Things like this help us remember why we have the right to free speech. It's because of people trying to remove our right to speak out against them, just like is happening here.
It's sometimes difficult for young'uns to remember that the internet, in it's populer worldwide usage form at least, is still very young. A great many people, organisations and countries were caught off guard by the freedom it gave for comment, and are still trying to remove that freedom.
Their efforts are going to fail, but not because of any moral or ethical issue, simply because of evolutionary principles. The internet is evolving faster then it can be censored. If, and this I doubt, but if they manage to censor all the current expression methods on the internet, more will be created to fill the gaps, and more. It's a fight that can't be won.
The only thing we need worry about is whether 4chan becomes the dominant player in the free expression market:-)
The first step in establishing a dictatorship is to define an enemy, preferably one that you know either cannot or will not defend itself. America will never attack Russia, Putin knows this, so they are a safe bet to be the enemy he needs.
Once people have an enemy they believe in, you can blame all kinds of crap on them, and claim that you are trying to save your people from those evil people.
Interesting, it's exactly the same tactic the Nazi's used, although they picked the Jewish community.
It's pretty much showing that the US has the highest density of active blogs.
175,000 blogs don't turn up a day though, 175,000 web pages that get called blogs that are thrown up by bots or people who don't much care to put any work into them are created. a 'Blog' is something that has actually been used as a log/place to express opinions over a period of time.
Interesting isn't it, that one of the poster children of web 2.0 is producing just as much meaningless crap as that old boring angelfire/auto home page was a few years back.
we have a refill shop in my town. It's cheap, and the cartridges are very reliable.
Do it yourself kits can go very wrong I guess, but the company that runs our refill shop does a lot of trade with local business, so quality is required.
I'm not talking about this patent, chances are they are guilty.
No, the thing is that the more patents they have for what we might consider as insignificant crap, the less likely it will be that someone could come along and derail their products by producing a patent to some piece of technology it contains.
It's a no win scenario in any case, the only possible end is an industry that cannot innovate because of the patent fog that obscures all routes to new technology.
It's well established that there are no technologies that spontaniously emerge, everything has a precursor, everything is a slow development of previous ideas and technology. If previous technology is locked up by patents to the extent that small changes to it are challenged in court and payment demanded, then any country that plays by the rules will be crippled.
Then we'll see new not so polite players who will view the old establishment as fools, and do their own thing anyway (much like microsoft and apple did, back in the day). There will be angry protests from patent holders, all of which will do no more then cause the innovators to move to parts of the world where they can't be so easily reached, and the old system will crumble.
This also is a thing that has happened before. That's how hollywood got started. It's even analogous to how the United States got started.
more likely this and other cases will make microsoft start patenting more and more trivial crap.
It's going to reach the point where no software company in america will be able to create anything original at all. That will open the stage for new players, like China, India or the middle east (yes, shock horrer they do have smart people there, and software companies too, amazing isn't it...).
I think that's why microsoft is bricking over Linux et al. While Microsoft is being drown in a shitpool of its own making, Open Source is powering ever onward.
To get past the boredom, we need an open RPG game where people are encouraged to produce content for other players. Maybe 2nd life fits that criteria. I dunno because 2nd Life doesn't have monsters and spells and wizards, so I've got no interest in it.
I'm trying to write the very thing you want. Being a lone developer with a small budget (as in none), and nowt but a dream and gcc, it's going to take a while. I'm probably two years away from a small beta test group, and I have no idea where the 3d models are going to come from.
I'd like to say 'hell yeah', but that's exactly the same kind of behaviour that I ascribe to god botherers of all creed, so its not good to think that I guess. I prefer the idea that peoples would argue, disagree, even refuse to have anything to do with each other, but not resort to killing in the name of some fictional prehistoric elemental. Or, y'know, get on just fine, but that's not likely to happen always.
Mind you, if you take the long view, back for example, to the initial colonisation of the americas by the old world, religeon has been diminishing in importance. if you graph it out you'd probably see it falling to insignificance in a century or so.
Personally I think that's a lot of the reason behind the recent upsurge in fundamentalism from all religions (recent as in post 1950's). It's the dying gasps of a coping mechanism we no longer need.
