> There ARE law abiding citizens WITHOUT Slave > Identification Numbers. They are the Sui Juris > (Free Men), and Sovereigns.
Ok, I withdraw generalization.. but how do they earn money, go to collage, etc.? or is the number only so you can withdraw it later and they don't really care if you have the number so long as you pay the taxes? I'm pretty shure both of the Universities I have been to required a social security number. If you need the number to pay the tax, it sounds like a good cause, but not exactly realistic for most people and if collages require the number then there is a large number of people who need it regardless.
Dose this mean the US gov. wil have to pay this guy royalties to use it? Can we patent up most of the other ways of identifing people?
Seriously, the patent should not have been awarded since it is a trivial (and has even been used in movies).
Unfortunatly, the U.S. gov. dosn't need any such primitive methods of keeping track of people. All the law abiding people have social security numbers and they take DNA sample from a LARGE number of criminals.
I wrote a little mp3 player wich uses something that is not a neural network (but could be replaced by one) to learn your music lissening patterns and adjust it's random number generator acordingly. It would be great if some CS type who knows something about real neural networks could write one into x11amp or something.
I was more concerned with the user interface issues of how to maximize the amount of information available to be learned then with the actual learning algorithm. Check out the code it's in Perl and uses Perl/GTK and mpg123.. and it will crash because it was only meant as proof of concept.
Your method is pretty good, except that there might be allowable variation in the output of an algorithm which would still allow the decryptor to work, but in practice if the chip says anything diffrent, then we have a flag to inspect it closer.. so your meathod still works. What I'm more concerned about is what if the whole card is designed to respond to or send special packets. How can we check against this possible backdoor?
The flipant version of this question is "why should I trust Intell?" The real question is how do I verify that the chip only dose the algorithms it's supposed to and nothing else?
Is there a way to plot out the chip by inspecing the silicon? Is there room for the card to transmit information to be sniffed (like hiding things in bad packets)? Can we show that the algorithm which the chip implements dose not leave loose information floating arround (perhaps even in the initial choice of random numbers) which would allow additional information to be encoded ontop of a good packet? Who is going to audit the hardware? How scalable are the keysizes?
We probable can make good hardware encryption, but I would like to know that it is not an NSA trojan horse like clipper was.
Jeff
Re:Security 101... Not offered on campus.
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, you told a sad story, but an unencombered ethernet (i.e. no firewalls) really is a great learning exprence for lots of people. when I was a freshman we had this one guy on our hall who would hack us all the time. It was pretty funny. One day my roomate distracted him while I took a boot disk into his room and changed true to queue an at job to call him a dried up stinky dick licker. Ahh.. those were the days. Anyway, I'd recommend for schools to take a mostly hands off aproach to student personal computer usage. Maybe run the script kiddy tools against them and email the system's owner.. and maybe make recomendations for people to run a Linux Lite if such a thing exists in the near future.
I noticed the first post asked what can we do about this.. and I saw a few responces.. but nothing specific enough. Here are my specific versions of what can we do about this:
What can we do to stop the legislation associated to this? I am an American and don't vote for the people who are imposing this law, but if there are phone calls to make or letters to write I would be happy to help. Who do I harass?
How much of this will be non-legislative cowaperation from the other companies at the conferance? And what can we do to fight that? Linux/Apache may own the server world (as in NT gone) before this is implemented.. could we make support for the protocoll modificatios a highly non-standard, difficult to install patch? (Linus/Apache Team save us! )
Can will hurt Bertelsmann (boycotts?). How can I make shure I don't buy anyhting that comes thourgh them? Would someone like to set up a FAQ or site on how to avoid givng them any money. Could we watch them very closly and gradually make the net anti-Bertelsmann? I notices a link to there holdings here.
Communism is a political system devised to try and make socialism work in practice. It's failure is not to be found in the nationalistic mumbo jumbo of most of the americans who complain about communism. It's failure lies in the fact that it is unstable. It is unstable because it uses government in crappy ways, i.e. to repress everyone and keep them working. IMHO the free software world is more stable then the commercial software model for basically the same reason that a free market beat out communism---just replace the government with MS. Now, we can argue about wether it is socialism till we are blue in the face, but I don't think that question matters much. The only importent questions are A) is it really a better way for people to interact with one another and B) is it stable. I personally believe the answer to both of these questions is ``add more freedom.''
If you think about the RMS arguments for the GPL (and reladed stuff) you will find it is positivly dripping with stability. Example: We may assume someone will write the software anyway.. then the GPL just gives them a way to get stuff added to it for free. Remember Linus started Linux for fun.. and then think of how much less useful Linux would be to Linus if he had not given it to people.
