Good News

I'm just off to AAMAS, but just some parting good news from the Onion - one economy is finally on the up.

Playing with Trackback

Just trying Haloscan.

Publicly funded competiton for private enterprise?

Lawrence Lessing's blog has a story on record companies complaining about the BBC release fo free recordings. While the title seems a little erroneous to me ("is public domain illegal" - but the story is really about fair/unfair competition) it's an interesting issue. One comment says:

"The record companies here make a fair point. It is not that the music itself is not in the public domain, but that BBC is using public money to fund performances which it is recording and releasing for free. The record companies also pay artists to perform pieces and then release the recordings for a cost. By utilizing public money to fund competition for these recordings would be unfair. I don't think any business wants to have the government funding competition to it. However, if a private group decided to undertake the same project, it would be a wonderful idea and certainly could not be considered unfair."

But surely this is wrong-headed? The BBC was there before the private companies in many cases, further why not apply this argument to UK public/private healthcare? (does the NHS act as unfair competition to BUPA?), or roads? (do public roads in France constitute unfair competition for tool roads?). The existance of the BBC is primarily as a trusted, independent news source - and in this area it seems undisputed. One could argue that Beethoven's 5th is not in its remit. But if not, why is childrens TV? Drama? Documentary and Comedy? Entertaining the nation (and big bits of the globe) has always been part of the remit.

What the BBC does is paid for by the taxpayer and the TV license - so surely it is only a matter of time before this this archic, inefficient, socialist way of generating / distributing content will collapse in the face of the more efficient market rules everything approach? :-)

Virtual sweatshops pay

A great article at 1up.com shows how online worlds might evolve - the money flowing through them is already rivaling small national economies. Seems like the black
market labour end of the scale to designer frocks for virtual avatars. [Thanks simon for the tip!]

Root server war?

It looks like the heat is going up in the fight for internet root node control. Can't help thinking that the idea of moving this to an "entirely technical issue" is unlikely to succeed. At some level politics play a role - lets hope we do not end up with two address spaces with no updates between them.

The hardest question in Computer Science

Since Comp Sci only got two mentions in the Top 125 science challenges, it was interesting to see that someone had come up with another proof for one of them - that P = NP. My maths is a little rusty so unfortunately wasn't able to fully to proof in full (shame on me), but its re-assuring that it's already been listed on the P-versus-NP page. Possible we have a way to go before we get a proof.

The great thing about the article though was that it led me to this article [PS file] by William Gasarch which surveys opinions of the great and the good in mathematics on when and how the question might be solved. Choice quotes (!):

• Richard Chang (Univ of MD Balt. County, 2066, P != NP) In the year, 2066, the idea that computers will double in speed every 18 months (Moore's Law) has been ludicrous for 50 years. As such, no one uses asymptotic analysis anymore. Programs are written in assembly language to shave the running time. Some poor assistant professor will prove that P != NP and fail to get tenure for it.


• Stuart Kertz (University of Chicago, 2050, P != NP) Knowing Ketan Mulmuly, I live in fear that the slution will be via algebraic geometry, and it will come soon enough that I'll be expected to understand it. An alternative nightmare is that the undergraduate who solves it will publish his solution in French.


• Ming Li (Waterloo, P != NP) For God's sake, let's keep it open for another 100 years! NSF needs to be convinced that theoretical CS is still relevant and supports it.
  

But there are plenty of less tounge in cheek answers too - well worth a read.

UPDATE: A nice explanation of the problem by Craig Feinstein.

The week that was...

Slate has a couple of good roundups (here and here) of sentiment in the Uk and on the net following the bomb attacks in London. Not much more to add, except that respect for the Sun *bloid sinks to new lows (see the slate story). Amongst all that there was some other news:

• The EU Software patent directive getting shot down - this is great news.
  
• The US Supreme court makes an intriguing ruling on Grokster v's MGM - as some people have pointed out, this is far from a clean cut victory for the studios.. (Peter's tip).
  
• American journalists got a blast of cold air.
  

Oh and there was the G8 meeting...

And in other news

This guardian blog post has been sitting in my must read pile for a while but i only just got around to it. Second Life catches the imagination because it's aim is to mirror real life but other worlds such as project entropia are taking off as well. Still if you though the sale of an Entropian virtual island for $26,000 (yes real US dollars) was freaky then Aleks Krotoski's observations on Second Life are a step further yet:

• Space Think Dream provides a real service selling designer clothes for your second life avatar - where's the store? - in second life's Avalon world, just swing your character by there and hava browse... Still personally i like the buggy.
  
• The Gaming Market seems to be doing pretty well (appart from having to drop a number of currencies), and they're even busy setting up ATMs in second life.
  

What's especially interesting about Second Life is that the game designers allow users to retain copyright over their designs - so if it's a hit online, maybe you can get it made for the streets of Paris.

Semantics meets WebServices meets Tools

Great to see some of the semantic web services work reaching tools for standard environments such as Eclipse and getting noticed by the mainstream.. Have to download this and play with it. Out of interest OWL-S and WSMO have both now gone to the W3C as inputs:

• OWL Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S) W3C Submission
  
• Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) Submission W3C Submission
  

They also already received comments back (see links from the individual pages).

An interesting take on the US filesharing ruling

In the guardian online (thanks to Peter for spotting it). Its certainly true that this wasn't an out-and-out win for the media industry but the ruling could still put P2P technology development into question - to what extent will technology developers be obliged to try to ensure infringing uses are "difficult" with their technology? and at what cost?

Top 125 Scientific Challenges

Science has an interesting list of 125 top unresolved scientific questions in their latest online issue (thanks slashdot). It's interesting to note that just two (maybe three) are in any way computer science related:

• What Is the Biological Basis of Consciousness? AI and computational cognitive scientists may have something to say on that...
  
• and .. What Are the Limits of Conventional Computing?
  

Maybe you can count the Malthus question as something CS can contribute to through simulations.

Still, either what compsci is doing isn't hard :-), nobody cares or we've failed to explain it :-).

[UPDATE] and we don't do a whole lot better in the next 100! Something really worth doing would be searching out lists of outstanding challenges in computer science - P=NP? made it, but not much else! Its hard to argue against the fact that many of the issues we are concerned with are engineering rather than scientific challenges - but some of the issues in the list are also how? rather than why? :)

America retains control of root servers

The Register's perfectly worded story: Bush administration annexes internet.

Open documents for Norway

In amongst bad news this week there is some good news with the Norwegian government moving towards open formats for all government documents.