Google is being "sued in to bankruptcy" for the Apache Harmony Java VM which has a BSD-like license.
That is quite the misrepresentation. This thread is about Google supposedly misusing the Linux kernel headers which are GPL'd, this controversy is over a copyright violation. The Google / Oracle suit is over patent violations, the BSD license is a non issue in this case.
Stripping license text from source files *is* a violation even of some BSD licenses.
Thats a straw man. The issue in the current controversy is that if Google loses then third party app developers might be forced to open their source code per GPL requirements (its not my theory, its what this/. article offers). I don't think this is very likely, but such a situation is not even possible under BSD since there is no requirement to publish source code.
For a large project one could create an organization that would hold the copyright of the entire project.... I'm not sure what the downside of such a scheme would be but I'm sure some kind soul out there could enlighten me.
Yes. The issue is that now you are putting faith in an organization to "do the right thing", an organization which has far more power to alter licensing terms than the FSF does. (After all, the FSF is unable to take away rights granted by a previous version of the GPL, whereas the copyright holder can.)
Thanks. I knew there was something wrong with my off-the-cuff solution.:-)
I see. And would you characterise your support for BSD licenses as... ideological?
So pointing out that a legal issue is GPL specific and does not affect open source is general is ideological. That's an interesting perspective.
If you can concede that being able to use a mature existing codebase is one of the main reason people use open source code in their projects...
BSD offers a mature code base.
... and if you concede that a large amount of open source code is only available under the GPL, then it follows that anyone who wants to develop something related to said GPL-only code, would be dissuaded from developing an open source project at all.
No. The condition that someone wants to develop something related to GPL'd code is fallacious. The original post mentioned open source in general, source code utilizing other licenses can be used. For example while Google chose GPL based code Apple, Sun, etc chose BSD based code.
Want to use GPL 3, go ahead, but you would be wise to delete any "version 3 or any future version" type of language. Wait to see what that future version actually contains and make sure its goals are in line with your goals.
While this advice is reasonable if there are very few contributors to a project, it doesn't work at all for large projects. By chosing only GPL vX, you have basically made it impossible for you to ever select a later version of the GPL unless you can get all contributors to sign off. But then again, some consider that to be a feature.
For a large project one could create an organization that would hold the copyright of the entire project. Contributors being required to grant non-exlcusive rights to this group. With this project being GPL'd one should be able to incorporate updates made by others to your original contribution in your own personal GPL'd projects. I'm not sure what the downside of such a scheme would be but I'm sure some kind soul out there could enlighten me. It does not seem terribly different from the FSF's suggestion of assigning the copyright of your GPL'd project to them.
Which explains why BSD is so much more popular than Linux, right? I humbly suggest you go check out netcraft.
That's a straw man. The GP said that issues like these drive people away from open source. I pointed out that not all open source has these issues. My point stands.
is simply this... when a new version of the GPL comes out and you wish to continue using the GPL, all future licensed software must be released under the new GPL license. GPL 3 is amazing, but too few people are using it.
Great idea, what could possibly go wrong with giving an ideological organization a blank check to do whatever they want with your work.
Want to use GPL 3, go ahead, but you would be wise to delete any "version 3 or any future version" type of language. Wait to see what that future version actually contains and make sure its goals are in line with your goals. Giving blind faith to the FSF seems equivalent to giving blind faith to a church. Do so if you like but at least be aware of your "follower" nature.
Some headers may be copyrightable. A header that merely contains #defines and prototypes may not be copyrightable, but a header that also contains macros or template definitions that implement logic may be copyrightable.
And every time issues like this come out, it drives people further away from developing Open Source alternatives. They think "If Google is having this much trouble, we'll get sued in to bankruptcy!"
Not quite. Replace "Open Source" with "GPL". There is no such fear among users of BSD and comparable licenses. I'm not saying the GPL is bad, I am just saying that there are costs associated with everything. If your license is viral, restrictive or ideological then its adoption will be impeded to some degree despite any idealistic motivations.
and the best you could do was..."Individual Gunshot Detector"
And what's even weirder is that the acronym that TFA attaches to that is IDG.
