Ray dismisses this argument by saying we'll have software that writes the software. Well, there's a tautology for you. If you can't write the software you need because it's too complicated, how can you possibly be expected to write the software to write that software?
I agree with you. To be able to solve a problem using a computer, you have to know how to solve the problem in the first place. Kurtzweil (and his string AI buddies) are counting on some "emergent miracle" to occur.
Now, such an event occured in nature (i.e. evolution), but it took little longer than 30 years.:-)
..who is nearly 11 plays Sims a lot. She also likes "Grand Theft Auto" - it's funny how she helps her friends on the phone, while playing GTA.
She played Tomb Raider a little, but found it too scary (she was less than 10 when she first tried). She plays Tomb Raider today, but not on the computer, but as a pretend-fantasy game with the house and her friends (I had to make her a paper gun, and many objects become "artifacts" that need to be collected, sofa cushions and the space under the table become caves). Very cute...
The 50,000 figure is a bit misleading. It's the number of distinct 4 note melodies possible with the 12 note western scale, without counting repetition that occur an octave apart.
Yeah. But the OTP needs to be given to all the people that want to read your messages. So, all the people who want share messages, need to share the OTP. What's preventing someone from stealing your keychain?
Also, how do I send a secret message to someone who doesn't have the pad?
That is not true. 14-bis had ailerons before anyone else. He was also the first to use internal combustion engines, while still working in ballons, and to steer dirigibles around. The Demoiselle was also the first ultralight airplane. And BTW, among other inventions he created the wristwatch, commissioning his friend Cartier to manufacture the first wristwatch ever, to be used while flying.
You are right. Santos Dumont was quite an inventor. His contribution to early aviation was clearly extensive.
I think the part that people miss about the Wright brothers is that they made the fundamental scientific discovery of how to make airplanes turn. They discovered "adverse aileron yaw" and figured out how to handle it.
They also made the first systematic study of wing sections (inventing the wind tunnel in the process).
I don't believe those discoveries were patented. It was the wing warping/rudder connection mechanism that was.
That would be an argument against patents, because they have the potential of throwing a whole field in disarray, like they are doing now for computing
Right. Especially, if getting a patent costs more than an average inventor can affford.
I attended a talk by a lawyer at NY LUG, and he said that there are not enough technical people becoming patent lawyers, so some of these ridiculous patents are accepted.
I don't have an answer. I'm too old to go to law school.:-)
I am not disputing that. I am saying that Santos-Dumont had a much better attitude by sharing what he did, and that served better the world than the Wright brothers secret, proprietary attitude.
OK. I see what you are saying. The problem is that Santos Dumont did not make any fundamental breakthroughs. In fact, according to this page
the Demoiselles, which first flew in 1907, did not have ailerons, or wing warping. Just rudder and elevator.
Also, patents should be always RAND. They should reward the inventor, not the manufacturer or distributor.
That sounds reasonable. The problem is that without exclusive manufacture and distribution how can one profit from an invention? Maybe there should be a mandatory fee for the inventor from anyone using the invention? Except that "using" cannot be as clearly defined as we'd like. Wrights thought Curtiss was using their invention, and Curtiss thought he didn't.
Software, processes and methods aren't in the original definition of patents, and have proved to be unmitigated evil.
> The Wrights had flown a fully controlled glider in 1902! Nobody else had a clue how to do that until the
False. They did they work in secrecy, so necessarily all the European designs, and much of the US ones, were parallel
developments.
Well, I guess we'll have to disagree. To me there seems that there is plenty of evidence that the Wrights were quite ahead of any competition.
When Santos Dumont was making hops in his 14 bis, the Wrights were flying in circles in Dayton, with plenty of witnesses.
In 1904 there was not a single heavier than air, powered aircraft in Europe that could have flown at all. Meanwhile the Wrights were flying in circles and made duration flights of over 30 minutes that year at Huffman Praire near Dayton.
So much worse. That means that, had they succeeded in their patents, they would have been able to forestall aviation during 17 years both in US and Europe.
Patents can be licensed. The Wrights expected to make money from their invention. Is that so bad?
