Lest anyone thing you need to be a well-connected researcher to "obtain access to Wikipedia edit data", it's actually all public. Although you will need 100GB+ of hard drive space, and some well thought out algorithms, to parse the full-history dumps that contain every revision of every page.
I've been using Debian full-time as my desktop since around 2001 (which admittedly doesn't make me one of the oldest-school users). I started noticing a big decrease in the amount of HOWTO-googling and config-editing I had to do somewhere around 2005. While presumably many improvements were made between 2000 and 2005, there were still a lot of things I had to do in 2004-2005 that I recall thinking would make it 100% impossible to get my non-tech-savvy friends and relatives to switch.
For example, when I bought a widescreen LCD in early 2005, I had to edit XFree86.conf to manually add a modeline to get it to work at the right resolution. And wireless around 2004-05 was a mess requiring a bunch of futzing with modules and utility scripts on the command line (I actually had a PCI wireless card get permanently borked by some sort of mishap with loading firmware at runtime). Since then I haven't noticed a whole lot of issues.
I personally mostly walk, but I'm actually somewhat unsure of the effects on greenhouse gases (I do it mostly for health). Last I looked up some numbers, biking/walking produces about as many greenhouse gases as driving does when the calories come from an average American diet, due to the high greenhouse-gas output of meat farms. To be a net win, the energy you're putting into your bike (in the form of food calories) has to be cleaner than petrol.
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
Your argument sounds like a pretty good case for piracy being damaging to free alternatives (like open-source software), but possibly a case for it being beneficial to large, established purveyors of expensive software, like Adobe and Microsoft. It seems like, if piracy were 100% stamped out tomorrow, it would lead to a significant loss of for-cost-software's market share.
I could be misreading, but I think he's using the IP of the server that actually connects to his server and attempts to deliver mail, not the IP reported in the mail headers.
In the NDA scenario, the only person liable is the person who signed the NDA and then violated it. I think it's perfectly legitimate for people to choose to voluntarily enter into contracts, and for there to be legal proceedings if they violate those contracts.
On the other hand, if I go download some music off the internet, I'm not violating any contract with the artist, because I never signed one. Why the music is on the internet in the first place, I don't know. Maybe the artist put it there, or maybe someone violated their non-disclosure agreement by putting it there. That's between the artist and that person, if so, and has nothing to do with the person downloading the music.
It's sort of like trade secrets and classified information. When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, someone was committing a crime by disclosing classified information. But the Times was not committing a crime by receiving and republishing it.
I agree the vast majority of email sent to "known bad" addresses will be sent by spambots, and that'll probably be the exclusive source for never-published addresses. But in the case where they publish these known-bad addresses on a page that they hope spambots will index, it seems blacklisting based on them is vulnerable to abuse. If I want to get some server blacklisted, and I have any sort of access to send mail from it, I can just send mail to the known-bad addresses. For example, good way for mischievous students to cause mayhem by getting their university's mail servers blacklisted.
The only thing Colgate has the right to, imo, is the physical product in their warehouses. I cannot go steal it, because then they would no longer have it. Similarly, IKEA has a right to keep its shelves, and I can't go take them. But if I can get an IKEA-lookalike shelf without buying one from IKEA (say, I buy some plywood and recreate their design), they don't really have a right to stop me. Artists also have the right to all property they own; I cannot go steal their LPs, or their couches, or their tour bus. However, they don't have some abstract "property" right inhering in all copies of items.
Of course, they can keep their music private if they don't want anyone to have it. If they only want some people to have it, they can give it to those people under a non-disclosure clause, and sue them if they disclose it to other people.
This is entirely unrelated to the inane lawn-mowing example. If you could ask me to mow your lawn and your lawn would get mowed without me showing up at your house or doing any additional work, of course that would be no imposition on me. The only thing wrong with asking me to mow your lawn unpaid is that it would force me to come over to your house and mow your lawn. Since me getting an artist's music for free does not require them to come over to my house and record a new copy of it, it's not a similar imposition on their time.
