/. needs a 'nitpick' filter (like the repetitive garbage character filter) to block out embarrasing ommissions such as this before they get out of hand.
Ok, so why are most of the BIG guys not doing it? Because they make exceptional money....
Oh, you're absolutely right - none of these people are going to make a move before they have to. At the very least, their agents will see to that. If I were U2, however, I'd have to wonder if getting $2 per CD (I expect their royalty is higher than average) is better than the $5 per CD i could make selling them from a web site for $10. At the very least, I'd run the numbers and try it out - maybe on a special release EP or throwaway "greatest hits live" to see what happens.
I mean, if it didn't work, they could tell everyone it sucked and go right back to selling CDs the old way, right?
They already do. MTV, at least, seems to use those schedules as a way to trick people into recording the wrong show.
Now that you mention it, I actually noticed that and figured it was just empty-v being, well, empty-v. You know -- probably too busy having inter-office sex orgies to bother updating the schedule.
[sigh]
Things just haven't been the same since they stopped running Beavis and Butthead.
This is an absolutely, completely, totally ---[R0XX0RZ]--- Salon article. Why - because of outstanding analysis and information therein about RIAA price gouging? No. Because even though *we* are all aware of the problems with the RIAA's anti-p2p, pro-DRM positions, my wife isn't.
This article explains to HER that:
> $16 of the $18 she's spends on a CD is record company profit.
Prices on CDs should be going down, not up.
A $5 CD sold direct to the consumer makes almost double the profit for the artist.
The positions of the RIAA on P2P and DRM are likely motivated by greed, not survival.
In my view, it's a LOT more important *where* this article is than *what* it actually says.
I'd love to see a big name (Madonna, U2, N'Sync, etc.) use the net to direct-market a low cost original CD just to confirm for everyone that the RIAA is obsolete. Likely, however, it'll go the other way - one of these 'unknowns' is going to hit it big and promote the hell out of this approach.
Does anyone know how Tivo and SonicBlue get the master TV programming schedules from the networks? NOTE: I'm not asking how *my* Tivo gets the schedule from Tivo central, but how Tivo central gets them from the TV networks. Are they sent out from the networks electronically using standard protocols as soon as the schedule is set or do the Tivo guys go out and buy the TV Guide every week and type 'em all in by hand? For that matter how does TV Guide get them?
The reason I ask is that it seems to me that TV schedules function in an analagous fashion with DNS and IP addresses for web sites. Namely, if my Tivo doesn't know when the Simpsons is on, it can't record it for me. Is there any possibility the networks could try to sabotage PVRs by restricting access to their schedules?
TV and radio advertising were based on 'sponsorship', not ads. Instead of a 22 minute show bookended and broken up by commercials, we had the "Alka-Seltzer Variety Hour" brought to you by "Alka-Seltzer" with the fizz that says "relief".
We'll probably be back where we started with similar sorts of corporate sponsorship in a few years. I don't really think it would be so bad, mostly I just flip channels during commercial breaks anyway looking for cooler commercials to watch than the ones paying for the show I'm watching.
Remember, in our universe, "Annoyance" is a conserved quantity - those wishing to advertise will certainly find ways to do so.
Now that the cat is out of the bag that MSSQL is "in play" as a target, I wonder if sealing 1433 and the sa password are enough to head off future attacks.
The linked articles explain how the worm replicates by essentially logging on as an SQL client and storing a copy of itself in the database. Ingenious, but relatively easy to defend. However, couldn't future versions infect any-old-user's PC using standard email/windows virus techniques and then look for an ODBC connection which would hopefully, by now, be configured with a no-longer-blank sa password to seed a new infection? It might even hit more systems because it gets you inside the firewall that closed off 1433?
In other words, is all the/. schadenfreude about dumb-ass sysadmins not setting the 'sa' password eventually going to be for naught? The problem is still MS's poorly thought-out standard of mixing code with data...
If your accounting software uses MSSQL as a backend and was installed by accounting consultants, you probably need to pay special attention to this alert. Odds are, they didn't set an sa password when it was installed either -- mine wasn't.
