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Mail 112 July 31 August 6, 2000

 

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Monday  July 31, 2000

Andrew Binder abinder@fau.edu

The problem with all of your intellectual property arguments both pro and con is that there is already a large population of artists that gain very little remuneration for their production from the current delivery systems.

In this case I am referring to visual artists. In the fine arts you make a painting and through a gallery you may sell it. When that work gets resold the original creator gets no resale royalty even though the markup might be several thousand times the original markup. The creator only gets limited royalties for the image if it is published by a reputable publisher. Enter the internet. Now it is even easier to cheat the original creator since no system has been created to pay for the images. Yes the creator can file for copy write protection and enforce same but that all costs money and in terms of images nobody seems to think that downloading them (maybe since they are already cashed in your machine) is theft.

Remember that some of these artworks were created with as much effort that you put into your books.

Where is the justice in any of your schemes and arguments when one of the largest branches of the arts always seems to be left out.

This arrangement only helps the gallery system and only hurts the little fish artist, since the big guys can always protect themselves. For myself I am curious how the rest of the creators will react to being cheated on such a large scale. After all we are the starving branch on the tree of the arts, and we do get by.

What would happen to the other arts when they can only sell the works just once in a buyers market, and only the distribution system reaps most of he profit.

Sounds really scary to you (I am sure), but painters live with that reality daily.

Maybe all the lobbying from the other branches of the arts will finally be to our benefit once all of the arts will be in the same boat.

That is actually what I am watching (and hoping) for.

Love the Books.

Andrew Binder

Excuse me, but why this tone with me?  As President of SFWA I did my best for the artists, but at the time I told them to form their own professional association, because our interests were not identical and I didn't have time to look out for everyone. Why your problems negate what I have said on the subject is a bit beyond me, nor do I know why you think it appropriate to berate me as if I were the source of your difficulties.

Good Morning Jerry.

I hope you can stomach yet more Napster dialogue.

Metallica was right in naming the users that were trading their music. For every song available for download through Napster, there's a user offering it up. Sure, making a copy of a cd for your wife's car, or for your son, is probably pretty safe under fair use, but sharing a song with twenty million of your closest friends probably goes a bit beyond the pale.

Hammers and screwdrivers aren't burglary tools until they're used in a burglary. I can tool around all day with a hammer and a screwdriver in the trunk of my car, but when they're found next to a stolen mink and pearls, then I'm charged with possession of burglary tools. Likewise with camcorders. There are those individuals who would rather pay ten dollars for a VHS tape dubbed from a camcorder tape of a movie shown in a theatre than pay the $8.50 to go to the theatre, or wait 4 weeks and pay the $5 to go to the second run theatre, and yet camcorder manufacturers are not sued for contributory infringement.

What percentage of infringing use vs. noninfringing use is allowable?(*)

But there are better solutions than litigation.

For starters, the RIAA collects a 2% levy on all audio DAT tapes and audio CD-R blanks under the Audio Home Recording Act, to go into a fund to redress artists for losses to alleged piracy and counterfeiting on that media. The vast majority of this money is distributed according to sales statistics, not piracy statistics. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what to do next: collect piracy statistics from Napster, and distribute a portion of that redress fund to the artists accordingly.

That idea can even be expanded by having Napster branded CD-R blanks, of which, 5%-15% of the profits go to artists who are traded on Napster.

Napster has 20 million users, each of whom communicates with one server or another. If Napster wants to build in a money transaction mechanism, they can, and make online purchasing, at least within their service, a reality.

However, before any money starts changing hands, Napster needs to add some finer granularity to their searches. As it stands now, Napster simply searches by filename. They'll need to register, and support searches for the ID3 tags that are contained in many MP3 files. There's no guarantee that you'll actually get the song you were expecting (some clown may have simply recorded himself singing 'Happy Birthday' and called it 'Nothing_Else_Matters_Metallica'), nor is there any guarantee that the song is of listenable quality. All in all, the service is on a par with radio taping (a decidedly legal activity) as far as quality and convenience goes.

All of which leads me to wonder, why didn't the RIAA approach Napster with sacks of money to develop the online music commerce program they want? Buy out the company, add server side protection and e-commerce capabilities to the service, and launch a big label blessed music commerce solution. Sure, server side security isn't as totally complete as client side security, but you can implement it, implement it now, and make it transparent to the users. You'll lose something to piracy, but that's different than the staus quo how? I doubt that it would be any greater than their current losses to counterfeiting, and there will always be somebody, like the viewer who buys the $10 camcorder dub instead of a movie ticket, who will take it for free.

If you can hear it, you can record it, and the more inconvenient record companies make it for consumers, the more consumers will try to get a free ride. The first rule of technology is that the most convenient technology wins.

And for every perceived inconvenience to the consumer ("So I need a MagicGate(tm) player to listen to Sony music, LiquidAudio to listen to BMG music, and Windows Media Player to listen to EMI music? Lemme just go download the mp3s."), and for every tale of contractual accounting that sounds like a movie studio rebuttal to a SAG audit, and for every unlisted and out of print song in a company's catalog, the consumer is going to debit that against the 'moral authority of the law'. Sure it's rationalization, but it's also human nature. Make it easy for people to follow the law, and the majority of them will follow the law.

To listen to the RIAA, you'd think they expect to take a thumbprint every time you want to play some music.

This is brand spanking new territory. Book on demand is here, and maybe (usable and affordable) electronic books will be here soon. There's a program that lets me record a DVD movie to my hard drive for later viewing. Right now it takes about 9-18 hours to do the recording, and the resulting file is too big for any but the fattest pipes, but those limitations will eventually drop. Should you be allowed to zap a DVD movie over to your laptop hard drive for viewing on the plane when your laptop isn't equipped with a DVD drive?

One thing is sure, we're now seeing the beginning of the end of prefab pop uberstars, music will become nichefied, and even regionalized, as there'll be no return for the expense of a nationwide promotion. After several pay-per-single experiments fail, we'll likely see subscription services pop up, such as deejays used in the eighties. Live performances will become an even larger portion of a musician's income. Hopefully we'll see the rise of the middle class musician, the musician who can make a decent living performing and selling music without needing multiplatinum sales.

There'll still be a need for record companies, but they'll be a much leaner sort of record company than we're used to seeing. They'll look and act more like agents, handling more of the business side of things on behalf of the musician, rather than the musician being beholden to them.

But in order to get there, we have to wade through the muck.

On July 11th, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on digital music and the internet. It ran for 2.5 hours, and present were Senator Leahy from Vermont, and Senator Hatch from Utah. Your own Senator Feinstein showed up for the last half hour to parrot her constituents' refrain. The most noteworthy data to come out of those hearings is that both Senators Hatch and Leahy have a very good understanding of the issue. Senator Feinstein represents California, so she's expected to be on long term lease to the likes of Sony Music and Capitol Records. Another pleasant surprise was learning that the spirit of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was supposed to encourage the distribution of content as widely (note: not freely) as possible on the net, and Senator Hatch, at least, is disappointed that that's not occurring.

A Realvideo copy can be found on cspan.org in the business and economy section for July 11. http://www.cspan.org/business_economy/index.asp?Recordset3_
Next=Next&;Recordset3_Action=++&;Recordset3_
Position=FIL%3AORD%3AABS%3A11KEY%3APAR%3A&;Recordset3_Looper1_State=10

[With a URL that long who cares?]

