Machines can be broken into two parts: the interface to the outside world and decision logic. Decision logic can be hardwired or configurable. A configuration of the configurable parts of a machine comprises the software. Software may be viewed as a program or as data. This is an artificial distinction: data may be viewed as a program for an interpreter (notepad.exe interprets a text file and generates an interactive graphical experience that appears to represent the contents of the text file). Some data may be interpreted by a hardwired logic unit.
All this was invented or discovered by WW2 with the exception of the fine details of the interface.
Use of a logic processing machine should not be considered patentable in any way. In principle, once Turing's paper was written, one could enumerate all software for all machines. Thus, since all the countable numbers were certainly discovered and logically formalised in the 19th century, they should be considered already discovered.
As soon as an outside world interface involves decision logic, the decision logic should be factored out and only that part that does not involve decision logic should be considered a design and be patentable.
Copyright should not apply to what can be logically derived from a problem specification: it should apply only to artistic expressions that are beyond derivation by a logical procedure.
Thus, what is truly art should be copyrightable (and there should be a common sense test of whether someone could have produced something similar). Designs should be patentable, but not decision logic. Decision logic should be considered already invented as of Turing's paper and thus beyond the scope of copyright or patent.
That is the only logically sensible way to apply copyright and patents to technology. Trouble is, laws are made by technologically naive people, presided upon by technologically naive judges and juries, and essentially those who understand technology properly have no power of those who make laws regulating it. This a dichotomy between understanding and power is why the system is as stupid and broken as it is.
DNA should, accordingly, be considered software for a pre-existing interpreter that is over 20 years old and thus equally non-patentable.
People should never interfere with another's computer or control it without explicit permission any more than they should have non-consensual sexual intercourse with that person. Violating someone's mind-space should be a crime, and how one is allowed to influence the mind of another should be tightly regulated. If you do not give me consent to play on your computer, it should be a crime to do so. If you give me certain bounds within which to play, it should be criminal to break those bounds. Only when full consent to break things is given should I be allowed to do the hardcore scary stuff on your computer. Equally, software companies should not be allowed to have any say on what a person does with their computer except by unforced mutual consent. Basically, software is like sex, and should only be exchanged when there is genuine mutual consent.
Science, especially those quasi-sciences that aren't physics or chemistry, generally just have massive walls of volumes of vague writings and no conclusive answers to anything. Until non-physical sciences (i.e. those other than physics and chemistry) are put on a solid mathematical footing as strong as physics, at the very least, I shan't be turning to them for solace. As a rule, if there are notions of statistics, something is lacking. Defining a precise metaphysical foundational framework and explaining rigorously from that framework why physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, must be the way they are, is a necessary step before anyone can talk of science going further than the old spiritual traditions. Getting the final conclusive answers whittled down so that they fit within a small number of volumes (say eight, of no more than 1200 pages each) and making them approachable to more than a handful of hardcore intellectuals is another important stage. Unfortunately too many people these days worship The Shiny Thing that The Boffin says Answers Everything. Personally, I'm not convinced the scientific method and its philosophy actually have much application beyond physics and systems simple enough to preclude life.
Unfortunately the 'it's number X in the DSM' shortcut thinking means that if clinician A makes a mistake, clinician B is likely to believe clinician A's opinion without critical analysis and just assume that the original diagnosis is correct. Roll on a few more meetings with clinicians and the 'the previous n clinicians could'nt be wrong' mentality means that a diagnosis is likely to stick whether correct or not.
It's interesting how a drug appears to be 'best thing since sliced bread' in early clinical trials and becomes 'as bad as the first generation drugs' when the patent expires and company X has a new wonder drug on the market. If you actually look at abstracts using something like the Trip database, you get the feeling that bad trials are getting hidden (like if you went to Amazon and all reviews were 4* or better).
And that's why there are papers floating around in the literature pointing out that there are often correlations between the 'best drug' in a clinical trial and the sponsoring corporation. (See Moncrieff's straight talking introduction book.)
Just take the source, change the hash algorithm and organise a race to a fixed target, giving out prizes for successively close approximations, and using the computational work to secure the network.
