The IOC owns the broadcast rights -- but does the IOC actually produce any broadcasts? do they operate TV stations? In fact, one of the main sources of revenue for the IOC (i.e., one of the main ways they pay for the games) is by licensing the broadcast rights separately for each oountry.
The PRC owns the rights for broadcast in China. This is no different from NBC owning the broadcast rights in the US, or the CBC owning the rights in Canada. Note that the CBC is an arm of the Canadian government.
Certainly voting technology should be open-source, cryptographically signed etc. But this is not the point. No matter where the software and hardware come from, there must be a unique certified official configuration, well ahead of the election. Ideally, there should be a way to prove that a given piece of hardware is in the certified configuration.
If there is adverse interaction between Diebold's software and the anti-virus software then the certified configuration should not have included the anti-virus software. Alternatively, once this was discovered. Diebold should have certified a new configuration (without the A/V) and removed the A/V product from the computers. In any case local authorities should not be in charge of making changes to the configuration, or installing software on their own (e.g. choosing the correct A/V product). To the customer, all components of the voting system should behave like black-box appliances -- not like general-purpose computers (independently of the underlying implementation).
It doesn't matter whether attribution was there or not -- or whether in this case a fair use defense would be successful. The point is that copyright law is complicated, and a panel of academics set up to judge issues of academic misconduct is not qualified to make the statement "this guy broke copyright laws". Whether his use was fair or not (even without attribution) is a tricky issue of law on which there surely are disagreements. Non-lawyers should not be saying that this guy definitely broke copyright laws, the same way that lawyers should not be saying that his experiments definitely defied the laws of physics.
Allegation: Taleyarkhan intentionally used data in a paper to a scientific journal that already had been used in another journal written by other authors.
Conclusion: While Taleyarkhan broke copyright laws, the authors agreed to share the data and have not claimed plagiarism. This is not research misconduct.
In fact, there is no copyright in data (that is, in the facts); actually, using data published by others is a hallmark of scientific progress. That's why they published the data in the first place. If he had claimed the data as his own it would be scientific misconduct; if he failed to attribute the data to its authors it would be scientific misconduct. But there is no way for him to break copyright laws by publishing facts that were generated by others. In fact, even if he used the author's actual graphs and tables (which may be copyrighted), it is not so obvious that he actually broke copyright laws -- scientific use (with attribution) may very well come under the defense of fair use.
We are seeing here the results of the propaganda campaign to extend copyright beyond all bounds.
Even easier to believe that they didn't know this was the case, or knew but did not understand.
This doesn't sound reasonable. If management behaved like this they would have been fired before this guy was -- the management problems would be greater than the technical ones.
It's hard to believe that management didn't care that a single employee was the only one who knew anything about critical infrastructure, no matter whether the employee arranged things this way because he thought no-one else was good enough or because this was his was of becoming entrenched.
Judge Kimball probably gets the law right (IANAL) but his idea for calculating damages is strange. He says Sun paid SCO for 4 things: a "release", as well as a license to UnixWare, some drivers, and Unix (SVRX). He values the release at $1.5M since MS paid that amount for a similar release. He then values each of the three licenses at one third of the remaining payment each. At no point does he justify this methods of calculation, which are a major win for SCO:
When contracts are negotiated separately, contract clauses are not commodity items: identically phrased legal releases can have different values to different entities. It is completely unclear to me why the "releases" should be worth the same to Sun and Microsoft. After all, the two companies are in different lines of business; their products have very different Unix component to them; and in any case they negotiated their "releases" separately. How much of the total $9M Sun paid SCO was for this "release" specifically depends on the details of the negotiations between Sun and SCO, not Microsoft and SCO.
It is preposterous to argue that Sun would pay equally for the rights to UnixWare, to the drivers, and to Unix. After all, their main goal was to open-source Solaris — a Unix derivative. Sun have no products based on UnixWare, and probably already had their own drivers written for Solaris x86. Clearly what they really wanted was the ability to open-source their derivative of Unix, and that's what they paid for; SCO throwing in a few add-ons (probably to make this appear to be a UnixWare license so they wouldn't have to give the money to Novell) shouldn't change the allocation of funds. This is a common fallacy: "we know that this sum was divided among three bins; we don't know exactly how it was divided, so it must have been divided equally". If we had no information whatsoever, then this would be the case, but here there is clear information that this wasn't the case. And when the judge himself says that doubts must be resolved against SCO, to me this means that he should have presumed that all the money that Sun paid was for the Unix license.
