While there may be a clause in the TOS that allows you to end it without early termination fees (ETF), the CTIA Consumer Code is a more complete expression of your rights as a consumer. The code can be found at:
The seventh right is the one that says they'll let you out of the long term agreement if they change the TOS.
The code may or may not have the legal weight of the TOS, but it makes for a good starting point when dealing with a customer service rep. I used it to get out of a contract about a month ago when they changed the arbitration agreement. The CRS agreed to allow me to go month-to-month. In the long run, AT&T benefitted because I used the freedon to get a bigger, better phone that required a beefier data plan, so it was win-win. Just remain polite and firm with the CSR.
Transportation is the usual methane capture project killer. Landfills and wastewater treatment plants are typically located away from densely populated regions, for reasons apparent to anybody who's ever been downwind of one. As such, there typically isn't as well developed as it would have to be to make a project work.
There are, of course, exceptions. Puente Hills Landfill in LA can generate 50MW. A more typical landfill can generate only a fraction of that.
I work for an engineering firm in California that does air permitting.
Nitrous oxides are primarily a concern as a smog/ozone precursor. Ground level NOx is a health concern because it will create an acid, as the parent mentioned.
CO and NOx are basicly dueling pollutants any time you have a combustion process. High temperatures lead to NOx, low temperatures lead to CO. In California, most reguins are in attainment for CO, but many are not in attainment for NOx. Permitting most combustion sources will result in trading one problem for another.
If you're so daft that you can't even figure out to clock on Applications->Office->Word processor, then you should consider an elementary computer class, with no matter which OS.
By doing that, you're assuming all programs with a similar purpose are compatible, but they aren't. It wasn't that long ago that OO added support for the Office 2007 formatted files. If emacs were listed in the same menu as OO Writer, would she be able to do the same thing? If your professor says they want the homework submitted in Word Perfect format, would she be able to do the same thing? (What, you haven't had a professor who's a bit of an anachronism?)
If you don't already know OO is compatible with Word, there's no reason to assume it is.
Some credits are better than others. There are several verification programs in existence. In the USA, I am most familiar with the Chicago Climate Exchange and the California Climate Action Reserve (CCAR). A lot of projects would have occurred anyway due to profitability or regulations, and GHG credits from these projects are junk. Preserving a piece of forest in a desolate valley nobody could profitably harvest or installing a landfill gas flare where carbon has become too expensive should be considered "business as usual," but unfortunately some accreditation agencies and verifiers don't consider "business as usual" and say there is a reduction anyway. These credits are a scam perpetrated by the seller, the verifier, the accreditor, and sometimes the buyer.
There are some projects that generate real reductions. For example, capture or methane from manure lagoons or landfills where it is not required by regulation and is not less expensive than carbon treatment or the planting and preservation of trees in an area that would otherwise be harvested. These credits are real reductions.
The problem is the layman has no idea where their credits are coming from. I'm in the industry, and I can't always tell you the value of a credit.
The signs are everywhere because the possibility exists that tobacco smoke or some other carcinogen (benzene in gasoline) will enter a facility. The signs are to legally cover asses, not because there is a recognized carcinogen in an appreciable amount.
Methane matters. The 100-year potential is 25 times higher than CO2. The shorter timeframe potentials are higher, and the long timeframe potentials are smaller. In the grand scheme of things, the 100 year potential is a reasonable one to use because it's looking at enough of the future to matter, but not so long as to look beyond what humans can effect in a (relatively) short time.
This isn't the media twisting figures. the 100-year GWP is almost always the one used by the media. The green groups will try and use a shorter one when they're attacking a methane emitter (i.e. landfill), or a longer term one when they're discussing something like sulfur hexafloride.
It's been a while since I've gone through the global warming potential section of the IPCC reports in that much detail, but I think the 100 year GWP value for methane includes the potential resulting from the CO2 that results from decomposition.
Yes, and over that short lifespan it's MUCH more potent than CO2. It's pretty much standard to use the 100-year global warming potential of a gas when discussing it's global warming potential. Otherwise, you're comparing apples and oranges (short lived but high impact versus long lived but low impact).
The system is 20 years old and predates XML. They've been trying to get it upgraded for the past 10 years, but the money hasn't been allocated. Apparently changing the code to allocate the money for an upgrade is also difficult.
