Ah...that makes sense. The water's still delivered to the house at ambient temperatures where it's heated by equipment owned by the utility. So they could (and do) monitor hot-water usage.

If we have a leaking hot water tap the water company notices after a full month after it started and calls us as our hotwater usage spikes and our bill is way up.

How does that work? Everywhere I've ever lived (including abroad) or visited the water company provides water at ambient temperatures and the customer heats it on site.

Once upon a time ago (in the US anyhow) apartment buildings used radiant heat based on hot water that was centrally heated and distributed. Perhaps they also delivered hot water to the residents. That's still not the water company.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. Just curious where it happens and how they transport the hot water to you without losing the heat energy. It just doesn't seem efficient.

There are two issues to address here: 1) cost and maintenance, and 2) data ownership. The first is obvious and is the crux of the CEO's pitch to Congress. The second is the one she's skirting. Sure, she acknowledges the government would "buy" the data. But for what use and with what limits? We already see corporations trying to get laws passed making them the only distributor of government-generated data (weather companies, journal publishers). With a ploy like this they make it that much more likely the public is excluded from having and using the data.

The only way I'd encourage the government to go this route is if the law and contracts specify the data is free in every sense of the word. Otherwise this is just another government hand out to private corporations.

If PlanetIQ think there's a real market for weather data, they should finance the whole thing with private equity. My guess is no one in the right mind will give them the capital unless they can get the government give them a monopoly.

Agreed. In my office we've standardized on OpenOffice (or LibreOffice). We write reports, produce spreadsheets and give presentations without problem. The only time I ever need access to MS Office is when somebody sends me an Office document that for whatever reason doesn't render correctly. It's not because the information isn't available. It's always a disagreement between the two programs as to how to render. OO and LO interchange nicely. The Apple iWork suite works as well. In my experience Office is the odd-man out.

At this stage of the game Office productivity is mostly a solved problem. The feature set is known. Now we're dickering over file formats and presentation.

The summary also notes this is savings to the end user. If I don't need all the features found in MS Office I shouldn't need to buy it. If I get what I need and pay $0 I've saved $150.

That's the whole point of the summary. Some segment of the public are getting what they need to get their "office productivity" tasks done for less cost.

Lots of people are noting that we sign these contracts willingly and that the phone is discounted because of the two-year contracts we sign. Many are overlooking two key facts:

1) There's a huge cancellation fee that makes up for the discount on the phone. ATT is up to $350 for cancelling a smartphone contract.

2) Wireless markets are constrained by government-granted monopolies. Monopolist have huge amounts of leverage on their side. Yes, you can buy the phone without a contract...and pay a huge margin on it. You're ostensibly free to go elsewhere...and find the same deal. The numbers are little different (T-Mobile charge $200 for cancelling early). But the structure of the deal is largely the same.

We congratulate ourselves on our free and open markets and put huge political pressure on other countries to do the same, but when you look under the hood we create vertically-integrated monopolies. Who in their right mind would give the same company control of: a) the means of delivery (airwaves or wires), b) equipment to access the service, and c) sale of content to use the service? We broke up Ma-Bell specifically for just this reason. We very nearly broke-up IBM and Microsoft for the same. But for some reason communication services (cellular and internet) are handed over on a silver platter to corporations.

And then we write criminal laws to protect their monopoly.

Is it fair in any meaningful sense of the word? I don't think so.

It's more than that. States and the Federal government have given the telcos and cable companies money multiple times over the past ~15 years to build out infrastructure[1]. In many cases cable companies have received exclusive rights to deliver phone service, cable TV or both.

Despite public largess, these companies come back to the trough over and over poor mouthing how expensive infrastructure build out has been. In Houston we can get up to 100 Mbps downloads but the price is nearly $300/month. To stay under $100/month you have to "settle" for 12 Mbps. That's not bad but when you consider how much money we've spent publicly the ROI isn't great. And let's not forget the gouging the public takes over wireless data.

I'm firmly in favor of for-profit businesses and letting free market work...but when as a society we've decided to hand over full and partial monopolies to for-profit corporations we have every right to participate in setting pricing and profits.

