It would be handy if the 25 teams claiming a doubling of solar cell efficiency would get together and make one really super-duper one wouldn't it. I wouldn't expect their doublings to exactly multiply but it's bound to be, say, at least double as efficient.;-)
How exactly is having illegal material transit your network legal grounds for convicting you of anything, given that you establish conditions where you don't know who is using your network?
It seems to me you're in the same legal position as say, Google would be if someone was to GMail some illegal material.
You are a common carrier. Not responsible for knowing what's going through your pipe.
Might not stop the police from bashing your head on incorrect suspicions, but that just means you live in a police state.
Yes. This definitely sucks. I've been bitten by it. I kept my previous cell phone for 8 years. I like not wasting functioning tech objects. It's going to become harder to do that it seems.
I have one quibble with the claim "irrelevant to the world beyond academia".
If a PhD truly is out there on the bleeding edge of knowledge in some specialized scientific field, who the hell (other than a few colleagues perhaps) is qualified to say whether the work is potentially significant or relevant to "the real world of the economy etc etc." Every once in a while, some fundamental new insight or discovery will come from working at that bleeding edge, and by definition almost, no-one else will initially understand it much less be able to assess its possible significance to human society.
Good science is, by definition, the pursuit of the UNKNOWN. The (mostly) systematic conversion of unknowns into knowns. Without getting all Rumsfeldian, until the unknowns are known, it is misguided to try to assess the potential value of knowing that new fact or technique. And the leading edge of science ought to be unpredictable enough that we won't know in advance which new facts or techniques will be realized or discovered. The value of scientific discoveries in pure, unapplied science is non-linear and mostly unpredictable. And often the economic value won't come to fruition for a generation or two after the original work.
So to all of you decrying the value of work you don't understand, I say, are you positive you're right about that? How do you know you wouldn't have shut down the work that led to the great scientific and technological revolutions of the past? How do you know you're not shutting down the next world-changing discovery before it has a chance to get made? You don't know. That's the freakin' point.
Yes. It must be frustrating and demotivating as hell to have your greatest insights into literature invalidated by automated Google corpus statistical analyses.
Hmmm. "Eco-nutter". I'm trying to think of an equally derogatory term for those who don't value eco-system integrity and the environment.
Let's see, how about: "Lemming" - as in those who are convinced it is fine to keep on running this way. "Genocidal maniac" - as in those who don't mind exterminating species and decimating future human well-being and population for the sake of comfort. "Ostrich" - as in "head in the tar sands" is clearly the best strategy. "Bio-blivious" - as in those who can't grasp or irrationally deny that we are a biological species in the context of a complex eco-system. "Money Eaters" - putting dollars before sense - as in those who think that money is more valuable than everything else, and are pretty sure they will be able to eat money after ecologically produced food supplies dwindle and clean water systems are used up. "Shopbots" - uncritical zombie-like over-consumers of wasteful or harmful products of the unsustainable economy. "Neo-convicts" guilty of environmentally criminal industrial, land development, or resource extraction acts, and of of not understanding or deliberately closing their eyes to the fact that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.
Actually the climate scientists are pretty much saying we need 80% to 100% GHG (CO2...) emissions reductions soon to avoid potentially catastrophic warming.
Your enlightenment may be on the blink.
Also, your stereotype and cliche filter probably needs replacing.
"Invented?" Oh and I suppose they will now patent the idea of storing music on servers so you can use it from anywhere.
When I thought of this (obvious) idea 20 years ago or so, I realized that in theory, only one copy (ok with several backups) of each tune or movie or whatever was required to exist. If people were to be charged money for it, each tune would just need a list of owners allowed to access it and stream it.
Then I thought. That's a pretty silly idea. People should just play a flat fee if any for access to all the content. The proceeds could be distributed according to some kind of measurement of how much each item gets streamed. These are all obvious ideas from a few hours of thought about the problem long ago. It's the execution, not the idea, that counts, and Apple has execution down.
Well they certainly did an outstanding job in this case. I always have, and always will, completely ignore all USPTO software patents, except to assess their value as the butt of jokes and ridicule.
( I live in the real world, not the innovation-crushing US of A).
It probably was a judge or panel of judges not a jury.
But having a judge who doesn't have a computer science dregree decide a software patent case's validity is likely to result in decisions akin to having a non-physicist judge declare e=mc^2 invalid and illegal because it makes everything disagreeably bendy.
You know what this technology would be well suited to? Garbage collecting software patents from USPTO.
I mean I'm sorry USPTO. You do not have the right to tell me I'm not allowed to think up an (THE) obvious solution to an obvious and easily specifiable algorithmic or data structure issue.
