Secondly, can you name any researchers that have left any field because of harassment from the ELF?
There have been plenty that were forced to stop their research. I seem to remember about one who pretty much could not do anything because activists were picketing his house.
Or a firefighter that has been injured?
I am sure some were injured. A firefighter getting injured in the line of duty is not the kind of thing that makes the papers. Not to mention, does one really need someone to be injured or killed to agree that their actions are extremely reckless?
Seriously, I'm not saying I support what they do
You are justifying their actions; therefore, you support what they do.
I agree that the risk they have brought to innocent people through terrorist activities is unacceptable, but the case against them is overblown, and I think it's specifically because they're a left wing group, not because they're some huge threat.
What's a bigger threat? Domestic terrorism is about as bad as it gets. Also, if you happen to be a left-winger, putting them on your side does not help your cause. Just a heads up.
I'd like to see some bare facts rather than people just blowing smoke, because it might actually convince me that they were more than 1/10000th the threat of religious fundamentalists, abortion opponents, or timothy McVeigh types. You know, the ones who actually kill people.
"The other guys are worse" is not a justification. I am pretty sure Timothy McVeigh didn't have a whole terrorist organization, and neither do the anti-abortion nutcases. The bare facts are that the ELF is a terrorist organization that plants firebombs and does all sorts of nasty things. How is the case against them overblown?
Then why don't we patent books too? or Paintings? or Musical Recordings? or Movies?
In those media, ideas are equivalent to their expression. A book can be adequately protected simply by disallowing blatant copying through copyright. An algorithm can be implemented in many different ways, so copyright laws will not protect it.
Software physically has more in common with books than inventions.
Uh, no. Books are simply ways to convey information. Software has far more in common with machinery than with literature. More specifically, any piece of software is essentially a representation of a certain finite state machine.
Furthermore, software is ALREADY covered by copyright while other inventions are not.
Many things enjoy similar protection. Integrated circuits, for example. The mask set is protected by copyright, while the circuitry itself can be protected by patents. This is done because it is trivial to create a different mask set for the same circuit, and because copyrights do not apply to circuits. The same is true of algorithms. The source and binary code is protected by copyright, while the algorithms themselves are protected by patents.
Well, they routinely harass researchers and destroy laboratories. This results in the unnecessary deaths of many humans who may have been saved through the research they disrupted. Many of those researchers leave the field because they cannot tolerate the constant harassment.
They also tend to recklessly disregard human life in their activities. How about the firefighters that have to put out the fires they start? How about the people whose lives they disrupt? Laboratories employ many people, you know.
Seriously, if there is a group of people that deserves to spend time in Guantanamo, it would be people who think it is acceptable to engage in terrorism in the name of "animal rights". ELF is a terrorist organization, plain and simple.
Duh, the point is that software patents aren't needed.
Just how do you figure that?
Designing hardware can be very expensive and unless there is some sort of patent protection for it not many would risk spending the millions of dollars doing research.
Pretty much any large software company spends millions of dollars doing research.
No. The set of irrational numbers, for example, are easily proven uncountable.
Sure, but you can't exactly patent irrational numbers. Nearly everything else IS enumerable, given the right metric. You can even enumerate every single possible patent.
But just spitting out software programs? Trivial.
Those wouldn't be programs, they would be random noise. Computer programs, by definition, have to solve some kind of problem.
And yet I presented it as series of steps. That's an algorithm. That is the POINT. Software algorithms can be reduced to mathematical equations.
Your argument is that something that is described using a formal language is automatically non-patentable? Utility patents are reserved for practical devices that are used commercially to solve problems. You can patent any novel, useful, and non-obvious arrangement of gears, for instance. However, a mechanical assembly could be reduced to a set of formal statements just as easily as a computer program.
In point of fact, bogosort isn't a comparison sort. So it actually does qualify as a separate solution.
Bogosort is certainly a comparison sort. It operates by only comparing elements with each other, which is the definition of "comparison sort". Besides, your assertion was that every algorithm that solves the same problem is equivalent. This is clearly not the case. Also, I am surprised by your implication that bogosort does not work. Mathematically, it is a perfectly legitimate sorting algorithm, and certainly works if implemented correctly.
But there are *also* many algorithms being used to sort that are variations of each other, or demonstratable transformations of an other.
So what? You are implying that since they are mathematically equivalent, they are obvious to derive from each other. Quite clearly, this is not the case.
Is there a mapping from quicksort to heapsort? I don't know. Maybe there is. If there is or one is discovered, what does that *mean*?
