Has anyone read this? Because I have. This is an algorithm only- a step by step procedure for solving a problem. The fact that's it's computer implemented is irrelevant. It's just an algorithm.
These patents are beyond ridiculous, they represent a mafioso style shakedown racket of the right to program a computer and a company-size-based monopoly on all progress and economic participation.
You'd assume that a system that destructive would eventually have to cause such economic damage to even the people who fund and benefit from it that it would just have to be changed, but that assumption wouldn't be taking into account U.S. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
After being informed that the loaded gun of software patents was now pointed at the industry that finances and supports the manufacture of that gun, the banking industry, Sessions promptly sponsored and shepherded through Congress a bill that exempted the banking industry from software patents emanating from the likes of
DataTreasury -- which has only three employees, according to the company -- claims most of the rights to that technology, and has sued dozens of large banks alleging patent infringement.
Working closely with allies in the industry, the Alabama Republican championed an amendment that would allow banks to avoid paying what an industry executive says could amount to billions of dollars a year in royalties. The royalties, on a technology that converts paper checks into electronic images, are being claimed by DataTreasury Corp. of Plano, Texas, which holds a handful of patents related to the process.
So we can't even count on the the disease to finally kill the host because the host is to be artificially kept alive by bitchboys like Sessions.
So let's grasp the full scope of what's going on here.
The Big Players like Amazon, Microsoft IBM etc aided and abetted at every turn by the banks are creating and financing a system which is so fundamentally toxic to economic participation, even they can't survive it. The only way they continue to exist is through special legislative action tailored to nothing but their exemption from the consequences of the system they create.
Meanwhile, Sessions et. al. are busy legislating a system into existence which is so toxic that even the banking industry can't survive it, and it therefore needs to go to Sessions- cash in hand- in order to obtain a special dispensation from The King.
readers may be interested to know that the Junior Senator from Alabama has received just over $100K from commercial banks in the last five years according to http://www.opensecrets.org./
So who's extorting whom? Are the trolls extorting the banks or are the banks and Amazon extorting would be competitors, or is Sessions extorting the banks?
It reads like some sort graduate student's thesis of self-stabilizing self-extortion rings where the simulation iterates until it finds its most stable, lowest energy state that nothing but pitchforks and torches can get it out of.
Government regulation of industry gives industry the opportunity to use government to increase the cost of entry to new competition. They achieve this through the devices of campaign contributions and a revolving door of government to industry employment.
There. Fixed that for you.
The "All government regulation is has unforseen consequences worse than the original problem "meme is all done now.
Why should/. readers restrict themselves to thinking in bumpersticker size chunks of information when the fully formed thought bears more actionable information and is more interesting to boot.
The perfect instantiation of no government regulation has a name; it's called "Somolia".
At a time when the world is facing it's greatest collective threat ever, global warming, and we are unable to act collectively against it because of the "anti-regulation" meme, it's hard to understand why that meme gets any play here on/. , home of some of the most sophisticated thinkers and do-ers online.
Just another case of patriotic fervour and artificial fear being used to paint the world as a scarier and more dangerous place than I believe it is.
OK so reassure us. Tell us why it's not possible for terrorists to deploy these same said techniques against populations.
Your comment implies that you know things people in the fields of microbiology and law enforcement aren't aware of or are thinking about wrongly, since they spend a lot of time worrying about just this topic:
Sorry but the you let the terrorist win meme is being strongly misapplied in this case given the potential downside.
Don't get me wrong, terrorists could kill a few thousand people a year in the US and I wouldn't approve the curtailment of one civil liberty one iota as a response.
But the level of destruction we're talking about here is unsurvivable, both as a nation and as for all intents and purposes as a species .
Have you ever considered what would be the fate of those left behind if 2/3 of the population just disappeared? Do you really think the other 1/3 would be able to fill the jobs, understand the technology they're left with so as to prevent nuclear meltdowns, keep the lights and all the safety systems that are at all the labs and facilities going?
Security isn't designed to keep going unmanned indefinitely. The remaining population would be subject to repeated Chernobyls , release of every kind of pathogen and pollutant into the environment, etc. etc.
Sorry but the first organizing principle of any society is mere brute survival. After that comes civil liberties and civil society. If we have constructed a civil society which permits a self-inflicted death sentence to be imposed by the will of just a few individuals, then our civil society has failed to keep up with the changing technological landscape. This has to be categorized as failure of civil society through refusal to face reality. Failure at the hands of just another form of religious fundamentalism if you think about it.
This is the first time I've seen a clear expression of the the dominant dilemma we're facing as a species in the open press. This dilemma will come to dominate not just our national security, but also our academic institutions, our manufacturing, our privacy laws and our civil liberties.. every aspect of our lives. Ultimately it will inevitably lead us to change who we are in a very fundamental way.
The dilemma is this:
The number of people needed to inflict damage on others is dropping at an alarming rate, tending towards the limit of...one
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the number of people that damage can be inflicted upon more or less simultaneously is rising at an equally alarming rate, tending towards the limit of...everyone
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the extent of the damage they can inflict is rising at an alarming rate, tending towards... death.
If C is your civil liberties then we can put this in the form of an equation thus:
C= (number of terrorists required) / [(victim number)^2 * (degree of damage) ]
Where the power of two reflects the fact that if death is inflicted on a few thousand , a few hundred million will come to the erroneous conclusion that they're next.
In a nutshell, your civil liberties are inversely proportional to how much mayhem how few people can produce against how many.
Nuclear proliferation is a walk in a (dark and dangerous) park (in an admittedly bad neighborhood) compared to what microbiology offers the aspiring terrorist / religious misanthrope.
There is no turning off the fount of knowledge, which is not to say we shouldn't try, because there IS buying time and time is what we need in order to begin to level the inequality which exists between our knowledge and control over nature and our knowledge and control over our own nature.
When just anyone can create a doomsday machine, then no one can be trusted. That's where this goes. The only possible defense against this is more detailed knowledge of the potential destructiveness implied in the capabilities of microbiology- for the purpose of countering it- and more knowledge of the individual personalities in every nation who would study this and related fields.
We need more knowledge of what everyone is doing in certain fields. That is where this has to go, at least. It's not perfect, but it buys us time.
And with that time we have to acquire knowledge of why people are fanatical. What about some humans leads them to the conclusion that everyone should die for the sake of some cause. What about humans causes them to to be illiberal in the broad sense of that term?
Let's just say it. It's not latte sipping, Volvo driving, paper recycling liberals who write their congressmen about danger of global warming who want to splice their way to a doomsday tweety.
It's religious conservatives and adherents of other irrational belief systems like Aum Shinrikyo and or the equally religious Mao adherents. It's the authoritarian personality type, a topic science needs to study more.
