Ask Dr. Science is great, but I like the parody on the "Dinosaurs" show -- Ask Mr. Lizard -- who invariably blew up his young assistant. The tag line was "Looks like we're going to need another Timmy!"
IANARA (I Am Not A Radio Astronomer) but I wonder if these are very fast correlator chips that are used to synchronize (I'm sure there's a much better technical word) multiple data streams so that the data from all the antennas in the array can be massaged to make X small antennas look like one gigantic one (in resolution). Apparently it's a process that's much faster to do in silicon (across many parallel channels) than in a general purpose CPU.
I visited the Parkes radio telescope in Australia about two years ago and specialized correlator hardware was a big part of the processing system. They had designed (IIRC) three generations of multi-channel correlator hardware.
Real Geezers (like me) remember the original Bernoulli Box which had a large -- 8 inch? -- removable disk cartridge that stored, IIRC, 10MB. This would have been around 1985 or so, long before Syquest or the later zip drives.
The unit I worked on had a pair of Bernoulli drives; the database system (built using R:Base 4000 -- anyone remember that?) ran on one drive, and the other was for backup.
The bottom channels in the UHF TV range are right above the UHF two-way radio allocation that runs from 450 to 470 MHz. That 20 MHz band is used by police, fire, other state/local government stuff, plus commercial users and in many areas they ran out of new frequency allocations.
A bunch of years ago -- 25? -- the FCC allowed users in some metro areas where there were no low-channel UHF stations to extend into the 470 - 512 MHz range to ease congestion. It's commonly known as the "UHF-T" band and it never displaced any existing TV stations. I believe that only public safety users can get licenses for that spectrum.
Not in a publically traded company in the US. The directors are nominated by the board itself (usually through a nominating committee) and elected by the shareholders at the annual meeting. In almost all cases, management controls enough proxies from the shareholders to elect the slate of directors it wants. It's the rare exception when a large enough block of shareholders is disgruntled and organized enough to nominate their own candidate and elect them.
Directors don't have to own any stock in the company at all, though it's considered good form to do so, and some companies require it (of course, many of those same companies grant options to the directors or even make outright share grants to make it easy for them).
Trivia time: There was an episode of (I think) LA Law where Dan Castelanetta played a character who talked normally except when he had a huge Homer mask/head on his shoulders; then he talked like Homer. I think the plot was that he got stuck in the puppet head, or something equally dumb.
That's really interesting. My experience was exactly the opposite. I was a journalism major undergrad, and law school would have made my writing much worse if I'd let it.
Legal writing has a tendency toward formalism and wordiness that makes many lawyers' writing painful to read. I think the problem is that law school so strongly emphasizes the thought process (framing the argument, supporting your position) that style and grace in exposition fall out of the equation.
Journalistic writing, with its emphasis on clarity, brevity, and top-down organization, is a great antidote for the muddiness that law school training seems to encourage.
My peers consider me a pretty good writer, and I firmly believe that my journalism courses had a lot more to do with it than law school did.
As a bonus tip, any comments above about the importance of proofreading are right on. Be your own toughest editor, but also recognize the value of another set of eyes reviewing your work. Editing turns the mediocre into the superb.
(Of course, having said that, someone will surely find -- and gleefully point out -- some egregious error I made in this post. Blame it on Sunday morning.)
Leaving aside the anthropomorphism and philosophical questions ("I pay dividends, therefore I am..."), a corporation is considered a person under law. A quick look at my ancient Black's Law Dictionary starts the definition with "An artificial person..." It's basic to the conception of an entity that can do the things that real people do, while isolating the owners (in most cases) from liability for its actions.
For example, a corporation can be convicted of a crime, but ordinarily the owners -- shareholders -- aren't punished except through the value of their stock (employees may be individually convicted, based on their personal actions, but not simply because they are an employee).
Sometimes the term "natural person" is used to distinguish between a human being and a corporation.
On point 1, you're right -- I should have said creation + fixed in a tangible medium.
On point 2, I stand by my statement that "substantial similarity" is the test for copyright infringement.
