With the leadership of this country seriously questionable, the developement of these bombers may further encourage irresponsible wars/police actions/whatever.
On the other hypersonic bombers sound really really cool.
Actually, my justification was not I did it in school and got away with it. My justification was more that algorithms are more mathematical discoveries than inventions. I guess the same could be said of many inventions (medecines are just biochemical discoveries).
I just really think it would benefit society most if algorithms were public domain. Let's face it most algorithms are developed in academia and fall into the public domain if the university doesn't patent them, but most of the funding for this research comes from government and corporate grants not from patent-royalties. Besides, I think code encryption and obfuscation provide plenty of protection for corporations.
Hmmm. Performer protocol, not bad...
Actually, that's somewhat similar to an idea I had...
It might greatly benefit society if the government applied eminent domain to IP. Suppose I make an invention that could greatly benefit society, but I'm not liscensing it cheaply enough to benefit many people. The government could pay me a fair price and then place my invention in the public domain. I definitely think the government should do this with the AIDS drugs so that people in Afric/Russia/etc. can afford them.
I realize that the regulations are different, but perhaps they should be more similar. I understand the need for companies to protect products, but algorithms are not products. They are very abstract high level things and it would benefit technological progress and humanity in general if they were free.
When I was a programmer in Computer Science 101, someone copied one of my programs, and I was accused of cheating. When I went to talk to the professor about it, I confessed that I had helped another student explaining that I told him how to get a particular graphic to work properly. He replied that in that instance, I had done nothing wrong that algorithms are free to share. I was absolved (the plagiarism was different).
But I still think algorithms should be public domain! If you own a company, and you have a particularly cool algorithm you want to hide, you should have to either obfuscate or encrypt the machine code. There is absolutely no reason that algorithms should be protected IP.
Computer Science is a weird mixture of science and engineering. A lot of the theoretical and some of the applied work is very scientific, while most systems work is very much engineering. Scientific discoveries are not generally patentable, inventions are.
The compromise I propose is this: allow source code to be copyrighted, but deny the patentabilty of algorithms. As anyone who has programed knows, even with a detailed algorithm and specification, there still is a lot of engineering required to complete a finished product. That engineering work would still be protected.
Well, I have taken (some of) your advice. I have written a letter to most of the EU representatives from the UK. I enclose the text so that other slashdotters can use it in contacting any EU reps. I may not be the best rhetorician, and I certainly glossed over many technical details, but feel free to use/modify the following:
I am writing this because the European Union is considering a alteration of patent law to bring it in line with U.S. patent law particularly with respect to software patents. I am an american, and I understand that my government is placing great pressure on the European Union to change their patent policy. However, I can tell you that the patent policy here is extremely bad. In particular, software patents are a problem for several reasons. First, allowing software patents will encourage a glut of ridiculous patent applications. Second, in the software industry collaboration is a more effective strategy than protection. Third, the admittance of software patents would encumber the developement and innovation process with too many legal considerations.
As a computer programmer, I keep track of significant developements in the software industry, and there have been some very silly patents awarded lately. One aspect of programming is that software tends to build on other software. As such when a new technology such as the internet becomes available, many applications that may seem non-obvious to a lay person are fairly obvious to a skilled programmer. It's then only a matter of who gets to the patent office first. One example of this is the Amazon.com one-click-purchase patent. It is quite evident how to do this. It's also a fairly obvious idea. Yet the patent led to a lawsuit which took years to settle. Ask yourself this, "Would I like to see European Union courts burdened by such frivoities?" I hope the answer is "No".
Collaboration is especially in the software industry. In particular, the success of Open Source Software (or OSS) shows how successful cooperation can be. If you are not familiar with OSS, it is a software developement model in which the client can see the internal workings of a program and freely copy them. Often, OSS programs are distributed free of charge, also. Often, many people (sometimes as many as one million; mostly amateurs) will contribute to an OSS project. Some OSS projects have accomplished things that giant corporations never could. For instance, Linux and BSD are some of the best most stable operating systems around. Many companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard use OSS as a starting point and build solutions for clients on top of it.
OSS has many advantages but is particularly vulnerable to software patents. Because the source code (internal representation) of the programs are available, patent owners can pick through the program to find an infringements where closed source programs do not have that problem. Also, because OSS projects are often undertaken by collectives of hobbyists and altruistic amateurs, if there is an accusation of patent infringement, there are not usually funds to fight in court. In this way, a corporation could stop an OSS competitor by just filing suit. If this ever became common practice, it would be the end of Open Source Software and the technolgical world (not just the computer industry) would suffer immensely.