In the Middle East that means religious fundamentalists. In the US that means religious fundamentalists... Christian Dominionists and other cults, and secular right wing anti-collectivist extremists like Timothy McVeigh. Even the Koch brothers can be seen as extremist terrorists because what is the continued release of C02 into the atmosphere but a form of religious violence against billions of innocent people?
So what's wrong with these people and how can we prevent it? That's the million dollar question. What is it about their makeup that enables them to blind themselves, or just not care, about the real world suffering they inflict on people-who-are-not-them, while at the same time running arms outstretched to the promise of some grand future paradise?
We have the concept of the sociopathic personality and that's a part of the puzzle, but lots of sociopaths confine themselves to livin
It is an unproven statement to say that Wall Streeters and the mortgage loan companies did not commit crimes, since you don't know that.
Only in the rarefied and technical proceedings of a court room are you considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In fact, people in general may know full well you're guilty and certainly people close to the executives know they're guilty and know exactly what they did and how they did it.
Your claim runs up against a huge amount of circumstantial evidence involving people like Angelo Mozilo. But see Google for details. Or go see Inside Job, or read All The Devils Are Here
Den of Thieves, Too Big To Fail.... in fact we are fortunate to live in a time when there is an embarrassing surfeit of talented investigative journalism documenting exactly the kind of corruption OWS is complaining about.
You really owe it to yourself and your fellow countrymen to sit down in your easy chair, get nice and comfy, pour yourself a cup of cocoa and break the spine of a book or two so that you can be an informed member of the electorate.
To operationalize the point, if you were to be given a chance by a magic genie to win a ten million dollars if you just guessed correctly whether Mozilo were actually guilty of crimes- things like conspiracy, mortgage fraud, contract fraud, corruption of public officials etc. etc. which choice would you make? Remember, the genie knows what the truth is.
Your of claim of having "committed no crime" which was already on the books is not particularly credible and people are behaving as though it was not particularly credible.
What you can say is that they did not get caught, yet, or even more precisely, DAs have not believed that they can gain evidence sufficient to convict them in a court of law. But that's a different thing from being innocent.
We have too many reports of people being told their mortgage contract said one thing when it really said another. That my friend, is a crime, nothwithstanding the fact that it's a crime which is hard to prove.
It's not possible for GE to have the chief lobbyist for tax law be seen literally on his knees in front of Charlie Rangel begging for Rangel to change his mind on a bill,. then have Rangel change his mind, then have GE pay zero...ZERO taxes to the government as a result of that bills passage then have Rangel be found guilty of 11 charges by the House Ethics Committee and not conclude, as OWS has, the government is fundamentally corrupt. .
It's impossible for a similarly situated John McCain to be "lobbied" by a young blonde "lobbyist" whose closeness and non-stop accompaniment of the Senator panicked his handlers during the 2004 Presidntial elections to such a degree that they sent out notes attempting to forbid her from getting near the Senator and then have the matters of concern to the company she represented succeed legislatively and not conclude that John McCain lets his cock be sucked in exchange for legislative outcomes.
At a time when 1% own 50% of this nations wealth and the bottom 80% own just 6% of the same wealth, it's amusing to listen to someone trot out the "they broke no law" meme when in reality they're breaking laws every day all the time and the result is all around us.
"I need eight less accidents on 67th and Anderson, 15 less on Main and Second and a ten percent drop in the Joensboro distrcit over all". Get out there and make it happen or there are going to be career repercussions "
Inevitably these are the words that will issue from some Superior Officer's mouth each morning so they can "prove" that red light camera improve safety even around the areas they're installed where there are no cameras.
And what follows is destroyed and distorted paperwork, reclassification of incidents, motorists NOT being issued tickets on certain roads, people being "let go" and individuals involved in accidents being encouraged to "work it out between yourselves so it doesn't go on your record".
We KNOW what happens when police are under pressure to produce downward statistics in crime each year, or in this case downward statistics for accidents. Policing becomes less professional and more third-worldy, even criminal.
It's not what the cops want to do, it's what well-intentioned people who think policing should be subject to the same kinds of productivity and performance metrics that other industries are subject to inadvertently cause.
Telling cops they need to produce such and such numbers for this and that reason is a stupid idea who time has never existed in the first place. Telling them they need to prove by stats that the camera improve intersection safety is a big mistake.
The way to work this is to let them do what from their experience they feel will work and have the insurance companies by law turn over their statistics to the government or the universities who then data mines it on an ongoing basis to see what works for traffic safety and what doesn't and what's trending and what isn't.
Don't make the source of the data also the beneficiary of the data when it leans a certain way. Also don't punish them when it leans some other way.
The police don't cause crime so it's not theirs to reduce year over year. Society causes crime, the economy causes crime, bad parenting and poor family environment causes crime, lousy neighborhoods cause crime. Not policing.
The vast majority of police forces do what they can in the best way they've learned how and results are really pretty good in most areas. But the lions share of the credit or blame goes to the population who either is or is not inclined to follow the law in the first place.
Squeezing departments to produce numbers is a sure fire way to have them enact a quota system which is a sure fire path to corruption which is a sure fire path to contempt for cop on the part of the citizenry which is a sure fire way to increase crime as the years go by.
We need to do everything we can to produce and maintain a justice system that honorable and equitable and run like hell from anything that tends to corrupt that system.
Arbitrarily saying "one of these is real journalism and the other isn't" doesn't really serve any purpose as long as you don't hold the 'real' ones to any meaningful standard either. Unless you're holding the 'traditional' ones to account, what's the point in saying the others aren't really journalists either?
Ahhh, no.
That's like saying you're a scientist and have revealed truth without having complied with the dictates of the scientific method. You may be right, the same way a broken clock is right twice a day, but you're not doing science.
Both journalism and science are concerned with uncovering truth. That requires that falsity be systematically hunted down and excluded from the account to the greatest degree possible. The extent to which this achieved is the extent to which a scientist or journalist has credibility.
Both cultures have developed over the years accepted ways of uncovering truth. Defying this accumulated knowledge of how to challenge and verify information in favor of your own process makes you nothing but wrong. If you have another, better way to conduct science from your armchair, then bring it forth and let's have a look at it.
Ditto journalism. If you have developed a way to confirm your assertions using nothing but your keyboard and the internet, then bring it forward and let's see how well it really works.
Maybe you got at the heart of the matter, maybe Wikileaks contained all the truth and nothing but the truth. But your being right amounts to getting lucky.
If you wouldn't accept the deployment of science and technology into your life which was backed by nothing more than assurances that previously the inventors had gotten lucky, then you shouldn't accept "journalism" or call yourself a "journalist" if you're not going subject yourself to the rigorous methods journalists use to confirm reality.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's simply a cynical device to collect those filing fees, with the negative effects on business and consumers being somebody else's problem.
And you have established this fact- as opposed to decided it sounded good to you one day, or heard it from somewhere - how exactly?