Or you can simply read the opening remarks of the participants as entered into the record: http://www.senate.gov/~judiciary/hot_topics.htm 

What, you were expecting answers maybe? I'm smart enough to know I don't have them. I know that writers have done a much better job at holding on to their rights than musicians have been able to. I know that interesting times lay ahead. I know that record companies are going to do whatever they can to keep as much of themselves between the musician and consumer as possible. Beyond that? Interesting times. Feel free to print this

Bruce Dykes bkd69@yahoo.com 

Good discussion. Thanks. And see below.


How can you not be concerned with the government monitoring what takes place? Should not privacy be respected and protected? The fact that ISPs have similar technology should not make us feel any better but rather be outraged. What right do they have to monitor what I or anyone else is doing. Plus if these programs had been installed on the ISPs that have been hit in recent hacker attacks, it would not have stopped them. Their attack would of been different perhaps, but with the same end result. The one thing about tecnology is that it is all completly manmade, which means if someone is intelligent to make it, then there is bound to be somone else who has enough inttelligence to break into it. No amount of monitoring software is going to stop that. If things keep going the way they have been we will soon be in a police state.

--Ted--

tnichol5 [tnichol5@utkux.utcc.utk.edu

I cannot imagine what I have said that would trigger that, nor can I make a lot of sense out of it other than outrage. I thought I made it pretty clear that governments have no rights to search without a court order. I don't much care for the way the warrant system has evolved either, but not all problems can be addressed in all essays.


Hi,

A little fuzzier than your usually crystalline thinking.

I see several problems with Carnivore. The primary one is that voice wiretaps/traces only give you the content/addressing information of one phone. A packet-sniffer, to work, has to search *all* the traffic going over a server. All it takes is one warrant in the jurisdiction of each major ISP, and the government has access to virtually all e-mail in the country.

Also, as your other reader pointed out, government snooping is different from private snooping. ISPs don't have much incentive to read e-mail (there's rarely profit in it). Governments have built-in incentives to spy. That was a limited problem with voice wiretaps, because of the laborious nature of such wiretapping. IP wiretapping is fast, easy, almost impossible to monitor. The potential for abuse is severe.

I'm attaching a column I did on Carnivore.

Thanks for your thoughts, as always. I'm a long-time reader.

Yrs,

Paul Coe

-------- Paul Coe Clark III Editor, Communications Today pclark@phillips.com   www.telecomweb.com 

O, I understand your point. Mine is that the technology will always outrace our efforts to deal with it, so that Eternal Vigilance is more important now than ever. We are not going to defeat the enemy once and for all.

I had a similar discussion with Clinton's White House staff people in 1993; they wanted all kinds of power, and they [these anyway] thought they were good guys, and that Clinton was a good guy, and no one would ever abuse this authority, and they needed the power to track down criminals and child molesters.  I said then in the old paper BYTE that one needed to watch such people, particularly those with high minded reasons.

If you'd sent the Techweb URL for that I could put it up, but I can't post a page.

Incidentally, the government pretty well already has access to anything it wants. Of course they will never use that without warrants, and I am Marie of Rumania.


Hi Jerry,

Your latest troubles are classic Pournelle. You treat all your computers like they were toys, but thanks for sharing it with us. You must have "best of breed" stamped on your forehead. In a perfect world that would be nice, but it doesn't work in the real world in you want any kind of reliability. This isn't MS-DOS anymore, and it's very complicated. It would be like holding IBM accountable for anything you downloaded from the Internet and tried to run on their S-390 machines. They would laugh at you. I'm laughing with you because I am guilty of the same thing, but only on my computers, never on my clients computers. I learned my lesson the hard way with RBase. You do it for material to write about and I love it. I do it because I might find value in the program, and I'm confident that I can fix anything it trashes, and I'll learn something from the experience. Knock on wood.

I am so tired of hearing whining from the uninformed that their NT servers crash twice a day. I'm sorry, but mine run forever, and never crash unless I ask for it. I can crash them on command. All I have to do is download a half-assed piece of software and run it, or in the case of RBase, install it. Microsoft did a study and found there was a factor of 10 in the reliability of the server depending on if it was treated as a mainframe or a toy. The Windows Logo on the srinked wraped box means something. The statement designed for Windows 95/98/NT/W2K doesn't mean a thing other than I hope I got it right. In most cases, they didn't. You know that, but you push the envelope for material, go for it, but be prepared to spend some long days and nights.

Microsoft has just released their data center server edition of W2K, and it's very firm in the hardware and software specifications. Install something other than the approved solutions and it's your server, not theirs. It sounds fair to me. What's your opinion?

Harley

Harley Lawrence <mailto:hlawrence@planetkc.com> Senior Systems Engineer, BSEE, MCT, MSCE, MCP + I

This seems to be my day for being misunderstood, and having everything taken in an odd light.

First, whatever makes you think I treat all my computers like toys? I always keep enough equipment unchanged to allow me to get my work done; for the rest, experimenting with new stuff is WHAT I DO. I get paid pretty well to do it, too. How the devil was I supposed to come up with anything real to say about the Plexwriter if I didn't USE it?  It was very clear, and I made it clear, that dropping it into a Windows 98 system would work. The question was, not is Plextwriter a good device -- it is, they are -- nor whether I recommend Plextor CR-RW devices -- I do -- but whether the claim that this time for sure regarding Direct CD and Windows 2000 was true.  And it wasn't. 

There is yet another version and they say THIS TIME FOR SURE, and I suppose I will have to try than one too; I have downloaded it and I just haven't had both the time and the nerve at the same moment, but I'll manage.  How is that treating my systems like toys?

What in the world would it mean to have "best of breed" stamped on my forehead, and what would it mean for that to "work" in the "real world" whatever that is?  I thought I lived in quite a real world, a bit chaotic with 34 computers and several operating systems, but still quite real.  I thought I ran a real small business, that pumps out many thousands of words a month, publishes a web site, does digital imaging, manages email, writes checks and pays bills and keeps books.  Why is my world not real?  Why is yours more real than mine?  What the heck are you trying to say?

I had not noticed that I said my NT servers crash twice a day. I thought I had made it pretty clear that until I had hardware problems, one dual Pentium Pro system had run for a couple of years without ever being shut down, and was only reset when we put in new service packs including the Y2K pack. Another, Spirit, has run for about 4 years now and except for upgrades of service packs, and the time I went on an overseas trip, hasn't been off line in all that time.  Didn't I make that clear enough?

NT servers work well and reliably until you do things to or with the hardware.  It's possible to crunch one by doing things with another machine, but it's not usual. On the other hand, I did manage to crunch a Windows 2000 Professional workstation through mapping a disk drive to a foreign system and then having the external system flake out, and I reported that. Should I not have?  

I don't understand the rest of your reference.  I am sure Microsoft as well as IBM would be happy to laugh at their customers, but I am pretty sure neither thinks that a very good business practice, nor do I.

Why do you think you are telling me things I do not know when you say that experimenting with software that doesn't have the Microsoft Approved sticker can cause problems?  Do you think there is anyone in my readership who doesn't know it?  Certainly I do, and I would be astonished if I have any long term readers who don't; I thought many people read me because I do all these silly things so they don't have to.

