Since you are asking which license to publish under, it sounds like you haven't done this within the framework of whatever institution where you are working.
It could very well be (probably be?) that the license you have to publish under is already set and that you are legally bound to follow it.
Depending on who funded the research, there could be other restrictions and obligations as well.
Certain funding institutions require there be no copyright at all, while others may have some agreement in place that you might violate if you don't investigate this first.
Stuff like this is how you can lose funding - not just for yourself, but for the institution. And the legal issues, under the wrong circumstances, could end up haunting you.
I would mod you up if I had mod points.
The video is pretty cool, and so is the application (apparently now available at the Apple Store), but the comparison to a Theremin is a bit off.
All the tilts were from front to back. Maybe if they add side to side (if the iPhone has those accelerometers as well), then it would be more Theremin-like with both pitch and volume instead of just pitch.
How to play a Theremin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd4jvtAr8JM
I do like the way this works, though. The codec pack is $39.95 (US) and is a download.
I'd like to see the other distros package really good licensed codecs too. The lack of prepackaged codecs does, I think, hobble Linux to some extent with users who don't know how to go other places to get codecs. And as Clang_Jangle said, bundle it all together in one integrated distribution.
That might not be as easy to do as say, though, because as soon as it gets bundled, they can't let you take your installation media and go installing it on all of your friend's computers, etc.
Maybe selling codecs separately from the main distribution is as good as we can hope for.
I checked their site and one of the codecs they offer there is Fluendo's mp3 codec.
I recently tried Fluendo's free version and it didn't sound right and seemed to have artifacts. I instead went to pacman and downloaded their mp3 codec and things sounded much better.
Maybe the Fluendo pay version is better than the free one. At any rate, I hope Ubuntu offers good codecs for sale so people still aren't turned off from Linux.
Um, I do believe it actually is illegal. It's just not discovered, tracked, or prosecuted all that much.
BTW, my vote is for NewEgg. I've had nothing but great service and when there have been problems, prompt handing of them. The problems have been few and far between though.
That would actually be the dew point. At the freezing point, the condensation will turn to ice.
And some of the Scandinavian countries are courting datacenters. They have plenty of power from geothermal energy and also have the colder outside air to make cooling more efficient and/or basically free.
How about just printing and storing the photographs? Use Giclee since it's archival and should easily last 100 years (it's pigment and not dye), and no computer is even needed to read out the data.
There is another issue though. It isn't all just about tracking and defeating the bad guy. Sometimes security puts you at odds with your coworkers or even your bosses.
It isn't quite as fun to be trying to figure out how to patch things up after trying to get coworkers to do the right thing and having to blow the whistle and call in heavies when they refuse.
Gosh, you don't think he was possibly being sarcastic and speaking in the voice of the people that just don't like anyone telling them they need to consider security, do you?
And please be the kind of system administrator that understands the security people are the ones who get crawled on the carpet if there is any kind of breach or other problem.
Being a security person means they walk a tightrope. They have admins who do things without ever considering the security aspect, they have admins who think "to hell with the security people, I know better", and then you have at least some of management who wants to know why all of their pet favorites can't just have root.
I agree completely with the build a relationship approach, but there are some out there that refuse to have anyone tell them anything because they already know their way is the right way and anyone who thinks different is obviously stupid and a hindrance to their oh so more important work.
And yep, management ought to can those kind of people, but when management sees them as being especially productive there isn't even disciplinary action.
RICHARD CLARKE: "I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue. They... well, President Bush himself says as much in his interview with Bob Woodward in the book "Bush at War." He said I didn't feel a sense of urgency. George Tenet and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the al-Qaida threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials. There was a process underway to address al-Qaida. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way."
And I fully understand that regardless of the question, Richard Clarke had no option but to give the Bush administration an out and a pass on being able to prevent 9/11. I don't think he had any other choice. But, with the various reports and testimony about how people saw the danger, stopped flying their staff on commercial airlines, and Clarke's own comments about his hair standing on end and being on fire because of the level of information coming in, how he had tried to raise the threat level in the White House, and how the Bush Administration basically didn't think there was that much of a threat and being unwilling to devote resources to checking it out, I will continue to believe that the Bush administration could possibly have prevented 9/11 had they given the prior events the consideration that others were.
