cyborg_za> If you cannot demonstrate that something is false (i.e. demonstrate that it does not exist) then you cannot talk about it scientifically.
LOL. You cannot demonstrate that anything does not exist. All you can do is invent theories that predict the things you see. These theories are like formal systems. The phenomena these theories predict may or may not conform to the reality we think we observe, depending on both the completeness of the formal system and our ability to measure phenomena.
I think what you're trying to say is that a "scientific" theory must make predictions that can be found not to match "reality" through empirical means.
But math is part of reality too. 2+2=4. Right?
The multiverse theory is simply begging the question, as one can then say that another set of laws governs the existence of the multiverse (what universes are possible) and proceed to ask the same anthropic question about the multiverse.
At some point, one simply concludes, "it is what it is." At that point the question of why is open. Answering "because God" doesn't stop it; then the follow-up is: "Why God?"
So believe what you want to believe, and be happy.
Then I make the same suggestion to you, again. It's quite easy to see the relevance if you're following the conversation. Not everything that is true is verifiable or falsifiable. That doesn't make those things "unscientific", whatever that even means, other than as a pejorative used to disqualify things on fuzzy bases.
So you're saying an MD5 sum is, in fact, a "derivative work", in your opinion?
How about the parity of an MD5 sum? Is that derivative?
At what legal threshold does a computational abstract from a copyrighted work attain the freedoms conferred by fair use?
If the GPL'd code was not modified, the software would not have sent information about the universities network back to the MPAA.
1. The software did not send information about the universities' network back to the MPAA.
2. The software that did phone home did so to check for updates, and was not GPLed software; it was their own Python code in/usr/local/sbin/peerwatch.py.
3. The update check does not download or install new software on its own; it simply notifies the user if a new version is available for download.
However, I am torn because the *PAAs have used their influence to ruin lives and savage our laws and customs - this is a great way to strike back a politically meaningful blow if it's played correctly.
A great way to strike back would be for the vociferous masses who hate the MPAA so much to get off their butts and form a political action committee to lobby for reform of the legislation they blame on the MPAA. In this case, rather, they're using the GPL itself to make it demonstrably more difficult for researchers to analyse software security, where there's no evidence of actual harm (i.e. distribution of modified software), and certainly no actual need for yet another mirror of xubuntu sources.
If poor legal interpretation has resulted in harm to innocents, that's the fault of inept judges, and should be remedied by appeal and subsequent sanction against the judges responsible. Remediating the DMCA properly requires action in Congress. This sort of shallow response against one potential abuser doesn't help us against the next abuser (it doesn't even help us against the MPAA in any practical way). I wish that all the energy being directed at striking a tiny, meaningless, blow against perceived injustice were instead harnessed into political initiative that could have a hope of effecting real change.
Interesting theory--is an MD5 digest of the source tarball for a GPL work a "derivative work"? If not, where do you draw the line, and on what legal pretext?
I'm uncomfortable because I'm not interested in being the target of certain people's ill-considered vendette.
Besides, those of us who were genuinely interested downloaded it and analysed it when it was available.
What do you think would be the natural outcome of this pursuit? Increased sharing of code? I distribute some code under GPLv2 as well, and I do so to assure that if someone modifies my code and builds something new with it, the improvements will benefit the community as a whole. If someone distributes unmodified binary copies of my code, on the other hand, I couldn't care less--I do *not* use the GPL so that I can get all litigious in their faces over a non-issue, and frankly, I don't think much of those who do; I'm certainly not going to give the litigious ones the opportunity to come after me.
If you have specific questions that could be answered computationally (e.g. checksum comparisons), however, I might be able to help.
andy753421> however there were Java Server Pages distributed as binary only as well as some shell scripts and maybe some python (again, i don't remember).
Close. There were Java server pages, which *are* source, and there were some Java classes in bytecode form, both of their own design. I decompiled the Java classes and there was nothing particularly interesting there. There was also Python, as you say, in source form.
I didn't see any evidence of modification of GPL code. There were configuration tweaks to ntop and snort.
I noted all this, as well as some vulnerabilities I found, in the SecurityFix comments at washingtonpost.com.
I have a copy of the ISO, but now that there's a GPL witch hunt going on, I'm not comfortable handing it over. Chilling effect, you know. It sounds funny, but I'm not kidding.
