In most Debian votes, the ballots are revealed afterwards. The same is true (IIRC) with Usenet new group votes, etc. There is nothing specifically undemocratic about non-secret votes.
In fact, revealing the votes can make the process more fair, because then everyone who voted can verify that their vote was recorded correctly, and that the vote was tallied correctly. That openness helps ensure that the vote remains fair.
However, the person running this particular vote made a mistake -- DPL votes are supposed to be kept secret. He didn't read the constitution properly while tired. He has already apologised to the Debian Developers.
A standard feature of US Copyright law is the "First Sale" rule -- after a legally produced, authorized copy is sold, the author/publisher/copyright holder has no say in what happens to that copy. It can be sold, resold, marked up, marked down, burned, etc, and the copyright holder has no say.
It can't be copied, since that creates a new copy. The copyright holder is the only one who has the right to allow that. But what happens to the original copy is not under control of the copyright holder.
That's why libraries, second-hand book stores, literary auction houses, etc aren't violating US Copyright laws. They don't make copies, and they work after the original First Sale.
Harlan is a professional writer. He makes his living off of his writing, the royalties he earns, etc. He has a very vested interest in strong copyright protection, and he is famously vocal in his opinion. He doesn't have a problem with used book stores or libraries -- besides being legal, they are instrumental in exposing new readers to his and other authors works, which benefits him and the industry. What he doesn't like is mass-production of his works in violation of his IP rights.
As I read it, there are two issues he disapproves of:
First, that his work is being copied to Usenet without his permission, and (more importantly) without his getting paid. This is consistant with Harlan's stance on stripped and remaindered books (both of which are books the publishers couldn't sell normally, and which are being sold at steep discounts with no royalties to the author), which he also abhors because he doesn't get paid.
Second, that his work is being posted to Usenet from poor scans without proofreading. This offends his sensibilities as a writer, because he feels his work is misrepresented, making it look bad. This is also consistant with past actions.
Wheatberries on the plant are surrounded by an inedible outer coating almost like the shell of a sunflower seed. Part of the processing of wheat involves breaking apart this outer coating so that the edible wheat inside can be harvested.
Once this is done, you are left with a bunch of small, dense, edible bits (the wheat), and a bunch of lighter, bigger, inedible bits (the chaff). The wheat is good, the chaff is useless.
The standard way of separating the wheat from the chaff was to throw both up into a breeze. The wheat would fall straight back down, the chaff would blow away.
Besides, "High Temperature" for a superconductor means "above 79 Kelvins". Considering that the Holy Grail of superconductor research is "room temperature", meaning "above 280 Kelvins", the high temperature stuff isn't that hot.
I've used the MH mail format for years. However, I've been thinking of switching (I'm getting tired of exmh, and of not being able to read my mail remotely). That's where I'm having a problem.
MH doesn't have a problem with large mailboxes. One-message-per-file doesn't have the problems with content-length or lines that begin with "from " that mbox does. I like those features. What I don't like is the separate meta-data files, the need to run special utilities to file mail, the locking issues, etc. It seems that the features of the mh folders I don't like are exactly what maildir was designed to solve.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of the mail-readers I'm confortable in using (exmh, elm, gnus, mailx) have decent support for maildir -- and converting 15,000+ messages in 50+ folders is no easy task!
I believe that that translates to "Volume 111 of the Federal Supplement (2nd edition), pages 294 and 326), from the Southern District of New York", which tells the judges which Court Reporter holds the text of the judgement, and where it is in it.
In this case, the Table of Authorities at the beginning of the brief identifies 111 F.Supp.2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) as "Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes". Also note that the parties in this brief are Universal Studios (as plaintiff-appellees), Eric Corley (as defendent-appellant), Shawn C. Reimerdes (defendent), and Roman Kazan (defendent). And, note that the district court was the Southern District of New York.
So, I'd say that the example citation is for the lower court case under appeal here.
I think he's saying there is a difference between programming and the language.
Functional, OO, imperative, structured, declarative, etc, programming aredesign methodologies. All of them can be used to design solutions to any computable problem and for any turing-machine compatable programming language.
The difference between doing OO programming in C versus C++/Java/Eiffel/Smalltalk/Objective-C is not that it is impossible in C, it's that the OOPLs provide support to make it easier.
