A software is a product, and it employs some sort of algorithm or algorithms. So let's say I use an algorithm that some other company developed. Do I have to pay them?
And yes, Open Source will have a problem. A corporation could easily say "Hey the Open Source implementation that you have of XYZ infringes on my patent on the commercial version".
IMHO, I don't think patents will work for software (at least in this form). It's simply too abstract, and too widespread. Writing a poem and writing an algorithm are two different things. The poet can get money for having his poem published in books. But let's say you come up with a rather innovative and efficient algorithm for doing task X, and you work for a company Y, then Y owns the patent on it. So anyone who wants to use it will have to pay money. But what if you came up with another algorithm that does the same thing? Could they sue? What if you're a small company Z that came up with said algorithm? The big guy could take you out...
IANAL, but our laws for software are probably not mature (and well thought out) enough to deal with this... yet.
I agree. When I used to code IE specific pages, I made extensive use of IE's filters (they use DirectX). You could use them, or combine them for some pretty neat effects. I once made a page that had some pretty neat gradient fading effects, animations, and background music loops -- all in DHTML using IE filters. People used to ask me if I was using Flash, and they would be suprised when I told them that it was just HTML. Of course, it was just an experiment I tried. The problem was that when you tried to render a bunch of elements, it started getting very slow.
I would REALLY like to see some standardized transition effects of filters. I guess I could learn Flash, but why not do it through Javascript and HTML on the browser? It's less overhead.
I hope this is something the Firefox team will consider -- to figure out a platform independent way to implement Microsoft-like filters.
It's a funny thing: any web programmer sees any web browser as a programming platform, not an app. But at the same time the rest of the planet sees the web browser, and most web sites, as just another kind of application. The conflict makes browser design tough: it's impossible to invest in the end-user experience and the developer experience to everyone's satisfaction (a burden consumer OS developers have). Hell, even if you were only trying to do one of those two things, you still wouldn't be able to do it to everyone's satisfaction.
This dichotomy exists, but does it necessarily mean that you cannot incorporate the two? "Programming Features" can be made transparent to the user -- only web programmers need to be familiar with them. The user doesn't care what browser or document properties you can access... all they want to see is content. So let's say you had a really good developer engine in the background - the user doesn't need to see that.
Furthermore in today's web-browsing experience you cannot divorce one from the other. A web browser HAS to be a programming platform if it needs to support things like DHTML or run Javascript. Saying that it's difficult to do, is no excuse.
[King Roland has given in to Dark Helmet's threats, and is telling him the combination to the "air shield"]
King Roland: One.
Dark Helmet: One.
Colonel Sandurz: One.
King Roland: Two.
Dark Helmet: Two.
Colonel Sandurz: Two.
King Roland: Three.
Dark Helmet: Three.
Colonel Sandurz: Three.
King Roland: Four.
Dark Helmet: Four.
Colonel Sandurz: Four.
King Roland: Five.
Dark Helmet: Five.
Colonel Sandurz: Five.
Dark Helmet: So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard! That's the kind of combination an idiot would put on his luggage!
IMHO, this is a movie that will make full use of Burton's talents.
Willy Wonka is a deeply eccentric character, and Burton is known for his well... "Burtonesque" way of doing things. Burton will really bring out the weirdness of Wonka. Although the book and even the previous movie (where Gene Wilder did a GREAT job) have alluded to it, I think Burton will really bring out how weird and eccentric and mysterious Wonka really is.
I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo. Future systems will include wireless file transfer, so that you can seamlessly access songs from your player while in your car. Yes, the Griffin iTrip accessory sends the songs over an FM frequency to your car, but it has trouble in certain urban environments, and you have to fish for an available frequency
He really has a point there. I got sick of burning CD's, so I bought an MP3 player. I use a car-kit (bless those things) to listen the music from my MP3 player. I use the FM transmit sometimes, but just like the article says, I have trouble finding available frequencies. New compression methods/formats are all well and good, but I'd like to see better integration between audio devices. I want to be able to stream music from my audio unit and have my car audio system pick it up and play it.
There are car MP3 players, but the ones I have seen require you to burn a CD with MP3's on them.
He talks about Radical Social changes, but what about environmental changes?
Can our ecosystem support people who live to be a 1000 years? Just in the last 100 years human population has increased exponentially because of better medical science. I doubt we have enough resources to support people living to be 1,000 years or more. The rate of reproduction is going to remain the same, while the rate of mortality will be very low for while (until maybe a 1000 years from now). We'll have a population explosion - how will we support this population?