The process of software developement does not need to be encumbered with the patent process. Software evolves rapidly and if developers have to do a patent search every time they write a program, software developement would grind to a halt. (You may think it unlikely that a programmer could accidentally write a patented program, but I assure it is not; note the above Amazon.com case, several auction patents, various interface patent; there are many more).
In closing I implore you to vote against software patents or at least to restrict the term. Drug companies may need 20 years to recoup developement costs, but the software industry moves much faster than that. Often a granted patent is many years obsolete by the time it expires.
we very well may be living there someday. The more places we live, the longer our species life expectancy will be. More importantly, the more life will be in the universe, and the more likely we will be to discover other life intelligent or otherwise in the universe. How could these things not be goals of our species?
That said, I think that the article brings up a valid point that humans aren't necessarily needed for as many experiments as they are being used for. On the other hand, I don't think the current (US) space program is making sufficient progress toward the loftier goal of permanent life in space and on other planets. It was encouraging to see that the Chinese will try to establish a permanent base on the moon. It's things like that that will help colonize Mars eventually.
Hmmmm. You may be right as far as consumer-software goes. People want bells-and-whistles, and those who are more security concerned use free software.
However, I think companies will be changing their minds about this when their admins explain how much money bad code is costing them.
One problem is that it is difficult to tell before purchase which commercial software products will be more reliable. Unlike open-source software, most companies don't publicize the bugs in their software. Thus, when making a new purchase, businesses have to rely on word-of-mouth, demos. Then after they have used a product for a while, they are locked in--it would take quite an expenditure of time and money to switch--so whether or not the product is reliable, they continue to use it.
Hopefully, the secrecy of commercial software will encourage companies to use OSS more. Even if there are problems with the system you purchased, if it's open source, you aren't really locked in. Also, there is a whole community working to make YOUR software bullet-proof.
Does anyone know of any good anonymizing P2P file-sharing software out there? I remember hearing something about it once, but I can't quite remember...
It is possible that a huge part of the $35 million discrepency is due to ALL of the attorneys' fees Verisign will have to pay (both for the initial lawsuit against Cohen and for the Kremen v. Verisign lawsuit).
Sure. I believe that and you believe that, but tell that to my girlfriend who says "Ewww. Chimps fling poo. I could not possibly be related to one of those things."
But seriously, I'm not sure that that has been established. For the first billion years or so, most of the life on this planet was bacterial. Note that bacteria are much simpler than eukariotic life. They consist of a loop of DNA surounded by cytoplasm containing RNA and all of the other chemicals that make life possible. I think that it's fairly likely that if one bacterium can evolve from the primodial ooze on its own, another should be able to also.
Notice that we are not proving theorems here and can not "logically" reach any conclusions.
It is really pretty much impossible to "prove" anything about the past. In fact it is impossible to prove anything without making assumptions.
But to answer your question from an anthropological point of view. First of all, IANAA, but I would guess that if these homo sapiens fossils pre-date most neanderthals, that is probably enough to establish the conclusion based on mutation and evolution rates of mammals. Again, IANAA, so anyone who knows more, please speak up!
I think that the most important part of this discovery, though is that it pretty much rules out the descent of homo sapiens from homo neanderathalensis. I know that there was a lot of evidence of that, anyway, but this seems pretty conclusive.
Still, I think that more interesting discoveries would be from 5 million years ogo. In particular, I would like to see remains of the ancestors of Australopithecenes and Ardopithecenes which would support the evolution of modern chimpanzees and modern humans from a common ancestor.
Main Entry: fasÂcism
Pronunciation...
1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
Note that I did not capitalize the word. I am using it as in definition 2. There was no fair election of the current regime (Bush et. al.). Censorship is being practiced (both in terms of obscenity laws and also by the FCC, as well as by the DMCA). Bush personally decide to go to war without being beholden to anyone. As is the topic of this post, the government is routinely spying on even law abiding citizens. Innocent people are being held indefinitely without due process (under the PATRIOT (II) act).
Now I'm not saying that there aren't good things about this country, but civil rights have certainly gone into the shitter since 9/11, and this means that the terrorists have won.