Actually, quantum physics does imply there are a finite number of states. Time, space, energy, motion, even Heisenberg's uncertainty are all descreet, quantisized values.
We thus have a system with an upper and lower limit on where the electron can be at any moment, and what vectors it may have. This means there is a finite number of possible states that can exist, and while that number is impossibly huge to contemplate, it is not infinite.
But 'discrete' and 'finite' and 'bounded' are not the same thing.
Counterexample: Consider the available electron energy states of Hydrogen. Discrete? Yes. Bounded? Yes. Finite? No - the energy levels (n>0) go like -1/n^2. COUNTABLY infinite, but definitely infinite. The electron can always be pushed into your favorite higher energy state (asymptotically approaching the ionization energy) by absorbing a photon of the right frequency.
The whole Zeosync thing's shady and doesn't quite make sense, which is of course why they've gotten flack about it.
Really, this doesn't even *sound* like a "technical BS" math explanation - it *sounds* like those people who try to explain the mysterious power of pyramids using geomery or prove the tenets of religion using "science" -- it's math definitions for about two lines, and then the proofs run around in obfuscated circles too convoluted to unravel.
I don't even agree that Zeosync gets the statement of the pigeonhole principle correct as this interpretation completely misses both the definition of a 'pigeonhole' and the reason it's important to the principle in the first place. Mostly, what bothers me is that it sounds like (I'm taking a guess - this 'technical' explanation is/really/ convoluted) their solution to add a bunch of extra dimensions to the space that dilute the data, then you compress that. In other words,
[data compressable by factor of 2]
+ [a bunch of extra unneccesary zeros]
= [new data compressable by factor of 100]
They already paid tax on it. In the US of A, tax is levied on income, not assets. That's why it's called "Income Tax". Now, unless there was some funny monkey business going on with their profit/loss, and they didn't report all of their revenue to the IRS gestapo, that's 40 bil after tax.
IANAA, but corps in the US don't pay 'income tax' either, they pay tax on capital gains (profit) and inventory. Of course this would accumulate over time into a cash balance, making your statement correct for essentially different reasons. (BTW, this taxing of profits is why companies with profit left over at end of the fiscal year will blow it on "unneccesary" stuff rather than let it sit in a savings account. "Inventory clearance" sales in the retail sector operate on the same principle - you don't have to pay tax on it if it isn't in your warehouse on inventory day.)
Shoot, isn't that one of the reasons why corps will pay dividends at EOY anyway? Perhaps the more interesting question to ask is why was MS's accountants willing to pay tax on the profit from CG rather than hide it? It must be nice to make money so fast you can't spend it all - at the very least, they could have dumped some of it on lobbyists and settled the antitrust suit the first time around, but I guess they were too busy making $$ to notice that it would be a problem.
There's a great funny and subtle scene in the movie "L.A. Story" with Steve Martin where he's programming his new voice-activated telephone/answering machine....
SM: "Dial Mom."
Phone:....
SM: "Dial MOM."
Phone:....
SM: "Dial... MOM!"
Phone: bink.bonk.beep.beep.boop.beep.bonk.boop
Phone: ring..... ring....
Phone: "Hello, this is Domino's, would you like take out or delivery?"
You know, you shouldn't use the F-word so much -- your liberal/socialistic bent is showing.;)
About the 'illegal stripping of 100,000 voters of the rights...', the supreme court halted the vote because it did not recount the entire state and thus treated voters in different counties differently.
Ironically, that's the one scenario where Gore might have won.
So how come VoterMarch hasn't been updated in over a year? The site is owned by Maybe this is why.... (NOTE- it's from a different Posner than the one who runs VoterMarch.)
