Re:time-space pathways and "holodecks" (spoiler)..
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
And the aliens made his mummy out of virtual hair.
Ahem...
lone.
The real reason why it sucked.
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
** SPOILER WARNING**
For one thing the acting of the boy and the scientist are really bad, something here doesn't work. At all. The boy, beside saying i want my mummy to love me, and please make me a real boy, he doesn't do anything interresting, neither does the scientist.
There is NOTHING profound in the way this story is treated.
Take the main subject, can human love machines ? can machines love humans ? That's a wonderfull subject, yet the implications of such questions are barely addressed. Oh yes, mummy cries a lot and this culminates in this (truely) awesome scene when she leaves david in the forest.
Yet, what do we have here ? mummy could not live with that, so she left david in the forest, now david wants to be a real boy so mummy loves him. Ahem...
Then on with another subject, mechas are used as cannon balls in an all american show. Well... That is also a good subject. Is it appropriate to use mechas, sentient machines as slaves and explosive material ? That's a really good subject ! You really feel that this is gonna be a great movie! The giggolo is sublime, you feel this is going to lead to a superb epic story of rights freedom and love.
The entire matter of mecha rights can be resumed to two sentences the Giggolo (i don't remember his name) says "They made us too soon, too smart and too many!", that was a great quote, this should have been the basis for a great leader speech! and "I am, I was" before he dies (or is caught, who knows). Don't expect anything more of this.
At this point everthing breaks down in the viewer's mind. A sense of "What am i doing in this theater watching this movie?". In short, something doesn't work here, people start to laugh at the story, this gets weird.
David is underwater for 2000 years and discovered by nice aliens of light... Ahem...
Again, this is an interresting idea on its own, but does it belong in this movie ? People can argue about that a long time. I think it's a great idea but the way it was done (it totally comes from NOWHERE at all) was stupid.
To end this rant, here is what I think: this should have been a trilogy.
The first movie should have really explored what love is between humans and machine, there was a great subject here that was spoiled by the lack of time.
The second movie should have been the rise of the epic struggle of the mechas for their sentient rights. Again this could have been awesome if well done, and not resumed to two sentences and a stupid vulgar fire show. This would have ended with david in the icy water.
The third movie would have begun with the aliens (in my view they would have been of a much more biological-type). And we could have followed the influence of david (and the human memory) among the thoughts of the alien population. They would have created people (and they would not have died stupidly one day after being cloned), They would just not have their memories, like clones should not. The alien civilization would have revived the human civilization as a gift for introducing love and compassion in their set of concepts.
Or something.
To make it short: It sucked because it tried to address too many issues. In the end it adresses none.
MP3 isn't exactly like One-click-shopping. There's a real basis of years-long research and development behind it, and it was certainly a non-obvious invention.
Then why were RMS and his gang able to come up with a free replacement (ogg) in their basement?
Could it be that the matter of psychoacoustic compression has been talked over many times in a large number of scientific paper and that recreating one is really a matter of recreating empirical data ? It's not easy, just easier.
Could this be attributed to coriolis force ? The solar system is not at rest within the galaxy, nor the galaxy is at rest withing the local group, and so on... An object staying on its trajectory may not appear to do so locally. I figure that they thought of this force and included it in their calculations, but what if more frames of references where embedded than currently accepted ? One could argue the universe itself is rotating (the same way a black hole can apparently rotate). Of course it would have to rotate very fast to have any kind of impact on a probe or such a tiny object so it's probably not it, but shuld coriolis force be dismissed altogether as an explaination ?
And maybe you should (re)open a history book and read about WW2 in europe, and this time, try to understand it.
As for the yahoo nazi auctions bans asked by the french gvt, I don't think it's a good idea but i don't think this is worst than evil-izing communism through decades of brainwash of an entire country either.
I would say the fear of repeating history is probably less stupid than the fear of the unknown. But that's just me.
Let Germany keep France after the war ? From what i grasped in school, when the war was over, France wasn't occupied, thanks to the FFI, the resistance, and to a good extent, to the US army whose veterans you're insulting.
