You're probably right, but that doesn't seem to prevent a number of/.ers from singing the praises of corporate power generally, and IP law in particular, every chance they get. It's possible that they're paid shills; more likely they're just victims of a kind of economic Stockholm Syndrome.
Turn off your computer now. Also turn off your electricity and water, stop eating any foodstuffs not hunted (by hand) or gathered in the wild, take off any clothes you're wearing that aren't made from animal hides or woven grass, and go chip some tools out of flint. Actually, scratch that last part -- who needs to waste time on researching how to break perfectly good rocks when you can just pick them up and throw them at things? Be careful, though; you don't want the fire in your cave to go out, since it can be hard to find a new source.
the idea that the potential for 'total viral immunity' is suspect on a logical (mathematical) basis might have some grounding doesn't seem on-its-face ridiculous
I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying that (a) right or wrong, it has nothing to do with Goedel, and (b) any model which attempts to deal with viral immunity or the lack thereof must reflect the way living organisms actually work, rather than using poor computational analogies. "All models are wrong, but some are useful"... but most models aren't even that. Building a model that's almost-right enough to be useful is not a trivial task; if you start with a bad analogy as the foundation of your model, the task becomes well-nigh impossible.
i think a lot of non-mathy people colloquially use 'godel's theorem/s' to refer to the pretty general notion that 'there exist simple formal problems which can be proven to admit no general solution.'
That may indeed be the case. The problem is, this usage is simply wrong.
considering genomes as programs
They're not, and any line of reasoning built on the assumption that they are fails on that basis.
If I sound impatient here, it's because as a bioinformaticist, I see a lot of people making really bad assumptions that concepts from one of the relevant fields (mathematics, statistics, computer science, biology, biochemistry) can be transferred without modification to one of the others, and it does not work that way in the real world.
Someone needs to do a little reading to understand what the incompleteness theorems say -- and, perhaps more importantly in this context, what they don't say, which can best be summarized as "a hell of a lot less than the endless stream of posters who namecheck Goedel without having the faintest idea what they're talking about seem to think they say."
Your freedom to have an entitlement complex is being infringed? My God, call the waaaaaaambulance immediately!
No, it's just freedom that's being infringed, no qualification needed. It's easy to make fun of other people complaining about the loss of their freedom, as long as it doesn't affect you personally; rest assured, the powers that be will get around to your freedom eventually. And they will rely on the support of people exactly like you (except that those people won't consider their own freedom to be in danger... for the moment) to do so.
In general anything that has to do with people, is not possible to do in a strict scientific way, and are therefore not a natural science.
I'm curious as to how you define this "strict scientific way," and how it automatically excludes any study of human beings. Humans are part of nature, so there's no reason that "natural science" shouldn't include us.
I kind of suspect that what you're getting at is the idea that if you're not doing controlled lab experiments, you're not really doing science -- in which case you must also exclude all of astronomy, most of geology, and large portions of physics and biology from the scientific realm. If you can come up with a definition of science that includes, say, astrophysics, but excludes any study of people, I'll be interested to hear it.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to assume that C#'s performance results would be about the same as Java's. Testing C vs. C++ vs. Fortran would much more interesting. (There is no such language as "C/C++" and it's really irritating when people lump them together, as many commenters on this story have.)
I remember that Borland Pascal (in 19991) executed almost 10 times faster than Borland C++ on a consistent basis on the same systems.
Apparently, the reason it executed so fast was because it was reaching 18000 years into the future to run on the computers of the galaxy-spanning civilization built by the hyperspatial god-beings who will be our distant descendants. Man, Borland had some great tech in its day.
Again, the point is that you cannot define what "develop for HTML5" means the way you could define "develop for HTML $X", where $X was any release from 1 to 4 (including point releases.) That is not a good thing.
