This is where it gets tricky. Now THEY are the ones distributing
your GPL code linked to their own code, not your
reverse-engineered stand-in.
If this unfounded claim were correct then the takedown
notice would be valid and the Minecraft owners would be complete
and utter morons. Why on earth would they go to the trouble of
replacing the decompiled code with their original source code?
It makes no sense. It adds no value and it means they are now
only distributing CraftBukkit in binary form which would be an
obvious copyright violation of the LGPL code in CraftBukkit.
What is actually going on is the Minecraft owners are
distributing source and binaries of CraftBukkit which includes
decompiled code of their original Minecraft server as well as
LGPLed code. At most, Minecraft would have to LGPL
this decompiled code that they are distributing but since they
are already acting like this decompiled code is LGPLed I see no
problem here.
Reverse engineering might be illegal in the US (is it?), but it can logically
speaking impossiblly be a copyright violation.
Decomplied != reverse engineered
Anyone can decompile. It takes work to reverse engineer. If
decompiling removes all copyright obligations then copyright
on source code is worthless. I just compile then decompile
and distribute.
What I personally would generally include would be a comment
along the lines of "this struct represents the KillAllHumans
message body as per " where the struct is
defined, and then a comment along the lines of "overlay our
message structure over the buffer to extract our data". This way
even if someone wasn't familiar with the bitset notation, they
could probably infer it.
I agree, comments are for the information you add, although well
thought out variable names go a long way to making code
understandable:
/* as per some specification */
struct KillAllHumans_Body { ...
}
I'll grant you that perl is very organic, probably the best "code
as you think" language that I know of, but the vast collection of
syntax and the functional density one can achieve (and some seem
compelled to do so) makes it a pain to read if you didn't write
it.
I am not disputing that it is easy to write obfuscated Perl but
Perl style guidelines have come a very long way with
Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway and the Perl::Critic
module and the perlcritic
program. There is a lot of Perl code written by other people
that I find very easy to read. The key is to write clear code
and use good variable and function names. The sigils provide
context (and higher information density) which is what makes
good Perl code easier to read than good Java or C code. YMMV.
Gregory Chaitin, one of the founders of algorithmic information
theory once said in jest:
The LISP interpreter is about three-hundred
lines of Mathematica code. Then I redid it in C, and it's a
thousand lines of C, and the program is incomprehensible,
which means that I'm a good C programmer!
Perl does tempt you to show off by writing incomprehensible
(and perhaps incompressible) code. The style guidelines and
experience can help you avoid this temptation.
IMO, the Camel Book is informationally dense. One reading was
not nearly enough for me. I probably have read it all at least a
half dozen times. I haven't used it in years because it is
almost all on-line now and also part of the perldoc system.
[...] how do you iterate through an array of hashmap references [...]
for my $hash_ref in (@Array_of_hash_refs) { ... $hash_ref->{$key}...
}
IMO, with descriptive variable names this construct is both
easy and clear. I think it is beautiful. If you want to
access just one element then use:
$Array_of_hash_refs[$index]->{$key}
For nested data structures like this I prefer to make the top
level structure a reference so this becomes:
$Array_of_hash_refs->[$index]->{$key}
Which I think is a little more consistent.
I've taught Perl in college and I admit there are some
(perhaps many) people who will never master it. OTOH,
I once wrote a CSM system in Perl in the time the Java
folks said they would need to come up with an estimate
for how long it would take them to do it.
In C, the first time I saw the size of elements of a struct
specified (i.e. int something : 3) it threw me (and that's a
hard problem to google). [...] (though a comment woulda been
nice unknown dev!)
The first hit from Google(struct) is the
Wikipedia(struct)
entry which starts with:
A struct in the C programming language (and many derivatives) is
a complex data type declaration that defines a physically grouped
list of variables to be placed under one name in a block of
memory, allowing the different variables to be accessed via a
single pointer, or the struct declared name which returns the
same address. The struct can contain many other complex and
simple data type in an association, so is a natural organizing
type for records like the mixed data types [...]
Furthermore, I really don't think a comment should be used to
explain a language element that is clearly defined in The C
Programming Language (K&R) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis
Ritchie. A C programmer should assume the reader is familiar
with what is in K&R, otherwise the comments become a language
tutorial.
