SLASHDOT KILLS FREE SPEECH WITH THEIR MODERATORS. YOU MUST ACT NOW AND REFRAIN FROM THE ILLS OFF
MISMODERATION. POWER TO THE PEOPLE, POWER TO THE BROTHAZ. ASLAMALEGLUM!!!
I suppose "aslamaleglum" is the Trollish for meta-moderation?
Thomas Miconi
(I know, I know, "don't feed the trolls"..)
when you replace the big slimy-looking mosters with strings of bacteria filled with magnets...
Well, yes and no. There is quite some debate going on about our origin, and there's a theory floating around that situates the origins of life (I mean, earth life) on Mars. The main point is that Earth cooled down much later than Mars did, and that the timespan between the cooling down of Earth and the appearance of life on our planet is somewhat short. No proof, of course, but it's sufficient to make scientists wonder. "We don't know" has become the standard answer.
If we find proof that some kind of life emerged on Mars, and that it can travel between Mars and the Earth (asteroid piggybacking involves quite severe conditions), then we have one thing to do: go to Mars, find life (or remains of it) and determine wether it has the same structure as ours - read: DNA.
This is why it is very important to preserve the natural lifeforms of Mars, or what remains of them:
If we ever find evidence of native DNA-based life on Mars, it will mean that life on Mars and the Earth have almost certainly the same (presumably martian) origin.
In other words: it would be proof that the "big alien monsters" do exist. It's you and me.:o)
Thomas Miconi
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 2
Seriously, humans can't even share diseases with most other mammals.
The NHS is not a socialised health care, it's a socialised life expectancy reducer:o)
Universal, socialised health care is rare, except in France (and in Scandinavia, of course). It seems to work well, provided you're ready to fund it decently - and the UK government is not.
The worst thing is, the average Brit wouldn't mind so much about paying a little more taxes and getting a reasonable cancer survival rate in return - but you know, ideology...
A much better system would be to have a gnutella like cluster of "servers". Clients could connect to one of the servers by getting a list of servers from a known source (just like connecting to gnutella) and then upload a list of all the files they're sharing to it.
Everything you describe already exists. It's called IRC. Why not set up a P2P client on top of it - using IRC for the requests, then P2P for actual transfer ?
You write: "Isn't this a lot like having a lot of small programs that, when scripted together, can outperform a large, monolithic one?"
Alas, I fear it is the exact opposite:o)
In the Unix philosphy, each little script is totally self-contained, its operation can be analyzed independently of the context, and combining several scripts will just yield the combination of their results.
Our genes, on the other hand, are not independant from each other : the presence of one given gene can have significant influence on the expression of another gene. A genotype cannot be analyzed gene-by-gene: the result of a genotype cannot be predicted from the result of each gene taken separately.
Which means that we are much more a MSWindows-like machinery, where in order to get any little thing working you must have tons of other programs / services / libraries installed and running in a very precise way - otherwise you're on your way to catastrophe. Every component is totally dependent on the context, and the context is the total sum of *all* other components.
Sad, but true : from a software engineering perspective, we are a perfect example of brain-damaged design:o)
"Emergent properties of the combination of genes" have been known for decades to be the dominant factor in genotype-to-phenotype translation. AI computer scientists working on genetic algorithms have called this epistasis, borrowing the word from biology (see here), and giving it a slightly broader meaning:
"You have epistasis when the expression of a given gene has a significant effect on the expression of other genes, thereby inducing the fact that a genotype of N genes cannot be analyzed by observing the effect of each gene separately". The unwritten corollary being: "which is quite a pain in the ass".
Genetic algorithms work best (in comparison to other methods) when the problem space is highly-yet-not-too-highly epistatic. See this page for extensive information, or just try a Google search.
Why not using IRC ? I mean, it's there, it's reasonably reliable, and allows both centralized and P2P communication.
The "client" would be a bot. It would join a channel (say, "#bjork" or "#trancegoa") and to make a request, it would simply utter something on that channel in some protocolish language (eg "SEARCH 'Bachelorette'"), and other bots would respond in a P2P fashion (ie/notice the_asking_bot IVEGOT Bachelorette.mp3).
This would deliver us from the scaling curse as it is described by Jordan's paper. This would also lead to a Usenet-like classification of available files among channels (if you like david bowie, you would/join #davidbowie), thereby bringing people with common interests together. Technically, IRC networks are the best example of a semi-centralized-yet-free network I can think of.
Think of this: Napster was made as a sharing system, where people could chat. We have a chatting system. Why not allow people to share files on top of it ?
Hey, don't say that: now at last we can have (slightly) more reliable floppies.
With more than 10 megs, you've got plenty of space to use Hamming codes[?], which means much better security.
Of course that will make floppy I/O slower, but hey, if you want speed, you don't use floppies !
I live in a country where full-time internet access is still far from widespread. Floppies are essential for us. It is the only tool we have to transport small amounts of data (e.g. documents) between two places (e.g. office and home).
