More appropriate to say if Jack Valentini had been around during the time of Nazi Germany, he would have led Hitler's book-burning campaign.
No, Jack Valenti, would have built a fence around the fire, posted guards, and made everyone show a reciept for the books they wanted to burn. Can't have people burning illegal copies.
Now, the field
changes from time (Win98) to time (WinXP). Differnt contours, different lines, but both teams have to play on the same field.
It's not so simple, not only does the field change from time to time, but the rules change at the whim of the home team. There are hidden passages from the 20 yard line to the end zone.
An ever shifting maze moves to a pattern known only to the home team. The field also tilts so that the opposing team is always running up hill.
Granted, Team A
practices there, so they have an upper hand, but if they were to go over to Team B's field (Solaris), they would have the same hard time adjusting.
You've forgotten that most of the spectators aren't there because they like Team A. They are there because ticket vendors are only allowed to sell cheap tickets to Team A's stadium. If they sell a ticket to Team B's stadium, the vendor still needs to pay Team A as if they had sold a ticket to Team A's stadium. So tickets to Team B's stadium are twice as expensive.
Team B tries to give tickets away so their hot dog vendors will make some money, but they need to distribute the tickets through licensed ticket vendors, who still need to pay Team A for the tickets.
The home team always has the advantage, but when it comes to apps, people ARE playing on a level field...they both have to develop for the same
OS.
Not even close, especially when the OS contains hidden APIs and can change in an instant to break a competitors software. Remember "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run." Remeber how WIN32S would immediately change every time IBM was able to make it run under OS/2?
Getting back to the point, you know how pissed off I'd be if someone told me I HAD to bundle someone else's software with my app? That's
ridiculous, absolutely preposterous, especially in this day and age of install wizards. Java takes two clicks to install, any moron can do it or have the
desired program do it for them.
Then you are certainly lucky that you don't have
a monopoly. Bill Gates is lucky he's not in jail.
(Yes, there are criminal penalties for abuse of
a monopoly position. Far be it for A$hcroft to seek anything like that.)
He's lucky he gets to sell his software at all.
But I bristle at your notion that libraries ought to be entitled to distribute recently created copyrighted works, with no compensation whatsoever to the author. On what basis do you feel that government should essentially engage in intellectual theft?
Sorry to point this out, but... At least in the US, copyright is an artifice created by govenment. The government gives you a monopoly on distribution of you books under the assumption that it is in the public interest for you to have that monopoly. Should the government wish to modify the terms of that monopoly, or eliminate it entirely, it is certainly within the powers granted to the Congress to do so, so long as the public interest is served. This would not be theft, because "intellectual property" is not really property. It only exists in this country by act of Congress.
The only purpose for copyright law is to serve the public interest by promoting the "useful arts and sciences." That you can also use it to make money is a side effect. The assumption that the side effect is the purpose seems to me to be "selfish and poorly thought out."
The question with the Eldred case is whether the Congress has passed copyright laws that are no longer in the public interest, and are therefore unconstitutional.
That's pretty arrogant and just plain wrong. No where did I mention that a copyright entitles the owner to profit. Quite the contrary, I said that owning a copyright entitles one, by and large, to determine the terms and conditions of its use.
Bullshit. That "by and large" means "within the bounds of existing copyright law and prior case law." Copyright law does not give the copyright holder rights to the physical medium, nor does it allow the copyright holder to determine "terms and conditions of use." To my knowledge it has not been determined whether a consumer can be forced to give up fair use rights by contractual agreement.
I think the point you are missing is that copyright itself is a limited monopoly. Monopolies such as this are allowed to exist only because they provide some benefit to the public.
If there is insufficient public benefit, the monopoly should be revoked. Current law goes to far in reducing public benefit by extending copyright terms (essentially forever) and by preventing fair use.
Now you may throw out "fair use", but this is a contentious issue. First, the doctrine of fair use is NOT in the Constitution, it came along afterwards.
Yet another person who thinks the Constitution gives us our rights. It does not. The Constitution limits the power of government. Any copyright law restricting fair use is not constitutional because it does not "promote the useful arts and sciences."
Third, there is no clear precedent for "fair use" here.