There is another social implication he hasn't talked about. Humanity has been advanced very rapidly in the last two centuries. Living to be a 1,000 years old will make us complacent and I don't know if we would be as driven to accomplish different things before we die.
It's hard to say how exactly our society will be affected, but the main issue is the population explosion problem.
The argument used by the conservatives is that using embryos means taking a life.
Well, then what about the hundreds of embryos that go un-used in fertility clinics? What do you think is done with them?
"When she saw the artificial fin for the first time, she ran away. She was so scared of the object. It took us five months to make her get used to the artificial fin. Now she is perfectly fine with it," he said.
Sometimes it's just because I want to have the latest and the greatest - my buddy might have something cooler, and I want it too, or I want BETTER! At other times it is a necessity.
You have to strike a balance between need/want. There are times I feel like shelling out some dough and upgrading my PC so that it is bleeding edge. But then I take a step back and think, "Do I REALLY need to?"
I hate and love a store like Fry's electronics. It has a bunch of cool stuff, but everytime I go in there, I come out with some sort of gadget. It's easy to get swept away. Luckily I make full use of most of the gadgets that I have. Others, not so much. I bought a hardware MPEG decoder card for my PC... but I don't even watch DVD's that much on my computer, because I had a DVD player? So it's simply sitting there...
Like the article says, you just need to know when to upgrade. Often you can make a smart decision by not getting the "latest and the greatest", but something that is a level below. Like for example, video cards. The top of the line ones are expensive, but the ones a level below have a good drop in price. So essentially buy a new gadget if you need it, if you can justify your use of it, and if it makes sense financially for you.
But of course, that doesn't rule out the occasional impulse purchase! I have purchased things on impulse, but luckily I end up using them a lot!
It is said that children who grow up in families with two native languages are better at learning new languages. In the context of this article, I wonder how that works out -- in the sense that I wonder how it makes it easy for these children to learn new languages.
Does the brain develop separate neural nets for each language? Is there a composite neural net? Does it matter how similar sounding or similar in grammar these two languages are?
I grew up learning Malayalam (a south indian language from the Dravidian family) and English at the same time. When I was 6, I started learning Hindi. I can speak fluent Malayalam and English and I am decently fluent in Hindi. In highschool, I started learning French and found it easy. Now, I do a lot of latin dancing and I hang around a lot of hispanic people and I've been picking up Spanish. I don't find it all that difficult to learn a language if I put my mind to it.
English and Malayalam are two radically different languages -- in sound and in grammar. I wonder how the neural nets in my brain developed to cope with this, and whether that is what makes it easy for me to pick up new languages.
Yes, in a manner of speaking. They first learn what the language is supposed to sound like.
The abstract tells us how the infants form words and sentences, but it doesn't tell us how they map the sounds to their meanings/contexts. Maybe the main article goes into more detail. I think the word/sound->meaning/context mapping would be interesting to study.
There are computer programs that can recognize words (voice recognition), but how many programs can (with a large rate of success) recognize the words and map them to their meanings, or context?
The point about the neural net is also interesting. It would seem that the brain is programmed to understand a certain language better. Does that mean that people who have learnt a certain language, can learn a similar language easily? The article seems to suggest that if the neural net is built in a certain way, it might be easy to learn similar sounding languages, but a language with a very similar grammar, but different sounds might be difficult? Would be interesting to pursue and find out...
Just the fact that different fossils exist and show clear progression from one for to the other, is enough to refute any sort of "intelligent design". So what if there is a gap? It doesn't mean that one form suddenly jumped from the other. If you date the layers you will see that there is a large time gap between those fossil layers too. Does that mean nothing existed during that gap? Or that there was only one form of that species that suddenly changed one fine day into a new one? Of course not.
Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies
DoubleClick is a terrible name for a cookie company. No wonder they are up for sale. They should have called it DoubleCrunch or DoubleCookie or something.
At the very least, a person who believes in Evolution, or a person who argues for Evolution.
However creationists seem to believe that there is this huge group of Evolutionists -- like it is some organized camp with some sort of agenda. The fact of the matter is that there isn't anything like it. Evolution gets validated through studies done in different biological fields. There is no concerted effort, just validation. I frequently hear the argument "You evolutionists are zealots! You are out to undermine faith!" or something stupid of that nature. There is no evolutionist camp.
Another thing to remember is that creationists only attack evolution and never come up with an alternative explanation other than "God did it". They frequently like to attack scientific studies and claim that there is a bias against them and that they are never taken seriously. Has any creationist every put out a scientific paper?
I agree. Most molecular biologists who are in the intelligent design camp are not against "micro-evolution", but are instead against "macro-evolution" -- primodial soup-type theories of genesis of life.
