So when can we expect the SEC investigation of SCO misconduct?
SCO's crap, while it's obvious to us that it's a shakedown-gone-wrong turned pump-n-dump scheme, proving that is another matter. Put another way - what would the SEC hit them *for*, and what would the proof be? And could they prove fraud as opposed to incompetence?
While SCO has plausible deniability for the claims in court, SCO executives mad a lot of public statements (such as about finding numbers of lines of infringing code) that would tend to inflate their stock price, were demonstrably false, that that the SCO executives in question either knew were false, or should have known, had they done their due diligence before uttering them. There ought to be plenty of meat there.
I'd expect that the SEC and the shareholders are holding off pending the resolution of the suit. After that, if there's anything worth going after and/or anyone left standing on the SCO side, you might see some action.
Some SCO executives ended up with money in their pockets. Some shareholders ended up losing bundles. Don't be surprised if, once SCO v. IBM is over there's another one, leveling anything left of SCO and turning the execs into imprisoned paupers.
Meanwhile, if the banking regulators are on the ball, they'll be watching the assets of the people in question, to see if they start moving into out-of-country money-cleaning-and-storage operations. B-)
Giving them all the rope they want to hang themselves with, as it were.
There's the BIG reel of rope, hung from a pipe. Judge Wells is holding up one end of the pipe and IBM's legal team is holding up the other.
The trial isn't over yet solely because there's still some rope left on the reel. The judge and IBM want SCO to unreel it all. That way, when SCO goes to the appeal judge(s) and claims they didn't let SCO unreel it all and see if it was all the same color, they can hold up the empty reel. Then the appeals judge(s) can laugh them out of the courtroom, rather than winding all the rope back on the reel and sending them back to Judge Wells' court to do it over. B-)
If you'll follow your own second link you'll see that the FSF agrees with my position. If the source wasn't included with the distribution, anyone can request it and it must be supplied.
The FSF goes on to state that the REASON for the right is for people who obtained the binaries to be able to obtain the source. But the right itself is not dependent on the requester having the binaries.
The vendor has the choice of distributing the source with the binaries or providing it (at no more than a nominal copying fee) to anyone who asks.
If you look at the second link in that post you'll see that the FSF agrees with MY interpretation. The requirement is to give (sell at nominal copying fee) the source to anyone who asks.
The stated REASON for the requirement is to let anyone who got the binaries to get the source. But the requirement itself isn't dependent on the requester having the binaries.
It's like the militia clause of the second amendment: It states an important reason for the right. But it doesn't limit the right to those who are exercising it for that reason, or even to those who are QUALIFIED to exercise it for that reason. B-)
... the only thing they HAVE to give people is any modifications to programs licensed under the GPL. If they modified the Linux kernel running on this (which they most likely did) then, yes, they need to release that. If they wrote a custom app for this purpose, that does not need to be released.
Sorry, not true.
If they have a stand-alone part that is unchanged they still have to distribute the source of it.
If they have stand-alone part they modified they have to license their modifications under the GPL and distribute the whole part's source (not just the deltas).
The only thing they can avoid *GPLing and distributing source for is a stand-alone part that they wrote from scratch - and then (since it's a single software load rather than a distribution containing clearly separable components) only if the underlying code was licensed under the LGPL rather than the full-blown GPL.
The issue is NOT whether you can prove ownership. The issue is the TERMS OF THE GPL.
The GPL (v2) REQUIRES that a commercial distribution of the software as object EITHER be accompanied by the source OR by an offer, good for three years, to sell a copy of the source to ANY THIRD PARTY for no more than a nominal copying fee. (Non-commercial distributions, under some circumstances, have a third option of just forwarding the offer they got from upstream.)
Since they didn't distribute the source, in machine-readable form, with every iPhone, they must make (and live up to) the offer to EVERYBODY - not just their customers, not just to repurchasers of their customers' equipment:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
Since they didn't distribute the source, in machine-readable form, with every iPhone, they must make (and live up to) the offer to EVERYBODY - not just their customers, not just to repurchasers of their customers' equipment.
Got it now?
Since they ALSO didn't make the offer they're already in violation, and have thus have no right to distribute the software and are liable for violation of the underlying copyrights. However, when someone is caught in violation by not making the offer, those enforcing the GPL will generally settle for letting them clean up their act by making the offer retroactively and providing source code under it.
Did anyone who purchased one of these phones ask for the source? They don't have to put the source out there for the general public.
Actually, according to the GPL, if they don't provide the source with every phone then they DO have to give it to anyone in the general public upon request - until they've sold or otherwise "distributed" the last one and for a period of time thereafter.
(You never know who ends up with the black box containing the object code, after all, and writing the GPL so it would require successive box owners to maintain a paper trail of ownership in order to obtain the source code would have subverted its purpose.)
When Cisco sued Apple, there was no way Apple was guilty... When an open-source "expert" announces that Cisco "might" have violated the GPL...
