Same issue as painting elephants. This has been discussed in copyright literature (PDF warning). Internally, the copyright office excluded works produced by animals, as well as works produced entirely by "mechanical processes or random selection without any contribution by a human author."
The U.S. Supreme Court's general rule that a copyrightable work's âoeauthor is the party who actually creates the work, that is, the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression entitled to copyright protection."... Broad and traditional notions of copyright authorship assumed the answer to that question was limited to human creators. But no definition of "author" appears in the copyright statute. Neither does the Constitution's reference to authors mandate that they be human.
From a theoretical perspective, the question often comes down to creativity - can animals be creative? Animal research tends to suggest that animals CAN be creative, to the same extent as humans. The issues are similar with computer generated "expression" - can a computer be creative? Should randomness be considered creativity?
However you come out on those questions, courts have decided, based on a policy choice favoring humans, to exclude animal authorship. Which makes some sense, since an elephant doesn't have capacity to enforce its rights (you could have a guardian do it, but we don't allow animal guardians to sue vets for malpractice, so it is hard to see why this would be different).
With elephant paintings, the copyright is typically in the name of the zoo, or whoever enabled the elephant to make the painting (e.g. selected colors, brush type, canvas type for the animal). In the case of a monkey who took a picture, probably the zoo or the camera owner.
Coincidentally, the law makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. So yeah, probable cause == brown skin, even though the law explicitly disallows racial profiling.
The disclaimer is unenforceable, they can't make you delete the email or do anything at all. Law firms add it so as not to waive attorney-client privilege if they send you any privileged information by mistake. With the disclaimer, if you get something by accident, it can't come in as evidence to trial. Without the disclaimer, they lose the privilege as to that material because they shared it with a 3rd party. IANAL (yet).
I can't believe this is modded informative. It is a joke people, he's referring to Godzilla and Mothra. The giant earth worm seems to be a reference to this Korean news article (though it remains unmentioned elsewhere).
Just FYI, 10,000 ft/min is only about 113 miles per hour. Typical cruising speed for a long-distance large jet aircraft is about 550 mph, so the pilots had slowed the plane quite a bit. The plane didn't go screaming into the ocean.
Finance pays extremely well. Why make $100,000 at Google when you can make $300,000 at Goldman Sachs? But here's the thing: revenue per employee at Goldman is $1.1 million. At Google it's $1.2 million. At Apple it's $1.3 million. Divide net income by revenue and you get a similar margin for all three businesses.
This all suggests that tech companies can, and perhaps should, be salary-competitive with finance for engineering-heavy jobs.
But big tech companies like Google aren't hurting for talent. Plenty of bright young computer scientists would far rather than work at Google than on Wall Street, even with a lower salary, simply because they consider it more interesting and fun. It's startups that are being drained of talent by finance, and that's what the author of the article is concerned about.
Shouldn't google at least have far more non-salary related costs than Goldman?
According to Wikipedia, Google's profit margin last year was 29 percent ($8.5B profit on $29.3B revenue) and Goldman's was 21 percent ($8.4B profit on $39.1B revenue). You're probably right that Google has more non-payroll costs, but at least last year, Google had a much bigger slice of its money left after all costs, payroll and otherwise.
They could be salary-competitive with Goldman and still have a >20 percent overall profit margin. The reason they just pocket the money instead is that even with their meager-compared-to-finance salaries, they still basically have their pick of the finest employees. I think they simply don't feel that finance is stealing all that many good candidates. But if Google et al start to have a measurable "Shit all the people we want are ditching us for Wall Street" problem, you can expect to see their engineering salaries go way up.
Like most, this article attacks investment banks in the wrong way. Investment banking is not quantitative finance. It's core business is M&A, underwriting and asset management.
Keeping engineers out of finance is good for both parties IMO. Engineers and mathematics majors became "must haves" for financial firms beginning in the 70's and 80's, but really seemed to hit full throttle in the 90's, with the emergence of hedge funds, such as LTCM. Many hedge funds and I-banks saw arbitrage opportunities and needed quant guys to come in and build models to exploit these quickly, especially due to the rapid technology shift and speed.
