I'd love to sign your petition but I was asked to sign up and get an Apple ID. I couldn't see any obvious links to do this - maybe I have to be a bona fide mac owner or something.
I also have my own domain name but I'm limited to 5 forwarded email addresses. I wanted to do what you suggested a while ago but couldn't. Then I stumbled across Sneakemail and it basically did everything I had intended anyway.
In a nutshell, you sign up for an account, giving only a contact email address (I use spam AT threewordslong DOTTY com). Once logged in you can create a new, randomized email address for each new web service that needs an email address. If one of these services spams or sells your sneakemail address you: a) know exactly who did it and cease further business with them and b) can filter on that specific email address.
It's a great service and no, I don't work for them...
It isn't just likely, it's fact. People buy the cds because they like them. If they didn't like them they wouldn't buy them; there are easily obtainable alternatives (even in a chain cd store) and they choose the popular stuff instead. The proof is in the purchase. This isn't a monopoly situation a la MS in terms of music, but rather in *distribution*.
While I agree with your points in your earlier posts about taste being subjective and people buying what they like, there is still the issue of what the vast majority of people ever get to hear. This, I take it, is what you mean by having a monopoly on the distribution of music.
So much marketing is put behind pop superstars. Images of success, beauty, and wealth are invoked in music videos, cross-promotions and even the music itself. Like much of what drives consumerism, people buy into an image or brand as much as they buy the product itself.
I find it shame that a lot of beautiful and/or important music remains unheard by many people because it can't be tied into a huge marketing campaign.
But Steve White, senior manager of IBM's autonomous computing division at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, said lower performance shouldn't be an option.
"I think we should be shooting for autonomous self-administering systems that can do better than humans do," Watson said in an interview.
Looks to me like they just made a boo-boo, substituting Watson for White.
I would have thought Scott kept quiet about whether or not Deckard was a replicant because, either:
He wanted people to think for themselves first, or
The distribution company wanted him to keep quiet about it.
Also, I very much doubt he thought up the possibility of Deckard ipso facto. The book he based Bladerunner on, Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", explores that idea in depth.
I'm surprised you think the philosophical side of the movie is better with a human Deckard. Finding out he is a replicant drives home your point of "rejecting the idea that replicants are morally less than human". After all, until the closing scenes you believed Deckard was a human, and one that had to make several difficult moral decisions.
Obligatory On-topic: I'm glad they bringing out a new DVD. I received one as a gift and was very disappointed to find a shoddily put together interface with no extras. Even the film's quality seemed no better than a VHS version.
Someone earlier mentioned an animation of the maps while Bosnia was attacked. Is there any similiar traceroute data before/during/after the recent terrorism on the US?
I by no means want to belittle the loss of human life because of this tragedy. I think it's unbelievably horrid and my thoughts and hope go out to the victims and their family and friends. I just think this would show us another dimension to the disaster.
The level of dialogue this "HAL" can achieve is reminiscient of some conversations I had with some of my Norns in the Cyberlife game called Creatures.
These cute little critters have a small but functional neural net which allows it to learn basic concepts and associate them with words with a little training. This game has been out since 1998 and there are no claims or evidence that the creatures can string together meaningful "sentences" longer than 6 words. If these things were going to improve their language skills, one would think they would have done it by now.
So, what does this say about "HAL"? Well, it's 3 years behind Creatures, doesn't have an environment to interact with and only one person training it.
Good luck with getting it to have adult coversations.
That said, show me some papers, algorithms, or implementation and I'd be ready to reconsider.
Writers are their own worst critics...good writers esepcially. And great writers, of whom I think Mr. Adams squeaks into the fray quite nicely, are often so critical of their own work they don't recognize the genius in it.
To add to your list of examples: Kafka (of "The Trial" and "The Castle" fame) did not publish anything while he was alive and his posthumous wish to his friend was to burn all his manuscripts. Thankfully, his friend had the good sense to realise Kafka was a genius of a writer.
Did anyone else look at the chart mentioned in the article?
