If government were run like a normal business, the way to keep goofing-off down would be to implement a "Do your work on time or get fired" policy (or at least a "Don't do your work on time and don't get a raise" policy.) But, firing gov't employees never happens and all their raises are set en masse by the legislature.
After a 13-year haitus from formal education, I'm in Law School where there is a debate about whether students should be allowed to use their laptops in class -- professors complain of non-class related usage. But, I see no difference from when I was in school and loafers just sat in the back row and read the newspaper.
It was information on 32,000 (anybody want to bet it was 32,768?) members of the public, not customers. To bad, in a way -- Lexis is used most by lawyers, judges, congresspeople and so on -- had the Lexis customer data been hacked and say all the judges on the 5th Circuit or the Ohio congressional delegation had their identities stolen as a result, you'd probably see reform a whole lot faster.
As a 2d year law student with a long engineering background, I think I have some input here...
(1) Patent lawyers are occasionally referred to as the "Dermatologists of the legal profession" -- they work semi-normal hours and get paid well.
(2) Patent is also hard to branch back out of if you don't like it -- you tend to pigeonhole yourself.
(3) Don't make your decision based on salary -- better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable. Also, while lawyers coming out of the top 12 or so law schools will typically start at $125-135/yr, those salary figures drop dramatically in the next tier. You don't want to rack on a bunch of debt only to find out that you're working more hours but making about what you were before.
I don't think that a JD would give you any help in management -- the only management skill you learn in law school is time management.
On the other hand, lawyers are the grease of the economy -- nothing much happens without them. When things go well, you need lawyers. And, when things go poorly, you need lawyers. Not too many legal jobs being outsourced to Bangalore.
The case that you're thinking about is Feist v. Rural. Basically, the Supreme Court said that a telephone directory does not have any new expression in it -- it's a compilation of facts organized in a standard way.
The requirement of original expression in a copyrighted work is minimal, but it's still there. If they had, say, organized the directory by how weird they thought the person's name was, it would have been protected. The underlying facts -- the individual listings, though are just facts and are not protected. So, if somebody else took the sorted-by-wierdness listings and sorted them alphabetically, the end result would have been in the public domain again.
Should note that copyright is actually pretty uniform through the western world -- the Boerne Convention has effectively standardized copyright in the western world. Has nothing to do with President Bush -- the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act happened during the Clinton Administration.
Incidently, in US Law, you do not have to "obtain" a copyright -- you just create something that's copyrightable and you automatically get the copyright at the moment of creation.
Strikes me that this would be somewhat deceitful -- as if I took the GPL, changed a few lines in the middle and then distributed it with my software.
There is one way to solve this problem.... The license itself is under copyright and thus has enforceable rights associated with it. The lawyer writing the license could say something like:
You may prepare derivative versions of this License only if you clearly indicate such changes at the beginning of the modified license and you title the modified license the 'Modified BSD License.' If you fail to comply with this section, then you agree to transfer any right to enforce the modified license to the Free Software Foundation.
(Note: I'm not a lawyer. Don't use my language without bouncing it off one. I hereby grant you a license to use it, however.)
As a policy matter, we've decided that it should be pretty easy to sue somebody -- as long as you can say what you think the other side did wrong, you can get through the door. Once you've gotten through the door, you get the legal power to find stuff out by subpoenaing information, questioning the other side, etc.... That's where things are right now. In general, once this process called 'discovery' has finished, you'd better have something. If you don't have enough information that would allow a jury to conceivably find for you, you're finished. In fact, if the judge determines that there was never anything to your case all along and you were just trying to harass the other side, he can impose sanctions.
Sanctions for SCO would probably be futile, though -- they're betting the farm on this case. If they lose, there won't be anything left to take.
Also, previous poster was wrong -- in a civil trial in federal court, jury decisions must be unanimous unless the parties agree otherwise. FRCP 48.
My guess is that discovery will continue for a while, SCO will try to stretch it out by continually asking for more or complaining that IBM isn't being forthcoming enough. Eventually, discovery will close and the judge will find that no jury would be able to find for SCO, and the case will be closed. SCO will appeal, but the appeals court won't hear it and that will be the end.
Your analogy would be better if it said "The dealer's son-in-law goes to the DEA and tells them that the dealer still has drugs.... finally lets the DEA back in, but prevents them from looking in the kitchen cabinets and the hall closet. DEA uses that and information from informants to raid the house. It later turns out that the informants were wrong."
People think hindsight is always 20/20. In reality, it's always 20/ : You know what happened when you went down one path, but still don't know what would have happened down the other path.
