The key to extradition between countries is that the accusation needs to be for a crime for which an extradition treaty exists. Between the US and NZ, here is a listing (which is typical of other country treaties with the US): https://internationalextraditi...... I did RTFA, but did not find a link to the NZ court ruling to confirm the extent to which this bilateral extradition treaty was the basis for the ruling.
Dotcom is accused of racketeering and money laundering, which would seem to be covered in the treaty section on fraud: "16. Obtaining property, money or valuable securities by false pretenses or by conspiracy to defraud the public or any person by deceit or falsehood or other fraudulent means, whether such deceit or falsehood or any fraudulent means would or would not amount to a false pretense." The definition of racketeering is something like, "dishonest and fraudulent business dealings."
International extradition treaties are part of why plaintiffs and prosecutors seek such high crimes, in their charges. The article links to the US court filing, if you want to see the full list. Another reason is that, in the US, criminal charges are made at the highest possible level of seriousness, so that there will be a plea bargain for a lower charge, rather than bringing a case all the way to the end. Federal prosecutions in the US very rarely result in Not Guilty or in charges being dismissed (under 5%).
That EU law that got struck down yesterday was part of an industry effort to add copyright infringement to the set of laws that would let enforcement cross national boundaries. For copyright, there is no current international extradition (at least, not with the US -- the EU has been doing its own thing). The Berne Convention, and associated treaties under WIPO, are the applicable international treaties for copyright, and do not make provisions for extradition or international enforcement for copyright violation. The fact that international boundaries are usually very easy to cross via Internet traffic is a big concern for publishers, media companies, etc., and they have been trying for a long time to extend reach of copyright laws beyond national boundaries.
One of the earliest such cases was in 2000, and involved a US copyright law forbidding reverse engineering of encryption. The DeCSS case, https://www.technewsworld.com/..., was to bring charges against Jon Johansen in Norway for posting a decryption program. Nowadays, I would expect charges in US courts would also include crimes for which extradition treaties apply, like fraud and larceny. This is easily achieved by stipulating large $ damages (due to lost revenue, piracy, etc.).
More recently, we know that Julian Assange is concerned about being extradited to the US under a secret indictment in the US courts. The rape charges in Sweden were sufficient for extradition from the UK (https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-justice/international-judicial-co-operation/extradition-for-criminal-offences/), but Ecuador has an approach that gives higher priority to avoiding torture than the bilateral treaties. The Guardian has a nice short cheeky piece about why Edward Snowden was also thought to be en route to Ecuador, before he ended up staying in Russia: https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
We are getting the picture, right? The US isn't the only country that seeks very high-level crimes in what are basically copyright cases, nor are they the only country where moneyed business interests are able to get the ear of criminal courts for issues that are, essentially, civil cases (a distinction that matters a lot in countries that follow common law... less so for countries with different legal heritage, like Ge
You are right, PvtVoid! Ok, well: Death's End is "the best of the best..." what I wrote above. All three books are fantastic, and surprisingly different from one another - even though they are related, and have several characters that persist throughout. Just read them all - they are science fiction at its best.
+1. It's the best of the best, published in 2016.. third in a trilogy, so you need to read the other two first. They are also fantastic, but the third turned out to be my favorite. Should be strong candidates for the annual science fiction awards.
Copyright is based on authorship. So, while the main text of Mein Kampf is in the public domain, this new two-volume work will legitimately claim a new copyright. The new copyright will come from all those notes, which were created through acts of authorship. Contrary to the other contemporary story of Otto Frank, editorship is sweat of the brow, while authorship is creativity (see https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki... , for example). Translation does qualify as authorship, since is an intellectual creative act. (Dunno about machine translation...)
In the US, public domain items often have a copyright claim due to a new preface, or introduction or even cover art. Check some of the "Penguin Classics" in your local bookstore for examples. For Mein Kampf, all that added content will create a mixed item, where extracting just the public domain content (minus notes and whatever else is new) will take some effort. Luckily, the public domain text is already widely available without the new notes.
As mentioned, copyright expiry based on life+70 has no bearing in the US for items published prior to 1978 (https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To). Due to GATT, no copyright renewal was required after 28 years for items published outside of the US to get the full copyright term. The translations into English were not made until after the original German, of course. In the US, copyright will expire 95 years after publication based on the current USC Title 17 (which, as we know, TPP might force to change). But that's another story...
- gbn
Concur. The design of the bulldozer modules was abundantly clear. The fact that the "cores" share an FPU was clearly disclosed and part of any diagram of the parts. The shared FPUs played a huge role in assessing bulldozer-based CPUs for high performance computing workloads. For HPC, the usual benchmark is HPL (a.k.a., high performance LINPACK), which is a measure of double precision floating point performance for a particular matrix operation called DGEMM. The fact that the FPU was doing double-duty for two "cores" on a module meant that the peak theoretical performance was limited by the number of FPUs in a CPU, not the number of cores or modules or anything else.
As others have noted, hyperthreading via Intel can have exactly the same impact: the threads share various components, including the FPU.
Another aspect that can have a major impact on performance is the number of memory channels, and how things like cache coherency is handled. Among other things, AMD's hyper-transport exhibits different scalability characteristics depending on the number of sockets. In a four or eight-socket configuration, latency due to cache coherency operations can have a big impact on performance.
- gbn
For something published in the US after 1923 and before 1964, renewal of copyright was necessary to get a further 28-year extension. (Term extensions in 1998 extended copyright of items published in 1964 onward, and removed the need to renew.)
The Rule 6 how-to has a template for non-renewal research that might satisfy YouTube, if you do the research and send it in.
Only around 10% of items published from 1923 onwards were renewed. (It's no longer required, but you can still renew today.) The US Library of Congress has records of copyright registrations and renewals, and the Rule 6 How-To describes where to get the records. For items from 1923-1963, the renewals for printed items are comprehensive.
Serialization is sometimes a problem. Items might have been published, then published in another form (say, a magazine article that was published as a book), and if the timing is close enough one renewal might cover both items.
