The most aggregious assault on personal liberties by the DMCA involves the ways in which copyright has been turned into patent level protection.
For example, copyright provides NO protection against reverse engineering. An musician can hear a rhythm from another musician, figure out how to make it, and add it to his repertoire. The source code of a program can be read, studied for its algorithms, and then those exact same algorithms can be implemented in different code completely legally.
But the DMCA specifically forbids reverse engineering to get around copyright protective measures. These measures can be totally trivial and they still prevent things like using DeCSS in the USA. That is a patent level of protection. This level was originally specifically EXCLUDED from copyright law - it is in patent law. A patent provides you the chance to forbid others from using your new invention without licensing. You can note how cleanly now the DMCA prevents others from playing DVDs without licensing. This has turned a copyright into a patent, plain and simple.
The separation between these concepts, copyright and patent, was made for a reason. Copyright is identified as coming from a source - one's reputation and value from one's words are at stake. Patents are intellectual property, and must pass a MUCH higher standard for being awarded.
This higher standard (regrettably not high enough IMHO) has now been bypassed with DMCA so that corporations with lawyers can prevent people from accessing copyrighted material than they own. What a gross perversion, and it will only get worse if UCITA passes.
I can go to the ibm hosted patent site and download the RSA patent.
I am not legally allowed to implement the patent, although I can legally download source that implements the patent in other countries.
I just don't see that not allowing the source to be open is such a big deal. I mean, the cat is out of the bag. I cannot legally distribute software using RSA until September, but I can possess source code that would implement it if compiled, and I can FREELY possess binaries that implement it (such as netscape, IE, ssh - for non-commercial use...)
Exactly how much of a head start is it going to be for mozilla to distribute the source ?
I also realize the REAL issue is that mozilla NEEDS permission to distribute the source, and that is the real hangup. It all seems so silly.
For my economics class, I created an 8.5x11 word 2000 document that was litterally full of equations (real equations using the equations builder tool), and didn't have any problems whatsoever. Can you elborate on 'totally chokes' ?
Sure. It took my former collaborator 2 weeks to print his thesis, with about 15 color figures dropped in. He couldn't even EDIT the thing with the figures in place. This is on a Pentium Pro 200 with 64 Meg Ram.
Any document of substantial length (let's say more than 10 pages single spaced) with more than about 5 figures causes a chokedown. I can write documents of ANY length with LaTeX - heck - I can write a 100 page novel with a figure on each page. My system sees the same load as it does for a simple text editor.
Heck, go type a letter into Word (a one page letter) and compare the time it takes to AbiWord on similar hardware. Then back the hardware down to a 486 and repeat.... Word is a total PIG. You like that little Office toolbar ?? M$ would have you believe it is to provide widgets for launching Office software so that you don't need to use the Start Menu. It really is an app that PRELOADS all the libraries Office needs. Otherwise it would load slower than emacs on a 2000 RPM ide drive without DMA ! The choice therefore is to occupy a substantial portion of your RAM continuously rather than have EVERYONE realize what a complete waste the software is !
Alright, I know I'm probably going to get moderated down for this one, but here goes... Why is it that whenever a company releases a powerful and useful tool for free, the first response of many here is to say "Great, now give us the source and we will like you!"
The largest gain from open source is the control it gives you as a programmer. If a library on my system has a flaky API, I can check the source. It once took days for me to find a bug in OSF's call for wordexp (a POSIX function), whereas finding how glibc did it took about 20 minutes, and most of that was downloading and untarring. Free as in free beer is nice, but free as in free speech is being able to take control of your own machine in as much or as little detail as you like. There is an enormous difference between the value of the two to anyone who has ever used source to get at the root of a bug.
So, whereas some people may shout it from the mountains when a compiler is made free as in beer, people who use the source will only think of it as a very small gain, primarily for PR value, and will say - "Show me your source!"
Say what you will about Microsoft, but Office is a great product. There is nothing even close to comparable. I know a lot of you people are of the mind that "Hell, I can write letters just fine using BogoOfficePerfect!", but if you want to do a complex document beyond the "Hi mom" level, the power of Office really shines.
