Its funny really, we invented economic imperialism (the concept that if you control a country's economy, you in effect control the country without ever having to put a man on the ground.)
You obviously don't know the history of Britain in India:-)
Huge country (by headcount). UK owned it, lock stock and barrel. Now that's economic control in action.
DNF is the acronym used in motor racing for Did Not Finish. That and having the word 'Forever' in the title pretty much tells you what's happening there doesn't it?:-)
OTOH, I think HL2 is actually going to ship within the next month.
but there is no clause in the gpl or in regular copyright (AFAIK) that would cause the ownership of the modification itself (the patch or whatever form it was created in, it is quite possible to consider the mod as a seperate work, that is derived from the main work, which the gpl specifically allows) to go to anyone other than either the programmer or Connelly
It certainly isn't a work in its own right, since it cannot work without the rest of the code that is clearly GPLd.
Ultimately, it is for a court to decide, but it seems to me atleast to be a derivative work.
And there are certainly precedents for this, noteably in the music industry. As an extreme example, the track 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' was legally written by the Rolling Stones, even though the stones did not buy it, did not write any of the lyrics or any of the notes! (In that case a group sampled the Stones work, and then The Verve sampled just 4 notes from that song- and from a section not written by the Stones- both songs ended up owned by the Stones in their entirety.)
The GPL has been accused of being contagious, with only a little justification, but to the extent that it gets this contagiousness it is a good deal to do with the fact that Copyright itself is contagious.
I don't think it's as bad as you say- as an analogy remember that in some countries you haggle for even over-the-counter stuff. Here they are just haggling on a per-shift basis.
I think there is an assumption that this kind of bidding is inherently unfair- I think that it may very well actually be somewhat *more* fair- the bureaucrats have less room to fiddle the rates- and the rates will adjust automatically for less desirable times. It should/could be better. Which isn't to say it will be.
Well, if the programmer was hired to do the work, it is quite possible that the work falls under the work for hire type of work. Then the copyright on the modification belongs to Connelly (or his company), while the copyright on the original work obviously remains unchanged.
Seems unlikely. Don't forget they are still creating a derivative work. It's not like they have written the entire application. At best they are now in joint ownership of the code; more likely it is still owned by the original authors.
OTOH if the code really is a trade secret then Connelly may well have a leg to stand on, but only with the guy who was hired; and only then if the contract stands up in court.
But it sounds to me like it is merely a trivial modification to the open source package, and may well not reach the level of a trade secret anyway. But it then comes down to the jurisdiction, and the laws in that jurisdiction- IANAL.
The American economy no longer exists, American business is multinational, global, and not limited to our borders. It finds cheap labor and brings the saving in production back to the U.S. where American consumers rejoice at the low cost of service and goods.
So, what you are saying is that the American economy and companies have grown so much, that the only way it can grow any further is to grow the rest of the world too?
Oh how sad. Other countries getting a better standard of living; and America probably not getting worse, or not much worse.
It's going to be good for the nurses when there is a shortage (apparently there is at the moment), and bad for the nurses where there is a surfeit.
Isn't that basically market forces at work?
IMHO probably; doesn't make it right or wrong- it may well work better than a fixed price though. But it's going to be vulnerable to all the normal market problems.
If I understand the facts right, this guy paid a professional programmer to modify GPL code in order to produce (what he thought would be) a competititive advantage for his website.
You mean, he took code released under the GPL license and modified it, whilst withholding the changes from the community, in an attempt to give himself a competitive advantage?
He never said that the programmer was allowed to give those modifications back to the Mombo team (he claims he has a "contract").
Irrelevant. Under copyright law, any right to make derivative works of a copyright code are owned by the original authors- not Connelly. The only right that 'the programmer' or Connelly has to create derivative works are permitted under the GNU Public License- which mandates that any derivative code *must* also be released under the GPL.
Therefore Connelly's code is GPLd, whatever he told the programmer, or contracted the programmer. Now, it may be that either the programmer is legally responsible for this mess; but whoever is responsible- the modified code *is* GPL'd, and as such, is available for integration with any other code. (Actually, to be strictly accurate, any of the customers of Connelly can get the code and basically do with it what they want- including giving it to other people to compile or sell).
