In 1932, the mean IQ in US, using today's scale, would be around 80. source. It is estimated that US gains 3 IQ points per decade. However, since mid-1990s this progression seems to have stopped.
Exactly.
Therefore, considering that a simple obfuscator can automatically change the expression of a code while retaining its functionality, can we agree that copyright on code is a totally useless notion ?
"Derivative work". Another term for which we have absolutely no clear definition. A clean room implementation is not a derivative work because there isa layer of miscommunication between two human teams. Automate this process and it becomes a derivative work even if the information flow is the same. That's magical thinking and should not exist in the law.
Which is just silly as expression is the least thing we are concerned about in a code. Can I take the binary syntax tree of your program and escape copyright ? If no, why not ?
I am sure that the process you describe could be automated, except for the lawyers who has, as we all know, a magical ability to understand how to make the difference between two copyrightable work and decide they are different (a process that, as far as I know, is non-computable for a lack of coherent definitions)
The function foo increments the first ten arguments of the integer buffer passed in argument, without checking bounds or overflow.
Here is what shocks me : these two paragraph convey the same information. They are two representations of the same (simple) algorithm. I could write a generator that would create hundreds of variants of this. Yet, it seems allowed to do that to escape copyright.
Maybe is it time to recognize that IP laws regarding software are incomplete and incoherent and that enforcing copyright on a specific code makes as much sense as enforcing copyright on a set of gears ratio in a watch.
The value of the code is not in its precise wording, it is in the function it accomplishes. Protecting the first is useless, protecting the second would stall the whole software industry. (Dibs on the loops !). Can't we just root for a sane reform now ?
The fact that India is a democracy is actually morally important. The fact that they are currently not at war (technically NK is at war with SK and has hundreds of artillery pieces pointed to Seoul) is also important.
The fact that it never signed a treaty saying it would refrain from such tests is also important.
A fuck was given when India first developped these capabilities. It was a nuclear nation a long time ago and now its missiles range went from 2500 to 3500. It is not that much a big deal.
I was interested in electronics before reading SF. Though, when thinking about the consequences of robots and workforce automation, I was reaching what I thought was crazy conclusions. Thanks to SF, I saw that post-scarcity economies are not that a crazy theory. Motivated me to learn more about robotics and to focus on programming (it is more about the AI than about the robot, actually)
It is not likely at all. We are in 2012 and during several years, various companies have shamelessly sold the "cyber-war" concept. There has been billions (really) of dollars made in training and countermeasure tools for federal organizations.
You are not in the 90s anymore where a scriptkiddy could brute-force FBI passwords without being noticed. You now should assume competence in the people charged with these affairs.
Game boys, wiis, are indeed a part of the post-PC era. One could imagine a world where you do work on your tablet and cell-phone and play games and watch movies on your wii, casual games on your gameboy. That is a post-PC scenario.
Sure you can play semantics, and this is a marketing field, not a scientific field, so the definitions are more blurry. I would personally agree that the Transformer is a product that bet on the continuation of the laptop. It is a tablet and a laptop and it bets (rightly, IMHO) that a tablet is not sufficient for working with 100% of the time.
Except, from what I have gathered, a wide spectrum of light opposition exists in China. There are lines you cannot cross, but talking about corruption, talking about pollution, is tolerated for instance. I doubt that people merely looking for information would be bothered a lot. They already have a hard time preventing people from posting opinions, I doubt they are willing to spend the resources to go after the people reading them.
There are voices in the Chinese communist party to ditch censorship totally, or to make it what it was first supposed to be : a counter-pornography filter and to remove political subjects from the filtered list.
China is not North Korea, it is possible that this move is the real thing.
Yes, EU, municipal and some regional elections too. However, some small "details" in EU elections has been changed to make it harder for small parties in France too. Normally, countries just make candidate lists and proportional rule applies, but "big" countries like France are allowed to split themselves in several "district". Making the threshold of representation higher.
Note however that even with a country list, it still is akin to a "by district" election : There are no proportional elections on the EU level. Actually there are no EU-wide elections. There are local elections to send representatives, that's all.
Microsoft is going the way of IBM, after having broken many things in the IT world and caused a lot of harm in the field of "intellectual property" ideology. Are they losing their evil ways ? This may be, but it will still take a few years of "neutral" behavior for me to forgive them.
> Tor onions. Are they good or are they whack?
I think they are outdated. The thing is, if the chaser is a government like China and has narrowed its options to a list of suspects, it is easy to break the connection of every suspect for 5 minutes and check if the onion service is still on.
If you want to put sensitive content online, do it through a DHT service and let the world mirror it.
Exactly. Having participated in the French PP, I can say that our chances of ever having a representative are far slimer : here you need a majority vote in a district for that to happen. But it can happen through deals with other big parties. "We are worth 3%. We'll call to vote for you if you put net neutrality in your program and let a PP candidate run without your opposition in 3% of the winnable districts"
The one thing you can do with bitcoin is to have a 100% black market wallet : you earn money anonymously, you spend it anonymously, but if you make a single transaction that is linked to your identity, all your other transactions can then be linked to you. With cash, if you earn money anonymously, you can still pay your rent and your food with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard Anonymous is hiding it.
In 1932, the mean IQ in US, using today's scale, would be around 80. source. It is estimated that US gains 3 IQ points per decade. However, since mid-1990s this progression seems to have stopped.