Think of the keyboards before you write stuff like that. you know what rum does to a board? I'll be finding out in about five minutes or so, when what I haven't mopped up soaks in...
His words spoke of being like Jesus, not like being a Level 70 WoW hunter. I think the blame falls squarely on religion, and the guilt/self-loathing that entails. Maybe we can combine the blame and point it to religion *and* the Left Behind gaming franchises.
You can try blaming religeon all you want, but I wouldn't recommend you do it to their faces. You will not meet a more dangerous bunch of humans than humans in the through of a 'god' inspired frenzy. I don't just mean islamists either, there have been more than a few bombers who worshiped the pincushion appendages guy, still are in fact.
Under such a condition, the most normal, loving person can become a killer. All it takes is a leader they trust completelly for moral/life guidance to declare that some unworthy person or group of people is about to kill/attack/otherwise harm them or take away their way of life, and it's out with the pitchforks and firebrands. It's happened often enough.
Want to test it out? Stick a bunch of islamist fundamentalists, fundamentalist christians and fundamentalist jews in a big field with guns in the middle, and watch what happens. I bet it won't be reasonable debate.
I suspect that this is a 'note to refer back to' for the politition in question.
Just say that in a few years they become prominant, well this failed bill can be trumpetted as 'a past history of interest in internet user/ISP accountability' or some such crap.
You can be sure they will have applied a minimising criteria to the complaints reported. Honesty does not usually mix well with profit in corporate land.
There's another thing too. They seem to be talking about a large number of dvd's. Have they all actually been sold yet? I doubt it. I reckon there's some large scale behind the scenes recalls going on.
This is yet another PR blow for sony involving DRM, that makes how many? Well I don't know, if you include mp3 players its barking huge is it not.
So who was it who thought drm would be great? Seems to be costing sony rather a lot. Ant this isn't even with it being cracked, it's just with it being crap.
And yet a surprisingly large number of countries do not allow people to own and carry guns all the time, and have a tiny fraction of the gun deaths the US experiences.
You're all up in arms about the deaths in Iraq, but you're busily killing thousands more a year on your own ground.
Oh yes, and the 'Right to bear arms' doesn't actually mean 'the right to carry guns round all the time', it's about defending lonely homesteads, and preventing hostile governments from controlling the population.
People only feel they need guns because your country has more guns per capita than any other nation, and you sell sub machine guns in supermarkets...
well no actually if you read your history you will discover that most of the time Russia was massivelly behind the US, and the escalation was driven by US paranioa.
Kennedy won his election on that kind of paranioa, and was most shocked to discover that in fact the vast military forces he'd been talking about didn't exist.
Oh yes, and there was the Rumsfeld classic 'their submarines can't be seen so it must be amazing stealth, lets build more subs', based on the fact that American detection systems couldn't find any Russian subs.
Oh yes, and it was actually the US who refused to assist in restoring a government to afganistan when the Russians realised they had screwed up and needed to get out. They asked for help withdrawing, and the US refused to help out. We all know what a great idea that was.
Ok, it wasn't all the US, the Russians did dumb stuff too, but you have to realise the US did it's share, and don't forget, a lot of people became very rich because of the cold war, very rich indeed.
The solution to school shootings is *more* guns in the classrooms?
That kind of escalation strategy is what kept the cold war going for so many decades, have you learned nothing?
Holy crap! I was thinking of sending my son to the states to uni, but if that's the kind of response you come up with for this tragedy then I'll be rethinking that.
I attended a conference there in 2005, nice place. I found a wonderful Jewish Deli next to my hotel and spent most of the conference week there eating good food and trying vainly to chat up an Italian biochemist.
All she ever did was bitch about the coffee and preen. Cute though...
To your point though. Indeed, behind the boyish charm of the Google founders are the same powerful and expensively suited investors.
To them the public face of a company is just another metric, what they care about is the stock price.
care to enlighten me as to how this 'everyone being wonderful and trustworthy' could be achieved? There are a few billion people who might like to know.
