I think the reason copyright continues for a significant number of year after the death of the copyright holder, is to make it economically infeasible to kill someone to free up their copyright.
If you think it's ridiculous that someone would be killed just to get free access to their work, your world-view is quite different from mine.If Bill Gates personally had the copyright on Windows, and it expired on his death, he'd have to live in a bunker.
I'm sure that the Slashdot editors were not fooled at all, and deliberately posted the thing without saying it was a satire, just to see the thousands of flames shooting like fireworks.
A large percent of the/. population is living up to that expectation nicely. Surprise, surprise.
A company I used to work for developed a neural net for a specialized Optical Character Recognition device that read the font that is used by magnetic readers (like on the bottom of a cheque). Once the code was written, all they did was read a whole shitload of the target data, and tell the neural net whether is was right in its guess of each character.
No one tried to explain the difference between an S and a 5, or even the difference between a letter and a number.
The end product was a best-in-class reader that could also reliably detect forgeries.
I don't think you could teach a person to read by showing them flash cards, having them guess the word, and then telling them whether they were right or not; it would take too long and the person would get very frustrated. Neural nets, on the other hand can learn this way.
These mind modeling projects differ only in scale, but the scale difference is gigantic. Can a neural net learn "common-sense" and natural language from a bunch of facts (some generally agreed upon, some not)? I think so, and am shoving stuff into GAC to do my bit.
An end result of a huge database of facts like "Water is wet" and "Picnics are fun" is not AI. Whether or not the back end can develop any kind of AI from this input remains to be seen. I hope so, because it would be really cool.
Mr King says "They ought to seriously address this issue of intellectual property. They certainly aren't allowing students to copy books in the university library."
Is he serious? Back in the dark ages when I went to University, there were photocopiers all over the library. Is it different now?
The major reason for RSA's early patent release may be to prevent "RSA Day" from being a media event. Most people in the security community have it marked on their calendars (I do!), and a lot of people had parties or other events planned.
RSA did not want to see headlines like "Techies Celebrate Patent Expiration" or "'We're free!' Shout Drunken Computer Geeks".
Companies like ElmSoft sell utilities for recovering lost application passwords. I'm sure these tools have been used to "circumvent copy protection"; certainly they are capable of it.
If I were to encrypt a Word document with the built-in encryption (no matter how feeble the encryption), it would be considered copy protected. Someone should sue someone about this.
I guess it's different when a large company's "revenue stream" is in jeopardy.
According to the FreeNet FAQ , FreeNet usage is not anonymous, just hard to track back. The Napster ruling (depending on how it turns out) may motivate the FreeNet folks to move truly anonymous access up on their schedule.
The 'secret service' in Canada is CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) which was split off from the RCMP in 1984 (is the date a coincidence?). They keep a pretty low profile.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's ridiculous that someone would be killed just to get free access to their work, your world-view is quite different from mine.If Bill Gates personally had the copyright on Windows, and it expired on his death, he'd have to live in a bunker.
A large percent of the /. population is living up to that expectation nicely. Surprise, surprise.
Oh Goddess, I hope not.
No one tried to explain the difference between an S and a 5, or even the difference between a letter and a number.
The end product was a best-in-class reader that could also reliably detect forgeries.
I don't think you could teach a person to read by showing them flash cards, having them guess the word, and then telling them whether they were right or not; it would take too long and the person would get very frustrated. Neural nets, on the other hand can learn this way.
These mind modeling projects differ only in scale, but the scale difference is gigantic. Can a neural net learn "common-sense" and natural language from a bunch of facts (some generally agreed upon, some not)? I think so, and am shoving stuff into GAC to do my bit.
An end result of a huge database of facts like "Water is wet" and "Picnics are fun" is not AI. Whether or not the back end can develop any kind of AI from this input remains to be seen. I hope so, because it would be really cool.
Is he serious? Back in the dark ages when I went to University, there were photocopiers all over the library. Is it different now?
RSA did not want to see headlines like "Techies Celebrate Patent Expiration" or "'We're free!' Shout Drunken Computer Geeks".
Lets all party anyway.
The MPAA are sending letters to people in Canada, but there are still mirrors (a few anyway).
If I were to encrypt a Word document with the built-in encryption (no matter how feeble the encryption), it would be considered copy protected. Someone should sue someone about this.
I guess it's different when a large company's "revenue stream" is in jeopardy.
Q. What has three legs and an asshole on top?
A. A drum stool.
Signed: a bass player.
According to the FreeNet FAQ , FreeNet usage is not anonymous, just hard to track back. The Napster ruling (depending on how it turns out) may motivate the FreeNet folks to move truly anonymous access up on their schedule.
The 'secret service' in Canada is CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) which was split off from the RCMP in 1984 (is the date a coincidence?). They keep a pretty low profile.