Cool, but this is the guy I was actually talking about - he was featured on a TV show a few years ago, I don't remember which one. Note that Boggs never tried to pass of his hand-drawn bills as authentic money, that's why he calls buying things with them 'transactions'. Yeah, I know. Apparently the court didn't buy it either.;)
There it a push in the US to standardize the election process to try to head off the kind of thing that happened in Florida in the US Presidential election of 2000. I don't know how long Germany has used a standard voting system or whether they've done it - to this point - US style, but I anticipate a lot of 1337 s1ah5d07 p0s73X0ring along the lines of 'we should do that too, 'cause Florida 2000 sucked!' I want to head off as much of that as possible.
The US Forefathers were smart - they intentionally left the specific details of how to collect the vote and tally the results to the states, and ultimately, the local county districts. They weren't concerned as much about regional cultural and financial differences as much as they were concerned about the integrity of the election process.
If I wanted to rig an election in the US, I would have to rig it ONE COUNTY AT A TIME, because each election office makes their own choice how to operate on the voting day in question.
With a centralized, standard voting system like Germany's open source plan, I would just have to know how to rig one system.
The Florida election worked exactly as it should have - the election was just really close. It sucks that we couldn't just call the election at 10PM and go to bed, but you know what? Your vote *does* matter.
Kinda like the guy that 'draws' $20 bills and trades them to people in exchange for goods & services, or the urban ledgend about the illustration artist who send a postcard resume to a prospective employer that simply stated, "Examine the stamp" (which was, of course, hand drawn). It's not high art in the classic sense, but it requires more skill than Madonna's last twelve albums and a hell of a lot more creativity.
Since the mid-nineties, HP's engineers in the PC and printer divisions have had *way* too much free time to devote to developing unneeded solutions to monumentally non-problems. Compaq isn't any better (you want to load the BIOS setup program from *WHERE*?), but I've wrestled too many idiotic HP driver install procedures and weird motherboard over-engineering (in the bad way) design 'issues' to have any real sympathy for them. Their printers are still pretty good hardware for the most part, but I use the old embedded MS-written LJ5 series drivers because HP refuses to understand that their drivers cause STOP 50 errors on Citrix servers and most of the time, I can live without the extra features the new drivers would provide. (Don't even get me started on the stupid trend they started with the "printer-monitoring" software for their inkjet printers!) I can understand that they need to try to differentiate their products, but sheesh -- go play some golf or something!
I believe this is also why the paperless office hasn't evolved like we expected: Computers are great at keeping information current, but previous versions of the info are too easily discarded because data is centrally stored (everyone works on the SAME copy) and the electrons are easily erased and reused. Business really does need to track all those little changes in the middle because they also tell a story about how their documents evolve, and therefore the decisions that were made, and ultimately how their organization works.
I'm not sure I completely agree with you because the law (even though it can be very specific) still provides for a human judge and/or jury to *evaluate* the material and evidence involved considering the intent of the defendant. In other words, the law would consider you argumentative and nitpicky, despite the fact that you are, techinically, correct. (If a court were to allow that sort of argument, you'd have trouble proving anyone does anything...)
However, I've been thinking about this kind of stuff since the CDA was passed (1996?) and since it's a lot of fun to think about, here's my $2E-02 contribution...
A few years ago I came across a Playstation game at a video store. It was largely unpopular, I guess, because I only read the box, I didn't play it, I haven't seen it since and the name of it always escapes me. It was kinda like Pokemon in that it featured battling monsters, but it was unique because not only could you use the pre-generated monsters included on the game CD, but you could drop your own *MUSIC* CDs in the your PS and it would NON-RANDOMLY generate monsters using the song data to give them their appearence and abilities.
Now what if that playstation game showed you generated pr0n animations extracted from the CD data? Is the song illegal? What if we came up with a file that if you open it using a spreadsheet program, it contains my personal checking account history; however, if you take that same file and open it in an image viewer, you get pr0n? One file, two interpretations: one of them completely legitimate, the other could get you in a lot of trouble.
The point is that the data file and the application that 'edits' that file have to be considered together as a whole. A data file on its own is just a number, but it's the instructions the computer is fed by the application based on the data that makes it interesting for us as users. I'm pretty sure that, with a little massaging, you could almost get a 'proof of the existence of God', or at least a definition of intelligence out of the fact that of all the possible numbers you can make out of 2^n binary digits, humans seem to continually find and re-use a very small subset of them that are interesting to us. Sorta like the rational and irrational numbers.
