Yes! That's the damned point. Selling an object is not the same thing as distributing copyrighted material included inside of it.
Your interpretation means that I'd have to read pages upon pages of legalese to find out if I have the rights to sell my Linux-powered router that I bought at a store. Am I including the license? Is it valid in this section of the country? Is it legal for me to offer this license?
The point is that I don't have to worry about this crap, because I'm not distributing the copyrighted material! I'm selling the damned object. The copyrighted material has already been distributed, and doesn't need to be covered again.
I'd really like to see you try your "selling is not distributing" argument in a court trying to get out of jail time.
Ever seen a used book store go to court? This is what their entire industry is based on. I'd win, if I was saying "I was just selling this damned book I bought, not distributing the material within against the copyright owner's wishes!"
Now, it might be possible to successfully argue that it would be unreasonable to attach distribution limitations for a physical device based on the grant of rights attached to a copyrighted work that make up just a component of the device itself - I don't know - I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not talking about Company X saying "You can't distribute the source code" - because that would be in violation of the GPL. What I'm talking about is the case of Company Y being a dick and not releasing the code, even though they could, simply because they are not obligated to.
Selling a book is not subject to copyright law because what is being sold is the book - the physical item.
Exactly, and that's what we're talking about here - the physical item - the ROM - is being sold.
these purchasers would be free of any obligations with regards to the copyrighted work.
Um, that's kindof the intention of the first sale doctrine, but you're interpreting it in a weird way that makes it sound really bad. The point is that the copyright restrictions apply to the work, not the physical object.
You can't attach obligations to "possessing" an object possessing copyrighted material. This is exactly analogous to a book - the physical book cannot have copyright restrictions tacked onto it, but the material can. That's the entire idea. The GPL does not state, anywhere, that you're restricted from using it in any way - it's right there - The act of running the Program is not restricted - and it also states that all you have to do is include the source code to all the people who you give the binaries to.
In this example, Company X has already done that to Company Y. Company Y is not bound to give the source code when the sell the physical ROM because it's just an object containing copyrighted material, and there is no restriction on the sale of that. This is precisely identical to a physical book.
The best way to think about it would be region-encoded DVDs. I'm sure the distributors are required to sign something that says they won't distribute them outside of a certain area, but once they do that, the owners of the DVDs can very simply sell them to a used DVD store in a different region. The DVD Consortium is just screwed here - there's nothing they can do, because all that's happening is the sale of a legally purchased item by its owner.
The best actual real example of this would be here - you've got a router, with GPL software on it. Imagine if the router came with a CD containing the GPLed software on it. This is all they need to do, according to 3b! But if Joe Blow owns this router, and sells it to Jane Doe, he doesn't have to include the CD, and the company can rightly say that it does not have to give Jane Doe the source, because they've already fulfilled their obligation under 3b. (Note that the company is, of course, being a jerk, and this is unlikely to happen, but it is valid).
First sale is pretty rigidly upheld, and that's a good thing - I'd rather not have to read legalese to find out if I can just sell something I own.
It allows them to sell their *single* copy to someone else, thus depriving them of that copy.
Yah. That's what I said.
It does *not* allow them to circumvent copyright law.
Author says to distributor: "You are authorized to distribute this book to only Amazon.com." Distributor: "OK, no problem" - distributes to Amazon.com. Joe Blow: Buys book at Amazon.com Joe Blow: Sells book to Whitey's Book Store on 5th.
First sale allows everything after the distributor to happen, because it's just a transferrence of the ownership, rather than a redistribution. In the end, though, the book got to Whitey's Book Store, when the author specifically said "Distribute only to Amazon.com". Most people would call that a 'circumvention'.
Contracts can add extra requirements and clauses which have nothing to do with, and can downright contradict, any common law including common copyright law.
The GPL is not a contract. It is a license for distribution. Hence the name "General Public License."
And licenses cannot override common law, because they can't screw with your fundamental rights as a purchaser as defined by local law. Hence the reason that Nintendo can go shove their "no backups" clause up the wazoo, and hence the reason that Microsoft, in California, had to give $400 to bunches of people with no restrictions because you couldn't say "you can't cancel this contract" in the rebate requirement.
Did you read the example fully? He didn't say distribute. He said sell. That is, give the physical ROM which has the code on it to another person, so that he no longer has the device that he purchased. This is selling by the original purchaser, which is not restricted by copyright law.
You can sell your copy of Windows, though, regardless of what crap Microsoft says.
If it only covered a 'first sale' then it'd be utterly useless.
It does not cover first sale. If it did, then I could not sell any of the books I own, because I do not have the right to make copies and distribute them! There is no license agreement in my books saying I can sell them - it's covered by first sale!
I say copyright law and the first sale doctrine. This is not semantics.
Selling it is distributing it.
No, it is not. Otherwise I could not sell any of the books I have. Saying selling something that you own is the same as distributing something is flat wrong.
In your example, Company Y would be off the hook, but Company X would still have to provide the source to those who owned the devices.
But company X is only required to give the code to whomever it was distributed to, by them - Company Y. Company Y doesn't have to follow any licensing agreements because the right of first sale allows them to sell without any permission from the copyright holder.
Imagine an author, writing a book. He gives the publisher permission to distribute his book. The publisher distributes it, and then the booksellers can sell it without any permission from the author, because they bought it originally.
If the author says to the publisher "you can only distribute this to Amazon.com", and Amazon.com sells it to Joe Blow, who sells it back to a local bookshop, Joe Blow didn't violate any license agreement, because it doesn't apply to him. Same deal. This is fundamentally identical to the GPL, except the GPL says "only distribute if you include the source" - again, this doesn't apply to Joe Blow.
Your parent is incorrect with his point 3, because the GPL compels Company X to distribute the source and object codes under the GPL. Thus, Company Y must agree to those terms, and it's bound to include the source code with the object code, or offer the code.
No. The GPL can't do that - it works only within standard copyright law, which is a restriction on distribution, not a forced requirement. That's the point.
