Did you notice that the US courts accept the fact that data is just as much property as your car is (for the MPAA's sake), and the fact that it is clearly not (if it has been gathered as evidence)?
Did you also notice the fact Russian law does not apply the federal agents hacking Russian computers, but clearly US law applies to Russians hacking American computers?
That's kind of a weird statement in my opinion. The paper essentially contains no new physics. The theory is tested, in the sense that we know that semiclassical approximation to quantum mechanics work very well in all kinds of systems. Superstring theory however is really new physics and in not only untested, but at the moment untestable.
In Europe there is a very clear seperation between trademark classes. This lawsuit is going nowhere because of the fact that it is clear mobilix has no intention of competing with Uderzo. So in the trademark class of names relating to computer technology, Mobilix was the first to claim it and is therefor the owner. There are ofcourse murkier examples. For instance, a Dutch television station wanted to change their name to ME, but that name was trademark by a clothing line. The clothing line sued and won because the television station often marketed baseball caps and t-shirt with their logo on it. This is a reasonable claim. The Mobilix claim is just ridiculous. Not only because it's a different trade mark class, but also because Uderzo has had more then enough time in the past to sue Unix, Posix, Ultrix, etc. and has made no move to do so. They cannot justify why Mobilix should be a worse threat. If the Mobilix people let this come before the European appeal court, they will win, no doubt about it.
I haven't read the nature article, but I presume the mechanism is similar to that of earlier experiments in atomic vapours. The groups of Fleischhauer and of Hau have done this some time ago now. There effect is explained as follows. The light is not actually stored as such, but all it's properties (wavelength and phase) are imprinted in the medium. On a later stage one can restore the photons by taking this information from the medium again. The "new" photons are fundamentally indistiguishable from the "old" ones, and for all practical purposes, the light was stored.
This is not true. If you read the material on the pages refered to by the Nobel prize webpage, you will find out, that if you put a (limited) amount of energy in the condensate, it will be excited in a collective mode, in which the condensate as a whole is shaking, but is still a condensate.
The theory you use to describe a BEC is similar to that of superconductor. The difference is that the atoms in a condensate don't have charge and therefore cannot be conductors.
It's not just an approximation. When you get below a certain temperature, the atoms in the trap (made by wires on the chip) is so tight in one direction that the atoms really cannot exploit freedom of movement in that direction. They behave really as a two dimensional gas. My humble apolofies if I'm being to technical.
One word: prior art.
Most, if not all phone number is use today have been dialed by someone in the past. This means that there is a prior art case for each phone number in their portefolio. I don't think anyone will be foolish enough to take this joke to court.
Often, one adds a remark stating to which journal it has been submitted.
That is usually the only way to judge preprints on their relevance.
If the author does not mention anything about where he/she will try to get it published, the layout of the article will usually tell you something about the intent. If revtex was used, it's probably some Physical Review magazine. If it's only four pages, it's probably written as a Physical Review Letter.
These are the thing you can go on.
Well, maybe in the US and maybe for usage for commercial purposes.
A movie theater will have to pay royalties to show Dolby movies, I can imagine that.
In Holland, it would (judiscialy) not be considered fair, to force a user to pay royalties in order to watch/listen to something he/she already paid for. If you CAN make your own cd player, you are free to do so, nobody will stop you as long as you don't try to make money of it.
Looking at another slashposting of today EU & US Patent "Syncing", I think this is interesting information. If the EU syncs its patent law with the States, the californian terror will also spread to Europe.
This will be interesting, because it's very easy to defeat a large company in European courts, by simply starting your own company. If a large company comes down on you with a patent, you smack an antitrust case in their face. Should be very interesting indeed!!!
While Dolby might have a case in claiming that the
distribution of a decoder is illigal (considering the fact that they have the patent) the use of the unlicensed decoder is not illigal.
The same goes for the DeCSS case. It might be that under the totally bizarre DMCA it's illigal to make a decoder, it's not illigal to use it, since the content is (still) mine too watch.
Add to that the fact that its arguable that for academic purposes one can develope a decoder, we are only stuck with the distribution issue and the DeCSS case teaches us that stopping the distribution of a piece of source code is simply impossible.
Books are also intelectual property. When a library buys a book, it doesn't have to pay for all the people that are going to read it. There are special rules for this that make it possible to run libraries, because it is in the public interest that people ecan read books.
The same goes for software licenses in my opinion.
Schools should not and cannot be held to the same financial standard as companies. If the BSA wants to build a case with intelectual property law, take them to court, because they have no case. Libraries are a clear example of how intelectual property is protected to such a degree that it is to the benefit of the public.
