Re: Archiving old magazines on website

[Lee Hart <leeahart@earthlink.net>]

Bill Garber wrote:
> The difference being that Laws are written by mindless idiots
> who are controlled by money grubbers and Windows is written by
> money grubbers and is usually controlled by mindless idiots.  8o)

Great quote :-)

To bring this back toward computers... Professors Lotfi Zadeh and Bart
Kosko have been working for years with 'fuzzy logic' -- a way to program
computers to have more human-like reasoning. Rather than strictly 0/1
true/false yes/no, fuzzy logic allows a continuous range of values
between 0 and 1. Any value can be slightly true, half-true, mostly true,
etc. As a consequence, a computer *can* partially execute an
instruction. Sounds bizarre, but it works!

Many laws use fuzzy logic, though they don't explicitly call it that.
Any time you have a penalty that is proportional to the crime, that's
using fuzzy logic. A "fuzzy" copyright law would base the penalty for
breaking it on how much damage was done. Making a copy for just your
brother-in-law would cost far less than pirating copies for a million
people. And, the cost for each violation would be proportional to the
damage it did to the original copyright holder.

An interesting notion... :-)
-- 
"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the
world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has!" -- Margaret Meade
--
Lee A. Hart  814 8th Ave N  Sartell MN 56377  leeahart_at_earthlink.net