It's quite simple to come to a conclusion about wether software patent laws are sane or not:
Imagine a world where Microsoft/IBM/AOL/Whoever came up with the very first OS, applications and network-solution. They patented that. Where would we be now?
I mean: COME ON! What if a company comes up with a totally new concept. Should they have monopoly on that? You can blablabla all you like, that they should be rewarded, but excactly how much are we supposed to give away? Noone has a "Right" to enslave humanity just because they came up with something great.
If I don't smoke, I will no longer be cool. That's a major problem I see. Is it worth chest-pains, anxiety attacks (unless you smoke more), and bad stamina?
Bad for heart, good for staying awake. I agree, but what's the point? The body tells when it's time to quit, why not listen to it?
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to sit down and have a healthy meal all the time. I'm not the one talking about "all the time".... Why do you feel you have to do something all the time?;-)
You obviously have no frame of reference to what the software industry is like. I'm working there, but noone said you gotta suffer just "because it's the way it is". Oh wait, they did tell you that, but forgot to mention it's voluntary.
You're fired. It's just a job. There's lots of other opportunities in IT still. No point in keeping a job where they don't respect you as a human being.
They tend to keep us techies in rooms with no windows Demand better ventilation or a better spot. Heck, even a server-room has better ventilation.
I can have anchovies and jalepenos on my pizza, thank you very much That's good, but cooked veggies aren't as good as fresh ones.
We have too much work to do. Sleep just interferes with our productivity. People are more than just being "productive" at work and being "consumers" in their spare time. Though if you like it, fine with me, it's your life.
My body likes big paychecks Correction: Your brain does. It's neither deserved or needed for a good life. Just you wait till they don't need you anymore. Not sure if that'll happen in our lifetime though.
IT employees are not able to lead "normal" lives. We always have to carry pagers, cell phones, PDA's, etc. We have to code all night for a project that we spent 8 months on, only to start from scratch and do it again because someone in management wanted something different...the day before lauch date. You make your own life. Nobody calls yourself a victim but yourself.
What matters in life? The size of your paycheck? I'm not saying this to be a prick or a wiseguy. I'm saying this because I'm fed up myself. How about you?
If you turn in your machine to service, they scan your HD for programs that might void warranties. Dunno if they check for OSes though, but they might spot LILO on the boot.
So basically what you're saying is that everybody should buy proprietary products, since they (sometimes) are interoperable. What to do when they're not, or just simply stink.. Upgrade to the new versions?
Doing comparisons between free products (both as in free speech and beer) and commercial proprietary products is a bit silly in such respect. If hardware manufacturer (X) doesn't release the specs to product (Y), how do you expect an open source release of said drivers (Z) without heavy reverse-engineering and tweaking?
Who's fault is it really, Xfree's?
I have no doubts of your tests, but I have doubts on such conclusions (which is what citizens should base their actions on).
- Steeltoe
I was given the choice between the red pill and the blue pill. One advice: DO NOT CONSUME BOTH!!!! (Uuuuurrkkk)
1) smoke. It's bad for your heart, lungs and arteries, among other things.
2) drink coffee/tea/Coke/Dr.Pepper. It's bad for your heart, among other things.
3) eat sporadically. It's bad for your entire body.
4) stay awake late. If you don't have enough free time for sleep, cut down on work-time.
Make sure you
1) tell your boss if you have too much/too little work to do.
2) have good breathing air. Open a window if not.
3) eat enough vegetables and fish.
4) get enough sleep.
5) listen to your own body.
Disobeying all these rules will almost surely put you 6 feet under ground before really necessary. What people forget is that your life is a living hell before that.
Hehe, yeah, but why pick on something so easily attackable?
