This kind of thing *really* pisses me off. A screwdriver is not a buglary tool, and calling it one doesn't make it so, any more than calling a tail a leg gives cows 5 legs. Anyone saying otherwise is wrong.
It appears to me that this guy commited a burglary, but there wasn't enough evidence, or whatever, to convict him. So they picked a convenient crime to which almost everyone in america is guilty of, and use that to "nail him". That is wrong. It shouldn't be allowed to happen, and everybody who helped make it possible (the prosecuting lawyer, judge, jury, and potentially police officers) all acted in an unethical and unprofessional manner. IMO, This guy should be relesed and preferably, all those people should have to apologize to him.
If you can't get enough evidence to convict someone of burglary, they shouldn't be convicted. It is as simple as that. Anything else undermines the "innocent unless proven guilty" concept on which a large portion of our constitutional freedoms are based.
Next thing you know, people doing perfectly legal things that aren't approved of by big brother/big business will be convicted of these crimes, and we will be one step further to becoming a police state.
A lot of people will think I am overreacting, but I really believe this is bad. It happend in the 1950's, and it could happen again.
However, the free (beer) license is still nasty, as it requires you to use cddb exclusively. So if you let you users have a choice between freedb and cddb, you can't be licensed. Also, you have to put their logo on your program.
As a side note, I wonder what this does to people with firewalls that strip/mangle/replace the User-Agent HTTP header? or is the filtering only on their cddb protocol, not http?
From memory, to write an applciation that uses CDDB, you must:
1) Advertize for CDDB. You must put their logo on your application somewhere. There were some restrictions about size/placement/visability/etc.
2) Use CDDB exclusively. You cannot allow users to enter a different server name, such as freedb.
3) You must not store or redistribute the data you get from cddb. This is including, but not limited to submitting the data back to freedb. I believe caching is allowed, at least for local use only. Not sure about putting the data into ID3 tags and the like.
4) You must agree that all data submitted becomes the exclusive property of gracenote.
5) I think commercial players have to pay a license fee, but free ones don't.
Note: I read this a long time ago, and can't be bothered to look it up. The license may have changed, or I may be mistaken.
Ok, I will one up you. Intellectual property isn't a right either. It is a privelege granted by the copyright laws, in accord with the constitution to encourage creativity and invention. This is much different that the "fundamental rights" regognized by the constitution. IP is a means to an end, not an end of its own.
I would also argue (though I doubt that a court would agree) that under the any exclusive rights granted by IP law that can be shown not to encourage creativity and invention is unconstitutional and should be repealed.
The fact is, the courts have regognized that certain types of personal use falls outside the juristiction of copyright law. Basically, these are:
1) Any copy needed to use the product as intended: you can copy software from a CD to a hard disk, or copy it into memory to execute it.
2) Backups for archival purposes: You may create backup copies of stuff to protect you in the event that the media is destroyed.
3) Copies made for personal use: You can copy a TV broadcast to a tape to view later (time shifting) or create compilations of music tracks for your own personal use. You can create MP3 encoded versions of your CDs so you can play 600 hours without changing disks.
The right/privlege to do these things are all granted to you implicity when you purchase software/music/etc. Not they they only apply to things you have lawfully purchased: That is the primary reason why using napster is illegal (you are making a personal use copy, but of someone else's CD), and the basis of the ruling against MP3.com (they were making they copy for you, which the courts ruled was not the same as you making it yourself, even if it was the same bits).
The problem isn't that people (well, at least me) think that the music industry should be able to defend their rights. I for one, would be happy to see Napster shut down... What I object to is that they try to take away my legal rights to fair use, etc. under the guise of "protecting their intellectual property". That is what this technology does (or claims to do -- I am skeptical that it works). Almost no illegal uses of CDs will be prevented by this, and many, many cases of fair use copying will be prevented. That why the RIAA is evil.
This just goes to show that the RIAA is always lying through their teeth when they way "We aren't concerned about casual copying. We are just trying to stop mass piracy."
They really want to take away your rights to use music you purchased legally.