As for Perl, once I really learned Perl I found it to be
extremely intuitive. It is a very powerful and very expressive
language. All of the sigils (and related "line noise"
characters) make the code much easier to read and they make it
extremely trivial to define and understand complicated data
structures. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, got an
undergraduate degree in natural and artificial languages and then
went on to do graduate work in linguistics. The Wikipedia says:
Wall's training as a linguist is apparent in his books,
interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural
language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with
linguistic rationale.
Your comment about Perl seems to boil down to the fact that it is
different from languages you are familiar with and you never
bothered to learn it so it makes no sense to you. Your gripe
about the C struct element seems to be similar, like
everyone else in the world, you have trouble reading languages
you are not familiar with. I have the same problem with Russian
and other languages I have never learned.
BTW, have you ever noticed that nuclear missiles tend to be only
targeted at countries that use a different alphabet? Perhaps it
is only a coincidence but I think it may be related to your
problems with Perl, an oversimplification that equates foreign
with bad.
Lee Smolin's brilliant book The
Trouble with Physics discussed this issue eight years ago.
The book also includes the best introduction to string theory for
a scientifically oriented non-physicist I have ever seen.
Smolin concluded the "trouble with physics" is the problem
discussed in the article: the current system rewards small
incremental steps over creative leaps. He discusses the
risk to payoff ratios. He says the current system drums
out most truly creative people.
Good points. I think the key concept is called Wing Loading which is the ratio of mass to wing area.
For example:
Effect on stability
Wing loading also affects gust response, the degree to which
the aircraft is affected by turbulence and variations in air
density. A small wing has less area on which a gust can act,
both of which [I think they are referring to low area and
high mass] serve to smooth the ride. For high-speed, low-level
flight (such as a fast low-level bombing run in an attack
aircraft), a small, thin, highly loaded wing is preferable:
aircraft with a low wing loading are often subject to a
rough, punishing ride in this flight regime.
IOW, what matters is the ratio of the mass to the wing area and
not just the mass (weight) with no context. For example, if you
have two round rocks of roughly the same mass and tie a very
light wing to one of them (which makes the masses equal). The one
with the wing will be more affected by gusts even though the
masses are the same.
Versata chose to steal the code instead of licensing it under
the commercial license or the GPL. Just because the GPL allowed
the thieves to legally look at the code or use it unmodified does
not magically transform this into a nightmare scenario. They
are not being forced to either abandon their project or
release their own code. They could just buy the commercial
license like any responsible grownup would do.
The claim that this is a GPL nightmare scenario is just a stupid
lawyer trick to try to fool people into blaming the victim
instead of the unscrupulous bastards who stole the code and who
still refuse to pay for it even after they were caught
red-handed.
Think for a moment what would happen if the unscrupulous bastards
prevail. The implications go far beyond the GPL. Imagine you
let me see your commercial code without authorizing me to use it
or copy it, perhaps through an NDA. Then I steal your code and
put it in my products which I sell to a bunch of people. I get
caught red handed and I still refuse to pay. Instead I hire a
sleaze-ball lawyer who claims this is a nightmare scenario for
commercial software licenses and NDAs. If the UBs win here, my
lawyer's job becomes much easier because she can use this case as
precedent. ISTM a win by the UBs would create a world where
simply letting someone see your code dissolves any rights you
have to that code.
In addition to what DamnOregonian said, there is another problem
with this quest to know what is ACTUALLY happening. For almost
all people who voice this desire, "what is ACTUALLY happening"
means a model That matches their intuition based on the
non-relativistic 3+1 dimensional, classical world of their senses.
This ain't gonna happen.
Maybe you misunderstand what the models in theoretical physics
actually do. You say we will never understand the models well
enough to make accurate predictions. While this may be true of
some string theories, but that is a recent phenomenon and a strong
deviation from the past. In general physics theories must
make disprovable predictions or they are not taken seriously --
they are not physics, just metaphysics.
Whether you like it or not, the underlying theories of the
Universe do not match our classical, non-relativistic intuition.
But we can still model what happens and make predictions with
these models. And people do develop intuitions based on
these extremely non-classical models. Almost all progress in
physics and math is based on a combination of intuition and
turning a crank on complicated mathematical formalisms.