The bible and it's ilk the Koran and all the rest are some of the worst set of "moral teachings" mankind has ever inflicted on itself.
You have only to do two cents worth of internet search or read God is Not Great by Hitchens or Why I am Not A Christian by Russel or anything by Dawkins and especially Sam Harris's The End of Faith http://www.samharris.org/ to explode the idea that religion is moral, or was moral at one time in the past
This is not something where you one say "well, you say this and I say that so both our arguments are equally valid.. because it's about morals" because religionists exactly DON'T believe that morals are relative and neither do scientists..
People behave in the ways they do because of genetics and environmental pressures. A part of that behaviour is the apprehension of and feelings about morality. Absent a compelling environmental contingency compelling a person to violent action, and that includes jealousy,. only sociopaths have to be told that killing is wrong. The rest of us *feel* it to be a horror and just plain wrong.
Ditto the uneasy feelings we get when we defy the norms of our society Sure, we can over come them for a reason, but that reason is also typically value - like The Truth- we learned from our society.
No one needs the Bible or any other holy book to help them to feel moral. It's a part f our genetic inheritance.
Ditto a moral society. Science is what produces a moral society because science brings us to truth and reality and when that meets our genetically mediated desire to "not do evil" and to empathize with our fellow human, we then can effectively meet those goals.
It;s no coincidence that religion is the number one source of wars throughout history, always in the name of doing good. That's because it's false knowledge, bad knowledge , with a Bronze Age understanding of How People Work and How The World Works and when THAT is what is guiding your inborn desire to achieve good and peace in the world, THIS is the result:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac
I forgot to add. What this seems to be is a huge public expenditure on Voodoo which will then used to separate people from their money, and charge them a fee for doing so.
THAT is how hedge funds make money when considered as a group. They con(vince) people to give them large sums of money. They then charge them for this "serrvice". They then go bust or make bank using their customers' money at exactly the rate and to exactly the degree that chance would predict.
Within this framework, there are winners and losers. The winners then heavily advertise (tot he right set of people) their record and proceed to charge even MORE money for their services. The losers no one hears from again.
See The Ascent Of Money by Niall Ferguson for the numbers behind this.
Ditto with banks.
If banks could really predict the market etc etc why would they zealously lobby Congress to defend the outrageous fees they saddle their unremarkable customers with?
Why wouldn't they gratefully accept without provocation any money anyone wanted to give them whatever the amount and quickly invest it in their sure-money machine?
Because they of all entities knows the long term record of that "sure money machine" and by comparison those $20.00 fees are, well, money in the bank.
So they've spent a lot of real money and used the services of serious researchers and technicians to build a... glossy brochure sure to convince the gullible-but-rich people to hand over some substantial part of their fortunes.
What they're NOT getting is the ability to more closely model the reality of the world. I say this because it appears from the article that they think they are (from the article)
There (is) new evidence of a payoff for certain kinds of customers from J.P. Morgan, which has been working since 2008 to adopt Maxelerâ(TM)s hardware and software to help assess its trading risks. The companies say the approach has allowed the financial-services company to quickly examine tens of thousands of possible scenarios for how its investments might be affected by events in financial markets, reducing the time for running certain scenarios from hours to a few minutes....quickly examine tens of thousands of possible scenarios for how its investments might be affected by events in financial markets,
Yeah sure, they examined them, chop chop, and what did this tell them? Nothing, unless all this refers to is guessing what other hedge funds will do in response to each other in a time frame that is not longer than a few milliseconds. .
Beyond that narrow (and getting narrower all the time) interpretation, there is no "prediction" about the market to be had, since the market is determined by what happens in the real world which is pathologically and permanently unpredictable.
Oskar Mencer, Maxelerâ(TM)s chief executive and founder, says the technology can prove its worth to J.P. Morgan in situations like handicapping whether debtor countries might default on obligationsâ"allowing the bank to make hedging transactions to reduce the financial impact.
âoeThey can ran different default scenarios two days ahead,â Mencer says. âoeThey can hedge against those scenarios very effectively.â
So you get what they're trying to do, right? They're trying to use historical data - about say, defaults, or just generally about what real world actors do under circumstance X when conditions Y and Z hold, and assign probabilities to them so they can make a decision and "beat the market".
The problems here are manifold.
One is, a perfect record of all the financial events in the world, however you want to define them, is not enough to form a statistical basis for analysis. Why? Because there's no reason to believe that such events are the product of Random (not "random") variables, which is a axiomatic of all statistical analysis.
Two, the events they're concerned with interact with each other and random (not "Random") world events in ways which are so complex they are fundamentally unpredictable. Only systems whose events of interest can be causally isolated from other events, however broadly you have to define events to make that happen, are amenable to statistical analysis.
In the real world, where literally every social and financial event could and does effect all others, you have the impossible task of having to model everything in order to predict anything accurately and consistently, or even on a, you know, regular basis.
The real world of human and financial events is not amenable to analytic predictive methods . Full stop.
This is not to say there won't be winner and losers where winner's predictions come true and losers predictions go bust. This is to say they don't know who they are in advance.
The unfolding of any given course of financial events is a one-time historical event happening forwards in time and is ultimately infinitely sensitive to any other real world event or set of conditions, either knowable or unknowable. There is no basis to form a probability distribution of likely futures because there is no clearly definable event or circumstance- every event and circumstance is one-off and sui genris.
But this s not REALLY what they're trying to achieve, at least, we can hope not.
What they're trying to achieve is to guess how OTHER institutions who understand the world as they themselves do are likely to act, and beat them to it or o
Your comment represents a type f fallacy I believe is called, , because it's so, therefore it's so.
Essentially you're saying because they are in management they must have earned it.
First observe that no matter what, someone HAS to be in management. CEO is a position, unlike yours, which cannot by stay empty for long.
Second, all that has to happen to rise in a company is someone above you promotes you. People who bet on Skill and Hard Work taking them there are a dime a dozen and what's become essential to their positions and thus their superiors' well being.
They aren't going anywhere, except out the door , when they can be replaced with someone cheaper or their talents are no longer required.
But people who are visibly ambitious (but not too!) and agreeable (to management) and wiling to fuck their fellow employees over in private conversation (but not obviously) and have a lust for power, and meet the other requirements male, white (or Brahmin, as the environment demands) taller than average and , uh nice looking with a authoritative air... you know, the leader type THOSE people are hard to come by and need to be kicked upstairs to those open positions ASAP.
What a joke. In my multi-billion dolar copany, the peole above me did my job for a matter of months.
What people are trying to tell you, if it's not clear, is that when management starts asking for stats of the that sort it's because they are in the process of creating a paper trail of evidence which can be used to defend them in court if you (or anyone else involved) should sue them for firing you or your team.
Probably someone simply doesn't like you and wants to see you gone. That's why you should have spent less energy working and learning and more energy getting people to like you.
