I don't remember anything in there about having seperate rules for your personal and public life--in fact, I seem to recall the pervasive idea that they were one and the same.
Further, I don't recall it saying anywhere that God only expected you to follow the rules when they were "a good policy"--and would let you off the hook if you decided to wing it based on your perception of what was more expedient. In fact, I seem to recall him going to some lengths to demonstrate the point that you shouldn't even flinch when your own death was on the line.
Could you perhaps point out the biblical source of your claims about special rules (e.g. whatever-works) for public policy?
By using lines like "You are an idiot" and "You are what is wrong with this world." and "You belong in jail" and so forth you pretty much give up the right to call the post you are responding to "flamebait."
I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on...
Heck, forget the monkeys--what about their bland willingness (or even outright blood lust) for killing non-christians? "Thou shalt not kill" isn't all that hard of a concept.
It doesn't say "thou shalt not kill people who look like you".
It doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill except for oil."
It doesn't even say "Thou shalt not kill unless they started it, in which case it's fine to open a little Whoop-ass on their sorry Is-le-amic butts."*
I wouldn't mind the fundementalists (of any flavour) nearly as much if they actually pratciced what they preached instead of running around like a bunch of anti-social nitwits, blowing up buses and abortion clinics and killing people--or voting to have somebody else's kids go kill them--in the name of their god.
--MarkusQ
* What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."
I think the key issue is time and manner of formation. The Earth's moon and the ISS, to choose an extreme example, differ in their size and orbit but the salient difference is still their history.
The main reason for saying that "Pluto isn't a planet" is that its history is very different from the other planets.
You all can fight back by using candid, frank, and direct language. But, you'll pay a price. Utlimately though I think you'll find it much more satisfying.
The price doesn't have to be to great. Once word get around that you prefer to use candid, frank, and direct language most people will be eager to work with you and very few will oppose you.
For those that don't initially grasp "the inherent dynamics of your paridgm" one or two simple public demonstrations of the power of clear language generally suffices to bring them around. After that they too will work with you (or at least stay very, very far away from you).
The difference is the other costs of manufacture (labor, material, etc.) and the profit they make on them.
But from what others are saying, it looks like solar water, new appliances, and home insulation should take precedence.
I'd strongly agree. And don't forget to look at things like "trip elimination"--by telecomuting and buying UHT milk (keeps for months without refridgeration) I've cut down significantly on my driving, compared to going into the office every day & shopping twice a week. Plus that means I've got more hours to work, spend with my kids, and still have time to post on/.!
if the myth were true, they would have to sell them for less than it costs to make them
But that's not what the parent said. He or she said it takes more energy to produce them then they will generate in their expected lifetime.
That has little or nothing to do with the actual cost. Energy, in most forms, is still reasonably cheap.
Uh, run that by me again? If X what I pay for a solar panel and Y is what it is worth to me (the net amount of reduction in my utility bills) then Y > X or I wouldn't buy it. Likewise, if Z is what it costs to make it (and let's assume for sake of your argument that the entire cost is somebody's utility bills, then we must have Z < X or they wouldn't sell it.
But according to the original post, Z is greater than Y, which doesn't compute.
Note that the fact that energy in most (or even all) forms is still "reasonably cheap" doesn't effect the logic of the inequalities.
As far as we know, photo-voltaic systems are not "self-sustaining". That is, every kilowatt hour of energy your system produces in it's entire lifetime will not be more than the kilowatt hours that were used up to purify and crystallize the silicon, and make the PV system.
This is a myth. After two to four years, there is a net gain. (It also fails the sniff test: if the myth were true, they would have to sell them for less than it costs to make them.)
Exactly. And history (and logic) has shown that you don't run out of vital resources suddenly. In fact, so long as they are durrable, you don't "run out" and all--as soon as it becomes clear you might run up, people start getting nervious, the price starts going up, and so people start buying less. This slows the process down, and forces the neccessary adjustments. And the process repeats itself. Eventually, you can wind up with the once industrially important resource becoming a form of wealth (e.g. gold). But you don't ever "run out".
