There have been a lot of responses to this post - the two that were modded up both insist that tracking people via RFIDs is possible. Both miss the point I made when I said it was unlikely that the government could do this. Look, whether or not they want to, are determined to, and have the legal means, and the databases, and everything else, they are also going to have to get long-range, high-quality radio signals out of a tiny device that is powered only by other radio waves. They are going to have to have the ability to distinguish between thousands of devices, and triangulate them quickly.
I wish an EE or ham radio guy or somebody could help me out here, because I have a gut feeling the range of RFIDs is going to be measured in feet, not the miles it would take to use them for large-scale surveillance of this type. Has anyone heard of a proposed application for these little things that involves signals traveling more than a few feet? Inventory control in warehouses and supermarkets sure doesn't do that.
The government cannot change the laws of physics. Unless you are really paranoid.
Nice post. I still do not think it is technically feasible to track people from any distance using RFIDs. I think range would be a problem. That is what I meant when I said it was implausible that the gov't could have such a device, not that it wouldn't want one, or wouldn't deploy it if it had one. I think you missed that, as your response seems only to cover what could happen if it did exist, glossing over the very good chance that it doesn't and can't.
Gov't cannot invade your privacy by tracking your every move and recording it without a probable cause, at least according to the U.S. Constitution anyway.
I want you to know that this is a very shaky argument. The problem is that the U.S. Constitution means whatever the courts say it means. It says so in the Constitution! While you may be right about the current rulings, legal precedent can be changed. I feel like I have made some convincing arguments as to how it could be changed to allow a system like this while allowing as little abuse as possible. See some of the other threads responding to the great-grandparent initial post of mine.
I think that terrorism happens only when there is some fundamental injustice in the world.
I wish I could agree. I think that terrorism, and most serious crimes, happen because some people are, for lack of a better description, innately evil. Perhaps they are responding to injustice, but their response is to amplify it, not to fix it. There have always been people like this, who are frequently incorrigible in their behaviors. Unfortunately, they do not respond to kindness, even though nearly everybody does. We will always have to have ways of controlling these people, and I will resign myself to that.
Whether a threat to those who run a society is a threat to the society as a whole depends on how just the society is to begin with. I like to think I live in a pretty just society, even if there are some exceptions.
And even though the American Revolution produced great benefits for the American people, it is not hard to find counterexamples of revolutions and revolutionaries who subjected countless people to death and misery. I'm thinking of such leaders as Hitler, Mao, and Castro. I hope we never reach such a low point where social revolution is the only option for us, because it has such unpredictable outcomes. There are always people around that think that social revolution is the only way to fix whatever they think is wrong with society, but they often fail to realize that it comes at a terrible price. In most cases, allowing them to have their way would be to distort the priorities of society away from just goals, not towards. Therefore I am opposed to revolution in general and I do not think it is reasonable for it to be possible in modern America. If our society were falling apart at the seams, I might think differently, but to be realistic means to see that it is not.
All sorts of things are inevitable, but the decline of our society due to increasingly rigid control by those in power is not. Enough of the populace is well educated and alert to this kind of thing to prevent true abuses. We have extrapolated very far in this discussion, with only the glimmer of a possibility raised by a technology as a stimulus. Other people think of these things too, I assure you, and don't like them any more than we do. That keeps me from worrying too much.
Do you really believe that the act of observing people who are outside their homes, and perhaps on public property, or at least in a public place, is spying? I think of spying as a more of looking in the windows of your house kind of thing, and yes, that should be covered by probable cause and warrants.
It would be objectionable if they were using a system that specifically tracked YOU as you moved through public places, for no specific reason. But if the system tracked everyone, it is pretty much the same as police looking at crowds of people, videotaping them, etc.
Individuals expecting to be able to hide in public is unreasonable. Police expecting to be able to track individuals specifically for no reason is unreasonable. A compromise might be that records were kept but it was illegal to access them except in the event of a crime. So the police would have to get warrants to search the records. Happy now? Nobody is able to watch you to see if you jaywalk, litter, or whatever, but if somebody gets beaten to death with a bat, they can check who was on their street that night.
Time for a you're a dick lesson. There are exceptions to this, and one of them is if evidence of a crime is in plain view of a police officer. What, did you think it was illegal for cops to look at you while you are in a public place, that they have to get a warrant with your name on it first? That would make enforcing any laws at all nearly impossible!
How is a system that tracks your movements through a public place any different than a police officer looking at you? I think if you are in public, you are in public, period.
Listen, I also think the technology to make this a reality does not exist, so don't worry about it.
I understand better now. Yes, I can see why constant profiling of every citizen at the levels you suggest would be bad, particularly if the profiles were acted on based on future actions they predicted. That is more than a bit fuzzy legally and morally. Initially we were talking about how it might be possible for movements to be tracked with RFID tags. Now you speak of tracking that is an order of magnitude more complex: books read, people talked, tv watched. I reiterate that I strongly doubt that this will be possible in the near future. Think about it, how could this be efficiently implemented? Chips in our brains, monitored by a godlike artificial intelligence? Very implausible.