Engineers and mathematicians don't really understand some of the key issues with finance and their models never are able to properly measure risk or build the proper safety nets against things that happened in the Wall St. collapse of '08, the Asian Crisis of '97, Russian Crisis of '98, etc.
I agree with the author to the point that engineers are best served in other industries. But, I also feel it would benefit the banks, as well.
You can't blame someone for taking the sure bet, especially when they're so burdened with debt. Crippling student loans are issue number one to address if new graduates are to be persuaded to be entrepreneurs instead of I-bankers.
Besides, there are way more PhDs in physics and math than there are professorships; the fact that financial firms hire them is actually a gain in their case, because otherwise you'd have a bunch of really bright people doing data entry or teaching high school, and not using any of their trained skills.
I'm just quoting, don't give me karma, give it to the reddit posters.
Yep, you're missing the incredibly 1-sided contracts users sign to access any cell networks. Here are some relevant gems from the AT&T contract:
We may, at our discretion, suspend your account if we believe your data usage is excessive, unusual or is better suited to another rate plan.
Furthermore, plans (unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/smartphone to computer accessories, BLUETOOTH\® or any other wireless technology) to Personal Computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose.
Accordingly, AT&T reserves the right to (i) deny, disconnect, modify and/or terminate Service, without notice, to anyone it believes is using the Service in any manner prohibited or whose usage adversely impacts its wireless network or service levels or hinders access to its wireless network...
Tethering without a tethering plan breaches your contract, so they can refuse to provide service, request you pay more for your plan, or do about anything.
Oh how I wish I could have the iPod hardware with an open source program in Linux to put music on it... unfortunately Apple does not want this.
You can. I know, the software that interfaces with iPods on linux are all something of a kludge, and Apple occasionally breaks compatibility and jerks you around. But you can run open software on your iPod and make it really easy. After screwing around with iPod loaders for years, I switched to rockbox and never looked back.
In the last few years, I've found search results have been dominated more and more by content mills like associated content, ehow, hubpages, about, and others; or some low quality Q&A page, like yahoo answers. The pages are hastily written and edited, and low content. The articles are also typically written by someone without any relevant knowledge or experience - so the information is common knowledge or wrong.
If google's metrics say quality is up, but their users think quality is down, then google's metrics need to be revised to match user experience more closely. I've started using duck duck go because they block content mills, and thus I think their results are as good or better than google, even without the complicated algorithms and all the data google has accumulated.
Thanks to the UDRP and ACPA, that isn't really a problem.
ICANN's UDRP simply requires a showing that the domain name is confusing similar (or identical) to a third party's mark, the registrant has no legitimate interests in the name, and the name is being used in bad faith. There is a lot that goes into showing & rebutting these steps, but that's the gist. UDRP isn't the law of a single country, so it governs disputes covering most TLD (it is mandatory by contract). The remedy is transferal of domain, no damages. It is low cost and quick.
Before the UDRP was released, congress got impatient and passed 15 U.S.C. 1125 (ACPA). It is a new subsection of the trademark statute (originally Lanham act) and imposes liability on a person who registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a distinctive mark (or dilutes a famous mark), and has a bad-faith intent to profit from the domain name. Again there is a lot that goes into showing or disproving these elements, but that's the gist. Like UDRP, it only covers domain names, not usernames [e.g. twitter "united air" account] or sublevel domains. Unlike UDRP, ACPA requires taking someone to court, costs a fortune, takes forever to resolve, and damages are available.
a federal judge has already opened the door saying jailbreaking an iPhone to get additional functionality (not piracy) is legal.
Actually, this was the library of congress granting a 3 year exemption to the DMCA as allowed by the DMCA. AFAIK all court cases over the DMCA have been unfavorable to modders and hackers.
Since Caveon Test Security . . . began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent.
How can anyone possibly know this? If they're detecting 70% less cheating, how do they know it is because students are cheating less rather than cheating in less detectable ways? The company methods aren't published or peer reviewed, and the graphs on the website are post-hoc graphs from excel (rather than whatever they use to data crunch - R, SAS, etc). As pointed out in the article, the company says nothing of type 1 (false positive) or type 2 (false negative) error rates. If students study together and have similar answers, particularly if the test is open book, how likely are they to be flagged as cheaters?