I can see the case for macrovision, at least on rental videos: When you only pay $2.50 to rent a video for 3 days (or whatever), you shouldn't be allowed to copy it, even for personal use. But trying to apply the same logic to CDs that you buy is just wrong.
Since maybe.1% of all music copying (legal or illegal) is cdda->cdda (as opposed to MP3 or other file formats, possibly on a CD), they really have no justification for doing this, other than to screw their customers.
If you put 3 transmitters in the arena and 1 on each robot, they could very easily determine their location and find the other bot.
A really good AI should be better at disabling opponents, because it can much better coordinate the use of several degrees of freedom. The reason human drivers suck is that they are trying to remotely manipulate their bots with an incredibly low bandwidth connection (human fingers). Robots designed to have microsecond reflexes would rock.
I do agree, at least at first, an autonomous divison would be much more fun for the participants, but much less fun for the spectators. But I think it is possible.
Are you sure about this? Do you have anything to back it up? I am skeptical because while the extra mass changes the boiling point and melting points (very slightly), the electronic properties are essentially identical -- solubilities and such ought to be the same. Since nuclear reactions are pretty rare inside humans, the extra neutron shouldn't make much differense.
It isn't that I don't this it is possible, I just am surprised and would like to see some reason other than "the body's metabolism is crafted around regular water" -- what processes are disrupted or altered?
The experement you link to is a smaller scale version of the one in the main article. Basically, several facillities have measure the neutrino mass (actually, the mass difference between two types of neutrinos), but no two experements agree. Also, the experemental methods have had several shortcommings, such as the inability of the detectors to see tau neutrinos, and low efficiency.
This experement, if successful should detect a large percentage of the solar neutrinos, and more importantly, all three types. This should allow for a fairly accurate measurement of the mass deltas and the mixing angles, as well as provide internal checks and balances. (if the sum of the mass deltas between the three types is not zero, something is horked).
Not to mention require substantial patching of the current incarnation of the standard model -- which really thinks neutrinos should be massless. At least, that is what the particle physics guys around here claim.
So far all the data I have seen for muon/electron neutrino mixing is sketchy at best -- 95% confidence bars from different experements don't even overlap.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what they get out of this.
According to this article from the LANL e-prints server, MgB2 appears to be a phonon mediated BCS superconductor. Of course, since the initial discovery was only a few weeks ago, it is hard to say.
The important thing here is that they have a metal that superconducts at ~40K. That is much higher than any other metalic superconductor (typical Tc ~ 4-10K). Metals are very easy to draw and make into wires, ceramics are not.
Also, the first ceramic high Tc superconductors were found at 40K and were quickly tuned to reach higher temperatures.
Also, MgB2 is non-toxic and available in mass quantities cheaply. If it can be made to superconduct at 77K (liquid nitrogen temperatures) with an appreciable current density, it truly would be a revolutionary advancment for superconducting applications.
That is why Nature posted the article on their website before it had been reviewed or published-- it truly is an amazing and potentially revolutionary discovery.
First, as mentioned above, I was smoking crack with regard to the existence of an existing code base from a 3rd party developer. There was no mention of this in the question, and I don't know why I thought there was.
Anyway, the owner of software is the person whose rights are protected by copyright. In particular, the owner can use the work in any way he (or she, or it) sees fit, including deleting it, giving it away, selling it or licensing it to any number of people.
The owner is never acountable to anyone on copyright issues. In particular, owner is free to release software under the GPL *and* sell it commercially to people who don't want to be bound by the restrictions of the GPL.
People who purchase a copy of software or whatever, own a copy, but have no ownership rights to the software itself, and are restricted from copying, performing, and making derivative works, except as granted to them by the owner.
As long as I am lecturing:) "Shrink-wrap" licenses are on very shaky legal grounds: you aren't really obligated to agree to them once you purchase software, and as long as you don't intend to perform any of the protected rights (copy, perform, make derivative works), I don't think there is any *legal* basis for enforcing them.
The GPL (and other open/free licenses) on the other hand, merely sets the conditions under which you can copy, distribute, and extend the software -- unless you accept the GPL you have no right to do those things. Thus, it has a very good basis for enforcment.