To a great degree, we already give up much of our personal identities in order to function in society. In order to get something we want, we generally have to behave in a fashion that will give other people what they want. This is true for everybody. Never forget that ultimately those in power are there because of the consent of others. This is why I think your argument is antisocial - When this system attempts to prevent threats to those in power, it is attempting to prevent threats to the society as a whole. Yet the core of the social contract is between individuals. Generally in American society we hesitate very much to sacrifice individuals for the good of society, unless there is concrete evidence against that individual, ie they are certainly a criminal.
Now with the recent developments, we are starting to become concerned with people who do not give any concrete evidence of being criminals, right up until the moment they commit atrocities. Even with the new procedures created to attempt to contend with such people, I think we are a long way away from the creation of the thought crimes you fear.
I have no problem with the government sponsoring free software development, but if they do so, they should use a license that allows anyone and everyone to benefit from the software. That means a BSD style license versus a GPL license.
The GPL is probably the reason that the government would be unable to just take the reigns of free software funding, like they took over the operation of libraries. Simply because it is counterproductive for the government, which has effectively unlimited resources, to compete with commercial entities. Nobody wins in that situation, not the gov't, not the companies, and not the consumer. GPL code cannot be used commercially in a conventional sense, and if the government were to put serious efforts behind it, they could wind up destroying a lot of commercial enterprises, not to mention wasting taxpayer dollars for a while as they duplicate a service which is already being provided to the public. Eventually, once commercial developers go under, they would just be providing the same service more expensively (government is generally less efficient than private enterprise).
Developers who use the GPL have already decided that their software should not be a public good in the sense that libraries are (in that anyone could go to a library, read books on a subject, and then resell what they learned for money). Even though the knowledge to understand GPL code might be expensive to get, and difficult to package in a useful way, they insist that anyone should be able to redistribute such an effort, for free, in exchange only for recognition for the developer. This effectively makes knowledge easy to exchange, but at a cost of making it worthless, unsellable.
A BSD license on goverment developed code might not be much better initially, as what could result would be the government doing work for commercial companies for free (from their point of view), while they continue to charge comparable prices for their work of packaging the software. Eventually, though, prices would be driven down, as the software itself became a commodity, and the knowledge of how to package it was the only way companies could compete. This would be software as a public good, in a general sense. Companies like the initial consequence of this scenario, and fear the second, so they want to make sure that things stay in the first stage, where the government is doing a certain amount of work for them, without eating their lunch.
I think if the government were to step in and make certain kinds of software (starting with the most often used pieces of code, the OS) a commodity, it could have very positive results for society. On the other hand, open source developement is already going on, so maybe they don't need to be involved, except for preserving the legal conditions that allows this to happen.
I am astonished by the seriousness of your reply. Firstly, I doubt very much that this technology exists, at least in such a way that really would allow tracking. Secondly, such tracking is not substantially different than having cops patrolling a beat, or any other people looking at you, etc. Even writing surveillance in all caps is not enough to frighten me. What do people do when looking around? One might say they survey the situation. But if their looking around is helped by technology (surveillance), it must be an overstepping of bounds. Guess we had better take all the cameras out of convenience stores, out of respect for the public privacy of the people who rob them. Give me a break, you antisocial paranoid. Just because you don't like anyone looking at you for any reason doesn't mean nobody ever should.
So, you are saying that it would work like this. I go to the store, and buy a pair of shoes with a credit card. The RFID in the shoes is scanned in order to bring up a price to charge my card. So conceivably there could be a database somewhere that matches my financial info, including my name and address, etc, to an RFID tag in my shoes. Presuming the government could get access to a database like this, they could track people with some kind of device that could read the RFID tags from a distance. Thereby tracking my movements with my shoes.
With each step in this process I have detailed, things become more and more implausible. Retail store having database records of purchases, likely, I am willing to believe. Government getting access to database, not too likely but possible with warrants or something. Government having device that can read the tags from a distance great enough to use it to effectively track your movements, probably next to impossible. I doubt these things are detectable at a range that would make tracking people practical. If you are willing to believe the government has the resources to put the trackers everywhere, on every streetcorner, without anyone knowing or getting upset, for budgetary if not privacy reasons, well...
Another obvious problem is what happens if I resell my shoes, or donate them to charity, or any number of other things that could cause inaccurate information in the database.
Finally, isn't it legal to observe people in public places? That is the very definition of public, a place where you cannot control being observed by others. The government might as well be looking at you if ten or twenty people you don't know personally are. I'm not saying that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, or some other silly thing. I just think expecting privacy in public is unrealistic.
