In America we have a saying: "The power to tax is the power to destroy." Beginning to tax computer ownership is part of a larger EU trend towards trying to regulate all electronic devices "on a level playing field," incidentally offering protection to old media, as I understand it. (See eg. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/605694 2.stm.)
A logical follow-up to a computer tax is to impose design specs on computers, such as DRM, and then you move towards making it illegal to own a general-purpose computer -- one that can perform any type of calculation without some sort of legally-mandated "safeguards" blocking it.
It's strange, but the comments I see in a quick read are mostly about whether this is a good way to prevent crime, rather than about the character of effectively being asked for your "papers" wherever you go. Since the sensors are government-mandated, isn't it fairly likely that (as with cameras) they'll soon be linked to a federal database such that dissidents, er, criminals can be identified at these handy checkpoints?
Englishmen, how far will you let this surveillance trend go? Is there any restriction your government could theoretically place on you that would cause you to say, "I won't let you treat me like this?" It seems you've already submitted to a lot of other things, and are now being told you can't even go out for a beer without being treated like a criminal. Are you comfortable with all possible forms of monitoring and control, or can you name one that will be too much?
Yes, and it'd probably be cheaper, hence more attractive to consumers (I use the word deliberately), than existing PCs. I think Microsoft is already offering such a thing, for one, but have no idea whether it has better security than a standard PC or is just stripped-down in terms of functionality.
It's not surprising people can't fix their own machine, how many people can fix their own car? How many people can even change the oil in their own car? The other option would be for computers to be more like cars.
Someone, Stephen Ambrose I think, has claimed that one of the secrets of America's success in WWII was Americans' familiarity with cars. The teenage kids who learned how to maintain and modify a Chevy were better able to maintain and upgrade Jeeps and tanks. (Seems to me that this "car culture" didn't exist till the 1950s, but I'm far too young to know.) With the Chinese supposedly engaging in "cyber-warfare" testing, how prepared are we with our low average skill level? See also Vernor Vinge's recent novel Rainbows End for the idea of who really owns your machines when they're full of parts you don't understand and can't access.
Yes! This is the "reciprocal transparency" argument made by David Brin in The Transparent Society -- "Show me yours first!" A nice example came when people learned of the "Total Information Awareness" project and responded by publishing aerial photographs of boss Poindexter's house, along with his personal phone number. A symbolic gesture in that case, as TIA seems to have lived on in other guises, but let's see, say, the Congressmen Kennedy fit themselves with tracking collars to show us just how wonderful these information-gathering technologies are.
The modern version of this "salami-slicing" progression with regards to installation of surveillance technology:
1) We're installing cameras in selected areas for limited purposes, eg. at street intersections to catch speeders. Don't be paranoid; we'd never link 'em up into an all-purpose surveillance system.
2) We're expanding the camera network to pedestrian areas to fight crime and, if you're in the UK, "anti-social behavio(u)r" (shudder). Don't be paranoid; it's not like we're trying to track you everywhere you go.
3) We're linking up the cameras into a region-wide surveillance system. How can you complain? You already accepted the monitoring itself, and now we're just coordinating our law-enforcement efforts among various places and agencies. It'll help us protect you better.
4) We're adding new software capabilities to the surveillance network, such as automatic license-plate reading, identification of "suspicious behavior," and cameras that bark orders. What's wrong? You already agreed to be watched everywhere you go; now we're simply going to look a little more closely.
5) We, who rule you, hereby exempt ourselves from monitoring. Transparency is for our side of the glass.
I wonder if this will hurt the company's sales of food, because customers will hear "virus" and think something's wrong with the fries instead of the chips.
As game budgets continue to grow, often exponentially, developers will have to find ways to minimize costs while maximizing profits.
The industry's assumption seems to be that games have to be developed with the budgets of Hollywood movies. Yet they don't seem to be getting better overall... Well, that's an old rant, but the point is that developers can also be innovative by finding new ways to use what are now old-school graphics standards.
