the useful solution that is easy to justify (if you believe in patent theory)
I would actually argue that first-to-file has very strong "theory" justifications, in addition to being far simpler to administer. Consider two people who invent the same invention. The first "invents" first, but keeps it a secret. She is slow to work out all of the details (to "reduce to practice" in patent parlance), to turn it into a commercial product (or else she would run into section 102 statutory bars against later filing her patent), or of course, to file the patent. Perhaps she has problems with finding the time or the necessary funding; perhaps she is simply lazy. (Of course, she can't be too lazy. The law requires that she be "diligent" in reducing to practice and in filing a patent, or else she loses out to the later inventor who is diligent and files first.)
The second inventor invents the same thing two month later. She did actually invent it entirely independantly of the first inventor, or else she can't get the patent under either first-to-invent or first-to-file. The first inventor, remember, has kept the details of the invention secret. Inventor two works hard to reduce to practice and promptly files a patent. She also quickly brings the product to market, all while inventor one is dawdling.
Who deserves the patent? I would say inventor two. Of what use are inventor one's efforts to anyone? Sure she "invented" the thing first, but why would I want to reward people who invent quickly, but then just sit on their inventions? Of course, you can come up with other stories that might shift the argument one way or the other. The point is that there is a value to having people make their inventions public quickly (so that others become aware of the idea, so that others know that a particular problem no longer needs to be solved, and so that others become aware that a patent is likely to cover a particular area in the future), and filing a patent does this, as patent applications generally are published 18 months after filing. (The patent reform proposals would increase the number of applications that must be published after 18 months, by the way.)
it's easier and will allow the patent office to process new patents quicker
This isn't about making it easier to process new patents quicker. Relatively few patent applications become involved in "interferences," two or more inventors attempting to patent the same invention. Where this change would make the biggest change is in the courts, where inventors claiming the same invention fight it out or where patent defendants try to invalidate a patent based upon a later filing that was arguably invented first. These court cases are pretty messy. First, the question of when an "invention" is made is often not clear cut. Years can pass between when you first get the idea to try something and when you know it works and have worked out the messy details. When during this period does "invention" occur? Second, these questions often are very difficult to prove, since much of the relevant work goes on largely within the mind of the inventor.
Perhaps the bigger reason for the change, however, has to do with international harmonization. Every country on the planet other than the U.S. has switched to first-to-file. If further harmonization of patent laws is to occur, the U.S. is clearly going to have to switch as well. What the U.S. hopes to get as quid pro quo, however, is a switch by Europe to allow a "grace period" between when you publish details about your invention and when you must file the patent. Current European law says that if you make your invention public before you file, you lose the right to file the patent. The U.S. lets you file up to a year after you make your invention public. Japan gives you six months and is otherwise a bit more restrictive than the U.S. The lack of a grace period in Europe means that inventors interested in the worldwide market e
So, wouldn't that make Bittorrent the greatest way to share copyrighted material. I mean, better than p2p, since you probably aren't seeding 1000 dollars in songs/movies at a time.
Clever, but tort and criminal law generally don't have loopholes like that. In civil copyright law, there are the notions of contributory and vicarious liability. Remember that Napster was shut down in a civil suit under the theory that they enabled or induced the copying that was actually being done by their users.
Since we are talking about criminal law here, the relevant concepts are "aiding and abetting" and "conspiracy." It's pretty clear that you are seeding a Bittorrent with the knowledge and intent that others will share further copies of what they download from you. In fact, the entire Bittorrent system is based on the implicit agreement that those who download from the seed will then share with others. Thus, the criminal law is likely to hold you responsible for those subsequent copies (under aiding and abetting or conspiracy theories) just as if you had made them yourself.
If you seed a Bittorrent with copyrighted material and at least $1,000 worth of copies eventually result, you are probably a felon under U.S. law. It is a harder case to prove than the direct p2p case, because it depends more upon your precise mental state when you set up the seed, but I think you are still likely to be found guilty. Whether you should be or not is, of course, another question.
It is a little bit strange, but in U.S. federal courts, subpoenas are issued by the authority of the court, but without specific approval by the court. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45(a)(3):
The clerk shall issue a subpoena, signed but otherwise in blank, to a party requesting it, who shall complete it before service. An attorney as officer of the court may also issue and sign a subpoena on behalf of [a court].
There are rules about what a subpoena can request from whom. If you ignore a valid subpoena, you are in contempt of the court under whose authority it was issued.
If you think that a subpoena is invalid, you can challenge it and ask the court for a protective order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c). That's what the attorneys for the students/universities in this case appear to have successfully done.
Under 17 U.S.C. 506(a)(2), willful copyright infringement "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" is a felony punishable by fine and up to a year in prison. Repeat offenses and larger volumes of copying can get you up to 6 years.
Given that iTunes sells music at $0.99 a track, you only need to share 1011 copies of songs to be a felon.
But can anyone tell me how this bill is related to punishing prerelease filesharers?
Strangely enough, a single bill can change the copyright law in more than one way. For what it is worth, this bill also reauthorized funding for the National Film Preservation Foundation and made it legal for libraries to copy films, music, and images during the last 20 years of copyright protection (remember that the term was extended 20 years by the Sonny Bono Act) for archival purposes.
Of course, you could have just clicked on the link to the bill in the article if you wanted to figure this out.
There is no reason for this story to be on the front page of Slashdot--unless everyone here is far more interested in the arcana of civil procedure than I think they are.
But, since you asked . . .
How does this relate to end of this trial?
Not much. This was just a pre-trial motion about when the court was going to hear oral arguments about several other pre-trial motions.
In the (often long) pre-trial phase, two main things happen: (1) the parties get information about what the facts are, both from witnesses and from each other, and (2) the parties and court iron out what the disputed issues are that will be decided at the trial.
The process of getting the facts is called "discovery." It is slow and expensive. It also is largely the responsibility of the parties, though often the court has to resolve disputes.
The disputed issues are laid out in a document called the "complaint." Everything the plaintiffs do at the trial must be directed at proving something in the complaint, and if you don't have a legal theory in your complaint, you give up the chance to ever argue it.
A large part of pre-trial is about refining the complaint. The defendants try to get parts of it dismissed. The plaintiffs get the chance to amend it, though except near the beginning, they need the permission of the court. Each party will try to have the judge rule on part or all of the complaint prior to trial--something called summary judgment. The whole process in federal court is largely governed by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Anyway, SCO wanted to delay the date of a hearing on whether it can amend its complaint. Delaying the date of the hearing would probably have delayed the date of the trial, assuming the case ever gets there. So I guess this brings the end of the case a little sooner.
So far all I can get (I am not a laywer) out of this is motion is that SCO wanted to file more compliants agaisnt IBM and the judge denied it.
Not even that. The judge won't decide whether SCO can amend until after the hearing. The judge just decided that the hearing has to happen on the scheduled date. Basically, he denied SCO's request for more time to prepare for the hearing.
which section of the constitution are you referring to?
