I don't know; I think it really depends on the art or skill. For example, repainting something from the Old Masters means that, at the very least, you will master the physical techniques if not the creative or visual rendering aspects. Recoding a video game--when you have the source--until you can do it perfectly probably amounts to memorizing the code. Being able to understand the code, and, more importantly, being able to design code to fulfill unexpected needs, is far more important.
What really strikes me about this is that in a shot-for-shot remake, with, it looks, even the same camera angles, you are doing what amounts to copying the strokes in an Old Master's painting. Stroke-for-stroke, or shot-for-shot, allows no individual expression in depicting the scene; at the very most the actor learned a little while trying to do an exact copy of Harrison Ford's acting style.
Acting and cinimetography (granted, not that demonstrated in, say, Armageddon) are individual expressions of an artistic creativity. Copying the work of someone else requires skill, but not the same sort.
That said, I think these guys just did it because they were young fanboys. Nothing wrong with that. But I wouldn't call it high art, either.
In defense of timothy, I may as well point out that his statement was clearly not a comparison of OSS and toddlers. I don't think there was any opinion, either expressed or implied, metaphorically comparing Open Source Software with young, as-yet undeveloped children.
It was a joke about how strict the regulations were. Didn't you see the part about sticking to the ceiling like a spider? That's not normal human child behavior, hence, the stated regulations that would require such would be unreasonably stringent. Timothy was drawing a parallel to the stringent regulations regarding OSS.
Of course, which is why I do believe I mentioned alternative feul sources (or did I forget that late last night?) such as various diminishing sources like nuclear, coal, and oil, as well, I suppose, as things like geothermal power (currently used in places like Iceland).
This still misses the mark, though. All of these technologies would be far more efficient if used directly, say, with thermocouples picking up the geothermal energy, than by somehow being used in some sort of modified photosynthetic process to power people who then power machines.
And anyway, machines can themselves currently do limited metabolic processes similar to those that humans do: slugbot.
Better than suggesting alternative power, why doesn't anyone ever point out the laws of thermodynamics?
This is always what got me about The Matrix. There is even a comment somewhere along in the first movie about how the living are fed the waste of the dead. Well, great, but what about conservation of energy? Where is this energy actually coming from? In our normal ecosystem, it comes from the sun via photosynthesis. Here, no sun, no plants, people eating people...sounds like perpetual motion.
And even if we do accept that animals can somehow power these machines, why don't they just use pigs or cows or something? Or give lobotomies on birth? Eh?
But as you said, quit thinking about it all seriously, and just enjoy the movie. It's a vehicle, and not every aspect should be taken at face value or should be expected to make perfect sense.
Yeah, there are a lot better, non-we-are-living-in-a-Matrix reasons to assume that time-travel, at least in both directions in time (as opposed to the approaching-the-speed-of-light-so-time-goes-slower -empirically-tested-to-be-true-Einstien way) is totally, logically impossible.
For example, let's assume time travel is possible. We can go both ways in the fourth dimension. This basically removes any sort of chronological constraints from our actions. In other words, ordinarily, if I want to drive a car, I first have to obtain it. But in this universe, if I want a time machine, I can go back in time and teach myself how to make a time machine so I can go back in time to teach myself how to make the time machine. You get the idea.
So if I decide I want a time machine right now, why can't I just teach myself how to make one so that I can go back in time to teach myself how to make one? Yeah. That's what I thought.
"(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small
(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours
(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation."
...So if you think that (1) and (2) are both false, you should accept (3).
Obviously this last sentence is meant more to play up the conclusion that we are in a simulation. (2) is the most plausible; it is incomprehensible to me (though admitedly I may be of a lesser mind that those running the simulation) why greater beings would waste CPU time on mere humans.
In all seriousness, though, if we assume 2 to be true and 1 to be false, we can most certainly dismiss 3. And if we assume 1 to be true, where does that leave us?
"Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Possibility (1) is relatively straightforward. For example, maybe there is some highly dangerous technology that every sufficiently advanced civilization develops, and which then destroys them. Let us hope that this is not the case."
