The other things you have to examine is whether the music in question is A) liked by the listener, and B) familiar to the listener.
I imagine in a study they probably picked some arbitrary pop songs and had everyone listen to the same stuff, so as to eliminate effects from giving one person song X and another person song Y.
If I had to listen to some random Celine Dion or Beyonce while trying to do work, hell yes I would be distracted (not to mention annoyed). I have no doubt my performance would suffer. Those artists, while very talented, are not my cup of tea.
But if you instead gave me some familiar 90s alternative, I suspect the effects might be different.
I similarly grew up in a small town without noise pollution to speak of, but still find that having background music helps me concentrate better than silence does.
Other noises are distracting - especially speech or television. Speech draws my attention whereas repetitive music does not.
So one big benefit is that music drowns out the intermittent noises from the environment, like speech, that might otherwise disrupt my train of thought. A pair of headphones was thus invaluable when working on projects in a college dorm room.
Another benefit is that (good) music has a relaxing effect for me. Being relaxed makes for easier concentration.
I prefer silence for more reflective activities where I want my mind to wander. But for focused or analytical tasks I use music.
A little public skepticism might actually be a good thing. We (and particularly the media) are far to quick to believe every new study that comes out, even though most published research turns out to be wrong.
They have every right to say this; when the people arguing against them are not climate scientists, or in scientific fields related. If I tell someone with a PhD in climate science that they are wrong, they have every right to chuckle at me, since I really don't know what I'm talking about. This is not a problem.
It is when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise entitles him to refuse to publish the full, raw data he used along with his analytic methods. It is when he uses his influence with a journal to exclude equivalently credentialed scientists' papers because they disagree with his interpretations of the data. Science is not a priesthood. We do not (and should not) accept proclamations from scientists as truth because they hold a piece of paper or have three letters next to their name. We analyze their data and their methods,and try to poke holes. If nobody can poke valid holes, then his analysis gains acceptance until someone comes up with a better analysis. When certain scientists - the very people who should know the merits of scientific scrutiny the best - start trying to circumvent this process, it damages their credibility and the hard-earned reputation of science as being based on fact rather than emotion or politics.
It is also a problem when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise in a given scientific field makes him an expert on public policy. Folks can accept scientific observations that the world has been warming in recent years yet have differing views on appropriate solutions. One of the disturbing things about many practitioners of climate science is how they've been merging with a parallel alarmist religious/political movement that thinks warming is our capitalistic sin against the planet, and which assumes the solution has to be drastic carbon output reductions regardless of how much economic collateral damage it would cause. The thought of engineering other ways to produce planetary cooling is dismissed. Discussions of such policies is not the realm of science. It is the realm of public policy, which thankfully is not left simply to a handful of people whose expertise is often exceeded by their hubris.
We need to remember that scientists are human beings too. They are as fallible as anyone else. Back in the 1970s there was a big scare from climate scientists that we were going to have massive global cooling and enter a new ice age. The problem is that climate is very complex, and attempts to model it inevitably miss something. While such models are valuable tools to gain understanding and predict future events, they do need to be taken with a grain of salt. So let's have a debate about what we should do about global warming. But let's go into it open-eyed, realizing that the participants and the models all have faults that should make us leery of hasty and dramatic changes in policy.
You're absolutely correct, nothing obliges Google from making money... even if it help someone else do evil.
If what we're concerned about is the welfare of the Chinese people - those to whom evil is being done by the Chinese government - then how would Google boycotting the country help those people?
There are really two options:
1. Google and other Western search providers refuse to provide service to the Chinese people because they disagree with the censorship restrictions. The Chinese government then says "you don't get to operate here". If the government of China hasn't been willing to relax censorship in respond to demands from its own people, nor in response to calls from the international community, it sure isn't about to roll over because a couple of American technology CEOs make a fuss.
2. Google and other Western providers comply with the demands of the Chinese government and censor their results in China.
In option #1, the Chinese people get censored search. In option #2, the Chinese people get censored search.
What Option #2 gives the Chinese people is search that sucks less, given that (at least currently) those with the best search technology happen to be the aforementioned Western companies.
While Option #1 gives us an opportunity to show off our moral superiority to Chinese censors, it actually makes the Chinese people themselves worse off.
If you want to go Godwin, a more fitting analogy would be an anti-Nazi German taking a job as a guard in a concentration camp. This would let them prevent some small abuses, maybe provide some secret aid to the prisoners when the bosses weren't looking, but it doesn't stop the biggest horrors of the camp, and means in some sense the guard is "helping someone else do evil".
