Uhm... The UN doesn't dictate anything, dumbass. Treaties need to be ratified to have any say in your country. It is entirely up to your governement whether or not they want to ratify a treaty. The UN doesn't have ANY legal way of enforcing provisions of a treaty on any country that hasn't ratified it, it also doesn't have the means to.
So, you see, when the US government ratifies stupid treaties, it is ITS OWN DAMN FAULT.
It's not as if the US government is some little sissy puppet in the hands of the big bad UN here - they are wilfully and intentionally taking part in the work of drafting the treaties because they are one of the major drivers for stronger IP protections in the world.
Try reading up on how the UN works. The UN doesn't regulate anything. Most of the UN organizations such as WIPO are organizations where countries voluntarily get together to voluntarily agree to treaties which the member countries then choose to sign and ratify in their national laws, or choose not to sign and take part in.
The UN just provides a forum and a process for those negotiations take to take place.
If any countries let themeselves be "regulated" it's their own bloody fault for signing stupid treaties with regulations they don't want in the first place. One would assume that your representatives actually bother to read what is ratified, and actually ratify the treaties because they agree with them, rather than blindly signing every random treaty that comes their way.
So why don't you stop spewing bullshit and place the blame where it belongs: On the governments who are more than happy to enter into treaties like this.
Newsflash: Treaties are enforced by the signatories, not by the UN, by whatever means the signatories agree on. Normally that means making the treaty into law. In the US it's even simpler: Once a treaty is ratified, it IS law, thought often a separate law will be passed because the treaties rarely are specific enough to be practical to enforce as is.
Yes, but the WIPO treaty in question contains language making a "device or system capable of decrypting or helping to decrypt an encrypted program-carrying signal". That clearly covers any general purpose computing device.
You can have meaningful relationships online, and you can have just as shallow interpersonal relationships offline as you can find online. As someone other than the poster you replied to, YES, I believe typing text characters into an e-mail or on IRC is more or less the same as actually speaking to somebody in person right in front of me, staring them in the face.
Except that online, their physical appearance and the smell of their breath will have no impact on what I think of what they say, which in many ways can allow you to form relationships that are profoundly different from those you might have formed to the same people had you met them offline first.
No, we are being exposed to the outcome of a process. That outcome is a program whose visual representation is a (near infinite) series of animation. The process is the writing of the program.
How is this different from a painting, where the visual representation is more static, yes, but is still influenced by the views and state of mind of the audience at the time, the light conditions, context in society (a painting of the WTC shown before and after 9/11 would likely evoke very different reactions, for instance), and in the same way we are not exposed to the artistic process, and only a very few of us are exposed to the beauty of the "raw" work closes to the source code: What techniques were applied to achieve the effects that people react to? What principles does the visual composition follows? Why were the colour scheme chosen?
And yes, K++ DOES contain code that imposes a specific set of principles for visual composition, and colour scheme among others.
Whether it's good art is highly subjective, but deriding it as just "some random graphical effects" is ignoring what it is: An exposition of how heuristics applied to randomness can be used to create graphics that emulate the esthetics of an artistic genre.
All the K++ people did was use a random number generator to generate colors, gradients, curve coordinates, circles, etc.
If you think that you either haven't bothered to study the generated images nor the code, or are just plain clueless.
If they'd been entirely random, the images would have been a complete mess. They are not. They follow quite a few rules to produce images that are more visually pleasing that random data would have been.
It most definitively is NOT just pumping out random shapes. You've just repeated the classic Picasso denounciation about a computer program - it's frequently claimed that some of Picasso's works "could have been drawn by a five year old".
A while back someone wished to test the assertion, by taking a Picasso work that is highly geometrical, and asking a bunch of kids to make drawings by placing the same geometric shapes in relation to eachother.
None of the kids came up with a result that remotely resembled the style or feel of the Picasso work.
For the purpose of judging Picasso's work, those kids drawings would be your "random" shapes.
This program may not produce amazing, stunning images that will be emulated for years to come, but it does follow a set of rules that makes it generate images that I would be willing to be will be significantly more pleasing to the average human than completely randomly generated images - they do make use of rules that organize the visual impact in ways that are known to generate a more favorable response than random data.
Elitism like this just wants me want to puke. As a "programmer" since I was a child, I find that my experience also massively helps me appreciate art - almost all "art" is highly rule based (even when it claims to break rules, it's successfull only when rules are broken in the right setting and the right way, effectively following rules), and programming have given me a lot of training in structured thought that applies directly to art.
