As long as you have an accurate sense of the intrinsic value of your shares at any given time; there is a price at which buybacks destroy more value for continuing shareholders than they would lose to taxes on dividends.
I don't mind CUDA, I do mind that all of the SDKs don't dynamically load the various CUDA shared libraries at runtime.. intertwining itself into your application linking process makes for extreme binary portability inconvenience.
There a flavor of CUDA runtime libraries that binds at runtime, so you can have a single binary that runs with CUDA and without it. I did this at work.
Obviously you need to check if CUDA is available before trying to execute kernels, or it will error out.
CA v. Altai (where the abstraction-filteration-comparison principle comes from) and SAS v. World provide pretty strong positive evidence that clean room is a valuable technique in both the US and Europe.
I do agree with you that the term is misused (it’s almost completely irrelevant here, anyway) and over-applied, but “not having ever been in a position to see or access the source code” is proven, especially in SAS v World, to be a pretty strong defense that’s worth pursuing in some re-implementation scenarios.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. "Not getting sued" doesn't validate a legal theory - legal theories are validated in court where they become case law. Until then, they are plainly speculative.
This "clean room RE" fabrication is also not something so obviously compelling that nobody would ever attempt to challenge it - it's just that nobody has cared to put dollars behind it. IP provenance cases are enormously difficult to prove and are almost always settled ahead of trial. This concept is software engineer folklore more than anything.
Saying you won't believe it's effective at all until someone sues and loses isn't the most compelling argument. If nobody sues then yes that is some evidence of effectiveness. It's not an absence of evidence, you're misusing that line.
>No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
You seem confused here? "Clean Room RE" is simply a descriptive result of copyright law in the US, and is well established. In the US there is no "sweat of the brow doctrine", pure facts simply cannot be copyrighted at all, nor underlying methods/ideas (that's patents). And as a direct result of the latter, again unlike patents, if two people truly independently write the same thing, both get separate copyright.
"Clean room reverse engineering" is just applying that to make any legal fight much cheaper or discourage it from every being bothered with in the first place. You have an RE "dirty" team that goes through copyrighted software and makes a specification that is purely factual, ie, "function 1 takes (int16)X input and does equation ABC on it, function 2 takes (long)X & (long)Y inputs and does LMN" etc. A factual/math spec like that cannot be copyrighted, so it breaks any derivation chain. They then give that, and only that with no other communications, to the clean team. If someone with no other exposure to the software being RE'd uses that spec to write a new piece of software themselves, then by definition the result cannot have any copyright of the original. It's a brand new work based off a list of uncopyrightable facts & math/ideas (though worth noting it could still get tripped up by abomination that is software patents).
There are other ways to argue against copyright infringement successfully, but they're much more subjective, which legally speaking reads "expensive, uncertain". CRRE simply trades that for two clear binary questions: was the spec copyrightable, and did the people writing a new piece of software from that spec have any previous exposure to the original? If the answers to that are no, then all arguments about function names being similar or whatever are no longer relevant.
On the subject of LLMs, one curious twist is that proprietary software might have less effective protection then open source depending on how it all goes. A coding LLM almost certain trained on all open source software available on the web. So there's at least some argument it's tainted. But proprietary software is proprietary. If the LLM has never had any of the source code in its training input, then isn't it clean in terms of producing anything derivative of that? That'll be kinda interesting, and might leave some companies with a bit of a conundrum (or I guess pushing the patent side even harder, but that has a much more sane 20 year expiration date vs copyright).
It's a defense. It's like having a moat around your castle. You don't need a moat to repel invaders since you also have a wall, and you might not get invaded anyway.
There's no law saying you have to do clean room RE. It's legal for me to look at a decompiled driver and write my own driver from scratch. It's not legal for me to just copy the decompilation, and a clean room environment is solid proof that it wasn't copied, but it's not the only way to not copy it, since I could also just not copy it.
But there are plenty of successful projects which would probably have been taken down if it wasn't for clean room RE. I mean just look at the clean room IBM BIOS clones from "IBM compatibles" in the early days of the personal computer.
The background level of software copyright legal actions is significant enough. If plane attacks happened that much then it would give us solid evidence of TSA effectiveness even if they never caught anyone directly.
Nintendo doesn't care. There's been proprietary Nintendo SDK code in libogc (open source library for making GameCube homebrew) for years. And more recently the various decompilation process have made recreations of linked code from the SDK that compile match byte for byte. In practice the legal risk of being sued into oblivion for this is not there. If anything there would be a DMCA takedown / cease and desist.
Right, but they are one of the biggest DMCA abusers. They killed many fan projects. They killed game renting in Japan as a concept. They killed Yuzu (a Switch emulator). And they could change their mind at any time.
