User: FreeUser

Wrong on all counts

On: Fair IP Laws?

Stallman's copyleft hack relies upon the existence of copyright to work.

Only because the goals he wished to achieve, namely the four freedoms the Free Software Foundation stands for, are denied everyone by default because of copyright. He had no other choice but to use copyright to subvert itself ... the alternative was to be unable to insure others the 4 basic freedoms he holds so dear ... indeed he was in the same quandary an artists would be in if they followed the suggestion to just dump their material into the public domain, which copyright then allows others to pilfer without giving back.

Ok, can we keep this discussion contemporary?

In other words, any part of our history (the vast majority of it) when copyrights did not exist, but artists were nevertheless able to make a reasonable living, are off limits because you have no reasonable counter argument to offer? Interesting. Ignore the vast portion of human experience which runs counter to the assumptions and arguments you wish to promote.

I find it fascinating that I am being shouted down for having the audacity to suggest we might include in our discussion the possibility that there might be other regimes that would work better than government mandated monopolies for compensating artists. It is even more interesting now that, when I point to historical examples that exemplify this, you are saying we shouldn't think about those examples.

Perhaps the entire notion of copyright isn't as easy to defend as you first thought?

How so? If you release your work into the public domain, nobody can take that away from the public. Your work will always be there. What you are talking about is value-add. Yes, you are right... Time Warner could take your work and use it in a movie without asking you.

No, what I'm saying is more subtle than that. I am saying that, if Time-Warner takes my work and incorporates it into their work, aspects of my work become inaccessible to others because of the TW copyright on their extentions. An example: TW makes a space opera based on my work, using my characters, etc. Now, if someone else wants to make a space opera based on my work and characters, they are confronted with a series of legal landmines they must avoid, lest the infringe on TW's copyrights. As there are only so many ways one can take a particular work and change it around, the danger of stumbling onto one of these landmines, even by accident, is sufficiently great that anyone with any sense would avoid the possiblity altogether ... meaning that my work has thus become less accessible to those who would like to build upon it as a result.

But now you are apparently saying this is wrong, which is an admission that you approve of our copyright laws. "Strange that is" says Yoda.

Good Lord, doesn't anyone study logic anymore?

Strange are the conclusions you draw indeed. I am saying that the public domain, in a context where people can take without giving (and that taking in turn acts to make the original material less accessible for others to use because of the legal liabilities with which it then surrounds that material), make the public domain an unworkable solution because of copyright law.

Without copyright law everything would be in the public domain, and anyone could use my material without risk, whether or not Disney or Time-Warner used the material. With copyright law, the moment they build upon my material is the moment others must step carefully when using that same materail, lest they run afoul of the law. Can you see the difference yet?

It is the same reason RMS had to write the GPL, though he really would have preferred to be able to simply put his stuff into the public domain. Indeed, in some respects it is why the BSD folks release their stuff under the BSD license, rather than simply put it in the public domain ... it protects and documents their right to continue using their own work, even if Microsoft takes part of it *cough* ip stack *cough* and incorporates it into their proprietary systems.

In other words, it isn't an admission of approval of copyright laws, it is a repudiation of copyright law at its most fundamental level.

Re:There ARE other ways

On: Fair IP Laws?

The very reasons that the examples you cite work are the facts that they're both SO revolutionary and that the creators mentioned weren't really after making a lot of money off of them.

They generally weren't all that revolutionary, they built upon the themes and movements of the time, "evolutionary" if you will, and were successful largely on their own merits, without being so revolutionary as to turn the world on its ear.

The point is that these artists were successful and compensated, as were many, many of their lessor known peers (sufficently many that there were communities of artists going all the way back to at least the enlightenment).

For one thing, creators like Van Gogh operated under sponsorship -- they were paid to "do their thing", not for specific results. It doesn't work like that anymore.

It doesn't work like that anymore because government mandated monopolies have changed the way it can work and entirely distorted what was, previously, a free market economy. Remove copyright and some other regime will replace it, likely one that is a whole lot more fair to artists and consumers. With a little thought and discussion, we can probably come up with an approach much better and more equitable than copyright, with a much less onerous social cost. I've already suggested several in this thread.

Re:There ARE other ways

On: Fair IP Laws?

All of the historical composers you mentioned were not creating great works out of the goodness of their heart, though. They may not have had copyright law and royalties, but instead they had the patronage (meaning $$) of the aristocracy.

I never said they were. I said there were alternatives to copyright which sufficed in the past, and that we should at least be looking at alternatives and not assuming copyright is the only, much less the best, way to insure artists are compensated.

You're right, i was refering to Homer. :)

As to the sheet music example, I think many of the absurdities that surrounded the attempted enforcement of copyright against sheet music sellers underscores how copyright isn't a very good approach at all in addressing any of these issues, and that the social costs associated with it are simply too high.

An Inaccurate Characterization

On: Fair IP Laws?

I urge you to respond and defend your positions a bit closer.

Since my position is that any discussion of improving the IP situation must include a discussion of alternatives to IP altogether that might achieve the same (purportedly) desired result, the only reason I can think that others would argue that such a discussion should exclude any consideration of alternatives to IP laws such as copyright would be because they have a vested interest in copyright as it now stands and don't want anyone to consider any alternatives whatsoever. Such a stance would hardly be a good starting point for an honest discussion of the issue.

That is one defense of my position, that we need to be discussing alternatives to copyright. Thus far, our society hasn't tried any alternatives of note, at least not until Richard Stalman's recent "social hack" known commonly as "copyleft". Now, as to some of your other points.

That is a flawed statement, because there was no way to easily copy these works when they were created (with the possible exception of Van Gogh who did suffer problems with copy cats and poorly made copies).

In a smaller world, it is easier to maintain control of one's intellectual property.

Your argument is flawed, in that you assume the artists had any need to "control" their works, or, even if they have the desire to control their works, that society should in any way grant that desire at the expense of everyone else's freedom.

Quite the contrary, often a musician such as Bach or Mozart would become more widely known, more in demand, and hence more successful, the more widely their works were copied and performed. They may not have liked it if their work was performed in a country with which their sponsor was at war (for example), but that doesn't mean they didn't benefit from it, nor does it mean that their desire should have been the paramount factor in whether or not to allow it.

