As a practical matter, the way court procedures work, a juror is extremely unlikely to know if any evidence has been withheld. It's a classic catch-22.
1. The FSF attorneys, who arguably have more expereince than anyone else on the planet with how copyright law effects open source software, decide that in your case pretending that the effects of the law are actually different from what they believe them to be is a good idea.
Fundamentally good questions. To which I would add: Lack of a CLA caused a project to be unable to update to a better license. Lack of a CLA caused a project to be lost to the public domain. Lack of a CLA caused an open source project to be captured by corporate interests.
OK, so I guess you are a slow reader. The door is not being shut on you. Part of being welcomed into the house is not pissing on the carpet, and not skinning and grilling the kids' cat for lunch.
Ummmm.... no. It's to provide a chain of provenance for all contributions that is defensible in court. Without that, it is often impractical to defend your code base against a legal attack.
I went to a high school that sounds similar to yours, so I understand what you are saying. My high school was the fourth largest school district in the state -- in square miles -- but graduating classes were under 200 students. There is a huge opportunity for change, and rural schools like that can lead the way. Clayton Christensen wrote a book called "Disrupting Class" which outlines possibilities for education reform that could be achieved in the next few years. With the advent of so many online classes, rural high schools could switch over to a model where specialized material is delivered online, and the local faculty act more as tutors rather than lecturers.
We homeschool, and already follow a similar online+tutor model, but without the bricks-and-morter school part. My daughter did calculus through Art-of-Problem-Solving, is doing AP German through Oklahoma State, did AP Comp Sci through EIMACS. There is no reason those same classes can't be had in any rural high school in any part of fly-over-land, supported by local faculty who will have more time for one-on-one support since they won't have as much prep and delivery time.
The school system is b0rk3d. Even here in well-funded suburbia.
You're only about 150 years behind the times. Stephen Foster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Foster was one of the first people to try to make a living as a song writer. He worked pretty hard to get copyrights on sheet music honored, because illicit copying (I hate the term piracy, except as applied to actual, you know, sea-going piriates like you find off Somalia or in the South China Sea...) ate into his income pretty badly. (My friend http://www.joeweed.com/ is a musician, musicologist, recording engineer, and Stephen Foster history fanatic.)
First, yes, let's get this discusson off of slashdot. It is sad when articles on robotics get 60 comments total, and firearms flamewars get to 500 in a few hours. But..
> no one believes, rationally, that Americans should be allowed to own/operate any kind of weaponry without limit.
What do you think the founders believed? In the early revolutionary period, the US had no navy. They issued letters of marque to privately owned, armed ships. As in: private individuals owned war ships.
The consitution has a mechanism to amend it. If you don't like what it says, use that. Letting 9 old timers in black robes try to convince us to collectively believe that it means something other than the plain words on the paper is caustic to the rule of law.
But yes, the debate should be about where to draw the line today, in the here-and-now. But, please, don't try to tell me "well, this week, this is what these words mean." Becuase I'm not buying it.
I'll agree, and add that it takes a certain amount of time to get into the 'Zen' of any particular language. I've been programming since the 1970's, and lost track of the number of languages I have used. When I learned Python, I was productive immediately -- but my code looked more like C or C++. It took me a while to learn to think in 'Pythonic' code, with list comprehensions, generators, etc. Same for Prolog -- Prolog does not become natural in a week.
I'm doubtful that a week spent on any one language can give anyone the sense of it's underpinnings. As a friend once said: "A good programmer can write FORTRAN in any language."
This. Rule number 1 for managers: have clear goals, and communicate them. Rule #2: make sure the team has what they need.
The best boss I ever had was an ex-Israeli commando officer. No, no, no, he wasn't a "do it or I kill you" manager. He was good because: 1) there was never, ever, any doubt in your mind whatsoever what he wanted accomplished. 2) When you told him what you needed to accomplish that, he either got it, or adjusted the goal. When you think about it, no good officer sends in a team of commandos with a fuzzy objective and poorly equipped. To do otherwise it to spend too much of your life writing unpleasant letters to parents.