Yeah, but what standard? That's the problem. For a number of years, ever since we got past the bad old days of Netscape vs. IE, you could point at HTML $NUMBER and say, "that's it, that's the standard." Kind of the point of TFA is that you can't do that anymore, or won't be able to shortly, and it sucks.
SAIC is not exactly your typical private company. Like many such contracting companies, it's essentially a quasi-private arm of the US government, and it's deeply tied in with (among other things) the intelligence community. We should take this paper just as seriously as if, say, a CIA analyst had written it.
I understand the world just fine. I particularly understand that corporations like Warner which see the law as a weapon to be used and abused at every opportunity, and the corporate apologists who cheer them on, do your level best every day to make the world a worse place to live.
Sane people see filing suit as a last resort, not standard practice. Sane people do not decide to go to court the minute they think they might gain some advantage by doing so. Sane people know that the law doesn't, can't, and shouldn't encompass every aspect of what's right and wrong, and that there are many behaviors which are perfectly legal but morally repulsive. While corporations aren't people no matter what Santa Clara says, if they were, they'd be psychopaths... and people like you would be their fan club, like the sickos who write fan letters to serial killers.
There is no hypocrisy here. They do what they can, according to the law. Just like you, or I, or any sane person would do if we ever appeared in court.
Hypocrisy is holding others to a standard to which you're not willing to hold yourself, which is exactly what's happening here. No, it's not illegal, but it's repulsive. And no, sane people do not take every possible advantage of the law to bludgeon people, and then use that same law as a defense when they're the ones on the receiving end of the bludgeoning. Sane people do their best to avoid legal conflict altogether, which is something the IP industry is notably reluctant to do.
Here's a hint for people who are innocuous: don't call yourselves "pirates."
It's pretty common for insults to be adopted as terms of pride: "yankee" and "redneck" come to mind, along with all sorts of racial slurs, and sometimes the word even becomes the official name of the group, as with "Methodist." So the Pirate Party is following in an old and largely successful tradition. Also, since it's self-evidently absurd to equate copying bits on a hard drive with armed robbery on the high seas, they might as well have fun with it; how else are you supposed to respond to something so over-the-top?
By using DRM to create a state enforced enforced monopoly, this becomes a very big deal.
This is an important point, and one that has to be made over and over again, about all sorts of corporate misbehavior. "It's a private compnay, they can do whatever they want" falls apart pretty fast when you consider that corporations are, in fact, a creation of the government, and that large corporations in particular take advantage of every legal twist they can think of the get their way (and when they can't find the obscure, badly written, or outright evil law they're looking for, if they're a big enough company they can very often buy a new law custom-tailored to their needs.) A company the size of Amazon is effectively an agency of the government of the country in which it is incorporated, in this case the US.
Private corporations don't have the right to do whatever they want, because corporations don't have any rights at all; people do. We, the people, ordain and establish the laws under which corporations operate, and if they act in a way contrary to the people's interest, then we can use those laws to make them stop. Or at least that's how it would work in any sane world.
Now you're being told, like so many other people, that you kink is not OK. That the things that interest you are not fit for mainstream consumption. That they need to be hidden away behind counters and curtains and closed doors. That you should be ashamed of your interests.
And unfortunately, people like GPP are all too often just fine with that, until it happens to them. Because you know, whatever I'm into is hot, but whatever you're into is just disgusting.
Ah, I see, you're talking about Libertopia Capitalism, which is this wonderful magical system which will take hold and sweep away all this corruption and power-mongering as soon as we get the eeevil gub'mint out of the way. Also, everyone gets a pony.
All right, back to reality. There is no such thing as capitalism except as it's practiced in the real world, just as there's no such thing as communism except the real-world variety (although, ironically in this context, F/OSS probably comes closer to a utopian Marxist's idea of how things ought to work than anything else ever has.) It's what happens in the real world, to real people, that counts. True believers in any economic ideology are as bad as religious fundamentalists: just as ignorant of the way the world works, just as likely to ride roughshod over people in their pursuit of the way they believe things ought to be, and just as likely to see their prophecies come to fruition.