Proving something is in the public domain in the US, for printed items, is not that hard for items published from 1923-1963. It takes some time and expertise, and there is always a chance there is a renewal that you didn't find. Proving it is still copyrighted is also easy: show me the renewal.
Advertisers: not so much. In fact, the 2600 marketplace section (2 pages at the back of the magazine) is free, and only available to subscribers. There is no paid advertising in 2600 Magazine.
The data centers in Quincy are quite large. Microsoft has a major facility, which is undergoing expansion. So does Yahoo, Intuit, Dell, and Sabey. These are major components of the tax base for the town of Quincy and elsewhere in Grant County. The data centers are highly resilient to power loss, with on-site diesel generators, 24x7 staffing, and all the other protections you'd expect. But prolonged use of the generators, if it becomes necessary, could exceed the permitted run time and accompanying pollution the facilities are allowed. Most likely, power from the other dams the Grant County PUD operates (or elsewhere on the regional power grid) could be routed to the data centers.
There are some other huge electricity consumers in the county. It's the world headquarters of a company that makes photovoltaic components, and also several food processors (all those potatoes from eastern Washington gotta be processed and cooked!). Industrial users might be able to turn down their power usage if there is a regional shortage, but data centers tend to operate at fairly stable 24x7 consumption levels. Major companies like those listed above have redundant facilities, and can shunt processing to other centers if required.
Site selection for major electricity consumers, including data centers, is a fascinating topic. The State of Washington has had various tax incentives to help businesses to choose to build facilities there. Electricity costs are among the lowest in the nation (under 3 cents/kWh for industrial customers). Plus, it makes extensive use of renewable sources, particularly hydroelectric (i.e., dams) and wind energy. Oregon has a similar story to tell, with their own rivers, dams, tax breaks, etc., and is part of why Amazon elected to put a huge facility there.
I think this could be a hoax. It's not a scientific paper, not in a peer-reviewed journal's letter section. It appears via a Google circles posting from Kerry Emanuel who is a well-known, though partially reformed, climatedenier. It looks like the Google+ account the letter is published in was just created. Plus, the facts are either skimpy & wrong. Saying we cannot ramp up solar & wind power fast enough, but can ramp up nuclear, is directly in opposition to what's happening. Solar installations are going up by double-digit percentage points each year, and meanwhile we haven't had a new nuclear power plant in over 40 years. The only pair that is underway (which is pictured in the Yahoo! story) is years from completion. There are only 19 permit applications active for new nukes in the US, and the power industry (which is notoriously risk-averse) has for decades shied away from their huge liability and expense.
200 or so is the end. The last Raptor just flew to my back yard during this past week: "Last F-22 Raptor fighter jet arrives in Alaska" (http://www.newsminer.com/view/full_story/18475362/article-Last-F-22-Raptor-fighter-jet-arrives-in-Alaska).
The F-35 is another matter that seems more relevant: production for those is still delayed. Keep in mind these are sold to other countries, not just used in the US.
The Anderson/Bear folks posted this a couple of places, and it was picked up a few other places. Here is the text of the most recent substantial message I sent them on the topic: http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt . The group has not provided the author/title (or PG eBook number) of any title they think was wrongly determined to be non-renewed, other than those mentioned in the email. They seem to have some theories about what is eligible for renewal, or who can renew, but these are not contested by Project Gutenberg (in fact, our policy is to NOT to question whether renewals were fully compliant with the law, nor whether a person had the correct standing to renew).
The issue is whether a renewal was made. For The Escape, part 1 was republished with a different title, complete with part 2. Part 1 was not individually renewed, but the newly titled complete work was. We were unaware of the subsequent retitled republication, so did not find the renewal. For the purposes of copyright and renewal, a major outcome of the legal advice we received concerning The Escape is that serialized works are treated as single acts of authorship. Thus, renewal of a part may be considered to apply to the whole -- provided it happens within a reasonable timespan (we have been advised to use +/- four years).
The Project Gutenberg Copyright How-To has details on our procedures, although the Rule 6 how-to there (for non-renewals) is older than the version we used for the original Anderson/Escape non-renewal determination. We are working on a revision that will include additional research for serials, and a few other variations like republication with different titles. The how-to is here: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
For those who aren't aware, Project Gutenberg is classified in the US as a 501(c)(3) charity, as a library. With over 35,000 published titles, and well over 50,000 unique instances of copyright research (thousands for our Rule 6), it's not surprising that we make occasional errors. To date (I've been doing this aspect of volunteer work for Project Gutenberg since around 1999), we've changed our stance on fewer than 1/2 dozen public domain determinations. Not perfect, but I believe we're doing a good job overall, and have some very solid procedures by copyright experts over the years.
I first initiated our Rule 6 nearly 10 years ago. This was because I saw that of all the books and serials published in the US from 1923-1963 (when renewal was required for copyright to still apply), 85--90% were never renewed. The US Library of Congress does annual reports on this. Statistically, that means there a million or so items from 1923-1964 whose copyright expired after a 28-year term. These items have been in the public domain in the US since 1992 or earlier (1964+28), and many are out of print. As a policy decision, Project Gutenberg decided it was worth the risk of occasionally missing a renewal, to be able to affirmatively identify the many items for which no renewal occurred. I still believe this decision was the right one.
For those who are paying attention to Project Gutenberg news today, there was a story in the Washington Post that, more or less, accused Amazon of abusing their customers by selling public domain Project Gutenberg works, with DRM added, for a fee. The article is here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html . (I exchanged several emails with the author.) It's a weird coincidence that within the same 24 hour period there is another story that basically accuses Project Gutenberg of stealing.
Enough for now. I'm going back to reading Marusek's "Mind over Ship" (sequel to the excellent "Counting Heads"), one of the hundreds of printed books I purchase every year. Maybe before I shut down for the evening I'll post Doctorow's "Makers"
I didn't notice anyone mentioning international issues with the public domain. Thanks to my involvement with Project Gutenberg, I'm often in the situation where something that is public domain in one place is still under copyright protection elsewhere.