My apologies for being irritated, but really, telling me in breathless tones things we all know is a bit annoying; perhaps you didn't mean to do that. Shall we start over?

What do you mean, treat like toys?  And why is the world I live in not real?


The interesting thing about the whole Napster debate is that nobody involved is exactly covered in glory. 

Courtney Love's screed at Salon has a lot of truth in it. Most pop artists are young, in their early 20s, and totally inexperienced in the ways of the world. So they get outlawyered by the music companies. They have no guild or union to look out for them, unlike salaried musicians (like symphonies, Broadway shows, etc.), who do and have well-defined recording rights. Few pop artists last longer than a couple of years, but the ones that do tend to get wise and realize that they are the cash cows and demand to hold on to some of the milk. Then they act as though the young artists are the enemy. 

The big music company execs want to hang onto their lunches at Spago, private jets and limos in any way possible, even to engaging in conduct that would get most of us thrown in jail (if Love's account of the DMCA "amendments" is correct). They are scared, scared hustlers that don't understand the issues that confront them and seek a legalistic solution to a technical and marketing problem. They claim huge losses in sales near college campuses due to Napster, but I have seen reports that if online sales are accounted for, CD sales are up near colleges. 

The Congress has, for the most part, thrown up their hands and adopted whatever their donors want - few lawyers (as most politicians are) understand technology and few of their staffers do, so they rely on the lobbyists to "help out". The Napster folks are producing a product that, for the most part, is being used by college students to violate the copyright laws. Their protestations of innocence are akin to Captain Renaud in "Casablanca" - "I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here!" "Your winnings, Sir." The MP3 traders are engaging in IP theft, even if it is of bad quality, bigger pipes will make exact digital copy swapping feasible.

Bruce Dykes hints at a possible win-win solution for most concerned: effective online purchases and niche marketing. A good example is the Grateful Dead. They broke all the record company rules and still made excellent money. They allowed taping of live shows, even providing the space and power. They encouraged non-commercial trading of taped shows. They didn't spend on A&;R payola  to radio chains. Yet they still made a lot of money by touring, selling live performance CDs by mail and the net, and by control of their IP. (They came down hard on counterfeit T-shirts, but made it easy to get licenses, for example.) 

Other performers have gone similar routes (Phish). There are a few small record companies that are making the transition to supporting Bruce's "middle class" performers - artists who do reasonably priced live shows w/o fireworks and huge supporting casts and release studio albums done with small budgets that can turn a tidy profit with 5-10k units sold. (I have a CD of acoustic guitar that was master recorded on a $1000 digital mini-disc system in the artist's garage. It sounds as good as his work done in a pro studio.) 

Some are experimenting with selling by subscription. Some release "internet fan only" CDs of live and studio work with print runs of 2500 or so, again with a reasonable profit. These artists, older, wiser and ignored by the big companies since they won't sell a million copies to teens, may lead the way in finding a middle ground for us all. If the lawyers don't screw it up for us all.

Book publishers ought to be watching closely - their turn is next.

Edmund Hack "I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV."

I seen nothing whatever to argue with in that. I emphasize again, though, a created work should be at least partly under the control of the creator: fuggheadedness on the part of the artist is no excuse for ripping him off. Publishers, on the other hand -- if an artist says "By all means put my works on Napster, the publisher is taking all the money anyway and can go to hell," then I think the ethical (although perhaps not the legal) ground shifts no matter how much the publisher protests.

RIAA has acted stupidly. It is interesting to see the number of people who condemn Microsoft for taking advantage of competitor stupidities but will insist that the recording studio stupidities give their customers the right to swap their property.

Mr. St. Onge insists that I am inconsistent because I sometimes record an episode of Buffy so I can watch it at a different time and I may not watch all the commercials, but I condemn the practice of taping stuff off the air and then swapping copies of the tape for yet more episodes, eventually involving thousands of people I never met. I find that bizarre, and I doubt that anyone including him is unable to see the difference.

I don't know the answers to all this; but I suspect everything that needs to be said has been said, so unless something new comes up, I regard this topic as pretty well closed.

And so soon as I say that, comes this:

One additional point about the DMCA... its restrictions on "access controls" disturb me more than any copyright protection, and Napster was probably legally doomed (and misguided) from the get-go. However, giving access restrictions the force of law - of copyright law, yet, instead of contract law! - is a fairly frightening extension of the definition of copyright.

You have commented in the past on Microsoft's new software lease-style contracts as a negative development. Think about the same thing applied to the entertainment industry. A movie studio can easily release a film on digital medium, run it through a simple algorithm that relies a one-use key, and charge you each time that you would like to use it. Even if the algorithm was completely trivial, if it's defined as an "access control", then breaking it violates 17 USC 1201, and you've just incurred thousands of dollars of legal liability to the company.

Fortunately, the market is intelligent enough (or paranoid, which worked out the same way) to reject DIVX, the MPAA's attempt at this sort of marketing structure. People are generally touchy about things that impinge on the first-use doctrine, thankfully.

Pay-per-use is not the only kind of onerous restriction that may be added, however. I bring up region coding of DVDs as a prime example of how these restrictions may be used to effectively deny users the right to actually use product for which companies will readily accept payment.

My work involves translating Japanese animation. Obviously, it's a large advantage to be able to view Japanese DVDs, since that is the best format that a company can afford to let me take home to watch. However, Japan is in Region 2 and I am in the US, Region 1. This leaves me with several unpalatable choices...

1) I can purchase a Japanese DVD player, hope that I don't have any electronics problems with the voltage change (admittedly, rare), warranty support in a language I can't read, trans-Pacific shipping charges, and whatnot.

2) I can purchase one of the very few US DVD players that come equipped with measures to circumvent the region coding, such as the Apex A600A. It's a poor player as far as quality goes, and I'd be embarrassed to support its release except for this feature. Incidentally, new models of the A600A can no longer perform this function... disabled by the manufacturer, under threat of lawsuit from the MPAA. Surprise, surprise.

3) I can modify my American player, which is likely a violation of the DMCA (at least, the MPAA holds that it is, and nobody's gone to court on it yet.) I don't know how to do this, so I have to get parts from another law-breaker, or information from another law-breaker (and the act of getting the parts or information is ITSELF a violation of the law, mind you.)

All this to play a disc that is, in format, identical to software that my current machine can run, aside from one small bit that tells the machine not to run it.

As an anti-piracy measure, DVD region coding is a joke; it is a trivial matter to produce a region-free DVD and that's exactly what existing pirates do. Its only major effect is to segment the world market for DVDs into smaller chunks, from which the MPAA's member companies can extract the maximum profits through differential prices.

Of course, if a given product is not available in your particular region, you're out of luck. This is why my company releases (legitimate) DVDs without region coding, so as not to burden our consumers, wherever and whenever possible.

In this way, the MPAA uses a law to force me to go to great extremes to enjoy a product that, presumably, my purchasing dollars have given me the right to enjoy. This is neither a public good nor a public service, nor does it serve any purpose in the interest of any group other than the hardware manufacturers that set up the DVD consortium and the movie producers of the MPAA.