However, such a system would make this exchange possible -
Spook #1: Hey, she's going to the mall again. Spook #2: Looks like the shoe store. Lemme see, yep, she's buying more shoes. Spook #1: Why does she keep selling them off for cash? It makes her harder to track. Spook #2: Dunno, maybe she likes to keep up with shoe trends. Spook #1: I think she's a goddamn terrorist.
People are nice to me on irc.debian.org, in #debian. I go there asking pointed questions, with specific error messages/log entries, after I have already fiddled for some time with the system. Sometimes the answer to a problem is not immediately obvious - the advice I get usually broadens my knowledge of the system, which helps solve other problems.
Maybe people who ask questions like "'X' doesn't work, how do I fix it?" receive answers that are less helpful. I've never seen anybody turned away though - Usually people start asking questions to try to identify the source of the problem. Users do not always have contextual information, or know how to get it.
Most people in the know are pretty friendly, but there is only so much they can do - you need to have a certain level of knowledge of the system before they can help you. The rude stereotype when it occurs is probably caused by these people being frustrated, not innately unhelpful.
How do you get to the level of knowledge where they can help you? There is no easy way to do this, I think. I read a lot of man pages, web pages, and some books, and used Linux for various things for a couple of years (still using it). Not a prescription for the faint of heart. You really have to be interested to do that.
I've always found this argument interesting. Basically you are arguing that the definition of sentience is the ability to create entirely new areas of art and science. While these are, in my opinion, the most noble pursuits of the human race, they are not activities that every human individual takes part in.
All people do not do these things. Nearly all people appreciate them, though. Otherwise nobody would engage in them.
Can you come up with a definition of sentience which excludes as few humans as possible, and excludes all machines?
Having a sense of aesthetics is common to nearly all humans, but no machines.
Re:The Matrix is just a movie
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Have you ever heard of Cybernetic Poet? Or any of the music composing artificial intelligences? They regularly produce art which human judges mistake for man-made. Sure, it's not 100% indistiguishable yet...
Yes, but both of these simulations work using patterns that were derived by analysis of existing works, which by definition always happens after the real creation already took place. Therefore nothing the machines produce is remotely original, they were just programmed to produce something similar by humans, who used their real intelligence to identify patterns that could be codified into a form a machine could understand. People do this too, imitating musical styles of past composers, for example. So in this way machines can be made to be sort of like people, producing new outputs from a fixed set of inputs, creating examples of rules.
The real problem arises in simulating truly creative human activities - for example the creation of an entirely new method of composing music that did not previously exist. Maybe it is an extension of something that existed before, or a synthesis of disparate elements. How do people do things like this? Much of it is based on intuition, interpreting their sensory experiences, and then creating something new. All this is difficult to define in terms of a machine. Even worse is the question, why do people do this? What motivates them? You have to simulate both the how and the why to create a truly creative entity. The machine must be able to create new sets of rules for itself, and must do so not arbitrarily, but for a reason. Aha, you say. The ability and motivation to create new rules must be defined in a sort of meta-rule! Right, all you have to do is understand the operations of conscious thought. But there is a showstopper problem with that notion - you must understand conscious thought from within your own mind, in terms of your thoughts. I reason by analogy here, but isn't there a mathematical principle that says that many systems cannot be proved from within themselves?
Otherwise, you get 'creative' machines as they are now, clever, highly trained parrots. Nothing more.
I will proceed further from 'interesting' into 'making people angry', and inform you all that my opinion is that artificial intelligence that has the creative capacity of humans will never exist. This is because I believe humans were endowed with their creative capacity by their Creator, but not given enough analytical ability to understand their creative abilities well enough to truly replicate them. Maybe if you have the mind of God you can create the mind of a human, but how can you create the mind of God if you cannot even make the mind of a human? I guess this ties into the concept of a soul, the part of our experience that we are aware of, but unable to analyze from within our experience.
James Randi is not a pseudo-scientist. He deals with a lot of people who insist that they have some sort of unknown capability, special power, whatever, or that they have some substance that does. Being a good scientist, he insists that these people provide reproducible, testable proof to validate these claims. These people do not - they say all sorts of things about him, insisting that it is him and his methods that are preventing the truth from coming out. Whatever. Randi does not ditch the scientific method. What he is offering anybody willing to accept his offer, an opportunity to truly prove their claims! Why toss out the only tool that is known to be reliable in doing this? However, he does not give people the benefit of the doubt all the time. Randi dispenses with equivocal language. Why bother acknowledging that something may be possible? Anything may be possible! Randi offers people the ability to prove that their claims are true, not just possible.
Do you think he refuses to give the people who make the claims a fair hearing? Oh, that is what they often think, but all he really does is make sure the tests are verifiable. There are plenty of charlatans in the world who demonstrate bogus phenomena with rigged demonstrations. Would you prefer he added legitimacy to these con men, by refusing to tests their claims accurately?
