A group of students at The University of Pretoria in South Africa did exactly this while I was still studying there, this was circa 2001. A large part of their motivation was to help build a technology for high-speed networks that were not subject to the state protected telecoms monopoly.
They used almost exactly the same technology, lazer-pointers for sending streams, but I believe they used solar-cells for receivers.
I remember they boasted speeds of over 1mbs which (back then) was incredibly fast (in fact faster than the internal buffers of the P2 computers they used - so that the data actually slowed DOWN after being received) but I don't believe they ever went beyond a single point-to-point connection.
Maybe one of the students who were involved is on slashdot and can give more details ?
How long do you think before they start suing people who hear a song for "storing a copy in biological media." After-all, if you remember a song, that means you've made a copy - in your neurons. In theory you can listen to the song for ever without paying - just keep remembering it. The more you listen, the less likely you become to EVER forget.
Of course there would be added penalties if you made a further reproduction or public performance possibly of a derived work... that is to say, the MAFIAA will sue you for twice as much if somebody heard you humming a song you once heard....
Actually there have been numerous successful democratic systems that do not have, or in some cases even ALLOW, political parties. One example is the system that existed in the old Boer Republics in South Africa. Under that system there were no parties. People ran for election as individuals within a specific region. The election winners then became representatives in the national government (which was called the Volksraad - lit. National Council). The members of the council then elected from among themselves a president who acted as the head of state.
This system kept politicians directly accountable to their constituencies and kept campaign influences relatively small.
Personally I would say such a system would ideally be coupled with a clause to make them instantly-recallable so that they have absolutely no power to vote in favor of a single decision that the majority of their constituencies do not support - but that's my socialist-libertarianism that believes we don't need politicians - at most we need mouthpieces for communities to negotiate with other communities on their behalf.
The system was far from perfect - for example the state president had way too much unilateral power in my book - the last president Paul Kruger created one of the world's first national parks against overwhelming opposition both from the population and the council but he could go ahead and do it anyway. In retrospect, he did a very good thing there - but he could just as easily have done some very bad things as recalling the president even if he ignored the council was very difficult, this would need additional checks and balances. Ironically it could be argued that Kruger's biggest mistake was to declare war on Britain (though it can be shown that Britain forced him to do so and he had no real choice about it) - but that mistake was roundly supported by the majority of the council and the bulk of the population - so maintaining high degrees of power for voters is not a guarantee against mistakes, I just think it's better than the alternative.
In the end, I am tied to a belief that the only just form of governance is self-governance. The only people who should be allowed to MAKE a law are the ones who have to live under it.
With regard to your sig... wouldn't you consider the annoyance of regularly changing it to be larger than the annoyance of ignoring an occasional reply to it ?...see what I did there ?
>No, I like Windows 7 and still have an unwrapped copy of XP in case the world ends.
I don't see how the wrapping will help... there aren't many world-end scenarios where anybody will be enforcing copyright licenses anymore... well unless you take yours from the more extreme corporate-rule cyberpunk stories of the 80's - but those don't exactly count as "world ended" in my book, they are just "world radically changed for the worse". Either way they didn't happen and probably won't. They were based on a premise of the governments disappearing (or at least becoming irrelevant) and corporations ruling the world - but that didn't happen, if only because the corporations found the government to be much too useful as a tool.
But is it still the norm ? Gamers are used to watching and participating in scenes are much higher FPS rates... for those of us who were born after 1980, this is better... tv looks flickery and annoying. We had the same issue with HD... our cellphones have higher resolution than that, why is it only being upgraded now and by so little ? The latter one inspired a wonderful XKCD (just so I'm not accused of plagiarism):P
Aaah, but your experiment has no natural selection.
When you add a selective element that actively culls the population of bad mutations the good ones not only win out but become dominant. In fact this exact process is the mechanism we use to do evolve learning into neural networks. Your exact experiment - only with a selective pressure added.
