Anyhow, yes, there is money to be made in selling wheelchairs, crutches, whatever. Medical insurance and over-priced essentials are good buddies. But we don't sit around discussing the latest motorized wheelchair like we discuss the latest movie or MP3 player.
New technology rarely benefits the people who most desperately need it. It sucks but it's true.
I'm still amazed at your comment about selfishness. I simply never met a person who was not selfish, and the ones who claimed the loudest to be unselfish were generally the worst offenders.
Would you cut off your finger to save a starving stranger? Nah, didn't think so...
That's why I put "guilty" in quotes. It's not a verdict but it is seen as one. The issue is one of perception, and perception alone. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and this dented sales not an iota. But a civil settlement with actual damages being paid... that will make an impact.
Whatever the financial aspects of this case (and one has to assume that whatever the settlement, it will be trivial compared to Microsoft's costs in other areas, such as fire-fighting the Linux guerilla bushwars), it is a definite victory for the market to have a solid verdict against Microsoft.
Being convicted of being a "monopolist", with random near-irrelevant punishments hurts no-one. But being convicted of stealing from the consumer and being told to give something back, that's something else.
I believe this is a landmark moment, akin to the first judgements against big tobacco, and with a similar future impact.
Obviously there will be many comments along the lines of "bad technology will cause more problems than it solves".
In the case of bulk industrial transport, it's painfully obvious that what's needed is not just more automation, but a shift away from roads and onto rail.
Rail is much safer and better controllable than road traffic. No-one would argue against remote control (at least emergency override) of train traffic, indeed I believe this had been standard operating procedure for some time in many countries.
Hacking the Internet is quite different from hacking a server. A single server behaves in an obvious and predictable fashion. The Internet behaves like a natural system: clearly there are always going to be a number of hacked systems, but the overall impact depends on how these systems have been hacked, what damage the hackers do, how fast the damage spreads, etc.
What I presume this 'model' will be used for is to do things like simulate how fast and far a new kind of virus could spread.
It's extremely pertinent research and the price tag is trivial compared with the cost of damage to the real thing.
And I want to tell you that Cowboy Bebop is totally rad, dude, like completely cool! Beebop, beebop... I love the music too. If you haven't seen it, you're an old square, and that goes for you too, Mr. "Payed Ad" Coward!
The cost of moving to IPv6 is going to be so huge that it will remain a research project until the benefits are correspondingly irresistable.
It will almost always be cheaper to hack IPv4 than to switch to IPv6, and this will be the rule for 99% of IP users.
My prediction is that IPv6 will never come into general use, we will stick with IPv4 for at least 40-50 more years. I have absolutely no idea what will replace IPv4, something will, but it will not be IPv6.
All viruses that attack a species have to be evolved to do so, and when a virus can jump from one species to another, it's because the species in question share the vulnerability.
Read my journal again, I discuss the difference between 'hot' and 'cold' viruses, this is very important. Viruses that jump into a new species generally start hot, doing excessive damage. Since this kills the host and limits the viruses' spread, the virus adapts to cool down, do less damage, and spread more widely. After a longer time, the virus can become passive, and eventually get absorbed into the host species' ecosystem, either indirectly like our intestinal fauna and flora (which are passed from parent to child by breastfeeding) or directly in the reproductive cells.
The first software viruses were hot: they damaged hard drives, wiped data... today's viruses are much more subtle, and can therefore spread more widely. One could argue that such viruses will eventually become so benign that they will do no harm, but the trouble is that a single widespread software virus can act as a gateway for a new, hot virus.
Perhaps the best natural model for this would be how a widespread debilitating sickness - e.g. malaria or AIDS - can act as the pathway for hotter viruses.
No, it's not at all an analogy, it's a model and a theory. There is a difference.
