I'm not against govt or business, but I don't like that a small group of people (who are running the show) being able to threaten and bully others to get what they want.
You hit the nail right on the head. Corporations and governments are all made up of people. Now assuming that most of these people aren't evil in and of themselves, I can see two reasons for the bullying (I'm going to take a few liberties with the word bullying) going on. One: the persons giving the orders, do not/will not feel its effects. Two: the people doing the bullying, who most likely would feel its effects were they at the receiving end, by acting on behalf of the group feel excused for thier actions (the group is doing it, not me).
So now lets take some examples...
In the first case I'm sure that if one started to post the data shadows of insurance industry execs/people or politicians in a number of very public places for all to view, in order get us all some decent data privacy. Wait until someone steals the identity of a politician.
The second case is that of the coders working on something like cyberpatrol. I'd be willing to bet there's at least one person over there writing code who reads/. and has been watching them get dumped on (deservedly). But that person works for the corporation, so like most of us they've checked thier morals at the door, when they clock in. This means, its not realy them, its cyberpatrol. How many people here will admit to working for MS? Do you those of you who work for MS just filter all MS stories so you don't see them? By all accounts there are a hell of a lot of really bright people @MS... So the SW should be better than it is. But its hard to stand up and say, no this shouldn't ship, or we shouldn't do this when your dinner depends on it, or when the company is counting on you.
So you disconnect, you act on behalf of the company, rather than asking what are the consequences of this? Should I do this?
The bottom line, corps/govs. are made up of peole. And most of the people don't feel empowered to break step. Theres a psych experiment where if there are 9 control people, and a test subject and those 9 say 2+2 =5 the subject will usually say 5 as well despite what they know to be true!
You have just set back the computer industry six years or more as we have just set the stage for the "balkanization" of the computer industry with multiple competing standards. This will be the ultimate IT manager nightmare, because they will have be current on multiple competing versions of Windows, Linux, BeOS and whatever x86-compatible operating system comes along the line.
I disagree. Examining what happened to ibm. They were under anti-trust preasure, and were overwhelmed by microsoft. They still remain a potent force in the computing industry, and there are still places where you can 'only buy ibm'. I think its more likely that microsoft, beset by a large number of class actions suits will give way to the next 'demon' of the computing industry.
I am afraid of the US Federal government in my industry. I am cheering for Microsoft even though I am a Linux user who doesn't like Microsoft's licensing practices.
Our industry is, for the most part, unregulated. If I release my own word processor tomorrow, I can give it the features I want. If I want a spell check, I'll add a spell check. If I want a talking paperclip, I'll add a talking paperclip. It's my software.
But lets be honest here. Industry that is not held in check by anything will screw the consumer/public anyway they can get away with. This has happened again and again. From chemistry to credit. And in our industry it comes from eulas that sign away your first born (more specifically the vender's responiblity), crap software pushed through a forced upgrade chain, security as an after thought... I could go on.
So now, here we are. After years of telling the consumer to bend over, the gov. might tell the SW industry to clean up its act. You know what, its about god damn time. The sw industry has once again proven the point that industries can't regulate themselves because they live in thier own little world with no external responsiblity.
The fact is that the gov. already tells you what features you can't implement (broadly, encryption). There are already laws about sw accesablity. Its perfectly reasonable that if sw is required infrastructure for particular (especially gov.) jobs then it like the building will be made accessible.
So to sum it up. Your unregulated industry already is. It has proven that it needs regulations so that it takes some responsibilty for its products (wouldn't you like to click through the eula on the new MS embeded elevator controller software -thank God for Mr. Otis). Hope to God MS gets its teeth kicked in in a major way, 'cause untill most bosses get a clue, that the only way the SW some of us have to use @work will get better. Somebody moderate me down for ranting.
My own proposal - Why not make a remote-virtual body instead?
Because its a pain in the ass to build a robot that is bipedal and has as wide a range motion/mobility as human being.
Instead of putting a LIFE human being at the place of work, why not use the virtual reality technology into work, and operate the exo-droid virtually - via remote control.
I suspect that while, pilots may be replaced more easily (i.e. sooner) than human ground troops, It will eventually happen. The problem for the exo-droid is that the human form + brain, though fragile is still much too versitle to be replaced completely. Most of the AIish projects that I've seen take a lot of space/energy/effort just replicating one or two of the features that are build into the sack of water that is the human body. Yes there is a japanese company that has robot that can walk up and down stairs... But can it crouch, sideslip, and jump or climb over obstacles?
Every company that wishes to archive or sell information about you should be forced to have you _explicitly_ sigh an agreement to do so.