When was the last time you saw the President's budget make it through unscathed and actually get enacted? Er, never?
Recognize what's happening here -- the budget conains some things that the President is adamant on and a number of bargaining chips. It allows his allies in the Congress to make bargains like "Ok. We'll keep the Hubble, but only if you vote for Social Security Reform."
The President's budget marks the beginning of the budget-making process, not the end.
I'll admit that it's been a few years, but the last time I checked, Software Engineers really do not have professional exams the same way say civil or mechanical engineers and are not generally legally licensed. (At least in the US.) There is no software equivalent of the PE exam.
And that should not be all that surprising -- software is a relatively young field and the people who are good at it are often closer to craftsmen than engineers. Heck, even the nature of software is different: When does 'design' actually end in software? While you want the large majority of design to be done up front, it's not really finished until you're done with the code. Would a civil engineer similarly say they're done designing when the bridge is finished?
Even the legal responsibilities are different -- the methods that physical engineers use are fairly standardized and change relatively slowly, in an incremental fashion. How about software engineers? How long as OO development been around? How about rapid prototyping? Let's say somebody gets hurt by buggy software -- do we have enough knowledge for a court to say "the reasonable person would not have used extreme programming here?"
Every software engineer learns by him/herself. You need to interact with a new type of system -- do you pick up the manual and read it or do you wait for an ISO 9001 certified training class? Heck, all good engineers learn things by themselves -- that's why we have things like trade journals and conferences. In fact, I'd argue that engineers have an ethical responsibility to keep up.
All that said, I fully agree that as a rule, there's a huge difference between those who go to some 2-year programming school and those who actually get a 4(+) year Bachelor's degree from a quality CS school.
The problem is that it is extremely difficult for a US company to actually collect on a judgement against a (red) Chinese citizen -- the Chinese courts are very loathe to allow US companies to collect monetary damages from Chinese interests. Criminal laws don't have the same problem, as it would be a Chinese prosecutor.
Criminal charges for copyright infringement are really a bad idea -- civil courts allow the copyright owner to decide whether to enforce a copyright. The civil requirement also more/less allows people to copy orphaned works with little risk, because it's not clear who owns the works -- that's a good thing, because without somebody infringing a copyright of unclear ownership, those orphaned works deteriorate over time. If you criminalize it, then the gov't could say "Hey! You're copying that 1943 work without permission from the copyright owner. We're going to prosecute, and never mind the fact that we (1) have no idea who actually owns it and (2) don't know if they care that you're copying it."
(1) Patents are a lot more expensive and time-consuming. Copyright is free. (2) Copyright protects expression, (loosely defined -- computer programs have a lot of expression), patents protect inventions. Most computer programs do not have the necessary novelty and/or non-obviousness to be considered inventions. (3) The Supreme Court has already had a chance to decide that copyright does not extend to software, but declined to do so. See Computer Associates v. Altai. (4) The shift would effectively put all current software completely out of IP protection -- if you put your invention out for public use and don't file for a patent w/in one year, you're out of luck. Most software is > 1 year old, so this would mean no copyright, no patent.
If there's a change to be made here, it will have to be Congress doing it, not the courts.
I currently have 3 choices for "broadband" internet to my home and possibly 3 more on the way.
You don't need to have a dozen players in the market -- nobody would argue that the soda market isn't competitive, despite there only being a few major players, or that home improvement stores (2 major players in the US -- Home Depot and Lowes) aren't fiercely competitive.
Presuming for a second that poor people need high speed internet in the same way that they need say food or shelter (a dubious proposition at best), covering an entire city with a wifi network is a horribly expensive way of doing it -- why not just set up public terminals in libraries?
My highspeed access runs about US$ 50/month, about what a second line and dial-up service would cost. I'd love for it to be less, but it's not really that expensive, either.
Roads make sense for a government monopoly just because having multiple road networks is infeasible. But, most homes already have 3 networks connected that can carry internet (power,phone,cableTV) plus large chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum, so that's clearly feasible.
I don't think the telecom companies would be opposed if it were about small towns where they don't want to provide the service -- the main impetus for this is Philadephia's plan to cover the city with wifi. (For those on the West Coast, Philly is the largest city in PA.)
THe other problem is that this isn't just cutting into some future service that one of the telcos wants to provide -- it will cut into service that they're already providing. They have to be concerned about people dropping their DSL or Cable Modem service. Why would you pay for high-speed access when you can put up an antenna, especially when you're already paying for wifi service through your taxes?
I don't see any reason why the government should take a bunch of money out of my pocket to do a lousy job at providing a service that private industry could do.