Of course most mutations die out. This is how evolution works. Obiously, we can assume that if evolution has gotten us this far, it is likely that it will have created similar intelligent beings and perhaps even more advanced than us (or we ourselves will acheive such a level of mental greatness).
This is a fun intellectual debate (and clearly meant to gain the limelight) but its a bit overblown, too, I think.
It's obvious that there is already plenty of incentive to use a good hash function simply to improve performance, even if people didn't worry about intentional DOS attacks. And of course, using a better hash function is not a solution to the attack per se, any more than getting a fatter pipe is a solution to a traditional DDOS.
The issue is that even the best hash functions perform worse under very specific circumstances, i.e. high numbers of hash collisions. An earlier poster mentioned quicksort; the quicksort algorithm, while being the most (or one of the most) efficient sorting algorithms, is extremely inefficient if given an ordered set already. Obviously, a check can be added to make sure you are not sorting an already sorted algorithm.
Presumably, the same could be done for hash functions, in which, by having a bunch of different hash functions available, the software could revert to an alternate if the primary function appeared to be generating way too many collisions. Just because people hadn't thought about this much or designed software to cope doesn't mean it would be very hard to prevent against.
The only particularly pertinent example you used is the one with the online book. So, what differences exist between an object in an online virtual world and a chunk of data you created? Neither is a diminishing resource, in the sense that if I steal your book, you don't have less of it.
The difference is thus: first, we must establish for clarity that if there is a philosophical "natural state of man," in that state there exist no fundamental property rights to ideas. All intellectual property rights are artificial: copyright and patents granted to promote innovation, trademark to facilitate ease of business conduct.
With that out of the way, then, we can examine your online book. Obviously, this book falls directly into the category of intellectual property designed to be protected via copyright. Prior to copyright laws, novels could be reproduced and sold by rival publishers, diminishing incentive for the artist to create. In the same vien, to "steal" your online book would be to deprive you of incentive to create.
Now, then, are we looking at your online birdhouse as intellectual property, or as an object which belongs to you? Clearly, the latter is fallacious; if I copy the design of your birdhouse, you still have it. If I obey the rules of the game we are participating in and steal your virtual house, it is a virtual theft; just as I would not be held responsible for murdering your character in the sims, I would not be responsible for stealing your house. What if I break into the game computers and steal your house? Obviously I have violated the terms of service, trespassed, etc.
Now, what if I merely copy the design of your house and use it in mine? You, had you had the foresight to copyright your digital house model, would have all the rights of any other artist to enforce that copyright. A work of the mind, even something as incorporeal as a virtual bird house, can be intellectual property. But this only applies to unauthorised duplication, were I to steal your house in the Sims in a legal way, obeying the rules of the game, you would have no argument. Even claims of copyright would be meaningless, in essense, I would have "stolen" the original, not made an unauthorised duplication. Since the "theft" was legal, you have no recourse.
You clearly did not read my post all that carefully.
First, I never excused corporate misbehavior; I in fact placed the blame for immoral actions on the corporate officers, the humans at fault, rather than on the corporation. Blaming the corporation excuses the humans themselves from blame. What I wrote does not excuse the true culprits.
I am, personally, not rah-rah capitalism; I do, however, think that a free-market, with careful regulation, is more likely to spawn innovation than many other systems. Socialism in terms of social welfare programs is, in fact, something I somewhat strongly support; however this is a far cry from a competition-devoid market.
OK, this is just a bit much for me. First, your implication is that those seven deadly sins are universally accepted rather than what the truly are, the moral fixtures of your own mundane, dime-a-dozen religion. You make the assumption that everyone is a member of such a religion or else a "satanist".
Did it ever cross your mind that there may be some people, albiet perhaps not as many as we may like, who are actually motivated, in terms of morality, purely by concern for their fellow human beings and a desire to do what they, individually, without the guidance of someone else or the coercion of threats of eternal hell, actually feel to be morally right? And what the hell does a soul have to do with a discussion of corporate laws and ethics?
It would arguably be unethical for a corporation to not seek profit; the corporation would be violating its promise to its shareholders. Corporations have no greed, they have no gluttony, no envy, no pride, nor anything else. They are not humans, and your insistence on personifying what is, in fact, an entity only on paper is mere misdirection from the true argument at hand.