I'd love a silver bullet to stop cheating, but I'd like it to be something we can all agree is a good check. More fundamentally, multiple choice tests are a lousy way to test anything but recall - they're just not capable of testing real learning: comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Maybe we ought to move towards other types of tests, less vulnerable to hidden cheating.
The reason he's still living is that he hasn't exposed anything embarrassing enough to Russia, or another country that doesn't have any problem getting their hands dirty.
If that wasn't enough, they're more likely to be arrested than make an arrest. They're absurdly expensive: we're paying $200M per arrest, about 4 arrests a year, and the arrests are almost exclusively small quantity drug possession charges. Last, on the very small percentage of flights they're actually on, they're not even sitting among the potential threats, they're always cloistered up in first class, which makes them really really easy to spot and really useless in spotting anything suspicious.
This isn't tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons occurs with non-excludable but exhaustible resources. Piracy makes games non-excludable, but the game is utterly inexaustible.
If a certain viewpoint is preferred by 90% of people, do you really think that 10% will keep a niche rather than be bullied & overwhelmed? What about when viewpoints are wrong? In vitro fertilization had overwhelming opposition when it was first pioneered, and human history is rife with illogical prejudice and absurd beliefs. I'd like to be an optimist like you, but it seems - with regard to religious or political issues - the majority typically attempts to impose its vision on others.
In English Common Law you follow precedent unless you can satisfactorily distinguish the instant case from prior cases. If you use your personal "judgment" to adjudicate that is judicial activism.
How do you think common law is/was developed/created? It is judges modifying existing law to fit new circumstances. If you have a law or precedent immediately on point, ruling against controlling authority (legislative or judicial) is activism. But when judges are presented with a new situation without controlling authority directly relevant, they have to use their own judgment to determine whether extending/reducing a law/precedent to cover/exclude a defendant is fair or not.
The PS3 is building up to be the Dream Console for emulation.
I softmodded my wii, it took about 10 minutes. It lets me run emulators for N64, SNES, NES, Genesis, NeoGeo, PS1, NDS, DOS, GBA, ScummVM, and more. I haven't seen any dreamcast emulators, but if it can run PSX games, dreamcast shouldn't be outside the realm of possibility. So other than running PS2 games instead of gamecube ones, I don't see why you would consider the PS3 a "dream console" for emulation when the wii can already do what the PS3 hopes to accomplish.
Agnostic and atheist gets confused all the time. Theism is about belief. Athiests do not believe in god. Theists do. Gnostism is about knowledge. Agnostics claim to have no special knowledge one way or another. Gnostics claim they do. You can have agnostic theists - people who don't claim to know, but believe in god; agnostic atheists - people who don't know, and don't believe in a god; or gnostic theists - people who claim to know and believe in the existence of a god. I suppose you could have gnostic athiests if you had people claiming knowledge about the lack of existence of god, and did not believe in a god.
I'm not an expert on this, but I believe Presidents can enter into executive agreements with other countries only until the President's actions affect US citizenry. Then we've got an ultra vires issue or presentment problem unless congress passes the agreement.
Executive agreements obviously cannot violate the Constitution. Since the Reid v. Covert decision, the U.S. has made it explicit that although the U.S. intends to abide by a treaty, if the treaty is ruled in violation of the Constitution by federal courts, then the U.S. legally can't follow the treaty since the U.S. signature would be ultra vires.
Plus treaty law (including executive agreements, congressional-executive treaties, and real treaties) is incorporated into the body of U.S. federal law. So congress can modify or repeal treaties afterwards, and SCOTUS can review it.
However, I'm still wary. According to an EFF article published in The Yale Journal of International Law [PDF]. Even if this article is true, the agreements are still subject to modification after they're passed, but that shouldn't be good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
From a theoretical perspective, the question often comes down to creativity - can animals be creative? Animal research tends to suggest that animals CAN be creative, to the same extent as humans. The issues are similar with computer generated "expression" - can a computer be creative? Should randomness be considered creativity?
However you come out on those questions, courts have decided, based on a policy choice favoring humans, to exclude animal authorship. Which makes some sense, since an elephant doesn't have capacity to enforce its rights (you could have a guardian do it, but we don't allow animal guardians to sue vets for malpractice, so it is hard to see why this would be different).
