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Software

Court Says First Sale Doctrine Doesn't Apply To Licensed Software 758

An anonymous reader wrote to tell us a federal appeals court ruled today that the first sale doctrine is "unavailable to those who are only licensed to use their copies of copyrighted works." This reverses a 2008 decision from the Autodesk case, in which a man was selling used copies of AutoCAD that were not currently installed on any computers. Autodesk objected to the sales because their license agreement did not permit the transfer of ownership. Today's ruling (PDF) upholds Autodesk's claims: "We hold today that a software user is a licensee rather than an owner of a copy where the copyright owner (1) specifies that the user is granted a license; (2) significantly restricts the user’s ability to transfer the software; and (3) imposes notable use restrictions. Applying our holding to Autodesk’s [software license agreement], we conclude that CTA was a licensee rather than an owner of copies of Release 14 and thus was not entitled to invoke the first sale doctrine or the essential step defense. "

Comment Re:The Navy? (Score 1) 490

I would assume the nuclear plants found on submarines and large warships both provide a lot of energy and are not in the category of 'extra large.'

Many of them would also be in the category of running a fuel enriched beyond what is allowed in civilian reactors.

Comment Re:from the article (Score 5, Informative) 301

Do you have a reference to the fact that the battery needs to run at 350C?

You could start with Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-sulfur_battery

It seems a bit impractical to heat a house-sized building that much, especially when you have lost power.

Good insulation, and you don't heat the building, you heat the guts of the battery. Also, the lost energy is likely heating the battery.

I'm guessing a 4MW generator would take a couple of minutes, maybe 10s of minutes, to spin up to capacity.

Not the ones I've seen. (Hospital and nuke reactor backup.)

Comment Re:Believe It or Not (Score 1) 202

Some companies have terrible "everything you do even outside of work is ours" clauses.

Check your state's laws. Some states have laws protecting workers from this, making such clauses unenforceable. I personally recall a co-worker I had who found our state's (Washington) law WRT this and challenged our employer over the issue (mid 90s). (I wish I had the citation handy for my example, but I don't.)

Comment after reading Cringely's rant on fax via VoIP... (Score 1) 221

After reading Cringely's rant on faximile via VoIP (which exposed that he had extremely little knowledge of the underlying technical issues in the subject), I don't bother wasting my time reading anything from him that requires engineering and technical proficiency in a specialized field to intelligently discuss.

Comment Re:Story available... (Score 1) 433

[...]The Republican party has cratered so badly, and is teetering so close to Fascism, everyone looks good by comparison, even the Democrats.[...]

Do you even know what that word means? It doesn't seem like you do due to how you use it. A comment like this getting +5 is why I think /. suffers from a bad case of group-think, and makes me want to build a new site with a moderation system that works against such.

Comment it's not green (Score 2, Insightful) 404

TFA calls it a "green energy project". The type of people who think this is green energy are the complete f-ing morons that side track the rest of us from real viable energy advancements.

Further more, the TFA claims this will "lower the energy consumption of the market". At the inefficiency of this (which is already limited to being no more efficient than a car is itself), it will actually increase the energy consumption of the market.

Comment buy the name in the other TLD(s) (Score 1) 800

I had a similar situation. In my situation I was able to purchase the .net version of the domain name. The squatter with the .com version then contacted me trying to sell it to me. I sent a nasty note back that I would not deal with a fucking squatter. I think I also sent a note to their upstream for UCE.

Soon after that the squatter dropped the name and I picked it up. I'd paid for 'domain name back order' at my registrar, so it cost me a little more than normal, but not much more and the fucking squatter didn't get any of that extra cost.

Comment Re:Power factor compensators (Score 1) 859

Oops... I didn't have enough coffee in me when I read the post I was replying to. My post was replying to the notion that you can correct the power factor of a CFL with an inductor/cap, not that you can make it appear to draw no power to the metering device. (Which is also not true.)

Comment Re:Power factor compensators (Score 2, Informative) 859

It is in fact, you can make a fluro light appear to your meter to use zero power (with the right inductor/cap combo).

No, you can't.

There are two different types of power factor. One is related to the phase of the current being shifted from the phase of the voltage, the other is related to the shape of the wave if you plot the current.

The first type, which is the type that most people are familiar with, can be corrected with inductors or capacitors. This is often done for induction motors.

The second type of bad power factor is often due to rectifiers feeding a capacitor... your basic AC to DC conversion. The current only flows when the voltage on the AC side exceeds the voltage on the DC side. Thus, you get spikes of current centered around the peaks of the AC voltage. The phase is correct, but the current waveform is not sinusoidal. This cannot be simply corrected by inductors or capacitors.

As a side note, this is the bad power factor that many computer power supplies suffer from.

More complex switching supplies can overcome this issue. I've usually seen it referred to as a "power factor corrected" supply. They cost more because there are more parts in it. Thus, you don't see them in cheap CFLs.

IAAEE (I am an Electrical Engineer)

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