User 1431 and you still haven't figured out that everybody on Slashdot is not the same person?
Perhaps if you had been here longer you might have noticed that the moderation system clearly promotes some opinions over others and encourages a self-reinforcing groupthink.
Ah yes, April 1st on Slashdot. If every single story
is an April Fools joke, we will just fool people over and over again
because it totally isn't predictable!
At the risk of shamelessly pimping my blog, I recently posted an entry describing MGM Vs Grokster and the issues:
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the MGM vs Grokster case today. For those living under a rock, at issue is the legal decision that prevented the movie industry from killing the VCR in the mid-80s (the "Sony-Betamax decision"). In retrospect the Supreme Court did them a big favour since most of the movie industry's revenue now comes from video rentals. Unfortunately the movie industry has not learned its lesson.
"Secondary copyright infringement" is when you yourself don't actually infringe copyright, but you somehow facilitate someone else doing it. I assume that this was originally intended as a way to get at the people that run "swap meets" where people exchange copies of software and CDs in violation of copyright law.
In the 1980s the Supreme Court said that the creator of a technology cannot be sued for secondary infringement if their technology is "capable of substantial non-infringing use", in effect creating a "shield" against secondary liability for technology creators. In the case of Grokster, two previous court judgements have said that this doctrine protects decentralised P2P software, in the same way that it shielded the creator of the VCR. The movie industry would like to see this shield weakened enough that Grokster and similar P2P file-sharing networks are no-longer protected by it.
Their opponents (myself included) fear that any weakening of this shield will create exactly the kind of legal uncertainty that can kill innovations before they have even made it out of the venture capitalist's office (and as a veteran of a number of VC's offices, I can attest to the fact that nothing turns them off like the threat of a legal battle).
If you don't mind Real Video, you can watch a great debate between Fred von Lohmann, Senior Staff Attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodore Olson, Former Solicitor General for the Bush Administration (2001-2004) and Representative of the Recording Industry and Motion Pictures Association here.
The argument only took place a few hours ago, but you can read a good summary from someone that appears to know their stuff here. His assessment? It went better for Grokster than he expected, but it is extremely dangerous to draw any conclusions from the oral argument phase of a court case.
I find neither amazing. Scruples only matter to a politician if there is a risk of discovery and public backlash, and debates over ethical implementation of intellectual property restrictions have nothing on soccer for entertaining the public.
Well, lets not get too cynical. Many MEPs have come around to the argument against software patents. The biggest problem is that the unelected institutions, the Council of Ministers and the European Commission, are still pushing for software patents and pushing hard.
The relevance to the article is clearly pointed out by my comment. It is the hypocrisy of taking action against an abusive monopolist on one hand while pushing for a change in the law that would greatly benefit Microsoft's ability to monopolise the software market on the other.
Furthermore, software patents would not allow only MS, but any company (and technically individual) to gain "thousands of monopolies".
Yeah, and the Tooth Fairy really exists:-) As anyone familiar with software patents will note, software patents only tend to be useful to the large companies that can afford to obtain and defend them. A smaller company with a patent will immediately get counter-sued if it attacks a large company and forced into a cross-licensing agreement, thus negating the value of their patent. Ironically the only type of small company that can effectively use a patent is one that avoids any kind of innovation, since this prevents any danger of counter-infringement. Hardly "promoting the sciences and useful arts" now is it?
For this reason it is large companies that are the primary beneficiaries of software patents (why do you think they are the ones lobbying for them, while SMEs lobby against?).
The software patent issue is far, far larger and more important than some "M$ versus teh world!" issue; please don't denigrate it to such.
It is a clear example of large monopolists and the patent industry versus the freedom of others to innovate. You are correct that it isn't just Microsoft, but they are one of the most vociferous advocates of software patents in the EU, and has clearly stated there interest in using patents to attack Linux.
Isn't it amazing that just as one part of the EU is recognising and addressing the dangers of Microsoft's monopoly, others within the EU are pushing for software patents which would allow Microsoft to create not just one monopoly, but thousands?
What is even more amazing is that Microsoft's lobbyists seem to be having an impact on some of our so-called representatives in the European Parliament.