Intuition is used for leaping ahead to a possible conclusion
which is followed by the grunt work of turning the crank to make
sure the intuitive leap was correct. Intuitive leaps are not
always correct.
I understand the mathematics involved in Fourier analysis, but
that is the mathematics -- is the electron ACTUALLY doing that,
or was that simply a mathematical/logical proof that correlates
highly with what we see?
ISTM your question is meaningless. The best we have to offer
on what the electron is ACTUALLY doing is with mathematics that
correlates highly with what we see. I don't know what it
means for there to be an actuality beyond that.
Even your question/remarks on the "correct conceptual framework"
seems to miss the mark. The best we have there is the simplest
mathematics that correlates highly with what we see.
All of this mathematical physics has its root in formulas that
were derived based on data collected in labs,..
Actually, a very big part of the theory is predicting new
and unexpected results that have not been seen in the lab
yet. Another big part is when the same mathematics can
describe different phenomenon that were previously thought to
be unrelated. Lee Smolin provides an excellent description
of how this all works in his book The Trouble with Physics.
I highly recommend it.
They tested 16 developers and gave statistics with four significant
figures. I think you would need to test at least 100,000,000
developers to get such precise measurements. Who do they think
they are? Dr. Spock on Star Trek?
After Ghandi got control of India he ordered _many_ killings in
the future 'Pakistan' and 'Bangladesh'. Non violence is for when
you don't have the power.
You mean when he personally visited the riot-prone areas to
stop the massacres:
Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and
Muslim League to cooperate and attain independence under a
provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition
could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim
majority. When Jinnah called for Direct Action, on 16 August
1946, Gandhi was infuriated and personally visited the most
riot-prone areas to stop the massacres. He made strong
efforts to unite the Indian Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and
struggled for the emancipation of the "untouchables" in Hindu
society.
Godse felt that it was Gandhi's fast (announced in the second
week of January) which had forced the cabinet to reverse it's
earlier recent decision not to give the cash balance of Rs. 55
crores to Pakistan on 13 January 1948.
[...]
He also felt that Gandhi had not protested against these
atrocities being suffered in Pakistan and instead resorted to
fasts.
[...] In Godse's own words during his final deposition in the
court during the trial, "...it was not so much the Gandhian
Ahimsa teachings that were opposed to by me and my group, but
Gandhiji, while advocating his views, always showed or evinced a
bias for Muslims, prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu
Community and its interests.
If Gandhi had been ordering murders in addition to his fasts and
prayers and actions to stop them, I would imagine this would have
been added to the list of reasons given for his assassination.
That is an inherent feature of feudalism. The result
has nothing to do with justice or fairness, just who is stronger
and it makes no difference what happens to peasants caught in
the crossfire.
Are you suggesting they sue the court? Good luck with that.
ISTM the fundamental problem is that the US courts have become
the corporations bitches. Who are you going to sue and where
are you going to sue them?
The book Econned
explains how people with a far right economic agenda have been
stacking the US courts for years. The result is what you see,
basically a feudal systems where corporations are treated like
lords and everyone else is a serf.
... computers most definitely can project themselves into the
physical world. To the extent this is true, software should be
considered as patentable as any other complex items which
physically exist.
That argument is obvious nonsense. The problem is that the same
software can run on lots of different hardware. Are you
suggesting someone would need a separate patent for each possible
hardware the software could run on? I don't think so. You want
one patent to cover all possible hardware implementions. That
is clearly patenting an idea, not a device/implementation.
[...] when encryption algorithms first came out, [...] they
should have been eligible, since they took a non-trivial amount
of effort to develop and had a number of practical uses.
Those are not good reasons for granting patents. A lot of effort
goes into making many useful things but the effort and the
usefulness do not make those things patent-eligible.
For example, in the fine article
you linked to, Gene Quinn says:
Software can be described by reference to a series of physical
actions operating through gates. This type of micro level
description of what happens is going to be required, [...]
This is BS. Software that can run on different architectures
cannot be described in terms of the physical hardware
the software runs on. At best the patent that resulted would
only be valid on the specific hardware that was described.
I grant you, Microsoft (IIRC) did argue this nonsense
successfully in a courtroom once but just because they were able
to buffalo some lawyers and judges, that doesn't make it true.
It is normal for it to be "unlikely to find a tenure-track job".