This is a basic life lesson. Even in IT, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
Of course, since the presumptive product of IT is deeply intertwined with real-world results- something has to work- and reality is essentially a a 500 lb gorilla with a bad attitude and a 14 inch strap-on, the company itself is going to get fired.
But not before you do.
Stall, obfuscate the stats and work hard at your new second job- looking for a job while you can still legitimately claim you're employed.
It was abandoned because the market seeks to commoditize labor anywhere it can, any way it can, except at the very top.
They won't be beholden to talent. Period. They don't want the one in ten thousand programmer working for them, period. By the same token, they don't want to develop talent in house so there's little tradition of apprenticeship in software, at least, that's the bad reason for it, the good reason of course being that the new programmers have a newer and better approach to software.....
On that last point, I get the impression that progressive places like ThoughtWorks (with whom I have zero connection and always will have zero connection) DO have a sense of apprenticeship and Do seek to develop talent. In cases like that, the people doing the mentoring are so good that the apprentice is always benefiting from their tutelage.
When i was in college, our Systems and Analysis teacher, a full professor and also long term corporate vet opened class one day with thsi bomb:
When you take over a department, your first priority is to find that one guy that you absolutely positively cannot do without, and fire him.
No kidding. They don't want anything to do with talent or high achievement. The drive is always to move IT as far a possible at every level toward the McDonald's Model of labor- programmers are commodities who can all do the job we ask of them.
The sad part is, they achieve this only through all programmers being equal amongst other politically driven, power seeking fuck ups.
Yeah that's right, BILLIONS of dollars spent by numerous US states on IT projects with NOTHING to show for it.
It's a diseased system from one end to other.
In my imagination, it's different elsewhere, like, say in Germany.
This is an aside, but the money and defensible position is in some (not to say one specific) combination of intanglibles- UI, user experience, algorithms, good will, associations, sheer mass of work to be accomplished, speed of development and release cycles, continual innovation.
This much is true- innovation per se isn't going to keep you alive in the market unless you can do it on an ongoing basis.
Apropo of this, Apple's problems are all in its head. Not EVERYONE was ever going to buy an Apple *.* of, for a variety of reasons- lock in, personal preference, price, philosophy...for me the music players lack in quality.. the audio is so compressed it sounds like crap.
Anyway, still interested if anyone has every received (or heard of anyone who has;) ) a clear explanation / understanding of an proprietary algo where the point was not to stop the algo from doing what it was trying to do - obfuscate, keylock.. secure.. but rather to clearly understand and reproduce the algo in new code.....
What you're saying is, the marketplace of people with the skills to hack *interesting* stuff is big enough that this person's competitors can afford to pay to have it done, if they don't possess these specialized skills and or software themselves.
That's surprising to me, but I'll admit this is a world I'm not acquainted with. So for some reasonable price, I could contact someone, describe what it is I'm looking for and within a reasonable amount of time, get back a comprehensible explanation of how his algo works? Which is different than a crack of a key for a keylocked program (i.e., here's your key- just type this in. )
I have to admit I wonder how well that would really go, but I'd be interested for someone to surprise me with their first hand account of having done this successfully (or otherwse).
My wife's company does nothing but HOPE that the next release fixes bugs and pay Big Companies Big Bucks to actually show up and make their already waaaaay too expensive product (finally) play nice with other software.
Mega-corps are in the business of selling billable hours Guess where there motivation lay from the time they write the software to the time three of their resources show up at your doorstep.
Ask Texas, Indiana, Virgiania states how well spending unbelievable sums of money - we're talking between 1 to 3 BILLION dollars in each case- on consultants from a Big Name Corp worked out for them.
Only on software engineers have the delusion that decompiling source == understanding source == reproducing functionality of that source.
In reality even if you have the source before you in plain text, it's not that easy to understand how the software does what it does. It's not like reading a plaintext book which was once encrypted.
It's actually much easier to not bother with decompilation and just do your own implementation of the functionality.
What software does is not a mystery that is revealed in a source code which is comprehensible without a huge effort.
The code base represents ONE, possibly highly creative, highly arbitrary design amongst a universe of possible designs , all of which solve the same large set of problems in different ways.
This is completely different from looking at the teacher's key to get the one right answer for the test.
The exact same thing is true of debugging,. So you stepped through the execution of a software program with a debugger.. now what?
Unless you had a specific hypothesis about what a program was doing and could use the debugger as a confirmatory / disconfirmatory device, it's really like drinking water through a firehouse.
When people hack binaries to thwart licensing schemes, this is all they're doing. They know what they're looking for and are waiting to see where it is. Then they find it and pounce, defeating the licensing scheme
To the layman, this makes low level hacking look like it confers God powers onto the hacker.
Wrong.
The way to reproduce a piece of software or an algorithm is to see what it does and start the creative process of assigning responsibilities and interactions between components in a way that makes sense to you.
Even specific algos are BARELY explainable by people writing textbooks whose sole goal is clarity.
The Cormen et al. implementation of Red Black trees was "less than optimal" , but on one caught onto it for the longest time. Virtually everyone got their understanding of the algo from their book and translated what they read into the same "less than optimal" solution.
Discerning how an algo works by watching a debugger output or decompiling source is more work than re-inventing the algo yourself. If you have a truly novel algo and you release it in binary, unless it'a matter of interest to the government or a represents a multi-billion dollar break through to Intel or AMD or perhaps is the topic of some PhD candidate, it's pretty safe from being cloned too quickly.
A completely normal brain, except extremely hypertrophied in the areas associated with logical thought and reasoning.
He himself said that he had to struggle to a degree that he found hard to believe in the years he was at the patent office. and working on his theory.
Same thing with Hawking. He was a bright student, but not exceptional. Then he got ALS. He himself has said that the net effect of his disease has been to make his life immensely richer and he doubted that he would have achieved what he achieved if it had not happened.
Lots of anecdotal evidence of people coming back from strokes which left them paralyzed and unable to speak after very very much effort. Could that really all be the migration of functions to undamaged parts of the brain?
All thought is subtended by some biochemical process. It's not that surprising that along with changes located in the synapses and the density of the interconnectedness between neurons there are gross morphological ones in the form of either head count or size of neurons, or both.
You know if you've ever spent every day for years studying hard that you're in a place that other people just aren't, and problem solving- not to say specific problems- that seemed hard to you now seems like a walk in the park.
You also know that if you leave that behind and later look back at your work, it's shocking and depressing to see what you had once been capable of.
Not to mention that if 30 people had uber moderating powers, those positions would become the target of heavy duty political and corporate ambitions, just like every other assemblage of people who wield power over what gets seen, spent, done and not done in society
Right it's as if Google patented the ability to methodologically assemble a group of like minded people to evaluate material.
The continuance of this kind of patenting relies on the people effect either not understanding what's happening and what it means in their lives, or believing there's nothing they can do about it.
