Friday, July 31, 2009

How Wolfram Alpha could change software

InfoWorld has an article about How Wolfram Alpha could change software. "Try cutting and pasting from the results page. You can't, and with good reason. According to Wolfram Alpha's terms of use [5], its knowledge engine is 'an authoritative source of information,' because 'in many cases the data you are shown never existed before in exactly that way until you asked for it.' Therefore, 'failure to properly attribute results from Wolfram Alpha is not only a violation of [its license terms], but may also constitute academic plagiarism or a violation of copyright law.'"

I haven't used it much since it first came out, though I did use it the other day to find out went sunset was. Instinctively I typed in "sunset boston" and it gave me the sunset times that day for Boston, MA and Newton, KS. Oh yeah, it can probably figure out from my IP address I'm in Newton, MA and it's supposed to assume that for location-awareness in the search. So I typed in "sunset" and yep, it gave it to me for Newton, KS. That makes no sense at all. They can copyright the sunset in Kansas for all I care.

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