... and as such is signed up to TRIPS which requires adherence to the Berne Convention.
In fact, I believe the change in copyright law came a couple of years ago in preparation for their accession to the World Trade Org. - so the copyright law mentioned is seriously out of date.
Certainly, the Taiwanese government was making an effort (without much effect) last year to stamp down on piracy etc. to convince the rest of the WTO that they'd be 'good neighbours' - but now they're in (as of January 1st) they might not care as much...
Reading the Webpage implies to me that this is one guy at the BBC being allowed to try this out for a limited period: "Update (2002-01-21): Ok, slight bogon." doesn't sound like the corporate face of the BBC talking!
So it could be that this will only get taken up properly by the BBC if they get positive feedback - they've got a mailing address just for this...
Certainly in the US there is a "Candor and Good Faith" obligation. This means that anyone applying for a patent must inform the USPO about all information (including prior-art) which is relevant to the invention. This obligation even applies after filing (i.e. if you find out after you file that it's been done, then you should inform the USPO).
I don't think the UK/Europe has a similar obligation though. Also, I'd be surprised if anyone has been sued/fined for not doing this...
Instead of hiring expensive lawyers to do the prior-art search before granting patents, why don't they just employ a bunch of semi-trained monkeys to type the patent title into a decent search engine, and grant the patent based on the results?
The problem with this is that most large companies deliberately give patent applications vague and general titles. This is because the title of the patent becomes public before the body of it - and there's no point telling your competition what you're working on until necessary.
Is that perception that software should be exempt from the sort of standards that other goods have accurate, or has that perception been constructed by years of poor software and a lack of accountability?
This perception is only apparent in the PC industry. There are a whole range of areas where software has to be 'good quality', and the consequences of failure are huge. For example:
Embedded software. When was the last time your TV crashed on you? Granted, the software is an order of magniture smaller than for PCs, but the consequence of a big bug in a released piece of consumer electronics is huge (people demand their money back), so it needs to be more rigorously tested.
Safety-critical systems. E.g. medical equiment needs to be 'safe', and often has to prove a certain level of testing/reliability before it is legal to sell it. You can be guaranteed that the s/w producers will be liable if an X-Ray machine gives you the wrong dose
The trouble is, the PC industry has come to accept the usual disclaimers ("No liability for any damage... we may download virii...etc.") - and the associated low reliability/safety. One reason for this is that PCs were traditionally the realm of technically savvy people, who value cutting edge features rather than rigoruously tested sw with half the features.
You would expect increasing reliability as the market moves more to (dumb) consumers - but, of course, everything is slightly screwed by one company having a monopoly...
(Just noticed - should the subject of this post be 'Re:Liability' or 'Reliability'?)
What possible use could that email list be in a trademark case?
Well, If they could show that several people on the email list had registered because they thought Lindows was some Windows related s/w, then they'd be able to prove there was some confusion in consumers minds. However, I'd guess that most people on the list are hardcore linux nuts, so it's pretty unlikely.
The question is then: are there some legal limitations to what they can do with this information? If not, companies would be subpoena-ing each other like crazy to get at all those juicy trade secrets...
It seems there is a problem to be solved here: at the moment there is no process for registering for soon-to-expire domains.
Verisign have been granted a monopoly from ICANN to handle the registration process. However, this proposed system is clearly extending this monopoly from the registration of new domains (via registrars) to a pre-registration phase.
This must be a matter that ICANN should take responsibility for. The way to allow pre-registration should be defined, and explicitly included in any registry agreement - if the only sensible way to approach it is to allow Verisign a monopoly then it should be regulated accordingly (i.e. $46 is way too much to be allowed). Apart from anything else, it would be nice to have a standard process for all TLDs (.com/.uk/.whatever).
Goal 1: Determine whether Life ever arose on Mars
Goal 2: Characterize the Climate of Mars
Goal 3: Characterize the Geology of Mars
Goal 4: Prepare for Human Exploration
So they are at least investigating if (and when) human colonisation is feasible.
For the more general question of why NASA is mucking about in space, have a look at some of the FAQs.
It seems one of most common questions is 'Can I apply to take a ride on the Space Shuttle?' (A very polite 'No' in case you were wondering. Presumably the Russian Space Agency have a different answer to this one...)
From the law you describe, the courts would have to prove that he got "unauthorized access to data... and cause damage by gaining or using such...".
