The sibling posters has a really good point... The GP made a really good point. You, on the other hand:
1) Took a small slice of his argument out of context. 2) Implied a meaning into the out-of-context statements that was a weak, silly meaning. 3) Successfully pointed out that the weak, silly argument that *you* crafted, yourself, is silly and weak.
That's a great example of a really disingenuous debating technique called the 'straw man', you can learn more about it, here:
Dear God, when will the FUD stop??!!?? This silly meme has been making the rounds for a very long time, ever since Gutmann wrote that god-awful paper for USENIX '96. IT IS NOT TRUE!! There are no scientific or engineering papers that provide any evidence to suggest otherwise--NONE.
Here's the story: Back in 1996, Peter Gutmann published a paper where he described the theoretical possibility of reading small sections of overwritten data, in a largely unreliable fashion. Having gone back through the source he cites, I came to be of the opinion that his assertion was irresponsible, since he makes a very bold claim without pointing out how many qualifications and 'but's are attached to it:
1) The specific techniques he discusses address older hard drive platter recording technologies that were completely supplanted, throughout the industry, in 1996-1997. Newer hard drives changed recording techniques to cram more data onto the same platter area, which eliminated the specific properties that would have allowed Gutmann's proposed recovery method to work.
2) None of Gutmann's citations ever claimed to have made the recovery methods work in a practical fashion (as in, actually recovering a sector of data, let alone a whole file) on a real hard drive. There were a few lab experiments that were NOT performed on hard drives, and nobody was cited as actually implementing a real-world method.
3) Since the 1996 paper (in '99, I believe), Gutmann published a revised draft that really only changed the section talking about this issue, and he significantly backpedaled his claims. Supposedly, some of his colleagues pointed out that his assertion was scientifically unsupported and extremely inflammatory. Net result: In the newest version of that paper, he basically admits that recovery of overwritten data, on modern hard drives, is snake oil.
There's more, though. Having worked in forensics and specifically dealt with federal law enforcement agencies, I get a chuckle when people (usually, the same tinfoil-hat guys who believe in aliens at Roswell) talk like the FBI has secret recovery technology that the private sector doesn't. This is provable bullshit, for several reasons:
1) The FBI has no real engineering capacity, and they're not as good at stuff like this as you think. In data forensics, especially, their equipment, techniques, and training have never been as good as what the private sector has. The private sector has more money, which means it can buy the newest toys and do real R&D, and it can afford to pay the big-ass salaries that cutting edge engineers require. For comparison, go ask somebody at Hitachi or Segate who does hard drive research how much money they make. Then, ask the FBI how much their highest-paid experts make. It's going to be at least a 2:1 difference, maybe more.
2) Secret methodologies are useless to the FBI, because they would never hold up in court. Data forensics depends on its credibility under the standards of scientific evidence, otherwise it gets tossed out of court and the defense wins. The basic test of scientific evidence is "Does the scientific community have a consensus that this method is correct?" If it's a secret method, there can be no consensus in the community, and it can't be used in court.
3) There's a simple thought experiment that verifies this: If it were possible to read data that has been overwritten even once, doesn't that mean that your hard drive has an actual storage capacity is twice what the manufacturer is actually giving you. How much sense does that make? Those guys jump on every technology possible to cram more data into a smaller space, so even if it's space-alien-magic stuff, they'll have an enormous incentive to make it practical to mass-produce. And they usually do just that. There only a tiny bit more usable capacity on your drive (Let alone 12x worth!) than the manufacturer's label says, and that's replacement sectors for areas that develop problems--we know about that, and it's not useful in data forensics for other reasons.
Oh, sure... I think I pointed out that, by definition, lying requires that the speaker intend to deceive the listener (i.e., make a statement that the speaker believes is not true), and not merely that the statement is not true. I'm not saying that your lie detector isn't a very good detector of the intent to deceive, not at all. My intent was to point out that detecting lies reliably only provides a partial solution to the factual questions that a court would ask.
There are two problems with machine-assisted lie detection: People who train to control their responses on a polygraph, and people who believe what they say, even though it isn't true. The brain activity monitoring method only attacks the first problem, not the second.
Part of this is a philosophical problem: Someone with a false grip on reality (to a greater or lesser extent, all of us have some false perceptions or memories) may make a factual statement that is not consistent with objective reality, but if that person *believes* in the truth of the statement, should we even consider them to be lying? I think that the common definition of lying implies intent--you have to know that what you're saying is false. Otherwise, you're merely wrong or delusional.
It doesn't take a complete nutter to believe in false things, either. Most people believe they are more attractive, more competent, and smarter than the rest of us would rate them. A fair number of people have body image or confidence issues that cause them to vastly underestimate their charms. Sometimes, people just ignore the unpleasant realities of life by not thinking about them. Even better examples come up in looking at objective assessments of eyewitness identification in criminal cases--people can fool themselves into believing all sorts of things.
I mean, just look at the two different stories that Reiser's son told regarding the last argument between his mother and father: He had to have been making false statements in one of the two interviews, since they contain mutually contradictory statements of fact. But did he believe in the truth of what he said at the time? If you don't think this is possible, try to imagine the terrific psychological pressures on the boy's head over the last few years.
Hence the problem with using brain activity as an indicator of truth: It can only tell you about the subjective truth of a person's statements, not the objective truth. There's a great potential for difference between the two.
What's this JPL license that the summary mentions? Aren't there enough open-source licenses, already? Is this some kind of special NASA license, or is it an aerospace industry thing? And what does the "J" stand for, anyway?
'Scuse me while I go RTFA to find out about the JPL...
I used to live in the building with the'Neck Face' tag that the article references--57 Jay Street, also home to R&R Frames and the DUMBA arts collective. My living room windows were right under the tag. There's a great view if you walk down Jay street from the F train stop at York street--look a little to the right of straight ahead, basically directly north, and you should see it.
Unfortunately, the photo quality in Google's street views isn't quite high enough to make out the tag. But if you're ever in NYC and you want to see some great old-school tags, DUMBO is a great place for sightseeing. There are lots of well-preserved examples from the late 1970s and early 1980s, which are getting hard to find (especially in Manhattan). Just take the F to York Street in Brooklyn, and follow the hipsters.
Personally, I have seen about a dozen examples of 'Neck Face' tags in Brooklyn, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side, although the tag at 57 Jay Street is by far the biggest and most noticeable. But 'Neck Face' isn't particularly good art, as such. If you want something you can appreciate, try googling for 'revs dumbo'. His installation sculptures of cut metal are incredible. Better see them quick, too--I've noticed a couple that were cut off with an angle grinder (presumed stolen, though I don't know). But that's what happens when your art gets valuable...
(This should NOT be modded insightful. It should be modded 'Wrong'. Read the goddamn Wikipedia article before you start modding, especially if you don't know anything about the law.)
You misunderstand the use of the 5th Amendment. In its broadest form, it applies only to direct admissions by the defendant. A defendant cannot be ordered to confess, or punished for not doing so, or be forced to provide testimony that amounts to a confession.
HOWEVER... Defendants CAN be compelled by the court to provide:
- fingerprints
- DNA samples (blood/saliva/etc)
- access codes for properties to be searched
- encryption keys to enciphered data
Note the difference: None of these latter group are direct admissions of guilt. The information may lead to evidence that the defendant is guiltly, but that's not what the 5th Amendment protects against.
(Also note that this protection only applies in situations where the crimes that are actually prosecutable. If the prosecutor so chooses, he/she can grant someone immunity from prosecution for a particular act, and then have the judge compel that person to testify about the crime.)
In any case, someone who refuses to testify when asked a question in court can be held in contempt of court: The judge orders that the recalcitrant witness be fined or held in prison, possibly indefinitely, until they change their tune. There might even be an obstruction of justice charge. A general rule is that the actual penalty (fine or prison time) levied for contempt or for obstruction is roughly equal to the penalty for the crime for which you're being tried. The defendant has nothing to gain by clamming up and refusing the court's order.
My lease to you of my property with the copyrighted software on it either allows you to copy that software, or it does not. If it does, then I have infringed the copyright as I have no license which allows me to allow you to copy the software onto whatever machine you're going to ultimately run it on.
This may be a misunderstanding. My point was that the GPL forbids you from making a lease agreement in the fashion you describe. IF the act of handing over the CD qualifies as distribution, you're breaking the GPL if you refuse to provide source to the end user, contract or no. Remember, the when you accept the terms of the GPL (by copying or re-distributing the licensed work), you're making a promise UPSTREAM, to the guy who owns the copyright on the software. You can't void that promise by making a second agreement, a lease or what have you, with someone downstream to whom you're passing a copy of the software.
We have to determine first whether there is distribution going on. If an act qualifies as distribution, then the copier has obligations to recipient of the distributed code under the terms of the GPL. That said, I think you have a neat argument here:
The difference with the receivers over the live CD is that unlike the live CD, where the program must be copied off the CD to run on your computer (even if it's only copied into memory for the purposes of running the program), the program in the receiver only runs on the receiver, which is still my property.
Let's put this another way. Let's say I create a business where I lease computers. Let's further say that I lease computers with Linux installed. You pay me $100 and I loan you a computer for a month. Am I obligated to give you the source code?
What if instead of giving you the computer, I have an internet cafe, and I instead charge you $20 to use my computer for an hour. Am I obligated to give you the source code then?
Your claim is an interesting one: the definition of distribution is tied to the nature of the act of copying--as long as ownership of the media is retained by the entity that made the copy, they aren't really distributing copies.
