The article was written by a guy at CD Baby. CD Baby's pitch is that they are a online music store will sell anyones album and even issue the artist a UPC for their album if they want one, all for a reasonably low setup fee and per-copy fee.
He was invited to this invitation-only meeting, where Apple was pitching their indie-contract to indie lables. Obviously, Apple thinks that CD Baby would qualify as a "label" or a "partner", and act as a gateway for Apple.
If that's the case, then anybody who submits their album to CD Baby could potentially ask for it to be sent on to iTunes. Anybody. Of course, there may be a higher setup fee for that, as its more work for CD Baby.
He didn't see a contract, so it's unclear how much money the "labels" are getting per song or album sold. CD Baby's current model is the artist sets the album retail price, and CD Baby takes a fixed cut per copy sold for their share of the retail price. I imagine in this case, of the $0.99/song, Apple will take a cut, and then CD Baby will take a cut, but who can tell how big those cuts will be?
Actually, a quote earlier indicated that Apple didn't want to deal with 200 lawyers. That, as much as anything, explains why they are channeling things through labels and partners.
It also mean fewer checks that need to be cut every month, fewer reports to be generated, etc.
Obviously, if they wanted to deal with CD Baby (who does all the essential services of a label, but will work for anyone for $35 plus $4/album), they aren't trying to shut people out.
The key, as I read that section, and others, is that by repackaging the physical videotapes, Dastar would be misrepresenting the origin of the physical videotapes. However, Dastar made new videotapes, and the very part of the paragraph you quoted in part makes that clear:
If "origin" refers only to the manufacturer or producer of the physical "goods" that are made available to the public (in this case the video tapes) then Dastar was the origin. If, however, "origin" includes the creator of the underlying work that Dastar copied, then someone else (perhaps Fox) was the origin of Dastar's product. At the bottom, we must decide S43(a)(1)(A) of the Lanham act means by "origin" of "goods".
After discussing the dictionary definition of "origin" and "goods", Scalia states unequivocably (on page 11 of the PDF you quoted) that
But as used in the Lanham act, the phrase "origin of goods" is in our view incapable of connoting the person or entity that originated the ideas or communications that "goods" embody or contain.
Traditional uses of the Lanham act, it states, are about misrepresenting physical goods. No one assumes (or so the court states) that Coke was the first people to come up with their formula, but they do assume that Coke stands behind products imprinted with the Coke logo. The idea of "Coke" isn't protected by the Lanham act, but the source of the product is.
The opinion considers if this might be different for intellectual products, where the ideas and communication is what is being sold. There, the buying public may have a vested interest in the origin of the ideas and communication. However....
The problem with this argument according special treatment to communicative products is that it causes the Lanham act to conflict with the law of Copyright, which addresses the subject specifically. The right to copy, and to copy without attribution, once a copyright has expired...passes to the public.
That statement (including a quotation and citation omitted) is the beginning of the last paragraph on Page 12, and the paragraph continues with citations from previous SCOTUS decisions concerning trademarks, patents, and copyrights well into the next page, all backing the idea that trademarks (which is what the Lanham act is about) cover origin of physical goods, while copyright covers origin of communicative ideas.
Besides, the opinion points out, descerning "origin" is difficult. A videotape of the MGM movie Carmen Jones, to use Scalia's example, copied after the expiration of the copyright, would presumably require attribution ot MGM (producer of the movie), Oscar Hamerstein II (author of musical the movie was based), Georges Bizet (author of opera the musical was based), and Prospero Merimee (the original novelist). In regard to Dastar's videotapes, which were put together from the work of newsreel photographers, the Court opines "We do not think the Lanham act requires this search for the source of the Nile and all its tributaries".
I think the court is very clear that the Lanham Act does not cover creative origin of communicative goods. If Dastar had merely reproduced Fox's original tapes, without attribution, it would have been just as OK as doing "arguably minor" modifications.
My reading of the Dastar decision was not that Dastar evaded the Latham act by making modifications to the original work, but rather that the point-of-origin provisions of the Latham act cannot apply to origin of creation for patentable or copyrightable ideas and expressions.
Dastar was accused of "reverse-passing-off", or selling a product made by someone else as their own, as if a Coke distributor filled Coke bottles with Pepsi and sold it as Coke. Under traditional interpretation of the Latham act (which was accepted by the Court) this is as prohibited as "passing-off", or selling their product with someone elses trade-mark on it. Both are misrepresenting the "point of origin" of the product.
The court ruled that the "point of origin" provisions of the Latham Act could not be construed to apply to the authorship of a copyrightable work.