Office is NOT a document creation tool. It is good letter writing software. TeX is a document creation tool. Adobe Framemaker is a document creation tool. Microsoft Word totally chokes on long documents with lots of equations and included figures, and is ridiculously slow compared to the competition on linux (Framemaker and TeX derivatives like Lyx and kLyx and LaTeX). Office is, however, a monopoly, and that makes SOME people think it is the greatest innovation since sliced bread. It is not. It will wither on the vine within five years as valid competition emerges on a non-Microsoft OS. A monopolist has no incentive to make good software - they merely need to make software good enough to prevent people from seeking alternatives - and incompatible enough that EVERYONE NEEDS to have access to it. Is there ANYONE who regularly exchanges documents that doesn't HAVE to have access to Word. No !! That is the problem. I write with LaTeX - but I am not a LaTeX bigot. There is lots of good document creation software out there. Word is NOT one of them.
Today I spent much of the day typing a protocol into Word because UCSF distributes their forms in Word format. Painful, to say the least. Even if LaTeX is less than intuitive on lots of things, at least it is consistent, and does not crash without explanation.
Went over to CERT They claim they've been finding a client called Stacheldraht on compromised hosts, sometimes with up to 100 connections to other compromised hosts. This is consistent with security claims at Dave Dittrich's site at U Wash Basically, someone uses known remote root exploits (lpr, named, ssh, to name a few recent ones) and compromises hosts. Then he synchronizes them to DoS some target from someplace very safe. One person can thus appear to be a few hundred clients all attacking some target simultaneously. By making a trivial change he could move his target. This is NOT a large synchronized group of people. It is one or at most a few good crackers just having a good time, hardly believing how much damage they are doing so easily. The report names linux and Solaris as the machine types with makefile rules defined in the program, and the program has only been seen on Solaris 2.* in the wild. German for "barbed wire".
Still waiting for Quicktime for linux
on
PPCLinux.Apple.Com
·
· Score: 2
Well, how about that port of Quicktime for linux ?
What exactly are my options for viewing movies created with their server software using patented Sorensen codecs ?
Apple seems perfectly willing to support ppclinux when they feel there is no possible way it can dent their OS. And when they are about ready to take BSD and release it as their next Mac operating system.
Maybe then they will allow lowly linux users to view their video - but I doubt it.
We've also had problems with power crashes and a lack of AdvFS recovery using salvage. Then we resort to a tar backup of the good inodes, and trashing the domain, and recreating the domain. That is one royal pain in the butt, and has us seriously considering going back to UFS. At least it was consistently fixable.
Another issue is that if we fill the file system we could get empty files and unbootable systems. That is no big deal if you can boot from other media and run a quick fdisk to mount a disk. Unfortunately, the AdvFS domains require a little more work to get mounted.
I think there are some nice ideas in AdvFS, but I also think anyone who has administered it a lot will think that it is more trouble than an unjournaled FS.
Another point about journaled file systems and linux. AFAIK, ext3 is the ONLY file system that works on something other than x86 systems.
The author clearly has some facts just plain wrong.
He claims Andreesen used the Mosaic code to "float netscape". Wrong. The Mosaic code was, in fact, the most valuable piece of code around at the time. It was licensed - to Microsoft. They then gave it away making it totally worthless to the people who invented the graphical browser.
Netscape rewrote the browser de novo.
Kelly makes other errors as well, but he misses the important commercialization point made at Linus' recent keynote. Big companies have done a LOT to make linux end user friendly in a short period of time, They've done a lot of menial bug chasing - the kind of code writing that is easiest done by paying someone. Redhat and VA linux especially do a lot. SGI is bringing some nfs work to linux, as well as the best file system in existence. IBM brought its (closed source) Java implementation. And on and on.
Yeah, big business is really affecting linux. Just not as JS Kelly thinks it is. Maybe he should actually try using it sometime.
Breaking commercial level encryption is quite a feat for a 16 year old. What is your background and experience in programming ? What platforms and programming languages are you familiar with ?
Of course the GPL is valid. It merely requires that all dependencies are standard shipping parts of the operating system, OR are GPL'd,
This was one of the original complaints about KDE. The KDE was claiming to use the GPL, yet QT was not GPLd and was NOT a standard component shipped with the operating system.
In any case, a shell for windows can and has been written and GPLd. Bash exists for windows, for example, as well as a host of other GNU software such as emacs (not microemacs which is NOT GPLd).
