Since 2000, I've been maintaining GraphApp, an open source GUI portability library. Although named GraphApp on the web site, it was always supposed to be part of a larger portability library providing other services, which is why its header file is named app.h, why it compiles to libapp.a under Linux and app.lib under Windows, why the FAQ mentions "App" as the name of the intended work, and why one of the first things you do when making a program with my library is you create an App struct using the new_app call.
Leaving aside the question of whether the term is now generic, what protection do Open Source developers have for the names they choose for their tools, which have been in use for years?
But you're only talking about Red Hat's employees' futures and jobs. Instead, they should consider how many companies use their distribution, and consider all _those_ companies' employees' futures and jobs first.
> "when your a company with peoples futures and jobs on the line often its not a good idea to expose all of the details"
Why don't all Creative Commons musicians make their own free "union" to collect on their behalf? Then donate it all back to those Internet "radio" stations which only play fully CC music??
You are right in thinking that Soundexchange even collects money on behalf of artists it doesn't represent. The theory is that Soundexchange collects the money and if the artist isn't represented by Soundexchange then the money gets divvied up between AFTRA and AFM. The non-represented artist then has to ask those two bodies to cough up the monies owed. Since AFTRA and AFM are unions...
Note, the decision was based on whether a digital signal was one of the four allowed patentable subject matters: "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter."
They decided a signal was not a process (IMHO fair enough).
Then they said a signal isn't a machine. I could imagine an argument that a laser beam could be a machine in that it could be used to manufacture diamonds from carbon. A counter-argument might be that the machine that created the laser beam is the actual machine which made the diamonds, but I can see counter-counter-arguments might exist. An extreme case would be where you fire a laser at a carbon-rich asteroid then turn the machine off (or for argument's sake even quickly disassemble it). By the time the laser light hits the asteroid and makes some diamonds for a space ship to later collect, the machine is no longer operating. So the light itself has acted as a machine to manufacture something.
They said a signal was not an "item of manufacture". See previous post on why I think this result is dodgy; namely a definition used in a case involving fruit isn't going to enlighten anyone when we are discussing digital signals.
They also said a signal is not a composition of matter. As I said, Einstein might have something to say about that.
In short, we shouldn't applaud this result merely if it accords with our common sense, because the way they got to that result was completely arbitrary! Someone needs to tighten up the definitions of what the law actually means rather than relying on these flood-fill case-law specific results which split hairs. An arbitrary decision-making process which goes our way today may just as easily go against us tomorrow, leaving no-one better off or wiser.
"Yet few people are suggesting we solve this problem by rectifying the law with reality"
OK, so I actually read the PDF. You are indeed correct in this case. The decision here hinged on how to interpret the word "manufacture" in the context of patent law, and to do that the court relied on a definition used in a previous case involving the American Fruit Growers. So, this court has decided that a digital signal is not manufactured based on a completely different case involving fruit. (They've also declared that a photonic or electrical signal is not matter, something Mr Einstein might have something to say about, but I digress.)
The fundamental problem is the law works like a flood-fill algorithm. The law looks at narrow definitions and specific cases and then extends them to other cases regardless of whether they really should be extended in this way.
Strangely, I find myself agreeing with the dissenting judge here. Digital transmissions _are_ manufactured by the machines described by this patent (notably, the machines themselves are protected by other claims not in dispute here). Drawing a line which says the transmissions themselves are not "items of manufacture" to me implies that other results of manufacture such as drugs and genes should not be patentable either; only the means to produce them should be. Consistency please!
Teaching the scientific method is more important than merely teaching the currently accepted best theory we have.
A teacher's job is not to tell the children what some people believe, his job is to teach what is known to be the most accurate theory in existence.
I disagree. A science teacher's job is to teach science.
A teacher should not be afraid of teaching old theories then showing how people discovered that the old theory was wrong, THEN teach the newer theory.