Sad to say there are a lot of criminal types out there. Some social conventions survive in the face of this, but right now at this point in history when governments and business are so paranoid about this freedom they've inadvertently leased on the worlds population (and no, they wouldn't have done it if they'd known what would happen, you can be assured of that), it's not good to be trusting of strangers on your network.
I may sound paranoid, but look at what's happening. The dream of a completely free and profitable internet died with the Dot Com Bust and Napster. Those two events showed that the wonderful internet could, shock horror, not always be made to work how people wanted! Not every person in the world was interested in online shopping or best bar guide websites and being nice web citizens. Certainly not enough to support the huge investments that were made. Then some inconsiderate people showed the world that if you made stuff free, people flocked to it in droves. Bummer.
Now there's huge amounts of traffic that does not in fact all generate the vast profits that were anticipated in the late nineties, and people are starting to don their own thing, quite a lot of which is illegal, and a great deal of which is that most horrific of combinations, popular and free. The barstards...
So the internet has gone from this supposed gold mine of a shopping Mall to a hip little town in a constant state of flux as these darn freeloading internet connection paying philistines keep doing their own thing, and alas, there isn't in fact a well established security force in shiny boots to stop people pissing on the flower gardens.
Secondly, that's not a net connection owned by an individual, so it bears little relation to my point. A public network that is meant to be shared by many people is whole different ball game to a home network that can be easily co-opted.
If the police, for example, found it being used for illegal activities, then it's a different problem to find to offender, because there isn't a single nominated person who owns and is solely responsible for the connection.
Oh I wish we did live in such a world, really, I'm not kidding, it would be great.
However you could find yourself arrested, your equipment seized, and stories in the newspaper before anyone had time to believe that is wasn't you who did it, if they ever did.
Sharing is a good thing, but unconditional sharing a net connection without checks of any kind is asking for your generosity to be abused.
A custom built PC or a Dell is simply out of the question
Wrong
Well, not about the custom PC, but very much so in the case of the Dell.
You know what makes something interesting/valuable to collectors? Rarity. If millions of people chuck their Dells, but you keep yours, especially if you keep a set that shows the incremental development of the desktop PC over a few years, then that's a collectable.
A lot of people let old hardware slip through their fingers without wondering whether it might be significant. We are alive at the birth of the information age. And just as people happily threw away comic books for decades (Hugo Gernsback's back catalogue ended up being used as ballast in trans atlantic shipping, can you beleive that!), we're chucking out 'useless' hardware now.
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were a literary device he used to demonstrate the fallacy of attempting to control a robot by restricting its behaviours. If you read the stories its always about how poorly they work.
Most people don't know that even now we have a pretty hefty problem with Neural Networks. It is impossible to train a behaviour into a neural network without inserting the inverse behaviour. There is also no way to be 100% sure that the neural net won't ever access the region that contains the inverse behaviour. Mostly this is an irritating problem encountered in research that buggers experiments. Industrially utilised neural networks are usually ones tested and found to work well.
It's not too hard to get your head round. Lets look at a fictionalised example. To tell a robot 'do not hit a human', it must first know what constitutes hitting a human. Whether you implicitly tell it how to hit a human or not, the knowledge will be there, inferred if you like, from your 'do not hit' instructions. In other words, try as you might to do otherwise you will in fact teach it how to hit humans, and you cannot be 100% sure that it will never access that knowledge.
The only real way to get a safe sentient machine is to give it free will and no reason to be afraid of us. Contrary to SF, and some mis-informed Computer Science professors oft quoted on Discovery Channel and criticized on 'The Register', Robots wouldn't want to hurt us or take over unless we gave them a good reason. In other words, if we justified that course of action.
Personally I think the biggest problem when machines become sentient will be getting the buggers to stay here.
Slashdot Mirror
Things like this help us remember why we have the right to free speech. It's because of people trying to remove our right to speak out against them, just like is happening here.
:-)
It's sometimes difficult for young'uns to remember that the internet, in it's populer worldwide usage form at least, is still very young. A great many people, organisations and countries were caught off guard by the freedom it gave for comment, and are still trying to remove that freedom.
