That bit about speeding is absolutely ridiculous. A percentage of drivers will always speed, but that percentage will always change. I guarantee if you set a speed limit of 20km/h on a major six-lane highway you'll get a helluva lot of people breaking it.
Similarly, I suppose, if you set a $20 pricetag on a $0.50 piece of plastic and metal, you'll get a helluva lot of people copying it.
Basically, people know what they're willing to pay (or drive at), and if the price (or speed limit) is too high, they'll disobey the law. This, as I understand it, is pretty much the economic theory of the black market. There'll always be one, but if you have reasonable prices (or speed limits), it'll be negligible. There'll always be the skinflints (speedsters) who'll copy (speed), but most people will obey the law.
Playing with words doesn't do that
I wasn't playing with words, I was playing with law. What I wrote above is what the legal system enforces (or at least, says it enforces).
Theft involves the transfer of property from one party to another, copyright violation involves the unauthorized duplication of property, which by creating a larger supply, invariably devalues the property.
And the whole point of copyright law is not to turn a creative work into property, or rather, it is to turn a creative work into communal property. The supposedly-temporary grant of copyright is in return for the author handing over their creation to the public after they've had a good few years use out of it.
One might argue that with the new laws and legislations being passed (copyright extension, the DMCA making it illegal to access public domain materiel if it comes in a copy-protected form) mean that authors never have to give their works into the public domain. If so, then the reason for copyright is null and void, and people should feel no guilt at all for not upholding it. Scratch it all, I say. There were authors, musicians and painters well before copyright. Let's head back a few hundred years and try again. Maybe we'll get it right next time.
Your description is of someone committing theft. Downloading music over P2P is copyright violation.
These are different crimes, with different results, different consequences, different punishments, and different courts even (Theft = criminal, Copyright violation = civil, I believe)
Nobody is saying it's not a crime because a lot of people are doing it. They're saying that it shouldn't be a crime because lots of people are doing it.
While that's not a perfect argument, it is still legitimate. The whole idea of a representational democracy is to give "the people" a say in the way their country is run. If a majority of people (43 million isn't a majority of Americans, but, as an earlier post pointed out, it's half of those with internet access, including those with dialup for whom file trading is less attractive) disobey that law, it would seem that at the very least the law should be examined.
If everyone speeds along the NY Turnpike, the speed limits should be examined to see if they really are realistic. If 80 million Americans smoke pot, the anti-pot laws should be re-examined. If half the people who have the opportunity to break copyright in this particular way (for personal use) break it, the copyright laws should be examined. More importantly, they should be examined with an eye to the well being of citizens before the well being of the corporations.
Of course, none of this makes those 43 million criminals less criminal. It just makes them the victim of a hypocritic government. Welcome to America, the worlds first Corpocracy.
I don't think that's entirely true. Basically there's always going to be a compromise between aesthetics and usability (until everything goes wireless maybe), but instead of sticking everything round the back, I think it's better to stick it behind a sliding panel or something at the front.
My Dad just bought a new computer, some German one from a company called Medion. And its got a neat panel at the front that contains USB ports, ports for three or four different digital camera/video cards, audio connections, and a host of other stuff, all hidden behind a panel that drops down at a gentle press. It's far more convenient to plug in stuff like that the front, and a little panel maintains a nice aesthetic.
Basically, it can only be read once. Just say you send a crypto key using this method to a friend. An evil hacker intercepts it and gets the key. Because it's intercepted, it never gets to your friend. Your friend, or rather, his quantum crypto protocol, tells you that it never got the key. You send another new key, repeat until hacker gets bored.
The hacker cannot simply intercept and repeat the key, because his interception modifies the photon before he gets a chance to read it. If he retransmitted his intercepted key, your friends computer wouldn't be able to understand it, would ignore it as corrupted, and ask for another key.
Some poor sucker is hosting his personnal do-it-yourself bonzai page off his jacket when some slashdot editor becomes fascinated with the topic and posts a story linking to it.
End result? Some poor shmuck, sitting down having a nice cup of tea is burned to death as his jacket slowly melts around him.
