Little guys need protection, and the patent office gives them that.
OK, so from your comments I assume that you've done an economics or maybe business ethics course. Nice. Well done. Now go and look at the real world.
Patent protection doesn't give the little guy squat.
Any larger company will be able to find a ton of patents that the smaller guy has infringed, and will offer to 'waive' them in exchange for free licensing rights to the little guys invention.
You can hide your head in the sand as much as you want but this is how the system works. As the original poster put it; little kids in the playground screaming 'but I thought of that first, you can't use it'.
We research wearable computing so we have quite a similar set of requirements to you. The board that we use is an ADS Bitsy which support either winCE (yup some peeps still call it that after all this time) or linux (hooray!). Take a look at their site for details. I'm not sure about ruggedness though, we put it inside a custom metal case so it can take a bit of a battering. We let student loose on them fer gods sake!
At one of the last wearables conferences I went to though I remember a talk from Xybernaut which sticks in the head as they claimed to have invented the concept of wearable computers to a room full of researchers working in the field, quite amusing. But anyways, they do a range of full blown windows / winCE devices in very rugged cases that were actually really good - but the battery life sucks on the fullblown windows ones. Try their site here.
Just look at the billions of dollars being spent to "stop cancer" when anyone with any general knowledge of the issue knows that this is an impossible act in the first place
Well, thats one hell of a claim to through into an argument, are you some kind of super-genius perhaps with access to medical knowledge that thousands of highly motivated researchers have missed? Wow, you must be so clever...
Good point. On a sidenote why do people bother to post 'please mod the parent post up' messages? The AC post is much more insightful than the parent.
These solutions all work because they recognise that the specification is a shifting target and so they seek to minimise the cost of change. If you know that the customer is going to change his mind in three weeks time then make the quickest change that you can to satisfy him, knowing that it will be gutted and rewritten several times. Quite different to the NASA school of programming where the spec (please don't blow up, oh god please don't blow up!) doesn't ever change so they invest time in doing it right first time rather than chasing a changing target.
Well I'll take it as a reliable anecdotal source and I'll swap it for another.
I've smoked pot on and off for ten years, at some stages I've been a heavy smoker (about a half ounce a week) and at other times I've hardly touched it.
I'm quite fit, healthy, I love my job and I'm a very motivated person.
Personal stories are just that, stories about you, unless you get the chance to relive your live you'll never know if it was the choices that you made or something about your own makeup that determined how your life went.
On the other hand, I've known people who have been 'damaged' by it in the same way. It is something that can screw you up if you're susceptible, or that can cause no harm if you're lucky. I'd say that is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco which will always cause damage if you use them continually.
I've recently quit smoking entirely (hated the nicotine addiction that all joint smokers tell themselves they don't have). I now stick to baked goods only.
I find that the effects that are frequently reported (lethargy, lack of motivation, ill-health etc) are those that are caused by nicotine. Perhaps it is the joints doing the damage rather than the drug they contain. Smoking is a very dangerous habit.
Oops stumbled onto an expert. Didn't realise that I'd actually told one of the 'smart people' that I was refering to as working on the problem how to do it. I'll check out your paper as it sounds quite interesting, we've definitely got a subscription although normally the sites don't carry scans of the older stuff (well the ACM's worse for that).
I'm actually working in a similar area myself looking at uses of specialisation so I'm quite familiar with how you write programs that you can analyse, I was just playing devils advocate;)
Good point. Didn't anybody else notice that in the article they state they can manipulate micro-particles with the electrical fields, but that nano-particles will require something more fine grained.
Crucial software components would have machine-checked proofs of correctness.
No they wouldn't. Its a common misconception that you can mechanically produce a program free from bugs. Firstly model-checking is hard because the state space is expodential in size (with respect to the program). Secondly certain properties are undecidable in logic (termination is the obvious example).
Nice idea, but lots of really smart people have spent many decades working on it without getting much closer.
