Larry Lessig has proposed a tiny tax 50 years after a work is first copyrighted. If the tax is unpaid, the work goes into the public domain
Good idea. I would prefer the payments to start
at the traditional 14 years, and increase exponentially.
That way it is the copyright owners who decide when
it would be worthwhile to keep extending the copyright.
Yes, this means that Mickey Mouse would probably
stay copyrighted for another century, but most other
works would not.
If need be, I'd be willing to compromize the initial
period to up to those 50 years, as long as the
increments would be small enough (say 5 years), and
the price increase would such that only few companies
could possibly be willing to pay for another 100 years.
If I hack into a disturbing machine, I am in the
wrong and deserve to go to jail. But if some machine
requests default.ida from my box, and I return a
valid response that happens to be bigger than
the requester expected, and he happens to crash
on that, I have done nothing wrong.
But there has to be a grey zone in between. Where
do we draw the line? Where do you think a judge
will draw it?
It is a flaw alright, but I fail to see it as
very serious. It is not a remote exploit, nor a
local one. It leaks basically random bytes from
the memory, without telling where in the memory
they come from, and without any way for the
attacker to specify where in the memory he wants
to read. So, yes, there could be a password in
it, but there could as well be a snippet of
executable code or binary data, or whatever.
It would take a lot of sniffing of these, and
a lot of filtering, before anything useful would
come out of it.
I am sure someone will rush to correct me if I
am wrong about this.
Make your algorithms public (in a way that can
be proven - any lawyer tell the best way). Then
you have prior art that can invalidate any patent
that attempts to prevent this use. Much easier
and cheaper than applying for a patent yourself.
Just have to do it right - consult a patent
lawyer anyway.
Or at least, find a scratch for an itch you know exists, and one you
can understand. It does you no good if the whole slashdot tells you
that fisheries need special software, if you have no understanding
of the conditions and needs of fishermen.
So, what are your interests? What do you know about? What kind
of people do you know? What problems do those people have?
Anything in those lines that looks like you could be of help? Any
chance someone in those fields would be willing to pay for that
help?
I think you have your premises badly wrong. There is a reason why
someone else is reaping "great" profits off your labour. For every
success story there are ten that went bankrupt - at huge personal
costs.
Assuming you manage to start a company, find some business, and
get some money rolling. How long can you survive without getting
any salary yourself? How long are you willing to pay others to do
the work, without getting anything much for yourself? If you some
day manage to start to recoup the (inevitable) starting losses, will
you be able and willing to pay your folks so much that they all will
not rush to start their own?
Think hard about this. Most successfull businesses are started to
get some work done, not just to make shitloads of money. The
costs of starting one are high, both economically and personally.
A few make it rich - many fail horribly. Some make do for a long
time, maybe even growing slowly. This is about the most you can
reasonably expect.
(written backwards in the rom to save a byte in copying it into ram)
Thats crazy talk! seriously though dude, you're crazy
Seriously, with the instruction set of the old RCA-1802, the "lda" instruction
loaded from memory and incremented the register used, and the push
instruction stored a byte and decremented the stack pointer, which
I used to point to the place I wanted to store the stuff into. I could have
loaded and decremented in two instructions, or stored and incremented
in two instructions, but load-increment and store-decrement was one
byte shorter. It is over 20 years ago, but I still remember the hex codes
fro those instructions were 44 73...
At that time I used to dream in hexadecimal... Those nightmares... Never again....
That is instruction times, not clock pulses. My first computer,
(way later in 1977) had a clock of 1.75MHz, but it took 16 clock
pulses for most instructions and 24 for the rest... It too
had 2KB of memory, and room to add another 2K, "if someone
could find use for all that memory" as it said in the instruction
book...
I sold a few programs for the beast on 2KB EPROMS. There can
be quite much stuff in 2K. (for example an editor + assembler
+ disassembler).
Once I added almost 500 bytes in a 2K program,
and optimized it back into a 2K chip. Talk of ugly coding, used
all the tricks
I knew (reusing jump addresses for instructions, self-modifying
code (written backwards in the rom to save a byte in copying
it into ram), jumping into unrelated routines to reuse
4 bytes of the exit code, you name it. All done in pure hex...