A corporation can not be evil. I said it before, but clearly it did not sink in. The people who make decisions for it certainly can, but the idea of corporate spirit is inherently fallacious.
Presumably, then, you feel any participation in a free-market economy is evil, since at some level the desire to accrue a profit is in a sense greed and gluttony? Are you a subscriber to the monastic, acetic philosophies which dictate a life free of materialistic possessions? Presumably you do, in fact, have a computer (or are interfacing with Slashdot through a jack implanted in your brain). So? Will I have the good fortune to see you strolling by my house dressed in a brown handwoven robe, begging for food and board so that you may continue to study the great works of philosophy and religion and seek to acheive a hightened state of mind?
I think you'd have to try pretty hard to claim that people are afraid to criticize Stalin for fear of being called McCarthyites. Thats ludicrous. There is very little stigma attached to being anti-Communist, for one (although the stigma attached to being involved in McCarthyist witchhunts should be greater, in my opinion; read this publication (supported by Lynn Cheney and Joe Lieberman) if you don't agree). For another, even were you afraid of being called a McCarthyite, while you may steer clear of random accusations of Pinko-ism, you certainly should have no fear of criticising someone like Stalin.
The far more likely cause of his not mentioning this is ignorance, plain and simple. The information was withheld; Stalin tried to keep this pretty silent internationally, so few people are as aware of this as they are of the Holocause under Hitler. Holocaust survivors have engaged in a fairly big campaign of education in order to prevent this sort of thing from hapening again, something which has not been done to a comparable degree by survivors of Stalinist killings. So, frankly, it doesn't have the public attention. No need to read anything more into it than that.
Jesus was worse than the CEO of a corporation. He became the CEO of a religion. Though admittedly, it quite possibly was not his intention or fault.
Anyway, I don't really think that your reply bears rational discussion; we are not talking about souls here, we are talking about profits, morality, and motivation. Corporations are profit-driven, yes. Their goal is to make a profit. This is all as I said it was. But they are not "invested the same rights as being [sic] with souls". Corporations occupy a specific and seperate legal niche, at least in the United States and Anglo common law, than you or I as individuals.
First off, all your talk about TCP/IP is irrelevant. TCP/IP is not the Internet, any more than radio-wave broadcasts are television networks. The content, the accessibility, and the interface are the Internet to most people, not the underlying protocol.
Second, you somehow seem to acknowledge that what I say is true about software companies, but not hardware. I don't see any distinction, but, regardless, you do seem to acknowledge some truth (you admit that Apple is responsible for ease-of-use, at least initially). Obviously this is true for hardware; there is no Open hardware running the Internet; in this regard it is all commercial.
Finally, you say that my argument that corporations are amoral excuses their officers from morality as well. Clearly not. The corporation as an entity is certainly amoral; the restrictions imposed statutorily are not about morals (remember, laws and morals do not universally correspond to each other) but rather about the greater good of society. It's not that a monopoly is immoral, but rather that we as a society have an interest, essentially a profit-driven interest, in beating back the monopolies which are, in fact, very profitable for their holders. The statutes which prevent this behavior are there to enforce restrictions that the corporation, being an amoral entity with only its own good in consideration, would never enforce upon itself voluntarily.
Not to nitpick, but this isn't likely to go before the Supreme Court. Unless there is a question of process, it is unlikely that there will be any apparent rational for an appeal, and thus no writ of certiorari granted.
Apeals are not granted if the higher court disagrees on the findings of facts; those are left as the lower court decided. Appeals are granted in order to straighten out errornious procedures by lower courts. When the Supreme Court is likely to hear a case is after an Appeals Court has already heard one, and usually, at that point, only if the question is a truly troubling one about the nature of due process or a certain constitutional issue.
This is why a petty criminal can't simply say "that's not fair" and appeal to the Supreme Court; the Court would not deem it a worthy case. Only if the appelate can come up with some sort of compelling argument for a flawed proceeding or flawed judgement will the Court hear the case.