Is the moral thing to do not to work there at all, even though you know that there are plenty of sadistic SOBs who'd be happy to do the job far more cruelly? Or is the moral thing to take the job so that you can mitigate the situation in whatever meager ways you can?
There's more to this situation than simply a question of money versus morality.
wait, what? who said anything about saving us anything on health care? I though the goal was just to get everyone health care
My recollection was that Obama talked extensively (and correctly!) about the need to reduce the cost of health care. After all, that's the root cause of so many people not having insurance. (He won points in the debate against Hillary when he said he thought people lacked insurance because they couldn't afford it, not because they didn't want it). Reducing the costs over the long run is key to being able to sustainably provide universal coverage.
If we limit ourselves to the (worthy but insufficient) goal of ensuring coverage to those without means (via government subsidy or government insurance), without "bending the cost curve", then we've committed ourselves to a death spiral. Double-digit percentage yearly increases in costs of care will require more and more people over time to receive government subsidies. Eventually everyone will require subsidies if we don't do something (and even then costs won't be controlled).
We may be spreading the pain more evenly, but the pain is still getting worse for everyone. That's why Obama spoke so eloquently about addressing costs, and why it's so regrettable that Congress has been busy watering down the parts of the health reform bill that have actual potential to lower costs significantly.
The only way to ensure a system of social support is to have a third-party with more resources and information analyse the problem holistically and allocate the funds as fairly as possible
The libertarian argument would be that there are third parties that accept funding from the citizenry, analyze societal problems, and spend that funding to help those problems. They're called charities. Charitable organizations, whether in the form of NGOs, churches, etc. have been around for ages.
Personally I think government has a proper role in providing a societal safety net. But it's not the only possible solution, and in fact is so often insufficient that our charitable organizations are still vital.
And like most classified material it actually means 'in the interest of protecting the people involved from political embarrassment'.
Do you have a citation to support this?
But it's great way to launder policy; take an internal policy for which you have no democratic political support, push it in a secret international forum as 'foreign policy', then take it back home and adopt it, claiming it's an international treaty requirement. Great way to bypass any democratic forms.
I appreciate (and somewhat agree with) your point that some of the negotiators attempt to insert domestically unpopular language into a treaty and then claim it was a necessary compromise with other nations. But for a treaty (however negotiated) to take effect upon the United States, the treaty has to be ratified by the Senate by two-thirds vote. A two-thirds majority would seem to imply considerable domestic support.
absent patent protection an engineer could simply disassemble your new vacuum cleaner (for example) and produce a clone, cheaper than yours as they don't have to cover the R&D costs.
Software can be disassembled / reverse-engineered too. As with your physical example, that could be cheaper than doing the original algorithm R&D. Software copyright protection does not protect the underlying idea, only a particular expression of an idea; just as a novelist has copyright protection for his romance novel but not on the concept of a love story.
While there may be good arguments against software patents, this claim that somehow copyright prevents others from using an algorithm is inaccurate.
When those US spies help thwart the next bombing in London or Madrid, perhaps you will reconsider your words.
Perhaps the EU Council is more concerned with the safety of their member nations' citizens than with the privacy of their financial transactions from the US intelligence community. You may disagree with the EU's decision to make that tradeoff, but to call it exploitation by the US is ridiculous.
As an American I'm sorry your experience with my countrymen has not been all it could be. Certainly we do not wish our positive interactions with our visitors to be purely on a superficial level.
In my experience many Americans are not so touchy as you describe, but likely that is because self-criticism is easier to take than the exact same criticism from outside. (A woman may claim she's fat, but if you dare voice the same sentiment to her...).
I do not know what your own country's customs around politics are. But here in the US, politics is considered a sensitive subject, laden with emotion, and we do not often discuss it with people we are not very close with. Even discussions among friends may become heated.
Please also realize that most Americans feel we get a heavy dose of criticism, and little appreciation, from other nations. A common view is that the rest of the world is perfectly willing to take our help without a word of thanks, whether it be formal economic or military aid, or charitable donations. But when we disagree on something, we are suddenly viewed as monsters. When we hear hyperbole from Europe about how we're the biggest threat to world peace (really? compared to the lunatics in Tehran or the tyrant in Pyongyang?), we tend to get a little defensive.
So while your critique may have been well-intentioned, it was probably perceived as piling on, which will make folks "circle the wagons" to defend their nation's honor, even if they may actually share your concerns.
Are we over-sensitive? Maybe. But I hope you can understand why we feel as we do, and that my countrymen will be able to do the same for you in your future visits.
presumably it's fixes for the variety of nasty bugs in the browser. The spec may not have changed but nothing says the browser software implements them all perfectly, or that it does so without allowing someone to take over your PC courtesy of some bug in the browser's security model, buffer management, etc.
