There's a great deal of concern for enchancing our capacity for experiencing the world, or durability to experience it longer, but very little for enhancing our internal mental experience, which is what this all seems to be about in the end.
We know that all of our experiences are the result of the workings of and inputs into our nervous and sensory systems, and ultimately our brains. If the goal is to enhance our own experience, it seems that ultimately direct input to our nervous and sensory systems and even the brain by electrical signals is the most effective, most efficient, most sustainable means of enchancing our own experiences.
There is no jet fuel to pollute our water and air when you fly across the world in an airplane in your mind. There are no natural disasters in this world if you do not want there to be. There is no death to see or experience if you do not want there to be.
And there is no reason to believe that experiences grounded in physical reality are the most enjoyable experiences to have. Evolution and geological processes are not directed to enchancing the quality of human mental experience, and to the extent they have enhanced it, by no means do we have reason to believe they have maximized it. And it may be technically very difficult to simulate the fullness of experience of the real sensory world to the mind. But perhaps raw emotions and sensations coupled with abtract realities can be every bit or more enjoyable.
There is also the matter of induced dreaming. Dreaming is a very cheap way to simulate experiencing the world - or some other - in a way that often seems very enjoyable to many people. If we could find ways through technology to induce and enhance the dreaming experience, we could relatively cheaply improve the quality of experience for many people.
Dreaming seems to consist in very real and compelling experiences, or at least the sense of having had real and compelling experiences. I retain very little of what I dream about, but at the moment I awake or perhaps just before, if I have had a dramatic dream, I have the very real experience of remembering having just had real and compelling experiences (whether I have or not I do not know).
If enhancing quality and duration of experience is our aim, then I think these will be ultimately the most rewarding courses to pursue.
Unfortunately, perhaps, I stubbornly believe there is much more to life than enhancing the quality and duration of experience.
"The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host's responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself."
In what novel way - or any way for that matter - does this differ from standard cryptographic challenge-response authentication? I mean, maybe they are using an extremely long generated series of psuedorandom keys, secrets, responses, or all 3 but I don't see how that is novel. Or perhaps incorrect responses result in the disk controller becoming non-responsive for a short period to increase the time required to exhaust the series, but that isn't novel either.
"Hilarious. Because nothing's funnier than making fun of people who are younger than you."
Except we do have, on the face of it, good reasons to believe that a legal drinking age of 21 is effective at reducing drinking among minors. Specifically, rather than acquiring alcohol from their immediate peers and classmates, minor high school students must acquire alcohol from their parents, older siblings, or whoever didn't cut it in college and hangs around looking to pick up highschool chicks instead. Absolutely this impacts the supply of alcohol to minors. Not enough perhaps, but certainly it narrows and lengthens the supply chain, and makes it an easier target for future actions.
And we do have good reasons to limit the supply of alcohol to minors, which is a major argument in favor of a legal drinking age of 21. While there are many exceptions, if you can't see the difference in the decision making maturity of, for example, an average 16 year old compared to an average 22 year old, you're just not thinking. There is significant brain development occurring up to even 18. We need to give minors every opportunity to be at a place developmentally where they can fully think through and appreciate the consequences of their actions before we as a society entirely remove the safeguards.
If you are yourself 21 or older, I feel sorry for you that you still see your parents and past teachers as involved in some sort of conspiracy to maliciously oppress and control you. It's an important step to your own self realization that you come to see yourself as an adult, recognizing how you have changed and progressed over the course of your own development.
"When we get to that point, expect all out lawlessness to ensue."
That seems quite unlikely to me. Quite to the contrary. So long as it isn't the children of senators and white middle class americans carrying out civil disobedience and being jailed, a majority of the country will rally behind the administration and law enforcement.
It would be for the same reasons that people react violently against anti-war protesters, and against people denouncing and criticising the government or the troops. I don't know what exactly that reason is psychologically, but I see it everywhere from FoxNews to freerepublic.dom to conservative talk radio. Some people outright *rage* the moment you seriously suggest that their government might be misleading them or the troops might be dying in vain.
"And all of the actors form War of the Worlds would be locked up.."
RTFA for crying out loud!
According to the article, you can only be held liable if 1) they (the government) react as if it were a real emergency, 2) you are aware of their overreaction, and 3) you fail to tell them that it is not a real emergency.
The War of the Worlds broadcast was broadcast with disclaimers. And I'm not aware of any government emergency response triggered by the broadcast. This law doesn't cover activities wasting private citizens' resources, only government resources. And CBS certainly would have informed the goverment of the nature of the program had they been aware of any official emergency response.
And the radio broadcast was ORSON Welles, not H.G. Welles.
From the article: "...the provisions in the bill would allow the government to take civil action against parties involved in perceived hoaxes if they fail to "promptly and reasonably inform one or more parties... of the actual nature of the activity" once they learn about investigative action taking place. In the case of Boston, this means that everyone involved could be sued for not immediately informing the police of the campaign upon receiving news of the emergency reaction."
So if you find out that the president is dispatching the national guard to combat your alien invasion hoax, you need to call the police up and let them know that it's just a joke, or risk being liable for emergency response costs.
That sounds down right reasonable to me.
Just like you can't scream "FIRE" in a crowded theatre and expect there to be no consequences.
The way the article puts it, you can't be held liable just if they over react. You can only be held liable if they overreact and you know about their overreaction but fail to alert them.
Where's the problem here? Emergency responses are expensive. I'd rather not give any more leeway than the constitution requires to some punks working for a marketing agency wasting my tax dollars, thanks.
"Because it runs on the client and is not dependent on code sent over the wire, it also means applications written in AJAX, such as Google Apps, can be used offline."
So JavaFX Script is just a client-side UI library? That's not AJAX. That's DHTML.