Certainly there is. You even mention it. "Time shifting" of programming is certainly fair use,
as is "viewer shifting" (having friends over to watch) as is "space shifting" (bringing a tape to a friends house to view). "Time skipping" is certainly permitted. There is no aspect of copyright law that could be construed to require complete sequential viewing. Do you think it would be possible to put a contract inside the cover of a book that would require that the reader read every page in order?
Lastly, there's nothing "fair" or reasonable about what you suggest. Genuine "time shifting" is one thing, but a method that is intentionally designed cut out the only source of revenue, i.e., ads, for a good number of channels/products, against the will of the copyright owners and licensees, is simply wrong.
Again bullshit! No aspect of copyright law requires the buyer of copyrighted materials to respect a buisness model. Copyright law restricts the rights of the consumer to produce copies of copyrighted works in a manner that is not consistant with fair use. It does not restrict use of copyrighted material in other ways. You can lend a DVD to a friend, for example. You have the right to resell the original copy.
Not only are you trampling on their copyright, but you are doing it in a way that will have devastating impact on their ability to profit from their efforts.
It's neither my job nor my concern to provide cable companies with a profitable business model.
Nor does my unwillingness to provide them with one indicate a violation of copyright law.
The country did alright before there were cable companies, it'll do alright after. Perhaps when the cable compaines fall, municipalities or states will take over the cables. Perhaps not.
Even if you cannot give a rats ass about the owners, you still need to honestly examine the question of efficiency.
Again, it's not my concern to provide them with an efficient buisness model. If the cable companies don't come up with a model that works, someone else will (provided the government doesn't keep propping the cable companies up and giving them an uncompetetive advantage.)
In other words, just because consumers may opt, as individuals, to skip over commercials does not mean that they are better off with that option.
It doesn't mean they're not better off that way, too.
In much the same way, you need to ask yourself whether you want to enable consumers to defeat ads.
I'm assuming you don't use a pop-up blocker on your browser. After all that would be immoral.
What's more, you need to factor the efficiency of payments in, even with all of our technology today, there is going to be significant overhead and structural costs involved with direct payment methodology.
If that's what they choose as a replacement business model, I think they'll need to loose their local monopolies, or be more subject to regulation. As far as efficiency goes, direct payment seems to have done OK for the phone companies. I'm pretty sure they would be willing to provide a cable equivalent should the cable companies fold.
This is a fallacious argument. Whether or not you happen to agree with the cable companies is besides the point. Firstly, copyright holders and, by extension, licensees of those copyrights (e.g., cable companies) do, with some notable exceptions, have the right to determine the terms and conditons of the use of their IP. You have the choice to use their service in compliance with their contract and pay; or not use their service and not pay them.
It's not quite so simple as you would make it out to be. First, cable companies are allowed local monopolies under the assumption that access a single cable company is in the public interest. That doesn't mean they can do whatever want, like imposing limits to legitimate fair-use of broadcast content.
People who receive cable are NOT signatories to any contracts that exist between the cable companies and content providers. Nothing in my cable contract has any limits to the type of device I use to view the content. Nothing prohibits recording content for personal use.
Nothing prohibits skipping commercials. Even if it did, it's likely that such clauses would not be binding.
The problem the cable companies have is that, to some extent, they have lost their monopolies. Satellite service has become affordable and it provides more programming choice. A legislative or technological straight-jacket forcing the public to cough up more money probably sounds pretty good to them right now. While we're making people pay for skipping commercials, let's force browsers to charge web surfers for pop-up blocking. After all, geocities has a Constitutional right to make a profit through coercion, doesn't it?
I think it might be time to pick up your copy of the US Constitution. Find the copyright clause.
Does the copyright clause mention compensation? Does it mention profit? The ends of copyright legislation is "promotion of the useful arts and sciences." If people can't make a profit from their works, or more likely selling someone elses work, tough! If cable compaines are worried about shrinking revenue from commercials, they'll need to come up with another way to make money. If it turns out that they can't compete with the alternatives (satellite, broadband over phonelines, local fiber, whatever), then the cable companies will go out of business. Makes you want to run out and buy stock, doesn't it.
I don't think this is a good idea, if by "more interesting" you mean "more likely to be an ETI signal".
The only thing we mean by "more interesting" is "less likely to occur by chance." In this search, that's the only thing we have to go on.