Whilst I think that blue brain may be overkill on the complexity side, there is still more complexity required than provided by ANNs.
That depends on what exactly it is you're trying to demonstrate or investigate. If we're trying to probe the nature of "intelligence" (by whatever of the many possible and potentially limited definitions we may use), examining the properties of a huge ANN may provide insight. For example, how much of a brain's abilities could be achieved by such a network if large enough (regardless of efficiency), and how much requires more complex arrangements?
It seems to me like there is some value in doing such simulations, and also value in investigating more complex models. IMO this controversy is just an academic pissing contest about whose approach is "better", when we could just recognize them as complementary and move on.
I suspect you would find that the new California Empire would just rob you just as blind as the Federal government does. After all, consider California's current inability to be fiscally responsible. Consider that the robbers of the "Federal Empire" are led by Speaker Pelosi, who was elected by... the citizens of California.
And consider that California doesn't even spend its money effectively - the services cost more but provide less in public goods compared to the performance of other demographically and geographically similar states.
Good luck with that plan to secede. That eight-largest economy will wither rather quickly if a secession happens.
I would think that folks designing programming languages would care quite a bit about what makes code maintainable. After all, designers want their creations to be used and valued, not to be some obscure relic in the dustbin of history. These days nobody's going to adopt a new language that is difficult to maintain.
You have the misfortune of commenting on a story whose sole purpose seems to be flamebait.
Based upon my experience in the field, I see it this way:
1. There is a wide spectrum of computer and algorithmic knowledge, and the boundaries of the various disciplines within this spectrum are fuzzy. To me all these flamewars over what CS is, or is not, are ridiculous. You draw from different parts of the spectrum as the problem domain requires.
My stab it would be thus: computer science helps you understand, analyze, and develop algorithms. Computer engineering helps you understand the machines those algorithms need to run on, thus improving your ability to implement algorithms as efficient programs. Software engineering helps you understand how to implement those programs in ways that efficient to maintain and extend, less error prone, etc. BUT THE BOUNDARIES ARE FUZZY.
2. There are multiple ways to learn this spectrum of knowledge. Formal degree programs are good ways to learn, but self-teaching and experience can also get you a lot.
3. Employers have a need to vet candidates for skills and intellect. College degrees provide a convenient shortcut, or pre-screening function, to narrow the pool of candidates. For an employer that may be a cost-effective strategy, but does mean they may miss out on some excellent candidates who don't fit the common mold.
4. My experience has been that the difference between really effective developers and mediocre ones is neither degree nor even IQ. The really great ones can adapt to murky and complex problems, communicate effectively (including writing easy-to-understand code), and exercise good judgment about when to polish the apple and when to say it's good enough.
I've seen plenty of developers who went to great schools, probably have great IQs, but struggle in a real-world environment. Because in the real world, problems are often ill-defined, you can't look up everything in a textbook or derive it from mathematical equations, and your limited resources need to be spent wisely.
So I wouldn't take too much grief from all the snobs coming out of the woodwork. If your employer is keeping you while laying off the others, that says that in the real world you're doing what needs to be done.
We know that other tasks involving acquired skills are influenced by natural ability. Intelligence is partly inherited, athletic ability is partly inherited, etc. It should come as no surprise that a task requiring some cognitive skill (paying attention to the right things) and physical skill (good steering, etc) is also influenced by genetics.
Starting off with a poor hand genetically just means you have to work harder. Some athletes have to work harder than others to get peak performance. Some students have to work harder than others to ace their exams. And some drivers need to work harder than others to drive well.
There's a world of difference between knowing in principle how to build something, and having a completely functional, debugged design/implementation in hand. Getting from the former to the latter requires a large investment of time and manpower. From a military standpoint, why wouldn't you want to force your adversaries to duplicate your effort, rather than doing the work for them?
Whoever is in charge, they can and will use their power to take from me and give to themselves. And someone will always be in charge, whether it's The Government, John Galt or Don Corleone. However, a democratic government is the the most likely of these to pay even lip service to listening to me every now and then, so I'd rather take it than a businessman or an outright mafioso.
Fair enough. But better would be to have power split, so that none of these are completely in charge. Checks and balances between government and business would serve us better than absolute control by either.
Government is also not always the better choice than a businessman, depending on which situation is being controlled. A businessman is generally interested in doing business, and can be "persuaded" by the prospect of getting your business, the fear of boycotts, government action, etc. OTOH, while politicians may have some limited accountability each election, a government bureaucrat has virtually none. No action on your or my part is likely to budge them. Even if they're incompetent the unions make them almost impossible to get fired. So if it's a bureaucrat standing in your way, you have even less recourse than with a businessman.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you own not an idea, but a government-granted monopoly on commercial exploitation of that idea for a limited time.
