It sounds to me like it would be pretty easy for the end user to distinguish between links that I've put there, and links that the browser generated to sites that MS thinks I might be interested in.
Frankly, who cares that they can be "distinguished"? This is my site... I don't want them there at all!
But would that block the end-user's fair-use rights to the page?
Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.
Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.
First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.
Second... a subtle but crucial point, there is a major difference between a "translator" and the described service. In theory, a translator does not in fact add value. In theory, the translated page is identical to the original page: Same links, same expression, same content. In reality it doesn't quite work that way, but there's no real benefit in whaling on the translation services because of that (and copyright law is all about issues of "benefit").
On the other hand, a page that is processed against the copyright-owner's will with these "smart tags" does have real content change. Links are suddenly present that previously did not exist and were in no way created or approved by the page copyright owner.
Even this simple change can have very real consequences to a site's message. Consider how the NoAmazon.com site might look through this feature... it's a good guess Amazon will be one of the featured services (they need the help), so now NoAmazon.com is plastered with links to Amazon whereever they mention Amazon (frequently), or products Amazon sells (look in the sidebar). Joy! Yes, that's maintaining the integrity of the site.
And commercially, of course, Microsoft-approved sites will do more business then the non-Microsoft approved sites that have the links automatically added to the MS-approved sites, who don't suffer from that disadvantage.
My big beef with this would be if the links looked like my own, or if they replaced my own links with links that the system thought were "better."
Get beefing, because they are. They are replacing your lack of links with links of their own. Lack of linkage can carry messages to, like the way NoAmazon.com doesn't link to Amazon (or at least not much; I'm not combing their site for counter-examples), or the perceived initial slighting of the web by Old Media when their articles never included links, even when writing about the Web.
Furthermore, bear in mind that if it's OK for Microsoft to do this, then it's OK for Microsoft to do other things, too. Not all of those other things may be so harmless. Expand your thinking a bit. Esp. from the point of view of copyright violation, if Microsoft is allowed to modify the intended output of the webpage in this fashion, there is no reason to believe that they won't be able to do anything else they wanted. And if Microsoft can do it, so can anyone else.
In fact, there's no practical difference between this and censorware, either; with the power of page modification in the hands of anyone who has the technical ability, and by saying that it's legal to do this, you are granting anybody with the power to modify pages the power to censor as they see fit. There's just no difference between that and what Microsoft's doing, it's just that Microsoft is proposing a weak use of that power.
They don't have to change the HTML (which is implicitly copyrighted) to add this feature. The makers of a web page cannot possibly copyright the finished, displayed product.
Incorrect on a couple of levels. First, many webpages are explicitly copyrighted. Secondly, copyright includes the idea of derivitive products, which your on-screen website rendering most assuredly is. If what you were saying were true, you'd be able to take screenshots of sites and then sell them on your own site as yours. You can't do that; those screenshots will be copyrighted by the web site owner.
So while many renderings of the final website exist, I most assuredly do claim a copyright on the final product.
The whole basis of this technique is that certain combinations of keywords are more likely in porn web pages than in, say, safe sex web pages. One reason why this approach should continue to work is that web pages intentionally put various keywords into the web pages so that you can find them using any standard search engine.
Sorry, but I don't think it's that simple. If a pr0n page puts in the phrase "safe sex" and "condom safety" in a few times (along with some other things that one can derive from empirical experience), the page is likely to make it through the filters without negatively impacting the search results to any appreciable degree.
In fact, should this catch on, expect the pr0n people to start doing this deliberately. Once that happens, this neural net becomes one big useless pile of numbers. People are a lot smarter then computers, and if the people ever start trying to deliberately get past the filters, they will succeed more often then not.
Yep, just look at the last few years: Napster, Gnutella, Freenet. We're definitely moving away from the free exchange of computer data.
Yep, one-tenth of one percent of the population runs fast enough to maintain the freedoms they have, the other 99.9% are increasingly screwed. Sounds like we're winning to me.
BSOD is not a bug. BSOD is the result of some bug which could be classified according to the scales. Any number of problems, from severity 5 to severity 1 all trigger BSOD. (Note the BSOD is essentially an effort to convert severity 2 bugs to severity three, by giving the operator the option to continue. 'Course, it never works in real life that I've seen, but sometimes it works just well enough to save to a new file and try again.)
