They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes.
No, it wouldn't be a derivative work. The API is the abstract definition how a library is supposed to work. It is not the library itself. A library implementing the API doesn't include the API. An application including the library doesn't include the API.
Let's see if I understand this correctly: If I use a lock to protect an array of data, and two threads access the array simultaneously, but read / write different cache lines of the array, then they will both think they got the lock, but no (time consuming) lock operation has actually happened. But if they access the same cache line of the array, then both threads are restored to the point where they tried to lock, and this time the lock is performed for real on both processors, with one having to wait. And the code to do this will run correctly on older processors, just without the optimisation.
If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs? Does every Java programmer need to add a comment "Copyright Oracle" to every file that uses a Java API?
That's what Oracle claims, but even that conclusion is very dubious (if we ignore the premise, which is not dubious but plain wrong). I think Microsoft tried to create a Java-like language, or an incompatible Java implementation years ago. So if Microsoft wrote an API for that implementation, that could be a work derived from Oracle's API and might infringe Oracle's copyright. However, if Google purchased or legally downloaded the documentation with Java APIs from Oracle's website, didn't make any copies and gave them to their programmers, then no copyright infringement. Code that implements an API is not derived from the API. That's similar to a customer writing requirements for software that you should develop for them; the requirements document might be protected to some degree, but the software that you write to deliver these requirements is not derived from the requirements in the sense that copyright law defines "derived".
The clock frequency is basically the same as for the decade old P4, the number of running cores on a chip seems to be limited too, at least compared to other architectures.
P4 was an architecture where clock frequency was the design goal, with no regards for actual performance. Any non-trivial operation used lots of cycles, because one cycle was just too short to do useful work. A simple shift instruction was four cycles. An integer multiplication nine cycles. Since Banias, the design goal was performance, not clock speed. The amount of work done in a cycle is vastly increased. The clock speed of P4 and current processors is just not comparable.
On the Macintosh side, Apple shipped pre-release Intel Macs with 3.6 GHz P4s to developers. The first real hardware with 1.83 GHz Core Duos ran _faster_. But if you look at benchmarks, current high-end consumer Macs run about 15 times faster again!
To maybe make a stronger impression: If Apple replaces the processor in the fastest iMac with a Haswell chip, you'll get a computer that would make it into the top 100 of the June 2000 "Top 500 Supercomputer" list. That's how fast a modern Intel computer is, compared to a P4.
.. to object to this. These good people basically say "it would be godawful if Oracle managed to get a copyright on APIs". What they should say is "according to copyright laws, APIs are not material that can be protected by copyright". Because that is what matters to a court. _If_ APIs could be protected by copyright (which they can't) it would be absolutely wrong for a judge to listen to these people.
(Why do APIs not have copyright protection? Because copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation. If a file contains just the API itself, it is not protected. If it contains comments, preferably in poetic form, the file cannot be copied, but still the API can be extracted. And making use of the API description is most definitely not protected by copyright law).
I agree there should be limits on speed - but not on acceleration. If your speed limit is 70 (I presume we are talking miles per hour here) then it doesn't matter how quick your vehicle gets up to that speed.
Here's my rule: People make mistakes (including myself). Accidents happen when people make mistakes, and other people don't or cannot compensate for the mistakes. Extreme acceleration reduces the possible reaction time when people make mistakes, makes it harder for everyone to compensate for mistakes, and therefore causes more accidents.
In the last few years, Intel has been adding new instructions that will give major performance gains when they are used. For example, Haswell can do two fused multiply-adds with four double or eight single precision operands per cycle per core, but no current code will use this. We'll get the advantage when HPC code is recompiled (in a few months time), and when general code assumes that everyone has this feature (in five years time). But on the other hand, we _now_ get the advantages of features they added five years ago.
For the costs of everything mentioned, it wouldn't be that much more per year to join Audible. The selection is excellent and even the worst readers are better than text to speech readers.
I downloaded "War and Peace" from Librivox. You are wrong. Some chapters were so bad, text to speech reader was definitely better. (Now a lot of Librivox books are excellent, some are of professional quality, some are even read by professionals, but sometimes you get one that is rubbish).
