That's 180% of the _estimated_ effort, or in fact the estimated elapsed calender-time. (It's also an exaggeration for humourous effect.) If we never underestimated work, or misidentified dependencies in the work, or lost the whole team for a week or two due to a nasty virus, we'd never have crunches. And in all those cases, crunches can still generally be avoided.
I think the 90-10 rule is different. I learned it as a rule of software optimisation, while the one I started with is a principle of project scheduling.
Of course, being a principle of project scheduling, project schedulers are aware of it. My boss takes any time estimate I give him, and applies some factor I haven't dared ask about.
And it's usually accurate, which is why I haven't dared ask. I'm happier not knowing for now.
As they used to say, "The first 90% takes 90% of the effort, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the effort". Crunch time is just the expression of doing that last 90% effort in the last 10% of the schedule.
Mind you, my current employer states that they'd prefer we to not have to crunch, given the chance. I get a talking to any time I come in and work on the weekend. ^_^
Then again, I quite like crunch, as long as it's not overly extended. It's a bit of a rush, and it can be fun unless you're the one who's hideously behind on the milestone.
There are plenty of crunch horror stories though, and everyone is aware that crunch adds bugs, so usually management will look to shift or redefine milestones where possible to avoid it. Or at least my management does. YMMV.
You need to look a little harder. There's two or three in the 26-50 and another three on the 50-75 pages.
The Kindle's results seem somewhat skewed because there's a lot of (I'd say mostly, but I havent' counted) free books in their top 100 list.
On the other hand, looking at the fictionwise list, the one title not tagged erotica is by an author whose other works I've read have involved plenty of sex and violence. They're not erotica or even overwhelmingly romantic, but my local bookshops no longer distinguish paranormal and paranormal romance, so they sit side-by-side on the shelf.
It might be that Ficitonwise has a particularly strong suit in the paranormal, romance and paranormal-romance categories, ranging up and down the scale erotica-wise. They're generally popular categories, I assume, based on the number of bookshops (particularly web-based bookshops) that specialise in these three categories.
Coming back to the parent post, the Stephenie Meyer books (Twilight etc) I'm told are the teenage girl's paranormal-romance of choice, equivalent to some of the less erotic novels that appear in Fictionwise's top sellers.
Again going by my local bookshop, in the science fiction/fantasy area, there's a shelf which is just Terry Pratchett books. Last time I was there, a shelf in the paranormal section was dedicated to Stephenie Myer, although this was right after the Twilight movie had released, so I don't know if that'll last.
I had a moment of terror thinking that Australian Magpies had turned out to be smarter than expected.
That would move them up from being little balls of random terror from the air to being capable of specifically targeting me, which I've always suspected anyway.
Just like so much in Australia, they're like a normal magpie except they want to kill you.
If I recall correctly, a UK study (one of the early ones that was studying mobile phone usage effects on driving) showed quite clearly that talking on a mobile phone you were holding while driving made you more likely to crash.
This seems kinda obvious, but I believe it was generally used as the basis of the legislative efforts here in Oz to make it illegal to do so.
The same experiment showed that talking on a hands-free mobile phone had a similar level of risk. This didn't seem to get picked up by the legislators, sadly.
What amused me was that the same experiment also showed that a passenger talking to you in the car produced the _same_ level of distraction and risk.
No one seemed to notice or care about that when making legislation, but I do note that our busses have prominent "Do not talk to the driver while the bus is moving" signs, so at least one area of professional driving has noticed. (Then again, people who insist on talking to Taxi drivers are really putting themselves on the line, given they already have trip-monitors and radio systems to operate)
1) I'm not clear exactly what law you think I'm breaking... It's a free download Microsoft offers on their website. I doubt either US Federal laws nor the TOS of the ISP I run would prevent that...
2) If they don't have copyright on the item, they can't exactly apply the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" to it...
3) Again, not sure here what the law you think I'm breaking here... Fraud? It's not like I'm suggesting I put them in identical-to-MS packaging and pass them off as MS-supplied product.
4) Duh, I'd pay tax. I'd hate to have the IRS have to fly out to Australia to arrest me for not paying US income tax... Oh, wait a sec....
And now eBay's going to sue me too? I'm pretty sure they'd fall under the 'unrelated party' exclusion... Unless they're suing me for violating a patent on selling duplicates of commerical items under retail price?