If he bought the DVDs that he used to break the encoding, then does he have the right to access the data? If so he hasn't gained 'unauthorized access' so hasn't broken the law.
And even if he doesn't have the right to break the encryption on his own DVD, they still have to prove he caused damage because of the unencrypted data. The law is protecting the data on the disks he decrypted, not the encryption. Thus, I would have thought he is pretty safe.
My definition of a selfish action would be one where the motivation is based purely on the implications for that person (i.e. you don't care what implications it has for anyone else). A selfish action can benefit others, in the same way as a selfless action can benefit the person who does it.
Imagine two people acting like this, one a Machiavellian, the other a Taoist. Both end up contributing to and sharing in the common good in an objectively equivalent way: their behaviour is indistinguishable. Although their motivations and perspectives may be different, they are each wise enough to know that their best chance at "happiness" lies in serving the community.
And this is the problem with this study. The game where punishment is allowed is set up so that selfish behaviour is indistinguishable from selfless behaviour. It tells us nothing about the motivation of the players - yet they make claims about the motivation of people.
It seems to me they set up a system *designed* to encourage punishment, then make grand claims about human nature as a result. Each player in the game they designed has an incentive to maximise the amount invested by everyone else - and the only way to influence other people is through punishment.
People will pay to punish - suggesting that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations.
No. Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase. All this shows is that the people playing the game were able to come up with vaguely intelligent long term (selfish) strategies.
If they wanted to prove that people will 'pay to punish', they should have setup the system where the cost of punishing someone was so high that overall profits decreased - and seen how long people kept on punishing.
My comment was meant to encourage you to learn more about GNU before you evaluate people's consistency with GNU values.
Taken in the spirit intended. I accept that the GNU principles are quite clearly defined - but is it really the case that "you're either with us or against us"? The original post was asking about Ximian "abandoning it's GNU values" - to which I think pointing out the open-source work it is doing is a perfectly valid response (it shows that the company at least has common ground with GNU). To be fair, I don't know if Ximian (the company) ever supported GNU values... but if they continue to spend say 80% of their time on GPL'd sw and the other 20% on prorietory sw does this imply they do or don't support GNU values?
So you're saying that only religious movements prize their values above their popularity?
No - I'm saying a political movement is of no value unless it gains acceptance. A religion (usually) has no intrinsic need for popularity (i.e. anything that you would be willing to die for even if everyone disagreed with your views I would class a 'religious belief'). In contrast, surely the ultimate goal of a political movement is to improve the world by gaining acceptance of its ideals.
The benefits it promotes are social and explicitly not technological
And herein lies the problem for me. The technical benefits of free software are clear to me, the social implications are a lot more complex. The GNU values only address the social benefits for the consumers of free software - not for the developers of free software. OK, developers benefit as consumers of others work, but they lose the right to profit from their work. The issue of 'how do I survive as a software developer, if all the software i develop is free?' is not (as far as I know) addressed by GNU beyond the simplistic 'we should live in a world where this is possible'.
Until that is sorted out (conservative estimate = 100 years) I admire and support companies like Ximian who strive to find a good balance between freedom for their users, and employment for their programmers.
The reasons.NET & mono are being developed now rather than years ago are the developments in inter-connectivity and networking over recent years. Nowadays, it's virtually assumed that every machine will be networked with a reasonable bandwidth. This allows a range of applications and services which are distributed over a range of PCs, servers or toasters (ok, maybe not toasters for a few more years...)
However one of the underlying principles of this is that it should free you from the constraints of programming languages - if one part of your system is written in C, another in Perl, and yet another in java, so what? As long as they can all communicate it makes no difference.
So why is.NET (and mono) so closely linked to C#? Does it really give you big advantages over FORTRAN? (I'm sure there are business reasons for M$ to want everyone to use their language, but are there any technical ones?)
The GNU/Linux system benefits little from "acceptance". The important thing is that the software be free. If there are ten people using it and it is Free, then it is better than if ten million are using it and it is non-free.
This is precisely the sort of sentiment that turns me off GNU. Unless GNU is a religous movement, then the whole point should be for "acceptance"... how does it benefit mankind if only RMS and his 9 disciples use it?