The theory is that the Internet obeys the same laws as natural systems, and this theory follows from the observation that articifial societies appear to follow the same rules as natural ones. This is not analogy, it is similarity based on fundamental rules of behaviour. One of those is that a natural system allows different strategies to evolve, and these will by definition come into conflict.
The point is that what we're seeing on the Net is not an abberation at all, it's entirely predictable if we understand the Net as a natural system.
The only speculative part of the analysis is that the best solutions to natural problems can be found in nature itself, mainly because 3bn years of trial and error are pretty effective.
:-) I've seen the movie as well, but it is fiction like most dramatic stories. Mozart was at times very wealthy, at times very poor, but the story of him as a poor oppressed artist fighting the establishment in the form of Salieri is just fantasy.
It's true that Mozart spent the last ten years of his life as an 'independent', after doing eleven years or so of the patronage circuit. It's also true that his best music comes from the time when he was desperate, starving, and sick. His early work is mainly junk. But that could be because he was young, not because of patronage.
Anyhow, Mozart is an excellent example, because it demonstrates something that I did not want to say, but which I believe is true: the best software comes, and will always come, from the desparate and starving and isolated developer, not the fat happy corporate keyboard bunny.
Personally, I am going through a late Mozart phase, working long hours for little gain, and I've never been so productive or creative in my life.
Humans can't naturally "evolve" resistance to the disease.
This is not correct. Humans can and do evolve resistance by combining their immune systems, through sex. Although this is not my speciality, my understanding is that immune systems work through combinations of proteins, and the specific proteins each person's DNA produces define in large part their immunity (or at least resistance) to parasites, viruses, etc. Sex allows two humans to shuffle their immune system proteins and produce children with new mixtures which will often be more resistant simply because they are less familiar to the parasites.
(It works because parasites need to evolve to attack hosts, not the other way around. This is exactly the same as software parasites.)
Since there is a strong selection for healthy children, we most definitely do evolve immunity, and often very quickly. The key - as I said in my journal - is the shuffling of the locks that happens during sex.
You miss the point: Mozart (and Salieri and many other musicians) lived almost entirely from patronage. Did Mozart not name some of his symphonies after his patrons? I don't know how your brain flipped into comparing Salieri with Microsoft, this is bizarre.
But the point is that art does not always sell, sometimes, often, it has to be sponsored, and although this seems scary, it's a model with a long tradition that has often worked very well indeed.
Sponsors can be stupid and brutal but they can also be generous and tolerant. Since the best art comes from an artist who has some freedom, the public generally ignores the stuff sponsored by heavy-hands, and goes for the finer work.
I was discussing a similar problem with some musicians the other day: how to pay for creative work?
Our solution was sponsoring, in one way or another: support from wealthier individuals or firms, getting advertising and honorable mentions in return.
The basis was the way traditional musicians are paid in Africa, which is by singing the praises of whoever gives them money. Since such musicians (like griots) are also respected on who is who in the community, their voices are sometimes worth a lot.
In software, why not something along the lines of "such and such paid for this feature", an eternal mention of one's contribution to the project. It worked for Bach and Mozart, why not for OSS today?
Certainly in Belgium, the main ISP (ironically called "Skynet") is pushing wireless ADSL routers. It makes sense: home internet users are already so down on security that it's hard to imagine wireless making any difference.
But for public access? Way too expensive, for one, and secondly there are really few people who trot around with their laptops, with the exception of air travellers, where wifi is a definite niche product with a future.
There have been projects to create free acess wifi networks around European cities but these need a level of collaboration which Europeans don't seem able to give.
Finally, Europe is _so_ wired. Why go wireless? For instance, in Brussels, there must be several hundred cybershops which offer internet at 1 Euro per hour.
Anyone who believes that this is the desperate act of a dying species is woefully wrong. Spammers used to be somewhat naive technologically, but the last year or two has seen a consolidation of spammers with virus writers and in essence the battlelines between the "good" and the "bad" users of the Internet have never been so well drawn as now.