You should read your credit card/bank acount/what ever application. Part of the agreement is that you let the company do what ever they want with your information. But as best as I can tell there's nothing you can do about it. Ideally you'd be able to read the application, and say I don't like this part of the contract (the bit where they can sell your information), at which point there would be some kind of negotiation and you could probably get it removed. But, in this day and age they would probably just not issue the card.
Basically, someone at the University (or maybe a script) should send emails to anyone hosting copyrighted material on Napster and tell them to delete it or face temporary termination of their connection. A student can't complain, because they _are_ breaking the law. This way, not everyone is punished for what only some people do.
Well now isn't this funny. If the university points out that pirating MP3s is illegal, and that people should stop it because they're chewing up bandwidth its ok. But God help the RIAA when they point out that just maybe pirating MP3s is illegal , and that maybe universities should ban Napster.
Compare the tone of this disscussion with any one of the other Jihads on 'Your rights on line'... The motivation for the control of napster must be irrelevant. Either, pirating MP3s is illegal, or its not. Doesn't matter who's pointing the finger or why. Now how far you want to go for that control depends upon which side you are looking at napster from (student or record company).
The fact is that if Unversities don't control MP3 piracy on campus, it will be used as an excuse to implement more and more draconian copy right protections by the Entertainment Industry.
You've shown that people don't obey rules just because they exist. But I am saying that the music industry will be able to *punish* people for casual piracy.
So lets take a look at something entirely different: Speeding. Everybody does it. It is possible to punish people for it, and if you get right down to it you can catch everybody. You just need to use something automated like photoradar. Here in Ontario they used it for a while, causing much public grumbling. As a matter of fact one of the promises of the current governement was to chuck the stuff (which they did). With this in mind consider that the government controls a pieced of toll highway (the 407) where ingress and egress are monitored by cameras and radio transponders. They mark where you enter and leave and charge you for distance traveled. They could very easily montior your speed, and using the mean value theorem nail you[1] for some pretty large fines. But the highway is still police patrolled.
Might point here is that even if you could punish everybody that pirated it would be counter productive... even if I stipulate that it can be done (which I'm not willing to do).
--locust
[1]You entered at time A you left at time B the distance is C so at some point in your trip you must have been going at least D for that to be phyiscally possible so here is your ticket for $E.
It may not be possible to filter out audible watermarks if the protocol for generating them is unknown
How long did it take to take appart CSS when a couple of people put thier minds to it?
They can wipe out wide-scale piracy (e.g. internet distribution) by court action. Then they could impose sanctions on casual pirates. If you're on their "blacklist", they won't sell you any music until you've paid your "fines", or perhaps ever.
Do you really think that you can wipe out piracy by decree? Does the pope saying that you should must not have premarital sex stop a large number of people?... Does he prevent the existence of condoms by saying that birth control is an a front to God?... Does video game priacy being illegal stop warez?... Do laws that say people under 18 are not allowed to buy smokes prevent them from smoking? "Nobody sold them to me. Honest officer, the pack just fell out of the sky". Do liquor laws prevent people under 18 (or 21 in the US) stop people below those ages from drinking?...
No such luck. Why? Because really people don't see these as dangerous/problematic activites. As long as you don't bother anybody else, nobody asks what you're doing, or points out that its technically illegal. Its when a bunch of underage drunks start causing trouble (or any drunks for that matter) that they have problems.
What about when they start releasing music in a secure format? One where you have to buy their special player? And where every copy of the music has its own individual signature hidden in the sound, so they can track piracy? And where they make you "pay per listen"?
As long as the music has to be transformed from its encrypted format to something audible for us to hear it, it will be possible to copy it. It will also be able to filter out audible watermarks. Further, as was shown to be the case with cable television people are willing to pay what they think is a fair price for an item or a service. When they are presented with no choice or all choices that are rip-offs they then feel no compunction about pirating that service or stealing that item. Nobody likes to get ripped off. When a sufficiently large portion of the population are doing something that is technically illegal, what are they going to do arrest everyone?
that this would have rather limited applications [snip] The real breakthrough would be the ability to store stuff in your procedural memory, so that in addition to knowing the definition of an integral, you know how to integrate, for example.
I'm not so sure, as I think about this that it would be all that useless. Consider that analysts are paid to filter information. One of the limiting factors for such a person is how much input they get/can process from thier natural senses. So write the info straight into thier brain, thus getting around the bandwidth restriction. Or let say you want to look at a problem domain in an entirely new way. So you replace a bunch of declarative memory in someone with a great deal of experience in some other field, and see what kind of inferences they make. This is of course abstracting away how hard or easy it might actually be to do something like that.