But WHY should this be the case? As I pointed out earlier, the literal definition of distribution is to turn copies over to the control of other people, regardless of who owns the media. I doubt NetFlix claim that since they still own all the DVDs they're mailing to people that they're not "distributing" anything. This may not be legally accurate, but you don't provide any reason for why your definition of distribution is better than the literal one.
I would suggest that the spirit of the GPL also comes into play, here: in order to get some benefit (i.e., using GPL software as a basis for your company), you should have to give something in return (i.e., provide the same opportunities to others). With leasing, you are actually creating a copy in order to install the software on each of the machines you lease out to your customers, and you are actually turning it over to them. Why should you be allowed to reap the benefits of copying/redistribution, which you would otherwise be forbidden from doing, without any price?
And I don't know how legally valid this is, but version 3 of the GPL actually replaces the term "distribute" with words such as "propagate" and "convey". According to Eben Moglen, who wrote both versions 2 and 3, this change is intended to answer the type of question that we're debating here. In fact, most of the changes from version 2 to version 3 are intended to shore up potential loopholes in wording and practices that might allow an unethical person or company to cheat. That doesn't mean they ARE loopholes--nobody's admitting that the GPL version 2 doesn't include your leasing company, or even your internet cafe, in the definition of distribution. It's just that they're trying to make it MORE explicit in the future. Check out the
So, in this case, who owns the receivers? If the cable company owned the receivers, and were just leasing them to the customers, I don't see that there's any infringement taking place. They're not distributing the software (it's on their hardware), so they're not obligated to distribute the source either.
You make a very tricky argument, here, about exactly what defines "distribution". I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that you're just drawing a distinction between distribution on machines being loaned/leased to the end user, versus distribution on machines where the end user actually buys the hardware. It seems to me, on face, that both are literally examples of "distribution". But the GPL (and a court, obviously) may support your distinction--the literal meaning might not be the whole story. The text of the GPLv2 (which I just reviewed on the FSF site) doesn't go into detail on this point.
However, I do believe that you are wrong, specifically because of the nature of how copyright law applies to the acts in question. I'm not sure if my position rests entirely on the literal definition of distribution, though. Let me see if I can construct an argument around this, and you can tell me whether it holds any water.
1) Consider the hardware boxes to be just another piece of media. Sure, they're functional in their own right, but the have internal flash or memory that carries GPL-governed binary code. In this sense, it seems like the sames rules should apply that govern other forms of media carrying GPL code, such as Linux-based live CDs.
2) Hypothetically, I could create a binary-only live CD (most of them are, anyway) and hand out copies of it to people. However, let's pretend that I stipulate to everybody receiving a CD that they don't actually own the CDs. I'm not giving them away, I'm just loaning or leasing those physical CDs. Maybe we write out a contract--you accept the CD as a loaner from me, but you're required to return it if I ask or at some designated future time.
3) It would seem that the contents of the hypothetical loaner CDs are clearly still covered by the GPL, in full effect. Although I could demand the physical CD-ROM back from a user, I couldn't also try to forbid them from making a copy and saving it, or giving it away to other people. In fact, even if we wrote out a special contract to that effect, it would violate the GPL to impose such conditions on them, which would in turn terminate MY rights to re-distribute GPL code in the first place. I couldn't prevent my users from exercising their GPL-given rights without losing my own license over that code.
4) The requirement that I pass on the right to copy and re-distribute GPL software is only one of the tenets of the license. Another tenet is that I must provide source code, upon request, when I distribute binaries. So in addition to #3, above, I would also be forced to provide the source code for my binary live CD when any of my users asked for it. And furthermore, I would be required to do so at a reasonable cost. If I refuse, or if I try to impose conditions on my users, I lose my own original right to give them the copies in the first place.
5) Given that the hardware boxes the cable company is handing to its end-users contain binaries of GPL code, it would therefore seem that the users maintain their rights under the GPL to demand the source code from the cable company at a reasonable cost. Unless the cable company meets this requirement, they have no right to distribute the GPL code along with their hardware.
So... Does that add up? I mean, I would contrast this against the case where the cable company installs edge routers in local neighborhoods that run Linux--those routers being sited in company offices and passing customer traffic as opposed to being given to customers to operate in their own homes. In that case, it would seem as if they were NOT distributing the software, since they maintain direct control over it, and therefore the customers w
I suppose you RTFA'd, so you must have been reading the same "translation" that I read. Here's a clue (for you and the rest that seem to have glossed over it):
IT'S NOT A TRANSLATION, IT'S A PARODY.
Some of the statements are distilled into plainer English than the original letter used, but many others are twisted and not true to the orignal. Some of them are directly contradictory to the original. One could take the original letter and rephrase it into more direct statements, but that's not what this blogger did. He chose to parody it, inserting his own commentary and viewpoint in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Which means, of course, that there's a simple reason why this Macrovision CEO didn't phrase himself as the parody did: because it's not what he actually wanted to say.
Call me a nitpicker, but the fact that most of Slashdot (including me) happens to agree with the blogger doesn't change the fact that the original and the "translation" are not making the same basic statements.
magine if one of the banks in town negotiates a deal with all the grocery stores, wherein customers of that bank get a 50% discount on all groceries, versus the marked price that everyone else pays. The grocery stores then raises their prices, so now anyone who doesn't use Eighteenth Street Bank is now paying significantly more for groceries than they're really worth.
Wow. You are to economics as that "Time Cube" guys is the physics. Sigh. I know this is a waste of time, but you sound like Rush Limbaugh or something, so I'm going to bite. Makes me feel better about myself.
1) You suggest that the providers (hospitals, etc.) are losing money on the insured patients because the negotiated rates are so low. This cannot possible be true: the negotiated rate will always be at least high enough per patient so that the provider can make *some* profit on the transaction. Otherwise, why are they in business? Hospitals may be owned by non-profits, but they still can't run at a loss. HOW, seriously, HOW THE FUCK could an insurance company *force* a hospital to accept less money than that procedure actually costs? They can't hold a gun to the hospital's head, and they can't have the government force them to do it. If the insurance company won't agree to a high enough rate, the hospital will tell them to kiss off and take their customers (the insured citizens) elsewhere. Contract negotiation, 101.
2) Even in your make-believe, magical fairy-tale land of hospitals run by idiots, you're still wrong. You suggest that hospitals make up the money they're losing to insured patients by over-charging the uninsured (or under-insured). That's not possible, because providers actually make less money, on average, per patient on uninsured cases. Less than 25% of the US has no insurance, and they tend to avoid doctors and hospitals because of the expense. That means that the number of patients and procedures that are covered by insurance are a *lot* more than the number that don't have insurance. Also, under-insured patients have a very high non-payment rate for medical bills--they are much more likely to default, go bankrupt, or just give false names at the ER. It's just not feasible to pay for our health-care system on the backs of the uninsured.
You cannot prove innocence. That's why our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty".
These two statements are not logically related. Did you mean them to be? Our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty" because under the U.S. system you must be indicted for a crime, at which point you are presumed innocent. The logical question at trial is not "is he innocent", but "is he guilty".
You can "prove" innocence to the same, imperfect degree that you "prove" guilt: by presenting evidence to that conclusion. A strong, defensible alibi is evidence of innocence, while eyewitness accounts are evidence of guilt. We never formally "prove" guilt in a court, at least not in the mathematical sense--even when sending someone to the Electric Chair, we're merely "pretty sure he's guilty". There's nothing stopping us from creating a hypothetical where U.S. courts presume guilt, and it's up to you to prove your innocence once you've been charged.
We don't do that because it's stupid in practice--we want to limit the power of those in government, and a "presumed guilty" system encourages abuses of prosecution. It's just too easy to put the mechanisms of the state in service of tyranny, which is kind of what the people that founded this country were trying to avoid. But this has *nothing* to do with whether guilt or innocence can be proven, formally.
1) Every american should be able to pay the negotiated rate for items. If all blue cross pays the hospital is $1,375 for a gall bladder operation- why should an uninsured person have to pay $18,325 for the same exact operation? If you can show that the hospital is charging anyone a certain price, you should be able to pay that same price for the same service.
I would question this statement. WHY should every American get the same price? Is it a matter of fairness, that there's some moral wrong being done to you if you have to pay more than me for the same item? Or is it just a plausible-on-the-surface argument that happens to support your case, but has no real basis?
Consider that many different grocery stores offer the same red delicious apples for different prices. In Los Angeles, Ralph's carries them for TWO DIFFERENT prices: a lower price if you're a "club member", and a higher price if you're not. Pavillion's has them for a totally different price. Is this all somehow wrong? I mean, they're all selling the exact same apples: they are grown in the same fields, picked by the same hands, and transported by the same trucks. Since wholesale produce pricing is determined by auction, all of the grocers have the exact same wholesale cost, too. If this is unjust or wrong, somehow, explain it to me, because I don't get it.
What if I own a grocery store (I'm the sole owner, to simplify things), and I let the local boy scout troop have a discount when they're stocking up for camping trips. They pay 1/2 price, barely enough over the wholesale cost of goods to cover my overhead, because I believe in encouraging kids to get outdoors. Sure, I won't sell YOU anything at that price, but that's because I feel no obligation to encourage you to do anything. Where's the harm, here? What have I done wrong, in your world?
