I agree, but only if we restrict the results of the study to talking about something like "popular bittorrent trackers" rather than "bittorrent" full stop. If you're talking about bittorrent as a technology, you really have to include all the various things distributed from 100%-legal-files-only trackers (which I doubt they included in their study), like this one.
Is there any precedent on this in the proprietary-software world? It seems like there must have been some company somewhere that's tried to argue that third-party plugins using their "internal APIs" without permission was illegal. Has anything like that ever gone to court?
Narrowing the definition of derivative work would be contrary to the GPL's goals, though. Its goal is basically to require anyone that uses the GPL'd code for anything, to also GPL the code that uses it, to the extent that copyright law allows the GPL to require this.
GNU does have a license that deliberately narrows the definition of "derivative work" significantly, the LGPL. Authors can choose to use it rather than the GPL if that's what they prefer.
I don't think there's a one-dimensional score of "fun" that's the "only" thing that matters. Different media have different mixtures of qualities: they provoke thought, entertain, addict, inspire, horrify, bore, explain, question, etc. And I think it makes some sense to look at why people are drawn to different media, and what we're getting out of them. What's compelling about reality TV, for example, and how is that similar or different to what's compelling about Futurama, or about Seinfeld, or about 24? Are there interesting angles to explore, things maybe people would be better off avoiding, etc.?
Using some pure "fun" metric is like judging films by their box-office totals or exit surveys or something, which is a pretty boring one-dimensional way to do it.
If you have relatively little but highly structured data, running it through a general search engine like Lucene or Sphinx doesn't seem like the ideal solution, because it doesn't make it easy to do structured queries ("give me all articles in Magazine including 'foo' in the title, published between 1950 and 1966").
A bibliography indexer would probably be a better choice. Two good free ones are Refbase or Aigaion. Both are targeted mainly at databases of scientific literature, so might need some tweaking for this purpose, though.
Technically a bit different issue than the way Moore phrased it, but conceptually could have some related effects. Moore was predicting an increase in transistor density of integrated circuits (ICs), while this work scales down the size of interconnects between separate ICs. That could have the same effect of increasing overall transistor density for an electronic component, but is a somewhat different than increasing transistor density within a single IC. For example, it won't allow CPUs to pack transistors more densely, because CPUs are already a single IC.
I hate it when news articles don't either link to the original scientific paper, or at the very least tell me what issue of what journal it was published in! Given the state of journalism-about-scientific-research, I like checking up on the original paper, either for more details, or for a better "related work" section (often the actual papers will be much more honest than the press releases about which parts of the work are new and which parts aren't, and how it relates to existing work).
It's really hard to get that perfect, though. If you're actually doing the same work, it's harder to accidentally leak information than if you're doing less work but trying to fake the equivalent amount. In the case of using a sleep, you're vulnerable to the particular scheduling implementation; it's pretty hard to make it so there's no visible timing differences between the sleep-using and non-sleep-using code paths.
There are cases where it's worth the effort, but I don't think strcmp() is one of them. When an attacker can gain information by detecting that you took different code paths, it's worth being somewhat conservative in unnecessarily introducing branching paths.
I don't think it's quite that. Even the summary admitted that "the DSM item refers to something completely different".
I'm not quite sure what the cause of it is, but there is an odd prevalence in mainly white, upper-class, liberal-ish areas of strangely heightened food allergies, with many people being supposedly allergic to two or three things that would otherwise be quite rarely found at all, much less together. Maybe there's a scientific reason that there are so many more food allergies among upper-class white residents of San Francisco than among lower-middle-class black residents of Atlanta, but it's at least possible that the reason is psychosomatic.
That's never really been settled, but to the extent courts have considered it, some have suggested that the First Amendment does place some outer limits on what Congress could ban under the copyright clause. If, for example, Congress attempted to ban all fair use, even up to illegalizing the quotation of short snippets from political speeches, there's a chance that the Supreme Court would carve out a constitutional fair-use requirement.