I gues a point I wanted to make is don't worry about the word socialism.. what you do may or may not fit it's definition.. worry about more importent aspects of what you are doing. Like wether you are really helping yourself (you are not waisting your time.. fun is a good enough reason to do soemthing) and if you are hurting anyone in the process.
I suspect there are a good many people who learned to program (sorta) before they were 10. My dad claims he started teaching me when I was 6, but i couldn't tell you when I actually understood and retained what the hell a goto did. I think it is good for kids to learn it that young, but I also think they should learn some stuff about the scientific method.. and i mean the bullshit debunking side of the scientific method. I think one of the most importent things about what langauge children use is wether they can see anyhting happen. Maybe if you added some simple game API like sprites or something to Python it would make and even better teaching langauge.
Second, don't assume real geniuses are modest. they frequently have quite large ego's, but that don't mean that they are obnoxious about it. I am a graduate student in mathematics and I can tell you most of us have huge ego's, but we are still nice people. ex: we pretty much avoid stepping on each other's ego's.
More news coverage would be very good, but I don't know that it would get to the heart of the problem.. which I suspect is a lack of memory for what the candidate dose. The special intrest groups are perfect for this.. they have a long memory, they are harder to buy off then some jurnalist, and they wont shrink from making a meaningful argument in order to maintain some bullshit jurnalistic objectivity. I say let the people who care make there arguments to the voters when the elections come arround. Currently special intrests and buisness buy candidates with money for advertising which is stupid, but if we make it easier for voters to hear content related arguments then these same special intrest groups can do a great service. The real problem is getting people to care about what the org has to say and hot how pretty there logo is or soemthing.
The online news (like/., Wired, etc.) could help a lot of US geeks by pointing us all to the score cards of the various groups arround election time.
I suppose a way to bring it to the general public would be to allow them to have issue advice actually at the poling places if they could get more then x many signatures. perhaps even in the voting both so no one could see what special intrest groups you were reading about.
Ok, I was very strongly in support of internet voting before I read some of the posts (and I will explain why in a min.), but there have been some interesting arguments that while there is plenty of security from direct fraud in internet voting there may not be security from interpersonal fraud, i.e. a family member making his/her whole family vote a specific way and being able to watch how people voted. This is a serious concern and I think it would need to be resolved before internet voting could be implemented.
That having been said I think there is a really wonderful possible side effect of internet voting: More involvment of special interests. Why is this good you ask. Imagin we had an internet voting system where special interest groups (Amnestry International, ACLU, NRA, CATO Institute, PETA, etc.) could host there own information servers and there would be services which list the servers. Then I could just check off the list of people who's opinion I gave a damn about and read what they had to say before I voted. It would be wonderful: Joe Random guy who knows zip about polotics but cares about gun ownership somewhat and has heard of the Libertarians would see what CATO and the NRA had to say about the candidates and if Joe had half a brain he would be able to look at the candidates voting record on the bills he cared about (ACLU for example keeps a score card).
Luckily, we don't really need internet voting to start this process however: How about when the next election commes arround we have an ask slashdot where people post links to geekish special intrest groups which have score cards?
What if I produce jpgs of my diffs or source and put the immages up for DL? along with some OCR software and a make file? The question is if it's a machine readable format, but the non-mechanicalness of a picture may make it more clear to the judge that they are violating our first amendment rights.
If that won't work what if I buy a fancy printer that can put a stamp on it and mail it to a mirror site in a free country? or do I need to mail it to lots of people for it to be ``publishing.''
I do know anyhitng about this, but I have alwas assumed that it was pretty much a given that we would not be working with individual nerve connections an time soon and that we didn't really need. The real question is how do you get the brain to learn to use the equipment you plug into aproximatly the right place, so the real advances are not necissarily in knowing what connects to what, but in knowing the connectivity establishing rules for the brain (which might involve neural growth hormones).
My question is: How much is known about how to do this? I know about the leach-computer that was mentioned on here a while back so we have at least some idea of how to electrically train neurons to do serton things, but the leach to computer may be really waistfull in that project (in terms of using the same nervers to do diffrent things).
What would be really cool and maybe realistic is a monkey version of the leach computer, i.e. a living monkey with a calculator attached to it's head who shows no side effects from using the calculator. It would show that we are maybe connecting to the nerves without fucking things up by talking to too many of them at once or something.