I read some of the sh*t in that link you posted - This is the usual nonsense runaround Randi gets from crackpots. In this particular case, he was going to be allowed to test the claims, but forced to sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement about the results of the test. Well, Randi called bullsh*t, and if you think that is unreasonable, it is your right.
You have to understand the position he is in. He is much more credible than the phony psychics and UFO lunatics and what have you. If he says that something may be possible (which anything is), these people take it as a blessing of truth from him. Why take the risk of being associated with a claim that has a 99.9% chance of being bogus? Especially when you know how to test the claim.
If universities want to increase profits, they should reengineer their existing business processes
Universities? For profit? Very few are run this way, in America at least. Public unis are not supposed to be run like businesses. What businesses have tenured employees and fund open-ended research? If everything in the world were run purely for the immediate monetary gains, civilization would not move forward.
Some universities think that research is inefficient, and tenured faculty are lazy. So they focus more on having non-tenured faculty teach what is already known to students. Nothing wrong with this approach, but big universities ought to be doing some research. After all, if academic institutions were not doing this stuff, do you think businesses would pick up all the slack? Not likely, they are too obsessed with quarterly performance to do long-term open-ended projects. Let real businesses chase after the profits while universities increase human knowledge, which is not always profitable in the short term.
but this sounds like something that has absolutely zero to do with furthering human knowledge.
Unless maybe you are at a music school? Or are taking music classes? Oh wait, knowledge of the arts is worthless knowledge. Actually, it is not knowledge at all, and anyone who says it is is just trying to trick you.
I know the plan sounds like it is more of an 'entertainment' package, but it could be related to the school's curriculum, if it were open ended enough to be used that way.
Most universities are terrified, repeat, terrified, of being legally liable for anything. They are doubtless motivated in this case not by the desire to provide music to students, but to provide assurance that they are not going to be sued, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Does anybody remember how the RIAA quietly went around and threatened to sue universities that did not block Napster? Right after this happened, mine announced they were blocking Napster because of 'bandwidth' reasons. This is the same kind of situation, the universities are just dying to pay protection money. They will do anything to avoid the high costs and bad publicity that could come with a lawsuit.
Software of this scale is the single most complicated project humanity has ever undertaken
I hope that is not true. Look at what we are using this for... I think humanity needs some new priorities if this is the case.
Re:Su-30 series or Quality/Quantity
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In-Flight Reboot?
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Pilots are important all right. Actually, an Air Force captain by the name of John Boyd figured out a way of dodging missiles, turning in a specific way or something, that made it into the still classified tactical manual he wrote, the Aerial Attack Study. I just wanted to mention this guy's name. I have been reading his biography. He was really an extraordinary person.
The best application for this would not be to try to compete with the mainstream media, that serves the taste of the mainstream public, but to find an underserved niche of people who are willing to pay for music that does not come through the main distribution channels.
Do you really think the average person would be able to appreciate something this complicated, and how they could benefit from it? If all the want is the music being sold to them already, just considering switching to a different system of getting it would be a waste of their time.
This system is not supposed to be a distributed sharing system. All the discs in the system are bought by the collective and centrally stored. Thus you cannot put discs you own into the system yourself, while retaining your copy. This would create obvious problems if you listened to the disc, or a fair use copy you had made of the disc.
True enough that adapting this system into a car or regular cd player would be implausible with current technology. It would only work on the computer. Yet if it worked well enough, it might be viable as a distribution method.
What if you could play 50 different songs once a day for a monthly subscription of $15? That is $200 per year to access a potentially enormous archive of music, giving you the ability to hear more music than you could ever hope to buy at that price.
I think it is worth it, but you should only be able to download as many songs as you can play. Screw the hoarders who want to copy the entire music archive to their giant raid array. Besides, in this case, there would be no reason to hoard, as you own the music, along with a lot of other people. The organization is just storing it for you and handling loaning it out - a bit like a private subscription library.
Huh, I didn't read the first snapster article, because I doubted it would have plausible ideas. This sounds interesting, basically in the electronic database, there would be one physical copy of the song that could only be used by one person at a time. This seems to make it legal - fair use is preserved, and communal ownership is possible.
I dunno about it being cheaper than the other ways of buying the music in many cases. Particularly if the music is popular: In that case, many people would want to access the music at once, requiring many physical copies to be purchased. You would always be walking a fine line between providing a useful service that is cheaper than outright ownership, and annoying people with a busy signal. Plus, as you bought more copies, the cost would go up.
Where this could really shine is building archives of music where overall volume of the archive makes it more valuable than being able to get to a specific song. There has been a lot of music made in the past, an enormous quantity really. Classical music fans would doubtless appreciate the ability to access recordings of as wide a variety of music as possible. Getting the latest hit single would not be a priority, and there are frequently multiple recordings of popular works anyway. Most other works would not have a much competition for access at any given time.