I think that you've missed the point he was making. Great coders aren't born with the complete ability to code and yes they still need education, but the actual greatness part is something that no amount of education will give you if you don't have it to begin with.
Whilst you are correct that some programming is as you describe, it does not cover all programming. There are some sorts of programming that are closer to art than engineering, the problem is that it covers such a broad range that people can quite happily look at their part of the design space and say look, look its an art! Whilst somebody else looks at another part and says Look,look its engineering. They're both right.
Ahh the old I wasn't going to pay for it anyway piracy argument being rehashed. Lots of subscribers like this means that HBO raise subscriptions, this is a vicious circle that leads to HBO going bust.
Why do people think that digital goods are completely different to physical ones? Yes they have a near-zero cost of distribution, but they still have a production cost. If it doesn't get paid they don't get produced.
Maybe a current p2p system but are you assuming that a p2p app 3 years down the line will have the same interface. Go an look at some of the pvr projects on sourceforge that people are writing. It isn't too hard to integrate tv listings with automatic recording, why would it be harder to find the programs that you want to watch on the schedule and then track down the file on a p2p system? Especially if one person starts publishing a tv guide with md5 hashes of the program rips...
OK lots of people have posted already about what a bad thing this is; loss of fair use, not being able to timeshift etc. These are good points, but what about the flipside of the argument?
Studios have to make money to employ people to make shows. If something like this isn't implemented then where will these people get their money from?
Picture a few years down the line, lots of people own tv cards. One person records all of the broadcast output and dumps it onto the p2p system of the day. Everyone downloads it for free, nobody watches the adverts (they've been stripped), nobody pays the subscription fee (download for free instead). So what happens to the studio that produces output that nobody pays for? They go bust.
So instead of attempting to cripple every pc and tv in the world which won't work (If I can see it then I sure I can find a way to record it) what is the alternative? What kind of system will work?
At the end of the day, somebody has to foot the bill...
I thought your first post was some kind of troll but obviously you do have a point, what do you mean by a 'loop' though? This isn't terminology that sounds familiar.
Also, I can't see any reason that you couldn't form a 'loop' in a quantum circuit, you can't copy information but that's a separate issue.
Well, its semi-novel. It's all based on Mark Weiser's ideas and calm computing. There is quite a good intro at
Calm computing.
Specifically this is an example of moving intrusive information (visual report of a network connection) into the periphery. One of the classical examples is the dangling string which this is an obvious reinvention of, although the dangling string is a lot cooler and would be more useful in a surgery setting.
Lots of previous posters have already pointed out that what you really need is quality of service but this is nice as if it gets a bit 'weird' eg laggy then you can look up (or listen) and get feedback that it is the network and not the system playing up. Useful reassurance...
Actually X-Windows is prior art to the system that the poster describes and the patent refers to another type of system entirely. As somebody pointed out earlier it is overly broad to be enforcable, and quite obvious even in the early 90's when multimedia wasn't mainstream.
The patent describes pushing compressed video over a broadcast system, any porn site delivering videos is using a client pull over a packet system. The two are completely different.
It sounds quite a lot like the patent BT tried to use to claim ownership of hyperlinks. Completely different, doens't mention any of the technology used (because it predates it) and is a blatent attempt to patent an idea rather than an implementation of an idea (in order to stop somebody actaully doing it). Any lawyer should be able to write you a letter to that effect pretty quickly, and even if they do charge by the hour it'll probably take them less than that to do it for you.
Have tracked down her homepage like a lot of other people in this discussion (actually because her work sounded interesting rather than because she's a hot chick; although lets face it, she is), I was a bit dissapointed to find a lack of materials on there. Maybe its different in physics (not my field so I wouldn't know) but normally people put publications links.
Does anybody in the field know anything about her work, I noticed that her thesis title was Quantum Gravity which sounds ambitious (not quite a solved problem yet is it?). Are there any critques out there, or even a copy of her papers?