>England and indeed the whole of the UK and EC/EU standardised on these in the early 70's as part of the Standard Units / Metric system.
hahahaha
sorry that's just so totally wrong:) Go have some vacations in france for instance and ask a 12 year old kid what a billion is:) last time i checked, france was in EU. And please, don't serve me the old anti-france stuff, that's not the point here, i'm not saying they are right i'm saying it's not standardized AT ALL.
>Some old fogies still use British Billion (and ounces and gallons, for fuck's sake...)
hahahaha again:)
i just bought 2.5 gallons (9.48L) of water. surely the people who designed the package are old fogies.
Ok, so let's talk about miles, feet, inches, yards, pounds, oz, and F:)
I'm going to propose a new system of units based on the length of my sexual aparatus. The first multiple of this unit shall be 4.57575757 times the original unit. My new temperature (the Z) will be scaled from 0 (the temperature of my nose in winter) to 100 (the temperature of my CDrom drive after it has been spinning for the length it takes to listen to AN album). My weight units shall be based off the weight of a mac donald's cheesburger.
I'm just tired of hearing arguments explaining why the us system is better, or why the metric system is better, or why any system is better at all.
I just wish NASA and its contractors could agree internally.
"At some point, the algorithm to tell the drive you have the key gets executed and can be intercepted."
Supposedly the key pairs system is here to ensure you can't just say "i have the key", but i agree with you that at some point, you have to actually use this key in order to sign or decypher data.
In the case of DeCSS, the key was unencrypted in one of the approved softwares (i belive it was grabbed from xing dvd player's binary and they then extrapolated more and more key at which point they stopped making new ones coz there was no point anymore).
The whole deal probably teached something to the industry... claiming something is secure is not enough, it actually has to be secure for the whole system to work. so basically they'll be more carefull when it comes to validating sofwares.
But again, i agree, this is not sufficient, at some point the software has to use that key and do something with it.
Thanks to debuggers, we have access to everything a software does and access. So the game for them would be to obfuscate the decrytion and signing code as much as possible. They probably won't care about the impact on performance since we're already hitting the Ghz and more.
But
There are two ways of 'cracking' this.. either get someone really clever who will step through the assembly, understand the algorithm and extract a key. This may be very hard if the code is very obfuscated. In that case, another option you have is to simply disassemble the program and cutpaste its assembly code, slightly modified to work with your calls.
Having done it myself and having seen people do it better than me, i know how easy it is to just disassemble a code and paste the assembly into another program.
This may not be easy in the case of a super-obfuscated binary, but it is DEFINITLY possible, and WILL be done.
Ask anybody who wrote a disassembler.
So here's one way to fight this: disassemble a trusted software. In the worst case, cut & paste its own assembly code inside your program (of course it's not as easy as that, but it's the main idea), then make your program be an ATA driver for your OS. Install two drives, one secure, one not secure. Drive the secure hdd with your ATA driver, make your driver autmatically decypher the data when it accesses protected sectors, then write it to the unprotected drive. Voila. The driver would basically render old software compatible again. The 'copy to another drive' part could simply be a copy command issued from the shell.
This is one among lots of other schemes which would work, i would bet my job on it.
How many people still use audio cassettes ? not many, and those who still do won't be able to do that for long... Don't think 5 or even 10 years ahead... think about 20, 30, 100 years in the future...
The scary thing about this technology is that it could mean eventually all media whatever it is gets fully encrypted & signed through all the parts of the chain.
Looks like the media industry is investing in the future... they probably know it won't be possible to enforce using this technology soon, but let's consider the following scenario :
2000-2010 : hdd manufacturers implement CPRM in hdd, part of the consumers mass buy them, but a non negligeable part of it work around the limitations, by using old hdd or SCSI drives. Foreign manifacturers still produce hdd with the old uncrippled ATA command set
2010-2020 : The industry realizes that a chain is as weak as its weakest part, and that CD-ROM drives still have the ability to dump raw audio data that can be saved without the copy protection bit. The next move is not pressure hw manufacturers to include CPRM v2 into CDrom drives, enforcing the copyright bozo bit that's been here for ages.
