When I said "horses", I am merely using labels to make the analogy clear. By "horses" I meant natural explanations for the phenomenon, i.e. explanations that I can see and touch in the world around me. I do not immediately assume the need for supernatural phenomena to explain the observations (indentations in the ground).
Right, but by his definition you are CHOOSING to give up your freedoms by buying a piece of hardware that you know to be non-compliant with Free Software practices. It shouldn't be anybody else's responsibility to help make your life more pleasant or make working with non-Free systems easier for you when you embraced them and consciously gave up your freedom.
Do I agree with him? No. I think he's a loon. Well that's not a nice way to put it, but I guess you might say he doesn't have to deal with realities - he's an ideologue, not a consensus builder nor a "doer" (although he has certainly made some valuable software contributions himself, like Emacs). That's why the rest of us have the "freedom" to take his rantings, pull the legitimate value from them, and make that into our own philosophy on software and freedom.
I think Richard DID answer it at the end. Yes it is okay IFF it supports your larger social goals. Thus it might be okay because annoying Sony into changing or rethinking their non-Free practices.
I think that's just the way he thinks of things... he's not a lawyer himself, and only views the law as a tool to use for his own social ends.
I agree. Carrying on dialgue with Mr. Stallman is very difficult (I've talked to him extensively once and he gets very irritable... and the best way to irritate him is definitely to mention, even in passing, Open Source). The key to remember is that to him everything is a social issue on a grand scale. He differs from most of us in that he really doesn't give a rat's ass about the technology or maximizing usefulness or utility of the technology. He has an abstract social goal which he hopes to attain THROUGH technology. But the goal itself does not really seem to involve the technology.
You are right. The example was apt, because I missed some possible assumptions. You filled them in, which follows the general scientific process. And I can follow your logic and agree with you that your process is rational and repeatable. I did not mean to imply that science was "complete" or that any piece of scientific knowledge was complete, but there is a process that is rational rather than irrational or imposed.
You are of course correct, and I do apologize if I implied that I could deduce the one True Truth and prove it. I certainly don't believe that. If it were that cut and dried, science would be sorta boring.
Now, I don't really want to get carried away with Godel's theorem because applying it to real life always confuses the hell out of me. Obviously second order logic or higher are provably incomplete, and most of real world stuff falls into this category.
My point, I guess, is that there are truths we can prove, or at reasonably explain. These are repeatable by rational thinkers. We may not ever deduce ALL the truths, we may not ever get THE answer(s). Then there are unprovable assertions that may or may not be true, but I can't be expected to accept assertions that while not inconsistent with the evidence do not follow according to logic or reason from the complete set of information we have. They may follow logically or reasonably from a very small set of information (it may have been rational 5 thousand years ago), but we have information now that when we put it all together doesn't necessitate regular intervention of the deity in our day-to-day existence.
No, when I see hoofprints I think hoofprints. Then I go looking around the area for animals with hoofs. If I find no animals with hoofs, I look for people with wheels imprinting false, hooflike prints in the ground. If after an exhaustive search for years or centuries I have still never seen a horse, nor any other explanation of the hoofprints then I can conclude that I simply cannot answer the question of whether or not horses created the hoofprints based on current knowledge or whether there is another source, artificial or manmade, of the hoofprints.
This is rational deduction. I am assuming zero starting information. Likewise, in our inquiry into the universe, which is a much, much more complicated problem, I assume zero starting information. In other words, I have no idea initially whether the universe has resulted from random processes or an act of God. If I am simple-minded, I will rely on the starting assumptions that others have placed into my mind, whether they are "science governs all" or "the universe was created by God". If I instead seek to embark on a rational inquiry, as I believe great thinkers tend to do, they start with as few assumptions as possible and look at the evidence piece by piece that has been collected over the centuries.
In this particular case the evidence is still inconclusive. This is not a philosophy. I do not philosophically believe that evidence is required to make factual statements. This is a necessity in order to define factual, repeatable results. If instead I make inquiries and answer questions based on pre-existing suppostions, people in different cultures which have had different collective experiences over the centuries will all come to vastly different conclusions. While most cultures would traditionally agree with you that some nonhuman deity or force created the universe, their explanations are not all monotheistic nor do they mesh with your Judeo-Christian explanation based on the Bible.