Project Gutenberg has long held that by making something in the public domain available, we do not infringe in places where that public domain item is not in the public domain. So, for example, PG's eBook of Peter Pan is public domain in the US and most other places, but not in the UK.
We have regularly stood up to claimants from non-US countries (and, in the case of Gone with the Wind, in the US: complaining about the PG of Australia organization), saying that infringement is committed by infringers -- not by those *legally* making an item available. We haven't been sued yet, and like the RIAA case there are aspects of copyright law that don't have much legal precedent. (Internationally, there are few precedents.)
The idea that infringement is done by infringers, not by those with legal rights to an item, is a very important distinction. Presumably there might be issues for conspiracy to infringe, for traffickers, and those who profit by fostering an environment for infringement. But for the everyday person with legal rights to an item, the ability to rip, store, share, etc. would be nice to confirm.
Another related aspect: what if I rip a CD (or whatever) I legally own, and make it available for download, and you own the same item and download it. Confirming this is non-infringing would really help... an analogous situation would be digitizing an eBook from a printed volume I own, and you own...even if the book is copyrighted, can we share the digital copy?
The final point for US residents is the anti-circumvention provision of copyright law. If we can confirm these various rights, does that mean that bypassing DRM etc. is legit? While there is deemphasis on DRM for music currently, it's still pretty strong for video, for the dedicated eBook formats, and re-emerging with Blu-Ray discs. I don't think DRM (or spawn of DRM) is dead yet. gbn
We (Project Gutenberg) haven't received anything from IMSLP yet, and depending on how easy it is to identify materials that are public domain in thUS, we might not be able to immediately redistribute it. But I did correspond with the person who runs IMSLP (when the issue first came up, not just recently) and do anticipate we'll be able to help. It's great to see the/. coverage of Michael's note to the BookPeople mailing list (the main link in the slashdot story thread), but at this point there's not a lot to report...
A few extra things: - Thanks to everyone who has said nice things about Project Gutenberg:) - Yes, we pledge to continue "fighting the good fight" for appropriateness of copyright enforcement - The Universal music claims are, as others have noted, legally unsupported here in the US. (I don't know whether anything relevant is different in Canada) - We maintain some of our past letters to these types of claims at http://cand.pglaf.org/ (cand == Cease And Desist:-). This includes telling the Mitchell estate the PG-US doesn't control PG-AU, where "Gone with the Wind" is posted, and there is no reason why PG-AU would need to block downloaders from elsewhere - We have also argued many times that *if* there is infringement (say in the UK, an EU country, etc.) then it is up to the infringed-upon party to take action, not Project Gutenberg. (We even offer to help, by writing a general letter explaining that people should check the laws of their country before downloading...as stated in every public domain eBook and on the gutenberg.org Web site) - Among other things, the rejection of IP address blocking (as proposed by Universal) can rest on the simple fact that even downloading a copyright item might not be a copyright violation: -- many countries have notions of "fair use" that allow such use of copyrighted content -- what if the downloader owns the item in question already (say, they own the sheet music in print form, and want it digitally)? -- what if the downloader is not where the IP address maps to? -- other examples you can think of...
It's no an immediate problem, and it's possible that GoogleBooks or another player will get there before PG does.
There are about a million works from 1923-1964 that are public domain, due to non-renewal of copyright (our Rule 6 in the PG Copyright HOWTO at www.gutenberg.org). Those will keep us busy... there are also lots of pamphlets, posters, manuscripts and other non-book items. Many government publications which were not (and are still not) copyrighted. Early film, photographs, etc. Many things to work on beyond books. Lots of non-US stuff, too.
Meanwhile, we have a few million items left just to complete all books in the public domain. Maybe by the time we're running low on such items, there will be new additions to the public domain again. The clock stopped in 1998, but is scheduled to start again in 2019 (due to Sonny Bono's last act [the one after he skied into a tree]). I'm not holding my breath, though -- another copyright term extension seems likely before then, given that Larry Lessig's failed attempt to challenge Sonny basically gave carte blanche to congress to have perpetual copyrights. As long as they only extend a few decades at a time!
Michael Hart's blog has some very detailed analysis of copyright term extensions over history. Very interesting reading, and using facts that are not disputed, but seldom pulled together in one cogent essay.
There's a shorter explanation here, The PG License. The legalese is mostly a royalty license for the Project Gutenberg name, which is a registered trademark. We made the preamble much shorter starting with book #10000. (Remember that in the early days, stuff like the GPL was also still new...lawyers wanted to "shrink wrap" the eBooks. These days, that seems stupid, but in the early 1990s things were different.)
You *can* remove the small print, etc. You *can* reuse the public domain titles in any way you choose, but if there are substantial changes (other than reformatting/repackaging) the PG name should be removed. You can't "trade" on the PG name without following the license or otherwise getting permission. That's partially so people can't abuse the PG name ("The official Project Gutenberg edition of Alice, for $13.95 postage paid!"). It's also because changes that PG didn't do, we might somehow be held responsible for or asked to support.
Conceptually, the PG "license" is almost the opposite of the GPL and such, even though the intention is very similar. The GPL gives a license to use something that is, and stays, copyrighted. The PG license is intended to very clearly state that an item is public domain, and that it may be used for any purpose at all...but it withholds permission to use the Project Gutenberg name except with an unchanged copy of the eBook (other than formatting and other minor changes). It also lists a royalty schedule for people who want to trade on the PG name...giving explicit permission to do so.
The preamble to all eBooks, for years, has been short and to the point: use it, share it, make copies, give it away, etc....
I know the license legalese is terrible, but we're in the same situation as people wanting to GPL their code or similar: we need to include it in each eBook, since each eBook needs to stand alone & complete.