It gets better we've used the process to evolve HARDWARE using programmable logic chips. The chips were initially programmed with random junk. Then a criteria was chosen, the chips that were best at the task were kept and replicated while those that were worst were discarded. Within just 1000 generations we had circuits that could complete complicated tasks. One specific experiment I know of used the task of distinguishing two frequencies. The interesting thing is... nobody has a clue how the result works ! It does work. But we don't know HOW exactly. No electronic engineer would try to build a frequency differentiator with 100 logic chips (they'd build an oscilator) but it was evolved from them. Then it was found that 24 chips could be removed, they weren't electrically connected. Voila... but now get this, there is another 18 chips that are not electrically connected to the circuit EITHER - but if you take any of those out, the circuit stops working ! We have no idea why, the guess is that they have some physical effect on the circuit, perhaps producing a weak natural capacitor or gaining current through induction - but we have no real idea. It's theorized that the circuit works by looping it's power repeatedly over a long "wire" through the chips to slow it down to the same speed as the lower frequency, and then compare the frequency to the result... but we really have no clue. This was the original pioneering work in the field by Adrian Thompson but evolvable hardware is now a solid engineering concept. Try reading up on it, it's really fascinating geeky stuff !
So in fact- the problem you describe doesn't say anything about evolution. You proved that random mutation by itself will mostly harm a species, but you left selection out entirely. Whether that selection is human guided (as it would have to be in your experiment) or natural (as it is in well nature) it has to exist - and when you combine selection with mutation you get evolution.
So guess what, this "only a theory" has been experimentally PROVEN in thousands of settings, even if you've always been told it wasn't.
They have a stock response for these: "adaptation within a species is not evolution. Species can adapt and change, both from human choices (breeding) or natural pressures, but they cannot change into an entirely different species".
I don't agree in the least, but I've heard the argument so I know how it goes.
Ultimately I think the best solution actually is password wallets in local code - at least for web-authentication (I'm not sure it's practical for anything else). A single password unlocks a program on your own machine, which supplies the passwords to various webservices - and those are completely random with significant entropy. You, yourself, don't even know your facebook password - but you know the password for the program that does. This means that you no longer have a memory concern for any passwords that are used online - only somebody with physical access to your box can get into those. What I don't know is how strong the generated passwords in wallets really are. It would be interesting to go look at them. A 40 character string that is entirely made up of random characters is near impossible to type or remember, but also has massive entropy that makes it hard for automated attacks to succeed, while a much simpler easy-to-remember-and-type password is actually used, but that password cannot be broken unless somebody already has local access to your own machine (at least physical access). An interesting permutation would be to give some additional protection to such a password container by making it able to (optionally) detect and prevent remote-execution of itself, so if you used say a linux box and somebody managed to get into it via SSH or VNC the program would refuse to run that way (optional - because for some people that's how they access their boxes).
Detecting whether a program is being called locally or remotely over systems deliberately designed to transparently hide this is left as an exercise for the reader.
That joke stopped being funny years ago - solar powered LED flashlights are on the market - I own one.
Sound useless ? It's not. It has a battery - during daytime it charges the battery from solar power, when you use it at night, the battery powers the LED lights.
It's a wonderfully useful tool on camping trips. As a bonus - since the battery isn't replaced during the lifetime of the device it has much less of a pollution (battery-acid) impact (granted this may be less of a consideration in some countries -mine has no systems in place for proper disposal/recycling of battery cells and people just toss them in the trash when they are used up).
That LEDs have become so powerful while remaining so efficient has led to us being able to do a lot of really cool things we weren't able to do even quite recently. Frankly compared to things like LED based airport runway signal lights a solar powered flashlight isn't even all that impressive:D
Truth be told the passwords we actively encourage are no stronger than what he used. If you want a really strong password, use a sentence of random words. Password length matters far more than password content - this is a simply provable fact - too bad hardly anybody in security realizes it.
The supreme court was just plain wrong. The US law specifically excludes maths from patentability, not just "abstract" maths.
These papers ought to be filed as friend-of-the-court briefs in these cases, so that judges can actually know what they are really dealing with.
But now I'll really bake your noodle. I wrote this blog post about a year ago - but I'll copy and paste it for you with a link to the original at the end - I set out to prove that software is always abstract, and succeeded... it was ridiculously easy. I am happy to live in a country where software is specifically illegal to patent (and the loopholes were blocked) - but if I ever faced a a software patent court case (perhaps after a law change or emigration) - this would be the basis of my defense.
------------ Lawyers have successfully managed to argue that computer programs are not mathematics and thus should not be covered by the exclusion of mathematics from patentable material. This comes from a deep misunderstanding of how computers really work â" particularly as implementations of a universal turing machine. Some great papers on this have been written â" including this one at groklaw. That explains in detail how computers really work and why all computer programs are simply mathematical functions â" and even why all mathematical functions are really just numbers.
A great quote from it is this one: âoeProgramming a computer is, essentially, just discovering a number that suits the programmers wishesâ.