But some process like python's PEP could be a good idea...since every programmer should listen its usersm and the users of computer languages are the other programmers.
Of course I overstated my case a bit... I was having fun (something in short supply here at the end of the semester). It's worth pointing out that the people the developers listen to tend to be people who have actually worked with the language and understand its gestalt... this new language may not even have a gestalt, and it certainly doesn't have people who have worked with it for hundreds of hours. I think until you get to that point, such things are pretty much a waste of time.
I want it to be object oriented!... except for the useles parts. Oh, and combine the best of imperative and functional, the best of perl and python, the best of C++ and smalltalk, the best of capabilities and UNIX, the best of BeOS and OSX, the best of nethack and Angband, and the kitchen sink.
It should be work on Palm Pilots, and Beowolf clusters. It should be easy to extend, easy to parrellize, and easy to optimize for every major processor currently in use. It should be easy to read, have a powerful and compact syntax, familar to people who understand Pascal, Ada, LISP, Prolog, or SQL. It should be comprehensible to an advanced two-year old, usable for teaching computer science concepts in college, and usable in a professional environment. It should be loved by both the Slashdot community and Microsoft, and it should be immune to embrace-and-extend.
It needs to perfectly fit my needs but also perfectly fit the needs of my grandmother. It should have a dancing baby as a atomic object. By the way, whatever your language is currently doing is totally wrong, and you should totally change it around. Also, you need to satisfy every last comment posted in response to this article, plus the ones people only thought, but didn't take the time to post.
Your language should replace OpenGL as the dominant graphics platform. Your language should have an order-N searching algorithm built in. Your language should easily extend into the quantum domain when such computers become available. There should be a command-line option that will read in all of my old QuickBasic programs from when I used DOS.
Your language should be interpreted, compiled to byte-code, compiled to Java(tm) byte-code, or compiled to native code, depending on context. Your language should make sure that all programs written with it should be optimally thread-safe. Your program should be able to detect whether a given program will go into an infinite loop. Your language should have no patent issues. Your language should have all the whiz-bang features other languages have.
I want to be able to apply an XSL stylesheet to my source code and get the equivalent program in Turing Machine code, but I don't want to learn XML... that's too much to ask. Your language should automatically internationalize all programs written in it.
Your language should be elegant. I want to be able to implement the Linux kernel in three lines of code.
I would take any suggestions on Slashdot with a Detroit-salt-mine-sized grain of salt. Consult a real language expert.... because most of all, your language should not designed by a committee of random computer users.
Attack on challenge B: A spectrum notch around 2800Hz is observed for some segments of samp2b.wav and another notch around 3500Hz is observed for some other segments of samp2b.wav.... The attack fills in those notches of samp3b.wav with random but bounded coefficient values... Both attacks were confirmed by SDMI oracle as successful.
Attack on challenge C:: In the first at- tack, we shifted the pitch of the audio by about a quartertone.... Our submissions were confirmed by SDMI oracle as successful. In addition, the perceptual quality of both attacks has passed the "golden ear" testing conducted by SDMI after the 3-week challenge.
Attack on challenge F: For Challenge F, we warped the time axis, by inserting a periodically varying delay.... confirmed by SDMI oracle as successful.
l-_-_-_-l-_-_-_-l
OK, C in particular was trivial, the kind of thing even somebody who knew nothing about signal processing would try, but, come on, didn't SDMI even try to crack their own things before throwing them out to the world?
Based on what I see in this paper, I think SDMI's motives may be misinterpreted here... I think there's a significant component of embarassment here! "Breaking" some of these "amazingly-wonderfully-powerful gonna-save-music-as-we-know-it" schemes was trivial. No wonder they want to hide it.
Note that the papers definately seem to have enough information to build automated crackers for some of the schemes, mostly shell scripts to already existing tools.
Read Flatland yourself,thanks to Project Gutenburg
on
The New Flatland
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· Score: 1
One is that you need one that learns. Before you flame me about this, let's think about this for a second.