We had 1/2 dozen lawyers with expertise in copyright confirm our No Sweat of the Brow Copyright statement for Project Gutenberg. It's what we rely on for harvesting GoogleBooks and many other sources. Here's the text:
Work performed on a public domain item, known as sweat of the brow, does not result in a new copyright. This is the judgment of Project Gutenberg's copyright lawyers, and is founded in a study of case law in the United States. This is founded in the notion of authorship, which is a prerequisite for a new copyright. Non-authorship activities do not create a new copyright.
Some organizations erroneously claim a new copyright when they add value to a public domain item, such as to an old printed book. But despite the difficulty of the work involved, none of these activities result in new copyright protection when performed on a public domain item:
* scanning and optical character recognition (OCR)
* proofreading and OCR error correction
* fixing spelling and typography, including substantial updates to spelling such as changing from American to British English
* adding markup (HTML, XML, TeX, etc.)
* digitizing, cropping, color-adjusting or other modifications to images
* addition of trivial new content, such as images to indicate page breaks in an HTML file, or pictures of gothic letters for the first letter in a chapter, or adding or removing a few words per chapter
* substantial reorganization, such as moving footnotes to end-notes, or changing the locations of pictures within the text
* recoding to new character sets, such as Unicode, or new formats, such as PDF
There is some value-added content that DOES get a new copyright, but only for the actual new work (that is, it may be possible to remove the new copyrighted content to go back to a public domain document):
* translation into another human language
* creating a new compilation of existing materials (though the individual items compiled retain their public domain status)
* creating new original art work
* creating an original derivative work, such as an audio performance, a new chapter, or a set of favorite quotations
* adding a new introduction or critical essay
Project Gutenberg is able to utilize any material which is judged to be public domain in the country of use (i.e., the United States). If it is determined that components of an item are public domain, but others are not, then the copyrighted components may be removed without the permission of whoever owns the copyright for the new content.
It is Project Gutenberg's practice to seek permission of those who distribute materials, including copyright claimants, before harvesting their materials. This is done in order to be polite, and to allow the producer or distributor to request a particular credit be used. But if permission is not given, public domain items can still be used by Project Gutenberg, typically without any attribution. Because Project Gutenberg receives submissions from many different sources, it is not always clear where an item came from. Volunteers who submit content they did not themselves generate should be diligent about reporting sources, even if the source will not be credited in the item as distributed by Project Gutenberg.
So find some errors and report them: errata AT pglaf.org. I think you're overstating the case... with over 22000 free eBooks, the quality for most is quite high. For some of the earlier ones (under #2000 or so) you can find some that are in rough shape. They're getting updated, HTML added, etc. over time.
We did an analysis of the "whole penguin" collection found on Amazon a few years ago. Pretty well everything is in Project Gutenberg.
You can help create the next eBook, to your own exacting standards. Try starting at Distributed Proofreaders
-- Greg
Discover, Visa, etc. all have Web pages discussing their merchant fees, but they are not too detailed and are country-specific. I'm being lazy and not pasting any URLs here, but they're easy enough to find - I just did this for some research I was doing regarding PayPal's chargeback fees.
$25 is ballpark accurate. I saw some for $35, and some for $10. It also depends on things like the issuing bank (since Visa & MC are issued through banks, versus Discover & AmEx which are monolithic companies), the size of the transaction, and (I suspect) the merchant. I know that small merchants pay higher fees than larger ones. I tried to set up a merchant account for a charity I'm involved with, but fees and other costs were too high for less than at least a few $100 per month. It's easy to imagine huge retailers paying smaller chargeback fees than smaller retailers.
As others have mentioned, the consumer is not usually charged for chargebacks. However, this can be a factor in your credit report: re-issued cards, even when the bank requires it, count as "another credit card" in your credit profile. Lots of credit card turnover is a factor in credit card scoring, though I don't know how weighty (does anyone?).
I looked closely at PayPal, when my charity started seeing chargebacks as described in the article. PayPal isn't much better or worse than other ways of getting donations, but they're online and don't balk at small payments (though they eat 35 cents + 3.2% of a transaction, so very small payments never reach the charity). For this reason, we get lots of small donations via PayPal. This is great, except that a $5 donation from a fraudulent card ends up costing us $$ via the chargeback: $10 or whatever chargeback fee PayPal was charged plus another 3.2%, plus of course the original $5 (which already had 3.2% and 35 cents deducted). It's consistent with what credit cards charge, but PayPal ends up being an easy way to take money *out* of a charity's pocket.
I saw Melanie's talk at What The Hack in summer 2005, and got to speak with her a little afterwards.
That was before the virus made news, but her interests in RFID were in strong evidence.
Here's the abstract: program.whatthehack.org
Here's video (MP4) of her talk, "Fun and Mayhem with RFID:" rehash.whatthehack.org
You can find other videos from WTH at the same site (disclosure: I'm there, too!)
First of all, my personal vanity domain is petascale.org. Really.
Second: it's nice to see supercomputing covered in Slashdot:)
Finally: these systems are going to be both revolutionary and evolutionary. The main thing you can predict, is that you can't predict what impact and uses they will have.
I don't know the answer to your question, but am pretty sure that Paul Graham and I were interviewed before the WSJ picked this up (that is, that the WSJ are the ankle-biters, in this case). Here's the link to the NPR piece, with transcript and audio: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5624749
One of my systems handles > 40K messages per day, and I can attest that Verizon email recently became a problem. I added an SPF record, and that instantly solved the problem. (I also filled out the online Verizon form, but haven't heard back yet). Summary: try SPF. http://www.openspf.org/wizard.html
Please visit http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/ for much faster download links (we redirected the traffic to a far fatter 'net pipe). Apologies to people who have been trying to get the data, but found the bandwidth insufficient. Greg
(I'm replying to the first-showing comment for visibility, since this story is already a little old)
Please visit http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/ for much faster download links (we redirected the traffic to a far fatter 'net pipe). Apologies to people who have been trying to get the data, but found the bandwidth insufficient. Greg
Slashdot Mirror
The key to extradition between countries is that the accusation needs to be for a crime for which an extradition treaty exists. Between the US and NZ, here is a listing (which is typical of other country treaties with the US): https://internationalextraditi... ... I did RTFA, but did not find a link to the NZ court ruling to confirm the extent to which this bilateral extradition treaty was the basis for the ruling.