First, we do not believe that quantum computers could solve NP problems (QP != NP in CS speak). If I remember correctly QP is strictly contained in #P (really P^#P). This means that a public key cryptosystem based on NP complete problems instead of factoring numbers could be secure against a quantum computer.. except that many many cases of an NP complete problem are easy to solve.. but if we can't use factoring numbers because of the preasence of quantum computers then this might be an acceptable alternative.. it could mean you would need to upgrade you're key (and software to generate keys) frequently to keep up with advances in mathematics and CS.
I geus a cheezy way to describe the limitations of cuantum computing is to say that you get a lot of really powerfull parallelism, but since you only read out one answer you can not directly take advantage of it. The quantum algorithms ``make the wrong answers cancel out.'' Currently all the quantum mechanical algorithms which provide exponential speedup (like factoring) work by finding the period of some function by useing a Foruer transform.
Ok, I can understand that people would want some visual art with their music, but visual art could be distributed with MP3s too. Maybe some artists could even sell advertising by embeding HTML and related files in MP3 headers if the players would show the stuff. Regardless, a phyisical media is not the answer because it constrains the lissener too much. Why should I be forced to lissen to music in the order someone else prescribes or even in the random order prescribed by a large CD changer. Hell, I think playlists are even too constraining. I have writen a simple perl-GTK front end to mpg123 which uses a simple AI and attempts to learn the users moods (check it out here). It also allows you to cancel songs before you hear them which keeps the user from waisting lots of time lissening to the beginnings of songs they dont want to hear (unlike more random play options). Note: since the palyer is in perl it is easy to modify the AI with your own rules that consider things like artist or song name similarity. The point is that we to have the needed flexibility in players we need the player front end to be implemented in software and to be easy to modify. I never lissen to CDs not because they waist too much time.. my player is writen specifically to save me time.. that is the beauty of software. Jeff
Actually, I don't believe any encryption algorithms are based on P != NP.. if there were they would be more secure then RSA. The problem with using P != NP in an encryption algorithm is that there are normally LOTS of special case to a problem that are P, i.e. you don't know how to pick a good key frpm the set of possible keys (a good key being one that is not in any of the special cases). Note: a quantum computer can factor numbers in polynomial time, but can not solve NP compleate problems as far as we know.
This is why people should distribute (electronicqally) things that the NSA might have an interest in to as many people as possible. It would be nice if there were groups of non-math people who tried to follow the research specifically to keep the NSA from being able to fuck with people. Luckaly, most research dose not occure in a vacume and there are to many people working to try and understand it for the NSA to stop things. You have made me curious now, what was he working on? (I'm a math person)
This brings up an intersting and related point.. How do we best discurage/save smart people from working for the NSA? We need to explain to people with an interest in number theory and algorithms research that they really do not want to spend their lives keeping secrets. It's hard enough to not be able to talk to people because they can't understand you.. I can not imagine not being allowed to talk to them.. Communication is a part of being human.
This rulling is just to keep the Bells from gaining power, which we the people have every right to do, not to keep them from making money, which we do not have the right to do.
I think something similler needs to be done with intelectual property, i.e. anyone has the right to use it, but they have to pay you a fair price for it.
Yes, piracy is illegal and WB dose own the episode, but that dose not make the piracy of the epison unjust or wrong. Let's not make the mistake of assuming that only a government can abuse our freedoms or that because intelectual property rights say we shouldn't do something that it is wrong. The truth is much more complex:
1) There should be some kind of intelectual property. 2) There should be piracy to balance it.
The piracy of Buffy is a good thing, just like the piracy of MP3s is a good thing.. it weakens the power of the corporations who are too powerful in the first place. Shure we could take what on the surface appears to be a more Stallman-ish approach like only lissening to music from mp3.com or boycotting Buffy untill the desired episode comes out, but there is a big diffrence here.. writing free software is ``stable'' in that while you may not take away many microsoft users in the first year, you are have made a somewhat permenent alternative. Boycotts and such are ``unstable'' in that they depend on the continued participation of people, so we need more drastic measures. Piracy is perfect, it dosn't really hurt the company all that much at first, but it dose force them to adopt new buisness practices or get hurt real bad later.. well not with buffy since no one will care next year anyway, but in general it's high profile is needed.
Piracy is a good thing and should be incuraged.. the companies can adapt.
I am so sick an tired of these morons who say ``whoa this is scarry'' and ``we shouldn't do that sort of science.'' Those objections are all bullshit. Proper Science and Research are INHERENTLY good. Proper here means that (1) they don't hurt any one in the process of doing the research (says nothing about the uses for the research afterwards) and (2) that the work has theoretical importance. This menas figuring out how to make a better biological weapon dose not qualify because it is too applied, but working to learn more about biology when what you know can be used for biological weapons is a good as long as you are really tring to learn something i the abstract.