> For the record Yuzu included code for circumventing Nintendo's DRM they had on game carts. It violated the DMCA.
It doesn't, this is what Nintendo claimed but it's false. The community learned their lessons from the Wii emulation era and you are supposed to bring your own keys, nothing is included in the emulator.
And yes, they also wrote this lie on their DMCA takedown against Suyu (which also doesn't have any keys), so they officially lied on a DMCA takedown.
There's no "circumvention mesure" in there, the emulator can only read unencrypted games by default. You won't find anything in the source code, if the game is encrypted, it cannot read it.
I disagree, this doesn't break anything, even the comments tell you so. This code does nothing by default.
Also I may mention that the support of external keys is there for you to get games for your own switch, pirates can just share decrypted games anyways.
Do you not see the references to decryption and decryption keys? This code is explicitly written to break the DRM of switch carts. If you mean by default you mean they don't provide a key, that doesn't matter in regards to it being considered corcumvention.
No that matters. As is, the emulator cannot be used to circumvent nor break any protection. Feel free to try it yourself, boot up the emulator, give it an encrypted game and see what it does.
Nintendo didn't want to get in court and also had to basically lie in a DMCA, I think that tells it all on their legal standpoint, they were afraid of creating a precedent.
Don't worry that if they were so sure to win, they would be in court already like they did with the R4 cartridge.
There's also been Wii games rereleased on PC with all debug symbols that cover the Wii parts that were still compiled in. You'd get mostly type names, enums, object layouts and function signatures that way.
there isn't ?? I sorta thought we figured all this out decades ago when SMB and DeCSS were being reversed? I think dosemu or something as well ?
I seem to recall DeCSS being the 'hot button' as it was RE'd in a 'non clean' way, the code released, and then a 'clean room' RE could be made from the 'public' info ??
edit: actually, at the time I think there was German law allowing RE for 'interoperablity' or some such. But that was a long time ago so my memory might be off.
> No statute defines "clean room RE" and there's basically no relevant litigation establishing case law.
It doesn't really make sense for it to be in a statute or in case law.
When you are a copyright infringement defendant the plaintiff has the burden of proving two things: (1) that they have valid and enforceable copyright rights, and (2) that you infringed those rights.
Direct proof of the later is rare, so they usually prove infringement by showing you had access to the work and that your alleged infringing work is substantially similar.
There are some defenses in the statute, such as fair use. With these defenses you are basically saying "Even if they prove everything that normally would prove they case, there is this exception that says in these circumstances I'm allowed to do that". (That's called an affirmative defense).
There are also affirmative defenses that were developed in case law. First sale doctrine was originally a case law developed affirmative defense, but was later incorporated in the statute. Copyright misuse is another case law affirmative defense. That one has not been incorporated into statute.
There are also non-affirmative defenses, often called negative defenses or failure-of-proof defenses. With these your defense it "They can't prove I did this thing that is necessary for them to win".
Clean room implementations are not technically a defense. They are a development methodology designed to provide rebuttal evidence to support a future failure-of-proof defense if you are accused of infringement.
How would you even put that in a statute? As far as case law goes all the case law you'd expect to see is around the particular evidence offered to show the implementers really did not have access to copyrighted elements of plaintiff's work, like record keeping and proof of authenticity and things like that.
An analogy would be like not having alcohol at an event you are hosting that is open to families because you want to make sure you don't violate laws against serving alcohol to minors. You aren't going to find a statute that says "Not having served alcohol to children is a defense to a charge violating the not serving alcohol to children statute". It is implicit in the not serving alcohol to children statute.
Any case law you find on this will not be about whether not serving alcohol to children is a valid way to avoid violating the not serving alcohol to children law. It will be about whether or not some kid that had alcohol got it from you or snuck it in from outside or about whether you took care to make sure your caterer adhered to you no alcohol policy or things like that.
> For example, over 8 weeks of resistance training in young men, creatine supplementation resulted in a faster increase in satellite cell number, myonuclei per muscle fiber, and muscle fiber size.
The question was asked whether creatine increases muscle nuclei or just water volume, and I provided a study (well, a meta-study which is referring to a specific study) which showed that creatine supplementation increased the muscle nuclei compared to no supplementation. The specific study referred to is titled "Creatine supplementation augments the increase in satellite cell and myonuclei number in human skeletal muscle induced by strength training"
the interesting claim about the study in the OP is that creatine increases muscle mass in non-trained/sedentary individuals. i haven't seen that claim previously (backed by a study) and took the question from user "15155" to be about that specifically. the claim that it increases muscle mass when combined with resistance training seems to be long-settled though
good question, and DXA won't tell you the answer there (they used DXA in the study) So not an especially convincing study in that case, since creatine leads to increased water retention.
