Perhaps you should mostly RTFCs, and probably should have started at the begining, with Circular 1, Copyright Basics
The operant section is excerpted:
WHO CAN CLAIM COPYRIGHT
Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.
In the case of works made for hire, the employer and not the employee is considered to be the author. Section 101 of the copyright law defines a "work made for hire" as:
* (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
* (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as:
o a contribution to a collective work
o a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work
o a translation
o a supplementary work
o a compilation
o an instructional text
o a test
o answer material for a test
o an atlas
if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire....
A careful reading of the excerpt you provide from Circular 9 says that it is only "likely" that a work created within the "scope of employment" will be deemed a "work for hire" - clearly NOT a default setting. And this does not even begin to address the areas, as discussed in this topic, where works are created outside the "scope of employment" or under a contracting agreement or arrangement.
This is why savy people always spell out the copyright ownership issues around created works in WRITING, which was really the crux of my post. I guess you could rely on your own interpretation of the Circulars to protect yourself, but it is clearly bad business. An enterprising attorney might just be able to parse terms like "scope of employment" contrary to your interpretations and drive the proverbial truck through the other loopholes.
Recall, fortunes can turn on the what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Put your GPA in perspective - it's probably better than John Kerry's or G.W. Bush's, and look where they are.
And if you want a senior level position, listen to steve - follow your heart, find what you like, and start your OWN company and you can be Chairman, President, & CEO...
At the take-down, a DHS big-wig was heard to exclaim: "Commander, tear this server apart until you've found those copyrighted files! And bring me the infringing users, I want them alive!"
To which the sysadmin replied: "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a server is insignificant next to the power of the BitTorrent."
"If you only knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father... He joined the Department of Homeland Security!" -- Apologies to Darth Vader
Counting, and cardinality in general, is a very subtle mathematical concept, involving the creation of a 1-1 correspondence between the members of the set to be counted, and the members of the set of Natural numbers (usually denoted N). It really gets interesting when you start to try to find the cardinality of infinite sets, which, of course, are exactly those sets which can be placed into a 1-1 correspondence with a proper subset of themselves. You find you have both countable (denumerable) and uncountable (nondenumerable) infinities, where countable implies the set in question can be placed in a 1-1 correspondence with N.
And while were on the subject of orders of infinity, we might as well begin to explore Cantor's transfinite numbers (i.e the aleph series), which of course will lead to an interesting discussion of the Continuum Hypothesis...
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Episode III fragments suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." - Apologies to Obi-Wan
Reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves -- a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"
I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this "discovery" -- even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew."
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! -- Richard P. Feynman
No, I think that honor would have to belong to Mission Impossible:
The scene is where Tom Cruise dangles in a ridiculous though somewhat acrobatic fashion above the computer in order avoid all the hi-tech intrusion detection sensors in the floor, as well as the ambient temperature monitors which are sensitive enough to detect minute temp rises in the room that would imply the presence of unauthorized persons -- yet somehow tapping on the keyboard and downloading highly classified information to the floppy drive (hilarious in its own right) when all the sensors indicate that absolutely no one can be in the room doesn't raise any security flags or alarms (I guess the system must have been sourced from the low bid vendor).
While on the subject of original ideas... This reminds me of a quote by Bill Gates spoken to Steve Jobs in a scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley:
"Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? 'That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first.' You're too late."
On another note, kinda makes you wonder what kind of world will be left once corporations and their minions in Congress manage to lock up every last thought, process, concept, idea, and all their respective derivatives (more properly refered to as IP theft in the brave, new lexicon) through draconian copyright, IP, and patent laws. A lot less creative, I'll bet...
"I mean Picasso had a saying - he said 'good artists copy, great artists steal'. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas..." -- Steve Jobs to Robert X. Cringely in Triumph of the Nerds
Personally, I think MS should first focus their energy on producing an OS that doesn't crash since, in this particlar application, an OS crash would seem to imply a Car crash (at least some of the time).