"Striking similarity" has been used to create an inference of access, and some of the cases talk about areas where the copyright is "weak" because of the nature of the subject matter; in those cases, claims have been made that a higher degree of similarity should be required, but that doesn't seem to be a prevailing view. (See, e.g., Hamil America, Inc. v. GFI).
And I did mention the requirement of access in my original posting.
1. Copyright exists from the moment of creation, regardless of whether the work is ever published, and regardless of whether there's a copyright notice. Formalities like including the notice and filing a registration can be very helpful, particularly if you want to sue an infringer and collect money from him, but they are necessary for the existence of the copyright.
2. The copyright holder enjoys five exclusive rights over his creation: the rights to copy, distribute, display, perform, and create derivative works. Derivative works include modifications, translations, etc. He can grant licenses to others to allow them to do any combination of these things. Running software mainly falls under the right to copy since you need to copy the work into temporary storage in order to use it. The GPL focuses mainly on the right to distribute.
3. Slightly oversimplified, the test for copyright infringement is access to the work plus "substantial similarity." If you had access to the original, and produce something substantially similar, the burden shifts to you to show non-infringement. If you didn't have access to the original, no infringement. Period. If the two works aren't substantially similar, no infringement. Period. Of course, the legal and factual determination of what constitutes substantial similarity is where it gets interesting.
4. Copyright does *not* protect ideas, only the *expression* of ideas. If there's only one way to express an idea, you can't copyright that expression. An example is a language (computer or otherwise) -- since the idea behind the language and the way it is expressed are inextricably linked (i.e., the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax), the idea of the language and its expression are said to have merged, resulting in no copyright. APIs often fall under this analysis as well -- if there's only one way to interface to a system, that interface may not be subject to copyright.
5. "Fair use" is a defense to infringement -- it applies where the court finds (based on a number of factors enumerated in the copyright act) that the infringement was excused because the social good resulting from the infringement outweighs the harm to the copyright holder. Except for the relatively few areas where the Supremes or enough circuit courts have made a ruling (as in the Betamax decision), you never an absolute guarantee that fair use will apply; it's always a roll of the dice based on how a court weighs all the factors.
(Note: the above is all based on US law. Most countries are roughly similar, but there are differences.)
That statement is merely a slightly more detailed version of what the copyright statute says when it describes the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder in 17 USC 106. It's not a license or a contract, but merely a statement of law (sort of like the goofy FBI notice at the beginning of a video).
And, fair use is not an exception from copyright, but a defense against infringement. If you copy a small portion of a work for academic purposes, you may have a fair use defense against an infringement claim. But you *have* infringed the holder's copyright. It's just that the court may decide that, under the fair use doctrine, the infringement was justified.
And, since I'm being pedantic, something called the "first sale doctrine" says that the copyright holder can't control what a purchaser does with a copy of a work (such as a book) once it's been purchased. So, the publisher can't prohibit me from selling the book to someone else, ripping the pages out, or throwing it in the fire. But that applies only to what happens to that physical copy. It has nothing to do with the author's right to control the underlying work.
So, while I can't stop you from throwing my book in the fire, I can stop you from making an unauthorized copy. You may have a fair use defense when I bring an infringement claim against you, but only if your use meets the fair use requirements. But again, you *did* infringe, even if the court finds in the end that it was excused.
With maybe one exception (I'm not sure about California) properly drafted non-compete clauses are enforceable in all the states of the US. The key, though, is that they must be properly drafted.
I'm a lawyer and many years ago ended up representing a bunch of clients who were being sued by their ex-employers over alleged violation of their non-competes. In each case we were able to get the non-compete thrown out because it was too broadly drafted -- it either lasted too long, had too wide a geographical scope, or tried to protect "secret" information that wasn't a trade secret. My state at the time (Wisconsin) has some very tough rules about what it takes for an enforceable non-compete, and these didn't meet the test.
However, a properly drafted non-compete, limited in geography, duration, and scope of employment, and (at least in some states) not tied to unreasonable confidentiality obligations, is enforceable.
"You can use the leviathan forces of attention and enthusiasm that are swirling around Web 2.0 these days as a powerful enabler to make something important and exciting happen in your organization."