I can only assume that the original poster was referring to Article I, Section 9, Clause 7:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.
The intelligence budget is hidden within the budgets for other government operations, primarily in the defense department budget. In the 1970s, for example, it is reported that the entire CIA budget was hidden within the Air Force procurement budget.
Spending money on the CIA that Congress appropriated to Air Force procurement clearly violates the requirement that money be drawn from the treasury only according to appropriations made by law. Similarly, the intentional false reporting of CIA spending as something else clearly violates the requirement of a "regular Statement and Account."
Re:I know this isn't a book review, but...
on
100 Years of Einstein
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· Score: 2, Informative
String theory requires only one make up shit parameter to make it working (string tension, IIRC.)
You only need one parameter (the string tension), but that's just because the low energy behavior of the theory, i.e., what we see in particle accelerators and the like, is determined by how the six/seven extra dimensions of spacetime are "compactified." At the present state of understanding in string theory, the way of compactifying those extra dimensions is entirely arbitrary.
As far as we know, to replace the standard model with string theory is just to replace 19 arbitrary parameters with an arbitrary compactification, itself perhaps requiring more than 19 parameters to describe.
I have one relative who collects Edison Cylinder Phonograph recording, the vast majority of those are outside copyright
Bizarrely enough, these likely are covered by copyright, in several U.S. states at least, until 2067. The federal copyright statute specifically does not preempt state laws with respect to sound recordings first fixed before Feb. 15, 1972. 17 U.S.C. 301(c). Many states have their own copyright and anti-bootlegging statutes. In California, for example, Cal. Civil Code sect. 980(a)(2) provides that you can be sued for making copies of such recordings until 2047, and Cal. Penal Code sect. 653h makes it a crime to make such copies before 2067. Note that it doesn't matter how long ago the original recording was made, so long as it was before 1972.
If your relative is making copies of these phonographs in California and makes, for example, more than 1000 copies of one of them, he could in principle go to prison for 5 years and face a $250,000 fine.
It should be noted that most of the fallout from current thermonuclear warheads is produced entirely by choice. As reported, for example, in the famous Progressive Magazine article of 1979, over half of the energy released and most of the fallout produced by such a warhead comes from fission that occurs after the fusion explosion. Effectively, the fusion explosion serves to produce a much larger and more complete burning of fissile material than could be produced with conventional explosives.
These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.
This clause is not nearly as troubling when you recognize that "purposes" and "principles" are used as terms of art, defined in Chapter I of the UN Charter.
Read against these definitions, Article 29 of the UDHP is just saying that you can't use the UDHP as an excuse to disrupt "international peace and security," to deny "equal rights and self-determination of peoples," to deny "sovereign equality of all [UN] Members," to engange in "threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," or similarly violate the "purposes" and "principles."
UDHR Article 29 was not intended to remove rights when they are "contrary to the interests of the government," because nowhere in the definition of "purposes" or "principles" are the general "interests" of states or of the UN as an entity even mentioned. It just says that you can't use the UDHR contrary to the stated reasons they founded the UN in the first place.
IMO, what the court cares about is that the written offer was made, creating a contract between B and C that was then breached when B refused to perform.
The problem is that merely making an offer doesn't necessarily create an enforcible contract. The two biggest problems I see are:
For a contract to exist in Common Law countries like the U.S., U.K., etc., there must be "consideration." Basically, each party must give up something. This means, for example, that promises to give gifts are not enforceable (there is generally an exception recognized for promises of gifts to charities, which can be enforceable). It is possible to argue that the offer to provide source is given in exchange for the purchase of the software product, in which case the sale and offer would form part of a single enforceable contract. It is easy to imagine, however, factual situations where this is not a plausible description of transaction between B and C, particularly when it comes to B's obligations to offer source code to D, E or F, who did not participate in the distribution of code from B to C that triggered B's obligation to make an offer under section 3(b) of the GPL.
Again in Common Law, offers can be freely revoked, assuming that they have not yet been accepted. (There are sometimes exceptions for offers that are by their terms irrevokable.) If you want to read 3(b) of the GPL narrowly so as to avoid any ongoing obligation from B to A, then B can comply with the literal terms of the GPL by distributing the binary code for sale, along with an offer to provide source code, and then immediately revoking the offer.
Of course, courts do have some tool available for dealing with such funny business, e.g., promissory estoppel. To invoke this, however, someone seeking to enforce the promise, say D, must prove that D reasonably relied on the promise, that B should have foreseen that D would rely on the promise, and that as a result D "to his or her loss acts or fails to act and suffers an injustice that can only be avoided by enforcement of the promise." It will be extremely difficult to make this sort of showing in the case of hobbyist programmer whose only loss is lack of access to source code he otherwise had no connection to.
In contrast, a court should have no problem enforcing B's promise to A, based on B's acceptance of the GPL. I can't see a court having any trouble finding a contract between A and B based on GPL section 3(b), and the remedies available based on such a contract are possibly very helpful to the GPLed-software author and his community.
I would note further that Prof. Moglen, while rightly pointing out that the most important remedies for enforcing the GPL are copyright remedies, not contract remedies, does not seem at all confident that a court will not treat the GPL as a contract. All of the capitalized text about express and implied warranties is really only relevant if you think it's a contract. Implied warranties generally exist only for sales (which are always treated as contracts in U.S. law), and only for sales of goods at that. Harms caused by property that is used under a license are generally only recoverable under tort, not warranty.
It took me a while to pin down what I think is wrong with that argument and it's this: that promise is not enforced under contract law. It's just part of a classical unilateral permission to use someone else's copyrighted work and hence must be enforced under copyright law.
The problem is that any contract can be recast as unilateral permission with certain conditions. You say that A made a contract to pay B $10,000 for B to paint A's house. I say that A unilaterally gave B permission to take $10,000 from A's bank account on the condition that B paint A's house first.
I think you have the right idea, however, in looking at available legal remedies in deciding what to call the GPL. I would argue that under certain circumstances, contract remedies are available for breaches of the GPL. In particular, suppose that A is the copyright holder, B is a distributor who has elected option (b) under section 3 of the GPL, and C is recipient of a covered binary, not necessarily from distributor B. I think that C as an intended third-party beneficiary of the section 3(b) agreement between A and B should be able to sue to enforce it, even if A herself is for some reason no longer interested in enforcing it. Third-party beneficiaries are allowed to bring such a suit under contract law, but not under copyright law alone. Since the GPL generally will satisfy all the legal requirements of a contract, I see no reason for a court not to allow such a suit, and in this suit, the GPL would clearly be functioning as a contract.
A contact, written or verbal, also requires the parties to know one another. I don't think Linus & friends know me.
Where did you get that idea? A contract in the U.S. generally requires at least two parties of sufficient mental capacity, mutual assent, terms definate enough to be enforced, possibly a signed writing depending on the subject of the contract. There is no requirement that the parties ever engage in mutual communications, let alone that they know each other.
