While this ruling may at first glance seem like a good thing by putting a greater burden of proof on copyright holders, I think it suffers the same problem that has plagued copyright enforcement in the modern age: it is tied to a particular technological implementation rather than based on general principles, and will cause trouble down the line as technology evolves.
Specifically, it assumes that there is a clear distinction between an "offer of distribution" and actual distribution. What about a copyrighted image or text posted to a website? If I view the page in my web-browser, I've already downloaded it to my hard drive. Is it being offered or distributed? Do I have to manually click "save as" before it becomes distribution?
You can't base law on which file types happen to be natively supported in a web browser.
Just because at present it takes more manual effort to "download" an mp3 doesn't mean there will always be such a clear separation of "offer" and "distribution".
In the future, the global voice network will merge with the global data network and we'll have realtime, always-on, p2p voice communications. Think instant messenger in your cell phone earbud. You'll be able to ask your buddy in Thailand a question as easily as asking the guy in the next cube over.
In a recent reactionary wave to the hassles of PDAs there is the Hipster PDA
The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and "beaming," and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.
Weather-resistant. Drop-proof. Unlimited battery life. There's even a "docking station".
Fortunately for a few lucky adventurers, this happens to be the season when sailboats cross the South Pacific from Mexico to French Polynesia (they call it the Puddle Jump). My mom's boat happens to be among them, traveling on her retirement adventure.
I created a blog for their sailboat. Since they have email access via single sideband radio, they can blog from the boat! Plus there's a GPS tracker built into the site so you can see the current position. Pretty neat.
When we begin to model gene expression accurately, with all of its epigenetic feedback loops, then the effects of genetic modification will be simulated inside a computer. There'll be no need to create living degenerate forms.
Instead we'll design the way Nature designs: run our own evolutionary algorithm through thousands of generations to arrive at a stable, functional form. Then you're only limited by your ability to define the right fitness test. In the end, if you like what you see, you "print to hardcopy".
When are we going to realize that we don't need to invent some magical nanotech assembler? We have been carrying it with us all along, inside each and every cell. DNA is nanotechnology.
Again we'll learn from Nature, this time how to do fabrication. Just as evolutionary computation is an abstraction of evolutionary biology, we'll create an abstraction of DNA's enzymatic assembler that serves our purposes. XNA anyone?
This stereotypical topic of coffee-house philosophers and stoners gets quite a serious treatment nowadays--The Matrix notwithstanding. Now Oxford faculty member Nick Bostrom provides a logical proof. Whoa.
In Rees's article, he gives the proposition even more support by showing how it's a direct consequence of multiverse theory:
Once you accept the idea of the multiverse, and that some universes will have immense potentiality for complexity, it's a logical consequence that in some of those universes there will be the potential to simulate parts of themselves...
Taking this one step further... If there is another universe X that is more complex than our universe U, universe X has the computational resources to simulate U in its entirety.
Space flight's impossible future
on
Ask Larry Niven
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· Score: 1
Larry, you introduced a bright 3rd grader to science-fiction with your "World Out of Time". Your vivid imaginations of a lone traveler crossing the yawning gapes of the interstellar void in a ramjet starship were consciousness-expanding to that little kid. And--scarcely 8 years old--gifted him with an intuitive grasp of relativistic physics.
My question is: do you think those interstellar dreams are still attainable? In other words: will our space technology beat the race against population growth, warfare, disease, poverty, et cetera? At present it seems WAY behind.
The child is now a man, and longs to escape The State for a simpler life among the branches of an Integral Tree.
I agree that the so-called "transhumanism" subculture (also known as extropians) are an idealist bunch that often delve into pseudoscientific fancies bordering on New Age. But you'd have to be utterly lacking an imagination not to see the very obvious ramifications of scientifically rigorous work in quantum computing, nanotechnology and the like. I suppose you must categorize that new-fangled "Computer Science" as a pseudoscience as well; and Richard Feynman (thought up quantum comp.), Bill Joy (creator of Berkeley Unix), Eric Drexler (nanotech), Ray Kurzweil (AI) all crackpots who never amounted to anything.
I can understand your viewpoint only if you were born less than 10 years ago--"the Web has always been around, right Mom?". On the contrary, the world has been transformed a thousand times over due to the progression of technology through the ages. And we've had our foot on the accelerator for centuries. 95% of the scientists and engineers who have ever lived are alive and working right now. This is simply an emergent phenomenon of exponential population growth. To discard the notion of the technology Singularity outright just because of its association with "transhumanists" is very unscientific of you. To do so is to discard all notions of exponential growth. If anything at all, the technology singularity represents the hope that tech will save us before the bacterial mass of humananity overruns our one petrie dish--and dies.
So, is GNU/Linx usage asymptotically headed towards, say 'all users', or 'half a billion users'?