Imagine what Oblivion could've been if the effort that went into its graphics had gone into more gameplay and AI instead, with the graphics being stuck at the level of Chrono Trigger (2D sprites, 3/4 overhead tiled backgrounds). It wouldn't necessarily have been a better game overall, but wouldn't it have been cheaper to make and with more complex gameplay?
As much as I'd love to play the Half-Life games, it looks like I can't. I recently saw HL1 on sale for $20 or so with Counterstrike etc., and bought it. Then I looked closely and realized it wasn't the stand-alone game I thought it was: I'd have to be online and ask Valve's permission every time I wanted to play. I returned the game unopened and tried to tell the clerk I wouldn't be buying any such game, but it didn't do any good; his reaction was basically, "Hey man, we don't make the games." Having to go online isn't always an option for me, and I'm not willing to have my computer report in like that. The thought makes me bristle. (If I'm wrong about how Steam works, please correct me.)
I'd like to see some creative new ideas on how to prevent piracy without going Orwell on customers. Until Valve comes up with something, I'm just not going to buy their games even if they're awesome.
Look at the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The clause most obviously relevant here is Article IV (no WMDs in space; space is only for "peaceful purposes"), but what interests me more is Article II:
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
No property rights in space? Is this a misguided attempt to close off any economic incentive to explore beyond Earth, or should it be understood as limiting ownership to private entities?
I think the common ground here which we can all agree on is that racism is a problem, and that we want to protect the public. From there, we can have a dialog on how to best accomplish it while maintaining individual civil liberties.
I disagree with the second half of your first sentence. Yes, "racism is a problem." But as far as I can tell, "we want to protect the public" means, "we want to use law -- the threat of violence -- to forbid people from expressing hurtful opinions." The cure is worse than the disease!
How about saying that the common ground is, "Racism is a problem, but we're committed to maintaining individual freedom of opinion and expression. Let's have a dialog on how to fight racism within that framework"?
For the sake of being a little on-topic: those predictions of the future are in some cases self-preventing! "Brave New World" and "1984" are examples of sci-fi scenarios unpleasant and memorable enough that people have actively and consciously worked to make sure the future isn't like that.
Anyway, Jakuta, Hi! I've been looking through some old e-mails after a hard drive crash, and found yours. I actually finished that little game demo (re: "I'm tired of being the hero"), such as it is, months ago. More info and the download are here. (Sorry for posting that here -- although it does involve sci-fi megalomania -- but I don't know how to contact you otherwise.)
(Deist) Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason argued that Nature is the only reliable scripture!
Actually there's a whole field of "biomimetics" that recognizes that evolution has solved a lot of engineering problems already, giving us clues into things like ideal shapes for sails (birds' wings) and durable macro-scale materials (beehives). The trick to that field is in figuring out what aspects of nature to imitate; for instance, the Wright Brothers studied birds but didn't feel compelled to build a true "ornithopter" or glue feathers on their Flyer. Nature has to operate under a very different set of constraints: no foresight, no metal smelters, etc.. One description I read somewhere was to imagine a human having to design a car that grows from motorcycle to sedan size and is capable of self-driving, self-fueling, and reproduction! So, we're not just "looking to nature," but figuring out what parts of it are worth stealing.
These whiskers tie in with existing research into artificial skin that can "feel." This 2005 NASA article describes mecha-skin that uses IR sensors to detect touch. Japanese researchers (2005) reported having a type that senses temperature and pressure through actual touching.
The skin research should be useful both for robotics and for replacement parts for humans, as an alternative to the clunky biological hand transplants that have been carried out. (I think I'd rather have a Luke Skywalker robot hand than a mismatched corpse's!) These artificial hand researchers will probably be interested as well, because having a prosthesis that can be sensed as well as controlled is necessary for it to be as good as the original. The big issue is how easy it will be to get these touch signals into the human nervous system in a useful way. For robots, the data can be built into existing software for making maps of a robot's surroundings. I picture a robot rat running a maze with a set of these whiskers. Won't whiskers serve as a low-energy-cost alternative to sonar and other sensing systems?