Inheritance, for instance, takes lots of bookkeeping to keep straight. In C, you have to do it yourself -- keeping track of inherited data elements, managing vtables, writing helper functions, remembering to do "c->method(&c,args...)" instead of "method(&c,args)", etc. C++ makes it easier: the bookkeeping happens behind the scenes, the helper functions are hidden, and method invocation becomes "c.method(args...)". Easier? Yes. Impossible without? No.
IIRC TeX is asymptotically converging on PI -- to an arbitrary but large percision -- for it's version number (trust a mathematician to come up with this). So when TeX is feature-complete for all possible uses and contains no bugs, version will exactly equal PI...
Actually, Knuth's plan is that all development of his TeX program shall cease when he dies, except for a single bumping of the version number to pi. At that point, it will be also be declared bug-free (any remaining "bugs" will become features). The same is true of METAFont -- which is asymptotically approaching e.
The place where common sense fails is that not all electors "represent" the same number of people. Each state gets 2 electors for being a state plus one or more based on population. In a small state (like Alaska), the capita per elector is smaller than in a large state (like New York).
And then there's rounding issues, like you said.
Two states follow a system of having each congressional district elect an elector, with two more chosen state-wide. It is possible for those states to have a split electoral vote.
Originally, the Electoral College was much more independent than it is now. The basic idea was that the members of the College would be selected for their ability to evaluate the candidates strengths and weaknesses, and they would vote on who they best thought fit the bill. It wasn't intended to be popular-vote-by-proxy or party driven, like it is now. It was supposed to be people chosen for their knowledge of the candidates to decide who the best choice for President was.
If you read the Federalist Papers discussion of the Electoral College, they were quite aware that it was a unique experimental system for choosing a chief executive. They deliberately intended the college to elect people who had made an impact on a national scope, and set impediments to ensure this (federal officials can't be electors, and all the electors from a state must meet and vote in the state's capitol, not Washington, etc).
What they did not expect was that the individual citizen would have the experience to know what was needed in a good chief executive, nor the knowledge of the candidates to make an informed decision. I think they would be appalled by what the election of the President has become.
But then, I don't like direct election of the Senate, either... I think it undermines the purpose of the Senate, and makes the Senators accountable to the wrong body. But that's just me.
Under -very- rare curcumstances it is possible to be forced to reveal ones vote. It happened in a local race in this area: One voter came forward after the election, and informed the board of elections that he had inadvertently voted in the wrong district, and therefore his votes were invalid. One of the races came out -exactly- tied, even after absentee ballots and recounts. The voter with the invalid vote was forced to reveal who he had voted for, so his vote would be invalidated and the tie broken.
Myself, I'd be highly tempted to lie, so my candidate would win.
The Chicago Tribune article was light on the tech details. Anybody got anything meatier? Online Papers? The patent numbers covering the process? The homepage of the lab he's working at, or that of the MRS?
I suppose I can get his patents by just knowing his name...I'll try that, and report back.
I believe an electron's mass standing still is 0.511 MeV (and yes, they do stand still).
As for relativity... What happens is that a particle has a total energy equal to the sum of it's rest energy and its kinetic energy (nitpickers: I'm simplifying, leaving out potential energies and internal energies...I don't believe electrons -have- internal energies anyway). The actual formula used these days is E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2v^2, where m is the rest mass and p is the momentum. Roughly speaking, those two terms correspond to the rest and kinetic energies, roughly. The momentum p = Mv, where M is the relativistic mass of the particle, which goes up with speed. So that last term is M^2v^4.
So as the total energy of a particle increases, the contribution from its rest mass remains constant, and the increase goes into increasing (Mv^2)^2. For any given amount of energy, there is only once consistant set of values for M and v, and both go up as energy goes up. M goes up because v goes up, so they are intimately tied.
So as E goes up, so does v, and M. It doesn't make the particle slow down, just harder to make go faster.
Besides how RMS can possibly think that someone who put a GPL header in a source file AND included the QT include files in their KDE program didn't intend their program to be used with QT is beyond me
RMS doesn't think that someone who put a GPL header and included the Qt include files didn't intend their program to be use with Qt. In that case, the intent of the original author is clear. That is what RMS means by "implicit permission" to link Qt to a KDE program.