Your entire assumption assumes a need and desire to control copying, a restriction inherent in copyright but not necessarilly inherent in the requirement that artists be compensated for their work, or even in their best interests. It is, almost without exception, in their publishers best interest, but the interest of an artist and their publisher are very often not the same at all.

I believe that copyright law is neessesary to protect intellectual property, though I do not support recent changes in the law. I believe that Walt Disney should enjoy some protection for his mouse (but not for enternity). I believe that I should have certain rights under law if I choose to express myself artistically to protect me from others unlawfully gaining profit from my song, painting, movie, computer program, etc...

This is a circular defintion. You are essentially saying "I believe copyright law is necessary to protect copyrighted works. I believe I should enjoy rights under a law making it illegal for people to copy my work without my permission, so that I'm protected against people violating the law that says they cannot copy my work."

Can you justify your stance without resorting to a circular definition?

This would be the argument of the non creative who seek to make money from other's achievements. If you produce a song, should others gain money from your achivements? What if you are not strong enough (politically or physically) to demand payments that are yours? If there is no copyright protection, who ensures that you will receive due payment?

Nonsense. This is the argument of creative people who are tired of having their work held hostage by publishers, record companies, and studios. It is the argument of creative people who want to be able to contribute to a creative commons without having their work then taken by a private firm and incorporated into a restricted work that diminishes that commons.

And if you are a creative person that feels that these laws are too restrivtive, then by all means, release your intelletual property to the public domain without demand or setoff.

I am such a creative person, and can easilly point out the fallacy of your argument. If I release my work into the public domain under current copyright laws, anyone from Hollywood studios to Time Warner records to Joes Publishing could take my work, restrict it from use by others by simply putting a wrapper around it and claiming copyright on the whole, and thereby make my own work less accessible for use by others by, in effect, surrounding it with copyright landmines.

Simply pouring stuff into the public domain doesn't work when someone, like Disney, can pilfer the public domain and excersize such tight copyright over the derivative works (e.g. Grimm Fairy Tales) that others are put off from doing similar work for fear of legal retaliation (justified or no). It doesn't work because copyright lets people take from the commons without giving back, in effect making the entire exchange a one way street.

As for alternatives, I have suggested several in this thread which are at least as workable as copyright from an artists and societies point of view ... indeed, the only losers are the aforementioned middlemen: publishers, studios, and recording companies.

Re:Talking at work

On: A New Kind of Science

If Wolfram's point does involve a finite state system, it won't work.

Probably not, but that is by no means a certainty (we do not know if the distribution of eigenstates themselves is quantisized or not ... there was some discussion of that back when I was in school, but the entire debate was relegated to philisophical discussions, as there didn't seem to be a way to prove it one way or another, for example. Again, I am not defending a belief of mine, merely pointing out the possibility that QM can and does describe a finite system).

But, like you, I don't know that that is a requirement for Wolfram's theories to be correct, and I strongly suspect it is not (I can't imagine someone as intelligent as him overlooking that aspect of it). One example comes to mind is a series of automata instructions that includes a one-off replication of the automata in one of its instructions, allowing the entire automata to grow without bounds as the universe grows. Another is a simple automata set that is defined as an infinite set with a specific, repeating pattern, followed by some rules by which a universe is derived. Infinite from beginning to end, but easilly encapsulated in a few lines of code. I have no idea if either of these notions have anything to do with what Wolfram has done, but they spring to mind as scenerios in which the finite v. infinite arguments do not suffice to debunk the notion as it has been described in the review here.

It is highly, highly, highly unlikely that the universe is made up of a finite number of discrete states.

I agree 100%. It is extremely unlikely. I merely leave open the possibility, and tried to present in layman's terms an argument as to why it might be possible, without delving into the nitty gritty of QM too deeply. Should have known better I guess. ;-)

Especially the point regarding reversability - people who think the Second Law is something spooky or difficult to understand are missing the point. The Second Law is obvious - it says the entropy of a closed system always increases or stays the same. Entropy is information: this is saying that for a closed system, one of two things is happening: either something is happening, or nothing is happening.

I agree, there is nothing spooky about entropy at all. That having been said, we do have border conditions that imply a reversal of entropy in some models ... e.g. the Big Bang theory of cyclical universes implies that at every cruch entropy must somehow be reversable. We sweep that notion under the rug, assigning it to those few microseconds of the big bang we as yet don't understand, or we dismiss the theory, but that again just pushes the question aside. If there is only one Big Bang and no cyclical universe (its a one shot deal in other words), the question remains as to how the initial conditions came into being, i.e. how did entropy get set to 0 (normalized for aguments sake)? Perhaps Wolframs work sheds some light on that, perhaps not. But the creation process of the universe, at some points, seems to imply the possiblity that, under some exotic conditions, entropy may in fact be reversable. Of course, we have long since left physics and delved into philosophy at this point, one of the dangers when one pokes around the edges of what we know about space and time I guess.

The universe is weird, and I suspect it may contain infinities of one sort or another (again, who says it is bounded by our mathematics, or even what our mathematics can describe, much less what our minds can grasp), but the point remains that QM can be used to describe a finite state universe as well as a non-finite state, finite bounded universe, and both explanaitions seem to be consistent with observed data IIRC (again, its been 12 years, so what at the time was an open debate has perhaps been closed since then). My point wasn't to argue that it is so (though I did use the words "does imply" when I should have said "can imply"), merely that QM doesn't suffice to debunk Wolfram's stuff, as has been described by the viewier here, on the basis of the original poster's coworkers' arguments.

A By No Means Exhaustive List

On: Fair IP Laws?

Okay, what are they? Please clarify. I'm not trolling; I want to discuss specifics to make sure that the alternatives you're proposing are fair.

First, I do not claim to have all the answers. I am merely stating that the discussion, to be at all fruitful, must consider alternatives to a system which is prone to abuse, and prone to worst vargaries of a command economy and government coercion by its very nature (and initial design requirements).

Second, this list is by no means exhaustive. It is off the top of my head, and others I'm sure could suggest more creative, perhaps more effective, approaches.