You seem to oppose the idea of patents altogether. Is there an invention that you think should have been patented? Do you think the patent on public key encryption, let's say, was OK, or not? Especially since public key cryptography was already invented by a British cryptographer, in the 60s - it was just kept secret by the british goverment.
The point is that it was not "theirs". It was made of incremental improvements over other people's works preceding and in parallel.
Of course the Wrights build on the work of others. As every scientist and inventor does. They used data from Lilienthal and Langley and others. They discovered that the data was wrong (this was computation on how much lift a wing section produces).
So they conducted their own experiments and Orville Wright built the first wind tunnel to measure the lift of different wing sections.
But their major invention was to figure out how to control an airplane in flight (i.e. turn). Lilienthal did it by weight shifting, others tried using just a rudder.
Even Santos Dumont's 14 bis was not really steerable. As it says
here.
Octave Chanute reported back to the Wrights that, while Santos-Dumont had indeed flown, he had no means of controlling the aircraft except by shifting his weight, and even that was difficult because the pilot stood in a narrow wicker basket. Santos' next airplane, the No. 15, equipped with a makeshift wing-warping mechanism, broke up while taxi-ing for a take-off in March 1907.
The Wrights had flown a fully controlled glider in 1902! Nobody else had a clue how to do that until the Wrights have shown them.
The Wright's patent was on the method and mechanism of controling an airplane in flight, not on the aileron. Aileron is just another implementation of the Wright's system.
Just as Santos-Dumont did. But when he did, he did not kept it to himself.
Santos-Dumont's first flying machine, the one that flew in 1906 could barely manage a hop. The Demoiselle did not fly until 1909!
Wilbur Wright went to Paris in 1908 to demonstrate the Wright Flyer. It caused a sensation. I believe that Santos Dumont was in Paris during that time.
I happen to think that patenting their invention was the right thing to do. It was quite an achievement. This was not a "one-click" patent. The Wrights risked they lives to perfect their invention.
Many words in aviation come from french (eg. fuselage etc). So what. The Wright's plane used wing-warping mechanism (so they weren't ailerons).
The point is that the Wrights understood how airplanes turn and they could build a machine that could do it.
Don't forget that the Wrights were flying fully controllable gliders several years before their power flights. During their glider flights they discovered the adverse aileron yaw (before ailerons were named) and figure out how to control it with the rudder.
Please read up on you history. For example take look at this:
Santos Dumont's first heavier than air flight was in October 1906. By then Wright's patent was already granted and they were trying to sell their working airplane to the US Goverment.
If you dig around and find out how much say, the basoonist in a famous world class orchestra makes, you'll immediately realize that classical musicians are in it for love of music as it is impossible to be there for love of money
Isn't this as it should be? People should work at what they love. It's great if they can actually make a living at it.
What you say about classical musicians, can also be said about jazz musicians.
Anyway, isn't the point of being a musician playing music for people, not selling records.
This whole "recording artist" thing is an abberation of the 20th century technology.
This is a totally unfounded affirmation, he did steer airships and went around Paris in them much before creating the 14-bis.
But that's the point. Airships are steered completely differently from airplanes.
This is common misunderstanding. Airships turn like boats with a rudder.
An airplane cannot be turned with a rudder. If you try it, the airplane will just skid sideways through the air. Airplanes turn because they bank. To bank you use ailerons, and the rudder is needed to balance the turn (look up adverse yaw).
The Wrights discovered this with their glider experiments, and devised a mechanism to allow an airplane to execute a balanced turn. No one else
had any idea.
and the real inventor was a Brazilian named Santos Dummont whose first flight was in Paris, France.
There were many who build machines that looked like birds and who tried to fly them. Santos Dumont was one of them, and his machine actually got of the ground.
However, the Wrights not only got a machine into the air, they figured out how to control it.
None of the others, like Santos Dumont or Gustav White, or Samuel Langley, had any idea how to steer an airplane (the rudder does not cause the turn).
The Wrights figured this out and designed a control system that allowed them to fly circle (literally) around any of their competition, who took years to catch up.
You should read about Harold Pitcairn. He had a number of patents
on autogyro and helicopter technology. When WW II started the Pitcairn allow the US goverment the use of his patents. The goverment let a guy name Sikorsky build helicopters as Pitcairn was busy with other war material production.
