This is also being done. Micro-reactors are generally sub-20MWe and are intended to be portable. The biggest name is micro-reactors is probably Project PELE[1]. PELE is a DoD project to develop a trailer mounted micro-reactors for remote deployment.
PELE will be tested at the Idaho National Lab[2] (DoE's primary nuclear energy research lab). Speaking of INL, they are also building the MARVEL[3] reactor. MARVEL is another test reactor of the micro-reactor type. MARVEL is being funded by DOE-NE (if I recall) and is designed to be be a 100kW.
One use of 2-3 years. You have two of them working at the same time and when it’s time to refuel you have a new one waiting and old gets shipped back to factory for refueling.
The expensive part of nuclear power plants is all the electricity generation part (turbines/generators/piping/transformers/etc) that is pretty much the same as for coal power plants. You don’t swap out any of that.
They are the size of a shipping container, not prohibitively expensive to move. The customers buying these things have no ability to recycle/refuel or dispose of the spent fuel. I presume any purchase agreement comes with a commitment to deal with it at end of life.
I guess if the supplier goes out of business, you might have trouble, but I'd expect these companies are putting things in place for that eventuality e.g. insurance.
They are one-use batteries in the sense that they are sealed and not intended to be refueled at the place of deployment, if ever. They can last for a decade without refueling though, so it may be fine.
Having served on a public body "governed" by Robert's Rules, there's one very important aspect of Robert's Rules that the author seems to be overlooking. While the default case certainly does constrain brainstorming, that is not a necessary case. Robert's Rules contains, at the very least, provisions for suspending or altering the rules temporarily for just this sort of reason.
I can't count the number of times the body I served on did just this. Admittedly, this was before COVID and the ensuing discussions were easier to manage in a live, in-person, format, regardless, Robert's Rules does allow for it.
As for public meeting's law, I can only speak for Illinois' Open Meetings Act, but yes, in fact, even email can be considered a meeting in some cases. In Illinois, what constitutes a meeting is a little more limiting. According to the OMA, a meeting occurs when a majority of quorum is present. In the 30 member instance discussed in the article, that's only 8 members (one half quorum plus one); In the case of our 8 member board, that was only 3.
Now, I understand the author's frustration, but these sunshine laws are important in keeping the public's business public, so, as frustrating as it may seem, these should not be relaxed.
Public performance of a copyrighted work. Unless the officer has a license to play the music for public consumption, it is illegal for him/her to do so.
I think this would be a pretty terrible abuse of that law - it would also be quite non-standard since listening to music on a boombox hasn't been prosecuted AFAIK[1].
Oh as I mentioned in a different comment I think this should be illegal and might already be illegal - but pulling some rando law out of the aether to force the charge isn't a great tactic.
Edit: Just to clarify, one of the other reasons I'm skeptical of using copyright law for this is because the intent doesn't match what the officer's intent would be allowing for officers to have a pretty good chance of avoiding any repercussions and because the penalties of sentencing are inappropriate. There are existing legal recourses in most instances for restricting the ability for civilians to record police incidents - if an officer is abusing copyright law to accomplish this silencing then they are likely running afoul of those laws and should be sentenced with breaking those laws since the penalties are more appropriate.
1. I'm going to guess it has happened sometime because racism, but it really shouldn't be. And thankfully a quick googling didn't turn up a litany of results.
I mean, if I were a business open to the public, playing music without paying the fees, I'd get in trouble. Here we have police business, open to the public, playing music, pressumably without paying the fees. Especially, if the officer is doing it when they know a recording is being made, that's an intentional act of public performance, or facilitating copying or somesuch prohibited conduct with copyrighted materials.
Also, depending on the volume, could be violating a noise ordinance.
Public performance isn't really some random law pulled out of the aether. It's one of the basic tenets of copyright and serves as the basis for the majority of copyright licensing in the U.S. Even the take-down process that the officer is looking to exploit exists because of the the rights holder's right to public performance (an Instagram video is a public performance).
That it is illegal (criminal) to willfully perform a copyrighted work in public is well established law and not the least bit random.
Sorry - I mean random with regard to the intent. The intent isn't to broadcast this music to the world so that dancing can happen - it is to specifically restrict the ability for observers to record the incident. Restricting the ability for observers to record police incidents is already illegal in most circumstances. I think making sure this is attempt to circumvent the law falls under the same laws and comes with the same penalties is important.
The point being that no rights holder, in their right mind would prospect someone for this, in the same way that they don't go after people walking around with boomboxes.
There might be a crazy example if this happening once. But mostly nobody gets prosecuted for walking around playing music on their phone.
Apparently you don't remember how hard Metallica went after their own fans for file sharing in the 90s. You should also consider that the person in question is a cop, not some random person. I'm sure that there are plenty of bands that would be happy to use this rule specifically against cops.
No, The idea that any court would say that someone walking around, playing music on their phone, while walking around outside, should be punished in any way, is so obviously false that it is just silly.
As in, maybe there has been 1 or 2 times, in history, where a court has ever punished anyone, for merely walking around, playing music on their phone, if it has ever happened at all.