Synthetic files at least have the advantage of automatically generated expected results files to go with them. Coming up with a good noise model seems to be the hard part. Perhaps record off-the-air noise and summing that into clean computer generated CW receive audio is a way to get a reasonable start on a channel model that has a more realistic HF noise model. Fading is easy enough to add to a propagation model, which could be extended to auroral flutter and backscatter.. Of course, you also need a sender model if you want to deal with poor hand-key sent code, badly-adjusted-bug code, and strangely-weighter-keyer code. Then you need a transmitter model to deal with mushy or clicky attack. An interference model could deal with adjacent and zero-beat interfering transmitters. One of the problems with the interference model is that you need to model the AGC profile of the receiver -- agressive AGC will make all stations in the passband equally loud, a more useful AGC will retain more of the signal strength difference (which is why contesters dumped FT-1000MP's when the Elecraft radios came out.)
All that modelling sounds nasty, but I think that is an easier way to get a test base than recording off-the-air. Getting enough of all of those test cases to fill in a test matrix is a huge cataloging effort. And then you need go create expected results. The synthetic audio files at least have the virtue of precisely controlled test conditions and give you expected results for free.
So it isn't that hard to record 200 KHz wide segments of an HF band using something like this: http://rfspace.com/RFSPACE/SDR-IQ.html How many hours of test audio do you need? If you had a few volunteer owners of SDRs do some recording for you, you would have a large test base quickly. Unless I complete misunderstand the scale of the test base that you are going after. But it seems to me that 100 or 200 hours should not be difficult to get from volunteers -- and 200 hours times 200 KHz is a lot of CW audio.
So.... I guess you've never heard of skimmer, the various remote receivers out there, and the SDR's that people are using to record large swathes of shortwave spectrum? You know people have been working on the problem for a while, as in decades? Skimmer decodes multiple streams of morse at once. Wake me when your stuff outperforms skimmer.
Here is the counter-argument: Should we remake the human world to accomodate our technology, or design the technology to fit into our world? Humans climb stairs. Your robot should, too. Humans can fold in the middle so that they can ride in the back seat of a car, and furthermore, are self-loading. I don't want to create a whole bunch of infrastructure to coddle some dumb robots. They should adjust to a world that is comfortable for me.
I have some experience with this as a manager. I had an employee (good, productive, employee), who was, unknown to me, bipolar. Meds kept it pretty well under control. For some reason or another, he changed doctors -- first one moved away or whatever. Anyway, the new MD decided to tinker with the meds. It didn't work out well. Severely abridged version of story: after the worst 3 days of my life as a manager ever, plus 2 HR reps, plus company nurse, plus N other impacted idividuals, we finally got him help. He was on medical leave for several weeks after that before things got put right again.
Here is the thing: he had plenty of friends in the company who would have been in the position to notice something going awry and heading off the trouble before it became a crisis. So, make a friend you can trust. One to whom you are not afraid to say: "My doctor is adjusting my medication. Watch for anything strange. If the wheels come off, here is my brother's phone number."
To pretend that the USA is not facing multiple existential threats every day is naive and childish. While I agree that the NSA has become a rogue agency and needs badly to be reigned in, denying that threats exist is not the way to start a reasoned argument for something better, something that is in keeping with the constitution and at the same time acknowledges that multiple, severe threats are always directed at us.
Well, sort of. What makes it safe to be around is that it is low mass, has a low upper speed bound, and is back-drivable. The UBR-1 arm is not counterbalanced in the same way that the PR-2 arm is, so the UBR-1 arm consumes power holding up an object proportional to the torque required to hold station. That varies with how far out from the "shoulder" the load is held.
Given that you could design the mass and speed such that the arm could hold a larger load and still be safe to be around outside of a cage, large load capacity would translate into larger motors, which translates into larger batteries, which translates into a larger robot, which translates into still larger batteries. Then it starts getting expensive.
