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A penny from a tall building can leave a pretty big crater

Since it seems a lot of people believe this, I'll comment. Because of its shape, a penny flutters like a falling leaf and reaches a terminal velocity too low to do any damage.

See this site for confirmation.

See also Cows with Guns .

Readers of this thread might be interested to see this page at Don Lancaster's web site to read about how patents fail to benefit the little guy.

There was U-boat activity along the east coast of the U.S. during WWII. See this link .

It is somewhat different when I publish in a public forum on a system I do not own or control.

Btw: In the case of Slashdot, I do own my comments (per the disclaimer at the bottom of the page) but that's not really relevant.

As to my hypotheticals, the point of those was to show that there are ways of looking at this in which the position the courts might take is a bit clearer. My opinion is that the medium of release has nothing to do with whether or not your property is protected by law.

As far as the mention of rape is concerned, I used the rape analogy on purpose because rape victims are often accused of failing to take appropriate measures to protect themselves from harm or even "asking for it" by being (publishing) in the wrong place or dressing (programming) in a way so as to invite the offense. To me, the same tactic is being used here: making the victim the guilty party. Victims do not have to proactively protect themselves from violations in order to be protected by law.

Suppose the rebroadcaster altered the "layout" (or "presentation") of the program by reducing the "space" of commercials to 1/100th of the normal amount?

Also, hasn't the retransmission of a completely unaltered signal been found to be a copyright violation anyway (that Canadian company that was retransmitting TV over the Internet).

Also, I don't see exactly why the format of publication has anything to do with the issue. By publishing on video tape or paper I am aware that someone could alter my work on the way to the consumer, that doesn't mean I have given my permission for that to happen.

Not a criminal offense: true enough, poor choice of words on my part. Perhaps I should have said "offender"?

I still disagree that a publisher needs to take explicit action to keep from issuing an implicit license.

Suppose I run a proxy service that marks up pages and then sends them on to the browser for rendering. Is that a copyright violation? Would I as a web site operator have to carefully comb my logs to make sure that this was not happening in order to protect my IP?

If that is a violation but it is argued that when it is under the control of the user it is not, suppose the proxy service was user-configurable? Is it still a copyright violation because of republishing or is it not?

If it is argued that it would not be a violation if the action took place entirely on the user's PC, suppose I license my proxy server to run as a DLL on the user's PC but otherwise the effects are exactly the same. Is that a violation?

While I can see that annotating a page yourself (like writing in the margins of a book) should be allowed, to me this is more like someone else writing in the margins before you have seen the book and then selling you the result.

If I have to take explicit action to protect my work then the appropriate course of action is to sue for copyright violation, not to add some "anti-copyright violation" kludge.

As someone else observed here, it is like intercepting a TV signal. While the response to that observation was that only the layout, not the content is affected I would counter argue that suppose the interceptor buffered the program and zapped the commercials to 1/100th their normal length. The content would still be there but the "layout" has been altered. Still a violation of copyright as far as I can see.

Sarcasm accomplishes nothing.

Getting back to the discussion at hand: breaking the law is breaking the law. It is not the default situation that the victim has to take special action to hinder the criminal.

Suppose I ran a proxy service that "annotated" pages for people this way. Would the proxy service be guilty of re-publishing?

Suppose I granted licenses for my proxy service to run as a DLL on the same computer as the browser?

Sure, and if a woman walking down the street fails to wear a sign saying "Do Not Rape Me", then she has given an implicit license to all rapists to procede with their business.

Wouldn't the use of SmartTags result in an unauthorized derived work and therefore open the user up to lawsuits as well as the purveyor of the tools used for committing the crime (i.e., Microsoft)?

This effect has been used in magic tricks for a long time.

There is an interesting page here where the various versions of the persecuted heroine story are online. Apparently there are hundreds of such folktales but the earliest one documented was written down by Charles Perrault (as you say) in Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Paris, 1697).

The Brothers Grimm version first appeared in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1st ed. (Berlin, 1812), v. 1, no. 21.