2025 : the media industry start complaining to SCSI manufacturers, alledging their drives makes it easier for people to pirate music & video. CPRM v3 is proposed as part of the SCSI command set and implemented a few years later.
2028: Video capture devices now handle the multiplexed copyright control data sent along with video signals. You can still digitize and distributes the movie of your summer hollidays, but you can't capture StarWars 11, let alone distribute it.
2030-2040: the media industry realizes (at last) that foreign hw manufacturers still produce hw (cd drives, hdd, sound & video capture cards) that ignores copy protection. Time to change how we distribute music and video, digital era is here since 30 years anyway, so the industry simply stops producing solid media, thus making CD drives and video capture devices only usefull to anything that is not copyrighted, and getting rid of the foreign technology problem altogether. It takes about 30 years, but finally the only reason to have CDs, DVDs & videotapes is as collectors items.
2060 : The entire chain is encrypted and signed, there is just no way to dump digital media as raw data, simply because all hardware is "authorized" in order to get a decryption key, and using such a key to dump data as raw binary would violate DMCA v5. Software industry has no choice, data travels on networks completly encrypted, so if they want to use that data, they have to Pay And Conform (the new media industry slogan)
2100: there has been no challenge to the 100% controled media system since 40 years. Very few people are aware that just 100 years in the past, there was no dinstinction between copyrighted data and non copyrighted data. OSes make the distinction at the very core of their architectures, a media file automatically inherits security properties.
No media software has been developped independently since 50 years because the process of being a trusted media processor(tm) is 1) much too expensive for an individual, 2) only granted to software giants who could pay giant amounts of money in case of misuse of the key they've been grated.
2130 : By now, the media industry starts to relax, hardware and software are all CPRM v5 compliant. A Media file now IS an encrypted file by nature.
Since you can't develop independantly a media player or producer anymore, and since a media file is a secure file by nature, independant artists fade away. The only way to distribute media is through "proper" channels: the media industry.
2200: There has been no way to produce or manipulate media independently from the media giants for more than a century. People don't even think this is wrong, it's just the way the system works.
Digital books, digital music, and digital video is now everywhere. And all of it has been approved. There is now no ned to worry anymore, you won't run into pornography or anything BAD, whatever that means.
Well, i just spent half a hour reading replies to this story, and all i can say is... very sad... this is all very sad... there are so much messages of hatry here against the french or the EU, i can't believe i'm reading slashdot...
I'm a french guy working for an US company... so what ? we're all the same... and we all would like some privacy ! So it's not just because its the french who are showing the way that it MUST be a bad way, with some evil goal behind that...
So is it like 'If the french do/did something wrong, then fuck them, let's do something even worse!' Is that thinking ?
Future french generations will be very happy if the US one day does something to raise the french population against a government which would just pee on their rights... and i guess americans may be happy in the future if what comes of all this france vs echelon story makes things a little better for them.
I'm not saying that france does that for the US people, i'm not that naive, but if everyone (US, France/EU, China, etc etc) is keeping an eye on each other, only good can come of it!
We're supposed to be geeks, firsts of a generation of people that can think without frontiers... live up to that, start actually doing it.
While we're sitting on our geek self satisfaction, a very small group of people are taking advantage of a technology we all own.
To state that something violates laws of physics, you must first know the layws of physics. Well, i'm sorry to disapoint you, but we don't know the laws of physics. We are merely working with models, called theories, that seem to work more or less like the actual universe we live in.
Someone once described the work of a physician as trying to figure out the internal mechanism of a clock, without opening it. You can develop a theory that says the base principle is that hours complete a rotation two times a day and minutes, 24 times a day. You can arbitrarily state that this is the nature of the clock and that it's never going to change since the theory does not allows it to. Providing this theory, you could say that stopping the hands of the clock is impossible and violates the laws of the clock's physics. However, the theory is only (very)partially correct, and stopping the clock is only a matter of removing the battery that powers it. As the theory has no knowledge of the concept of battery, it seems impossible, yet it's not.
We're still very far from understanding physics globally. And even if we, someday, find a theory that perfectly matches reality, there will be no guarantee that the theory is exact.