I think the key issue here is something nobody in the courts has even alluded to understanding: We need to figure out exactly what 'information' is; that is what makes one bit-pattern ok and another not?
SF doesn't make bestseller lists for the same reason SF/Fantasy doesn't win Oscars and Blockbuster *HAS* *NO* science fiction section (it's distributed through the other sections - mostly 'action'.) Face it, despite the 'geek chic' thing we keep hearing about on TechTV, we're still looked upon with disdain by those who can't do math.
Now, by my count, of the top 25 grossing US pictures of all time:
2 comedy...
3 drama...
5 cartoon/family...
SIXTEEN -- SIX-FSCKing-TEEN fit in the SF/Fantasy category.(though Twister might count as a comedy...)
Of course, you can divy 'em up however you want, but my point here should be crystal clear. I'm *NOT* gonna say this again.
BTW, by my count - for those that are interested...
3 movies rated R
4 movies rated PG13
THIRTEEN movies rated PG
2 movies rated G
Now, explain to me why Hollywood keeps doping films with gratuitous sex, violence & language that does nothing to advance the story. My guess is that they're more interested in impressing their party-friends and pushing a social agenda than making decent films. I believe Walt Disney used to say he made family films because "Why sell two tickets when you can sell four?" Hollywood - sheesh. What a bunch of morons.
(Sorry to rant so far OT, but my car ran out of gas on the way to the store tonight, and BP DOESN'T HAVE GAS CANS for loan, rent or buy; so I had to walk to Sheetz Fuel Mart in the rain and buy one. By the time I finally got to the store, it had just closed. What a night -- I'm such an idiot!)
I suspect that the distributions of answers will be more informative than the answers themselves.
Dead on - nice.
Correlations can do some nasty things to you.
[grin]
For example:
Alternative medicine
Psychic hotlines, Syliva Browne and the National Enquirer
Advertising
USA Today's 'science' section
Every other mainstream publications 'science' sections for that matter
Medical journals - even the refereed ones sometimes (see the part about the latest miracle food that decreases cancer risk)
Most of what the EPA does
The Green Lobby - you know, global warming, dioxin, alar and such...
I could go on....
Clifford Stoll said this a lot better than I could. We would be better off removing the distraction of computers from the schools and teaching them 1337 4n41y71c 7h1nX0r1n9 5k1llz instead. You know, basic stuff like "correlation != causality". If I had a million billion trillion dollars for lawyers, I'd put up a web page discrediting bogus thinking ever-where and take up the occupation of teaching people how to make lawyers look dumb.
Correlate which way the steering wheel is pointed with whether you are too far left or right in your lane. All it takes is a feedback system with something aproximating intelligence and your very good model can get things backwards.
Yeah! what we need is a completely LINEAR universe!:)
Of course, there's the other way it could swing too...with malware-authors using some kind of legal argument against anti-malware programs like Ad-Aware...I wouldn't put it past them to call it a "Circumvention Device" or somesuch under the DMCA, and attempt to have it banned, although I can't see anything short of a huge bribe convincing any reasonable judge of the validity of such an argument.
How close are we, for that matter, to some of these bozos putting a line in their EULA stating "you may not uninstall this software or reformat your HD" and sealing the uninstaller with a DMCA-enforcable mechanism, so that the software can't be uninstalled w/o violating the DMCA?
The key here is a matter of scale. The mesoscale type systems are extremely hard to model, but you take a global system (long wave patterns), and you will have a much better time of modeling them. How? You throw out the small scale stuff like your butterfly and such. On a global scale, something like that would quickly disappear into the larger scale.
On the other hand, the point of nonlinear dynamics is that these effects do NOT get damped out on a larger scale. What you are describing is LINEAR behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, Ok, you got me. Touche'.
