It would smack of 'evil' in contradiction to his company's motto. More likely, he would use it, like Google News, as a draw to Google, gaining mind-share, and indirectly boosting revenues.
Whether Wikipedia should accept is another matter. I don't think that they should. It's much easier to appear independent if you have to pay your way, and for an encyclopedia, appearing independent is really pretty important.
Do you know what a truly thorough documentary expaining both sides to the story is?
It's academic work.
No, it's British Journalism, BBC-style, where there are always exactly two sides, a compromise position, and there isn't an underlying reality.
Acedemic work is frequently more extreme than the debate, for abstract thought is less bound by social norms. You won't find many acedemics keen on the Creationists' "teach the controversy" policy presciption, for example. These articles on "balancedreporting" illustrate the problem.
Acedmics will however put forward a variety of theories, but they will do so collectively, not individually.
Well it looks to me that the flaw in the WILI principle is actually that people pretend to like something, when they actually don't, or else convince themselves that they do for personal ease, or for reasons to do with group dynamics.
People's minds differ, but similar principles apply, so using yourself as a guide is not too bad. Using each member of a group, individually, as a guide is better still, especially is you have different thinking styles. And usability need not be maximum stupidity, although you do need to make compromises in that direction. One solution might be to use all of the staff in your feasibility study, including the cleaner and the receptionist!
WWLI (well we like it) combined with awareness of some basic principles might then give the best answer, but how to ensure self-critical goodwill is a managent problem. I suspect that you need to start with a manager who has those qualities him or herself.
Maybe so, but social awareness is part of growing up. And Asperger's simply means that that aspect of personal development is slowed down. Besides, if he wrote exploits but didn't actually send them into the wild, how is he different from a "respectable" security researcher?
I have Asperger's and I am certainly not morally bankrupt, however, I perfectly understand the motive here, and the creation of a good virus is not the same thing as propagating it.
If you are not motivated to cause harm, it's hard to see how the moral argument is relevant. Most people would not wish to be seen as causing harm, but how one is seen would not be a strong motivator to someone with Aspergers. Rather, they'd be likely to be more moral than average, since they are inclined more towards the abstract than to greed.
As for the 666 stuff; that's the group being "cool". Not especially revealing. Background processes in Unix are called daemons. When Demon Internet (UK) uses dial-in numbers ending in "666". So what?
As to the odds, you've got it back to front. For any given person, the odds are small, but 0.3% of the population have Aspergers, so there are a lot of people from whom some would end up doing stuff like this. If you're going to use stats, you ought to know a little about conditional probability: P(Aspergers|Virus_Writer)!=P(Virus_Writer|Asperger s).
More likely, he's got Asperger's Syndrome. If you don't think in terms of colliding interpersonal interests, you'll simply see it as an abstract challenge. It's more interesting than many challenges, since you're pitting yourself against others. Think of it as a game of chess.
To witness similar "amoral thinking", read this interview of Bram Cohen.
If you have a very pure abstract mind, all challenges are equal. "Thinking through the moral implications" is only relevant if you have ill intent. If you don't, you'll naturally pick the first sufficiently interesting challenge that comes along.
Following up upon Abcd1234's comment, I should add that if you're going to correct the popular form of the term "fascism" for a more rigourous use, you need to extend the same rigour to the term "communism". Communism means "ownership by the people"; the fact that it doesn't work is another matter entirely.
You should be okay given my suggestion: it is based upon propagation rates whilst you're downloading (you can't algorithmically know in advance if someone keeps their client up). Once you're done, you can shut down.
The idea is that seeds and "generous individuals" both favour superior propagators (it's an improvement upon superseeding that should still work if you're not the only seed, or even if you're not seeding!) The rest can be filled out by standard clients, but you won't be picked out for a boost unless you are uploading at a reasonable rate.
You don't look at what people are telling you; you infer rates from the distribution of files in the wild, and how they change. It's a problem involving stats and matrix manipulation.
The thing about bittorrent is that it is a trading protocol. Your upload is your 'bid', and you can receive a corresponding download. The trouble is that if your upload 'bid' is high, there won't be download 'bids' of equal magnitude, so you have to accept what you can get.