I guess what I am really saing here is that if the scientific method provides both your motivation and your tools (and you don't hurt anyone) then you are doing nothing wrong (and are infact helping humanity). This is as opposed to the biological weapons research who is motivated to creat biological weapons and noly uses the scientific method as a tool. People need to understand this distinction. Things can be missused, but that is true of most anything, not just new discoveries.
It gets a little tricky when you want to really go build soemthing since then you have other motivations the pure research, but still: knowledge and understanding == good, motivations == good or bad depending on the situation.
Personaly, I am happy whenever I hear about genetic engenering.. it is inherently good to know these things.
Examples to help convince those who are not so theoretically minded about the value of genetic engenering: They can or are close to being able to accelerate and control the evolution of microbes. Clearly, this can be used to make really nasty biological weapons, but what it will be used for it to make really kick ass antibiotics. Perhaps you didn't know that our antibiotics are becomming less and less effective and we are having a hgard time finding new ones. Accelerated evoltion of the animals that creat penacilin and the likes could make the diffrence between your kids growing up in a world with antibiotics or one without. Another genetic engeering break through is using DNA to identify other DNA. This can make incredibly fact tests for very hard to identify diseases and could make the difrence between knowing wether a homeless person is infected with AIDS or not.
Knowledge and understand == good
Also, these neuron computer things are not really for doing traditional computer tasks, they are more for doing the aproximate tasks that we do every day. Just think about how much repetitive stuff gets given to humans to do simply because it it not quite repetitive enough for a computer.
I forget the original use of the word monad, but I think it was to refer to an idea of ``soul'' and the Catholic church burnd the guy who said that.. Then Libnitz used it both in his religious philosophy and *maybe* in his philosophical justifications for his calculous. Now, the Haskell use of the word monad comes directly from Category Theory (a very abstract branch of Mathematics) which probable got it from Libnetz. I do not know why Category theory used the word monad, but their use of it has been somewhat vindicated by the ``almost soul like importance'' of the monad in solving the issue of where the state of an object is in a functional langauge. Blah..
Anywho, the realevence of this to the programmer world is that this stuff moves us closer to a functional langauge which agree with as least part of the Perl philosophy and feal. Postmodernisn improved by modernist research.. sorta.. of couse that's not at all ruled out by postmodernism. If anything Perl's dependance on it's imperitive style is keeping it from being more postmodern. Er.. Well.. Whatever.. Maybe I'm spouting bullshit here.. I'm never quite shure about these things..
Larry has a very interesting take on language disign. I liked is postmodernism comments. Perl definitly feals more like english then other langauges, but maybe that's just because I'm addicted. I don't think, however, that we are at all ready for a ``universilly postmodern'' approach to computation or programming langauges as there is just too much which need to be rigorous. I think we will ultimatly need something more like the Lucky project for Haskell to do the parsing side anything. That is to say Larry's philosophy is importent even if we do need stronger theoretical building blocks then traditional imperitive programming provides.
Jeff
BTW> Lucky is a monadic parser. Monads are a very powerful way to resolve the contradictions between functional and object oriented programming philosophies. A monadic parser has all the elegance, flexibility, and raw power of a functional parser without the grammer constrains normaly imposd on a functional parser.
This is really worth considering. I think maybe somoen who knows something more personal about the ``hacker'' community should check it out. Like maybe we could get some URLs to pages of people connected to these group who might be celebrating.
The question is how best should we get word to IPIX's potential investors about this problem. Our message should be: You don't want to invest in them since 1) we are boycotting them; and 2) there are more flexible free alternatives like VRML.
Our problem is that the free alternatives (while more flexable) are of slightly lower image quality and we don't want to risk creating any new investors for them via drawing attention to them.
I suggest that someone who knows more about IPO's then I do post soemthing about how to find there future investors without finding any investors who have not heard of them. Note: JP Morgan is handling there IPO.
I suppose we could keep an eye on the chat stuff in forbes.com and fortune.com (at least one of them has one), but I did not want to draw attention to them ammong investors unless people were discussing them already.
http://www.fh-fu rtwangen.de/%7Edersch/sphere_format/Spherical.html is the real page which IPIX forced himn to remove and it is this and it is this page we need to mirror since it explains how to convert from IPIX's image format. If we want to boycot them then we sould make it uber simple to convert from IPIX images to other formats. Can someone please post a link to the original content of this page? thanks..
Slashdot Mirror
> There ARE law abiding citizens WITHOUT Slave
> Identification Numbers. They are the Sui Juris
> (Free Men), and Sovereigns.
