The point here is not that its a viable situation, rather that the RIAA tends to interpret law, or figures, in the way which is most convient at the time.
Unlike most/. readers.;-) It also coincides with the price of DVDs, a digital copy of a movie which took say $100 million to produce, falling below $10, and that of compact discs, which take perhaps $50,000 to master rising above $20.
I don't suppose you would be deliberately misinterpreting facts and figures now, would you?
What percentage of movies do you think actually cost $100 million to make? 1 percent? 5 percent? And can you get any DVD you want for under $10, or just the crappy ones? Could you get say Lord of the Rings (a movie that actually did cost $100 million to make) for that price? Have you even tried looking for CDs under $20? (You don't have to shop at Wal-Mart, you know.)
Here's a little test: Go to amazon.com right now and compare the average price of their 10 top-selling DVDs to the average price of their top 10 CDs. I have performed this experiment on several occasions, and the price of the CDs is consistently $5 cheaper. So my advice to you is before you go off accusing everyone else of spewing propaganda, you might want to take a closer look at what is coming out of your own mouth. (or fingers)
No one (that is sane and levelheaded, that is) has said the *AA's can't protect their copyrights. At least not from what I've read..
The general tone of/. reader's is that they're not opposed to copyright owners protecting their copyrights in theory. However, they are opposed to every conceivable practical way in which the *AAs might do so. They seem to believe that if you're a business trying to make a profit then you have no rights while the little guy is immune from blame.
Last I checked, Edison died a very, very obscenely rich man. Could Edison's actions really be called "Mistakes" if they resulted in him and his company overall obtaining a massive amount of money and political clout?
That's tip-off #1 that this guy is about to right a biased, unsubstantiated article. I stopped reading when I saw this quote: Major league baseball is a perfect example -- there's no such thing as an independent major league baseball team... No [baseball] team "wins" just because they have the richest owner.
You mention it cost Progress $10million in lost development and marketing work, but there is nothing regarding what kind of intelligence was exercised by Progress investing so much money into a questionable business practice?
Using OSS is a questionable business practice? Damn... I knew it!
I too hate a lot of things about C++. But frankly, even though it's not even close to my first language, I can't think of another language I like more for a generic problem domain. Sure, when it's web apps it's PHP; when it's database toys or mostly UI apps it's Delphi; et cetera. Still, when it's difficult, it's c++, every single time.
I'm with you. I can think of huge flaws with every language I use. I used to use C++ a lot, but now I'm in a job where we have a large codebase that's entirely in C. I see lots of bugs that a good C++ programmer would never make... semaphores that aren't released, memory leaks in strdup, incorrect typecasting. Sure, everyone can see flaws in C++, but I guess the reason why none of the D languages have caught on is that no one can agree on what the specific flaws are.
Whenever you post a survey like this, you mainly get responses from people with strong opinions. What we really need to see is the responses from the other 80% of the people who don't care enough to respond to a survey like this.
No, if I was starting a project just to get MS to lower their prices, I would state that PRICE and only PRICE was what was driving me to look at alternatives. I wouldn't mention reasons that might piss MS off and hurt negotiations.
Who mentioned that stuff anyway? This article is not "news", it is commentary by a BBC columnist. The article alleges that they are studying the effectiveness and cost savings of open source, then the rest of the text is all the author's opinion.
Frankly, I think OSS advocates in the media try to downplay the cost savings of open source and focus on the quality/security aspects. Because advocacy is about spin and being perceived as anti-business is not good publicity.
Doing so would be nothing more than creating a human! For instance, if a automaton behaved, thought, and acted exactly like humans, they are humans in my eyes--are they not?
I can't speak for what is human "in your eyes", but I would say no. "Human" refers to the species. So if you're not flesh and blood, you're not human. If a human--or any other being--is non-deterministic, it has free will. That's pretty much the definition...
No way. An electron is non-deterministic. Does that mean it has free will? What about a computer that takes input from a random number generator? By the way, by random I do not mean that the outcomes have equal probability. For instance, if humans random numbers are skewed towards '7', it can still be random
I agree, but that's pretty tangential to my point. Atheists like me believe that there is nothing special that separates man from machines. It seems to me that we hold machines to high standards in some areas where we don't expect them of humans. (E.g. random number generation.)
