Hard drives always die sooner or later, usually when you need them most. If you only want to keep your data a few months, then hard drive storage is fine. For 2 or 3 years, duplicating it on two hard drives is usually OK -- but we once lost thousands of JPEG pictures of our manufacturing process to a virus. If you want the data to actually be _safe_, then you've got to have off-line copies -- and it's best to have some of the copies stored somewhere else. If you want to have it ten years from now, then write-once media is a big plus, you need off-line copies that don't lose data with time (floppy disks start losing data in about 8 years, tapes will die sooner without special treatment to keep them from getting brittle), you need to somehow ensure that ten years from now you'll still have a drive that will physically read the media, drivers that understand the format, and for many files you will need an obsolete computer that can run the software to read the data. Many optical formats claim decades of readable life, but only a very popular non-proprietary format will give you a chance of finding a drive in 10 years. CD-R meets that requirement nicely, and because it uses an operating-system independent format, computers in 2011 will still be able to find the files, but it's too damn small. DVD*R* at around 10X the size is a little small, but it would be the best chance we have if they ever settle on a format.
Whether your computer will be able to understand the files depends: I certainly wouldn't count on Word 2011 reading a Word 2000 document, but ASCII will still be around. Databases can be saved in ASCII; you might have to reconstruct the relations and forms to move to new software, but it's a lot better than looking through 10,000 pages of printout to find the cost basis of that piece of equipment... JPEG, MPEG, and HTML will have a good chance of working in backwards compatible viewers. PDF may or may not last. I haven't found any way to keep CAD files up to date for even five years other than continually paying for program updates and transferring all the files to each new version...
The power for the vacuum is a tank of compressed air. That's a fairly good energy source, and there is a lightweight and no-moving-parts way of turning it into vacuum (a Venturi). So it's got lots of vacuum, at least for a little while. Then you use a _big_ soft rubber pad and there won't be that much air leaking in from the edges even on a stubbly surface. Exterior building materials aren't going to be so porous that you can actually pull air through the bulk material. But I do think that on a brick, concrete, or stucco surface your time will be pretty limited. And always have safety lines; you could easily pull a window right out of the building, or wind up falling with a layer of paint or stucco still adhering to your pads.
I'm kind of surprised it took 40 posts before this came up. Glass is actually pretty strong, as long as the load is spread out so it doesn't initiate a crack. Those pads spread it out plenty, and the force is mostly downwards along the pane (the strong way). But I'd worry about how the window is mounted. You'd pretty obviously pull the average house window right out of the frame. On tall buildings, the glass is thick because the high winds you get at altitude can push against a big window with a force of a few hundred pounds. But the frame has to allow the glass some freedom to move, otherwise building sway can break windows and drop them on passersby. (The John Hancock building in Chicago was once notorious for falling glass; I'm not sure if it was due to too-thin panes or improper mounts.) So I think there's a chance that the guy scaling the glass building in the picture is going to wind up hanging from his safety ropes, still attached to a big thick glass rectangle.
This does sound like the best approach. If UGO is making offers like this, they are probably pretty close to bankruptcy--and if they aren't, they probably will be once the credit reporting companies find out about that letter. I assume that the arrears are not a huge amount, so you don't expect to collect enough to make having your own lawyer worthwhile, so giving up 25% for a piece of Dun and Bradstreets' lawyer is probably good deal.
Imagine what sealand could do with this!
Of course, first Sealand had better get the British patent on "acquiring territory by conquest." Darn it, there seems to be prior art...
Yes, it would have worked--for the real purpose, not for the stated purpose. It wouldn't have caught criminals and terrorists, or at least not those smart enough to even load PGP. But it would have allowed for a lot of spying on everyone naive enough to trust the gov't not to spy on law-abiding people.
The "wackiness" referred to seems be be that the US gov't was willing to share the keys with not-very-friendly foreign gov'ts. If you assume that they were telling the truth when they said they wanted Clipper for _national_ security, that's definitely wacky. If they wanted Clipper solely for the security of certain people in our gov't,...
