Plus, the more money we extort the more likely we are to see real patent reform.
Wouldn't it be better if we were working *toward* something here? Say if we were all trying to develop a document that summarizes the basic arguments, so we don't have to go through the same old stuff every time?
This would be wonderful. If/. ever starts making lots of money they could hire authors to write sumerise/indexes of the previous related discussions onto the end of the new articles. It might even be possible to write an AI that would make this less work by cataloging all the crap.
If that's all.. would someone explain exactly what's so great about that?
It's conceptually pretty which makes the Computer Scientist in all of us smile..:)
Seriously, there are a lot of advantages to microkernel's because you solve the problems in a more generic way. Example: any good microkernel inherently supports all the real-time stuff you would need because that is how it's device drivers work (Mach did not do this in the past.. i donno about now) and there are commercial microkernels which work quite well on this philosophy. This means that when your video driver crashes it dose not crash your system. It also make it much easier to write OS emulation software.
It is also nice that unprivliged users can do all sorts of cool things like create there own file system or user privlage tracking system without creating a security hole. This security system is one of the more revolutionary parts of the Hurd as I understand it. Example: you can add and remove privliges from a running process under the Hurd.
There are advantages and disadvantage and it is generally agreed that the advantages will eventually out weight the disadvantages AND the cost of porting all the software.. the question is when.. sorta like cleaning up your room..:)
The article is correct in it's concern that only an OSS broadcasting solution can creat the future we all want.. where anyone can broadcast there video over the internet.. and patents are our obstical. The solution appears to be ``compramize our principals in the short term, but not in the long term.'' I will explain..
A legislation solution (I think this is RMS's proposed solution) seems unlikely.. especially for Algorithms that really do require an understanding of a good bit of math to create.
Many mathematicians are getting kinda sick of inventing some cool new thing to help sociaty only to see some company steal it's applications by putting one word like computer, audio, or video in front of it.. and many researchers could probable be talked into giving the open source community a list of possible applications when they invent something new.. so we could patent it first and use a viral patent license. Unfortunatly, this is considered too expencive by people in the know (like RMS). I personally feal this is workable if the patenting orginisation were less principaled then the FSF could pull something off by doing the following:
1) Use an extreamly viral license the prohibits mixed use of the patent with any patents not distributed under the same license, i.e. no company can use our patents unless the cross licence with the rest of the world via our license.
2) Allow companies to get arround 1 by paying thorugh the nose and use the money to reward the researchers and pay for lawyers, i.e. compramize our principals occasionally.
Unfortunatly, the above dose require a lot of orginisation, a lot of conenctions, and a lot of work.
The best solution is probable: control the viewer and server. If a codec maker dose not want to go OSS then we should make it hard for them to get users.. up to the point that they are really a hell of a lot better then anyhting we are using.. at which point we should compramize a little.
It is also worth mentioning that codec makers make money by licensing the authoring software (i think) or with crap attached to the codec, so there should probable be a push to implement OSS versions of the authoring software and codecs in countries where the patent dose not apply.. then make the OSS version the default, i.e. default RedHat xanim has no support for the codec so the user is forced to choose between downloading a single OSS xanim which is illegal or downloading a million codecs. This will cut into there proffit margin.
Yup all the mp3 player makers are pretty clueless.. Hmm.. I can only think of ONE good design for a portable mp3 player.. built it into the frigin headphones! It's not like it needs to weigh anything and the buttons can be designed so that you can find theem without looking at the player.
Now, there are all sorts of things which is is good to include mp3 players in via software.. cellphones, PDAs, car sterios (removable like you were talking about would be very cool), etc. Also, you could make a case that a dual mp3 player / low bit rate voice recorder should probable not be a pair of head phones too.
There have been a lot of speculations about such things and I don't know that much about any of them, but the better ones appear to be *consistent* at best.
I believe one story is: if you were already traveling faster then light then you could continue to do so with no problem.. infact you would not be able to slow down below the speed of light. This is where all the interest in tacheons came from, but one on has managed to find them.
I do not know anything about the method you quote, but I was always under the impression that gravety moves at the speed of light.. maybe gravety is not what they mean by movment of space.. i donno.
Now, any of these methods would still imply time travel, by the argument I gave in my post, but time travel is not necissarily the contradiction many peoplethink it is.. who knows.
I heard people say that it should be possible to build a time machine: it would be a long tube with radius about 1 mile, 1/2 the mass of the sun, and spinning at 1/3 the speed of light.. not an easy thing to build. A funny though I had one is maybe the consistancy of the universe somehow hinges on an engenering difficulty in constructing a time machine like this one.:)
My personal bet on how we will deal with the time required to travel to other star systems is by replacing ourselves with intelegent machines or genetic engenering away the problems we have with prolonged space flight.
The other serious problem with prolonged space flight is having enough perpellant, but if idea's like the hydrogen ram jet (use a magnetic scoop to pick up hydrogen atoms and then fuse them in your engin) pan out then we could go any place we wanted.. it would just take a while.
Jeff
BTW> If you want to see an application of theoretical physics in the short term future look at quantum computation.
Actually, I'm under the impression that it is widly accepted that faster then light travel and time travel are equivelent. First, it is clear that time travel implies faster then light travel (just go back in time long enough to get you there in time for tea). Second, everyone who I have ever talked to who knows something about realitivity says that faster then light travel.. any sort of faster then light travel (wormholes etc.).. implies time travel. The Feynman lectures in physics I even assigns this as a homework problem, but I can't remember the specific argument. I think the idea is that if you used your faster then light travel in an accellerated refence frame then your "now" points into someone else's past so your faster then light travel places you in the past, i.e. now can not be defined independently of your speed at significant distace away from you.
Clearly, this has not been experementally observed, but it is based on such fundamental parts of fundamental and well tested theory (realitivity) that it seems unlikely to be wrong. I mean just look at the argument.. its pretty straight forward and uses only basic idea's about realitivity.
