And, if there is no hope for this particular after the fact problem, or for corporations to put in general legal safeguards for tidy disposal of property without the need for expensive lawyers, then is there some small "sunset" clause that software developers could put in their code to ease the transfer, like a quit-claim that goes into effect if the corporation dissolves and no creditors assert any rights for a period of one year.
I like that idea - problem is, I don't think it's enforceable unless it is agreed to (probably ahead of time) by every potential lienholder/creditor of the company, down to common stockholders.
It is enforceable -- it is just that it is just like any other debt or contract in effect when bankruptcy is declared. It does not get preferential treatment. That is, once bankruptcy is declared, creditors have to be satisfied in turn, the company can no longer arbitrarily chose to honour some agreements and some agreements not. And at that point the code is still an asset in the company. It would be a different thing if the contract would be effective on some other pre-bankruptcy condition, but that seems difficult to achieve.
This makes me wonder how code escrow agreements can actually work. Clients that depend on a company being around to fulfill maintenance on some code they are using often put in a clause in the contract that give them the right to the source (for their own use only) in case the supplier goes belly-up.
Odd things happen all the time and people are far too unwilling that to accept that they do because of coincidence and people acting stupid.
The problem for conspiracies is that for any interesting conspiracy to work (more than your wife or hubby cheating on you) far too many people have to be involved to make them even remotely likely to be kept secret.
You are (always!) acting in good faith -- since it is illegal to share music you don't have redistribution rights for to the general public, you have to assume that all the people out there have the rights they need to do it legally.
It is unreasonable to go around life believing everyone else is a criminal. After all, do you check that you don't buy fenced goods when you buy things through an ad? Nah, he looks honest to me.
And sorry Mr. or Ms. EU Citizen, your website subscription now costs 15% to 25% more, starting July 1. Hope you like this added value.
Nope. You don't have to pay EU VAT on a service that is rendered in the US (such as a website subscription). You DO have to pay VAT on goods imported into the EU, even if those goods lack material manifestation.
Of course, the line between goods and service can be difficult to draw at times.
You have to walk for a quarter mile in the maze of some large stations to just chage lines (i.e. times square/42nd street station)
This is actually quite interesting: NYC has chosen to construct the underground system according to the constraints of the ticket system, rather than the other way around.
In NYC (unless they changed things in the past few years, but lets assume they didn't for the sake of argument) you forfeit the ticket to get in to the underground. Having entered, you have no longer any proof you paid. Hence, in order to make transfers between lines free, you have to make tunnels that are inside the fenced area. The tunnels can be several blocks long, even if it would have been much cheaper to have people walk the same distance at street level. And conversely, you can't use an underpassage under the street for pedestrians that just want to cross the street, since they would have to pay to go in the underground.
In many cities you get to, and have to, keep the ticket until the end of the ride. That way you can transfer between lines regardless of whether there is a tunnel. And you can transfer between underground, trains, busses and trams.
It's just the plain Moneo card that is anonymous. Since the Moneo application can be (and will be) incorporated into you regular bank card, the typical Moneo card is not anonymous.
The system as such is (probably not) anonymous. That is, you can always trace the payment to the card. At least that is the case with the Swedish system -- my brother lost his card, and got refunded the remaining balance of the lost card from his bank after a couple of weeks.
Not true. When Sweden extended the copyright from life+50 to life+70 a couple of years back, work of authors who had been dead between 50 and 70 years (such as Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf) were retracted from the public domain.
I tend to doubt that was lawful (being confiscatory), but there is no place to test the constitutionality of the laws in this country.
IANAL (obviously), but just as a customer loses goods payed for, but not delivered, in the case of the vendor goes bankrupt, escrows are lost (since they are not delivered to the other party, they are still in the possession of the bankrupted party).
NOW, if you twist it a bit. You make an escrow-like agreement where the source is deposited (in a sealed manner) with the customer and an agreement is signed that the customer may not break the seal unless the vendor fails to fulfill etc (goes bankrupt), then it should be protected from a bankruptcy, no?
Not having read up on Gandhi, but at least visited his Bombay home (he wasn't in...), I tend to believe you're wrong. The British did their best wrecking the Indian economy. Not that it was their goal, but the effect was the same. The British enforced some kind of unidirectional free trade on India. That is India had to import factory produced cotton cloth from Britain, but wasn't given the chance to export "refined" goods to Britain. Needless to say, the cheaper labour in India would have made investments in Indian factories more profitable than in British factories, if they would have been allowed to compete on equal terms.
