Well, interesting that you should hit BBC where it hurts, an in some cases maybe they deserve it. But, I think this "story" that you talk of is not one of those. Look at my take of the story behind the story behind the story.... The Blair-Bush team is more devious than you might want to believe...
ALL Quotations below are from the MSNBC article... my comments are in the [TT] [/TT] format....
At the end of the day, officials say, the Lakhani case remains a story about potential threats and not the real-life terrorists they had once hoped to nail. For all the hoopla over the case, the official confirmed, it was essentially a government-arranged sting that never involved any contact with actual terrorists. If there was no contact with a "real" terrorist, how were they supposed to trap these "real" terrorists ??? But, wait, it gets even better.. the terrorists in the case were essentially all actors -undercover informants playing associates of terrorists for the purposes of making a case against Lakhani, an international arms dealer who, according to Christie, has a history of alleged criminal activity. So, now a person who tends towards a certain kind of behavior is now enticed... Does this bring to mind the word "entrapment?" They noted that Lakhani, in taped conversations with undercover operatives, expressed his hostility for the United States, his sympathy for bin Laden and his willingness to work with terrorists to supply them with the weapons they needed to shoot down airliners. Is this hostility really surprising when it is known that majority of the world population thought Mr. Bush's actions have been consistently unjust and immoral? We didn't want this to get out before we could determine whether this guy would cooperate or not.? So, now you tempt him even more. Promise the fix to the junkie. Even if the tendency to additction is genetic.
And what better thing to do to tempt the suseptible by playing both sides - being the buyer, and being the supplier. It sort of reminds me of the "Truman Show." The FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents then arranged to involve the Russian FSB, that country's security service. When Lakhani flew to Moscow last month to actually inspect the missile he would be buying, he met with two FSB agents posing as missile suppliers. Looks like a scene from a C grade movie. The snookered Lakhani then arranged for the missile to be shipped from St. Petersburg and made a commitment to the two FSB undercover operates to buy 50 more such weapons as well as a multiton quantity of C-4 plastic explosives. Snookered Lakhani... yes, snookered.. you know what snookered means ? It means Fooled or duped
When you wake up, ask yourself... could you be living in times scarier than these....
Tony Blair got busted in the WMD case because of the names of the people who revised the WMD Documents were still in the Word file. Now, it seems, that the Downing Street only puts PDF files on the web - and has removed all the MS word documents that were already there....
The UK Government was just the latest in a long line of organisations that has learned to its cost just how much information can be gleaned from innocent looking files. Earlier this year it issued a document called the 'dodgy dossier" about Iraq's concealment of weapons of mass destruction that was written using Microsoft Word. Every Word document remembers who made the last few revisions to it. The log reveals the names of four of the people who prepared the Iraq document for publication and the government Communications Information Centre that some of them work for. It was this log that Number 10 press chief Alastair Campbell had to explain to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in late June as part of its investigation into the Iraq dossier's history. Some of this information can be seen simply by right-clicking to view the properties of the downloaded document in a file listing. Utility programs can get even more information from Word revision logs.
The life stories of the documents we create are becoming increasingly important as the scrutiny of industries and governments gathers pace. Every time you write or edit these files you leave a trail of information revealing what you did and when you did it. With the right tools it is possible to extract this data and work out the trail of authors and workers who created a document. That is why we should all use opensource and open data formats - so that we can humanly read what all we are "putting" into the document. The Word version of this document has now been removed from government websites but copies of it are still available elsewhere on the net.
Unabridged and unedited article at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3037760.stm
Microsoft & others want to spam too - legally
on
Following the Spam Trail
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
as this was a a mortage related spam - aka respectable spam - as opposed to the unrespectable spam like "enlarge..." spam, it is not too off track to show how the big corporations are lobbying for the ability to send spam directly rather than thru these layers...
It is also very interesting that the big companies like Microsoft are paying lobbyists for laws that shall allow them to send spam, on the pretext that if only their spam is identified as spam it is no longer spam. I might give my email id to a Microsoft division, and then without my permission it is available to all the divisions of microsoft - even if I have no interest in all their products save one for which I gave my email - so isn't all the unrelated email they send me now spam ???
What the big companies want to do is to send spam themselves, but prevent others from sending it. All knowing that spam is dirt cheap tool for sales, but there is only so much spam a consumer can take before the backlash hurts all spammers...
it is pure and simple application of game theory - when it becomes lucrative enough for the politicians, they will step into it too...
I am not trying to be a "something-something" but just wanted to see if someone has been able to distill the essence of the arguement of why privacy is needed at the individual level, and can express it in a soundbite of say 30-60 seconds. I have been having a hard time articulating myself in the period of the attention span of most people. Of course I could ask them to read stuff like Orwell, but that is asking too much of them. I am looking for something short and sweet...
So my question is very simple. Is there a short and sweet way of capturing the need of ABSOLUTE privacy in at least some spheres of your life, no matter who you are. Even if you don't hold such an extreme position, but only slightly tend towards privacy over surveillance, I would still be interested in seeing how you express yourself in just a few words....
To distill the essence I have many times tried to boil it down to its abstraction. But when I do it it becomes pretty awkard to express... Here is an example
I can feel the need in my guts, or
I don't believe that in a final analysis a real and physical human being should ever become completely subservient to a massless and abstract organization. The trump cards must always be in the hands of humans, for it is they who carry the burden of facing their creator someday. It is a heavy enough burden to bear, and as each person meets his creator privately after death, they must be able to live privately when they are alive. And as the privacy in the former case is absolute, so must it be in the latter case.
Would anyone want to share their formulation of this need for privacy...
written with a little poetic licence - maybe this will be a catharisis, and I will feel much better after all the emotional dump is made....
I think this is one of the watershed moments of our generation, and these moments seem to come in cycles. A lot of forces are converging that shall give our generation a chance to have a revolution of its own - rather than just reading about the old ones in history or seeing them on TV. We must heed the bugle and assemble of our own accord, to wage a war, and the side we choose shall decide our fate, as the wheels of excess come crashing down on the unreasonable. So, be reasonable, and look at what your side is asking in sacrifice and compare it to what they provide in return.
And when you look at the other side and see the lawmakers and the Corporations lined up against you, don't be surprised. The lawmakers are in the pockets of the corporations that line their pockets. Campaign Donations Sway Lawmakers' Votes So, the adversary is definitely formidable. And there is no other choice but to uproot them completely and totally, for their nexus has corrupted the system down to its core.