Hehe.. You took me a little to seriously.. and yes I know Larry Wall is religious (and just a damn cool guy).. that was supposed to be part of the humor.
The only realy content to what I said, asside from the humor, is that there is some small chance that being able to program would push people into slightly more logical though, i.e. nothing special about perl here.. that was part of the humor. This is by no means a forgon conclusion since it seems that a person can learn to think logically about one thing and irrationalliy about another. Hell, I even had roomate who was a religious nut cases who didn't believe in evolution and was studing biology.. go figure that one.
It just difficult to say what would happen since the technology that the general public has been given before has never been programmable beond when to start recording your TV show. Clearly, learning how to program won't make people stop believing in God, but it could make people think slightly more logically in some situations.. which should be really a good thing.
I agree that there are other OSes which are potentially better suited to embedded system, but many of the hardware limitations to using a bloated desktop OS in an embedded system are gone.. and while Linux may seem bloated next to some of the newer embedded system OSes.. it has a known record for reliability. I mean it takes debuging time to get an OS stable. Also, an open source embedded OS would have a lot less interest then Linux. Plus, these devices will increasingly require programability and the familearity of Joe Programmer with Linux could help. I'm not saing Linux is the best way to go, but it may be the way people actually go for a little while..
I'm still a little bit conrfused about why they said what they did though because Linux really kicks ass in the server world.. and we will probable see *something* in the next few years which says once and for all that microsoft is going noware in the server world. Open source is just too good at the server stuff.
I agree about the education thing.. and one thing to point out is that other countries (France and Mexic at least, right?) are moving all the schools to Linux. Is it possible that our schools will wiat too long and we will give a technilogical advantage to these other countries? It would kinda suck to have a generation of Americans that can only shop online while Mexico imports all our buisnesses because they have lots of cheap programming tallent.
What I really want to see is lots of programmable embedded systems.. so that the children of all these fuckers who can't think their way out of a paper bag will need to learn to program.. and will maybe become more logical thinkers then their parents. Who knows perl could be even be the beginning of the end for religion (I know I getting just plain silly here.. but one can hope).
I have an interesting correction to their MP3 prediction: The internet seems to have contributed a good deal of economic freedom to the arts in general (wintess online commics like Sluggy Frelance), but not to the music world. The solution is for artists to do exactly what the web comics do and commercialize directly. The only problem with this is that people will tend to keep a free mp3 and play it over and over and not get more. The solution to this is to include a web page (or at least links) with the mp3 and have the player's add a button to open up the page. this would allow the musicians to include visual art (so people will actually want ot look atthe page and wont just strip it from the file) and advertising directly.. and draw people back to their site to pay for shirts and other songs. mp3.com is just another label.. the artists really need to directly connect with their fans to make the real money.
We could also use a recommendation based radio system.. it could be as simple as a page which refreshes periodically to artists pages which send you sample mp3s.
A random prediction: we are probable ripe for a more serious intrest in electronic music from achedimic circles.. music theory could probable start taking things like wavelets and some newer math into account.. techno may really turn into the new classical that everyone wants to see.
A point I sould make about the e-commerce backlash prediction.. such a backlash will probable not effect the real technology stocks like MS, IBM, VA, RedHat, CISCO, etc. nearly as much as the stocks like Amazon and eToys.
Another random prediction: People (including open source developers) will become much more interested is practical applications of AI.. Slashdot will have a good AI to moderate down trolls.. and one of the serious mp3 players will implement some AI playlist stuff like I did in SmartPlay (it's a little Gtk-perl mpg123 front end which uses a primitive AI and well though through user interface to decrease the time you waist fucking arround with your mp3 player.. but it's buggy as hell as I only wrote it to convince people with more free time that they sould rewrite it.. and to give myself a better player).
The discussion here is not pissed off enough! Is it because of that bit by the lawyer in the article? Who cares if they have made this search legal.. it should be illegal. Shure, the feds have been doing related things to all sorts of non-electronics type people for a while now, but we should still be pissed off!
If this was an article about a company messing with someone there would have been 50 posts talking about was to help get them to stop. I have not seen ONE such post about this article. We should be fucking slashdoting the agency that did this with complaints!
What else can we do? What is the most effective way to slashdot these people. It seems we first need to know who they are, but I have not seen any information posted about exactly which parts of the Dept. of Justic / FBI were involved in this. We should start a web site to collect the names of the agents and officials involved in this.. to make shure that their crimes are not forgoten.. and that they are remembered as the tyrants which they are. I would love to hear from people about the preacticality / legality of such a site.
Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants" and I think it is time to spill the blood of these specific tyrants the slashdot style.
I'm pretty shure you are correct, but I don't even see how the above posters idea would work? As you sell something to tank it don't you loose a lot of money? Sales taking time to go through and all.
I do have one slightly-related question---the glass of water is partially ontopic instead of mostly offtopic.:)
Background: I believe enviromental orginisations have occasionally gotten into trouble for tring to trash a co.'s stock price, but I do not know wether it was just that the co. could sued them or the SEC came after them (can the SEC come after you if your just saing things and not buying or selling?).. and there are people currently trieng to do this to etoys (and I hope they drive them into the ground).
Question: Can we get arround the problems those enviromental orginisations with trashing a company by not being orginized? If it's just a lot of people talking about how cool it would be if people did X en-mass and people do X en-mass (where X is only illegal to do en-mass).. is there really collusion or whatever going on?
I realize this is going to be very specific to the situation, but it seems like our legal system may need leaders and orginization to have a conspiracy? The Etoys thing is a good example.. as people just keep posting to the investment chat rooms about how everyone is boycotting and hacking them.. then the stock may contuinue to decline.. but no one is orginizing it.
There are a few missunderstandings, but there are also some really good points to the Manifesto.
The part beginning with Artists, dont be afraid of commercialization. is just plain wonderful.