That is why the GPL (probably) could stand up in court, while a standard shrink-wrap license (probably) could not.
If your companies contract specified that your company would retain ownership of the code, then you can release it under any license you like, as long as you let them use it.
If the contract says the military owns exclusive rights to the code, and the people there who agreed to use the GPL were authorized to do so, then it is TS for them: they got their contract cheaper than if someone wrote the code from scratch, but they have to pay for it in terms of licensing.
If nobody authorized to make that kind of decision was consulted, then you are at fault, and the govt. is probably obligated to abide by the GPL (since the existing code you used was only licensed under it), but you are screwed.
If you were the exclusive copyright owner, you could potentially release the software publically under the GPL while giving the military a non-exclusive license to use the software in their system.
Really, your initial proposal should have stated that you planned to use existing software licensed under the GPL, and the final product would have to be distributed in compliance with that license, along with including a copy of it with your proposal.
The RIAA and others eventually hope to abandon copyright entirely, since it was created by a bunch of bleeding heart hippies who think that consumers still have rights. In the future, if they get their way, acceptable use will be governed not by laws, controlled by unreliable congressmen (who have this nasty tendancy of not staying bribed), but by technology that allows them complete control over uses of their so-called property.
Since subverting content protection schemes, even for completely legal purposes is now illegal, as soon as they manage to widely deploy these technologies, it will be illegal to make even fair use of copyrighted material.
We have already seen it with DeCSS and region coded DVDs, it is only a matter of time before the music industry catches up.
Write your elected representatives! encourage them to support consumer freedom and choice! They probably won't listen, but you can say you tried.
Who knows, it might raise their bribe threshold to the point it is unprofitable for the RIAA:)
Every computer user in the world has copyrighted data on their comptuer. It may be legal (free software, or an owned copy of windows), illegal (MP3s from Napster or pirated version of windows), but copyrighted none the less. Thus copy protection is an issue for all users.
Second, this brings up a number of fair use concerns. I like to think that I am entitled to rip and mp3ify CDs I own, store them on my hard drive, and upload some subset of them onto my portable MP3 player. The RIAA would like me to pay for each copy I have, and to pay each time I upload a song onto my MP3 player. A sucessful copy protection scheme would give them a means to enforce this.
This is the important part: Even though my actions are perfectly legal, the DMCA would make it illegal for me to bypass the encryption to allow me to do so.
Another important concern I have over this kind of software is that it requires a "trusted" copy command that contains the keys necessary to decrypt the content and doesn't allow the data to be subverted to a non-protected representation. This means, any software that can access "protected" materials needs to have direct hardware access, since it must bypass the OS (or be part of it). This effectively means that you have to have tools like cp and media player execute in kernel space. Now who thinks this is a good idea?
If you used company resources (ie, your time) to modify a GPL program (written by you or someone else) without making it clear to you employer the restrictions placed on derived works, you are acting in bad faith. I believe the way this would work is that the company would still be bound by the GPL (since they don't own the code), but they could sue you for damages at least up to the value of the code they had to give away. Not sure on that, though.
Actually his opinion is (more or less) the law. Work you do on your own time is yours, regardless of what the IP agreement claims. And there is no reason you have to divulge any prior IP work, nor do you have to tell them about any projects you work on on your own time during your employment.
This is not an opinion, it is law. IP contracts that contradict this are illegal and unenforcable. I still would rather not sign something like this, because it would give grounds for a lawsuit to determine whether the agreement was enforcable, and whether you were in violation of it, and I like to avoid lawsuits.
Second, "wasting" time rewriting software you have done at home is not fucking the company, if it your job. If you hadn't already written it, you would have to do so on the companies time anyway. Now, if they want to accept the license you released your code under (including restrictions about licensing modifications), and not have you redo the work, that is fine, but if they don't, they are fucking themselves.
On the other hand, you DO owe it to your company to 1) make them aware if there is freely available code you can work from, rather than reimplementing something, whether you wrote it or not, and 2) to make sure they are aware of the ownership/licensing restrictions of any free software you choose to modify or redistribute as part of your job.
