Economists will fight over the interpretation of the empirical data all day long, and they have been arguing bitterly about it for a *very* long time now.

The fundamental issue is the underlying complexity of economies, coupled with the inability to perform any controlled experiments on an economy. As a bonus, no economic theory adequately describes even a simplistic version of the historical data. Furthermore, the predictive value of these theories is negligible—ask yourself how the downturn of 2008 caught nearly every economist by surprise. Even Greenspan and Bernanke were caught off guard; one would hope they would be paying attention to the state of the economy, right?

Effectively, all that's left is for economists to:
1) Argue about whose model is least grotesquely inadequate to describe the historical data.
2) Offer conjecture about what's actually inside the black box that is the economy. (given the situation, this is about as practically useful as philosophical musings on ontology)
3) Contrive excuses about why they didn't actually perceive (and their model didn't predict) the latest bubble in the economy that just burst and caused a major recession. Once the public opprobrium from their latest failure has blown over they can get back to 1), which is their "real job". Usually, they do this by squinting at the burst bubble and then shoehorning the empirical data into their preconceived notions. At this point, they claim that their model actually *did* predict the bubble burst. In hindsight. Every time, of course.

Here are two very amusing EconStories videos to illustrate the point:
"Fear the Boom and Bust" a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem
Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two

Yes, and gold fringe around American flags in courtrooms is a key example of this conspiracy. *cough*

Face it, these sovereign individual/allodial title/income-taxes-only-apply-to-government-employees/the-US-government-is-a-corporation/admiralty law/etc conspiracy theories are all a crock. Here's how you can tell: even if this conspiracy theory were true, the common people want it this way.

Let's imagine that the conspiracy were true and were exposed. Suddenly everyone is declared a sovereign individual. Hooray, no income taxes, etc, etc. It would take about 3.7 seconds for a new Constitution/Constitutional amendment to be passed to reinstate present income tax levels once everyone saw that all government functions were shut down due to lack of funding.

So, if there's a conspiracy, it seems to be resulting in a state that causes contentment for the overwhelming preponderance of the populace. Even written laws cannot defy a culture's will for long.

Cf. a "real" conspiracy: the backdooring of federal intrusion into all aspects of life via abuse of the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause. This was derived from cultural shifts in the early 20th century. The populace is happy with the result, even though the level of cognitive dissonance in these judicial decisions is farcical.

Same deal here: let's imagine that the US Supreme Court were somehow instantly packed with hardcore libertarians. All these unconstitutional federal intrusions would be struck down. Social Security & Medicare would be instantly shut down. Food & drug contents would no longer be regulated. Vehicles would no longer be required to meet safety standards. How long do you think it would take for a Constitutional amendment to be passed to reauthorize all of this presently-unconstitutional federal intrusion?

The culture wants it this way, so even written law cannot defy that mandate.

Consider this as a de facto vs de jure argument against these types of conspiracies.

"You must be new here..."

Slashdot is the 'home away from basement' for every Captain Obvious who erroneously believes they are the next Wernher von Braun.

I'll see your "contrived use case" and raise you your own comment:

I'm not the one changing the scenario around; you are. I arbitrarily limited the scenario to be "all 4 minute, incredibly simplistic song representations".

O Rly. Let's take your cited scenario:

I presume you will agree that there is more than 1 octave available in music. I chose 8 octaves, which I believe is a reasonable number, but it doesn't really matter (as you will see presently). 8 octaves * 12 notes = 96 available notes. Fine. Now, 8 notes per chord: 96 choose 8 == 132,601,016,340 possible chords. Forgive me for switching to logarithmic notation at this point, because the numbers are just too enormous to post here. Apply this to 16 chords per measure, 4 measures.

(96 choose 8)^16^4 == 10^(log(96 choose 8)*16*4) ~= 10^712

Congratulations, you have narrowed the space to 10^712 permutations. This disregards the explosion of permutations that would happen if you *also* allowed chords of smaller than 8 notes or allowed silence for one or more beats.

Feel free to insinuate this isn't what you meant by saying that you could fit static copies of this data into a few GB, but we both know the truth. Much like 10^1200, 10^712 is also a very good approximation of infinity.

Sounds useful! Just grab all 7 billion people on Earth and have them listen to your samples for ~10^703 years. FYI, the ultimate heat death of the universe (after all the black holes have evaporated) is scheduled for ~10^100 years, so you might have to develop some new physics to finish your experiment.

Well, given that your copyright would have expired before you could even begin to scratch the surface of that particular experiment...