Every potential signal we have detected is within 0.1 degree of a star, simply because there is no place on the sky where there isn't a star within 0.1 degree.
In order to make a managable sample, we need to restict ourselves to coincidences that are unlikely to occur by chance. We've restricted ourselves to nearby stars with known distances because nearby stars are more rare than distant ones and are less likely to be coincident with a hit.
We don't require coincidence with a star for a signal to be interesting. In fact, coincidence between two strong candidates generally results in a better score than coincidence between a candidate and a nearby star.
I'd tend to look for Sun-like stars that are a bit younger or a lot older. What do the models say the Sun will look like in a few billion years?
For the next 4 billion years or so, the sun will look pretty much like it does today. It will get slightly brighter and a maybe tiny bit bluer (maybe a tiny bit redder, there's some disagreement on this), but not significantly so. (slightly in an astronomical sense, it may be too hot for life to exist on earth in a couple hundred million years, but the sun will only be a few percent brighter). The sun would still be very near the zero point of our gaussian term.
It's not necessarily that blue is good, it's just that blue is more rare than red. A chance coincidence of a potential signal with a rare blue star is less likely than a chance coincidence with a common red star. If it's less likely to occur by chance, then by this measure, it is more interesting.
As an aside: A lot of people, including some astronomers, continue to spread the myth that the sun is an average star. It's not. The sun is brighter, bluer, and more massive than 95% of the stars out there. The sun is a monster of a star compared to the average.
The Gaussian term is there to provide a penalty for things that are too blue or too red to be good candidates for earth-like life. Anything too much bluer than the sun won't have a long enough lifetime. Anything too red, and the habitable zone may be too small.
Maybe we were't clear, low scores are better.
(I didn't have a chance to review Amir's article before it went out. In fact, I haven't read it yet. Does that mean I'm a real slashdotter?)
When you get down to it this "star score" is fairly arbitrary. I outght to know, I invented it. If you take out the Gaussian term, it reduces to the number of stars in our sample closer to the sun than the star being scored that are also bluer than the star being scored.
I threw in the Gaussian term as a "we like stars like the sun" term.
But it's OK for this "star score" to be somewhat arbitrary. The "star score" represents how interesting the star is to us, not a literal interpretation of the probability of life existing around that star. A "how probable is life there" score doesn't really exist.
Cheating will always be possible. You can't have a trusted conversation with someone you can't trust. It's not like we can charge their credit card for every invalid result or have them arrested.
All you can do is make cheating hard. If you would like cheating to be very hard, feel free to go here and put in some work to help make it hard.
Official Word: not a problem for the science.
on
Cheating at Seti@home
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yet another overblow cheating report. Frankly, it doesn't really impact the science. The cheaters only process a small fraction of the total data and candidate identification doesn't rely on either a single result or a results from a single work unit.
Lets keep the the scope of the problem in perspective. What these guys are worried about is being in first place in the stats. I understand their concerns, but right now we have neither the funds nor the manpower to share them. Perhaps when SETI@home is shut down, and SETI@home II is running, we will go back and adjust the totals. Perhaps not.
SETI@home II will run under BOINC and will have more immunity to such exploits. The cost of such immunity will likely be a GUID for each machine running BOINC, in addition to a per user key pair.
This, of course, will get slammed by privacy advocates. Hell, if Microsoft were doing it I'd slam them.
Right now our priorities are
Keeping everything running.
Identifying candidates for reobservation at Arecibo (sometime in the next 4 months or so).
Building the SETI@home II data recorder.
Getting Astropulse running as part of the BOINC beta.
Finding enough funding to keep us running.
Designing the SETI@home II analysis code.
Sorry, but fixing the stats can't be a priority right now. The extension of that to "SETI@home doesn't care about cheating" is extrapolating too far.
This report isn't really unexpected. The reasons are fairly obvious.
The public in the US is mainly educated in political matters by the press, especially cable media. Alternatives to the cable giants, ala BBC are not readily available. The cable media are owned by mega-corporations. It's no surprise that these corporations are interested in preserving their power through economic and political means.
Because money is the main concern, their agenda tends to be a conservative one. Hence they will:
Help to accelerate the destruction of the public education system since an educated populace might not be interested in sensationalized reporting skewed towards a conservative viewpoint.