What about when prices change, over time? If a movie theater decides to have a promotion, where it sells the first 100 tickets on any given night at 1/2 price, and I'm the 101st person in line, have the somehow wronged me? What exactly did they do to me?
Seriously, I can't think of a single reason why your point, above, could be true. Help a brother out, here.
Urm, that depends. Linux CAN be a pre-emptible kernel, if you compile it to be. There are various levels of pre-emptibility, depending on your needs. The in-kernel docs say that pre-emption is intended for desktop environments where perceived latency is a big deal, but servers will probably benefit from the lessened overhead of a non-pre-emptible configuration.
But the original poster's comment is still bullshit. Windows Vista is a microkernel? What has THAT guy been smoking? Multi-core designs aren't that different from multi-CPU configurations, and we already know from experience that Linux hasn't been sidelined performance-wise.
Actually, now that I think about it, the likeliest explanation is that the OP was just trolling.
One of my aunts did a Civil War battleground tour, recently, on the tail of visiting relatives in Pennsylvania, and sent me a really neat letter about it. I have a really peculiar middle name, a gift from my great-grandfather, and she managed to find out that he got it from his grandfather, who enlisted in a Pennsylvania regiment about two months before the battle of Gettysburg and died, there. Found his name on the monument and everything. I thought this was one of the coolest things I'd heard in a while, just because I personally feel so little connection with history or my ancestors.
It got me thinking about all the OTHER things I wish I could know about them. These were coal-mining Irish folks, not so much for the reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, so they didn't make a lot of efforts to record anything, at least not that's survived the years. In the other branches of my family, the more recent immigrants from Croatia and Spain, we have a few stories and a little jewelry, but past 1880 or so, there's just nothing.
I want to know more. I want to know what they thought about the current events of their world (why DID my great-great-great grandfather enlist, anyway? ). What did they think of their jobs, and their families, and about why they were in their places in the world? Did they wonder what I'd be like? What did they wonder most about the future, and did they care?
So... tell me, Slashdot, on this fine, dark, cold Tuesday morning: If this technology, or something similar, had been available, what do you wish your ancestors would have left behind for you to read, or watch videos of, or hear? And why?
I would be careful of taking the dude without a grain of salt. And I speak from personal experience. A few jobs ago, I was beginning the career path into data forensics, with a private firm handling mostly civil litigation issues. In the course of our work, I interacted with a lot of people who performed computer forensics, in various capacities, in private and public sector companies.
At the beginning, I was young and didn't have a college background in CS, so I assumed most of the 30-40-something professionals (lots of current and ex-cops, including some with technical degrees) knew more than I did. As a knee-jerk reaction, my usual first instinct was to believe that the other guys knew more than me about forensics.
I began to realize after a few months that most of these people, whether self-qualified or with an EnCase certification, were pretty clueless. Guys get into forensics because they are the lone PC enthusiast in the local PD, and it's a cushier job than busting crack dealers. Their supervisors pay $3,000 a pop to send them to a certification-mill course (even the BEST forensics certs are 1/10 as much effort as a RHCE or MCSE, let alone a real cert like Cisco does), and they can suddenly be sent into court by a prosecutor. Five or six years later, Joe Law realizes that private consulting firms will triple his salary to do the same thing, and they take early retirement. But their actual work, in ALL of this, is about as hard as collecting shell casings from a crime scene.
The qualifications to become a certified, court-approved, well-paid "expert" in computer forensics are only *slightly* more meaningful that the qualifications to become an expert in Satanic Ritual Abuse. The certs are about whether you know how to use the software interface, not whether you can analyze the data. The fact that someone's testified before is circular logic. And years of experience don't mean anything because most of those years were spent running automated disk-acquisition programs and running searches for "*.jpg", NOT analysing anything. It is really, REALLY hard to tell the good from the bad.
Things may be starting to change, with more actual college course focusing on forensics, but I seriously doubt the integrity of the curriculum when (for one) there is so much financial incentive for schools to grab people with dubious qualifications to fill an instructor spot, and (for another) the entire instructor pool is made up of the gits I described above. Give the field another three generations, and MAYBE it'll be worth something. Til then, be skeptical.
(There ARE some high-quality, extremely good people in the field who I know... Mike in NY, and Bill in Seattle, big shout out. But the odds are not good that you'll get one of those guys on your side.)
Do you even KNOW anything about the law? There are some VERY good reasons in exising legal principles why the lower court ruled as they did. The fact that you're ignorant of the arguments doesn't make them not exist.
Going way, way back into the history of English law (from which the American courts are descended), there are a couple of basic operating principles that are echoed throughout legal decisions that seem to be more practical than theoretical. Case in point is stare decisis, the concept behind precedence in judicial decision-making: if a case or judge has previously decided the same or a similar issue, you are obliged to apply his logic to your case in a consistent fashion.
This principle doesn't come from an attempt to maximize "justice", at least not in the Aristotelean sense. It's a basically practical rule that imposes some consistency and durability on the legal system--that a claimant or defendant can be sure that the same rules apply to every situation (critical when most law is not statutory, "written-down" law), so the trust the courts more and don't try to settle things vigilante-style.
Returning to the question in front of us... Another general principle finding application in our law is this idea that once you're assented to something in practice, you're admitting to its correctness in theory, too. There's lots of examples, here's a few:
- child support and paternity: If you EVER admit paternity of a child, even falsely (or mistakenly), you will be liable in the future for child support no matter what. So if you accept a woman's assertion that you're the father of her baby and start paying, and then three or four years later you get a paternity test and find out she duped you, you're still fucked. (Some states have begun changing this through specific statutory law, recently, but not many.) Note that this usually applies even if you never explicitly admit paternity, but say if you co-habitate with the child's mother or provide financial assistance...
- jurisdictional challenges: If you believe that a court does not have jurisdiction to hear your case, but you show up to argue the case, anyway, the court views this as proof that you really do believe the court has proper jurisdiction. Once you've responding to a brief or made an appearance, you can never worm your way back out by trying to claim the court has no authority. (Sometimes, there is a strictly jurisdictional type hearing to address that one particular question, without granting it, but those are a relatively recent innovation.)
If your actions belie an agreement with the truth of a particular proposition of fact, the courts will generally hold you to that fact. If you relate this principle to patents, the lower court's original decision makes a lot more sense--if you thought the patent was invalid years ago, why didn't you sue THEN, instead of paying the license fees and waiting until now?
Generally, this is practical: the courts want things settled as soon as possible, and as finally as possible, to save them effort and to save everybody money. (Strange as it sounds, the law tends to discourage additional litigation through this principle.) Had the USSC made the opposite decision and let the lower court ruling stand, companies would be forced to do all their homework and look at every possible detail BEFORE they agree to licensing, because that would be their last chance, ever, to challenge patent validity.
Of course, there are problems with this approach, some of which may be related to the USSC decision:
- What if the facts change, because new prior art is discovered? In patent litigation, it might take some time for prior art to come to light, and since there's no unified "prior art" collection (like the collection of patents at the USPTO) it isn't reasonable to expect a claimant to be able to discover every possible potential prior art example in a finite amount of time.
- Patent litigation i
if it's not worth $10k to nVidia to open up the source code themselvs, then why should it be that the software shouldn't be worth more than that to develop?
You misunderstand why NVidia refuses to open their driver code. They're not just being dicks, and they probably aren't too scared to expose their own proprietary technologies, because there ARE benefits to gaining the acceptance of the OSS community that translate directly into more profit.
The real problem is that NVidia didn't write all of the driver code itself, from scratch. They incorporated copyrighted code licensed from other companies, probably some derivative and some word-for-word. They probably use patented algorithms and technologies, too. Several other companies hold rights over the NVidia source code, in such a way that NVidia can't just release it and contribute it to the Linux kernel without violating its own agreements, or exposing the Linux kernel to litigation.
(I really wish I had a quote about this, I cannot for the life of me remember where I read it, but I *believe* that an NVidia exec stated as much in a press conference or release. So unless you do your own research, take me with a grain of salt.)
there's likely to be an inquiry by nVidia, to ensure that it was not inappropriated from them
I find this highly unlikely. Unless one of the companies holding licenses over NVidia's head assumes that they contributed under the table to the OSS effort, there are no grounds whatsover to assume that code was "inappropriated" (sic). NVidia itself has no interest in preventing the release of an OSS driver--if anything, it will help sell me hardware and drive their market share upward as they become the "OSS-friendly" graphics card company. (That's worth a lot of fanboy forum toadying.)
NVidia probably could develop a fresh OSS driver for release into the Linux kernel, via the 'clean-room' approach. It would have to hire developers to do it, provide them with enough specs/code to get the job done but NOT provide them with the licensed code or algorithms, and sit back and watch the payroll fly out the door. This would probably cost them a lot more than $10,000, given the complexity of modern GPUs and the relative rarity of the software skills to do this kind of work. But if someone else wants to do it for free, all they'd have to do is stay the hell away and cross their fingers.
Because the firms running these plants are most likely foreign based. Meaning that the profits are probably shipped outside of the country. If the company was setting up jobs & providing services and money in the economy, then I'd almost be tempted to overlook the asthma & health problems associated with these companies. The problem is that I'm almost certain none of that wealth is returning to the local community.
So these people are working for peanuts? Did you sleep through econ 101, or what? IT DOESN'T MATTER WHICH COUNTRY THE PROFITS FLOW TO! The benefits of opening a factory in my town are that the jobs pay wages to local workers, which pumps money into the local economy.
