If the world were a simpler place, we could have our cake and eat it too..
But, even if hitler won (yech. blech. yuck), the chances that his regime would let him kill everyone would be slimmer than what a standard nutjob ould do today with modern science.
Governments act to preserve their own power! They cannot do that if they have noone to support them.
(The question I should have asked in the beginning: Which is more important. Survival as a species, or survival as a species of individuals, assuming they are mutually exclusive)
I'm of two minds about the NSA and related branches.
One one hand, I'm afraid of the power they wield. On the other hand,I'm afriad of the power that can be wielded by crazy, lone individuals.
The sad fact is that it is becoming easier and easier to create weapons of mass destruction, and easier and easier to deliver them.
This is very scary, because some of these things (biological) have the capacity to wipe us out.
I'm for the perpetuation of our species first and foremost, and as a result I'd rather have big brother than not exist. (It is in big brother's best interest to perpetuate the species)
So is this good, or is it bad?
What are you more afraid of? Losing your individual rights, or fearful for our species?
I would have to go with RPG-style games, like Baldur's Gate, and other good games of the genre.
Why? Well, most of the geeks around here love a good RPG, and on the technical side, it shouldn't be too hard to port a 2d game. (or 2 1/2 D, which most RPGs are))
Hmm.. I wonder if we can get the space-sickness feeling fom it.
IF so, it could help in astronaut training.. In russia, they put you in spinning chairs, and things in order to get cosmonauts accustomed to space sickness..
The space-inclined among us might think this a novel experience...
For that price I an get a 1000Mhz Athalon system. OK, so the graphics pipeline isn't quite as fast, nor will it run IRIX, but I think the graphics stuff will be changing soon (like it has been doing).
However, this will help less people in the end than exploring space will.
The technologies discovered as a result of space exploration alone have made much much for our economy than the money we spent on it: End result: More txable income, and more money that can potentially help these individuals.
Putting it another way: Would you rather spend all of the gov'ts money on the homeless, etc now, or would you rather put money into the police, congress, etc so that society can be better prepared to do this later?
When I got to Ga Tech the network hadn't yet been wired. I payed MY money to hook up the campus network.
Later on, (still living in the dorm) it was decided to turn on the ports for everyone, and charge it to everyone on their dorm bill.
In effect, I was paying for the network access, not the state.
In case you are going to argue that students pay less, yes, they do, and there is a simple economic explanation for it: 1) The network DOES get used for non personal things, saving the State money. 2) Economy of scale- There are few other places where people are packed in so densly. The cost to connect everyone in the dorm is minimal after the cable has been installed.
I think it is obvious that this legislator has personal problems- Idealizing white glove cleanliness tests, and other puritannical "reforms?"
It seems painfully obvious to me that this person has had some sort of emotional trauma to cause her to be so afraid of normal sexual relations (like those carried out between "modern" men+women).
Also, as per: "There are plenty of other places to meet"
That is true, but unless there are no laws concerning having sex in public, you'd better let people do it in the privacy of their bedrooms.
And incidentally, sex is considered a NEED by most psychologists, whether begat though sex with a partner, or auto-eroticism.
Yes, but it was also about the persaviness of the media, and how it effected society and the fabric of humanity (adversely).
I'm just as frightened by the mass consumption of mindless dribble as I am by the lack of production of meaningful thought.
Slashdot is one of those rare islands where the meaningless dribble manages to filter itself out, and the interesting (meaningful) if sometimes repetitive thought comes out.
Fahrenheit 451 is just less about the burning of books, and more about the pacification of the mind.. Equality of thought! (How frightening!)
Producing/selling at a lower rate, making it difficult for anyone who doesn't do the same to compete..
Direct result: Anyone who isn't at least "their size" has difficulty competing in the market..
Making it (more) difficult for new companies to enter the market.
Vertical monopolies are not always bad (in many cases, they can be very beneficial), however this is a special case- This organization has great sway over the political life of this country, and as a result is subject to regulation (FCC, etc).
The vertical monopoly in "material" industries is less dangerous. Though they might be able to force a single automobile model on us (or something else, "hypothetical"), they cannot force a single THOUGHT on us. This is why a media company is more dangerous.