But both sides really *are* authoritarian. The Reps don't want to dismantle the nanny state. They just want to fire the current nanny and bring in their own to enforce a different set of rules.
Exactly. The FCC has rf safety guidelines that all rf emitters need to meet. Even us ham radio operators are supposed to do an assessment of their own stations. I'd like to see what kind of field strengths they are talking about and at what frequencies and distances.
Also.... having some familiarity with CAN bus and auto electronics, I'm wondering exactly how they can say that their pulse generator only applies the brakes and makes the radio wacky. Why wouldn't some random disruption cause, say, the fuel injection system to go to full throttle? Or maybe the brakes on only one side of the car go full on? Or the automatic transmission to start shifting randomly?
The validation test matrix for this kind of device is impractically huge, and the safety implications of a missed case are severe.
So, if humans can sue to say that monkeys are not property, but deserve rights as humans, then what is to stop my cat from suing to have me legally declared it's property and servant? After all, that would only be making the de facto the de jure.
Well, the nature of the community support is important, too. I used to be a very active Gentoo user. The support community was great, for me. I found on the Gentoo forums you could ask an intelligent question about a deep technical issue, and immediately get several intelligent responses/suggestions. The Ubuntu support forums have been totally and absolutely useless for me -- on the Ubuntu forums, a simple, newbie question gets many cheerful responses. A question on a deep technical edge-case.... crickets chirping. Ubuntu forums did me no good -- I don't have newbie *nix questions, I got those answered in 1979.
OTOH... I moved away from Gentoo. I got tired of the treadmill. Basically, if I didn't update weekly, the systems would fall too far behind to be updateable without severe breakage. That is not a bad thing in some instances, it just doesn't mesh with my workflow. The support community was one of the attractions of staying with Gentoo -- but the update management implementation didn't work for me. The general cluelessness of the Ubuntu support forums has been a annoyance to me since ever since I built my first Ubuntu system. The only thing that makes me keep Ubuntu around is that application stacks that I use are built/released first for Ubuntu. I wish Ubuntu would hurry up and die already so that those applications would pick a different lead development platform.
So I agree that the support community is an important factor in chosing a distro that is right for you -- but I think the most important factor about a support community is whether or not they can actually help with the particular problems that you have, and that is not one-size-fits-all.
I agree, leftists want a society where they get to tell everyone else what to do. Unfortunately, the right also wants a society where they get to tell everyone else what to do. In the US, the Republicans don't want to dismantle the nanny state. They want to fire the current nanny and replace her with a nanny that enforces a different set of rules.
What we really need is a debate about the legitimate powers of government.
Anarchist: There are no legitimate powers of government. Libertarian: Most libertarians consider enforcing contracts to be a legitimate power of government, but start sqabbling amongst themselves if you go beyond that. Founders of the republic: Enforce contracts, defend the republic against existential threats, prevent tragedy of the commons, construct infrastructure for common benefit. Current politicians, both R and D: Tell me how to live my life. (Yo, Bloomberg, if I want a 32 oz soda, what the hell business is that of yours? Hey, you R's over there: if my friend wants to marry someone of the same sex, how is that bad for the rest of us?)
If that's the case, it should be pretty easy to crap-flood them. Does it even need a be from a TV? I presume the TV reports it's identifcation with a serial number or such. So... make up a few valid serial numbers, and spin up a few AZW instances, and for pennies a day their database could be filled with so much invalid and malformed data that they never crawl out from under it. Also, why is the cheif of police watching so much porn?
When there are at least two good choices for open source electronic design automation tools (gEDA and KiCAD, maybe others), why is it that Adafruit uses closed-source and cripple-ware EDA tools for their open hardware? Linux has proven that open source tools, not just open applications, are important in maintaining healthy open ecosystem. Adafruit seems to be missing an opportunity to provide leadership in this area.
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As a practical matter, the way court procedures work, a juror is extremely unlikely to know if any evidence has been withheld. It's a classic catch-22.