Basically says it all. One could dress it up as a serious research paper, but what's the point, it would only be a waste of a precious scarce and becoming scarcer resource (trees).
All the good tricks were worked out in the 70s when people wrote real code in real langauges (C, Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp) for real machines and things actually... get this... actually... (shudders trying to get the blasphemous word out...) WORKED! Then came the dark times, the second order postincrement operator and its subsequent application to that most beautiful of low level langauges... then they ripped the heart out of Smalltalk and stuffed it to another offshoot of that beautiful low level language... lists became list<int>'s and even the free variables were frogmarched into class { } and forced to do all their best work in { private: } only showing in { public: } what was acceptable to the evil overlords to be shown. Oh the horror!
Things were good in the old days. Then there were the brief happy days of the eight-bitters. The Amstrad 6128 was my idol then. It booted in just under two seconds, you could program just by typing a number followed by a space and then your code; you could run by typing run, without... get this... without even compiling, and things just worked... or else just crashed the computer, but there was always ctrl shift escape and, if that didn't work you could flick the off switch without corrupting your data, and did I mention it booted in under two seconds! Oh how far we have fallen in our search for crystal castles with see-through walls and shiny fruit so beautiful you can't even eat it without poisoning yourself (if, that is, you can even get something 27" across down your throat).
<letter re="patent"> <translat source="english" target="legalese"> Are you drunk? No, seriously... are you drinking scotch and whiskey with a side of crack cocaine while you "examine" patent applications? (Heavy emphasis on the quotes.) Do you just mail merge rejection letters from your home? Is that what taxpayers are getting in exchange for your services? Have you even read the patent application? I'm curious. Because you either haven't read the patent application or are... (I don't want to say the "R" word) "Special."
Numerous examples abound in terms of this particular Examiner not following the law. Clearly, the combination of references would render the final product to be inoperable for its intended use. However, for this Special Needs Examiner, logic just doesn't cut it. It is manifestly clear that this Examiner has a huge financial incentive to reject patent applications so he gets a nice Christmas bonus at the end of the year. When in doubt, reject right?
Since when did the USPTO become a post World War II jobs program? What's the point of hiring 2,000 additional examiners when 2,000 rubber stamps would suffice just fine? So, tell me something Corky...what would it take for a patent application to be approved? Do we have to write patent applications in crayon? Does a patent application have to come with some sort of pop-up book? Do you have to be a family member or some big law firm who incentivizes you with some other special deal? What does it take Corky?
Perhaps you might want to take your job seriously and actually give a sh.t! What's the point in having to deal with you Special Olympics rejects when we should just go straight to Appeals? While you idiots sit around in bathtubs farting and picking your noses, you should know that there are people out here who actually give a sh.t about their careers, their work, and their dreams.
Your job is not a joke, but you are turning it into a regular three ring circus. If you can't motivate yourself to take your job seriously, then you need to quit and let someone else take over what that actually wants to do the job right. </translate> </letter>
And if he'd only used a standard Open Source XML Validator to check his source before compiling his letter.;-).
The lessons enumerated at http://deardiary.chalisque.org/multistage-computer-language-evolution/ have yet to be learned in many parts of the current world of computing. This is more important when stringent resource constraints mean that the obvious 'industry standard best practice(TM) stuff' is no longer applicable and you have to work stuff out from scratch.
We have met strange aliens. They've taken human form and infiltrated jobs like social security clerk and... BANG... silence... voices: gffbvgfgfggvfffdssdf...:-)
Eventually you just have to come up with a simple, single, authoritative book of answers to all these silly paradoxes, and to save space, interleave it into a book of deep spiritual and worldly wisdom without changing even a single word. It's an almost impossible exercise, especially if you demand that it be done in less than 1500 pages. But it's been done once, and doesn't need to be done again. So if in doubt, look the answer up in the [BOOM TISH!]!!
Who says we're not all raging Conservative Evangelicals just pretending to be raging atheists on the one last bastion of the web where Christians can get pounced on and made fun of without religious equality laws being used to bash you over the head...
