UPS bought II Morrow, a fairly respected name in the avionics business about two years back I believe. That business was renamed "UPS Aviation Technologies"
I wouldn't get complacient about things like freenet. IP interests hold a lot of sway in Washington, and shutting down P-P systems is quite possible technically. For starters, they could mandate that anyone with more than X level of sustained upstream bandwidth would need some kind of license. Second, they could simply demand that ISPs block all inbound ports. Even if Freenet migrates to a UDP based protocol, technology is already available to allow recognized UDP protocols through, and block everything else. Further, they could make anonymous encrypted file transfer illegal, thus requiring people to have accountability for what they are sending.
Don't underestimate the political power of these corporations. There is a very real threat to the music industry in these technologies. Even if the music industry's profits aren't hurting now, they will be when more people get high bandwidth connections and start getting all of their music from the net instead of from the record store.
It is disingenuous to say that who the music industry is going after are the unsigned artists. Unsigned artists can put their music up on mp3.com or their own websites if they want to distribute it for free. The only reason for systems like Freenet is to protect the distribution of illegal content. While you might disagree with what is currently considered illegal by our government (DeCSS for example), the fact remains that there is no reason for secret file sharing if it is legal. If you content is legal, you can have anonynimity by posting it to geocities or usenet from a cybercafe.
The liquid sodium problem can be solved by careful selection of piping and humidity control and such to reduce the risk of fire from a coolant leak. This is a problem with the LMFBR, but it is a solvable one, and I don't know all of the specifics as to how it was solved in the IFR, but it is my impression that this is not much of an issue. Furthermore, a fire from a coolant leak would not generally threaten the reactor core as it would have shut itself off if coolant was no longer flowing sufficiently.
As to the "Weapons Grade" problem, yes, this is a problem, but the IFR design solves this by making sure that Pu is never in pure form. The on-site reprocessing separates out the fissiles from the non-fissiles, but not specifically the Pu. So the stuff they put back in the reactor is a mix of fissile elements, many of which are gamma emitters. Hence, it would require further refining to get "weapons grade" Pu, and the risk of theft of fissile material is essentally zero because while the radiation from Pu is managable, it would be nearly impossible to handle the mixed fissile material in the IFR.
Unfortunately, Uranium supplies would dry up in about sixty years if we used it for all of our energy in non-breeder reactors. Granted, it's longer than oil will last, but as I see it, one of the big advantages of nuclear power is that it is sustainable over the long term (until we get fusion going). I think that 5000 years should be enough time.
If we wanted to build clean, safe power generation facilities which are not dependent on the sun or wind, with a fuel source which will last for thousands of years, all we need is to start building the (already designed) LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder) reactor. Argonne developed a particularly good design of this, the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor). These types of reactors are much better than current commercial reactors. First, they use fuel much more efficiently because they create more fissile material as they run, i.e. you can burn the U-238 as well as the U-235. The first nice effect of this are that you get much less high-level waste as you typically burn the fuel until it is no longer significantly radioactive. The second is that it means that our Uranium reserves will last for thousands of years even if we used this technology to provide all of our energy. The third very nice feature of the IFR and I believe LMFBRs in general is that it is inherently safe. If there is a cooling problem and the reactor core begins to overheat, the reaction will automatically stop because the coolant won't pass fast neutrons as efficiently at higher temperatures. Therefore if there is a pump failure or other coolant failure, the reactor automatically shuts down without any human or mechanical intervention.
The existence of technology like this, and its lack of political support make me frustrate me greatly. The public has an irrational fear of all things nuclear, and thus there is no political support for setting this up on a commercial basis. More people die every year from coal mining and lung diseases related to the burning of coal than died from the Chernobyl disaster, the largest nuclear power accident ever, yet no one ever talks about the "2000 coal disaster" or the "1999 coal disaster." Write your congressman and tell him that you want funding for the IFR project and that you want one built commercially.
Actually, in terms of alternative fuels, Ethanol is well ahead of all of the others -- a couple of million cars on the road today are capable of burning 85% ethanol 15% gasoline mix. Ford has a number of cars out which have this capability. Most new ford minivans, and some of their sedans can do this. If it can it says FFV on a little metal plaque on the side. Although it is not 100% ethanol, it is mostly renewable, available at several hundred gas stations, and costs (with government subsidies) about the same as gasoline. Furthermore, the same engine can burn gasoline if Ethanol is not available.