Once again it shows that something is very wrong. Copyright was invented to give artists and insentive to create. Microsoft earns enough money to justify continuing their work, so there is no reason trying to scrape money where there is none.
If Microsoft thinks that piracy costs them so much money that they are losing the insentive to create more, then by al means: quit creating, 'cause you're not helping anyone.
Slashdotters do realize this. What they also realize is that if they don't speak up, the world will never change. The world probably won't change when we do speak up, but since speaking up doesn't hurt, we can always try.
That said, idealism is not the only reason to publish free software. Ego is another. For me, ego is a stronger force then greed. People do stuff in order to make themselves feel better. I would like to have my name in a piece of software that people use, because this is good for my selfesteem. It shows me that my ideas and programming skills mean something.
A nice analogy:
I play in a band, but not because I want to get famous and want to make a lot of money, but because of the fact that people can have a good time dancing to my music. This gives me the rush.
I think a lot of GPL developers just like the feeling that a lot of people use their software, without having to resort to marketing techniques.
I have a lot of back pain because of an accident I had. For this reason I sit in a good chair at my desk and have a wireless keyboard and mouse.
Often, the position of your keyboard is dominating the way you sit, while it should be the other way around.
After a long time of sitting behind the computer, I relax in a good sitting chair with a book and a drink, because if I go right from the computer to bed I wake up with back pain.
And ofcourse, you also get used to it.
Furthermore, you have the right of parody.
Even if the name Aimster was chosen to reflect that it's a AIM clone, the right of parody applies. See for instance the Intel Secrets.
Intel tried to sue them for infringing patent on their logo, but since you have the right to make a parady on a logo, they lost.
It think one of the best ways to discourage massive sueing of p2p protocols is to rename every.tgz file you have to an.mp3 file. This will keep the lawyers busy.
Furthermore, I encourage everyone who records his/her own songs (or covers of other artists) to make these public. It is perfectly legal to record and distribute songs if you are the recording artist (even if you're not the original author, only when you start making money of it can the author claim a percentage). The industry needs to realize that they might have the artists in their pocket, but they don't have a monopoly on distributing music.
A nice way of doing this would be to tell your application (ssh for instance), to not only encrypt the data, but to padd it with hot words in plain ascii.
btw. if you really want to go paranoia, using long encryption keys is not enough. Get rid of your signature, it appears in every email and gives big brother food for doing correlations.
I don't know how it is in the rest of Europe or in the rest of the world, but here in Holland I'm not that worried. If you just use encryption, your privacy is pretty much ensured. There are ofcourse laws that say that you have to hand over your key, but it is arguable that the same rigorous protocols are necessary in such a case as in the case of tapping phonelines, reading s-mail, etc.
If the police think there is information in your files that is incriminating to others, you can be forced to hand over the key for a certain amount of time, if this is reasonable. This is comparable to the laws applicable when a journalist is forced to reveal a source. If the information is incriminating for yourself, you cannot be forced at all, because you cannot be forced to testify to your own disadvantage.
There is a tendency for new "digital" laws to be sloppy with your rights and your privacy, but you can always go back to old laws. You can always argue that a certain law is contradictory with another law, in which case a judge is perfectly within his rights to ignore the newer law and send it back to the people who make the laws.
If you switch the magnet of slower then you switch it on, the momentum might be lower, but the duration will be longer.
And btw, if the effect would be the momentum in the EM field, this is old news: driving a rocket by pointing a laser backwards is a concept that theoretically has the highest final speed to initial mass ratio.
The only thing that is left to discuss is: why doesn't the coil radiate in both directions?
That could be due to the fact that your EM wave reflects on the chunck of metal. If your proposal is correct, I would say that a laser is much more efficient then this mechanism as the momentum of a photon is inversely proportional to the wavelength and light has a higher momentum then radiofrequent waves.
Unfortunately, the magnetic field of a coil drops rapidly with distance (it drops like the field of a dipole at long distances). That means the chunk of metal has to be close, preferably even sit inside the coil for the thing to work.
I would say this is a joke, I really don't understand how this can get into a magazine that claims to have a scientific contents.
It's actually not like a railgun. It's like a coil gun. In a railgun, a static current is used through two rails and the conducting projectile.
I a coilgun, there is no electrical contact between the coils and the projectile, but the time derivative of the magnetic field cause eddy current to run in the projectile, which in turn produce a magnetic moment in the projectile.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would have been entrapment when they would have been prosecuted only for the demonstration.