I don't need permission from the authors at all to sell my copy of Gravitation, for instance. The GPL says "We do not give you permission unless you distribute source as well" - the seller then says "I don't need your permission at all - by first sale doctrine."
The GPL uses standard copyright law to restrict distribution. Normal copyright law restricts all distribution, but first sale allows selling - just not copying. Company Y can only sell whatever Company X gave them. It's that simple.
Yah, but the problem is that under copyright law, they're not allowed to make that restriction in this case - I can resell a book without having permission to copy it at all. The GPL says "You don't have permission to copy it without including the source", but first sale says you don't need any permission. That's the point - Someone could say to company Y "You don't have the right to distribute this GPLed software without source!" and company Y's response would be "I'm not distributing it. I'm selling it."
It is an interesting loophole, and it is a loophole. The easy way to see this is just consider that copyright gives you no rights to copy and distribute a copyrighted work you bought without a license. But first sale doctrine does allow you to sell something you bought.
Any theory that can arbitrarily fit data based on an adjustable parameter at some point has to be discarded simply on simplicity grounds. There are many examples like this - Brans-Dicke theory is a good example - it's characterized by basically one parameter, which in the limit of it going to infinity becomes general relativity. The problem with this is that if we say "well, maybe the parameter's just a bit higher..." we'd be here till the end of time trying to disprove it.
This isn't exactly the case for the Higgs, because there's an energy range that it can't exceed, so if it isn't found below that level, then fundamentally, there's something very screwed up.
However, the idea is pretty much the same, because even if you don't see a signal in a given energy range, you can keep trying, keep trying, and keep trying. While I might be a little bit "eagerly skeptical" - too happy to have the Higgs die, it's not totally crazy, as there have been many models which put the Higgs clearly in the LEP range. Then they didn't see it, so they changed the models, and it put the Higgs clearly in the LHC's proposed range. Given that, and the particle type (no other known scalar fields, and the scalar field is the easiest toy-model you study in QFT), a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.
Anyway, it's somewhat akin to me saying that I turn purple when you're not looking, then after you set up a camera, me saying when you're not looking and not filming me - etc, etc. At some point the null results have to be interpreted as a possible result of null, especially if there's fundamentally no other way to prove the null.
they're horrible for viewing at anything other than dead-on; gamma and contrast change drastically from side to side or above/below
Yah, valid point. But the digital photo frame does actually generate light, so it does draw attention to itself.
Further, if I have a great photo, I want it to always be there, or at least be instantly accessible. No easy way to do that here...
What if you have 5 "great photos"? Then you either take up a huge amount of wall space, or cycle through 5 of them slowly in a digital frame.
framing a picture means it was good enough to warrant said treatment.
How many people have a ton of picture albums rather than a ton of frames? The reason you only hang pictures you consider important is that the frame + the picture enlargement cost money, and the wall space is precious.
I have a lot of pictures from a lot of trips that I'd love to have hanging on a wall for people to see - especially right after I've taken the trip - but I don't know if I'd want to go through the money to have it hanging for a long time.
they need a power cord, which is fugly
Not very creative, are you? Here's what I've come up with so far to hide the power cord for mine:
1) Grab a potted plant, put it beside it, run it down behind it. 2) Hang a picture or something behind it, run it behind that. 3) Drill a hole into the wall behind it, drop the cord down to the ground, drill another hole and plug it in there.
the LCD panel won't last very long being on all day, every day; the backlights are rated for a few thousand hours tops.
Is 50 a few? Most are in the neighborhood of 50K hours, which is about a year of constant use. And it wouldn't take that much fiddling (you can even do it in Windows!) to turn it off during crazy points of the day. Plus the 50,000 is of course a worst-case: backlights have routinely lasted for far longer than that in constant commercial use.
they have vastly inferior resolution; high-resolution LCD panels aren't available anywhere except in laptops. A standard print from even, say, Walmart's digital photo lab machine...is at least 300dpi, more like 600dpi.
Oddly enough, you don't need high-resolution - pictures look very good even at 640x480 at larger than 6" x 8" if they're on an LCD. Plus the added benefit of having consistent lighting (via the backlight) makes the color representation look much more vivid and lifelike.
Hard drives especially don't like heat...
Hard drives, if not being accessed, can last for a long time with in a moderate heat setting. All the pictures sit in memory. Spin down the drive, and put it in full sleep mode.
Archival photo paper, with UV-blocking glass, mounted with acid-free materials, will last decades
Digital photos last forever. And that's just natively! Physical frames, however, can get damaged just as easily.
Of course, you're forgetting the main reason: it's a PC, for crying out loud! Get creative! Drop a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, 802.11b card. Boom, instant easy Web access at your fingertips anytime (the number of times I've grabbed movie times from mine...). A normal frame can't do that.
Get a TI Extensa 550/560/570. They have socketed CPUs, so you can just drop in a P166, and as you're going to rip apart its guts, you can upgrade its heatsink as well.
If you're TOTALLY nuts, you can drop in a Socket 7 if you can get ahold of a Socket 7 adapter.
Best part is the price. Extensas, without hard drive, go for ~$20-$30 on eBay.
Then again, I have NO idea why anyone would use them to just display pictures! Drop in a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, and 802.11b PCMCIA card. Boom. Instant computer whenever you need it, and when you're not using it, it displays pictures. I use Windows 98 heavily stripped down on mine, because it's pretty usable, even with only a P75 currently. I could probably heavily strip down Debian+X as well if I worked at it.
I love mine. Total cost would have been maybe $75 including everything.
Which isn't to say that it will be exactly like the SM Higgs, just that it won't look too different at low energy, or we already would have seen its impact in precision eletroweak measurements, for instance.
