jancona

More likely he'll wake up to find that Twitter has given away his handle.

I'll change my mind if the plaintiffs and the plaintiffs' lawyers donate the proceeds to charity.

Presumably the press release was issued after the write was pointed out to them. They warned Treasury in advance about the downgrade.

My reading of the Treasury release is that this all has to do with"baselines". Compared to current spending the deal didn't make cuts at all--spending will continue to increase over the next 10 years. The "cuts" are compared to a projection of what would have been spent without the deal, called a baseline. There are various ways of calculating baseline, i.e. how you account for inflation.It seems that S&P's error was related to misunderstanding which baseline the 2.1T applied to.

The US did not come within one day of defaulting. It came within a day of hitting the debt ceiling, which is a very different thing. Despite the way it was portrayed, the government could have limped along for days our weeks without defaulting.

(I'm not saying that would have been a good thing--just that the idea of August 2nd as the day default would have occurred is incorrect.)

So it should only be illegal if a hacker wouldn't think it's lame? Got it.

How is this not "unauthorized access" "in any meaningful sense"?

They blocked his IP, they blocked his MAC, and he hid a machine in a wiring closet to get on MIT's network. What would he have to do to make it "meaningful"?

Do you have any basis for claiming that "an open door could likely be construed as implied consent"?

I would not advise that you try that in many parts of the US. You'll be risking getting shot, and the homeowner would not have committed a crime.

Why do you think a "properly implemented" OpenID site should allow the user to use any authentication provider? The relying party site is trusting the OpenID provider to authenticate its users. Wouldn't sites with real security requirements want to vet providers before trusting them?

And you are failing to understand the legal questions at issue...

The Fifth Amendment, as currently interpreted, doesn't provide the protection you describe. It protects against giving self-incriminating testimony and essentially the question is whether the password is "testimony." Keep in mind that the government is not asking him to disclose it, just to type it into the computer. Here's a good discussion: http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1197670606.shtml (There seems to be a CSS problem with that page, but the text is fine.)

It's not true that "you may not own the copyright to changes you make ... because the court may rule it a derivative work." You may not be able to distribute those changes without violating someone else's copyright, but that doesn't affect the fact that you own the copyright to your own work.

Consider what would happen in your FanFic case if Sony tried to incorporate the kid's changes into EverQuest. The kid could sue them for infringement.

So you're arguing that obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia cause long commutes? Or that some factor causes both? What might that be?

I'm suspicious of this sort of research for lots of reasons, but concerns about the direction of causality is pretty low on my list in this case.

Any reason you didn't just increase the permgen size on your JVM? It's hardly just a Groovy issue.

Copyright law prohibits distribution of derived works. The LGPL is a license which gives permission to distribute software if certain conditions are met. In this case the license is from the many authors of Webkit and it permits Apple to distribute a derivative work (the iOS browser). If you think about it that way then "immediately" doesn't really come into play. If Apple provides a copy of the source when asked, they're complying with the license. If they don't they have no license. Technically, they are infringing copyright every time they distribute a copy of iOS.

If someone sues, would a court award damages for the copies distributed or enjoin distribution of iOS until they comply? I doubt anyone knows because AFAIK no case has ever made it that far. Typically (L)GPL disputes are settled long before they make it to court, because the cost of litigation for both sides is high compared to the remedy desired (release of modified source).

I wonder if there's a role for "Copyleft Trolls", i.e. litigators who acquire copyrights to GPL or LGPL source, then sue license violators with the intention of collecting damages rather than just compelling release? US copyright law allows statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work infringed.[1] If each source file is a separate work, there could be a lot of money at stake. In other words, the Righthaven strategy[2] applied to source code instead of newspaper pictures. Perhaps I should apply for a business method patent on that idea.[3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyright... [2] http://www.google.com/search?q=righthaven+site%3Anews.ycombi... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent

Also unreadable on an Android phone.

AFAIK, no one is claiming that plagiarism is a crime. It's just unethical, and those who do it should be called out.

Lack of attribution is precisely what TFA is complaining about. Plagiarism is claiming others' work as your own, not necessarily copying. So lack of attribution is really what defines it.

According to the NYT at the time, the deal was valued at about $34B: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B16FC3E5D...

Unfortunately, if the VC has decided to not to participate in any future financing, the failure of the company may be a best case scenario for him. Think about it from his point of view--two of the worst things you can do as a VC are:

- Throw good money after bad by pouring more money into a loser, and

- Give up on a company, only to have it succeed without you, either through a cram-down or an acquisition on unfavorable terms

So in that situation, the VC's interest is that your company either succeed without further investment or go out of business.

I wish I had good advice for you--perhaps, as some others have suggested, threats may help. My guess is that you don't have much to lose.

Just last week, I had some root-owned hidden directories in my home directory. So I did:

sudo chown -R me:mygroup .*

Fortunately, I caught it before it made it out of /home, so only some user directories were affected, and the cleanup was relatively straightforward.

Ideally, you wouldn't have to trust them, you would be able to contract with them. Or rather, if you owned the data, they would have to contract with you to use it.

I agree that given the current environment, it would require regulatory changes to implement the data ownership concept. And given the degree of regulatory capture in such markets, good luck getting such a change implemented.

Of course, someone could watch my house now and see when I turn on my lights. Better yet, they could see me stumble in when the bars close at 2 am. The issue isn't that private information is being made public, it's that the cost of gathering and aggregating public information is being drastically reduced.

Without smart meters, it might cost someone hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire a private detective to discover my drinking habits. My estranged spouse might be willing to spend that money in a custody case, but my life insurer wouldn't find it to be cost-effective. With new sources of low-cost data like that from smart meters, the calculation might be different.

(edit: corrected a couple of typos)

I believe even the AT&T phones with Unknown Sources disabled allow sideloading with ADB. Not that that's a good option for most users.

Of course Android allows competing app stores--indeed Amazon's is one. So both developers and users have a choice on Android that's not available on iOS.

There's no need to root most Android phones to install any software you want. Just go to Settings/Applications and check "Unknown sources Allow installation of non-Market applications"

AT&T (and perhaps other carriers) disable that option, but even in that case, there's a workaround that doesn't require rooting. (Google "android non-market adb".)

You can modify GPL code and keep it to yourself. What you can't do is modify it and distribute the resultant binary without also releasing the modified source.

Given how long it takes to load each message in their mailing list archive, I'd say java.net has issues.

FWIW, here's the Oracle rep saying that Github wasn't an issue: http://java.net/projects/hudson/lists/dev/archive/2011-02/me...

If use the J2SE code (which is GPL with classpath exception) you can't run the TCK. Without passing the TCK you can't call it Java, and you don't get the patent license. See here: http://skife.org/java/jcp/2010/12/07/the-tck-trap.html

If you use the J2ME code, presumably you can get the TCK for mobile use (and associated patent protection), but the license doesn't include the classpath exception.

You'd better consult a lawyer I if you're planning on running anything other than GPL software on a phone, because I'm pretty sure the classpath exception doesn't apply on mobile platforms, meaning that anything you run on the GPL JVM must itself be GPL.