I totaly agree with you on this point. There is absolutly no way today to support the assumpion that an exact replica of the brain state will have consciousness and memory. This is pure speculation.
IF the experience works, it will prove that consciousness is a side effect of complexity. If it does not work, it will just prove nothing, as it will raise this question: Did the experience failed because there is a 'soul' that we cannot physically duplicate, or because we just don't know enough about biological neurons behaviour.
There are more claims these days that the actual 'operator' (as opposed to the concept of soul which is rather esoteric) which would control my brain would be a result of quantum effects inside it. Memory and analytical data would be handled quite like what we think now, but the flow of thoughts, and more specifically, thinking reflexes (like issuing a veto on a thought) are a result of a process that goes way too fast to be the simple result of biological neurons as we know them.
There also are a lot of experiences showing that what we can read about a brain activity is not a direct representation of what the brain actually does. If i decide to take this apple, you can detect activity in my brain even before i actually decide to do anything. Bouddhists can think while in meditation, but if you monitor the brain activity, it will show nothing. This is a problem as this activity is one of the official ways to declare clinical death...
The problem with brain science is that results of todays experiences are very difficult to interpret... They are very different from what we would expect and confuses scientists logic. Given this simple fact, i just can't believe we can ever dream to duplicate a brain state within 50 years and expect to see consciousness duplicated.
This does not mean that building an artificial neural net based on the human brain model will not give an good artificial intelligence. The problem is consciousness... Pure analytical ai, even if it was as or more powerfull than human's brain, would still lack consciousness.
There is a very interresting theory about how neurons could be the equivalent of a quatum detection device. As quatum state is undefined (it has many possible states) before it is measured, and set as a reality as soon as it is measured, that gives a quiete interresting explaination of the concept of free will. You brain (neurons, connections) would be your thoughts-precessor. Quantum states would be the thoughts itself. By deciding to think about something, you just select a possible quatum state, and by selecting it, you make it real. It's a bit difficult to explain (and as you may have noticed i'm not a specialist) but this would fairly well (better than anything else anyway) unite determinism and free will.
The gaia theory does not involve any kind of consciousness, James Lovelock, its author, was VERY carefull about that. The models he created were specifically designed to show that gaia doesn't need to be conscious to work. Gaia is merely a way to look at our planet as a biological entity.
As for conscious rocks and trees, i don't think anybody here needs me to reply on that.
This was a link to 'great pictures to stare at', it was not meant to be a Hubble specific site. The great thing about this site is that it shows a different picture every day and usually (but not always) related to something which just happened. However this site shows Hubble pictures from time to time.
Several months ago, i've set my Litestep windows windowmanager (or shell as the windows world like to call it) under GPL.
Since then, many new win-windowmanagers saw light, some of them GPL.
At that point, though it was not the first GPL software for windows, it was one of the first windows-only softwares GPL'ed.
The point is, a new development team took back the code, removed its high dependance over C++ Builder, set up a CVS tree and some dev mailing lists, and all seems to run smoothly (last stable version was out about a week ago http://floach.pimpin.net/).
During this period, there were some people willing to speed up things about Win GPL... i can remember some people tried to get attention from the slashdot community and try to get some support from the *nix GPL world. Unfortunately, though many people welcomed the effort, many others were close-minded and were just looking at us as bugs...
GPL under Windows DOES work, but *nix GPL defenders should not consider that GPL is only good for *nix plateforms.
At first i though it was a question of code openness, but for MOST people, it is definitly a question of windows vs *nix.
Slashdot Mirror
And the aliens made his mummy out of virtual hair.
Ahem...
lone.
** SPOILER WARNING**
... That is also a good subject. Is it appropriate to use mechas, sentient machines as slaves and explosive material ? That's a really good subject ! You really feel that this is gonna be a great movie! The giggolo is sublime, you feel this is going to lead to a superb epic story of rights freedom and love.
For one thing the acting of the boy and the scientist are really bad, something here doesn't work. At all. The boy, beside saying i want my mummy to love me, and please make me a real boy, he doesn't do anything interresting, neither does the scientist.