Me, I'll stick with explanations that are repeatable by any reasonable, rational, logical thinker.
Your statement presumes that the overall economic health is the top priority and nullifies any value to equity within the benefits brought about from that economic health. Your approach reminds me of what I would describe as a pre-Millsian "Utilitarian integral". Only absolute integrated happiness over the total population space matters and it is irrelevant how that happiness is distributed. Replace happiness with money and you have your statement. This is fairly easily debunked as being value-laden. You can equally well place some value on equitable distribution. Think of it as an equation:
E + D = TH
where E is total integrated economic health/wealth (perhaps corresponding to some combination of GDP with national savings/investment figures), and D is a dollar value we might place on the ideal of a Liberal Democracy of having some equity of wealth distribution and total happiness/Utility is TH. Now you are maximizing a different equation, neh?
And that attitude blows goats too. Real software engineers can do both. People who can architect systems, solve hard algorithmic and data structure problems and then write quality code based on those solutions. If you can do that, you will be extremely valued by your employer. In otherwords, they'll do whatever they have to do to keep you around including but not limited to large salaries and large option packages. If you're just a coder monkey, well, you're probably a semi-replaceable commodity.
Re:Implications to Cryptography
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
Other people already pointed out your major mathematical error here (you multiplied together the exponents, you should be adding together work-operations, i.e. O(n^6)+O(n^2) == O(n^6) not O(n^8) and REALLY not O(n^12)). I just wanted to point out that while certainly the polynomial order of any potential P==NP reduction is relevant (and the constants embedded in that O are usually significant too), the overall result of any (hypothetical) such reduction will probably slaughter things like 4096 bit factoring NP-Hard problems, since they fundamentally rely on the exponential scaling of difficulty.
In your example a 4096-bit key would be require something like, at worst, C*4096^7 operations to factor for some C. This is tiny compared to 2^4096. And you only gain security in some polynomial of the number of bits you now have to use, so doubling the number of bits doesn't exponentially increase the search space for solutions.
Which are basically just improved Reid-Solomon codes. Byer worked with a Harvard prof, Mitzenmacher on Tornado codes. I have a friend doing some ongoing research with Mitzenmacher that relates to the subject.
Well, I was an undergraduate at Harvard until my graduation in May and I have to say this is a new spin for Harvard. Last year Harvard's Office of the General Counsel received a cease and desist bully-letter with no legal basis from the MPAA that a student (me) was distributing DeCSS which they determined was illegal, even though no legally binding court injuction in our district had been issued. Harvard got down on its knees like a two dollar whore for the MPAA and threatened me to force me to remove DeCSS from my own computer and to cease electronic distribution of this "illegal" software. University administrations are NOT our friends in this area. Perhaps Harvard's General Counsel's office has had a change of heart, but I am seriously doubtful. They have NO qualms about following the pack on these issues but they are too chicken shit to stand up for their students rights on their own.
Actually, you're not entirely correct on this one. We can do relatively complete simulations of what it looks and "feels" like to fall in toward and past the event horizon of a black hole. Based on what I remember of these results, your perception of the outside stars and starts to contract behind you until it basically becomes a single pinpoint of light and you are otherwise surrounded entirely by darkness. I.e. your effective horizon of vision of light falling in contracts down to a pinpoint, I believe at a point in time after you've fallen through the event horizon. But my memory of these things has faded somewhat, you can probably pull some of this stuff out of some books on black holes. Of course it's all rather useless since tidal forces will tear you to pieces before you get close enough to enjoy the view (i.e. the delta in gravitational force exerted on your head versus your feet assuming you are falling in lengthwise... depending on the size of the black hole, you could get torn apart long before you get close to the event horizon.
Well, if I'm going to be paying for the right to copy music, then morally there is nothing wrong with hitting Napster and leeching away, since I've already paid for the right to do it. This completely removes any moral imperative to respect copyright laws or to ever go buy the CD of an artist that you actually like.