The thing is â" for somebody whose only understanding of computation theory is even that paper- this will seem like a bit of a leap. After all the process of writing code is creative, involves design and innovative thinking â" surely this wonderful process cannot just be âoediscovering a numberâ â" after all â" you can do that just by counting â" this is WHY itâ(TM)s unpatentableâ¦
What I want to do with this post is to â" very simply â" explain why that really is true. Iâ(TM)m going to give you a very simple computer program. Iâ(TM)ll write it in pseudocode so non-programmers can read it, but it can be implemented easily in any programming language and run â" and in most of them will take less than about 10 lines of code to do:
Make the vairable X equal to 0; Start a loop here: Write the binary representation of X into a new file. increase X by 1 continue the above loop until the program is interrupted by deliberately killing it (an infinite loop);
With this simple program â" I can create an exact copy of every single program ever written and â" this is important â" every single program that CAN ever be written. This is because any compiled program becomes a file filled with zeros and ones â" to a computer, thatâ(TM)s just a big number (the whole computation theory and lambda calculus etc. that explains how a number can BE an algorithm is needed to know how this happens â" but the important thing is â" itâ(TM)s a number). This program will store every number that can exist into a file â" by just counting.
The process is very ineffective for a few reasons: firstly almost every program it produces wonâ(TM)t run, the vast majority of numbers do not correspond to useful programs â" in fact only an incredibly small subset of them do â" but they are still numbers you can count to, and they are still numbers my program WILL produce. Secondly there is no real way to determine the useful programs from the ones that arenâ(TM)t- you have to manually try to run all of them â" and see for yourself what happens. More-over for every program in there, youâ(TM)ll produce thousands of copies â" some that will only run on other computers than yours. But somewhere in there will be a full version of Microsoft OutLook that can run on your computer⦠if you run it long enough at least. Another inefficiency is t
If you bothered to read the link I said you would find that it specifically addresses the rest of your post including showing that the supreme court was in error. It points out current research into functional proofs for software programs which will in the near future allow for a whole new type of debugger that determines whether a program is free of logical bugs by testing it as a mathematical function and determining if it is a valid proof. The early stages of this research already exists - thought it's not industry ready. In the near future it will be - and it will be impossible to patent software without EXPLICITLY allowing each software patent to also cover ALL of mathematics... insane ? But true.
On an even higher level - all computer programs really ARE just a number, because a number is a function and a function is a number (that's what lambda calculus was CREATED to prove). Numbers cannot be invented, they can only be discovered. Programming is NOT an act of invention but of discovery. Writing a program is a method of discovering a number that suits a programmer's purpose.
This is not abstract or theoretical, it's the very essence of what programming is - though the method used to discover the program deliberately hides what is really happening to make it easier for humans to do the discovery, what is hidden does not cease to be.
There's the second problem with software patents - patent law specifically excludes ANYTHING that is not an invention but a discovery. Changing that means that one must also allow patenting things like natural laws.
So to answer your question: yes we really ARE arguing that software programs are like the laws of physics. They are not invented, they are numbers that are discovered - there is a process by which we discover a number which (in the given context) suits our purposes. This process is deliberately abstracted to resemble processes of things which are innovations - but that is a way to make the discovery easier, it doesn't change what is actually happening. Software cannot be invented, it can only be discovered.
>"Vanishingly," as in "the similarity you speak of is irrelevant."
Actually - quite the inverse - it's not a similiarity but an EXACT REPLICA. No wait, that's still not the right word, it's not even a replica - it's the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING. If you think there is ANY difference between mathematical formulas and software programs then you don't know computational theory at all. There isn't. A software program IS a mathematical formula, it is merely a formula specifically intended for a Turing machine - which itself is a mathematical formula. In fact it is quite possible to rewrite any software program as a mathematical formula, in effect this is exactly what a compiler does. A step further you can actually rewrite any software program using lambda calculus, and the relationship goes the other way as well - there are programming languages that are directly developed FROM lambda calculus (literally the only difference is the choice of symbols - changed for the sake of easier typing: LISP is such a language)
This is not a small resemblence, it's not some outdated "x developed out of y" concept - it's the entire set of laws and theories that allow computers to work, and software to be developed. Software isn't LIKE maths, software doesn't USE maths. Software programs ARE mathematical formulas. Nothing more and NOTHING less.
You sir, are just plain ignorant. Sadly so are all the lawyers who continue to believe otherwise.