As for fairness, I can think of several things that would be at least as fair as the current, very unfair system of copyright (unfair to artists and consumers both), without the burden on our society of state enforced monopolies.

One, as others have mentioned, is patronage. It is, in one sense, how most programmers are paid today (most of us work on inhouse software, NOT retail software being sold under copyright. Some of us are fortunate enough to be working on free software or open source projects). It is also how most acters are paid, in another sense. Indeed, arguably it is how any artist or professional is paid who does a "work for hire" where the artist (or professional) in question never enjoys "ownership" of the copyright on the work they produce, or the patent on the work they invent.

Another possibility is derivative income. Example: you don't make money on the music, you make money on the performance of the music. Again, this won't change how most bands make money, for example, as they receive most of their revinues from concerts (while their publishers, the record companies, rake in millions via their control of the copyright itself, selling copies of the music on CDs, etc.).

Another possibility is "busking" or the electronic equivelent thereof via micropayments of one sort or another.

Another possibility is simply creating wealth and sharing it to ones advantage, much as free software has done for many of us. I make my living off of the deployment of free software, which I can, share, and modify freely despite having not written it myself. The developers in turn make good money, because they are well known and thus in demand. We all win (and though free software is copyrighted by definition, the license is designed to negate the restrictions of copyright). I give back a little in my own way, which further enriches others (perhaps in ways I don't even know about or expect).

None of these approaches are perfect, all of them have problems and challenges, but no more so than copyright itself, and assuming your goal is to insure the artist is compensated, and the society is enriched, they are all superior to the copyright regime we now have, or even in its much more benign form as initially implimented in the United States.

Now, if your goal is to protect and enrich publishers, as it was at the time the constitution was written to include provisions for copyright, then you might object to these approaches, but artists and society at large would likely benefit greatly from any of them over the current system, particularaly now that we have the internet to make publishing costs negligable.

There ARE other ways

On: Fair IP Laws?

We know that this system is wrong, and must be changed. However, nullifying all IP laws is IMHO a bit too strong, because there will be no incentive to create anything for mass market sale except out of goodwill, or for leveraging other revenue (aka Linux).

This is an assumption that is stated so often it has become arguably an axiom of intellectual property proponents.

But, the history of the human race, indeed of our own civilization, doesn't bear it out. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Ulysees, Shakespear, Van Gogh, Michaelangelo, and other artists too numerous to mention had all the incentive they needed to create the greatest works our civilization has ever known, all without the existence of copyright or any other form of "intellectual property."

There are other ways to insure artists are compensated, without granting them (or, more likely, their publishers) an exclusive monopoly on their work, for any length of time.

It is unfortunate that our society never even discussed, much less considered, alternatives to copyright when the republic was founded, instead saddling us with an approach whose original conception was designed to facilitate censorship of the press, a design flaw which a little tweaking to help give something back to the artist is insufficient to alleviate.

We should be discussing alternatives to copyright which can be implimented to insure that artists get compensated for their work, without imposing artifical, government mandated monopolies upon our society, monopolies which are antithetical to free markets, to freedom of speech, and ultimately, to freedom itself.

Re:Talking at work

On: A New Kind of Science

Higher energy states occur with increasing rareness, and thus for practical purposes scientists often truncate and only deal with the first several states. This does not however mean that nature doesn't concern itself with all of them. (Perhaps, nature truncates too, but Wolfram sure hasn't shown that, and QED experiments would imply that nature sure doesn't truncate early on.)

Assuming the universe is a closed system, I think we can at the very least, most niave level truncate the upper bounds as equal to all the energy in the universe contained within the one state, for the one particle. This places an upper limit on the energe state, which once again appears to put a limit on the number of possible states, albeit a very, very large one.

You are right, though, that both interpretations (quantitization of space, not in terms of particle's location, since it only exists as a cloud of probability, but in terms of space itself, and alternatively, continuis space) are both supportable under QM. It has admittedly been 12 years since I've studied QM in any depth at all (and I am obviously quite rusty), but I do recall many of those infinities involved in earlier problems turn out not to be correct, because the math as applied ignores fundamental, real world limitations. It also remains unknown whether the spread of probability is in any way quantisized (I suspect not, and perhaps all of this has been further illuminated in the last decade ... I really haven't kept up on all the nuances in the field since then).

My point wasn't to argue for a finite system per se, or to argue that Wolfram is right (or that his arguments depend on a finite system as the original poster supposes), but merely to point out the quantum mechanics can certainly support the notion of a finite system of finite states depending on how aspects of it are interpreted, and that therefor using QM as an argument to dismiss Wolfram out of hand, even assuming the poster's coworkers' notion that infinite states = wolfram wrong were true, really isn't justified as such.

Since I haven't even seen my copy of the book yet, much less read it (it is still in the mail somewhere), I don't have an opinion on his work one way or the other.

Re:INTERVIEW WOLFRAM!

On: A New Kind of Science

Since, according to the reviewer, nobody will be able to digest this book for at least a year, perhaps we could get a Slashdot interview with Wolfram?

I think we should wait a year, perhaps two.

And I think the questioners should be required to have read the book in question, and pass a test on the subject as an (admittedly imperfect) assurance that they have done so.

Otherwise the questions are likely to be an emberrassment, and the answers rather scathing. :-)

Then again, that might be worth it, just for entertainment value. [grin]

Re:Talking at work

On: A New Kind of Science

So yes, there probably is a breakdown between the mathematics and the physical world, but that's just because our models of the physical world are incorrect. Including, perhaps, the Plank constant.

This is quickly becoming a religious discussion.

If you are interested in emperical evidence that has been collected which validates QM, may I humbly suggest a google search on the topic as a starting point. We have electrical devices which rely on quantum tunnelling to function is one example that comes to mind ... there are literally hundreds of other examples, both of experimental evidence demonstrating quantum behavior and validating the underlying models, and of practical applications of quantum mechanical systems in the everyday world.

Your "religious" stance is that mathematics can be used to define and model the physical world at any level (and by implicaton, any physical system), and wherever it cannot, it must be because our view of the physical world, not our mathematics or the application thereof, is wrong.

