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Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Nobody Wants to Deal with Copyright

July 21st 2008

A thought occurred to me as I was leaving class today. The topic had been brought up that in today’s culture we are in a state of making small, incremental improvements to things, but nobody ever comes up with strange new ideas, that shake the fabric our culture. This contrasts ‘the olden days’ of the industrial revolution when people were pumping out crazy shit left, right and center to benefit everybody. So why is it we are stuck this way? Why doesn’t somebody pull something from their sleeve and blow us away?

Nobody (except large corporations with lots of money and lawyers) want to deal with copyright and patent bullshit.

Seriously. Odds are, even if you invent something ‘new’, it’s still going to replace or make obsolete something else. That something else though, is probably some popular product produced by a large corporation. They have the resources (read: money) to stomp you out. They can simply buy you out. They can buy marketing share and make your product inferior in the eyes of the consumer. They can run you into debt in so many ways, the favorite is court and other legal battles. They can have you fucking killed. I’m not joking. If you don’t think money can buy murder in this world you’re naive.

All of these new things people come out with are simple expansions on proven ideas. Little things that don’t step on anybody’s feet with regard to copyrights or patents, and then are copywritten or patented again, or simply released into world with a low restriction license or evern just full public domain status. Less problems for everybody.

If you disagree, comment away.

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | 1 Comment »

On ‘A File Structure for the Complex’

July 19th 2008

Nelson, Theodor H. “A File Structure for the Complex.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 134-145

While reading this article I kept having to remind myself that Nelson is not talking about the Executable and Linkable Format but his own format. About half way through the article I decided his Evolutionary List File should really be called the Extremely Limited File, or the Enigmatic Laborious File.Correct me if I’m wrong, but I got the impression that Nelson didn’t see too much farther than the immediate future and was all excited about giving historians something to pine over.

To me, it seems as though the file structure is quite limited to text, and that Nelson didn’t see into the future possibilities and potential the computer offers, and therefore ELF is ‘extremely limited’ as I put it. This is not to say it’s completely useless for other things, but it doesn’t take a genius to see it was designed with text and the sort in mind.

It also seems enigmatic and laborious as I put it. The historian isn’t going to care how the data is stored, only that it is. The supposedly easy to use structure of ELF is probably not going to be easy to use for most other people. Have you tried learning Lisp? I haven’t wrapped my head around it completely due to lack of time, but it’s definitely a programmer’s language. ELF seems like a low level Lisp, and unless things are explicitly identified as “manuscript” and “footnote”, historians and the like aren’t going to find it very easy.

I could be wrong however, but a few simple searches on Google and Wikipedia turn up nothing on “evolutionary list file”, so I gather nobody cares.

Nelson probably should have titled his essay “A Complex File Structure for Historians”

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | 2 Comments »

On ‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’

July 14th 2008

Licklider, J. C. R. “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 74-81

Licklider’s essay is similar in topic to Weiner’s essay. Licklider discusses the changes that must happen for man and computer to be symbiotic, but most of these revolve around reducing and potentially removing the time spent doing menial tasks. He discusses how most of his time is spent graphing, plotting, and calculating, all tasks which computers are well suited for and can perform almost infinitely faster than humans performing the tasks by hand. He eludes to, I believe, an evolution of this idea such that the relationship between man and computer become a seamless one. Man and computer should work in harmony to simply accomplish things, and not be bound by one or the other. It’s an interesting idea, and I’d like to see more.

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | 1 Comment »

On ‘Men, Machines, and the World About’

July 13th 2008

Wiener, Norbert. “Men, Machines, and the World About.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 67-72

This informal piece draws on different aspects of ‘new media’ by referencing replacing humans as the control mechanisms for machines. The author explains the second industrial revolution as this replacement, and I think the observation is completely justified. I want to take that further and say further steps would include humans being taken out of the design loop, where you just give a design or a description to a machine and it builds it for you. I could take that further and take humans out of the production phase completely, where a learning machine merely figures out what society needs and any given point in time and produces it. Kind of scary, but the essay leads me down that path.

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | 1 Comment »

On ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’

July 13th 2008

Turing, Alan. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 50-64

I wouldn’t be typing this if it wasn’t for Turing. I’d be carving it in stone. A bit over the top, but comparatively that’s how you could look at it. He makes some excellent points about machine intelligence, but he doesn’t write as if he is the end-all-be-all subject matter expert. His last line:

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty that needs to be done.

sort of sums up the machine intelligence situation, even today. Computers are faster, store more, are more versatile, more affordable, and more commonplace, but put a human and machine next to each other (in such an experiment as The Imitation Game) and you can still tell them apart quite easily. Computers can do a very good job of fooling us humans, but they still need to be led around by programmers, hands held, and being told what to do. Once a computer can actually learn, and not just imitate, will machine intelligence be a formidable opponent for humans.

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | No Comments »

On ‘As We May Think’

July 13th 2008

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” “The New Media Reader.” 2003. 37-47

I started to trail off reading everything Bush had to say, since after the first little bit I could see where he was going.

Bush seems like one of those crazy old guys standing on a soap box yelling at the passersby. Except he’s not crazy, but very smart. He identified the problems of the day, and envisioned ways to fix them. The sheer radical nature of his ideas (at the time) could make him seem like that crazy soap box man, but in reality, all of the problems he described have been solved. Not necessarily by the ways he describes, but along the same lines. Bush had the problems of current media in his head, and the ways to fix them. Now, in a time of ‘new media’ we see his visions put into practice, although not always in the literal sense.

Posted by darkhelmet under Philosophy | No Comments »

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