LOL, IDK, shouldn't it be IGD?
Assuming its not a typo there actually is logic for IDG. Military nomenclature likes a noun,adjective type of format. Consider:
Individual Detector, Gunshot
Individual Detector, Explosion
Individual Detector, Radiation
Individual Detector, Chemical
Seeing something labeled IDx would then suggest its basic function of individual detector.
You'd think with the enormous increase in processing power experienced over the past 4 decades, the amount of money required for operating the credit card networks would have plummeted. So why are credit card fees still anywhere from 2% on up (borne by sellers)?
That increase of processing power is accompanied by increased use of credit and debit cards. Also there may be some requirements of locality, that a transaction processor must be inside some jurisdiction. Quality of service may also dictate locality. So its not clear that they can use consolidation and other techniques to reduce their costs.
And is it (much) more expensive to send $100 vs. $10?
Think of other credit card benefits like automatic extension of your warranty. I had a TV go bad 13 months into a 12 month warranty. The manufacturer's warranty did not cover this, the credit card's extended warranty covered this. This extended warranty has to cost something proportional to the charge.
Maybe this was not the best translation, and maybe these phrases have a cultural meaning that is not apparent, but the codes seem to lean in favor of the defendant:
"... the juror's oath explicitly recommended that the jury did not betray the interests of the defendants, and took attention of the means of defense... and mandated the court to appoint the defendant a lawyer if the defendant did not have one (failure to do so rendered the proceedings null)."
That said it does not seem as explicit as "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", but hey, I'm just looking at a wiki article.
Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting.
IIRC this particular aircraft does not reposition the manual throttle controls as the autopilot changes thrust. I can not image why it is designed to work in this manner. There is a theory that while maneuvering to avoid weather the autopilot reduced thrust below what the levers were visually indicating.
More specifically, the simulation shown in the episode was conducted by two instructor pilots, whose first reaction to the loss of airspeed indications was to (as you mentioned) set a specific thrust setting (86%, IIRC), and to set a specific attitude (5 nose-up, IIRC), which, as stated in the episode, for the A330 will cause the aircraft to settle at a safe airspeed (too fast or slow = stall). Other posts, and the NOVA episode, mention the compilation of singular issues that compounded to a fatal accident. Its interesting to me how often a simple procedure (such as a thrust & pitch setting) can negate the world conspiring against you.
I believe the episode also showed an arguable design flaw. IIRC the manual throttle control levers are not automatically repositioned as the autopilots changes the thrust. Other aircraft do so, this particular aircraft does not. So the levels could visually seem to be at an 86% setting while in reality they are at a lower setting recently set by the autopilot prior to its disengaging. I'm not sure if the flight simulator recreations included the maneuvering around weather that may have left the controls in the visually erroneous position.
They should know how to handle all the information that is being given to them by all the sensors and dials in the cockpit.
The problem is that the failure was in the sensors providing the pilots/instruments with data. When flying in instrument only conditions, at night over the atlantic with no visual references, the pilot's human senses can provide no information (or they provide incorrect information - part of instrument training is to ignore your senses and trust the instruments) and the pilot *must* have sensor data / instruments.
I think it is unfair to blame the pilots at this point. It may be more of a design error, a lack of a redundant/alternative source of flight data or some way to avoid the pitot tube failure. Upgrades being made to the pitot tubes suggest the later.
By the way, they don't know what happened. They never found the black box or anything like that.
Actually they do have something "like that". The aircraft computers automatically sent diagnostic messages including alerts of various system failures to Air France via satellite. Think of it as text messages. I believe these messages document pitot tube flight data failures and the disengaging of autopilot and autothrust systems. This led investigators to construct reasonable theories of loss of control and to replay these failures in a flight simulator to evaluate crew responses and standard procedures.