Is that true? I didn't think the precision electroweak stuff depended too much on the pure Higgs interactions, but just on the symmetry-broken 'residual interactions' - i.e. the ones that gave the particles mass. I always find it hard to tell, though, as most books completely gloss over the Higgs physics sections because it hasn't been seen.
we have no experimentally confirmed examples of fundamental tensor fields, either, but most of us think gravitons exist:-)
Well, we do have an experimentally confirmed example of a tensor field - gravity. That's what linearized gravity says - if you did have a spin-2 field, it'd generate gravity in the linearized limit. The important part is that the argument is reversible - you can say "what spin particle would cause these effects?" So we don't have experimental evidence of the particle, but we do have experimental evidence of the field.
The same isn't true for the Higgs field - you can't "reverse course" like you can with gravity, and take the interactions and work backwards to the dynamics of the particle. The easiest counterexample is technicolor, which would just as easily explain the Higgs interaction (ignore for the moment it also suggests other junk which is unobserved - it's unimportant to the argument). The point is that the scalar Higgs interaction does not uniquely predict anything. (As far as I know, no one's worked backwards from the fact that particles have mass and we see the interactions we do and said "only a fundamental scalar can cause this")
those line shapes are inconsistent with the presence of fermions that we haven't yet seen which are lighter than half the Z mass.
Yah, but I thought that restricted the heavier of the lepton family only (i.e. the electron-type) and not the lighter. Hrm, should go off and read the PDB section on that again.
But they all have their own challenges, usually conflict with existing data.
Ah, but doesn't a purely scalar Higgs conflict with existing data as well? We don't see one, after all. The excuse of saying "we haven't looked at high enough energies" seems to be exactly that - an excuse. I'll give the Higgs mechanism credit for being a "well-constructed theory" - a theory with enough flexibility in its parameters to avoid being disproven for quite some time. Like SUSY, for example (which I also don't believe is real).
The main reason that a simple scalar Higgs theory dominates now is because of the simplicity argument (and because it was first...), but I don't agree that having one fundamental scalar, and then everything else being more complex, is simple.:)
By the way, the link on your homepage to your research appears broken....
It is - that isn't my homepage anymore (I don't have a current one...), though my current research is here, if that web server's running.:) I really need to create a new webpage...
Anyway, the funny thing is that I know all of the complications about the Higgs's existence - I mean, I've done the toy problem as to why it has to have the isospin that it does, etc. - but I still just don't believe that any particle that conveniently avoids discovery, and is the only one of its kind, has to be real. Note that I don't necessarily believe in a fundamental graviton, either.:) And also, it's not like I have a better idea - I'm just skeptical. Lots of people can give me good reasons why a proton needs to decay, after all - and I'll still point to the >10^33 years measurement and say "Prove it."
there's your implication that this is some what frivolous.
I'd love to agree with you, but the Standard Model's Higgs mechanism has absolutely no authority to avoid the term "frivolous." In a lot of ways, it is.
The Higgs mechanism is done in the simplest way possible to generate masses - it uses a scalar field, which is the simplest field you can use, and, curiously, of which there are no other examples in nature - leptons and quarks are spinors (fermions of spin-1/2), photons/gluons are vectors, and even gravitons, if they exist, would probably be tensors.
There's no reason to desparately cling to the Higgs mechanism, other than we have no other way of generating mass that theorists 'like'. And, to be perfectly honest, this 'detection' does raise eyebrows - it's at the edge of LEP's detection, and it's only a 3 sigma (or so) detection. Now, that's not saying that Nature can't have been cruel to us and put the Higgs right at the edge of LEP's detection range, sure - worse things have happened. But it's a little suspicious.
Also, the Higgs "boson" has predicted nothing - anything that does symmetry breaking in a similar way would predict exactly the same thing.
(Sorry - I hate the fervent adherence to the Higgs, especially when we've looked, looked, and keep having to shove the mass up 'just a little higher' to the next accelerator range. I also hate the fact that no one else thinks that maybe a fundamental scalar just isn't possible for some subtle reason we don't understand. This would allow much more complicated Higgs interactions which people have typically ignored based on simplicity arguments. People said "if LEP doesn't find the Higgs..." and now people are saying "if LHC doesn't find the Higgs..." - what's next?)
("there will be one more light neutrino species, but no more after that")
To nitpick, the "N=3" discovery is only valid in the energy range of interest. You have to generate the lepton partner as well, so while the neutrino species could still be light, the lepton partner could be ungodly heavy, and thus outside of the detection field.
It would have to have odd mixing angles, sure, but a fourth family isn't out of the question.
That's meant to mean there's no additional science gained by reservicing the shuttles, which is a purely operational task, not that there's no new science in SM4. It was ambiguous, and God forbid I get misinterpreted on something else.
A lot of good research projects will continue to be done, but some will no longer be possible... and that's a shame because all of this was decided by ONE person and without a proper clear review of the process.
Yah. And that person was President Bush, by pushing the Moon thing to the exclusion of anything else. The science cuts hurt everywhere, and I don't think it's fair that Hubble gets the most attention.
I never intended to say that JWST would make everyone happy in space astronomy. Of course it won't. But science funding through NASA has suddenly gotten very, very hard, and unless you change the political climate (not out of the question...), you're going to have to make sacrifices, so the goal is to get the most science done with the least money. I think JWST is good science for the money, because it's moderately far along at this point, and because it will do a lot of cutting-edge stuff.
Basically, I feel bad about Hubble, but there are a lot of fields of science that are just as screwed as (for instance) the upper-optical/UV band is with the loss of Hubble, thanks to the budget crap. I just don't agree that Hubble should get any more special consideration than other fields/missions which got screwed in the process. A lot of optical/infrared/UV astronomers would be more than happy if SM4 came back, and JWST launched. But that really seems to unfairly screw a lot of the other scientists whose missions got canned.
Plus considering the budgetary strappings I don't think that the additional overhead in cost really justifies SM4. Now, if the servicing could be made cheaper, or whatever, then it's reasonable. I guess it's kindof the frugal part of me - Hubble's "science/cost" ratio is quite high now, but I don't see the "science/cost" ratio for SM4 being as good as where else the money can go, given that the cost just jumped a lot, and there's no new science.