Suppose I publish an ad offering $1 million to the first person to walk on Mars, so long as it occurs before 2020. If someone I've never met shows up at my doorstep with proof that she has just walked on Mars, then my promise to pay her $1 million is enforcable as a contract, so long as I have not revoked the offer prior to her successful performance. U.S. law students will recognize this as a "unilateral contract," as neither part is bound until one of them has performed, but it is certainly treated as a contract, despite the fact that the astronaut and I communicated only through a one-way newspaper ad. (Of course, good luck collecting $1 million from me...)
This is no different from the GPL case where I read the "COPYING" file included in the kernel tarball by Linus, for example, and I accept the license/contract through the act of copying, modifying, or distributing the kernel.
If the GPL is a contract, who are the contracting parties? The copyright holder and the distributor, right? Now, to whom is the commitment to provide source code made? To the recipient of the offer (or anyone they give it to, etc.).
Let A be the copyright holder and B the distributor. B promises to offer the source code to C, D, E, etc. The offer is to C, but the promise is to A. The offer by itself may not be legally enforceable. In general, the offer would need to be part of an agreement in which B received something from C, or B must have reasonably expected the offer to induce action on the part of C.
What is almost surely enforceable, however, is B's obligation under the GPL to make (and by implication to honor) the offer.
The GPL is a pure grant of permission, with some specification of how the permission is to be exercised. If a distributor provides the written offer along with the binary, then the terms of the GPL have been satisfied, even if the distributor later fails to make good on the offer. The GPL's language only requires that the offer be provided. The GPL only places constraints on how you go about exercising the granted permissions of copying, distribution and modification, it creates no obligations.
Really? You think that I'm complying with the GPL if I make an offer to distribute source with no intention of honoring the offer? I agree that it's a plausible literal reading, but it is a reading that entirely defeats the aims of the GPL and I find it extremely hard to see a court accepting it.
Whatever doctrinal boxes you want to put the GPL into, the intended effect is clearly to require people who distribute the covered code in binary form to also either distribute the source code with the binaries, or to promise to provide the source code to anyone who wants it. It is clear, to me at least, that the intent is that this promise be legally enforceable. Why else go to all the trouble?
To the legally trained (I'm a law student, by the way), there is a word for an enforceable promise: contract. To a lawyer or a judge, in the U.S. at least, if it's a promise and it's not a contract, it's not legally enforceable.
That said, it appears from the wording that Prof. Moglen was intentionally trying to avoid making the GPL look like a contract. Taking the language literally, when B accepts the GPL he is not making any promises to A to be performed in the future. He is merely obligated to make an offer to C at the same time as he exercises his rights to distribute under the license. As long as someone plans to enforce that offer, however, there has to be a contract with someone.
The GPL is purely one-sided.
Well, the intent of the GPL is to enforce a reciprocal exchange. It is clearly intended to induce persons to distribute the software, possibly modified, and make the source code available to all users. It could have achieved this goal by requiring anyone distributing binaries to distribute source simultaneously, but in a nod to practicality it allows distributors to merely promise to make the source code available in the future. As such, the effect is not merely allowing distribution only in certain ways. Rather, the effect of section 3(b) is to allow distribution in exchange for certain promises. Granted, the terms are set entirely by the copyright holder, but to this legally trained mind, it sure looks like a reciprocal exchange to me.
This is actually very interesting, because it makes the GPL more powerful than any license that creates future obligations on anyone who accepts it. Any license that does that is clearly also a contract, by definition. And any contract is subject to a judicial review of the contract, which review could potentially find the contract invalid. But the GPL, as a pure license, is not subject to the vagaries of contract law. The only determinations to be made in court ar
You'll know a real software contract when you see a real one. It involves paper and signatures and *no sign whatsoever* of buttons you click on.
Hogwash. Most U.S. states only require certain types of contracts to be written and signed, e.g., contracts for sale of interests in land, contracts not to be performed within one year, contracts made in consideration of marriage, suretyship contracts, certain contracts made by executors or administrators of estates, contracts for over a certain dollar value, or contracts for sales of goods for a price of over $500.
Since software is generally not considered to be a "good" for legal purposes, most contracts involving contracts do not legally require a writing or signatures. An oral agreement or other behavior indicating mutual assent is generally sufficient. That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't very good reasons to make such a contract in writing.
FYI The GPL is not a contract, it is a license. There is a difference which has been written about by the FSF as well as Groklaw.
This is indeed the position of Eben Moglen, but there is nothing to prevent a single document from being both a license and a contract (and indeed several other thing, e.g., copyright assignment).
As I read the GPL, a distributor who elects option (b) under section 3 of the GPL makes a legally enforceable promise, one enforceable by both the license grantor and most likely by third parties. Such a distributor has thus entered into a contract obliging them to distribute certain source code in exchange for a license.
Prof. Moglen's main point is that the mostly likely remedies for breach of the GPL are copyright remedies, not contract remedies, and thus that it is useless for a defendant to argue that the GPL is not an enforceable contract. This is certainly true. It does not mean, however, that a court may not treat the GPL as a contract in certain circumstances, for example by allowing third parties to sue to enforce the requirement to distribute source code under GPL section 3(b), a remedy clearly grounded in contract law, not copyright law.
Thirdly, the difference between contracts and licenses is far more than their similarities.
No doubt, but it doesn't follow that EULAs or the GPL are not, in fact, both licenses and contracts. Calling something a license does not mean that it can't be a contract as well, and in fact it is common for documents that look like what the layperson would call a contract, a negotiated written document signed by both parties, to in fact function as both a contract and a license, and perhaps some other things as well.
In U.S. law, perhaps the definative definition of "contract" is that in the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, section 1:
A contract is a promise or a set of promises for the breach of which the law gives a remedy, or the performance fo which the law in some way recognizes as a duty
A distributor who elects option (b) under section 3 of the GPL is indeed making such a promise, namely a promise to distribute source code to anyone who requests it for a period of at least three years, in exchange for a license from the copyright holder.
although some EULAs may think they are contracts or try and impose contractual obligations, there is no mutual agreement entered into between the parties beforehand, nothing that specifies payment made for good or services received or penalties under contract law. It's just a license - permission to do something which you otherwise would not be allowed to do.
What prevents the typical shrinkwrap EULA from being legally enforcable is not any distinction between licenses and contracts. Rather it is the lack of legal consent by the recipient of the software license. Courts which have rejected shrinkwrap agreements have generally found that a contract was formed at the time of sale, including an implicit license to use the software. Presenting the user with the terms of the shrinkwrap agreement after this sale then is viewed as an attempt to modify this contract, and this modification is found to fail because either the user does not perform acts sufficient to manifest assent to the modification or because the changes only benefit the copyright holder and thus lack the mutual exchange generally required for a contract to be enforcable. See, e.g., Klocek v. Gateway, Inc., 104 F. Supp. 2d 1332 (D. Kan. 2000) (refusing to enforce an arbitration provision in Gateway "Standard Terms" provided inside a computer box).
