Excellent point. And in addition, virtually every story about this seems to also make these two erroneous assumptions:
1. The items in the simulation correspond to items in the reality.
2. The items in the simulation resemble items in the reality.
Neither of those statements is necessarily true, and it isn't difficult to imagine cases where they're false.
E.g: Perhaps this simulation is done not to simulate the reality but to explore alternatives, and we look nothing like the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who created the simulation. (Who have of course been secretly monitoring us these long eons in the form of mice, and are anxiously awaiting their opportunity to resume their game of Brockian Ultra Cricket).
What makes you think that owning a physical object is "a natural property of the physical world"?
Owning a physical object isn't like gravity, mass, or distance. 'Ownership' isn't something that exists 'out there', enforced by the physical world. The physical world doesn't know or care about your relation to items you consider your property.
What does this scenario suggest:
Suppose that you own a piece of land. That is, you consider that physical object, the parcel of land, to be your property. Now suppose that someone else shares a similar view. Namely, they also consider that land to be their property. How is this conflict resolved? How do we determine the real owner of the property?
Well, we don't consult the physical world. The natural properties of the physical world have nothing to tell us about any ownership claim on the property. Typically, in the modern industrial world, the the validity of the ownership claims are adjudicated by a court of the land.
Now suppose that (after a trial that follows the laws of the land fairly) the court decides in favor of the other claimant; The court rules that you are not the owner of the land, the other person is. Do you still own this land? If you disagree (and exhaust all appeals without success) and remain on the land, because, in your mind, this is really your land, what will happen next? Will you be able to keep this property which you know is yours? And after the government branch (the court) assigns the police or another governmental agency to evict you from the land, and you are now elsewhere because you have been forcefully removed from your land by the government, is this land still your property? Or is it now the property of the other claimant, who is living on the land with the full support of the government, and perhaps thanks to the assistance of governmental force?
The 'ownership' of this physical object appears to be a social convention, perhaps not all that different from the social convention we live by that says that the government issued piece of paper that has a five dollar bill printed on can be traded for five times the value of a similar piece of paper that has a one dollar bill printed on it. As others in this thread have said, the notion of property appears to be a construct that we live by. Some perhaps unknowingly. More than that, it is a government regulated and enforced construct. One might even say that it is a 'monopoly' of sorts - the government has granted you sole ownership of the property, to do with it as you see fit. And if that ownership is contested or violated, the government will lend you its bodies of force in order to enforce your ownership claim.
It could be disputed that calling this kind of property ownership a 'monopoly' is not accurate - that 'monopoly' typically refers to a 'supplier' of 'commodities' rather than an 'owner' of 'property'. Investigating those ideas further would no doubt provide further insight into the similarities and differences between these uses of the term 'monopoly'. Regardless, what is clear at this point is that the two uses of 'monopoly' share a useful family resemblance and, in particular, the statement that "private property is a government enforced monopoly" appears to be closer to the reality than the statement that "Owning a physical object is a natural property of the physical world around us."
If you haven't seen it already, you'll want to watch this great Google Tech Talk on how to
survive and thrive on Open Source project teams.
Beyond what the title claims you'll learn from the talk, you'll also also come away with a ton of excellent insight into how to recognize healthy project teams.
If your son is a fan of computer games then Game Maker is a great place to start.
It combines a gentle introduction to programming logic with a high reward component from creating his own graphic computer games - games that can look and play as good as anything on the casual game market.
An interested teen with this Game Maker book, The Game Maker's Apprentice, and help from a programming mentor can get a solid introduction to a complete development process, including aspects like weaving sound and graphic assets together to create a complete software package - aspects of development that often aren't covered at an introductory level.
The Game Maker's Apprentice is structured as a series of projects, starting with the most basic and gradually increasing in complexity to cover rudimentary AI concepts by the end. The projects are fun, with clear direction and plenty of opportunity to play and explore beyond the specified project.
The "series of projects" structure can also help you out as you teach too. You'll have the insight to see what's new with each project, what ideas to help emphasize, and they'll serve as guideposts to give an idea what level of concepts are being taught at each point along the way.
"Don't sue your customers"
Eben Moglen recently gave an informative discussion about the dynamics of this principle, as it specifically relates to the Novell / Microsoft deal and the GPL,
here.
HOw about this for a target: spend half as much on renewable energy as you do on killing other people and developing weapons to kill other people and pretty soon (10 yrs) you wont NEED to kill people as you wont need to steal their oil anymore.
