Psyberspace

RE: Should Wine follow Sleepycat’s Deven T. Corzine (deven@ties.org) on Date: Fri Feb 22 2002 – 11:45:13 EST wrote:

Sleepycat's approach is to let anyone use the code freely with open-source applications, since they're giving something back by increasing the amount of open source code in the world. For those companies that aren't willing to contribute to the common good in that fashion, they sell them a fairly traditional software license instead.

This mailinglist is a way of discovering the meaning of the distinctions, in a series of well worded collaborative posts. From the paragraphs above it is possible to glean how the purists might object. Is theres something tainted in allowing closed software for a price? We will let you dump the oranges in the sea, as long as you pay some money to a charity? Or must these pragmatic arrangments be permitted until they become part of a more primary contradition, when Linux has world domination, and the battle is for the software that runs on it? I somehow prefer a clearer dividing line, but then what do I know, here in Windows XP!!

Berkeley DB

Sleepycat Software distributes Berkeley DB under a
license agreement that draws on both the UC Berkeley
copyright and the GPL. The license guarantees that
Berkeley DB will remain an Open Source product and
provides Sleepycat with opportunities to make money
to fund continued development on the software.

I am intrigued by licences, not because of the legal complexity, rather because of the way in which some make the world worse, and others make it better. Not just the world, but the noosphere, that is the offence. It is a sin to hoard knowledge, just as it is a sin to dump oranges in the sea to keep prices high when people are starving. The logic of a system that makes that viable for a few is a flawed logic. It might take a lawyer to explain why the Sleepycat licence is used instead of the GPL… but it does seem to accomplish the same end, of keeping modifications open for our future.

I just noticed my use of the word “sin” here. That may be how this item relates to the seemingly diverse string of items in my weblog. Sin ties in with soul. Crime is wrong, but crimes against soul are sins?

I’m glad this item by William Rivers Pitt makes it into the top of the links in daypop. It puts clearly the view of Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, who is opposed to the war. He has more info than anyone to refute the Bush lies. This war must not happen!

This is not about the security of the United States,” said this card-carrying Republican while pounding the lectern. “This is about domestic American politics. The national security of the United States of America has been hijacked by a handful of neo-conservatives who are using their position of authority to pursue their own ideologically-driven political ambitions. The day we go to war for that reason is the day we have failed collectively as a nation.

This essay was quoted in the Chapter by Lyle Burkhead (see earlier entry on Meaning. However Lyle Burkhead’s link did not work, but the Wayback machine found it. This is a real classic. Of course this ability to recall links from the dead upsets some people. I enjoy having this essa as it matches a book I have True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier celebrating Vinge’s idea. Here is an opening quote in the essay defining Singularity.

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

Update: Actually it is available online without the Wayback Machine.

A big download but a nice example of what can be done on the web, and a great story. I recall having this typeface in letraset to make brochures and so on in the early 70s. Mastication Is Normal: Behind the Typeface

Update: I just noticed that on win98 I don’t see this font as intended. You can ask anyone with XP to sent you the coopbl.ttf file. I had to copy the fonts out of the special Windows/Fonts folder to a new folder in XP to see them.) On the Win98 machine in the Windows/Fonts folder I went to File > Install New Font, found the folder where I had saved them, Presto! I had a go at Stencil and Brush Script MT Italic as well We use both for some documents at Mt. Lyford Horse Treks.

I am noticing a particular style of futureology… I have not really grasped it fully, it might be a syndrome, which is a sort of illiteracy. Some tech has different meaning to others, and it is quite an art to get the difference. It is easy to over estimates the power and impact of technology as such, but underestimate the power and impact – i.e. meaning – of specific technology. Technology is media, it mediates between us and the world, and so lumping it all together as having one big impact – the message of technology – makes some sense. “Man is a tool using animal”.

But finer perception is needed. Looking at “technology” like that is to see all of the inventions in a meaningless way, like looking at the alphabet as 26 letters. The alphabet becomes more interesting once arranged in words, words have more meaning in their context too (Jaron Lanier mentions the importance of say, “I do” in certain contexts.) McLuhan was a literary critic and so looked at media with a sort of super-literacy. For example moveable type was, according to McLuhan and it makes sense, the fore-runner of the whole of industrialisation because it unconsciously impacted how we saw the world, as bits we could put together in different ways. Lego. The NET extends other media and exponentially extend moveable type, even if nothing more was ever be invented, we will be – are now – totally transformed once again, it keeps happening only faster and it is hard to notice.

This is a chapter, Singularity or Automorphosis, out of an online book Nanotechnology without Genies, (c) 1999 by Lyle Burkhead. Where does this interesting chapter fit into my hypothesis?

Adding this link on Sunday, 25 August 2002: Vernor Vinge on the Singularity

I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans’ natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology. And yet … we are the initiators. Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. We have the freedom to establish initial conditions, make things happen in ways that are less inimical than others. Of course (as with starting avalanches), it may not be clear what the right guiding nudge really is.

Here he makes it clear that some small tiny thing, unknown to us now could be triggering the avalanche. That allows the future to remain an unknown. This is from a 1993 article – better than the interview I post later.

I heard someone say in the movie about Stanley Kubrick, that 2001 was the first SF movie that left the future unknown.