In the long run, if there's competition in the market, service qualities will go up and prices will go down. A government monopoly funded by tax dollars will give government style service with no incentive to keep costs down.
It seems to me that the solution is pretty easy: Instead of just giving a whole block of visas away once a month, auction off 1/12th of them every month. And, make the visas tradeable.
This would solve several problems with the current system: (1) The current "First to the trough" assignment method would disappear. Instead, it would be replaced by a "highest value user" method. Companies that truly need some foreign worker b/c there is no American who can do the job will be able to fill those positions. But, companies that are just trying to low-ball their development costs probably won't. (2) THe disparity between domestic labor and imported foreign labor would shrink, due to the increased cost of the foreign labor. (3) Helps pay off the budget deficit.
There's a spectrum of protectability, from generic to descriptive to fanciful. So, you can't trademark the word "Soap" when applied to, well, soap. "Ivory soap," however, is more fanciful. And, you can use "Soap" when applied to something other than soap, like say photo cleaning software -- then it's more fanciful.
"Word" when applied to a word processor and "Office" when applied to an office suite are on the more generic/descriptive side of it. "Windows" had a hard time because it was generic -- "X-windows" and the idea of "Windowing operating environments" had already been around for a while.
"Excel," on the other hand, does not have any relation to spreadsheets, making it more fanciful. With respect to spreadsheets, "Excel" is not generic at all, but may become so -- "Aspirin" used to be a trademark of Bayer Corp (and still is in Europe, I believe), but they failed to protect it in the US and lost their right to it.
Should note that these words do not disappear from the english language just because somebody trademarks them -- people can still use words like "Office" and "Windows" to talk about, well, offices and windows. And, in fact, somebody could conceivably use those words to describe some other product. Look at "Delta" for example -- it's an airline, a faucet manufacturer and a power tool maker. SAS, similarly, is an airline and a software company. The touchstone is customer confusion -- if a customer would be confused by your use of a mark, that's a pretty good indication that you're infringing.
So, first of all, most people look to the exit poll numbers that came out during the day and compare them with the end results. Since the demographics of the voter changes during the day, you should expect them to be different.
Take Florida for example, According to end-of-day exit polls, 47.6% voted for Kerry, 51.4% for Bush. The actual numbers were Bush 52.1%, Kerry 47.1%. That seems to be pretty close to me, especially considering that the exit poll counted fewer than 3000 votes in FL.
You are paying (1) to get updates, (2) for their warranty protection, (3) for the right to get tech support from Red Hat and (4) for the (limited) right to use their trademarks on your computer with the software. If those are of no value to you, then don't renew the subscription -- I think all you need to do is edit out their logos and name.
Red Hat's business model is built around adding value to Linux. If none of that added value means anything to you, then don't buy it.
Well, that's kinda funny -- in law, the Reasonable Person standard is considered objective. The subjective standard would be the one that says "if you intended to do it." It's subjective if you have to look at the person's state of mind, objective if you don't.
There are generally 4 levels of intent: (1) you meant for it to happen, (2) you knew that it would happen, (3) you recklessly disregarded the risk that it would happen, (4) you should have known that it would happen. The reasonable person standard is #4. (Note: not all laws fit nicely into these categories, nor do they all specify a category.)
There is a 5th level, and I'm surprised that they didn't go there: (5) it doesn't matter what you knew or should have known.
IANAL, but I'd be really surprised if the SCOTUS tossed out the reasonable person standard as unconstitutionally vague -- it's all over the place in law.
Note that I'm not defending the Act -- if it had been enacted prior to the creation of the WWW, a 'reasonable person' might have seen the web server as inducement. Ditto with the tape recorder and CD burner.
That's just plain wrong -- you absolutely can register a trademark on a real word. Here are some examples: Ford, Coke, Cheerio, Delta, Target, McDonald's, Wendy's, Jet, Dick's, Subway, Bell, Apple, Polo, etc....
What you can't do is take a generic term for a type of item and register a trademark for that item. For example, Subway couldn't register the word 'submarine' in reference to their sandwiches, because it's a generic term relating to types of sandwiches. Similarly, Apple can't register the name 'Computer' or 'digital audio player.'
If I recall correctly, Microsoft was actually able to register 'Windows,' but how they got to do it was really fishy and there's some speculation that the trademark wouldn't hold up in the US, because it was a generic term at the time.
Funny you should ask. I'm in the middle of editing a video highlighting my internship... I did everything myself. Very low-budget, using my Sony Digital-8 Camcorder that I bought about 4 years ago for ~ $600.
