But I don't suppose you've felt the need to try and analyze why there hasn't been a truely precedent setting court case just yet, have you?
Heh. I've read a few explanations of this, from FSF people and others. It seems there have been a number of attempts to challenge the GPL, but they don't seem to reach the point of anyone actually filing court papers. What always seems to happen is that the company's lawyers look at it, and say "Well, you have two choices. You can forget about it and follow the GPL. Or you can challenge the GPL, meaning that until the case is settled, you'll have the default permissions given to you by copyright law, i.e., you can't use the software at all. Eventually you'll lose the case, and then you'll have to follow the GPL. Do you want me to persue this further? In that case, I'd advise not using the software until the case is settled, because if you do, you'll probably have to pay damages."
The basic problem is that the GPL gives you more rights than copyright law gives you. And unless you can show that the copyright claim is false, the law gives you no right to use someone else's copyrighted code. So if you win a challenge to the GPL, you lose your rights to use the code. Somehow this doesn't seem like a rational act. Why would you sue someone to force them to decrease your right to use their property?
It's not surprising that the GPL doesn't get challenged. Any legal tests are going to have to come from the copyright owner against violators. And these haven't gotten far, either, because guess what the violators' lawyers advise them...
The GPL isn't a complex legal document. It's a simple copyright license. Like any license, it gives you some rights that you wouldn't otherwise have. Unlike most licenses, you don't have to pay anything. If you don't like this, you don't have to exercise those rights. But this isn't something that any sensible lawyer would want to take to court.
Oh, yeah; IANAL. But I've occasionally listened to them.;-)
Proprietary software, on the other hand, may not have such a record o contributions, and even if one exists, it's certainly not open to public inspection (short of a lawsuit).
True. And it's worse than that. I've worked on a lot of proprietary, company-funded software projects over the 3 decades I've been programming. In every one, all record of who did what part of the code when was carefully erased. Yes, they put company copyright notices in. But they always removed any credits to the authors. This is standard practice in most of the corporate world. Everything is produced by the corportation, not by the mere humans that work for the corporation.
I haven't ever seen a company project in which it's possible to trace the authorship of pieces of the code, much less where they may have found the algorithms. Sometimes the authors will hide "Easter eggs" in the code that will announce the authors' names to users. But you'll notice that most corporations consider this something to be deleted when they discover it. And this rarely includes anything more than the authors' names. No clues as to who wrote which parts when, or where their ideas came from.
OTOH, this information is routine in the open-source community. Everyone uses one of the source archives, mostly CVS, that tracks who checked in what when. There's rarely a formal way to document how you got your ideas, but it's common to see this in the code's comments.
A lot of this is because the free/open-source community values proper attribution. If you're not getting paid for the code, you should at least get the honor and recognition.
Remember a couple of years back, when Sun got the F/OSS crowd all upset? It wasn't because Sun was selling the software. It was because they stripped the attributions out of the code. That was unforgivable, and a lot of us still remember it.
So saying that Open Source is untraceable is mostly just a big lie. It's the only code that usually is traceable to any meaningful degree. Corporate code rarely comes with any such information, and when it does, they often strip it out in the next release.
The best defense against bogus software patents is simply to overwealmingly sweep the software market with superior, Free, commercially supported alternatives.
This will certainly help, but it's not necessarily the best defense against such things as patent and copyright litigation.
The best defense against this is probably to use the "open source" concept where it's most useful: In making public the details of the algorithms used. The only real defense against a patent lawsuit is to show "prior art". This can only really be done when the prior art is open and available for public inspection. Proprietary software has a real disadvantage here: The source isn't available, so you can't determine who "invented" an algorithm. But with open, public source in accessible archives, we can very often respond to a patent challenge by showing that someone did something very similar N years before the patent application was filed.
I've seen the same thing with music copyright. There is now a lot of old music online, in simple, readable form. There have been a number of reports of a publisher claiming that someone's online tune is a violation of their copyright. A bit of search, and the person sends back the reply "That tune was published by so-and-so in London in 1743, how do you claim to own the copyright?" The publisher realizes that their fraudulent claim has beeen exposed, and they slink away, never to be heard from again.
This only works with open, freely-accessible material. But for it to work, the material must be available to be discovered and inspected. So get all your old source code online as soon as you can, make sure it's correctly dated, and help out in efforts to get it all indexed and searchable. Whether anyone uses your code isn't as important as the fact that making it available will help defend against bogus "IP" claims.
Seriously, how are republicans any different from democrats?
There was a good explanation of this a couple of years ago in Doonesbury. When someone pointed out that the Democrats had engaged in the same sort of corrupt, immoral, unethical behavior that the Republicans were committing, another character said something like "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
That explanation has stuck with me. I've found that it helps to ask the old question "Have they no shame?" Very often, the difference does turn out to be that the Democrats do have shame, but with effort they manage to overcome it. The Republicans think their shameful behavior is right and God is on their side.
This is a bit of an over-generalization, of course, since there's enough shame to go around, and there are still non-extremist Republicans who understand that it's wrong. Such generalizations really only apply to the leaders of these two gangs. Behind the scenes, neither is all that monolithic.
Nope; not much. That's why I suggested also looking around for some big, legal Windows-related download. I've seen mention of a few of them.
Of course, if your school has computer-related classes, you can probably find useful mass downloads easily. A linux ISO is just one of many likely examples. A class of 20 or 30 students downloading a gigabyte-size file for class could easily cause a noticable blip in network usage, and what it is doesn't much matter. The point is to get across to the dummy admins that bittorent is a tool designed to eliminate most of the network load in such cases.
Actually, Microsoft is more likely than linux to provide huge files that a class needs to download. After all, the Open Source gang distributes most of its stuff in source form, and source files aren't usually huge. Microsoft distributes mostly binaries, which are much larger. Mac software tends to be somewhere in between, though a lot of updates are binaries, so that's also a likely source of big downloads.