But what happens when a GPLed program without Qt headers is modified by a third party to use Qt, and then distributed? Is it clear that the original author "intended" for the program to be linked to Qt? Is it clear that "implicit permission" to link is granted by the original author (the one who -didn't- use Qt in the first place)?
The makers of Xerox and Kleenex advertise constantly in magazines like "Writer's Digest", requesting that writers a) capitalize the product names, and b) use them as adjectives (Xerox copiers, Kleenex tissues) rather than as nouns (a xerox of something, or hand me a kleenex), or verbs.
They do their best to defend their trademarks and prevent the use of their product names generically. How well they succeed is a matter of debate.
Coke occasionally takes someone to court over their trademarks.
Bayer managed to lose their trademark for aspirin -- but that may have had more to do with lack of legal standing to defend it during WWI than with neglect.
Probably more accurate is that it was created for PUBLISHERS, not artists (or, writers, actually).
The basis for the legal notion of copuright was the agreements between various early printers for their own economic needs. There was a lot of risk in publishing and advertising a book -- it was expensive, and the book may flop. The risk was especially high if the other 15 printers in town would simply reset your book after they knew it was a hit -- they had low risk, but it screwed you out of recouping your costs. So the printers made deals with each other basically agreeing to not do that. That way, the overall risk was lower, and more books were published.
Artists and writers benefitted -- their work was being published -- but they weren't the ones making the agreements nor directly benefitting from them.
Therefore, if everyone on the internet gets a copy of DeCSS it can be argued that the MPAA isn't properly enforcing its trade secret/the MPAA can't realistically enforce its trade secret, so it's no longer a trade secret.
BTW, the last sentance is actually almost a halfway-valid reason the MPAA should sue CopyLeft (if there is such a thing.
Except that CopyLeft did not violate the NDA, nor did the DeCSS code itself stem from a violation of the NDA. If anyone should get sued by the MPAA (or whoever) for revealing the trade secret, it should be the software DVD company that left their bloody key in plaintext.
True, it was the DC-X, but the project as a whole was the "Delta Clipper" project. Three planned ships: The DC-X, a small, "proof of concept" unmanned vehicle designed to show that the VTOL concept had merit; the DC-Y, a larger, sub-orbital vehicle designed to prove scaleability and flightworthiness; and finally the Delta Clipper, a manned, single-stage-to-orbit VTOL ship, capable of doing the job required of it.
The $70M people discuss covered the DC-X. The DC-Y was pitched as a candidate for the X-33 project, with the Delta Clipper being the SSTO candidate after that.
US Military test pilots aren't stupid people. Most of them have advanced degrees in aeronautics or aeuronautical engineering -- at the insistance of the military or aerospace firm they work for.
I suspect that, upon seeing the "computer restart" button, the test pilot evaluating the aircraft would start asking a series of questions:
1. What is the failure rate of the computers; i.e., how often will that button have to be pressed.
2. What is the time elapsed between the computer failing and the computer operational, including the reaction time of the pilot or weapons officer? Assume that the pilot and weapons officer are already a) flying the plane, b) lining up on target, c) watching for SAM sites, ground fire, enemy aircraft, and d) coordinating with friendly aircraft.
3. How does the computer controlled, fly-by-wire system function during the timeframe covered in question 2? Will it fly steady (given that many modern fighter airframes are inherently unstable in flight, and rely on active computer control)? Will I have any control over the plane until it restarts?
4. If this happens in a dogfight, what are the chances of recovery and survival?
Or not... In truth, I suspect the first few questions would really be something like "You're kidding me, right? Do you think I'm crazy? Would you be willing to fly this deathtrap?"
My understanding (IANAL, of course) is that the problem occurs because the GPL isn't an agreement with a particular person. Because of this there's no document that represents the license agreement, and so there's no legal standing for the license. Hopefuly, a court would realize that all parties (well, most all) are well aware of the license, and that there is a meeting of the minds. But who knows whether that's even relavent in the twisted mind of the court.
The GPL doesn't have to have a meeting of the minds in order to work. Refusal to accept the GPL is not a valid defense against infringement.