Building an archive that people would want to access would have to mean an archive that would rival any individual's collection of recordings, while costing significantly less. But if this holds water legally, it might be possible. It would take a lot of cdrom drives though, unless the media was transferred to disk, and the physical copies were merely tallied and stored.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been a lot of responses to this post - the two that were modded up both insist that tracking people via RFIDs is possible. Both miss the point I made when I said it was unlikely that the government could do this. Look, whether or not they want to, are determined to, and have the legal means, and the databases, and everything else, they are also going to have to get long-range, high-quality radio signals out of a tiny device that is powered only by other radio waves. They are going to have to have the ability to distinguish between thousands of devices, and triangulate them quickly.
I wish an EE or ham radio guy or somebody could help me out here, because I have a gut feeling the range of RFIDs is going to be measured in feet, not the miles it would take to use them for large-scale surveillance of this type. Has anyone heard of a proposed application for these little things that involves signals traveling more than a few feet? Inventory control in warehouses and supermarkets sure doesn't do that.
The government cannot change the laws of physics. Unless you are really paranoid.
Nice post. I still do not think it is technically feasible to track people from any distance using RFIDs. I think range would be a problem. That is what I meant when I said it was implausible that the gov't could have such a device, not that it wouldn't want one, or wouldn't deploy it if it had one. I think you missed that, as your response seems only to cover what could happen if it did exist, glossing over the very good chance that it doesn't and can't.
I want you to know that this is a very shaky argument. The problem is that the U.S. Constitution means whatever the courts say it means. It says so in the Constitution! While you may be right about the current rulings, legal precedent can be changed. I feel like I have made some convincing arguments as to how it could be changed to allow a system like this while allowing as little abuse as possible. See some of the other threads responding to the great-grandparent initial post of mine.
I wish I could agree. I think that terrorism, and most serious crimes, happen because some people are, for lack of a better description, innately evil. Perhaps they are responding to injustice, but their response is to amplify it, not to fix it. There have always been people like this, who are frequently incorrigible in their behaviors. Unfortunately, they do not respond to kindness, even though nearly everybody does. We will always have to have ways of controlling these people, and I will resign myself to that.
Whether a threat to those who run a society is a threat to the society as a whole depends on how just the society is to begin with. I like to think I live in a pretty just society, even if there are some exceptions.
And even though the American Revolution produced great benefits for the American people, it is not hard to find counterexamples of revolutions and revolutionaries who subjected countless people to death and misery. I'm thinking of such leaders as Hitler, Mao, and Castro. I hope we never reach such a low point where social revolution is the only option for us, because it has such unpredictable outcomes. There are always people around that think that social revolution is the only way to fix whatever they think is wrong with society, but they often fail to realize that it comes at a terrible price. In most cases, allowing them to have their way would be to distort the priorities of society away from just goals, not towards. Therefore I am opposed to revolution in general and I do not think it is reasonable for it to be possible in modern America. If our society were falling apart at the seams, I might think differently, but to be realistic means to see that it is not.
All sorts of things are inevitable, but the decline of our society due to increasingly rigid control by those in power is not. Enough of the populace is well educated and alert to this kind of thing to prevent true abuses. We have extrapolated very far in this discussion, with only the glimmer of a possibility raised by a technology as a stimulus. Other people think of these things too, I assure you, and don't like them any more than we do. That keeps me from worrying too much.
Do you really believe that the act of observing people who are outside their homes, and perhaps on public property, or at least in a public place, is spying? I think of spying as a more of looking in the windows of your house kind of thing, and yes, that should be covered by probable cause and warrants.
It would be objectionable if they were using a system that specifically tracked YOU as you moved through public places, for no specific reason. But if the system tracked everyone, it is pretty much the same as police looking at crowds of people, videotaping them, etc.
Individuals expecting to be able to hide in public is unreasonable. Police expecting to be able to track individuals specifically for no reason is unreasonable. A compromise might be that records were kept but it was illegal to access them except in the event of a crime. So the police would have to get warrants to search the records. Happy now? Nobody is able to watch you to see if you jaywalk, litter, or whatever, but if somebody gets beaten to death with a bat, they can check who was on their street that night.
Time for a you're a dick lesson. There are exceptions to this, and one of them is if evidence of a crime is in plain view of a police officer. What, did you think it was illegal for cops to look at you while you are in a public place, that they have to get a warrant with your name on it first? That would make enforcing any laws at all nearly impossible!
How is a system that tracks your movements through a public place any different than a police officer looking at you? I think if you are in public, you are in public, period.
Listen, I also think the technology to make this a reality does not exist, so don't worry about it.