Linux makes this example easy, and also more importantly, it puts in your face the lessons you need to learn to be able to construct such examples at will, varying according to whatever new restrictions lawmakers come up with. I'd have to install software onto anything else to make the above work, but linux out of the box I can just bring up a Terminal, type it in and it will work.
Most important thing about linux is the way it allows you to learn how things work.
Even though I use Linux a lot, I am still conditioned psychologically to expect Mac and Windows solutions to have GUIs and require lots of code. If I want to do small is beautiful, eventually I end up writing command line scripts and stuff on one of my Linux boxes. Seriously, it is easier to get a Debian image working in VirtualBox and do things there than to bother trying to sort things out on the Windows command line.
The what happens is that people move their porn to Linux, take a file like, say 'manandwoman.mov' and do:
split -b 10M manandwoman.mov $HARMLESSFILE
for s in $HARMLESSFILE*; do
$ENCRYPT -password "${HARMLESSFILE}MrFlibble$HARMLESSFILE" $s -o $s.bin
done
# copy the files to multiple free cloud storage facilities and post links to friends, passing instructions for reassembly
# via other means (sneakernet?)
# do this for many innocent files too, so that if someone catches you, you may deduce how they did it before
# you do and realise that they have been cheating at the Game of Life, or else have supernatural powers.
# In case you need to buy yourself out of jail, present evidence in completion of a certain challenge.
Without it, greedy corporations will enslave many poor postdoc compsci people and force them to make an unnecessary fork to get it in. It is better to accept DRM in HTML5 and simply boycott its usage in the hope that one day it will be deprecated, so that if future corporations demand it's undeprecation they will be accused of taking the p*** and laughed out of the room.
Slashdot Mirror
Machines can be broken into two parts: the interface to the outside world and decision logic.
Decision logic can be hardwired or configurable. A configuration of the configurable
parts of a machine comprises the software. Software may be viewed as a program or
as data. This is an artificial distinction: data may be viewed as a program for an interpreter
(notepad.exe interprets a text file and generates an interactive graphical experience that
appears to represent the contents of the text file). Some data may be interpreted by
a hardwired logic unit.
All this was invented or discovered by WW2 with the exception of the fine details of the interface.
Use of a logic processing machine should not be considered patentable in any way.
In principle, once Turing's paper was written, one could enumerate all software for all machines.
Thus, since all the countable numbers were certainly discovered and logically formalised
in the 19th century, they should be considered already discovered.
As soon as an outside world interface involves decision logic, the decision logic should
be factored out and only that part that does not involve decision logic should be considered
a design and be patentable.
Copyright should not apply to what can be logically derived from a problem specification: it
should apply only to artistic expressions that are beyond derivation by a logical procedure.
Thus, what is truly art should be copyrightable (and there should be a common sense test
of whether someone could have produced something similar). Designs should be patentable,
but not decision logic. Decision logic should be considered already invented as of Turing's
paper and thus beyond the scope of copyright or patent.
That is the only logically sensible way to apply copyright and patents to technology. Trouble is,
laws are made by technologically naive people, presided upon by technologically naive judges and juries,
and essentially those who understand technology properly have no power of those who make laws
regulating it. This a dichotomy between understanding and power is why the system is as stupid
and broken as it is.
DNA should, accordingly, be considered software for a pre-existing interpreter that is over 20 years
old and thus equally non-patentable.
People should never interfere with another's computer or control it without explicit permission any more than they should have non-consensual sexual intercourse with that person. Violating someone's mind-space should be a crime, and how one is allowed to influence the mind of another should be tightly regulated. If you do not give me consent to play on your computer, it should be a crime to do so. If you give me certain bounds within which to play, it should be criminal to break those bounds. Only when full consent to break things is given should I be allowed to do the hardcore scary stuff on your computer. Equally, software companies should not be allowed to have any say on what a person does with their computer except by unforced mutual consent. Basically, software is like sex, and should only be exchanged when there is genuine mutual consent.
