A priori, there is no moral reason why copying and sharing pure patterns, regardless of their origin, is immoral. I don't care if somebody spent a whole lifetime to create a pattern. I have considered several kinds of moral thinking - Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, Chritianity, and my own intuitive ideas on what is moral. I simply fail to see how, in light of these moral theories, copying patterns could be immoral.
I believe it is immoral to unnecessarily limit the freedom of a human being. Copyright and patent laws seek to limit our freedoms in profound ways, and increasingly so. Does the benefit the we, as a society, gain from these laws outweigh the sacrifice of our freedoms? I say that the benefits are to very few while the freedoms of everyone are sacrified. I don't think it's good social policy.
I believe people have a basic human right to record and remember their life experiences as accurately as they see fit - using their brains or brain aumenting devices such as computers, tape recorders, or some day neural implants. I also believe they have the right to share their experiences with arbitrary fidelity. If you seek to limit these self-evident (to me, at least) rights, you had better have a damned good reason that benefits everyone more than it harms everyone. I can't think of such a reason.
If you don't want your information to be spread, the keep it in your head. If you send sound waves, text, or code in someone's direction, then that becomes part of their life experience which they then have the right to remember and share as they see fit.
Superficially, it may seem anthropomorphic. But it is essetially the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Nitrogen molecules do not want to gather in the corner of my room - they want to spread out. In the same way, information wants to be free. And it will be.
It's a law of nature. And if a government or corporation wishes to oppose a fundamental law of nature, then they must spend a proportionate amount of energy to maintain the highly ordered state of control or secrecy.
And the higher the temperature in thermodynamics, the more effort is required to maintain that ordered state.
The internet has raised the temperature in the information mileu by an order of magnitude. I don't think any company or government will have the resources to maintain the highly ordered and unlikely state of control.
Information wants to be free. Regardless of your moral position, it's a law of nature. This is what the author of the article fails to see or acknowledge.
[i]Linux is free if your time is worth nothing. Medical Doctors need not apply.[/i]
This is a perplexing statement. I'm an MD who's been hacking on Linux (and Solaris before Linux was born) for a while now and it's been more than worth my while. I value my time, so I don't waste it on Mac/Windows anymore.
Please explain what you mean by this.
...to record the experiences in my life using my brain's memory and any brain augmenting devices available to me.
...to share my experiences with others
I see no fundamental moral difference between "replaying" a piece of music in my head - I do this all the time with very good accuracy (at least it hits most of the same cognitive triggers as the recorded version does) - and recording and replaying the music I've heard with a brain augmenting device such as a tape recorder or, in the futre, some kind of neural implants. Either way I am simply reliving one of my experiences as best I can and I firmly believe I have that right.
If I read some text, I have the right to make notes about that text in anyway I see fit and to review those notes at any time in the future.
I believe it is my basic right to talk about anything I hear or read while sharing my experiences with friends. I believe I should be able to show them notes I have taken. I believe I should be able to hum a tune I heard...or play and sing it with a guitar...or with a whole band...as accurately as I want to...or play them an mp3 or wav recording of any sound waves that were sent in my direction during my life. And if my friend can read my mind, I should be able to share those songs that I play back in my head with good fidelity.
If we are to limit a person's basic right to relive and share any of their life experiences then you are limiting their ability to live a human life, and there had better be a damned good reason to restrict such a basic right. I can't think of any good ones that have an overall benefit to humanity. And I don't appreciate people trying to take away those basic rights which may not be codified, but should be.
I'm an artist (maybe not so good, though) and I don't want or expect any compensation for my music. Furthermore, I think that music made primarily with the profit motive in mind isn't so hot anyway. So I won't miss that kind of music when it disappears. I'll continue to enjoy the music of artists who make art as a means of personal expression.
Omigosh dood! $50 for a shot and $20 for a visit! That's probably not even half of what it takes to visit an auto mechanic for any problem. So I guess we also need a socialist auto repair program too, huh?
The $500/month in prescription drugs is way abnormal. You must have some pretty significant conditions. And I do think that is out of line. But that's the pharmaceutical industry, which isn't really a proper part of the health care system. These issues might be addressed better by changing patent laws and busting anticompetitive tactics - not creating a socialist medical system.
Well the stuff about the Canadian Health care system seems to be true. I hear it all the time from Canadian doctors and nurses that fled to come here. They've got plenty of stories.
Middle class Canadian with nagging gallstones? Maybe you'll get that operation in a few months.