Thomas Edison was not a scientist. He did not engage in discovery of new science. He did not work in the same realm as his peers.
Thomas Edison advanced TECHNOLOGY, not SCIENCE. There are fundamentally different motivations involved in the two. This has been the subject of quite a few essays by the late Thomas Kuhn.
There are plenty of debates as to whether science leads or lags technology, a topic I do not want get into. But people like Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison fundamentally developed new technology. They did not carefully consider mechanisms by which their technologies worked, nor did they CARE about careful investigation of mechanism. They made products that served a function.
Both science and technology advance society. Technology does it with a shorter time lag than science, in general. Science often does not have immediately visible consequences to society - technology always does. The failure of the government to fund science will leave us with a society that is fundamentally driven by technology. And that has long lasting consequences to consider.
As unpopular as it may be, I'm totally against this funding. Do I want to see science advanced? Are nanobites cool? Of course. But why in the world do we want to have them funded by the government? Why is that the government's responsibility (or privelege)?
Research dollars spent by the government can be allotted based on contribution to society. Research dollars spent by industry ARE allotted based on likely financial return. There is a difference.
I see direct consequences of this in biomedical research daily. An altruistic funding source is a true benefit to society.
Several reseachers at Harvard have run an implant into a cat's visual cortex, and can transmit images from the cat's mind to a computer. This is the reverse direction of sending images INTO the brain, but it displays a solid enough knowledge of visual signals in the brain that I'd hesitate to use the word "ludicrous". They'll get there, and soon.
I think I will stick with my words for now. The idea is that you can take an image display and figure out what patterns of activity it causes in the brain, and then cause them through an implant. To think that this is possible currently through stimulation at the level of the cerebral cortex is ludicrous. Besides, the effects of sustained long term stimulation at that level are well known, and if the experiment works initially it will not work for ANY extended period.
LOWER levels of the visual system offer substantially more hope for this process. It is much easier to describe the coding of a visual image at the level of the retina, where simple things like local contrast and brightness of a pixel in space are (almost) all that matter. In fact, there is a professor at UC Berkeley, Frank Werblin, who has a nice display of how far along this has come. It would be VERY possible to take an image and stimulate the retina to create a perception of the image.
Clay Reid at Harvard works on a model of the lateral geniculate nucleus in which he looks at image coding one level higher in the nervous system. There are well known effects of gaze angle and attention that he ignores to simplify his work. Others, like Joe Malpeli, work very hard on those other effects, and work in awake preparations. Even to say we have a STRONG understanding of the coding at the LGN does not mean we know what is happening one level higher in the cerebral cortex.
And that was the level we were talking about simulating an image.
From http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/01/1215235.shtm l
"Clark's #7, sensory input. I just talked to a professor of neurophysiology here and he told me a few interesting things. He said that we would definitely be able to do this within 100 years.
There's lots of research into this area, especially the eyes. Today we have a pad you can wear on your back that has thousands of pins in it. These pins put light pressure on the skin of your back to form a "braille" image of the b/w image from a camera. With practice, people are able to see with their skin. Fully jacking the brain should be do-able by 2100 he says definitely. I think he was being conservative."
Hmmm, this is interesting. I am a neurophysiologist who studies the sense of touch and I haven't heard of these sensory pads - not that they'd be that hard to construct. But again spatial resolution will be a problem. There is plenty of skin back there, but the spatial resolving capability is poor due to receptor density. The fingertips and lips are the high spatial resolution centers.
In any case, I'd appreciate a reference if you have one more detailed than the above.
The device you describe has been created, and is little improvement over classical Braille. It is called the Optican. There are various technical reasons for the limitations of the skin. The largest is the resolution. Braille uses 0.5 mm high dots in a 2x3 grid with 2 mm spacing. And, BTW, you would recognize Braille characters as well as a blind person with about 2 days of training.
Even reasonable but not so hot visual information requires about 100 pixels. The fingertips also do not like to work together. Some blind people use 3 fingers locked together to read Braille; these fingers have an extraordinary tendency to stay locked together the rest of the time too.
Basically, you have a nice idea, and one that was explored and largely dropped in the late 1960s.