This is basic second year computer science undergrad basics, at best.
This is complete crap.
If I were Google UI would vest all my software technology rights in a small branch company in Barbados and be done with it.
That's not exactly true. If you look at existing immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, they generally lack what we'd think of as hierarchal governance, and it's likely that our ancestors lived in a similar way for hundreds of thousands of years.
Hierarchal leadership and the necessary support system to maintain that hierarchy really only came into play when sedentary agricultural societies began to take hold.
Are you saying that these hunter-gatherer societies typically don't have a "head-man" or respected matriarch or small decision making council of elders? That's still a nascent form of hierarchy.
None, because there is no, or at least no simple, technical solution to the social problems of: > simple rubber hose coercion, Applies to all elections, internet-based or not. Harder to do the coercion if the "polling place" is "anywhere you can access the net, for a one month period".
>vote buying, Applies to all elections regardless of technology. Hard to verify you got what you paid for in a secret ballot system. Maybe you are saying it is more prevalent in some cultures, so we couldn't include them in a "reliable" global vote.
>outright civil disobedience by the electorate, Not sure what you're saying here. Burning of ballot boxes? Much harder to do with an internet-vote. Maybe you mean refusal to vote. Refusal to vote (self-disenfranchisement) by some groups is no biggie, in the grand scheme of things of a global vote. As long as they had an effective right and ability to vote, it would be a legitimate result. They say you get the government or policy you deserve in a democratic decision making system. If you choose not to vote that is doubly true.
> the innumerable electioneering laws about physical separation of campaigners and voting sites, This is not a problem if internet voting is used. There is no specific voting site.
>lack of legal peer liability (if a poll worker decides to intentionally let me illegally vote, they are liable, but if I'm facebook friends with someone who cannot legally vote, or friends with a real person and an alias of that person...), Yes. A tough one. Instead of legal liability on a few people, the technical solution would have to reduce the chance that you illegally voted, via recursive identity and reputation ranking, similar to page rank. You may need a minimum number of independent vouchers for you, and there may be restrictions on how they themselves are vouched for (i.e. not just by you or each other or your direct associates.)
> serious privacy problems (how will all your peers know if you are legally able to vote?) and what essentially boils down to MITM keystroke logging attacks. I'm thinking that the only information about you that should be vouched for is: 1. You are a real person with the name you claim 2. You are at least 18 years old as of this date (or whatever the voting minimum age is decided to be) 3. You live in this city, town etc. in this province/state of this country (and have resided there for at least some minimum length period of time. 3 months?)
A global vote would not have an ability to get any more picky than that about a person's voting rights. Citizenship status is pretty much irrelevant here. We're just talking about permitting real adult humans to vote.
The "statist" argument I make is that hierarchical governance will establish itself in human society no matter what. We are descended from a long line of social animal species and cohabiting with many others.
Reciprocity is adaptive. It reduces the energy expended for an increment of survival probability.
Hierarchical coordination of reciprocity is a thermodynamically more stable configuration of reciprocity, because of the information flow topology (1 - n compared to n - n) leading to feasible alignment of goals and actions of larger numbers of social agents, and leading to fewer accidentally oppositional (and energy-wasting) actions.
You really can't fight this, given the general kind of survival oriented, energy-conserving, socially aware, plan-forming agents that we are.
So the only choice you have is what FORM (and to some degree what degree) of hierarchical governance you will have. You don't have a choice not to have it. The pattern will impose itself on you no matter what, eventually.
If you kick out the constitution that is an agreement to have democratically elected hierarchical governance, you'll get some other kind, emerging from the latent empire builders always present in human society. Whether this ends up being a glorified drug-lord or a benevolent but ruthless dictator is anyone's guess, but it will be something, you can be sure of that. It will start out with lots of small hierarchical organizations, and gradually they will coalesce into the largest (federal layered) hierarchical organization supportable by the communication, transportation, logistics coordinatation, and force-projection technologies of the day.
That one, you guessed it, we will end up calling "the state".
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever posted anything as Anonymous or any variation of that name?
uhh. Yeah. I guess so.
Guilty! Bam!
Building a case against Anonymous is like chasing your own shadow to the end of the rainbow.
How do we know you are not Anonymous cleverly disguising yourself as a coward?
It will never work
Plain, simple (really simple) racists.
It's pretty simple.
You do know I assume that there's a meta-conspiracy to take out conspiracy theorists just because they're so damned annoying.
Check out the Sahara Solar Breeder Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Solar_Breeder_Project
If you get enough of them, you can make the process self-sustaining energy-wise, even accounting for manufacturing the cells and panels.
