I hope http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/university.html helps. You may also ask the funding body for help if it is an external one. Finally there is the Freedom Of Information Act. But first try to resolve this within the institution you are working for. Resolving means that you get a copyright disclaimer.
The GPL already contains a clause which requires the distributor of GPL software to grant a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide patent license. The article however suggests some kind of club where members use their patents defensively against non-members. That's not going to be effective unless you restrict membership. But I don't see how you can restrict membership without starting to discriminate users and developers of the software.
No third party APIs are allowed. I.e. the terms and conditions are against distribution of wrappers for scripting languages like Ruby or Python. At this point Adobe is probably the last big company still willing to accept the risks associated with contributing to Apple software.
Myself I am developing HornetsEye which is a Ruby-extension for doing computer vision. The problem with supporting various types is that you end up with a lot of possible combinations when doing computations. I.e. say if you want to support arrays of 8-, 16-, 32-, and 64-bit integers (signed and unsigned) as well as 32-bit and 64-bit floating point, you have 10 ** 2 possible combinations of types when element-wise adding two arrays. If speed is not an issue however, you could just use Ruby's dynamic typing. Ruby's integer classes use dynamic typing in their computations in order to avoid numeric overflow: ( 10 ** 2 ).class # Fixnum ( 10 ** 10 ).class # Bignum
Also you can seamlessly combine rational numbers, big numbers, complex numbers, and matrices in a seamless way which is really neat: require 'mathn' 2/4 # 1/2 ( Complex::I / 2 ) ** 3 # Complex(0, -1/8) 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 # Complex(1/2, 1/3) ( 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 ) ** 5 # Complex(-199/2592, 61/3888) ( 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 ) ** 24 # Complex(584824319281/4738381338321616896, 161741277005/32905425960566784) a = Matrix[ [ 2 / 3, 3 / 4 ], [ 4 / 5, 5 / 6 ] ] # Matrix[[2/3, 3/4], [4/5, 5/6]] b = a.inv # Matrix[[-75/4, 135/8], [18, -15]] a * b # Matrix[[1, 0], [0, 1]]
I don't know how it is over there in the US. But here in UK I can buy decent movies on DVD for 3£. I'm not going to spend more money on an electronic book if it comes with DRM. I hope that authors such as Cory Doctorow will take over eventually. I.e. that books will be based on donations or sponsorships.
My brain is getting repetitive strain injury from all this April fool jokes. If the next news is about the Ubuntu security update setting up a bot-net, I might just ignore it.
Didn't know about this myself. So far I thought that circular polarisers are only used to convert linear polarised light to circular polarised light in photography. I.e. you want to suppress the reflection of a window in the scene without suppressing reflections in the camera optics itself.
Doesn't work to well with something like MySpace or Facebook. Somebody else adds you as a friend, uploads a picture and tags your face, enters your detail in a search box, sends you a message,...
Furthermore they track what groups you are part of and what other profiles you are watching. Also there are social widgets on websites all over the internet. Even if nobody betrays you, they will catch you sooner or later;)
Ultimately nobody needs advertising. And a lot of articles these days are "content" with the purpose of "generating" advertising revenue. There would still be plenty of stuff to read even if every internet user only wrote a single article about the most important thing in his/her life. The average quality might even benefit.
I can see at least five articles today about ad blocking. Each of them coming with advertising. It is insane. Everytime a "big" story comes up, hundreds of bloggers pick it up and run with it. And many of them seem to have no prior knowledge about what they are writing about.
I am only waiting for Ruppert Murdoch to join the debate at this point.
I was expecting the article to give some hands on experience on how to justify to paying customers that sharing of code goes both ways. Instead the author explains how he justifies to customers that he is not sharing his code with anybody. I bet as a software developer he would never agree to pay for development under these conditions himself.
People still confuse the X11-desktop with Windows. They also confuse Compiz with MacOS. Maybe the strategy is to make sure that the desktop colours are distinctly different from the colour schemes used by the proprietary operating systems. If you choose one of the most popular themes onGNOME-look or KDE-look you will likely wind up with something that very much resembles Windows or MacOS.
I am not sure whether ACTA plays into this but a quick look at the court's press release indicates that they had to do quite a bit of work to prevent legal intimidation by the European Union:
The regulations under scrutiny are to be understood as an implementation of the European Parliament's and Commission's directive 2006/24/EG about data retention from the year 2006.
Die angegriffenen Vorschriften verstehen sich als Umsetzung der Richtlinie 2006/24/EG des Europäischen Parlaments und des Rates über die Vorratsdatenspeicherung aus dem Jahre 2006. (The regulations under scrutiny are to be understood as an implementation of the European Parliament's and Commission's directive 2006/24/EG about data retention from the year 2006.)
Furthermore they state that the German data retention act goes way beyond what would have been required by the European Commission and that there is no need to involve the European Court at this point.