As an aside, I'm surprised that Novell didn't ask Sun to testify in court about what they thought they paid for. I guess this may be due to potential conflict-of-interest (since Sun open-sourced Solaris based on a license SCO didn't have the authority to give them, they are now in trouble with Novell over this).
Indeed: instead of burning oil in the engine of a car, converting the heat to motion, it is proposed that we burn oil in the power plant, convert this to electricity, conduct the electricity to the home, use this to separate water, and finally burn the hydrogen in the car?
Last year BusyBox successfully enforced their copyrights in at least twoinstances. While the terms of the settlements have not been disclosed, I'm sure the SFLC will be happy to get involved again.
Well, we all realize it's very important for everyone (especially young children) to learn that being watched at all places and all times is normal and important for the functioning of civilizations. Airplane cabins are a convenient place to start since some people are sufficiently scared of flying to accept surveilance there.
Wikipedia (like the WWW graph and unlike the "acted together in a film graph)) is naturally a directed graph. In other words, the links have a direction. This has nothing to do with the property of being "simply connected" -- which for graphs like Wikipedia is equivalent to the absence of loops.
Legislation is difficult to change once passed. Competing interests (or lack of interests) and simple inertia mean that whatever gets written into law stays there for a while. It makes sense for the law to say that the standards should be open, that they should be chosen by a particular state agency, or that they should be reviewed every X years. But writing the choice of standards into law is very inflexible. There is a reason why we have building codes and highway codes. This doesn't say that administrative rulemaking is less subject to lobbying and corruption, or that it is more transparent. But on these counts it is no worse than primary legislation.
are the way to go, just you say. The resulting ballots are then readable by both humans and machines, while the voting machine remains stateless.
This gives you the advantages of the machine (UI, automated counting of the ballots), without sacrificing privacy (since the voting machine doesn't keep track of vote totals) and security (as long as the voter checks the generated ballot, no tampering with the voting machine will help; as long as machine-generated counts are hand-checked at random precints, tampering with the counting machines can also be detected).
Why bother? Because it's cheaper to buy an existing product than to reinvent the wheel. Later they may decide to reverse-engineer, but even then it's cheaper to buy the blueprints.
Can some help a non-expert in the audience: I assume that a "framebuffer" driver only gives pixel-level access to the card, without access to the HW acceleration features?
Skype used an embedded Linux operating system in a mobile phone device. The GPL applies to the Linux kernel and the system utilities they used, not to the proprietary Skype software (e.g. the client) that they also installed on the device. It's ok for the device to have both GPL'd software (Linux) and non-GPL'd software (the Skype client). The problem is that they didn't obey the GPL regarding Linux, by not advising the customers that about their rights regarding the free software on the device. At no point was the secrecy of the Skype protocol at stake.
Actually, if you RTFA you'd see that NASA is floating this as one possible stepping-stone toward a Mars mission and as a potential use of the CEV. At 3-6 months the asteroid mission would be shorter than a trip to Mars, closer to Earth, and require simpler spacecraft (the CEV). It would serve as a test for the capabilities required for going to Mars (or even long-term to the moon), and for the abilities of the CEV. You are completely right that this is one idea they are kicking around on, and my guess is that the best description of their reasoning is:
We're going to build the CEV; officially Congress said we're supposed to be going the moon first and then to Mars. What could we do that would use the CEV, and could be sold to Congress as part of the politically-assigned goals?
NASA plans a large number of missions but political considerations affect their budget so much that I wouldn't bet this is going to happen, no matter how cool it sounds. Right now, Mars is officially high on the agenda, so stepping-stones toward Mars are hot. In 5 years the next administration might decide to take the unmanned direction and this will go to the back burner. For the moment this should be thought of as contingency planning.
Repeat after me: the researchers constructed a membristor.
Somehow, I don't think these scientists really care about the abstract existence of memristors. Moreover, you can't prove the existence of something that didn't exist before you started. You might be able to proved the feasibility of such devices, but only in mathematics it may be appropriate to say you "proved the existence" of something when you actually have a construction.