The odd thing is that here, the research is not into copying human abilities, but those of (nonhuman) animals. I wrote a silly article arguing that future robots will be made to resemble animals, not humans, and Charles Van Doren (in A History of Knowledge) predicted "warm and fuzzy" robotics. Is that where we're headed?
Rice is a token black woman... Colin Powell (another token Black hire)...
Tell me, does a token normally go to the Secretary of State slot, the highest-ranking Cabinet post, or remain in control of the most prominent position (National Security Advisor)? And how many tokens does an administration have to hire before you would consider them not to be "tokens?" If the President is a Democrat rather than a Republican, does that number change? Finally, does one normally "put someone in their place" by making them one's right-hand (wo)man?
Note that there's the Blade Engine and Ren'Py for those who want to make these things.
I'm struggling to figure out how important the graphics and interactivity are, having played a few of these things and having writing but not artistic skill. The most visually impressive "VN" game I saw ("Ori, Ochi, Onoe," sic) had me clicking hundreds of times to advance the text and making only a few, apparently trivial decisions. How can we set the audience's expectations so that they don't think they're playing an FPS game and get frustrated, but still not have the gameplay consist of clicking the equivalent of "next line of dialogue please" over and over?
As a writer and gamer, I'd love to write for games. But I've been told that game companies figure they don't need writers, and that they can just have the designers or other non-specialists do the word stuff. The closest thing I've seen to an opportunity for writers is the contest BioWare held months ago, asking for people to create interactive stories through the Neverwinter Nights editor. There the rules said not to worry about programming or graphics, just storytelling, but entering still required learning their editor program, and its particular way of making characters move and talk.
That's about as science fiction as having someone illuminate the road ahead while driving by activating a switch to pass electricity to light producing devices on the front of their car.
If you drive an English car, that is science fiction.
Let's go the reverse route, then! How about focusing on building a durable motherboard on a tray, in a few standard sizes, with easily-reached sockets and standard-shaped fasteners, arranged so you can plug this tray into various cases? That is, instead of people assembling their own PCs piece by piece versus buying a complete desktop system (case, keyboard etc.) from Dell, you could buy a standard set of hardware picked out some indy designer, and pick from many independently-designed cases that will all fit that same set of chips.
In the slightly longer term, maybe we should reexamine the concept of plugging everything into a central motherboard, partly because that format limits the physical shape of the PC to being based around a rectangle. Is there a practical way (especially given current hardware) to have, say, a motherboard split into three stacked segments? Or to do away with it altogether?
Later, if restrictive technologies like DRM become more onerous and invasive, and mandatory, I expect a whole class of rogue hardware designs that can be printed using 3D printing tech. It won't be the most powerful on the market, and it'll be condemed for "being only useful for illegal and anti-social activity," but it'll have the advantage of being ours, subject only to design requirements that users want.
There's a science fiction story I read once, in which people had various ornate cases for their portable computers, and kept the same one while replacing the innards. They thought of that system as keeping the same computer, but seeing it get more powerful over time.
The version I'm waiting for has several hundred e-ink pages like a novel, so that I can flip between them at will, hold several open at once with my fingers, etc..
This is good news! There's a larger problem, though; much of the budget is "mandatory" spending in the sense that if it's listed at all, it's more complicated than getting a single budget change to fight it. The entire welfare establishment works this way, as I understand it. Unless we do something to change the situation, the government will continue to grow despite our valiant efforts to stop the bridges-to-nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
On a floating colony in international waters, of course!
In America we have a saying: "The power to tax is the power to destroy." Beginning to tax computer ownership is part of a larger EU trend towards trying to regulate all electronic devices "on a level playing field," incidentally offering protection to old media, as I understand it. (See eg. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/605694 2.stm .)