There is NOTHING profound in the way this story is treated.
Take the main subject, can human love machines ? can machines love humans ? That's a wonderfull subject, yet the implications of such questions are barely addressed. Oh yes, mummy cries a lot and this culminates in this (truely) awesome scene when she leaves david in the forest.
Yet, what do we have here ? mummy could not live with that, so she left david in the forest, now david wants to be a real boy so mummy loves him. Ahem...
Then on with another subject, mechas are used as cannon balls in an all american show. Well
The entire matter of mecha rights can be resumed to two sentences the Giggolo (i don't remember his name) says "They made us too soon, too smart and too many!", that was a great quote, this should have been the basis for a great leader speech! and "I am, I was" before he dies (or is caught, who knows). Don't expect anything more of this.
At this point everthing breaks down in the viewer's mind. A sense of "What am i doing in this theater watching this movie?". In short, something doesn't work here, people start to laugh at the story, this gets weird.
David is underwater for 2000 years and discovered by nice aliens of light... Ahem...
Again, this is an interresting idea on its own, but does it belong in this movie ? People can argue about that a long time. I think it's a great idea but the way it was done (it totally comes from NOWHERE at all) was stupid.
To end this rant, here is what I think: this should have been a trilogy.
The first movie should have really explored what love is between humans and machine, there was a great subject here that was spoiled by the lack of time.
The second movie should have been the rise of the epic struggle of the mechas for their sentient rights. Again this could have been awesome if well done, and not resumed to two sentences and a stupid vulgar fire show. This would have ended with david in the icy water.
The third movie would have begun with the aliens (in my view they would have been of a much more biological-type). And we could have followed the influence of david (and the human memory) among the thoughts of the alien population. They would have created people (and they would not have died stupidly one day after being cloned), They would just not have their memories, like clones should not. The alien civilization would have revived the human civilization as a gift for introducing love and compassion in their set of concepts.
Or something.
To make it short: It sucked because it tried to address too many issues. In the end it adresses none.
lone.
MP3 isn't exactly like One-click-shopping. There's a real basis of years-long research and development behind it, and it was certainly a non-obvious invention.
Then why were RMS and his gang able to come up with a free replacement (ogg) in their basement?
Could it be that the matter of psychoacoustic compression has been talked over many times in a large number of scientific paper and that recreating one is really a matter of recreating empirical data ? It's not easy, just easier.
Could this be attributed to coriolis force ? The solar system is not at rest within the galaxy, nor the galaxy is at rest withing the local group, and so on... An object staying on its trajectory may not appear to do so locally. I figure that they thought of this force and included it in their calculations, but what if more frames of references where embedded than currently accepted ? One could argue the universe itself is rotating (the same way a black hole can apparently rotate). Of course it would have to rotate very fast to have any kind of impact on a probe or such a tiny object so it's probably not it, but shuld coriolis force be dismissed altogether as an explaination ?
lone
And maybe you should (re)open a history book and read about WW2 in europe, and this time, try to understand it.
As for the yahoo nazi auctions bans asked by the french gvt, I don't think it's a good idea but i don't think this is worst than evil-izing communism through decades of brainwash of an entire country either.
I would say the fear of repeating history is probably less stupid than the fear of the unknown. But that's just me.
Let Germany keep France after the war ? From what i grasped in school, when the war was over, France wasn't occupied, thanks to the FFI, the resistance, and to a good extent, to the US army whose veterans you're insulting.
>000 000 = million
>000 000 000 = milliard
>000 000 000 000 = billion
>000 000 000 000 000 = billiard
>000 000 000 000 000 000 = trillion
France has the same system.
>England and indeed the whole of the UK and EC/EU standardised on these in the early 70's as part of the Standard Units / Metric system.
:) Go have some vacations in france for instance and ask a 12 year old kid what a billion is :) last time i checked, france was in EU. And please, don't serve me the old anti-france stuff, that's not the point here, i'm not saying they are right i'm saying it's not standardized AT ALL.