. . . Yes, but then you would need a powerful military to prevent them from killing you and stealing your superior renewable energy. Don't forget, 'we' always act for
noble
reasons , and we wouldn't need a massive 'defense' industry if 'they' weren't so dangerous.
Given that there will be killing and that there will be stealing of others valuable resources, wouldn't you rather that the death, destruction, and stealing did not happen to you? Ergo invading other countries and building the largest
military industrial complex in history is the only reasonable course of action.
And, if any country is going to be an
aggressor , extending their hegemony throughout the world, wouldn't you rather it was a country that espoused the ideals of democracy and claimed to be a beacon of liberty? Just look at how South America and Central America have prospered under the American sphere of influence.
" . ..they think that waving their dicks around and threatening/bullying the rest of the world will make us safer . .."
You're giving the Vice President too much credit here! In this case they think that waving their Bush around, threatening/bullying the rest of the world will make it safer.
That's one approach they use.
Another line of reasoning avaiable is more like:
"Anything that does not cause or sustain its own existance requires an external source to cause and maintain its existance."
Or, contingent entities require necessary entities to account for their coming into being and continuing to be. Not only that, but the necessary entities must also (obviously) have the ability to create and sustain the contingent beings.
And with that, you can see that we're already well on our way to creating an ontology rich with entities and relations we have no experience of.
Not that that's a much more satisfying line of reasoning, but there it is.
Presumably you could have a chain of contingent entities that have the ability to create other contingent entities. (Something like humans writing a computer program perhaps?) But ultimately the chain of entities must end with an entity whose existance is necessary not contingent. Someone who believes that might be inclined to say "It's turtles all the way down, except for the last one: The necessary turtle"
Why we should believe that the entity that created us is a necessary one and not a contingent one is yet another item for debate.
Mr Fibble is pointing to some of the core issues here. Don't miss 'em!
Really.
Here they are distilled: (1) The heads of Microsoft are not dumb. (2) Microsoft leaders understand that Microsoft is threatened by the free software movement, but cannot acknowledge that publicly.
The smart Free Software leaders are only too aware of this. Any perspective that assumes that Microsoft leadership is stupid, misses the point and is itself vacuous.
It's as simple, and clear, as that.
Don't forget that: Any comments that imply that Microsoft leadership is stupid, or "doesn't understand" the strength of free software, is missing the point and can be ignored.
On the other hand, comments that start from the assumption that Microsoft leadership is savvy and crafty, and then proceed to weave a plot, are worth standing up and paying attention to.
" . . . somewhere in the snows of Redmond A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant Antarctic bird. . . "
The Q&A with McBride in Computer world contains one of the first clear (re)statements of SCO's (current) intent. In the interview, McBride's tone towards Linux is carefully conciliatory, conveying an attitude of "We accept that Linux will be around for a while, so let's find a way to work things out."
The 'problem' with Linux that needs to be resolved, he says, is the GPL. Or, as McBride puts it:
"If we're going into a new business environment around Linux, well, let's ask the question right upfront: Does the free business model work? Everything we've looked at, whether it's free Internet, free telecom, free music, all of these things tend to, for one reason or another, not work over an extended period of time. Clearly, the free model just about killed our company, and I would argue that it's going to kill a lot of other software companies if the GPL [General Public License] is able to gain a foothold and run rampant throughout the industry."
This statement first trots out the old "free software means free as in beer" misinformation and then proceeds with the explicit mud slinging about how the GPL will "kill" alot of companies if it is permitted to "gain a foothold" and "run rampant." Yikes! Scary stuff, if it were true. This bit of FUD is well formulated to push the fear buttons of your friendly neighborhood PHB.
And it raises many more questions. Like:
(1) Will the mainstream media eventually bite this SCO spin and spread the slander against the GPL?
(2) Will a significant portion of the open source community one day buy into this characterization of the problem, and allow the thin edge of the wedge that McBride has presented to fracture the community?
(3) Is Microsoft behind this FUD campaign against the GPL, which, at minimum, they must find exceptionally agreeable?
(4) Even if Microsoft and SCO aren't coordinating their attacks against the GPL and the open source community, do the similarities in their attacks indicate a fundamental hostility that we can expect capitalists to hold against the free software model?
Apparently the University of Waterloo sold half it's soul to the devil. If you read the article . ..
"The university ultimately backed down this spring, saying for now the classes will be "multilingual."
Can we assume that "multilingual" is the university's code for "C# by default and C++ with those with the know how and the temperament to make a fuss"?