And say what you will about Plame not being outted by Cheney. Pretty much everyone else believes it happened on Cheney's order because he was infuriated by Joe Wilson's editorial about not finding any links between Iraq, Niger uranium, and WMDs.
To be clear, I did not say that Bush conspired to produce our own version of the Reischtag fire with the 9/11 attacks. What I did say was the most vacationing president in US history couldn't be bothered to see to the business of this country and keeping it safe. He was well known for wanting to keep any briefings short and for not being prepared beforehand or afterwards. The guy is a lazy idiot and it was more important to him to go cut brush in Crawford than to protect this country against what had become a credible threat.
It was his incompetence that led directly to 9/11. Not his inauguration. People had been trying to raise the red flag and he simply could not be distracted from "presidentering" and using the position for ego stroking instead of the actual work that the position requires.
The White House staff considered the threat credible enough to stop flying people anywhere on commercial airlines yet Bush couldn't see his way to put agencies together and work on getting more information. It was the CIA who was briefing him on the Al Qaeda danger and the FBI who was monitoring the odd flight training and comings and goings of the hijackers. All they would have had to do was have key people in the same room for a meeting and that plan could possibly have been broken. But Bush had brush to cut.
When he was sitting in that school room reading My Pet Goat to the kids and Andrew Card walked over to him and told him the USA was under attack, he sat there. He was scared shitless and had no clue what to do.
He didn't know how the USA was under attack. He didn't know if major cities were vaporizing from nuclear weapons or what. He just sat there. His staff had to decide he needed to leave and escorted him out. Meanwhile, nobody was able to issue any shootdown orders had the opportunity to shoot down any of the planes presented itself. Cheney finally did it against USA law - but at least the order was given to protect this country. Not by who was supposed to do it, but by someone who wasn't.
Again, Bush, as Commander in Chief, had been briefed and Condoleeza Rice testified under oath to that effect in Congressional testimony. Condoleeza Rice was the one who quoted the report as saying "targets such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon" and using commercial aircraft as weapons - under guidance from Osama bin Laden.
Why do you think Bush and Cheney refused to testify under oath, refused to allow any recording devices - even pencil and paper, and refused to testify about their experiences leading up to that day to anyone but a subset of the full panel? It's because Bush knew his incompetence and dereliction of duty was in large part responsible for 9/11 playing out as it had.
How specific does the threat have to be to this country before you expect the president to mobilize resources?
As far as I'm concerned, Bush's conduct during these two terms has been nothing less than treason. He basically let 9/11 happen because he was too busy partying it up at taxpayer expense. Those 3000 lives were lost because party boy liked the idea of being presidenter and the decider but couldn't be bothered with the actual work.
The 4,500 dead American soldiers, and somewhere around 20,000 maimed and injured American soldiers are because of his need to try to blame someone else and somehow whitewash the legacy of 3000 dead he was responsible for. He and Cheney ignored any evidence that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, smeared and exposed a CIA agent who actually was trying to locate and prevent WMDs from finding their way into terrorist hands, and went to war after pumping Americans full of patriotism based on lies.
Tell me how that all does not constitute treason against this country.
We have the finest {democracy, republic, dictatorship, monarchy} here in the United States that money can buy.
I am quite sure that the 2000 and 2004 elections were both tampered with in various ways. Whether it was Tammy-Faye lookalike Katherine Harris, or the SCOTUS, dropped votes, intentionally misleading ballots, lost voter registrations and roles, or any of the other dirty tricks that all combined handed the elections to someone who did not actually win - either the popular vote or the electoral college.
The people involved may have thought they were working for their country, but instead, what they did was commit treason against this country.
I hope they realize that their crimes have led directly to the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11 and some 4500 since then in a failed and illegal war. This is not to mention bankrupting the country to make the Bush family fortune, and those of their friends, huge.
Treason has been a part of the Bush legacy since before WWII when Prescott Bush and Sheldon Bush, against Federal law and while Prescott's son was fighting in the Pacific, helped to finance the Nazi war machine in order to make billions of dollars.
The facts are that the Bush clan was meeting with the bin Laden family to discuss oil deals at the very moment the planes slammed into the WTC towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania. They were quickly escorted out of the country in one of the only planes allowed to fly during the nationwide grounding of all aircraft besides military flights guarding major cities. This was done on executive order and against the protests of the FBI who wanted to question them. The Bush family made the decision that their business partners convenience was more important than the safety and security of the USA.