Anyway, I bought 3 sheets of neon green posterboard, taped them together and used it as a green screen which I sit in front of. The software (Premiere) actually does a good job of keying out the green so I have my head floating in front of a transparent alpha-channel, and so I can manipulate the background easily.
Here's the problem: The camera sees all that green. In fact, it thinks it sees too much green and tries to tint the picture toward red to compensate. As a result, I come out looking like I have a bad sunburn. Now, I think I've figured out how to correct the color in the editor, but it sure was a PITA.
I know that the professional cameras have a lot more features (at much, much higher prices), but my dinky little camcorder does almost everything I want, except there's no way to tell it what white looks like.
The other thing to make sure to get is the ability to add a wide-angle lens. Really increases your options for framing your shots.
CHeck out wwug.com and digitalvideoediting.com for all sorts of cool information.
I'm all for your making as much as you can, but I think that the desire to be "very highly reimbursed" is probably counterproductive: you take that position and nobody's going to buy the copyright. As a result, you hold the copyright on thousands and thousands of shots of people's weddings. They're not doing much for you except decreasing in value -- newlyweds are generally going to be more willing to pay for them than are people who've been married for a few years. Sure, there are exceptions, but you can factor all those into the price you charge for the copyrights. When you die, what is going to happen to them? The copyrights will probably pass to your heirs who probably won't even clue in that they have something of value.
And, in fact, what are you going to do if somebody infringes on the copyright? Are you even going to know? In the US, you have to register the image with the copyright office before you can sue and even if you win, you can probably only collect damages i.e. your lost profit. You can't even collect attorney's fees, and the entire process could take a couple of years. (IANAL, yet...)
Re:Red Hat versus reality is more like it...
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Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The CFO is still on board. The announcement was that he was going to resign, not that he had.
Should also note that so far, there are not any plantiffs in the case, only a law firm seeking a lead plaintiff.
I wonder how easy it'll be for the firm to get this certified as a class action, considering that 11.3% of the stock is held by insiders and 81% is held by institutions. By my book, that leaves under 8% generally owned by the public. That's still around 14M shares, but when you consider that a bunch of those owners probably aren't interested in a class action (many are probably employees or other Linux-lovers), it may make a judge think twice whether or not this 'lead plaintiff' can actually represent the supposedly injured class.
The tape market and hard drive markets have diverged dramatically since the introduction of the hard drive into personal computers in (what 1985?), for a variety of reasons:
(1) There are far more hard drives produced each year than there are tape drives and so there's much more of an incentive to increase the capacity of hard drives.
Back in the day, 86-88ish, I was a part-time computer operator at Carnegie Mellon. We ran nightly incremental and weekly full backups onto 1/2 inch (I think it was 1/2 inch) reel-to-reel tape. It worked reasonably well because you could store a lot more on the tapes than you could on the disks that we had at the time.
(2) the backup tape market is not as tolerant of changes in technology as the disk-drive market is. Because most new disk drives are put into new computers, we don't really care much if you can't stick your 3-year-old 8 GB hard drive in it. But, it's hard to justify a new backup system that doesn't work with your 3-year-old backup tapes.
This is also magnified by the price differential: disk drives benefit from much larger economies of scale than are tape drives. How much does it cost to buy a tape drive to back up your new 120GB disk?
The best solution is the one that's made unavailable by most home broadband connections: back it up over the web to a central backup provider. They have the expensive tape drives and their marginal cost of backing up your computer is the cost of a tape and some network bandwidth. Here, though, we're all bitten by the asymmetric part of DSL or cable modems: we have a lot of download bandwidth, but not much upload.
I don't let my Washing Machine use the phone
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Planet Broadband
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Does anybody really want the Washing Machine to call its own repairman? Ok, maybe if there was a new Washing Machine firmware update. But, repairmen are expensive and come at inconvenient times -- I don't want somebody trying to charge me $60 for a missed appointment that my Whirlpool made on my behalf. Heck, the thing's broken and who in their right mind lets a broken washer spend their money?
Then there's the idea of having the refrigerator keep track of how long things have been in the refrigerator: how does it know what's in there? Is it going to recognize the 3-day-old leftover lasagna or the jar of homemade jam? What happens when my little girl decides to stick her baby doll in there? I really want a fridge to tell me which shelf the mustard is on, not when I'm almost out of milk -- that I can figure out for myself.
Traditional household appliances are not good users of broadband networks. Now, if I can remotely program my TIVO to record Law & Order so I can download it and watch it later from my laptop, that sounds good.
Slashdot Mirror
Or the business that they're running on the side.