If, that is, you don't apply for immigration, but come here anyway, apply for refugee status when you do get here, and burn your papers so that nobody can tell wether you are a legitimate refugee or not.
But there are differences between the Matrix and Zion. Look at how zonked Neo gets when he does his stuff at the end of the movie. It requires a lot more power to do stuff in Zion than it does in the Matrix. That would tend to indicate that they are not the same construct.
It's not so dumb for the agent to be able to exist in human wetware. After all, that uber-syringe thing they get in the back of the head when they jack in is an interface between the mind and the matrix. If a human consciousness can be digitized, why can't a digital consciousness be humanized? Just like a modem; digital to analog, analog to digital.
I doubt they'd have rebuilt Zion. They don't need to "rebuild" it. Humans escaping from the Matrix wouldn't expect to find everything all nice and ordered after they escape from the Matrix into a post-apocalyptic world. They'd expect it to be falling apart. The machines just need to torch the machines and leave Zion how it is. Not to mention that Zion might change locations each iteration.
All this is assuming, of course, that what the Architect says is true.
One of the things the Matrix Reloaded has done is redefine the world of the Matrix. After the original, it was a very simple setup. Humans (goodies) trapped within the Matrix (virtual world) by machines (baddies).
But now it's more like a massive game of Core War. We've got a whole bunch of independant fragments of code (the Oracle, the guy with the accent whose name I can't remember, the Keymaker, Agent Smith) all with their own agendas, that fight against the machines, for the machines, or just sit tight. To me it seems the AI in general would be more worried about these rebels in its own ranks than the humans.
Maybe Zion isn't so much an escape valve for a algorithmic anomoly as it is a honey-pot for soft-hearted AI rebels (Keymaker, Oracle) so the evil AI's can track em down and nail em. After all, would the machines really care that there's a few thousand rebels out there? Pre-Neo, they couldn't do jack all in the Matrix against the Agents and their ships have to turn and run whenever a Sentinel comes near. They can always just up production in the baby factories to replace the ones that escape from the Matrix. These are machines remember, they're not going to throw all this force against something that doesn't really threaten them; that would be inefficient.
All of this besides, if the whole plot of the movie ends up taking place in the virtualized world of the Matrix, it's going to be damn hard to get an audience to care about it at all. There has to be something real, a real victory or a real tragedy or something for people to engage with it. If the movie ends with the cinematic equivelant of "and then I woke up", people are going to feel gyped.
Bah, we haven't seen that sorta stuff for ages. If the world is a simulations, it must have been superceded by SimReality 4000 or something. All the players have gotten bored.
I don't reckon Zion is a nested Matrix. That sorta things been done before (13th Floor, for one, damn good movie). I think the W-brothers are going for something a little more metaphysical. I think in the third part, Neo's gonna realize that the real world is just the same as a matrix, except with atoms instead of bits, and that it can be manipulated by one with the comprehension of his condition.
The Matrix may have popularized it, but the idea of living in a "virutal" world has been around for ages. Read Descartes first meditation. The thing about this idea is that it is absolutely impossible to disprove, thus making it wonderful for philosophers.
If you operating system doesn't let you do this, your operating system has a bug (or at least bad design)
Yeah, he already said he was using Windows
Re:My wife the nurse said ...
on
Build Your Own ECG
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You don't really need it to be 100% accurate or not, what it needs to be able to do is know when it's accurate, and when it's not. If the algorithm can determine when it's diagnosis is shaky or not, it can then page a cardiologist. If a cardiologist only has to check up on the 5% of cases that the ECG can't figure out for itself, that's a massive reduction in work load.
No, if enough folks skipped the ads, high-financed media companies would buy some shiny new legislation and sue the makers of the technology that enabled folks to skip ads.
That's the real golden rule of capitalism - "he who has the gold, makes the rule".
Which language would you try and compile it under? The author doesn't specify which language it's for; he just specifies "Java-like". The example is more in the nature of pseudo-code than real code. He's demonstrating a methodology, not an implementation.