The only thing that reliably motivates behavior is the structure of incentives. Senior management's bonuses must suffer and shareholder dividends and investments must suffer when a corporation commits serious criminal offenses. Yes some shareholders may be innocent "widows and orphans", retirees, etc but the risk of losses should make them a little more careful about where they invest. Perhaps the risk will incentive shareholders to pressure the board of directors to do its jobs of oversight, representing the shareholder's interests. Regarding employees, perhaps fines could only be paid from bonus pools, retained earnings, etc and not operating funds where payroll normally comes from -- yes I'm not quite sure how to implement this particular concept, accounting tricks to work around this would need to be criminalized.
Anyway, this decision looks like just about every other descision France makes when prosecuting over aircraft disasters - place the blame on every party except any that are French.
Airbus is a subsidiary of EADS, EADS is part French and IIRC the French government owns part of this. Air France is, as its name suggests, French. I'm a little confused as to how the French are blaming others with respect to this Rio/Paris flight, I don't see the parallels to Concorde.
French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
Those that I know from France, and those that I know that took goverment classes in French Universities (but were not French) say that their legal system is much less innocent until proven guilty than ours. Is England just that much worse, or am I misinformed? It is a fairly small sampling, but they are educated people. Ours being American (in the USA sense).
It seems that both Napoleonic and Common Law declare a suspect innocent until proven guilty. According to the wiki article the guilty until proven innocent charge seems to be made due to the ability to hold someone in custody prior to trial when the charge is serious, ex murder. To be honest I am a little confused as to how this differs from the US legal system where a murder suspect may be denied bail. Perhaps it has to do with the right to a speedy trial? I'm just guessing. Maybe its merely anti-Napoleon propaganda from centuries ago? Maybe its really a reference to the reign of terror during the French Revolution (if so that's a shame since Napoleonic Law seems to prohibit such abuse)?
Something like the MacBook Pro where there is basic graphics integrated into the CPU (favors power consumption) and optional high end graphics available from a discrete GPU (favors performance)?
"Energy-efficient graphics.
Thanks to the new microarchitecture, the graphics processor is on the same chip as the central processor and has direct access to L3 cache. That proximity translates into performance. The graphics processor also automatically increases clock speeds for higher workloads. An integrated video encoder enables HD video calls with FaceTime, while an efficient decoder gives you long battery life when you’re watching DVDs or iTunes movies.
Up to 3x quicker on the draw. And the render.
When you need more performance for things like playing 3D games, editing HD video, or even running CAD software, the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models automatically switch to discrete AMD Radeon graphics that let you see more frames per second and experience better responsiveness. With up to 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 video memory, these processors provide up to 3x faster performance than the previous generation." http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html
How do we dispose of them? Are they as recyclable as petroleum-based plastics? Also, are they biodegradable?
According to the article: "Pepsi says it is the world's first bottle of a common type of plastic called PET made entirely of plant materials." PET, Polyethylene terephthalate, made from petroleum or from food waste is still the same molecule. It should perform the same regardless of what it is made from.
... it would be unlikely that the software was included in course plans and in my experience most students were conservative in course purchases.
Actually it was. This particular book was an experiment by the publisher, one that offered tight integration between the book and the software. The software not only performed 3D visualization and model building but it also offer 2D chemical diagramming. You could think of it a a drawing program with built-in tools for chemists. The sample course plans, sample home work assignments, etc that were part of the materials for adopting professors referenced the software. Also the textbook publisher confirmed that the software was used at the universities showing near zero sales.
... On the other hand, the students in these course have reasons to know each other thus making piracy of DRM free software very easy. In fact many of them would be living in dormatories meaning they could literally use the same install media to install the software without having to go to any trouble at all. In essence you have one of the worst case scenarios for piracy. The students are required to have your product, don't value the product, are living in close quarters with people in a similar circumstance, are on minimal or no income, and are among the group of people most likely to pirate software (probably because they have minimal or no income). I suspect any generalizations you pull from that experience are going to be of very dubious quality, partly because you target audience likely considers the "reasonable price" for that software to be $0, and I wouldn't be willing to bet that they're wrong.