Take, for example, Spain's Manuel Medina MEP, who appears to have bought completely into their propaganda. In a recent article he writes:
In the United Stated, computer patents have on the one hand allowed to innovation to thrive in this area and on the other hand make Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
He goes on to tell us that software authors (of whom he claims there are few in the EU, presumably because we haven't had the benefit of software patents) support patents, while only those self-interested "network users" oppose the directive.
If you live in Spain and care about this issue I ask you to contact Mr Medina and politely provide him with some counter-arguments to this pro-software patent FUD. His contact info is:
email: mmedina [at] europarl.eu.int fax Bruselas: +32 (0)2 284 9882 fax Estrasburgo: +33 (0)3 88 17 9882 mail: Europe Parlament , Rue Wiertz ASP 11G351 B-1047 BRUSELAS
An alternative to sexual reproduction (which is not always possible, depending on your application) is to keep "physical discontinuity".
Yes, in fact this is also part of what I was doing as the creatures only reproduced with their neighbors. It is possible that this was a more important factor in preventing local maxima than the fact that sexual reproduction was involved.
That wouldn't be what we call a genetic algorithm.
You might not call it a genetic algorithm, but the people who write the comp.ai.genetic FAQ clearly consider asexual reproduction to be a form of genetic algorithm.
After reading the site, I am not sure I can see what opportunity there can be for evolution when there is only a population of two robots. Evolution requires competition, but there can be no competition when you only have two robots and each gets an opportunity to pass on their genetic code.
To exhibit real evolution you would need at least three robots, and realistically you would need many many more. A more realistic experiment migth be to evolve the robots in a simulated environment.
If you liked this you might also be interested in a recent experiment I did with genetic algorithms where I "evolved" creatures which could emulate an exclusive-or gate (ie. take two inputs, output 0 if they are the same and 1 if they are different).
The result was interesting, and from it I created a nice MPEG video which illustrates the learning process - you can find this if you follow the link above.
One interesting thing I discovered was the importance of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction (insert lewd joke here) as I describe in a follow-up blog entry:
My first approach was simply to take the creature that performed best, and use it as the basis for the entire next generation, each of which contained random variations.
This approach was somewhat effective, although it tended to get stuck with a far from perfect solution, but where most small variation on that solution was worse (such as outputting 0.5 regardless of the input). This is known as getting stuck in a "local minima".
So I tried a different approach where we start out with completely random creatures for the first generation, as before, but instead of just taking the best and losing everything else, we take neighbours and "merge" them, where the better one forms 90% of the children's make-up, and the worse one the remaining 10%.
This had the effect of being much more resilliant against local minima as it gave more scope for the GA to try different options and where it found a good one, that may not be the best one, it kept it around for the next generation.
England may apply this logic to kitchen knives, but they don't apply it to PlayStation mod chips, which a judge, last year, decided were illegal to make, advertise, or sell.
That some kid stole a couple thousand dollars from Discover Card and some Visa merchant - so what? This guy acts like they were stealing the money from him.
If you don't object to people stealing from big evil corporations, how can you reasonably object when they steal from you?
After following the EU software patent debate very closely all I can say is that getting politicians to verbally agree with you is only the first step. When powerful interests are involved, a politicians vote can often differ quite substantially from their stated intentions...
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom (and its a PITA).
Instead of adding a torrent, just prepend "http://dijjer.org/get/" to the URL of the large file and hey-presto, it is now being distributed through Dijjer.
It's so plain and simple. You can pirate all the music you want (just make sure you cover your tracks). But don't assume that piracy is your natural given right.
Fair use is my right, and it isn't piracy. You should really learn the difference if you are going to try to participate in these discussions.
Its the "bend over and take it" approach, no matter how you look at it. The record companies can't pull support for online downloads, those will happen with or without their say-so. All they can do is pull support for legal online downloads, and this can only hurt them in the end.
iTMS is one of a small number of ways that people can conveniently obtain music and pay for it. If the record companies refuse to support it, then all they will do is drive people back to sources of music where they aren't compensated at all.
In short, Apple is in a strong enough negociating position to distribute music that respects their customer's fair use rights. They deserve criticism for not fighting harder on behalf of their customers.
