But clearly, consciousness is the sum of neural activity. It is simply unscientific to believe anything else.
So you belive that consciousness is the sum of neural activity? Would that by any chance be an unconditional belief?:-)
Seriously, while it may be a consistent belief in a physicalistic model, it does not appear to take us very far today. You may think that psychology and sociology, for example, are full of shit, but for the purpose of predicting individual and collective actions I will chose them over neural science without hesitation.
What about tomorrow? What if there is simply no good way to describe "consciousness" as a sum of neural activity? What if we are dealing with something resembling a neural net, and the easiest way to describe it fully is to depict the states of all neurons and the relations between them? What if that is simply too much to depict?
While you are boring the brain with your clumsy tools, others will come up with a description of a teaching/learning process which will take us from child's brain to an adult brain. Such framework may be much more successful in describing consciousness than the neuroscience. And if it is... Then physicalists are also full of shit; and I am one of them, so please take everything I said with good humour.
The project has the enthusiastic backing of Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg and Jon S. Corzine. In addition to proudly witnessing the technology, the pair announced last week that, once again, they had secured $1 million in federal funding for the project. Last year, they secured a similar amount.
And later:
Under New Jersey law, passed in Dec. 2002, only smart guns can be purchased in the state three years after personalized handguns become commercially available.
Let us speculate on whether the technology will be patented, and who is likely to get all the royalties. Hmm... That's a tough one. While the slashdot crowd is discussing EMP, fascinating as it is, Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg and Jon S. Corzine pass another bill to give an unfair advantage to a private business.
I saw a number of posts where people saying that uncovering security vulnerabilities and publishing the research may hurt the customers. OK, let's put that to the test, let's imagine that we are in the world where such publications are prohibited. Last time I checked, the major driving force behind the scientific research was a desire to be recognised. Yes, white hats and black hats have the same personal reason to do what they do -- they want to be famous. If the only way for a white hat to get famous is the court hearing, then you can say bye-bye to the independent security research. From that point on we will be finding out about vulnerabilities when our systems turn against us. As a rule, patches will be coming out after vulnerabilities have been successfully exploited by bad guys. This would be the last blow to the positive meaning of "hacker", and who wants that? I would rather have white hats held in honour, and software companies held accountable for their mistakes.
And have you even tried to assess the threat of such publications? On one side you have a bunch of black hats who are poorly organized, do not have very effective channels of communication, have an inferior understanding of the vulnerable product; on the other side you have a corporation which does nothing but, which is on top of things, which, for a change, has the entire source code along with people who understand it completely.
Who will win in this race? By jailing independent researchers they are effectively sending a message: we are incapable of beating a bunch of amateurs in our own game. The reality is that they simply do not want to, because it costs them more money -- they would rather watch us crash and burn, and then jump in and save the day. Once a day. For all eternity.
The following options will be given consideration:
PeopleX
People XP
People#
Visual People
VisualSoft
MS Soft
However, given their complete lack of imagination (Word, Office, Notepad, Windows, Money, etc.) the product will ultimately become known as Microsoft Management (c), and, needless to say, everyone will have to adapt to it when the next version of Windows comes.
Starting from the end of your comment, what copyright? I described a business model that would survive with copyright law striken down. Of course it cannot work today for commercial art, because it presupposes that an organiser has zero overhead from dealing with the intellectual property rights - more or less like Google or Slashdot today.
As for the equipment, let me surprise you: if there is demand for art (and there is such demand, regardless of the existence of the copyright law), people will pay money, and some of that money will go to the artist, who will spend them on equipment. No mystery here.
I am not fighting for free art - that is silly. I am fighting for our right to speak, or, more generally, to publish information, as well as to freely access the information that has been published. As far as art is concerned, I want to ensure that arists have a right to create and to profit from the derivative works, so that the best artist can win in the market, regardless of who originally came up with the idea. Seems to work for science, does it not? A skillful utilizer gets rich, while a genius becomes famous.
Just a thought: it could be that the stagnation of the modern Western art is partly due to the restrictions on creating derivative works. I am sure that there are people out there who could take Batman or that certain mouse to the next level, but we will not see that happening, because exploiting static cultural icons proved to be a better business strategy for a publisher - nevermind an artist (in case with the mouse the artist couldn't care less).
Parent has a point. Moreover, for as long as there is demand, there will be supply. Do you enjoy art? Are you willing to pay for live performances? Are you willing to pay for original paintings directly to an artist? Are you willing to donate to the sources which keep producing the art which you really enjoy? If you are anything like me, you will say yes.
