If the US senate and house are so concerned about a Triploy in wireless communication...
Apart from the odd capitalization, "triploy" isn't a word, though if it were, it might refer to some kind of three-pronged ploy.
Tripoli, formerly sometimes spelled Tripoly, is perhaps the closest word. It is Greek for "triple city"; famous examples include those in modern-day Lebanon, Libya, and Greece.
The term tri-poly or tripoly can also have some uses in chemical nomenclature, as in sodium tripolyphosphate.
Moving further afield, one can extend the competitive-markets concept monopoly to refer to situations where there is more than one major player, but a small number who jointly control the market between themselves. The most common is the duopoly, where a pair of market participants own the market between themselves. This can, less commonly, be extended to three or four with terms such as triopoly and quadropoly. The more general term is an oligopoly.
Man, that is one evasive-as-hell statement. Time for us academics to put pressure on journal editors who have clout with JSTOR to clarify what their role is.
It's unconstitutionally vague, because courts are completely unsure how to draw the line between which ToS violations are criminal and which are not.
A non-vague possibility would be that all ToS violations are a federal "hacking" crime. For example, evading a Slashdot ban might be a felony. But few courts seem to want to do that. So which ToS are enforceable and which aren't?
Let's say that I'm on a university network without breaking into it (which I am). If I slurp 4 million JSTOR documents, this is clearly a violation of JSTOR's terms of service. But I have not in any meaningful way "hacked into" JSTOR; I accessed it from my university network, which I had legitimate access to. Yet it appears, under the theory advanced here, that I would be guilty of a federal crime, "stealing" 4 million documents from JSTOR, because my access went above the use JSTOR authorized me to make of their service, and therefore constitutes computer trespassing.
I don't think that's a Belgium-specific thing, unfortunately; in the U.S. as well, if cell phone records place your cell-phone at the scene of the crime, then you face an uphill battle trying to argue that you weren't there.
I'd rather see a big upsurge in the popularity of homeopathic medicine in that case. At least the money goes to mostly-harmless hippies, the side effects are fewer, and it's cheaper.
Gimp being scriptable with Python is one thing I like about it. You can script Photoshop with some custom Adobe scripting language, but I already know Python, so prefer using a "standard" scripting language.
They also have a much less-fuzzy presence, in the sense of an actual office with employees, via a wholly owned subsidiary (i.e. shell company) in California, but I suppose that's another issue. Texas is going after them for similar shell-company games.
This is fairly standard given current law, and is the "easy" part of the win. Hosts of these kinds of user-driven content sites (e.g. YouTube) are not themselves considered to be violating copyright when copyrighted material ends up on them. The harder part is that sites alleged to be largely organized around promoting infringement can be held liable, under circumstances not completely clarified, for some variety fo inducement or contributory infringement. The Napster case was the leading one in that area.
So the fact that they got direct-infringement charges dismissed doesn't mean a whole lot, for better or worse; that was mostly a foregone conclusion, and I'd guess was thrown in just on the off chance that plaintiffs would get lucky with their draw of judges. The controversial part of the case, whether Hotfile is more Napster-like or more YouTube-like, is still to come.
I think it highlights some of the angles of CS that are actually important as well. It's not just about learning a set of tools, but about a sort of meta-skill of computational thinking: conceiving of ways that you can code procedures to do things, and understanding how changing code will result in changed doing-of-things. For an intro class, quick visual feedback so you can see that changing your code made different stuff happen on screen is a nice way of highlighting that, as well as hopefully building students' interest in "hmm, I wonder if I can make it do [x]?" type questions.
is likely to see organizations examining their own policies and reminding their staff on acceptable usage and best practice for email
It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.
It's kind of interesting that the Space Shuttle was what was supposed to make going to space reliable and routine, as an advance from the previous single-use capsule technologies, which were expensive and could only be used once each.
But for a variety of reasons, it turned out that the Space Shuttle remained fairly expensive and complex to launch, while capsules became reliable and cheap enough to be a routine way of getting people and stuff to/from space.
That's still privileging coal and gas over nuclear: there's a moratorium on replacing old nuclear plants with new ones, but no similar moratorium on replacing old coal/gas with new ones. If Germany wants to show a commitment to environmentalism, coal plants should have at least as strong a moratorium as nuclear, since they're much worse. If the decision is "no new nuclear", it should definitely include "no new coal", and ideally should include a coal phase-out before the nuclear phase-out, since we should start the phase-out with the worst power sources first.