--MarkusQ
P.S. And we already know where to find more carbon for plastic, etc. then we have ever used for fuel--in fact there are any number of sources--we just need to figure out how to get it.
Because "Peak Oil" is only terribly serious if you fail to realize that energy is perhaps the most fungible commodity there is. As the suplies run down the cost will run up, and this will eventually make one or more of the (presently marginal) alternatives cost effective. As they start taking up more of the demand the economies of scale will drive their price down and at the same time their growing profitability will atract more money for research on ways to improve them.
The big risk isn't running out of oil. It seeing the posibility of running out of oil as a boogyman big enough (and frightening enough) to justify killing large numbers of people over control of the last little bits before the--oh wait, I forgot. Oil wasn't the reason. It was weapons of mass distruction. Or spreading democracy. Or something like that. But my main point stands.
Running out of common sense, human kindness, and the willingness to see problems as something to solve rather than a reason to lash out and kill strangers are all much more pressing dangers than running out of oil.
I think I see where we failed to connect: AI research has more or less abandoned the concept of "inductive" reasoning (though I don't recall anyone throwing a going-away party for it, and I've never seen a "Minsky confirms: induction is dead" troll.
There are grave problem with calling something "inductive"--saying, in effect, that the system/person starts with no theory and builds one up by generalizing on experience--and stopping there. For example, in many cases individuals don't get anywhere near enough examples to learn what they demostrably do learn (the paucity of input problem). Further, there are a huge number of ways in which people could generalize on their experience, but very few in which they do. Finally, many experiements have shown that people's ability to perform "inductive" reasoning is heavily dependent on things such as the subject matter (we have a cheater-detector) or their age (we have a "language aquisition device" that is active when we are young and shuts down)--which argues strongly that what we're seeing is really specific systems for deducing specific types of rules rather than true induction.
Human reasoning is far more deductive than inductive (if there even is such a thing as pure inductive reasoning--it isn't clear what this would actually mean). Experience is "slotted in" to a rich and complex system as aditional axioms; it isn't used to build up the system.
--MarkusQ
P.S.:
it seemed as if you were assuming that just because Goedel proved that some things are unprovable, that every time we fail to be able to prove something it must be due to Goedel's theorem. That would be a fallacious argument.
Agreed, it would be fallacious. But I never said anything about the reasons people fail to prove things. I just said that any system (human, AI, alien, magic eight ball, whatever) will either fail to recognize the truth of some true statements, incorrectly believe that some statements are true when they are in fact false, or both. This does in fact follow from Godel. But I never said that there were not additional potential causes for such failures.
You keep saying that I am mistaken and have misunderstood what Godel's theorem says.
However, you aren't saying how, or what a correct (in your view) understanding would lead to, so I have a hard time responding to your claim. As it happens, I have read Godel's proof (the original not a gloss) several times over the last few decades, and believe I understand it well enough to reconstruct it from memory[1].
The best I can tell is that you are saying that an AI wouldn't have to be as inconsistant or as incomplete as a human, which is true but a strawman. I never introduced the idea of measuring/quantifying these factors in comparison to humans; I simply stated that any sufficently powerful reasoning systems would have to succum to them.
Further, the real limit (for both humans and AIs) is closely related to Godel's proof; it comes for their finite storage (roughly, using a modulo arithmetic in Godel's proof) and by virtue of the fixed point theorem (or just common sense) it's easy to show that the problem is much worse when you restrict the storage capacity of the system--to see this, consider that there are very few interesting statements for which the proof is as short or shorter than the statement; I believe you can prove that the vast majority of true statements within a finite system are not proble within the system unless it is inconsistant (basically, there are many more long-true-statements than there are short-true-statements, and for almost all of them the proofs are longer than the statements, and for the bulk of these the system could represent the statement but not prove it--roughly along the lines of the proof that any non lossy file compression algorithm makes most files larger).
