Seriously, I was looking forward to another round of thoughtful analysis of what happens in the various Sony litigations.
It is certainly true that the SCO circus wound down to an exceedingly dull side show in the last year, and that Groklaw has been searching a bit to find material that really captures the imagination. But with a new, interesting Sony circus setting up in town, I would have thought that Groklaw would be back at the top of its game -- indeed recent postings on SCEA indicate that it is.
In SCO, it is clear that both sides, and maybe the judges, read Groklaw. That thoughtful and thorough analysis contributed, I'm sure materially, to the rightful outcome. It also gave thousands of folks an insight into this sort of protracted, cynical legal process that we would otherwise never have had. I always assumed that litigants like SCO were full of bovine droppings, but it took Groklaw to demonstrate the exact shade of brown, and what methods they might use to pretend that the droppings were solid gold.
I am grateful to PJ and all the other contributors to Groklaw for their efforts and the material benefits that have come from them. The world is a better place because of their efforts. Thank you.
Project Gutenberg is scrupulously careful and does not post material without a very solid case that they have a right to do so -- usually because things are public domain in the USA. PG Canada, Australia, Germany etc abide by their applicable laws just as scrupulously.
Whatever may be wrong with the copyright rules in the US (and elsewhere) it is certain that the rules are spelled out in enough detail to allow an unequivocal determination that these items are public domain in the US.
The authors don't have a leg to stand on and they know it. They are nothing but whiners.
Wait! This is good news: by patenting, Apple prevents HTC, Nokia, Moto and all the others from bricking your phone when you unlock it. All the more reason for buying an open phone.
ARM is the most successful and widely used architecture, not just in mobile devices but in all kinds of embedded systems, especially the ones geeks know and love, such as Arduino, hackable appliances and embedded Linux platforms. Although there are zillions of ARM implementations, including open cores than you can burn onto FPGAs in the privacy of your own home, they are all, for commercial purposes, licensed from ARM.
Having a technology that is do deeply embedded in ubiquitous cheap and geek friendly hardware fall under the hand of a company like Apple is not going to bode well. Apple can already have all the ARM chips they want at any price they can negotiate from a FAB. The only reasons to buy ARM are for their revenue stream, or to control _who else_ can get ARM chips. I doubt Apple is interested in the revenue stream from ARM licensing. My bet is they're out to torpedo competing products that are dependent on ARM architecture.
There is no question that conducted energy weapons are much safer than the weapon alternatives available to police. Gun-fired bean bags or even batons are much more likely to cause injury or even death than electric shock guns. The fine line here is that police are somehow mixing up the concept of "safer than a baton" with "no risk at all." Being struck by an energy weapon is not pleasant. If I were to go jolting random passers-by in the street, I would be charged with assault. Even that simple fact should be enough to cause police to think twice about using them. The fact that the RCMP had clearly decided to use their energy weapon before even seeing Robert Dziekanski, as Paul Pritchard's video makes plain [In the video, the sequence of conversation by the arriving RCMP is: "Are we going to user Tasers?" "Yes." "Where is he?"], tells us something unpleasant about their attitude towards the use of these things: they act as if there is absolutely no risk at all. But there is risk. People die from being shocked by these weapons.
Taser International aggressively defends their weapon's safety record, influencing investigations [Taser v. Kohler, Ohio, 2006.11.7421] and conducting PR campaigns to promote their image as safe. They have a reason to defend their use. Fully 25% of Taser International's revenue comes from cartridges for their weapons. [Taser International 2007 annual report] Taser International has a strong incentive to see not only that their weapons are issued to law enforcement organizations, but also that those weapons are then used as often as possible. A quarter of their income comes from the cartridge that is used each time one of their weapons is fired at someone. The vendor will do what it can to encourage the use of the weapons and defend the safety and reliability record that justifies this use.
Electric shock weapon proponents have gone so far as to invent a new hypothetical medical condition named "excited delirium" that is said to be the actual cause of death in cases where an electric shock weapon was used. The so called "thin skull" legal doctrine applies here though. This doctrine says that if a victim has an unusually susceptibility, such as a thin skull, this in no way diverts the blame from a blow to the head that causes injury. The fact that the injury might have been greater to the thin-skulled victim than to a "normal" person does not lessen the degree of fault with the blow -- or the electric shock.