The other point which I made earlier, is that some kinds of procedural memory require (i.e. Kung-fu) might required more than just a brain dump.
As for your point about adding interconnects, how else would we be downloading the information in the first place?
The tech. discussed in the article has to do with stimulating cells to accept impulses. Thus one could cause some synapses to fire and others not to. One could, in princle, train the human mind the same way that one trains some neural nets these days[1]. Thus existing interconnects are messed with as opposed to new ones being formed. This can be combined with the injection of specific neuro-transmitters to do lower/raise the fireing thresholds of specific synapses. The question then becomes at what point do new interconnects grow? And how much knoweldge is stored by which interconnect. We get into the problem that has arisen in the study of neural nets. We just don't know how the net stores the information, we just know that its in there somewhere, and the net makes the right inference.
Bottom line, I'm not sure that my original assertion about not being able to create new interconnects is reasonable. Lets say that you find an arangement of neurons, in a specific brain region that you localize some knowledge in. You can then stimultate a similar set of cells in the same brain region of someone else to try to get the same config. But each person is different, so you might turn someone who wants to learn kung-fu into stephen hawking as opposed to bruce lee. Vice versa for mathematics.
--locust
[1] This is paterned upon how the human mind works, so we've come full circle to a certain extent.
The moral of the story is to go to Internet Options --> Security --> Custom Level on your IE browser and turn off ActiveX.
Definately. Even if you set signed component to prompt, a Microsft signed Active X component doesn't ask you if it should install. It d/ls then just installs anyway (see bugtraq). cuartango put up a demo of this.
Me: The reason it worked for Neo is that he didn't have to train his muscles (though they did regrow/train them to some extent)
cybercuzo: but in the matrix, it doesnt matter how fast you are
Sorry I should have been more clear. You're absoultely right, because it was all mental this is why it worked for Neo. The muscles did have to be stimulated(?) because they had never acutally been used so that he could walk around the ship.
Genom:Imagine if this becomes a reality the new definition of virus-writers, writing virii that "crash" the psyche of the recipient.
You have a couple of options in the way of crashing the psyche. You can simply overload it with new data. You can insert new contradictory data. You can insert a large number of false, but very similar data sets into the brain (especially if these are close to some knowledge the target is knows or is trying to learn). And of course you can mix these. All this assumes that you can't add understanding, as well as knowledge.
The real question is how much of knowledge or understanding comes from the firing of synapses or how much interconects represent, and how much neurotransmitters play a part. For example, given that every time a synapse fires/does not fire that interconnect is strengthend or weakend, one might by being able to pass electicity into brain cells, be able to stimulate or inhibit the firing of certain synapses (maybe even without the neurotransmitter that might normaly help it). Presuming you could know what which synapse repesents you could in theory covince someone of something, or you could disuade them of something. The same applies if it turns out that you could cause the construction of new interconnects by stimulating a cell with the right current.
Potentially, if you had enough time and could create new interconnects, you could completely rewire pretty much all of someones brain. How's that for a virus?! But this sounds like it would take much more time than a simple download.
) Probably the most interesting implications would involve improved learning abilities. It would be really interesting to have the capability to link a kind of mental hard drive into someone. This would be sort of like Neo in The Matrix when he plugs himself into a computer, and several seconds later wakes up saying, ``I know Kung-Fu!''
I'm not sure its quite that easy. Lets say you do download 'Kung-Fu'. You still don't have the agility, strength, or anything else to actually do 'Kung-Fu'. Your muscles 'remeber' how far they have been streched, and become accustomed to certain repeated movements. The reason it worked for Neo is that he didn't have to train his muscles (though they did regrow/train them to some extent). I guess you would have to program your entire body.
Now in the case of other knowledge, its entirely possible that one might d/l all of mathematics and not understand any of it. Your brain might simply not have the interconects that need to grow in order to think about a given subject. Similarly, one could d/l all of human history, be able to give names and dates and places of interest, but not be able to reason about those, thus missing the analysis that someone who understands history could make. I don't know how you could download understanding short of instructing the growth of interconects in the brain.
In fact, older Americans are statistically the fastest growing group of people on the Net and Web.
But, aging baby boomers (largest portion of the population) are making older Americans the fastest growing portion of the American population. So the question has to be what fraction of the aging population is getting online, and is this larger or smaller than those of other populations. I would suggest that, by such a (normalized) metric young people (k-12) are the fastest growing segement, as more and more schools get wired.
Didn't you read suck this morning. We're responsible for the DDoS on Yahoo...
The actual perpetrator is more likely a surly thirteen-year-old kid, tired of knocking over neighbor's mailboxes. Or he's a railing anti-consumerist, hopped up on grade-B agitprop and ready to take down the Man. Or he's a Canadian -- you just know they're involved somehow -- amusing himself by testing what makes Americans panic. The specifics hardly matter.
