the Israelis, renowned for respecting the civil rights of those they consider enemies of the state.
Fixed that for you. For a country under continuous assault by the most vicious terrorists, who, along with their supporters, have no respect whatever for civil rights, Israel has been extraordinarily restrained. In what other country do terrorists not only have rapid access to the Supreme Court, but frequently win cases before the Supreme Court?
Although they evidently used XP for that presentation, the real IT infrastructure that makes the Olympics run is mostly Unix according to this Computer World Hong Kong article.
In some cases people are starving because they can't grow enough food to support themselves and can't earn enough income to import food. In many cases, however, there is no shortage of food, just bad distribution. If a corrupt government steals enough of a country's wealth, there isn't money left to import what people need, or to obtain things like fuel and fertilizer that they need to grow food. Corrupt governments can also simply mismanage things to the point of destroying the economy. A current example is Zimbabwe, which in principle can feed itself just fine but whose economy has been destroyed almost single-handedly by Roberto Mugabe.
Some years ago I remember reading about how a theatre in Beijing had solved their problem with patrons talking on their cell phones and annoying everybody else. When a ban on cellphones didn't work, they made an arrangement with the People's Liberation Army, which simply jammed the relevant band in the vicinity of the theatre.
I see two major problems with the application for the order. The first is that it claims that disclosure of how to hack the cards constitutes a danger to the public. How so? All these cards are good for is paying the fare. Hacking them allows people to ride the subway for free. That's petty larceny, not a danger to the public.
The second is that the application asked the court to forbid:
publicly stating or indicating that the security or integrity of the CharlieCard pass, the CharlieTicket pass, or the MBTA's Fare Media systems has been compromised.
There's no conceivable justification for that. Even if there is justification for forbidding disclosure of the details of the hack, stating that there is a problem is certainly constitutionally protected. (It is possible that the court did not include such language in the TRO; this is what Massachusetts asked for, but possibly not what they got. Anybody got a link to the actual TRO?).
Uh, you don't know what makes something a work for hire, do you? Writing the program was most emphatically NOT in the course of his duties. He was not a programmer. He asked for training in programming and was turned down. He taught himself at home and wrote t he program at home. The court explicitly makes the point that the source code never left his home. That makes it his code, period. How he learned of the need for it is irrelevant, as is the fact that it was tested at work. If you tell me you could use a program with certain features, I write it and give you a copy to test, do you think that makes it yours? It certainly does not, even if you happen to employ me to do something else.
Here is the actual court decision, which contains a more detailed account of what actually happened. Among other things, it makes it clear that the source code never left the guy's home.
You have an odd idea of what makes a work for hire. The guy's job was explicitly not programming. He actually asked for training in programming and was turned down. It appears that he in fact did do all of the work on his own time with the possible exception of listening to requests for improvements in the software that he graciously provided at no cost.
Even if he did do some of the work while on duty, that wouldn't make it government property. It would only be government property if it was the product of his job. Suppose that a soldier while on duty works on his novel or that a sailor carves scrimshaw. Do you think that the resulting novel or carving cease to be his property? No, they don't, because they weren't made in the course of his job.
No, if you read the article it indicates that he wrote the code from scratch. He initially proposed that such a program be created and asked for training in programming. They said no. He taught himself to program and wrote the program at home, then brought it in to work and used it. Other people found out about it and asked for it. He provided it at no cost. When they asked for improvements, he made them, on his own time, at no cost. He owned the code, lock, stock, and barrell. He only sold it to a third party when the military tried to steal the code from him.
Sorry, but no, he didn't install a defect. The military knew that the expiration code was there and when it would expire - he wasn't springing a trap. And the software was not life-critical. He did nothing criminal.
The military handled this very badly. The guy may have made limited use of military resources for testing, but the testing was done only for the use of the military, not for third parties. He developed the software on his own, outside of his job responsibilities. He wasn't a programmer and when he asked for training in programming they refused him. It's his software. If the military hadn't been complete assholes they would have paid him a bit and given him a pat on the back and the problem would never have arisen.
I don't think that anyone is criticizing the engineers. The problem is (a) that the Olympics are going to be held in such a location and (b) that the local organizing committee persuaded the IOC that it would be okay because they would either improve Hwy 99 or build a new road in a different location. The latter was ruled out by both cost and environmental considerations, so what they've done is make relatively minor improvements to Hwy 99, which don't really change things.
I have driven that road many times and frankly, the risk of rockfall is not the major problem. The major problem are the idiot drivers who go too fast, slide over the centerline on curves, don't have proper snow tires in the winter, etc. There are lots of accidents on that stretch of Hwy 99, of which hardly any are due to rockslides. They are almost always due to poor driving.
The Berkeley men's water polo team probably doesn't really care, but the board of trustees and the alumni organization probably do. Maybe not a lot, but politicians at least seem to think that this kind of thing is good for them.
I've never been much of a fan of Feinstein, but for reasons other than sponsoring a lot of silly resolutions.