Another company, AMT, makes tiny turbojets for models, but one guy got another idea and put two of them on his tiny homebuilt plane, which can go 150 MPH! Check it out http://www.amtjets.com/gallery_real_plain.html
Has anyone else noticed that this is a regurgitation of the NY Times article from about a week back, down to the quotes from university officials? Gotta love Katz.
The way to think about these types of systems is that of a simple rental arrangment. The commercial CPU broker is renting your CPU part time. Therefore, you are not entitled to anything beyond the rental fee. Similarly, a biotech firm that rents office space does not owe their landlord anything more than monthly rent.
Furthermore, your CPU simply isn't that valuable from a computational standpoint. Once you strip off the monitor, hard drive, fancy video card, etc, the monthly cost of a large (10,000+ proc) PC cluster drops to less than $20 per processor month, including initial purchase and maintainence.
Well, despite what some of the other posters have said, I don't think that IANA ultimately has as much power as is claimed. Ultimately, as the saying goes, possesion is 9/10 of the law, and the ultimate reason that you get NSI's database when you type in the address at the top of your browser is this: You query your ISP probably, who is probably running BIND, which has a list of IP addresses for root servers, the first of which being the A root server, which NSI has direct control over.
The way to get your alternic style system implemented is to convince Paul Vixie, who can put your addresses by default into new versions of BIND. If Alternic had been able to do this, they wouldn't have had to convince ISPs one at a time to change their configuration, it would have already been there.
There are actually good reasons for doing this. IANAL, but as I understand it, if you purchase a capital good such as a computer, you have to depreciate it over a period of years on your taxes, that is, if you buy a bunch of laptops, you pay the money now but you don't get to deduct it on your taxes until later. With a lease, you deduct the lease payments so you don't have the delayed deduction. This can be worth it even if the lease is more expensive than buying it outright.
You are, of course, neglecting the inevitable arrival of radio shack employees who will scratch their heads and then turn the computer off as you snicker and peer in the windows.
Well, continuous physics is not a tractable problem on a turing machine, however, an arbitrary approximation of it is, at least assuming that our current theories of physics are right enough to predict the interactions. I agree that simulating isn't the same is being, and I don't think that it would be possible to make an AI which had subjective experience (although I wouldn't rule it out). Putnam has an argument which basically boils down to the idea that every physical system with a proper labeling of particles, dimensions, etc, implements every possible logical system. Therefore we conclude that subjective experience is not the result of the logical organization of our brains. That said, it is unclear then what role subjective experience has to play in our brains -- whether it is a relatively passive observer, or if there is some kind of nonphysical phenomena going on which is essential to the functioning of our brains. I'm not really sure, but I'm working on large-scale ANNs to try to help find out. When we build a realistic simulation of the brain, we should get a much better idea of what role consciousness plays.
Hey man, get off the damn cell phone! You are spending over 10% of your waking hours on that thing. Your head is getting irradiated, and you are the type of person who is going to have brain cancer 15 years down the line! BTW, stay away from the 1900Mhz phones if you use it that much.
Check out the failure of the Connection Machine and you'll see that actually us software guys are too dumb to write good massively parallel software. I do it, and it's hard, especally the debugging, and that's just parallelizing to 64 processors. Perhaps there are other paradigms other than the standard imperative programming languages that would make using these architectures more efficient, but as it stands now, it is very hard to effectively use parallel architectures. With the introduction of Intel's Merced, a VLIW architecture, we will see what happens when excellent compilier writers take a crack at a somewhat parallel architecture. The problem is not as easy as you make it out to be or it would have been done.
The fundamental problem here is that now that Slashdot is owned by a major corporation, its purpose is to generate advertising impressions. To do that, you must dumb down the content. Slashdot used to (like 2 years ago or so) be aimed at somewhere near the 95th percentile. Now, however it's around 75 or 80. People who like to see more thought provoking material, and more informative material are a smaller audience than those who want to see a Linux version of News.com, which is what Slashdot has essentally become. Slashdot (and Linux) has degenerated into mindless dogma and herd mentality, each person desparately wanting to belong to this movement that all logic and temperance disappears in favor of spouting idiotic platitudes.
