The SKA will have digitised signals coming from one or more receiving heads and radio receivers mounted on each of the 3000 radio telescopes that form the array. There's a massive amount of data that that needs to be time correlated to within a nanosecond or so (over transmission distances > 1000km), corrected for known system distortions, subject to beam forming, corrected for rotation and atmospheric effects, passed through Fourier analysis, analysed for polarisation, filtered, binned, summarised and stored in useful ways. Some of the tasks need to be done in real time, others can wait. Some of those tasks are heavy on the floating point work and easy to parallelise. Much can be done with dedicated hardware but that is much less flexible over the longer term than a programmable device.
Nuclear power will be a perfectly viable solution, except in all the cases it will not be. How many nuclear reactors will the western nuclear powers allow to be installed in North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Zimbabwe? How about Venezuela or Cuba? What about failed states like Somalia, or non-states like Somaliland? Not many I venture. The problems are large, overwhelmingly political, and even less likely to engender consensus than 'no-brainers' like reducing emissions as a risk-mitigation strategy.
Whether you like it or not, patents have been around for over a couple hundred years. No matter how much moaning and groaning people do about patents (particularly software patents), they aren't going away anytime soon.
Nobody is being revisionist and claiming that patents have not existed for hundreds of years, although you'd be hard put to claim software patents have. Longevity, of itself, does not make them inherently valuable or suited to today. The "it's always been that way" perspective also fails to allow for the possibility that evolution of elements of patent law over that time has produced aspects that are neither valuable nor desirable. If people do not exercise a little of their right to "moaning and groaning" then the situation absolutely will not change in their interest, only those of others. If you do not wish to moan, fine, but do not expect everyone else to accept your fatalist position.
Lawyers get paid the big bucks when somebody tries to fight a losing battle.
In any battle one side will be fighting the losing battle, ergo the lawyers always get paid the big bucks. The even get paid when people opt not to fight the battle because then the victims has to acquiesce to whatever is demanded of them by the lawyers.
but in every case that they have pressed charges it was found that the farmer either A) violated the contract they signed
This is another insidious piece of rot. Companies are constantly overclaiming the actual privileges that copyright/trademark/patent law extends them and use contract law as a way to extend "rights" to their liking. Sure, no-one has to sign the contract, but then it is becoming increasingly difficult to source things without signing an overreaching contract. In Monsanto's case they are using contract law to control use of the patented item in precisely manner it is designed to function: seed germinates, grows, produces more viable seed.
At the time mouse and keyboard used those Oh-so-retro DIN connectors. I guess the modern equivalent would involve gluing the keyboard and mouse USB plugs into the sockets although that's a bit of a maintenance headache, although arguably still cheaper than the loss of the information. I didn't notice a particular decline in carbon-based failure rate;)
In certain military environments I worked in the USB, Firewire, and microphone ports were immediately filled with epoxy and (where possible) disconnected from the motherboard.
You can take payment on eBay by means other than PayPal in Australia; our competition laws saw to that. Cheques are essentially dead as a payment type but direct deposit is alive and well. Our laws do not, however, mandate that eBay should make that as easy as using their triple-dipping PayPal service.
It's made even better by the steadfast refusal of TFV to be anything other than a black hole in the page here (FF13 and Opera on Linux in AU). Perhaps regional restrictions?
The well-known journalistic suffix of "-ish" is used when quoting figures from Wikipedia, where you cannot be sure of veracity, or using woefully vague units like "ton". Wikipedia gives the mass as "approximately 450,000 kg (990,000 lb)", which is 450 tonnes (a non-SI unit acceptable in SI) or 495 short tons, the unit most commonly called "ton" in the US, 446 long tons, the unit used for the displacement of ships and in the UK. NASA, on the other hand, give the much less massive figure of "861,804 lb (390,908 kilograms)" or 391 tonnes, 431 short tons, or 395 long tons. Both sources approximate conversion from kg to lb, so there are four different figures to choose from even if you ignore the vagueness of "ton." Pick your poison.