So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure?
If you provide a service to the public, whether or not you charge directly for that service, you are taking on certain moral (and in some cases legal) obligations. One of the foremost of those obligations is not to pull the rug out from under people's feet.
I always wonder if people who say "if you're not taking someone's money you don't owe them anything" apply that principle to their daily lives. Do you refuse to send birthday cards to your family unless they pay you to do it? Do you tell your friend, "sure, I'll give you a ride to the store in an hour," and then, when he calls two hours later asking where you are, laugh at him and tell him how stupid he was to think you'd help him out for free? Do you turn the other way when you see a little kid about to wander out into traffic, because hey, it's not like the little brat's going to pay you to pull him out of the way of an oncoming car? How far are you willing to go in service to this vile principle in which you claim to believe?
Hold on, hold on people! This isn't some troll/flame. Take a few moments to read and think about it.
Okay, I've read it, thought about it, taken a few moments, read it and thought about it again... yep, you're trolling.
Either that or you're just ignorant, since if you really believe that capitalism as it's actually practiced in the real world has anything at all in common with F/OSS, you honestly don't know enough to have a meaningful opinion on either economics or software development. You profess to be amazed at the number of F/OSS advocates who are politically leftish; maybe you should consider that there's a reason for this phenomenon.
To put it another way: my username on my high school's servers was recently deactivated, probably since it has been several years since I was a student there. Would it be reasonable to complain about having lost that username?
Perhaps you should e-mail the Slashdot admins and see if they'd be willing to take away BadAnalogyGuy's username and give it to you, because you'd clearly do a great job with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Big business doesn't read slashdot.
You're probably right, but that doesn't seem to prevent a number of /.ers from singing the praises of corporate power generally, and IP law in particular, every chance they get. It's possible that they're paid shills; more likely they're just victims of a kind of economic Stockholm Syndrome.
:)
... explain how our current system of IP law "promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts."
Come on, guys. Don't disappoint me.
Turn off your computer now. Also turn off your electricity and water, stop eating any foodstuffs not hunted (by hand) or gathered in the wild, take off any clothes you're wearing that aren't made from animal hides or woven grass, and go chip some tools out of flint. Actually, scratch that last part -- who needs to waste time on researching how to break perfectly good rocks when you can just pick them up and throw them at things? Be careful, though; you don't want the fire in your cave to go out, since it can be hard to find a new source.
the idea that the potential for 'total viral immunity' is suspect on a logical (mathematical) basis might have some grounding doesn't seem on-its-face ridiculous
I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying that (a) right or wrong, it has nothing to do with Goedel, and (b) any model which attempts to deal with viral immunity or the lack thereof must reflect the way living organisms actually work, rather than using poor computational analogies. "All models are wrong, but some are useful" ... but most models aren't even that. Building a model that's almost-right enough to be useful is not a trivial task; if you start with a bad analogy as the foundation of your model, the task becomes well-nigh impossible.
i think a lot of non-mathy people colloquially use 'godel's theorem/s' to refer to the pretty general notion that 'there exist simple formal problems which can be proven to admit no general solution.'
That may indeed be the case. The problem is, this usage is simply wrong.
considering genomes as programs
They're not, and any line of reasoning built on the assumption that they are fails on that basis.
If I sound impatient here, it's because as a bioinformaticist, I see a lot of people making really bad assumptions that concepts from one of the relevant fields (mathematics, statistics, computer science, biology, biochemistry) can be transferred without modification to one of the others, and it does not work that way in the real world.
Someone needs to do a little reading to understand what the incompleteness theorems say -- and, perhaps more importantly in this context, what they don't say, which can best be summarized as "a hell of a lot less than the endless stream of posters who namecheck Goedel without having the faintest idea what they're talking about seem to think they say."