The fact is that people have been making fun of and flaming different cultures/countries for as long as they been on the face of the earth. But, we [Canadians] do have a tendency to look down our noses at "the states". And you know, after a while it might wear a little thin south of the border. This is the same way that one might find it a little presumptious that the championship of baseball is called the World Series.
So lets do a quick comparison: Canadian National Broadcaster:CBC Conistently tells you point blank what you will think today (citizen). American National Broadcaster: NPR Consistently puts you to sleep. Canadian Leader:Jean Chretien Beats up protesters. American Leader:Bill Clinton Hits on interns. Canadian Currency:The Looney Nuff Said. American Currency:The Green Back Worth something like 1 million to the Canadian dollar ... So, don't take it so seriously, and don't worry about being picked on for being a Canuck, 'eh. Now how about you and all the snowbirds[1] go down to the deep south and remind 'em who torched the Whitehouse during the war of 1812.
--locust
[1] Snowbirds, Canadians who go to the southern states [florida] for the winter. Did you know they have a couple of french language dailys down there just for those lucky SoBs?.. Eh Jaques, votre testicules sont echape de vos speedos!
Network Associates, Inc. [NASDAQ:NETA], has launched a new business-to-business service called myCIO.com which allows enterprises to click on to the myCIO.com Web site for a check of their servers' vulnerability.
It continous to talk about how you don't have to download the government tools, but can rather use thiers stright from thier web site. And so on. It plugs at least one other Network Associates tool before finally blowing its self out. Of course no details which vulernability is being exploited is mentioned... But they claim they can find it.
I wish someone had seen the site before this story was posted, and the Jihad was declared.
...a review of a book on/. that says: 1/10, don't buy this book... It sounds like it might be usefull, it makes terrific claims, but I found it vacous, a complete waste of my time (sort of like you might find this post). It was so bad in fact that I recomend the rest of you avoid it like the plague.
Perhaps a better book review system is needed, so that every book that appears doesn't say 'Oh my God! This book changed my life!!!'. Ok, that was a little hyperbole. I would prefer to see a selection of books reviewed and rated relative to one another. It gives a better reference point than just one review in isolation. I am assuming that the people who submit reviews have done at least a little reading in the field of the book that they are reviewing, and can thus give some kind of a meaningful feedback on how the book stands up to similar works in its field. Of course if you don't trust the reviewer, you can always ignore the recomendations.
I work for the Engineering computing department at my school and we have mostly Sun UNIX workstations, but the labs are crowded and it would be kinda cool if more people used Linux in their dorm room and ssh'ed into the labs..
Old PCs make great X Terminals in a pinch. This how it was up @school when we hit a shortage of terminals for our various Sun boxes, and we needed access for projects. They set up XDM to allow login to some of the servers and workstations. You couldn't actually login locally to the machine.
He often posts in the comments, take a look at his user info sometime.
jonKatz
Damn. You're right. But hardly anything of his ever gets moderated back up above 1. So surfing @ 2 as I do by default, I don't see it. I with draw the question.
donations should end up in the right hands and not the trunk of some shyster speeding for the boarder..
Hello? All the organizations that are mentioned appear reputable. In principle one should be careful where one donates, but the people who've put thier names to this don't look like they'd be easily taken in. If you're worried about the formal fundraiser, I get the distinct feeling they (i.e. @stake) will make sure the money gets where its going.
decidedly vested interested in publicizing the notion that music, movies and culture in general belong to private corporations, not code-writing geeks and nerds.
Culture in general belongs to society at large. It is in the best interest of the corporation to to make you forget that 'The Little Mermaid' existed before Disney's version. Thus elements of the culture end up belonging to the corporation. Btw-> thanks to the Canadian Government for selling the image of the Mountie (Royal Canadian Mounted Police- you know, red jacket, funny black pants) to Disney. But I can't fault corporations for that, they're just trying to make a buck like everybody else (and before I get flamed to oblivion for that last, a man's gota eat, so hold your torches). I can fault them for thier tactics in trying to do so.
And now the blindingly obvious... Individual works of art such as movies, and music do in fact belong to individual people, or corporations. They have for ages, and people do and have in fact earned a living making works of art that become part of a culture. (Depending upon how you look at it code can be a piece of art. But I digress.)
Culture in and of itself cannot be completely owned by one person/entity. There is a culture that is shared by code-writing geeks and nerds[sic] and in some sense it does belong to them as a group, but it also belongs to the individuals who have contributed it. A case in point, slashdot. It belongs to the comunity that uses it, and at the same time it belongs to Andover. Would you fault Andover for owning it?