With elephant paintings, the copyright is typically in the name of the zoo, or whoever enabled the elephant to make the painting (e.g. selected colors, brush type, canvas type for the animal). In the case of a monkey who took a picture, probably the zoo or the camera owner.
Coincidentally, the law makes it a state crime to be an illegal immigrant. So yeah, probable cause == brown skin, even though the law explicitly disallows racial profiling.
You don't even need that. Just shoot the the exposed tires and it won't be protecting anything except the piece of dirt it is stuck on.
The disclaimer is unenforceable, they can't make you delete the email or do anything at all. Law firms add it so as not to waive attorney-client privilege if they send you any privileged information by mistake. With the disclaimer, if you get something by accident, it can't come in as evidence to trial. Without the disclaimer, they lose the privilege as to that material because they shared it with a 3rd party. IANAL (yet).
I can't believe this is modded informative. It is a joke people, he's referring to Godzilla and Mothra. The giant earth worm seems to be a reference to this Korean news article (though it remains unmentioned elsewhere).
Just FYI, 10,000 ft/min is only about 113 miles per hour. Typical cruising speed for a long-distance large jet aircraft is about 550 mph, so the pilots had slowed the plane quite a bit. The plane didn't go screaming into the ocean.
I'm just quoting, don't give me karma, give it to the reddit posters.
Tethering without a tethering plan breaches your contract, so they can refuse to provide service, request you pay more for your plan, or do about anything.
Oh how I wish I could have the iPod hardware with an open source program in Linux to put music on it ... unfortunately Apple does not want this.
You can. I know, the software that interfaces with iPods on linux are all something of a kludge, and Apple occasionally breaks compatibility and jerks you around. But you can run open software on your iPod and make it really easy. After screwing around with iPod loaders for years, I switched to rockbox and never looked back.
Hopefully they learn somewhat from digg and redesign in a faster less buggy & controlling way.
In the last few years, I've found search results have been dominated more and more by content mills like associated content, ehow, hubpages, about, and others; or some low quality Q&A page, like yahoo answers. The pages are hastily written and edited, and low content. The articles are also typically written by someone without any relevant knowledge or experience - so the information is common knowledge or wrong.
If google's metrics say quality is up, but their users think quality is down, then google's metrics need to be revised to match user experience more closely. I've started using duck duck go because they block content mills, and thus I think their results are as good or better than google, even without the complicated algorithms and all the data google has accumulated.
Thanks to the UDRP and ACPA, that isn't really a problem.
ICANN's UDRP simply requires a showing that the domain name is confusing similar (or identical) to a third party's mark, the registrant has no legitimate interests in the name, and the name is being used in bad faith. There is a lot that goes into showing & rebutting these steps, but that's the gist. UDRP isn't the law of a single country, so it governs disputes covering most TLD (it is mandatory by contract). The remedy is transferal of domain, no damages. It is low cost and quick.
Before the UDRP was released, congress got impatient and passed 15 U.S.C. 1125 (ACPA). It is a new subsection of the trademark statute (originally Lanham act) and imposes liability on a person who registers, traffics in, or uses a domain name that is identical or confusingly similar to a distinctive mark (or dilutes a famous mark), and has a bad-faith intent to profit from the domain name. Again there is a lot that goes into showing or disproving these elements, but that's the gist. Like UDRP, it only covers domain names, not usernames [e.g. twitter "united air" account] or sublevel domains. Unlike UDRP, ACPA requires taking someone to court, costs a fortune, takes forever to resolve, and damages are available.
a federal judge has already opened the door saying jailbreaking an iPhone to get additional functionality (not piracy) is legal.
Actually, this was the library of congress granting a 3 year exemption to the DMCA as allowed by the DMCA. AFAIK all court cases over the DMCA have been unfavorable to modders and hackers.
Since Caveon Test Security . . . began working for the state of Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent.
How can anyone possibly know this? If they're detecting 70% less cheating, how do they know it is because students are cheating less rather than cheating in less detectable ways? The company methods aren't published or peer reviewed, and the graphs on the website are post-hoc graphs from excel (rather than whatever they use to data crunch - R, SAS, etc). As pointed out in the article, the company says nothing of type 1 (false positive) or type 2 (false negative) error rates. If students study together and have similar answers, particularly if the test is open book, how likely are they to be flagged as cheaters?