A millibit is 1/1000 of a bit. This may not be something you can give your mom for her birthday, but it is a meaningful quantity when talking about cryptographic concepts such as entropy, where you end up with fractional statistical quantities, measured in bits.
Also, wouldn't MiB be "mebibytes"?
While I understand why people wanted to distinguish between base-2 and base-10 prefixes, the specific scheme chosen doesn't work because debi- is not distinguishable between base-2 deka and base-2 deci.
If it's all about trust, then you don't want to extend the TTL, you want to *shorten* it. That way if you're hit with a cache-poisioning attack, you get the correct record *faster*, instead of holding on to crap for weeks.
Uh, no. The TTL of a poison record is up to the attacker, not you. A poisoner will simply set the TTL to 99999999 in the poison record.
If you want trustable DNS, start advocating for DNSSEC.
A weak effort, given that the chapters are only a page or two long.
Maybe you should have given it more of a shot. The Sheep Look Up is, of the three Brunner novels mentioned, by far the best, and that's saying a lot--Stand On Zanzibar is pretty damned impressive as well. Sheep has a few clunkers in the prediction department (e.g. evil microwave ovens), but overall it's terrifyingly prescient. It covers pesticides becoming ineffectual, overuse of antibiotics in livestock feed, and a huge variety of general ecological failures. Brunner predicts the rise of organic grocery stores, the breeding of cannabis into strains with very high THC content, an African economic union (c.f.the African Union), oxygen bars, and a seemingly endless list of things we now see every day.
It's nice to see this book back in print. Far too few have read it.
How the heck are they going to make object code readable by humans? A hex listing?
The obvious purpose is for humans to be able to verify that the object code on a voting system implements the source code that has been inspected. If object code could be hidden, fraudsters could present clean source for inspection and install trojaned binaries on actual voting systems.
He only said that because he accidentally published it with the movements being of different lengths, yet still adding up to exactly 4'33", which seems to indicate that his clame of note-for-note composition was little more than marketing spin.
There's a fair amount of discussion on this point in the document you originally cited. There are a number of potential explanations for the disparity in timings between publications. The most obvious one is a simple misremembering, which itself might be considered a chance operation. For you to claim with a tone of authority why it happened or what Cage was thinking is pretty ridiculous, particularly in the light of Cage's own statements that contradict your claims. One wonders, as well, why you would doubt so stubbornly that the piece was composed note by note (not "note-for-note")--as Cage was in the process of writing Music For Changes at the time, he was doing this pretty regularly. Why should anyone believe your claim that it was "marketing spin" and not several days of actual compositional process, as Cage himself stated?
In other words, one is free to perform 4'33" at any time, for any duration, for one's own, or someone else's entertainment or interest.
You are confusing 4'33" with 0'0", which was a later work he "composed," which consisted of actively listening to one's environment in any context for any druration.
Here are two additional quotations from the document you cited:
Later, Cage did not regard the length of the movements as important. "It can be any length," he said, "so that we can listen at any time to what there is to hear." "I think what we need in the field of music is a very long performance of that work." If the length is insignificant, then why spend "several days to write it"? And, why have specific lengths at all? -- It was most likely because Cage later realized that a fixed temporal frame was not necessary for this work. Perhaps he realized the mistake of the two different timings and decided that it really didn't matter after all. (Perhaps this was the "mistake" he referred to in I-VI.) This, in itself, points to another change in compositional philosophy after writing 4'33", which may have been the cause of it.
And...
When asked about the disparity in time lengths of the scores, Cage replied that it could be of any length. This does not mean, however, that the formal structure of 4'33" can be violated. He said that it would still be titled 4'33", that the durations of the movements must be determined by some type of chance procedure, and that it must be in three movements.
On to your other statement:
4'33" is always performed by one instrument, and always for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Here's another quote from the document you cited. You yourself, in fact, already quoted this paragraph earlier in the discussion:
4'33" is written for any instrument or combination of instruments. It is, however, usually done as a piano piece. This is probably because of the precedent set by the premiere performance, since the score does not specify a piano or any other instrument.
I suggest you read a bit more background about the piece; see the link cited above. The piece was, in fact, composed note by note using randomly generated data produced using a combination of the I Ching and a deck of tarot cards. The resulting data was converted into note durations using a systematic method of Cage's device, and the durations were then summed to produce the lengths of the three movements. The original durations are not recorded on the performance score, so any other gestalt of environmental events is free to take the place of the original notes comprising the piece.
