I think you are wrong. In "GENERAL TALKING PICTURES CORP. V. WESTERN ELEC. CO., 304 U. S. 175 (1938)" the SCOTUS found that a patent holder CAN authorize a manufacturer to only manufacture for a particular market (home use vs commercial), and that any subsequent purchasers only get the same authorization that the manufacturer had. For example, if MPEG-LA authorized Canon to use MPEG patents in consumer cameras only, and you bought one of those cameras and used it for commercial use, you are infringing the patent.
The sole purpose of trademarks is to protect buyers; it is not to give companies additional revenue sources.
Says who? Not the SCOTUS, which summed it up as:
"[T]rademark law, by preventing others from copying a source-identifying mark, 'reduce[s] the customer's cost's of shopping and making purchasing decisions,' for it quickly and easily assures a potential customer that the item with this mark is made by the same producer as other similarly marked items that he or she liked (or disliked) in the past. At the same time, the law helps assure a producer that it (and not an imitating competitor) will reap the financial, reputation related rewards associated with a desirable product."
Let's say we have an image of 8 gray bars, with the brightest one 8 times as bright as the darkest. If we have a 3-bit sensor, with a resolution of 2 pixels per bar, we could adjust the exposure so the brightest bar had a value of 7, and we get the following pixel values:
0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 and after averaging, we would have 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, which is an accurate representation. This sensor has enough dynamic range for the picture.
If we take the same picture with a 2-bit sensor, and again adjust the exposure so the brightest bar has the value 3, we have the following pixel values:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 and after averaging, we would have 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 3. The entire left side of the image is black, all shadows are gone. Averaging did not fix that.
If we expose so we keep the shadows, we wind up with pixel values of 0 1 2 3 3 3 3 3 after averaging. The entire right side of the image is blown. Averaging did not fix that. If we expose for the center, we end up with averaged pixels of 0 0 0 0 1 2 3 3 3 3, with the shadows gone and the hilites blown.
Averaging can not make up for insufficient dynamic range.
There are no sensors that have 'reals'. There are (cheap) sensors that have 256 integers, and there are sensors that have 1024 (and more) integers. The sensors are basically counting the number of photons that hit them during the exposure. A sensor that has 1024 integers can capture 4 times the light as one that has 256. Therefore, the exposure can be 4 times longer without overflowing for the same lighting. During that 4 times longer exposure, some of the pixels that are on a darker area may capture some photons that they would not if the exposure was shorter. That is how the dynamic range gets extended. Your averaging method can not do that. If the exposure is short enough to not overflow the sensor, then some darker (but not black) areas will not have any photons registered, and will show up on the picture as black. If you average those dark areas you still get zero. If you make the exposure longer you can capture some shadow detail, but the bright areas will have overflowed and show as blown out. If you average those areas you still get the max number. The only thing averaging can do is insert a (false) value between adjacent dark and light areas, which improves neither the dynamic range nor the picture.
Resolution and range are not the same thing. Resolution is the number of increments within the range. Range defines how dark your darkest area can be compared to how bright the brightest area can be. Resolution is the number of shades of grey between black and white. If you have some areas of the picture that exceed the blackest black and others that exceed the whitest white you don't have enough range, and averaging pixels can not correct that.
Wage taxes are on income from employment (ie reported on a W-2). Income tax is on all sources of income, including wages, dividends, interest, capital gains, etc.
Music CD-Rs have a fee associated with them which gets paid to someone (I think RIAA) to cover the royalties of the music which will be recorded on them.
No. Unauthorized access to a "protected" computer is a federal crime. "Protected" means protected by the law, not any technical measures. The federal law is very clear about what a protected computer is: any computer owned or used by the federal government, and any computer owned or used by a financial institution. Nobodies home computer is a protect computer under federal law.
Nobody would be 'guilty' because there is no law broken. I assume you are talking about child porn laws, but those require 'knowingly' taking/storing/sending such pictures. It is what happens AFTER such a picture is taken (ie. once you know what it is) that counts. If you just delete it, you have not broken the law. If you do anything else with it, you probably have broken the law.