One of the fun things about a university setting is that you will get a lot of cases where an entire class will want to get the same thing at about the same time. If the thing is big, it could produce a big hit on the local network, especially the gateways to the outside. It's an ideal situation for teaching the admins about tools to lighten the network load.
and I can tell you that the larger issue is the amount of bandwidth used by students.
If that were true, then you'd expect that they'd require the use of bittorrent. All that it really does is decrease the number of packets crossing the network. It does this by discovering that several people are downloading the same file, and arranging the packets so that only one download actually happens, with the packets being passed around by all the local downloaders.
If BT has been banned, it means that the administration is not primarily concerned with bandwidth usage. The proof is that they have banned a tool whose sole function is to decrease network traffic.
Most Campus IT Centers would be happy to make available local mirrors of software like Mandrake Linux.
But this would do nothing to lighten the load within the campus network due to downloads from the local mirror. The solution to that problem, of course, is to run BT locally, to lighten the local load.
And when you do this, it eliminates much of the reason for setting up that local server. Well, you probably do still want the server. But you'll just run BT on it, and let BT figure out a close-to-optimal distribution scheme for whatever the popular downloads are an any particular time.
Outlawing BT entirely is simply shooting your own network in the foot. It means that you have clueless admins in charge of such decisions. In particular, your network admins have little understanding of how to lighten the load.
Sounds like Portland State no longer qualifies as an "educational" institution.
Good Internet access is now just as important as good libraries to any university. If they aren't providing it, they have seriously crippled their own ability to educate.
I'd let them know this, and look seriously at switching to a better school.
It's really too bad; Portland State used to be a good school.
Get together a cabal of linux (or *BSD or whatever) users when a new release comes out. Instead of using bittorrent, you arrange for the whole cabal to fire up http downloads of the ISOs simultaneously. This will drag the university net to a crawl.
When they hit you with a complaint, you nicely explain that you would have used bittorent for the downloads, which would have created only 1% of the load. But the administration has decreed that, if you do that, you'll be treated as criminals, so you didn't.
Also, it helps if you can bring up class- or job-related reasons that you were doing the downloads. If it's required for a class, they can't very well fault you for downloading it from the public repositories.
It might be fun if you could find a bittorrent source for something like the next big MS Service Pack, and arrange for a whole flock of Windows users to attempt to download it at the same time. This will really confuse the dummies in the U's admin. They can't very well object to people installing security stuff in Windows. And if you can make it clear that bittorrent would have greatly lessened the network load if not for their dumb ban on its use, maybe the idea will start to get through their thick skulls.
After all, bittorrent is merely a way to make copying big, popular files a lot faster and a lighter network load. It isn't restricted to just illegal copies; it works just as well for files that it is legal for you to download.
It really pains me that so many supposedly intelligent people haven't made this obvious connection yet.
Actually, a lot of us have. But we learned early in life that, if you want to survive in a society dominated by Christians, it's best to be somewhat careful about who you talk to about such things. Christians do have this well-documented history of how they deal with unbelievers.
OTOH, in a forum like this, the population is mostly techie geeks, and we are statistically not often true believers in anything. Well, except maybe for things like emacs and MacOS, but even those are rarely vicious killers. They seem to have this funny idea that you can convert people by talking to them and explaining, rather than by threatening them.
So a lot of us are willing to talk more openly here than "in public".
Of course, when Pat Robertson becomes president, we may learn that this is actually a very public forum, and all our comments will be used as evidence in our trials. Stick around and find out. One effect of the Internet may be that everything we've ever said or typed can be found and used against us.
The dating of dinosaurs has nothing to do with the how science determined the age of the earth.
Actually, both are pretty much done by the same methods. You make accurate measurements of radioactive isotopes and their decay products. From this info, plus knowledge of the isotopes' half-lives, you calculate the ages of fossils or minerals. This gives ages for the oldest rocks that are hundreds of times the ages of dinosaur fossils. But that doesn't mean there's any major difference in the dating methods.
Well, actually, you do mostly use different isotopes. For younger fossils, you want isotopes with relatively shorter half-lives. It helps if there are measurable amounts of both the radio-isotopes and their decay products. But again, this isn't a difference in methods, and the same remarks apply to both fossils and rocks. It's just that we have a few rocks that are much older than any fossils.
Also, in both cases, you want multiple measurements based on different isotopes. If they don't agree, then something (contamination, leaching) has modified the speciments over the millenia, and the results can't be trusted. Sometimes things can't be dated accurately because of this. Sometimes you can set an upper or lower bound on a sample's age, but not both.
OTOH, sometimes you can date things by dating the surrounding material. But again, this isn't materially different for fossils and geological strata. In particular, if you can date things in the adjacent strata, that gives you bounds on the age of something between them.
There is also the special case with dating the Earth's creation. There aren't any strata from then, of course. But an upper bound can be had by dating the sun. (This assumes that both were created together, of course.)
This is a topic that people spend years learning...
While those examples may be considered fictional by most, there are some very real examples of species known from the fossil record, believed extinct, and then found.
The most famous is the coelacanth, the deep-water fish discovered alive in 1938 when a fisherman caught one off the east coast of Africa. Since then, a few more have been caught, and several of their habitats have been found. Several fossils of similar fish had been found, and they were considered ancestral to land animals. No modern relatives were known, and the entire group was considered extinct.
Another example is the familiar gingko tree. It is the sole remaining member of a family of plants that were once world-wide, and were well-known in the fossil record. Scientists figured out early on (in the 1800's) that this Chinese tree was a member of the family. It's scientifically interesting as a living member of this family, telling us a lot that can't be learned from fossils.