/. needs a 'nitpick' filter (like the repetitive garbage character filter) to block out embarrasing ommissions such as this before they get out of hand.
Ok, so why are most of the BIG guys not doing it? Because they make exceptional money....
Oh, you're absolutely right - none of these people are going to make a move before they have to. At the very least, their agents will see to that. If I were U2, however, I'd have to wonder if getting $2 per CD (I expect their royalty is higher than average) is better than the $5 per CD i could make selling them from a web site for $10. At the very least, I'd run the numbers and try it out - maybe on a special release EP or throwaway "greatest hits live" to see what happens.
I mean, if it didn't work, they could tell everyone it sucked and go right back to selling CDs the old way, right?
They already do. MTV, at least, seems to use those schedules as a way to trick people into recording the wrong show.
Now that you mention it, I actually noticed that and figured it was just empty-v being, well, empty-v. You know -- probably too busy having inter-office sex orgies to bother updating the schedule.
[sigh]
Things just haven't been the same since they stopped running Beavis and Butthead.
This article explains to HER that:
> $16 of the $18 she's spends on a CD is record company profit.
Prices on CDs should be going down, not up.
A $5 CD sold direct to the consumer makes almost double the profit for the artist.
The positions of the RIAA on P2P and DRM are likely motivated by greed, not survival.
In my view, it's a LOT more important *where* this article is than *what* it actually says.
I'd love to see a big name (Madonna, U2, N'Sync, etc.) use the net to direct-market a low cost original CD just to confirm for everyone that the RIAA is obsolete. Likely, however, it'll go the other way - one of these 'unknowns' is going to hit it big and promote the hell out of this approach.
Does anyone know how Tivo and SonicBlue get the master TV programming schedules from the networks? NOTE: I'm not asking how *my* Tivo gets the schedule from Tivo central, but how Tivo central gets them from the TV networks. Are they sent out from the networks electronically using standard protocols as soon as the schedule is set or do the Tivo guys go out and buy the TV Guide every week and type 'em all in by hand? For that matter how does TV Guide get them?
The reason I ask is that it seems to me that TV schedules function in an analagous fashion with DNS and IP addresses for web sites. Namely, if my Tivo doesn't know when the Simpsons is on, it can't record it for me. Is there any possibility the networks could try to sabotage PVRs by restricting access to their schedules?
TV and radio advertising were based on 'sponsorship', not ads. Instead of a 22 minute show bookended and broken up by commercials, we had the "Alka-Seltzer Variety Hour" brought to you by "Alka-Seltzer" with the fizz that says "relief".
We'll probably be back where we started with similar sorts of corporate sponsorship in a few years. I don't really think it would be so bad, mostly I just flip channels during commercial breaks anyway looking for cooler commercials to watch than the ones paying for the show I'm watching.
Remember, in our universe, "Annoyance" is a conserved quantity - those wishing to advertise will certainly find ways to do so.
here's a topic for further discussion....
/. schadenfreude about dumb-ass sysadmins not setting the 'sa' password eventually going to be for naught? The problem is still MS's poorly thought-out standard of mixing code with data...
Now that the cat is out of the bag that MSSQL is "in play" as a target, I wonder if sealing 1433 and the sa password are enough to head off future attacks.
The linked articles explain how the worm replicates by essentially logging on as an SQL client and storing a copy of itself in the database. Ingenious, but relatively easy to defend. However, couldn't future versions infect any-old-user's PC using standard email/windows virus techniques and then look for an ODBC connection which would hopefully, by now, be configured with a no-longer-blank sa password to seed a new infection? It might even hit more systems because it gets you inside the firewall that closed off 1433?
In other words, is all the
If your accounting software uses MSSQL as a backend and was installed by accounting consultants, you probably need to pay special attention to this alert. Odds are, they didn't set an sa password when it was installed either -- mine wasn't.
I'm bored, so I'm going to keep you honest. :)
Actually, quantum physics does imply there are a finite number of states. Time, space, energy, motion, even Heisenberg's uncertainty are all descreet, quantisized values.