Please note that Slashdot posters are not a homogeneous mass. Different claims are typically posted by different people with different opinions.
Also please note that there are different types of "IP" involved in the differing infringements:
- In the Apple-Cisco dispute it is a trademark issue. (Last news I saw makes it look like Cisco had let the trademark lapse - which leaves it open to the next claimant.)
- In the Cisco-GPL dispute it is a matter of whether Cisco failed to abide by copyright licensing terms, along with an attempt by a party to whom those terms grant rights to require performance.
Well, then, it should be easy for you to provide a list of drug discoveries that came from government funding. But even if you could (and you can't b/c it's not true) that's not due to socialism.
Not only that: Those administering government programs view drugs to cure cancers or otherwise extend life as a liability.
They perceive such drugs and treatments as extending the period when retired workers consume government-funded medical care and retirement entitlements, putting the already-stressed system further at risk. (As one of them, discussing a previous iteration of the social-security demographic crisis, once said on CNN, "We have to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate.")
Interestingly, I didn't see any mention of genetics among the eliminated compounding factors (at least in the slashdot summary).
Lifelong bilingualism would be more prevalent in some population groups than others (if only for reasons of environment - i.e. growing up where multiple languages are in common use), different populations have different frequencies of various versions of genes (due to incomplete interbreeding of humanity), and susceptability to dementia (a biochemical problem) may be greater for some versions of some particular gene(s) than for others. So bilingualism could easily be correlated with an inherited lower susceptability to dimentia through pure historical accident.
Another potential genetic compounding factor: Hybrid vigor. Billingualism could be expected to be more common in children of parents from distinct linguistic groups - who would be more likely to have two different versions of some gene rather than two identical ones. If resistance to dimentia is greater when some gene is present in two different forms you again have a correlation.
Why are the child porn types writing software that magically puts child porn on random people's computers? I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there, other than potentially hurting their business by bringing child pornography into the spotlight.
I can take a guess, and come up with two possibilities just off the top of my head:
1) Maybe (as one user already pointed out) their malware is parasitizing the system as a server.
but more likely:
2) Law enforcement is currently able to obtain child porn convictions based on simple possession, if they find a file (even a deleted one) on the accused's machine. By spreading malware that drops such files on a large number of innocent people's machines, they may hope to get a judgement that mere possession of the files is not evidence of a crime and/or get the laws on simple possession repealed - perhaps after major pressure from improperly prosecuted innocents (as we're seeing now).
This would force the prosecutors to actually prove the accused person hunted down and downloaded, or solicited the transmission of, the files, rather than just that the files were on his machine. That's a much tougher job for the prosecutors.
I live (and vote) in California. What were we supposed to do in November?
By November it was far too late.
What you should have been doing is:
- voting in the primaries (where you get to have an influence in the selection of the "lessor devil") and
- becoming involved in the local organizations of one of the major parties.
You think the politicians pay attention to their contributors? It's NOTHING to the attention they pay to their staffers, election workers, and other party functionaries.
And it's a real scream when it comes election time and the volunteers refuse to distribute literature for one of the party's candidates - leaving the local party boss with the choice of getting the other candidates' literature out or getting none out. B-)
(The Republicans found that out in the last election, when a bunch of their volunteers refused to post signs, circulate literature, or even talk to voters about, a notorious gun-grabing R.)
So get off your heinie and do it NOW, to head off more such fallout from the NEXT election.
(And also to get the word across to the fallout from THIS election that they've misjudged the opinions of their TRUE base - the rank-and-file of their own party.)
Geez. Of all the people I'd expect to adopt a relativist position on matters of science, you are the last I'd think of. Has moving to the Bay Area finally affected your mind, or is it just reaction to all the fruitcakes around you?
That's because you misunderstand my point.
I'm not taking a relativist position on matters of science. (Nor was the original complainant, nor was the school board.)
I'm pointing out that the issue was the suppresion of one side of a political debate in a government-funded, mandatory-attendance, school.
I'm pointing out that, as such, the particular opinions of the complainant, no matter how ill-grounded they may be, DON'T MATTER.
And I'm pointing out that the reportage of his opinions is ITSELF propaganda directed against those who don't believe that public schools should be government-run political indoctrination mills.
To the extent that I'm taking a position of my own on this, it's against mandatory government indoctrination of youth in politically correct thinking and against propaganda in the press disguised as unbiased reporting.
Does that fit better with your opinion of my thinking based on my other postings? B-)
Therefore, his chosen belief system does have a bearing "on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming," as the OP said, since that evidence is science-based as well.
However, the argument that he presented to the school board, and on which it ruled, had NOTHING to do with HIS evaluation of the theories of global warming.
His argument was that:
- the film was a partisan propaganda piece, presenting one political party's positions on a number of controversial assertions as objective fact,
- presenting it without opposing views to school children causes them to believe that the issues are settled, and
- so presenting it in this way (and thus indoctrinating schoolchildren with one political party's position on a controversial issue) is not a proper activity for public schools.