If government were run like a normal business, the way to keep goofing-off down would be to implement a "Do your work on time or get fired" policy (or at least a "Don't do your work on time and don't get a raise" policy.) But, firing gov't employees never happens and all their raises are set en masse by the legislature.
After a 13-year haitus from formal education, I'm in Law School where there is a debate about whether students should be allowed to use their laptops in class -- professors complain of non-class related usage. But, I see no difference from when I was in school and loafers just sat in the back row and read the newspaper.
It was information on 32,000 (anybody want to bet it was 32,768?) members of the public, not customers. To bad, in a way -- Lexis is used most by lawyers, judges, congresspeople and so on -- had the Lexis customer data been hacked and say all the judges on the 5th Circuit or the Ohio congressional delegation had their identities stolen as a result, you'd probably see reform a whole lot faster.
As a 2d year law student with a long engineering background, I think I have some input here...
(1) Patent lawyers are occasionally referred to as the "Dermatologists of the legal profession" -- they work semi-normal hours and get paid well.
(2) Patent is also hard to branch back out of if you don't like it -- you tend to pigeonhole yourself.
(3) Don't make your decision based on salary -- better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable. Also, while lawyers coming out of the top 12 or so law schools will typically start at $125-135/yr, those salary figures drop dramatically in the next tier. You don't want to rack on a bunch of debt only to find out that you're working more hours but making about what you were before.
I don't think that a JD would give you any help in management -- the only management skill you learn in law school is time management.
On the other hand, lawyers are the grease of the economy -- nothing much happens without them. When things go well, you need lawyers. And, when things go poorly, you need lawyers. Not too many legal jobs being outsourced to Bangalore.
The case that you're thinking about is Feist v. Rural. Basically, the Supreme Court said that a telephone directory does not have any new expression in it -- it's a compilation of facts organized in a standard way.
The requirement of original expression in a copyrighted work is minimal, but it's still there. If they had, say, organized the directory by how weird they thought the person's name was, it would have been protected. The underlying facts -- the individual listings, though are just facts and are not protected. So, if somebody else took the sorted-by-wierdness listings and sorted them alphabetically, the end result would have been in the public domain again.
Should note that copyright is actually pretty uniform through the western world -- the Boerne Convention has effectively standardized copyright in the western world. Has nothing to do with President Bush -- the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act happened during the Clinton Administration.
Incidently, in US Law, you do not have to "obtain" a copyright -- you just create something that's copyrightable and you automatically get the copyright at the moment of creation.
Strikes me that this would be somewhat deceitful -- as if I took the GPL, changed a few lines in the middle and then distributed it with my software.
There is one way to solve this problem.... The license itself is under copyright and thus has enforceable rights associated with it. The lawyer writing the license could say something like:
You may prepare derivative versions of this License only if you clearly indicate such changes at the beginning of the modified license and you title the modified license the 'Modified BSD License.' If you fail to comply with this section, then you agree to transfer any right to enforce the modified license to the Free Software Foundation.
(Note: I'm not a lawyer. Don't use my language without bouncing it off one. I hereby grant you a license to use it, however.)
First of all, it's 'Plaintiff,' not prosecutor.
As a policy matter, we've decided that it should be pretty easy to sue somebody -- as long as you can say what you think the other side did wrong, you can get through the door. Once you've gotten through the door, you get the legal power to find stuff out by subpoenaing information, questioning the other side, etc.... That's where things are right now. In general, once this process called 'discovery' has finished, you'd better have something. If you don't have enough information that would allow a jury to conceivably find for you, you're finished. In fact, if the judge determines that there was never anything to your case all along and you were just trying to harass the other side, he can impose sanctions.
Sanctions for SCO would probably be futile, though -- they're betting the farm on this case. If they lose, there won't be anything left to take.
Also, previous poster was wrong -- in a civil trial in federal court, jury decisions must be unanimous unless the parties agree otherwise. FRCP 48.
My guess is that discovery will continue for a while, SCO will try to stretch it out by continually asking for more or complaining that IBM isn't being forthcoming enough. Eventually, discovery will close and the judge will find that no jury would be able to find for SCO, and the case will be closed. SCO will appeal, but the appeals court won't hear it and that will be the end.
Your analogy would be better if it said "The dealer's son-in-law goes to the DEA and tells them that the dealer still has drugs. ... finally lets the DEA back in, but prevents them from looking in the kitchen cabinets and the hall closet. DEA uses that and information from informants to raid the house. It later turns out that the informants were wrong."
