Editor’s note (10/14/13): This post was originally published on Friday, October 11, 2013, at 16:58, and taken down within the hour. As fully detailed here, we could not quickly verify the facts of the blog post and consequently for legal reasons we had to remove it. Email to the editor referenced in this post to elicit his comments has gone unanswered. Biology Online would not disclose his identity or give out additional contact information and other efforts to identify him to solicit a response have been unsuccessful. Biology Online has confirmed the exchange. This post is therefore being republished as of October 14th at 4:46pm.
The Scientific American editor didn't seem to realize that the guy at Biology Online had been fired.
2) Email the Biology-online editor and attempt to reach him by phone, and ask whether he in fact sent the email in question
Had the answer to point #2 been "yes", then Dr. Lee's blog post should have remained intact, and the next issue would be, what to do about SciAm's now troubled relationship with Biology-online.
Apparently the editor-in-chief did none of those things. After all, it was "Friday before a long weekend." Everyone has things to do... places to go... people to meet.
Actually, they apparently did pretty much do that. When they didn't get a response back, they went ahead and reposted the original blog post. I'm a bit surprised. I would have thought that a manager would want to deal with the other person's manager quietly. That's just the way they usually want to handle things. Who's turf is who's is very important to managers. Normally, it would probably better to let the management of Biology Online have a crack at dealing with the problem first, and to apply pressure only if the results weren't satisfactory.
BTW, the guy who sent the email was fired, so there isn't a "troubled relationship" with Biology Online to deal with.
Regarding the first thing you think the Editor In Chief should have done, I'm not sure any verification from Dr. Lee was necessary, but I do think that Dr. Lee should have been notified as soon as the blog post was pulled and given an explanation. Dr. Lee would have been a lot less upset if she had just been told, "That email is clearly not acceptable. Let me handle it." Of course, the Editor In Chief had better handle it then.
I think the explanation for the tweet was lame, but at least DiChristina acknowledged that she screwed up.
My brief attempt to clarify, posted with the belief that “saying something is better than saying nothing,” clearly had the opposite effect. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had simply promised a fuller reply when I was able to be better connected and more thorough.
It's kind of hard for me to be very critical. After all, I just screwed up by not putting what I just said in my previous comment.
This was recently posted on Sci Am's website: A Message from Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief. It looks like a pretty reasonable explanation to me. The excuse is that it happened on a three-day weekend (Monday is Columbus Day in the USA) so they were short staffed. They were worried that if the accusation isn't correct, they could be sued, so they want to check the accuracy of the blog first. They acknowledge that they should have done better and claim that they will develop procedures for the future.
The FBI didn't seem to be deceived. A special agent talked to the informant, and didn't bother investigating any further. Guy Hottel (probably his superior) wrote a memo summarizing what the informant said. I think that was all that there was to it.
I misread something on another site. The informant was saying what an Air Force investigator supposedly said, not the other way around.
It is notable that the SA (FBI Special Agent) decided that what what the informant said wasn't worth investigating. That's in the PDF of the FBI memo.
I wish I could delete my own comments.
I agree that it's just "another sensationalist samzenpus headline", but I think that there was probably more to the original Air Force memo than what you said. IIRC, there actually was a crash in the area, apparently of a secret airplane. The USAF would naturally want to know how much foreign spies could learn from talking to the local population. It's not surprising that the USAF would have investigators find out and document what the locals would say about the crash, no matter how crazy it was.
I'm not saying Groklaw is without flaws but I am saying that the deletion of posts that are designed to discredit the site is not one of them. This has nothing to do with a "lack of transparency" because the posts that are deleted do not reflect PJ or the Groklaw community. The deleted posts lack transparency because they are almost always anonymous and they are almost always by someone pretending to be a member of the community who is not.
The problem is the deletion and sandboxing of comments that don't discredit Groklaw and that are perfectly consistent with her rules. They are often not anonymous and often by members of the community. Another problem is PJ and some of her supporters who keep hiding and misrepresenting what is going on.
If you continue to insist that what you said is true, please explain why so many of comments in the first corrections thread to this article were hidden, causing nsomos to start a second corrections thread because no one could see the first corrections thread. How were they posted anonymously? How did they discredit Groklaw? Doesn't it look like they were posted by a members of the community in order to be helpful?
For that matter, how is the unannounced sandboxing of comments ever consistent with transparency? The intent is clearly to mislead members of the Groklaw community into thinking that their comments are visible to others when they are not.