Too bad they didn't fix the real problem: Javascript. I would rather see Java as a first class language in the browser to replace Javascript entirely. Instead of writing Java GUI applications to target Swing or AWT you would be able to write them to target the browser DOM directly. And you'd have compile time checking. The DOM+CSS model is a pretty nice for documents. Of course that would require all browsers to have compliant DOM implementations (maybe that's the holdup). But JavaFX sounds more like Flash.
"While I have sympathy for your situation, every single (US) soldier who is pulling a trigger is a volunteer. "I was only following orders" stopped being a valid excuse for government-sanctioned murder a loooong time ago in an all-volunteer army."
Soldiers from lower middle class backgrounds without a college education are disproportionately represented in combat units. This suggests they are more pressured or inclined by their circumstances to enter the military. No one chooses the family they are born into or the environment in which they are raised. In many cases they may see no viable alternative to military service to realizing the demanding values and expectations society has instilled in them, and may be unable to see or acknowledge this coercion even when presented with it.
Add to this that the military spends millions of dollars to actively misrepresent the nature, scope, and risks of military service in elaborate advertising campaigns targeted at young people in such circumstances, and you have a truly despicable situation.
If you supported this war based on the premise that those there are enthusiastic volunteers having made fully free and informed decisions about their participation, you are deluded. Let me guess: you feel the same way about sex workers in southeast asia?
"The author is playing with words. At the end of the day a viral license like the GPL cannot exist without laws that acknowledge the "specialness" of intellectual property. You can't GPL a hammer."
No no no.
The GPL is not the objective. Free Software is the objective. The GPL is convenient tool functioning within current copyright law to provide and enforce proliferation of Free Software. Free Software is something very specific. It is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users as outlined by the Free Software Foundation.
No one is "for the GPL" per se. The FSF is *for* Free Software.
The GPL utilizes a technique called Copyleft to enforce the *proliferation* of Free Software, but the definition of Free Software does not require enforcement of proliferation. The definition of Free Software is completely independent of Copyright and makes no mention of it. There are many non-Copyleft Free Software licenses.
Someone who is both anti-Copyright and pro-Free Software would advocate the elimination of copyright in exchange for enshrining the 4 essential freedoms of software users in law, which IF YOU HAD READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE you would have seen is explained by the author.
""Director of information policy at the Cato Institute..." Oh, I'm sorry, am I supposed to continue giving a shit after that?"
Well we don't want the government silencing someone even if we don't agree with them.
That said, the implementation of this website is deeply flawed and simply dishonest.
They estimate the cost of spending to the "average family" or "family of 3" basically working from the premise that a flat (non-progressive) tax is the only legitimate tax. Not only do they not argue for this assumption, it is completely disconnected from reality. Yes, the cost of a piece of legislation averaged over all taxpayers may be $100, but in reality most taxpayers won't pay anywhere near that toward the spending. But nonetheless this shill website suggests they will. Of course $100 may seem like a lot when you are working 3 minimum wage jobs to support your children, but it is pocket change to those in the top 1% paying the most toward it.
What a ridiculous little ad-filled blurb this is. This is a "column"? My mother could have written a more insightful technology column, and she doesn't even use computers.
More infuriating is his use of the term "OS". What exactly are these user level features you are adding to your "OS"? Oh, right, things like internet browsers. Of course.
This reads like it was written by grade school student.
This wouldn't even pass as an insightful technical column on CNN. What is it doing here?
I've worked as an engineer on a number of the "costly commerical packages" the submitter alludes to. I've followed the open source alternatives over the years. I'd love to see a competitive open source solution and would gladly develop free software instead if it could pay the bills, but if you are a technology decision maker in your district I would encourage you to still go through the bidding process, and yes, solicit a bid from this Open Solutions for Education group as well.
When you sit down and compare the value you are getting, I think you will be surprised how favorably the commercial solutions compare.
The top 3 considerations will probably be support, services, and state reporting.
The largest cost in many of these packages is the services and support component. In this respect, open source or not is largely irrelevant unless you are planning to do support and services in house. But that means supporting a product that you have limited training on, and have very limited familiarity with the codebase of. And unless you plan on doing 1st tier support on up personally, you'll be hiring additional people on staff. Add their salaries into the bid.
If you'll be relying on the vendor, they you have a different set of questions. What kind of response level does the open source provider guarantee? Do they have the staffing and budget to fly technicians and trainers out same day or next day? Can they provide the level of support your district needs? Remember, if the system inexplicably goes down printing report cards the night before parent teacher conferences, the school board isn't going to let you off the hook because you saved a few bucks by going open source.
The other place you are likely to be burned is State Reporting. The reporting requirements in many states are so elaborate that it is only by economies of scale that a vendor can afford to provide and support compliant implementations. The complexity of these requirements are increasing as the state and federal governments want information in more detail, and the requirements change every year. Does this open source provider even have an implementation for state reporting in your state? Does it satisfy the data privacy regulations of your state? Does it support the internal data auditing requirements of your state? Will your auditor agree?
And if it doesn't have a state reporting implementation for your state, how much value does it really provide you, and how will it need to integrate into your existing process in terms of export and import?
If I were starting a student information system from scratch like a lot of these open source solutions are trying to do, I would start in a single state with modest state reporting requirements and target small schools. The customization needs you are going to start seeing even in 5000 student districts will quickly leave you in need of a large services and support organization (or business partners to provide the same), only you won't benefit from the economies of scale the established vendors do. "We'll offer the same product and services as big vendor X, only we'll do it for less!" is generally a non-starter as a business plan. Probably you are going to be looking either to be bought out by one of these established vendors (not a good strategy in the current market), or targeting a niche market, such as sub-5000 student districts, or even sub-1000 student districts.