It would appear that the balance of laws are shifting. The original intent of a body of laws was to provide protection for members of society. Are companies really a member of society? In modern laws they would appear to be, and are offered most of the same legal protections as people.
Most laws are designed to create a protocol for the exchange of comodities, until people invented trading there was no need for people to follow the same system. Now it provided security and allowed commerce. Hence, early laws that are considered to be a basic part of most western legal systems. Protection against murder, theft and other activities that would stop society functioning. So laws offered extended protection, not just to people, but also to their property, or chattel.
At one time companies would be considered to be chattel, owned by an individual
and subject to the protection that he had within the law. In the modern era though, companies have become much bigger entities; owned by many different people.
And so somewhere along the line they have become individuals under the law and offered certain protection. Now, the property of companies are ideas. So laws are evolving again to protect the chattel of individuals.
Its interesting to see that most of the people who were consulted thought that more protection for intellectual property (theres a whole bit kettle of fish, whether that actually exists or not;) was not necessary. More importantly, that it
would begin to stiffle individuals or small companies and shift the balance of power towards the larger corporations. Even more interesting is that the commission decided to ignore their view, and then to decide that they were wrong, actual
ly most of them did agree but had been biased.
So, are we entering a world where corporations begin to have democratic rights?
Apparently the EU is a democratic system, however it would appear that corporate opinions have more 'weight' than individuals. This kind of transition smells of a return to a more fuedal, or perhaps monarchic system with patronage of power and influence. Only those who can secure the backing of larger players can enter the playing field. What does this do to individual rights? Are we no longer allowed to compete on a level playing field?
I don't normally bite (well thats a complete lie) but seeing as you're such a good troll lets play along and feed you.
1. this is not as simple as the ant effect
This is the ant effect. Laying down paths between websites like this is something that IBM did quite a while ago.
2. this is not the same problem as the travelling salesman problem
Hmm, I'd partially agree with you there. It is similar but there do seem to be differences. Whilst an element of this is about connecting up shortest paths (by ensuring that related sites are more fully connected) it is more about the local area of a site and where the 'interesting' links go. I think that qualifies it as slightly different.
3. this is a system by which various correlations are attempted, and rated for fitness by the users who choose to follow or ignore the suggested links
True. I don't think that's what you originally claimed or that that qualifies as an obstifucated version of a GA.
4. this is a lot more like a GA system than an "ant" system.
correlations are attempted, and rated for fitness by the users who choose to follow or ignore the suggested links.
A GA works with a static fitness function that is evaluated against a changing set of rules. Here, the fitness function changes continuously as it dependent on which ant is following the link, as we play the ants in this and we all have different criteria for good and bad links this equates to a dynamically chaning fitness function. This is a very different thing indeed.
5. i am a dickwad
Well you were acting like one by slating the guy for making some good points.
Sounds like a really good idea actually. GUI's are good for some things (finding things, choices from not so well used menus etcs). Command lines are good for other things (like ordering eg piping different commands together to perform some kind of composite). Combining the two would probably be quite hard to get used to (you would have to really use the mouse and keyboard rather than mainly using one of them like people do now), but could be a lot more powerful.
If you find something that works that way then I'd start using it...
I'd ignore Mosch he's just flaming. It has nothing to do with dressing up a GA algorithm. In a GA system you modify your candidate algorithms independently and then check them for fitness.
This does something entirely different, each path can reinforce parts of other paths. In this way, potential paths can vote for each other. Yes, this does make it a different problem, yes this is very similar to what entangle are doing, yes mosch is a dickwad.
Nice to see someone with a little humility for a change, prepared to be wrong, even though it is obvious to everyone reading this thread that they are not.
Slashdot Mirror
Little guys need protection, and the patent office gives them that.
OK, so from your comments I assume that you've done an economics or maybe business ethics course. Nice. Well done. Now go and look at the real world.