OK, so I see three solutions to your problem:
1. The FSF attorneys, who arguably have more expereince than anyone else on the planet with how copyright law effects open source software, decide that in your case pretending that the effects of the law are actually different from what they believe them to be is a good idea.
2. Your employer stops being a dick.
3. You find an employer that is not a dick.
Fundamentally good questions. To which I would add: Lack of a CLA caused a project to be unable to update to a better license. Lack of a CLA caused a project to be lost to the public domain. Lack of a CLA caused an open source project to be captured by corporate interests.
OK, so I guess you are a slow reader. The door is not being shut on you. Part of being welcomed into the house is not pissing on the carpet, and not skinning and grilling the kids' cat for lunch.
Ummmm.... no. It's to provide a chain of provenance for all contributions that is defensible in court. Without that, it is often impractical to defend your code base against a legal attack.
I went to a high school that sounds similar to yours, so I understand what you are saying. My high school was the fourth largest school district in the state -- in square miles -- but graduating classes were under 200 students. There is a huge opportunity for change, and rural schools like that can lead the way. Clayton Christensen wrote a book called "Disrupting Class" which outlines possibilities for education reform that could be achieved in the next few years. With the advent of so many online classes, rural high schools could switch over to a model where specialized material is delivered online, and the local faculty act more as tutors rather than lecturers.
We homeschool, and already follow a similar online+tutor model, but without the bricks-and-morter school part. My daughter did calculus through Art-of-Problem-Solving, is doing AP German through Oklahoma State, did AP Comp Sci through EIMACS. There is no reason those same classes can't be had in any rural high school in any part of fly-over-land, supported by local faculty who will have more time for one-on-one support since they won't have as much prep and delivery time.
The school system is b0rk3d. Even here in well-funded suburbia.
You're only about 150 years behind the times. Stephen Foster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Foster was one of the first people to try to make a living as a song writer. He worked pretty hard to get copyrights on sheet music honored, because illicit copying (I hate the term piracy, except as applied to actual, you know, sea-going piriates like you find off Somalia or in the South China Sea...) ate into his income pretty badly. (My friend http://www.joeweed.com/ is a musician, musicologist, recording engineer, and Stephen Foster history fanatic.)
First, yes, let's get this discusson off of slashdot. It is sad when articles on robotics get 60 comments total, and firearms flamewars get to 500 in a few hours. But..
> no one believes, rationally, that Americans should be allowed to own/operate any kind of weaponry without limit.
What do you think the founders believed? In the early revolutionary period, the US had no navy. They issued letters of marque to privately owned, armed ships. As in: private individuals owned war ships.
The consitution has a mechanism to amend it. If you don't like what it says, use that. Letting 9 old timers in black robes try to convince us to collectively believe that it means something other than the plain words on the paper is caustic to the rule of law.
But yes, the debate should be about where to draw the line today, in the here-and-now. But, please, don't try to tell me "well, this week, this is what these words mean." Becuase I'm not buying it.
I'll agree, and add that it takes a certain amount of time to get into the 'Zen' of any particular language. I've been programming since the 1970's, and lost track of the number of languages I have used. When I learned Python, I was productive immediately -- but my code looked more like C or C++. It took me a while to learn to think in 'Pythonic' code, with list comprehensions, generators, etc. Same for Prolog -- Prolog does not become natural in a week.
I'm doubtful that a week spent on any one language can give anyone the sense of it's underpinnings. As a friend once said: "A good programmer can write FORTRAN in any language."
This. Rule number 1 for managers: have clear goals, and communicate them. Rule #2: make sure the team has what they need.
The best boss I ever had was an ex-Israeli commando officer. No, no, no, he wasn't a "do it or I kill you" manager. He was good because: 1) there was never, ever, any doubt in your mind whatsoever what he wanted accomplished. 2) When you told him what you needed to accomplish that, he either got it, or adjusted the goal. When you think about it, no good officer sends in a team of commandos with a fuzzy objective and poorly equipped. To do otherwise it to spend too much of your life writing unpleasant letters to parents.