"Without copyright there wouldn't be GPL because there would not be a need for it."
This is close, but it's missing one important part.
The GPL is specifically a tool to proliferate Free Software. Free Software is something very specific. It is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
If we simply abolished software copyrights and stopped there, we would lose an important tool for Free Software proliferation!
You see, abolishing software copyrights alone won't guarantee that all software is Free Software. It would still be possible for proprietary software companies to lock away the source to their application in a vault and never give it to users. Free distribution and disassembly aren't enough to satisfy the 4 essential freedoms.
We would be worse off if this is all we did. But that doesn't mean we can't abolish software copyrights!
We can abolish software copyrights, but only if in their place we enshrine in law the enforcement of the 4 essential freedoms of software users recognized by the FSF: - The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0). - The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. - The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2). - The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
If we did this, then, and only then, would there be no need for Free Software licenses, or the Copyleft proliferation technique (e.g. GPL, LGPL).
"You're missing the point. Without copyright, the most important aspect of the GPL (it's "viral" nature) disappears because it cannot be enforced. The GPL *requires* copyright law to do its work."
This is why the FSF does not advocate GPL usage as an end. The FSF advocates Free Software. Specifically, it advocates that all software should be Free Software. Free Software is something very particular. It is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
The GPL - Copyleft generally - is not primarily a tool to enshrine software freedoms in a software copyright world. Rather, it is a tool to *proliferate* Free Software in a world in which the 4 essential freedoms of software users are not enshrined in law. There are plenty of *merely* Free Software licenses - licenses for Free Software that do not employ the Copyleft proliferation strategy.
Again, the FSF is not anti-copyright per se, but rather is pro software freedom.
So while the FSF is not anti-copyright, it is quite sound to be both pro-Free Software and anti-copyright, with the qualification that in place of copyright we would like to see the 4 essential freedoms of software users enshrined in law.
"But without copyright, one would also have no need to enforce the GPL, as any releases made would be into the public domain assuming it is possible to disassemble the software."
I think there's some confusion here about Open Source and Free Software. The GPL is just a license that uses a technique called Copyleft to proliferate Free Software in the current legal setting. But there is plenty of non-Copylefted Free Software.
The FSF advocates that all software should be Free Software; software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). But Free Softare is not in any way dependent on copyright law. The definition of Free Software makes no reference to copyright. And you don't need to settle for copyright vs. essential freedoms and resort to relying on disassembling software or something like that.
Instead, you can advocate that software should be covered by law that mandates the 4 essential freedoms of software users, in addition to, or in place of copyright.
The FSF (the publisher of the GPL) is not anti-copyright per se. It is pro-software freedom. It is a logically sound position. If this position is appealing to you, read up on it. Don't let blogger prattle throw you like that.
"This article seems to equate "open source" with the GPL. BSD and Apache licenses would have much less problem with lack of copyright."
There's a lot of confusion out there. Just to be absolutely clear, the FSF does not advocate GPL licensed software as an end. The FSF advocates, unsurprisingly, Free Software. What is Free Software? Free Software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of all software users (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html) . These freedoms are completely independent of copyright. Proprietary Software is considered unethical to develop and distribute because it fails to satisfy these 4 essential freedoms of software users.
The GPL just happens to be a convenient advocacy tool under the current legal system.
If you could pin RMS down and ask him what sort of legislation he would support, it would most likely be legislation that makes all software governed by a mandatory system that enforces the 4 essential freedoms of software users, rather than governed by copyright (or copyright alone).
The FSF is not anti-copyright per se. It is pro-mandatory software freedoms. The 4 essential freedoms are freedoms of *software* users in particular. They do not apply to books, music, etc.
The piece is really ridiculous. It's clear the author has no idea what he is talking about from the moment he starts generalizing about some anti-copyright, gpl-endorsing crowd. He could have at least pointed out one other person or article that even advocates this position. Is he talking about the FSF? I don't think even he knows.
The FSF, for example, does not advocate the elimination of copyright law. They advocate, if anything, that software in particular should be governed by laws that recognize the 4 essential freedoms of software users - Free Software - instead of copyright. But RMS has been very clear that he is hesitant to extend these rights beyond software. RMS, for example, does not advocate eliminating copyright on books and music, or extending the 4 essential freedoms of software users to books and music.
The movement is very oriented toward software in particular. The Free Software movement is NOT a general anti-copyright movement.
The FSF is an organization committed to the advancement of Free Software. The FSF contends that proprietary (non-Free) software development and distribution is unethical and should cease because it fails to satisfy the 4 essential freedoms of software users.
Free software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of users of software. These freedoms are completely independent of Copyright's existence or non-existence. The definition of Free Software makes no mention of copyright.
Absent the voluntary or involuntary elimination of proprietary software, the Free Software Foundation generally encourages the use of Copyleft. You seem to be confused about the difference between Free Software and Copyleft. Free Software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users. Copyleft, on the other hand, is a licensing strategy employed wherin existing Copyright law is leveraged to further the proliferation of Free Software. There is much non-Copylefted Free Software.
You also seem to confuse Open Source with Free Software or Copyleft. These are all quite different things.
Having said all this, please consider taking a few minutes to inform yourself in the future before making wild generalizations about people and organizations you know nothing about. And congrats on completing sophomore year!
The codebase of those from scratch projects is probably less complex because they do not yet implement the last 30% of complex functionality implemented by the codebase you inherited.
Requiring users to learn a new UI and new ways of doing things, not to mention each having a long list of missing functionality, will alienate your userbase and reduce funding.
Likely the codebase appears more complex to you than it is because you are inexperienced with it.
If the issue is the complexity of the plugin interface, instead of discarding thousands of man hours of value, you should be working toward refactoring around a modern, less complex plugin interface.