I see the proliferation of Linux (and open-source in general) as yet one more rocket booster up the exponential slope of the Technology Singularity. As is typical of such booster phenomena, the growth trend will level out as it approaches saturation. But the the meta-trend of overall technological innovation surfs the waves of many such growth trends; it is the shuttle being repeatedly boosted at a rate of acceleration that is truly exponential. The future OS will bear little resemblance to Linux, but it will surely be open source since only entities that can dynamically evolve over micro-timescales will survive the rush to Singularity. And after that...?
Slashdot Mirror
While this ruling may at first glance seem like a good thing by putting a greater burden of proof on copyright holders, I think it suffers the same problem that has plagued copyright enforcement in the modern age: it is tied to a particular technological implementation rather than based on general principles, and will cause trouble down the line as technology evolves.
Specifically, it assumes that there is a clear distinction between an "offer of distribution" and actual distribution. What about a copyrighted image or text posted to a website? If I view the page in my web-browser, I've already downloaded it to my hard drive. Is it being offered or distributed? Do I have to manually click "save as" before it becomes distribution?
You can't base law on which file types happen to be natively supported in a web browser.
Just because at present it takes more manual effort to "download" an mp3 doesn't mean there will always be such a clear separation of "offer" and "distribution".
In the future, the global voice network will merge with the global data network and we'll have realtime, always-on, p2p voice communications. Think instant messenger in your cell phone earbud. You'll be able to ask your buddy in Thailand a question as easily as asking the guy in the next cube over.
Talk about voices in the head...
Fortunately for a few lucky adventurers, this happens to be the season when sailboats cross the South Pacific from Mexico to French Polynesia (they call it the Puddle Jump). My mom's boat happens to be among them, traveling on her retirement adventure.
I created a blog for their sailboat. Since they have email access via single sideband radio, they can blog from the boat! Plus there's a GPS tracker built into the site so you can see the current position. Pretty neat.
http://wind-river.blogspot.com
Here is a hi-res map of the eclipse path: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/eclipse/map105.p df
When we begin to model gene expression accurately, with all of its epigenetic feedback loops, then the effects of genetic modification will be simulated inside a computer. There'll be no need to create living degenerate forms.
Instead we'll design the way Nature designs: run our own evolutionary algorithm through thousands of generations to arrive at a stable, functional form. Then you're only limited by your ability to define the right fitness test. In the end, if you like what you see, you "print to hardcopy".
When are we going to realize that we don't need to invent some magical nanotech assembler? We have been carrying it with us all along, inside each and every cell. DNA is nanotechnology.
Again we'll learn from Nature, this time how to do fabrication. Just as evolutionary computation is an abstraction of evolutionary biology, we'll create an abstraction of DNA's enzymatic assembler that serves our purposes. XNA anyone?
In Rees's article, he gives the proposition even more support by showing how it's a direct consequence of multiverse theory: Taking this one step further... If there is another universe X that is more complex than our universe U, universe X has the computational resources to simulate U in its entirety.
Larry, you introduced a bright 3rd grader to science-fiction with your "World Out of Time". Your vivid imaginations of a lone traveler crossing the yawning gapes of the interstellar void in a ramjet starship were consciousness-expanding to that little kid. And--scarcely 8 years old--gifted him with an intuitive grasp of relativistic physics.
My question is: do you think those interstellar dreams are still attainable? In other words: will our space technology beat the race against population growth, warfare, disease, poverty, et cetera? At present it seems WAY behind.
The child is now a man, and longs to escape The State for a simpler life among the branches of an Integral Tree.
Larry, thank you for your visions.
I can understand your viewpoint only if you were born less than 10 years ago--"the Web has always been around, right Mom?". On the contrary, the world has been transformed a thousand times over due to the progression of technology through the ages. And we've had our foot on the accelerator for centuries. 95% of the scientists and engineers who have ever lived are alive and working right now. This is simply an emergent phenomenon of exponential population growth. To discard the notion of the technology Singularity outright just because of its association with "transhumanists" is very unscientific of you. To do so is to discard all notions of exponential growth. If anything at all, the technology singularity represents the hope that tech will save us before the bacterial mass of humananity overruns our one petrie dish--and dies.
I see the proliferation of Linux (and open-source in general) as yet one more rocket booster up the exponential slope of the Technology Singularity. As is typical of such booster phenomena, the growth trend will level out as it approaches saturation. But the the meta-trend of overall technological innovation surfs the waves of many such growth trends; it is the shuttle being repeatedly boosted at a rate of acceleration that is truly exponential. The future OS will bear little resemblance to Linux, but it will surely be open source since only entities that can dynamically evolve over micro-timescales will survive the rush to Singularity. And after that...?
more info @ the link above and Ander's Transhuman Resources
The philosopher Daniel Dennett put it simply: "Information is the one commodity which can be given away and kept at the same time."
To what extent is the ibiblio community idealistically motivated towards the future "free-ing" of all published works?
To what extent is the community motivated by the possibility of future profit?