Your freedom to have an entitlement complex is being infringed? My God, call the waaaaaaambulance immediately!
No, it's just freedom that's being infringed, no qualification needed. It's easy to make fun of other people complaining about the loss of their freedom, as long as it doesn't affect you personally; rest assured, the powers that be will get around to your freedom eventually. And they will rely on the support of people exactly like you (except that those people won't consider their own freedom to be in danger ... for the moment) to do so.
You may want to reconsider your user name.
In general anything that has to do with people, is not possible to do in a strict scientific way, and are therefore not a natural science.
I'm curious as to how you define this "strict scientific way," and how it automatically excludes any study of human beings. Humans are part of nature, so there's no reason that "natural science" shouldn't include us.
I kind of suspect that what you're getting at is the idea that if you're not doing controlled lab experiments, you're not really doing science -- in which case you must also exclude all of astronomy, most of geology, and large portions of physics and biology from the scientific realm. If you can come up with a definition of science that includes, say, astrophysics, but excludes any study of people, I'll be interested to hear it.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to assume that C#'s performance results would be about the same as Java's. Testing C vs. C++ vs. Fortran would much more interesting. (There is no such language as "C/C++" and it's really irritating when people lump them together, as many commenters on this story have.)
I remember that Borland Pascal (in 19991) executed almost 10 times faster than Borland C++ on a consistent basis on the same systems.
Apparently, the reason it executed so fast was because it was reaching 18000 years into the future to run on the computers of the galaxy-spanning civilization built by the hyperspatial god-beings who will be our distant descendants. Man, Borland had some great tech in its day.
Government abuse of power amuses you. Thanks for this flash of insight into the right-wing mind.
develop for HTML5. done.
Again, the point is that you cannot define what "develop for HTML5" means the way you could define "develop for HTML $X", where $X was any release from 1 to 4 (including point releases.) That is not a good thing.
Yeah, but what standard? That's the problem. For a number of years, ever since we got past the bad old days of Netscape vs. IE, you could point at HTML $NUMBER and say, "that's it, that's the standard." Kind of the point of TFA is that you can't do that anymore, or won't be able to shortly, and it sucks.
You could always put up a "This site is best viewed in ..." button, for that touch of 90s nostalgia.
SAIC is not exactly your typical private company. Like many such contracting companies, it's essentially a quasi-private arm of the US government, and it's deeply tied in with (among other things) the intelligence community. We should take this paper just as seriously as if, say, a CIA analyst had written it.
I understand the world just fine. I particularly understand that corporations like Warner which see the law as a weapon to be used and abused at every opportunity, and the corporate apologists who cheer them on, do your level best every day to make the world a worse place to live.
Sane people see filing suit as a last resort, not standard practice. Sane people do not decide to go to court the minute they think they might gain some advantage by doing so. Sane people know that the law doesn't, can't, and shouldn't encompass every aspect of what's right and wrong, and that there are many behaviors which are perfectly legal but morally repulsive. While corporations aren't people no matter what Santa Clara says, if they were, they'd be psychopaths ... and people like you would be their fan club, like the sickos who write fan letters to serial killers.
There is no hypocrisy here. They do what they can, according to the law. Just like you, or I, or any sane person would do if we ever appeared in court.
Hypocrisy is holding others to a standard to which you're not willing to hold yourself, which is exactly what's happening here. No, it's not illegal, but it's repulsive. And no, sane people do not take every possible advantage of the law to bludgeon people, and then use that same law as a defense when they're the ones on the receiving end of the bludgeoning. Sane people do their best to avoid legal conflict altogether, which is something the IP industry is notably reluctant to do.
Here's a hint for people who are innocuous: don't call yourselves "pirates."
It's pretty common for insults to be adopted as terms of pride: "yankee" and "redneck" come to mind, along with all sorts of racial slurs, and sometimes the word even becomes the official name of the group, as with "Methodist." So the Pirate Party is following in an old and largely successful tradition. Also, since it's self-evidently absurd to equate copying bits on a hard drive with armed robbery on the high seas, they might as well have fun with it; how else are you supposed to respond to something so over-the-top?
