Yeah, perhaps Indy1 took it a bit too far. A better analogy would be the following. Your country (your ISP) is harbouring terrorists (spammers). These terrorists use our planes (network) to bring down skyscrapers (e-mail system) and kill civilians (annoy users). My country's Ministry of Exterior (SPEWS) publishes a warning (blacklist), suggesting that our citizens avoid travelling to your country (receiving e-mail from you).
I think this is perfectly acceptable. And even if our airline will cancel some of the flights and inconvenience some of our citizens, because they have to fly to Frankfurt and then to your country (use another SMTP server or webmail), this is perfectly legal and accepted way to deal with the problem.
I have a choice to either accept their policies, or not use the internet.
False dilemma. You also have a choice to contact them, explain the problem and ask their help. My ISP went as far as to disable spam filtering for my personal accounts when I asked. There is no ingerent reason why your ISP should not (just try to ask them).
If either of our ISPs gets blacklisted, we no longer communicate.
Very recently, around mid-nighties some companies started to provide an innovative service called web-mail. Why don't you check it out? Another alternative - send the mail to your father through the SMTP server of his ISP (and vice versa).
In summary, blacklists are an annoyance for some, but they are hardly preventing people from using e-mail at all even in the worst cases.
you catch people who can't do anything about the problem either because they are disenfranchised or because they are unaware there's any mail being blocked.
I don't know how it is in the States, but in my experience you usually get a nice e-mail saying something "you've been blacklisted". I lived in Finland and my ISP (Sonera, one of the largest in Finland) was blocked by Mail.Ru - the largest e-mail provider in Russia. It took some time and a couple of e-mails, but eventually the problem was fixed (presumably the ISP acted or promised to act against spammers the way Mail.Ru required). All the time I knew that e-mail was not coming through and I had to use other SMTP servers to send it. An annoyance? Sure. Unacceptable problem? No way.
You ask what do we do? How about real-word harrassment? Poison their dog, threaten their kids, put a head of a dead horse into their bed. Get a flashmob and trample down their lawn, piss on their car. There are millions of ways, the only necessary thing is to find their real-world contact information. A few well-publicised cases of spammer's suicides (suicides?) will do a lot in resolving this problem.
Of course, it depends on your company very much (number of employees, organisational structure, type of work, etc.), but I would suggest you first start with the computers you already have and experiment. You might want to limit this initially to mid-day and after-work W3 matches or something (the games depend very much on the tastes of the workers).
But if/when you are ready to move to a dedicated game-room, I have the following suggestions: 1) for recreation: if you want people to spend short gamebreaks playing individually, use some arcade games, or Unreal Tournament, or something else that would not cause people to spend too much time playing (somethat that is easy to start and finish - spending as little time as you have). 2) for team-building: it doesn't really matter what kind of games it would be, as long as someone is responsible for making it team-building activity. It doesn't happen by itself. If you want more than people becoming friends with each other, someone should spend time doing something like training people to play CS in teams. Teach them strategy, communication skills, etc. Watch demos after the games and discuss what went wrong/right, etc.
I don't think the problem is too much exploitation. After all, that's what the modern entertainment business is built on. Harry Potter, Star Wars, everything else is exploited just fine without the brand losing value. In case of Lara the problem might simply lie in the fact that two primary brand development engines - games and movies aren't so hot.
If I was a brand manager at Eidos, I would concentrate on making the next game really good. Scrap the plans to reuse the engine for several games. Make a couple addons, if you must, but license a decent engine (Half-Life2, Doom3 or something simplier) and make an exciting, interesting and really good-looking game. Today's computers (and tomorrow's consoles) are capable of displaying very realistic and hot-looking chicks. Think of what is possible when you can dedicate 30% of the GPU power to rendering the main character, something that looks like the Nvidia's Dawn or even better. Realistic rendering of Angelina Jolie is possible if Eidos wanted that. If they combined it with decent gameplay that made original TR so cool (come on, this is not art, this is craft, you just need to hire good game designers), the game would sell like crazy and with the right marketing will attract a wide audience, including both young males AND females. Then Lara will be ready for the next round of exploitation all right.