If I commissioned a symphony from a guy, he went off and spent 6 months writing it, and then I refused to pay him, sure, he'd have a legitimate beef, and that would be analogous to "hiring" someone to come clean your place and then failing to pay him.
But if some guy goes off, entirely unasked, and writes some music, I don't see why he has the right to expect any money in return. Maybe people will buy something from him anyway, or donate money in appreciation of his art, but it's not as if they hired him for a job that he did; he just went off and did some job, which yes may have been difficult, without anyone requesting him to.
IBM also took the approach of ditching files, and just having persistence of objects (which yes, presumably somewhere in the bowels of the OS got written to disk). It was efficient enough to run on 1980s hardware, so I don't see a reason it couldn't be done today.
In most computers prior to the System/38, and most modern ones, data stored on disk was stored in separate logical files. When data was added to a file it was written in the sector dedicated to this, or if the sector was full, on a new sector somewhere else. In the case of the S/38, every piece of data was stored separately and could be put anywhere on the system. There was no such thing as a physically contiguous file on disk, and the operating system managed the storage and recall of all data elements.
It's kind of weird to take Larrabee as evidence of Intel having successfully produced a GPU, since they still haven't produced it, despite years of hype. It might turn out to be as excellent as they claim. It might turn out to be as excellent as revolutionary as their last revolutionary new architecture, Itanium.
For what it's worth, on the merits this is also unlikely to be a genuine leak, even if we ignore it being from the Inquirer. They claim that they got this scoop from a "nice Sony engineering lady at CES". It's unlikely that a random Sony representative at CES would even be privy to such information, or it would've leaked by now. These sorts of decisions are generally kept pretty close to the chest, and don't leak very early unless someone fucks up. (When they do leak, it can lead to SEC investigations.)
I know Slashdot isn't known for its high standards of editorial oversight, but do you really have to waste our time parroting Inquirer bullshit?
Note that the only media source claiming that Intel is designing the PS4 GPU is The Inquirer, which is wrong more often than they're right. And Sony has explicitly denied the rumors.
Intel might end up designing the PS4 GPU, who knows. This story doesn't give us any more information than we had before either way, and the headline is certainly wrong in concluding otherwise.
The biggest proponents of Yes-on-8, both by on-the-ground activism of bishops and priests, and by actual yes votes, were the Catholics, and I don't see anyone scapegoating them. Probably because they're an important voting bloc so you have to be nice to them, while the Mormons are a small enough minority that they're a useful scapegoat.
As far as people who have religious disagreements go, I've personally found my interactions with Mormons to be much more pleasant than me interactions with religious Catholics, southern Baptists, Muslims, or vegans. They generally politely try to excuse themselves if they disagree with something or avoid the issue, rather than lambasting you about whatever their pet issue is.
The main problems aren't so much the language as the lack of a useful standard library. No cross-platform networking, no cross-platform threads, no thanks.
This is slowly being addressed, so it may be less of a problem in the future. OpenMP is slowly becoming a threading standard, and it looks like boost now has a sockets library. But it's a huge hassle of #ifdefs for now.
Normal peer review is basically a grouped version of the same thing. A paper being published in a journal tells you that the journal's editors/reviewers thought it was a legitimate contribution. What that tells you depends on what you think of the journal's editors/reviewers. It's basically an endorsement mechanism: publication venue X, meaning set of people Y, says that paper Z is good. This is a somewhat more decentralized version, where individual researchers can say that paper Z is good.
This doesn't seem to be a plan to better site windmills or increase their efficiency, but rather a way of predicting their near-future output to ease grid operation. If you know how much electricity your wind-farm is likely to produce tomorrow, you can better plan which non-wind power plants need to be operating, and at what levels. That can make things cheaper, because you can ramp up or down base-load power stations rather than having to rely on last-minute emergency generation when your wind farm produced less electricity than expected.