It would mean absolutely nothing, unless you like to argue about semantics. The fact is, inventing a good sorting algorithm is still considered an achievement. Finding a prime number isn't. Unless there is a mechanical way to generate good sorting algorithms, coming up with one is still an act of creative genius. This is what patents are supposed to reward.
So can anything else. This is, quite honestly, the stupidest argument I have ever heard.
In a very real sense a useful software program is little more than a useful integer, like a very large prime number.
Oh, really? And you can write software to discover other software programs mechanically? Is that how they came up with the latest version of Windows, or did it involve a lot of programmers working on it?
Suppose someone had patented the algorithm for determining distance travelled while under constant acceleration from a particular starting velocity in a given time frame.
This isn't technically an algorithm, it's a simple algebraic formula.
turns out that 'algorithm' is the representation of a simple mathematical equation; worse the equation itself, is a simple calculus integral.
Which makes it obvious and thus non-patentable.
In the physical world, you are free to invent a variety of solutions to a problem. In software, there is often only one possible unique solution. Any other solution, even if developed independantly, and done completely differently might be shown to be a mathematically equivalent variation of the first.
Not sure what you mean there. If you patent one solution, you don't own the rights to all solutions, just that one. You do have to describe your patent claims in extreme detail, you know.
I could trivially take any algorithm and transform it into a different algorithm that is mathematically equivalent and then dodge your patent.
Sounds like you flunked algorithms class. There is no easy way to transform one algorithm into an equivalent one. By your logic, every searching or sorting algorithm is trivially equivalent to every other one, because they do the same damn thing. Try showing me how you can get quicksort or heapsort by algorithmically transforming, say, bogosort.
You could have the same argument about any other kind of patent, too. Not to mention, I fail to see your point. The most profitable companies are headquartered in USA, which has had software patents for the last 26 years or so. I'm not saying it's all because of the patent system, but I don't think you have much evidence to support your assertion.
I still don't understand what makes algorithms and software OBVIOUSLY not patentable. Also, stop misusing the word "mathematical". I am not a proponent of software patents; I just don't see what makes software patents so different from other patents, and I haven't seen a single logical argument against software patents that doesn't involve circular reasoning.
sounds like are talking about "compression" which is dynamics processing, but not EQ - a compressor (like any audio processor) has an input and an output - you define a threshold and every time the input gain surpasses the threshold, the gain is reduced by a specified ratio and that becomes the output - as you mentioned,
Your description of compression is not correct. If you just clipped the peaks of the signal, you would get nasty distortion. Compressors actually run the signal through an envelope detector, lowpass it with an adjustable filter (which determines the attack/release time), and then use that signal to modulate the gain of an amplifier. The compressor doesn't look at the signal, it looks at the envelope of the signal. A compressor differs from a limiter in that compressors can increase AND decrease levels, while limiters only decrease the level to prevent clipping.
Compression is a valid technique, and it is impossible to make a good recording without it. However, it has been notoriously abused by recording engineers trying to make the recording sound "louder" on the radio, and making the CD sound identical to the radio version. This is a symptom of the general decline of hi-fi audio, and the proliferation of automotive CD players. Many recordings today have a dynamic range of only 0.5dB, which makes them sound flat and lifeless. They are also recorded at a much higher level, with considerable distortion already in the recording. If you listen to The Dark Side of the Moon, leave the amplifier knobs where they are, and pop in Californication, your ears (and possibly speakers) will pretty much explode.
If you implement/code security software with holes in it, you deserve to have them exploited.
So, if you don't have bars on your windows, you deserve to get robbed? If you park your car on the street, you deserve to have it broken into? If a girl dresses slutty, she deserves to be raped? Yeah, great argument you got there.
This is a university, their primary concern should be research, their secondary concern should be education
Exactly. Securing their network against attacks by their own students is neither research nor education.
Um, because otherwise there is a very good risk of being sued by Microsoft? If it costs them next to nothing, then why not? At the end, they will be in the same position as they started out with.
No. They are not. Generally, they have an engineering background, and are paid reasonably well. The problem is that the USPTO does not have the authority to decide that a patent is obvious. The only way to declare a patent application as obvious is to find evidence that someone else proposed doing _the exact thing in the exact way proposed in the patent_. This is the result of an appeals court ruling in the early 80s, and this is what opened the floodgates for ridiculous patents.
Not really. It smells nasty, but if done properly it's not much more harmful than burning wood. The main problem is that plastics don't burn hot enough in a typical fire. If you build a proper incinerator (with forced air and so on), plastics are as safe to burn as any other fuel.
You can be sued for libel at any time, regardless of what you do. Even if you are right, you still have to hire a lawyer and argue your point in court. Since libel cases are civil cases (in the US), it's your responsibility to prove your statements were not libelous.
