Sure, like leaving the existing, poorly accounted R&D writeoffs in place would do any better. And Joe Blow? He could be in the U.S. and could be someone who wants to call you to buy something from you, thanks to the money he didn't have to Blow on someone's idiotic monopoly.
Re:I *am* original... the facts about me define me
on
The Ethics Of Data Brokers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Thank you. Very informative (except for the comment about
this being a stupid line of discussion. Not true unless you think people need
to be kept in the dark about it).
Well, your argument didn't convince me that consumers' rights
are being fully considered. You said:
Simply, there has to be a creative choice to include some facts and to
not include other ones.
OK. Once upon a time, I selectively decided to purchase one
specific hot dog product instead of another. Instead of using one
credit card to pay for it, I artistically whipped out another
and rendered my digitized signature with a unique flourish. This was
recorded.
Then I traveled to another location and creatively decided
to pay for an electronics part in cash. That was not recorded. Thus I decided what to leave
on my credit record "storyline" and what to leave out.
The next day, to add to the biography, I creatively considered several areas to move to,
and which address, and moved to one of them, crossing storied mountains and
rivers. I chose from among many numbers and streets, for instance I
may have moved to a #80 address or a #404 -- my choice. How often do
I make payments and on what day? That could also be a choice. All of
these things put together can read like a storyline, similar to how a
book author chooses the names of characters, events, streets and
towns. Those who observe me must write down the actions as I
have performed them. It is as if I am dictating to them a message and
they are writing it down.
A non-fiction story is a compilation of facts. A fictional story
is a compilation of some mixture of fact and imagination. Both are
subject to copyright. People can take excerpts, but (correct me if I'm wrong) they cannot obtain the entire work. If giving out one number allows someone to obtain the entire work, would that not be considered a violation of copyright? (Even if you disagree, that's OK, read on.)
Your credit record is a document you are writing either by action
or inaction. There is no end to those credit-repair agencies which
claim they are able to help generate a fictitious or semi-fictitious
storyline to make your "online character" look more creditworthy.
They are spinning a tale for someone else to read, which you would
otherwise be the author of. Book authors can also allow "ghost
writers" to handle part of the work for that purpose, yet the author
can still own the copyright.
Copyright aside, someone has already been issued a
provisional patent on a storyline as in this recent
story. (So even if copyrights are out of the picture there are
plenty of other precedents being set.)
OTOH, to argue the reverse, if the results of my decisions are mere
facts and not part of a biographical storyline that I am writing, then I could
also conclude that:
a movie is merely a very large integer and as such, the number
contains no creativity inside it whatsoever
A song is just a smaller integer, similarly consisting of bytes
placed end to end.
A book is a yet smaller integer, and to prove it I could reduce it
down to its factors, just like any other number.
etc....
A movie, song, or book is reducible to a fact, then. The
creative part of the movie is what they performed while in the course
of their business (e.g. shooting it in their studios). They did so
under constraints of time and money, just as I have constraints
of time and money in producing my storyline. That very long integer
they produced as a result, well, that's just a "fact," just like the
data I produce through my decisions is merely a "fact." I may choose
to view a factual report of their activities through my viewer of
choice, but I will probably be obliged to pay them for that privilege even though copyr
The tax collected is always less than what people are paying to buy the
software, plus the time they spend reading licensing, monitoring lawful
use, worrying about return policies, throwing away packaging, and all of the other costs and
maintenance commercial software typically faces.
Since people no longer have to buy the software, it is like giving
every user a tax credit and lowering the barrier to entry, allowing
computers to be even cheaper, more accessible and more widespread. Everyone has more
money left over to buy other things, which generate tax revenue, or
they save it, which increases the savings rate and allows cheaper
lending. Either way, the money doesn't disappear, it simply gets
redirected into other businesses, so that they experience a
boost. (Not only consumers would benefit from OSS, it will simplify
life for businesses and government too. )
In the meantime, this would help increase the use of software and
push people towards broadband. People would be freer to try out new
and different things, and so they would. They wouldn't be stuck using things that don't meet their requirements. (Well, at least until some lobbyists mandate that rootkits, spyware and bloat cannot be taken out, or some other betrayal of consumers' interests happens.)
Turning it around: What ever happens to the R&D tax credits the
government gives to the large software companies? Do you think those will be missed?
Server and service uptime are not necessarily the same thing.
Either way, the users won't appreciate it if the service they're in the middle of using
goes down and loses the connection. Minimizing that is a good thing, right? I mean, the timeliness and predictability of some transactions might be important to someone right? Or are you arguing that all services should be connectionless?
Ironically, one of the reasons I've sent my daughter to a Catholic
school here is that they teach evolution.
Doubling the irony, this enlightened policy is probably why there
is any discussion at all about including ID in science textbooks.
Had instead, a number of errant Catholics (or a very vocal cult)
somehow gained control of the board and decided that a competing
proposal had to be included side by side with ID, such as Indirect
Design (e.g. cast the Virgin Mary in the role of Earth's birth mother
for a sort of intentional but indirect creation type of thing), then
Protestant religious leaders would scramble to put an end to ID
entirely. If there is any chance that their children will actually
grow up being taught a different religion in secular schools than
precisely what they believe, they will withdraw their support and
begin to cite "separation of C&C."