Now, an entirely different issue is non-compete agreements. If, while employed by a company, you choose to work on something substantially related to your job, you would need to verify that you weren't violating your non-compete agreement. Since most non-compete agreements only seem to deal with commercial competition, as long as you don't sell or otherwise profit from your work, I bet you could slip through that loophole, but I imagine companies will be catching on and filling that one in, as well Non-compete agreements do not cover work you did before joining the company, though, and do not grant ownership of anything to the company.
Right, but I *want* to burn out the tag. If the store wants to verify a return item, they are going to have to do it the old fasioned way, by having a human read off the serial number. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: I insist that RFID tags be burned out on anything I buy. If stores won't do it for me, I will do it myself.
First, the occupational safety of the guy scanning stuff is a much different issue than every product in the country constantly broadcasting at every person. Now, it could still suck to be him, but the power levels of these things are (in my estimation) several orders of magnitude lower than cell phones, and the extent of effect cell phones have is far from clear.
Also, keep in mind that for the forseeable future, research is not particularly directed at increasing range (except maybe for warehouse or industrial scenereos that are less cost sensitive), but at decreasing size and cost while retaining a range of a few feet.
Now, in a warehouse, it would be sweet to be able to walk down a aisle and have a reader in your back pocket record everything there. But applications like this are still looking at a couple of dollars a tag for some time yet.
Lets not worry about worldwide GPS tracking of individual grains of rice when it might become feasable.
That whole mattress tag thing is a myth, and the RF tags would be the same situation. Mattress tags are not to be removed, except by the consumer. They contain information such as materials and safety warnings that need to be given to the consumer. It really isn't much different from the "nutrition facts" label on food products -- this is the same reason that when you buy a bag of candy bars, they say "not labeled for individual resale" -- they don't have the government mandated nutrition information on individual bars.
Likewise, you will be permitted to remove RF tags from products you own. Hopefully the government will prohibit placing them where it is hard to remove, but if not, they can be burned out with an RF field slightly stronger than used to read them.
That is exactly what you would want to do. The primary legitimate purposes of these devices are for inventory tracking from manufacture to purchase. At that point the tag should be burned out.
Chances are, you can do this the same way they handle the anti-theft "stickers" on CDs and such. They work by the same principle (inductive coupling) but have a simple RC circuit at the center of the spiral antenna. In a weak RF field, they couple to the field and give a detectable signal. when the store runs your CD over the eraser, it generates a moderate strength RF field that burns out the RC ciruit.
You could do the same with these tags, either at the store, or once you got it home (if the stores won't do it for you). Enough power down the antenna will burn out the circuit, and render it useless.
These types of tags really have the potential to streamline production and shipping, and are in general a Good Thing(tm). We just have to be careful how they are used. Almost exactly like every other technology in existence.
I would agree, except it doesn't look like they have anything to replace it with. Admission boards should try to get as many data points as possible, ie: GPA, SATI, SATII, teacher recommendations, extra-curricular activities, etc. and make their decisions based on all of the above. Most private schools do this (at least, they claim to -- they don't like to talk about what acutally goes on in the admissions process. I suppose that protects them from lawsuits).
Now, most large public schools have too many applicants and too few resources to actually look at anything other than a few numbers and plug them through. So, if you want to replace one of those numbers (SAT) with something you think is a fairer representation of the elusive quality "is this the kind of student we want here", fine. But I think it is irresponsible to remove one of the few pieces of data they actually have because it isn't perfect.
On the other hand, I am opposed to ending affirmative action in school admissions for several resons. First, I think it is *critical* that college campuses have racially diverse populations, even IF it means admiting some students who aren't as good. Second, yes current testing systems have a racial bias, which impairs their ability to measure a students ability to succeed in school.
Finally, that "we need a less numerical and more holistic approach to admissions" is BS. I agree that 3 or 4 numbers isn't enough to base someone's admission on, but holism, in this context, means "We don't know what we want, but 'holistic' sounds PC, and doesn't really commit to anything". And, as I mentioned before, admissions committes at large state schools don't have the resources to do more than look at a few numbers.