I don't care about the size of the company, or its monopoly status (there are good monopolies), rather I care about the effect any competition on the paucity of ideas that exist.
Any corporation that effectively removes (or threatens, or has a great potential to do either) the possibility of independant thought from the marketplace I will oppose.
I, for one, will carefully watch this one.. You should do the same.
Copyright law should be enough to protect this software!
Unlike mechanical aparatus, whose workings are apparent, software's workings are inherently more complicated, and harder to reverse-engineer.
Furthermore- both copyright and patents have durations which are much too long for modern times.
Creation of intellectual property is at an all-time high, and the fact is that future knowledge is based off of current. THis means that our society is dependant more and more on the sharing of knowledge and ideas and less and less upon production. (i.e. we are becoming a service based economy)
Patents and elongated copyright durations serve only to inhibit the growth of this industry! I can understand a patent or copyright duration of a decade and a half, but the current copyright regulations are ludicrous! Why extend copyright? (esp. for corporations!)
The only good argument for it (and the reason that these laws were enacted) is to ENCOURAGE invention and the creation of new things.
Patent law is having the opposite effect. Copyright law is also having the opposite effect. (i.e. software, the DCMA, etc.)
I think that OSS is the best example of this- the OSS community is a meritocracy, based upon individual AND group prowess. This sort of organization profits by the share of ideas- one's reputation is made by it. (this is an example of copyright WORKING)
Watermarking can be _very_ subtle. If HP a watermarking algorithm into their printers, (a good one) how would we know that it was there? On one hand, if I can't tell that it is there, it doesn't bother me too much (at least from the perspective of quality of output), however from a privacy standpoint it bothers me to the core. Law enforcement would be happy to be able to trace everything through each and every pair of hands hat touched it, I'm sure. I am not so sure that this would be safe- Laws are not always enforced.. and just about everyone is breaking a few laws they never knew about every dy. The sad fact is that there are so many laws (and conflicting laws! There is no ammendment saying that conflicting laws must be stricken! How does the average citizen deal with them?!), that noone can obey all of them, even if it is their intention. The law does not govern intention (except to classify degrees of murder, and a few more), but only comes into effect based on actions, inactions or behaviours. This is one more thing that makes it easier for law enforcement to trace each and every action that you do.. and to possibly nail you on each and every day that you live.. Ignorance is no excuse... So anyon who is all gung-ho for watermarking (effectively, tracibility), keep in mind the dangers- YOU are breaking the law pretty much just by living... Do you want everyone to know it?
hmm.. So, since win2000 is too large for any person to comprehend, let alone write by themselves.. does this mean that noone can tell whether or not it is an operating system? (heh.) If I were to take what you are saying one step further, I would say that you don't understand the OS because you didn't design the hardware, and that is where the OS resides when its doing any interesting work, right? (yes, its slightly different.) Ok, then how about saying that you don't understand programming because you didn't write the compiler.. I know a few people who've never written an OS, but have done plenty of coding for microcontrollers, etc, and I'm sure that this represents -nearly- the same problem set. I would say: Noone can be told what an OS is.. No simple definition will suffice.. You should have expierence dealing with getting to the innards to the computer, and how the OS helps you out there to understand what it does, and (by the nature of programs!) thussly what it IS.
And how does this differ from using the copy machine? Is the copy machine illegal in the UK because it *can* be used to make copies? Or how about the cassette-deck, or the VCR.. Oh my!
Do you think that Andover could afford to hire a lawyer to do this for us as a semi-permanent thing?
(by which I mean that we can ask questions, and get answers. I know that I'd be willing to contribute towards something like this.. maybe other people would, and perhaps even some corporations..)
Well, Yahoo is seen as an open discussion board for the masses. IF Yahoo removes mesages on a whim, and doesn't explain itself thuroughly (sp?), then it isn't open.
Yahoo Should be able to do anything they want to? Well, I don't care what they do as long as they don't pretend to be doing somehting else.
Naw. What you get out of a computer-related degree is the ability to think analytically about problems. This is something which will always will be useful to you.
Perhaps you should have said: open source game offerings. Loki does have some open-source stuff on the web (mainly related to bugtracking and a/v playback).