The gizmo idea is a bit flawed, but repairable. As others have said disposible products are waistful and bloatware is very bad, but devices which empower users via communicationg with each other and allowing efficent programability is a very good thing, i.e. everything is a preriferal to your wearable computer. This all means that gizmo's should have the properties described, but only by virtue of interacting with other gizmos and your computer. The only real disadvantage is that people who can not program will not be able to function, but hey you can't make an omlet without breaking a few eggs..:)
We have an ideology for the masses that could preform everything he wants.. it's called the scientific method. The masses just refuse to learn it.. hell they even teach it wrong in all the high schools.. and many people with engenering degree's never reall learn it. I suspect Bruce has not read enough Carl Sagan or he would understand this.
Finally, I dissagre that we are really creating problems for another generration. Example: Did the discovery of evolution creat problems for us? Asside from a few morons who refuse to evolve themselves and don't believe in it.. nope not really. Did automation of assembly plants cause any problems? Nope, a few people had to move from dangerous crappy jobs to safer but basically equivelent jobs.. execpt that now they can get a car for cheaper. there is no reason to believe that future advances in technology will be harder to adapt to. The will come faster, but we are even learning to cope with that.. these things will only help us in the long run.
Our big problem is that people do not understand the scientific method (and all the associated things that go allong with this like believing in God). The Church-Turring Thesis may help us over the first step: getting people to think through the process to things a little since it can be streached to say that you can not use a computere effictivly without understanding a little bit of flow control (using a computer effectivly is deffined as writing a one line script to do a repeditive task for you).
This is dead wrong for non-lossy compression.. which is obviously what he is talking about (since he mentioned information theorey). He is making two eperate statments (1) you can not do any better with a non-lossy algorithm (but the compression phase is slow) and (2) wavelets degrade better then anyhting else if you start leaving out the big parts (lossy compression).
You could start spouting bushit about how (2) is subjective, but (2) is not the part of his post which you quoted.. and (2) is probable stil true *enough* in the near future.
..to point out somne real advantages of open source game protocols. Specifically, human evolution via improved computer interfaces! We should not be doiing things to discurage these ``cheats'' we should be doing things to incurage structuring and sharing them.
The aim-bots are a peerfect example of a good cheat.. as they consist of using a computer to improve a humans performance. Shure they take a little bit of the skill out of the game, but they give the human more time to think about stratagy and the importent things that only a human can do.
I am a great fan of StarCraft/WarCraft/CC/etc. but the truth is these games have crap for a user interface. Who wants to spend all their time commanding individual units to attack specific targets during the conflict. Yet, this is what the game rewards. The truth is the only way to fix these games is an easy to use scripting langauge.
Video games are a great oppertunity for human computer interactions research.. and the mechinism for this research is to write the tools to allow people to easily make the computer do more of the work. Scripts and bots are the pefect opertunity to help illiminate mindless repetitive action in video games and let us focus on the imprortent part of the game.. stratagy.
Jeff
BTW> I know some moron who only read the first paragraph ofthis post is going to reply about how unfair it is to be able to see arround corners in quake. Clearly, protocol based cheats like that are NOT what I am talking about here. I pretty much agree with ESR on protocol based cheats.. and I accept the possible need for blessed clients untill ping times are faster. It might even be reasonable to have blessed clients which shared your scripts with your opponent.
I have never looked at the netrek source code, but is there anything stoping you from just changing the protocoll to prevent cheating.. and perhaps changing the game mechanics and ideas about fair play too. After all any cheats that could be accomplished by an external program which monitored the X events is not really a cheat. The ``proper open source''' solution to borg clients is to include a scripting language to incurage them.. giving everyone equal opertunity via sharing these scripts.
Now, an interesting application of your existing blessed clients system would be to make a clients which gave a copy of your scripts to your oponent trivial.. and roge clients which did not give away the script a pain in the ass.
Finally, if people are sharing lots of borg scripts (even via some automatic script sharing system) then there would eventually be no benifit in making a client to keep your scripts secret since your scripts wouldn't really be that much better then anyone else, i.e. the user interface to the game has evolved.. which is what we all want anyway.. especially in those build and send troops games like StarCraft. A script system is exactly what they need.
Frequently censorware seems to targe anti-censorship (sites/people) as much as they target porn (this was especially a problem in Australia). What can be done about this? Are there laws in the U.S. or Australia that would allow people who censor anti-censorship sites to be sued?
Also, how good is the anti-censorship software now? Are there Active X things which will disable the censorware when someone visits your page? It seems to me that a good way to fight the censorship of anti-censorship sites is for everyone to turn his/her site into an anti censorship site, i.e. offer programs which remove the censorware for download and install Active X stuff which automatically disables it.
..we also do need to tax people fairly.. and more importently we need to tax them in a way that they see, i.e. if the people do not see the tax then the gov. is committing fraud. I believe our current system of hidden taxation (by making the employer pay it for the consumer) should be illegal, but the fact remains that it is actually unrealistic to expect the Joe Moron to save enough money to pay his taxes.. the only compramize as I see it is to move totally to sales tax and do away with things like income tax and social security. Plus, it really is not that much harder to make a computer system handle the tax part. Now, perhaps we should use the interstand commerce clause to unifomize the state sales tax wthin the U.S., i.e. make city sales tax illegal so that sales tax can always be determined by zip code or state or soemthing. That would be a nice justifiable application of the interstate commerce clause that would solve the problem you discribe. Jeff
Katz is bengs stupid, but why?
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Clearly, Katz is a moron who fears the unknown, truth, or something, but why? and it is not just him.. all of holywood seems obsessed with the idea that ``we are not ready for it yeat'' or ``this technology is dangerous and should be abolished'' I watched an Earth Final Conflict Episode within the last year where the hero (Liam) blew up a super advanced alian race's Library because he didn't want anyone to get at what was inside.. needless to say I will not watch EFC again.