Help to ensure that politicians are elected that are sympathetic to their viewpoint. This is accomplished through a combination of biased reporting, emphasizing the faults of political opponents, and prolifieration of punditry disguised as journalism.
Self sensorship, and support of governement or corporate sensorship, to maintain a favorable political atmosphere.
Monitary support of politicians as a means of encouraging support for the corporate political agenda.
The corporate media own american politics. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
So in order to be sure that nothing
"funky" is happening, the system should be opensourced.
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
We're in the process of attempting a new solution to this problem. We're open sourcing the distributed computing framework (essentially the operating system) and allowing the computing application to be closed source. This method opens the code signing/verification and data encryption code to be viewed by anyone who is interested, but doesn't necessarily allow untrusted application code to return a result.
(Look here for more info).
The situation isn't as dire as it sounds. Our dominant problem has been that the falling economy has caused some of our sponsors to withdraw support. With support withdrawn, we are denied matching funds from the University. Essentially, the University is witholding funding until we find further sponsors. We are actively seeking corporate sponsors who would be willing to donate, and have their contributions matched by the University. Under the matching program the sponsors must be for-profit industry. If anyone reading this works for such a corporation, please contact SETI@home through our web site.
Individuals wishing to make a contribution can do so through the SETI@home web site. Please be aware that our current largest sponsor is the Planetary Society. A membership to the Planetary Society (assuming it is done through the links on the SETI@home page) may return more to SETI@home than does a direct contribution, as it indicates the importance of SETI@home to members of the Society.
Regardless of the funding issues, we are working hard to make SETI@home II a reality. We have funding from the NSF to develop the BOINC client/server code which will be used as the framework for SETI@home II. We are in the process of building the SETI@home II data recorder. What we do with it (multibeam, wide bandwidth) and where (Arecibo or Parkes) depends upon what we can afford.
We are also seeking NSF funding for AstroPulse and SETHI and SERENDIP V.
That said, things are currently somewhat tight here. We'll need to make do with fewer employees until we're back in the black. I don't think this spells the end of SETI@home by any means.
My comment would be that encrypted or time limited distribution of copyrighted works is antithetical to the purpose of the copyright clause in the US Consitiution. Copyright was intended to promote the advancement of arts and sciences by ensuring that the authors would be entitled to sole distribution for a limited term, and that the works would enter the public domain following that term.
Encrypted distribution can be used to prevent the limited term and the necessary public access required by the Consititution. Works can be rendered unreadable after the copyright expiration. Therefore, I would suggest that encrypted distribution should only be protected under copyright law if provision is made for release of unencrypted distribution at term expiration. This provision should be that the copyright holder should provide an unencrypted rendition of the work of equivalent (or higher) quality to the Library of Congress. Until this is provided, the copyright of the encrypted work should be considered invalid.
Not to mention the obvious comments that all circumvention devices have fair-use potential and should therefore be permitted.
Where, exactly? I did a quick skim through the Presidential and Judicial Articles, and saw nothing of the sort. The best I could find in the Legislative article (Article I, Section 8) stated that Congress shall have the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions".
So close! It's in Article I Section 9 Paragraph 2: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
Regardless of the decision of Judge Kaplan in the 2600 case, DeCSS is protected speech, so long as it is posted for reasons recognized as protected speech. These include, but are not limited to:
Posting DeCSS as journalistic material as part of a news article.
Posting DeCSS as a form of political protest.
Using DeCSS as educational material.
It's unfortunate that 2600 dropped the case.
BTW, personal favorite DeCSS site is here.
No offense to the State of Maryland, but the U.S. Constitution provides for suspension of habeas corpus in cases of "in cases of rebellion or invasion."
That said, the illegitimate son of George I has exceeded his constitutional authority in this case.
Under BOINC there is more of a separation between the communications code and the data processing code. The data processing code is essentially
a separate application controlled by the BOINC
client
The BOINC client will know how many CPUs you have, how many you are willing to use for processing, and what fraction of your CPU time you want to spend on each of the BOINC projects you have joined. Application binaries can be cryptographically signed to verify origin.
BOINC will cache workunits by default, with disk usage limits set by the user.