I heard Chung on the radio this afternoon and it sounds like the system isn't set up to work that way. It sounds like there's a base pay, then there are things like bonuses for special duties (i.e. being bilingual, motorcycle CHP, etc.). Then you have to take out money for retirement funds, taxes, social security, etc; some are flat rates, some are percentages.
Changing it so everybody gets the minimum wage while still keeping track of all the special designations, payments for those designations, taxes, etc is a lot of work. Don't forget, the state employees will be payed back pay for the time when their wages were cut, so you have to run two systems in parallel.
On the lighter side, the conservative host chuckled when the controller said the system wasn't designed to reduce state worker pay.
Excel is great for number crunching in my field (environmental engineering consulting). I consistantly blow co-workers away with time saving tricks. Oddly enough, find and replace is one of the best weapons in my arsenal.
That said, I'd never use it for high order calculations. For serious programming, I run into Fortran the most because I use a lot of models that were put together by the EPA or the like. I know the most basic elements of Fortran, but my year of learning C++ is almost untransferable. I don't think many of the elements mentioned in the original question (flow control, resource management, etc...) are the kind of things that are learned in a semester of computer science.
The more like MS Office it is, the easier it is for corporations to switch to OO. The more compatible with MS Office it is, the easier it is for people to use OO.
I use MS Office 2007 at work. I don't have a choice in the matter. If we start delivering documents in any other format, our clients will have a conniption fit. If we can't open a Word file because our office suite isn't perfectly compatible with the file, we have a major problem.
Unfortunately, I sometimes have to take my work home with me, where I don't want to pay the MS tax. The more easily I can work with Word and Excel files with OO on my home computer, the happier I am. The more OO screws up my cell formatting and causes things to print incorrectly, the more likely I am to turn to the dark side at home.
Before anybody brings it up, no, it's not an option to explain to our clients that open source and implementing open standards is the way to go. We get files from governments at all levels and work for dozens of different clients. Most of them are a hell of a lot bigger than us and won't care if some engineering consulting company thinks an open program is better. Changing office suites is a big deal to some companies. Just look at the feedback MS got for changing to ribbons in Office 2007. People bitched and moaned that they couldn't find anything and it took a whole click more to do a something they had done in three clicks before.
Paper Ballots - Paper Ballots - PAPER BALLOTS! Why do you think it is any more difficult to rig an election with paper ballots? They've been doing it for centuries now. I don't think Zimbabwe used electronic voting machines, but I'm willing to bet the election there wasn't on the up and up.
What we do need is a verifiable paper trail, no matter what kind of voting system we have. This trail can be created many ways, but for electronic machines it boils down to the fact that voters need to look at a printout of what their vote is recorded as and that same piece of paper needs to be checked against the machines memory. A few precincts need to do a complete check of the ballots to verify that the paper and machine totals match, and all precincts need to spot check enough ballots to be significantly sure (in a statistical sense) there aren't discrepancies.
The advantage paper ballots have is that they essentially create a verifiable trail by default. Since many paper ballots are still tallied by a machine, we still need to do the similar checking to the electronic voting machines.
Beyond those basic requirements, I don't care how it's done. We don't need open source software, but it would be nice. We absolutely don't want voters taking home their ballots any more than we need them taking copies of their paper ballots home.
DDT causes genetic damage. It's not just carcinogenic. The damaged genes can be passed from parent to child (assuming that your genetically-defected fetus lives long enough to be born). From the EPA IRIS database:
Weight-of-Evidence Characterization
B2 (Probable human carcinogen - based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in animals)
Weight-of-Evidence Narrative:
Observation of tumors (generally of the liver) in seven studies in various mouse strains and three studies in rats. DDT is structurally similar to other probable carcinogens, such as DDD and DDE.
This may be a synopsis of the full weight-of-evidence narrative.
Bolding mine.
Likewise, California's Toxicicity Criteria Database lists it as a carcinogen, though it's based largely on the EPA assessment. If you're evaluating health risk in the US, those are the go-to sources for risk criteria.
The worldwide DDT ban has caused the deaths of millions worldwide. Even if DDT were to make the bald eagle extinct, which is highly doubtful, the lives of millions of men, women, and children is more important to me.
The global outright ban was an overreaction, but we were just spraying the stuff willy nilly and it was spreading throughout the environment. The stuff is carcinogenic. In the US, where a person is more likely to die of cancer than malaria, it doesn't make sense to use it.