In any case, they'll at least need to work on updating the Windows EULA, getting a click-through assent that accepts that a fatal system error may lead to user fatality. When bundled with their standard disclaimers of any warranties, your wrongful death damages will, of course, be limited to the lesser of the purchase price of the software or $5. Come to think of it, Ford should have sourced their Explorer tires from MS instead of Firestone - could have saved themselves plenty of settlement money...
Anyone employing Excel for any statistical calculations should get a nice chill from reading any of B.D McCullough's papers on Microsoft's egregious (and mostly uncorrected or corrected badly) errors in this area.
Click here for a link to one of his recent critiques entitled:
On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003
Here is a nice quote from the above paper:
"...persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution...Persons desiring to conduct statistical analyses of data are advised not to use Excel 2003."
"Excel is like a bikini. What it reveals is suggestive, but what it conceals is vital." -- apologies to Aaron Levenstein
Or how adding senarios about having sex with interns and staffers, then plotting to murder their reputations? Of course, they'd have to change the name to Grand Theft White House, the Clinton Years...
Interesting, isn't it, how at a time when consumer debt is at an all-time high ($1.7 trillion in a $12 trillion US economy by GDP in 2004), that the credit card companies may have finally found a way to turn all their unsecured debt into debt secured by Uncle Sam's new bankruptcy laws (if, as expected, the House passes it and W signs it).
When Senator Orrin Hatch was asked for comment on the Senate passage of the Bankruptcy bill, his response was "The short answer is fairness."
Point taken. And, in all fairness, I'm sure the next great idea hatched by our favorite RIAA-loving Senator will be to hold Senate hearings looking into the "fairness" of 30+ % interest rates, limitless punitive fees, 5+ credit card solicitations per day per mailbox, and universal default policies, in light of the new (pending) bankruptcy law. No doubt, we've all been told how these practices were "necessary" and the "cost" of banks doing business in a world were all the "deadbeats" could easily walk away from their responsiblities to "live life large" on the gravy-train that was the old bankruptcy regime. Now that it looks as if this "old world" is coming to an end, all these predatory and outrageous policies will be ending as well, right? It's only fair, right?
Unfortunately, ITRW, Hatch would be more likely to hold hearings to look into how to best add debtor's prison wings to Abu-Gharib and Gitmo (right next to the downloader-pirate wing, down the hall from Al-Qaeda wing) - after all, the boom is coming...
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
I agree with much of what you say. In my anecdote I was merely trying to contrast two different mindsets:
Mathematics as art - solving problems for the problems sake - and using the process to develop, link, and sometimes create mathematical ideas. Here, the process is usually at least as important as the result, if only for the development of the mathematician's mind and understanding of his subject.
vs.
Mathematics as a sophisticated tool to be employed in a craft like engineering - and here I'll agree, somewhat, that the artifact produced as the end result usually trumps the process.
But that said, there is at least one person in this world who, when marveling at an "Engineering work of art", can't help but ponder the beauty behind the utilitarian beauty of the artifact - the beauty of mathematics.
--
"I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions that serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature." - René Descartes
Thank you for your insightful post on the Insightfulness quotient of ignorant, but otherwise Intersesting or Informative posts, and their relationship to moderators and/or posters who may be deficient in their comprehension of quantum mechanics.
--
"Plato winces when I track dust on his rugs: he knows that I am walking on his vanity." -- Diogenes of Sinope (AKA The Dog)
This reminds me of a time when I was taking some engineering courses subsequent to completing my undergrad in mathematics.
The professor had given a "challenge problem" in dynamics. I've long since forgotten the specifics of the problem, but this, I do remember:
I spent several days pondering the problem, trying to figure out how to decouple the equations or do a gradient walk or some such - in order to obtain a closed form global solution.
Having had no luck, I asked an engineering major student in the same class how he was coming on the problem. He said he had solved it a couple of nights ago. As I excitedly began to quiz him on what math wizardry he had employed, he began to look at me as if I was from some strange and alien planet. He informed me that he had "plugged it into TK-solver" and out came the answer.