I understand better now. Yes, I can see why constant profiling of every citizen at the levels you suggest would be bad, particularly if the profiles were acted on based on future actions they predicted. That is more than a bit fuzzy legally and morally. Initially we were talking about how it might be possible for movements to be tracked with RFID tags. Now you speak of tracking that is an order of magnitude more complex: books read, people talked, tv watched. I reiterate that I strongly doubt that this will be possible in the near future. Think about it, how could this be efficiently implemented? Chips in our brains, monitored by a godlike artificial intelligence? Very implausible.
To a great degree, we already give up much of our personal identities in order to function in society. In order to get something we want, we generally have to behave in a fashion that will give other people what they want. This is true for everybody. Never forget that ultimately those in power are there because of the consent of others. This is why I think your argument is antisocial - When this system attempts to prevent threats to those in power, it is attempting to prevent threats to the society as a whole. Yet the core of the social contract is between individuals. Generally in American society we hesitate very much to sacrifice individuals for the good of society, unless there is concrete evidence against that individual, ie they are certainly a criminal.
Now with the recent developments, we are starting to become concerned with people who do not give any concrete evidence of being criminals, right up until the moment they commit atrocities. Even with the new procedures created to attempt to contend with such people, I think we are a long way away from the creation of the thought crimes you fear.
I have no problem with the government sponsoring free software development, but if they do so, they should use a license that allows anyone and everyone to benefit from the software. That means a BSD style license versus a GPL license.
The GPL is probably the reason that the government would be unable to just take the reigns of free software funding, like they took over the operation of libraries. Simply because it is counterproductive for the government, which has effectively unlimited resources, to compete with commercial entities. Nobody wins in that situation, not the gov't, not the companies, and not the consumer. GPL code cannot be used commercially in a conventional sense, and if the government were to put serious efforts behind it, they could wind up destroying a lot of commercial enterprises, not to mention wasting taxpayer dollars for a while as they duplicate a service which is already being provided to the public. Eventually, once commercial developers go under, they would just be providing the same service more expensively (government is generally less efficient than private enterprise).
Developers who use the GPL have already decided that their software should not be a public good in the sense that libraries are (in that anyone could go to a library, read books on a subject, and then resell what they learned for money). Even though the knowledge to understand GPL code might be expensive to get, and difficult to package in a useful way, they insist that anyone should be able to redistribute such an effort, for free, in exchange only for recognition for the developer. This effectively makes knowledge easy to exchange, but at a cost of making it worthless, unsellable.
A BSD license on goverment developed code might not be much better initially, as what could result would be the government doing work for commercial companies for free (from their point of view), while they continue to charge comparable prices for their work of packaging the software. Eventually, though, prices would be driven down, as the software itself became a commodity, and the knowledge of how to package it was the only way companies could compete. This would be software as a public good, in a general sense. Companies like the initial consequence of this scenario, and fear the second, so they want to make sure that things stay in the first stage, where the government is doing a certain amount of work for them, without eating their lunch.
I think if the government were to step in and make certain kinds of software (starting with the most often used pieces of code, the OS) a commodity, it could have very positive results for society. On the other hand, open source developement is already going on, so maybe they don't need to be involved, except for preserving the legal conditions that allows this to happen.
I am astonished by the seriousness of your reply. Firstly, I doubt very much that this technology exists, at least in such a way that really would allow tracking. Secondly, such tracking is not substantially different than having cops patrolling a beat, or any other people looking at you, etc. Even writing surveillance in all caps is not enough to frighten me. What do people do when looking around? One might say they survey the situation. But if their looking around is helped by technology (surveillance), it must be an overstepping of bounds. Guess we had better take all the cameras out of convenience stores, out of respect for the public privacy of the people who rob them. Give me a break, you antisocial paranoid. Just because you don't like anyone looking at you for any reason doesn't mean nobody ever should.
So, you are saying that it would work like this. I go to the store, and buy a pair of shoes with a credit card. The RFID in the shoes is scanned in order to bring up a price to charge my card. So conceivably there could be a database somewhere that matches my financial info, including my name and address, etc, to an RFID tag in my shoes. Presuming the government could get access to a database like this, they could track people with some kind of device that could read the RFID tags from a distance. Thereby tracking my movements with my shoes.
With each step in this process I have detailed, things become more and more implausible. Retail store having database records of purchases, likely, I am willing to believe. Government getting access to database, not too likely but possible with warrants or something. Government having device that can read the tags from a distance great enough to use it to effectively track your movements, probably next to impossible. I doubt these things are detectable at a range that would make tracking people practical. If you are willing to believe the government has the resources to put the trackers everywhere, on every streetcorner, without anyone knowing or getting upset, for budgetary if not privacy reasons, well...
Another obvious problem is what happens if I resell my shoes, or donate them to charity, or any number of other things that could cause inaccurate information in the database.
Finally, isn't it legal to observe people in public places? That is the very definition of public, a place where you cannot control being observed by others. The government might as well be looking at you if ten or twenty people you don't know personally are. I'm not saying that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, or some other silly thing. I just think expecting privacy in public is unrealistic.