This is what the school board ruled on, and it agreed with him.
Bringing his other opinions into the argument is an obvious ad-hominem, attempting to discredit not just him, but also to project his beliefs on, and discredit, the school board and all others who question any of the claims made in Gore's film.
Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old.
The fundamentalist Christians...
The article's constant harping on the other beliefs of the person who filed the initial complaint is an attempt to use an ad-hominem to discredit all opposition to Gore's controversial position. That is a transparent piece of propaganda, and it saddens me to see so many Slashdot posters echoing it.
Though the first one to complain may have other beliefs with which you disagree, those beliefs are apparently not what drove the school board's decision.
Regardless of your opinion of the veracity of the several claims made in the film, it is clear that the film itself is a propaganda piece promoting one side of a partisan political argument - the side taken by the Democratic party and its spoksman on the issue: the losing candidate in a national election where the country was almost exactly split.
Hardison's complaint was that showing such a partisan piece in a public school (where attendance is mandatory), with no voice from any of the opposing views, constitutes propaganda and indoctrination. It gives the children who view it the impression that all the claims are settled fact - and he presents his own child's experience as evidence of this. Thus he claims it is not proper to present this in such a stand-alone manner in the public schools.
This issue, not his other beliefs, is what he presented, and what the school board ruled on.
Bringing up his other beliefs - and by implication attributing them to ALL who disagree with any of the films claims or its presentation in this manner - is itself another piece of partisan propaganda.
If you want to flame Peter Jackson you should at least do it under a handle with a reputation.
Anonymous Coward postings on the subject are likely to be dismissed as studio astroturfing, trying to head off fan pressure on the studio administrators through their product sales prospects and stockholder/board pressure.
The computer industry learned this lesson long ago with the Apple ][ and IBM PC. Everything was documented - even the source to the BIOS was available. This allowed for 3rd parties to easily create software and hardware for them.
In particular, they learned it anew when Apple follwed the open Apple ][ with the closed Lisa and initially-closed MAC, at which poiont IBM's very-open PC and the clone army took over most of the market.
If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?
The question is content-free. No such system is possible. It's worse than trying to solve the halting problem (because it includes interpreting law).
Systems which ARE possible will be error-prone, subject to misuse both by content sellers (which will use it to abrogate the content user's rights), and will create new vulnerabilities to malware on the users' machines.
Absent such an impossible system there is nothing to support. So the question is meaningless.
There are limits in performance imposed by the physical size of the object (microphones and lenses are two examples).
Size limits the directionality of a microphone. But it can get down to the micrometer scale before its size limits it ability to accurately sense air pressure or velocity variations at audio rates. (Even then the problem is just noise from thermal agitation due to a small number of molecules to sample.)
Look at the microphones in modern cellphones: They're the size of a chip capacitor - about like a bit snapped off the end of a piece of spaghetti or a thin noodle - with a sensing hole comparable to the diameter of an automatic pencil lead. And that's nowhere near the limit.
Even a small coin is enormous by comparison.
However, I think they use the best microphones possibles inside that envelope
That depends on your definition of "best". B-) "Best for the purpose", no doubt. But they may sacrifice things like sound quality for other factors - like no need for powering the microphone, for instance.
Fortunately for the designers, they don't need directionality. The orientation of the coin will be random with respect to the direction to each speaker, so an omnidirectional microphone is the best fit. Those are very easy to make tiny.
For the life of me, I can't figure a reason that somebody would do this. Coins change hands quickly and RFID has a pretty limited range.
If you RTFA article closely you'll see that the souce told the press that transmitters were found in coins.
Then (in paragraph 11) reporter notes that the type of transmitter was not disclosed. In paragraph 12 he starts speculating about RFID. The rest of the article (and possibly part of the preceeding section - along with the Slashdot headline) is based on the unfounded assumption that the transmitter IS an RFID-type device.
Which strikes me as totally bogus.
IMHO it's more likely that the "transmitter" found is a remotely-powered area audio bug, like "The Great Seal Bug", the martini fake olive bug, or the "diodes in the wall" bugs. Planted on a person it would bug his conversations and those around him until he spent it - hours or days later. (As you can imagine from the martini-olive bug, which is only useful while the spy is toting the martini, in some situations long-term bugging is an unnecessary bonus.)
Such bugs can be simple: A shaped cavity with a flexible membrane over it is one way to do it - the cavity resonates, giving a strong reflection, while the sound modulates the cavity's effectiveness, AMing the reflection. Another is just to fasten a diode to something that can be vibrated by sound. The diode frequency-doubles the reflected signal or mixes two of them to produce the sum and difference frequencies (sorting the diode's reflection from most ordinary reflections) and the vibration of it along the line between the bug and the monitor phase-modulates the return with the local audio. No fancy circuitry or local power supplies necessary.