Whether the owner is a local American, a fat cat in New York City, or a Japanese dude, the factory is still helping my standard of living and giving me a better job, so maybe I can send my kids to college and own a house. Even if the owner of the factory was a local, HE WOULD KEEP THE PROFITS, ANYWAY. It's a capitalist market system! It's not like because he's African, he's going to hand out big wads of cash to his countrymen just because they share a border and a government.
The only differences between domestic versus foreign ownership are:
- personal income taxes are not paid domestically; however, corporate income taxes, property taxes, payroll, import/export duties ARE paid locally, so the lost funds are probably minimal in relation to the total tax paid;
- less secondary economic impact of a domestic owner spending his profits in the local economy; given the huge proportion of industrial operating costs associated with labor (pwyroll), though, this is also probably minimal in relation to the amount of money paid directly to workers as wages;
Go hug a tree, Granola Boy. And think for five minutes before you spout off about subjects where you're as ignorant as this.
Rather than trot out some quasi-rational, paranoid, right-wing rhetoric about how the Federal Reserve Bank is a giant scam (like the sibling poster, who thankfully has been moderated down), I'll give you the obvious reason why this doesn't really matter:
Currency in circulation is a very small percentage of the overall amount of money in the economy that's handled in units of dollars. According to a quick google source , the total amount of U.S. currency in circulation in 1999 was about $470B. The US GDP was around $12T that year, so currency in circulation was less than 5% of our entire economic output.
The use of checks, in particular, limits the amount of currency we actually need to transact business. Large purchases are rarely negotiated in cash, mostly for reasons of convenience. If you want to buy a car from me for $10,000, you would normally write me a personal check for that amount (or get a cashier's check from the bank, if I didn't want to wait for the check to clear). When I deposit the check, my bank would just clear the check through your bank, which is entirely a matter of record-keeping. No cash needed.
Since bank deposits, asset valuations, lines of credit, securities and all sorts of other non-cash stores of value are counted in dollars, and are generally convertible to cash via some means, most economic activity (in terms of total value, not number of transactions) has nothing whatsoever to do with cash. Stock markets? Totally cashless. Mortgages on car and home purchases? Totally cashless. Hell, with Direct Deposit as common as it is, now, most people get paid wages without anything other than some record-keeping activity between banks.
If we had a somewhat more cash-based economy, you'd be right. Simply by printing more or less hard currency, the government could adjust its value dramatically.
You are 100% correct. I don't know what this guy's problem is--are IT and development are the only two departments allowed by law in his jusrisdiction? I mean, it's normal for an "Ask Slashdot" question to be totally stupid, but this one is pretty bad. I wish I knew what company it was, so I could avoid them. Someone always needs to lead a deployment project, and to be responsible for both the quality of the application AND the quality of the installation it's running on. This dude doesn't need a whole department, but he does need to have access to the time and knowledge of both the people writing the code and the people running the servers. A company that hasn't figured that out, yet, is courting trouble.
I take issue with other details of the poster's question, too:
1) Why is their production environment so unstable? If the server software (OS, middleware, support apps) is unstable, why the hell are they running it in production? If it's the specifics of their setup that are causing the problems, fire the IT director and get somebody in there who know how to engineer production systems. And then tell them to come up with a plan to fix all of it, give them a budget and time and people, and make sure they fix it.
2) If people aren't "in the loop" regarding changes that effect them, your mananagers need to be sacked. A large part of a manager's job is to keep issues that don't concern you from bothering you, and to make sure that you ARE aware of issues that do concern you. A sysadmin or software developer should have someone above him who sees the big picture, goes to inter-department meetings, and stays in the loop so he can keep his people in the loop.
3) Any idiot could tell you that the developers need a staging environment that replicates the production runtime environment as closely as possible. That means it includes whatever feature may bear on the application operation/health/efficiency, like load balancing and replication. The sysadmins set it up, the developers write-test-debug their code on it, and when they hit a release candidate, the deployment project manager checks out the release, installs it on the staging systems, and runs it through the QA process. If it doesn't work properly, the project manager sends it back to the developers with notes and they fix it. This *should* guarantee that the developers are aware of whatever production-environment issues exist--if not, fire your sysadmin because he lied to you when he said the staging environment was as identical to the production environment as possible.
Having lived through the kinds of startup environments where these issues crop up, I would guess that the current clusterfuck of affairs is jointly the fault of a lot of people. Management doesn't understand these issues--they think they can hire a bunch of sysadmins, a bunch of programmers, and appoint a director of IT and shit will get done. The people lower down fail to impress on management the need for proper processes, and they get lazy and don't want to be as careful and thorough as they should.
Of course, many companies do achieve a buyout without ever fixing their issues--but nobody will ever have a successful growth past that without realizing the right way to run production systems.
Ooh, but your analogy can extend! Sure, I can go down to Home Depot and buy some interior paint to spruce up my living room, or some 2x4s to build a new deck, or something like that. But have you ever heard of building inspections? Anytime you do serious work, like an addition or a new building or even heavy electrical, you're probably going to have to get permits, submit plans, and then have a licensed building inspector come out and check your work. And it if ain't done to code, you're going to have to rip it all out and hire somebody who know what they're doing.
The reason behind all this bureacratic, intrusive government oversight is that building codes are written in blood. Code specs have emerged over time because people died when buildings collapsed, or bad electrical wiring caused fires. The lesson is that if you're not doing something that could cause injury or death, go ahead and do it yourself. If not, you'd either better learn the right way to do it or hire somebody.
Code divides into similar categories, although I the decision point is different: Is the failure of this application tolerable? It may be a question of lives at risk (avionics, air traffic control, miliary systems, automotives braking/control, medical) or it might just be economic (my business stops and I lose money when our servers bug out). It's only prudent to analyze your situation and come to a rational decision about whether you want to tolerate the risks of hiring professionals (or learning professional methods and implementing them yourself), versus playing pickup ball.
Having lived through a couple of start-ups, both successful and unsuccessful, I can tell you that the different approaches do make a difference. I think that's what Bjarne is getting at: if the application matters, you'd better do it right.
I've heard this argument a lot, but it has problems. I get what you're saying--that the right to own pistols, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns doesn't provide much answer to tanks rolling in the streets and soldiers with assault rifles. But there are a lot more dimensions to this issue.
First of all, recognize the premise: we're talking about the possiblity that the United States could devolve into a state of armed uprising, where non-government, civilian groups take violent action and the government responds by fielding the National Guard or the regular miliary on U.S. soil.
1) Such a situation would probably not spring up overnight. Armed movements don't start quietly, and they take time to get organized and get into action. The Federal government would certainly see this coming to head, and take emergency measures to immediatelty disarm the populace, regardless of the Constitution. They would also restrict a number of other basic civil liberties (speech, assembly, habeas corpus, etc.), on that same emergency basis. So by the time the conflict could even get going, there would be *no* legal private gun ownership.
2) Given (1), above, what impact does the CURRENT existence of firearms legally in private hands have on resolution of the eventual conflict?
This is not an easy question to answer. We can assume that at the outset of government response (seizing weapons from private homes), many people involved in or sympathetic to the anti-government cause will hide and stockpile guns. Civilians will see the government reponse coming (just as the government has anticipated the outbreak of an uprising), and they will have some time react. So the government will have a much harder time getting all of the guns. This would not really be an issue if we didn't start from a position of private, legal gun ownership.
Also, many people have learned how to shoot over the years with privately-owned handguns and rifles. Without private gun ownership, this wouldn't be a possibility. Even if some insurgent group suddenly managed to smuggle in a large enough cache of weapons, the lack of people with ANY experience handling guns would present a signficant problem--not only do you have to raise, hide, train, and feed your insurgent army, you also have to teach them the basic skill of soldiering from the group up. And learning how to shoot can take months of practice.
So I think it's fair to say that upholding private, legal gun ownership in our current situation leads us into any potential civil conflict with two important factors in play: more guns are available for an insurgent group to use, and more people are closer in skill to the point where they could plausibly participate in an armed uprising.
Granted, they'll probably still lose if it comes to shooting, but that's no guarantee. Especially in urban areas, a few clever snipers and ambushes can create a significant number of casualties for an invading force, especially if they know the urban terrain and have the civilian population's sympathy (viz. Iraq). The resolve of soldiers to marching into urban combat, already knowing that they're fighting against their own countrymen, is a pretty shaky proposition to being with. Commanders are generally less willing to press these situations tactically, because they know that their biggest edges (superior firepower, tighter training) are severely blunted.
All of which leads me to the Big Point: the government wil be much less likely to roll tanks in the streets if it see the possiblity of an extended, armed conflict and lots of bloodshed. If it fears an armed civilian reaction, it will be more cautious and less interested in directly pushing its military advantage. The government will look for more surreptitious solutions: talking with rebel leaders, assassinating key insurgent figures, and slowly starving them out. The political costs of pushing a shooting war in America are enormous.
To tell the truth, I'd much rather have that situation than one in which the government holds all the cards, regardless of my sympathies to any particular armed movement. It leaves more possible outcomes where people reach an accord, lay down their arms, and none of our cities are leveled by fighting.
Slashdot Mirror
The sibling posters has a really good point... The GP made a really good point. You, on the other hand:
1) Took a small slice of his argument out of context.
2) Implied a meaning into the out-of-context statements that was a weak, silly meaning.
3) Successfully pointed out that the weak, silly argument that *you* crafted, yourself, is silly and weak.
