Actually I can prove that organic cauliflower has far more protein than conventionally farmed cauliflower. If you don't believe me, buy a head of organic cauliflower. Cut it in half. See those juicy larvae? Lots of protein.
Yes, because nothing could go wrong by letting the world know your house will be empty for the next X weeks. I make a habit of posting my vacation plans to my web site every time I go on vacation.
Personally, I think a creator's right to decide what parts of his creations he wants to reveal, and at what terms, trumps somebody else's right to know how exactly how he created (in fact I think the latter is barely a "right" at all, even if it may be desirable under some circumstances). Do you think you have a (moral or legal) right to the Coke recipe just because Coca Cola offers the final product for sale? No? Then you don't have a "right" to the source code of computer software either.
And as soon as people are forced to release their work under the GPL I will agree you have a point. But until then, you're just another Microsoft shill.
I don't think, in this case, a new notion of a contingent copyright makes sense: it isn't necesasry. But I do thing a license on otherwise non-copywritable works does. EULAs, in principle, are not bad things, just because the historic pattern has been for them to be (a) draconian, and (b) shrinkwrapped (which, IMHO, makes them unenforceable, but IANAL).
Such a license is only enforcable on the person who agreed to it. So A buys the book, agrees to the license, and loans it to B or gives it to B as a gift. B is under no obligation to agree to the license. B doesn't even have to read the license, unless the book can't be opened without agreeing to it. That would be a physically difficult mechanism to build.
I have answered this elsewhere it fell under the issue of being a collection.
Which means it would not apply to a book, since a book is not a collection. It might apply to a collection of books, but as long as you don't reproduce the entire collection in the same order and format you're OK.
I am curious about the right to copy a rare public-domain book. Let's say someone owns the only copy of a book. They do not allow anyone else to scan it. But, they do scan it themselves.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that?
yes
They can put a copyright on the scanned version, but that doesn't mean that the copyright is valid. Is there any case law that says scanning a book is a creative process worthy of copyright protection?
Could they sue me for copying their scanned version?
Yes
They can sue, but they might lose, which would prove that the copyright is invalid.
Suppose they ran it through some OCR. Then they changed the layout but not the text. Now could they use that as a basis from stopping me from copying it? It's their font/layout configuration after all.
Yes
I suppose further, I could run their scanned work through my own OCR, and since the text itself is not copyrighted, I could then distribute the text.
no because you used their work without permission An example of this is taking a photo of a work in the public domain. If it is your photo you can reproduce it and use it all you want. If it is someone else's photo you are SOL if you do not have rights to work with their photo.
I highly doubt that. They do not own a copyright on the textual content of the work. How you obtain that textual content is irrelevant to whether you can use it. In your example (a picture of a public domain work) the picture is not and does not contain the public domain work. In the case of a scan, it does, in fact contain all of the public domain work. For example, you can't change the frame on the Mona Lisa and claim that nobody can take a picture of it because you own copyright on the frame/picture combination. You might, however, be able to require that people remove the frame from any pictures they take of it.
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate. And as more and more public domain items come into the light, there will be more and more "stake holders" trying to protect their cash cows.
you could however do it anyways and then they would have to prove that you used their copies to create your work. the problem is if it is a one of a kind and they can show you had access to it once again you are SOL.
It doesn't take much of a change in aerodynamics to apply a force of 10g to a supersonic aircraft, after all.
There are two problems to this idea. 1) Parts of the debris cloud are decelerating at much greater than 10g. That's why the cloud is so big to begin with. 2) 10g of aerodynamic stress is the wrong direction will destroy the spacecraft very quickly.
I've been pointing out this for quite a while. Despite the advantages of sitting on top of the stack, there still are, and will probably always be, certain flight phases where an abort is less than 100% survivable. A full minute is significantly longer than I expected for early boost. But there are probably significant times later in flight where aerodynamic forces make the reversal following an abort maneuver problematic.
Its incredible to me that NASA wouldn't think far enough ahead to save these tapes for posterity's sake.
You can thank Congress for that one.
NASA Program Manager: Hi, Mr. Congressman, can we have a few thousand dollars to buy tapes so we can record the data from the Voyager flyby of Jupiter?
Congressman: What happened to all those tapes we bought you in the late 60s?
NASA Program Manager: We used all those on Apollo.