Some have already sold their soul, and for them the choice no longer exists. For the millions of others the day to make the choice is approaching soon. For about a 1000 the day of making the choice has approached. Will all of them be divided and individually be chopped to pieces, or will they recognize that providence has brought them together under a single banner - and now they must stick together, serve as the nucleus of this revolution, and even as the coalesce together, pull in together the millions of others who when presented with two choices will choose to join the "1000 Nodes of Light."
If the 1000 start by contributing 10 cents for each song on their harddrive today (instead of the $750 to $150,000 that they may be liable to pay the RIAA some sunny day) I am sure enough money can be collected to buy the materials like server space, paper, printing, postage needed to run their war. Then what is needed is time from volunteers which can be solicited from some in the 1000. If this movement has sticking power, then I am sure people like slashdotters would not mind volunteering. And then if there are enough volunteers, the broader population might even choose to support with their cents and dollars.
The money should be spread out to counterattack all the 12-24 lawyers of the RIAA, and drag them into a battle over the very nature of copyright and how their compensation should be calculated. It just needs a focus of a good case, and I am sure there are some in the 1000 that would just from the odds of it - qualify to be that Test case. And with a broad support of the other 999, and of the (23 million -1) people, some sanity can be injected into this whole issue. What the RIAA is demanding for one song is 150000 times what the song actually costs. Even if I pay 1 dollar a day to listen to the song, it will be 410 years of paying a dollar EVERYDAY, before listening to the song costs me $150,000. What sane mind could deem this arrangement reasonable ? Something is out of whack, and it needs to be whacked back into place.
And I think, just like Bush might have bitten off a little too much in Iraq, RIAA might have bitten off a little too much of the "Illegal" File-Sharers universe. The war has been started based on a deliberate misinterpretation of archaic data, and RIAA's assualt was started based on a jaundiced interpretation of archaic laws. Laws are being twisted to the word, even as the spirit is raped and pillaged. But, the hands of the masses will grasp these lying Boosies and rip them from their priviledged and ivory tower havens, and plunge them in the depths of Dante's inferno. And all this will be done electronically. Communication will be electronic revolution.
I am firmly in the camp that Red Hat is doing the right thing.
I remember many years ago during my college days when I first saw the Red Hat boxed version in a Best Buy. I was looking at the games and other software in the windows section, mainly to decide what warez to get later that evening. It used to be so hard browsing for titles on the net, and it was better to make decisions of what I needed or wanted and then go find it.
Looking at the Red Hat box with the "free software" Linux in that Best Buy felt discomforting, and I remember distinctly feeling "oh you MS wannabee's." This whole market of selling boxed software, I remember thinking was MS's creation. They figured out how to sell a box that was 98% empty by volume, for really exhorbitant prices. And now Red Hat was copying them. And they probably had a dream that like the thousands of software titles in the windows section, someday Best Buy would have a section of thousands of Linux software.
But I think Red Hat forgot that MS shrinkwrap box strategy was crafted before the networks and Internet were a force. And more importantly, Bill Gates had wrought a revolution by charging for "software" which hobbyists routinely gave away for free. Linux was a revolution that was giving away for free what had routinely been charged for. There were big differences. And I thought that it was suicide to try to play by the rules that MS had created for the market that it had created.
The world is a few years away from the heyday of the shrinkwrap box. Red Hat should't ape MS and their market strategy. They should choose the one that works for them. And if that requires burn-CD-on-demand then that is what it should be. If it requires networks and downloads that is what is should be. I guess, what I am saying is, that their strategy should be what it should be. Just like a man's got to do what a man's got to do. And what ever all the above means to you, you are right.
It had to happen in North Carolina, because politics is ultimately about local issues. Static Control Components of Sanford, (close to Raleigh) employs 1200, and might even more if business grows. The Company had enough pull in the State to get the law passed.
And I think this should be a lesson for other issues too... Abstractions have to come down to one or few test cases where the rubber hits the road.... guess RIAA's thousands points of lawsuits will also meet such a fate from the localities where the lawsuits draw first blood.
I would be foolish enough to say to RIAA "Bring 'em on" but I think that they should expect the unexpected when the finally go for it.
You go here and it fills the NYTimes registration page with random characters. Maybe it might come handy some day, but, oh god, you must be pretty angry about it. Yeah. And tell me about it. I agree with you fully 100%.
I wonder where this will stop. NYTimes might get google to stop caching the direct link for a certain article. That is fine. But it is just one more step to do a search in google for the article with a few keywords from the article. If any person has been good enough to save it in a personal page, discussion board (like traditionally done for articles likely to be slashdotted) or any other place, the google results will show it. Would NYTimes now want to restrict google from showing thses pages because of the copyrighted stuff. You will be amazed as to how many articles I find this way. Many of them are just excerpts but others are complete.
Another thing on a tangent was that I really do hate the fact that information is restricted for just one fundamental reason - if it is not commonly available then it cannot be linked to in most of my writings for they are going to be unavailable to the party that I am writing to. This is especially true if the writing is not immediate but is meant to be read a month or two later. This is also relevant to Bloggers who might make comments and refer to a link, only to have the links go dead because the content is space,time, or space-time restricted. I am willing to pay for reading the articles, but before I can write about them I need to ensure that they are going to be available to my common readers. And as in the Blogging or P2P scenario I am not sure if one person is going to read my writing or thousands so buying a license for them is illogical. And then, if they need to send it further, are they also supposed to pay ???
Basically, for me to be able to write, to build upon existing work, to look ahead standing on the shoulder's of the giants, I need to be able to pass on the information. I am adding value because I am couching that content in a context, but until I can freely share the underlying articles too, my product is stunted. I can reach narrow audience but can't reach the common All this is very good in developing software where you might negotiate a deal once in a while to include someone's underlying code, but not writing where you might be writing 10-15 articles a week...
Basically all I am saying is that there should be a movement similar to Open Source not only for software products, but for journalistic content.
Your point is well taken, but I just have a simple concern about how regularly will the AOL'ers blog.
If most of the nerds can't keep their journals on slashdot, then most of the AOL'ers probably won't on AOL. I am not sure what the percentage of slashdotters who keep a journal is (can someone write a hack to do this?) but divide that by 5, and multiply by 34 million, and you get a guesstimate of the AOL journalers. I bet you that this is a pretty small number.
600 to 899 -- Not shown due to
space constraints
(Criminality, Hypercriminality,
and Hyperviolence)
Did any one notice on this page "Call for Contributors" http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/fairhaven/call-for-es says.html
the author declines to list DCE-I classifications because of space constraints. Space constraints on the web? This has to be the lamest and dumbest excuse I have seen.
response as originating directly from said computer, simulating artificial intelligence
I think the "simulating artificial intelligence" is a very strong claim.