--MarkusQ
1: Off the top of my head, and only on my second cup of coffee:
map symbols to primes,
map strings of symbols to composites,
map rules of inference to (arithmetic) functions on integers,
and thus for every proof there is a corresponding statement about the properties of integers.
Imagine a function F that says "there does not exist an integer that corresponds to a proof of the statement which corresponds to X"
Quine it to get G, which gives a statement that makes the assertion about itself.
If provable, it is false, and the system is inconsistant; if not provable it is true and unprovable and thus the system is incomplete.
It's not at all clear that any of these characteristics of human intelligence have anything whatsoever to do with Goedel's theorem.
I never said they did. What I said was that Godel's theorem proves that any system that is going to be as smart or smarter than a human (e.g. "sufficently complex"--the real limit is down around "the ability to do math with integers, and think about the fact that it's doing so") will either be incomplete (unable to figure out things that are both true and comprehensible to it), inconsistent (able to convince itself of things that are not in fact true) or both. The fact that humans have these properties isn't significant (or even interesting) in this context since all sufficently complex systems have them.
Goedel's theorem does have implications for AI, but they are much more subtle than this.
Godel's proof basically involves forming the statement "this statement is false" in a specialized language
No, the statement was "this statement cannot be proven true using this proof system".
Part of the "specialized language" was the hypothetical (and, as he shows, impossible) proof system that proves all-and-only true statements. This was introduced specifically to formalize the concept of "false", just as the coding system was introduced to formalize the concept of "this statement."
It is not at all clear that Goedel's theorem has anything whatsoever to do with strong AI.
Sure it is. It means that an AI, to be as smart as a human (or smarter) will have to be subject to failure as we are. It will have to wind up having (and acting on) mistaken beliefs, either through inability to follow thoughts through to their logical conclusion, inability to resolve inconsistant articles of faith, or both.
But a computer cannot demonstrate this truth. I don't claim to understand why not, but it clearly says in the wikipedia article that it can't.
Short answer: you're incorrect.
Long answer: The reason you seem to think that you are correct is also, I believe, incorrect. Godel's proof basically involves forming the statement "this statement is false" in a specialized language that allows you to do so without reference to pronouns--instead, he assigned each symbol a unique integer, and worked out ways of manipulating them both with and without regard to their "meaning". That part would be easy to do with a computer (e.g. asci/text editor/compiler).
Next, he posited a string of symbols where the meaning was related to the process for the manipulation of the meaningless symbols (this is also easy on a computer--sort of like using an editor to edit its own source code).
Using these, he constructed a relatively normal argument about the meaning level that coresponded to an argument at the symbol level--an argument that said "the argument represented by this long string of digits is unprovable"--but the kicker was the long string of digits was the coded representation of the argument itself. If false, the system could obviously not prove it (since we are assuming here that it only proves things that are true). Therefore it must be true, but that means it can't be proven within the system. Tricky, but there was nothing magical about the logic--no quantum mechanical must-derive-this-step-from-the-sprit-world voodoo that would make it impossible for a computer to follow.
--MarkusQ
P.S. A computer might not be able to understand the proof, but that shouldn't be held against it--after all, most of the people who discuss it don't understand it either.
like several people e-mailing one person but not each other, which is how some criminal networks operate.
We have an addresses "techsupport@internaldomain" which matches this pattern to a T.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Back when we were on MS-Windows, it would have been OK, because the people asking for TechSupport were often sending each other worms at the same time.
Google hit $80bn on the NYSE yesterday, so is now worth more than Time Warner
For some reason this reminded me of an old minimalist joke:
So the guy on his way down sees a woman on her way up, and figures it wouldn't hurt to ask. "Hey lady," he shouts as they pass, "do you know anything about parachutes?"