Homeless American bum with no insurance at all? Show up at your nearest University Hospital to get it taken care of in less than a week, gratis.
It's true.
you mean you actually use 8 bit embedded controllers - you wus! Real hackers do it with bread boards and homemade transisters attached to giant 12V batteries. You've been spoiled by those sissy "prefab" silicone devices. sheesh.
You can argue about taste, but Metallica would not exist without the record industry
Look, I'm not even a Metallica fan, but I know for certain that they were selling out arenas long before any record company gave them the time of day. It's a well known story.
And popular music has always existed, even if it was performed mainly by the guy down the street because there was no recording technology way back then.
Rap wouldn't exist.
Again, rap was alive and well on the streets of America long before the record companies gave it the time of day. They only acknowledged it when their calculations indicated that they could make money off the rappers.
Music is a grass roots cultural phenomenon. Record identify current tastes and offer horribly unfair contracts to business-naive artists who, until now, had no other way to effectively distribute and promote their music. The net has changed this. If I was a popular artist who could choose between the 10% royalty of a major label or the 50% royalty at mp3.com, guess which one I'm going to choose. It's only a matter of time before artists realize this.
When an apparently normal pair of glasses has a retinal scanner in the hinges for high resolution displays which are superimposed on the world around us, with wireless high bandwidth access to the net and vast personal experience databases at our fingertips...... that will be cool indeed
Vast information and computational power at our fingertips everywhere we go. Intellegent assistants to assist us in any decision we come across. Brain augmentation, essentially. As a wearable prosthesis not unlike an ordinary pair of glasses.
Check out the Mr. House program. It's perl meets X10 with both a web and a Tk GUI. You can do what you want and much much more. Not bad at all. And there's a nice article about it in the latest issue of The Perl Journal.
Agreed. And why do we really need to impart special legal protections so that [i]only one[/i] company can sell grassy balls? That doesn't really benefit the public at large!
Without patent protection all of that work will go to waste if competitors get there first. (And the biotech world is fiercely competitive even within universities). Public institutions and charitable research groups simply cannot afford to take those risks.
And the problem this poses for the general public is _____?????
If a competitor gets to market first and offers a superior implementation at a superior price, then the public benefits and the research does not go to waste. If the company who has the advantage of making the initial discovery can't implement their product and get to market first, then they deserve to lose. When there is a market with money to be made, somebody is going to offer up products. And if there are no patents providing artificial obstacles to competition, there will be fair open market prices and more rapid competitive advancement of product as competitors try to get the upper hand... until the product eventualy becomes a commodity, and at that point the public still wins. Research is expensive and the people who fork out the cash have to see some reward.
I don't care if the research is too unweildy, slow paced, and expensive. It doesn't matter. All that matters is the quality of your product and time to market. If your company can master those things, then they are benefitting the public and should be rewarded financially. And where there is money to be made, somebody will find a way.
So those companies should just spend billions of dollars on that research without any possibility of getting a return on their investment?
Yes. Let them spend as much as they want on biological discoveries. But do not let them patent nature. If they wish to keep something a trade secret, then that is fine.
And do you really believe that absence of patent protection would mean nobody would bother to try to innovate and sell products? I don't. If there is a market and money to be made, then there will be competitive products. Fair, open competition - best product at the best price that the market will support. I just don't see how eliminating genetic patents would adversely affect things. It would piss off a lot of executives with stock options, but would have negligible negative impact on the public at large. But I firmly believe that genetic patents (and many other types of patents) do stifle competitive advancement of goods and services since it allows an effective monopoloy situation where complacence, stagnation and price gouging go unchecked.
Simple standard supported graphic or glyphy type pictography type deals to represent "If...Then" stuff and "Do...While" crap would keep you from typing the same grammatical declarations all day long.
But would it really be more efficient to have to create and connects some glyphs? I think typing is much more efficient than creating icons, dragging & dropping them, and then connecting them - as long as you are using a sufficiently high level language like Perl or Python. Though I started out as a GUI junkie and initially hated command line interfaces, I am much more efficient working with the file system from the command line than through a Macintosh Finder or Windows Browser. But I can see your point - for some situations, things like "Lab View" are really cool.
Call me a simple-minded clod, but what is wrong with just putting the session ID into a cookie instead of going through all the trouble to embed it into every URL? Tarzan not understand!
Re:OO is for representing things as objects.
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Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 1
That's what I mean with you cannot treat the implementation as a black box. Saying yes you can if it was implemented this and this way is just proving my point; not disproving it.
