Every time you go to court, there will be a certain amount of randomness in the outcome, because the legal system isn't run by mathematical logic, it is run by humans (lawyers, judges, juries) and they are notoriously unpredictable.
> BTW, buying the software is agreeing to the EULA.
That makes about as much sense for the consumer as not having any ingredient list directly on food items --- hey, you could have looked it up on our website before going to the supermarket, no?
OTOH, law often doesn't make any sense. So this wasn't a totally unexpected outcome.
"The dream of owning a household robot" might have quite a different meaning in a different context, eh?
I wonder when the first physical theft will be executed totally by remote via controlling a super-sophisticated household robot ("Take jewelery. Put in box. Send box to Astoria.")?
In fact, I'd say there's enough non-**AA-non-British music "out there" that attempting "domination" is either doomed to fail, or dooms our personal freedoms ("you will listen only to our music").
And another thing --- I'd guess that the majority of the Ordinary Joes would be perfectly happy with the free 192kbps track(s). Given the way I appreciate most music, I'd say that probably goes for me, also. So, no, minimally, they'd have to make it mono, I'd guess.
I do agree, though, that 30 seconds isn't enough, and 1 minute is a more reasonable length for a preview.
The problem here seems to be that we're defining "science" differently. See my other post. (E.g., it's hard for me to see how a clinical psycologist is going to contradict the statement "the universe is filled with love" via experiment.)
> Are you arguing that "God" like "love" is an entirely subjective > phenomenon that occurs only in the human brain?
No, I'm merely arguing that both of these concepts are essentially non-scientific, I'm not ruling out the possibility of their existence independently of human cognition. Such "existence" would, however, necessarily be non-physical in nature.
To see that (most religious models of) "God" is non-scientific, it suffices to make several scientific hypotheses which include God, and by inspection see that these hypotheses are not contradictable --- i.e., there doesn't exist any observation which could cause one to discard one of the hypotheses in favor of the other. For example: "The universe was created by God out of nothing 6000 years ago in exactly the state we observed it 6000 years ago", "The universe was created by God out of nothing 5 minutes ago in exactly the state we observed it 5 minutes ago", and "The universe was created by God via the Big Bang". (All this assumes an omnipotent God.) Since all scientific hypotheses have to be contradictable by observation, it seems clear that these are not scientific hypotheses.
"Love" is actually harder to show as being non-scientific, since that hinges on its being defined in a totally subjective manner. Some people, for example, if asked, might believe that "all of the universe is filled with love". Or they might even be strong literal believers in the saying "God is Love". Etc., etc.
The answer "she loves me" wouldn't be appropriate in a journal article in a scientific journal about correlating human brain activity with human actions, but it might very well be an appropriate answer in other contexts.
It could also be the case that when she looked at you, she remembered how much fun she had cheating on you last week and felt smug about keeping it a secret.
In other words, you can't justify your explanation because it requires you to know something you can't know. (ie the mind/nature/intent of your wife/God).
How nice! Without trying, I've made you partially espouse something which I believe in, which is strong agnosticism
At least your analogy has two advantages over the "God did it" hypothesis: First, it actually does offer an explanation even if you can't justify it.
I think you're missing a big point in my analogy, here, which is that "love", like "God", is an undefined concept in the field of science.
It makes a lot of assumptions but if we accept those then the conclusion can follow logically. "God did it" offers no such possible connection... it's merely a bald assertion.
No, it's merely a non-scientific assertion.
Second, there is sufficient cause to believe your wife actually exists in the first place, which is actually another layer to the problem.
Again, you seem to miss the fact that I'm assuming that "love" exists, and in this sense the analogy is closer than you credit it.
> believing in the "god" of overpowering stupidity.
I guess we mathematicians must be really overpoweringly stupid, then, considering that a lot of interesting mathematics is proving that there are things which cannot be proven, or other things which cannot be calculated.
Or perhaps I just don't believe in the "god" which bestows the ability on humans to know everything?:-)
> So why should we accept "God did it" as the reason the universe exists?