BOINC will support multiple servers. Donation credits will be based upon the amount of work done (FLOPs, int ops, network bandwidth, disk space, etc.) If one project runs out of data, or the servers go down,
you machine will devote time to the other projects
you've joined.
We're really trying to address all of the lessons we learned throughout SETI@home. And, if there are some we missed, the server/client code is open source, and will be available on sourceforge.
Project specific code can be open source or not as the people behind each project desire.
I think you are missing the larger point that vendors are going to build Palladium support into their applications. What happens when Adobe incorporates it into Acrobat and Acrobat Reader? The reader will only be able to read PDFs from licensed copies of Acrobat. Acrobat will create documents only readable by Acrobat Reader. Adobe will have the ability to censor content in PDFs. They'll sneak this in slowly, then throw a switch
to enable it.
Microsoft will do the same thing with Office. It will require applications to get Palladium keys from MS before they will run in Microsoft Windows XXP. Those same applications will not run and documents will not be accessible under a non-MS operating system. Bye bye WINE.
Presidents, Congressmen, and other criminals will give their incriminating documents expiration dates beyond which they will be unreadable. The documents will only be readable on a few machines that they trust. Investigative reporting will be even more impossible than it currently is.
The other problem with TCPA/Palladium is that you will be forced to used it (probably by law). You should really be frightened of this.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Jack Valenti, would have built a fence around the fire, posted guards, and made everyone show a reciept for the books they wanted to burn. Can't have people burning illegal copies.
I patented your genetic code, retrieved from a hair sample, last week. You can't afford to store your genetic code.
Backups?
Backups are illegal under the Ernest P. Worhl Copyright Act (EPWCA) of 2005.
Anyone?
People may not be duplicated under the Arnold Ziffle Anti-Cloning Act (AZACA) of 2007. Disney holds the copyright to most people anyway.
It's not so simple, not only does the field change from time to time, but the rules change at the whim of the home team. There are hidden passages from the 20 yard line to the end zone. An ever shifting maze moves to a pattern known only to the home team. The field also tilts so that the opposing team is always running up hill.
Granted, Team A practices there, so they have an upper hand, but if they were to go over to Team B's field (Solaris), they would have the same hard time adjusting.
You've forgotten that most of the spectators aren't there because they like Team A. They are there because ticket vendors are only allowed to sell cheap tickets to Team A's stadium. If they sell a ticket to Team B's stadium, the vendor still needs to pay Team A as if they had sold a ticket to Team A's stadium. So tickets to Team B's stadium are twice as expensive.
Team B tries to give tickets away so their hot dog vendors will make some money, but they need to distribute the tickets through licensed ticket vendors, who still need to pay Team A for the tickets.
The home team always has the advantage, but when it comes to apps, people ARE playing on a level field...they both have to develop for the same OS.
Not even close, especially when the OS contains hidden APIs and can change in an instant to break a competitors software. Remember "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run." Remeber how WIN32S would immediately change every time IBM was able to make it run under OS/2?
Getting back to the point, you know how pissed off I'd be if someone told me I HAD to bundle someone else's software with my app? That's ridiculous, absolutely preposterous, especially in this day and age of install wizards. Java takes two clicks to install, any moron can do it or have the desired program do it for them.
Then you are certainly lucky that you don't have a monopoly. Bill Gates is lucky he's not in jail. (Yes, there are criminal penalties for abuse of a monopoly position. Far be it for A$hcroft to seek anything like that.) He's lucky he gets to sell his software at all.
The real proof is here!
This is the year to be happy you've got a paycheck and some money in your 401k.
Sorry to point this out, but... At least in the US, copyright is an artifice created by govenment. The government gives you a monopoly on distribution of you books under the assumption that it is in the public interest for you to have that monopoly. Should the government wish to modify the terms of that monopoly, or eliminate it entirely, it is certainly within the powers granted to the Congress to do so, so long as the public interest is served. This would not be theft, because "intellectual property" is not really property. It only exists in this country by act of Congress.
The only purpose for copyright law is to serve the public interest by promoting the "useful arts and sciences." That you can also use it to make money is a side effect. The assumption that the side effect is the purpose seems to me to be "selfish and poorly thought out."