For me the ultimate goal of Free vs. Open source vs. proprietory software is to find an even balance between letting good developers develop (i.e. give them income or kudos for what they do) and providing users with what they want at a reasonable cost (whether that is $$$s or feedback to the developers community).
Companies like Ximian do (and hopefully will continue to) play a vital role in this - selling some software to pay their developers to develop both proprietory and free software. Their cause is not helped by zealots (from either the free or proprietory side) branding them as traitors.
Why does working with Microsoft imply an abandonment of GNU values? Ximian are clearly deeply involved in open source projects (i.e. Gnome & Mono) - and as a company are busy working out how to make money from this investment.
You could argue that what open-source needs most is more collaboration with MS. For example, just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux. Of course, if you get into bed with MS, there is a fair chance you're going to get screwed - but that just means that Ximian (or anyone) has to be very careful in their negotiations.
While branding MS as the devil is easy & popular - it may be possible to work with them without selling your soul:-)
So does this mean you need a huge water tank? I saw no mention of this in the article - but I would guess you'd need more water than you need petrol in current cars.
There is an amazingly small amount of hype/pre-publicity out here in Taiwan about the movie... this could be related to the fact that noone here has ever heard of (or read) the original books. I had a quick look, and couldn't even find a Chinese translation (I guess it ain't the easiest book to translate) - so everyone here will judge it purely as a film, not an adaptation of a book(religion?).
Incidentally, it's also coming out much later (mid-Jan) - which may be because the holiday season is around the Chinese new year (in Feb) rather than Christmas.
Now, Harry Potter is completely different - everyone reads the books, adverts for the films are still all over the place & the film was released on the same day as U.S./U.K.!
What about other non-English speaking countries?
Re:applicability of Nobel Prizes in the modern wor
on
Nobel Prizes Awarded
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Both the medecine and the chemistry prizes were awarded for proprietary research done in the interests of multinational pharmaceutical corporations.
The economics prize was given to researchers into "asymmetric information" - or how information affects your behaviour. Sounds interesting, but the reporter struggled to explain it:
It also explored how people with inside knowledge of a high-technology company's financial prospects gain an edge over other investors, while people who don't fully understand a company's finances may invest unwisely.
One assumes there was slightly more to their theories than this!
More worryingly, why does one of the recipients look exactly like Steve Martin?
Re:Why not new Nobel Prizes? Math Prize and more..
on
Nobel Prizes Awarded
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The Maths equivalent of the Nobel prize is the Fields medal.
My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting:-)
This "news" report comes straight from a press release.
So, a company selling email filtering software say that email filtering is ever so important? What they actually said was:
"Our database of holiday-related email messages and attachments has grown 650 percent since last Christmas,"
But their job is to build up a database of junk, so it's not really surprising - it's just saying that their database is up to date (or that their database was very out-of-date last year).
The experiments include: STARSHINE-2, the Prototype Synchrotron Radiation Detector, Collisions Into Dust Experiment-2, Capillary Pump Loop, and Space Experiment Module-11.
STARSHINE 2 will be the third satellite of Project Starshine -- the Student Tracked Atmospheric Research Satellite for Heuristic International Networking Experiment -- to be deployed. More than 25,000 students from 26 countries will track STARSHINE 2 as it orbits Earth for eight months. The students will use the information that they collect to calculate the density of the Earth's upper atmosphere. Starshine will fly into space in a Hitchhiker canister in the payload bay of Endeavour and will be deployed 240 miles (387 kilometers) above the Earth.
So 25,000 students will be monitoring it - it wasn't built by 25,000 students:-)
Slashdot Mirror
... and as such is signed up to TRIPS which requires adherence to the Berne Convention.
...
In fact, I believe the change in copyright law came a couple of years ago in preparation for their accession to the World Trade Org. - so the copyright law mentioned is seriously out of date.
Certainly, the Taiwanese government was making an effort (without much effect) last year to stamp down on piracy etc. to convince the rest of the WTO that they'd be 'good neighbours' - but now they're in (as of January 1st) they might not care as much
Reading the Webpage implies to me that this is one guy at the BBC being allowed to try this out for a limited period:
...
"Update (2002-01-21): Ok, slight bogon."
doesn't sound like the corporate face of the BBC talking!