Ok, I withdraw generalization.. but how do they earn money, go to collage, etc.? or is the number only so you can withdraw it later and they don't really care if you have the number so long as you pay the taxes? I'm pretty shure both of the Universities I have been to required a social security number. If you need the number to pay the tax, it sounds like a good cause, but not exactly realistic for most people and if collages require the number then there is a large number of people who need it regardless.
Jeff
Dose this mean the US gov. wil have to pay this guy royalties to use it? Can we patent up most of the other ways of identifing people?
Seriously, the patent should not have been awarded since it is a trivial (and has even been used in movies).
Unfortunatly, the U.S. gov. dosn't need any such primitive methods of keeping track of people. All the law abiding people have social security numbers and they take DNA sample from a LARGE number of criminals.
Jeff
I wrote a little mp3 player wich uses something that is not a neural network (but could be replaced by one) to learn your music lissening patterns and adjust it's random number generator acordingly. It would be great if some CS type who knows something about real neural networks could write one into x11amp or something.
I was more concerned with the user interface issues of how to maximize the amount of information available to be learned then with the actual learning algorithm. Check out the code it's in Perl and uses Perl/GTK and mpg123.. and it will crash because it was only meant as proof of concept.
Jeff
Your method is pretty good, except that there might be allowable variation in the output of an algorithm which would still allow the decryptor to work, but in practice if the chip says anything diffrent, then we have a flag to inspect it closer.. so your meathod still works. What I'm more concerned about is what if the whole card is designed to respond to or send special packets. How can we check against this possible backdoor?
Jeff
The flipant version of this question is "why should I trust Intell?" The real question is how do I verify that the chip only dose the algorithms it's supposed to and nothing else?
Is there a way to plot out the chip by inspecing the silicon? Is there room for the card to transmit information to be sniffed (like hiding things in bad packets)? Can we show that the algorithm which the chip implements dose not leave loose information floating arround (perhaps even in the initial choice of random numbers) which would allow additional information to be encoded ontop of a good packet? Who is going to audit the hardware? How scalable are the keysizes?
We probable can make good hardware encryption, but I would like to know that it is not an NSA trojan horse like clipper was.
Jeff
Yes, you told a sad story, but an unencombered ethernet (i.e. no firewalls) really is a great learning exprence for lots of people. when I was a freshman we had this one guy on our hall who would hack us all the time. It was pretty funny. One day my roomate distracted him while I took a boot disk into his room and changed true to queue an at job to call him a dried up stinky dick licker. Ahh.. those were the days. Anyway, I'd recommend for schools to take a mostly hands off aproach to student personal computer usage. Maybe run the script kiddy tools against them and email the system's owner.. and maybe make recomendations for people to run a Linux Lite if such a thing exists in the near future.
Jeff
I noticed the first post asked what can we do about this.. and I saw a few responces.. but nothing specific enough. Here are my specific versions of what can we do about this:
What can we do to stop the legislation associated to this? I am an American and don't vote for the people who are imposing this law, but if there are phone calls to make or letters to write I would be happy to help. Who do I harass?
How much of this will be non-legislative cowaperation from the other companies at the conferance? And what can we do to fight that?
Linux/Apache may own the server world (as in NT gone) before this is implemented.. could we make support for the protocoll modificatios a highly non-standard, difficult to install patch? (Linus/Apache Team save us! )
Can will hurt Bertelsmann (boycotts?). How can I make shure I don't buy anyhting that comes thourgh them? Would someone like to set up a FAQ or site on how to avoid givng them any money. Could we watch them very closly and gradually make the net anti-Bertelsmann? I notices a link to there holdings here.
Analysis?
Jeff
Communism is a political system devised to try and make socialism work in practice. It's failure is not to be found in the nationalistic mumbo jumbo of most of the americans who complain about communism. It's failure lies in the fact that it is unstable. It is unstable because it uses government in crappy ways, i.e. to repress everyone and keep them working. IMHO the free software world is more stable then the commercial software model for basically the same reason that a free market beat out communism---just replace the government with MS. Now, we can argue about wether it is socialism till we are blue in the face, but I don't think that question matters much. The only importent questions are A) is it really a better way for people to interact with one another and B) is it stable. I personally believe the answer to both of these questions is ``add more freedom.''
If you think about the RMS arguments for the GPL (and reladed stuff) you will find it is positivly dripping with stability. Example: We may assume someone will write the software anyway.. then the GPL just gives them a way to get stuff added to it for free. Remember Linus started Linux for fun.. and then think of how much less useful Linux would be to Linus if he had not given it to people.