I suppose if someone really wanted to enumerate the whole list of
Design hypotheses, there shouldn't only be ID, FSM, or BSD, it should begin to look something like this:
Intelligent Design, where it is presumed that a very powerful
being creates the Earth and decides all of the finer details of it
Indirect Design (I indirectly created the earth as a result of
getting the Mother Goddess pregnant, it was all part of my
plan... but, I left the details to somebody else.)
Unintentional Design (I got the Mother Goddess pregnant and now look what
happened -- there are billions of people pestering me every day with
trivial requests about back problems and skin infections)
Accidental Design (oops, I didn't mean to create that, and now
that darned Prometheus gave out Fire while I wasn't looking)
Messed Up Design (Now listen up folks, I was going to say
"let there be light... elements" but somebody interrupted, so now
we've got to wait until the fusion reactor cools down.)
Profitable Design (Once the population reaches 1 trillion, we will
teleport them to Deneb where they will make profitable slaves for our
salt mines)
Evil Design (Muhahahahaaa... look at those fools I've created, who
think I did this for anything other than my own amusement. Howsabout
another hurricane eh? *Whoosh!*)
Taking uploading into account, ones lifespan could be trillions of
years
How many planned obsolescence cycles is that? And, will the EULA
for each upgrade require that your "brain engrams" maintain a positive opinion of the
vendor or provider?
In theory, "mobile computing" allows people to continue working wherever they are. In practice, however, not all environments are that great ergonomically or productively. For instance, try setting down your laptop on the kitchen table while your family is trying to talk to you, and see if you get any significant work done there. The reduction of the rate of productivity will only become a source of frustration there. You try this on the couch or in bed but it doesn't seem to work too well there either. Eventually you realize that you need to be locked away in a room somewhere without as many interruptions, and you find yourself in the room where your desktop computer is already sitting, so, to save yourself the time of setting up the laptop there, you use that instead.:) The laptop, then, is merely there to serve as a reminder of the work you have to get done.:)
The commercials that promoted laptops as something you would take with you to the beach were fantasy, pure fantasy. By all means, if you ever see anyone at the beach stupid enough to bring a laptop, feel free to kick sand everywhere or create as many interruptions as possible. You will be doing them a favor, and you will keep laws from being passed that designate beaches as "quiet zones" or something equally ridiculous.
What this is *not* in any form is a general purpose CPU.
The article doesn't seem to agree:
One of the big challenges to becoming a mainstream commercial
processor is compatibility with existing software and systems,
especially x86 compatibility, Moore says. But one way to maintain
compatibility would be to use Trips as a co-processor, he says. "The
general-purpose [x86] processor could offload heavy tasks onto the
co-processor while still handling legacy compatibility on its own."
So, it looks like they're trying to get Intel or AMD interested in
producing a heterogeneous multi-core unit that includes their trippy
core, in the hopes of keeping the number of cores (and their communications overhead) down to a minimum. Intel already has a form of (so-called) instruction-level
parallelism with the Itanic, and it didn't work out too well (except
maybe for crypto-heavy workloads). It's possible AMD will be mulling
it over. One of the things they will have to worry about is whether a
compiler can actually be written to use it, FTA:
... the Trips compiler sends executable code to the hardware in blocks
of up to 128 instructions.
With 128 instructions to schedule at once, that might provide a
chance to actually keep all of the processing units on the chip busy.
With the Itanic, it was really a challenge to do that, since you had
to pull two floating point instructions out from somewhere in every
clock cycle, something that not all workloads could accomplish, and I
can see the compiler writers going crazy trying to produce some sorts
of ultimately self-defeating hacks trying get that accomplished:)
This is not to say that I disagree that much with your post,
Kurzweil may have been overly optimistic about this decade's research
(at least the parts of it that weren't classified), but note that
sometimes political decisions play a larger role than technological
advances.
You cited a quote from 2000. Well, as it turns out, history took a
sharp turn only 1 year later. Is it reasonable to require Kurzweil or
anyone else to account for unlikely political events, especially for
barely credible over-reactions? You are certainly reasonable to
expect him to refactor his arguments, but not if you think he should
be able to foresee everything on the political front. I cannot but
think that the paranoid security focus that has afflicted us since
then has had some impact on technological progress and the ability of
our whole society to participate in that progress. The technological
growth curve has gone from a certain exponential rise to a bumpy,
foggy, less predictable road. And in contrast to the initial freedoms
of the internet, one has to keep asking what sorts of things may be
outlawed next. There is no telling. If he had somehow been able to
presage all of this in photographic detail in 2000, the likelihood is
that we would have ridiculed him (then) as an overly pessimistic
crackpot.
So, really we are just accusing him of being a futurist. Of which
he is guilty as charged. But this is not as condemning as it sounds
because we need people like him, and I don't mean as a sort of total
fantasy trip either. We (optimists and pessimists alike) at least
need to keep some idea of whether there is a future worth working
toward or not, and how far we are veering off from that future. If
nobody can conjure up such a future, not even an undying optimist,
then, maybe then, we will know we have reached a dead end and finally
question the direction we're going in.
By that point we may not even care about the golden future we have
lost -- the mind control "freedom" rays will keep us from worrying
about it, and the memory disruption "protection" rays will cause us to
forget, just in case:)
The definitions vary so much that ontology is in danger of losing its traditional meanings to become a buzzword that doesn't actually mean anything other than "we are going to use this new jargon word for our patents now that we have hired an internet founder or some other famous figure who has agreed to back us up on our use of the term despite the conceptual existence of alternatives." If your post isn't perfectly informative, at least it can be insightful.