Yeah, I'd say that at least in the American system (the European system is somewhat different), a typical PhD takes 5-6 years, and is segmented something like: 2-3 years of figuring out wtf is going on, and 3-4 years of doing a thesis.
My guess is they haven't. A warning label might deter people from entering dangerous areas, or at least think twice or take precautions, if it isn't on everything. When every damn public or commercial building has a Prop 65 warning on it, it becomes semantically equivalent to "Warning: you are entering a building".
In practice, everyone does anyway. I don't know of any country where the people who use the internet haven't already developed at least some informal way of writing in the Latin alphabet, at least for short snippets like addresses. Many seem to prefer it even when alternatives are available--- for example, Facebook supports UTF-8 status updates, but my Greek cousins use Greek transliterated into ASCII more often than they use the Greek alphabet.
While I don't like to raise too much sturm und drang about it, as a native English speaker I must still take some affront at the chutzpah with which these dirty foreigners waltz into our tongue, thinking they have carte blanche to sully our language.
Well, there needs to always be some vaguely disaster-ish background story to report on when other stuff runs low. The Afghanistan war, frankly, just ain't cutting it. Oh, we're still in Afghanistan, great. And the economy/joblessness/whatever is getting old. At least the oil is still somewhat fresh!
There are some attempts to mitigate the problem, though you're right that it can be one. Some registrars are limiting the characters that can appear in their domain, and there's a push to make that more widespread. One approach is to limit to "local" scripts only, so e.g. Cyrillic or Latin in.ru, but no Telegu or CJK in.ru. That greatly limits the number of clashing pairs compared to allowing all of Unicode. Some registers also have policies on not permitting certain known clashes, such as allowing two domains to be registered that are identical, except for one having a Latin 'a' where the other has a Cyrillic 'a' (which look identical in most fonts).
Firefox and Opera will only display the internationalized Unicode name for TLDs that are whitelisted as having a "safe" policy on the subject, and will display the punycode for other domains. Here is Mozilla's current policy.
Yeah, in that era "citizen" had strong republican (i.e. anti-monarchist) connotations, which would be made even clearer in the revolution a few years later in France, where "Citizen so-and-so" became the common mode of greeting (to emphasize that all titles were abolished, replaced by a single title, "Citizen", that everyone possessed), and was featured prominently in such texts as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
I don't believe it had quite as radical a connotation in 1776, but it was still a clear shift from "grievances of subjects who feel their king is unjust" (which was the sentiment of some of the colonists) to a more explicit declaration of anti-monarchism.
To be fair, they do attempt to address that, though they do so only in the average case. Actually a big part of the paper is exactly that: an attempt "to assess the links between purchase location and the isotopic composition of beverages" and given that purchase location may not be the same as bottling location, whether or not "these beverages could have a confounding impact on the overall isotopic composition of a consumer’s fluid intake".
The problem is that one of their four assumptions is that the script for the undeciphered language maps characters 1-to-1 onto an existing language's script in a way such that letter frequencies are similar, which is something people have already looked for and which appears not to be the case with the Voynich manuscript.
Hmm, somehow I misread that several times in the problem statement. I could've sworn it said, "he has two children, the first of which was a boy born on a Tuesday". But then clearly the problem would be much less paradoxical, so makes more sense now.
Shouldn't ordering matter in the first part? You're told that the first child was a boy, so of the four ordered possibilities (boy, boy), (boy, girl), (girl, boy), (girl, girl), you can eliminate both (girl, boy) and (girl, girl).
Sounds vaguely similar to the same failure-of-intuition behind the Monty Hall problem: you fix several quantities, then you reveal one of them, and then ask for a guess for the probabilities of the remaining, unrevealed quantities. Since the unrevealed quantities are completely independent of the revealed ones, it seems like the revealed information shouldn't matter, and your guess should still be that they're uniformly randomly distributed. But, it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, but only if we restrict the results of the study to talking about something like "popular bittorrent trackers" rather than "bittorrent" full stop. If you're talking about bittorrent as a technology, you really have to include all the various things distributed from 100%-legal-files-only trackers (which I doubt they included in their study), like this one.
