I don't think I understand how your statements follow from mine. How is authorization going to require infinite employees answering requests in finite time? Why are employees even involved?
Credit cards simply should not work based on knowledge of a stupid number. Change the system so that every transaction is authorized through a direct communication between the cardholder and credit card company, and you've eliminated the danger of not knowing which merchants to trust with a common number.
Right, this just sounds absurd. Does anyone have a link to another article to verify this, as the only one in the summary is too biased for me to completely trust its interpretation?
Ah, that was a fun part of the deposition. Yes, Mr. Beckerman was right to call him out on that and ask him repeatedly for an answer. The downside was that he did the same thing at other times when Jacobson was actually answering a malformed technical question as best as he could, and it didn't produce the result Beckerman was looking for.
> "Someone on slashdot turned me onto this before, I feel it important others check it out... I've signed up and have been a member of emusic for a while now, and now have over 300 non-drm'ed mp3s and love it. And, I don't have to worry about the RIAA, at least I don't think I do."
eMusic comes up regularly on Slashdot, and every time it does, I try to mention Magnatune.com. Yes, eMusic has DRM-free music and a decent selection (from what I hear, I never subscribed), but Magnatune has that plus the ideology. While the former got rid of DRM as a business decision in order to enter an under-exploited market, the latter is actually trying to change the face of music in the internet age.
Magnatune's policies include: No DRM, multiple free formats, medium quality songs distributable for free (the full-length samples are Creative Commons licensed!), choose your own price, 50-50 split between label and artist, and more. Check out the info link for details.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Magnatune, I simply am a very satisfied customer.
I know what you mean. I was once after this guy at::1 but IPv6 is unhackable, you know? I felt bad too, because when I couldn't do it, the guy in the mirror started looking at me funny.
> "He can't do that. It's impossible. there is no way he can use those materials to prove that a computer owned by the defendant was used."
By that I think he meant that he could demonstrate that she did not have a wireless router, and therefore that the computer belonged to her. Yes, a friend could have come by and plugged in, but ruling out wireless squatters as a scapegoat is a significant achievement for the plaintiff.
> "His report has this error shortly after his credentials: [...] He doesn't mention NAT or proxy servers at all."
That's like saying Newton's laws of motion are errors because of relativity. There are different levels of detail we can go into when discussing these things, and since he started with a postal analogy I think it's safe to say that NAT, proxies, etc., are a little bit beyond the scope of this introductory explanation. If you want to say he was imprecise or generalizing, fine, but he was not "wrong".
> "The expert that did the DNA test didn't save the results because they didn't show you were the father [...]"
Why on Earth should the expert for the plaintiff be required to save the results of the test? Let him do whatever the hell he wants to with his test, if he has no further use for it then he can throw it out for all I care. I have my own copy of the test results and the source material after all.
Correct. My post was not in direct response to anything in this article and was not supposed to address his eligibility as an expert witness based on the legal criteria. I am indeed off-topic. What I was addressing was how easily people seem to dismiss him as an expert (in the informal sense) based on his answers in the deposition. I am limiting my discussion of him to that deposition because I know nothing of the man or his status in this case besides what I read in it.
> "Firstly, he states that a computer (rather than a network card) is what the IP address is assigned to, when in fact it is the reverse that is true."
I don't remember him specifically saying that a network card does not have an IP address, but I think I do remember him attributing IPs to computers. I do not consider this to be a mistake because there's no reason why we can't consider a single NIC to be part of a personal computer. Really, why make a distinction between the two unless there's more than one NIC on a single host? It does not affect the equation as far as NAT and other relevant aspects.
> "Secondly, he states that because the IP Kazaa reports in the IP payload matches the IP header, the computer wasn't NATed. I don't know the Kazaa protocol well enough to say for sure, but I would guess that it would be smart enough to not advertise a private address and determine it's public address by interaction with a peer. It seemed like the defense kept hinting at that, but never made him spell it out explicitly."