That's not the way CS was taught to me. At my school (Harvard) we primary learned computational theory, algorithmic design, and specific issues and concepts related to general fields of research such as AI, computing hardware, computer graphics, and networking. Now in some kinds of classes there were specific tools we used, but the tools were always secondary to the concepts. And they never taught us C, C++, Java or LISP, they expected us to learn them on our own and they simply overviewed them in class.
Doubtful. He's a false populist, a bigot and antisemite, and generally way too close-minded for most of the more libertarian-Open-Source-Free-Software type of crowd.
You're right. But on the other hand most Mozilla project members would not want a GPL-only fork of the tree. And GPL-only patches will never be accepted because they violate the spirit of the dual licensed product. If you want to make your own GPL-only fork, fine, but you won't get much respect from any Mozilla community members. The point of this is to allow the free use of Mozilla and it's components in GPLed projects. Patches against the Mozilla codebase should still be contributed back under both licenses so they can reach the broadest audience and keep in the spirit of the original. The nice thing is you're not coerced here, so if you want to be a prick you can. The shame and dishonor brought upon you will be coercive enough.
The point here is that the dual-licensed version gives everyone the best of both worlds, so there won't ever be any real incentive to fork a GPL only version (nobody would seriously contribute to a GPL only fork and cut themselves off from the orginating organization which is giving them all the options they want already). You could possibly argue the second license ought to have been LGPL. Perhaps they figured that combining MPL with LGPL would seem silly due to the general similarity of the license terms and they'd be better off dual-licensing GPL and MPL to reach the broadest audience of developers and projects. Honestly, it's good for Mozilla so it's good for me.
Actually, the query "Which countries share a border with Turkey?" worked fine, and I also tried "Which countries border Poland?" which also worked. The phraseology of your last question seems to confuse START, but it knows the answer if you ask "Who is the president of the US?". Funny, that.
nope, go read the article and no biscuit for you. They are actually referring to submarine vehicles exceeding the speed of sound _in water_ (speeds they refer to include 1.5 km/s and 2.5 km/s). Now that's fast. Of course, this is all very theoretical anyway.
I would pay for a lawyer if I were you. First, though, I would recommend checking your registrar's policy yourself and the current legal status of this issue so you know whether you have a prayer of winning or not. And even if you don't have a prayer of winning, they can't make you pay them for their legal bills. They would have to sue you for that and they'd never bother, as they know they wouldn't win if they couldn't prove malicious intent on your part and you handed over your domain name (IANAL, but it just wouldn't happen). Nevertheless I would educate yourself and understand the current state of the regulations from ICANN and your registrar to see what their dispute resolution policy is.
If they *are* clearly marking the content as changed then I think MORALLY it is fine. If they aren't, then MORALLY it's not so fine as they are changing the intent conveyed by the original message. However, neither of these matter a shitbit for anything other than my personal opinion. What MATTERS is that LEGALLY you cannot simply take text, even text that has been published to a common-use forum, and modify and redistribute it. This is not my opinion. This is copyright law. Posting to Usenet, clearly, gives implicit permission to distribute throughout the Usenet network, including Dejanews' access service. It does not give Usenet access providers any sort of license beyond that to your original work, such as the license to modify content. Now, it's quite likely that this would hold up as "window dressing" to the original post LEGALLY if they *are* clearly demarking the link with an orange "deja triangle" (everyone seems to have conflicting info on this -- I don't have time to find out myself). However, there is no guarantee of that, and it would either sit around pissing people off or somebody would sue and it would be determined by a judge. If they aren't indicating changes to the content which they have no license to use other than that implied through Usenet distribution, it could be held in LEGAL violation of copyright law or possibly as fraud (misrepresenting original statements and opinions of users of the Usenet system). Please note that IANAL, but think for a minute and use your brain. Some people are blindly ranting, some of us see that there is a connection between moral and legal judgements, sometimes the correllation is postive, sometimes not.
