It really is bizarre, much more than the usual situation. Actors and directors, for example, kvetch about Hollywood, but I haven't seen nearly the same level of anti-studio invective from prominent directors and actors as I have seen anti-music-industry invective from prominent musicians. The RIAA types seem to have done a remarkably thorough job in pissing off the people they claim to represent, across a wide swathe of genres.
Yes, but as we've been trying to hammer into the RIAA's defenders for a few years now, suing someone for copyright infringement requires proving that they distributed copies.
I agree that id's forte has been working under real-world hardware constraints, which is why they were so dominant early on in the development of 3d (well, pseudo-3d at the time) games. But I'll have to say this still doesn't look like it'll be fun: not all constrained design results with interesting challenges result in good games...
They'll try to use it as some sort of precedent, sure. But legally, it's basically irrelevant. They won the case almost solely on the basis that they asked the defendant if he was liable, and the defendant said "yes" in open court. All the precedent that sets is: if the plaintiff's lawyer outright asks you if you're at fault in a case, your lawyer fails to object to the question, you actually answer it, and you say "yes", then, well, you lose. But I think everyone already knew that.
I think we (as a society) still haven't worked out what we want to do about this as the problems become more apparent. I wouldn't call the ownership-of-information view as dead as you seem to think it is. If anything, it has considerable support among moderate conservatives or libertarians who agree that we need to do something about privacy and large aggregate databases of personal information, but are wary of more centralized, paternalist solutions based solely around regulation. If you have that combination of traits---want something done, but want it not to be paternalist---a property right in personal information is an attractive idea. It's a few years old now, but this book has a good concise overview (pp. 76-79; might be able to get enough of an excerpt on Google Books if you're lucky) of a bunch of the proposals.
An interesting variant are those that revolve around the idea of default implied contracts. The way that in normal contract law, there are all sorts of implied things for what happens if the contract doesn't explicitly specify terms governing a particular situation, some of the proposals would have default terms include some sensible governance for ownership and use of private information, and require deviation from those to actually be agreed by both sides (this might require broader EULA reform, though, to make sure people really do know what they're agreeing to).
To be fair, the book also (pp. 81-92) has a decent summary of problems and criticisms of these proposals. Some are from people who'd love to aggregate huge databases of information and use it without any restraints, but there are a number from well-meaning people too. The problem is that the property rights are really the means, not the end--- it's not that we think having property rights in information is an inherent ethical good, but that we want to avoid some sort of dystopian surveillance society, and having property rights in your personal information is one possible proposal for how to avoid that. But designing markets is tricky, and subject to unintended consequences and loopholes, or just failing to really produce what we'd like them to produce.
Although (to reply to my own post), an interesting study [PDF] I ran across while looking for that other one suggests American attitudes towards robot employees are warming up in some areas:
We present a study of peopleâ(TM)s attitudes toward robot workers.... We found that public opinion favors robots for jobs that require memorization, keen perceptual abilities, and service-orientation. People are preferred for occupations that require artistry, evaluation, judgment and diplomacy."
Ah yeah, I had forgotten about that angle. It's an interesting viewpoint--- I can't find the link again, but I recall reading a study that found that the idea of robots taking care of old people was viewed as a dystopian possibility in the U.S., but a utopian one in Japan.
Depends on if you're investing for dollars or inventions, I suppose. I think Toyota has a good research program, and there's a good chance that long-term more exciting things will come out of it. But it's a totally different question whether this will result in Toyota stock being worth significantly more. They could totally implode in the medium-term if their actual business (selling cars) does badly, for example. Or they could fail to figure out how to commercialize the technology, Xerox PARC style. Etc.
This sort of data-mining of quasi-private data to spot anomalous behavior is sometimes referred to as "terrorism informatics", since lots of the funding for it and interest in it comes from the case where anomalous=terrorist. Not sure it's going to be good for society to be applying the same sorts of intrusive analysis to legal things that are merely bad for business.
Of course, it's a tricky regulatory issue. On the one hand you might say that a business should be able to analyze its internal data however it wants. But on the other hand, most people view the phone companies as infrastructure, and people don't expect them to be analyzing their calls--- just providing them with service at the stated rates. And since they form a oligopoly of sorts with very high barriers to entry, it's not clear that "just don't do business with the shady ones" is a feasible solution.
In the really old days, a platform was almost synonymous with its hardware: when you wrote straight assembly on the Atari VCS and directly controlled the video interface, the hardware was your game platform. What you could or couldn't do on the platform was more or less defined but what you could or couldn't get its bizarre hardware to do. (There's an excellent recent book that traces just how big an influence the Atari's odd hardware had on its game design, among other things.)