Er, I believe that's incorrect. I too can't say for sure as I have no familiarity with kazaa, but it would seem to go against common sense to duplicate an external IP address in the payload of the packet, as that information is easily available to the receiver in the normal IP header. Furthermore, I think everything said about this in the deposition suggested that the kazaa data did contain the internal IP address, or else the entire matter would not be relevant. I would expect Jacobson to get this part correct more than any other, because it is directly related to his use of MediaSentry, whereas some other networking details might be outside his domain of work with the RIAA.
> "Of course, the biggest problem with the testimony is that he was working off of 'evidence' he didn't acquire himself and using methods that he made that and have not been peer reviewed in any way."
If, as others have said, the RIAA does not intend to call additional witnesses from Verizon and MediaSentry, then this is indeed a major flaw in their argument. This didn't raise a red flag for me when I read the deposition, because the entire time I was assuming that I was only reading one piece of the puzzle and that they would indeed bring forth other witnesses.
Yes, that is another more plausible scenario, but people didn't settle for the plausible ones, they explored the more exotic and unrealistic explanations in an attempt to discredit Jacobson's generalizations. He was stating the rule, and his enemies were stating the exception.
This touches on a fundamental conflict in technology and computer science: That there is a difference between what is practical and real, and what is mathematically possible. One can prove that it's possible that a number of factors can come together to form an insecurity that can be taken advantage of by a suitably knowledgeable attacker - but this doesn't mean we need to incorporate this possibility into every single discussion about the system in question. It's permissible to ignore these unlikely details and make generalizations that apply to how the system is actually used, depending on the context of the discussion. Trying to explain technology to a layperson is one such situation. Or for another example, I wouldn't use the possibility of an unintentional hash collision as cause for reasonable doubt in a criminal trial.
> "I don't see how an objective reader of the transcript could conclude that Jacobson is a qualified expert."
Trust me, either I'm objective, or I have a bias against the RIAA, not for it. I'm no Slash-heretic. I read the whole transcript several weeks back when it was current news, and I didn't see anything so horribly wrong as to exclude him from being considered an expert witness. Someone mentioned that his methods haven't been peer-reviewed - fine, maybe that's a good reason, but I'm talking specifically about the testimony he gave.
Jacobson did make a couple of mistakes. The one that comes to my mind is his confusing packets with frames at one point, but I think it was a temporary misspeak at the prompting of a layperson. The rest of his testimony was inadequate for a technical audience, but he was specifically asked to not get technical.
But it seemed like Mr. Beckerman was specifically grilling Jacobson for not enumerating the vast number of things he did not find in his search.
Instead of saying "I found no evidence of animals", he was expected to record "I found no monkeys. I found no elephants. I found no really really big elephants. I found no zebras..." The information is simply redundant given that it can be summarized to a very simple line, but I suppose it's just good lawyering that one would draw out the point for as long as possible to emphasize the fact.
Am I the only one who does NOT despise Jacobson? I thought he held up fairly well in that deposition under the pressure of some of Mr. Beckerman's more irrelevant questions - for example, the ones targetting his vocabulary, or the ones about why he didn't produce imaginary documentation detailing an absense of evidence.
There are plenty of weak points in the RIAA's case as a whole. One could attack the chain of identity leading to the defendent - is the infringing activity traced to the correct IP, and is the IP at that time actually the one that belonged to Ms. Lindor, and can we be reasonably sure the activity took place on her computer, and we don't even know that she was the one at the computer so would she even be liable... The chain of identity is probably the best weak point in their case, but you could also argue that the damages are negligable and fight the absurd statutory fee, or that perhaps no uploading took place and the torrent was all seeded one way.
There are a number of legitimate arguments to be made, but the point I'm getting at is I don't see how the deposition of Jacobson attacked any of them sufficiently to prove or disprove his competence as an expert witness. Slashdot was quick to point out the minor screw-ups in his testimony, but many of those statements were perfectly fine in the context of explaining the technology to a layperson. Some of the "holes" in his argument were so unlikely that I would not even consider them reasonable doubt in a criminal case. Do you really think someone actually decided to frame the woman by filesharing wirelessly and changing her MAC address and internal NAT mappings to mask the presence of a wireless router? I don't.