Suppose one in a thousand people were severely allergic to pepper spray, such that upon being sprayed those people would lapse into anaphylactic shock, and possibly die. Even though safe for the vast majority, this small risk of severe reaction and possible death would have to be taken into account by the police when using the stuff. We have this situation with electric shock weapons. Out of 1,000 normal looking folks walking the street, 3 of them will drop dead if you give them a jolt from one of these things. You may call it "excited delirium" if you want -- or call it thin skull. But if someone's alive before getting shocked and dead afterward, it is clear where the blame belongs.
There is a small degree of danger in using these weapons, probably about the same level of danger as feeding a peanut butter sandwich to an elementary school kid. It's not enough to ban the use of the things by any stretch. But it should be enough to make the law enforcement forces much less cavalier about using them than they seem to be. There is a real risk in using these weapons and the police have to take that seriously.
I know -- IDEs suck. I just do everything directly from VI -- shell out to various tools, pipe output back into a VI buffer to look at it. It really does all anyone could need.
Secrecy is necessary because the process is fundamentally anti-democratic. Much of the electorate of most of the participants would be offended by the process and the elected officials would be embarrassed by what is going on. They would not be able to explain what they are up to and might have a hard time living it down. Some would be unelectable in future based on their sellout. Therefore secrecy is imperative.
As long as all the negotiations are behind closed doors, the elected officials can continue to cash their donation cheques and can pass the required legislation with a straight face. Even unpopular legislation can be forced through by pleading that they are bound to the legal constraints by an international treaty.
Secrecy is the means by which the industrial lobby can carry on its efforts. If any of this was exposed to the light of day, virtually all the participants would be forced to walk away from the table and the lobbyists would crawl back under the furniture like the cockroaches they are. None of this process could stand up if it got 1% of the scrutiny it deserves.
It's a lucky thing that Pirates have never heard of jet boats, because such a boat would skim harmlessly over any amount of nets or other prop-fouling stuff.
Agreed. I would go lower down the ladder still -- like charging someone for selling washers because they could be put into parking meters to fraudulently obtain parking.
Careful. Australia follows Life+50 which is different from the US rules, but is not strictly looser. There are items that are PD in the US that are NOT PD in Australia and vice versa. The real difference is the Life+ time limit being so long in the US that the only things currently in PD are PD due to the old published prior to 1923 rules. But there are pre 1923 items whose authors don't meet the Life+50 test. Lots of them.
There is a serious problem with journalism here. From TFA,
Nearly 22 centimetres (8.7 inches) long and 2.2 centimetres (one inch) in diameter
The photograph clearly shows that the object in question is not more than 2/3 the diameter of the person's finger. This is NOT 2.2cm -- it is probably around 10mm to 12mm. So how much of ANY of the rest of the info in this article accurate?
"For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is occasionally referred to as piracy (an early reference was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 when he said of his novel True-born Englishman : "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"). The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself. Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603."
This was pre-Berne, in an era when copyright rules operated only within a country. Of course even then the US media would not have said so, but this sort of thing was going on both ways. In fact it was American's routinely pirating copyrighted books for sale in the American market that was one of the drivers for instituting the Berne convention to begin with. Canada signed Berne in 1928. The US in 1989. Where was the urgency for fancy international copyright conventions then?
Too funny. I'm old enough to remember when non-relational databases were old-guard proven technology and the newfangled relational stuff was buggy, bloated, complex and unproven. I guess everything old is new again.
I think that the RIAA is signaling that they have an all-new tortured-logic murky legal theory that they intend to roll out. The target of the new theory is likely ISPs. We can look forward to ISPs being hit with bogus litigation in order to force their co-operation. The big guys who already do traffic shaping and content filtering will click their heels, shout "sieg heil" and close up file sharing -- the ones that haven't already. A few smaller ISPs will band together and fight it, until they run out of money and go out of business.
I don't see how the issue of exactly *how* the drive was searched by the police matters all that much. The thing that troubles me is the way they got their hands on the drive to begin with. It was given to the police by a third party. One that had an ax to grid against the accused.
Imagine if I want to crucify my tenant, what I do is go in, grab his computer, fill it full of bad stuff and then hand it to the police. You'd think the police would think twice about where the stuff is coming from and whether it is legitimate evidence in the first place. My take is that it is no more evidence against the accused than against the landlord or his accomplice.