They absolutely cannot interpret and send brain signals as images. That is ludicrous to think about with our current understanding of visual signals in the brain.
What they can do, is map 100 inputs onto 100 surface electrodes of the brain. Naw, scratch that. Given most implants viability, they probably have a 100 electrode implant with about 20 good signals. The person then learns to interpret whatever perceptual form those 20 inputs take in his brain.
This is also already working in the other direction. They have human motor cortex implants that allow patients to light up patterns of activity in LED grids, and researcher John Chapin of Hahneman has similar implants in rats. His trained rats operate motorized lever arms with their brain signals.
The potential for fine levels of control is still not so hot though, and miniaturizing biocompatible implant grids takes a certain degree of skill. It is not as simple as throwing it on a wafer board and off we go.
The retina implants have a lot more promise than Dobelle's at this point. I should point out that cochlear implants with a dozen electrodes are becoming commonplace. The US version was developed at UCSF by close friends.
Active Directory is a cleverly disguised marketing ploy from Microsoft, where we haven't met a standard we didn't think we could improve.
Of course, you can note Active Directory ONLY works if Microsoft is your name server. No one in their right mind is currently using Microsoft products for name serving.
So, to summarize the Active Directory stance. 1) Make some great new client technology, push it HUGELY in marketing 2) Oh yeah. You see that FreeBSD box in the closet running named that hasn't been rebooted in years and never drops a request. It has to go. Otherwise this great new thing, Active Directory, is no more than the Windows Explorer all over again.
Microsoft is trying to change client technology in ways that will force Microsoft's server technology down your throat. That is your innovation.
The plain truth is that monopolists have no incentive to innovate. Microsoft changes things only to extend its dominance. I don't think I will recommend changing domain name services to Microsoft ANYTIME soon.
The OS I am running to make this post was installed with my choice of a password. And besides, I was given the choice of exactly which services to place on the net BEFORE they were started.
ANY software package that is going to serve to the net HAS to install with user chosen passwords, or HAS to install without outside access capable. To think otherwise is quite foolish.
MySQL from Microsoft installs with an account with NO password. This is apparently not publicized very well, or else some 2500 people wouldn't have had their credit card info revealed by MSNBC, and anyone else who cares.
Actually, if you read the article, it is obvious the problem is the install program leaves a gaping hole in the database to the outside world. This enormous gaping hole must then be removed by a sys admin who should have noticed the security update two years ago.
How can ANYONE not blame this one on Microsoft ? It is just totally unconscionable to have your enterprise-ready e-commerce database package install in this way.
This is a really big one, that will shape the future of genetic engineering. The Cohen-Boyer patent from UCSF/Stanford 18 years ago was worth billions as it described the process by which genes could be introduced into existing organisms. That became an enormous process in molecular biology that led Genetech to its wealth.
If intellectual property protection is not given to those who find new genes, then HUGE amounts of money will not be spent investigating the potential of existing human genes to cure existing pathologies. Think about that for a second. This could keep some company from curing hemophilia, or dystonia, or schizophrenia, all of which have known contributions from at least one gene. The research for this work is being driven by industry. Without intellectual property protection, it would cease to exist. The companies exist to profit, not to make you feel better. There are not enough truly altruistic sources of research funding to make this work otherwise as things sit today.
To me that is the real issue. Do we give companies a reason to exploit the genome for potential human benefit or not ?
I know a lot of you think that gmake is sexy and that real programmers debug using printf, but once you've used a real IDE like CodeWarrior, everything else seems so primitive.
Why is it that no one who has done substantial development on a Unix platform thinks that IDEs are the shit, while people who routinely develop for Windows or Mac can't fathom not using them ?
All an IDE does is provide you with SOME of the usability that a few terminals, a decent shell, gdb, and a decent programming editor (take your pick) provide.
That guy working 16-hour days and subsisting on pizza and twinkies is not necessarily more productive (especially in the long run) than the guy whose leaving at 5:30.
That is true.
And he will generally lose out anyway to the guy subsisting on M&Ms and six packs of Coke.
Slashdot Mirror
The most aggregious assault on personal liberties by the DMCA involves the ways in which copyright has been turned into patent level protection.