But I don't think this fact has any important practical consequences. If you store something on a CD, you would obviously be able to fit the same amount of data on the disk, regardless of what base you use. Of course, if you could use another technology (one dot on a CD being a value in a different base, not just on or off), then decimal would be much better than ternary.;)
Of course, if you are talking about processing information (CPU vs. RAM), ternary system is a little bit better, but the advantage over binary is very small, IIRC - about 10% may be. Not worth the hassle, I would say, unless there are other advantages.
1) Like with diamonds, there is artificial scarcity of good singers. If this technology can turn everyone into Pavarotti, good for us all. 2) RIAA claims that music is expensive to make. If this technology can make this process cheaper (record the album in one take instead of spending a whole month), they lose the right to complain about P2P sharing.
i was refering to the process of filesharing as such
You see, the labels are not in the business of selling MP3s, that's why they shouldn't care whether there is any difference between two MP3 copies, like De Beers shouldn't worry whether artificial diamonds made by Company A and Company B are different. Both these cartels have to worry about persuading customers that their own products are superior to cheap imitations.
MP3's? who the hell shares those anymore?, do a search on lossess audio compression, with broadband most people who are even marginally audiophiles ditched MP3's a long time ago.
1) Most people are not audiophiles. 2) Most people use crappy speakers and headphones. 3) Most people actually switched to higher bitrate MP3s instead of ditching it alltogether. 192Kbps or 256Kbps are almost indistinguishable from CDs. 4) "Oops! I did it again" sounds pretty much the same on both CD and MP3.:)
So while there definitely are some people sharing (and downloading) music in lossless formats, most people could not care less. The general P2P music sharing picture is shaped by the majority, not by you and your audiophiles friends.:)
Just a few simple questions. 1) Is Canada able to market and sell "blood-free" diamonds? Yes. 2) Is there any real difference between a gem from Canada and a gem from South Africa? No. 3) Can De Beers do the same as Canada? May be.
You don't really need anything past selen (atomic number 34) to build stuff. Organic chemistry works wonders in nature and that is H+O+C+N and some other atoms in minuscule quantities for some extra effect. Heck, you can build most of things from carbon alone.
Francium - atomic number 87, is an alkali metal of group IA of the Periodic Table. It is very unstable and quite short-lived, lasting about 21 minutes. It has never been found occurring for any long periods in nature. It is known, however, to form water-soluble salts. (Source
Why the heck would you need francium for?!?!?! To make water-soluble salts? LOL
Uranium is pretty useless as well, unless you use it to make energy or bombs. For both thing hydrogen works just fine and is reaily available from the nearest puddle. And while you are at it, there are shitloads of gold dissolved in water that can be easily extracted if needed.
Hope that helps alleviate your worries about shortage of raw materials in our posthuman future.:)
Filesharing creates inferior MP3 copies of "perfect" CD audio WAVs. The difference between MP3 and CD is the same as between "artificial" carbon crystal and the "natural" one. If Debeers can "educate" people that their diamonds are real ones, then RIAA do the same to educate people that MP3s are crap. If, on the other hand, RIAA can't educate people so, the chances are Debeers will not be able to do that either. See the Wired article for some quotes by a diamond trader - he is happy to make his profit on artificial diamonds and his customers (in his opinion) are happy to buy cheaper gems.
I think that eventually so called "elite" will switch to other gems, middle class and poor people will be happy with their ~100$ diamond jewelry, some people will use diamonds in extravagant ways (like on the Wired cover - cool! or completely covering a Bugatti or a personal jet in diamonds).:) Eventually, as other gems are copied as well, rich people will probably switch to smart nanogems with fluorescence, animation, holographics, artificial genetically-designed scented bio-jewelry or something else, which is still expensive to make. Once we have advanced nanoassemblers, of course, all that will be in vain and capitalist meritocracies will collapse all other the world.:)
As for RIAA, they will suffer from the same problem. MP3s are a decent substitute for music CDs. People will get these MP3s and listen to them. There are two possible developments. 1) RIAA (labels) survive and start selling MP3s (with no or minimal DRM) cheaply. They are able to maintain some sort of monopoly and still benefit somewhat from pricesetting (now for MP3s). 2) RIAA doesn't survive the P2P blow and labels slowly/quickly die out. Then a competitive market will emerge. The consumers are likely to benefit because competition is likely to improve quality (and keep prices comfortably low).