Did you notice that the US courts accept the fact that data is just as much property as your car is (for the MPAA's sake), and the fact that it is clearly not (if it has been gathered as evidence)?
Did you also notice the fact Russian law does not apply the federal agents hacking Russian computers, but clearly US law applies to Russians hacking American computers?
This is disgusting...
That's kind of a weird statement in my opinion. The paper essentially contains no new physics. The theory is tested, in the sense that we know that semiclassical approximation to quantum mechanics work very well in all kinds of systems. Superstring theory however is really new physics and in not only untested, but at the moment untestable.
In Europe there is a very clear seperation between trademark classes. This lawsuit is going nowhere because of the fact that it is clear mobilix has no intention of competing with Uderzo. So in the trademark class of names relating to computer technology, Mobilix was the first to claim it and is therefor the owner. There are ofcourse murkier examples. For instance, a Dutch television station wanted to change their name to ME, but that name was trademark by a clothing line. The clothing line sued and won because the television station often marketed baseball caps and t-shirt with their logo on it. This is a reasonable claim. The Mobilix claim is just ridiculous. Not only because it's a different trade mark class, but also because Uderzo has had more then enough time in the past to sue Unix, Posix, Ultrix, etc. and has made no move to do so. They cannot justify why Mobilix should be a worse threat. If the Mobilix people let this come before the European appeal court, they will win, no doubt about it.
I haven't read the nature article, but I presume the mechanism is similar to that of earlier experiments in atomic vapours. The groups of Fleischhauer and of Hau have done this some time ago now. There effect is explained as follows. The light is not actually stored as such, but all it's properties (wavelength and phase) are imprinted in the medium. On a later stage one can restore the photons by taking this information from the medium again. The "new" photons are fundamentally indistiguishable from the "old" ones, and for all practical purposes, the light was stored.
This is not true. If you read the material on the pages refered to by the Nobel prize webpage, you will find out, that if you put a (limited) amount of energy in the condensate, it will be excited in a collective mode, in which the condensate as a whole is shaking, but is still a condensate.
The theory you use to describe a BEC is similar to that of superconductor. The difference is that the atoms in a condensate don't have charge and therefore cannot be conductors.
It's not just an approximation. When you get below a certain temperature, the atoms in the trap (made by wires on the chip) is so tight in one direction that the atoms really cannot exploit freedom of movement in that direction. They behave really as a two dimensional gas. My humble apolofies if I'm being to technical.
One word: prior art.
Most, if not all phone number is use today have been dialed by someone in the past. This means that there is a prior art case for each phone number in their portefolio. I don't think anyone will be foolish enough to take this joke to court.
Often, one adds a remark stating to which journal it has been submitted. That is usually the only way to judge preprints on their relevance. If the author does not mention anything about where he/she will try to get it published, the layout of the article will usually tell you something about the intent. If revtex was used, it's probably some Physical Review magazine. If it's only four pages, it's probably written as a Physical Review Letter. These are the thing you can go on.
Well, maybe in the US and maybe for usage for commercial purposes. A movie theater will have to pay royalties to show Dolby movies, I can imagine that. In Holland, it would (judiscialy) not be considered fair, to force a user to pay royalties in order to watch/listen to something he/she already paid for. If you CAN make your own cd player, you are free to do so, nobody will stop you as long as you don't try to make money of it.
Looking at another slashposting of today EU & US Patent "Syncing", I think this is interesting information. If the EU syncs its patent law with the States, the californian terror will also spread to Europe. This will be interesting, because it's very easy to defeat a large company in European courts, by simply starting your own company. If a large company comes down on you with a patent, you smack an antitrust case in their face. Should be very interesting indeed!!!
While Dolby might have a case in claiming that the distribution of a decoder is illigal (considering the fact that they have the patent) the use of the unlicensed decoder is not illigal. The same goes for the DeCSS case. It might be that under the totally bizarre DMCA it's illigal to make a decoder, it's not illigal to use it, since the content is (still) mine too watch.
Add to that the fact that its arguable that for academic purposes one can develope a decoder, we are only stuck with the distribution issue and the DeCSS case teaches us that stopping the distribution of a piece of source code is simply impossible.
Books are also intelectual property. When a library buys a book, it doesn't have to pay for all the people that are going to read it. There are special rules for this that make it possible to run libraries, because it is in the public interest that people ecan read books.