I think the answer to that question is context-dependent. If we're talking about scientific research, "God did it" isn't an interesting explanation. In other contexts, it might be.
As a (unfortunately non-car) analogy, think about the question "why did my wife smile when she looked at me just now?". The answer "she loves me" wouldn't be appropriate in a journal article in a scientific journal about correlating human brain activity with human actions, but it might very well be an appropriate answer in other contexts.
> Turns out all camps are offended I don't pick a side.
Even worse if you believe in strong agnosticism, as I do. Neither side on the religion flamewar can wrap its head around that belief, especially since belief in strong agnosticism makes arguing over the (abstract) question idiotic. See also: Non-overlapping magisteria.
> IIRC correctly, Seldane was the sinus medication prescribed by a > doctor that could cause heart stoppage in a very small percent of users
Seldane (terfenadine) is a bad example, because it was discontinued because it became possible to use fexofenadine instead. Fexofenadine, being terfenadine's active metabolite, has all of the biological activity of terfenadine but without the cardiotoxic drawbacks.
Ooops, forgot to add --- all those academics who don't use LaTeX could probably use something open-source (OO.o, Abiword, KWord), except that my guess is that (many of) the journals they publish in only accept their submissions in MS Word format. So they decide to play safe and use MS.
> started using LaTeX, which is older but vastly superior to Word
I love LaTeX, it produces beautifully typeset math, but for your average biologist, English professor, etc., I can see that something a bit less high-powered and easier to use ("what you see is approximately what you get") would be more optimal.
In other words, it's not chance that many academics don't use LaTeX.
> We need some proof that any problems caused by getting rid of copyright > are outweighed by the benefits.
You do understand that that sword cuts both ways, right? Especially when the other side isn't a rabid anti-copyrightist-from-ideology but rather someone, like me, who is a "pragmatic copyrightist" who is interested in trying to reform current copyright law into a form which is more beneficial to society as a whole?
But this is all academic, since there can be no "proof" of benefit / deficit since there is no practical way to do a controlled experiment on a whole society over the course of decades. And that ignores the equally large problem of agreeing on a way to quantify the benefit.
Anyway, this law proposal underlines the fundamental problem with copyright law: it's created by people who are more easily swayed by money than abstract benefits like an expanding public domain, increased (but non-taxable) creativity, or even, regretfully, personal freedom.
> Well, there's 90-100% of their music-generating hours down the toilet. > Is there some shortage of manual labourers that I'm not aware of?
Well, let's see here. Is that a false dichotomy I smell?
When I look at the (small, non-statistical sample of) musicians I'm familiar with who do side jobs, I find that they tend to do rather more useful things than manual labor. Here's my list:
Nick Drozdoff - teaches high school physics
David Julian Gray - Audio/multimedia engineer
Lev Liberman - Professional voice artist specializing in voice-overs
Stephen McDonald (Einstein's Wardrobe, Starfly 69) - some version of UK lawyerdom : barrister and/or solicitor
I'm not claiming that no artists do manual labor either before or in parallel with working as performers: Tom Baker was working as a construction worker before he landed the acting job as The Fourth Doctor, for example.
> As for Shakespeare's plays... Old texts often undergo serious > editing before being published,... and the edited version is > quite definitely not in public domain.
And this idiocy, AFAICS, is why you can't download from Google Books the 1911 edition of Bloxam's Chemistry, a text which was mainly written by a someone who died in 1887.
Copyright law is definitely messed up. I can understand that added commentary which has definitive authorship deserves copyright, but editing, which essentially is trying to change the work into the form that the editor believes that original author wanted it in? That's more like touching up the colors of a photo of a painting --- something which isn't covered by copyright.
And if the added stuff is an insignificant portion of the whole (say, 10%?), it shouldn't matter how creative the added stuff was. Otherwise it just becomes too easy to game away the public domain, without even paying lobbyists!
> The commercial and freeware products today do most certainly leave traces.