This is not a hypothetical situation - it happens all the time. Go to any amusement park where they have cameras to take shots of the customers (ie on a roller coaster), and I guarantee you that multiple times a day pictures are taken which could be construed as child porn (girls flashing the camera, fake sex acts, etc). As long as the pictures are immediately deleted there is no problem.
Um, no. The federal child porn laws have phrases like 'knowingly sending a picture of a minor in a sexually explicit position'. If you haven't yet seen the picture you have no way to know that it contains a minor in a sexually explicit position. Now, if they did indeed capture such pictures, and then stored them or shared them, they would possibly be guilty of violating child porn laws. There is apparently no evidence that such a thing happened.
What federal laws do you think have been broken? I see some people on here suggesting 'wiretapping' or 'child porn' laws, but even for those the federal laws are only for things that happen across state borders. This all happened within a single school district, so why would the feds be involved at all?
You doubt what? That the federal government can only file charges for federal crimes? Wiretapping laws apply to intercepted communications, not snapping pictures. The federal law is here. Which section prohibits taking pictures without consent?
(1) “wire communication” means any aural transfer made in whole or in part through the use of facilities for the transmission of communications by the aid of wire, cable, or other like connection between the point of origin and the point of reception (including the use of such connection in a switching station) furnished or operated by any person engaged in providing or operating such facilities for the transmission of interstate or foreign communications or communications affecting interstate or foreign commerce;
Taking pictures is not an 'aural transfer'
The police recording issue (in the link you provided), is about a Maryland (state) law, not a federal law, so it has no bearing on this at all.
In order for the federal government to file charges, a federal law would need to be broken. Laws against taking pictures in a private residence would be state, not federal, laws.
You keep the Certificate of Occupancy that is given to you when the building permit is closed out (final inspections complete). The municipality also keeps copies of COs and building permits.
Spoken like someone with no idea of what is involved in a manufacturing process.
You have to qualify the blanks (make sure they are up to your standards, not some cheapo WalMart disk that will lose data in a couple of years). That is cost
You have to have a supplier to get you the qualified blanks. That is cost.
You have to store the blanks somewhere. That is cost.
You have to get the blanks to the burners. That is cost.
You have to burn the blanks. That is cost.
You have to purchase and store sleeves for the disks. That is cost.
You have to get the sleeves to the disks and insert the disks. That is cost.
You have to store the disk/sleeve assemblies somewhere. That is cost.
You have to secure the disks. That is cost.
You have to have logistical tracking of the disks. That is cost.
You have to get the disks and sleeves to the shipping area and get the correct disk inserted in the box. That is cost.
You have to be prepared to handle complaints about the disks. That is cost.
You have to be prepared to ship replacement disks (warranty). That is cost.
And after you do all that, you have to ask - how many more sales is that cost going to generate? Should I spend the same money on something that may actually result in a sale?
There is a rather large gulf between 'financial harm' and 'dead'. If someone extorts money from you like that you are still alive. You can file a complaint with the police. If the people you 'protected' by paying the money find out they will probably be grateful to you, if a little poorer. Life goes on. On the other hand, if someone extorts an organ from you and you decide to complain to the police, you better hope they catch the person before they carry out the threat. There is no possibility of making the 'payoff', putting your family somewhere safe and THEN filing a complaint (even the stereotypical 'open if I'm dead' letter does no good - you are not there to be a witness, so chances of a conviction are very slim). If the people you protected find out about it they will forever know that you DIED to save them. Could you live with that guilt? What about the person who received your organs? For example, could you live with the fact that your spouse basically murdered someone for those organs?
It was poor planning on the specification of the JVM that there is not a standard way to specify the requested heap size. So Eclipse tries to figure out the JVM the best it can so it can pass in the correct parameters to the JVM. In this case, they could not determine the JVM, so I guess they just used the default heap size. I am not sure there is anything Eclipse could do differently (except maybe issue an 'unknown JVM' message, which doesn't help the users any more than possibly running out of memory).
Are you sure those are cameras? Around here, there are strobe lights in front of some red lights just to further call your attention to the red light. There are no cameras.