Talk about an "AHA!" moment - it would have never occurred to me that numerical analysis was "good enough" for the job, which of course was to obtain a numerical answer that could be "engineered" with. The problem probably didn't even have an analytical solution proper.
Sounds funny, but we were coming at the problem from two completely different perspectives. (BTW, it was then that I decided that I was not cut out to be an engineer!)
Oh, and one more thing...
I did gain one other valuable insight from that dynamics class that has stuck with me to this day. Namely, that a rotating body is stable only when rotating about its major or minor axis - rotation about any other axis will induce a "flip"... Try it out with a DVD case or some such;-)
Why are you getting your panties and Gödel all in a bunch?
Although they are closely linked, I don't think a proof is a theorem per se. You see, a proof is a logically valid deduction of a theorem from the theorem's premises, as well as the system's axioms and previously proven theorems.
Hence, a proof might be more accurately described as that which confers theoremhood on a given proposition, but certainly should not be confused with the theorem itself... you fuckwit.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should mostly RTFCs, and probably should have started at the begining, with Circular 1, Copyright Basics
The operant section is excerpted:
WHO CAN CLAIM COPYRIGHT
Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.
In the case of works made for hire, the employer and not the employee is considered to be the author. Section 101 of the copyright law defines a "work made for hire" as:
* (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
* (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as:
o a contribution to a collective work
o a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work
o a translation
o a supplementary work
o a compilation
o an instructional text
o a test
o answer material for a test
o an atlas
if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire....
A careful reading of the excerpt you provide from Circular 9 says that it is only "likely" that a work created within the "scope of employment" will be deemed a "work for hire" - clearly NOT a default setting. And this does not even begin to address the areas, as discussed in this topic, where works are created outside the "scope of employment" or under a contracting agreement or arrangement.
This is why savy people always spell out the copyright ownership issues around created works in WRITING, which was really the crux of my post. I guess you could rely on your own interpretation of the Circulars to protect yourself, but it is clearly bad business. An enterprising attorney might just be able to parse terms like "scope of employment" contrary to your interpretations and drive the proverbial truck through the other loopholes.
Recall, fortunes can turn on the what the meaning of the word "is" is.
Copyright auto-vests to the author, unless the contract specifically assigns it to the paying company. I believe the term of art is "works for hire."
Yeah, nothing much ever comes of grad-school dev...
Right Larry? Right Sergey?
Put your GPA in perspective - it's probably better than John Kerry's or G.W. Bush's, and look where they are.
And if you want a senior level position, listen to steve - follow your heart, find what you like, and start your OWN company and you can be Chairman, President, & CEO...
This know as perpetual copyright on the installment plan...
Careful now, or I might just blow my Sierpinski gasket!
At the take-down, a DHS big-wig was heard to exclaim: "Commander, tear this server apart until you've found those copyrighted files! And bring me the infringing users, I want them alive!"
.. He joined the Department of Homeland Security!" -- Apologies to Darth Vader
To which the sysadmin replied: "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a server is insignificant next to the power of the BitTorrent."
"If you only knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Infinite, eh?
Counting, and cardinality in general, is a very subtle mathematical concept, involving the creation of a 1-1 correspondence between the members of the set to be counted, and the members of the set of Natural numbers (usually denoted N). It really gets interesting when you start to try to find the cardinality of infinite sets, which, of course, are exactly those sets which can be placed into a 1-1 correspondence with a proper subset of themselves. You find you have both countable (denumerable) and uncountable (nondenumerable) infinities, where countable implies the set in question can be placed in a 1-1 correspondence with N.
And while were on the subject of orders of infinity, we might as well begin to explore Cantor's transfinite numbers (i.e the aleph series), which of course will lead to an interesting discussion of the Continuum Hypothesis...