Does anyone else see the irony in producing computers that people can get for 200 dollars so that they can close the "digital gap"? I mean, come on, if they can't afford a
500$ computer and a telephone line, they are probably poor enough that they live in substandard housing and/or recieve poor medical attention and/or have crappy schools
and/or live on a poor diet and/or etc. etc.
No. In poorer countries, most things are cheaper than in the US and Europe, for obvious reasons. But computers, being foreign-made, have roughly the same price everywhere. Thus, a family can have decent living standards with a decent house, a decent diet and a decent medical attention, and still be unable to afford a computer.
As for crappy schools, the notion that the quality of your school should be linked to the money you have (except of course for the 1-2% who can attend very expensive private schools) or the city you live in is a very American one.
The other point is, who is paying for this. If the government is sucking up the "loss" in the sales, where is that money coming from, taxxed people? So now you will take other
people's money away so that less fortunate won't fall behind on the latest issue of "the Onion" and can keep up with slashdot? WTF?
Translation in the educational/medical domain: "So now you will take other people's money away so that less fortunate will have a reasonable life expectancy and even possibly get a decent education ?"
We're not talking about "power rangers" here. We're talking about basic IT-literacy. We're talking about a divide that might soon become almost as important as the one between people who can read/write, and people who can't. Maybe you'll call me an arrogant European socialist, but the idea to take money from GE, IBM and Esso (big corporations contribute much more to tax revenue than "taxpayers" do) to enhance significantly the fate of a huge majority of the population, that idea does not really strikes me as particularly upsetting.
In fact that's exactly what 90% of western countries do. Britain and US being two noticeable exceptions.
Is a Government bought and sold to/by TransNational Corporate interest not enough?
In France, political parties cannot be funded by corporations.
Although individuals can make private donations (no more than FF 50000, ie approximately $8000), the main source of financial support for political organizations is the State. Each party receives an amount of money which is calculated according to its scores in previous elections.
This may seem somewhat unfair towards small parties, but under such a system, Ralph Nader (randomly chosen example of course:o) would get much more money than he does right now. Why do you think the Green Party is a government party in France and Germany ?
However, this kind of law could probably not be passed in the US. The ability of a party to collect funds is seen as a strong indicator of its popularity (ie representativity), and therefore as an essential aspect of the democratic mechanism. Suppressing corporate funding would probably cause strong opposition, not only from coporate powers, but also from the public at large (although most/. reader would probably beg to differ:o).
Vous êtes un morceau sans valeur de droppings de babboon. Votre posez la question de slashdot était le morceau d'abats le plus sans valeur sur lequel
j'ai jamais étendu des yeux. Si je vous rencontre jamais je donnerai un coup de pied votre âne. Non, brouillon qui, je violera votre âne. Et vous
l'apprécierez. Ayez un jour agréable.
Here's a handmade translation of this obviously babelfished piece of text:
You are a bit without value of droppings of babboon. Your ask the question of Slashdot was the bit of cut-downs the most without value on which I ever laid some eyes. If I meet you ever I will give a kick your donkey. No, draft who, I will rape your donkey. And you will appreciate it. Have a pleasant day.
This sounds pretty much like the good old Minitel [?] pricing system. : you access some service/content, the ISP charges you some price and gives back a part of it to the service/content provider.
This "redistribution" model has been around for decades (the minitel system being only the most prominent application of it).
The only question is whether such a thing is possible in a business landscape where zillions of players coexist. Since the Internet relies on open standards, anybody with a computer and a communication line can become an ISP. The minitel system was, on the other hand, a proprietary system, so its owner (France Telecom) could control anything that went through it.
Have a nice time trying to apply such a model to the internet jungle, lads:o)
Huh? Something that prevents you from watching the film can make it more popular?
He meant : "Something that prevent you from buying [random Schwarzenneger movie] as soon as it's released can give a significant help to [random indie studio movie]".
The right thing to do would be to release the movies everywhere simultaneously.
Are you aware of the fact that a few people around the world still don't understand American English perfectly (you know, there are even people who don't speak English at all - no kidding), and therefore need silly things such as translation and dubbing ?
Those things happen to take quite some time. Hence the delay.
The timing for the Yahoo Minitel portal is perfect. France Telecom, owner of the Minitel system, has recently launched a huge advertising campaign for its computer-version of the Minitel : "iMinitel" (read "eemeeneetel"), a PC program that allows you to connect on the Minitel network.
The minitel system is antiquated. It's slow, text-mode (although ncurses-like "graphics" are commonly used) and much more expensive than the internet. So how could it survive ?
The answer is simple: "business model". So far, few internet companies have been able to develop a sustainable business model (ie something more profitable than "putting banner ads everywhere"). The Minitel system, on the other hand, is based on a pay-per-minute scheme. If you want to provide some service on Minitel (say, an access to some big legal database), you simply choose a pricing category (from the cheap 3614 to the $1/min 3617). When people connect to your service, they pay the price you chose to France Telecom, who keeps a part of it and gives you the rest. Ridiculous charges, maximal profit. A service provider's dream.
This is why many non-public national databases (such as Euridile, the national register of commerce) can only be accessed through the Minitel system. And this is also the reason why such a deprecated system as the minitel might survive for years, coexisting with the cheaper, faster, better Internet system.