Because the GPL does not require any promises in return from licensees, it does not need contract enforcement in order to work.
It is true that the GPL does not require promises in return from licensees, it does often exact such promises. In particular, section 3 of the GPL requires that commercial distributors either actually accompany any distribution of covered software with the source code or "b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party . . . a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code." Though the literal text of the GPL only requires that the distributor make the offer, I think that the only reasonable way to interpret the GPL is that it also requires the distributor to honor this offer. That is, I take it that a failure to honor the offer, and not merely a failure to make the offer, would give the copyright owner an action for breach of the GPL. This is important because the offer itself may not be enforcable as an independant contract.
In that case, a court would be enforcing a promise (to provide the source code) that was given in exchange for a license to distribute copyrighted material. That sure smells like a contract to me.
My reading is that if a person distributes under the GPL and chooses either option (a) or option (c) under section 3, the GPL functions as a simple license--permission to engage in a certain use of copyrighted material. If the distributor chooses option (b), however, the GPL functions as both a license and a contract. That is, the license to distribute under the GPL is granted in exchange for a promise to distibute source code on request in the future.
Ultimately the label doesn't matter a great deal, since copyright remedies are generally more desirable to a free software author than breach of contract remedies are. In particular, copyright law allows damages without any proof of harm. There are two places where having contract remedies available could be useful:
Contract law would allow specific enforcement of the promise to distribute source under certain circumstances, meaning that the court could actually force the release of source code to derived works and not merely award monetary damages. This is only likely in U.S. law where monetary damages were somehow inadequate.
Contract law would also allow enforcement by third parties that were intended beneficiaries of the contract. That is, GPL section 3(b) might give persons other than the copyright holder the right to enforce the promise to distribute source code. Copyright law itself gives third parties no cause of action for copyright breach. This could be very important if, for example, the original copyright holder went out of business or for some reason decided to abandon its commitment to free software.
CNS no longer exists, sort of. The new VP of IS (Lev Gonick) has come in and ripped up departments and is making all kinds of big structure changes. The department formerly known as CNS is now being called INS, or so I'm told./me is just a student worker so isn't totally in the loop.:p Actually, I'm posting @ work.;)
That's funny. During my time there (1994-1998), they changed the name from INS to CNS. I think the change happened in 1995 or 1996. No new names under the sun, I guess.
My point is that you *do* see effects like this in conventional conductors as resistance approaches zero (i.e. in practice when you're at high enough frequency for reactive effects to dominate resistance). An ordinary conductor will very happily reflect/exclude applied oscillating magnetic fields by setting up opposed currents, and for the same reason you get "skin effect" for high frequency currents.
The underlying mechanisms in a superconductor are different, which causes interesting effects in the transition region (magnetic flux bundles penetrating the superconductor in regions of local breakdown, which AFAIK does not happen with conventional conductors). However, I do not recall any mention of the proposed measured effects being tied to phenomena that were exclusive to superconductors.
Hmmm... You are certainly right about skin effects and magnetic field exclusion in ordinary conductors. The author of the paper seems to think that the non-dissipative nature of super-conductors is key, but as I've said, I think he has made a couple of major errors.
My guess is that this coupling occurs in both normal metals and in superconductors, but is quite a bit more efficient in superconductors. In either case, it is orders of magnitude weaker than this paper predicts.
Really, this coupling must exist. The QED Lagrangian has the interaction term for a photon and e+ e-. A similar term then appears in the energy-momentum tensor. In linearized quantum gravity, then, there must be a coupling between e+, e-, photon, and graviton. This means that electrons couple photons to gravitons. Actually, this should be pretty obvious classically. Just solve Maxwell's equations and their linearized gravity analogs simultaneously. The only question then is how much quantum effects due to Cooper pairs condensing enhance this.
As to whether we should have seen this before, I'm not so sure. Suppose that the author is correct and that under certain circumstances a fraction, say five percent, of the incident electromagnetic energy that you thought was being dissipated as heat was actually being dissipated as gravity waves. The only ways I can see to notice this are precision calorimetry or direct detection of the gravitational waves. Note too that the effect is only claimed to work for waves with quadrapole polarizations. It seems entirely plausible to me that no one would have stumbled upon this by chance.
Of course we could also hope to have seen things going in the opposite direction: gravity to electromagnetic. It's my sense, though, that the presumed gravity wave spectrum is dominated by very long wavelength waves, hence the gigantic LIGO detector. How would you distinguish electromagnetic waves produced from these gravity waves from the blackbody radiation from even the coldest of reflectors?
What makes a superconductor special is the fact that when electrons have condensed into Cooper pairs, there is a large energy gap between their state and any other accessible state. This essentially forbids collisions with the crystal lattice or other electrons. The coherence of an electron's wavefunction is usually destroyed by frequent collisions, but in a superconductor this coherence is maintained over very large distances.
This coherence turns out to be impossible if a magnetic field is present in the bulk of the superconductor. If there is an external magnetic field, the material has a choice: cease being a superconductor or exclude the magnetic field. The superconducting state has lower energy than the normal state. If the external magnetic field is small, it actually takes less energy to just expel the magnetic field, by creating currents which cancel it than it does to become a normal metal.
The resulting expulsion of magnetic fields is called the Meissner effect. Another consequence of this is that currents can not flow in the bulk of a superconductor, but only at the surface. This is why superconducting wires are always finely threaded, to increase the surface area per weight. All of this is quite different from a normal conductor, even in the limit of zero resistance. It is all a direct consequence of the existence of a macroscopic, coherent quantum state.
Now, for the question of gravity and superconductors. Gravitomagnetic fields are simply gravitational fields caused by moving masses, much as magnetic fields are EM fields caused by moving charges. In this terminology, the normal gravity we all know and love is the result of gravitoelectric fields. (I should point out that gravitoelectric and gravitomagnetic fields only make sense in the limit of weak fields, but anywhere in our solar system they are a fine approximation.)
Gravitomagnetic fields are predicted by general relativity and must exist in order for gravitational waves to exist. The existence of gravitational waves is inferred from the observed energy loss in rapidly rotating binary star systems. This observation has already won the discoverers the Nobel prize.
Anyway, the same quantum coherence that forces magnetic fields out of superconductors will also cause gravitomagnetic fields to affect superconductors in a peculiar way. If you have a large, rapidly rotating mass near a superconductor, the resulting gravitomagnetic field is capable of destroying the coherent state. To prevent this, tiny currents, and thus magnetic fields, must be present in the superconductor. Known as the Lense-Thirring effect, this is a well-established experimental fact. I think that this very real effect is the source of all of the quite wacky superconductor anti-gravity claims which followed.