I'd love a silver bullet to stop cheating, but I'd like it to be something we can all agree is a good check. More fundamentally, multiple choice tests are a lousy way to test anything but recall - they're just not capable of testing real learning: comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, or evaluation. Maybe we ought to move towards other types of tests, less vulnerable to hidden cheating.
The reason he's still living is that he hasn't exposed anything embarrassing enough to Russia, or another country that doesn't have any problem getting their hands dirty.
That and no one knows what is in his insurance policy.
If that wasn't enough, they're more likely to be arrested than make an arrest. They're absurdly expensive: we're paying $200M per arrest, about 4 arrests a year, and the arrests are almost exclusively small quantity drug possession charges. Last, on the very small percentage of flights they're actually on, they're not even sitting among the potential threats, they're always cloistered up in first class, which makes them really really easy to spot and really useless in spotting anything suspicious.
This isn't tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons occurs with non-excludable but exhaustible resources. Piracy makes games non-excludable, but the game is utterly inexaustible.
If a certain viewpoint is preferred by 90% of people, do you really think that 10% will keep a niche rather than be bullied & overwhelmed? What about when viewpoints are wrong? In vitro fertilization had overwhelming opposition when it was first pioneered, and human history is rife with illogical prejudice and absurd beliefs. I'd like to be an optimist like you, but it seems - with regard to religious or political issues - the majority typically attempts to impose its vision on others.
Copyright law isn't as broke as the justice system that overcompensates for infringement
Replace "justice system" with "legislature" and I'm with you. However I still think copyright - its scope and length - is broken.
In English Common Law you follow precedent unless you can satisfactorily distinguish the instant case from prior cases. If you use your personal "judgment" to adjudicate that is judicial activism.
How do you think common law is/was developed/created? It is judges modifying existing law to fit new circumstances. If you have a law or precedent immediately on point, ruling against controlling authority (legislative or judicial) is activism. But when judges are presented with a new situation without controlling authority directly relevant, they have to use their own judgment to determine whether extending/reducing a law/precedent to cover/exclude a defendant is fair or not.
Doesn't someone spellcheck these summaries?
The US DMCA has the same requirement, but the "effective" has been read by courts to simply cover whether the DRM works, not how easy it is to break.
The PS3 is building up to be the Dream Console for emulation.
I softmodded my wii, it took about 10 minutes. It lets me run emulators for N64, SNES, NES, Genesis, NeoGeo, PS1, NDS, DOS, GBA, ScummVM, and more. I haven't seen any dreamcast emulators, but if it can run PSX games, dreamcast shouldn't be outside the realm of possibility. So other than running PS2 games instead of gamecube ones, I don't see why you would consider the PS3 a "dream console" for emulation when the wii can already do what the PS3 hopes to accomplish.
Agnostic and atheist gets confused all the time. Theism is about belief. Athiests do not believe in god. Theists do. Gnostism is about knowledge. Agnostics claim to have no special knowledge one way or another. Gnostics claim they do. You can have agnostic theists - people who don't claim to know, but believe in god; agnostic atheists - people who don't know, and don't believe in a god; or gnostic theists - people who claim to know and believe in the existence of a god. I suppose you could have gnostic athiests if you had people claiming knowledge about the lack of existence of god, and did not believe in a god.
I'm not an expert on this, but I believe Presidents can enter into executive agreements with other countries only until the President's actions affect US citizenry. Then we've got an ultra vires issue or presentment problem unless congress passes the agreement.
Executive agreements obviously cannot violate the Constitution. Since the Reid v. Covert decision, the U.S. has made it explicit that although the U.S. intends to abide by a treaty, if the treaty is ruled in violation of the Constitution by federal courts, then the U.S. legally can't follow the treaty since the U.S. signature would be ultra vires.
Plus treaty law (including executive agreements, congressional-executive treaties, and real treaties) is incorporated into the body of U.S. federal law. So congress can modify or repeal treaties afterwards, and SCOTUS can review it.
However, I'm still wary. According to an EFF article published in The Yale Journal of International Law [PDF]. Even if this article is true, the agreements are still subject to modification after they're passed, but that shouldn't be good enough.