We thus have a system with an upper and lower limit on where the electron can be at any moment, and what vectors it may have. This means there is a finite number of possible states that can exist, and while that number is impossibly huge to contemplate, it is not infinite.
But 'discrete' and 'finite' and 'bounded' are not the same thing.
Counterexample: Consider the available electron energy states of Hydrogen. Discrete? Yes. Bounded? Yes. Finite? No - the energy levels (n>0) go like -1/n^2. COUNTABLY infinite, but definitely infinite. The electron can always be pushed into your favorite higher energy state (asymptotically approaching the ionization energy) by absorbing a photon of the right frequency.
The whole Zeosync thing's shady and doesn't quite make sense, which is of course why they've gotten flack about it.
/really/ convoluted) their solution to add a bunch of extra dimensions to the space that dilute the data, then you compress that. In other words,
Really, this doesn't even *sound* like a "technical BS" math explanation - it *sounds* like those people who try to explain the mysterious power of pyramids using geomery or prove the tenets of religion using "science" -- it's math definitions for about two lines, and then the proofs run around in obfuscated circles too convoluted to unravel.
I don't even agree that Zeosync gets the statement of the pigeonhole principle correct as this interpretation completely misses both the definition of a 'pigeonhole' and the reason it's important to the principle in the first place. Mostly, what bothers me is that it sounds like (I'm taking a guess - this 'technical' explanation is
[data compressable by factor of 2]
+ [a bunch of extra unneccesary zeros]
= [new data compressable by factor of 100]
What am I missing?
They already paid tax on it. In the US of A, tax is levied on income, not assets. That's why it's called "Income Tax". Now, unless there was some funny monkey business going on with their profit/loss, and they didn't report all of their revenue to the IRS gestapo, that's 40 bil after tax.
IANAA, but corps in the US don't pay 'income tax' either, they pay tax on capital gains (profit) and inventory. Of course this would accumulate over time into a cash balance, making your statement correct for essentially different reasons. (BTW, this taxing of profits is why companies with profit left over at end of the fiscal year will blow it on "unneccesary" stuff rather than let it sit in a savings account. "Inventory clearance" sales in the retail sector operate on the same principle - you don't have to pay tax on it if it isn't in your warehouse on inventory day.)
Shoot, isn't that one of the reasons why corps will pay dividends at EOY anyway? Perhaps the more interesting question to ask is why was MS's accountants willing to pay tax on the profit from CG rather than hide it? It must be nice to make money so fast you can't spend it all - at the very least, they could have dumped some of it on lobbyists and settled the antitrust suit the first time around, but I guess they were too busy making $$ to notice that it would be a problem.
Curious indeed.
There's a great funny and subtle scene in the movie "L.A. Story" with Steve Martin where he's programming his new voice-activated telephone/answering machine....
....
....
SM: "Dial Mom."
Phone:
SM: "Dial MOM."
Phone:
SM: "Dial... MOM!"
Phone: bink.bonk.beep.beep.boop.beep.bonk.boop
Phone: ring..... ring....
Phone: "Hello, this is Domino's, would you like take out or delivery?"
No, more corporate cash did not go to Gore. I think it was about 2/3 to the Republicans.
Excuse me? Please provide a source for the '2/3' number - this is highly dubious, and I suspect you're making it up. Are you aware Al Gore's OIL company just bought one of Enron's interests in the Middle East? The Democrats play the moneygrubbing big-bidness game quite well, thank you.
After the election Gore was trying to get a recount, but the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to stop the recount. Those 5 were all Republican appointees.
The supreme court vote to HALT THE RECOUNT was 7-2, the 5-4 vote to decide whether they would adhere to Florida law in requiring all recounts to be completed by December 13th.
You know, you shouldn't use the F-word so much -- your liberal/socialistic bent is showing. ;)
About the 'illegal stripping of 100,000 voters of the rights...', the supreme court halted the vote because it did not recount the entire state and thus treated voters in different counties differently. Ironically, that's the one scenario where Gore might have won.