An important caveat I forgot: If you do plan to use patents on open-source software defensively, it's fairly tricky to figure out the right way to do it. You cannot just give a blanket grant to anyone to use the patent for any purpose, since then it loses its defensive value: you have to be able to retain the right to threaten the extension-patenter with a patent-infringement suit. But at the same time you clearly don't want normal users to feel thus threatened.
You instead need to take an approach that grants a royalty-free patent license, but conditional on a reciprocal grant of any relevant patents the other party holds (for some definition of "relevant"). The in-development Open Patent License was an attempt to codify this in an off-the-shelf license, but seems to have died about 1 1/2 years ago. I'm not sure if there are any current such licenses.
(I'm nothing close to a lawyer, as probably goes without saying here. An IP lawyer is necessary if the answer to this question has any significant value to your business.)
As far as prior art goes, there may be a minor practical benefit to registration. Publishing your stuff publicly is enough to establish that your thing exists and is public domain, and will prevent someone else from legitimately patenting it. However, having an actual patent registered might make it more likely that a patent examiner would find your prior art and reject any subsequent attempts to patent the same thing (your sourceforge project is less likely to come to the examiner's attention, so a crappy patent might get granted that later has to be invalidated).
However a bigger benefit is probably a defensive one. Although publishing your stuff online establishes prior art, someone could patent an extension of it to cover some case it doesn't currently handle, and use the patent to prevent you or your users from implementing any similar extension. This is sort of the "embrace and extend" approach, where a commercial entity extends free systems and prevents (in this case through patents) the free systems from implementing similar extensions. If your stuff is patented, you can use the patent defensively to prevent this, since they would be unable to use their extension to your patented stuff without reaching a patent agreement with you, in which you could demand some sort of cross-licensing.
Slashdot Mirror
Lest anyone thing you need to be a well-connected researcher to "obtain access to Wikipedia edit data", it's actually all public. Although you will need 100GB+ of hard drive space, and some well thought out algorithms, to parse the full-history dumps that contain every revision of every page.
I think this is the source I was thinking of.
I've been using Debian full-time as my desktop since around 2001 (which admittedly doesn't make me one of the oldest-school users). I started noticing a big decrease in the amount of HOWTO-googling and config-editing I had to do somewhere around 2005. While presumably many improvements were made between 2000 and 2005, there were still a lot of things I had to do in 2004-2005 that I recall thinking would make it 100% impossible to get my non-tech-savvy friends and relatives to switch.
For example, when I bought a widescreen LCD in early 2005, I had to edit XFree86.conf to manually add a modeline to get it to work at the right resolution. And wireless around 2004-05 was a mess requiring a bunch of futzing with modules and utility scripts on the command line (I actually had a PCI wireless card get permanently borked by some sort of mishap with loading firmware at runtime). Since then I haven't noticed a whole lot of issues.
I personally mostly walk, but I'm actually somewhat unsure of the effects on greenhouse gases (I do it mostly for health). Last I looked up some numbers, biking/walking produces about as many greenhouse gases as driving does when the calories come from an average American diet, due to the high greenhouse-gas output of meat farms. To be a net win, the energy you're putting into your bike (in the form of food calories) has to be cleaner than petrol.
Agreeing on the cause is one thing, and as you point out, there is pretty good agreement on it. There is much less agreement on the proposed solutions. What effects would lowering carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2009 have vs. not lowering them? And what amount would they have to be lowered by to have some particular desired outcome? Is lowering emissions going forward even a useful option at this stage, or do we need some sort of active reversal of existing damage in addition (or instead)? The answers to all those questions seem pretty up in the air.
I'd personally like to see an IPCCC-like document outlining proposed best practices, which currently available scientific evidence suggests would, if followed, have some desirable outcome or prevent some undesirable outcome. Or at least giving some odds on each of the major proposals. But we still seem to be a bit off from that.
Your argument sounds like a pretty good case for piracy being damaging to free alternatives (like open-source software), but possibly a case for it being beneficial to large, established purveyors of expensive software, like Adobe and Microsoft. It seems like, if piracy were 100% stamped out tomorrow, it would lead to a significant loss of for-cost-software's market share.