Now, is it just me or did I count at least five musicians above the CEO of the RIAA in terms of contribution? The trend continues too: The CEO of BMG dug deep and ponied up a huuuuge $1000 - twice as much as the Executive Vice President of Sony. Sheryl Crow on the other hand put up $5000 and many other musicians I've never heard of put up substantial amounts also.
Now, I don't pretend to know anything about the politics of the Democrats and I don't particularly care. What does interest me is how the musicians and composers seems to be much more forthcoming with their money while most of the industry execs (apart from the top 6 donations) are tight. Maybe the poor RIAA is going under due to all this terrible, hideous piracy.
I don't care how a page looks, feels, or how many flashy things I see. A page is badly designed, in my opinion, if it does not correctly follow the W3C's standards
Have you tried designing any web site recently? Hmmm... didn't think so.
The problem is if you do follow the W3C standard you will, more often than not, get a web page that doesn't work under any browser (especially if you want to use CSS1 which, IHMO, is a brilliant piece of W3C spec. I can't believe no one has implemented it properly yet (IE5.5 on Mac excluded)).
I'd have to agree with some of the early posts:
IE is much more standards compliant than NS - but it strikes me as crazy that they'd spend time adding non-standard features before implementing the W3C specs first
The W3C should come down hard on any company who says they support XYZ if they don't do it 100% correctly
I hear all the time of people in Autralia or Europe bemoaning the per minute charges there. They would jump on the opportunity that we have here.
Ummm... last I checked all my local phone calls were flat fee (as low as AUS$0.15) and unlimited time. Unless you mean "local" as in "anywhere in Australia"? In that case, we do have timed calls. Just so we're not comparing tomatoes and tomatoes, what does "local" mean in the US?
Mind you, if we did switch to timed local (as in my friend down the road) calls I would be most unimpressed.
Greg Egan - Aussie hard sci-fi writer and part time computer programmer. Check out some of his very cool applets at his home page. They often act as alternate, animated covers for his books.
Marvin Minsky - Well, he wrote a book along with Harry Harrison called "The Turing Option". I'm sure Minsky has done some programming in his time.:)
ObSycophant: Cryptonomicon is fantastic! No, really, it is. Read it now! Again!
After reading this article a strange idea came to mind: a list of companies along with brief descriptions of all their cowardly shots at companies, individuals, or groups smaller than them.
Bank of America would be in there thanks to this ridiculous claim against the Dialectizer. Microsoft would probably lead the pack and I don't need to give examples here.
This sort of thing would serve two purposes. Firstly, it would be a permanent, searchable record of "dumb things companies do". A boon for historians. Secondly, it would allow people to get a feel for what the companies attitude is if they happen to be considering working for them, buying their products or even, heaven forbid!, poking a bit of fun at them.
Is anyone keeping such a list? If so where? If not, want to help me start one?
What we could do with is an online _based_ submission and review site for scientific papers; something based on the/. model (with a discussion area for online discussion and analysis of papers, some sort of versioning to allow corrections by the author, and the ability to rate papers on a scale of 1-10).
This does sound like a good idea but I think the biggest problem here would be setting up a decent readership.
I've been a PhD student now for a few years and I find it difficult to read and critically assess papers submitted to journals and conference proceedings in my field alone. And these are the papers that have already been peer reviewed. Slashdot works, I believe, because "many moderators make most trolls invisible". A Slashdot-esque review process in a small community would be succeptable to a small contingent of people overhyping garbage.
Another problem that springs to mind is the current protocol of referencing sources when writing papers of your own. If these prototype papers are freely available people will want to reference them. Care would have to be taken to make sure there is an easy way to reliably do this. There would be nothing worse than reading a good paper that makes impressive, bold claims only to find that all of their sources have disappeared off the face of the web! I guess this brings us back to the point of something like LOCKSS (which I believe is a very good idea).