First, the guy muddles the definition of AI by adding ethical to it.
Secondly, there is no convincing proof that AI has been simulated. It is still a damn dream - when I see AI, I am sure it will hit me like a sledge-hammer and be better than even an orgasm. And people haven't been reporting that reaction. I am pretty sure the patent examiner didn't feel that. And they probably let it on because though they had no clue what the patent was about, they were too ashamed to acknowledge ignorance.
Thirdly, surely there is no proof of ethical Artificial Intelligence. God, no one except this patentee knows what ethical artificial intelligence stands for. We know something about ethical, something about Artificial intelligence, but almost nothing about ethical artificial intelligence. In cases like this neither is 1 + 1 = 2, nor is it equal to 1.
Fourthly, it is purely being justified as patentable because it has a potential commercial value. This is not a strong enough criteria by which to judge what is intellectual property and what is not. There are some people who would be willing to pay money for turd, but their judgement should not reflect on the general intelligence of the living population or the artificial intelligence of the non-living population.
Now they can use millions of the CueCat scanners
on
Swiping Out Cancer
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I am glad somebody found out what to do with these scanners.
Hopefully now all those millions of CueCat http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20001012.html scanners can be put to some use....
If you think it's awesome that librarians are on your side against the Patriot Act, might I suggest helping them back by volunteering?
I agree with you. When I look back upon my life, what molded me the most was the time that I spent in the library.
I explored all topics, and if the FBI/CIA were to get my reading list they wouldn't have a clue why I was reading what all I was reading - and I am sure I would end up on some submarine somewhere where nobody would know my name, because they just wouldn't be able to understand what I was trying to understand. And, isn't it true, that they are afraid of things that they don't understand - and also afraid of people who do understand.
And the one library that I have much to thank for is the Wake County library at the Cameron Village in Raleigh.
When I finished my thesis in 2001 I had decided that I would make monetory donations to help in its upkeep.... but the Herbert Hoover economy has been ruining those plans.... and if I think about it, the economy was ruined because of the same people that have come up with the Patriot Acts and similar legislations....
I guess, tongue in cheek, I am trying to say that, today I should help the library because of the Patriot Act, but it is because of the Patriot act that I can't help the library today ..... go, figure.
Anyway, horay for more animation (that isn't aimed at kids).
Just before I got to slashdot, I finished reading an article on the way people are using Sims to create their own sitcoms. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59461,00.ht ml This is truly a way in which animation can be used by the masses for expression. I am sure other products using this concept will soon come in the market and make it a legitimate market.
What is interesting in the Sim's story is how many people are using the characters to deal with many deep issues. Right now it is being done using the Album feature, but for his part, "Wright hopes to incorporate the storytelling as a more prescribed feature in next year's The Sims 2, and would like to find a way to let players use motion in order to make movies. " The unintended use of the album feature as what Wright terms "a tool of self-expression" is an example of a phenomenon known as emergence. Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of gameLab and designer of the Web-based game Sissyfight, says emergent play is among the best parts of game designing.
Players "go to a lot of trouble to get the Sims to do things they don't want to do," Wright says, explaining that players must keep their would-be actors fed, clean, rested and happy before they will even consider playing their parts. "So in that sense, it's almost like they're a director.... It's almost like a real movie shoot." Initially, it was all superheroes all the time. But users quickly began making the albums richer, with multilayered characters and multiple episodes. "It went way beyond my expectations," Wright said. "They were sort of like small novels."
What no one imagined -- least of all The Sims' designers -- was that thousands of players would quickly bypass the album's intended use and instead use it to create dozens of staged snapshots, crafting what can be complex, scripted, multi-episode social commentaries, graphic novels or even movies, as it were, with the Sims starring in the lead roles.
Service, known in the Sims community as nsknight, has created several albums that are highly ranked by her peers. Among them is her six-part Vanderbilt series, which took her months to write and stage and which revolves around the story of three sisters separated by the murder of their mother.
Other users have conjured up such storylines as a young woman's drug addiction and recovery;
an African-American girl's adoption by a white family;
and, naturally, poor girls falling in love with rich guys.
Andrea Davis, known as VioletKitty, uses the albums to build narrative Sims tutorials. "Since my Sims weren't 'acting,'" she explained, "it (is) more like reality TV."
This month Maxis is preparing to announce the creation of the 100,000th album.
Users' sophistication in the current version continues to impress him, [Wright] particularly given the difficulties of getting Sims to perform the roles required of them.
I think the more interesting situation is not how to recognize a single human, but how to recognize the contribution of the human in the network of computers and humans.
What I mean with the visual spam test is that some spammers had put a person to the task of just looking at the letters and typing them it in. That way you could still automate the creation of mailboxes, with one tiny step left for a person to do. It slowed them down a little but now much, because in an Adam Smithian kind of way, they could produce 10 times more needles than before the division of labor....
In the above story it is mentioned Turing test... I think Turing test is valid only for a stand-alone device. If it is a networked device, then the notion of the Turing test has to be updated.
The notion that Turing proposed about determining Artificial Intelligence, emerging from ?computer bits,? has to be broadened in context of the "network bits" or "nits"? This is because of the human-nature derived unpredictability in the Human-Computer networks.
While the material and natural forces help to differentiate between, say high and low voltage, and define the computer bit, the human-nature forces help differentiate between bestseller and pulp fiction, and thus partially define the ?network bit? or ?nit.?
This confoundedness of human or their agent involvement in the very definition of the symbolic meaning, and value, of different ?states? (like high and low and lower, or 0 and 1) differentiates the network ?nit? from the computer ?bit.?
When we try to adapt the Turing Test to try to decide if the human-computer network can be said to be "thinking" as well as a human, we must pay special attention to the
nature of the interrogator - in the networks the "interrogator" cannot be defined precisely in space, time, or personalities. Some of the roles are being taken by emarketplaces, brokers, infomediaries, chat rooms, discussion boards, etc. Thus in the network, no single interrogator exists, and thus the uncertainity in the definition of the interrogators, must be factored in the fidelity of the questions transmitted from the questioner and the responses passed on by the interrogator.
number of humans and computers in the closed room in Turing's Test it was possible to isolate one human and one computer, and try to see if the questioner outside the room could tell the difference between them. But in the "closed room" of the networks like the Internet, millions of computer systems, and millions of humans, are present. For a questioner, or a Internet User, in our case, the queries and the responses between humans and computers are confounded, and the question between trying to differentiate between one human and a computer in a closed room, becomes meaningless.