That's a great example of a really disingenuous debating technique called the 'straw man', you can learn more about it, here:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Maybe if you learn it a little better, you won't be so transparent, next time.
Dear God, when will the FUD stop??!!?? This silly meme has been making the rounds for a very long time, ever since Gutmann wrote that god-awful paper for USENIX '96. IT IS NOT TRUE!! There are no scientific or engineering papers that provide any evidence to suggest otherwise--NONE.
Here's the story: Back in 1996, Peter Gutmann published a paper where he described the theoretical possibility of reading small sections of overwritten data, in a largely unreliable fashion. Having gone back through the source he cites, I came to be of the opinion that his assertion was irresponsible, since he makes a very bold claim without pointing out how many qualifications and 'but's are attached to it:
1) The specific techniques he discusses address older hard drive platter recording technologies that were completely supplanted, throughout the industry, in 1996-1997. Newer hard drives changed recording techniques to cram more data onto the same platter area, which eliminated the specific properties that would have allowed Gutmann's proposed recovery method to work.
2) None of Gutmann's citations ever claimed to have made the recovery methods work in a practical fashion (as in, actually recovering a sector of data, let alone a whole file) on a real hard drive. There were a few lab experiments that were NOT performed on hard drives, and nobody was cited as actually implementing a real-world method.
3) Since the 1996 paper (in '99, I believe), Gutmann published a revised draft that really only changed the section talking about this issue, and he significantly backpedaled his claims. Supposedly, some of his colleagues pointed out that his assertion was scientifically unsupported and extremely inflammatory. Net result: In the newest version of that paper, he basically admits that recovery of overwritten data, on modern hard drives, is snake oil.
There's more, though. Having worked in forensics and specifically dealt with federal law enforcement agencies, I get a chuckle when people (usually, the same tinfoil-hat guys who believe in aliens at Roswell) talk like the FBI has secret recovery technology that the private sector doesn't. This is provable bullshit, for several reasons:
1) The FBI has no real engineering capacity, and they're not as good at stuff like this as you think. In data forensics, especially, their equipment, techniques, and training have never been as good as what the private sector has. The private sector has more money, which means it can buy the newest toys and do real R&D, and it can afford to pay the big-ass salaries that cutting edge engineers require. For comparison, go ask somebody at Hitachi or Segate who does hard drive research how much money they make. Then, ask the FBI how much their highest-paid experts make. It's going to be at least a 2:1 difference, maybe more.
2) Secret methodologies are useless to the FBI, because they would never hold up in court. Data forensics depends on its credibility under the standards of scientific evidence, otherwise it gets tossed out of court and the defense wins. The basic test of scientific evidence is "Does the scientific community have a consensus that this method is correct?" If it's a secret method, there can be no consensus in the community, and it can't be used in court.
3) There's a simple thought experiment that verifies this: If it were possible to read data that has been overwritten even once, doesn't that mean that your hard drive has an actual storage capacity is twice what the manufacturer is actually giving you. How much sense does that make? Those guys jump on every technology possible to cram more data into a smaller space, so even if it's space-alien-magic stuff, they'll have an enormous incentive to make it practical to mass-produce. And they usually do just that. There only a tiny bit more usable capacity on your drive (Let alone 12x worth!) than the manufacturer's label says, and that's replacement sectors for areas that develop problems--we know about that, and it's not useful in data forensics for other reasons.
Oh, sure... I think I pointed out that, by definition, lying requires that the speaker intend to deceive the listener (i.e., make a statement that the speaker believes is not true), and not merely that the statement is not true. I'm not saying that your lie detector isn't a very good detector of the intent to deceive, not at all. My intent was to point out that detecting lies reliably only provides a partial solution to the factual questions that a court would ask.
There are two problems with machine-assisted lie detection: People who train to control their responses on a polygraph, and people who believe what they say, even though it isn't true. The brain activity monitoring method only attacks the first problem, not the second.
Part of this is a philosophical problem: Someone with a false grip on reality (to a greater or lesser extent, all of us have some false perceptions or memories) may make a factual statement that is not consistent with objective reality, but if that person *believes* in the truth of the statement, should we even consider them to be lying? I think that the common definition of lying implies intent--you have to know that what you're saying is false. Otherwise, you're merely wrong or delusional.
It doesn't take a complete nutter to believe in false things, either. Most people believe they are more attractive, more competent, and smarter than the rest of us would rate them. A fair number of people have body image or confidence issues that cause them to vastly underestimate their charms. Sometimes, people just ignore the unpleasant realities of life by not thinking about them. Even better examples come up in looking at objective assessments of eyewitness identification in criminal cases--people can fool themselves into believing all sorts of things.
I mean, just look at the two different stories that Reiser's son told regarding the last argument between his mother and father: He had to have been making false statements in one of the two interviews, since they contain mutually contradictory statements of fact. But did he believe in the truth of what he said at the time? If you don't think this is possible, try to imagine the terrific psychological pressures on the boy's head over the last few years.
Hence the problem with using brain activity as an indicator of truth: It can only tell you about the subjective truth of a person's statements, not the objective truth. There's a great potential for difference between the two.
What's this JPL license that the summary mentions? Aren't there enough open-source licenses, already? Is this some kind of special NASA license, or is it an aerospace industry thing? And what does the "J" stand for, anyway?
'Scuse me while I go RTFA to find out about the JPL...
I used to live in the building with the'Neck Face' tag that the article references--57 Jay Street, also home to R&R Frames and the DUMBA arts collective. My living room windows were right under the tag. There's a great view if you walk down Jay street from the F train stop at York street--look a little to the right of straight ahead, basically directly north, and you should see it.
r eet,+brooklyn&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.28737 3,82.265625&ie=UTF8&ll=40.705693,-73.985925&spn=0. 01137,0.020084&z=16&om=1&layer=c&cbll=40.702096,-7 3.986721&cbp=1,361.1,0.5,0
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=57+Jay+St
Unfortunately, the photo quality in Google's street views isn't quite high enough to make out the tag. But if you're ever in NYC and you want to see some great old-school tags, DUMBO is a great place for sightseeing. There are lots of well-preserved examples from the late 1970s and early 1980s, which are getting hard to find (especially in Manhattan). Just take the F to York Street in Brooklyn, and follow the hipsters.
Personally, I have seen about a dozen examples of 'Neck Face' tags in Brooklyn, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side, although the tag at 57 Jay Street is by far the biggest and most noticeable. But 'Neck Face' isn't particularly good art, as such. If you want something you can appreciate, try googling for 'revs dumbo'. His installation sculptures of cut metal are incredible. Better see them quick, too--I've noticed a couple that were cut off with an angle grinder (presumed stolen, though I don't know). But that's what happens when your art gets valuable...
Hey, flamebait--who let you in here? Anybody got some mod points for this dick?
(This should NOT be modded insightful. It should be modded 'Wrong'. Read the goddamn Wikipedia article before you start modding, especially if you don't know anything about the law.)
You misunderstand the use of the 5th Amendment. In its broadest form, it applies only to direct admissions by the defendant. A defendant cannot be ordered to confess, or punished for not doing so, or be forced to provide testimony that amounts to a confession.
HOWEVER... Defendants CAN be compelled by the court to provide:
- fingerprints
- DNA samples (blood/saliva/etc)
- access codes for properties to be searched
- encryption keys to enciphered data
Note the difference: None of these latter group are direct admissions of guilt. The information may lead to evidence that the defendant is guiltly, but that's not what the 5th Amendment protects against.
(Also note that this protection only applies in situations where the crimes that are actually prosecutable. If the prosecutor so chooses, he/she can grant someone immunity from prosecution for a particular act, and then have the judge compel that person to testify about the crime.)
In any case, someone who refuses to testify when asked a question in court can be held in contempt of court: The judge orders that the recalcitrant witness be fined or held in prison, possibly indefinitely, until they change their tune. There might even be an obstruction of justice charge. A general rule is that the actual penalty (fine or prison time) levied for contempt or for obstruction is roughly equal to the penalty for the crime for which you're being tried. The defendant has nothing to gain by clamming up and refusing the court's order.
What's the significance of chilling a dime-sized mirror, vs chilling a dime?
No idea, but the significance of chilling WITH a dime is that I'm high as hell on some stinky, stinky weed.
JK, Mom.
My lease to you of my property with the copyrighted software on it either allows you to copy that software, or it does not. If it does, then I have infringed the copyright as I have no license which allows me to allow you to copy the software onto whatever machine you're going to ultimately run it on.
This may be a misunderstanding. My point was that the GPL forbids you from making a lease agreement in the fashion you describe. IF the act of handing over the CD qualifies as distribution, you're breaking the GPL if you refuse to provide source to the end user, contract or no. Remember, the when you accept the terms of the GPL (by copying or re-distributing the licensed work), you're making a promise UPSTREAM, to the guy who owns the copyright on the software. You can't void that promise by making a second agreement, a lease or what have you, with someone downstream to whom you're passing a copy of the software.
We have to determine first whether there is distribution going on. If an act qualifies as distribution, then the copier has obligations to recipient of the distributed code under the terms of the GPL. That said, I think you have a neat argument here:
The difference with the receivers over the live CD is that unlike the live CD, where the program must be copied off the CD to run on your computer (even if it's only copied into memory for the purposes of running the program), the program in the receiver only runs on the receiver, which is still my property.
Let's put this another way. Let's say I create a business where I lease computers. Let's further say that I lease computers with Linux installed. You pay me $100 and I loan you a computer for a month. Am I obligated to give you the source code?