I don't own a television. Transcripts don't really give a complete sense of the candidate's performance. Luckily I've been able to find the debates so far for both parties on YouTube.
Just search for "republican presidential debate part" or "democrat presidential debate part" respectively on YouTube. They're split into 9 minute chunks.
I think it would be awfully bad form for MSNBC to pull these from YouTube. But I commend the candidates and CNN for making this issue public. We shouldn't have to rely on the good will (or hesitant takedown action) of MSNBC in order to get coverage of the men and women, one of whom will in a relatively short amount of time hold the highest political office in our democracy.
But sometimes I'm not sure why I care, or that I do. Especially when I see headlines like this: "FLASH: FOXNEWS O'REILLY TOPS MSNBC GOP DEBATE".
And look at the viewership numbers. That's right, not only did less than 1% of elligible voters even WATCH that debate, MORE people watched some blowhard talk about the debate than watched the debate itself.
This should dominate mainstream broadcast and print media. This should preempt regular programming on every broadcast channel.
Or let me correct that last sentence: "Because you configured your fridge like this when you set it up, when you query "low" in the context of "refrigerator" that becomes an alias for "bottom door-shelf".
If you're having trouble thinking of realistic use cases, the key is to work from the assumption that rfid and rfid scanners are ubiquitous. Think of things in your home or in your place of business. Now, ask yourself what would it mean to you if you could uniquely identify that item and track its location anywhere in the building, and what if you could do that remotely (with proper safeguards for privacy)?
Now couple this with ubiquitous eletronic mapping of your home and the buildings you spend your day in.
Your Dinner Plates Are Trackable It's time to do dishes. You have a glass and a small plate at your family computer from that snack you ate while reading the news after work. You have two glasses on the coffee table and one on the sofa from the guests you had over last night. Your son has three plates, a bowl, flatware, and a few glasses up in his room. You left a drinking glass on the washroom counter.
But you don't know that they are there yet! Sure, you could walk into the family room and look around and pick up any you see, but you can do better. Open up your mobile, direct the interface to show the location of all diningware in your home. Now filter that to exclude diningware not already in the kitchen. How do you do that? I don't know, maybe it's as direct as typing "diningware +home -kitchen" into a prompt. But however you do it, now you see on your mobile a layout of your home with red dots indicating the location of diningware you need to round up to wash.
Your Refrigerator Is Queryable Only it isn't that clunky Refrigerator of the Future you saw in that magazine article.
You're at the grocery store. You're out of milk, low on soy sauce, and out of eggs. But you can only remember the eggs! Open up your mobile. Query "groceries +refrigerator +out" to get a list of groceries that belong in your refrigerator that you are out of: "1. milk, 2. eggs". How does it know what you are out of? After all, if you are out of it, it isn't there. AI? Of course not. It gives a list of groceries that have recently been in your refrigerator but aren't now.
But wait, what about the soy sauce? Well, it's still there, so your query for things you are out of didn't catch it. How can it know you are low on it? Does the soy sauce bottle have a amount remaining meter that can be read? Of course not, let's be realistic! What you did is designate to your fridge when you set it up that the bottom door-shelf is for things you are running low on. You put the soy sauce bottle there last night after the meal to be sure you'd remember - or rather so it would remember - and your fridge has rfid scanners with sufficient granularity to know what is on this shelf. So you rewrite your query: "groceries +refrigerator +out +low" and you get "1. milk, 2. eggs, 3. soy sauce". Aha! Soy sauce, that's what you were missing. Because you configured your fridge like this when you set it up, when you query "low" in the context of "refrigerator" that's becomes an alias for "top left shelf".
Your house would have more rfid scanners than electrical outlets. And everything from a carton of milk to your cat's collar would have an rfid tag.
Other good examples once you make these assumptions? 1) Tracking locations of projectors, televisions, and media carts in the office or school. 2) Tracking locations of books in a library. 813.11A. Where the heck is that? Instead of asking the librarian or following signs through the winding maze of shelves until you find 800xxx, just query it in your mobile and it will show you exactly where it is in the electronically mapped library. Just walk over and pick it up.
When your mother told you, "Because I said so," you should have listened.
Congratulations on completing High School. Welcome to the real world!
Laws and regulations do not exist to accord with moral principles or even common sense. Laws exist to compel behavior. There is no court of principle or reason to hear your appeals.
You do not abide by rules, regulations, and laws because you necessarily agree with them or believe them to be justified. In many cases you abide by them because you fear the consequences of violating them. You abide by them because they are threats, threats of the form: "If you do [or do not do] X, then we will punish you by doing Y."
Society, your High School, your College - like your mother - rules not by prior consent, not by reason, not by universal moral principles, but rather by tradition, intuition, emotion, and force.
Better these students learn this in school as minors than in the real world and end up in prison.
This isn't really anything dramatic. It appears to only differ from what they were already doing with Blue Gene I think a year ago in that now they've made some optimizations to their firing/communication algorithms to be less resource intensive (and correspond less directly to what occurs physically), allowing for simulation of more neurons and firings.
They don't seem to be simulating any neuroanatomy beyond interconnected neurons, and the initial interconnection pattern is just artificially generated.
So while this is cool, and their resources are very impressive, this is no way warrants the article title "Mouse Brain Simulated Via Computer".
But the submitter also asks about this implying a coming "system for human mental storage." I think we've all seen that ST:TNG episode too:) But at this point I think that is more a question for philosophers and linguists than for serious AI researchers if that is what you are getting at.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a great deal of concern for enchancing our capacity for experiencing the world, or durability to experience it longer, but very little for enhancing our internal mental experience, which is what this all seems to be about in the end.
We know that all of our experiences are the result of the workings of and inputs into our nervous and sensory systems, and ultimately our brains. If the goal is to enhance our own experience, it seems that ultimately direct input to our nervous and sensory systems and even the brain by electrical signals is the most effective, most efficient, most sustainable means of enchancing our own experiences.