No, patent applications are NOT public record, at least in the US. I think in Europe the application is published after 18 months even if it's still under consideration, but here there have been applications that were secrets for 20+ years, until the much-amended patent was finally granted, and then they were out trying to collect royalties for ideas everyone thought had been in the public domain forever -- two of these claimed to cover integrated circuits and microprocessors. As I recall, by going back to the original "integrated circuit" patent application, one found it actually covered four transistors grown on one block of silicon and connected by soldered wires, hardly relevant to modern IC production -- but if they'd waited for the late 90's instead of trying to collect on it in the 80's, some corporate stooge of a judge might well have taken it seriously.
an international patent office (==an american rooted patent office) Funny thing is, on this side of the Atlantic they tell us many recent outrageous changes in the patent and copyright system were mandated by treaties with Europe. At the Presidential campaign level, both parties have been owned by the global corporations since before 1992; Clinton and Gore were as far into the GC's pocket as it is possible to be and still talk like a Democrat now and then, and the Bush family _is_ a GC. However most Congressmen and many Senators are not fully in the GC's pockets, since no amount of paid advertising can outweigh the wrong choice on local issues. So to get something really raw past Congress, they have to resort to trickery: the President appoints servants of the corporations to go negotiate treaties, they insist "America" wants this and that, and because America is the last major power they get it into the treaty, then they bring the treaty back here and tell Congress the rest of the world wants it. So please, keep fighting!!!
That would take _lots_ of stilts. Also lots of insulation under the floor; wind underneath a building will sure run up the heating bills, not to mention that it's going to be hard keeping techs if their feet get frostbit _indoors_. Pretty expensive. For something this big, I wonder if it might be better to just design it to float in melted permafrost.
I'd worry about the whole million-square foot building sinking in the permafrost... I suppose there must be construction techniques that overcome this, but they are expensive.
First, most sysadmin work doesn't require physical presence -- you could do it from a terminal in NYC (although personally I'd rather be on the North Slope), or even from a _desirable_ location as long as it's got good broadbsnd access. You do need some techs to plug stuff in, trace down cable faults, and swap out dead servers, but those "250 jobs" mentioned in the article are probably mostly the construction crew. Second, for the necessary on-site staff, you do the same thing they do to get construction workers on the pipeline -- pay them so much that they'll be able to retire in ten years... High pay and nowhere to spend it sure builds the bank account.
The technology exists to put all the world's traffic through a single fiber -- so wherever fiber exists, more bandwidht is just a matter of upgradeing the electronics at the ends, and that can be done just as soon as someone is wiling to pay for it.
However, I've never seen any large server project so exposed to a single point of failure -- when frost heaves or sabotage break that fiber, it might take a week to get it back online.
Don't attack the copyright, nullify the law...
on
Is Law Copyrighted?
·
· Score: 2
Authors do have a right to copyright their work, unless they have themselves given up that right, e.g. by "working for hire". But to take that copyrighted work and make it a law requires making copies -- so it was the legislature that violated copyright first. (IANAL, but it sounds good -- and I've seen too many building inspectors that were more interested in preserving unionized construction jobs than in ensuring things were built right.)
What I really love about the advertising world: They sell TV ads at rates determined by the quarterly Nelson sweeps. And you can you tell when a Nelson sweep is underway, because most of the normal shows are temporarily replaced by stuff that's almost worth watching. In other words, the idiots running the corporate advertising budget are paying for time in a Cops re-run based on the audience when some mini-series was running...
"Licensing" in the software industry began because 20 years ago the courts weren't sure where software fit in the copyright and patent laws -- so the software vendors used contract law in an attempt to cover themselves even if their copyrights didn't hold up. But since then, it's turned into a big mess, with the software vendors using licensing in abusive ways. A book publisher once tried something equivalent to the software license -- a contract on the flyleaf, which you supposedly agreed to by purchasing and reading the book, and which didn't allow resale. The courts threw that out, and enunciated the "first sale" doctrine. Basically, they said that if it looks like a sale, it's a sale, and you own the item and are restricted only by the usual laws. (E.g., you can't beat someone to death with your book or copy it in excess of the fair use exception, but you can read it an unlimited number of times, let other people read it, and resell it.)
