Yeah, so I screwed up a bit: Intel's new chip, which has a somewhat similar architecture (bunch of less capable units working in parallel), does not actually run off a VLIW. However, my core points still hold: (1) there is a class of applications which will run well on this sort of processor, but the majority won't, (2) effective use of the processor will either need re-coding of applications in a parallel-conscious language or a very smart compiler, and (3) for many applications, a cluster of general-purpose machines will be more cost-efficient.
Incidently, the sarcasm is not appreciated. I have a full degree followed by 13 years designing parallel and distributed systems. I admit that I confused Intel's research with stuff going on at IBM.
In response to the sibling comment, the cost is in the design and manufacture of a new chip. The fixed cost to create a new processor is enormous, which means that have to produce millions in order to drive the per-unit price down. If I have an application that runs about as well on an 80-core processor at $500,000 as it does on 80 $1000 machines, guess what I'm going to choose? Heck, even if it takes 200 such machines, I'm still better off. (Excluding power considerations.) People have been building massively parallel machines for years, but they have never achieved broad commercial success.
As the article points out, this is a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) design -- in effect, each instruction word will be broken up into chunks, with a chunk going to each processor. This means that you can end up with some bizarre situations -- what happens, for example, if one processor needs to jump to one location in memory and the other 79 don't? Effectively, your compiler would need to be able to realize this, and have the instructions at that memory location for the 79 processors be the same. (In reality, I don't think you'd do this -- that processor would probably just sit and wait for the others.) This is not the equivalent of having two cores, with each able to run independently.
The real bottleneck here is the compiler, not the processor, because the compiler has to be able to pick up on implicit parallelism in the code and dole it out among the available cores. While it's possible to the compiler by using a language where the programmer specifies the parallelism, if you think about it, that's the opposite direction from the progress of computer languages in the last 20 years.
The biggest problem that this technology has is that it is expensive when compared with a compute cluster, which can scale easily and can be more easily programmed. The main time the cluster won't do better are the instances where each core needs results from other cores so frequently that the overhead in message passing is too high.
I would suggest talking with an attorney before doing that. First of all, what you're suggesting is most likely illegal. And, secondly, you're very likely to be caught -- "Hmm.... Except for OS files, there's nothing on this computer older than 2 weeks, but the computer itself is 2 years old."
Yeah, well, that's a problem. If you get a subpoena, you have to preserve the evidence or be found it contempt of court. And, the evidence that you have a new hard drive will probably be considered as well.
I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if somebody set up a wide-open wireless network, but didn't have ANY computer attached to it.
Well, that's part of the calculus. If you're a 75-year-old grandmother with an open network, chances are that no jury is going to think that it's more likely than not that you were the one downloading gangster rap.
In any case, I don't think "We noticed somebody from this IP address sharing this song at XX time, and the ISP's logs said that was the defendant" is enough. That's why, after all, the RIAA subpoenas the disk drives.
It depends. If it's a purely automatic process, then format-shifting does not create a new copyright. Copyright requires some creative expression beyond the pre-existing matter. So, for example, copying a recording of a congressional hearing onto cassette tape doesn't add anything new and thus there is no copyright. But, if you take that tape and do a bunch of audio engineering work to make it sound better, the result would probably be protected. Note that doing this produces something of a thin copyright -- a transcription of the tape would be in the public domain, because the transcriber didn't copy any creative expression.
This was essentially the argument with photographs -- originally, there was an argument that a photograph was just a copy of something in nature. And, since you can't copyright nature, you shouldn't be able to copyright the copy. But, courts have found that photographers put a lot of creativity into doing things such as framing the shot. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this means that the output of, say, a surveillance camera is not under copyright, unless the action in front of it were performed.
Aha! You can claim it, under the current Copyright Act. However, this guy claims that he invented the electric slide in 1976. But, the current version of copyright law that we have didn't become effective until 1978. His claim of copyright would have come under the 1909 act, which contains no such reference. There are other problems related to the 1909 act as well. If I recall correctly, publication was necessary for protection.