This bit is inexplicable. You must have changes that are as-yet unpublished then, because if you've published the changes already, under a BSD license, then they can't be exclusively bought.
If you have unpublished work in progress, is there anything about your contract that would prevent you from publishing it before executing the contract? If the employment contract forbids this, then there is value on the unpublished work, and you should negotiate a cash value for that, separate from employment.
As for "outcast in the project's community" I doubt that very much. People are forced to put aside O/S projects all the time, and this is a natural situation when you have to feed yourself and the O/S project is a hobby. I would be not at all surprised if your paid job keeps you from doing this particular project as a hobby going forward. That kind of stuff happens. If you have contributed anything of value during your O/S participation, then you are a hero.
If there were a real crunch on IPv4 address space, you'd see 127/8 redefined as 127.0.0/24 to gain back 16 million odd addresses. You'd see legacy class A holders -- Hewlett Packard has at least 2, or 32 million addresses -- auctioning off or leasing out their address space. You'd see IANA raising cash by FTC-style address space auctions like they do with radio bandwidth. You'd see the huge swaths of "reserved" and "experimental" address space, like 240/8 through 254/8 being converted over to CIDR and used for normal IPv4 stuff.
Is this a look into the future where the majority of malware will function based on extortion?
The principle economic activity generated by malware is the virus scanner, firewall, intrusion detection business (and the spending on extra CPU, memory and bandwidth to offset their associated drag on performance). The only way this outlay of money keeps going into the virus scanner companies' pockets is if there are lots of new viruses all the time. Do you doubt that these "security" folks would act to protect their revenue stream? I bet that 80% of the new viruses are commissioned by the same people we pay to protect us from them.
In my opinion it's all nothing but extortion already.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I was looking forward to another round of thoughtful analysis of what happens in the various Sony litigations.
It is certainly true that the SCO circus wound down to an exceedingly dull side show in the last year, and that Groklaw has been searching a bit to find material that really captures the imagination. But with a new, interesting Sony circus setting up in town, I would have thought that Groklaw would be back at the top of its game -- indeed recent postings on SCEA indicate that it is.
In SCO, it is clear that both sides, and maybe the judges, read Groklaw. That thoughtful and thorough analysis contributed, I'm sure materially, to the rightful outcome. It also gave thousands of folks an insight into this sort of protracted, cynical legal process that we would otherwise never have had. I always assumed that litigants like SCO were full of bovine droppings, but it took Groklaw to demonstrate the exact shade of brown, and what methods they might use to pretend that the droppings were solid gold.
I am grateful to PJ and all the other contributors to Groklaw for their efforts and the material benefits that have come from them. The world is a better place because of their efforts. Thank you.
Project Gutenberg is scrupulously careful and does not post material without a very solid case that they have a right to do so -- usually because things are public domain in the USA. PG Canada, Australia, Germany etc abide by their applicable laws just as scrupulously.
Whatever may be wrong with the copyright rules in the US (and elsewhere) it is certain that the rules are spelled out in enough detail to allow an unequivocal determination that these items are public domain in the US.
The authors don't have a leg to stand on and they know it. They are nothing but whiners.
Everyone who tried to do something useful in APL, put up your hand.
Wait! This is good news: by patenting, Apple prevents HTC, Nokia, Moto and all the others from bricking your phone when you unlock it. All the more reason for buying an open phone.
I switched to FrostWire a while ago. I'd be interested to see how they try and come after an open source project.
ARM is the most successful and widely used architecture, not just in mobile devices but in all kinds of embedded systems, especially the ones geeks know and love, such as Arduino, hackable appliances and embedded Linux platforms. Although there are zillions of ARM implementations, including open cores than you can burn onto FPGAs in the privacy of your own home, they are all, for commercial purposes, licensed from ARM.
Having a technology that is do deeply embedded in ubiquitous cheap and geek friendly hardware fall under the hand of a company like Apple is not going to bode well. Apple can already have all the ARM chips they want at any price they can negotiate from a FAB. The only reasons to buy ARM are for their revenue stream, or to control _who else_ can get ARM chips. I doubt Apple is interested in the revenue stream from ARM licensing. My bet is they're out to torpedo competing products that are dependent on ARM architecture.