There is a lot of that junk, isn't there? I think that Feinstein does a lot of that because she comes form a big state with a lot of major sports teams and headquarters of organizations that want things sponsored, plus she's at this point pretty senior and so good at getting things done. She'll do some so as to stay in the good graces of her constituents, and people in her district will come to her, other things being equal (unless, say, there is a Senator particularly tied to their cause).
The functional aspects of the game layout are not protected but the non-functional, artistic aspects are. Scrabulous should have been okay if they used a board with the same dimensions and locations for the double word scores and so forth but different colors, fonts, and other details.
This is good advice for many consumer products but not for all software since some software is intended for users of whom the CEO is probably not representative. Software for technical people, for example, may trade a longer learning curve for greater efficiency or configurability for experienced users, and software for some tasks assume specialized knowledge of the task that most people won't have.
Good luck finding a CEO who will let you fire him if he doesn't test your software.
I don't understand why the Scrabulous folks took an approach that virtually guaranteed that they would be shut down. The rules of the game are not subject to copyright or any other restriction, so anybody can make a Scrabble-like game. The name itself is trade-marked, and the board artwork is copyrighted. That means that all you have to do to be free of IP restrictions is use a clearly distinct name and different artwork. It would not have been difficult to avoid legal problems. Why they didn't is beyond me.
I agree, especially about the awful teacher education programs. In addition to not teaching enough about the subjects to be taught and too much education junk, a critical problem is that few elementary teachers are actually competent to teach children how to read. Since ability to read is not only a critical skill important for student morale and continued desire to learn, good reading instruction in the early years is very important. Even so, most teacher training programs have a bit of a philosophical chat about different approaches to reading but don't actually teach the teachers how to teach reading or the basic linguistic knowledge that underlies it. Even if the school system adopts a good phonics program, if the teachers don't understand why children need need to be phonemically aware and how to bring this about, and if they themselves don't know what the sounds of English are and what the letter-to-sound rules are, how can they possibly teach it?
Well, if I put my tin-foil hat on, I figure that Microsoft hopes to make the OLPC dependent on XP. With XP no longer available anywhere else, people who really want it will have to get it from OLPCs, rendering them unusable. In this way, MS will satisfy customers who really want XP, while destroying the OLPC.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixed that for you. For a country under continuous assault by the most vicious terrorists, who, along with their supporters, have no respect whatever for civil rights, Israel has been extraordinarily restrained. In what other country do terrorists not only have rapid access to the Supreme Court, but frequently win cases before the Supreme Court?
Although they evidently used XP for that presentation, the real IT infrastructure that makes the Olympics run is mostly Unix according to this Computer World Hong Kong article.
For commentary by an expert on First Amendment law, see Eugene Volokh's post.
In some cases people are starving because they can't grow enough food to support themselves and can't earn enough income to import food. In many cases, however, there is no shortage of food, just bad distribution. If a corrupt government steals enough of a country's wealth, there isn't money left to import what people need, or to obtain things like fuel and fertilizer that they need to grow food. Corrupt governments can also simply mismanage things to the point of destroying the economy. A current example is Zimbabwe, which in principle can feed itself just fine but whose economy has been destroyed almost single-handedly by Roberto Mugabe.
I'm amazed that nobody has noticed that this means that webcams have passed the Turing test.
Sure you could. The properties of such a world just don't correspond to those of the one in which we live.
Some years ago I remember reading about how a theatre in Beijing had solved their problem with patrons talking on their cell phones and annoying everybody else. When a ban on cellphones didn't work, they made an arrangement with the People's Liberation Army, which simply jammed the relevant band in the vicinity of the theatre.
Thanks. At least the judge did not go along with the plaintiff and forbid them from saying that the system is broken.
I see two major problems with the application for the order. The first is that it claims that disclosure of how to hack the cards constitutes a danger to the public. How so? All these cards are good for is paying the fare. Hacking them allows people to ride the subway for free. That's petty larceny, not a danger to the public.
The second is that the application asked the court to forbid:
There's no conceivable justification for that. Even if there is justification for forbidding disclosure of the details of the hack, stating that there is a problem is certainly constitutionally protected. (It is possible that the court did not include such language in the TRO; this is what Massachusetts asked for, but possibly not what they got. Anybody got a link to the actual TRO?).
They forgot the REALLY TOUGH even: documentation.
Uh, you don't know what makes something a work for hire, do you? Writing the program was most emphatically NOT in the course of his duties. He was not a programmer. He asked for training in programming and was turned down. He taught himself at home and wrote t he program at home. The court explicitly makes the point that the source code never left his home. That makes it his code, period. How he learned of the need for it is irrelevant, as is the fact that it was tested at work. If you tell me you could use a program with certain features, I write it and give you a copy to test, do you think that makes it yours? It certainly does not, even if you happen to employ me to do something else.
No, they may be able to tell you what to do 24/7, but they don't own the results of work that you do outside of your military responsibilities.
