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June 21, 2003
How many hits are there in Google on “weblog”? How many on “blog”? What’s the total number of mentions for weblog and blog? (Hint it’s about 8x the number of mentions of “web log” in quotes.)
Answers within an order of magnitude count as correct and will be placed in a sweepstakes the grand prize of which is the chance to imagine having won a real sweepstakes.
The solution is in the first comment to this blog entry.
June 20, 2003
The brand, spankin’ new mega-monster PC is still in the shop. They’ve confirmed that the onboard ethernet port is busted. But they put in a new, identical mobo, and the system still isn’t working. New RAM also. So, now they’re checking whether one of my boards is causing the problem. Another day or two is required, which means I won’t get it back until Tuesday at the earliest.
Living via my laptop is certainly ok, although I feel like I’m eating every meal out of a picnic basket. But there are some problems. First, my Quicken data is on the broken desktop machine which means that my bills are going unpaid. Second, there’s the forking of my email. Yes, sure, we all want to say “Forking email!” from time to time, but all I mean is that I have to remember to search two separate Outlook files when I look for old messages.
Also, all the good games are on the desktop machine. Not that that matters. I can control my finger twitches. Really I can. Must. Must. Control. Twitching.
There Is No Cat is getting nasty mail from someone who claims to own the trademark on the phrase “Clue-by-four.” Since the phrase is used in sentences like “He wouldn’t understand the Internet if you hit him with a clue-by-four,” There Is No Cat points out the irony of it all.
You know what? So long as we’re not trying to confuse your customers for our own commercial gain, we’re going to use the words we want. Even though Silence Is Golden®
I enjoyed GroovyMother‘s response to the same not-yet-a-lawyer letter from the owner of the trademark on Clue-by-Four. (Thanks to One Pot Meal for the link.)
I somehow missed the landmark moment in Akma’s blogging of a talk that Larry Lessig gave at Northwestern in April. Included in Akma’s coverage is Larry’s 100% genuine digital autograph.
Have we at last found an incontestable use for strict digital rights management software?
All hail Declan McCullagh. E.g., a couple of days ago he covered the Council of Europe’s all-but-final proposal that would require ” Internet news organizations, individual Web sites, moderated mailing lists and even Web logs” to offer a “right of reply.” The proposal is absurdly detailed. In fact, it’s just plain absurd.
In honor of this proposal, I am turning off the comments capability for this blog entry.
June 19, 2003
According to Declan:
On Wednesday, Hatch came under attack for allegedly being a copyright pirate himself. His hatch.senate.gov Web site’s menus use JavaScript code created by the U.K. company Milonic Solutions. Milonic Solutions charges between $35 and $900 for the right to obtain a license number for its JavaScript menu, but Hatch’s site does not include a license number. Instead, this comment appears in the site’s HTML code: “i am the license for the menu (duh).”
Hatch is, of course, the senator who suggested two days ago that enabling copyright holders to destroy the machines of violators would be a darn fine way to enforce copyrights.
The online world is so messy that we’re all pirates one way or another. Find a machine that doesn’t have material on it that even unintentionally violates someone’s copyright. Likewise, find a cubicle or a refrigerator door that’s pure. Find a copying machine that has never been used to violate someone’s copyright. Shall we blow ’em all up? Or should decide that computers are too inflexible to enforce copyright, whether it’s by not letting us copy a frame of a DVD or by melting our hard drives. We need more elbow room than a Terminator can ever understand.
Thanks to Greg for the link.
Eric Norlin flags an important development from Verisign and explains its importance.
Here’s Ray Kurzweil on the nature of the self, in his generous and excellent article on Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science:
If I ask the question, ‘Who am I?’ I could conclude that, perhaps I am this stuff here, i.e., the ordered and chaotic collection of molecules that comprise my body and brain.
However, the specific set of particles that comprise my body and brain are completely different from the atoms and molecules than comprised me only a short while (on the order of weeks) ago. We know that most of our cells are turned over in a matter of weeks. Even those that persist longer (e.g., neurons) nonetheless change their component molecules in a matter of weeks.
So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago. All that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern changes also, but slowly and in a continuum from my past self. From this perspective I am rather like the pattern that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules (of water) change every millisecond, but the pattern persists for hours or even years.
From this Kurzweil seems to conclude — fallaciously — that the self is merely formal. That is, the substance is irrelevant. Therefore, other stuff with the same form is just as much the self. Thus, strong AI is possible.
The fallacy is in thinking that if the stuff of X changes, all that counts is what remains constant, i.e. the pattern, and the pattern could be moved onto new types of material which would be an X just as real and fully as the original. Here’s a counterexample: A restaurant is constantly bringing in, cooking, and serving new food-stuff. All that remains constant are the patterns: the menus and the recipes. Therefore, if we instantiated the same menus and recipes in non-food stuff, it’d still be the same great restaurant. (Remember, Kurzweil isn’t talking about re-creating the pattern of person X in flesh but in an entirely different medium, a program running on silicon, where the pattern is actually even more abstract than a 1:1 relationship.)
I’m perfectly happy to say that life is an emergent property of our carbon-based molecules. Consciousness, too. I am not an essentialist who thinks that somewhere there’s a soul, ghost or life force that exists independent of the body. (Actually, I’m agnostic on the topic, mainly because a universe in which my wife’s soul doesn’t continue is not only unjust, it’s just plain stupid.) But emergent properties often (always?) inhere in that from which they emerge: if, say, democracy emerges from the interaction of free individuals, you can’t say that the same pattern when expressed on paper is a democracy; you need the free individuals for that.
I can put this more simply: We are bodies. Flesh rulz.
By the way, I’m going to go to the first day of Wolfram’s 3-day conference on his new kind of science.
Michele Costantini’s Italian blog (with many entries in English) points to a blog entry by Hossein Drakhshan that points to a BBC report on Iranians’ feelings about the US.
Michele also has a link to a suggestion by Eve Tushnet that the US encourage yet more blogging in Iran.
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