And the same man who axiomatized quantum theory, provided us with one possible (not ZF)axiomatization of set theory, proved the spectral and ergodic theorems, originated game theory, developed fundamental economic equilibrium growth models and came up with too many mathematical theorems and papers to list. There's a nice biography by Norman McRae(sic?). Unfortunately I forget the title...
There's a nice anecdote about Von Neumann. He was asked the "brain teaser": two trains are on a collision course 1 mile apart. Both trains are going 10mph. There is a very scared bird flying 20mph back and forth between the two trains, turning around and flying in the opposite direction when it sees that it is about to be hit by one of them. How far does the bird fly before it goes splat? This is not a brain teaser if you note that the trains will collide in.05 hours and a bird going 20mph will fly 1 mile in that time. However some mathematicians can be tricked into treating the bird as a point which is going faster than the trains and can turn around instantly and, hence, makes an infinite number of reversals before the trains collide. One way to find the distance is to add up an infinite series for the distance for each trip back and forth. Mathematicians are predisposed to do this the hard way. When Von Neumann was asked this question he immediately came up with the right answer. When his friend asked him "So you know the trick?" he said "What trick? I just summed the infinite series."
I think a decent implementation of RSA does get more complicated. But you're right; the basic algorithm is pretty simple.
Also, unless I am misremembering, I think it's not illegal to experiment with patented ideas. Coding up RSA for research purposes, even if what you are researching is the feasibility of folding it into BSD when the patent expires, shouldn't have been illegal. They were probably working on it for a while.
This is probably true in the long-run, but expecting current Linux kernel maintainers to maintain code for machines they'll never see is unrealistic. These sort of changes are going to occur at first experimentally in-house at a large corporation. That will be a fork for at least a little while. Presumably they'll be GPL'd (they better be!) so the changes can always be brought in if people want them. And hopefully the unnamed corporation will want the good karma they'll achieve by later hiring someone to help with folding the resulting code back into the regular kernel.
With GPL'd code, I don't find a (possibly temporary) fork to do something extremely specialized all that threatening; if anything it sounds like a practical necessity at the moment.
Bingo with the 1-d comment. The classical Rayleigh limit is inherently a 1-d measure. Halving that limit gives the potential for 4x as many transistors.
IBM has had x-ray lithography for a while, but engineering challenges have kept that (shorter wavelength) technology in the small-scall arena for the time being.
I agree and I'll add that they've kept them there for a long time in the past. Industrial scale X-ray lithography looks as much like a pipe dream now as it did ten years ago. As an undergrad I took a course in quantum electronics (basically a course in quantum physics and electronic device applications). Tangentially, X-ray lithography was mentioned as a "Good thing", if the engineering details could be worked out. That was around 1990 and they still haven't been worked out to my knowledge.
Any new approach intrigues me. Maybe enough new approaches will yield something that can be worked out in the near future. X-ray lithography is starting to look like fusion: something amazingly good that might be worked out at some indefinite point in the future. We need something quicker than that!
Why is it that "my" community is always there when it comes to ruining legitimate businesses? As soon as some company comes up with a neat device and accompanying businessmodel (I-Opener, Cuecat), there's a whole bunch of geeks that are ready to ruin the company by finding all kinds of little loopholes in some law.
Possibly because this forum is sympathetic to free software and/or limited protection of IP. There are a few general positions taken in this forum:
1. Radical: All software should be free. IP sucks.
2. Legal traditionalist: The copyright law is OK as it used to be. Attempts by corporations to extend their copyright through lobbying (DMCA, etc.) and shrink-wrap licenses suck. If I buy a copy of a piece of software, I OWN a copy under the usual provisions of copyright law unless I've explicitly agreed to a contract before purchase which says otherwise. I'll continue to exercise my fair use rights despite the EULA.
3. The corporate line: The copyright law needs to be changed to support control of use as well as copying. Fair use is a threat to economic growth in information industries and to the development of new business models. The DMCA and Shrinkwrap licenses need strong support under the law to promote the health of the industry.
That's probably a bit biased: I detest the arguments of camp 3 and I think they should be squashed like bugs whenever the law makes it possible---especially when you consider their lobying clout; if we don't use the law against them now, we won't have a law to use against them later. And I don't think camp 1's position is achievable or entirely desirable. I'll leave it to the proponents of these positions to give a better defense.
The vast majority of Slashdot readers seem to fall in camps 1 and 2. Most seem to fall in 2, though general arguments against IP are not rare. The proponents of position 1 will generally support the arguments of position 2 under the belief that "it's the best we can get."
This is a case of a company suggesting that they might enforce a license for an unsolicited product. Is it a big surprise that a crowd that's generally hostile to extension of licenses beyond explicitly negotiated contracts is pissed off by this? It seems like a consistent position to me. And finding out what laws there are against this strikes me as defending their turf in a way that is traditionally supported by law for good reason and might not be supported in the future. There's a sense of urgency here.
Amazon has gotten a lot of flak for their patents, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Seems like a consistent stance to me.
This looks irrelevant. Did the person to whom you are responding say anything positive about the Baby Bell monopolies? It is easier to prevent a monopoly from forming than to eliminate one that is already in existence. Most US law on the matter is geared to doing this rather than engineering break-ups or regulation. Hence in advocating an active anti-trust policy, it seems perfectly consistent to worry about AOL/TW first.