The fact that sales went from near zero to comparable with textbook sales in such a hostile environment is exactly my point. Even minimal DRM seems to work. This was observed at multiple universities across the country.
In other words, it stops 'casual' 'pirates' who are likely technologically illiterate (actually, it hardly takes any effort in the first place).
They are not necessarily technically illiterate. These are people taking freshman chemistry. In addition to chem students there are cs, ee, etc in there too. And if not into hacking/cracking themselves they are surrounded by others who are when outside of chem class, they are on a college campus after all. In reality its a cost benefit thing. If there is no cost at all (no DRM) then most seem to pirate. If there is a modest technical barrier *and* the product is reasonably priced then many seem to actually purchase, its not worth the effort/risk even to some who are perfectly capable of pirating.
These Japanese reactors are old and fairly well understood while Chernobyl was brand new. These Japanese reactors had already been in service for 16 years when Chernobyl melted down. In comparative terms there is no comparison — Chernobyl was vastly worse.
My reading: older, better known reactor designs are safer.
I think you also need to consider the cold war era Soviet system that designed and built Chernobyl. Public safety may have been a secondary consideration to the state's immediate need for electrical power. If the Russian scientists and engineers had worked in a system comparable to the one that the Japanese scientists and engineers had worked in then I expect that we would never have heard of Chernobyl and it would still be generating power today.
... For all you know, more people simply could have decided to buy the software...
The beauty of this example is that the students *had* to use the software to do assignments. Its not like a game they can simply decide not to play. In the initial non-DRM quarter with very few sales everyone was still turning in assignments, the software was being used. The textbook publisher was comparing subsidized (via coupon) software sales to textbook sales on a per university basis, the coupon for the software was shrink wrapped into the textbook. The behaviors described were not at a single school, it was a pattern that repeated all over the country.
I realize this is also anecdotal but what apparently happened with this chemistry app has happened with PC games. Over the years I've seen the same thing posted to forums over and over: "A friend brought his legit disc to school, we copied it but it did not work, so I bought a legit copy for myself." Of course these were high profile popular games, not something that a gamer would easily move on from.
Slashdot Mirror
Google is being "sued in to bankruptcy" for the Apache Harmony Java VM which has a BSD-like license.
That is quite the misrepresentation. This thread is about Google supposedly misusing the Linux kernel headers which are GPL'd, this controversy is over a copyright violation. The Google / Oracle suit is over patent violations, the BSD license is a non issue in this case.
Stripping license text from source files *is* a violation even of some BSD licenses.
Thats a straw man. The issue in the current controversy is that if Google loses then third party app developers might be forced to open their source code per GPL requirements (its not my theory, its what this /. article offers). I don't think this is very likely, but such a situation is not even possible under BSD since there is no requirement to publish source code.
Yes. The issue is that now you are putting faith in an organization to "do the right thing", an organization which has far more power to alter licensing terms than the FSF does. (After all, the FSF is unable to take away rights granted by a previous version of the GPL, whereas the copyright holder can.)
Thanks. I knew there was something wrong with my off-the-cuff solution. :-)
I see. And would you characterise your support for BSD licenses as... ideological?
So pointing out that a legal issue is GPL specific and does not affect open source is general is ideological. That's an interesting perspective.
If you can concede that being able to use a mature existing codebase is one of the main reason people use open source code in their projects ...
BSD offers a mature code base.
... and if you concede that a large amount of open source code is only available under the GPL, then it follows that anyone who wants to develop something related to said GPL-only code, would be dissuaded from developing an open source project at all.
No. The condition that someone wants to develop something related to GPL'd code is fallacious. The original post mentioned open source in general, source code utilizing other licenses can be used. For example while Google chose GPL based code Apple, Sun, etc chose BSD based code.