A incentivised deincentivisation system?
on
More A's, More Pay
·
· Score: 1
So the idea is that teachers are offered money to get their classes to score well, but if their classes score unusually well (ie. statistically out of step with the non-incentivised baseline) they're detected as cheaters and deincentivised?
1) Download Windows 2003 Server R2 demo disks free from the MS website 2) Remove the time-restriction 3) Burn onto professional-looking CD-Rs and sell at 60% of MS retail 4) Profit
I could sell one copy a week and make more than I'm making now, which would leave me lots of time free to spend in court when MS realises that they're going to have to help defend an open source project's copyright to save their own... ^_^
I think you've munged the rationale behind patents (A limited monopoly in exchange for publication, to ensure that knowledge and inventions are not lost) and then applied it to copyright.
I think the idea of copyright is to allow the commoditisation of the inalienable moral rights that many jurisdictions (the US being a notable exception) grant to the actual creator. Obviously this makes sense as an idea. An author can't spend all their time cranking their gutenberg press, so they sell the right to do that to someone else, as well as to sell the results, in exchange for part of the proceeds thereof.
How did the US system get so badly corrupted? Lack of moral (rights). ^_^
It's the TV-Out chip.
http://www.conexant.com/default.sph/SaServletEng in e.class/Web/products/products.jsp?Type=Prod&ProdFa mId=10&ProdCatId=0&ProdSubCatId=94&PartId=278&clrT rail=yes
If it was doing the DVD playback it'd be marked 'Video Decoder'
and I don't think Conexant actually makes an MPEG-2 decoder chip.
HardOCP made the same mistake... Hmm...
Actually, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission is asking the Australian DVD distributors to 'please explain' in what way Region Code Protection isn't a restraint on free trade.
They're already in court with Warner Pty Ltd about attempting to restrict parallel imports of Audio CDs (using marketing clout rather than technological measures). And Sony, who were also being taken to court, settled.
I understand New Zealand already requires DVD players sold to be region-free.
Anyway, RPC Phase II can be defeated by a 'region-select' player, can't it?
I think you've missed a rather important nuance here, which is that as a film matter, it's an artistic work and the provisions for hiring and such mean that there's nothing that makes the video rental place _have_ to buy the $55 version of the DVD.
As a software item, there is no such provision and Warner can license the DVD such that the $25 one isn't allowed to be rented, while the $55 one is.
Warner's playing a dangerous game here, because if DVDs are considered software then the provisions I listed in my previous post apply and DeCSS becomes not only legal but the ACCC case that RPC is in breach of the trade practices act is massively strengthened by gaining acces to a wide field of precedent.
This precedent includes a legislation under consideration to legalise parallel imports by wholesalers and retailers of books and _software_.
By trying to make $30 more on rental DVD's, they could be opening all the DVD distributors in Australia to unexpected competition levels. Competitors who won't charge extra to the rental place.:-)
Then again, Warner are still being sued by the ACCC over strongarming retailers about parallel CD imports, so maybe they figured they'd just try that again.
I don't hold a legal qualification, but Copyright was my chosen topic for Engineering Law in my Software Engineering course. So this is a topic close to my heart. I am not a lawyer, but I play one on TV
While this will make rental DVDs more expensive (possibly?) it will give us Australians certain rights over our purchased DVDs which I don't think we have over purchased movies:Copyright ACT 1968
Part III Division 4A is the interesting part:
COPYRIGHT ACT 1968 Division 4A--Acts not constituting infringements of copyright in computer programs
In this Division:
computer program includes any literary work that is:
(a)incorporated in, or associated with, a computer program; and
(b)essential to the effective operation of a function of that computer program.
Sections 47B and 47D protect the right to make reproductions of software for the purposes of studying the software and making compatible software (reverse engineering)
Section 47C protects the back-up rights of software, including for any of the following purposes:
(i)to enable the owner or licensee of the original copy to use the
reproduction in lieu of the original copy and to store the original copy;
(ii)to enable the owner or licensee of the original copy to store the
reproduction for use in lieu of the original copy if the original copy is lost,
destroyed or rendered unusable;
(iii)to enable the owner or licensee of the original copy to use the
reproduction in lieu of the original copy, or of another reproduction made
under this subsection, if the original copy, or the other reproduction, is
lost, destroyed or rendered unusable.
However, these are not valid (amongst other restrictions)
(b)if the owner of the copyright in the computer program has so designed the
program that copies of it cannot be made without modifying the program; or
However I think the DeCSS case showed that copies can certainly be made without modifying the "program".