It's that critical thinking about falsifiability which is at the core of the scientific method, and that's what we should aim to impart to the next generation.
I know light and radio are all on the same spectrum. I was using 'spectrum' colloquially to mean the part that's regulated by laws, i.e. radio, infrared, etc, not (yet) visible light. I was using the absurdity of regulating human-visible colours as an analogue of how pushing P2P underground pushes society closer to regulating human speech person-to-person, or visible signage such as the clothes you wear (or the colours that flowers use to attract insects, or indeed their fragrances, one of the oldest signalling methods on the airwaves). My point is, at some stage invasive laws regulating communication start interfering with stuff that's so ingrained into society that it starts becoming not just impractical but absurd.
Radio / wifi is one way to hook up such a city-wide personal network. Light is another: point-to-point connections using light signals. Yeah, much harder to do than radio (which is omnidirectional) but also much harder to regulate. Not just regulating spectrum, we're now talking about the government regulating visible light. "Sorry, you can't use green or red in this area, and blue can only be used under joint licensing from IBM and Sony."
I included the keys themselves in the concept of the network (as many other posts have pointed out, you need that information to reconstruct the originals).
The dictionary (well, a word list) is an interesting case, because it may not contain enough information, although it contains all the requisite components. If you want to take the dictionary as an example, you might as well reduce it even further to just this: 0 and 1. Does that set contain as much information as The Lord of the Rings? No. You can't compress LotR down to just the set {0,1} and still retrieve it, without effectively encoding LotR into the decompression algorithm itself. {0,1} just doesn't have enough info.
By comparison, the brightnet network as a whole (including the keys needed to retrieve the broken pieces) includes sufficient information to encode the original encoded works. It's like compression: you can keep gzipping a file as long as you like, but at some point you won't be able to make it any smaller. You've reached a kind of limit of how much information is needed to encode the original. (Admittedly that's only gzip's limit, not the theoretical limit, but I think there must be a theoretical limit for any given data set you wish to compress.) A simple word list would be smaller than the theoretical minimum size of compressing certain works. The brightnet idea is just splitting the data up in a clever way so that it gets smeared around, it doesn't actually reduce the data to merely a word list (which might actually throw away information).
By the way, I'm not advocating a law court find OFF to be illegal, I'm just speculating that could be a result of the inability by the powers that be to monitor or control such a network. And a vector of attack could be that the copyright has been smeared around so that no chunk transmitted through the network can be said to be "clean". Even if you did transmit a dictionary through that network, it could be said to infringe LotR, not because they both contain the word "king", but because the dictionary is a component of a machine which infringes that and many other copyrights. In essence, my argument is that by making data/copyright non-local to single packets, OFF has made the entire system the only thing which can be attacked because every packet in it infringes to a small degree. This is either very clever, or very stupid, I'm not sure which.
The OFF argument is akin to this: take a copyrighted work, let's say it's a novel. Cut it in half. Is that half still under copyright? Yes. OK, cut it half again, and again, and again. At some point you'll get down to individual words, letters, or single bits. These do not have copyright in themselves, and so can be joined together with other words, letters or bits from other places and stored in 128K chunks which likewise don't themselves have any copyright. These chunks can then be distributed because they are just random-looking chunks of data.
The problem with this argument is it's reductionist. If you blend up 5 copyrighted works and pour them into 10 shot-glasses (the network), sure you can claim each individual shot-glass doesn't fall under the same copyright of any single one of the original works. But since you can extract each of the 5 original works from the collective set of the 10 shot-glasses, then the network as a wholedoes contain the copyrighted works, and does fall under copyright protection. In a sense, they have smeared each copyright out over many (possibly overlapping) chunks, but it's still there because the originals can still be retrieved. Banning the whole network seems a possible legal outcome, since non-infringing uses may still involve moving chunks which contain a partial copyright.
As much as the creators of OFF might claim their work is different to a darknet, actually it relies on very similar principles of obfuscation.