I recently got into indy music a little bit - mostly jazz. I was never a fan of the genre before, but I found some real jems in there (Thursday Group, Drop Trio, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey). I'd highly recommend that every self-respecting geek at least consider browsing through the catalogs of services like http://www.magnatune.com/ before buying their next RIAA-produced album.
In a way, Jack is difficult to dismiss, because the tools we normally use to do so are sarcasm and parody. But how on Earth do you parody a man who is so unreal, so orthogonal to the plane of right/wrong and coherence/absurdity? Fortunately, we are spared the burden of trying to find a way; his comments do more damage to his own reputation than ANYTHING another human being could possibly say.
For damages I can see its relevance, if it has impacted her emotionally or aggrevated her condition. But I don't believe that the RIAA has committed *additional* extortion simply because of the defendent's disability - unless of course, they used it as leverage to try to force her to settle.
I can assure you there's certainly no lack of money in this institution. Our president gets paid almost seven digits, and I can't fathom the IT deptartment having budgetting issues. But the wiring issue that the other post mentioned seems like a possibility, since this dorm must be at about forty years old if not more.
> "not only am I not seeing ANY increase in speed (usenet still tops out at 1MB/sec)"
Either that was a typo or you have no right to complain in my book. That number with a lowercase 'b' sounds more rant worthy.
> "i wish people would consider the impact they have on the network when doing that sort of thing. I typically limit large transfers to off-peak hours for that reason (and my roommate's complain if I'm over-using the network and they can't do what they need to do)."
Just yesterday my roomate got a notice that he was overusing the campus network - 108 GB in one week. It's hanging on our door now.
I'm at one of the most wired campuses in the country, and yet somehow our dorms seem to be on hubs. Well, actually, I can't really tell. I was told today by my Networking TA that they're actually switches configured at 10Mbps half-duplex to keep us from eating up the institution's bandwidth, but there are two problems I have with that claim:
1. Why on earth can't they just give us gigabit access to everything on the freaking campus and QoS us at the link to the Internet? This isn't a complaint at the administration so much as networks in general. What's wrong with dumping a huge load of bandwidth at everything in your internal site where it's essentially free? 2. If it's a switch, why am I able to sniff non-broadcast packets? Is there a legitimate network configuration that could result in my being able to see a dormmate's AIM buddy list if we're not on the same collision domain?
I think we all saw it coming. Well, it was obvious to me that at least the Wii would rock and the others would suck, but I didn't quite expect that fact to be reflected in sales.
And can you believe the outrage we all remember having when they changed the name around this time last year from "Revolution"? Nintendo presented some very forward-thinking reasons for the switch, but I will admit that I couldn't envision just how appropriate the decision was until recently.
I recently watched a Google talk by Van Jacobson (http://tinyurl.com/28j762) about changing the way we design networks to accommodate the new tasks we use them for. To summarize: a dialing in a circuit switched network can be described as programming a path within the network; your destination identifier also determines the exact route you take. But weren't interested in the path once communication lines were everywhere - we were interested in conversations between endpoints, and the path was irrelevant. So packet-switching gave us the independence we needed to continue innovating.
In this talk, he proposes that we no longer care even about establishing a conversation between two parties; that is now as irrelevant as the path. What we care about is information, and disseminating it to all interested parties. In this dissemination network, instead of sending and receiving data to and from another host specified by a network address, you would actually exchange data with the network itself and allow it to manage the details of how it is distributed. (Obviously, security would be a concern, but that too can be implemented by the network.)
Of course there's little to no chance of this kind of revolution changing the face of the Internet within decades. The details, economics, liabilities, etc., are just too foreign to our current models. But a man can dream.