Is there any precedent on this in the proprietary-software world? It seems like there must have been some company somewhere that's tried to argue that third-party plugins using their "internal APIs" without permission was illegal. Has anything like that ever gone to court?
Narrowing the definition of derivative work would be contrary to the GPL's goals, though. Its goal is basically to require anyone that uses the GPL'd code for anything, to also GPL the code that uses it, to the extent that copyright law allows the GPL to require this.
GNU does have a license that deliberately narrows the definition of "derivative work" significantly, the LGPL. Authors can choose to use it rather than the GPL if that's what they prefer.
I don't think there's a one-dimensional score of "fun" that's the "only" thing that matters. Different media have different mixtures of qualities: they provoke thought, entertain, addict, inspire, horrify, bore, explain, question, etc. And I think it makes some sense to look at why people are drawn to different media, and what we're getting out of them. What's compelling about reality TV, for example, and how is that similar or different to what's compelling about Futurama, or about Seinfeld, or about 24? Are there interesting angles to explore, things maybe people would be better off avoiding, etc.?
Using some pure "fun" metric is like judging films by their box-office totals or exit surveys or something, which is a pretty boring one-dimensional way to do it.
As someone who doesn't buy these services, I'm quite happy if they overcharge for them in order to subsidize cheaper prices for my tickets.
If you have relatively little but highly structured data, running it through a general search engine like Lucene or Sphinx doesn't seem like the ideal solution, because it doesn't make it easy to do structured queries ("give me all articles in Magazine including 'foo' in the title, published between 1950 and 1966").
A bibliography indexer would probably be a better choice. Two good free ones are Refbase or Aigaion. Both are targeted mainly at databases of scientific literature, so might need some tweaking for this purpose, though.
Technically a bit different issue than the way Moore phrased it, but conceptually could have some related effects. Moore was predicting an increase in transistor density of integrated circuits (ICs), while this work scales down the size of interconnects between separate ICs. That could have the same effect of increasing overall transistor density for an electronic component, but is a somewhat different than increasing transistor density within a single IC. For example, it won't allow CPUs to pack transistors more densely, because CPUs are already a single IC.
I hate it when news articles don't either link to the original scientific paper, or at the very least tell me what issue of what journal it was published in! Given the state of journalism-about-scientific-research, I like checking up on the original paper, either for more details, or for a better "related work" section (often the actual papers will be much more honest than the press releases about which parts of the work are new and which parts aren't, and how it relates to existing work).
Anyway, it's this:
Jie Hu and Min-Feng Yu (2010). Meniscus-Confined Three-Dimensional Electrodeposition for Direct Writing of Wire Bonds. Science 329(5989): 313-316.
It's really hard to get that perfect, though. If you're actually doing the same work, it's harder to accidentally leak information than if you're doing less work but trying to fake the equivalent amount. In the case of using a sleep, you're vulnerable to the particular scheduling implementation; it's pretty hard to make it so there's no visible timing differences between the sleep-using and non-sleep-using code paths.
There are cases where it's worth the effort, but I don't think strcmp() is one of them. When an attacker can gain information by detecting that you took different code paths, it's worth being somewhat conservative in unnecessarily introducing branching paths.
Too bad, because if it had been published in the Journal of Machine Learning Research instead, people might actually be able to read it.
I don't think it's quite that. Even the summary admitted that "the DSM item refers to something completely different".
I'm not quite sure what the cause of it is, but there is an odd prevalence in mainly white, upper-class, liberal-ish areas of strangely heightened food allergies, with many people being supposedly allergic to two or three things that would otherwise be quite rarely found at all, much less together. Maybe there's a scientific reason that there are so many more food allergies among upper-class white residents of San Francisco than among lower-middle-class black residents of Atlanta, but it's at least possible that the reason is psychosomatic.
That's never really been settled, but to the extent courts have considered it, some have suggested that the First Amendment does place some outer limits on what Congress could ban under the copyright clause. If, for example, Congress attempted to ban all fair use, even up to illegalizing the quotation of short snippets from political speeches, there's a chance that the Supreme Court would carve out a constitutional fair-use requirement.