Anyway, I definately enjoy reading critical comments from people so knowledgable(to read: arrogant) that they don't bother reading their own quotations.
I'm not saying they own it, but they do have a right to inspect it.
If you've signed an agreement restricting your use of company resources to company use, and most of us have, then there shouldn't be anything incriminating on their for them to find; it should only be stuff you've done for them.
If, on the other hand, there's something personal on their machines, you've violated an agreement.
The company has two choices: They can assume you're guilty of breaching the agreement and sack you, or they can assume you're not, and that everything on your computer is there as a result of your work.
If you don't want your employer to find out personal details about you, don't use their computers, or phones, for personal things. You're not supposed to be doing that anyway.
"...no company owns my sole(sic), even for eight hours a day. When we enter work we do not become property of the company."
The company doesn't own your soul. It owns the computer you're running. The company paid for, and owns, the hardware. It has (presumably) paid for and licensed the software. It pays the bandwidth bill. The company therefore has a right in saying how you use the things it owns.
Re:"Oh! I have an idea!" said one Microsoftee...
on
Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: 1
I actually don't mind the new concept of the Libraries that this guy talks about.
I mean, I find all the "My Photos", "My Videos", etc stuff obnoxious, but with Longhorn, it looks like they're not going to be real directories, just a virtualized directory that contains the results of a predefined search. Now IF (and this is a big if) Microsoft would just allow users to create their own and delete Microsofts old, pointless ones, this feature might actually be a plus.
Slashdot Mirror
That bit about speeding is absolutely ridiculous. A percentage of drivers will always speed, but that percentage will always change. I guarantee if you set a speed limit of 20km/h on a major six-lane highway you'll get a helluva lot of people breaking it.
Similarly, I suppose, if you set a $20 pricetag on a $0.50 piece of plastic and metal, you'll get a helluva lot of people copying it.
Basically, people know what they're willing to pay (or drive at), and if the price (or speed limit) is too high, they'll disobey the law. This, as I understand it, is pretty much the economic theory of the black market. There'll always be one, but if you have reasonable prices (or speed limits), it'll be negligible. There'll always be the skinflints (speedsters) who'll copy (speed), but most people will obey the law.
Playing with words doesn't do that I wasn't playing with words, I was playing with law. What I wrote above is what the legal system enforces (or at least, says it enforces).
Theft involves the transfer of property from one party to another, copyright violation involves the unauthorized duplication of property, which by creating a larger supply, invariably devalues the property.
And the whole point of copyright law is not to turn a creative work into property, or rather, it is to turn a creative work into communal property. The supposedly-temporary grant of copyright is in return for the author handing over their creation to the public after they've had a good few years use out of it.
One might argue that with the new laws and legislations being passed (copyright extension, the DMCA making it illegal to access public domain materiel if it comes in a copy-protected form) mean that authors never have to give their works into the public domain. If so, then the reason for copyright is null and void, and people should feel no guilt at all for not upholding it. Scratch it all, I say. There were authors, musicians and painters well before copyright. Let's head back a few hundred years and try again. Maybe we'll get it right next time.
Apples to apples please troll.
Your description is of someone committing theft. Downloading music over P2P is copyright violation.
These are different crimes, with different results, different consequences, different punishments, and different courts even (Theft = criminal, Copyright violation = civil, I believe)
Nobody is saying it's not a crime because a lot of people are doing it. They're saying that it shouldn't be a crime because lots of people are doing it.
While that's not a perfect argument, it is still legitimate. The whole idea of a representational democracy is to give "the people" a say in the way their country is run. If a majority of people (43 million isn't a majority of Americans, but, as an earlier post pointed out, it's half of those with internet access, including those with dialup for whom file trading is less attractive) disobey that law, it would seem that at the very least the law should be examined.
If everyone speeds along the NY Turnpike, the speed limits should be examined to see if they really are realistic. If 80 million Americans smoke pot, the anti-pot laws should be re-examined. If half the people who have the opportunity to break copyright in this particular way (for personal use) break it, the copyright laws should be examined. More importantly, they should be examined with an eye to the well being of citizens before the well being of the corporations.