Man, those were the days...
why is it that stills in the old days used to blow up?
They still do. You know how a still works: It heats the alcohol
to a point where it evaporates (but water does not), collects
the vapors, and condenses them back to liquid. Now alcohol is
a pretty well flammable liquid, and alcohol vapors mixed with
suitable amount of air are downright explosive. If your still
is badly constructed (as many are), and run in a place without
much ventilation, you risk leaking vapors into the room. Add
a spark or a small flame and you have an instant demonstration
of the workings of a fuel-air bomb.
Kids, don't try this at home. Or if you do, at least know
what you are dealing with!!!
Been brewing about a year now, some 20 batches. Some have
turned out quite well, some I have dumped straight in the
drain.
There are only a few things that can go wrong. Infections,
which can be avoided by keeping things clean and sanitizing
everything; and exploding bottles, which can be avoided by
long enough fermentation (or by kegging the stuff).
As to economy, it is pretty hard to compete with the cheapest
commercial breweries (at least here in Denmark), but who wants
to make that kind of stuff anyway. Making good quality beer
is certanly cheaper than buying the imported stuff. And most
of all, you get to choose what kind of beer you want to have,
down to the last detail. There is lots of room for tweaking
and hacking...
I have been looking for a good definition of Science Fiction ever
since my school days, several decades ago. In my opinion good
SciFi should not only have some science in it, but the story should
be based on something "scientific". Moving an old fairy tale onto
another planet does not make it SciFi, nor does dating it a few
milennia away from current time.
I have two counter-examples to test any definition:
1) Star Wars does not count as SciFi in my book, it is a space
western.
2) Isaac Asimovs stopry of the hen that laid golden eggs is a prime
example of SciFi, because of the scientific way he treats the problem.
I know this puts me in the hard core end of SciFi fans, and prbably
that StarWars limit offends some readers - sorry about that.
Many Linux firewalls already do connection tracking. All this needs
is another table of recent connections (unless one already exists
for routing purposes!), and a few options to tune it with
(/proc/sys/net/ip_throttle_memory (how many seconds to count as recent),/proc/sys/net/ip_throttle_delay (how long to delay when throttling))
But since I do not necessarily believe our stuff to be interesting enough
for the world, I also rsync it to a central backup server that keeps cp-al's
for past seven days, plus four weekly ones. (yes, it has a big disk,
even if it is only selected files...). Every night this backup server rsyncs the
recent stuff to my home box over ssl for off-site backup. We don't have
hurricanes or earthquakes here in Denmark, so I believe 2km must be
sufficient distance. We are also setting me up as a secondary DNS, so if
the office goes, I can host our website or at least point to it.
And yes, we have tested the procedures, and recovered accidentally deleted
files (but we haven't burned down the office just to see if that works...).
All seems to work quite well. And the company pays me a good fat
ADSL pipe and some extra disks.
Blocking regular ads on pages is an interesting feature
in Mozilla, which I'm glad doesn't exist in konqueror or
most other browsers - I can't see how this could be good
for the user in the long run.
Compromise: How about a feature that allows me to specify
that from some sites I do not want ads at all, and from other
sites I want to download the ad, but not display it. Thus the
site gets their advertising money, and I am not bothered. Haven't
seen this in any browser yet, though.
The literary history is full of pseudonyms, assumed
identities, and secret double lifes. These must provide
legal precedent on how to publish without tarnishing
your good name, and yet be able to claim authorship
once your name so wel established that it doesn't
matter, or so badly tarnished anyway that it doesn't
matter. Consult a good lawyer, or if you can not afford
one, someone who knows the history of literature...
Are kids in the US the only ones
befitting a "safe" surfing experience?
On the contrary, only US kids are subjected to
this politically correct cencorship - the rest
of the world is still free. (haha - only serious)
I bet the acceptable standards in the US would be
very different than those in (say) Denmark
(where pornography is relatively free and
considered mostly harmless) or
Germany (where Nazi material is especially
sensitive), not to speak of countries where the
default religion is anything else than Christian.