> "Define "intelligent patterns" and "unique phenomena". So now that I've dismissed 2/3 of your definition because of its vague terminology, "
It wasn't a definition so much as a definition schema (unless you're going to pick at the semantics of *that* characterization, in which case it was just a couple of adjectives and nouns that most humans should understand). The point was not to name the exact criteria but to exclude arbitrary, human-centric values and biases.
> "let's talk about self-replication. Well, clouds can pick up more moisture and then split apart, is that self-replication? And what about viruses?"
I didn't mean to get into this, but for my actual beliefs, you can replace self-replication with computation. I'm something of a Turing Functionalist: the physical manifestation of an intelligence isn't important, but its complexity and interactions determine its intrinsic worth as a sentient being. So we may be special entities that arise from a bunch of pulsing neurons, but we're no better than the same program running on an computer, or some sort of freaky dynamic geological formation, or an elaborate system comprised of trillions of third-world children moving around in patterns visible from space and wearing identifying T-shirts selected from a finite alphabet.
> "Humans are only interested in "life" as it is identifiable to humans."
That is why humans suck.
> "Having to travel to the center of the sun to view some alternate version of life is... not something we're interested in."
But that would be very, very cool. I don't see why the patterns that exist in what we deem to count as "life" on Earth can't exist in space or on the most inhospitable (by our standards, obviously) planets.
> "Identifying certain characteristics of a planet (like climate, chemical properties, etc) as is the best way to pare down habitats."
If you want to argue that you get a lot of interesting activity when certain compounds are present, based on their mathematical or chemical interactions, that's fine. It's analogous to how some cellular automata are Turing-complete, while others aren't. But looking specifically for a planet that has our average temperature and continental area and weather patterns and plant colors is far too picky. Indeed, the presumption that, on a planet that had exactly the same physical characteristics as Earth, you would have a chance of finding ANYTHING even resembling a "plant" as we know it, demonstrates the extreme close-mindedness people tend to have towards this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I understand how your statements follow from mine. How is authorization going to require infinite employees answering requests in finite time? Why are employees even involved?
Credit cards simply should not work based on knowledge of a stupid number. Change the system so that every transaction is authorized through a direct communication between the cardholder and credit card company, and you've eliminated the danger of not knowing which merchants to trust with a common number.
No, you're thinking of "Beam me up, God".
Right, this just sounds absurd. Does anyone have a link to another article to verify this, as the only one in the summary is too biased for me to completely trust its interpretation?
Ah, that was a fun part of the deposition. Yes, Mr. Beckerman was right to call him out on that and ask him repeatedly for an answer. The downside was that he did the same thing at other times when Jacobson was actually answering a malformed technical question as best as he could, and it didn't produce the result Beckerman was looking for.
> "Someone on slashdot turned me onto this before, I feel it important others check it out... I've signed up and have been a member of emusic for a while now, and now have over 300 non-drm'ed mp3s and love it. And, I don't have to worry about the RIAA, at least I don't think I do."
eMusic comes up regularly on Slashdot, and every time it does, I try to mention Magnatune.com. Yes, eMusic has DRM-free music and a decent selection (from what I hear, I never subscribed), but Magnatune has that plus the ideology. While the former got rid of DRM as a business decision in order to enter an under-exploited market, the latter is actually trying to change the face of music in the internet age.
Magnatune's policies include: No DRM, multiple free formats, medium quality songs distributable for free (the full-length samples are Creative Commons licensed!), choose your own price, 50-50 split between label and artist, and more. Check out the info link for details.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Magnatune, I simply am a very satisfied customer.
I know what you mean. I was once after this guy at ::1 but IPv6 is unhackable, you know? I felt bad too, because when I couldn't do it, the guy in the mirror started looking at me funny.
> "He can't do that. It's impossible. there is no way he can use those materials to prove that a computer owned by the defendant was used."
By that I think he meant that he could demonstrate that she did not have a wireless router, and therefore that the computer belonged to her. Yes, a friend could have come by and plugged in, but ruling out wireless squatters as a scapegoat is a significant achievement for the plaintiff.