Think about it. What exactly is "macro" or "micro" evolution? Evolution doesn't occur through huge leaps and bounds; it happens through subtle changes. The reason we see huge changes is because there is a limit to the resolution we can get on fossil records. The subtle changes over a long period of time, do add up to a substantial change. This is what is misconstrued as "macro" evolution. To have macro, you need micro. You can't have one without the other.
One good argument against creationists regarding the "amazing eye" and how it is an example of "God's work" is this:
The human eye (for example) is not efficient. It is badly wired. There is a blindspot where the optic nerves exit the eye. The photoreceptors are upside down and the neurons and the blood vessels are in front of them. causing deficiencies in vision for humans. Is this an example of the creator's "crowning creation"?
On the other hand, the squid's eye doesn't have any of these problems. Looks like the "crowning creation" got a bum deal.
The beauty is that now that the vulnerability is known, there are already people out there working to fix it.
No software really 100% secure. They may always have some bugs or vulnerabilities. The cool thing about Open Source is that these vulnerabilities are quickly identified and patched, simply because the information is not proprietary. Compared this to Microsoft where some person finds an exploit, or when suddenly computers start getting slammed by a new virus that exploits a new vulnerability. In this case, the vulnerability is known, but it takes them a while to come up with a response.
I don't see how this means that open source software is most likely to have backdoors. {/tinfoil hat on} I'd be more afraid about some corporation has a backdoor in their software that allows them to get my information. What is there to stop them from doing that? Isn't their code proprietary? Who can look at it? They can deny it, but how will the prove it short opening their proprietary source? {/tinfoil hat off}. So saying that Open Source is the most likely to cointain backdoors is a ridiculous proposition. Yes it may, but by its very nature, open source code is open to inspection and it doesn't take someone long to notice a backdoor and make it known to the community.
Slashdot Mirror
A software is a product, and it employs some sort of algorithm or algorithms. So let's say I use an algorithm that some other company developed. Do I have to pay them?
And yes, Open Source will have a problem. A corporation could easily say "Hey the Open Source implementation that you have of XYZ infringes on my patent on the commercial version".
IMHO, I don't think patents will work for software (at least in this form). It's simply too abstract, and too widespread. Writing a poem and writing an algorithm are two different things. The poet can get money for having his poem published in books. But let's say you come up with a rather innovative and efficient algorithm for doing task X, and you work for a company Y, then Y owns the patent on it. So anyone who wants to use it will have to pay money. But what if you came up with another algorithm that does the same thing? Could they sue? What if you're a small company Z that came up with said algorithm? The big guy could take you out...
IANAL, but our laws for software are probably not mature (and well thought out) enough to deal with this... yet.
I agree. When I used to code IE specific pages, I made extensive use of IE's filters (they use DirectX). You could use them, or combine them for some pretty neat effects. I once made a page that had some pretty neat gradient fading effects, animations, and background music loops -- all in DHTML using IE filters. People used to ask me if I was using Flash, and they would be suprised when I told them that it was just HTML. Of course, it was just an experiment I tried. The problem was that when you tried to render a bunch of elements, it started getting very slow.
I would REALLY like to see some standardized transition effects of filters. I guess I could learn Flash, but why not do it through Javascript and HTML on the browser? It's less overhead.
I hope this is something the Firefox team will consider -- to figure out a platform independent way to implement Microsoft-like filters.
It's a funny thing: any web programmer sees any web browser as a programming platform, not an app. But at the same time the rest of the planet sees the web browser, and most web sites, as just another kind of application. The conflict makes browser design tough: it's impossible to invest in the end-user experience and the developer experience to everyone's satisfaction (a burden consumer OS developers have). Hell, even if you were only trying to do one of those two things, you still wouldn't be able to do it to everyone's satisfaction.
This dichotomy exists, but does it necessarily mean that you cannot incorporate the two? "Programming Features" can be made transparent to the user -- only web programmers need to be familiar with them. The user doesn't care what browser or document properties you can access... all they want to see is content. So let's say you had a really good developer engine in the background - the user doesn't need to see that.
Furthermore in today's web-browsing experience you cannot divorce one from the other. A web browser HAS to be a programming platform if it needs to support things like DHTML or run Javascript. Saying that it's difficult to do, is no excuse.
Or maybe I'm reading this wrong.
Best password/pin ever:
[King Roland has given in to Dark Helmet's threats, and is telling him the combination to the "air shield"]
King Roland: One.
Dark Helmet: One.
Colonel Sandurz: One.
King Roland: Two.
Dark Helmet: Two.