Patent protection doesn't give the little guy squat.
Any larger company will be able to find a ton of patents that the smaller guy has infringed, and will offer to 'waive' them in exchange for free licensing rights to the little guys invention.
You can hide your head in the sand as much as you want but this is how the system works. As the original poster put it; little kids in the playground screaming 'but I thought of that first, you can't use it'.
We research wearable computing so we have quite a similar set of requirements to you. The board that we use is an ADS Bitsy which support either winCE (yup some peeps still call it that after all this time) or linux (hooray!). Take a look at their site for details. I'm not sure about ruggedness though, we put it inside a custom metal case so it can take a bit of a battering. We let student loose on them fer gods sake!
At one of the last wearables conferences I went to though I remember a talk from Xybernaut which sticks in the head as they claimed to have invented the concept of wearable computers to a room full of researchers working in the field, quite amusing. But anyways, they do a range of full blown windows / winCE devices in very rugged cases that were actually really good - but the battery life sucks on the fullblown windows ones. Try their site here.
Just look at the billions of dollars being spent to "stop cancer" when anyone with any general knowledge of the issue knows that this is an impossible act in the first place
Well, thats one hell of a claim to through into an argument, are you some kind of super-genius perhaps with access to medical knowledge that thousands of highly motivated researchers have missed? Wow, you must be so clever...
Give a man a fish, he owes you one fish.
Teach a man to fish, you give up your monopoly on fisheries.
Nice, I always preferred;
Light a man's fire and he'll be warm for the night.
Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Good point. On a sidenote why do people bother to post 'please mod the parent post up' messages? The AC post is much more insightful than the parent.
These solutions all work because they recognise that the specification is a shifting target and so they seek to minimise the cost of change. If you know that the customer is going to change his mind in three weeks time then make the quickest change that you can to satisfy him, knowing that it will be gutted and rewritten several times. Quite different to the NASA school of programming where the spec (please don't blow up, oh god please don't blow up!) doesn't ever change so they invest time in doing it right first time rather than chasing a changing target.
Well I'll take it as a reliable anecdotal source and I'll swap it for another.
I've smoked pot on and off for ten years, at some stages I've been a heavy smoker (about a half ounce a week) and at other times I've hardly touched it.
I'm quite fit, healthy, I love my job and I'm a very motivated person.
Personal stories are just that, stories about you, unless you get the chance to relive your live you'll never know if it was the choices that you made or something about your own makeup that determined how your life went.
On the other hand, I've known people who have been 'damaged' by it in the same way. It is something that can screw you up if you're susceptible, or that can cause no harm if you're lucky. I'd say that is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco which will always cause damage if you use them continually.
I've recently quit smoking entirely (hated the nicotine addiction that all joint smokers tell themselves they don't have). I now stick to baked goods only.
I find that the effects that are frequently reported (lethargy, lack of motivation, ill-health etc) are those that are caused by nicotine. Perhaps it is the joints doing the damage rather than the drug they contain. Smoking is a very dangerous habit.
Oops stumbled onto an expert. Didn't realise that I'd actually told one of the 'smart people' that I was refering to as working on the problem how to do it. I'll check out your paper as it sounds quite interesting, we've definitely got a subscription although normally the sites don't carry scans of the older stuff (well the ACM's worse for that).
;)
I'm actually working in a similar area myself looking at uses of specialisation so I'm quite familiar with how you write programs that you can analyse, I was just playing devils advocate
Good point. Didn't anybody else notice that in the article they state they can manipulate micro-particles with the electrical fields, but that nano-particles will require something more fine grained.
Crucial software components would have machine-checked proofs of correctness.
No they wouldn't. Its a common misconception that you can mechanically produce a program free from bugs. Firstly model-checking is hard because the state space is expodential in size (with respect to the program). Secondly certain properties are undecidable in logic (termination is the obvious example).
Nice idea, but lots of really smart people have spent many decades working on it without getting much closer.