This backlash against the English language [?] must be taken in a wider context. English is silently creeping its way to Absolute World Domination, IT being only its last (and most powerful) Trojan horse.
20 years ago, when the first IT wave hit our side of the Ocean, the French tried (and managed) to prevent the linguistic tsunami by creating new words (or reusing old ones) for IT-related stuff, and these words were indeed quite good ("ordinateur" and "logiciel" sound nicer to our ears than "computer" and "software") and were quickly adopted. But at some point you have to face the obvious : The Internet is 90% English-speaking. Whatever the subject, documentation written in English may be ten times as abundant as in any other language. What can you do against that ?
This is especially frightening for us in a EU context : how long will we be able to carry on with the current policy, that is,translating any document in the 3 major languages (German, French and English) and as many documents as possible in the 11 (as of now) languages of the EU ? It's already cumbersome enough today - so what will it be like in a 30-members EU ? We feel that at some point the case for "English Everywhere" will become extremely strong, and to be honest we find it not only unfair (Britons would get a huge comparative advantage) but downright terrifying.
"One world, one economy, one language" (I wonder what it sounds like in German ?). Welcome to a Brave New World of civilization and progress, where the global elite will use its own language (American English), turning every other language into minor dialects used only by poorly educated locals.
Now this may sound like plain paranoia (and it is, to some point). But History shows that whenever local tongues are confronted with a mainstream language used by the cultural/technical/administrative elite, the latter wins. Think of Russia in the 17th-18th century (or even better, read "War and Peace" to see how close Russia came to becoming a French-speaking country, and why it didn't). The only major exception I can think of is Quebec - which survived as a cultural entity thanks to the federal nature of Canada.
There's a real fear here, and although I understand that it may look somewhat ridiculous when looked at from the good side of the Babel Fish, you should realize that it is nothing like nationalistic ranting.
If we were machines, driven by purely rational goals such as productivity, efficiency, etc., we would all agree to speak the same language - be it English, Latin, SmallTalk, whatever.
We're not machines. We have a thing which we call culture, and that culture is the very definition of our identity (this is especially true for old European countries). The current "Anglicization" of the world is seen by some as a menace to our national identities, virtually undistinguishable from a military one. The Quebec example, which is now seen as an exception, might soon become the general standard.
After European peasants destroying McDonald's diners, who knows the next step of the transatlantic cold war won't be angry academics sacking cybercafés ?
How is it possible not to vote when you are among the (relatively) few people who can elect the most powerful leader in the world ?
I'm French, so of course I can't vote. I'm just watching as you Americans choose the man who will make peace or war in the Middle East, in Korea, in China, in the Balkans, and in several regions of Africa and Central Asia. The man who will negotiate all those issues with Vladimir Putin, Jiang Zemin et al. The man who will decide, incidentally, whether we Europeans can set up our own military force outside of NATO. Maybe you don't fully realize what "the President of the sole superpower" means, but believe me, we do.
The fact that millions among you (you = young, educated middle-class Americans) won't vote today - and that they're proud of it - upsets me.
Don't tell me that your vote wouldn't make a difference. At 50/50 every single vote counts, including yours. And you know that.
Don't tell us that the US election system is flawed. We know that already [?]. That's no excuse. Not voting will only make things worse.
Don't, please don't tell us that there's absolutely no difference between the two candidates. There is. You may not care much about the IQ or the qualification of your president, but we definitely do, for the very reasons I mentioned above.
Thinking that just because you didn't take ten minutes of your precious time to drop a paper in a little box, the next President of the United States will probably be George Bush jr instead of Al Gore, that drives me crazy. In any democracy, not voting is a Bad Thing, the expression of a "spoilt child" attitude. But in the US, the responsibility is even bigger, because the man you're electing will influence the lives of millions of people around the world, much more than yours. And those people cannot decide who that man will be. And you can. And you won't.
If you think you can't make a difference you're just lying to yourself. At 50/50 every single vote counts. Even yours. Period.
Thomas Miconi
Re:(clank!) Bring out your dead! (clank!)
on
Voteauction.com
·
· Score: 1
(Totally offtopic - no links - I love it)
Le Canard Enchaine was founded during WWI, in a time when "bourrage de crane" ("skull-stuffing", ie propaganda) was the dominant activity among government officials and most of traditional press (eg "German corpses smell worse than French corpses"). The Canard Enchaine was designed from the start as a satirical newspaper (which it still is), and its main goal was to investigate and find out what was going out behind the official speeches (which it still does - it has unveiled more political scandals than any other newspaper in the country).
"Canard" (duck) means "newspaper" in popular language. The name "Canard Enchaine" is a lovely piece of pure irony, which indirectly stresses the "un-chained" nature of the paper.
This (weekly) paper also features a very high level of language. If you happen to be a student of French (I heard there are still a few people in the US who try to learn foreign languages - probably a rumour, though:o), the absolute test is not being able to read Proust or Balzac, but being able to understand all the puns and jokes of the Canard Enchaine.
