Hmm, that's very intersting. Although for some reason they have a proprietary download manager (statically linked to wxWindows), it does work on my i686 Linux. Aside from that, it's great. Hopefully they can make deals with more labels. I think I'll email them about Vorbis, but even without that, I'm considering signing up. Perhaps the industry needs some positive reinforcement.
Thank you. I also can't wait to pay for fast downloads of good music in a completely DRM-free (and preferable patent-free) format. And I really think it can happen.
RIAA has lied to us about what they use DRM for, and too many people believe it. DRM absolutely does not combat piracy in any way, shape, or form. Piracy will always be possible, and at present it's pretty easy. DRM is about limiting fair use, and nothing more. What RIAA is only now slowly learning is that limiting fair use doesn't sell. iTunes has shown that the fewer restrictions there are, the more people will buy.
Eventually someone will convince RIAA to let them sell DRM-free files, and eventually the RIAA will agree. They have absolutely nothing to lose.
I wonder if anyone has read Realware, by Rudy Rucker. It's available on P2P.
SPOILER ALERT!
In the end, we all get allas, which can create anything (up to a certain size) by rearranging and transforming the atoms in the area, and depend on a big catalog of what to make. The allas can make others, so in a few weeks, everyone has one. The book shows what would happen with reasonable accuracy: intellectual property and real estate become the only valuable things. There are artists who sell cool T-shirt designs, and pirates who hang out by the door and make cheap imitations of them. All the manufacturing companies fail, but it doesn't really matter, because everyone has an alla.
The book didn't mention the manufacturing companies attemps to survive, and I think it underestimated them. If the allas had been less user-friendly and not everyone had them, I'm sure the manufacturing companies could have made them illegal, and the short-sighted government would have let them. Obviously this wouldn't work; it's difficult to kill someone who has an alla, so it would be similar to P2P today: illegal but mostly unenforcable.
SPOILER ALERT!
Eventually, the men realize they can hurl huge blocks of TNT at each other, and the aliens and their god take the allas away at the behest of a few humans. Allas are too dangerous for one-dimensional time.
Unfortunatly (and I can't remember the source of this), I've heard that even if there were large quantities of gold in orbit, it still wouldn't be cost-effective to bring it back.
Well I imagine it's Linux x86 (maybe even 586), because it's binary. Since they understandably won't release the source, they're the only ones who can port it to other architectures. However, once they've ported it to Linux and GCC, porting it to other CPUs and kernels should be little more than a recompile. When Linux takes off, hardware will get interesting again, because any platform with GCC, Linux, and X can compete with Intel on level ground.
Simple solution: make it illegal for the doctor to know whether you are a donor until after he pronounces you dead. If you are pronounced dead by someone who knows, that would be grounds for a big malpractice suit. Obviously this wouldn't help you, but it would ensure that common practice would be to hide your donorship from doctors.
Frankly, this being America after all, I'm surprised nobody has sued on these grounds before. (Maybe they have.)
Unfortunately, if the goal is to create "good" original poetry, selecting a net based on the poem's similarity to known good poetry would probably only lead to a revolutionary new file compression algorithm. (Screw random monkeys, here's a 25KB neural net that reproduces Shakespeare!)
Computers function as they are designed. Hardware is (usually) designed to obey the software it runs, because it's more flexible that way. Software is not designed to obey communications from random servers on the internet, because that would be completely and utterly braindead. When software does obey these random computers, it's called a remote root exploit.
You wouldn't happen to be a Swedish legislator, would you? It would explain a lot.
Well, OK, let's play semantic games. Evolution is a process which selects the most fit individiuals. Bioevolution is a subset of evolution where fitness is determined by survival and reproduction in the physical world. Breeding is a subset of evolution where fitness is determined by humans based on their goals and ideals. Darwinian Poetry is both evolution and breeding. I do completely agree with your insistance that bioevolution and breeding are distinct, because bioevolution does not depend on intelligent design.
In sentencnces (and even poems), words have complex interdependencies, and sometimes even meanings. So instead of evolving a poem, it would be better to evolve a poem-making machine.