Quite an interesting story. What was his name? What did he end up doing?
I think that you've missed the point he was making. Great coders aren't born with the complete ability to code and yes they still need education, but the actual greatness part is something that no amount of education will give you if you don't have it to begin with.
Whilst you are correct that some programming is as you describe, it does not cover all programming. There are some sorts of programming that are closer to art than engineering, the problem is that it covers such a broad range that people can quite happily look at their part of the design space and say look, look its an art! Whilst somebody else looks at another part and says Look,look its engineering. They're both right.
That sounds quite interesting, could you expand on what you mean by a rhetorical paradigm?
Ahh the old I wasn't going to pay for it anyway piracy argument being rehashed. Lots of subscribers like this means that HBO raise subscriptions, this is a vicious circle that leads to HBO going bust.
Why do people think that digital goods are completely different to physical ones? Yes they have a near-zero cost of distribution, but they still have a production cost. If it doesn't get paid they don't get produced.
Maybe a current p2p system but are you assuming that a p2p app 3 years down the line will have the same interface. Go an look at some of the pvr projects on sourceforge that people are writing. It isn't too hard to integrate tv listings with automatic recording, why would it be harder to find the programs that you want to watch on the schedule and then track down the file on a p2p system? Especially if one person starts publishing a tv guide with md5 hashes of the program rips...
OK lots of people have posted already about what a bad thing this is; loss of fair use, not being able to timeshift etc. These are good points, but what about the flipside of the argument?
Studios have to make money to employ people to make shows. If something like this isn't implemented then where will these people get their money from?
Picture a few years down the line, lots of people own tv cards. One person records all of the broadcast output and dumps it onto the p2p system of the day. Everyone downloads it for free, nobody watches the adverts (they've been stripped), nobody pays the subscription fee (download for free instead). So what happens to the studio that produces output that nobody pays for? They go bust.
So instead of attempting to cripple every pc and tv in the world which won't work (If I can see it then I sure I can find a way to record it) what is the alternative? What kind of system will work?
At the end of the day, somebody has to foot the bill...
OK I'm interested, what are you talking about?
I thought your first post was some kind of troll but obviously you do have a point, what do you mean by a 'loop' though? This isn't terminology that sounds familiar.
Also, I can't see any reason that you couldn't form a 'loop' in a quantum circuit, you can't copy information but that's a separate issue.
Well, its semi-novel. It's all based on Mark Weiser's ideas and calm computing. There is quite a good intro at Calm computing.
Specifically this is an example of moving intrusive information (visual report of a network connection) into the periphery. One of the classical examples is the dangling string which this is an obvious reinvention of, although the dangling string is a lot cooler and would be more useful in a surgery setting.
Lots of previous posters have already pointed out that what you really need is quality of service but this is nice as if it gets a bit 'weird' eg laggy then you can look up (or listen) and get feedback that it is the network and not the system playing up. Useful reassurance...
Actually X-Windows is prior art to the system that the poster describes and the patent refers to another type of system entirely. As somebody pointed out earlier it is overly broad to be enforcable, and quite obvious even in the early 90's when multimedia wasn't mainstream.
The patent describes pushing compressed video over a broadcast system, any porn site delivering videos is using a client pull over a packet system. The two are completely different.
It sounds quite a lot like the patent BT tried to use to claim ownership of hyperlinks. Completely different, doens't mention any of the technology used (because it predates it) and is a blatent attempt to patent an idea rather than an implementation of an idea (in order to stop somebody actaully doing it). Any lawyer should be able to write you a letter to that effect pretty quickly, and even if they do charge by the hour it'll probably take them less than that to do it for you.
Have tracked down her homepage like a lot of other people in this discussion (actually because her work sounded interesting rather than because she's a hot chick; although lets face it, she is), I was a bit dissapointed to find a lack of materials on there. Maybe its different in physics (not my field so I wouldn't know) but normally people put publications links.