A logical follow-up to a computer tax is to impose design specs on computers, such as DRM, and then you move towards making it illegal to own a general-purpose computer -- one that can perform any type of calculation without some sort of legally-mandated "safeguards" blocking it.
It's strange, but the comments I see in a quick read are mostly about whether this is a good way to prevent crime, rather than about the character of effectively being asked for your "papers" wherever you go. Since the sensors are government-mandated, isn't it fairly likely that (as with cameras) they'll soon be linked to a federal database such that dissidents, er, criminals can be identified at these handy checkpoints?
Englishmen, how far will you let this surveillance trend go? Is there any restriction your government could theoretically place on you that would cause you to say, "I won't let you treat me like this?" It seems you've already submitted to a lot of other things, and are now being told you can't even go out for a beer without being treated like a criminal. Are you comfortable with all possible forms of monitoring and control, or can you name one that will be too much?
This process gives new meaning and life to the old game "Core Wars," the one in which people wrote what were basically prototype viruses.
Your post, in fact this whole discussion, scares me.
Thank you.
Yes, and it'd probably be cheaper, hence more attractive to consumers (I use the word deliberately), than existing PCs. I think Microsoft is already offering such a thing, for one, but have no idea whether it has better security than a standard PC or is just stripped-down in terms of functionality.
It's not surprising people can't fix their own machine, how many people can fix their own car? How many people can even change the oil in their own car? The other option would be for computers to be more like cars.
Someone, Stephen Ambrose I think, has claimed that one of the secrets of America's success in WWII was Americans' familiarity with cars. The teenage kids who learned how to maintain and modify a Chevy were better able to maintain and upgrade Jeeps and tanks. (Seems to me that this "car culture" didn't exist till the 1950s, but I'm far too young to know.) With the Chinese supposedly engaging in "cyber-warfare" testing, how prepared are we with our low average skill level? See also Vernor Vinge's recent novel Rainbows End for the idea of who really owns your machines when they're full of parts you don't understand and can't access.
Yes! This is the "reciprocal transparency" argument made by David Brin in The Transparent Society -- "Show me yours first!" A nice example came when people learned of the "Total Information Awareness" project and responded by publishing aerial photographs of boss Poindexter's house, along with his personal phone number. A symbolic gesture in that case, as TIA seems to have lived on in other guises, but let's see, say, the Congressmen Kennedy fit themselves with tracking collars to show us just how wonderful these information-gathering technologies are.
The modern version of this "salami-slicing" progression with regards to installation of surveillance technology:
1) We're installing cameras in selected areas for limited purposes, eg. at street intersections to catch speeders. Don't be paranoid; we'd never link 'em up into an all-purpose surveillance system.
2) We're expanding the camera network to pedestrian areas to fight crime and, if you're in the UK, "anti-social behavio(u)r" (shudder). Don't be paranoid; it's not like we're trying to track you everywhere you go.
3) We're linking up the cameras into a region-wide surveillance system. How can you complain? You already accepted the monitoring itself, and now we're just coordinating our law-enforcement efforts among various places and agencies. It'll help us protect you better.
4) We're adding new software capabilities to the surveillance network, such as automatic license-plate reading, identification of "suspicious behavior," and cameras that bark orders. What's wrong? You already agreed to be watched everywhere you go; now we're simply going to look a little more closely.
5) We, who rule you, hereby exempt ourselves from monitoring. Transparency is for our side of the glass.
I wonder if this will hurt the company's sales of food, because customers will hear "virus" and think something's wrong with the fries instead of the chips.
Just don't order the Snow Crash shake.
As game budgets continue to grow, often exponentially, developers will have to find ways to minimize costs while maximizing profits.