Listen to people like John Katz talk about how geek culture is defined by pop culture, and Eric Raymond say that all geeks are libertarians, and you see the kernel of truth. Although many geeks think that they're rebels and free-thinkers, most of them are really just subscribers to a set of dogma that is already laid out before them ready for them to hitch a ride onto.
You are no better than anyone else for subscribing to this ideology. You still can't think for yourself any more than "mainstream" people do. You are just parroting what a different segment of society thinks. Just because you read Slashdot or use Linux doesn't mean that you are smarter than anyone else.
I think the reason everyone hates Katz is that he is trying to define our movement from the outside, and being the only columnnist on Slashdot lends him legitimacy as a spokesperson for our movement. Imagine for a moment other social/political movements. Suppose some suburban white guy in the sixties proclaimed that he could speak for the Black Panthers. Further suppose that he was the sole comentator in the Black Panther newsletter. I don't think that the members of that organization would be too happy about this. Katz is not part of the open source movement. The audience for his articles is not Slashdot, it is the rest of the media. When the media looks at Slashdot, they see him, and he explains it so they can understand. Therefore, Slashdot gives Katz the credibility to speak for us. The only way to mitigate the influence of Katz is to keep posting flames about him in the comments, and hopefully the media will see those too and decide that maybe he isn't the voice of open source after all.
This is not a waste of spectrum. This is 5Ghz+, which only works for line of sight communications. It will not pass through anything. This is above even the microwave band. Therefore, applications like this are really the only way to use such small wavelengths.
Look. You wouldn't see someone like Stallman doing this. Clearly there are lots of people who could benefit from Transmeta's code -- I'm sure several companies would like to make crusoe compatable silicon and sell it with the software. Furthermore, the community could fix bugs and improve the code morphing program. These are the arguments which are used to justify everything else being open-sourced. Why shouldn't it apply to everyone. The only reason you think Transmeta is so damn cool is because Linus is there. If he's betraying his ideals to be there, I don't see how you could find that admirable.
Ok, since you seem to be pretty sure about there being good free groupware available for Linux, name the package that's better than Microsoft's exchange system. And don't say Lotus notes because that's not free.
Many messages here are talking about a functional description of consciousness -- that is, defining consciousness as having an idea in your mind which coresponds to yourself. This is not what philosophers are talking about when they talk about consciousness. (at least not since these issues were clarified by amongst others, Thomas Nagel)
What philosophers are talking about when they talk about consciousness is "the thing it is like to be you." That is, what it is like to see the color red, hear middle C, taste a piece of candy, touch a hot poker, etc. Essentally, there is no good reason that science can come up with as to why there would be experiences such as these.
It is important to understand that this really doesn't have anything to do with the functional aspects of seeing red or feeling pain, etc. Clearly there are well understood (in prinicple) reasons why you pull your hand back from a hot stove, but there's no explanation why it *feels* like that.
Perhaps at this point, those of us who value progress in the computer field need to take a different approach towards patents and start playing rough with the big boys instead of whining on the sidelines. Here is what I propose.
A non-profit organization is created under the auspices of say, the FSF which files for as many pantents as possible, and perhaps, with a big enough bankroll, purchases the patent portfolios of bankrupt companies.
All of these patents are licensed free of charge to any project which meets a suitable definition of "free software."
Further, this organization would retain lawyers, in much the same manner as the ACLU does, to fight infringement cases brought against free software projects. If sufficient money is available, the organization could also help defend patent cases against smaller commercial software companies who would otherwise be forced to settle.
The big stick that the organization would carry, however is patent cross-licensing. Imagine if when the DVD CCA drags you into court, you countersue with infringement claims against all DVD players, and offer to settle in exchange for attorney's fees and the dropping of the suit. In some instances, this organization could even negotiate for patent sub-licensing rights so that more patents could be used in this manner.
Obviously, this organization would wield a lot of power, and so it is important that it be controlled by trustworthy people, as well as having a charter that explicitly defined its goals, but it could perhaps end one part of corporate tyrany -- patent tyrany.