Now I'm going to rant in a manner not necessarily directed at you: I've often wondered why phone/cable lines shouldn't be opened to competitors. The Baby Bells and cable companies have their wires on land that they don't own---by grace of local and state governments. Even barring anti-trust action, we are not living in a libertarian paradise; the government has already intervened on behalf of the monopoly. This is a substantial government conceived barrier of entry for competitors. It seems that the "pure" free-market solution to access of diverse services from cable/telephone monopolies would be to let private property owners rent out the land and refuse to rent it out if they are not receiving the services they want.
Do the pure libertarians among us really feel that private individuals should be able to do this? If so, I'll give them points for consistency, if not practicality. Otherwise, I'll have to say that much of the more rabid free-market hype I see on this issue is just that, hype.
FWIW, I'm fairly enthusiastic about free markets myself and I'm not particularly against big business. But I do see an important role for antitrust law, particularly in cases where government has already helped in setting up a "natural" monopoly.
Everyone knows N, but only you know P and Q. P and Q are prime and it's _very_ hard to find them from large N. Given a message encoded in this way you have precomputed a quantity D such that
3*D=1 mod (p-1)*(q-1)
From Euler's extension of Fermat's little theorem stating that
a^(tot(N))=1 mod N
whenever a is relatively prime to N. Here tot(N) is Euler's totient function, the number integers less than N which are relatively prime to N. The condition that a be relatively prime to N can be dropped if we write
a^(tot(N)+1)=a mod N
and it can be shown that tot(N)=(P-1)*(Q-1) so
3D=1 mod(p-1)*(q-1) implies that
(x^3)^D=x^(3*D)=x^(1+m*(p-1)*(q-1)) mod N
for some m. A repeated application of Euler's theorem m times gives
(x^3)^D=x mod N
The security of the method depends on the fact that D is very difficult to compute from N. The number 3 is not magic, other exponents are possible.
Although you clearly know it, the original poster did not: With proper choice of N, this has only been "cracked" in the somewhat trivial sense that any public key system can be cracked: with enough computational power, you can determine the secret key from the private key. But increasing the key size makes things safe very quickly.
(Of course, you have to a good job coding this all up and choosing N---a non-trivial job).
Weren't Diesel engines orginally famous for running off anything from coal dust to corn oil?
I would have thought you could run a Diesel engine off of propane...
Government will not tolerate an alternative to the ir capitalist New World Order, that they are trying to promote. Since RMS views free software movement as a product of socialist ideas, rather then example of "natural law", they deem his as a socialist.
Does RMS really view it that way? Natural law arguments against copyrights and patents have a fine pedigree in American history, going back to Jefferson. I thought RMS was squarely in that tradition and took the view that freedom to spread information was a natural right and that
copyrights and free licenses were merely a necessary evil given the current system.
As someone else pointed out here, RMS is very frequently misrepresented. Through all the smoke, I can't figure out if he's a socialist or a radical libertarian; there are arguments for free software from both points of view.
This just suggests that government can't hold the copyright. It doesn't seem to eliminate the possiblity that government could fund only projects in which the authors have agreed to hold the copyrights and release the software under the GPL. Or am I missing something? I don't really know anything about the law on this...
However, I still think the BSD-style license is most likely to be favored by corporations.
BSD doesn't have the viral aspect to it. So, they can take BSD code, develop it, and then release the source or not. That "or not" is a nice option for corporations to have
At the risk of simply rewording Xeno's post, BSD is the license that corporations want _you_ to use. If they have any code sitting around that they might consider releasing as open source, they'll generally prefer to release _their_ code under a more restrictive license. (usually even more restrictive than the GPL).
I'm not anti-BSD. I think people who use the BSD license are being very generous, so I'd be ashamed to say anything against them. But if corporations are going to be contributing to open source software or, in some cases, generating it from scratch, I don't think free software can standardize on the BSD license. Corporations will want to get everything as BSD code and release everything under something more restrictive. The GPL is at least closer to providing a level of protection for the author that both hackers and corporations can live with.
Whatever sort of free BSD lunch corporations might seem to want from open source developers, Xeno's point that they usually choose something closer to the GPL for their own code is telling.
You can't change a license retroactively. Also, many (most?) authors give you the option of redistributing under version x.x or later (your choice) of the GPL. (Sorry, I can't remember the version numbers...). In those circumstances, people wouldn't have any rights taken away by the change.
Keep in mind that the GPL is a license that gives you extra rights to distribute---rights you wouldn't normally have under copyright law. The validity of the GPL is the only way people can justify freely redistributing code. If it were declared completely invalid, everyone (except copyright holders) distributing GPL code would have to stop. You would be shooting yourself in the foot by even challenging its validity.
Not that there aren't more subtle attacks on and potential loopholes in the GPL. But presumably we have RMS staying up at night worrying about that and trying to make it ironclad in upcoming versions. That's a much bigger can of worms.
Some noteworthy ideas, including that of "open patent" development, which keeps resurfacing whenever patents are discussed, but doesn't really seem to have taken hold yet.
Isn't that because patents cost $$$$? Even if all the little guys band together they'll have a hard time coming up with the cash to patent at the rate the larger companies do. It's really very unfair. I'm working on developing some algorithms, relevant to engineering computations, that I hope might be profitably patentable (with the intent of taking money from large companies and letting everyone else use them for free) but I don't even have the cash to consider filing a patent (and, to be honest, my work, while I think it's promising, isn't ready for prime-time yet.)