It should also be noted that SM4 doesn't necessarily get you through 2010. Goddard put out a study which basically says that SM4 will only get you about 3 years (50%) error-free operation, and only a 30% chance to make it to 2010, though that's a bit conservative. I just don't see it being worth that much.
The Dell 802.11b/g miniPCI cards (which use broadcom chipsets) work beautifully with ndiswrapper. Even stuff like iwspy works fine, so you can use ifplugd/waproamd to handle connecting to different networks and autodetecting dropped re-established connections and firing off the DHCP request again. Gotta love it. It works much better than in Windows!
(Jeez, one poorly worded statement. If I had put a "for JWST" after it, no one would've answered...)
No, true, but in those cases, adaptive optics can do well, because it's single source rather than deep field imaging.
Look, everyone can find a reason why a certain class of telescopes should exist. Yes, adaptive optics aren't necessarily a panacaea, but I don't think a large space telescope is the end-all, be-all of the field, and I think that politically they're much harder to get off the ground.
When redshifted, this line often ends up in blue band, where the JWST can't see.
And when redshifted more, it ends up in the green and near-infrared, which is where JWST can see.
Yah, yah, I know. High-Z isn't everything, and I agree. But that wasn't my point. JWST is a big-mirror telescope. A *really* big mirror telescope (6.5 meter space telescope? yipes). And you just don't need a big mirror to see things that are close. For that, a smaller telescope would do fine. And you wouldn't even need the size of Hubble, either.
I'm frankly appalled that someone with even a passing knowledge of astrophysics, much less a degree in the subject, would issue a blanket statement like "the optical is boring."
Yah, yah, I know. The post was something like 4 lines long - it wasn't intended to be in depth. I was actually saying that the optical is boring with reference to JWST, which is correct - JWST is a deep-field scope, and deep-field high-optical/UV isn't nearly as useful as deep/far infrared.
It was a bit of a short-tempered post because I hate it when people refer to the JWST as "just an" infrared telescope. It's not. It's optimized for infrared, definitely, but that's where big mirror, huge collection area, long integration times are most important, and that's what I was trying to say.
And what of the 9x oversubscription rate on HST itself? Do you honestly think all those observations, or even a large majority, are in the limited wavelength regime that NGST/JWST will have in common with HST?
I think a lot of them are. (Specifically I think that this one - the ultra deep field - is, and I'd be correct). I do agree that losing Hubble's UV is bad. I had hoped that the MIDEX AO wasn't pushed back, but I must've missed that - I knew others were.
I'm presuming you actually have a more nuanced view of the subject than your post would indicate
If you read it again, I said "the optical is boring" with reference to JWST. It wasn't as clear as I had hoped (it was clear to me, but then again, I wrote it).
we will have any sort of UV capability for the following ten years or so
No, I agree we won't. But unfortunately I don't think we'd get another 10 years out of Hubble, and then we'd be out of the UV anyway. I don't think it's worth wasting the equivalent of several MIDEX's worth of money to try to keep it running for an extra 4 or 5 years.
There's still plenty of interesting science to be done in the optical. Just not high-redshift stuff. Don't be a high-z snob.
No high-redshift stuff => Objects are close => Objects are bright =>
Don't need a large telescope.
Optical is 'boring' for gigantic mirrors. You'd be better off taking the instruments for SM4 and proposing a new mission solely designed to look in the high optical/UV. In other words, plan to compliment JWST, not HST.
Hrm? FUSE was a MIDEX class observatory, wasn't it? That's $180 million, total - that's not too bad. Granted you'd need a slightly different setup to push down closer to optical, but I don't think it would be that bad.
Hubble costs about $200 million a year just in operations, and it should be noted that the instruments for SM4 cost ~$200 million or so - so that's a large chunk of instrumentation which wouldn't have to be built from scratch for a new observatory as well.
I don't think a MIDEX class mission to replace the lost UV capability on Hubble is out of the question.
Moderators need explain how your got rated a 4 for your silly reply.
Because JWST is an medium optical, near infrared, and far infrared telescope, not an IR scope as the parent said, and therefore it is informative?
NGST is most certainly not a replacement for Hubble.
It is in the deep-field category, which is where all the pretty-picture enthusiasts are pushing.
optical ground based adaptive optics catches on
Catches on? I think just about everyone agrees that optical AO is the obvious next step - hence the thirty-meter-telescope (TMT) and many other AO projects.
I'll agree with you that in the UV, Hubble doesn't have a match out there yet. But JWST doesn't serve a complimentary role to HST, it supersedes it in a lot of Hubble's operational capacity.
Honestly, with this servicing mission, how long do you think Hubble will last? 10 years? And how much will it cost? Considering they need to recertify the shuttles specifically to do this task, and have a backup shuttle ready in case something goes wrong... I don't think most people fully understand the excess cost that would need to go into it.
I'm not saying that Hubble isn't a good observatory. It is. What I'm saying is that scientists never expected Hubble to last forever, and they have planned past it (for crying out loud, there are conferences that are basically called "Life After Hubble").
Sure, maybe you can't see the most red-shifted "foo" galaxy, but with STIS (the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) we can obtain optical/near UV spectra which contain an enormous number of ionised metal transitions.
No, you're definitely right that the blue->UV band has interesting features, but you really want a telescope that's designed specifically for the UV, and there's absolutely no doubt that NASA will fund a UV-specific telescope.
The question being raised here is "should we spend money on Hubble, and use it for a while" or "spend money on a UV-specific telescope". I'd rather the second option.
The other question is "what kind of a telescope do you need"? Infrared needs an utterly huge one, because all the deep-field stuff is far, far away and incredibly dim. You don't really need a massive telescope for ultraviolet - not as much as you do for infrared, anyway. So it makes more sense to have two dedicated missions rather than 1 combined one.
Slashdot Mirror
Selling something is not distributing it?
Yes! That's the damned point. Selling an object is not the same thing as distributing copyrighted material included inside of it.