True, but the modern pizza (i.e., since the 17th century) is not possible without the tomato of the New World as discussed here .
OpenSourcerers

Locking out that 10% makes perfect business sense as you reach a point of diminishing returns on the effort required to land them as customers.

Business is a free-for-all grabfest. Consider a child's party with a pinata. When the pinata breaks and the candy lands in a pile (the 90%) and some scatters everywhere (the 10%), the children all dive for the middle where the big pile is. Only after the big pile is nearly all gone (the density of what is left begins to approach the density of the 10%) do the children look up and start to hunt for the remaining 10%. They also don't know how much of the hard-to-get 10% (or 8%) they will have accumulated by the time the other kids begin to compete for it as well.

Any child that tries to divide its attention equally between the 90% and the 10% will end up with less due to the wasted effort involved in traveling between the two areas.

A gambling child might choose to chase the 10% from the beginning (i.e., try to operate in a niche market) hoping that the 10% will be more than the percentage they might have gotten from the big pile while competing head-to-head with everyone else but that is a real risk because the child doesn't know ahead of time if the 10% isn't perhaps really 8%.

There is even more importance in chasing the easy 90% in business because there isn't just one pinata and whoever gets the most of the first pinata will get the most of the second, and third, and so one. By getting there "firstest with the mostest" you become the de facto market leader/standard. Anyone who tries to get into selling books online today will find that the easy 90% is gone (mostly to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Borders) and that the best they can do is try to pick up the 10% that might be left but now the others can afford to turn their attention to the untapped market and, if any market of significance is left, they will pursue that with their huge resources.

Business people use careful research to study how markets operate and how to best perform in markets. The Boston Consulting Group came up with a widely accepted portfolio matrix which says that if you are on the downhill slope if you are any smaller than your largest competitor. In this case the best you can hope for is that you are in a market that is growing and more than 10% in which case you have a "Problem Child" product. If the market is growing at less than 10% you have a "Dog" product and you should go do something else.

Techies have a tendency to think business people (suits) are morons. I have been guilty of this myself. However, the objective of business is profit and by that measure suits beat techies with ease. While someone like Bill Gates may have some techie in him, his real strength is as a suit.

Assuming a techie wants profits, by considering suits to be morons, he is underestimating his "enemy" which is one of the surest paths to defeat. Business today is a science in that theories are formulated, experiments are done, observations are made, data is collected and analyzed, and then the theories are modified as needed.

There is a discussion of the BCG matrix here .

If you are interested in this sort of stuff, look for books by Lillian Lieber. She wrote:

• The Einstein Theory of Relativity some of which is online here
• Non-Euclidean Geometry
• Galois and the Theory of Groups
• The Education of T. C. Mits
• Mathematics for the Two Billion
• Mits, Wits, and Logic
• Infinity

I really loved her books as a kid and I find that they still hold up today. Mrs. Lieber, wherever you are today, thank you!

The 2nd Amendment says:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

The definitions of "regulated" in the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes this definition:

Of troops: Properly disciplined; obs. Rare.

The definition of people is pretty obvious (OK, perhaps not to the Roe v. Wade debaters but the rest of us can probably find a working definition for our purposes here).

Therefore, the 2nd Amendment can be paraphrased as "in order to maintain the freedom we have won, we must have an available pool of people who are disciplined in the use of weapons, therefore the people shall be allowed to keep weapons".

This is very much like the mandatory longbow training in England during the Middle Ages (cite). At that time, longbow practice was mandatory after church on Sundays.

There is a law that is still on the books in South Carolina that says that every adult male must bring a weapon to church on Sundays. These people are part of the militia being referred to in the Constitution. At the time that law was enacted it seems clear that the average adult male had a weapon available to him.

The statements that attempt to tar me with the brush of the poorly regarded pseudo-military organizations sensationalized by the media and the brush of the flat earthers are purely red herrings.

The founding fathers indicated their intentions in more places than just the Constitution.

• Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the American people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences, and tendencies prove that to ensure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference--they deserve a place of honor with all that's good. - George Washington.
• If the people are armed and the federalists do not know where the arms are, there can never be an oppressive government. - George Washington.
• The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms. - Samuel Adams.
• The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in Government. - Thomas Jefferson.
• No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. - Thomas Jefferson.
• The people will not understand the importance of the 2nd Amendment until it is too late. - Thomas Jefferson.
• Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them. - Thomas Paine.
• I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials. - George Mason.
• To disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them. - George Mason.
• A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves and include all men capable of bearing arms ...To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms... - Richard Henry Lee.
• The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. . .(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. - James Madison.
• What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government is impossible to be foreseen...The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious if it were capable of being carried into execution... Little more can reasonably be aimed at with the respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped ; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year. - Alexander Hamilton.

Then of course, there's The Militia Act of 1792, passed May 8, 1792, providing federal standards for the organization of the Militia which also makes clear that the word "militia" did not mean a standing army but instead meant that each citizen should own and understand his own weapon:

I. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia, by the Captain or Commanding Officer of the company, within whose bounds such citizen shall reside, and that within twelve months after the passing of this Act. And it shall at all time hereafter be the duty of every such Captain or Commanding Officer of a company, to enroll every such citizen as aforesaid, and also those who shall, from time to time, arrive at the age of 18 years, or being at the age of 18 years, and under the age of 45 years (except as before excepted) shall come to reside within his bounds; and shall without delay notify such citizen of the said enrollment, by the proper non-commissioned Officer of the company, by whom such notice may be proved. That every citizen, so enrolled and notified, shall, within six months thereafter, provide himself with a good musket or firelock, a sufficient bayonet and belt, two spare flints, and a knapsack, a pouch, with a box therein, to contain not less than twenty four cartridges, suited to the bore of his musket or firelock, each cartridge to contain a proper quantity of power and ball; or with a good rifle, knapsack, shot-pouch, and power-horn, twenty balls suited to the bore of his rifle, and a quarter of a power of power; and shall appear so armed, accoutred and provided, when called out to exercise or into service, except, that when called out on company days to exercise only, he may appear without a knapsack. That the commissioned Officers shall severally be armed with a sword or hanger, and esontoon; and that from and after five years from the passing of this Act, all muskets from arming the militia as is herein required, shall be of bores sufficient for balls of the eighteenth part of a pound; and every citizen so enrolled, and providing himself with the arms, ammunition and accoutrements, required as aforesaid, shall hold the same exempted from all suits, distresses, executions or sales, for debt or for the payment of taxes.

While it might be argued that today we don't do these things, the point is to prove what the founding fathers meant by the word "militia": the majority of males of fighting age and their privately owned weapons.

My final point was to observe that, according to the founding fathers themselves, in the U.S. we the people are the most qualified to interpret the Constitution, not some political appointees.

There is a good article on all of this here .

Readers should also note the posting here by ScuzzMonkey who makes several good points.

Actually, since I was careful to include a link to the Section of 311, perhaps I didn't quote it as a space consideration. I notice that you carefully avoided quoting it in its entirety, preferring instead to edit it.

Paragraph (b) was clearly not required as we are discussing the definition of who is in the militia, not how those people are allocated in the militia.

Paragraph (b) says:

The classes of the militia are -

1. the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
2. the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia. (I.e., the people not listed in the bullet point directly above.)

Which is simply a statement of how the militia defined in paragraph (a) as:

The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

are distributed. There is the organized militia in the form of the National Guard and the Navy and then there is everyone else who qualified under paragraph (a).

If I say in paragraph (a) that swans are large water fowl that shall be fed corn and then in paragraph (b) I say that swans consist of the white ones and the not white ones, that does not mean that only white swans shall be fed corn.

You also failed to quote much of Article 1 Section 8 which says:

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
Emphasis mine.

Since some of the militia are employed in the service of the United States it is clear that some of the militia is not. I.e., some of the militia is organized, receiving paychecks, and being given government issued weapons while some of the militia is not organized, not receiving paychecks, and is providing their own weapons per the 2nd amendment.