It's also fact that George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were briefed over a month before 9/11 (the August 6 PDB) that bin Laden was planning an attack using commercial aircraft "against targets such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon". He never bothered to read the full briefing and instead went to Crawford to vacation. Condoleeza Rice admitted the title of the briefing, the general contents, and that she didn't read the full briefing either during filmed and documented testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission. You can see the video on YouTube.
In spite of Bush family history, George W's literal desertion and refusal to even serve in the National Guard while others died in Vietnam, his extremely low intelligence, and his outright laziness, elitism, and being an untreated alcoholic, people compromised their country and their futures to keep the power in the hands of the republicans.
I hope they are happy. Our economy has suffered a huge blow from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Wait until people figure out the same thing is melting down in the credit card industry. They bundle up credit debt and sell it to investment companies who buy it with your retirement dollars. As defaults skyrocket, what you have left is going to take another and a very big hit. Meanwhile we pay some $2 billion dollars a week for George W's illegal war while the rest of the country rots.
This country allowed two elections to be stolen, and a complete idiot to assume office and do more damage to this country than any enemy, country, or threat has ever been able to do. The USSR couldn't end the USA and neither could communist China - until George W. Bush took the reigns and dug us into such a hole, and at such a time - when cheap energy is running out and climate change is about to really screw with food supplies - that we more than likely will not be able to survive as a nation anyone here recognizes.
Everywhere that I know has contracts in place regarding the patenting of patentable ideas. You are legally bound to inform the IP people of any discoveries and they decide if it is worthy of a patent.
The patent, while in her name, will be owned and under the control of the university. She will get get some cut of the royalties, but will have little to no say in how the university licenses the patent or to whom.
Settle down on the condemnations until you know that she was not obligated to help the university pursue the patent to add to the university's portfolio of IP. Most likely she has zero control over how the patent is licensed.
A patent helps her to be able to control her vision.
What if she was to license some big corporation and use the proceeds to fund her own humanitarian projects?
You have no clue what she will do with that patent. Also, you should also consider that most places bind employees, students, and professors to allow the company/university to patent discoveries. It could very easily be that for her to not cooperate in the patent process could make her legally liable for damages to the university where she is a student.
I know that everywhere I have either been a graduate student or been employed, there have been contracts regarding patentable ideas and how they are handled, what cooperation is required, and how royalties (if any) will be divided.
You need to give this gal a break until you actually see her do something evil. The fact that she has a patent probably only means she fulfilled her legal obligation to the university.
I agree that people should have disaster recovery plans. For me, I would think moving to Google web applications might be a good strategy to continue operations in the event of some disaster.
Maybe it would even be worthwhile to encrypt and push backups up to Google, or Amazon, or anyone else offering storage solutions. That could make resuming operations much easier depending on local backup integrity, etc.
Storing at Google would be kind of a setup to transitioning to Google Apps if the need came up.
I agree that good DR is extremely important because things do happen. I don't say anything against disaster recovery. I just personally don't think the risk of relying on remotely-served applications is worth it. As an interim measure during some kind of disaster, sure. But for me, not as standard operating procedure.
Marcus Sachs at SANS has a post up where he says he doesn't think it is so much a war but others piling on and doing their own personal attacks to help out. He also admits that he might be being cynical about the actual scale of Russian state involvement.
But lots of other computer security places are reporting it as a real cyber attack by Russia against Georgia. It really doesn't matter all that much where the attack is coming from - the end result is the same. Georgian government websites are being DDoSed and the country's network is pretty well clogged.
And the points about why this is happening are irrelevant. Anyone who has followed this understands the South Ossetians are trying to break away and Georgia was trying to prevent it and that's when Russia decided to attack Georgia. That's not news.
Some good points but they can also be turned around. Something like GMail will definitely be more robust than trying to get the mail down to a local server. But web applications are subject to those same kinds of service interruptions. Even if Google has the bandwidth and distributed systems to be that robust, the choke point is the link in/out of the company and a DOS attack there can still close off access to the apps people need to run.
And I think we're all starting to get a feeling for what other company's privacy policies are worth. While a local server at your company might be more likely to be penetrated depending on the skill of the admins and how well it is hardened compared to Google, other companies and the links between you and them are still subject to being compromised. You can also have issues with malicious insiders and I'm sure that Google is no different in that respect. Looking just at that, there could be a bigger risk at Google just based on the numbers of people that have access to your data. And your point with Ameritrade is just more proof of that risk.