After all, owning a patent does not entitle one to forbid the teaching of the idea (which if you truly "owned" the idea you could do). It just grants you exclusivity over use of that idea in commerce for a while.
Similarly, owning a copyright on a song about how The Man is keeping you down grants you the right to control use of your particular expression of the idea, but does not prevent someone else from creating a different song about The Man keeping you down. The idea is not your property, the time-limited right to reproduce your particular expression of that idea is.
If you go sing a song or recite a poem on the street corner, that's speech. Depending on the lyrics, it might even be interesting speech:-)
If you go sing the latest copyrighted lyrics from Metallica or Beyonce, you are engaging in a public performance of copyrighted material. Unless you have worked out a licensing agreement with the owner of that copyright, you are violating copyright law. The copyright holder may or may not bother to take civil action against you as a result, but either way your speech has violated the law.
Copyright is thus clearly a limitation upon speech. That observation is neutral as to whether the limitation is appropriate (we generally think restricting speech in some ways is OK, such as laws against libel, slander, "yelling fire in a crowded theater", etc; yet find other restrictions unacceptable). But it is clearly a limitation of one's right to speak freely.
After all, a person can be wealthy and powerful simply by inheriting land or gold, through no virtue of their own. Property can be gained simply through violence or dispossession. However, intellectual property requires some sort of intelligence, innovation or talent to generate
A person can gain IP through inheritance too. It can also be gained by a type of violence - namely the threat of bringing a lawsuit. Even if of dubious merit, a lawsuit threat is a time-proven way to extort rights to use someone's IP, given that lawsuits are so expensive to defend that even winning one can be a net loss.
You can also gain IP that represents no innovation. Just pick something obvious, get the unworthy patent through a highly overworked patent office, and then ask for royalties from the companies that actually do the real innovation. If you ask for modest sums from each, they might well pay rather than spend even more money to fight your nuisance patent. We've seen plenty of unmerited patents get granted in the high-tech field. Getting such an innovation-less patent is not a sure thing, but it's been done.
All property is intellectual property. What makes an atom so much more significant than a pattern?
False. Ownership of a physical object is not the same as "ownership" of an idea. You can replicate an idea by teaching it to someone else, without the teacher having lost a thing. Both are better for it. You can't give someone a physical object without losing possession of it yourself.
I'm not advocating abolishing the government-granted monopolies some folks lump together into the term "intellectual property". Properly conditioned and time-limited, those monopolies (trademarks, copyrights, patents) can help provide for the public good. But it's ridiculous to consider them IDENTICAL to real property.
If I own an ounce of gold should I be able swap it for a crafted gold ornament of equal weight? Why not? They're both just gold!
Sure, if you can find someone to swap with you. Maybe there's someone who thinks their gold ornament is hideous and would rather have your differently-shaped, equal weight gold object than their own. Nobody has forbid you from doing so.
The individual would have no ownership. The individual would have no control. This is the "Free market" that most non-interventionists advocate. A world where corporations are free to rob the public blind.
The consequences you claim would come from abolishing "intellectual property" sound a lot like the consequences we see today with IP. Artists are often indentured to corporations. Those corporations regularly and successfully lobby Congress to retroactively extend the copyrights, thus robbing the public blind in exchange for no public benefit. (At least the initial copyright you can claim is a monopoly granted to incentivize creation, which benefits the public; but the retroactive extensions of that copyright are pure money grabs with no public benefit, only public loss). Congress passes laws like the DMCA which use the power of government to prevent individuals from exercising their rights to use lawfully-purchased content.
Because that's what 'free market' is all about. It's about looking out for the freedom to do as you please, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. It's the freedom from government so that corporations of unchecked and unaccountable institutions can use their power and control to enslave and rob the population blind.
Highly-regulated markets incentivize corporations to spend lots of money lobbying their regulators. They eventually gain huge control over those regulators (look up "regulatory capture"). Then what you get is corporations using government's power and control to enslave and rob the population blind. That's often even more powerful than what the corporation could have done on its own.
Look at the telecoms or at the RIAA and MPAA. They've got their regulators wrapped around their fingers.
Now if I wanted to be inflammatory I could say "that's what 'regulation' is all about". But just as the free market is not about anarchy and anarchy's resulting abuses, neither is government regulation is about its abuses of power.
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The other things you have to examine is whether the music in question is A) liked by the listener, and B) familiar to the listener.