It'd be interesting to known what percentage of people even with landline phones already have this problem, given the prevalence of cordless phones. When the power's out, the only thing that works is an old-fashioned phone with a cord directly plugged into the wall.
Larger businesses tend not to use POTS anymore, even for "landline" phones that present themselves as such. Certainly within a building, bigger companies are almost all on some kind of soft-PBX setup these days, not running copper wires to every desk. Increasingly they're doing the backlink with the phone company directly as some sort of VoIP as well.
It was done on a publicly accessible site that explicitly invites editing, though. If the gallery were in a public park, with a sign on the front that explicitly said "all visitors are free to rearrange the paintings", should it still be illegal if I move your painting to hide it?
Err, revising theories to account for evidence that doesn't fit simpler theories is how science works. "Sulphur emissions exerted a downward pressure on average temperatures in the 1940-70 period" is a hypothesis. There are alternative ones as well, but it's not "dismissing" the evidence. It's how things work in physics as well; when experimental evidence doesn't agree with theoretical predictions, the usual response is to hypothesize what would cause the observed anomaly.
It depends on how he used it in that video (it doesn't appear to be available anymore). If it was used as just a portion of the video, I actually see a stronger case for that being fair use, than for the pixel-art version. The pixel-art version is arguably using a derivative work of the original image in a straightforward commercial use, as the cover art of a new album. Displaying a photograph of the original album as one part of a video about the release of a tribute to the album seems much more like commentary. For example, if I make a documentary about Miles Davis, it is not copyright infringement for me to display the cover art of Miles Davis's albums within my documentary--- but it would be more problematic if I used one of them as the cover art of my documentary.
This seems like basically the same issue as "forgot to remove my SQL password from the config file in the code I uploaded to github", which is also quite common. If you upload a working version of some of your infrastructure somewhere, you need to be careful about whether it contains any sort of authentication tokens.
It doesn't appear to be included in the rather poor article Slashdot chose to link, but the much better Ars piece links the actual ruling [pdf], which includes that sentence on the last page.
I'm not sure if it's the main cause, but it surely doesn't seem to have helped. In the last two medium-sized cities I've lived, the "local" paper was owned by MediaNews Group, and was sort of a superficially localized version of their larger regional papers. As Wikipedia explains, the company's founder was:
a pioneer in "clustering"—developing groups of newspapers that centralized a variety of functions, including production, ad sales, business operations and, in some cases, editorial. An example of this was the Alameda Newspaper Group in suburban San Francisco, where in the mid-1990s, a central newsroom in Pleasanton, California, did all the copy editing, layout and page makeup for five daily papers.
Their M.O. is to rebrand what's effectively one newspaper into a half-dozen or more versions, with a few new articles added to each for local flavor. The added articles are rarely particularly in-depth reporting, and tend to be more along the lines of how the local high-school football team is doing, or a review of a local restaurant. Overall, if you looked at only their local content as a news stream, I would classify it as "mediocre local-interest blog"; it's not hard to imagine someone doing better with even a moderate amount of spare time devoted. These things only look like newspapers because they're padded with 50-70% Reuters/AP reprints, and much of the rest reprints from non-local MediaNews Group stories.
This specific Supreme Court review didn't really touch on the technology issue, though, just the legal standard of proof, since the question they were reviewing was a pretty narrow one of statutory construction. Section 282 of the patent code specifies that, when a patent is challenged in court:
1. "A patent shall be presumed valid."
and
2. "The burden of establishing invalidity of a patent or any claim thereof shall rest on the party asserting such invalidity."
I disagree with that as a matter of policy, but that's what the Patent Act says, and absent any claim that it's unconstitutional, the only thing the Court was asked to decide here is what "burden" means, legally.
The Federal Circuit (a lower appeals court) has held for some years now that "burden of establishing invalidity" means that the party bringing a challenge must show "clear and convincing evidence" of the patent's invalidity. Microsoft argued that, for prior art that the patent office had not already considered in its review record, the burden of establishing invalidity should be lower, with a "preponderance of the evidence" standard.
I'd prefer the lower burden of proof, but this question isn't really at the heart of why we have a patent mess; at best it's a symptom.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the odd capitalization, "triploy" isn't a word, though if it were, it might refer to some kind of three-pronged ploy.