By using DRM to create a state enforced enforced monopoly, this becomes a very big deal.
This is an important point, and one that has to be made over and over again, about all sorts of corporate misbehavior. "It's a private compnay, they can do whatever they want" falls apart pretty fast when you consider that corporations are, in fact, a creation of the government, and that large corporations in particular take advantage of every legal twist they can think of the get their way (and when they can't find the obscure, badly written, or outright evil law they're looking for, if they're a big enough company they can very often buy a new law custom-tailored to their needs.) A company the size of Amazon is effectively an agency of the government of the country in which it is incorporated, in this case the US.
Private corporations don't have the right to do whatever they want, because corporations don't have any rights at all; people do. We, the people, ordain and establish the laws under which corporations operate, and if they act in a way contrary to the people's interest, then we can use those laws to make them stop. Or at least that's how it would work in any sane world.
Now you're being told, like so many other people, that you kink is not OK. That the things that interest you are not fit for mainstream consumption. That they need to be hidden away behind counters and curtains and closed doors. That you should be ashamed of your interests.
And unfortunately, people like GPP are all too often just fine with that, until it happens to them. Because you know, whatever I'm into is hot, but whatever you're into is just disgusting.
Ah, I see, you're talking about Libertopia Capitalism, which is this wonderful magical system which will take hold and sweep away all this corruption and power-mongering as soon as we get the eeevil gub'mint out of the way. Also, everyone gets a pony.
All right, back to reality. There is no such thing as capitalism except as it's practiced in the real world, just as there's no such thing as communism except the real-world variety (although, ironically in this context, F/OSS probably comes closer to a utopian Marxist's idea of how things ought to work than anything else ever has.) It's what happens in the real world, to real people, that counts. True believers in any economic ideology are as bad as religious fundamentalists: just as ignorant of the way the world works, just as likely to ride roughshod over people in their pursuit of the way they believe things ought to be, and just as likely to see their prophecies come to fruition.
Now go away, kid, the grown-ups are talking.
So you want that someone who doesn't PAY A DIME for a service GIVEN FOR FREE, to get granted higher rights than the person owning the domain name and infrastructure?
If you provide a service to the public, whether or not you charge directly for that service, you are taking on certain moral (and in some cases legal) obligations. One of the foremost of those obligations is not to pull the rug out from under people's feet.
I always wonder if people who say "if you're not taking someone's money you don't owe them anything" apply that principle to their daily lives. Do you refuse to send birthday cards to your family unless they pay you to do it? Do you tell your friend, "sure, I'll give you a ride to the store in an hour," and then, when he calls two hours later asking where you are, laugh at him and tell him how stupid he was to think you'd help him out for free? Do you turn the other way when you see a little kid about to wander out into traffic, because hey, it's not like the little brat's going to pay you to pull him out of the way of an oncoming car? How far are you willing to go in service to this vile principle in which you claim to believe?
Hold on, hold on people! This isn't some troll/flame. Take a few moments to read and think about it.
Okay, I've read it, thought about it, taken a few moments, read it and thought about it again ... yep, you're trolling.
Either that or you're just ignorant, since if you really believe that capitalism as it's actually practiced in the real world has anything at all in common with F/OSS, you honestly don't know enough to have a meaningful opinion on either economics or software development. You profess to be amazed at the number of F/OSS advocates who are politically leftish; maybe you should consider that there's a reason for this phenomenon.
To put it another way: my username on my high school's servers was recently deactivated, probably since it has been several years since I was a student there. Would it be reasonable to complain about having lost that username?
Perhaps you should e-mail the Slashdot admins and see if they'd be willing to take away BadAnalogyGuy's username and give it to you, because you'd clearly do a great job with it.