What shows she lacks integrity is deleting and sandboxing comments that aren't even close to being "terrible", than falsely claiming that she doesn't do that after she has the evidence hidden. Your claims of what the "truth" is are worthless. All you know about are the parts of the truth that you can see. You can't see what is missing.
How your comment gained the score for "5, Insightful" is beyond me. You paint everything in simplistic black and white terms and make broad claims as if what you can't see must not exist.
I can't read Brian Proffitt's article (I get an "Unsupported database type" error), but I can't hold out much hope for a "a bigger, more community-oriented site" given PJ's desire to limit and control what can be said. Already there isn't enough time for her to adequately review and consider whether or not comments actually deserve to be censored, nor even to explain her decisions afterward. It seems that she would prefer to have a small, pure, community rather than a large and potentially messy one. That limits its value to me.
Skimming through the comments so far, I get the impression that most people are concentrating on the argument that if a person can't pirate, that doesn't mean they will buy. TFA makes an even better point: They BSA assumed that, by value, 50% of the software in use is pirated. Otherwise a 10% reduction in piracy wouldn't result in a 10% increase in sales, even if all of the ex-pirates purchased. Gee, doesn't 50% seem a little high?
How did BSA get 50%? A questionable study said greater than 40%, and since 50% is greater than 40%, it must be the correct number. (The actual number was 43%, FWIW.
The earlier study included countries such as China and Russia and it appears (even the detailed version didn't really say) that they assumed that each piece of unlicensed software counted as much as each piece of licensed software. So every unlicensed copy of Windows 98 running on an underpowered PC in a third world or BRIC country was as valuable as any piece of brand-new business software.
One thing that makes this look like so much hoo-ha is that the "detailed studies" available as PDFs don't contain any collected data or details about methodology. It's just nicely presented conclusions and spin.
The part added by kdawson isn't quite right. The article is available on the New York Times website, but was not written by them. It obviously says: "By PAUL QUINLAN AND JOSH VOORHEES of Greenwire", "Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved", "Greenwire is published by Environment & Energy Publishing." The actual New York Times article was written by different people and doesn't say anyone was "awed."
In addition to what truthsearch said, Alex Brown was a very influential person in the "but it will be different this time" camp. It's getting to the point that there are very few credible people who aren't employed by Microsoft or its partners who would argue that anymore. So more governments may conclude that Office 2010 doesn't produce output that matches a valid ISO standard. Besides, people enjoy schadenfreude.
You are right, TFA did say the appellate court affirmed the lower court decision. I missed that. However, in an earlier blog post the same author said the appeals court overturned it. I think he forgot which way the lower court initially ruled. I admit that's sloppy. He definitely is an attorney, though, for what that's worth.
I don't think the legal costs to date were included. The reasonable costs and attorney fees mentioned in the settlement were for filing the stipulated judgment if Katzer doesn't make the payments on time. Also, if they had to go to arbitration in the future, the looser would pay the winner's attorney fees.
I think Katzer was trying to give himself time to come up with the money rather than having the court put a lien on him or forcing him to pay the money immediately. Jacobsen got the injunction he wanted, though (he doesn't seem to trust Katzer for some reason), and by being able to force Katzer into binding arbitration, he should be able to avoid the hassle and expense of the courts if Katzer starts misbehaving again.
No, as TFA, which was written by a lawyer, makes clear, the decisions of the lower court that weren't overturned create precedent as well. The idea is that the law is to be administered consistently, so judges will tend to rule consistent with previous decisions. Precedent created by a lower court isn't as weighty as that set by a higher court, but it still exists.
The decision by the appellate court was on a very important point. If copyright law couldn't be applied to software that is copied and distributed without payment, F/OSS would have lost an important weapon. It was important that the court ruled that this does not make the licenses too broad to be enforced. All of the logic used by the Court of Appeals to reach that conclusion also sets precedent (or strengthens previously existing precedent).
I don't understand why you are making a big deal about the fact that the case was heard in federal court. Federal courts have precedence over state courts in matters of federal law. Copyright law is federal law.
Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)?
At and before the time Linux was developed, yes, they behaved very differently. As a matter of fact, the real owners of the patents have always behaved differently. SCO never actually owned the patents, after all.
I'm in the real world, where I didn't say anything about PJ not being level-headed or insightful in absolute terms. I just said that Andy Updegrove is a bit more so. That was in the context of document standards, of course. That is much more his area of expertise than it is PJ's.