In the 1940's, another botanical example appeared, when a botanist mailed seeds of a tree from western China to colleagues around the world. They were from a stand of Metasequoia, which was known from fossils but believed extinct for several million years. The only known sequoias were the two North-American species. This third species was almost extinct, but isn't now. There are 50-year-old specimens in botanical gardens around the world. Where they've done well, they are spectacular 20-to-30-m trees, though of course they are only juveniles. I've seen them for sale in nurseries ("tiny" 2- and 3-meter babies;-). I'm tempted to plant one in our yard...
The term "living fossil" has been applied to lots of newly-discovered species, especially those known from fossils before being found alive somewhere.
birds have been discovered fossilised contemporaneously with dinosaurs -... - and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
By the same reasoning, humans live contemporaneously with primates (chimps, monkeys, etc.), and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
The religious folks do use this reasoning, usually by denying that humans are descended from chimps or monkeys. They are, strictly speaking, correct, since (contemporary) chimps and monkeys are not our ancestors. But we are primates; we share relatively recent common ancestors with other primates. Some of those common ancestors looked a lot like chimps (5 million years ago) or monkeys (20 million years ago). But they weren't (modern) chimps or (modern) monkeys, they were ancestral primates.
Similarly, tyrannosaurs were not ancestral to birds. But nobody claims that birds evolved from tyrannosaurs. The claim is that they shared a common ancestor (between 150 and 200 million years ago), and that ancestor was apparently a theropod dinosaur. It wasn't a tyrannosaur or bird; they hadn't evolved yet. The term "theropod" refers to a large branch of the dinosaur tree whose sub-branches include tyrannosaurs and birds.
It is pretty clear now from the fossil record that "birds are dinosaurs", in the same sense that "humans are primates" or "cattle are ungulates". In each case, there are still a lot of open question about the details of their evolutionary history. But the basic cladistic trees are fairly well determined.
Actually, the idea that birds are dinosaurs isn't new. It was proposed and discussed in the early 1800's. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize very well, so the usual scientific reaction was "That's interesting; can you find some more evidence?" Until the very recently, the only avian fossils from before the 65-million-year disaster were the 5 Archaeopterix fossils. Not much evidence. Then, around 1980, Chinese paleontologists discovered the Liaoning formations, full of fossils. This included the remains of lots of more birds and similar small dinosaurs. For several decades now, paleontologists have been going wild studying the confused, tangled mess of 120- to 180-million-year-old bones and trying to organize them into a consistent tree.
Of course, birds still don't fossilize very well. The debate over the details of their family tree is raging, and probably will continue for decades. But the rough outline is slowly emerging.
To learn a lot more, ask google about "Liaoning avian fossil". That'll get around 900 hits, which should keep you busy for a few weeks. Then omit the "avian", and you'll have months of' good reading on the general topic (17,700 hits right now), including the non-avian theropod dinosaurs with feather-like coverings.
Although there are no ads now, google could easily add some in the future, and make money off something they never paid for.
Not sure I'd agree with this. True, google doesn't provide the "content" (news articles in this case). But that's not their job. Their job is to index and classify the articles, show us tiny excerpts, and tell us where to find the articles that we think are interesting. That's a service that's not being provided by the news services like AFP. They could have done it, probably more easily than google did, but they didn't. I don't fault them for this, because the Web ws something rather new and outside their experience.
Funny thing is that a few news services, notably the NYT, have long had similar news-indexing services. But they are very expensive, and don't work via the web (to my knowledge; maybe some do now). They are "professional" services, marketed only to other news services and to researchers, and they're priced way past what a typical person could afford.
I personally think that google news provides a very useful meta-news service. I wouldn't find it objectionable at all if they included ads along the lines of the ads in their regular search service. As long as I can tell which are news items and which are ads.
There are far too many news sources out there. But I suppose that's where google news comes in. I've often recommended that people look at it, not for the top-listed stories, but because you can click on the "... 389 related" links and find all sorts of interesting news sources that you've never heard of. Some of them can be really interesting. And some can be really boring.
But google's so-called "infringement" is easily within what is usually called "fair use" by reviewers, booksellers, library catalogs, etc. They only "publish" excerpts that are in the range of 200-250 bytes, typically one or two sentences, which is less than what reviewers often quote. The images are "thumbnails", which have also been considered fair use by courts. The headlines, thumbnails and excerpts are accompanied by the site's names and links to the actual content. Considering this a copyright infringement is a violation of pretty much all precedent.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, AFP does have a robots.txt file, and google apparently honors it. AFP is actually suing to stop google from directing people to other sites that are displaying AFP content.
This is truly bizarre. If they object to this, WTF are they doing permitting their content to be on the Web at all?
Maybe it's yet another attempt to get the courts to outlaw search sites entirely?
Why would they want one publication to copy their news and photos and use them without payment?
But google isn't doing this. Google gives only a very brief excerpt, under 250 bytes, and the images are "thumbnail" reductions. Both of these should be easily covered by the "fair use" rules. And then they give links to the full story. So if you find the excerpt or the image interesting, you have to visit the actual news site for anything more. Google also gives the name of the site that's referenced, just below the title or thumbnail.
This amounts to no more (and usually less) than what most reviewers reproduce. And if the judge has any sense, he'll just toss it out with a summary judgement.
Of course, google may have asked the judge to not do this, in order to get a judgement that will serve as precedent. It does seem that, any time something gets computerized, all precedent is forgotten, and you have to fight the old legal battles all over again.
So why don't they just put a line in their robots.txt file telling googlebot to stay away?
In my experience, google does a good job of following a robots.txt file. I've worked on a number of sites that have directories with nothing that should be indexed, and putting a "Disallow: dir" entry for dir has always resulted in that directory's contents not appearing in google. In a few cases where google indexed a directory before we disallowed it, simply following google's instructions for removing things has worked very well.
