I'm no expert, but I think you are right. Apparently Frankovich v Italy was a landmark case of this type, where the European Court required the Italian government to pay compensation to workers in a situation where they would automatically have been compensated if an EU directive had been properly implemented in Italian law.
It is worth noting, however, that directives like this are not self-implementing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_(European_Union)). The Italian government is required by EU treaties to pass laws implementing the directive, but in an Italian court you cannot appeal directly to the directive itself. So the key question here is the wording of the relevant Italian law.
The current system of law on copyright and other IP issues seems to have many flaws, but it does not seem so easy to design a better system. Does anyone know of any detailed proposals with serious analysis of their expected consequences?
I don't know at the books (listed at the parent's link) but the journal 'Seminaire N. Bourbaki' is at NUMDAM. I'm not sure about the formal relationship but much of the journal is in a fairly similar style to the books. There's lots of other good French mathematics at the same site.
Probably many slashdotters are familiar with the discrete Fourier transform (used in JPEG encoding, incidentally). The DFT for sequences of length n fits together nicely with the DFT for longer sequences whose length is a multiple of n. If you try to put all these DFTs for sequences of different length together in a certain way and combine them with the continuous Fourier transform, you end up with something called the adelic Fourier transform. (That's a little bit different from how it is described in the usual books, but it is essentially equivalent.)
Next, if n has many factors then most integers will share a common factor with n; the proportion of integers that do not have a common factor will be small. Connes's statement that 'ideles form a set of measure zero' is what you get from this by taking the limit for large n.
Suppose you have a sequence a_1,...,a_n, where a_k is zero whenever k has a common factor with n. If n has many factors then a_k is usually zero and so the DFT of the sequence will be small. The limiting version of this fact is that if a function is supported on the ideles, then its adelic Fourier transform is zero. Thus, adelic Fourier theory is useless for studying such functions.
Connes is probably right that this is a showstopper.
That's true, but most of them are obvious drivel. I have looked through this one, and it is clearly a real attempt by a genuine mathematician who understands the relevant background. I'd still bet on it being wrong, but not stupidly wrong.
The Chinese leadership are obnoxious in many ways. But under their leadership, literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty. Even if only a small proportion of that is due to their actions, it is not a minor matter. Rural China used to be as poor as sub-Saharan Africa. Anyone who could give that region Chinese growth rates would be thought a miracle worker. It may be easier and more comfortable to think in terms of black and white, there are many things to balance against the undoubted repressive tendencies of the Chinese leaders. They are at least doing their best to advance the interests of the country as they see them, not just building themselves palaces.
Has anyone actually looked at the picture? The top half of the window is covered by a blind. The bottom half looks almost black, apart from reflections of stuff across the street. On maximum zoom you can just about make out a cat with its face right next to the glass. You can't see anything else in the room at all. Unless Google have changed the pictures since this story came out, the complaint is ridiculous.
Is there actually any real educational content for these machines? On the OLPC website there is a rather disorganised wiki with a fair bit of verbiage about constructionist pedagogy, but the only real material I could find was a rather uninspiring draft of an algebra textbook. There's a lot of goodwill about for this project, and many people would be happy to try to contribute, but there doesn't seem to be much of a framework for this: no examples, no coherent roadmap for what is needed or what is already available, and especially no visible input from anyone with direct knowledge of the target schools and communities.
The situation for software seems similar, unfortunately. I downloaded about 200MB of stuff from various sources to set up an OLPC laptop emulator on my XP machine. The emulator is very slow, and the default set of applications seems pretty limited. Again, many people would be happy to write more applications, if they could. But there is a desperate need for better organisation and documentation. It should surely be possible to run Sugar without the whole laptop emulation thing. It would be very useful to have some well-documented examples of Sugar-based applications in some easily visible place. And again, there is no roadmap, no overview of what has been done and what is needed, and no input from anyone with real local knowledge.
I am a big fan of the basic idea of OLPC. But if poor countries end up spending millions on laptops without useful teaching material or software, that will be a terrible waste, especially given the huge resources that OLPC could call upon if they merely asked in a more organised way.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no expert, but I think you are right. Apparently Frankovich v Italy was a landmark case of this type, where the European Court required the Italian government to pay compensation to workers in a situation where they would automatically have been compensated if an EU directive had been properly implemented in Italian law.