It's about time the courts figured out that now that software is clearly copyrightable, the first sale doctrine should apply at least to shrink-wrapped software. (Site licenses are a different beast -- but it's often possible to negotiate the terms of a site license. With shrink-wrap, you not only don't get to negotiate, but often you don't get to read the EULA until you've paid for it and taken it home.) The EULA is no longer needed to protect the vendors IP; instead, it protects the vendor from coming under the normal laws covering warranties and the maker's responsibility for quality. Most significantly, under the UCC, on items sold to consumers the manufacturer cannot disclaim the warranty of merchantibility: basically, that means it had better do the job it is represented to do, with reasonable safety, and no "warranty" printed on the package can reduce the manufacturer's liability to less than this. Obviously, under such a doctrine Microsoft would be in deep doodoo...
The government is paranoid about money laundering and they think that making cash more of a pain to handle they will slow that down. Then they should go back to gold, you'll _notice_ someone with $50K of gold in his briefcase.
$500 for the _first_ unsolicited e-mail is a little steep, and IANAL, but probably it would be rejected by the courts. In some long-ago case the Supreme Court decided that for a city to ban _all_ door to door sales violates the first amendment, and that's certainly more intrusive than e-mail. However, I think that first contact is about all that's protected; there can be (and I hope are) laws against salesmen carrying false ID or coming back after the homeowner tells them to stay away.
So what I'd like to see would be like this: One unsolicited e-mail allowed from a business to one address. Unless the addressee responds in such a way as to specifically invite more mail, the second one (from the same or any associated business) costs $500, the third $1,000, etc. Unsolicited commercial mail with a bogus return address: $10,000, with prison time possible if the offense is repeated.
Finally, a strict opt-in policy for any web sites that collect e-mail addresses or other personal data. That is, you have to check a box or something by the question "Can we send you e-mail announcing new products or services." It cannot be checked by default. It has to be distinct from permission to e-mail in regards to your existing business relationship; that is, if you tell them they can e-mail you about delivery of your order, that doesn't allow them to e-mail advertisements. And finally, to give your e-mail address or any other personal information to others requires another opt-in -- and selling your e-mail address without permission will cost the seller on the same per e-mail scale as with unsolicited e-mail.
I think it would work pretty well for English classes -- anyone who can rewrite a paper well enough to get past that scan, without lowering the grade a point or more, would be competent at English composition. But for a programming assignment you could just change the variable names with a global search and replace, and it would fly right past this sort of scan. (I could write a program that did this for those too dumb to do their own global search and replace in about half an hour, but if they pirate homework assignments, how do you keep them from pirating the program...) I suppose you could write a more sophisticated scanner that identified identical structures in the programs, but if the assignments are as simple as when I was in college, it will be hard to decide when that wasn't just two people independently arriving at the same algorithm.
I only wish there was some way to prove original authorship. I think 95% of the time it would become obvious just by asking the two people a few questions about the subject of the paper -- if only one knows what's in the paper... If it was duplicate computer programs, the odds would rise to 99%. If all else fails, you could do stylistic analysis (compare the suspect report to other reports turned in by the same people.)
Apparently this prof had 500 students in one class. If he actually read all the papers, he wouldn't be able to pick out the instances of same wording from among them all (Probably 5 or 10 slaves^h^h^h^h^hgrad asst's graded the papers for him, but that gives you a pretty good chance that the duplicate papers won't end up in front of the same guy.)
Detecting this in programs and in english composition is probably a bit different. Programs are probably going to look quite a lot alike because they do the same thing -- but variable names don't become identical by accident. So it really just comes down to whether they cribbed from each other, or all of them cribbed from the same source (Knuth, e.g.) and didn't bother to rename the variables... and how much cribbing from Knuth is allowed?
Having often had that experience of doing 75% of the work and getting 25% of the credit -- it sounds like this is an improvement. Assuming the peer grading doesn't turn into a popularity contest...
They can't do a computer search for plagiarism on hard copy!
Just kidding. I _do not_ want to have to work alongside someone who got through college by copying papers from the internet. Obviously schools need to do a lot more along this line, or else a college degree will soon be worth no more than the high school diploma is now.
The main material is oil. It's used to make plastic, and it's burned to supply the heat or power needed for the other chemical processes. And oil is going up.
But probably the main reason for the increase is that the mfg's think they can get a higher price. Or maybe some of those CD-R production plants are in CA, and the manufacturers wondering whether it would be more profitable to close the plant and auction off their electricity allotment? Or something horrible happens when a blackout hits in the middle of the machine cycle...