This is quite simply a load of silly rhetoric. The "battle" between Open software and commercial is not at all what it appears to be. It certainly is not an issue of moral rectitude or sin, nor is it an issue of corporations fighting against all that is good and proper.
The goal of a corporation is to make profit for its shareholders. A corporation, by its very definition, cannot be morally wrong or right, any more than a table or a house or a crate can be. Corporations themselves are designed, if they are at all successful, to pursue profits.
In that regard, corporate behavior is fairly predictable. Corporations are not inherently in favor of ownership. Many would gladly support Open Source (or for that manner do things which appear to help their opponents, such as selling off valuable intellectual property) in the pursuit of profits. IBM does not support Open Source as much as it does due to some sort of good-hearted committment to We The Programmers, but because it is beneficial (or intended to be beneficial) for IBM's profit margin to be able to offer a mature UNIX alternative at relatively minimal development costs.
There will always be a place for commercial innovation, as well. What drove the Internet to widespread use and acceptance, Open, grassroots movement, or commercial promotion? What made computers easy enough that your grandmother can use them, Open software or corporate profits? Not to say that I am anti-Free Software--quite the opposite is true--but this sort of silly thoughtless rhetoric is not what any of this is truly about.
I refuse to turn this into a debate about capitalism and its alternatives (are you truly suggesting we would all be better off were we all socialists?), but I just want to point out how silly it is to turn a conflict more about the efficacy of certain software development models, business practices, and peices of software into a debate over economics of profit versus some sort of high-moraled committment to the community. If you so want to see everything in terms of moral black and white, let me ask you something: when Burger King serves you a bad lunch, is it moral wrongness? Or is it just beacuse they figured that a certain low quality is best for their profits?
This is, I believe, the same system used by proximity smart cards. You would presumably be wondering why I can't steal someone's smart-card key-code via a proximity sensor in, say, an elevator.
Since the card itself contains a processor, it is entirely possible to make this system every bit as complex as any current PKI infrastructure. In other words, each card could contain its own private key as well as VISA's public key. The key-combination means that transactions could be "signed" (essentially, the private key would encrypt a hash of the transaction data that could then be decypted, or "verified", by the public key; this is how pgp signatures work as well) to prove that this is a valid transaction. What prevents someone from just rebroadcasting this transaction, as you said? Simple. Include some sort of incremented number, or the date and time, or any other dynamic information that would not be repeated. Anyone can rebroadcast an encrypted message, but this proves when the message was encrypted. If this is transaction number 35, and someone rebroadcasts it, he'd have to change the transaction number to 36 and then re-sign it before encrypting it for VISA. This is not possible, since he does not have the card's unique private key.
Much as with PGP, the combination of public key encryption and private key signing (the encryption itself is only necessary to hide the CC# to prevent online theft) renders the data transaction not only secret but also verifiable. Not only does VISA know no one else knows your CC#, but they can be assured that it was in fact your card that did the transaction.
"Skimmers" are pretty common as is. If we had a more complex system to defeat them involving some sort of PKI you have two issues.
First, this would be hardware based and it'd be fairly likely that someone out there would sell a legit signed reader to a theif or a theif would get one somehow. Unlike the CA analogy, where this only effects people if the fake store manages to steal the real store's private key as well and the weak point of trust is still a legitimate store, here, we are looking at a stolen card reader and suddenly the weak point in the chain is not just a shopkeeper or retailer, but any random theif who manages to walk by you on the street.
Second, how would this infrastructure work in conjunction with CC# purchases where there is no physical transaction, i.e. online purchases? I suppose you could only implement it for proximity card purchases, some sort of built in smart-card feature as you said, but I don't even see it as providing that much security. As I said, one stolen reader and someone can charge you whatever they like.
The best solution I can come up with, now that I think about it, is to have all the proximity-broadcast information encrypted with a public key for VISA or whoever, and only VISA can decrypt it. That way, even a stolen reader is useless, all someone can do is charge for purchases, and then the money paid from the CC company is traceable anyway. There is no way for the theif to actually gain the CC details. No need for any other sort of security; you could give this information out to everyone on the planet and have it still be totally secure.