And the funnest bit is that the license agreement cannot deny these clauses:
An agreement, or a provision of an agreement, that excludes or limits, or has
the effect of excluding or limiting, the operation of subsection 47B(3), or
section 47C, 47D, 47E or 47F, has no effect.
The essential point here is that in the Commission's view, there is an attempt to use copyright laws for a purpose related to areas beyond their real purpose. This coding system is a mechanism to allow price discrimination, not to protect the inherent rights of Intellectual Property owners.
It's worth noting that the ACCC has a good history in this area. If you read the linked article, as well as the full reasoning for DVD region coding being a breach of the Trade Practices Act, also mentioned is the ongoing case by the ACCC against Sony, Warner and Universal over parallel CD imports. Sony settled without admitting liability, but did give $200k to the ACCC for legal costs. Universal, Warner and several senior execs were still facing court, with the penalty being up to $10 million per contravention.
Re:Making friends in the Australian outback
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 1
Huh?
I don't understand how this is either relevant to the Linux Kernel 2.4.13, nor how you came to the conclusion that people in the Australian Outback talk like that.
At the service stations here (Oz), you can buy a one-shot breathalyser thingy which simply tells you if you're over the 0.05 limit or not.
And you can buy a breathlyser unit for about $50.
I can't see why they _wouldn't_ be purchasable? Are they some kind of munition in a way I don't even _want_ to comprehend.
I prefer being over here where any damn idiot can get a breathalyser, but you need to have a good reason to have a gun, than the US alternative apparent from this question.:-)
--
TBBle
Surely RSA's only used to set up the session key for ssh? Once you're connected, you're using a symetrical cryptography algortihm. So C-P could only save you time in the connection setup.
IANAB: I Am Not A Banana. (Just in case anyone assumed I was)
Less the substantial money to be gained through the sale of copyrights, how exactly is an artist to make money?
The money made off copyright is by licensing someone else (for sum of money x) to duplicate your copyrighted work (with specific limitations on how, where, formats and duration of license et. al) and they can then sell those copies or whatever they want to do with them, to recuperate (and exceed) sum x, either financially or in other terms.
That's how books work. The publisher doesn't hold copyright on the book, but will generally hold a license to produce copies of the book in a specific format (hardcover or softcover) for sale only in a specific region.
This is why you buy a software license, rather than the software itself. Your license to the author's copyrighted software product allows you to do certain things with it, detailed on the back of the box or somesuch.
For some reason, (Detailed by Courtney Love at a stage show a while ago, don't remember the website though...) recorded music in America under the RIAA seems to involve the artist selling the copyright to the music to the label. This is the problem! If the artist holds the copyright on their music, they'd quite quickly find (Like their book-publishing brethren did recently) that the studios only hold the rights to music in a certain format, in this case it would be music distributed through CDs, tapes, records, and via radio/tv/movie broadcast and suchlike.
On the other hand, consigning the copyright to a music label does put someone larger and more powerful than just the recording artist in a position to pursue copyright infringement.
Yes, in the same way _someone else_ can change your work and establish copyright over the changed work. (I don't know how much changing is needed though.)
You can license the other person to duplicate the work as much as they like, while still retaining copyright. (See my other response on this thread.)
Secondly, and this one's good:
The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!
Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course.
Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.
The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.
Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.
Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.
Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.
The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.
Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.
Some trivia:
Although the ANU group project required RedHat 6.1, the two spare machines in the room ran Debian Linux up until the last month or so of the project where they went from spare to testing-platform.
I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.
Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!
More than 50% of people in the ACT have a computer.
The ACT at some stage in the last few (5)years, had more ISPs per capita than anywhere else in the world.
Australians familes are more likely to have a computer than American families. (Smaller population, more spread out.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's 180% of the _estimated_ effort, or in fact the estimated elapsed calender-time. (It's also an exaggeration for humourous effect.) If we never underestimated work, or misidentified dependencies in the work, or lost the whole team for a week or two due to a nasty virus, we'd never have crunches. And in all those cases, crunches can still generally be avoided.
I think the 90-10 rule is different. I learned it as a rule of software optimisation, while the one I started with is a principle of project scheduling.
Of course, being a principle of project scheduling, project schedulers are aware of it. My boss takes any time estimate I give him, and applies some factor I haven't dared ask about.
And it's usually accurate, which is why I haven't dared ask. I'm happier not knowing for now.