Even under the 1976 act, it has problems. For example, the fixation requirement at the end of that quote may be at issue here -- if he created the dance AND fixed it sometime before others copied it, then it's probably protected. But, if he created the dance, others copied it and THEN he fixed it, well that's another matter. Fixation of a dance can happen in any of a number of ways, but usually happens either (1) in a notation used by professional choreographers for such things or (2) just by videotaping it.
And, finally, up until the late 1980's, there was a notice requirement of copyright (Remember the Circle-C?). No notice, no copyright (with some limits.)
Notice that I haven't even talked about fair use yet.
(You should not rely on this post as legal advice. Consult your own attorney if you need such advice.)
First of all, I can't believe my (grandfather) post got modded down to 0. That's poor.
Second, yes, I do believe the situation is better. It sounds like your scenario is not well-run -- any university that continually pulls their phd candidates' research out from under them is not likely to continue to have many such candidates. Bayh-Dole does not require your university to do what its doing.
But, consider this: if your federally-funded research gets sold off, the buying company typically wants to hire the inventor(s). I fail to see how that's bad for you. If no company could get exclusivity to your work, no company would want to spend the effort doing the development. And, as a result, both you and your research languish in the university.
Here's another way to think about it: the federal government pays for a bunch of research. Once the research is done, what SHOULD happen to it? Companies will very rarely develop technology which they do not have the exclusive right to -- the risk is that they do the development and then somebody else comes along and steals all their work. And, the federal government proved itself to be horrible at commercialization in the 60's and 70's.
Hardly. Private companies do research all the time. Even if they didn't, your solution (denying patent protection to the results of federally-funded research) wouldn't help the situation: no private company would invest in research because if somebody in a university discovers it first, the technology falls into the public domain. The reason why we allow private entities to commercialize the results of federally-funded research is because the previous situation was so bad -- useful research was just sitting in labs because nobody could make any money off it.
I'm a lawyer who (among other things) advises startups who want to license discoveries from universities. There is already a thriving market in such research, thanks in large part to the Bayh-Dole act, which allows universities to exploit inventions funded by the US government. The gov't gets a non-exclusive right to practice the invention (or have it practiced for the government) and there are a few other relatively minor restrictions. Because of this, Universities have been mining their research for years. Especially in the biochem and biotech industries, the vegas-like attitude does not exist. Quite the opposite -- researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability. Before Bayh-Dole, this rarely happened.
Most documentary evidence can be forged. The question of whether it has or not is generally for the jury. And, I have my doubts that a judge is going to let the plaintiff go into a bunch of evidence about how screenshots can be altered without having any sort of independent basis for showing that they were.
If the original author (or, in this case photographer) posted it, then a screen shot that shows the picture and the license (or the CC mark) should probably be enough to protect you. But, remember that only the original author can offer it under a different license -- if somebody else posted it without the author's permission, then the "license" is irrelevant.
Check with an attorney in your state if you want a full analysis.
First of all, the Constitution does restrict something -- the ability of the government to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. But, the fact that some rights are not enumerated in the Constitution does not mean that those rights do not exist. Understand where the founding fathers were coming from -- they had a "natural rights" view of law. Effectively, this means that our rights come from God; they are rights which we possess everywhere and anywhere, no matter what the laws of the place are. Under this view, while it is technically possible for a government to use force to limit the exercise such rights, any such limit is illegitimate.
I will agree that whether people have the right to petition for the writ is very important. My point is that what you call "Gonzalez' analysis" was not a statement on whether people have such a right, but a recognition that if they do, that right is not specifically granted by the Constitution. It does not speak to the existence of the right, only to its source.
People are taking a tiny portion of a much longer dialog and twisting it to imply something that it clearly doesn't say, as if it gave an instant transparent window into the Attorney General's thoughts. For those who already believed that he was Satan on earth, the statement seems to confirm it. For the rest of us, it means nothing.