Scalia pointed out the double-edged result of a contrary result: If Dastar had simply repackaged and resold Fox's tape series without modification, Fox could have sued them for "passing off", but if they relabelled it and didn't credit Fox, Fox did sue for "reverse-pasing-off".
Passing off someone else's copyrightable work as your own is "plagiarism", and covered by copyright. Scalia also asserted that allowing the Latham act to protect against plagiarism would, in effect, allow the Latham Act to effect a perpetual copyright, which is forbidden to it.
Fox lost the original copyright when it didn't renew it; they make no claims otherwise. Therefore, the Court rules, Fox has no claim against plagierism.
All Supreme Court cases, if the lower court is overturned, are remanded to the lower court "for further proceedings consistant with this opinion". This is boilerplate. The Supreme Court doesn't make the final decision on the case, they just answer narrowly tailored questions of law -- upon which the case usually hangs.
The kicker with this case is that it is unknown if the copyright on the original book is still valid. The copyright was renewed as a "work for hire", but the original author took tax advantages for the book as if he hadn't been hired to write it. Dastar may still be on the hook for these videos.
There were several reports of passengers finding out on one of the September 11th 2001 flights about the hijackings-in-progress via cell phone. When they were told that the other three hijackings ended with deliberate crashes into buildings, they overpowered their hijackers and crashed into a field.
Neutrinos were theorized to explain issues with beta decay.
When physicists started studying how neutrons decays in beta decay, they saw each neutron decaying into a proton and an electron. They also knew, from conservation of momentum and energy, that when a stationry particle decayed into to particles, the resulting two particles should have paths 180 degrees apart from each other, and should have a fixed velocity relationship.
Neither of these results held for beta decay. THe proton and electron did not shoot off in opposite directions, but rather at a variety of angles (and very rarely was that angle a straight angle). The velocities also had some variance, which shouldn't have happened. So either something odd was going on, or conservation of momentum and energy was broken.
Of the several explanations proposed, the one that made the most sense was that a third particle was involved. But the physics of the situation indicated that it had to have a very small rest mass and a very high velocity and be electrically neutral -- hence, the name "neutrino".
The original theories proposed a zero rest mass, but there was no good justification for that. Subsequent theories proposed interesting results of the neutrino had a small, but non-zero rest mass. The experimentalists have, until recently, said their results were "consistant with zero rest mass".
Well, I'm thinking "I wish I could use phoenix, but I need Mozilla for the mail client." So anything which puts pressure on Minotaur to emerge sounds good to me.
According to the Bitstream page for Vera, the ten fonts are Vera Sans, Vera Sans Oblique, Vera Sans Bold, Vera Sans Bold Oblique, Vera Sans Mono, Vera Sans Mono Oblique, Vera Sans Mono Bold, Vera Sans Mono Bold Oblique, Vera Serif and Vera Serif Bold.
It appears that none of the Vera family have italic versions, just obliques (and there is a difference between italic and oblique), and the Vera Serif family doesn't have Oblique forms.
I would love to have a Vera Serif Italic and Vera Serif Italic Bold to go with the rest of the family, but I'm not the one paying Bitstream to do this.
When the ignorant make fun of that, ask them if being wrong would mean that Christ didn't die for them. If they say ``no'', ask them why they are fussing about trivia.
Good argument. Unfortunately, I'm not Christian -- I don't personally accept the the statement you give as the foundation of your faith. Somehow, I doubt that your response would work well if I tried it myself on Christian fundamentalists who think, in your words, that Genesis is a "How-to for creation".
Since they say it takes 2-3 weeks to prepare the transcripts and put them on the web site, and since Monday (two days ago) was the first day of oral arguments since April 15th, I'm not surprised there weren't any transcripts more recent than that.
You're 20, you know you have a long life in front of you. You just found out that the song you wrote was liked by a top Hollywood director and will be in his next, most-likely-Oscar-nominated movie. Your royalty checks as song-writer will be substantial and will keep coming for the rest of your life -- and beyond, as the movie gets played and played and played around the world for decades on TV and in the video stores.
What incentive do you have to create new songs? Why not simply live off of that one song for the rest of your life?
I think that copyrights should be for a fixed, limited, non-extendable time not dependent on the death of the creator. It should be long enough that the creator has a reasonable chance to market and benefit from the copyright, but not long enough that the creator can be guaranteed a free-ride forever.
If copyright is held for, say, 20 years (period), then:
A: Copyright holders have reasonable opportunity to benefit from the copyright.