But that hasn't been true for a while. Sure, hardware is still an important part of the platform. But so are lots of other things. What's the programming model? What kind of SDK do you have? What libraries are there? How does the platform look to a programmer? What can they do with it easily and what's hard to do on it? Hardware is only one of the things from that perspective; unless you're programming on bare metal, what matters is the entire stack. The hardware could be so terrible or so great that it makes or breaks the entire stack. But I would suspect that of the things that can be an impediment to producing a good game on a particular platform, "the hardware just couldn't support what we wanted to do" is the bottleneck less and less often.
I don't see it as some sort of prerequisite for a word that describes humans to describe a single entity that's empirically testable. People use phrases like "kind" and "loving" and "artistic" and "creative" to describe humans, even though there is probably no solid definition that's empirically testable. I'd still resist some scientist trying to take one of those terms and apply it to their own pet concept that happens to be empirically testable but isn't what the word actually means. Inventing new jargon, while less sexy, would be less confusing.
This seems to be a common mode of argument for people who for some reason don't like what people commonly mean by "intelligence", which is something closer to "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information", but nonetheless like the aura of the term. There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means, so should probably get new names instead of being shoehorned in there. Now we've got survivability, which is indeed an interesting trait of an organism, but is not in itself actually what anyone calls intelligence (though being more intelligent might help with survivability, at least in some contexts).
It's a perfectly valid argument to say: look, I don't think intelligence is the most interesting property to study; here's this other property, which might overlap somewhat, but I argue is more interesting. But pretending that your new property is really intelligence is a weird sort of linguistic move, because your property is not what people use that word to mean.
There are certainly things that humans are still better at than computers, but solving SAT problems is not one of them. I would be surprised if the collective efforts of several thousand humans solving SAT problems were faster than one regular desktop running a decent modern algorithm.
The topic of ocean mixing is a huge subject, and seems to implicate just about everything you can think of: the atmosphere, geologic activity, emergent effects from complex system dynamics, boundary layers, energy dissipation, fluid turbulence, climate change, dissolved minerals, the rotation of the earth, gravitational effects of the moon, etc., etc. It's not particularly surprising to me that the actions of marine life are a significant component as well, though it's interesting to see actual numbers claiming to demonstrate it.
Unless the swimmer is frictionless, their sides drag some water along with them. Yes, water must be displaced backwards, but it's not false that "some water travels with the swimmer".
This sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it; thanks to Google Books I'm remembering a pretty cool section in Robot Builder's Bonanza on DIY robot firefighters, building up simple circuits to ever more capable, fire-detection systems, control schemes, and automatically controlled extinguishing apparatus.
Obviously not quite the same thing, but it was pretty cool when I read it, and so I'm taking this opportunity to plug the awesomeness of building DIY firefighting robots. =]
Given the epistemological rigor of western Science...
While it's certainly better than, say, religion, it's pretty easy to overstate this as well. There's a reason most science degree programs don't teach much philosophy of science: because it's not really agreed on, and most scientists sweep it under the rug and hold to a sort of ad-hoc mash of positivism and falsificationism.
Yeah, I imagine it meant something more like "include part of" rather than literally citing. Many publishers just ignore the issue, but some publishers are sticklers who complain if you re-use a graph of your own data that had already been published in a previous paper---and was therefore copyrighted by that previous paper's journal. So people end up having to do stupid things like re-graphing the same data in a different piece of plotting software so the figure looks different.
You complainers about Windows support need to learn that it's BECAUSE OLPC is an open platform that Microsoft is able to port Windows XP for it. You are completely ridiculous not understanding that for OLPC to not support Windows XP, they would have had to build a closed proprietary system. Since specs of XO are opened, and it's X86 based, Microsoft is obviously able to read the specs on the Wiki and build a port of Windows XP for it. It's just plain stupid to keep asking for OLPC to somehow block Microsoft.
I don't think anyone's asking for OLPC to block Microsoft. The claim, which I don't have enough information to evaluate, is that the OLPC accommodated Microsoft by upping the specs on the device from what they had originally intended to something that could support WinXP better, which raised its price point.
While those look like good suggestions, they were both published in the 1980s, so I'm guessing they don't cover very much of the 1990s. =] I'll take a look at them for the 80s content, though; thanks.
I'm 27, and I cannot recall a pre-computer writing age. For elementary school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote my essays in AppleWriter for the Apple ][ and printed them out on a nice loud dot-matrix printer to turn in. Just about the only time I actually wrote anything more than brief notes by hand was when we were required to do in-class essays for one reason or another, which were rarely longer than 2-3 pages.
Since I like history and dead-tree, anyone have a suggestion for a good book covering the history of these 1990s hacking/security/blackhat/whitehat/grayhat groups, and what you might call the fragmentation/dissolution of the underground? There's good material on the 80s, but much less on the 90s, it seems, despite a decade having passed.
