174311427
submission
Registered Coward v2 writes:
NBC News) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released from a British prison and on his way to a remote Pacific island on Tuesday where he will plead guilty to a conspiracy charge as part of a plea deal with the U.S. Justice Department, according to court documents. Starting in late 2009, according to the government, Assange conspired with Chelsea Manning, a military intelligence analyst, to use his WikiLeaks website to disclose tens of thousands of activity reports about the war in Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of reports about the war in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and assessment briefs of detainees at the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
142139170
submission
Registered Coward v2 writes:
Wall Street has decided if you can't beat them, at least watch them. They're paying for data that shows which stocks are most talked about on Reddit stock forums, ostensibly to allow them to adjust their positions or take advantage of opportunities to trade based on Reddit.
Nothing could go wrong there, since Reddit would decide to seed the data with misinformation, or simply pipe the data into a filter and produce their own free list...
88829353
submission
Registered Coward v2 writes:
IEEE Spetrum asks that question in an article about Comma.ai’s and its CEO George Hotz who have released, on GITHub, their open source software for self driving cars. It currently adds capabilities to some Hondas and Acuras. Given the difficulties in testing such software it is possible bugs exist and might cause a crash. While many legal experts agree OSS is "buyer beware" and that Comma.ai and Hotz would not be liable, it is a gray area in the law.
The software is release under the MIT OSS license and the Read Me contains the disclaimer “THIS IS ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. THIS IS NOT A PRODUCT. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR COMPLYING WITH LOCAL LAWS AND REGULATIONS. NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.”
SCOTUS,in a series of court cases in the 1990s, ruled open source code as free speech protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The question is does that release the author(s) from liability. The EU has no EU wide rules on liability in such cases.
One open question is even if the person who used the software could not sue, a third party injured by it might be able to since they are not a party to the license agreement.
88770101
submission
Registered Coward v2 writes:
Vault, in a blog post, discusses wether colleges should base tuition on the actual cost of providing the education rather than on a once price for all credits basis. Their argument is base on an article in Quartz that shows engineering and science degrees costa school a lot more to provide than a liberal arts degrees; for a variety of reasons including higher professor salaries and equipment / infrastructure costs. As a result, those majors are subsidized by the cheaper ones; and they also have the highest earnings in aggregate.
39302091
submission
Registered Coward v2 writes:
SCOTUS is set to hear a case to determine how copyright law and the doctrine of first sale applies to copyrighted works bought overseas, imported to the US and then sold. The case involves a foreign student who imported textbooks from Asia and the resold them in the US to help fund his education. He was sued by the publisher, lost and was ordered to pay $600k in damages. Now SCOTUS gets to weigh in on the issue.