Ultimately, the scientific community is precisely that - a community. The internet is just starting come up with excellent ways of getting communities to interact faster and better but its groups like Slashdot, web developers, and other net-centric collectives that are currently taking advantage of this, naturally. The scientific community was around along time before the net and seemed to do okay so I think it will take quite a bit of gentle persuasion to move it online. There are certainly worse goals to strive for though and I'd love to see a move like this.
For an interesting look at what sort of dramas this sort of thing can create, check out Greg Egan's short story "Mitochondrial Eve". It's in his collection "Luminous".
Oh and while you're there read the rest of his stories, fantastic hard sci-fi. If you want to try before you buy, he's got a free novella on his web site: http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/
I wholeheartedly agree with gribbly here. Sonic Foundry write *amazing* music software. The Photoshop of music is not an exaggeration either. You want to know why?
User Interface.
Acid, Sound Forge (both by Sonic Foundry) and Photoshop are all really, really easy to use. All you usually need to do nearly anything in these programs is a two button mouse, ctrl, alt and shift. Play around with these buttons in Acid for 5 minutes and you'll be looping, cutting, pasting, zooming, stretching, panning, and generally manipulating sound right there on your screen. The interface looks really simple but it hides a monster of a program.
Like one of the very early posters said, digital audio is also my ball and chain to Windows. Unfortunately, making music is one of my true pleasures in life and there's no way I'm giving up the ability to do that quickly, easily and at home just because of an OS war. Sorry, I'm just not that much of an idealist, so sue me!:)
The Linux community could do a couple of things to rectify this situation:
Contact Sonic Foundry and see if they want to come to the party with something like Acid or Sound Forge. Big call I know but that would be an awesome start
Someone design an FX API. I luuuuurve effects and would really like to code some of my own. Pin this down well and watch coders go crazy building better and better plug ins
Put more pressure on audio hardware manufacturers to release their drivers for Linux too.
Do all this for me and I'll promise to pull the plug for good... except maybe for the odd game of Half-life:)
Your post made some good points and contrary to what you believe, I've found a lot of well thought out arguments on Slashdot, yours included.
Why then did you have to end your discussion with the self-same name-calling that bothers you?
(Side note -- I'm bothered by the subtle and not-so-subtle ad hominem attacks going on here. It seems as if, according to Dr. Shapiro, Roblimo, and the majority of Slashdotters, that by definition anyone who holds to the traditional Christian position that it's simply wrong to kill children, or anyone else, because they are "defective" by some standard is "unthinking", whereas anyone who's willing to entertain Dr. Singer's philosophy is by definition an intellectual. This is nothing more than name-calling.)
Slashdot is a funny place: despite all the "expertise" in computers and logic, a logical, well-thought-out argument is quite hard to find, but wooly thinking abounds, especially if wrapped in the latest trendiness. THINK, people!
I take it this is exactly the not-so-subtle ad hominem attack you were talking about? What you're saying here is no different to "...wooly thinking abounds, especially if wrapped in traditional Christian mindset".
Everyone thinks. People come up with different conclusions. Deal with it. If you want to change their minds don't tell them to think, they have already. Instead, give them a different perspective to think about.
Here's another example of Racter's output found on the t-shirt we had made up for our AI Lab:
More than iron, more than lead
more than gold I need electricity
I need it more than lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber I need it for my dreams
Quite stirring for a computer program don't you think? It's probably worth keeping in mind that a whole lot of garbage had to be sifted through before this gem was found. Oh, that reminds me...
I'd have to agree with several of the earlier comments about Katz' article: the whole technology line was a little gratuitous. That said, I don't think his article was out of place on slashdot though. I think a number of readers, like myself, are "News Nerds" - curious and critical of the mediaspace and the power it wields.
He does make a few good points. The line between news and entertainment is becoming blurred. People enjoy being up with the latest gossip be it tech gossip, gossip about friends or gossip that gets fed to us via CRTs. It's human nature. News media plays off that need to be up to date- "Stay tuned for when we cross to...", "Next week's feature article is...", "Exclusive!", etc.
If you want to be entertained. Fine. Sit there and absorb. If you want information you will have to be a little more discerning. Use the remote. Hunt around for other points of view. Do some research. Talk to your friends and family.