But if you, and me, and millions of other people are willing to pay, copyright or not, how can we imagine art business ever going away, let alone art itself?
I think the general public justs wants content at a reasonable price that they can use in multiple areas of their lives.
A reasonable price for making a copy of a publicly available work is zero. The general public is not going to fight and die for a right to pay. The only people who really want the information to be "reasonably priced", and in our case it actually means "commercially distributed with copying restrictions", are content holders. Everyone else is tired of paying for the distribution.
There is one thing that costs money: organising the content. That is, providing the client with an interactive process which enables the client to obtain information he/she needs. Look at Google, Craigslist, Slashdot, etc. -- these sites thrive having virtually no content of their own. A Napster-like (the original one) music service offering tracks at a reasonable price of 5 cents would be able to thrive too, if only their music database was superbly organised and cross-referenced, because your vanilla P2P, albeit free, is a huge mess.
Whoever does that best can make money in the world without copyright; moreover, these content organisers would be able to support the content providers (artists) and thus garner more support (yes, people have a good will!) from the consumers.
This is not some anarchist bullshit; IMHO, I have described a viable business model for producing art, and it happens not to infringe on our right to speak whatever we want to whoever wants to listen. This is what a consumer wants -- easy and painless access to the information at the cheapest rate possible, without fear of landing in jail for sharing a song; and this is exactly what publishers should be doing today. Lowering CD prices won't cut it.
I do hope they drop Steam though, it really, really sucks.
IMHO, Steam will not be dropped. If you think about it, it is the only viable copy protection scheme out there, and the only one which can enable the production of big games like HalfLife 2 after (and if) the beast of copyright is subdued. Personally, I felt that Steam is very comfortable, because CD is not required to play the game. For a company that uses Steam-like technology to protect its assets, there is no longer a temptation to scan user's system for 3-rd party software, to install low-level drivers -- none of this stupidity; authentication seems to be enough.
We use the ubiquity of Internet to gain access to the information, while they use it to get paid for their work. That's a fair game I'm willing to play, and this means a lot, coming from an anti-copyright zealot like myself.
I don't remember Google charging $1000 per user license... If by "another Google" they mean, a few folks got stinkin' rich, then yeah, may be; but I don't see them changing the way we browse, and that's what Google did for the internet community.
The system was tested over a 2-year pilot program and produced results virtually identical to those of trained readers.
I've graded an upper division Geometry class in Cal state (kind of similar, because I was looking at proofs in essay form), and I find it very easy to believe that a computer can produce similar grades.
Many of you indicated that this new grading method is unfair and/or easy to trick. I'm not surprised, because, IMHO, the old method was already unfair and easy to trick. Unfair, because a letter grade (or 6 point scale grade) is providing the worst possible kind of feedback. Brilliant flashes of insight + imperfect grammar may give you B- . Being ultimately average in every respect, but reasonably prepared may give you B+ . The positive reinforcement mechanism is broken: people are awarded for the time spent, or sometimes even for how carefully they copy and paste, and never for their actual excellence.
Now, the automated grading takes it one step further. A live teacher could be subjective in grading, by trying to reflect, for example, how student was improving after she was provided with feedback. Automation deals away with it, and we are left with this rigid system which only rewards an adherence to standards.
Religion is a human invention, and as such means different things to different people. To many people, it means the things you disavow.
Science is too a human invention. It did not always exist, and it keeps changing. It was not always so easy to say where science ends and religion begins. Plenty of serious scientists can be named who thought that they were discovering universal laws instantiated by a deity.
The very scientific method is not a subject of science today, and it never was, to be sure. Aristotle already distinguished between physics and metaphysics, and that gap grew wider with years. Consider, for example, that even the foundation of modern mathematics is not mathematical. The axiomatic method which allows us to be perfectly objective in our reasoning also forces us to make a subjective choice of axioms.
As you noted so insightfully, religion means different things to different people, and that's precisely because its purpose is to provide us with subjective knowledge, as opposed to science, which seeks objective knowledge. Religion is there to shape one's sense of identity and to enable one to make deeply personal choices. Atheists are not religious in a conventional way, but they too have a metaphysical foundation to their notions and beliefs, which is entirely subjective and therefore non-scientific. In the modern world, their very escape from religion was prompted and shaped by the said religion.