The industry's assumption seems to be that games have to be developed with the budgets of Hollywood movies. Yet they don't seem to be getting better overall... Well, that's an old rant, but the point is that developers can also be innovative by finding new ways to use what are now old-school graphics standards.
Imagine what Oblivion could've been if the effort that went into its graphics had gone into more gameplay and AI instead, with the graphics being stuck at the level of Chrono Trigger (2D sprites, 3/4 overhead tiled backgrounds). It wouldn't necessarily have been a better game overall, but wouldn't it have been cheaper to make and with more complex gameplay?
As much as I'd love to play the Half-Life games, it looks like I can't. I recently saw HL1 on sale for $20 or so with Counterstrike etc., and bought it. Then I looked closely and realized it wasn't the stand-alone game I thought it was: I'd have to be online and ask Valve's permission every time I wanted to play. I returned the game unopened and tried to tell the clerk I wouldn't be buying any such game, but it didn't do any good; his reaction was basically, "Hey man, we don't make the games." Having to go online isn't always an option for me, and I'm not willing to have my computer report in like that. The thought makes me bristle. (If I'm wrong about how Steam works, please correct me.)
I'd like to see some creative new ideas on how to prevent piracy without going Orwell on customers. Until Valve comes up with something, I'm just not going to buy their games even if they're awesome.
Look at the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The clause most obviously relevant here is Article IV (no WMDs in space; space is only for "peaceful purposes"), but what interests me more is Article II:
Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.
No property rights in space? Is this a misguided attempt to close off any economic incentive to explore beyond Earth, or should it be understood as limiting ownership to private entities?
I think the common ground here which we can all agree on is that racism is a problem, and that we want to protect the public. From there, we can have a dialog on how to best accomplish it while maintaining individual civil liberties.
I disagree with the second half of your first sentence. Yes, "racism is a problem." But as far as I can tell, "we want to protect the public" means, "we want to use law -- the threat of violence -- to forbid people from expressing hurtful opinions." The cure is worse than the disease!
How about saying that the common ground is, "Racism is a problem, but we're committed to maintaining individual freedom of opinion and expression. Let's have a dialog on how to fight racism within that framework"?
For the sake of being a little on-topic: those predictions of the future are in some cases self-preventing! "Brave New World" and "1984" are examples of sci-fi scenarios unpleasant and memorable enough that people have actively and consciously worked to make sure the future isn't like that.
Anyway, Jakuta, Hi! I've been looking through some old e-mails after a hard drive crash, and found yours. I actually finished that little game demo (re: "I'm tired of being the hero"), such as it is, months ago. More info and the download are here. (Sorry for posting that here -- although it does involve sci-fi megalomania -- but I don't know how to contact you otherwise.)
(Deist) Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason argued that Nature is the only reliable scripture!
Actually there's a whole field of "biomimetics" that recognizes that evolution has solved a lot of engineering problems already, giving us clues into things like ideal shapes for sails (birds' wings) and durable macro-scale materials (beehives). The trick to that field is in figuring out what aspects of nature to imitate; for instance, the Wright Brothers studied birds but didn't feel compelled to build a true "ornithopter" or glue feathers on their Flyer. Nature has to operate under a very different set of constraints: no foresight, no metal smelters, etc.. One description I read somewhere was to imagine a human having to design a car that grows from motorcycle to sedan size and is capable of self-driving, self-fueling, and reproduction! So, we're not just "looking to nature," but figuring out what parts of it are worth stealing.
These whiskers tie in with existing research into artificial skin that can "feel." This 2005 NASA article describes mecha-skin that uses IR sensors to detect touch. Japanese researchers (2005) reported having a type that senses temperature and pressure through actual touching.
