Category: Personal

Annotated and Hyperlinked Notes on Professor Dewar’s talk on Software Copyrights, Patents and Free Software

Below are a few notes I took at Professor Dewar’s talk the day before yesterday. I also annotated them a bit with relevant hyperlinks.

When I find a copy of Dewar’s slides posted online, I’ll link to those as well.

  • Libertarian thought: property rights are central. If you regard ideas as property, Ayn Rand’s position isn’t surprising.
  • Jefferson: private letter to Isaac McPherson 1813. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
  • Jefferson faction won on this issue, Intellectual Property Clause.
  • Copyright extension case, now life + 90 years.
  • England: history of copyright, fundamental moral right?
  • Software: special case of copyright infringement and trade secret violation simultaneously!
  • Computer Associates vs. Altai (source vs. object code copyrights, interesting read here).
  • Borland copying a macro language (interesting, if old, article by an MIT student), Supreme Court.
  • Derived works: fair use provisions. But fair use goes to juries, and it’s very vague.
  • Software will never fall into public domain, due to perpetual derived works.
  • Patent an invention, but not an idea, but in practice you can patent either. Europe turned down this law.
  • “Obvious” patents. Juries can’t really judge how obvious they are.
  • You can copyright a non-obvious combination of obvious ideas. Intermittent wind shield wipers.
  • Does a program express inventions and ideas? Is software is distinct from physical stuff?
  • Big risk for free software–patents can ask for damages. And patent is secret until it’s granted (this may not be true, I can’t really tell for sure: “To protect your privacy, we suggest that you delete such information from any documentation you send the office. Alternatively, you may request that the submissions be kept out of the public file, if appropriate. (See MPEP Sections 724. 02 to 724.06.) Please remember that all patent application files are published and made available to the public 18 months from the filing date, unless a non-publication request is made in the application. Additionally, all patented application files will become available to the public upon the grant of the patent.”).
  • Open Source business model can work–selling support and services, while keeping code GPLed.

George Carlin goes morbid

George Carlin’s last comedy routine was a little disappointing. He has become horribly bitter and depressed. He had a couple of good lines in it:

On feminism, “hey ladies, men are about 4 times more likely to commit suicide than women are. So, if you want that whole equality thing, you better start killing yourselves in large numbers.”

On necrophelia, “the great thing about necrophelia is that you don’t have to bring her the flowers. They’re usually already there.”

But he also had a 20-minute-long tirade about a 24-hour “suicide” network that was really difficult to watch due to its being more depressing than funny. And he used the phrase, “this depraved, twisted culture of ours” a bit too much. It is depraved and twisted, but after awhile you get the point.

I like his old stuff so much that I have to just let this “slide.” Like when he opened the show I saw in Burlington with:

“You ever notice that women who are against abortion are women you’d never want to fuck in the first place?”

and later on,

“Ah, women. Y’know, I never had a ’10’. But I once had five ‘2”s.”

He is a comic genius. But it’s hard to last as long as he has.

False alarm

I thought my server was hacked this weekend, but I think in reality someone on Peer1’s network took my IP address by accident, caused an IP conflict, and because I detected ssh running on a non-standard port, I assumed I had been rooted. In fact, when I returned to my machine today, I found no such rooting, and chkrootkit reported nothing. What really freaked me out was that I found vsftpd running on port 21, but wouldn’t accept any of my usernames/passwords, so I really assumed I had been rooted. But here I am, and nothing has been changed.

Whew, I guess?

Classes change, new schedule

Well, this week I was caught up in classes, but then eventually decided that I had to change the classes I’m in. Why? Well, let’s just say that in high school, I supposedly took AP Calculus, but in reality, I used to use that period to think up my best ideas. I recently found my Calculus notebook, and about 90% of it is very unrelated to integrals and derivatives. It’s amazing but although I got an A in Calculus, and thus tested out of having to take in college, since I literally have never used it for 3 years, my brain has all but forgotten about the discipline entirely. Therefore, I dropped by Calculus II class, and am going to audit a Calculus I class so that I can actually get up to speed for next semester.

Meno male, as the Italians say, because I got to get into a class I wanted to take anyway–US History up to 1865. I e-mailed the professor and was let in today. Lots of reading, but thankfully, most of it interesting. So now I am taking two non-CS courses (this one and one on Modern Philosophy) alongside one pure CS course (Theory of Computation) and one sort-of CS course (Introduction to Motion Capture). This last course is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life–more on that later.

Alas, my schedule isn’t as sweet at before, especially with a “fifth” class to audit, but I’ll make do.

  Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
8:25-
9:15am		       US History
Recitation
9:30-
10:45am		 US History Theory of
Computation		 US History Theory of
Computation
12:30-
1:15pm		 Modern
Philosophy		   Modern
Philosophy		  
2:00-
3:15pm		 Calculus (review) Motion Capture Calculus (review) Motion Capture

To Snip?

I need to read this.

UPDATE: I heard about the same studies mentioned here (re: circumcision lowers HIV rate among Africans) years ago in a documentary on the topic.

However, the context not provided here is the actual paradox in circumcising to prevent HIV. What the study finds is that of men who have sex with HIV infected women, you are say 70% less likely to contract the virus if you are circumcised. However, mass circumcision would do nothing but slightly slow the spread of AIDs, since Africans will treat the procedure as “protection” and therefore not use condoms or any other form of protection.

The proper way, instead of slicing off as many foreskins as you can find, is to distribute condoms, educate the people to use them, and get people to start having safer sex. Not only is this cheaper, but it’s, morally-speaking, much more sound.

Server “secured”

I stopped by my web host, Peer1, in order to check out my server and see if I could come up with an explanation to yesterday’s downtime. Nothing looked fishy, but it seems likely it was the stupid power cable again. So, to completely eliminate that variable, I hooked two metal ties into the grill of the nearby fans and wrapped them around the power cable’s plug. Now when I yank on the cable, instead of it coming out, it pulls the whole fucking server across the racking slide. That’s right, sysadmin soup du jour: metal ties as power cable securer.