Dotcom is accused of racketeering and money laundering, which would seem to be covered in the treaty section on fraud: "16. Obtaining property, money or valuable securities by false pretenses or by conspiracy to defraud the public or any person by deceit or falsehood or other fraudulent means, whether such deceit or falsehood or any fraudulent means would or would not amount to a false pretense." The definition of racketeering is something like, "dishonest and fraudulent business dealings."
International extradition treaties are part of why plaintiffs and prosecutors seek such high crimes, in their charges. The article links to the US court filing, if you want to see the full list. Another reason is that, in the US, criminal charges are made at the highest possible level of seriousness, so that there will be a plea bargain for a lower charge, rather than bringing a case all the way to the end. Federal prosecutions in the US very rarely result in Not Guilty or in charges being dismissed (under 5%).
That EU law that got struck down yesterday was part of an industry effort to add copyright infringement to the set of laws that would let enforcement cross national boundaries. For copyright, there is no current international extradition (at least, not with the US -- the EU has been doing its own thing). The Berne Convention, and associated treaties under WIPO, are the applicable international treaties for copyright, and do not make provisions for extradition or international enforcement for copyright violation. The fact that international boundaries are usually very easy to cross via Internet traffic is a big concern for publishers, media companies, etc., and they have been trying for a long time to extend reach of copyright laws beyond national boundaries.
One of the earliest such cases was in 2000, and involved a US copyright law forbidding reverse engineering of encryption. The DeCSS case, https://www.technewsworld.com/..., was to bring charges against Jon Johansen in Norway for posting a decryption program. Nowadays, I would expect charges in US courts would also include crimes for which extradition treaties apply, like fraud and larceny. This is easily achieved by stipulating large $ damages (due to lost revenue, piracy, etc.).
More recently, we know that Julian Assange is concerned about being extradited to the US under a secret indictment in the US courts. The rape charges in Sweden were sufficient for extradition from the UK (https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-justice/international-judicial-co-operation/extradition-for-criminal-offences/), but Ecuador has an approach that gives higher priority to avoiding torture than the bilateral treaties. The Guardian has a nice short cheeky piece about why Edward Snowden was also thought to be en route to Ecuador, before he ended up staying in Russia: https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
We are getting the picture, right? The US isn't the only country that seeks very high-level crimes in what are basically copyright cases, nor are they the only country where moneyed business interests are able to get the ear of criminal courts for issues that are, essentially, civil cases (a distinction that matters a lot in countries that follow common law... less so for countries with different legal heritage, like Ge
You are right, PvtVoid! Ok, well: Death's End is "the best of the best..." what I wrote above. All three books are fantastic, and surprisingly different from one another - even though they are related, and have several characters that persist throughout. Just read them all - they are science fiction at its best.
+1. It's the best of the best, published in 2016.. third in a trilogy, so you need to read the other two first. They are also fantastic, but the third turned out to be my favorite. Should be strong candidates for the annual science fiction awards.
Copyright is based on authorship. So, while the main text of Mein Kampf is in the public domain, this new two-volume work will legitimately claim a new copyright. The new copyright will come from all those notes, which were created through acts of authorship. Contrary to the other contemporary story of Otto Frank, editorship is sweat of the brow, while authorship is creativity (see https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki... , for example). Translation does qualify as authorship, since is an intellectual creative act. (Dunno about machine translation...)
In the US, public domain items often have a copyright claim due to a new preface, or introduction or even cover art. Check some of the "Penguin Classics" in your local bookstore for examples. For Mein Kampf, all that added content will create a mixed item, where extracting just the public domain content (minus notes and whatever else is new) will take some effort. Luckily, the public domain text is already widely available without the new notes.
As mentioned, copyright expiry based on life+70 has no bearing in the US for items published prior to 1978 (https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To). Due to GATT, no copyright renewal was required after 28 years for items published outside of the US to get the full copyright term. The translations into English were not made until after the original German, of course. In the US, copyright will expire 95 years after publication based on the current USC Title 17 (which, as we know, TPP might force to change). But that's another story...
- gbn
Concur. The design of the bulldozer modules was abundantly clear. The fact that the "cores" share an FPU was clearly disclosed and part of any diagram of the parts. The shared FPUs played a huge role in assessing bulldozer-based CPUs for high performance computing workloads. For HPC, the usual benchmark is HPL (a.k.a., high performance LINPACK), which is a measure of double precision floating point performance for a particular matrix operation called DGEMM. The fact that the FPU was doing double-duty for two "cores" on a module meant that the peak theoretical performance was limited by the number of FPUs in a CPU, not the number of cores or modules or anything else.
As others have noted, hyperthreading via Intel can have exactly the same impact: the threads share various components, including the FPU.
Another aspect that can have a major impact on performance is the number of memory channels, and how things like cache coherency is handled. Among other things, AMD's hyper-transport exhibits different scalability characteristics depending on the number of sockets. In a four or eight-socket configuration, latency due to cache coherency operations can have a big impact on performance.
- gbn
This might help: https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki...
And, the updated "Rule 6 How-To" at https://copy.pglaf.org/
For something published in the US after 1923 and before 1964, renewal of copyright was necessary to get a further 28-year extension. (Term extensions in 1998 extended copyright of items published in 1964 onward, and removed the need to renew.)
The Rule 6 how-to has a template for non-renewal research that might satisfy YouTube, if you do the research and send it in.
Only around 10% of items published from 1923 onwards were renewed. (It's no longer required, but you can still renew today.) The US Library of Congress has records of copyright registrations and renewals, and the Rule 6 How-To describes where to get the records. For items from 1923-1963, the renewals for printed items are comprehensive.