PJ was very level-headed and insightful when the subject was SCO's lawsuits. Her background was very relevant then. On subjects that don't have much to do with lawsuits or the GPL (e.g., OOXML) she often doesn't do as well.
To see what I mean, compare how PJ and Andy blogged about UOF when they first heard about it:
PJ was already declaring victory for ODF in 2006 (before OOXML even got to ISO/IEC) just because UOF existed and there was some people were interested in harmonizing UOF and ODF! If that doomed OOXML, what has all of the fuss in the last couple of years been about then?
Andy is a lawyer and mostly a big picture guy. If you want more technical details, you might want to check out some other blogs, such as Rob Weir's that talk about ODF, OOXML and so on. Rob is a co-chair of the OASIS ODF technical committee, so he knows what he's talking about. As a paralegal turned journalist, PJ just doesn't have the kind of background that bloggers like Rob and Andy have.
Next, when it is in autonomous flight mode, it fine tunes the control laws to optimize the chopper's performance.
I don't get the sense that there is really an autonomous flight mode. It sounded to me as if the helicopter only carries the instrumentation that needed to be on board ("accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers"). All smarts seemed to be on the ground.
Unfortunately the news release was written by a layman (a PR person, yet) for laymen, so you can't trust it.
There is another "fact" that can't hardly be correct:
How in any way do you come to that conclusion based upon the data in the story? ... Can we please get some editors that understand what they are reading?
From the article:
During a flight, some of the necessary instrumentation is mounted on the helicopter, some on the ground. Together, they continuously monitor the position, direction, orientation, velocity, acceleration and spin of the helicopter in several dimensions. A ground-based computer crunches the data, makes quick calculations and beams new flight directions to the helicopter via radio 20 times per second.
If the helicopter is being directed by a ground-based computer, it's not autonomous. Kdawson was correct this time. Yes, the article contradicts itself, but I think the most detailed information is correct. Whoever wrote that news release didn't seem to understand what they were writing.
RTFA, and even better, read the actual decision. The test doesn't work. As a practical matter, it won't detect anything whether the steer was infected or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The Scientific American editor didn't seem to realize that the guy at Biology Online had been fired.
2) Email the Biology-online editor and attempt to reach him by phone, and ask whether he in fact sent the email in question
Had the answer to point #2 been "yes", then Dr. Lee's blog post should have remained intact, and the next issue would be, what to do about SciAm's now troubled relationship with Biology-online.
Apparently the editor-in-chief did none of those things. After all, it was "Friday before a long weekend." Everyone has things to do... places to go... people to meet.
Actually, they apparently did pretty much do that. When they didn't get a response back, they went ahead and reposted the original blog post. I'm a bit surprised. I would have thought that a manager would want to deal with the other person's manager quietly. That's just the way they usually want to handle things. Who's turf is who's is very important to managers. Normally, it would probably better to let the management of Biology Online have a crack at dealing with the problem first, and to apply pressure only if the results weren't satisfactory.
BTW, the guy who sent the email was fired, so there isn't a "troubled relationship" with Biology Online to deal with.
Regarding the first thing you think the Editor In Chief should have done, I'm not sure any verification from Dr. Lee was necessary, but I do think that Dr. Lee should have been notified as soon as the blog post was pulled and given an explanation. Dr. Lee would have been a lot less upset if she had just been told, "That email is clearly not acceptable. Let me handle it." Of course, the Editor In Chief had better handle it then.
I think the explanation for the tweet was lame, but at least DiChristina acknowledged that she screwed up.
It's kind of hard for me to be very critical. After all, I just screwed up by not putting what I just said in my previous comment.
This was recently posted on Sci Am's website: A Message from Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief. It looks like a pretty reasonable explanation to me. The excuse is that it happened on a three-day weekend (Monday is Columbus Day in the USA) so they were short staffed. They were worried that if the accusation isn't correct, they could be sued, so they want to check the accuracy of the blog first. They acknowledge that they should have done better and claim that they will develop procedures for the future.
The FBI didn't seem to be deceived. A special agent talked to the informant, and didn't bother investigating any further. Guy Hottel (probably his superior) wrote a memo summarizing what the informant said. I think that was all that there was to it.
I misread something on another site. The informant was saying what an Air Force investigator supposedly said, not the other way around. It is notable that the SA (FBI Special Agent) decided that what what the informant said wasn't worth investigating. That's in the PDF of the FBI memo. I wish I could delete my own comments.
