cicada

I need to clarify:

* Evidence doesn't mean prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Also, given the sorts of arguments in other matters in the public sphere, and the numbers of adherents, I think you do not realize just what can succeed. 9/11 truthers, for instance.

* The rift between the free software and open source philosophies is well known, especially from RMS's own writings which is something that's especially relevant here. alexey's comments clearly put him in the latter camp.

* It is not disagreeing that makes their ideas unsupported. People who agree can also have unsupported ideas.

For all RMS knows, this advice could be alexey's way of manipulating him into working against what he values.

If alexey is honest in his sincerity, he could reiterate his points more strongly with evidence. 'It looks like a crazy marginalized perspective' is something to think about, but there's no weight to the argument offered. Does RMS's talks do worse than expected? Is it caused by people ending up with this opinion after hearing him?

How much time should he devote to exploring unsupported ideas from those who disagree, versus his own ideas for persuasion?

The report is Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, website at http://piracy.ssrc.org/ where the pdf is available under a "Consumer’s Dilemma" license.

A Google engineer should not expect to get a helpful response when he asks the Google search engine for advice on building a better Google.

The qualitative and quantitative improvements from the flynn effect and the population increase reflected back on humanity as a whole, not the creators of the industrial revolution. This is why we've got accelerating growth, but it's also why the second derivative is still small.

Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence that invented it.

FTR: Lichess does this, visit http://lichess.org/friend

This is nice. I was a little saddened that the replay and analyse option after games did not actually analyse games, but with the export I can download the games into my favourite chess engine and have it analyse the games for me.

[edit: noticed that there is a forum, don't go there. While someone occasionally posts an interesting game like http://lichess.org/analyse/0mbole the level of conversation is roughly what you'd expect from a 4chan /chess/ board.]

Shouldn't there be a debate about the technical merits of the idea? I want my libraries and tools to make unwise things hard to do, and the wise easy and obvious. It's a framing issue, one that I think Marco's right about. But I'd like to hear what OpenSSL has to say about this and other, other, other things.

The first 144 digits of the fractional part of pi sum to 666.

The solution seems obvious now, but the problem had to be framed that way to get it. I can only speak for myself, but this had not occurred to me before reading the article. I suspect that it would be the same for most -- considering that people argue the positive impact of piracy on business in terms of marketing, not revenue.

It's really annoying how all the pictures are on an angle.

http://www.mediafire.com/?yzu0w5xnmkk

Anyone who wants to mirror can try downloading the video from http://media.river-valley.tv/conferences/tug-2010/Don-Knuth....

It was too long. For instance, I missed that quote which I would have replied to:

What exactly is meant by letting the system fall apart? The economy is the system that keeps you fed. You as in yourself. As in your family. As in your friends. As in the people who live near you who will also be driven to desperation. As the solutions you pondered had intended, we have to minimize the human cost of fixing our problems -- as we are those humans.

I'm not surprised by some of the observations. Windows software, being mainly closed source, has forced the platform to address compatibility and exotic configuration problems more thoroughly -- even sometimes to its detriment. First thought is that if game studios are serious about stepping up OSS support, a lot of effort could be saved by building a compatibility layer -- DirectX on steroids -- that can be targeted by the devs and left to the distros to properly support.

Actually, this seems a better idea than I first thought: done properly, it could also work as a standalone platform for consoles/handhelds, as a browser plugin for easy web gaming and as an open source flash replacement.

The ethical concerns about the Milgram experiment are too varied to go into much detail here (if you're interested, http://books.google.com/books?id=U44OAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA193 ) but the short, relevant, version is that the psychological impact was positive, not negative. 84% of those surveyed (out of 92% who participated) reported that they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated in the experiment.