The reason why not is because the GPL grants conditional permission to do what would clearly be illegal otherwise. The GPL (and any other license based in copyright law (most commercial software, shrink-wrap licenses aren't)) is not a tool for the plaintiff in a infringement suit, but a tool for the defendant. It allows the defense to say "The plaintiff granted me permission, in the form of this license, which I complied with". If the plaintiff can show that the copyright was infringed, and the defense disclaims the validity of the license...it doesn't look good for the defense. The FSF or any other plaintiff doesn't even have to bring up the GPL if the defense doesn't mention it.
Let's face it. It's highly likely that eventually, we're going to go forth and spread throughout the cosmos. Let's assume for a second that we don't discover ways to transmit data faster than the speed of light. How well will the Internet scale when it extends to distant planets or even stars?
Vernor Vinge already covered that in his two books "A Fire Upon The Deep" and "A Deepness In The Sky". Granted, the protocols being used are not IP, but the basic technologies, etc. are clearly (and at one point, explicitly) descended from modern-day networking.
Vinge does better than most SF authors about having believable (from a tech and programming standpoint) computer systems. It is clear from his writing that he has thought about such things as "how would robust communications protocols work among civilisations that are spread out to interstellar distances and relativistic velocities" -- and his solutions are more than just handwaving. Of course, Vinge's day job is a CS professor...
Slashdot Mirror
Well...
In most Debian votes, the ballots are revealed afterwards. The same is true (IIRC) with Usenet new group votes, etc. There is nothing specifically undemocratic about non-secret votes.
In fact, revealing the votes can make the process more fair, because then everyone who voted can verify that their vote was recorded correctly, and that the vote was tallied correctly. That openness helps ensure that the vote remains fair.
However, the person running this particular vote made a mistake -- DPL votes are supposed to be kept secret. He didn't read the constitution properly while tired. He has already apologised to the Debian Developers.
It can't be copied, since that creates a new copy. The copyright holder is the only one who has the right to allow that. But what happens to the original copy is not under control of the copyright holder.
That's why libraries, second-hand book stores, literary auction houses, etc aren't violating US Copyright laws. They don't make copies, and they work after the original First Sale.
Harlan is a professional writer. He makes his living off of his writing, the royalties he earns, etc. He has a very vested interest in strong copyright protection, and he is famously vocal in his opinion. He doesn't have a problem with used book stores or libraries -- besides being legal, they are instrumental in exposing new readers to his and other authors works, which benefits him and the industry. What he doesn't like is mass-production of his works in violation of his IP rights.
As I read it, there are two issues he disapproves of:
First, that his work is being copied to Usenet without his permission, and (more importantly) without his getting paid. This is consistant with Harlan's stance on stripped and remaindered books (both of which are books the publishers couldn't sell normally, and which are being sold at steep discounts with no royalties to the author), which he also abhors because he doesn't get paid.
Second, that his work is being posted to Usenet from poor scans without proofreading. This offends his sensibilities as a writer, because he feels his work is misrepresented, making it look bad. This is also consistant with past actions.
Just my thoughts.
Once this is done, you are left with a bunch of small, dense, edible bits (the wheat), and a bunch of lighter, bigger, inedible bits (the chaff). The wheat is good, the chaff is useless.
The standard way of separating the wheat from the chaff was to throw both up into a breeze. The wheat would fall straight back down, the chaff would blow away.
I think RMS would be flattered by your sentiment, but would probably take exception to the title of King of Open Source.
Besides, "High Temperature" for a superconductor means "above 79 Kelvins". Considering that the Holy Grail of superconductor research is "room temperature", meaning "above 280 Kelvins", the high temperature stuff isn't that hot.
MH doesn't have a problem with large mailboxes. One-message-per-file doesn't have the problems with content-length or lines that begin with "from " that mbox does. I like those features. What I don't like is the separate meta-data files, the need to run special utilities to file mail, the locking issues, etc. It seems that the features of the mh folders I don't like are exactly what maildir was designed to solve.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of the mail-readers I'm confortable in using (exmh, elm, gnus, mailx) have decent support for maildir -- and converting 15,000+ messages in 50+ folders is no easy task!
In this case, the Table of Authorities at the beginning of the brief identifies 111 F.Supp.2d 294 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) as "Universal City Studios v. Reimerdes". Also note that the parties in this brief are Universal Studios (as plaintiff-appellees), Eric Corley (as defendent-appellant), Shawn C. Reimerdes (defendent), and Roman Kazan (defendent). And, note that the district court was the Southern District of New York.