As they used to say, "The first 90% takes 90% of the effort, the last 10% takes the other 90% of the effort". Crunch time is just the expression of doing that last 90% effort in the last 10% of the schedule.
Mind you, my current employer states that they'd prefer we to not have to crunch, given the chance. I get a talking to any time I come in and work on the weekend. ^_^
Then again, I quite like crunch, as long as it's not overly extended. It's a bit of a rush, and it can be fun unless you're the one who's hideously behind on the milestone.
There are plenty of crunch horror stories though, and everyone is aware that crunch adds bugs, so usually management will look to shift or redefine milestones where possible to avoid it. Or at least my management does. YMMV.
You need to look a little harder. There's two or three in the 26-50 and another three on the 50-75 pages.
The Kindle's results seem somewhat skewed because there's a lot of (I'd say mostly, but I havent' counted) free books in their top 100 list.
On the other hand, looking at the fictionwise list, the one title not tagged erotica is by an author whose other works I've read have involved plenty of sex and violence. They're not erotica or even overwhelmingly romantic, but my local bookshops no longer distinguish paranormal and paranormal romance, so they sit side-by-side on the shelf.
It might be that Ficitonwise has a particularly strong suit in the paranormal, romance and paranormal-romance categories, ranging up and down the scale erotica-wise. They're generally popular categories, I assume, based on the number of bookshops (particularly web-based bookshops) that specialise in these three categories.
Coming back to the parent post, the Stephenie Meyer books (Twilight etc) I'm told are the teenage girl's paranormal-romance of choice, equivalent to some of the less erotic novels that appear in Fictionwise's top sellers.
Again going by my local bookshop, in the science fiction/fantasy area, there's a shelf which is just Terry Pratchett books. Last time I was there, a shelf in the paranormal section was dedicated to Stephenie Myer, although this was right after the Twilight movie had released, so I don't know if that'll last.
The actual survey, from 2002, is at http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/lint/
I had a moment of terror thinking that Australian Magpies had turned out to be smarter than expected.
That would move them up from being little balls of random terror from the air to being capable of specifically targeting me, which I've always suspected anyway.
Just like so much in Australia, they're like a normal magpie except they want to kill you.
If I recall correctly, a UK study (one of the early ones that was studying mobile phone usage effects on driving) showed quite clearly that talking on a mobile phone you were holding while driving made you more likely to crash.
This seems kinda obvious, but I believe it was generally used as the basis of the legislative efforts here in Oz to make it illegal to do so.
The same experiment showed that talking on a hands-free mobile phone had a similar level of risk. This didn't seem to get picked up by the legislators, sadly.
What amused me was that the same experiment also showed that a passenger talking to you in the car produced the _same_ level of distraction and risk.
No one seemed to notice or care about that when making legislation, but I do note that our busses have prominent "Do not talk to the driver while the bus is moving" signs, so at least one area of professional driving has noticed. (Then again, people who insist on talking to Taxi drivers are really putting themselves on the line, given they already have trip-monitors and radio systems to operate)
1) I'm not clear exactly what law you think I'm breaking... It's a free download Microsoft offers on their website. I doubt either US Federal laws nor the TOS of the ISP I run would prevent that...
2) If they don't have copyright on the item, they can't exactly apply the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act" to it...
3) Again, not sure here what the law you think I'm breaking here... Fraud? It's not like I'm suggesting I put them in identical-to-MS packaging and pass them off as MS-supplied product.
4) Duh, I'd pay tax. I'd hate to have the IRS have to fly out to Australia to arrest me for not paying US income tax... Oh, wait a sec....
And now eBay's going to sue me too? I'm pretty sure they'd fall under the 'unrelated party' exclusion... Unless they're suing me for violating a patent on selling duplicates of commerical items under retail price?
So the idea is that teachers are offered money to get their classes to score well, but if their classes score unusually well (ie. statistically out of step with the non-incentivised baseline) they're detected as cheaters and deincentivised?
Oh, a business opportunity!
1) Download Windows 2003 Server R2 demo disks free from the MS website
2) Remove the time-restriction
3) Burn onto professional-looking CD-Rs and sell at 60% of MS retail
4) Profit
I could sell one copy a week and make more than I'm making now, which would leave me lots of time free to spend in court when MS realises that they're going to have to help defend an open source project's copyright to save their own... ^_^
Debian GNU/OpenSolaris. (cf. Nexenta at http://www.gnusolaris.org/gswiki and Debian's non-Linux ports at http://www.debian.org/ports/#nonlinux)
I think you've munged the rationale behind patents (A limited monopoly in exchange for publication, to ensure that knowledge and inventions are not lost) and then applied it to copyright.