> there are plenty of bands that would be happy
And the band would waste a lot of money and lose in court doing that.
I am truly curious as to how far you actually think this goes. As in, do you truly believe, that, to give a more extreme example, if someone was walking around, and had headsets in, and was listen to music but someone walking next to them could hear it, that any court ever would call this a public performance?
I mean someone can hear it right? That makes it a public performance? No. That is ridiculous. This would never happen.
Because that is only a slightly more extreme situation.
Copywrite law would be completely meaningless, if you are willing to bit the bullet on these kinds of extreme hypotheticals.
I'm a bit late replying so I'm not sure if you're going to see this or not.
In your headphone example, I'd say it's pretty clear that this would not be a public performance. Let's approach the problem from the other direction. If you have a store and play music over speakers in the store then this does count and stores pay licensing fees for this. What about if an employee regularly plays music with a bluetooth speaker while they're working at the cash register? This is a representative of the company playing music where customers can hear it so you could argue it still counts. What if they don't use the speaker and play the music directly over their phone's speakers? Does the quality of the speakers matter? What if instead of a store it's a government employee working somewhere like the DMV? Is the government exempt from copyright laws? What's the difference between the DMV employee and a cop? They both work for the government, doing a job where they interact with the public, and are playing music over speakers where the public around them can hear it.
At what point in that series does it stop being a public performance? Where exactly does the law draw the line? Is there even a clear line in established case law? Does that precedent vary depending on your location in the US? I would be surprised if there is relevant precedent for this example. There wouldn't normally be any incentive for anyone in the music industry to claim this type of scenario is a public performance. However, I think that changes when the police start doing this to as a way to avoid criticism.
> I think this would be a pretty terrible abuse of that law
No more or less terrible than automatically removing the video of the officer is. It's the same law! If it's unethical to prevent an officer from playing music it's equally unethical to exploit someone else's enforcement of that law for reasons that have nothing to do with playing music.
> But every now and then, a business makes the decision to ignore the legal rights of the music creators that help them make money. We only pursue lawsuits as a last resort after multiple attempts to negotiate with the licensee in question.
If the officer is playing the music incidentally as they go about their day, would that be fair use?
I wonder if a de-music service would be feasible so that the copyrighted audio within a video would be detected and suppressed without suppressing the video and other noises.
Willful infringement of copyright is criminal. Incidental infringement is not (also incidental recording of music would probably not be civil infringement either in my honest and not at all a lawyer opinion).
To perform or display a work “publicly” means . . . (1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or (2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
They will use the argument that their partner cop in the squad car is a "social acquaintance" or work friend, and that the music was intended for them.
Playing music to yourself, your friends etc. is 100% legal in all cases.
The cop doesn't need to make any arguments whatsoever about who it's being played for.
The person doing the filming and distributing is the person infringing.
It's completely obvious, there is no ambiguity.
The only approach, however hairbrained and ridiculous - would be for the IP owner to go after both the content video/distributor - and then somehow also rope the cop in as though they were somehow 'part of the preformative act' of making the video. But that's beyond a stretch.
In reality there are no hairs to split. If there is infringement, it's the person making the video.
Anyone playing the music to themselves is not playing it where 'a substantial number of persons' can hear it, nor are they projecting in such a manner.
If this were the case, then anyone playing music, anywhere would be in violation, which is obviously ridiculous and no, it's not about some odd technicality of the law.
It is straight up, 100% legal to play music to yourself.
Given that there are millions of instances of people doing this every day, and zero cases of infringement in these scenarios, it would seem both the letter of the law, and case history quite handily demonstrate how crazy the claim is.
HN threads descend into a weird distortion field when dealing with hot-button issues such as DRM, policing, NIMBYism, blockchain, privacy etc.
-> Someone playing music to themselves (and not filming themselves and putting said video in public) is not infringing on anything.
-> Someone filming someone else else playing music, may be infringing by virtue of the fact they are posting the content 'in public'.
I don't think it's a matter of 'a difficult case to make' against a person being filed while listening to music to themselves, there is no case.
The videographer, yes.
Twitch / Youtubers know this as they cannot stream DRM'd music in their streams, but of course, they are directly making said music public, in which case it's a legal problem.
If you are playing music to yourself, and someone films you - you are not infringing - the person filming and uploading is - possibly, though that's more questionable.
I imagine it's hard to build a case against the guy blasting his car radio without a recording, and the affected people aren't particularly unhappy with it.
If copyright was more like trademarks, and they had to protect it to keep it, you'd see more cases of people playing their music too loud.
We'll see the same happen with streaming services as smart TVs get popular. You'll have to pay per viewer as licenses change
You are not infringing on anything by playing music to yourself, and it's not a matter of cases being failed to pursued, it's straight up legal to do so in every sense.
If there is some random person filming you - then they are infringing - not you.