Tripoli, formerly sometimes spelled Tripoly, is perhaps the closest word. It is Greek for "triple city"; famous examples include those in modern-day Lebanon, Libya, and Greece.
The term tri-poly or tripoly can also have some uses in chemical nomenclature, as in sodium tripolyphosphate.
Moving further afield, one can extend the competitive-markets concept monopoly to refer to situations where there is more than one major player, but a small number who jointly control the market between themselves. The most common is the duopoly, where a pair of market participants own the market between themselves. This can, less commonly, be extended to three or four with terms such as triopoly and quadropoly. The more general term is an oligopoly.
Man, that is one evasive-as-hell statement. Time for us academics to put pressure on journal editors who have clout with JSTOR to clarify what their role is.
It's unconstitutionally vague, because courts are completely unsure how to draw the line between which ToS violations are criminal and which are not.
A non-vague possibility would be that all ToS violations are a federal "hacking" crime. For example, evading a Slashdot ban might be a felony. But few courts seem to want to do that. So which ToS are enforceable and which aren't?
Let's say that I'm on a university network without breaking into it (which I am). If I slurp 4 million JSTOR documents, this is clearly a violation of JSTOR's terms of service. But I have not in any meaningful way "hacked into" JSTOR; I accessed it from my university network, which I had legitimate access to. Yet it appears, under the theory advanced here, that I would be guilty of a federal crime, "stealing" 4 million documents from JSTOR, because my access went above the use JSTOR authorized me to make of their service, and therefore constitutes computer trespassing.
For security reasons we'll of course need to perform some preliminary screening before the secure area in which the comment box is located.
I don't think that's a Belgium-specific thing, unfortunately; in the U.S. as well, if cell phone records place your cell-phone at the scene of the crime, then you face an uphill battle trying to argue that you weren't there.
I'd rather see a big upsurge in the popularity of homeopathic medicine in that case. At least the money goes to mostly-harmless hippies, the side effects are fewer, and it's cheaper.
Gimp being scriptable with Python is one thing I like about it. You can script Photoshop with some custom Adobe scripting language, but I already know Python, so prefer using a "standard" scripting language.
At the federal level, yes, but we're talking about state taxes here, which go back to the founding era.
They also have a much less-fuzzy presence, in the sense of an actual office with employees, via a wholly owned subsidiary (i.e. shell company) in California, but I suppose that's another issue. Texas is going after them for similar shell-company games.
This is fairly standard given current law, and is the "easy" part of the win. Hosts of these kinds of user-driven content sites (e.g. YouTube) are not themselves considered to be violating copyright when copyrighted material ends up on them. The harder part is that sites alleged to be largely organized around promoting infringement can be held liable, under circumstances not completely clarified, for some variety fo inducement or contributory infringement. The Napster case was the leading one in that area.
So the fact that they got direct-infringement charges dismissed doesn't mean a whole lot, for better or worse; that was mostly a foregone conclusion, and I'd guess was thrown in just on the off chance that plaintiffs would get lucky with their draw of judges. The controversial part of the case, whether Hotfile is more Napster-like or more YouTube-like, is still to come.
I think it highlights some of the angles of CS that are actually important as well. It's not just about learning a set of tools, but about a sort of meta-skill of computational thinking: conceiving of ways that you can code procedures to do things, and understanding how changing code will result in changed doing-of-things. For an intro class, quick visual feedback so you can see that changing your code made different stuff happen on screen is a nice way of highlighting that, as well as hopefully building students' interest in "hmm, I wonder if I can make it do [x]?" type questions.
It'd be pretty sad if the lesson people take from the News Corp fiasco is: man, their IT staff should've really been more on the ball about making sure no evidence of the crimes they committed was accidentally retained.
It's kind of interesting that the Space Shuttle was what was supposed to make going to space reliable and routine, as an advance from the previous single-use capsule technologies, which were expensive and could only be used once each.
But for a variety of reasons, it turned out that the Space Shuttle remained fairly expensive and complex to launch, while capsules became reliable and cheap enough to be a routine way of getting people and stuff to/from space.