It might also be, as others have suggested, that your upload is choking your download.
Which works fine for a single file. All of your stats are reset as soon as you switch to a new torrent/tracker. The only way around this is keeping all torrents on the same tracker (see: empornium), but that has its own failings.
This is true, but if your are sniffed out within a few minutes by your fellow clients, it'll be a slow business getting any file. This makes leeching pretty pointless.
Ratio will do it, of course, but if a techinical fix could be found, that would help to keep things open.
There might be a texhnical fix to this: modifying the protocol to do better than tit-for-tat, perhaps as with this feature request of mine (see also follow-up).
If clients bias towards good propagators themselves, then they will be themselves rewarded by those who do likewise. Leechers that do not upload anywhere near proportionally are, by definition bad propogators.
Many contracts are illegal (eg. a contract to murder), and thus are immediately void.
End users have rights, and a contract agreement not to reverse engineer is not fair competition since (near enough) every company would have such a clause, regardless of the customer's wishes. Reverse engineering makes competion act more swiftly, which any amount of feelgood on the customers behalf is not going to outweigh. Why do you think that companies form cartels when they can? Why do big companies lobby so strongly for stronger patents laws?
Genetic algorithms are pretty simple, compared to what the bulk of what the kernel is doing. Furthermore, the technology is a known quantity, and probably won't be running at run time. Given the existing size of the kernel (6 million lines), I don't think that it'll add a lot to complexity.
Fair enough. I do not believe that all software should necessarily be free, but I do believe that the protection in law is too strong. The original context is that Bill Gates likens supporters of CC and the GPL to communists. He'd be more accurate describing them as anarchists, since Bill is deliberately seeking to confuse two meanings of "communism" in the listeners' minds: supporters of a strong totalitarian "beneficial" state, and believers in the sharing of property.
CC/GPL licenses are good in that they allow alternate property systems to co-exist with convention "maximum" property. The GPL in particular allows free software to stand up on its own with a mirror to the protections that are afforded to proprietry software, excepting patent issues (one problem with strong decentralisation is that the resources to protect your code are unavailable). The fact that they do this with conventional property law shows that copyright, as it stands, isn't too broken (except perhaps that it has an excessive longevity; 50 years regardless of the creators' lifespan would mean that people know where they stand).
I suggested a default license to show that a granted monopoly isn't the only option available. Perhaps a standard fee of $25 or an extra 100% of the selling price to retailers (whichever is greater) could be an option, but the more that I look at this idea, the less workable it appears: what of designers of chip design software, normally of the order of a few hundred thousand dollars per license? Maybe someone clever can find a better solution.
People should be compensated for their work, if the profit is there to be made, but we already don't let particular sanctions be applied against transgressors of IP, and a default (if it could be made workable) would still allow you to license under different terms. Monopoly is an incroachment upon freedom, and thus needs justification. It is my belief that the justification isn't strong enough to justify total control of the idea, only to guaruntee a reasonable profit through licensing. There's little utility to be gain in extending the right to the opportunity to make reasonable profit to that of total control.
As for innovation, people invent things all the time; profit selects which inventions to pursue into a product. Some will go in at near zero investment cost; some take a lot of money to reasearch and develop. In any case, free software competes fairly with proprietry software: the innovation that exists within free software will be that which is typically at the more affordable end, and those who engineer free software exercise the same rights to reverse engineering as any other competitor. The fact that they are typically not being paid for it induces a delay (people have to earn money somehow) within which returns can be earnt on the original.
I think your argument is saying that if the software is out for public use then more innovation will happen. But most people copying the works are not doing so to innovate it, they are doing so to use it. They want it for free.
People want the price to be low, and the originator want it to be high. Competition is the usual mechanism by which the two sides come to a deal. IP is much more difficult, in that it only has value when the freedom to copy is regulated, although there are other mechaisms such as the head-start in further innovation afforded to the originators: reverse engineering with help one catch up, but will not completly align one with the original creative vision. Knowing that others are reverse-engineering your product can in fact be a spur to further innovation!