The Global Cooling theory was actually fairly accurate. It just came at the end of a cold spell. But much like the GW theories of today, people look at a graph and see it going in a particular direction and draw a straight line in that same direction to predict the future. Today, it's called the "hockey stick" graph, because that's what it looks like. Global cooling was never mainstream. Yes, it merited some brief consideration, but even back in 1970, most people considered global warming a more serious threat than global cooling. Predictions today are based on much more sophisticated models of global climate that consider both the cooling effects of aerosols and the warming effects of greenhouse gasses.
Pollution/Smog was a problem in LA. Not so much in Raleigh NC. The problem is that people who never left LA assumed the whole country was like that made predictions based on what they saw. Many of the global cooling theories was based on this (smog blocks the sun and leads to GC).
Pollution controls have helped LA. They've done nothing for Plano TX. Actually, they have reduces carbon monoxide, respirable particulate, ground level ozone, NOx, and diesel particulate throughout the nation. Not every area had concentrations that exceeded EPA standards, but reducing the concentrations further lessens health impacts from air pollution.
The Ozone layer was shown to be "growing back" even before any ban on CFC's could have an effect. Then it shrank again. Then it grew back again. It's a cycle. The problem is that we discovered it during the shrinking phase and freaked out, much like today. Yes, the ozone layer goes through seasonal fluctuations. It's much like the CO2 concentration in that way. However, the low, high, and average concentrations each year all showed downward trends.
I'll take a pass on the 1960's because I don't deal with pesticides every day at work. I do, however, work on air emissions every day, so I'm more than happy to discuss your issues for the 70s onward.
Global cooling wasn't ever taken very seriously. By 1970, groups were listing global warming as a potential environmental disaster, but almost no major groups considered global cooling a serious threat. The few groups that did tended to temper their warnings of cooling with sentences like "we don't know if the cooling effect of aerosols or the warming effect of CO2 will dominate." Now that we've refined our climate models (it's nice when you don't have to write them on punch cards), nobody seriously thinks global cooling is a threat.
Pollution and smog are still an issue. They always will be. We've done lots to reduce the amount of smog, such as requiring catalytic converters. As it is, the EPA recently lowered the National Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) threshold for NOx, a smog precursor.
Don't kid yourself and think the plumes coming from large facilities will have no health effects. Due to bad city planning, residential areas are frequently located near facilities that emit tons of carcinogens each year.
Some of the most toxic compounds will take centuries to degrade. PCBs, dioxins, and dioxins have become so ubiquitous that few residents of the USA don't contain a measurable amount of the compounds in their body. All of those compounds are VERY potent carcinogens.
I'm not saying we're all going to die a horrible cancerous death, but pollution is a very real threat to human health.
The hole in the ozone layer is one of the best documented environmental problems ever. Halogens like chlorine and fluorine were reaching the upper atmosphere in CFCs. Once there, the molecules broke apart, and the molecular halogens acted as a catalyst to create O2 from O3. Fortunately, it's been one of the easiest global problems ever to reach a consensus on. Since the activation of the Montreal Protocol in 1991, global emissions of CFCs has dropped significantly. Damage to the ozone layer has slowed and may be reversing. It will still be decades before the ozone layer returns to its natural state, but the Montreal Protocol stands out as an example of global cooperation on an environmental issue.
Global warming is a lot more complicated to solve than the ozone layer. Replacements existed for CFCs that were nearly as good and nearly as cheap. We don't have a replacement for fossil fuels that's as cheap. CFC emissions are easy to calculate. GHG emissions aren't. Yes, tailpipe emissions from a car are easy enough, but enteric fermentation, rice paddy farming, and landfill emissions are entirely different beasts. throw in the fact that every industry wants credit for any GHG reduction, no matter how many degrees of separation, and you have a real mess.
1) Many engineering programs take 5 years. Business majors can almost always graduate in 4 years even with Fridays off. Of course, I'm assuming you can get into the classes you need. If an engineer can't, they could end up with a 6 year bachelors degree. My business major firends never had that trouble because their classes have four or five different days and times per year while my chemical engineering classes were only offered every other year.
2) You can't save money or time by starting an engineering degree at a community college. Sure, you could knock out a few core classes as CC, but you can't take a Foo Engineering 101 at CC. Some CCs don't even offer the math courses you need for engineering.