My "religious" stance (since I'm not going to bother to dig up the references here ... I have to get back to work ... it is only fair to characterize it as such) is that mathematics can be misapplied, and an assumption of infinity (e.g. an infinite number of points in a line of finite length) may be mathematically valid while completely inapplicable (indeed, wholey invalid) with repect to the real world because space is quite probably not a smooth continuity (contrary to an axiomatic assumption in that particular branch of mathematics), but a granular matrix defined by the plank length ... if quantum mechanics is to be believed (and at this point all the evidence indicates it is).

Any argument which starts by dismissing emperical evidence as "imperfect and therefor to be dismissed in favor of our elegant models which we hold so dear" (as an aside, the heisenberg uncertaintly principle refers to a particle's position and vector, not the overall, possible constraints thereof. It does not preclude emperical evidence of its existence, measurement of its value, or consiquences, as you mistakenly assume. Indeed, quite the opposite) in favor of appeals to authority ("we've used this approach for thousands of years and it works, so anything we see that conflicts must be wrong!") becomes a religious, or perhaps philisophical, but certainly not scientific, discussion.

The Greeks didn't like the fact that the number two had an irrational square root ... they'd used rational numbers quite effectively for centuries, after all, and irrational numbers simply weren't elegant. That didn't stop rational numbers from existing as such, or the Greeks from being very wrong, while their rejection of emperical evidence to the contrary (in the form of a triangle scratched onto the deck of a ship, with hypotenus length=2) did mean exactly that: elegance or aesthetic preferences aside, they were wrong.

It depends on your definition of socialism

On: Copyright Office Rejects CARP Recommendations

For how long has the music economy been socialist? Is our intolerance of the RIAA limited to its bullying and selfishness, or can it be extended to this attempt to corrupt the freedom of commerce itself?

Since the music economy has taken something that was completely free (as in freedom) for the first 3 million years of humanity's existence, and locked it down under copyright for the last couple of centuries or so, one answer (in which socialism is defined as a government mandated, command economy ... a definition in common usage in the United States) would be two centuries or so, give or take.

Essentially ever since we started granting authors and publishers artificial monopolies on their works in the, possibly misguided, assumption that it was necessary in order to foster creativity and expand the public commons (centuries of opposing evidence containing such greats as Michealangelo, Bach, Mozart, and William Shakespear nothwithstanding). So long as the government is using its coercive powers to impose scarcity and restriction where no such natural barriers exist, we will have a media economy that is, effectively, a command economy.

It should come as no surprise that the parties involved in a command economy have to go to the government to have their rates set and their operating parameters defined. "Free" in any sense of the word, be it market, price, or freedom, has little if anything to do with the situation our approach to artistic compensation via monopoly copyrights has created.

Re:Talking at work

On: A New Kind of Science

This is the Menger Sponge problem. Fractals are the same way -- Sure, they may have a finite derivable volume, but try and calculate the area and you're wasting your time. It's infinite. Koch Curves are the same way.

In mathematics, that is true. However, there is emperical evidence that does indicate the basic notions of quantum mechanics are more or less correct. What this means is that the smallest unit by which position can change or be defined is defined by the plank constant (normalize it to the plank constant for simplicity sake if you like), the smallest increment of time is defined by the plank constant (again, normalize if you like), ditto for energy, which means ditto for veloocity and acceleration, etc.

Thus, for an electron orbiting [bad word, but traditional] a nucleus there is a lower limit to the number of descrete positions it can have (because at that level space itself becomes granular), and a lower limit to its vector (say, at reast, ie. V=0).

There is also an upper limit, namely the size of the universe (assuming no other constraints on the electron to keep it bound to the nucleus) to its position and the speed of light to its velocity respectively.

We already know that the possible states are defined by two values which are essentially quantum values (i.e. grunular in nature at the smallest level), thus there is a finite number of velocities the electron can have between being at rest and travelling at the speed of light, just as there are a finite number of places it can be, defined by the granular nature of spacetime itself at plank lenths.

Infinities within these constraints are artifacts of mathematics, not physical properties, assuming, of course, quantum mechanics has a basis in the "real world." Mathematically you can define a fractal down to levels well beneath the plank length, but that doesn't mean you can lay points out in space at that resolution. Again, assuming QM is an accurate picture of what is going on (it seems to be at this point based on empiracal evidence, but as with all theories, it is only an approximation of what is really going on). Mathematics, on the other hand, contains the notion of infinitely divisiable continuities, which appear not to be reflected in our physical reality. This is one example where the math doesn't appear to map correctly to the physical world, and where the math can come up with infinities that, to the best of our knowledge, simply are not there in the physical world.

Skepticism is Good, Dismissal (or Elevating) Bad

On: A New Kind of Science

It is not a thought of wrong or right, we're just perhaps wary of the "Earth shattering" connotations everyone seems to be placing upon the work. And as the review reads, it doesn't seem to prove or describe things as much as try to get people interested in the field.

First, I wouldn't trust any reviewer of the work. I would read it yourself and draw your own conclusions. That is exactly what I intend to do when I receive my copy.

Second, I agree, skepticism is what any critically thinking person should have when approaching any work, particular a work which claims to offer a new paradigm shift in scientific thought. I disagree with uninformed people lauding his work before they've read it (as you allude to) as much as I do people who are dismissing it because it doesn't map to their preconceptions. Both extremes are wrong ... I don't have an opinion (and neither should you or your co-workers, unless you've managed to snag a copy sooner than I) because I haven't read it yet. I've read some articles on it, and some reviews, by people that may or may not understand it (likely the latter ... most reviews, including this one, contain disclaimers about "I didn't get this part" and such), and while that whets my appetite, it should not form any kind of predisposition or opinion IMHO.

That having been said, the claim may very well be right. I really don't know (and I may not even know after I've read his work ... for all I know it may require years of remedial education before I can even understand it, much less comment intelligently on it). One thing is certain, most groundbreaking work is initially rejected out of hand by a conservative establishment ... an indication of one of the weaknesses inherent in our current system. Which isn't to say it doesn't have many strengths, what I am rather trying to say is that to assume one conclusion or the other ahead of time is a mistake.