Going back to the issue of jumpers, the economics here are very different to those of engineering software, but I have to ask you whether people are in general better off with rapid propagation of (other) jumper technologies (such as techniques to knit a warmer jumper), or not to have those cheaper developments in wide use, but to make the d
IP law is a compromise between producer and consumer, the justification for which is pretty much explicitally utilitarian.
The real question that you need to ask is what state of law most promotes the progress of science and of the arts. Sometimes it's to allow rapid innovation upon discovery, and sometimes it's to "protect" that discovery from being used competitively against the discoverer.
The projected gain by allowing people to copy your jumper prematurely may be negative, but to allow general jumper copying still allows an advantage in producing an original sufficient to allow plenty of innovations to take place (since you can advertise originality). The balance of cost and benefit, in the case of jumper manufacture is almost certainly of the side of copiers, although perhaps a better state of affairs would be to have an innovation tax on non-originators (increasing the price differential); a "default licence", if you will.
An explicit recognition of the incentives, and blocks to creativity would give us better laws. The view of having an absolute moral right to one's one work is one that is ignorant of the mechanism of creativity. I couldn't find the study, but a brain scan of creative types as against normal people shows that the former group make heavy use of memory in the process of creation. Thus "total originality" is a myth.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether Wikipedia should accept is another matter. I don't think that they should. It's much easier to appear independent if you have to pay your way, and for an encyclopedia, appearing independent is really pretty important.
I particularly like the final sentence:
-- No Text --
Although I agree with AC that it's welcome variety.
Acedemic work is frequently more extreme than the debate, for abstract thought is less bound by social norms. You won't find many acedemics keen on the Creationists' "teach the controversy" policy presciption, for example. These articles on "balanced reporting" illustrate the problem.
Acedmics will however put forward a variety of theories, but they will do so collectively, not individually.
It would just be vulnerable to space snort.
People's minds differ, but similar principles apply, so using yourself as a guide is not too bad. Using each member of a group, individually, as a guide is better still, especially is you have different thinking styles. And usability need not be maximum stupidity, although you do need to make compromises in that direction. One solution might be to use all of the staff in your feasibility study, including the cleaner and the receptionist!
WWLI (well we like it) combined with awareness of some basic principles might then give the best answer, but how to ensure self-critical goodwill is a managent problem. I suspect that you need to start with a manager who has those qualities him or herself.
These guys will offer you real solutions!
Maybe so, but social awareness is part of growing up. And Asperger's simply means that that aspect of personal development is slowed down. Besides, if he wrote exploits but didn't actually send them into the wild, how is he different from a "respectable" security researcher?
If you are not motivated to cause harm, it's hard to see how the moral argument is relevant. Most people would not wish to be seen as causing harm, but how one is seen would not be a strong motivator to someone with Aspergers. Rather, they'd be likely to be more moral than average, since they are inclined more towards the abstract than to greed.
As for the 666 stuff; that's the group being "cool". Not especially revealing. Background processes in Unix are called daemons. When Demon Internet (UK) uses dial-in numbers ending in "666". So what?
As to the odds, you've got it back to front. For any given person, the odds are small, but 0.3% of the population have Aspergers, so there are a lot of people from whom some would end up doing stuff like this. If you're going to use stats, you ought to know a little about conditional probability: P(Aspergers|Virus_Writer)!=P(Virus_Writer|Asperger s).
To witness similar "amoral thinking", read this interview of Bram Cohen.
If you have a very pure abstract mind, all challenges are equal. "Thinking through the moral implications" is only relevant if you have ill intent. If you don't, you'll naturally pick the first sufficiently interesting challenge that comes along.
Of course, you could write an operating system, and then sell security for it.
Technocrat is quite good.
Following up upon Abcd1234's comment, I should add that if you're going to correct the popular form of the term "fascism" for a more rigourous use, you need to extend the same rigour to the term "communism". Communism means "ownership by the people"; the fact that it doesn't work is another matter entirely.
The idea is that seeds and "generous individuals" both favour superior propagators (it's an improvement upon superseeding that should still work if you're not the only seed, or even if you're not seeding!) The rest can be filled out by standard clients, but you won't be picked out for a boost unless you are uploading at a reasonable rate.
You don't look at what people are telling you; you infer rates from the distribution of files in the wild, and how they change. It's a problem involving stats and matrix manipulation.