I used Debian long, long ago - a while back when moving from Ubuntu I considered it instead of LinuxMint but I ran into a problem. Not having been actively following it - I found there was nowhere I could easily determine which codename refers to which branch - or even what the right choice for a desktop would be. Testing or Unstable ? And what are their names these days - which is which ?
After half and hour of digging and failing to find the information to know what I ought to download... I gave up and installed LinuxMint Ubuntu. I did try Mint Debian but it annoyed me - a lot (was several months ago though - I honestly cannot remember what exactly it did that annoyed me).
Trouble is BSD didn't establish any case law. It was eventually settled out of court. Settlements don't establish precedent. So while indeed it's a relevant case, and the decision may be of interest it is only possible for Google to refer to it as evidence that these kinds of practices are common in the industry and can be resolved with agreements between the parties - it does not give them any legal maneuvering beyond that since there was no judgement made about the case. An out of court settlement is basically a private contract that ends the litigation. It has no legal weight on other cases.
Pray tell what do you suggest is the mechanism through which we advance ? Because I think there are several, the most important one is science.
More-over you didn't define "advance".
So by another definition of advance I could point out that most human progress can be attributed to one simple mechanism: minds evolve much faster than bodies. I am proposing to enhance that process, not dismantle it, but allowing more minds to evolve more efficiently.
Only an idiot thinks that suffering and inequality is the mechanism of advancement. On the contrary it's the greatest impediment to advancement and it's a great testimony to the persistence of human mental evolution that these things did not entirely stem the inexorable advance of our species.
I haven't been a kid in a very long time. Nor can you accuse me of being (that other favorite conservative ad hominem attack) "stuck in academia and never having had to live in the real world" (by which they dismiss all suggestions by academics and professors that their arguments are false out of hand without having to consider their merit) - I work in the private sector, I make a very large salary - in fact at age 32 I'm out-earning my brother who is a chartered accountant.
Now here's the shocker - I've been where YOU are when *I* was a kid. It wasn't the only way in it which I was a selfish little bastard convinced of his own greatness and blind to the fact that without the benefits of privilege I was born into I probably wouldn't have had the opportunities I did and thus almost certainly wouldn't have had the success I did. Make no mistake- I worked very, very hard to get where I am, just like every conservative. But unlike them - I am no longer arrogant enough to think I got here JUST because I worked hard. In fact I can see all around me people who work much, much harder than I ever will and earn far less. Indeed it seems that actual earnings tend to be inversely proportional to actual productiveness because capitalism directs money to investors -not to producers - that's what capitalism MEANS. In so doing it reduces our capacity for entrepeneurship, stifles innovation and technological advancement (which happened DESPITE it, but at a slower rate than it could have), and becomes grossly inefficient by having numerous talents wasted without the opportunity to develop. When somebody is born with a genius level IQ and dies without ever having had a chance to go to school - that is a harm to everybody in society.
What people like me believe in, is a system where that shouldn't happen. And there is a very simple, selfish personal-survival reason for that. Every wasted talent, every person who dies poor makes ME less well-off and reduces my PERSONAL quality of life as well.
Conservatives are so blinkered by their immediate financial state that they don't realize the harm which other people's poverty do to their own (and everybody else's) long-term prosperity.
Now I am almost certain you have no idea what philosophy I embrace. I told you right from the start, I'm not a liberal. So how about you go read about participism and socialist libertarianism.
If you want a serious debate, then you need to first know the position your opponent actually embraces. You may find me a much tougher opponent than most liberals- I've had six years at university being trained to defend my ideas with critical thinking.
I am neither a crook nor an idiot. I'm a professional software engineer with a master's degree in philosophy. I also happen to live in a third world country. I know I went ad hominem but I never used that as evidence for the truth of my arguments, I just mocked the simplistic stupidity of yours - which is not a fallacy, that was just me having some fun at your expense. My actual arguments were reasoned and provable.
Granted I didn't exactly give you a huge amount of factual evidence or indeed a very strong argument, but that's because you are clearly so deep in your cognitive dissonance that you are incapable of considering any alternative evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
A group of students at The University of Pretoria in South Africa did exactly this while I was still studying there, this was circa 2001.
A large part of their motivation was to help build a technology for high-speed networks that were not subject to the state protected telecoms monopoly.
They used almost exactly the same technology, lazer-pointers for sending streams, but I believe they used solar-cells for receivers.
I remember they boasted speeds of over 1mbs which (back then) was incredibly fast (in fact faster than the internal buffers of the P2 computers they used - so that the data actually slowed DOWN after being received) but I don't believe they ever went beyond a single point-to-point connection.