What Gandhi did was to recognize that all industries start small, and tried to foster cottage industries on the Indian countryside (the spinning wheel in the Indian flag reminds of this). Today, there are literally hundreds of banks involved in micro-financing these types of projects. Because of this, India is much better off than comparable countries (e.g. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran,...).
Would Sjöman (or for that matter Bergman...) object to their films being shown at Sudersandsbion? Sudersandsbion is a cinema barn at Fårö, and has only one projector. They have a fifteen minute break in the middle of all films to sell candy (and reload the proj). Getting the sun in your eyes after one hour in the darkness sure does distract you from the plot of the film.
Objections? Probably not. Sudersandsbion is a culture heritage, and Fårö is the summer retreat for the Swedish cultural and political elite.
Electronic voting booths are a hi-tech solution to a lo-tech problem.
Since general elections is government's way to ask confidence of the the people, you have to keep the system simple enough that everyone can (in principle) determine if it is trustworthy.
That means a lo-tech solution, with tangible ballots that are clear enough that no interpretation is needed.
Sweden has general elections on Sunday. The polling stations close at eight o'clock. Three hours later six million votes will have been counted. In three days, the votes have been recounted and any modifications of the orders of the lists (Sweden has list elections) have been counted.
It is manual. It is all paper ballots. The counting is public. Very few votes are unintentionally invalid (though there are always blank or phony protest votes).
In view of this it is very difficult to understand the need of electronic voting machines. You don't mend the foundation of a house by building the house higher.
There are a couple of differences of importance between Sweden and the US when it comes to voting:
1/ In Sweden different parties have different ballots. In Florida all candidates for the same office are on the same ballot, requiring you to make marks, which is (obviously) much more error prone and open to interpretation.
2/ In Sweden all ballots are in identical format nation-wide. No need for local experts to try to figure which way is the best to layout the ballot. Also much is easier to teach people how the ballot works. It also makes counting faster and more accurate.
3/ In Sweden, if, for some reason, error or fraud (significant enough to have an effect on the result) should be discovered, a reelection may be called in one or more circles.
Since Sweden has list elections, putting all parties on the same ballot simply is not feasible. It also means that there is no technical requirement for a party to pre-register to take part in the election. You can take a blank ballot and write your very own party name on it, and it will be counted.
There are a couple of complications to the Swedish system:
You can modify the order of the list by marking a candidate of a list, promoting him or her to the top (sort of). Counting the crosses take extra time, however it only modifies the order of a list, so it doesn't affect the forming of majorities in assemblies.
You can vote out of your district at post offices across the country up to and including election day. The votes cast in a post office on election day may not be counted until three days after election.
Anyway, I would recommend US politicians a trip to Sweden for the weekend (unfortunately, fall is finally coming, expect 10-15 degrees and showers). It might give some ideas how to implement a simple, cheap and trustworthy election system.
As far as culture is concerned, it's the other way round. You can't retain culture if you haven't got the intellectual mechanisms to understand / store / re-phrase. So we have culture because we have speech. No the other way round.
Depends on what constitutes "culture". If speech radio is culture, then, yes speech is a pre-requisite. However, if passing acquired knowledge on to your tribe mates is culture, then there are animals capable of this. Certain crow bird populations have learnt to manafacture and use tools for catching insects and have passed this knowledge on to through the generations. (Other populations of the same species have not developped this tool)
Similar stuff has been observed for other animals.
Granted, speech radio is more abstract than biting at a twig until it works for catching flies, but still...
There is also the summer movie issue. If a movie is tied into summer releases, its winter downunder. Sure it won't make much difference in the real world...
Climate is one of the few things that does make a difference (and that Internet hasn't changed yet). July 4 is a big opening day in the US, but it is close to hopeless to get people to go to the movies in July in northern countries (it does feel unnatural to come out of the late movies and be blinded by the sunshine, besides with 5 weeks of vacation, nobody is in the cities in July anyway).
Now, shifting the opening of a US July 4 opening to late August in Scandinavia is not going to make a big difference for when you can do worldwide DVD releases anyway.
Neutrinos do of course interact with matter but just through the weak interaction. The weak interaction is just that, weak. That means the probability that a neutrino will interact is low, and that you need a lot of them and cover a lot of volume to see anything. That's why Amanda (and Antares and other neutrino experiments) have to be huge.