B: Copyright holders have an incentive to create new works
C: Buyers and sellers of IP rights have a fixed basis to compute future value of copyrights.
(Explanation of C: If I were to create a valuble copyrighted work, and I wished to sell the copyrights to a third party, there are ways to compute the discounted future value of the copyright, but they depend on the lifetime of the copyright. If the copyright is, say, life+5 years, then a copyright can vary in length from 5 years to 75 years (or more), depending on when the author dies. Obviously, the longer copyright is more valuble. So the value of the copyright with an unknown life is harder to compute than one of known life.)
Actually, you wouldn't need to find 128 different angles to illuminate the chip with. If I am understanding the technology correctly (which isn't necessarily a given, since none of the linked articles even show a picture of the device, or go into any sort of tech detail), it should be possible to generate a unique pattern by shining two incident beams on it that is non-linearly related to the patterns from each beam individually. So you could devise an interrogator that had (say) 16 lasers shining on the token at 16 different angles, or even 16 different positions, that would give you 65535 different patterns to interrogate against.
However, I'm not sure I understand your encryption technique, and I don't have a lot of confidence in it. Could you explain in more detail how you'd use it for encryption?
I've been a vegetarian (ovo-lacto) from birth. My rule is "if you have to kill and animal to get it, I won't eat it. I will eat gametes but not zygotes." My reasons for being vegetarian have nothing to do with the well-being of the animals; I use leather, prefer eggs from factory-raised hens (held in small cages and fed hormone-laden feed, with no exercise, turning them into egg-producing machines) to free-range hens (who have better overall health and living conditions, but also have access to roosters). I feel I'm living proof you can get fat and diabetic from a vegetarian diet, and I'm reasonably happy with my health. I recognise that I have canines for tearing flesh and an intestinal tract short enoug to clear itself of meat, but I won't eat it to test that. It probably would be healthier to consume some meat, but I don't care.
I'm vegetarian for personal religious reasons. I don't insist that others be vegetarian.
Some portable MP3 players do come with FM tuners. The salient sales factors that led me to get the one I got (a RioVolt SP250) was a) support for CD and MP3/WMA on CD-ROM (and the OS-independence that goes with that), b) FM radio built in, and c) flash-upgradeable firmware (so it could eventually support Ogg Vorbis).
I've already emailed Sonic Blue customer support about Ogg Vorbis support, so hopefully soon they will listen to us and provide it.
I believe in the US, the mile is defined in terms of feet (1 mile = 5280 feet), feet defined in terms of inches (1 foot = 12 inches), inches in terms of centimeters (1 inch = 2.54 cm exactly), centimeters in terms of meters, and the meter is defined (since the early 80's, I believe) in terms of the second and the speed of light. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of hyperfine transitions of cesium-80, if I remember correctly.
A resistor converts a voltage drop into current, and in a very prescribed, predictable amount.
LED's work longest when the current through them is low, and they have a constant voltage drop across them. To change the brightness of an LED, you change the current going through it, but the voltage drop remains the same. So to get a dimmer, you need a constant voltage, variable current power supply. A battery and a resistor does that.
Some math: Let's say you have an LED rated at 3.5V drop, 20mA max current, and a wattage of 0.07W (by my calculation. You have 3 Alkaline cells in series (1.5V/cell, 4.5V total) powering it. You must drop the voltage by 1V, and limit the current to 20mA total. That calls for a 50Ohm resistor, and a total power usage by the resistor of 20mW. Add a potentiometer in series (0-200Ohm), and you have a dimmer that takes your LED from using 90mw to using 18mW. Not exactly a power-hog.
Rule 1: Forbid for-profit and tax-exempt corporations from participation in the political process. Corporation may not contribute to political campaigns, lobby government officials (elected or appointed), or pay others to do so. This would mean that if Michael Eisner chose to testify before Congress, Disney would need to record that time against his vacation or paid sick time, or not pay him for that time at all.
I think this would go a long way towards taking politicians out of corporate pockets.
RMS didn't like KDE because it was not "free" -- and in fact, in his opinion, it's position was threatening Free Software in general (it undermined the GPL, it took people away from developing Free alternatives, etc). So he argued against KDE, in favor of GNOME, a truely Free alternative.
KDE is now Free, in part because of serious amounts of lobbying by the Free Software Community, including RMS. KDE is no longer the bad guy, RMS no longer has a beef with KDE.