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Hard drives always die sooner or later, usually when you need them most. If you only want to keep your data a few months, then hard drive storage is fine. For 2 or 3 years, duplicating it on two hard drives is usually OK -- but we once lost thousands of JPEG pictures of our manufacturing process to a virus. If you want the data to actually be _safe_, then you've got to have off-line copies -- and it's best to have some of the copies stored somewhere else. If you want to have it ten years from now, then write-once media is a big plus, you need off-line copies that don't lose data with time (floppy disks start losing data in about 8 years, tapes will die sooner without special treatment to keep them from getting brittle), you need to somehow ensure that ten years from now you'll still have a drive that will physically read the media, drivers that understand the format, and for many files you will need an obsolete computer that can run the software to read the data. Many optical formats claim decades of readable life, but only a very popular non-proprietary format will give you a chance of finding a drive in 10 years. CD-R meets that requirement nicely, and because it uses an operating-system independent format, computers in 2011 will still be able to find the files, but it's too damn small. DVD*R* at around 10X the size is a little small, but it would be the best chance we have if they ever settle on a format.
Whether your computer will be able to understand the files depends: I certainly wouldn't count on Word 2011 reading a Word 2000 document, but ASCII will still be around. Databases can be saved in ASCII; you might have to reconstruct the relations and forms to move to new software, but it's a lot better than looking through 10,000 pages of printout to find the cost basis of that piece of equipment... JPEG, MPEG, and HTML will have a good chance of working in backwards compatible viewers. PDF may or may not last. I haven't found any way to keep CAD files up to date for even five years other than continually paying for program updates and transferring all the files to each new version...
The power for the vacuum is a tank of compressed air. That's a fairly good energy source, and there is a lightweight and no-moving-parts way of turning it into vacuum (a Venturi). So it's got lots of vacuum, at least for a little while. Then you use a _big_ soft rubber pad and there won't be that much air leaking in from the edges even on a stubbly surface. Exterior building materials aren't going to be so porous that you can actually pull air through the bulk material. But I do think that on a brick, concrete, or stucco surface your time will be pretty limited. And always have safety lines; you could easily pull a window right out of the building, or wind up falling with a layer of paint or stucco still adhering to your pads.
I'm kind of surprised it took 40 posts before this came up. Glass is actually pretty strong, as long as the load is spread out so it doesn't initiate a crack. Those pads spread it out plenty, and the force is mostly downwards along the pane (the strong way). But I'd worry about how the window is mounted. You'd pretty obviously pull the average house window right out of the frame. On tall buildings, the glass is thick because the high winds you get at altitude can push against a big window with a force of a few hundred pounds. But the frame has to allow the glass some freedom to move, otherwise building sway can break windows and drop them on passersby. (The John Hancock building in Chicago was once notorious for falling glass; I'm not sure if it was due to too-thin panes or improper mounts.) So I think there's a chance that the guy scaling the glass building in the picture is going to wind up hanging from his safety ropes, still attached to a big thick glass rectangle.
This does sound like the best approach. If UGO is making offers like this, they are probably pretty close to bankruptcy--and if they aren't, they probably will be once the credit reporting companies find out about that letter. I assume that the arrears are not a huge amount, so you don't expect to collect enough to make having your own lawyer worthwhile, so giving up 25% for a piece of Dun and Bradstreets' lawyer is probably good deal.
Imagine what sealand could do with this! Of course, first Sealand had better get the British patent on "acquiring territory by conquest." Darn it, there seems to be prior art...
Yes, it would have worked--for the real purpose, not for the stated purpose. It wouldn't have caught criminals and terrorists, or at least not those smart enough to even load PGP. But it would have allowed for a lot of spying on everyone naive enough to trust the gov't not to spy on law-abiding people.
Interesting story, but I got to it by clicking underneath the Clipper story...
The "wackiness" referred to seems be be that the US gov't was willing to share the keys with not-very-friendly foreign gov'ts. If you assume that they were telling the truth when they said they wanted Clipper for _national_ security, that's definitely wacky. If they wanted Clipper solely for the security of certain people in our gov't, ...