I presume this one did involve at least a diode, or some semiconductor circuitry, since it was found in a radio scan - which is often done by looking for the frequency-multiplying and/or frequency mixing effect of diodes / semiconductor junctions. Finding a pure cavity resonator bug - or even identifying what it is when you have it - is a bitch.
Bugging the audio at a conference, or the conversations of a contractor at work on classified projects, would be worth planting a bug on him and having it there for only a few hours. After that, if he "spends" it, so what? (At least until they are noticed and a way found to identify them BEFORE the conversations to be monitored.)
All the obvious problems are in the way though, the worst of which is working with metal; I have trouble imagining the rebirth of the micro(pico?)forge(birth if you don't wanna count musket balls...). If you want to machine metal, everything gets bigger and harder to work with. From what I have seen, material quality and finish aren't all that great, or all that bad, but they are pretty much going up against injection molding, which is a very mature process.
I have no trouble imagining it whatsoever.
The trick is to abandon forging and mechanical cutting, and substitute electrodynamic machining:
- Mount the workpiece on a 3-axis motion controller.
- Immerse it in a dilectric fluid. (water, oil,...)
- Bring an electrode, powered by a high-frequency pulsed-DC supply, near it.
- Draw an arc to it through the dilectric. A microscopic pit melts in the workpiece, then the arc vapor-cavity collapses, creating a shockwave that blasts the still-molten material into the dilectric fluid as dust. Repeat several thousand times a second.
- Measure the voltage to give feedback to control the spacing between the electrode and the workpiece.
- Pump the dilectric through a filter, or dither the electrode around to push it around, to get the dust out of the gap.
- Make your motion control able to back out as necessary when a chip shorts the electrode, until it's clear, then move back in.
Slow, but enormously accurate. Gives a mirror finish with no further processing (due to the arc's inherent tendency to selectively hit and abrade the high spots.) Able to cut or drill anything conductive. Steel. Tungsten. Diamonds... (For diamonds you flash a bit of aluminum onto them for an initial contact, then the arc leaves a thin surface layer of graphite which carries the current from the next arc. Acid-etch the aluminum away when you're done.)
Three basic types of tooling:
- Use the end of a (slowly fed) wire for a drill for tiny holes.
- Use the side of a (slowly moving) wire for a bandsaw.
- Use a carved graphite electrode, dithered in small circles to pump the fluid around, to drill big holes of odd shapes.
I did motion control software in Forth for a commercial EDM machine a couple decades ago. Pretty simple stuff. Sparker power supply needs some big resistors and transistors but is otherwise pretty straightforward. Computer is pretty basic (we used a cheap Z80 board), as is the pumping stuff.
Main "hard" part for electronics nerds is manufacturing the motorized mechanical mechanisms for accurate motion control - which is exactly what the gadgets referenced here are designed to be - and to make.
= = = =
Of course if you want to make a casting you can make an initial wax (or low-melting point plastic) model, coat it with plaster to form your negative mold, and use the lost-wax casting process (where the molten metal melts the initial model away and replaces it) to make your part.
1) Have it write resist patterns on printed circuit boards. (Then etch them the normal way.) 2) Add a drilling head to make the holes. (Then plate through the normal way, then go to 1. Now you can make multi-layer boards rather than one-sided, surface-mount-parts-only boards) 3) Add a milling head and you can grind away copper rather than etching it...
Lots of variations.
It will be a long time before you can home-brew integrated circuits, due to the tiny scales and clean-environment issues. (But there ARE FPGAs...)
To summarize your answer: "If lawyers weren't such slippery pieces of shit, we wouldn't have this language problem."
Sorry, wrong.
To summarize the answer:
- The legal language is exact and well-defined.
- It must be, so that people can understand what the law means and apply it correctly.
And to add a corollary:
- Your inability to understand it is the result of the failure of your school system's administrators when they chose not to teach it to you. They have kept you ignorant of it, and thus of how to read the laws you are expected to obey.
- This is convenient for them and their masters in government: It makes you easier to control.
The perceived "slipperyness" of lawyers is a side-effect of their function: To help their employers present effective arguments for the most-favorable-to-them interpretations of legal matters in dispute. This means they're often stuck with trying to put a shine on a pig.
Actually, I've found it's more a problem trying to convince a manager that it would take LESS time to redo the damn code than it would be to figure out what the last guy did, and "resuse it" in the "new context"...
Hear, hear!
I'm not advocating you reuse OTHER people's stuff.
Reusing your own older work, however, may be far easier than starting over. Also much faster and less mind-numbing. (Of course that's IF it turned out to be a good fit to the new prolem and IF he documented it well enough that HE understand what YOUNGER HIM wrote. B-) )
The point I'm making is that the only way a programmer knows nearly 100% of what he needs to know when the project starts is if the project is a repeat of one he already did. If that's the case, why is he restarting from scratch?
Slashdot Mirror
So when can we expect the SEC investigation of SCO misconduct?