There is no jet fuel to pollute our water and air when you fly across the world in an airplane in your mind. There are no natural disasters in this world if you do not want there to be. There is no death to see or experience if you do not want there to be.
And there is no reason to believe that experiences grounded in physical reality are the most enjoyable experiences to have. Evolution and geological processes are not directed to enchancing the quality of human mental experience, and to the extent they have enhanced it, by no means do we have reason to believe they have maximized it. And it may be technically very difficult to simulate the fullness of experience of the real sensory world to the mind. But perhaps raw emotions and sensations coupled with abtract realities can be every bit or more enjoyable.
There is also the matter of induced dreaming. Dreaming is a very cheap way to simulate experiencing the world - or some other - in a way that often seems very enjoyable to many people. If we could find ways through technology to induce and enhance the dreaming experience, we could relatively cheaply improve the quality of experience for many people.
Dreaming seems to consist in very real and compelling experiences, or at least the sense of having had real and compelling experiences. I retain very little of what I dream about, but at the moment I awake or perhaps just before, if I have had a dramatic dream, I have the very real experience of remembering having just had real and compelling experiences (whether I have or not I do not know).
If enhancing quality and duration of experience is our aim, then I think these will be ultimately the most rewarding courses to pursue.
Unfortunately, perhaps, I stubbornly believe there is much more to life than enhancing the quality and duration of experience.
"The information can only be accessed by a host if the host can respond to random challenges asked by the disk drive. The host's responses are generated using a cryptography chip processing a specific algorithm. This technique allows the disk drive and the host to communicate using a coded security system where attempts to break the code and choose the correct password take longer to learn than the useful life of the disk drive itself."
In what novel way - or any way for that matter - does this differ from standard cryptographic challenge-response authentication? I mean, maybe they are using an extremely long generated series of psuedorandom keys, secrets, responses, or all 3 but I don't see how that is novel. Or perhaps incorrect responses result in the disk controller becoming non-responsive for a short period to increase the time required to exhaust the series, but that isn't novel either.
Any ideas?
"Do we really need Vulcans to be involved before we get excited about a *mission to explore another solar system*?"
Maybe not, but it helps! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T'Pol
"Hilarious. Because nothing's funnier than making fun of people who are younger than you."
Except we do have, on the face of it, good reasons to believe that a legal drinking age of 21 is effective at reducing drinking among minors. Specifically, rather than acquiring alcohol from their immediate peers and classmates, minor high school students must acquire alcohol from their parents, older siblings, or whoever didn't cut it in college and hangs around looking to pick up highschool chicks instead. Absolutely this impacts the supply of alcohol to minors. Not enough perhaps, but certainly it narrows and lengthens the supply chain, and makes it an easier target for future actions.
And we do have good reasons to limit the supply of alcohol to minors, which is a major argument in favor of a legal drinking age of 21. While there are many exceptions, if you can't see the difference in the decision making maturity of, for example, an average 16 year old compared to an average 22 year old, you're just not thinking. There is significant brain development occurring up to even 18. We need to give minors every opportunity to be at a place developmentally where they can fully think through and appreciate the consequences of their actions before we as a society entirely remove the safeguards.
If you are yourself 21 or older, I feel sorry for you that you still see your parents and past teachers as involved in some sort of conspiracy to maliciously oppress and control you. It's an important step to your own self realization that you come to see yourself as an adult, recognizing how you have changed and progressed over the course of your own development.
"When we get to that point, expect all out lawlessness to ensue."
That seems quite unlikely to me. Quite to the contrary. So long as it isn't the children of senators and white middle class americans carrying out civil disobedience and being jailed, a majority of the country will rally behind the administration and law enforcement.
It would be for the same reasons that people react violently against anti-war protesters, and against people denouncing and criticising the government or the troops. I don't know what exactly that reason is psychologically, but I see it everywhere from FoxNews to freerepublic.dom to conservative talk radio. Some people outright *rage* the moment you seriously suggest that their government might be misleading them or the troops might be dying in vain.
"And all of the actors form War of the Worlds would be locked up.."
RTFA for crying out loud!
According to the article, you can only be held liable if 1) they (the government) react as if it were a real emergency, 2) you are aware of their overreaction, and 3) you fail to tell them that it is not a real emergency.
The War of the Worlds broadcast was broadcast with disclaimers. And I'm not aware of any government emergency response triggered by the broadcast. This law doesn't cover activities wasting private citizens' resources, only government resources. And CBS certainly would have informed the goverment of the nature of the program had they been aware of any official emergency response.
And the radio broadcast was ORSON Welles, not H.G. Welles.
From the article:
"...the provisions in the bill would allow the government to take civil action against parties involved in perceived hoaxes if they fail to "promptly and reasonably inform one or more parties... of the actual nature of the activity" once they learn about investigative action taking place. In the case of Boston, this means that everyone involved could be sued for not immediately informing the police of the campaign upon receiving news of the emergency reaction."
So if you find out that the president is dispatching the national guard to combat your alien invasion hoax, you need to call the police up and let them know that it's just a joke, or risk being liable for emergency response costs.
That sounds down right reasonable to me.
Just like you can't scream "FIRE" in a crowded theatre and expect there to be no consequences.
The way the article puts it, you can't be held liable just if they over react. You can only be held liable if they overreact and you know about their overreaction but fail to alert them.
Where's the problem here? Emergency responses are expensive. I'd rather not give any more leeway than the constitution requires to some punks working for a marketing agency wasting my tax dollars, thanks.
"Because it runs on the client and is not dependent on code sent over the wire, it also means applications written in AJAX, such as Google Apps, can be used offline."