Of course, none of this makes those 43 million criminals less criminal. It just makes them the victim of a hypocritic government. Welcome to America, the worlds first Corpocracy.
"their goal was to elimate the way of life we had here"
No, it wasn't. Most of the terrorist organizations out there couldn't give a stuff what Americans do, as long as they do it in America.
Most of the serious terrorists these days (Bin Laden et al) want Americans out of the Middle East.
*Looks at Afghanistan, Iraq*
Yep, that worked.
I don't think that's entirely true. Basically there's always going to be a compromise between aesthetics and usability (until everything goes wireless maybe), but instead of sticking everything round the back, I think it's better to stick it behind a sliding panel or something at the front.
My Dad just bought a new computer, some German one from a company called Medion. And its got a neat panel at the front that contains USB ports, ports for three or four different digital camera/video cards, audio connections, and a host of other stuff, all hidden behind a panel that drops down at a gentle press. It's far more convenient to plug in stuff like that the front, and a little panel maintains a nice aesthetic.
Basically, it can only be read once. Just say you send a crypto key using this method to a friend. An evil hacker intercepts it and gets the key. Because it's intercepted, it never gets to your friend. Your friend, or rather, his quantum crypto protocol, tells you that it never got the key. You send another new key, repeat until hacker gets bored.
The hacker cannot simply intercept and repeat the key, because his interception modifies the photon before he gets a chance to read it. If he retransmitted his intercepted key, your friends computer wouldn't be able to understand it, would ignore it as corrupted, and ask for another key.
where this'll lead.
Some poor sucker is hosting his personnal do-it-yourself bonzai page off his jacket when some slashdot editor becomes fascinated with the topic and posts a story linking to it.
End result? Some poor shmuck, sitting down having a nice cup of tea is burned to death as his jacket slowly melts around him.
You can tell you're a German native.
;p
Real Germans only speak in accented english, the German language itself is only a urban legend.
What the hell is trollish abot this?
Is some moderator on an ego trip or what?
Of course we will.
If, that is, you don't apply for immigration, but come here anyway, apply for refugee status when you do get here, and burn your papers so that nobody can tell wether you are a legitimate refugee or not.
But there are differences between the Matrix and Zion. Look at how zonked Neo gets when he does his stuff at the end of the movie. It requires a lot more power to do stuff in Zion than it does in the Matrix. That would tend to indicate that they are not the same construct.
It's not so dumb for the agent to be able to exist in human wetware. After all, that uber-syringe thing they get in the back of the head when they jack in is an interface between the mind and the matrix. If a human consciousness can be digitized, why can't a digital consciousness be humanized? Just like a modem; digital to analog, analog to digital.
I doubt they'd have rebuilt Zion. They don't need to "rebuild" it. Humans escaping from the Matrix wouldn't expect to find everything all nice and ordered after they escape from the Matrix into a post-apocalyptic world. They'd expect it to be falling apart. The machines just need to torch the machines and leave Zion how it is. Not to mention that Zion might change locations each iteration.
All this is assuming, of course, that what the Architect says is true.
One of the things the Matrix Reloaded has done is redefine the world of the Matrix. After the original, it was a very simple setup. Humans (goodies) trapped within the Matrix (virtual world) by machines (baddies).
But now it's more like a massive game of Core War. We've got a whole bunch of independant fragments of code (the Oracle, the guy with the accent whose name I can't remember, the Keymaker, Agent Smith) all with their own agendas, that fight against the machines, for the machines, or just sit tight. To me it seems the AI in general would be more worried about these rebels in its own ranks than the humans.
Maybe Zion isn't so much an escape valve for a algorithmic anomoly as it is a honey-pot for soft-hearted AI rebels (Keymaker, Oracle) so the evil AI's can track em down and nail em. After all, would the machines really care that there's a few thousand rebels out there? Pre-Neo, they couldn't do jack all in the Matrix against the Agents and their ships have to turn and run whenever a Sentinel comes near. They can always just up production in the baby factories to replace the ones that escape from the Matrix. These are machines remember, they're not going to throw all this force against something that doesn't really threaten them; that would be inefficient.