Congressman: Here's 25 bucks. Go down to K-mart and buy a bulk eraser.
I am unaware of any BOINC project that actually does make such a comparison. People unaffiliated with the projects often do, however.
And if you actually find someone from a project that does make a claim of their total floating point performance, please ask them how they calculated the number of floating point calculations their application does. Chances are that their number is high by a factor of 10. (See my post elsewhere in this discussion titled "Not really 2 PetaFLOP/s")
In order to understand how much work BOINC is really doing, you need to understand how that 2 PetaFLOP/s is calculated. It is based upon the total amount of credit granted by all of the BOINC projects in existence.
Most projects grant credit by multiplying the run time of an application by some benchmark scores done by the application run time. The benchmarks are small and fit easily into cache. The applications tend to have a large memory footprint, and so end up spending a lot of processor time in cache misses. So the number might be better understood as a theoretical max performance for non SIMD code.
An application that isn't hand optimized to minimize cache misses might typically spend 95% of its time waiting on cache.
As far as I know only one BOINC project has actually counted the number of floating point operations it does and compared them to the BOINC benchmarks. (Of course there are disagreements about what a floating point operation is. Is a sin() one operation? Is a floating point division one operation? SETI@home counts each as one FLOP) The current (fairly well optimized SSE(2-4)) version of SETI@home does floating point operations at about 38% of the benchmark rate. It spends 62% of its time waiting for memory transfers. (Actually it's worse than that because most of those floating point operations are done 4 at a time.)
So the 632 TFLOP/s that is reported for SETI@home is actually about 240 TFLOP/s.
I'd be astonished if the other projects were as well optimized, given the number of people that have worked on the SETI@home code to speed it up. Lets estimate the rest of them get 15% of the benchmark rate. That would bring BOINC's actual performance to around 550 TFLOP, rather than the 2049 TFLOP theoretical value.
As far as I am aware, folding at home also doesn't count flops, but also estimated the FLOP count of the application based on processor benchmarks, so the 5 TFLOP it claims is probably as much of an "exaggeration" as the 2 TFLOPs claimed for BOINC.
That doesn't make the projects any less useful. You just need to take these claims with a large grain of salt.
Look at what I wrote. TiVo didn't own the copyrights to the code, so they couldn't close the source or modify the terms of the license. They had to make their contributions available under the GPL, and they did so. What they didn't do was give anyone the ability to run that code on a TiVo. That was within the letter of the GPL v2. Hence the need for GPL v3.
I had assumed you were talking about code you had written, not somebody else's code you were selling as if it was your own. The original author apparently wants assholes who can't code for themselves to be able to do that, so it's fine.
For code you didn't write, you don't get to chose whether it is under the BSDL in the first place. In that case you aren't selling the code, but a binary based upon the code. The code is still free.
How many times are you going to post on this thread? No matter how many times you say it, you're still wrong. If you distribute your code under a BSD license I can do whatever the hell I want with it, including selling it, shredding it, selling binaries, distributing modified versions, posting it to the web, and tattooing it on my wife's ass and selling photos of that.
Bullshit. If you are the sole copyright holder, you can relicense your code any way you want. What you can't do is relicense someone else's code either that you used in addition to your code, or that somebody contributed to your project.
Sigh... not sure if you're trolling there or just making a bitter point - but a point you have, there. It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe, after centuries and centuries of contrary evidence, that more government will make their lives better.
Yeah! Because things are just great in here in Somalia...
Even Microsoft Excel ran on Macs first, as did plenty of other software back then.
Ummm.... Excel wasn't Microsoft's first spreadsheet. Excel wasn't even Microsoft's first spreadsheet for the Macintosh. Multiplan was released in 1982 and reached the Macintosh in 1984.
And what the heck does Jobs have to do with VisiCalc? I haven't seen any indication that Jobs ever talked to Bricklin, or wouldn't have developed VisiCalc on a TRS-80 if the Apple II hadn't been available.
Gate's & Allen's "innovation" was to (practically) steal an operating system (DOS) from a not very worldly programmer named Tim Patterson, which happened to be appropriate to run on IBM's new (at that time) PC computer.
Let's not forget that much of Patterson's DOS had more than a passing resemblance to an automated translation of CP/M-80. The only significant improvement in DOS was the file system (FAT) which came from Microsoft BASIC-86. Patterson denies that translation was used, but the similarity of code sections in DOS with CP/M code translated by Intel's automated 8080-8088 translator puts that in some doubt.