Reinvention of the lexicon is a possible backdoor into the patent system for pre-existing technologies, or technologies that are similar to pre-existing functions for the same thing. They are basically renamed so as to appear like something new, and if it is official-sounding enough (ontology sounds like a pretty serious term...), they may be able to pass under the patent office's radar. If the patent office doesn't watch for this exploit, we will end up with a bunch of overlapping cruft. (Not that that isn't already the case.)
I agree that it could help the most at the starting point, but even after that:
1....it could (ideally speaking) save time as a reference to help find related scientific papers or related reference materials. It may be quicker at this task than the average library index and have a more uniform interface than disparate libraries. If it points to inappropriate references, it will be either obvious from the title or will soon be discovered (and hopefully deleted by the researcher.)
2. After a paper is finished, it might help to have a quick sanity check for formulae and that sort of thing. Trolls can change those things, but if they are inconsistent with the paper they would need to be double-checked anyway, so it is no worse for that, and the researcher may then correct the wiki if necessary. (It can also help with hints about less crucial things like conventions for spelling and notation.)
3. The more scientists use it, the more authoritative it will become. Or, it may evolve or fork into a more authoritative source.
4. How well would the traditional publishing industry survive a spate of troll submissions? Is its immune system even prepared to handle a determined effort by trolls in the future?
Ya, there's so many possibilities, I can barely contain the excitement:
Now we can search the Moon for... traces of the Apollo module, and... uh?
We can search inside Mars for the Beagle crash site, and... uh?
We can search the asteroid belt for... rocks? Irony?
We can search Jupiter to see where the Big Red Storm is today?
We can search Saturn for... ring composition?
We can search inside Neptune for... car keys?
We can search inside Ur...
OK, maybe those of us who haven't lost our moral fibre should stick
to searching the inner planets, and leave those "other" types of
searches to those in the law-making bodies of the executive branch who are inherently unable to enjoy those types of things and will therefore exercise the appropriate levels of restraint when reviewing the data they have collected *cough* *cough*....
The title of the patent (from the uspto website) is:
"DISTRIBUTED HYPERMEDIA METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY INVOKING EXTERNAL APPLICATION PROVIDING INTERACTION AND DISPLAY OF EMBEDDED OBJECTS WITHIN A HYPERMEDIA DOCUMENT"
If this covers only one possible method of making plugins, that's one thing. FOSS browsers could simply find a different way of doing it. But if it covers all methods of making a plugin to a web browser, or of embedding apps into a browser, then it could be a problem. The latter one is what MSFT will be most interested in, as they depend so heavily on browser-embeddable apps. It may be cheaper for them to simply buy out whoever owns the patent if they can. Then, of course, if they can, they can turn around and use it against everyone else.
If they can't, I wonder how the eminent domain precedent will play out in allowing a backdoor into taking another company's (or a university's) patents when they don't want to sell? What's the limit? Can someone replace a university campus with a walmart if they want to, because of not enough revenue? It would have been an interesting question for Mr. Roberts, who, incidentally, was recently confirmed and so will be helping to decide the MSFT case that is currently queued up.
Warning! *flashing lights* Already four words come out and the
reply is trying to shove the word "ban" into my mouth, where I said
"oppose." Oppose is something people do voluntarily, while "ban" is a
negative act of force against voluntary choice. Big
difference. Big whitewash.
As it turns out, taking away consumer choice is more along the
lines of what the TCG consortium is guilty of supporting. Not little
ol' me, I'm not forcing people to do anything....Hypocrisy, pure and
simple.... I favor voluntary, informed choices, while your pals
(or masters) the TCG members favor removing your choice to buy
anything other than their TCG-infested hardware.
So, first you get it bass ackwards, and then the next part of
your argument takes license to mindlessly drag that straw dummy on a
determined rampage through the muck of a dark spooky wilderness of
convenient doubts, casting all sorts of fantasy assumptions and
wild-eyed fears on it and then only to find... that it was built on a
false premise. Well, duh. But now you wake up and the light shines
upon it and what is revealed? Who said ban? You did.
*cackling straw-dummy laughter*
Just because [RMS] says it, doesn't make it true.
And just because YOU say it, doesn't make it false. Whom to
believe then? The only way to determine is not by saying, but by
listening carefully to the arguments. Seeing as you are not good at
listening to what people say but instead deliriously misrepresenting
arguments, I would tend to think that RMS is slightly ahead of you on
the credibility scale.
Apple is putting a TCM chip (correct abbreviation? I get them mixed
up) into their new Intel Macs,
You mean TPM (Trusted Platform Module). But not only Macs will
have this. The TCG consortium is very large and seems intent on
sticking their TPM (capability) into everything they can.
Apple is making noises like they may grant a reprieve from total
DRM imprisonment right now, but since all computers will eventually
have the capability, someone's assurance is not a long term guarantee
that you won't be 0wnzored later.
but they're not going to be saying you can only run Apple software on
it.
Point to where my post says that? You're sure pulling a lot of
stuff out of your rapidly emptying posterior. I guess you are down to
the bottom of the barrel to scrounge up any kind of argument.