I could be misreading, but I think he's using the IP of the server that actually connects to his server and attempts to deliver mail, not the IP reported in the mail headers.
In the NDA scenario, the only person liable is the person who signed the NDA and then violated it. I think it's perfectly legitimate for people to choose to voluntarily enter into contracts, and for there to be legal proceedings if they violate those contracts.
On the other hand, if I go download some music off the internet, I'm not violating any contract with the artist, because I never signed one. Why the music is on the internet in the first place, I don't know. Maybe the artist put it there, or maybe someone violated their non-disclosure agreement by putting it there. That's between the artist and that person, if so, and has nothing to do with the person downloading the music.
It's sort of like trade secrets and classified information. When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, someone was committing a crime by disclosing classified information. But the Times was not committing a crime by receiving and republishing it.
I agree the vast majority of email sent to "known bad" addresses will be sent by spambots, and that'll probably be the exclusive source for never-published addresses. But in the case where they publish these known-bad addresses on a page that they hope spambots will index, it seems blacklisting based on them is vulnerable to abuse. If I want to get some server blacklisted, and I have any sort of access to send mail from it, I can just send mail to the known-bad addresses. For example, good way for mischievous students to cause mayhem by getting their university's mail servers blacklisted.
The only thing Colgate has the right to, imo, is the physical product in their warehouses. I cannot go steal it, because then they would no longer have it. Similarly, IKEA has a right to keep its shelves, and I can't go take them. But if I can get an IKEA-lookalike shelf without buying one from IKEA (say, I buy some plywood and recreate their design), they don't really have a right to stop me. Artists also have the right to all property they own; I cannot go steal their LPs, or their couches, or their tour bus. However, they don't have some abstract "property" right inhering in all copies of items.
Of course, they can keep their music private if they don't want anyone to have it. If they only want some people to have it, they can give it to those people under a non-disclosure clause, and sue them if they disclose it to other people.
This is entirely unrelated to the inane lawn-mowing example. If you could ask me to mow your lawn and your lawn would get mowed without me showing up at your house or doing any additional work, of course that would be no imposition on me. The only thing wrong with asking me to mow your lawn unpaid is that it would force me to come over to your house and mow your lawn. Since me getting an artist's music for free does not require them to come over to my house and record a new copy of it, it's not a similar imposition on their time.
If I commissioned a symphony from a guy, he went off and spent 6 months writing it, and then I refused to pay him, sure, he'd have a legitimate beef, and that would be analogous to "hiring" someone to come clean your place and then failing to pay him.
But if some guy goes off, entirely unasked, and writes some music, I don't see why he has the right to expect any money in return. Maybe people will buy something from him anyway, or donate money in appreciation of his art, but it's not as if they hired him for a job that he did; he just went off and did some job, which yes may have been difficult, without anyone requesting him to.
If someone voluntarily showed up and changed your oil, unasked, they would be out of line to demand payment.
IBM also took the approach of ditching files, and just having persistence of objects (which yes, presumably somewhere in the bowels of the OS got written to disk). It was efficient enough to run on 1980s hardware, so I don't see a reason it couldn't be done today.
From Wikipedia:
It's kind of weird to take Larrabee as evidence of Intel having successfully produced a GPU, since they still haven't produced it, despite years of hype. It might turn out to be as excellent as they claim. It might turn out to be as excellent as revolutionary as their last revolutionary new architecture, Itanium.
For what it's worth, on the merits this is also unlikely to be a genuine leak, even if we ignore it being from the Inquirer. They claim that they got this scoop from a "nice Sony engineering lady at CES". It's unlikely that a random Sony representative at CES would even be privy to such information, or it would've leaked by now. These sorts of decisions are generally kept pretty close to the chest, and don't leak very early unless someone fucks up. (When they do leak, it can lead to SEC investigations.)
I know Slashdot isn't known for its high standards of editorial oversight, but do you really have to waste our time parroting Inquirer bullshit?
