No, the right of Sun to write and sell Solaris is not in doubt.
The right to free the code is in doubt, since SCO didn't own all of what Sun opened, and, apparently, Novell owns much of it. Since SCO was ostensibly working for Novell at the time, there very well may be some legal debate about whether Sun had the right to rely on SCO's representations.
Anyway, from a practical matter, the idea that Novell would cause trouble for users of OpenSolaris is dubious at best.
IANAL, etc., so don't rely on my post
Except that I don't get an extra hour of sun during the summer. I just get up an hour earlier and call it the same time. Still get the same amount of sun.
IAJAWG (I Am Just A White Guy) but
Hopi or Cherokee or Sioux or whatever is preferred.
Indian or American Indian seems fine, though ambiguous, you might just be talking about someone from India.
But a native American is anyone who was born in America, including me.
Their models did actually say that loans were safe even where the income and assets of the debtors were "self documented" and not checked.
They were based on data from good economic times when rising house prices allowed equity to rise significantly before the ARM rates jumped up. Good debtors could therefore refinance, or, bad debt could be foreclosed on without much loss. And those older sub-prime loans in the database rarely failed.
But the models didn't take into account that every year the loans were getting shakier and the process more corrupt. (NINJA, anyone?)
And the models assumed that the risks for each mortgage were independent, when, in reality, they are connected. A bad economy can increase the default rate, which hurts the economy, which makes people less able to pay their loans, which increases the default rate, which causes a credit default swap to kick in, which reduces investors' bottom lines, which causes a cutback in business, which scares people, which causes debt to tighten, which makes it harder to refinance, which scares more people, which causes business to slow, which makes it harder to pay back, which causes more default swaps to be payed out, which causes ratings to fall, which causes bankruptcies when too many swaps are called, which reduces the available "money", which increases interest rates, which causes more failures, which makes someone else payout, etc, etc, etc. (not necessarily in that order)
What do you mean by "overpriced"? The term has no real meaning if you consider supply and demand.
I don't know what the OP meant, but if the price is greatly higher than the cost to build, then I consider it overpriced. Also, if the demand for those high prices is created by questionable approvals of loans with artificially low ARM introductory rates which depend on unwavering rising prices in order to be safe, then supply and demand isn't working.
I don't know about Australian law, but in the US the phone book may be copyrighted, but the information in it is not.
So, if you photocopy someone's phone book and sell that, it would be copyright infringment; but if you re-type the phone book entries (hopefully, for my old eyes, in a larger font) and publish it in your own format, it would not be infringing.
YMMV
The mortgages backing the securities were only a small part of the problem.
Calculating the values of the debt swaps as if they had independent risks, when they did not, is a bigger part of the problem.
Prepared Testimony of Michael S. Barr
Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Before the
Committee on Financial Services
U.S. House of Representatives
Hearing On
âoeThe Community Reinvestment Act:
Thirty Years of Accomplishments, But Challenges Remainâ
February 13, 2008
see this:
In a Federal Reserve Board survey of CRA-covered institutions, most responded that CRA lending was profitable or marginally profitable, and not overly risky.
this:
Despite the fact that CRA appears to have increased bank and thrift lending in low- and moderate-income communities, such institutions are not the only ones operating in these areas. In fact, with new and lower-cost sources of funding available from the secondary market through securitization, and with advances in financial technology, subprime lending exploded in the late 1990s, reaching over $600 billion and 20% of all originations by 2005. More than half of subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies not subject to comprehensive federal supervision; another 30 percent of such originations were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts, which are not subject to routine examination or supervision, and the remaining 20 percent were made by banks and thrifts.
and this:
As has become all too evident, the subprime market has been plagued by serious problems. Some subprime borrowers who could have qualified for loans from prime lenders end up in the subprime market, paying higher rates: Preliminary research suggests up to 35% of subprime borrowers could qualify for prime mortgage loans.
IIRC, jpeg uses run-length encoding (at least to a limited extent). It avoids individually storing all those 0's arising when the quantization throws out unimportant high frequencies.
. . . the immutable dogma : that the laws of physics exist and are utterly dogmatic, final and eternal.
From the parent:
It cannot exist in mathematics, therefore if mathematical logic applies in "the universe" it cannot have a rational basis.
What I mean here by a rational basis is a non-dogmatic basis. A basis that is not dependant on axioms, which are unexaplainable, eternal, non-negotiable truths.
True that you need to have axioms on which to base any logical system, and within that system they need to be considered true rather than explained. But science does not need to treat axioms as immutable, eternal, or final starting points for reality. Science is required to change the 'dogma' if it does not fit the facts. That is, cognitive dissonance must be resolved in favor of observations, not preconceived dogma.