:)
:)
hahahaha
sorry that's just so totally wrong
>Some old fogies still use British Billion (and ounces and gallons, for fuck's sake...)
hahahaha again
i just bought 2.5 gallons (9.48L) of water. surely the people who designed the package are old fogies.
Ok, so let's talk about miles, feet, inches, yards, pounds, oz, and F
I'm going to propose a new system of units based on the length of my sexual aparatus. The first multiple of this unit shall be 4.57575757 times the original unit. My new temperature (the Z) will be scaled from 0 (the temperature of my nose in winter) to 100 (the temperature of my CDrom drive after it has been spinning for the length it takes to listen to AN album). My weight units shall be based off the weight of a mac donald's cheesburger.
I'm just tired of hearing arguments explaining why the us system is better, or why the metric system is better, or why any system is better at all.
I just wish NASA and its contractors could agree internally.
<i>"It's just software we can hack it"</i>
As stupid as it sounds, i may come down to just that, as it is (by far) the weakest part of the chain.
lonedfx
"At some point, the algorithm to tell the drive you have the key gets executed and can be intercepted."
Supposedly the key pairs system is here to ensure you can't just say "i have the key", but i agree with you that at some point, you have to actually use this key in order to sign or decypher data.
In the case of DeCSS, the key was unencrypted in one of the approved softwares (i belive it was grabbed from xing dvd player's binary and they then extrapolated more and more key at which point they stopped making new ones coz there was no point anymore).
The whole deal probably teached something to the industry... claiming something is secure is not enough, it actually has to be secure for the whole system to work. so basically they'll be more carefull when it comes to validating sofwares.
But again, i agree, this is not sufficient, at some point the software has to use that key and do something with it.
Thanks to debuggers, we have access to everything a software does and access. So the game for them would be to obfuscate the decrytion and signing code as much as possible. They probably won't care about the impact on performance since we're already hitting the Ghz and more.
But
There are two ways of 'cracking' this.. either get someone really clever who will step through the assembly, understand the algorithm and extract a key. This may be very hard if the code is very obfuscated. In that case, another option you have is to simply disassemble the program and cutpaste its assembly code, slightly modified to work with your calls.
Having done it myself and having seen people do it better than me, i know how easy it is to just disassemble a code and paste the assembly into another program.
This may not be easy in the case of a super-obfuscated binary, but it is DEFINITLY possible, and WILL be done.
Ask anybody who wrote a disassembler.
So here's one way to fight this: disassemble a trusted software. In the worst case, cut & paste its own assembly code inside your program (of course it's not as easy as that, but it's the main idea), then make your program be an ATA driver for your OS. Install two drives, one secure, one not secure. Drive the secure hdd with your ATA driver, make your driver autmatically decypher the data when it accesses protected sectors, then write it to the unprotected drive. Voila. The driver would basically render old software compatible again. The 'copy to another drive' part could simply be a copy command issued from the shell.
This is one among lots of other schemes which would work, i would bet my job on it.
lonedfx.
How many people still use audio cassettes ? not many, and those who still do won't be able to do that for long... Don't think 5 or even 10 years ahead... think about 20, 30, 100 years in the future...
:/
The scary thing about this technology is that it could mean eventually all media whatever it is gets fully encrypted & signed through all the parts of the chain.
Looks like the media industry is investing in the future... they probably know it won't be possible to enforce using this technology soon, but let's consider the following scenario :
2000-2010 : hdd manufacturers implement CPRM in hdd, part of the consumers mass buy them, but a non negligeable part of it work around the limitations, by using old hdd or SCSI drives. Foreign manifacturers still produce hdd with the old uncrippled ATA command set
2010-2020 : The industry realizes that a chain is as weak as its weakest part, and that CD-ROM drives still have the ability to dump raw audio data that can be saved without the copy protection bit. The next move is not pressure hw manufacturers to include CPRM v2 into CDrom drives, enforcing the copyright bozo bit that's been here for ages.
2025 : the media industry start complaining to SCSI manufacturers, alledging their drives makes it easier for people to pirate music & video. CPRM v3 is proposed as part of the SCSI command set and implemented a few years later.