Based on my experience I'd say most programmers have a very strong foundation for appreciating art, something that also fits well with how often programmers also take on other creative tasks either professionally or as a hobby, such as composing and playing music, writing poetry and novels, drawing/painting etc.
As for what art is, NO you having done illustration most of your life does not make you any more qualified to say what art is than any random person I pick off the street.
Art is art because people say it is.
Some art is more "respected" because more respected people say it is.
What is art depends entirely on who is looking.
That said, you can objectively evaluate some aspects of the quality of some types of art, but this is only applicable because we often can demonstrate experimentally that following certain rules will get certain responses from people. But even that requires you to decide what responses are wanted - some artists go out of their way to shock, and that is the purpose of their art, so you can't automatically assume.
To me, good art is a "well executed" piece that accomplishes the goal of the artist in terms of what response they want from the public, OR a creative work that is judged as art by the viewer. You might realize that both of the two will cover ground not covered by the other...
What is "well executed" depends on that purpose, though certain basics can usually be assumed: If you compose a piece of classical music, you would normally expect the composer to stick to well established harmonies and stick to established rules for instance. But often successful art is about knowing exactly when and where it is acceptable to "bend the rules". A classical example is Schuberts piece "Der Erlkonig" which was widely criticized when it was published because of the pronounced disharmonies. However they are there for a very good reason: To represent the wailing of a dying child.
Now, to the page in question... Is it art?
To me, that just raises a question: What is the motivation?
The motivation is clearly to explore computer generated abstract art - it says so on the page itself.
So is it well executed?
After testing it a few times, most images are at least interesting. Some are quite intriguing. One thing that computer generated art misses is the lack of any motivation behind the individually generated images, which might make them feel more interesting, but to me that's never been a big thing - I'm more interested in my own response.
From the documentation, the author also makes a point out of wanting to make computer generated art which is judged "artistic" or "pleasing" in a quantifiable way.
So there is your motivation. From that aspect it certainly DOES succeed for me. There are images that are visually pleasing, and also most images does appear to follow some basic rules of visual composition, such as making use of the golden cut, which inherently tend to make images more pleasing to humans
Does that mean I think it's great art? Not the images, though some of them look good. With some significant work it might get to the point where I would consider the program great art. If only because replicating an artistic style at high quality by encoding it's rules in a program would be a fitting commentary about how art and "creative thinking" intersects with logic and structure.
The title "Task list window for use in an integrated development environment" and the summary and the first couple of lines of claim one: "1. A computer-implemented method for managing development-related tasks, the method comprising:
during an interactive code development session, " shows pretty clearly that the patent is about an IDE.
Secondly, the patent consists of 75 claims, many of which DO say a lot about syntax errors, including dynamically altering the priorities of tasks depending on whether syntax errors are present or not. The fact that a compiler also identifies syntax errors is irrelevant - the claims are not about detecting sytax errors, but about identifying them and using their presence to alter the task list.
Lastly, using the term "TODO comments" is a generic way of referring to comments formatted a specific way to indicate comments that define tasks to be carried out.
It's not difficult to do, but that isn't relevant. The question is whether someone has done that before, or if the idea is obvious to a trained practitioner in the field.
Read the damn patent. The patent specifically covers, in three separate claims, cases where the tags are predetermined before starting the application, where the tags are determined by the user during operation, and where the tags can't be controlled by the user.
Actually, your idea sounds a LOT closer to the claims of the patent than the overly broad silly generalisations posted in the article summary and most comments here. Hence, for what it's worth your solution is likely closer to being at risk of violating the patent than most of the silly "I've been doing that for grep for years" posts from people who obviously didn't bother even briefly looking at the patent.
Specifically your language about "linking" the todo items to the source code, and automating it through the IDE.
The (few) claims I read did specifically NOT say anything about how the source was organised (one or more files, database, whatever) so separating it would not likely help much, possibly except if the separation is done manually so you can circumvent the whole bit about locating comments with a specific tag part of the first few claims.
I wrote a script that "auto generates a coding task list based on TODO: cmments in the code" 6 years ago. The idea did seem glaringly obvious to me when I did it then, and I'm sure I was nowhere near being the first. My script was a bit more fancy than just doing a grep - it would extract the comment from XML style tags, and would create a nicely formatted HTML page from them.
However, that said, this patent has a lot of claims. Keep in mind that the invention patented is described by the full set of claims, so taking one or two of them and describing the patent based on that is flawed. There's no way a basic todo list extracted from source code with a simple grep or similar is covered by this patent.