All of this besides, if the whole plot of the movie ends up taking place in the virtualized world of the Matrix, it's going to be damn hard to get an audience to care about it at all. There has to be something real, a real victory or a real tragedy or something for people to engage with it. If the movie ends with the cinematic equivelant of "and then I woke up", people are going to feel gyped.
Sorry? What was that? Playing Everquest is indicative of a high IQ? Come on, I mean, I know this is Slashdot, but this is just getting ridiculous.
Bah, we haven't seen that sorta stuff for ages. If the world is a simulations, it must have been superceded by SimReality 4000 or something. All the players have gotten bored.
I don't think our world can be a simulation. Just think about it? What is the single most fun thing to do in a simulation? That's right, wreck the joint. An advanced civilization might manage to simulate human existence for 4000+ years, but no matter how advanced, they aren't gonna be able to reduce the temptation to suddenly create giant lizard-like monsters in population centers, slap people around with giant discorporate hands or send people to the bottom of the ocean.
I don't reckon Zion is a nested Matrix. That sorta things been done before (13th Floor, for one, damn good movie). I think the W-brothers are going for something a little more metaphysical. I think in the third part, Neo's gonna realize that the real world is just the same as a matrix, except with atoms instead of bits, and that it can be manipulated by one with the comprehension of his condition.
The Matrix may have popularized it, but the idea of living in a "virutal" world has been around for ages. Read Descartes first meditation. The thing about this idea is that it is absolutely impossible to disprove, thus making it wonderful for philosophers.
It makes good movies too.
If you operating system doesn't let you do this, your operating system has a bug (or at least bad design)
Yeah, he already said he was using Windows
You don't really need it to be 100% accurate or not, what it needs to be able to do is know when it's accurate, and when it's not. If the algorithm can determine when it's diagnosis is shaky or not, it can then page a cardiologist. If a cardiologist only has to check up on the 5% of cases that the ECG can't figure out for itself, that's a massive reduction in work load.
Ask Slashdot: Why do we have to have a hyperlink on the word air?
No, if enough folks skipped the ads, high-financed media companies would buy some shiny new legislation and sue the makers of the technology that enabled folks to skip ads.
That's the real golden rule of capitalism - "he who has the gold, makes the rule".
Which language would you try and compile it under? The author doesn't specify which language it's for; he just specifies "Java-like". The example is more in the nature of pseudo-code than real code. He's demonstrating a methodology, not an implementation.
Anyway, I definately enjoy reading critical comments from people so knowledgable(to read: arrogant) that they don't bother reading their own quotations.
I'm not saying they own it, but they do have a right to inspect it.
If you've signed an agreement restricting your use of company resources to company use, and most of us have, then there shouldn't be anything incriminating on their for them to find; it should only be stuff you've done for them.
If, on the other hand, there's something personal on their machines, you've violated an agreement.
The company has two choices: They can assume you're guilty of breaching the agreement and sack you, or they can assume you're not, and that everything on your computer is there as a result of your work.
If you don't want your employer to find out personal details about you, don't use their computers, or phones, for personal things. You're not supposed to be doing that anyway.
"...no company owns my sole(sic), even for eight hours a day. When we enter work we do not become property of the company."
The company doesn't own your soul. It owns the computer you're running. The company paid for, and owns, the hardware. It has (presumably) paid for and licensed the software. It pays the bandwidth bill. The company therefore has a right in saying how you use the things it owns.
I actually don't mind the new concept of the Libraries that this guy talks about.
I mean, I find all the "My Photos", "My Videos", etc stuff obnoxious, but with Longhorn, it looks like they're not going to be real directories, just a virtualized directory that contains the results of a predefined search. Now IF (and this is a big if) Microsoft would just allow users to create their own and delete Microsofts old, pointless ones, this feature might actually be a plus.