About nothing. He was making a quibbling little technical point, that the Constitution does not expressly grant a right to the writ of Habeas Corpus, while being questioned by a bunch of quibblers -- the senate judiciary committee. And guess what? He's right -- it doesn't. In fact, there's technically no right of habeas corpus at all, there's only the right to *petition* for the writ. (A 'writ' is a court order.) But, even though the Constitution doesn't expressly grant the right, the writ is well established in US law. Heck, the language of the Constitution implies that habeas corpus is even more foundational than the Constitution itself.
26 U.S.C. 1(a): "There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of..." and then goes to list different classes, including "every individual".
26 U.S.C. 7805(a) "... the Secretary shall prescribe all needful rules and regulations for the enforcement of this title..."
26 C.F.R. 1.441-1(a): "Taxable income must be computed and a return must be made for a period known as the taxable year."
In general, the statutes and regulations of the tax system are in 26 U.S.C. and 26 C.F.R., respectively. They can most easily found at www.law.cornell.edu. There are other sources of law that affect taxes, like court decisions and interpretive rulings. But, the meat of our tax system is in the Code and the Regulations.
Punishing weathermen who disagree with the AMC's will have the necessary impact of restraining their speech ("If I say this, I'll get kicked out, so I won't say it.") This policy would have the effect of silencing dissenting opinions. And that, at least in my mind, raises the question of whether this effect was the intent as well It's the sort of restraint that you often see in political and religious organizations, not scientific or professional ones, which supposedly value dissent.
The weatherman's statements are not reasonably assigned to the AMS just because he's a member. Nobody faults the ABA or AMA because of the opinions of their members -- only when the member ACTS in contravention of his professional ethical duties do they boot him out.
As far as the realclimate.org link and germ stuff, my point is that there's far more disagreement among appropriate scientists about the nature of climate change than there is that germs cause disease. I can easily find reasonable research that disagrees with the "consensus" opinion that human beings (1) are causing significant and destructive climate change and (2) have it within their means to remedy such change. Can you find such research that disagrees with the consensus opinion that (1) germs cause significant and debilitating diseases and infections and (2) such diseases and infections can be remedied through things such as antibiotics, hand-washings and immunizations?
But, that's the problem -- that "value" will change based on what it's projecting. It's not as if the sensor is stuck at sending "0x5c" or something as it is in a normal digital camera -- it's stuck at adding mirror #41956's current output to the output of all the rest. And, that output can change. It could be that the correct answer is to sample mirror #41956 and then subtract that from the results of all the other pixels (if that even makes sense), but that ends up severely diminishing the range of the others: if the mirror happens to be sending white light (say 0xffffff), subtracting that from the results for the other mirrors is going to give you a black image, except for one pixel.
Actually, I don't think you could. If you had a mirror that got stuck into the 'on' position (i.e. it's pointing at the single sensor), it would partially blind the sensor whenever any other mirror was also pointing at the sensor. If that one mirror happened to be seeing pink, the entire photo would have a pinkish hue. If it happened to be seeing white, the picture would be washed out. If it happened to be seeing pitch black, well, then you're in business.
First of all, I can prove that germs exist by pulling out a microscope, scraping my tongue and showing you. You cannot do the same thing with climate change, and you especially cannot pull one side of an argument (the realclimate.org link), label it authoritative, and then use it to say things are "Beyond Doubt." That's a little like saying "It's beyond doubt that we're winning in Iraq because the President SAID we are."
Second, I don't disagree that there's climate variability, especially when you compare individual years. But, that's been true since before the martians dropped our ancestors off on this planet. I'm merely pointing out that a weatherman's ability to forcecast 5 days out isn't affected, in the least, by his view of climate change.
There's an AC post (unfortunately modded at 0) claiming, in effect, that the weatherman's harm comes when people actually believe him. So, for that reason, the weathermen should be silenced. But, that sounds too much like burning heretics at the stake, lest they pollute the minds of the faithful. The cure for speech you don't like is more speech -- if you think the weatherman is wrong, the right approach is to demonstrate why, not to just try to shut him up.