No, patent applications are NOT public record, at least in the US. I think in Europe the application is published after 18 months even if it's still under consideration, but here there have been applications that were secrets for 20+ years, until the much-amended patent was finally granted, and then they were out trying to collect royalties for ideas everyone thought had been in the public domain forever -- two of these claimed to cover integrated circuits and microprocessors. As I recall, by going back to the original "integrated circuit" patent application, one found it actually covered four transistors grown on one block of silicon and connected by soldered wires, hardly relevant to modern IC production -- but if they'd waited for the late 90's instead of trying to collect on it in the 80's, some corporate stooge of a judge might well have taken it seriously.
an international patent office (==an american rooted patent office) Funny thing is, on this side of the Atlantic they tell us many recent outrageous changes in the patent and copyright system were mandated by treaties with Europe. At the Presidential campaign level, both parties have been owned by the global corporations since before 1992; Clinton and Gore were as far into the GC's pocket as it is possible to be and still talk like a Democrat now and then, and the Bush family _is_ a GC. However most Congressmen and many Senators are not fully in the GC's pockets, since no amount of paid advertising can outweigh the wrong choice on local issues. So to get something really raw past Congress, they have to resort to trickery: the President appoints servants of the corporations to go negotiate treaties, they insist "America" wants this and that, and because America is the last major power they get it into the treaty, then they bring the treaty back here and tell Congress the rest of the world wants it. So please, keep fighting!!!
That would take _lots_ of stilts. Also lots of insulation under the floor; wind underneath a building will sure run up the heating bills, not to mention that it's going to be hard keeping techs if their feet get frostbit _indoors_. Pretty expensive. For something this big, I wonder if it might be better to just design it to float in melted permafrost.
I'd worry about the whole million-square foot building sinking in the permafrost... I suppose there must be construction techniques that overcome this, but they are expensive.
First, most sysadmin work doesn't require physical presence -- you could do it from a terminal in NYC (although personally I'd rather be on the North Slope), or even from a _desirable_ location as long as it's got good broadbsnd access. You do need some techs to plug stuff in, trace down cable faults, and swap out dead servers, but those "250 jobs" mentioned in the article are probably mostly the construction crew. Second, for the necessary on-site staff, you do the same thing they do to get construction workers on the pipeline -- pay them so much that they'll be able to retire in ten years... High pay and nowhere to spend it sure builds the bank account.
The technology exists to put all the world's traffic through a single fiber -- so wherever fiber exists, more bandwidht is just a matter of upgradeing the electronics at the ends, and that can be done just as soon as someone is wiling to pay for it.
However, I've never seen any large server project so exposed to a single point of failure -- when frost heaves or sabotage break that fiber, it might take a week to get it back online.
Authors do have a right to copyright their work, unless they have themselves given up that right, e.g. by "working for hire". But to take that copyrighted work and make it a law requires making copies -- so it was the legislature that violated copyright first. (IANAL, but it sounds good -- and I've seen too many building inspectors that were more interested in preserving unionized construction jobs than in ensuring things were built right.)
What I really love about the advertising world: They sell TV ads at rates determined by the quarterly Nelson sweeps. And you can you tell when a Nelson sweep is underway, because most of the normal shows are temporarily replaced by stuff that's almost worth watching. In other words, the idiots running the corporate advertising budget are paying for time in a Cops re-run based on the audience when some mini-series was running...
"Licensing" in the software industry began because 20 years ago the courts weren't sure where software fit in the copyright and patent laws -- so the software vendors used contract law in an attempt to cover themselves even if their copyrights didn't hold up. But since then, it's turned into a big mess, with the software vendors using licensing in abusive ways. A book publisher once tried something equivalent to the software license -- a contract on the flyleaf, which you supposedly agreed to by purchasing and reading the book, and which didn't allow resale. The courts threw that out, and enunciated the "first sale" doctrine. Basically, they said that if it looks like a sale, it's a sale, and you own the item and are restricted only by the usual laws. (E.g., you can't beat someone to death with your book or copy it in excess of the fair use exception, but you can read it an unlimited number of times, let other people read it, and resell it.)