It would be extremely unusual for it to be otherwise unless
students in general embarked on a policy of assassinating at
least one professor after getting their doctorate.
[...] "the Chinese Room argument has probably been the most widely
discussed philosophical argument in cognitive science to appear
in the past 25 years".
Most of the discussion consists of attempts to refute it. "The
overwhelming majority," notes BBS editor Stevan Harnad, "still
think that the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong."
[...] The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the
philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and
artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to
their fields.
Even if it were not so controversial, Searle's argument does even
come close to proving the creation of sentient machines is
impossible. We do not yet know if it is possible or not. The
GP makes a good argument that it might be possible but certainly
doesn't prove it. As many others have said before, the Chinese
room argument is not pertinent to the discussion of what is
possible with AI.
Re:But that's not all Snowden did...
on
Why Snowden Did Right
·
· Score: 5, Informative
But doing a massive document dump that included things the NSA is
*supposed* to do [...]
This was a lie when it was said about Chelsea Manning and it is a
lie when it is said about Edward Snowden. Neither one of them
did a "massive document dump" although they both had the opportunity.
Instead, they did the responsible thing and disclosed what they
found to news organizations to let the news organizations decide
what was safe to publish and what wasn't.
If the only way you can support your world-view is with outright
lies, perhaps you need to reconsider your world-view. Of course,
those who most need to reconsider almost never do.
You could get statistics by scrapping this page list
of British police officers killed in the line of duty. I
think it is roughly 71/248 or about 30%.
I would not be surprised if the GP was correct and the
percentage
of British police officers killed by guns is greater than the
percentage of US police officers. This could be due to the fact
that British
police don't have guns.
But the percentages are terribly misleading if you don't look at
the absolute numbers or per capita numbers. In the US, 500
people per year are killed by the police while in Britain only
30 people total have been killed by the police (up until
2005). Since Britain has 1/5th the population of the US, the total
(over all years) per capita number of people killed in Britain by
police is less than 1/3rd of the per capita killed in the US
every year.
Over
100 US police officers are killed in the line of duty each
year while according to the page linked to above, the number
of British police officers killed in the line of duty is 2 per
year (this century). So on a per capita basis ten times as many
US police officers get killed on duty than British police
officers. If, as the GP states, roughly 30% of US police deaths
on duty are due to firearms then it is 10 times more likely for a
person in the US to gun down a police officer than someone in
Britain.
Whatever the exact numbers are, it is clear that the amount of
police related gun violence in Britain is drastically lower than
police related gun violence in the US on a per capita basis.
If all you want to do is use Java, or implement a compatible version, the
license is good and you will have no problem.
This is completely false. Oracle changed the rules around for what it
means to be "compatible" so that only projects that Oracle likes will
be deemed compatible.
Apache is being forced into a Java Fork:
The problem's core is that first Sun, and now Oracle, won't give
Apache a chance to certify Apache's Project Harmony as being Java
Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) compliant.
Apache: I know my rights. I want my compatibility
certification!
Oracle: How can you get a certification if you can't take
the test?
Bullshit, in this they are against stupid laws trying to handwave the
economic reality because "hurrr durrr green energy!!".
You are so far off base, you are on the wrong planet. The Koch bros are
about screw the planet, screw everyone else, even screw themselves for a
little short-sighted short-term monetary profit.
There are certain harsh economic realities that unfettered markets
do not deal with correctly. Generating energy from coal has great
negative externalities. IOW, the Koch bros are not paying for the
cost of dealing with all the pollution their plants generate.
Another thing unfettered markets don't deal with correctly is
limited resources. Those resources might be fossil fuels in
the ground or the capacity of the atmosphere to hold carbon
emissions without disastrous effects on the human race.
If the wisest policy involves not using up these
resources as fast as possible then unfettered markets don't
do the right thing.
Even if we accept your unstated assumption that the subsidies
of the fossil fuel industries do not dwarf those of
renewables, it still makes sense to subsidize renewables.
Partly due to the current subsidies, the cost of renewables
is dropping. It is in the best interest of the human
race to switch over to renewables before we run out of non-renewables
and before the waste products of non-renewables make the planet
uninhabitable.
Blind faith in the infallibility of markets is part and parcel
of the greed is good mentality that continues to wreak
havoc on our economy and on our social stability. These are the
harsh economic realities the Koch bros are ignoring.