This excerpt is really the epitome of what I think most people on Slashdot believe. There are very good reasons for people holding the type of philosophy that Katz espouses, but I think it's necessary to examine the effects of this attitude towards society. First of all, the example Katz gives in the excerpt about the television interview is pretty telling about the attitudes of a lot of self-described geeks. These guys were essentally being unapoligetic jackasses because they held something over the other people at the station. I really don't see how this is any different than the football players in high school shoving someone's head in the toilet. You see this kind of behavior all of the time among, for example, system administrators.
There are lots of people who don't get along well socially, and I think that this, more than anything is the best definition of a geek. I think it's important for normal people to be tolerant of people who don't have the same social skills as them, but at the same time, it's as important for geeks to realize that just as they lack skills that others have, others don't know as much about computers, or math, or whatever else. I see so many geeks deride people for their inability to use a computer, or their lack of inteligence, but just as these people lack certain skills, so do the geeks.
The lesson that Katz is trying to teach is that it's good to be a geek, and it's good to be arrogant about the skills that you have if you happen to be economically in demand. I think that this is a dangerous lesson for the geeks, and for society in general. In order to have a world that we all want to live in, people need to understand, accept, and be tolerant of everyone's differences. We need everyone, from the supermarket checkout clerk, to the system administrator to work together to make this into the kind of world we want to live in.
Do you want to live up to your full potential? Do you want to make the world a better place for everyone to live? Tommorow can be the start of a sea-change in all of our lives if we make it so. Let's show a little consideration and kindness. Don't waste your most precious resource on petty arguments. Carpe diem. Let's cast off this tribalism and all work together for a great future! Technology has given us the opportunity to make all of our lives better. Let's not waste the opportunity through intolerance and hatred, on both sides.
Inter-node communication is far more important than heat or space. In fact, I would say that heat and space are two of the smallest problems with Beowulfs.
Slashdot Mirror
There were seven Salyut stations, one Mir, and now ISS.
UPS bought II Morrow, a fairly respected name in the avionics business about two years back I believe. That business was renamed "UPS Aviation Technologies"
I wouldn't get complacient about things like freenet. IP interests hold a lot of sway in Washington, and shutting down P-P systems is quite possible technically. For starters, they could mandate that anyone with more than X level of sustained upstream bandwidth would need some kind of license. Second, they could simply demand that ISPs block all inbound ports. Even if Freenet migrates to a UDP based protocol, technology is already available to allow recognized UDP protocols through, and block everything else. Further, they could make anonymous encrypted file transfer illegal, thus requiring people to have accountability for what they are sending.
Don't underestimate the political power of these corporations. There is a very real threat to the music industry in these technologies. Even if the music industry's profits aren't hurting now, they will be when more people get high bandwidth connections and start getting all of their music from the net instead of from the record store.
It is disingenuous to say that who the music industry is going after are the unsigned artists. Unsigned artists can put their music up on mp3.com or their own websites if they want to distribute it for free. The only reason for systems like Freenet is to protect the distribution of illegal content. While you might disagree with what is currently considered illegal by our government (DeCSS for example), the fact remains that there is no reason for secret file sharing if it is legal. If you content is legal, you can have anonynimity by posting it to geocities or usenet from a cybercafe.
The liquid sodium problem can be solved by careful selection of piping and humidity control and such to reduce the risk of fire from a coolant leak. This is a problem with the LMFBR, but it is a solvable one, and I don't know all of the specifics as to how it was solved in the IFR, but it is my impression that this is not much of an issue. Furthermore, a fire from a coolant leak would not generally threaten the reactor core as it would have shut itself off if coolant was no longer flowing sufficiently.
As to the "Weapons Grade" problem, yes, this is a problem, but the IFR design solves this by making sure that Pu is never in pure form. The on-site reprocessing separates out the fissiles from the non-fissiles, but not specifically the Pu. So the stuff they put back in the reactor is a mix of fissile elements, many of which are gamma emitters. Hence, it would require further refining to get "weapons grade" Pu, and the risk of theft of fissile material is essentally zero because while the radiation from Pu is managable, it would be nearly impossible to handle the mixed fissile material in the IFR.
