The (unproven) idea is that if you want to do the best at guessing what comes next (similar to compression), you have to have a great understanding of how the language and human minds work, including spelling, grammar, associated topics (for example, if you're talking about the weather, "sunny" and "rainy" are more likely to come than "airplane"), and so on. (Emphasis is mine)
But, surely, the compression algorithm isn't actually guessing at all - it knows what comes next because it is working from a very strict set of rules. I would probably be more impressed(*) if they wrote a heuristic that could accurately guess symbols based upon previous symbols - even if such a heuristic were to give a higher error rate than what the deterministic algorithm does.
Then perhaps as the next logical step, we could have a heuristic trained by Wikipedia which could accurately predict considerable parts of Britannica, or a physics text book, or a text book on the hundred years war, etc. Then we'd be talking.
(*) - not that I'm not impressed as it is, but there's always more where that came from:-)
As far as i am aware of anyone who can play a CD can also play a DVD. The other way around. I believe his point was that if you can play a CD, chances are you're doing it on a DVD player, since there are hardly any pure CD players left on the market, and so practically anyone who can play a CD can play a DVD. I'm not entirely convinced of this though. Does it also hold for car stereo systems etc.?
The 'God hypothesis' is a working hypothesis, but it is one nonetheless. Indeed, it's just not a scientific one.
It isn't currently scientifically testable, but then neither are other, more well-accepted theories such as macroevolution. It's fairly well-established in science to let people work from more or less educated guesses just to see if they can get anywhere interesting. As such, far from everything that is worked in within the field of science is strictly scientific in nature. But none of it will actually be taken into the fold as accepted theories until they can be formulated in a scientifically rigid manner.
(...) I'm just saying that you can't claim that all of scientific thought and theory is repeatedly testable and proven. Scientific thought can certainly be wildly speculative. The exact process of getting from a question up to an actual scientific theory cannot be easily codified and it often contains vast amounts of guesswork, intuition and good old luck. A good scientist is one that can think creatively and outside the box in a well disciplined manner, and who has the necessary skill to be able to recognize a lucky strike when it bites him on the nose. A scientific theory on the other hand will have to fulfill a number of basic requirements in order to earn that name. This requires it, among other things, to be falsifiable. As for being proven - scientific theories generally cannot be proven so this is something of a red herring. Proving scientific theories isn't much of a priority within the scientific community because it's a waste of time.
At some point, you *will* put faith in SOMETHING. It's just a choice of what to put your faith in. If anything, this would be the scientific method as such. Its adoption is accompanied by a great number of rational arguments and is based more upon the fact that experience tells us it works very well than it is on blind faith. When compared to religion, its most interesting characteristic is perhaps that if it can be shown to be less effecient at what it does than some other proposed method, it will be discarded practically overnight. Religious dogma tend to be somewhat more difficult to replace.
Empowering the end user doesn't make the software "free." It does precisely as you claim: it takes power away from one group and transfers it to someone else. Unless you're preaching anarchy, then this is exactly what freedom is: it takes power away from those who would otherwise rule and gives it to those who would have been ruled. This is, in a nutshell, what is meant by "free software" etc.
I know, I know, they needed to restrict your freedoms in order to guarantee them No, they don't. They restrict your freedoms in order to guarantee the freedoms of others. Specifically, they restrict the freedoms of the software developer in order to empower the end user. That is what the GPL is all about: take power away from the developer and give it to the end user. With this in mind, it is predictable that many software developers will rail against it. When GPL is advertised as "free as in speech", this is mainly directed at the end user. For him, GPL software is indeed free as in speech (to the extent that analogy holds) because the user can do whatever he pleases with it. Once the user transforms into a software developer, however, things change. He is now on the other side of the fence and must abide by the requirement that he should give up power of his own and give it to his end users.