I have looked at this paper in detail and I have concluded that the central claim is false. The author makes two major mistakes which cause him to grossly overestimate the strength of the effect. I believe that the transduction he predicts does really happen, but that it happens at a rate at least 15 orders of magnitude lower than he predicts. I would expect it to be impossible to observe with present technology. I'm planing to write a paper on this, or I would go into greater detail.
Perhaps you could explain to me where the "amendment process" says this. To quote Article V of the U.S. Constitution, in its entirety:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress; provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
The Sudbury experiment [queensu.ca] this summer is starting to show non-zero neutrino mass, which I understood meant that oscillation between states was going to not happer - or be severely limited.
It's actually precisely the opposite. The modern way to understand this is in terms of quantum fields. The energy density of space depends on the values of these fields. In order for one neutrino to oscillate into another, the expression for this energy density must include a term which contains the anti-neutrino field of one flavor of neutrino and the neutrino field of another flavor (neutrinos come in three types, called flavors). This allows a neutrino of one flavor to be annihilated at the same time as another is created.
Now mass for a particular neutrino flavor comes mainly from a term containing the neutrino and anti-neutrino fields of the same flavor, but also those terms that mix it with other flavors. To be more precise, the measured masses of neutrinos are the eigenvalues of the matrix made up of these terms which multiply anti-neutrino and neutrino fields.
The only matrix with all eigenvalues zero is the zero matrix. Thus, if all neutrinos are massless, there is no mixing. The inverse is not necessarily true.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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If you are so disgusted with the States then why don't you leave the cushy environs of Stanford? I suggest resuming your studies in some country that has not played military or economic power to their advantage. Of course, this means that you would not be resuming your studies, since such a country would have vanished at the hands of other, less foolish, geopolitical players.
You may disagree with my opinion on this, and you are certainly free to do so and post it for the world to see (Yet another benefit of "Globalization").
I can understand that everyone's nerves are raw right now. I can barely think straight right now. I think, though, that you are attacking me for things I have not said. My post never even mentioned the U.S., except for some claims about how the U.S. involvement in the Second World War came about. I never even said that I thought "globalization" was bad.
All that I did was attack what I see as some very sloppy reasoning and a lack of historical perspective in the usual debate about these issues.
"This is a common claim, but it demonstrably false."
If it were "demonstrably" false then why isn't accepted as such?
Sometimes, the things that everyone believe are wrong. I'm sure that you can come up with a list of examples of this phenomenon as well as I can. I assert that something is false and then proceed to demonstrate it, or try to. It seems to me that if you disagree, you could point out a flaw in my demonstration.
"In fact, one could argue that the second world war in the pacific was largely caused by trade relationships."
"Fact" and "one could argue"? FACT: You CAN argue that gravity does not exist. Facts and arguments are logically very different things.
Perhaps my phrasing was confusing. How about: "Large-scale international trade did not stop two world wars. One could even argue that the second world war in the pacific was largely caused by trade relationships."
"What has changed, is the greatly increased importance of multinational corporations."
Great! Let me list some of the ways that multinationals are currently benefiting YOU:
-The electricity that you depend on for your current state of life was generated using turbines made by a multinational company.
-Driven lately? Ride the bus instead? Yep, made by "multinationals."
-The computer you are using? Multinationals.
-Your fine University? It does business with many countries, and is thus "multinational".
-On and on and on...
I suppose the fact that I lived in England for one year makes me a "multinational," too? Note that I was talking about "multinational corporations." Note too that I didn't even say they were bad. I just said that they are more important now than they were a century ago. This doesn't strike me as a particularly controversial statement. For the record, I think multinational corporations produce some marvelous things. I also think there are other ways to produce these marvelous things.
Am I "disgusted with the States?" I certainly didn't say that I was. I was pretty much just pointing out flaws I see in the common debate over "globalization" and correcting an error about the relative military strengths of some U.S. allies. There are things about my country I love and cherish. There are also things my country has done that "disgust" me. The biggest would be slavery and the slaughter of Native Americans. While the U.S. has become a far more humane and just society since those two atrocities ended, it is still not perfect. In my version of "patriotism," I see it as my duty to point out what I see as the clear flaws in my society so that they can be fixed.
The fact that no one's hands are clean, my own included, does not excuse us from the obligation to try to do better in the future. Do you disagree? How would me leaving Stanford possibly help the situation?
Slashdot Mirror
I would actually argue that first-to-file has very strong "theory" justifications, in addition to being far simpler to administer. Consider two people who invent the same invention. The first "invents" first, but keeps it a secret. She is slow to work out all of the details (to "reduce to practice" in patent parlance), to turn it into a commercial product (or else she would run into section 102 statutory bars against later filing her patent), or of course, to file the patent. Perhaps she has problems with finding the time or the necessary funding; perhaps she is simply lazy. (Of course, she can't be too lazy. The law requires that she be "diligent" in reducing to practice and in filing a patent, or else she loses out to the later inventor who is diligent and files first.)
The second inventor invents the same thing two month later. She did actually invent it entirely independantly of the first inventor, or else she can't get the patent under either first-to-invent or first-to-file. The first inventor, remember, has kept the details of the invention secret. Inventor two works hard to reduce to practice and promptly files a patent. She also quickly brings the product to market, all while inventor one is dawdling.
Who deserves the patent? I would say inventor two. Of what use are inventor one's efforts to anyone? Sure she "invented" the thing first, but why would I want to reward people who invent quickly, but then just sit on their inventions? Of course, you can come up with other stories that might shift the argument one way or the other. The point is that there is a value to having people make their inventions public quickly (so that others become aware of the idea, so that others know that a particular problem no longer needs to be solved, and so that others become aware that a patent is likely to cover a particular area in the future), and filing a patent does this, as patent applications generally are published 18 months after filing. (The patent reform proposals would increase the number of applications that must be published after 18 months, by the way.)
This isn't about making it easier to process new patents quicker. Relatively few patent applications become involved in "interferences," two or more inventors attempting to patent the same invention. Where this change would make the biggest change is in the courts, where inventors claiming the same invention fight it out or where patent defendants try to invalidate a patent based upon a later filing that was arguably invented first. These court cases are pretty messy. First, the question of when an "invention" is made is often not clear cut. Years can pass between when you first get the idea to try something and when you know it works and have worked out the messy details. When during this period does "invention" occur? Second, these questions often are very difficult to prove, since much of the relevant work goes on largely within the mind of the inventor.