Most of what I would have written was already explained by cooldev (a few lines above), so let's summarize in one sentence:
In a world without IP nobody will be allowed to earn a living out of the product of his mind.
I stress the word "allowed". This is not about freedom. This is the very opposite of freedom. The basic idea holds in a few words: "I don't care who you are / what you do, as soon as you publish something, whatever the genre, whatever the way, you lose any kind of rights over it. It does not belong to you any more. Just forget the idea that you might even be rewarded for it - let alone make a living from it."
I especially like the way he makes his point: "IP is inane in this and that situation, therefore the very concept of IP is bullshit". Obviously Mr Martin would have done very poorly as a science teacher (for info, he seems to be a profes sor at Wollongong's faculty of arts).
But I think it is better explained by an excerpt from Mr Martin's paper:
"The first argument for intellectual property is that people are entitled to the results of their labour. Hettinger's response is that not all the value of intellectual products is due to labour. Nor is the value of intellectual products due to the work of a single labourer, or any small group. Intellectual products are social products.
Suppose you have written an essay or made an invention. Your intellectual work does not exist in a social vacuum. It would not have been possible without lots of earlier work - both intellectual and nonintellectual - by many other people"
This man is telling us that since Beethoven used the western musical style, and would probably not have existed would there have been no Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi, Bach and Haydn before him, Beethoven has no significance in himself - and that the very idea that he should be rewarded for his work is ridiculous.
1) A "moral person" is a legal concept which includes corportations, associations, foundations, and any kind of organisation that can have a legal existence.
2) It's rather surprising to discover a law project from my own government on Slashdot... This proposal hasn't made headlines here in France - in fact nobody mentioned it. This is even stranger when you consider the Nouvelle Economie frenzy that has developed over the last few months in the press - anything that involves computers, internet and economics has become incredibly fashionable here. Not to mention the extensive coverage of the Microsoft case (see today's edition of Liberation)
3) The strongly pro-market vocabulary ("consumer choice", "more competition", etc.) is also unusual for left-wing MPs. In fact, the text of this law project seems to be designed for the European level. I would not be surprised to see proposals of this kind making their way to the European parliament of Strasbourg over the next few months.
4) A short real-world case study: Universities in France are regarded as public administrations (although they are independent for their internal organisation). In my university, as far as data exchange is concerned, open standards are enforced - e.g., all complex text documents are transmitted under RTF format. This is not for political reasons, but simply to avoid problems with different versions of Word. Microsoft programs has pushed the proprietary logic as far as losing compatibility with themselves (!), thus providing a strong rationale for using open standards.
Digitization is a massive trend all over the world. Just have a look at the home page of Bibliotheca Univeralis Project (affiliated to the G7). Among other things, you can see that almost every big national library has set up some kind of digitization project, including the LoC.
The most impressive effort to date seems to be the Gallica server at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France : 15 million pages on line, most of them as images or PDF documents (I'm sure you all dreamed of reading a XVth century bible in Middle French, didn't you ?). All documents that are copyright-free are publicly available.
I didn't check the LoC project, but the name (American Memory) sounds rather self-explaining.
Digitization is not the future : it is the present. As usual, computer scientists have paved the way (on-line papers, etc.) have paved the way, but the rest of the world are catching on.
Although Mr Billington's comments about the importance of the physical support do make sense (if you techno-junkies don't understand this, just trust me: they do;o), using this understandable fear as a rationale for rejecting digitization altogether is plain nonsense.
There needs not be any opposition between computers and good old paper codex. They simply are different tools for different purposes, not to mention the fact that transition from electronic to physical form is a common task even among technologically oriented people (ever heard about those little boxes they call "printers" ?)
Thomas PS: My opinion: the real reason is, they don't want to spend money in it (alt: they don't have any money to spend in it). What do you think ?
The very essence of being conscious is an ability to behave in a random fashion, also known as free will
There's no such thing as true randomness on the non-quantic scale. What we call "free will" is the result of a (highly structured) bunch of intercommunicating neurons. While the process of decision (ie will) remains one of the darkest parts of the Neurosciences realm, we already have enough clues to figure out where we should look (can you say "basal ganglia" ?).
From what I understand though JK's description, Mr Harel is probably talking about the NP-hard problems, ie problems which take exponential time to solve (exponential being related to their "size", eg solving the travelling salesman problem for N cities takes k*exp(N) steps).
Although those problems are effectively unsolvable through the classical, algorithmic way, quite a lot of them can be solved using the most recent AI techniques - the drawback being that the solution is not 100% guaranteed optimal. Genetic Algorithms [?], for example, are the most powerful optimization tool that ever came out of AI. It can deal with the travalling salesman's problem (see one version here), just as well as other technique such as "Ant colonies"
Furthermore, complexity theory (which deals with "computability") only holds for Turing machines. DNA / quantum computers do not fell in the "NP-cursed" category of computers.