Consumer Reports generally doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. They are OK if you are completely clueless about a certain type of product. However, they are often even more clueless. Just look at their ratings for cars, music players, hi-fi equipment, and so on. With cars, they often give badge-engineered versions of the same car wildly different ratings, with the Toyota version always being on top and the GM version being at the bottom for things like reliability ratings. With hi-fi equipment, they used to use sound quality tests that might have been meaningful in the 50s. With music players, they look at the feature list rather than the product.
I can almost always make a better decision by looking at the products myself and making a subjective decision rather than deriving a score from a set of 5 "objective" variables. The magazine quite obviously caters to a demographic of paranoid cheapskates who think everyone is out to rip them off, and their results generally reflect that.
First, Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. The air car article has more glaring errors than this discussion, even. Second, isothermal compression is not practically feasible. Practical compressors are almost perfectly adiabatic. This makes this approach extremely inefficient.
It takes about 9.8 Watts to move one kilogram one meter in one second.
Uh, what? Where the hell did you get this one from? Ever hear of Newton's first law? By your math, an 80kg human puts down about 1.5 horsepower just walking in a straight line.
Sure, pesky won't-go-away details, like the laws of physics. Thermodynamically, compressing air to 300 atmospheres is a very inefficient process, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Not to mention the whole energy density thing.
Where do you get your data on real-world usage of the car? It does not say anything about it on their website, and it does not appear to be technically feasible to use this car for more than a short demo. If anything, this whole enterprise appears to be an elaborate scam.
It's a lot easier and faster to repair one server than it is to reformat and clear a few thousand client machines. You think you would have done much if all of the client machines got infected with a worm?
Sounds like you need a reading comprehension class, because you are clearly retarded. Microsoft is extorting money from large corporations that use Linux, such as Deutsche Bank, AIG, and so on. Those would be the companies they could potentially sue for a lot of cash.
First, VCRs could also RECORD tapes. In fact, that was their primary mode of operation when they first appeared.
Second, the grandparent's point was that the format is marginal right now. A winner will have already emerged by the time the players come down in price.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, can you name any researchers that have left any field because of harassment from the ELF?
There have been plenty that were forced to stop their research. I seem to remember about one who pretty much could not do anything because activists were picketing his house.
Or a firefighter that has been injured?
I am sure some were injured. A firefighter getting injured in the line of duty is not the kind of thing that makes the papers. Not to mention, does one really need someone to be injured or killed to agree that their actions are extremely reckless?
Seriously, I'm not saying I support what they do
You are justifying their actions; therefore, you support what they do.
I agree that the risk they have brought to innocent people through terrorist activities is unacceptable, but the case against them is overblown, and I think it's specifically because they're a left wing group, not because they're some huge threat.
What's a bigger threat? Domestic terrorism is about as bad as it gets. Also, if you happen to be a left-winger, putting them on your side does not help your cause. Just a heads up.
I'd like to see some bare facts rather than people just blowing smoke, because it might actually convince me that they were more than 1/10000th the threat of religious fundamentalists, abortion opponents, or timothy McVeigh types. You know, the ones who actually kill people.
"The other guys are worse" is not a justification. I am pretty sure Timothy McVeigh didn't have a whole terrorist organization, and neither do the anti-abortion nutcases. The bare facts are that the ELF is a terrorist organization that plants firebombs and does all sorts of nasty things. How is the case against them overblown?
Then why don't we patent books too? or Paintings? or Musical Recordings? or Movies?
In those media, ideas are equivalent to their expression. A book can be adequately protected simply by disallowing blatant copying through copyright. An algorithm can be implemented in many different ways, so copyright laws will not protect it.
Software physically has more in common with books than inventions.
Uh, no. Books are simply ways to convey information. Software has far more in common with machinery than with literature. More specifically, any piece of software is essentially a representation of a certain finite state machine.
Furthermore, software is ALREADY covered by copyright while other inventions are not.
Many things enjoy similar protection. Integrated circuits, for example. The mask set is protected by copyright, while the circuitry itself can be protected by patents. This is done because it is trivial to create a different mask set for the same circuit, and because copyrights do not apply to circuits. The same is true of algorithms. The source and binary code is protected by copyright, while the algorithms themselves are protected by patents.
Well, they routinely harass researchers and destroy laboratories. This results in the unnecessary deaths of many humans who may have been saved through the research they disrupted. Many of those researchers leave the field because they cannot tolerate the constant harassment.
They also tend to recklessly disregard human life in their activities. How about the firefighters that have to put out the fires they start? How about the people whose lives they disrupt? Laboratories employ many people, you know.