Perhaps the bigger reason for the change, however, has to do with international harmonization. Every country on the planet other than the U.S. has switched to first-to-file. If further harmonization of patent laws is to occur, the U.S. is clearly going to have to switch as well. What the U.S. hopes to get as quid pro quo, however, is a switch by Europe to allow a "grace period" between when you publish details about your invention and when you must file the patent. Current European law says that if you make your invention public before you file, you lose the right to file the patent. The U.S. lets you file up to a year after you make your invention public. Japan gives you six months and is otherwise a bit more restrictive than the U.S. The lack of a grace period in Europe means that inventors interested in the worldwide market e
Since we are talking about criminal law here, the relevant concepts are "aiding and abetting" and "conspiracy." It's pretty clear that you are seeding a Bittorrent with the knowledge and intent that others will share further copies of what they download from you. In fact, the entire Bittorrent system is based on the implicit agreement that those who download from the seed will then share with others. Thus, the criminal law is likely to hold you responsible for those subsequent copies (under aiding and abetting or conspiracy theories) just as if you had made them yourself.
If you seed a Bittorrent with copyrighted material and at least $1,000 worth of copies eventually result, you are probably a felon under U.S. law. It is a harder case to prove than the direct p2p case, because it depends more upon your precise mental state when you set up the seed, but I think you are still likely to be found guilty. Whether you should be or not is, of course, another question.
If you think that a subpoena is invalid, you can challenge it and ask the court for a protective order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(c). That's what the attorneys for the students/universities in this case appear to have successfully done.
Given that iTunes sells music at $0.99 a track, you only need to share 1011 copies of songs to be a felon.
Of course, you could have just clicked on the link to the bill in the article if you wanted to figure this out.
But, since you asked . . .
Not much. This was just a pre-trial motion about when the court was going to hear oral arguments about several other pre-trial motions.In the (often long) pre-trial phase, two main things happen: (1) the parties get information about what the facts are, both from witnesses and from each other, and (2) the parties and court iron out what the disputed issues are that will be decided at the trial.
The process of getting the facts is called "discovery." It is slow and expensive. It also is largely the responsibility of the parties, though often the court has to resolve disputes.
The disputed issues are laid out in a document called the "complaint." Everything the plaintiffs do at the trial must be directed at proving something in the complaint, and if you don't have a legal theory in your complaint, you give up the chance to ever argue it.
A large part of pre-trial is about refining the complaint. The defendants try to get parts of it dismissed. The plaintiffs get the chance to amend it, though except near the beginning, they need the permission of the court. Each party will try to have the judge rule on part or all of the complaint prior to trial--something called summary judgment. The whole process in federal court is largely governed by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Anyway, SCO wanted to delay the date of a hearing on whether it can amend its complaint. Delaying the date of the hearing would probably have delayed the date of the trial, assuming the case ever gets there. So I guess this brings the end of the case a little sooner.
Not even that. The judge won't decide whether SCO can amend until after the hearing. The judge just decided that the hearing has to happen on the scheduled date. Basically, he denied SCO's request for more time to prepare for the hearing.Spending money on the CIA that Congress appropriated to Air Force procurement clearly violates the requirement that money be drawn from the treasury only according to appropriations made by law. Similarly, the intentional false reporting of CIA spending as something else clearly violates the requirement of a "regular Statement and Account."
As far as we know, to replace the standard model with string theory is just to replace 19 arbitrary parameters with an arbitrary compactification, itself perhaps requiring more than 19 parameters to describe.
If your relative is making copies of these phonographs in California and makes, for example, more than 1000 copies of one of them, he could in principle go to prison for 5 years and face a $250,000 fine.
Crazy...
It should be noted that most of the fallout from current thermonuclear warheads is produced entirely by choice. As reported, for example, in the famous Progressive Magazine article of 1979, over half of the energy released and most of the fallout produced by such a warhead comes from fission that occurs after the fusion explosion. Effectively, the fusion explosion serves to produce a much larger and more complete burning of fissile material than could be produced with conventional explosives.
Read against these definitions, Article 29 of the UDHP is just saying that you can't use the UDHP as an excuse to disrupt "international peace and security," to deny "equal rights and self-determination of peoples," to deny "sovereign equality of all [UN] Members," to engange in "threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," or similarly violate the "purposes" and "principles."
UDHR Article 29 was not intended to remove rights when they are "contrary to the interests of the government," because nowhere in the definition of "purposes" or "principles" are the general "interests" of states or of the UN as an entity even mentioned. It just says that you can't use the UDHR contrary to the stated reasons they founded the UN in the first place.
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For a contract to exist in Common Law countries like the U.S., U.K., etc., there must be "consideration." Basically, each party must give up something. This means, for example, that promises to give gifts are not enforceable (there is generally an exception recognized for promises of gifts to charities, which can be enforceable). It is possible to argue that the offer to provide source is given in exchange for the purchase of the software product, in which case the sale and offer would form part of a single enforceable contract. It is easy to imagine, however, factual situations where this is not a plausible description of transaction between B and C, particularly when it comes to B's obligations to offer source code to D, E or F, who did not participate in the distribution of code from B to C that triggered B's obligation to make an offer under section 3(b) of the GPL.
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Again in Common Law, offers can be freely revoked, assuming that they have not yet been accepted. (There are sometimes exceptions for offers that are by their terms irrevokable.) If you want to read 3(b) of the GPL narrowly so as to avoid any ongoing obligation from B to A, then B can comply with the literal terms of the GPL by distributing the binary code for sale, along with an offer to provide source code, and then immediately revoking the offer.
Of course, courts do have some tool available for dealing with such funny business, e.g., promissory estoppel. To invoke this, however, someone seeking to enforce the promise, say D, must prove that D reasonably relied on the promise, that B should have foreseen that D would rely on the promise, and that as a result D "to his or her loss acts or fails to act and suffers an injustice that can only be avoided by enforcement of the promise." It will be extremely difficult to make this sort of showing in the case of hobbyist programmer whose only loss is lack of access to source code he otherwise had no connection to.In contrast, a court should have no problem enforcing B's promise to A, based on B's acceptance of the GPL. I can't see a court having any trouble finding a contract between A and B based on GPL section 3(b), and the remedies available based on such a contract are possibly very helpful to the GPLed-software author and his community.
I would note further that Prof. Moglen, while rightly pointing out that the most important remedies for enforcing the GPL are copyright remedies, not contract remedies, does not seem at all confident that a court will not treat the GPL as a contract. All of the capitalized text about express and implied warranties is really only relevant if you think it's a contract. Implied warranties generally exist only for sales (which are always treated as contracts in U.S. law), and only for sales of goods at that. Harms caused by property that is used under a license are generally only recoverable under tort, not warranty.
I think you have the right idea, however, in looking at available legal remedies in deciding what to call the GPL. I would argue that under certain circumstances, contract remedies are available for breaches of the GPL. In particular, suppose that A is the copyright holder, B is a distributor who has elected option (b) under section 3 of the GPL, and C is recipient of a covered binary, not necessarily from distributor B. I think that C as an intended third-party beneficiary of the section 3(b) agreement between A and B should be able to sue to enforce it, even if A herself is for some reason no longer interested in enforcing it. Third-party beneficiaries are allowed to bring such a suit under contract law, but not under copyright law alone. Since the GPL generally will satisfy all the legal requirements of a contract, I see no reason for a court not to allow such a suit, and in this suit, the GPL would clearly be functioning as a contract.