If this were somebody attacking, say, the heliocentric view of the solar system, I'd agree with you. But, climate change is still subject to legitimate scientific debate; we still don't really understand either the extent to which it's happening or its causes.
Your surgeon analogy still overstates the case for two reasons (1) the existence of germs is much better proven than humans causing significant climate change, and (2) the surgeon's error may cause somebody to die, but the weatherman's is harmless (except, perhaps, to somebody else's agenda).
That's not a good analogy. A better one would be "Nobody screams censorship when a doctor gets kicked out of the AMA for suggesting that leeches have legitimate medical uses." (Which, of course, they do.)
The more problematic question is "Why?" What is motivating her to suggest this? You kick doctors out of the AMA because you're concerned about patients. These are TV weathermen -- how on earth does a view on climate change affect whether you can accurately predict tomorrow's weather?
So, the Fairness Doctrine was rooted in the idea that if you're using the public airways, you needed to do so in a manner that benefited the public. It's the same basic idea that forced TV and radio stations to put on public interest shows that nobody watched. It's a bad idea for a number of reasons:
(1) The public has already chosen what they like to listen to and watch -- the market can, and does, give people what they want.
(2) This is really just a back-door attempt to squelch a format where liberals have been unsuccessfully trying to penetrate for years: talk radio. The idea is to FORCE radio stations to pick up the next "Air America" if they're going to continue to broadcast Rush Limbaugh. But, (going back to #1), if nobody listens, is there a benefit? To Liberals there is -- by forcing "fairness," a Radio station will have to silence about half of its conservative voices.
(3) It's not like there's a paucity of available opinions -- the Internet has made it possible for every side to get its message out, with very little budget. Plus, things have changed since the days where CBS, NBC and ABC rules the TV airways. There are now hundreds of television stations.
(4) What about the First Amendment? Sure, the fact that they're public airways means that they are subject to some restrictions, but do we really want to add more limits on speech?
(5) Despite what Commissioner Copps said, it's not going to get rid of garbage TV (I'm thinking NBC's "Fear Factor" as a great example), because those shows don't espouse any political opinions.
The Democrats are beginning the process of making sure they're not re-elected in 2 years. Did any candidate run on the Fairness Doctrine?
Incidently, the differences between the Fairness Doctrine and Net Neutrality are: (1) one is content-based and one isn't and (2) Net-Neutrality regulates the information pipes, not the sources.
This really illustrates the argument over net neutrality: Netflix's service (almost) directly competes with your cable company's video-on-demand service. But, what has to be even more galling to the cable companies, the Netflix service does it by sending video over cable company's own network! (Assuming you get your internet through a cable modem.) No wonder they want to treat different providers differently.
The problem, of course, is that since most "high-speed" residential internet services still don't provide truly high-speed service, the quality of this Netflix service is probably nowhere near as good as the cable company's video-on-demand service. And, that gives the cable company a big disincentive to upgrade their data network -- as soon as they do, somebody will use that upgraded network to "steal" customers from their other services.
Because most phone companies also want to provide video over their high-speed networks, the probable end result of this will be that so-called "high-speed" providers will slow their deployment of faster Internet connections. Competition is the only real cure for this.
First of all, employment relationships are very different than the purely contractual IBM/Microsoft or 3rd party software development relationships you cite. Heck, even in the third-party software development case, An assignment might not be strictly necessary -- that's probably a Work Made for Hire under the Copyright Act. (Don't confuse what you think of as employer/employee with the Copyright Act's use of 'employee.')
Secondly, you cannot assume that just because IT companies have employees sign over their invention rights as part of their employment agreement, the companies would not own those inventions without the agreement. Lawyers are belt-and-suspenders people who see little problem in contracting you to what you're probably already obligated to do.