What if instead of giving you the computer, I have an internet cafe, and I instead charge you $20 to use my computer for an hour. Am I obligated to give you the source code then?
Your claim is an interesting one: the definition of distribution is tied to the nature of the act of copying--as long as ownership of the media is retained by the entity that made the copy, they aren't really distributing copies.
But WHY should this be the case? As I pointed out earlier, the literal definition of distribution is to turn copies over to the control of other people, regardless of who owns the media. I doubt NetFlix claim that since they still own all the DVDs they're mailing to people that they're not "distributing" anything. This may not be legally accurate, but you don't provide any reason for why your definition of distribution is better than the literal one.
I would suggest that the spirit of the GPL also comes into play, here: in order to get some benefit (i.e., using GPL software as a basis for your company), you should have to give something in return (i.e., provide the same opportunities to others). With leasing, you are actually creating a copy in order to install the software on each of the machines you lease out to your customers, and you are actually turning it over to them. Why should you be allowed to reap the benefits of copying/redistribution, which you would otherwise be forbidden from doing, without any price?
And I don't know how legally valid this is, but version 3 of the GPL actually replaces the term "distribute" with words such as "propagate" and "convey". According to Eben Moglen, who wrote both versions 2 and 3, this change is intended to answer the type of question that we're debating here. In fact, most of the changes from version 2 to version 3 are intended to shore up potential loopholes in wording and practices that might allow an unethical person or company to cheat. That doesn't mean they ARE loopholes--nobody's admitting that the GPL version 2 doesn't include your leasing company, or even your internet cafe, in the definition of distribution. It's just that they're trying to make it MORE explicit in the future. Check out the
So, in this case, who owns the receivers? If the cable company owned the receivers, and were just leasing them to the customers, I don't see that there's any infringement taking place. They're not distributing the software (it's on their hardware), so they're not obligated to distribute the source either.
You make a very tricky argument, here, about exactly what defines "distribution". I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that you're just drawing a distinction between distribution on machines being loaned/leased to the end user, versus distribution on machines where the end user actually buys the hardware. It seems to me, on face, that both are literally examples of "distribution". But the GPL (and a court, obviously) may support your distinction--the literal meaning might not be the whole story. The text of the GPLv2 (which I just reviewed on the FSF site) doesn't go into detail on this point.
However, I do believe that you are wrong, specifically because of the nature of how copyright law applies to the acts in question. I'm not sure if my position rests entirely on the literal definition of distribution, though. Let me see if I can construct an argument around this, and you can tell me whether it holds any water.
1) Consider the hardware boxes to be just another piece of media. Sure, they're functional in their own right, but the have internal flash or memory that carries GPL-governed binary code. In this sense, it seems like the sames rules should apply that govern other forms of media carrying GPL code, such as Linux-based live CDs.
2) Hypothetically, I could create a binary-only live CD (most of them are, anyway) and hand out copies of it to people. However, let's pretend that I stipulate to everybody receiving a CD that they don't actually own the CDs. I'm not giving them away, I'm just loaning or leasing those physical CDs. Maybe we write out a contract--you accept the CD as a loaner from me, but you're required to return it if I ask or at some designated future time.
3) It would seem that the contents of the hypothetical loaner CDs are clearly still covered by the GPL, in full effect. Although I could demand the physical CD-ROM back from a user, I couldn't also try to forbid them from making a copy and saving it, or giving it away to other people. In fact, even if we wrote out a special contract to that effect, it would violate the GPL to impose such conditions on them, which would in turn terminate MY rights to re-distribute GPL code in the first place. I couldn't prevent my users from exercising their GPL-given rights without losing my own license over that code.
4) The requirement that I pass on the right to copy and re-distribute GPL software is only one of the tenets of the license. Another tenet is that I must provide source code, upon request, when I distribute binaries. So in addition to #3, above, I would also be forced to provide the source code for my binary live CD when any of my users asked for it. And furthermore, I would be required to do so at a reasonable cost. If I refuse, or if I try to impose conditions on my users, I lose my own original right to give them the copies in the first place.
5) Given that the hardware boxes the cable company is handing to its end-users contain binaries of GPL code, it would therefore seem that the users maintain their rights under the GPL to demand the source code from the cable company at a reasonable cost. Unless the cable company meets this requirement, they have no right to distribute the GPL code along with their hardware.
So... Does that add up? I mean, I would contrast this against the case where the cable company installs edge routers in local neighborhoods that run Linux--those routers being sited in company offices and passing customer traffic as opposed to being given to customers to operate in their own homes. In that case, it would seem as if they were NOT distributing the software, since they maintain direct control over it, and therefore the customers w
I suppose you RTFA'd, so you must have been reading the same "translation" that I read. Here's a clue (for you and the rest that seem to have glossed over it):
IT'S NOT A TRANSLATION, IT'S A PARODY.
Some of the statements are distilled into plainer English than the original letter used, but many others are twisted and not true to the orignal. Some of them are directly contradictory to the original. One could take the original letter and rephrase it into more direct statements, but that's not what this blogger did. He chose to parody it, inserting his own commentary and viewpoint in some subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Which means, of course, that there's a simple reason why this Macrovision CEO didn't phrase himself as the parody did: because it's not what he actually wanted to say.
Call me a nitpicker, but the fact that most of Slashdot (including me) happens to agree with the blogger doesn't change the fact that the original and the "translation" are not making the same basic statements.
magine if one of the banks in town negotiates a deal with all the grocery stores, wherein customers of that bank get a 50% discount on all groceries, versus the marked price that everyone else pays. The grocery stores then raises their prices, so now anyone who doesn't use Eighteenth Street Bank is now paying significantly more for groceries than they're really worth.
Wow. You are to economics as that "Time Cube" guys is the physics. Sigh. I know this is a waste of time, but you sound like Rush Limbaugh or something, so I'm going to bite. Makes me feel better about myself.
1) You suggest that the providers (hospitals, etc.) are losing money on the insured patients because the negotiated rates are so low. This cannot possible be true: the negotiated rate will always be at least high enough per patient so that the provider can make *some* profit on the transaction. Otherwise, why are they in business? Hospitals may be owned by non-profits, but they still can't run at a loss. HOW, seriously, HOW THE FUCK could an insurance company *force* a hospital to accept less money than that procedure actually costs? They can't hold a gun to the hospital's head, and they can't have the government force them to do it. If the insurance company won't agree to a high enough rate, the hospital will tell them to kiss off and take their customers (the insured citizens) elsewhere. Contract negotiation, 101.
2) Even in your make-believe, magical fairy-tale land of hospitals run by idiots, you're still wrong. You suggest that hospitals make up the money they're losing to insured patients by over-charging the uninsured (or under-insured). That's not possible, because providers actually make less money, on average, per patient on uninsured cases. Less than 25% of the US has no insurance, and they tend to avoid doctors and hospitals because of the expense. That means that the number of patients and procedures that are covered by insurance are a *lot* more than the number that don't have insurance. Also, under-insured patients have a very high non-payment rate for medical bills--they are much more likely to default, go bankrupt, or just give false names at the ER. It's just not feasible to pay for our health-care system on the backs of the uninsured.
I suggest you go to college.
You cannot prove innocence. That's why our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty".
These two statements are not logically related. Did you mean them to be? Our verdicts are "guilty" and "not guilty" because under the U.S. system you must be indicted for a crime, at which point you are presumed innocent. The logical question at trial is not "is he innocent", but "is he guilty".
You can "prove" innocence to the same, imperfect degree that you "prove" guilt: by presenting evidence to that conclusion. A strong, defensible alibi is evidence of innocence, while eyewitness accounts are evidence of guilt. We never formally "prove" guilt in a court, at least not in the mathematical sense--even when sending someone to the Electric Chair, we're merely "pretty sure he's guilty". There's nothing stopping us from creating a hypothetical where U.S. courts presume guilt, and it's up to you to prove your innocence once you've been charged.
We don't do that because it's stupid in practice--we want to limit the power of those in government, and a "presumed guilty" system encourages abuses of prosecution. It's just too easy to put the mechanisms of the state in service of tyranny, which is kind of what the people that founded this country were trying to avoid. But this has *nothing* to do with whether guilt or innocence can be proven, formally.
1) Every american should be able to pay the negotiated rate for items. If all blue cross pays the hospital is $1,375 for a gall bladder operation- why should an uninsured person have to pay $18,325 for the same exact operation? If you can show that the hospital is charging anyone a certain price, you should be able to pay that same price for the same service.
I would question this statement. WHY should every American get the same price? Is it a matter of fairness, that there's some moral wrong being done to you if you have to pay more than me for the same item? Or is it just a plausible-on-the-surface argument that happens to support your case, but has no real basis?
Consider that many different grocery stores offer the same red delicious apples for different prices. In Los Angeles, Ralph's carries them for TWO DIFFERENT prices: a lower price if you're a "club member", and a higher price if you're not. Pavillion's has them for a totally different price. Is this all somehow wrong? I mean, they're all selling the exact same apples: they are grown in the same fields, picked by the same hands, and transported by the same trucks. Since wholesale produce pricing is determined by auction, all of the grocers have the exact same wholesale cost, too. If this is unjust or wrong, somehow, explain it to me, because I don't get it.