I gues a point I wanted to make is don't worry about the word socialism.. what you do may or may not fit it's definition.. worry about more importent aspects of what you are doing. Like wether you are really helping yourself (you are not waisting your time.. fun is a good enough reason to do soemthing) and if you are hurting anyone in the process.
Jeff
I suspect there are a good many people who learned to program (sorta) before they were 10. My dad claims he started teaching me when I was 6, but i couldn't tell you when I actually understood and retained what the hell a goto did. I think it is good for kids to learn it that young, but I also think they should learn some stuff about the scientific method.. and i mean the bullshit debunking side of the scientific method. I think one of the most importent things about what langauge children use is wether they can see anyhting happen. Maybe if you added some simple game API like sprites or something to Python it would make and even better teaching langauge.
Second, don't assume real geniuses are modest. they frequently have quite large ego's, but that don't mean that they are obnoxious about it. I am a graduate student in mathematics and I can tell you most of us have huge ego's, but we are still nice people. ex: we pretty much avoid stepping on each other's ego's.
Jeff
More news coverage would be very good, but I don't know that it would get to the heart of the problem.. which I suspect is a lack of memory for what the candidate dose. The special intrest groups are perfect for this.. they have a long memory, they are harder to buy off then some jurnalist, and they wont shrink from making a meaningful argument in order to maintain some bullshit jurnalistic objectivity. I say let the people who care make there arguments to the voters when the elections come arround. Currently special intrests and buisness buy candidates with money for advertising which is stupid, but if we make it easier for voters to hear content related arguments then these same special intrest groups can do a great service. The real problem is getting people to care about what the org has to say and hot how pretty there logo is or soemthing.
/., Wired, etc.) could help a lot of US geeks by pointing us all to the score cards of the various groups arround election time.
The online news (like
I suppose a way to bring it to the general public would be to allow them to have issue advice actually at the poling places if they could get more then x many signatures. perhaps even in the voting both so no one could see what special intrest groups you were reading about.
Jeff
Ok, I was very strongly in support of internet voting before I read some of the posts (and I will explain why in a min.), but there have been some interesting arguments that while there is plenty of security from direct fraud in internet voting there may not be security from interpersonal fraud, i.e. a family member making his/her whole family vote a specific way and being able to watch how people voted. This is a serious concern and I think it would need to be resolved before internet voting could be implemented.
That having been said I think there is a really wonderful possible side effect of internet voting: More involvment of special interests. Why is this good you ask. Imagin we had an internet voting system where special interest groups (Amnestry International, ACLU, NRA, CATO Institute, PETA, etc.) could host there own information servers and there would be services which list the servers. Then I could just check off the list of people who's opinion I gave a damn about and read what they had to say before I voted. It would be wonderful: Joe Random guy who knows zip about polotics but cares about gun ownership somewhat and has heard of the Libertarians would see what CATO and the NRA had to say about the candidates and if Joe had half a brain he would be able to look at the candidates voting record on the bills he cared about (ACLU for example keeps a score card).
Luckily, we don't really need internet voting to start this process however: How about when the next election commes arround we have an ask slashdot where people post links to geekish special intrest groups which have score cards?
Jeff
What if I produce jpgs of my diffs or source and
put the immages up for DL? along with some OCR
software and a make file? The question is if
it's a machine readable format, but the non-mechanicalness of a picture may make it more
clear to the judge that they are violating our
first amendment rights.
If that won't work what if I buy a fancy printer
that can put a stamp on it and mail it to a mirror
site in a free country? or do I need to mail it to lots of people for it to be ``publishing.''
Jeff
I do know anyhitng about this, but I have alwas assumed that it was pretty much a given that we would not be working with individual nerve connections an time soon and that we didn't really need. The real question is how do you get the brain to learn to use the equipment you plug into aproximatly the right place, so the real advances are not necissarily in knowing what connects to what, but in knowing the connectivity establishing rules for the brain (which might involve neural growth hormones).
My question is: How much is known about how to do this? I know about the leach-computer that was mentioned on here a while back so we have at least some idea of how to electrically train neurons to do serton things, but the leach to computer may be really waistfull in that project (in terms of using the same nervers to do diffrent things).
What would be really cool and maybe realistic is a monkey version of the leach computer, i.e. a living monkey with a calculator attached to it's head who shows no side effects from using the calculator. It would show that we are maybe connecting to the nerves without fucking things up by talking to too many of them at once or something.