Mr Harel's thoughts, while being perfectly snesible as far as his own field is concerned (Turing-like algorithmics), should not be taken as holy scripture. Digital calculators are only a couple of decades old. It took thousands of years to fully exploit the power of the steam engine. We can try to imagine what "computers" will be like in 30 years from now, but expecting such a forecast to be accurate would be foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
SLASHDOT KILLS FREE SPEECH WITH THEIR MODERATORS. YOU MUST ACT NOW AND REFRAIN FROM THE ILLS OFF MISMODERATION. POWER TO THE PEOPLE, POWER TO THE BROTHAZ. ASLAMALEGLUM!!!
I suppose "aslamaleglum" is the Trollish for meta-moderation?
Thomas Miconi
(I know, I know, "don't feed the trolls"..)
when you replace the big slimy-looking mosters with strings of bacteria filled with magnets...
:o)
Well, yes and no. There is quite some debate going on about our origin, and there's a theory floating around that situates the origins of life (I mean, earth life) on Mars. The main point is that Earth cooled down much later than Mars did, and that the timespan between the cooling down of Earth and the appearance of life on our planet is somewhat short. No proof, of course, but it's sufficient to make scientists wonder. "We don't know" has become the standard answer.
If we find proof that some kind of life emerged on Mars, and that it can travel between Mars and the Earth (asteroid piggybacking involves quite severe conditions), then we have one thing to do: go to Mars, find life (or remains of it) and determine wether it has the same structure as ours - read: DNA.
This is why it is very important to preserve the natural lifeforms of Mars, or what remains of them: If we ever find evidence of native DNA-based life on Mars, it will mean that life on Mars and the Earth have almost certainly the same (presumably martian) origin.
In other words: it would be proof that the "big alien monsters" do exist. It's you and me.
Thomas Miconi
Seriously, humans can't even share diseases with most other mammals.
Yeah - except for a few exceptions. Example:
Creutzfeld-Jakob variants
AIDS
Get it ?
Thomas Miconi
The NHS is not a socialised health care, it's a socialised life expectancy reducer :o)
Universal, socialised health care is rare, except in France (and in Scandinavia, of course). It seems to work well, provided you're ready to fund it decently - and the UK government is not.
The worst thing is, the average Brit wouldn't mind so much about paying a little more taxes and getting a reasonable cancer survival rate in return - but you know, ideology...
Thomas Miconi
A much better system would be to have a gnutella like cluster of "servers". Clients could connect to one of the servers by getting a list of servers from a known source (just like connecting to gnutella) and then upload a list of all the files they're sharing to it.
Everything you describe already exists. It's called IRC. Why not set up a P2P client on top of it - using IRC for the requests, then P2P for actual transfer ?
Thomas Miconi
You write: "Isn't this a lot like having a lot of small programs that, when scripted together, can outperform a large, monolithic one?"
:o)
:o)
Alas, I fear it is the exact opposite
In the Unix philosphy, each little script is totally self-contained, its operation can be analyzed independently of the context, and combining several scripts will just yield the combination of their results.
Our genes, on the other hand, are not independant from each other : the presence of one given gene can have significant influence on the expression of another gene. A genotype cannot be analyzed gene-by-gene: the result of a genotype cannot be predicted from the result of each gene taken separately.
Which means that we are much more a MSWindows-like machinery, where in order to get any little thing working you must have tons of other programs / services / libraries installed and running in a very precise way - otherwise you're on your way to catastrophe. Every component is totally dependent on the context, and the context is the total sum of *all* other components.
Sad, but true : from a software engineering perspective, we are a perfect example of brain-damaged design
Thomas Miconi
"Emergent properties of the combination of genes" have been known for decades to be the dominant factor in genotype-to-phenotype translation. AI computer scientists working on genetic algorithms have called this epistasis, borrowing the word from biology (see here), and giving it a slightly broader meaning:
"You have epistasis when the expression of a given gene has a significant effect on the expression of other genes, thereby inducing the fact that a genotype of N genes cannot be analyzed by observing the effect of each gene separately". The unwritten corollary being: "which is quite a pain in the ass".
Genetic algorithms work best (in comparison to other methods) when the problem space is highly-yet-not-too-highly epistatic. See this page for extensive information, or just try a Google search.
Why not using IRC ? I mean, it's there, it's reasonably reliable, and allows both centralized and P2P communication.
/notice the_asking_bot IVEGOT Bachelorette.mp3).
/join #davidbowie), thereby bringing people with common interests together. Technically, IRC networks are the best example of a semi-centralized-yet-free network I can think of.
The "client" would be a bot. It would join a channel (say, "#bjork" or "#trancegoa") and to make a request, it would simply utter something on that channel in some protocolish language (eg "SEARCH 'Bachelorette'"), and other bots would respond in a P2P fashion (ie
This would deliver us from the scaling curse as it is described by Jordan's paper. This would also lead to a Usenet-like classification of available files among channels (if you like david bowie, you would
Think of this: Napster was made as a sharing system, where people could chat. We have a chatting system. Why not allow people to share files on top of it ?
Hey, don't say that: now at last we can have (slightly) more reliable floppies.
With more than 10 megs, you've got plenty of space to use Hamming codes[?], which means much better security.
Of course that will make floppy I/O slower, but hey, if you want speed, you don't use floppies !