The only one I know of with more than a passing mention is a 20-page overview in Ch. 3 ("Hacking in the 1990s") of the book Hacker Culture (2003). Others?
Why don't they say that, then? By wording it as blanket permission for "Appearance in Facebook Ads", it certainly carries an implication that you're giving them permission (opted in by default) to use your likeness in Facebook ads.
Slashdot Mirror
But I prefer my leaves unelectrified.
It really is bizarre, much more than the usual situation. Actors and directors, for example, kvetch about Hollywood, but I haven't seen nearly the same level of anti-studio invective from prominent directors and actors as I have seen anti-music-industry invective from prominent musicians. The RIAA types seem to have done a remarkably thorough job in pissing off the people they claim to represent, across a wide swathe of genres.
Yes, but as we've been trying to hammer into the RIAA's defenders for a few years now, suing someone for copyright infringement requires proving that they distributed copies.
I agree that id's forte has been working under real-world hardware constraints, which is why they were so dominant early on in the development of 3d (well, pseudo-3d at the time) games. But I'll have to say this still doesn't look like it'll be fun: not all constrained design results with interesting challenges result in good games...
They'll try to use it as some sort of precedent, sure. But legally, it's basically irrelevant. They won the case almost solely on the basis that they asked the defendant if he was liable, and the defendant said "yes" in open court. All the precedent that sets is: if the plaintiff's lawyer outright asks you if you're at fault in a case, your lawyer fails to object to the question, you actually answer it, and you say "yes", then, well, you lose. But I think everyone already knew that.
I think we (as a society) still haven't worked out what we want to do about this as the problems become more apparent. I wouldn't call the ownership-of-information view as dead as you seem to think it is. If anything, it has considerable support among moderate conservatives or libertarians who agree that we need to do something about privacy and large aggregate databases of personal information, but are wary of more centralized, paternalist solutions based solely around regulation. If you have that combination of traits---want something done, but want it not to be paternalist---a property right in personal information is an attractive idea. It's a few years old now, but this book has a good concise overview (pp. 76-79; might be able to get enough of an excerpt on Google Books if you're lucky) of a bunch of the proposals.
An interesting variant are those that revolve around the idea of default implied contracts. The way that in normal contract law, there are all sorts of implied things for what happens if the contract doesn't explicitly specify terms governing a particular situation, some of the proposals would have default terms include some sensible governance for ownership and use of private information, and require deviation from those to actually be agreed by both sides (this might require broader EULA reform, though, to make sure people really do know what they're agreeing to).
To be fair, the book also (pp. 81-92) has a decent summary of problems and criticisms of these proposals. Some are from people who'd love to aggregate huge databases of information and use it without any restraints, but there are a number from well-meaning people too. The problem is that the property rights are really the means, not the end--- it's not that we think having property rights in information is an inherent ethical good, but that we want to avoid some sort of dystopian surveillance society, and having property rights in your personal information is one possible proposal for how to avoid that. But designing markets is tricky, and subject to unintended consequences and loopholes, or just failing to really produce what we'd like them to produce.
Although (to reply to my own post), an interesting study [PDF] I ran across while looking for that other one suggests American attitudes towards robot employees are warming up in some areas:
Ah yeah, I had forgotten about that angle. It's an interesting viewpoint--- I can't find the link again, but I recall reading a study that found that the idea of robots taking care of old people was viewed as a dystopian possibility in the U.S., but a utopian one in Japan.
Depends on if you're investing for dollars or inventions, I suppose. I think Toyota has a good research program, and there's a good chance that long-term more exciting things will come out of it. But it's a totally different question whether this will result in Toyota stock being worth significantly more. They could totally implode in the medium-term if their actual business (selling cars) does badly, for example. Or they could fail to figure out how to commercialize the technology, Xerox PARC style. Etc.
This sort of data-mining of quasi-private data to spot anomalous behavior is sometimes referred to as "terrorism informatics", since lots of the funding for it and interest in it comes from the case where anomalous=terrorist. Not sure it's going to be good for society to be applying the same sorts of intrusive analysis to legal things that are merely bad for business.
Of course, it's a tricky regulatory issue. On the one hand you might say that a business should be able to analyze its internal data however it wants. But on the other hand, most people view the phone companies as infrastructure, and people don't expect them to be analyzing their calls--- just providing them with service at the stated rates. And since they form a oligopoly of sorts with very high barriers to entry, it's not clear that "just don't do business with the shady ones" is a feasible solution.
In the really old days, a platform was almost synonymous with its hardware: when you wrote straight assembly on the Atari VCS and directly controlled the video interface, the hardware was your game platform. What you could or couldn't do on the platform was more or less defined but what you could or couldn't get its bizarre hardware to do. (There's an excellent recent book that traces just how big an influence the Atari's odd hardware had on its game design, among other things.)