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It appears to me that this guy commited a burglary, but there wasn't enough evidence, or whatever, to convict him. So they picked a convenient crime to which almost everyone in america is guilty of, and use that to "nail him". That is wrong. It shouldn't be allowed to happen, and everybody who helped make it possible (the prosecuting lawyer, judge, jury, and potentially police officers) all acted in an unethical and unprofessional manner. IMO, This guy should be relesed and preferably, all those people should have to apologize to him.
If you can't get enough evidence to convict someone of burglary, they shouldn't be convicted. It is as simple as that. Anything else undermines the "innocent unless proven guilty" concept on which a large portion of our constitutional freedoms are based.
Next thing you know, people doing perfectly legal things that aren't approved of by big brother/big business will be convicted of these crimes, and we will be one step further to becoming a police state.
A lot of people will think I am overreacting, but I really believe this is bad. It happend in the 1950's, and it could happen again.
However, the free (beer) license is still nasty, as it requires you to use cddb exclusively. So if you let you users have a choice between freedb and cddb, you can't be licensed. Also, you have to put their logo on your program.
As a side note, I wonder what this does to people with firewalls that strip/mangle/replace the User-Agent HTTP header? or is the filtering only on their cddb protocol, not http?
From memory, to write an applciation that uses CDDB, you must:
1) Advertize for CDDB. You must put their logo on your application somewhere. There were some restrictions about size/placement/visability/etc.
2) Use CDDB exclusively. You cannot allow users to enter a different server name, such as freedb.
3) You must not store or redistribute the data you get from cddb. This is including, but not limited to submitting the data back to freedb. I believe caching is allowed, at least for local use only. Not sure about putting the data into ID3 tags and the like.
4) You must agree that all data submitted becomes the exclusive property of gracenote.
5) I think commercial players have to pay a license fee, but free ones don't.
Note: I read this a long time ago, and can't be bothered to look it up. The license may have changed, or I may be mistaken.
Ok, I will one up you. Intellectual property isn't a right either. It is a privelege granted by the copyright laws, in accord with the constitution to encourage creativity and invention. This is much different that the "fundamental rights" regognized by the constitution. IP is a means to an end, not an end of its own.
I would also argue (though I doubt that a court would agree) that under the any exclusive rights granted by IP law that can be shown not to encourage creativity and invention is unconstitutional and should be repealed.
The fact is, the courts have regognized that certain types of personal use falls outside the juristiction of copyright law. Basically, these are:
1) Any copy needed to use the product as intended: you can copy software from a CD to a hard disk, or copy it into memory to execute it.
2) Backups for archival purposes: You may create backup copies of stuff to protect you in the event that the media is destroyed.
3) Copies made for personal use: You can copy a TV broadcast to a tape to view later (time shifting) or create compilations of music tracks for your own personal use. You can create MP3 encoded versions of your CDs so you can play 600 hours without changing disks.
The right/privlege to do these things are all granted to you implicity when you purchase software/music/etc. Not they they only apply to things you have lawfully purchased: That is the primary reason why using napster is illegal (you are making a personal use copy, but of someone else's CD), and the basis of the ruling against MP3.com (they were making they copy for you, which the courts ruled was not the same as you making it yourself, even if it was the same bits).
The problem isn't that people (well, at least me) think that the music industry should be able to defend their rights. I for one, would be happy to see Napster shut down... What I object to is that they try to take away my legal rights to fair use, etc. under the guise of "protecting their intellectual property". That is what this technology does (or claims to do -- I am skeptical that it works). Almost no illegal uses of CDs will be prevented by this, and many, many cases of fair use copying will be prevented. That why the RIAA is evil.
This just goes to show that the RIAA is always lying through their teeth when they way "We aren't concerned about casual copying. We are just trying to stop mass piracy."
.1% of all music copying (legal or illegal) is cdda->cdda (as opposed to MP3 or other file formats, possibly on a CD), they really have no justification for doing this, other than to screw their customers.
They really want to take away your rights to use music you purchased legally.