It's likely that she's asking for a lot more than she expects (or even wants) to get. If you walk into a car dealership and want to haggle, you don't immediately offer the highest price you're willing to pay, you offer something lower and work your way up to a price you can agree on. Similarly, she may only want a reasonable amount of money so Sony can use the technology she patented and is asking for something that will hurt Sony a lot more than a reasonable settlement.
Of course, that's also the tactic a patent troll would take: ask for a huge penalty then be happy when they get a few million for squatting on a patent that never should have been granted. It's a shame that the tactics look the same and it's almost impossible to tell how legit her case is based on TFA.
As long as Nevada hasn't changed the voting machines since I moved in 2004, they still have the best electronic voting system in the nation. Damned by faint praise, I know, but at least there's a verifiable paper trail.
Sequoia isn't saying they think the professors will be stealing intellectual property. They are saying that if New Jersey lets the professors test the software, NJ is breaking the terms of the software license. In short, NJ signed the license agreement, which presumably says that NJ can't give the voting machines to outside testers for evaluation and reporting. It's software as a licensed service and not as property, which is also a heap of bovine excrement. What should be happening is states putting a line in the request for proposals saying something along the lines of "All proposed systems that prohibit independent testing and evaluation will not be considered by STATE," only in legalese.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.ctia.org/content/index.cfm/AID/10352
and here:
http://www.wireless.att.com/learn/articles-resources/consumer-code.jsp
The seventh right is the one that says they'll let you out of the long term agreement if they change the TOS. The code may or may not have the legal weight of the TOS, but it makes for a good starting point when dealing with a customer service rep. I used it to get out of a contract about a month ago when they changed the arbitration agreement. The CRS agreed to allow me to go month-to-month. In the long run, AT&T benefitted because I used the freedon to get a bigger, better phone that required a beefier data plan, so it was win-win. Just remain polite and firm with the CSR.
More details are available here:
http://consumerist.com/228186/script-for-escaping-cingular-contracts-without-fee-based-on-new-arbitration-clause
There are, of course, exceptions. Puente Hills Landfill in LA can generate 50MW. A more typical landfill can generate only a fraction of that.
Nitrous oxides are primarily a concern as a smog/ozone precursor. Ground level NOx is a health concern because it will create an acid, as the parent mentioned.
CO and NOx are basicly dueling pollutants any time you have a combustion process. High temperatures lead to NOx, low temperatures lead to CO. In California, most reguins are in attainment for CO, but many are not in attainment for NOx. Permitting most combustion sources will result in trading one problem for another.
If you're so daft that you can't even figure out to clock on Applications->Office->Word processor, then you should consider an elementary computer class, with no matter which OS.
By doing that, you're assuming all programs with a similar purpose are compatible, but they aren't. It wasn't that long ago that OO added support for the Office 2007 formatted files. If emacs were listed in the same menu as OO Writer, would she be able to do the same thing? If your professor says they want the homework submitted in Word Perfect format, would she be able to do the same thing? (What, you haven't had a professor who's a bit of an anachronism?)
If you don't already know OO is compatible with Word, there's no reason to assume it is.
There are some projects that generate real reductions. For example, capture or methane from manure lagoons or landfills where it is not required by regulation and is not less expensive than carbon treatment or the planting and preservation of trees in an area that would otherwise be harvested. These credits are real reductions.
The problem is the layman has no idea where their credits are coming from. I'm in the industry, and I can't always tell you the value of a credit.
So it the GP's. It should be "ist," not "is."
The signs are everywhere because the possibility exists that tobacco smoke or some other carcinogen (benzene in gasoline) will enter a facility. The signs are to legally cover asses, not because there is a recognized carcinogen in an appreciable amount.
Methane matters. The 100-year potential is 25 times higher than CO2. The shorter timeframe potentials are higher, and the long timeframe potentials are smaller. In the grand scheme of things, the 100 year potential is a reasonable one to use because it's looking at enough of the future to matter, but not so long as to look beyond what humans can effect in a (relatively) short time.
This isn't the media twisting figures. the 100-year GWP is almost always the one used by the media. The green groups will try and use a shorter one when they're attacking a methane emitter (i.e. landfill), or a longer term one when they're discussing something like sulfur hexafloride.
It's been a while since I've gone through the global warming potential section of the IPCC reports in that much detail, but I think the 100 year GWP value for methane includes the potential resulting from the CO2 that results from decomposition.
