A lot of posts in this thread talked about how students were "customers" of universities. Most (not all) graduate students in computer science that do research are funded by their universities, and, while they don't make a ton of money, usually don't pay tuition and receive a small stipend each month. So they're actually receiving a decent bit of money each year, as if they were really employees. In fact, if you add in the cost of tuition, your average grad student at a private school makes the equivalent of ~30-40k a year. Is that a lot? No. But it's not like we're all paying someone to take our IP, and we're definitely not customers.
It's also important to notice that (despite dire threats to the contrary) the kind of work that schools are trying to "own" is not projects undergrads are writing in their dorm rooms. They're interested in the really lucrative research phd candidates are doing in a lab- research which is for the most part funded by NSF or DARPA under grants that specifically give universities the rights to do as they please with the research. Also remember that the universities aren't owned by anyone and don't issue stock or pay dividends- the money is used to fund either education or more research.
On a final note, we had the IP lawyers in to my research group a few months back- they advised us on a number of situations which researchers often find themselves in that make it impossible to later copyright work. One of those situations is publishing a paper detailing specific features (I can't recall which) of your work. Another is presenting those details in any talk to a group of a particular size or constituency, which happens to include a job talk (very common in CS). So if you're really that concerned, there are probably a number of things you can do that will preclude anyone ever making a dime off your work, and odds are the IP guys will tell you about them when they come to speak.
Here are links to abstracts from two papers that detail the inner workings of Google. The links below lead to abstracts- from those pages you can view cached pdf and postscript copies of the papers. The first paper is a reasonably high-level overview, although it's a bit technical. The second paper is more in-depth and discusses pagerank in more detail than you most of you probably want. In any case this should give you a good idea about what goes on in a real search engine, and should clarify why it's hard to fool google.
If most of what's being passed around on Gnutella is IP belonging to someone else (music, games, appz, etc), and you set up some scheme where you're allocating resources based on contributions (ie you get to download other stuff based on how much stuff you upload), aren't you then in a position where you gain (receive more files) only by collecting some kind of credit (sending files to other people)?
Is that any different than burning a bunch of copies of the newest Limp Bizkit CD and then running over to the Virgin Megastore to buy a few more new CDs with the money? This to me looks an awful lot like you're trying making a profit off someone else's work.
In all natural languages, syntax is so difficult and complex that despite hundreds of years of effort, we are still incapable of creating even an adequate rigorous guideline for a single language. Yet your average computer language can be described completely, rigorously, and absolutely in somewhere between a few dozen and few hundred pages of text. This is because computer languages need to be utterly unambiguous- a sharp contrast to human languages, which are riddled with ambiguity and imprecision.
This need for precision has led us to create computer languages that contain nothing but the barest minimum of syntax. Even a syntactically rich language like Perl has a fairly limited set of rules and an extremely small lexicon. For this reason, computer languages appear fairly natural-language independent. Instead, they encode the most basic logical rules needed to encapsulate a series of orders- rules that appear to be fairly universal.
In some sense, a computer language appears to be what you'd get if you boiled down a natural language to it's absolute bare bones. In that sense, it's independent from any one language and instead incorporates the most basic element of all of them. But the richness- the things that make natural languages so interesting, and of course so different- that doesn't compute.
A more interesting question might be to discover if anyone has in fact "translated" the lexicon of an English computer language into another natural language. I imagine this would be a fairly trivial task- a language like C has perhaps a few dozen keywords and no more than a few hundred functions in the basic libraries. The apparent simplicity of this kind of semantic transformation underscores the basic nature of computer languages. Similar tasks between natural languages are extremely complex, even for human beings.
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A lot of posts in this thread talked about how students were "customers" of universities. Most (not all) graduate students in computer science that do research are funded by their universities, and, while they don't make a ton of money, usually don't pay tuition and receive a small stipend each month. So they're actually receiving a decent bit of money each year, as if they were really employees. In fact, if you add in the cost of tuition, your average grad student at a private school makes the equivalent of ~30-40k a year. Is that a lot? No. But it's not like we're all paying someone to take our IP, and we're definitely not customers.
It's also important to notice that (despite dire threats to the contrary) the kind of work that schools are trying to "own" is not projects undergrads are writing in their dorm rooms. They're interested in the really lucrative research phd candidates are doing in a lab- research which is for the most part funded by NSF or DARPA under grants that specifically give universities the rights to do as they please with the research. Also remember that the universities aren't owned by anyone and don't issue stock or pay dividends- the money is used to fund either education or more research.
On a final note, we had the IP lawyers in to my research group a few months back- they advised us on a number of situations which researchers often find themselves in that make it impossible to later copyright work. One of those situations is publishing a paper detailing specific features (I can't recall which) of your work. Another is presenting those details in any talk to a group of a particular size or constituency, which happens to include a job talk (very common in CS). So if you're really that concerned, there are probably a number of things you can do that will preclude anyone ever making a dime off your work, and odds are the IP guys will tell you about them when they come to speak.
Here are links to abstracts from two papers that detail the inner workings of Google. The links below lead to abstracts- from those pages you can view cached pdf and postscript copies of the papers. The first paper is a reasonably high-level overview, although it's a bit technical. The second paper is more in-depth and discusses pagerank in more detail than you most of you probably want. In any case this should give you a good idea about what goes on in a real search engine, and should clarify why it's hard to fool google.
If most of what's being passed around on Gnutella is IP belonging to someone else (music, games, appz, etc), and you set up some scheme where you're allocating resources based on contributions (ie you get to download other stuff based on how much stuff you upload), aren't you then in a position where you gain (receive more files) only by collecting some kind of credit (sending files to other people)?
Is that any different than burning a bunch of copies of the newest Limp Bizkit CD and then running over to the Virgin Megastore to buy a few more new CDs with the money? This to me looks an awful lot like you're trying making a profit off someone else's work.
In all natural languages, syntax is so difficult and complex that despite hundreds of years of effort, we are still incapable of creating even an adequate rigorous guideline for a single language. Yet your average computer language can be described completely, rigorously, and absolutely in somewhere between a few dozen and few hundred pages of text. This is because computer languages need to be utterly unambiguous- a sharp contrast to human languages, which are riddled with ambiguity and imprecision. This need for precision has led us to create computer languages that contain nothing but the barest minimum of syntax. Even a syntactically rich language like Perl has a fairly limited set of rules and an extremely small lexicon. For this reason, computer languages appear fairly natural-language independent. Instead, they encode the most basic logical rules needed to encapsulate a series of orders- rules that appear to be fairly universal. In some sense, a computer language appears to be what you'd get if you boiled down a natural language to it's absolute bare bones. In that sense, it's independent from any one language and instead incorporates the most basic element of all of them. But the richness- the things that make natural languages so interesting, and of course so different- that doesn't compute. A more interesting question might be to discover if anyone has in fact "translated" the lexicon of an English computer language into another natural language. I imagine this would be a fairly trivial task- a language like C has perhaps a few dozen keywords and no more than a few hundred functions in the basic libraries. The apparent simplicity of this kind of semantic transformation underscores the basic nature of computer languages. Similar tasks between natural languages are extremely complex, even for human beings.