Not sure what illusion the author is under - many mp3 files from Amazon are DRM'd with a personal identifier. This creates a legal trail that puts you on the hook for who uses your file, with or without your permission.
Do you call a "personal identifier" DRM?
There are two arguments against DRM; one is "it makes it harder for me to get pirated copies or give pirated copies to other", the other is "it makes it harder for me to use things I bought the way I want to use them". One argument is unacceptable, the other is very much legitimate.
How would anyone have copies of your files without your permission? If anyone managed to copy files from your hardware without your knowledge, you better reformat everything because you can't trust it anymore. If someone stole your hardware, you go to the police, report it as stolen, get a copy of the police report, and if things turn up on the internet, you show them the copy of the police report.
It's easier to strip it from a B&N book (book can be downloaded on any machine, encryption key is based on a fixed value) or an Adobe book (book can be downloaded on a "blessed" machine, encryption key is account-specific). Kindle is third on the list (book can be downloaded on a "blessed" machine, encryption key is machine- and book-specific).
It's rather strange to judge DRM by how easily it can be stripped away. I have three choices: Buy ebooks without DRM. Buy ebooks with DRM and suffer. Buy ebooks with DRM, remove the DRM, and become a criminal (not morally, but factually). The last one is not acceptable to me, so how easy it is to become a criminal is not something that I would consider.
If you want to sell your books through Amazon, they must be in DRM-"protected" Kindle format. If you want to sell your books through iTunes, they must be in ePub format; with or without DRM is up to the publisher. If you buy from both, you end up with books in two incompatible formats which is just a pain. But it's not up to the publisher really.
In a good team, it's good to have one person who is good at maths. Just in case. Maybe two or three if you are developing graphics engines. Same in the financial industry. Or if you need software to run fast, someone who can figure out how to use a cache in an optimal way. Someone who can give the correct answer to "if one Kilobyte costs 0.002 cents, how much is a Gigabyte" is handy. If there is nobody, a team can be in trouble.
Who knows, maybe too much automation isn't such a good thing. For example, your phone anticipates you wish to make a phone call, but will it anticipate your emotional state at that time? It's much like e-mails. In the heat of the moment we can send stuff, but when we cooled down, often, we kinda wished we hadn't. So, in that same vein, sometimes, you have to wonder in this day and age, if certain actions should not be limited to a human decision. I don't think a machine should anticipate an action. But that's my 2 cents.
There are things that could be done. For example, if a phone is in a woman's handbag, and the phone starts ringing, she will open the handbag. The phone could notice this and take action. The loudness of the ringtone could go down because that's something that majorly annoys people around you - ringing phones getting louder when they are removed from pockets, handbags etc. And it could send a message to the caller that it is going to be picked up soon - annoying to the callee if they take ten seconds to find a phone in all the junk in the handbag, and then the caller has hung up.
For emails, an optional setting where the email software tries to detect your emotional state (like use of the word "bastard" in an email to your boss), and delays sending and asks you for permission to send a minute later; could be a life/job saver for some people.
Again for the phone, if I'm driving and the caller is important to me, it could send a message back, tell them I'm driving, and ask if I should park the car to take the call.
And you can buy just about any other MP3 player on the market with the same features for under $50...
Please give us actual product names. I'm curious. If you are looking for a pure music player, maybe. But the iPod Touch is an awful lot more than a music player.
Yes and no. If the download records isn't enough to convict - too bad. Encrypted data are private by every standard no matter what they can decode to. This is analogous to copy protection. In most countries where you are allowed to make private copies of copyrighted stuff, you're not allowed to break the copy protection in order to do so. Same thing should apply to private data - if they're encrypted in a non-trivial way, they're off limits to the authorities.
There is no right to privacy when they are looking for evidence of a crime.
Legal contortionism. How does the fact that the FBI can demonstrate that the drives are his mean that giving them the password is not self-incrimination?
Because opening up the contents of the hard drive is not self-incriminating. The incriminating evidence is there, it is just being uncovered. Before the police decrypted the first drive, they didn't have proof that he was the owner of the drives, and by decrypting the drives, he would have given them self-incriminating evidence that he was the owner.