The same goes for software licenses in my opinion. Schools should not and cannot be held to the same financial standard as companies. If the BSA wants to build a case with intelectual property law, take them to court, because they have no case. Libraries are a clear example of how intelectual property is protected to such a degree that it is to the benefit of the public. Once again it shows that something is very wrong. Copyright was invented to give artists and insentive to create. Microsoft earns enough money to justify continuing their work, so there is no reason trying to scrape money where there is none. If Microsoft thinks that piracy costs them so much money that they are losing the insentive to create more, then by al means: quit creating, 'cause you're not helping anyone.
Slashdotters do realize this. What they also realize is that if they don't speak up, the world will never change. The world probably won't change when we do speak up, but since speaking up doesn't hurt, we can always try.
That said, idealism is not the only reason to publish free software. Ego is another. For me, ego is a stronger force then greed. People do stuff in order to make themselves feel better. I would like to have my name in a piece of software that people use, because this is good for my selfesteem. It shows me that my ideas and programming skills mean something.
A nice analogy:
I play in a band, but not because I want to get famous and want to make a lot of money, but because of the fact that people can have a good time dancing to my music. This gives me the rush.
I think a lot of GPL developers just like the feeling that a lot of people use their software, without having to resort to marketing techniques.
I have a lot of back pain because of an accident I had. For this reason I sit in a good chair at my desk and have a wireless keyboard and mouse. Often, the position of your keyboard is dominating the way you sit, while it should be the other way around. After a long time of sitting behind the computer, I relax in a good sitting chair with a book and a drink, because if I go right from the computer to bed I wake up with back pain. And ofcourse, you also get used to it.
Furthermore, you have the right of parody. Even if the name Aimster was chosen to reflect that it's a AIM clone, the right of parody applies. See for instance the Intel Secrets. Intel tried to sue them for infringing patent on their logo, but since you have the right to make a parady on a logo, they lost.
It think one of the best ways to discourage massive sueing of p2p protocols is to rename every .tgz file you have to an .mp3 file. This will keep the lawyers busy.
Furthermore, I encourage everyone who records his/her own songs (or covers of other artists) to make these public. It is perfectly legal to record and distribute songs if you are the recording artist (even if you're not the original author, only when you start making money of it can the author claim a percentage). The industry needs to realize that they might have the artists in their pocket, but they don't have a monopoly on distributing music.
A nice way of doing this would be to tell your application (ssh for instance), to not only encrypt the data, but to padd it with hot words in plain ascii. btw. if you really want to go paranoia, using long encryption keys is not enough. Get rid of your signature, it appears in every email and gives big brother food for doing correlations.
I don't know how it is in the rest of Europe or in the rest of the world, but here in Holland I'm not that worried. If you just use encryption, your privacy is pretty much ensured. There are ofcourse laws that say that you have to hand over your key, but it is arguable that the same rigorous protocols are necessary in such a case as in the case of tapping phonelines, reading s-mail, etc. If the police think there is information in your files that is incriminating to others, you can be forced to hand over the key for a certain amount of time, if this is reasonable. This is comparable to the laws applicable when a journalist is forced to reveal a source. If the information is incriminating for yourself, you cannot be forced at all, because you cannot be forced to testify to your own disadvantage. There is a tendency for new "digital" laws to be sloppy with your rights and your privacy, but you can always go back to old laws. You can always argue that a certain law is contradictory with another law, in which case a judge is perfectly within his rights to ignore the newer law and send it back to the people who make the laws.
If you switch the magnet of slower then you switch it on, the momentum might be lower, but the duration will be longer. And btw, if the effect would be the momentum in the EM field, this is old news: driving a rocket by pointing a laser backwards is a concept that theoretically has the highest final speed to initial mass ratio. The only thing that is left to discuss is: why doesn't the coil radiate in both directions? That could be due to the fact that your EM wave reflects on the chunck of metal. If your proposal is correct, I would say that a laser is much more efficient then this mechanism as the momentum of a photon is inversely proportional to the wavelength and light has a higher momentum then radiofrequent waves.
Unfortunately, the magnetic field of a coil drops rapidly with distance (it drops like the field of a dipole at long distances). That means the chunk of metal has to be close, preferably even sit inside the coil for the thing to work. I would say this is a joke, I really don't understand how this can get into a magazine that claims to have a scientific contents.
It's actually not like a railgun. It's like a coil gun. In a railgun, a static current is used through two rails and the conducting projectile. I a coilgun, there is no electrical contact between the coils and the projectile, but the time derivative of the magnetic field cause eddy current to run in the projectile, which in turn produce a magnetic moment in the projectile.