I see two possible designs: One is to evolve many simple, deterministic algorithms which produce one poem when run. This is most similar to what Darwinian Poetry does, evolving individual poems. The other approach is to evolve a smaller population of algorithms with access to an entrophy source, which produces many different poems. I think the latter approach would lead to machines with a basic, ingrained understanding of what makes a good poem.
So what I'd do is make virtual machine, neural network, or cellular automata, with access to a random number generator, which somehow outputs indexes into a word list. Each time the page reloads, two machines from the population would be run, and their output presented, and the user would select the best one.
Unless the algorithm allows for the individuals to understand what they write, it's little more than a bunch of random paragraphs moderated by a bunch of random people. Hmm.
I think that's a really bad idea. Face it, the RIAA all but owns the government, and if something like this became popular, they would have an excuse for removing fair use from the copyright laws. They've already managed to remove fair use via legally protected technological measures, but at least it still exists in theory. Until we abuse it, that is.
Great idea. Some other ideas: $1.00 is too much, this store should be supported by local taxes. Instead of using credit cards, they could issue their own cards, and even minors could obtain them. Instead of just CDs, they could also carry movies and books.
Yeah, if you have DRI access, you can probably crash the machine. However, you can restrict access to the devices easily. And of course, if you have access to the local X server, you probably have access to the power cord. And finally, MIDI isn't played by the same processes that have DRI.
It seems to me like the placebo effect must take place to some extent. IOW, if I just spent $10K on a sound system, I'm going to think it sounds better than my $5K rig, regardless of whether there's any difference.
Could you please give me that email address? I tried to find it myself, but buymusic.com is bitching about me not running IE, and changing User-Agent headers isn't helping.
Does Messenger 6.0 run in Wine? Also, does the MSN protocol have the equivalent of User-Agent headers that I must fake when using Gaim? I can't wait until someone gets the money, then reveals that they use Windows CDs as coasters.
Something like this may be coming. Check out http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware for a list of hardware that can play Vorbis now, and also hardware that will be able to do so. There are currently 2 CD-R players in the "Coming soon" list. The Freemax has an external battery pack, will cost about $150, but will be sold in Korea.
Interesting though it may be, commercial space flight is a nuclear proliferation nightmare: what if anyone with (say) $50M to spend could put any payload he wanted, anywhere on the planet, reliably?
Oh, you mean like FedEx? Yeah, that would be scary.
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Hmm, that's very intersting. Although for some reason they have a proprietary download manager (statically linked to wxWindows), it does work on my i686 Linux. Aside from that, it's great. Hopefully they can make deals with more labels. I think I'll email them about Vorbis, but even without that, I'm considering signing up. Perhaps the industry needs some positive reinforcement.
RIAA has lied to us about what they use DRM for, and too many people believe it. DRM absolutely does not combat piracy in any way, shape, or form. Piracy will always be possible, and at present it's pretty easy. DRM is about limiting fair use, and nothing more. What RIAA is only now slowly learning is that limiting fair use doesn't sell. iTunes has shown that the fewer restrictions there are, the more people will buy.
Eventually someone will convince RIAA to let them sell DRM-free files, and eventually the RIAA will agree. They have absolutely nothing to lose.
SPOILER ALERT!
In the end, we all get allas, which can create anything (up to a certain size) by rearranging and transforming the atoms in the area, and depend on a big catalog of what to make. The allas can make others, so in a few weeks, everyone has one. The book shows what would happen with reasonable accuracy: intellectual property and real estate become the only valuable things. There are artists who sell cool T-shirt designs, and pirates who hang out by the door and make cheap imitations of them. All the manufacturing companies fail, but it doesn't really matter, because everyone has an alla.
The book didn't mention the manufacturing companies attemps to survive, and I think it underestimated them. If the allas had been less user-friendly and not everyone had them, I'm sure the manufacturing companies could have made them illegal, and the short-sighted government would have let them. Obviously this wouldn't work; it's difficult to kill someone who has an alla, so it would be similar to P2P today: illegal but mostly unenforcable.
SPOILER ALERT!
Eventually, the men realize they can hurl huge blocks of TNT at each other, and the aliens and their god take the allas away at the behest of a few humans. Allas are too dangerous for one-dimensional time.