SCO's crap, while it's obvious to us that it's a shakedown-gone-wrong turned pump-n-dump scheme, proving that is another matter. Put another way - what would the SEC hit them *for*, and what would the proof be? And could they prove fraud as opposed to incompetence?
While SCO has plausible deniability for the claims in court, SCO executives mad a lot of public statements (such as about finding numbers of lines of infringing code) that would tend to inflate their stock price, were demonstrably false, that that the SCO executives in question either knew were false, or should have known, had they done their due diligence before uttering them. There ought to be plenty of meat there.
I'd expect that the SEC and the shareholders are holding off pending the resolution of the suit. After that, if there's anything worth going after and/or anyone left standing on the SCO side, you might see some action.
Some SCO executives ended up with money in their pockets. Some shareholders ended up losing bundles. Don't be surprised if, once SCO v. IBM is over there's another one, leveling anything left of SCO and turning the execs into imprisoned paupers.
Meanwhile, if the banking regulators are on the ball, they'll be watching the assets of the people in question, to see if they start moving into out-of-country money-cleaning-and-storage operations. B-)
There's the BIG reel of rope, hung from a pipe. Judge Wells is holding up one end of the pipe and IBM's legal team is holding up the other.
The trial isn't over yet solely because there's still some rope left on the reel. The judge and IBM want SCO to unreel it all. That way, when SCO goes to the appeal judge(s) and claims they didn't let SCO unreel it all and see if it was all the same color, they can hold up the empty reel. Then the appeals judge(s) can laugh them out of the courtroom, rather than winding all the rope back on the reel and sending them back to Judge Wells' court to do it over. B-)
If you'll follow your own second link you'll see that the FSF agrees with my position. If the source wasn't included with the distribution, anyone can request it and it must be supplied.
The FSF goes on to state that the REASON for the right is for people who obtained the binaries to be able to obtain the source. But the right itself is not dependent on the requester having the binaries.
The vendor has the choice of distributing the source with the binaries or providing it (at no more than a nominal copying fee) to anyone who asks.
If you look at the second link in that post you'll see that the FSF agrees with MY interpretation. The requirement is to give (sell at nominal copying fee) the source to anyone who asks.
The stated REASON for the requirement is to let anyone who got the binaries to get the source. But the requirement itself isn't dependent on the requester having the binaries.
It's like the militia clause of the second amendment: It states an important reason for the right. But it doesn't limit the right to those who are exercising it for that reason, or even to those who are QUALIFIED to exercise it for that reason. B-)
... the only thing they HAVE to give people is any modifications to programs licensed under the GPL. If they modified the Linux kernel running on this (which they most likely did) then, yes, they need to release that. If they wrote a custom app for this purpose, that does not need to be released.
Sorry, not true.
If they have a stand-alone part that is unchanged they still have to distribute the source of it.
If they have stand-alone part they modified they have to license their modifications under the GPL and distribute the whole part's source (not just the deltas).
The only thing they can avoid *GPLing and distributing source for is a stand-alone part that they wrote from scratch - and then (since it's a single software load rather than a distribution containing clearly separable components) only if the underlying code was licensed under the LGPL rather than the full-blown GPL.
The GPL (v2) REQUIRES that a commercial distribution of the software as object EITHER be accompanied by the source OR by an offer, good for three years, to sell a copy of the source to ANY THIRD PARTY for no more than a nominal copying fee. (Non-commercial distributions, under some circumstances, have a third option of just forwarding the offer they got from upstream.)
Since they didn't distribute the source, in machine-readable form, with every iPhone, they must make (and live up to) the offer to EVERYBODY - not just their customers, not just to repurchasers of their customers' equipment:
Since they didn't distribute the source, in machine-readable form, with every iPhone, they must make (and live up to) the offer to EVERYBODY - not just their customers, not just to repurchasers of their customers' equipment.
Got it now?
Since they ALSO didn't make the offer they're already in violation, and have thus have no right to distribute the software and are liable for violation of the underlying copyrights. However, when someone is caught in violation by not making the offer, those enforcing the GPL will generally settle for letting them clean up their act by making the offer retroactively and providing source code under it.
Did anyone who purchased one of these phones ask for the source? They don't have to put the source out there for the general public.
Actually, according to the GPL, if they don't provide the source with every phone then they DO have to give it to anyone in the general public upon request - until they've sold or otherwise "distributed" the last one and for a period of time thereafter.
(You never know who ends up with the black box containing the object code, after all, and writing the GPL so it would require successive box owners to maintain a paper trail of ownership in order to obtain the source code would have subverted its purpose.)
When Cisco sued Apple, there was no way Apple was guilty...
When an open-source "expert" announces that Cisco "might" have violated the GPL...
Please note that Slashdot posters are not a homogeneous mass. Different claims are typically posted by different people with different opinions.
Also please note that there are different types of "IP" involved in the differing infringements:
- In the Apple-Cisco dispute it is a trademark issue. (Last news I saw makes it look like Cisco had let the trademark lapse - which leaves it open to the next claimant.)