I think the idea of copyright is to allow the commoditisation of the inalienable moral rights that many jurisdictions (the US being a notable exception) grant to the actual creator. Obviously this makes sense as an idea. An author can't spend all their time cranking their gutenberg press, so they sell the right to do that to someone else, as well as to sell the results, in exchange for part of the proceeds thereof.
How did the US system get so badly corrupted? Lack of moral (rights). ^_^
> What is interesting is the cats origin , Is it a pure puma or has it interbred with other escaped cats in the bush
As long as it hasn't interbred with the dropbears, or we'll have forests full of nothing but the noise of
Jagulars crying "Help! Help!".
It's the TV-Out chip.g in e.class/Web/products/products.jsp?Type=Prod&ProdFa mId=10&ProdCatId=0&ProdSubCatId=94&PartId=278&clrT rail=yes
http://www.conexant.com/default.sph/SaServletEn
If it was doing the DVD playback it'd be marked 'Video Decoder'
and I don't think Conexant actually makes an MPEG-2 decoder chip.
HardOCP made the same mistake... Hmm...
Actually, the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission is asking the Australian DVD distributors to 'please explain' in what way Region Code Protection isn't a restraint on free trade.
They're already in court with Warner Pty Ltd about attempting to restrict parallel imports of Audio CDs (using marketing clout rather than technological measures). And Sony, who were also being taken to court, settled.
I understand New Zealand already requires DVD players sold to be region-free.
Anyway, RPC Phase II can be defeated by a 'region-select' player, can't it?
I think you've missed a rather important nuance here, which is that as a film matter, it's an artistic work and the provisions for hiring and such mean that there's nothing that makes the video rental place _have_ to buy the $55 version of the DVD.
:-)
As a software item, there is no such provision and Warner can license the DVD such that the $25 one isn't allowed to be rented, while the $55 one is.
Warner's playing a dangerous game here, because if DVDs are considered software then the provisions I listed in my previous post apply and DeCSS becomes not only legal but the ACCC case that RPC is in breach of the trade practices act is massively strengthened by gaining acces to a wide field of precedent.
This precedent includes a legislation under consideration to legalise parallel imports by wholesalers and retailers of books and _software_.
By trying to make $30 more on rental DVD's, they could be opening all the DVD distributors in Australia to unexpected competition levels. Competitors who won't charge extra to the rental place.
Then again, Warner are still being sued by the ACCC over strongarming retailers about parallel CD imports, so maybe they figured they'd just try that again.
I don't hold a legal qualification, but Copyright was my chosen topic for Engineering Law in my Software Engineering course. So this is a topic close to my heart. I am not a lawyer, but I play one on TV
While this will make rental DVDs more expensive (possibly?) it will give us Australians certain rights over our purchased DVDs which I don't think we have over purchased movies:Copyright ACT 1968
Part III Division 4A is the interesting part:
Firstly, the meaning of a "Computer Program":
Sections 47B and 47D protect the right to make reproductions of software for the purposes of studying the software and making compatible software (reverse engineering)
Section 47C protects the back-up rights of software, including for any of the following purposes:
However, these are not valid (amongst other restrictions)
However I think the DeCSS case showed that copies can certainly be made without modifying the "program".
And the funnest bit is that the license agreement cannot deny these clauses:
Sideline: Grr to Slashdot not liking <dl>'s.
More interesting sideline: Ross Jones, commisioner of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission had this to say about DVDs:Difficulties between the pro-competitive community and Intellectual Property
It's worth noting that the ACCC has a good history in this area. If you read the linked article, as well as the full reasoning for DVD region coding being a breach of the Trade Practices Act, also mentioned is the ongoing case by the ACCC against Sony, Warner and Universal over parallel CD imports. Sony settled without admitting liability, but did give $200k to the ACCC for legal costs. Universal, Warner and several senior execs were still facing court, with the penalty being up to $10 million per contravention.
Huh?
I don't understand how this is either relevant to the Linux Kernel 2.4.13, nor how you came to the conclusion that people in the Australian Outback talk like that.
Actualy, if you poke around the HP linux pages, they list the Jornada 690 (From memory) in the list of support Linux hardware.
