" In the past Grandmasters came to our computer tournaments to laugh. Today they come to watch. Soon they will come to learn. "

http://tinyurl.com/297gcuk

or

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

While I suspect that TRILLIONS is an overestimate, I certainly believe it is greatly in the interest of any economy to have a free flow of information, and such information significantly enhances productivity. Striking that balance between freedom to use information and a strong incentive-structure in which innovation (via copyright, among other things) is rewarded is no small challenge -- and I suspect many of these issues (in the U.S.) will ultimately be thrashed out in the U.S. Supreme Court.

In any case, I suspect that nations and economies that respect openness to a very significant degree will always have economic advantages over those that do not. The limited access to information of nations like North Korea or (to a lesser degree) China will, other things being equal, be a substantial drag on their productivity and economic vitality.

Incidentally, Ars Technica's "Law & Disorder" page for legal matters surrounding technology is often interesting:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/

More about "fair use" and associated copyright issues, courtesy of Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Hope you are all in good spirits....

http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2010/051...

It's one of the few cartoons I've seen that inspired a book!

=== begin quoted text ===

This book was inspired by the cover of a Datamation magazine that appeared about 20 years ago. It shows a man in an office with what used to be a desktop computer on the table in front of him. The poor guy has his hands poised over the keyboard, but the rest of the machine is in tiny pieces all over the room. His eyebrows have been burned off, his hair is blown straight back, and his coffee cup has tipped over. There's a huge cloud of black smoke over his head. It is obvious that the computer has exploded about five seconds earlier. He's thinking, "It's never done that before...."

[- from the book "It's Never Done That Before: A Guide to Troubleshooting Windows XP (2006); from the introduction]

=== end quoted text ===

And here it is....

... in color (as it appeared on the Datamation cover):

http://tinyurl.com/its-never-done-t...

... and in greyscale, as I first saw it:

http://tinyurl.com/its-never-done-t...

Best wishes and careful computing to all!

http://www.lawphil.net/judjuris/jur...

http://openjurist.org/999/f2d/497/u...

Kasparov says "Look, it can't even swim! Now it has to learn it! Stupid computer!"

and in the explaning box it says

"After the defeat, Kasparov wanted to test if the computer also was better at other things"

"A few months after all the work I did on the <Deep Blue project>, at the US Championship, I thought <"miserable Earthlings, you have no chance against me!" <>>

-- Joel Benjamin

"In certain situations, <Deep Blue> plays like a God.

-- Kasparov

I just think we should look at this as a chess match between the world's greatest chess player, and Garry Kasparov.

~ Lou Gerstner (IBM Chairman)

<Toward the end of my interview with him, [Murray] Campbell somewhat mischievously referred to an incident that had occurred toward the end of the first game in their 1997 match with Kasparov.

“A bug occurred in the game and it may have made Kasparov misunderstand the capabilities of Deep Blue,” Campbell told me. “He didn’t come up with the theory that the move it played was a bug.”

The bug had arisen on the forty-fourth move of their first game against Kasparov; unable to select a move, the program had defaulted to a last-resort fail-safe in which it picked a play completely at random. The bug had been inconsequential, coming late in the game in a position that had already been lost; Campbell and team repaired it the next day. “We had seen it once before, in a test game played earlier in 1997, and thought that it was fixed,” he told me. “Unfortunately there was one case that we had missed.”

In fact, the bug was anything but unfortunate for Deep Blue: it was likely what allowed the computer to beat Kasparov. In the popular recounting of Kasparov’s match against Deep Blue, it was the second game in which his problems originated—when he had made the almost unprecedented error of forfeiting a position that he could probably have drawn.

But what had inspired Kasparov to commit this mistake? His anxiety over Deep Blue’s forty-fourth move in the first game—the move in which the computer had moved its rook for no apparent purpose. Kasparov had concluded that the counterintuitive play must be a sign of superior intelligence. He had never considered that it was simply a bug.>

Meh.