Morris wasn't a criminal, he was a Cornell Science student. You wouldn't expect him to write and release the worm. Same thing today, although some viruses might be written by criminals or [conspiracy]antivirus companies[/conspiracy], most are written for fun by people who should have known better.
So we can be reasonably sure that viruses will appear in the future even if we somehow manage to educate the people and turn all virus writers to good. Another Morris will appear and write a virus not wanting to cause any harm. And the problem is that the more complex our systems become, the more dangerous will they be. Yes, the chances of viruses emerging from ones and zeros are currently slim. But what will happen when we have smart networks? Some harmless maintenance functions might become dangerous because of a bug or because of unpredicted interaction with other harmless components (there was an excellent post here on/. that I can't find that described a very complex and difficult to find bug, which required combined efforts of 4-5 highly qualified specialists to eliminate it. The author was very proud of his own achievement - he managed to "reliably" reproduce the bug in ~30% of tests).
Random criminals are not so dangerous, because their actions are limited by the nature of our phisical world. Even the most dangerous serial killer can't kill more than a hundred people. Computer viruses, on the other hand, are potentially capable (not today and with extremely low probability) of penetrating 90% of the world network in 5 seconds, blowing up several nuclear power plants, distrupting GPS and crashing hundreds of planes, wrecking shousands of ships and hundreds of thousands of cars, not to mention killing millions of people in hospitals, lifts, subways and literally everywhere. Add to that releasing some deadly biological viruses by shutting down security systems in the research labs. It only takes one virus in right circumstances to do all that shit.
So you can ignore the risks of potential real criminals and live with weak (in a good sense) and simple law enforcement. But you can't ignore the danger (potential future danger) of computer viruses in the same way.
It's a completely different thing with criminals. Crime does not "just happen", it usually have social roots. There are countries with extremely low crime level and they don't have to worry that situation will somehow worsen quickly and dramatically (unless they invite a lot of immigrants from less civilized countries).
In the same venue, some countries are safer from terrorism than others and this is not going to change dramatically (unless Iceland manages to piss off Pakistan or Angola somehow).
The situation with viruses is different - viruses do "just happen", because our experience shows that virus writers to not need any extra motivation - they write viruses just for the sake of it. Ergo no country (system) can be considered safe, because a virus may emerge any day. Another problem is that simple bugs are often enough to cause virus-like behaviour. There have been cases when an innocent mistake made a system to send too many e-mails, producing a spam-like behaviour. Imagine that a bug in DNS server will cause it to "spam" other DNS servers with lotsa packets instead of just sending the update a shutting up. Internet brought to a halt by a bug. You can imagine many similar scenarios. To defend against that we need to build secure systems. And viruses do help.
I think it might be time. In my opinion we'd rather take the risks, try everything new (unless it's obvsiouly a bad thing to do, like creating Skynet, Jurassic Park or smth like that) and solve a few problems that arise later, then not try and remain in the Industrial Age forever (or actually until we run out of oil and gradually drift back into Environmental golden age (i.e. Stone Age or Mad Max style anti-utopia).
P.S. This is not a troll. I am honestly sick of people worrying too much. We need our techno-optimism of the 60s back and if that means killing every environmentonazi, then so be it!
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Yeah, perhaps Indy1 took it a bit too far. A better analogy would be the following. Your country (your ISP) is harbouring terrorists (spammers). These terrorists use our planes (network) to bring down skyscrapers (e-mail system) and kill civilians (annoy users). My country's Ministry of Exterior (SPEWS) publishes a warning (blacklist), suggesting that our citizens avoid travelling to your country (receiving e-mail from you).