Wait, where am I going with this?.. Oh yeah, a claim that scientists today are mostly non-religious, if by that we understand a disbelief in a personal god. Well, big deal. As I indicated above, they still believe great many things irrationally. In a most amusing fashion many of them believe that the scientific progress is good; they value very highly things like freedom of speech, unrestricted access to information, high degree of tolerance to various religions, cultures, lifestyles, etc. (I speak now as a scientist, and as one who shares in these beliefs, or at least is empathic to them.) Neither of these beliefs is rational or is rooted in their scientific research, and all together they may be said to constitute their version of religion.
Here's another unsafe data pathway for you: air. Seriously, I wouldn't be worried about the analog audio inputs disappearing, for two reasons.
First, if digital becomes universally or mostly DRMed, there will be a steady demand for analog technology. The same people who were selling us tape recorders, VCRs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, will be selling all the technology we need for manipulating sound.
Second, there's this air thing. When everything else fails, park a decent microphone in front of your digital Bose speakers, and off you go. Remember, it's enough to make just one decent non-DRMed copy. Video is sligtly trickier, but any video stream will have to become unscrambled just before hitting the screen, and that's when you can get it.
Bottom line is, we are dealing with the kind of media that is designed to interface with humans. The only real way to protect the respective rights is to "fix" our very brains.
I suspect it's been suggested before, but anyway: how about writing a file-sharing virus? A user then will be able to claim that her computer was infected at the time of uploading, and that she had no knowledge of the file sharing taking place. It doesn't matter if the virus isn't very successful -- it just has to be out there.
The biggest problem with copyrights, IMHO, is that on P2P networks the information almost distributes itself. Under the current model, pirates are still liable, althogh not nearly as much as people who started their own CD pressing plant (I'm speaking in practical terms here -- it seems that every individual pirate is only hurting RIAA a little, and is much harder to prosecute).A virus-like software would completely remove the liability.
Slashdot Mirror
Why, let's just click on their link and see if they have as much bandwidth as the real Red Cross :-)
But clearly, consciousness is the sum of neural activity. It is simply unscientific to believe anything else.
So you belive that consciousness is the sum of neural activity? Would that by any chance be an unconditional belief? :-)
Seriously, while it may be a consistent belief in a physicalistic model, it does not appear to take us very far today. You may think that psychology and sociology, for example, are full of shit, but for the purpose of predicting individual and collective actions I will chose them over neural science without hesitation.
What about tomorrow? What if there is simply no good way to describe "consciousness" as a sum of neural activity? What if we are dealing with something resembling a neural net, and the easiest way to describe it fully is to depict the states of all neurons and the relations between them? What if that is simply too much to depict?
While you are boring the brain with your clumsy tools, others will come up with a description of a teaching/learning process which will take us from child's brain to an adult brain. Such framework may be much more successful in describing consciousness than the neuroscience. And if it is... Then physicalists are also full of shit; and I am one of them, so please take everything I said with good humour.
Kids know that science is not entertainment...
Something that accomplished scientists have seemingly forgotten.
Yeah!
From TFA:
The project has the enthusiastic backing of Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg and Jon S. Corzine. In addition to proudly witnessing the technology, the pair announced last week that, once again, they had secured $1 million in federal funding for the project. Last year, they secured a similar amount.
And later:
Under New Jersey law, passed in Dec. 2002, only smart guns can be purchased in the state three years after personalized handguns become commercially available.
Let us speculate on whether the technology will be patented, and who is likely to get all the royalties. Hmm... That's a tough one. While the slashdot crowd is discussing EMP, fascinating as it is, Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg and Jon S. Corzine pass another bill to give an unfair advantage to a private business.
I saw a number of posts where people saying that uncovering security vulnerabilities and publishing the research may hurt the customers. OK, let's put that to the test, let's imagine that we are in the world where such publications are prohibited. Last time I checked, the major driving force behind the scientific research was a desire to be recognised. Yes, white hats and black hats have the same personal reason to do what they do -- they want to be famous. If the only way for a white hat to get famous is the court hearing, then you can say bye-bye to the independent security research. From that point on we will be finding out about vulnerabilities when our systems turn against us. As a rule, patches will be coming out after vulnerabilities have been successfully exploited by bad guys. This would be the last blow to the positive meaning of "hacker", and who wants that? I would rather have white hats held in honour, and software companies held accountable for their mistakes.