Your coworkers used an inaccurate argument (which exposed some commonly held misconceptions about quantum physics that was the foundation of their argument) to argue for dismissing his work outright, or at least starting it with a fairly closed mind and a rather strong predisposition regarding its contents. That IMHO is a mistake...the work will stand (or fall) on its own, but it should be considered from a skeptical, but ultimately neutral, position.

It is not you I am arguing against, it is against dismissing his work without reading it, which the fallicious argument I rebutted seemed to imply would be justified.

By all accounts this guy (Wolfram) can be arrogant and annoying. He is also indesputably a genius, and his past performance, scientific and mathematical work, and achievements more than justifies that this work, however revolutionary in its arguments, however anti-establishment in its creation, however controversial in its conclusions, at least be considered fairly and not dismissed out of hand.

He really could be on to something ... and he isn't the only one to have done work in that field that has led to hints of something very profound wrt information theory, cellullar automata, and the underlying nature of our reality. Right or wrong in its final conclusions, this work is likely to sparc a great deal of productive activity and research if it even lives up to a fraction of its billing.

I am waiting impatiently for my copy for this very reason: whether I agree or disagree with the guy, I'm going to enjoy having my mind challenged in ways it hasn't been for far too long.

Re:Talking at work

On: A New Kind of Science

As some of my collegues were quick to point out, this is all most likely toss. For cellular automata to be relevant you'd have to assume the universe has a finite number of 'states'. Quantum physics currently is pretty certain it is not.

Actually, quantum physics does imply there are a finite number of states. Time, space, energy, motion, even Heisenberg's uncertainty are all descreet, quantisized values. The number of eigenstates that exist before an observation is made that collapses into one observed "event" is not infinite, it is merely a very, very, very big number (made much bigger when one considered the true vastness of the universe on a macro scale, and the number of quantum processes thus contained, many of which are not observed and thus, arguably, never collapsed into one given state or another).

We tend to think of quantum clouds of probability and "alternate universe" scenerios as containing an infinite number of possible states, but that isn't really true. Consider the plank constant (a measure of the smallest possible increment of space, time, or energy, the base unit of the universe, if you will [and if you normalize it to whatever units you are working with]). Now consider a cloud of probability that contains, for example, all possible locations and vectors of an electron within a hydrogen atom, for example. That volume has some descrete limit (though depending on one's interpretation, that limit may be the entire volume of the universe, or more commonly, some small volume around that atom's nucleus). Either way, that volume has an upper limit. We thus have a system with an upper and lower limit on where the electron can be at any moment, and what vectors it may have. This means there is a finite number of possible states that can exist, and while that number is impossibly huge to contemplate, it is not infinite.

Therefor, while Wolfram may or may not be right in his thesis, quantum physics does not in any way conflict with that thesis. Indeed, it might even lend his thesis some support (I have no idea if it does ... I haven't received my copy of his work yet, much less begun reading it).

This isn't to say Wolfram can't be wrong ... he might be very wrong for all I know. I am merely saying that your coworkers' arguments for dismissing his work out of hand are very, very mistaken.

Re:It is Good(tm) Regardless

On: China Plans Moonbase

Why would the Chinese do this? 1969? You've never seen 2001 have you?

I have seen 2001, and my point remains. We did not have the technology to create the kind of special effects to simulate a moon flight and landing that would withstand 30 years of scrutiny by scientists, historians, and journalists, much less "fake" the moonrocks that have been used for scientific research in so many laboratories.

The entire sentence was an aside to another thread, in which it was pointed out that the Chinese "official" position is the bizarr notion that the Lunar Moon Landings never took place, something which even most X-File Conspiracy Believers would find unlikely, and which, quite frankly, no sensible person puts much stock in at all. The entire notion has been debunked so many times, in so many ways, that it becomes apparent that those who do cling to such conspiracy theories are akin to those who cling to creationism in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, i.e. the unwillingness to accept evidence, even proof, which runs counter to their world view. But that is a tangent for another day.

Given that the official position of the Chinese government is that "there is no proof the lunar landings ever took place" (haven't they ever pointed a telescope at the moon? Even amateurs can see sparkles at the landing sites when conditions are right), the notion that any physical proof (which you can see sparkling in the sun on the moon with a telescope at times) would be removed for political reasons isn't so far fetched, given the current political climate between the US and China, and the propensity for authoritarian governments (including our own ever more authoritarian government here in the United States) to rewrite history and adjust the physical evidence to follow.

Are You Being Deliberately Obtuse?

On: RMS Replies to "The Stallman Factor"

Of course, all the BSD's use pretty much the whole GNU system as well, and you don't see him whining about calling them GNU/BSD. This is yet another reason why I think RMS is, deep down inside, just being pissy ...

Nonsense.

RMS recognizes that BSD was developed independently of GNU. They may be using many GNU tools now, but they had their own compilers, their own file utils, bin utils, etc., fully independent of GNU.

The Linux kernel never had any of this. It was created with gcc, and could only become a usable operating system with the plethora of tools made available by the GNU project. Unlike BSD, Linux owes its entire existence to the GNU project. Giving them credit for having written most of what makes up a basic UNIX system, minus the kernel (which came last), really isn't so much to ask.

Your assertion that he should ask the BSD folks (who do not owe their existence to his project) to prefix their projects with GNU because he requests that courtesy of the Linux projects (who do owe their existence to his project), demonstrates not only a woeful ignorance of both the history and current makeup of both BSD and Linux projects on your part, but an assumption of arragance with respect to RMS that the history of his actions and words, all slander aside, simply do not bear out.

It isn't like Stallman is asking people to call GNU/Linux "Stallix" or something ... all he is asking is that his project, GNU, without which the Linux kernel not only wouldn't exist, but would be completely unusable, be given some credit. Typing 4 extra characters, or saying one syllable, seems like the very least we can do, all things considered.

We owe the guy a great debt for his contribution to our quality of life (and in some cases our livlihoods) ... certainly a greater debt than we owe any other single person, Linus Torvalds included. Showing a modicum of respect and support for his project's contribution, and the emphesis on freedom their project represents, really shouldn't be so much to ask.

Re:Credit where credit is due

On: RMS Replies to "The Stallman Factor"

X is not part of the operating system.

You can choose not to install X and still have a useful, working system.