- In the Cisco-GPL dispute it is a matter of whether Cisco failed to abide by copyright licensing terms, along with an attempt by a party to whom those terms grant rights to require performance.
Well, then, it should be easy for you to provide a list of drug discoveries that came from government funding. But even if you could (and you can't b/c it's not true) that's not due to socialism.
Not only that: Those administering government programs view drugs to cure cancers or otherwise extend life as a liability.
They perceive such drugs and treatments as extending the period when retired workers consume government-funded medical care and retirement entitlements, putting the already-stressed system further at risk. (As one of them, discussing a previous iteration of the social-security demographic crisis, once said on CNN, "We have to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate.")
So don't expect a lot of help from government.
Has to be at least $1.00. Probably costs 'em several dollars to handle the dollar...
Interestingly, I didn't see any mention of genetics among the eliminated compounding factors (at least in the slashdot summary).
Lifelong bilingualism would be more prevalent in some population groups than others (if only for reasons of environment - i.e. growing up where multiple languages are in common use), different populations have different frequencies of various versions of genes (due to incomplete interbreeding of humanity), and susceptability to dementia (a biochemical problem) may be greater for some versions of some particular gene(s) than for others. So bilingualism could easily be correlated with an inherited lower susceptability to dimentia through pure historical accident.
Another potential genetic compounding factor: Hybrid vigor. Billingualism could be expected to be more common in children of parents from distinct linguistic groups - who would be more likely to have two different versions of some gene rather than two identical ones. If resistance to dimentia is greater when some gene is present in two different forms you again have a correlation.
Why are the child porn types writing software that magically puts child porn on random people's computers? I'm really not clear about what they're accomplishing there, other than potentially hurting their business by bringing child pornography into the spotlight.
I can take a guess, and come up with two possibilities just off the top of my head:
1) Maybe (as one user already pointed out) their malware is parasitizing the system as a server.
but more likely:
2) Law enforcement is currently able to obtain child porn convictions based on simple possession, if they find a file (even a deleted one) on the accused's machine. By spreading malware that drops such files on a large number of innocent people's machines, they may hope to get a judgement that mere possession of the files is not evidence of a crime and/or get the laws on simple possession repealed - perhaps after major pressure from improperly prosecuted innocents (as we're seeing now).
This would force the prosecutors to actually prove the accused person hunted down and downloaded, or solicited the transmission of, the files, rather than just that the files were on his machine. That's a much tougher job for the prosecutors.
I live (and vote) in California. What were we supposed to do in November?
By November it was far too late.
What you should have been doing is:
- voting in the primaries (where you get to have an influence in the selection of the "lessor devil") and
- becoming involved in the local organizations of one of the major parties.
You think the politicians pay attention to their contributors? It's NOTHING to the attention they pay to their staffers, election workers, and other party functionaries.
And it's a real scream when it comes election time and the volunteers refuse to distribute literature for one of the party's candidates - leaving the local party boss with the choice of getting the other candidates' literature out or getting none out. B-)
(The Republicans found that out in the last election, when a bunch of their volunteers refused to post signs, circulate literature, or even talk to voters about, a notorious gun-grabing R.)
So get off your heinie and do it NOW, to head off more such fallout from the NEXT election.
(And also to get the word across to the fallout from THIS election that they've misjudged the opinions of their TRUE base - the rank-and-file of their own party.)
Geez. Of all the people I'd expect to adopt a relativist position on matters of science, you are the last I'd think of. Has moving to the Bay Area finally affected your mind, or is it just reaction to all the fruitcakes around you?
That's because you misunderstand my point.
I'm not taking a relativist position on matters of science. (Nor was the original complainant, nor was the school board.)
I'm pointing out that the issue was the suppresion of one side of a political debate in a government-funded, mandatory-attendance, school.
I'm pointing out that, as such, the particular opinions of the complainant, no matter how ill-grounded they may be, DON'T MATTER.
And I'm pointing out that the reportage of his opinions is ITSELF propaganda directed against those who don't believe that public schools should be government-run political indoctrination mills.
To the extent that I'm taking a position of my own on this, it's against mandatory government indoctrination of youth in politically correct thinking and against propaganda in the press disguised as unbiased reporting.
Does that fit better with your opinion of my thinking based on my other postings? B-)
Therefore, his chosen belief system does have a bearing "on his own ability to objectively evaluate the evidence concerning global warming," as the OP said, since that evidence is science-based as well.
However, the argument that he presented to the school board, and on which it ruled, had NOTHING to do with HIS evaluation of the theories of global warming.
His argument was that:
- the film was a partisan propaganda piece, presenting one political party's positions on a number of controversial assertions as objective fact,
- presenting it without opposing views to school children causes them to believe that the issues are settled, and
- so presenting it in this way (and thus indoctrinating schoolchildren with one political party's position on a controversial issue) is not a proper activity for public schools.