Does anybody in the field know anything about her work, I noticed that her thesis title was Quantum Gravity which sounds ambitious (not quite a solved problem yet is it?). Are there any critques out there, or even a copy of her papers?
And here is another one in the uk:
Mobile Bristol
It would appear that the balance of laws are shifting. The original intent of a body of laws was to provide protection for members of society. Are companies really a member of society? In modern laws they would appear to be, and are offered most of the same legal protections as people.
;) was not necessary. More importantly, that it
would begin to stiffle individuals or small companies and shift the balance of power towards the larger corporations. Even more interesting is that the commission decided to ignore their view, and then to decide that they were wrong, actual
ly most of them did agree but had been biased.
Most laws are designed to create a protocol for the exchange of comodities, until people invented trading there was no need for people to follow the same system. Now it provided security and allowed commerce. Hence, early laws that are considered to be a basic part of most western legal systems. Protection against murder, theft and other activities that would stop society functioning. So laws offered extended protection, not just to people, but also to their property, or chattel.
At one time companies would be considered to be chattel, owned by an individual and subject to the protection that he had within the law. In the modern era though, companies have become much bigger entities; owned by many different people. And so somewhere along the line they have become individuals under the law and offered certain protection. Now, the property of companies are ideas. So laws are evolving again to protect the chattel of individuals.
Its interesting to see that most of the people who were consulted thought that more protection for intellectual property (theres a whole bit kettle of fish, whether that actually exists or not
So, are we entering a world where corporations begin to have democratic rights? Apparently the EU is a democratic system, however it would appear that corporate opinions have more 'weight' than individuals. This kind of transition smells of a return to a more fuedal, or perhaps monarchic system with patronage of power and influence. Only those who can secure the backing of larger players can enter the playing field. What does this do to individual rights? Are we no longer allowed to compete on a level playing field?
I don't normally bite (well thats a complete lie) but seeing as you're such a good troll lets play along and feed you.
1. this is not as simple as the ant effect
This is the ant effect. Laying down paths between websites like this is something that IBM did quite a while ago.
2. this is not the same problem as the travelling salesman problem
Hmm, I'd partially agree with you there. It is similar but there do seem to be differences. Whilst an element of this is about connecting up shortest paths (by ensuring that related sites are more fully connected) it is more about the local area of a site and where the 'interesting' links go. I think that qualifies it as slightly different.
3. this is a system by which various correlations are attempted, and rated for fitness by the users who choose to follow or ignore the suggested links
True. I don't think that's what you originally claimed or that that qualifies as an obstifucated version of a GA.
4. this is a lot more like a GA system than an "ant" system. correlations are attempted, and rated for fitness by the users who choose to follow or ignore the suggested links.
A GA works with a static fitness function that is evaluated against a changing set of rules. Here, the fitness function changes continuously as it dependent on which ant is following the link, as we play the ants in this and we all have different criteria for good and bad links this equates to a dynamically chaning fitness function. This is a very different thing indeed.
5. i am a dickwad
Well you were acting like one by slating the guy for making some good points.
Sounds like a really good idea actually. GUI's are good for some things (finding things, choices from not so well used menus etcs). Command lines are good for other things (like ordering eg piping different commands together to perform some kind of composite). Combining the two would probably be quite hard to get used to (you would have to really use the mouse and keyboard rather than mainly using one of them like people do now), but could be a lot more powerful.
...
If you find something that works that way then I'd start using it
I'd ignore Mosch he's just flaming. It has nothing to do with dressing up a GA algorithm. In a GA system you modify your candidate algorithms independently and then check them for fitness.
This does something entirely different, each path can reinforce parts of other paths. In this way, potential paths can vote for each other. Yes, this does make it a different problem, yes this is very similar to what entangle are doing, yes mosch is a dickwad.
Nice to see someone with a little humility for a change, prepared to be wrong, even though it is obvious to everyone reading this thread that they are not.