I'm not going to flame you. You are essentially correct. The problem is the practical difficulty.
There is a backgammon program that learned, from scratch, how to play backgammon. It is now a world-class player. So clearly, we can learn how to play games.
One little catch: The program played millions of games of backgammon with itself before it got that good.
As you might imagine, Alpha Centauri is significantly more difficult then backgammon. Chess hasn't even been "learned" yet (all the best approaches I know have heavy dollops of brute-force searching). Plus, as the problem increases in difficulty, the time necessary grows. Ouch.
It's a good idea, but we don't know how to do it practically yet. That's why B&W really is interesting to me; while the algorithms aren't necessarily ground-breaking, it is an interesting application of real-time AI in an environment where the AI really shines (as opposed to input difficulties).
True, but as we aren't about to get teleportation any time soon, and have good reason to believe that we never will have it, it's not like there's going to be a naming conflict in the future. This is as close to "teleportation" we'll be getting anytime in the next 30 years. (I wanted to say 50 but I'm not that brave.)
In a vain attempt to save face, I would point out that in trademark law, there are some number of recognized domains, which I don't care to look up right now but encourage the reader to do so:-) and that all computer code, not surprisingly, falls under the same domain. As all are code libraries, SGI could still validly claim infringement.
Now someone please pass a napkin, I've got egg on my face...
WTF!? They trademarked the word "smile"? Makes me sick...
No, of course not. Simple words are not trademarkable, all else being equal (the truth is more complicated), and they can't start suing people who simply use the word "smile" in a novel.
What they've trademarked is the word smile in that font, color, size, and position. You can't pluck that particular graphic (which happens to spell "smile" in English) and use it for your own restaurant, or other purposes, because that particular graphic is trademarked by McDonalds.
Within reason, you could create another graphic with the word "smile" in it in a different font and color and trademark that for yourself. "Within reason" here means that it can't be too similar.
This applies directly to the topic at hand, in fact. OpenGL(tm) as a trademark is limited and people know what it is. Does Open?L infringe? Frankly, if I had to guess, the answer would be an emphatic Yes! Only one letter of difference, and both are graphics libraries? That's just asking for it. My direct answer to this ask Slashdot, bearing in mind that IANAL, is yes, you are legitimately in violation of the SGI trademark, it is quite conceivable that people could confuse OpenGL and Open[ICA]L, esp. as all are graphics libraries, and you should not fight this, because you will quite legitimately lose.
On the other hand, assaulting everybody with "Open" and "GL" is another story. SGI should really only be seen as having "Open" in the context of "OpenGL" and "GL" in the context of "OpenGL". Using on piece or another, especially as both terms seperately are quite generic in nature, should not be enough. "GLScene" and "DemoGL" are far more tenuous claims. In fact, the use of "GL" in this context is so widespread that the argument could probably be made that this has "passed" into common usage... which assumes that it ever did belong exclusively to SGI which I have to doubt.
Still, I can't help making the point that it doesn't take a genius to realize that any 3 independant lines in two-space are bound to meet in a point. Just call me cynical, I guess.
Apparently, it does take a genius. (Hint: lines x = 1, x = 2, x = 3.)
The point here is while that's science... you have no self-evident rational basis for believing in science. ("Self" here means you, the person, not the basis.)
Have you personally examined data from a particle accelerator (preferably built by you) and seen the evidence for, say, gluons? Have you personally seen evidence for blank holes, or personally explored theories of gravitation sufficiently to make a theory of black holes?
Science does ask for a few "religious" beliefs, such as "other people really exist", "other people (called 'scientists') tend to tell the truth", "real truth exists" (an epistomological result that can not be truly proven, merely accepted). You can prove none of these. (Should you disagree, please write the book to prove it; it'll inevitably win every award you can think of.) On the basis of the faith you have in the truthfulness of these unprovable statements, you accept the stuff you are calling "science". (Ask a post-modern literature professor if all people accept all of these statements.)
To drag this back on topic, and to agree with a couple of other posters on the story, I suspect that at the heart of the reviewed book lies some different definitions of 'life' then those we are traditionally comfortable with. This is not a bad thing, but it does probably mean that nearly none of the review or the book should be taken at face value (i.e., in the absense of whatever defintion of "life" the author lays out), because our "default" definition of "life" carries a lot of baggage with it.
