Wikipedia, as linked in the summary: "Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment."
I take it you've never heard of apprenticeships? For humour's sake, here in Soviet Canada at the high school I went to, there was a for-credit cooking class that actually produced the specials that the cafeteria sold, and most of the regular cafeteria staff were also students.
More important than that: the font samples provided online were wrong. The test was a comparison between Comic Sans and Bodoni, which is a modernist serif typeface commonly used in the titles of fashion magazines and for the main text in (ugh) my physiology textbook. I had wondered why, since its elegance is grating after a while—I guess I know now, which means this study is already old news. Wikipedia on Bodoni.
But both Japan and the United States grew out of that role by becoming IP-based. China doesn't have anyone to hand it off to—but then, they're large enough to support the best of both worlds, and the rest of the world will have its money drained from it over time.
The *AA are American companies in that they control substantial portions of the American government, press, and culture. What is bad for them is bad for the overall economy. There aren't many big American businesses that do manufacturing any more—as John Sculley said in an interview posted here a few days ago, most American companies are advertising and some form of R&D, media production, retail, pharmaceuticals... They don't produce anything that can't be undermined by knowledge of the schematics, or the manufacturing process, or source code, or possession of the audio/video data. It's all information.
While that's certainly true, China has demonstrated their interest in harming intellectual property-based American businesses as well, for instance by stealing trade secrets. General software and media piracy is a double win for them.
That's not a disagreement, merely a differing. It's only a disagreement when your two choices are mutually exclusive—I want to go study for my midterm and people keep replying to my comment, for example...
I don't personally hold the "copyright maximalist" viewpoint, as you put it, but I urge you to not dismiss this as some kind of anarchist ideal situation. Remember all of those ugly stories about the Chinese government stealing the trade secrets of US companies? How about breaking into journalists' accounts at Google? And, on top of that, even if some (or "many") party members don't endorse the Great Firewall, it's still there and talking about Tienanmen Square is still illegal—and at least for a period, smoking was promoted as "healthy" because the government considered it a potential birth control option. This isn't merely culture that has different views on information security and privacy from us; this is a government—an organization made up of people who happen to live within that culture—which has demonstrated an active and repeated interest in manipulating information and undermining other countries.
Maybe, sure, the guy selling seedy DVDs with the inkjet label on the corner is culturally just not big on respecting the design work of others, absolutely. Same for the architects who built copies of various European landmarks to populate rich Chinese suburbs with. But it becomes a very, very different matter when the state acknowledges it as an end goal, especially a state that so consistently disrespects other countries when the culture of its people is so heavily driven by respect.
That's a fair point, but again you must consider the Official Sanctionage that's going on here. This is a state-run newspaper, not merely popular opinion. Given that the state has the duty to set the polite status quo, especially in far-East cultures like China, this says quite a bit more than the abundance of counterfeiting does.
...only when it benefits them. Consider how Baidu beat Google: by offering free searches of copyright-infringing content in addition to the legitimate services that Google provides. If I'm reading the stereotypes correctly, the Chinese government has no interest in protecting IP rights, especially those of American companies, since it ultimately seeks to undermine the American economy by devaluing it. So this really is towing the party line, if you assume that the movies, software and music are all seen as tied to America and American-allied countries (Japan, South Korea...) from the Chinese perspective.
No, Anton simulated one millisecond over the course of a hundred days. The previous recordholder took roughly the same time to do a hundredth of the work. (This was probably the RIKEN MDGRAPE-3, but again, documentation is le sparse.)
You've missed the part about alternatives. I gave a more detailed breakdown elsewhere in this comment thread, but it looks more like an online store with backup plans for out-of-stock items—except these item descriptions need to be copyright-protected, so I guess "out of stock" really means "region-locked".
Let me take a shot using an online store metaphor...
1. "Available sources of information are accessed" = server database query
2. "Components are extracted, labeled, and formed into discrete units called contexts" = entries from the database query are converted into objects in memory with IDs?
3. "A user selects and rearranges context labels and their associated contents" = user picks items from a catalog or menu and can rearrange them?
4. "Contexts are selected and combined into new information structures called alternates, which are combinable with contexts into preferred situations." = the items that the user picked (or possibly other items) are grabbed as possible alternatives to the user's primary choices, perhaps if a product is out of stock. Backup plans are made based on these, and ranked by how close they approximate the user's original desire.
5. "The preferred situations in turn are combinable with the foregoing components into meta-situations." = The rest of the text doesn't mention meta-situations again... I presume this is about optimizing the search for the best possible alternative when the user's first choices don't work, by forming an associative data structure.