Also, laws are not quite the same as axioms. While laws are not proved, but assumed to be true, laws are based on actual observations, axioms chosen to create a framework of logic.
It's not a loan. I haven't seen the details, but the idea I get is that it'll be a blank check from Congress to the Secretary of the Treasury to buy up to $700,000,000,000 of securities that no one trusts. This means that the US government would own those assets, and might make or lose money on them. (Ironic how the "free-market" republicans are advocating socialism in this case) The government backing is supposed to alleviate the fears of the investors/speculators and stabilize the markets, allowing companies to continue borrowing and lending. If this works better than expected, they might not have to spend all of the money, but if it works as I expect, there'll be more outstretched hands in a couple of months asking for even more, and the economy will tank anyway, just not as bad as it would've.
The only problem is that the financial crisis we see today is the result of the exact opposite of hands-off Reganomics.
One can make a cogent argument that too much government regulation is bad, and you might even be able to make a fair argument that the current crisis was not caused by too little regulation, but there is no reasonable argument that can conclude that the current crisis has been caused by too much regulation.
It's already common for things like HVAC, lighting, UPS, emergnecy generators, etc. to be networked, with that network connected to the internet through a gateway. What would giving individual devices public internet addresses add, other than a larger number of points of attack?
If an agent of the government commits acrome to obtain evidence, that may be thrown out. But that doesn't necessarily extend to evidence made public by a third party.
IANAAS (I Am Not An Atmospheric Scientist) but from what I recall,
High CO2 levels and "high" temperatures are not exactly new and will cause 2 effects
Only 2?
increase in plant mass due
Probably, but hard to predict, and different in in some areas than others.
Antarctica was once lush forest . .
Sure, when Antartica was near the equator, many, many millions of years ago.
Less permafrost will allow forests to expand . .
And release large quantities of methane, which, pound for pound, has a more powerful greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.
Likewise the top layer of the ocean will heat up, leading to more algae (and *slightly* more storms), more fish, and more O2 production to countermand CO2 production
Not at all clear that those will occur. E.g., one of the main ways that nature actually is limiting the carbon dioxide buildup so far is by dissolving carbon dioxide. This changes the PH of the ocean, and affects the marine life. Also, since when does more algae and more fish go hand in hand, and how in the heck does oxygen countermand CO2 production?
The reality is that all co2 that is stored in oil comes from the athmosphere
The reality is that all of the carbon came from somewhere (comets, asteroids, volcanoes?) before some of it entered the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and also that all that carbon locked up in fossil "fuels" may have never been in the atmosphere all at once. It is not at all clear that we would only recreate the past by burning all the fossil fuels. In fact, in eras past (not sure about dinosaur times) Oxygen levels were much greater than they are now.
I find the opposite to be true. Once I get going (which, I admit, can sometimes be hard at home) I get much more done on days I telecommute than I can at the office with all of its' distractions. Still, I do need to colloborate with other people at the office, and I don't think I could get away with telecommutning full time at home.
On the other hand, I worked today at home and spent an hour on a conference call and 2 or three hours responding to e-mails (not just reading and writing, but actually doing a lot of work needed to respond to them). And on my current jobs I'm collaborating with clients and coworkers not only near the office in Chicago, but also in about 4 different suburbs more than 20 miles from the office and in Washington D.C. Whether I'm at home or in the office doesn't seem to make much difference, especially when I have to be out of the office a lot anyway.
I think there are people who would take a lower wage in exchange for a telecommute. I would, anyway.
I did, anyway.
Though it was more of a raise - I got offered a job with a 10% raise, my employer practically begged me to stay, but they would only give me a 5% raise (above the regular end-of-the-year raise). They asked me what would keep me there, and I asked for one day a week working at home. I stayed because it saves me over three hours commute on that day. And I find I usually get more productive work done on that day than when I'm in the office.
I am in a very collaborative business, though, (consulting mechanical engineer in construction, mostly HVAC) so I couldn't get away with working at home full time. Heck, even when I'm in the office, I tend to spend about 25% of the time out of the office at clients offices, construction sites, etc.
I telecommute one day a week, and, when it comes to getting my jobs done (as opposed to responding to interruptions that I admit also sometimes need to be taken care of) I typically get more done at home than at the office.
Today, though I got off to a slow start, I put in a good 8 hours, not needing to stop during for lunch, able to spend a couple of breaks outside in the good weather with our dogs and my son, and finishing some calculations that I haven't had a chance to start for the last two weeks. It also seems to help make the rest of the week in the office much more productive, as it breaks up the drag of what can sometimes otherwise become a monotonous daily routine.