People think hindsight is always 20/20. In reality, it's always 20/ : You know what happened when you went down one path, but still don't know what would have happened down the other path.
When was the last time you saw the President's budget make it through unscathed and actually get enacted? Er, never?
Recognize what's happening here -- the budget conains some things that the President is adamant on and a number of bargaining chips. It allows his allies in the Congress to make bargains like "Ok. We'll keep the Hubble, but only if you vote for Social Security Reform."
The President's budget marks the beginning of the budget-making process, not the end.
I'll admit that it's been a few years, but the last time I checked, Software Engineers really do not have professional exams the same way say civil or mechanical engineers and are not generally legally licensed. (At least in the US.) There is no software equivalent of the PE exam.
And that should not be all that surprising -- software is a relatively young field and the people who are good at it are often closer to craftsmen than engineers. Heck, even the nature of software is different: When does 'design' actually end in software? While you want the large majority of design to be done up front, it's not really finished until you're done with the code. Would a civil engineer similarly say they're done designing when the bridge is finished?
Even the legal responsibilities are different -- the methods that physical engineers use are fairly standardized and change relatively slowly, in an incremental fashion. How about software engineers? How long as OO development been around? How about rapid prototyping? Let's say somebody gets hurt by buggy software -- do we have enough knowledge for a court to say "the reasonable person would not have used extreme programming here?"
Every software engineer learns by him/herself. You need to interact with a new type of system -- do you pick up the manual and read it or do you wait for an ISO 9001 certified training class? Heck, all good engineers learn things by themselves -- that's why we have things like trade journals and conferences. In fact, I'd argue that engineers have an ethical responsibility to keep up.
All that said, I fully agree that as a rule, there's a huge difference between those who go to some 2-year programming school and those who actually get a 4(+) year Bachelor's degree from a quality CS school.
The problem is that it is extremely difficult for a US company to actually collect on a judgement against a (red) Chinese citizen -- the Chinese courts are very loathe to allow US companies to collect monetary damages from Chinese interests. Criminal laws don't have the same problem, as it would be a Chinese prosecutor.
Criminal charges for copyright infringement are really a bad idea -- civil courts allow the copyright owner to decide whether to enforce a copyright. The civil requirement also more/less allows people to copy orphaned works with little risk, because it's not clear who owns the works -- that's a good thing, because without somebody infringing a copyright of unclear ownership, those orphaned works deteriorate over time. If you criminalize it, then the gov't could say "Hey! You're copying that 1943 work without permission from the copyright owner. We're going to prosecute, and never mind the fact that we (1) have no idea who actually owns it and (2) don't know if they care that you're copying it."
Having just gotten out of my IP exam....
(1) Patents are a lot more expensive and time-consuming. Copyright is free.
(2) Copyright protects expression, (loosely defined -- computer programs have a lot of expression), patents protect inventions. Most computer programs do not have the necessary novelty and/or non-obviousness to be considered inventions.
(3) The Supreme Court has already had a chance to decide that copyright does not extend to software, but declined to do so. See Computer Associates v. Altai.
(4) The shift would effectively put all current software completely out of IP protection -- if you put your invention out for public use and don't file for a patent w/in one year, you're out of luck. Most software is > 1 year old, so this would mean no copyright, no patent.
If there's a change to be made here, it will have to be Congress doing it, not the courts.
I currently have 3 choices for "broadband" internet to my home and possibly 3 more on the way.
You don't need to have a dozen players in the market -- nobody would argue that the soda market isn't competitive, despite there only being a few major players, or that home improvement stores (2 major players in the US -- Home Depot and Lowes) aren't fiercely competitive.
Presuming for a second that poor people need high speed internet in the same way that they need say food or shelter (a dubious proposition at best), covering an entire city with a wifi network is a horribly expensive way of doing it -- why not just set up public terminals in libraries?
My highspeed access runs about US$ 50/month, about what a second line and dial-up service would cost. I'd love for it to be less, but it's not really that expensive, either.
Roads make sense for a government monopoly just because having multiple road networks is infeasible. But, most homes already have 3 networks connected that can carry internet (power,phone,cableTV) plus large chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum, so that's clearly feasible.
I don't think the telecom companies would be opposed if it were about small towns where they don't want to provide the service -- the main impetus for this is Philadephia's plan to cover the city with wifi. (For those on the West Coast, Philly is the largest city in PA.)
THe other problem is that this isn't just cutting into some future service that one of the telcos wants to provide -- it will cut into service that they're already providing. They have to be concerned about people dropping their DSL or Cable Modem service. Why would you pay for high-speed access when you can put up an antenna, especially when you're already paying for wifi service through your taxes?