A symptom of all evolving systems, natural or artificial, is that parasites will take advantage of easy opportunities. In nature, this battle has been a fundamental force for evolution and change. I don't see why it should be different in the Internet, which largely behaves like a natural system.
Here is an analysis of the subject by an expert on the matter (oh, it's ME?!). Bottom line: as long as the Internet is built on predictable defined structures (protocols and gateways), it will be heavily parasitized. What we see today is only a warmup. The solution is to find ways of evolving the structures of the Internet faster than the parasites can evolve.
This problem won't go away through wishful thinking - we need to understand what is actually going on. Heck, this discussion is moot: if my theory is correct, self-modifying defensive systems will happen exactly as the parasites have evolved: because this is what happens in natural systems.
The 'web' is not strictly defined, but it is unlikely to be interpreted as just HTTP/HTML. What about XML over HTTP? What about FTP accessed from a browser? What about intranets, web protocols used over a LAN? What about accessing your own hard disk via a browser?
Strictly speaking, any URL-able resource is part of the web. This is what makes the patent meaningless: LAN connections, even local files on your own disk could be seen as being part of the 'web'.
But custom TCP/IP protocols are most definitely not.
As spammers and virus writers get more and more integrated. Spammers have the money, virus writers have the skills, together they will play havoc with the cornfields of the Internet.
In the natural world, something like 60% of all species are parasitical, and the war between parasites and hosts is one of the defining aspects of all nature. Sex, for instance, is a way of shuffling locks faster than parasites can evolve keys.
It seems inevitable that software and communications will have to develop similar kinds of defenses against what is an inevitable onslaught from the parasitical forces that have developed to snack on the soft underbelly of the Net.
Not only that, but over-clean households have the ironic effect of reducing the strength of our immune systems. Dirt is actually good for us, we're evolved to handle it, even if now and then we tend to die from its extremes.
Bleaching one's bathroom and kitchen probably does more harm than good.
Related note: use of antibiotics in childhood have now been confirmed as a cause of allergies and asthma in later life. We actually _need_ exposure to those bugs if we're to remain healthy.
The toilet aerosol and kitchen sink are possibly the reasons why westerners are still reasonably healthy despite living in otherwise sterlized environments.
The Scene: Aliens have taken over Sigourney's body. Arnold has been sent back in time by Predators to try to find and stop Sigourney from blowing up their hidden spaceship. Arnie is a Predator morphed into a human, while Sigourney is just a really evil bitch with the soul of an alien.
The Action: Takes place in an half-abandoned inner city ghetto, in between gang drug wars and robotised police who use massive firepower to try to outgun the local crooks. The crooks have just robbed an army depot, so they are well armed.
Siggy and Arnie stumble into the midst of this three-way battle and add their own style of inferno.
Now... this could be fun. Of course Siggy wins, after hacking Arnie and turning him into a good guy. They blow away the robotized cops (maybe we could call them 'robotcops' or something), blow up the gang headquarters, and then find the Predator spaceship, which is actually the old Pentagon. They take a handy nuke left behind by one of the drug lords, and blow it up.
Escaping, at the last minute, in a hidden underground subway car, Siggy turns to Arnie and bares her teeth, out comes an alien set of jaws, and the film closes with the sight of Arnie's bug-eyed face with the sound of his heart being ripped out.
Chaos theory was in part defined following studies of populations of just TWO animals, the arctic hare and the the Canadian lynx. This was around 1989.
So why should it be surprising that populations of lemmings are chaotic?
Slashdot Mirror
"Not all people are selfish"?
What a curious comment. (Shakes head, amazed.)
Anyhow, yes, there is money to be made in selling wheelchairs, crutches, whatever. Medical insurance and over-priced essentials are good buddies. But we don't sit around discussing the latest motorized wheelchair like we discuss the latest movie or MP3 player.
New technology rarely benefits the people who most desperately need it. It sucks but it's true.
