Technological *and* social issues would have to be addressed, cryptography used to be classified as a munition at one time in the US: Its use in the future could be curtailed to specific situations only. This would be part of the social aspects to be addressed.
I'm not even sure if such a system would be desirable, I'm only saying it would be plausible.
Piracy is a social problem *and* a technical problem so a solution that pleases everyone (probably excepting RMS) and actually works would need measures in both. It would not be a simple solution but I believe that all the measures can be arranged around a common point: licenses must be obeyed. Everything going onto the Internet should be catagorized into a specific spot on the license spectrum. Free like GNU/Linux, commercial like games, and so on. The consequences of enforcing a truthful catagorization is that the source of the content needs to be identifiable so that if later the content turns out to be mislabeled or illegal appropriate action can be taken. So you need some universal systems: a credential system, a payment system, and auditing systems. To establish all three of these systems would not only need to vault some serious technological hurdles but would also take some considerable political will to be established into Law. I do believe the Internet twenty years from now will not be the Wild West it is now - scary results of an actual implementation of a complete system in this vein would be like a Deep Space Nine episode where Quark asks a Cardasian contact to look up a product for him on Cardasian networks and the search triggers an alert where the contact is basically immediately sentenced to lifelong incarceration merely for looking for the search term but I'm hoping in any eventual system that civilian groups would oversee most auditing and only truly heinous material - and the identities of those who posted them - would be forwarded to government.
Backbone routers. And its not purely a technological solution, it would take legislation creating standardized: credentials (to purchase or acquire), registries (to associate who put what on the 'net and what license it uses), and enforcement/auditing software to make sure everything was running smoothly. It's basically taking the 'Wild West' out of the Internet and moving it towards something that would probably end up being more Gibson-esque where most people use the 'net according to the built in Laws while some people will still connect using 'illegal' rigs.
...'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'...
I know how to stop it but no-one heres going to like it. Taking a page from Snow Crash where the network routers police traffic according to democratically arrived at laws, Internet protocols should be regulated in such a way that the network itself enforces distribution licenses. You download you're Linux iso's for free because thats the license in appropriate field of the Bit-Torrent 2009 protocol while material requiring payment has it automatically debited from your account on download, again depending on whats in the license field of the torrent. Regulating the network itself in a way that all licenses from free to ad-supported to subscription to purchase are enforced where it would be difficult to circumvent them (on the network not your computer) would ease issues in other areas that suck because of the lack of regulation of the network: having to put up with the likes of copy-protection on our computers and various nasties (think of the children being exploited) being filtered at the network level. The Internet is not a new phenomenom that magically facilitates people circumventing payment based licenses: before it was the SneakerNet but now that the Internet is a reality, it has become the tool of choice to distribute things beyond their intended audiences.
And just a quick word to people who think all bits should be free: If someone wants to give it away for free then more power to them *but* in our economic framework it takes effort to organize all the bits in software and you paying the publisher then them paying their employees then the employees paying their bills is a great way to spread the effort around. Entertainment is hard to make for free right now - operating systems are different, they're infrastructure and there are more obvious benefits to cooperation in them.
If the telecoms are granted immunity by the government then the USA will no longer be under the rule of law. If it comes to pass, some people or organizations will be above the law and in my opinion that is not what the US should be about. What's next Bush, dictator for life?!?
I have exactly one terabyte of HD space - that much was unimaginable to me only a few short years ago. Remember when Windows 95 only used somewhere around the neighborhood of 50MB? With todays OS storage requirements sitting around one GB it's not unimaginable anymore that someday the OS alone will be a terabyte (although I can't imagine what it would contain) and overall hard drives will be truly unimaginable sizes by todays standards.
If I remember correctly isn't the XO a linux based device?? And isn't the SimCity a Windows (or DOS) binary? Are they going to be running it in dosbox or cedega or something?? Anyone know for sure?