At most, the state would own the copyright on your contributions, if those contributions contained enough creative expression to be copyrightable. But, they would still be bound by the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, so I screwed up a bit: Intel's new chip, which has a somewhat similar architecture (bunch of less capable units working in parallel), does not actually run off a VLIW. However, my core points still hold: (1) there is a class of applications which will run well on this sort of processor, but the majority won't, (2) effective use of the processor will either need re-coding of applications in a parallel-conscious language or a very smart compiler, and (3) for many applications, a cluster of general-purpose machines will be more cost-efficient.
Incidently, the sarcasm is not appreciated. I have a full degree followed by 13 years designing parallel and distributed systems. I admit that I confused Intel's research with stuff going on at IBM.
In response to the sibling comment, the cost is in the design and manufacture of a new chip. The fixed cost to create a new processor is enormous, which means that have to produce millions in order to drive the per-unit price down. If I have an application that runs about as well on an 80-core processor at $500,000 as it does on 80 $1000 machines, guess what I'm going to choose? Heck, even if it takes 200 such machines, I'm still better off. (Excluding power considerations.) People have been building massively parallel machines for years, but they have never achieved broad commercial success.
As the article points out, this is a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) design -- in effect, each instruction word will be broken up into chunks, with a chunk going to each processor. This means that you can end up with some bizarre situations -- what happens, for example, if one processor needs to jump to one location in memory and the other 79 don't? Effectively, your compiler would need to be able to realize this, and have the instructions at that memory location for the 79 processors be the same. (In reality, I don't think you'd do this -- that processor would probably just sit and wait for the others.) This is not the equivalent of having two cores, with each able to run independently.
The real bottleneck here is the compiler, not the processor, because the compiler has to be able to pick up on implicit parallelism in the code and dole it out among the available cores. While it's possible to the compiler by using a language where the programmer specifies the parallelism, if you think about it, that's the opposite direction from the progress of computer languages in the last 20 years.
The biggest problem that this technology has is that it is expensive when compared with a compute cluster, which can scale easily and can be more easily programmed. The main time the cluster won't do better are the instances where each core needs results from other cores so frequently that the overhead in message passing is too high.
I would suggest talking with an attorney before doing that. First of all, what you're suggesting is most likely illegal. And, secondly, you're very likely to be caught -- "Hmm.... Except for OS files, there's nothing on this computer older than 2 weeks, but the computer itself is 2 years old."
Yeah, well, that's a problem. If you get a subpoena, you have to preserve the evidence or be found it contempt of court. And, the evidence that you have a new hard drive will probably be considered as well.
I think it'd be interesting to see what would happen if somebody set up a wide-open wireless network, but didn't have ANY computer attached to it.
Well, that's part of the calculus. If you're a 75-year-old grandmother with an open network, chances are that no jury is going to think that it's more likely than not that you were the one downloading gangster rap.
In any case, I don't think "We noticed somebody from this IP address sharing this song at XX time, and the ISP's logs said that was the defendant" is enough. That's why, after all, the RIAA subpoenas the disk drives.
It depends. If it's a purely automatic process, then format-shifting does not create a new copyright. Copyright requires some creative expression beyond the pre-existing matter. So, for example, copying a recording of a congressional hearing onto cassette tape doesn't add anything new and thus there is no copyright. But, if you take that tape and do a bunch of audio engineering work to make it sound better, the result would probably be protected. Note that doing this produces something of a thin copyright -- a transcription of the tape would be in the public domain, because the transcriber didn't copy any creative expression.
This was essentially the argument with photographs -- originally, there was an argument that a photograph was just a copy of something in nature. And, since you can't copyright nature, you shouldn't be able to copyright the copy. But, courts have found that photographers put a lot of creativity into doing things such as framing the shot. I don't know for sure, but I suspect this means that the output of, say, a surveillance camera is not under copyright, unless the action in front of it were performed.
Aha! You can claim it, under the current Copyright Act. However, this guy claims that he invented the electric slide in 1976. But, the current version of copyright law that we have didn't become effective until 1978. His claim of copyright would have come under the 1909 act, which contains no such reference. There are other problems related to the 1909 act as well. If I recall correctly, publication was necessary for protection.