The question with the Eldred case is whether the Congress has passed copyright laws that are no longer in the public interest, and are therefore unconstitutional.
Bullshit. That "by and large" means "within the bounds of existing copyright law and prior case law." Copyright law does not give the copyright holder rights to the physical medium, nor does it allow the copyright holder to determine "terms and conditions of use." To my knowledge it has not been determined whether a consumer can be forced to give up fair use rights by contractual agreement.
I think the point you are missing is that copyright itself is a limited monopoly. Monopolies such as this are allowed to exist only because they provide some benefit to the public. If there is insufficient public benefit, the monopoly should be revoked. Current law goes to far in reducing public benefit by extending copyright terms (essentially forever) and by preventing fair use.
Now you may throw out "fair use", but this is a contentious issue. First, the doctrine of fair use is NOT in the Constitution, it came along afterwards.
Yet another person who thinks the Constitution gives us our rights. It does not. The Constitution limits the power of government. Any copyright law restricting fair use is not constitutional because it does not "promote the useful arts and sciences."
Third, there is no clear precedent for "fair use" here.
Certainly there is. You even mention it. "Time shifting" of programming is certainly fair use, as is "viewer shifting" (having friends over to watch) as is "space shifting" (bringing a tape to a friends house to view). "Time skipping" is certainly permitted. There is no aspect of copyright law that could be construed to require complete sequential viewing. Do you think it would be possible to put a contract inside the cover of a book that would require that the reader read every page in order?
Lastly, there's nothing "fair" or reasonable about what you suggest. Genuine "time shifting" is one thing, but a method that is intentionally designed cut out the only source of revenue, i.e., ads, for a good number of channels/products, against the will of the copyright owners and licensees, is simply wrong.
Again bullshit! No aspect of copyright law requires the buyer of copyrighted materials to respect a buisness model. Copyright law restricts the rights of the consumer to produce copies of copyrighted works in a manner that is not consistant with fair use. It does not restrict use of copyrighted material in other ways. You can lend a DVD to a friend, for example. You have the right to resell the original copy.
Not only are you trampling on their copyright, but you are doing it in a way that will have devastating impact on their ability to profit from their efforts.
It's neither my job nor my concern to provide cable companies with a profitable business model. Nor does my unwillingness to provide them with one indicate a violation of copyright law. The country did alright before there were cable companies, it'll do alright after. Perhaps when the cable compaines fall, municipalities or states will take over the cables. Perhaps not.
Even if you cannot give a rats ass about the owners, you still need to honestly examine the question of efficiency.
Again, it's not my concern to provide them with an efficient buisness model. If the cable companies don't come up with a model that works, someone else will (provided the government doesn't keep propping the cable companies up and giving them an uncompetetive advantage.)
In other words, just because consumers may opt, as individuals, to skip over commercials does not mean that they are better off with that option.
It doesn't mean they're not better off that way, too.
In much the same way, you need to ask yourself whether you want to enable consumers to defeat ads.
I'm assuming you don't use a pop-up blocker on your browser. After all that would be immoral.
What's more, you need to factor the efficiency of payments in, even with all of our technology today, there is going to be significant overhead and structural costs involved with direct payment methodology.
If that's what they choose as a replacement business model, I think they'll need to loose their local monopolies, or be more subject to regulation. As far as efficiency goes, direct payment seems to have done OK for the phone companies. I'm pretty sure they would be willing to provide a cable equivalent should the cable companies fold.
It's not quite so simple as you would make it out to be. First, cable companies are allowed local monopolies under the assumption that access a single cable company is in the public interest. That doesn't mean they can do whatever want, like imposing limits to legitimate fair-use of broadcast content.
People who receive cable are NOT signatories to any contracts that exist between the cable companies and content providers. Nothing in my cable contract has any limits to the type of device I use to view the content. Nothing prohibits recording content for personal use. Nothing prohibits skipping commercials. Even if it did, it's likely that such clauses would not be binding.
The problem the cable companies have is that, to some extent, they have lost their monopolies. Satellite service has become affordable and it provides more programming choice. A legislative or technological straight-jacket forcing the public to cough up more money probably sounds pretty good to them right now. While we're making people pay for skipping commercials, let's force browsers to charge web surfers for pop-up blocking. After all, geocities has a Constitutional right to make a profit through coercion, doesn't it?