It seems to me that, while we won't ever make the system so cash-neutral that unpatented prior art establishes an implicit patent (in contrast to copyrights), small-time software houses and programmers should collaborate on establishing a database on prior art. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who would pay the legal fees for defending it. Right now patents seem to be an exclusive right to any idea you want, so long as you have big money to defend your dubious claims in court.
To end: your misuse of pseudo-science to attack common sense comes off as arrogant:-)
As with most things, the answer to nature vs. nurture is probably "both". But keep in mind that the person you are responding to was in turn responding to someone who made a pseudoscientific reference to twin studies to support the claim that observed gender differences are the result of nature rather than nurture. When dealing with something that dogmatically bogus, I'd probably also go overboard in pointing out that nurture might be important.
FWIW, I'm an agnostic middle-of-the-roader
on nature vs. nurture. Given my own experience meeting men and women both with quite broad personality variations within each gender, my suspicion is that innate gender differences might be small with most observed differences falling out on the side of parental and societal expectations (i.e. nurture). Certainly this isn't an offense to common sense as I see it; but I don't really know. And given the relative lack of girls raised as boys and boys raised as girls, science isn't likely to settle this in a convincing manner anytime soon.
The other guy (jetson123) responded with some good technical points on why Fortran is to be preferred to C under some circumstances. It all comes down to the fact that array manipulations suck under C.
It's also worth adding that the array syntax in Fortran 90 (or later) is VERY nice---especially if, as many numerical oriented programmers do, you prototype your code in Matlab first. This makes developing some types of numerical codes incredibly quick and easy compared to trying to do the equivalent in C. Note that this is not an apology for Fortran 77, which I hate using. Fortran isn't dying, it's just evolved and become even better suited to the narrow market of numerical/scientific computation. I'm always amazed at what a pleasure it is to use Fortran 90/95; it's a really nice language.
Plus on many high-end machines, Fortran compilers produce much faster code. C can compete with some hand-tuning, but it's not fun.
Myself, I'm the entire "VAX Fortran project", though there hasn't been much to do there in the past few years.
It surprises me that one person would be the entire VAX Fortran team. Where there are VAXen, I'd assume there would be demand for a Fortran compiler. I used VAX Fortran around 1990 and, at least where I was working it seemed like the dominant language (or perhaps that was just where I was working...). I tried the VAX C compiler at around the same time and it seemed a bit flakey to me. What language are people with old VAXen currently using?
Maybe I'm just getting old and my memory is going...
Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell?
on
Looking Back At NeXT
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I've seen little from the Jobs camp apart from spin and the ability to have smart techs around him a lot of the time that come up with cool stuff.
That's what I give him credit for. He seems to have a rare knack for finding people with good ideas. He may (or may not) be an asshole and what he does may not be as cool as being a master hardware hacker like Woz, but compared to all the companies that succeed with no interesting ideas at all, Jobs does seem to have some cool instincts on what ideas to support. His failures have been more interesting than most people's successes. (And Apple doesn't really seem to be failing anymore.)
Blocking an intersection may cause an inconvience for motorists, but it does NOT impede their constitutional rights. Last time I check, there was no ammendment regarding a "right to drive down Main street".
I do not agree. Blocking an intersection could well interfere with someones free speech rights. In fact, hindering access to a forum in which people are saying things you don't like
isn't that uncommon a protest tactic. Personally, I think that the police should protect everyone's right to go where they need to say what they want.
FWIW, I don't have an axe to grind. I'm probably more politically aligned with the protestors than with the Republicans, but I'm an American living in Australia. As such I don't have enough information to asign blame between the police and the protestors. Depending on whose sets of facts I believe (police making mass
arrests and tear-gassing everyone in sight vs. violent protestors destroying property and trying to block roads with dumpsters), I could see either party as deserving the lion's share of the blame. It is, however, interesting to see the polarization in the reports; no one seems to agree on the facts. Can anyone give a run-down on what happened without revealing a political agenda?
There are accepted limits on free speech regardless of medium. Public display of obscenity falls in this category in most places, whether it's on a T-shirt or coming out of your mouth. And school kids don't generally have the right to express themselves through their clothing; hell, some schools require uniforms.
So if your point is that not everything you can put on a T-shirt deserves 1st amendment protection, then, well, duh... It's the same for other types of speech. Some things do deserve this protection, however. (e.g. political campaign T-shirts). Did you have a non-obvious point?
I see WINE as being just one more thing that people are doing to make Linux look bad. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but in the long run WINE encourages people to "port" Windows software to Linux through WINE (Look at WordPerfect Office) instead of writing solid native apps. I don't see this as a good thing.
Look at it as maintaining backward compatability for apps written for an archaic platform. When everyone has switched to Linux, there will still be a few people needing software for outdated platforms. (i.e. Windows.)
More seriously, I agree that discouraging native apps is certainly a danger. But, considering the rate of progress on WINE, it's not an immediate danger---at the moment, trying to run most Windows apps under WINE is an act of experimentation/desperation. The bigger danger IMO, is that people don't switch to Linux because of lack of apps and the fickle press loses interest in an alternative OS, killing the momentum that Linux currently has. If Linux popularity builds, native apps will come, whatever support there might be for Windows software.