Air carrier liability is partly limited by the Warsaw Convention and other legislation but they are usually still liable for acts of criminal negligence and open to civil claims. Consequently, mention the word "aviation" in a conversation with an insurer and you can be fairly certain you'll be surprised by the climb rate of premiums:)
So between you, the grandparent, and great-grandparent posts we have everyone covered... reminds me of Kay in Men-in-Black: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
You do realise that New Zealand is not part of the United States don't you? US law does not apply in New Zealand, where this potential copyright infringement occurred, which is why any remedy would be subject to New Zealand law regardless of how many US court antics go on. You're right, attempting to sue for copyright violation would almost certainly fail probably because of exemptions in NZ copyright law for law enforcement or "public good" (I do not profess to know NZ law BTW) but that does not justify dismissing the presence of copyright interests in the content of those hard drives.
Unless he poached files from Megaupload and stored them on one of his personal HD's, there's no copyrighted material.
Anything on those personal hard disks written by DotCom is a work protected by copyright, and that copyright is held by Dotcom. Any email received by Dotcom and stored on those hard disks is a work subject to copyright where the copyright holder is not Dotcom. Any software on those hard disks that was licensed to Dotcom for use on that machine, e.g. Windows, is subject to copyright law and the copyright holder is not Dotcom. To say there is nothing "copyrighted" on those hard disks is to ignore the obvious and swallow the "Big media" line that only they create works subject to copyright law and the protections that offers. Whether Dotcom and others have remedies for unauthorised reproduction of those works available under New Zealand law is a separate matter.
For the large contracts I have been part of the contractual arrangements typically include a warranty period of 12 months for latent defects, that is things that are not functioning as agreed in the specification and could not reasonably have been expected to be found during the agreed customer acceptance testing (the equivalent of a pre-purchase inspection for a tangible good). For example; the software is specified to handle any Standard XYZ message, a wide range of messages were tested and the software accepted, but an unforeseen, legitimate real-world message breaks the live system. Everything else involves a fee to change the contract, which includes the specifications, and do the work. They hire people to be bloody-minded about what creeps into the "latent defect" category. For high risk projects they will take out insurance against the possibility of latent defects (and charge the customer indirectly).
If nothing else, Technicolor has contributed to that paragon of smoke-and-mirrors: endless growth in gross domestic product. GDP includes funds earned through the "service" of extracting licencing fees, whether sanely justified or obtained by threat of legal oblivion.
Project Gutenberg publishes materials that are in the public domain because the copyright term has expired, a fact you'd have noted had you bothered to look before going off half-cocked. They also publish a small number of books still in copyright for which they hold an explicit release from the author. Project Gutenberg is not depriving any author of rewards for their creativity, they are merely exercising the rights we have to materials in the public domain. Project Gutenberg may be depriving other publishers of income from peddling public domain works (often with a fraudulent copyright notice attached) - this is called competition and, at least at the moment, is not illegal.
Telstra and the AFL, the "big guys", beat Optus, the "little" guys. Both are large telco players: this was a Goliath v Goliath match in court... but only the little guys that the big guys did not feel threatened by, Beem and MyTVR, are going to go out of business as a result.
Article II of the Outer Space Treaty came into force before the first manned Moon landing and expressly prohibits the appropriation of celestial bodies by states. It does give the originating state control over any object it places in space, which would cover the Apollo, Luna, Surveyor etc. artefacts. Of course, there will eventually be some weasel-faced lawyer willing to try appropriating the Moon for a private equity firm registered in one of the countries that has not signed or ratified the treaty.
Slashdot Mirror
The SKA will have digitised signals coming from one or more receiving heads and radio receivers mounted on each of the 3000 radio telescopes that form the array. There's a massive amount of data that that needs to be time correlated to within a nanosecond or so (over transmission distances > 1000km), corrected for known system distortions, subject to beam forming, corrected for rotation and atmospheric effects, passed through Fourier analysis, analysed for polarisation, filtered, binned, summarised and stored in useful ways. Some of the tasks need to be done in real time, others can wait. Some of those tasks are heavy on the floating point work and easy to parallelise. Much can be done with dedicated hardware but that is much less flexible over the longer term than a programmable device.