Someone did something similar- They disabled mouse movement at stupid times. With that person's hack, it is much much more difficult to mess up your carefully planned movement with a badly timed mouse-click. For me, it was all about reducing the size of the game. The installed footprint should be 15 MB smaller now, thanks to compression.
Well I know that the focus here at Ga Tech is on programming concepts and algorithms..
Not specific languages (although if you get out of here without knowing java, c, smalltalk, and maybe prolog you've done something interesting)
(I also got a bit of pascal in that, but it was phased out for Java.)
Under the old curriculum we'd get to know lisp really intimately too.
Notice there isn't any c++ in there.. but remember that the focus is on algorithms and concepts.. Much Much more valuable than learning a specific language.
There are courses on security, etc but they are mainly graduate-level courses from what I remember. The intro to unix class (concurrency+control under the old curriculum, I'm not sure what it is under the new one) taught you all about make, etc, and had you create your own shell.
From what I understand now, there is some compiler stuff thrown in there now..
I thuroughly agree with the way they go about teaching CS here... I can pick up just about any language given a reference manual and a couple of hours, but the concepts are invaluable.
Personally, I'd avoid any courses which were tool-specific (an particular language is a tool), because most tools are relatively simple to learn/use with a bit of time invested in reading the manual. Weekend seminars and the like are much better for learning tools..
Slashdot Mirror
Here Here!
Oh I agree completely!
If the world were a simpler place, we could have our cake and eat it too..
But, even if hitler won (yech. blech. yuck), the chances that his regime would let him kill everyone would be slimmer than what a standard nutjob ould do today with modern science.
Governments act to preserve their own power! They cannot do that if they have noone to support them.
(The question I should have asked in the beginning: Which is more important. Survival as a species, or survival as a species of individuals, assuming they are mutually exclusive)
Never before in history has a single person been able to create something that cna (by itself) wipe out entire cities or more.
I'm referring to chemical (and worse) biological agents.
I'm of two minds about the NSA and related branches.
One one hand, I'm afraid of the power they wield.
On the other hand,I'm afriad of the power that can be wielded by crazy, lone individuals.
The sad fact is that it is becoming easier and easier to create weapons of mass destruction, and easier and easier to deliver them.
This is very scary, because some of these things (biological) have the capacity to wipe us out.
I'm for the perpetuation of our species first and foremost, and as a result I'd rather have big brother than not exist. (It is in big brother's best interest to perpetuate the species)
So is this good, or is it bad?
What are you more afraid of? Losing your individual rights, or fearful for our species?
I, personally, am torn.
I would have to go with RPG-style games, like Baldur's Gate, and other good games of the genre.
Why? Well, most of the geeks around here love a good RPG, and on the technical side, it shouldn't be too hard to port a 2d game. (or 2 1/2 D, which most RPGs are))
Hmm.. I wonder if we can get the space-sickness feeling fom it.
IF so, it could help in astronaut training..
In russia, they put you in spinning chairs, and things in order to get cosmonauts accustomed to space sickness..
The space-inclined among us might think this a novel experience...
For that price I an get a 1000Mhz Athalon system.
OK, so the graphics pipeline isn't quite as fast, nor will it run IRIX, but I think the graphics stuff will be changing soon (like it has been doing).
Yes..
However, this will help less people in the end than exploring space will.
The technologies discovered as a result of space exploration alone have made much much for our economy than the money we spent on it:
End result: More txable income, and more money that can potentially help these individuals.
Putting it another way:
Would you rather spend all of the gov'ts money on the homeless, etc now, or would you rather put money into the police, congress, etc so that society can be better prepared to do this later?
When I got to Ga Tech the network hadn't yet been wired. I payed MY money to hook up the campus network.
Later on, (still living in the dorm) it was decided to turn on the ports for everyone, and charge it to everyone on their dorm bill.
In effect, I was paying for the network access, not the state.
In case you are going to argue that students pay less, yes, they do, and there is a simple economic explanation for it:
1) The network DOES get used for non personal things, saving the State money.
2) Economy of scale- There are few other places where people are packed in so densly. The cost to connect everyone in the dorm is minimal after the cable has been installed.
