In a previous job at a midsized university, I
ended up in the role of copyright cop. This was probably because I was the only one (outside of the library) who knew the difference between a copyright, a trademark and a patent. I never
actively hunted for violations within our domain,
but I did act when something came to my attention.
After a while, I learned that my curiosity about
students web pages (all staff and students had
space on our webserver, starting in 1993) which had a high level of hits only caused more unpleasant work for me (copyright, quasi-porn, etc)
Fortunately for me, this was before the days napster and file sharing, so I never had to professionally deal with that.
But some of the cop nature has worn off on me.
Despite my hatred of the RIAA and the structure
of the music industry as a whole, I do oppose those who engage in copyright violation. And just
because the RIAA is a bunch of feckheads, doesn't
make such copyright violations right.
There are cases where I would be more sympathetic
to copyright violators:
The item was originally published more than
17 (or maybe 34) years prior, and so would be in
the public domain under a founders copyright scheme.
The item is out of print and the used market
is bare. (I would take the music publishers
claims of trying to serve the artist more
seriously if they released the rights back
to the artist when they took things out of
print.)
The violator is (as in civil disobedience)
willing to commit their copyright violation
act publically and under their own name.
When a law or structure is bad enough that
one feels it is legitimate to violate it, you
need to be willing to take the consequences.
Otherwise we all just merely would be obeying
laws when it is convenient to do so.
Without that last condition being met, bad laws and a bad publishing industry does not make you a good guy for violating copyright.
Now I am currently enganged in a compaign of "civil obedience". This term was coined to complying strictly and obnoxiously to bad laws in order to highlight how bad the laws are.
I made some home videos (which I'll be sending to
maybe half a dozen relatives) to which I've added
a soundtrack using things I legitimately have
copies of. I am slowly trying to work through the
procedures to be allowed to distribute six or so
copies of VHS tapes of my daughter's trip the an
aquarium to which I've added a soundtrack. So far it seems difficult to get useful responses to my email requesting permissions or license terms.
The Santa Cruz Operation was founded by some friends of mine. I don't
think that they have been involved with it for a very very long time. One of them still has my copy of The Feynman Lectures, which he hasn't returned. If he's still connected to SCO, I'll be sure to sue him.
Origins of Virtue review
on
The Red Queen
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I am a co-author of a review essay on one of Matt Ridley's other books, Origin of Virtue.
It was published in Managerial and Decision Economics in 1998. On-line copies of a draft of the review can be found here.
Apologies in advance for the yucky HTML that LaTeX2HTML produced in those days. If I can find the original source, I'll see if I can generate a usable PDF.
(And let me fix a few of the broken links in that before I hit the submit button).
Nagy meglepetes, hogy meg vannok "export restrinction"ek, 2003-ban.
But I'll continue in English.
I have very suprised to learn that export restrictions still apply, considering that Hungary has been a member of NATO for a number of years (and will be an EU member in one year). When I first lived there (1988), things were different, and we simply avoided silly US export restrictions by buying from Taiwan.
My guess is that Hungary simply isn't a large enough market for many on-line retailers to find it worth while to make the proper arrangements for Hungarian customs. Once Hungary is part of the EU, that problem will go away.
Monopoly of idea as a "Natural" right
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
When Thomas Jefferson put the idea of intellectual property into the Constitution of the United States,
Maybe Hamilton, maybe Madison; but Jefferson was not party to the constitutional convention.
And considering that (as you correctly quote) he was of the "information wants to free" crowd, it makes it even less likely that he wrote the copyright and patent clause, although what you quote was written 26 years after the US constitution and may reflect a change of heart.
Quoting more from the same document, his ambivalance becomes clearer.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
If you read the whole of the document, it is clear
that what Jefferson is arguing is that a monopoly
on an idea isn't a natural right, but one
legal one that may (or may not) be granted by the state.
The article seems to be confused (or at least confusing) on this point. It mumbles about Java, but gives JavaScript examples. I suppose that some Javascript may be being used to do something nasty with Java, but I simply don't get it.
Can anyone who knows about this sort of stuff point to a more credible analysis?
I like it. No it's not as configurable as sendmail.
Of course it does not have the rewriting magic that sendmail is so feared for
The beauty and horror of sendmail is that its configuration system is a fairly general rewriting system. This has some peculiar consequences. Things that should be hard coded ((2)822 address parsing for example) are done in the configuration and things that should be configurable (eg, time delay in throttling) is hardcoded (or at best compile time options).
I'm not sure that I want an MTA in which it is easy to solve the Towers of Hanoi, but still a pain to fully qualify unqualified domain names.
Sendmail's second greatest advantage (milters) is a consequence of its greatest weakness (some natural things one might want to do being difficult). (The greatest advantage is its enormous user base.)
Anyway, I install exim when I will be running or maintaining the system, but I install sendmail when I know that the client may have to call in someone else down the road to help with the system. That is, an exotic system that is easy to maintain can be harder to maintain than a common system which is difficult to maintain.