Slashdot Mirror
This is where it gets tricky. Now THEY are the ones distributing your GPL code linked to their own code, not your reverse-engineered stand-in.
If this unfounded claim were correct then the takedown notice would be valid and the Minecraft owners would be complete and utter morons. Why on earth would they go to the trouble of replacing the decompiled code with their original source code? It makes no sense. It adds no value and it means they are now only distributing CraftBukkit in binary form which would be an obvious copyright violation of the LGPL code in CraftBukkit.
What is actually going on is the Minecraft owners are distributing source and binaries of CraftBukkit which includes decompiled code of their original Minecraft server as well as LGPLed code. At most, Minecraft would have to LGPL this decompiled code that they are distributing but since they are already acting like this decompiled code is LGPLed I see no problem here.
Reverse engineering might be illegal in the US (is it?), but it can logically speaking impossiblly be a copyright violation.
Decomplied != reverse engineered
Anyone can decompile. It takes work to reverse engineer. If decompiling removes all copyright obligations then copyright on source code is worthless. I just compile then decompile and distribute.
What I personally would generally include would be a comment along the lines of "this struct represents the KillAllHumans message body as per " where the struct is defined, and then a comment along the lines of "overlay our message structure over the buffer to extract our data". This way even if someone wasn't familiar with the bitset notation, they could probably infer it.
I agree, comments are for the information you add, although well thought out variable names go a long way to making code understandable:
struct KillAllHumans_Body {
}
I'll grant you that perl is very organic, probably the best "code as you think" language that I know of, but the vast collection of syntax and the functional density one can achieve (and some seem compelled to do so) makes it a pain to read if you didn't write it.
I am not disputing that it is easy to write obfuscated Perl but Perl style guidelines have come a very long way with Perl Best Practices by Damian Conway and the Perl::Critic module and the perlcritic program. There is a lot of Perl code written by other people that I find very easy to read. The key is to write clear code and use good variable and function names. The sigils provide context (and higher information density) which is what makes good Perl code easier to read than good Java or C code. YMMV.
Gregory Chaitin, one of the founders of algorithmic information theory once said in jest:
The LISP interpreter is about three-hundred lines of Mathematica code. Then I redid it in C, and it's a thousand lines of C, and the program is incomprehensible, which means that I'm a good C programmer!
Perl does tempt you to show off by writing incomprehensible (and perhaps incompressible) code. The style guidelines and experience can help you avoid this temptation.
IMO, the Camel Book is informationally dense. One reading was not nearly enough for me. I probably have read it all at least a half dozen times. I haven't used it in years because it is almost all on-line now and also part of the perldoc system.
[...] how do you iterate through an array of hashmap references [...]
for my $hash_ref in (@Array_of_hash_refs) {
... $hash_ref->{$key} ...
}
IMO, with descriptive variable names this construct is both easy and clear. I think it is beautiful. If you want to access just one element then use:
$Array_of_hash_refs[$index]->{$key}
For nested data structures like this I prefer to make the top level structure a reference so this becomes:
$Array_of_hash_refs->[$index]->{$key}
Which I think is a little more consistent.
I've taught Perl in college and I admit there are some (perhaps many) people who will never master it. OTOH, I once wrote a CSM system in Perl in the time the Java folks said they would need to come up with an estimate for how long it would take them to do it.
In C, the first time I saw the size of elements of a struct specified (i.e. int something : 3) it threw me (and that's a hard problem to google). [...] (though a comment woulda been nice unknown dev!)
The first hit from Google(struct) is the Wikipedia(struct) entry which starts with:
A struct in the C programming language (and many derivatives) is a complex data type declaration that defines a physically grouped list of variables to be placed under one name in a block of memory, allowing the different variables to be accessed via a single pointer, or the struct declared name which returns the same address. The struct can contain many other complex and simple data type in an association, so is a natural organizing type for records like the mixed data types [...]
Furthermore, I really don't think a comment should be used to explain a language element that is clearly defined in The C Programming Language (K&R) by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. A C programmer should assume the reader is familiar with what is in K&R, otherwise the comments become a language tutorial.