I imagine in a study they probably picked some arbitrary pop songs and had everyone listen to the same stuff, so as to eliminate effects from giving one person song X and another person song Y.
If I had to listen to some random Celine Dion or Beyonce while trying to do work, hell yes I would be distracted (not to mention annoyed). I have no doubt my performance would suffer. Those artists, while very talented, are not my cup of tea.
But if you instead gave me some familiar 90s alternative, I suspect the effects might be different.
I similarly grew up in a small town without noise pollution to speak of, but still find that having background music helps me concentrate better than silence does.
Other noises are distracting - especially speech or television. Speech draws my attention whereas repetitive music does not.
So one big benefit is that music drowns out the intermittent noises from the environment, like speech, that might otherwise disrupt my train of thought. A pair of headphones was thus invaluable when working on projects in a college dorm room.
Another benefit is that (good) music has a relaxing effect for me. Being relaxed makes for easier concentration.
I prefer silence for more reflective activities where I want my mind to wander. But for focused or analytical tasks I use music.
A little public skepticism might actually be a good thing. We (and particularly the media) are far to quick to believe every new study that comes out, even though most published research turns out to be wrong.
They have every right to say this; when the people arguing against them are not climate scientists, or in scientific fields related. If I tell someone with a PhD in climate science that they are wrong, they have every right to chuckle at me, since I really don't know what I'm talking about. This is not a problem.
It is when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise entitles him to refuse to publish the full, raw data he used along with his analytic methods. It is when he uses his influence with a journal to exclude equivalently credentialed scientists' papers because they disagree with his interpretations of the data. Science is not a priesthood. We do not (and should not) accept proclamations from scientists as truth because they hold a piece of paper or have three letters next to their name. We analyze their data and their methods,and try to poke holes. If nobody can poke valid holes, then his analysis gains acceptance until someone comes up with a better analysis. When certain scientists - the very people who should know the merits of scientific scrutiny the best - start trying to circumvent this process, it damages their credibility and the hard-earned reputation of science as being based on fact rather than emotion or politics.
It is also a problem when the guy with the PhD thinks his expertise in a given scientific field makes him an expert on public policy. Folks can accept scientific observations that the world has been warming in recent years yet have differing views on appropriate solutions. One of the disturbing things about many practitioners of climate science is how they've been merging with a parallel alarmist religious/political movement that thinks warming is our capitalistic sin against the planet, and which assumes the solution has to be drastic carbon output reductions regardless of how much economic collateral damage it would cause. The thought of engineering other ways to produce planetary cooling is dismissed. Discussions of such policies is not the realm of science. It is the realm of public policy, which thankfully is not left simply to a handful of people whose expertise is often exceeded by their hubris.
We need to remember that scientists are human beings too. They are as fallible as anyone else. Back in the 1970s there was a big scare from climate scientists that we were going to have massive global cooling and enter a new ice age. The problem is that climate is very complex, and attempts to model it inevitably miss something. While such models are valuable tools to gain understanding and predict future events, they do need to be taken with a grain of salt. So let's have a debate about what we should do about global warming. But let's go into it open-eyed, realizing that the participants and the models all have faults that should make us leery of hasty and dramatic changes in policy.
You're absolutely correct, nothing obliges Google from making money... even if it help someone else do evil.
If what we're concerned about is the welfare of the Chinese people - those to whom evil is being done by the Chinese government - then how would Google boycotting the country help those people?
There are really two options:
1. Google and other Western search providers refuse to provide service to the Chinese people because they disagree with the censorship restrictions. The Chinese government then says "you don't get to operate here". If the government of China hasn't been willing to relax censorship in respond to demands from its own people, nor in response to calls from the international community, it sure isn't about to roll over because a couple of American technology CEOs make a fuss.
2. Google and other Western providers comply with the demands of the Chinese government and censor their results in China.
In option #1, the Chinese people get censored search.
In option #2, the Chinese people get censored search.
What Option #2 gives the Chinese people is search that sucks less, given that (at least currently) those with the best search technology happen to be the aforementioned Western companies.
While Option #1 gives us an opportunity to show off our moral superiority to Chinese censors, it actually makes the Chinese people themselves worse off.
If you want to go Godwin, a more fitting analogy would be an anti-Nazi German taking a job as a guard in a concentration camp. This would let them prevent some small abuses, maybe provide some secret aid to the prisoners when the bosses weren't looking, but it doesn't stop the biggest horrors of the camp, and means in some sense the guard is "helping someone else do evil".