This is what the school board ruled on, and it agreed with him.
Bringing his other opinions into the argument is an obvious ad-hominem, attempting to discredit not just him, but also to project his beliefs on, and discredit, the school board and all others who question any of the claims made in Gore's film.
Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old.
...
The fundamentalist Christians
The article's constant harping on the other beliefs of the person who filed the initial complaint is an attempt to use an ad-hominem to discredit all opposition to Gore's controversial position. That is a transparent piece of propaganda, and it saddens me to see so many Slashdot posters echoing it.
Though the first one to complain may have other beliefs with which you disagree, those beliefs are apparently not what drove the school board's decision.
Regardless of your opinion of the veracity of the several claims made in the film, it is clear that the film itself is a propaganda piece promoting one side of a partisan political argument - the side taken by the Democratic party and its spoksman on the issue: the losing candidate in a national election where the country was almost exactly split.
Hardison's complaint was that showing such a partisan piece in a public school (where attendance is mandatory), with no voice from any of the opposing views, constitutes propaganda and indoctrination. It gives the children who view it the impression that all the claims are settled fact - and he presents his own child's experience as evidence of this. Thus he claims it is not proper to present this in such a stand-alone manner in the public schools.
This issue, not his other beliefs, is what he presented, and what the school board ruled on.
Bringing up his other beliefs - and by implication attributing them to ALL who disagree with any of the films claims or its presentation in this manner - is itself another piece of partisan propaganda.
If you want to flame Peter Jackson you should at least do it under a handle with a reputation.
Anonymous Coward postings on the subject are likely to be dismissed as studio astroturfing, trying to head off fan pressure on the studio administrators through their product sales prospects and stockholder/board pressure.
The computer industry learned this lesson long ago with the Apple ][ and IBM PC. Everything was documented - even the source to the BIOS was available. This allowed for 3rd parties to easily create software and hardware for them.
In particular, they learned it anew when Apple follwed the open Apple ][ with the closed Lisa and initially-closed MAC, at which poiont IBM's very-open PC and the clone army took over most of the market.
If digital media was available for sale at a reasonable price, but subject to a DRM scheme that allowed full legitimate usage (format shifting, time shifting, playback on different devices, etc.) and only blocked illicit usage (illegal copying), would you support the usage of such a DRM scheme?
The question is content-free. No such system is possible. It's worse than trying to solve the halting problem (because it includes interpreting law).
Systems which ARE possible will be error-prone, subject to misuse both by content sellers (which will use it to abrogate the content user's rights), and will create new vulnerabilities to malware on the users' machines.
Absent such an impossible system there is nothing to support. So the question is meaningless.
There are limits in performance imposed by the physical size of the object (microphones and lenses are two examples).
Size limits the directionality of a microphone. But it can get down to the micrometer scale before its size limits it ability to accurately sense air pressure or velocity variations at audio rates. (Even then the problem is just noise from thermal agitation due to a small number of molecules to sample.)
Look at the microphones in modern cellphones: They're the size of a chip capacitor - about like a bit snapped off the end of a piece of spaghetti or a thin noodle - with a sensing hole comparable to the diameter of an automatic pencil lead. And that's nowhere near the limit.
Even a small coin is enormous by comparison.
However, I think they use the best microphones possibles inside that envelope
That depends on your definition of "best". B-) "Best for the purpose", no doubt. But they may sacrifice things like sound quality for other factors - like no need for powering the microphone, for instance.
Fortunately for the designers, they don't need directionality. The orientation of the coin will be random with respect to the direction to each speaker, so an omnidirectional microphone is the best fit. Those are very easy to make tiny.
For the life of me, I can't figure a reason that somebody would do this. Coins change hands quickly and RFID has a pretty limited range.
If you RTFA article closely you'll see that the souce told the press that transmitters were found in coins.
Then (in paragraph 11) reporter notes that the type of transmitter was not disclosed. In paragraph 12 he starts speculating about RFID. The rest of the article (and possibly part of the preceeding section - along with the Slashdot headline) is based on the unfounded assumption that the transmitter IS an RFID-type device.
Which strikes me as totally bogus.
IMHO it's more likely that the "transmitter" found is a remotely-powered area audio bug, like "The Great Seal Bug", the martini fake olive bug, or the "diodes in the wall" bugs. Planted on a person it would bug his conversations and those around him until he spent it - hours or days later. (As you can imagine from the martini-olive bug, which is only useful while the spy is toting the martini, in some situations long-term bugging is an unnecessary bonus.)
Such bugs can be simple: A shaped cavity with a flexible membrane over it is one way to do it - the cavity resonates, giving a strong reflection, while the sound modulates the cavity's effectiveness, AMing the reflection. Another is just to fasten a diode to something that can be vibrated by sound. The diode frequency-doubles the reflected signal or mixes two of them to produce the sum and difference frequencies (sorting the diode's reflection from most ordinary reflections) and the vibration of it along the line between the bug and the monitor phase-modulates the return with the local audio. No fancy circuitry or local power supplies necessary.