As for Perl, once I really learned Perl I found it to be extremely intuitive. It is a very powerful and very expressive language. All of the sigils (and related "line noise" characters) make the code much easier to read and they make it extremely trivial to define and understand complicated data structures. Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, got an undergraduate degree in natural and artificial languages and then went on to do graduate work in linguistics. The Wikipedia says:
Wall's training as a linguist is apparent in his books, interviews, and lectures. He often compares Perl to a natural language and explains his decisions in Perl's design with linguistic rationale.
Your comment about Perl seems to boil down to the fact that it is different from languages you are familiar with and you never bothered to learn it so it makes no sense to you. Your gripe about the C struct element seems to be similar, like everyone else in the world, you have trouble reading languages you are not familiar with. I have the same problem with Russian and other languages I have never learned.
BTW, have you ever noticed that nuclear missiles tend to be only targeted at countries that use a different alphabet? Perhaps it is only a coincidence but I think it may be related to your problems with Perl, an oversimplification that equates foreign with bad.
Lee Smolin's brilliant book The Trouble with Physics discussed this issue eight years ago. The book also includes the best introduction to string theory for a scientifically oriented non-physicist I have ever seen.
Smolin concluded the "trouble with physics" is the problem discussed in the article: the current system rewards small incremental steps over creative leaps. He discusses the risk to payoff ratios. He says the current system drums out most truly creative people.
Good points. I think the key concept is called Wing Loading which is the ratio of mass to wing area. For example:
Effect on stability
Wing loading also affects gust response, the degree to which the aircraft is affected by turbulence and variations in air density. A small wing has less area on which a gust can act, both of which [I think they are referring to low area and high mass] serve to smooth the ride. For high-speed, low-level flight (such as a fast low-level bombing run in an attack aircraft), a small, thin, highly loaded wing is preferable: aircraft with a low wing loading are often subject to a rough, punishing ride in this flight regime.
IOW, what matters is the ratio of the mass to the wing area and not just the mass (weight) with no context. For example, if you have two round rocks of roughly the same mass and tie a very light wing to one of them (which makes the masses equal). The one with the wing will be more affected by gusts even though the masses are the same.
Versata chose to steal the code instead of licensing it under the commercial license or the GPL. Just because the GPL allowed the thieves to legally look at the code or use it unmodified does not magically transform this into a nightmare scenario. They are not being forced to either abandon their project or release their own code. They could just buy the commercial license like any responsible grownup would do.
The claim that this is a GPL nightmare scenario is just a stupid lawyer trick to try to fool people into blaming the victim instead of the unscrupulous bastards who stole the code and who still refuse to pay for it even after they were caught red-handed.
Think for a moment what would happen if the unscrupulous bastards prevail. The implications go far beyond the GPL. Imagine you let me see your commercial code without authorizing me to use it or copy it, perhaps through an NDA. Then I steal your code and put it in my products which I sell to a bunch of people. I get caught red handed and I still refuse to pay. Instead I hire a sleaze-ball lawyer who claims this is a nightmare scenario for commercial software licenses and NDAs. If the UBs win here, my lawyer's job becomes much easier because she can use this case as precedent. ISTM a win by the UBs would create a world where simply letting someone see your code dissolves any rights you have to that code.
In addition to what DamnOregonian said, there is another problem with this quest to know what is ACTUALLY happening. For almost all people who voice this desire, "what is ACTUALLY happening" means a model That matches their intuition based on the non-relativistic 3+1 dimensional, classical world of their senses. This ain't gonna happen.
Maybe you misunderstand what the models in theoretical physics actually do. You say we will never understand the models well enough to make accurate predictions. While this may be true of some string theories, but that is a recent phenomenon and a strong deviation from the past. In general physics theories must make disprovable predictions or they are not taken seriously -- they are not physics, just metaphysics.
Whether you like it or not, the underlying theories of the Universe do not match our classical, non-relativistic intuition. But we can still model what happens and make predictions with these models. And people do develop intuitions based on these extremely non-classical models. Almost all progress in physics and math is based on a combination of intuition and turning a crank on complicated mathematical formalisms. Intuition is used for leaping ahead to a possible conclusion which is followed by the grunt work of turning the crank to make sure the intuitive leap was correct. Intuitive leaps are not always correct.
I understand the mathematics involved in Fourier analysis, but that is the mathematics -- is the electron ACTUALLY doing that, or was that simply a mathematical/logical proof that correlates highly with what we see?