...And if one is written, you won't have to buy it, unless it's
legislated that it's mandatory
That was precisely my point. Junk like this should not be
monopolistically forced down our throats by industry coalitions. The
consumer should have a choice. See, you even agree with me on
that, which is my real premise, that of voluntary
opposition (not the false one you invented), but you are intent on
militantly disagreeing.... Snap out of it. *snap* *snap*
If they don't want their hardware to be used a certain way, buy
something else.
That would be a great choice to have, wouldn't it? Now go and show
me a new motherboard that isn't TCG conformant that I have the choice
to buy.
*raps fingers on desk*
*folds arms*
*checks watch*
Couldn't find one? You mean they don't make them anymore? Hmm....
Then it doesn't look so good for the cell phone industry either, does it?
Fair use is not a fundamental right.
They must have slipped that into your kool-aid somehow. Actually,
Fair Use stems naturally from two things:
You might be surprised to discover that the source code for SSH.com's
SSH server and client software is available to anyone who wants to
examine it
Thank you, I didn't know that. Maybe the story title should have said it draws Theo's ire, not open source ire, if they are just as open (of course it depends on the other specific license restrictions, etc.)
Then again, reporting that something draws Theo's ire wouldn't be big news:)
Anyway, what is so 'enterprise' about it that OpenSSH doesn't have?
Good question. It seems very enterprising to claim that a closed software
product is "in a different class by itself" -- tantamount to saying it
is more secure than an open source product.
The crucial difference for me is whether I can check the source
code for gaping security holes. With open source software, it is
relatively easy. At least you can get a third party to vouch for the
lack of obvious security holes in an open source product. With a
closed product, you get only the vendor's assurance. Maybe the vendor
could leave some secret exploits in there to convince people that they
need to upgrade every so often? You would have no choice but to pay
up, after all, your "enterprise" depends on it now.
But does closed software retain some security through obscurity?
Can blackhat hackers reverse engineer a closed software product
anyway? Yes, they can, and I wonder if it is a coincidence if this
happens close to a product upgrade cycle.
IMHO, they are using the enterprise buzzword to try to evoke images
of an "Enterprise class" warship, bristling with weapons and rotating
radars and the latest bleeping control center screens, roaming your
coastline defending you against any possible attack. The only trouble
is you are not allowed to inspect the ship to see if it has a leak,
and if the ship sinks, they'd rather you didn't tell anyone because
they might not meet their sales target for that quarter....:)
the slowing of its landing, however, is to be due to parachutes.
So I guess the idea is, the plane is able to determine the general location, but once
the parachutes are deployed, it sounds like the specific location is
left up to the winds to determine.
Do you know if the parachutes are deployed out the back (so that
the plane lands on its nose, which seems awkward), or at the nose
(landing on its thrusters???), or at the top (aerodynamics issues,
flipping end over end during deployment...)?
(I'm wondering if a normal radially-symmetric capsule with some
small control surfaces added wouldn't be able to do much the same
thing and cost less to develop.)
That you could use a chip to limit what can be done on a cell phone is
hardly new or interesting..
Heavy duty TPM encryption can enable such things as biometric (e.g. fingerprint) signing of EULA acceptance for DRM-governed purchases. The existing cellphone technology includes a EULA as part of your service contract (with its own nasty provisions for early termination, etc...), but this way they can hold you to each agreement individually and so have a lot more room to play with variations on the legal verbiage that can be used to lock you into a frustrating agreement, with evidence that it was signed explicitly by your own finger.
when the topic is changed to peer-to-peer technologies and the RIAA
efforts against those, make the argument that you shouldn't argue
against a technology just because it has some bad uses
It is not inconsistent to argue in support of personal freedoms in
both cases (TCG implementation and use of P2P technologies by
consumers).
The argument here is not which technology makes us smile from ear to ear, it is how to preserve our rights against constant assaults, which I think is a little bit more important. Don't you?
all it consists of is a bunch of hypothetical examples of ways
technology could be used, without giving any evidence to believe they
will be used that way
Is it safe to speculate yet who will benefit from future "crowd
control pain rays?" Would a lot of deep hypothetical speculation be
necessary to figure out who "crowd control machine-gun robots" will
ultimately be aimed at?
What possible benefit to you will outweigh a possible one-way loss
of basic freedoms? Wouldn't it be better to insist on a solution that
doesn't have those disadvantages, if that is good enough?
Does it matter that you won't be the initial target of these
control measures (under the current leadership)? Wouldn't it be a
wise precaution to oppose them just in case the public elects a leader
you think is irresponsible? Why not stick with technologies that
exclude the possibility of that sort of danger?
I suppose you want us not to oppose those things, but rather let
them happen because we don't have any evidence yet to believe
they will be used against us (um, like prosecution of P2P filesharing
teenagers, illegality of DVD decrypting in your own home, voting
machine abuse, unseen unsigned EULA contract abuse, spyware,
nonskippable commercials on various devices, spam, cussing out
employees and chair throwing, etc....)
~ Oh no, they wouldn't misuse it, they are so perfect and smiling, they have clearly been so responsible with the other technologies they have come
across. *drinks kool-aid* ~
Once a precedent allowing nasty stuff through TCG stands in the
courts as a legalized infringement of property and other rights, it
will be much harder to get rid of. But there is still one vote that
counts: the one that you exercise in not buying this junk, because
that is the only way they will get the message (even if they pretend
otherwise and blame the poor sales figures on a lack of ringtones or
something.)
I believe there's a Federal law prohibiting squatting.