Maybe one of the students who were involved is on slashdot and can give more details ?
How long do you think before they start suing people who hear a song for "storing a copy in biological media."
After-all, if you remember a song, that means you've made a copy - in your neurons. In theory you can listen to the song for ever without paying - just keep remembering it. The more you listen, the less likely you become to EVER forget.
Of course there would be added penalties if you made a further reproduction or public performance possibly of a derived work... that is to say, the MAFIAA will sue you for twice as much if somebody heard you humming a song you once heard....
Actually there have been numerous successful democratic systems that do not have, or in some cases even ALLOW, political parties.
One example is the system that existed in the old Boer Republics in South Africa. Under that system there were no parties. People ran for election as individuals within a specific region. The election winners then became representatives in the national government (which was called the Volksraad - lit. National Council). The members of the council then elected from among themselves a president who acted as the head of state.
This system kept politicians directly accountable to their constituencies and kept campaign influences relatively small.
Personally I would say such a system would ideally be coupled with a clause to make them instantly-recallable so that they have absolutely no power to vote in favor of a single decision that the majority of their constituencies do not support - but that's my socialist-libertarianism that believes we don't need politicians - at most we need mouthpieces for communities to negotiate with other communities on their behalf.
The system was far from perfect - for example the state president had way too much unilateral power in my book - the last president Paul Kruger created one of the world's first national parks against overwhelming opposition both from the population and the council but he could go ahead and do it anyway.
In retrospect, he did a very good thing there - but he could just as easily have done some very bad things as recalling the president even if he ignored the council was very difficult, this would need additional checks and balances.
Ironically it could be argued that Kruger's biggest mistake was to declare war on Britain (though it can be shown that Britain forced him to do so and he had no real choice about it) - but that mistake was roundly supported by the majority of the council and the bulk of the population - so maintaining high degrees of power for voters is not a guarantee against mistakes, I just think it's better than the alternative.
In the end, I am tied to a belief that the only just form of governance is self-governance. The only people who should be allowed to MAKE a law are the ones who have to live under it.
With regard to your sig... wouldn't you consider the annoyance of regularly changing it to be larger than the annoyance of ignoring an occasional reply to it ? ...see what I did there ?
I'm the child of two right-handed people - and I'm neither, I'm one of the 1% ambidextrous people - but I prefer to write with my left hand.
60Hz is still nearly 3 times the 24Hz that movies use.
>No, I like Windows 7 and still have an unwrapped copy of XP in case the world ends.
I don't see how the wrapping will help... there aren't many world-end scenarios where anybody will be enforcing copyright licenses anymore... well unless you take yours from the more extreme corporate-rule cyberpunk stories of the 80's - but those don't exactly count as "world ended" in my book, they are just "world radically changed for the worse".
Either way they didn't happen and probably won't. They were based on a premise of the governments disappearing (or at least becoming irrelevant) and corporations ruling the world - but that didn't happen, if only because the corporations found the government to be much too useful as a tool.
But is it still the norm ? Gamers are used to watching and participating in scenes are much higher FPS rates... for those of us who were born after 1980, this is better... tv looks flickery and annoying. ... our cellphones have higher resolution than that, why is it only being upgraded now and by so little ? The latter one inspired a wonderful XKCD (just so I'm not accused of plagiarism) :P
We had the same issue with HD
I gotta hand it to you, you got guts kid.
Aaah, but your experiment has no natural selection.
When you add a selective element that actively culls the population of bad mutations the good ones not only win out but become dominant.
In fact this exact process is the mechanism we use to do evolve learning into neural networks. Your exact experiment - only with a selective pressure added.
It gets better we've used the process to evolve HARDWARE using programmable logic chips. The chips were initially programmed with random junk. Then a criteria was chosen, the chips that were best at the task were kept and replicated while those that were worst were discarded. ... nobody has a clue how the result works ! It does work. But we don't know HOW exactly. No electronic engineer would try to build a frequency differentiator with 100 logic chips (they'd build an oscilator) but it was evolved from them. Then it was found that 24 chips could be removed, they weren't electrically connected. Voila... but now get this, there is another 18 chips that are not electrically connected to the circuit EITHER - but if you take any of those out, the circuit stops working !
Within just 1000 generations we had circuits that could complete complicated tasks.