I'm still amazed at your comment about selfishness. I simply never met a person who was not selfish, and the ones who claimed the loudest to be unselfish were generally the worst offenders.
Would you cut off your finger to save a starving stranger? Nah, didn't think so...
It will happen....
...but it will never be used to help the disabled.
It will be used for porn...
It will be used as a drug...
It will be used for gaming...
Finally, it will be used in business....
They just don't have any economic power.
That's why I put "guilty" in quotes. It's not a verdict but it is seen as one. The issue is one of perception, and perception alone. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist, and this dented sales not an iota. But a civil settlement with actual damages being paid... that will make an impact.
Hype.
Anything with 'nano' or 'cyber' in the name is hype. Yeah, we will see smaller cheaper electronics, but that's hardly news.
Whatever the financial aspects of this case (and one has to assume that whatever the settlement, it will be trivial compared to Microsoft's costs in other areas, such as fire-fighting the Linux guerilla bushwars), it is a definite victory for the market to have a solid verdict against Microsoft.
Being convicted of being a "monopolist", with random near-irrelevant punishments hurts no-one. But being convicted of stealing from the consumer and being told to give something back, that's something else.
I believe this is a landmark moment, akin to the first judgements against big tobacco, and with a similar future impact.
Obviously there will be many comments along the lines of "bad technology will cause more problems than it solves".
In the case of bulk industrial transport, it's painfully obvious that what's needed is not just more automation, but a shift away from roads and onto rail.
Rail is much safer and better controllable than road traffic. No-one would argue against remote control (at least emergency override) of train traffic, indeed I believe this had been standard operating procedure for some time in many countries.
Hacking the Internet is quite different from hacking a server. A single server behaves in an obvious and predictable fashion. The Internet behaves like a natural system: clearly there are always going to be a number of hacked systems, but the overall impact depends on how these systems have been hacked, what damage the hackers do, how fast the damage spreads, etc.
What I presume this 'model' will be used for is to do things like simulate how fast and far a new kind of virus could spread.
It's extremely pertinent research and the price tag is trivial compared with the cost of damage to the real thing.
And I want to tell you that Cowboy Bebop is totally rad, dude, like completely cool! Beebop, beebop... I love the music too. If you haven't seen it, you're an old square, and that goes for you too, Mr. "Payed Ad" Coward!
Yeah, that's it. When I can get 64k IP addresses for the same price as 4, I'll replace my entire router cabinet.
It's da cash, like the man says.
That I can send short text messages from my PC (which has a bluetooth dongle thingy) to my mobile while I'm in meetings close by? For free...
The cost of moving to IPv6 is going to be so huge that it will remain a research project until the benefits are correspondingly irresistable.
It will almost always be cheaper to hack IPv4 than to switch to IPv6, and this will be the rule for 99% of IP users.
My prediction is that IPv6 will never come into general use, we will stick with IPv4 for at least 40-50 more years. I have absolutely no idea what will replace IPv4, something will, but it will not be IPv6.
All viruses that attack a species have to be evolved to do so, and when a virus can jump from one species to another, it's because the species in question share the vulnerability.
Read my journal again, I discuss the difference between 'hot' and 'cold' viruses, this is very important. Viruses that jump into a new species generally start hot, doing excessive damage. Since this kills the host and limits the viruses' spread, the virus adapts to cool down, do less damage, and spread more widely. After a longer time, the virus can become passive, and eventually get absorbed into the host species' ecosystem, either indirectly like our intestinal fauna and flora (which are passed from parent to child by breastfeeding) or directly in the reproductive cells.
The first software viruses were hot: they damaged hard drives, wiped data... today's viruses are much more subtle, and can therefore spread more widely. One could argue that such viruses will eventually become so benign that they will do no harm, but the trouble is that a single widespread software virus can act as a gateway for a new, hot virus.
Perhaps the best natural model for this would be how a widespread debilitating sickness - e.g. malaria or AIDS - can act as the pathway for hotter viruses.