Even under the 1976 act, it has problems. For example, the fixation requirement at the end of that quote may be at issue here -- if he created the dance AND fixed it sometime before others copied it, then it's probably protected. But, if he created the dance, others copied it and THEN he fixed it, well that's another matter. Fixation of a dance can happen in any of a number of ways, but usually happens either (1) in a notation used by professional choreographers for such things or (2) just by videotaping it.
And, finally, up until the late 1980's, there was a notice requirement of copyright (Remember the Circle-C?). No notice, no copyright (with some limits.)
Notice that I haven't even talked about fair use yet.
(You should not rely on this post as legal advice. Consult your own attorney if you need such advice.)
First of all, I can't believe my (grandfather) post got modded down to 0. That's poor.
Second, yes, I do believe the situation is better. It sounds like your scenario is not well-run -- any university that continually pulls their phd candidates' research out from under them is not likely to continue to have many such candidates. Bayh-Dole does not require your university to do what its doing.
But, consider this: if your federally-funded research gets sold off, the buying company typically wants to hire the inventor(s). I fail to see how that's bad for you. If no company could get exclusivity to your work, no company would want to spend the effort doing the development. And, as a result, both you and your research languish in the university.
Here's another way to think about it: the federal government pays for a bunch of research. Once the research is done, what SHOULD happen to it? Companies will very rarely develop technology which they do not have the exclusive right to -- the risk is that they do the development and then somebody else comes along and steals all their work. And, the federal government proved itself to be horrible at commercialization in the 60's and 70's.
Hardly. Private companies do research all the time. Even if they didn't, your solution (denying patent protection to the results of federally-funded research) wouldn't help the situation: no private company would invest in research because if somebody in a university discovers it first, the technology falls into the public domain. The reason why we allow private entities to commercialize the results of federally-funded research is because the previous situation was so bad -- useful research was just sitting in labs because nobody could make any money off it.
I'm a lawyer who (among other things) advises startups who want to license discoveries from universities. There is already a thriving market in such research, thanks in large part to the Bayh-Dole act, which allows universities to exploit inventions funded by the US government. The gov't gets a non-exclusive right to practice the invention (or have it practiced for the government) and there are a few other relatively minor restrictions. Because of this, Universities have been mining their research for years. Especially in the biochem and biotech industries, the vegas-like attitude does not exist. Quite the opposite -- researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability. Before Bayh-Dole, this rarely happened.
Most documentary evidence can be forged. The question of whether it has or not is generally for the jury. And, I have my doubts that a judge is going to let the plaintiff go into a bunch of evidence about how screenshots can be altered without having any sort of independent basis for showing that they were.
If the original author (or, in this case photographer) posted it, then a screen shot that shows the picture and the license (or the CC mark) should probably be enough to protect you. But, remember that only the original author can offer it under a different license -- if somebody else posted it without the author's permission, then the "license" is irrelevant.
Check with an attorney in your state if you want a full analysis.
First of all, the Constitution does restrict something -- the ability of the government to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. But, the fact that some rights are not enumerated in the Constitution does not mean that those rights do not exist. Understand where the founding fathers were coming from -- they had a "natural rights" view of law. Effectively, this means that our rights come from God; they are rights which we possess everywhere and anywhere, no matter what the laws of the place are. Under this view, while it is technically possible for a government to use force to limit the exercise such rights, any such limit is illegitimate.
I will agree that whether people have the right to petition for the writ is very important. My point is that what you call "Gonzalez' analysis" was not a statement on whether people have such a right, but a recognition that if they do, that right is not specifically granted by the Constitution. It does not speak to the existence of the right, only to its source.
People are taking a tiny portion of a much longer dialog and twisting it to imply something that it clearly doesn't say, as if it gave an instant transparent window into the Attorney General's thoughts. For those who already believed that he was Satan on earth, the statement seems to confirm it. For the rest of us, it means nothing.