The words "methods" and "procedures" are in the extended process of being clearly defined by successive SCOTUS and legislative efforts.
No one accepts that a useful novel and non-obvious method of explaining a calculus problem to another person is potential patent material. Yet it's a method and a procedure.
To pretend that this is settled law is to foist a falsehood on the American people so that what? They'll shake their fists but be demotivated from taking action against such absurd notions?
Judging from the reception that software engineers on Slashdot give the neo-liberal interpretation of intellectual property rights every time a story on the topic hits the wires , I'd say that strategy "no use complaining it's all settled now" isn't really working and isn't going to work.
Slashdot Mirror
These patents are beyond ridiculous, they represent a mafioso style shakedown racket of the right to program a computer and a company-size-based monopoly on all progress and economic participation.
You'd assume that a system that destructive would eventually have to cause such economic damage to even the people who fund and benefit from it that it would just have to be changed, but that assumption wouldn't be taking into account U.S. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
After being informed that the loaded gun of software patents was now pointed at the industry that finances and supports the manufacture of that gun, the banking industry, Sessions promptly sponsored and shepherded through Congress a bill that exempted the banking industry from software patents emanating from the likes of
(above excerpted from WSJ and http://www.leftinalabama.com/diary/566/ More from same sources:
So we can't even count on the the disease to finally kill the host because the host is to be artificially kept alive by bitchboys like Sessions.
So let's grasp the full scope of what's going on here.
The Big Players like Amazon, Microsoft IBM etc aided and abetted at every turn by the banks are creating and financing a system which is so fundamentally toxic to economic participation, even they can't survive it. The only way they continue to exist is through special legislative action tailored to nothing but their exemption from the consequences of the system they create.
Meanwhile, Sessions et. al. are busy legislating a system into existence which is so toxic that even the banking industry can't survive it, and it therefore needs to go to Sessions- cash in hand- in order to obtain a special dispensation from The King.
from: http://www.techlawforum.net/post.cfm/senator-takes-an-interest-in-patent-law-or-money>
So who's extorting whom? Are the trolls extorting the banks or are the banks and Amazon extorting would be competitors, or is Sessions extorting the banks?
It reads like some sort graduate student's thesis of self-stabilizing self-extortion rings where the simulation iterates until it finds its most stable, lowest energy state that nothing but pitchforks and torches can get it out of.
We are Rome.
Government regulation of industry gives industry the opportunity to use government to increase the cost of entry to new competition. They achieve this through the devices of campaign contributions and a revolving door of government to industry employment.
There. Fixed that for you.
The "All government regulation is has unforseen consequences worse than the original problem "meme is all done now.
Why should /. readers restrict themselves to thinking in bumpersticker size chunks of information when the fully formed thought bears more actionable information and is more interesting to boot.
The perfect instantiation of no government regulation has a name; it's called "Somolia".
At a time when the world is facing it's greatest collective threat ever, global warming, and we are unable to act collectively against it because of the "anti-regulation" meme, it's hard to understand why that meme gets any play here on /. , home of some of the most sophisticated thinkers and do-ers online.
Just another case of patriotic fervour and artificial fear being used to paint the world as a scarier and more dangerous place than I believe it is.
OK so reassure us. Tell us why it's not possible for terrorists to deploy these same said techniques against populations.
Your comment implies that you know things people in the fields of microbiology and law enforcement aren't aware of or are thinking about wrongly, since they spend a lot of time worrying about just this topic:
http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/biochem/scientists_working_group/
http://www.spusa.org/pubs/peace_security/biologicalstudies/biostudies_interviews.html
http://www.cdc.gov/ncpdcid/dbpr/about.html/
Sorry but the you let the terrorist win meme is being strongly misapplied in this case given the potential downside.
Don't get me wrong, terrorists could kill a few thousand people a year in the US and I wouldn't approve the curtailment of one civil liberty one iota as a response.
But the level of destruction we're talking about here is unsurvivable, both as a nation and as for all intents and purposes as a species .
Have you ever considered what would be the fate of those left behind if 2/3 of the population just disappeared? Do you really think the other 1/3 would be able to fill the jobs, understand the technology they're left with so as to prevent nuclear meltdowns, keep the lights and all the safety systems that are at all the labs and facilities going?
Security isn't designed to keep going unmanned indefinitely. The remaining population would be subject to repeated Chernobyls , release of every kind of pathogen and pollutant into the environment, etc. etc.
Sorry but the first organizing principle of any society is mere brute survival. After that comes civil liberties and civil society. If we have constructed a civil society which permits a self-inflicted death sentence to be imposed by the will of just a few individuals, then our civil society has failed to keep up with the changing technological landscape. This has to be categorized as failure of civil society through refusal to face reality. Failure at the hands of just another form of religious fundamentalism if you think about it.
I second the New Yorker. In fact, a subscription to same nets you both print and online access. The NYTImes is always a good read also.
This is the first time I've seen a clear expression of the the dominant dilemma we're facing as a species in the open press. This dilemma will come to dominate not just our national security, but also our academic institutions, our manufacturing, our privacy laws and our civil liberties.. every aspect of our lives. Ultimately it will inevitably lead us to change who we are in a very fundamental way.
The dilemma is this:
The number of people needed to inflict damage on others is dropping at an alarming rate, tending towards the limit of ...one ...everyone
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the number of people that damage can be inflicted upon more or less simultaneously is rising at an equally alarming rate, tending towards the limit of
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the extent of the damage they can inflict is rising at an alarming rate, tending towards... death.
If C is your civil liberties then we can put this in the form of an equation thus:
C= (number of terrorists required) / [(victim number)^2 * (degree of damage) ]
Where the power of two reflects the fact that if death is inflicted on a few thousand , a few hundred million will come to the erroneous conclusion that they're next.
In a nutshell, your civil liberties are inversely proportional to how much mayhem how few people can produce against how many.
Nuclear proliferation is a walk in a (dark and dangerous) park (in an admittedly bad neighborhood) compared to what microbiology offers the aspiring terrorist / religious misanthrope.
There is no turning off the fount of knowledge, which is not to say we shouldn't try, because there IS buying time and time is what we need in order to begin to level the inequality which exists between our knowledge and control over nature and our knowledge and control over our own nature.
When just anyone can create a doomsday machine, then no one can be trusted. That's where this goes. The only possible defense against this is more detailed knowledge of the potential destructiveness implied in the capabilities of microbiology- for the purpose of countering it- and more knowledge of the individual personalities in every nation who would study this and related fields.
We need more knowledge of what everyone is doing in certain fields. That is where this has to go, at least. It's not perfect, but it buys us time.
And with that time we have to acquire knowledge of why people are fanatical. What about some humans leads them to the conclusion that everyone should die for the sake of some cause. What about humans causes them to to be illiberal in the broad sense of that term?