Thus, we have to redefine the test to determine if the network is "intelligent."
The test has to be cognizant of the fact that we can pose no queries to human and computers separately, that we might not get a sufficient sample of the responses from the network to make statistically relevant inferences, and that we can never query all the network systems and hence the responses from our limited set of networks is only probabilistically valid, and that we can never fully understand the nature and bias of the interrogator.
This surveillance s**t is worse than my conscience, which let me tell you, can some times be pretty unfair and brutal.... But there are ways I know of dealing with it...
At least I can do the right thing by my conscience and not mind it being everywhere I want to go.
But when the State gets the powers of tracking me, similar to my conscience, and when the right and wrong are blurred, and the illegal and immoral are at conflict, and the wrong people have gotten hold of the State machinary...
I think I am basically screwed. It is already starting to feel like that.
I think this is going to be the real debate of the 21 st century.
If I can't be safe in the physical world (because of technology that can identify me by my walk, or by the temperature of my breath measured by satellites miles in the sky, etc.),
and
I can't be safe in the abstract world (because of all these Carnivores and Patriot Acts),
where am I going to go on those occasions when I really want to crawl out of my own skin. And there are other times when I want to go where there is nobody else but me.
That is my innate desire, so the temptation will always be there...
what international agreements govern spectrum management; what international agreements govern licensing of WiFi or 802.11
I don't think there are any International Agreements. Just International Standards.
A lot of the "govern"ment in the country depends on
what the existing infrastructure is like,
what is the new technology going to compete with
how much of the revenue projections of the existing players are still unrealized
how much can the Telecom Committees be "influenced"
etc. etc. etc.
In short, there are many domestic compulsions on which countries base their implementation of WiFi. It is illogical to look for logic in it, because most of the countries are pretty illogical to begin with. And laws in that country will anyday trump the international "agreements."I mean that in a good way.
The big issue is not bits of data here and there. The real issue is as to how much power should be given to an agency to collect those bits together. Put together the bits will reveal much more than what they reveal in parts - so the motive is there for them to go ahead. If the wrong people assume power, and try to use this data, real or deduced or imaginary, "with the full force of the law" against you - you are basically screwed.
Now it comes down to your gut. Do you trust that the systems designed are so well in place that the wrong guys cannot be arraigned against you? If you do so, then I got a Brooklyn WMD to sell to you. The problems in keeping the data off the hands of the wrong guys when all these commercial companies are playing merry hell with the data they have are:
When commercial entities start selling data without oversight and in stealth, then it becomes difficult to know if the data will finally end up illegally comandeered by the State. There are cases of CIA buying data from private agencies in other countries that would have been illegal under those countries laws. I remember reading about this in the last 4 weeks but can't track it down now - could somebody help here?
Further, methods which would have been illegal for the State agencies to use are fair game for the commercial agencies - think of the salesman in the boiler room doing social engineering on of the suckers. And once obtained, the State can conveniently buy the "tainted" data from these commercial setups.
Both the above options are bad.
If you can make foolproof laws for keeping the wrong guys from trying to get hold of your data, you haven't met Mr. Scalia.
If you can't keep the wrong guys from winning once in a while, try not to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't let all these bits of pieces be collected in one basket. Don't allow that to happen surreptitiously. And don't allow it to happen by deceit.
And the first step is not to allow these commercial companies to trade your data based on lies and deceit. Later we can try to prevent John Edgar Hoover from dancing around in his bikini, trying to apply the "full force of the law" against people on his wrong side.
I did a study for a company in India. I think the concept of Wi-Fi will not work in at least one Developing Country, India, unless -
the distance can be increased from 300 ft to about 3000 ft (or the things that do wireless for 3,000 ft or more become cheaper,) To break-even on your installation and maintenance costs you have to cover houses in such a big radius given the low penetration of internet. This is the case everywhere except apartment complexes, which are again problematic due to the thick walls and floors. Further, in Apartment complexes, there are favored ISP's which find it cheaper to actually run new cables.
Bandwidth is expensive, and the typical cable internet connection in New Delhi, India provides a speed of 4 KBps (i.e less than a 56 Kbps modem). The local ISP (via cable) basically buys 64 KBps and distributes this bandwidth to about 40-60 homes. So, sharing the bandwidth does not make much sense.
Further, even though the WiFi access points and cards are cheap in dollars, converted to local currency they are Rs 10,000 and Rs 5,000. (A network LAN card costs about Rs 300.) So, for a house it would mean investing at least Rs 15,000. One month's service in India is Rs 1,000 on the cable, so it means that I would have to invest 15 months of internet subscription fees in the installation of WiFi equipment itself.
In U.S. terms it means that the WiFi equipment would cost me about $ 750 (assuming monthly charges of Rs 50 for 15 months.) Obviously, it is comparatively too high.
By the way, the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) of the Rs vs. $ is around 5.20. It means that a dollar in India buys 5.2 times more than it would buy in the U.S. The exchange rate, on the other hand, is 1 $ buys about Rs 45.
If confirmed, the sentence would generate jurisprudence for that if they oppose to the technology of "controlled copies"
I would be interested in knowing as to what the logical reasoning and the legal framework of the case was.
Was the winning based on something substantial, or could it be just overcome by the CD producer putting up a disclaimer sticker on the CD saying the "this might not work on certain devices." Basically the intention is to understand the depth of the victory.
Could somebody help with some links or any more info??
I have come around to believing this bumper-sticker philosophy
Kill Plagiarism Support Piracy
The fact that such ridiculous court decisions are being made, with nary a chance of ever being realized (like 30,000 years, or in Jordan'case billions of dollars) means that there is a disconnect between the laws of copyright and the reality of digital distribution. Crazy models and interpretations that generally came out of the academic confines of class rooms, are now coming from the real world of the courts.
I fully respect someone's ideas, and completely am against plagarism. But I am starting to differ about how much they should be allowed to profit from them, and am starting to see how the role of piracy is underappreciated in the wide dissemination of ideas.
The decision whether piracy is good or bad must be made based on two factors:
what is the cost to society when the idea is to be commercially exploited for the gain for a few.
What are the impediments that are being created to the development of technologies, products, and services by the quest for profit by the few.
is there a significant number of people who when exposed to the ideas might eventually add to humanity's body of knowledge building upon digital content that they were exposed to - and would a significant number of these be denied access to ideas unless the costs are reduced to the bare minimum by piracy.
We are in a new world, unimaginable even 10 years ago. We can make infinite and perfect copies of a product, something which we could never could earlier.