Consider an extreme case: A person is killed by being hit on the head with a heavy laptop, which is left at the scene. The police cannot prove who owned the laptop but is quite sure that the owner is the murderer. And the hard drive of the laptop is encrypted. It is quite likely that the encrypted drive has no information relevant to the case, but the person who has the key to the drive is most likely the killer. Decrypting the hard drive would be self-incriminating.
Or let's say there's a locker, some witness saw someone putting drugs into the locker but can't describe the person. The police asks you to open the locker. By being able to open it you incriminate yourself - it shows that you had access to the locker.
wasn't there already a case in which being forced to decrypt one's hard drives was deemed self-incrimination?
Yes, clever boy. Exactly the same case. Because the FBI didn't have proof yet that the drives were his, therefore being able to decrypt them would imply something the FBI didn't know yet. This has changed now; they now know that he was the owner, therefore it is not self-incrimination anymore.
He should inform the honorable judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters or whatever they are called.
This way, he puts the ball back into their court. That is, to prove that he indeed still remembers these parameters.
Not at all. First, informing the judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters would have been an awful stupid move. "Having forgotten" would have implied that he once knew them, which would have been proof that the hard drives were his. Second, since the drives are now known to be his because the FBI encrypted a drive, refusing to decrypt would now be taken as evidence that he's got something to hide, basically an admission of guilt.
Sorry but if they don't have offices and servers in Italy I don't see how Italian law applies,
If an Italian court decides that a crime has happened, and that a company is responsible, then I don't think it makes any difference where the company resides. And it doesn't matter whether there was any contract between company and victim either.
Because it seems to me your central assumption is: FB did not entered in a contract with minors in Italy, because any such contract would be automatically void thus unenforceable.
Contracts with minors are not void. They are _voidable_ by the minor and their guardian, but not by the other party if that party is an adult. The minor _can_ enforce the contract if they wish to do so. The other party can't because the minor can void the contract.
No, he's too young to enter into a contract to receive money for finding a bug.
You are totally, totally wrong. You can enter contracts at any age. BUT if you are underage, you can then void the contract, so you will find adults often unwilling to enter contracts with you. Until you or your guardian voids the contract, it is valid. And if the contract is between a child and an adult, the child can void the contract, the adult can't.
When I was 17 (Two years ago) I was able to sign an NDA and write code for a company while getting payed about $500 a month. If I was able to do that, I see no reason that paying this kid would be against the law.
Whoever hired you took a huge risk. At 17, you can of course sign an NDA, and then turn around and say you changed your mind and tell the world everything you learned under NDA, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
You are aware kids can have savings accounts at banks? That seems like doing business with a minor. Alcohol and Tobacco have age limits - banking doesn't.
You can do business with minors. You just have to be aware that any contract with a minor can be voided by the minor or their guardians until some time after their 18th birthday. So you wouldn't sell a brand new car to a minor, because they can drive it for two weeks, possibly crash it, and then void the contract and you have to return the money, getting a used car or even a crashed car back.
In case of the bank, worst case if the kid has money in a bank account is that they close the account and return the money. Giving a loan to a minor would be risky.
Payouts from just about any 'contest' style arrangement to under-18s tend to be legally obnoxious; but Paypal are a bunch of legendary assholes(and not mentioning such a salient limitation is a total dick move), so I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't just accuse him of hacking and then freeze and seize a few dozen random accounts...
What happens legally if you are 18 or over: You enter a contract with Paypal that allows them to make use of the bug information that you found and gave them, and in exchange they give you some money. What happens if you are under 18: The same, but as the kid under 18 you or your guardian can void the contract at any time, which would mean Paypal wouldn't have the right to use the information you gave them. Now consider what happens if they fixed a bug based on your information, shipped a product and suddenly they have no permission anymore to use the information. Ugly.
Slashdot Mirror
They would be a derivative work, so arguably, yes.
No, it wouldn't be a derivative work. The API is the abstract definition how a library is supposed to work. It is not the library itself. A library implementing the API doesn't include the API. An application including the library doesn't include the API.