That's still privileging coal and gas over nuclear: there's a moratorium on replacing old nuclear plants with new ones, but no similar moratorium on replacing old coal/gas with new ones. If Germany wants to show a commitment to environmentalism, coal plants should have at least as strong a moratorium as nuclear, since they're much worse. If the decision is "no new nuclear", it should definitely include "no new coal", and ideally should include a coal phase-out before the nuclear phase-out, since we should start the phase-out with the worst power sources first.
Interesting; my office phone has cat5 coming out the back, which has been the case anywhere I've worked for a few years now.
It'd be interesting to known what percentage of people even with landline phones already have this problem, given the prevalence of cordless phones. When the power's out, the only thing that works is an old-fashioned phone with a cord directly plugged into the wall.
Larger businesses tend not to use POTS anymore, even for "landline" phones that present themselves as such. Certainly within a building, bigger companies are almost all on some kind of soft-PBX setup these days, not running copper wires to every desk. Increasingly they're doing the backlink with the phone company directly as some sort of VoIP as well.
It was done on a publicly accessible site that explicitly invites editing, though. If the gallery were in a public park, with a sign on the front that explicitly said "all visitors are free to rearrange the paintings", should it still be illegal if I move your painting to hide it?
Err, revising theories to account for evidence that doesn't fit simpler theories is how science works. "Sulphur emissions exerted a downward pressure on average temperatures in the 1940-70 period" is a hypothesis. There are alternative ones as well, but it's not "dismissing" the evidence. It's how things work in physics as well; when experimental evidence doesn't agree with theoretical predictions, the usual response is to hypothesize what would cause the observed anomaly.
It depends on how he used it in that video (it doesn't appear to be available anymore). If it was used as just a portion of the video, I actually see a stronger case for that being fair use, than for the pixel-art version. The pixel-art version is arguably using a derivative work of the original image in a straightforward commercial use, as the cover art of a new album. Displaying a photograph of the original album as one part of a video about the release of a tribute to the album seems much more like commentary. For example, if I make a documentary about Miles Davis, it is not copyright infringement for me to display the cover art of Miles Davis's albums within my documentary--- but it would be more problematic if I used one of them as the cover art of my documentary.
Hard to say without seeing it, though.
Hope Soulskill has $32,500 lying around...
This seems like basically the same issue as "forgot to remove my SQL password from the config file in the code I uploaded to github", which is also quite common. If you upload a working version of some of your infrastructure somewhere, you need to be careful about whether it contains any sort of authentication tokens.
It doesn't appear to be included in the rather poor article Slashdot chose to link, but the much better Ars piece links the actual ruling [pdf], which includes that sentence on the last page.
I'm not sure if it's the main cause, but it surely doesn't seem to have helped. In the last two medium-sized cities I've lived, the "local" paper was owned by MediaNews Group, and was sort of a superficially localized version of their larger regional papers. As Wikipedia explains, the company's founder was:
Their M.O. is to rebrand what's effectively one newspaper into a half-dozen or more versions, with a few new articles added to each for local flavor. The added articles are rarely particularly in-depth reporting, and tend to be more along the lines of how the local high-school football team is doing, or a review of a local restaurant. Overall, if you looked at only their local content as a news stream, I would classify it as "mediocre local-interest blog"; it's not hard to imagine someone doing better with even a moderate amount of spare time devoted. These things only look like newspapers because they're padded with 50-70% Reuters/AP reprints, and much of the rest reprints from non-local MediaNews Group stories.
This specific Supreme Court review didn't really touch on the technology issue, though, just the legal standard of proof, since the question they were reviewing was a pretty narrow one of statutory construction. Section 282 of the patent code specifies that, when a patent is challenged in court:
1. "A patent shall be presumed valid."
and
2. "The burden of establishing invalidity of a patent or any claim thereof shall rest on the party asserting such invalidity."
I disagree with that as a matter of policy, but that's what the Patent Act says, and absent any claim that it's unconstitutional, the only thing the Court was asked to decide here is what "burden" means, legally.
The Federal Circuit (a lower appeals court) has held for some years now that "burden of establishing invalidity" means that the party bringing a challenge must show "clear and convincing evidence" of the patent's invalidity. Microsoft argued that, for prior art that the patent office had not already considered in its review record, the burden of establishing invalidity should be lower, with a "preponderance of the evidence" standard.
I'd prefer the lower burden of proof, but this question isn't really at the heart of why we have a patent mess; at best it's a symptom.