It will be interesting to see if this dance with the devil results in "Canada's MIT" becoming Canada's Waterloo.
---- From: Alan Cox To: Larry McVoy Subject: Re: Bitkeeper Cc: Richard Stallman , Linux Kernel Mailing List Date: 18 Jul 2003 22:23:30 +0100
On Gwe, 2003-07-18 at 21:44, Larry McVoy wrote: > I'm trying hard to stay out of this, I think Richard may be trolling, > but I need to make sure that people understand that what Richard is > suggesting is violation of our license and copyright.
Actually your license is simply irrelevant in most of thre world. You aren't allowed to forbid reverse engineering for interoperability.
Larry McVoy claims that the Bitkeeper licence agreement will prevent cloning of Bitkeeper, thanks to a clause that "states that you can't use BK if you are developing a similar system, i.e., a clone."
This clause sounds suspiciously unenforcable. Are licence agreements powerful enought to allow vendors to specify/limit product use in this way?
--- From: Larry McVoy To: Richard Stallman Subject: Re: Bitkeeper Cc: Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 13:44:05 -0700
I'm trying hard to stay out of this, I think Richard may be trolling, but I need to make sure that people understand that what Richard is suggesting is violation of our license and copyright.
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 03:51:36PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote: > I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client > that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching > to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice: > if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community > that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.
Our license states that you can't use BK if you are developing a similar system, i.e., a clone. Without using BK it's impossible to reverse engineer BK to create the clone. So your message seems to be saying "it would be appropriate at this point to violate the BitKeeper license in order to write a free client which talks with BitKeeper".
Are you really instructing people to go out and violate our license?
Dood,
Why don't you step up and be that ideal representative you dream of. Until you do you are doomed to put up with the idiosyncracies of the people who do commit their time and energy.
If you achieve anything even remotely similar to setting the foundation for Free and Open Source software as we know it, then we'll be happy to acknowledge your effort. But if all you're going to do is rehash cheap talk about people who otherwise have done a great deal of good then, uh, I think you're late for your board meeting.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent point. And in addition, virtually every story about this seems to also make these two erroneous assumptions:
1. The items in the simulation correspond to items in the reality.
2. The items in the simulation resemble items in the reality.
Neither of those statements is necessarily true, and it isn't difficult to imagine cases where they're false.
E.g: Perhaps this simulation is done not to simulate the reality but to explore alternatives, and we look nothing like the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings who created the simulation. (Who have of course been secretly monitoring us these long eons in the form of mice, and are anxiously awaiting their opportunity to resume their game of Brockian Ultra Cricket).
. . . "and we will be restoring reality just as soon as we are sure what is real anyway."
"I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced."
What makes you think that owning a physical object is "a natural property of the physical world"?
Owning a physical object isn't like gravity, mass, or distance. 'Ownership' isn't something that exists 'out there', enforced by the physical world. The physical world doesn't know or care about your relation to items you consider your property.
What does this scenario suggest:
Suppose that you own a piece of land. That is, you consider that physical object, the parcel of land, to be your property. Now suppose that someone else shares a similar view. Namely, they also consider that land to be their property. How is this conflict resolved? How do we determine the real owner of the property?
Well, we don't consult the physical world. The natural properties of the physical world have nothing to tell us about any ownership claim on the property. Typically, in the modern industrial world, the the validity of the ownership claims are adjudicated by a court of the land.
Now suppose that (after a trial that follows the laws of the land fairly) the court decides in favor of the other claimant; The court rules that you are not the owner of the land, the other person is. Do you still own this land? If you disagree (and exhaust all appeals without success) and remain on the land, because, in your mind, this is really your land, what will happen next? Will you be able to keep this property which you know is yours? And after the government branch (the court) assigns the police or another governmental agency to evict you from the land, and you are now elsewhere because you have been forcefully removed from your land by the government, is this land still your property? Or is it now the property of the other claimant, who is living on the land with the full support of the government, and perhaps thanks to the assistance of governmental force?
The 'ownership' of this physical object appears to be a social convention, perhaps not all that different from the social convention we live by that says that the government issued piece of paper that has a five dollar bill printed on can be traded for five times the value of a similar piece of paper that has a one dollar bill printed on it. As others in this thread have said, the notion of property appears to be a construct that we live by. Some perhaps unknowingly. More than that, it is a government regulated and enforced construct. One might even say that it is a 'monopoly' of sorts - the government has granted you sole ownership of the property, to do with it as you see fit. And if that ownership is contested or violated, the government will lend you its bodies of force in order to enforce your ownership claim.