In this respect, video games are a lot like expensive hollywook blockbusters. The amount of money that goes into production is prohibitive for small art-house flicks (or games). Those who shell out the money would rather invest in something tried and true than something scary and new. Perhaps even more a factor, the tastes of the market tend to be pretty bland and repetetive. People don't necessarily want something new, or at least, what they want to be new isn't predictable enough to spawn much investment in new things.
Producers invest in what is profitable, which really just means what will please the most people the most predictably. New things may please some people a whole lot more, but some people a lot less. And if you make someone happy enough to buy the game, he doesn't need to be made any happier. If we all reluctantly go to see the next Vin Diesel summer hit, knowing its a bad movie, well, we still spent our money on tickets. And if we all reluctanlty buy the next action-packed first-person-shooter, knowing its the same as all the ones before, we still shelled out enough for the game. Making more people happy enough to buy the game is profitable. Changing people's lives with new art and ideas isn't.
No, you can't. I assume this was intended as a joke, but I may as well point out that unless a program is not an applet, unless it implements the interface Applet (I think thats the right name...). You can't run any random Java program from a web browser or applet viewer.
You were right to be suspicious of his alleged credentials. For example, check out this previous post:
"At Nintendo, we've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Laotian and others governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Kaysone Phomvihan to teach Laotian youth in new and engaging dynamic ways." --article here
And a google search reveals nobody by that name with any connection to Nintendo from any site except Slashdot. Think about it.
Every single post by this guy (or girl) is trolling on his alleged position with Nintendo. Don't fall for it.
I'm sure if this weren't costing bandwidth, someone'd called me a karma-whore. That said, I'm attempting to wget a mirror to here.
If you can, please mirror my mirror. I'm sure a large number of slashdot readers have servers available they can put to good use.
Re:Completely illegal in MA, and hence, at MIT
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
There are probably exceptions available for research. Especially on Massachusetts; Boston has the greatest density of institutions of higher education per square mile of anywhere in the US (or world?).
Slashdot Mirror
What really strikes me about this is that in a shot-for-shot remake, with, it looks, even the same camera angles, you are doing what amounts to copying the strokes in an Old Master's painting. Stroke-for-stroke, or shot-for-shot, allows no individual expression in depicting the scene; at the very most the actor learned a little while trying to do an exact copy of Harrison Ford's acting style.
Acting and cinimetography (granted, not that demonstrated in, say, Armageddon) are individual expressions of an artistic creativity. Copying the work of someone else requires skill, but not the same sort.
That said, I think these guys just did it because they were young fanboys. Nothing wrong with that. But I wouldn't call it high art, either.
It was a joke about how strict the regulations were. Didn't you see the part about sticking to the ceiling like a spider? That's not normal human child behavior, hence, the stated regulations that would require such would be unreasonably stringent. Timothy was drawing a parallel to the stringent regulations regarding OSS.
And who says geeks don't have a sense of humor?
This still misses the mark, though. All of these technologies would be far more efficient if used directly, say, with thermocouples picking up the geothermal energy, than by somehow being used in some sort of modified photosynthetic process to power people who then power machines.
And anyway, machines can themselves currently do limited metabolic processes similar to those that humans do: slugbot.
This is always what got me about The Matrix. There is even a comment somewhere along in the first movie about how the living are fed the waste of the dead. Well, great, but what about conservation of energy? Where is this energy actually coming from? In our normal ecosystem, it comes from the sun via photosynthesis. Here, no sun, no plants, people eating people...sounds like perpetual motion.
And even if we do accept that animals can somehow power these machines, why don't they just use pigs or cows or something? Or give lobotomies on birth? Eh?
But as you said, quit thinking about it all seriously, and just enjoy the movie. It's a vehicle, and not every aspect should be taken at face value or should be expected to make perfect sense.
For example, let's assume time travel is possible. We can go both ways in the fourth dimension. This basically removes any sort of chronological constraints from our actions. In other words, ordinarily, if I want to drive a car, I first have to obtain it. But in this universe, if I want a time machine, I can go back in time and teach myself how to make a time machine so I can go back in time to teach myself how to make the time machine. You get the idea.