Survival is just one evolutionary pressure. As long as we will use inheritable criterion for choosing mating partners, evolution will continue.
Da Vinci's airplanes were built, and they didn't fly. Babbage computers were built, and they worked.
Exactly.
Therefore, considering that a simple obfuscator can automatically change the expression of a code while retaining its functionality, can we agree that copyright on code is a totally useless notion ?
"Derivative work". Another term for which we have absolutely no clear definition. A clean room implementation is not a derivative work because there isa layer of miscommunication between two human teams. Automate this process and it becomes a derivative work even if the information flow is the same. That's magical thinking and should not exist in the law.
Which is just silly as expression is the least thing we are concerned about in a code. Can I take the binary syntax tree of your program and escape copyright ? If no, why not ?
The function foo increments the first ten arguments of the integer buffer passed in argument, without checking bounds or overflow.
Here is what shocks me : these two paragraph convey the same information. They are two representations of the same (simple) algorithm. I could write a generator that would create hundreds of variants of this. Yet, it seems allowed to do that to escape copyright.
Maybe is it time to recognize that IP laws regarding software are incomplete and incoherent and that enforcing copyright on a specific code makes as much sense as enforcing copyright on a set of gears ratio in a watch.
The value of the code is not in its precise wording, it is in the function it accomplishes. Protecting the first is useless, protecting the second would stall the whole software industry. (Dibs on the loops !). Can't we just root for a sane reform now ?
The fact that India is a democracy is actually morally important.
The fact that they are currently not at war (technically NK is at war with SK and has hundreds of artillery pieces pointed to Seoul) is also important.
The fact that it never signed a treaty saying it would refrain from such tests is also important.
A fuck was given when India first developped these capabilities. It was a nuclear nation a long time ago and now its missiles range went from 2500 to 3500. It is not that much a big deal.
I was interested in electronics before reading SF. Though, when thinking about the consequences of robots and workforce automation, I was reaching what I thought was crazy conclusions. Thanks to SF, I saw that post-scarcity economies are not that a crazy theory. Motivated me to learn more about robotics and to focus on programming (it is more about the AI than about the robot, actually)
It is not likely at all. We are in 2012 and during several years, various companies have shamelessly sold the "cyber-war" concept. There has been billions (really) of dollars made in training and countermeasure tools for federal organizations.
You are not in the 90s anymore where a scriptkiddy could brute-force FBI passwords without being noticed. You now should assume competence in the people charged with these affairs.
Game boys, wiis, are indeed a part of the post-PC era. One could imagine a world where you do work on your tablet and cell-phone and play games and watch movies on your wii, casual games on your gameboy. That is a post-PC scenario.
Sure you can play semantics, and this is a marketing field, not a scientific field, so the definitions are more blurry. I would personally agree that the Transformer is a product that bet on the continuation of the laptop. It is a tablet and a laptop and it bets (rightly, IMHO) that a tablet is not sufficient for working with 100% of the time.
"individual computer that is not a desktop or a laptop."
Except, from what I have gathered, a wide spectrum of light opposition exists in China. There are lines you cannot cross, but talking about corruption, talking about pollution, is tolerated for instance. I doubt that people merely looking for information would be bothered a lot. They already have a hard time preventing people from posting opinions, I doubt they are willing to spend the resources to go after the people reading them.
There are voices in the Chinese communist party to ditch censorship totally, or to make it what it was first supposed to be : a counter-pornography filter and to remove political subjects from the filtered list.
China is not North Korea, it is possible that this move is the real thing.
Sssshhh, we are talking about the filthy commie censorship here, not the moral and understandable capitalist one...
Yes, EU, municipal and some regional elections too. However, some small "details" in EU elections has been changed to make it harder for small parties in France too. Normally, countries just make candidate lists and proportional rule applies, but "big" countries like France are allowed to split themselves in several "district". Making the threshold of representation higher.
Note however that even with a country list, it still is akin to a "by district" election : There are no proportional elections on the EU level. Actually there are no EU-wide elections. There are local elections to send representatives, that's all.
NUTS. I meants nuts. Damn it...
Actually the politically correct word for "buts" is "reality challenged"
Microsoft is going the way of IBM, after having broken many things in the IT world and caused a lot of harm in the field of "intellectual property" ideology. Are they losing their evil ways ? This may be, but it will still take a few years of "neutral" behavior for me to forgive them.
> Tor onions. Are they good or are they whack? I think they are outdated. The thing is, if the chaser is a government like China and has narrowed its options to a list of suspects, it is easy to break the connection of every suspect for 5 minutes and check if the onion service is still on.
If you want to put sensitive content online, do it through a DHT service and let the world mirror it.
I should have bought one of these "Hacking is not a crime" stickers they proposed on the hackerspaces mailing list...
Exactly. Having participated in the French PP, I can say that our chances of ever having a representative are far slimer : here you need a majority vote in a district for that to happen. But it can happen through deals with other big parties. "We are worth 3%. We'll call to vote for you if you put net neutrality in your program and let a PP candidate run without your opposition in 3% of the winnable districts"
... got a "sad refelction on our modern lives".
Good bye Slashdot.
You could always trade wallets anonymously
Yes, if you have cash.
The one thing you can do with bitcoin is to have a 100% black market wallet : you earn money anonymously, you spend it anonymously, but if you make a single transaction that is linked to your identity, all your other transactions can then be linked to you. With cash, if you earn money anonymously, you can still pay your rent and your food with that.
It is free. And it is free.