Devices that use spread spectrum should, in theory, not cause interference. For some reason, the reality is much different. I have a 2.4GHz spread-spectrum phone system. It makes my 2.4GHz (channelized) wireless video unusable on all channels -- streaks of noise sufficient to disrupt the sync are visible.
What good is a 32-bit CPU without developers making 32-bit code? What good are MMX or SSE instructions if developers don't use them? No CPU is any good unless developers use the features it provides. It has *always* been a partnership. The reality is that in all practical situations, it will always be easier to make two chips than one twice as fast.
This is a silly argument. We've had a stable POSIX threads API for 10 years. No standard says the computer can't refuse to run your application entirely.
The performance boost can be greater than 8. Consider, for example, an application where 8 tasks must be performed in rapid succession and then the process repeat. With a single CPU, you could spend the vast majority of your time just switching from task to task. With 8 CPUs, you need never switch tasks.
Threads are a superset of a message passing interface. With threads, you can trivially implement a message passing interface if that's what works best. The thing is, you don't have to use message passing if it's not.
What's the difference exactly? In both cases if you only want to buy one small item, you overpay and have leftovers you don't want. In either case, the company holds your money until you can find something to use it on. The difference is that with Sony's scheme, you have a cash balance. They may well be breaking the law if they don't offer you interest.
I accidentally renewed someone else's xbox live subscription instead of my own -- he had recovered his account on my xbox and I didn't notice I was in his, not mine. Of course I couldn't cancel his account. But worse, there was literally no way to unlink my credit card from his account. He could buy points, renew, whatever. I spent over 12 hours trying to work things out with Microsoft's front line support, second line support, email support, and so on. I finally cancelled the credit card.
Xbox live is an utter and total disaster. *Nobody* is in charge. *Nobody* can help you. The people who provide phone support aren't trusted with access to actually provide you that support. The email support is limited to canned responses.
What's funny part is that xbox live is, from a technical standpoint, pretty darned good.
Actually, there are usually *more* fees for debit versus credit. The difference is that the customer pays the debit fee and the merchant pays the credit fee. Generally, if a merchant asks you whether you'd like to pay debit or credit, debit is the sucker's choice.
Can you cite any actual instance where any of these "problems" actually caused anyone a problem? I can invent hypothetical problems with the GPL and the BSD license all day long. For example, "someone might sue you for no good reason" applies to every license.
The advantage of public domain is that it is compatible with every open source license. If you want your work to provide the maximum advantage to mankind, public domain probably does it.
Anyone can look at and study the code free of encumbrance. They can tweak it, embed it in their projects, all without having any real worry about licenses, notices, being sued, or anything else.
They can cut only a few functional lines that they need without having to worry about changing the license on the file they cut it into, without having to add an author attribution, or anything else. If it solves their problem, they can use it. Period.
No company I know of has a policy that prohibits public domain code from being added to projects they are working on. Other licenses generally require a clearance process that's typically more trouble than it's worth.
It's really clear that you don't understand the first thing about copyright and haven't spent even a minute thinking about what you post. On the off chance that you're not trolling, consider for a second what would happen if what you said were true.
Someone copies something I wrote, without permission, and posts it with no copyright notice. Other people see that post and assume they can copy it. What happens?
No, a copyright notice is not necessary. Have you been under a rock for 35 years? A copyright notice, as it name suggests, is just a *notice* of the copyright. It tells you who holds the copyright and the date of the copyright. If it wasn't copyrighted already, there would be nothing for the notice to give you notice *of*.
When was the last time you heard a song on the radio with a copyright notice in it? Can you copy them?
I agree. If they had followed the recipe in his code in their own code, they'd be just fine. But they took his instructions verbatim and incorporated them into their own. *That* requires permission.
They didn't take his ideas, they took the precise way he chose to express those ideas.
"Posting code publicly, aka in the public domain, aka distributing it without a license, does not put the code in the public domain? That's news to me!"