Why are these people so fearful of the unknown or ideas that chalange their religious crap? I suspect that they think of science and technology as possesions whichthey know they will never have because they can never understand them. They must not understand the nature of knowledge. that is you share it and find out new things. If somethings are dangerous you call up the Gov. and have them regulate them.. or you create a code of ethics yuorself. Generally, scientsts develop a much stronger code of ethics then any of the morons like Katz who attack the research it's self.
Finally, these people do not seem to understand that we really need our advances in any field of science.. including genetics. If somne else starts genetic engenering their kids and we do not then we will be the third world in 100 years.
Anyway, this sort of mindless fear of the unknown and fear of understanding is one of humanities few truly evil traits. We are ready for genetic engenring.. not because we will do everything correctly.. but because we will fix our mistakes.
I guess the good news is that social evolution is an active part of modern society. Like the people who do not believe in evolution.. the people who oppose genetic engeneric will eventually force themselves out of an importent aspect of modren life.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, if it's handy I would like to know what he was talking about.
Ok, here is abstract from the Rutgers mathematics department colloquium:
Sept. 24: Craig Benham, Mount Sinai School of Medicine
The Emergence of Mathematical Biology - New Opportunities and Old Pitfalls
ABSTRACT: Biology is unique among the sciences in that it periodically reinvents itself through the
development of unanticipated new methodologies and perspectives. The discovery by Watson and Crick of the linear encoding of genetic information in the DNA molecule has caused a revolutionary paradigm shift, in which the fundamental determinants of many important biological phenomena are now realized to be encoded in molecular sequences, structures and interactions. This has brought biology into the realm of the traditional
"hard" sciences - physics, chemistry and mathematics. Because few biologists are trained in mathematics, unprecedented opportunities are becoming available for mathematicians to contribute to, and in some substantial measure create, the biology of the 21st century. This talk will describe one point of view on the opportunities and pitfalls facing a mathematician who wishes to work on new biological problems. If one wishes to make a useful contribution to biology one must first understand biologists - what problems they regard as important, and what contributions they view as useful. So the cultural perspective from which biologists view their domain will be described. Then several new directions in biology will be described that provide unique opportunities for mathematicians. Commonly, these are situations where a complete list of the components of a biological system are known, but where there is little understanding of how these work together to make the system dynamically stable yet rapidly adaptive to change. The mathematical and numerical analysis of the governing dynamical systems provide the means by which the global organization of many biological systems will be understood. Examples of this type will be described from areas such as genetics, cellular biology and neurobiology. By developing effective ways to treat specific situations such as these, mathematicians will create a methodology that will be at the heart of 21st century biology. Finally, if time permits a brief history will be sketched of this investigator's research on mathematical aspects of DNA structure and function. This will show how cascades of mathematically tractable yet biologically important problems can be developed from apparently naive initial insights.
Disclaimer: I am a math person and not a biology person, but someone gave a coloquim recently tring to talk lots of us math type into getting interested in math biology problems.
:)
As to the idea that this was only conclusively demonstrated 10 years ago - I really don't know about that. If you are dismissing all the other "inconclusive", yet highly consistent, evidence that cohered with the idea that it was a double-helix then I don't know what you would accept as reasonable evidence. What was the conclusive demonstration?
I really do not know that much about it, but I do know that they ultimatly found that it is sometimes not a double helix (the story we got was that it can twist back and forth instead of arround).. and the impress I got from the speaker was that it still satisfies the old arguments for a double helix when it dose this, but that some newer more convincing arguments showed that DNA was a double helix most of the time.
I would go look up the speakers name from last symesters coloquim list for you, but I do not think it was his main line of research (it was really a look the scientific method can be a lot of fun just like the mathemaical method statment) so it probable would not help you find papaers. It would probable be better to look for papers directly related to the structure of DNA.
I donno.. as they say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing..
Jeff
Do you feel that science in general is to critical of new ideas.
Contrary to popular beleive science dose contain something like ``dogma.''
Example 1: Biology only reacently (10 years) showed that DNA really is a double helix, but most biologists and the public believed this almost blindly long before it was really shown to be true. They concluded it was a double helix from scatering experiments which showed it had a ``shadow'' consistant with a double helix and a double helix seemed like a good idea for other inconclusive reasons. (Biologits even call this the central dogma)
Example 2: The evidence we are all given as children for the big bang is that most of the stars are moving away from us.. which is compleat rubish.. just because objects are roughly moving away now dose not mean that there trajectories necissarily run back a single point! Now, I believe there is good evidence for the big bang in the scatering of elements and the make up of back ground radiation (I've never really looked).
The thing that you need to understand about this ``dogma'' is that some amount of it is necissary for advancing the science.
Example: There are large cardinal axioms in mathematics which people spend there whole livesworking on, but we can proove (via Goodle) that these axioms can not be proven consistent with ZFC (the basic axioms).
I've noticed that anything that doesn't agree with mainstream thought is flamed
Normally these non-mainstream ideas are crap (Examples: anything Mulder on the X-files would like, perpetual motion machines, anything with the words creation or christian, etc.). Scientists can not really be expected to spend there time debunking all of these myths and whatnot.. there are just too many of them. (I suggest you look at Caral Sagan's A Daemon Haunted World)
Occasionally there is represion of a correct idea (Example: Cocain is physically to large to pass through the uterus wall, but reputable journals refused to publish this fact because it was not politically correct to challenge anything related to crack babies.. nevermind that knowing that the damage caused to these babies is all induced by changes to ther mother's normal system might actually help them). This dose not happen much, but it is soemthing we should be careful about.. which brings me to my question for the interview:
What can we do to educate people about the REAL scientiic method.. maybe focusing on the historical development of science instead of the results? I'm in graduate school in mathematics, but I would not say I really understood the scientific method until I learned some of the basics and history of quantum mechanics.
Jeff
This is the best post I have seen so far and it has only a fraction of the moderation that the obsurd aregument over who asked the "do you believe in god" question first.