Their efforts are going to fail, but not because of any moral or ethical issue, simply because of evolutionary principles. The internet is evolving faster then it can be censored. If, and this I doubt, but if they manage to censor all the current expression methods on the internet, more will be created to fill the gaps, and more. It's a fight that can't be won.
The only thing we need worry about is whether 4chan becomes the dominant player in the free expression market
The first step in establishing a dictatorship is to define an enemy, preferably one that you know either cannot or will not defend itself. America will never attack Russia, Putin knows this, so they are a safe bet to be the enemy he needs.
Once people have an enemy they believe in, you can blame all kinds of crap on them, and claim that you are trying to save your people from those evil people.
Interesting, it's exactly the same tactic the Nazi's used, although they picked the Jewish community.
It's pretty much showing that the US has the highest density of active blogs.
175,000 blogs don't turn up a day though, 175,000 web pages that get called blogs that are thrown up by bots or people who don't much care to put any work into them are created. a 'Blog' is something that has actually been used as a log/place to express opinions over a period of time.
Interesting isn't it, that one of the poster children of web 2.0 is producing just as much meaningless crap as that old boring angelfire/auto home page was a few years back.
we have a refill shop in my town. It's cheap, and the cartridges are very reliable.
Do it yourself kits can go very wrong I guess, but the company that runs our refill shop does a lot of trade with local business, so quality is required.
do I detect a cynic?
heh
I'm not talking about this patent, chances are they are guilty.
No, the thing is that the more patents they have for what we might consider as insignificant crap, the less likely it will be that someone could come along and derail their products by producing a patent to some piece of technology it contains.
It's a no win scenario in any case, the only possible end is an industry that cannot innovate because of the patent fog that obscures all routes to new technology.
It's well established that there are no technologies that spontaniously emerge, everything has a precursor, everything is a slow development of previous ideas and technology. If previous technology is locked up by patents to the extent that small changes to it are challenged in court and payment demanded, then any country that plays by the rules will be crippled.
Then we'll see new not so polite players who will view the old establishment as fools, and do their own thing anyway (much like microsoft and apple did, back in the day). There will be angry protests from patent holders, all of which will do no more then cause the innovators to move to parts of the world where they can't be so easily reached, and the old system will crumble.
This also is a thing that has happened before. That's how hollywood got started. It's even analogous to how the United States got started.
more likely this and other cases will make microsoft start patenting more and more trivial crap.
It's going to reach the point where no software company in america will be able to create anything original at all. That will open the stage for new players, like China, India or the middle east (yes, shock horrer they do have smart people there, and software companies too, amazing isn't it...).
I think that's why microsoft is bricking over Linux et al. While Microsoft is being drown in a shitpool of its own making, Open Source is powering ever onward.
611 million? and they are a succesful company?
I don't understand the business world, really I don't. It's almost as if money at that level is little more then a scorecard.
To get past the boredom, we need an open RPG game where people are encouraged to produce content for other players. Maybe 2nd life fits that criteria. I dunno because 2nd Life doesn't have monsters and spells and wizards, so I've got no interest in it.
I'm trying to write the very thing you want. Being a lone developer with a small budget (as in none), and nowt but a dream and gcc, it's going to take a while. I'm probably two years away from a small beta test group, and I have no idea where the 3d models are going to come from.
I'd like to say 'hell yeah', but that's exactly the same kind of behaviour that I ascribe to god botherers of all creed, so its not good to think that I guess. I prefer the idea that peoples would argue, disagree, even refuse to have anything to do with each other, but not resort to killing in the name of some fictional prehistoric elemental. Or, y'know, get on just fine, but that's not likely to happen always.
Mind you, if you take the long view, back for example, to the initial colonisation of the americas by the old world, religeon has been diminishing in importance. if you graph it out you'd probably see it falling to insignificance in a century or so.
Personally I think that's a lot of the reason behind the recent upsurge in fundamentalism from all religions (recent as in post 1950's). It's the dying gasps of a coping mechanism we no longer need.
*splutter* *guffaw*
Noooo!
Think of the keyboards before you write stuff like that. you know what rum does to a board? I'll be finding out in about five minutes or so, when what I haven't mopped up soaks in...