But malware will be a risk regardless of where the data is hosted. Even if you are working on some document remotely, you are still seeing it locally and if that system is exfiltrating data, you are still compromised.
I am sure that Google has good security policies, good backups, good admins. But I stand by myself not wanting to risk the added exposure and possibility of being shut down by events outside of my control. I tend to think that with remote applications, I still have all of the local risk that I had before and add extra risk by using remote applications. About the only good I see is that a place like Google really should have excellent data backup practices that probably exceed what most companies call adequate.
Another issue is web/network attacks. They are going up big time and are even state-sponsored. Look at what Russia is, and has been doing to Georgia.
I don't understand how anyone in this day and age can justify going with remotely-hosted applications. The ability to reach remote servers can be taken away even by morons and botnets who might not like your company.
In my opinion, remote web hosting of applications that are presumably important for a company to be able to run is just asking for trouble. I wonder how many fingers will get pointed when some critical deadline looms and nobody can run their applications to be able to meet it.
It's reckless and risky for business to expose themselves like that. As others have pointed out, OpenOffice is free and it is good. Why waste money on training people on both the Google (or other) remotely-hosted application and OpenOffice (if that is your emergency backup). Just train people on OpenOffice and now you don't need a backup plan in case the network goes down and you can't run the remote stuff.
Remote applications may have been a solution before the Internet got nasty but these days, running business-critical stuff over it when you don't need to does not make sense to me.
Maybe I'm missing the huge economic advantages that justify the unknown and growing risk, but I see network (Internet) applications as being at huge risk for outages, a security risk, a data privacy risk, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you are asking which license to publish under, it sounds like you haven't done this within the framework of whatever institution where you are working.
It could very well be (probably be?) that the license you have to publish under is already set and that you are legally bound to follow it.
Depending on who funded the research, there could be other restrictions and obligations as well.
Certain funding institutions require there be no copyright at all, while others may have some agreement in place that you might violate if you don't investigate this first.
Stuff like this is how you can lose funding - not just for yourself, but for the institution. And the legal issues, under the wrong circumstances, could end up haunting you.
I would mod you up if I had mod points.
The video is pretty cool, and so is the application (apparently now available at the Apple Store), but the comparison to a Theremin is a bit off.
All the tilts were from front to back. Maybe if they add side to side (if the iPhone has those accelerometers as well), then it would be more Theremin-like with both pitch and volume instead of just pitch.
How to play a Theremin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd4jvtAr8JM
I do like the way this works, though. The codec pack is $39.95 (US) and is a download.
I'd like to see the other distros package really good licensed codecs too. The lack of prepackaged codecs does, I think, hobble Linux to some extent with users who don't know how to go other places to get codecs. And as Clang_Jangle said, bundle it all together in one integrated distribution.
That might not be as easy to do as say, though, because as soon as it gets bundled, they can't let you take your installation media and go installing it on all of your friend's computers, etc.
Maybe selling codecs separately from the main distribution is as good as we can hope for.
I checked their site and one of the codecs they offer there is Fluendo's mp3 codec.
I recently tried Fluendo's free version and it didn't sound right and seemed to have artifacts. I instead went to pacman and downloaded their mp3 codec and things sounded much better.
Maybe the Fluendo pay version is better than the free one. At any rate, I hope Ubuntu offers good codecs for sale so people still aren't turned off from Linux.
What's a pirate's favorite fast food restaurant?
ARRRRRBYS!
Free cake?
I think "explained appropriately" is all in the eye of the beholder.
So existing customer satisfaction isn't important to Microsoft? Who would have ever thought that?
;-)
Well, knock me over with a feather!
Um, I do believe it actually is illegal. It's just not discovered, tracked, or prosecuted all that much.
BTW, my vote is for NewEgg. I've had nothing but great service and when there have been problems, prompt handing of them. The problems have been few and far between though.
That would actually be the dew point. At the freezing point, the condensation will turn to ice.
And some of the Scandinavian countries are courting datacenters. They have plenty of power from geothermal energy and also have the colder outside air to make cooling more efficient and/or basically free.