Now that the "Free KDE" battle is over, RMS is now saying "Um guys... we won -- ALL of us (KDE and GNOME) won, last year. It's time, past time, to stop sabre-rattling at each other". Since Qt became GPL-compatable, I haven't seen RMS stoking the GNOME v. KDE fires. Now he's trying to quench the GNOME v. KDE fires, because leaving them smouldering is bad for Free Software in general.
It seems to me that if you have a sine wave with a frequency (or bandwidth) of 1, and you sample it at a sampling rate of 2, then you are expecting more than the sampling theorem will give you. What's the waveform that samples at f(0)=0, f(pi) = 0, f(2*pi) = 0, f(3*pi) = 0, etc, and no frequency greater than one wave every 2*pi? The only choice is c*sin(k*x), where c is 0 or k is 1. What's the waveform that under the same condition samples f(0)=1, f(pi)=-1,... f(n*pi)=-1^n? The only choice is cos(x).
Interesting article. What's more interesting is that the last time I was at Arlington National Cemetery, I noticed the rows and rows and rows of white crosses. As such, the last paragraph threw the entire article into question for me.
Since this Sklyarov incident began, I've heard lots of rumors about what he actually was charged with -- giving the speech, writing the program, selling the program, etc -- but very little authoritative about why he was arrested.
Now that he's been indicted, and the indictments are public, we can find out -exactly- with what he's been accused of doing.
Once I know what he's accused of doing, I can direct my outrage better -- The US shouldn't be charging him with writing the "circumvention device" when he wrote it in Russia where it was legal (and thus outside of US jurisdiction); or, the US shouldn't be charging him with giving a speech about it because that violates 1st Amendment protections of free speech; or, the US shouldn't be charging him with selling it because it wasn't him, it was a third party or his employer, not him, that was selling it.
I checked out Dr. Hrisoulis's armoury, and I can find nothing to back up your repeated claims that the two researchers referred to in this story were plaigerizing the work of Dr. Hrisoulis.
In fact, from reading the articles that others have cited about their work, and from reading Dr. Hrisoulis's web site, it is very clear that their two works are completely different in intent and technique. Dr. Hrisoulis does not claim, on his web site at least, that Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray copied his work.
Dr. Hrisoulis is a master at pattern welding. (For others besides cprael reading this, I recommend going to his armoury and looking at his work. It's really worth it), and freely admits his technique and skill. To his credit, he has also written three books on his techniques, for the purposes of sharing that technique and his hard-won knowledge to others. As he points out, pattern welding is a technique that has been used for centuries by people all over the world.
However, Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray are not doing pattern welding -- nor do they claim to be. In their articles, they admit that pattern welding has been used for centuries and many different cultures to produce blades with Damascine patterns. It is clear that they understand the process and technique.
What they claim is that research has long shown that the best museum examples of Damascus Steel blades are forged out of a single alloy, rather than multiple alloys as pattern welding does. This technique has long vanished, and apparently flourished in India and Persia for a relatively short time (a few hundred years). What they claim to have done is developed a process for reliably recreating the alloy as well as recreating the special forging techniques needed to create properly formed wootz-metal Damascus steel blades.
Based on what I read on Dr. Hrisoulis's site, I seems reasonable to me that he would be happy to see Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray's work continue. Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray are recreating an bringing alive again a lost ancient metalworking art, which seems right in line with Dr. Hrisoulis's goals and asperations.
What the ruling is saying is that in order to point a device that can read infrared THROUGH WALLS (infrared normally can't be "seen" or "heard" by humans unassisted), you need to have a warrant.
Er, no it doesn't. In fact, the police were arguing specifically that since the thermal imaging system they were using could NOT read infrared THROUGH WALLS, it was OK -- because they could only 'see' the heat on the outside of the building, not through the walls.
The majority didn't buy it. Sure, they accepted the contention by the government that all they could detect were 'amorphous hot spots' on the exterior of the house, but they didn't accept that that made the use of the the infrared imager not a 'search'. In fact, they said, specifically, that their bright-line definition of a 'search' (requiring a warrant is:
We think that obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical ?intrusion into a constitutionally protected area,? Silverman , 365 U.S., at 512, constitutes a search?at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use. This assures preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted. On the basis of this criterion, the information obtained by the thermal imager in this case was the product of a search.
The police could not have detected those "amorphous blobs of heat" without tresspassing a constitutionally protected area: the house or the curtilage around it.
The cases they cite (specifically US v. Karo) have a similar viewpoint. In the Karo case, the DEA placed an electronic tracer in a can of ether that an informant was selling to the suspect. They then used that tracer to follow the can around for a few weeks until it they found the cocaine lab they were looking for. The court found that the use of the tracer to find the can of ether was an unconstitutional search, for much the same reason as this case.