As a writer, it would be a real pain to rescan printed manuscripts (which might have some incidental markup or printing defects) and then try to find what was incorrectly OCR'd. Admittedly, a 1GB USB key can store most of my critical data, but in my experience they die far more often than hard disks do so they're not a reliable backup system. CD-ROM may be the best, together with paper printouts as a last resort, but that's not going to last 1000 years unless you were to use controlled environments. Vellum is good for 1000 years but isn't friendly to the calves. I'm in favour of some kind of miniature embossing on a hard surface (ideally something like manufactured diamond), with the actual data written in human-readable form in the middle of a plate with checksums around the outside to facilitate OCR and correct defects. Then a reader only needs a magnifying apparatus to know there is information there and start decoding it.
>How about making sure Clarke Orbit becomes the common name for the geostationary orbit?
No, how about making sure geostationary orbit is the common name for the geostationary orbit.
It's descriptive, it makes sense, it's already the common name for it. Why change it?
An issue I've always had with scientific and mathematical theorems is the tendency of scientists to name them after themselves, or after some reason which ultimately sheds little light on the underlying nature of the system. I mean, why? It actually makes such ideas harder for students to learn and understand because the students must learn the various names then put them aside to understand the deeper interconnections. For example, atomic orbitals are named s, p, d, f, g, h... It's basically alphabetical order without s, p, and d, and missing a to e (except d). Great naming scheme there. Now sure, they need to be named somehow, and in this case there is indeed an empirical reason for those first few letters, which is far better than what you're proposing: replacing an explicable term with a human name. Please, let's prefer logical, explicable names for scientific matters. Like geostationary orbits for orbits that are stationary with respect to the ground.
And the other problem is the masses of all the galaxies are different. The dwarf galaxy wouldn't act as a lens for them in the same way that the massive galaxy does for us.
Tree planting is especially unlikely to work. There just isn't enough land to plant enough trees to soak up all our emissions. Do the calculations, or see http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/trees.shtml
A friend of mine was a teacher for a while, until a student with severe attention deficit disorder decided to record lessons in order to prove that my friend the teacher was picking on him. Here's the recipe: record what someone says, edit on home computer to make it say what you want it to say, play to parents, get parents to visit school with you, get teacher in trouble. That the school took the kid's word for it without any forensic analysis of the recording shows you what's wrong with the idea of surveillance for the masses - it can be incredibly easily fabricated, edited or modified by computer-savvy kids and the adults are clueless or powerless to stop the false accusations from flying. My friend gave up teaching soon after and went to make money at a tech company instead. What's needed is integrity checks in the recordings to highlight where omissions or changes are made, otherwise it's no better than hearsay.
Microsoft Windows is now so big and complex that we don't know exactly how it all works, but we can still recognise when it's broken.
Saying "we don't understand everything" isn't the same as saying "we understand nothing". There's plenty we do know about the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
> Encryption keys shouldn't be treated any differently from a combination to a safe.
You're fairly likely to know there is a safe built into a wall in your house.
You're fairly unlikely to know of the exact contents or even existence of most files on your computer. Any kind of auto-update program, virus, browser, or random other user of that computer could have put those files there.
So, just getting to the point where authorities can prove there _is_ any deliberate encryption by that person is problematic. If they skip that step, you can't say it's justice.
As Ben Rich said about working in the Skunk Works, never work with the Navy. After their success designing stealth fighters and stealth bombers for the Airforce, Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works proposed a different kind of attack ship to the Navy: stealth nuke ship, four person crew. The Navy didn't buy it, figuratively and literally. Rich claimed this was because of ego. The Navy is all about chain of command. An admiral needs big boats so there's lots of crew to boss around. Robot drones cost less and are expendable, and are, perhaps, the future of human warfare.
If the universe is within a black hole, there's actually no need for the singularity, only an event horizon.