To convince you that undetectable steganography is possible, think about the following algorithm (which, I admit, has a very, very low ratio of information to carrier). While generating the images I want to use for my carrier data, I set my camera to snap 250 images each time rather than 1. If the scene and the camera are at all realistic, there will be enough entropy in the sets of 250 images so that I can always (for all practical purposes) select one image out of each set of 250 images such that 4 bits of a cryptographic hash of it prefixed by a secret key is a particular nybble.
The encrypted message is then just a sequence of images, one per nybble, where none of the images has been altered in any way whatsoever, merely selected. One has to be careful, however, not to be caught with the other 249 images, and as you have also pointed out, this will not give security against traffic analysis.
Sorry if you already knew this, I see you aren't the original poster, who gave the impression that good steganography was more or less impossible.
> the program has to leave footprints in the image file so it can extract the encoded text.
A good stenagographic system has the property that as the ratio of concealed information to the amount of information it's concealed in is decreased (to zero), the probability of reliably identifying a message as containing concealed information also decreases (to zero).
I find it hard to believe that one cannot hide hundreds of bits in megabytes of real-world images without fear of detection.
That's theory, of course. I don't claim that such a system actually exists, yet.
Given your Slashdot user ID, I'm surprised that you didn't ask first for an open standard for steganographic exchange of information in the modern era. After there is a standard, there will be implementations. Of course, often the standard is based on a pioneering implementation, and maybe that's what is important about Collage.
Or maybe not. Sometimes it's just a matter of the luck of being in the right place at the right time.
My impression is that there are separate facilities for white-collar criminals, so he probably won't have to interact with rapists and murderers. Am I being optimistic?
Copyright belongs to the creator; the example emphasizes the bizarre reality that even if the creator doesn't care about the work enough to maintain his own copy/ies, his copyright remains in force.
... For example, you could make yourself an audio-CD copy, or some FLAC files on a Flash-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device, or whatever, and stick it in a safe deposit box
Flash needs to be refreshed approximately every 10 years.
Most people don't live long enough to preserve works for the public domain, and many, or even most, cannot rely on their heirs to be bothered with the work involved.
Slashdot Mirror
> How did this happen .... ?
Every time you go to court, there will be a certain amount of randomness in the outcome, because the legal system isn't run by mathematical logic, it is run by humans (lawyers, judges, juries) and they are notoriously unpredictable.
> BTW, buying the software is agreeing to the EULA.
That makes about as much sense for the consumer as not having any ingredient list directly on food items --- hey, you could have looked it up on our website before going to the supermarket, no?
OTOH, law often doesn't make any sense. So this wasn't a totally unexpected outcome.
"The dream of owning a household robot" might have quite a different meaning in a different context, eh?
I wonder when the first physical theft will be executed totally by remote via controlling a super-sophisticated household robot ("Take jewelery. Put in box. Send box to Astoria.")?
"An Industry Named Sue"?
(Sorry, Shel --- RIP).
> There is way too much music out there
In fact, I'd say there's enough non-**AA-non-British music "out there" that attempting "domination" is either doomed to fail, or dooms our personal freedoms ("you will listen only to our music").
And another thing --- I'd guess that the majority of the Ordinary Joes would be perfectly happy with the free 192kbps track(s). Given the way I appreciate most music, I'd say that probably goes for me, also. So, no, minimally, they'd have to make it mono, I'd guess.
I do agree, though, that 30 seconds isn't enough, and 1 minute is a more reasonable length for a preview.
The problem here seems to be that we're defining "science" differently. See my other post. (E.g., it's hard for me to see how a clinical psycologist is going to contradict the statement "the universe is filled with love" via experiment.)
> Are you arguing that "God" like "love" is an entirely subjective
> phenomenon that occurs only in the human brain?
No, I'm merely arguing that both of these concepts are essentially non-scientific, I'm not ruling out the possibility of their existence independently of human cognition. Such "existence" would, however, necessarily be non-physical in nature.