No, it's not at all an analogy, it's a model and a theory. There is a difference.
The theory is that the Internet obeys the same laws as natural systems, and this theory follows from the observation that articifial societies appear to follow the same rules as natural ones. This is not analogy, it is similarity based on fundamental rules of behaviour. One of those is that a natural system allows different strategies to evolve, and these will by definition come into conflict.
The point is that what we're seeing on the Net is not an abberation at all, it's entirely predictable if we understand the Net as a natural system.
The only speculative part of the analysis is that the best solutions to natural problems can be found in nature itself, mainly because 3bn years of trial and error are pretty effective.
:-) I've seen the movie as well, but it is fiction like most dramatic stories. Mozart was at times very wealthy, at times very poor, but the story of him as a poor oppressed artist fighting the establishment in the form of Salieri is just fantasy.
It's true that Mozart spent the last ten years of his life as an 'independent', after doing eleven years or so of the patronage circuit. It's also true that his best music comes from the time when he was desperate, starving, and sick. His early work is mainly junk. But that could be because he was young, not because of patronage.
Anyhow, Mozart is an excellent example, because it demonstrates something that I did not want to say, but which I believe is true: the best software comes, and will always come, from the desparate and starving and isolated developer, not the fat happy corporate keyboard bunny.
Personally, I am going through a late Mozart phase, working long hours for little gain, and I've never been so productive or creative in my life.
Humans can't naturally "evolve" resistance to the disease.
This is not correct. Humans can and do evolve resistance by combining their immune systems, through sex. Although this is not my speciality, my understanding is that immune systems work through combinations of proteins, and the specific proteins each person's DNA produces define in large part their immunity (or at least resistance) to parasites, viruses, etc. Sex allows two humans to shuffle their immune system proteins and produce children with new mixtures which will often be more resistant simply because they are less familiar to the parasites.
(It works because parasites need to evolve to attack hosts, not the other way around. This is exactly the same as software parasites.)
Since there is a strong selection for healthy children, we most definitely do evolve immunity, and often very quickly. The key - as I said in my journal - is the shuffling of the locks that happens during sex.
You miss the point: Mozart (and Salieri and many other musicians) lived almost entirely from patronage. Did Mozart not name some of his symphonies after his patrons? I don't know how your brain flipped into comparing Salieri with Microsoft, this is bizarre.
But the point is that art does not always sell, sometimes, often, it has to be sponsored, and although this seems scary, it's a model with a long tradition that has often worked very well indeed.
Sponsors can be stupid and brutal but they can also be generous and tolerant. Since the best art comes from an artist who has some freedom, the public generally ignores the stuff sponsored by heavy-hands, and goes for the finer work.
I was discussing a similar problem with some musicians the other day: how to pay for creative work?
Our solution was sponsoring, in one way or another: support from wealthier individuals or firms, getting advertising and honorable mentions in return.
The basis was the way traditional musicians are paid in Africa, which is by singing the praises of whoever gives them money. Since such musicians (like griots) are also respected on who is who in the community, their voices are sometimes worth a lot.
In software, why not something along the lines of "such and such paid for this feature", an eternal mention of one's contribution to the project. It worked for Bach and Mozart, why not for OSS today?
Certainly in Belgium, the main ISP (ironically called "Skynet") is pushing wireless ADSL routers. It makes sense: home internet users are already so down on security that it's hard to imagine wireless making any difference.
But for public access? Way too expensive, for one, and secondly there are really few people who trot around with their laptops, with the exception of air travellers, where wifi is a definite niche product with a future.
There have been projects to create free acess wifi networks around European cities but these need a level of collaboration which Europeans don't seem able to give.
Finally, Europe is _so_ wired. Why go wireless? For instance, in Brussels, there must be several hundred cybershops which offer internet at 1 Euro per hour.