I particularly like the last option. There's no way I keep up with every bit of news around the world. It's just not possible. Instead, I follow closely what interests me most. If I need to know about something outside my jurisdiction, say the political situation in East Timor, I ask friends of mine who I trust and feel are knowledgable in that area. The street goes both ways too - I'm happy to explain, as accurately and simply as I can, what I know about computers, music, maths, whatever. If I can't offer insight into something I'm asked about, "Sorry, I don't know" seems to work okay.
The trust is a little harder to establish but the idea carries over to the media as well. I have a small staple of trusted news services that I read, watch and compare. If there is conflicting information from any of these I turn elsewhere to get another point of view.
The first I heard about JFK Jr's death was via a rather tasteless e-mail joke that was going around. I'd heard the name JFK Jr before and someone out there thought that news of their death would be sufficiently virulent to spread succesfully. My "gossip-hunger" was piqued. I quickly hunted down some details and was sated. No need to have emotionally charged rhetoric on the topic added when I don't need it.
Bottom-line: Find trusted sources of information and use them when you feel the need, otherwise sit back and enjoy the show!
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to sign your petition but I was asked to sign up and get an Apple ID. I couldn't see any obvious links to do this - maybe I have to be a bona fide mac owner or something.
Help?
I also have my own domain name but I'm limited to 5 forwarded email addresses. I wanted to do what you suggested a while ago but couldn't. Then I stumbled across Sneakemail and it basically did everything I had intended anyway.
In a nutshell, you sign up for an account, giving only a contact email address (I use spam AT threewordslong DOTTY com). Once logged in you can create a new, randomized email address for each new web service that needs an email address. If one of these services spams or sells your sneakemail address you: a) know exactly who did it and cease further business with them and b) can filter on that specific email address.
It's a great service and no, I don't work for them...
While I agree with your points in your earlier posts about taste being subjective and people buying what they like, there is still the issue of what the vast majority of people ever get to hear. This, I take it, is what you mean by having a monopoly on the distribution of music.
So much marketing is put behind pop superstars. Images of success, beauty, and wealth are invoked in music videos, cross-promotions and even the music itself. Like much of what drives consumerism, people buy into an image or brand as much as they buy the product itself.
I find it shame that a lot of beautiful and/or important music remains unheard by many people because it can't be tied into a huge marketing campaign.
Looks to me like they just made a boo-boo, substituting Watson for White.
Also, I very much doubt he thought up the possibility of Deckard ipso facto. The book he based Bladerunner on, Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", explores that idea in depth.
I'm surprised you think the philosophical side of the movie is better with a human Deckard. Finding out he is a replicant drives home your point of "rejecting the idea that replicants are morally less than human". After all, until the closing scenes you believed Deckard was a human, and one that had to make several difficult moral decisions.
Obligatory On-topic: I'm glad they bringing out a new DVD. I received one as a gift and was very disappointed to find a shoddily put together interface with no extras. Even the film's quality seemed no better than a VHS version.
Audiophiles are people who listen to the sound system, not the music.
Someone earlier mentioned an animation of the maps while Bosnia was attacked. Is there any similiar traceroute data before/during/after the recent terrorism on the US?
I by no means want to belittle the loss of human life because of this tragedy. I think it's unbelievably horrid and my thoughts and hope go out to the victims and their family and friends. I just think this would show us another dimension to the disaster.
These cute little critters have a small but functional neural net which allows it to learn basic concepts and associate them with words with a little training. This game has been out since 1998 and there are no claims or evidence that the creatures can string together meaningful "sentences" longer than 6 words. If these things were going to improve their language skills, one would think they would have done it by now.
So, what does this say about "HAL"? Well, it's 3 years behind Creatures, doesn't have an environment to interact with and only one person training it.
Good luck with getting it to have adult coversations.
That said, show me some papers, algorithms, or implementation and I'd be ready to reconsider.