For example, copyright provides NO protection against reverse engineering. An musician can hear a rhythm from another musician, figure out how to make it, and add it to his repertoire. The source code of a program can be read, studied for its algorithms, and then those exact same algorithms can be implemented in different code completely legally.
But the DMCA specifically forbids reverse engineering to get around copyright protective measures. These measures can be totally trivial and they still prevent things like using DeCSS in the USA. That is a patent level of protection. This level was originally specifically EXCLUDED from copyright law - it is in patent law. A patent provides you the chance to forbid others from using your new invention without licensing. You can note how cleanly now the DMCA prevents others from playing DVDs without licensing. This has turned a copyright into a patent, plain and simple.
The separation between these concepts, copyright and patent, was made for a reason. Copyright is identified as coming from a source - one's reputation and value from one's words are at stake. Patents are intellectual property, and must pass a MUCH higher standard for being awarded.
This higher standard (regrettably not high enough IMHO) has now been bypassed with DMCA so that corporations with lawyers can prevent people from accessing copyrighted material than they own. What a gross perversion, and it will only get worse if UCITA passes.
I don't get this.
I can download the binary and use RSA FOC.
I can go to the ibm hosted patent site and download the RSA patent.
I am not legally allowed to implement the patent, although I can
legally download source that implements the patent in other
countries.
I just don't see that not allowing the source to be open is such
a big deal. I mean, the cat is out of the bag. I cannot legally
distribute software using RSA until September, but I can
possess source code that would implement it if compiled, and
I can FREELY possess binaries that implement it (such as
netscape, IE, ssh - for non-commercial use...)
Exactly how much of a head start is it going to be for mozilla
to distribute the source ?
I also realize the REAL issue is that mozilla NEEDS permission to
distribute the source, and that is the real hangup. It all seems
so silly.
If the sounds of these drives are anything like their Cheetahs we may need to sue them for tinnitus aggravation.
For my economics class, I created an 8.5x11 word 2000 document that was litterally full of equations (real equations using the equations builder tool), and didn't have any problems whatsoever. Can you elborate on 'totally chokes' ?
Sure. It took my former collaborator 2 weeks to print his thesis, with about 15 color figures dropped in. He couldn't even EDIT the thing with the figures in place. This is on a Pentium Pro 200 with 64 Meg Ram.
Any document of substantial length (let's say more than 10 pages single spaced) with more than about 5 figures causes a chokedown. I can write documents of ANY length with LaTeX - heck - I can write a 100 page novel with a figure on each page. My system sees the same load as it does for a simple text editor.
Heck, go type a letter into Word (a one page letter) and compare the time it takes to AbiWord on similar hardware. Then back the hardware down to a 486 and repeat.... Word is a total PIG. You like that little Office toolbar ?? M$ would have you believe it is to provide widgets for launching Office software so that you don't need to use the Start Menu. It really is an app that PRELOADS all the libraries Office needs. Otherwise it would load slower than emacs on a 2000 RPM ide drive without DMA ! The choice therefore is to occupy a substantial portion of your RAM continuously rather than have EVERYONE realize what a complete waste the software is !
Alright, I know I'm probably going to get moderated down for this one, but here goes... Why is it that whenever a company releases a powerful and useful tool for free, the first response of many here is to say "Great, now give us the source and we will like you!"
The largest gain from open source is the control it gives you as a programmer. If a library on my system has a flaky API, I can check the source. It once took days for me to find a bug in OSF's call for wordexp (a POSIX function), whereas finding how glibc did it took about 20 minutes, and most of that was downloading and untarring. Free as in free beer is nice, but free as in free speech is being able to take control of your own machine in as much or as little detail as you like. There is an enormous difference between the value of the two to anyone who has ever used source to get at the root of a bug.
So, whereas some people may shout it from the mountains when a compiler is made free as in beer, people who use the source will only think of it as a very small gain, primarily for PR value, and will say - "Show me your source!"
Say what you will about Microsoft, but Office is a great product. There is nothing even close to comparable. I know a lot of you people are of the mind that "Hell, I can write letters just fine using BogoOfficePerfect!", but if you want to do a complex document beyond the "Hi mom" level, the power of Office really shines.