There is no question that conducted energy weapons are much safer than the weapon alternatives available to police. Gun-fired bean bags or even batons are much more likely to cause injury or even death than electric shock guns. The fine line here is that police are somehow mixing up the concept of "safer than a baton" with "no risk at all." Being struck by an energy weapon is not pleasant. If I were to go jolting random passers-by in the street, I would be charged with assault. Even that simple fact should be enough to cause police to think twice about using them. The fact that the RCMP had clearly decided to use their energy weapon before even seeing Robert Dziekanski, as Paul Pritchard's video makes plain [In the video, the sequence of conversation by the arriving RCMP is: "Are we going to user Tasers?" "Yes." "Where is he?"], tells us something unpleasant about their attitude towards the use of these things: they act as if there is absolutely no risk at all. But there is risk. People die from being shocked by these weapons.
Taser International aggressively defends their weapon's safety record, influencing investigations [Taser v. Kohler, Ohio, 2006.11.7421] and conducting PR campaigns to promote their image as safe. They have a reason to defend their use. Fully 25% of Taser International's revenue comes from cartridges for their weapons. [Taser International 2007 annual report] Taser International has a strong incentive to see not only that their weapons are issued to law enforcement organizations, but also that those weapons are then used as often as possible. A quarter of their income comes from the cartridge that is used each time one of their weapons is fired at someone. The vendor will do what it can to encourage the use of the weapons and defend the safety and reliability record that justifies this use.
Electric shock weapon proponents have gone so far as to invent a new hypothetical medical condition named "excited delirium" that is said to be the actual cause of death in cases where an electric shock weapon was used. The so called "thin skull" legal doctrine applies here though. This doctrine says that if a victim has an unusually susceptibility, such as a thin skull, this in no way diverts the blame from a blow to the head that causes injury. The fact that the injury might have been greater to the thin-skulled victim than to a "normal" person does not lessen the degree of fault with the blow -- or the electric shock.
Suppose one in a thousand people were severely allergic to pepper spray, such that upon being sprayed those people would lapse into anaphylactic shock, and possibly die. Even though safe for the vast majority, this small risk of severe reaction and possible death would have to be taken into account by the police when using the stuff. We have this situation with electric shock weapons. Out of 1,000 normal looking folks walking the street, 3 of them will drop dead if you give them a jolt from one of these things. You may call it "excited delirium" if you want -- or call it thin skull. But if someone's alive before getting shocked and dead afterward, it is clear where the blame belongs.
There is a small degree of danger in using these weapons, probably about the same level of danger as feeding a peanut butter sandwich to an elementary school kid. It's not enough to ban the use of the things by any stretch. But it should be enough to make the law enforcement forces much less cavalier about using them than they seem to be. There is a real risk in using these weapons and the police have to take that seriously.
I know -- IDEs suck. I just do everything directly from VI -- shell out to various tools, pipe output back into a VI buffer to look at it. It really does all anyone could need.
Secrecy is necessary because the process is fundamentally anti-democratic. Much of the electorate of most of the participants would be offended by the process and the elected officials would be embarrassed by what is going on. They would not be able to explain what they are up to and might have a hard time living it down. Some would be unelectable in future based on their sellout. Therefore secrecy is imperative.
As long as all the negotiations are behind closed doors, the elected officials can continue to cash their donation cheques and can pass the required legislation with a straight face. Even unpopular legislation can be forced through by pleading that they are bound to the legal constraints by an international treaty.
Secrecy is the means by which the industrial lobby can carry on its efforts. If any of this was exposed to the light of day, virtually all the participants would be forced to walk away from the table and the lobbyists would crawl back under the furniture like the cockroaches they are. None of this process could stand up if it got 1% of the scrutiny it deserves.
It's a lucky thing that Pirates have never heard of jet boats, because such a boat would skim harmlessly over any amount of nets or other prop-fouling stuff.
Agreed. I would go lower down the ladder still -- like charging someone for selling washers because they could be put into parking meters to fraudulently obtain parking.
Australia, which has much looser copyrights
Careful. Australia follows Life+50 which is different from the US rules, but is not strictly looser. There are items that are PD in the US that are NOT PD in Australia and vice versa. The real difference is the Life+ time limit being so long in the US that the only things currently in PD are PD due to the old published prior to 1923 rules. But there are pre 1923 items whose authors don't meet the Life+50 test. Lots of them.