Let's just say it. It's not latte sipping, Volvo driving, paper recycling liberals who write their congressmen about danger of global warming who want to splice their way to a doomsday tweety.
It's religious conservatives and adherents of other irrational belief systems like Aum Shinrikyo and or the equally religious Mao adherents. It's the authoritarian personality type, a topic science needs to study more.
In the Middle East that means religious fundamentalists. In the US that means religious fundamentalists... Christian Dominionists and other cults, and secular right wing anti-collectivist extremists like Timothy McVeigh. Even the Koch brothers can be seen as extremist terrorists because what is the continued release of C02 into the atmosphere but a form of religious violence against billions of innocent people?
So what's wrong with these people and how can we prevent it? That's the million dollar question. What is it about their makeup that enables them to blind themselves, or just not care, about the real world suffering they inflict on people-who-are-not-them, while at the same time running arms outstretched to the promise of some grand future paradise?
We have the concept of the sociopathic personality and that's a part of the puzzle, but lots of sociopaths confine themselves to livin
It is an unproven statement to say that Wall Streeters and the mortgage loan companies did not commit crimes, since you don't know that.
Only in the rarefied and technical proceedings of a court room are you considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In fact, people in general may know full well you're guilty and certainly people close to the executives know they're guilty and know exactly what they did and how they did it.
Your claim runs up against a huge amount of circumstantial evidence involving people like Angelo Mozilo. But see Google for details. Or go see Inside Job, or read All The Devils Are Here
Den of Thieves, Too Big To Fail.... in fact we are fortunate to live in a time when there is an embarrassing surfeit of talented investigative journalism documenting exactly the kind of corruption OWS is complaining about.
You really owe it to yourself and your fellow countrymen to sit down in your easy chair, get nice and comfy, pour yourself a cup of cocoa and break the spine of a book or two so that you can be an informed member of the electorate.
To operationalize the point, if you were to be given a chance by a magic genie to win a ten million dollars if you just guessed correctly whether Mozilo were actually guilty of crimes- things like conspiracy, mortgage fraud, contract fraud, corruption of public officials etc. etc. which choice would you make? Remember, the genie knows what the truth is.
Your of claim of having "committed no crime" which was already on the books is not particularly credible and people are behaving as though it was not particularly credible.
What you can say is that they did not get caught, yet, or even more precisely, DAs have not believed that they can gain evidence sufficient to convict them in a court of law. But that's a different thing from being innocent.
We have too many reports of people being told their mortgage contract said one thing when it really said another. That my friend, is a crime, nothwithstanding the fact that it's a crime which is hard to prove.
It's not possible for GE to have the chief lobbyist for tax law be seen literally on his knees in front of Charlie Rangel begging for Rangel to change his mind on a bill,. then have Rangel change his mind, then have GE pay zero...ZERO taxes to the government as a result of that bills passage then have Rangel be found guilty of 11 charges by the House Ethics Committee and not conclude, as OWS has, the government is fundamentally corrupt. .
It's impossible for a similarly situated John McCain to be "lobbied" by a young blonde "lobbyist" whose closeness and non-stop accompaniment of the Senator panicked his handlers during the 2004 Presidntial elections to such a degree that they sent out notes attempting to forbid her from getting near the Senator and then have the matters of concern to the company she represented succeed legislatively and not conclude that John McCain lets his cock be sucked in exchange for legislative outcomes.
At a time when 1% own 50% of this nations wealth and the bottom 80% own just 6% of the same wealth, it's amusing to listen to someone trot out the "they broke no law" meme when in reality they're breaking laws every day all the time and the result is all around us.
Good day, Sir.
Inevitably these are the words that will issue from some Superior Officer's mouth each morning so they can "prove" that red light camera improve safety even around the areas they're installed where there are no cameras.
And what follows is destroyed and distorted paperwork, reclassification of incidents, motorists NOT being issued tickets on certain roads, people being "let go" and individuals involved in accidents being encouraged to "work it out between yourselves so it doesn't go on your record".
We KNOW what happens when police are under pressure to produce downward statistics in crime each year, or in this case downward statistics for accidents. Policing becomes less professional and more third-worldy, even criminal.
Some examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3mmuZsHmv8
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/13/ex-nypd-cop-we-planted-ev_n_1009754.html/
It's not what the cops want to do, it's what well-intentioned people who think policing should be subject to the same kinds of productivity and performance metrics that other industries are subject to inadvertently cause.
Telling cops they need to produce such and such numbers for this and that reason is a stupid idea who time has never existed in the first place. Telling them they need to prove by stats that the camera improve intersection safety is a big mistake.
The way to work this is to let them do what from their experience they feel will work and have the insurance companies by law turn over their statistics to the government or the universities who then data mines it on an ongoing basis to see what works for traffic safety and what doesn't and what's trending and what isn't.
Don't make the source of the data also the beneficiary of the data when it leans a certain way. Also don't punish them when it leans some other way.
The police don't cause crime so it's not theirs to reduce year over year. Society causes crime, the economy causes crime, bad parenting and poor family environment causes crime, lousy neighborhoods cause crime. Not policing.
The vast majority of police forces do what they can in the best way they've learned how and results are really pretty good in most areas. But the lions share of the credit or blame goes to the population who either is or is not inclined to follow the law in the first place.
Squeezing departments to produce numbers is a sure fire way to have them enact a quota system which is a sure fire path to corruption which is a sure fire path to contempt for cop on the part of the citizenry which is a sure fire way to increase crime as the years go by.
We need to do everything we can to produce and maintain a justice system that honorable and equitable and run like hell from anything that tends to corrupt that system.
And this is not collusion somehow? Seriously, there's a lot about business and law I just don't understand.
Arbitrarily saying "one of these is real journalism and the other isn't" doesn't really serve any purpose as long as you don't hold the 'real' ones to any meaningful standard either. Unless you're holding the 'traditional' ones to account, what's the point in saying the others aren't really journalists either?
Ahhh, no.
That's like saying you're a scientist and have revealed truth without having complied with the dictates of the scientific method. You may be right, the same way a broken clock is right twice a day, but you're not doing science.
Both journalism and science are concerned with uncovering truth. That requires that falsity be systematically hunted down and excluded from the account to the greatest degree possible. The extent to which this achieved is the extent to which a scientist or journalist has credibility.
Both cultures have developed over the years accepted ways of uncovering truth. Defying this accumulated knowledge of how to challenge and verify information in favor of your own process makes you nothing but wrong. If you have another, better way to conduct science from your armchair, then bring it forth and let's have a look at it.
Ditto journalism. If you have developed a way to confirm your assertions using nothing but your keyboard and the internet, then bring it forward and let's see how well it really works.
Maybe you got at the heart of the matter, maybe Wikileaks contained all the truth and nothing but the truth. But your being right amounts to getting lucky.