Now, this low interaction probability is also good. Ordinary telescopes detect electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves etc), however photons do scatter of the interstellar medium and even off the background radiation (for high enough energies of the radiation). This means that for long distances the vision of such telescopes is blurred. Neutrinos on the other hand don't scatter (with any significant probability) on the interstellar medium etc so it makes for "sharper images" of the universe if you can build a telescope that can see neutrinos.
What you can study is sources that emit neutrinos (of course). Points of interest could be e.g. active galactic nuclei. Also, it has been hypothethized that supersymmetric particles could account for a significant portion of dark matter. The lightest susy particle (the neutralino) has to be stable and would accumulate in the center of heavy objects (such as the Earth or the Sun) because of gravity. There the concentration would be high enough that they could annihilate with their antiparticles, and produce neutrinos.
This entirely off the top of my head. I used to share office with Amanda people a couple of years back.
Hats off for Amanda. It's just a lovely piece of engineering (and interesting science)!
Whilst it's easy to claim that Germans are idiots and no such thing would ever happen in the US (free speech, etc), please remember that frivolous suits are pretty uncommon in Germany: people claiming money for eating peanuts and suing because they were allergic to nuts and there was no 'WARNING: May contain nuts' label on the box,
Whether that is handled by law suits or by criminal code in Germany I don't know, but there is an EU directive (79/112/EEG) that requires packaged food to be clearly marked with the list of ingredients. Hence, it should say peanuts on something containing peanuts.
Also, there is some text about consumer protection that may be relevant.
That would bypass the problem where new CAs start with zero credibility because their certs aren't included with any browsers. OTOH, these CAs would start out with, and continue with, zero credibility because their keys are compromised from day 0!
That does depend on the country, of course. Can't imagine you would have a problem getting a residence permit for an IT-job in Sweden for example. Given that you have a job offer.
Slashdot Mirror
And, if there is no hope for this particular after the fact problem, or for corporations to put in general legal safeguards for tidy disposal of property without the need for expensive lawyers, then is there some small "sunset" clause that software developers could put in their code to ease the transfer, like a quit-claim that goes into effect if the corporation dissolves and no creditors assert any rights for a period of one year.
I like that idea - problem is, I don't think it's enforceable unless it is agreed to (probably ahead of time) by every potential lienholder/creditor of the company, down to common stockholders.
It is enforceable -- it is just that it is just like any other debt or contract in effect when bankruptcy is declared. It does not get preferential treatment. That is, once bankruptcy is declared, creditors have to be satisfied in turn, the company can no longer arbitrarily chose to honour some agreements and some agreements not. And at that point the code is still an asset in the company. It would be a different thing if the contract would be effective on some other pre-bankruptcy condition, but that seems difficult to achieve.
This makes me wonder how code escrow agreements can actually work. Clients that depend on a company being around to fulfill maintenance on some code they are using often put in a clause in the contract that give them the right to the source (for their own use only) in case the supplier goes belly-up.
The moral would be: Don't use personal data that are not treated as secrets as passwords.
Export labour unions from where to where? Not from the United States of A, right?
Odd things happen all the time and people are far too unwilling that to accept that they do because of coincidence and people acting stupid.
The problem for conspiracies is that for any interesting conspiracy to work (more than your wife or hubby cheating on you) far too many people have to be involved to make them even remotely likely to be kept secret.
You are (always!) acting in good faith -- since it is illegal to share music you don't have redistribution rights for to the general public, you have to assume that all the people out there have the rights they need to do it legally.
It is unreasonable to go around life believing everyone else is a criminal. After all, do you check that you don't buy fenced goods when you buy things through an ad? Nah, he looks honest to me.
Even in your country you probably have a legal maximum working hour, and if you need help to do the argument, join the union.
And sorry Mr. or Ms. EU Citizen, your website subscription now costs 15% to 25% more, starting July 1. Hope you like this added value.
Nope. You don't have to pay EU VAT on a service that is rendered in the US (such as a website subscription). You DO have to pay VAT on goods imported into the EU, even if those goods lack material manifestation.
Of course, the line between goods and service can be difficult to draw at times.
Seriously.
Move to Sweden, we already have that. Eg. Write "460430-0013, Sweden" on an envelope and his royal majesty will get it (don't forget the stamp).