About nothing. He was making a quibbling little technical point, that the Constitution does not expressly grant a right to the writ of Habeas Corpus, while being questioned by a bunch of quibblers -- the senate judiciary committee. And guess what? He's right -- it doesn't. In fact, there's technically no right of habeas corpus at all, there's only the right to *petition* for the writ. (A 'writ' is a court order.) But, even though the Constitution doesn't expressly grant the right, the writ is well established in US law. Heck, the language of the Constitution implies that habeas corpus is even more foundational than the Constitution itself.
26 U.S.C. 1(a): "There is hereby imposed on the taxable income of ..." and then goes to list different classes, including "every individual".
..."
26 U.S.C. 7805(a) "... the Secretary shall prescribe all needful rules and regulations for the enforcement of this title
26 C.F.R. 1.441-1(a): "Taxable income must be computed and a return must be made for a period known as the taxable year."
In general, the statutes and regulations of the tax system are in 26 U.S.C. and 26 C.F.R., respectively. They can most easily found at www.law.cornell.edu. There are other sources of law that affect taxes, like court decisions and interpretive rulings. But, the meat of our tax system is in the Code and the Regulations.
Punishing weathermen who disagree with the AMC's will have the necessary impact of restraining their speech ("If I say this, I'll get kicked out, so I won't say it.") This policy would have the effect of silencing dissenting opinions. And that, at least in my mind, raises the question of whether this effect was the intent as well It's the sort of restraint that you often see in political and religious organizations, not scientific or professional ones, which supposedly value dissent.
The weatherman's statements are not reasonably assigned to the AMS just because he's a member. Nobody faults the ABA or AMA because of the opinions of their members -- only when the member ACTS in contravention of his professional ethical duties do they boot him out.
As far as the realclimate.org link and germ stuff, my point is that there's far more disagreement among appropriate scientists about the nature of climate change than there is that germs cause disease. I can easily find reasonable research that disagrees with the "consensus" opinion that human beings (1) are causing significant and destructive climate change and (2) have it within their means to remedy such change. Can you find such research that disagrees with the consensus opinion that (1) germs cause significant and debilitating diseases and infections and (2) such diseases and infections can be remedied through things such as antibiotics, hand-washings and immunizations?
But, that's the problem -- that "value" will change based on what it's projecting. It's not as if the sensor is stuck at sending "0x5c" or something as it is in a normal digital camera -- it's stuck at adding mirror #41956's current output to the output of all the rest. And, that output can change. It could be that the correct answer is to sample mirror #41956 and then subtract that from the results of all the other pixels (if that even makes sense), but that ends up severely diminishing the range of the others: if the mirror happens to be sending white light (say 0xffffff), subtracting that from the results for the other mirrors is going to give you a black image, except for one pixel.
Actually, I don't think you could. If you had a mirror that got stuck into the 'on' position (i.e. it's pointing at the single sensor), it would partially blind the sensor whenever any other mirror was also pointing at the sensor. If that one mirror happened to be seeing pink, the entire photo would have a pinkish hue. If it happened to be seeing white, the picture would be washed out. If it happened to be seeing pitch black, well, then you're in business.
First of all, I can prove that germs exist by pulling out a microscope, scraping my tongue and showing you. You cannot do the same thing with climate change, and you especially cannot pull one side of an argument (the realclimate.org link), label it authoritative, and then use it to say things are "Beyond Doubt." That's a little like saying "It's beyond doubt that we're winning in Iraq because the President SAID we are."
Second, I don't disagree that there's climate variability, especially when you compare individual years. But, that's been true since before the martians dropped our ancestors off on this planet. I'm merely pointing out that a weatherman's ability to forcecast 5 days out isn't affected, in the least, by his view of climate change.
There's an AC post (unfortunately modded at 0) claiming, in effect, that the weatherman's harm comes when people actually believe him. So, for that reason, the weathermen should be silenced. But, that sounds too much like burning heretics at the stake, lest they pollute the minds of the faithful. The cure for speech you don't like is more speech -- if you think the weatherman is wrong, the right approach is to demonstrate why, not to just try to shut him up.