> "His report has this error shortly after his credentials: [...] He doesn't mention NAT or proxy servers at all."
That's like saying Newton's laws of motion are errors because of relativity. There are different levels of detail we can go into when discussing these things, and since he started with a postal analogy I think it's safe to say that NAT, proxies, etc., are a little bit beyond the scope of this introductory explanation. If you want to say he was imprecise or generalizing, fine, but he was not "wrong".
> "The expert that did the DNA test didn't save the results because they didn't show you were the father [...]"
Why on Earth should the expert for the plaintiff be required to save the results of the test? Let him do whatever the hell he wants to with his test, if he has no further use for it then he can throw it out for all I care. I have my own copy of the test results and the source material after all.
Correct. My post was not in direct response to anything in this article and was not supposed to address his eligibility as an expert witness based on the legal criteria. I am indeed off-topic. What I was addressing was how easily people seem to dismiss him as an expert (in the informal sense) based on his answers in the deposition. I am limiting my discussion of him to that deposition because I know nothing of the man or his status in this case besides what I read in it.
> "Firstly, he states that a computer (rather than a network card) is what the IP address is assigned to, when in fact it is the reverse that is true."
I don't remember him specifically saying that a network card does not have an IP address, but I think I do remember him attributing IPs to computers. I do not consider this to be a mistake because there's no reason why we can't consider a single NIC to be part of a personal computer. Really, why make a distinction between the two unless there's more than one NIC on a single host? It does not affect the equation as far as NAT and other relevant aspects.
> "Secondly, he states that because the IP Kazaa reports in the IP payload matches the IP header, the computer wasn't NATed. I don't know the Kazaa protocol well enough to say for sure, but I would guess that it would be smart enough to not advertise a private address and determine it's public address by interaction with a peer. It seemed like the defense kept hinting at that, but never made him spell it out explicitly."
Er, I believe that's incorrect. I too can't say for sure as I have no familiarity with kazaa, but it would seem to go against common sense to duplicate an external IP address in the payload of the packet, as that information is easily available to the receiver in the normal IP header. Furthermore, I think everything said about this in the deposition suggested that the kazaa data did contain the internal IP address, or else the entire matter would not be relevant. I would expect Jacobson to get this part correct more than any other, because it is directly related to his use of MediaSentry, whereas some other networking details might be outside his domain of work with the RIAA.
> "Of course, the biggest problem with the testimony is that he was working off of 'evidence' he didn't acquire himself and using methods that he made that and have not been peer reviewed in any way."
If, as others have said, the RIAA does not intend to call additional witnesses from Verizon and MediaSentry, then this is indeed a major flaw in their argument. This didn't raise a red flag for me when I read the deposition, because the entire time I was assuming that I was only reading one piece of the puzzle and that they would indeed bring forth other witnesses.
Yes, that is another more plausible scenario, but people didn't settle for the plausible ones, they explored the more exotic and unrealistic explanations in an attempt to discredit Jacobson's generalizations. He was stating the rule, and his enemies were stating the exception.
This touches on a fundamental conflict in technology and computer science: That there is a difference between what is practical and real, and what is mathematically possible. One can prove that it's possible that a number of factors can come together to form an insecurity that can be taken advantage of by a suitably knowledgeable attacker - but this doesn't mean we need to incorporate this possibility into every single discussion about the system in question. It's permissible to ignore these unlikely details and make generalizations that apply to how the system is actually used, depending on the context of the discussion. Trying to explain technology to a layperson is one such situation. Or for another example, I wouldn't use the possibility of an unintentional hash collision as cause for reasonable doubt in a criminal trial.
> "I don't see how an objective reader of the transcript could conclude that Jacobson is a qualified expert."
Trust me, either I'm objective, or I have a bias against the RIAA, not for it. I'm no Slash-heretic. I read the whole transcript several weeks back when it was current news, and I didn't see anything so horribly wrong as to exclude him from being considered an expert witness. Someone mentioned that his methods haven't been peer-reviewed - fine, maybe that's a good reason, but I'm talking specifically about the testimony he gave.
