Copyright and patents weren't enacted to make sure that ideas were never lost. They were in the Constitution itself in the US to ensure that people who created new inventions, devices and arts and sciences could have a limited State-sanctioned monopoly as incentive to innovate and create.
Well now youre just full of it.
Patents are an alternative to trade secrets, and are ostensibly to prevent the loss of knowledge. The incentive is in exchange for disclosure, not for "creation".
Copyright have no such excuse. They existed to benefit the big printers, not the authors. In its original incarnation, the copyright was assigned to the printing house and not even the author!
As to this crap being in the constitution, well so was slavery; which by the way, I consider quite analogous to copyright's and patents: They are slavery for your mind.
Al ideas are derived, all inventions build upon what came before.
Once we realize this as a society, we can accelerate progress simply by ending the practice of slowing it down.
I agree with trademarks. Otherwise, no, copyright and patents are immoral.
At one point patents made sense, in that they were a tool to ensure certain knowledge wouldnt be lost forever.
Since then, theyve become a tool to ensure the exact opposite. (The are obfuscated, and typically dont contain the real secrets, and they can be indefinitly extended by patenting obvious derivitives.)
Copyright never ever made any sense. The French experimented with dropping copyright, but they recoiled when tabloid newsrags emerged. Silly, they didnt realize that they were temporarily 300 years ahead of their time.
Just because there is precedent doesnt make it any more right.
Comparing copying to piracy was as stupid back then as it is now. It was likely done for the shock value of the term pirate, which was probably an even more loaded word back then.
Youve just proven that its both old and stupid.
Dissemination of ideas can never compare to annexation of physical matter.
Recursion is your friend, perhaps I skipped to the point to fast for you:
The reason it is unimplementable is "Who watches the watchers?". The framers of the US constitution had this same problem.
If you assign one AI to supervise another, than that supervisor needs a supervisor as well or IT will have no moral code of its own. So then the "asimov morality chip" will behave like a classic symbiote, and steer the decisions it allows of the robot it controls to its own ends as well.
You can see that it quickly leads to either infinite recursion of watchers, or the need for some sort of circular heirarchy, which is subject to imorality as a group rather than an indivudual.
As for making the arbitrary assumption that just because someone is studying something that there will be progress: that is sheer hubris. We can predict that new things will be discovered, we cannot predict what avenues these discoveries will come from.
AI has been studied for as long as there have been computers. So far, I have seen zero empirical progress in terms of sapience. That has had little effect on people's predictions of future progress in the field, stangely.
Picard> Computer, calculate the time needed for repairs. Computer> What? Picard> Calculate the time needed to repair the impulse drive. Computer> The impulse drive cannot be repaired. Picard> I mean to patch it up sufficiently such that the ship can move. Computer> The ship can already move, we are being accelerated by nearby gravity well. Picard> (In frustration perhaps) Calculate the time needed to recalibrate the impulse generation coils, considering that ion capacitor was functioning within normal parameters. (or some other jargon) Computer> (Finally having an answerable question) Recalibration will require 14 minutes. (This does not mean that they will be fully "repaired", just they they will be enough to perhaps be usefull )
And as for Asimov's silly laws: they are a contradiction in terms. Any routine capable of enforcing such rules upon the AI would have to be AI itself. Therefore such rules are a paradox in that they cannot be implemented. Any working AI would be fully subject to its own volition.
All other checks and balances are MEANINGLESS. No matter how well built a fortress is, with zero sentient creatures guarding in, it is defenseless. No matter how strong a weapon, unwielded, it is powerless.
If you ever listen to the types of commands they give to their computers in star trek, they are subjective and ambiguous. Any computer capable of understanding such commands would have no need for the crew (as it would quickly realize).
As an alternate prediction, assuming that AI does not compute, is that we will always need people who know how to use computers, and we will always need people who know how to think.
Future languages may free you from pecadillo's, give you greater code reuse and portability, improve the mapping down to machine language, reduce the amount of time/space it takes to express algorithms, and possibly allow a larger degree of algorithmic analysis. What they will not do is free you from the need for programmers.
I seriously doubt that idiots with powerful computers can accomplish anything.
Being able to use a computer is the equivalent of using a weapon such as a sword or spear. Its a weapon for your mind.
Weapons are called force multipliers by the military for good reason: a totally out of shape clumsy slob with a sword is less dangerous than a fit and well trained warrior with a dagger. The same goes for computers, they are force multipliers, but not forces themselves.
Eventually, all our warriors (thinkers) will also be programmers. Not all at the same level or using the same languages and tools, but some sort of programmers for sure.
Well, Ive done lisp, actually before C++, and I found it to be lacking. Its a good attempt, but I dont think it is an optimal implementation of the lambda calculus.
If you've ever seen efficient lisp coding techniques, they tend towards the counter-intuitive. Whereas templates in C++ are often faster than equivalent C code.
The idea that since computers are getting faster, that performance will become a non-issue is a fallacy. Java, as it exists today, will never be fast. Also, its assignment semantics are simply broken.
I dont rule out the possibility that a higher level language will be invented that doesnt suffer from the failings of lisp, but I havent seen it yet. Perhaps something will come out of category theory...
Can you show me a high level language that duplicates the flexibility and performance of C++ templates? Once you realize that you cannot, youll understand that C++ is still the only game in town.
And performance does matter. How pleasant are client side gui's implemented in Java? HORRID! They are just slow, and ugly.
This seems to be the opinion of a windows using non-coder who disparages the project yet is somehow mysteriously on the "core team", versus the foremost developer of the project who was kicked off said team.
This case was totally open and shut to me.
Code talks.
Plus come on, can you take someone named "Wexelblat" seriously?
best way to do that is to charge them for the bandwidth they use
The problem is that it doesnt take much bandwidth to send out spam. If the spammers had to send each email individually, or if they had to encrypt each message to the recipients public key, then the costs would be exorbitant.
And if you dont think the return-receipt idea will work, can you give one reason why? Personally, I dont want to be overchanged just because I run a webserver, like your scheme would require.
Its very simple to stop spam with a tech fix: Make it uneconomical.
Whenever your mail agent receives a new email from an unknown source, it could send back a return receipt requesting that the sender either click on a link or reply to it to verify their return address. (You could also white list people, or you could limit this return receipt to only kick in when the mail look like spam)
If a spammer had to do this for each intended recipient, then they would quickly be out of business.
Black-lists, the current most popular choice, dont work, because its very easy to get a new source address.
Re:Alex should have just waited
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 1
It's interesting how bullying by people who are geeks is funny, when the same sort of activity by jocks is decried.
Wait a second, who said it wasnt funny the first time?
The GPL would be unnecessary if there were no copyright law.
If there is no "copyright", then why would you need a "copyleft"?
GPL is supposed to spit in the face of copyright law. The beauty of it is that it does this by depending upon it.
If there were no copyright, then closed source would still be inviable: because anyone could copy it around. The difference would be that the BSD, LGPL, and GPL licenses would be effectively compatible, and I could finally see goddam SVG enabled in mozilla by default, etc.
The reason the GPL does not need copyright, is that eliminating copyright would eliminate the incentive to violate the GPL. Thats a catch 22.
I take issue with that. Pipes have been binary clean for ages, before linux was even a thought.
Just because the wheel was designed in the stone age doesnt mean the wheel is obsolete as a concept. Stream based pipes are still ideal for certian tasks, and the GNU tools will always be useful.
ASCII is a dim memory, as *nix systems have long since moved to UNICODE/UTF-8 NF-C. In many ways linux has superior internationalization support as an operating system than even WindowsXP, which is stuck with the inferior UTF-16 legacy encoding model, BOMs, difficulties with surrogate pairs in many places, and scattershot support within the operating system itself.
Youre total misunderstanding of the unix architechture is a sure sign of weakness. It doesnt preclude COM or CORBA or other higher level I/O methods whatsoever. The unix filesystem as a concept can be used with ACLs or capabilities as well as the normal unix permissions.
Like they say, "Those who dont understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"
How do these things relate to Linux? No one's arguing that it isn't a good development environment, but perl runs in Win32 fairly easily.
Have you tried to use perl on windows? It just isnt the same. Perl proggies typically make heavy use of syscalls such as "fork" and "pipe".
Performance of these under windows is atrocious, not to mention that the whole windows filesystem/exec is shockingly low performance. (Its not designed to be used in the way perl programs typically use it)
perl is seemingly perfect for linux, with its low forking overhead (comparable to creating a thread or lwp on other OSen) and its I/O subsytem performance.
Programming, even in high level languages, is a totally different ballgame under windows, if you want performance. You have to do it differently.
The designers of the program - i.e., usually the project managers (*ducks*) or system architects do most of the creative work of conceptualizings how things will work and how they will meet the constraints of the particular problem. The programmers, most of the time, are brick-layers, carpenters and plumbers. Not that there is anything less noble about this latter work, but it's hard to call it creative.
This is the biggest, yet most common, misconception in the software world, mostly espoused by the idiot managers themselves.
Sure it could work like that in THEORY, were a visionary architect foresees all the real issues, but down here in the trenches, never once have I seen that happen for anything but the simplest tasks.
In reality the customer doesnt know what the want, the manager is a clueless suit who pumps out buzzwords, and the analysts do essentially nothing. And the lowly "plumbers" are left to figure out:
What the customer *really* needs
What the best level of abstraction is
How to implement specific details.
The coders almost invariably shoulder the burden for all their "management" types, who, even if the are ex-programmers themselves, are flat out incapable of understanding the problems at hand.
The reality of the situation is, the coders are doing creative work, and they are typically the only ones who even have the ability to design solutions.
Even if there is an infinite number of combinations, this is a valid strategy. The reason is the banned clients dont have to store any state, but the server does. So after some ungodly number of combinations are banned the server will fail from having to store such a large database of banned clients.
To make the method most effective, its best to make sure the serial numbers/MAC are well spread through the valid number space.
If you were confronted by someone who had just lost a bunch of important data because of this exploit, do you really think they'd be impressed if you said "But I was trying to make a very important point to Microsoft!".
Instead of that, you should say "By not fixing the bug, Microsoft was trying to make a very important point to you!"
Then they will at least be angry at the right entity.
If you coddle your kids like so, youre almost guaranteeing that when they finally do get a taste of the forbidden when youre not around theyll get hooked and become anime otaku or something.
Where do you think all the freaky addicts come from? Over sheltered families natually. Its in a kids nature to do the opposite of what their parents herd them towards.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright and patents weren't enacted to make sure that ideas were never lost. They were in the Constitution itself in the US to ensure that people who created new inventions, devices and arts and sciences could have a limited State-sanctioned monopoly as incentive to innovate and create.
Well now youre just full of it.
Patents are an alternative to trade secrets, and are ostensibly to prevent the loss of knowledge. The incentive is in exchange for disclosure, not for "creation".
Copyright have no such excuse. They existed to benefit the big printers, not the authors. In its original incarnation, the copyright was assigned to the printing house and not even the author!
As to this crap being in the constitution, well so was slavery; which by the way, I consider quite analogous to copyright's and patents: They are slavery for your mind.
Al ideas are derived, all inventions build upon what came before.
Once we realize this as a society, we can accelerate progress simply by ending the practice of slowing it down.
I agree with trademarks.
Otherwise, no, copyright and patents are immoral.
At one point patents made sense, in that they were a tool to ensure certain knowledge wouldnt be lost forever.
Since then, theyve become a tool to ensure the exact opposite. (The are obfuscated, and typically dont contain the real secrets, and they can be indefinitly extended by patenting obvious derivitives.)
Copyright never ever made any sense. The French experimented with dropping copyright, but they recoiled when tabloid newsrags emerged. Silly, they didnt realize that they were temporarily 300 years ahead of their time.
Just because there is precedent doesnt make it any more right.
Comparing copying to piracy was as stupid back then as it is now. It was likely done for the shock value of the term pirate, which was probably an even more loaded word back then.
Youve just proven that its both old and stupid.
Dissemination of ideas can never compare to annexation of physical matter.
Recursion is your friend, perhaps I skipped to the point to fast for you:
The reason it is unimplementable is "Who watches the watchers?". The framers of the US constitution had this same problem.
If you assign one AI to supervise another, than that supervisor needs a supervisor as well or IT will have no moral code of its own. So then the "asimov morality chip" will behave like a classic symbiote, and steer the decisions it allows of the robot it controls to its own ends as well.
You can see that it quickly leads to either infinite recursion of watchers, or the need for some sort of circular heirarchy, which is subject to imorality as a group rather than an indivudual.
As for making the arbitrary assumption that just because someone is studying something that there will be progress: that is sheer hubris. We can predict that new things will be discovered, we cannot predict what avenues these discoveries will come from.
AI has been studied for as long as there have been computers. So far, I have seen zero empirical progress in terms of sapience. That has had little effect on people's predictions of future progress in the field, stangely.
So, an episode of stark trek for you goes like:
Picard> Computer, calculate the time needed for repairs.
Computer> What?
Picard> Calculate the time needed to repair the impulse drive.
Computer> The impulse drive cannot be repaired.
Picard> I mean to patch it up sufficiently such that the ship can move.
Computer> The ship can already move, we are being accelerated by nearby gravity well.
Picard> (In frustration perhaps) Calculate the time needed to recalibrate the impulse generation coils, considering that ion capacitor was functioning within normal parameters. (or some other jargon)
Computer> (Finally having an answerable question) Recalibration will require 14 minutes. (This does not mean that they will be fully "repaired", just they they will be enough to perhaps be usefull )
And as for Asimov's silly laws: they are a contradiction in terms. Any routine capable of enforcing such rules upon the AI would have to be AI itself. Therefore such rules are a paradox in that they cannot be implemented. Any working AI would be fully subject to its own volition.
All other checks and balances are MEANINGLESS. No matter how well built a fortress is, with zero sentient creatures guarding in, it is defenseless.
No matter how strong a weapon, unwielded, it is powerless.
If you ever listen to the types of commands they give to their computers in star trek, they are subjective and ambiguous. Any computer capable of understanding such commands would have no need for the crew (as it would quickly realize).
As an alternate prediction, assuming that AI does not compute, is that we will always need people who know how to use computers, and we will always need people who know how to think.
Future languages may free you from pecadillo's, give you greater code reuse and portability, improve the mapping down to machine language, reduce the amount of time/space it takes to express algorithms, and possibly allow a larger degree of algorithmic analysis. What they will not do is free you from the need for programmers.
I seriously doubt that idiots with powerful computers can accomplish anything.
Being able to use a computer is the equivalent of using a weapon such as a sword or spear. Its a weapon for your mind.
Weapons are called force multipliers by the military for good reason: a totally out of shape clumsy slob with a sword is less dangerous than a fit and well trained warrior with a dagger. The same goes for computers, they are force multipliers, but not forces themselves.
Eventually, all our warriors (thinkers) will also be programmers. Not all at the same level or using the same languages and tools, but some sort of programmers for sure.
Well, Ive done lisp, actually before C++, and I found it to be lacking. Its a good attempt, but I dont think it is an optimal implementation of the lambda calculus.
If you've ever seen efficient lisp coding techniques, they tend towards the counter-intuitive.
Whereas templates in C++ are often faster than equivalent C code.
The idea that since computers are getting faster, that performance will become a non-issue is a fallacy. Java, as it exists today, will never be fast. Also, its assignment semantics are simply broken.
I dont rule out the possibility that a higher level language will be invented that doesnt suffer from the failings of lisp, but I havent seen it yet. Perhaps something will come out of category theory...
anyway, thats my opinion...
Can you show me a high level language that duplicates the flexibility and performance of C++ templates? Once you realize that you cannot, youll understand that C++ is still the only game in town.
And performance does matter. How pleasant are client side gui's implemented in Java? HORRID! They are just slow, and ugly.
This seems to be the opinion of a windows using non-coder who disparages the project yet is somehow mysteriously on the "core team", versus the foremost developer of the project who was kicked off said team.
This case was totally open and shut to me.
Code talks.
Plus come on, can you take someone named "Wexelblat" seriously?
The problem is that it doesnt take much bandwidth to send out spam. If the spammers had to send each email individually, or if they had to encrypt each message to the recipients public key, then the costs would be exorbitant.
And if you dont think the return-receipt idea will work, can you give one reason why? Personally, I dont want to be overchanged just because I run a webserver, like your scheme would require.
Besides the fact that it tastes like shit, nutrasweet gives me a headache even in modest quantities.
So yeah, the solution is darwinism: the idiots who ingest the stuff will die off.
Its very simple to stop spam with a tech fix:
Make it uneconomical.
Whenever your mail agent receives a new email from an unknown source, it could send back a return receipt requesting that the sender either click on a link or reply to it to verify their return address.
(You could also white list people, or you could limit this return receipt to only kick in when the mail look like spam)
If a spammer had to do this for each intended recipient, then they would quickly be out of business.
Black-lists, the current most popular choice, dont work, because its very easy to get a new source address.
Wait a second, who said it wasnt funny the first time?
The GPL would be unnecessary if there were no copyright law.
If there is no "copyright", then why would you need a "copyleft"?
GPL is supposed to spit in the face of copyright law. The beauty of it is that it does this by depending upon it.
If there were no copyright, then closed source would still be inviable: because anyone could copy it around. The difference would be that the BSD, LGPL, and GPL licenses would be effectively compatible, and I could finally see goddam SVG enabled in mozilla by default, etc.
The reason the GPL does not need copyright, is that eliminating copyright would eliminate the incentive to violate the GPL. Thats a catch 22.
I take issue with that. Pipes have been binary clean for ages, before linux was even a thought.
Just because the wheel was designed in the stone age doesnt mean the wheel is obsolete as a concept. Stream based pipes are still ideal for certian tasks, and the GNU tools will always be useful.
ASCII is a dim memory, as *nix systems have long since moved to UNICODE/UTF-8 NF-C. In many ways linux has superior internationalization support as an operating system than even WindowsXP, which is stuck with the inferior UTF-16 legacy encoding model, BOMs, difficulties with surrogate pairs in many places, and scattershot support within the operating system itself.
Youre total misunderstanding of the unix architechture is a sure sign of weakness. It doesnt preclude COM or CORBA or other higher level I/O methods whatsoever. The unix filesystem as a concept can be used with ACLs or capabilities as well as the normal unix permissions.
Like they say, "Those who dont understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly"
How do these things relate to Linux? No one's arguing that it isn't a good development environment, but perl runs in Win32 fairly easily.
Have you tried to use perl on windows?
It just isnt the same. Perl proggies typically make heavy use of syscalls such as "fork" and "pipe".
Performance of these under windows is atrocious, not to mention that the whole windows filesystem/exec is shockingly low performance.
(Its not designed to be used in the way perl programs typically use it)
perl is seemingly perfect for linux, with its low forking overhead (comparable to creating a thread or lwp on other OSen) and its I/O subsytem performance.
Programming, even in high level languages, is a totally different ballgame under windows, if you want performance. You have to do it differently.
Youre making an assumption that the Simdesk business plan doesnt end with:
2. Get bought out by Microsoft.
3. Profit!
This is exactly the reason why a win for ANY proprietary software company is a not a win for Free Software.
Do you have anything to back up this vague assertion?
I wrote a book about video compression! http://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Why damage your credibility with a sig like that
The designers of the program - i.e., usually the project managers (*ducks*) or system architects do most of the creative work of conceptualizings how things will work and how they will meet the constraints of the particular problem. The programmers, most of the time, are brick-layers, carpenters and plumbers. Not that there is anything less noble about this latter work, but it's hard to call it creative.
This is the biggest, yet most common, misconception in the software world, mostly espoused by the idiot managers themselves.
Sure it could work like that in THEORY, were a visionary architect foresees all the real issues, but down here in the trenches, never once have I seen that happen for anything but the simplest tasks.
In reality the customer doesnt know what the want, the manager is a clueless suit who pumps out buzzwords, and the analysts do essentially nothing. And the lowly "plumbers" are left to figure out:
The coders almost invariably shoulder the burden for all their "management" types, who, even if the are ex-programmers themselves, are flat out incapable of understanding the problems at hand.
The reality of the situation is, the coders are doing creative work, and they are typically the only ones who even have the ability to design solutions.
To make the method most effective, its best to make sure the serial numbers/MAC are well spread through the valid number space.
If you were confronted by someone who had just lost a bunch of important data because of this exploit, do you really think they'd be impressed if you said "But I was trying to make a very important point to Microsoft!".
Instead of that, you should say "By not fixing the bug, Microsoft was trying to make a very important point to you!"
Then they will at least be angry at the right entity.
If you coddle your kids like so, youre almost guaranteeing that when they finally do get a taste of the forbidden when youre not around theyll get hooked and become anime otaku or something.
Where do you think all the freaky addicts come from? Over sheltered families natually. Its in a kids nature to do the opposite of what their parents herd them towards.
If only there were someway to post japanese on slashdot, It would be perfect for sigs and snide elitist comments too.
Damn lameness filter.
It went more like this:
MS: hey bum, heres a dollar. Go buy me a hot dog.
Bum: but those cost $1.50!
MS: Well spot me the rest and Ill let you watch me eat it.
Bum: Keep your dollar asshole!
here is a summary of just the proposed change.
It seems to comply with unicode just fine, I dont see what the controversy is really.