But it isn't about being able to see through walls.
The good news is that his current publishers are on the ball, and the American Hardcover editions are now released at the same time as the English hardcovers. In fact, the American edition of "Thief of Time" came out about a half-week BEFORE the English edition.
The bad news is that the American edition covers are bad. And by bad, I mean hideous. And have little to do with the actual story. The cover for Thief of Time has as iconography four squares contaiing a picture of a rat. Since there are no rats in the story (except the Death of Rats), it makes no sense to me.
Because of the covers alone, I'll keep ordering my Discworld books from England. The difference in cost? $5/book or so. Not bad on a $20 hardcover.
Re:qmail isn't Open Source - Because it's not GPL?
on
New Mail RFCs Released
·
· Score: 1
Check out this page for the closest I've been able to find to a copyright license to qmail.
The softwarelaw.html page you cited give DJB's take on what your rights are after you have legally received a copy -- you can make backups, modify it, etc. He says nothing about distributing further copies, nor distributing your changes. And he's right. The law he cites allows making of copies for yourself for specific reasons ("(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an
essential step in the utilization of the computer program in
conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other
manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes
only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that
continued possession of the computer program should cease to be
rightful. "), but not the distributions of the copies or "adaptations".
For that, you need the permission of the copyright owner, and DJB won't give it for modified versions (what he says is "If you want to distribute modified versions of qmail (including ports, no matter how minor the changes are) you'll have to get my approval. This does not
mean approval of your distribution method, your intentions, your e-mail address, your haircut, or any other irrelevant information. It means a detailed
review of the exact package that you want to distribute."
What he says about licenses on the software law page and on the distribution page are not contradictory, but rather deal with different portions of the law. He does not believe in "shrinkwrap" licenses, so he doesn't use one. He demands absolute control over what gets distributed, so he uses a very-tight copyright license.
Slashdot Mirror
The article was written by a guy at CD Baby. CD Baby's pitch is that they are a online music store will sell anyones album and even issue the artist a UPC for their album if they want one, all for a reasonably low setup fee and per-copy fee.
He was invited to this invitation-only meeting, where Apple was pitching their indie-contract to indie lables. Obviously, Apple thinks that CD Baby would qualify as a "label" or a "partner", and act as a gateway for Apple.
If that's the case, then anybody who submits their album to CD Baby could potentially ask for it to be sent on to iTunes. Anybody. Of course, there may be a higher setup fee for that, as its more work for CD Baby.
He didn't see a contract, so it's unclear how much money the "labels" are getting per song or album sold. CD Baby's current model is the artist sets the album retail price, and CD Baby takes a fixed cut per copy sold for their share of the retail price. I imagine in this case, of the $0.99/song, Apple will take a cut, and then CD Baby will take a cut, but who can tell how big those cuts will be?
Actually, a quote earlier indicated that Apple didn't want to deal with 200 lawyers. That, as much as anything, explains why they are channeling things through labels and partners.
It also mean fewer checks that need to be cut every month, fewer reports to be generated, etc.
Obviously, if they wanted to deal with CD Baby (who does all the essential services of a label, but will work for anyone for $35 plus $4/album), they aren't trying to shut people out.
My reading of the Dastar decision was not that Dastar evaded the Latham act by making modifications to the original work, but rather that the point-of-origin provisions of the Latham act cannot apply to origin of creation for patentable or copyrightable ideas and expressions.
Dastar was accused of "reverse-passing-off", or selling a product made by someone else as their own, as if a Coke distributor filled Coke bottles with Pepsi and sold it as Coke. Under traditional interpretation of the Latham act (which was accepted by the Court) this is as prohibited as "passing-off", or selling their product with someone elses trade-mark on it. Both are misrepresenting the "point of origin" of the product.
The court ruled that the "point of origin" provisions of the Latham Act could not be construed to apply to the authorship of a copyrightable work.
Scalia pointed out the double-edged result of a contrary result: If Dastar had simply repackaged and resold Fox's tape series without modification, Fox could have sued them for "passing off", but if they relabelled it and didn't credit Fox, Fox did sue for "reverse-pasing-off".
Passing off someone else's copyrightable work as your own is "plagiarism", and covered by copyright. Scalia also asserted that allowing the Latham act to protect against plagiarism would, in effect, allow the Latham Act to effect a perpetual copyright, which is forbidden to it.
Fox lost the original copyright when it didn't renew it; they make no claims otherwise. Therefore, the Court rules, Fox has no claim against plagierism.