To see that (most religious models of) "God" is non-scientific, it suffices to make several scientific hypotheses which include God, and by inspection see that these hypotheses are not contradictable --- i.e., there doesn't exist any observation which could cause one to discard one of the hypotheses in favor of the other. For example: "The universe was created by God out of nothing 6000 years ago in exactly the state we observed it 6000 years ago", "The universe was created by God out of nothing 5 minutes ago in exactly the state we observed it 5 minutes ago", and "The universe was created by God via the Big Bang". (All this assumes an omnipotent God.) Since all scientific hypotheses have to be contradictable by observation, it seems clear that these are not scientific hypotheses.
"Love" is actually harder to show as being non-scientific, since that hinges on its being defined in a totally subjective manner. Some people, for example, if asked, might believe that "all of the universe is filled with love". Or they might even be strong literal believers in the saying "God is Love". Etc., etc.
It could also be the case that when she looked at you, she remembered how much fun she had cheating on you last week and felt smug about keeping it a secret.
In other words, you can't justify your explanation because it requires you to know something you can't know. (ie the mind/nature/intent of your wife/God).
How nice! Without trying, I've made you partially espouse something which I believe in, which is strong agnosticism
At least your analogy has two advantages over the "God did it" hypothesis: First, it actually does offer an explanation even if you can't justify it.
I think you're missing a big point in my analogy, here, which is that "love", like "God", is an undefined concept in the field of science.
It makes a lot of assumptions but if we accept those then the conclusion can follow logically. "God did it" offers no such possible connection... it's merely a bald assertion.
No, it's merely a non-scientific assertion.
Second, there is sufficient cause to believe your wife actually exists in the first place, which is actually another layer to the problem.
Again, you seem to miss the fact that I'm assuming that "love" exists, and in this sense the analogy is closer than you credit it.
> believing in the "god" of overpowering stupidity.
I guess we mathematicians must be really overpoweringly stupid, then, considering that a lot of interesting mathematics is proving that there are things which cannot be proven, or other things which cannot be calculated.
Or perhaps I just don't believe in the "god" which bestows the ability on humans to know everything? :-)
> So why should we accept "God did it" as the reason the universe exists?
I think the answer to that question is context-dependent. If we're talking about scientific research, "God did it" isn't an interesting explanation. In other contexts, it might be.
As a (unfortunately non-car) analogy, think about the question "why did my wife smile when she looked at me just now?". The answer "she loves me" wouldn't be appropriate in a journal article in a scientific journal about correlating human brain activity with human actions, but it might very well be an appropriate answer in other contexts.
> Turns out all camps are offended I don't pick a side.
Even worse if you believe in strong agnosticism, as I do. Neither side on the religion flamewar can wrap its head around that belief, especially since belief in strong agnosticism makes arguing over the (abstract) question idiotic. See also: Non-overlapping magisteria.
You're too late --- ironically, this is disclosed in the header of the Wikipedia article on the character.
> IIRC correctly, Seldane was the sinus medication prescribed by a
> doctor that could cause heart stoppage in a very small percent of users
Seldane (terfenadine) is a bad example, because it was discontinued because it became possible to use fexofenadine instead. Fexofenadine, being terfenadine's active metabolite, has all of the biological activity of terfenadine but without the cardiotoxic drawbacks.
Ooops, forgot to add --- all those academics who don't use LaTeX could probably use something open-source (OO.o, Abiword, KWord), except that my guess is that (many of) the journals they publish in only accept their submissions in MS Word format. So they decide to play safe and use MS.
> started using LaTeX, which is older but vastly superior to Word
I love LaTeX, it produces beautifully typeset math, but for your average biologist, English professor, etc., I can see that something a bit less high-powered and easier to use ("what you see is approximately what you get") would be more optimal.
In other words, it's not chance that many academics don't use LaTeX.
> We need some proof that any problems caused by getting rid of copyright
> are outweighed by the benefits.
You do understand that that sword cuts both ways, right? Especially when the other side isn't a rabid anti-copyrightist-from-ideology but rather someone, like me, who is a "pragmatic copyrightist" who is interested in trying to reform current copyright law into a form which is more beneficial to society as a whole?