(If the author simply never defines life, then this book is sensationalistic trash.)
"What is life?" is a highly religious question, and in fact, "Science", which you claim doesn't ask you to believe anybody, does ask you to at least accept certain definitions of life when talking about biology, which are often religious. (Pop quiz: Are viruses alive? (Traditionally, yes, but barely.) What about prions? (Ummmmm... can I have another?)) The author of this book will ask probably ask you to accept another definition (and it's hard to avoid saying he's probably "proselytizing" the definition).
Indeed, there is an entire branch of philosophy called the philosophy of science (and that's a google search with hundreds of thousands of results, not some obscure ten-employee "think tank" stationed in California), and if that ain't a religion as much as a philosophy, I don't know what is.
I accept much of the philosophy of science (thought I do personally reject that the universe is closed, that there is necessarily no external influence, I think it's an impossibly strong statement), but it's philosophy/religion nonetheless, not some sort of immediately evident-to-Self reality. You say, "in science, nothing is supposed to be taken as gospel, but revealed to all for critical scrutiny." And I say, that statement is Gospel in science. Try arguing against that statement and see how far you get. (And yes, that's a perfectly valid point... Godel's Proof rests on something quite similar. "There is no gospel truth" is a self-contradictory statement, as the statement is claiming to be Truth.)
And this quibbling over the definition of life is properly and most correctly understood as a philosophical debate, not some sort of scientific experiment. No lab experiment can ever prove what "life" is.
While I'm sure that your message is extremely interesting, informative, and thought provoking, I find that I am unable to legally decrypt it under the terms of the DMCA.
Would you please consider posting a message "in the clear" so we can all read the unprotected version, or is your message only for those who have licensed your decryption product so as to read your protected, copyrighted text? If the latter, where can we obtain such a license?
Please re-read the fourth-to-last paragraph (the one with bold words). The DMCA does not make a distinction for those trying to enforce their own copyright (and it can't; it's trivial to set up any number of scenarios where anybody could use that as their own personal loophole). And there are perfectly legal files on Napster which can be "protected" in this way. Napster is not equivalent to copyright violation, and the presence of legal songs means that RIAA could find itself in violation if it "cracks" one of those... and they would, to 100% certainty (specifically, legal paradies).
In all likelihood, the filename is no more copyrighted then your address, and for the same reasons. File names that are simply labels for the contained files will almost certainly not meet originality or creativity requirements.
If Aimster is trying to go on a "My filenames are copyrighted" argument, then this entire exercise was even more futile then anyone imagined. (Or, alternatively, solely a press stunt.)
Furthermore, you might be surprised what a "circumvention device" is. It's not clearly defined. Simply typing it "by hand" into the computer on the tech's desk could make that computer a circumvention device. It's very, very vague.
The problem, obviously, is that the encryption is not desgiend to protect a copyright holder, sadly enough.
Remember, there are songs on Napster not owned by any of the companies RIAA represents. While what you say is true, RIAA is put into a legal Catch-22... they can't download an arbitrary file encrypted in this manner, no matter how provocative the title, unless they are certain in advance that it's a copyright violation, because if they download something that isn't theirs, then they will be themselves in violation.
True, the protection may not extend to the illegal files, but nobody can be sure they're illegal until they are downloaded, which could itself be illegal. Oops. They will get some 'legal' files if they're not careful (for example, parody files).
You suffer from the fallacy that someone who does not agree with you must not agree because they do not understand. I understand. I still don't agree.
I am personally undisturbed for other philosophical reasons (which are not worth going into) that mathematics is not self-proving, and am perfectly happy with an "infinity" that may not be definable in the conventional sense but still has definable behaviors. "The square root of negative one" isn't real either, but still has definable behaviors, and is thus as real as necessary.
(Still, kudos for the approach; it takes guts to shake the foundations of reality and see what comes out, even if I don't agree with your assessments. This is not sarcasm, it only sounds that way on the Internet.)