Is the moral thing to do not to work there at all, even though you know that there are plenty of sadistic SOBs who'd be happy to do the job far more cruelly? Or is the moral thing to take the job so that you can mitigate the situation in whatever meager ways you can?
There's more to this situation than simply a question of money versus morality.
wait, what? who said anything about saving us anything on health care? I though the goal was just to get everyone health care
My recollection was that Obama talked extensively (and correctly!) about the need to reduce the cost of health care. After all, that's the root cause of so many people not having insurance. (He won points in the debate against Hillary when he said he thought people lacked insurance because they couldn't afford it, not because they didn't want it). Reducing the costs over the long run is key to being able to sustainably provide universal coverage.
If we limit ourselves to the (worthy but insufficient) goal of ensuring coverage to those without means (via government subsidy or government insurance), without "bending the cost curve", then we've committed ourselves to a death spiral. Double-digit percentage yearly increases in costs of care will require more and more people over time to receive government subsidies. Eventually everyone will require subsidies if we don't do something (and even then costs won't be controlled).
We may be spreading the pain more evenly, but the pain is still getting worse for everyone. That's why Obama spoke so eloquently about addressing costs, and why it's so regrettable that Congress has been busy watering down the parts of the health reform bill that have actual potential to lower costs significantly.
The only way to ensure a system of social support is to have a third-party with more resources and information analyse the problem holistically and allocate the funds as fairly as possible
The libertarian argument would be that there are third parties that accept funding from the citizenry, analyze societal problems, and spend that funding to help those problems. They're called charities. Charitable organizations, whether in the form of NGOs, churches, etc. have been around for ages.
Personally I think government has a proper role in providing a societal safety net. But it's not the only possible solution, and in fact is so often insufficient that our charitable organizations are still vital.
And like most classified material it actually means 'in the interest of protecting the people involved from political embarrassment'.
Do you have a citation to support this?
But it's great way to launder policy; take an internal policy for which you have no democratic political support, push it in a secret international forum as 'foreign policy', then take it back home and adopt it, claiming it's an international treaty requirement. Great way to bypass any democratic forms.
I appreciate (and somewhat agree with) your point that some of the negotiators attempt to insert domestically unpopular language into a treaty and then claim it was a necessary compromise with other nations. But for a treaty (however negotiated) to take effect upon the United States, the treaty has to be ratified by the Senate by two-thirds vote. A two-thirds majority would seem to imply considerable domestic support.
absent patent protection an engineer could simply disassemble your new vacuum cleaner (for example) and produce a clone, cheaper than yours as they don't have to cover the R&D costs.
Software can be disassembled / reverse-engineered too. As with your physical example, that could be cheaper than doing the original algorithm R&D. Software copyright protection does not protect the underlying idea, only a particular expression of an idea; just as a novelist has copyright protection for his romance novel but not on the concept of a love story.
While there may be good arguments against software patents, this claim that somehow copyright prevents others from using an algorithm is inaccurate.
So what is it about the US Constitution that you think needs "a profound renovation of their political and social system"?
When those US spies help thwart the next bombing in London or Madrid, perhaps you will reconsider your words.
Perhaps the EU Council is more concerned with the safety of their member nations' citizens than with the privacy of their financial transactions from the US intelligence community. You may disagree with the EU's decision to make that tradeoff, but to call it exploitation by the US is ridiculous.
As an American I'm sorry your experience with my countrymen has not been all it could be. Certainly we do not wish our positive interactions with our visitors to be purely on a superficial level.
In my experience many Americans are not so touchy as you describe, but likely that is because self-criticism is easier to take than the exact same criticism from outside. (A woman may claim she's fat, but if you dare voice the same sentiment to her...).
I do not know what your own country's customs around politics are. But here in the US, politics is considered a sensitive subject, laden with emotion, and we do not often discuss it with people we are not very close with. Even discussions among friends may become heated.
Please also realize that most Americans feel we get a heavy dose of criticism, and little appreciation, from other nations. A common view is that the rest of the world is perfectly willing to take our help without a word of thanks, whether it be formal economic or military aid, or charitable donations. But when we disagree on something, we are suddenly viewed as monsters. When we hear hyperbole from Europe about how we're the biggest threat to world peace (really? compared to the lunatics in Tehran or the tyrant in Pyongyang?), we tend to get a little defensive.
So while your critique may have been well-intentioned, it was probably perceived as piling on, which will make folks "circle the wagons" to defend their nation's honor, even if they may actually share your concerns.
Are we over-sensitive? Maybe. But I hope you can understand why we feel as we do, and that my countrymen will be able to do the same for you in your future visits.
presumably it's fixes for the variety of nasty bugs in the browser. The spec may not have changed but nothing says the browser software implements them all perfectly, or that it does so without allowing someone to take over your PC courtesy of some bug in the browser's security model, buffer management, etc.