So, I'd say that the example citation is for the lower court case under appeal here.
Functional, OO, imperative, structured, declarative, etc, programming aredesign methodologies. All of them can be used to design solutions to any computable problem and for any turing-machine compatable programming language.
The difference between doing OO programming in C versus C++/Java/Eiffel/Smalltalk/Objective-C is not that it is impossible in C, it's that the OOPLs provide support to make it easier.
Inheritance, for instance, takes lots of bookkeeping to keep straight. In C, you have to do it yourself -- keeping track of inherited data elements, managing vtables, writing helper functions, remembering to do "c->method(&c,args...)" instead of "method(&c,args)", etc. C++ makes it easier: the bookkeeping happens behind the scenes, the helper functions are hidden, and method invocation becomes "c.method(args...)". Easier? Yes. Impossible without? No.
And then there's rounding issues, like you said.
Two states follow a system of having each congressional district elect an elector, with two more chosen state-wide. It is possible for those states to have a split electoral vote.
If you read the Federalist Papers discussion of the Electoral College, they were quite aware that it was a unique experimental system for choosing a chief executive. They deliberately intended the college to elect people who had made an impact on a national scope, and set impediments to ensure this (federal officials can't be electors, and all the electors from a state must meet and vote in the state's capitol, not Washington, etc).
What they did not expect was that the individual citizen would have the experience to know what was needed in a good chief executive, nor the knowledge of the candidates to make an informed decision. I think they would be appalled by what the election of the President has become.
But then, I don't like direct election of the Senate, either... I think it undermines the purpose of the Senate, and makes the Senators accountable to the wrong body. But that's just me.
Under -very- rare curcumstances it is possible to be forced to reveal ones vote. It happened in a local race in this area: One voter came forward after the election, and informed the board of elections that he had inadvertently voted in the wrong district, and therefore his votes were invalid. One of the races came out -exactly- tied, even after absentee ballots and recounts. The voter with the invalid vote was forced to reveal who he had voted for, so his vote would be invalidated and the tie broken.
Myself, I'd be highly tempted to lie, so my candidate would win.
True, I can see smileys replacing full stops. But how do smilies interact with parethesis?
:-) )" or is "(this is a joke :-)" sufficient?
Is it proper to go "(this is a joke
Inquiring minds want to know!
The Chicago Tribune article was light on the tech details. Anybody got anything meatier? Online Papers? The patent numbers covering the process? The homepage of the lab he's working at, or that of the MRS?
I suppose I can get his patents by just knowing his name...I'll try that, and report back.
As for relativity... What happens is that a particle has a total energy equal to the sum of it's rest energy and its kinetic energy (nitpickers: I'm simplifying, leaving out potential energies and internal energies...I don't believe electrons -have- internal energies anyway). The actual formula used these days is E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2v^2, where m is the rest mass and p is the momentum. Roughly speaking, those two terms correspond to the rest and kinetic energies, roughly. The momentum p = Mv, where M is the relativistic mass of the particle, which goes up with speed. So that last term is M^2v^4.
So as the total energy of a particle increases, the contribution from its rest mass remains constant, and the increase goes into increasing (Mv^2)^2. For any given amount of energy, there is only once consistant set of values for M and v, and both go up as energy goes up. M goes up because v goes up, so they are intimately tied.
So as E goes up, so does v, and M. It doesn't make the particle slow down, just harder to make go faster.
RMS doesn't think that someone who put a GPL header and included the Qt include files didn't intend their program to be use with Qt. In that case, the intent of the original author is clear. That is what RMS means by "implicit permission" to link Qt to a KDE program.
But what happens when a GPLed program without Qt headers is modified by a third party to use Qt, and then distributed? Is it clear that the original author "intended" for the program to be linked to Qt? Is it clear that "implicit permission" to link is granted by the original author (the one who -didn't- use Qt in the first place)?
The makers of Xerox and Kleenex advertise constantly in magazines like "Writer's Digest", requesting that writers a) capitalize the product names, and b) use them as adjectives (Xerox copiers, Kleenex tissues) rather than as nouns (a xerox of something, or hand me a kleenex), or verbs.