Unfortunately, Uranium supplies would dry up in about sixty years if we used it for all of our energy in non-breeder reactors. Granted, it's longer than oil will last, but as I see it, one of the big advantages of nuclear power is that it is sustainable over the long term (until we get fusion going). I think that 5000 years should be enough time.
If we wanted to build clean, safe power generation facilities which are not dependent on the sun or wind, with a fuel source which will last for thousands of years, all we need is to start building the (already designed) LMFBR (Liquid Metal Fast Breeder) reactor. Argonne developed a particularly good design of this, the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor). These types of reactors are much better than current commercial reactors. First, they use fuel much more efficiently because they create more fissile material as they run, i.e. you can burn the U-238 as well as the U-235. The first nice effect of this are that you get much less high-level waste as you typically burn the fuel until it is no longer significantly radioactive. The second is that it means that our Uranium reserves will last for thousands of years even if we used this technology to provide all of our energy. The third very nice feature of the IFR and I believe LMFBRs in general is that it is inherently safe. If there is a cooling problem and the reactor core begins to overheat, the reaction will automatically stop because the coolant won't pass fast neutrons as efficiently at higher temperatures. Therefore if there is a pump failure or other coolant failure, the reactor automatically shuts down without any human or mechanical intervention.
The existence of technology like this, and its lack of political support make me frustrate me greatly. The public has an irrational fear of all things nuclear, and thus there is no political support for setting this up on a commercial basis. More people die every year from coal mining and lung diseases related to the burning of coal than died from the Chernobyl disaster, the largest nuclear power accident ever, yet no one ever talks about the "2000 coal disaster" or the "1999 coal disaster." Write your congressman and tell him that you want funding for the IFR project and that you want one built commercially.
Actually, in terms of alternative fuels, Ethanol is well ahead of all of the others -- a couple of million cars on the road today are capable of burning 85% ethanol 15% gasoline mix. Ford has a number of cars out which have this capability. Most new ford minivans, and some of their sedans can do this. If it can it says FFV on a little metal plaque on the side. Although it is not 100% ethanol, it is mostly renewable, available at several hundred gas stations, and costs (with government subsidies) about the same as gasoline. Furthermore, the same engine can burn gasoline if Ethanol is not available.
Another company, AMT, makes tiny turbojets for models, but one guy got another idea and put two of them on his tiny homebuilt plane, which can go 150 MPH! Check it out http://www.amtjets.com/gallery_real_plain.html
Has anyone else noticed that this is a regurgitation of the NY Times article from about a week back, down to the quotes from university officials? Gotta love Katz.
The way to think about these types of systems is that of a simple rental arrangment. The commercial CPU broker is renting your CPU part time. Therefore, you are not entitled to anything beyond the rental fee. Similarly, a biotech firm that rents office space does not owe their landlord anything more than monthly rent.
Furthermore, your CPU simply isn't that valuable from a computational standpoint. Once you strip off the monitor, hard drive, fancy video card, etc, the monthly cost of a large (10,000+ proc) PC cluster drops to less than $20 per processor month, including initial purchase and maintainence.
Well, despite what some of the other posters have said, I don't think that IANA ultimately has as much power as is claimed. Ultimately, as the saying goes, possesion is 9/10 of the law, and the ultimate reason that you get NSI's database when you type in the address at the top of your browser is this: You query your ISP probably, who is probably running BIND, which has a list of IP addresses for root servers, the first of which being the A root server, which NSI has direct control over.
The way to get your alternic style system implemented is to convince Paul Vixie, who can put your addresses by default into new versions of BIND. If Alternic had been able to do this, they wouldn't have had to convince ISPs one at a time to change their configuration, it would have already been there.
There are actually good reasons for doing this. IANAL, but as I understand it, if you purchase a capital good such as a computer, you have to depreciate it over a period of years on your taxes, that is, if you buy a bunch of laptops, you pay the money now but you don't get to deduct it on your taxes until later. With a lease, you deduct the lease payments so you don't have the delayed deduction. This can be worth it even if the lease is more expensive than buying it outright.