After the war, the patents were not returned and Pitcairn sued the goverment. The case lasted for over 20 years and eventually (after Harold Pitcairn's death) the Pitcairns won.
Meanwhile, think of the largest companies that build helicopters today.
The Wright brothers actually figured out how airplanes turn and developed a system to control the flight of an airplane. Curtiss just used their results and ideas, improved the implementation but did not do his own research.
But I want a player which can interpret any editing script. So, if you want you can edit the movie and leave only the nude scenes and the profanities.
The point is that if such a DVD player existed, people could distribute the scripts (maybe for money) that, when loaded into your player, would play the parts you want.
Imagine a DVD player that can be programmed to skip scenes or to bleep out sounds for a second or two. Now imagine that the instructions to do this can have be downloaded into the player.
Then all Clean Flicks can do is to sell the edit instructions, and not touch the DVD at all.
Clearly the player should be set up that a movie without edits could not be played, unless you knew sme password...etc. Then we could all see the alternate edit of "Phantom Menace"...
... but apparently some technology I have never heard of that is named after an Ed Wood movie will defeat it.
Apparently the guys that named this technology have a record for coming up with silly names. Just imagine they named their first project "UNIX". That project also faded into obsurity. Didn't it?
If I ran a bookstore, I couldn't put child porn on the shelves. If I was a media distributor, who wholesaled books and magazines to bookstores, I couldn't be a carrier and distributor of child porn.
Of course, but would you search each customer to make sure that he didn't carry any child porn into your book store?
Guess what. The average price someone wants to pay for something, regardless of its value, is zero.
Not true. I'm willing to pay a price that I feel is fair. But I don't want to pay, if I'm being ripped off.
For example, I buy a lot of old jazz recordings. Why should I pay $15 for a CD of music that's 50 years old, when I know the CD costs 50 cents and that the artists is not getting anything.
So, now I can search and find MP3 files by emailing Word files? How cool is that!
Re:Although you may be right
on
"Squishy" DRM?
·
· Score: 2
The argument that downloading and sharing music is good for the music industry is a strong one, I haven't denied that in my earlier post. The problem is, it isn't even remotely fair use. It will never be considered fair use. Hopefully some day it will be considered a good marketing strategy, but not fair use as the term is used.
Is listening to the radio "stealing music"? After all I don't pay for it and I mute it during commercials.
I sometimes tape stuff of the radio. Is that "stealing music" too?
Copyright violation (which this action maybe at worst) is not stealing. Depriving someone else of profits is not stealing (or is driving a fuel efficient car "stealing" from oil companies?).
If you think of file sharing as promotion (which is how record companies think of radio or MTV) then it's a great way for artists to be exposed to new listeners. Think how much music is being produced and how long playlists on a particular radio station are. There are probably less than 500 songs played on the radio any given week.
What if I don't like any of the crap that record companies put on the radio. Where do I go to hear music I may like?
The record companies somehow became total control freaks. They want to pick the music for me, then decide when I can listen to it, using what devices and in what order.
I want to control my own music. If the radio and MTV become a wasteland of stuff that doesn't interest me, fine. But don't expect me to pay for it. I'll go directly to the artists and buy my music there (I've been doing that more and more - since most of my favorite artists have their own websites). And to find new music I use the Net - news groups, etc and I use gnutella to sample stuff (althought most artists I like have samples directly on their sites).
If RIAA DRMs their precious "content" they can keep it, I'm not going to buy it.
Re:How do we distance ourselves from the thieves
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 1, Troll
Unfortunately, the people that only do this are in the minority. The majority, even giving them the benefit of the doubt, steal music.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you. To be able to solve a problem using a computer, you have to know how to solve the problem in the first place. Kurtzweil (and his string AI buddies) are counting on some "emergent miracle" to occur.
Now, such an event occured in nature (i.e. evolution), but it took little longer than 30 years. :-)
She played Tomb Raider a little, but found it too scary (she was less than 10 when she first tried). She plays Tomb Raider today, but not on the computer, but as a pretend-fantasy game with the house and her friends (I had to make her a paper gun, and many objects become "artifacts" that need to be collected, sofa cushions and the space under the table become caves). Very cute...