Absolutely right.

Not only that, but for a long time the BSD license wasn't compatible with the GPL, so no BSD code entered the GNU project, or Linux kernel, for quite some time. That changed in later years and, IIRC, some of the excellent BSD networking code subsequently made its way into the Linux kernel. The vast majority of the Linux kernel was, however, written from scratch and not taken from any project. All of the GNU utilities were originally written from scratch, though now that the BSD license is compatible with the GPL some BSD code may have made it into other GNU projects as well.

The GNU software, including all of the file utilities, bin utilities, compilers, assemblers, etc., ie. about 90% of what makes a basic UNIX operating systems (the kernel being the other 10%), we have because of the GNU project and, frankly, because of (here, much maligned) Richard Stallman. All he is asking is that we respect and recognize that contribution by typing an additional 4 letters when we talk about the entire operating system (GNU/Linux) and say one extra syllable.

Are we such ungrateful wretches that we can't even be bothered to honor as simple a request as that?

It is Good(tm) Regardless

On: China Plans Moonbase

I wonder what would happen if China offered the US participation in the program. It probably would not happen but if China is serious about benefiting the whole of mankind (?) they should consider such an offer.

It is good for humanity, regardless.

If China is serious about this, maybe it will be get US Government off of its sorry ass, stop underfunding NASA, and start actually doing something to facilitate long term economic exploitation of space.

If the US doesn't get off its ass, humans will still have finally gotten off their sorry asses and begun colonizing space. Once we have colonies independent of earth, the liklihood of our extinction goes way down. This is a Good Thing(tm), regardless of whether those humans come from the United States, China, or Timbuktu.

If the Chinese manage to start another space race with the United States I will personally take my hat off to them, because apparently we (the United States, and the West in general) don't have the will, or the vision, to do it on our own, without competition from the Russians or someone else.

Maybe the threat of having the Chinese sweep away all physical proof of the lunar moon landings (to promote the absurd myth that the landings were somehow fake ... as if they had modern special effects back in 1969) will be enough to at least send someone up to secure that historical site. :-)

Re:strange relationship between Windows and Linux

On: Microsoft Loses Appeal To Shut Down LindowsOS

The more I read about "Lindows" and other wannabe Windows retrofittings for Linux, the more I wonder about the psychological health of the (wannabe Windows) Linux community.

Nonsense. It is merely a migration tool, nothing more. Many large enterprises would like to migrate away from Windows, particularly with Microsoft's new, extortionate licensing scheme, but they can't do so overnight in a "cold turkey" fashion because they depend on too many custom or niche applications that do not run on GNU/Linux, or at least didn't until Wine, Codeweavers, Transgaming, and Lindows came along.

Others want to migrate, but don't want to retrain their workers for a new OS. The Lindows folks saw an opportunity and jumped. I won't ever run their distribution, but many very well may, and they'll be getting something the other distros those of us more savvy prefer doesn't offer them ... seemless and (as) painless (as possible for any) migration from a legacy, monopoly OS to a more sustainable, open and free(dom) alternative.

Someone saw an opportunity and decided to package up and market a GNU/Linux distribution to take advantage of that opportunity and make a few bucks. No deep or sinister freudian psychology involved, just simple, free market economics.

In case you've misled others who aren't informed .

On: Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs

I hate to respond to what is now obviously a troll, but just in case some cursory reader sees your links and is mislead into believe your reply is a relevant rebuttal (it isn't, it underscores my very point about privishing, assuming one knows what the word means ... it is a word specific to the publishing industry) I must respond.

If you really are not a troll, and our personalities are merely clashing online (a possibity I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on) I would plead with you to inform yourself about these issues and think for yourself, rather than simply spouting the media line on what is and is not censorship, and what copyright does and does not do.

I couldn't find "privish" in any of the dictionaries I tried, but I assume it means "available at Amazon.com" since that's where I found the book you refered too.

You found four used copies (three of which are also available at Barns and Noble). The book is out of print, and having been privished it never enjoyed widespread availability and was always very difficult to obtain, despite significant demand during the author's book tour (for which the books were not delivered, denying those who were interested access to the material at the time). The book was privished in 1974. It is now 2002, and you can buy a whopping 3 used copies on the net, and probably not more than a dozen nationwide altogether.

[a 0.1 second google search yeilds]

To "privish" is to print too few copies to make a book financially viable. I hope that this is not the fate of this book, as it is a true eye-opener.

Censorship is not about people being able to sell books or publish papers, censorship is about preventing ideas from being shared.

censorship

n 1: counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy [syn: censoring, security review] 2: deleting parts of publications or correspondence or theatrical performances [syn: censoring]

censor
n.

1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.
2. An official, as in the armed forces, who examines personal mail and official dispatches to remove information considered secret or a risk to security.
3. One that condemns or censures.
4. One of two officials in ancient Rome responsible for taking the public census and supervising public behavior and morals.
5. Psychology. The agent in the unconscious that is responsible for censorship.

Censorship is most certainly about publishing papers and (being allowed to) sell books. If a publisher deliberately prints too few books, and deliberately doesn't ship them out to bookstores for book tours in an effort to insure the book is financially unviable (that is privishing), then they are most certainly "preventing ideas from being shared" (your words), and they are using copyright law to do so. If a professor cannot publish his research results for fear of prosecution under copyright law, that is censorship. In both cases people are being prevented from sharing their ideas. What is your next argument, that suppression of a work or idea in a mass medium isn't real censorship because the people being so silenced could go door to door and share their thoughts in person?

Each and every one of my examples demonstrated how copyright law is being used to censor people in various professions and walks of life. Your argument that people "voluntarilly" are giving up their rights is akin to the notion that prisoners are "voluntarilly" giving up their freedom. Copyright law in its current form allows, even facilitates, the wholesale swindling of artists and consumers by the Copyright Cartels, and The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is but one of many artists trying to let the uninformed world know that, despite being very effectively silenced by the media controlled, in many instances, by those very same cartels.

Those people were no more censoring "themselves" than the millions in eastern Europe who remained quiet beneath an authoritarian regime were ... those artists are being censored by the copyright cartels, throuhg a process made possible by the very same copyright protocols that were originally designed to do just that. It is as much censorship as that which silenced the masses in eastern Europe, and in neither case is it appropriate to be blaming the victim or accusing them of "self-censorship."