Unfortunatly (and I can't remember the source of this), I've heard that even if there were large quantities of gold in orbit, it still wouldn't be cost-effective to bring it back.
Well I imagine it's Linux x86 (maybe even 586), because it's binary. Since they understandably won't release the source, they're the only ones who can port it to other architectures. However, once they've ported it to Linux and GCC, porting it to other CPUs and kernels should be little more than a recompile. When Linux takes off, hardware will get interesting again, because any platform with GCC, Linux, and X can compete with Intel on level ground.
Frankly, this being America after all, I'm surprised nobody has sued on these grounds before. (Maybe they have.)
Unfortunately, if the goal is to create "good" original poetry, selecting a net based on the poem's similarity to known good poetry would probably only lead to a revolutionary new file compression algorithm. (Screw random monkeys, here's a 25KB neural net that reproduces Shakespeare!)
You wouldn't happen to be a Swedish legislator, would you? It would explain a lot.
Well, OK, let's play semantic games. Evolution is a process which selects the most fit individiuals. Bioevolution is a subset of evolution where fitness is determined by survival and reproduction in the physical world. Breeding is a subset of evolution where fitness is determined by humans based on their goals and ideals. Darwinian Poetry is both evolution and breeding. I do completely agree with your insistance that bioevolution and breeding are distinct, because bioevolution does not depend on intelligent design.
I see two possible designs: One is to evolve many simple, deterministic algorithms which produce one poem when run. This is most similar to what Darwinian Poetry does, evolving individual poems. The other approach is to evolve a smaller population of algorithms with access to an entrophy source, which produces many different poems. I think the latter approach would lead to machines with a basic, ingrained understanding of what makes a good poem.
So what I'd do is make virtual machine, neural network, or cellular automata, with access to a random number generator, which somehow outputs indexes into a word list. Each time the page reloads, two machines from the population would be run, and their output presented, and the user would select the best one.
Unless the algorithm allows for the individuals to understand what they write, it's little more than a bunch of random paragraphs moderated by a bunch of random people. Hmm.
That's just because it's hard to copy books. Libraries (at least mine) have CDs too, so everyone can have one. (Not legal, but still...)
I think that's a really bad idea. Face it, the RIAA all but owns the government, and if something like this became popular, they would have an excuse for removing fair use from the copyright laws. They've already managed to remove fair use via legally protected technological measures, but at least it still exists in theory. Until we abuse it, that is.
Great idea. Some other ideas: $1.00 is too much, this store should be supported by local taxes. Instead of using credit cards, they could issue their own cards, and even minors could obtain them. Instead of just CDs, they could also carry movies and books.
If I'm going to pay for a movie, and then spend a week downloading it, I want it to work for more than 30 days. And the DRM doesn't help, either.
Yeah, if you have DRI access, you can probably crash the machine. However, you can restrict access to the devices easily. And of course, if you have access to the local X server, you probably have access to the power cord. And finally, MIDI isn't played by the same processes that have DRI.
It seems to me like the placebo effect must take place to some extent. IOW, if I just spent $10K on a sound system, I'm going to think it sounds better than my $5K rig, regardless of whether there's any difference.
You're right, that was the whole point of /etc/shadow. Passwords used to be in /etc/passwd, but the it became feasible to brute force them.
Two weeks later, cop comes by, asks student: "What's the password for your encrypted /home?"
Could you please give me that email address? I tried to find it myself, but buymusic.com is bitching about me not running IE, and changing User-Agent headers isn't helping.
So you're basically saying that it should be illegal to write software unless you're rich? Wow.
And that's what's wrong.
Does Messenger 6.0 run in Wine? Also, does the MSN protocol have the equivalent of User-Agent headers that I must fake when using Gaim? I can't wait until someone gets the money, then reveals that they use Windows CDs as coasters.
Something like this may be coming. Check out http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware for a list of hardware that can play Vorbis now, and also hardware that will be able to do so. There are currently 2 CD-R players in the "Coming soon" list. The Freemax has an external battery pack, will cost about $150, but will be sold in Korea.
Oh, you mean like FedEx? Yeah, that would be scary.