What is the point of "free" software that you can't actually do as you please with? It's just trading one set of shackles for another. That's all fine and dandy if the RMS shackles don't bother you, but somehow it's still evil and despicable when the {Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc.} shackles don't bother you. Hypocrisy at its finest. It would help if you actually understood the topic before you started ranting on it. GPL empowers the end user while MS, Apple, IBM, etc., generally don't. Empowering the end user is seen as one of the modern ideals and as such it is glorified above the aforementioned corporations who generally just want to bleed as much money as possible out of the end user and who wouldn't dream of empowering him unless it involves some serious dollar amounts changing hands. GPL generally says: screw the developer, we're in this for the benefit of the user. There is nothing hypocritical about it, even if this particular sort of idealism may not appeal overly much to developers' egoes.
my disbelief in the big bang as describing the birth fo the ENTIRE universe stems from an instinct i have about the history of science: 1. at one time, people believed the world was flat These weren't scientists. For one, science wasn't invented yet so at best, the philosophers believed this. If you study the era in question however, not even they did. Some religious people may have, but it seems to me that it was a rather low-key artifact of the religious debate at the time that wasn't widely believed even by church leaders but since its truth/no-truth value was of little practical significance to anyone at the time no-one found it worthwhile to correct the misconception. Until Galileo made the mistake of turning it into a heresy anyway. At that time, it turned into church intrigue and its truth value became completely insignificant, as truth always does in high-level power struggles.
2. at one time, people believed the sun revolved aorund the earth These weren't scientists either since science wasn't invented yet. Philosophers may have believed this, largely because they didn't have the very critical-minded tools employed by science today to steer clear of total disasters like this.
3. at one time, people believe humans were created in the image of god, above the other beasts People still believe this, but that is hardly down to science.
It will not, however, resolve the basic conflict at the heart of the false science/religion dichotomy: Why should an Intelligent Designer not design intelligent rules and then follow them? The thing about god and science is that the "God hypothesis" (for lack of a better name) isn't a scientific hypothesis. It follows that science, as such, doesn't really care whether god exists or not. This doesn't mean that god cannot exist, nor does it mean that god must exist. What it means is that it's all the same to science. The moment someone successfully poses a variant of the god hypothesis that is scientific in nature, then perhaps science will start caring about it. Now, scientists on the other hand will have varying approaches to the question. This is largely because they are humans rather than scientific automatons. The scientist in them shouldn't really care unless the question has somehow come to jeopardize their scientific work - and even then it's not a scientific issue so much as it is a political or religious one.
This didactic line of argument itself suggests that a theory that may actually be true (and true theories aren't disprovable either) then it isn't science either. The most interesting observation would be that there may exist theories that are true, but which are not scientific theories. As an example: "God makes light curve around heavy objects because he likes the nice shiny patterns". Even if this were in actual fact true, it wouldn't be a scientific theory because there would be no way to disprove it if it were false.
Conversely, the theories that are most easily disprovable are most likely to turn to be false. This is an erroneous assumption. In fact, the truth is almost the opposite. The theory that is easily falsifiable but which has not yet been proven false is the theory that is most likely to be correct.
I recognize I am using 'disprovable' in a more literal sense than you mean. More interestingly, you appear to be using it in the sense that science is not. When science demands from a theory that it be disprovable, it has a very particular definition of disprovable in mind. It does not mean that the theory must have already been proven to be false, nor does it mean that the theory must, in actual fact, be proven false in the future. It means that it must be possible to prove that the theory is false in the event that it actually is false. In the event that the theory is true, it must still be possible, in principle, to prove it false but, of course, you can't do it in practice because the theory isn't false.
However, even more broadly, ID is disprovable if you can prove that another theory (like DE) actually occured. Scientific theories cannot be proven so this is an impossible test. It is for this very reason that one of the main tests for a scientific theory is whether or not it can be disproven - we must have some means by which to discard the theory and get on to the next, better one at some point. A non-disprovable theory will never be discarded (there are simply no criteria for doing it) and so we cannot have them around since it would gridlock any future development in the field.
Why is it not a scientific theory? Because it isn't disprovable. This is a very simple, formal test that any theory must pass in order to be considered a scientific theory.
To quote wikipedia on the matter: Signatory Dr. Steve Brill of Rutgers University has stated, "To be called a scientific theory, Intelligent Design must be at the very least, disprovable. Since there is no way for Intelligent Design to be disproved, it fails the simplest test of scientific theory."
Now, ID can still be a theory, it just can't be a scientific one.