"No," she shouts back, "Do you know anything about gas ovens?"
I see. So Microsoft is willing to graciously accept the court's ruling and open its APIs, provided that people don't learn to use them, or do anything that would allow other to learn to use them.
Sorry, Markus, I know you're drooling over this, but this is simply stupid.
I don't know how to respond to this for the simple reason I don't have any idea what it means.
No. The fine was punishment. The rest of the order is an attempt to create competition going forward. The EC is going to try to get zero-cost licensing for "non innovative" (their words) features, but I'm really dubious about that.
I will grant that, as a Microsoft employee, you have probably been following this in more detail than I have, and accept your assertion.
But it still doesn't change (or answer) the fundemental question: if the effect of the rulling is that Microsoft must allow others to interoperate, how could it possible cause different harm based on the licence of the competitor's software?
--MarkusQ
P.S. And as for the retraction strawman--that at some point you may get a reversal and demand that the code be removed--the exact same logic appiles to F/OSS-licenced software: code has been removed from F/OSS in exactly this sort of situation in the past, and there's no reason to believe it won't be in the future. In fact, several players (e.g. SCOX) have refused to detail "infringing" code for fear that it would be removed too quickly.
If you have a license to write code based on a certain protocol and to distribute compiled code based on that knowledge, then someone seeking to implement the protocol still needs to reverse engineer the communication between client and server. If the source to that application is distributed, however, then it can be used as a template by those who want to implement the protocol without paying the license fee, which, at least in principle, compensates Microsoft for the use of the protocol.
But the whole point of the sanction was that Microsoft had to let other people write code that interoperated with Microsoft code, without having to pay a licensing fee and without having to reverse engineer anything. That's why they are supposed to (and have agreed to) open up the definitions to competitors that want to write such software.
And as for them deserving compensation, this is supposed to be a punishment. What kind of bizaro world is it where criminals get to dicker over their compensation package before agreeing to accept their punishment?
The release of an open source implementation of any of these protocols would constitute irremediable harm
How, exactly, do you conclude this? If opening the specs doesn't do irremediable harm, and letting people write code to the specs doesn't do irremediable harm, and letting them sell the software they write (or, for that matter, give it away) doesn't do irremediable harm, how exactly does the release of said code under a F/OS licence do additional irremediable harm?
Surely you aren't claiming the GPL is so viral that it would somehow climb back up the chain of derivation and taint Microsoft?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember anything in there about having seperate rules for your personal and public life--in fact, I seem to recall the pervasive idea that they were one and the same.
Further, I don't recall it saying anywhere that God only expected you to follow the rules when they were "a good policy"--and would let you off the hook if you decided to wing it based on your perception of what was more expedient. In fact, I seem to recall him going to some lengths to demonstrate the point that you shouldn't even flinch when your own death was on the line.
Could you perhaps point out the biblical source of your claims about special rules (e.g. whatever-works) for public policy?
--MarkusQ
By using lines like "You are an idiot" and "You are what is wrong with this world." and "You belong in jail" and so forth you pretty much give up the right to call the post you are responding to "flamebait."
--MarkusQ
I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on...
Heck, forget the monkeys--what about their bland willingness (or even outright blood lust) for killing non-christians? "Thou shalt not kill" isn't all that hard of a concept.
It doesn't say "thou shalt not kill people who look like you".
It doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill except for oil."
It doesn't even say "Thou shalt not kill unless they started it, in which case it's fine to open a little Whoop-ass on their sorry Is-le-amic butts."*
I wouldn't mind the fundementalists (of any flavour) nearly as much if they actually pratciced what they preached instead of running around like a bunch of anti-social nitwits, blowing up buses and abortion clinics and killing people--or voting to have somebody else's kids go kill them--in the name of their god.
--MarkusQ
* What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."
I think the key issue is time and manner of formation. The Earth's moon and the ISS, to choose an extreme example, differ in their size and orbit but the salient difference is still their history.