However, such a system would make this exchange possible -
Spook #1: Hey, she's going to the mall again.
Spook #2: Looks like the shoe store. Lemme see, yep, she's buying more shoes.
Spook #1: Why does she keep selling them off for cash? It makes her harder to track.
Spook #2: Dunno, maybe she likes to keep up with shoe trends.
Spook #1: I think she's a goddamn terrorist.
People are nice to me on irc.debian.org, in #debian. I go there asking pointed questions, with specific error messages/log entries, after I have already fiddled for some time with the system. Sometimes the answer to a problem is not immediately obvious - the advice I get usually broadens my knowledge of the system, which helps solve other problems.
Maybe people who ask questions like "'X' doesn't work, how do I fix it?" receive answers that are less helpful. I've never seen anybody turned away though - Usually people start asking questions to try to identify the source of the problem. Users do not always have contextual information, or know how to get it.
Most people in the know are pretty friendly, but there is only so much they can do - you need to have a certain level of knowledge of the system before they can help you. The rude stereotype when it occurs is probably caused by these people being frustrated, not innately unhelpful.
How do you get to the level of knowledge where they can help you? There is no easy way to do this, I think. I read a lot of man pages, web pages, and some books, and used Linux for various things for a couple of years (still using it). Not a prescription for the faint of heart. You really have to be interested to do that.
While I have your undivided attention due to interest in the story, dare I ask why slashdot breaks links like that? Anyone know?
This may be a mixed blessing. When elephants dance, the mice hide.
All people do not do these things. Nearly all people appreciate them, though. Otherwise nobody would engage in them.
Having a sense of aesthetics is common to nearly all humans, but no machines.
Yes, but both of these simulations work using patterns that were derived by analysis of existing works, which by definition always happens after the real creation already took place. Therefore nothing the machines produce is remotely original, they were just programmed to produce something similar by humans, who used their real intelligence to identify patterns that could be codified into a form a machine could understand. People do this too, imitating musical styles of past composers, for example. So in this way machines can be made to be sort of like people, producing new outputs from a fixed set of inputs, creating examples of rules.
The real problem arises in simulating truly creative human activities - for example the creation of an entirely new method of composing music that did not previously exist. Maybe it is an extension of something that existed before, or a synthesis of disparate elements. How do people do things like this? Much of it is based on intuition, interpreting their sensory experiences, and then creating something new. All this is difficult to define in terms of a machine. Even worse is the question, why do people do this? What motivates them? You have to simulate both the how and the why to create a truly creative entity. The machine must be able to create new sets of rules for itself, and must do so not arbitrarily, but for a reason. Aha, you say. The ability and motivation to create new rules must be defined in a sort of meta-rule! Right, all you have to do is understand the operations of conscious thought. But there is a showstopper problem with that notion - you must understand conscious thought from within your own mind, in terms of your thoughts. I reason by analogy here, but isn't there a mathematical principle that says that many systems cannot be proved from within themselves?
Otherwise, you get 'creative' machines as they are now, clever, highly trained parrots. Nothing more.
I will proceed further from 'interesting' into 'making people angry', and inform you all that my opinion is that artificial intelligence that has the creative capacity of humans will never exist. This is because I believe humans were endowed with their creative capacity by their Creator, but not given enough analytical ability to understand their creative abilities well enough to truly replicate them. Maybe if you have the mind of God you can create the mind of a human, but how can you create the mind of God if you cannot even make the mind of a human? I guess this ties into the concept of a soul, the part of our experience that we are aware of, but unable to analyze from within our experience.
Well, since all this only seems to affect only the people and companies who have commercial interests in Linux, I say let them foot the bill.
James Randi is not a pseudo-scientist. He deals with a lot of people who insist that they have some sort of unknown capability, special power, whatever, or that they have some substance that does. Being a good scientist, he insists that these people provide reproducible, testable proof to validate these claims. These people do not - they say all sorts of things about him, insisting that it is him and his methods that are preventing the truth from coming out. Whatever. Randi does not ditch the scientific method. What he is offering anybody willing to accept his offer, an opportunity to truly prove their claims! Why toss out the only tool that is known to be reliable in doing this? However, he does not give people the benefit of the doubt all the time. Randi dispenses with equivocal language. Why bother acknowledging that something may be possible? Anything may be possible! Randi offers people the ability to prove that their claims are true, not just possible.
Do you think he refuses to give the people who make the claims a fair hearing? Oh, that is what they often think, but all he really does is make sure the tests are verifiable. There are plenty of charlatans in the world who demonstrate bogus phenomena with rigged demonstrations. Would you prefer he added legitimacy to these con men, by refusing to tests their claims accurately?