I've gone on at length about one possible restriction - it's a trivial exercise to imagine others, and not much more difficult to find other examples of this in use today. Even in contract form, this would be upsetting, but at least there a judge could find the terms onerous and throw them out on a case-by-case basis. The DMCA doesn't work like that, I'm afraid...

Andy Kent

Thanks!

 

 

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Tuesday, August 1, 2000

This is not quite what I expected:

From: monty@sprintmail.com 

Subj: Games and War: Shooters and Strategists

In View for Mon 31 Jul 2000, you indicate that the speeding up of hardware has changed Microsoft AGE OF EMPIRES from a strategy game to a shooter, even at the slowest game-speed setting available.

Has not the same thing happened in real-world warfare?

How have the real-world war-fighters coped?

Captain Wayne P. Hughes, Jr. (USN, retired), in _Fleet_Tactics_, 2nd ed. (Naval Institute Press, 2000), p. 217, in the course of a discussion of command and control, comments that "[t]he Aegis missile system, while still subject to human intervention and to override, is designed to operate on preprogrammed tactical doctrine."

For ballistic-missile defense, in the battles for control of Earth orbit (both low and geosynchronous), and eventually for space-naval warfare, moving the _operation_ of tactical doctrine -- as distinct from its _formation_ -- into the automation is going to be even more necessary, no?

And most important of all will be identifying, and giving the officers in tactical command useful control over, the few key decisions that humans _will_ be able to make on the spot, in real time, better than the automation could make them.

I wonder whether there's a market for games based on that model? I've seen no such games -- which does not at all mean that none exist.

I know there are some techno-geek games, like "Core Wars", in which each opponent preprograms his forces, then launches them into a fight to the finish against the enemy(ies?), without real-time interaction or control. That's not what I have in mind.

You are being far too serious: I was concerned about Age of Empires being a clickfest. Sure, it's a real problem, and I tried to cope with some of it back in the battle scenes in MOTE IN GOD'S EYE. Alas, the major battle with which I opened the book got cut before publication. I think it got printed somewhere in "Building the Mote in God's Eye" and if I had a machine readable copy -- MOTE was written on Selectric typewriters -- I would put it up.

But I was mostly concerned about games, which I turn to to get away from thinking about such serious matters...


re: How much money do artists make?

JP> although they make, or are said to make, far more money than most of us writers.

The recording winners (say, Michael Jackson) make more than the writing winners (say Grisham or Heinlein), but there are far more people entering the race. One of the watercooler discussions on the recording industry I listened in on referred to the recording business as "buying a lottery ticket with a year or few of your life.". At least the writers don't come out deaf. 

The guy driving the discussion does technical work in recording production and informal financial advice for unknown musicians. The only real money to be made even in being famous, is when you accumulate enough capital to take your own risks. He said that there's reasonable craftsman's wages in studio work-for-hire, but no living to be made in either recording for credit or live play unless you can put up the risk. "The money goes to the risk. Whoever puts up the risk capital makes the money. It's just like the outer edges of NASDAQ".

He also blames some of the problems of living on the small proportion of remaining credit on proportions-of-credit defined by the Canadian musician's union. Since SFWA seldom has to divide lyricist/music author/performer/whatever (I forget the fourth split), this question may not be comparable to your union experience.

- Greg Goss ( mailto:gossg@mindlink.com )

Thanks. I hadn't thought about collaborative nature of the work. All my collaborations have been equal shares.


This is about as succinct and valuable a statement on the philosophy of science as I have seen:

The common sense and scientific view is that

1. The world existed and had various properties and various forms of life long before there were any people to form theories or philosophers of science to tell them what kinds of theories they are allowed to form.

2. Animals and people evolved to have partial knowledge of the world obtained through their sense organs but also partially built in by evolution.

3. The fundamental state of the world is a matter of quarks, quantum mechanics and relativity, etc., and evolution did not provide humans with knowledge of that. Direct human observation is of middle sized phenomena; this is an accident of evolution.

4. Scientific theories are an extension and revision of common sense knowledge. Science is difficult but individual scientists and the scientific community accumulate theories, mostly correct, but sometimes wrong.

5. Philosophical theories of knowledge that start from the senses of an individual and work out are unproductive of scientific knowledge. The Vienna Circle was wrong and Goedel, as a graduate student, was right in rejecting their views. He was also right that it was very hard to fight the popular world view, e.g. advanced by Russell and Popper, of his time. That view still has great power in our time.

6. Now it is possible to begin to design robots. It is silly to design a robot to believe that the world is a creation of its own consciousness, although most of the work in computer learning and computer discovery amounts to that. The computer programs so designed have very serious limitations.

7. These views are elaborated in my "Philosophical and Scientific Presuppositions of Logical Artificial Intelligence" http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/phil2.html , which doesn't require mathematics to read. Comments are welcome.

8. There is so much work to be done in elaborating a scientific philosophy of knowledge that it is a waste of time to argue with Popper, Kuhn and Lakatos.

John McCarthy, Stanford

I don't know that I have a lot to add to that. Thanks.


The Velikovsky discussion stimulated a mild discussion of the First Dark Age: the period after the invention of Mycenaean writing (Linear B, clay tablets, syllabic characters). There were several centuries in which writing was lost, most palace organization was lost, and history fell into legend and myth. Some of the legends are clearly based on real incidents but no one knows which were which.  Was the Stone God rising from the sea an eruption on Santorini? And so forth.

Jerry, I wonder if Somtow's suggestion, in The Shattered Horse, is right. He makes a case for the Trojan War causing the Dark Age.

The idea is that for ten years, the Greek Kings, who knew how to administer the palace economies, were away at war; less skilled subordinates were left in charge, who didn't understand the importance of maintenence and upkeep. Also, most of the surplus food, equipment and manpower was shipped off to the war, leaving too little behind to do much more than just "muddle through." Then, of course, when the war ended, many of the soldiers wanted to enjoy their loot rather than work. This could have lead to a crash, and depression. When you consider how few people there were with the skills needed to rebuild the economy, it's easy to imagine a depression bringing the entire culture down.

I really don't know if the above has any merit, but it's certainly an interesting speculation. --- Joe Zeff 

The Guy With the Sideburns If you can't play with words, what good are they? http://home.earthlink.net/~sidebrnz 

I think there was more to it than just that. But it is interesting that the walls of Mycenae and Tyrins were thought to be "cyclopean" meaning built by the Cyclops since they were clearly beyond the capability of humans. On the other hand we know that Pylos was razed by invaders coming by ship from the north.

And the collapse was pretty wide spread across the East Mediterranean, not just in Greece and Macedonia.


Dear "Marie of Rumania",

I rediscovered your website recently while looking for references to "Edward Hume" (a personal survey to see what is said/known about me on the Web). In addition to my website, I found many references to my websites (my clinical wisdom pages are apparently fairly popular; and my website on Chinese adoptions is number three behind the main support organization for adopters of Chinese children and the website run by the Chinese government agency responsible for adoptions).

Among the references I found one on a Chaos Manor page. Read the page, read others, then I couldn't quit. I began to feel I needed to contribute. But the task sat for quite awhile. Mainly, I hate writing checks (I don't write enough of them to merit using Quicken's checkwriting feature). And I didn't want to pay some bank to give you money. Finally it dawned on me that in my heyday of using Chase Bank's electronic payment capacity, not all of the companies were "electronic payees". As I thought about it I thought I remembered that Chase mailed something out.