It's about time the courts figured out that now that software is clearly copyrightable, the first sale doctrine should apply at least to shrink-wrapped software. (Site licenses are a different beast -- but it's often possible to negotiate the terms of a site license. With shrink-wrap, you not only don't get to negotiate, but often you don't get to read the EULA until you've paid for it and taken it home.) The EULA is no longer needed to protect the vendors IP; instead, it protects the vendor from coming under the normal laws covering warranties and the maker's responsibility for quality. Most significantly, under the UCC, on items sold to consumers the manufacturer cannot disclaim the warranty of merchantibility: basically, that means it had better do the job it is represented to do, with reasonable safety, and no "warranty" printed on the package can reduce the manufacturer's liability to less than this. Obviously, under such a doctrine Microsoft would be in deep doodoo...
The government is paranoid about money laundering and they think that making cash more of a pain to handle they will slow that down. Then they should go back to gold, you'll _notice_ someone with $50K of gold in his briefcase.
$500 for the _first_ unsolicited e-mail is a little steep, and IANAL, but probably it would be rejected by the courts. In some long-ago case the Supreme Court decided that for a city to ban _all_ door to door sales violates the first amendment, and that's certainly more intrusive than e-mail. However, I think that first contact is about all that's protected; there can be (and I hope are) laws against salesmen carrying false ID or coming back after the homeowner tells them to stay away.
So what I'd like to see would be like this: One unsolicited e-mail allowed from a business to one address. Unless the addressee responds in such a way as to specifically invite more mail, the second one (from the same or any associated business) costs $500, the third $1,000, etc. Unsolicited commercial mail with a bogus return address: $10,000, with prison time possible if the offense is repeated.
Finally, a strict opt-in policy for any web sites that collect e-mail addresses or other personal data. That is, you have to check a box or something by the question "Can we send you e-mail announcing new products or services." It cannot be checked by default. It has to be distinct from permission to e-mail in regards to your existing business relationship; that is, if you tell them they can e-mail you about delivery of your order, that doesn't allow them to e-mail advertisements. And finally, to give your e-mail address or any other personal information to others requires another opt-in -- and selling your e-mail address without permission will cost the seller on the same per e-mail scale as with unsolicited e-mail.
I think it would work pretty well for English classes -- anyone who can rewrite a paper well enough to get past that scan, without lowering the grade a point or more, would be competent at English composition. But for a programming assignment you could just change the variable names with a global search and replace, and it would fly right past this sort of scan. (I could write a program that did this for those too dumb to do their own global search and replace in about half an hour, but if they pirate homework assignments, how do you keep them from pirating the program...) I suppose you could write a more sophisticated scanner that identified identical structures in the programs, but if the assignments are as simple as when I was in college, it will be hard to decide when that wasn't just two people independently arriving at the same algorithm.
I only wish there was some way to prove original authorship. I think 95% of the time it would become obvious just by asking the two people a few questions about the subject of the paper -- if only one knows what's in the paper... If it was duplicate computer programs, the odds would rise to 99%. If all else fails, you could do stylistic analysis (compare the suspect report to other reports turned in by the same people.)
Apparently this prof had 500 students in one class. If he actually read all the papers, he wouldn't be able to pick out the instances of same wording from among them all (Probably 5 or 10 slaves^h^h^h^h^hgrad asst's graded the papers for him, but that gives you a pretty good chance that the duplicate papers won't end up in front of the same guy.)
Detecting this in programs and in english composition is probably a bit different. Programs are probably going to look quite a lot alike because they do the same thing -- but variable names don't become identical by accident. So it really just comes down to whether they cribbed from each other, or all of them cribbed from the same source (Knuth, e.g.) and didn't bother to rename the variables... and how much cribbing from Knuth is allowed?
Having often had that experience of doing 75% of the work and getting 25% of the credit -- it sounds like this is an improvement. Assuming the peer grading doesn't turn into a popularity contest...
They can't do a computer search for plagiarism on hard copy!
Just kidding. I _do not_ want to have to work alongside someone who got through college by copying papers from the internet. Obviously schools need to do a lot more along this line, or else a college degree will soon be worth no more than the high school diploma is now.
The main material is oil. It's used to make plastic, and it's burned to supply the heat or power needed for the other chemical processes. And oil is going up.
But probably the main reason for the increase is that the mfg's think they can get a higher price. Or maybe some of those CD-R production plants are in CA, and the manufacturers wondering whether it would be more profitable to close the plant and auction off their electricity allotment? Or something horrible happens when a blackout hits in the middle of the machine cycle...