While this advice is reasonable if there are very few contributors to a project, it doesn't work at all for large projects. By chosing only GPL vX, you have basically made it impossible for you to ever select a later version of the GPL unless you can get all contributors to sign off. But then again, some consider that to be a feature.
For a large project one could create an organization that would hold the copyright of the entire project. Contributors being required to grant non-exlcusive rights to this group. With this project being GPL'd one should be able to incorporate updates made by others to your original contribution in your own personal GPL'd projects. I'm not sure what the downside of such a scheme would be but I'm sure some kind soul out there could enlighten me. It does not seem terribly different from the FSF's suggestion of assigning the copyright of your GPL'd project to them.
Which explains why BSD is so much more popular than Linux, right? I humbly suggest you go check out netcraft.
That's a straw man. The GP said that issues like these drive people away from open source. I pointed out that not all open source has these issues. My point stands.
is simply this... when a new version of the GPL comes out and you wish to continue using the GPL, all future licensed software must be released under the new GPL license. GPL 3 is amazing, but too few people are using it.
Great idea, what could possibly go wrong with giving an ideological organization a blank check to do whatever they want with your work.
Want to use GPL 3, go ahead, but you would be wise to delete any "version 3 or any future version" type of language. Wait to see what that future version actually contains and make sure its goals are in line with your goals. Giving blind faith to the FSF seems equivalent to giving blind faith to a church. Do so if you like but at least be aware of your "follower" nature.
Some headers may be copyrightable. A header that merely contains #defines and prototypes may not be copyrightable, but a header that also contains macros or template definitions that implement logic may be copyrightable.
And every time issues like this come out, it drives people further away from developing Open Source alternatives. They think "If Google is having this much trouble, we'll get sued in to bankruptcy!"
Not quite. Replace "Open Source" with "GPL". There is no such fear among users of BSD and comparable licenses. I'm not saying the GPL is bad, I am just saying that there are costs associated with everything. If your license is viral, restrictive or ideological then its adoption will be impeded to some degree despite any idealistic motivations.
and the best you could do was..."Individual Gunshot Detector"
And what's even weirder is that the acronym that TFA attaches to that is IDG.
LOL, IDK, shouldn't it be IGD?
Assuming its not a typo there actually is logic for IDG. Military nomenclature likes a noun,adjective type of format. Consider:
Individual Detector, Gunshot
Individual Detector, Explosion
Individual Detector, Radiation
Individual Detector, Chemical
Seeing something labeled IDx would then suggest its basic function of individual detector.
You'd think with the enormous increase in processing power experienced over the past 4 decades, the amount of money required for operating the credit card networks would have plummeted. So why are credit card fees still anywhere from 2% on up (borne by sellers)?
That increase of processing power is accompanied by increased use of credit and debit cards. Also there may be some requirements of locality, that a transaction processor must be inside some jurisdiction. Quality of service may also dictate locality. So its not clear that they can use consolidation and other techniques to reduce their costs.
And is it (much) more expensive to send $100 vs. $10?
Think of other credit card benefits like automatic extension of your warranty. I had a TV go bad 13 months into a 12 month warranty. The manufacturer's warranty did not cover this, the credit card's extended warranty covered this. This extended warranty has to cost something proportional to the charge.
Maybe this was not the best translation, and maybe these phrases have a cultural meaning that is not apparent, but the codes seem to lean in favor of the defendant: ... and mandated the court to appoint the defendant a lawyer if the defendant did not have one (failure to do so rendered the proceedings null)."
"... the juror's oath explicitly recommended that the jury did not betray the interests of the defendants, and took attention of the means of defense
That said it does not seem as explicit as "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt", but hey, I'm just looking at a wiki article.
Now even without an airspeed indicator, most or the presumptions were a frozen and clogged pilot tube, you can still get a good clue about airspeed with nothing more then throttle setting.
IIRC this particular aircraft does not reposition the manual throttle controls as the autopilot changes thrust. I can not image why it is designed to work in this manner. There is a theory that while maneuvering to avoid weather the autopilot reduced thrust below what the levers were visually indicating.