So how come VoterMarch hasn't been updated in over a year? The site is owned by Maybe this is why.... (NOTE- it's from a different Posner than the one who runs VoterMarch.)
Oh, yeah, and by the way, see what *this* Brit has to say about about Palast's book.
Your sources are biased and have an adgenda. Nice try.
Cool, but this is the guy I was actually talking about - he was featured on a TV show a few years ago, I don't remember which one. Note that Boggs never tried to pass of his hand-drawn bills as authentic money, that's why he calls buying things with them 'transactions'. Yeah, I know. Apparently the court didn't buy it either. ;)
The US Forefathers were smart - they intentionally left the specific details of how to collect the vote and tally the results to the states, and ultimately, the local county districts. They weren't concerned as much about regional cultural and financial differences as much as they were concerned about the integrity of the election process.
If I wanted to rig an election in the US, I would have to rig it ONE COUNTY AT A TIME, because each election office makes their own choice how to operate on the voting day in question.
With a centralized, standard voting system like Germany's open source plan, I would just have to know how to rig one system.
The Florida election worked exactly as it should have - the election was just really close. It sucks that we couldn't just call the election at 10PM and go to bed, but you know what? Your vote *does* matter.
Kinda like the guy that 'draws' $20 bills and trades them to people in exchange for goods & services, or the urban ledgend about the illustration artist who send a postcard resume to a prospective employer that simply stated, "Examine the stamp" (which was, of course, hand drawn). It's not high art in the classic sense, but it requires more skill than Madonna's last twelve albums and a hell of a lot more creativity.
Since the mid-nineties, HP's engineers in the PC and printer divisions have had *way* too much free time to devote to developing unneeded solutions to monumentally non-problems. Compaq isn't any better (you want to load the BIOS setup program from *WHERE*?), but I've wrestled too many idiotic HP driver install procedures and weird motherboard over-engineering (in the bad way) design 'issues' to have any real sympathy for them. Their printers are still pretty good hardware for the most part, but I use the old embedded MS-written LJ5 series drivers because HP refuses to understand that their drivers cause STOP 50 errors on Citrix servers and most of the time, I can live without the extra features the new drivers would provide. (Don't even get me started on the stupid trend they started with the "printer-monitoring" software for their inkjet printers!) I can understand that they need to try to differentiate their products, but sheesh -- go play some golf or something!
I believe this is also why the paperless office hasn't evolved like we expected: Computers are great at keeping information current, but previous versions of the info are too easily discarded because data is centrally stored (everyone works on the SAME copy) and the electrons are easily erased and reused. Business really does need to track all those little changes in the middle because they also tell a story about how their documents evolve, and therefore the decisions that were made, and ultimately how their organization works.
I'm not sure I completely agree with you because the law (even though it can be very specific) still provides for a human judge and/or jury to *evaluate* the material and evidence involved considering the intent of the defendant. In other words, the law would consider you argumentative and nitpicky, despite the fact that you are, techinically, correct. (If a court were to allow that sort of argument, you'd have trouble proving anyone does anything...)
However, I've been thinking about this kind of stuff since the CDA was passed (1996?) and since it's a lot of fun to think about, here's my $2E-02 contribution...
A few years ago I came across a Playstation game at a video store. It was largely unpopular, I guess, because I only read the box, I didn't play it, I haven't seen it since and the name of it always escapes me. It was kinda like Pokemon in that it featured battling monsters, but it was unique because not only could you use the pre-generated monsters included on the game CD, but you could drop your own *MUSIC* CDs in the your PS and it would NON-RANDOMLY generate monsters using the song data to give them their appearence and abilities.
Now what if that playstation game showed you generated pr0n animations extracted from the CD data? Is the song illegal? What if we came up with a file that if you open it using a spreadsheet program, it contains my personal checking account history; however, if you take that same file and open it in an image viewer, you get pr0n? One file, two interpretations: one of them completely legitimate, the other could get you in a lot of trouble.