Could it be that AFP's web masters have never heard of robots.txt? Somehow, I don't believe that.
But I'd think this would be faster and cheaper than filing suit in another country.
A quick check of google news shows that they excerpt roughly the first 200-240 bytes of each story, and you have to follow the link to see the rest of the story.
So how could this not be fair use? I'd think that a judge would just laugh and toss it out with a summary judgement. Why didn't the judge do this?
Is it now illegal to tell someone a few words about a story and then tell them where they can read the story?
If so, is every slashdot summary now a potential violation?
... less productivity from the same hardware is good.
Yeah, you got that one right.
After N tries getting TFA in an otherwise-idle browser's window, and clicking on the MPEG4 link to see the demo, that browser is now at 30% of my cpu, and still hasn't shown me anything. Good demo of soaking up cpu for eye candy.
My main question would be; How do I turn off all the cpu-eating goodies, not to mention stuff like my-time-eating window wobble, and make it just put things where I want them with minimum effort?
My experience so far is that eye candy can't be fully disabled, at least it can't without sinking an inordinate amount of forever-lost time into learning yet another overly-complex GUI tool to tweak the settings. And some things can't be turned off at all.
Thus, I've been noting that the more recent the release is, the more of those obnoxious popup explanatory thingies I see. They would be useful, if they would go away cleanly. But more and more I stumble across popups that don't go away without a lot of wasted time and motion trying to figure out how to trick the software into erasing them. On several machines that I use, the bottom several inches of the screen are nearly unusable, because if the pointer ever accidentally touches the task bar that's there, a helpful information popup appears over what I'm trying to work on, and I have to suspend what I'm doing to poke around until it goes away. I simply can't throw away the huge chunks of time that it takes to learn the ad-hoc controls, different on every machine, that it takes to disable junk like this.
This is not an improvement. It's getting to be as bad as MS Windows. (And the same things happen a lot with OS X.;-)
Hey, the MPEG download finished - and I got a popup saying that I'm "missing software required to display this movie file." Grrr...
Maybe, but where is it all documented? I looked all around in its menus and meagre Help stuff, and couldn't find a thing that let me do any image editing at all. I could load images from iPhoto, but I couldn't find even a way to do a bit of cropping. All it seems to allow is loading images from other apps or files, and has no actual "composing" ability at all.
From the name "Icon Composer", I was expecting something that would let me edit individual pixels and perform at least a few of the more common transformations. Nope; none to be found anywhere.
So what am I missing? Where's the "compose" stuff hidden?
Once a planet with life and industry is located, you then simply start scanning frequencies for non-random signals. At this point, Earth fails the test and they move on*.
Heh. Actually, an interesting paper on the topic was published in Science back in January 1978. You probably need a subscription to read it. The title is "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth" by W.T.Sullivan III, S.Brown, C.Wetherill. Maybe I should nab a copy of the paper and put it online somewhere...
To summarize, they considered the radio signal of Earth as it would appear to a remote radio astronomer listening in at various latitudes. They assumed that no content could be decoded; only the radio spectrum was measurable. The idea was that the aliens had technology roughly comparable to our own, and could record our signal over time, and analyze it. They calculated that the spectrum of several hundred of our broadcast stations could be reliably measured out to at least 25 light years, and 250 light years for the military radar.
Their conclusions were interesting. For example, the usual doppler effects, plus knowing the size and mass of the sun, gave the Earth's orbit and the fact that we have a large satellite.
But the fun part is based on the fact that our strong radio signals (military radar and commercial television) are strongly directional, with most of the energy going out horizontally. So the remote astronomers would receive mostly signal from the Earth's limb. Broadcasts use narrow frequencies, so a particular station would appear in the spectrum very briefly and fade. 12 hours later, most of them would reappear, slightly doppler shifted up or down. Then 24 hours later (23:56 actually), the original frequency would appear. They now know our rotation period, and from the amount of the doppler shift, the planet's radius can be calculated. This will depend on the station's latitude, of course, and the max is the actual radius of the planet.
Over a period of a year, a collection of the broadcast stations can be collected, and when they are detected gives their longitude. We know latitudes from the doppler shifts. So we have a rough map of the broadcast stations. One thing that stands out in this map is that the planet has two kinds of surfaces, and almost all the stations are on the smaller of these. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, we infer that it's a world with liquid water. The fixed positions of the stations (determined over several years) tells us that the stations are on land, which is roughly 1/4 of the planet's surface; the other surface is ocean. The stations are clustered strongly on the boundary, so the planet's advanced species is a land animal that likes to live near ocean shores.
To quote a summary paragraph:
After several years of careful monitoring of the intensity and frequency variations of several hundred stations, the observer could deduce (i) the complete orbit of the earth; (ii) the existence of station broadcast schedules influenced by the sun; (iii) the presence of an ionosphere and perhaps even a troposphere; (iv) the size, rotation rate, and axis of rotation of the earth; (v) a complete map of the stations; (vi) the mass and distance of the moon; (vii) the size of the radiating antennas; and (viii) various cultural inferences concerning our civilization.
It's an interesting read. I wonder if anyone has done a similar study since then? Google finds 21 matches for the article's title, but they all seem to be bibliographic references. It could be interesting to dig into some of the matches and see what else turns up.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't suppose you've felt the need to try and analyze why there hasn't been a truely precedent setting court case just yet, have you?
...
;-)
Heh. I've read a few explanations of this, from FSF people and others. It seems there have been a number of attempts to challenge the GPL, but they don't seem to reach the point of anyone actually filing court papers. What always seems to happen is that the company's lawyers look at it, and say "Well, you have two choices. You can forget about it and follow the GPL. Or you can challenge the GPL, meaning that until the case is settled, you'll have the default permissions given to you by copyright law, i.e., you can't use the software at all. Eventually you'll lose the case, and then you'll have to follow the GPL. Do you want me to persue this further? In that case, I'd advise not using the software until the case is settled, because if you do, you'll probably have to pay damages."