More specifically, the simulation shown in the episode was conducted by two instructor pilots, whose first reaction to the loss of airspeed indications was to (as you mentioned) set a specific thrust setting (86%, IIRC), and to set a specific attitude (5 nose-up, IIRC), which, as stated in the episode, for the A330 will cause the aircraft to settle at a safe airspeed (too fast or slow = stall). Other posts, and the NOVA episode, mention the compilation of singular issues that compounded to a fatal accident. Its interesting to me how often a simple procedure (such as a thrust & pitch setting) can negate the world conspiring against you.
I believe the episode also showed an arguable design flaw. IIRC the manual throttle control levers are not automatically repositioned as the autopilots changes the thrust. Other aircraft do so, this particular aircraft does not. So the levels could visually seem to be at an 86% setting while in reality they are at a lower setting recently set by the autopilot prior to its disengaging. I'm not sure if the flight simulator recreations included the maneuvering around weather that may have left the controls in the visually erroneous position.
They should know how to handle all the information that is being given to them by all the sensors and dials in the cockpit.
The problem is that the failure was in the sensors providing the pilots/instruments with data. When flying in instrument only conditions, at night over the atlantic with no visual references, the pilot's human senses can provide no information (or they provide incorrect information - part of instrument training is to ignore your senses and trust the instruments) and the pilot *must* have sensor data / instruments.
I think it is unfair to blame the pilots at this point. It may be more of a design error, a lack of a redundant/alternative source of flight data or some way to avoid the pitot tube failure. Upgrades being made to the pitot tubes suggest the later.
By the way, they don't know what happened. They never found the black box or anything like that.
Actually they do have something "like that". The aircraft computers automatically sent diagnostic messages including alerts of various system failures to Air France via satellite. Think of it as text messages. I believe these messages document pitot tube flight data failures and the disengaging of autopilot and autothrust systems. This led investigators to construct reasonable theories of loss of control and to replay these failures in a flight simulator to evaluate crew responses and standard procedures.
The only thing that reliably motivates behavior is the structure of incentives. Senior management's bonuses must suffer and shareholder dividends and investments must suffer when a corporation commits serious criminal offenses. Yes some shareholders may be innocent "widows and orphans", retirees, etc but the risk of losses should make them a little more careful about where they invest. Perhaps the risk will incentive shareholders to pressure the board of directors to do its jobs of oversight, representing the shareholder's interests. Regarding employees, perhaps fines could only be paid from bonus pools, retained earnings, etc and not operating funds where payroll normally comes from -- yes I'm not quite sure how to implement this particular concept, accounting tricks to work around this would need to be criminalized.
Anyway, this decision looks like just about every other descision France makes when prosecuting over aircraft disasters - place the blame on every party except any that are French.
Airbus is a subsidiary of EADS, EADS is part French and IIRC the French government owns part of this. Air France is, as its name suggests, French. I'm a little confused as to how the French are blaming others with respect to this Rio/Paris flight, I don't see the parallels to Concorde.
French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty".
Those that I know from France, and those that I know that took goverment classes in French Universities (but were not French) say that their legal system is much less innocent until proven guilty than ours. Is England just that much worse, or am I misinformed? It is a fairly small sampling, but they are educated people. Ours being American (in the USA sense).
Wikipedia seems to have a decent overview.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_law
It seems that both Napoleonic and Common Law declare a suspect innocent until proven guilty. According to the wiki article the guilty until proven innocent charge seems to be made due to the ability to hold someone in custody prior to trial when the charge is serious, ex murder. To be honest I am a little confused as to how this differs from the US legal system where a murder suspect may be denied bail. Perhaps it has to do with the right to a speedy trial? I'm just guessing. Maybe its merely anti-Napoleon propaganda from centuries ago? Maybe its really a reference to the reign of terror during the French Revolution (if so that's a shame since Napoleonic Law seems to prohibit such abuse)?