What amazes me is that courts generally distrust pictures (because they finally understood that pictures can be manipulated), distrust digital pictures at least twice as much, but would trust a screenshot. Every halfway talented 10 year old and his dog can forge a screenshot. And if I can't, I simply create a window that displays what I want it to display and then take a shot. How can this in any way be evidence? It really depends what this is a screenshot of. I have no idea what the case may be for this particular lawsuit, but in previous lawsuits from the SONYs of the world, screenshots from the forensic computer teams were presented. That is, someone in the employ of RIAA tracked computer traffic and ended up with an on-screen log of IP addresses etc. A screenshot was produced of this log and presented as evidence.
In this case, the screenshot in itself would probably be of little value in court. What would typically happen, however, would be that the computer forensics people would give evidence and swear before the court that the screenshot presented was an accurate depiction of their findings and then it would be their testimony that would be used to help rule the case.
jesus what drivel. 99.9999% of people who pirate movies are not movie directros. To the extent that this is true, chances are that current bans on copying culture has a lot to do with it.
explain to me how the fuck they plan on enriching our culture by torrenting the latest hollywood movie? You could at the very least have made an effort to make this challenging. In any case, torrenting the movie helps ensure that it is spread to many thousands more who might otherwise never have become familiar with it. (Whether or not easily available Hollywood movies would actually enrich our culture is left as an exercise for the reader.)
And do'nt trot out that infantile crap about "we had culture before copyright". yes we did, plays written by one guy, paintings done by one guy. This has little to do with copyright and everything to do with surplus. In a society with little surplus, it stands to reason they could only feed so many artists. In today's society, with obscene food surplus, we can pretty much feed any number of artists.
Most of us LIKE big budget movies, TV shows and software. You will kill all that off if thieves like you insist on abolishing copyright. Even if that were the case, it would be preferable to the stagnation we will face if <randomInsult offense="25%" originality="0%"/> like you are allowed to keep dictating how our society should develop into the future.
It's not fair to ignore the Rules in your own actions, then hide behind them when others act againt you. Therefore, If you choose to break the Rules, it's only fair that you are no longer protected by them, either. Therefore, it's okay for people to kill criminals. Except, possibly, when the Rules say that you cannot kill people just for being criminals.
The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time. I'm not entirely up to date on US geography . . . would this be anywhere near Innsmouth?
*shudder*
The doctor will only let me see the headlines these days. Does the article say anything about inscriptions or the like?
Really? What planet do you live on? I live on Planet Earth, where the sky is blue, sparks fly upwards, and corruption is endemic. A good portion of the money spent on music will go to waste any way you organise it. Whether it goes into a politician's swiss bank account or gets snorted up a music exec's nose is really not going to make that much of a difference.
You have no right to take the fruits of other peoples hard work without compensating them. This is just morally wrong, and an incentive for everyone to sit on their ass and leech of other people. Nothing is being taken - it is being copied. There is a fundamental difference. The entirity of human culture and, indeed, infrastructure is based on the premise that we can make use of that which others have created. We shouldn't compromise this unless we decide that one thing we truly want is stagnation.
They're called riders. (...) These damn things should be outlawed. The supposed benefits are far outweighed by those that think nothing of abusing the good intention of riders ("think of the children!" "it's to fight terrorists!") Riders aren't really the issue here - riders are just the mechanism by which political compromise is realized. The issue is that you have a large number of elected representatives, each of them has his own agenda, and many of them don't really care much one way or the other about some specific issue that you are trying to get through. So you negotiate with them until you have enough of them supporting your case that you can get it voted in. In order to get them on your side, however, you must give them something in return (i.e. you promise to vote with them on something they care about). This is just politics, and it is how politics must work in anything except a dictatorship (and even dictatorships can be complicated beasts).
Now, whether the end result gets passed as n separate laws or as one composite law is really beside the point - it will all go into law anyway. In fact, it can be argued that riders are preferrable because it makes it slightly more transparent, in retrospect, which issues were sold in exchange for which other issues. (It also, presumably, makes it more difficult for one side to back down on its promises and this would facilitate the forming of compromises.)
It's not like "T-shirt labelled Tommy Hilfiger" is a whole market that needs competition. If this is true, then it follows that there is no money to be made by competing in that market and if so, nobody will. Whether or not it is legal is therefore of little interest in this case (why make a law to regulate something nobody does anyway). If it is false, however, it is advantageous that we allow free competition and so we should.