I don't see any reason why the government should take a bunch of money out of my pocket to do a lousy job at providing a service that private industry could do.
In the long run, if there's competition in the market, service qualities will go up and prices will go down. A government monopoly funded by tax dollars will give government style service with no incentive to keep costs down.
It seems to me that the solution is pretty easy: Instead of just giving a whole block of visas away once a month, auction off 1/12th of them every month. And, make the visas tradeable.
This would solve several problems with the current system:
(1) The current "First to the trough" assignment method would disappear. Instead, it would be replaced by a "highest value user" method. Companies that truly need some foreign worker b/c there is no American who can do the job will be able to fill those positions. But, companies that are just trying to low-ball their development costs probably won't.
(2) THe disparity between domestic labor and imported foreign labor would shrink, due to the increased cost of the foreign labor.
(3) Helps pay off the budget deficit.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL (yet):
There's a spectrum of protectability, from generic to descriptive to fanciful. So, you can't trademark the word "Soap" when applied to, well, soap. "Ivory soap," however, is more fanciful. And, you can use "Soap" when applied to something other than soap, like say photo cleaning software -- then it's more fanciful.
"Word" when applied to a word processor and "Office" when applied to an office suite are on the more generic/descriptive side of it. "Windows" had a hard time because it was generic -- "X-windows" and the idea of "Windowing operating environments" had already been around for a while.
"Excel," on the other hand, does not have any relation to spreadsheets, making it more fanciful. With respect to spreadsheets, "Excel" is not generic at all, but may become so -- "Aspirin" used to be a trademark of Bayer Corp (and still is in Europe, I believe), but they failed to protect it in the US and lost their right to it.
Should note that these words do not disappear from the english language just because somebody trademarks them -- people can still use words like "Office" and "Windows" to talk about, well, offices and windows. And, in fact, somebody could conceivably use those words to describe some other product. Look at "Delta" for example -- it's an airline, a faucet manufacturer and a power tool maker. SAS, similarly, is an airline and a software company. The touchstone is customer confusion -- if a customer would be confused by your use of a mark, that's a pretty good indication that you're infringing.
So, first of all, most people look to the exit poll numbers that came out during the day and compare them with the end results. Since the demographics of the voter changes during the day, you should expect them to be different.
Take Florida for example, According to end-of-day exit polls, 47.6% voted for Kerry, 51.4% for Bush. The actual numbers were Bush 52.1%, Kerry 47.1%. That seems to be pretty close to me, especially considering that the exit poll counted fewer than 3000 votes in FL.
You are paying (1) to get updates, (2) for their warranty protection, (3) for the right to get tech support from Red Hat and (4) for the (limited) right to use their trademarks on your computer with the software. If those are of no value to you, then don't renew the subscription -- I think all you need to do is edit out their logos and name.
Red Hat's business model is built around adding value to Linux. If none of that added value means anything to you, then don't buy it.
Well, that's kinda funny -- in law, the Reasonable Person standard is considered objective. The subjective standard would be the one that says "if you intended to do it." It's subjective if you have to look at the person's state of mind, objective if you don't.
There are generally 4 levels of intent: (1) you meant for it to happen, (2) you knew that it would happen, (3) you recklessly disregarded the risk that it would happen, (4) you should have known that it would happen. The reasonable person standard is #4. (Note: not all laws fit nicely into these categories, nor do they all specify a category.)
There is a 5th level, and I'm surprised that they didn't go there: (5) it doesn't matter what you knew or should have known.
IANAL, but I'd be really surprised if the SCOTUS tossed out the reasonable person standard as unconstitutionally vague -- it's all over the place in law.
Note that I'm not defending the Act -- if it had been enacted prior to the creation of the WWW, a 'reasonable person' might have seen the web server as inducement. Ditto with the tape recorder and CD burner.
That's just plain wrong -- you absolutely can register a trademark on a real word. Here are some examples: Ford, Coke, Cheerio, Delta, Target, McDonald's, Wendy's, Jet, Dick's, Subway, Bell, Apple, Polo, etc....
What you can't do is take a generic term for a type of item and register a trademark for that item. For example, Subway couldn't register the word 'submarine' in reference to their sandwiches, because it's a generic term relating to types of sandwiches. Similarly, Apple can't register the name 'Computer' or 'digital audio player.'
If I recall correctly, Microsoft was actually able to register 'Windows,' but how they got to do it was really fishy and there's some speculation that the trademark wouldn't hold up in the US, because it was a generic term at the time.