I live in a country where full-time internet access is still far from widespread. Floppies are essential for us. It is the only tool we have to transport small amounts of data (e.g. documents) between two places (e.g. office and home).
Thomas Miconi
Does anyone else see the irony in producing computers that people can get for 200 dollars so that they can close the "digital gap"? I mean, come on, if they can't afford a 500$ computer and a telephone line, they are probably poor enough that they live in substandard housing and/or recieve poor medical attention and/or have crappy schools and/or live on a poor diet and/or etc. etc.
No. In poorer countries, most things are cheaper than in the US and Europe, for obvious reasons. But computers, being foreign-made, have roughly the same price everywhere. Thus, a family can have decent living standards with a decent house, a decent diet and a decent medical attention, and still be unable to afford a computer.
As for crappy schools, the notion that the quality of your school should be linked to the money you have (except of course for the 1-2% who can attend very expensive private schools) or the city you live in is a very American one.
The other point is, who is paying for this. If the government is sucking up the "loss" in the sales, where is that money coming from, taxxed people? So now you will take other people's money away so that less fortunate won't fall behind on the latest issue of "the Onion" and can keep up with slashdot? WTF?
Translation in the educational/medical domain: "So now you will take other people's money away so that less fortunate will have a reasonable life expectancy and even possibly get a decent education ?"
We're not talking about "power rangers" here. We're talking about basic IT-literacy. We're talking about a divide that might soon become almost as important as the one between people who can read/write, and people who can't. Maybe you'll call me an arrogant European socialist, but the idea to take money from GE, IBM and Esso (big corporations contribute much more to tax revenue than "taxpayers" do) to enhance significantly the fate of a huge majority of the population, that idea does not really strikes me as particularly upsetting.
In fact that's exactly what 90% of western countries do. Britain and US being two noticeable exceptions.
Thomas Miconi
Is a Government bought and sold to/by TransNational Corporate interest not enough?
:o) would get much more money than he does right now. Why do you think the Green Party is a government party in France and Germany ?
/. reader would probably beg to differ :o).
In France, political parties cannot be funded by corporations.
Although individuals can make private donations (no more than FF 50000, ie approximately $8000), the main source of financial support for political organizations is the State. Each party receives an amount of money which is calculated according to its scores in previous elections.
This may seem somewhat unfair towards small parties, but under such a system, Ralph Nader (randomly chosen example of course
However, this kind of law could probably not be passed in the US. The ability of a party to collect funds is seen as a strong indicator of its popularity (ie representativity), and therefore as an essential aspect of the democratic mechanism. Suppressing corporate funding would probably cause strong opposition, not only from coporate powers, but also from the public at large (although most
Thomas Miconi
Here's a handmade translation of this obviously babelfished piece of text
Glory to The Fish !You are a bit without value of droppings of babboon. Your ask the question of Slashdot was the bit of cut-downs the most without value on which I ever laid some eyes. If I meet you ever I will give a kick your donkey. No, draft who, I will rape your donkey. And you will appreciate it. Have a pleasant day.
Thomas Miconi
This sounds pretty much like the good old Minitel [?] pricing system. : you access some service/content, the ISP charges you some price and gives back a part of it to the service/content provider.
:o)
This "redistribution" model has been around for decades (the minitel system being only the most prominent application of it).
The only question is whether such a thing is possible in a business landscape where zillions of players coexist. Since the Internet relies on open standards, anybody with a computer and a communication line can become an ISP. The minitel system was, on the other hand, a proprietary system, so its owner (France Telecom) could control anything that went through it.
Have a nice time trying to apply such a model to the internet jungle, lads
Huh? Something that prevents you from watching the film can make it more popular?
He meant : "Something that prevent you from buying [random Schwarzenneger movie] as soon as it's released can give a significant help to [random indie studio movie]".
Thomas Miconi
The right thing to do would be to release the movies everywhere simultaneously.
Are you aware of the fact that a few people around the world still don't understand American English perfectly (you know, there are even people who don't speak English at all - no kidding), and therefore need silly things such as translation and dubbing ?
Those things happen to take quite some time. Hence the delay.
Thomas Miconi
The timing for the Yahoo Minitel portal is perfect. France Telecom, owner of the Minitel system, has recently launched a huge advertising campaign for its computer-version of the Minitel : "iMinitel" (read "eemeeneetel"), a PC program that allows you to connect on the Minitel network.
The minitel system is antiquated. It's slow, text-mode (although ncurses-like "graphics" are commonly used) and much more expensive than the internet. So how could it survive ?
The answer is simple: "business model". So far, few internet companies have been able to develop a sustainable business model (ie something more profitable than "putting banner ads everywhere"). The Minitel system, on the other hand, is based on a pay-per-minute scheme. If you want to provide some service on Minitel (say, an access to some big legal database), you simply choose a pricing category (from the cheap 3614 to the $1/min 3617). When people connect to your service, they pay the price you chose to France Telecom, who keeps a part of it and gives you the rest. Ridiculous charges, maximal profit. A service provider's dream.