If the event horizon accumulates sufficient mass it could become an event horizon from the inside of the sphere too. Space within the sphere would be stretched towards the mass accumulating at the edges of a spherical supermassive shell. This also causes gravitational acceleration towards the outer edges of the universe, but without the need for a singularity in the middle. It also explains the big bang to some degree, as a phase transition from a black hole with a near-singularity at its centre, to a black shell with normal (expanding space) in its middle, and a brand new time axis.
Think of the universe as an enormous Easter egg.
Slashdot Mirror
Since 2000, I've been maintaining GraphApp, an open source GUI portability library. Although named GraphApp on the web site, it was always supposed to be part of a larger portability library providing other services, which is why its header file is named app.h, why it compiles to libapp.a under Linux and app.lib under Windows, why the FAQ mentions "App" as the name of the intended work, and why one of the first things you do when making a program with my library is you create an App struct using the new_app call.
Leaving aside the question of whether the term is now generic, what protection do Open Source developers have for the names they choose for their tools, which have been in use for years?
But you're only talking about Red Hat's employees' futures and jobs. Instead, they should consider how many companies use their distribution, and consider all _those_ companies' employees' futures and jobs first.
> "when your a company with peoples futures and jobs on the line often its not a good idea to expose all of the details"
You are right in thinking that Soundexchange even collects money on behalf of artists it doesn't represent. The theory is that Soundexchange collects the money and if the artist isn't represented by Soundexchange then the money gets divvied up between AFTRA and AFM. The non-represented artist then has to ask those two bodies to cough up the monies owed. Since AFTRA and AFM are unions...
Note, the decision was based on whether a digital signal was one of the four allowed patentable subject matters: "process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter."
They decided a signal was not a process (IMHO fair enough).
Then they said a signal isn't a machine. I could imagine an argument that a laser beam could be a machine in that it could be used to manufacture diamonds from carbon. A counter-argument might be that the machine that created the laser beam is the actual machine which made the diamonds, but I can see counter-counter-arguments might exist. An extreme case would be where you fire a laser at a carbon-rich asteroid then turn the machine off (or for argument's sake even quickly disassemble it). By the time the laser light hits the asteroid and makes some diamonds for a space ship to later collect, the machine is no longer operating. So the light itself has acted as a machine to manufacture something.
They said a signal was not an "item of manufacture". See previous post on why I think this result is dodgy; namely a definition used in a case involving fruit isn't going to enlighten anyone when we are discussing digital signals.
They also said a signal is not a composition of matter. As I said, Einstein might have something to say about that.
In short, we shouldn't applaud this result merely if it accords with our common sense, because the way they got to that result was completely arbitrary! Someone needs to tighten up the definitions of what the law actually means rather than relying on these flood-fill case-law specific results which split hairs. An arbitrary decision-making process which goes our way today may just as easily go against us tomorrow, leaving no-one better off or wiser.
"Yet few people are suggesting we solve this problem by rectifying the law with reality"
OK, so I actually read the PDF. You are indeed correct in this case. The decision here hinged on how to interpret the word "manufacture" in the context of patent law, and to do that the court relied on a definition used in a previous case involving the American Fruit Growers. So, this court has decided that a digital signal is not manufactured based on a completely different case involving fruit. (They've also declared that a photonic or electrical signal is not matter, something Mr Einstein might have something to say about, but I digress.)
The fundamental problem is the law works like a flood-fill algorithm. The law looks at narrow definitions and specific cases and then extends them to other cases regardless of whether they really should be extended in this way.
Strangely, I find myself agreeing with the dissenting judge here. Digital transmissions _are_ manufactured by the machines described by this patent (notably, the machines themselves are protected by other claims not in dispute here). Drawing a line which says the transmissions themselves are not "items of manufacture" to me implies that other results of manufacture such as drugs and genes should not be patentable either; only the means to produce them should be. Consistency please!
A teacher's job is not to tell the children what some people believe, his job is to teach what is known to be the most accurate theory in existence.