I'm not sure quite what it is they send out. It should be a check from your point of view. But I know the bank treats it as an electronic payment from my point of view-I don't receive a canceled check. It's a nice example of disaggregating functions/feature and reaggregating them. Anyway, you're an experiment: a real person who is receiving an "electronic" payment. We'll see just what it is that you receive (money, we hope).

On a completely different tack, I let go my younger daughter last night, thinking she had a good grip on the bottom of the bathtub with her feet, as usual. She did not. She slipped and her chin hit the rail that the shower door rides on. Ouch! And a visit to the local PromptCare.

The emergency doc was the son of a local principal. A young man, and pleasant, who probably entered kindergarten the year I graduated medical school. He glued the cut on my daughter's chin.

DermaBond, it's called. It's a bluish purple (Blue's Glue?)[Blue's Clues is a good TV show for young kids] form of adhesive like Super Glue, etc. He put the edges of the cut together, painted the adhesive on, held them for 15-30 seconds, then let the skin relax. Another two iterations of squeeze, and hold, and he was done. No anesthesia, no stitches. And the result looks like a scratch, not a cut through the skin, which it had been. The process did sting, and what my daughter really wanted was a "butterfly" (old technology, but then, I am an old doc). The only problem is that she can't swim or get it wet for 5-7 days, like stitches. We were done and home just before my wife got back from her evening's errands.

This got me thinking about the progress of medicine. I graduated medical school in 1975, a short quarter-century ago. As a student I held charts in my hands of prior admissions to hospital where labs were done individually, by hand. As a student, I drew blood, put a drop on a slide, drew it into a pipette, stuck one end in clay, put the pipette in a centrifuge, and put the resulting sedimented pipette up against a card to find a patient's hematocrit. I started accessing the hospital's computer system for lab data in 1974-at night, in an administrative office; we had to come down from the floors to get at that terminal. I saw one of the first commercial CAT scanners. I saw the first experimental PET scanner. The point of this: I'm a baby-boomer. I haven't been at this all that long (we have a man practicing cutting-edge psychiatry in this town in his late 80's), but what I've seen so far is breathtaking. Looking back every once in a while helps to keep things in perspective.

BTW, for a great source of desktop backgrounds, check out the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive, at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html 

Have a great day, "Marie"

[Ed Hume]

Thanks.  When do we get together again? You seem to have given up on AAAS meetings.  Though I recall one in DC that ended up in a parade past the Soviet Embassy, where we all shouted defiance...


I'll let this stand for about a dozen answers. Thanks to all!

Hi Dr Pournelle,

You mentioned some stories that were published in Analog. It just happens that I was reading them last week and I thought I could help you on the author. I enjoy reading your column in Byte and your Chaos Manor diary.

The stories are by James Tiptree Jr. in an anthology called '10,000 light years from home'

The first is 'Mama come home' by Galaxy Publishing Corp 1968; published in If under the title 'The mother ship' The second is 'Help' by Galaxy 1968; published in If under the title 'Pupa knows best'

'Mama come home' is a first contact story of a race of Amazonian woman (8 foot 3) visisiting earth. They then want to take people back to their world for breeding purposes as their men are somewhat weak. Through some sleight of hand our security team convince them that there is a larger race of men breaking down their world. The main characters are George (the cryptographer), Tillie (the bruised woman) and Max (our narrator).

Max gets raped in a park by these large woman ie the vacuum cleaner analogy.

In 'Help' there are two gangs of missionaries trying to convert the earth to the teachings of the Great Pupa. They have a huge conflict over minor doctrinal issues and practically destroy the earth. The earth is saved by the intervention of a third race.

Cheers Francois van Niekerk

francois.vniekerk@aspentech.com

 

 

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Wednesday, August 2, 2000

I was tearing my hair out having purchased a Mitsumi 4804TU USB CD burner and suffering the dreadful CE-Quadrat WinOnCD software that it is bundled with. Then, to add the final touch, I found not only that WinOnCD doesn't work at all on Win2K but can't even find the drive. And when I contacted them they bumped me off to Mitsumi for support, who then told me that they didn't know when, or if, Win2K support would ever be available. They also said that they knew of no other software which would support the drive - exasperating, as it is only three months old.

After reading your column I downloaded the demo copy of Nero and found to my great joy that it worked perfectly under Win2K, and furthermore could burn at 4X speed, something I could never do reliably before with WinOnCD under Win98. So I purchased it, and I will be recommending it.

I think, btw, you were a little unfair about its user interface, which I found quite intuitive. Compared to WinOnCD it is much nicer to look at and easier to use. Your column is a weekly 'must read' and although I wept bitter tears when Byte ceased to publish, it has been wonderful to see byte.com go from strength to strength. Thank you very very much!.

Thank you for the kind words.

Jerry ---

I have been following your discussion concerning DirectCD/Easy CD Creator Pro under Windows 2000 both on Byte and your web. I have one suggestion to make: your use of using "CD-R" to mean mastering (such as under Easy CD Creator Pro) and CD-RW to mean packet writing (such as under DirectCD) is very confusing to many readers. I know that you define your use of the terms (although you fail to do so in the most recent BYTE column). Still, using well-defined terms in unusual ways can cause confusion.

For example, I advise most people to use DirectCD to do daily backups to CD-R media. Once they read your column, though, they become confused, thinking that DirectCD only works with CD-RW media. I like the DirectDC/CD-R combination because the price of CD-R media is so low that it never makes sense to overwrite backups and DirectCD works nicely as an incremental backup solution. In addition, DirectCD can prepare a CD-R disk for use in about one minute while preparing a CD-RW disk takes an hour. Finally, DirectCD can make a packet-written disk usable in a standard CD reader (even one lacking the UDF reader) but it cannot perform that trick on CD-RW media.

By the way: I have written a Windows Script Host file (the modern equivalent of a .BAT file) to do my daily backups via the Windows 2000 scheduler. I will be happy to send you the .WSH file if you would like to try it.

One more thing: the newest version of Windows Media Player (version 7) includes an optional Adaptec plug-in. If you have installed DirectCD, do NOT install the Adaptec plug-in as part of the Media Player installation routine.

Thanks for trying things out so I do not have to. Keep up the good work.

Howard E. Abrams E-mail: habrams@pumpkinsoftware.com 

Anyone using DirectCD with IDE drives on Windows 2000 systems takes chances I would not take. There is a new version that is said to work properly, but then that was said of the previous three.

My advice is, use Nero, and forget Adaptec, and in particular forget DirectCD. For Windows 98 systems it's a bit different, and if you can afford the time it takes to format CD-RW blanks under DirectCD that does work. As to using DirectCD with CD-R blanks, I have not had the success you have with IDE drives. With SCSI most of this works pretty well, and I suppose I ought to say something about that. The truth, though, is that I don't put SCSI in most of my new systems.

I would like to relate a recent experience with Adaptec products.