So JavaFX Script is just a client-side UI library? That's not AJAX. That's DHTML.
Too bad they didn't fix the real problem: Javascript. I would rather see Java as a first class language in the browser to replace Javascript entirely. Instead of writing Java GUI applications to target Swing or AWT you would be able to write them to target the browser DOM directly. And you'd have compile time checking. The DOM+CSS model is a pretty nice for documents. Of course that would require all browsers to have compliant DOM implementations (maybe that's the holdup). But JavaFX sounds more like Flash.
"While I have sympathy for your situation, every single (US) soldier who is pulling a trigger is a volunteer. "I was only following orders" stopped being a valid excuse for government-sanctioned murder a loooong time ago in an all-volunteer army."
Soldiers from lower middle class backgrounds without a college education are disproportionately represented in combat units. This suggests they are more pressured or inclined by their circumstances to enter the military. No one chooses the family they are born into or the environment in which they are raised. In many cases they may see no viable alternative to military service to realizing the demanding values and expectations society has instilled in them, and may be unable to see or acknowledge this coercion even when presented with it.
Add to this that the military spends millions of dollars to actively misrepresent the nature, scope, and risks of military service in elaborate advertising campaigns targeted at young people in such circumstances, and you have a truly despicable situation.
If you supported this war based on the premise that those there are enthusiastic volunteers having made fully free and informed decisions about their participation, you are deluded. Let me guess: you feel the same way about sex workers in southeast asia?
"The author is playing with words. At the end of the day a viral license like the GPL cannot exist without laws that acknowledge the "specialness" of intellectual property. You can't GPL a hammer."
No no no.
The GPL is not the objective. Free Software is the objective. The GPL is convenient tool functioning within current copyright law to provide and enforce proliferation of Free Software. Free Software is something very specific. It is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users as outlined by the Free Software Foundation.
No one is "for the GPL" per se. The FSF is *for* Free Software.
The GPL utilizes a technique called Copyleft to enforce the *proliferation* of Free Software, but the definition of Free Software does not require enforcement of proliferation. The definition of Free Software is completely independent of Copyright and makes no mention of it. There are many non-Copyleft Free Software licenses.
Someone who is both anti-Copyright and pro-Free Software would advocate the elimination of copyright in exchange for enshrining the 4 essential freedoms of software users in law, which IF YOU HAD READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE you would have seen is explained by the author.
""Director of information policy at the Cato Institute..." Oh, I'm sorry, am I supposed to continue giving a shit after that?"
Well we don't want the government silencing someone even if we don't agree with them.
That said, the implementation of this website is deeply flawed and simply dishonest.
They estimate the cost of spending to the "average family" or "family of 3" basically working from the premise that a flat (non-progressive) tax is the only legitimate tax. Not only do they not argue for this assumption, it is completely disconnected from reality. Yes, the cost of a piece of legislation averaged over all taxpayers may be $100, but in reality most taxpayers won't pay anywhere near that toward the spending. But nonetheless this shill website suggests they will. Of course $100 may seem like a lot when you are working 3 minimum wage jobs to support your children, but it is pocket change to those in the top 1% paying the most toward it.
What a ridiculous little ad-filled blurb this is. This is a "column"? My mother could have written a more insightful technology column, and she doesn't even use computers.
More infuriating is his use of the term "OS". What exactly are these user level features you are adding to your "OS"? Oh, right, things like internet browsers. Of course.
This reads like it was written by grade school student.
This wouldn't even pass as an insightful technical column on CNN. What is it doing here?
I've worked as an engineer on a number of the "costly commerical packages" the submitter alludes to. I've followed the open source alternatives over the years. I'd love to see a competitive open source solution and would gladly develop free software instead if it could pay the bills, but if you are a technology decision maker in your district I would encourage you to still go through the bidding process, and yes, solicit a bid from this Open Solutions for Education group as well.
When you sit down and compare the value you are getting, I think you will be surprised how favorably the commercial solutions compare.
The top 3 considerations will probably be support, services, and state reporting.
The largest cost in many of these packages is the services and support component. In this respect, open source or not is largely irrelevant unless you are planning to do support and services in house. But that means supporting a product that you have limited training on, and have very limited familiarity with the codebase of. And unless you plan on doing 1st tier support on up personally, you'll be hiring additional people on staff. Add their salaries into the bid.
If you'll be relying on the vendor, they you have a different set of questions. What kind of response level does the open source provider guarantee? Do they have the staffing and budget to fly technicians and trainers out same day or next day? Can they provide the level of support your district needs? Remember, if the system inexplicably goes down printing report cards the night before parent teacher conferences, the school board isn't going to let you off the hook because you saved a few bucks by going open source.
The other place you are likely to be burned is State Reporting. The reporting requirements in many states are so elaborate that it is only by economies of scale that a vendor can afford to provide and support compliant implementations. The complexity of these requirements are increasing as the state and federal governments want information in more detail, and the requirements change every year. Does this open source provider even have an implementation for state reporting in your state? Does it satisfy the data privacy regulations of your state? Does it support the internal data auditing requirements of your state? Will your auditor agree?
And if it doesn't have a state reporting implementation for your state, how much value does it really provide you, and how will it need to integrate into your existing process in terms of export and import?
If I were starting a student information system from scratch like a lot of these open source solutions are trying to do, I would start in a single state with modest state reporting requirements and target small schools. The customization needs you are going to start seeing even in 5000 student districts will quickly leave you in need of a large services and support organization (or business partners to provide the same), only you won't benefit from the economies of scale the established vendors do. "We'll offer the same product and services as big vendor X, only we'll do it for less!" is generally a non-starter as a business plan. Probably you are going to be looking either to be bought out by one of these established vendors (not a good strategy in the current market), or targeting a niche market, such as sub-5000 student districts, or even sub-1000 student districts.