You are, of course, neglecting the inevitable arrival of radio shack employees who will scratch their heads and then turn the computer off as you snicker and peer in the windows.
Well, continuous physics is not a tractable problem on a turing machine, however, an arbitrary approximation of it is, at least assuming that our current theories of physics are right enough to predict the interactions. I agree that simulating isn't the same is being, and I don't think that it would be possible to make an AI which had subjective experience (although I wouldn't rule it out). Putnam has an argument which basically boils down to the idea that every physical system with a proper labeling of particles, dimensions, etc, implements every possible logical system. Therefore we conclude that subjective experience is not the result of the logical organization of our brains. That said, it is unclear then what role subjective experience has to play in our brains -- whether it is a relatively passive observer, or if there is some kind of nonphysical phenomena going on which is essential to the functioning of our brains. I'm not really sure, but I'm working on large-scale ANNs to try to help find out. When we build a realistic simulation of the brain, we should get a much better idea of what role consciousness plays.
Hey man, get off the damn cell phone! You are spending over 10% of your waking hours on that thing. Your head is getting irradiated, and you are the type of person who is going to have brain cancer 15 years down the line! BTW, stay away from the 1900Mhz phones if you use it that much.
Check out the failure of the Connection Machine and you'll see that actually us software guys are too dumb to write good massively parallel software. I do it, and it's hard, especally the debugging, and that's just parallelizing to 64 processors. Perhaps there are other paradigms other than the standard imperative programming languages that would make using these architectures more efficient, but as it stands now, it is very hard to effectively use parallel architectures. With the introduction of Intel's Merced, a VLIW architecture, we will see what happens when excellent compilier writers take a crack at a somewhat parallel architecture. The problem is not as easy as you make it out to be or it would have been done.
The fundamental problem here is that now that Slashdot is owned by a major corporation, its purpose is to generate advertising impressions. To do that, you must dumb down the content. Slashdot used to (like 2 years ago or so) be aimed at somewhere near the 95th percentile. Now, however it's around 75 or 80. People who like to see more thought provoking material, and more informative material are a smaller audience than those who want to see a Linux version of News.com, which is what Slashdot has essentally become. Slashdot (and Linux) has degenerated into mindless dogma and herd mentality, each person desparately wanting to belong to this movement that all logic and temperance disappears in favor of spouting idiotic platitudes.
Listen to people like John Katz talk about how geek culture is defined by pop culture, and Eric Raymond say that all geeks are libertarians, and you see the kernel of truth. Although many geeks think that they're rebels and free-thinkers, most of them are really just subscribers to a set of dogma that is already laid out before them ready for them to hitch a ride onto.
You are no better than anyone else for subscribing to this ideology. You still can't think for yourself any more than "mainstream" people do. You are just parroting what a different segment of society thinks. Just because you read Slashdot or use Linux doesn't mean that you are smarter than anyone else.
This will be my last transmission.
I think the reason everyone hates Katz is that he is trying to define our movement from the outside, and being the only columnnist on Slashdot lends him legitimacy as a spokesperson for our movement. Imagine for a moment other social/political movements. Suppose some suburban white guy in the sixties proclaimed that he could speak for the Black Panthers. Further suppose that he was the sole comentator in the Black Panther newsletter. I don't think that the members of that organization would be too happy about this. Katz is not part of the open source movement. The audience for his articles is not Slashdot, it is the rest of the media. When the media looks at Slashdot, they see him, and he explains it so they can understand. Therefore, Slashdot gives Katz the credibility to speak for us. The only way to mitigate the influence of Katz is to keep posting flames about him in the comments, and hopefully the media will see those too and decide that maybe he isn't the voice of open source after all.
This is not a waste of spectrum. This is 5Ghz+, which only works for line of sight communications. It will not pass through anything. This is above even the microwave band. Therefore, applications like this are really the only way to use such small wavelengths.
Who Cares? It's in the 5Ghz+ band. That is useless spectrum for anything but line of sight things like this. The more access options the better!