One specific experiment I know of used the task of distinguishing two frequencies. The interesting thing is
We have no idea why, the guess is that they have some physical effect on the circuit, perhaps producing a weak natural capacitor or gaining current through induction - but we have no real idea. It's theorized that the circuit works by looping it's power repeatedly over a long "wire" through the chips to slow it down to the same speed as the lower frequency, and then compare the frequency to the result... but we really have no clue.
This was the original pioneering work in the field by Adrian Thompson but evolvable hardware is now a solid engineering concept. Try reading up on it, it's really fascinating geeky stuff !
So in fact- the problem you describe doesn't say anything about evolution. You proved that random mutation by itself will mostly harm a species, but you left selection out entirely. Whether that selection is human guided (as it would have to be in your experiment) or natural (as it is in well nature) it has to exist - and when you combine selection with mutation you get evolution.
So guess what, this "only a theory" has been experimentally PROVEN in thousands of settings, even if you've always been told it wasn't.
They have a stock response for these: "adaptation within a species is not evolution. Species can adapt and change, both from human choices (breeding) or natural pressures, but they cannot change into an entirely different species".
I don't agree in the least, but I've heard the argument so I know how it goes.
Your species is "a strain of bacteria that lives in the gut of insects" ?
Yet you've mastered the art of using slashdot ?
Well let me be the first to say: I for one welcome our new intelligent bacterial overlords.
Ultimately I think the best solution actually is password wallets in local code - at least for web-authentication (I'm not sure it's practical for anything else).
A single password unlocks a program on your own machine, which supplies the passwords to various webservices - and those are completely random with significant entropy.
You, yourself, don't even know your facebook password - but you know the password for the program that does.
This means that you no longer have a memory concern for any passwords that are used online - only somebody with physical access to your box can get into those.
What I don't know is how strong the generated passwords in wallets really are. It would be interesting to go look at them.
A 40 character string that is entirely made up of random characters is near impossible to type or remember, but also has massive entropy that makes it hard for automated attacks to succeed, while a much simpler easy-to-remember-and-type password is actually used, but that password cannot be broken unless somebody already has local access to your own machine (at least physical access).
An interesting permutation would be to give some additional protection to such a password container by making it able to (optionally) detect and prevent remote-execution of itself, so if you used say a linux box and somebody managed to get into it via SSH or VNC the program would refuse to run that way (optional - because for some people that's how they access their boxes).
Detecting whether a program is being called locally or remotely over systems deliberately designed to transparently hide this is left as an exercise for the reader.
That joke stopped being funny years ago - solar powered LED flashlights are on the market - I own one.
Sound useless ? It's not. It has a battery - during daytime it charges the battery from solar power, when you use it at night, the battery powers the LED lights.
It's a wonderfully useful tool on camping trips. As a bonus - since the battery isn't replaced during the lifetime of the device it has much less of a pollution (battery-acid) impact (granted this may be less of a consideration in some countries -mine has no systems in place for proper disposal/recycling of battery cells and people just toss them in the trash when they are used up).
That LEDs have become so powerful while remaining so efficient has led to us being able to do a lot of really cool things we weren't able to do even quite recently. :D
Frankly compared to things like LED based airport runway signal lights a solar powered flashlight isn't even all that impressive
http://xkcd.com/936/
Truth be told the passwords we actively encourage are no stronger than what he used.
If you want a really strong password, use a sentence of random words. Password length matters far more than password content - this is a simply provable fact - too bad hardly anybody in security realizes it.
The supreme court was just plain wrong. The US law specifically excludes maths from patentability, not just "abstract" maths.
These papers ought to be filed as friend-of-the-court briefs in these cases, so that judges can actually know what they are really dealing with.
But now I'll really bake your noodle. I wrote this blog post about a year ago - but I'll copy and paste it for you with a link to the original at the end - I set out to prove that software is always abstract, and succeeded... it was ridiculously easy. I am happy to live in a country where software is specifically illegal to patent (and the loopholes were blocked) - but if I ever faced a a software patent court case (perhaps after a law change or emigration) - this would be the basis of my defense.
------------
Lawyers have successfully managed to argue that computer programs are not mathematics and thus should not be covered by the exclusion of mathematics from patentable material. This comes from a deep misunderstanding of how computers really work â" particularly as implementations of a universal turing machine. Some great papers on this have been written â" including this one at groklaw. That explains in detail how computers really work and why all computer programs are simply mathematical functions â" and even why all mathematical functions are really just numbers.
A great quote from it is this one: âoeProgramming a computer is, essentially, just discovering a number that suits the programmers wishesâ.