It is impossible for you to conjure up "infinity" in your mind, because that would take forever.
Really? I can. Didn't take me forever, either.
I suppose you'll next claim that "big numbers like 'trillion' don't exist" because we can't conjure those up in our minds either? (Might not take you forever if you insist on counting each number but it will exceed your lifespan.)
The concept of doing anything which is infinite is completely absurd!
Not gotten very far in Physics, have you? Particle physics without the mathematics of infinity are, to borrow your word, "absurd".
Last month, I received an email out of the blue from Carl Voth, of British Columbia. Expanding on my research, Carl had discovered an interesting "feature" in certain popular brands of email readers. Using a little bit of JavaScript code embedded in an email message, he found that not only could the sender of a message be notified when an email is opened, but the sender could capture the text of messages when the email is forwarded.
Who labelled the parent of this message insightful? RTFA!
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, who cares that they can be "distinguished"? This is my site... I don't want them there at all!
But would that block the end-user's fair-use rights to the page?
Gotta watch that "fair-use" stuff... it's extremely limited and does not refer to modification at all. You have the right to quote small snippets in a academic context, parody, and a couple of other small things, but it does not extend to arbitrary modification.
Both systems would be an end-user activity that adds value, in the user's mind, to the information already present in the website.
First, there is no "right" to add value to somebody else's copyrighted work. If your use isn't covered under the extremely limited fair-use clauses and you don't have permission, you are legally out of luck.
Second... a subtle but crucial point, there is a major difference between a "translator" and the described service. In theory, a translator does not in fact add value. In theory, the translated page is identical to the original page: Same links, same expression, same content. In reality it doesn't quite work that way, but there's no real benefit in whaling on the translation services because of that (and copyright law is all about issues of "benefit").
On the other hand, a page that is processed against the copyright-owner's will with these "smart tags" does have real content change. Links are suddenly present that previously did not exist and were in no way created or approved by the page copyright owner.
Even this simple change can have very real consequences to a site's message. Consider how the NoAmazon.com site might look through this feature... it's a good guess Amazon will be one of the featured services (they need the help), so now NoAmazon.com is plastered with links to Amazon whereever they mention Amazon (frequently), or products Amazon sells (look in the sidebar). Joy! Yes, that's maintaining the integrity of the site.
And commercially, of course, Microsoft-approved sites will do more business then the non-Microsoft approved sites that have the links automatically added to the MS-approved sites, who don't suffer from that disadvantage.
My big beef with this would be if the links looked like my own, or if they replaced my own links with links that the system thought were "better."
Get beefing, because they are. They are replacing your lack of links with links of their own. Lack of linkage can carry messages to, like the way NoAmazon.com doesn't link to Amazon (or at least not much; I'm not combing their site for counter-examples), or the perceived initial slighting of the web by Old Media when their articles never included links, even when writing about the Web.
Furthermore, bear in mind that if it's OK for Microsoft to do this, then it's OK for Microsoft to do other things, too. Not all of those other things may be so harmless. Expand your thinking a bit. Esp. from the point of view of copyright violation, if Microsoft is allowed to modify the intended output of the webpage in this fashion, there is no reason to believe that they won't be able to do anything else they wanted. And if Microsoft can do it, so can anyone else.
In fact, there's no practical difference between this and censorware, either; with the power of page modification in the hands of anyone who has the technical ability, and by saying that it's legal to do this, you are granting anybody with the power to modify pages the power to censor as they see fit. There's just no difference between that and what Microsoft's doing, it's just that Microsoft is proposing a weak use of that power.
Consider the consequences!
Incorrect on a couple of levels. First, many webpages are explicitly copyrighted. Secondly, copyright includes the idea of derivitive products, which your on-screen website rendering most assuredly is. If what you were saying were true, you'd be able to take screenshots of sites and then sell them on your own site as yours. You can't do that; those screenshots will be copyrighted by the web site owner.
So while many renderings of the final website exist, I most assuredly do claim a copyright on the final product.
Sorry, but I don't think it's that simple. If a pr0n page puts in the phrase "safe sex" and "condom safety" in a few times (along with some other things that one can derive from empirical experience), the page is likely to make it through the filters without negatively impacting the search results to any appreciable degree.