I read some of the sh*t in that link you posted - This is the usual nonsense runaround Randi gets from crackpots. In this particular case, he was going to be allowed to test the claims, but forced to sign some sort of non-disclosure agreement about the results of the test. Well, Randi called bullsh*t, and if you think that is unreasonable, it is your right.
You have to understand the position he is in. He is much more credible than the phony psychics and UFO lunatics and what have you. If he says that something may be possible (which anything is), these people take it as a blessing of truth from him. Why take the risk of being associated with a claim that has a 99.9% chance of being bogus? Especially when you know how to test the claim.
Universities? For profit? Very few are run this way, in America at least. Public unis are not supposed to be run like businesses. What businesses have tenured employees and fund open-ended research? If everything in the world were run purely for the immediate monetary gains, civilization would not move forward.
Some universities think that research is inefficient, and tenured faculty are lazy. So they focus more on having non-tenured faculty teach what is already known to students. Nothing wrong with this approach, but big universities ought to be doing some research. After all, if academic institutions were not doing this stuff, do you think businesses would pick up all the slack? Not likely, they are too obsessed with quarterly performance to do long-term open-ended projects. Let real businesses chase after the profits while universities increase human knowledge, which is not always profitable in the short term.
Unless maybe you are at a music school? Or are taking music classes? Oh wait, knowledge of the arts is worthless knowledge. Actually, it is not knowledge at all, and anyone who says it is is just trying to trick you.
I know the plan sounds like it is more of an 'entertainment' package, but it could be related to the school's curriculum, if it were open ended enough to be used that way.
Most universities are terrified, repeat, terrified, of being legally liable for anything. They are doubtless motivated in this case not by the desire to provide music to students, but to provide assurance that they are not going to be sued, no matter how unlikely it may be.
Does anybody remember how the RIAA quietly went around and threatened to sue universities that did not block Napster? Right after this happened, mine announced they were blocking Napster because of 'bandwidth' reasons. This is the same kind of situation, the universities are just dying to pay protection money. They will do anything to avoid the high costs and bad publicity that could come with a lawsuit.
I hope that is not true. Look at what we are using this for... I think humanity needs some new priorities if this is the case.
Pilots are important all right. Actually, an Air Force captain by the name of John Boyd figured out a way of dodging missiles, turning in a specific way or something, that made it into the still classified tactical manual he wrote, the Aerial Attack Study. I just wanted to mention this guy's name. I have been reading his biography. He was really an extraordinary person.
The best application for this would not be to try to compete with the mainstream media, that serves the taste of the mainstream public, but to find an underserved niche of people who are willing to pay for music that does not come through the main distribution channels.
Do you really think the average person would be able to appreciate something this complicated, and how they could benefit from it? If all the want is the music being sold to them already, just considering switching to a different system of getting it would be a waste of their time.
This system is not supposed to be a distributed sharing system. All the discs in the system are bought by the collective and centrally stored. Thus you cannot put discs you own into the system yourself, while retaining your copy. This would create obvious problems if you listened to the disc, or a fair use copy you had made of the disc.
True enough that adapting this system into a car or regular cd player would be implausible with current technology. It would only work on the computer. Yet if it worked well enough, it might be viable as a distribution method.
What if you could play 50 different songs once a day for a monthly subscription of $15? That is $200 per year to access a potentially enormous archive of music, giving you the ability to hear more music than you could ever hope to buy at that price. I think it is worth it, but you should only be able to download as many songs as you can play. Screw the hoarders who want to copy the entire music archive to their giant raid array. Besides, in this case, there would be no reason to hoard, as you own the music, along with a lot of other people. The organization is just storing it for you and handling loaning it out - a bit like a private subscription library.
Huh, I didn't read the first snapster article, because I doubted it would have plausible ideas. This sounds interesting, basically in the electronic database, there would be one physical copy of the song that could only be used by one person at a time. This seems to make it legal - fair use is preserved, and communal ownership is possible.
I dunno about it being cheaper than the other ways of buying the music in many cases. Particularly if the music is popular: In that case, many people would want to access the music at once, requiring many physical copies to be purchased. You would always be walking a fine line between providing a useful service that is cheaper than outright ownership, and annoying people with a busy signal. Plus, as you bought more copies, the cost would go up.
Where this could really shine is building archives of music where overall volume of the archive makes it more valuable than being able to get to a specific song. There has been a lot of music made in the past, an enormous quantity really. Classical music fans would doubtless appreciate the ability to access recordings of as wide a variety of music as possible. Getting the latest hit single would not be a priority, and there are frequently multiple recordings of popular works anyway. Most other works would not have a much competition for access at any given time.
Building an archive that people would want to access would have to mean an archive that would rival any individual's collection of recordings, while costing significantly less. But if this holds water legally, it might be possible. It would take a lot of cdrom drives though, unless the media was transferred to disk, and the physical copies were merely tallied and stored.