Serialization is sometimes a problem. Items might have been published, then published in another form (say, a magazine article that was published as a book), and if the timing is close enough one renewal might cover both items.
Proving something is in the public domain in the US, for printed items, is not that hard for items published from 1923-1963. It takes some time and expertise, and there is always a chance there is a renewal that you didn't find. Proving it is still copyrighted is also easy: show me the renewal.
- Greg
Advertisers: not so much. In fact, the 2600 marketplace section (2 pages at the back of the magazine) is free, and only available to subscribers. There is no paid advertising in 2600 Magazine.
The data centers in Quincy are quite large. Microsoft has a major facility, which is undergoing expansion. So does Yahoo, Intuit, Dell, and Sabey. These are major components of the tax base for the town of Quincy and elsewhere in Grant County. The data centers are highly resilient to power loss, with on-site diesel generators, 24x7 staffing, and all the other protections you'd expect. But prolonged use of the generators, if it becomes necessary, could exceed the permitted run time and accompanying pollution the facilities are allowed. Most likely, power from the other dams the Grant County PUD operates (or elsewhere on the regional power grid) could be routed to the data centers.
There are some other huge electricity consumers in the county. It's the world headquarters of a company that makes photovoltaic components, and also several food processors (all those potatoes from eastern Washington gotta be processed and cooked!). Industrial users might be able to turn down their power usage if there is a regional shortage, but data centers tend to operate at fairly stable 24x7 consumption levels. Major companies like those listed above have redundant facilities, and can shunt processing to other centers if required.
Site selection for major electricity consumers, including data centers, is a fascinating topic. The State of Washington has had various tax incentives to help businesses to choose to build facilities there. Electricity costs are among the lowest in the nation (under 3 cents/kWh for industrial customers). Plus, it makes extensive use of renewable sources, particularly hydroelectric (i.e., dams) and wind energy. Oregon has a similar story to tell, with their own rivers, dams, tax breaks, etc., and is part of why Amazon elected to put a huge facility there.
I think this could be a hoax. It's not a scientific paper, not in a peer-reviewed journal's letter section. It appears via a Google circles posting from Kerry Emanuel who is a well-known, though partially reformed, climate denier. It looks like the Google+ account the letter is published in was just created. Plus, the facts are either skimpy & wrong. Saying we cannot ramp up solar & wind power fast enough, but can ramp up nuclear, is directly in opposition to what's happening. Solar installations are going up by double-digit percentage points each year, and meanwhile we haven't had a new nuclear power plant in over 40 years. The only pair that is underway (which is pictured in the Yahoo! story) is years from completion. There are only 19 permit applications active for new nukes in the US, and the power industry (which is notoriously risk-averse) has for decades shied away from their huge liability and expense.
200 or so is the end. The last Raptor just flew to my back yard during this past week: "Last F-22 Raptor fighter jet arrives in Alaska" (http://www.newsminer.com/view/full_story/18475362/article-Last-F-22-Raptor-fighter-jet-arrives-in-Alaska).
The F-35 is another matter that seems more relevant: production for those is still delayed. Keep in mind these are sold to other countries, not just used in the US.
The Anderson/Bear folks posted this a couple of places, and it was picked up a few other places. Here is the text of the most recent substantial message I sent them on the topic: http://cand.pglaf.org/bear-response.txt . The group has not provided the author/title (or PG eBook number) of any title they think was wrongly determined to be non-renewed, other than those mentioned in the email. They seem to have some theories about what is eligible for renewal, or who can renew, but these are not contested by Project Gutenberg (in fact, our policy is to NOT to question whether renewals were fully compliant with the law, nor whether a person had the correct standing to renew).
The issue is whether a renewal was made. For The Escape, part 1 was republished with a different title, complete with part 2. Part 1 was not individually renewed, but the newly titled complete work was. We were unaware of the subsequent retitled republication, so did not find the renewal. For the purposes of copyright and renewal, a major outcome of the legal advice we received concerning The Escape is that serialized works are treated as single acts of authorship. Thus, renewal of a part may be considered to apply to the whole -- provided it happens within a reasonable timespan (we have been advised to use +/- four years).
The Project Gutenberg Copyright How-To has details on our procedures, although the Rule 6 how-to there (for non-renewals) is older than the version we used for the original Anderson/Escape non-renewal determination. We are working on a revision that will include additional research for serials, and a few other variations like republication with different titles. The how-to is here: www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Copyright_How-To
For those who aren't aware, Project Gutenberg is classified in the US as a 501(c)(3) charity, as a library. With over 35,000 published titles, and well over 50,000 unique instances of copyright research (thousands for our Rule 6), it's not surprising that we make occasional errors. To date (I've been doing this aspect of volunteer work for Project Gutenberg since around 1999), we've changed our stance on fewer than 1/2 dozen public domain determinations. Not perfect, but I believe we're doing a good job overall, and have some very solid procedures by copyright experts over the years.
I first initiated our Rule 6 nearly 10 years ago. This was because I saw that of all the books and serials published in the US from 1923-1963 (when renewal was required for copyright to still apply), 85--90% were never renewed. The US Library of Congress does annual reports on this. Statistically, that means there a million or so items from 1923-1964 whose copyright expired after a 28-year term. These items have been in the public domain in the US since 1992 or earlier (1964+28), and many are out of print. As a policy decision, Project Gutenberg decided it was worth the risk of occasionally missing a renewal, to be able to affirmatively identify the many items for which no renewal occurred. I still believe this decision was the right one.
For those who are paying attention to Project Gutenberg news today, there was a story in the Washington Post that, more or less, accused Amazon of abusing their customers by selling public domain Project Gutenberg works, with DRM added, for a fee. The article is here: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/11/amazon_charges_kindle_users_fo.html . (I exchanged several emails with the author.) It's a weird coincidence that within the same 24 hour period there is another story that basically accuses Project Gutenberg of stealing.