Your interpretation means that I'd have to read pages upon pages of legalese to find out if I have the rights to sell my Linux-powered router that I bought at a store. Am I including the license? Is it valid in this section of the country? Is it legal for me to offer this license?
The point is that I don't have to worry about this crap, because I'm not distributing the copyrighted material! I'm selling the damned object. The copyrighted material has already been distributed, and doesn't need to be covered again.
I'd really like to see you try your "selling is not distributing" argument in a court trying to get out of jail time.
Ever seen a used book store go to court? This is what their entire industry is based on. I'd win, if I was saying "I was just selling this damned book I bought, not distributing the material within against the copyright owner's wishes!"
Now, it might be possible to successfully argue that it would be unreasonable to attach distribution limitations for a physical device based on the grant of rights attached to a copyrighted work that make up just a component of the device itself - I don't know - I'm not a lawyer.
I'm not talking about Company X saying "You can't distribute the source code" - because that would be in violation of the GPL. What I'm talking about is the case of Company Y being a dick and not releasing the code, even though they could, simply because they are not obligated to.
Selling a book is not subject to copyright law because what is being sold is the book - the physical item.
Exactly, and that's what we're talking about here - the physical item - the ROM - is being sold.
these purchasers would be free of any obligations with regards to the copyrighted work.
Um, that's kindof the intention of the first sale doctrine, but you're interpreting it in a weird way that makes it sound really bad. The point is that the copyright restrictions apply to the work, not the physical object.
You can't attach obligations to "possessing" an object possessing copyrighted material. This is exactly analogous to a book - the physical book cannot have copyright restrictions tacked onto it, but the material can. That's the entire idea. The GPL does not state, anywhere, that you're restricted from using it in any way - it's right there - The act of running the Program is not restricted - and it also states that all you have to do is include the source code to all the people who you give the binaries to.
In this example, Company X has already done that to Company Y. Company Y is not bound to give the source code when the sell the physical ROM because it's just an object containing copyrighted material, and there is no restriction on the sale of that. This is precisely identical to a physical book.
The best way to think about it would be region-encoded DVDs. I'm sure the distributors are required to sign something that says they won't distribute them outside of a certain area, but once they do that, the owners of the DVDs can very simply sell them to a used DVD store in a different region. The DVD Consortium is just screwed here - there's nothing they can do, because all that's happening is the sale of a legally purchased item by its owner.
The best actual real example of this would be here - you've got a router, with GPL software on it. Imagine if the router came with a CD containing the GPLed software on it. This is all they need to do, according to 3b! But if Joe Blow owns this router, and sells it to Jane Doe, he doesn't have to include the CD, and the company can rightly say that it does not have to give Jane Doe the source, because they've already fulfilled their obligation under 3b. (Note that the company is, of course, being a jerk, and this is unlikely to happen, but it is valid).
First sale is pretty rigidly upheld, and that's a good thing - I'd rather not have to read legalese to find out if I can just sell something I own.
It allows them to sell their *single* copy to someone else, thus depriving them of that copy.
Yah. That's what I said.
It does *not* allow them to circumvent copyright law.
Author says to distributor: "You are authorized to distribute this book to only Amazon.com."
Distributor: "OK, no problem" - distributes to Amazon.com.
Joe Blow: Buys book at Amazon.com
Joe Blow: Sells book to Whitey's Book Store on 5th.
First sale allows everything after the distributor to happen, because it's just a transferrence of the ownership, rather than a redistribution. In the end, though, the book got to Whitey's Book Store, when the author specifically said "Distribute only to Amazon.com". Most people would call that a 'circumvention'.
Contracts can add extra requirements and clauses which have nothing to do with, and can downright contradict, any common law including common copyright law.
The GPL is not a contract. It is a license for distribution. Hence the name "General Public License."
And licenses cannot override common law, because they can't screw with your fundamental rights as a purchaser as defined by local law. Hence the reason that Nintendo can go shove their "no backups" clause up the wazoo, and hence the reason that Microsoft, in California, had to give $400 to bunches of people with no restrictions because you couldn't say "you can't cancel this contract" in the rebate requirement.
Did you read the example fully? He didn't say distribute. He said sell. That is, give the physical ROM which has the code on it to another person, so that he no longer has the device that he purchased. This is selling by the original purchaser, which is not restricted by copyright law.
You can sell your copy of Windows, though, regardless of what crap Microsoft says.
If it only covered a 'first sale' then it'd be utterly useless.
It does not cover first sale. If it did, then I could not sell any of the books I own, because I do not have the right to make copies and distribute them! There is no license agreement in my books saying I can sell them - it's covered by first sale!
You say tomatoes,
I say copyright law and the first sale doctrine. This is not semantics.
Selling it is distributing it.
No, it is not. Otherwise I could not sell any of the books I have. Saying selling something that you own is the same as distributing something is flat wrong.
In your example, Company Y would be off the hook, but Company X would still have to provide the source to those who owned the devices.
But company X is only required to give the code to whomever it was distributed to, by them - Company Y. Company Y doesn't have to follow any licensing agreements because the right of first sale allows them to sell without any permission from the copyright holder.
Imagine an author, writing a book. He gives the publisher permission to distribute his book. The publisher distributes it, and then the booksellers can sell it without any permission from the author, because they bought it originally.
If the author says to the publisher "you can only distribute this to Amazon.com", and Amazon.com sells it to Joe Blow, who sells it back to a local bookshop, Joe Blow didn't violate any license agreement, because it doesn't apply to him. Same deal. This is fundamentally identical to the GPL, except the GPL says "only distribute if you include the source" - again, this doesn't apply to Joe Blow.
Your parent is incorrect with his point 3, because the GPL compels Company X to distribute the source and object codes under the GPL. Thus, Company Y must agree to those terms, and it's bound to include the source code with the object code, or offer the code.
No. The GPL can't do that - it works only within standard copyright law, which is a restriction on distribution, not a forced requirement. That's the point.