Now, I think we should adjust the slashdot interview policy to give the person we are interviewing more choice in the questions, i.e. take a higher percentage of upwardly moderated posts (killing repeats) and incurage them to only answer the questions they want to answer. I think we would see a lot more interesting responce to the interviews.. the person we are interviewing generally seems to know a lot more about why they are interesting then we do.
Jeff
As opposed to cases in which, say, the university claims all rights
Hmm.. How do most universities handle this now? I would assume that they had some restrictions, but it would seem that the OPL would be in-line with these restrictions---it would seem to be in the mission of the university. Are there problems here or are universities a good place to market the OPL?
Jeff
I can see broadly what they're saying on a general level, but, to use a technical term from mathematics... there seems to be a lot of arm waving going on. Can someone help me out here?
:)
:)
Unfortunatly, most of the web page is in consultant speak too, but it appears that they are talking about (1) making it easy for people to search for information and (2) figure out what the hell it is saing. I assume that there are some indexing ideas for (1) and some ideas based on linking for (2). I did not see any specific mention of Artificial Intelegence to assist in the process of indexing or paraphrasing (Wow! That is a cool though a world full of humans who can not understand each others execpt through there computer paraphrtasors.. that would make a good short story). There dose not appear to be any math here. They may also be talking about orginisational stuff, but I donno.
I think it is clear that what they are tring to do is a good idea and Englebart may have some deep insights into the ``ergonomics of information'' (i think that keeps it from sounding like consultant speak). It is woth mentioning that there have been a lot of snake-oil salesmen who did not realize they were snake-oil salesmen (Freud, early medicin, all religious leaders, etc.), but some of them have actually inspired people to create soemthing great (Feurd bullshit and bleading people did sorta pave the way for modern medicin and psychology). I am not really qualified to judge this one, but whenever you strik out for the frengis of science and the applicable experemental method you run the risk of fathering a field of blabering idots. Example: Psychology has turned into a science which actually gets results while Scosiology has turned into who knows what.
My opinion is that Engelbert dose know what he is talking about, but that he may have made a mistake in tring to apply the computer interface ergonomics we know him for to the social world. I personally REALLY want to see information ergonomics developed (paraphrasing and autolinking via AI's and user interfaces which make these things easy), but it may be unrealistic to develop it in the context of creating social changes.. who knows.. I hope it works. We could use a little more intelegence in our public decission making processes.. and maybe a little understanding is all that is required.
Information ergonomics (I keep saing this I know what it means.. and I am not confident that I know exactly what bootstrapping is) should be very useful to science, but I do not know that it would be as useful as just creating more brilliant people via good psychological research into education and critical thinking skills. Translation: Englebart says the data buss is too slow, but I'm point out that just adding more processors might help as much in the short term.
Regardless, the talk should be inspiring if you
want to make the world a better place..
Jeff
BTW> I also have a sneeking suspission that information ergonomics is part of the door into real intelegent AI, but that is just wild speculation.
I would rather the researchers own the patents themselves, and merely license them under the OPL. If someone wants to use the patent other than as the Open Patent License allows, they can go to the patent holder, in this case the researcher or perhaps the university, to negotiate terms.
This would be much better if it is finatially realistic. I was under the impression (from things RMS has said) that patents were really too expencive for the researchers to obtain and defend.. which is why I suggested using a holding orginisation.
The other problem I see is the researchers time. I am a graduate student in mathematics and I could very well see getting myself into the situation where I discovered things which were relevent, but I did not have the time to do the patent grunt work.. which to me includes actually figuring out what it might really be applicable to in addition to all the patent paper work.
It might make sence to have a non-profit orginisation which did some of the research into the applicability of the research and actually applied for the patents in exchange for partial onership. I'm realy thinking of something where I can give them some realy raw shit and they will sorta check off a list of things that it could apply to and go patent them, i.e. use exactly the tactics which the big nasty co.s use, but since anyone can use it via the OPL we are the good guys.
Hell, you could even implement it as start up headed for an IPO.. with partial onership in a crapload of patents and after winning some big lawsuits you could make yourself a lot of money.. and make the world safe for OSS in the process. There isn't really any reason to restrict it to patents relevent to software either.. do drugs patents and all sorts of other things.. just refuse to let drug co.s who wont OPL there patent use any of them without paying.
I realize there is a little conflict of intrest here since this org. would need to descided between pushing a co. to OPL or just letting them pay up and use it, but the orginator of the idea would still own most of it and would have a lot of say in the process. Plus, the more money we extort the more likely we are to see real patent reform.
Just a though..
Jeff
Wouldn't it be better if we were working *toward* something here? Say if we were all trying to develop a document that summarizes the basic arguments, so we don't have to go through the same old stuff every time?
/. ever starts making lots of money they could hire authors to write sumerise/indexes of the previous related discussions onto the end of the new articles. It might even be possible to write an AI that would make this less work by cataloging all the crap.
This would be wonderful. If
Jeff
If that's all.. would someone explain exactly what's so great about that?
:)
:)
It's conceptually pretty which makes the Computer Scientist in all of us smile..
Seriously, there are a lot of advantages to microkernel's because you solve the problems in a more generic way. Example: any good microkernel inherently supports all the real-time stuff you would need because that is how it's device drivers work (Mach did not do this in the past.. i donno about now) and there are commercial microkernels which work quite well on this philosophy. This means that when your video driver crashes it dose not crash your system. It also make it much easier to write OS emulation software.
It is also nice that unprivliged users can do all sorts of cool things like create there own file system or user privlage tracking system without creating a security hole. This security system is one of the more revolutionary parts of the Hurd as I understand it. Example: you can add and remove privliges from a running process under the Hurd.
There are advantages and disadvantage and it is generally agreed that the advantages will eventually out weight the disadvantages AND the cost of porting all the software.. the question is when.. sorta like cleaning up your room..