ISTM your question is meaningless. The best we have to offer on what the electron is ACTUALLY doing is with mathematics that correlates highly with what we see. I don't know what it means for there to be an actuality beyond that.
Even your question/remarks on the "correct conceptual framework" seems to miss the mark. The best we have there is the simplest mathematics that correlates highly with what we see.
All of this mathematical physics has its root in formulas that were derived based on data collected in labs, ..
Actually, a very big part of the theory is predicting new and unexpected results that have not been seen in the lab yet. Another big part is when the same mathematics can describe different phenomenon that were previously thought to be unrelated. Lee Smolin provides an excellent description of how this all works in his book The Trouble with Physics. I highly recommend it.
They tested 16 developers and gave statistics with four significant figures. I think you would need to test at least 100,000,000 developers to get such precise measurements. Who do they think they are? Dr. Spock on Star Trek?
In a society that's so fucked up, people will inevitably turn to radical ideologies that blame all their troubles on external enemies.
So true.
After Ghandi got control of India he ordered _many_ killings in the future 'Pakistan' and 'Bangladesh'. Non violence is for when you don't have the power.
You mean when he personally visited the riot-prone areas to stop the massacres:
Gandhi suggested an agreement which required the Congress and Muslim League to cooperate and attain independence under a provisional government, thereafter, the question of partition could be resolved by a plebiscite in the districts with a Muslim majority. When Jinnah called for Direct Action, on 16 August 1946, Gandhi was infuriated and personally visited the most riot-prone areas to stop the massacres. He made strong efforts to unite the Indian Hindus, Muslims, and Christians and struggled for the emancipation of the "untouchables" in Hindu society.
Read the reasons given for his assassination:
Godse felt that it was Gandhi's fast (announced in the second week of January) which had forced the cabinet to reverse it's earlier recent decision not to give the cash balance of Rs. 55 crores to Pakistan on 13 January 1948.
[...] He also felt that Gandhi had not protested against these atrocities being suffered in Pakistan and instead resorted to fasts.
[...] In Godse's own words during his final deposition in the court during the trial, "...it was not so much the Gandhian Ahimsa teachings that were opposed to by me and my group, but Gandhiji, while advocating his views, always showed or evinced a bias for Muslims, prejudicial and detrimental to the Hindu Community and its interests.
If Gandhi had been ordering murders in addition to his fasts and prayers and actions to stop them, I would imagine this would have been added to the list of reasons given for his assassination.
but it's a company against company now.
That is an inherent feature of feudalism. The result has nothing to do with justice or fairness, just who is stronger and it makes no difference what happens to peasants caught in the crossfire.
Lawsuits should be flying in all directions.
Are you suggesting they sue the court? Good luck with that. ISTM the fundamental problem is that the US courts have become the corporations bitches. Who are you going to sue and where are you going to sue them?
The book Econned explains how people with a far right economic agenda have been stacking the US courts for years. The result is what you see, basically a feudal systems where corporations are treated like lords and everyone else is a serf.
What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.
... computers most definitely can project themselves into the physical world. To the extent this is true, software should be considered as patentable as any other complex items which physically exist.
That argument is obvious nonsense. The problem is that the same software can run on lots of different hardware. Are you suggesting someone would need a separate patent for each possible hardware the software could run on? I don't think so. You want one patent to cover all possible hardware implementions. That is clearly patenting an idea, not a device/implementation.
[...] when encryption algorithms first came out, [...] they should have been eligible, since they took a non-trivial amount of effort to develop and had a number of practical uses.
Those are not good reasons for granting patents. A lot of effort goes into making many useful things but the effort and the usefulness do not make those things patent-eligible.
For example, in the fine article you linked to, Gene Quinn says:
Software can be described by reference to a series of physical actions operating through gates. This type of micro level description of what happens is going to be required, [...]
This is BS. Software that can run on different architectures cannot be described in terms of the physical hardware the software runs on. At best the patent that resulted would only be valid on the specific hardware that was described. I grant you, Microsoft (IIRC) did argue this nonsense successfully in a courtroom once but just because they were able to buffalo some lawyers and judges, that doesn't make it true.
Here you go
Gene Quinn? Yes, an excellent reminder of how much we need PJ to cut through the BS for us. Thank you.