One of the remaining problems under GNU/Linux is proprietary NVidia and ATI graphics drivers. It is not legal to distribute them which makes it impossible to properly integrate them into the package repository. Furthermore it is not possible to change the software (fix bugs or just compile with a new version of libc). This kind of problems may be tolerable for acceleration of 3D graphics but I wouldn't want to have this kind of problems when it comes to basic features such as parallel computing.
And I don't think the proprietary folks are too happy either. It probably reminds them of the problems they had for a long time with introducing support for SVGA and Truecolor in their software.
I am still waiting for OpenCL to get traction. All this CUDA and StreamSDK stuff is tied to a particular company's hardware. I think there is a need for a free software implementation of OpenCL with different backends (NVidia-GPU, AMD-GPU, x86-CPU). Software developers will have great difficulties to support GPUs as long as there is no hardware-independent standard.
Photosynth actually started as a PhD project called Photo Tourism before it was taken over by Microsoft. There was a presentation where they downloaded a lot of pictures of the cathedral in Strasbourg. Given enough samples they were able to find typical viewpoints, they managed to align day- and night-shots, and they even could detect obstruction.
Sorry, I meant to say "disprove" (instead of prove). Ignore my earlier reply.
No. The extent of snow certainly does not support global warming. If it was increased precipitation only, you wouldn't get snow that far in the South.
If you read the last IPCC report, you will find the hockey stick graph and lots of dire predictions for our future. You certainly won't find predictions of increased snowfall in there. But recently global warming is being used to predict everything ranging from drought to increased snowfall.
Of course the current snowfall record does not disprove global warming either. It merely comes at a politically inconvenient time, when CRU, Penn State University, and the IPCC are being investigated for tampering with the temperature records.
No. The extent of snow certainly does not support global warming. If it was increased precipitation only, you wouldn't get snow that far in the South.
If you read the last IPCC report, you will find the hockey stick graph and lots of dire predictions for our future. You certainly won't find predictions of increased snowfall in there. But recently global warming is being used to predict everything ranging from drought to increased snowfall.
Of course the current snowfall record does not prove global warming either. It merely comes at a politically inconvenient time, when CRU, Penn State University, and the IPCC are being investigated for tampering with the temperature records.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/university.html helps. You may also ask the funding body for help if it is an external one. Finally there is the Freedom Of Information Act. But first try to resolve this within the institution you are working for. Resolving means that you get a copyright disclaimer.
ISOC-NY Event: Eben Moglen ‘Freedom in the Cloud’ – 2/5/2010. ISOC-NY afterward created a provisional page on their Wiki about a Freedom Box.
The GPL already contains a clause which requires the distributor of GPL software to grant a non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide patent license.
The article however suggests some kind of club where members use their patents defensively against non-members. That's not going to be effective unless you restrict membership. But I don't see how you can restrict membership without starting to discriminate users and developers of the software.
NVidia will die if it doesn't provide free software drivers to its customers.
No third party APIs are allowed. I.e. the terms and conditions are against distribution of wrappers for scripting languages like Ruby or Python. At this point Adobe is probably the last big company still willing to accept the risks associated with contributing to Apple software.
Myself I am developing HornetsEye which is a Ruby-extension for doing computer vision.
The problem with supporting various types is that you end up with a lot of possible combinations when doing computations. I.e. say if you want to support arrays of 8-, 16-, 32-, and 64-bit integers (signed and unsigned) as well as 32-bit and 64-bit floating point, you have 10 ** 2 possible combinations of types when element-wise adding two arrays.
If speed is not an issue however, you could just use Ruby's dynamic typing. Ruby's integer classes use dynamic typing in their computations in order to avoid numeric overflow:
( 10 ** 2 ).class
# Fixnum
( 10 ** 10 ).class
# Bignum
Also you can seamlessly combine rational numbers, big numbers, complex numbers, and matrices in a seamless way which is really neat:
require 'mathn'
2/4
# 1/2
( Complex::I / 2 ) ** 3
# Complex(0, -1/8)
1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3
# Complex(1/2, 1/3)
( 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 ) ** 5
# Complex(-199/2592, 61/3888)
( 1 / 2 + Complex::I / 3 ) ** 24
# Complex(584824319281/4738381338321616896, 161741277005/32905425960566784)
a = Matrix[ [ 2 / 3, 3 / 4 ], [ 4 / 5, 5 / 6 ] ]
# Matrix[[2/3, 3/4], [4/5, 5/6]]
b = a.inv
# Matrix[[-75/4, 135/8], [18, -15]]
a * b
# Matrix[[1, 0], [0, 1]]
Go back to work!
At this point Google Android would be in a better position if they had used the GPL.
You should try talking to trees as an exercise. They are a pretty alien life form IMHO.
I'm just trying to imagine how ridiculous this must look to a Squeak/Smalltalk developer ;)
I don't know how it is over there in the US. But here in UK I can buy decent movies on DVD for 3£. I'm not going to spend more money on an electronic book if it comes with DRM. I hope that authors such as Cory Doctorow will take over eventually. I.e. that books will be based on donations or sponsorships.
My brain is getting repetitive strain injury from all this April fool jokes. If the next news is about the Ubuntu security update setting up a bot-net, I might just ignore it.