I agree that it's just "another sensationalist samzenpus headline", but I think that there was probably more to the original Air Force memo than what you said. IIRC, there actually was a crash in the area, apparently of a secret airplane. The USAF would naturally want to know how much foreign spies could learn from talking to the local population. It's not surprising that the USAF would have investigators find out and document what the locals would say about the crash, no matter how crazy it was.
I'm not saying Groklaw is without flaws but I am saying that the deletion of posts that are designed to discredit the site is not one of them. This has nothing to do with a "lack of transparency" because the posts that are deleted do not reflect PJ or the Groklaw community. The deleted posts lack transparency because they are almost always anonymous and they are almost always by someone pretending to be a member of the community who is not.
The problem is the deletion and sandboxing of comments that don't discredit Groklaw and that are perfectly consistent with her rules. They are often not anonymous and often by members of the community. Another problem is PJ and some of her supporters who keep hiding and misrepresenting what is going on.
If you continue to insist that what you said is true, please explain why so many of comments in the first corrections thread to this article were hidden, causing nsomos to start a second corrections thread because no one could see the first corrections thread. How were they posted anonymously? How did they discredit Groklaw? Doesn't it look like they were posted by a members of the community in order to be helpful?
For that matter, how is the unannounced sandboxing of comments ever consistent with transparency? The intent is clearly to mislead members of the Groklaw community into thinking that their comments are visible to others when they are not.
What shows she lacks integrity is deleting and sandboxing comments that aren't even close to being "terrible", than falsely claiming that she doesn't do that after she has the evidence hidden. Your claims of what the "truth" is are worthless. All you know about are the parts of the truth that you can see. You can't see what is missing.
How your comment gained the score for "5, Insightful" is beyond me. You paint everything in simplistic black and white terms and make broad claims as if what you can't see must not exist.
I can't read Brian Proffitt's article (I get an "Unsupported database type" error), but I can't hold out much hope for a "a bigger, more community-oriented site" given PJ's desire to limit and control what can be said. Already there isn't enough time for her to adequately review and consider whether or not comments actually deserve to be censored, nor even to explain her decisions afterward. It seems that she would prefer to have a small, pure, community rather than a large and potentially messy one. That limits its value to me.
Skimming through the comments so far, I get the impression that most people are concentrating on the argument that if a person can't pirate, that doesn't mean they will buy. TFA makes an even better point: They BSA assumed that, by value, 50% of the software in use is pirated. Otherwise a 10% reduction in piracy wouldn't result in a 10% increase in sales, even if all of the ex-pirates purchased. Gee, doesn't 50% seem a little high?
How did BSA get 50%? A questionable study said greater than 40%, and since 50% is greater than 40%, it must be the correct number. (The actual number was 43%, FWIW.
The earlier study included countries such as China and Russia and it appears (even the detailed version didn't really say) that they assumed that each piece of unlicensed software counted as much as each piece of licensed software. So every unlicensed copy of Windows 98 running on an underpowered PC in a third world or BRIC country was as valuable as any piece of brand-new business software.
One thing that makes this look like so much hoo-ha is that the "detailed studies" available as PDFs don't contain any collected data or details about methodology. It's just nicely presented conclusions and spin.
The part added by kdawson isn't quite right. The article is available on the New York Times website, but was not written by them. It obviously says: "By PAUL QUINLAN AND JOSH VOORHEES of Greenwire", "Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved", "Greenwire is published by Environment & Energy Publishing." The actual New York Times article was written by different people and doesn't say anyone was "awed."
In addition to what truthsearch said, Alex Brown was a very influential person in the "but it will be different this time" camp. It's getting to the point that there are very few credible people who aren't employed by Microsoft or its partners who would argue that anymore. So more governments may conclude that Office 2010 doesn't produce output that matches a valid ISO standard. Besides, people enjoy schadenfreude.
Any user flagged as a "hostile life form" is punished by the website playing Mr. Shatner's version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" the next time they access the site.
You are right, TFA did say the appellate court affirmed the lower court decision. I missed that. However, in an earlier blog post the same author said the appeals court overturned it. I think he forgot which way the lower court initially ruled. I admit that's sloppy. He definitely is an attorney, though, for what that's worth.
I don't think the legal costs to date were included. The reasonable costs and attorney fees mentioned in the settlement were for filing the stipulated judgment if Katzer doesn't make the payments on time. Also, if they had to go to arbitration in the future, the looser would pay the winner's attorney fees.