Science, especially those quasi-sciences that aren't physics or chemistry, generally just have massive walls of volumes of vague writings and no conclusive answers to anything. Until non-physical sciences (i.e. those other than physics and chemistry) are put on a solid mathematical footing as strong as physics, at the very least, I shan't be turning to them for solace. As a rule, if there are notions of statistics, something is lacking. Defining a precise metaphysical foundational framework and explaining rigorously from that framework why physics, including relativity and quantum mechanics, must be the way they are, is a necessary step before anyone can talk of science going further than the old spiritual traditions. Getting the final conclusive answers whittled down so that they fit within a small number of volumes (say eight, of no more than 1200 pages each) and making them approachable to more than a handful of hardcore intellectuals is another important stage. Unfortunately too many people these days worship The Shiny Thing that The Boffin says Answers Everything. Personally, I'm not convinced the scientific method and its philosophy actually have much application beyond physics and systems simple enough to preclude life.
Unfortunately the 'it's number X in the DSM' shortcut thinking means that if clinician A makes a mistake, clinician B is likely to believe clinician A's opinion without critical analysis and just assume that the original diagnosis is correct. Roll on a few more meetings with clinicians and the 'the previous n clinicians could'nt be wrong' mentality means that a diagnosis is likely to stick whether correct or not.
It's interesting how a drug appears to be 'best thing since sliced bread' in early clinical trials and becomes 'as bad as the first generation drugs' when the patent expires and company X has a new wonder drug on the market. If you actually look at abstracts using something like the Trip database, you get the feeling that bad trials are getting hidden (like if you went to Amazon and all reviews were 4* or better).
And that's why there are papers floating around in the literature pointing out that there are often correlations between the 'best drug' in a clinical trial and the sponsoring corporation. (See Moncrieff's straight talking introduction book.)
One trained to investigate serious fraud would recognise this mindset as the 'who benefits' meme that goes around those circles.
Just take the source, change the hash algorithm and organise a race to a fixed target, giving out prizes for successively close approximations, and using the computational work to secure the network.
Is it still possible to get a look at QNX source at all??
http://deardiary.chalisque.org/more-tweets-on-economics-and-finance/
Basically says it all. One could dress it up as a serious research paper, but what's the point, it would only be a waste of a precious scarce and becoming scarcer resource (trees).
All the good tricks were worked out in the 70s when people wrote real code in real langauges (C, Forth, Smalltalk, Lisp) for real machines and things actually... get this... actually... (shudders trying to get the blasphemous word out...) WORKED! Then came the dark times, the second order postincrement operator and its subsequent application to that most beautiful of low level langauges... then they ripped the heart out of Smalltalk and stuffed it to another offshoot of that beautiful low level language... lists became list<int>'s and even the free variables were frogmarched into class { } and forced to do all their best work in { private: } only showing in { public: } what was acceptable to the evil overlords to be shown. Oh the horror!
Things were good in the old days. Then there were the brief happy days of the eight-bitters. The Amstrad 6128 was my idol then. It booted in just under two seconds, you could program just by typing a number followed by a space and then your code; you could run by typing run, without... get this... without even compiling, and things just worked... or else just crashed the computer, but there was always ctrl shift escape and, if that didn't work you could flick the off switch without corrupting your data, and did I mention it booted in under two seconds! Oh how far we have fallen in our search for crystal castles with see-through walls and shiny fruit so beautiful you can't even eat it without poisoning yourself (if, that is, you can even get something 27" across down your throat).
<letter re="patent">
;-).
<translat source="english" target="legalese">
Are you drunk? No, seriously... are you drinking scotch and whiskey with a side of crack cocaine while you "examine" patent applications? (Heavy emphasis on the quotes.) Do you just mail merge rejection letters from your home? Is that what taxpayers are getting in exchange for your services? Have you even read the patent application? I'm curious. Because you either haven't read the patent application or are... (I don't want to say the "R" word) "Special."
Numerous examples abound in terms of this particular Examiner not following the law. Clearly, the combination of references would render the final product to be inoperable for its intended use. However, for this Special Needs Examiner, logic just doesn't cut it. It is manifestly clear that this Examiner has a huge financial incentive to reject patent applications so he gets a nice Christmas bonus at the end of the year. When in doubt, reject right?