Colonel Sandurz: Two.
King Roland: Three.
Dark Helmet: Three.
Colonel Sandurz: Three.
King Roland: Four.
Dark Helmet: Four.
Colonel Sandurz: Four.
King Roland: Five.
Dark Helmet: Five.
Colonel Sandurz: Five.
Dark Helmet: So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard! That's the kind of combination an idiot would put on his luggage!
IMHO, this is a movie that will make full use of Burton's talents. Willy Wonka is a deeply eccentric character, and Burton is known for his well... "Burtonesque" way of doing things. Burton will really bring out the weirdness of Wonka. Although the book and even the previous movie (where Gene Wilder did a GREAT job) have alluded to it, I think Burton will really bring out how weird and eccentric and mysterious Wonka really is.
Who knew that Chinese Restaurants would start making web browsers?
I'm tired of having to burn CD's if I want to play my files on my car stereo. Future systems will include wireless file transfer, so that you can seamlessly access songs from your player while in your car. Yes, the Griffin iTrip accessory sends the songs over an FM frequency to your car, but it has trouble in certain urban environments, and you have to fish for an available frequency
.
He really has a point there. I got sick of burning CD's, so I bought an MP3 player. I use a car-kit (bless those things) to listen the music from my MP3 player. I use the FM transmit sometimes, but just like the article says, I have trouble finding available frequencies. New compression methods/formats are all well and good, but I'd like to see better integration between audio devices. I want to be able to stream music from my audio unit and have my car audio system pick it up and play it
There are car MP3 players, but the ones I have seen require you to burn a CD with MP3's on them.
He talks about Radical Social changes, but what about environmental changes?
Can our ecosystem support people who live to be a 1000 years? Just in the last 100 years human population has increased exponentially because of better medical science. I doubt we have enough resources to support people living to be 1,000 years or more. The rate of reproduction is going to remain the same, while the rate of mortality will be very low for while (until maybe a 1000 years from now). We'll have a population explosion - how will we support this population?
There is another social implication he hasn't talked about. Humanity has been advanced very rapidly in the last two centuries. Living to be a 1,000 years old will make us complacent and I don't know if we would be as driven to accomplish different things before we die.
It's hard to say how exactly our society will be affected, but the main issue is the population explosion problem.
The argument used by the conservatives is that using embryos means taking a life. Well, then what about the hundreds of embryos that go un-used in fertility clinics? What do you think is done with them?
"When she saw the artificial fin for the first time, she ran away. She was so scared of the object. It took us five months to make her get used to the artificial fin. Now she is perfectly fine with it," he said.
Wow! They got her artificial feet too?
Sometimes it's just because I want to have the latest and the greatest - my buddy might have something cooler, and I want it too, or I want BETTER! At other times it is a necessity.
You have to strike a balance between need/want. There are times I feel like shelling out some dough and upgrading my PC so that it is bleeding edge. But then I take a step back and think, "Do I REALLY need to?"
I hate and love a store like Fry's electronics. It has a bunch of cool stuff, but everytime I go in there, I come out with some sort of gadget. It's easy to get swept away. Luckily I make full use of most of the gadgets that I have. Others, not so much. I bought a hardware MPEG decoder card for my PC... but I don't even watch DVD's that much on my computer, because I had a DVD player? So it's simply sitting there...
Like the article says, you just need to know when to upgrade. Often you can make a smart decision by not getting the "latest and the greatest", but something that is a level below. Like for example, video cards. The top of the line ones are expensive, but the ones a level below have a good drop in price. So essentially buy a new gadget if you need it, if you can justify your use of it, and if it makes sense financially for you.
But of course, that doesn't rule out the occasional impulse purchase! I have purchased things on impulse, but luckily I end up using them a lot!
The grammar and rule syntaxes are very reminiscent of BNF's and EBNF's although maybe not as descriptive.
self-organizing neural networks for rapid acquisition of linguistic comprehension and synthesis in embryonic homo sapiens Shouldn't that be infantile?
It is said that children who grow up in families with two native languages are better at learning new languages. In the context of this article, I wonder how that works out -- in the sense that I wonder how it makes it easy for these children to learn new languages.
Does the brain develop separate neural nets for each language? Is there a composite neural net? Does it matter how similar sounding or similar in grammar these two languages are? I grew up learning Malayalam (a south indian language from the Dravidian family) and English at the same time. When I was 6, I started learning Hindi. I can speak fluent Malayalam and English and I am decently fluent in Hindi. In highschool, I started learning French and found it easy. Now, I do a lot of latin dancing and I hang around a lot of hispanic people and I've been picking up Spanish. I don't find it all that difficult to learn a language if I put my mind to it.