All Supreme Court cases, if the lower court is overturned, are remanded to the lower court "for further proceedings consistant with this opinion". This is boilerplate. The Supreme Court doesn't make the final decision on the case, they just answer narrowly tailored questions of law -- upon which the case usually hangs.
The kicker with this case is that it is unknown if the copyright on the original book is still valid. The copyright was renewed as a "work for hire", but the original author took tax advantages for the book as if he hadn't been hired to write it. Dastar may still be on the hook for these videos.
You have been trolled.
There were several reports of passengers finding out on one of the September 11th 2001 flights about the hijackings-in-progress via cell phone. When they were told that the other three hijackings ended with deliberate crashes into buildings, they overpowered their hijackers and crashed into a field.
Neutrinos were theorized to explain issues with beta decay.
When physicists started studying how neutrons decays in beta decay, they saw each neutron decaying into a proton and an electron. They also knew, from conservation of momentum and energy, that when a stationry particle decayed into to particles, the resulting two particles should have paths 180 degrees apart from each other, and should have a fixed velocity relationship.
Neither of these results held for beta decay. THe proton and electron did not shoot off in opposite directions, but rather at a variety of angles (and very rarely was that angle a straight angle). The velocities also had some variance, which shouldn't have happened. So either something odd was going on, or conservation of momentum and energy was broken.
Of the several explanations proposed, the one that made the most sense was that a third particle was involved. But the physics of the situation indicated that it had to have a very small rest mass and a very high velocity and be electrically neutral -- hence, the name "neutrino".
The original theories proposed a zero rest mass, but there was no good justification for that. Subsequent theories proposed interesting results of the neutrino had a small, but non-zero rest mass. The experimentalists have, until recently, said their results were "consistant with zero rest mass".
Well, I'm thinking "I wish I could use phoenix, but I need Mozilla for the mail client." So anything which puts pressure on Minotaur to emerge sounds good to me.
According to the Bitstream page for Vera, the ten fonts are Vera Sans, Vera Sans Oblique, Vera Sans Bold, Vera Sans Bold Oblique, Vera Sans Mono, Vera Sans Mono Oblique, Vera Sans Mono Bold, Vera Sans Mono Bold Oblique, Vera Serif and Vera Serif Bold.
It appears that none of the Vera family have italic versions, just obliques (and there is a difference between italic and oblique), and the Vera Serif family doesn't have Oblique forms.
I would love to have a Vera Serif Italic and Vera Serif Italic Bold to go with the rest of the family, but I'm not the one paying Bitstream to do this.
When the ignorant make fun of that, ask them if being wrong would mean that Christ didn't die for them. If they say ``no'', ask them why they are fussing about trivia.
Good argument. Unfortunately, I'm not Christian -- I don't personally accept the the statement you give as the foundation of your faith. Somehow, I doubt that your response would work well if I tried it myself on Christian fundamentalists who think, in your words, that Genesis is a "How-to for creation".
Since they say it takes 2-3 weeks to prepare the transcripts and put them on the web site, and since Monday (two days ago) was the first day of oral arguments since April 15th, I'm not surprised there weren't any transcripts more recent than that.
Let's take it a step further...
You're 20, you know you have a long life in front of you. You just found out that the song you wrote was liked by a top Hollywood director and will be in his next, most-likely-Oscar-nominated movie. Your royalty checks as song-writer will be substantial and will keep coming for the rest of your life -- and beyond, as the movie gets played and played and played around the world for decades on TV and in the video stores.
What incentive do you have to create new songs? Why not simply live off of that one song for the rest of your life?
I think that copyrights should be for a fixed, limited, non-extendable time not dependent on the death of the creator. It should be long enough that the creator has a reasonable chance to market and benefit from the copyright, but not long enough that the creator can be guaranteed a free-ride forever.
If copyright is held for, say, 20 years (period), then:
A: Copyright holders have reasonable opportunity to benefit from the copyright.
B: Copyright holders have an incentive to create new works
C: Buyers and sellers of IP rights have a fixed basis to compute future value of copyrights.
(Explanation of C: If I were to create a valuble copyrighted work, and I wished to sell the copyrights to a third party, there are ways to compute the discounted future value of the copyright, but they depend on the lifetime of the copyright. If the copyright is, say, life+5 years, then a copyright can vary in length from 5 years to 75 years (or more), depending on when the author dies. Obviously, the longer copyright is more valuble. So the value of the copyright with an unknown life is harder to compute than one of known life.)