Jeff
First, we do not believe that quantum computers could solve NP problems (QP != NP in CS speak). If I remember correctly QP is strictly contained in #P (really P^#P). This means that a public key cryptosystem based on NP complete problems instead of factoring numbers could be secure against a quantum computer.. except that many many cases of an NP complete problem are easy to solve.. but if we can't use factoring numbers because of the preasence of quantum computers then this might be an acceptable alternative.. it could mean you would need to upgrade you're key (and software to generate keys) frequently to keep up with advances in mathematics and CS.
I geus a cheezy way to describe the limitations of cuantum computing is to say that you get a lot of really powerfull parallelism, but since you only read out one answer you can not directly take advantage of it. The quantum algorithms ``make the wrong answers cancel out.'' Currently all the quantum mechanical algorithms which provide exponential speedup (like factoring) work by finding the period of some function by useing a Foruer transform.
Ok, I can understand that people would want some visual art with their music, but visual art could be distributed with MP3s too. Maybe some artists could even sell advertising by embeding HTML and related files in MP3 headers if the players would show the stuff. Regardless, a phyisical media is not the answer because it constrains the lissener too much. Why should I be forced to lissen to music in the order someone else prescribes or even in the random order prescribed by a large CD changer. Hell, I think playlists are even too constraining. I have writen a simple perl-GTK front end to mpg123 which uses a simple AI and attempts to learn the users moods (check it out here). It also allows you to cancel songs before you hear them which keeps the user from waisting lots of time lissening to the beginnings of songs they dont want to hear (unlike more random play options). Note: since the palyer is in perl it is easy to modify the AI with your own rules that consider things like artist or song name similarity. The point is that we to have the needed flexibility in players we need the player front end to be implemented in software and to be easy to modify. I never lissen to CDs not because they waist too much time.. my player is writen specifically to save me time.. that is the beauty of software. Jeff
Every year somone proves P=NP.. and it's wrong.
.. if there were they would be more secure then RSA. The problem with using P != NP in an encryption algorithm is that there are normally LOTS of special case to a problem that are P, i.e. you don't know how to pick a good key frpm the set of possible keys (a good key being one that is not in any of the special cases). Note: a quantum computer can factor numbers in polynomial time, but can not solve NP compleate problems as far as we know.
Actually, I don't believe any encryption algorithms are based on P != NP
This is why people should distribute (electronicqally) things that the NSA might have an interest in to as many people as possible. It would be nice if there were groups of non-math people who tried to follow the research specifically to keep the NSA from being able to fuck with people. Luckaly, most research dose not occure in a vacume and there are to many people working to try and understand it for the NSA to stop things. You have made me curious now, what was he working on? (I'm a math person)
This brings up an intersting and related point.. How do we best discurage/save smart people from working for the NSA? We need to explain to people with an interest in number theory and algorithms research that they really do not want to spend their lives keeping secrets. It's hard enough to not be able to talk to people because they can't understand you.. I can not imagine not being allowed to talk to them.. Communication is a part of being human.
This rulling is just to keep the Bells from gaining power, which we the people have every right to do, not to keep them from making money, which we do not have the right to do.
I think something similler needs to be done with intelectual property, i.e. anyone has the right to use it, but they have to pay you a fair price for it.
Yes, piracy is illegal and WB dose own the episode, but that dose not make the piracy of the epison unjust or wrong. Let's not make the mistake of assuming that only a government can abuse our freedoms or that because intelectual property rights say we shouldn't do something that it is wrong. The truth is much more complex:
1) There should be some kind of intelectual property.
2) There should be piracy to balance it.
The piracy of Buffy is a good thing, just like the piracy of MP3s is a good thing.. it weakens the power of the corporations who are too powerful in the first place. Shure we could take what on the surface appears to be a more Stallman-ish approach like only lissening to music from mp3.com or boycotting Buffy untill the desired episode comes out, but there is a big diffrence here.. writing free software is ``stable'' in that while you may not take away many microsoft users in the first year, you are have made a somewhat permenent alternative. Boycotts and such are ``unstable'' in that they depend on the continued participation of people, so we need more drastic measures. Piracy is perfect, it dosn't really hurt the company all that much at first, but it dose force them to adopt new buisness practices or get hurt real bad later.. well not with buffy since no one will care next year anyway, but in general it's high profile is needed.
Piracy is a good thing and should be incuraged.. the companies can adapt.
I am so sick an tired of these morons who say ``whoa this is scarry'' and ``we shouldn't do that sort of science.'' Those objections are all bullshit. Proper Science and Research are INHERENTLY good. Proper here means that (1) they don't hurt any one in the process of doing the research (says nothing about the uses for the research afterwards) and (2) that the work has theoretical importance. This menas figuring out how to make a better biological weapon dose not qualify because it is too applied, but working to learn more about biology when what you know can be used for biological weapons is a good as long as you are really tring to learn something i the abstract.