I disagree. A science teacher's job is to teach science.
A teacher should not be afraid of teaching old theories then showing how people discovered that the old theory was wrong, THEN teach the newer theory. It's that critical thinking about falsifiability which is at the core of the scientific method, and that's what we should aim to impart to the next generation.
I know light and radio are all on the same spectrum. I was using 'spectrum' colloquially to mean the part that's regulated by laws, i.e. radio, infrared, etc, not (yet) visible light. I was using the absurdity of regulating human-visible colours as an analogue of how pushing P2P underground pushes society closer to regulating human speech person-to-person, or visible signage such as the clothes you wear (or the colours that flowers use to attract insects, or indeed their fragrances, one of the oldest signalling methods on the airwaves). My point is, at some stage invasive laws regulating communication start interfering with stuff that's so ingrained into society that it starts becoming not just impractical but absurd.
Radio / wifi is one way to hook up such a city-wide personal network. Light is another: point-to-point connections using light signals. Yeah, much harder to do than radio (which is omnidirectional) but also much harder to regulate. Not just regulating spectrum, we're now talking about the government regulating visible light. "Sorry, you can't use green or red in this area, and blue can only be used under joint licensing from IBM and Sony."
The dictionary (well, a word list) is an interesting case, because it may not contain enough information, although it contains all the requisite components. If you want to take the dictionary as an example, you might as well reduce it even further to just this: 0 and 1. Does that set contain as much information as The Lord of the Rings? No. You can't compress LotR down to just the set {0,1} and still retrieve it, without effectively encoding LotR into the decompression algorithm itself. {0,1} just doesn't have enough info.
By comparison, the brightnet network as a whole (including the keys needed to retrieve the broken pieces) includes sufficient information to encode the original encoded works. It's like compression: you can keep gzipping a file as long as you like, but at some point you won't be able to make it any smaller. You've reached a kind of limit of how much information is needed to encode the original. (Admittedly that's only gzip's limit, not the theoretical limit, but I think there must be a theoretical limit for any given data set you wish to compress.) A simple word list would be smaller than the theoretical minimum size of compressing certain works. The brightnet idea is just splitting the data up in a clever way so that it gets smeared around, it doesn't actually reduce the data to merely a word list (which might actually throw away information).
By the way, I'm not advocating a law court find OFF to be illegal, I'm just speculating that could be a result of the inability by the powers that be to monitor or control such a network. And a vector of attack could be that the copyright has been smeared around so that no chunk transmitted through the network can be said to be "clean". Even if you did transmit a dictionary through that network, it could be said to infringe LotR, not because they both contain the word "king", but because the dictionary is a component of a machine which infringes that and many other copyrights. In essence, my argument is that by making data/copyright non-local to single packets, OFF has made the entire system the only thing which can be attacked because every packet in it infringes to a small degree. This is either very clever, or very stupid, I'm not sure which.
The problem with this argument is it's reductionist. If you blend up 5 copyrighted works and pour them into 10 shot-glasses (the network), sure you can claim each individual shot-glass doesn't fall under the same copyright of any single one of the original works. But since you can extract each of the 5 original works from the collective set of the 10 shot-glasses, then the network as a whole does contain the copyrighted works, and does fall under copyright protection. In a sense, they have smeared each copyright out over many (possibly overlapping) chunks, but it's still there because the originals can still be retrieved. Banning the whole network seems a possible legal outcome, since non-infringing uses may still involve moving chunks which contain a partial copyright.
As much as the creators of OFF might claim their work is different to a darknet, actually it relies on very similar principles of obfuscation.