In fact, should this catch on, expect the pr0n people to start doing this deliberately. Once that happens, this neural net becomes one big useless pile of numbers. People are a lot smarter then computers, and if the people ever start trying to deliberately get past the filters, they will succeed more often then not.
Yep, just look at the last few years: Napster, Gnutella, Freenet. We're definitely moving away from the free exchange of computer data. Yep, one-tenth of one percent of the population runs fast enough to maintain the freedoms they have, the other 99.9% are increasingly screwed. Sounds like we're winning to me.
BSOD is not a bug. BSOD is the result of some bug which could be classified according to the scales. Any number of problems, from severity 5 to severity 1 all trigger BSOD. (Note the BSOD is essentially an effort to convert severity 2 bugs to severity three, by giving the operator the option to continue. 'Course, it never works in real life that I've seen, but sometimes it works just well enough to save to a new file and try again.)
Of course I overstated my case a bit... I was having fun (something in short supply here at the end of the semester). It's worth pointing out that the people the developers listen to tend to be people who have actually worked with the language and understand its gestalt... this new language may not even have a gestalt, and it certainly doesn't have people who have worked with it for hundreds of hours. I think until you get to that point, such things are pretty much a waste of time.
It should be work on Palm Pilots, and Beowolf clusters. It should be easy to extend, easy to parrellize, and easy to optimize for every major processor currently in use. It should be easy to read, have a powerful and compact syntax, familar to people who understand Pascal, Ada, LISP, Prolog, or SQL. It should be comprehensible to an advanced two-year old, usable for teaching computer science concepts in college, and usable in a professional environment. It should be loved by both the Slashdot community and Microsoft, and it should be immune to embrace-and-extend.
It needs to perfectly fit my needs but also perfectly fit the needs of my grandmother. It should have a dancing baby as a atomic object. By the way, whatever your language is currently doing is totally wrong, and you should totally change it around. Also, you need to satisfy every last comment posted in response to this article, plus the ones people only thought, but didn't take the time to post.
Your language should replace OpenGL as the dominant graphics platform. Your language should have an order-N searching algorithm built in. Your language should easily extend into the quantum domain when such computers become available. There should be a command-line option that will read in all of my old QuickBasic programs from when I used DOS.
Your language should be interpreted, compiled to byte-code, compiled to Java(tm) byte-code, or compiled to native code, depending on context. Your language should make sure that all programs written with it should be optimally thread-safe. Your program should be able to detect whether a given program will go into an infinite loop. Your language should have no patent issues. Your language should have all the whiz-bang features other languages have.
I want to be able to apply an XSL stylesheet to my source code and get the equivalent program in Turing Machine code, but I don't want to learn XML... that's too much to ask. Your language should automatically internationalize all programs written in it.
Your language should be elegant. I want to be able to implement the Linux kernel in three lines of code.
I would take any suggestions on Slashdot with a Detroit-salt-mine-sized grain of salt. Consult a real language expert.... because most of all, your language should not designed by a committee of random computer users.
What are you replying to? My message doesn't contain the phrase "minor distortions". Which part of the paper?
Attack on challenge C:: In the first at- tack, we shifted the pitch of the audio by about a quartertone.... Our submissions were confirmed by SDMI oracle as successful. In addition, the perceptual quality of both attacks has passed the "golden ear" testing conducted by SDMI after the 3-week challenge.
Attack on challenge F: For Challenge F, we warped the time axis, by inserting a periodically varying delay.... confirmed by SDMI oracle as successful.
l-_-_-_-l-_-_-_-l
OK, C in particular was trivial, the kind of thing even somebody who knew nothing about signal processing would try, but, come on, didn't SDMI even try to crack their own things before throwing them out to the world?
Based on what I see in this paper, I think SDMI's motives may be misinterpreted here... I think there's a significant component of embarassment here! "Breaking" some of these "amazingly-wonderfully-powerful gonna-save-music-as-we-know-it" schemes was trivial. No wonder they want to hide it.
Note that the papers definately seem to have enough information to build automated crackers for some of the schemes, mostly shell scripts to already existing tools.