So it could be that this will only get taken up properly by the BBC if they get positive feedback - they've got a mailing address just for this
Certainly in the US there is a "Candor and Good Faith" obligation. This means that anyone applying for a patent must inform the USPO about all information (including prior-art) which is relevant to the invention. This obligation even applies after filing (i.e. if you find out after you file that it's been done, then you should inform the USPO).
...
I don't think the UK/Europe has a similar obligation though. Also, I'd be surprised if anyone has been sued/fined for not doing this
Instead of hiring expensive lawyers to do the prior-art search before granting patents, why don't they just employ a bunch of semi-trained monkeys to type the patent title into a decent search engine, and grant the patent based on the results?
Of course you'd need a Legal gibberish to English translation tool as well.
The problem with this is that most large companies deliberately give patent applications vague and general titles. This is because the title of the patent becomes public before the body of it - and there's no point telling your competition what you're working on until necessary.
This perception is only apparent in the PC industry. There are a whole range of areas where software has to be 'good quality', and the consequences of failure are huge. For example:
The trouble is, the PC industry has come to accept the usual disclaimers ("No liability for any damage
You would expect increasing reliability as the market moves more to (dumb) consumers - but, of course, everything is slightly screwed by one company having a monopoly
(Just noticed - should the subject of this post be 'Re:Liability' or 'Reliability'?)
What possible use could that email list be in a trademark case?
...
Well, If they could show that several people on the email list had registered because they thought Lindows was some Windows related s/w, then they'd be able to prove there was some confusion in consumers minds. However, I'd guess that most people on the list are hardcore linux nuts, so it's pretty unlikely.
The question is then: are there some legal limitations to what they can do with this information? If not, companies would be subpoena-ing each other like crazy to get at all those juicy trade secrets
It seems there is a problem to be solved here: at the moment there is no process for registering for soon-to-expire domains.
Verisign have been granted a monopoly from ICANN to handle the registration process. However, this proposed system is clearly extending this monopoly from the registration of new domains (via registrars) to a pre-registration phase.
This must be a matter that ICANN should take responsibility for. The way to allow pre-registration should be defined, and explicitly included in any registry agreement - if the only sensible way to approach it is to allow Verisign a monopoly then it should be regulated accordingly (i.e. $46 is way too much to be allowed). Apart from anything else, it would be nice to have a standard process for all TLDs (.com/.uk/.whatever).
So they are at least investigating if (and when) human colonisation is feasible.
For the more general question of why NASA is mucking about in space, have a look at some of the FAQs.
It seems one of most common questions is 'Can I apply to take a ride on the Space Shuttle?' (A very polite 'No' in case you were wondering. Presumably the Russian Space Agency have a different answer to this one
From the law you describe, the courts would have to prove that he got "unauthorized access to data ... and cause damage by gaining or using such ...".
If he bought the DVDs that he used to break the encoding, then does he have the right to access the data? If so he hasn't gained 'unauthorized access' so hasn't broken the law.
And even if he doesn't have the right to break the encryption on his own DVD, they still have to prove he caused damage because of the unencrypted data. The law is protecting the data on the disks he decrypted, not the encryption. Thus, I would have thought he is pretty safe.
Oh, and by the way, I guess the Slashdot interview with him may be of interest again.
And this is the problem with this study. The game where punishment is allowed is set up so that selfish behaviour is indistinguishable from selfless behaviour. It tells us nothing about the motivation of the players - yet they make claims about the motivation of people.
So next time I get moderation priveledges, I'm going to mod down people who haven't posted anything :)
No. Punishment is a purely selfish strategy: spend money punishing someone, so they will invest more, so your profits increase. All this shows is that the people playing the game were able to come up with vaguely intelligent long term (selfish) strategies.
If they wanted to prove that people will 'pay to punish', they should have setup the system where the cost of punishing someone was so high that overall profits decreased - and seen how long people kept on punishing.
The object is a brown dwarf
... :-)
Doesn't look that brown to me!
Then again, I believe that black holes aren't that black either
Taken in the spirit intended. I accept that the GNU principles are quite clearly defined - but is it really the case that "you're either with us or against us"? The original post was asking about Ximian "abandoning it's GNU values" - to which I think pointing out the open-source work it is doing is a perfectly valid response (it shows that the company at least has common ground with GNU). To be fair, I don't know if Ximian (the company) ever supported GNU values
No - I'm saying a political movement is of no value unless it gains acceptance. A religion (usually) has no intrinsic need for popularity (i.e. anything that you would be willing to die for even if everyone disagreed with your views I would class a 'religious belief'). In contrast, surely the ultimate goal of a political movement is to improve the world by gaining acceptance of its ideals.