I don't need permission from the authors at all to sell my copy of Gravitation, for instance. The GPL says "We do not give you permission unless you distribute source as well" - the seller then says "I don't need your permission at all - by first sale doctrine."
The GPL uses standard copyright law to restrict distribution. Normal copyright law restricts all distribution, but first sale allows selling - just not copying. Company Y can only sell whatever Company X gave them. It's that simple.
Yah, but the problem is that under copyright law, they're not allowed to make that restriction in this case - I can resell a book without having permission to copy it at all. The GPL says "You don't have permission to copy it without including the source", but first sale says you don't need any permission. That's the point - Someone could say to company Y "You don't have the right to distribute this GPLed software without source!" and company Y's response would be "I'm not distributing it. I'm selling it."
It is an interesting loophole, and it is a loophole. The easy way to see this is just consider that copyright gives you no rights to copy and distribute a copyrighted work you bought without a license. But first sale doctrine does allow you to sell something you bought.
Since you haven't found it yet, it doesn't exist.
Any theory that can arbitrarily fit data based on an adjustable parameter at some point has to be discarded simply on simplicity grounds. There are many examples like this - Brans-Dicke theory is a good example - it's characterized by basically one parameter, which in the limit of it going to infinity becomes general relativity. The problem with this is that if we say "well, maybe the parameter's just a bit higher..." we'd be here till the end of time trying to disprove it.
This isn't exactly the case for the Higgs, because there's an energy range that it can't exceed, so if it isn't found below that level, then fundamentally, there's something very screwed up.
However, the idea is pretty much the same, because even if you don't see a signal in a given energy range, you can keep trying, keep trying, and keep trying. While I might be a little bit "eagerly skeptical" - too happy to have the Higgs die, it's not totally crazy, as there have been many models which put the Higgs clearly in the LEP range. Then they didn't see it, so they changed the models, and it put the Higgs clearly in the LHC's proposed range. Given that, and the particle type (no other known scalar fields, and the scalar field is the easiest toy-model you study in QFT), a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.
Anyway, it's somewhat akin to me saying that I turn purple when you're not looking, then after you set up a camera, me saying when you're not looking and not filming me - etc, etc. At some point the null results have to be interpreted as a possible result of null, especially if there's fundamentally no other way to prove the null.
they're horrible for viewing at anything other than dead-on; gamma and contrast change drastically from side to side or above/below
Yah, valid point. But the digital photo frame does actually generate light, so it does draw attention to itself.
Further, if I have a great photo, I want it to always be there, or at least be instantly accessible. No easy way to do that here...
What if you have 5 "great photos"? Then you either take up a huge amount of wall space, or cycle through 5 of them slowly in a digital frame.
framing a picture means it was good enough to warrant said treatment.
How many people have a ton of picture albums rather than a ton of frames? The reason you only hang pictures you consider important is that the frame + the picture enlargement cost money, and the wall space is precious.
I have a lot of pictures from a lot of trips that I'd love to have hanging on a wall for people to see - especially right after I've taken the trip - but I don't know if I'd want to go through the money to have it hanging for a long time.
they need a power cord, which is fugly
Not very creative, are you? Here's what I've come up with so far to hide the power cord for mine:
1) Grab a potted plant, put it beside it, run it down behind it.
2) Hang a picture or something behind it, run it behind that.
3) Drill a hole into the wall behind it, drop the cord down to the ground, drill another hole and plug it in there.
the LCD panel won't last very long being on all day, every day; the backlights are rated for a few thousand hours tops.
Is 50 a few? Most are in the neighborhood of 50K hours, which is about a year of constant use. And it wouldn't take that much fiddling (you can even do it in Windows!) to turn it off during crazy points of the day. Plus the 50,000 is of course a worst-case: backlights have routinely lasted for far longer than that in constant commercial use.
they have vastly inferior resolution; high-resolution LCD panels aren't available anywhere except in laptops. A standard print from even, say, Walmart's digital photo lab machine...is at least 300dpi, more like 600dpi.
Oddly enough, you don't need high-resolution - pictures look very good even at 640x480 at larger than 6" x 8" if they're on an LCD. Plus the added benefit of having consistent lighting (via the backlight) makes the color representation look much more vivid and lifelike.
Hard drives especially don't like heat...
Hard drives, if not being accessed, can last for a long time with in a moderate heat setting. All the pictures sit in memory. Spin down the drive, and put it in full sleep mode.
Archival photo paper, with UV-blocking glass, mounted with acid-free materials, will last decades
Digital photos last forever. And that's just natively! Physical frames, however, can get damaged just as easily.
Of course, you're forgetting the main reason: it's a PC, for crying out loud! Get creative! Drop a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, 802.11b card. Boom, instant easy Web access at your fingertips anytime (the number of times I've grabbed movie times from mine...). A normal frame can't do that.
Get a TI Extensa 550/560/570. They have socketed CPUs, so you can just drop in a P166, and as you're going to rip apart its guts, you can upgrade its heatsink as well.
If you're TOTALLY nuts, you can drop in a Socket 7 if you can get ahold of a Socket 7 adapter.
Best part is the price. Extensas, without hard drive, go for ~$20-$30 on eBay.
Then again, I have NO idea why anyone would use them to just display pictures! Drop in a wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, and 802.11b PCMCIA card. Boom. Instant computer whenever you need it, and when you're not using it, it displays pictures. I use Windows 98 heavily stripped down on mine, because it's pretty usable, even with only a P75 currently. I could probably heavily strip down Debian+X as well if I worked at it.
I love mine. Total cost would have been maybe $75 including everything.
Which isn't to say that it will be exactly like the SM Higgs, just that it won't look too different at low energy, or we already would have seen its impact in precision eletroweak measurements, for instance.
:-)
:)
:) I really need to create a new webpage...
:) And also, it's not like I have a better idea - I'm just skeptical. Lots of people can give me good reasons why a proton needs to decay, after all - and I'll still point to the >10^33 years measurement and say "Prove it."