I think this is perfectly acceptable. And even if our airline will cancel some of the flights and inconvenience some of our citizens, because they have to fly to Frankfurt and then to your country (use another SMTP server or webmail), this is perfectly legal and accepted way to deal with the problem.
I have a choice to either accept their policies, or not use the internet.
False dilemma. You also have a choice to contact them, explain the problem and ask their help. My ISP went as far as to disable spam filtering for my personal accounts when I asked. There is no ingerent reason why your ISP should not (just try to ask them).
If either of our ISPs gets blacklisted, we no longer communicate.
Very recently, around mid-nighties some companies started to provide an innovative service called web-mail. Why don't you check it out? Another alternative - send the mail to your father through the SMTP server of his ISP (and vice versa).
In summary, blacklists are an annoyance for some, but they are hardly preventing people from using e-mail at all even in the worst cases.
you catch people who can't do anything about the problem either because they are disenfranchised or because they are unaware there's any mail being blocked.
I don't know how it is in the States, but in my experience you usually get a nice e-mail saying something "you've been blacklisted". I lived in Finland and my ISP (Sonera, one of the largest in Finland) was blocked by Mail.Ru - the largest e-mail provider in Russia. It took some time and a couple of e-mails, but eventually the problem was fixed (presumably the ISP acted or promised to act against spammers the way Mail.Ru required). All the time I knew that e-mail was not coming through and I had to use other SMTP servers to send it. An annoyance? Sure. Unacceptable problem? No way.
You ask what do we do? How about real-word harrassment? Poison their dog, threaten their kids, put a head of a dead horse into their bed. Get a flashmob and trample down their lawn, piss on their car. There are millions of ways, the only necessary thing is to find their real-world contact information. A few well-publicised cases of spammer's suicides (suicides?) will do a lot in resolving this problem.
Well, if you change ISPs, your IP is going to change in the process, isn't it?
And please, when you successfully do this, write about your experiences for /. readers. That would be really interesting.
Of course, it depends on your company very much (number of employees, organisational structure, type of work, etc.), but I would suggest you first start with the computers you already have and experiment. You might want to limit this initially to mid-day and after-work W3 matches or something (the games depend very much on the tastes of the workers).
But if/when you are ready to move to a dedicated game-room, I have the following suggestions:
1) for recreation: if you want people to spend short gamebreaks playing individually, use some arcade games, or Unreal Tournament, or something else that would not cause people to spend too much time playing (somethat that is easy to start and finish - spending as little time as you have).
2) for team-building: it doesn't really matter what kind of games it would be, as long as someone is responsible for making it team-building activity. It doesn't happen by itself. If you want more than people becoming friends with each other, someone should spend time doing something like training people to play CS in teams. Teach them strategy, communication skills, etc. Watch demos after the games and discuss what went wrong/right, etc.
Check the Masters of Doom book, it contained a good description of Ion Storm extravagant office. Served them good. :)
I don't think the problem is too much exploitation. After all, that's what the modern entertainment business is built on. Harry Potter, Star Wars, everything else is exploited just fine without the brand losing value. In case of Lara the problem might simply lie in the fact that two primary brand development engines - games and movies aren't so hot.
If I was a brand manager at Eidos, I would concentrate on making the next game really good. Scrap the plans to reuse the engine for several games. Make a couple addons, if you must, but license a decent engine (Half-Life2, Doom3 or something simplier) and make an exciting, interesting and really good-looking game. Today's computers (and tomorrow's consoles) are capable of displaying very realistic and hot-looking chicks. Think of what is possible when you can dedicate 30% of the GPU power to rendering the main character, something that looks like the Nvidia's Dawn or even better. Realistic rendering of Angelina Jolie is possible if Eidos wanted that. If they combined it with decent gameplay that made original TR so cool (come on, this is not art, this is craft, you just need to hire good game designers), the game would sell like crazy and with the right marketing will attract a wide audience, including both young males AND females. Then Lara will be ready for the next round of exploitation all right.
Hey, but how they can afford it?! They told me will be out of business soon if they sold their products so cheaply!