It seems to me that there's a balance to be struck here. I don't think Windows emulation should be a top priority of the Linux community as a whole---I'd rather see free software types working on native apps. But given that the WINE team is a limited section of people coding productively on a difficult project that could make migration to Linux pain-free for the average user, I'm not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. And, since 100% of my real work goes on under Linux, I find the occasional reboot to run something Windows-only extremely painful. I'd like to see WINE working flawlessly.
Obsolutely not ! BSD is more like that. GPL is here to enforce "freedom", and not your average definition of freedom but only as defined by FSF folks.
There are all sorts of freedom for all sorts of people. Some developers want to be free to include any corporate modification of their code into their version. It seems to me that the GPL tries to balance the freedom of ordinary users, business and free software developers, with a heavy slant to users and developers. With all sorts of possible conflicting "freedoms" to maintain, arguing which license is most free seems rather silly.
Be real. How the heck you can sell software that anybody can copy afterwards ? There is no example proving that a company was able to survive following this model.
Perhaps not. But the fact is that GPL software provides a resource for all sorts of businesses whose primary business will not be selling modified versions of the software. How many companies are saving money by using Linux servers or in-house modified versions of GPL software? And in any event, most programmers have jobs working on in-house, unmarketed software anyway; this is the largest part of the software "market". They are getting a lot of free help and IMO companies shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
IMO, the real strength of the GPL is in areas where issues of vendor lock-in and interoperability are so compelling that you are forced to wonder if it's a huge loss for consumers for companies to be selling proprietary versions of that type of product at all. This includes proprietary OSs with hidden API calls and word processors with poorly documented document formats. Core functional software of a computer shall be GPL; or I'll never use it. A library shall be LGPL; or I'll never link to it. And all other software I use of what license please God or its developers.
That doesn't help you; in fact it hurts you immensely. Now these even more complicated things need to spring into existance spontaneously, and then find a pathway back to a simpler configuration.
I think that the flaw in this reasoning is that you are looking for a gradual building of a _single_ non-interacting biological process. This seems to assume that all the components of this biochemical process were there for the purpose of achieving this particular process in some earlier primitive form. If the various chemicals were involved in different process (as even I, as a non-biochemist with a minor interest in yeast metabolism during fermentation know happens), then a seemingly minor change could cause a new process to spring up. In other words in a complicated chemical soup, all sorts of processes involving these molecules, perhaps completely unrelated to their current function, might have been taking place.
To assess the probability of (e.g.) light sensitivity springing up, you would have to speculate on all sorts of biochemical processes that might not currently offer selective advantages to organisms and might not even be currently happening in cells. That is, to disprove Behe, you would have to assess potential selective advantages of each of the chemicals involved in light sensitivty when they might have been operating in other processes in the past. To prove Behe right on his claim of improbability, you would have to make the same assessment. Given our current knowledge, and our likely ability to recover knowledge of possibly extinct biochemical pathways, this strikes me as an impossibly high hurdle. Which is why I don't think speculation of this sort sounds particularly scientific.
YMMV. I'm open-minded and you don't sound like a fanatic or a nut-case, so if you say Behe assesses his claims of improbability in the context of multiple, interacting, possibly extinct biochemical processes with different purposes and different selective advantages, then I'll look for his book. Otherwise, it sounds like an oversimplification to me and I don't think I'll bother.
So this means we shouldn't defend our intellectual property now? Sony tried very hard to create a game system that was reasonably priced that could play cutting-edge games - and someone took their ideas and patents, released a competiting product.
No. A court found the copyright infringement claims invalid. Sony has voluntarily dropped the patent infringement claims, suggesting to me that they probably weren't valid either---if they did have a valid patent claim they have lots of money for lawyers and they could easily win. This is pretty much what I'd expect for a clean-room reverse engineered product: any overlap with Sony's intellectual property would have to have been the result of chance; that's pretty unlikely.
Here's a laymans rundown of what various forms of intellectual property traditionally protect: Trademarks protect a particular name or logo that distinguishes a company or product in the market. This case has nothing to do with trademarks. Copyrights protect the particular expression of an idea. Patents protect a particular implementation of a functional idea (i.e. an invention, defined quite narrowly by how it was implemented). Trade secrets protect all sorts of things, but once the cat is out of the bag they provide no protection at all. The real issues here were copyright and patent infringement.
Smart people trying to produce an emulator would have poked through the Playstation and documented the interface for games without describing Sony's patented algorithms or providing any of Sony's copyrighted code; then a separate team would have written an emulator to the specification without even looking at a console. (i.e. the clean room reverse engineering mentioned above). Barring a massive coincidence, this pretty much guarantees that they don't use any of Sony's IP.
Regarding your own hypothetical product, anyone is free to make a product that does the same thing, so long as it doesn't borrow from your particular implementation. Thus _all_ people can profit from their own particular ideas and innovations, including emulator companies.
Yet, no one here seems to bat an eye about the simple fact that this gives the internet an unfair advantage over businesses that choose to use a more traditional broadcast media.
Most people here seem to feel that an ISP is a common carrier (i.e. a medium that is open to all and, as such, it would be a ridiculous burden to expect carrier to police everything that every user might send over the network) and not a broadcast medium. The line is sometimes blurred by sufficiently popular web sites, but a common carrier for the general public is probably the use of the internet that is near and dear to most/.ers hearts. This interpretation is probably defensible under the law, as well. If, in fact, an ISP enjoys common carrier status, then the appropriate analogy is with the telephone and not with television, radio, magazines, billboards and newspapers. You don't prosecute or impose regulations on AT&T because of crank or obscene calls; you prosecute whoever made the call. That may superficially seem to make protecting children harder, but if you think trying to regulate a common carrier will work well enough to give parents a helping hand in protecting their children, maybe you should set your sights on AT&T and try to regulate them to prevent obscene phone calls.