So if I decide I want a time machine right now, why can't I just teach myself how to make one so that I can go back in time to teach myself how to make one? Yeah. That's what I thought.
(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours
(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation."
Obviously this last sentence is meant more to play up the conclusion that we are in a simulation. (2) is the most plausible; it is incomprehensible to me (though admitedly I may be of a lesser mind that those running the simulation) why greater beings would waste CPU time on mere humans.
In all seriousness, though, if we assume 2 to be true and 1 to be false, we can most certainly dismiss 3. And if we assume 1 to be true, where does that leave us?
"Let us consider the options in a little more detail. Possibility (1) is relatively straightforward. For example, maybe there is some highly dangerous technology that every sufficiently advanced civilization develops, and which then destroys them. Let us hope that this is not the case."
Of course most mutations die out. This is how evolution works. Obiously, we can assume that if evolution has gotten us this far, it is likely that it will have created similar intelligent beings and perhaps even more advanced than us (or we ourselves will acheive such a level of mental greatness).
This is a fun intellectual debate (and clearly meant to gain the limelight) but its a bit overblown, too, I think.
The issue is that even the best hash functions perform worse under very specific circumstances, i.e. high numbers of hash collisions. An earlier poster mentioned quicksort; the quicksort algorithm, while being the most (or one of the most) efficient sorting algorithms, is extremely inefficient if given an ordered set already. Obviously, a check can be added to make sure you are not sorting an already sorted algorithm.
Presumably, the same could be done for hash functions, in which, by having a bunch of different hash functions available, the software could revert to an alternate if the primary function appeared to be generating way too many collisions. Just because people hadn't thought about this much or designed software to cope doesn't mean it would be very hard to prevent against.
please mirror if you can.
The difference is thus: first, we must establish for clarity that if there is a philosophical "natural state of man," in that state there exist no fundamental property rights to ideas. All intellectual property rights are artificial: copyright and patents granted to promote innovation, trademark to facilitate ease of business conduct.
With that out of the way, then, we can examine your online book. Obviously, this book falls directly into the category of intellectual property designed to be protected via copyright. Prior to copyright laws, novels could be reproduced and sold by rival publishers, diminishing incentive for the artist to create. In the same vien, to "steal" your online book would be to deprive you of incentive to create.
Now, then, are we looking at your online birdhouse as intellectual property, or as an object which belongs to you? Clearly, the latter is fallacious; if I copy the design of your birdhouse, you still have it. If I obey the rules of the game we are participating in and steal your virtual house, it is a virtual theft; just as I would not be held responsible for murdering your character in the sims, I would not be responsible for stealing your house. What if I break into the game computers and steal your house? Obviously I have violated the terms of service, trespassed, etc.
Now, what if I merely copy the design of your house and use it in mine? You, had you had the foresight to copyright your digital house model, would have all the rights of any other artist to enforce that copyright. A work of the mind, even something as incorporeal as a virtual bird house, can be intellectual property. But this only applies to unauthorised duplication, were I to steal your house in the Sims in a legal way, obeying the rules of the game, you would have no argument. Even claims of copyright would be meaningless, in essense, I would have "stolen" the original, not made an unauthorised duplication. Since the "theft" was legal, you have no recourse.
First, I never excused corporate misbehavior; I in fact placed the blame for immoral actions on the corporate officers, the humans at fault, rather than on the corporation. Blaming the corporation excuses the humans themselves from blame. What I wrote does not excuse the true culprits.
I am, personally, not rah-rah capitalism; I do, however, think that a free-market, with careful regulation, is more likely to spawn innovation than many other systems. Socialism in terms of social welfare programs is, in fact, something I somewhat strongly support; however this is a far cry from a competition-devoid market.
Anway, thanks for the feedback.
Did it ever cross your mind that there may be some people, albiet perhaps not as many as we may like, who are actually motivated, in terms of morality, purely by concern for their fellow human beings and a desire to do what they, individually, without the guidance of someone else or the coercion of threats of eternal hell, actually feel to be morally right? And what the hell does a soul have to do with a discussion of corporate laws and ethics?