2028: Video capture devices now handle the multiplexed copyright control data sent along with video signals. You can still digitize and distributes the movie of your summer hollidays, but you can't capture StarWars 11, let alone distribute it.
2030-2040: the media industry realizes (at last) that foreign hw manufacturers still produce hw (cd drives, hdd, sound & video capture cards) that ignores copy protection. Time to change how we distribute music and video, digital era is here since 30 years anyway, so the industry simply stops producing solid media, thus making CD drives and video capture devices only usefull to anything that is not copyrighted, and getting rid of the foreign technology problem altogether. It takes about 30 years, but finally the only reason to have CDs, DVDs & videotapes is as collectors items.
2060 : The entire chain is encrypted and signed, there is just no way to dump digital media as raw data, simply because all hardware is "authorized" in order to get a decryption key, and using such a key to dump data as raw binary would violate DMCA v5. Software industry has no choice, data travels on networks completly encrypted, so if they want to use that data, they have to Pay And Conform (the new media industry slogan)
2100: there has been no challenge to the 100% controled media system since 40 years. Very few people are aware that just 100 years in the past, there was no dinstinction between copyrighted data and non copyrighted data. OSes make the distinction at the very core of their architectures, a media file automatically inherits security properties.
No media software has been developped independently since 50 years because the process of being a trusted media processor(tm) is 1) much too expensive for an individual, 2) only granted to software giants who could pay giant amounts of money in case of misuse of the key they've been grated.
2130 : By now, the media industry starts to relax, hardware and software are all CPRM v5 compliant. A Media file now IS an encrypted file by nature.
Since you can't develop independantly a media player or producer anymore, and since a media file is a secure file by nature, independant artists fade away. The only way to distribute media is through "proper" channels: the media industry.
2200: There has been no way to produce or manipulate media independently from the media giants for more than a century. People don't even think this is wrong, it's just the way the system works.
Digital books, digital music, and digital video is now everywhere. And all of it has been approved. There is now no ned to worry anymore, you won't run into pornography or anything BAD, whatever that means.
Our children are safe
lone.
> If you're not pirating anything (software, MP3s, DiVX, et al) then you have nothing to worry about.
This kind of comments really scare me...
From now on i'll listen to your phone conversations, read your mail before you do, and inspect your house on a random basis.
Surely you won't mind at all, since you have nothing to hide...
lone.
The language was PPL, and executables were PPE, not PPC :) PPC was an alternate compiler by Aegis (who also made PPLX, the decompiler)...
Well, i just spent half a hour reading replies to this story, and all i can say is... very sad... this is all very sad... there are so much messages of hatry here against the french or the EU, i can't believe i'm reading slashdot...
I'm a french guy working for an US company... so what ? we're all the same... and we all would like some privacy ! So it's not just because its the french who are showing the way that it MUST be a bad way, with some evil goal behind that...
So is it like 'If the french do/did something wrong, then fuck them, let's do something even worse!' Is that thinking ?
Future french generations will be very happy if the US one day does something to raise the french population against a government which would just pee on their rights... and i guess americans may be happy in the future if what comes of all this france vs echelon story makes things a little better for them.
I'm not saying that france does that for the US people, i'm not that naive, but if everyone (US, France/EU, China, etc etc) is keeping an eye on each other, only good can come of it!
We're supposed to be geeks, firsts of a generation of people that can think without frontiers... live up to that, start actually doing it.
While we're sitting on our geek self satisfaction, a very small group of people are taking advantage of a technology we all own.
To state that something violates laws of physics, you must first know the layws of physics. Well, i'm sorry to disapoint you, but we don't know the laws of physics. We are merely working with models, called theories, that seem to work more or less like the actual universe we live in.
Someone once described the work of a physician as trying to figure out the internal mechanism of a clock, without opening it. You can develop a theory that says the base principle is that hours complete a rotation two times a day and minutes, 24 times a day. You can arbitrarily state that this is the nature of the clock and that it's never going to change since the theory does not allows it to. Providing this theory, you could say that stopping the hands of the clock is impossible and violates the laws of the clock's physics. However, the theory is only (very)partially correct, and stopping the clock is only a matter of removing the battery that powers it. As the theory has no knowledge of the concept of battery, it seems impossible, yet it's not.