Whilst I think that blue brain may be overkill on the complexity side, there is still more complexity required than provided by ANNs.
That depends on what exactly it is you're trying to demonstrate or investigate. If we're trying to probe the nature of "intelligence" (by whatever of the many possible and potentially limited definitions we may use), examining the properties of a huge ANN may provide insight. For example, how much of a brain's abilities could be achieved by such a network if large enough (regardless of efficiency), and how much requires more complex arrangements?
It seems to me like there is some value in doing such simulations, and also value in investigating more complex models. IMO this controversy is just an academic pissing contest about whose approach is "better", when we could just recognize them as complementary and move on.
I suspect you would find that the new California Empire would just rob you just as blind as the Federal government does. After all, consider California's current inability to be fiscally responsible. Consider that the robbers of the "Federal Empire" are led by Speaker Pelosi, who was elected by... the citizens of California.
And consider that California doesn't even spend its money effectively - the services cost more but provide less in public goods compared to the performance of other demographically and geographically similar states.
Good luck with that plan to secede. That eight-largest economy will wither rather quickly if a secession happens.
I would think that folks designing programming languages would care quite a bit about what makes code maintainable. After all, designers want their creations to be used and valued, not to be some obscure relic in the dustbin of history. These days nobody's going to adopt a new language that is difficult to maintain.
You have the misfortune of commenting on a story whose sole purpose seems to be flamebait.
Based upon my experience in the field, I see it this way:
1. There is a wide spectrum of computer and algorithmic knowledge, and the boundaries of the various disciplines within this spectrum are fuzzy. To me all these flamewars over what CS is, or is not, are ridiculous. You draw from different parts of the spectrum as the problem domain requires.
My stab it would be thus: computer science helps you understand, analyze, and develop algorithms. Computer engineering helps you understand the machines those algorithms need to run on, thus improving your ability to implement algorithms as efficient programs. Software engineering helps you understand how to implement those programs in ways that efficient to maintain and extend, less error prone, etc. BUT THE BOUNDARIES ARE FUZZY.
2. There are multiple ways to learn this spectrum of knowledge. Formal degree programs are good ways to learn, but self-teaching and experience can also get you a lot.
3. Employers have a need to vet candidates for skills and intellect. College degrees provide a convenient shortcut, or pre-screening function, to narrow the pool of candidates. For an employer that may be a cost-effective strategy, but does mean they may miss out on some excellent candidates who don't fit the common mold.
4. My experience has been that the difference between really effective developers and mediocre ones is neither degree nor even IQ. The really great ones can adapt to murky and complex problems, communicate effectively (including writing easy-to-understand code), and exercise good judgment about when to polish the apple and when to say it's good enough.
I've seen plenty of developers who went to great schools, probably have great IQs, but struggle in a real-world environment. Because in the real world, problems are often ill-defined, you can't look up everything in a textbook or derive it from mathematical equations, and your limited resources need to be spent wisely.
So I wouldn't take too much grief from all the snobs coming out of the woodwork. If your employer is keeping you while laying off the others, that says that in the real world you're doing what needs to be done.
what USB device has Palm broken?
We know that other tasks involving acquired skills are influenced by natural ability. Intelligence is partly inherited, athletic ability is partly inherited, etc. It should come as no surprise that a task requiring some cognitive skill (paying attention to the right things) and physical skill (good steering, etc) is also influenced by genetics.
Starting off with a poor hand genetically just means you have to work harder. Some athletes have to work harder than others to get peak performance. Some students have to work harder than others to ace their exams. And some drivers need to work harder than others to drive well.
There's a world of difference between knowing in principle how to build something, and having a completely functional, debugged design/implementation in hand. Getting from the former to the latter requires a large investment of time and manpower. From a military standpoint, why wouldn't you want to force your adversaries to duplicate your effort, rather than doing the work for them?
Whoever is in charge, they can and will use their power to take from me and give to themselves. And someone will always be in charge, whether it's The Government, John Galt or Don Corleone. However, a democratic government is the the most likely of these to pay even lip service to listening to me every now and then, so I'd rather take it than a businessman or an outright mafioso.
Fair enough. But better would be to have power split, so that none of these are completely in charge. Checks and balances between government and business would serve us better than absolute control by either.