At the service stations here (Oz), you can buy a one-shot breathalyser thingy which simply tells you if you're over the 0.05 limit or not.
:-)
And you can buy a breathlyser unit for about $50.
I can't see why they _wouldn't_ be purchasable? Are they some kind of munition in a way I don't even _want_ to comprehend.
I prefer being over here where any damn idiot can get a breathalyser, but you need to have a good reason to have a gun, than the US alternative apparent from this question.
--
TBBle
Surely RSA's only used to set up the session key for ssh? Once you're connected, you're using a symetrical cryptography algortihm. So C-P could only save you time in the connection setup.
--
TBBle
IANAB: I Am Not A Banana. (Just in case anyone assumed I was)
Less the substantial money to be gained through the sale of copyrights, how exactly is an artist to make money?
The money made off copyright is by licensing someone else (for sum of money x) to duplicate your copyrighted work (with specific limitations on how, where, formats and duration of license et. al) and they can then sell those copies or whatever they want to do with them, to recuperate (and exceed) sum x, either financially or in other terms.
That's how books work. The publisher doesn't hold copyright on the book, but will generally hold a license to produce copies of the book in a specific format (hardcover or softcover) for sale only in a specific region.
This is why you buy a software license, rather than the software itself. Your license to the author's copyrighted software product allows you to do certain things with it, detailed on the back of the box or somesuch.
For some reason, (Detailed by Courtney Love at a stage show a while ago, don't remember the website though...) recorded music in America under the RIAA seems to involve the artist selling the copyright to the music to the label. This is the problem! If the artist holds the copyright on their music, they'd quite quickly find (Like their book-publishing brethren did recently) that the studios only hold the rights to music in a certain format, in this case it would be music distributed through CDs, tapes, records, and via radio/tv/movie broadcast and suchlike.
On the other hand, consigning the copyright to a music label does put someone larger and more powerful than just the recording artist in a position to pursue copyright infringement.
But I don't think it's worth the trade-off.
Yes, in the same way _someone else_ can change your work and establish copyright over the changed work. (I don't know how much changing is needed though.)
You can license the other person to duplicate the work as much as they like, while still retaining copyright. (See my other response on this thread.)
Firstly.... Australian Capital _Territory_. :-)
Secondly, and this one's good: The actual project site. GPL requirements mean code's open source. And it is!
Software Improvements is a key player in a very good spot here. One of the principals of SI, Clive Boughton, is an associate Lecturer (or visiting lecturer) at the ANU, where he currently convenes the Software Engineering course. Last year, as well as teaching Software Analysis and Design and Project Management to the 3rd year cohort, he was strongly connected with the 3rd year Software Engineering Group Project.
The group project was to produce an online, web-based voting system. The project was targeted at Federal elections, but apart from the preference counting system, the principle holds.
Out of the project (after 1 academic year) came 12 seperate online voting systems. One of these systems was apparently pitched to the ACT government in response to the Request For Tender they released near the end of the year, which looked an awful lot like the Request For Proposal the teams were given at the beginning of the year.
Amongst the requirements for the project, was that the system be utterly open source (except for the RDBMS) and be delivered as a set of RPMs and SRPMS against Redhat 6.1.
Another important requirement of both projects (and the Australian electoral system) is that a person be able to vote just once, and that once a vote is recorded, it must not be able to be linked to a specific person.
The group project had tougher requirements than the ACT's project, in that the group project was for use in Internet voting, not just computerising polling booths.
Software Improvements can (and in fact has, I am given to understand) draw upon this unique pool of experience to produce what I confidently expect will be a successful product which I look forward to using come the election.
Some trivia:
How do I know all this?
I was one of the group leaders for the 3rd year group project. I hold the distinction of having the only RedHat 6.1 computer in the project room which the system testers could not break into without getting a screwdriver from upstairs to clear the bios.
Mind you, that wasn't part of the testing. They just wanted to see our developement machine and figured it would be easier than calling me. Fooled 'em good!
====================
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
That is funny. Dude, don't watch so much TV.
More than 50% of people in the ACT have a computer.
The ACT at some stage in the last few (5)years, had more ISPs per capita than anywhere else in the world.
Australians familes are more likely to have a computer than American families. (Smaller population, more spread out.)
====================
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
This is pretty much what the guys who created APLinux (Linux port to the Fujitsu AP1000) did.
:-)
Not a good post, true, but it reminded me of the story they told in Operating Systems so I thought I'd share it.
====================
Paul "TBBle" Hampson