It could be disputed that calling this kind of property ownership a 'monopoly' is not accurate - that 'monopoly' typically refers to a 'supplier' of 'commodities' rather than an 'owner' of 'property'. Investigating those ideas further would no doubt provide further insight into the similarities and differences between these uses of the term 'monopoly'. Regardless, what is clear at this point is that the two uses of 'monopoly' share a useful family resemblance and, in particular, the statement that "private property is a government enforced monopoly" appears to be closer to the reality than the statement that "Owning a physical object is a natural property of the physical world around us."
"Ready". Of course it is. The question is: "Ready for what?" According to Valve's Gabe Newell and others, it's ready for a catastrophe.
If you haven't seen it already, you'll want to watch this great Google Tech Talk on how to survive and thrive on Open Source project teams.
Beyond what the title claims you'll learn from the talk, you'll also also come away with a ton of excellent insight into how to recognize healthy project teams.
Baguette? You're thinking of the wrong French culture. The word you're looking for here is Poutine.
If your son is a fan of computer games then Game Maker is a great place to start.
It combines a gentle introduction to programming logic with a high reward component from creating his own graphic computer games - games that can look and play as good as anything on the casual game market.
An interested teen with this Game Maker book, The Game Maker's Apprentice, and help from a programming mentor can get a solid introduction to a complete development process, including aspects like weaving sound and graphic assets together to create a complete software package - aspects of development that often aren't covered at an introductory level.
The Game Maker's Apprentice is structured as a series of projects, starting with the most basic and gradually increasing in complexity to cover rudimentary AI concepts by the end. The projects are fun, with clear direction and plenty of opportunity to play and explore beyond the specified project.
The "series of projects" structure can also help you out as you teach too. You'll have the insight to see what's new with each project, what ideas to help emphasize, and they'll serve as guideposts to give an idea what level of concepts are being taught at each point along the way.
"Don't sue your customers"
Eben Moglen recently gave an informative discussion about the dynamics of this principle, as it specifically relates to the Novell / Microsoft deal and the GPL, here.
. . . Yes, but then you would need a powerful military to prevent them from killing you and stealing your superior renewable energy. Don't forget, 'we' always act for noble reasons , and we wouldn't need a massive 'defense' industry if 'they' weren't so dangerous.
Given that there will be killing and that there will be stealing of others valuable resources, wouldn't you rather that the death, destruction, and stealing did not happen to you? Ergo invading other countries and building the largest military industrial complex in history is the only reasonable course of action.
And, if any country is going to be an aggressor , extending their hegemony throughout the world, wouldn't you rather it was a country that espoused the ideals of democracy and claimed to be a beacon of liberty? Just look at how South America and Central America have prospered under the American sphere of influence.
" . . .they think that waving their dicks around and threatening/bullying the rest of the world will make us safer . . ."
You're giving the Vice President too much credit here! In this case they think that waving their Bush around, threatening/bullying the rest of the world will make it safer.
That's one approach they use. Another line of reasoning avaiable is more like: "Anything that does not cause or sustain its own existance requires an external source to cause and maintain its existance." Or, contingent entities require necessary entities to account for their coming into being and continuing to be. Not only that, but the necessary entities must also (obviously) have the ability to create and sustain the contingent beings. And with that, you can see that we're already well on our way to creating an ontology rich with entities and relations we have no experience of. Not that that's a much more satisfying line of reasoning, but there it is. Presumably you could have a chain of contingent entities that have the ability to create other contingent entities. (Something like humans writing a computer program perhaps?) But ultimately the chain of entities must end with an entity whose existance is necessary not contingent. Someone who believes that might be inclined to say "It's turtles all the way down, except for the last one: The necessary turtle" Why we should believe that the entity that created us is a necessary one and not a contingent one is yet another item for debate.
Mr Fibble is pointing to some of the core issues here. Don't miss 'em!
Really.
Here they are distilled:
(1) The heads of Microsoft are not dumb.
(2) Microsoft leaders understand that Microsoft is threatened by the free software movement, but cannot acknowledge that publicly.
The smart Free Software leaders are only too aware of this. Any perspective that assumes that Microsoft leadership is stupid, misses the point and is itself vacuous.
It's as simple, and clear, as that.
Don't forget that: Any comments that imply that Microsoft leadership is stupid, or "doesn't understand" the strength of free software, is missing the point and can be ignored.