Also, how do I send a secret message to someone who doesn't have the pad?
I'm 37337! I am!
You are right. Santos Dumont was quite an inventor. His contribution to early aviation was clearly extensive.
I think the part that people miss about the Wright brothers is that they made the fundamental scientific discovery of how to make airplanes turn. They discovered "adverse aileron yaw" and figured out how to handle it.
They also made the first systematic study of wing sections (inventing the wind tunnel in the process).
I don't believe those discoveries were patented. It was the wing warping/rudder connection mechanism that was.
That would be an argument against patents, because they have the potential of throwing a whole field in disarray, like they are doing now for computing
Right. Especially, if getting a patent costs more than an average inventor can affford.
I attended a talk by a lawyer at NY LUG, and he said that there are not enough technical people becoming patent lawyers, so some of these ridiculous patents are accepted.
I don't have an answer. I'm too old to go to law school. :-)
OK. I see what you are saying. The problem is that Santos Dumont did not make any fundamental breakthroughs. In fact, according to this page the Demoiselles, which first flew in 1907, did not have ailerons, or wing warping. Just rudder and elevator.
Also, patents should be always RAND. They should reward the inventor, not the manufacturer or distributor.
That sounds reasonable. The problem is that without exclusive manufacture and distribution how can one profit from an invention? Maybe there should be a mandatory fee for the inventor from anyone using the invention? Except that "using" cannot be as clearly defined as we'd like. Wrights thought Curtiss was using their invention, and Curtiss thought he didn't.
Software, processes and methods aren't in the original definition of patents, and have proved to be unmitigated evil.
I tend to agree with you on software patents.
False. They did they work in secrecy, so necessarily all the European designs, and much of the US ones, were parallel developments.
Well, I guess we'll have to disagree. To me there seems that there is plenty of evidence that the Wrights were quite ahead of any competition. When Santos Dumont was making hops in his 14 bis, the Wrights were flying in circles in Dayton, with plenty of witnesses.
In 1904 there was not a single heavier than air, powered aircraft in Europe that could have flown at all. Meanwhile the Wrights were flying in circles and made duration flights of over 30 minutes that year at Huffman Praire near Dayton.
Here are some photographs from 1905.
When did 14 bis fly? 1906 or was it 1907?
So much worse. That means that, had they succeeded in their patents, they would have been able to forestall aviation during 17 years both in US and Europe.
Patents can be licensed. The Wrights expected to make money from their invention. Is that so bad?
You seem to oppose the idea of patents altogether. Is there an invention that you think should have been patented? Do you think the patent on public key encryption, let's say, was OK, or not? Especially since public key cryptography was already invented by a British cryptographer, in the 60s - it was just kept secret by the british goverment.
Of course the Wrights build on the work of others. As every scientist and inventor does. They used data from Lilienthal and Langley and others. They discovered that the data was wrong (this was computation on how much lift a wing section produces).
So they conducted their own experiments and Orville Wright built the first wind tunnel to measure the lift of different wing sections.
But their major invention was to figure out how to control an airplane in flight (i.e. turn). Lilienthal did it by weight shifting, others tried using just a rudder.
Even Santos Dumont's 14 bis was not really steerable. As it says here.
The Wrights had flown a fully controlled glider in 1902! Nobody else had a clue how to do that until the Wrights have shown them.
The Wright's patent was on the method and mechanism of controling an airplane in flight, not on the aileron. Aileron is just another implementation of the Wright's system.
Santos-Dumont's first flying machine, the one that flew in 1906 could barely manage a hop. The Demoiselle did not fly until 1909!
Wilbur Wright went to Paris in 1908 to demonstrate the Wright Flyer. It caused a sensation. I believe that Santos Dumont was in Paris during that time.
I happen to think that patenting their invention was the right thing to do. It was quite an achievement. This was not a "one-click" patent. The Wrights risked they lives to perfect their invention.
The point is that the Wrights understood how airplanes turn and they could build a machine that could do it.
Don't forget that the Wrights were flying fully controllable gliders several years before their power flights. During their glider flights they discovered the adverse aileron yaw (before ailerons were named) and figure out how to control it with the rudder.