I think the Real 3D article explains it.
Didn't know about this myself. So far I thought that circular polarisers are only used to convert linear polarised light to circular polarised light in photography. I.e. you want to suppress the reflection of a window in the scene without suppressing reflections in the camera optics itself.
Doesn't work to well with something like MySpace or Facebook. Somebody else adds you as a friend, uploads a picture and tags your face, enters your detail in a search box, sends you a message, ...
Furthermore they track what groups you are part of and what other profiles you are watching. Also there are social widgets on websites all over the internet. Even if nobody betrays you, they will catch you sooner or later ;)
Especially because back then, you still needed MS-DOS to run underneath Windows.
I remember this. I used to create a file called c:\win.bat with the following content:
@echo off
echo This program requires Microsoft Windows
On booting the machine it would actually run that BAT file instead of the Windows executable.
Ultimately nobody needs advertising. And a lot of articles these days are "content" with the purpose of "generating" advertising revenue. There would still be plenty of stuff to read even if every internet user only wrote a single article about the most important thing in his/her life. The average quality might even benefit.
I can see at least five articles today about ad blocking. Each of them coming with advertising. It is insane. Everytime a "big" story comes up, hundreds of bloggers pick it up and run with it. And many of them seem to have no prior knowledge about what they are writing about.
I am only waiting for Ruppert Murdoch to join the debate at this point.
I was expecting the article to give some hands on experience on how to justify to paying customers that sharing of code goes both ways. Instead the author explains how he justifies to customers that he is not sharing his code with anybody. I bet as a software developer he would never agree to pay for development under these conditions himself.
People still confuse the X11-desktop with Windows. They also confuse Compiz with MacOS. Maybe the strategy is to make sure that the desktop colours are distinctly different from the colour schemes used by the proprietary operating systems. If you choose one of the most popular themes onGNOME-look or KDE-look you will likely wind up with something that very much resembles Windows or MacOS.
From the article:
By Prodeus' account, he notified Microsoft of the flaw Feb. 1, about four weeks before publishing his findings.
I am not sure whether ACTA plays into this but a quick look at the court's press release indicates that they had to do quite a bit of work to prevent legal intimidation by the European Union:
The regulations under scrutiny are to be understood as an implementation of the European Parliament's and Commission's directive 2006/24/EG about data retention from the year 2006.
Die angegriffenen Vorschriften verstehen sich als Umsetzung der Richtlinie 2006/24/EG des Europäischen Parlaments und des Rates über die Vorratsdatenspeicherung aus dem Jahre 2006. (The regulations under scrutiny are to be understood as an implementation of the European Parliament's and Commission's directive 2006/24/EG about data retention from the year 2006.)
Furthermore they state that the German data retention act goes way beyond what would have been required by the European Commission and that there is no need to involve the European Court at this point.
One of the remaining problems under GNU/Linux is proprietary NVidia and ATI graphics drivers. It is not legal to distribute them which makes it impossible to properly integrate them into the package repository. Furthermore it is not possible to change the software (fix bugs or just compile with a new version of libc). This kind of problems may be tolerable for acceleration of 3D graphics but I wouldn't want to have this kind of problems when it comes to basic features such as parallel computing.
And I don't think the proprietary folks are too happy either. It probably reminds them of the problems they had for a long time with introducing support for SVGA and Truecolor in their software.
I am still waiting for OpenCL to get traction. All this CUDA and StreamSDK stuff is tied to a particular company's hardware. I think there is a need for a free software implementation of OpenCL with different backends (NVidia-GPU, AMD-GPU, x86-CPU). Software developers will have great difficulties to support GPUs as long as there is no hardware-independent standard.
Photosynth actually started as a PhD project called Photo Tourism before it was taken over by Microsoft. There was a presentation where they downloaded a lot of pictures of the cathedral in Strasbourg. Given enough samples they were able to find typical viewpoints, they managed to align day- and night-shots, and they even could detect obstruction.
Sorry, I meant to say "disprove" (instead of prove). Ignore my earlier reply.
No. The extent of snow certainly does not support global warming. If it was increased precipitation only, you wouldn't get snow that far in the South.
If you read the last IPCC report, you will find the hockey stick graph and lots of dire predictions for our future. You certainly won't find predictions of increased snowfall in there. But recently global warming is being used to predict everything ranging from drought to increased snowfall.
Of course the current snowfall record does not disprove global warming either. It merely comes at a politically inconvenient time, when CRU, Penn State University, and the IPCC are being investigated for tampering with the temperature records.
No. The extent of snow certainly does not support global warming. If it was increased precipitation only, you wouldn't get snow that far in the South.
If you read the last IPCC report, you will find the hockey stick graph and lots of dire predictions for our future. You certainly won't find predictions of increased snowfall in there. But recently global warming is being used to predict everything ranging from drought to increased snowfall.
Of course the current snowfall record does not prove global warming either. It merely comes at a politically inconvenient time, when CRU, Penn State University, and the IPCC are being investigated for tampering with the temperature records.