There are many good reasons for this and many equally good against. Sidestepping the whole issue all I have to say is that it sends a chill down my spine for a very simple reason: Its a step towards totalitarianism. Each little step may be small but theres a lot of future ahead to make up for that.
I never implied the Democrats would be any better, what I'm advocating is making the activities of government transparent. That way you can root out the bastards who are actively - even if they don't realize it - working against fundamental human interests. That's something that cuts across all parties and doesn't seem to be on the radar for either.
The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task. -- Nietzsche
I love Slashdots almost prescient ability to provide a fortune that bears on the topic. The US is going into the toilet, Bush's war needs to be paid for and that money is going to be coming from US' citizens children for quite some time to come. The government of the US exists within a moral vacuum, nobody asks if something is "right" they just ask if its "legal". From the Patriot Act denying first ammendment rights (you can't tell anyone - even your lawyer or a judge - if you've been served under that act effectively cutting due process out of the loop) to what is torture, waterboarding. I think they should all be lined up against a wall and shot. This would be satisfying but would not likely result in any improvements so something else must be done. The only thing I can think of that has any hope of leading us out of the quagmire is demanding full transparency out of government. So, no "secret" subpeonas, no "secret" detentions, no "secret" trials, no "secret" interrogation techniques, no secrets because thats where evil hides.
Fuck Bush. I think he's leading a great nation into ruin.
Based on nothing more than pure speculation, I believe the missing mass of the Universe is tucked away in all those little tiny extra dimensions at the planck scale of things.
Of course I'm wrong but hey - this is Slashdot.
With software being in it's infancy relatively compared to other engineering disciplines, I can't wait to see what an OS is going to look like even twenty years from now... much less fifty.
I thought AmigaOS was the sh*t way back when so already I'm impressed even with bugs.
I'm stunned that in the first place a system that could not be 100% audited was allowed to be used in the first place! Seriously, even though politicians don't seem to give a damn what you think the voting process is supposed to be a key-stone of democracy. If you can't trust the ballots you can't trust the system. It's fundamental.
Thanks for the offer, however I *really* have tried everything - check out the link in my other reply in this thread: it covers pretty much everything.:(
I have a dual-core and I have tried setting processor affinity. I've also used imagecfg.exe to make the affinity permanent but still to no avail. I've used an unwrapper for the copy protection. I've downloaded the "xp-fixed" exe's but they just have the affinity set in them. Thank you for the tip I really wish it would work on my machine but I guess I can't expect miracles from a game thats almost a decade old.
Through the Looking Glass has a comprehensive forum of things to try to get SS2 working but unfortunately none of it has worked for me.
I still have the disc and I'd play it again in a heartbeat if it would just run on a modern system - I've tried everything. With patience, my media will hopefully be useful again someday once the Open Dark Engine reaches maturity.
I think America needs more "terrorists" or as I like to call them: patriots.
Re:Organizing the search space...
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
Most of the problems that they thought would be easy in the early days instead turned out to be the most difficult. Walking, vision, hearing - very difficult because they're based on pattern manipulation. The problems they thought would be more challenging such as algorithm proving (an example would be Eurisko) turned out to be much easier to implement in a machine. I believe solving go would be equivalent to solving machine intelligence because the qualities needed to play go effectively are defined by the missing pieces in our current understanding of intelligence.
Re:Organizing the search space...
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
The difference is that it is much more difficult to measure whether or not a move is "good" or "bad" in go.
Organizing the search space...
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's a running joke that in artificial intelligence that to solve a problem you almost have to know the answer already. When you consider all the possible ways to be intelligent as a search space, the process of evolution has "narrowed down" what it is "almost" like to be a human and we as individuals fine-tune the rest of the answer starting from birth. The human mind is a remarkable pattern processing machine and the day a computer can play go against a human master and win is the day we truly understand how to replicate sentience in a machine.
The only reason I support even some software patents is the cases where the patent is truly un-obvious and took a significant effort to research it. I agree that math (which in essence all of computing is) should not be patentable but rather the effort it takes to find the solution should have some reward attached to it.