That you assume the opposite raise an alarm with me. Could you show us that you know what you're talking about by giving us some reasons for your position? Here's what I know:
a) The guy you're slamming has a published article on the subject. b) You're posting on Slashdot.
Touche. I can't argue with that.
I think this guy probably knows more about chess than I do, but I doubt he knows much about AI. (BTW, I have written some published articles on AI, since you seem to care.) For some more in depth reasons why this guy is wrong, see the rest of this thread.
But if the states are RANDOM, you will never be able to simulate the brain, or anything else for that matter. What you are sayin is akin to trying to predict the EXACT position of an electron in a nucleus. It just cannot be done.
If the uncertainty principle affects the brain (which it certainly does, but perhaps not as much as you think), then we won't be able to predict the exact output of *a particular* human brain. But that's not what I'm talking about; it should be possible to build a computer that thinks like a human without copying one particular human. humans indeed have free will, IN THE SENSE THAT you cannot predict what humans--or any process for that matter--will do.
I don't call that "free will". I call that "the illusion of free will". On top of all this, can computers (a deterministic finite system) ever generate random numbers? I'm not too knowledgeable in this matter but my feeling was that computers only generate pseudo-random numbers and other questionable numbers passed off as "random".
Computers generally have some non-deterministic components that can be used to seed a random number generator.
BTW, you might consider that humans aren't that great at choosing a random number either. Ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 10 and the first thing that pops into their head is usually 7.
Who has suggested that chess is turning into a giant game of memorization?
I believe it was Kasparov, although I'm not completely sure. I think this was his justification for wanting to consult reference materials during the opening.
This is the same code, but the latter is more understandable.
You have got to be kidding me!!! There are many good reasons to comment code and many bad reasons. Check out the book "Code Complete" if you want a good discussion of this. The *WORST* type of comment is the kind that mindlessly repeats what any fool can see that the code does. E.g.:
x--;// decrement x if (x 0)// check if x is less than 0
return 3;// return 3 if x is less than 0.
That is pretty much exactly what your "good" version does. (Except that the comments arbitrarily make comments about each line that could apply equally well to any of the other lines.)
Here are some fictitious examples of good comments:/* x should never go below 0 here, but if it does, return 3, since that allows us to fail gracefully. */ x--; if (x 0)
return 3;// Implement the sanity check from section 2.8 of the RFC. x--; if (x 0)
return 3;/* This kludge allows us to be backwards compatible with v2.50, which had a bug where the index in the datafile is sometimes incorrect. */ x--; if (x 0)
return 3;
Certainly, you are right and the OP is wrong, except maybe for the law of diminishing returns. The best computers will pass the best humans very, very soon (assuming that they haven't already), and the ratings still seem to be going up fairly linearly.
But if chess turns out to be a theoretical draw (as most people expect it to be) then the returns will be diminishing in the sense that the best computers may never be able to consistently beat the best human players (they will never lose, usually draw, and occasionally win). In fact, humans will very likely give up on trying to beat the computer and they will concentrate on earning the easiest draw with the fewest complications.
I don't know if I understand what you mean by cellular automata. Is that the same idea that everything in the universe is deterministic? If yes, you are wrong. The universe can be shown to be non-deterministic. Modern day science is heading in the direction that everything is probabilistic. What this means is that humans are NOT automatons.
I agree with the OP. Even if the universe is not deterministic (which in my opinion has yet to be proven -- think hidden variables), it should be possible to build a computer that follows the same statistical laws as the human brain. Just because our brains are probabilistic doesn't mean we have "true" free will. What it implies is merely that we are non-deterministic cellular automata.
They used that strategy to kill a company that had no business case. Netscape was already giving away their software for free. Microsoft just gave it away for free in a slightly more convenient manner.
BTW, the Fritz people make a big deal about beating deep blue in 1995. That would have been a big deal, but the program they beat was Deep Thought II ("Deep Blue Prototype"), not deep blue, a weaker program running on weaker hardware. The match was in Hong Kong where DT2 had persistent problems with their data line to the USA where DT2 was physically located.
What's the big deal about the data line? Isn't the computer choosing the moves? If that's the case you can just have someone tell you the moves it chooses over the phone!