Look. You wouldn't see someone like Stallman doing this. Clearly there are lots of people who could benefit from Transmeta's code -- I'm sure several companies would like to make crusoe compatable silicon and sell it with the software. Furthermore, the community could fix bugs and improve the code morphing program. These are the arguments which are used to justify everything else being open-sourced. Why shouldn't it apply to everyone. The only reason you think Transmeta is so damn cool is because Linus is there. If he's betraying his ideals to be there, I don't see how you could find that admirable.
Ok, since you seem to be pretty sure about there being good free groupware available for Linux, name the package that's better than Microsoft's exchange system. And don't say Lotus notes because that's not free.
Many messages here are talking about a functional description of consciousness -- that is, defining consciousness as having an idea in your mind which coresponds to yourself. This is not what philosophers are talking about when they talk about consciousness. (at least not since these issues were clarified by amongst others, Thomas Nagel)
What philosophers are talking about when they talk about consciousness is "the thing it is like to be you." That is, what it is like to see the color red, hear middle C, taste a piece of candy, touch a hot poker, etc. Essentally, there is no good reason that science can come up with as to why there would be experiences such as these.
It is important to understand that this really doesn't have anything to do with the functional aspects of seeing red or feeling pain, etc. Clearly there are well understood (in prinicple) reasons why you pull your hand back from a hot stove, but there's no explanation why it *feels* like that.
Perhaps at this point, those of us who value progress in the computer field need to take a different approach towards patents and start playing rough with the big boys instead of whining on the sidelines. Here is what I propose.
A non-profit organization is created under the auspices of say, the FSF which files for as many pantents as possible, and perhaps, with a big enough bankroll, purchases the patent portfolios of bankrupt companies.
All of these patents are licensed free of charge to any project which meets a suitable definition of "free software."
Further, this organization would retain lawyers, in much the same manner as the ACLU does, to fight infringement cases brought against free software projects. If sufficient money is available, the organization could also help defend patent cases against smaller commercial software companies who would otherwise be forced to settle.
The big stick that the organization would carry, however is patent cross-licensing. Imagine if when the DVD CCA drags you into court, you countersue with infringement claims against all DVD players, and offer to settle in exchange for attorney's fees and the dropping of the suit. In some instances, this organization could even negotiate for patent sub-licensing rights so that more patents could be used in this manner.
Obviously, this organization would wield a lot of power, and so it is important that it be controlled by trustworthy people, as well as having a charter that explicitly defined its goals, but it could perhaps end one part of corporate tyrany -- patent tyrany.
Your thoughts?
This excerpt is really the epitome of what I think most people on Slashdot believe. There are very good reasons for people holding the type of philosophy that Katz espouses, but I think it's necessary to examine the effects of this attitude towards society. First of all, the example Katz gives in the excerpt about the television interview is pretty telling about the attitudes of a lot of self-described geeks. These guys were essentally being unapoligetic jackasses because they held something over the other people at the station. I really don't see how this is any different than the football players in high school shoving someone's head in the toilet. You see this kind of behavior all of the time among, for example, system administrators.
There are lots of people who don't get along well socially, and I think that this, more than anything is the best definition of a geek. I think it's important for normal people to be tolerant of people who don't have the same social skills as them, but at the same time, it's as important for geeks to realize that just as they lack skills that others have, others don't know as much about computers, or math, or whatever else. I see so many geeks deride people for their inability to use a computer, or their lack of inteligence, but just as these people lack certain skills, so do the geeks.
The lesson that Katz is trying to teach is that it's good to be a geek, and it's good to be arrogant about the skills that you have if you happen to be economically in demand. I think that this is a dangerous lesson for the geeks, and for society in general. In order to have a world that we all want to live in, people need to understand, accept, and be tolerant of everyone's differences. We need everyone, from the supermarket checkout clerk, to the system administrator to work together to make this into the kind of world we want to live in.
Do you want to live up to your full potential? Do you want to make the world a better place for everyone to live? Tommorow can be the start of a sea-change in all of our lives if we make it so. Let's show a little consideration and kindness. Don't waste your most precious resource on petty arguments. Carpe diem. Let's cast off this tribalism and all work together for a great future! Technology has given us the opportunity to make all of our lives better. Let's not waste the opportunity through intolerance and hatred, on both sides.
Inter-node communication is far more important than heat or space. In fact, I would say that heat and space are two of the smallest problems with Beowulfs.