The main reason for saying that "Pluto isn't a planet" is that its history is very different from the other planets.
--MarkusQ
"The fates of nations" by Paul Colinvaux
--MarkusQ
You all can fight back by using candid, frank, and direct language. But, you'll pay a price. Utlimately though I think you'll find it much more satisfying.
The price doesn't have to be to great. Once word get around that you prefer to use candid, frank, and direct language most people will be eager to work with you and very few will oppose you.
For those that don't initially grasp "the inherent dynamics of your paridgm" one or two simple public demonstrations of the power of clear language generally suffices to bring them around. After that they too will work with you (or at least stay very, very far away from you).
--MarkusQ
the language needs to shave of a few rough corners
Yo nee t b carefu whe cuttin corner; i yo cu to fa yo ca reall "f" yoursel ove goo!
--MarkusQ
the web sites say 2 years, our contractor says 12
The difference is the other costs of manufacture (labor, material, etc.) and the profit they make on them.
But from what others are saying, it looks like solar water, new appliances, and home insulation should take precedence.
I'd strongly agree. And don't forget to look at things like "trip elimination"--by telecomuting and buying UHT milk (keeps for months without refridgeration) I've cut down significantly on my driving, compared to going into the office every day & shopping twice a week. Plus that means I've got more hours to work, spend with my kids, and still have time to post on /.!
--MarkusQ
Uh, run that by me again? If X what I pay for a solar panel and Y is what it is worth to me (the net amount of reduction in my utility bills) then Y > X or I wouldn't buy it. Likewise, if Z is what it costs to make it (and let's assume for sake of your argument that the entire cost is somebody's utility bills, then we must have Z < X or they wouldn't sell it.
But according to the original post, Z is greater than Y, which doesn't compute.
Note that the fact that energy in most (or even all) forms is still "reasonably cheap" doesn't effect the logic of the inequalities.
--MarkusQ
As far as we know, photo-voltaic systems are not "self-sustaining". That is, every kilowatt hour of energy your system produces in it's entire lifetime will not be more than the kilowatt hours that were used up to purify and crystallize the silicon, and make the PV system.
This is a myth. After two to four years, there is a net gain. (It also fails the sniff test: if the myth were true, they would have to sell them for less than it costs to make them.)
--MarkusQ
Exactly. And history (and logic) has shown that you don't run out of vital resources suddenly. In fact, so long as they are durrable, you don't "run out" and all--as soon as it becomes clear you might run up, people start getting nervious, the price starts going up, and so people start buying less. This slows the process down, and forces the neccessary adjustments. And the process repeats itself. Eventually, you can wind up with the once industrially important resource becoming a form of wealth (e.g. gold). But you don't ever "run out".
--MarkusQ
P.S. And we already know where to find more carbon for plastic, etc. then we have ever used for fuel--in fact there are any number of sources--we just need to figure out how to get it.
Because "Peak Oil" is only terribly serious if you fail to realize that energy is perhaps the most fungible commodity there is. As the suplies run down the cost will run up, and this will eventually make one or more of the (presently marginal) alternatives cost effective. As they start taking up more of the demand the economies of scale will drive their price down and at the same time their growing profitability will atract more money for research on ways to improve them.
The big risk isn't running out of oil. It seeing the posibility of running out of oil as a boogyman big enough (and frightening enough) to justify killing large numbers of people over control of the last little bits before the--oh wait, I forgot. Oil wasn't the reason. It was weapons of mass distruction. Or spreading democracy. Or something like that. But my main point stands.
Running out of common sense, human kindness, and the willingness to see problems as something to solve rather than a reason to lash out and kill strangers are all much more pressing dangers than running out of oil.
--MarkusQ
I think I see where we failed to connect: AI research has more or less abandoned the concept of "inductive" reasoning (though I don't recall anyone throwing a going-away party for it, and I've never seen a "Minsky confirms: induction is dead" troll.
