An author's copyrights can be assigned or transferred to a third party. This leaves the author with only the same rights as any member of the general public. (There are a few narrow exceptions, but nothing that would prevent the possibility of an author infringing on the copyright of a work he created)

It's also possible for a person who prepares a work to not be considered the author. This is the case for works made for hire.

And of course copyright isn't mandatory, though that just leads to works being in the public domain, so at least there's no danger of infringement there.

However, bear in mind that copyright only applies to original material, not to pre-existing material. A review which includes a quote is copyrightable, but the new copyright for the review only covers the portion original to the reviewer; the material quoted is only covered by the copyright of the work the quotes are drawn from.

17 USC 103(b):

And why would the accounting department or HR consult with IT before purchasing accounting or sales or HR software? My fiancee is a school registrar. She understands the software she uses very well and is an expert within the limited domain of school registration and billing software. Why would she call their school's IT contracted company to consult before picking out a hypothetical new replacement piece of software to do her job.

Fucking IT, I swear. The fact that you know how to manage a server, fix a RAID or setup a router doesn't make you an expert on ever fucking aspect of technology in the universe. I'm incredibly technologically proficient but there is no reason my fiancee would consult with me on what software to use to do her job. Ideally she would design her own software, in the real world she would find a developer and have them make software that meets her needs but most likely she'll just have to shop on the market for a commercial product already available. None of those scenarios though need any input from IT.

Let me translate that: the company was nearly broke and the employees were given the opportunity to become *investors* and potentially get their money in an installment plan assuming the company didn't go bankrupt before the installment plan was complete for presumably little to no return or take their owed severance.

I can't believe that employees who were fired might not choose to invest in their former employer who just fired them... especially when they were fired because the business was already going down.

The existing investors were also smart enough to cut their losses and liquidate. If the profit-seeking investors who presumably believed in the company weren't willing to invest then why the fuck would a laid off worker choose to invest int he company's future?

Even with 3 kids, you do not need 5000 square feet of house.

That actually depends a lot on the people involved. As a single person with no kids, I'm finding ~1,800 square feet to be woefully insufficient for my needs. When I do woodworking projects, I have to either lose my master bathroom or my kitchen, and sometimes both, because I don't have a proper wood shop. My drum kit, weight bench, and grand piano take up almost the entire living room, so I don't have a proper living room. My filing cabinet, sewing table, printer table (for a printer the size of an office refrigerator), and Christmas tree (too big for any of my closets) ensure that I don't have a proper dining room, either—just the breakfast nook in the kitchen. My bedroom has essentially no available floor space, between the bed, dresser, two bedside tables, and a treadmill, with the exception of the main walking path into the room. My guest bedroom is completely filled with the bed, one tall dresser, and a small bedside table. I'd like to add another bookcase, but there's no space left in my house unless I put it on the front porch.

Basically, I've done the math, and to be comfortable, I need a minimum of 400 square feet for a wood shop, 200 square feet of closet space for the tree, at least 200 square feet of dedicated space for exercise equipment, and ideally a music room with another 400 square feet or so, for a total of 1,200 additional square feet, or 3,000 square feet total. If I got married, and if my wife had similarly space-demanding hobbies, and if we had three kids, even after you deduplicate the kitchen, bathrooms, and shared living space, we would still need well over 6,000 square feet. So 5,000 square feet for a family of 5 is not excessive. If anything, I'd find it kind of cramped.

Get a smaller, comfortable place to live and put you money somewhere more useful. If you're married, obviously your spouse needs to agree with this...

Or move to a location where you can afford a decent-sized house. Five thousand square feet is not a mansion. I believe that the current lower bound is 8,000 square feet.

Indeed, while he seems often villified, it was him who showed the US that the spying was happening. It it looking like his legacy is having some serious positive consequences, in real terms. And he's risked his life and will probably have to spend his life in exile. But he did it for the good of his country.

A true patriot and a true hero.

It would only be off topic if Dice weren't suppressing the biggest stories in the FOSS world this week.

They are suppressing it because it reflects badly on them. We have nowhere else to discuss it, so like Beta it'll get discussed everywhere until they finally listen.

It is sad.

Sourceforge used to be a pillar of the community. It seemed something more than what github is now. I'm not sure precisely what caused the demise, but I remember it going downhill since before github was really, really big.

Apparently they decided GIMP-Win was "abandoned". It was after a fashion---the distributor decided to stop using sourceforce and instead goes through the main GIMP site. Naturally the thing to do here is for sourceforge to take over the reigns and start putting the latest GIMP releases in it's place for the 6 or 7 remaining people who still use sourceforge. That in itself is not terrible, but it's the way they hijacked the installer which stinks.

But it's all OK since the account owner never knew^Wobjected.

Here's the delightful corporate weasel wording:

https://sourceforge.net/blog/g...

But it's not "obnoxious shitware" it's "easy to decline third party offers". Right.

Now Dice: grow a spine and let this article on the front page. You fucked up, everyone knows you fucked up now own it.

Nope. The dart is made of DU. The sabot is some lightweight material. It bulks out the dart ot the size of the barrel and is then discarded when the whole package exits the cannon. By that stage the sabots are going fast enough to damage unarmoured things.

Oh, well, that would explain why the camera had a distressingly low frame rate then.

Yes, so GREs are necessary to get into a PHD program since they are the first cut. And again with the prelims, they're better, but a PhD is not exams, it's research, and exam at that point exams are just testing completely the wrong thing.

Anyway the American PhD system has more wrong with it than just exams.

Military grade thermal imaging of the sort on fighter jets or heat seeking missiles is not really the same as the consumer level junk you'd find on e-bay that people use to look for Sasquatch or find people in burning buildings.

How is it different apart from the usual mil spec things of being robust? The only experience I've got is with industrial thermal imagers. They're super sensitive (you could recover which keys had been pressedon a keyboard for example). One of the main things was it had some funky internal optics and a calibrated temperature source. Every few seconds, it would go ker-thunk and point the imager at the calibrated source (with a pause in the video) and then flip back. This seemed to ensure that the measurements were actually accurate (modulo emissivity of course).

Oh and it came in a funky metal case and streamed over a 100 mbit/s ethernet port using RTSP, uncompressed 16 bit thermal data, 0--655.36K or a nice false colour image complete with a colour bar.

And and the internal CPU ran WinCE and responded to telnet.

And of course if cost $LOTS, but not $MILITARY_LOTS.

The SAT/GRE/etc. are terrible ways of selecting students; they can be specifically prepped for, students can cheat, they exclude otherwise-worthy students who don't "test" well, etc. But for better or worse, they are about the best available.

The GRE is the graduate one. It's about the worse method in existence for selecting PhD students, and certainly not the best available. I'm not claiming it's perfect, but the system we use in the UK which is somewhat more ad-hoc is very substantially better.

Then again, we have some grade obsession in that the EPSRC (who by the way are literally clowns: office uniform includes red nosesand floppy shoes, I'm led to believe) won't fund a PhD for someone with less than a 2:1. While there's a weak correlation with grades, some of the smartest people I've known didn't get a 2:1.

So in other words ridiculous rote learning teaching METHOD in a particular subject, i.e. chemistry means an unrelated subject is useless?