They do their best to defend their trademarks and prevent the use of their product names generically. How well they succeed is a matter of debate.
Coke occasionally takes someone to court over their trademarks.
Bayer managed to lose their trademark for aspirin -- but that may have had more to do with lack of legal standing to defend it during WWI than with neglect.
That doesn't acknowledge the UK researchers who have a web site showing their magnetically levitating frogs.
/. even.
I didn't save the cite either, but I saw it about 12-18 months ago -- I was probably pointed there by
I beleive there are ways of doing this, but not with PGP/GPG. It's trivial with a one-time-pad.
Probably more accurate is that it was created for PUBLISHERS, not artists (or, writers, actually).
The basis for the legal notion of copuright was the agreements between various early printers for their own economic needs. There was a lot of risk in publishing and advertising a book -- it was expensive, and the book may flop. The risk was especially high if the other 15 printers in town would simply reset your book after they knew it was a hit -- they had low risk, but it screwed you out of recouping your costs. So the printers made deals with each other basically agreeing to not do that. That way, the overall risk was lower, and more books were published.
Artists and writers benefitted -- their work was being published -- but they weren't the ones making the agreements nor directly benefitting from them.
Except that CopyLeft did not violate the NDA, nor did the DeCSS code itself stem from a violation of the NDA. If anyone should get sued by the MPAA (or whoever) for revealing the trade secret, it should be the software DVD company that left their bloody key in plaintext.
True, it was the DC-X, but the project as a whole was the "Delta Clipper" project. Three planned ships: The DC-X, a small, "proof of concept" unmanned vehicle designed to show that the VTOL concept had merit; the DC-Y, a larger, sub-orbital vehicle designed to prove scaleability and flightworthiness; and finally the Delta Clipper, a manned, single-stage-to-orbit VTOL ship, capable of doing the job required of it.
The $70M people discuss covered the DC-X. The
DC-Y was pitched as a candidate for the X-33 project, with the Delta Clipper being the SSTO candidate after that.
US Military test pilots aren't stupid people. Most of them have advanced degrees in aeronautics or aeuronautical engineering -- at the insistance of the military or aerospace firm they work for.
I suspect that, upon seeing the "computer restart" button, the test pilot evaluating the aircraft would start asking a series of questions:
1. What is the failure rate of the computers; i.e., how often will that button have to be pressed.
2. What is the time elapsed between the computer failing and the computer operational, including the reaction time of the pilot or weapons officer? Assume that the pilot and weapons officer are already a) flying the plane, b) lining up on target, c) watching for SAM sites, ground fire, enemy aircraft, and d) coordinating with friendly aircraft.
3. How does the computer controlled, fly-by-wire system function during the timeframe covered in question 2? Will it fly steady (given that many modern fighter airframes are inherently unstable in flight, and rely on active computer control)? Will I have any control over the plane until it restarts?
4. If this happens in a dogfight, what are the chances of recovery and survival?
Or not... In truth, I suspect the first few questions would really be something like "You're kidding me, right? Do you think I'm crazy? Would you be willing to fly this deathtrap?"
The GPL doesn't have to have a meeting of the minds in order to work. Refusal to accept the GPL is not a valid defense against infringement.
The reason why not is because the GPL grants conditional permission to do what would clearly be illegal otherwise. The GPL (and any other license based in copyright law (most commercial software, shrink-wrap licenses aren't)) is not a tool for the plaintiff in a infringement suit, but a tool for the defendant. It allows the defense to say "The plaintiff granted me permission, in the form of this license, which I complied with". If the plaintiff can show that the copyright was infringed, and the defense disclaims the validity of the license...it doesn't look good for the defense. The FSF or any other plaintiff doesn't even have to bring up the GPL if the defense doesn't mention it.
Vernor Vinge already covered that in his two books "A Fire Upon The Deep" and "A Deepness In The Sky". Granted, the protocols being used are not IP, but the basic technologies, etc. are clearly (and at one point, explicitly) descended from modern-day networking.
Vinge does better than most SF authors about having believable (from a tech and programming standpoint) computer systems. It is clear from his writing that he has thought about such things as "how would robust communications protocols work among civilisations that are spread out to interstellar distances and relativistic velocities" -- and his solutions are more than just handwaving. Of course, Vinge's day job is a CS professor...