"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Episode III fragments suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." - Apologies to Obi-Wan
IntelliVision used a click-wheel type controller on their 70s video game console way back in the, uh, 70s - insanely great engineering...
Reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves -- a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"
I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."
All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by this "discovery" -- even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal). They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew."
I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way -- by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile! -- Richard P. Feynman
No, I think that honor would have to belong to Mission Impossible:
The scene is where Tom Cruise dangles in a ridiculous though somewhat acrobatic fashion above the computer in order avoid all the hi-tech intrusion detection sensors in the floor, as well as the ambient temperature monitors which are sensitive enough to detect minute temp rises in the room that would imply the presence of unauthorized persons -- yet somehow tapping on the keyboard and downloading highly classified information to the floppy drive (hilarious in its own right) when all the sensors indicate that absolutely no one can be in the room doesn't raise any security flags or alarms (I guess the system must have been sourced from the low bid vendor).
While on the subject of original ideas... This reminds me of a quote by Bill Gates spoken to Steve Jobs in a scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley:
"Get real, would ya? You and I are both like guys who had this rich neighbor - Xerox - who left the door open all the time. And you go sneakin' in to steal a TV set. Only when you get there, you realize that I got there first. I got the loot, Steve! And you're yellin'? 'That's not fair. I wanted to try to steal it first.' You're too late."
On another note, kinda makes you wonder what kind of world will be left once corporations and their minions in Congress manage to lock up every last thought, process, concept, idea, and all their respective derivatives (more properly refered to as IP theft in the brave, new lexicon) through draconian copyright, IP, and patent laws. A lot less creative, I'll bet...
"I mean Picasso had a saying - he said 'good artists copy, great artists steal'. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas..." -- Steve Jobs to Robert X. Cringely in Triumph of the Nerds
looks like they'll be updating that motto to:
"Fix Or Reboot Daily"...
Personally, I think MS should first focus their energy on producing an OS that doesn't crash since, in this particlar application, an OS crash would seem to imply a Car crash (at least some of the time).
In any case, they'll at least need to work on updating the Windows EULA, getting a click-through assent that accepts that a fatal system error may lead to user fatality. When bundled with their standard disclaimers of any warranties, your wrongful death damages will, of course, be limited to the lesser of the purchase price of the software or $5. Come to think of it, Ford should have sourced their Explorer tires from MS instead of Firestone - could have saved themselves plenty of settlement money...
That's a bold statement considering Fermat's contributions to number theory, analysis, analytic geometry, probability theory, etc...
BTW, the theorem you cite is known as Fermat's Little Theorem, and is the basis of Public Key Cryptography methods.
"I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too small to contain."" -- Pierre de Fermat
Anyone employing Excel for any statistical calculations should get a nice chill from reading any of B.D McCullough's papers on Microsoft's egregious (and mostly uncorrected or corrected badly) errors in this area.
Click here for a link to one of his recent critiques entitled:
On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 2003
Here is a nice quote from the above paper:
"...persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution...Persons desiring to conduct statistical analyses of data are advised not to use Excel 2003."
"Excel is like a bikini. What it reveals is suggestive, but what it conceals is vital." -- apologies to Aaron Levenstein
Or how adding senarios about having sex with interns and staffers, then plotting to murder their reputations? Of course, they'd have to change the name to Grand Theft White House, the Clinton Years...
Interesting, isn't it, how at a time when consumer debt is at an all-time high ($1.7 trillion in a $12 trillion US economy by GDP in 2004), that the credit card companies may have finally found a way to turn all their unsecured debt into debt secured by Uncle Sam's new bankruptcy laws (if, as expected, the House passes it and W signs it).
When Senator Orrin Hatch was asked for comment on the Senate passage of the Bankruptcy bill, his response was "The short answer is fairness."