Oh yeah, forgot some people are bullies;-P
- Steeltoe
Unimaginative corporations will kick and scream
on
Freenet 0.3 Released
·
· Score: 1
The long version: Most likely the corporations will sue/prosecute the creators and major hosts of FreeNet. They'll also try to buy new laws/force big nodes into installing mandatory censoring firewalls at major routers (even funding this effort, or simply make'em outsource it on behalf of the "free market"-slogan). Expect draconian monitoring and punishments for breaking copyright, DMCA, UCITA, shrinkwrap-licenses and badly configured firewalls. On-line schemes where people can rat on each other will pop-up as "free services to strengthen the community moral". The bought-out media will tout propaganda explaining all of this necessary to protect "consumer rights" -- That FreeNet is full of phedophile hacking-freeriders conspiring to cast society back into primitive stoneage.
The short version: The beast of capitalism will reveal itself. d;-)
- Steeltoe
Human -> Citizen -> Customer -> Consumer. The power of the word says all about trends in power.
I wouldn't recommend Christianity to an atheist. There are more general and personal religions out there that makes much more sense than the confusion presented in the bible. Guilt seems to be the cornerstone of many's beliefs, completely misunderstanding the real meaning of what Jesus Christ spoke and (supposedly) did. The bible has been translated and written down by so many conservative priests and scholars, the real meaning has been lost to the heavy beliefs of the Church (a religious government and power-structure).
Those interested can head over to http://www.spiritweb.org. This is a fairly extensive center of many religions and beliefs. If you think religion is all about Mary, Jesus and lambs, you're sadly mistaken. There are many sound religions out there, but also many crackpots or confused people.
Duuh.. Just don't install Freenet on your computer. Either you're for free speech, in all forms, or you're against it;-)
Suppressing ideas with potential bad influence have never worked well. You can imprison, torture and execute the people but the ideas always remains in some form. Later they return to haunt the living.
Free speech allows people to communicate so they can understand and teach each other better. Not all free speech is what you can call constructive, but always has the potential to resolve conflicts.
This extends to all endeavours in life, be it both abusal- and healthy relationships.
Making speech free may have some bad short-term effects, but that's just because free speech have been suppressed for so long. This happened when Internet became publicly accessible, and it will happen with FreeNet. However, FreeNet is more capable than TPC/IP and NNTP for keeping people's freedom.
"The whole point of it is that the information that is in the network can not be "tracked to a single IP address", neither on the sender not on the recipient side."
Maybe you should back that up yourself? It's one thing to design a system like this, it's entirely different to make it foolproof. Personally I think his explanation made sense, although there will always be weaknesses.
Moderate this parent UP please. It's the essence of the philosophy surrounding Freenet.
Think of the Freenet-network as a "virtual airspace". Why should someone ban some kinds of speech in certain areas? That's not free speech, that's monitoring and censorship.
If Microsoft fails to compete with a free alternative, then they're out of the market, yes.
Nowhere does it say that a corporation is entitled to a market -- yet.
It's not like you have to pay for everything in life. In fact, the best stuff are usually for free.
But what was your point? We're supposed to feel sorry for Microsoft? Or Linux should be made a single entity company so that Microsoft can buy it out? What?
Yes, I know what you're talking about and it's possible to create a computer that is also "conscious". Just narrow down to a manageable definition of conscious. However, to what degree? And to what degree are we self-aware? For instance, I *cannot* make my heart stop by will only (however, some mystics claim they can). I cannot feel my heart beat, except for physical senses if I sit really still. There are also many psychological "laws" we have yet to grasp. So we are limited too (just like machines). Neither of us are bound forever by those limitations though.
However, it's useless to define consciousness as being self-aware only. The word has too many other meanings elsewhere. I agree that makes a technical discussion pointless.
Reflective programming is the term most suited. It basically means (programming) a program that can inspect, test, evaluate and improve itself, even on the very code it uses to do reflectiveness. It's a program well-equipped to modify itself (so the programmer won't have to do it all and incorporate many new bugs).
We can learn more about consciousness from such programming. Since such a program can never go beyond its bounds by reasoning on itself alone. Some point in the future, it has optimized according to its parameters and is unwilling/unable to go further. It then needs input from an external system. Likewise, we cannot exist in a vacuum. So consciousness is not just about reasoning on your internals, and reasoning on that reasoning etc, it's also about communicating with the external world _and_ incorporating what you find in yourself. Otherwise it would be too static, too linear, repetitive or just boring;-). I suspect this extends throughout the universe, wether we like it or not.