I presume this one did involve at least a diode, or some semiconductor circuitry, since it was found in a radio scan - which is often done by looking for the frequency-multiplying and/or frequency mixing effect of diodes / semiconductor junctions. Finding a pure cavity resonator bug - or even identifying what it is when you have it - is a bitch.
Bugging the audio at a conference, or the conversations of a contractor at work on classified projects, would be worth planting a bug on him and having it there for only a few hours. After that, if he "spends" it, so what? (At least until they are noticed and a way found to identify them BEFORE the conversations to be monitored.)
All the obvious problems are in the way though, the worst of which is working with metal; I have trouble imagining the rebirth of the micro(pico?)forge(birth if you don't wanna count musket balls...). If you want to machine metal, everything gets bigger and harder to work with. From what I have seen, material quality and finish aren't all that great, or all that bad, but they are pretty much going up against injection molding, which is a very mature process.
...)
I have no trouble imagining it whatsoever.
The trick is to abandon forging and mechanical cutting, and substitute electrodynamic machining:
- Mount the workpiece on a 3-axis motion controller.
- Immerse it in a dilectric fluid. (water, oil,
- Bring an electrode, powered by a high-frequency pulsed-DC supply, near it.
- Draw an arc to it through the dilectric. A microscopic pit melts in the workpiece, then the arc vapor-cavity collapses, creating a shockwave that blasts the still-molten material into the dilectric fluid as dust. Repeat several thousand times a second.
- Measure the voltage to give feedback to control the spacing between the electrode and the workpiece.
- Pump the dilectric through a filter, or dither the electrode around to push it around, to get the dust out of the gap.
- Make your motion control able to back out as necessary when a chip shorts the electrode, until it's clear, then move back in.
Slow, but enormously accurate. Gives a mirror finish with no further processing (due to the arc's inherent tendency to selectively hit and abrade the high spots.) Able to cut or drill anything conductive. Steel. Tungsten. Diamonds... (For diamonds you flash a bit of aluminum onto them for an initial contact, then the arc leaves a thin surface layer of graphite which carries the current from the next arc. Acid-etch the aluminum away when you're done.)
Three basic types of tooling:
- Use the end of a (slowly fed) wire for a drill for tiny holes.
- Use the side of a (slowly moving) wire for a bandsaw.
- Use a carved graphite electrode, dithered in small circles to pump the fluid around, to drill big holes of odd shapes.
I did motion control software in Forth for a commercial EDM machine a couple decades ago. Pretty simple stuff. Sparker power supply needs some big resistors and transistors but is otherwise pretty straightforward. Computer is pretty basic (we used a cheap Z80 board), as is the pumping stuff.
Main "hard" part for electronics nerds is manufacturing the motorized mechanical mechanisms for accurate motion control - which is exactly what the gadgets referenced here are designed to be - and to make.
= = = =
Of course if you want to make a casting you can make an initial wax (or low-melting point plastic) model, coat it with plaster to form your negative mold, and use the lost-wax casting process (where the molten metal melts the initial model away and replaces it) to make your part.
1) Have it write resist patterns on printed circuit boards. (Then etch them the normal way.)
2) Add a drilling head to make the holes. (Then plate through the normal way, then go to 1. Now you can make multi-layer boards rather than one-sided, surface-mount-parts-only boards)
3) Add a milling head and you can grind away copper rather than etching it...
Lots of variations.
It will be a long time before you can home-brew integrated circuits, due to the tiny scales and clean-environment issues. (But there ARE FPGAs...)
To summarize your answer: "If lawyers weren't such slippery pieces of shit, we wouldn't have this language problem."
Sorry, wrong.
To summarize the answer:
- The legal language is exact and well-defined.
- It must be, so that people can understand what the law means and apply it correctly.
And to add a corollary:
- Your inability to understand it is the result of the failure of your school system's administrators when they chose not to teach it to you. They have kept you ignorant of it, and thus of how to read the laws you are expected to obey.
- This is convenient for them and their masters in government: It makes you easier to control.
The perceived "slipperyness" of lawyers is a side-effect of their function: To help their employers present effective arguments for the most-favorable-to-them interpretations of legal matters in dispute. This means they're often stuck with trying to put a shine on a pig.
Actually, I've found it's more a problem trying to convince a manager that it would take LESS time to redo the damn code than it would be to figure out what the last guy did, and "resuse it" in the "new context" ...
Hear, hear!
I'm not advocating you reuse OTHER people's stuff.
Reusing your own older work, however, may be far easier than starting over. Also much faster and less mind-numbing. (Of course that's IF it turned out to be a good fit to the new prolem and IF he documented it well enough that HE understand what YOUNGER HIM wrote. B-) )
The point I'm making is that the only way a programmer knows nearly 100% of what he needs to know when the project starts is if the project is a repeat of one he already did. If that's the case, why is he restarting from scratch?