Good writeup.
"Without copyright there wouldn't be GPL because there would not be a need for it."
This is close, but it's missing one important part.
The GPL is specifically a tool to proliferate Free Software. Free Software is something very specific. It is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
If we simply abolished software copyrights and stopped there, we would lose an important tool for Free Software proliferation!
You see, abolishing software copyrights alone won't guarantee that all software is Free Software. It would still be possible for proprietary software companies to lock away the source to their application in a vault and never give it to users. Free distribution and disassembly aren't enough to satisfy the 4 essential freedoms.
We would be worse off if this is all we did. But that doesn't mean we can't abolish software copyrights!
We can abolish software copyrights, but only if in their place we enshrine in law the enforcement of the 4 essential freedoms of software users recognized by the FSF:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
If we did this, then, and only then, would there be no need for Free Software licenses, or the Copyleft proliferation technique (e.g. GPL, LGPL).
"You're missing the point. Without copyright, the most important aspect of the GPL (it's "viral" nature) disappears because it cannot be enforced. The GPL *requires* copyright law to do its work."
This is why the FSF does not advocate GPL usage as an end. The FSF advocates Free Software. Specifically, it advocates that all software should be Free Software. Free Software is something very particular. It is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).
The GPL - Copyleft generally - is not primarily a tool to enshrine software freedoms in a software copyright world. Rather, it is a tool to *proliferate* Free Software in a world in which the 4 essential freedoms of software users are not enshrined in law. There are plenty of *merely* Free Software licenses - licenses for Free Software that do not employ the Copyleft proliferation strategy.
Again, the FSF is not anti-copyright per se, but rather is pro software freedom.
So while the FSF is not anti-copyright, it is quite sound to be both pro-Free Software and anti-copyright, with the qualification that in place of copyright we would like to see the 4 essential freedoms of software users enshrined in law.
"But without copyright, one would also have no need to enforce the GPL, as any releases made would be into the public domain assuming it is possible to disassemble the software."
I think there's some confusion here about Open Source and Free Software. The GPL is just a license that uses a technique called Copyleft to proliferate Free Software in the current legal setting. But there is plenty of non-Copylefted Free Software.
The FSF advocates that all software should be Free Software; software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html). But Free Softare is not in any way dependent on copyright law. The definition of Free Software makes no reference to copyright. And you don't need to settle for copyright vs. essential freedoms and resort to relying on disassembling software or something like that.
Instead, you can advocate that software should be covered by law that mandates the 4 essential freedoms of software users, in addition to, or in place of copyright.
The FSF (the publisher of the GPL) is not anti-copyright per se. It is pro-software freedom. It is a logically sound position. If this position is appealing to you, read up on it. Don't let blogger prattle throw you like that.
"This article seems to equate "open source" with the GPL. BSD and Apache licenses would have much less problem with lack of copyright."
) . These freedoms are completely independent of copyright. Proprietary Software is considered unethical to develop and distribute because it fails to satisfy these 4 essential freedoms of software users.
There's a lot of confusion out there. Just to be absolutely clear, the FSF does not advocate GPL licensed software as an end. The FSF advocates, unsurprisingly, Free Software. What is Free Software? Free Software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of all software users (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html
The GPL just happens to be a convenient advocacy tool under the current legal system.
If you could pin RMS down and ask him what sort of legislation he would support, it would most likely be legislation that makes all software governed by a mandatory system that enforces the 4 essential freedoms of software users, rather than governed by copyright (or copyright alone).
The FSF is not anti-copyright per se. It is pro-mandatory software freedoms. The 4 essential freedoms are freedoms of *software* users in particular. They do not apply to books, music, etc.
The piece is really ridiculous. It's clear the author has no idea what he is talking about from the moment he starts generalizing about some anti-copyright, gpl-endorsing crowd. He could have at least pointed out one other person or article that even advocates this position. Is he talking about the FSF? I don't think even he knows.
The FSF, for example, does not advocate the elimination of copyright law. They advocate, if anything, that software in particular should be governed by laws that recognize the 4 essential freedoms of software users - Free Software - instead of copyright. But RMS has been very clear that he is hesitant to extend these rights beyond software. RMS, for example, does not advocate eliminating copyright on books and music, or extending the 4 essential freedoms of software users to books and music.
The movement is very oriented toward software in particular. The Free Software movement is NOT a general anti-copyright movement.
Looks like another college sophomore just discovered the GPL.
r eedom.html
Welcome, sir. To start, why don't you Read the Fine Manual?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The FSF is an organization committed to the advancement of Free Software. The FSF contends that proprietary (non-Free) software development and distribution is unethical and should cease because it fails to satisfy the 4 essential freedoms of software users.
Free software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of users of software. These freedoms are completely independent of Copyright's existence or non-existence. The definition of Free Software makes no mention of copyright.
Absent the voluntary or involuntary elimination of proprietary software, the Free Software Foundation generally encourages the use of Copyleft. You seem to be confused about the difference between Free Software and Copyleft. Free Software is software that satisfies the 4 essential freedoms of software users. Copyleft, on the other hand, is a licensing strategy employed wherin existing Copyright law is leveraged to further the proliferation of Free Software. There is much non-Copylefted Free Software.
You also seem to confuse Open Source with Free Software or Copyleft. These are all quite different things.
Once again, I refer you to the Fine manual:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-f
Having said all this, please consider taking a few minutes to inform yourself in the future before making wild generalizations about people and organizations you know nothing about. And congrats on completing sophomore year!
The codebase of those from scratch projects is probably less complex because they do not yet implement the last 30% of complex functionality implemented by the codebase you inherited.
Requiring users to learn a new UI and new ways of doing things, not to mention each having a long list of missing functionality, will alienate your userbase and reduce funding.