It would be handy if the 25 teams claiming a doubling of solar cell efficiency would get together and make one really super-duper one wouldn't it. ;-)
I wouldn't expect their doublings to exactly multiply but it's bound to be, say, at least double as efficient.
How exactly is having illegal material transit your network legal grounds for convicting you of anything, given that you establish conditions where you don't know who is using your network?
It seems to me you're in the same legal position as say, Google would be if someone was to GMail some illegal material.
You are a common carrier. Not responsible for knowing what's going through your pipe.
Might not stop the police from bashing your head on incorrect suspicions, but that just means you live in a police state.
Yes. This definitely sucks. I've been bitten by it.
I kept my previous cell phone for 8 years. I like not wasting functioning tech objects.
It's going to become harder to do that it seems.
Yes it did briefly. On OS version 3.0 if I remember correctly. It was "fixed" (read "disabled") in the next minor release.
Can I press a different button to have someone DENIED a soda next time they put their money in a Pepsi machine?
No refund. Nada.
I have a 3G still on contract.
I stopped upgrading the OS way way back to avoid loss of tethering support.
I have one quibble with the claim "irrelevant to the world beyond academia".
If a PhD truly is out there on the bleeding edge of knowledge in some specialized scientific field, who the hell (other than a few colleagues perhaps) is qualified to say whether the work is potentially significant or relevant to "the real world of the economy etc etc."
Every once in a while, some fundamental new insight or discovery will come from working at that bleeding edge, and by definition almost, no-one else will initially understand it much less be able to assess its possible significance to human society.
Good science is, by definition, the pursuit of the UNKNOWN. The (mostly) systematic conversion of unknowns into knowns. Without getting all Rumsfeldian, until the unknowns are known, it is misguided to try to assess the potential value of knowing that new fact or technique. And the leading edge of science ought to be unpredictable enough that we won't know in advance which new facts or techniques will be realized or discovered. The value of scientific discoveries in pure, unapplied science is non-linear and mostly unpredictable. And often the economic value won't come to fruition for a generation or two after the original work.
So to all of you decrying the value of work you don't understand, I say, are you positive you're right about that?
How do you know you wouldn't have shut down the work that led to the great scientific and technological revolutions of the past?
How do you know you're not shutting down the next world-changing discovery before it has a chance to get made? You don't know. That's the freakin' point.
Yes. It must be frustrating and demotivating as hell to have your greatest insights into literature invalidated by automated Google corpus statistical analyses.
1 + log(# of slashdot posts)
That is so f**ing stupid.
If you weaken the (at least semi-democratically elected) govenrment, there's nothing left to exercise power
EXCEPT the corporate oligarchs.
Hmmm. "Eco-nutter". I'm trying to think of an equally derogatory term for those who don't value eco-system integrity and the environment.
Let's see, how about:
"Lemming" - as in those who are convinced it is fine to keep on running this way.
"Genocidal maniac" - as in those who don't mind exterminating species and decimating future human well-being and population for the sake of comfort.
"Ostrich" - as in "head in the tar sands" is clearly the best strategy.
"Bio-blivious" - as in those who can't grasp or irrationally deny that we are a biological species in the context of a complex eco-system.
"Money Eaters" - putting dollars before sense - as in those who think that money is more valuable than everything else, and are pretty sure they will be able to eat money after ecologically produced food supplies dwindle and clean water systems are used up.
"Shopbots" - uncritical zombie-like over-consumers of wasteful or harmful products of the unsustainable economy.
"Neo-convicts" guilty of environmentally criminal industrial, land development, or resource extraction acts, and of of not understanding or deliberately closing their eyes to the fact that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.
Actually the climate scientists are pretty much saying we need 80% to 100% GHG (CO2...) emissions reductions soon to avoid potentially catastrophic warming.
Your enlightenment may be on the blink.
Also, your stereotype and cliche filter probably needs replacing.
"Invented?" Oh and I suppose they will now patent the idea of storing music on servers so you can use it from anywhere.
When I thought of this (obvious) idea 20 years ago or so, I realized that in theory, only one copy (ok with several backups)
of each tune or movie or whatever was required to exist.
If people were to be charged money for it, each tune would just need a list of owners allowed to access it and stream it.
Then I thought. That's a pretty silly idea. People should just play a flat fee if any for access to all the content. The proceeds
could be distributed according to some kind of measurement of how much each item gets streamed. These are all obvious
ideas from a few hours of thought about the problem long ago. It's the execution, not the idea, that counts, and Apple has
execution down.
Well they certainly did an outstanding job in this case. I always have, and always will, completely ignore all USPTO software patents,
except to assess their value as the butt of jokes and ridicule.