Seriously, if there is a group of people that deserves to spend time in Guantanamo, it would be people who think it is acceptable to engage in terrorism in the name of "animal rights". ELF is a terrorist organization, plain and simple.
Duh, the point is that software patents aren't needed.
Just how do you figure that?
Designing hardware can be very expensive and unless there is some sort of patent protection for it not many would risk spending the millions of dollars doing research.
Pretty much any large software company spends millions of dollars doing research.
No. The set of irrational numbers, for example, are easily proven uncountable.
Sure, but you can't exactly patent irrational numbers. Nearly everything else IS enumerable, given the right metric. You can even enumerate every single possible patent.
But just spitting out software programs? Trivial.
Those wouldn't be programs, they would be random noise. Computer programs, by definition, have to solve some kind of problem.
And yet I presented it as series of steps. That's an algorithm. That is the POINT. Software algorithms can be reduced to mathematical equations.
Your argument is that something that is described using a formal language is automatically non-patentable? Utility patents are reserved for practical devices that are used commercially to solve problems. You can patent any novel, useful, and non-obvious arrangement of gears, for instance. However, a mechanical assembly could be reduced to a set of formal statements just as easily as a computer program.
In point of fact, bogosort isn't a comparison sort. So it actually does qualify as a separate solution.
Bogosort is certainly a comparison sort. It operates by only comparing elements with each other, which is the definition of "comparison sort". Besides, your assertion was that every algorithm that solves the same problem is equivalent. This is clearly not the case. Also, I am surprised by your implication that bogosort does not work. Mathematically, it is a perfectly legitimate sorting algorithm, and certainly works if implemented correctly.
But there are *also* many algorithms being used to sort that are variations of each other, or demonstratable transformations of an other.
So what? You are implying that since they are mathematically equivalent, they are obvious to derive from each other. Quite clearly, this is not the case.
Is there a mapping from quicksort to heapsort? I don't know. Maybe there is. If there is or one is discovered, what does that *mean*?
It would mean absolutely nothing, unless you like to argue about semantics. The fact is, inventing a good sorting algorithm is still considered an achievement. Finding a prime number isn't. Unless there is a mechanical way to generate good sorting algorithms, coming up with one is still an act of creative genius. This is what patents are supposed to reward.
For starters, software can be enumerated.
So can anything else. This is, quite honestly, the stupidest argument I have ever heard.
In a very real sense a useful software program is little more than a useful integer, like a very large prime number.
Oh, really? And you can write software to discover other software programs mechanically? Is that how they came up with the latest version of Windows, or did it involve a lot of programmers working on it?
Suppose someone had patented the algorithm for determining distance travelled while under constant acceleration from a particular starting velocity in a given time frame.
This isn't technically an algorithm, it's a simple algebraic formula.
turns out that 'algorithm' is the representation of a simple mathematical equation; worse the equation itself, is a simple calculus integral.
Which makes it obvious and thus non-patentable.
In the physical world, you are free to invent a variety of solutions to a problem. In software, there is often only one possible unique solution. Any other solution, even if developed independantly, and done completely differently might be shown to be a mathematically equivalent variation of the first.
Not sure what you mean there. If you patent one solution, you don't own the rights to all solutions, just that one. You do have to describe your patent claims in extreme detail, you know.
I could trivially take any algorithm and transform it into a different algorithm that is mathematically equivalent and then dodge your patent.
Sounds like you flunked algorithms class. There is no easy way to transform one algorithm into an equivalent one. By your logic, every searching or sorting algorithm is trivially equivalent to every other one, because they do the same damn thing. Try showing me how you can get quicksort or heapsort by algorithmically transforming, say, bogosort.
You could have the same argument about any other kind of patent, too. Not to mention, I fail to see your point. The most profitable companies are headquartered in USA, which has had software patents for the last 26 years or so. I'm not saying it's all because of the patent system, but I don't think you have much evidence to support your assertion.
I still don't understand what makes algorithms and software OBVIOUSLY not patentable. Also, stop misusing the word "mathematical". I am not a proponent of software patents; I just don't see what makes software patents so different from other patents, and I haven't seen a single logical argument against software patents that doesn't involve circular reasoning.
sounds like are talking about "compression" which is dynamics processing, but not EQ - a compressor (like any audio processor) has an input and an output - you define a threshold and every time the input gain surpasses the threshold, the gain is reduced by a specified ratio and that becomes the output - as you mentioned,
Your description of compression is not correct. If you just clipped the peaks of the signal, you would get nasty distortion. Compressors actually run the signal through an envelope detector, lowpass it with an adjustable filter (which determines the attack/release time), and then use that signal to modulate the gain of an amplifier. The compressor doesn't look at the signal, it looks at the envelope of the signal. A compressor differs from a limiter in that compressors can increase AND decrease levels, while limiters only decrease the level to prevent clipping.