Likely the codebase appears more complex to you than it is because you are inexperienced with it.
If the issue is the complexity of the plugin interface, instead of discarding thousands of man hours of value, you should be working toward refactoring around a modern, less complex plugin interface.
I don't own a television. Transcripts don't really give a complete sense of the candidate's performance. Luckily I've been able to find the debates so far for both parties on YouTube.
Just search for "republican presidential debate part" or "democrat presidential debate part" respectively on YouTube. They're split into 9 minute chunks.
I think it would be awfully bad form for MSNBC to pull these from YouTube. But I commend the candidates and CNN for making this issue public. We shouldn't have to rely on the good will (or hesitant takedown action) of MSNBC in order to get coverage of the men and women, one of whom will in a relatively short amount of time hold the highest political office in our democracy.
But sometimes I'm not sure why I care, or that I do. Especially when I see headlines like this: "FLASH: FOXNEWS O'REILLY TOPS MSNBC GOP DEBATE".
And look at the viewership numbers. That's right, not only did less than 1% of elligible voters even WATCH that debate, MORE people watched some blowhard talk about the debate than watched the debate itself.
This should dominate mainstream broadcast and print media. This should preempt regular programming on every broadcast channel.
Or let me correct that last sentence:
"Because you configured your fridge like this when you set it up, when you query "low" in the context of "refrigerator" that becomes an alias for "bottom door-shelf".
If you're having trouble thinking of realistic use cases, the key is to work from the assumption that rfid and rfid scanners are ubiquitous. Think of things in your home or in your place of business. Now, ask yourself what would it mean to you if you could uniquely identify that item and track its location anywhere in the building, and what if you could do that remotely (with proper safeguards for privacy)?
Now couple this with ubiquitous eletronic mapping of your home and the buildings you spend your day in.
Your Dinner Plates Are Trackable
It's time to do dishes. You have a glass and a small plate at your family computer from that snack you ate while reading the news after work. You have two glasses on the coffee table and one on the sofa from the guests you had over last night. Your son has three plates, a bowl, flatware, and a few glasses up in his room. You left a drinking glass on the washroom counter.
But you don't know that they are there yet! Sure, you could walk into the family room and look around and pick up any you see, but you can do better. Open up your mobile, direct the interface to show the location of all diningware in your home. Now filter that to exclude diningware not already in the kitchen. How do you do that? I don't know, maybe it's as direct as typing "diningware +home -kitchen" into a prompt. But however you do it, now you see on your mobile a layout of your home with red dots indicating the location of diningware you need to round up to wash.
Your Refrigerator Is Queryable
Only it isn't that clunky Refrigerator of the Future you saw in that magazine article.
You're at the grocery store. You're out of milk, low on soy sauce, and out of eggs. But you can only remember the eggs! Open up your mobile. Query "groceries +refrigerator +out" to get a list of groceries that belong in your refrigerator that you are out of: "1. milk, 2. eggs". How does it know what you are out of? After all, if you are out of it, it isn't there. AI? Of course not. It gives a list of groceries that have recently been in your refrigerator but aren't now.
But wait, what about the soy sauce? Well, it's still there, so your query for things you are out of didn't catch it. How can it know you are low on it? Does the soy sauce bottle have a amount remaining meter that can be read? Of course not, let's be realistic! What you did is designate to your fridge when you set it up that the bottom door-shelf is for things you are running low on. You put the soy sauce bottle there last night after the meal to be sure you'd remember - or rather so it would remember - and your fridge has rfid scanners with sufficient granularity to know what is on this shelf. So you rewrite your query: "groceries +refrigerator +out +low" and you get "1. milk, 2. eggs, 3. soy sauce". Aha! Soy sauce, that's what you were missing. Because you configured your fridge like this when you set it up, when you query "low" in the context of "refrigerator" that's becomes an alias for "top left shelf".
Your house would have more rfid scanners than electrical outlets. And everything from a carton of milk to your cat's collar would have an rfid tag.
Other good examples once you make these assumptions? 1) Tracking locations of projectors, televisions, and media carts in the office or school. 2) Tracking locations of books in a library. 813.11A. Where the heck is that? Instead of asking the librarian or following signs through the winding maze of shelves until you find 800xxx, just query it in your mobile and it will show you exactly where it is in the electronically mapped library. Just walk over and pick it up.
When your mother told you, "Because I said so," you should have listened.
Congratulations on completing High School. Welcome to the real world!
Laws and regulations do not exist to accord with moral principles or even common sense. Laws exist to compel behavior. There is no court of principle or reason to hear your appeals.
You do not abide by rules, regulations, and laws because you necessarily agree with them or believe them to be justified. In many cases you abide by them because you fear the consequences of violating them. You abide by them because they are threats, threats of the form: "If you do [or do not do] X, then we will punish you by doing Y."
Society, your High School, your College - like your mother - rules not by prior consent, not by reason, not by universal moral principles, but rather by tradition, intuition, emotion, and force.
Better these students learn this in school as minors than in the real world and end up in prison.
This isn't really anything dramatic. It appears to only differ from what they were already doing with Blue Gene I think a year ago in that now they've made some optimizations to their firing/communication algorithms to be less resource intensive (and correspond less directly to what occurs physically), allowing for simulation of more neurons and firings.
:) But at this point I think that is more a question for philosophers and linguists than for serious AI researchers if that is what you are getting at.
They don't seem to be simulating any neuroanatomy beyond interconnected neurons, and the initial interconnection pattern is just artificially generated.
So while this is cool, and their resources are very impressive, this is no way warrants the article title "Mouse Brain Simulated Via Computer".
But the submitter also asks about this implying a coming "system for human mental storage." I think we've all seen that ST:TNG episode too