That's why many people propose making the first stage of a launcher reusable, and throwing away the upper stage (rather than the other way around, like the shuttle)
<nitpick>
Though the liquid fuel tank for the shuttle was thrown away after use, the solid fuel boosters for the shuttle were designed to be recovered and reused.
</nitpick>
One problem is that if you file your part of the patent claim to the legal people and then they file the patent they may chose to cut out parts of prior art that you have written just to ensure that it will get through the patent system.
If you ever have a lawyer that does something like that, document what they did, then fire them right away, and report them to the bar. That sort of thing can get you, the patent applicant, in very serious trouble.
IANAL, but I believe that you are incorrect. An acutal person must be named on the application and is the one to receive the patent. Then the employemt agreement kicks in and the ownership of the patent is transferred to the company.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that, regardless of whether or not your employment agreement makes the company owner of all your work, only the original inventor can file and receive a patent. That might not prevent the company from claiming that someone else was the real inventor, but otherwise it means that the company can't just file patent on an employee's work, the employee has to get the patent and the turn it over to the company.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the right of Sun to write and sell Solaris is not in doubt.
The right to free the code is in doubt, since SCO didn't own all of what Sun opened, and, apparently, Novell owns much of it. Since SCO was ostensibly working for Novell at the time, there very well may be some legal debate about whether Sun had the right to rely on SCO's representations.
Anyway, from a practical matter, the idea that Novell would cause trouble for users of OpenSolaris is dubious at best.
IANAL, etc., so don't rely on my post
Except that I don't get an extra hour of sun during the summer. I just get up an hour earlier and call it the same time. Still get the same amount of sun.
IAJAWG (I Am Just A White Guy) but Hopi or Cherokee or Sioux or whatever is preferred.
Indian or American Indian seems fine, though ambiguous, you might just be talking about someone from India.
But a native American is anyone who was born in America, including me.
Their models did actually say that loans were safe even where the income and assets of the debtors were "self documented" and not checked.
They were based on data from good economic times when rising house prices allowed equity to rise significantly before the ARM rates jumped up. Good debtors could therefore refinance, or, bad debt could be foreclosed on without much loss. And those older sub-prime loans in the database rarely failed.
But the models didn't take into account that every year the loans were getting shakier and the process more corrupt. (NINJA, anyone?)
And the models assumed that the risks for each mortgage were independent, when, in reality, they are connected. A bad economy can increase the default rate, which hurts the economy, which makes people less able to pay their loans, which increases the default rate, which causes a credit default swap to kick in, which reduces investors' bottom lines, which causes a cutback in business, which scares people, which causes debt to tighten, which makes it harder to refinance, which scares more people, which causes business to slow, which makes it harder to pay back, which causes more default swaps to be payed out, which causes ratings to fall, which causes bankruptcies when too many swaps are called, which reduces the available "money", which increases interest rates, which causes more failures, which makes someone else payout, etc, etc, etc. (not necessarily in that order)
I don't know what the OP meant, but if the price is greatly higher than the cost to build, then I consider it overpriced.
Also, if the demand for those high prices is created by questionable approvals of loans with artificially low ARM introductory rates which depend on unwavering rising prices in order to be safe, then supply and demand isn't working.
I don't know about Australian law, but in the US the phone book may be copyrighted, but the information in it is not.
So, if you photocopy someone's phone book and sell that, it would be copyright infringment; but if you re-type the phone book entries (hopefully, for my old eyes, in a larger font) and publish it in your own format, it would not be infringing.
YMMV
The mortgages backing the securities were only a small part of the problem.
Calculating the values of the debt swaps as if they had independent risks, when they did not, is a bigger part of the problem.
see this:
this:
and this:
(emphasis mine)
IIRC, jpeg uses run-length encoding (at least to a limited extent). It avoids individually storing all those 0's arising when the quantization throws out unimportant high frequencies.
Pluripotent != totipotent
From the parent:
True that you need to have axioms on which to base any logical system, and within that system they need to be considered true rather than explained. But science does not need to treat axioms as immutable, eternal, or final starting points for reality. Science is required to change the 'dogma' if it does not fit the facts. That is, cognitive dissonance must be resolved in favor of observations, not preconceived dogma.
Also, laws are not quite the same as axioms. While laws are not proved, but assumed to be true, laws are based on actual observations, axioms chosen to create a framework of logic.