The basic problem is that the GPL gives you more rights than copyright law gives you. And unless you can show that the copyright claim is false, the law gives you no right to use someone else's copyrighted code. So if you win a challenge to the GPL, you lose your rights to use the code. Somehow this doesn't seem like a rational act. Why would you sue someone to force them to decrease your right to use their property?
It's not surprising that the GPL doesn't get challenged. Any legal tests are going to have to come from the copyright owner against violators. And these haven't gotten far, either, because guess what the violators' lawyers advise them
The GPL isn't a complex legal document. It's a simple copyright license. Like any license, it gives you some rights that you wouldn't otherwise have. Unlike most licenses, you don't have to pay anything. If you don't like this, you don't have to exercise those rights. But this isn't something that any sensible lawyer would want to take to court.
Oh, yeah; IANAL. But I've occasionally listened to them.
Proprietary software, on the other hand, may not have such a record o contributions, and even if one exists, it's certainly not open to public inspection (short of a lawsuit).
True. And it's worse than that. I've worked on a lot of proprietary, company-funded software projects over the 3 decades I've been programming. In every one, all record of who did what part of the code when was carefully erased. Yes, they put company copyright notices in. But they always removed any credits to the authors. This is standard practice in most of the corporate world. Everything is produced by the corportation, not by the mere humans that work for the corporation.
I haven't ever seen a company project in which it's possible to trace the authorship of pieces of the code, much less where they may have found the algorithms. Sometimes the authors will hide "Easter eggs" in the code that will announce the authors' names to users. But you'll notice that most corporations consider this something to be deleted when they discover it. And this rarely includes anything more than the authors' names. No clues as to who wrote which parts when, or where their ideas came from.
OTOH, this information is routine in the open-source community. Everyone uses one of the source archives, mostly CVS, that tracks who checked in what when. There's rarely a formal way to document how you got your ideas, but it's common to see this in the code's comments.
A lot of this is because the free/open-source community values proper attribution. If you're not getting paid for the code, you should at least get the honor and recognition.
Remember a couple of years back, when Sun got the F/OSS crowd all upset? It wasn't because Sun was selling the software. It was because they stripped the attributions out of the code. That was unforgivable, and a lot of us still remember it.
So saying that Open Source is untraceable is mostly just a big lie. It's the only code that usually is traceable to any meaningful degree. Corporate code rarely comes with any such information, and when it does, they often strip it out in the next release.
The best defense against bogus software patents is simply to overwealmingly sweep the software market with superior, Free, commercially supported alternatives.
This will certainly help, but it's not necessarily the best defense against such things as patent and copyright litigation.
The best defense against this is probably to use the "open source" concept where it's most useful: In making public the details of the algorithms used. The only real defense against a patent lawsuit is to show "prior art". This can only really be done when the prior art is open and available for public inspection. Proprietary software has a real disadvantage here: The source isn't available, so you can't determine who "invented" an algorithm. But with open, public source in accessible archives, we can very often respond to a patent challenge by showing that someone did something very similar N years before the patent application was filed.
I've seen the same thing with music copyright. There is now a lot of old music online, in simple, readable form. There have been a number of reports of a publisher claiming that someone's online tune is a violation of their copyright. A bit of search, and the person sends back the reply "That tune was published by so-and-so in London in 1743, how do you claim to own the copyright?" The publisher realizes that their fraudulent claim has beeen exposed, and they slink away, never to be heard from again.
This only works with open, freely-accessible material. But for it to work, the material must be available to be discovered and inspected. So get all your old source code online as soon as you can, make sure it's correctly dated, and help out in efforts to get it all indexed and searchable. Whether anyone uses your code isn't as important as the fact that making it available will help defend against bogus "IP" claims.
Seriously, how are republicans any different from democrats?
There was a good explanation of this a couple of years ago in Doonesbury. When someone pointed out that the Democrats had engaged in the same sort of corrupt, immoral, unethical behavior that the Republicans were committing, another character said something like "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
That explanation has stuck with me. I've found that it helps to ask the old question "Have they no shame?" Very often, the difference does turn out to be that the Democrats do have shame, but with effort they manage to overcome it. The Republicans think their shameful behavior is right and God is on their side.
This is a bit of an over-generalization, of course, since there's enough shame to go around, and there are still non-extremist Republicans who understand that it's wrong. Such generalizations really only apply to the leaders of these two gangs. Behind the scenes, neither is all that monolithic.
Nope; not much. That's why I suggested also looking around for some big, legal Windows-related download. I've seen mention of a few of them.
Of course, if your school has computer-related classes, you can probably find useful mass downloads easily. A linux ISO is just one of many likely examples. A class of 20 or 30 students downloading a gigabyte-size file for class could easily cause a noticable blip in network usage, and what it is doesn't much matter. The point is to get across to the dummy admins that bittorent is a tool designed to eliminate most of the network load in such cases.
Actually, Microsoft is more likely than linux to provide huge files that a class needs to download. After all, the Open Source gang distributes most of its stuff in source form, and source files aren't usually huge. Microsoft distributes mostly binaries, which are much larger. Mac software tends to be somewhere in between, though a lot of updates are binaries, so that's also a likely source of big downloads.
One of the fun things about a university setting is that you will get a lot of cases where an entire class will want to get the same thing at about the same time. If the thing is big, it could produce a big hit on the local network, especially the gateways to the outside. It's an ideal situation for teaching the admins about tools to lighten the network load.
and I can tell you that the larger issue is the amount of bandwidth used by students.