Well, if your point is that you cannot treat any arbitrary Perl class as a black box, maybe so. In certain cases, you can treat it as a black box, if that's what your design calls for and that's what the author has indicated in his/her documentation. In other cases maybe you want to get at the guts. If you want to inherit from someone's object that was implemented as a hashref, then you do indeed have to be careful. But this is not the fault of the language, but rather the fault of the programmer. Again, you can have black box type data encapsulation and protection on the cheap if you want. And Perl is clearly not the language that is best suited for projects involving big teams. Java/C++ is certainly more suited to that scenario.
"Code reuse" is a desireable goal, but its associated hype is way out of proportion to reality, and it's neither a necessary nor sufficient attribute of productive OO programming. OO is not about "code reuse" - it can be if you design your object model well. But there are always trade offs between trying to make something generalize well (code reuse) and making something that is optimized to the problem at hand. What OO is actually about is binding data and procedures together. If you code reuse is what makes you happy, then you'll love the highly reusable regular expression, hash and string handling code that is built into the Perl language! Those features of Perl, and many more, have probably saved me from needlessly reinventing the wheel more than any Java or C++ class library!
Re:I scanned this book at B&N, and passed....
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Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 1
(the fourth thing I did was make a Slash::Handler class to interface to Apache, automatically placing query args or form input into fields on itself - s
Also check out Apache::Request for an interface to the apache API that automatically parses your forms,etc.
Re:OO is for representing things as objects.
on
Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 1
Hello Abigail, Now you want to inherit a class with such an object. Where are you going to put your variables? Right. In the same hash reference. No data encapsulation.
You could do that if you want, to. Perl gives you the freedom to implement data inheritance and encapsulation however you like. You might decide that instead to used a linked list of blessed tied hases and delegate with AUTOLOAD, FETCH, etc. Whatever floats your boat!
You cannot treat the implementation as a black box and only look at the public API. Yes you can - use a tied hash interface and everything suddenly has to go through an access function! Not awkward in the least.
I like that kind of flexibility and am much more productive with Perl for most things than I was with C++ or Java. But no need for language wars here - just wanted to point some things out.
To try to place restrictions on information so that others may not find out and spread it along - this is a highly ordered state which requires a lot of effort to maintain. Entropy definitely favors the information leaking and spreading.
If you prefer an alternative viewpoint, read "The Meme Machine" - memes want to be free!
Slashdot Mirror
A priori, there is no moral reason why copying and sharing pure patterns, regardless of their origin, is immoral. I don't care if somebody spent a whole lifetime to create a pattern. I have considered several kinds of moral thinking - Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, Chritianity, and my own intuitive ideas on what is moral. I simply fail to see how, in light of these moral theories, copying patterns could be immoral.
I believe it is immoral to unnecessarily limit the freedom of a human being. Copyright and patent laws seek to limit our freedoms in profound ways, and increasingly so. Does the benefit the we, as a society, gain from these laws outweigh the sacrifice of our freedoms? I say that the benefits are to very few while the freedoms of everyone are sacrified. I don't think it's good social policy.
I believe people have a basic human right to record and remember their life experiences as accurately as they see fit - using their brains or brain aumenting devices such as computers, tape recorders, or some day neural implants. I also believe they have the right to share their experiences with arbitrary fidelity. If you seek to limit these self-evident (to me, at least) rights, you had better have a damned good reason that benefits everyone more than it harms everyone. I can't think of such a reason.
If you don't want your information to be spread, the keep it in your head. If you send sound waves, text, or code in someone's direction, then that becomes part of their life experience which they then have the right to remember and share as they see fit.
Superficially, it may seem anthropomorphic. But it is essetially the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Nitrogen molecules do not want to gather in the corner of my room - they want to spread out. In the same way, information wants to be free. And it will be.
It's a law of nature. And if a government or corporation wishes to oppose a fundamental law of nature, then they must spend a proportionate amount of energy to maintain the highly ordered state of control or secrecy.
And the higher the temperature in thermodynamics, the more effort is required to maintain that ordered state.
The internet has raised the temperature in the information mileu by an order of magnitude. I don't think any company or government will have the resources to maintain the highly ordered and unlikely state of control.
Information wants to be free. Regardless of your moral position, it's a law of nature. This is what the author of the article fails to see or acknowledge.
whoops! Too much time lately on a ubb!
[i]Linux is free if your time is worth nothing. Medical Doctors need not apply.[/i] This is a perplexing statement. I'm an MD who's been hacking on Linux (and Solaris before Linux was born) for a while now and it's been more than worth my while. I value my time, so I don't waste it on Mac/Windows anymore. Please explain what you mean by this.