How about just printing and storing the photographs? Use Giclee since it's archival and should easily last 100 years (it's pigment and not dye), and no computer is even needed to read out the data.
Just a thought...
There is another issue though. It isn't all just about tracking and defeating the bad guy. Sometimes security puts you at odds with your coworkers or even your bosses.
It isn't quite as fun to be trying to figure out how to patch things up after trying to get coworkers to do the right thing and having to blow the whistle and call in heavies when they refuse.
Gosh, you don't think he was possibly being sarcastic and speaking in the voice of the people that just don't like anyone telling them they need to consider security, do you?
And please be the kind of system administrator that understands the security people are the ones who get crawled on the carpet if there is any kind of breach or other problem.
Being a security person means they walk a tightrope. They have admins who do things without ever considering the security aspect, they have admins who think "to hell with the security people, I know better", and then you have at least some of management who wants to know why all of their pet favorites can't just have root.
I agree completely with the build a relationship approach, but there are some out there that refuse to have anyone tell them anything because they already know their way is the right way and anyone who thinks different is obviously stupid and a hindrance to their oh so more important work.
And yep, management ought to can those kind of people, but when management sees them as being especially productive there isn't even disciplinary action.
And so it goes.
RICHARD CLARKE: "I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue. They... well, President Bush himself says as much in his interview with Bob Woodward in the book "Bush at War." He said I didn't feel a sense of urgency. George Tenet and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the al-Qaida threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials. There was a process underway to address al-Qaida. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way."
And I fully understand that regardless of the question, Richard Clarke had no option but to give the Bush administration an out and a pass on being able to prevent 9/11. I don't think he had any other choice. But, with the various reports and testimony about how people saw the danger, stopped flying their staff on commercial airlines, and Clarke's own comments about his hair standing on end and being on fire because of the level of information coming in, how he had tried to raise the threat level in the White House, and how the Bush Administration basically didn't think there was that much of a threat and being unwilling to devote resources to checking it out, I will continue to believe that the Bush administration could possibly have prevented 9/11 had they given the prior events the consideration that others were. And say what you will about Plame not being outted by Cheney. Pretty much everyone else believes it happened on Cheney's order because he was infuriated by Joe Wilson's editorial about not finding any links between Iraq, Niger uranium, and WMDs.
To be clear, I did not say that Bush conspired to produce our own version of the Reischtag fire with the 9/11 attacks. What I did say was the most vacationing president in US history couldn't be bothered to see to the business of this country and keeping it safe. He was well known for wanting to keep any briefings short and for not being prepared beforehand or afterwards. The guy is a lazy idiot and it was more important to him to go cut brush in Crawford than to protect this country against what had become a credible threat.
It was his incompetence that led directly to 9/11. Not his inauguration. People had been trying to raise the red flag and he simply could not be distracted from "presidentering" and using the position for ego stroking instead of the actual work that the position requires.
The White House staff considered the threat credible enough to stop flying people anywhere on commercial airlines yet Bush couldn't see his way to put agencies together and work on getting more information. It was the CIA who was briefing him on the Al Qaeda danger and the FBI who was monitoring the odd flight training and comings and goings of the hijackers. All they would have had to do was have key people in the same room for a meeting and that plan could possibly have been broken. But Bush had brush to cut.
When he was sitting in that school room reading My Pet Goat to the kids and Andrew Card walked over to him and told him the USA was under attack, he sat there. He was scared shitless and had no clue what to do.
He didn't know how the USA was under attack. He didn't know if major cities were vaporizing from nuclear weapons or what. He just sat there. His staff had to decide he needed to leave and escorted him out. Meanwhile, nobody was able to issue any shootdown orders had the opportunity to shoot down any of the planes presented itself. Cheney finally did it against USA law - but at least the order was given to protect this country. Not by who was supposed to do it, but by someone who wasn't.
Again, Bush, as Commander in Chief, had been briefed and Condoleeza Rice testified under oath to that effect in Congressional testimony. Condoleeza Rice was the one who quoted the report as saying "targets such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon" and using commercial aircraft as weapons - under guidance from Osama bin Laden.
Why do you think Bush and Cheney refused to testify under oath, refused to allow any recording devices - even pencil and paper, and refused to testify about their experiences leading up to that day to anyone but a subset of the full panel? It's because Bush knew his incompetence and dereliction of duty was in large part responsible for 9/11 playing out as it had.