I think it is obvious that this legislator has personal problems- Idealizing white glove cleanliness tests, and other puritannical "reforms?"
It seems painfully obvious to me that this person has had some sort of emotional trauma to cause her to be so afraid of normal sexual relations (like those carried out between "modern" men+women).
Also, as per: "There are plenty of other places to meet"
That is true, but unless there are no laws concerning having sex in public, you'd better let people do it in the privacy of their bedrooms.
And incidentally, sex is considered a NEED by most psychologists, whether begat though sex with a partner, or auto-eroticism.
Actually..
IF we get room-temperature superconductors..
Such a containment beast COULD be feasable..
(I think.)
In any case, what I want to see is those room-temperature superconductors.
(Imagine the stuff we could build with that!)
Yes, but it was also about the persaviness of the media, and how it effected society and the fabric of humanity (adversely).
I'm just as frightened by the mass consumption of mindless dribble as I am by the lack of production of meaningful thought.
Slashdot is one of those rare islands where the meaningless dribble manages to filter itself out, and the interesting (meaningful) if sometimes repetitive thought comes out.
Fahrenheit 451 is just less about the burning of books, and more about the pacification of the mind.. Equality of thought! (How frightening!)
Producing/selling at a lower rate, making it difficult for anyone who doesn't do the same to compete..
Direct result: Anyone who isn't at least "their size" has difficulty competing in the market..
Making it (more) difficult for new companies to enter the market.
Vertical monopolies are not always bad (in many cases, they can be very beneficial), however this is a special case- This organization has great sway over the political life of this country, and as a result is subject to regulation (FCC, etc).
The vertical monopoly in "material" industries is less dangerous. Though they might be able to force a single automobile model on us (or something else, "hypothetical"), they cannot force a single THOUGHT on us. This is why a media company is more dangerous.
I don't care about the size of the company, or its monopoly status (there are good monopolies), rather I care about the effect any competition on the paucity of ideas that exist.
Any corporation that effectively removes (or threatens, or has a great potential to do either) the possibility of independant thought from the marketplace I will oppose.
I, for one, will carefully watch this one.. You should do the same.
What? a la "The Coorporation" in Aliens, or "The Corporation" in cyberpunk novels?
At the very least we still have public TV for variety, hmm?
(Ever notice that we get the most variety of shows from public TV+BBC?)
I'm slightly afraid of these media companies getting to big.
In more than a few ways they wield more power than any other entity in this country (and indeed, in just about any "free" (as in speech) country).
Anyone who has read Fahrenheit 451 realizes how powerful a media entity that doesn't have sufficient competition becomes.
On the other hand, perhaps they will do well for us.(But, my fears remain.)
Even in this case, a patent is a bad idea.
Copyright law should be enough to protect this software!
Unlike mechanical aparatus, whose workings are apparent, software's workings are inherently more complicated, and harder to reverse-engineer.
Furthermore- both copyright and patents have durations which are much too long for modern times.
Creation of intellectual property is at an all-time high, and the fact is that future knowledge is based off of current.
THis means that our society is dependant more and more on the sharing of knowledge and ideas and less and less upon production.
(i.e. we are becoming a service based economy)
Patents and elongated copyright durations serve only to inhibit the growth of this industry! I can understand a patent or copyright duration of a decade and a half, but the current copyright regulations are ludicrous! Why extend copyright? (esp. for corporations!)
The only good argument for it (and the reason that these laws were enacted) is to ENCOURAGE invention and the creation of new things.
Patent law is having the opposite effect.
Copyright law is also having the opposite effect.
(i.e. software, the DCMA, etc.)
I think that OSS is the best example of this-
the OSS community is a meritocracy, based upon individual AND group prowess. This sort of organization profits by the share of ideas- one's reputation is made by it. (this is an example of copyright WORKING)
I love the shuttle, but it sucks technically.
Yeah, it is/was a great achievement, but they made too many design tradeoffs..
Is it a payload vehicle?
Or is it supposed to put people into space?
As a result, it does neither cost-effectively.
(There is a whole history here, fascinating reading.)