This is why many non-public national databases (such as Euridile, the national register of commerce) can only be accessed through the Minitel system. And this is also the reason why such a deprecated system as the minitel might survive for years, coexisting with the cheaper, faster, better Internet system.
This backlash against the English language [?] must be taken in a wider context. English is silently creeping its way to Absolute World Domination, IT being only its last (and most powerful) Trojan horse.
20 years ago, when the first IT wave hit our side of the Ocean, the French tried (and managed) to prevent the linguistic tsunami by creating new words (or reusing old ones) for IT-related stuff, and these words were indeed quite good ("ordinateur" and "logiciel" sound nicer to our ears than "computer" and "software") and were quickly adopted. But at some point you have to face the obvious : The Internet is 90% English-speaking. Whatever the subject, documentation written in English may be ten times as abundant as in any other language. What can you do against that ?
This is especially frightening for us in a EU context : how long will we be able to carry on with the current policy, that is,translating any document in the 3 major languages (German, French and English) and as many documents as possible in the 11 (as of now) languages of the EU ? It's already cumbersome enough today - so what will it be like in a 30-members EU ? We feel that at some point the case for "English Everywhere" will become extremely strong, and to be honest we find it not only unfair (Britons would get a huge comparative advantage) but downright terrifying.
"One world, one economy, one language" (I wonder what it sounds like in German ?). Welcome to a Brave New World of civilization and progress, where the global elite will use its own language (American English), turning every other language into minor dialects used only by poorly educated locals.
Now this may sound like plain paranoia (and it is, to some point). But History shows that whenever local tongues are confronted with a mainstream language used by the cultural/technical/administrative elite, the latter wins. Think of Russia in the 17th-18th century (or even better, read "War and Peace" to see how close Russia came to becoming a French-speaking country, and why it didn't). The only major exception I can think of is Quebec - which survived as a cultural entity thanks to the federal nature of Canada.
There's a real fear here, and although I understand that it may look somewhat ridiculous when looked at from the good side of the Babel Fish, you should realize that it is nothing like nationalistic ranting. If we were machines, driven by purely rational goals such as productivity, efficiency, etc., we would all agree to speak the same language - be it English, Latin, SmallTalk, whatever.
We're not machines. We have a thing which we call culture, and that culture is the very definition of our identity (this is especially true for old European countries). The current "Anglicization" of the world is seen by some as a menace to our national identities, virtually undistinguishable from a military one. The Quebec example, which is now seen as an exception, might soon become the general standard.
After European peasants destroying McDonald's diners, who knows the next step of the transatlantic cold war won't be angry academics sacking cybercafés ?
How is it possible not to vote when you are among the (relatively) few people who can elect the most powerful leader in the world ?
I'm French, so of course I can't vote. I'm just watching as you Americans choose the man who will make peace or war in the Middle East, in Korea, in China, in the Balkans, and in several regions of Africa and Central Asia. The man who will negotiate all those issues with Vladimir Putin, Jiang Zemin et al. The man who will decide, incidentally, whether we Europeans can set up our own military force outside of NATO. Maybe you don't fully realize what "the President of the sole superpower" means, but believe me, we do.
The fact that millions among you (you = young, educated middle-class Americans) won't vote today - and that they're proud of it - upsets me.
Don't tell me that your vote wouldn't make a difference. At 50/50 every single vote counts, including yours. And you know that.
Don't tell us that the US election system is flawed. We know that already [?]. That's no excuse. Not voting will only make things worse.
Don't, please don't tell us that there's absolutely no difference between the two candidates. There is. You may not care much about the IQ or the qualification of your president, but we definitely do, for the very reasons I mentioned above.
Thinking that just because you didn't take ten minutes of your precious time to drop a paper in a little box, the next President of the United States will probably be George Bush jr instead of Al Gore, that drives me crazy. In any democracy, not voting is a Bad Thing, the expression of a "spoilt child" attitude. But in the US, the responsibility is even bigger, because the man you're electing will influence the lives of millions of people around the world, much more than yours. And those people cannot decide who that man will be. And you can. And you won't.
Thomas Miconi
If you think you can't make a difference you're just lying to yourself. At 50/50 every single vote counts. Even yours. Period.
Thomas Miconi
(Totally offtopic - no links - I love it)
:o), the absolute test is not being able to read Proust or Balzac, but being able to understand all the puns and jokes of the Canard Enchaine.
Le Canard Enchaine was founded during WWI, in a time when "bourrage de crane" ("skull-stuffing", ie propaganda) was the dominant activity among government officials and most of traditional press (eg "German corpses smell worse than French corpses"). The Canard Enchaine was designed from the start as a satirical newspaper (which it still is), and its main goal was to investigate and find out what was going out behind the official speeches (which it still does - it has unveiled more political scandals than any other newspaper in the country).
"Canard" (duck) means "newspaper" in popular language. The name "Canard Enchaine" is a lovely piece of pure irony, which indirectly stresses the "un-chained" nature of the paper.
This (weekly) paper also features a very high level of language. If you happen to be a student of French (I heard there are still a few people in the US who try to learn foreign languages - probably a rumour, though
Thomas Miconi
In a world without IP nobody will be allowed to earn a living out of the product of his mind.