Indeed, the commonly regarded "point" of the piece is to engage the audience into listening to its environment as music. The piece does not, however, have to be performed in a concert hall, and no one needs to be shocked. Cage later stated that the specific durations of the movements were not important. In other words, one is free to perform 4'33" at any time, for any duration, for one's own, or someone else's entertainment or interest. The "performer" is anyone who creates the context of a performance of 4'33", by sitting down at a piano and not playing it, switching on a microphone and not speaking into it, or stepping outside and making a conscious decision to listen to the world. The "performance" is the moment of Zen that results.
You're confusing the manuscript with the writing process. As with a number of Cage's pieces, the actual notes were chosen using chance operations. The fact that the manuscript had no notes written on it is due to the notes' already having been rendered tacet. No doubt there is a page somewhere in the world where Cage wrote down the operations and their result before producing the manuscript you are referring to.
Similarly, Cage once made a film of a chess game he played with Marcel Duchamp, wherein the exposure settings for the film camera were determined by chance operations. Parts of the film are completely black. This doesn't mean there wasn't a chessboard in the frame; it means that the process didn't record its image. The manuscript for 4'33" is like the black segments of the chess film--the image is there, but the notes have been erased.
I wrote it note by note, just like the Music of Changes [1951]. That's how I knew how long it was when I added the notes up. It was done like a piece of music, except there were no sounds -- but there were durations.
We may never know whether the notes Cage wrote for 4'33" had pitches. It may be that he didn't generate enough chance data to derive pitches from, or that he merely didn't bother to extract the pitch information from his data, since it wasn't needed. In the latter case, if we knew the process and had the data, we could indeed produce the pitches to go along with the durations.
But assuming, for the sake of [your] argument, that no information for pitches was ever even generated, we could have a semantic debate as to whether durations by themselves, without pitch, constitute "notes". The fact is that, underlying 4'33", at the very least, there is a sequence of durations of specific durations. These constitute a rhythm; would you argue that a specific rhythm written out on a score to be played on a snare drum is not written "note by note"? Now take away the snare drum.
Finally, consider that rests often occur in places where a specific pitch is expected, such as the middle of a phrase; one hears the pitch in one's mind even though it is not heard. 4'33" can be regarded as a piece where all of the notes are expected, yet heard only in one's mind. It illustrates how the act of listening for music enables the mind to hear it, even if the guy at the piano isn't touching any keys.
Cage also wrote pieces for "prepared" piano. One could prepare a piano for 4'33" by removing the hammers or strings. One would need to know the original notes, however, and I don't know where those are documented.
See the 1990 American Masters documentary on John Cage, in which he states explicitly, "4'33" was written note by note."
There are in fact three movements. Since the piece is not written specifically for piano, closing and reopening the lid is arguably showmanship, but useful to denote the transition between movements, since there's no other auditory evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
[Sorry about the formatting. I don't post often enough here to remember to switch the stupid format widget.]
cyborg_za> If you cannot demonstrate that something is false (i.e. demonstrate that it does not exist) then you cannot talk about it scientifically. LOL. You cannot demonstrate that anything does not exist. All you can do is invent theories that predict the things you see. These theories are like formal systems. The phenomena these theories predict may or may not conform to the reality we think we observe, depending on both the completeness of the formal system and our ability to measure phenomena. I think what you're trying to say is that a "scientific" theory must make predictions that can be found not to match "reality" through empirical means. But math is part of reality too. 2+2=4. Right?
The multiverse theory is simply begging the question, as one can then say that another set of laws governs the existence of the multiverse (what universes are possible) and proceed to ask the same anthropic question about the multiverse.
At some point, one simply concludes, "it is what it is." At that point the question of why is open. Answering "because God" doesn't stop it; then the follow-up is: "Why God?"
So believe what you want to believe, and be happy.
Then I make the same suggestion to you, again. It's quite easy to see the relevance if you're following the conversation. Not everything that is true is verifiable or falsifiable. That doesn't make those things "unscientific", whatever that even means, other than as a pejorative used to disqualify things on fuzzy bases.
I suggest you go read up on a fellow named Kurt Gödel.