I think it boils down to the issue of whether or not you believe software should be patentable. Without patents, the codecs would only have copyright to support exclusive use and that scenario is easily overcome by clean-room reverse engineering and re-implementation. However, once patents enter the picture then it doesn't matter how you re-implement the software, you are still infringing.
I personally believe that algorithms should be patentable. Supporting this I believe that all software fundamentally represents a particular organization of logic gates, so in effect software represents an abstract machine and machines are patentable. However I do not support patent-ability for design patterns or business processes as I believe the difference between algorithms and patterns and processes is that algorithms are hard to create while patterns and processes often have an obvious implementation that anyone in the field could independently come up with.
What do you think?
Maybe I should have used a better example - but HTML formatting is the default. Try to italicize with text formatting. This is coming from someone who used SuSE as my only operating system for almost a year and almost cried after trying an apt-get based system (Ubuntu) because installing software was not a walk through hell anymore. Then there's the setting I always have to make to my x.conf file: changing the mouse type from PS/2 to IMPS/2 to get my mouse wheel to work. And I hear Ubuntu is finally going to include a "safe" mode for when X gibbles itself. Without being a guru being dumped to a command shell on boot usually meant a reinstall for me - I don't know which line to change or even which file to edit with emacs. And I don't know how to use emacs either - to this day when I have to use a console editor I use nano. So the example may not have been the best but hopefully constructive criticism of this kind I hope will lead to step-by-step improvements to FOSS so that one day (hopefully soon;) "it" will be ready.
It isn't. No matter how you try to cut it - geekiness is ingrained into the culture.
Look! This text is on a different line.
I used <br> tags.
Slashdotters are so used to doing things in a technical way that they disregard the very real usability issues that surround Open Source. If I put text on a different line in this textbox I should not have to know or care about the br tag. This is FOSS's greatest barrier to adoption in a nutshell.
Slashdot Mirror
Technological *and* social issues would have to be addressed, cryptography used to be classified as a munition at one time in the US: Its use in the future could be curtailed to specific situations only. This would be part of the social aspects to be addressed.
I'm not even sure if such a system would be desirable, I'm only saying it would be plausible.
Piracy is a social problem *and* a technical problem so a solution that pleases everyone (probably excepting RMS) and actually works would need measures in both. It would not be a simple solution but I believe that all the measures can be arranged around a common point: licenses must be obeyed. Everything going onto the Internet should be catagorized into a specific spot on the license spectrum. Free like GNU/Linux, commercial like games, and so on. The consequences of enforcing a truthful catagorization is that the source of the content needs to be identifiable so that if later the content turns out to be mislabeled or illegal appropriate action can be taken. So you need some universal systems: a credential system, a payment system, and auditing systems. To establish all three of these systems would not only need to vault some serious technological hurdles but would also take some considerable political will to be established into Law. I do believe the Internet twenty years from now will not be the Wild West it is now - scary results of an actual implementation of a complete system in this vein would be like a Deep Space Nine episode where Quark asks a Cardasian contact to look up a product for him on Cardasian networks and the search triggers an alert where the contact is basically immediately sentenced to lifelong incarceration merely for looking for the search term but I'm hoping in any eventual system that civilian groups would oversee most auditing and only truly heinous material - and the identities of those who posted them - would be forwarded to government.
Backbone routers. And its not purely a technological solution, it would take legislation creating standardized: credentials (to purchase or acquire), registries (to associate who put what on the 'net and what license it uses), and enforcement/auditing software to make sure everything was running smoothly. It's basically taking the 'Wild West' out of the Internet and moving it towards something that would probably end up being more Gibson-esque where most people use the 'net according to the built in Laws while some people will still connect using 'illegal' rigs.
...'It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it.'...