If you wouldn't accept the deployment of science and technology into your life which was backed by nothing more than assurances that previously the inventors had gotten lucky, then you shouldn't accept "journalism" or call yourself a "journalist" if you're not going subject yourself to the rigorous methods journalists use to confirm reality.
Unless you work at FoxNews.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's simply a cynical device to collect those filing fees, with the negative effects on business and consumers being somebody else's problem.
Oh you mean like every other software patent?
The bible and it's ilk the Koran and all the rest are some of the worst set of "moral teachings" mankind has ever inflicted on itself.
You have only to do two cents worth of internet search or read God is Not Great by Hitchens or Why I am Not A Christian by Russel or anything by Dawkins and especially Sam Harris's The End of Faith http://www.samharris.org/ to explode the idea that religion is moral, or was moral at one time in the past
This is not something where you one say "well, you say this and I say that so both our arguments are equally valid.. because it's about morals" because religionists exactly DON'T believe that morals are relative and neither do scientists..
People behave in the ways they do because of genetics and environmental pressures. A part of that behaviour is the apprehension of and feelings about morality. Absent a compelling environmental contingency compelling a person to violent action, and that includes jealousy,. only sociopaths have to be told that killing is wrong. The rest of us *feel* it to be a horror and just plain wrong.
Ditto the uneasy feelings we get when we defy the norms of our society Sure, we can over come them for a reason, but that reason is also typically value - like The Truth- we learned from our society.
No one needs the Bible or any other holy book to help them to feel moral. It's a part f our genetic inheritance.
Ditto a moral society. Science is what produces a moral society because science brings us to truth and reality and when that meets our genetically mediated desire to "not do evil" and to empathize with our fellow human, we then can effectively meet those goals.
It;s no coincidence that religion is the number one source of wars throughout history, always in the name of doing good. That's because it's false knowledge, bad knowledge , with a Bronze Age understanding of How People Work and How The World Works and when THAT is what is guiding your inborn desire to achieve good and peace in the world, THIS is the result: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac
Can you be more specific about what the problem is you're having?
I forgot to add. What this seems to be is a huge public expenditure on Voodoo which will then used to separate people from their money, and charge them a fee for doing so.
THAT is how hedge funds make money when considered as a group. They con(vince) people to give them large sums of money. They then charge them for this "serrvice". They then go bust or make bank using their customers' money at exactly the rate and to exactly the degree that chance would predict. Within this framework, there are winners and losers. The winners then heavily advertise (tot he right set of people) their record and proceed to charge even MORE money for their services. The losers no one hears from again.
See The Ascent Of Money by Niall Ferguson for the numbers behind this.
Ditto with banks.
If banks could really predict the market etc etc why would they zealously lobby Congress to defend the outrageous fees they saddle their unremarkable customers with?
Why wouldn't they gratefully accept without provocation any money anyone wanted to give them whatever the amount and quickly invest it in their sure-money machine?
Because they of all entities knows the long term record of that "sure money machine" and by comparison those $20.00 fees are, well, money in the bank.
So they've spent a lot of real money and used the services of serious researchers and technicians to build a... glossy brochure sure to convince the gullible-but-rich people to hand over some substantial part of their fortunes.
For a fee.
There (is) new evidence of a payoff for certain kinds of customers from J.P. Morgan, which has been working since 2008 to adopt Maxelerâ(TM)s hardware and software to help assess its trading risks. The companies say the approach has allowed the financial-services company to quickly examine tens of thousands of possible scenarios for how its investments might be affected by events in financial markets, reducing the time for running certain scenarios from hours to a few minutes....quickly examine tens of thousands of possible scenarios for how its investments might be affected by events in financial markets,
Yeah sure, they examined them, chop chop, and what did this tell them? Nothing, unless all this refers to is guessing what other hedge funds will do in response to each other in a time frame that is not longer than a few milliseconds. .
Beyond that narrow (and getting narrower all the time) interpretation, there is no "prediction" about the market to be had, since the market is determined by what happens in the real world which is pathologically and permanently unpredictable.
Oskar Mencer, Maxelerâ(TM)s chief executive and founder, says the technology can prove its worth to J.P. Morgan in situations like handicapping whether debtor countries might default on obligationsâ"allowing the bank to make hedging transactions to reduce the financial impact. âoeThey can ran different default scenarios two days ahead,â Mencer says. âoeThey can hedge against those scenarios very effectively.â
So you get what they're trying to do, right? They're trying to use historical data - about say, defaults, or just generally about what real world actors do under circumstance X when conditions Y and Z hold, and assign probabilities to them so they can make a decision and "beat the market".
The problems here are manifold.
One is, a perfect record of all the financial events in the world, however you want to define them, is not enough to form a statistical basis for analysis. Why? Because there's no reason to believe that such events are the product of Random (not "random") variables, which is a axiomatic of all statistical analysis.
Two, the events they're concerned with interact with each other and random (not "Random") world events in ways which are so complex they are fundamentally unpredictable. Only systems whose events of interest can be causally isolated from other events, however broadly you have to define events to make that happen, are amenable to statistical analysis.
In the real world, where literally every social and financial event could and does effect all others, you have the impossible task of having to model everything in order to predict anything accurately and consistently, or even on a, you know, regular basis.
The real world of human and financial events is not amenable to analytic predictive methods . Full stop.
This is not to say there won't be winner and losers where winner's predictions come true and losers predictions go bust. This is to say they don't know who they are in advance.
The unfolding of any given course of financial events is a one-time historical event happening forwards in time and is ultimately infinitely sensitive to any other real world event or set of conditions, either knowable or unknowable. There is no basis to form a probability distribution of likely futures because there is no clearly definable event or circumstance- every event and circumstance is one-off and sui genris.
But this s not REALLY what they're trying to achieve, at least, we can hope not.
What they're trying to achieve is to guess how OTHER institutions who understand the world as they themselves do are likely to act, and beat them to it or o
First observe that no matter what, someone HAS to be in management. CEO is a position, unlike yours, which cannot by stay empty for long.
Second, all that has to happen to rise in a company is someone above you promotes you. People who bet on Skill and Hard Work taking them there are a dime a dozen and what's become essential to their positions and thus their superiors' well being.
They aren't going anywhere, except out the door , when they can be replaced with someone cheaper or their talents are no longer required.
But people who are visibly ambitious (but not too!) and agreeable (to management) and wiling to fuck their fellow employees over in private conversation (but not obviously) and have a lust for power, and meet the other requirements male, white (or Brahmin, as the environment demands) taller than average and , uh nice looking with a authoritative air... you know, the leader type THOSE people are hard to come by and need to be kicked upstairs to those open positions ASAP. What a joke. In my multi-billion dolar copany, the peole above me did my job for a matter of months.
Probably someone simply doesn't like you and wants to see you gone. That's why you should have spent less energy working and learning and more energy getting people to like you.