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When I said "horses", I am merely using labels to make the analogy clear. By "horses" I meant natural explanations for the phenomenon, i.e. explanations that I can see and touch in the world around me. I do not immediately assume the need for supernatural phenomena to explain the observations (indentations in the ground).
Right, but by his definition you are CHOOSING to give up your freedoms by buying a piece of hardware that you know to be non-compliant with Free Software practices. It shouldn't be anybody else's responsibility to help make your life more pleasant or make working with non-Free systems easier for you when you embraced them and consciously gave up your freedom.
Do I agree with him? No. I think he's a loon. Well that's not a nice way to put it, but I guess you might say he doesn't have to deal with realities - he's an ideologue, not a consensus builder nor a "doer" (although he has certainly made some valuable software contributions himself, like Emacs). That's why the rest of us have the "freedom" to take his rantings, pull the legitimate value from them, and make that into our own philosophy on software and freedom.
I think Richard DID answer it at the end. Yes it is okay IFF it supports your larger social goals. Thus it might be okay because annoying Sony into changing or rethinking their non-Free practices.
I think that's just the way he thinks of things... he's not a lawyer himself, and only views the law as a tool to use for his own social ends.
I agree. Carrying on dialgue with Mr. Stallman is very difficult (I've talked to him extensively once and he gets very irritable... and the best way to irritate him is definitely to mention, even in passing, Open Source). The key to remember is that to him everything is a social issue on a grand scale. He differs from most of us in that he really doesn't give a rat's ass about the technology or maximizing usefulness or utility of the technology. He has an abstract social goal which he hopes to attain THROUGH technology. But the goal itself does not really seem to involve the technology.
You are right. The example was apt, because I missed some possible assumptions. You filled them in, which follows the general scientific process. And I can follow your logic and agree with you that your process is rational and repeatable. I did not mean to imply that science was "complete" or that any piece of scientific knowledge was complete, but there is a process that is rational rather than irrational or imposed.
You are of course correct, and I do apologize if I implied that I could deduce the one True Truth and prove it. I certainly don't believe that. If it were that cut and dried, science would be sorta boring.
Now, I don't really want to get carried away with Godel's theorem because applying it to real life always confuses the hell out of me. Obviously second order logic or higher are provably incomplete, and most of real world stuff falls into this category.
My point, I guess, is that there are truths we can prove, or at reasonably explain. These are repeatable by rational thinkers. We may not ever deduce ALL the truths, we may not ever get THE answer(s). Then there are unprovable assertions that may or may not be true, but I can't be expected to accept assertions that while not inconsistent with the evidence do not follow according to logic or reason from the complete set of information we have. They may follow logically or reasonably from a very small set of information (it may have been rational 5 thousand years ago), but we have information now that when we put it all together doesn't necessitate regular intervention of the deity in our day-to-day existence.
No, when I see hoofprints I think hoofprints. Then I go looking around the area for animals with hoofs. If I find no animals with hoofs, I look for people with wheels imprinting false, hooflike prints in the ground. If after an exhaustive search for years or centuries I have still never seen a horse, nor any other explanation of the hoofprints then I can conclude that I simply cannot answer the question of whether or not horses created the hoofprints based on current knowledge or whether there is another source, artificial or manmade, of the hoofprints.
This is rational deduction. I am assuming zero starting information. Likewise, in our inquiry into the universe, which is a much, much more complicated problem, I assume zero starting information. In other words, I have no idea initially whether the universe has resulted from random processes or an act of God. If I am simple-minded, I will rely on the starting assumptions that others have placed into my mind, whether they are "science governs all" or "the universe was created by God". If I instead seek to embark on a rational inquiry, as I believe great thinkers tend to do, they start with as few assumptions as possible and look at the evidence piece by piece that has been collected over the centuries.
In this particular case the evidence is still inconclusive. This is not a philosophy. I do not philosophically believe that evidence is required to make factual statements. This is a necessity in order to define factual, repeatable results. If instead I make inquiries and answer questions based on pre-existing suppostions, people in different cultures which have had different collective experiences over the centuries will all come to vastly different conclusions. While most cultures would traditionally agree with you that some nonhuman deity or force created the universe, their explanations are not all monotheistic nor do they mesh with your Judeo-Christian explanation based on the Bible.