I know how to stop it but no-one heres going to like it. Taking a page from Snow Crash where the network routers police traffic according to democratically arrived at laws, Internet protocols should be regulated in such a way that the network itself enforces distribution licenses. You download you're Linux iso's for free because thats the license in appropriate field of the Bit-Torrent 2009 protocol while material requiring payment has it automatically debited from your account on download, again depending on whats in the license field of the torrent. Regulating the network itself in a way that all licenses from free to ad-supported to subscription to purchase are enforced where it would be difficult to circumvent them (on the network not your computer) would ease issues in other areas that suck because of the lack of regulation of the network: having to put up with the likes of copy-protection on our computers and various nasties (think of the children being exploited) being filtered at the network level. The Internet is not a new phenomenom that magically facilitates people circumventing payment based licenses: before it was the SneakerNet but now that the Internet is a reality, it has become the tool of choice to distribute things beyond their intended audiences.
And just a quick word to people who think all bits should be free: If someone wants to give it away for free then more power to them *but* in our economic framework it takes effort to organize all the bits in software and you paying the publisher then them paying their employees then the employees paying their bills is a great way to spread the effort around. Entertainment is hard to make for free right now - operating systems are different, they're infrastructure and there are more obvious benefits to cooperation in them.
If the telecoms are granted immunity by the government then the USA will no longer be under the rule of law. If it comes to pass, some people or organizations will be above the law and in my opinion that is not what the US should be about. What's next Bush, dictator for life?!?
I have exactly one terabyte of HD space - that much was unimaginable to me only a few short years ago. Remember when Windows 95 only used somewhere around the neighborhood of 50MB? With todays OS storage requirements sitting around one GB it's not unimaginable anymore that someday the OS alone will be a terabyte (although I can't imagine what it would contain) and overall hard drives will be truly unimaginable sizes by todays standards.
Sorry! :) I guess I've been posting to /. way too much!
If I remember correctly isn't the XO a linux based device?? And isn't the SimCity a Windows (or DOS) binary? Are they going to be running it in dosbox or cedega or something?? Anyone know for sure?
There are many good reasons for this and many equally good against. Sidestepping the whole issue all I have to say is that it sends a chill down my spine for a very simple reason: Its a step towards totalitarianism. Each little step may be small but theres a lot of future ahead to make up for that.
I never implied the Democrats would be any better, what I'm advocating is making the activities of government transparent. That way you can root out the bastards who are actively - even if they don't realize it - working against fundamental human interests. That's something that cuts across all parties and doesn't seem to be on the radar for either.
The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity. To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task. -- Nietzsche
I love Slashdots almost prescient ability to provide a fortune that bears on the topic. The US is going into the toilet, Bush's war needs to be paid for and that money is going to be coming from US' citizens children for quite some time to come. The government of the US exists within a moral vacuum, nobody asks if something is "right" they just ask if its "legal". From the Patriot Act denying first ammendment rights (you can't tell anyone - even your lawyer or a judge - if you've been served under that act effectively cutting due process out of the loop) to what is torture, waterboarding. I think they should all be lined up against a wall and shot. This would be satisfying but would not likely result in any improvements so something else must be done. The only thing I can think of that has any hope of leading us out of the quagmire is demanding full transparency out of government. So, no "secret" subpeonas, no "secret" detentions, no "secret" trials, no "secret" interrogation techniques, no secrets because thats where evil hides.
Fuck Bush. I think he's leading a great nation into ruin.
Based on nothing more than pure speculation, I believe the missing mass of the Universe is tucked away in all those little tiny extra dimensions at the planck scale of things.
Of course I'm wrong but hey - this is Slashdot.
With software being in it's infancy relatively compared to other engineering disciplines, I can't wait to see what an OS is going to look like even twenty years from now... much less fifty.
I thought AmigaOS was the sh*t way back when so already I'm impressed even with bugs.
I'm stunned that in the first place a system that could not be 100% audited was allowed to be used in the first place! Seriously, even though politicians don't seem to give a damn what you think the voting process is supposed to be a key-stone of democracy. If you can't trust the ballots you can't trust the system. It's fundamental.