And have you even tried to assess the threat of such publications? On one side you have a bunch of black hats who are poorly organized, do not have very effective channels of communication, have an inferior understanding of the vulnerable product; on the other side you have a corporation which does nothing but, which is on top of things, which, for a change, has the entire source code along with people who understand it completely. Who will win in this race? By jailing independent researchers they are effectively sending a message: we are incapable of beating a bunch of amateurs in our own game. The reality is that they simply do not want to, because it costs them more money -- they would rather watch us crash and burn, and then jump in and save the day. Once a day. For all eternity.
Granted, OT, but is that like healthcare or what?
The following options will be given consideration:
PeopleX
People XP
People#
Visual People
VisualSoft
MS Soft
However, given their complete lack of imagination (Word, Office, Notepad, Windows, Money, etc.) the product will ultimately become known as Microsoft Management (c), and, needless to say, everyone will have to adapt to it when the next version of Windows comes.
Would that be sjsu? Because your description sounds very familiar.
Wow, that's quite something.
Starting from the end of your comment, what copyright? I described a business model that would survive with copyright law striken down. Of course it cannot work today for commercial art, because it presupposes that an organiser has zero overhead from dealing with the intellectual property rights - more or less like Google or Slashdot today.
As for the equipment, let me surprise you: if there is demand for art (and there is such demand, regardless of the existence of the copyright law), people will pay money, and some of that money will go to the artist, who will spend them on equipment. No mystery here.
I am not fighting for free art - that is silly. I am fighting for our right to speak, or, more generally, to publish information, as well as to freely access the information that has been published. As far as art is concerned, I want to ensure that arists have a right to create and to profit from the derivative works, so that the best artist can win in the market, regardless of who originally came up with the idea. Seems to work for science, does it not? A skillful utilizer gets rich, while a genius becomes famous.
Just a thought: it could be that the stagnation of the modern Western art is partly due to the restrictions on creating derivative works. I am sure that there are people out there who could take Batman or that certain mouse to the next level, but we will not see that happening, because exploiting static cultural icons proved to be a better business strategy for a publisher - nevermind an artist (in case with the mouse the artist couldn't care less).
Parent has a point. Moreover, for as long as there is demand, there will be supply. Do you enjoy art? Are you willing to pay for live performances? Are you willing to pay for original paintings directly to an artist? Are you willing to donate to the sources which keep producing the art which you really enjoy? If you are anything like me, you will say yes.
But if you, and me, and millions of other people are willing to pay, copyright or not, how can we imagine art business ever going away, let alone art itself?
I think the general public justs wants content at a reasonable price that they can use in multiple areas of their lives.
A reasonable price for making a copy of a publicly available work is zero. The general public is not going to fight and die for a right to pay. The only people who really want the information to be "reasonably priced", and in our case it actually means "commercially distributed with copying restrictions", are content holders. Everyone else is tired of paying for the distribution.
There is one thing that costs money: organising the content. That is, providing the client with an interactive process which enables the client to obtain information he/she needs. Look at Google, Craigslist, Slashdot, etc. -- these sites thrive having virtually no content of their own. A Napster-like (the original one) music service offering tracks at a reasonable price of 5 cents would be able to thrive too, if only their music database was superbly organised and cross-referenced, because your vanilla P2P, albeit free, is a huge mess.
Whoever does that best can make money in the world without copyright; moreover, these content organisers would be able to support the content providers (artists) and thus garner more support (yes, people have a good will!) from the consumers.
This is not some anarchist bullshit; IMHO, I have described a viable business model for producing art, and it happens not to infringe on our right to speak whatever we want to whoever wants to listen. This is what a consumer wants -- easy and painless access to the information at the cheapest rate possible, without fear of landing in jail for sharing a song; and this is exactly what publishers should be doing today. Lowering CD prices won't cut it.
I do hope they drop Steam though, it really, really sucks.
IMHO, Steam will not be dropped. If you think about it, it is the only viable copy protection scheme out there, and the only one which can enable the production of big games like HalfLife 2 after (and if) the beast of copyright is subdued. Personally, I felt that Steam is very comfortable, because CD is not required to play the game. For a company that uses Steam-like technology to protect its assets, there is no longer a temptation to scan user's system for 3-rd party software, to install low-level drivers -- none of this stupidity; authentication seems to be enough.
We use the ubiquity of Internet to gain access to the information, while they use it to get paid for their work. That's a fair game I'm willing to play, and this means a lot, coming from an anti-copyright zealot like myself.
Even Googling "corporation" returns Microsoft at the top of the search results.