I realize that space flight is incredibly complex, but is it really that much more complex than regular flight?
Probably, slightly, you have to deal with more problems that you don't have to deal with in aircraft- vacuum, heating, radiation etc. etc.
Why does it seem that space flight is constantly plagued with problems?
Mainly because there are bugs in the vehicles, or the production line that produces the vehicles, or bugs in the way that the vehicles are being used.
The reason that the bugs are there is because every vehicle in service right now has only been launched a hundred or so times at most. Most aircraft have seen many times more launches than that during testing; and the bugs would have been removed. In addition there's more experience on how to avoid some of the bugs in the first place in aircraft- this experience has not been directly applied to launch vehicles.
If commercial space flight ever takes off, is that what will make it more reliable?
Pretty much yes, launch any vehicle enough; uncover the bugs and remove them, and you have a safe vehicle at the end of it.
Even if they wanted to recover the password in extremis (they could charge money for the service, and customers are very likely to forget the password...), they should have encrypted it using public key encryption- where the hard-drive *does* not have the decryption key.
Only the manufacturers would keep that in a locked safe; and would fix the harddrive for a high price, and with an agreed on process.
Actually, the Russian gadget does that; more or less.
So far as I can tell, they don't spin the gadget, they set up a vortex in the electrolyte, and that gives you a pressure gradient (essentially artificial gravity) that gives the bubbles an 'up'- in this case an 'in'. They then feed the oxygen into the cabin and dump the hydrogen overboard.
Wow. That's news. At least to anyone completely unaware of Newton's method.
Yeah, but Newton's method isn't guaranteed to converge. This method claims to converge; although you don't get the exact answer in a finite number of steps.
Whether this method is useful or not, probably depends on how fast it converges and how long it takes to do each step.
Should never have made the Genesis probe using unstable protomatter:-)
(Ref: Star Trek, Wrath of Khan- hey this is News for Nerds!)
Always begging for trouble.
Re:Seems a bit pricey compared to other small WISP
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The link bandwidth isn't usually the expensive bit, the connection to the internet is pricey. They do often run caches to minise their costs there.
Re:Seems a bit pricey compared to other small WISP
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It's not hard to get that kind of price.
Don't forget that the actual contention ratio that people get on ADSL or cable is only 20:1 or 50:1- users simply don't get close to maxing out their pipe most of the time.
With a single 3mbs web link you can support 50*3/0.256 = 600 users.
On top of that, there's multiple WIFI channels, and further, using directional antennas and multiple masts you can reuse the channels quite a bit.
And 50:1 is not ridiculously oversold- I'm sitting on that right now, I'm perfectly happy with it.
Yeah, that's why I said 'about'- a probability of 0.5 is 'about' 1:-)
The equation I gave overestimates the probability somewhat, but it's probably only out by an order of magnitude (much less so for small numbers than big ones near one). The equation also gives a probability of greater than one in certain situations:-)
The exact equation is a lot more fiddly, so I didn't want to use it.
But what I dont get is this still doesn't allow somebody to arbitrarily pick whatever sum they want for their code right?
It's based on the birthday party paradox.
For two randomly chosen hashes, the chances of them being the same is 1/p where p is the maximum size of the hash.
However, if you pick n hashes at random, then the chance that any two of them match is approximately n^2/2p, since any one of the 'n' could match with any other of the 'n'.
So if p is 1/(2^160) and you generate 2^80 hashes of random (or partly random) data, then theres about a probability of 1 that two of them match each other. 2^80 is still a big number, but they've managed to reduce it further with some clever tricks, and modern processors can do billions of operations per second.
So, if you write two programs one evil, one good, and then add 2^80 different random fillers on the end of each, chances are, two of the good/bads will have the same hash.
But the chances of any of the bads matching a given hash that somebody hands you is only 2^80/2^160 which is 1/2^80- much too small.
But now I'm troubled by the notion that Comcast will (or will not) assign me a senderID whether (or not) I want them to.
No, as I understand it, that's not how it works, atleast as far as spam killing goes.