For instance, in any organization, there are many like-minded people (not necessarily too like-minded though). These are actually nodes in a greater "brain". By conveying complex information between eachother, these people are part of an "over-brain", or whatever else you want to call it. In essence every living being on this planet may conceivably be part of many such "over-brains".
This shows in many aspects of our modern life: trends, fashions, politics, corporations, stockmarket, wars etc, etc.
I'm not saying these "over-brains" are necessarily conscious/self-ware. But it's strange to think about if they were in some arcane way. Being an "over-brain" would be experienced vastly different than experiencing being a human (if it was conscious/self-aware) so we are probably not good judges on wether it is or not.
If you've read the Foundation series of Isaac Asimov, you know what I'm talking about. The ability to calculate predictions over mass-behaviour in people. It's not so different than analyzing one person's mind. I don't think we'll be able to do it reliably though, and any published result will affect the result recursively if you're going to predict anything;-)
Sorry for this long post, I hope you found it worth reading even though I drifted a bit.
You are saying consciousness is only reflective programming (well programmed). That's one definition but hardly explains why people feel as they do. Why you personate with your experience of yourself and reflect on your very reflective processes about yourself. Hell, it's not even explaining how the universe can exist (or why we experience it). If it's all machina and automata, where's all the servers (or the machine holding The mind)?
Why can't the universe be limitless and infinite in all respects (like a dream)? (Because it's very uncomfortable and difficult to think of it that way, I know, but it's just as true as believing only what you see.)
Our bodies and brains are still *EXTREMELY* unknown to us. Certainly you can take the easy way out and just say you know/see the answer (gut feeling), but I'm not going to believe you until you convince me. And by the most vague definitions of consciousness, you CAN'T convince anyone. However, you can find "small truths", stuff that is true within a given context (eg organic chemistry). Just too bad such truths are never so true in a greater context..
I'm by no means qualified to answer this, but there is something called Quantuum Computing, or the like. Search on it on the Net, it's really interesting (but I can't explain it well, so I better not speak about it;)
It's vastly different than normal computing though, because you're dealing with different states in your machine _at the same "time"_. Fork() just got beaten;)
...and just you people wait for the weekly patches to Microsoft Windows! Those of you that have played Everquest have seen nothing yet...*whimper*
- Steeltoe
Ask people if they would do unfair things for personal gain if it was socially acceptable. Those very people should NEVER be in a high position, but always are.
Well, it's very comfortable and easy to have rational and normalized opinions. I'm really surprised not more people on Slashdot have them, but I guess many of them choose not to speak up. I suspect they deep down inside really don't care what is steering them, as long as it looks okay on the surface (On the higher level, feelings is what's making us tick. That's why people may suddenly change to the opposite once or twice in their lives. Nobody is truly rational.)
Problems arise when a society accepts certain views as "escapable" and inherently in every context. It then loses the ability to be truly reflective and correct its course when its due time. So even though alot of "dirt" comes up to the surface in such forums as these, I believe it's necessary dirt that do have some truth to be extracted. It's only matter of willingness to do the job, with an open mind.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I know who you are and how you think. I'm saying this is the perception I get from the little information available from posts such as these. I'm not saying I'm right.
My point was that if people really buys this shit, they gotta eat it too.
Without people buying it, the corporations must give in. People can survive a long time on "obsolete hardware" rather than hardware that simply doesn't function properly.
Jesus, it'll be friggin' time people wake up too. More power to corporations!
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite quote from this article is "We got a rude awakening today and we thought...'Let's make this clearer for the consumers' "
Okay! How many of you put Microsoft employees in your contact list?
- Steeltoe
It's quite simple to come to a conclusion about wether software patent laws are sane or not:
Imagine a world where Microsoft/IBM/AOL/Whoever came up with the very first OS, applications and network-solution. They patented that. Where would we be now?