I love getting my music digitally, so I would prefer that a few bad DVD John-like people not ruin it for me.
Yeah, those evil programmers hurting those poor multinational record labels by writing software that allows us to exercise our fair use rights under copyright law.
Your bend over and take it attitude makes me sick.
If anything Europeans need to fight harder against this stuff because often those arguing against it are arrogant Americans whose argument is often "we do it in the US, therefore you must too".
This is a very important point, lest anyone in the UK be lulled into a false sense of security as to their vulnerability to this kind of thing.
If anything Europeans need to fight harder against this stuff because often those arguing against it are arrogant Americans whose argument is often "we do it in the US, therefore you must too". The irony often is that they have a harder time pushing it in the US than elsewhere.
I had a recent experience of this type of thing in teh debate over software patents in the EU.
...isn't Think Secret the very website at the center of the court case where, just a few articles
ago so many loyal slashdotters were welcoming Apple's victory against journalism?
The hypocrisy displayed by commenters and moderators on this website whenever Apple or Google or mentioned is close to making me physically sick. I was around when only trolls might have defended the notion of a large company using trade secret law to trump the free speech rights of independent journalists.
Slashdot Mirror
...I remember the days when everyone loved this guy, that was, of course, until he applied his skills to slashdot's favorite purveyor of DRM.
Ah yes, April 1st on Slashdot. If every single story is an April Fools joke, we will just fool people over and over again because it totally isn't predictable!
Here. Its a shame it wasn't linked in the main text of the article :-(
For this reason it is large companies that are the primary beneficiaries of software patents (why do you think they are the ones lobbying for them, while SMEs lobby against?).
It is a clear example of large monopolists and the patent industry versus the freedom of others to innovate. You are correct that it isn't just Microsoft, but they are one of the most vociferous advocates of software patents in the EU, and has clearly stated there interest in using patents to attack Linux.What is even more amazing is that Microsoft's lobbyists seem to be having an impact on some of our so-called representatives in the European Parliament.
Take, for example, Spain's Manuel Medina MEP, who appears to have bought completely into their propaganda. In a recent article he writes:
He goes on to tell us that software authors (of whom he claims there are few in the EU, presumably because we haven't had the benefit of software patents) support patents, while only those self-interested "network users" oppose the directive.If you live in Spain and care about this issue I ask you to contact Mr Medina and politely provide him with some counter-arguments to this pro-software patent FUD. His contact info is:
To exhibit real evolution you would need at least three robots, and realistically you would need many many more. A more realistic experiment migth be to evolve the robots in a simulated environment.
The result was interesting, and from it I created a nice MPEG video which illustrates the learning process - you can find this if you follow the link above.
One interesting thing I discovered was the importance of sexual as opposed to asexual reproduction (insert lewd joke here) as I describe in a follow-up blog entry:
England may apply this logic to kitchen knives, but they don't apply it to PlayStation mod chips, which a judge, last year, decided were illegal to make, advertise, or sell.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom (and its a PITA).
Check out the Dijjer Firefox extension.
Instead of adding a torrent, just prepend "http://dijjer.org/get/" to the URL of the large file and hey-presto, it is now being distributed through Dijjer.
iTMS is one of a small number of ways that people can conveniently obtain music and pay for it. If the record companies refuse to support it, then all they will do is drive people back to sources of music where they aren't compensated at all.
In short, Apple is in a strong enough negociating position to distribute music that respects their customer's fair use rights. They deserve criticism for not fighting harder on behalf of their customers.
Your bend over and take it attitude makes me sick.
If anything Europeans need to fight harder against this stuff because often those arguing against it are arrogant Americans whose argument is often "we do it in the US, therefore you must too". The irony often is that they have a harder time pushing it in the US than elsewhere.
I had a recent experience of this type of thing in teh debate over software patents in the EU.
Ever felt like Apple might be paying people to astroturf on /.?
The hypocrisy displayed by commenters and moderators on this website whenever Apple or Google or mentioned is close to making me physically sick. I was around when only trolls might have defended the notion of a large company using trade secret law to trump the free speech rights of independent journalists.