Let's see if I understand this correctly: If I use a lock to protect an array of data, and two threads access the array simultaneously, but read / write different cache lines of the array, then they will both think they got the lock, but no (time consuming) lock operation has actually happened. But if they access the same cache line of the array, then both threads are restored to the point where they tried to lock, and this time the lock is performed for real on both processors, with one having to wait. And the code to do this will run correctly on older processors, just without the optimisation.
If Java API's are copyrightable, does this mean that Oracle has a copyright interest in every program ever written that uses those APIs? Does every Java programmer need to add a comment "Copyright Oracle" to every file that uses a Java API?
That's what Oracle claims, but even that conclusion is very dubious (if we ignore the premise, which is not dubious but plain wrong). I think Microsoft tried to create a Java-like language, or an incompatible Java implementation years ago. So if Microsoft wrote an API for that implementation, that could be a work derived from Oracle's API and might infringe Oracle's copyright. However, if Google purchased or legally downloaded the documentation with Java APIs from Oracle's website, didn't make any copies and gave them to their programmers, then no copyright infringement. Code that implements an API is not derived from the API. That's similar to a customer writing requirements for software that you should develop for them; the requirements document might be protected to some degree, but the software that you write to deliver these requirements is not derived from the requirements in the sense that copyright law defines "derived".
The clock frequency is basically the same as for the decade old P4, the number of running cores on a chip seems to be limited too, at least compared to other architectures.
P4 was an architecture where clock frequency was the design goal, with no regards for actual performance. Any non-trivial operation used lots of cycles, because one cycle was just too short to do useful work. A simple shift instruction was four cycles. An integer multiplication nine cycles. Since Banias, the design goal was performance, not clock speed. The amount of work done in a cycle is vastly increased. The clock speed of P4 and current processors is just not comparable.
On the Macintosh side, Apple shipped pre-release Intel Macs with 3.6 GHz P4s to developers. The first real hardware with 1.83 GHz Core Duos ran _faster_. But if you look at benchmarks, current high-end consumer Macs run about 15 times faster again!
To maybe make a stronger impression: If Apple replaces the processor in the fastest iMac with a Haswell chip, you'll get a computer that would make it into the top 100 of the June 2000 "Top 500 Supercomputer" list. That's how fast a modern Intel computer is, compared to a P4.
.. to object to this. These good people basically say "it would be godawful if Oracle managed to get a copyright on APIs". What they should say is "according to copyright laws, APIs are not material that can be protected by copyright". Because that is what matters to a court. _If_ APIs could be protected by copyright (which they can't) it would be absolutely wrong for a judge to listen to these people.
(Why do APIs not have copyright protection? Because copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation. If a file contains just the API itself, it is not protected. If it contains comments, preferably in poetic form, the file cannot be copied, but still the API can be extracted. And making use of the API description is most definitely not protected by copyright law).
I agree there should be limits on speed - but not on acceleration. If your speed limit is 70 (I presume we are talking miles per hour here) then it doesn't matter how quick your vehicle gets up to that speed.
Here's my rule: People make mistakes (including myself). Accidents happen when people make mistakes, and other people don't or cannot compensate for the mistakes. Extreme acceleration reduces the possible reaction time when people make mistakes, makes it harder for everyone to compensate for mistakes, and therefore causes more accidents.
In the last few years, Intel has been adding new instructions that will give major performance gains when they are used. For example, Haswell can do two fused multiply-adds with four double or eight single precision operands per cycle per core, but no current code will use this. We'll get the advantage when HPC code is recompiled (in a few months time), and when general code assumes that everyone has this feature (in five years time). But on the other hand, we _now_ get the advantages of features they added five years ago.
For the costs of everything mentioned, it wouldn't be that much more per year to join Audible. The selection is excellent and even the worst readers are better than text to speech readers.
I downloaded "War and Peace" from Librivox. You are wrong. Some chapters were so bad, text to speech reader was definitely better. (Now a lot of Librivox books are excellent, some are of professional quality, some are even read by professionals, but sometimes you get one that is rubbish).