Like "Sorny" or "Panaphonic" or whatever they had in Simpson's land. Is it wrong if it's CALLED Sorny? Well, you wouldn't get very far. Could you start a software company and call it "micorsoft" or "microhard" or "softmicro"? What about sunglasses and call them "jokeleys"? A soda drink and call it "poopsi"? You shouldn't be able to do this if you do it in a way that is likely to confuse the purchaser about who actually manufactured the item. Which is all that trademarks should really be doing. So long as the purchaser is well-informed about who the manufacturer was, trademark law should have no complaints about it.
Actually to me it seems to be a case of trademarks going exactly as they're supposed to. If you want to sell crap clothes, come up with your own name. It's not really the name that is at issue, but the design. The problem only arises because designers today incorporate the name into the design specifically to make it difficult to compete with them.
Well, the trademark is usually something people will shell out extra money for to gain the status symbol effect. If everyone could have a cheap knock off the people who spent extra to get the status symbol would no longer stand out and no longer want to pay extra for the privilege. Therefore the knockoffs cause real damage even if noone's selling them as the real thing, the person wearing them still looks as if he has a genuine one. But the purpose of trademarks is not to create fashion markets - it's to enable consumers to know who manufactured a given piece of merchandise that they are considering to buy. They can then use this to build a mental map of who makes good quality products, who makes bad quality products etc. That it can also be used to establish fashion monopolies is an unintended side effect and one we should get rid of.
Besides, there's no reason to permit using other people's trademarks on your wares in a way that looks like they are the manufacturer, if the trademark is worthless surely you have no need to put it there, if it isn't surely random people shouldn't be able to take it? There is if the trademark is used in such a way as to become part of the product design. In this case, the only way to offer competing products would be to copy the design, which includes the trademark. This has become very common, presumably because it's a sneaky way to get legal protection for something that originally couldn't be protected.
There needs to be a separation of product design and the manufacturer mark on the product such that you can copy the design while still not claiming to be whoever created the original. This is elegantly solved by sticking the manufacturer's trademark somewhere inconspicuous rather than making it a central part of the design itself. So you'd have a sweater that said "Tommy Hilfiger" all over the chest while on the label inside it would say "Cheap Knockoff Productions Inc".
The second point is a little bit more tricky, though. Yes, more than anything you're paying for a name when you spend that 3k on the bag, but the manufacturer spent time and money building up that name. I guess you could say the value IS the name, even if it's just for social status. As you say, the identity of the manufacturer is the value of the product. And this is the reason why people with more money than self confidence will keep spending too much money getting products that are "genuine" even when cheaper copies are available. Only if the name becomes worth too little for them to bother (e.g. it's no longer hip) will they stop doing this and at this time, again, the manufacturer deserves to go out of business because he failed to maintain his one unique selling point (exclusivity or quality or whatever).
I think it depends on what you're buying. In Chinatown, here in NYC, you can buy a purse for $35 that looks EXACTLY like a $3000 gucci or whatever. Which would you want to pay? Well, personally, I probably wouldn't buy either. However, in practice, some would want to pay $35 and some would want to pay $3,000. The latter would largely be purchasing social status and don't really care how much it costs.
If thousands of people decide to buy the $35 knock-off the legit companies are out quite a lot of money. This is hardly a bad thing. If you can't provide value for money, you deserve to go out of business. In fact, our economic system depends upon it.
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But, surely, the compression algorithm isn't actually guessing at all - it knows what comes next because it is working from a very strict set of rules. I would probably be more impressed(*) if they wrote a heuristic that could accurately guess symbols based upon previous symbols - even if such a heuristic were to give a higher error rate than what the deterministic algorithm does.
Then perhaps as the next logical step, we could have a heuristic trained by Wikipedia which could accurately predict considerable parts of Britannica, or a physics text book, or a text book on the hundred years war, etc. Then we'd be talking.
(*) - not that I'm not impressed as it is, but there's always more where that came from
I'm not entirely convinced of this though. Does it also hold for car stereo systems etc.?
When GPL is advertised as "free as in speech", this is mainly directed at the end user. For him, GPL software is indeed free as in speech (to the extent that analogy holds) because the user can do whatever he pleases with it. Once the user transforms into a software developer, however, things change. He is now on the other side of the fence and must abide by the requirement that he should give up power of his own and give it to his end users. What is the point of "free" software that you can't actually do as you please with? It's just trading one set of shackles for another. That's all fine and dandy if the RMS shackles don't bother you, but somehow it's still evil and despicable when the {Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc.} shackles don't bother you. Hypocrisy at its finest. It would help if you actually understood the topic before you started ranting on it. GPL empowers the end user while MS, Apple, IBM, etc., generally don't. Empowering the end user is seen as one of the modern ideals and as such it is glorified above the aforementioned corporations who generally just want to bleed as much money as possible out of the end user and who wouldn't dream of empowering him unless it involves some serious dollar amounts changing hands.