Since when did the USPTO become a post World War II jobs program? What's the point of hiring 2,000 additional examiners when 2,000 rubber stamps would suffice just fine? So, tell me something Corky...what would it take for a patent application to be approved? Do we have to write patent applications in crayon? Does a patent application have to come with some sort of pop-up book? Do you have to be a family member or some big law firm who incentivizes you with some other special deal? What does it take Corky?
Perhaps you might want to take your job seriously and actually give a sh.t! What's the point in having to deal with you Special Olympics rejects when we should just go straight to Appeals? While you idiots sit around in bathtubs farting and picking your noses, you should know that there are people out here who actually give a sh.t about their careers, their work, and their dreams.
Your job is not a joke, but you are turning it into a regular three ring circus. If you can't motivate yourself to take your job seriously, then you need to quit and let someone else take over what that actually wants to do the job right.
</translate>
</letter>
And if he'd only used a standard Open Source XML Validator to check his source before compiling his letter.
The lessons enumerated at http://deardiary.chalisque.org/multistage-computer-language-evolution/ have yet to be learned in many parts of the current world of computing. This is more important when stringent resource constraints mean that the obvious 'industry standard best practice(TM) stuff' is no longer applicable and you have to work stuff out from scratch.
The art is to shit a turd such that when polished, you get a real gem. Many try, few succeed. ;-).n
See http://deardiary.chalisque.org/10-good-reasons-for-drm-score-2/
Who needs Kdevelop when you can use vi?
Here's proof... I'm writing my own world beating operating system to prove it!
We have met strange aliens. They've taken human form and infiltrated jobs like social security clerk and ... BANG... silence... voices: gffbvgfgfggvfffdssdf... :-)
Eventually you just have to come up with a simple, single, authoritative book of answers to all these silly paradoxes, and to save space, interleave it into a book of deep spiritual and worldly wisdom without changing even a single word. It's an almost impossible exercise, especially if you demand that it be done in less than 1500 pages. But it's been done once, and doesn't need to be done again. So if in doubt, look the answer up in the [BOOM TISH!]!!
Who says we're not all raging Conservative Evangelicals just pretending to be raging atheists on the one last bastion of the web where Christians can get pounced on and made fun of without religious equality laws being used to bash you over the head...
Linux makes this example easy, and also more importantly, it puts in your face the lessons you need to learn to be able to construct such examples at will, varying according to whatever new restrictions lawmakers come up with. I'd have to install software onto anything else to make the above work, but linux out of the box I can just bring up a Terminal, type it in and it will work.
Most important thing about linux is the way it allows you to learn how things work.
Even though I use Linux a lot, I am still conditioned psychologically to expect Mac and Windows solutions to have GUIs and require lots of code. If I want to do small is beautiful, eventually I end up writing command line scripts and stuff on one of my Linux boxes. Seriously, it is easier to get a Debian image working in VirtualBox and do things there than to bother trying to sort things out on the Windows command line.
The what happens is that people move their porn to Linux, take a file like, say 'manandwoman.mov' and do:
split -b 10M manandwoman.mov $HARMLESSFILE
for s in $HARMLESSFILE*; do
$ENCRYPT -password "${HARMLESSFILE}MrFlibble$HARMLESSFILE" $s -o $s.bin
done
# copy the files to multiple free cloud storage facilities and post links to friends, passing instructions for reassembly
# via other means (sneakernet?)
# do this for many innocent files too, so that if someone catches you, you may deduce how they did it before
# you do and realise that they have been cheating at the Game of Life, or else have supernatural powers.
# In case you need to buy yourself out of jail, present evidence in completion of a certain challenge.
Without it, greedy corporations will enslave many poor postdoc compsci people and force them to make an unnecessary fork to get it in. It is better to accept DRM in HTML5 and simply boycott its usage in the hope that one day it will be deprecated, so that if future corporations demand it's undeprecation they will be accused of taking the p*** and laughed out of the room.
p.s. it took me a while to spot that nicety about my UID.
;-) Highest 3-digit possible without duplicate digits :-)