Anyone who believes that this is the desperate act of a dying species is woefully wrong. Spammers used to be somewhat naive technologically, but the last year or two has seen a consolidation of spammers with virus writers and in essence the battlelines between the "good" and the "bad" users of the Internet have never been so well drawn as now.
A symptom of all evolving systems, natural or artificial, is that parasites will take advantage of easy opportunities. In nature, this battle has been a fundamental force for evolution and change. I don't see why it should be different in the Internet, which largely behaves like a natural system.
Here is an analysis of the subject by an expert on the matter (oh, it's ME?!). Bottom line: as long as the Internet is built on predictable defined structures (protocols and gateways), it will be heavily parasitized. What we see today is only a warmup. The solution is to find ways of evolving the structures of the Internet faster than the parasites can evolve.
This problem won't go away through wishful thinking - we need to understand what is actually going on. Heck, this discussion is moot: if my theory is correct, self-modifying defensive systems will happen exactly as the parasites have evolved: because this is what happens in natural systems.
I just trolled myself. Damn.
The 'web' is not strictly defined, but it is unlikely to be interpreted as just HTTP/HTML. What about XML over HTTP? What about FTP accessed from a browser? What about intranets, web protocols used over a LAN? What about accessing your own hard disk via a browser?
Strictly speaking, any URL-able resource is part of the web. This is what makes the patent meaningless: LAN connections, even local files on your own disk could be seen as being part of the 'web'.
But custom TCP/IP protocols are most definitely not.
From a while back...
here
As spammers and virus writers get more and more integrated. Spammers have the money, virus writers have the skills, together they will play havoc with the cornfields of the Internet.
In the natural world, something like 60% of all species are parasitical, and the war between parasites and hosts is one of the defining aspects of all nature. Sex, for instance, is a way of shuffling locks faster than parasites can evolve keys.
It seems inevitable that software and communications will have to develop similar kinds of defenses against what is an inevitable onslaught from the parasitical forces that have developed to snack on the soft underbelly of the Net.
Cybersex, anyone?
Not only that, but over-clean households have the ironic effect of reducing the strength of our immune systems. Dirt is actually good for us, we're evolved to handle it, even if now and then we tend to die from its extremes.
Bleaching one's bathroom and kitchen probably does more harm than good.
Related note: use of antibiotics in childhood have now been confirmed as a cause of allergies and asthma in later life. We actually _need_ exposure to those bugs if we're to remain healthy.
The toilet aerosol and kitchen sink are possibly the reasons why westerners are still reasonably healthy despite living in otherwise sterlized environments.
Sigourney Weaver vs. Arnold Schwarzenegger
The Scene: Aliens have taken over Sigourney's body. Arnold has been sent back in time by Predators to try to find and stop Sigourney from blowing up their hidden spaceship. Arnie is a Predator morphed into a human, while Sigourney is just a really evil bitch with the soul of an alien.
The Action: Takes place in an half-abandoned inner city ghetto, in between gang drug wars and robotised police who use massive firepower to try to outgun the local crooks. The crooks have just robbed an army depot, so they are well armed.
Siggy and Arnie stumble into the midst of this three-way battle and add their own style of inferno.
Now... this could be fun. Of course Siggy wins, after hacking Arnie and turning him into a good guy. They blow away the robotized cops (maybe we could call them 'robotcops' or something), blow up the gang headquarters, and then find the Predator spaceship, which is actually the old Pentagon. They take a handy nuke left behind by one of the drug lords, and blow it up.
Escaping, at the last minute, in a hidden underground subway car, Siggy turns to Arnie and bares her teeth, out comes an alien set of jaws, and the film closes with the sight of Arnie's bug-eyed face with the sound of his heart being ripped out.
Chaos theory was in part defined following studies of populations of just TWO animals, the arctic hare and the the Canadian lynx. This was around 1989.
So why should it be surprising that populations of lemmings are chaotic?
What, exactly, is the news here?