In other words, hype building on hype. Just what the world needs...
But web view loses all concept of pagination -- it's just an endless roll of paper. The Word Normal view really is an excellent format for drafting because it makes the information (like page breaks) visible without slowing things down.
There's a bug open for OOo to add normal view, and there's been a lot of noise recently on it, but since the bug has been there a couple of years and OOo 2.0 still hasn't implemented it, I'm not sure if we'll ever see a normal view. Which is a shame.
Some kinds of contract provisions (disclaimer of warranties under the Uniform Commercial Code, and the notices required by numerous consumer protection laws) are required by statute to be in "conspicuous" type. All caps is considered conspicious if the rest of the document is capitalized normally. So, that's why those "ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED..." provisions are done that way. (You'll often see those provisions in bold as well, just at add more conspicuousness.)
However, if the whole document is in caps and the magic provision thus isn't differentiated from the rest of the text, then there's a pretty good argument that it's not "conspicuous," and there's a good chance a judge interested in the fine points of the law would find that clause unenforceable.
Last year my organization bought one of the cheap ($69 at Sam's Club) PSC combo units to use in our exhibit booth at a show. It was very amusing to watch the configuration process on a Windows laptop and on a Linux laptop.
The Windows installation took about 45 minutes, with many interesting words being said along the way.
The Linux installation, including downloading and installing the Debian packages for the HP office printer project (or whatever it's called) took less than ten minutes. And it worked perfectly both in print and scan modes on the first try.
Another important reason is that there's a constitutional right to a speedy criminal trial. Criminal matters take priority over civil ones as a result.
Civil cases are often have more complex evidence to deal with (OJ notwithstanding) so they tend to have a longer schedule. Add to that getting bumped by the criminal docket, and you can see how civil cases take longer.
The way to preempt patents is to publish your ideas as widely as you can, in the most widely read (at least, available) journals you can get into.
Then, those ideas become prior art and can't be swooped up by someone else -- or if they do attempt to patent them, the publications can be cited to invalidate the patent.
You want the most widely known publications because the patent examiner is more likely to find the ideas there; they aren't real good at finding obscure references.
I heard it a bit differently from my doctor -- the adjustment for thickness is because the glaucoma pressure check essentially pushes the cornea to see how much it deflects. A thicker cornea is stiffer and won't deflect as much, giving the impression of higher pressure.
I have a condition called keratoconus that leads to corneal thinning, and had cornea transplants in both eyes about 8 years ago. I now have glaucoma (which may or may not have been triggered by the transplants) and the doctors have an interesting time trying to interpret the pressure test results through the transplanted corneas, which are adequately thick but don't act quite the same as the original ones. I'm on two different eye drops twice a day to keep the pressure under control. So far, things seem reasonably stable but I get my pressure checked every two months, and have a visual field test annually.
There are more than a few well-respected hackers (in the good sense of the word) are hams, and there's a lot of software development going on in ham radio.
In particular, ham operators are doing lots of work with new digital modes made possible by using the sound card + PC as a powerful DSP platform. There's a lot of good stuff going on there.
Blatant plug -- I'm president of TAPR, which is a group that's promoting computer-related R&D in the ham radio community. Along with the ARRL (the US national ham group), we sponsor an annual Digital Communications Conference where papers are presented on all sorts of new uses of technology in ham radio.
PS -- for the hams here who may not be familiar, TAPR is not significantly focused on packet radio these days; we're doing lots of other stuff related to digital communications.
Just did an apt-get upgrade last night from unstable, and got 0.10PR (don't recall the exact version string; it was the Firefox string plus some additional stuff. But anyway, it's not 0.9.3 anymore.
Are you sure about that 1 hour recording limit? My first VCR was a Betamax ("because it's better, honey") and we recorded full-length movies. This was in 1982 or thereabouts; perhaps the very earliest Beta had faster record speeds (or shorter tapes).
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Ask Dr. Science is great, but I like the parody on the "Dinosaurs" show -- Ask Mr. Lizard -- who invariably blew up his young assistant. The tag line was "Looks like we're going to need another Timmy!"