Then you've been under a rock for the past 35 years or so. A split second of common sense would show how crazy your claim is. Songs are played on the radio, which is precisely akin to a public post. So can I record them off the radio and sell copies?
"First, please stop repeating the meme that information can be "stolen". It's copyright infringement."
Copyright infringement is, at least in some cases, a form of stealing. I grant that you might be able to create cases that are copyright infringement but not stealing, but this is most certainly one of them.
Stealing doesn't require taking something by force. Violating an agreement can be stealing. For example, if we agree that I'll give you my car today and you'll pay me $1,000 next week, not paying me the $1,000 is the same as stealing the car. You took something that wasn't yours and failed to comply with the terms by which the creator of that something is compensated.
When you read code in a forum, you are bound by copyright law. They set the terms by which the poster agrees to post the work so that you can read them. Copyright sets the default agreement for such transfers, just like the explicit agreement to pay $1,000 next week in the car example.
Failing to comply with the post/read agreement and using the posted code without the agreed compensation to the poster (which would be a copyright license) is just as much stealing as taking the car without the agreed compensation (the $1,000 next week).
Violating an agreement in which you get something in exchange for compensation to the provider by not providing the something in exchange is stealing the thing you got.
No, fair use doesn't work that way. I'm assuming he took the entire piece of code, so he only took 200 lines because there only were 200 lines.
Now, someone might argue that because the work is so short it isn't entitled to copyright protection. But I don't think 200 lines is anywhere near short enough.
If he took 200 lines from a 560,000 line work, that would weigh in favor of a finding of fair use but wouldn't make it fair use automatically.
One of the biggest problems with fair use is that the rules for deciding what is or isn't fair use are so complicated and randomly applied and enforced that it's almost impossible to know ahead of time whether any particular use is fair or not.
I hope you don't take this wrong, but you're an *idiot*. I really hope nobody takes your advice.
It's entirely possible the guy wrote the code and also posted it to the forum, perhaps under another name. It's also possible he obtained permission to use the code.
But posting code publicly most certainly does not license other people to use or copy it and professional software development organizations take such things *very* seriously.
So what? They'll just grant you immunity. You'll be forced to divulge the key or spend the rest of your life in jail. They won't be able to use the fact that you knew the key or what the key is against you, but they can use the documents that the key decrypts -- even against you in a criminal prosecution.
It's the same with documents. If you have documents they want, they can compel you to produce them. If you plead the fifth, they'll grant you immunity from them using the fact that you had the documents against you. They can still use the contents of the documents against you.
The fifth amendment does not protect the contents of documents in any place other than your head.
> To say someone is "highly evolved" is nonsensical.
Of course, because individuals don't evolve, species do. But to say a modern species is more highly evolved than dinosaurs is perfectly sensible.
> Evolution doesn't really express a value judgement. > If we are to take your sentence at face value, you could be saying no > species has gotten further than the other species.
Right, in an evolutionary sense, all modern species have come just as far.
> By different measurements they have, i.e. flies are a very succesful species > in numbers, humans have attained a larger biological complexity than bacteria, >... Maybe you'd do better to explain what you meant instead of making people guess.
Exactly. Each organism has evolved different survival techniques for different niches. Trying to compare flies ability to produce numbers to human's technology is nonsense from an evolutionary standpoint. All species evolve in different directions, but they've all evolved just as much.
It sounds like you understand exactly what I mean.
> And to claim that squirrels are the kind of intelligent life that > we would be interested in is silly.
Exactly. That's why SETI is silly. It's not looking for intelligent life, it's looking for *human* intelligence.
> Squirrels are unable to communicate in any complex way.
If by "complex" you mean "as humans do", then you're right.
> Whatever your definition of intelligence, they're clearly > less intelligent than us.
I really don't know if that's true or not. My only experience is with the particular type of life that has evolved on this planet. If we saw what squirrels would evolve into in a few billion years, we might think that squirrels are further along that path than humans are.
Clearly, by a human-centric definition of intelligence, humans are further along. But that's because we're defining intelligence as "what humans do". It's not clear what paths lead to what forms of intelligence. We don't know.