The sender Id identifies the ISP, not the user. That way, if a users' machine gets owned, the sender Id doesn't get added, because the mail isn't being officially sent by the ISP's server. So when the mail arrives at the destination mail server, it throws it away, because it doesn't have the right digital signature to say it is from the ISP that apparently sent it.
And if the users' machine attempts to go through the ISP's mail server, that already is going to be set up with spam detectors and rate limiters and ultimately backed up by the mark 1.0 human eyeball so that the spam never enters the internet at all. It's much better to do this on the way in to the internet, because the spammers quickly realise that they are onto a losing proposition and go somewhere else, or give up.
Yes, but the Falkland island thing isn't quite the same- the aluminum structure was uncooled. What happens is that the aluminum gets hot and melts, and then droplets of it disconnect from the body- they can then easily burn and set off a self-sustaining reaction.
In a LOX tank or pipe, the LOX continuously cools the aluminum, and *cooled* aluminum is incredibly hard to melt, let alone ignite.
Slashdot Mirror
You obviously don't know the history of Britain in India :-)
Huge country (by headcount). UK owned it, lock stock and barrel. Now that's economic control in action.
OTOH, I think HL2 is actually going to ship within the next month.
It certainly isn't a work in its own right, since it cannot work without the rest of the code that is clearly GPLd.
Ultimately, it is for a court to decide, but it seems to me atleast to be a derivative work.
And there are certainly precedents for this, noteably in the music industry. As an extreme example, the track 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' was legally written by the Rolling Stones, even though the stones did not buy it, did not write any of the lyrics or any of the notes! (In that case a group sampled the Stones work, and then The Verve sampled just 4 notes from that song- and from a section not written by the Stones- both songs ended up owned by the Stones in their entirety.)
The GPL has been accused of being contagious, with only a little justification, but to the extent that it gets this contagiousness it is a good deal to do with the fact that Copyright itself is contagious.
I think there is an assumption that this kind of bidding is inherently unfair- I think that it may very well actually be somewhat *more* fair- the bureaucrats have less room to fiddle the rates- and the rates will adjust automatically for less desirable times. It should/could be better. Which isn't to say it will be.
Seems unlikely. Don't forget they are still creating a derivative work. It's not like they have written the entire application. At best they are now in joint ownership of the code; more likely it is still owned by the original authors.
OTOH if the code really is a trade secret then Connelly may well have a leg to stand on, but only with the guy who was hired; and only then if the contract stands up in court.
But it sounds to me like it is merely a trivial modification to the open source package, and may well not reach the level of a trade secret anyway. But it then comes down to the jurisdiction, and the laws in that jurisdiction- IANAL.
So, what you are saying is that the American economy and companies have grown so much, that the only way it can grow any further is to grow the rest of the world too?
Oh how sad. Other countries getting a better standard of living; and America probably not getting worse, or not much worse.
Isn't that basically market forces at work?
IMHO probably; doesn't make it right or wrong- it may well work better than a fixed price though. But it's going to be vulnerable to all the normal market problems.
You mean, he took code released under the GPL license and modified it, whilst withholding the changes from the community, in an attempt to give himself a competitive advantage?
He never said that the programmer was allowed to give those modifications back to the Mombo team (he claims he has a "contract").
Irrelevant. Under copyright law, any right to make derivative works of a copyright code are owned by the original authors- not Connelly. The only right that 'the programmer' or Connelly has to create derivative works are permitted under the GNU Public License- which mandates that any derivative code *must* also be released under the GPL.
Therefore Connelly's code is GPLd, whatever he told the programmer, or contracted the programmer. Now, it may be that either the programmer is legally responsible for this mess; but whoever is responsible- the modified code *is* GPL'd, and as such, is available for integration with any other code. (Actually, to be strictly accurate, any of the customers of Connelly can get the code and basically do with it what they want- including giving it to other people to compile or sell).
Then you have to have brave investors.
Probably, slightly, you have to deal with more problems that you don't have to deal with in aircraft- vacuum, heating, radiation etc. etc.
Why does it seem that space flight is constantly plagued with problems?
Mainly because there are bugs in the vehicles, or the production line that produces the vehicles, or bugs in the way that the vehicles are being used.