But I don't think this fact has any important practical consequences. If you store something on a CD, you would obviously be able to fit the same amount of data on the disk, regardless of what base you use. Of course, if you could use another technology (one dot on a CD being a value in a different base, not just on or off), then decimal would be much better than ternary. ;)
Of course, if you are talking about processing information (CPU vs. RAM), ternary system is a little bit better, but the advantage over binary is very small, IIRC - about 10% may be. Not worth the hassle, I would say, unless there are other advantages.
1) Like with diamonds, there is artificial scarcity of good singers. If this technology can turn everyone into Pavarotti, good for us all.
2) RIAA claims that music is expensive to make. If this technology can make this process cheaper (record the album in one take instead of spending a whole month), they lose the right to complain about P2P sharing.
i was refering to the process of filesharing as such
You see, the labels are not in the business of selling MP3s, that's why they shouldn't care whether there is any difference between two MP3 copies, like De Beers shouldn't worry whether artificial diamonds made by Company A and Company B are different. Both these cartels have to worry about persuading customers that their own products are superior to cheap imitations.
Regarding cd images, see my reply below.
MP3's? who the hell shares those anymore?, do a search on lossess audio compression, with broadband most people who are even marginally audiophiles ditched MP3's a long time ago.
:)
:)
1) Most people are not audiophiles.
2) Most people use crappy speakers and headphones.
3) Most people actually switched to higher bitrate MP3s instead of ditching it alltogether. 192Kbps or 256Kbps are almost indistinguishable from CDs.
4) "Oops! I did it again" sounds pretty much the same on both CD and MP3.
So while there definitely are some people sharing (and downloading) music in lossless formats, most people could not care less. The general P2P music sharing picture is shaped by the majority, not by you and your audiophiles friends.
Just a few simple questions.
1) Is Canada able to market and sell "blood-free" diamonds? Yes.
2) Is there any real difference between a gem from Canada and a gem from South Africa? No.
3) Can De Beers do the same as Canada? May be.
I hate to burst your bubble, but that is where strong AI enters the picture. :)
You don't really need anything past selen (atomic number 34) to build stuff. Organic chemistry works wonders in nature and that is H+O+C+N and some other atoms in minuscule quantities for some extra effect. Heck, you can build most of things from carbon alone.
:)
Francium - atomic number 87, is an alkali metal of group IA of the Periodic Table. It is very unstable and quite short-lived, lasting about 21 minutes. It has never been found occurring for any long periods in nature. It is known, however, to form water-soluble salts. (Source
Why the heck would you need francium for?!?!?! To make water-soluble salts? LOL
Uranium is pretty useless as well, unless you use it to make energy or bombs. For both thing hydrogen works just fine and is reaily available from the nearest puddle. And while you are at it, there are shitloads of gold dissolved in water that can be easily extracted if needed.
Hope that helps alleviate your worries about shortage of raw materials in our posthuman future.
Bullshit!
:) Eventually, as other gems are copied as well, rich people will probably switch to smart nanogems with fluorescence, animation, holographics, artificial genetically-designed scented bio-jewelry or something else, which is still expensive to make. Once we have advanced nanoassemblers, of course, all that will be in vain and capitalist meritocracies will collapse all other the world. :)
Filesharing creates inferior MP3 copies of "perfect" CD audio WAVs. The difference between MP3 and CD is the same as between "artificial" carbon crystal and the "natural" one. If Debeers can "educate" people that their diamonds are real ones, then RIAA do the same to educate people that MP3s are crap. If, on the other hand, RIAA can't educate people so, the chances are Debeers will not be able to do that either. See the Wired article for some quotes by a diamond trader - he is happy to make his profit on artificial diamonds and his customers (in his opinion) are happy to buy cheaper gems.
I think that eventually so called "elite" will switch to other gems, middle class and poor people will be happy with their ~100$ diamond jewelry, some people will use diamonds in extravagant ways (like on the Wired cover - cool! or completely covering a Bugatti or a personal jet in diamonds).
As for RIAA, they will suffer from the same problem. MP3s are a decent substitute for music CDs. People will get these MP3s and listen to them. There are two possible developments.