If that were true, then you'd expect that they'd require the use of bittorrent. All that it really does is decrease the number of packets crossing the network. It does this by discovering that several people are downloading the same file, and arranging the packets so that only one download actually happens, with the packets being passed around by all the local downloaders.
If BT has been banned, it means that the administration is not primarily concerned with bandwidth usage. The proof is that they have banned a tool whose sole function is to decrease network traffic.
Most Campus IT Centers would be happy to make available local mirrors of software like Mandrake Linux.
But this would do nothing to lighten the load within the campus network due to downloads from the local mirror. The solution to that problem, of course, is to run BT locally, to lighten the local load.
And when you do this, it eliminates much of the reason for setting up that local server. Well, you probably do still want the server. But you'll just run BT on it, and let BT figure out a close-to-optimal distribution scheme for whatever the popular downloads are an any particular time.
Outlawing BT entirely is simply shooting your own network in the foot. It means that you have clueless admins in charge of such decisions. In particular, your network admins have little understanding of how to lighten the load.
Sounds like Portland State no longer qualifies as an "educational" institution.
Good Internet access is now just as important as good libraries to any university. If they aren't providing it, they have seriously crippled their own ability to educate.
I'd let them know this, and look seriously at switching to a better school.
It's really too bad; Portland State used to be a good school.
So here's what you should do:
Get together a cabal of linux (or *BSD or whatever) users when a new release comes out. Instead of using bittorrent, you arrange for the whole cabal to fire up http downloads of the ISOs simultaneously. This will drag the university net to a crawl.
When they hit you with a complaint, you nicely explain that you would have used bittorent for the downloads, which would have created only 1% of the load. But the administration has decreed that, if you do that, you'll be treated as criminals, so you didn't.
Also, it helps if you can bring up class- or job-related reasons that you were doing the downloads. If it's required for a class, they can't very well fault you for downloading it from the public repositories.
It might be fun if you could find a bittorrent source for something like the next big MS Service Pack, and arrange for a whole flock of Windows users to attempt to download it at the same time. This will really confuse the dummies in the U's admin. They can't very well object to people installing security stuff in Windows. And if you can make it clear that bittorrent would have greatly lessened the network load if not for their dumb ban on its use, maybe the idea will start to get through their thick skulls.
After all, bittorrent is merely a way to make copying big, popular files a lot faster and a lighter network load. It isn't restricted to just illegal copies; it works just as well for files that it is legal for you to download.
If you can pull it off, let us know how it works.
It really pains me that so many supposedly intelligent people haven't made this obvious connection yet.
Actually, a lot of us have. But we learned early in life that, if you want to survive in a society dominated by Christians, it's best to be somewhat careful about who you talk to about such things. Christians do have this well-documented history of how they deal with unbelievers.
OTOH, in a forum like this, the population is mostly techie geeks, and we are statistically not often true believers in anything. Well, except maybe for things like emacs and MacOS, but even those are rarely vicious killers. They seem to have this funny idea that you can convert people by talking to them and explaining, rather than by threatening them.
So a lot of us are willing to talk more openly here than "in public".
Of course, when Pat Robertson becomes president, we may learn that this is actually a very public forum, and all our comments will be used as evidence in our trials. Stick around and find out. One effect of the Internet may be that everything we've ever said or typed can be found and used against us.
Am I paranoid enough yet?
The dating of dinosaurs has nothing to do with the how science determined the age of the earth.
...
Actually, both are pretty much done by the same methods. You make accurate measurements of radioactive isotopes and their decay products. From this info, plus knowledge of the isotopes' half-lives, you calculate the ages of fossils or minerals. This gives ages for the oldest rocks that are hundreds of times the ages of dinosaur fossils. But that doesn't mean there's any major difference in the dating methods.
Well, actually, you do mostly use different isotopes. For younger fossils, you want isotopes with relatively shorter half-lives. It helps if there are measurable amounts of both the radio-isotopes and their decay products. But again, this isn't a difference in methods, and the same remarks apply to both fossils and rocks. It's just that we have a few rocks that are much older than any fossils.
Also, in both cases, you want multiple measurements based on different isotopes. If they don't agree, then something (contamination, leaching) has modified the speciments over the millenia, and the results can't be trusted. Sometimes things can't be dated accurately because of this. Sometimes you can set an upper or lower bound on a sample's age, but not both.
OTOH, sometimes you can date things by dating the surrounding material. But again, this isn't materially different for fossils and geological strata. In particular, if you can date things in the adjacent strata, that gives you bounds on the age of something between them.
There is also the special case with dating the Earth's creation. There aren't any strata from then, of course. But an upper bound can be had by dating the sun. (This assumes that both were created together, of course.)
This is a topic that people spend years learning
While those examples may be considered fictional by most, there are some very real examples of species known from the fossil record, believed extinct, and then found.
;-). I'm tempted to plant one in our yard ...
The most famous is the coelacanth, the deep-water fish discovered alive in 1938 when a fisherman caught one off the east coast of Africa. Since then, a few more have been caught, and several of their habitats have been found. Several fossils of similar fish had been found, and they were considered ancestral to land animals. No modern relatives were known, and the entire group was considered extinct.
Another example is the familiar gingko tree. It is the sole remaining member of a family of plants that were once world-wide, and were well-known in the fossil record. Scientists figured out early on (in the 1800's) that this Chinese tree was a member of the family. It's scientifically interesting as a living member of this family, telling us a lot that can't be learned from fossils.