Something like the MacBook Pro where there is basic graphics integrated into the CPU (favors power consumption) and optional high end graphics available from a discrete GPU (favors performance)?
"Energy-efficient graphics.
Thanks to the new microarchitecture, the graphics processor is on the same chip as the central processor and has direct access to L3 cache. That proximity translates into performance. The graphics processor also automatically increases clock speeds for higher workloads. An integrated video encoder enables HD video calls with FaceTime, while an efficient decoder gives you long battery life when you’re watching DVDs or iTunes movies.
Up to 3x quicker on the draw. And the render.
When you need more performance for things like playing 3D games, editing HD video, or even running CAD software, the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models automatically switch to discrete AMD Radeon graphics that let you see more frames per second and experience better responsiveness. With up to 1GB of dedicated GDDR5 video memory, these processors provide up to 3x faster performance than the previous generation."
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/performance.html
How do we dispose of them? Are they as recyclable as petroleum-based plastics? Also, are they biodegradable?
According to the article: "Pepsi says it is the world's first bottle of a common type of plastic called PET made entirely of plant materials." PET, Polyethylene terephthalate, made from petroleum or from food waste is still the same molecule. It should perform the same regardless of what it is made from.
Oops. I mistakenly pressed submit rather than edit after a quick proofread/preview. Apologies for the various errors.
... it would be unlikely that the software was included in course plans and in my experience most students were conservative in course purchases.
Actually it was. This particular book was an experiment by the publisher, one that offered tight integration between the book and the software. The software not only performed 3D visualization and model building but it also offer 2D chemical diagramming. You could think of it a a drawing program with built-in tools for chemists. The sample course plans, sample home work assignments, etc that were part of the materials for adopting professors referenced the software. Also the textbook publisher confirmed that the software was used at the universities showing near zero sales.
The fact that sales went from near zero to comparable with textbook sales in such a hostile environment is exactly my point. Even minimal DRM seems to work. This was observed at multiple universities across the country.
In other words, it stops 'casual' 'pirates' who are likely technologically illiterate (actually, it hardly takes any effort in the first place).
They are not necessarily technically illiterate. These are people taking freshman chemistry. In addition to chem students there are cs, ee, etc in there too. And if not into hacking/cracking themselves they are surrounded by others who are when outside of chem class, they are on a college campus after all. In reality its a cost benefit thing. If there is no cost at all (no DRM) then most seem to pirate. If there is a modest technical barrier *and* the product is reasonably priced then many seem to actually purchase, its not worth the effort/risk even to some who are perfectly capable of pirating.
These Japanese reactors are old and fairly well understood while Chernobyl was brand new. These Japanese reactors had already been in service for 16 years when Chernobyl melted down. In comparative terms there is no comparison — Chernobyl was vastly worse.
My reading: older, better known reactor designs are safer.
I think you also need to consider the cold war era Soviet system that designed and built Chernobyl. Public safety may have been a secondary consideration to the state's immediate need for electrical power. If the Russian scientists and engineers had worked in a system comparable to the one that the Japanese scientists and engineers had worked in then I expect that we would never have heard of Chernobyl and it would still be generating power today.
... For all you know, more people simply could have decided to buy the software ...
The beauty of this example is that the students *had* to use the software to do assignments. Its not like a game they can simply decide not to play. In the initial non-DRM quarter with very few sales everyone was still turning in assignments, the software was being used. The textbook publisher was comparing subsidized (via coupon) software sales to textbook sales on a per university basis, the coupon for the software was shrink wrapped into the textbook. The behaviors described were not at a single school, it was a pattern that repeated all over the country.
I realize this is also anecdotal but what apparently happened with this chemistry app has happened with PC games. Over the years I've seen the same thing posted to forums over and over: "A friend brought his legit disc to school, we copied it but it did not work, so I bought a legit copy for myself." Of course these were high profile popular games, not something that a gamer would easily move on from.