There is, it's called the 1999 Anti-CyberSquatting Act, or the more
official name of Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, or the
even more official name of S.1948 Intellectual Property and
Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999.
Too bad it doesn't cover the current scheme of patent squatting
being rampantly performed by some companies with the excuse that they
are doing it "defensively." Or does it? IANAL, but if it applies to names and marks maybe it could be
applied to patents as well since the industry constantly uses the
catch-all term of "Intellectual Property" to refer to several
different things. Well, if that flawed terminology is going to be
allowed to reign supreme in the industry, then maybe this law could be
applied against all kinds of IP and used to challenge patents
as well, when the patents are cyber-patents and little more than a
"name for a domain of knowledge" in patent clothing?
This reminds me of the time some years ago when "the death of the PC" was imminent. Well, there was a lot of hand-wringing over it, but it doesn't look like that came true.
On what grounds to they predict this one besides the mantra that the network is the computer and you will be doing all of your surfing through a tiny phone, when a lot of people tell me they just want a phone to be a phone, not a magic wand with worse sound quality than a turn of the previous-century aliminum drum?
One craft will impact the asteroid while the other will observe the
asteroid before and after the collision
This sounds a lot like something that's been tried before. Why don't they draw a conclusion from the existing data from Tempel-1? Or, while they're at it, why not try a new concept?
For instance, how about landing on the asteroid and attaching an
anchor to it? Drop anchor (unreel) and wait for the closest approach to the
moon. Then, use an ion drive on the anchor to
bring it as close to the moon as possible. If the cable is
long enough, the anchor will be pulled down into the gravity well of
the moon with much greater force than otherwise. It won't capture the
asteroid in lunar orbit, but the trajectory of the asteroid will be
changed in a far more predictable and adjustable way than with impacts
and explosions.
An extra bonus is that communicating with the anchor, you will
always know the exact location of the asteroid.
The only catch is that you need a very long cable, and that will
raise the launch costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, like leaving the existing, poorly accounted R&D writeoffs in place would do any better. And Joe Blow? He could be in the U.S. and could be someone who wants to call you to buy something from you, thanks to the money he didn't have to Blow on someone's idiotic monopoly.
Thank you. Very informative (except for the comment about this being a stupid line of discussion. Not true unless you think people need to be kept in the dark about it).
Well, your argument didn't convince me that consumers' rights are being fully considered. You said:
OK. Once upon a time, I selectively decided to purchase one specific hot dog product instead of another. Instead of using one credit card to pay for it, I artistically whipped out another and rendered my digitized signature with a unique flourish. This was recorded.
Then I traveled to another location and creatively decided to pay for an electronics part in cash. That was not recorded. Thus I decided what to leave on my credit record "storyline" and what to leave out.
The next day, to add to the biography, I creatively considered several areas to move to, and which address, and moved to one of them, crossing storied mountains and rivers. I chose from among many numbers and streets, for instance I may have moved to a #80 address or a #404 -- my choice. How often do I make payments and on what day? That could also be a choice. All of these things put together can read like a storyline, similar to how a book author chooses the names of characters, events, streets and towns. Those who observe me must write down the actions as I have performed them. It is as if I am dictating to them a message and they are writing it down.
A non-fiction story is a compilation of facts. A fictional story is a compilation of some mixture of fact and imagination. Both are subject to copyright. People can take excerpts, but (correct me if I'm wrong) they cannot obtain the entire work. If giving out one number allows someone to obtain the entire work, would that not be considered a violation of copyright? (Even if you disagree, that's OK, read on.)
Your credit record is a document you are writing either by action or inaction. There is no end to those credit-repair agencies which claim they are able to help generate a fictitious or semi-fictitious storyline to make your "online character" look more creditworthy. They are spinning a tale for someone else to read, which you would otherwise be the author of. Book authors can also allow "ghost writers" to handle part of the work for that purpose, yet the author can still own the copyright.
Copyright aside, someone has already been issued a provisional patent on a storyline as in this recent story. (So even if copyrights are out of the picture there are plenty of other precedents being set.)
OTOH, to argue the reverse, if the results of my decisions are mere facts and not part of a biographical storyline that I am writing, then I could also conclude that:
A movie, song, or book is reducible to a fact, then. The creative part of the movie is what they performed while in the course of their business (e.g. shooting it in their studios). They did so under constraints of time and money, just as I have constraints of time and money in producing my storyline. That very long integer they produced as a result, well, that's just a "fact," just like the data I produce through my decisions is merely a "fact." I may choose to view a factual report of their activities through my viewer of choice, but I will probably be obliged to pay them for that privilege even though copyr
Think embedded. Think cell phones, etc. Small devices can become economical enough to spread to the third world, etc.
The tax collected is always less than what people are paying to buy the software, plus the time they spend reading licensing, monitoring lawful use, worrying about return policies, throwing away packaging, and all of the other costs and maintenance commercial software typically faces.
Since people no longer have to buy the software, it is like giving every user a tax credit and lowering the barrier to entry, allowing computers to be even cheaper, more accessible and more widespread. Everyone has more money left over to buy other things, which generate tax revenue, or they save it, which increases the savings rate and allows cheaper lending. Either way, the money doesn't disappear, it simply gets redirected into other businesses, so that they experience a boost. (Not only consumers would benefit from OSS, it will simplify life for businesses and government too. )
In the meantime, this would help increase the use of software and push people towards broadband. People would be freer to try out new and different things, and so they would. They wouldn't be stuck using things that don't meet their requirements. (Well, at least until some lobbyists mandate that rootkits, spyware and bloat cannot be taken out, or some other betrayal of consumers' interests happens.)