There are grave problem with calling something "inductive"--saying, in effect, that the system/person starts with no theory and builds one up by generalizing on experience--and stopping there. For example, in many cases individuals don't get anywhere near enough examples to learn what they demostrably do learn (the paucity of input problem). Further, there are a huge number of ways in which people could generalize on their experience, but very few in which they do. Finally, many experiements have shown that people's ability to perform "inductive" reasoning is heavily dependent on things such as the subject matter (we have a cheater-detector) or their age (we have a "language aquisition device" that is active when we are young and shuts down)--which argues strongly that what we're seeing is really specific systems for deducing specific types of rules rather than true induction.
Human reasoning is far more deductive than inductive (if there even is such a thing as pure inductive reasoning--it isn't clear what this would actually mean). Experience is "slotted in" to a rich and complex system as aditional axioms; it isn't used to build up the system.
--MarkusQ
P.S.: it seemed as if you were assuming that just because Goedel proved that some things are unprovable, that every time we fail to be able to prove something it must be due to Goedel's theorem. That would be a fallacious argument.
Agreed, it would be fallacious. But I never said anything about the reasons people fail to prove things. I just said that any system (human, AI, alien, magic eight ball, whatever) will either fail to recognize the truth of some true statements, incorrectly believe that some statements are true when they are in fact false, or both. This does in fact follow from Godel. But I never said that there were not additional potential causes for such failures.
You keep saying that I am mistaken and have misunderstood what Godel's theorem says.
However, you aren't saying how, or what a correct (in your view) understanding would lead to, so I have a hard time responding to your claim. As it happens, I have read Godel's proof (the original not a gloss) several times over the last few decades, and believe I understand it well enough to reconstruct it from memory[1].
The best I can tell is that you are saying that an AI wouldn't have to be as inconsistant or as incomplete as a human, which is true but a strawman. I never introduced the idea of measuring/quantifying these factors in comparison to humans; I simply stated that any sufficently powerful reasoning systems would have to succum to them.
Further, the real limit (for both humans and AIs) is closely related to Godel's proof; it comes for their finite storage (roughly, using a modulo arithmetic in Godel's proof) and by virtue of the fixed point theorem (or just common sense) it's easy to show that the problem is much worse when you restrict the storage capacity of the system--to see this, consider that there are very few interesting statements for which the proof is as short or shorter than the statement; I believe you can prove that the vast majority of true statements within a finite system are not proble within the system unless it is inconsistant (basically, there are many more long-true-statements than there are short-true-statements, and for almost all of them the proofs are longer than the statements, and for the bulk of these the system could represent the statement but not prove it--roughly along the lines of the proof that any non lossy file compression algorithm makes most files larger).
--MarkusQ
1: Off the top of my head, and only on my second cup of coffee:
It's not at all clear that any of these characteristics of human intelligence have anything whatsoever to do with Goedel's theorem.
I never said they did. What I said was that Godel's theorem proves that any system that is going to be as smart or smarter than a human (e.g. "sufficently complex"--the real limit is down around "the ability to do math with integers, and think about the fact that it's doing so") will either be incomplete (unable to figure out things that are both true and comprehensible to it), inconsistent (able to convince itself of things that are not in fact true) or both. The fact that humans have these properties isn't significant (or even interesting) in this context since all sufficently complex systems have them.
Goedel's theorem does have implications for AI, but they are much more subtle than this.
Such as?
--MarkusQ
No, the statement was "this statement cannot be proven true using this proof system".
Part of the "specialized language" was the hypothetical (and, as he shows, impossible) proof system that proves all-and-only true statements. This was introduced specifically to formalize the concept of "false", just as the coding system was introduced to formalize the concept of "this statement."
--MarkusQ
It is not at all clear that Goedel's theorem has anything whatsoever to do with strong AI.