Most OS projects that I know do not start with a clear
set of requirements, since they are not made to satisfy
a need on the market place. They are started to scratch
a personal itch, or just for the fun of it. If they turn out to
be popular, they attract more people to them, and some
discussion on the overall planning is in place, and some
process starts to develope. But if someone comes from
the outside and starts to say "no-no-no, you have to do it
*this* way, and write all these papers *before* you start
coding, this outsider will most likely feel himself not at all
welcome, no matter how fine theories he is trying to push.
Of course some of those "process" things can be
valuable, and when a project meets a problem,
they can use a solution. For some projects it even
makes sense to talk of focus groups (KDE comes
to mind), and regression testing is used in some
(GnuGo).
I think it is fine to make some of these techniques
available to those who see the need of them. Good
introduction material about such would be welcome.
But do accept that most OS projects are better off
without a pointy-haired boss and his bureaucracy.
Fine by me! And seemingly by most of my countrymen.
Pornographic stuff has been free here in Denmark
for ages (I think since late 1960's), and no harmful
effects of it has been shown.
The zoning laws etc. make no special distinction
between a porn empire, and a second-hand bookstore,
and indeed both kinds exist freely in the cities.
Many shops carry pornographic magazines, just like
they carry magazines about movie/music stars
fine arts, and photography, without anyone trying
classify the stuff into "obscene" and "decent".
Those who don't want to
purchase them are free not to. Those few who take
offense on happening to see a bit of bare skin
are tolerated with an amused smile, and mostly
ignored, just like those who object to people
eating meat or wearing furs.
As the article says, people will have to work
harder, in less pleasant environments, doing less
interesting work. In short, closer to the kind
of life managers and accountants are forced to
live. It is an act of kindness to insist on ties
for those geeks, for the same reason the rest of
the company has to wear them: To reduce the blood
flow to the brain, so they will not feel so much
of the pain.
The one thing I remember best from Braitenberg
(I read it when it was farly new, in the 80's). is that
analyzing complex behaviour is hard, building it is
much easier. Or, in other words, things seem much
more simple once you know how they work.
This is a book I enjoyed greatly, and that gave me
some sort of insight to many problems, most notably
debugging software...
[...]if you leave your blinds open you can expect to have zero privacy. Neighbours and others are well within their right to watch and record anything you do within your home.
Legalities aside (this wouldn't go here in Denmark), there
is quite a difference between
1) You happen to walk by an open window and see something
that you mention to a friend, and
2) You build a multi-camera webcam system that scans
all visible windows, detects where blinds are open,
recognizes interesting activity, and shows it all on the web.
If you do #2, expect to get in trouble with the law, with
the public opinion, and with one of he muscular fellows
whose girlfirned is living behind those windows... Don't
expect much sympathy even here, iven if building that
machine was a cool hack.
The problem is more or less what's called in the AI world the branching factor
Yes, the branching factor makes a huge difference.
Another, equally important difference is the cost of
the evaluation function. In chess it only takes a few
CPU cycles to see if the position is mate, or to count
who has more material. There is no way to do this in
go. Even the end of the game is non-trivial to recognize,
and even then it is hard to say who won.
I do not know of any go program that does much of
global reading. I know GnuGo does none at all, it "only"
evaluates the position once (which includes lots of local
reading), and uses some heuristics to propose moves
and to estimate their effect. Then it chooses the best.
This it can do in a matter of a few seconds.
I believe this sort of approach can be extended quite far,
and take good advantage of increasingly powerful
computers. But I doubt it will ever be sufficient to beat
a professional player.
Chess is a trivial game - computers beat most of humans
most of the time, and even on the top level it is a very close call.
Given the speed computers advance, it is only a matter
of time before no human can beat a computer in chess.
Machines have beaten man in many trivial games (tic-tac-toe.
100m sprint, weather prediction, etc). They have also failed
in several "obviously easy" challenges (speech interfaces, AI,...)
Before they play GO, I will not worry about my job.
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea. I would prefer the payments to start at the traditional 14 years, and increase exponentially. That way it is the copyright owners who decide when it would be worthwhile to keep extending the copyright. Yes, this means that Mickey Mouse would probably stay copyrighted for another century, but most other works would not.