Actually, you wouldn't need to find 128 different angles to illuminate the chip with. If I am understanding the technology correctly (which isn't necessarily a given, since none of the linked articles even show a picture of the device, or go into any sort of tech detail), it should be possible to generate a unique pattern by shining two incident beams on it that is non-linearly related to the patterns from each beam individually. So you could devise an interrogator that had (say) 16 lasers shining on the token at 16 different angles, or even 16 different positions, that would give you 65535 different patterns to interrogate against.
However, I'm not sure I understand your encryption technique, and I don't have a lot of confidence in it. Could you explain in more detail how you'd use it for encryption?
I've been a vegetarian (ovo-lacto) from birth. My rule is "if you have to kill and animal to get it, I won't eat it. I will eat gametes but not zygotes." My reasons for being vegetarian have nothing to do with the well-being of the animals; I use leather, prefer eggs from factory-raised hens (held in small cages and fed hormone-laden feed, with no exercise, turning them into egg-producing machines) to free-range hens (who have better overall health and living conditions, but also have access to roosters). I feel I'm living proof you can get fat and diabetic from a vegetarian diet, and I'm reasonably happy with my health. I recognise that I have canines for tearing flesh and an intestinal tract short enoug to clear itself of meat, but I won't eat it to test that. It probably would be healthier to consume some meat, but I don't care.
I'm vegetarian for personal religious reasons. I don't insist that others be vegetarian.
Can you respect my vegetarianism?
Some portable MP3 players do come with FM tuners. The salient sales factors that led me to get the one I got (a RioVolt SP250) was a) support for CD and MP3/WMA on CD-ROM (and the OS-independence that goes with that), b) FM radio built in, and c) flash-upgradeable firmware (so it could eventually support Ogg Vorbis).
I've already emailed Sonic Blue customer support about Ogg Vorbis support, so hopefully soon they will listen to us and provide it.
I believe in the US, the mile is defined in terms of feet (1 mile = 5280 feet), feet defined in terms of inches (1 foot = 12 inches), inches in terms of centimeters (1 inch = 2.54 cm exactly), centimeters in terms of meters, and the meter is defined (since the early 80's, I believe) in terms of the second and the speed of light. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of hyperfine transitions of cesium-80, if I remember correctly.
A resistor converts a voltage drop into current, and in a very prescribed, predictable amount.
LED's work longest when the current through them is low, and they have a constant voltage drop across them. To change the brightness of an LED, you change the current going through it, but the voltage drop remains the same. So to get a dimmer, you need a constant voltage, variable current power supply. A battery and a resistor does that.
Some math: Let's say you have an LED rated at 3.5V drop, 20mA max current, and a wattage of 0.07W (by my calculation. You have 3 Alkaline cells in series (1.5V/cell, 4.5V total) powering it. You must drop the voltage by 1V, and limit the current to 20mA total. That calls for a 50Ohm resistor, and a total power usage by the resistor of 20mW. Add a potentiometer in series (0-200Ohm), and you have a dimmer that takes your LED from using 90mw to using 18mW. Not exactly a power-hog.
Rule 1: Forbid for-profit and tax-exempt corporations from participation in the political process. Corporation may not contribute to political campaigns, lobby government officials (elected or appointed), or pay others to do so. This would mean that if Michael Eisner chose to testify before Congress, Disney would need to record that time against his vacation or paid sick time, or not pay him for that time at all.
I think this would go a long way towards taking politicians out of corporate pockets.
RMS didn't like KDE because it was not "free" -- and in fact, in his opinion, it's position was threatening Free Software in general (it undermined the GPL, it took people away from developing Free alternatives, etc). So he argued against KDE, in favor of GNOME, a truely Free alternative.
KDE is now Free, in part because of serious amounts of lobbying by the Free Software Community, including RMS. KDE is no longer the bad guy, RMS no longer has a beef with KDE.
Now that the "Free KDE" battle is over, RMS is now saying "Um guys... we won -- ALL of us (KDE and GNOME) won, last year. It's time, past time, to stop sabre-rattling at each other". Since Qt became GPL-compatable, I haven't seen RMS stoking the GNOME v. KDE fires. Now he's trying to quench the GNOME v. KDE fires, because leaving them smouldering is bad for Free Software in general.
That's what Nyquist gives you.
Interesting article. What's more interesting is that the last time I was at Arlington National Cemetery, I noticed the rows and rows and rows of white crosses. As such, the last paragraph threw the entire article into question for me.
Since this Sklyarov incident began, I've heard lots of rumors about what he actually was charged with -- giving the speech, writing the program, selling the program, etc -- but very little authoritative about why he was arrested.