The reason that the bugs are there is because every vehicle in service right now has only been launched a hundred or so times at most. Most aircraft have seen many times more launches than that during testing; and the bugs would have been removed. In addition there's more experience on how to avoid some of the bugs in the first place in aircraft- this experience has not been directly applied to launch vehicles.
If commercial space flight ever takes off, is that what will make it more reliable?
Pretty much yes, launch any vehicle enough; uncover the bugs and remove them, and you have a safe vehicle at the end of it.
How can it take off until it is more reliable?
You have to have brave people.
Even if they wanted to recover the password in extremis (they could charge money for the service, and customers are very likely to forget the password...), they should have encrypted it using public key encryption- where the hard-drive *does* not have the decryption key.
Only the manufacturers would keep that in a locked safe; and would fix the harddrive for a high price, and with an agreed on process.
What a reversal! Just shows how unfit Dave Barry was for the post; U turns like that, he's probably a better candidate for a taxi driver.
Well, he's lost my vote.
Simulated annealing is *really* slow.
But even then, Newton's method isn't guaranteed to find all the roots is it? AFAIK there is no algorithm for the initial guess.
So far as I can tell, they don't spin the gadget, they set up a vortex in the electrolyte, and that gives you a pressure gradient (essentially artificial gravity) that gives the bubbles an 'up'- in this case an 'in'. They then feed the oxygen into the cabin and dump the hydrogen overboard.
Yeah, but Newton's method isn't guaranteed to converge. This method claims to converge; although you don't get the exact answer in a finite number of steps.
Whether this method is useful or not, probably depends on how fast it converges and how long it takes to do each step.
(Ref: Star Trek, Wrath of Khan- hey this is News for Nerds!)
Always begging for trouble.
The link bandwidth isn't usually the expensive bit, the connection to the internet is pricey. They do often run caches to minise their costs there.
With a single 3mbs web link you can support 50*3/0.256 = 600 users.
On top of that, there's multiple WIFI channels, and further, using directional antennas and multiple masts you can reuse the channels quite a bit.
And 50:1 is not ridiculously oversold- I'm sitting on that right now, I'm perfectly happy with it.
The equation I gave overestimates the probability somewhat, but it's probably only out by an order of magnitude (much less so for small numbers than big ones near one). The equation also gives a probability of greater than one in certain situations :-)
The exact equation is a lot more fiddly, so I didn't want to use it.
Um. Strictly accurately, there is! He's a DJ on radio-1, and there's a 'play live' music button :-)
It's based on the birthday party paradox.
For two randomly chosen hashes, the chances of them being the same is 1/p where p is the maximum size of the hash.
However, if you pick n hashes at random, then the chance that any two of them match is approximately n^2/2p, since any one of the 'n' could match with any other of the 'n'.
So if p is 1/(2^160) and you generate 2^80 hashes of random (or partly random) data, then theres about a probability of 1 that two of them match each other. 2^80 is still a big number, but they've managed to reduce it further with some clever tricks, and modern processors can do billions of operations per second.
So, if you write two programs one evil, one good, and then add 2^80 different random fillers on the end of each, chances are, two of the good/bads will have the same hash.
But the chances of any of the bads matching a given hash that somebody hands you is only 2^80/2^160 which is 1/2^80- much too small.
No, as I understand it, that's not how it works, atleast as far as spam killing goes.
The sender Id identifies the ISP, not the user. That way, if a users' machine gets owned, the sender Id doesn't get added, because the mail isn't being officially sent by the ISP's server. So when the mail arrives at the destination mail server, it throws it away, because it doesn't have the right digital signature to say it is from the ISP that apparently sent it.
And if the users' machine attempts to go through the ISP's mail server, that already is going to be set up with spam detectors and rate limiters and ultimately backed up by the mark 1.0 human eyeball so that the spam never enters the internet at all. It's much better to do this on the way in to the internet, because the spammers quickly realise that they are onto a losing proposition and go somewhere else, or give up.
Um, but only the mail servers *need* to implement SenderId. Outlook Express and Outlook are irrelevant in this.
In a LOX tank or pipe, the LOX continuously cools the aluminum, and *cooled* aluminum is incredibly hard to melt, let alone ignite.