If this were somebody attacking, say, the heliocentric view of the solar system, I'd agree with you. But, climate change is still subject to legitimate scientific debate; we still don't really understand either the extent to which it's happening or its causes.
Your surgeon analogy still overstates the case for two reasons (1) the existence of germs is much better proven than humans causing significant climate change, and (2) the surgeon's error may cause somebody to die, but the weatherman's is harmless (except, perhaps, to somebody else's agenda).
That's not a good analogy. A better one would be "Nobody screams censorship when a doctor gets kicked out of the AMA for suggesting that leeches have legitimate medical uses." (Which, of course, they do.)
The more problematic question is "Why?" What is motivating her to suggest this? You kick doctors out of the AMA because you're concerned about patients. These are TV weathermen -- how on earth does a view on climate change affect whether you can accurately predict tomorrow's weather?
So, the Fairness Doctrine was rooted in the idea that if you're using the public airways, you needed to do so in a manner that benefited the public. It's the same basic idea that forced TV and radio stations to put on public interest shows that nobody watched. It's a bad idea for a number of reasons:
(1) The public has already chosen what they like to listen to and watch -- the market can, and does, give people what they want.
(2) This is really just a back-door attempt to squelch a format where liberals have been unsuccessfully trying to penetrate for years: talk radio. The idea is to FORCE radio stations to pick up the next "Air America" if they're going to continue to broadcast Rush Limbaugh. But, (going back to #1), if nobody listens, is there a benefit? To Liberals there is -- by forcing "fairness," a Radio station will have to silence about half of its conservative voices.
(3) It's not like there's a paucity of available opinions -- the Internet has made it possible for every side to get its message out, with very little budget. Plus, things have changed since the days where CBS, NBC and ABC rules the TV airways. There are now hundreds of television stations.
(4) What about the First Amendment? Sure, the fact that they're public airways means that they are subject to some restrictions, but do we really want to add more limits on speech?
(5) Despite what Commissioner Copps said, it's not going to get rid of garbage TV (I'm thinking NBC's "Fear Factor" as a great example), because those shows don't espouse any political opinions.
The Democrats are beginning the process of making sure they're not re-elected in 2 years. Did any candidate run on the Fairness Doctrine?
Incidently, the differences between the Fairness Doctrine and Net Neutrality are: (1) one is content-based and one isn't and (2) Net-Neutrality regulates the information pipes, not the sources.
This really illustrates the argument over net neutrality: Netflix's service (almost) directly competes with your cable company's video-on-demand service. But, what has to be even more galling to the cable companies, the Netflix service does it by sending video over cable company's own network! (Assuming you get your internet through a cable modem.) No wonder they want to treat different providers differently.
The problem, of course, is that since most "high-speed" residential internet services still don't provide truly high-speed service, the quality of this Netflix service is probably nowhere near as good as the cable company's video-on-demand service. And, that gives the cable company a big disincentive to upgrade their data network -- as soon as they do, somebody will use that upgraded network to "steal" customers from their other services.
Because most phone companies also want to provide video over their high-speed networks, the probable end result of this will be that so-called "high-speed" providers will slow their deployment of faster Internet connections. Competition is the only real cure for this.
First of all, employment relationships are very different than the purely contractual IBM/Microsoft or 3rd party software development relationships you cite. Heck, even in the third-party software development case, An assignment might not be strictly necessary -- that's probably a Work Made for Hire under the Copyright Act. (Don't confuse what you think of as employer/employee with the Copyright Act's use of 'employee.')
Secondly, you cannot assume that just because IT companies have employees sign over their invention rights as part of their employment agreement, the companies would not own those inventions without the agreement. Lawyers are belt-and-suspenders people who see little problem in contracting you to what you're probably already obligated to do.
At most, the state would own the copyright on your contributions, if those contributions contained enough creative expression to be copyrightable. But, they would still be bound by the GPL.