Jacobson did make a couple of mistakes. The one that comes to my mind is his confusing packets with frames at one point, but I think it was a temporary misspeak at the prompting of a layperson. The rest of his testimony was inadequate for a technical audience, but he was specifically asked to not get technical.
But it seemed like Mr. Beckerman was specifically grilling Jacobson for not enumerating the vast number of things he did not find in his search.
Instead of saying "I found no evidence of animals", he was expected to record "I found no monkeys. I found no elephants. I found no really really big elephants. I found no zebras..." The information is simply redundant given that it can be summarized to a very simple line, but I suppose it's just good lawyering that one would draw out the point for as long as possible to emphasize the fact.
Yes, because making a difference in the community and hating the RIAA are two sure-fire ways to earn yourself a punch in the face on slashdot.
Am I the only one who does NOT despise Jacobson? I thought he held up fairly well in that deposition under the pressure of some of Mr. Beckerman's more irrelevant questions - for example, the ones targetting his vocabulary, or the ones about why he didn't produce imaginary documentation detailing an absense of evidence.
There are plenty of weak points in the RIAA's case as a whole. One could attack the chain of identity leading to the defendent - is the infringing activity traced to the correct IP, and is the IP at that time actually the one that belonged to Ms. Lindor, and can we be reasonably sure the activity took place on her computer, and we don't even know that she was the one at the computer so would she even be liable... The chain of identity is probably the best weak point in their case, but you could also argue that the damages are negligable and fight the absurd statutory fee, or that perhaps no uploading took place and the torrent was all seeded one way.
There are a number of legitimate arguments to be made, but the point I'm getting at is I don't see how the deposition of Jacobson attacked any of them sufficiently to prove or disprove his competence as an expert witness. Slashdot was quick to point out the minor screw-ups in his testimony, but many of those statements were perfectly fine in the context of explaining the technology to a layperson. Some of the "holes" in his argument were so unlikely that I would not even consider them reasonable doubt in a criminal case. Do you really think someone actually decided to frame the woman by filesharing wirelessly and changing her MAC address and internal NAT mappings to mask the presence of a wireless router? I don't.
I recently got into indy music a little bit - mostly jazz. I was never a fan of the genre before, but I found some real jems in there (Thursday Group, Drop Trio, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey). I'd highly recommend that every self-respecting geek at least consider browsing through the catalogs of services like http://www.magnatune.com/ before buying their next RIAA-produced album.
In a way, Jack is difficult to dismiss, because the tools we normally use to do so are sarcasm and parody. But how on Earth do you parody a man who is so unreal, so orthogonal to the plane of right/wrong and coherence/absurdity? Fortunately, we are spared the burden of trying to find a way; his comments do more damage to his own reputation than ANYTHING another human being could possibly say.
For damages I can see its relevance, if it has impacted her emotionally or aggrevated her condition. But I don't believe that the RIAA has committed *additional* extortion simply because of the defendent's disability - unless of course, they used it as leverage to try to force her to settle.
I can assure you there's certainly no lack of money in this institution. Our president gets paid almost seven digits, and I can't fathom the IT deptartment having budgetting issues. But the wiring issue that the other post mentioned seems like a possibility, since this dorm must be at about forty years old if not more.
> "not only am I not seeing ANY increase in speed (usenet still tops out at 1MB/sec)"
Either that was a typo or you have no right to complain in my book. That number with a lowercase 'b' sounds more rant worthy.
> "i wish people would consider the impact they have on the network when doing that sort of thing. I typically limit large transfers to off-peak hours for that reason (and my roommate's complain if I'm over-using the network and they can't do what they need to do)."
Just yesterday my roomate got a notice that he was overusing the campus network - 108 GB in one week. It's hanging on our door now.
So we're being dragged into the past, and you want us to become Luddites in protest?
I'll get right on that when my torrents finish.