Office is NOT a document creation tool. It is good letter writing software. TeX is a document creation tool. Adobe Framemaker is a document creation tool. Microsoft Word totally chokes on long documents with lots of equations and included figures, and is ridiculously slow compared to the competition on linux (Framemaker and TeX derivatives like Lyx and kLyx and LaTeX). Office is, however, a monopoly, and that makes SOME people think it is the greatest innovation since sliced bread. It is not. It will wither on the vine within five years as valid competition emerges on a non-Microsoft OS. A monopolist has no incentive to make good software - they merely need to make software good enough to prevent people from seeking alternatives - and incompatible enough that EVERYONE NEEDS to have access to it. Is there ANYONE who regularly exchanges documents that doesn't HAVE to have access to Word. No !! That is the problem. I write with LaTeX - but I am not a LaTeX bigot. There is lots of good document creation software out there. Word is NOT one of them.
Today I spent much of the day typing a protocol into Word because UCSF distributes their forms in Word format. Painful, to say the least. Even if LaTeX is less than intuitive on lots of things, at least it is consistent, and does not crash without explanation.
Went over to CERT
They claim they've been finding a client called Stacheldraht on compromised hosts, sometimes with up to 100 connections to other compromised hosts.
This is consistent with security claims at Dave Dittrich's site at U Wash
Basically, someone uses known remote root exploits (lpr, named, ssh, to name a few recent ones) and compromises hosts. Then he synchronizes them to DoS some target from someplace very safe. One person can thus appear to be a few hundred clients all attacking some target simultaneously. By making a trivial change he could move his target.
This is NOT a large synchronized group of people. It is one or at most a few good crackers just having a good time, hardly believing how much damage they are doing so easily.
The report names linux and Solaris as the machine types with makefile rules defined in the program, and the program has only been seen on Solaris 2.* in the wild.
German for "barbed wire".
Well, how about that port of Quicktime for linux ?
What exactly are my options for viewing movies created with their server software using patented Sorensen codecs ?
Apple seems perfectly willing to support ppclinux when they feel there is no possible way it can dent their OS. And when they are about ready to take BSD and release it as their next Mac operating system.
Maybe then they will allow lowly linux users to view their video - but I doubt it.
We've also had problems with power crashes and a lack of AdvFS recovery using salvage. Then we resort to a tar backup of the good inodes, and trashing the domain, and recreating the domain. That is one royal pain in the butt, and has us seriously considering going back to UFS. At least it was consistently fixable.
Another issue is that if we fill the file system we could get empty files and unbootable systems. That is no big deal if you can boot from other media and run a quick fdisk to mount a disk. Unfortunately, the AdvFS domains require a little more work to get mounted.
I think there are some nice ideas in AdvFS, but I also think anyone who has administered it a lot will think that it is more trouble than an unjournaled FS.
Another point about journaled file systems and linux. AFAIK, ext3 is the ONLY file system that works on something other than x86 systems.
The author clearly has some facts just plain wrong.
He claims Andreesen used the Mosaic code to "float netscape". Wrong. The Mosaic code was, in fact, the most valuable piece of code around at the time. It was licensed - to Microsoft. They then gave it away making it totally worthless to the people who invented the graphical browser.
Netscape rewrote the browser de novo.
Kelly makes other errors as well, but he misses the important commercialization point made at Linus' recent keynote. Big companies have done a LOT to make linux end user friendly in a short period of time, They've done a lot of menial bug chasing - the kind of code writing that is easiest done by paying someone. Redhat and VA linux especially do a lot. SGI is bringing some nfs work to linux, as well as the best file system in existence. IBM brought its (closed source) Java implementation. And on and on.
Yeah, big business is really affecting linux. Just not as JS Kelly thinks it is. Maybe he should actually try using it sometime.
Breaking commercial level encryption is quite a feat for a 16 year old. What is your background and experience in programming ? What platforms and programming languages are you familiar with ?
Of course the GPL is valid. It merely requires that all dependencies are standard shipping parts of the operating system, OR are GPL'd,
This was one of the original complaints about KDE. The KDE was claiming to use the GPL, yet QT was not GPLd and was NOT a standard component shipped with the operating system.
In any case, a shell for windows can and has been written and GPLd. Bash exists for windows, for example, as well as a host of other GNU software such as emacs (not microemacs which is NOT GPLd).