Anyway, I think this article is dumb. The guy raises the possibility that computers will never be better at chess than humans. That should set off immediate alarm bells that the author doesn't know what he's talking about.
Then he states that if it does happen, it won't happen in the near future. That, in itself, would be a defensible position (if the guy hadn't already proved that he doesn't know what he's talking about). But he doesn't back up this assertion with any compelling logic. If, as has often been speculated, chess is turning into a giant game of memorization, it stands to reason that computers are going to gain the upper hand.
Eolas, the company that sued Microsoft back in 1999 for alleged violation of its browser plug-in patent, was awarded $521 million by a Chicago jury on Monday.
Regardless of their intent, I would say that old laws lose their relevance with time. Laws to protect intellectual property are recent ones, as they should be. The laws are adapting to a modern era where piracy is quick and easy. They are also adapting to an environment where the majority of the populace is not involved in subsistance farming, and commercial entertainment is a much more important part of our lives.
I don't believe in the validity of analogies. You seem to defer to them. Jefferson had some good ideas, in priciple. But to put them into practice, you must take them with a grain of salt, seeing as how they are over 200 years old. The concept of information and data and music all just being 1s and 0s didn't exist back then. You also didn't have movies or the concept of an artistic work that can cost over $100 million to produce.
The US constitution has some good parts and some bad parts that seemed like a good idea at the time and we would now be better off without. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans adhere dogmatically to the word of the constitution as if it was cast in stone. (Despite the fact that it has been amended quite a few times.)
Speaking of stuff that's cast in stone, the bible is full of 2000+ year old ideas which are now hopelessly outdated.
Jefferson wrote that 200 years ago about ideas, not movies/music. So by using that as your argument, you assume that:
a) I would agree with Jefferson. b) anything that applies to ideas should also apply to music/movies, since they are both "information" (a categorization that I doubt Jefferson would have agreed with). c) 200 year old ideas are still likely to be relevant today.
Slashdot Mirror
Good comment.
-a
The point here is not that its a viable situation, rather that the RIAA tends to interpret law, or figures, in the way which is most convient at the time.
Unlike most
It also coincides with the price of DVDs, a digital copy of a movie which took say $100 million to produce, falling below $10, and that of compact discs, which take perhaps $50,000 to master rising above $20.
I don't suppose you would be deliberately misinterpreting facts and figures now, would you?
What percentage of movies do you think actually cost $100 million to make? 1 percent? 5 percent? And can you get any DVD you want for under $10, or just the crappy ones? Could you get say Lord of the Rings (a movie that actually did cost $100 million to make) for that price? Have you even tried looking for CDs under $20? (You don't have to shop at Wal-Mart, you know.)
Here's a little test: Go to amazon.com right now and compare the average price of their 10 top-selling DVDs to the average price of their top 10 CDs. I have performed this experiment on several occasions, and the price of the CDs is consistently $5 cheaper. So my advice to you is before you go off accusing everyone else of spewing propaganda, you might want to take a closer look at what is coming out of your own mouth. (or fingers)
-a
No one (that is sane and levelheaded, that is) has said the *AA's can't protect their copyrights. At least not from what I've read..
The general tone of
-a
Generally, invoicing for other people's work is not held in high regard by the law.
Invoicing for someone else's work? Actually, that sounds like something a lawyer would do.
-a
All you spelling nazis... in case you're wondering, I spelled write right on purpose. I'm testing you. :-)
-a
Last I checked, Edison died a very, very obscenely rich man. Could Edison's actions really be called "Mistakes" if they resulted in him and his company overall obtaining a massive amount of money and political clout?
That's tip-off #1 that this guy is about to right a biased, unsubstantiated article. I stopped reading when I saw this quote:
Major league baseball is a perfect example -- there's no such thing as an independent major league baseball team... No [baseball] team "wins" just because they have the richest owner.
Somebody's been smoking crack.
-a
You mention it cost Progress $10million in lost development and marketing work, but there is nothing regarding what kind of intelligence was exercised by Progress investing so much money into a questionable business practice?
Using OSS is a questionable business practice? Damn... I knew it!
-a
I too hate a lot of things about C++. But frankly, even though it's not even close to my first language, I can't think of another language I like more for a generic problem domain. Sure, when it's web apps it's PHP; when it's database toys or mostly UI apps it's Delphi; et cetera. Still, when it's difficult, it's c++, every single time.