Wow! Day-trading must have gone to new extremes then. Check out one of the conditions of entry:
Writers are their own worst critics...good writers esepcially. And great writers, of whom I think Mr. Adams squeaks into the fray quite nicely, are often so critical of their own work they don't recognize the genius in it.
To add to your list of examples: Kafka (of "The Trial" and "The Castle" fame) did not publish anything while he was alive and his posthumous wish to his friend was to burn all his manuscripts. Thankfully, his friend had the good sense to realise Kafka was a genius of a writer.
Did anyone else look at the chart mentioned in the article?
Now, is it just me or did I count at least five musicians above the CEO of the RIAA in terms of contribution? The trend continues too: The CEO of BMG dug deep and ponied up a huuuuge $1000 - twice as much as the Executive Vice President of Sony. Sheryl Crow on the other hand put up $5000 and many other musicians I've never heard of put up substantial amounts also.
Now, I don't pretend to know anything about the politics of the Democrats and I don't particularly care. What does interest me is how the musicians and composers seems to be much more forthcoming with their money while most of the industry execs (apart from the top 6 donations) are tight. Maybe the poor RIAA is going under due to all this terrible, hideous piracy.
Have you tried designing any web site recently? Hmmm... didn't think so.
The problem is if you do follow the W3C standard you will, more often than not, get a web page that doesn't work under any browser (especially if you want to use CSS1 which, IHMO, is a brilliant piece of W3C spec. I can't believe no one has implemented it properly yet (IE5.5 on Mac excluded)).
I'd have to agree with some of the early posts:
Pop quiz: How are the quotes of the day generated? Random per person? Random per day? Carefully selected?
I'm curious because the quote I can see at the bottom of this article is:
Hmmmm... regardless though - congrats Hemos and all the best!
Ummm... last I checked all my local phone calls were flat fee (as low as AUS$0.15) and unlimited time. Unless you mean "local" as in "anywhere in Australia"? In that case, we do have timed calls. Just so we're not comparing tomatoes and tomatoes, what does "local" mean in the US?
Mind you, if we did switch to timed local (as in my friend down the road) calls I would be most unimpressed.
Just did a quick scan of my bookshelf and found:
ObSycophant: Cryptonomicon is fantastic! No, really, it is. Read it now! Again!
Doesn't this require you to register in order to view it?
Hmmmm... kinda funny really.
After reading this article a strange idea came to mind: a list of companies along with brief descriptions of all their cowardly shots at companies, individuals, or groups smaller than them.
Bank of America would be in there thanks to this ridiculous claim against the Dialectizer. Microsoft would probably lead the pack and I don't need to give examples here.
This sort of thing would serve two purposes. Firstly, it would be a permanent, searchable record of "dumb things companies do". A boon for historians. Secondly, it would allow people to get a feel for what the companies attitude is if they happen to be considering working for them, buying their products or even, heaven forbid!, poking a bit of fun at them.
Is anyone keeping such a list? If so where? If not, want to help me start one?
This does sound like a good idea but I think the biggest problem here would be setting up a decent readership.
I've been a PhD student now for a few years and I find it difficult to read and critically assess papers submitted to journals and conference proceedings in my field alone. And these are the papers that have already been peer reviewed. Slashdot works, I believe, because "many moderators make most trolls invisible". A Slashdot-esque review process in a small community would be succeptable to a small contingent of people overhyping garbage.
Another problem that springs to mind is the current protocol of referencing sources when writing papers of your own. If these prototype papers are freely available people will want to reference them. Care would have to be taken to make sure there is an easy way to reliably do this. There would be nothing worse than reading a good paper that makes impressive, bold claims only to find that all of their sources have disappeared off the face of the web! I guess this brings us back to the point of something like LOCKSS (which I believe is a very good idea).
Ultimately, the scientific community is precisely that - a community. The internet is just starting come up with excellent ways of getting communities to interact faster and better but its groups like Slashdot, web developers, and other net-centric collectives that are currently taking advantage of this, naturally. The scientific community was around along time before the net and seemed to do okay so I think it will take quite a bit of gentle persuasion to move it online. There are certainly worse goals to strive for though and I'd love to see a move like this.