Flatland, a romance of many dimensions.
I'm not going to flame you. You are essentially correct. The problem is the practical difficulty.
There is a backgammon program that learned, from scratch, how to play backgammon. It is now a world-class player. So clearly, we can learn how to play games.
One little catch: The program played millions of games of backgammon with itself before it got that good.
As you might imagine, Alpha Centauri is significantly more difficult then backgammon. Chess hasn't even been "learned" yet (all the best approaches I know have heavy dollops of brute-force searching). Plus, as the problem increases in difficulty, the time necessary grows. Ouch.
It's a good idea, but we don't know how to do it practically yet. That's why B&W really is interesting to me; while the algorithms aren't necessarily ground-breaking, it is an interesting application of real-time AI in an environment where the AI really shines (as opposed to input difficulties).
True, but as we aren't about to get teleportation any time soon, and have good reason to believe that we never will have it, it's not like there's going to be a naming conflict in the future. This is as close to "teleportation" we'll be getting anytime in the next 30 years. (I wanted to say 50 but I'm not that brave.)
In a vain attempt to save face, I would point out that in trademark law, there are some number of recognized domains, which I don't care to look up right now but encourage the reader to do so :-) and that all computer code, not surprisingly, falls under the same domain. As all are code libraries, SGI could still validly claim infringement.
Now someone please pass a napkin, I've got egg on my face...
No, of course not. Simple words are not trademarkable, all else being equal (the truth is more complicated), and they can't start suing people who simply use the word "smile" in a novel.
What they've trademarked is the word smile in that font, color, size, and position. You can't pluck that particular graphic (which happens to spell "smile" in English) and use it for your own restaurant, or other purposes, because that particular graphic is trademarked by McDonalds.
Within reason, you could create another graphic with the word "smile" in it in a different font and color and trademark that for yourself. "Within reason" here means that it can't be too similar.
This applies directly to the topic at hand, in fact. OpenGL(tm) as a trademark is limited and people know what it is. Does Open?L infringe? Frankly, if I had to guess, the answer would be an emphatic Yes! Only one letter of difference, and both are graphics libraries? That's just asking for it. My direct answer to this ask Slashdot, bearing in mind that IANAL, is yes, you are legitimately in violation of the SGI trademark, it is quite conceivable that people could confuse OpenGL and Open[ICA]L, esp. as all are graphics libraries, and you should not fight this, because you will quite legitimately lose.
On the other hand, assaulting everybody with "Open" and "GL" is another story. SGI should really only be seen as having "Open" in the context of "OpenGL" and "GL" in the context of "OpenGL". Using on piece or another, especially as both terms seperately are quite generic in nature, should not be enough. "GLScene" and "DemoGL" are far more tenuous claims. In fact, the use of "GL" in this context is so widespread that the argument could probably be made that this has "passed" into common usage... which assumes that it ever did belong exclusively to SGI which I have to doubt.
Here's some non-parallel lines that still don't meet at a point: x = 1, y = x, y = 2.
To go back on topic... maybe the kid in the story is a math whiz after all...
Apparently, it does take a genius. (Hint: lines x = 1, x = 2, x = 3.)
Have you personally examined data from a particle accelerator (preferably built by you) and seen the evidence for, say, gluons? Have you personally seen evidence for blank holes, or personally explored theories of gravitation sufficiently to make a theory of black holes?
Science does ask for a few "religious" beliefs, such as "other people really exist", "other people (called 'scientists') tend to tell the truth", "real truth exists" (an epistomological result that can not be truly proven, merely accepted). You can prove none of these. (Should you disagree, please write the book to prove it; it'll inevitably win every award you can think of.) On the basis of the faith you have in the truthfulness of these unprovable statements, you accept the stuff you are calling "science". (Ask a post-modern literature professor if all people accept all of these statements.)
To drag this back on topic, and to agree with a couple of other posters on the story, I suspect that at the heart of the reviewed book lies some different definitions of 'life' then those we are traditionally comfortable with. This is not a bad thing, but it does probably mean that nearly none of the review or the book should be taken at face value (i.e., in the absense of whatever defintion of "life" the author lays out), because our "default" definition of "life" carries a lot of baggage with it.