How specific does the threat have to be to this country before you expect the president to mobilize resources?
As far as I'm concerned, Bush's conduct during these two terms has been nothing less than treason. He basically let 9/11 happen because he was too busy partying it up at taxpayer expense. Those 3000 lives were lost because party boy liked the idea of being presidenter and the decider but couldn't be bothered with the actual work.
The 4,500 dead American soldiers, and somewhere around 20,000 maimed and injured American soldiers are because of his need to try to blame someone else and somehow whitewash the legacy of 3000 dead he was responsible for. He and Cheney ignored any evidence that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, smeared and exposed a CIA agent who actually was trying to locate and prevent WMDs from finding their way into terrorist hands, and went to war after pumping Americans full of patriotism based on lies.
Tell me how that all does not constitute treason against this country.
We have the finest {democracy, republic, dictatorship, monarchy} here in the United States that money can buy.
I am quite sure that the 2000 and 2004 elections were both tampered with in various ways. Whether it was Tammy-Faye lookalike Katherine Harris, or the SCOTUS, dropped votes, intentionally misleading ballots, lost voter registrations and roles, or any of the other dirty tricks that all combined handed the elections to someone who did not actually win - either the popular vote or the electoral college.
The people involved may have thought they were working for their country, but instead, what they did was commit treason against this country.
I hope they realize that their crimes have led directly to the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11 and some 4500 since then in a failed and illegal war. This is not to mention bankrupting the country to make the Bush family fortune, and those of their friends, huge.
Treason has been a part of the Bush legacy since before WWII when Prescott Bush and Sheldon Bush, against Federal law and while Prescott's son was fighting in the Pacific, helped to finance the Nazi war machine in order to make billions of dollars.
The facts are that the Bush clan was meeting with the bin Laden family to discuss oil deals at the very moment the planes slammed into the WTC towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Pennsylvania. They were quickly escorted out of the country in one of the only planes allowed to fly during the nationwide grounding of all aircraft besides military flights guarding major cities. This was done on executive order and against the protests of the FBI who wanted to question them. The Bush family made the decision that their business partners convenience was more important than the safety and security of the USA. It's also fact that George Bush and Condoleeza Rice were briefed over a month before 9/11 (the August 6 PDB) that bin Laden was planning an attack using commercial aircraft "against targets such as the World Trade Center and Pentagon". He never bothered to read the full briefing and instead went to Crawford to vacation. Condoleeza Rice admitted the title of the briefing, the general contents, and that she didn't read the full briefing either during filmed and documented testimony in front of the 9/11 Commission. You can see the video on YouTube.
In spite of Bush family history, George W's literal desertion and refusal to even serve in the National Guard while others died in Vietnam, his extremely low intelligence, and his outright laziness, elitism, and being an untreated alcoholic, people compromised their country and their futures to keep the power in the hands of the republicans.
I hope they are happy. Our economy has suffered a huge blow from the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Wait until people figure out the same thing is melting down in the credit card industry. They bundle up credit debt and sell it to investment companies who buy it with your retirement dollars. As defaults skyrocket, what you have left is going to take another and a very big hit. Meanwhile we pay some $2 billion dollars a week for George W's illegal war while the rest of the country rots.
This country allowed two elections to be stolen, and a complete idiot to assume office and do more damage to this country than any enemy, country, or threat has ever been able to do. The USSR couldn't end the USA and neither could communist China - until George W. Bush took the reigns and dug us into such a hole, and at such a time - when cheap energy is running out and climate change is about to really screw with food supplies - that we more than likely will not be able to survive as a nation anyone here recognizes.
Oh well.
Everywhere that I know has contracts in place regarding the patenting of patentable ideas. You are legally bound to inform the IP people of any discoveries and they decide if it is worthy of a patent.
The patent, while in her name, will be owned and under the control of the university. She will get get some cut of the royalties, but will have little to no say in how the university licenses the patent or to whom.
Settle down on the condemnations until you know that she was not obligated to help the university pursue the patent to add to the university's portfolio of IP. Most likely she has zero control over how the patent is licensed.
Got Paranoia?
A patent helps her to be able to control her vision.
What if she was to license some big corporation and use the proceeds to fund her own humanitarian projects?