( I live in the real world, not the innovation-crushing US of A).
It probably was a judge or panel of judges not a jury.
But having a judge who doesn't have a computer science dregree decide a software patent case's validity is
likely to result in decisions akin to having a non-physicist judge declare e=mc^2 invalid and illegal because
it makes everything disagreeably bendy.
You know what this technology would be well suited to? Garbage collecting software patents from USPTO.
I mean I'm sorry USPTO. You do not have the right to tell me I'm not allowed to think up an (THE) obvious
solution to an obvious and easily specifiable algorithmic or data structure issue.
This is basic second year computer science undergrad basics, at best.
This is complete crap.
If I were Google UI would vest all my software technology rights in a small branch company in Barbados and be done with it.
That's not exactly true. If you look at existing immediate-return hunter-gatherer societies, they generally lack what we'd think of as hierarchal governance, and it's likely that our ancestors lived in a similar way for hundreds of thousands of years.
Hierarchal leadership and the necessary support system to maintain that hierarchy really only came into play when sedentary agricultural societies began to take hold.
Are you saying that these hunter-gatherer societies typically don't have a "head-man" or respected matriarch or small decision making council of elders?
That's still a nascent form of hierarchy.
Addressing these issues one at a time:
None, because there is no, or at least no simple, technical solution to the social problems of:
> simple rubber hose coercion,
Applies to all elections, internet-based or not. Harder to do the coercion if the "polling place" is "anywhere you can access the net, for a one month period".
>vote buying,
Applies to all elections regardless of technology. Hard to verify you got what you paid for in a secret ballot system.
Maybe you are saying it is more prevalent in some cultures, so we couldn't include them in a "reliable" global vote.
>outright civil disobedience by the electorate,
Not sure what you're saying here. Burning of ballot boxes? Much harder to do with an internet-vote.
Maybe you mean refusal to vote. Refusal to vote (self-disenfranchisement) by some groups is no biggie, in the grand scheme of things
of a global vote. As long as they had an effective right and ability to vote, it would be a legitimate result.
They say you get the government or policy you deserve in a democratic decision making system. If you choose not to vote that is doubly true.
> the innumerable electioneering laws about physical separation of campaigners and voting sites,
This is not a problem if internet voting is used. There is no specific voting site.
>lack of legal peer liability (if a poll worker decides to intentionally let me illegally vote, they are liable, but if I'm facebook friends with someone who cannot legally vote, or friends with a real person and an alias of that person...),
Yes. A tough one. Instead of legal liability on a few people, the technical solution would have to reduce the chance that you illegally voted, via recursive identity and reputation ranking, similar to page rank. You may need a minimum number of independent vouchers for you, and there may be restrictions on how they themselves are vouched for (i.e. not just by you or each other or your direct associates.)
> serious privacy problems (how will all your peers know if you are legally able to vote?) and what essentially boils down to MITM keystroke logging attacks.
I'm thinking that the only information about you that should be vouched for is:
1. You are a real person with the name you claim
2. You are at least 18 years old as of this date (or whatever the voting minimum age is decided to be)
3. You live in this city, town etc. in this province/state of this country (and have resided there for at least some minimum length period of time. 3 months?)
A global vote would not have an ability to get any more picky than that about a person's voting rights. Citizenship status is pretty much irrelevant here. We're just talking about permitting real adult humans to vote.
The "statist" argument I make is that hierarchical governance will establish itself in human society no matter what.
We are descended from a long line of social animal species and cohabiting with many others.
Reciprocity is adaptive. It reduces the energy expended for an increment of survival probability.
Hierarchical coordination of reciprocity is a thermodynamically more stable configuration of reciprocity, because of the information flow topology (1 - n compared to n - n) leading to feasible alignment of goals and actions of larger numbers of social agents, and leading to fewer accidentally oppositional (and energy-wasting) actions.
You really can't fight this, given the general kind of survival oriented, energy-conserving, socially aware, plan-forming agents that we are.
So the only choice you have is what FORM (and to some degree what degree) of hierarchical governance you will have. You don't have a choice not to have it. The pattern will impose itself on you no matter what, eventually.
If you kick out the constitution that is an agreement to have democratically elected hierarchical governance, you'll get some other kind, emerging from the latent empire builders always present in human society. Whether this ends up being a glorified drug-lord or a benevolent but ruthless dictator is anyone's guess, but it will be something, you can be sure of that. It will start out with lots of small hierarchical organizations, and gradually they will coalesce into the largest (federal layered) hierarchical organization supportable by the communication, transportation, logistics coordinatation, and force-projection technologies of the day.
That one, you guessed it, we will end up calling "the state".