Couldn't have said it better myself. May be actionable by the litigious, but doesn't actually matter.
So you're saying an MD5 sum is, in fact, a "derivative work", in your opinion? How about the parity of an MD5 sum? Is that derivative? At what legal threshold does a computational abstract from a copyrighted work attain the freedoms conferred by fair use?
1. The software did not send information about the universities' network back to the MPAA.
2. The software that did phone home did so to check for updates, and was not GPLed software; it was their own Python code in /usr/local/sbin/peerwatch.py.
3. The update check does not download or install new software on its own; it simply notifies the user if a new version is available for download.
A great way to strike back would be for the vociferous masses who hate the MPAA so much to get off their butts and form a political action committee to lobby for reform of the legislation they blame on the MPAA. In this case, rather, they're using the GPL itself to make it demonstrably more difficult for researchers to analyse software security, where there's no evidence of actual harm (i.e. distribution of modified software), and certainly no actual need for yet another mirror of xubuntu sources.
If poor legal interpretation has resulted in harm to innocents, that's the fault of inept judges, and should be remedied by appeal and subsequent sanction against the judges responsible. Remediating the DMCA properly requires action in Congress. This sort of shallow response against one potential abuser doesn't help us against the next abuser (it doesn't even help us against the MPAA in any practical way). I wish that all the energy being directed at striking a tiny, meaningless, blow against perceived injustice were instead harnessed into political initiative that could have a hope of effecting real change.
Interesting theory--is an MD5 digest of the source tarball for a GPL work a "derivative work"? If not, where do you draw the line, and on what legal pretext?
I'm uncomfortable because I'm not interested in being the target of certain people's ill-considered vendette.
Besides, those of us who were genuinely interested downloaded it and analysed it when it was available.
What do you think would be the natural outcome of this pursuit? Increased sharing of code? I distribute some code under GPLv2 as well, and I do so to assure that if someone modifies my code and builds something new with it, the improvements will benefit the community as a whole. If someone distributes unmodified binary copies of my code, on the other hand, I couldn't care less--I do *not* use the GPL so that I can get all litigious in their faces over a non-issue, and frankly, I don't think much of those who do; I'm certainly not going to give the litigious ones the opportunity to come after me.
If you have specific questions that could be answered computationally (e.g. checksum comparisons), however, I might be able to help.
andy753421> however there were Java Server Pages distributed as binary only as well as some shell scripts and maybe some python (again, i don't remember).
Close. There were Java server pages, which *are* source, and there were some Java classes in bytecode form, both of their own design. I decompiled the Java classes and there was nothing particularly interesting there. There was also Python, as you say, in source form.
I didn't see any evidence of modification of GPL code. There were configuration tweaks to ntop and snort.
I noted all this, as well as some vulnerabilities I found, in the SecurityFix comments at washingtonpost.com.
I have a copy of the ISO, but now that there's a GPL witch hunt going on, I'm not comfortable handing it over. Chilling effect, you know. It sounds funny, but I'm not kidding.
A millibit is 1/1000 of a bit. This may not be something you can give your mom for her birthday, but it is a meaningful quantity when talking about cryptographic concepts such as entropy, where you end up with fractional statistical quantities, measured in bits.
Also, wouldn't MiB be "mebibytes"?
While I understand why people wanted to distinguish between base-2 and base-10 prefixes, the specific scheme chosen doesn't work because debi- is not distinguishable between base-2 deka and base-2 deci.
Not acronym. Initialism.
Uh, no. The TTL of a poison record is up to the attacker, not you. A poisoner will simply set the TTL to 99999999 in the poison record.
If you want trustable DNS, start advocating for DNSSEC.
Would Mr. Uh, Clem please report to the hospitality tower in your area.
A weak effort, given that the chapters are only a page or two long.
Maybe you should have given it more of a shot. The Sheep Look Up is, of the three Brunner novels mentioned, by far the best, and that's saying a lot--Stand On Zanzibar is pretty damned impressive as well. Sheep has a few clunkers in the prediction department (e.g. evil microwave ovens), but overall it's terrifyingly prescient. It covers pesticides becoming ineffectual, overuse of antibiotics in livestock feed, and a huge variety of general ecological failures. Brunner predicts the rise of organic grocery stores, the breeding of cannabis into strains with very high THC content, an African economic union (c.f. the African Union), oxygen bars, and a seemingly endless list of things we now see every day.