Point taken. And, in all fairness, I'm sure the next great idea hatched by our favorite RIAA-loving Senator will be to hold Senate hearings looking into the "fairness" of 30+ % interest rates, limitless punitive fees, 5+ credit card solicitations per day per mailbox, and universal default policies, in light of the new (pending) bankruptcy law. No doubt, we've all been told how these practices were "necessary" and the "cost" of banks doing business in a world were all the "deadbeats" could easily walk away from their responsiblities to "live life large" on the gravy-train that was the old bankruptcy regime. Now that it looks as if this "old world" is coming to an end, all these predatory and outrageous policies will be ending as well, right? It's only fair, right?
Unfortunately, ITRW, Hatch would be more likely to hold hearings to look into how to best add debtor's prison wings to Abu-Gharib and Gitmo (right next to the downloader-pirate wing, down the hall from Al-Qaeda wing) - after all, the boom is coming...
Actually, the correct quote (fully expanded) is:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
-- Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism.
I agree with much of what you say. In my anecdote I was merely trying to contrast two different mindsets:
Mathematics as art - solving problems for the problems sake - and using the process to develop, link, and sometimes create mathematical ideas. Here, the process is usually at least as important as the result, if only for the development of the mathematician's mind and understanding of his subject.
vs.
Mathematics as a sophisticated tool to be employed in a craft like engineering - and here I'll agree, somewhat, that the artifact produced as the end result usually trumps the process.
But that said, there is at least one person in this world who, when marveling at an "Engineering work of art", can't help but ponder the beauty behind the utilitarian beauty of the artifact - the beauty of mathematics.
--
"I have resolved to quit only abstract geometry, that is to say, the consideration of questions that serve only to exercise the mind, and this, in order to study another kind of geometry, which has for its object the explanation of the phenomena of nature." - René Descartes
Thank you for your insightful post on the Insightfulness quotient of ignorant, but otherwise Intersesting or Informative posts, and their relationship to moderators and/or posters who may be deficient in their comprehension of quantum mechanics.
--
"Plato winces when I track dust on his rugs: he knows that I am walking on his vanity." -- Diogenes of Sinope (AKA The Dog)
But wouldn't that make her Shrödinger's pussy, and not the AC's?
This reminds me of a time when I was taking some engineering courses subsequent to completing my undergrad in mathematics.
... Try it out with a DVD case or some such ;-)
The professor had given a "challenge problem" in dynamics. I've long since forgotten the specifics of the problem, but this, I do remember:
I spent several days pondering the problem, trying to figure out how to decouple the equations or do a gradient walk or some such - in order to obtain a closed form global solution.
Having had no luck, I asked an engineering major student in the same class how he was coming on the problem. He said he had solved it a couple of nights ago. As I excitedly began to quiz him on what math wizardry he had employed, he began to look at me as if I was from some strange and alien planet. He informed me that he had "plugged it into TK-solver" and out came the answer.
Talk about an "AHA!" moment - it would have never occurred to me that numerical analysis was "good enough" for the job, which of course was to obtain a numerical answer that could be "engineered" with. The problem probably didn't even have an analytical solution proper.
Sounds funny, but we were coming at the problem from two completely different perspectives. (BTW, it was then that I decided that I was not cut out to be an engineer!)
Oh, and one more thing...
I did gain one other valuable insight from that dynamics class that has stuck with me to this day. Namely, that a rotating body is stable only when rotating about its major or minor axis - rotation about any other axis will induce a "flip"
Why are you getting your panties and Gödel all in a bunch?
Although they are closely linked, I don't think a proof is a theorem per se. You see, a proof is a logically valid deduction of a theorem from the theorem's premises, as well as the system's axioms and previously proven theorems.
Hence, a proof might be more accurately described as that which confers theoremhood on a given proposition, but certainly should not be confused with the theorem itself... you fuckwit.
A googol minus 1 gives you 100 9s.
Of course, you may have been thinking in logarithmic terms (as is the natural tendency when confronted with quantities this large) - as in:
common_log(googol) - 1 = 99
I liked the analogy, but current math geeks love precision with numeric concepts even more.
I feel a great disturbance in the force - as if dozens of mapquest-like sites cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced...