Translations are not new works, which is why copyright notices in books specifically state that translations are not permitted. They're covered by the original copyright.
Digitizations are an interesting problem. Photographs of a person, a landscape, or something similar, is a creative work. The conditions can never be reproduced exactly and never occurred before, and thus the work is of something new.
A digitized rendering of something, however, is an exact (as near as makes no odds, if done right) duplicate. A second digitization will be indistinguishable from a copy made of the first digitization. There is therefore no identifiable, unique, moment of creation. If there's no moment of creation, there is little need for a creator. (Apologies to Stephen Hawking for paraphrasing him here.)
Most digital collections can be covered by copyright as databases, as indeed can any structured, organized set of data. This data, as it stands, is not obviously structured. The geographic attribute is assigned by the donor, so what was there for this library to organize?
No doubt someone who is a lawyer in this field can answer that particular question, but I just can't see anything that is obviously new, unique, non-obvious and provided by the collection that is not otherwise present.
I don't, but I do know that on one of the digital archaeology mailing lists I'm on, there's been a call-for-papers for research into an OCR implementation that can handle cuneiform and other ancient writing systems.
You are correct. There's no shortage of Middle Eastern material already on the Internet ETCSL, Library of Congress, CDLI all have collections of cuneiform documents from Sumeria, Akkadia and Babylonia. It would have been child's play to collect all of that and add it to the collection.
They might well do so, in future. The standings in the league table are merely the starting point. But, yes, because of who is doing the starting, it IS no surprise that American and British researchers would concentrate on texts closer to home, particularly as there's going to be a national incentive to prioritize home-grown stuff above museum pieces. Especially if *cough* some of the museums would rather not remind people of what they have.
On the other hand, Middle Eastern countries don't have quite the same fascination with massively ancient cultures, many simply don't have the money or the resources (Iraq being a good example), and even when they DO have these, more than a few of the really early writings from the region are, ummm, elsewhere.
The eyes probably couldn't be steered accurately enough. His muscular control was a mess when I saw him in person in the late 1980s, and it won't have improved since.
On the other hand, if they tune into the neurons that control his arm, they may be able to anticipate what he is going to type. That might help accelerate things for him. It's a bit much to be able to decode the language centres sufficiently to record thoughts directly, but it will eventually get to that point.
Once it is possible to decode his thoughts directly, he would be able to communicate as fast as he can think. Which means that it'll be a babble because he thinks far too fast. On the other hand, it will help him to turn out papers at a fantastic speed.
Similar things have been done. Robot arms can be moved by the mind. Rats brains have flown F14 fighters. EEG sensors placed directly onto the brain (rather than onto the head) produce far more detailed information - it's not a stretch to suggest that some day a sensor layer will be placed onto the inside of the skull with a connection to the outside world.
You could, of course, play with EEG technology yourself. The OpenEEG project details the hardware needed and provides some basic software. See if you can find ways to get better results by changing the antenna used. See if you can get results good enough to be able to control your character in Quake or Netrek - a lot simpler than your average F14!
I mean, wiring your home computer to your brain... what could possibly go wrong?
By full, I take it they mean of the chest infection, not that they're experimenting with stem cell therapy to replace the motor neurons in his brain and spinal cord. (Though if they got to that point before he was too old to operate on, it might be kinda cool.)
Maybe the anti-Hawking is merely employing the newly-discovered form of tunneling, as discussed in a prior article. We need to establish a Casimir Effect such as to exclude the anti-Hawking particle from being a valid state. Do you think if we made him a tinfoil hat, it would work?
And this would be a bad thing, how? Seems to me that hell would be a great place for Microsoft. Does anyone have any Elder Signs available? Preferably on a chair.
+2 would still be fine, as I was one of those who suspected Oracle might make a move.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. For example, Oracle can now add modifications to Solaris to provide acceleration for Oracle. But it doesn't stop there. Sun also provides the UltraSPARC range of processors, so it would be possible - at some point - for Oracle to push some low-level primitives useful for databases into the CPU itself.
Why would they want to do that? Duh! Databases are a huge market. Intel is the standard platform at the moment, but it's very hard to get good, sustained performance. Even if a database-enhanced CPU is sold purely as an accelerator card for PCs, you'd have a good source of income from the hardware unit, which has been doing badly.
But Sun servers would look a whole lot more attractive for databases in data centres if they become much more powerful per $ spent. PCs are too cheap to compete on absolute price, but Oracle could utilize their deeper understanding of both relational databases and data warehousing to make Sun servers significantly cheaper per transaction/second.
...we might all be using Haiku? Or did you mean Dragonfly BSD? Or maybe FreeRTOS? Um, um, um, help me out here, guys! Ok, ok, Plan9! Nope... ExoPC? Nope... MULTICS! Nope... VxWorks! Nope... OS/X? Oracle's Solaris? OSF/1? OpenVMS? Trusted IRIX? Genesis? Damn, I'm out of ideas. You'll have to tell me.
Seriously, that's a good question. Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope (otherwise known as the Lovell Telescope), a key part of eMerlin, was threatened with closure due to a budget shortfall for science and research. Jodrell Bank was deemed, by British ministers, to be of relatively little significance.
Given that, and given the problems with then getting everything done on time, upgrading their computer facilities might not have been so easy. Until the budget was fixed, they had nothing to buy equipment with. They were considering scrapping eMerlin altogether because they couldn't find the money to get the network in place, let alone process the data.
Buying computer equipment last-minute in a panic, especially when you've shielding constraints from hell and a lot of media visibility, is not a good idea. There's absolutely no telling if they had the cash to buy enough compute power even to record the data, let alone crunch it. We will know that when it's fully online and results start coming through.
ObTrivia: Brian May, guitarist for Queen, studied readio astronomy under Professor Lovell and may well have ended up a director for the telescope (and eMerlin) if his music hasn't, ummm, diverted his attention.
There is a new update. His condition is said to have improved (which is good). The illness is some sort of chest infection (which in his case is very very bad).
The reports from Stephen Hawking's personal website report that he's comfortable in hospital and that there'll be an update in the morning. I'm hoping this means he merely got a mild illness that was beyond the ability of his 24-hour nurse to handle and that Cambridge was more reflecting how the nurse felt prior to the Professor going into hospital rather than any solid medical assessment.
Well, admittedly the BBC picture makes him look like he's sick of being photographed. On the other hand, it's probably better than a photo of him racing his modded electric wheelchair down the roads at breakneck speed.
(P.S. Can anyone confirm that Prof. Hawking was planning on getting one of Braun's F1 diffusers added to the back of his wheelchair for extra cornering speed?)
The latest news on Stephen Hawking's own website says that he is "comfortable" and that there will be no further updates until tomorrow morning. I am hoping this means that the illness simply required more medical supervision than the one full-time nurse he currently has, but is otherwise not likely to throw up additional complications. This would indeed be "very ill" prior to getting into hospital, but would explain why he's "comfortable" now.
However, in today's PR-based world, it could just as easily mean that they want to keep any further bad news getting out. I hope that's not the case, and that my original guess is correct, but you just can't tell these days.
*loads thoughts into blunderbus, scatters them over landscape*
Seriously, we know the following from experimental science: a) Rats are capable of flying F-14s b) African Grey parrots are capable of basic grammar, understand attributes as distinct from objects, and comprehend zero. c) Crows can solve basic problems and manufacture their own tools
These do not have significant development in the brain areas associated with processing data, but they DO have exceptionally well-developed brains for handling raw sensory information. Ergo, the virtualization is more important.
Experience is important, yes, but studies in humans and animals suggests that experience is remembered as a simulation of past experience. Children, for example, listen when told not to do something, but don't act on it because they have nothing to link that instruction to. The instruction is only acted upon on subsequent events. Ergo, modeling is more critical to learning than direction.
Senses are linked in ways that are not fully understood. It is believed that all babies have an extreme form of synaesthesia until the brain develops filters. Even then, though, senses are linked. Taste changes when you have a cold, because it is linked to scent, for example.
Damage to key structures has an unpredictable effect. The cartoonist Scott Adams was able to redevelop speech, for example, by bypassing an area involving language. On the other hand, there was a case of a person whose ability to store new long-term memories was destroyed when brain surgery destroyed the critical component involved. It's unclear to me what efforts were made to bypass the area, if any, but clearly the function never restored itself.
I don't think it accurate to call memory holographic. Although any given memory appears to be distributed across the memory regions as a whole, the brain's ability to be fooled by self-similar images seems closer to storing things in a manner more analogous to fractal compression than to an interference pattern. Interference works in time as well as space (a pulsed laser can generate interference patterns), but there is no analogy in memory - spacially-separated events do not get mapped to temporally-separated events.
Slashdot Mirror
Translations are not new works, which is why copyright notices in books specifically state that translations are not permitted. They're covered by the original copyright.
Digitizations are an interesting problem. Photographs of a person, a landscape, or something similar, is a creative work. The conditions can never be reproduced exactly and never occurred before, and thus the work is of something new.
A digitized rendering of something, however, is an exact (as near as makes no odds, if done right) duplicate. A second digitization will be indistinguishable from a copy made of the first digitization. There is therefore no identifiable, unique, moment of creation. If there's no moment of creation, there is little need for a creator. (Apologies to Stephen Hawking for paraphrasing him here.)
Most digital collections can be covered by copyright as databases, as indeed can any structured, organized set of data. This data, as it stands, is not obviously structured. The geographic attribute is assigned by the donor, so what was there for this library to organize?
No doubt someone who is a lawyer in this field can answer that particular question, but I just can't see anything that is obviously new, unique, non-obvious and provided by the collection that is not otherwise present.
I don't, but I do know that on one of the digital archaeology mailing lists I'm on, there's been a call-for-papers for research into an OCR implementation that can handle cuneiform and other ancient writing systems.
Most of the publishers' nations are also extinct. Lawyers, though, I can't vouch for. Demons have very long lifespans.
You are correct. There's no shortage of Middle Eastern material already on the Internet ETCSL, Library of Congress, CDLI all have collections of cuneiform documents from Sumeria, Akkadia and Babylonia. It would have been child's play to collect all of that and add it to the collection.
They might well do so, in future. The standings in the league table are merely the starting point. But, yes, because of who is doing the starting, it IS no surprise that American and British researchers would concentrate on texts closer to home, particularly as there's going to be a national incentive to prioritize home-grown stuff above museum pieces. Especially if *cough* some of the museums would rather not remind people of what they have.
On the other hand, Middle Eastern countries don't have quite the same fascination with massively ancient cultures, many simply don't have the money or the resources (Iraq being a good example), and even when they DO have these, more than a few of the really early writings from the region are, ummm, elsewhere.
Just a curiosity question: Do you program in Forth much?
The friggin' shark named it.
...do you want sharks to have a targeting laser?
The eyes probably couldn't be steered accurately enough. His muscular control was a mess when I saw him in person in the late 1980s, and it won't have improved since.
On the other hand, if they tune into the neurons that control his arm, they may be able to anticipate what he is going to type. That might help accelerate things for him. It's a bit much to be able to decode the language centres sufficiently to record thoughts directly, but it will eventually get to that point.
Once it is possible to decode his thoughts directly, he would be able to communicate as fast as he can think. Which means that it'll be a babble because he thinks far too fast. On the other hand, it will help him to turn out papers at a fantastic speed.
Similar things have been done. Robot arms can be moved by the mind. Rats brains have flown F14 fighters. EEG sensors placed directly onto the brain (rather than onto the head) produce far more detailed information - it's not a stretch to suggest that some day a sensor layer will be placed onto the inside of the skull with a connection to the outside world.
You could, of course, play with EEG technology yourself. The OpenEEG project details the hardware needed and provides some basic software. See if you can find ways to get better results by changing the antenna used. See if you can get results good enough to be able to control your character in Quake or Netrek - a lot simpler than your average F14!
I mean, wiring your home computer to your brain... what could possibly go wrong?
By full, I take it they mean of the chest infection, not that they're experimenting with stem cell therapy to replace the motor neurons in his brain and spinal cord. (Though if they got to that point before he was too old to operate on, it might be kinda cool.)
The deal requires that Death be listed as co-author and gets 25% on the movie rights. Oh, and the movie is to have a major role for Binky.
Maybe the anti-Hawking is merely employing the newly-discovered form of tunneling, as discussed in a prior article. We need to establish a Casimir Effect such as to exclude the anti-Hawking particle from being a valid state. Do you think if we made him a tinfoil hat, it would work?
*sticks tounge out*
Still doesn't work, as you can't throw the zero'th chair. You'd have subtract one more. So there! Nyah!
And this would be a bad thing, how? Seems to me that hell would be a great place for Microsoft. Does anyone have any Elder Signs available? Preferably on a chair.
He'd imparted all the spin to the revolving chair in his office.
(NB: We need 2^64 chair jokes on this story. Please contribute. CmdrTaco might thank you.)
+2 would still be fine, as I was one of those who suspected Oracle might make a move.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. For example, Oracle can now add modifications to Solaris to provide acceleration for Oracle. But it doesn't stop there. Sun also provides the UltraSPARC range of processors, so it would be possible - at some point - for Oracle to push some low-level primitives useful for databases into the CPU itself.
Why would they want to do that? Duh! Databases are a huge market. Intel is the standard platform at the moment, but it's very hard to get good, sustained performance. Even if a database-enhanced CPU is sold purely as an accelerator card for PCs, you'd have a good source of income from the hardware unit, which has been doing badly.
But Sun servers would look a whole lot more attractive for databases in data centres if they become much more powerful per $ spent. PCs are too cheap to compete on absolute price, but Oracle could utilize their deeper understanding of both relational databases and data warehousing to make Sun servers significantly cheaper per transaction/second.
I think you meant 65,534 (65535 is the largest 16-bit value - 655360 is not a power of 2).
However, Windows is now 64-bit, and we should increase the number of chair jokes appropriately.
...we might all be using Haiku? Or did you mean Dragonfly BSD? Or maybe FreeRTOS? Um, um, um, help me out here, guys! Ok, ok, Plan9! Nope... ExoPC? Nope... MULTICS! Nope... VxWorks! Nope... OS/X? Oracle's Solaris? OSF/1? OpenVMS? Trusted IRIX? Genesis? Damn, I'm out of ideas. You'll have to tell me.
The aliens supply that.
Seriously, that's a good question. Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope (otherwise known as the Lovell Telescope), a key part of eMerlin, was threatened with closure due to a budget shortfall for science and research. Jodrell Bank was deemed, by British ministers, to be of relatively little significance.
Given that, and given the problems with then getting everything done on time, upgrading their computer facilities might not have been so easy. Until the budget was fixed, they had nothing to buy equipment with. They were considering scrapping eMerlin altogether because they couldn't find the money to get the network in place, let alone process the data.
Buying computer equipment last-minute in a panic, especially when you've shielding constraints from hell and a lot of media visibility, is not a good idea. There's absolutely no telling if they had the cash to buy enough compute power even to record the data, let alone crunch it. We will know that when it's fully online and results start coming through.
ObTrivia: Brian May, guitarist for Queen, studied readio astronomy under Professor Lovell and may well have ended up a director for the telescope (and eMerlin) if his music hasn't, ummm, diverted his attention.
There is a new update. His condition is said to have improved (which is good). The illness is some sort of chest infection (which in his case is very very bad).
The reports from Stephen Hawking's personal website report that he's comfortable in hospital and that there'll be an update in the morning. I'm hoping this means he merely got a mild illness that was beyond the ability of his 24-hour nurse to handle and that Cambridge was more reflecting how the nurse felt prior to the Professor going into hospital rather than any solid medical assessment.
Well, admittedly the BBC picture makes him look like he's sick of being photographed. On the other hand, it's probably better than a photo of him racing his modded electric wheelchair down the roads at breakneck speed.
(P.S. Can anyone confirm that Prof. Hawking was planning on getting one of Braun's F1 diffusers added to the back of his wheelchair for extra cornering speed?)
The latest news on Stephen Hawking's own website says that he is "comfortable" and that there will be no further updates until tomorrow morning. I am hoping this means that the illness simply required more medical supervision than the one full-time nurse he currently has, but is otherwise not likely to throw up additional complications. This would indeed be "very ill" prior to getting into hospital, but would explain why he's "comfortable" now.
However, in today's PR-based world, it could just as easily mean that they want to keep any further bad news getting out. I hope that's not the case, and that my original guess is correct, but you just can't tell these days.
*loads thoughts into blunderbus, scatters them over landscape*
Seriously, we know the following from experimental science:
a) Rats are capable of flying F-14s
b) African Grey parrots are capable of basic grammar, understand attributes as distinct from objects, and comprehend zero.
c) Crows can solve basic problems and manufacture their own tools
These do not have significant development in the brain areas associated with processing data, but they DO have exceptionally well-developed brains for handling raw sensory information. Ergo, the virtualization is more important.
Experience is important, yes, but studies in humans and animals suggests that experience is remembered as a simulation of past experience. Children, for example, listen when told not to do something, but don't act on it because they have nothing to link that instruction to. The instruction is only acted upon on subsequent events. Ergo, modeling is more critical to learning than direction.
Senses are linked in ways that are not fully understood. It is believed that all babies have an extreme form of synaesthesia until the brain develops filters. Even then, though, senses are linked. Taste changes when you have a cold, because it is linked to scent, for example.
Damage to key structures has an unpredictable effect. The cartoonist Scott Adams was able to redevelop speech, for example, by bypassing an area involving language. On the other hand, there was a case of a person whose ability to store new long-term memories was destroyed when brain surgery destroyed the critical component involved. It's unclear to me what efforts were made to bypass the area, if any, but clearly the function never restored itself.
I don't think it accurate to call memory holographic. Although any given memory appears to be distributed across the memory regions as a whole, the brain's ability to be fooled by self-similar images seems closer to storing things in a manner more analogous to fractal compression than to an interference pattern. Interference works in time as well as space (a pulsed laser can generate interference patterns), but there is no analogy in memory - spacially-separated events do not get mapped to temporally-separated events.
They get abducted by Government agents when their books get too close to the truth. (Tinfoil hats at half price, today only.)