Is that true? I didn't think the precision electroweak stuff depended too much on the pure Higgs interactions, but just on the symmetry-broken 'residual interactions' - i.e. the ones that gave the particles mass. I always find it hard to tell, though, as most books completely gloss over the Higgs physics sections because it hasn't been seen.
we have no experimentally confirmed examples of fundamental tensor fields, either, but most of us think gravitons exist
Well, we do have an experimentally confirmed example of a tensor field - gravity. That's what linearized gravity says - if you did have a spin-2 field, it'd generate gravity in the linearized limit. The important part is that the argument is reversible - you can say "what spin particle would cause these effects?" So we don't have experimental evidence of the particle, but we do have experimental evidence of the field.
The same isn't true for the Higgs field - you can't "reverse course" like you can with gravity, and take the interactions and work backwards to the dynamics of the particle. The easiest counterexample is technicolor, which would just as easily explain the Higgs interaction (ignore for the moment it also suggests other junk which is unobserved - it's unimportant to the argument). The point is that the scalar Higgs interaction does not uniquely predict anything. (As far as I know, no one's worked backwards from the fact that particles have mass and we see the interactions we do and said "only a fundamental scalar can cause this")
those line shapes are inconsistent with the presence of fermions that we haven't yet seen which are lighter than half the Z mass.
Yah, but I thought that restricted the heavier of the lepton family only (i.e. the electron-type) and not the lighter. Hrm, should go off and read the PDB section on that again.
But they all have their own challenges, usually conflict with existing data.
Ah, but doesn't a purely scalar Higgs conflict with existing data as well? We don't see one, after all. The excuse of saying "we haven't looked at high enough energies" seems to be exactly that - an excuse. I'll give the Higgs mechanism credit for being a "well-constructed theory" - a theory with enough flexibility in its parameters to avoid being disproven for quite some time. Like SUSY, for example (which I also don't believe is real).
The main reason that a simple scalar Higgs theory dominates now is because of the simplicity argument (and because it was first...), but I don't agree that having one fundamental scalar, and then everything else being more complex, is simple.
By the way, the link on your homepage to your research appears broken....
It is - that isn't my homepage anymore (I don't have a current one...), though my current research is here, if that web server's running.
Anyway, the funny thing is that I know all of the complications about the Higgs's existence - I mean, I've done the toy problem as to why it has to have the isospin that it does, etc. - but I still just don't believe that any particle that conveniently avoids discovery, and is the only one of its kind, has to be real. Note that I don't necessarily believe in a fundamental graviton, either.
there's your implication that this is some what frivolous.
I'd love to agree with you, but the Standard Model's Higgs mechanism has absolutely no authority to avoid the term "frivolous." In a lot of ways, it is.
The Higgs mechanism is done in the simplest way possible to generate masses - it uses a scalar field, which is the simplest field you can use, and, curiously, of which there are no other examples in nature - leptons and quarks are spinors (fermions of spin-1/2), photons/gluons are vectors, and even gravitons, if they exist, would probably be tensors.
There's no reason to desparately cling to the Higgs mechanism, other than we have no other way of generating mass that theorists 'like'. And, to be perfectly honest, this 'detection' does raise eyebrows - it's at the edge of LEP's detection, and it's only a 3 sigma (or so) detection. Now, that's not saying that Nature can't have been cruel to us and put the Higgs right at the edge of LEP's detection range, sure - worse things have happened. But it's a little suspicious.
Also, the Higgs "boson" has predicted nothing - anything that does symmetry breaking in a similar way would predict exactly the same thing.
(Sorry - I hate the fervent adherence to the Higgs, especially when we've looked, looked, and keep having to shove the mass up 'just a little higher' to the next accelerator range. I also hate the fact that no one else thinks that maybe a fundamental scalar just isn't possible for some subtle reason we don't understand. This would allow much more complicated Higgs interactions which people have typically ignored based on simplicity arguments. People said "if LEP doesn't find the Higgs..." and now people are saying "if LHC doesn't find the Higgs..." - what's next?)
("there will be one more light neutrino species, but no more after that")
To nitpick, the "N=3" discovery is only valid in the energy range of interest. You have to generate the lepton partner as well, so while the neutrino species could still be light, the lepton partner could be ungodly heavy, and thus outside of the detection field.
It would have to have odd mixing angles, sure, but a fourth family isn't out of the question.
there's no new science.
That's meant to mean there's no additional science gained by reservicing the shuttles, which is a purely operational task, not that there's no new science in SM4. It was ambiguous, and God forbid I get misinterpreted on something else.
A lot of good research projects will continue to be done, but some will no longer be possible... and that's a shame because all of this was decided by ONE person and without a proper clear review of the process.
Yah. And that person was President Bush, by pushing the Moon thing to the exclusion of anything else. The science cuts hurt everywhere, and I don't think it's fair that Hubble gets the most attention.
I never intended to say that JWST would make everyone happy in space astronomy. Of course it won't. But science funding through NASA has suddenly gotten very, very hard, and unless you change the political climate (not out of the question...), you're going to have to make sacrifices, so the goal is to get the most science done with the least money. I think JWST is good science for the money, because it's moderately far along at this point, and because it will do a lot of cutting-edge stuff.
Basically, I feel bad about Hubble, but there are a lot of fields of science that are just as screwed as (for instance) the upper-optical/UV band is with the loss of Hubble, thanks to the budget crap. I just don't agree that Hubble should get any more special consideration than other fields/missions which got screwed in the process. A lot of optical/infrared/UV astronomers would be more than happy if SM4 came back, and JWST launched. But that really seems to unfairly screw a lot of the other scientists whose missions got canned.
Plus considering the budgetary strappings I don't think that the additional overhead in cost really justifies SM4. Now, if the servicing could be made cheaper, or whatever, then it's reasonable. I guess it's kindof the frugal part of me - Hubble's "science/cost" ratio is quite high now, but I don't see the "science/cost" ratio for SM4 being as good as where else the money can go, given that the cost just jumped a lot, and there's no new science.