Please read up on you history. For example take look at this:
Wright's Chronology
Santos Dumont's first heavier than air flight was in October 1906. By then Wright's patent was already granted and they were trying to sell their working airplane to the US Goverment.
Isn't this as it should be? People should work at what they love. It's great if they can actually make a living at it.
What you say about classical musicians, can also be said about jazz musicians.
Anyway, isn't the point of being a musician playing music for people, not selling records. This whole "recording artist" thing is an abberation of the 20th century technology.
But that's the point. Airships are steered completely differently from airplanes. This is common misunderstanding. Airships turn like boats with a rudder.
An airplane cannot be turned with a rudder. If you try it, the airplane will just skid sideways through the air. Airplanes turn because they bank. To bank you use ailerons, and the rudder is needed to balance the turn (look up adverse yaw).
The Wrights discovered this with their glider experiments, and devised a mechanism to allow an airplane to execute a balanced turn. No one else had any idea.
There were many who build machines that looked like birds and who tried to fly them. Santos Dumont was one of them, and his machine actually got of the ground.
However, the Wrights not only got a machine into the air, they figured out how to control it.
None of the others, like Santos Dumont or Gustav White, or Samuel Langley, had any idea how to steer an airplane (the rudder does not cause the turn).
The Wrights figured this out and designed a control system that allowed them to fly circle (literally) around any of their competition, who took years to catch up.
After the war, the patents were not returned and Pitcairn sued the goverment. The case lasted for over 20 years and eventually (after Harold Pitcairn's death) the Pitcairns won.
Meanwhile, think of the largest companies that build helicopters today.
The Wright brothers actually figured out how airplanes turn and developed a system to control the flight of an airplane. Curtiss just used their results and ideas, improved the implementation but did not do his own research.
Do you ever fast foward through sections of a movie that you don't want to see? If so, what give you the right to "tamper with the directors work"?
The point is that if such a DVD player existed, people could distribute the scripts (maybe for money) that, when loaded into your player, would play the parts you want.
Like seeing "Memento" forwards in time...
Then all Clean Flicks can do is to sell the edit instructions, and not touch the DVD at all.
Clearly the player should be set up that a movie without edits could not be played, unless you knew sme password...etc. Then we could all see the alternate edit of "Phantom Menace"...
I wonder how this would be made illegal? :-)
Apparently the guys that named this technology have a record for coming up with silly names. Just imagine they named their first project "UNIX". That project also faded into obsurity. Didn't it?
Of course, but would you search each customer to make sure that he didn't carry any child porn into your book store?
Not true. I'm willing to pay a price that I feel is fair. But I don't want to pay, if I'm being ripped off.
For example, I buy a lot of old jazz recordings. Why should I pay $15 for a CD of music that's 50 years old, when I know the CD costs 50 cents and that the artists is not getting anything.
Is listening to the radio "stealing music"? After all I don't pay for it and I mute it during commercials.
I sometimes tape stuff of the radio. Is that "stealing music" too?
Copyright violation (which this action maybe at worst) is not stealing. Depriving someone else of profits is not stealing (or is driving a fuel efficient car "stealing" from oil companies?).
If you think of file sharing as promotion (which is how record companies think of radio or MTV) then it's a great way for artists to be exposed to new listeners. Think how much music is being produced and how long playlists on a particular radio station are. There are probably less than 500 songs played on the radio any given week.
What if I don't like any of the crap that record companies put on the radio. Where do I go to hear music I may like?
The record companies somehow became total control freaks. They want to pick the music for me, then decide when I can listen to it, using what devices and in what order.
I want to control my own music. If the radio and MTV become a wasteland of stuff that doesn't interest me, fine. But don't expect me to pay for it. I'll go directly to the artists and buy my music there (I've been doing that more and more - since most of my favorite artists have their own websites). And to find new music I use the Net - news groups, etc and I use gnutella to sample stuff (althought most artists I like have samples directly on their sites).
If RIAA DRMs their precious "content" they can keep it, I'm not going to buy it.
I'm pretty sure you are wrong here. Check out the analysis of the stats by Dan Briklin here: http://www.bricklin.com/recordsales.htm