FWIW, In real life I play a reasonably protective step-father. I don't think that sort of regulation would work well enough to help me at all; and it would open up all sorts of insane liability issues for ISPs that could shut quite a few of them down. The way I see it: the/. party line on this shows no hypocrisy, just common sense. Do you really think parents should have to lord over their children 24 hours a day to make sure they don't stumble across some disgusting man on man pornography and turn into sexual deviants or homosexuals? Would you like it if your parents had to do that with you?
Don't worry: there's more heterosexual porn out there turning innocent gay kids into rabid and deviant heterosexuals than the other way around. If you think it has such a strong influence maybe you should consider exposing more children to heterosexual porn just to be safe.
Slashdot Mirror
And the same man who axiomatized quantum theory, provided us with one possible (not ZF)axiomatization of set theory, proved the spectral and ergodic theorems, originated game theory, developed fundamental economic equilibrium growth models and came up with too many mathematical theorems and papers to list. There's a nice biography by Norman McRae(sic?). Unfortunately I forget the title...
There's a nice anecdote about Von Neumann. He was asked the "brain teaser": two trains are on a collision course 1 mile apart. Both trains are going 10mph. There is a very scared bird flying 20mph back and forth between the two trains, turning around and flying in the opposite direction when it sees that it is about to be hit by one of them. How far does the bird fly before it goes splat? This is not a brain teaser if you note that the trains will collide in .05 hours and a bird going 20mph will fly 1 mile in that time. However some mathematicians can be tricked into treating the bird as a point which is going faster than the trains and can turn around instantly and, hence, makes an infinite number of reversals before the trains collide. One way to find the distance is to add up an infinite series for the distance for each trip back and forth. Mathematicians are predisposed to do this the hard way. When Von Neumann was asked this question he immediately came up with the right answer. When his friend asked him "So you know the trick?" he said "What trick? I just summed the infinite series."
I think a decent implementation of RSA does get more complicated. But you're right; the basic algorithm is pretty simple.
Also, unless I am misremembering, I think it's not illegal to experiment with patented ideas. Coding up RSA for research purposes, even if what you are researching is the feasibility of folding it into BSD when the patent expires, shouldn't have been illegal. They were probably working on it for a while.
This is probably true in the long-run, but expecting current Linux kernel maintainers to maintain code for machines they'll never see is unrealistic. These sort of changes are going to occur at first experimentally in-house at a large corporation. That will be a fork for at least a little while. Presumably they'll be GPL'd (they better be!) so the changes can always be brought in if people want them. And hopefully the unnamed corporation will want the good karma they'll achieve by later hiring someone to help with folding the resulting code back into the regular kernel.
With GPL'd code, I don't find a (possibly temporary) fork to do something extremely specialized all that threatening; if anything it sounds like a practical necessity at the moment.
Bingo with the 1-d comment. The classical Rayleigh limit is inherently a 1-d measure. Halving that limit gives the potential for 4x as many transistors.
I agree and I'll add that they've kept them there for a long time in the past. Industrial scale X-ray lithography looks as much like a pipe dream now as it did ten years ago. As an undergrad I took a course in quantum electronics (basically a course in quantum physics and electronic device applications). Tangentially, X-ray lithography was mentioned as a "Good thing", if the engineering details could be worked out. That was around 1990 and they still haven't been worked out to my knowledge. Any new approach intrigues me. Maybe enough new approaches will yield something that can be worked out in the near future. X-ray lithography is starting to look like fusion: something amazingly good that might be worked out at some indefinite point in the future. We need something quicker than that!
Possibly because this forum is sympathetic to free software and/or limited protection of IP. There are a few general positions taken in this forum:
1. Radical: All software should be free. IP sucks.
2. Legal traditionalist: The copyright law is OK as it used to be. Attempts by corporations to extend their copyright through lobbying (DMCA, etc.) and shrink-wrap licenses suck. If I buy a copy of a piece of software, I OWN a copy under the usual provisions of copyright law unless I've explicitly agreed to a contract before purchase which says otherwise. I'll continue to exercise my fair use rights despite the EULA.
3. The corporate line: The copyright law needs to be changed to support control of use as well as copying. Fair use is a threat to economic growth in information industries and to the development of new business models. The DMCA and Shrinkwrap licenses need strong support under the law to promote the health of the industry.
That's probably a bit biased: I detest the arguments of camp 3 and I think they should be squashed like bugs whenever the law makes it possible---especially when you consider their lobying clout; if we don't use the law against them now, we won't have a law to use against them later. And I don't think camp 1's position is achievable or entirely desirable. I'll leave it to the proponents of these positions to give a better defense.
The vast majority of Slashdot readers seem to fall in camps 1 and 2. Most seem to fall in 2, though general arguments against IP are not rare. The proponents of position 1 will generally support the arguments of position 2 under the belief that "it's the best we can get."