We're still very far from understanding physics globally. And even if we, someday, find a theory that perfectly matches reality, there will be no guarantee that the theory is exact.
I totaly agree with you on this point. There is absolutly no way today to support the assumpion that an exact replica of the brain state will have consciousness and memory. This is pure speculation.
IF the experience works, it will prove that consciousness is a side effect of complexity. If it does not work, it will just prove nothing, as it will raise this question: Did the experience failed because there is a 'soul' that we cannot physically duplicate, or because we just don't know enough about biological neurons behaviour.
There are more claims these days that the actual 'operator' (as opposed to the concept of soul which is rather esoteric) which would control my brain would be a result of quantum effects inside it. Memory and analytical data would be handled quite like what we think now, but the flow of thoughts, and more specifically, thinking reflexes (like issuing a veto on a thought) are a result of a process that goes way too fast to be the simple result of biological neurons as we know them.
There also are a lot of experiences showing that what we can read about a brain activity is not a direct representation of what the brain actually does. If i decide to take this apple, you can detect activity in my brain even before i actually decide to do anything. Bouddhists can think while in meditation, but if you monitor the brain activity, it will show nothing. This is a problem as this activity is one of the official ways to declare clinical death...
The problem with brain science is that results of todays experiences are very difficult to interpret... They are very different from what we would expect and confuses scientists logic. Given this simple fact, i just can't believe we can ever dream to duplicate a brain state within 50 years and expect to see consciousness duplicated.
This does not mean that building an artificial neural net based on the human brain model will not give an good artificial intelligence. The problem is consciousness... Pure analytical ai, even if it was as or more powerfull than human's brain, would still lack consciousness.
There is a very interresting theory about how neurons could be the equivalent of a quatum detection device. As quatum state is undefined (it has many possible states) before it is measured, and set as a reality as soon as it is measured, that gives a quiete interresting explaination of the concept of free will. You brain (neurons, connections) would be your thoughts-precessor. Quantum states would be the thoughts itself. By deciding to think about something, you just select a possible quatum state, and by selecting it, you make it real. It's a bit difficult to explain (and as you may have noticed i'm not a specialist) but this would fairly well (better than anything else anyway) unite determinism and free will.
Then there is the whole Gaia thing.
The gaia theory does not involve any kind of consciousness, James Lovelock, its author, was VERY carefull about that. The models he created were specifically designed to show that gaia doesn't need to be conscious to work. Gaia is merely a way to look at our planet as a biological entity.
As for conscious rocks and trees, i don't think anybody here needs me to reply on that.
if one is forced by the "deterministic" laws of nature to draw conclusions, and not by logic, then what's the point of proving anything?
Who said there was a point to anything ?
This was a link to 'great pictures to stare at', it was not meant to be a Hubble specific site. The great thing about this site is that it shows a different picture every day and usually (but not always) related to something which just happened. However this site shows Hubble pictures from time to time.
Several months ago, i've set my Litestep windows windowmanager (or shell as the windows world like to call it) under GPL.
Since then, many new win-windowmanagers saw light, some of them GPL.
At that point, though it was not the first GPL software for windows, it was one of the first windows-only softwares GPL'ed.
The point is, a new development team took back the code, removed its high dependance over C++ Builder, set up a CVS tree and some dev mailing lists, and all seems to run smoothly (last stable version was out about a week ago http://floach.pimpin.net/).
During this period, there were some people willing to speed up things about Win GPL... i can remember some people tried to get attention from the slashdot community and try to get some support from the *nix GPL world. Unfortunately, though many people welcomed the effort, many others were close-minded and were just looking at us as bugs...
GPL under Windows DOES work, but *nix GPL defenders should not consider that GPL is only good for *nix plateforms.
At first i though it was a question of code openness, but for MOST people, it is definitly a question of windows vs *nix.
lone.
If you want facts, there are some here :
h tml
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/1043/safe.
There are some references such as the Research Journal, which is a undiscardable source of scientific data.