(If the author simply never defines life, then this book is sensationalistic trash.)
"What is life?" is a highly religious question, and in fact, "Science", which you claim doesn't ask you to believe anybody, does ask you to at least accept certain definitions of life when talking about biology, which are often religious. (Pop quiz: Are viruses alive? (Traditionally, yes, but barely.) What about prions? (Ummmmm... can I have another?)) The author of this book will ask probably ask you to accept another definition (and it's hard to avoid saying he's probably "proselytizing" the definition).
Indeed, there is an entire branch of philosophy called the philosophy of science (and that's a google search with hundreds of thousands of results, not some obscure ten-employee "think tank" stationed in California), and if that ain't a religion as much as a philosophy, I don't know what is.
I accept much of the philosophy of science (thought I do personally reject that the universe is closed, that there is necessarily no external influence, I think it's an impossibly strong statement), but it's philosophy/religion nonetheless, not some sort of immediately evident-to-Self reality. You say, "in science, nothing is supposed to be taken as gospel, but revealed to all for critical scrutiny." And I say, that statement is Gospel in science. Try arguing against that statement and see how far you get. (And yes, that's a perfectly valid point... Godel's Proof rests on something quite similar. "There is no gospel truth" is a self-contradictory statement, as the statement is claiming to be Truth.) And this quibbling over the definition of life is properly and most correctly understood as a philosophical debate, not some sort of scientific experiment. No lab experiment can ever prove what "life" is.
While I'm sure that your message is extremely interesting, informative, and thought provoking, I find that I am unable to legally decrypt it under the terms of the DMCA.
Would you please consider posting a message "in the clear" so we can all read the unprotected version, or is your message only for those who have licensed your decryption product so as to read your protected, copyrighted text? If the latter, where can we obtain such a license?
Sincerely, Jerf
Please re-read the fourth-to-last paragraph (the one with bold words). The DMCA does not make a distinction for those trying to enforce their own copyright (and it can't; it's trivial to set up any number of scenarios where anybody could use that as their own personal loophole). And there are perfectly legal files on Napster which can be "protected" in this way. Napster is not equivalent to copyright violation, and the presence of legal songs means that RIAA could find itself in violation if it "cracks" one of those... and they would, to 100% certainty (specifically, legal paradies).
If Aimster is trying to go on a "My filenames are copyrighted" argument, then this entire exercise was even more futile then anyone imagined. (Or, alternatively, solely a press stunt.)
Furthermore, you might be surprised what a "circumvention device" is. It's not clearly defined. Simply typing it "by hand" into the computer on the tech's desk could make that computer a circumvention device. It's very, very vague.
Remember, there are songs on Napster not owned by any of the companies RIAA represents. While what you say is true, RIAA is put into a legal Catch-22... they can't download an arbitrary file encrypted in this manner, no matter how provocative the title, unless they are certain in advance that it's a copyright violation, because if they download something that isn't theirs, then they will be themselves in violation.
True, the protection may not extend to the illegal files, but nobody can be sure they're illegal until they are downloaded, which could itself be illegal. Oops. They will get some 'legal' files if they're not careful (for example, parody files).
I am personally undisturbed for other philosophical reasons (which are not worth going into) that mathematics is not self-proving, and am perfectly happy with an "infinity" that may not be definable in the conventional sense but still has definable behaviors. "The square root of negative one" isn't real either, but still has definable behaviors, and is thus as real as necessary.
(Still, kudos for the approach; it takes guts to shake the foundations of reality and see what comes out, even if I don't agree with your assessments. This is not sarcasm, it only sounds that way on the Internet.)
Really? I can. Didn't take me forever, either.
I suppose you'll next claim that "big numbers like 'trillion' don't exist" because we can't conjure those up in our minds either? (Might not take you forever if you insist on counting each number but it will exceed your lifespan.)
The concept of doing anything which is infinite is completely absurd!
Not gotten very far in Physics, have you? Particle physics without the mathematics of infinity are, to borrow your word, "absurd".
Nice troll!
Who labelled the parent of this message insightful? RTFA!
It's all just a wrapper around a Turing machine.