The presumption that something that makes up part of your culture belongs to you is exactly what got people so angry when the interface to freshmeat changed a while back (remeber?). The culture doesn't belong to code-writing geeks and nerds any more than it does to the corporations. (And now my bias comes through.)Its just that invoking code-writing geeks and nerds is the only way that Katz attempts to write for, and connect with, this audience.
The GPL seems pretty ill-equipped to deal with this type of code 'piracy'. (I think the whole Sun-Blackdown situation pretty much showed that.)
Only, I don't recall the code given to blackdown everbeing GPLed. I believe the terms of the license said it could be used by Sun @ any time. And they took it.
On a more general note, I can't really think of any way to tell (absolutely) if your code has been stolen, provided its been embedded deeply enough. With something like an IP stack, you might be able to tell because an implementation responds precisely the same way as your piece of code, and may or may not have the same control structures. One thing I found pretty funny was looking in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\drivers\etc to find a hosts, and services file, for the first time and wondering which *nix got its code into NT.
So in the end you either have to have someone with the source, who knows its been grabbed, or you have to test the offending software looking for the same performance/functionality signature as your piece of software. Having the same flaws in the ip stack would be an example.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit the nail right on the head. Corporations and governments are all made up of people. Now assuming that most of these people aren't evil in and of themselves, I can see two reasons for the bullying (I'm going to take a few liberties with the word bullying) going on. One: the persons giving the orders, do not/will not feel its effects. Two: the people doing the bullying, who most likely would feel its effects were they at the receiving end, by acting on behalf of the group feel excused for thier actions (the group is doing it, not me).
So now lets take some examples...
In the first case I'm sure that if one started to post the data shadows of insurance industry execs/people or politicians in a number of very public places for all to view, in order get us all some decent data privacy. Wait until someone steals the identity of a politician.
The second case is that of the coders working on something like cyberpatrol. I'd be willing to bet there's at least one person over there writing code who reads /. and has been watching them get dumped on (deservedly). But that person works for the corporation, so like most of us they've checked thier morals at the door, when they clock in. This means, its not realy them, its cyberpatrol. How many people here will admit to working for MS? Do you those of you who work for MS just filter all MS stories so you don't see them? By all accounts there are a hell of a lot of really bright people @MS... So the SW should be better than it is. But its hard to stand up and say, no this shouldn't ship, or we shouldn't do this when your dinner depends on it, or when the company is counting on you.
So you disconnect, you act on behalf of the company, rather than asking what are the consequences of this? Should I do this?
The bottom line, corps/govs. are made up of peole. And most of the people don't feel empowered to break step. Theres a psych experiment where if there are 9 control people, and a test subject and those 9 say 2+2 =5 the subject will usually say 5 as well despite what they know to be true!
-- locust
I disagree. Examining what happened to ibm. They were under anti-trust preasure, and were overwhelmed by microsoft. They still remain a potent force in the computing industry, and there are still places where you can 'only buy ibm'. I think its more likely that microsoft, beset by a large number of class actions suits will give way to the next 'demon' of the computing industry.
--locust
Our industry is, for the most part, unregulated. If I release my own word processor tomorrow, I can give it the features I want. If I want a spell check, I'll add a spell check. If I want a talking paperclip, I'll add a talking paperclip. It's my software.
But lets be honest here. Industry that is not held in check by anything will screw the consumer/public anyway they can get away with. This has happened again and again. From chemistry to credit. And in our industry it comes from eulas that sign away your first born (more specifically the vender's responiblity), crap software pushed through a forced upgrade chain, security as an after thought... I could go on.
So now, here we are. After years of telling the consumer to bend over, the gov. might tell the SW industry to clean up its act. You know what, its about god damn time. The sw industry has once again proven the point that industries can't regulate themselves because they live in thier own little world with no external responsiblity.
The fact is that the gov. already tells you what features you can't implement (broadly, encryption). There are already laws about sw accesablity. Its perfectly reasonable that if sw is required infrastructure for particular (especially gov.) jobs then it like the building will be made accessible.
So to sum it up. Your unregulated industry already is. It has proven that it needs regulations so that it takes some responsibilty for its products (wouldn't you like to click through the eula on the new MS embeded elevator controller software -thank God for Mr. Otis). Hope to God MS gets its teeth kicked in in a major way, 'cause untill most bosses get a clue, that the only way the SW some of us have to use @work will get better. Somebody moderate me down for ranting.
--locsut
Because its a pain in the ass to build a robot that is bipedal and has as wide a range motion/mobility as human being.