I think it might be time to pick up your copy of the US Constitution. Find the copyright clause. Does the copyright clause mention compensation? Does it mention profit? The ends of copyright legislation is "promotion of the useful arts and sciences." If people can't make a profit from their works, or more likely selling someone elses work, tough! If cable compaines are worried about shrinking revenue from commercials, they'll need to come up with another way to make money. If it turns out that they can't compete with the alternatives (satellite, broadband over phonelines, local fiber, whatever), then the cable companies will go out of business. Makes you want to run out and buy stock, doesn't it.
That was before the dark time, before the Supreme Court decided that bribery was protected by the first amendment.
The only thing we mean by "more interesting" is "less likely to occur by chance." In this search, that's the only thing we have to go on. Every potential signal we have detected is within 0.1 degree of a star, simply because there is no place on the sky where there isn't a star within 0.1 degree.
In order to make a managable sample, we need to restict ourselves to coincidences that are unlikely to occur by chance. We've restricted ourselves to nearby stars with known distances because nearby stars are more rare than distant ones and are less likely to be coincident with a hit.
We don't require coincidence with a star for a signal to be interesting. In fact, coincidence between two strong candidates generally results in a better score than coincidence between a candidate and a nearby star.
I'd tend to look for Sun-like stars that are a bit younger or a lot older. What do the models say the Sun will look like in a few billion years? For the next 4 billion years or so, the sun will look pretty much like it does today. It will get slightly brighter and a maybe tiny bit bluer (maybe a tiny bit redder, there's some disagreement on this), but not significantly so. (slightly in an astronomical sense, it may be too hot for life to exist on earth in a couple hundred million years, but the sun will only be a few percent brighter). The sun would still be very near the zero point of our gaussian term.
As an aside: A lot of people, including some astronomers, continue to spread the myth that the sun is an average star. It's not. The sun is brighter, bluer, and more massive than 95% of the stars out there. The sun is a monster of a star compared to the average.
The Gaussian term is there to provide a penalty for things that are too blue or too red to be good candidates for earth-like life. Anything too much bluer than the sun won't have a long enough lifetime. Anything too red, and the habitable zone may be too small.
The reason I joined SETI was to get exactly that signal with Ellie Arroway in the room.
When you get down to it this "star score" is fairly arbitrary. I outght to know, I invented it. If you take out the Gaussian term, it reduces to the number of stars in our sample closer to the sun than the star being scored that are also bluer than the star being scored.
I threw in the Gaussian term as a "we like stars like the sun" term.
But it's OK for this "star score" to be somewhat arbitrary. The "star score" represents how interesting the star is to us, not a literal interpretation of the probability of life existing around that star. A "how probable is life there" score doesn't really exist.
Cheating will always be possible. You can't have a trusted conversation with someone you can't trust. It's not like we can charge their credit card for every invalid result or have them arrested.
All you can do is make cheating hard. If you would like cheating to be very hard, feel free to go here and put in some work to help make it hard.
Yet another overblow cheating report. Frankly, it doesn't really impact the science. The cheaters only process a small fraction of the total data and candidate identification doesn't rely on either a single result or a results from a single work unit.
Lets keep the the scope of the problem in perspective. What these guys are worried about is being in first place in the stats. I understand their concerns, but right now we have neither the funds nor the manpower to share them. Perhaps when SETI@home is shut down, and SETI@home II is running, we will go back and adjust the totals. Perhaps not.
SETI@home II will run under BOINC and will have more immunity to such exploits. The cost of such immunity will likely be a GUID for each machine running BOINC, in addition to a per user key pair. This, of course, will get slammed by privacy advocates. Hell, if Microsoft were doing it I'd slam them.
Right now our priorities are
- Keeping everything running.
- Identifying candidates for reobservation at Arecibo (sometime in the next 4 months or so).
- Building the SETI@home II data recorder.
- Getting Astropulse running as part of the BOINC beta.
- Finding enough funding to keep us running.
- Designing the SETI@home II analysis code.
Sorry, but fixing the stats can't be a priority right now. The extension of that to "SETI@home doesn't care about cheating" is extrapolating too far.This report isn't really unexpected. The reasons are fairly obvious.