I'm with you. I can think of huge flaws with every language I use. I used to use C++ a lot, but now I'm in a job where we have a large codebase that's entirely in C. I see lots of bugs that a good C++ programmer would never make... semaphores that aren't released, memory leaks in strdup, incorrect typecasting. Sure, everyone can see flaws in C++, but I guess the reason why none of the D languages have caught on is that no one can agree on what the specific flaws are.
-a
strncpy() has existed for quite some time, thanks.
strncpy, in itself, does not eliminate buffer overflows.
-a
Keyword: unscientific poll.
Whenever you post a survey like this, you mainly get responses from people with strong opinions. What we really need to see is the responses from the other 80% of the people who don't care enough to respond to a survey like this.
-a
No, if I was starting a project just to get MS to lower their prices, I would state that PRICE and only PRICE was what was driving me to look at alternatives. I wouldn't mention reasons that might piss MS off and hurt negotiations.
Who mentioned that stuff anyway? This article is not "news", it is commentary by a BBC columnist. The article alleges that they are studying the effectiveness and cost savings of open source, then the rest of the text is all the author's opinion.
Frankly, I think OSS advocates in the media try to downplay the cost savings of open source and focus on the quality/security aspects. Because advocacy is about spin and being perceived as anti-business is not good publicity.
-a
Doing so would be nothing more than creating a human! For instance, if a automaton behaved, thought, and acted exactly like humans, they are humans in my eyes--are they not?
I can't speak for what is human "in your eyes", but I would say no. "Human" refers to the species. So if you're not flesh and blood, you're not human.
If a human--or any other being--is non-deterministic, it has free will. That's pretty much the definition...
No way. An electron is non-deterministic. Does that mean it has free will? What about a computer that takes input from a random number generator?
By the way, by random I do not mean that the outcomes have equal probability. For instance, if humans random numbers are skewed towards '7', it can still be random
I agree, but that's pretty tangential to my point. Atheists like me believe that there is nothing special that separates man from machines. It seems to me that we hold machines to high standards in some areas where we don't expect them of humans. (E.g. random number generation.)
-a
That you assume the opposite raise an alarm with me. Could you show us that you know what you're talking about by giving us some reasons for your position? Here's what I know:
a) The guy you're slamming has a published article on the subject.
b) You're posting on Slashdot.
Touche. I can't argue with that.
I think this guy probably knows more about chess than I do, but I doubt he knows much about AI. (BTW, I have written some published articles on AI, since you seem to care.) For some more in depth reasons why this guy is wrong, see the rest of this thread.
-a
Hence my comment that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
-a
But if the states are RANDOM, you will never be able to simulate the brain, or anything else for that matter. What you are sayin is akin to trying to predict the EXACT position of an electron in a nucleus. It just cannot be done.
If the uncertainty principle affects the brain (which it certainly does, but perhaps not as much as you think), then we won't be able to predict the exact output of *a particular* human brain. But that's not what I'm talking about; it should be possible to build a computer that thinks like a human without copying one particular human.
humans indeed have free will, IN THE SENSE THAT you cannot predict what humans--or any process for that matter--will do.
I don't call that "free will". I call that "the illusion of free will".
On top of all this, can computers (a deterministic finite system) ever generate random numbers? I'm not too knowledgeable in this matter but my feeling was that computers only generate pseudo-random numbers and other questionable numbers passed off as "random".
Computers generally have some non-deterministic components that can be used to seed a random number generator.
BTW, you might consider that humans aren't that great at choosing a random number either. Ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 10 and the first thing that pops into their head is usually 7.
-a
Who has suggested that chess is turning into a giant game of memorization?
I believe it was Kasparov, although I'm not completely sure. I think this was his justification for wanting to consult reference materials during the opening.
-a
This is the same code, but the latter is more understandable.
You have got to be kidding me!!! There are many good reasons to comment code and many bad reasons. Check out the book "Code Complete" if you want a good discussion of this. The *WORST* type of comment is the kind that mindlessly repeats what any fool can see that the code does. E.g.:
x--;
if (x 0)
return 3;
That is pretty much exactly what your "good" version does. (Except that the comments arbitrarily make comments about each line that could apply equally well to any of the other lines.)