I remember when the "Imminent death of the net predicted!" thread started back in the mid-80s. The threats were increased traffic, college students, the great renaming, fidonet, AOL and spam. Somehow it's still there if you want it. And it'll still be there tomorrow. I don't even have a newsreader installed at this point.
So let's do what NASA is incredibly good at: Send Fucking Robots.
As most anyone on Slashdot can tell you, we don't yet know how to build fucking robots. At least not ones that are any good. And if, by some miracle someone did manage to build a decent fucking robot, there would be way too much demand for them here on Earth to be sending them into space.
Branson's efforts have managed to produce a vehicle of about the same capability as the early Mercury missions. In one respect, it's impressive, in another, well... the US government has significantly greater resources both financially and technically than any private interest.
You're kidding, right? The Spaceship One spacecraft is nowhere near the capability of a Mercury capsule. Even if you could get it into orbit, there is no way Spaceship One could make a survivable reentry. The Mercury capsule was intended from the start to be an orbital spacecraft. Spaceship One is a suborbital dead end. Even Spaceship Two is targeting a 120km apogee and about 1 km/s velocity at MECO. The feathered reentry won't do the job if you're going much faster than that.
The first manned Mercury hit 2.3 km/s at MECO, 186 km apogee and 500 km downrange. Apogee mass of it and Spaceship One are about the same, so there's only a factor of 5.3 in the amount of energy Mercury dissipated on reentry. Toss Spaceship One into the air at 2.3 km/s and you'll be picking up charcoal where it comes down.
Spaceship One is a toy for rich people, and is only a spacecraft because someone decided that the arbitrary edge of space is 100 km. The real, non-arbitrary edge of space is 7.8 km/s. When Scaled Composites gets there, then they can say they have spaceship. Since there isn't a way there from Spaceship One, it'll be a bit of a wait.
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Actually I can prove that organic cauliflower has far more protein than conventionally farmed cauliflower. If you don't believe me, buy a head of organic cauliflower. Cut it in half. See those juicy larvae? Lots of protein.
Yes, because nothing could go wrong by letting the world know your house will be empty for the next X weeks. I make a habit of posting my vacation plans to my web site every time I go on vacation.
Interesting? He's got it exactly opposite.
Personally, I think a creator's right to decide what parts of his creations he wants to reveal, and at what terms, trumps somebody else's right to know how exactly how he created (in fact I think the latter is barely a "right" at all, even if it may be desirable under some circumstances). Do you think you have a (moral or legal) right to the Coke recipe just because Coca Cola offers the final product for sale? No? Then you don't have a "right" to the source code of computer software either.
And as soon as people are forced to release their work under the GPL I will agree you have a point. But until then, you're just another Microsoft shill.
I don't think, in this case, a new notion of a contingent copyright makes sense: it isn't necesasry. But I do thing a license on otherwise non-copywritable works does. EULAs, in principle, are not bad things, just because the historic pattern has been for them to be (a) draconian, and (b) shrinkwrapped (which, IMHO, makes them unenforceable, but IANAL).
Such a license is only enforcable on the person who agreed to it. So A buys the book, agrees to the license, and loans it to B or gives it to B as a gift. B is under no obligation to agree to the license. B doesn't even have to read the license, unless the book can't be opened without agreeing to it. That would be a physically difficult mechanism to build.
I have answered this elsewhere it fell under the issue of being a collection.
Which means it would not apply to a book, since a book is not a collection. It might apply to a collection of books, but as long as you don't reproduce the entire collection in the same order and format you're OK.
I am curious about the right to copy a rare public-domain book. Let's say someone owns the only copy of a book. They do not allow anyone else to scan it. But, they do scan it themselves.
Do they own the "scan". Can they copyright that?
yes
They can put a copyright on the scanned version, but that doesn't mean that the copyright is valid. Is there any case law that says scanning a book is a creative process worthy of copyright protection?
Could they sue me for copying their scanned version?
Yes
They can sue, but they might lose, which would prove that the copyright is invalid.
Suppose they ran it through some OCR. Then they changed the layout but not the text. Now could they use that as a basis from stopping me from copying it? It's their font/layout configuration after all.