Compression is a valid technique, and it is impossible to make a good recording without it. However, it has been notoriously abused by recording engineers trying to make the recording sound "louder" on the radio, and making the CD sound identical to the radio version. This is a symptom of the general decline of hi-fi audio, and the proliferation of automotive CD players. Many recordings today have a dynamic range of only 0.5dB, which makes them sound flat and lifeless. They are also recorded at a much higher level, with considerable distortion already in the recording. If you listen to The Dark Side of the Moon, leave the amplifier knobs where they are, and pop in Californication, your ears (and possibly speakers) will pretty much explode.
You don't get the point, do you? Just a hint: it's not the victim who's the guilty party.
If you implement/code security software with holes in it, you deserve to have them exploited.
So, if you don't have bars on your windows, you deserve to get robbed? If you park your car on the street, you deserve to have it broken into? If a girl dresses slutty, she deserves to be raped? Yeah, great argument you got there.
This is a university, their primary concern should be research, their secondary concern should be education
Exactly. Securing their network against attacks by their own students is neither research nor education.
Um, because otherwise there is a very good risk of being sued by Microsoft? If it costs them next to nothing, then why not? At the end, they will be in the same position as they started out with.
No. They are not. Generally, they have an engineering background, and are paid reasonably well. The problem is that the USPTO does not have the authority to decide that a patent is obvious. The only way to declare a patent application as obvious is to find evidence that someone else proposed doing _the exact thing in the exact way proposed in the patent_. This is the result of an appeals court ruling in the early 80s, and this is what opened the floodgates for ridiculous patents.
Not really. It smells nasty, but if done properly it's not much more harmful than burning wood. The main problem is that plastics don't burn hot enough in a typical fire. If you build a proper incinerator (with forced air and so on), plastics are as safe to burn as any other fuel.
You can be sued for libel at any time, regardless of what you do. Even if you are right, you still have to hire a lawyer and argue your point in court. Since libel cases are civil cases (in the US), it's your responsibility to prove your statements were not libelous.
Consumer Reports generally doesn't know what the hell they are talking about. They are OK if you are completely clueless about a certain type of product. However, they are often even more clueless. Just look at their ratings for cars, music players, hi-fi equipment, and so on. With cars, they often give badge-engineered versions of the same car wildly different ratings, with the Toyota version always being on top and the GM version being at the bottom for things like reliability ratings. With hi-fi equipment, they used to use sound quality tests that might have been meaningful in the 50s. With music players, they look at the feature list rather than the product.
I can almost always make a better decision by looking at the products myself and making a subjective decision rather than deriving a score from a set of 5 "objective" variables. The magazine quite obviously caters to a demographic of paranoid cheapskates who think everyone is out to rip them off, and their results generally reflect that.
First, Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. The air car article has more glaring errors than this discussion, even. Second, isothermal compression is not practically feasible. Practical compressors are almost perfectly adiabatic. This makes this approach extremely inefficient.
Enjoy your shitty 44.1KHz to 48KHz converter. Even the SPDIF output on the SBLive cards fucks up the audio due to sample rate conversion.
It takes about 9.8 Watts to move one kilogram one meter in one second.
Uh, what? Where the hell did you get this one from? Ever hear of Newton's first law? By your math, an 80kg human puts down about 1.5 horsepower just walking in a straight line.
Sure, pesky won't-go-away details, like the laws of physics. Thermodynamically, compressing air to 300 atmospheres is a very inefficient process, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Not to mention the whole energy density thing.
Where do you get your data on real-world usage of the car? It does not say anything about it on their website, and it does not appear to be technically feasible to use this car for more than a short demo. If anything, this whole enterprise appears to be an elaborate scam.
Try pulling a drive out of an iMac. Or a Mac Mini, for that matter. Corporate desktops my ass.
It's a lot easier and faster to repair one server than it is to reformat and clear a few thousand client machines. You think you would have done much if all of the client machines got infected with a worm?
Sounds like you need a reading comprehension class, because you are clearly retarded. Microsoft is extorting money from large corporations that use Linux, such as Deutsche Bank, AIG, and so on. Those would be the companies they could potentially sue for a lot of cash.
First, VCRs could also RECORD tapes. In fact, that was their primary mode of operation when they first appeared.
Second, the grandparent's point was that the format is marginal right now. A winner will have already emerged by the time the players come down in price.