First of all, the patent requires that the extraction happens during an interactive development session. I would argue this likely means "in an IDE", though IANAL:). This is in claim 1. The patent also requires that the task list is modified on completion of the task.
Further claim 5 includes monitoring the comments in the code to change the task list. This, together with claim one seems to make it quite clear that batch processing to regenerate the task list from scratch would be in the clear, and this covers most methods I've seen referenced in this discussion.
Already at this stage, the "invention" differs quite obviously from the description in the article summary.
That doesn't mean it's can't be bloody stupid, but at least it's nowhere near as troublesome as it could have been.
Re:Yet another OpenGL binding
on
OpenGL in PHP
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It's mean to suggest something like that... Someone now WILL feel they NEED to write OpenGL bindings for BrainF*ck and Bash just because you suggested it and it's perverted enough.
The context it was mentioned in was as a suggestion to curb overpopulation as a result of reducing infant deaths, and that is different from suggesting that it could be used by individuals here and there. Condoms certainly weren't widespread at that time.
A large part of the point is that we tend to assume that current patterns stay the same when trying to extrapolate how society would be with a specific change, but it's rarely the case - as average lifespans have increased drastically in the industrialised countries, births have dropped drastically, for instance.
Aubrey's argument is that this is likely to be the case if we massively increase lifespans further too. I'm not sure I agree that birth rates will drop sufficiently to make up for an average 5000 year lifespan (as he suggests due to the likelihood of dying of non-age related issues, such as accidents). I'd be curious to know how much in the drop in birth rate is related to a perceived higher likelihood of being able to raise children that will survive later in life, as that would seem to me to be a good indicator of to what extend voluntary measures could curb a population explosion if you will live for so much longer.
If you knew you could safely put off having kids almost any length of time, and then decide to have them, I could see birth rates dropping significantly as a result. The big question is how far.
I doubt any court would agree with you that an operational electronic device still communicating data is abandoned. Or do you consider traffic lights abandoned?
Unless there are obvious indications that the device is not being used or maintained, or it's just laying around or placed in a location where it obviously isn't serving any purpose, I don't think you'd have a snowballs chance in hell of getting a court to accept that it was abandoned, and you'd be unlikely to convince the court you really seriously believed it was abandoned as well.
Twelve Monkeys definitively definitively did not make use of a time loop. A time loop refers to time repeating for one or more individuals, but in twelve monkeys, the main character doesn't loop - he is purposefully sent back to different times and places, and his earlier selves are still there (at the end, for instance, when we see him seeing himself). It doesn't match the Wikipedia entry you refer to.
The thing with Twelve Monkeys is that we get to know so little about the future/present/whatever, that we don't really know whether anything gets changed, and so there is very little basis for saying anything about it's tretment of time travel.
Which mass wave of immigration of muslims is it you are referring to? Most European countries have among the strictest immigration laws in the world. Can you perhaps point us to some documentation of this apparent danger from other Muslims one would face in Europe?
And what makes it a "national security issue"? That it is a crime that targets a large number of people. And, the government DO have a business "predicting and preventing crimes" - a large amount of police work is exactly for that purpose. That isn't the issue, methods are. Particularly overly broad methods that aren't subject to proper scrutiny.
Terrorism is a way down the list of crimes and accidents you are likely to be a victim of, so why does the government spend your tax money on it and encroach on your liberties to do so, instead of spending similar amounts to protect you from things that are actually likely to matter?
The only answer I can come up with is that the current US government WANTS terrorism to be a big issue, because it fits their agenda, and allows them to lead the foreign policy and domestic security policies they want with blatant disregard for whether it is of benefit to most people.
You want better solutions? Stop hyping up the terrorist threat, and while you're at it, stop pissing off most of the world by invading sovereign countries, and instead use all that money to reduce road accidents.
It's a significantly larger threat to the average American than terrorists, and as an added bonus if your government didn't do their best to piss off everyone with their foreign policy all the time the terrorists would have a significantly harder time finding recruits.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you see, when the US government ratifies stupid treaties, it is ITS OWN DAMN FAULT.
It's not as if the US government is some little sissy puppet in the hands of the big bad UN here - they are wilfully and intentionally taking part in the work of drafting the treaties because they are one of the major drivers for stronger IP protections in the world.
The UN just provides a forum and a process for those negotiations take to take place.