Yes
I suppose further, I could run their scanned work through my own OCR, and since the text itself is not copyrighted, I could then distribute the text.
no because you used their work without permission An example of this is taking a photo of a work in the public domain. If it is your photo you can reproduce it and use it all you want. If it is someone else's photo you are SOL if you do not have rights to work with their photo.
I highly doubt that. They do not own a copyright on the textual content of the work. How you obtain that textual content is irrelevant to whether you can use it. In your example (a picture of a public domain work) the picture is not and does not contain the public domain work. In the case of a scan, it does, in fact contain all of the public domain work. For example, you can't change the frame on the Mona Lisa and claim that nobody can take a picture of it because you own copyright on the frame/picture combination. You might, however, be able to require that people remove the frame from any pictures they take of it.
Sounds silly and convoluted, but this is the kind of argument we can expect to see as information becomes easy to control and manipulate. And as more and more public domain items come into the light, there will be more and more "stake holders" trying to protect their cash cows.
you could however do it anyways and then they would have to prove that you used their copies to create your work. the problem is if it is a one of a kind and they can show you had access to it once again you are SOL.
It doesn't take much of a change in aerodynamics to apply a force of 10g to a supersonic aircraft, after all.
There are two problems to this idea. 1) Parts of the debris cloud are decelerating at much greater than 10g. That's why the cloud is so big to begin with. 2) 10g of aerodynamic stress is the wrong direction will destroy the spacecraft very quickly.
I've been pointing out this for quite a while. Despite the advantages of sitting on top of the stack, there still are, and will probably always be, certain flight phases where an abort is less than 100% survivable. A full minute is significantly longer than I expected for early boost. But there are probably significant times later in flight where aerodynamic forces make the reversal following an abort maneuver problematic.
trying to profit off of someone else's work is not right.
You've confused me. Isn't that the very definition of capitalism?
Its incredible to me that NASA wouldn't think far enough ahead to save these tapes for posterity's sake.
You can thank Congress for that one.
NASA Program Manager: Hi, Mr. Congressman, can we have a few thousand dollars to buy tapes so we can record the data from the Voyager flyby of Jupiter?
Congressman: What happened to all those tapes we bought you in the late 60s?
NASA Program Manager: We used all those on Apollo.
Congressman: Here's 25 bucks. Go down to K-mart and buy a bulk eraser.
I am unaware of any BOINC project that actually does make such a comparison. People unaffiliated with the projects often do, however.
And if you actually find someone from a project that does make a claim of their total floating point performance, please ask them how they calculated the number of floating point calculations their application does. Chances are that their number is high by a factor of 10. (See my post elsewhere in this discussion titled "Not really 2 PetaFLOP/s")
In order to understand how much work BOINC is really doing, you need to understand how that 2 PetaFLOP/s is calculated. It is based upon the total amount of credit granted by all of the BOINC projects in existence.
Most projects grant credit by multiplying the run time of an application by some benchmark scores done by the application run time. The benchmarks are small and fit easily into cache. The applications tend to have a large memory footprint, and so end up spending a lot of processor time in cache misses. So the number might be better understood as a theoretical max performance for non SIMD code.
An application that isn't hand optimized to minimize cache misses might typically spend 95% of its time waiting on cache.
As far as I know only one BOINC project has actually counted the number of floating point operations it does and compared them to the BOINC benchmarks. (Of course there are disagreements about what a floating point operation is. Is a sin() one operation? Is a floating point division one operation? SETI@home counts each as one FLOP) The current (fairly well optimized SSE(2-4)) version of SETI@home does floating point operations at about 38% of the benchmark rate. It spends 62% of its time waiting for memory transfers. (Actually it's worse than that because most of those floating point operations are done 4 at a time.) So the 632 TFLOP/s that is reported for SETI@home is actually about 240 TFLOP/s.
I'd be astonished if the other projects were as well optimized, given the number of people that have worked on the SETI@home code to speed it up. Lets estimate the rest of them get 15% of the benchmark rate. That would bring BOINC's actual performance to around 550 TFLOP, rather than the 2049 TFLOP theoretical value.
As far as I am aware, folding at home also doesn't count flops, but also estimated the FLOP count of the application based on processor benchmarks, so the 5 TFLOP it claims is probably as much of an "exaggeration" as the 2 TFLOPs claimed for BOINC.