In the 1940's, another botanical example appeared, when a botanist mailed seeds of a tree from western China to colleagues around the world. They were from a stand of Metasequoia, which was known from fossils but believed extinct for several million years. The only known sequoias were the two North-American species. This third species was almost extinct, but isn't now. There are 50-year-old specimens in botanical gardens around the world. Where they've done well, they are spectacular 20-to-30-m trees, though of course they are only juveniles. I've seen them for sale in nurseries ("tiny" 2- and 3-meter babies
The term "living fossil" has been applied to lots of newly-discovered species, especially those known from fossils before being found alive somewhere.
... calling for fossil museum curators the world over to go on a wild bone-busting rampage.
More likely the rampage will start with X-rays, followed by MRI scans. Then they'll have a good idea just where to cut.
birds have been discovered fossilised contemporaneously with dinosaurs - ... - and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
By the same reasoning, humans live contemporaneously with primates (chimps, monkeys, etc.), and hence cannot reasonably be said to have evolved from them.
The religious folks do use this reasoning, usually by denying that humans are descended from chimps or monkeys. They are, strictly speaking, correct, since (contemporary) chimps and monkeys are not our ancestors. But we are primates; we share relatively recent common ancestors with other primates. Some of those common ancestors looked a lot like chimps (5 million years ago) or monkeys (20 million years ago). But they weren't (modern) chimps or (modern) monkeys, they were ancestral primates.
Similarly, tyrannosaurs were not ancestral to birds. But nobody claims that birds evolved from tyrannosaurs. The claim is that they shared a common ancestor (between 150 and 200 million years ago), and that ancestor was apparently a theropod dinosaur. It wasn't a tyrannosaur or bird; they hadn't evolved yet. The term "theropod" refers to a large branch of the dinosaur tree whose sub-branches include tyrannosaurs and birds.
It is pretty clear now from the fossil record that "birds are dinosaurs", in the same sense that "humans are primates" or "cattle are ungulates". In each case, there are still a lot of open question about the details of their evolutionary history. But the basic cladistic trees are fairly well determined.
Actually, the idea that birds are dinosaurs isn't new. It was proposed and discussed in the early 1800's. But birds are fragile and don't fossilize very well, so the usual scientific reaction was "That's interesting; can you find some more evidence?" Until the very recently, the only avian fossils from before the 65-million-year disaster were the 5 Archaeopterix fossils. Not much evidence. Then, around 1980, Chinese paleontologists discovered the Liaoning formations, full of fossils. This included the remains of lots of more birds and similar small dinosaurs. For several decades now, paleontologists have been going wild studying the confused, tangled mess of 120- to 180-million-year-old bones and trying to organize them into a consistent tree.
Of course, birds still don't fossilize very well. The debate over the details of their family tree is raging, and probably will continue for decades. But the rough outline is slowly emerging.
To learn a lot more, ask google about "Liaoning avian fossil". That'll get around 900 hits, which should keep you busy for a few weeks. Then omit the "avian", and you'll have months of' good reading on the general topic (17,700 hits right now), including the non-avian theropod dinosaurs with feather-like coverings.
We might also note Dave Barry's observation, that in modern American spelling, the apostrophe is used to warn the reader than an 's' is coming.
Although there are no ads now, google could easily add some in the future, and make money off something they never paid for.
Not sure I'd agree with this. True, google doesn't provide the "content" (news articles in this case). But that's not their job. Their job is to index and classify the articles, show us tiny excerpts, and tell us where to find the articles that we think are interesting. That's a service that's not being provided by the news services like AFP. They could have done it, probably more easily than google did, but they didn't. I don't fault them for this, because the Web ws something rather new and outside their experience.
Funny thing is that a few news services, notably the NYT, have long had similar news-indexing services. But they are very expensive, and don't work via the web (to my knowledge; maybe some do now). They are "professional" services, marketed only to other news services and to researchers, and they're priced way past what a typical person could afford.
I personally think that google news provides a very useful meta-news service. I wouldn't find it objectionable at all if they included ads along the lines of the ads in their regular search service. As long as I can tell which are news items and which are ads.
What? No aljazeera.com? ;-)
There are far too many news sources out there. But I suppose that's where google news comes in. I've often recommended that people look at it, not for the top-listed stories, but because you can click on the "... 389 related" links and find all sorts of interesting news sources that you've never heard of. Some of them can be really interesting. And some can be really boring.
Hmmm ... www.news.pl returns a page that starts: ...ten adres nie istnieje
Did it used to have news?
I don't read Polish well enough to understand the entire page; maybe there's an explantion there, but I don't quite follow it.
But google's so-called "infringement" is easily within what is usually called "fair use" by reviewers, booksellers, library catalogs, etc. They only "publish" excerpts that are in the range of 200-250 bytes, typically one or two sentences, which is less than what reviewers often quote. The images are "thumbnails", which have also been considered fair use by courts. The headlines, thumbnails and excerpts are accompanied by the site's names and links to the actual content. Considering this a copyright infringement is a violation of pretty much all precedent.
Anyway, as others have pointed out, AFP does have a robots.txt file, and google apparently honors it. AFP is actually suing to stop google from directing people to other sites that are displaying AFP content.
This is truly bizarre. If they object to this, WTF are they doing permitting their content to be on the Web at all?
Maybe it's yet another attempt to get the courts to outlaw search sites entirely?
Why would they want one publication to copy their news and photos and use them without payment?
But google isn't doing this. Google gives only a very brief excerpt, under 250 bytes, and the images are "thumbnail" reductions. Both of these should be easily covered by the "fair use" rules. And then they give links to the full story. So if you find the excerpt or the image interesting, you have to visit the actual news site for anything more. Google also gives the name of the site that's referenced, just below the title or thumbnail.
This amounts to no more (and usually less) than what most reviewers reproduce. And if the judge has any sense, he'll just toss it out with a summary judgement.
Of course, google may have asked the judge to not do this, in order to get a judgement that will serve as precedent. It does seem that, any time something gets computerized, all precedent is forgotten, and you have to fight the old legal battles all over again.