Part of my job involves compliance testing for internal web sites. The regulations.gov site is pretty good from a compliance point of view. Have you tried 'viewing' it with a screen reader (eg JAWS)? All of your 'insights' are wrong.
A screen reader does not just read the source of a web page aloud. It renders the page, then helps the user navigate through it.
I did not find any non-tagged images (ok, if you look at the source you will see some, but those are in comments and thus not rendered).
The graphical navigation tabs work correctly (the reader tells the user what the alt tags are for each area of the map, and allows them to 'click' on them).
Pop-up javascript is no more of a problem to a screen reader than to a sighted user. When a pop-up occurs the screen reader will say 'new window' and read the contents of it.
The embedded alert has exactly the same effect on a screen reader as it does on a sighted person - none, because it is never rendered.
The image tagged 'close' is a big red X that is displayed at the top of a pop-up window. If a sighted person can understand that clicking on that X will close the window (as opposed to meaning 'sign here' or 'treasure is buried here'), why would a person using a screen reader have difficulty understanding that a clickable thing tagged 'close' at the top of a page will close the window?
Lastly, tagging an unclickable image as "logo" tells the user everything they need to know about it - the image contains new usable information.
You need to remember that having a page read to you is already a much slower process than looking at it. Making non-ambiguous things (like 'close' and 'logo') as terse as possible while still conveying the correct meaning is the right thing to do.
No, but I do think you are a liar if you say the statement "We think that mimicking IBM's proprietary, 64-bit System Z architecture requires IBM intellectual property, and you will understand that IBM could not be reasonably asked to consider licensing it's operating systems for use on infringing platforms," is in any way making "grandiose threatening claims about the number of patents infringed". That first statement is the ENTIRE statement about 'infringement' from letter #2.
The simple fact is that IBM NEVER made any claims, grandiose, threatening, or otherwise about patents or the number thereof except in letter #4, where they DID provide a list of all the patents.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are wrong. In "GENERAL TALKING PICTURES CORP. V. WESTERN ELEC. CO., 304 U. S. 175 (1938)" the SCOTUS found that a patent holder CAN authorize a manufacturer to only manufacture for a particular market (home use vs commercial), and that any subsequent purchasers only get the same authorization that the manufacturer had. For example, if MPEG-LA authorized Canon to use MPEG patents in consumer cameras only, and you bought one of those cameras and used it for commercial use, you are infringing the patent.
The sole purpose of trademarks is to protect buyers; it is not to give companies additional revenue sources.
Says who? Not the SCOTUS, which summed it up as:
"[T]rademark law, by preventing others from copying a source-identifying mark, 'reduce[s] the customer's cost's of shopping and making purchasing decisions,' for it quickly and easily assures a potential customer that the item with this mark is made by the same producer as other similarly marked items that he or she liked (or disliked) in the past. At the same time, the law helps assure a producer that it (and not an imitating competitor) will reap the financial, reputation related rewards associated with a desirable product."
Let's say we have an image of 8 gray bars, with the brightest one 8 times as bright as the darkest. If we have a 3-bit sensor, with a resolution of 2 pixels per bar, we could adjust the exposure so the brightest bar had a value of 7, and we get the following pixel values:
0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 and after averaging, we would have 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7, which is an accurate representation. This sensor has enough dynamic range for the picture.
If we take the same picture with a 2-bit sensor, and again adjust the exposure so the brightest bar has the value 3, we have the following pixel values:
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 and after averaging, we would have 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 3. The entire left side of the image is black, all shadows are gone. Averaging did not fix that.
If we expose so we keep the shadows, we wind up with pixel values of 0 1 2 3 3 3 3 3 after averaging. The entire right side of the image is blown. Averaging did not fix that. If we expose for the center, we end up with averaged pixels of 0 0 0 0 1 2 3 3 3 3, with the shadows gone and the hilites blown.
Averaging can not make up for insufficient dynamic range.