The thing is â" for somebody whose only understanding of computation theory is even that paper- this will seem like a bit of a leap. After all the process of writing code is creative, involves design and innovative thinking â" surely this wonderful process cannot just be âoediscovering a numberâ â" after all â" you can do that just by counting â" this is WHY itâ(TM)s unpatentableâ¦
What I want to do with this post is to â" very simply â" explain why that really is true. Iâ(TM)m going to give you a very simple computer program. Iâ(TM)ll write it in pseudocode so non-programmers can read it, but it can be implemented easily in any programming language and run â" and in most of them will take less than about 10 lines of code to do:
Make the vairable X equal to 0;
Start a loop here:
Write the binary representation of X into a new file.
increase X by 1
continue the above loop until the program is interrupted by deliberately killing it (an infinite loop);
With this simple program â" I can create an exact copy of every single program ever written and â" this is important â" every single program that CAN ever be written.
This is because any compiled program becomes a file filled with zeros and ones â" to a computer, thatâ(TM)s just a big number (the whole computation theory and lambda calculus etc. that explains how a number can BE an algorithm is needed to know how this happens â" but the important thing is â" itâ(TM)s a number). This program will store every number that can exist into a file â" by just counting.
The process is very ineffective for a few reasons: firstly almost every program it produces wonâ(TM)t run, the vast majority of numbers do not correspond to useful programs â" in fact only an incredibly small subset of them do â" but they are still numbers you can count to, and they are still numbers my program WILL produce. Secondly there is no real way to determine the useful programs from the ones that arenâ(TM)t- you have to manually try to run all of them â" and see for yourself what happens. More-over for every program in there, youâ(TM)ll produce thousands of copies â" some that will only run on other computers than yours. But somewhere in there will be a full version of Microsoft OutLook that can run on your computer⦠if you run it long enough at least.
Another inefficiency is t
If you bothered to read the link I said you would find that it specifically addresses the rest of your post including showing that the supreme court was in error. It points out current research into functional proofs for software programs which will in the near future allow for a whole new type of debugger that determines whether a program is free of logical bugs by testing it as a mathematical function and determining if it is a valid proof. ... insane ? But true.
The early stages of this research already exists - thought it's not industry ready. In the near future it will be - and it will be impossible to patent software without EXPLICITLY allowing each software patent to also cover ALL of mathematics
On an even higher level - all computer programs really ARE just a number, because a number is a function and a function is a number (that's what lambda calculus was CREATED to prove). Numbers cannot be invented, they can only be discovered. Programming is NOT an act of invention but of discovery. Writing a program is a method of discovering a number that suits a programmer's purpose.
This is not abstract or theoretical, it's the very essence of what programming is - though the method used to discover the program deliberately hides what is really happening to make it easier for humans to do the discovery, what is hidden does not cease to be.
There's the second problem with software patents - patent law specifically excludes ANYTHING that is not an invention but a discovery. Changing that means that one must also allow patenting things like natural laws.
So to answer your question: yes we really ARE arguing that software programs are like the laws of physics. They are not invented, they are numbers that are discovered - there is a process by which we discover a number which (in the given context) suits our purposes. This process is deliberately abstracted to resemble processes of things which are innovations - but that is a way to make the discovery easier, it doesn't change what is actually happening.
Software cannot be invented, it can only be discovered.
>"Vanishingly," as in "the similarity you speak of is irrelevant."
Actually - quite the inverse - it's not a similiarity but an EXACT REPLICA. No wait, that's still not the right word, it's not even a replica - it's the EXACT SAME FUCKING THING.
If you think there is ANY difference between mathematical formulas and software programs then you don't know computational theory at all. There isn't. A software program IS a mathematical formula, it is merely a formula specifically intended for a Turing machine - which itself is a mathematical formula.
In fact it is quite possible to rewrite any software program as a mathematical formula, in effect this is exactly what a compiler does. A step further you can actually rewrite any software program using lambda calculus, and the relationship goes the other way as well - there are programming languages that are directly developed FROM lambda calculus (literally the only difference is the choice of symbols - changed for the sake of easier typing: LISP is such a language)
This is not a small resemblence, it's not some outdated "x developed out of y" concept - it's the entire set of laws and theories that allow computers to work, and software to be developed. Software isn't LIKE maths, software doesn't USE maths. Software programs ARE mathematical formulas. Nothing more and NOTHING less.
You sir, are just plain ignorant. Sadly so are all the lawyers who continue to believe otherwise.