Turning it around: What ever happens to the R&D tax credits the government gives to the large software companies? Do you think those will be missed?
Either way, the users won't appreciate it if the service they're in the middle of using goes down and loses the connection. Minimizing that is a good thing, right? I mean, the timeliness and predictability of some transactions might be important to someone right? Or are you arguing that all services should be connectionless?
Doubling the irony, this enlightened policy is probably why there is any discussion at all about including ID in science textbooks.
Had instead, a number of errant Catholics (or a very vocal cult) somehow gained control of the board and decided that a competing proposal had to be included side by side with ID, such as Indirect Design (e.g. cast the Virgin Mary in the role of Earth's birth mother for a sort of intentional but indirect creation type of thing), then Protestant religious leaders would scramble to put an end to ID entirely. If there is any chance that their children will actually grow up being taught a different religion in secular schools than precisely what they believe, they will withdraw their support and begin to cite "separation of C&C."
I suppose if someone really wanted to enumerate the whole list of Design hypotheses, there shouldn't only be ID, FSM, or BSD, it should begin to look something like this:
How many planned obsolescence cycles is that? And, will the EULA for each upgrade require that your "brain engrams" maintain a positive opinion of the vendor or provider?
In theory, "mobile computing" allows people to continue working wherever they are. In practice, however, not all environments are that great ergonomically or productively. For instance, try setting down your laptop on the kitchen table while your family is trying to talk to you, and see if you get any significant work done there. The reduction of the rate of productivity will only become a source of frustration there. You try this on the couch or in bed but it doesn't seem to work too well there either. Eventually you realize that you need to be locked away in a room somewhere without as many interruptions, and you find yourself in the room where your desktop computer is already sitting, so, to save yourself the time of setting up the laptop there, you use that instead. :) The laptop, then, is merely there to serve as a reminder of the work you have to get done. :)
The commercials that promoted laptops as something you would take with you to the beach were fantasy, pure fantasy. By all means, if you ever see anyone at the beach stupid enough to bring a laptop, feel free to kick sand everywhere or create as many interruptions as possible. You will be doing them a favor, and you will keep laws from being passed that designate beaches as "quiet zones" or something equally ridiculous.
The article doesn't seem to agree:
So, it looks like they're trying to get Intel or AMD interested in producing a heterogeneous multi-core unit that includes their trippy core, in the hopes of keeping the number of cores (and their communications overhead) down to a minimum. Intel already has a form of (so-called) instruction-level parallelism with the Itanic, and it didn't work out too well (except maybe for crypto-heavy workloads). It's possible AMD will be mulling it over. One of the things they will have to worry about is whether a compiler can actually be written to use it, FTA:
With 128 instructions to schedule at once, that might provide a chance to actually keep all of the processing units on the chip busy. With the Itanic, it was really a challenge to do that, since you had to pull two floating point instructions out from somewhere in every clock cycle, something that not all workloads could accomplish, and I can see the compiler writers going crazy trying to produce some sorts of ultimately self-defeating hacks trying get that accomplished :)
This is not to say that I disagree that much with your post, Kurzweil may have been overly optimistic about this decade's research (at least the parts of it that weren't classified), but note that sometimes political decisions play a larger role than technological advances.
You cited a quote from 2000. Well, as it turns out, history took a sharp turn only 1 year later. Is it reasonable to require Kurzweil or anyone else to account for unlikely political events, especially for barely credible over-reactions? You are certainly reasonable to expect him to refactor his arguments, but not if you think he should be able to foresee everything on the political front. I cannot but think that the paranoid security focus that has afflicted us since then has had some impact on technological progress and the ability of our whole society to participate in that progress. The technological growth curve has gone from a certain exponential rise to a bumpy, foggy, less predictable road. And in contrast to the initial freedoms of the internet, one has to keep asking what sorts of things may be outlawed next. There is no telling. If he had somehow been able to presage all of this in photographic detail in 2000, the likelihood is that we would have ridiculed him (then) as an overly pessimistic crackpot.
So, really we are just accusing him of being a futurist. Of which he is guilty as charged. But this is not as condemning as it sounds because we need people like him, and I don't mean as a sort of total fantasy trip either. We (optimists and pessimists alike) at least need to keep some idea of whether there is a future worth working toward or not, and how far we are veering off from that future. If nobody can conjure up such a future, not even an undying optimist, then, maybe then, we will know we have reached a dead end and finally question the direction we're going in.
By that point we may not even care about the golden future we have lost -- the mind control "freedom" rays will keep us from worrying about it, and the memory disruption "protection" rays will cause us to forget, just in case :)
There are many and varied definitions, including yours BTW, which the Troll modders apparently didn't bother checking.
Google define:Ontology
The definitions vary so much that ontology is in danger of losing its traditional meanings to become a buzzword that doesn't actually mean anything other than "we are going to use this new jargon word for our patents now that we have hired an internet founder or some other famous figure who has agreed to back us up on our use of the term despite the conceptual existence of alternatives." If your post isn't perfectly informative, at least it can be insightful.