Sure it is. It means that an AI, to be as smart as a human (or smarter) will have to be subject to failure as we are. It will have to wind up having (and acting on) mistaken beliefs, either through inability to follow thoughts through to their logical conclusion, inability to resolve inconsistant articles of faith, or both.
--MarkusQ
But a computer cannot demonstrate this truth. I don't claim to understand why not, but it clearly says in the wikipedia article that it can't.
Short answer: you're incorrect.
Long answer: The reason you seem to think that you are correct is also, I believe, incorrect. Godel's proof basically involves forming the statement "this statement is false" in a specialized language that allows you to do so without reference to pronouns--instead, he assigned each symbol a unique integer, and worked out ways of manipulating them both with and without regard to their "meaning". That part would be easy to do with a computer (e.g. asci/text editor/compiler).
Next, he posited a string of symbols where the meaning was related to the process for the manipulation of the meaningless symbols (this is also easy on a computer--sort of like using an editor to edit its own source code).
Using these, he constructed a relatively normal argument about the meaning level that coresponded to an argument at the symbol level--an argument that said "the argument represented by this long string of digits is unprovable"--but the kicker was the long string of digits was the coded representation of the argument itself. If false, the system could obviously not prove it (since we are assuming here that it only proves things that are true). Therefore it must be true, but that means it can't be proven within the system. Tricky, but there was nothing magical about the logic--no quantum mechanical must-derive-this-step-from-the-sprit-world voodoo that would make it impossible for a computer to follow.
--MarkusQ
P.S. A computer might not be able to understand the proof, but that shouldn't be held against it--after all, most of the people who discuss it don't understand it either.
That would probably be the reason they named it that.
You can't even say they didn't warn you.
--MarkusQ
P.S. If the next update contains a program called something like "fuscan.exe," "bsodscan.exe," or "solscan.exe" I'd advise against running it.
This line in the lead jumped out at me: We have an addresses "techsupport@internaldomain" which matches this pattern to a T.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Back when we were on MS-Windows, it would have been OK, because the people asking for TechSupport were often sending each other worms at the same time.
For some reason this reminded me of an old minimalist joke: --MarkusQ
I see. So Microsoft is willing to graciously accept the court's ruling and open its APIs, provided that people don't learn to use them, or do anything that would allow other to learn to use them.
Personally, I'd call that non-complience.
--MarkusQ
I don't know how to respond to this for the simple reason I don't have any idea what it means. I will grant that, as a Microsoft employee, you have probably been following this in more detail than I have, and accept your assertion.
But it still doesn't change (or answer) the fundemental question: if the effect of the rulling is that Microsoft must allow others to interoperate, how could it possible cause different harm based on the licence of the competitor's software?
--MarkusQ
P.S. And as for the retraction strawman--that at some point you may get a reversal and demand that the code be removed--the exact same logic appiles to F/OSS-licenced software: code has been removed from F/OSS in exactly this sort of situation in the past, and there's no reason to believe it won't be in the future. In fact, several players (e.g. SCOX) have refused to detail "infringing" code for fear that it would be removed too quickly.
So yes, bizaro world.
But the whole point of the sanction was that Microsoft had to let other people write code that interoperated with Microsoft code, without having to pay a licensing fee and without having to reverse engineer anything. That's why they are supposed to (and have agreed to) open up the definitions to competitors that want to write such software.
And as for them deserving compensation, this is supposed to be a punishment. What kind of bizaro world is it where criminals get to dicker over their compensation package before agreeing to accept their punishment?
--MarkusQ
How, exactly, do you conclude this? If opening the specs doesn't do irremediable harm, and letting people write code to the specs doesn't do irremediable harm, and letting them sell the software they write (or, for that matter, give it away) doesn't do irremediable harm, how exactly does the release of said code under a F/OS licence do additional irremediable harm?
Surely you aren't claiming the GPL is so viral that it would somehow climb back up the chain of derivation and taint Microsoft?
--MarkusQ