I see no fundamental moral difference between "replaying" a piece of music in my head - I do this all the time with very good accuracy (at least it hits most of the same cognitive triggers as the recorded version does) - and recording and replaying the music I've heard with a brain augmenting device such as a tape recorder or, in the futre, some kind of neural implants. Either way I am simply reliving one of my experiences as best I can and I firmly believe I have that right.
If I read some text, I have the right to make notes about that text in anyway I see fit and to review those notes at any time in the future.
I believe it is my basic right to talk about anything I hear or read while sharing my experiences with friends. I believe I should be able to show them notes I have taken. I believe I should be able to hum a tune I heard...or play and sing it with a guitar...or with a whole band...as accurately as I want to...or play them an mp3 or wav recording of any sound waves that were sent in my direction during my life. And if my friend can read my mind, I should be able to share those songs that I play back in my head with good fidelity.
If we are to limit a person's basic right to relive and share any of their life experiences then you are limiting their ability to live a human life, and there had better be a damned good reason to restrict such a basic right. I can't think of any good ones that have an overall benefit to humanity. And I don't appreciate people trying to take away those basic rights which may not be codified, but should be.
I'm an artist (maybe not so good, though) and I don't want or expect any compensation for my music. Furthermore, I think that music made primarily with the profit motive in mind isn't so hot anyway. So I won't miss that kind of music when it disappears. I'll continue to enjoy the music of artists who make art as a means of personal expression.
Omigosh dood! $50 for a shot and $20 for a visit! That's probably not even half of what it takes to visit an auto mechanic for any problem. So I guess we also need a socialist auto repair program too, huh? The $500/month in prescription drugs is way abnormal. You must have some pretty significant conditions. And I do think that is out of line. But that's the pharmaceutical industry, which isn't really a proper part of the health care system. These issues might be addressed better by changing patent laws and busting anticompetitive tactics - not creating a socialist medical system.
Maybe doing drugs isn't a sin
Well the stuff about the Canadian Health care system seems to be true. I hear it all the time from Canadian doctors and nurses that fled to come here. They've got plenty of stories. Middle class Canadian with nagging gallstones? Maybe you'll get that operation in a few months. Homeless American bum with no insurance at all? Show up at your nearest University Hospital to get it taken care of in less than a week, gratis. It's true.
... I'm going to go check these out. Gracias!
you mean you actually use 8 bit embedded controllers - you wus! Real hackers do it with bread boards and homemade transisters attached to giant 12V batteries. You've been spoiled by those sissy "prefab" silicone devices. sheesh.
You can argue about taste, but Metallica would not exist without the record industry
Look, I'm not even a Metallica fan, but I know for certain that they were selling out arenas long before any record company gave them the time of day. It's a well known story.
And popular music has always existed, even if it was performed mainly by the guy down the street because there was no recording technology way back then.
Rap wouldn't exist.
Again, rap was alive and well on the streets of America long before the record companies gave it the time of day. They only acknowledged it when their calculations indicated that they could make money off the rappers.
Music is a grass roots cultural phenomenon. Record identify current tastes and offer horribly unfair contracts to business-naive artists who, until now, had no other way to effectively distribute and promote their music. The net has changed this. If I was a popular artist who could choose between the 10% royalty of a major label or the 50% royalty at mp3.com, guess which one I'm going to choose. It's only a matter of time before artists realize this.
When an apparently normal pair of glasses has a retinal scanner in the hinges for high resolution displays which are superimposed on the world around us, with wireless high bandwidth access to the net and vast personal experience databases at our fingertips ...... that will be cool indeed
Vast information and computational power at our fingertips everywhere we go. Intellegent assistants to assist us in any decision we come across. Brain augmentation, essentially. As a wearable prosthesis not unlike an ordinary pair of glasses.
Check out the Mr. House program. It's perl meets X10 with both a web and a Tk GUI. You can do what you want and much much more. Not bad at all. And there's a nice article about it in the latest issue of The Perl Journal.
Agreed. And why do we really need to impart special legal protections so that [i]only one[/i] company can sell grassy balls? That doesn't really benefit the public at large!
It's actually supposed to be: Think "different".
hmm....this is different
Excuse me now, I'm thinking "cheesecake".
Without patent protection all of that work will go to waste if competitors get there first. (And the biotech world is fiercely competitive even within universities). Public institutions and charitable research groups simply cannot afford to take those risks.