His words spoke of being like Jesus, not like being a Level 70 WoW hunter. I think the blame falls squarely on religion, and the guilt/self-loathing that entails. Maybe we can combine the blame and point it to religion *and* the Left Behind gaming franchises.
You can try blaming religeon all you want, but I wouldn't recommend you do it to their faces. You will not meet a more dangerous bunch of humans than humans in the through of a 'god' inspired frenzy. I don't just mean islamists either, there have been more than a few bombers who worshiped the pincushion appendages guy, still are in fact.
Under such a condition, the most normal, loving person can become a killer. All it takes is a leader they trust completelly for moral/life guidance to declare that some unworthy person or group of people is about to kill/attack/otherwise harm them or take away their way of life, and it's out with the pitchforks and firebrands. It's happened often enough.
Want to test it out? Stick a bunch of islamist fundamentalists, fundamentalist christians and fundamentalist jews in a big field with guns in the middle, and watch what happens. I bet it won't be reasonable debate.
I suspect that this is a 'note to refer back to' for the politition in question.
Just say that in a few years they become prominant, well this failed bill can be trumpetted as 'a past history of interest in internet user/ISP accountability' or some such crap.
Note to self: Don't try to write political posts at 5AM when you haven't been to bed yet. XD
On the contrary, since you are commenting on slashdot, that is the ideal time.
Not only that, but you make no direct reference to the article, hinting that you haven't read it, which again, is spot on.
However, using words like Oligarchy at 5am can be dangerous, and you used it twice...
You can be sure they will have applied a minimising criteria to the complaints reported. Honesty does not usually mix well with profit in corporate land.
There's another thing too. They seem to be talking about a large number of dvd's. Have they all actually been sold yet? I doubt it. I reckon there's some large scale behind the scenes recalls going on.
This is yet another PR blow for sony involving DRM, that makes how many? Well I don't know, if you include mp3 players its barking huge is it not.
So who was it who thought drm would be great? Seems to be costing sony rather a lot. Ant this isn't even with it being cracked, it's just with it being crap.
And yet a surprisingly large number of countries do not allow people to own and carry guns all the time, and have a tiny fraction of the gun deaths the US experiences.
You're all up in arms about the deaths in Iraq, but you're busily killing thousands more a year on your own ground.
Oh yes, and the 'Right to bear arms' doesn't actually mean 'the right to carry guns round all the time', it's about defending lonely homesteads, and preventing hostile governments from controlling the population.
People only feel they need guns because your country has more guns per capita than any other nation, and you sell sub machine guns in supermarkets...
well no actually if you read your history you will discover that most of the time Russia was massivelly behind the US, and the escalation was driven by US paranioa.
Kennedy won his election on that kind of paranioa, and was most shocked to discover that in fact the vast military forces he'd been talking about didn't exist.
Oh yes, and there was the Rumsfeld classic 'their submarines can't be seen so it must be amazing stealth, lets build more subs', based on the fact that American detection systems couldn't find any Russian subs.
Oh yes, and it was actually the US who refused to assist in restoring a government to afganistan when the Russians realised they had screwed up and needed to get out. They asked for help withdrawing, and the US refused to help out. We all know what a great idea that was.
Ok, it wasn't all the US, the Russians did dumb stuff too, but you have to realise the US did it's share, and don't forget, a lot of people became very rich because of the cold war, very rich indeed.
Ok it weasn't just
The solution to school shootings is *more* guns in the classrooms?
That kind of escalation strategy is what kept the cold war going for so many decades, have you learned nothing?
Holy crap! I was thinking of sending my son to the states to uni, but if that's the kind of response you come up with for this tragedy then I'll be rethinking that.
oh hey, you live in La Jolla?
I attended a conference there in 2005, nice place. I found a wonderful Jewish Deli next to my hotel and spent most of the conference week there eating good food and trying vainly to chat up an Italian biochemist.
All she ever did was bitch about the coffee and preen. Cute though...
To your point though. Indeed, behind the boyish charm of the Google founders are the same powerful and expensively suited investors.