Re:Some Examples of Contempory Censorship through

On: Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs

I'll assume that you aren't a communist moron, merely you just don't know how to think for yourself.

So you were a mindless troll after all, not merely uninformed. My mistake.

Licenses are the biggest threat to a true commons

On: Creative Commons

As I understand it, an artist will be able to tailor the license. Perhaps an artist could make the art free for noncommercial use. If a big buyer comes along they have to pay for alternate licensing terms.

It is these sorts of licenses that are truly a big threat to the creation of a 'creative commons.' One of the reasons Free Software was able to succeed so well, and so quickly (a blink of an eye in historical terms) was because there were relatively few free licenses: X, BSD, and the GPL initially, around which a critical mass of software was able to evolve.

In a creative commons, one would ideally be able to incorporate the work of any project into their own, so long as their work is also released into the commons for others to use. As an example, I might want to have a Star Trek episode that is particularly apropos to my project, running on a television in the background in one of my movie's scenes. I cannot do this now because of draconian copyright regimes, nor will I be able to do this within my lifetime because of copyright's no longer (practical in human terms) limitation in duration.

But, if every clip and contribution is distributed under its own, tailormade license, I will likely be unable to do this in any project, even taking material from the creative commons.

Maybe, for example, I do want to sell my movie on custom burned DVDs, so I can make a little money to cover my filming expenses. But, I plan to release it under a GPL-like license (GPL-like so that Hollywood movie moghuls can't take my work and then steal the freedoms I offer from their customers by making it proprietary and css-encoding it onto their DVDs, for example, which public domain and BSD-like licenses wouldn't prevent), so it is free as in freedom, but commercial in that I'd like to get a couple of bucks selling my CDs. Or perhaps commercial in that, I've become successful and well known, and coca cola is paying me a bunch of cash to place their logo in a few key scenes in the movie.

Now I've got to wade through a dozen different licenses, for a dozen different clips or musical scores I'd like to include, any of which may be mutually incompatible with one another as well as my own project. This severely diminishes the usefulness of the creative commons.

What is needed is a relatively few number of licenses, as compatible with one another as possible. Ideally they would boil down to a GPL-like license, a BSD-like license, and public domain, so that, depending on one's philosophy, one can license ones work, and use the work of others, in a relatively straightforward approach. Whether one is using my Free Media License (still being drafted, not ready for use, and if a better, more widely accepted one a la the GPL comes along I'll use that instead), or one of the other licenses out there, as great a degree of compatiblity as possible is needed for a commons like this to work at all.

What is really missing from the entire Free Media and Creative Commons movement is a good, solid licensing framework we can all use to license our contributions. My Free Media License is one attempt to fix this, but I'd much rather be writing a novel than writing a license, and most other creative people probably feel likewise, which makes addressing this deficiency difficult.

Unfortunately, the Creative Commons website seems a little short on Licensing information as well ... a deficiency I sincerely hope will be corrected in the not too distant future. :-)

Some Examples of Contempory Censorship through (c)

On: Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs

The post I was replying to asserted that copyright is being used as a form of censorship TODAY.

You haven't gotten out much the last few months, have you?

I am assuming you are not a troll, merely uninformed. I suggest you begin by going to eff.org. Then continue your education by looking up information on digital watermarks, and how the DMCA was used to initimidate and, initially, prevent the publication of a scholarly paper demonstrating how ineffective watermarking is (the work was later published, as a direct result of the widespread public outcry, much of which was stirred up by the reporting of that very story here on slashdot).

I would then refer you to Dmitry Sklyarov, who was imprisoned in the United States for giving a speech on the weaknesses of Adobe's eBook encryption while attending a conference in Las Vegas (hint to Adobe: rot13 is NOT encryption!), under the incredibly weak notion that he as an employee was responsible for his employer having sold software illegal in the U.S. (but legal and, under Russian law, required before any eBook may be legally sold there!).

Ever wonder why Prince is now 'the Artist formerly known as Prince?' No, it wasn't arrogance. He signed a bad contract with a record label, so draconian he wasn't even allowed to use his own stage name anymore, unless he continued working for that label for pennies on the dollar. Instead he wrote the word "SLAVE" across his forhead and performed (on MTV IIRC) as the guy 'formerly known' as Prince, and for a while (perhaps still) he couldn't even perform his older material that he, as an artist, created. This is censorship, brought to you by modern American copyright law.

There are numerous hip-hop and rap artists who have been censored from presenting their work because of copyright, not necessarilly because their sampling isn't fair use (in most cases it is), but because the threat of a lawsuit by deep pocketed Copyright Cartels like the record labels is sufficient to silence their speech. This is censorship, brought to you by modern American copyright law.

More recently, George Lucas co-opted the Star Wars Fan Fiction Convention, then summarilly disallowed any and all fan fiction that wasn't a parody or spoof, eliminating many, many works (including some of the IMHO most interesting ones) from competition or exposure, effectively silencing those authors. Copyright allows him to do this (it grants him exclusive ownership of the Star Wars universe and will do so for the rest of our natural lives), despite the fact that the Star Wars mythos has ingrained itself into our cultural fabric.

Silencing those authors is censorship, brought to you by modern American copyright law.

There was an attempt to use copyright law to silence the author of The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of Gone With the Wind from a black American slave's point of view, an attempt which very nearly succeeded and didn't mainly because of the racial overtones and the amount of attention (and funding for the defense) that particular aspect of the issue brought to bear.

Had she not had such strong public opinion on her side, and such wide public exposure as a result, she too would likely have fallen prey to censorship, brought to you once again by modern American copyright law. For every author like that who does manage to get into the public eye, there are hundreds of others who do not, and whose work you never see, never hear, as a result.

Finally, have you tried to get a copy of Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain by Gerard Colby? Good luck. The book was privished by its publisher (against the author's wishes, obviously) at the behest of one of America's most powerful families. I suggest you look up the word "privish" ... authors' own publishers can and do use copyright to silence books they do not want to see the light of day, and much of this censorship is politically motivated. (See Into the Buzzsaw, edited by Kristina Borjesson, for other accounts by Pulitzer and Peabody Award winning journalists for testimonials about the current state of the "free press" in America today. It will make you hair stand up on end.