Jeff
The article is correct in it's concern that only an OSS broadcasting solution can creat the future we all want.. where anyone can broadcast there video over the internet.. and patents are our obstical. The solution appears to be ``compramize our principals in the short term, but not in the long term.'' I will explain..
A legislation solution (I think this is RMS's proposed solution) seems unlikely.. especially for Algorithms that really do require an understanding of a good bit of math to create.
Many mathematicians are getting kinda sick of inventing some cool new thing to help sociaty only to see some company steal it's applications by putting one word like computer, audio, or video in front of it.. and many researchers could probable be talked into giving the open source community a list of possible applications when they invent something new.. so we could patent it first and use a viral patent license. Unfortunatly, this is considered too expencive by people in the know (like RMS). I personally feal this is workable if the patenting orginisation were less principaled then the FSF could pull something off by doing the following:
1) Use an extreamly viral license the prohibits mixed use of the patent with any patents not distributed under the same license, i.e. no company can use our patents unless the cross licence with the rest of the world via our license.
2) Allow companies to get arround 1 by paying thorugh the nose and use the money to reward the researchers and pay for lawyers, i.e. compramize our principals occasionally.
Unfortunatly, the above dose require a lot of orginisation, a lot of conenctions, and a lot of work.
The best solution is probable: control the viewer and server. If a codec maker dose not want to go OSS then we should make it hard for them to get users.. up to the point that they are really a hell of a lot better then anyhting we are using.. at which point we should compramize a little.
It is also worth mentioning that codec makers make money by licensing the authoring software (i think) or with crap attached to the codec, so there should probable be a push to implement OSS versions of the authoring software and codecs in countries where the patent dose not apply.. then make the OSS version the default, i.e. default RedHat xanim has no support for the codec so the user is forced to choose between downloading a single OSS xanim which is illegal or downloading a million codecs. This will cut into there proffit margin.
Jeff
Yup all the mp3 player makers are pretty clueless.. Hmm.. I can only think of ONE good design for a portable mp3 player.. built it into the frigin headphones! It's not like it needs to weigh anything and the buttons can be designed so that you can find theem without looking at the player.
Now, there are all sorts of things which is is good to include mp3 players in via software.. cellphones, PDAs, car sterios (removable like you were talking about would be very cool), etc. Also, you could make a case that a dual mp3 player / low bit rate voice recorder should probable not be a pair of head phones too.
Jeff
There have been a lot of speculations about such things and I don't know that much about any of them, but the better ones appear to be *consistent* at best.
:)
I believe one story is: if you were already traveling faster then light then you could continue to do so with no problem.. infact you would not be able to slow down below the speed of light. This is where all the interest in tacheons came from, but one on has managed to find them.
I do not know anything about the method you quote, but I was always under the impression that gravety moves at the speed of light.. maybe gravety is not what they mean by movment of space.. i donno.
Now, any of these methods would still imply time travel, by the argument I gave in my post, but time travel is not necissarily the contradiction many peoplethink it is.. who knows.
I heard people say that it should be possible to build a time machine: it would be a long tube with radius about 1 mile, 1/2 the mass of the sun, and spinning at 1/3 the speed of light.. not an easy thing to build. A funny though I had one is maybe the consistancy of the universe somehow hinges on an engenering difficulty in constructing a time machine like this one.
My personal bet on how we will deal with the time required to travel to other star systems is by replacing ourselves with intelegent machines or genetic engenering away the problems we have with prolonged space flight.
The other serious problem with prolonged space flight is having enough perpellant, but if idea's like the hydrogen ram jet (use a magnetic scoop to pick up hydrogen atoms and then fuse them in your engin) pan out then we could go any place we wanted.. it would just take a while.
Jeff
BTW> If you want to see an application of theoretical physics in the short term future look at quantum computation.
Actually, I'm under the impression that it is widly accepted that faster then light travel and time travel are equivelent. First, it is clear that time travel implies faster then light travel (just go back in time long enough to get you there in time for tea). Second, everyone who I have ever talked to who knows something about realitivity says that faster then light travel.. any sort of faster then light travel (wormholes etc.).. implies time travel. The Feynman lectures in physics I even assigns this as a homework problem, but I can't remember the specific argument. I think the idea is that if you used your faster then light travel in an accellerated refence frame then your "now" points into someone else's past so your faster then light travel places you in the past, i.e. now can not be defined independently of your speed at significant distace away from you.
Clearly, this has not been experementally observed, but it is based on such fundamental parts of fundamental and well tested theory (realitivity) that it seems unlikely to be wrong. I mean just look at the argument.. its pretty straight forward and uses only basic idea's about realitivity.
Jeff
Hehe.. You took me a little to seriously.. and yes I know Larry Wall is religious (and just a damn cool guy).. that was supposed to be part of the humor.
The only realy content to what I said, asside from the humor, is that there is some small chance that being able to program would push people into slightly more logical though, i.e. nothing special about perl here.. that was part of the humor. This is by no means a forgon conclusion since it seems that a person can learn to think logically about one thing and irrationalliy about another. Hell, I even had roomate who was a religious nut cases who didn't believe in evolution and was studing biology.. go figure that one.
It just difficult to say what would happen since the technology that the general public has been given before has never been programmable beond when to start recording your TV show. Clearly, learning how to program won't make people stop believing in God, but it could make people think slightly more logically in some situations.. which should be really a good thing.
Jeff
I agree that there are other OSes which are potentially better suited to embedded system, but many of the hardware limitations to using a bloated desktop OS in an embedded system are gone.. and while Linux may seem bloated next to some of the newer embedded system OSes.. it has a known record for reliability. I mean it takes debuging time to get an OS stable. Also, an open source embedded OS would have a lot less interest then Linux. Plus, these devices will increasingly require programability and the familearity of Joe Programmer with Linux could help. I'm not saing Linux is the best way to go, but it may be the way people actually go for a little while..
I'm still a little bit conrfused about why they said what they did though because Linux really kicks ass in the server world.. and we will probable see *something* in the next few years which says once and for all that microsoft is going noware in the server world. Open source is just too good at the server stuff.