Instead of putting a LIFE human being at the place of work, why not use the virtual reality technology into work, and operate the exo-droid virtually - via remote control.
I suspect that while, pilots may be replaced more easily (i.e. sooner) than human ground troops, It will eventually happen. The problem for the exo-droid is that the human form + brain, though fragile is still much too versitle to be replaced completely. Most of the AIish projects that I've seen take a lot of space/energy/effort just replicating one or two of the features that are build into the sack of water that is the human body. Yes there is a japanese company that has robot that can walk up and down stairs... But can it crouch, sideslip, and jump or climb over obstacles?
--locust
You should read your credit card/bank acount/what ever application. Part of the agreement is that you let the company do what ever they want with your information. But as best as I can tell there's nothing you can do about it. Ideally you'd be able to read the application, and say I don't like this part of the contract (the bit where they can sell your information), at which point there would be some kind of negotiation and you could probably get it removed. But, in this day and age they would probably just not issue the card.
--locust
Well now isn't this funny. If the university points out that pirating MP3s is illegal, and that people should stop it because they're chewing up bandwidth its ok. But God help the RIAA when they point out that just maybe pirating MP3s is illegal , and that maybe universities should ban Napster.
Compare the tone of this disscussion with any one of the other Jihads on 'Your rights on line'... The motivation for the control of napster must be irrelevant. Either, pirating MP3s is illegal, or its not. Doesn't matter who's pointing the finger or why. Now how far you want to go for that control depends upon which side you are looking at napster from (student or record company).
The fact is that if Unversities don't control MP3 piracy on campus, it will be used as an excuse to implement more and more draconian copy right protections by the Entertainment Industry.
--locust
Its the Katz factor:
sigh
Incidently, can we get a picture of Cat Five from userfriendly to be the icon for a john katz story?
--locust
So lets take a look at something entirely different: Speeding. Everybody does it. It is possible to punish people for it, and if you get right down to it you can catch everybody. You just need to use something automated like photoradar. Here in Ontario they used it for a while, causing much public grumbling. As a matter of fact one of the promises of the current governement was to chuck the stuff (which they did). With this in mind consider that the government controls a pieced of toll highway (the 407) where ingress and egress are monitored by cameras and radio transponders. They mark where you enter and leave and charge you for distance traveled. They could very easily montior your speed, and using the mean value theorem nail you[1] for some pretty large fines. But the highway is still police patrolled.
Might point here is that even if you could punish everybody that pirated it would be counter productive... even if I stipulate that it can be done (which I'm not willing to do).
--locust
[1]You entered at time A you left at time B the distance is C so at some point in your trip you must have been going at least D for that to be phyiscally possible so here is your ticket for $E.
How long did it take to take appart CSS when a couple of people put thier minds to it?
They can wipe out wide-scale piracy (e.g. internet distribution) by court action. Then they could impose sanctions on casual pirates. If you're on their "blacklist", they won't sell you any music until you've paid your "fines", or perhaps ever.
Do you really think that you can wipe out piracy by decree? Does the pope saying that you should must not have premarital sex stop a large number of people?... Does he prevent the existence of condoms by saying that birth control is an a front to God?... Does video game priacy being illegal stop warez?... Do laws that say people under 18 are not allowed to buy smokes prevent them from smoking? "Nobody sold them to me. Honest officer, the pack just fell out of the sky". Do liquor laws prevent people under 18 (or 21 in the US) stop people below those ages from drinking?...
No such luck. Why? Because really people don't see these as dangerous/problematic activites. As long as you don't bother anybody else, nobody asks what you're doing, or points out that its technically illegal. Its when a bunch of underage drunks start causing trouble (or any drunks for that matter) that they have problems.
--locust
As long as the music has to be transformed from its encrypted format to something audible for us to hear it, it will be possible to copy it. It will also be able to filter out audible watermarks. Further, as was shown to be the case with cable television people are willing to pay what they think is a fair price for an item or a service. When they are presented with no choice or all choices that are rip-offs they then feel no compunction about pirating that service or stealing that item. Nobody likes to get ripped off. When a sufficiently large portion of the population are doing something that is technically illegal, what are they going to do arrest everyone?
--locust
I'm not so sure, as I think about this that it would be all that useless. Consider that analysts are paid to filter information. One of the limiting factors for such a person is how much input they get/can process from thier natural senses. So write the info straight into thier brain, thus getting around the bandwidth restriction. Or let say you want to look at a problem domain in an entirely new way. So you replace a bunch of declarative memory in someone with a great deal of experience in some other field, and see what kind of inferences they make. This is of course abstracting away how hard or easy it might actually be to do something like that.