GPL generally says: screw the developer, we're in this for the benefit of the user. There is nothing hypocritical about it, even if this particular sort of idealism may not appeal overly much to developers' egoes.
1. at one time, people believed the world was flat These weren't scientists. For one, science wasn't invented yet so at best, the philosophers believed this. If you study the era in question however, not even they did. Some religious people may have, but it seems to me that it was a rather low-key artifact of the religious debate at the time that wasn't widely believed even by church leaders but since its truth/no-truth value was of little practical significance to anyone at the time no-one found it worthwhile to correct the misconception. Until Galileo made the mistake of turning it into a heresy anyway. At that time, it turned into church intrigue and its truth value became completely insignificant, as truth always does in high-level power struggles. 2. at one time, people believed the sun revolved aorund the earth These weren't scientists either since science wasn't invented yet. Philosophers may have believed this, largely because they didn't have the very critical-minded tools employed by science today to steer clear of total disasters like this. 3. at one time, people believe humans were created in the image of god, above the other beasts People still believe this, but that is hardly down to science.
Now, scientists on the other hand will have varying approaches to the question. This is largely because they are humans rather than scientific automatons. The scientist in them shouldn't really care unless the question has somehow come to jeopardize their scientific work - and even then it's not a scientific issue so much as it is a political or religious one.
To quote wikipedia on the matter:
Signatory Dr. Steve Brill of Rutgers University has stated, "To be called a scientific theory, Intelligent Design must be at the very least, disprovable. Since there is no way for Intelligent Design to be disproved, it fails the simplest test of scientific theory."
Now, ID can still be a theory, it just can't be a scientific one.
How can this in any way be evidence? It really depends what this is a screenshot of. I have no idea what the case may be for this particular lawsuit, but in previous lawsuits from the SONYs of the world, screenshots from the forensic computer teams were presented. That is, someone in the employ of RIAA tracked computer traffic and ended up with an on-screen log of IP addresses etc. A screenshot was produced of this log and presented as evidence.
In this case, the screenshot in itself would probably be of little value in court. What would typically happen, however, would be that the computer forensics people would give evidence and swear before the court that the screenshot presented was an accurate depiction of their findings and then it would be their testimony that would be used to help rule the case.
"They made the choice to die when they pirated my latest album!"
"They made the choice to die when they brought a camcorder into my theater!"
"They made the choice to die when they modchipped their PS3!"
*shudder*
The doctor will only let me see the headlines these days. Does the article say anything about inscriptions or the like?
(...)
These damn things should be outlawed. The supposed benefits are far outweighed by those that think nothing of abusing the good intention of riders ("think of the children!" "it's to fight terrorists!") Riders aren't really the issue here - riders are just the mechanism by which political compromise is realized. The issue is that you have a large number of elected representatives, each of them has his own agenda, and many of them don't really care much one way or the other about some specific issue that you are trying to get through. So you negotiate with them until you have enough of them supporting your case that you can get it voted in. In order to get them on your side, however, you must give them something in return (i.e. you promise to vote with them on something they care about). This is just politics, and it is how politics must work in anything except a dictatorship (and even dictatorships can be complicated beasts).
Now, whether the end result gets passed as n separate laws or as one composite law is really beside the point - it will all go into law anyway. In fact, it can be argued that riders are preferrable because it makes it slightly more transparent, in retrospect, which issues were sold in exchange for which other issues. (It also, presumably, makes it more difficult for one side to back down on its promises and this would facilitate the forming of compromises.)
There needs to be a separation of product design and the manufacturer mark on the product such that you can copy the design while still not claiming to be whoever created the original. This is elegantly solved by sticking the manufacturer's trademark somewhere inconspicuous rather than making it a central part of the design itself. So you'd have a sweater that said "Tommy Hilfiger" all over the chest while on the label inside it would say "Cheap Knockoff Productions Inc".