Suppose I publish an ad offering $1 million to the first person to walk on Mars, so long as it occurs before 2020. If someone I've never met shows up at my doorstep with proof that she has just walked on Mars, then my promise to pay her $1 million is enforcable as a contract, so long as I have not revoked the offer prior to her successful performance. U.S. law students will recognize this as a "unilateral contract," as neither part is bound until one of them has performed, but it is certainly treated as a contract, despite the fact that the astronaut and I communicated only through a one-way newspaper ad. (Of course, good luck collecting $1 million from me...)
This is no different from the GPL case where I read the "COPYING" file included in the kernel tarball by Linus, for example, and I accept the license/contract through the act of copying, modifying, or distributing the kernel.
Let A be the copyright holder and B the distributor. B promises to offer the source code to C, D, E, etc. The offer is to C, but the promise is to A. The offer by itself may not be legally enforceable. In general, the offer would need to be part of an agreement in which B received something from C, or B must have reasonably expected the offer to induce action on the part of C.
What is almost surely enforceable, however, is B's obligation under the GPL to make (and by implication to honor) the offer.
Really? You think that I'm complying with the GPL if I make an offer to distribute source with no intention of honoring the offer? I agree that it's a plausible literal reading, but it is a reading that entirely defeats the aims of the GPL and I find it extremely hard to see a court accepting it.
Whatever doctrinal boxes you want to put the GPL into, the intended effect is clearly to require people who distribute the covered code in binary form to also either distribute the source code with the binaries, or to promise to provide the source code to anyone who wants it. It is clear, to me at least, that the intent is that this promise be legally enforceable. Why else go to all the trouble?
To the legally trained (I'm a law student, by the way), there is a word for an enforceable promise: contract. To a lawyer or a judge, in the U.S. at least, if it's a promise and it's not a contract, it's not legally enforceable.
That said, it appears from the wording that Prof. Moglen was intentionally trying to avoid making the GPL look like a contract. Taking the language literally, when B accepts the GPL he is not making any promises to A to be performed in the future. He is merely obligated to make an offer to C at the same time as he exercises his rights to distribute under the license. As long as someone plans to enforce that offer, however, there has to be a contract with someone.
Well, the intent of the GPL is to enforce a reciprocal exchange. It is clearly intended to induce persons to distribute the software, possibly modified, and make the source code available to all users. It could have achieved this goal by requiring anyone distributing binaries to distribute source simultaneously, but in a nod to practicality it allows distributors to merely promise to make the source code available in the future. As such, the effect is not merely allowing distribution only in certain ways. Rather, the effect of section 3(b) is to allow distribution in exchange for certain promises. Granted, the terms are set entirely by the copyright holder, but to this legally trained mind, it sure looks like a reciprocal exchange to me.
Since software is generally not considered to be a "good" for legal purposes, most contracts involving contracts do not legally require a writing or signatures. An oral agreement or other behavior indicating mutual assent is generally sufficient. That doesn't mean, of course, that there aren't very good reasons to make such a contract in writing.
This is indeed the position of Eben Moglen, but there is nothing to prevent a single document from being both a license and a contract (and indeed several other thing, e.g., copyright assignment).
As I read the GPL, a distributor who elects option (b) under section 3 of the GPL makes a legally enforceable promise, one enforceable by both the license grantor and most likely by third parties. Such a distributor has thus entered into a contract obliging them to distribute certain source code in exchange for a license.
Prof. Moglen's main point is that the mostly likely remedies for breach of the GPL are copyright remedies, not contract remedies, and thus that it is useless for a defendant to argue that the GPL is not an enforceable contract. This is certainly true. It does not mean, however, that a court may not treat the GPL as a contract in certain circumstances, for example by allowing third parties to sue to enforce the requirement to distribute source code under GPL section 3(b), a remedy clearly grounded in contract law, not copyright law.
In U.S. law, perhaps the definative definition of "contract" is that in the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, section 1:
A distributor who elects option (b) under section 3 of the GPL is indeed making such a promise, namely a promise to distribute source code to anyone who requests it for a period of at least three years, in exchange for a license from the copyright holder. What prevents the typical shrinkwrap EULA from being legally enforcable is not any distinction between licenses and contracts. Rather it is the lack of legal consent by the recipient of the software license. Courts which have rejected shrinkwrap agreements have generally found that a contract was formed at the time of sale, including an implicit license to use the software. Presenting the user with the terms of the shrinkwrap agreement after this sale then is viewed as an attempt to modify this contract, and this modification is found to fail because either the user does not perform acts sufficient to manifest assent to the modification or because the changes only benefit the copyright holder and thus lack the mutual exchange generally required for a contract to be enforcable. See, e.g., Klocek v. Gateway, Inc. , 104 F. Supp. 2d 1332 (D. Kan. 2000) (refusing to enforce an arbitration provision in Gateway "Standard Terms" provided inside a computer box).In that case, a court would be enforcing a promise (to provide the source code) that was given in exchange for a license to distribute copyrighted material. That sure smells like a contract to me.
My reading is that if a person distributes under the GPL and chooses either option (a) or option (c) under section 3, the GPL functions as a simple license--permission to engage in a certain use of copyrighted material. If the distributor chooses option (b), however, the GPL functions as both a license and a contract. That is, the license to distribute under the GPL is granted in exchange for a promise to distibute source code on request in the future.
Ultimately the label doesn't matter a great deal, since copyright remedies are generally more desirable to a free software author than breach of contract remedies are. In particular, copyright law allows damages without any proof of harm. There are two places where having contract remedies available could be useful:
My point is that you *do* see effects like this in conventional conductors as resistance approaches zero (i.e. in practice when you're at high enough frequency for reactive effects to dominate resistance). An ordinary conductor will very happily reflect/exclude applied oscillating magnetic fields by setting up opposed currents, and for the same reason you get "skin effect" for high frequency currents.
The underlying mechanisms in a superconductor are different, which causes interesting effects in the transition region (magnetic flux bundles penetrating the superconductor in regions of local breakdown, which AFAIK does not happen with conventional conductors). However, I do not recall any mention of the proposed measured effects being tied to phenomena that were exclusive to superconductors.
Hmmm... You are certainly right about skin effects and magnetic field exclusion in ordinary conductors. The author of the paper seems to think that the non-dissipative nature of super-conductors is key, but as I've said, I think he has made a couple of major errors.
My guess is that this coupling occurs in both normal metals and in superconductors, but is quite a bit more efficient in superconductors. In either case, it is orders of magnitude weaker than this paper predicts.