IANARA (I Am Not A Radio Astronomer) but I wonder if these are very fast correlator chips that are used to synchronize (I'm sure there's a much better technical word) multiple data streams so that the data from all the antennas in the array can be massaged to make X small antennas look like one gigantic one (in resolution). Apparently it's a process that's much faster to do in silicon (across many parallel channels) than in a general purpose CPU.
I visited the Parkes radio telescope in Australia about two years ago and specialized correlator hardware was a big part of the processing system. They had designed (IIRC) three generations of multi-channel correlator hardware.
Real Geezers (like me) remember the original Bernoulli Box which had a large -- 8 inch? -- removable disk cartridge that stored, IIRC, 10MB. This would have been around 1985 or so, long before Syquest or the later zip drives.
The unit I worked on had a pair of Bernoulli drives; the database system (built using R:Base 4000 -- anyone remember that?) ran on one drive, and the other was for backup.
It actually worked pretty well.
The bottom channels in the UHF TV range are right above the UHF two-way radio allocation that runs from 450 to 470 MHz. That 20 MHz band is used by police, fire, other state/local government stuff, plus commercial users and in many areas they ran out of new frequency allocations.
A bunch of years ago -- 25? -- the FCC allowed users in some metro areas where there were no low-channel UHF stations to extend into the 470 - 512 MHz range to ease congestion. It's commonly known as the "UHF-T" band and it never displaced any existing TV stations. I believe that only public safety users can get licenses for that spectrum.
Huh???
Not in a publically traded company in the US. The directors are nominated by the board itself (usually through a nominating committee) and elected by the shareholders at the annual meeting. In almost all cases, management controls enough proxies from the shareholders to elect the slate of directors it wants. It's the rare exception when a large enough block of shareholders is disgruntled and organized enough to nominate their own candidate and elect them.
Directors don't have to own any stock in the company at all, though it's considered good form to do so, and some companies require it (of course, many of those same companies grant options to the directors or even make outright share grants to make it easy for them).
Trivia time: There was an episode of (I think) LA Law where Dan Castelanetta played a character who talked normally except when he had a huge Homer mask/head on his shoulders; then he talked like Homer. I think the plot was that he got stuck in the puppet head, or something equally dumb.
That's really interesting. My experience was exactly the opposite. I was a journalism major undergrad, and law school would have made my writing much worse if I'd let it.
Legal writing has a tendency toward formalism and wordiness that makes many lawyers' writing painful to read. I think the problem is that law school so strongly emphasizes the thought process (framing the argument, supporting your position) that style and grace in exposition fall out of the equation.
Journalistic writing, with its emphasis on clarity, brevity, and top-down organization, is a great antidote for the muddiness that law school training seems to encourage.
My peers consider me a pretty good writer, and I firmly believe that my journalism courses had a lot more to do with it than law school did.
As a bonus tip, any comments above about the importance of proofreading are right on. Be your own toughest editor, but also recognize the value of another set of eyes reviewing your work. Editing turns the mediocre into the superb.
(Of course, having said that, someone will surely find -- and gleefully point out -- some egregious error I made in this post. Blame it on Sunday morning.)
Leaving aside the anthropomorphism and philosophical questions ("I pay dividends, therefore I am..."), a corporation is considered a person under law. A quick look at my ancient Black's Law Dictionary starts the definition with "An artificial person..." It's basic to the conception of an entity that can do the things that real people do, while isolating the owners (in most cases) from liability for its actions.
For example, a corporation can be convicted of a crime, but ordinarily the owners -- shareholders -- aren't punished except through the value of their stock (employees may be individually convicted, based on their personal actions, but not simply because they are an employee).
Sometimes the term "natural person" is used to distinguish between a human being and a corporation.
On point 1, you're right -- I should have said creation + fixed in a tangible medium.
On point 2, I stand by my statement that "substantial similarity" is the test for copyright infringement.
"Striking similarity" has been used to create an inference of access, and some of the cases talk about areas where the copyright is "weak" because of the nature of the subject matter; in those cases, claims have been made that a higher degree of similarity should be required, but that doesn't seem to be a prevailing view. (See, e.g., Hamil America, Inc. v. GFI).
