Since the bad guys have the code anyways, they should immediately publish the code as Open Source. Chances are, someone from the community will find the exploits before the guys who have stolen it.

This incident might also be used as an argument for open sourcing even critical code.

j.

Never done.
Yep, sounds informative.

j.

Reminds me of an old joke:

"So, how do you do these ships in bottles?"

"Well, I take some glue, some wooden sticks and some cord and throw it all into a bottle. Then I shake the bottle vigorously until the glue settles. Many funny things come out. Some of them are ships."

j.

As a Linux user, I was about to ignore the article when I glanced over the sentence "It affected not only Sun's Java but other implementations such as OpenJDK, on multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. "

If I understand it correctly, all Java implementations have this flaw, so why write that it is a "MacOS vulnerability" and not "Java vulnerability"?

I want to know more how it affects my Ubuntu box!

j.

You have not read the article (or you have read it, but failed to understand). For example, you write "so long as the user owns the input" -- and this is most obviously not the case here (because you don't own the data that was used to produce the graphics).

Secondly, you don't own the software -- it is not running on your machine. Rather, you ask someone to produce specific results for you using software that you don't have and data that you don't own. It's like asking your friend, who owns rabbits and Adobe Illustrator, to draw an picture of a rabbit for you, and not like drawing yourself a picture of your own rabbit using your own software. It's a service, not a piece of software.

Thirdly, the license is quite specific about what is the subject of the copyright. (i) data might be copyrighted by a third party, and therefore it is necessary to give a link to specific results so as to attribute this particular data correctly; (ii) "specific images, such as plots, typeset formulas, and tables, as well as the general page layouts" are copyrighted. If you care, you can reproduce them on your own using your own software and data.

Finally, it is way better to have a precise license that clearly states what is allowed and what is not allowed than to be unsure whether the results can be used (and in what form), and who actually owns the copyright.

j.

You think it's not reasonable? Then write your own Wolphram Alpha, if you really think it is that simple, and use that instead of WA for your work. Man, you have no idea what you are talking about here. Modern biology would be nowhere if people who build such "turing machines" were not credited for their work, and consequently get grants for their research.

For example, tons of software in bioinformatics is written with a completely open source and well known algorithms, using data gathered by experimentalists, and yet they get the recognition -- because someone had to come up the with the idea, gather (and maintain!) the data, run tests, implement, etc. etc. Believe me, even with simple ideas and algorithms and for simpler data sets this is a shitload of work. Heck, even re-implementations of existing tools get recognized.

Secondly, a scientific procedure requires that you publish your methods -- you have used software X to generate figure Y and table Z, then you have to write how you did it. And noone in her or his right mind will reimplement existing tools just for the sake of the current work without a very good reason.

That said, sometimes a tool like that allows you to "get on the trail" -- which you then pursue using something else. For example, WA would give you a hint that there might be a connection between cancer and, say, cigarettes, and you show this connection using clinical trials. In such a case, however, when you do not publish the data from WA directly, nor any figures derived from it, you are not required to cite it.

Note that I am in no way convinced that WA is of any use. The parts of it that overlap with my area of expertise (biology / biocomputing) are naive and rudimentary, and mostly useless to say the least.

j.

All they ask is that you attribute them when publishing results derived from their service. Example:

Methods: "The comparative population studies were derived from the Wolphram Alpha service (Wolphram, 2009)"

Regular thing for academics. I cite NCBI blast service, I cite PFAM, I cite dozens of other services out there. Most of these tools require or ask for an attribution; and in most cases, this is anyways necessary in a scientific procedure.

j.

Linux is ready for the desktop.

For my desktop, to be specific. Has been ready for years.

Any other desktops are irrelevant.

j.

Apparently, there is a skewed (high) rating for: white or black frame around the picture and black and white photographs esp. portraits.

j.

One thing first. There *are* certain esthetic and technical rules / guidelines which are what we could call "objective" in the sense that they are very general. For example, a photograph usually looks better if the composition is balanced, if the 2/3rd (or golden mean) rule is used, the lines in the picture are coherent and lead the eye in the right direction (e.g. towards the subject), if the photograph is correctly exposed, colors matched etc. Of course, some of the greatest photographs break those rules; however, like in many things, you succeed in breaking the rules if you know what you are doing, and you cannot do it very often.

I can imagine that you can come up with an engine that is able to detect how "rule conformant" a given picture is.

However, pure formal esthetic judgement is what we rarely mean when talking about a "good photograph".
There is one main issue that will make it very hard to match our "overall" esthetic sense. Firstly, we are unable to detach the image contents from the "pure form". That means, if we see a worried women holding a child, we cannot just look at that as a composition. Also, we are always considering what we know about the subject. E.g. if we have a photograph of a man standing in water, if the photograph ends just below the place that his legs go into the water, we will have the impression that his legs are cut off, and that there is something wrong about the photograph. Finally, facial expression is immensely important for the perceived esthetics of a photograph.

I did some experimenting -- some of the truly great photographs of our times got rather lousy scores (e.g. Dorothea Lange's famous photograph, but also some color photographs as well), while at the same time rather random shots I did of my sons got even five out of five stars. Well. Maybe it will still be useful to someone to filter out the worse photographs.

j.