Here is the actual court decision, which contains a more detailed account of what actually happened. Among other things, it makes it clear that the source code never left the guy's home.
You have an odd idea of what makes a work for hire. The guy's job was explicitly not programming. He actually asked for training in programming and was turned down. It appears that he in fact did do all of the work on his own time with the possible exception of listening to requests for improvements in the software that he graciously provided at no cost.
Even if he did do some of the work while on duty, that wouldn't make it government property. It would only be government property if it was the product of his job. Suppose that a soldier while on duty works on his novel or that a sailor carves scrimshaw. Do you think that the resulting novel or carving cease to be his property? No, they don't, because they weren't made in the course of his job.
No, if you read the article it indicates that he wrote the code from scratch. He initially proposed that such a program be created and asked for training in programming. They said no. He taught himself to program and wrote the program at home, then brought it in to work and used it. Other people found out about it and asked for it. He provided it at no cost. When they asked for improvements, he made them, on his own time, at no cost. He owned the code, lock, stock, and barrell. He only sold it to a third party when the military tried to steal the code from him.
Sorry, but no, he didn't install a defect. The military knew that the expiration code was there and when it would expire - he wasn't springing a trap. And the software was not life-critical. He did nothing criminal.
The military handled this very badly. The guy may have made limited use of military resources for testing, but the testing was done only for the use of the military, not for third parties. He developed the software on his own, outside of his job responsibilities. He wasn't a programmer and when he asked for training in programming they refused him. It's his software. If the military hadn't been complete assholes they would have paid him a bit and given him a pat on the back and the problem would never have arisen.
No, it wasn't. Although India was not at the time a unified country, the term "India" was known to Europeans. Columbus was looking for the "Indies".
I don't think that anyone is criticizing the engineers. The problem is (a) that the Olympics are going to be held in such a location and (b) that the local organizing committee persuaded the IOC that it would be okay because they would either improve Hwy 99 or build a new road in a different location. The latter was ruled out by both cost and environmental considerations, so what they've done is make relatively minor improvements to Hwy 99, which don't really change things.
I have driven that road many times and frankly, the risk of rockfall is not the major problem. The major problem are the idiot drivers who go too fast, slide over the centerline on curves, don't have proper snow tires in the winter, etc. There are lots of accidents on that stretch of Hwy 99, of which hardly any are due to rockslides. They are almost always due to poor driving.
The Berkeley men's water polo team probably doesn't really care, but the board of trustees and the alumni organization probably do. Maybe not a lot, but politicians at least seem to think that this kind of thing is good for them.
I've never been much of a fan of Feinstein, but for reasons other than sponsoring a lot of silly resolutions.
There is a lot of that junk, isn't there? I think that Feinstein does a lot of that because she comes form a big state with a lot of major sports teams and headquarters of organizations that want things sponsored, plus she's at this point pretty senior and so good at getting things done. She'll do some so as to stay in the good graces of her constituents, and people in her district will come to her, other things being equal (unless, say, there is a Senator particularly tied to their cause).
The functional aspects of the game layout are not protected but the non-functional, artistic aspects are. Scrabulous should have been okay if they used a board with the same dimensions and locations for the double word scores and so forth but different colors, fonts, and other details.
This is good advice for many consumer products but not for all software since some software is intended for users of whom the CEO is probably not representative. Software for technical people, for example, may trade a longer learning curve for greater efficiency or configurability for experienced users, and software for some tasks assume specialized knowledge of the task that most people won't have.
Good luck finding a CEO who will let you fire him if he doesn't test your software.
I don't understand why the Scrabulous folks took an approach that virtually guaranteed that they would be shut down. The rules of the game are not subject to copyright or any other restriction, so anybody can make a Scrabble-like game. The name itself is trade-marked, and the board artwork is copyrighted. That means that all you have to do to be free of IP restrictions is use a clearly distinct name and different artwork. It would not have been difficult to avoid legal problems. Why they didn't is beyond me.
I agree, especially about the awful teacher education programs. In addition to not teaching enough about the subjects to be taught and too much education junk, a critical problem is that few elementary teachers are actually competent to teach children how to read. Since ability to read is not only a critical skill important for student morale and continued desire to learn, good reading instruction in the early years is very important. Even so, most teacher training programs have a bit of a philosophical chat about different approaches to reading but don't actually teach the teachers how to teach reading or the basic linguistic knowledge that underlies it. Even if the school system adopts a good phonics program, if the teachers don't understand why children need need to be phonemically aware and how to bring this about, and if they themselves don't know what the sounds of English are and what the letter-to-sound rules are, how can they possibly teach it?
Well, if I put my tin-foil hat on, I figure that Microsoft hopes to make the OLPC dependent on XP. With XP no longer available anywhere else, people who really want it will have to get it from OLPCs, rendering them unusable. In this way, MS will satisfy customers who really want XP, while destroying the OLPC.