Is there anyone producing an open source java variant for linux ??
If not, why not ?
Why would Red Hat include a non-open source product in their main distribution ?
Or was that all smoke being blown by Young until it was convenient to release closed source products that he feels add value to RH's products ?
Open Java for linux !
Thomas Edison was not a scientist. He did not engage in discovery of new science. He did not work in the same realm as his peers.
Thomas Edison advanced TECHNOLOGY, not SCIENCE. There are fundamentally different motivations involved in the two. This has been the subject of quite a few essays by the late Thomas Kuhn.
There are plenty of debates as to whether science leads or lags technology, a topic I do not want get into. But people like Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison fundamentally developed new technology. They did not carefully consider mechanisms by which their technologies worked, nor did they CARE about careful investigation of mechanism. They made products that served a function.
Both science and technology advance society. Technology does it with a shorter time lag than science, in general. Science often does not have immediately visible consequences to society - technology always does. The failure of the government to fund science will leave us with a society that is fundamentally driven by technology. And that has long lasting consequences to consider.
As unpopular as it may be, I'm totally against this funding. Do I want to see science advanced? Are nanobites cool? Of course. But why in the world do we want to have them funded by the government? Why is that the government's responsibility (or privelege)?
Research dollars spent by the government can be allotted based on contribution to society. Research dollars spent by industry ARE allotted based on likely financial return. There is a difference.
I see direct consequences of this in biomedical research daily. An altruistic funding source is a true benefit to society.
Several reseachers at Harvard have run an implant into a cat's visual cortex, and can transmit images from the cat's mind to a computer. This is the reverse direction of sending images INTO the brain, but it displays a solid enough knowledge of visual signals in the brain that I'd hesitate to use the word "ludicrous". They'll get there, and soon.
I think I will stick with my words for now. The idea is that you can take an image display and figure out what patterns of activity it causes in the brain, and then cause them through an implant. To think that this is possible currently through stimulation at the level of the cerebral cortex is ludicrous. Besides, the effects of sustained long term stimulation at that level are well known, and if the experiment works initially it will not work for ANY extended period.
LOWER levels of the visual system offer substantially more hope for this process. It is much easier to describe the coding of a visual image at the level of the retina, where simple things like local contrast and brightness of a pixel in space are (almost) all that matter. In fact, there is a professor at UC Berkeley, Frank Werblin, who has a nice display of how far along this has come. It would be VERY possible to take an image and stimulate the retina to create a perception of the image.
Clay Reid at Harvard works on a model of the lateral geniculate nucleus in which he looks at image coding one level higher in the nervous system. There are well known effects of gaze angle and attention that he ignores to simplify his work. Others, like Joe Malpeli, work very hard on those other effects, and work in awake preparations. Even to say we have a STRONG understanding of the coding at the LGN does not mean we know what is happening one level higher in the cerebral cortex.
And that was the level we were talking about simulating an image.
According to slashdot, this has already happened.
m l
From http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/01/1215235.sht
"Clark's #7, sensory input. I just talked to a professor of neurophysiology here and he told me a few interesting things. He said that we would definitely be able to do this within 100 years.
There's lots of research into this area, especially the eyes. Today we have a pad you can wear on your back that has thousands of pins in it. These pins put light pressure on the skin of your back to form a "braille" image of the b/w image from a camera. With practice, people are able to see with their skin. Fully jacking the brain should be do-able by 2100 he says definitely. I think he was being conservative."
Hmmm, this is interesting. I am a neurophysiologist who studies the sense of touch and I haven't heard of these sensory pads - not that they'd be that hard to construct. But again spatial resolution will be a problem. There is plenty of skin back there, but the spatial resolving capability is poor due to receptor density. The fingertips and lips are the high spatial resolution centers.
In any case, I'd appreciate a reference if you have one more detailed than the above.
The device you describe has been created, and is little improvement over classical Braille. It is called the Optican. There are various technical reasons for the limitations of the skin. The largest is the resolution. Braille uses 0.5 mm high dots in a 2x3 grid with 2 mm spacing. And, BTW, you would recognize Braille characters as well as a blind person with about 2 days of training.
Even reasonable but not so hot visual information requires about 100 pixels. The fingertips also do not like to work together. Some blind people use 3 fingers locked together to read Braille; these fingers have an extraordinary tendency to stay locked together the rest of the time too.