I think Katzer was trying to give himself time to come up with the money rather than having the court put a lien on him or forcing him to pay the money immediately. Jacobsen got the injunction he wanted, though (he doesn't seem to trust Katzer for some reason), and by being able to force Katzer into binding arbitration, he should be able to avoid the hassle and expense of the courts if Katzer starts misbehaving again.
No, as TFA, which was written by a lawyer, makes clear, the decisions of the lower court that weren't overturned create precedent as well. The idea is that the law is to be administered consistently, so judges will tend to rule consistent with previous decisions. Precedent created by a lower court isn't as weighty as that set by a higher court, but it still exists.
The decision by the appellate court was on a very important point. If copyright law couldn't be applied to software that is copied and distributed without payment, F/OSS would have lost an important weapon. It was important that the court ruled that this does not make the licenses too broad to be enforced. All of the logic used by the Court of Appeals to reach that conclusion also sets precedent (or strengthens previously existing precedent).
I don't understand why you are making a big deal about the fact that the case was heard in federal court. Federal courts have precedence over state courts in matters of federal law. Copyright law is federal law.
... and the rulings will likely be influential in other circuits, as explained in TFA.
TFA might be getting slashdotted, though. Google has it cached: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.consortiuminfo.org%2Fstandardsblog%2Farticle.php%3Fstory%3D201002190850472
"Purity". You make it sound like the Aryan Brotherhood or something.
Well, this discussion wouldn't be complete without some mention of Nazis or Neo-Nazis, I guess.
Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)?
At and before the time Linux was developed, yes, they behaved very differently. As a matter of fact, the real owners of the patents have always behaved differently. SCO never actually owned the patents, after all.
I'm in the real world, where I didn't say anything about PJ not being level-headed or insightful in absolute terms. I just said that Andy Updegrove is a bit more so. That was in the context of document standards, of course. That is much more his area of expertise than it is PJ's.
PJ was very level-headed and insightful when the subject was SCO's lawsuits. Her background was very relevant then. On subjects that don't have much to do with lawsuits or the GPL (e.g., OOXML) she often doesn't do as well.
To see what I mean, compare how PJ and Andy blogged about UOF when they first heard about it:
PJ was already declaring victory for ODF in 2006 (before OOXML even got to ISO/IEC) just because UOF existed and there was some people were interested in harmonizing UOF and ODF! If that doomed OOXML, what has all of the fuss in the last couple of years been about then?
Andy is a lawyer and mostly a big picture guy. If you want more technical details, you might want to check out some other blogs, such as Rob Weir's that talk about ODF, OOXML and so on. Rob is a co-chair of the OASIS ODF technical committee, so he knows what he's talking about. As a paralegal turned journalist, PJ just doesn't have the kind of background that bloggers like Rob and Andy have.
Next, when it is in autonomous flight mode, it fine tunes the control laws to optimize the chopper's performance.
I don't get the sense that there is really an autonomous flight mode. It sounded to me as if the helicopter only carries the instrumentation that needed to be on board ("accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers"). All smarts seemed to be on the ground.
Unfortunately the news release was written by a layman (a PR person, yet) for laymen, so you can't trust it.
There is another "fact" that can't hardly be correct:
The piÃce de résistance may have been the "tic toc," in which the helicopter, while pointed straight up, hovers with a side-to-side motion as if it were the pendulum of an upside down clock.
I don't know much about model helicopters, but I find it hard to believe that they can hover with a pitch angle of 90 degrees!
How in any way do you come to that conclusion based upon the data in the story?
...
Can we please get some editors that understand what they are reading?
From the article:
During a flight, some of the necessary instrumentation is mounted on the helicopter, some on the ground. Together, they continuously monitor the position, direction, orientation, velocity, acceleration and spin of the helicopter in several dimensions. A ground-based computer crunches the data, makes quick calculations and beams new flight directions to the helicopter via radio 20 times per second.
If the helicopter is being directed by a ground-based computer, it's not autonomous. Kdawson was correct this time. Yes, the article contradicts itself, but I think the most detailed information is correct. Whoever wrote that news release didn't seem to understand what they were writing.
Andy Updegrove does, too. As usual, he's a bit more level-headed and insightful than PJ.
RTFA, and even better, read the actual decision. The test doesn't work. As a practical matter, it won't detect anything whether the steer was infected or not.