If any countries let themeselves be "regulated" it's their own bloody fault for signing stupid treaties with regulations they don't want in the first place. One would assume that your representatives actually bother to read what is ratified, and actually ratify the treaties because they agree with them, rather than blindly signing every random treaty that comes their way.
So why don't you stop spewing bullshit and place the blame where it belongs: On the governments who are more than happy to enter into treaties like this.
Newsflash: Treaties are enforced by the signatories, not by the UN, by whatever means the signatories agree on. Normally that means making the treaty into law. In the US it's even simpler: Once a treaty is ratified, it IS law, thought often a separate law will be passed because the treaties rarely are specific enough to be practical to enforce as is.
Try RTFA sometime.
Except that online, their physical appearance and the smell of their breath will have no impact on what I think of what they say, which in many ways can allow you to form relationships that are profoundly different from those you might have formed to the same people had you met them offline first.
HOW is it any different?
How is this different from a painting, where the visual representation is more static, yes, but is still influenced by the views and state of mind of the audience at the time, the light conditions, context in society (a painting of the WTC shown before and after 9/11 would likely evoke very different reactions, for instance), and in the same way we are not exposed to the artistic process, and only a very few of us are exposed to the beauty of the "raw" work closes to the source code: What techniques were applied to achieve the effects that people react to? What principles does the visual composition follows? Why were the colour scheme chosen?
And yes, K++ DOES contain code that imposes a specific set of principles for visual composition, and colour scheme among others.
Whether it's good art is highly subjective, but deriding it as just "some random graphical effects" is ignoring what it is: An exposition of how heuristics applied to randomness can be used to create graphics that emulate the esthetics of an artistic genre.
What makes it not art?
If you think that you either haven't bothered to study the generated images nor the code, or are just plain clueless.
If they'd been entirely random, the images would have been a complete mess. They are not. They follow quite a few rules to produce images that are more visually pleasing that random data would have been.
A while back someone wished to test the assertion, by taking a Picasso work that is highly geometrical, and asking a bunch of kids to make drawings by placing the same geometric shapes in relation to eachother.
None of the kids came up with a result that remotely resembled the style or feel of the Picasso work.
For the purpose of judging Picasso's work, those kids drawings would be your "random" shapes.
This program may not produce amazing, stunning images that will be emulated for years to come, but it does follow a set of rules that makes it generate images that I would be willing to be will be significantly more pleasing to the average human than completely randomly generated images - they do make use of rules that organize the visual impact in ways that are known to generate a more favorable response than random data.
Based on my experience I'd say most programmers have a very strong foundation for appreciating art, something that also fits well with how often programmers also take on other creative tasks either professionally or as a hobby, such as composing and playing music, writing poetry and novels, drawing/painting etc.
As for what art is, NO you having done illustration most of your life does not make you any more qualified to say what art is than any random person I pick off the street.
Art is art because people say it is.
Some art is more "respected" because more respected people say it is.
What is art depends entirely on who is looking.
That said, you can objectively evaluate some aspects of the quality of some types of art, but this is only applicable because we often can demonstrate experimentally that following certain rules will get certain responses from people. But even that requires you to decide what responses are wanted - some artists go out of their way to shock, and that is the purpose of their art, so you can't automatically assume.
To me, good art is a "well executed" piece that accomplishes the goal of the artist in terms of what response they want from the public, OR a creative work that is judged as art by the viewer. You might realize that both of the two will cover ground not covered by the other...
What is "well executed" depends on that purpose, though certain basics can usually be assumed: If you compose a piece of classical music, you would normally expect the composer to stick to well established harmonies and stick to established rules for instance. But often successful art is about knowing exactly when and where it is acceptable to "bend the rules". A classical example is Schuberts piece "Der Erlkonig" which was widely criticized when it was published because of the pronounced disharmonies. However they are there for a very good reason: To represent the wailing of a dying child.
Now, to the page in question... Is it art?
To me, that just raises a question: What is the motivation?
The motivation is clearly to explore computer generated abstract art - it says so on the page itself.
So is it well executed?
After testing it a few times, most images are at least interesting. Some are quite intriguing. One thing that computer generated art misses is the lack of any motivation behind the individually generated images, which might make them feel more interesting, but to me that's never been a big thing - I'm more interested in my own response.
From the documentation, the author also makes a point out of wanting to make computer generated art which is judged "artistic" or "pleasing" in a quantifiable way.