I see a parallel between this and suits (or threats of suits) against DNS based blocking lists, such as
the Spamhaus SBL or SPEWS. Those are lists of opinions. No one is forced to use those lists. But some people find them reliable enough with useful listing criteria to actually block connections based on those listings.
So, I am pleased by this ruling not only for what it means for google, but for what it may mean for DNSbls.
As Paul Erdos (active until his 80s) used to like to
say:
The first sign of senility is when you forget your theorems. The second sign is when you forget to zip
up. The third sign is when you forget to zip down.
Absolutely. I loved the play since I first read it, and I must have seen half a dozen stage productions of the play prior to seeing the movie. I'd expected to be disappointed by the movie, but found it better than any of the stage productions I'd seen.
I whole heartedly recommend this to all. Thanks for
reminding me of it.
I saw Outland during the summer that a girlfriend and I were making an effort to see terrible movies. It lived down to our expectations. Even Connery couldn't save that. And it had nothing on the original High Noon.
That same summer, we'd seen previews for something called "Raiders of the Lost Ark". We expected it to
be terrible when we saw it on opening night. Wow, were we surprised.
When I first read about some discovery of a weakness
(for example, I know your name from your work on MD5), I am always struck by the thinking beyond the framework of the designer of the system and of the community to date. The same things strikes me about timing attacks and similar sorts of things. These are things that I wouldn't have thought of in a million years. Can you give any insight into how minds like yours work. And to what extent you think
that this might be a trainable skill.
I normally hate the cliche of "thinking outside of the box", but here it is fully appropriate.
If more people would run relay honeypots
such as jackpot
that might make a dent in the economics of spam.
I'm not saying that the recipient server tar-pitting is a bad idea, but I think that there are more effective ways of raising the cost for spammers. Blacklisting the entire/24 of anything supporting spam would pressure providers to nuke spammers (or at least pass on costs to spammers).
The site
certainly allows anyone to fill out the form. But it gives the distinct impression that all submitted requests are processed by a human. So until I see something like "rumor.mil" registered, I'm not convinced that this is as wide open as the original article suggests.
if you had tens of millions of dollars to analyze how humans do specific tasks compared to computers you might be able to code something up, but just guessing? I don't believe anyone can come up with solutions to this without doing huge amounts of research.
You are, of course, right. But what you don't know is that there has been a huge amount of research on how people behave in such games. These sorts of games have been used to test models
of how people think of fairness, how much people prefer absolute outcomes versus relative outcomes (eg, would rather win $5 if the other player gets $1 than win $7 if the other player $9), and, of course, the imfamous prisoner's dilemma.
So, for many classes of games that come up, particular researchers will have serious ideas about how people behave (and may have conducted thier own experiments).
Someone who shared the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics was for his work on experimental game theory. I expect that he will be submitting something.
The class of games is extremely well defined. But the specific pay-off matrices will be input to the emulator. That is, an emulator will have to read the pay-off matrix and decide how to play it. Also note that many games of this nature will be played.
There is a good reason for this. If the game (or a small finite set of games) were pre-defined, it would be easy to have a bunch of human subjects play it and then have the emulator regurgitate such a "book". Most entries, I suspect, will be from people or teams who are familiar with studies of how real people do play such games.
I would have expected them to at least add shell-scripting to this
If you take a look at this section you will see that they are pretty flexible about language:
We intend to eventually allow submission of entries in other languages besides those mentioned above. If you prefer to write your algorithm in some other language or software, please contact the Turing group via email at...
Also they mention the possibility of using a shell script as a wrapper.
This is not the Loeber prize, which Pinker was describing correctly. This is a much more constrained and narrow contest, focusing on a very well studied portion of human behavior.
Does anybody actually read the stuff pointed to before posting?
This actually is useful, but not for AI. There is a whole branch of what is called "experimental game theory". Getting something that plays these games like humans is interesting (well, to me at least).
The strength of Google's case here (as described
in the analysis) is also good news for DNS-based blacklists, such as SPEWS. While it seems obvious that publishing such a list should be protected on free speech grounds, it is nice that such a close analogy is being tested.
Fair enough. I suspect that my west coast bias was showing through in my original comment. I wasn't a physics student, but I knew some of the grad students in the non-linear dynamics group at UC Santa Cruz in the
early 1980s. So I was learning about chaos while being fleeced at poker.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately for me, this was before the days napster and file sharing, so I never had to professionally deal with that.
But some of the cop nature has worn off on me. Despite my hatred of the RIAA and the structure of the music industry as a whole, I do oppose those who engage in copyright violation. And just because the RIAA is a bunch of feckheads, doesn't make such copyright violations right.
There are cases where I would be more sympathetic to copyright violators:
- The item was originally published more than
17 (or maybe 34) years prior, and so would be in
the public domain under a founders copyright scheme.
- The item is out of print and the used market
is bare. (I would take the music publishers
claims of trying to serve the artist more
seriously if they released the rights back
to the artist when they took things out of
print.)