The point is that the data file and the application that 'edits' that file have to be considered together as a whole. A data file on its own is just a number, but it's the instructions the computer is fed by the application based on the data that makes it interesting for us as users. I'm pretty sure that, with a little massaging, you could almost get a 'proof of the existence of God', or at least a definition of intelligence out of the fact that of all the possible numbers you can make out of 2^n binary digits, humans seem to continually find and re-use a very small subset of them that are interesting to us. Sorta like the rational and irrational numbers.
I think the key issue here is something nobody in the courts has even alluded to understanding: We need to figure out exactly what 'information' is; that is what makes one bit-pattern ok and another not?
they're more interested in impressing their party-friends and pushing a social agenda than making decent films.
Oops! By 'decent', I meant in the sense of 'good quality' not 'sterile & puritan' - S/V/L have their place, just not everywhere.
Check this out.
Now, by my count, of the top 25 grossing US pictures of all time:
2 comedy...
3 drama...
5 cartoon/family...
SIXTEEN -- SIX-FSCKing-TEEN fit in the SF/Fantasy category.(though Twister might count as a comedy...)
Of course, you can divy 'em up however you want, but my point here should be crystal clear. I'm *NOT* gonna say this again.
BTW, by my count - for those that are interested...
3 movies rated R
4 movies rated PG13
THIRTEEN movies rated PG
2 movies rated G
Now, explain to me why Hollywood keeps doping films with gratuitous sex, violence & language that does nothing to advance the story. My guess is that they're more interested in impressing their party-friends and pushing a social agenda than making decent films. I believe Walt Disney used to say he made family films because "Why sell two tickets when you can sell four?" Hollywood - sheesh. What a bunch of morons.
(Sorry to rant so far OT, but my car ran out of gas on the way to the store tonight, and BP DOESN'T HAVE GAS CANS for loan, rent or buy; so I had to walk to Sheetz Fuel Mart in the rain and buy one. By the time I finally got to the store, it had just closed. What a night -- I'm such an idiot!)
Dead on - nice.
Correlations can do some nasty things to you.
[grin]
For example:
Alternative medicine
Psychic hotlines, Syliva Browne and the National Enquirer
Advertising
USA Today's 'science' section
Every other mainstream publications 'science' sections for that matter
Medical journals - even the refereed ones sometimes (see the part about the latest miracle food that decreases cancer risk)
Most of what the EPA does
The Green Lobby - you know, global warming, dioxin, alar and such...
:)
I could go on....
Clifford Stoll said this a lot better than I could. We would be better off removing the distraction of computers from the schools and teaching them 1337 4n41y71c 7h1nX0r1n9 5k1llz instead. You know, basic stuff like "correlation != causality". If I had a million billion trillion dollars for lawyers, I'd put up a web page discrediting bogus thinking ever-where and take up the occupation of teaching people how to make lawyers look dumb.
Correlate which way the steering wheel is pointed with whether you are too far left or right in your lane. All it takes is a feedback system with something aproximating intelligence and your very good model can get things backwards.
Yeah! what we need is a completely LINEAR universe!
Of course, there's the other way it could swing too...with malware-authors using some kind of legal argument against anti-malware programs like Ad-Aware...I wouldn't put it past them to call it a "Circumvention Device" or somesuch under the DMCA, and attempt to have it banned, although I can't see anything short of a huge bribe convincing any reasonable judge of the validity of such an argument.
How close are we, for that matter, to some of these bozos putting a line in their EULA stating "you may not uninstall this software or reformat your HD" and sealing the uninstaller with a DMCA-enforcable mechanism, so that the software can't be uninstalled w/o violating the DMCA?
The key here is a matter of scale. The mesoscale type systems are extremely hard to model, but you take a global system (long wave patterns), and you will have a much better time of modeling them. How? You throw out the small scale stuff like your butterfly and such. On a global scale, something like that would quickly disappear into the larger scale.
On the other hand, the point of nonlinear dynamics is that these effects do NOT get damped out on a larger scale. What you are describing is LINEAR behavior.