If you record me playing a song on my phone and post that on youtube, you're responsible for any copyright infringement, not me. There is no law against playing a song on your phone, even if you're being recorded
Most music is under a copyright that explicitely prevents public diffusion without a license. Unless the music doesn't have such a limitation, or the police have a license, yes, playing music in a public fashion like that is most probably illegal
There are definitely cases where playing music violates the license, but I wouldn't call it illegal[1]. Playing music at some business almost certainly is not allowed by default, you'd probably need to get a permission from someone authorized to give you one (i.e. a different license). Playing music in public likely has similar rules.
If your phone has an FM radio, sure. However Internet radio doesn’t offer the same broadcast exemptions that traditional radio does, so you still need to deal with licensing when it comes to playing internet radio in public.
Now on one hand, every day people will find this absurd. However, I am pretty sure it is not a defense that it’s not enforced evenly in all circumstances. A lot of people go 5mph over the speed limit without consequences; means nothing if you’re in court for it.
However, if you are acting in bad faith, you can expect people to become more creative with their use of the law against you. The police do this all the time.
And I really, really don’t think we need to argue that the police officer here just really wanted to share his taste in music while being uncooperative and has no idea what’s going on.
Copyright holders often act in bad faith, non-copyright holders as well. We see both all the time on YouTube. Yet people continue to proceed in bad faith without repercussion.
I do know lots of small businesses (pop-ups) use streamed media -so do company picnics and so on. It’s a thing. Officially I’m sure ASCAP frowns on this. On the other hand it’s a fruitless pursuit.
It’s obviously up to rights holders to decide what they would like to do. ASCAP is probably largely not interested in policing mundane and mostly personal uses of music in public places; especially a one-off event like a company luncheon, where relevant legal exemptions (at least for broadcast radio) exist. Seems like a case of not much to gain with a bit to lose.
However, it might possibly become a different story in this case. Here is a pretty objectionable use of copyrighted music on a small scale. It makes copyright holders look bad because the system they lobbied for could now possibly be used to help corrupt or abusive police officers escape accountability and censor opposition. Ordinarily, a copyright holder taking action against a small scale case like this would seem like a David and Goliath situation, but in this case the “little guy” is not the person playing the music.
Acting in bad faith is, of course, one thing, when you are an individual and you are acting against a large conglomerate. It doesn’t justify the action, but the optics of enforcement are not great. Just remember issues like Mike Rowe Soft for example. (P.S.: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...)
This case is more complicated because the perceived wrong is not exactly the use of copyrighted music but how copyright systems are being used against a citizen exercising their rights.
It remains to be seen what happens, but if this sort of behavior continues I can at least bet on musicians not being very happy to hear when their music is used for this purpose.
It has a very large effect on what shows up next to the "sales tax" label on your receipt. Sure if they were honest it would say "fee to make the developer's interest payments", but it never says that.
It seems, perhaps, Resolver One's time has finally come. Alas, Resolver One (and Resolver Systems) died a slow death and ceased to be in 2012. Perhaps this will fare better.
I always thought Resolver was a brilliant idea, but they never gained any traction against the heavy weights (Excel).
> doing this stunt in what looks like a suburban park strikes me as shockingly irresponsible.
It look like an R/C air park, actually. I live near the headquarters for two large hobby companies (Hobbico - makers of RealFlight, mentioned elsewhere, and Horizon Hobbies). One of the two (I don't remember which) built a similar air park specifically to provide a location for flying R/C jets.
The same over here. I stayed at a DoubleTree (also a Hilton hotel) in Monrovia CA a few weeks ago. They also had a bottle of water on the desk with a $5 USD price tag.
Ironically, they gave me at least $5 worth of chocolate chip cookies when I checked in.
Musk might not have been the founder on paper, but he was the founder in every respect that matters. The company you see today is his vision, not the product of Eberhard and Tarpenning.
> but he was the founder in every respect that matters.
Except actually being a founder. He provided money to an existing company, resulting in a controlling stake in that company. Certainly he is important aspect of Tesla as it is today, I'm not disputing that, but being important, perhaps even the single most critical aspect of Tesla today, does not make him a founder. It only makes him important.
Even Musk doesn't claim to have founded Tesla. He's said in the past the he was looking for a company like Tesla to become involved in. That Eberhard's dream (an electric sports car) overlapped Musk's (build affordable electric cars, but start with a high end sports car) is what brought them together.
It's funny you should mention graph theory and network security. I'm involved in cyber security research, though more on the operations side of security than networks. However, our research group does do quite a bit of work on the network side. Most of it's focused on SCADA networks, but there's a couple of really cool tools (read startups) that have come out of our group that lean heavily on graph theory.
NP-View[1] maps connections. That is, If HostA can reach HostB, and HostB can reach HostC, is there a path from HostC to HostA.
Veriflow (which I know far less about) is a large topology mapping tool.
PELE will be tested at the Idaho National Lab[2] (DoE's primary nuclear energy research lab). Speaking of INL, they are also building the MARVEL[3] reactor. MARVEL is another test reactor of the micro-reactor type. MARVEL is being funded by DOE-NE (if I recall) and is designed to be be a 100kW.
[1] https://www.cto.mil/pele_eis/ [2] https://gain.inl.gov/GAINEPRINEI_MicroreactorProgramVirtualW... [3] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/new-marvel-project-aims-s...