Enough for now. I'm going back to reading Marusek's "Mind over Ship" (sequel to the excellent "Counting Heads"), one of the hundreds of printed books I purchase every year. Maybe before I shut down for the evening I'll post Doctorow's "Makers"
I didn't notice anyone mentioning international issues with the public domain. Thanks to my involvement with Project Gutenberg, I'm often in the situation where something that is public domain in one place is still under copyright protection elsewhere.
Project Gutenberg has long held that by making something in the public domain available, we do not infringe in places where that public domain item is not in the public domain. So, for example, PG's eBook of Peter Pan is public domain in the US and most other places, but not in the UK.
We have regularly stood up to claimants from non-US countries (and, in the case of Gone with the Wind, in the US: complaining about the PG of Australia organization), saying that infringement is committed by infringers -- not by those *legally* making an item available. We haven't been sued yet, and like the RIAA case there are aspects of copyright law that don't have much legal precedent. (Internationally, there are few precedents.)
The idea that infringement is done by infringers, not by those with legal rights to an item, is a very important distinction. Presumably there might be issues for conspiracy to infringe, for traffickers, and those who profit by fostering an environment for infringement. But for the everyday person with legal rights to an item, the ability to rip, store, share, etc. would be nice to confirm.
Another related aspect: what if I rip a CD (or whatever) I legally own, and make it available for download, and you own the same item and download it. Confirming this is non-infringing would really help... an analogous situation would be digitizing an eBook from a printed volume I own, and you own...even if the book is copyrighted, can we share the digital copy?
The final point for US residents is the anti-circumvention provision of copyright law. If we can confirm these various rights, does that mean that bypassing DRM etc. is legit? While there is deemphasis on DRM for music currently, it's still pretty strong for video, for the dedicated eBook formats, and re-emerging with Blu-Ray discs. I don't think DRM (or spawn of DRM) is dead yet. gbn
We (Project Gutenberg) haven't received anything from IMSLP yet, and depending on how easy it is to identify materials that are public domain in thUS, we might not be able to immediately redistribute it. But I did correspond with the person who runs IMSLP (when the issue first came up, not just recently) and do anticipate we'll be able to help. It's great to see the /. coverage of Michael's note to the BookPeople mailing list (the main link in the slashdot story thread), but at this point there's not a lot to report...
:) :-). This includes telling the Mitchell estate the PG-US doesn't control PG-AU, where "Gone with the Wind" is posted, and there is no reason why PG-AU would need to block downloaders from elsewhere
A few extra things:
- Thanks to everyone who has said nice things about Project Gutenberg
- Yes, we pledge to continue "fighting the good fight" for appropriateness of copyright enforcement
- The Universal music claims are, as others have noted, legally unsupported here in the US. (I don't know whether anything relevant is different in Canada)
- We maintain some of our past letters to these types of claims at http://cand.pglaf.org/ (cand == Cease And Desist
- We have also argued many times that *if* there is infringement (say in the UK, an EU country, etc.) then it is up to the infringed-upon party to take action, not Project Gutenberg. (We even offer to help, by writing a general letter explaining that people should check the laws of their country before downloading...as stated in every public domain eBook and on the gutenberg.org Web site)
- Among other things, the rejection of IP address blocking (as proposed by Universal) can rest on the simple fact that even downloading a copyright item might not be a copyright violation:
-- many countries have notions of "fair use" that allow such use of copyrighted content
-- what if the downloader owns the item in question already (say, they own the sheet music in print form, and want it digitally)?
-- what if the downloader is not where the IP address maps to?
-- other examples you can think of...
Greg Newby (of Project Gutenberg)
It's no an immediate problem, and it's possible that GoogleBooks or another player will get there before PG does.
There are about a million works from 1923-1964 that are public domain, due to non-renewal of copyright (our Rule 6 in the PG Copyright HOWTO at www.gutenberg.org). Those will keep us busy... there are also lots of pamphlets, posters, manuscripts and other non-book items. Many government publications which were not (and are still not) copyrighted. Early film, photographs, etc. Many things to work on beyond books. Lots of non-US stuff, too.
Meanwhile, we have a few million items left just to complete all books in the public domain. Maybe by the time we're running low on such items, there will be new additions to the public domain again. The clock stopped in 1998, but is scheduled to start again in 2019 (due to Sonny Bono's last act [the one after he skied into a tree]). I'm not holding my breath, though -- another copyright term extension seems likely before then, given that Larry Lessig's failed attempt to challenge Sonny basically gave carte blanche to congress to have perpetual copyrights. As long as they only extend a few decades at a time!
Michael Hart's blog has some very detailed analysis of copyright term extensions over history. Very interesting reading, and using facts that are not disputed, but seldom pulled together in one cogent essay.
There's a shorter explanation here, The PG License. The legalese is mostly a royalty license for the Project Gutenberg name, which is a registered trademark. We made the preamble much shorter starting with book #10000. (Remember that in the early days, stuff like the GPL was also still new...lawyers wanted to "shrink wrap" the eBooks. These days, that seems stupid, but in the early 1990s things were different.)
You *can* remove the small print, etc. You *can* reuse the public domain titles in any way you choose, but if there are substantial changes (other than reformatting/repackaging) the PG name should be removed. You can't "trade" on the PG name without following the license or otherwise getting permission. That's partially so people can't abuse the PG name ("The official Project Gutenberg edition of Alice, for $13.95 postage paid!"). It's also because changes that PG didn't do, we might somehow be held responsible for or asked to support.
Conceptually, the PG "license" is almost the opposite of the GPL and such, even though the intention is very similar. The GPL gives a license to use something that is, and stays, copyrighted. The PG license is intended to very clearly state that an item is public domain, and that it may be used for any purpose at all...but it withholds permission to use the Project Gutenberg name except with an unchanged copy of the eBook (other than formatting and other minor changes). It also lists a royalty schedule for people who want to trade on the PG name...giving explicit permission to do so.
The preamble to all eBooks, for years, has been short and to the point: use it, share it, make copies, give it away, etc....