The idea behind copyright is to promote the progress of science/art for society as a whole. I'll rebut your claim that I am appealing to unnamed authority (ie. without citing legal precedent) with a counterpoint that you are asserting without proof that having the USPTO grant you sole copyright over all copyrightable material would serve to promote the progress of art and science in society.

Because, for all the changing of your proposed attack vectors, that is your stated goal: to own all copyright and somehow foment massive changes to US intellectual property law. It is patently obvious that it doesn't serve the public interest to grant this kind of meta-copyright and so it won't be allowed.

I am not even going to engage in a futile search for case law on this, because it is so absurd. I will leave you with an adage from US jurisprudence: "The Constitution is not a suicide pact" . If even the US Constitution can be set aside in certain circumstances for the common good, what do you think your semantic games on a $35 online copyright registration will count for when weighed against the potential for destroying all intellectual property production for 75 years? Again, this doesn't cover the arguments that you know lawyers could come up against this, even based on extant law & regulations.

Your meta-copyright would be first mocked as frivolous, then retroactively rejected if you ever managed to get it granted and subsequently tried to assert it. By all means give it a shot, but don't forget I told you what was going to happen.

Don't mistake my claim that your attack is unworkable as support for the status quo in the US IP regime. In fact, the polar opposite is true: I am almost to the point that I believe that all copyright should be abolished. I just don't believe your approach is tenable in the legal system.

I presume you mean my argument that this kind of copyright claim could be trivially thrown out via constitutionality argument? (The "promote the Progess of Science and useful Arts" quote was an excerpt from the Copyright Clause, if it wasn't clear)

Courts generally refrain from resorting to making decisions regarding constitutionality if there are alternative rationales available. Regardless, you aren't going to find a copyright clerk or a judge who will support your claim of an infinitely-long "work" that encompasses all possible works within it. Your claim of holding the world hostage to your "exploit" copyright is trivial to reject because it does not promote progress to assign all copyright in the world to a single entity, especially one who merely submitted a single recurrence relation as a frivolous claim to hold all possible copyrightable works. That's all: your attack is done for that reason alone. However, I'm certain that lawyers could get your claim thrown out as frivolous without having to resort to the constitutionality angle at all.

Perhaps that's because you keep changing your proposed attack vector.

First, you proposed copyrighting static output. I presume you were talking about that, because the output of a copyrighted program isn't itself copyrighted by the software author's copyright holder (eg. Microsoft does not own copyright to the documents you make with Word):

"An example might be to create a software program that outputs every possible combination of notes permissible under the rules of standard musical notation, then file copyright on it."

This was shown to be impossible, though you were shopping the "copyright the static output" idea to other people:

"You could do it systematically, creating "choatic symphonies", each one being a permeutation of the possible space.[...]Theoretically, I could have my 8 core i7 "composing" 8 symphonies at a whack."

...it's never going to work. The permutation space is too large. Never fear, you switched gears to a different approach:

These contain a section for "sample" data, then a programatical sequence. Essentially, a program that generates the music, rather than a static representation of the music.

...at which point you have to demonstrate that it will contain all possible permutations. You can do this a variety of ways: eg. via searching a transcendental number (an idea which you rejected as pointless), or you can make it deterministic. You suggested an approach:

"The location as a timestamp would be solvable in polynomial time, and because it is rational, and not irrational like pi, it can be bounded and defined with precision."

...which I refined to be "try to copyright the natural numbers" (trivially mathematically represented as a recurrence relation), which makes claims easier for you because you wouldn't need to search at all. Not that you are going to be able to copyright a recurrence relation to expand all the naturals, but hey, this is your idea here. Why make it more complicated than that?

Finally, you presume that the humans interpreting the laws and regulations will allow your attack to bring the entire intellectual property system crashing down over some vague semantics that you attempt to exploit in a single meta-copyright claim. Yeah, this kind of approach is great for smashing stacks and exploiting code on computers. However, it's not going to play out that way in the legal system.

Feel free to try it if you don't believe me. Hell, email the EFF and post their reply in the thread. I would love to read it.

I think you are presuming that the legal system operates like a computer, via strict logical operations and firm, clearly defined semantics.

That isn't the case.

The humans involved aren't going to accept that your copyright submission is legitimate. My guess is that you will run afoul of the definition of the submission of a "complete" copy as, by definition, any such algorithm's output would require an eternity to play/output/whatever. Barring that, your copyright would likely be thrown out as unconstitutional because it could be trivially argued that it does not "promote the Progess of Science and useful Arts".