The public in the US is mainly educated in political matters by the press, especially cable media. Alternatives to the cable giants, ala BBC are not readily available. The cable media are owned by mega-corporations. It's no surprise that these corporations are interested in preserving their power through economic and political means.
Because money is the main concern, their agenda tends to be a conservative one. Hence they will:
The corporate media own american politics. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.
We're in the process of attempting a new solution to this problem. We're open sourcing the distributed computing framework (essentially the operating system) and allowing the computing application to be closed source. This method opens the code signing/verification and data encryption code to be viewed by anyone who is interested, but doesn't necessarily allow untrusted application code to return a result. (Look here for more info).
The situation isn't as dire as it sounds. Our dominant problem has been that the falling economy has caused some of our sponsors to withdraw support. With support withdrawn, we are denied matching funds from the University. Essentially, the University is witholding funding until we find further sponsors. We are actively seeking corporate sponsors who would be willing to donate, and have their contributions matched by the University. Under the matching program the sponsors must be for-profit industry. If anyone reading this works for such a corporation, please contact SETI@home through our web site.
Individuals wishing to make a contribution can do so through the SETI@home web site. Please be aware that our current largest sponsor is the Planetary Society. A membership to the Planetary Society (assuming it is done through the links on the SETI@home page) may return more to SETI@home than does a direct contribution, as it indicates the importance of SETI@home to members of the Society.
Regardless of the funding issues, we are working hard to make SETI@home II a reality. We have funding from the NSF to develop the BOINC client/server code which will be used as the framework for SETI@home II. We are in the process of building the SETI@home II data recorder. What we do with it (multibeam, wide bandwidth) and where (Arecibo or Parkes) depends upon what we can afford.
We are also seeking NSF funding for AstroPulse and SETHI and SERENDIP V.
That said, things are currently somewhat tight here. We'll need to make do with fewer employees until we're back in the black. I don't think this spells the end of SETI@home by any means.
Encrypted distribution can be used to prevent the limited term and the necessary public access required by the Consititution. Works can be rendered unreadable after the copyright expiration. Therefore, I would suggest that encrypted distribution should only be protected under copyright law if provision is made for release of unencrypted distribution at term expiration. This provision should be that the copyright holder should provide an unencrypted rendition of the work of equivalent (or higher) quality to the Library of Congress. Until this is provided, the copyright of the encrypted work should be considered invalid.
Not to mention the obvious comments that all circumvention devices have fair-use potential and should therefore be permitted.
So close! It's in Article I Section 9 Paragraph 2: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
- Posting DeCSS as journalistic material as part of a news article.
- Posting DeCSS as a form of political protest.
- Using DeCSS as educational material.
It's unfortunate that 2600 dropped the case. BTW, personal favorite DeCSS site is here.No offense to the State of Maryland, but the U.S. Constitution provides for suspension of habeas corpus in cases of "in cases of rebellion or invasion."
That said, the illegitimate son of George I has exceeded his constitutional authority in this case.
The BOINC client will know how many CPUs you have, how many you are willing to use for processing, and what fraction of your CPU time you want to spend on each of the BOINC projects you have joined. Application binaries can be cryptographically signed to verify origin. BOINC will cache workunits by default, with disk usage limits set by the user. BOINC will support multiple servers. Donation credits will be based upon the amount of work done (FLOPs, int ops, network bandwidth, disk space, etc.) If one project runs out of data, or the servers go down, you machine will devote time to the other projects you've joined.
We're really trying to address all of the lessons we learned throughout SETI@home. And, if there are some we missed, the server/client code is open source, and will be available on sourceforge. Project specific code can be open source or not as the people behind each project desire.
Microsoft will do the same thing with Office. It will require applications to get Palladium keys from MS before they will run in Microsoft Windows XXP. Those same applications will not run and documents will not be accessible under a non-MS operating system. Bye bye WINE.
Presidents, Congressmen, and other criminals will give their incriminating documents expiration dates beyond which they will be unreadable. The documents will only be readable on a few machines that they trust. Investigative reporting will be even more impossible than it currently is.
The other problem with TCPA/Palladium is that you will be forced to used it (probably by law). You should really be frightened of this.
Flamebait? You gotta be kidding! May the metamoderators screw you over.