I know the license legalese is terrible, but we're in the same situation as people wanting to GPL their code or similar: we need to include it in each eBook, since each eBook needs to stand alone & complete.
We had 1/2 dozen lawyers with expertise in copyright confirm our No Sweat of the Brow Copyright statement for Project Gutenberg. It's what we rely on for harvesting GoogleBooks and many other sources. Here's the text:
Work performed on a public domain item, known as sweat of the brow, does not result in a new copyright. This is the judgment of Project Gutenberg's copyright lawyers, and is founded in a study of case law in the United States. This is founded in the notion of authorship, which is a prerequisite for a new copyright. Non-authorship activities do not create a new copyright.
Some organizations erroneously claim a new copyright when they add value to a public domain item, such as to an old printed book. But despite the difficulty of the work involved, none of these activities result in new copyright protection when performed on a public domain item:
* scanning and optical character recognition (OCR)
* proofreading and OCR error correction
* fixing spelling and typography, including substantial updates to spelling such as changing from American to British English
* adding markup (HTML, XML, TeX, etc.)
* digitizing, cropping, color-adjusting or other modifications to images
* addition of trivial new content, such as images to indicate page breaks in an HTML file, or pictures of gothic letters for the first letter in a chapter, or adding or removing a few words per chapter
* substantial reorganization, such as moving footnotes to end-notes, or changing the locations of pictures within the text
* recoding to new character sets, such as Unicode, or new formats, such as PDF
There is some value-added content that DOES get a new copyright, but only for the actual new work (that is, it may be possible to remove the new copyrighted content to go back to a public domain document):
* translation into another human language
* creating a new compilation of existing materials (though the individual items compiled retain their public domain status)
* creating new original art work
* creating an original derivative work, such as an audio performance, a new chapter, or a set of favorite quotations
* adding a new introduction or critical essay
Project Gutenberg is able to utilize any material which is judged to be public domain in the country of use (i.e., the United States). If it is determined that components of an item are public domain, but others are not, then the copyrighted components may be removed without the permission of whoever owns the copyright for the new content.
It is Project Gutenberg's practice to seek permission of those who distribute materials, including copyright claimants, before harvesting their materials. This is done in order to be polite, and to allow the producer or distributor to request a particular credit be used. But if permission is not given, public domain items can still be used by Project Gutenberg, typically without any attribution. Because Project Gutenberg receives submissions from many different sources, it is not always clear where an item came from. Volunteers who submit content they did not themselves generate should be diligent about reporting sources, even if the source will not be credited in the item as distributed by Project Gutenberg.
We did an analysis of the "whole penguin" collection found on Amazon a few years ago. Pretty well everything is in Project Gutenberg.
You can help create the next eBook, to your own exacting standards. Try starting at Distributed Proofreaders -- Greg
Discover, Visa, etc. all have Web pages discussing their merchant fees, but they are not too detailed and are country-specific. I'm being lazy and not pasting any URLs here, but they're easy enough to find - I just did this for some research I was doing regarding PayPal's chargeback fees.
$25 is ballpark accurate. I saw some for $35, and some for $10. It also depends on things like the issuing bank (since Visa & MC are issued through banks, versus Discover & AmEx which are monolithic companies), the size of the transaction, and (I suspect) the merchant. I know that small merchants pay higher fees than larger ones. I tried to set up a merchant account for a charity I'm involved with, but fees and other costs were too high for less than at least a few $100 per month. It's easy to imagine huge retailers paying smaller chargeback fees than smaller retailers.
As others have mentioned, the consumer is not usually charged for chargebacks. However, this can be a factor in your credit report: re-issued cards, even when the bank requires it, count as "another credit card" in your credit profile. Lots of credit card turnover is a factor in credit card scoring, though I don't know how weighty (does anyone?).
I looked closely at PayPal, when my charity started seeing chargebacks as described in the article. PayPal isn't much better or worse than other ways of getting donations, but they're online and don't balk at small payments (though they eat 35 cents + 3.2% of a transaction, so very small payments never reach the charity). For this reason, we get lots of small donations via PayPal. This is great, except that a $5 donation from a fraudulent card ends up costing us $$ via the chargeback: $10 or whatever chargeback fee PayPal was charged plus another 3.2%, plus of course the original $5 (which already had 3.2% and 35 cents deducted). It's consistent with what credit cards charge, but PayPal ends up being an easy way to take money *out* of a charity's pocket.
I saw Melanie's talk at What The Hack in summer 2005, and got to speak with her a little afterwards. That was before the virus made news, but her interests in RFID were in strong evidence. Here's the abstract: program.whatthehack.org Here's video (MP4) of her talk, "Fun and Mayhem with RFID:" rehash.whatthehack.org You can find other videos from WTH at the same site (disclosure: I'm there, too!)
Here's a little photoshop job I did awhile ago with Jack Valenti as Devil (131KB gif).
First of all, my personal vanity domain is petascale.org. Really.
:)
Second: it's nice to see supercomputing covered in Slashdot
Finally: these systems are going to be both revolutionary and evolutionary. The main thing you can predict, is that you can't predict what impact and uses they will have.
I don't know the answer to your question, but am pretty sure that Paul Graham and I were interviewed before the WSJ picked this up (that is, that the WSJ are the ankle-biters, in this case). Here's the link to the NPR piece, with transcript and audio: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=5624749
One of my systems handles > 40K messages per day, and I can attest that Verizon email recently became a problem. I added an SPF record, and that instantly solved the problem. (I also filled out the online Verizon form, but haven't heard back yet). Summary: try SPF. http://www.openspf.org/wizard.html
Please visit http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/ for
much faster download links (we redirected the
traffic to a far fatter 'net pipe). Apologies to
people who have been trying to get the data, but
found the bandwidth insufficient. Greg
(I'm replying to the first-showing comment for visibility, since
this story is already a little old)
Please visit http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/ for
much faster download links (we redirected the
traffic to a far fatter 'net pipe). Apologies to
people who have been trying to get the data, but
found the bandwidth insufficient. Greg