This is a basic life lesson. Even in IT, it's not what you know, it's who you know.
Of course, since the presumptive product of IT is deeply intertwined with real-world results- something has to work- and reality is essentially a a 500 lb gorilla with a bad attitude and a 14 inch strap-on, the company itself is going to get fired.
But not before you do.
Stall, obfuscate the stats and work hard at your new second job- looking for a job while you can still legitimately claim you're employed.
They won't be beholden to talent. Period. They don't want the one in ten thousand programmer working for them, period. By the same token, they don't want to develop talent in house so there's little tradition of apprenticeship in software, at least, that's the bad reason for it, the good reason of course being that the new programmers have a newer and better approach to software.....
On that last point, I get the impression that progressive places like ThoughtWorks (with whom I have zero connection and always will have zero connection) DO have a sense of apprenticeship and Do seek to develop talent. In cases like that, the people doing the mentoring are so good that the apprentice is always benefiting from their tutelage.
When i was in college, our Systems and Analysis teacher, a full professor and also long term corporate vet opened class one day with thsi bomb:
When you take over a department, your first priority is to find that one guy that you absolutely positively cannot do without, and fire him.
No kidding. They don't want anything to do with talent or high achievement. The drive is always to move IT as far a possible at every level toward the McDonald's Model of labor- programmers are commodities who can all do the job we ask of them.
The sad part is, they achieve this only through all programmers being equal amongst other politically driven, power seeking fuck ups.
Yeah that's right, BILLIONS of dollars spent by numerous US states on IT projects with NOTHING to show for it.
It's a diseased system from one end to other.
In my imagination, it's different elsewhere, like, say in Germany.
Am I dreaming, Herr Programmer?
This much is true- innovation per se isn't going to keep you alive in the market unless you can do it on an ongoing basis.
Apropo of this, Apple's problems are all in its head. Not EVERYONE was ever going to buy an Apple *.* of, for a variety of reasons- lock in, personal preference, price, philosophy...for me the music players lack in quality.. the audio is so compressed it sounds like crap.
Anyway, still interested if anyone has every received (or heard of anyone who has ;) ) a clear explanation / understanding of an proprietary algo where the point was not to stop the algo from doing what it was trying to do - obfuscate, keylock.. secure.. but rather to clearly understand and reproduce the algo in new code.....
What you're saying is, the marketplace of people with the skills to hack *interesting* stuff is big enough that this person's competitors can afford to pay to have it done, if they don't possess these specialized skills and or software themselves.
That's surprising to me, but I'll admit this is a world I'm not acquainted with. So for some reasonable price, I could contact someone, describe what it is I'm looking for and within a reasonable amount of time, get back a comprehensible explanation of how his algo works? Which is different than a crack of a key for a keylocked program (i.e., here's your key- just type this in. )
I have to admit I wonder how well that would really go, but I'd be interested for someone to surprise me with their first hand account of having done this successfully (or otherwse).
Ask Texas, Indiana, Virgiania states how well spending unbelievable sums of money - we're talking between 1 to 3 BILLION dollars in each case- on consultants from a Big Name Corp worked out for them.
http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/article/pitfalls-outsourcing-it
Worked out OK for the Big Name Billers I'd say.
In reality even if you have the source before you in plain text, it's not that easy to understand how the software does what it does. It's not like reading a plaintext book which was once encrypted.
It's actually much easier to not bother with decompilation and just do your own implementation of the functionality.
What software does is not a mystery that is revealed in a source code which is comprehensible without a huge effort.
The code base represents ONE, possibly highly creative, highly arbitrary design amongst a universe of possible designs , all of which solve the same large set of problems in different ways.
This is completely different from looking at the teacher's key to get the one right answer for the test.
The exact same thing is true of debugging,. So you stepped through the execution of a software program with a debugger.. now what?
Unless you had a specific hypothesis about what a program was doing and could use the debugger as a confirmatory / disconfirmatory device, it's really like drinking water through a firehouse.
When people hack binaries to thwart licensing schemes, this is all they're doing. They know what they're looking for and are waiting to see where it is. Then they find it and pounce, defeating the licensing scheme
To the layman, this makes low level hacking look like it confers God powers onto the hacker.
Wrong.
The way to reproduce a piece of software or an algorithm is to see what it does and start the creative process of assigning responsibilities and interactions between components in a way that makes sense to you.
Even specific algos are BARELY explainable by people writing textbooks whose sole goal is clarity.
The Cormen et al. implementation of Red Black trees was "less than optimal" , but on one caught onto it for the longest time. Virtually everyone got their understanding of the algo from their book and translated what they read into the same "less than optimal" solution.
Discerning how an algo works by watching a debugger output or decompiling source is more work than re-inventing the algo yourself. If you have a truly novel algo and you release it in binary, unless it'a matter of interest to the government or a represents a multi-billion dollar break through to Intel or AMD or perhaps is the topic of some PhD candidate, it's pretty safe from being cloned too quickly.
He himself said that he had to struggle to a degree that he found hard to believe in the years he was at the patent office. and working on his theory.
Same thing with Hawking. He was a bright student, but not exceptional. Then he got ALS. He himself has said that the net effect of his disease has been to make his life immensely richer and he doubted that he would have achieved what he achieved if it had not happened.
Lots of anecdotal evidence of people coming back from strokes which left them paralyzed and unable to speak after very very much effort. Could that really all be the migration of functions to undamaged parts of the brain?
All thought is subtended by some biochemical process. It's not that surprising that along with changes located in the synapses and the density of the interconnectedness between neurons there are gross morphological ones in the form of either head count or size of neurons, or both.
You know if you've ever spent every day for years studying hard that you're in a place that other people just aren't, and problem solving- not to say specific problems- that seemed hard to you now seems like a walk in the park.
You also know that if you leave that behind and later look back at your work, it's shocking and depressing to see what you had once been capable of.
What does the song say?
When you're up, looks like a longs ways down..
When you're down, looks like a long way up...
It's all the same thing..No new tale to tell...
Not to mention that if 30 people had uber moderating powers, those positions would become the target of heavy duty political and corporate ambitions, just like every other assemblage of people who wield power over what gets seen, spent, done and not done in society
The continuance of this kind of patenting relies on the people effect either not understanding what's happening and what it means in their lives, or believing there's nothing they can do about it.
No one accepts that a useful novel and non-obvious method of explaining a calculus problem to another person is potential patent material. Yet it's a method and a procedure.
To pretend that this is settled law is to foist a falsehood on the American people so that what? They'll shake their fists but be demotivated from taking action against such absurd notions?
Judging from the reception that software engineers on Slashdot give the neo-liberal interpretation of intellectual property rights every time a story on the topic hits the wires , I'd say that strategy "no use complaining it's all settled now" isn't really working and isn't going to work.