>And no, they DO NOT dress like the 17th century >guy on the oats box. That's more of an Amish >style.
Well... As a member of said liberal-arts college (once denounced by no less of an authority than S. Agnew as the "Kremlin on the Crum"), I would have to say that we do have a fair number of students whose fashion sense does extend to the big hat and cloak traditions that the oat box glorifies. No, they are neither Amish nor SCA members. They're just SWIL. Google at your own peril.
There's an additional complication, if a fellow Swarthmore student may add a few words. We don't have P2P access as of earlier today due to continuous networking issues, so someone besides a why-war or SSDC member will have to seed it off campus and subject their server to a slashdotting.
Good luck, guys. I guess it's time to find out if this college's grand civil disobedience tradition will carry over into the internet.
IMNAL (yet) and all the other acronyms and disclaimers.
Goodness yes. It gets more useful as a test case as this is explicitly an academic paper and U.S. courts have traditionally been very protective of academic free speech, with famous exceptions. An example? During the days in which it was illegal to "facilitate" an abortion, pro-choice activists would pass out literature detailing how to perform early-term abortions with less risk to the woman in question than either a coat hanger or the guy in the alleyway posed. When hauled into court, the constant defense was that the material was mimeographed (remember those?) from medical textbooks and thus part of academic speech. Worked every time in the Northern District of CA in the early 70s, as far as I can tell.
Granted, this is a different world and it's a civil suit, but it's going to be hard to go after this one in court, and that's disregarding the already-beaten horse of publicity. Either way, it should make for a good example in IP classes and, if it comes out the way it seems the great lobbying force that is slashdot wants it to come out, this case could create a wonderful loophole: don't publish code; describe "methods" that can easily be coded or don't even need code for implementation. And do it in print, as academic printed works rank just slightly below political speech on the courts' "hands off" scale (See P. Zimmerman's methods of getting early PGP code to Europe legally).
Why don't I have over 1k/. comments, as your sig asks? Because I go outside. If a website/blog becomes your life, that's great if you're happy, but seasonal affect disorder's going to kick in soon enough, and then you'll be a raving caffinated lump of CRT-tanned mush. Go play frisbee or something, please. CRT-tanned mush is difficult to get off of chairs.
If you want an Honor Code that's both the best and the worst situation possible, check out Haverford College. It's a Quaker school (no, not Quake Quaker, Society of Friends Quaker; they're the ones you've seen on TV protesting wars) in PA where the students write and ratify both an academic and a social honor code every year. Stuff down to the level of "Change the toilet paper roll" is in this document. I suppose it's great practice for padding bills with amendments in Congress, but, other than that, it seems like it would be a little stifling. At least the students can rewrite it, though, which is better than Davidson's attempt at fostering honorable behavior through totalitarianism.
The order of dismissal for the case states only that the parties have reached an agreement, the trial date is therefore stricken from the record, and the Court's final judgement is filed under seal, which is pretty standard for corporate settlements like this. You can probably find the order itself at the Western District of Washington web records. It's a public record, so you could also call up the clerk for a copy.
It's too bad that we don't know what happened in the settlement, from a public access standpoint, but it will be very, very clear soon enough. If bn.com has a 1-click style checkout without a.com licensing/suing other companies for the technology, then bn.com came out on top. If bn.com either doesn't have 1-click or does, but a.com continues to license the technology to other companies, then it's a pretty safe bet that amazon came out on top.
Slashdot Mirror
>And no, they DO NOT dress like the 17th century >guy on the oats box. That's more of an Amish >style. Well... As a member of said liberal-arts college (once denounced by no less of an authority than S. Agnew as the "Kremlin on the Crum"), I would have to say that we do have a fair number of students whose fashion sense does extend to the big hat and cloak traditions that the oat box glorifies. No, they are neither Amish nor SCA members. They're just SWIL. Google at your own peril.
There's an additional complication, if a fellow Swarthmore student may add a few words. We don't have P2P access as of earlier today due to continuous networking issues, so someone besides a why-war or SSDC member will have to seed it off campus and subject their server to a slashdotting. Good luck, guys. I guess it's time to find out if this college's grand civil disobedience tradition will carry over into the internet.
IMNAL (yet) and all the other acronyms and disclaimers. Goodness yes. It gets more useful as a test case as this is explicitly an academic paper and U.S. courts have traditionally been very protective of academic free speech, with famous exceptions. An example? During the days in which it was illegal to "facilitate" an abortion, pro-choice activists would pass out literature detailing how to perform early-term abortions with less risk to the woman in question than either a coat hanger or the guy in the alleyway posed. When hauled into court, the constant defense was that the material was mimeographed (remember those?) from medical textbooks and thus part of academic speech. Worked every time in the Northern District of CA in the early 70s, as far as I can tell. Granted, this is a different world and it's a civil suit, but it's going to be hard to go after this one in court, and that's disregarding the already-beaten horse of publicity. Either way, it should make for a good example in IP classes and, if it comes out the way it seems the great lobbying force that is slashdot wants it to come out, this case could create a wonderful loophole: don't publish code; describe "methods" that can easily be coded or don't even need code for implementation. And do it in print, as academic printed works rank just slightly below political speech on the courts' "hands off" scale (See P. Zimmerman's methods of getting early PGP code to Europe legally).
Why don't I have over 1k /. comments, as your sig asks? Because I go outside. If a website/blog becomes your life, that's great if you're happy, but seasonal affect disorder's going to kick in soon enough, and then you'll be a raving caffinated lump of CRT-tanned mush. Go play frisbee or something, please. CRT-tanned mush is difficult to get off of chairs.
If you want an Honor Code that's both the best and the worst situation possible, check out Haverford College. It's a Quaker school (no, not Quake Quaker, Society of Friends Quaker; they're the ones you've seen on TV protesting wars) in PA where the students write and ratify both an academic and a social honor code every year. Stuff down to the level of "Change the toilet paper roll" is in this document. I suppose it's great practice for padding bills with amendments in Congress, but, other than that, it seems like it would be a little stifling. At least the students can rewrite it, though, which is better than Davidson's attempt at fostering honorable behavior through totalitarianism.
The order of dismissal for the case states only that the parties have reached an agreement, the trial date is therefore stricken from the record, and the Court's final judgement is filed under seal, which is pretty standard for corporate settlements like this. You can probably find the order itself at the Western District of Washington web records. It's a public record, so you could also call up the clerk for a copy.
It's too bad that we don't know what happened in the settlement, from a public access standpoint, but it will be very, very clear soon enough. If bn.com has a 1-click style checkout without a.com licensing/suing other companies for the technology, then bn.com came out on top. If bn.com either doesn't have 1-click or does, but a.com continues to license the technology to other companies, then it's a pretty safe bet that amazon came out on top.