This is a case of a company suggesting that they might enforce a license for an unsolicited product. Is it a big surprise that a crowd that's generally hostile to extension of licenses beyond explicitly negotiated contracts is pissed off by this? It seems like a consistent position to me. And finding out what laws there are against this strikes me as defending their turf in a way that is traditionally supported by law for good reason and might not be supported in the future. There's a sense of urgency here.
Amazon has gotten a lot of flak for their patents, so I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Seems like a consistent stance to me.
This looks irrelevant. Did the person to whom you are responding say anything positive about the Baby Bell monopolies? It is easier to prevent a monopoly from forming than to eliminate one that is already in existence. Most US law on the matter is geared to doing this rather than engineering break-ups or regulation. Hence in advocating an active anti-trust policy, it seems perfectly consistent to worry about AOL/TW first.
Now I'm going to rant in a manner not necessarily directed at you: I've often wondered why phone/cable lines shouldn't be opened to competitors. The Baby Bells and cable companies have their wires on land that they don't own---by grace of local and state governments. Even barring anti-trust action, we are not living in a libertarian paradise; the government has already intervened on behalf of the monopoly. This is a substantial government conceived barrier of entry for competitors. It seems that the "pure" free-market solution to access of diverse services from cable/telephone monopolies would be to let private property owners rent out the land and refuse to rent it out if they are not receiving the services they want.
Do the pure libertarians among us really feel that private individuals should be able to do this? If so, I'll give them points for consistency, if not practicality. Otherwise, I'll have to say that much of the more rabid free-market hype I see on this issue is just that, hype.
FWIW, I'm fairly enthusiastic about free markets myself and I'm not particularly against big business. But I do see an important role for antitrust law, particularly in cases where government has already helped in setting up a "natural" monopoly.
More specifically if N=P*Q and 0x^3 mod N
Everyone knows N, but only you know P and Q. P and Q are prime and it's _very_ hard to find them from large N. Given a message encoded in this way you have precomputed a quantity D such that
3*D=1 mod (p-1)*(q-1)
From Euler's extension of Fermat's little theorem stating that
a^(tot(N))=1 mod N
whenever a is relatively prime to N. Here tot(N) is Euler's totient function, the number integers less than N which are relatively prime to N. The condition that a be relatively prime to N can be dropped if we write
a^(tot(N)+1)=a mod N
and it can be shown that tot(N)=(P-1)*(Q-1) so 3D=1 mod(p-1)*(q-1) implies that
(x^3)^D=x^(3*D)=x^(1+m*(p-1)*(q-1)) mod N
for some m. A repeated application of Euler's theorem m times gives
(x^3)^D=x mod N
The security of the method depends on the fact that D is very difficult to compute from N. The number 3 is not magic, other exponents are possible.
Although you clearly know it, the original poster did not: With proper choice of N, this has only been "cracked" in the somewhat trivial sense that any public key system can be cracked: with enough computational power, you can determine the secret key from the private key. But increasing the key size makes things safe very quickly. (Of course, you have to a good job coding this all up and choosing N---a non-trivial job).
Weren't Diesel engines orginally famous for running off anything from coal dust to corn oil? I would have thought you could run a Diesel engine off of propane...
Does RMS really view it that way? Natural law arguments against copyrights and patents have a fine pedigree in American history, going back to Jefferson. I thought RMS was squarely in that tradition and took the view that freedom to spread information was a natural right and that copyrights and free licenses were merely a necessary evil given the current system.
As someone else pointed out here, RMS is very frequently misrepresented. Through all the smoke, I can't figure out if he's a socialist or a radical libertarian; there are arguments for free software from both points of view.
This just suggests that government can't hold the copyright. It doesn't seem to eliminate the possiblity that government could fund only projects in which the authors have agreed to hold the copyrights and release the software under the GPL. Or am I missing something? I don't really know anything about the law on this...
At the risk of simply rewording Xeno's post, BSD is the license that corporations want _you_ to use. If they have any code sitting around that they might consider releasing as open source, they'll generally prefer to release _their_ code under a more restrictive license. (usually even more restrictive than the GPL).
I'm not anti-BSD. I think people who use the BSD license are being very generous, so I'd be ashamed to say anything against them. But if corporations are going to be contributing to open source software or, in some cases, generating it from scratch, I don't think free software can standardize on the BSD license. Corporations will want to get everything as BSD code and release everything under something more restrictive. The GPL is at least closer to providing a level of protection for the author that both hackers and corporations can live with.
Whatever sort of free BSD lunch corporations might seem to want from open source developers, Xeno's point that they usually choose something closer to the GPL for their own code is telling.
You can't change a license retroactively. Also, many (most?) authors give you the option of redistributing under version x.x or later (your choice) of the GPL. (Sorry, I can't remember the version numbers...). In those circumstances, people wouldn't have any rights taken away by the change.
Keep in mind that the GPL is a license that gives you extra rights to distribute---rights you wouldn't normally have under copyright law. The validity of the GPL is the only way people can justify freely redistributing code. If it were declared completely invalid, everyone (except copyright holders) distributing GPL code would have to stop. You would be shooting yourself in the foot by even challenging its validity.
Not that there aren't more subtle attacks on and potential loopholes in the GPL. But presumably we have RMS staying up at night worrying about that and trying to make it ironclad in upcoming versions. That's a much bigger can of worms.