The other point which I made earlier, is that some kinds of procedural memory require (i.e. Kung-fu) might required more than just a brain dump.
As for your point about adding interconnects, how else would we be downloading the information in the first place?
The tech. discussed in the article has to do with stimulating cells to accept impulses. Thus one could cause some synapses to fire and others not to. One could, in princle, train the human mind the same way that one trains some neural nets these days[1]. Thus existing interconnects are messed with as opposed to new ones being formed. This can be combined with the injection of specific neuro-transmitters to do lower/raise the fireing thresholds of specific synapses. The question then becomes at what point do new interconnects grow? And how much knoweldge is stored by which interconnect. We get into the problem that has arisen in the study of neural nets. We just don't know how the net stores the information, we just know that its in there somewhere, and the net makes the right inference.
Bottom line, I'm not sure that my original assertion about not being able to create new interconnects is reasonable. Lets say that you find an arangement of neurons, in a specific brain region that you localize some knowledge in. You can then stimultate a similar set of cells in the same brain region of someone else to try to get the same config. But each person is different, so you might turn someone who wants to learn kung-fu into stephen hawking as opposed to bruce lee. Vice versa for mathematics.
--locust
[1] This is paterned upon how the human mind works, so we've come full circle to a certain extent.
Definately. Even if you set signed component to prompt, a Microsft signed Active X component doesn't ask you if it should install. It d/ls then just installs anyway (see bugtraq). cuartango put up a demo of this.
--locust
cybercuzo: but in the matrix, it doesnt matter how fast you are
Sorry I should have been more clear. You're absoultely right, because it was all mental this is why it worked for Neo. The muscles did have to be stimulated(?) because they had never acutally been used so that he could walk around the ship.
Genom:Imagine if this becomes a reality the new definition of virus-writers, writing virii that "crash" the psyche of the recipient.
You have a couple of options in the way of crashing the psyche. You can simply overload it with new data. You can insert new contradictory data. You can insert a large number of false, but very similar data sets into the brain (especially if these are close to some knowledge the target is knows or is trying to learn). And of course you can mix these. All this assumes that you can't add understanding, as well as knowledge.
The real question is how much of knowledge or understanding comes from the firing of synapses or how much interconects represent, and how much neurotransmitters play a part. For example, given that every time a synapse fires/does not fire that interconnect is strengthend or weakend, one might by being able to pass electicity into brain cells, be able to stimulate or inhibit the firing of certain synapses (maybe even without the neurotransmitter that might normaly help it). Presuming you could know what which synapse repesents you could in theory covince someone of something, or you could disuade them of something. The same applies if it turns out that you could cause the construction of new interconnects by stimulating a cell with the right current.
Potentially, if you had enough time and could create new interconnects, you could completely rewire pretty much all of someones brain. How's that for a virus?! But this sounds like it would take much more time than a simple download.
--locust
I'm not sure its quite that easy. Lets say you do download 'Kung-Fu'. You still don't have the agility, strength, or anything else to actually do 'Kung-Fu'. Your muscles 'remeber' how far they have been streched, and become accustomed to certain repeated movements. The reason it worked for Neo is that he didn't have to train his muscles (though they did regrow/train them to some extent). I guess you would have to program your entire body.
Now in the case of other knowledge, its entirely possible that one might d/l all of mathematics and not understand any of it. Your brain might simply not have the interconects that need to grow in order to think about a given subject. Similarly, one could d/l all of human history, be able to give names and dates and places of interest, but not be able to reason about those, thus missing the analysis that someone who understands history could make. I don't know how you could download understanding short of instructing the growth of interconects in the brain.
--locust
Me thinks someone has been playing too much illuminati.
--locust
But, aging baby boomers (largest portion of the population) are making older Americans the fastest growing portion of the American population. So the question has to be what fraction of the aging population is getting online, and is this larger or smaller than those of other populations. I would suggest that, by such a (normalized) metric young people (k-12) are the fastest growing segement, as more and more schools get wired.
--locust
Didn't you read suck this morning. We're responsible for the DDoS on Yahoo...
The actual perpetrator is more likely a surly thirteen-year-old kid, tired of knocking over neighbor's mailboxes. Or he's a railing anti-consumerist, hopped up on grade-B agitprop and ready to take down the Man. Or he's a Canadian -- you just know they're involved somehow -- amusing himself by testing what makes Americans panic. The specifics hardly matter.
Or check out the movie Canadian Bacon.
The fact is that people have been making fun of and flaming different cultures/countries for as long as they been on the face of the earth. But, we [Canadians] do have a tendency to look down our noses at "the states". And you know, after a while it might wear a little thin south of the border. This is the same way that one might find it a little presumptious that the championship of baseball is called the World Series.