But that hasn't been true for a while. Sure, hardware is still an important part of the platform. But so are lots of other things. What's the programming model? What kind of SDK do you have? What libraries are there? How does the platform look to a programmer? What can they do with it easily and what's hard to do on it? Hardware is only one of the things from that perspective; unless you're programming on bare metal, what matters is the entire stack. The hardware could be so terrible or so great that it makes or breaks the entire stack. But I would suspect that of the things that can be an impediment to producing a good game on a particular platform, "the hardware just couldn't support what we wanted to do" is the bottleneck less and less often.
I don't see it as some sort of prerequisite for a word that describes humans to describe a single entity that's empirically testable. People use phrases like "kind" and "loving" and "artistic" and "creative" to describe humans, even though there is probably no solid definition that's empirically testable. I'd still resist some scientist trying to take one of those terms and apply it to their own pet concept that happens to be empirically testable but isn't what the word actually means. Inventing new jargon, while less sexy, would be less confusing.
This seems to be a common mode of argument for people who for some reason don't like what people commonly mean by "intelligence", which is something closer to "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information", but nonetheless like the aura of the term. There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means, so should probably get new names instead of being shoehorned in there. Now we've got survivability, which is indeed an interesting trait of an organism, but is not in itself actually what anyone calls intelligence (though being more intelligent might help with survivability, at least in some contexts).
It's a perfectly valid argument to say: look, I don't think intelligence is the most interesting property to study; here's this other property, which might overlap somewhat, but I argue is more interesting. But pretending that your new property is really intelligence is a weird sort of linguistic move, because your property is not what people use that word to mean.
There are certainly things that humans are still better at than computers, but solving SAT problems is not one of them. I would be surprised if the collective efforts of several thousand humans solving SAT problems were faster than one regular desktop running a decent modern algorithm.
The topic of ocean mixing is a huge subject, and seems to implicate just about everything you can think of: the atmosphere, geologic activity, emergent effects from complex system dynamics, boundary layers, energy dissipation, fluid turbulence, climate change, dissolved minerals, the rotation of the earth, gravitational effects of the moon, etc., etc. It's not particularly surprising to me that the actions of marine life are a significant component as well, though it's interesting to see actual numbers claiming to demonstrate it.
Unless the swimmer is frictionless, their sides drag some water along with them. Yes, water must be displaced backwards, but it's not false that "some water travels with the swimmer".
This sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it; thanks to Google Books I'm remembering a pretty cool section in Robot Builder's Bonanza on DIY robot firefighters, building up simple circuits to ever more capable, fire-detection systems, control schemes, and automatically controlled extinguishing apparatus.
Obviously not quite the same thing, but it was pretty cool when I read it, and so I'm taking this opportunity to plug the awesomeness of building DIY firefighting robots. =]
While it's certainly better than, say, religion, it's pretty easy to overstate this as well. There's a reason most science degree programs don't teach much philosophy of science: because it's not really agreed on, and most scientists sweep it under the rug and hold to a sort of ad-hoc mash of positivism and falsificationism.
Yeah, I imagine it meant something more like "include part of" rather than literally citing. Many publishers just ignore the issue, but some publishers are sticklers who complain if you re-use a graph of your own data that had already been published in a previous paper---and was therefore copyrighted by that previous paper's journal. So people end up having to do stupid things like re-graphing the same data in a different piece of plotting software so the figure looks different.
I don't think anyone's asking for OLPC to block Microsoft. The claim, which I don't have enough information to evaluate, is that the OLPC accommodated Microsoft by upping the specs on the device from what they had originally intended to something that could support WinXP better, which raised its price point.
While those look like good suggestions, they were both published in the 1980s, so I'm guessing they don't cover very much of the 1990s. =] I'll take a look at them for the 80s content, though; thanks.
It was the future in 2001; inspired the masses with its vision of the glorious future in 2003; and of course we are presumably right on the cusp of this golden future today.
I'm 27, and I cannot recall a pre-computer writing age. For elementary school in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote my essays in AppleWriter for the Apple ][ and printed them out on a nice loud dot-matrix printer to turn in. Just about the only time I actually wrote anything more than brief notes by hand was when we were required to do in-class essays for one reason or another, which were rarely longer than 2-3 pages.
Since I like history and dead-tree, anyone have a suggestion for a good book covering the history of these 1990s hacking/security/blackhat/whitehat/grayhat groups, and what you might call the fragmentation/dissolution of the underground? There's good material on the 80s, but much less on the 90s, it seems, despite a decade having passed.
The only one I know of with more than a passing mention is a 20-page overview in Ch. 3 ("Hacking in the 1990s") of the book Hacker Culture (2003). Others?
Why don't they say that, then? By wording it as blanket permission for "Appearance in Facebook Ads", it certainly carries an implication that you're giving them permission (opted in by default) to use your likeness in Facebook ads.