Detailed source: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091111151305785
I used Debian long, long ago - a while back when moving from Ubuntu I considered it instead of LinuxMint but I ran into a problem.
Not having been actively following it - I found there was nowhere I could easily determine which codename refers to which branch - or even what the right choice for a desktop would be.
Testing or Unstable ? And what are their names these days - which is which ?
After half and hour of digging and failing to find the information to know what I ought to download ... I gave up and installed LinuxMint Ubuntu. I did try Mint Debian but it annoyed me - a lot (was several months ago though - I honestly cannot remember what exactly it did that annoyed me).
>>Frankly I don't think anyone dies understanding quantum mechanics.
>There may be a certain cat that understands it...
Yeah but the cat's not dead. Or alive. or ... er.. /blink ] dead.
Shroedinger's cat is [blink] not [
Trouble is BSD didn't establish any case law. It was eventually settled out of court. Settlements don't establish precedent.
So while indeed it's a relevant case, and the decision may be of interest it is only possible for Google to refer to it as evidence that these kinds of practices are common in the industry and can be resolved with agreements between the parties - it does not give them any legal maneuvering beyond that since there was no judgement made about the case.
An out of court settlement is basically a private contract that ends the litigation. It has no legal weight on other cases.
Pray tell what do you suggest is the mechanism through which we advance ? Because I think there are several, the most important one is science.
More-over you didn't define "advance".
So by another definition of advance I could point out that most human progress can be attributed to one simple mechanism: minds evolve much faster than bodies. I am proposing to enhance that process, not dismantle it, but allowing more minds to evolve more efficiently.
Only an idiot thinks that suffering and inequality is the mechanism of advancement. On the contrary it's the greatest impediment to advancement and it's a great testimony to the persistence of human mental evolution that these things did not entirely stem the inexorable advance of our species.
I haven't been a kid in a very long time. Nor can you accuse me of being (that other favorite conservative ad hominem attack) "stuck in academia and never having had to live in the real world" (by which they dismiss all suggestions by academics and professors that their arguments are false out of hand without having to consider their merit) - I work in the private sector, I make a very large salary - in fact at age 32 I'm out-earning my brother who is a chartered accountant.
Now here's the shocker - I've been where YOU are when *I* was a kid. It wasn't the only way in it which I was a selfish little bastard convinced of his own greatness and blind to the fact that without the benefits of privilege I was born into I probably wouldn't have had the opportunities I did and thus almost certainly wouldn't have had the success I did.
Make no mistake- I worked very, very hard to get where I am, just like every conservative. But unlike them - I am no longer arrogant enough to think I got here JUST because I worked hard. In fact I can see all around me people who work much, much harder than I ever will and earn far less. Indeed it seems that actual earnings tend to be inversely proportional to actual productiveness because capitalism directs money to investors -not to producers - that's what capitalism MEANS.
In so doing it reduces our capacity for entrepeneurship, stifles innovation and technological advancement (which happened DESPITE it, but at a slower rate than it could have), and becomes grossly inefficient by having numerous talents wasted without the opportunity to develop.
When somebody is born with a genius level IQ and dies without ever having had a chance to go to school - that is a harm to everybody in society.
What people like me believe in, is a system where that shouldn't happen. And there is a very simple, selfish personal-survival reason for that. Every wasted talent, every person who dies poor makes ME less well-off and reduces my PERSONAL quality of life as well.
Conservatives are so blinkered by their immediate financial state that they don't realize the harm which other people's poverty do to their own (and everybody else's) long-term prosperity.
Now I am almost certain you have no idea what philosophy I embrace. I told you right from the start, I'm not a liberal. So how about you go read about participism and socialist libertarianism.
If you want a serious debate, then you need to first know the position your opponent actually embraces. You may find me a much tougher opponent than most liberals- I've had six years at university being trained to defend my ideas with critical thinking.
I am neither a crook nor an idiot. I'm a professional software engineer with a master's degree in philosophy. I also happen to live in a third world country.
I know I went ad hominem but I never used that as evidence for the truth of my arguments, I just mocked the simplistic stupidity of yours - which is not a fallacy, that was just me having some fun at your expense. My actual arguments were reasoned and provable.
Granted I didn't exactly give you a huge amount of factual evidence or indeed a very strong argument, but that's because you are clearly so deep in your cognitive dissonance that you are incapable of considering any alternative evidence.
There is nothing self-destructive about thinking that a species that has advanced as fast as we have should continue to do so.