As a writer, it would be a real pain to rescan printed manuscripts (which might have some incidental markup or printing defects) and then try to find what was incorrectly OCR'd. Admittedly, a 1GB USB key can store most of my critical data, but in my experience they die far more often than hard disks do so they're not a reliable backup system. CD-ROM may be the best, together with paper printouts as a last resort, but that's not going to last 1000 years unless you were to use controlled environments. Vellum is good for 1000 years but isn't friendly to the calves. I'm in favour of some kind of miniature embossing on a hard surface (ideally something like manufactured diamond), with the actual data written in human-readable form in the middle of a plate with checksums around the outside to facilitate OCR and correct defects. Then a reader only needs a magnifying apparatus to know there is information there and start decoding it.
No, how about making sure geostationary orbit is the common name for the geostationary orbit.
It's descriptive, it makes sense, it's already the common name for it. Why change it?
An issue I've always had with scientific and mathematical theorems is the tendency of scientists to name them after themselves, or after some reason which ultimately sheds little light on the underlying nature of the system. I mean, why? It actually makes such ideas harder for students to learn and understand because the students must learn the various names then put them aside to understand the deeper interconnections. For example, atomic orbitals are named s, p, d, f, g, h... It's basically alphabetical order without s, p, and d, and missing a to e (except d). Great naming scheme there. Now sure, they need to be named somehow, and in this case there is indeed an empirical reason for those first few letters, which is far better than what you're proposing: replacing an explicable term with a human name. Please, let's prefer logical, explicable names for scientific matters. Like geostationary orbits for orbits that are stationary with respect to the ground.
And the other problem is the masses of all the galaxies are different. The dwarf galaxy wouldn't act as a lens for them in the same way that the massive galaxy does for us.
Tree planting is especially unlikely to work. There just isn't enough land to plant enough trees to soak up all our emissions. Do the calculations, or see http://www.ptua.org.au/myths/trees.shtml
A friend of mine was a teacher for a while, until a student with severe attention deficit disorder decided to record lessons in order to prove that my friend the teacher was picking on him. Here's the recipe: record what someone says, edit on home computer to make it say what you want it to say, play to parents, get parents to visit school with you, get teacher in trouble. That the school took the kid's word for it without any forensic analysis of the recording shows you what's wrong with the idea of surveillance for the masses - it can be incredibly easily fabricated, edited or modified by computer-savvy kids and the adults are clueless or powerless to stop the false accusations from flying. My friend gave up teaching soon after and went to make money at a tech company instead. What's needed is integrity checks in the recordings to highlight where omissions or changes are made, otherwise it's no better than hearsay.
Saying "we don't understand everything" isn't the same as saying "we understand nothing". There's plenty we do know about the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
> Encryption keys shouldn't be treated any differently from a combination to a safe. You're fairly likely to know there is a safe built into a wall in your house. You're fairly unlikely to know of the exact contents or even existence of most files on your computer. Any kind of auto-update program, virus, browser, or random other user of that computer could have put those files there. So, just getting to the point where authorities can prove there _is_ any deliberate encryption by that person is problematic. If they skip that step, you can't say it's justice.
As Ben Rich said about working in the Skunk Works, never work with the Navy. After their success designing stealth fighters and stealth bombers for the Airforce, Lockheed-Martin's Skunk Works proposed a different kind of attack ship to the Navy: stealth nuke ship, four person crew. The Navy didn't buy it, figuratively and literally. Rich claimed this was because of ego. The Navy is all about chain of command. An admiral needs big boats so there's lots of crew to boss around. Robot drones cost less and are expendable, and are, perhaps, the future of human warfare.
If the universe is within a black hole, there's actually no need for the singularity, only an event horizon. If the event horizon accumulates sufficient mass it could become an event horizon from the inside of the sphere too. Space within the sphere would be stretched towards the mass accumulating at the edges of a spherical supermassive shell. This also causes gravitational acceleration towards the outer edges of the universe, but without the need for a singularity in the middle. It also explains the big bang to some degree, as a phase transition from a black hole with a near-singularity at its centre, to a black shell with normal (expanding space) in its middle, and a brand new time axis. Think of the universe as an enormous Easter egg.