I mean: COME ON! What if a company comes up with a totally new concept. Should they have monopoly on that? You can blablabla all you like, that they should be rewarded, but excactly how much are we supposed to give away? Noone has a "Right" to enslave humanity just because they came up with something great.
- Steeltoe
"If you were working for Adobe or Macromedia, would you do anything differently?"
;-)
I'd probably quit my job.
Okay,okay, I'm just saying that
- Steeltoe
If I don't smoke, I will no longer be cool.
;-)
That's a major problem I see. Is it worth chest-pains, anxiety attacks (unless you smoke more), and bad stamina?
Bad for heart, good for staying awake.
I agree, but what's the point? The body tells when it's time to quit, why not listen to it?
Not everyone has the luxury of being able to sit down and have a healthy meal all the time.
I'm not the one talking about "all the time".... Why do you feel you have to do something all the time?
You obviously have no frame of reference to what the software industry is like.
I'm working there, but noone said you gotta suffer just "because it's the way it is". Oh wait, they did tell you that, but forgot to mention it's voluntary.
You're fired.
It's just a job. There's lots of other opportunities in IT still. No point in keeping a job where they don't respect you as a human being.
They tend to keep us techies in rooms with no windows
Demand better ventilation or a better spot. Heck, even a server-room has better ventilation.
I can have anchovies and jalepenos on my pizza, thank you very much
That's good, but cooked veggies aren't as good as fresh ones.
We have too much work to do. Sleep just interferes with our productivity.
People are more than just being "productive" at work and being "consumers" in their spare time. Though if you like it, fine with me, it's your life.
My body likes big paychecks
Correction: Your brain does. It's neither deserved or needed for a good life. Just you wait till they don't need you anymore. Not sure if that'll happen in our lifetime though.
IT employees are not able to lead "normal" lives. We always have to carry pagers, cell phones, PDA's, etc. We have to code all night for a project that we spent 8 months on, only to start from scratch and do it again because someone in management wanted something different...the day before lauch date.
You make your own life. Nobody calls yourself a victim but yourself.
What matters in life? The size of your paycheck? I'm not saying this to be a prick or a wiseguy. I'm saying this because I'm fed up myself. How about you?
- Steeltoe
In such cases, you'd probably end up dead anyways.
- Steeltoe
It was all games and sport, until someone started making money.
- Steeltoe
If you turn in your machine to service, they scan your HD for programs that might void warranties. Dunno if they check for OSes though, but they might spot LILO on the boot.
Not everyone does this mind you.
- Steeltoe
So basically what you're saying is that everybody should buy proprietary products, since they (sometimes) are interoperable. What to do when they're not, or just simply stink.. Upgrade to the new versions?
Doing comparisons between free products (both as in free speech and beer) and commercial proprietary products is a bit silly in such respect. If hardware manufacturer (X) doesn't release the specs to product (Y), how do you expect an open source release of said drivers (Z) without heavy reverse-engineering and tweaking?
Who's fault is it really, Xfree's?
I have no doubts of your tests, but I have doubts on such conclusions (which is what citizens should base their actions on).
- Steeltoe
I was given the choice between the red pill and the blue pill. One advice: DO NOT CONSUME BOTH!!!! (Uuuuurrkkk)
1) smoke. It's bad for your heart, lungs and arteries, among other things.
2) drink coffee/tea/Coke/Dr.Pepper. It's bad for your heart, among other things.
3) eat sporadically. It's bad for your entire body.
4) stay awake late. If you don't have enough free time for sleep, cut down on work-time.
Make sure you
1) tell your boss if you have too much/too little work to do.
2) have good breathing air. Open a window if not.
3) eat enough vegetables and fish.
4) get enough sleep.
5) listen to your own body.
Disobeying all these rules will almost surely put you 6 feet under ground before really necessary. What people forget is that your life is a living hell before that.
- Steeltoe
This is actually a good idea. If you want free solutions, stick with it. Want something extra? Pay for it.
It's good for the Linux community that people make money on Linux (in various ways).