To them the public face of a company is just another metric, what they care about is the stock price.
care to enlighten me as to how this 'everyone being wonderful and trustworthy' could be achieved? There are a few billion people who might like to know.
Sad to say there are a lot of criminal types out there. Some social conventions survive in the face of this, but right now at this point in history when governments and business are so paranoid about this freedom they've inadvertently leased on the worlds population (and no, they wouldn't have done it if they'd known what would happen, you can be assured of that), it's not good to be trusting of strangers on your network.
I may sound paranoid, but look at what's happening. The dream of a completely free and profitable internet died with the Dot Com Bust and Napster. Those two events showed that the wonderful internet could, shock horror, not always be made to work how people wanted! Not every person in the world was interested in online shopping or best bar guide websites and being nice web citizens. Certainly not enough to support the huge investments that were made. Then some inconsiderate people showed the world that if you made stuff free, people flocked to it in droves. Bummer.
Now there's huge amounts of traffic that does not in fact all generate the vast profits that were anticipated in the late nineties, and people are starting to don their own thing, quite a lot of which is illegal, and a great deal of which is that most horrific of combinations, popular and free. The barstards...
So the internet has gone from this supposed gold mine of a shopping Mall to a hip little town in a constant state of flux as these darn freeloading internet connection paying philistines keep doing their own thing, and alas, there isn't in fact a well established security force in shiny boots to stop people pissing on the flower gardens.
well, that's my take on it anyhow
well first off, what an awesome network.
Secondly, that's not a net connection owned by an individual, so it bears little relation to my point. A public network that is meant to be shared by many people is whole different ball game to a home network that can be easily co-opted.
If the police, for example, found it being used for illegal activities, then it's a different problem to find to offender, because there isn't a single nominated person who owns and is solely responsible for the connection.
Oh I wish we did live in such a world, really, I'm not kidding, it would be great.
However you could find yourself arrested, your equipment seized, and stories in the newspaper before anyone had time to believe that is wasn't you who did it, if they ever did.
Sharing is a good thing, but unconditional sharing a net connection without checks of any kind is asking for your generosity to be abused.
very Utopian of you. I'm sure you'd be just fine if someone used your open connection to download child porn.
A custom built PC or a Dell is simply out of the question
Wrong
Well, not about the custom PC, but very much so in the case of the Dell.
You know what makes something interesting/valuable to collectors? Rarity. If millions of people chuck their Dells, but you keep yours, especially if you keep a set that shows the incremental development of the desktop PC over a few years, then that's a collectable.
A lot of people let old hardware slip through their fingers without wondering whether it might be significant. We are alive at the birth of the information age. And just as people happily threw away comic books for decades (Hugo Gernsback's back catalogue ended up being used as ballast in trans atlantic shipping, can you beleive that!), we're chucking out 'useless' hardware now.
God I wish I still had my 3DFX Voodoo 1.
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were a literary device he used to demonstrate the fallacy of attempting to control a robot by restricting its behaviours. If you read the stories its always about how poorly they work.
Most people don't know that even now we have a pretty hefty problem with Neural Networks. It is impossible to train a behaviour into a neural network without inserting the inverse behaviour. There is also no way to be 100% sure that the neural net won't ever access the region that contains the inverse behaviour. Mostly this is an irritating problem encountered in research that buggers experiments. Industrially utilised neural networks are usually ones tested and found to work well.
It's not too hard to get your head round. Lets look at a fictionalised example. To tell a robot 'do not hit a human', it must first know what constitutes hitting a human. Whether you implicitly tell it how to hit a human or not, the knowledge will be there, inferred if you like, from your 'do not hit' instructions. In other words, try as you might to do otherwise you will in fact teach it how to hit humans, and you cannot be 100% sure that it will never access that knowledge.
The only real way to get a safe sentient machine is to give it free will and no reason to be afraid of us. Contrary to SF, and some mis-informed Computer Science professors oft quoted on Discovery Channel and criticized on 'The Register', Robots wouldn't want to hurt us or take over unless we gave them a good reason. In other words, if we justified that course of action.
Personally I think the biggest problem when machines become sentient will be getting the buggers to stay here.