Watermarking can be _very_ subtle. If HP a watermarking algorithm into their printers, (a good one) how would we know that it was there? On one hand, if I can't tell that it is there, it doesn't bother me too much (at least from the perspective of quality of output), however from a privacy standpoint it bothers me to the core. Law enforcement would be happy to be able to trace everything through each and every pair of hands hat touched it, I'm sure. I am not so sure that this would be safe- Laws are not always enforced.. and just about everyone is breaking a few laws they never knew about every dy. The sad fact is that there are so many laws (and conflicting laws! There is no ammendment saying that conflicting laws must be stricken! How does the average citizen deal with them?!), that noone can obey all of them, even if it is their intention. The law does not govern intention (except to classify degrees of murder, and a few more), but only comes into effect based on actions, inactions or behaviours. This is one more thing that makes it easier for law enforcement to trace each and every action that you do.. and to possibly nail you on each and every day that you live.. Ignorance is no excuse... So anyon who is all gung-ho for watermarking (effectively, tracibility), keep in mind the dangers- YOU are breaking the law pretty much just by living... Do you want everyone to know it?
hmm.. So, since win2000 is too large for any person to comprehend, let alone write by themselves.. does this mean that noone can tell whether or not it is an operating system? (heh.) If I were to take what you are saying one step further, I would say that you don't understand the OS because you didn't design the hardware, and that is where the OS resides when its doing any interesting work, right? (yes, its slightly different.) Ok, then how about saying that you don't understand programming because you didn't write the compiler.. I know a few people who've never written an OS, but have done plenty of coding for microcontrollers, etc, and I'm sure that this represents -nearly- the same problem set. I would say: Noone can be told what an OS is.. No simple definition will suffice.. You should have expierence dealing with getting to the innards to the computer, and how the OS helps you out there to understand what it does, and (by the nature of programs!) thussly what it IS.
And how does this differ from using the copy machine? Is the copy machine illegal in the UK because it *can* be used to make copies? Or how about the cassette-deck, or the VCR.. Oh my!
Do you think that Andover could afford to hire
a lawyer to do this for us as a semi-permanent thing?
(by which I mean that we can ask questions, and get answers. I know that I'd be willing to contribute towards something like this.. maybe other people would, and perhaps even some corporations..)
Well, Yahoo is seen as an open discussion board for the masses.
IF Yahoo removes mesages on a whim, and doesn't explain itself thuroughly (sp?), then it isn't open.
Yahoo Should be able to do anything they want to?
Well, I don't care what they do as long as they don't pretend to be doing somehting else.
Naw. What you get out of a computer-related degree is the ability to think analytically about problems. This is something which will always will be useful to you.
Perhaps you should have said: open source game offerings. Loki does have some open-source stuff on the web (mainly related to bugtracking and a/v playback).
Someone did something similar- They disabled mouse movement at stupid times. With that person's hack, it is much much more difficult to mess up your carefully planned movement with a badly timed mouse-click. For me, it was all about reducing the size of the game. The installed footprint should be 15 MB smaller now, thanks to compression.
Well I know that the focus here at Ga Tech is on programming concepts and algorithms..
Not specific languages (although if you get out of here without knowing java, c, smalltalk, and maybe prolog you've done something interesting)
(I also got a bit of pascal in that, but it was phased out for Java.)
Under the old curriculum we'd get to know lisp really intimately too.
Notice there isn't any c++ in there.. but remember that the focus is on algorithms and concepts.. Much Much more valuable than learning a specific language.
There are courses on security, etc but they are mainly graduate-level courses from what I remember. The intro to unix class (concurrency+control under the old curriculum, I'm not sure what it is under the new one) taught you all about make, etc, and had you create your own shell.
From what I understand now, there is some compiler stuff thrown in there now..
I thuroughly agree with the way they go about teaching CS here... I can pick up just about any language given a reference manual and a couple of hours, but the concepts are invaluable.
Personally, I'd avoid any courses which were tool-specific (an particular language is a tool), because most tools are relatively simple to learn/use with a bit of time invested in reading the manual. Weekend seminars and the like are much better for learning tools..
(And, of course, peer encouragement!!)
Good luck!