Yes, and over that short lifespan it's MUCH more potent than CO2. It's pretty much standard to use the 100-year global warming potential of a gas when discussing it's global warming potential. Otherwise, you're comparing apples and oranges (short lived but high impact versus long lived but low impact).
The system is 20 years old and predates XML. They've been trying to get it upgraded for the past 10 years, but the money hasn't been allocated. Apparently changing the code to allocate the money for an upgrade is also difficult.
Changing it so everybody gets the minimum wage while still keeping track of all the special designations, payments for those designations, taxes, etc is a lot of work. Don't forget, the state employees will be payed back pay for the time when their wages were cut, so you have to run two systems in parallel.
On the lighter side, the conservative host chuckled when the controller said the system wasn't designed to reduce state worker pay.
...or a .50 cal to get rid your "rodent" problem.
Pansy. I use a mortar. It works especially well on burrowing rodents.
That said, I'd never use it for high order calculations. For serious programming, I run into Fortran the most because I use a lot of models that were put together by the EPA or the like. I know the most basic elements of Fortran, but my year of learning C++ is almost untransferable. I don't think many of the elements mentioned in the original question (flow control, resource management, etc...) are the kind of things that are learned in a semester of computer science.
That's because they're scaly and slimy. Trout are better.
I use MS Office 2007 at work. I don't have a choice in the matter. If we start delivering documents in any other format, our clients will have a conniption fit. If we can't open a Word file because our office suite isn't perfectly compatible with the file, we have a major problem.
Unfortunately, I sometimes have to take my work home with me, where I don't want to pay the MS tax. The more easily I can work with Word and Excel files with OO on my home computer, the happier I am. The more OO screws up my cell formatting and causes things to print incorrectly, the more likely I am to turn to the dark side at home.
Before anybody brings it up, no, it's not an option to explain to our clients that open source and implementing open standards is the way to go. We get files from governments at all levels and work for dozens of different clients. Most of them are a hell of a lot bigger than us and won't care if some engineering consulting company thinks an open program is better. Changing office suites is a big deal to some companies. Just look at the feedback MS got for changing to ribbons in Office 2007. People bitched and moaned that they couldn't find anything and it took a whole click more to do a something they had done in three clicks before.
What we do need is a verifiable paper trail, no matter what kind of voting system we have. This trail can be created many ways, but for electronic machines it boils down to the fact that voters need to look at a printout of what their vote is recorded as and that same piece of paper needs to be checked against the machines memory. A few precincts need to do a complete check of the ballots to verify that the paper and machine totals match, and all precincts need to spot check enough ballots to be significantly sure (in a statistical sense) there aren't discrepancies.
The advantage paper ballots have is that they essentially create a verifiable trail by default. Since many paper ballots are still tallied by a machine, we still need to do the similar checking to the electronic voting machines.
Beyond those basic requirements, I don't care how it's done. We don't need open source software, but it would be nice. We absolutely don't want voters taking home their ballots any more than we need them taking copies of their paper ballots home.
Weight-of-Evidence Narrative: Observation of tumors (generally of the liver) in seven studies in various mouse strains and three studies in rats. DDT is structurally similar to other probable carcinogens, such as DDD and DDE. This may be a synopsis of the full weight-of-evidence narrative.
Bolding mine.
Likewise, California's Toxicicity Criteria Database lists it as a carcinogen, though it's based largely on the EPA assessment. If you're evaluating health risk in the US, those are the go-to sources for risk criteria.
The global outright ban was an overreaction, but we were just spraying the stuff willy nilly and it was spreading throughout the environment. The stuff is carcinogenic. In the US, where a person is more likely to die of cancer than malaria, it doesn't make sense to use it.