But this is all academic, since there can be no "proof" of benefit / deficit since there is no practical way to do a controlled experiment on a whole society over the course of decades. And that ignores the equally large problem of agreeing on a way to quantify the benefit.
Anyway, this law proposal underlines the fundamental problem with copyright law: it's created by people who are more easily swayed by money than abstract benefits like an expanding public domain, increased (but non-taxable) creativity, or even, regretfully, personal freedom.
> Well, there's 90-100% of their music-generating hours down the toilet.
> Is there some shortage of manual labourers that I'm not aware of?
Well, let's see here. Is that a false dichotomy I smell?
When I look at the (small, non-statistical sample of) musicians I'm familiar with who do side jobs, I find that they tend to do rather more useful things than manual labor. Here's my list:
I'm not claiming that no artists do manual labor either before or in parallel with working as performers: Tom Baker was working as a construction worker before he landed the acting job as The Fourth Doctor, for example.
> As for Shakespeare's plays ... Old texts often undergo serious ... and the edited version is
> editing before being published,
> quite definitely not in public domain.
And this idiocy, AFAICS, is why you can't download from Google Books the 1911 edition of Bloxam's Chemistry, a text which was mainly written by a someone who died in 1887.
Copyright law is definitely messed up. I can understand that added commentary which has definitive authorship deserves copyright, but editing, which essentially is trying to change the work into the form that the editor believes that original author wanted it in? That's more like touching up the colors of a photo of a painting --- something which isn't covered by copyright.
And if the added stuff is an insignificant portion of the whole (say, 10%?), it shouldn't matter how creative the added stuff was. Otherwise it just becomes too easy to game away the public domain, without even paying lobbyists!
> The commercial and freeware products today do most certainly leave traces.
To convince you that undetectable steganography is possible, think about the following algorithm (which, I admit, has a very, very low ratio of information to carrier). While generating the images I want to use for my carrier data, I set my camera to snap 250 images each time rather than 1. If the scene and the camera are at all realistic, there will be enough entropy in the sets of 250 images so that I can always (for all practical purposes) select one image out of each set of 250 images such that 4 bits of a cryptographic hash of it prefixed by a secret key is a particular nybble.
The encrypted message is then just a sequence of images, one per nybble, where none of the images has been altered in any way whatsoever, merely selected. One has to be careful, however, not to be caught with the other 249 images, and as you have also pointed out, this will not give security against traffic analysis.
Sorry if you already knew this, I see you aren't the original poster, who gave the impression that good steganography was more or less impossible.
> the program has to leave footprints in the image file so it can extract the encoded text.
A good stenagographic system has the property that as the ratio of concealed information to the amount of information it's concealed in is decreased (to zero), the probability of reliably identifying a message as containing concealed information also decreases (to zero).
I find it hard to believe that one cannot hide hundreds of bits in megabytes of real-world images without fear of detection.
That's theory, of course. I don't claim that such a system actually exists, yet.
Given your Slashdot user ID, I'm surprised that you didn't ask first for an open standard for steganographic exchange of information in the modern era. After there is a standard, there will be implementations. Of course, often the standard is based on a pioneering implementation, and maybe that's what is important about Collage.
Or maybe not. Sometimes it's just a matter of the luck of being in the right place at the right time.
Inherent value != value. This is a strawman which gets raised over and over again in the discussions here about "how the creator should get paid".
Or are you willing to spend the rest of your life without any form of entertainment, which you do not generate yourself, if I pay you $1?
What is true is that the value of entertainment is constantly decreasing, because of the market being swamped by free alternatives.
My impression is that there are separate facilities for white-collar criminals, so he probably won't have to interact with rapists and murderers. Am I being optimistic?
Copyright belongs to the creator; the example emphasizes the bizarre reality that even if the creator doesn't care about the work enough to maintain his own copy/ies, his copyright remains in force.
... For example, you could make yourself an audio-CD copy, or some FLAC files on a Flash-based USB 2.0 Mass Storage Device, or whatever, and stick it in a safe deposit box