And herein lies the problem for me. The technical benefits of free software are clear to me, the social implications are a lot more complex. The GNU values only address the social benefits for the consumers of free software - not for the developers of free software. OK, developers benefit as consumers of others work, but they lose the right to profit from their work. The issue of 'how do I survive as a software developer, if all the software i develop is free?' is not (as far as I know) addressed by GNU beyond the simplistic 'we should live in a world where this is possible'.
Until that is sorted out (conservative estimate = 100 years) I admire and support companies like Ximian who strive to find a good balance between freedom for their users, and employment for their programmers.
Given that Linux perceives Microsoft as Threat Number One (see most links here) one can't stop wonder what Ximians hidden agenda is.
:-)
The reasons .NET & mono are being developed now rather than years ago are the developments in inter-connectivity and networking over recent years. Nowadays, it's virtually assumed that every machine will be networked with a reasonable bandwidth. This allows a range of applications and services which are distributed over a range of PCs, servers or toasters (ok, maybe not toasters for a few more years ...)
.NET (and mono) so closely linked to C#? Does it really give you big advantages over FORTRAN? (I'm sure there are business reasons for M$ to want everyone to use their language, but are there any technical ones?)
However one of the underlying principles of this is that it should free you from the constraints of programming languages - if one part of your system is written in C, another in Perl, and yet another in java, so what? As long as they can all communicate it makes no difference.
So why is
This is precisely the sort of sentiment that turns me off GNU. Unless GNU is a religous movement, then the whole point should be for "acceptance"
For me the ultimate goal of Free vs. Open source vs. proprietory software is to find an even balance between letting good developers develop (i.e. give them income or kudos for what they do) and providing users with what they want at a reasonable cost (whether that is $$$s or feedback to the developers community).
Companies like Ximian do (and hopefully will continue to) play a vital role in this - selling some software to pay their developers to develop both proprietory and free software. Their cause is not helped by zealots (from either the free or proprietory side) branding them as traitors.
Why does working with Microsoft imply an abandonment of GNU values? Ximian are clearly deeply involved in open source projects (i.e. Gnome & Mono) - and as a company are busy working out how to make money from this investment.
:-)
You could argue that what open-source needs most is more collaboration with MS. For example, just imagine what it would do for acceptance of Linux if a company worked with MS to produce a reliable up-to-date version of Word for Linux. Of course, if you get into bed with MS, there is a fair chance you're going to get screwed - but that just means that Ximian (or anyone) has to be very careful in their negotiations.
While branding MS as the devil is easy & popular - it may be possible to work with them without selling your soul
So does this mean you need a huge water tank? I saw no mention of this in the article - but I would guess you'd need more water than you need petrol in current cars.
There is an amazingly small amount of hype/pre-publicity out here in Taiwan about the movie ... this could be related to the fact that noone here has ever heard of (or read) the original books. I had a quick look, and couldn't even find a Chinese translation (I guess it ain't the easiest book to translate) - so everyone here will judge it purely as a film, not an adaptation of a book(religion?).
Incidentally, it's also coming out much later (mid-Jan) - which may be because the holiday season is around the Chinese new year (in Feb) rather than Christmas.
Now, Harry Potter is completely different - everyone reads the books, adverts for the films are still all over the place & the film was released on the same day as U.S./U.K.!
What about other non-English speaking countries?
Well actually, the medecine prize was given to 2 people who work for the Imperial Cancer Research Foundation which is a UK based charity, and one person who works in the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center which is also a non-profit organisation.
One assumes there was slightly more to their theories than this!
More worryingly, why does one of the recipients look exactly like Steve Martin?
The Maths equivalent of the Nobel prize is the Fields medal.
... but I suspect that's just a rumour put about to make maths look interesting :-)
My professor at university claimed that there isn't a Nobel prize for Mathematics because Alfred Nobel's wife ran off with a mathematician
So, a company selling email filtering software say that email filtering is ever so important? What they actually said was:But their job is to build up a database of junk, so it's not really surprising - it's just saying that their database is up to date (or that their database was very out-of-date last year).
So 25,000 students will be monitoring it - it wasn't built by 25,000 students