Note that the only media source claiming that Intel is designing the PS4 GPU is The Inquirer, which is wrong more often than they're right. And Sony has explicitly denied the rumors.
Intel might end up designing the PS4 GPU, who knows. This story doesn't give us any more information than we had before either way, and the headline is certainly wrong in concluding otherwise.
The biggest proponents of Yes-on-8, both by on-the-ground activism of bishops and priests, and by actual yes votes, were the Catholics, and I don't see anyone scapegoating them. Probably because they're an important voting bloc so you have to be nice to them, while the Mormons are a small enough minority that they're a useful scapegoat.
As far as people who have religious disagreements go, I've personally found my interactions with Mormons to be much more pleasant than me interactions with religious Catholics, southern Baptists, Muslims, or vegans. They generally politely try to excuse themselves if they disagree with something or avoid the issue, rather than lambasting you about whatever their pet issue is.
The main problems aren't so much the language as the lack of a useful standard library. No cross-platform networking, no cross-platform threads, no thanks.
This is slowly being addressed, so it may be less of a problem in the future. OpenMP is slowly becoming a threading standard, and it looks like boost now has a sockets library. But it's a huge hassle of #ifdefs for now.
Normal peer review is basically a grouped version of the same thing. A paper being published in a journal tells you that the journal's editors/reviewers thought it was a legitimate contribution. What that tells you depends on what you think of the journal's editors/reviewers. It's basically an endorsement mechanism: publication venue X, meaning set of people Y, says that paper Z is good. This is a somewhat more decentralized version, where individual researchers can say that paper Z is good.
This doesn't seem to be a plan to better site windmills or increase their efficiency, but rather a way of predicting their near-future output to ease grid operation. If you know how much electricity your wind-farm is likely to produce tomorrow, you can better plan which non-wind power plants need to be operating, and at what levels. That can make things cheaper, because you can ramp up or down base-load power stations rather than having to rely on last-minute emergency generation when your wind farm produced less electricity than expected.
An important caveat I forgot: If you do plan to use patents on open-source software defensively, it's fairly tricky to figure out the right way to do it. You cannot just give a blanket grant to anyone to use the patent for any purpose, since then it loses its defensive value: you have to be able to retain the right to threaten the extension-patenter with a patent-infringement suit. But at the same time you clearly don't want normal users to feel thus threatened.
You instead need to take an approach that grants a royalty-free patent license, but conditional on a reciprocal grant of any relevant patents the other party holds (for some definition of "relevant"). The in-development Open Patent License was an attempt to codify this in an off-the-shelf license, but seems to have died about 1 1/2 years ago. I'm not sure if there are any current such licenses.
(I'm nothing close to a lawyer, as probably goes without saying here. An IP lawyer is necessary if the answer to this question has any significant value to your business.)
As far as prior art goes, there may be a minor practical benefit to registration. Publishing your stuff publicly is enough to establish that your thing exists and is public domain, and will prevent someone else from legitimately patenting it. However, having an actual patent registered might make it more likely that a patent examiner would find your prior art and reject any subsequent attempts to patent the same thing (your sourceforge project is less likely to come to the examiner's attention, so a crappy patent might get granted that later has to be invalidated).
However a bigger benefit is probably a defensive one. Although publishing your stuff online establishes prior art, someone could patent an extension of it to cover some case it doesn't currently handle, and use the patent to prevent you or your users from implementing any similar extension. This is sort of the "embrace and extend" approach, where a commercial entity extends free systems and prevents (in this case through patents) the free systems from implementing similar extensions. If your stuff is patented, you can use the patent defensively to prevent this, since they would be unable to use their extension to your patented stuff without reaching a patent agreement with you, in which you could demand some sort of cross-licensing.
If it were 100% impossible to pirate Microsoft and Adobe products, it'd speed up their replacement with open-source software immensely.
I'd say trying to get some people in a third-world country to pay rich American monopolists extra money is an immoral act.