Not that it really has anything to do with my e-mail, but if you really do have a factoring polynomial time algorithm, you really ought to publish. That would be a great step toward a Turing award.
IANAG (I am not a geneticist), but a possibilty could be that the groups of Chimps refered to in the article could have been found in zoos and taken from completely different locations/lineages.
If the group of two thousand that survived happened to be lucky enough to have come from the same approximate lineage, they would not have an large amount of genetic diversity compared to the much larger group of chimps (which would then be sampled fairly randomly for inclusion in zoos).
Sure. I seriously doubt that the people at the NSA have found a polynomial time algorithm for factoring, and assuming that they haven't found a SMALL polynomial time algorithm for factoring, there is no way that they'll be able to decrypt all of the encrypted e-mail being sent around.
Learn a little bit about cryptography. Rooms full of supercomputers really don't mean a whole lot without the right algorithms.
This is not remoptely offtopic. I was simply expressing pleasure at the passage of such bills. I might not have done so in a verbose fashion, but this post was certainly on topic.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a really nice tactic. Unfortunately, it only works with small local companies. Larger companies have phone-trees, caller-id blocking, etc.
Does anyone know how to find out where a telemarketer is REALLY calling you from?
Wouldn't that be great, you could sell a telemarketer's number to other telemarketers?
Wow. No offense meant, but you are one sick puppy to even think of that.
Please never work for a defense contractor.
With the leadership of this country seriously questionable, the developement of these bombers may further encourage irresponsible wars/police actions/whatever.
On the other hypersonic bombers sound really really cool.
Actually, my justification was not I did it in school and got away with it. My justification was more that algorithms are more mathematical discoveries than inventions. I guess the same could be said of many inventions (medecines are just biochemical discoveries).
I just really think it would benefit society most if algorithms were public domain. Let's face it most algorithms are developed in academia and fall into the public domain if the university doesn't patent them, but most of the funding for this research comes from government and corporate grants not from patent-royalties. Besides, I think code encryption and obfuscation provide plenty of protection for corporations.
Hmmm. Performer protocol, not bad...
Actually, that's somewhat similar to an idea I had...
It might greatly benefit society if the government applied eminent domain to IP. Suppose I make an invention that could greatly benefit society, but I'm not liscensing it cheaply enough to benefit many people. The government could pay me a fair price and then place my invention in the public domain. I definitely think the government should do this with the AIDS drugs so that people in Afric/Russia/etc. can afford them.
I realize that the regulations are different, but perhaps they should be more similar. I understand the need for companies to protect products, but algorithms are not products. They are very abstract high level things and it would benefit technological progress and humanity in general if they were free.
When I was a programmer in Computer Science 101, someone copied one of my programs, and I was accused of cheating. When I went to talk to the professor about it, I confessed that I had helped another student explaining that I told him how to get a particular graphic to work properly. He replied that in that instance, I had done nothing wrong that algorithms are free to share. I was absolved (the plagiarism was different).
But I still think algorithms should be public domain! If you own a company, and you have a particularly cool algorithm you want to hide, you should have to either obfuscate or encrypt the machine code. There is absolutely no reason that algorithms should be protected IP.
Computer Science is a weird mixture of science and engineering. A lot of the theoretical and some of the applied work is very scientific, while most systems work is very much engineering. Scientific discoveries are not generally patentable, inventions are.
The compromise I propose is this: allow source code to be copyrighted, but deny the patentabilty of algorithms. As anyone who has programed knows, even with a detailed algorithm and specification, there still is a lot of engineering required to complete a finished product. That engineering work would still be protected.
It's so ironic that such a devout creationist looks so damned much like a chimp. I love it!
we very well may be living there someday. The more places we live, the longer our species life expectancy will be. More importantly, the more life will be in the universe, and the more likely we will be to discover other life intelligent or otherwise in the universe. How could these things not be goals of our species?
That said, I think that the article brings up a valid point that humans aren't necessarily needed for as many experiments as they are being used for. On the other hand, I don't think the current (US) space program is making sufficient progress toward the loftier goal of permanent life in space and on other planets. It was encouraging to see that the Chinese will try to establish a permanent base on the moon. It's things like that that will help colonize Mars eventually.
Hmmmm. You may be right as far as consumer-software goes. People want bells-and-whistles, and those who are more security concerned use free software.
However, I think companies will be changing their minds about this when their admins explain how much money bad code is costing them.