Funny you should ask. I'm in the middle of editing a video highlighting my internship... I did everything myself. Very low-budget, using my Sony Digital-8 Camcorder that I bought about 4 years ago for ~ $600.
Anyway, I bought 3 sheets of neon green posterboard, taped them together and used it as a green screen which I sit in front of. The software (Premiere) actually does a good job of keying out the green so I have my head floating in front of a transparent alpha-channel, and so I can manipulate the background easily.
Here's the problem: The camera sees all that green. In fact, it thinks it sees too much green and tries to tint the picture toward red to compensate. As a result, I come out looking like I have a bad sunburn. Now, I think I've figured out how to correct the color in the editor, but it sure was a PITA.
I know that the professional cameras have a lot more features (at much, much higher prices), but my dinky little camcorder does almost everything I want, except there's no way to tell it what white looks like.
The other thing to make sure to get is the ability to add a wide-angle lens. Really increases your options for framing your shots.
CHeck out wwug.com and digitalvideoediting.com for all sorts of cool information.
I'm all for your making as much as you can, but I think that the desire to be "very highly reimbursed" is probably counterproductive: you take that position and nobody's going to buy the copyright. As a result, you hold the copyright on thousands and thousands of shots of people's weddings. They're not doing much for you except decreasing in value -- newlyweds are generally going to be more willing to pay for them than are people who've been married for a few years. Sure, there are exceptions, but you can factor all those into the price you charge for the copyrights. When you die, what is going to happen to them? The copyrights will probably pass to your heirs who probably won't even clue in that they have something of value.
And, in fact, what are you going to do if somebody infringes on the copyright? Are you even going to know? In the US, you have to register the image with the copyright office before you can sue and even if you win, you can probably only collect damages i.e. your lost profit. You can't even collect attorney's fees, and the entire process could take a couple of years. (IANAL, yet...)
The CFO is still on board. The announcement was that he was going to resign, not that he had.
Should also note that so far, there are not any plantiffs in the case, only a law firm seeking a lead plaintiff.
I wonder how easy it'll be for the firm to get this certified as a class action, considering that 11.3% of the stock is held by insiders and 81% is held by institutions. By my book, that leaves under 8% generally owned by the public. That's still around 14M shares, but when you consider that a bunch of those owners probably aren't interested in a class action (many are probably employees or other Linux-lovers), it may make a judge think twice whether or not this 'lead plaintiff' can actually represent the supposedly injured class.
The tape market and hard drive markets have diverged dramatically since the introduction of the hard drive into personal computers in (what 1985?), for a variety of reasons:
(1) There are far more hard drives produced each year than there are tape drives and so there's much more of an incentive to increase the capacity of hard drives.
Back in the day, 86-88ish, I was a part-time computer operator at Carnegie Mellon. We ran nightly incremental and weekly full backups onto 1/2 inch (I think it was 1/2 inch) reel-to-reel tape. It worked reasonably well because you could store a lot more on the tapes than you could on the disks that we had at the time.
(2) the backup tape market is not as tolerant of changes in technology as the disk-drive market is. Because most new disk drives are put into new computers, we don't really care much if you can't stick your 3-year-old 8 GB hard drive in it. But, it's hard to justify a new backup system that doesn't work with your 3-year-old backup tapes.
This is also magnified by the price differential: disk drives benefit from much larger economies of scale than are tape drives. How much does it cost to buy a tape drive to back up your new 120GB disk?
The best solution is the one that's made unavailable by most home broadband connections: back it up over the web to a central backup provider. They have the expensive tape drives and their marginal cost of backing up your computer is the cost of a tape and some network bandwidth. Here, though, we're all bitten by the asymmetric part of DSL or cable modems: we have a lot of download bandwidth, but not much upload.
Does anybody really want the Washing Machine to call its own repairman? Ok, maybe if there was a new Washing Machine firmware update. But, repairmen are expensive and come at inconvenient times -- I don't want somebody trying to charge me $60 for a missed appointment that my Whirlpool made on my behalf. Heck, the thing's broken and who in their right mind lets a broken washer spend their money?
Then there's the idea of having the refrigerator keep track of how long things have been in the refrigerator: how does it know what's in there? Is it going to recognize the 3-day-old leftover lasagna or the jar of homemade jam? What happens when my little girl decides to stick her baby doll in there? I really want a fridge to tell me which shelf the mustard is on, not when I'm almost out of milk -- that I can figure out for myself.
Traditional household appliances are not good users of broadband networks. Now, if I can remotely program my TIVO to record Law & Order so I can download it and watch it later from my laptop, that sounds good.