Government is also not always the better choice than a businessman, depending on which situation is being controlled. A businessman is generally interested in doing business, and can be "persuaded" by the prospect of getting your business, the fear of boycotts, government action, etc. OTOH, while politicians may have some limited accountability each election, a government bureaucrat has virtually none. No action on your or my part is likely to budge them. Even if they're incompetent the unions make them almost impossible to get fired. So if it's a bureaucrat standing in your way, you have even less recourse than with a businessman.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you own not an idea, but a government-granted monopoly on commercial exploitation of that idea for a limited time.
After all, owning a patent does not entitle one to forbid the teaching of the idea (which if you truly "owned" the idea you could do). It just grants you exclusivity over use of that idea in commerce for a while.
Similarly, owning a copyright on a song about how The Man is keeping you down grants you the right to control use of your particular expression of the idea, but does not prevent someone else from creating a different song about The Man keeping you down. The idea is not your property, the time-limited right to reproduce your particular expression of that idea is.
If you go sing a song or recite a poem on the street corner, that's speech. Depending on the lyrics, it might even be interesting speech :-)
If you go sing the latest copyrighted lyrics from Metallica or Beyonce, you are engaging in a public performance of copyrighted material. Unless you have worked out a licensing agreement with the owner of that copyright, you are violating copyright law. The copyright holder may or may not bother to take civil action against you as a result, but either way your speech has violated the law.
Copyright is thus clearly a limitation upon speech. That observation is neutral as to whether the limitation is appropriate (we generally think restricting speech in some ways is OK, such as laws against libel, slander, "yelling fire in a crowded theater", etc; yet find other restrictions unacceptable). But it is clearly a limitation of one's right to speak freely.
After all, a person can be wealthy and powerful simply by inheriting land or gold, through no virtue of their own. Property can be gained simply through violence or dispossession. However, intellectual property requires some sort of intelligence, innovation or talent to generate
A person can gain IP through inheritance too. It can also be gained by a type of violence - namely the threat of bringing a lawsuit. Even if of dubious merit, a lawsuit threat is a time-proven way to extort rights to use someone's IP, given that lawsuits are so expensive to defend that even winning one can be a net loss.
You can also gain IP that represents no innovation. Just pick something obvious, get the unworthy patent through a highly overworked patent office, and then ask for royalties from the companies that actually do the real innovation. If you ask for modest sums from each, they might well pay rather than spend even more money to fight your nuisance patent. We've seen plenty of unmerited patents get granted in the high-tech field. Getting such an innovation-less patent is not a sure thing, but it's been done.
All property is intellectual property. What makes an atom so much more significant than a pattern?
False. Ownership of a physical object is not the same as "ownership" of an idea. You can replicate an idea by teaching it to someone else, without the teacher having lost a thing. Both are better for it. You can't give someone a physical object without losing possession of it yourself.
I'm not advocating abolishing the government-granted monopolies some folks lump together into the term "intellectual property". Properly conditioned and time-limited, those monopolies (trademarks, copyrights, patents) can help provide for the public good. But it's ridiculous to consider them IDENTICAL to real property.
If I own an ounce of gold should I be able swap it for a crafted gold ornament of equal weight? Why not? They're both just gold!
Sure, if you can find someone to swap with you. Maybe there's someone who thinks their gold ornament is hideous and would rather have your differently-shaped, equal weight gold object than their own. Nobody has forbid you from doing so.
The individual would have no ownership. The individual would have no control. This is the "Free market" that most non-interventionists advocate. A world where corporations are free to rob the public blind.
The consequences you claim would come from abolishing "intellectual property" sound a lot like the consequences we see today with IP. Artists are often indentured to corporations. Those corporations regularly and successfully lobby Congress to retroactively extend the copyrights, thus robbing the public blind in exchange for no public benefit. (At least the initial copyright you can claim is a monopoly granted to incentivize creation, which benefits the public; but the retroactive extensions of that copyright are pure money grabs with no public benefit, only public loss). Congress passes laws like the DMCA which use the power of government to prevent individuals from exercising their rights to use lawfully-purchased content.
Because that's what 'free market' is all about. It's about looking out for the freedom to do as you please, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. It's the freedom from government so that corporations of unchecked and unaccountable institutions can use their power and control to enslave and rob the population blind.
Highly-regulated markets incentivize corporations to spend lots of money lobbying their regulators. They eventually gain huge control over those regulators (look up "regulatory capture"). Then what you get is corporations using government's power and control to enslave and rob the population blind. That's often even more powerful than what the corporation could have done on its own.
Look at the telecoms or at the RIAA and MPAA. They've got their regulators wrapped around their fingers.
Now if I wanted to be inflammatory I could say "that's what 'regulation' is all about". But just as the free market is not about anarchy and anarchy's resulting abuses, neither is government regulation is about its abuses of power.