Synthetic files at least have the advantage of automatically generated expected results files to go with them. Coming up with a good noise model seems to be the hard part. Perhaps record off-the-air noise and summing that into clean computer generated CW receive audio is a way to get a reasonable start on a channel model that has a more realistic HF noise model. Fading is easy enough to add to a propagation model, which could be extended to auroral flutter and backscatter.. Of course, you also need a sender model if you want to deal with poor hand-key sent code, badly-adjusted-bug code, and strangely-weighter-keyer code. Then you need a transmitter model to deal with mushy or clicky attack. An interference model could deal with adjacent and zero-beat interfering transmitters. One of the problems with the interference model is that you need to model the AGC profile of the receiver -- agressive AGC will make all stations in the passband equally loud, a more useful AGC will retain more of the signal strength difference (which is why contesters dumped FT-1000MP's when the Elecraft radios came out.)
All that modelling sounds nasty, but I think that is an easier way to get a test base than recording off-the-air. Getting enough of all of those test cases to fill in a test matrix is a huge cataloging effort. And then you need go create expected results. The synthetic audio files at least have the virtue of precisely controlled test conditions and give you expected results for free.
So it isn't that hard to record 200 KHz wide segments of an HF band using something like this: http://rfspace.com/RFSPACE/SDR-IQ.html How many hours of test audio do you need? If you had a few volunteer owners of SDRs do some recording for you, you would have a large test base quickly. Unless I complete misunderstand the scale of the test base that you are going after. But it seems to me that 100 or 200 hours should not be difficult to get from volunteers -- and 200 hours times 200 KHz is a lot of CW audio.
So.... I guess you've never heard of skimmer, the various remote receivers out there, and the SDR's that people are using to record large swathes of shortwave spectrum? You know people have been working on the problem for a while, as in decades? Skimmer decodes multiple streams of morse at once. Wake me when your stuff outperforms skimmer.
Here is the counter-argument: Should we remake the human world to accomodate our technology, or design the technology to fit into our world? Humans climb stairs. Your robot should, too. Humans can fold in the middle so that they can ride in the back seat of a car, and furthermore, are self-loading. I don't want to create a whole bunch of infrastructure to coddle some dumb robots. They should adjust to a world that is comfortable for me.
I have some experience with this as a manager. I had an employee (good, productive, employee), who was, unknown to me, bipolar. Meds kept it pretty well under control. For some reason or another, he changed doctors -- first one moved away or whatever. Anyway, the new MD decided to tinker with the meds. It didn't work out well. Severely abridged version of story: after the worst 3 days of my life as a manager ever, plus 2 HR reps, plus company nurse, plus N other impacted idividuals, we finally got him help. He was on medical leave for several weeks after that before things got put right again.
Here is the thing: he had plenty of friends in the company who would have been in the position to notice something going awry and heading off the trouble before it became a crisis. So, make a friend you can trust. One to whom you are not afraid to say: "My doctor is adjusting my medication. Watch for anything strange. If the wheels come off, here is my brother's phone number."
To pretend that the USA is not facing multiple existential threats every day is naive and childish. While I agree that the NSA has become a rogue agency and needs badly to be reigned in, denying that threats exist is not the way to start a reasoned argument for something better, something that is in keeping with the constitution and at the same time acknowledges that multiple, severe threats are always directed at us.
Well, sort of. What makes it safe to be around is that it is low mass, has a low upper speed bound, and is back-drivable. The UBR-1 arm is not counterbalanced in the same way that the PR-2 arm is, so the UBR-1 arm consumes power holding up an object proportional to the torque required to hold station. That varies with how far out from the "shoulder" the load is held.
Given that you could design the mass and speed such that the arm could hold a larger load and still be safe to be around outside of a cage, large load capacity would translate into larger motors, which translates into larger batteries, which translates into a larger robot, which translates into still larger batteries. Then it starts getting expensive.