As with the meta-patent ideas, you are free to try to file this and then bring suit when your claim is rejected. I just don't believe that an infinitely-long work that copyrights all possible permutations is going to be accepted by the copyright office. Even if you "sneak it by" the copyright registration process without any human realizing what you were claiming, your copyright would just be retroactively rejected as soon as you made your first infringement claim.

Furthermore, I don't believe that a rule for the rejection of infinitely-long, impossible-to-ever-actually-express-in-fullness "works" would even require a new law to be passed. Your claim is going to be thrown out by the copyright office, or if you persist in wasting money, by an appellate court (this wouldn't even meet the criteria for a Supreme Court case).

Your copyright assertion would be inane:
"My song contains all possible permutations of notes because I am asserting copyright on all possible permutations of notes."

Just try to copyright the natural numbers instead, because that's what you are insinuating. Then there is nothing to solve at all, because the content of the work that is "infringing" is its own offset in your copyrighted work.

As a bonus, you get copyright to all copyrightable works made after the date you filed (as derivative works, which you show by performing arbitrary mappings of their content to the numberline as well). So, while this approach is not necessarily mathematically impossible, it's as vapid as all those ideas about filing meta-patents. ("I'm going to patent the idea of patenting something! Take that, stupid USPTO!")

This isn't a workable attack.

In that case, your algorithm is essentially transcendental and normal. Difficult to prove that it will include all possibilities, so you may as well just copyright Pi instead of inventing your own (it's at the same state of proof as what you propose). As a bonus, you can sue everyone who produces anything at all after that date, because you just apply a "trivial" (*cough*) mapping from the offset within your musical notes to textual or binary representation.

I am being somewhat satirical, because even if you were granted such farcical copyright protection, you would still have to prove that the other material infringes by being able to cite your time offset. You couldn't make some hand-wavy assertion that "it's somewhere in there, you dastardly infringer!"

Look at the Pi-Search system that indexes the first 200 million digits of Pi and search for a your favorite up-to-120-digits-long number. Just for fun:
"The string 1234567890 did not occur in the first 200000000 digits of pi after position 0."

That's a 10 digit long number. Didn't occur within the first 200 million digits of Pi. Most songs are going to be more than 10 notes long. The odds of finding the "infringing" material rapidly drop to essentially 0 for any nontrivial search key.

Your approach is impossible. You may as well try to copyright Middle C and then presume that you can sue anyone that "infringes" on your copyright by including that musical note in their work.

Okay, let's take a look at the math for what you propose.

Our incredibly limiting assumptions will be:
1) Ignore harmony and focus solely on melody
2) Melody is defined as single note per beat
3) Only deal with songs <= 4 minutes long
4) Since this is a geek site we should cover electronica, so we need to represent tempo up to 150 bpm
5) 8 octaves are available

Taking Western notation, we will map the 12 notes per octave (ie. lettered notes plus sharps and flats) * 8 octaves. We will also represent silence for one beat as one "note". Therefore, there are 97 notes in this representation.

150 beats/min * 4 minutes = 600 beats. This implies that there would be 97^600 possible songs. Call it order of 10^1200 possibilities. (what's multiplying by an extra few billion times between friends?) This is a reasonable approximation for "infinity" for all practical purposes, as there are presumed to be "only" around 10^82 particles in the entire observable universe.

Yes, I have made some trivializing assumptions with how to model the permutations here, but don't forget that we have also simplified the model to exclude many aspects of music (multiple notes played simultaneously, longer songs, etc), which would cause the number of permutations to explode.

As rare as it is for governments to actually do that, I propose your apples-to-apples comparison would be to a nonprofit corporation. Alternatively, a nonprofit foundation funded by a for-profit corporation might be an appropriate comparison to your hypothetical benevolent government.

No, it's more like your father and grandfather borrowed money from your rich uncle. Your father and grandfather spent all the money they made and more, and so now your uncle is hitting you up to pay back their debts, most of which were created before you were born. His rationale is that your father and grandfather told him that you would be liable for their debts, even though they never asked you.

Furthermore, the rest of your extended family gasps in horrified disbelief when you suggest that it might not be your responsibility to pay your uncle back. Instead, your family demands that you, your uncle, your father, and your grandfather vote about this issue to determine what is the "fair" solution.