Really, this coupling must exist. The QED Lagrangian has the interaction term for a photon and e+ e-. A similar term then appears in the energy-momentum tensor. In linearized quantum gravity, then, there must be a coupling between e+, e-, photon, and graviton. This means that electrons couple photons to gravitons. Actually, this should be pretty obvious classically. Just solve Maxwell's equations and their linearized gravity analogs simultaneously. The only question then is how much quantum effects due to Cooper pairs condensing enhance this.
As to whether we should have seen this before, I'm not so sure. Suppose that the author is correct and that under certain circumstances a fraction, say five percent, of the incident electromagnetic energy that you thought was being dissipated as heat was actually being dissipated as gravity waves. The only ways I can see to notice this are precision calorimetry or direct detection of the gravitational waves. Note too that the effect is only claimed to work for waves with quadrapole polarizations. It seems entirely plausible to me that no one would have stumbled upon this by chance.
Of course we could also hope to have seen things going in the opposite direction: gravity to electromagnetic. It's my sense, though, that the presumed gravity wave spectrum is dominated by very long wavelength waves, hence the gigantic LIGO detector. How would you distinguish electromagnetic waves produced from these gravity waves from the blackbody radiation from even the coldest of reflectors?
What makes a superconductor special is the fact that when electrons have condensed into Cooper pairs, there is a large energy gap between their state and any other accessible state. This essentially forbids collisions with the crystal lattice or other electrons. The coherence of an electron's wavefunction is usually destroyed by frequent collisions, but in a superconductor this coherence is maintained over very large distances.
This coherence turns out to be impossible if a magnetic field is present in the bulk of the superconductor. If there is an external magnetic field, the material has a choice: cease being a superconductor or exclude the magnetic field. The superconducting state has lower energy than the normal state. If the external magnetic field is small, it actually takes less energy to just expel the magnetic field, by creating currents which cancel it than it does to become a normal metal.
The resulting expulsion of magnetic fields is called the Meissner effect. Another consequence of this is that currents can not flow in the bulk of a superconductor, but only at the surface. This is why superconducting wires are always finely threaded, to increase the surface area per weight. All of this is quite different from a normal conductor, even in the limit of zero resistance. It is all a direct consequence of the existence of a macroscopic, coherent quantum state.
Now, for the question of gravity and superconductors. Gravitomagnetic fields are simply gravitational fields caused by moving masses, much as magnetic fields are EM fields caused by moving charges. In this terminology, the normal gravity we all know and love is the result of gravitoelectric fields. (I should point out that gravitoelectric and gravitomagnetic fields only make sense in the limit of weak fields, but anywhere in our solar system they are a fine approximation.)
Gravitomagnetic fields are predicted by general relativity and must exist in order for gravitational waves to exist. The existence of gravitational waves is inferred from the observed energy loss in rapidly rotating binary star systems. This observation has already won the discoverers the Nobel prize.
Anyway, the same quantum coherence that forces magnetic fields out of superconductors will also cause gravitomagnetic fields to affect superconductors in a peculiar way. If you have a large, rapidly rotating mass near a superconductor, the resulting gravitomagnetic field is capable of destroying the coherent state. To prevent this, tiny currents, and thus magnetic fields, must be present in the superconductor. Known as the Lense-Thirring effect, this is a well-established experimental fact. I think that this very real effect is the source of all of the quite wacky superconductor anti-gravity claims which followed.
I have looked at this paper in detail and I have concluded that the central claim is false. The author makes two major mistakes which cause him to grossly overestimate the strength of the effect. I believe that the transduction he predicts does really happen, but that it happens at a rate at least 15 orders of magnitude lower than he predicts. I would expect it to be impossible to observe with present technology. I'm planing to write a paper on this, or I would go into greater detail.
Perhaps you could explain to me where the "amendment process" says this. To quote Article V of the U.S. Constitution, in its entirety:
It's actually precisely the opposite. The modern way to understand this is in terms of quantum fields. The energy density of space depends on the values of these fields. In order for one neutrino to oscillate into another, the expression for this energy density must include a term which contains the anti-neutrino field of one flavor of neutrino and the neutrino field of another flavor (neutrinos come in three types, called flavors). This allows a neutrino of one flavor to be annihilated at the same time as another is created.
Now mass for a particular neutrino flavor comes mainly from a term containing the neutrino and anti-neutrino fields of the same flavor, but also those terms that mix it with other flavors. To be more precise, the measured masses of neutrinos are the eigenvalues of the matrix made up of these terms which multiply anti-neutrino and neutrino fields.
The only matrix with all eigenvalues zero is the zero matrix. Thus, if all neutrinos are massless, there is no mixing. The inverse is not necessarily true.
I can understand that everyone's nerves are raw right now. I can barely think straight right now. I think, though, that you are attacking me for things I have not said. My post never even mentioned the U.S., except for some claims about how the U.S. involvement in the Second World War came about. I never even said that I thought "globalization" was bad.
All that I did was attack what I see as some very sloppy reasoning and a lack of historical perspective in the usual debate about these issues.
"This is a common claim, but it demonstrably false." If it were "demonstrably" false then why isn't accepted as such?
Sometimes, the things that everyone believe are wrong. I'm sure that you can come up with a list of examples of this phenomenon as well as I can. I assert that something is false and then proceed to demonstrate it, or try to. It seems to me that if you disagree, you could point out a flaw in my demonstration.
"In fact, one could argue that the second world war in the pacific was largely caused by trade relationships." "Fact" and "one could argue"? FACT: You CAN argue that gravity does not exist. Facts and arguments are logically very different things.
Perhaps my phrasing was confusing. How about: "Large-scale international trade did not stop two world wars. One could even argue that the second world war in the pacific was largely caused by trade relationships."
"What has changed, is the greatly increased importance of multinational corporations." Great! Let me list some of the ways that multinationals are currently benefiting YOU: -The electricity that you depend on for your current state of life was generated using turbines made by a multinational company. -Driven lately? Ride the bus instead? Yep, made by "multinationals." -The computer you are using? Multinationals. -Your fine University? It does business with many countries, and is thus "multinational". -On and on and on ...
I suppose the fact that I lived in England for one year makes me a "multinational," too? Note that I was talking about "multinational corporations." Note too that I didn't even say they were bad. I just said that they are more important now than they were a century ago. This doesn't strike me as a particularly controversial statement. For the record, I think multinational corporations produce some marvelous things. I also think there are other ways to produce these marvelous things.
Am I "disgusted with the States?" I certainly didn't say that I was. I was pretty much just pointing out flaws I see in the common debate over "globalization" and correcting an error about the relative military strengths of some U.S. allies. There are things about my country I love and cherish. There are also things my country has done that "disgust" me. The biggest would be slavery and the slaughter of Native Americans. While the U.S. has become a far more humane and just society since those two atrocities ended, it is still not perfect. In my version of "patriotism," I see it as my duty to point out what I see as the clear flaws in my society so that they can be fixed.
The fact that no one's hands are clean, my own included, does not excuse us from the obligation to try to do better in the future. Do you disagree? How would me leaving Stanford possibly help the situation?