So there is your motivation. From that aspect it certainly DOES succeed for me. There are images that are visually pleasing, and also most images does appear to follow some basic rules of visual composition, such as making use of the golden cut, which inherently tend to make images more pleasing to humans
Does that mean I think it's great art? Not the images, though some of them look good. With some significant work it might get to the point where I would consider the program great art. If only because replicating an artistic style at high quality by encoding it's rules in a program would be a fitting commentary about how art and "creative thinking" intersects with logic and structure.
Secondly, the patent consists of 75 claims, many of which DO say a lot about syntax errors, including dynamically altering the priorities of tasks depending on whether syntax errors are present or not. The fact that a compiler also identifies syntax errors is irrelevant - the claims are not about detecting sytax errors, but about identifying them and using their presence to alter the task list.
Lastly, using the term "TODO comments" is a generic way of referring to comments formatted a specific way to indicate comments that define tasks to be carried out.
It's not difficult to do, but that isn't relevant. The question is whether someone has done that before, or if the idea is obvious to a trained practitioner in the field.
And to me, using "grep" doesn't even remotely match even the first claim of the patent, so what's your point?
Read the damn patent. The patent specifically covers, in three separate claims, cases where the tags are predetermined before starting the application, where the tags are determined by the user during operation, and where the tags can't be controlled by the user.
Specifically your language about "linking" the todo items to the source code, and automating it through the IDE.
The (few) claims I read did specifically NOT say anything about how the source was organised (one or more files, database, whatever) so separating it would not likely help much, possibly except if the separation is done manually so you can circumvent the whole bit about locating comments with a specific tag part of the first few claims.
However, that said, this patent has a lot of claims. Keep in mind that the invention patented is described by the full set of claims, so taking one or two of them and describing the patent based on that is flawed. There's no way a basic todo list extracted from source code with a simple grep or similar is covered by this patent.
First of all, the patent requires that the extraction happens during an interactive development session. I would argue this likely means "in an IDE", though IANAL :). This is in claim 1. The patent also requires that the task list is modified on completion of the task.
Further claim 5 includes monitoring the comments in the code to change the task list. This, together with claim one seems to make it quite clear that batch processing to regenerate the task list from scratch would be in the clear, and this covers most methods I've seen referenced in this discussion.
Already at this stage, the "invention" differs quite obviously from the description in the article summary.
That doesn't mean it's can't be bloody stupid, but at least it's nowhere near as troublesome as it could have been.
It's mean to suggest something like that... Someone now WILL feel they NEED to write OpenGL bindings for BrainF*ck and Bash just because you suggested it and it's perverted enough.
Like The ublic Patent Foundation you mean?
A large part of the point is that we tend to assume that current patterns stay the same when trying to extrapolate how society would be with a specific change, but it's rarely the case - as average lifespans have increased drastically in the industrialised countries, births have dropped drastically, for instance.
Aubrey's argument is that this is likely to be the case if we massively increase lifespans further too. I'm not sure I agree that birth rates will drop sufficiently to make up for an average 5000 year lifespan (as he suggests due to the likelihood of dying of non-age related issues, such as accidents). I'd be curious to know how much in the drop in birth rate is related to a perceived higher likelihood of being able to raise children that will survive later in life, as that would seem to me to be a good indicator of to what extend voluntary measures could curb a population explosion if you will live for so much longer.
If you knew you could safely put off having kids almost any length of time, and then decide to have them, I could see birth rates dropping significantly as a result. The big question is how far.
We already have a fully functioning 64 bit supported OS on the x86 systems: Linux.
Unless there are obvious indications that the device is not being used or maintained, or it's just laying around or placed in a location where it obviously isn't serving any purpose, I don't think you'd have a snowballs chance in hell of getting a court to accept that it was abandoned, and you'd be unlikely to convince the court you really seriously believed it was abandoned as well.
Uhm.. I think Sybase would object to on of their flahship products being called "dead database".
The thing with Twelve Monkeys is that we get to know so little about the future/present/whatever, that we don't really know whether anything gets changed, and so there is very little basis for saying anything about it's tretment of time travel.
Terrorism is a way down the list of crimes and accidents you are likely to be a victim of, so why does the government spend your tax money on it and encroach on your liberties to do so, instead of spending similar amounts to protect you from things that are actually likely to matter?
The only answer I can come up with is that the current US government WANTS terrorism to be a big issue, because it fits their agenda, and allows them to lead the foreign policy and domestic security policies they want with blatant disregard for whether it is of benefit to most people.
It's a significantly larger threat to the average American than terrorists, and as an added bonus if your government didn't do their best to piss off everyone with their foreign policy all the time the terrorists would have a significantly harder time finding recruits.