Merlin is a K6 III 450 Mhz with 192 MB of RAM, a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP card, an Adaptec 2940 UW card, a Fujitsu 9.1 GB UW, a Western Digital 9.1 GB UW, and Quantun Fireball 6.4 GB IDE. Also installed is a DVS 6x DVD/CDROM, and a Yamaha 6416 SCSI burner, along with an internal 100 MB ZIP drive.

Until a month ago I had been running Easy creator 4 and Direct CD under Windows 98 with no problems other than a few coasters. When I bought my Western Digital UW I bought Windows 2000 Professional and upon completion of the hardware installation did a clean install of Win 2000. Except for my Afgha Snapscan everything got recognized and I thought I was off to the races. Software installation was a nonevent until Easy CD creator. After installation, the software told me that Direct CD was not compatible with WIN 2000 and offered to d/l the update. I clicked yes, and the update downloaded, bringing my installation to version 4.02, and 3.01 of Direct CD. The please restart for changes to take effect dialog box came up, and I complied.

The first indication of anything wrong was when Windows, before the shell loaded insisted on checking my zip disk for defects. Then, once Windows had loaded, and everything in the Startup folder started, Direct CD indicated there were no compatible drives available on the system. !?! I clicked on My Computer, and all my hard drives, Zip drives, etc, showed up as usual, but no DVD and no burner. A check on System showed the missing drives...but no drivers to run them.

A call to Adaptec tech support cleared up the mystery, but added some bad news. The update to Direct CD needed two more small patches installed in a specific order along with NO reboots until the very end of the process, otherwise CDROMS and like hardware would not function properly, or Win 2000 would cease to function altogether.

The only solution was to reinstall Windows 2000 since the repair option would not fix this type of damage. Also, despite the tech support claim, Windows offered to either install to the original WINNT folder, thereby wiping out all settings and My Documents, or install to a different folder altogether. I chose the first option and ended up reinstalling my all my software.

Then I had the idea (yes, I am a masochist) to try to repeat the problem, which met with much success. This time, a call to tech support resulted in an offer to help me edit the registry, which would solve the phantom CDROM problem. I've included the email from Adaptec tech support as an attachment. Editing the registry was uneventful, and did restore the DVD and the Yamaha burner. As instructed, I immediately uninstalled Easy CD Creator and Direct CD, restarted, and reinstalled along with the required patches.

I now have a stable system, although Direct CD is still a little temperamental,...

Sincerely, Jon Bountalas Saint John, New Brunswick Canada

Thank you. Once again: using DirectCD with Windows 2000 is outside my recommendations, although it tends to work better with SCSI than IDE.  I prefer NERO in any event.


The palace economies in bronze age Crete lacked a market system and so had no way of assessing the real cost of the goods they produced or bought. Apparently, they specialized in cloth-making for export to Egypt and the Near East. Their imports were apparently elite goods, which they traded locally for food and other basic staples. This system had a lot in common with the MIT Beer Game, which is known to be chaotic due to the lack of a feedback mechanism.

The archaeological data seem to indicate that the Cretan palaces became increasingly specialized over time, to the point that almost everyone was involved in sheep-herding or cloth-making. The speculation is that they overproduced the demand for their goods, which then collapsed, and they went with it. The archaeological data also show that the bronze age palaces in Greece took over the Cretan role about a generation later, and began specializing in turn...

There's also data on a similar system involving bronze in the Western Mediterranean about 1800 BC. The foundries were in Spain and expanded to the point that they had to be producing enough bronze to saturate the demand in that area. Apparently demand collapsed and the foundries closed permanently.

Note also that palace economies, being dependent on tribute and redistribution, lacked large surpluses. The thing about market-based economies is that they allow the rulers of the market-place to levy a sales tax to fund defense and site development. The sales tax is more or less willingly paid (unlike tribute) as a part of the cost of doing business. Without a large surplus, a palace economy was always vulnerable to an unfriendly takeover. Even market-based economies had problems with this (Constantinople, Wessex after Alfred), but palace economies could not afford much of anything in the way of a standing defense force.

My point is that palace economies could easily expand to the point that they saturated demand or became prime targets for the next raider to come around the cape.

-- --- Harry Erwin, PhD, Computational Neuroscientist (modeling bat behavior), Senior SW Analyst and Security Engineer, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, GMU. CV and papers available at: <http://mason.gmu.edu/~herwin/CV.htm>

All true, but in my judgment insufficient to explain the absolute collapse all over the Basin, to the point where writing became a myth, legend replaced history, and the art of Cyclopean walls was so thoroughly lost that people believed the walls they saw were beyond the capabilities of mortal men.

We know that Crete was badly mauled by the explosion of Thera, which cost them two major naval bases, Thera itself and Zakros. We have the legend of Talos the bronze giant who defended Crete from invaders, and who might well have been a mercenary force of bronze armored Dorians or others of large stature and warlike temperament, but the way he was killed in legend is interesting.

I've walked through all the major ruins on Crete, and none of them ever had walls or anything like walls; unlike the fortresses on the Greek mainland.  One comes off muttering Tiryns is a fortress, Mycenae is the home of warrior kings, but the Palace of Minos is the seat of an Empire.

In Greek legend Crete collapsed as a result of a raid by Theseus, who had been educated by Minos. If the Cretan Navy were gone, this wouldn't be any great trick.  But the Minoan civilization was too widespread, and too thriving, to have collapsed as the result of market forces. Not all at once like that. And indeed, it's pretty clear that earthquakes and volcanism did the Minoans in.

I think you will find something similar to have assisted in the destruction of the later Mycenaean civilization.

This is another theme that probably deserves its own discussion page. Real Soon Now. Alas, I have found that when I take stuff off the main mail page the discussions dry up fast.  There needs to be a way I can keep the discussions going, then paste all the stuff onto one place to let newcomers catch up...  But then it overloads THIS page.  Sigh.

For the moment I have copied everything to a new page.

 


This is from a senior tech support friend:

I had a gentleman call, earlier today, on our VIP line with connection trouble. I checked the modem: USR WinModem on Com 3, Port already open. Rebooted, and got the same error. Sent him off to get it fixed, telling him it's probably just the drivers.

He called back later. Gateway "tech support" had re-installed the drivers. Now, it's on Com 2. They don't see anything odd in this. Checking diagnostics again, the UART is grayed out, not responding. OK, now it's hardware.

Got a third call. Gateway "proved" that the modem can connect, so it's OK. I 'splained to the VIP that yes, the modem will connect, but at any speed above 9600 baud it will throw most of the data in the bit bucket. I also told him that the "tech" he'd talked to has no right to their paycheck in my opinion. Then I sent him to 3Com.

This is not, by any means, the first such story I've heard about Gateway.

Gateway used to have periodic problems: they'd get lots of sales and outrun their tech support capability. Then they'd use the new income to hire and train more. It went stairstep. But that was in their growth days. 

I have had no new Gateway equipment here for at least 3 years, possible longer. I do have a couple of Gateway systems that have been in continuous use for that long and with no problems.


Dear Jerry;

I hope I'm not remiss in interrupting all this great philosophical stuff (especially Professor McCarthy's fascinating rules -- I intend to look up his paper and study it), but I was hoping to manhandle the conversation to something a bit more practical.