It is worth noting, however, that directives like this are not self-implementing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_(European_Union)). The Italian government is required by EU treaties to pass laws implementing the directive, but in an Italian court you cannot appeal directly to the directive itself. So the key question here is the wording of the relevant Italian law.
The current system of law on copyright and other IP issues seems to have many flaws, but it does not seem so easy to design a better system. Does anyone know of any detailed proposals with serious analysis of their expected consequences?
I don't know at the books (listed at the parent's link) but the journal 'Seminaire N. Bourbaki' is at NUMDAM. I'm not sure about the formal relationship but much of the journal is in a fairly similar style to the books. There's lots of other good French mathematics at the same site.
This is not all that bad.
Probably many slashdotters are familiar with the discrete Fourier transform (used in JPEG encoding, incidentally). The DFT for sequences of length n fits together nicely with the DFT for longer sequences whose length is a multiple of n. If you try to put all these DFTs for sequences of different length together in a certain way and combine them with the continuous Fourier transform, you end up with something called the adelic Fourier transform. (That's a little bit different from how it is described in the usual books, but it is essentially equivalent.)
Next, if n has many factors then most integers will share a common factor with n; the proportion of integers that do not have a common factor will be small. Connes's statement that 'ideles form a set of measure zero' is what you get from this by taking the limit for large n.
Suppose you have a sequence a_1,...,a_n, where a_k is zero whenever k has a common factor with n. If n has many factors then a_k is usually zero and so the DFT of the sequence will be small. The limiting version of this fact is that if a function is supported on the ideles, then its adelic Fourier transform is zero. Thus, adelic Fourier theory is useless for studying such functions.
Connes is probably right that this is a showstopper.
That's true, but most of them are obvious drivel. I have looked through this one, and it is clearly a real attempt by a genuine mathematician who understands the relevant background. I'd still bet on it being wrong, but not stupidly wrong.
The Chinese leadership are obnoxious in many ways. But under their leadership, literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty. Even if only a small proportion of that is due to their actions, it is not a minor matter. Rural China used to be as poor as sub-Saharan Africa. Anyone who could give that region Chinese growth rates would be thought a miracle worker. It may be easier and more comfortable to think in terms of black and white, there are many things to balance against the undoubted repressive tendencies of the Chinese leaders. They are at least doing their best to advance the interests of the country as they see them, not just building themselves palaces.
Has anyone actually looked at the picture? The top half of the window is covered by a blind. The bottom half looks almost black, apart from reflections of stuff across the street. On maximum zoom you can just about make out a cat with its face right next to the glass. You can't see anything else in the room at all. Unless Google have changed the pictures since this story came out, the complaint is ridiculous.
Is there actually any real educational content for these machines? On the OLPC website there is a rather disorganised wiki with a fair bit of verbiage about constructionist pedagogy, but the only real material I could find was a rather uninspiring draft of an algebra textbook. There's a lot of goodwill about for this project, and many people would be happy to try to contribute, but there doesn't seem to be much of a framework for this: no examples, no coherent roadmap for what is needed or what is already available, and especially no visible input from anyone with direct knowledge of the target schools and communities.
The situation for software seems similar, unfortunately. I downloaded about 200MB of stuff from various sources to set up an OLPC laptop emulator on my XP machine. The emulator is very slow, and the default set of applications seems pretty limited. Again, many people would be happy to write more applications, if they could. But there is a desperate need for better organisation and documentation. It should surely be possible to run Sugar without the whole laptop emulation thing. It would be very useful to have some well-documented examples of Sugar-based applications in some easily visible place. And again, there is no roadmap, no overview of what has been done and what is needed, and no input from anyone with real local knowledge.
I am a big fan of the basic idea of OLPC. But if poor countries end up spending millions on laptops without useful teaching material or software, that will be a terrible waste, especially given the huge resources that OLPC could call upon if they merely asked in a more organised way.