It might also be, as others have suggested, that your upload is choking your download.
Ratio will do it, of course, but if a techinical fix could be found, that would help to keep things open.
If clients bias towards good propagators themselves, then they will be themselves rewarded by those who do likewise. Leechers that do not upload anywhere near proportionally are, by definition bad propogators.
End users have rights, and a contract agreement not to reverse engineer is not fair competition since (near enough) every company would have such a clause, regardless of the customer's wishes. Reverse engineering makes competion act more swiftly, which any amount of feelgood on the customers behalf is not going to outweigh. Why do you think that companies form cartels when they can? Why do big companies lobby so strongly for stronger patents laws?
Great quote, though!
Genetic algorithms are pretty simple, compared to what the bulk of what the kernel is doing. Furthermore, the technology is a known quantity, and probably won't be running at run time. Given the existing size of the kernel (6 million lines), I don't think that it'll add a lot to complexity.
CC/GPL licenses are good in that they allow alternate property systems to co-exist with convention "maximum" property. The GPL in particular allows free software to stand up on its own with a mirror to the protections that are afforded to proprietry software, excepting patent issues (one problem with strong decentralisation is that the resources to protect your code are unavailable). The fact that they do this with conventional property law shows that copyright, as it stands, isn't too broken (except perhaps that it has an excessive longevity; 50 years regardless of the creators' lifespan would mean that people know where they stand).
I suggested a default license to show that a granted monopoly isn't the only option available. Perhaps a standard fee of $25 or an extra 100% of the selling price to retailers (whichever is greater) could be an option, but the more that I look at this idea, the less workable it appears: what of designers of chip design software, normally of the order of a few hundred thousand dollars per license? Maybe someone clever can find a better solution.
People should be compensated for their work, if the profit is there to be made, but we already don't let particular sanctions be applied against transgressors of IP, and a default (if it could be made workable) would still allow you to license under different terms. Monopoly is an incroachment upon freedom, and thus needs justification. It is my belief that the justification isn't strong enough to justify total control of the idea, only to guaruntee a reasonable profit through licensing. There's little utility to be gain in extending the right to the opportunity to make reasonable profit to that of total control.
As for innovation, people invent things all the time; profit selects which inventions to pursue into a product. Some will go in at near zero investment cost; some take a lot of money to reasearch and develop. In any case, free software competes fairly with proprietry software: the innovation that exists within free software will be that which is typically at the more affordable end, and those who engineer free software exercise the same rights to reverse engineering as any other competitor. The fact that they are typically not being paid for it induces a delay (people have to earn money somehow) within which returns can be earnt on the original.
People want the price to be low, and the originator want it to be high. Competition is the usual mechanism by which the two sides come to a deal. IP is much more difficult, in that it only has value when the freedom to copy is regulated, although there are other mechaisms such as the head-start in further innovation afforded to the originators: reverse engineering with help one catch up, but will not completly align one with the original creative vision. Knowing that others are reverse-engineering your product can in fact be a spur to further innovation!
Going back to the issue of jumpers, the economics here are very different to those of engineering software, but I have to ask you whether people are in general better off with rapid propagation of (other) jumper technologies (such as techniques to knit a warmer jumper), or not to have those cheaper developments in wide use, but to make the d
The real question that you need to ask is what state of law most promotes the progress of science and of the arts. Sometimes it's to allow rapid innovation upon discovery, and sometimes it's to "protect" that discovery from being used competitively against the discoverer.
The projected gain by allowing people to copy your jumper prematurely may be negative, but to allow general jumper copying still allows an advantage in producing an original sufficient to allow plenty of innovations to take place (since you can advertise originality). The balance of cost and benefit, in the case of jumper manufacture is almost certainly of the side of copiers, although perhaps a better state of affairs would be to have an innovation tax on non-originators (increasing the price differential); a "default licence", if you will.
An explicit recognition of the incentives, and blocks to creativity would give us better laws. The view of having an absolute moral right to one's one work is one that is ignorant of the mechanism of creativity. I couldn't find the study, but a brain scan of creative types as against normal people shows that the former group make heavy use of memory in the process of creation. Thus "total originality" is a myth.