There are no sensors that have 'reals'. There are (cheap) sensors that have 256 integers, and there are sensors that have 1024 (and more) integers. The sensors are basically counting the number of photons that hit them during the exposure. A sensor that has 1024 integers can capture 4 times the light as one that has 256. Therefore, the exposure can be 4 times longer without overflowing for the same lighting. During that 4 times longer exposure, some of the pixels that are on a darker area may capture some photons that they would not if the exposure was shorter. That is how the dynamic range gets extended. Your averaging method can not do that. If the exposure is short enough to not overflow the sensor, then some darker (but not black) areas will not have any photons registered, and will show up on the picture as black. If you average those dark areas you still get zero. If you make the exposure longer you can capture some shadow detail, but the bright areas will have overflowed and show as blown out. If you average those areas you still get the max number. The only thing averaging can do is insert a (false) value between adjacent dark and light areas, which improves neither the dynamic range nor the picture.
Resolution and range are not the same thing. Resolution is the number of increments within the range. Range defines how dark your darkest area can be compared to how bright the brightest area can be. Resolution is the number of shades of grey between black and white. If you have some areas of the picture that exceed the blackest black and others that exceed the whitest white you don't have enough range, and averaging pixels can not correct that.
Wage taxes are on income from employment (ie reported on a W-2). Income tax is on all sources of income, including wages, dividends, interest, capital gains, etc.
Music CD-Rs have a fee associated with them which gets paid to someone (I think RIAA) to cover the royalties of the music which will be recorded on them.
No. Unauthorized access to a "protected" computer is a federal crime. "Protected" means protected by the law, not any technical measures. The federal law is very clear about what a protected computer is: any computer owned or used by the federal government, and any computer owned or used by a financial institution. Nobodies home computer is a protect computer under federal law.
Nobody would be 'guilty' because there is no law broken. I assume you are talking about child porn laws, but those require 'knowingly' taking/storing/sending such pictures. It is what happens AFTER such a picture is taken (ie. once you know what it is) that counts. If you just delete it, you have not broken the law. If you do anything else with it, you probably have broken the law.
This is not a hypothetical situation - it happens all the time. Go to any amusement park where they have cameras to take shots of the customers (ie on a roller coaster), and I guarantee you that multiple times a day pictures are taken which could be construed as child porn (girls flashing the camera, fake sex acts, etc). As long as the pictures are immediately deleted there is no problem.
Do you know what the word 'aural' means? If not, here it is: of or relating to the ear.
Um, no. The federal child porn laws have phrases like 'knowingly sending a picture of a minor in a sexually explicit position'. If you haven't yet seen the picture you have no way to know that it contains a minor in a sexually explicit position. Now, if they did indeed capture such pictures, and then stored them or shared them, they would possibly be guilty of violating child porn laws. There is apparently no evidence that such a thing happened.
What federal laws do you think have been broken? I see some people on here suggesting 'wiretapping' or 'child porn' laws, but even for those the federal laws are only for things that happen across state borders. This all happened within a single school district, so why would the feds be involved at all?
You doubt what? That the federal government can only file charges for federal crimes? Wiretapping laws apply to intercepted communications, not snapping pictures. The federal law is here. Which section prohibits taking pictures without consent?
Yes, that is correct. From US Code Title 18.2510:
(1) “wire communication” means any aural transfer made in whole or in part through the use of facilities for the transmission of communications by the aid of wire, cable, or other like connection between the point of origin and the point of reception (including the use of such connection in a switching station) furnished or operated by any person engaged in providing or operating such facilities for the transmission of interstate or foreign communications or communications affecting interstate or foreign commerce;
Taking pictures is not an 'aural transfer'
The police recording issue (in the link you provided), is about a Maryland (state) law, not a federal law, so it has no bearing on this at all.
In order for the federal government to file charges, a federal law would need to be broken. Laws against taking pictures in a private residence would be state, not federal, laws.
You keep the Certificate of Occupancy that is given to you when the building permit is closed out (final inspections complete). The municipality also keeps copies of COs and building permits.
Spoken like someone with no idea of what is involved in a manufacturing process.
You have to qualify the blanks (make sure they are up to your standards, not some cheapo WalMart disk that will lose data in a couple of years). That is cost
You have to have a supplier to get you the qualified blanks. That is cost.
You have to store the blanks somewhere. That is cost.