Yeah, I'd say that at least in the American system (the European system is somewhat different), a typical PhD takes 5-6 years, and is segmented something like: 2-3 years of figuring out wtf is going on, and 3-4 years of doing a thesis.
My guess is they haven't. A warning label might deter people from entering dangerous areas, or at least think twice or take precautions, if it isn't on everything. When every damn public or commercial building has a Prop 65 warning on it, it becomes semantically equivalent to "Warning: you are entering a building".
In practice, everyone does anyway. I don't know of any country where the people who use the internet haven't already developed at least some informal way of writing in the Latin alphabet, at least for short snippets like addresses. Many seem to prefer it even when alternatives are available--- for example, Facebook supports UTF-8 status updates, but my Greek cousins use Greek transliterated into ASCII more often than they use the Greek alphabet.
While I don't like to raise too much sturm und drang about it, as a native English speaker I must still take some affront at the chutzpah with which these dirty foreigners waltz into our tongue, thinking they have carte blanche to sully our language.
Some have turned out not all that catastrophically, though.
Well, there needs to always be some vaguely disaster-ish background story to report on when other stuff runs low. The Afghanistan war, frankly, just ain't cutting it. Oh, we're still in Afghanistan, great. And the economy/joblessness/whatever is getting old. At least the oil is still somewhat fresh!
There are some attempts to mitigate the problem, though you're right that it can be one. Some registrars are limiting the characters that can appear in their domain, and there's a push to make that more widespread. One approach is to limit to "local" scripts only, so e.g. Cyrillic or Latin in .ru, but no Telegu or CJK in .ru. That greatly limits the number of clashing pairs compared to allowing all of Unicode. Some registers also have policies on not permitting certain known clashes, such as allowing two domains to be registered that are identical, except for one having a Latin 'a' where the other has a Cyrillic 'a' (which look identical in most fonts).
Firefox and Opera will only display the internationalized Unicode name for TLDs that are whitelisted as having a "safe" policy on the subject, and will display the punycode for other domains. Here is Mozilla's current policy.
Yeah, in that era "citizen" had strong republican (i.e. anti-monarchist) connotations, which would be made even clearer in the revolution a few years later in France, where "Citizen so-and-so" became the common mode of greeting (to emphasize that all titles were abolished, replaced by a single title, "Citizen", that everyone possessed), and was featured prominently in such texts as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
I don't believe it had quite as radical a connotation in 1776, but it was still a clear shift from "grievances of subjects who feel their king is unjust" (which was the sentiment of some of the colonists) to a more explicit declaration of anti-monarchism.
To be fair, they do attempt to address that, though they do so only in the average case. Actually a big part of the paper is exactly that: an attempt "to assess the links between purchase location and the isotopic composition of beverages" and given that purchase location may not be the same as bottling location, whether or not "these beverages could have a confounding impact on the overall isotopic composition of a consumer’s fluid intake".
The problem is that one of their four assumptions is that the script for the undeciphered language maps characters 1-to-1 onto an existing language's script in a way such that letter frequencies are similar, which is something people have already looked for and which appears not to be the case with the Voynich manuscript.
Hmm, somehow I misread that several times in the problem statement. I could've sworn it said, "he has two children, the first of which was a boy born on a Tuesday". But then clearly the problem would be much less paradoxical, so makes more sense now.
Shouldn't ordering matter in the first part? You're told that the first child was a boy, so of the four ordered possibilities (boy, boy), (boy, girl), (girl, boy), (girl, girl), you can eliminate both (girl, boy) and (girl, girl).
Sounds vaguely similar to the same failure-of-intuition behind the Monty Hall problem: you fix several quantities, then you reveal one of them, and then ask for a guess for the probabilities of the remaining, unrevealed quantities. Since the unrevealed quantities are completely independent of the revealed ones, it seems like the revealed information shouldn't matter, and your guess should still be that they're uniformly randomly distributed. But, it isn't.