Me, I'll stick with explanations that are repeatable by any reasonable, rational, logical thinker.
Your statement presumes that the overall economic health is the top priority and nullifies any value to equity within the benefits brought about from that economic health. Your approach reminds me of what I would describe as a pre-Millsian "Utilitarian integral". Only absolute integrated happiness over the total population space matters and it is irrelevant how that happiness is distributed. Replace happiness with money and you have your statement. This is fairly easily debunked as being value-laden. You can equally well place some value on equitable distribution. Think of it as an equation:
E + D = TH
where E is total integrated economic health/wealth (perhaps corresponding to some combination of GDP with national savings/investment figures), and D is a dollar value we might place on the ideal of a Liberal Democracy of having some equity of wealth distribution and total happiness/Utility is TH. Now you are maximizing a different equation, neh?
And that attitude blows goats too. Real software engineers can do both. People who can architect systems, solve hard algorithmic and data structure problems and then write quality code based on those solutions. If you can do that, you will be extremely valued by your employer. In otherwords, they'll do whatever they have to do to keep you around including but not limited to large salaries and large option packages. If you're just a coder monkey, well, you're probably a semi-replaceable commodity.
Other people already pointed out your major mathematical error here (you multiplied together the exponents, you should be adding together work-operations, i.e. O(n^6)+O(n^2) == O(n^6) not O(n^8) and REALLY not O(n^12)). I just wanted to point out that while certainly the polynomial order of any potential P==NP reduction is relevant (and the constants embedded in that O are usually significant too), the overall result of any (hypothetical) such reduction will probably slaughter things like 4096 bit factoring NP-Hard problems, since they fundamentally rely on the exponential scaling of difficulty.
In your example a 4096-bit key would be require something like, at worst, C*4096^7 operations to factor for some C. This is tiny compared to 2^4096. And you only gain security in some polynomial of the number of bits you now have to use, so doubling the number of bits doesn't exponentially increase the search space for solutions.
That's 35 shareholders, I believe.
Which are basically just improved Reid-Solomon codes. Byer worked with a Harvard prof, Mitzenmacher on Tornado codes. I have a friend doing some ongoing research with Mitzenmacher that relates to the subject.
Well, I was an undergraduate at Harvard until my graduation in May and I have to say this is a new spin for Harvard. Last year Harvard's Office of the General Counsel received a cease and desist bully-letter with no legal basis from the MPAA that a student (me) was distributing DeCSS which they determined was illegal, even though no legally binding court injuction in our district had been issued. Harvard got down on its knees like a two dollar whore for the MPAA and threatened me to force me to remove DeCSS from my own computer and to cease electronic distribution of this "illegal" software. University administrations are NOT our friends in this area. Perhaps Harvard's General Counsel's office has had a change of heart, but I am seriously doubtful. They have NO qualms about following the pack on these issues but they are too chicken shit to stand up for their students rights on their own.
Actually, you're not entirely correct on this one. We can do relatively complete simulations of what it looks and "feels" like to fall in toward and past the event horizon of a black hole. Based on what I remember of these results, your perception of the outside stars and starts to contract behind you until it basically becomes a single pinpoint of light and you are otherwise surrounded entirely by darkness. I.e. your effective horizon of vision of light falling in contracts down to a pinpoint, I believe at a point in time after you've fallen through the event horizon. But my memory of these things has faded somewhat, you can probably pull some of this stuff out of some books on black holes. Of course it's all rather useless since tidal forces will tear you to pieces before you get close enough to enjoy the view (i.e. the delta in gravitational force exerted on your head versus your feet assuming you are falling in lengthwise... depending on the size of the black hole, you could get torn apart long before you get close to the event horizon.
Thoroughly blocking Mem Drive to those of us who commute under the overpass to our cubicle rat jobs in Kendall Square.
Well, if I'm going to be paying for the right to copy music, then morally there is nothing wrong with hitting Napster and leeching away, since I've already paid for the right to do it. This completely removes any moral imperative to respect copyright laws or to ever go buy the CD of an artist that you actually like.