Whether performed by corporations, by powerful individuals, or by government, silencing the words, thoughts, creativity, and opinions of people is censorship, and the most common tool in use today for accomplishing that is Copyright Law.

Copyright Law was initially created and designed to facilitate censorship. It has since been subject to some minor modifications and reforms, but its inherent structure remains largely unchanged. No one has even considered trying a different approach to granting exclusive monopolies as a means to compensating the artists, in large part because, by the time the question ever arose, there were already large publishing interests in place who benefited from the old, censorship-prone copyright regime.

This is why copyright, more than any other set of laws, is so effective at facilitating censorship in countries that otherwise are fairly open and permissive. It is why websites can be taken down at the merest allegation of copyright violation, even while the supreme court with the other hand defends the rights of adult websites to remain on the 'net. Of the two approaches to censoring the net, the DMCA, and copyright, has been vastly more effective than the SCA we all feared so much a couple of years earlier.

With the Right GNU/Linux Distro Fixes Are FAST

On: MSIE Uber-patch Of The Month

For Linux users, it would be up to the Linux distro to provide patches like that if they wished. But none of them will either. Too much work for no money

On my Source Mage system I simply run a 'sorcery update' before going to bed, and any new versions of packages are downloaded, compiled, and upgraded accordingly. All dependent packages are recompiled as needed, such that all are optomized and compiled against the most current rev. Downloading and compiling mozilla may be time consuming, but if I'm asleep while its happening who really cares?

On my Gentoo system I do an 'emerge rsync' followed by an 'emerge --update system --pretend' (to first see what it is going to do), then if I like what is going to happen, the same command again without the --pretend to actually do the update, followed by an 'emerge --update world --pretend' and, once again if I like what is going to happen, an 'emerge --update world'. If I don't want to upgrade everything (not as safe to do under Gentoo as Source Mage) I simply do an 'emerge --update [package-name]', such as 'emerge --update mozilla' before going to sleep.

In either case, the next morning I wake up with the most current security patches (if any) and newest stable versions of all the Free Software out there, including Mozilla.

I had Mozilla rc2 running within 24 hours of its release, fully compiled and optimized for my machine. No waiting on Red Hat, Suse, or, God forbid, Debian to get around to pushing their versions out. (Though in defense of Debian they do push SECURITY fixes out very fast ... its just the snazzy new versions of things that take a lifetime before you see them ... e.g. "Stop asking me when X 4.2 debs will be out, it will be months!" as one of the developers posted, a day or two after 4.2 had been released by the XFree group, and was already up and running on my Source Mage and Gentoo boxes.

Minor correction (well, not so minor actually)

On: Siva Vaidhyanathan On Copyrights and Wrongs

The original concept of copyright was based on the notion that by producing creative works, authors benefit society, and so were entitled to make a living from a time-limited legal monopoly on the reproduction and distribution of their creations

ahem. No.

The original concept of copyright was instituted by the British Monarchy to facilitate authoritarian control over the then-emergent printing press, by requiring all works to 'register themselves' and provide certain information making the publisher known, accessible, and ultimately accountable to the Crown if they printed something the Crown found offensive. It was a means of controlling the printing press (by banning unauthorized printing presses) and, most importantly, controlling what was printed.

In other words, copyright was designed from the beginning to do exactly what it is becoming most famous for doing today: facilitate censorship.

Later refinements insured the profitability of those publishers so "blessed" by the crown, by setting up a book in which they could register works they were publishing so that the oligarchs wouldn't be competing with one another.

It wasn't until much later that the justification of "protecting the artist's right to profit from their works" was introduced, almost as an afterthought, well after the publishing oligarchy was well entrenched and generally as a way to mitigate criticism in some quarters with respect to the restritive (and monopolistic) nature of copyright. Unfortunately for the artists, copyright law then, as now, favors the publishers over the authors in most respects, belying its real intent (today: the maintenance of the copyright cartels and oligarchs, then: the maintenance of the authority of the Crown over what information was, and was not, available in print).

The United States adopted both copyright and patent law more or less intact from our former British overlords, with little questioning of the propoganda that justified such strictures (Thomas Jefferson was a rare exception who did question, and criticize, both concepts). The British Empire rose upon the force of tightly controlled trade monopolies and ultimately met its demise when said force, coupled with their weakening navel power to enforce it, couldn't withstand the pressures of a more open, modern marketplace. It is interesting that the two most restrictive, dangerous democracy-threatening aspects of American law both have their roots in British monopoly regimes we adopted more or less unchanged and without question.

The new notion of copyright seems to be based on a cyptographically and legally enforced "secure pipeline" from the content creator to each individually authorized end user.

Again, this is really only new in form, not in underlying substance. There have even been people drawn and quartered for copyright violation in England, and more recently, at the turn of the 20th century shopkeepers were beaten, businesses burned, and people perhaps even killed for copyright violations when the copyright holders of musical scores hired thugs to enforce their copyrights in accordance to a new law granting them such powers. Coercion has always been a part of copyright, as it must be since it creates an unnatural monopoly and artificial scarcity out of something which is inherently bountious (information).

if it succeeds in establishing itself, an entirely new information economy will result. Unfortunately, free speech will be an early casualty. Orwell's 1984 will no longer be a dystopian speculation, but a first-year business text.

That economy is likely to be relatively short lived and short circuit itself. Monopoly economies never operate at anything approaching the effeciency of an open, more or less free market, and there is only so much people are willign to spend, and so many hoops people are willing to jump through, before they will simply say "to hell with it, I'll do without." The Copyright Cartels, if they get what they want, will likely make far less than will if freedom of information wins out. It is similar to when they tried to ban videotape, only to have more than half their profits coming from video tape sales and rentals a decade later. Multiply that by a dozen emergent technologies, and who knows how many more that will never emerge if "Disney" Hollings has his way.

You are right, though, the first casualty of the New American Copyright will almost certainly be freedom of speech, exactly as copyright was designed to do in the first place, four centuries ago.