If need be, I'd be willing to compromize the initial period to up to those 50 years, as long as the increments would be small enough (say 5 years), and the price increase would such that only few companies could possibly be willing to pay for another 100 years.
It's not dead - it is resting. It is pining for the fjords.
But there has to be a grey zone in between. Where do we draw the line? Where do you think a judge will draw it?
Nothing's so bad that it can't be used for some good...
I am sure someone will rush to correct me if I am wrong about this.
Make your algorithms public (in a way that can be proven - any lawyer tell the best way). Then you have prior art that can invalidate any patent that attempts to prevent this use. Much easier and cheaper than applying for a patent yourself. Just have to do it right - consult a patent lawyer anyway.
There is a web site dedicated to Open Source Systems for Libraries
So, what are your interests? What do you know about? What kind of people do you know? What problems do those people have? Anything in those lines that looks like you could be of help? Any chance someone in those fields would be willing to pay for that help?
I think you have your premises badly wrong. There is a reason why someone else is reaping "great" profits off your labour. For every success story there are ten that went bankrupt - at huge personal costs.
Assuming you manage to start a company, find some business, and get some money rolling. How long can you survive without getting any salary yourself? How long are you willing to pay others to do the work, without getting anything much for yourself? If you some day manage to start to recoup the (inevitable) starting losses, will you be able and willing to pay your folks so much that they all will not rush to start their own?
Think hard about this. Most successfull businesses are started to get some work done, not just to make shitloads of money. The costs of starting one are high, both economically and personally. A few make it rich - many fail horribly. Some make do for a long time, maybe even growing slowly. This is about the most you can reasonably expect.
Good luck anyway, even if I sound pessimistic
Seriously, with the instruction set of the old RCA-1802, the "lda" instruction loaded from memory and incremented the register used, and the push instruction stored a byte and decremented the stack pointer, which I used to point to the place I wanted to store the stuff into. I could have loaded and decremented in two instructions, or stored and incremented in two instructions, but load-increment and store-decrement was one byte shorter. It is over 20 years ago, but I still remember the hex codes fro those instructions were 44 73...
At that time I used to dream in hexadecimal... Those nightmares... Never again....
I sold a few programs for the beast on 2KB EPROMS. There can be quite much stuff in 2K. (for example an editor + assembler + disassembler). Once I added almost 500 bytes in a 2K program, and optimized it back into a 2K chip. Talk of ugly coding, used all the tricks I knew (reusing jump addresses for instructions, self-modifying code (written backwards in the rom to save a byte in copying it into ram), jumping into unrelated routines to reuse 4 bytes of the exit code, you name it. All done in pure hex... Man, those were the days...
They still do. You know how a still works: It heats the alcohol to a point where it evaporates (but water does not), collects the vapors, and condenses them back to liquid. Now alcohol is a pretty well flammable liquid, and alcohol vapors mixed with suitable amount of air are downright explosive. If your still is badly constructed (as many are), and run in a place without much ventilation, you risk leaking vapors into the room. Add a spark or a small flame and you have an instant demonstration of the workings of a fuel-air bomb.
Kids, don't try this at home. Or if you do, at least know what you are dealing with!!!
There are only a few things that can go wrong. Infections, which can be avoided by keeping things clean and sanitizing everything; and exploding bottles, which can be avoided by long enough fermentation (or by kegging the stuff).
As to economy, it is pretty hard to compete with the cheapest commercial breweries (at least here in Denmark), but who wants to make that kind of stuff anyway. Making good quality beer is certanly cheaper than buying the imported stuff. And most of all, you get to choose what kind of beer you want to have, down to the last detail. There is lots of room for tweaking and hacking...
I have two counter-examples to test any definition:
1) Star Wars does not count as SciFi in my book, it is a space western.
2) Isaac Asimovs stopry of the hen that laid golden eggs is a prime example of SciFi, because of the scientific way he treats the problem.
I know this puts me in the hard core end of SciFi fans, and prbably that StarWars limit offends some readers - sorry about that.
When do we see this in iptables ??