Actually, the constitution is very specific about appointments of "Officers" of the Federal Government (in Article II section 2):
[The President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
The board of appeals judges are probably "inferior officers" and not ordinary federal employees. Since the Director of the PTO is not a "Head of [a] Department" (he is an Undersecretary in the Department of Commerce), Congress can't delegate the appointment authority to him. Only the Secretary of Commerce can appoint these judges. This was the case, actually, until 2000, so judges appointed before then are OK.
Hurting competition in and of itself hurts consumers. I thought that was the whole idea behind antitrust laws in the first place.
Wrong. Actually, consumers benefit when they can get better goods or services at cheaper prices. Sometimes competition actually harms consumers. Here are two examples: first, due to economies of scale, sometimes when competitors merge prices actually go down. This is not to say every merger is good for the consumer, just that sometimes there's a downside to further competition. Secondly, consider a market where there is a high barrier to entry (power generation, or R&D intesive fields etc). In these cases the prospect of competition might actually deter companies from entering the market in the first place, leaving the consumer with zero options. In these cases a common solution is a government-assured monopoly (e.g. via exclusive licenses or patents). If you couldn't get patents then there would be a lot more competition for producing the inventions. But eliminating this particular form of competition can help the consumer. This is not to say everything should be patentable, just that you should weigh things from the point of view of the end (better results for the consumer) and not the means (more competition is usually better).
"Crude oil looks more similar to gasoline than biomass does"
More importantly, if they get 50% of the cellulose's energy into hydrocarbons then processing twice as much cellulose should given them a $2/gallon hydrocarbon. What they should tell us is whether a gallon of their hydrocarbon mixture has the same amount of energy as a gallon of oil For example, a gallon of ethanol has about 2/3rds the energy of a gallon of regular gasoline, so if it's only priced at 2/3rd the price of regular it won't break even.
The bottom line: we need price in dollars per kilojoule, not in dollars per gallon.
Slashdot Mirror
The IOC owns the broadcast rights -- but does the IOC actually produce any broadcasts? do they operate TV stations? In fact, one of the main sources of revenue for the IOC (i.e., one of the main ways they pay for the games) is by licensing the broadcast rights separately for each oountry.
The PRC owns the rights for broadcast in China. This is no different from NBC owning the broadcast rights in the US, or the CBC owning the rights in Canada. Note that the CBC is an arm of the Canadian government.
Certainly voting technology should be open-source, cryptographically signed etc. But this is not the point. No matter where the software and hardware come from, there must be a unique certified official configuration, well ahead of the election. Ideally, there should be a way to prove that a given piece of hardware is in the certified configuration.
If there is adverse interaction between Diebold's software and the anti-virus software then the certified configuration should not have included the anti-virus software. Alternatively, once this was discovered. Diebold should have certified a new configuration (without the A/V) and removed the A/V product from the computers. In any case local authorities should not be in charge of making changes to the configuration, or installing software on their own (e.g. choosing the correct A/V product). To the customer, all components of the voting system should behave like black-box appliances -- not like general-purpose computers (independently of the underlying implementation).
It doesn't matter whether attribution was there or not -- or whether in this case a fair use defense would be successful. The point is that copyright law is complicated, and a panel of academics set up to judge issues of academic misconduct is not qualified to make the statement "this guy broke copyright laws". Whether his use was fair or not (even without attribution) is a tricky issue of law on which there surely are disagreements. Non-lawyers should not be saying that this guy definitely broke copyright laws, the same way that lawyers should not be saying that his experiments definitely defied the laws of physics.
In fact, there is no copyright in data (that is, in the facts); actually, using data published by others is a hallmark of scientific progress. That's why they published the data in the first place. If he had claimed the data as his own it would be scientific misconduct; if he failed to attribute the data to its authors it would be scientific misconduct. But there is no way for him to break copyright laws by publishing facts that were generated by others. In fact, even if he used the author's actual graphs and tables (which may be copyrighted), it is not so obvious that he actually broke copyright laws -- scientific use (with attribution) may very well come under the defense of fair use. We are seeing here the results of the propaganda campaign to extend copyright beyond all bounds.
This doesn't sound reasonable. If management behaved like this they would have been fired before this guy was -- the management problems would be greater than the technical ones.