And here we are being trapped into artificial market segmentations by middlemen who, thanks to the FCC and Powell, are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger... This is just pathetic.... (maybe I am a little harsh, but after hearing about the RIAA decision to sue thousands of file-sharers I am not in a very generous mood).
The providers of content that can be digitized, just have to forge a stronger relationship with the audience... they have to use their static and digitized content as a "marketing and business card" towards the development of a dynamic relationship between the audience and the engines of creation.
I will reverse myself in any court of law, but right now I say Kill Plagiarism Support Piracy...
I think that there is too much emphasis paid to the computing aspect. There are two other aspects that need to be considered - the memory aspect, and the AGENT of interaction between cpu (computing) and memory roles. In some cases the computer does the computing, but in many cases it just serves as an extension of our memory. The roles of the Humans change from being of the memory role to the cpu role almost instantly, with the Computer picking up the complimentary role - thus creating what we call the S-W Computer.
In short, the computer has 5 elements - input, output, storage, cpu, and memory. The input, output, and storage is provided by the hardware. We are left with the cpu and the memory aspects. In the HuCoNOS (Human Computer Network Operating System) one of the roles, either memory or cpu, is taken by the Human and the other by the Computer, and this whole arrangement in time can be considered as the S-W Computer.
What is most important is the how the roles of the human are changing from that of CPU to that of MEMORY, and how this journey between these "mutually exclusive" roles is traversed in time. In the S-W Computer conception, the human itself is a part of the computer, thus bringing in the notion of sentient... Infact, by the element of dyanmism that is added, there is a notion of emergent that becomes important, giving rise to Network Intelligence (a network analogue of Artificial Intelligence).
I also had some description of this S-W Machine (a sort of GUI Turing Machine) and S-W Computer in my doctoral thesis, but don't have the separate chapters posted. One of these days I will break up the thesis and post these relevant sections describing these concepts.
What would it take to have a TiVo-like service for radio stations, that could be programmed to record all songs by a certain artist, or from an album, or one DJ'd by someone... (analogous to Kazaalite choice of Song, Album, and User)
Could we then burn these songs on a DVD or CD from there....
Many radio stations could release the playlist in advance to help in the recordings (aka TV listings) and in addition to the Clear Channel (go to hell) stations there could be many many many (maybe millions like kazaalite, or thousands like iTunes) of radio broadcasters... broadcasting all the songs all the time...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, interesting that you should hit BBC where it hurts, an in some cases maybe they deserve it. But, I think this "story" that you talk of is not one of those. Look at my take of the story behind the story behind the story .... The Blair-Bush team is more devious than you might want to believe ...
ALL Quotations below are from the MSNBC article ... my comments are in the [TT] [/TT] format ....
At the end of the day, officials say, the Lakhani case remains a story about potential threats and not the real-life terrorists they had once hoped to nail. For all the hoopla over the case, the official confirmed, it was essentially a government-arranged sting that never involved any contact with actual terrorists. If there was no contact with a "real" terrorist, how were they supposed to trap these "real" terrorists ??? But, wait, it gets even better .. the terrorists in the case were essentially all actors -undercover informants playing associates of terrorists for the purposes of making a case against Lakhani, an international arms dealer who, according to Christie, has a history of alleged criminal activity. So, now a person who tends towards a certain kind of behavior is now enticed ... Does this bring to mind the word "entrapment?" They noted that Lakhani, in taped conversations with undercover operatives, expressed his hostility for the United States, his sympathy for bin Laden and his willingness to work with terrorists to supply them with the weapons they needed to shoot down airliners. Is this hostility really surprising when it is known that majority of the world population thought Mr. Bush's actions have been consistently unjust and immoral? We didn't want this to get out before we could determine whether this guy would cooperate or not.? So, now you tempt him even more. Promise the fix to the junkie. Even if the tendency to additction is genetic.
And what better thing to do to tempt the suseptible by playing both sides - being the buyer, and being the supplier. It sort of reminds me of the "Truman Show." The FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents then arranged to involve the Russian FSB, that country's security service. When Lakhani flew to Moscow last month to actually inspect the missile he would be buying, he met with two FSB agents posing as missile suppliers. Looks like a scene from a C grade movie. The snookered Lakhani then arranged for the missile to be shipped from St. Petersburg and made a commitment to the two FSB undercover operates to buy 50 more such weapons as well as a multiton quantity of C-4 plastic explosives. Snookered Lakhani ... yes, snookered .. you know what snookered means ? It means Fooled or duped
When you wake up, ask yourself ... could you be living in times scarier than these ....
Tony Blair got busted in the WMD case because of the names of the people who revised the WMD Documents were still in the Word file. Now, it seems, that the Downing Street only puts PDF files on the web - and has removed all the MS word documents that were already there ....
Tools reveal secret life of documents - Documents like in Word save too much Info - Blair Episode
By Mark Ward
July 03, 2003
The UK Government was just the latest in a long line of organisations that has learned to its cost just how much information can be gleaned from innocent looking files. Earlier this year it issued a document called the 'dodgy dossier" about Iraq's concealment of weapons of mass destruction that was written using Microsoft Word. Every Word document remembers who made the last few revisions to it. The log reveals the names of four of the people who prepared the Iraq document for publication and the government Communications Information Centre that some of them work for. It was this log that Number 10 press chief Alastair Campbell had to explain to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee in late June as part of its investigation into the Iraq dossier's history. Some of this information can be seen simply by right-clicking to view the properties of the downloaded document in a file listing. Utility programs can get even more information from Word revision logs.
The life stories of the documents we create are becoming increasingly important as the scrutiny of industries and governments gathers pace. Every time you write or edit these files you leave a trail of information revealing what you did and when you did it. With the right tools it is possible to extract this data and work out the trail of authors and workers who created a document. That is why we should all use opensource and open data formats - so that we can humanly read what all we are "putting" into the document. The Word version of this document has now been removed from government websites but copies of it are still available elsewhere on the net.
Unabridged and unedited article at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3037760.stm
as this was a a mortage related spam - aka respectable spam - as opposed to the unrespectable spam like "enlarge ..." spam, it is not too off track to show how the big corporations are lobbying for the ability to send spam directly rather than thru these layers ...
It is also very interesting that the big companies like Microsoft are paying lobbyists for laws that shall allow them to send spam, on the pretext that if only their spam is identified as spam it is no longer spam. I might give my email id to a Microsoft division, and then without my permission it is available to all the divisions of microsoft - even if I have no interest in all their products save one for which I gave my email - so isn't all the unrelated email they send me now spam ???