You have to get the blanks to the burners. That is cost.
You have to burn the blanks. That is cost.
You have to purchase and store sleeves for the disks. That is cost.
You have to get the sleeves to the disks and insert the disks. That is cost.
You have to store the disk/sleeve assemblies somewhere. That is cost.
You have to secure the disks. That is cost.
You have to have logistical tracking of the disks. That is cost.
You have to get the disks and sleeves to the shipping area and get the correct disk inserted in the box. That is cost.
You have to be prepared to handle complaints about the disks. That is cost.
You have to be prepared to ship replacement disks (warranty). That is cost.
And after you do all that, you have to ask - how many more sales is that cost going to generate? Should I spend the same money on something that may actually result in a sale?
Total market dominance of an absolutely non-essential market. Movies are too expensive? Don't go to the movies.
There is a rather large gulf between 'financial harm' and 'dead'. If someone extorts money from you like that you are still alive. You can file a complaint with the police. If the people you 'protected' by paying the money find out they will probably be grateful to you, if a little poorer. Life goes on. On the other hand, if someone extorts an organ from you and you decide to complain to the police, you better hope they catch the person before they carry out the threat. There is no possibility of making the 'payoff', putting your family somewhere safe and THEN filing a complaint (even the stereotypical 'open if I'm dead' letter does no good - you are not there to be a witness, so chances of a conviction are very slim). If the people you protected find out about it they will forever know that you DIED to save them. Could you live with that guilt? What about the person who received your organs? For example, could you live with the fact that your spouse basically murdered someone for those organs?
Sell your organs to who? Highest bidder? Plus, there is way to much opportunity for coercion.
It was poor planning on the specification of the JVM that there is not a standard way to specify the requested heap size. So Eclipse tries to figure out the JVM the best it can so it can pass in the correct parameters to the JVM. In this case, they could not determine the JVM, so I guess they just used the default heap size. I am not sure there is anything Eclipse could do differently (except maybe issue an 'unknown JVM' message, which doesn't help the users any more than possibly running out of memory).
Are you sure those are cameras? Around here, there are strobe lights in front of some red lights just to further call your attention to the red light. There are no cameras.
Argh. "New usable information" should be "no usable information".
Part of my job involves compliance testing for internal web sites. The regulations.gov site is pretty good from a compliance point of view. Have you tried 'viewing' it with a screen reader (eg JAWS)? All of your 'insights' are wrong.
A screen reader does not just read the source of a web page aloud. It renders the page, then helps the user navigate through it.
I did not find any non-tagged images (ok, if you look at the source you will see some, but those are in comments and thus not rendered).
The graphical navigation tabs work correctly (the reader tells the user what the alt tags are for each area of the map, and allows them to 'click' on them).
Pop-up javascript is no more of a problem to a screen reader than to a sighted user. When a pop-up occurs the screen reader will say 'new window' and read the contents of it.
The embedded alert has exactly the same effect on a screen reader as it does on a sighted person - none, because it is never rendered.
The image tagged 'close' is a big red X that is displayed at the top of a pop-up window. If a sighted person can understand that clicking on that X will close the window (as opposed to meaning 'sign here' or 'treasure is buried here'), why would a person using a screen reader have difficulty understanding that a clickable thing tagged 'close' at the top of a page will close the window?
Lastly, tagging an unclickable image as "logo" tells the user everything they need to know about it - the image contains new usable information.
You need to remember that having a page read to you is already a much slower process than looking at it. Making non-ambiguous things (like 'close' and 'logo') as terse as possible while still conveying the correct meaning is the right thing to do.
No, but I do think you are a liar if you say the statement "We think that mimicking IBM's proprietary, 64-bit System Z architecture requires IBM intellectual property, and you will understand that IBM could not be reasonably asked to consider licensing it's operating systems for use on infringing platforms," is in any way making "grandiose threatening claims about the number of patents infringed". That first statement is the ENTIRE statement about 'infringement' from letter #2.
The simple fact is that IBM NEVER made any claims, grandiose, threatening, or otherwise about patents or the number thereof except in letter #4, where they DID provide a list of all the patents.