It should also be noted that SM4 doesn't necessarily get you through 2010. Goddard put out a study which basically says that SM4 will only get you about 3 years (50%) error-free operation, and only a 30% chance to make it to 2010, though that's a bit conservative. I just don't see it being worth that much.
The Dell 802.11b/g miniPCI cards (which use broadcom chipsets) work beautifully with ndiswrapper. Even stuff like iwspy works fine, so you can use ifplugd/waproamd to handle connecting to different networks and autodetecting dropped re-established connections and firing off the DHCP request again. Gotta love it. It works much better than in Windows!
(Jeez, one poorly worded statement. If I had put a "for JWST" after it, no one would've answered...)
No, true, but in those cases, adaptive optics can do well, because it's single source rather than deep field imaging.
Look, everyone can find a reason why a certain class of telescopes should exist. Yes, adaptive optics aren't necessarily a panacaea, but I don't think a large space telescope is the end-all, be-all of the field, and I think that politically they're much harder to get off the ground.
When redshifted, this line often ends up in blue band, where the JWST can't see.
And when redshifted more, it ends up in the green and near-infrared, which is where JWST can see.
Yah, yah, I know. High-Z isn't everything, and I agree. But that wasn't my point. JWST is a big-mirror telescope. A *really* big mirror telescope (6.5 meter space telescope? yipes). And you just don't need a big mirror to see things that are close. For that, a smaller telescope would do fine. And you wouldn't even need the size of Hubble, either.
I'm frankly appalled that someone with even a passing knowledge of astrophysics, much less a degree in the subject, would issue a blanket statement like "the optical is boring."
Yah, yah, I know. The post was something like 4 lines long - it wasn't intended to be in depth. I was actually saying that the optical is boring with reference to JWST, which is correct - JWST is a deep-field scope, and deep-field high-optical/UV isn't nearly as useful as deep/far infrared.
It was a bit of a short-tempered post because I hate it when people refer to the JWST as "just an" infrared telescope. It's not. It's optimized for infrared, definitely, but that's where big mirror, huge collection area, long integration times are most important, and that's what I was trying to say.
And what of the 9x oversubscription rate on HST itself? Do you honestly think all those observations, or even a large majority, are in the limited wavelength regime that NGST/JWST will have in common with HST?
I think a lot of them are. (Specifically I think that this one - the ultra deep field - is, and I'd be correct). I do agree that losing Hubble's UV is bad. I had hoped that the MIDEX AO wasn't pushed back, but I must've missed that - I knew others were.
I'm presuming you actually have a more nuanced view of the subject than your post would indicate
If you read it again, I said "the optical is boring" with reference to JWST. It wasn't as clear as I had hoped (it was clear to me, but then again, I wrote it).
we will have any sort of UV capability for the following ten years or so
No, I agree we won't. But unfortunately I don't think we'd get another 10 years out of Hubble, and then we'd be out of the UV anyway. I don't think it's worth wasting the equivalent of several MIDEX's worth of money to try to keep it running for an extra 4 or 5 years.
NASA doesn't want more egg on its face for another lost crew
Call me crazy, but I think that NASA just doesn't want 7 more dead employees.
I think PR might take a back seat to losing friends.
There's still plenty of interesting science to be done in the optical. Just not high-redshift stuff. Don't be a high-z snob.
No high-redshift stuff => Objects are close => Objects are bright =>
Don't need a large telescope.
Optical is 'boring' for gigantic mirrors. You'd be better off taking the instruments for SM4 and proposing a new mission solely designed to look in the high optical/UV. In other words, plan to compliment JWST, not HST.
Hrm? FUSE was a MIDEX class observatory, wasn't it? That's $180 million, total - that's not too bad. Granted you'd need a slightly different setup to push down closer to optical, but I don't think it would be that bad.
Hubble costs about $200 million a year just in operations, and it should be noted that the instruments for SM4 cost ~$200 million or so - so that's a large chunk of instrumentation which wouldn't have to be built from scratch for a new observatory as well.
I don't think a MIDEX class mission to replace the lost UV capability on Hubble is out of the question.
Moderators need explain how your got rated a 4 for your silly reply.
Because JWST is an medium optical, near infrared, and far infrared telescope, not an IR scope as the parent said, and therefore it is informative?
NGST is most certainly not a replacement for Hubble.
It is in the deep-field category, which is where all the pretty-picture enthusiasts are pushing.
optical ground based adaptive optics catches on
Catches on? I think just about everyone agrees that optical AO is the obvious next step - hence the thirty-meter-telescope (TMT) and many other AO projects.
I'll agree with you that in the UV, Hubble doesn't have a match out there yet. But JWST doesn't serve a complimentary role to HST, it supersedes it in a lot of Hubble's operational capacity.
Honestly, with this servicing mission, how long do you think Hubble will last? 10 years? And how much will it cost? Considering they need to recertify the shuttles specifically to do this task, and have a backup shuttle ready in case something goes wrong... I don't think most people fully understand the excess cost that would need to go into it.
I'm not saying that Hubble isn't a good observatory. It is. What I'm saying is that scientists never expected Hubble to last forever, and they have planned past it (for crying out loud, there are conferences that are basically called "Life After Hubble").
Sure, maybe you can't see the most red-shifted "foo" galaxy, but with STIS (the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) we can obtain optical/near UV spectra which contain an enormous number of ionised metal transitions.
No, you're definitely right that the blue->UV band has interesting features, but you really want a telescope that's designed specifically for the UV, and there's absolutely no doubt that NASA will fund a UV-specific telescope.
The question being raised here is "should we spend money on Hubble, and use it for a while" or "spend money on a UV-specific telescope". I'd rather the second option.
The other question is "what kind of a telescope do you need"? Infrared needs an utterly huge one, because all the deep-field stuff is far, far away and incredibly dim. You don't really need a massive telescope for ultraviolet - not as much as you do for infrared, anyway. So it makes more sense to have two dedicated missions rather than 1 combined one.