It would arguably be unethical for a corporation to not seek profit; the corporation would be violating its promise to its shareholders. Corporations have no greed, they have no gluttony, no envy, no pride, nor anything else. They are not humans, and your insistence on personifying what is, in fact, an entity only on paper is mere misdirection from the true argument at hand.
A corporation can not be evil. I said it before, but clearly it did not sink in. The people who make decisions for it certainly can, but the idea of corporate spirit is inherently fallacious.
Presumably, then, you feel any participation in a free-market economy is evil, since at some level the desire to accrue a profit is in a sense greed and gluttony? Are you a subscriber to the monastic, acetic philosophies which dictate a life free of materialistic possessions? Presumably you do, in fact, have a computer (or are interfacing with Slashdot through a jack implanted in your brain). So? Will I have the good fortune to see you strolling by my house dressed in a brown handwoven robe, begging for food and board so that you may continue to study the great works of philosophy and religion and seek to acheive a hightened state of mind?
The far more likely cause of his not mentioning this is ignorance, plain and simple. The information was withheld; Stalin tried to keep this pretty silent internationally, so few people are as aware of this as they are of the Holocause under Hitler. Holocaust survivors have engaged in a fairly big campaign of education in order to prevent this sort of thing from hapening again, something which has not been done to a comparable degree by survivors of Stalinist killings. So, frankly, it doesn't have the public attention. No need to read anything more into it than that.
Anyway, I don't really think that your reply bears rational discussion; we are not talking about souls here, we are talking about profits, morality, and motivation. Corporations are profit-driven, yes. Their goal is to make a profit. This is all as I said it was. But they are not "invested the same rights as being [sic] with souls". Corporations occupy a specific and seperate legal niche, at least in the United States and Anglo common law, than you or I as individuals.
Second, you somehow seem to acknowledge that what I say is true about software companies, but not hardware. I don't see any distinction, but, regardless, you do seem to acknowledge some truth (you admit that Apple is responsible for ease-of-use, at least initially). Obviously this is true for hardware; there is no Open hardware running the Internet; in this regard it is all commercial.
Finally, you say that my argument that corporations are amoral excuses their officers from morality as well. Clearly not. The corporation as an entity is certainly amoral; the restrictions imposed statutorily are not about morals (remember, laws and morals do not universally correspond to each other) but rather about the greater good of society. It's not that a monopoly is immoral, but rather that we as a society have an interest, essentially a profit-driven interest, in beating back the monopolies which are, in fact, very profitable for their holders. The statutes which prevent this behavior are there to enforce restrictions that the corporation, being an amoral entity with only its own good in consideration, would never enforce upon itself voluntarily.
Apeals are not granted if the higher court disagrees on the findings of facts; those are left as the lower court decided. Appeals are granted in order to straighten out errornious procedures by lower courts. When the Supreme Court is likely to hear a case is after an Appeals Court has already heard one, and usually, at that point, only if the question is a truly troubling one about the nature of due process or a certain constitutional issue.
This is why a petty criminal can't simply say "that's not fair" and appeal to the Supreme Court; the Court would not deem it a worthy case. Only if the appelate can come up with some sort of compelling argument for a flawed proceeding or flawed judgement will the Court hear the case.
The goal of a corporation is to make profit for its shareholders. A corporation, by its very definition, cannot be morally wrong or right, any more than a table or a house or a crate can be. Corporations themselves are designed, if they are at all successful, to pursue profits.
In that regard, corporate behavior is fairly predictable. Corporations are not inherently in favor of ownership. Many would gladly support Open Source (or for that manner do things which appear to help their opponents, such as selling off valuable intellectual property) in the pursuit of profits. IBM does not support Open Source as much as it does due to some sort of good-hearted committment to We The Programmers, but because it is beneficial (or intended to be beneficial) for IBM's profit margin to be able to offer a mature UNIX alternative at relatively minimal development costs.
There will always be a place for commercial innovation, as well. What drove the Internet to widespread use and acceptance, Open, grassroots movement, or commercial promotion? What made computers easy enough that your grandmother can use them, Open software or corporate profits? Not to say that I am anti-Free Software--quite the opposite is true--but this sort of silly thoughtless rhetoric is not what any of this is truly about.