I agree about the education thing.. and one thing to point out is that other countries (France and Mexic at least, right?) are moving all the schools to Linux. Is it possible that our schools will wiat too long and we will give a technilogical advantage to these other countries? It would kinda suck to have a generation of Americans that can only shop online while Mexico imports all our buisnesses because they have lots of cheap programming tallent.
What I really want to see is lots of programmable embedded systems.. so that the children of all these fuckers who can't think their way out of a paper bag will need to learn to program.. and will maybe become more logical thinkers then their parents. Who knows perl could be even be the beginning of the end for religion (I know I getting just plain silly here.. but one can hope).
I have an interesting correction to their MP3 prediction: The internet seems to have contributed a good deal of economic freedom to the arts in general (wintess online commics like Sluggy Frelance), but not to the music world. The solution is for artists to do exactly what the web comics do and commercialize directly. The only problem with this is that people will tend to keep a free mp3 and play it over and over and not get more. The solution to this is to include a web page (or at least links) with the mp3 and have the player's add a button to open up the page. this would allow the musicians to include visual art (so people will actually want ot look atthe page and wont just strip it from the file) and advertising directly.. and draw people back to their site to pay for shirts and other songs. mp3.com is just another label.. the artists really need to directly connect with their fans to make the real money.
We could also use a recommendation based radio system.. it could be as simple as a page which refreshes periodically to artists pages which send you sample mp3s.
A random prediction: we are probable ripe for a more serious intrest in electronic music from achedimic circles.. music theory could probable start taking things like wavelets and some newer math into account.. techno may really turn into the new classical that everyone wants to see.
A point I sould make about the e-commerce backlash prediction.. such a backlash will probable not effect the real technology stocks like MS, IBM, VA, RedHat, CISCO, etc. nearly as much as the stocks like Amazon and eToys.
Another random prediction: People (including open source developers) will become much more interested is practical applications of AI.. Slashdot will have a good AI to moderate down trolls.. and one of the serious mp3 players will implement some AI playlist stuff like I did in SmartPlay (it's a little Gtk-perl mpg123 front end which uses a primitive AI and well though through user interface to decrease the time you waist fucking arround with your mp3 player.. but it's buggy as hell as I only wrote it to convince people with more free time that they sould rewrite it.. and to give myself a better player).
Wow.. I went on for a while..
Jeff
The discussion here is not pissed off enough! Is it because of that bit by the lawyer in the article? Who cares if they have made this search legal.. it should be illegal. Shure, the feds have been doing related things to all sorts of non-electronics type people for a while now, but we should still be pissed off!
If this was an article about a company messing with someone there would have been 50 posts talking about was to help get them to stop. I have not seen ONE such post about this article. We should be fucking slashdoting the agency that did this with complaints!
Here is a list of contact related information from The RAMSEY Discussion board: Send an e-mail to your newspaper from mrsmithmedia.com. Send an e-mail to your representatives from mrsmith.com. http://www.conservativeusa.org has phones, faxes,addresses.
What else can we do? What is the most effective way to slashdot these people. It seems we first need to know who they are, but I have not seen any information posted about exactly which parts of the Dept. of Justic / FBI were involved in this. We should start a web site to collect the names of the agents and officials involved in this.. to make shure that their crimes are not forgoten.. and that they are remembered as the tyrants which they are. I would love to hear from people about the preacticality / legality of such a site.
Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants" and I think it is time to spill the blood of these specific tyrants the slashdot style.
Jeff
I'm pretty shure you are correct, but I don't even see how the above posters idea would work? As you sell something to tank it don't you loose a lot of money? Sales taking time to go through and all.
:)
I do have one slightly-related question---the glass of water is partially ontopic instead of mostly offtopic.
Background: I believe enviromental orginisations have occasionally gotten into trouble for tring to trash a co.'s stock price, but I do not know wether it was just that the co. could sued them or the SEC came after them (can the SEC come after you if your just saing things and not buying or selling?).. and there are people currently trieng to do this to etoys (and I hope they drive them into the ground).
Question: Can we get arround the problems those enviromental orginisations with trashing a company by not being orginized? If it's just a lot of people talking about how cool it would be if people did X en-mass and people do X en-mass (where X is only illegal to do en-mass).. is there really collusion or whatever going on?
I realize this is going to be very specific to the situation, but it seems like our legal system may need leaders and orginization to have a conspiracy? The Etoys thing is a good example.. as people just keep posting to the investment chat rooms about how everyone is boycotting and hacking them.. then the stock may contuinue to decline.. but no one is orginizing it.
Jeff
it probably will take years for a working fix to be released.
Is a fix possible without a recall? I mean this is a WebTV we are talking about.. is it a problem in a rom?
Jeff
There are a few missunderstandings, but there are also some really good points to the Manifesto.
:)
The part beginning with Artists, dont be afraid of commercialization. is just plain wonderful.
The gizmo idea is a bit flawed, but repairable. As others have said disposible products are waistful and bloatware is very bad, but devices which empower users via communicationg with each other and allowing efficent programability is a very good thing, i.e. everything is a preriferal to your wearable computer. This all means that gizmo's should have the properties described, but only by virtue of interacting with other gizmos and your computer. The only real disadvantage is that people who can not program will not be able to function, but hey you can't make an omlet without breaking a few eggs..
We have an ideology for the masses that could preform everything he wants.. it's called the scientific method. The masses just refuse to learn it.. hell they even teach it wrong in all the high schools.. and many people with engenering degree's never reall learn it. I suspect Bruce has not read enough Carl Sagan or he would understand this.
Finally, I dissagre that we are really creating problems for another generration. Example: Did the discovery of evolution creat problems for us? Asside from a few morons who refuse to evolve themselves and don't believe in it.. nope not really. Did automation of assembly plants cause any problems? Nope, a few people had to move from dangerous crappy jobs to safer but basically equivelent jobs.. execpt that now they can get a car for cheaper. there is no reason to believe that future advances in technology will be harder to adapt to. The will come faster, but we are even learning to cope with that.. these things will only help us in the long run.