What the big companies want to do is to send spam themselves, but prevent others from sending it. All knowing that spam is dirt cheap tool for sales, but there is only so much spam a consumer can take before the backlash hurts all spammers ...
it is pure and simple application of game theory - when it becomes lucrative enough for the politicians, they will step into it too ...
I am not trying to be a "something-something" but just wanted to see if someone has been able to distill the essence of the arguement of why privacy is needed at the individual level, and can express it in a soundbite of say 30-60 seconds. I have been having a hard time articulating myself in the period of the attention span of most people. Of course I could ask them to read stuff like Orwell, but that is asking too much of them. I am looking for something short and sweet ...
So my question is very simple. Is there a short and sweet way of capturing the need of ABSOLUTE privacy in at least some spheres of your life, no matter who you are. Even if you don't hold such an extreme position, but only slightly tend towards privacy over surveillance, I would still be interested in seeing how you express yourself in just a few words ....
To distill the essence I have many times tried to boil it down to its abstraction. But when I do it it becomes pretty awkard to express ... Here is an example
Would anyone want to share their formulation of this need for privacy...
written with a little poetic licence - maybe this will be a catharisis, and I will feel much better after all the emotional dump is made ....
I think this is one of the watershed moments of our generation, and these moments seem to come in cycles. A lot of forces are converging that shall give our generation a chance to have a revolution of its own - rather than just reading about the old ones in history or seeing them on TV. We must heed the bugle and assemble of our own accord, to wage a war, and the side we choose shall decide our fate, as the wheels of excess come crashing down on the unreasonable. So, be reasonable, and look at what your side is asking in sacrifice and compare it to what they provide in return.
And when you look at the other side and see the lawmakers and the Corporations lined up against you, don't be surprised. The lawmakers are in the pockets of the corporations that line their pockets. Campaign Donations Sway Lawmakers' Votes So, the adversary is definitely formidable. And there is no other choice but to uproot them completely and totally, for their nexus has corrupted the system down to its core.
Some have already sold their soul, and for them the choice no longer exists. For the millions of others the day to make the choice is approaching soon. For about a 1000 the day of making the choice has approached. Will all of them be divided and individually be chopped to pieces, or will they recognize that providence has brought them together under a single banner - and now they must stick together, serve as the nucleus of this revolution, and even as the coalesce together, pull in together the millions of others who when presented with two choices will choose to join the "1000 Nodes of Light."
If the 1000 start by contributing 10 cents for each song on their harddrive today (instead of the $750 to $150,000 that they may be liable to pay the RIAA some sunny day) I am sure enough money can be collected to buy the materials like server space, paper, printing, postage needed to run their war. Then what is needed is time from volunteers which can be solicited from some in the 1000. If this movement has sticking power, then I am sure people like slashdotters would not mind volunteering. And then if there are enough volunteers, the broader population might even choose to support with their cents and dollars.
The money should be spread out to counterattack all the 12-24 lawyers of the RIAA, and drag them into a battle over the very nature of copyright and how their compensation should be calculated. It just needs a focus of a good case, and I am sure there are some in the 1000 that would just from the odds of it - qualify to be that Test case. And with a broad support of the other 999, and of the (23 million -1) people, some sanity can be injected into this whole issue. What the RIAA is demanding for one song is 150000 times what the song actually costs. Even if I pay 1 dollar a day to listen to the song, it will be 410 years of paying a dollar EVERYDAY, before listening to the song costs me $150,000. What sane mind could deem this arrangement reasonable ? Something is out of whack, and it needs to be whacked back into place.
And I think, just like Bush might have bitten off a little too much in Iraq, RIAA might have bitten off a little too much of the "Illegal" File-Sharers universe. The war has been started based on a deliberate misinterpretation of archaic data, and RIAA's assualt was started based on a jaundiced interpretation of archaic laws. Laws are being twisted to the word, even as the spirit is raped and pillaged. But, the hands of the masses will grasp these lying Boosies and rip them from their priviledged and ivory tower havens, and plunge them in the depths of Dante's inferno. And all this will be done electronically. Communication will be electronic revolution.
I am firmly in the camp that Red Hat is doing the right thing.
I remember many years ago during my college days when I first saw the Red Hat boxed version in a Best Buy. I was looking at the games and other software in the windows section, mainly to decide what warez to get later that evening. It used to be so hard browsing for titles on the net, and it was better to make decisions of what I needed or wanted and then go find it.
Looking at the Red Hat box with the "free software" Linux in that Best Buy felt discomforting, and I remember distinctly feeling "oh you MS wannabee's." This whole market of selling boxed software, I remember thinking was MS's creation. They figured out how to sell a box that was 98% empty by volume, for really exhorbitant prices. And now Red Hat was copying them. And they probably had a dream that like the thousands of software titles in the windows section, someday Best Buy would have a section of thousands of Linux software.
But I think Red Hat forgot that MS shrinkwrap box strategy was crafted before the networks and Internet were a force. And more importantly, Bill Gates had wrought a revolution by charging for "software" which hobbyists routinely gave away for free. Linux was a revolution that was giving away for free what had routinely been charged for. There were big differences. And I thought that it was suicide to try to play by the rules that MS had created for the market that it had created.
The world is a few years away from the heyday of the shrinkwrap box. Red Hat should't ape MS and their market strategy. They should choose the one that works for them. And if that requires burn-CD-on-demand then that is what it should be. If it requires networks and downloads that is what is should be. I guess, what I am saying is, that their strategy should be what it should be. Just like a man's got to do what a man's got to do. And what ever all the above means to you, you are right.
It had to happen in North Carolina, because politics is ultimately about local issues. Static Control Components of Sanford, (close to Raleigh) employs 1200, and might even more if business grows. The Company had enough pull in the State to get the law passed.
And I think this should be a lesson for other issues too ... Abstractions have to come down to one or few test cases where the rubber hits the road .... guess RIAA's thousands points of lawsuits will also meet such a fate from the localities where the lawsuits draw first blood.
I would be foolish enough to say to RIAA "Bring 'em on" but I think that they should expect the unexpected when the finally go for it.
I fully agree with you 100 %. And tell me about it. And what do you think of this site . Random NYTimes.com Registration Generator http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
You go here and it fills the NYTimes registration page with random characters. Maybe it might come handy some day, but, oh god, you must be pretty angry about it. Yeah. And tell me about it. I agree with you fully 100%.