It's not a loan. I haven't seen the details, but the idea I get is that it'll be a blank check from Congress to the Secretary of the Treasury to buy up to $700,000,000,000 of securities that no one trusts. This means that the US government would own those assets, and might make or lose money on them. (Ironic how the "free-market" republicans are advocating socialism in this case)
The government backing is supposed to alleviate the fears of the investors/speculators and stabilize the markets, allowing companies to continue borrowing and lending. If this works better than expected, they might not have to spend all of the money, but if it works as I expect, there'll be more outstretched hands in a couple of months asking for even more, and the economy will tank anyway, just not as bad as it would've.
One can make a cogent argument that too much government regulation is bad, and you might even be able to make a fair argument that the current crisis was not caused by too little regulation, but there is no reasonable argument that can conclude that the current crisis has been caused by too much regulation.
It's already common for things like HVAC, lighting, UPS, emergnecy generators, etc. to be networked, with that network connected to the internet through a gateway.
What would giving individual devices public internet addresses add, other than a larger number of points of attack?
If an agent of the government commits acrome to obtain evidence, that may be thrown out. But that doesn't necessarily extend to evidence made public by a third party.
Please mod the parent up.
Where are the mod points when you actually want them?
Only 2?
Probably, but hard to predict, and different in in some areas than others.
Sure, when Antartica was near the equator, many, many millions of years ago.
And release large quantities of methane, which, pound for pound, has a more powerful greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide.
Not at all clear that those will occur. E.g., one of the main ways that nature actually is limiting the carbon dioxide buildup so far is by dissolving carbon dioxide. This changes the PH of the ocean, and affects the marine life. Also, since when does more algae and more fish go hand in hand, and how in the heck does oxygen countermand CO2 production?
The reality is that all of the carbon came from somewhere (comets, asteroids, volcanoes?) before some of it entered the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and also that all that carbon locked up in fossil "fuels" may have never been in the atmosphere all at once. It is not at all clear that we would only recreate the past by burning all the fossil fuels. In fact, in eras past (not sure about dinosaur times) Oxygen levels were much greater than they are now.
It's the open source angle that makes this newsworthy, in a news for nerds sort of way.
I find the opposite to be true. Once I get going (which, I admit, can sometimes be hard at home) I get much more done on days I telecommute than I can at the office with all of its' distractions. Still, I do need to colloborate with other people at the office, and I don't think I could get away with telecommutning full time at home.
On the other hand, I worked today at home and spent an hour on a conference call and 2 or three hours responding to e-mails (not just reading and writing, but actually doing a lot of work needed to respond to them). And on my current jobs I'm collaborating with clients and coworkers not only near the office in Chicago, but also in about 4 different suburbs more than 20 miles from the office and in Washington D.C. Whether I'm at home or in the office doesn't seem to make much difference, especially when I have to be out of the office a lot anyway.
I did, anyway.
Though it was more of a raise - I got offered a job with a 10% raise, my employer practically begged me to stay, but they would only give me a 5% raise (above the regular end-of-the-year raise). They asked me what would keep me there, and I asked for one day a week working at home. I stayed because it saves me over three hours commute on that day. And I find I usually get more productive work done on that day than when I'm in the office.
I am in a very collaborative business, though, (consulting mechanical engineer in construction, mostly HVAC) so I couldn't get away with working at home full time. Heck, even when I'm in the office, I tend to spend about 25% of the time out of the office at clients offices, construction sites, etc.
I telecommute one day a week, and, when it comes to getting my jobs done (as opposed to responding to interruptions that I admit also sometimes need to be taken care of) I typically get more done at home than at the office. Today, though I got off to a slow start, I put in a good 8 hours, not needing to stop during for lunch, able to spend a couple of breaks outside in the good weather with our dogs and my son, and finishing some calculations that I haven't had a chance to start for the last two weeks. It also seems to help make the rest of the week in the office much more productive, as it breaks up the drag of what can sometimes otherwise become a monotonous daily routine.
<nitpick> Though the liquid fuel tank for the shuttle was thrown away after use, the solid fuel boosters for the shuttle were designed to be recovered and reused. </nitpick>
If you ever have a lawyer that does something like that, document what they did, then fire them right away, and report them to the bar. That sort of thing can get you, the patent applicant, in very serious trouble.
IANAL, but I believe that you are incorrect. An acutal person must be named on the application and is the one to receive the patent. Then the employemt agreement kicks in and the ownership of the patent is transferred to the company.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that, regardless of whether or not your employment agreement makes the company owner of all your work, only the original inventor can file and receive a patent. That might not prevent the company from claiming that someone else was the real inventor, but otherwise it means that the company can't just file patent on an employee's work, the employee has to get the patent and the turn it over to the company.