But since I do not necessarily believe our stuff to be interesting enough for the world, I also rsync it to a central backup server that keeps cp-al's for past seven days, plus four weekly ones. (yes, it has a big disk, even if it is only selected files...). Every night this backup server rsyncs the recent stuff to my home box over ssl for off-site backup. We don't have hurricanes or earthquakes here in Denmark, so I believe 2km must be sufficient distance. We are also setting me up as a secondary DNS, so if the office goes, I can host our website or at least point to it.
And yes, we have tested the procedures, and recovered accidentally deleted files (but we haven't burned down the office just to see if that works...). All seems to work quite well. And the company pays me a good fat ADSL pipe and some extra disks.
Compromise: How about a feature that allows me to specify that from some sites I do not want ads at all, and from other sites I want to download the ad, but not display it. Thus the site gets their advertising money, and I am not bothered. Haven't seen this in any browser yet, though.
The literary history is full of pseudonyms, assumed identities, and secret double lifes. These must provide legal precedent on how to publish without tarnishing your good name, and yet be able to claim authorship once your name so wel established that it doesn't matter, or so badly tarnished anyway that it doesn't matter. Consult a good lawyer, or if you can not afford one, someone who knows the history of literature...
On the contrary, only US kids are subjected to this politically correct cencorship - the rest of the world is still free. (haha - only serious)
I bet the acceptable standards in the US would be very different than those in (say) Denmark (where pornography is relatively free and considered mostly harmless) or Germany (where Nazi material is especially sensitive), not to speak of countries where the default religion is anything else than Christian.
Of course some of those "process" things can be valuable, and when a project meets a problem, they can use a solution. For some projects it even makes sense to talk of focus groups (KDE comes to mind), and regression testing is used in some (GnuGo).
I think it is fine to make some of these techniques available to those who see the need of them. Good introduction material about such would be welcome. But do accept that most OS projects are better off without a pointy-haired boss and his bureaucracy.
The zoning laws etc. make no special distinction between a porn empire, and a second-hand bookstore, and indeed both kinds exist freely in the cities. Many shops carry pornographic magazines, just like they carry magazines about movie/music stars fine arts, and photography, without anyone trying classify the stuff into "obscene" and "decent". Those who don't want to purchase them are free not to. Those few who take offense on happening to see a bit of bare skin are tolerated with an amused smile, and mostly ignored, just like those who object to people eating meat or wearing furs.
As the article says, people will have to work harder, in less pleasant environments, doing less interesting work. In short, closer to the kind of life managers and accountants are forced to live. It is an act of kindness to insist on ties for those geeks, for the same reason the rest of the company has to wear them: To reduce the blood flow to the brain, so they will not feel so much of the pain.
This is a book I enjoyed greatly, and that gave me some sort of insight to many problems, most notably debugging software...
Legalities aside (this wouldn't go here in Denmark), there is quite a difference between
1) You happen to walk by an open window and see something that you mention to a friend, and
2) You build a multi-camera webcam system that scans all visible windows, detects where blinds are open, recognizes interesting activity, and shows it all on the web.
If you do #2, expect to get in trouble with the law, with the public opinion, and with one of he muscular fellows whose girlfirned is living behind those windows... Don't expect much sympathy even here, iven if building that machine was a cool hack.
Yes, the branching factor makes a huge difference. Another, equally important difference is the cost of the evaluation function. In chess it only takes a few CPU cycles to see if the position is mate, or to count who has more material. There is no way to do this in go. Even the end of the game is non-trivial to recognize, and even then it is hard to say who won.
I do not know of any go program that does much of global reading. I know GnuGo does none at all, it "only" evaluates the position once (which includes lots of local reading), and uses some heuristics to propose moves and to estimate their effect. Then it chooses the best. This it can do in a matter of a few seconds.
I believe this sort of approach can be extended quite far, and take good advantage of increasingly powerful computers. But I doubt it will ever be sufficient to beat a professional player.
Machines have beaten man in many trivial games (tic-tac-toe. 100m sprint, weather prediction, etc). They have also failed in several "obviously easy" challenges (speech interfaces, AI, ...)
Before they play GO, I will not worry about my job.