> We're looking for space aliens with about the same level of intelligence or higher. > Whether their existence is probable is debatable of course.
Except by "level of intelligence" you mean level of human-like intelligence. That's natural, since you're a human. But you have no idea what alien intelligence would look like, and there is no reason to think it would lead to communication by electromagnetic waves other than that it did so for humans.
You need to decide how much the rights they want are worth and see if they're willing to pay for them. Tell them honestly, "Here's a list of all the things you want from me, and here's how much I think they're worth. You need to decide which of those are worth having and which aren't." Be reasonable, and one of two things will happen:
1) They'll be reasonable too, they'll get what they want, and you'll get what you want.
2) They'll be unreasonable, and you'll find a job elsewhere, with a company that is willing to pay you what you are worth.
You're really good with the name calling. Now my claim that every living thing on the planet is just as highly evolved as every other is "so ridiculous as to boggle the mind". However, you have failed to explain what is incorrect about it.
You've added a new claim, that I "don't consider technology a manifestation of intelligence". That would be really bad if it were true, but it's clearly false, since technology is my prime example of human intelligence, just as hiding and finding nuts would be the prime example of squirrel intelligence.
Someone who will say "complete bullshit" to someone else's point because of some difference between being "highly evolved" and "sustaining evolutionary change", who then fails to explain that difference is obviously more interested in exchanging insults that ideas.
So all you managed to do was:
1) Say that my claims are "complete bullshit".
2) Claim that I confused being "highly evolved" with how much "evolutionary change" was sustained, without explaining what difference you think there is between these two or why it matters.
3) Complain that I "implicitly claim" something that's not true.
So, in sum, you have not pointed out anything wrong with anything I actually did say. But thank you for playing.
Yes. Every living thing on this planet is just as highly evolved as every other, yet only one has the type of technology that could ever lead to radio transmissions.
> The search for sentience and technology (signals analysis methods aside) is anthropocentric?
Yes. Squirrels are quite intelligent, they don't transmit radio signals. SETI is not a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it is a search for extraterrestrial *human* intelligence.
The idea that we should do useless things because, by pure luck, we might wind up doing useful things is crazy. It's much more efficient to try to do useful things in the first place.
Sure, it makes sense to factor into the cost/benefit analysis unexpected benefits as well as unexpected costs. But the hope for such benefits really can't justify doing something that isn't otherwise useful. Doing *anything* will have unexpected benefits.
Too often, the numbers are rigged. The unexpected benefits are added into the benefits column, but the unexpected benefits of everything else we could have done instead never finds its way into the costs column. Had we not gone to the moon, those same people would have done something else. The unexpected benefits of technology developed in as a side effect of the Apollo project is much mentioned, but the unexpected benefits of whatever those bright guys would have done elsewhere is never counted as a cost.
Is there any reason to think the unexpected benefits of SETI are any greater than the unexpected benefits of anything else those same guys would do? And if not, then there's a cost that precisely outweighs that benefit.
I would argue that the unexpected benefits of *practical* projects generally exceed the unexpected benefits of less practical ones.
What's anti-scientific is to claim you are searching for intelligent life when what you are actually searching for is the very attributes that make *human* intelligence unique. Squirrels are intelligent. They can hide hundreds of nuts and remember where each one is come winter. But SETI won't find squirrels.
If SETI were thought up by elephants, it would be the search for extra-terrestrial trunks. Why? Because trunks are what make elephants unique, so naturally, evolution on other worlds should produce trunks too.
The basic premise is that humans are the goal of evolution and that sufficiently-advanced evolution on other worlds would also produce human-like creatures. That's simply nonsense. In fact, every organism on this planet is just as highly evolved as every other, and exactly one species with human-like intelligence exists.
SETI is the extra-terrestrial search for what makes humans unique. *That* is stupefyingly anti-scientific.
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Devices that use spread spectrum should, in theory, not cause interference. For some reason, the reality is much different. I have a 2.4GHz spread-spectrum phone system. It makes my 2.4GHz (channelized) wireless video unusable on all channels -- streaks of noise sufficient to disrupt the sync are visible.