Our big problem is that people do not understand the scientific method (and all the associated things that go allong with this like believing in God). The Church-Turring Thesis may help us over the first step: getting people to think through the process to things a little since it can be streached to say that you can not use a computere effictivly without understanding a little bit of flow control (using a computer effectivly is deffined as writing a one line script to do a repeditive task for you).
Jeff
There is no optimal image compression
This is dead wrong for non-lossy compression.. which is obviously what he is talking about (since he mentioned information theorey). He is making two eperate statments (1) you can not do any better with a non-lossy algorithm (but the compression phase is slow) and (2) wavelets degrade better then anyhting else if you start leaving out the big parts (lossy compression).
You could start spouting bushit about how (2) is subjective, but (2) is not the part of his post which you quoted.. and (2) is probable stil true *enough* in the near future.
Jeff
..to point out somne real advantages of open source game protocols. Specifically, human evolution via improved computer interfaces! We should not be doiing things to discurage these ``cheats'' we should be doing things to incurage structuring and sharing them.
The aim-bots are a peerfect example of a good cheat.. as they consist of using a computer to improve a humans performance. Shure they take a little bit of the skill out of the game, but they give the human more time to think about stratagy and the importent things that only a human can do.
I am a great fan of StarCraft/WarCraft/CC/etc. but the truth is these games have crap for a user interface. Who wants to spend all their time commanding individual units to attack specific targets during the conflict. Yet, this is what the game rewards. The truth is the only way to fix these games is an easy to use scripting langauge.
Video games are a great oppertunity for human computer interactions research.. and the mechinism for this research is to write the tools to allow people to easily make the computer do more of the work. Scripts and bots are the pefect opertunity to help illiminate mindless repetitive action in video games and let us focus on the imprortent part of the game.. stratagy.
Jeff
BTW> I know some moron who only read the first paragraph ofthis post is going to reply about how unfair it is to be able to see arround corners in quake. Clearly, protocol based cheats like that are NOT what I am talking about here. I pretty much agree with ESR on protocol based cheats.. and I accept the possible need for blessed clients untill ping times are faster. It might even be reasonable to have blessed clients which shared your scripts with your opponent.
I have never looked at the netrek source code, but is there anything stoping you from just changing the protocoll to prevent cheating.. and perhaps changing the game mechanics and ideas about fair play too. After all any cheats that could be accomplished by an external program which monitored the X events is not really a cheat. The ``proper open source''' solution to borg clients is to include a scripting language to incurage them.. giving everyone equal opertunity via sharing these scripts.
Now, an interesting application of your existing blessed clients system would be to make a clients which gave a copy of your scripts to your oponent trivial.. and roge clients which did not give away the script a pain in the ass.
Finally, if people are sharing lots of borg scripts (even via some automatic script sharing system) then there would eventually be no benifit in making a client to keep your scripts secret since your scripts wouldn't really be that much better then anyone else, i.e. the user interface to the game has evolved.. which is what we all want anyway.. especially in those build and send troops games like StarCraft. A script system is exactly what they need.
Jeff
Frequently censorware seems to targe anti-censorship (sites/people) as much as they target porn (this was especially a problem in Australia). What can be done about this? Are there laws in the U.S. or Australia that would allow people who censor anti-censorship sites to be sued?
Also, how good is the anti-censorship software now? Are there Active X things which will disable the censorware when someone visits your page? It seems to me that a good way to fight the censorship of anti-censorship sites is for everyone to turn his/her site into an anti censorship site, i.e. offer programs which remove the censorware for download and install Active X stuff which automatically disables it.
Jeff
..we also do need to tax people fairly.. and more importently we need to tax them in a way that they see, i.e. if the people do not see the tax then the gov. is committing fraud. I believe our current system of hidden taxation (by making the employer pay it for the consumer) should be illegal, but the fact remains that it is actually unrealistic to expect the Joe Moron to save enough money to pay his taxes.. the only compramize as I see it is to move totally to sales tax and do away with things like income tax and social security. Plus, it really is not that much harder to make a computer system handle the tax part. Now, perhaps we should use the interstand commerce clause to unifomize the state sales tax wthin the U.S., i.e. make city sales tax illegal so that sales tax can always be determined by zip code or state or soemthing. That would be a nice justifiable application of the interstate commerce clause that would solve the problem you discribe. Jeff
Clearly, Katz is a moron who fears the unknown, truth, or something, but why? and it is not just him.. all of holywood seems obsessed with the idea that ``we are not ready for it yeat'' or ``this technology is dangerous and should be abolished'' I watched an Earth Final Conflict Episode within the last year where the hero (Liam) blew up a super advanced alian race's Library because he didn't want anyone to get at what was inside.. needless to say I will not watch EFC again.
Why are these people so fearful of the unknown or ideas that chalange their religious crap? I suspect that they think of science and technology as possesions whichthey know they will never have because they can never understand them. They must not understand the nature of knowledge. that is you share it and find out new things. If somethings are dangerous you call up the Gov. and have them regulate them.. or you create a code of ethics yuorself. Generally, scientsts develop a much stronger code of ethics then any of the morons like Katz who attack the research it's self.
Finally, these people do not seem to understand that we really need our advances in any field of science.. including genetics. If somne else starts genetic engenering their kids and we do not then we will be the third world in 100 years.
Anyway, this sort of mindless fear of the unknown and fear of understanding is one of humanities few truly evil traits. We are ready for genetic engenring.. not because we will do everything correctly.. but because we will fix our mistakes.
I guess the good news is that social evolution is an active part of modern society. Like the people who do not believe in evolution.. the people who oppose genetic engeneric will eventually force themselves out of an importent aspect of modren life.
Jeff