... until the product eventualy becomes a commodity, and at that point the public still wins. Research is expensive and the people who fork out the cash have to see some reward.
And the problem this poses for the general public is _____?????
If a competitor gets to market first and offers a superior implementation at a superior price, then the public benefits and the research does not go to waste. If the company who has the advantage of making the initial discovery can't implement their product and get to market first, then they deserve to lose. When there is a market with money to be made, somebody is going to offer up products. And if there are no patents providing artificial obstacles to competition, there will be fair open market prices and more rapid competitive advancement of product as competitors try to get the upper hand
I don't care if the research is too unweildy, slow paced, and expensive. It doesn't matter. All that matters is the quality of your product and time to market. If your company can master those things, then they are benefitting the public and should be rewarded financially. And where there is money to be made, somebody will find a way.
So those companies should just spend billions of dollars on that research without any possibility of getting a return on their investment?
Yes. Let them spend as much as they want on biological discoveries. But do not let them patent nature. If they wish to keep something a trade secret, then that is fine.
And do you really believe that absence of patent protection would mean nobody would bother to try to innovate and sell products? I don't. If there is a market and money to be made, then there will be competitive products. Fair, open competition - best product at the best price that the market will support. I just don't see how eliminating genetic patents would adversely affect things. It would piss off a lot of executives with stock options, but would have negligible negative impact on the public at large. But I firmly believe that genetic patents (and many other types of patents) do stifle competitive advancement of goods and services since it allows an effective monopoloy situation where complacence, stagnation and price gouging go unchecked.
eh?
Simple standard supported graphic or glyphy type pictography type deals to represent "If...Then" stuff and "Do...While" crap would keep you from typing the same grammatical declarations all day long.
But would it really be more efficient to have to create and connects some glyphs? I think typing is much more efficient than creating icons, dragging & dropping them, and then connecting them - as long as you are using a sufficiently high level language like Perl or Python. Though I started out as a GUI junkie and initially hated command line interfaces, I am much more efficient working with the file system from the command line than through a Macintosh Finder or Windows Browser. But I can see your point - for some situations, things like "Lab View" are really cool.
Call me a simple-minded clod, but what is wrong with just putting the session ID into a cookie instead of going through all the trouble to embed it into every URL? Tarzan not understand!
Well, if your point is that you cannot treat any arbitrary Perl class as a black box, maybe so. In certain cases, you can treat it as a black box, if that's what your design calls for and that's what the author has indicated in his/her documentation. In other cases maybe you want to get at the guts. If you want to inherit from someone's object that was implemented as a hashref, then you do indeed have to be careful. But this is not the fault of the language, but rather the fault of the programmer. Again, you can have black box type data encapsulation and protection on the cheap if you want. And Perl is clearly not the language that is best suited for projects involving big teams. Java/C++ is certainly more suited to that scenario.
"Code reuse" is a desireable goal, but its associated hype is way out of proportion to reality, and it's neither a necessary nor sufficient attribute of productive OO programming. OO is not about "code reuse" - it can be if you design your object model well. But there are always trade offs between trying to make something generalize well (code reuse) and making something that is optimized to the problem at hand. What OO is actually about is binding data and procedures together. If you code reuse is what makes you happy, then you'll love the highly reusable regular expression, hash and string handling code that is built into the Perl language! Those features of Perl, and many more, have probably saved me from needlessly reinventing the wheel more than any Java or C++ class library!
(the fourth thing I did was make a Slash::Handler class to interface to Apache, automatically placing query args or form input into fields on itself - s
Also check out Apache::Request for an interface to the apache API that automatically parses your forms,etc.
Now you want to inherit a class with such an object. Where are you going to put your variables? Right. In the same hash reference. No data encapsulation.
You could do that if you want, to. Perl gives you the freedom to implement data inheritance and encapsulation however you like. You might decide that instead to used a linked list of blessed tied hases and delegate with AUTOLOAD, FETCH, etc. Whatever floats your boat!
You cannot treat the implementation as a black box and only look at the public API. Yes you can - use a tied hash interface and everything suddenly has to go through an access function! Not awkward in the least.
I like that kind of flexibility and am much more productive with Perl for most things than I was with C++ or Java. But no need for language wars here - just wanted to point some things out.
To try to place restrictions on information so that others may not find out and spread it along - this is a highly ordered state which requires a lot of effort to maintain. Entropy definitely favors the information leaking and spreading.
If you prefer an alternative viewpoint, read "The Meme Machine" - memes want to be free!
You started out plausible, but when you got to the Beatles you lost all credibility