There is a serious problem with journalism here. From TFA,
Nearly 22 centimetres (8.7 inches) long and 2.2 centimetres (one inch) in diameter
The photograph clearly shows that the object in question is not more than 2/3 the diameter of the person's finger. This is NOT 2.2cm -- it is probably around 10mm to 12mm. So how much of ANY of the rest of the info in this article accurate?
Do you really think copyright infringers were called "pirates" in 1897?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
"For electronic and audio-visual media, unauthorized reproduction and distribution is occasionally referred to as piracy (an early reference was made by Daniel Defoe in 1703 when he said of his novel True-born Englishman : "Its being Printed again and again, by Pyrates"). The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself. Even prior to the 1709 enactment of the Statute of Anne, generally recognized as the first copyright law, the Stationers' Company of London in 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly on publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603."
This was pre-Berne, in an era when copyright rules operated only within a country. Of course even then the US media would not have said so, but this sort of thing was going on both ways. In fact it was American's routinely pirating copyrighted books for sale in the American market that was one of the drivers for instituting the Berne convention to begin with. Canada signed Berne in 1928. The US in 1989. Where was the urgency for fancy international copyright conventions then?
Too funny. I'm old enough to remember when non-relational databases were old-guard proven technology and the newfangled relational stuff was buggy, bloated, complex and unproven. I guess everything old is new again.
Well I work for and we ! Frankly, otherwise. Furthermore , and I really don't see the problem.
I think that the RIAA is signaling that they have an all-new tortured-logic murky legal theory that they intend to roll out. The target of the new theory is likely ISPs. We can look forward to ISPs being hit with bogus litigation in order to force their co-operation. The big guys who already do traffic shaping and content filtering will click their heels, shout "sieg heil" and close up file sharing -- the ones that haven't already. A few smaller ISPs will band together and fight it, until they run out of money and go out of business.
Please learn how to better say it.
I call split infinitive on "to say", Mr Pedantic. Should be "how to say it better."
I don't see how the issue of exactly *how* the drive was searched by the police matters all that much. The thing that troubles me is the way they got their hands on the drive to begin with. It was given to the police by a third party. One that had an ax to grid against the accused.
Imagine if I want to crucify my tenant, what I do is go in, grab his computer, fill it full of bad stuff and then hand it to the police. You'd think the police would think twice about where the stuff is coming from and whether it is legitimate evidence in the first place. My take is that it is no more evidence against the accused than against the landlord or his accomplice.
but also my changes leading up to this moment
This bit is inexplicable. You must have changes that are as-yet unpublished then, because if you've published the changes already, under a BSD license, then they can't be exclusively bought.
If you have unpublished work in progress, is there anything about your contract that would prevent you from publishing it before executing the contract? If the employment contract forbids this, then there is value on the unpublished work, and you should negotiate a cash value for that, separate from employment.
As for "outcast in the project's community" I doubt that very much. People are forced to put aside O/S projects all the time, and this is a natural situation when you have to feed yourself and the O/S project is a hobby. I would be not at all surprised if your paid job keeps you from doing this particular project as a hobby going forward. That kind of stuff happens. If you have contributed anything of value during your O/S participation, then you are a hero.
Wall Street's high-tech data centers become the crown jewels for buyers of distressed assets
This is like calling the van-loads of Herman-Miller chairs that were the only marketable assets of so many dot-com fiascos the "crown jewels".
If there were a real crunch on IPv4 address space, you'd see 127/8 redefined as 127.0.0/24 to gain back 16 million odd addresses. You'd see legacy class A holders -- Hewlett Packard has at least 2, or 32 million addresses -- auctioning off or leasing out their address space. You'd see IANA raising cash by FTC-style address space auctions like they do with radio bandwidth. You'd see the huge swaths of "reserved" and "experimental" address space, like 240/8 through 254/8 being converted over to CIDR and used for normal IPv4 stuff.
None of that is happening.
usually when I check it there is nothing interesting, but every so often there's something wonderful
This describes Slashdot exactly.
Is this a look into the future where the majority of malware will function based on extortion?
The principle economic activity generated by malware is the virus scanner, firewall, intrusion detection business (and the spending on extra CPU, memory and bandwidth to offset their associated drag on performance). The only way this outlay of money keeps going into the virus scanner companies' pockets is if there are lots of new viruses all the time. Do you doubt that these "security" folks would act to protect their revenue stream? I bet that 80% of the new viruses are commissioned by the same people we pay to protect us from them.
In my opinion it's all nothing but extortion already.