And I did mention the requirement of access in my original posting.
1. Copyright exists from the moment of creation, regardless of whether the work is ever published, and regardless of whether there's a copyright notice. Formalities like including the notice and filing a registration can be very helpful, particularly if you want to sue an infringer and collect money from him, but they are necessary for the existence of the copyright.
2. The copyright holder enjoys five exclusive rights over his creation: the rights to copy, distribute, display, perform, and create derivative works. Derivative works include modifications, translations, etc. He can grant licenses to others to allow them to do any combination of these things. Running software mainly falls under the right to copy since you need to copy the work into temporary storage in order to use it. The GPL focuses mainly on the right to distribute.
3. Slightly oversimplified, the test for copyright infringement is access to the work plus "substantial similarity." If you had access to the original, and produce something substantially similar, the burden shifts to you to show non-infringement. If you didn't have access to the original, no infringement. Period. If the two works aren't substantially similar, no infringement. Period. Of course, the legal and factual determination of what constitutes substantial similarity is where it gets interesting.
4. Copyright does *not* protect ideas, only the *expression* of ideas. If there's only one way to express an idea, you can't copyright that expression. An example is a language (computer or otherwise) -- since the idea behind the language and the way it is expressed are inextricably linked (i.e., the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax), the idea of the language and its expression are said to have merged, resulting in no copyright. APIs often fall under this analysis as well -- if there's only one way to interface to a system, that interface may not be subject to copyright.
5. "Fair use" is a defense to infringement -- it applies where the court finds (based on a number of factors enumerated in the copyright act) that the infringement was excused because the social good resulting from the infringement outweighs the harm to the copyright holder. Except for the relatively few areas where the Supremes or enough circuit courts have made a ruling (as in the Betamax decision), you never an absolute guarantee that fair use will apply; it's always a roll of the dice based on how a court weighs all the factors.
(Note: the above is all based on US law. Most countries are roughly similar, but there are differences.)
That statement is merely a slightly more detailed version of what the copyright statute says when it describes the exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder in 17 USC 106. It's not a license or a contract, but merely a statement of law (sort of like the goofy FBI notice at the beginning of a video).
And, fair use is not an exception from copyright, but a defense against infringement. If you copy a small portion of a work for academic purposes, you may have a fair use defense against an infringement claim. But you *have* infringed the holder's copyright. It's just that the court may decide that, under the fair use doctrine, the infringement was justified.
And, since I'm being pedantic, something called the "first sale doctrine" says that the copyright holder can't control what a purchaser does with a copy of a work (such as a book) once it's been purchased. So, the publisher can't prohibit me from selling the book to someone else, ripping the pages out, or throwing it in the fire. But that applies only to what happens to that physical copy. It has nothing to do with the author's right to control the underlying work.
So, while I can't stop you from throwing my book in the fire, I can stop you from making an unauthorized copy. You may have a fair use defense when I bring an infringement claim against you, but only if your use meets the fair use requirements. But again, you *did* infringe, even if the court finds in the end that it was excused.
With maybe one exception (I'm not sure about California) properly drafted non-compete clauses are enforceable in all the states of the US. The key, though, is that they must be properly drafted.
I'm a lawyer and many years ago ended up representing a bunch of clients who were being sued by their ex-employers over alleged violation of their non-competes. In each case we were able to get the non-compete thrown out because it was too broadly drafted -- it either lasted too long, had too wide a geographical scope, or tried to protect "secret" information that wasn't a trade secret. My state at the time (Wisconsin) has some very tough rules about what it takes for an enforceable non-compete, and these didn't meet the test.
However, a properly drafted non-compete, limited in geography, duration, and scope of employment, and (at least in some states) not tied to unreasonable confidentiality obligations, is enforceable.
"You can use the leviathan forces of attention and enthusiasm that are swirling around Web 2.0 these days as a powerful enabler to make something important and exciting happen in your organization."
In other words, hype building on hype. Just what the world needs...