At this point I'm in favor of treating the last mile for internet connectivity the same way we treat the last mile for electricity. Have a poles-and-wires company and separate service providers who deliver content and services. There's too much incentive to drive users to in-house offerings and service when the ISP is also a content company. In other words, if we're going to make the last mile a monopoly then we need net neutrality.

[1] "$7.2 billion for complete broadband and wireless Internet access" See American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as one example.

The plaintiff will almost certainly seek (and receive) an injunction against further infringement of the work by the defendant. I imagine it would also raise the plaintiff's next complaint against the same defendant to willful infringement with its painful $150,000 per-infringing-work penalty.

Being found guilty and paying a fine is not a blessing to do it again.

The Berne Convention was written and first formally accepted in 1886...but not by the United States. The US steadfastly refused to adopt the convention because it would have required large changes to our copyright laws and acceptance of doctrines like author's moral rights for which we don't have analogous protections.

The US did eventually adopt the Berne Convention and did so in the only way permitted by our Constitution: Congress passed the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988. The US Senate then formally ratified the Berne Convention making the US a signatory to the treaty.

So yes, (some) US lawmakers did make a decision that resulted in changing our copyright laws.

The OP, however, is not correct in his oblique suggestion that Sonny Bono is in part or whole to blame. (Though I have no doubt Sonny Bono supported it.) Sonny Bono's name is sometimes attached to the Copyright Extension Act of 1998 but he did not vote for it. (Though he had sponsored similar legislation earlier.) He died nine months before it's passage. His wife Mary, who was elected to his Congressional seat after his death, was instrumental in getting it passed in his name.

Berne Convention
Copyright Extension Act

I live in NZ too, but NZ have treaties with the US to extradite criminals and that is OK. People shouldn't be able to evade justice by simply going to another country.

That's the point, though, isn't it? Dotcom didn't physically perpetrate any crimes in the US. He didn't flee our jurisdiction. Extradition laws are typically about crimes committed in a jurisdiction from which the the defendant fled.

Even more to the point. Dotcom is CEO of a corporation that is accused—not convicted—of copyright infringement. Officers and employees of corporations are usually exempt from prosecution for laws broken by the company. There are ways of piercing the corporate veil but to do so typically requires that the officers and employees in question knew the actions were illegal. MegaUpload and Dotcom are arguing that they adhered to the laws and even helped US authorities gather evidence in other proceedings.

There's a great deal of uncertainty regarding the case...uncertainty that might be clarified during trial proceedings against MegaUpload. To argue that Dotcom should be prosecuted at all would, to me, require that MegaUpload be first found guilt of a crime. Once that had been done the extradition request would have been a mere formality.

But that's not what happened. US authorities have seemingly abandoned the niceties of sending officers to the accused's house or place of business during daylight hours. In many cases they've resorted to a shock-and-awe methodology of pre-dawn raids with smoke, tear gas and loaded weapons drawn. The argue it's necessary to prevent destruction of evidence.

Somehow US authorities convinced NZ authorities this method of arrest was necessary to "capture" a rather portly big mouth who's shot more videos than he has firing-range targets.

I don't believe any of it was necessary. I don't believe there's a viable case of criminal conduct. What I suspect is the whole thing is a botched case that authorities in both countries want to sweep under the rug. And, while we're on the topic...the argument that exposing the case to public scrutiny will "reveal intelligence gathering and sharing methods" is straight from the US playbook.

The real shame is they tried to use criminal-case law and methods in what should have been a civil case, screwed it up and as a result have undermined public confidence in the justice system in general.

"Begun the Clone War has" - Yoda

RTS could make Red Hat happy by running a Black Duck analysis on their proprietary code and sharing the result

Bradley Kuhn addressed this already with two objections:

1. Blackduck can only confirm that the code in question doesn't copy directly from code in it's look-up database. It can't determine whether a given bit of modified code is a derivative work under copyright law and hence a possible GPL violation (where GPL code is involved).
2. The Blackduck software is proprietary. While their clients may feel assured (and are perhaps indemnified against mistakes), copyright holders have no assurance that the software is exhaustive or accurate in its analysis.

In other words, a Blackduck assurance is a proprietary, "black box" assurance...worthless to third parties.