Nuclear power will be a perfectly viable solution, except in all the cases it will not be. How many nuclear reactors will the western nuclear powers allow to be installed in North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, or Zimbabwe? How about Venezuela or Cuba? What about failed states like Somalia, or non-states like Somaliland? Not many I venture. The problems are large, overwhelmingly political, and even less likely to engender consensus than 'no-brainers' like reducing emissions as a risk-mitigation strategy.
Whether you like it or not, patents have been around for over a couple hundred years. No matter how much moaning and groaning people do about patents (particularly software patents), they aren't going away anytime soon.
Nobody is being revisionist and claiming that patents have not existed for hundreds of years, although you'd be hard put to claim software patents have. Longevity, of itself, does not make them inherently valuable or suited to today. The "it's always been that way" perspective also fails to allow for the possibility that evolution of elements of patent law over that time has produced aspects that are neither valuable nor desirable. If people do not exercise a little of their right to "moaning and groaning" then the situation absolutely will not change in their interest, only those of others. If you do not wish to moan, fine, but do not expect everyone else to accept your fatalist position.
Lawyers get paid the big bucks when somebody tries to fight a losing battle.
In any battle one side will be fighting the losing battle, ergo the lawyers always get paid the big bucks. The even get paid when people opt not to fight the battle because then the victims has to acquiesce to whatever is demanded of them by the lawyers.
but in every case that they have pressed charges it was found that the farmer either A) violated the contract they signed
This is another insidious piece of rot. Companies are constantly overclaiming the actual privileges that copyright/trademark/patent law extends them and use contract law as a way to extend "rights" to their liking. Sure, no-one has to sign the contract, but then it is becoming increasingly difficult to source things without signing an overreaching contract. In Monsanto's case they are using contract law to control use of the patented item in precisely manner it is designed to function: seed germinates, grows, produces more viable seed.
At the time mouse and keyboard used those Oh-so-retro DIN connectors. I guess the modern equivalent would involve gluing the keyboard and mouse USB plugs into the sockets although that's a bit of a maintenance headache, although arguably still cheaper than the loss of the information. I didn't notice a particular decline in carbon-based failure rate ;)
In certain military environments I worked in the USB, Firewire, and microphone ports were immediately filled with epoxy and (where possible) disconnected from the motherboard.
Was it the Can Do (aka Canned Poo) attitude that gave it away?
This all feeds in to the "We never went to the Moon" conspiracies. Surely if we had been to the Moon everybody would know which way the Earth spins. ;)
I guess any piece of software that might make generating such divergent personas easier for a human being would be at risk though.
You can take payment on eBay by means other than PayPal in Australia; our competition laws saw to that. Cheques are essentially dead as a payment type but direct deposit is alive and well. Our laws do not, however, mandate that eBay should make that as easy as using their triple-dipping PayPal service.
The idea is good but I think you are grossly overestimating the technical understanding of the government party :(
It's made even better by the steadfast refusal of TFV to be anything other than a black hole in the page here (FF13 and Opera on Linux in AU). Perhaps regional restrictions?
The well-known journalistic suffix of "-ish" is used when quoting figures from Wikipedia, where you cannot be sure of veracity, or using woefully vague units like "ton". Wikipedia gives the mass as "approximately 450,000 kg (990,000 lb)", which is 450 tonnes (a non-SI unit acceptable in SI) or 495 short tons, the unit most commonly called "ton" in the US, 446 long tons, the unit used for the displacement of ships and in the UK. NASA, on the other hand, give the much less massive figure of "861,804 lb (390,908 kilograms)" or 391 tonnes, 431 short tons, or 395 long tons. Both sources approximate conversion from kg to lb, so there are four different figures to choose from even if you ignore the vagueness of "ton." Pick your poison.