I have a WinTel system (W98 SE, AMD K-6 II 450) with a couple of medium-to-big drives, 7 GB each. I've been ruminating on how to do backups, which have become so technically difficult that I'm no longer sure how to do them (backup to what medium?). Reading some of your columns, I finally concluded the best thing to do is set up what you call a "box o' drives" (BOD) which I assume is a computer that is basically a shell for one or two huge hard drives... say a couple of 30 GB drives.

But I still have several questions: should the box also be a server, so I can connect my WinTel and my wife's Mac, allowing us both to backup to the BOD -- and incidentally, send files back and forth from my computer to hers?

What operating system should the BOD have -- W98? Linux? Can a Windows OS server connect with a Mac? I heard somewhere that WinNT won't, but you can run a program called Samba on Linux which fools NT into thinking Linux is really Windows and -- and bzzt, the explanation lost me. I have no idea how to do that, but I'm willing to learn if there's a good HOW_TO.

How fast a chip does the BOD need? How much RAM? Should I make my Internet connection go through the BOD, so I can put a firewall on it?

Physically how far away can the BOD sit -- my desk is too crowded as it is! For that matter, can I get really long keyboard and video cables and stick my normal working machine off in a closet somewhere?

Is this a good topic for one of your patented special reports, or are the answers simple enough that you can respond on the mail page so that even I can understand them?

Sincerely, your new subscriber, --

Dafydd ab Hugh

Clinton To Have Tissue Removed From Nose

You ask a LOT of questions, all good, but which are going to be answered in the hardware book that Thompson and I are working on even as I speak.

The simplest thing to do is go to Fry's, get a decent motherboard and chip  -- the Celeron down below the knee in the price curve would be my recommendation -- and a couple of big dirves. IBM 20's were on sale at Fry's this week at $97, and 30's at under $150. Get a pair of Ethernet cards (100 base t): D-Link 10/100 in a box is about right, under $100 at Frys last time I looked. Build a simple system with Windows 98 or whatever you have on it, use Microsoft Network Client, and use that to back up every file of importance. THEN you can start worrying about Linux and SAMBA and all the other stuff and go for that when you feel right. Moshe Bar's place is the right place to go to learn all that.  As to firewalls. study up a bit. 

If you try to solve all problems at once you will not solve any.

 

 

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Thursday, August 3, 2000

Column time and I also have all the parts to build a new super games system, Intel 933 P-III and their motherboard. 

From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com

Subject: Dark Ages and Artificial Intelligence

Dear Jerry:

The letters from Zeff and Erwin are intriguing, but I don't buy them either.

As far as Somtow's suggestion goes: First, I don't believe the Trojan War lasted ten years. I think that was just put in to indicate 'a long time.'

In any case: if the Greek economies could support the soldiers, with the Kings absent, then why when the war ends and they come home is there a collapse? Soldiers don't want to work? Well, they weren't working before. Kings' subordinates didn't do as well as the Kings? Hey, the Kings are back.

Historically, there have been depressions in modern economies at the end of major wars, but that's because the economy has to stop making so many armaments, has to re-absorb lots of returned soldiers, etc. Was there anything like this in the ancient Mediterranean? I don't think we know enough to comment.

The same question to Erwin's suggestion: do we know enough to speculate? About the alleged specialization -- what little I know of ancient economies says at least 80% of the population MUST have been engaged in food production. If correct, how could the specialization take place?

Natural disaster of some kind sounds more plausible to me. Really widespread crop failure, caused by Thera exploding, might lower the carrying capacity below that required to keep the Palace people fed. The attempt to maintain the Palace's standard of living puts people into a downward spiral, the barbarians move in as the Mediterranean people weaken, the few with technological knowledge die ...

Aside from the astronomical disasters a la Velikovsky, disease is a possibility here. Epidemics can't flourish very well in small communities. Everyone gets sick, and either dies or becomes immune. In a large community, circa 1 million, by the time everyone in the old generation who was going to get the disease has, there's a fresh crop of bodies to infect. The fall of the Roman Empire may have been due to smallpox or measles reducing the population around Commodus's time below that required to support the Emperors and Caesers (On all this, see Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill).

About AI: all these attempts to model the human mind in computers remind me of the pre-WWII attempts to model it as a telephone switchboard: that is, poetic metaphor disguised as science. I can't help but think there's something fundamental missing here, just as with the First Dark Age.

In any case, sure is interesting.

Best, St. Onge

One day I will do a whole book on the First Dark Age. I am about 20 years out of date -- make that nearly 30 -- but I spent time in Greece, on Thera and Crete and in digs near Pylos as well as in museums, and I know a good bit about what was known then. If you go to Tiryns you cannot help being impressed by those walls; how could the art of building them be so thoroughly lost?

This and other materials on this subject are copied into a separate page as well as appear in mail.


Dear Jerry,

In noting Dafydd ab Hugh's question, I don't believe he needs astonishingly high transfer rates or a new computer for his proposed backup system supporting WinTel and Mac. WinNT 4.0 Server will do the job nicely and with a minimum of fuss. Additionally, he'll need to run "Services for Macintosh" which implements a local "Appletalk" environment over Ethernet that her Mac should read natively.

I've implemented a similar system appropriate for the home environment and used a Pentium 166 feeding 3 hard drives for a similar backup system to which two Macs [(PowerBook 500mHz - Pismo) and G3 (450mHz Yosemite)] are linked by Ethernet. Works like a charm. Additionally, his wife can also print over Ethernet to a "LocalTalk" compliant printer as well using an Ethernet to LocalTalk adapter such as that built by Farallon.

The key is the use of "Services for Macintosh" and then setting up accessible volumes on the from "MacFile" in the Services Manager under WinNT 4.0 Server.

Suggest that he also take a look at: http://www.macwindows.com/  and http://www.threemacs.com/network/index.html  as both sites provide some useful insights.

Hope this helps.

-- Cheers,

Art Russell

mailto:artrussell@mindspring.com http://education.gsu.edu/spehar

"The only way to successfully predict the future is to invent it." - Alan Kay

That aphorism may have been said by Alan Kay, but Dandrige Cole said it first.

What Dafydd really needs is to get started. The rest will come. And apropos:

Dear Jerry;

Your suggestions on the backup conundrum were excellent, especially the last: "if you try to solve all problems at once you will not solve any." It induced the epiphany that no matter what system I set up, I still have to buy a chip, a motherboard, a pair of drives, and a box to put them in. Oh, and ethernet cards.

That's a concrete step I can take. After I put that together, producing that BOD, /then/ I can worry about how to hook it all up! But I'll have already taken one step, so the next won't look as huge. --

Dafydd ab Hugh

Drugs And Crime Are Overrated

Like that pretentious actor on TV, you confuse an epiphany with a revelation or a realization. An epiphany is a manifestation, an event in the real world, not an internal one. (And yes, I know some dictionaries give as a third or fourth meaning "sudden insight" but that is in my judgment one of those definitions from misusage that ought not have crept into dictionaries; epiphany is a good word for a phenomenon for which we have no other real word.) Having chided you on words, my congratulations: go DO it. You will be glad.

Do buy a good case and power supply. Not an el cheapo. I prefer PC Power and Cooling but in any event pay the man the extra thirty bucks or so for a solid power supply you can rely on.