You have no clue what she will do with that patent. Also, you should also consider that most places bind employees, students, and professors to allow the company/university to patent discoveries. It could very easily be that for her to not cooperate in the patent process could make her legally liable for damages to the university where she is a student.
I know that everywhere I have either been a graduate student or been employed, there have been contracts regarding patentable ideas and how they are handled, what cooperation is required, and how royalties (if any) will be divided.
You need to give this gal a break until you actually see her do something evil. The fact that she has a patent probably only means she fulfilled her legal obligation to the university.
An excellent comment, BIGELLOW. And you have some very good points.
I guess you are right - it is time to catch up. I wasn't aware of Gears and the ability to keep working even if the network connection was down.
That does take care of a lot of the issues but I still don't think I will move to hosted applications - at least for the time being.
There are still a number of good arguments against them voiced by others on this page.
I agree that people should have disaster recovery plans. For me, I would think moving to Google web applications might be a good strategy to continue operations in the event of some disaster.
Maybe it would even be worthwhile to encrypt and push backups up to Google, or Amazon, or anyone else offering storage solutions. That could make resuming operations much easier depending on local backup integrity, etc.
Storing at Google would be kind of a setup to transitioning to Google Apps if the need came up.
I agree that good DR is extremely important because things do happen. I don't say anything against disaster recovery. I just personally don't think the risk of relying on remotely-served applications is worth it. As an interim measure during some kind of disaster, sure. But for me, not as standard operating procedure.
Marcus Sachs at SANS has a post up where he says he doesn't think it is so much a war but others piling on and doing their own personal attacks to help out. He also admits that he might be being cynical about the actual scale of Russian state involvement.
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4903
But lots of other computer security places are reporting it as a real cyber attack by Russia against Georgia. It really doesn't matter all that much where the attack is coming from - the end result is the same. Georgian government websites are being DDoSed and the country's network is pretty well clogged.
And the points about why this is happening are irrelevant. Anyone who has followed this understands the South Ossetians are trying to break away and Georgia was trying to prevent it and that's when Russia decided to attack Georgia. That's not news.
Some good points but they can also be turned around. Something like GMail will definitely be more robust than trying to get the mail down to a local server. But web applications are subject to those same kinds of service interruptions. Even if Google has the bandwidth and distributed systems to be that robust, the choke point is the link in/out of the company and a DOS attack there can still close off access to the apps people need to run.
And I think we're all starting to get a feeling for what other company's privacy policies are worth. While a local server at your company might be more likely to be penetrated depending on the skill of the admins and how well it is hardened compared to Google, other companies and the links between you and them are still subject to being compromised. You can also have issues with malicious insiders and I'm sure that Google is no different in that respect. Looking just at that, there could be a bigger risk at Google just based on the numbers of people that have access to your data. And your point with Ameritrade is just more proof of that risk.
But malware will be a risk regardless of where the data is hosted. Even if you are working on some document remotely, you are still seeing it locally and if that system is exfiltrating data, you are still compromised.
I am sure that Google has good security policies, good backups, good admins. But I stand by myself not wanting to risk the added exposure and possibility of being shut down by events outside of my control. I tend to think that with remote applications, I still have all of the local risk that I had before and add extra risk by using remote applications. About the only good I see is that a place like Google really should have excellent data backup practices that probably exceed what most companies call adequate.
Another issue is web/network attacks. They are going up big time and are even state-sponsored. Look at what Russia is, and has been doing to Georgia.
I don't understand how anyone in this day and age can justify going with remotely-hosted applications. The ability to reach remote servers can be taken away even by morons and botnets who might not like your company.
In my opinion, remote web hosting of applications that are presumably important for a company to be able to run is just asking for trouble. I wonder how many fingers will get pointed when some critical deadline looms and nobody can run their applications to be able to meet it.
It's reckless and risky for business to expose themselves like that. As others have pointed out, OpenOffice is free and it is good. Why waste money on training people on both the Google (or other) remotely-hosted application and OpenOffice (if that is your emergency backup). Just train people on OpenOffice and now you don't need a backup plan in case the network goes down and you can't run the remote stuff.
Remote applications may have been a solution before the Internet got nasty but these days, running business-critical stuff over it when you don't need to does not make sense to me.
Maybe I'm missing the huge economic advantages that justify the unknown and growing risk, but I see network (Internet) applications as being at huge risk for outages, a security risk, a data privacy risk, etc.