Isn't that because patents cost $$$$? Even if all the little guys band together they'll have a hard time coming up with the cash to patent at the rate the larger companies do. It's really very unfair. I'm working on developing some algorithms, relevant to engineering computations, that I hope might be profitably patentable (with the intent of taking money from large companies and letting everyone else use them for free) but I don't even have the cash to consider filing a patent (and, to be honest, my work, while I think it's promising, isn't ready for prime-time yet.)
It seems to me that, while we won't ever make the system so cash-neutral that unpatented prior art establishes an implicit patent (in contrast to copyrights), small-time software houses and programmers should collaborate on establishing a database on prior art. Unfortunately, I'm not sure who would pay the legal fees for defending it. Right now patents seem to be an exclusive right to any idea you want, so long as you have big money to defend your dubious claims in court.
As with most things, the answer to nature vs. nurture is probably "both". But keep in mind that the person you are responding to was in turn responding to someone who made a pseudoscientific reference to twin studies to support the claim that observed gender differences are the result of nature rather than nurture. When dealing with something that dogmatically bogus, I'd probably also go overboard in pointing out that nurture might be important.
FWIW, I'm an agnostic middle-of-the-roader on nature vs. nurture. Given my own experience meeting men and women both with quite broad personality variations within each gender, my suspicion is that innate gender differences might be small with most observed differences falling out on the side of parental and societal expectations (i.e. nurture). Certainly this isn't an offense to common sense as I see it; but I don't really know. And given the relative lack of girls raised as boys and boys raised as girls, science isn't likely to settle this in a convincing manner anytime soon.
The other guy (jetson123) responded with some good technical points on why Fortran is to be preferred to C under some circumstances. It all comes down to the fact that array manipulations suck under C.
It's also worth adding that the array syntax in Fortran 90 (or later) is VERY nice---especially if, as many numerical oriented programmers do, you prototype your code in Matlab first. This makes developing some types of numerical codes incredibly quick and easy compared to trying to do the equivalent in C. Note that this is not an apology for Fortran 77, which I hate using. Fortran isn't dying, it's just evolved and become even better suited to the narrow market of numerical/scientific computation. I'm always amazed at what a pleasure it is to use Fortran 90/95; it's a really nice language.
Plus on many high-end machines, Fortran compilers produce much faster code. C can compete with some hand-tuning, but it's not fun.
It surprises me that one person would be the entire VAX Fortran team. Where there are VAXen, I'd assume there would be demand for a Fortran compiler. I used VAX Fortran around 1990 and, at least where I was working it seemed like the dominant language (or perhaps that was just where I was working...). I tried the VAX C compiler at around the same time and it seemed a bit flakey to me. What language are people with old VAXen currently using?
Maybe I'm just getting old and my memory is going...
That's what I give him credit for. He seems to have a rare knack for finding people with good ideas. He may (or may not) be an asshole and what he does may not be as cool as being a master hardware hacker like Woz, but compared to all the companies that succeed with no interesting ideas at all, Jobs does seem to have some cool instincts on what ideas to support. His failures have been more interesting than most people's successes. (And Apple doesn't really seem to be failing anymore.)
I do not agree. Blocking an intersection could well interfere with someones free speech rights. In fact, hindering access to a forum in which people are saying things you don't like isn't that uncommon a protest tactic. Personally, I think that the police should protect everyone's right to go where they need to say what they want.
FWIW, I don't have an axe to grind. I'm probably more politically aligned with the protestors than with the Republicans, but I'm an American living in Australia. As such I don't have enough information to asign blame between the police and the protestors. Depending on whose sets of facts I believe (police making mass arrests and tear-gassing everyone in sight vs. violent protestors destroying property and trying to block roads with dumpsters), I could see either party as deserving the lion's share of the blame. It is, however, interesting to see the polarization in the reports; no one seems to agree on the facts. Can anyone give a run-down on what happened without revealing a political agenda?
There are accepted limits on free speech regardless of medium. Public display of obscenity falls in this category in most places, whether it's on a T-shirt or coming out of your mouth. And school kids don't generally have the right to express themselves through their clothing; hell, some schools require uniforms.
So if your point is that not everything you can put on a T-shirt deserves 1st amendment protection, then, well, duh... It's the same for other types of speech. Some things do deserve this protection, however. (e.g. political campaign T-shirts). Did you have a non-obvious point?
Look at it as maintaining backward compatability for apps written for an archaic platform. When everyone has switched to Linux, there will still be a few people needing software for outdated platforms. (i.e. Windows.)
More seriously, I agree that discouraging native apps is certainly a danger. But, considering the rate of progress on WINE, it's not an immediate danger---at the moment, trying to run most Windows apps under WINE is an act of experimentation/desperation. The bigger danger IMO, is that people don't switch to Linux because of lack of apps and the fickle press loses interest in an alternative OS, killing the momentum that Linux currently has. If Linux popularity builds, native apps will come, whatever support there might be for Windows software.
It seems to me that there's a balance to be struck here. I don't think Windows emulation should be a top priority of the Linux community as a whole---I'd rather see free software types working on native apps. But given that the WINE team is a limited section of people coding productively on a difficult project that could make migration to Linux pain-free for the average user, I'm not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. And, since 100% of my real work goes on under Linux, I find the occasional reboot to run something Windows-only extremely painful. I'd like to see WINE working flawlessly.