For an interesting look at what sort of dramas this sort of thing can create, check out Greg Egan's short story "Mitochondrial Eve". It's in his collection "Luminous".
Oh and while you're there read the rest of his stories, fantastic hard sci-fi. If you want to try before you buy, he's got a free novella on his web site: http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/
I wholeheartedly agree with gribbly here. Sonic Foundry write *amazing* music software. The Photoshop of music is not an exaggeration either. You want to know why?
User Interface.
Acid, Sound Forge (both by Sonic Foundry) and Photoshop are all really, really easy to use. All you usually need to do nearly anything in these programs is a two button mouse, ctrl, alt and shift. Play around with these buttons in Acid for 5 minutes and you'll be looping, cutting, pasting, zooming, stretching, panning, and generally manipulating sound right there on your screen. The interface looks really simple but it hides a monster of a program.
Like one of the very early posters said, digital audio is also my ball and chain to Windows. Unfortunately, making music is one of my true pleasures in life and there's no way I'm giving up the ability to do that quickly, easily and at home just because of an OS war. Sorry, I'm just not that much of an idealist, so sue me! :)
The Linux community could do a couple of things to rectify this situation:
Do all this for me and I'll promise to pull the plug for good... except maybe for the odd game of Half-life :)
'nuff said.
Your post made some good points and contrary to what you believe, I've found a lot of well thought out arguments on Slashdot, yours included.
Why then did you have to end your discussion with the self-same name-calling that bothers you?
I take it this is exactly the not-so-subtle ad hominem attack you were talking about? What you're saying here is no different to "...wooly thinking abounds, especially if wrapped in traditional Christian mindset".
Everyone thinks. People come up with different conclusions. Deal with it. If you want to change their minds don't tell them to think, they have already. Instead, give them a different perspective to think about.
Here's another example of Racter's output found on the t-shirt we had made up for our AI Lab:
Quite stirring for a computer program don't you think? It's probably worth keeping in mind that a whole lot of garbage had to be sifted through before this gem was found. Oh, that reminds me...
Shopping list:
- Infinity x bananas
- Infinity x typewriter ribbons
mystaI'd have to agree with several of the earlier comments about Katz' article: the whole technology line was a little gratuitous. That said, I don't think his article was out of place on slashdot though. I think a number of readers, like myself, are "News Nerds" - curious and critical of the mediaspace and the power it wields.
He does make a few good points. The line between news and entertainment is becoming blurred. People enjoy being up with the latest gossip be it tech gossip, gossip about friends or gossip that gets fed to us via CRTs. It's human nature. News media plays off that need to be up to date- "Stay tuned for when we cross to...", "Next week's feature article is...", "Exclusive!", etc.
If you want to be entertained. Fine. Sit there and absorb. If you want information you will have to be a little more discerning. Use the remote. Hunt around for other points of view. Do some research. Talk to your friends and family.
I particularly like the last option. There's no way I keep up with every bit of news around the world. It's just not possible. Instead, I follow closely what interests me most. If I need to know about something outside my jurisdiction, say the political situation in East Timor, I ask friends of mine who I trust and feel are knowledgable in that area. The street goes both ways too - I'm happy to explain, as accurately and simply as I can, what I know about computers, music, maths, whatever. If I can't offer insight into something I'm asked about, "Sorry, I don't know" seems to work okay.
The trust is a little harder to establish but the idea carries over to the media as well. I have a small staple of trusted news services that I read, watch and compare. If there is conflicting information from any of these I turn elsewhere to get another point of view.
The first I heard about JFK Jr's death was via a rather tasteless e-mail joke that was going around. I'd heard the name JFK Jr before and someone out there thought that news of their death would be sufficiently virulent to spread succesfully. My "gossip-hunger" was piqued. I quickly hunted down some details and was sated. No need to have emotionally charged rhetoric on the topic added when I don't need it.
Bottom-line: Find trusted sources of information and use them when you feel the need, otherwise sit back and enjoy the show!