Not sure what illusion the author is under - many mp3 files from Amazon are DRM'd with a personal identifier. This creates a legal trail that puts you on the hook for who uses your file, with or without your permission.
Do you call a "personal identifier" DRM?
There are two arguments against DRM; one is "it makes it harder for me to get pirated copies or give pirated copies to other", the other is "it makes it harder for me to use things I bought the way I want to use them". One argument is unacceptable, the other is very much legitimate.
How would anyone have copies of your files without your permission? If anyone managed to copy files from your hardware without your knowledge, you better reformat everything because you can't trust it anymore. If someone stole your hardware, you go to the police, report it as stolen, get a copy of the police report, and if things turn up on the internet, you show them the copy of the police report.
It's easier to strip it from a B&N book (book can be downloaded on any machine, encryption key is based on a fixed value) or an Adobe book (book can be downloaded on a "blessed" machine, encryption key is account-specific). Kindle is third on the list (book can be downloaded on a "blessed" machine, encryption key is machine- and book-specific).
It's rather strange to judge DRM by how easily it can be stripped away. I have three choices: Buy ebooks without DRM. Buy ebooks with DRM and suffer. Buy ebooks with DRM, remove the DRM, and become a criminal (not morally, but factually). The last one is not acceptable to me, so how easy it is to become a criminal is not something that I would consider.
If you want to sell your books through Amazon, they must be in DRM-"protected" Kindle format. If you want to sell your books through iTunes, they must be in ePub format; with or without DRM is up to the publisher. If you buy from both, you end up with books in two incompatible formats which is just a pain. But it's not up to the publisher really.
Here's how some people think:
1. I want to be rich.
2. If I was rich, I wouldn't want to pay a lot of taxes.
3. Therefore, I don't want rich people to pay a lot of taxes.
It's totally irrational, but that's how it goes.
In a good team, it's good to have one person who is good at maths. Just in case. Maybe two or three if you are developing graphics engines. Same in the financial industry. Or if you need software to run fast, someone who can figure out how to use a cache in an optimal way. Someone who can give the correct answer to "if one Kilobyte costs 0.002 cents, how much is a Gigabyte" is handy. If there is nobody, a team can be in trouble.
Doesn't have to be you, though.
Who knows, maybe too much automation isn't such a good thing. For example, your phone anticipates you wish to make a phone call, but will it anticipate your emotional state at that time? It's much like e-mails. In the heat of the moment we can send stuff, but when we cooled down, often, we kinda wished we hadn't. So, in that same vein, sometimes, you have to wonder in this day and age, if certain actions should not be limited to a human decision. I don't think a machine should anticipate an action. But that's my 2 cents.
There are things that could be done. For example, if a phone is in a woman's handbag, and the phone starts ringing, she will open the handbag. The phone could notice this and take action. The loudness of the ringtone could go down because that's something that majorly annoys people around you - ringing phones getting louder when they are removed from pockets, handbags etc. And it could send a message to the caller that it is going to be picked up soon - annoying to the callee if they take ten seconds to find a phone in all the junk in the handbag, and then the caller has hung up.
For emails, an optional setting where the email software tries to detect your emotional state (like use of the word "bastard" in an email to your boss), and delays sending and asks you for permission to send a minute later; could be a life/job saver for some people.
Again for the phone, if I'm driving and the caller is important to me, it could send a message back, tell them I'm driving, and ask if I should park the car to take the call.
And you can buy just about any other MP3 player on the market with the same features for under $50...
Please give us actual product names. I'm curious. If you are looking for a pure music player, maybe. But the iPod Touch is an awful lot more than a music player.
Yes and no. If the download records isn't enough to convict - too bad. Encrypted data are private by every standard no matter what they can decode to. This is analogous to copy protection. In most countries where you are allowed to make private copies of copyrighted stuff, you're not allowed to break the copy protection in order to do so. Same thing should apply to private data - if they're encrypted in a non-trivial way, they're off limits to the authorities.
There is no right to privacy when they are looking for evidence of a crime.
Legal contortionism. How does the fact that the FBI can demonstrate that the drives are his mean that giving them the password is not self-incrimination?