It's hard to believe that management didn't care that a single employee was the only one who knew anything about critical infrastructure, no matter whether the employee arranged things this way because he thought no-one else was good enough or because this was his was of becoming entrenched.
As an aside, I'm surprised that Novell didn't ask Sun to testify in court about what they thought they paid for. I guess this may be due to potential conflict-of-interest (since Sun open-sourced Solaris based on a license SCO didn't have the authority to give them, they are now in trouble with Novell over this).
Eleven years, actually (till 2019). It will take longer in practice, I'm sure, but you should check your figures before posting.
In other words, at this stage this is about the development team, not about the technical issues.
Indeed: instead of burning oil in the engine of a car, converting the heat to motion, it is proposed that we burn oil in the power plant, convert this to electricity, conduct the electricity to the home, use this to separate water, and finally burn the hydrogen in the car?
Last year BusyBox successfully enforced their copyrights in at least two instances. While the terms of the settlements have not been disclosed, I'm sure the SFLC will be happy to get involved again.
Well, we all realize it's very important for everyone (especially young children) to learn that being watched at all places and all times is normal and important for the functioning of civilizations. Airplane cabins are a convenient place to start since some people are sufficiently scared of flying to accept surveilance there.
Wikipedia (like the WWW graph and unlike the "acted together in a film graph)) is naturally a directed graph. In other words, the links have a direction. This has nothing to do with the property of being "simply connected" -- which for graphs like Wikipedia is equivalent to the absence of loops.
Legislation is difficult to change once passed. Competing interests (or lack of interests) and simple inertia mean that whatever gets written into law stays there for a while. It makes sense for the law to say that the standards should be open, that they should be chosen by a particular state agency, or that they should be reviewed every X years. But writing the choice of standards into law is very inflexible. There is a reason why we have building codes and highway codes. This doesn't say that administrative rulemaking is less subject to lobbying and corruption, or that it is more transparent. But on these counts it is no worse than primary legislation.
are the way to go, just you say. The resulting ballots are then readable by both humans and machines, while the voting machine remains stateless.
This gives you the advantages of the machine (UI, automated counting of the ballots), without sacrificing privacy (since the voting machine doesn't keep track of vote totals) and security (as long as the voter checks the generated ballot, no tampering with the voting machine will help; as long as machine-generated counts are hand-checked at random precints, tampering with the counting machines can also be detected).Why bother? Because it's cheaper to buy an existing product than to reinvent the wheel. Later they may decide to reverse-engineer, but even then it's cheaper to buy the blueprints.
Can some help a non-expert in the audience: I assume that a "framebuffer" driver only gives pixel-level access to the card, without access to the HW acceleration features?
Skype used an embedded Linux operating system in a mobile phone device. The GPL applies to the Linux kernel and the system utilities they used, not to the proprietary Skype software (e.g. the client) that they also installed on the device. It's ok for the device to have both GPL'd software (Linux) and non-GPL'd software (the Skype client). The problem is that they didn't obey the GPL regarding Linux, by not advising the customers that about their rights regarding the free software on the device. At no point was the secrecy of the Skype protocol at stake.
NASA plans a large number of missions but political considerations affect their budget so much that I wouldn't bet this is going to happen, no matter how cool it sounds. Right now, Mars is officially high on the agenda, so stepping-stones toward Mars are hot. In 5 years the next administration might decide to take the unmanned direction and this will go to the back burner. For the moment this should be thought of as contingency planning.
Groklaw has the scoop: after their experience at oral argument, Skype decided to drop their appeal. Notch another win to Harald Welte!
Repeat after me: the researchers constructed a membristor.
Somehow, I don't think these scientists really care about the abstract existence of memristors. Moreover, you can't prove the existence of something that didn't exist before you started. You might be able to proved the feasibility of such devices, but only in mathematics it may be appropriate to say you "proved the existence" of something when you actually have a construction.More importantly, if they get 50% of the cellulose's energy into hydrocarbons then processing twice as much cellulose should given them a $2/gallon hydrocarbon. What they should tell us is whether a gallon of their hydrocarbon mixture has the same amount of energy as a gallon of oil For example, a gallon of ethanol has about 2/3rds the energy of a gallon of regular gasoline, so if it's only priced at 2/3rd the price of regular it won't break even.
The bottom line: we need price in dollars per kilojoule, not in dollars per gallon.