AFP doesn't want users directed to their website.
So why don't they just put a line in their robots.txt file telling googlebot to stay away?
In my experience, google does a good job of following a robots.txt file. I've worked on a number of sites that have directories with nothing that should be indexed, and putting a "Disallow: dir" entry for dir has always resulted in that directory's contents not appearing in google. In a few cases where google indexed a directory before we disallowed it, simply following google's instructions for removing things has worked very well.
Could it be that AFP's web masters have never heard of robots.txt? Somehow, I don't believe that.
But I'd think this would be faster and cheaper than filing suit in another country.
A quick check of google news shows that they excerpt roughly the first 200-240 bytes of each story, and you have to follow the link to see the rest of the story.
So how could this not be fair use? I'd think that a judge would just laugh and toss it out with a summary judgement. Why didn't the judge do this?
Is it now illegal to tell someone a few words about a story and then tell them where they can read the story?
If so, is every slashdot summary now a potential violation?
... less productivity from the same hardware is good.
;-)
Yeah, you got that one right.
After N tries getting TFA in an otherwise-idle browser's window, and clicking on the MPEG4 link to see the demo, that browser is now at 30% of my cpu, and still hasn't shown me anything. Good demo of soaking up cpu for eye candy.
My main question would be; How do I turn off all the cpu-eating goodies, not to mention stuff like my-time-eating window wobble, and make it just put things where I want them with minimum effort?
My experience so far is that eye candy can't be fully disabled, at least it can't without sinking an inordinate amount of forever-lost time into learning yet another overly-complex GUI tool to tweak the settings. And some things can't be turned off at all.
Thus, I've been noting that the more recent the release is, the more of those obnoxious popup explanatory thingies I see. They would be useful, if they would go away cleanly. But more and more I stumble across popups that don't go away without a lot of wasted time and motion trying to figure out how to trick the software into erasing them. On several machines that I use, the bottom several inches of the screen are nearly unusable, because if the pointer ever accidentally touches the task bar that's there, a helpful information popup appears over what I'm trying to work on, and I have to suspend what I'm doing to poke around until it goes away. I simply can't throw away the huge chunks of time that it takes to learn the ad-hoc controls, different on every machine, that it takes to disable junk like this.
This is not an improvement. It's getting to be as bad as MS Windows. (And the same things happen a lot with OS X.
Hey, the MPEG download finished - and I got a popup saying that I'm "missing software required to display this movie file." Grrr...
I think that says it all.
Maybe, but where is it all documented? I looked all around in its menus and meagre Help stuff, and couldn't find a thing that let me do any image editing at all. I could load images from iPhoto, but I couldn't find even a way to do a bit of cropping. All it seems to allow is loading images from other apps or files, and has no actual "composing" ability at all.
From the name "Icon Composer", I was expecting something that would let me edit individual pixels and perform at least a few of the more common transformations. Nope; none to be found anywhere.
So what am I missing? Where's the "compose" stuff hidden?
Once a planet with life and industry is located, you then simply start scanning frequencies for non-random signals. At this point, Earth fails the test and they move on*.
...
Heh. Actually, an interesting paper on the topic was published in Science back in January 1978. You probably need a subscription to read it. The title is "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth" by W.T.Sullivan III, S.Brown, C.Wetherill. Maybe I should nab a copy of the paper and put it online somewhere
To summarize, they considered the radio signal of Earth as it would appear to a remote radio astronomer listening in at various latitudes. They assumed that no content could be decoded; only the radio spectrum was measurable. The idea was that the aliens had technology roughly comparable to our own, and could record our signal over time, and analyze it. They calculated that the spectrum of several hundred of our broadcast stations could be reliably measured out to at least 25 light years, and 250 light years for the military radar.
Their conclusions were interesting. For example, the usual doppler effects, plus knowing the size and mass of the sun, gave the Earth's orbit and the fact that we have a large satellite.
But the fun part is based on the fact that our strong radio signals (military radar and commercial television) are strongly directional, with most of the energy going out horizontally. So the remote astronomers would receive mostly signal from the Earth's limb. Broadcasts use narrow frequencies, so a particular station would appear in the spectrum very briefly and fade. 12 hours later, most of them would reappear, slightly doppler shifted up or down. Then 24 hours later (23:56 actually), the original frequency would appear. They now know our rotation period, and from the amount of the doppler shift, the planet's radius can be calculated. This will depend on the station's latitude, of course, and the max is the actual radius of the planet.
Over a period of a year, a collection of the broadcast stations can be collected, and when they are detected gives their longitude. We know latitudes from the doppler shifts. So we have a rough map of the broadcast stations. One thing that stands out in this map is that the planet has two kinds of surfaces, and almost all the stations are on the smaller of these. From the planet's orbit and the sun's brightness, we infer that it's a world with liquid water. The fixed positions of the stations (determined over several years) tells us that the stations are on land, which is roughly 1/4 of the planet's surface; the other surface is ocean. The stations are clustered strongly on the boundary, so the planet's advanced species is a land animal that likes to live near ocean shores.
To quote a summary paragraph:
After several years of careful monitoring of the intensity and frequency variations of several hundred stations, the observer could deduce (i) the complete orbit of the earth; (ii) the existence of station broadcast schedules influenced by the sun; (iii) the presence of an ionosphere and perhaps even a troposphere; (iv) the size, rotation rate, and axis of rotation of the earth; (v) a complete map of the stations; (vi) the mass and distance of the moon; (vii) the size of the radiating antennas; and (viii) various cultural inferences concerning our civilization.
It's an interesting read. I wonder if anyone has done a similar study since then? Google finds 21 matches for the article's title, but they all seem to be bibliographic references. It could be interesting to dig into some of the matches and see what else turns up.