1) RIAA (labels) survive and start selling MP3s (with no or minimal DRM) cheaply. They are able to maintain some sort of monopoly and still benefit somewhat from pricesetting (now for MP3s).
2) RIAA doesn't survive the P2P blow and labels slowly/quickly die out. Then a competitive market will emerge. The consumers are likely to benefit because competition is likely to improve quality (and keep prices comfortably low).
Morris wasn't a criminal, he was a Cornell Science student. You wouldn't expect him to write and release the worm. Same thing today, although some viruses might be written by criminals or [conspiracy]antivirus companies[/conspiracy], most are written for fun by people who should have known better.
/. that I can't find that described a very complex and difficult to find bug, which required combined efforts of 4-5 highly qualified specialists to eliminate it. The author was very proud of his own achievement - he managed to "reliably" reproduce the bug in ~30% of tests).
So we can be reasonably sure that viruses will appear in the future even if we somehow manage to educate the people and turn all virus writers to good. Another Morris will appear and write a virus not wanting to cause any harm. And the problem is that the more complex our systems become, the more dangerous will they be. Yes, the chances of viruses emerging from ones and zeros are currently slim. But what will happen when we have smart networks? Some harmless maintenance functions might become dangerous because of a bug or because of unpredicted interaction with other harmless components (there was an excellent post here on
Random criminals are not so dangerous, because their actions are limited by the nature of our phisical world. Even the most dangerous serial killer can't kill more than a hundred people. Computer viruses, on the other hand, are potentially capable (not today and with extremely low probability) of penetrating 90% of the world network in 5 seconds, blowing up several nuclear power plants, distrupting GPS and crashing hundreds of planes, wrecking shousands of ships and hundreds of thousands of cars, not to mention killing millions of people in hospitals, lifts, subways and literally everywhere. Add to that releasing some deadly biological viruses by shutting down security systems in the research labs. It only takes one virus in right circumstances to do all that shit.
So you can ignore the risks of potential real criminals and live with weak (in a good sense) and simple law enforcement. But you can't ignore the danger (potential future danger) of computer viruses in the same way.
It's a completely different thing with criminals. Crime does not "just happen", it usually have social roots. There are countries with extremely low crime level and they don't have to worry that situation will somehow worsen quickly and dramatically (unless they invite a lot of immigrants from less civilized countries).
In the same venue, some countries are safer from terrorism than others and this is not going to change dramatically (unless Iceland manages to piss off Pakistan or Angola somehow).
The situation with viruses is different - viruses do "just happen", because our experience shows that virus writers to not need any extra motivation - they write viruses just for the sake of it. Ergo no country (system) can be considered safe, because a virus may emerge any day. Another problem is that simple bugs are often enough to cause virus-like behaviour. There have been cases when an innocent mistake made a system to send too many e-mails, producing a spam-like behaviour. Imagine that a bug in DNS server will cause it to "spam" other DNS servers with lotsa packets instead of just sending the update a shutting up. Internet brought to a halt by a bug. You can imagine many similar scenarios. To defend against that we need to build secure systems. And viruses do help.
But there isn't much reason to believe it is any more likely than the moon spontaneously converting itself into a duck.
How about Moon turning into grey cheese?
I think it might be time. In my opinion we'd rather take the risks, try everything new (unless it's obvsiouly a bad thing to do, like creating Skynet, Jurassic Park or smth like that) and solve a few problems that arise later, then not try and remain in the Industrial Age forever (or actually until we run out of oil and gradually drift back into Environmental golden age (i.e. Stone Age or Mad Max style anti-utopia).
P.S. This is not a troll. I am honestly sick of people worrying too much. We need our techno-optimism of the 60s back and if that means killing every environmentonazi, then so be it!
I was a little surprised nobody mentioned this story that was posted recently here.
Nobody, except for the editor: Mmmm, foreshadowing.
Another reason is that SRAM is used in a CPU for cache - its VERY fast but takes up more silicon per bit and is very expensive per bit.
:)
Really? Very expensive? How many dollars per bit is that?
Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age discussed on Slashdot earlier. Actually the link to the eariler /. story was posted above under "foreshadowing".