There are all sorts of freedom for all sorts of people. Some developers want to be free to include any corporate modification of their code into their version. It seems to me that the GPL tries to balance the freedom of ordinary users, business and free software developers, with a heavy slant to users and developers. With all sorts of possible conflicting "freedoms" to maintain, arguing which license is most free seems rather silly.
Be real. How the heck you can sell software that anybody can copy afterwards ? There is no example proving that a company was able to survive following this model.Perhaps not. But the fact is that GPL software provides a resource for all sorts of businesses whose primary business will not be selling modified versions of the software. How many companies are saving money by using Linux servers or in-house modified versions of GPL software? And in any event, most programmers have jobs working on in-house, unmarketed software anyway; this is the largest part of the software "market". They are getting a lot of free help and IMO companies shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
IMO, the real strength of the GPL is in areas where issues of vendor lock-in and interoperability are so compelling that you are forced to wonder if it's a huge loss for consumers for companies to be selling proprietary versions of that type of product at all. This includes proprietary OSs with hidden API calls and word processors with poorly documented document formats. Core functional software of a computer shall be GPL; or I'll never use it. A library shall be LGPL; or I'll never link to it. And all other software I use of what license please God or its developers.
I think that the flaw in this reasoning is that you are looking for a gradual building of a _single_ non-interacting biological process. This seems to assume that all the components of this biochemical process were there for the purpose of achieving this particular process in some earlier primitive form. If the various chemicals were involved in different process (as even I, as a non-biochemist with a minor interest in yeast metabolism during fermentation know happens), then a seemingly minor change could cause a new process to spring up. In other words in a complicated chemical soup, all sorts of processes involving these molecules, perhaps completely unrelated to their current function, might have been taking place.
To assess the probability of (e.g.) light sensitivity springing up, you would have to speculate on all sorts of biochemical processes that might not currently offer selective advantages to organisms and might not even be currently happening in cells. That is, to disprove Behe, you would have to assess potential selective advantages of each of the chemicals involved in light sensitivty when they might have been operating in other processes in the past. To prove Behe right on his claim of improbability, you would have to make the same assessment. Given our current knowledge, and our likely ability to recover knowledge of possibly extinct biochemical pathways, this strikes me as an impossibly high hurdle. Which is why I don't think speculation of this sort sounds particularly scientific.
YMMV. I'm open-minded and you don't sound like a fanatic or a nut-case, so if you say Behe assesses his claims of improbability in the context of multiple, interacting, possibly extinct biochemical processes with different purposes and different selective advantages, then I'll look for his book. Otherwise, it sounds like an oversimplification to me and I don't think I'll bother.
No. A court found the copyright infringement claims invalid. Sony has voluntarily dropped the patent infringement claims, suggesting to me that they probably weren't valid either---if they did have a valid patent claim they have lots of money for lawyers and they could easily win. This is pretty much what I'd expect for a clean-room reverse engineered product: any overlap with Sony's intellectual property would have to have been the result of chance; that's pretty unlikely.
Here's a laymans rundown of what various forms of intellectual property traditionally protect: Trademarks protect a particular name or logo that distinguishes a company or product in the market. This case has nothing to do with trademarks. Copyrights protect the particular expression of an idea. Patents protect a particular implementation of a functional idea (i.e. an invention, defined quite narrowly by how it was implemented). Trade secrets protect all sorts of things, but once the cat is out of the bag they provide no protection at all. The real issues here were copyright and patent infringement.
Smart people trying to produce an emulator would have poked through the Playstation and documented the interface for games without describing Sony's patented algorithms or providing any of Sony's copyrighted code; then a separate team would have written an emulator to the specification without even looking at a console. (i.e. the clean room reverse engineering mentioned above). Barring a massive coincidence, this pretty much guarantees that they don't use any of Sony's IP.
Regarding your own hypothetical product, anyone is free to make a product that does the same thing, so long as it doesn't borrow from your particular implementation. Thus _all_ people can profit from their own particular ideas and innovations, including emulator companies.
Most people here seem to feel that an ISP is a common carrier (i.e. a medium that is open to all and, as such, it would be a ridiculous burden to expect carrier to police everything that every user might send over the network) and not a broadcast medium. The line is sometimes blurred by sufficiently popular web sites, but a common carrier for the general public is probably the use of the internet that is near and dear to most /.ers hearts. This interpretation is probably defensible under the law, as well. If, in fact, an ISP enjoys common carrier status, then the appropriate analogy is with the telephone and not with television, radio, magazines, billboards and newspapers. You don't prosecute or impose regulations on AT&T because of crank or obscene calls; you prosecute whoever made the call. That may superficially seem to make protecting children harder, but if you think trying to regulate a common carrier will work well enough to give parents a helping hand in protecting their children, maybe you should set your sights on AT&T and try to regulate them to prevent obscene phone calls.
FWIW, In real life I play a reasonably protective step-father. I don't think that sort of regulation would work well enough to help me at all; and it would open up all sorts of insane liability issues for ISPs that could shut quite a few of them down. The way I see it: the /. party line on this shows no hypocrisy, just common sense. Do you really think parents should have to lord over their children 24 hours a day to make sure they don't stumble across some disgusting man on man pornography and turn into sexual deviants or homosexuals? Would you like it if your parents had to do that with you?
Don't worry: there's more heterosexual porn out there turning innocent gay kids into rabid and deviant heterosexuals than the other way around. If you think it has such a strong influence maybe you should consider exposing more children to heterosexual porn just to be safe.