I can see the case for macrovision, at least on rental videos: When you only pay $2.50 to rent a video for 3 days (or whatever), you shouldn't be allowed to copy it, even for personal use. But trying to apply the same logic to CDs that you buy is just wrong.
Since maybe
If you put 3 transmitters in the arena and 1 on each robot, they could very easily determine their location and find the other bot.
A really good AI should be better at disabling opponents, because it can much better coordinate the use of several degrees of freedom. The reason human drivers suck is that they are trying to remotely manipulate their bots with an incredibly low bandwidth connection (human fingers). Robots designed to have microsecond reflexes would rock.
I do agree, at least at first, an autonomous divison would be much more fun for the participants, but much less fun for the spectators. But I think it is possible.
Are you sure about this? Do you have anything to back it up? I am skeptical because while the extra mass changes the boiling point and melting points (very slightly), the electronic properties are essentially identical -- solubilities and such ought to be the same. Since nuclear reactions are pretty rare inside humans, the extra neutron shouldn't make much differense.
It isn't that I don't this it is possible, I just am surprised and would like to see some reason other than "the body's metabolism is crafted around regular water" -- what processes are disrupted or altered?
The experement you link to is a smaller scale version of the one in the main article. Basically, several facillities have measure the neutrino mass (actually, the mass difference between two types of neutrinos), but no two experements agree. Also, the experemental methods have had several shortcommings, such as the inability of the detectors to see tau neutrinos, and low efficiency.
This experement, if successful should detect a large percentage of the solar neutrinos, and more importantly, all three types. This should allow for a fairly accurate measurement of the mass deltas and the mixing angles, as well as provide internal checks and balances. (if the sum of the mass deltas between the three types is not zero, something is horked).
Not to mention require substantial patching of the current incarnation of the standard model -- which really thinks neutrinos should be massless. At least, that is what the particle physics guys around here claim.
So far all the data I have seen for muon/electron neutrino mixing is sketchy at best -- 95% confidence bars from different experements don't even overlap.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what they get out of this.
Why? It is one link out of many on a quickies story, clearly marked as porn, and very funny to those of us not behind corporate firewalls :)
If your you are going to get fired for looking at pictures of hairy guys hugging computer equipment, don't follow the link.
According to this article from the LANL e-prints server, MgB2 appears to be a phonon mediated BCS superconductor. Of course, since the initial discovery was only a few weeks ago, it is hard to say.
The important thing here is that they have a metal that superconducts at ~40K. That is much higher than any other metalic superconductor (typical Tc ~ 4-10K). Metals are very easy to draw and make into wires, ceramics are not.
Also, the first ceramic high Tc superconductors were found at 40K and were quickly tuned to reach higher temperatures.
Also, MgB2 is non-toxic and available in mass quantities cheaply. If it can be made to superconduct at 77K (liquid nitrogen temperatures) with an appreciable current density, it truly would be a revolutionary advancment for superconducting applications.
That is why Nature posted the article on their website before it had been reviewed or published-- it truly is an amazing and potentially revolutionary discovery.
First, as mentioned above, I was smoking crack with regard to the existence of an existing code base from a 3rd party developer. There was no mention of this in the question, and I don't know why I thought there was.
:) "Shrink-wrap" licenses are on very shaky legal grounds: you aren't really obligated to agree to them once you purchase software, and as long as you don't intend to perform any of the protected rights (copy, perform, make derivative works), I don't think there is any *legal* basis for enforcing them.
Anyway, the owner of software is the person whose rights are protected by copyright. In particular, the owner can use the work in any way he (or she, or it) sees fit, including deleting it, giving it away, selling it or licensing it to any number of people.
The owner is never acountable to anyone on copyright issues. In particular, owner is free to release software under the GPL *and* sell it commercially to people who don't want to be bound by the restrictions of the GPL.
People who purchase a copy of software or whatever, own a copy, but have no ownership rights to the software itself, and are restricted from copying, performing, and making derivative works, except as granted to them by the owner.
As long as I am lecturing
The GPL (and other open/free licenses) on the other hand, merely sets the conditions under which you can copy, distribute, and extend the software -- unless you accept the GPL you have no right to do those things. Thus, it has a very good basis for enforcment.