Thanks for the offer, however I *really* have tried everything - check out the link in my other reply in this thread: it covers pretty much everything. :(
I have a dual-core and I have tried setting processor affinity. I've also used imagecfg.exe to make the affinity permanent but still to no avail. I've used an unwrapper for the copy protection. I've downloaded the "xp-fixed" exe's but they just have the affinity set in them. Thank you for the tip I really wish it would work on my machine but I guess I can't expect miracles from a game thats almost a decade old.
Through the Looking Glass has a comprehensive forum of things to try to get SS2 working but unfortunately none of it has worked for me.
I still have the disc and I'd play it again in a heartbeat if it would just run on a modern system - I've tried everything. With patience, my media will hopefully be useful again someday once the Open Dark Engine reaches maturity.
I think America needs more "terrorists" or as I like to call them: patriots.
Most of the problems that they thought would be easy in the early days instead turned out to be the most difficult. Walking, vision, hearing - very difficult because they're based on pattern manipulation. The problems they thought would be more challenging such as algorithm proving (an example would be Eurisko) turned out to be much easier to implement in a machine. I believe solving go would be equivalent to solving machine intelligence because the qualities needed to play go effectively are defined by the missing pieces in our current understanding of intelligence.
The difference is that it is much more difficult to measure whether or not a move is "good" or "bad" in go.
It's a running joke that in artificial intelligence that to solve a problem you almost have to know the answer already. When you consider all the possible ways to be intelligent as a search space, the process of evolution has "narrowed down" what it is "almost" like to be a human and we as individuals fine-tune the rest of the answer starting from birth. The human mind is a remarkable pattern processing machine and the day a computer can play go against a human master and win is the day we truly understand how to replicate sentience in a machine.
The only reason I support even some software patents is the cases where the patent is truly un-obvious and took a significant effort to research it. I agree that math (which in essence all of computing is) should not be patentable but rather the effort it takes to find the solution should have some reward attached to it.
I think it boils down to the issue of whether or not you believe software should be patentable. Without patents, the codecs would only have copyright to support exclusive use and that scenario is easily overcome by clean-room reverse engineering and re-implementation. However, once patents enter the picture then it doesn't matter how you re-implement the software, you are still infringing.
I personally believe that algorithms should be patentable. Supporting this I believe that all software fundamentally represents a particular organization of logic gates, so in effect software represents an abstract machine and machines are patentable. However I do not support patent-ability for design patterns or business processes as I believe the difference between algorithms and patterns and processes is that algorithms are hard to create while patterns and processes often have an obvious implementation that anyone in the field could independently come up with.
What do you think?
Maybe I should have used a better example - but HTML formatting is the default. Try to italicize with text formatting. This is coming from someone who used SuSE as my only operating system for almost a year and almost cried after trying an apt-get based system (Ubuntu) because installing software was not a walk through hell anymore. Then there's the setting I always have to make to my x.conf file: changing the mouse type from PS/2 to IMPS/2 to get my mouse wheel to work. And I hear Ubuntu is finally going to include a "safe" mode for when X gibbles itself. Without being a guru being dumped to a command shell on boot usually meant a reinstall for me - I don't know which line to change or even which file to edit with emacs. And I don't know how to use emacs either - to this day when I have to use a console editor I use nano. So the example may not have been the best but hopefully constructive criticism of this kind I hope will lead to step-by-step improvements to FOSS so that one day (hopefully soon ;) "it" will be ready.
It isn't. No matter how you try to cut it - geekiness is ingrained into the culture.
Look! This text is on a different line.
I used <br> tags.
Slashdotters are so used to doing things in a technical way that they disregard the very real usability issues that surround Open Source. If I put text on a different line in this textbox I should not have to know or care about the br tag. This is FOSS's greatest barrier to adoption in a nutshell.