What if I own a grocery store (I'm the sole owner, to simplify things), and I let the local boy scout troop have a discount when they're stocking up for camping trips. They pay 1/2 price, barely enough over the wholesale cost of goods to cover my overhead, because I believe in encouraging kids to get outdoors. Sure, I won't sell YOU anything at that price, but that's because I feel no obligation to encourage you to do anything. Where's the harm, here? What have I done wrong, in your world?
What about when prices change, over time? If a movie theater decides to have a promotion, where it sells the first 100 tickets on any given night at 1/2 price, and I'm the 101st person in line, have the somehow wronged me? What exactly did they do to me?
Seriously, I can't think of a single reason why your point, above, could be true. Help a brother out, here.
Urm, that depends. Linux CAN be a pre-emptible kernel, if you compile it to be. There are various levels of pre-emptibility, depending on your needs. The in-kernel docs say that pre-emption is intended for desktop environments where perceived latency is a big deal, but servers will probably benefit from the lessened overhead of a non-pre-emptible configuration.
But the original poster's comment is still bullshit. Windows Vista is a microkernel? What has THAT guy been smoking? Multi-core designs aren't that different from multi-CPU configurations, and we already know from experience that Linux hasn't been sidelined performance-wise.
Actually, now that I think about it, the likeliest explanation is that the OP was just trolling.
One of my aunts did a Civil War battleground tour, recently, on the tail of visiting relatives in Pennsylvania, and sent me a really neat letter about it. I have a really peculiar middle name, a gift from my great-grandfather, and she managed to find out that he got it from his grandfather, who enlisted in a Pennsylvania regiment about two months before the battle of Gettysburg and died, there. Found his name on the monument and everything. I thought this was one of the coolest things I'd heard in a while, just because I personally feel so little connection with history or my ancestors.
It got me thinking about all the OTHER things I wish I could know about them. These were coal-mining Irish folks, not so much for the reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, so they didn't make a lot of efforts to record anything, at least not that's survived the years. In the other branches of my family, the more recent immigrants from Croatia and Spain, we have a few stories and a little jewelry, but past 1880 or so, there's just nothing.
I want to know more. I want to know what they thought about the current events of their world (why DID my great-great-great grandfather enlist, anyway? ). What did they think of their jobs, and their families, and about why they were in their places in the world? Did they wonder what I'd be like? What did they wonder most about the future, and did they care?
So... tell me, Slashdot, on this fine, dark, cold Tuesday morning: If this technology, or something similar, had been available, what do you wish your ancestors would have left behind for you to read, or watch videos of, or hear? And why?
I would be careful of taking the dude without a grain of salt. And I speak from personal experience. A few jobs ago, I was beginning the career path into data forensics, with a private firm handling mostly civil litigation issues. In the course of our work, I interacted with a lot of people who performed computer forensics, in various capacities, in private and public sector companies.
At the beginning, I was young and didn't have a college background in CS, so I assumed most of the 30-40-something professionals (lots of current and ex-cops, including some with technical degrees) knew more than I did. As a knee-jerk reaction, my usual first instinct was to believe that the other guys knew more than me about forensics.
I began to realize after a few months that most of these people, whether self-qualified or with an EnCase certification, were pretty clueless. Guys get into forensics because they are the lone PC enthusiast in the local PD, and it's a cushier job than busting crack dealers. Their supervisors pay $3,000 a pop to send them to a certification-mill course (even the BEST forensics certs are 1/10 as much effort as a RHCE or MCSE, let alone a real cert like Cisco does), and they can suddenly be sent into court by a prosecutor. Five or six years later, Joe Law realizes that private consulting firms will triple his salary to do the same thing, and they take early retirement. But their actual work, in ALL of this, is about as hard as collecting shell casings from a crime scene.
The qualifications to become a certified, court-approved, well-paid "expert" in computer forensics are only *slightly* more meaningful that the qualifications to become an expert in Satanic Ritual Abuse. The certs are about whether you know how to use the software interface, not whether you can analyze the data. The fact that someone's testified before is circular logic. And years of experience don't mean anything because most of those years were spent running automated disk-acquisition programs and running searches for "*.jpg", NOT analysing anything. It is really, REALLY hard to tell the good from the bad.
Things may be starting to change, with more actual college course focusing on forensics, but I seriously doubt the integrity of the curriculum when (for one) there is so much financial incentive for schools to grab people with dubious qualifications to fill an instructor spot, and (for another) the entire instructor pool is made up of the gits I described above. Give the field another three generations, and MAYBE it'll be worth something. Til then, be skeptical.
(There ARE some high-quality, extremely good people in the field who I know... Mike in NY, and Bill in Seattle, big shout out. But the odds are not good that you'll get one of those guys on your side.)
Do you even KNOW anything about the law? There are some VERY good reasons in exising legal principles why the lower court ruled as they did. The fact that you're ignorant of the arguments doesn't make them not exist.
Going way, way back into the history of English law (from which the American courts are descended), there are a couple of basic operating principles that are echoed throughout legal decisions that seem to be more practical than theoretical. Case in point is stare decisis, the concept behind precedence in judicial decision-making: if a case or judge has previously decided the same or a similar issue, you are obliged to apply his logic to your case in a consistent fashion.
This principle doesn't come from an attempt to maximize "justice", at least not in the Aristotelean sense. It's a basically practical rule that imposes some consistency and durability on the legal system--that a claimant or defendant can be sure that the same rules apply to every situation (critical when most law is not statutory, "written-down" law), so the trust the courts more and don't try to settle things vigilante-style.
Returning to the question in front of us... Another general principle finding application in our law is this idea that once you're assented to something in practice, you're admitting to its correctness in theory, too. There's lots of examples, here's a few:
- child support and paternity: If you EVER admit paternity of a child, even falsely (or mistakenly), you will be liable in the future for child support no matter what. So if you accept a woman's assertion that you're the father of her baby and start paying, and then three or four years later you get a paternity test and find out she duped you, you're still fucked. (Some states have begun changing this through specific statutory law, recently, but not many.) Note that this usually applies even if you never explicitly admit paternity, but say if you co-habitate with the child's mother or provide financial assistance...
- jurisdictional challenges: If you believe that a court does not have jurisdiction to hear your case, but you show up to argue the case, anyway, the court views this as proof that you really do believe the court has proper jurisdiction. Once you've responding to a brief or made an appearance, you can never worm your way back out by trying to claim the court has no authority. (Sometimes, there is a strictly jurisdictional type hearing to address that one particular question, without granting it, but those are a relatively recent innovation.)
If your actions belie an agreement with the truth of a particular proposition of fact, the courts will generally hold you to that fact. If you relate this principle to patents, the lower court's original decision makes a lot more sense--if you thought the patent was invalid years ago, why didn't you sue THEN, instead of paying the license fees and waiting until now?
Generally, this is practical: the courts want things settled as soon as possible, and as finally as possible, to save them effort and to save everybody money. (Strange as it sounds, the law tends to discourage additional litigation through this principle.) Had the USSC made the opposite decision and let the lower court ruling stand, companies would be forced to do all their homework and look at every possible detail BEFORE they agree to licensing, because that would be their last chance, ever, to challenge patent validity.
Of course, there are problems with this approach, some of which may be related to the USSC decision:
- What if the facts change, because new prior art is discovered? In patent litigation, it might take some time for prior art to come to light, and since there's no unified "prior art" collection (like the collection of patents at the USPTO) it isn't reasonable to expect a claimant to be able to discover every possible potential prior art example in a finite amount of time.
- Patent litigation i
if it's not worth $10k to nVidia to open up the source code themselvs, then why should it be that the software shouldn't be worth more than that to develop?
You misunderstand why NVidia refuses to open their driver code. They're not just being dicks, and they probably aren't too scared to expose their own proprietary technologies, because there ARE benefits to gaining the acceptance of the OSS community that translate directly into more profit.
The real problem is that NVidia didn't write all of the driver code itself, from scratch. They incorporated copyrighted code licensed from other companies, probably some derivative and some word-for-word. They probably use patented algorithms and technologies, too. Several other companies hold rights over the NVidia source code, in such a way that NVidia can't just release it and contribute it to the Linux kernel without violating its own agreements, or exposing the Linux kernel to litigation.
(I really wish I had a quote about this, I cannot for the life of me remember where I read it, but I *believe* that an NVidia exec stated as much in a press conference or release. So unless you do your own research, take me with a grain of salt.)
there's likely to be an inquiry by nVidia, to ensure that it was not inappropriated from them
I find this highly unlikely. Unless one of the companies holding licenses over NVidia's head assumes that they contributed under the table to the OSS effort, there are no grounds whatsover to assume that code was "inappropriated" (sic). NVidia itself has no interest in preventing the release of an OSS driver--if anything, it will help sell me hardware and drive their market share upward as they become the "OSS-friendly" graphics card company. (That's worth a lot of fanboy forum toadying.)
NVidia probably could develop a fresh OSS driver for release into the Linux kernel, via the 'clean-room' approach. It would have to hire developers to do it, provide them with enough specs/code to get the job done but NOT provide them with the licensed code or algorithms, and sit back and watch the payroll fly out the door. This would probably cost them a lot more than $10,000, given the complexity of modern GPUs and the relative rarity of the software skills to do this kind of work. But if someone else wants to do it for free, all they'd have to do is stay the hell away and cross their fingers.
Because the firms running these plants are most likely foreign based. Meaning that the profits are probably shipped outside of the country. If the company was setting up jobs & providing services and money in the economy, then I'd almost be tempted to overlook the asthma & health problems associated with these companies. The problem is that I'm almost certain none of that wealth is returning to the local community.