Here are some fictitious examples of good comments:
x--;
if (x 0)
return 3;
x--;
if (x 0)
return 3;
incorrect. */
x--;
if (x 0)
return 3;
-a
Certainly, you are right and the OP is wrong, except maybe for the law of diminishing returns. The best computers will pass the best humans very, very soon (assuming that they haven't already), and the ratings still seem to be going up fairly linearly.
But if chess turns out to be a theoretical draw (as most people expect it to be) then the returns will be diminishing in the sense that the best computers may never be able to consistently beat the best human players (they will never lose, usually draw, and occasionally win). In fact, humans will very likely give up on trying to beat the computer and they will concentrate on earning the easiest draw with the fewest complications.
-a
I don't know if I understand what you mean by cellular automata. Is that the same idea that everything in the universe is deterministic? If yes, you are wrong. The universe can be shown to be non-deterministic. Modern day science is heading in the direction that everything is probabilistic. What this means is that humans are NOT automatons.
I agree with the OP. Even if the universe is not deterministic (which in my opinion has yet to be proven -- think hidden variables), it should be possible to build a computer that follows the same statistical laws as the human brain. Just because our brains are probabilistic doesn't mean we have "true" free will. What it implies is merely that we are non-deterministic cellular automata.
-a
They used that strategy to kill a company that had no business case. Netscape was already giving away their software for free. Microsoft just gave it away for free in a slightly more convenient manner.
-a
BTW, the Fritz people make a big deal about beating deep blue in 1995. That would have been a big deal, but the program they beat was Deep Thought II ("Deep Blue Prototype"), not deep blue, a weaker program running on weaker hardware. The match was in Hong Kong where DT2 had persistent problems with their data line to the USA where DT2 was physically located.
What's the big deal about the data line? Isn't the computer choosing the moves? If that's the case you can just have someone tell you the moves it chooses over the phone!
Anyway, I think this article is dumb. The guy raises the possibility that computers will never be better at chess than humans. That should set off immediate alarm bells that the author doesn't know what he's talking about.
Then he states that if it does happen, it won't happen in the near future. That, in itself, would be a defensible position (if the guy hadn't already proved that he doesn't know what he's talking about). But he doesn't back up this assertion with any compelling logic. If, as has often been speculated, chess is turning into a giant game of memorization, it stands to reason that computers are going to gain the upper hand.
-a
Eolas, the company that sued Microsoft back in 1999 for alleged violation of its browser plug-in patent, was awarded $521 million by a Chicago jury on Monday.
The thing about sensational jury awards is that they usually end up getting reduced later. For example, in the McDonalds coffee case the jury awarded $2.7 million in punative damages, but the judge later reduced the award to only $480k.
Microsoft was found in violation, and they're probably not going to overturn that. But half a bil is a ridiculous award, as anyone can see.
-a
Regardless of their intent, I would say that old laws lose their relevance with time. Laws to protect intellectual property are recent ones, as they should be. The laws are adapting to a modern era where piracy is quick and easy. They are also adapting to an environment where the majority of the populace is not involved in subsistance farming, and commercial entertainment is a much more important part of our lives.
I don't believe in the validity of analogies. You seem to defer to them. Jefferson had some good ideas, in priciple. But to put them into practice, you must take them with a grain of salt, seeing as how they are over 200 years old. The concept of information and data and music all just being 1s and 0s didn't exist back then. You also didn't have movies or the concept of an artistic work that can cost over $100 million to produce.
-a
The US constitution has some good parts and some bad parts that seemed like a good idea at the time and we would now be better off without. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans adhere dogmatically to the word of the constitution as if it was cast in stone. (Despite the fact that it has been amended quite a few times.)
Speaking of stuff that's cast in stone, the bible is full of 2000+ year old ideas which are now hopelessly outdated.
-a
Jefferson wrote that 200 years ago about ideas, not movies/music. So by using that as your argument, you assume that:
a) I would agree with Jefferson.
b) anything that applies to ideas should also apply to music/movies, since they are both "information" (a categorization that I doubt Jefferson would have agreed with).
c) 200 year old ideas are still likely to be relevant today.
-a