English and Malayalam are two radically different languages -- in sound and in grammar. I wonder how the neural nets in my brain developed to cope with this, and whether that is what makes it easy for me to pick up new languages.
Essentially they figure out what the language sounds like, before they figure out what it means.
Yes, in a manner of speaking. They first learn what the language is supposed to sound like. The abstract tells us how the infants form words and sentences, but it doesn't tell us how they map the sounds to their meanings/contexts. Maybe the main article goes into more detail. I think the word/sound->meaning/context mapping would be interesting to study.
There are computer programs that can recognize words (voice recognition), but how many programs can (with a large rate of success) recognize the words and map them to their meanings, or context? The point about the neural net is also interesting. It would seem that the brain is programmed to understand a certain language better. Does that mean that people who have learnt a certain language, can learn a similar language easily? The article seems to suggest that if the neural net is built in a certain way, it might be easy to learn similar sounding languages, but a language with a very similar grammar, but different sounds might be difficult? Would be interesting to pursue and find out...
It doesn't explain why they pick up swearwords much easier than normal words :)
ga ga goo goo.
Just the fact that different fossils exist and show clear progression from one for to the other, is enough to refute any sort of "intelligent design". So what if there is a gap? It doesn't mean that one form suddenly jumped from the other. If you date the layers you will see that there is a large time gap between those fossil layers too. Does that mean nothing existed during that gap? Or that there was only one form of that species that suddenly changed one fine day into a new one? Of course not.
Many sources report that DoubleClick - the world's leading supplier of cookies
DoubleClick is a terrible name for a cookie company. No wonder they are up for sale. They should have called it DoubleCrunch or DoubleCookie or something.
Do they have chocolate chip cookies?
At the very least, a person who believes in Evolution, or a person who argues for Evolution.
However creationists seem to believe that there is this huge group of Evolutionists -- like it is some organized camp with some sort of agenda. The fact of the matter is that there isn't anything like it. Evolution gets validated through studies done in different biological fields. There is no concerted effort, just validation. I frequently hear the argument "You evolutionists are zealots! You are out to undermine faith!" or something stupid of that nature. There is no evolutionist camp.
Another thing to remember is that creationists only attack evolution and never come up with an alternative explanation other than "God did it". They frequently like to attack scientific studies and claim that there is a bias against them and that they are never taken seriously. Has any creationist every put out a scientific paper?
I recommend this site: http://vuletic.com/hume/cefec/ It has a bunch of commonly used creationist arguments and rebuttals to them.
I agree. Most molecular biologists who are in the intelligent design camp are not against "micro-evolution", but are instead against "macro-evolution" -- primodial soup-type theories of genesis of life. Think about it. What exactly is "macro" or "micro" evolution? Evolution doesn't occur through huge leaps and bounds; it happens through subtle changes. The reason we see huge changes is because there is a limit to the resolution we can get on fossil records. The subtle changes over a long period of time, do add up to a substantial change. This is what is misconstrued as "macro" evolution. To have macro, you need micro. You can't have one without the other.
One good argument against creationists regarding the "amazing eye" and how it is an example of "God's work" is this:
The human eye (for example) is not efficient. It is badly wired. There is a blindspot where the optic nerves exit the eye. The photoreceptors are upside down and the neurons and the blood vessels are in front of them. causing deficiencies in vision for humans. Is this an example of the creator's "crowning creation"?
On the other hand, the squid's eye doesn't have any of these problems. Looks like the "crowning creation" got a bum deal.
Don't put water on them either. Now you know why cats don't like water. Hmmm?? Hmmm??
The beauty is that now that the vulnerability is known, there are already people out there working to fix it.
No software really 100% secure. They may always have some bugs or vulnerabilities. The cool thing about Open Source is that these vulnerabilities are quickly identified and patched, simply because the information is not proprietary. Compared this to Microsoft where some person finds an exploit, or when suddenly computers start getting slammed by a new virus that exploits a new vulnerability. In this case, the vulnerability is known, but it takes them a while to come up with a response.
I don't see how this means that open source software is most likely to have backdoors. {/tinfoil hat on} I'd be more afraid about some corporation has a backdoor in their software that allows them to get my information. What is there to stop them from doing that? Isn't their code proprietary? Who can look at it? They can deny it, but how will the prove it short opening their proprietary source? {/tinfoil hat off}. So saying that Open Source is the most likely to cointain backdoors is a ridiculous proposition. Yes it may, but by its very nature, open source code is open to inspection and it doesn't take someone long to notice a backdoor and make it known to the community.