- The violator is (as in civil disobedience)
willing to commit their copyright violation
act publically and under their own name.
When a law or structure is bad enough that
one feels it is legitimate to violate it, you
need to be willing to take the consequences.
Otherwise we all just merely would be obeying
laws when it is convenient to do so.
Without that last condition being met, bad laws and a bad publishing industry does not make you a good guy for violating copyright.Now I am currently enganged in a compaign of "civil obedience". This term was coined to complying strictly and obnoxiously to bad laws in order to highlight how bad the laws are.
I made some home videos (which I'll be sending to maybe half a dozen relatives) to which I've added a soundtrack using things I legitimately have copies of. I am slowly trying to work through the procedures to be allowed to distribute six or so copies of VHS tapes of my daughter's trip the an aquarium to which I've added a soundtrack. So far it seems difficult to get useful responses to my email requesting permissions or license terms.
The Santa Cruz Operation was founded by some friends of mine. I don't think that they have been involved with it for a very very long time. One of them still has my copy of The Feynman Lectures, which he hasn't returned. If he's still connected to SCO, I'll be sure to sue him.
Apologies in advance for the yucky HTML that LaTeX2HTML produced in those days. If I can find the original source, I'll see if I can generate a usable PDF.
(And let me fix a few of the broken links in that before I hit the submit button).
But I'll continue in English.
I have very suprised to learn that export restrictions still apply, considering that Hungary has been a member of NATO for a number of years (and will be an EU member in one year). When I first lived there (1988), things were different, and we simply avoided silly US export restrictions by buying from Taiwan.
My guess is that Hungary simply isn't a large enough market for many on-line retailers to find it worth while to make the proper arrangements for Hungarian customs. Once Hungary is part of the EU, that problem will go away.
And considering that (as you correctly quote) he was of the "information wants to free" crowd, it makes it even less likely that he wrote the copyright and patent clause, although what you quote was written 26 years after the US constitution and may reflect a change of heart.
Quoting more from the same document, his ambivalance becomes clearer.
If you read the whole of the document, it is clear that what Jefferson is arguing is that a monopoly on an idea isn't a natural right, but one legal one that may (or may not) be granted by the state.Can anyone who knows about this sort of stuff point to a more credible analysis?
Since US butts are, on the whole, larger than in the rest of the world, I can guess that a metric buttload is larger than a US buttload.
I'm not sure that I want an MTA in which it is easy to solve the Towers of Hanoi, but still a pain to fully qualify unqualified domain names.
Sendmail's second greatest advantage (milters) is a consequence of its greatest weakness (some natural things one might want to do being difficult). (The greatest advantage is its enormous user base.)
Anyway, I install exim when I will be running or maintaining the system, but I install sendmail when I know that the client may have to call in someone else down the road to help with the system. That is, an exotic system that is easy to maintain can be harder to maintain than a common system which is difficult to maintain.
So, I am pleased by this ruling not only for what it means for google, but for what it may mean for DNSbls.
I whole heartedly recommend this to all. Thanks for reminding me of it.
That same summer, we'd seen previews for something called "Raiders of the Lost Ark". We expected it to be terrible when we saw it on opening night. Wow, were we surprised.
I normally hate the cliche of "thinking outside of the box", but here it is fully appropriate.
How quickly everyone has forgotten Mir.
I like exim. And I've heard good things about PostFix from people who's judgement I respect.
I'm not saying that the recipient server tar-pitting is a bad idea, but I think that there are more effective ways of raising the cost for spammers. Blacklisting the entire /24 of anything supporting spam would pressure providers to nuke spammers (or at least pass on costs to spammers).
And, no. I'm not going to be the one to try it.
When I was in school, the plural of "schema" was "schemata".
</>
I've already selected "No Karma Bonus". Beyond that I can't mod myself downward.
So, for many classes of games that come up, particular researchers will have serious ideas about how people behave (and may have conducted thier own experiments).
Someone who shared the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics was for his work on experimental game theory. I expect that he will be submitting something.
There is a good reason for this. If the game (or a small finite set of games) were pre-defined, it would be easy to have a bunch of human subjects play it and then have the emulator regurgitate such a "book". Most entries, I suspect, will be from people or teams who are familiar with studies of how real people do play such games.
Does anybody actually read the stuff pointed to before posting?
This actually is useful, but not for AI. There is a whole branch of what is called "experimental game theory". Getting something that plays these games like humans is interesting (well, to me at least).
The strength of Google's case here (as described in the analysis) is also good news for DNS-based blacklists, such as SPEWS. While it seems obvious that publishing such a list should be protected on free speech grounds, it is nice that such a close analogy is being tested.
Fair enough. I suspect that my west coast bias was showing through in my original comment. I wasn't a physics student, but I knew some of the grad students in the non-linear dynamics group at UC Santa Cruz in the early 1980s. So I was learning about chaos while being fleeced at poker.