What good is a 32-bit CPU without developers making 32-bit code? What good are MMX or SSE instructions if developers don't use them? No CPU is any good unless developers use the features it provides. It has *always* been a partnership. The reality is that in all practical situations, it will always be easier to make two chips than one twice as fast.
This is a silly argument. We've had a stable POSIX threads API for 10 years. No standard says the computer can't refuse to run your application entirely.
The performance boost can be greater than 8. Consider, for example, an application where 8 tasks must be performed in rapid succession and then the process repeat. With a single CPU, you could spend the vast majority of your time just switching from task to task. With 8 CPUs, you need never switch tasks.
Of course, this seldom happens in the real world.
Threads are a superset of a message passing interface. With threads, you can trivially implement a message passing interface if that's what works best. The thing is, you don't have to use message passing if it's not.
What's the difference exactly? In both cases if you only want to buy one small item, you overpay and have leftovers you don't want. In either case, the company holds your money until you can find something to use it on. The difference is that with Sony's scheme, you have a cash balance. They may well be breaking the law if they don't offer you interest.
I accidentally renewed someone else's xbox live subscription instead of my own -- he had recovered his account on my xbox and I didn't notice I was in his, not mine. Of course I couldn't cancel his account. But worse, there was literally no way to unlink my credit card from his account. He could buy points, renew, whatever. I spent over 12 hours trying to work things out with Microsoft's front line support, second line support, email support, and so on. I finally cancelled the credit card.
Xbox live is an utter and total disaster. *Nobody* is in charge. *Nobody* can help you. The people who provide phone support aren't trusted with access to actually provide you that support. The email support is limited to canned responses.
What's funny part is that xbox live is, from a technical standpoint, pretty darned good.
Actually, there are usually *more* fees for debit versus credit. The difference is that the customer pays the debit fee and the merchant pays the credit fee. Generally, if a merchant asks you whether you'd like to pay debit or credit, debit is the sucker's choice.
Can you cite any actual instance where any of these "problems" actually caused anyone a problem? I can invent hypothetical problems with the GPL and the BSD license all day long. For example, "someone might sue you for no good reason" applies to every license.
The advantage of public domain is that it is compatible with every open source license. If you want your work to provide the maximum advantage to mankind, public domain probably does it.
Anyone can look at and study the code free of encumbrance. They can tweak it, embed it in their projects, all without having any real worry about licenses, notices, being sued, or anything else.
They can cut only a few functional lines that they need without having to worry about changing the license on the file they cut it into, without having to add an author attribution, or anything else. If it solves their problem, they can use it. Period.
No company I know of has a policy that prohibits public domain code from being added to projects they are working on. Other licenses generally require a clearance process that's typically more trouble than it's worth.
No other license can match that.
It's really clear that you don't understand the first thing about copyright and haven't spent even a minute thinking about what you post. On the off chance that you're not trolling, consider for a second what would happen if what you said were true.
Someone copies something I wrote, without permission, and posts it with no copyright notice. Other people see that post and assume they can copy it. What happens?
No, a copyright notice is not necessary. Have you been under a rock for 35 years? A copyright notice, as it name suggests, is just a *notice* of the copyright. It tells you who holds the copyright and the date of the copyright. If it wasn't copyrighted already, there would be nothing for the notice to give you notice *of*.
When was the last time you heard a song on the radio with a copyright notice in it? Can you copy them?
I agree. If they had followed the recipe in his code in their own code, they'd be just fine. But they took his instructions verbatim and incorporated them into their own. *That* requires permission.
They didn't take his ideas, they took the precise way he chose to express those ideas.
"Posting code publicly, aka in the public domain, aka distributing it without a license, does not put the code in the public domain? That's news to me!"
Then you've been under a rock for the past 35 years or so. A split second of common sense would show how crazy your claim is. Songs are played on the radio, which is precisely akin to a public post. So can I record them off the radio and sell copies?