But web view loses all concept of pagination -- it's just an endless roll of paper. The Word Normal view really is an excellent format for drafting because it makes the information (like page breaks) visible without slowing things down.
There's a bug open for OOo to add normal view, and there's been a lot of noise recently on it, but since the bug has been there a couple of years and OOo 2.0 still hasn't implemented it, I'm not sure if we'll ever see a normal view. Which is a shame.
Some kinds of contract provisions (disclaimer of warranties under the Uniform Commercial Code, and the notices required by numerous consumer protection laws) are required by statute to be in "conspicuous" type. All caps is considered conspicious if the rest of the document is capitalized normally. So, that's why those "ALL OTHER WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED..." provisions are done that way. (You'll often see those provisions in bold as well, just at add more conspicuousness.)
However, if the whole document is in caps and the magic provision thus isn't differentiated from the rest of the text, then there's a pretty good argument that it's not "conspicuous," and there's a good chance a judge interested in the fine points of the law would find that clause unenforceable.
Last year my organization bought one of the cheap ($69 at Sam's Club) PSC combo units to use in our exhibit booth at a show. It was very amusing to watch the configuration process on a Windows laptop and on a Linux laptop.
The Windows installation took about 45 minutes, with many interesting words being said along the way.
The Linux installation, including downloading and installing the Debian packages for the HP office printer project (or whatever it's called) took less than ten minutes. And it worked perfectly both in print and scan modes on the first try.
I was there when that happened (at least, one of the times it happened) in the late '70s. The ROTC people were very scary.
Another important reason is that there's a constitutional right to a speedy criminal trial. Criminal matters take priority over civil ones as a result.
Civil cases are often have more complex evidence to deal with (OJ notwithstanding) so they tend to have a longer schedule. Add to that getting bumped by the criminal docket, and you can see how civil cases take longer.
The way to preempt patents is to publish your ideas as widely as you can, in the most widely read (at least, available) journals you can get into.
Then, those ideas become prior art and can't be swooped up by someone else -- or if they do attempt to patent them, the publications can be cited to invalidate the patent.
You want the most widely known publications because the patent examiner is more likely to find the ideas there; they aren't real good at finding obscure references.
I heard it a bit differently from my doctor -- the adjustment for thickness is because the glaucoma pressure check essentially pushes the cornea to see how much it deflects. A thicker cornea is stiffer and won't deflect as much, giving the impression of higher pressure.
I have a condition called keratoconus that leads to corneal thinning, and had cornea transplants in both eyes about 8 years ago. I now have glaucoma (which may or may not have been triggered by the transplants) and the doctors have an interesting time trying to interpret the pressure test results through the transplanted corneas, which are adequately thick but don't act quite the same as the original ones. I'm on two different eye drops twice a day to keep the pressure under control. So far, things seem reasonably stable but I get my pressure checked every two months, and have a visual field test annually.
Phil Karn, KA9Q and Bdale Garbee, KB0G, are two more.
Yeah, that struck me as ill-informed.
There are more than a few well-respected hackers (in the good sense of the word) are hams, and there's a lot of software development going on in ham radio.
In particular, ham operators are doing lots of work with new digital modes made possible by using the sound card + PC as a powerful DSP platform. There's a lot of good stuff going on there.
Blatant plug -- I'm president of TAPR, which is a group that's promoting computer-related R&D in the ham radio community. Along with the ARRL (the US national ham group), we sponsor an annual Digital Communications Conference where papers are presented on all sorts of new uses of technology in ham radio.
PS -- for the hams here who may not be familiar, TAPR is not significantly focused on packet radio these days; we're doing lots of other stuff related to digital communications.
Just did an apt-get upgrade last night from unstable, and got 0.10PR (don't recall the exact version string; it was the Firefox string plus some additional stuff. But anyway, it's not 0.9.3 anymore.
I saw BoomChicago in Amsterdam a few years ago. Unbelievably funny show...
Are you sure about that 1 hour recording limit? My first VCR was a Betamax ("because it's better, honey") and we recorded full-length movies. This was in 1982 or thereabouts; perhaps the very earliest Beta had faster record speeds (or shorter tapes).