- Steeltoe
Hehe, yeah, but why pick on something so easily attackable?
;-P
Oh yeah, forgot some people are bullies
- Steeltoe
The long version: Most likely the corporations will sue/prosecute the creators and major hosts of FreeNet. They'll also try to buy new laws/force big nodes into installing mandatory censoring firewalls at major routers (even funding this effort, or simply make'em outsource it on behalf of the "free market"-slogan). Expect draconian monitoring and punishments for breaking copyright, DMCA, UCITA, shrinkwrap-licenses and badly configured firewalls. On-line schemes where people can rat on each other will pop-up as "free services to strengthen the community moral". The bought-out media will tout propaganda explaining all of this necessary to protect "consumer rights" -- That FreeNet is full of phedophile hacking-freeriders conspiring to cast society back into primitive stoneage.
The short version: The beast of capitalism will reveal itself. d;-)
- Steeltoe
Human -> Citizen -> Customer -> Consumer. The power of the word says all about trends in power.
Those interested can head over to http://www.spiritweb.org. This is a fairly extensive center of many religions and beliefs. If you think religion is all about Mary, Jesus and lambs, you're sadly mistaken. There are many sound religions out there, but also many crackpots or confused people.
- Steeltoe
Duuh.. Just don't install Freenet on your computer. Either you're for free speech, in all forms, or you're against it ;-)
Suppressing ideas with potential bad influence have never worked well. You can imprison, torture and execute the people but the ideas always remains in some form. Later they return to haunt the living.
Free speech allows people to communicate so they can understand and teach each other better. Not all free speech is what you can call constructive, but always has the potential to resolve conflicts.
This extends to all endeavours in life, be it both abusal- and healthy relationships.
Making speech free may have some bad short-term effects, but that's just because free speech have been suppressed for so long. This happened when Internet became publicly accessible, and it will happen with FreeNet. However, FreeNet is more capable than TPC/IP and NNTP for keeping people's freedom.
- Steeltoe
"The whole point of it is that the information that is in the network can not be "tracked to a single IP address", neither on the sender not on the recipient side."
Maybe you should back that up yourself? It's one thing to design a system like this, it's entirely different to make it foolproof. Personally I think his explanation made sense, although there will always be weaknesses.
- Steeltoe
Moderate this parent UP please. It's the essence of the philosophy surrounding Freenet.
Think of the Freenet-network as a "virtual airspace". Why should someone ban some kinds of speech in certain areas? That's not free speech, that's monitoring and censorship.
- Steeltoe
If Microsoft fails to compete with a free alternative, then they're out of the market, yes.
Nowhere does it say that a corporation is entitled to a market -- yet.
It's not like you have to pay for everything in life. In fact, the best stuff are usually for free.
But what was your point? We're supposed to feel sorry for Microsoft? Or Linux should be made a single entity company so that Microsoft can buy it out? What?
- Steeltoe
Aha, thanks for clearing that up. Sorry for being so grumpy.
- Steeltoe
Yes, I know what you're talking about and it's possible to create a computer that is also "conscious". Just narrow down to a manageable definition of conscious. However, to what degree? And to what degree are we self-aware? For instance, I *cannot* make my heart stop by will only (however, some mystics claim they can). I cannot feel my heart beat, except for physical senses if I sit really still. There are also many psychological "laws" we have yet to grasp. So we are limited too (just like machines). Neither of us are bound forever by those limitations though.
;-). I suspect this extends throughout the universe, wether we like it or not.
;-)
However, it's useless to define consciousness as being self-aware only. The word has too many other meanings elsewhere. I agree that makes a technical discussion pointless.
Reflective programming is the term most suited. It basically means (programming) a program that can inspect, test, evaluate and improve itself, even on the very code it uses to do reflectiveness. It's a program well-equipped to modify itself (so the programmer won't have to do it all and incorporate many new bugs).