I'm at one of the most wired campuses in the country, and yet somehow our dorms seem to be on hubs. Well, actually, I can't really tell. I was told today by my Networking TA that they're actually switches configured at 10Mbps half-duplex to keep us from eating up the institution's bandwidth, but there are two problems I have with that claim:
1. Why on earth can't they just give us gigabit access to everything on the freaking campus and QoS us at the link to the Internet? This isn't a complaint at the administration so much as networks in general. What's wrong with dumping a huge load of bandwidth at everything in your internal site where it's essentially free?
2. If it's a switch, why am I able to sniff non-broadcast packets? Is there a legitimate network configuration that could result in my being able to see a dormmate's AIM buddy list if we're not on the same collision domain?
I think we all saw it coming. Well, it was obvious to me that at least the Wii would rock and the others would suck, but I didn't quite expect that fact to be reflected in sales.
And can you believe the outrage we all remember having when they changed the name around this time last year from "Revolution"? Nintendo presented some very forward-thinking reasons for the switch, but I will admit that I couldn't envision just how appropriate the decision was until recently.
I recently watched a Google talk by Van Jacobson (http://tinyurl.com/28j762) about changing the way we design networks to accommodate the new tasks we use them for. To summarize: a dialing in a circuit switched network can be described as programming a path within the network; your destination identifier also determines the exact route you take. But weren't interested in the path once communication lines were everywhere - we were interested in conversations between endpoints, and the path was irrelevant. So packet-switching gave us the independence we needed to continue innovating.
In this talk, he proposes that we no longer care even about establishing a conversation between two parties; that is now as irrelevant as the path. What we care about is information, and disseminating it to all interested parties. In this dissemination network, instead of sending and receiving data to and from another host specified by a network address, you would actually exchange data with the network itself and allow it to manage the details of how it is distributed. (Obviously, security would be a concern, but that too can be implemented by the network.)
Of course there's little to no chance of this kind of revolution changing the face of the Internet within decades. The details, economics, liabilities, etc., are just too foreign to our current models. But a man can dream.
> "Define "intelligent patterns" and "unique phenomena". So now that I've dismissed 2/3 of your definition because of its vague terminology, "
It wasn't a definition so much as a definition schema (unless you're going to pick at the semantics of *that* characterization, in which case it was just a couple of adjectives and nouns that most humans should understand). The point was not to name the exact criteria but to exclude arbitrary, human-centric values and biases.
> "let's talk about self-replication. Well, clouds can pick up more moisture and then split apart, is that self-replication? And what about viruses?"
I didn't mean to get into this, but for my actual beliefs, you can replace self-replication with computation. I'm something of a Turing Functionalist: the physical manifestation of an intelligence isn't important, but its complexity and interactions determine its intrinsic worth as a sentient being. So we may be special entities that arise from a bunch of pulsing neurons, but we're no better than the same program running on an computer, or some sort of freaky dynamic geological formation, or an elaborate system comprised of trillions of third-world children moving around in patterns visible from space and wearing identifying T-shirts selected from a finite alphabet.
> "Humans are only interested in "life" as it is identifiable to humans."
That is why humans suck.
> "Having to travel to the center of the sun to view some alternate version of life is... not something we're interested in."
But that would be very, very cool. I don't see why the patterns that exist in what we deem to count as "life" on Earth can't exist in space or on the most inhospitable (by our standards, obviously) planets.
> "Identifying certain characteristics of a planet (like climate, chemical properties, etc) as is the best way to pare down habitats."
If you want to argue that you get a lot of interesting activity when certain compounds are present, based on their mathematical or chemical interactions, that's fine. It's analogous to how some cellular automata are Turing-complete, while others aren't. But looking specifically for a planet that has our average temperature and continental area and weather patterns and plant colors is far too picky. Indeed, the presumption that, on a planet that had exactly the same physical characteristics as Earth, you would have a chance of finding ANYTHING even resembling a "plant" as we know it, demonstrates the extreme close-mindedness people tend to have towards this issue.