AT&T Vs 4chan

AT&T apparently is getting into the business of telling people what they can/can’t do on the internet. They have blocked some the site’s popular message boards (including /b/) in certain parts of US. Apart from the act being absolutely ridiculous, they have picked up the wrong guy.

The lines are drawn. Very excited about it, I hope AT&T doesn’t back out, More on this at:

Reddit

Techcrunch

Project AT&T

Bill Gates puts Feyman Lectures Online

Readers of this blog ( handful I know ) would invariably be big fans of Richard Feynman, so this might be something of interest to them, if they didn’t know it already (its a bit old news):

More on the NY Times website:
NYTimes

Its an awesome gesture, but whats not so good, is that there is some Microsoft software that I am supposed to download for it to work in Firefox, and I am not too excited about that. So haven’t watched it yet, maybe sometime this week if workload is not too bad.

IE Vs Firefox – Microsoft getting desperate?

I have been using Firefox for years now, and I absolutely love it! Plug-ins, addons, Greasemonkey etc. help you really customize your browsing experience. If you haven’t tried it out yet. here’s the link:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

Strongly recommend the browser, do give it a try if you haven’t already.

Anyways, Microsoft seems to be getting desperate in the browser war, they better be because I can do so much with my Firefox browser, which might seem like a far fetched dream with IE.

The most abused business term of this decade

Innovation!

There is too much talk about innovation all around the place, but no action!

Mathematical Ideas should not be patented – Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth, a distinguished computer scientist from Standford, and the author of  “The art of programming” has submitted a letter to the European Patent office, questioning the act of granting patents to non-mathematical algorithms

Some snippets from Groklaw

I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be.

Some more interesting ones from an earlier letter,

Nor is it possible to distinguish between “numerical” and “nonnumerical” algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data. Mathematicians work much more with symbolic entities than with numbers.

Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It’s like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.

Congress wisely decided long ago that mathematical things cannot be patented. Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed. The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts. Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their publishers had permission from the owners of the words. Algorithms are exactly as basic to software as words are to writers, because they are the fundamental building blocks needed to make interesting products.

I am not sure, where I lie in the patent – no patent argument. As an investor, I love patents, they are a great barrier to entry especially in technology/research driven areas of IT or Lifesciences. But as a mathematician-scientist-programmer, I think patents deter innovation more than promoting it.

I guess there is no black or white, but we certainly need to take a long hard look at the patent regime of today, or  else entrepreneurial innovation would be the biggest loser.

Puzzle for the day

From Feynman,

Find a set of digits which fit the pattern,

         * * A *
         —————
* A * ) * * * * A * *
          * * A A
          ——-
             * * * A
                * * A
               ——-
                * * * *
                * A * *
                ———
                   * * * *
                   * * * *
                  ———-
                        0

Each of the dots represent some digit(any digit)

Each of the As represent the same digit(for example, a 3)

None of the dots are the same as the A (i.e. no dot can be 3 if A is 3)

Have fun!

Magnet falling through an Eddy current tube

Nice video

Enough of computerisation in the country

Wow! Mr.Mulayam Singh Yadav has come up with an innovative solution to tackle unemployment in the country.

Addressing a press conference in Lucknow, he said

India is a country with millions of unemployed hands and if we go on computerising everything, we will soon have a bigger army of unemployed youth.Nothing should be allowed to go beyond certain limits. We have seen enough of computerisation and any further move in that direction would be detrimental to the overall growth of the nation.Even proliferation of management courses seemed to have only resulted in producing more and more unemployed MBAs. I have always been in favour of discouraging the use of machine in jobs that could be carried out easily by the human hand and mind.

I am so proud of our leaders today. But before you make any judgments, the entire outsourcing/offshoring issue which was played up during US elections, had a similar reasoning behind it.

The Pirate Bay trial

I have been following the Pirate Bay trial for sometime now, having an interest from both a technology as well as legal perspective. But most importantly from an individual rights perspective. The Scandinavian countries are admired for their approach towards individual rights and personal liberty, and one hopes that the admiration would still hold good after the trial.

I find the trial ridiculous because of the couple of reasons:

1. Blaming Pirate Bay for piracy is akin to blaming Google for whatever is wrong with the internet. They have absolutely zero responsibility for what people decide to share.

2.But more importantly, I believe, the entire episode strongly infringes into individual rights. One cannot be sued, if one is sharing a music CD or a book with a friend. I cannot get a legal notice for singing a popular song at the dinner table with family and friends. The music industry has to realize the fact that the advancements in technology has led to new ways in which people share things, and this will continue to happen.

Instead of fighting technology advancements, they should look at utilizing it to reach out  to so many users out there. Its a great opportunity for the music industry and the artistes to get recognized, no matter where you are, if you are talented you would can easily make it.

I think the Pirate Bay trial is also a case of the legal framework trailing technological advancements. We need new laws to deal with such things, the IP laws of yore are ridiculous.

What’s also ridiculous is the entire case in itself. Lets assume an extreme scenario that the court orders the Pirate Bay to be shut down. Do the lawyers realize that hundreds of thousands of Pirate Bays can spring overnight, and just mailing costs of the judicial notices would be more than the profits of the  entire music industry.

I cannot accept the fact that the legal eagles in the music industry fail to understand these simple arguments. Its a classic case of the corporate financial muscle trying to prove a point through a ridiculous case like this. Although they might have gotten away with it in the past, but such instances would become rare thanks to the rising awareness among general public.

One hopes that the Swedish courts would decide to send the case to its rightful place,  Trash.

Update: The Pirate Bay found guilty. That’s really disappointing

Extreme Sheep LED art

Some guys strapped LED covered vests on sheep and then had the dogs herd them in specific patterns to create ridiculous art on a hillside in Wales.