Ah, but it does. Social Security and the general budget are inextricably linked because there can never be any concept of a "savings account" or "lockbox" at this scale. Thus, the SSA never had any choice but to dump their surplus into the general federal budget (albeit via indirection), and any redemption of the debts in the Trust Fund must always come from general tax income.

The Trust Fund itself has never been anything but a notional, bookkeeping entity created to confuse, inveigle, and obfuscate.

This. The previous generations' decisions to implement a pyramid scam do not obligate the current generations to double-down on FAIL.

As I have pointed out before, the Social Security Trust fund is a farce: there is no possible way the government could "save" any surplus payments (ie. the "lockbox" is an impossible concept). The money wasn't "stolen" because it never can be saved in the first place. Thus, even though SS receipts are in surplus at the moment, once the Boomers retire then SS payments will be made out of general tax receipts.

Also, definitions would need to be altered if SS wage basis amounts were changed. SS was always envisioned as a pension-like system, which is why the tax doesn't "go all the way up" on income. This explains why Medicare lacks a wage basis... unlike SS, it was never pitched as a system where the amount paid out is linked to the amount paid in.

It is also clear that tax increases are insufficient to fix the budget—spending cuts are absolutely necessary, especially in social programs like SS/Medicare. For example, even if we cut the ~700 billion defense budget to zero (obviously untenable), it would only cut our annual deficit by 50%, from ~1.4 trillion down to ~700 billion.

Much of the reticence to raise tax rates is that tax increases have historically taken effect immediately, and any promised "spending cuts" always manage to evaporate before they ever take effect. Therefore, a "balanced approach" of tax increases + spending cuts always ends up being tax increases only.

Personally, I advocate austerity: unfairly high taxes for the successful and cuts in social programs for the poor. These entitlement programs like SS/Medicare need to be recast as welfare for the poor only. The qualification age for SS/Medicare benefits needs to be raised, probably to age 70+. We need to severely cut defense expenditures, keep out of foreign military involvements, and generally stop footing the bill for the world's defense. To make this happen, we somehow need to make real spending cuts in absolute expenditure amounts, make those cuts stick, and also raise taxes to near-punitive levels.

If we don't made these hard decisions now, then we Millennials will just be passing the same sorry situation to our children that our parents handed to us—except with compounded interest and even more toxic debt levels.

Fun fact: Agent Orange was, at worst, 99.8% dioxin-free.

Actually, most reports of Agent Orange dioxin contamination peg it no worse than 30 ppm TCDD dioxin concentration, which, of course, means the Agent Orange could still be 99.997% pure!

So, next time you see something that claims to be "99% organic" or "99 44/100% pure", just remember that it could potentially be several orders of magnitude worse than the contaminated Agent Orange used in Vietnam.

I believe you forgot to calculate your stove/fireplace efficiency, which will cause your calculations to significantly overstate the value of your firewood. Let's say you get 40% heating efficiency out of your hardwood.

Also, the CanSolair spec sheet conflicts with unit conversion. 10,000 BTU/hr is 2900 W. Their spec sheet lists 1200 – 2400 W, so let's use the 2400 W figure, though this was cited as being the noon-hour, highest output value. I am going to decline to calculate an integral for the total estimated daily output based on solar incidence angle, etc, and we will just use your 4 hr period.

Also, I am going to abjure the "rods per hogshead" Imperial units and calculate using SI units.

Firewood: 22 million BTU per cord * 3.5 cords * 40% = 32 GJ per season (Google Calculator is made of win)
CanSolair: 2400 W * 4 hours/day * 145 days = 5 GJ per season

5/32 is roughly 15%, so one might expect you to be able to shave off up to $150 per year. Again, these estimates likely favor the CanSolair by overstating the expected output (also, don't forget the electrical cost of running the blower for the CanSolair). Calculating the present value of that annuity is left as an exercise for the reader.

PS. Okay, I lied about not doing the calculus (couldn't resist). I calculated the value of a sawtooth integral (rather than a sineform), presuming 8 hours of sunlight per day and a triangular slope that started at 1200 W at dawn, peaked to 2400 W at noon, and then doubled that for the afternoon - dusk period. I have no idea if the CanSolair actually delivers 1200 W at dawn, but we are trying to give it the fairest possible shake here. The CanSolair delivered an additional ~50% in this flawed estimate vs. the one in the above calculations.

I use ISO 8601 for everything computer related because it sorts lexically. However, when interacting with people I use compact, unambiguous DD MMM YYYY format which will always parse even though it's non-standard.

Who can fail to understand "28 Oct 2011"?