That is why the GPL (probably) could stand up in court, while a standard shrink-wrap license (probably) could not.
If your companies contract specified that your company would retain ownership of the code, then you can release it under any license you like, as long as you let them use it.
If the contract says the military owns exclusive rights to the code, and the people there who agreed to use the GPL were authorized to do so, then it is TS for them: they got their contract cheaper than if someone wrote the code from scratch, but they have to pay for it in terms of licensing.
If nobody authorized to make that kind of decision was consulted, then you are at fault, and the govt. is probably obligated to abide by the GPL (since the existing code you used was only licensed under it), but you are screwed.
If you were the exclusive copyright owner, you could potentially release the software publically under the GPL while giving the military a non-exclusive license to use the software in their system.
Really, your initial proposal should have stated that you planned to use existing software licensed under the GPL, and the final product would have to be distributed in compliance with that license, along with including a copy of it with your proposal.
The RIAA and others eventually hope to abandon copyright entirely, since it was created by a bunch of bleeding heart hippies who think that consumers still have rights. In the future, if they get their way, acceptable use will be governed not by laws, controlled by unreliable congressmen (who have this nasty tendancy of not staying bribed), but by technology that allows them complete control over uses of their so-called property.
:)
Since subverting content protection schemes, even for completely legal purposes is now illegal, as soon as they manage to widely deploy these technologies, it will be illegal to make even fair use of copyrighted material.
We have already seen it with DeCSS and region coded DVDs, it is only a matter of time before the music industry catches up.
Write your elected representatives! encourage them to support consumer freedom and choice! They probably won't listen, but you can say you tried.
Who knows, it might raise their bribe threshold to the point it is unprofitable for the RIAA
Every computer user in the world has copyrighted data on their comptuer. It may be legal (free software, or an owned copy of windows), illegal (MP3s from Napster or pirated version of windows), but copyrighted none the less. Thus copy protection is an issue for all users.
Second, this brings up a number of fair use concerns. I like to think that I am entitled to rip and mp3ify CDs I own, store them on my hard drive, and upload some subset of them onto my portable MP3 player. The RIAA would like me to pay for each copy I have, and to pay each time I upload a song onto my MP3 player. A sucessful copy protection scheme would give them a means to enforce this.
This is the important part: Even though my actions are perfectly legal, the DMCA would make it illegal for me to bypass the encryption to allow me to do so.
Another important concern I have over this kind of software is that it requires a "trusted" copy command that contains the keys necessary to decrypt the content and doesn't allow the data to be subverted to a non-protected representation. This means, any software that can access "protected" materials needs to have direct hardware access, since it must bypass the OS (or be part of it). This effectively means that you have to have tools like cp and media player execute in kernel space. Now who thinks this is a good idea?
If you used company resources (ie, your time) to modify a GPL program (written by you or someone else) without making it clear to you employer the restrictions placed on derived works, you are acting in bad faith. I believe the way this would work is that the company would still be bound by the GPL (since they don't own the code), but they could sue you for damages at least up to the value of the code they had to give away. Not sure on that, though.
Actually his opinion is (more or less) the law. Work you do on your own time is yours, regardless of what the IP agreement claims. And there is no reason you have to divulge any prior IP work, nor do you have to tell them about any projects you work on on your own time during your employment.
This is not an opinion, it is law. IP contracts that contradict this are illegal and unenforcable. I still would rather not sign something like this, because it would give grounds for a lawsuit to determine whether the agreement was enforcable, and whether you were in violation of it, and I like to avoid lawsuits.
Second, "wasting" time rewriting software you have done at home is not fucking the company, if it your job. If you hadn't already written it, you would have to do so on the companies time anyway. Now, if they want to accept the license you released your code under (including restrictions about licensing modifications), and not have you redo the work, that is fine, but if they don't, they are fucking themselves.
On the other hand, you DO owe it to your company to 1) make them aware if there is freely available code you can work from, rather than reimplementing something, whether you wrote it or not, and 2) to make sure they are aware of the ownership/licensing restrictions of any free software you choose to modify or redistribute as part of your job.