6. "All components have labels; labels and their associated contents are interchangeable movable and copyable at the levels of these information structures" = something like SOAP I think—objects are accessible through a uniform backend whether they've been fetched or not. Not exactly a big deal and I'm sure uttering in a patent this infringes on five hundred other patents.
7. "When a label is invoked and manipulated, its contents or description is simultaneously displayed" = obvious. You want to display data, you pass its ID to a display function.
8. "Each information structure can be rearranged into one or more models which can be displayed by user selection, and models can be displayed at varying levels of detail." = the user's primary choices, products in the catalogue, alternatives to products, combinations of alternatives to products, and a navigable system of combinations of alternatives to products can all "be displayed at varying levels of detail".
9. "With built-in copyright accounting, commerical contorl remains with information owners, while operational use is centralized in each user." = I think at this point they're talking less about an online store and more about a classic case of a DRM-heavy media server. My gut reaction here is to say 'but wait, why would a media server need to have alternatives to users' selections?' and my guess would be things like region-locking or servers that are incomplete mirrors of each other and don't actually have all of the media in store.
So not only are these "Webvention" scum demanding money for a trivial technology, they're using a completely irrelevant patent to do it. Maybe they couldn't read the piece of shit?
Unfortunately, most MBAs are beyond hope. Sure, in our polite society we like to shuffle them along, giving them middle management positions and places in government bureaucracy, but we have yet to understand the fundamental problem that drives people towards getting an MBA.
No, regexes came from qed, of which ed is a clone. qedx was a much better line editor with a far more complete feature set and user-friendly ways of saying "?".
Ed was never pioneering in any sense—if you're going to be romantic about the past, at least be right. It's essentially a minimalist clone of qed made by and for, as usual, Unix guys who couldn't run the real deal on their low-end PDPs. qed/qedx, for the record, had all sorts of bells and whistles, including at one point regexes.
Slashdot Mirror
By which I mean the summary is in error.
Wikipedia, as linked in the summary: "Its secure government communications work has involved the NSA in numerous technology areas, including the design of specialized communications hardware and software, production of dedicated semiconductors (at the Ft. Meade chip fabrication plant), and advanced cryptography research. The agency contracts with the private sector in the fields of research and equipment."
Spectrum IEEE: "The DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive."
I'm betting this statement is now bullshit.
"...We promise we won't get caught next time."
I take it you've never heard of apprenticeships? For humour's sake, here in Soviet Canada at the high school I went to, there was a for-credit cooking class that actually produced the specials that the cafeteria sold, and most of the regular cafeteria staff were also students.
I've got four words for you: patents, patents, patents, patents.
More important than that: the font samples provided online were wrong. The test was a comparison between Comic Sans and Bodoni, which is a modernist serif typeface commonly used in the titles of fashion magazines and for the main text in (ugh) my physiology textbook. I had wondered why, since its elegance is grating after a while—I guess I know now, which means this study is already old news. Wikipedia on Bodoni.
But both Japan and the United States grew out of that role by becoming IP-based. China doesn't have anyone to hand it off to—but then, they're large enough to support the best of both worlds, and the rest of the world will have its money drained from it over time.
The *AA are American companies in that they control substantial portions of the American government, press, and culture. What is bad for them is bad for the overall economy. There aren't many big American businesses that do manufacturing any more—as John Sculley said in an interview posted here a few days ago, most American companies are advertising and some form of R&D, media production, retail, pharmaceuticals... They don't produce anything that can't be undermined by knowledge of the schematics, or the manufacturing process, or source code, or possession of the audio/video data. It's all information.
But they're in those trade agreements: see WTO.
While that's certainly true, China has demonstrated their interest in harming intellectual property-based American businesses as well, for instance by stealing trade secrets. General software and media piracy is a double win for them.
That's not a disagreement, merely a differing. It's only a disagreement when your two choices are mutually exclusive—I want to go study for my midterm and people keep replying to my comment, for example...
I don't personally hold the "copyright maximalist" viewpoint, as you put it, but I urge you to not dismiss this as some kind of anarchist ideal situation. Remember all of those ugly stories about the Chinese government stealing the trade secrets of US companies? How about breaking into journalists' accounts at Google? And, on top of that, even if some (or "many") party members don't endorse the Great Firewall, it's still there and talking about Tienanmen Square is still illegal—and at least for a period, smoking was promoted as "healthy" because the government considered it a potential birth control option. This isn't merely culture that has different views on information security and privacy from us; this is a government—an organization made up of people who happen to live within that culture—which has demonstrated an active and repeated interest in manipulating information and undermining other countries.