Your argument trying to use the absence of orders from the President fails basic logic. He also did not issue orders to launch ICBMs, that does not that mean they can't be launched.

In fact, the President does have the power to:

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

So in the event of an insurrection or invasion that was beyond the capability of the organized militia to handle I would expect the President to issue an order for the unorganized militia to step forward.

The fact that the Supreme court has made certain rulings does not obviate my right to share an alternate interpretation with millions of citizens. The Supreme Court and the the rest of the government (in fact, all governments of free people) operate at the largesse of the citizenry which may revoked at will as demonstrated in 1776.

Gun ownership may be an American right, but it is an unneeded, stupid one.

Tell that to the millions of unarmed and oppressed people of the world.

Guns work by propelling a lead bullet at supersonic speeds. This can only cause harm to something, whether it be a tree or a human being. Therefore, guns are good.

Hmm, we seem to have some disagreement about the definitions of bad and good.

Actually, the right to bear arms is given to a much larger group.

Even assuming that the phrase in the Bill of Rights is intended to limit those who are eligible rather than to simply give a reason for the inclusion of the 2nd Amendment (and I think that assumption is false) your statement is false.

According the the U.S. Code, Title 10, Section 311 the definition of militia is:

The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

Title 32, section 313 covers who is eligible for enlistment in the National Guard and who is eligible for appointment as an officer.

...and so did the Mongols (aka Tatar) in 1237. They continued to control Russia until 1480. Details are here

Suppose you had resources like Bill Gates? How about building a pyramid like (or larger than) the Great Pyramid? After all, today there's modern earth moving equipment.

Does anyone know about the Fujitsu J822s SuperServer? I inherited one with DRS/NX (ICL Unix) installed but I would like to run Linux or a *BSD on it. However, I also don't want to ruin the current installation by blindly experimenting.

I know for a fact that Joe W. Kittinger went supersonic in 1960 as described. He reached a maximum speed of 714 mph.

I know this information is a fact because I was told by Colonel Kittinger (Ret) himself.

To follow up on my own post... I was also told by the lawyer that the other person does not have to initial the changes. They are supposed to examine the returned contract before accepting it. YMMV.

I have done this on employment contracts, leases, and rental agreements. I have been advised by a lawyer that if the other person accepts the modified contract and the transaction takes place, then it will hold up in court. I have never had to test it.

Btw: the page at the Wright Patterson Airforce Museum says 714 mph. I am suspecting that the discrepencies people are finding wrt supersonic or not and other details are artifacts of Cold War paranoia.

According to what I have read elsewhere, and as cited at PBS, Kittenger did go supersonic during his jump.

Please excuse the (somewhat) off-topic nature of this post but I would really like an answer.

I have a Fujitsu-ICL SuperServer 822s (dual SPARC) which initially ran DRS/NX (ICL's SVR4) which is now a defunct OS.

I would like to run a Free Software operating system on it but I have seen no mention of this hardware on any of the *BSD or Linux pages. Searching Google and Usenet News produces nearly no references to ICL of any sort.

If you know of anything that might run on it, I would appreciate a pointer. TIA.

Someone had better explain that to Rod Canion, co-founder and former CEO of Compaq Computer Corp. who spent about $1M to do it (note this is a quote):

"It was really hard, it took a lot of time, a lot of resources and people to legally reverse- engineer that BIOS. And IBM never came knocking on our door.

Now, one could argue that it's a matter of definitions. Since this involves the law, let's check a law-related web page like this one which says:

...reverse engineer the code by following a clean room procedure...

Seems to me that saying "Compaq reverse engineered the IBM BIOS" is quite accurate.

This is so easy to check, why not take 30 seconds to get it right.

IBM did NOT open up their specs. COMPAQ had to reverse engineer the BIOS.

See this article at Zilog for some documentation.

Thanks. GC

You're welcome!

My assumption here, based on your question, is that you do not particularly feel drawn towards one degree or the other.