We need someone who is familiar with the law to explain this to us techies. PJ we need you!
It is normal for it to be "unlikely to find a tenure-track job". It would be extremely unusual for it to be otherwise unless students in general embarked on a policy of assassinating at least one professor after getting their doctorate.
From the article you linked to:
[...] "the Chinese Room argument has probably been the most widely discussed philosophical argument in cognitive science to appear in the past 25 years".
Most of the discussion consists of attempts to refute it. "The overwhelming majority," notes BBS editor Stevan Harnad, "still think that the Chinese Room Argument is dead wrong."
[...] The Chinese room argument is primarily an argument in the philosophy of mind, and both major computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers consider it irrelevant to their fields.
Even if it were not so controversial, Searle's argument does even come close to proving the creation of sentient machines is impossible. We do not yet know if it is possible or not. The GP makes a good argument that it might be possible but certainly doesn't prove it. As many others have said before, the Chinese room argument is not pertinent to the discussion of what is possible with AI.
But doing a massive document dump that included things the NSA is *supposed* to do [...]
This was a lie when it was said about Chelsea Manning and it is a lie when it is said about Edward Snowden. Neither one of them did a "massive document dump" although they both had the opportunity. Instead, they did the responsible thing and disclosed what they found to news organizations to let the news organizations decide what was safe to publish and what wasn't.
If the only way you can support your world-view is with outright lies, perhaps you need to reconsider your world-view. Of course, those who most need to reconsider almost never do.
You could get statistics by scrapping this page list of British police officers killed in the line of duty. I think it is roughly 71/248 or about 30%. I would not be surprised if the GP was correct and the percentage of British police officers killed by guns is greater than the percentage of US police officers. This could be due to the fact that British police don't have guns.
But the percentages are terribly misleading if you don't look at the absolute numbers or per capita numbers. In the US, 500 people per year are killed by the police while in Britain only 30 people total have been killed by the police (up until 2005). Since Britain has 1/5th the population of the US, the total (over all years) per capita number of people killed in Britain by police is less than 1/3rd of the per capita killed in the US every year.
Over 100 US police officers are killed in the line of duty each year while according to the page linked to above, the number of British police officers killed in the line of duty is 2 per year (this century). So on a per capita basis ten times as many US police officers get killed on duty than British police officers. If, as the GP states, roughly 30% of US police deaths on duty are due to firearms then it is 10 times more likely for a person in the US to gun down a police officer than someone in Britain.
Whatever the exact numbers are, it is clear that the amount of police related gun violence in Britain is drastically lower than police related gun violence in the US on a per capita basis.
If all you want to do is use Java, or implement a compatible version, the license is good and you will have no problem.
This is completely false. Oracle changed the rules around for what it means to be "compatible" so that only projects that Oracle likes will be deemed compatible. Apache is being forced into a Java Fork:
The problem's core is that first Sun, and now Oracle, won't give Apache a chance to certify Apache's Project Harmony as being Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) compliant.
Apache: I know my rights. I want my compatibility certification!
Oracle: How can you get a certification if you can't take the test?
Bullshit, in this they are against stupid laws trying to handwave the economic reality because "hurrr durrr green energy!!".
You are so far off base, you are on the wrong planet. The Koch bros are about screw the planet, screw everyone else, even screw themselves for a little short-sighted short-term monetary profit.
There are certain harsh economic realities that unfettered markets do not deal with correctly. Generating energy from coal has great negative externalities. IOW, the Koch bros are not paying for the cost of dealing with all the pollution their plants generate.
Another thing unfettered markets don't deal with correctly is limited resources. Those resources might be fossil fuels in the ground or the capacity of the atmosphere to hold carbon emissions without disastrous effects on the human race. If the wisest policy involves not using up these resources as fast as possible then unfettered markets don't do the right thing.
Even if we accept your unstated assumption that the subsidies of the fossil fuel industries do not dwarf those of renewables, it still makes sense to subsidize renewables. Partly due to the current subsidies, the cost of renewables is dropping. It is in the best interest of the human race to switch over to renewables before we run out of non-renewables and before the waste products of non-renewables make the planet uninhabitable.
Blind faith in the infallibility of markets is part and parcel of the greed is good mentality that continues to wreak havoc on our economy and on our social stability. These are the harsh economic realities the Koch bros are ignoring.