"First, please stop repeating the meme that information can be "stolen". It's copyright infringement."
Copyright infringement is, at least in some cases, a form of stealing. I grant that you might be able to create cases that are copyright infringement but not stealing, but this is most certainly one of them.
Stealing doesn't require taking something by force. Violating an agreement can be stealing. For example, if we agree that I'll give you my car today and you'll pay me $1,000 next week, not paying me the $1,000 is the same as stealing the car. You took something that wasn't yours and failed to comply with the terms by which the creator of that something is compensated.
When you read code in a forum, you are bound by copyright law. They set the terms by which the poster agrees to post the work so that you can read them. Copyright sets the default agreement for such transfers, just like the explicit agreement to pay $1,000 next week in the car example.
Failing to comply with the post/read agreement and using the posted code without the agreed compensation to the poster (which would be a copyright license) is just as much stealing as taking the car without the agreed compensation (the $1,000 next week).
Violating an agreement in which you get something in exchange for compensation to the provider by not providing the something in exchange is stealing the thing you got.
No, fair use doesn't work that way. I'm assuming he took the entire piece of code, so he only took 200 lines because there only were 200 lines.
Now, someone might argue that because the work is so short it isn't entitled to copyright protection. But I don't think 200 lines is anywhere near short enough.
If he took 200 lines from a 560,000 line work, that would weigh in favor of a finding of fair use but wouldn't make it fair use automatically.
One of the biggest problems with fair use is that the rules for deciding what is or isn't fair use are so complicated and randomly applied and enforced that it's almost impossible to know ahead of time whether any particular use is fair or not.
I hope you don't take this wrong, but you're an *idiot*. I really hope nobody takes your advice.
It's entirely possible the guy wrote the code and also posted it to the forum, perhaps under another name. It's also possible he obtained permission to use the code.
But posting code publicly most certainly does not license other people to use or copy it and professional software development organizations take such things *very* seriously.
You don't know any of the keywords they would be searching for.
So what? They'll just grant you immunity. You'll be forced to divulge the key or spend the rest of your life in jail. They won't be able to use the fact that you knew the key or what the key is against you, but they can use the documents that the key decrypts -- even against you in a criminal prosecution.
It's the same with documents. If you have documents they want, they can compel you to produce them. If you plead the fifth, they'll grant you immunity from them using the fact that you had the documents against you. They can still use the contents of the documents against you.
The fifth amendment does not protect the contents of documents in any place other than your head.
> To say someone is "highly evolved" is nonsensical.
... Maybe you'd do better to explain what you meant instead of making people guess.
Of course, because individuals don't evolve, species do. But to say a modern species is more highly evolved than dinosaurs is perfectly sensible.
> Evolution doesn't really express a value judgement.
> If we are to take your sentence at face value, you could be saying no
> species has gotten further than the other species.
Right, in an evolutionary sense, all modern species have come just as far.
> By different measurements they have, i.e. flies are a very succesful species
> in numbers, humans have attained a larger biological complexity than bacteria,
>
Exactly. Each organism has evolved different survival techniques for different niches. Trying to compare flies ability to produce numbers to human's technology is nonsense from an evolutionary standpoint. All species evolve in different directions, but they've all evolved just as much.
It sounds like you understand exactly what I mean.
> And to claim that squirrels are the kind of intelligent life that
> we would be interested in is silly.
Exactly. That's why SETI is silly. It's not looking for intelligent life, it's looking for *human* intelligence.
> Squirrels are unable to communicate in any complex way.
If by "complex" you mean "as humans do", then you're right.
> Whatever your definition of intelligence, they're clearly
> less intelligent than us.
I really don't know if that's true or not. My only experience is with the particular type of life that has evolved on this planet. If we saw what squirrels would evolve into in a few billion years, we might think that squirrels are further along that path than humans are.
Clearly, by a human-centric definition of intelligence, humans are further along. But that's because we're defining intelligence as "what humans do". It's not clear what paths lead to what forms of intelligence. We don't know.