That's not the way CS was taught to me. At my school (Harvard) we primary learned computational theory, algorithmic design, and specific issues and concepts related to general fields of research such as AI, computing hardware, computer graphics, and networking. Now in some kinds of classes there were specific tools we used, but the tools were always secondary to the concepts. And they never taught us C, C++, Java or LISP, they expected us to learn them on our own and they simply overviewed them in class.
Doubtful. He's a false populist, a bigot and antisemite, and generally way too close-minded for most of the more libertarian-Open-Source-Free-Software type of crowd.
You're right. But on the other hand most Mozilla project members would not want a GPL-only fork of the tree. And GPL-only patches will never be accepted because they violate the spirit of the dual licensed product. If you want to make your own GPL-only fork, fine, but you won't get much respect from any Mozilla community members. The point of this is to allow the free use of Mozilla and it's components in GPLed projects. Patches against the Mozilla codebase should still be contributed back under both licenses so they can reach the broadest audience and keep in the spirit of the original. The nice thing is you're not coerced here, so if you want to be a prick you can. The shame and dishonor brought upon you will be coercive enough.
You mean minor parts like Qt?
The point here is that the dual-licensed version gives everyone the best of both worlds, so there won't ever be any real incentive to fork a GPL only version (nobody would seriously contribute to a GPL only fork and cut themselves off from the orginating organization which is giving them all the options they want already). You could possibly argue the second license ought to have been LGPL. Perhaps they figured that combining MPL with LGPL would seem silly due to the general similarity of the license terms and they'd be better off dual-licensing GPL and MPL to reach the broadest audience of developers and projects. Honestly, it's good for Mozilla so it's good for me.
Actually, the query "Which countries share a border with Turkey?" worked fine, and I also tried "Which countries border Poland?" which also worked. The phraseology of your last question seems to confuse START, but it knows the answer if you ask "Who is the president of the US?". Funny, that.
nope, go read the article and no biscuit for you. They are actually referring to submarine vehicles exceeding the speed of sound _in water_ (speeds they refer to include 1.5 km/s and 2.5 km/s). Now that's fast. Of course, this is all very theoretical anyway.
I would pay for a lawyer if I were you. First, though, I would recommend checking your registrar's policy yourself and the current legal status of this issue so you know whether you have a prayer of winning or not. And even if you don't have a prayer of winning, they can't make you pay them for their legal bills. They would have to sue you for that and they'd never bother, as they know they wouldn't win if they couldn't prove malicious intent on your part and you handed over your domain name (IANAL, but it just wouldn't happen). Nevertheless I would educate yourself and understand the current state of the regulations from ICANN and your registrar to see what their dispute resolution policy is.
If they *are* clearly marking the content as changed then I think MORALLY it is fine. If they aren't, then MORALLY it's not so fine as they are changing the intent conveyed by the original message. However, neither of these matter a shitbit for anything other than my personal opinion. What MATTERS is that LEGALLY you cannot simply take text, even text that has been published to a common-use forum, and modify and redistribute it. This is not my opinion. This is copyright law. Posting to Usenet, clearly, gives implicit permission to distribute throughout the Usenet network, including Dejanews' access service. It does not give Usenet access providers any sort of license beyond that to your original work, such as the license to modify content. Now, it's quite likely that this would hold up as "window dressing" to the original post LEGALLY if they *are* clearly demarking the link with an orange "deja triangle" (everyone seems to have conflicting info on this -- I don't have time to find out myself). However, there is no guarantee of that, and it would either sit around pissing people off or somebody would sue and it would be determined by a judge. If they aren't indicating changes to the content which they have no license to use other than that implied through Usenet distribution, it could be held in LEGAL violation of copyright law or possibly as fraud (misrepresenting original statements and opinions of users of the Usenet system). Please note that IANAL, but think for a minute and use your brain. Some people are blindly ranting, some of us see that there is a connection between moral and legal judgements, sometimes the correllation is postive, sometimes not.