Because opening up the contents of the hard drive is not self-incriminating. The incriminating evidence is there, it is just being uncovered. Before the police decrypted the first drive, they didn't have proof that he was the owner of the drives, and by decrypting the drives, he would have given them self-incriminating evidence that he was the owner.
Consider an extreme case: A person is killed by being hit on the head with a heavy laptop, which is left at the scene. The police cannot prove who owned the laptop but is quite sure that the owner is the murderer. And the hard drive of the laptop is encrypted. It is quite likely that the encrypted drive has no information relevant to the case, but the person who has the key to the drive is most likely the killer. Decrypting the hard drive would be self-incriminating.
Or let's say there's a locker, some witness saw someone putting drugs into the locker but can't describe the person. The police asks you to open the locker. By being able to open it you incriminate yourself - it shows that you had access to the locker.
wasn't there already a case in which being forced to decrypt one's hard drives was deemed self-incrimination?
Yes, clever boy. Exactly the same case. Because the FBI didn't have proof yet that the drives were his, therefore being able to decrypt them would imply something the FBI didn't know yet. This has changed now; they now know that he was the owner, therefore it is not self-incrimination anymore.
He should inform the honorable judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters or whatever they are called.
This way, he puts the ball back into their court. That is, to prove that he indeed still remembers these parameters.
Not at all. First, informing the judge that he's forgotten the decryption parameters would have been an awful stupid move. "Having forgotten" would have implied that he once knew them, which would have been proof that the hard drives were his. Second, since the drives are now known to be his because the FBI encrypted a drive, refusing to decrypt would now be taken as evidence that he's got something to hide, basically an admission of guilt.
Sorry but if they don't have offices and servers in Italy I don't see how Italian law applies,
If an Italian court decides that a crime has happened, and that a company is responsible, then I don't think it makes any difference where the company resides. And it doesn't matter whether there was any contract between company and victim either.
Because it seems to me your central assumption is: FB did not entered in a contract with minors in Italy, because any such contract would be automatically void thus unenforceable.
Contracts with minors are not void. They are _voidable_ by the minor and their guardian, but not by the other party if that party is an adult. The minor _can_ enforce the contract if they wish to do so. The other party can't because the minor can void the contract.
No, he's too young to enter into a contract to receive money for finding a bug.
You are totally, totally wrong. You can enter contracts at any age. BUT if you are underage, you can then void the contract, so you will find adults often unwilling to enter contracts with you. Until you or your guardian voids the contract, it is valid. And if the contract is between a child and an adult, the child can void the contract, the adult can't.
When I was 17 (Two years ago) I was able to sign an NDA and write code for a company while getting payed about $500 a month. If I was able to do that, I see no reason that paying this kid would be against the law.
Whoever hired you took a huge risk. At 17, you can of course sign an NDA, and then turn around and say you changed your mind and tell the world everything you learned under NDA, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
You are aware kids can have savings accounts at banks? That seems like doing business with a minor. Alcohol and Tobacco have age limits - banking doesn't.
You can do business with minors. You just have to be aware that any contract with a minor can be voided by the minor or their guardians until some time after their 18th birthday. So you wouldn't sell a brand new car to a minor, because they can drive it for two weeks, possibly crash it, and then void the contract and you have to return the money, getting a used car or even a crashed car back.
In case of the bank, worst case if the kid has money in a bank account is that they close the account and return the money. Giving a loan to a minor would be risky.
Payouts from just about any 'contest' style arrangement to under-18s tend to be legally obnoxious; but Paypal are a bunch of legendary assholes(and not mentioning such a salient limitation is a total dick move), so I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't just accuse him of hacking and then freeze and seize a few dozen random accounts...
What happens legally if you are 18 or over: You enter a contract with Paypal that allows them to make use of the bug information that you found and gave them, and in exchange they give you some money. What happens if you are under 18: The same, but as the kid under 18 you or your guardian can void the contract at any time, which would mean Paypal wouldn't have the right to use the information you gave them. Now consider what happens if they fixed a bug based on your information, shipped a product and suddenly they have no permission anymore to use the information. Ugly.