I refuse to turn this into a debate about capitalism and its alternatives (are you truly suggesting we would all be better off were we all socialists?), but I just want to point out how silly it is to turn a conflict more about the efficacy of certain software development models, business practices, and peices of software into a debate over economics of profit versus some sort of high-moraled committment to the community. If you so want to see everything in terms of moral black and white, let me ask you something: when Burger King serves you a bad lunch, is it moral wrongness? Or is it just beacuse they figured that a certain low quality is best for their profits?
Since the card itself contains a processor, it is entirely possible to make this system every bit as complex as any current PKI infrastructure. In other words, each card could contain its own private key as well as VISA's public key. The key-combination means that transactions could be "signed" (essentially, the private key would encrypt a hash of the transaction data that could then be decypted, or "verified", by the public key; this is how pgp signatures work as well) to prove that this is a valid transaction. What prevents someone from just rebroadcasting this transaction, as you said? Simple. Include some sort of incremented number, or the date and time, or any other dynamic information that would not be repeated. Anyone can rebroadcast an encrypted message, but this proves when the message was encrypted. If this is transaction number 35, and someone rebroadcasts it, he'd have to change the transaction number to 36 and then re-sign it before encrypting it for VISA. This is not possible, since he does not have the card's unique private key.
Much as with PGP, the combination of public key encryption and private key signing (the encryption itself is only necessary to hide the CC# to prevent online theft) renders the data transaction not only secret but also verifiable. Not only does VISA know no one else knows your CC#, but they can be assured that it was in fact your card that did the transaction.
First, this would be hardware based and it'd be fairly likely that someone out there would sell a legit signed reader to a theif or a theif would get one somehow. Unlike the CA analogy, where this only effects people if the fake store manages to steal the real store's private key as well and the weak point of trust is still a legitimate store, here, we are looking at a stolen card reader and suddenly the weak point in the chain is not just a shopkeeper or retailer, but any random theif who manages to walk by you on the street.
Second, how would this infrastructure work in conjunction with CC# purchases where there is no physical transaction, i.e. online purchases? I suppose you could only implement it for proximity card purchases, some sort of built in smart-card feature as you said, but I don't even see it as providing that much security. As I said, one stolen reader and someone can charge you whatever they like.
The best solution I can come up with, now that I think about it, is to have all the proximity-broadcast information encrypted with a public key for VISA or whoever, and only VISA can decrypt it. That way, even a stolen reader is useless, all someone can do is charge for purchases, and then the money paid from the CC company is traceable anyway. There is no way for the theif to actually gain the CC details. No need for any other sort of security; you could give this information out to everyone on the planet and have it still be totally secure.
Producers invest in what is profitable, which really just means what will please the most people the most predictably. New things may please some people a whole lot more, but some people a lot less. And if you make someone happy enough to buy the game, he doesn't need to be made any happier. If we all reluctantly go to see the next Vin Diesel summer hit, knowing its a bad movie, well, we still spent our money on tickets. And if we all reluctanlty buy the next action-packed first-person-shooter, knowing its the same as all the ones before, we still shelled out enough for the game. Making more people happy enough to buy the game is profitable. Changing people's lives with new art and ideas isn't.
No, you can't. I assume this was intended as a joke, but I may as well point out that unless a program is not an applet, unless it implements the interface Applet (I think thats the right name...). You can't run any random Java program from a web browser or applet viewer.
And how is this easier than the current reigning champs, Kazaa and Gnutella?
"At Nintendo, we've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Laotian and others governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Kaysone Phomvihan to teach Laotian youth in new and engaging dynamic ways." --article here
And a google search reveals nobody by that name with any connection to Nintendo from any site except Slashdot. Think about it.
Every single post by this guy (or girl) is trolling on his alleged position with Nintendo. Don't fall for it.
If you can, please mirror my mirror. I'm sure a large number of slashdot readers have servers available they can put to good use.
There are probably exceptions available for research. Especially on Massachusetts; Boston has the greatest density of institutions of higher education per square mile of anywhere in the US (or world?).
No. It resembles an electric razor. Though those things can be dangerous in and of themselves.