That doesn't make the projects any less useful. You just need to take these claims with a large grain of salt.
Look at what I wrote. TiVo didn't own the copyrights to the code, so they couldn't close the source or modify the terms of the license. They had to make their contributions available under the GPL, and they did so. What they didn't do was give anyone the ability to run that code on a TiVo. That was within the letter of the GPL v2. Hence the need for GPL v3.
For code you didn't write, you don't get to chose whether it is under the BSDL in the first place. In that case you aren't selling the code, but a binary based upon the code. The code is still free.
The usual problem is that most of the bug reports are complaints that your X11 widget won't compile properly under Visual Studio.
How many times are you going to post on this thread? No matter how many times you say it, you're still wrong. If you distribute your code under a BSD license I can do whatever the hell I want with it, including selling it, shredding it, selling binaries, distributing modified versions, posting it to the web, and tattooing it on my wife's ass and selling photos of that.
Bullshit. If you are the sole copyright holder, you can relicense your code any way you want. What you can't do is relicense someone else's code either that you used in addition to your code, or that somebody contributed to your project.
Sigh... not sure if you're trolling there or just making a bitter point - but a point you have, there. It never ceases to amaze me how many people believe, after centuries and centuries of contrary evidence, that more government will make their lives better.
Yeah! Because things are just great in here in Somalia...
Nearly six in 10 companies have no current plans to deploy Windows 7 by the end of next year...
It does make you wonder what the other four are smoking.
Even Microsoft Excel ran on Macs first, as did plenty of other software back then.
Ummm.... Excel wasn't Microsoft's first spreadsheet. Excel wasn't even Microsoft's first spreadsheet for the Macintosh. Multiplan was released in 1982 and reached the Macintosh in 1984. And what the heck does Jobs have to do with VisiCalc? I haven't seen any indication that Jobs ever talked to Bricklin, or wouldn't have developed VisiCalc on a TRS-80 if the Apple II hadn't been available.
Gate's & Allen's "innovation" was to (practically) steal an operating system (DOS) from a not very worldly programmer named Tim Patterson, which happened to be appropriate to run on IBM's new (at that time) PC computer.
Let's not forget that much of Patterson's DOS had more than a passing resemblance to an automated translation of CP/M-80. The only significant improvement in DOS was the file system (FAT) which came from Microsoft BASIC-86. Patterson denies that translation was used, but the similarity of code sections in DOS with CP/M code translated by Intel's automated 8080-8088 translator puts that in some doubt.
I remember when the "Imminent death of the net predicted!" thread started back in the mid-80s. The threats were increased traffic, college students, the great renaming, fidonet, AOL and spam. Somehow it's still there if you want it. And it'll still be there tomorrow. I don't even have a newsreader installed at this point.
So let's do what NASA is incredibly good at: Send Fucking Robots.
As most anyone on Slashdot can tell you, we don't yet know how to build fucking robots. At least not ones that are any good. And if, by some miracle someone did manage to build a decent fucking robot, there would be way too much demand for them here on Earth to be sending them into space.
Branson's efforts have managed to produce a vehicle of about the same capability as the early Mercury missions. In one respect, it's impressive, in another, well... the US government has significantly greater resources both financially and technically than any private interest.
You're kidding, right? The Spaceship One spacecraft is nowhere near the capability of a Mercury capsule. Even if you could get it into orbit, there is no way Spaceship One could make a survivable reentry. The Mercury capsule was intended from the start to be an orbital spacecraft. Spaceship One is a suborbital dead end. Even Spaceship Two is targeting a 120km apogee and about 1 km/s velocity at MECO. The feathered reentry won't do the job if you're going much faster than that.
The first manned Mercury hit 2.3 km/s at MECO, 186 km apogee and 500 km downrange. Apogee mass of it and Spaceship One are about the same, so there's only a factor of 5.3 in the amount of energy Mercury dissipated on reentry. Toss Spaceship One into the air at 2.3 km/s and you'll be picking up charcoal where it comes down.
Spaceship One is a toy for rich people, and is only a spacecraft because someone decided that the arbitrary edge of space is 100 km. The real, non-arbitrary edge of space is 7.8 km/s. When Scaled Composites gets there, then they can say they have spaceship. Since there isn't a way there from Spaceship One, it'll be a bit of a wait.