I wonder where this will stop. NYTimes might get google to stop caching the direct link for a certain article. That is fine. But it is just one more step to do a search in google for the article with a few keywords from the article. If any person has been good enough to save it in a personal page, discussion board (like traditionally done for articles likely to be slashdotted) or any other place, the google results will show it. Would NYTimes now want to restrict google from showing thses pages because of the copyrighted stuff. You will be amazed as to how many articles I find this way. Many of them are just excerpts but others are complete.
Another thing on a tangent was that I really do hate the fact that information is restricted for just one fundamental reason - if it is not commonly available then it cannot be linked to in most of my writings for they are going to be unavailable to the party that I am writing to. This is especially true if the writing is not immediate but is meant to be read a month or two later. This is also relevant to Bloggers who might make comments and refer to a link, only to have the links go dead because the content is space,time, or space-time restricted. I am willing to pay for reading the articles, but before I can write about them I need to ensure that they are going to be available to my common readers. And as in the Blogging or P2P scenario I am not sure if one person is going to read my writing or thousands so buying a license for them is illogical. And then, if they need to send it further, are they also supposed to pay ??? Basically, for me to be able to write, to build upon existing work, to look ahead standing on the shoulder's of the giants, I need to be able to pass on the information. I am adding value because I am couching that content in a context, but until I can freely share the underlying articles too, my product is stunted. I can reach narrow audience but can't reach the common All this is very good in developing software where you might negotiate a deal once in a while to include someone's underlying code, but not writing where you might be writing 10-15 articles a week ...
Your point is well taken, but I just have a simple concern about how regularly will the AOL'ers blog.
If most of the nerds can't keep their journals on slashdot, then most of the AOL'ers probably won't on AOL. I am not sure what the percentage of slashdotters who keep a journal is (can someone write a hack to do this?) but divide that by 5, and multiply by 34 million, and you get a guesstimate of the AOL journalers. I bet you that this is a pretty small number.
It's just a guess, but it's still pretty small !
I think the "simulating artificial intelligence" is a very strong claim.
First, the guy muddles the definition of AI by adding ethical to it.
Secondly, there is no convincing proof that AI has been simulated. It is still a damn dream - when I see AI, I am sure it will hit me like a sledge-hammer and be better than even an orgasm. And people haven't been reporting that reaction. I am pretty sure the patent examiner didn't feel that. And they probably let it on because though they had no clue what the patent was about, they were too ashamed to acknowledge ignorance.
Thirdly, surely there is no proof of ethical Artificial Intelligence. God, no one except this patentee knows what ethical artificial intelligence stands for. We know something about ethical, something about Artificial intelligence, but almost nothing about ethical artificial intelligence. In cases like this neither is 1 + 1 = 2, nor is it equal to 1.
Fourthly, it is purely being justified as patentable because it has a potential commercial value. This is not a strong enough criteria by which to judge what is intellectual property and what is not. There are some people who would be willing to pay money for turd, but their judgement should not reflect on the general intelligence of the living population or the artificial intelligence of the non-living population.
I am glad somebody found out what to do with these scanners.
Hopefully now all those millions of CueCat http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20001012.html scanners can be put to some use ....
I agree with you. When I look back upon my life, what molded me the most was the time that I spent in the library.
I explored all topics, and if the FBI/CIA were to get my reading list they wouldn't have a clue why I was reading what all I was reading - and I am sure I would end up on some submarine somewhere where nobody would know my name, because they just wouldn't be able to understand what I was trying to understand. And, isn't it true, that they are afraid of things that they don't understand - and also afraid of people who do understand.
And the one library that I have much to thank for is the Wake County library at the Cameron Village in Raleigh.
When I finished my thesis in 2001 I had decided that I would make monetory donations to help in its upkeep .... but the Herbert Hoover economy has been ruining those plans .... and if I think about it, the economy was ruined because of the same people that have come up with the Patriot Acts and similar legislations ....
I guess, tongue in cheek, I am trying to say that, today I should help the library because of the Patriot Act, but it is because of the Patriot act that I can't help the library today ..... go, figure.
Just before I got to slashdot, I finished reading an article on the way people are using Sims to create their own sitcoms. http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,59461,00.ht ml This is truly a way in which animation can be used by the masses for expression. I am sure other products using this concept will soon come in the market and make it a legitimate market.
What is interesting in the Sim's story is how many people are using the characters to deal with many deep issues. Right now it is being done using the Album feature, but for his part, "Wright hopes to incorporate the storytelling as a more prescribed feature in next year's The Sims 2, and would like to find a way to let players use motion in order to make movies. " The unintended use of the album feature as what Wright terms "a tool of self-expression" is an example of a phenomenon known as emergence. Eric Zimmerman, the CEO of gameLab and designer of the Web-based game Sissyfight, says emergent play is among the best parts of game designing.
Players "go to a lot of trouble to get the Sims to do things they don't want to do," Wright says, explaining that players must keep their would-be actors fed, clean, rested and happy before they will even consider playing their parts. "So in that sense, it's almost like they're a director.... It's almost like a real movie shoot." Initially, it was all superheroes all the time. But users quickly began making the albums richer, with multilayered characters and multiple episodes. "It went way beyond my expectations," Wright said. "They were sort of like small novels."
What no one imagined -- least of all The Sims' designers -- was that thousands of players would quickly bypass the album's intended use and instead use it to create dozens of staged snapshots, crafting what can be complex, scripted, multi-episode social commentaries, graphic novels or even movies, as it were, with the Sims starring in the lead roles.
Users' sophistication in the current version continues to impress him, [Wright] particularly given the difficulties of getting Sims to perform the roles required of them.
I think the more interesting situation is not how to recognize a single human, but how to recognize the contribution of the human in the network of computers and humans.
What I mean with the visual spam test is that some spammers had put a person to the task of just looking at the letters and typing them it in. That way you could still automate the creation of mailboxes, with one tiny step left for a person to do. It slowed them down a little but now much, because in an Adam Smithian kind of way, they could produce 10 times more needles than before the division of labor ....
In the above story it is mentioned Turing test ... I think Turing test is valid only for a stand-alone device. If it is a networked device, then the notion of the Turing test has to be updated.
Here is an excerpt from a document that I wrote ... http://www.bubbleui.com/thesis/Invention%20disclos ure%20NCSU%20Sept%2025%202000.pdf
The notion that Turing proposed about determining Artificial Intelligence, emerging from ?computer bits,? has to be broadened in context of the "network bits" or "nits"? This is because of the human-nature derived unpredictability in the Human-Computer networks.
When we try to adapt the Turing Test to try to decide if the human-computer network can be said to be "thinking" as well as a human, we must pay special attention to the
Thus, we have to redefine the test to determine if the network is "intelligent."