Bah. If you want a pleasant surprise, try operating system
I don't remember Google charging $1000 per user license... If by "another Google" they mean, a few folks got stinkin' rich, then yeah, may be; but I don't see them changing the way we browse, and that's what Google did for the internet community.
Or is it sheer ignorance.
Is that a question?
Check out "the internet", in lower case :)
65 Mb file download? Slashdot? If that works out, thumbs up to the DreamHost.
The system was tested over a 2-year pilot program and produced results virtually identical to those of trained readers.
I've graded an upper division Geometry class in Cal state (kind of similar, because I was looking at proofs in essay form), and I find it very easy to believe that a computer can produce similar grades.
Many of you indicated that this new grading method is unfair and/or easy to trick. I'm not surprised, because, IMHO, the old method was already unfair and easy to trick. Unfair, because a letter grade (or 6 point scale grade) is providing the worst possible kind of feedback. Brilliant flashes of insight + imperfect grammar may give you B- . Being ultimately average in every respect, but reasonably prepared may give you B+ . The positive reinforcement mechanism is broken: people are awarded for the time spent, or sometimes even for how carefully they copy and paste, and never for their actual excellence.
Now, the automated grading takes it one step further. A live teacher could be subjective in grading, by trying to reflect, for example, how student was improving after she was provided with feedback. Automation deals away with it, and we are left with this rigid system which only rewards an adherence to standards.
Religion is a human invention, and as such means different things to different people. To many people, it means the things you disavow.
Science is too a human invention. It did not always exist, and it keeps changing. It was not always so easy to say where science ends and religion begins. Plenty of serious scientists can be named who thought that they were discovering universal laws instantiated by a deity.
The very scientific method is not a subject of science today, and it never was, to be sure. Aristotle already distinguished between physics and metaphysics, and that gap grew wider with years. Consider, for example, that even the foundation of modern mathematics is not mathematical. The axiomatic method which allows us to be perfectly objective in our reasoning also forces us to make a subjective choice of axioms.
As you noted so insightfully, religion means different things to different people, and that's precisely because its purpose is to provide us with subjective knowledge, as opposed to science, which seeks objective knowledge. Religion is there to shape one's sense of identity and to enable one to make deeply personal choices. Atheists are not religious in a conventional way, but they too have a metaphysical foundation to their notions and beliefs, which is entirely subjective and therefore non-scientific. In the modern world, their very escape from religion was prompted and shaped by the said religion.
Wait, where am I going with this?.. Oh yeah, a claim that scientists today are mostly non-religious, if by that we understand a disbelief in a personal god. Well, big deal. As I indicated above, they still believe great many things irrationally. In a most amusing fashion many of them believe that the scientific progress is good; they value very highly things like freedom of speech, unrestricted access to information, high degree of tolerance to various religions, cultures, lifestyles, etc. (I speak now as a scientist, and as one who shares in these beliefs, or at least is empathic to them.) Neither of these beliefs is rational or is rooted in their scientific research, and all together they may be said to constitute their version of religion.
I, for one, welcome our new nanobot overlords!
I'm not sure how is it working under the hood, but my GAIM for Windows XP has a full blown transparency.
Here's another unsafe data pathway for you: air. Seriously, I wouldn't be worried about the analog audio inputs disappearing, for two reasons.
First, if digital becomes universally or mostly DRMed, there will be a steady demand for analog technology. The same people who were selling us tape recorders, VCRs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, will be selling all the technology we need for manipulating sound.
Second, there's this air thing. When everything else fails, park a decent microphone in front of your digital Bose speakers, and off you go. Remember, it's enough to make just one decent non-DRMed copy. Video is sligtly trickier, but any video stream will have to become unscrambled just before hitting the screen, and that's when you can get it.
Bottom line is, we are dealing with the kind of media that is designed to interface with humans. The only real way to protect the respective rights is to "fix" our very brains.
I suspect it's been suggested before, but anyway: how about writing a file-sharing virus? A user then will be able to claim that her computer was infected at the time of uploading, and that she had no knowledge of the file sharing taking place. It doesn't matter if the virus isn't very successful -- it just has to be out there.
The biggest problem with copyrights, IMHO, is that on P2P networks the information almost distributes itself. Under the current model, pirates are still liable, althogh not nearly as much as people who started their own CD pressing plant (I'm speaking in practical terms here -- it seems that every individual pirate is only hurting RIAA a little, and is much harder to prosecute).A virus-like software would completely remove the liability.
That is pretty darn useless :p
What school is that?