This is actually quite interesting: NYC has chosen to construct the underground system according to the constraints of the ticket system, rather than the other way around.
In NYC (unless they changed things in the past few years, but lets assume they didn't for the sake of argument) you forfeit the ticket to get in to the underground. Having entered, you have no longer any proof you paid. Hence, in order to make transfers between lines free, you have to make tunnels that are inside the fenced area. The tunnels can be several blocks long, even if it would have been much cheaper to have people walk the same distance at street level. And conversely, you can't use an underpassage under the street for pedestrians that just want to cross the street, since they would have to pay to go in the underground.
In many cities you get to, and have to, keep the ticket until the end of the ride. That way you can transfer between lines regardless of whether there is a tunnel. And you can transfer between underground, trains, busses and trams.
It's just the plain Moneo card that is anonymous. Since the Moneo application can be (and will be) incorporated into you regular bank card, the typical Moneo card is not anonymous.
The system as such is (probably not) anonymous. That is, you can always trace the payment to the card. At least that is the case with the Swedish system -- my brother lost his card, and got refunded the remaining balance of the lost card from his bank after a couple of weeks.
And Libya gets to head the UN commission on human rights.
Oh, wait.
Not true. When Sweden extended the copyright from life+50 to life+70 a couple of years back, work of authors who had been dead between 50 and 70 years (such as Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf) were retracted from the public domain.
I tend to doubt that was lawful (being confiscatory), but there is no place to test the constitutionality of the laws in this country.
What if the passenger listens to his radio so that the driver can hear it? What if the driver says "Hey, you can use my radio, serve yourself!"?
IANAL (obviously), but just as a customer loses goods payed for, but not delivered, in the case of the vendor goes bankrupt, escrows are lost (since they are not delivered to the other party, they are still in the possession of the bankrupted party).
NOW, if you twist it a bit. You make an escrow-like agreement where the source is deposited (in a sealed manner) with the customer and an agreement is signed that the customer may not break the seal unless the vendor fails to fulfill etc (goes bankrupt), then it should be protected from a bankruptcy, no?
Not having read up on Gandhi, but at least visited his Bombay home (he wasn't in...), I tend to believe you're wrong. The British did their best wrecking the Indian economy. Not that it was their goal, but the effect was the same. The British enforced some kind of unidirectional free trade on India. That is India had to import factory produced cotton cloth from Britain, but wasn't given the chance to export "refined" goods to Britain. Needless to say, the cheaper labour in India would have made investments in Indian factories more profitable than in British factories, if they would have been allowed to compete on equal terms.
...).
What Gandhi did was to recognize that all industries start small, and tried to foster cottage industries on the Indian countryside (the spinning wheel in the Indian flag reminds of this). Today, there are literally hundreds of banks involved in micro-financing these types of projects. Because of this, India is much better off than comparable countries (e.g. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran,
Where Tungsten is Wolfram, Tungsten is the name of the mineral you find the element in.
Would Sjöman (or for that matter Bergman...) object to their films being shown at Sudersandsbion? Sudersandsbion is a cinema barn at Fårö, and has only one projector. They have a fifteen minute break in the middle of all films to sell candy (and reload the proj). Getting the sun in your eyes after one hour in the darkness sure does distract you from the plot of the film.
Objections? Probably not. Sudersandsbion is a culture heritage, and Fårö is the summer retreat for the Swedish cultural and political elite.
Electronic voting booths are a hi-tech solution to a lo-tech problem.
Since general elections is government's way to ask confidence of the the people, you have to keep the system simple enough that everyone can (in principle) determine if it is trustworthy.
That means a lo-tech solution, with tangible ballots that are clear enough that no interpretation is needed.
Sweden has general elections on Sunday. The polling stations close at eight o'clock. Three hours later six million votes will have been counted. In three days, the votes have been recounted and any modifications of the orders of the lists (Sweden has list elections) have been counted.
It is manual. It is all paper ballots. The counting is public. Very few votes are unintentionally invalid (though there are always blank or phony protest votes).
In view of this it is very difficult to understand the need of electronic voting machines. You don't mend the foundation of a house by building the house higher.
There are a couple of differences of importance between Sweden and the US when it comes to voting:
1/ In Sweden different parties have different ballots. In Florida all candidates for the same office are on the same ballot, requiring you to make marks, which is (obviously) much more error prone and open to interpretation.