Dr. Pournelle,

"Alas, I have found that when I take stuff off the main mail page the discussions dry up fast. There needs to be a way I can keep the discussions going, then paste all the stuff onto one place to let newcomers catch up... But then it overloads THIS page. Sigh."

How about posting a "plug" for the continuing discussions when you update the "current mail" and "current view" pages. Such as "More on Discussion X here: " _then_ post the day's messages afterwards. Maybe a syposis, like "Bozo the Clown sends message refuting Earth as Globe theory discussion, see : xxx.htm" I have noticed you do this a little bit now and again, but maybe it needs reminding more often? I love the alt mail discussions. Some I can participate in, others I just soak up (I have pretty much made most of my education on my own in this sort of way). Thanks, and keep up the great work!

George Laiacona III <george@eisainc.com> ICQ 37042478/ 28885038 "I'm too busy worrying about what I've done to think about what I'm doing." -Axly Suregrip "Relax. This city has been here for a hundred years. How much damage can a few criminals do in only eight hours? Here, have another donut." -Officer Axly

In my copious free time. If this place were all I had to worry about, I'd do a lot of indexing and cross referencing. As it is, I have decided to open pages on some subject and paste into them, but continue to put the discussion in MAIL as well. We will see what happens. 

I have done this with the Bronze Age materials.


John McCarthy presents some interesting ideas and talks of designing robots and what they should "believe" about the world. His analysis is careful and thoughtful, but he like many other AI proponents chooses to ignore the non deterministic elements of consciousness. The human mind is more than a blob of neurons connected to sensory organs and a life support system. Roger Penrose and others have made a case for that far more elegantly than I could, but the naive views of AI proponents (fed by a new generation of robotologists) still persist. Remember the "life in a test tube" stories from the 1960s? Our ability to create and manipulate new life forms was "just around the corner". And let's not forget Clarke's HAL 9000...

As a 45 year old scientist and entrepreneur, it took me 35 years to come to the simple realization that science really doesn't know squat about the human mind, biological growth processes, or how this universe operates on a fundamental level. McCarthy's assertion that "The fundamental state of the world is a matter of quarks, quantum mechanics and relativity, etc.", is to me, a shaky basis for making further inferences and setting a path for AI research.

Having children and experiencing first-hand the wonder and mystery of their physical and mental growth changed my opinions on many areas of science. I believe there is a holistic dimension to existence and consciousness that cannot be captured in any deterministic system. Consciousness spans both time and physical space (think of an evolving fractal in 3D), and until we break away from our colliding billiard ball models of the universe, I don't believe we can begin to understand it. We are inextricably linked with our past and future through this domain we call consciousness. How can a machine with no past possibly enter into consciousness?

Here are two references that have helped me along the way:

http://www.sciam.com/1998/0198issue/0198ingber.html 

Suojanen, Waino W. 1983. "Management and the Brain." Georgia State University.

The first is a beautiful intimation of how connected the universe may be. The second explores the nature vs. nurture, and instinct vs. ethology arguments without much of the politically correct nonsense we see today.

James McSheehy Suwanee GA *************

I have this quarrel with John McCarthy (and Minsky) fairly often; I tend to the Penrose view. I am certain the discussion cannot do anything but good.

I'm more in Douglas Hofstadter's camp; have you read _Goedel, Escher, Bach_, and _Creative Concepts &; Fluid Analogies_?

Hofstadter's position is that Goedel was right, and so what? We don't have to understand completely how it works in order to build it.

Roland Dobbins 

 

Dear Dr Pournelle

James McSheehy's letter reminds me of the 19th century distinction between Inorganic and Organic Chemistry; the former dealt with compounds that could be produced in a laboratory, the latter with those which were so complex that they could be produced only by living organisms. The fact that the problem of understanding the origins of intelligence has turned out to be more complex than was expected in the 50s does not mean that it is not amenable to analysis and simulation.

The writer also falls into the trap of assuming that unpredictable equates with non-deterministic; weather systems provide the classic counter-example of a deterministic non-linear systems which are predictable only over limited intervals. Some years' ago some colleagues and I developed a model of aircrew behaviour (IEEE Trans Sys, Man &; Cyb, SMC-23, Jan/Feb 1993) which was both determistic and unpredictable (we intended the former but not the latter); the evolution of any run was explicable in hindsight, but could not be predicted over any extended period, thus the model appeared to exhibit free will.

This does not mean that Penrose is wrong and McCarthy is right; however, Occam's razor makes me prefer explanations based on our current physical theories to those which require the introduction of new factors.

As for colliding billiard ball models of the universe, they have been out of fashion since the Solvay conference in 1927 set the course for the future development of quantum mechanics.

Regards,

Peter Morgan -- 

 

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Friday, August 4, 2000

August 4

Dear Jerry:

Last week in Mail there was discussion of Adaptec's CD-ROM burning software install causing a W2000 system to lose it's drivers and the use of any CD-ROM at all: the exact same thing happened to me. In fact the drivers are still there, but the Adaptec un-install in my case messed with the registry so that the drivers would not load properly, and no CD-ROM devices could be recognized by the system even tho they would spin up on boot and show up in Device Manager. In any event that reader's solution was to re-install W2000 (how he did that without a working CD-ROM drive I'd like to know - truly) but by accident I discovered that installing Microsoft's new Windows Media Player 7 will also repair the registry errors and save the situation. Even at a 9MB download it's faster than reinstalling the OS, it's actually a pretty nice program itself, and I thought he and others might like to know.

Adaptec's software is a more or less hopeless morass of patches and updates these days, and load order is terribly important: unfortunately their file names are more cryptic than usual and I found it far easier to get things in the wrong order than the right one. They need to do a total refresh, a true version 5, and give or sell it to us long suffering W2000 users at a nominal price.

Right now the latest version of Nero Burning ROM is on my machine; fast, efficient, and the company was a pleasure to do business with: by the time I was done downloading the demo software the serial number unlock key I had charged to my credit card was sitting in my e-mail in-box, and I had a fully functioning registered version of the program. As you would say "Highly recommended."

All the best--

Tim Loeb

Thanks. I have the full Nero with manuals, but you don't really need all that. It sure works. 

 

 

 

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Saturday, August 5, 2000

It's column time.

 

 

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read book now

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Sunday, August 6, 2000

Column time. Short Shrift.

First Dark Age (continued from above):

Dear Sir,

I have a faint recollection of reading somewhere that the first dark age was basically an economic depression which was caused by the loss (to Med basin cultures) of their supply of tin with which to make bronze, and that it took approx. 400 years for folks to develop iron-based technology to the point at which it could produce affordable replacements for the wide variety of bronze tools on which the previous high level of trade and civilization had largely been based. I regret that the source of this recollection eludes me. An inquiry to an expert on bronze age material sources and trade routes might be the quickest way to determine the plausibility of this notion. It seems to me that the only significant sources of bronze-age tin were Wales and some similarly remote location to east or south-east of the Med basin. I speculate that perhaps the long distance trade was disrupted by a climate shift, perhaps as a result of the Thera detonation.

Best regards,

TVVB

Certainly there were tin problems, and "where did they get the tin?" is sill a difficult question. I understand there were some neutron activation studies to determine where the tin for some known and datable bronze artifact came from, but I don't recall seeing the results.

 

 

 

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