> We're looking for space aliens with about the same level of intelligence or higher.
> Whether their existence is probable is debatable of course.
Except by "level of intelligence" you mean level of human-like intelligence. That's natural, since you're a human. But you have no idea what alien intelligence would look like, and there is no reason to think it would lead to communication by electromagnetic waves other than that it did so for humans.
What kind of punitive action could they take that you couldn't avoid by simply quitting? It seems like they have no leverage at all.
You need to decide how much the rights they want are worth and see if they're willing to pay for them. Tell them honestly, "Here's a list of all the things you want from me, and here's how much I think they're worth. You need to decide which of those are worth having and which aren't." Be reasonable, and one of two things will happen:
1) They'll be reasonable too, they'll get what they want, and you'll get what you want.
2) They'll be unreasonable, and you'll find a job elsewhere, with a company that is willing to pay you what you are worth.
You're really good with the name calling. Now my claim that every living thing on the planet is just as highly evolved as every other is "so ridiculous as to boggle the mind". However, you have failed to explain what is incorrect about it.
You've added a new claim, that I "don't consider technology a manifestation of intelligence". That would be really bad if it were true, but it's clearly false, since technology is my prime example of human intelligence, just as hiding and finding nuts would be the prime example of squirrel intelligence.
Someone who will say "complete bullshit" to someone else's point because of some difference between being "highly evolved" and "sustaining evolutionary change", who then fails to explain that difference is obviously more interested in exchanging insults that ideas.
So all you managed to do was:
1) Say that my claims are "complete bullshit".
2) Claim that I confused being "highly evolved" with how much "evolutionary change" was sustained, without explaining what difference you think there is between these two or why it matters.
3) Complain that I "implicitly claim" something that's not true.
So, in sum, you have not pointed out anything wrong with anything I actually did say. But thank you for playing.
> Sentience and technology makes humans unique?
Yes. Every living thing on this planet is just as highly evolved as every other, yet only one has the type of technology that could ever lead to radio transmissions.
> The search for sentience and technology (signals analysis methods aside) is anthropocentric?
Yes. Squirrels are quite intelligent, they don't transmit radio signals. SETI is not a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it is a search for extraterrestrial *human* intelligence.
> You seem to be very confused.
How so?
The idea that we should do useless things because, by pure luck, we might wind up doing useful things is crazy. It's much more efficient to try to do useful things in the first place.
Sure, it makes sense to factor into the cost/benefit analysis unexpected benefits as well as unexpected costs. But the hope for such benefits really can't justify doing something that isn't otherwise useful. Doing *anything* will have unexpected benefits.
Too often, the numbers are rigged. The unexpected benefits are added into the benefits column, but the unexpected benefits of everything else we could have done instead never finds its way into the costs column. Had we not gone to the moon, those same people would have done something else. The unexpected benefits of technology developed in as a side effect of the Apollo project is much mentioned, but the unexpected benefits of whatever those bright guys would have done elsewhere is never counted as a cost.
Is there any reason to think the unexpected benefits of SETI are any greater than the unexpected benefits of anything else those same guys would do? And if not, then there's a cost that precisely outweighs that benefit.
I would argue that the unexpected benefits of *practical* projects generally exceed the unexpected benefits of less practical ones.
What's anti-scientific is to claim you are searching for intelligent life when what you are actually searching for is the very attributes that make *human* intelligence unique. Squirrels are intelligent. They can hide hundreds of nuts and remember where each one is come winter. But SETI won't find squirrels.
If SETI were thought up by elephants, it would be the search for extra-terrestrial trunks. Why? Because trunks are what make elephants unique, so naturally, evolution on other worlds should produce trunks too.
The basic premise is that humans are the goal of evolution and that sufficiently-advanced evolution on other worlds would also produce human-like creatures. That's simply nonsense. In fact, every organism on this planet is just as highly evolved as every other, and exactly one species with human-like intelligence exists.
SETI is the extra-terrestrial search for what makes humans unique. *That* is stupefyingly anti-scientific.