We can learn more about consciousness from such programming. Since such a program can never go beyond its bounds by reasoning on itself alone. Some point in the future, it has optimized according to its parameters and is unwilling/unable to go further. It then needs input from an external system. Likewise, we cannot exist in a vacuum. So consciousness is not just about reasoning on your internals, and reasoning on that reasoning etc, it's also about communicating with the external world _and_ incorporating what you find in yourself. Otherwise it would be too static, too linear, repetitive or just boring
For instance, in any organization, there are many like-minded people (not necessarily too like-minded though). These are actually nodes in a greater "brain". By conveying complex information between eachother, these people are part of an "over-brain", or whatever else you want to call it. In essence every living being on this planet may conceivably be part of many such "over-brains".
This shows in many aspects of our modern life: trends, fashions, politics, corporations, stockmarket, wars etc, etc.
I'm not saying these "over-brains" are necessarily conscious/self-ware. But it's strange to think about if they were in some arcane way. Being an "over-brain" would be experienced vastly different than experiencing being a human (if it was conscious/self-aware) so we are probably not good judges on wether it is or not.
If you've read the Foundation series of Isaac Asimov, you know what I'm talking about. The ability to calculate predictions over mass-behaviour in people. It's not so different than analyzing one person's mind. I don't think we'll be able to do it reliably though, and any published result will affect the result recursively if you're going to predict anything
Sorry for this long post, I hope you found it worth reading even though I drifted a bit.
- Steeltoe
You are saying consciousness is only reflective programming (well programmed). That's one definition but hardly explains why people feel as they do. Why you personate with your experience of yourself and reflect on your very reflective processes about yourself. Hell, it's not even explaining how the universe can exist (or why we experience it). If it's all machina and automata, where's all the servers (or the machine holding The mind)?
Why can't the universe be limitless and infinite in all respects (like a dream)? (Because it's very uncomfortable and difficult to think of it that way, I know, but it's just as true as believing only what you see.)
Our bodies and brains are still *EXTREMELY* unknown to us. Certainly you can take the easy way out and just say you know/see the answer (gut feeling), but I'm not going to believe you until you convince me. And by the most vague definitions of consciousness, you CAN'T convince anyone. However, you can find "small truths", stuff that is true within a given context (eg organic chemistry). Just too bad such truths are never so true in a greater context..
- Steeltoe
No you can't, you haven't defined reasoning.
What a stupid discussion.
- Steeltoe
I'm by no means qualified to answer this, but there is something called Quantuum Computing, or the like. Search on it on the Net, it's really interesting (but I can't explain it well, so I better not speak about it ;)
;)
It's vastly different than normal computing though, because you're dealing with different states in your machine _at the same "time"_. Fork() just got beaten
- Steeltoe
...and just you people wait for the weekly patches to Microsoft Windows! Those of you that have played Everquest have seen nothing yet...*whimper*
- Steeltoe
Ask people if they would do unfair things for personal gain if it was socially acceptable. Those very people should NEVER be in a high position, but always are.
Well, it's very comfortable and easy to have rational and normalized opinions. I'm really surprised not more people on Slashdot have them, but I guess many of them choose not to speak up. I suspect they deep down inside really don't care what is steering them, as long as it looks okay on the surface (On the higher level, feelings is what's making us tick. That's why people may suddenly change to the opposite once or twice in their lives. Nobody is truly rational.)
Problems arise when a society accepts certain views as "escapable" and inherently in every context. It then loses the ability to be truly reflective and correct its course when its due time. So even though alot of "dirt" comes up to the surface in such forums as these, I believe it's necessary dirt that do have some truth to be extracted. It's only matter of willingness to do the job, with an open mind.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying I know who you are and how you think. I'm saying this is the perception I get from the little information available from posts such as these. I'm not saying I'm right.
- Steeltoe
My point was that if people really buys this shit, they gotta eat it too.
;-)
Without people buying it, the corporations must give in. People can survive a long time on "obsolete hardware" rather than hardware that simply doesn't function properly.
Jesus, it'll be friggin' time people wake up too. More power to corporations!
I'm tired, sorry for any incoherencies
- Steeltoe