Reinvention of the lexicon is a possible backdoor into the patent system for pre-existing technologies, or technologies that are similar to pre-existing functions for the same thing. They are basically renamed so as to appear like something new, and if it is official-sounding enough (ontology sounds like a pretty serious term...), they may be able to pass under the patent office's radar. If the patent office doesn't watch for this exploit, we will end up with a bunch of overlapping cruft. (Not that that isn't already the case.)
I agree that it could help the most at the starting point, but even after that:
1. ...it could (ideally speaking) save time as a reference to help find related scientific papers or related reference materials. It may be quicker at this task than the average library index and have a more uniform interface than disparate libraries. If it points to inappropriate references, it will be either obvious from the title or will soon be discovered (and hopefully deleted by the researcher.)
2. After a paper is finished, it might help to have a quick sanity check for formulae and that sort of thing. Trolls can change those things, but if they are inconsistent with the paper they would need to be double-checked anyway, so it is no worse for that, and the researcher may then correct the wiki if necessary. (It can also help with hints about less crucial things like conventions for spelling and notation.)
3. The more scientists use it, the more authoritative it will become. Or, it may evolve or fork into a more authoritative source.
4. How well would the traditional publishing industry survive a spate of troll submissions? Is its immune system even prepared to handle a determined effort by trolls in the future?
Ya, there's so many possibilities, I can barely contain the excitement:
OK, maybe those of us who haven't lost our moral fibre should stick to searching the inner planets, and leave those "other" types of searches to those in the law-making bodies of the executive branch who are inherently unable to enjoy those types of things and will therefore exercise the appropriate levels of restraint when reviewing the data they have collected *cough* *cough*....
The title of the patent (from the uspto website) is:
"DISTRIBUTED HYPERMEDIA METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY INVOKING EXTERNAL APPLICATION PROVIDING INTERACTION AND DISPLAY OF EMBEDDED OBJECTS WITHIN A HYPERMEDIA DOCUMENT"
If this covers only one possible method of making plugins, that's one thing. FOSS browsers could simply find a different way of doing it. But if it covers all methods of making a plugin to a web browser, or of embedding apps into a browser, then it could be a problem. The latter one is what MSFT will be most interested in, as they depend so heavily on browser-embeddable apps. It may be cheaper for them to simply buy out whoever owns the patent if they can. Then, of course, if they can, they can turn around and use it against everyone else.
If they can't, I wonder how the eminent domain precedent will play out in allowing a backdoor into taking another company's (or a university's) patents when they don't want to sell? What's the limit? Can someone replace a university campus with a walmart if they want to, because of not enough revenue? It would have been an interesting question for Mr. Roberts, who, incidentally, was recently confirmed and so will be helping to decide the MSFT case that is currently queued up.
Warning! *flashing lights* Already four words come out and the reply is trying to shove the word "ban" into my mouth, where I said "oppose." Oppose is something people do voluntarily, while "ban" is a negative act of force against voluntary choice. Big difference. Big whitewash.
As it turns out, taking away consumer choice is more along the lines of what the TCG consortium is guilty of supporting. Not little ol' me, I'm not forcing people to do anything. ...Hypocrisy, pure and
simple.... I favor voluntary, informed choices, while your pals
(or masters) the TCG members favor removing your choice to buy
anything other than their TCG-infested hardware.
So, first you get it bass ackwards, and then the next part of your argument takes license to mindlessly drag that straw dummy on a determined rampage through the muck of a dark spooky wilderness of convenient doubts, casting all sorts of fantasy assumptions and wild-eyed fears on it and then only to find... that it was built on a false premise. Well, duh. But now you wake up and the light shines upon it and what is revealed? Who said ban? You did.
*cackling straw-dummy laughter*
And just because YOU say it, doesn't make it false. Whom to believe then? The only way to determine is not by saying, but by listening carefully to the arguments. Seeing as you are not good at listening to what people say but instead deliriously misrepresenting arguments, I would tend to think that RMS is slightly ahead of you on the credibility scale.
You mean TPM (Trusted Platform Module). But not only Macs will have this. The TCG consortium is very large and seems intent on sticking their TPM (capability) into everything they can.
Apple is making noises like they may grant a reprieve from total DRM imprisonment right now, but since all computers will eventually have the capability, someone's assurance is not a long term guarantee that you won't be 0wnzored later.
Point to where my post says that? You're sure pulling a lot of stuff out of your rapidly emptying posterior. I guess you are down to the bottom of the barrel to scrounge up any kind of argument.
That was precisely my point. Junk like this should not be monopolistically forced down our throats by industry coalitions. The consumer should have a choice. See, you even agree with me on that, which is my real premise, that of voluntary opposition (not the false one you invented), but you are intent on militantly disagreeing.... Snap out of it. *snap* *snap*
That would be a great choice to have, wouldn't it? Now go and show me a new motherboard that isn't TCG conformant that I have the choice to buy.
*raps fingers on desk*
*folds arms*
*checks watch*
Couldn't find one? You mean they don't make them anymore? Hmm.... Then it doesn't look so good for the cell phone industry either, does it?
They must have slipped that into your kool-aid somehow. Actually, Fair Use stems naturally from two things:
Thank you, I didn't know that. Maybe the story title should have said it draws Theo's ire, not open source ire, if they are just as open (of course it depends on the other specific license restrictions, etc.)
Then again, reporting that something draws Theo's ire wouldn't be big news :)
Good question. It seems very enterprising to claim that a closed software product is "in a different class by itself" -- tantamount to saying it is more secure than an open source product.