Automated kill chains and domestic surveillance are happening regardless of what one corporation wants. These technologies will never be inaccessible to the government or government contractors who already have zero issues navigating red tape.
The point of regulation is to kill competitors and prevent private individuals from having unfettered access.
Jamming them is easy, replaying them so as to trick unacquainted receivers is easy, but "faking" a network of signals so as to precisely control present a specific location is not easy or feasible.
"Overpowering" (as to jam) inherently means detectable, these signals are arriving below the noise floor anyway. And if you aren't overpowering, the original signals will leak through. Also, depending on the sophistication of the receiver, your ability to present an implausibly different location may not exist at all (AGPS.)
Yes, a motivated actor can move a naive receiver somewhere different than where it thinks it is by some small amount - ideally outside of the CEP of whatever weapons system is targeting, but that's much different than precisely controlling the location to be somewhere else arbitrarily.
Yes, it's called expert epistemology, it's the basis of your entire life. Or do you do your own safety checks of every airplane you get on? Do you do your own research rather than trusting doctors? Do you think climate change doesn't exist because the reason we think it exists is because experts say it does, despite the fact that it snows sometimes?
A valid appeal to authority is normally accompanied by a specific expert's name or working group rather than some abstract "scientists." Also, these appeals to authority normally cite an expert in a field that has an existence exceeding 3 years.
Saying people spent "their lives" on fledgling technology is intellectually dishonest.. Are these "scientists" 22 years old? I'm sure you'll snipe back: "ALICE!!!" I couldn't care less about these completely irrelevant approaches.
The other issue is the venue these appeals are being made in. The people who work on this technology are actually here, commenting. This is like walking into a medical symposium and citing "doctors say" as if it were a valid way to shut down discussion amongst the people who wrote the textbooks.
It is a fact that among experts there is no consensus on saying '(super)intelligence is broadly safe and easy to control'. There might even be a consensus forming on the opposite claim.
Regardless, why would there be no scientific consensus if the question was easy and clear cut? I think the easiest reason is that these are hard questions to answer.
> it's not necessarily legal to use information to dox if that can be construed as harassment.
This is an incorrect understanding of the issue, these individuals are protected using a unique and unusual statute. In a mass broadcast scenario, without identifying their profession in context, there's arguably no crime here. There's certainly no crime to broadcast that you've seen their license plates with no association with their names (the statute doesn't cover that.)
> Even if you crowd sourced the identification of somebody involved in a potentially criminal act, you can only share that with the police and not the wider public.
What are you talking about? This is most certainly legally false in the United States. If you are incorrect about someone you might be found against for libel, but there's no crime here. This is basic First Amendment activity. Have you never watched the news or read a newspaper? Allegations are part and parcel.
These are also entirely the wrong analogies. Both of these are highly individualized scenarios that are not akin to Flock. "Public Flock" is more like a public traffic cam that anyone can view, and these already exist without issue.
I'm trying to distinguish the collection of information from the use. Collection is legal - however there is no point to collecting it if you can't actually use it for anything.
I'm well aware of these cases (and have commented about the specific statute in question in the past here.) The originally-purported analogy of a "public Flock" that you can "actually use" is completely different than what the statute protects. "Hey! Look! Here's an ICE agent's home address" is a lot different than "here's a list of vehicles who traveled down this street on a given date and time."
To preface: this statute is very arguably prior restraint and unconstitutional, which is likely why you only see those cases (non-affluent, non-connected defendants.) Furthermore, you'll notice that it requires "intent to threaten, intimidate, or incite the commission of a crime of violence."
I hate to get specific into this one very questionable statute, but no general/broad restrictions exist with regards to disseminating the video data or license plate information contained within. License plate data doesn't fall into the statute's definition of "restricted personal information," and the operator of a hypothetical service that doesn't single out these "protected" individuals amongst the rest of the population cannot be possibly construed as having malicious intent. This is an extremely unusual statute, few others like it exist.
A "public Flock" would let any interested party query the entire database of observed license plates. Collection isn't individualized to any one person, use and intent resides with the individual consuming the service.
The original posters premise was the way to make government dragnet surveillance banned was to do a public one. In general it's a good principle however I'm not sure in this case.
I can see how a public flock, which is just a queryable database, would be ok under the current rules. But would it make the government want to regulate? They could just continue to go after data use where legal asymmetry already exists.
You could frame almost any use as some sort of stalking/harassment.
Even in this case if they shut it down, government carve outs would apply.
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