The skin research should be useful both for robotics and for replacement parts for humans, as an alternative to the clunky biological hand transplants that have been carried out. (I think I'd rather have a Luke Skywalker robot hand than a mismatched corpse's!) These artificial hand researchers will probably be interested as well, because having a prosthesis that can be sensed as well as controlled is necessary for it to be as good as the original. The big issue is how easy it will be to get these touch signals into the human nervous system in a useful way. For robots, the data can be built into existing software for making maps of a robot's surroundings. I picture a robot rat running a maze with a set of these whiskers. Won't whiskers serve as a low-energy-cost alternative to sonar and other sensing systems?
The odd thing is that here, the research is not into copying human abilities, but those of (nonhuman) animals. I wrote a silly article arguing that future robots will be made to resemble animals, not humans, and Charles Van Doren (in A History of Knowledge) predicted "warm and fuzzy" robotics. Is that where we're headed?
Rice is a token black woman... Colin Powell (another token Black hire)...
Tell me, does a token normally go to the Secretary of State slot, the highest-ranking Cabinet post, or remain in control of the most prominent position (National Security Advisor)? And how many tokens does an administration have to hire before you would consider them not to be "tokens?" If the President is a Democrat rather than a Republican, does that number change? Finally, does one normally "put someone in their place" by making them one's right-hand (wo)man?
I've done some hobbyist work on AI, and would be interested in seeing anything you've posted on this topic.
Note that there's the Blade Engine and Ren'Py for those who want to make these things.
I'm struggling to figure out how important the graphics and interactivity are, having played a few of these things and having writing but not artistic skill. The most visually impressive "VN" game I saw ("Ori, Ochi, Onoe," sic) had me clicking hundreds of times to advance the text and making only a few, apparently trivial decisions. How can we set the audience's expectations so that they don't think they're playing an FPS game and get frustrated, but still not have the gameplay consist of clicking the equivalent of "next line of dialogue please" over and over?
As a writer and gamer, I'd love to write for games. But I've been told that game companies figure they don't need writers, and that they can just have the designers or other non-specialists do the word stuff. The closest thing I've seen to an opportunity for writers is the contest BioWare held months ago, asking for people to create interactive stories through the Neverwinter Nights editor. There the rules said not to worry about programming or graphics, just storytelling, but entering still required learning their editor program, and its particular way of making characters move and talk.
That's about as science fiction as having someone illuminate the road ahead while driving by activating a switch to pass electricity to light producing devices on the front of their car.
If you drive an English car, that is science fiction.
Let's go the reverse route, then! How about focusing on building a durable motherboard on a tray, in a few standard sizes, with easily-reached sockets and standard-shaped fasteners, arranged so you can plug this tray into various cases? That is, instead of people assembling their own PCs piece by piece versus buying a complete desktop system (case, keyboard etc.) from Dell, you could buy a standard set of hardware picked out some indy designer, and pick from many independently-designed cases that will all fit that same set of chips.
In the slightly longer term, maybe we should reexamine the concept of plugging everything into a central motherboard, partly because that format limits the physical shape of the PC to being based around a rectangle. Is there a practical way (especially given current hardware) to have, say, a motherboard split into three stacked segments? Or to do away with it altogether?
Later, if restrictive technologies like DRM become more onerous and invasive, and mandatory, I expect a whole class of rogue hardware designs that can be printed using 3D printing tech. It won't be the most powerful on the market, and it'll be condemed for "being only useful for illegal and anti-social activity," but it'll have the advantage of being ours, subject only to design requirements that users want.
There's a science fiction story I read once, in which people had various ornate cases for their portable computers, and kept the same one while replacing the innards. They thought of that system as keeping the same computer, but seeing it get more powerful over time.
The version I'm waiting for has several hundred e-ink pages like a novel, so that I can flip between them at will, hold several open at once with my fingers, etc..
This is good news! There's a larger problem, though; much of the budget is "mandatory" spending in the sense that if it's listed at all, it's more complicated than getting a single budget change to fight it. The entire welfare establishment works this way, as I understand it. Unless we do something to change the situation, the government will continue to grow despite our valiant efforts to stop the bridges-to-nowhere.