So lets do a quick comparison:
...
Canadian National Broadcaster:CBC
Conistently tells you point blank what you will think today (citizen).
American National Broadcaster: NPR
Consistently puts you to sleep.
Canadian Leader:Jean Chretien
Beats up protesters.
American Leader:Bill Clinton
Hits on interns.
Canadian Currency:The Looney
Nuff Said.
American Currency:The Green Back
Worth something like 1 million to the Canadian dollar
So, don't take it so seriously, and don't worry about being picked on for being a Canuck, 'eh. Now how about you and all the snowbirds[1] go down to the deep south and remind 'em who torched the Whitehouse during the war of 1812.
--locust
[1] Snowbirds, Canadians who go to the southern states [florida] for the winter. Did you know they have a couple of french language dailys down there just for those lucky SoBs?.. Eh Jaques, votre testicules sont echape de vos speedos!
It continous to talk about how you don't have to download the government tools, but can rather use thiers stright from thier web site. And so on. It plugs at least one other Network Associates tool before finally blowing its self out. Of course no details which vulernability is being exploited is mentioned... But they claim they can find it.
I wish someone had seen the site before this story was posted, and the Jihad was declared.
--locust
Perhaps a better book review system is needed, so that every book that appears doesn't say 'Oh my God! This book changed my life!!!'. Ok, that was a little hyperbole. I would prefer to see a selection of books reviewed and rated relative to one another. It gives a better reference point than just one review in isolation. I am assuming that the people who submit reviews have done at least a little reading in the field of the book that they are reviewing, and can thus give some kind of a meaningful feedback on how the book stands up to similar works in its field. Of course if you don't trust the reviewer, you can always ignore the recomendations.
--locust
Old PCs make great X Terminals in a pinch. This how it was up @school when we hit a shortage of terminals for our various Sun boxes, and we needed access for projects. They set up XDM to allow login to some of the servers and workstations. You couldn't actually login locally to the machine.
--locust
jonKatz
Damn. You're right. But hardly anything of his ever gets moderated back up above 1. So surfing @ 2 as I do by default, I don't see it. I with draw the question.
--locust
--locust
Hello? All the organizations that are mentioned appear reputable. In principle one should be careful where one donates, but the people who've put thier names to this don't look like they'd be easily taken in. If you're worried about the formal fundraiser, I get the distinct feeling they (i.e. @stake) will make sure the money gets where its going.
--locust
Culture in general belongs to society at large. It is in the best interest of the corporation to to make you forget that 'The Little Mermaid' existed before Disney's version. Thus elements of the culture end up belonging to the corporation. Btw-> thanks to the Canadian Government for selling the image of the Mountie (Royal Canadian Mounted Police- you know, red jacket, funny black pants) to Disney. But I can't fault corporations for that, they're just trying to make a buck like everybody else (and before I get flamed to oblivion for that last, a man's gota eat, so hold your torches). I can fault them for thier tactics in trying to do so.
And now the blindingly obvious...
Individual works of art such as movies, and music do in fact belong to individual people, or corporations. They have for ages, and people do and have in fact earned a living making works of art that become part of a culture. (Depending upon how you look at it code can be a piece of art. But I digress.)
Culture in and of itself cannot be completely owned by one person/entity. There is a culture that is shared by code-writing geeks and nerds[sic] and in some sense it does belong to them as a group, but it also belongs to the individuals who have contributed it. A case in point, slashdot. It belongs to the comunity that uses it, and at the same time it belongs to Andover. Would you fault Andover for owning it?
The presumption that something that makes up part of your culture belongs to you is exactly what got people so angry when the interface to freshmeat changed a while back (remeber?). The culture doesn't belong to code-writing geeks and nerds any more than it does to the corporations. (And now my bias comes through.)Its just that invoking code-writing geeks and nerds is the only way that Katz attempts to write for, and connect with, this audience.
--locust
Only, I don't recall the code given to blackdown everbeing GPLed. I believe the terms of the license said it could be used by Sun @ any time. And they took it.
On a more general note, I can't really think of any way to tell (absolutely) if your code has been stolen, provided its been embedded deeply enough. With something like an IP stack, you might be able to tell because an implementation responds precisely the same way as your piece of code, and may or may not have the same control structures. One thing I found pretty funny was looking in C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\drivers\etc to find a hosts, and services file, for the first time and wondering which *nix got its code into NT.
So in the end you either have to have someone with the source, who knows its been grabbed, or you have to test the offending software looking for the same performance/functionality signature as your piece of software. Having the same flaws in the ip stack would be an example.
--locust