I've been using VB6 ever since I was 12 (since 2002)
Way to make someone feel old you insensitive clod ;)
Air carrier liability is partly limited by the Warsaw Convention and other legislation but they are usually still liable for acts of criminal negligence and open to civil claims. Consequently, mention the word "aviation" in a conversation with an insurer and you can be fairly certain you'll be surprised by the climb rate of premiums :)
So between you, the grandparent, and great-grandparent posts we have everyone covered... reminds me of Kay in Men-in-Black: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
You do realise that New Zealand is not part of the United States don't you? US law does not apply in New Zealand, where this potential copyright infringement occurred, which is why any remedy would be subject to New Zealand law regardless of how many US court antics go on. You're right, attempting to sue for copyright violation would almost certainly fail probably because of exemptions in NZ copyright law for law enforcement or "public good" (I do not profess to know NZ law BTW) but that does not justify dismissing the presence of copyright interests in the content of those hard drives.
Unless he poached files from Megaupload and stored them on one of his personal HD's, there's no copyrighted material.
Anything on those personal hard disks written by DotCom is a work protected by copyright, and that copyright is held by Dotcom. Any email received by Dotcom and stored on those hard disks is a work subject to copyright where the copyright holder is not Dotcom. Any software on those hard disks that was licensed to Dotcom for use on that machine, e.g. Windows, is subject to copyright law and the copyright holder is not Dotcom. To say there is nothing "copyrighted" on those hard disks is to ignore the obvious and swallow the "Big media" line that only they create works subject to copyright law and the protections that offers. Whether Dotcom and others have remedies for unauthorised reproduction of those works available under New Zealand law is a separate matter.
For the large contracts I have been part of the contractual arrangements typically include a warranty period of 12 months for latent defects, that is things that are not functioning as agreed in the specification and could not reasonably have been expected to be found during the agreed customer acceptance testing (the equivalent of a pre-purchase inspection for a tangible good). For example; the software is specified to handle any Standard XYZ message, a wide range of messages were tested and the software accepted, but an unforeseen, legitimate real-world message breaks the live system. Everything else involves a fee to change the contract, which includes the specifications, and do the work. They hire people to be bloody-minded about what creeps into the "latent defect" category. For high risk projects they will take out insurance against the possibility of latent defects (and charge the customer indirectly).
FF12 never did anything like that here so, yes, I guess they fixed that proactively ;) What option?
If nothing else, Technicolor has contributed to that paragon of smoke-and-mirrors: endless growth in gross domestic product. GDP includes funds earned through the "service" of extracting licencing fees, whether sanely justified or obtained by threat of legal oblivion.
Project Gutenberg publishes materials that are in the public domain because the copyright term has expired, a fact you'd have noted had you bothered to look before going off half-cocked. They also publish a small number of books still in copyright for which they hold an explicit release from the author. Project Gutenberg is not depriving any author of rewards for their creativity, they are merely exercising the rights we have to materials in the public domain. Project Gutenberg may be depriving other publishers of income from peddling public domain works (often with a fraudulent copyright notice attached) - this is called competition and, at least at the moment, is not illegal.
Telstra and the AFL, the "big guys", beat Optus, the "little" guys. Both are large telco players: this was a Goliath v Goliath match in court... but only the little guys that the big guys did not feel threatened by, Beem and MyTVR, are going to go out of business as a result.
Indeed. If Osama bin Laden hid on the Moon you would be there by now... for about the same money and with fewer people killed in the process.
Article II of the Outer Space Treaty came into force before the first manned Moon landing and expressly prohibits the appropriation of celestial bodies by states. It does give the originating state control over any object it places in space, which would cover the Apollo, Luna, Surveyor etc. artefacts. Of course, there will eventually be some weasel-faced lawyer willing to try appropriating the Moon for a private equity firm registered in one of the countries that has not signed or ratified the treaty.