Basically, you have a nice idea, and one that was explored and largely dropped in the late 1960s.
They absolutely cannot interpret and send brain signals as images. That is ludicrous to think about with our current understanding of visual signals in the brain.
What they can do, is map 100 inputs onto 100 surface electrodes of the brain. Naw, scratch that. Given most implants viability, they probably have a 100 electrode implant with about 20 good signals. The person then learns to interpret whatever perceptual form those 20 inputs take in his brain.
This is also already working in the other direction. They have human motor cortex implants that allow patients to light up patterns of activity in LED grids, and researcher John Chapin of Hahneman has similar implants in rats. His trained rats operate motorized lever arms with their brain signals.
The potential for fine levels of control is still not so hot though, and miniaturizing biocompatible implant grids takes a certain degree of skill. It is not as simple as throwing it on a wafer board and off we go.
The retina implants have a lot more promise than Dobelle's at this point. I should point out that cochlear implants with a dozen electrodes are becoming commonplace. The US version was developed at UCSF by close friends.
Active Directory is a cleverly disguised marketing ploy from Microsoft, where we haven't met a standard we didn't think we could improve.
Of course, you can note Active Directory ONLY works if Microsoft is your name server. No one in their right mind is currently using Microsoft products for name serving.
So, to summarize the Active Directory stance.
1) Make some great new client technology, push it HUGELY in marketing
2) Oh yeah. You see that FreeBSD box in the closet running named that hasn't been rebooted in years and never drops a request. It has to go. Otherwise this great new thing, Active Directory, is no more than the Windows Explorer all over again.
Microsoft is trying to change client technology in ways that will force Microsoft's server technology down your throat. That is your innovation.
The plain truth is that monopolists have no incentive to innovate. Microsoft changes things only to extend its dominance. I don't think I will recommend changing domain name services to Microsoft ANYTIME soon.
The OS I am running to make this post was installed with my choice of a password. And besides, I was given the choice of exactly which services to place on the net BEFORE they were started.
ANY software package that is going to serve to the net HAS to install with user chosen passwords, or HAS to install without outside access capable. To think otherwise is quite foolish.
MySQL from Microsoft installs with an account with NO password. This is apparently not publicized very well, or else some 2500 people wouldn't have had their credit card info revealed by MSNBC, and anyone else who cares.
Actually, if you read the article, it is obvious the problem is the install program leaves a gaping hole in the database to the outside world. This enormous gaping hole must then be removed by a sys admin who should have noticed the security update two years ago.
How can ANYONE not blame this one on Microsoft ? It is just totally unconscionable to have your enterprise-ready e-commerce
database package install in this way.
This is a really big one, that will shape the future of genetic engineering. The Cohen-Boyer patent from UCSF/Stanford 18 years ago was worth billions as it described the process by which genes could be introduced into existing organisms. That became an enormous process in molecular biology that led Genetech to its wealth.
If intellectual property protection is not given to those who find new genes, then HUGE amounts of money will not be spent investigating the potential of existing human genes to cure existing pathologies. Think about that for a second. This could keep some company from curing hemophilia, or dystonia, or schizophrenia, all of which have known contributions from at least one gene. The research for this work is being driven by industry. Without intellectual property protection, it would cease to exist. The companies exist to profit, not to make you feel better. There are not enough truly altruistic sources of research funding to make this work otherwise as things sit today.
To me that is the real issue. Do we give companies a reason to exploit the genome for potential human benefit or not ?
I know a lot of you think that gmake is sexy and that real programmers debug using printf, but once you've used a real IDE like CodeWarrior, everything else seems so primitive.
Why is it that no one who has done substantial development on a Unix platform thinks that IDEs are the shit, while people who routinely develop for Windows or Mac can't fathom not using them ?
All an IDE does is provide you with SOME of the usability that a few terminals, a decent shell, gdb, and a decent programming editor (take your pick) provide.
That guy working 16-hour days and subsisting on pizza and twinkies is not necessarily more productive (especially in the long run) than the guy whose leaving at 5:30.
That is true.
And he will generally lose out anyway to the guy subsisting on M&Ms and six packs of Coke.