As an engineer, I strongly advocate an engineering degree (of any sort but especially "fundamental" engineering like chemical, civil, mechanical, or electrical) over a CS degree.

The reason is this: an engineer is a general problem solver and a potential candidate for a wide range of positions.

One more point: the file formats of Free Software projects may become the de facto standard for the government and people who deal with the government (i.e., all U.S. citizens at a minimum). This effectively toasts Microsoft Office's monopoly.

It seems to me that Microsoft's objective is to prevent the U.S. Government from using Linux or other GPLed products. A recent example of the sort of thing Microsoft is worried about is the NSA Linux project which is GPLed (of course) and the use of Linux at places involved in government-sponsored research like Los Alamos.

If the government starts large-scale development in a GPLed environment then companies like Microsoft will be affected in several ways:

• they will lose government sales
• the government will be effectively underwriting the development efforts of one of their competitors: the Free Software community
• GPLed code will spread virally throughout government development projects thereby affecting areas not immediately affected
• government contractors will use government-compatible systems (GPLed)
• government contractors will be under increasing pressure to GPL their code or possibly face accusations of incorporating GPLed code into a proprietary product

From here the whole thing can snowball out of (Microsoft's) control. Personally, I like the idea.

Actually, you can create a product using GPLed source code and charge for it. You just have to make the source available to your customer under the GPL license.

Typically, the reason your customer will pay for a GPLed program is because they want some customization or hand-holding.

It would be interesting to ask them for a complete list of their inventions as of your hiring date. For their protection, of course!

The phrase is actually nipped it in the bud and the link I provided points to a collection of similar common errors.

That may be true in your case. It is not necessarily so for the 130,000,000 other people in the U.S. who also are shareholders. There is research available (see my other post on this topic for one data point) that indicates that attitudes and political beliefs are changing as the percentage of shareholders in society increases.

...nipped it in the butt

There is an interesting page here.

This is a short list right off the top of my head of things that have happened in my lifetime that people were initially very upset about but they then got used to:

• sending in a punchcard with a bill payment (becoming "just a number")
• ongoing military action without declaring a war
• welfare (as a demoralizing trap)
• appearance of UPC tags on consumer items
• restrictions on carrying firearms (the Black Panthers carried firearms in public because the law said they could -- see this article)
• credit cards (the rise of consumer debt)
• criminalization of drug possession/use
• high school students being paid police informants
• requiring social security numbers for children
• mandatory drug tests
• employee background checks
• the RICO act and Asset Forfeiture
• political correctness
• expelling students for casual conversation

I really don't think there is a dark motive behind the technology in this article but remember: just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

There is an interesting paper called The Rise of Worker Capitalism .

It is interesting to note that, of the people in the U.S., about half are shareholders and about half participate in presidential elections. Can anyone provide a citation about the intersection of these two sets?

See Title 17, Section 506 of the US Code where it defines Criminal Offenses in the context of Copyright Infringement and Remedies and it says:

• (a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
  • (1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
  • (2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000, shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.

From what I read, it seems that casual (less than $1000/180 days) copying is not a crime. This is underscored by the portion of the statement that says For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction...by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.

There is a floating point of equilibrium between monetary cost and quality/support. A certain quality of software/support is available "for free". Higher quality software/support can be gotten for payment (even open source software is better if the developers can afford do it full-time).

Microsoft is complaining about where the equilibrium point may be drifting. Microsoft is effectively saying that there is no commercial value in (some of) what they produce because you can get the equivalent for free.

The current Pulpit has an interesting related analysis.

This leads into the interesting hall of mirrors where it is illegal to sell a molecular fabber that can build a less constrained molecular fabber or any part thereof!

I disagree about the amount of respect professors receive (having spent over a decade in a university environment) but that is just a matter of opinion.

What is certainly true is that professors are poorly paid considering their education. The poverty stricken professor is a stock character.

I would start by examining the logs to see which pages are requested the most and fix them first.

If high tech workers are going to organize, the objective should be to become professionals like doctors rather than union members like autoworkers. Professionals are paid more, get more respect from society, and are more independent.