So these people are working for peanuts? Did you sleep through econ 101, or what? IT DOESN'T MATTER WHICH COUNTRY THE PROFITS FLOW TO! The benefits of opening a factory in my town are that the jobs pay wages to local workers, which pumps money into the local economy.
Whether the owner is a local American, a fat cat in New York City, or a Japanese dude, the factory is still helping my standard of living and giving me a better job, so maybe I can send my kids to college and own a house. Even if the owner of the factory was a local, HE WOULD KEEP THE PROFITS, ANYWAY. It's a capitalist market system! It's not like because he's African, he's going to hand out big wads of cash to his countrymen just because they share a border and a government.
The only differences between domestic versus foreign ownership are:
- personal income taxes are not paid domestically; however, corporate income taxes, property taxes, payroll, import/export duties ARE paid locally, so the lost funds are probably minimal in relation to the total tax paid;
- less secondary economic impact of a domestic owner spending his profits in the local economy; given the huge proportion of industrial operating costs associated with labor (pwyroll), though, this is also probably minimal in relation to the amount of money paid directly to workers as wages;
Go hug a tree, Granola Boy. And think for five minutes before you spout off about subjects where you're as ignorant as this.
Rather than trot out some quasi-rational, paranoid, right-wing rhetoric about how the Federal Reserve Bank is a giant scam (like the sibling poster, who thankfully has been moderated down), I'll give you the obvious reason why this doesn't really matter:
Currency in circulation is a very small percentage of the overall amount of money in the economy that's handled in units of dollars. According to a quick google source , the total amount of U.S. currency in circulation in 1999 was about $470B. The US GDP was around $12T that year, so currency in circulation was less than 5% of our entire economic output.
The use of checks, in particular, limits the amount of currency we actually need to transact business. Large purchases are rarely negotiated in cash, mostly for reasons of convenience. If you want to buy a car from me for $10,000, you would normally write me a personal check for that amount (or get a cashier's check from the bank, if I didn't want to wait for the check to clear). When I deposit the check, my bank would just clear the check through your bank, which is entirely a matter of record-keeping. No cash needed.
Since bank deposits, asset valuations, lines of credit, securities and all sorts of other non-cash stores of value are counted in dollars, and are generally convertible to cash via some means, most economic activity (in terms of total value, not number of transactions) has nothing whatsoever to do with cash. Stock markets? Totally cashless. Mortgages on car and home purchases? Totally cashless. Hell, with Direct Deposit as common as it is, now, most people get paid wages without anything other than some record-keeping activity between banks.
If we had a somewhat more cash-based economy, you'd be right. Simply by printing more or less hard currency, the government could adjust its value dramatically.
You are 100% correct. I don't know what this guy's problem is--are IT and development are the only two departments allowed by law in his jusrisdiction? I mean, it's normal for an "Ask Slashdot" question to be totally stupid, but this one is pretty bad. I wish I knew what company it was, so I could avoid them. Someone always needs to lead a deployment project, and to be responsible for both the quality of the application AND the quality of the installation it's running on. This dude doesn't need a whole department, but he does need to have access to the time and knowledge of both the people writing the code and the people running the servers. A company that hasn't figured that out, yet, is courting trouble.
I take issue with other details of the poster's question, too:
1) Why is their production environment so unstable? If the server software (OS, middleware, support apps) is unstable, why the hell are they running it in production? If it's the specifics of their setup that are causing the problems, fire the IT director and get somebody in there who know how to engineer production systems. And then tell them to come up with a plan to fix all of it, give them a budget and time and people, and make sure they fix it.
2) If people aren't "in the loop" regarding changes that effect them, your mananagers need to be sacked. A large part of a manager's job is to keep issues that don't concern you from bothering you, and to make sure that you ARE aware of issues that do concern you. A sysadmin or software developer should have someone above him who sees the big picture, goes to inter-department meetings, and stays in the loop so he can keep his people in the loop.
3) Any idiot could tell you that the developers need a staging environment that replicates the production runtime environment as closely as possible. That means it includes whatever feature may bear on the application operation/health/efficiency, like load balancing and replication. The sysadmins set it up, the developers write-test-debug their code on it, and when they hit a release candidate, the deployment project manager checks out the release, installs it on the staging systems, and runs it through the QA process. If it doesn't work properly, the project manager sends it back to the developers with notes and they fix it. This *should* guarantee that the developers are aware of whatever production-environment issues exist--if not, fire your sysadmin because he lied to you when he said the staging environment was as identical to the production environment as possible.
Having lived through the kinds of startup environments where these issues crop up, I would guess that the current clusterfuck of affairs is jointly the fault of a lot of people. Management doesn't understand these issues--they think they can hire a bunch of sysadmins, a bunch of programmers, and appoint a director of IT and shit will get done. The people lower down fail to impress on management the need for proper processes, and they get lazy and don't want to be as careful and thorough as they should.
Of course, many companies do achieve a buyout without ever fixing their issues--but nobody will ever have a successful growth past that without realizing the right way to run production systems.
Ooh, but your analogy can extend! Sure, I can go down to Home Depot and buy some interior paint to spruce up my living room, or some 2x4s to build a new deck, or something like that. But have you ever heard of building inspections? Anytime you do serious work, like an addition or a new building or even heavy electrical, you're probably going to have to get permits, submit plans, and then have a licensed building inspector come out and check your work. And it if ain't done to code, you're going to have to rip it all out and hire somebody who know what they're doing.
The reason behind all this bureacratic, intrusive government oversight is that building codes are written in blood. Code specs have emerged over time because people died when buildings collapsed, or bad electrical wiring caused fires. The lesson is that if you're not doing something that could cause injury or death, go ahead and do it yourself. If not, you'd either better learn the right way to do it or hire somebody.
Code divides into similar categories, although I the decision point is different: Is the failure of this application tolerable? It may be a question of lives at risk (avionics, air traffic control, miliary systems, automotives braking/control, medical) or it might just be economic (my business stops and I lose money when our servers bug out). It's only prudent to analyze your situation and come to a rational decision about whether you want to tolerate the risks of hiring professionals (or learning professional methods and implementing them yourself), versus playing pickup ball.
Having lived through a couple of start-ups, both successful and unsuccessful, I can tell you that the different approaches do make a difference. I think that's what Bjarne is getting at: if the application matters, you'd better do it right.
I've heard this argument a lot, but it has problems. I get what you're saying--that the right to own pistols, semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns doesn't provide much answer to tanks rolling in the streets and soldiers with assault rifles. But there are a lot more dimensions to this issue.
First of all, recognize the premise: we're talking about the possiblity that the United States could devolve into a state of armed uprising, where non-government, civilian groups take violent action and the government responds by fielding the National Guard or the regular miliary on U.S. soil.
1) Such a situation would probably not spring up overnight. Armed movements don't start quietly, and they take time to get organized and get into action. The Federal government would certainly see this coming to head, and take emergency measures to immediatelty disarm the populace, regardless of the Constitution. They would also restrict a number of other basic civil liberties (speech, assembly, habeas corpus, etc.), on that same emergency basis. So by the time the conflict could even get going, there would be *no* legal private gun ownership.
2) Given (1), above, what impact does the CURRENT existence of firearms legally in private hands have on resolution of the eventual conflict?
This is not an easy question to answer. We can assume that at the outset of government response (seizing weapons from private homes), many people involved in or sympathetic to the anti-government cause will hide and stockpile guns. Civilians will see the government reponse coming (just as the government has anticipated the outbreak of an uprising), and they will have some time react. So the government will have a much harder time getting all of the guns. This would not really be an issue if we didn't start from a position of private, legal gun ownership.
Also, many people have learned how to shoot over the years with privately-owned handguns and rifles. Without private gun ownership, this wouldn't be a possibility. Even if some insurgent group suddenly managed to smuggle in a large enough cache of weapons, the lack of people with ANY experience handling guns would present a signficant problem--not only do you have to raise, hide, train, and feed your insurgent army, you also have to teach them the basic skill of soldiering from the group up. And learning how to shoot can take months of practice.
So I think it's fair to say that upholding private, legal gun ownership in our current situation leads us into any potential civil conflict with two important factors in play: more guns are available for an insurgent group to use, and more people are closer in skill to the point where they could plausibly participate in an armed uprising.
Granted, they'll probably still lose if it comes to shooting, but that's no guarantee. Especially in urban areas, a few clever snipers and ambushes can create a significant number of casualties for an invading force, especially if they know the urban terrain and have the civilian population's sympathy (viz. Iraq). The resolve of soldiers to marching into urban combat, already knowing that they're fighting against their own countrymen, is a pretty shaky proposition to being with. Commanders are generally less willing to press these situations tactically, because they know that their biggest edges (superior firepower, tighter training) are severely blunted.
All of which leads me to the Big Point: the government wil be much less likely to roll tanks in the streets if it see the possiblity of an extended, armed conflict and lots of bloodshed. If it fears an armed civilian reaction, it will be more cautious and less interested in directly pushing its military advantage. The government will look for more surreptitious solutions: talking with rebel leaders, assassinating key insurgent figures, and slowly starving them out. The political costs of pushing a shooting war in America are enormous.
To tell the truth, I'd much rather have that situation than one in which the government holds all the cards, regardless of my sympathies to any particular armed movement. It leaves more possible outcomes where people reach an accord, lay down their arms, and none of our cities are leveled by fighting.