I think I am basically screwed. It is already starting to feel like that.
I think this is going to be the real debate of the 21 st century.
where am I going to go on those occasions when I really want to crawl out of my own skin. And there are other times when I want to go where there is nobody else but me.
That is my innate desire, so the temptation will always be there ...
I don't think there are any International Agreements. Just International Standards.
A lot of the "govern"ment in the country depends on
- what the existing infrastructure is like,
- what is the new technology going to compete with
- how much of the revenue projections of the existing players are still unrealized
- how much can the Telecom Committees be "influenced"
- etc. etc. etc.
In short, there are many domestic compulsions on which countries base their implementation of WiFi. It is illogical to look for logic in it, because most of the countries are pretty illogical to begin with. And laws in that country will anyday trump the international "agreements."I mean that in a good way.The big issue is not bits of data here and there. The real issue is as to how much power should be given to an agency to collect those bits together. Put together the bits will reveal much more than what they reveal in parts - so the motive is there for them to go ahead. If the wrong people assume power, and try to use this data, real or deduced or imaginary, "with the full force of the law" against you - you are basically screwed.
Now it comes down to your gut. Do you trust that the systems designed are so well in place that the wrong guys cannot be arraigned against you? If you do so, then I got a Brooklyn WMD to sell to you. The problems in keeping the data off the hands of the wrong guys when all these commercial companies are playing merry hell with the data they have are:
If you can make foolproof laws for keeping the wrong guys from trying to get hold of your data, you haven't met Mr. Scalia.
If you can't keep the wrong guys from winning once in a while, try not to put all your eggs in one basket. Don't let all these bits of pieces be collected in one basket. Don't allow that to happen surreptitiously. And don't allow it to happen by deceit.
And the first step is not to allow these commercial companies to trade your data based on lies and deceit. Later we can try to prevent John Edgar Hoover from dancing around in his bikini, trying to apply the "full force of the law" against people on his wrong side.
I did a study for a company in India. I think the concept of Wi-Fi will not work in at least one Developing Country, India, unless -
Further, even though the WiFi access points and cards are cheap in dollars, converted to local currency they are Rs 10,000 and Rs 5,000. (A network LAN card costs about Rs 300.) So, for a house it would mean investing at least Rs 15,000. One month's service in India is Rs 1,000 on the cable, so it means that I would have to invest 15 months of internet subscription fees in the installation of WiFi equipment itself.
By the way, the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) of the Rs vs. $ is around 5.20. It means that a dollar in India buys 5.2 times more than it would buy in the U.S. The exchange rate, on the other hand, is 1 $ buys about Rs 45.
I would be interested in knowing as to what the logical reasoning and the legal framework of the case was.
Was the winning based on something substantial, or could it be just overcome by the CD producer putting up a disclaimer sticker on the CD saying the "this might not work on certain devices." Basically the intention is to understand the depth of the victory.
Could somebody help with some links or any more info??
I have come around to believing this bumper-sticker philosophy
The fact that such ridiculous court decisions are being made, with nary a chance of ever being realized (like 30,000 years, or in Jordan'case billions of dollars) means that there is a disconnect between the laws of copyright and the reality of digital distribution. Crazy models and interpretations that generally came out of the academic confines of class rooms, are now coming from the real world of the courts.
I fully respect someone's ideas, and completely am against plagarism. But I am starting to differ about how much they should be allowed to profit from them, and am starting to see how the role of piracy is underappreciated in the wide dissemination of ideas.
The decision whether piracy is good or bad must be made based on two factors:
We are in a new world, unimaginable even 10 years ago. We can make infinite and perfect copies of a product, something which we could never could earlier.
And here we are being trapped into artificial market segmentations by middlemen who, thanks to the FCC and Powell, are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger ... This is just pathetic .... (maybe I am a little harsh, but after hearing about the RIAA decision to sue thousands of file-sharers I am not in a very generous mood).
The providers of content that can be digitized, just have to forge a stronger relationship with the audience ... they have to use their static and digitized content as a "marketing and business card" towards the development of a dynamic relationship between the audience and the engines of creation.
I will reverse myself in any court of law, but right now I say Kill Plagiarism Support Piracy ...
Thanks for your reprimand ... it was laziness on my part ...my apologies .. i just wish I could make this correction to to my earlier post ....
Here is the pdf link
PDF FORMAT - Invention Disclosure for NCSU (315 KB)
I think that there is too much emphasis paid to the computing aspect. There are two other aspects that need to be considered - the memory aspect, and the AGENT of interaction between cpu (computing) and memory roles. In some cases the computer does the computing, but in many cases it just serves as an extension of our memory. The roles of the Humans change from being of the memory role to the cpu role almost instantly, with the Computer picking up the complimentary role - thus creating what we call the S-W Computer.
In short, the computer has 5 elements - input, output, storage, cpu, and memory. The input, output, and storage is provided by the hardware. We are left with the cpu and the memory aspects. In the HuCoNOS (Human Computer Network Operating System) one of the roles, either memory or cpu, is taken by the Human and the other by the Computer, and this whole arrangement in time can be considered as the S-W Computer.
What is most important is the how the roles of the human are changing from that of CPU to that of MEMORY, and how this journey between these "mutually exclusive" roles is traversed in time. In the S-W Computer conception, the human itself is a part of the computer, thus bringing in the notion of sentient ... Infact, by the element of dyanmism that is added, there is a notion of emergent that becomes important, giving rise to Network Intelligence (a network analogue of Artificial Intelligence).
There is a simple explanation in My Invention Disclosure at North Carolina State University. (1.2 MB) http://www.bubbleui.com/thesis/Invention%20disclos ure%20NCSU%20Sept%2025%202000.doc (1.2 MB)
I also had some description of this S-W Machine (a sort of GUI Turing Machine) and S-W Computer in my doctoral thesis, but don't have the separate chapters posted. One of these days I will break up the thesis and post these relevant sections describing these concepts.
Just a thought ...
What would it take to have a TiVo-like service for radio stations, that could be programmed to record all songs by a certain artist, or from an album, or one DJ'd by someone ... (analogous to Kazaalite choice of Song, Album, and User)
Could we then burn these songs on a DVD or CD from there ....
Many radio stations could release the playlist in advance to help in the recordings (aka TV listings) and in addition to the Clear Channel (go to hell) stations there could be many many many (maybe millions like kazaalite, or thousands like iTunes) of radio broadcasters ... broadcasting all the songs all the time ...
just a thought ....