On the other hand, comments that start from the assumption that Microsoft leadership is savvy and crafty, and then proceed to weave a plot, are worth standing up and paying attention to.
No complications required.
Listen to Mr. Fibble. Or at least mod him up.
" . . . somewhere in the snows of Redmond
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant Antarctic bird. . . "
--- With thanks to W. B. Yeats.
The Q&A with McBride in Computer world contains one of the first clear (re)statements of SCO's (current) intent. In the interview, McBride's tone towards Linux is carefully conciliatory, conveying an attitude of "We accept that Linux will be around for a while, so let's find a way to work things out."
The 'problem' with Linux that needs to be resolved, he says, is the GPL. Or, as McBride puts it:
"If we're going into a new business environment around Linux, well, let's ask the question right upfront: Does the free business model work? Everything we've looked at, whether it's free Internet, free telecom, free music, all of these things tend to, for one reason or another, not work over an extended period of time. Clearly, the free model just about killed our company, and I would argue that it's going to kill a lot of other software companies if the GPL [General Public License] is able to gain a foothold and run rampant throughout the industry."
This statement first trots out the old "free software means free as in beer" misinformation and then proceeds with the explicit mud slinging about how the GPL will "kill" alot of companies if it is permitted to "gain a foothold" and "run rampant." Yikes! Scary stuff, if it were true. This bit of FUD is well formulated to push the fear buttons of your friendly neighborhood PHB.
And it raises many more questions. Like:
(1) Will the mainstream media eventually bite this SCO spin and spread the slander against the GPL?
(2) Will a significant portion of the open source community one day buy into this characterization of the problem, and allow the thin edge of the wedge that McBride has presented to fracture the community?
(3) Is Microsoft behind this FUD campaign against the GPL, which, at minimum, they must find exceptionally agreeable?
(4) Even if Microsoft and SCO aren't coordinating their attacks against the GPL and the open source community, do the similarities in their attacks indicate a fundamental hostility that we can expect capitalists to hold against the free software model?
Apparently the University of Waterloo sold half it's soul to the devil. If you read the article . . .
"The university ultimately backed down this spring, saying for now the classes will be "multilingual."
Can we assume that "multilingual" is the university's code for "C# by default and C++ with those with the know how and the temperament to make a fuss"?
It will be interesting to see if this dance with the devil results in "Canada's MIT" becoming Canada's Waterloo.
Thank you Alan Cox.
----
From: Alan Cox
To: Larry McVoy
Subject: Re: Bitkeeper
Cc: Richard Stallman , Linux Kernel Mailing List
Date: 18 Jul 2003 22:23:30 +0100
On Gwe, 2003-07-18 at 21:44, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I'm trying hard to stay out of this, I think Richard may be trolling,
> but I need to make sure that people understand that what Richard is
> suggesting is violation of our license and copyright.
Actually your license is simply irrelevant in most of thre world. You
aren't allowed to forbid reverse engineering for interoperability.
Larry McVoy claims that the Bitkeeper licence agreement will prevent cloning of Bitkeeper, thanks to a clause that "states that you can't use BK if you are developing a similar system, i.e., a clone."
This clause sounds suspiciously unenforcable. Are licence agreements powerful enought to allow vendors to specify/limit product use in this way?
---
From: Larry McVoy
To: Richard Stallman
Subject: Re: Bitkeeper
Cc:
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 13:44:05 -0700
I'm trying hard to stay out of this, I think Richard may be trolling,
but I need to make sure that people understand that what Richard is
suggesting is violation of our license and copyright.
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 03:51:36PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I think it would be appropriate at this point to write a free client
> that talks with Bitkeeper, and for Linux developers to start switching
> to that from Bitkeeper. At that point, McVoy will face a hard choice:
> if he carries out these threats, he risks alienating the community
> that he hopes will market Bitkeeper for him.
Our license states that you can't use BK if you are developing a similar
system, i.e., a clone. Without using BK it's impossible to reverse
engineer BK to create the clone. So your message seems to be saying
"it would be appropriate at this point to violate the BitKeeper license
in order to write a free client which talks with BitKeeper".
Are you really instructing people to go out and violate our license?
Dood, Why don't you step up and be that ideal representative you dream of. Until you do you are doomed to put up with the idiosyncracies of the people who do commit their time and energy. If you achieve anything even remotely similar to setting the foundation for Free and Open Source software as we know it, then we'll be happy to acknowledge your effort. But if all you're going to do is rehash cheap talk about people who otherwise have done a great deal of good then, uh, I think you're late for your board meeting.