Now, an entirely different issue is non-compete agreements. If, while employed by a company, you choose to work on something substantially related to your job, you would need to verify that you weren't violating your non-compete agreement. Since most non-compete agreements only seem to deal with commercial competition, as long as you don't sell or otherwise profit from your work, I bet you could slip through that loophole, but I imagine companies will be catching on and filling that one in, as well Non-compete agreements do not cover work you did before joining the company, though, and do not grant ownership of anything to the company.
Right, but I *want* to burn out the tag. If the store wants to verify a return item, they are going to have to do it the old fasioned way, by having a human read off the serial number. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear: I insist that RFID tags be burned out on anything I buy. If stores won't do it for me, I will do it myself.
First, the occupational safety of the guy scanning stuff is a much different issue than every product in the country constantly broadcasting at every person. Now, it could still suck to be him, but the power levels of these things are (in my estimation) several orders of magnitude lower than cell phones, and the extent of effect cell phones have is far from clear.
Also, keep in mind that for the forseeable future, research is not particularly directed at increasing range (except maybe for warehouse or industrial scenereos that are less cost sensitive), but at decreasing size and cost while retaining a range of a few feet.
Now, in a warehouse, it would be sweet to be able to walk down a aisle and have a reader in your back pocket record everything there. But applications like this are still looking at a couple of dollars a tag for some time yet.
Lets not worry about worldwide GPS tracking of individual grains of rice when it might become feasable.
That whole mattress tag thing is a myth, and the RF tags would be the same situation. Mattress tags are not to be removed, except by the consumer. They contain information such as materials and safety warnings that need to be given to the consumer. It really isn't much different from the "nutrition facts" label on food products -- this is the same reason that when you buy a bag of candy bars, they say "not labeled for individual resale" -- they don't have the government mandated nutrition information on individual bars.
Likewise, you will be permitted to remove RF tags from products you own. Hopefully the government will prohibit placing them where it is hard to remove, but if not, they can be burned out with an RF field slightly stronger than used to read them.
That is exactly what you would want to do. The primary legitimate purposes of these devices are for inventory tracking from manufacture to purchase. At that point the tag should be burned out.
Chances are, you can do this the same way they handle the anti-theft "stickers" on CDs and such. They work by the same principle (inductive coupling) but have a simple RC circuit at the center of the spiral antenna. In a weak RF field, they couple to the field and give a detectable signal. when the store runs your CD over the eraser, it generates a moderate strength RF field that burns out the RC ciruit.
You could do the same with these tags, either at the store, or once you got it home (if the stores won't do it for you). Enough power down the antenna will burn out the circuit, and render it useless.
These types of tags really have the potential to streamline production and shipping, and are in general a Good Thing(tm). We just have to be careful how they are used. Almost exactly like every other technology in existence.
I would agree, except it doesn't look like they have anything to replace it with. Admission boards should try to get as many data points as possible, ie: GPA, SATI, SATII, teacher recommendations, extra-curricular activities, etc. and make their decisions based on all of the above. Most private schools do this (at least, they claim to -- they don't like to talk about what acutally goes on in the admissions process. I suppose that protects them from lawsuits).
Now, most large public schools have too many applicants and too few resources to actually look at anything other than a few numbers and plug them through. So, if you want to replace one of those numbers (SAT) with something you think is a fairer representation of the elusive quality "is this the kind of student we want here", fine. But I think it is irresponsible to remove one of the few pieces of data they actually have because it isn't perfect.
On the other hand, I am opposed to ending affirmative action in school admissions for several resons. First, I think it is *critical* that college campuses have racially diverse populations, even IF it means admiting some students who aren't as good. Second, yes current testing systems have a racial bias, which impairs their ability to measure a students ability to succeed in school.
Finally, that "we need a less numerical and more holistic approach to admissions" is BS. I agree that 3 or 4 numbers isn't enough to base someone's admission on, but holism, in this context, means "We don't know what we want, but 'holistic' sounds PC, and doesn't really commit to anything". And, as I mentioned before, admissions committes at large state schools don't have the resources to do more than look at a few numbers.