The crucial difference for me is whether I can check the source code for gaping security holes. With open source software, it is relatively easy. At least you can get a third party to vouch for the lack of obvious security holes in an open source product. With a closed product, you get only the vendor's assurance. Maybe the vendor could leave some secret exploits in there to convince people that they need to upgrade every so often? You would have no choice but to pay up, after all, your "enterprise" depends on it now.
But does closed software retain some security through obscurity? Can blackhat hackers reverse engineer a closed software product anyway? Yes, they can, and I wonder if it is a coincidence if this happens close to a product upgrade cycle.
IMHO, they are using the enterprise buzzword to try to evoke images of an "Enterprise class" warship, bristling with weapons and rotating radars and the latest bleeping control center screens, roaming your coastline defending you against any possible attack. The only trouble is you are not allowed to inspect the ship to see if it has a leak, and if the ship sinks, they'd rather you didn't tell anyone because they might not meet their sales target for that quarter.... :)
So I guess the idea is, the plane is able to determine the general location, but once the parachutes are deployed, it sounds like the specific location is left up to the winds to determine.
Do you know if the parachutes are deployed out the back (so that the plane lands on its nose, which seems awkward), or at the nose (landing on its thrusters???), or at the top (aerodynamics issues, flipping end over end during deployment...)?
(I'm wondering if a normal radially-symmetric capsule with some small control surfaces added wouldn't be able to do much the same thing and cost less to develop.)
Heavy duty TPM encryption can enable such things as biometric (e.g. fingerprint) signing of EULA acceptance for DRM-governed purchases. The existing cellphone technology includes a EULA as part of your service contract (with its own nasty provisions for early termination, etc...), but this way they can hold you to each agreement individually and so have a lot more room to play with variations on the legal verbiage that can be used to lock you into a frustrating agreement, with evidence that it was signed explicitly by your own finger.
It is not inconsistent to argue in support of personal freedoms in both cases (TCG implementation and use of P2P technologies by consumers).
The argument here is not which technology makes us smile from ear to ear, it is how to preserve our rights against constant assaults, which I think is a little bit more important. Don't you?
Is it safe to speculate yet who will benefit from future "crowd control pain rays?" Would a lot of deep hypothetical speculation be necessary to figure out who "crowd control machine-gun robots" will ultimately be aimed at?
What possible benefit to you will outweigh a possible one-way loss of basic freedoms? Wouldn't it be better to insist on a solution that doesn't have those disadvantages, if that is good enough?
Does it matter that you won't be the initial target of these control measures (under the current leadership)? Wouldn't it be a wise precaution to oppose them just in case the public elects a leader you think is irresponsible? Why not stick with technologies that exclude the possibility of that sort of danger?
I suppose you want us not to oppose those things, but rather let them happen because we don't have any evidence yet to believe they will be used against us (um, like prosecution of P2P filesharing teenagers, illegality of DVD decrypting in your own home, voting machine abuse, unseen unsigned EULA contract abuse, spyware, nonskippable commercials on various devices, spam, cussing out employees and chair throwing, etc....)
~ Oh no, they wouldn't misuse it, they are so perfect and smiling, they have clearly been so responsible with the other technologies they have come across. *drinks kool-aid* ~
Once a precedent allowing nasty stuff through TCG stands in the courts as a legalized infringement of property and other rights, it will be much harder to get rid of. But there is still one vote that counts: the one that you exercise in not buying this junk, because that is the only way they will get the message (even if they pretend otherwise and blame the poor sales figures on a lack of ringtones or something.)
There is, it's called the 1999 Anti-CyberSquatting Act, or the more official name of Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, or the even more official name of S.1948 Intellectual Property and Communications Omnibus Reform Act of 1999.
Too bad it doesn't cover the current scheme of patent squatting being rampantly performed by some companies with the excuse that they are doing it "defensively." Or does it? IANAL, but if it applies to names and marks maybe it could be applied to patents as well since the industry constantly uses the catch-all term of "Intellectual Property" to refer to several different things. Well, if that flawed terminology is going to be allowed to reign supreme in the industry, then maybe this law could be applied against all kinds of IP and used to challenge patents as well, when the patents are cyber-patents and little more than a "name for a domain of knowledge" in patent clothing?
This reminds me of the time some years ago when "the death of the PC" was imminent. Well, there was a lot of hand-wringing over it, but it doesn't look like that came true.
On what grounds to they predict this one besides the mantra that the network is the computer and you will be doing all of your surfing through a tiny phone, when a lot of people tell me they just want a phone to be a phone, not a magic wand with worse sound quality than a turn of the previous-century aliminum drum?
This sounds a lot like something that's been tried before. Why don't they draw a conclusion from the existing data from Tempel-1? Or, while they're at it, why not try a new concept?
For instance, how about landing on the asteroid and attaching an anchor to it? Drop anchor (unreel) and wait for the closest approach to the moon. Then, use an ion drive on the anchor to bring it as close to the moon as possible. If the cable is long enough, the anchor will be pulled down into the gravity well of the moon with much greater force than otherwise. It won't capture the asteroid in lunar orbit, but the trajectory of the asteroid will be changed in a far more predictable and adjustable way than with impacts and explosions.
An extra bonus is that communicating with the anchor, you will always know the exact location of the asteroid.
The only catch is that you need a very long cable, and that will raise the launch costs.