But both sides really *are* authoritarian. The Reps don't want to dismantle the nanny state. They just want to fire the current nanny and bring in their own to enforce a different set of rules.
Exactly. The FCC has rf safety guidelines that all rf emitters need to meet. Even us ham radio operators are supposed to do an assessment of their own stations. I'd like to see what kind of field strengths they are talking about and at what frequencies and distances.
Also.... having some familiarity with CAN bus and auto electronics, I'm wondering exactly how they can say that their pulse generator only applies the brakes and makes the radio wacky. Why wouldn't some random disruption cause, say, the fuel injection system to go to full throttle? Or maybe the brakes on only one side of the car go full on? Or the automatic transmission to start shifting randomly?
The validation test matrix for this kind of device is impractically huge, and the safety implications of a missed case are severe.
So, if humans can sue to say that monkeys are not property, but deserve rights as humans, then what is to stop my cat from suing to have me legally declared it's property and servant? After all, that would only be making the de facto the de jure.
Well, the nature of the community support is important, too. I used to be a very active Gentoo user. The support community was great, for me. I found on the Gentoo forums you could ask an intelligent question about a deep technical issue, and immediately get several intelligent responses/suggestions. The Ubuntu support forums have been totally and absolutely useless for me -- on the Ubuntu forums, a simple, newbie question gets many cheerful responses. A question on a deep technical edge-case.... crickets chirping. Ubuntu forums did me no good -- I don't have newbie *nix questions, I got those answered in 1979.
OTOH... I moved away from Gentoo. I got tired of the treadmill. Basically, if I didn't update weekly, the systems would fall too far behind to be updateable without severe breakage. That is not a bad thing in some instances, it just doesn't mesh with my workflow. The support community was one of the attractions of staying with Gentoo -- but the update management implementation didn't work for me. The general cluelessness of the Ubuntu support forums has been a annoyance to me since ever since I built my first Ubuntu system. The only thing that makes me keep Ubuntu around is that application stacks that I use are built/released first for Ubuntu. I wish Ubuntu would hurry up and die already so that those applications would pick a different lead development platform.
So I agree that the support community is an important factor in chosing a distro that is right for you -- but I think the most important factor about a support community is whether or not they can actually help with the particular problems that you have, and that is not one-size-fits-all.
I agree, leftists want a society where they get to tell everyone else what to do. Unfortunately, the right also wants a society where they get to tell everyone else what to do. In the US, the Republicans don't want to dismantle the nanny state. They want to fire the current nanny and replace her with a nanny that enforces a different set of rules.
What we really need is a debate about the legitimate powers of government.
Anarchist: There are no legitimate powers of government.
Libertarian: Most libertarians consider enforcing contracts to be a legitimate power of government, but start sqabbling amongst themselves if you go beyond that.
Founders of the republic: Enforce contracts, defend the republic against existential threats, prevent tragedy of the commons, construct infrastructure for common benefit.
Current politicians, both R and D: Tell me how to live my life. (Yo, Bloomberg, if I want a 32 oz soda, what the hell business is that of yours? Hey, you R's over there: if my friend wants to marry someone of the same sex, how is that bad for the rest of us?)
Wait.... I thought Norway was part of Denmark before independence in 1905...
If that's the case, it should be pretty easy to crap-flood them. Does it even need a be from a TV? I presume the TV reports it's identifcation with a serial number or such. So... make up a few valid serial numbers, and spin up a few AZW instances, and for pennies a day their database could be filled with so much invalid and malformed data that they never crawl out from under it. Also, why is the cheif of police watching so much porn?
When there are at least two good choices for open source electronic design automation tools (gEDA and KiCAD, maybe others), why is it that Adafruit uses closed-source and cripple-ware EDA tools for their open hardware? Linux has proven that open source tools, not just open applications, are important in maintaining healthy open ecosystem. Adafruit seems to be missing an opportunity to provide leadership in this area.