One problem is that it is difficult to tell before purchase which commercial software products will be more reliable. Unlike open-source software, most companies don't publicize the bugs in their software. Thus, when making a new purchase, businesses have to rely on word-of-mouth, demos. Then after they have used a product for a while, they are locked in--it would take quite an expenditure of time and money to switch--so whether or not the product is reliable, they continue to use it.
Hopefully, the secrecy of commercial software will encourage companies to use OSS more. Even if there are problems with the system you purchased, if it's open source, you aren't really locked in. Also, there is a whole community working to make YOUR software bullet-proof.
Does anyone know of any good anonymizing P2P file-sharing software out there? I remember hearing something about it once, but I can't quite remember...
It is possible that a huge part of the $35 million discrepency is due to ALL of the attorneys' fees Verisign will have to pay (both for the initial lawsuit against Cohen and for the Kremen v. Verisign lawsuit).
Sure. I believe that and you believe that, but tell that to my girlfriend who says "Ewww. Chimps fling poo. I could not possibly be related to one of those things."
But seriously, I'm not sure that that has been established. For the first billion years or so, most of the life on this planet was bacterial. Note that bacteria are much simpler than eukariotic life. They consist of a loop of DNA surounded by cytoplasm containing RNA and all of the other chemicals that make life possible. I think that it's fairly likely that if one bacterium can evolve from the primodial ooze on its own, another should be able to also.
Notice that we are not proving theorems here and can not "logically" reach any conclusions.
It is really pretty much impossible to "prove" anything about the past. In fact it is impossible to prove anything without making assumptions.
But to answer your question from an anthropological point of view. First of all, IANAA, but I would guess that if these homo sapiens fossils pre-date most neanderthals, that is probably enough to establish the conclusion based on mutation and evolution rates of mammals. Again, IANAA, so anyone who knows more, please speak up!
Are you being serious? If so, please explain where you would get that idea. If not, please explain the joke.
I think that the most important part of this discovery, though is that it pretty much rules out the descent of homo sapiens from homo neanderathalensis. I know that there was a lot of evidence of that, anyway, but this seems pretty conclusive.
Still, I think that more interesting discoveries would be from 5 million years ogo. In particular, I would like to see remains of the ancestors of Australopithecenes and Ardopithecenes which would support the evolution of modern chimpanzees and modern humans from a common ancestor.
A very brave, Anonymous Coward. Call me a fool.
But seriously...
---from www.m-w.com---
Main Entry: fasÂcism
Pronunciation...
1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
Note that I did not capitalize the word. I am using it as in definition 2. There was no fair election of the current regime (Bush et. al.). Censorship is being practiced (both in terms of obscenity laws and also by the FCC, as well as by the DMCA). Bush personally decide to go to war without being beholden to anyone. As is the topic of this post, the government is routinely spying on even law abiding citizens. Innocent people are being held indefinitely without due process (under the PATRIOT (II) act).
Now I'm not saying that there aren't good things about this country, but civil rights have certainly gone into the shitter since 9/11, and this means that the terrorists have won.
Not that it really has anything to do with my e-mail, but if you really do have a factoring polynomial time algorithm, you really ought to publish. That would be a great step toward a Turing award.
No. I am no more an anarchist than Thomas Jefferson. I just happen to believe in civil rights.
IANAG (I am not a geneticist), but a possibilty could be that the groups of Chimps refered to in the article could have been found in zoos and taken from completely different locations/lineages.
If the group of two thousand that survived happened to be lucky enough to have come from the same approximate lineage, they would not have an large amount of genetic diversity compared to the much larger group of chimps (which would then be sampled fairly randomly for inclusion in zoos).
Sure. I seriously doubt that the people at the NSA have found a polynomial time algorithm for factoring, and assuming that they haven't found a SMALL polynomial time algorithm for factoring, there is no way that they'll be able to decrypt all of the encrypted e-mail being sent around. Learn a little bit about cryptography. Rooms full of supercomputers really don't mean a whole lot without the right algorithms.
Why? It's billiant satire. It's also a great (albeit small) way to stick it to the fascists running the world's governments.
This is not remoptely offtopic. I was simply expressing pleasure at the passage of such bills. I might not have done so in a verbose fashion, but this post was certainly on topic.
Sweeeeeeeeeet!
Isn't one media player enough? Isn't there some .mov codec that I can download?