It's nice to see this book back in print. Far too few have read it.
The obvious purpose is for humans to be able to verify that the object code on a voting system implements the source code that has been inspected. If object code could be hidden, fraudsters could present clean source for inspection and install trojaned binaries on actual voting systems.
... or A minor.
There's a fair amount of discussion on this point in the document you originally cited. There are a number of potential explanations for the disparity in timings between publications. The most obvious one is a simple misremembering, which itself might be considered a chance operation. For you to claim with a tone of authority why it happened or what Cage was thinking is pretty ridiculous, particularly in the light of Cage's own statements that contradict your claims. One wonders, as well, why you would doubt so stubbornly that the piece was composed note by note (not "note-for-note")--as Cage was in the process of writing Music For Changes at the time, he was doing this pretty regularly. Why should anyone believe your claim that it was "marketing spin" and not several days of actual compositional process, as Cage himself stated?
Here are two additional quotations from the document you cited:
And...
On to your other statement:
Here's another quote from the document you cited. You yourself, in fact, already quoted this paragraph earlier in the discussion:
I suggest you read a bit more background about the piece; see the link cited above. The piece was, in fact, composed note by note using randomly generated data produced using a combination of the I Ching and a deck of tarot cards. The resulting data was converted into note durations using a systematic method of Cage's device, and the durations were then summed to produce the lengths of the three movements. The original durations are not recorded on the performance score, so any other gestalt of environmental events is free to take the place of the original notes comprising the piece.
Indeed, the commonly regarded "point" of the piece is to engage the audience into listening to its environment as music. The piece does not, however, have to be performed in a concert hall, and no one needs to be shocked. Cage later stated that the specific durations of the movements were not important. In other words, one is free to perform 4'33" at any time, for any duration, for one's own, or someone else's entertainment or interest. The "performer" is anyone who creates the context of a performance of 4'33", by sitting down at a piano and not playing it, switching on a microphone and not speaking into it, or stepping outside and making a conscious decision to listen to the world. The "performance" is the moment of Zen that results.
You're confusing the manuscript with the writing process. As with a number of Cage's pieces, the actual notes were chosen using chance operations. The fact that the manuscript had no notes written on it is due to the notes' already having been rendered tacet. No doubt there is a page somewhere in the world where Cage wrote down the operations and their result before producing the manuscript you are referring to.
Similarly, Cage once made a film of a chess game he played with Marcel Duchamp, wherein the exposure settings for the film camera were determined by chance operations. Parts of the film are completely black. This doesn't mean there wasn't a chessboard in the frame; it means that the process didn't record its image. The manuscript for 4'33" is like the black segments of the chess film--the image is there, but the notes have been erased.
If you actually go back and read the document you quoted, without attribution, among many other details, you'll find the following quote from Cage:
We may never know whether the notes Cage wrote for 4'33" had pitches. It may be that he didn't generate enough chance data to derive pitches from, or that he merely didn't bother to extract the pitch information from his data, since it wasn't needed. In the latter case, if we knew the process and had the data, we could indeed produce the pitches to go along with the durations.
But assuming, for the sake of [your] argument, that no information for pitches was ever even generated, we could have a semantic debate as to whether durations by themselves, without pitch, constitute "notes". The fact is that, underlying 4'33", at the very least, there is a sequence of durations of specific durations. These constitute a rhythm; would you argue that a specific rhythm written out on a score to be played on a snare drum is not written "note by note"? Now take away the snare drum.
Finally, consider that rests often occur in places where a specific pitch is expected, such as the middle of a phrase; one hears the pitch in one's mind even though it is not heard. 4'33" can be regarded as a piece where all of the notes are expected, yet heard only in one's mind. It illustrates how the act of listening for music enables the mind to hear it, even if the guy at the piano isn't touching any keys.
Cage also wrote pieces for "prepared" piano. One could prepare a piano for 4'33" by removing the hammers or strings. One would need to know the original notes, however, and I don't know where those are documented.
See the 1990 American Masters documentary on John Cage, in which he states explicitly, "4'33" was written note by note."
There are in fact three movements. Since the piece is not written specifically for piano, closing and reopening the lid is arguably showmanship, but useful to denote the transition between movements, since there's no other auditory evidence.