2/ In Sweden all ballots are in identical format nation-wide. No need for local experts to try to figure which way is the best to layout the ballot. Also much is easier to teach people how the ballot works. It also makes counting faster and more accurate.
3/ In Sweden, if, for some reason, error or fraud (significant enough to have an effect on the result) should be discovered, a reelection may be called in one or more circles.
Since Sweden has list elections, putting all parties on the same ballot simply is not feasible. It also means that there is no technical requirement for a party to pre-register to take part in the election. You can take a blank ballot and write your very own party name on it, and it will be counted.
There are a couple of complications to the Swedish system:
You can modify the order of the list by marking a candidate of a list, promoting him or her to the top (sort of). Counting the crosses take extra time, however it only modifies the order of a list, so it doesn't affect the forming of majorities in assemblies.
You can vote out of your district at post offices across the country up to and including election day. The votes cast in a post office on election day may not be counted until three days after election.
Anyway, I would recommend US politicians a trip to Sweden for the weekend (unfortunately, fall is finally coming, expect 10-15 degrees and showers). It might give some ideas how to implement a simple, cheap and trustworthy election system.
As far as culture is concerned, it's the other way round. You can't retain culture if you haven't got the intellectual mechanisms to understand / store / re-phrase. So we have culture because we have speech. No the other way round. Depends on what constitutes "culture". If speech radio is culture, then, yes speech is a pre-requisite. However, if passing acquired knowledge on to your tribe mates is culture, then there are animals capable of this. Certain crow bird populations have learnt to manafacture and use tools for catching insects and have passed this knowledge on to through the generations. (Other populations of the same species have not developped this tool) Similar stuff has been observed for other animals. Granted, speech radio is more abstract than biting at a twig until it works for catching flies, but still...
There is also the summer movie issue. If a movie is tied into summer releases, its winter downunder. Sure it won't make much difference in the real world...
Climate is one of the few things that does make a difference (and that Internet hasn't changed yet). July 4 is a big opening day in the US, but it is close to hopeless to get people to go to the movies in July in northern countries (it does feel unnatural to come out of the late movies and be blinded by the sunshine, besides with 5 weeks of vacation, nobody is in the cities in July anyway).
Now, shifting the opening of a US July 4 opening to late August in Scandinavia is not going to make a big difference for when you can do worldwide DVD releases anyway.
Neutrinos do of course interact with matter but just through the weak interaction. The weak interaction is just that, weak. That means the probability that a neutrino will interact is low, and that you need a lot of them and cover a lot of volume to see anything. That's why Amanda (and Antares and other neutrino experiments) have to be huge.
Now, this low interaction probability is also good. Ordinary telescopes detect electromagnetic radiation (light, radio waves etc), however photons do scatter of the interstellar medium and even off the background radiation (for high enough energies of the radiation). This means that for long distances the vision of such telescopes is blurred. Neutrinos on the other hand don't scatter (with any significant probability) on the interstellar medium etc so it makes for "sharper images" of the universe if you can build a telescope that can see neutrinos.
What you can study is sources that emit neutrinos (of course). Points of interest could be e.g. active galactic nuclei. Also, it has been hypothethized that supersymmetric particles could account for a significant portion of dark matter. The lightest susy particle (the neutralino) has to be stable and would accumulate in the center of heavy objects (such as the Earth or the Sun) because of gravity. There the concentration would be high enough that they could annihilate with their antiparticles, and produce neutrinos.
This entirely off the top of my head. I used to share office with Amanda people a couple of years back.
Hats off for Amanda. It's just a lovely piece of engineering (and interesting science)!
Whilst it's easy to claim that Germans are idiots and no such thing would ever happen in the US (free speech, etc), please remember that frivolous suits are pretty uncommon in Germany: people claiming money for eating peanuts and suing because they were allergic to nuts and there was no 'WARNING: May contain nuts' label on the box,
Whether that is handled by law suits or by criminal code in Germany I don't know, but there is an EU directive (79/112/EEG) that requires packaged food to be clearly marked with the list of ingredients. Hence, it should say peanuts on something containing peanuts.
Also, there is some text about consumer protection that may be relevant.
That would bypass the problem where new CAs start with zero credibility because their certs aren't included with any browsers. OTOH, these CAs would start out with, and continue with, zero credibility because their keys are compromised from day 0!
That does depend on the country, of course. Can't imagine you would have a problem getting a residence permit for an IT-job in Sweden for example. Given that you have a job offer.