Now that he's been indicted, and the indictments are public, we can find out -exactly- with what he's been accused of doing.
Once I know what he's accused of doing, I can direct my outrage better -- The US shouldn't be charging him with writing the "circumvention device" when he wrote it in Russia where it was legal (and thus outside of US jurisdiction); or, the US shouldn't be charging him with giving a speech about it because that violates 1st Amendment protections of free speech; or, the US shouldn't be charging him with selling it because it wasn't him, it was a third party or his employer, not him, that was selling it.
Right now, I don't know why to be upset.
In fact, from reading the articles that others have cited about their work, and from reading Dr. Hrisoulis's web site, it is very clear that their two works are completely different in intent and technique. Dr. Hrisoulis does not claim, on his web site at least, that Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray copied his work.
Dr. Hrisoulis is a master at pattern welding. (For others besides cprael reading this, I recommend going to his armoury and looking at his work. It's really worth it), and freely admits his technique and skill. To his credit, he has also written three books on his techniques, for the purposes of sharing that technique and his hard-won knowledge to others. As he points out, pattern welding is a technique that has been used for centuries by people all over the world. However, Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray are not doing pattern welding -- nor do they claim to be. In their articles, they admit that pattern welding has been used for centuries and many different cultures to produce blades with Damascine patterns. It is clear that they understand the process and technique.
What they claim is that research has long shown that the best museum examples of Damascus Steel blades are forged out of a single alloy, rather than multiple alloys as pattern welding does. This technique has long vanished, and apparently flourished in India and Persia for a relatively short time (a few hundred years). What they claim to have done is developed a process for reliably recreating the alloy as well as recreating the special forging techniques needed to create properly formed wootz-metal Damascus steel blades.
Based on what I read on Dr. Hrisoulis's site, I seems reasonable to me that he would be happy to see Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray's work continue. Dr. Verhoeven and Mr. Pendray are recreating an bringing alive again a lost ancient metalworking art, which seems right in line with Dr. Hrisoulis's goals and asperations.
Er, no it doesn't. In fact, the police were arguing specifically that since the thermal imaging system they were using could NOT read infrared THROUGH WALLS, it was OK -- because they could only 'see' the heat on the outside of the building, not through the walls.
The majority didn't buy it. Sure, they accepted the contention by the government that all they could detect were 'amorphous hot spots' on the exterior of the house, but they didn't accept that that made the use of the the infrared imager not a 'search'. In fact, they said, specifically, that their bright-line definition of a 'search' (requiring a warrant is:
The police could not have detected those "amorphous blobs of heat" without tresspassing a constitutionally protected area: the house or the curtilage around it.
The cases they cite (specifically US v. Karo) have a similar viewpoint. In the Karo case, the DEA placed an electronic tracer in a can of ether that an informant was selling to the suspect. They then used that tracer to follow the can around for a few weeks until it they found the cocaine lab they were looking for. The court found that the use of the tracer to find the can of ether was an unconstitutional search, for much the same reason as this case.
But it isn't about being able to see through walls.
I'm got good news and bad news, then...
The good news is that his current publishers are on the ball, and the American Hardcover editions are now released at the same time as the English hardcovers. In fact, the American edition of "Thief of Time" came out about a half-week BEFORE the English edition.
The bad news is that the American edition covers are bad. And by bad, I mean hideous. And have little to do with the actual story. The cover for Thief of Time has as iconography four squares contaiing a picture of a rat. Since there are no rats in the story (except the Death of Rats), it makes no sense to me.
Because of the covers alone, I'll keep ordering my Discworld books from England. The difference in cost? $5/book or so. Not bad on a $20 hardcover.
The softwarelaw.html page you cited give DJB's take on what your rights are after you have legally received a copy -- you can make backups, modify it, etc. He says nothing about distributing further copies, nor distributing your changes. And he's right. The law he cites allows making of copies for yourself for specific reasons ("(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or (2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful. "), but not the distributions of the copies or "adaptations".
For that, you need the permission of the copyright owner, and DJB won't give it for modified versions (what he says is "If you want to distribute modified versions of qmail (including ports, no matter how minor the changes are) you'll have to get my approval. This does not mean approval of your distribution method, your intentions, your e-mail address, your haircut, or any other irrelevant information. It means a detailed review of the exact package that you want to distribute."
What he says about licenses on the software law page and on the distribution page are not contradictory, but rather deal with different portions of the law. He does not believe in "shrinkwrap" licenses, so he doesn't use one. He demands absolute control over what gets distributed, so he uses a very-tight copyright license.