Maybe, sure, the guy selling seedy DVDs with the inkjet label on the corner is culturally just not big on respecting the design work of others, absolutely. Same for the architects who built copies of various European landmarks to populate rich Chinese suburbs with. But it becomes a very, very different matter when the state acknowledges it as an end goal, especially a state that so consistently disrespects other countries when the culture of its people is so heavily driven by respect.
That's a fair point, but again you must consider the Official Sanctionage that's going on here. This is a state-run newspaper, not merely popular opinion. Given that the state has the duty to set the polite status quo, especially in far-East cultures like China, this says quite a bit more than the abundance of counterfeiting does.
...only when it benefits them. Consider how Baidu beat Google: by offering free searches of copyright-infringing content in addition to the legitimate services that Google provides. If I'm reading the stereotypes correctly, the Chinese government has no interest in protecting IP rights, especially those of American companies, since it ultimately seeks to undermine the American economy by devaluing it. So this really is towing the party line, if you assume that the movies, software and music are all seen as tied to America and American-allied countries (Japan, South Korea...) from the Chinese perspective.
TFA includes a Scribd copy of the appeal. "State of California".
It sounds like you're thinking of some variant of the prisoner's dilemma, which is a classic, basic example of a non-zero-sum game.
You win.
No, Anton simulated one millisecond over the course of a hundred days. The previous recordholder took roughly the same time to do a hundredth of the work. (This was probably the RIKEN MDGRAPE-3, but again, documentation is le sparse.)
You've missed the part about alternatives. I gave a more detailed breakdown elsewhere in this comment thread, but it looks more like an online store with backup plans for out-of-stock items—except these item descriptions need to be copyright-protected, so I guess "out of stock" really means "region-locked".
Let me take a shot using an online store metaphor...
1. "Available sources of information are accessed" = server database query
2. "Components are extracted, labeled, and formed into discrete units called contexts" = entries from the database query are converted into objects in memory with IDs?
3. "A user selects and rearranges context labels and their associated contents" = user picks items from a catalog or menu and can rearrange them?
4. "Contexts are selected and combined into new information structures called alternates, which are combinable with contexts into preferred situations." = the items that the user picked (or possibly other items) are grabbed as possible alternatives to the user's primary choices, perhaps if a product is out of stock. Backup plans are made based on these, and ranked by how close they approximate the user's original desire.
5. "The preferred situations in turn are combinable with the foregoing components into meta-situations." = The rest of the text doesn't mention meta-situations again... I presume this is about optimizing the search for the best possible alternative when the user's first choices don't work, by forming an associative data structure.
6. "All components have labels; labels and their associated contents are interchangeable movable and copyable at the levels of these information structures" = something like SOAP I think—objects are accessible through a uniform backend whether they've been fetched or not. Not exactly a big deal and I'm sure uttering in a patent this infringes on five hundred other patents.
7. "When a label is invoked and manipulated, its contents or description is simultaneously displayed" = obvious. You want to display data, you pass its ID to a display function.
8. "Each information structure can be rearranged into one or more models which can be displayed by user selection, and models can be displayed at varying levels of detail." = the user's primary choices, products in the catalogue, alternatives to products, combinations of alternatives to products, and a navigable system of combinations of alternatives to products can all "be displayed at varying levels of detail".
9. "With built-in copyright accounting, commerical contorl remains with information owners, while operational use is centralized in each user." = I think at this point they're talking less about an online store and more about a classic case of a DRM-heavy media server. My gut reaction here is to say 'but wait, why would a media server need to have alternatives to users' selections?' and my guess would be things like region-locking or servers that are incomplete mirrors of each other and don't actually have all of the media in store.
So not only are these "Webvention" scum demanding money for a trivial technology, they're using a completely irrelevant patent to do it. Maybe they couldn't read the piece of shit?
Unfortunately, most MBAs are beyond hope. Sure, in our polite society we like to shuffle them along, giving them middle management positions and places in government bureaucracy, but we have yet to understand the fundamental problem that drives people towards getting an MBA.
They actually prevented that by hand-coding the categories that NELL can put things in. It's so basic as to be trivial as to be pointless.
No, regexes came from qed, of which ed is a clone. qedx was a much better line editor with a far more complete feature set and user-friendly ways of saying "?".
I only said "not pioneering" because the TFS says it's pioneering ;)
Ed was never pioneering in any sense—if you're going to be romantic about the past, at least be right. It's essentially a minimalist clone of qed made by and for, as usual, Unix guys who couldn't run the real deal on their low-end PDPs. qed/qedx, for the record, had all sorts of bells and whistles, including at one point regexes.