The Global Cooling theory was actually fairly accurate. It just came at the end of a cold spell. But much like the GW theories of today, people look at a graph and see it going in a particular direction and draw a straight line in that same direction to predict the future. Today, it's called the "hockey stick" graph, because that's what it looks like. Global cooling was never mainstream. Yes, it merited some brief consideration, but even back in 1970, most people considered global warming a more serious threat than global cooling. Predictions today are based on much more sophisticated models of global climate that consider both the cooling effects of aerosols and the warming effects of greenhouse gasses. Pollution/Smog was a problem in LA. Not so much in Raleigh NC. The problem is that people who never left LA assumed the whole country was like that made predictions based on what they saw. Many of the global cooling theories was based on this (smog blocks the sun and leads to GC). Pollution controls have helped LA. They've done nothing for Plano TX. Actually, they have reduces carbon monoxide, respirable particulate, ground level ozone, NOx, and diesel particulate throughout the nation. Not every area had concentrations that exceeded EPA standards, but reducing the concentrations further lessens health impacts from air pollution. The Ozone layer was shown to be "growing back" even before any ban on CFC's could have an effect. Then it shrank again. Then it grew back again. It's a cycle. The problem is that we discovered it during the shrinking phase and freaked out, much like today. Yes, the ozone layer goes through seasonal fluctuations. It's much like the CO2 concentration in that way. However, the low, high, and average concentrations each year all showed downward trends.Global cooling wasn't ever taken very seriously. By 1970, groups were listing global warming as a potential environmental disaster, but almost no major groups considered global cooling a serious threat. The few groups that did tended to temper their warnings of cooling with sentences like "we don't know if the cooling effect of aerosols or the warming effect of CO2 will dominate." Now that we've refined our climate models (it's nice when you don't have to write them on punch cards), nobody seriously thinks global cooling is a threat.
Pollution and smog are still an issue. They always will be. We've done lots to reduce the amount of smog, such as requiring catalytic converters. As it is, the EPA recently lowered the National Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) threshold for NOx, a smog precursor.
Don't kid yourself and think the plumes coming from large facilities will have no health effects. Due to bad city planning, residential areas are frequently located near facilities that emit tons of carcinogens each year.
Some of the most toxic compounds will take centuries to degrade. PCBs, dioxins, and dioxins have become so ubiquitous that few residents of the USA don't contain a measurable amount of the compounds in their body. All of those compounds are VERY potent carcinogens.
I'm not saying we're all going to die a horrible cancerous death, but pollution is a very real threat to human health.
The hole in the ozone layer is one of the best documented environmental problems ever. Halogens like chlorine and fluorine were reaching the upper atmosphere in CFCs. Once there, the molecules broke apart, and the molecular halogens acted as a catalyst to create O2 from O3. Fortunately, it's been one of the easiest global problems ever to reach a consensus on. Since the activation of the Montreal Protocol in 1991, global emissions of CFCs has dropped significantly. Damage to the ozone layer has slowed and may be reversing. It will still be decades before the ozone layer returns to its natural state, but the Montreal Protocol stands out as an example of global cooperation on an environmental issue.
Global warming is a lot more complicated to solve than the ozone layer. Replacements existed for CFCs that were nearly as good and nearly as cheap. We don't have a replacement for fossil fuels that's as cheap. CFC emissions are easy to calculate. GHG emissions aren't. Yes, tailpipe emissions from a car are easy enough, but enteric fermentation, rice paddy farming, and landfill emissions are entirely different beasts. throw in the fact that every industry wants credit for any GHG reduction, no matter how many degrees of separation, and you have a real mess.
1) Many engineering programs take 5 years. Business majors can almost always graduate in 4 years even with Fridays off. Of course, I'm assuming you can get into the classes you need. If an engineer can't, they could end up with a 6 year bachelors degree. My business major firends never had that trouble because their classes have four or five different days and times per year while my chemical engineering classes were only offered every other year.
2) You can't save money or time by starting an engineering degree at a community college. Sure, you could knock out a few core classes as CC, but you can't take a Foo Engineering 101 at CC. Some CCs don't even offer the math courses you need for engineering.
Of course, that's also the tactic a patent troll would take: ask for a huge penalty then be happy when they get a few million for squatting on a patent that never should have been granted. It's a shame that the tactics look the same and it's almost impossible to tell how legit her case is based on TFA.
As long as Nevada hasn't changed the voting machines since I moved in 2004, they still have the best electronic voting system in the nation. Damned by faint praise, I know, but at least there's a verifiable paper trail.
Sequoia isn't saying they think the professors will be stealing intellectual property. They are saying that if New Jersey lets the professors test the software, NJ is breaking the terms of the software license. In short, NJ signed the license agreement, which presumably says that NJ can't give the voting machines to outside testers for evaluation and reporting. It's software as a licensed service and not as property, which is also a heap of bovine excrement. What should be happening is states putting a line in the request for proposals saying something along the lines of "All proposed systems that prohibit independent testing and evaluation will not be considered by STATE," only in legalese.