I stress the word "allowed". This is not about freedom. This is the very opposite of freedom. The basic idea holds in a few words: "I don't care who you are / what you do, as soon as you publish something, whatever the genre, whatever the way, you lose any kind of rights over it. It does not belong to you any more. Just forget the idea that you might even be rewarded for it - let alone make a living from it."
I especially like the way he makes his point: "IP is inane in this and that situation, therefore the very concept of IP is bullshit". Obviously Mr Martin would have done very poorly as a science teacher (for info, he seems to be a profes sor at Wollongong's faculty of arts).
But I think it is better explained by an excerpt from Mr Martin's paper:
Suppose you have written an essay or made an invention. Your intellectual work does not exist in a social vacuum. It would not have been possible without lots of earlier work - both intellectual and nonintellectual - by many other people"
This man is telling us that since Beethoven used the western musical style, and would probably not have existed would there have been no Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi, Bach and Haydn before him, Beethoven has no significance in himself - and that the very idea that he should be rewarded for his work is ridiculous.
"Pitoyable".
Thomas Miconi
1) A "moral person" is a legal concept which includes corportations, associations, foundations, and any kind of organisation that can have a legal existence.
2) It's rather surprising to discover a law project from my own government on Slashdot...
This proposal hasn't made headlines here in France - in fact nobody mentioned it. This is even stranger when you consider the Nouvelle Economie frenzy that has developed over the last few months in the press - anything that involves computers, internet and economics has become incredibly fashionable here. Not to mention the extensive coverage of the Microsoft case (see today's edition of Liberation)
3) The strongly pro-market vocabulary ("consumer choice", "more competition", etc.) is also unusual for left-wing MPs. In fact, the text of this law project seems to be designed for the European level. I would not be surprised to see proposals of this kind making their way to the European parliament of Strasbourg over the next few months.
4) A short real-world case study:
Universities in France are regarded as public administrations (although they are independent for their internal organisation). In my university, as far as data exchange is concerned, open standards are enforced - e.g., all complex text documents are transmitted under RTF format. This is not for political reasons, but simply to avoid problems with different versions of Word. Microsoft programs has pushed the proprietary logic as far as losing compatibility with themselves (!), thus providing a strong rationale for using open standards.
I can't help finding this incredibly funny.
This is rather surprising.
;o), using this understandable fear as a rationale for rejecting digitization altogether is plain nonsense.
Digitization is a massive trend all over the world. Just have a look at the home page of Bibliotheca Univeralis Project (affiliated to the G7). Among other things, you can see that almost every big national library has set up some kind of digitization project, including the LoC.
The most impressive effort to date seems to be the Gallica server at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France : 15 million pages on line, most of them as images or PDF documents (I'm sure you all dreamed of reading a XVth century bible in Middle French, didn't you ?). All documents that are copyright-free are publicly available.
I didn't check the LoC project, but the name (American Memory) sounds rather self-explaining.
Digitization is not the future : it is the present. As usual, computer scientists have paved the way (on-line papers, etc.) have paved the way, but the rest of the world are catching on.
Although Mr Billington's comments about the importance of the physical support do make sense (if you techno-junkies don't understand this, just trust me: they do
There needs not be any opposition between computers and good old paper codex. They simply are different tools for different purposes, not to mention the fact that transition from electronic to physical form is a common task even among technologically oriented people (ever heard about those little boxes they call "printers" ?)
Thomas
PS: My opinion: the real reason is, they don't want to spend money in it (alt: they don't have any money to spend in it). What do you think ?
Basic Chaos Theory [?].
The very essence of being conscious is an ability to behave in a random fashion, also known as free will
There's no such thing as true randomness on the non-quantic scale. What we call "free will" is the result of a (highly structured) bunch of intercommunicating neurons. While the process of decision (ie will) remains one of the darkest parts of the Neurosciences realm, we already have enough clues to figure out where we should look (can you say "basal ganglia" ?).
Thomas Miconi
From what I understand though JK's description, Mr Harel is probably talking about the NP-hard problems, ie problems which take exponential time to solve (exponential being related to their "size", eg solving the travelling salesman problem for N cities takes k*exp(N) steps).
Although those problems are effectively unsolvable through the classical, algorithmic way, quite a lot of them can be solved using the most recent AI techniques - the drawback being that the solution is not 100% guaranteed optimal. Genetic Algorithms [?], for example, are the most powerful optimization tool that ever came out of AI. It can deal with the travalling salesman's problem (see one version here), just as well as other technique such as "Ant colonies"
Furthermore, complexity theory (which deals with "computability") only holds for Turing machines. DNA / quantum computers do not fell in the "NP-cursed" category of computers.
Mr Harel's thoughts, while being perfectly snesible as far as his own field is concerned (Turing-like algorithmics), should not be taken as holy scripture. Digital calculators are only a couple of decades old. It took thousands of years to fully exploit the power of the steam engine. We can try to imagine what "computers" will be like in 30 years from now, but expecting such a forecast to be accurate would be foolish.
Thomas Miconi