I guess what I am really saing here is that if the scientific method provides both your motivation and your tools (and you don't hurt anyone) then you are doing nothing wrong (and are infact helping humanity). This is as opposed to the biological weapons research who is motivated to creat biological weapons and noly uses the scientific method as a tool. People need to understand this distinction. Things can be missused, but that is true of most anything, not just new discoveries.
It gets a little tricky when you want to really go build soemthing since then you have other motivations the pure research, but still: knowledge and understanding == good, motivations == good or bad depending on the situation.
Personaly, I am happy whenever I hear about genetic engenering.. it is inherently good to know these things.
Examples to help convince those who are not so theoretically minded about the value of genetic engenering: They can or are close to being able to accelerate and control the evolution of microbes. Clearly, this can be used to make really nasty biological weapons, but what it will be used for it to make really kick ass antibiotics. Perhaps you didn't know that our antibiotics are becomming less and less effective and we are having a hgard time finding new ones. Accelerated evoltion of the animals that creat penacilin and the likes could make the diffrence between your kids growing up in a world with antibiotics or one without. Another genetic engeering break through is using DNA to identify other DNA. This can make incredibly fact tests for very hard to identify diseases and could make the difrence between knowing wether a homeless person is infected with AIDS or not.
Knowledge and understand == good
Also, these neuron computer things are not really for doing traditional computer tasks, they are more for doing the aproximate tasks that we do every day. Just think about how much repetitive stuff gets given to humans to do simply because it it not quite repetitive enough for a computer.
Jeff
I forget the original use of the word monad, but I think it was to refer to an idea of ``soul'' and the Catholic church burnd the guy who said that.. Then Libnitz used it both in his religious philosophy and *maybe* in his philosophical justifications for his calculous. Now, the Haskell use of the word monad comes directly from Category Theory (a very abstract branch of Mathematics) which probable got it from Libnetz. I do not know why Category theory used the word monad, but their use of it has been somewhat vindicated by the ``almost soul like importance'' of the monad in solving the issue of where the state of an object is in a functional langauge. Blah..
Anywho, the realevence of this to the programmer world is that this stuff moves us closer to a functional langauge which agree with as least part of the Perl philosophy and feal. Postmodernisn improved by modernist research.. sorta.. of couse that's not at all ruled out by postmodernism. If anything Perl's dependance on it's imperitive style is keeping it from being more postmodern. Er.. Well.. Whatever.. Maybe I'm spouting bullshit here.. I'm never quite shure about these things..
Larry has a very interesting take on language disign. I liked is postmodernism comments. Perl definitly feals more like english then other langauges, but maybe that's just because I'm addicted. I don't think, however, that we are at all ready for a ``universilly postmodern'' approach to computation or programming langauges as there is just too much which need to be rigorous. I think we will ultimatly need something more like the Lucky project for Haskell to do the parsing side anything. That is to say Larry's philosophy is importent even if we do need stronger theoretical building blocks then traditional imperitive programming provides.
Jeff
BTW> Lucky is a monadic parser. Monads are a very powerful way to resolve the contradictions between functional and object oriented programming philosophies. A monadic parser has all the elegance, flexibility, and raw power of a functional parser without the grammer constrains normaly imposd on a functional parser.
This is really worth considering. I think maybe somoen who knows something more personal about the ``hacker'' community should check it out. Like maybe we could get some URLs to pages of people connected to these group who might be celebrating.
The question is how best should we get word to IPIX's potential investors about this problem. Our message should be: You don't want to invest in them since
1) we are boycotting them; and
2) there are more flexible free alternatives like VRML.
Our problem is that the free alternatives (while more flexable) are of slightly lower image quality and we don't want to risk creating any new investors for them via drawing attention to them.
I suggest that someone who knows more about IPO's then I do post soemthing about how to find there future investors without finding any investors who have not heard of them. Note: JP Morgan is handling there IPO.
I suppose we could keep an eye on the chat stuff in forbes.com and fortune.com (at least one of them has one), but I did not want to draw attention to them ammong investors unless people were discussing them already.
Just my thoughs..
http://www.fh-fu rtwangen.de/%7Edersch/sphere_format/Spherical.html is the real page which IPIX forced himn to remove and it is this and it is this page we need to mirror since it explains how to convert from IPIX's image format. If we want to boycot them then we sould make it uber simple to convert from IPIX images to other formats. Can someone please post a link to the original content of this page? thanks..