2012-03-15
Patents vs Copyright
text 19:13:06
We should think ourselves very lucky that Alan Turing didn’t patent “a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence”
— jasongorman (@jasongorman) March 13, 2012
It’s is an amusing point, but at least patents expire after twenty years (for example, the LZW/GIF patent held by Unisys). What would have been terrible was if he (or one of the other early computing pioneers) had been granted copyright on the idea.
2011-05-18
post/5611647559
quote 19:27:35
“ I don’t suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction But you have gone much further and I can’t help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at. ”
Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Olaf Stapledon after reading his novel, Star Maker. Quoted in a Guardian story, Science fiction author hits out at Booker judges, about Kim Stanley Robinson criticising fiction prizes for concentrating on the genre of literary fiction.
