Daily Shaarli
January 7, 2023
On November 4th, a class action lawsuit — Doe 1 v. GitHub Inc., N.D. Cal., No. 3:22-cv-06823, 11/3/22 — was filed in the US District Court in the Northern District in California, alleging against Microsoft and GitHub (a Microsoft subsidiary), inter alia: violation of the DMCA; breach of contract; tortious interference in a contractual relationship; unjust enrichment; unfair competition; violation of California Consumer Privacy Act; and negligence. Also sued were a confusing mishmash of for profit and non-profit related entities all using a variation of the name OpenAI (OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI, LLC, OpenAI Startup Fund GP I, L.L.C.; you get the picture). OpenAI received one billion dollars in funding from Microsoft although they seem “officially unrelated.” //
Plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and GitHub assembled and distributed a commercial product called Copilot to create generative code using publicly accessible code originally made available under various “open source”-style licenses, many of which include an attribution requirement. As GitHub states, “…[t]rained on billions of lines of code, GitHub Copilot turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages.” The resulting product allegedly omitted any credit to the original creators. //
As a final note, the complaint alleges a violation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for removal of copyright notices, attribution, and license terms, but conspicuously does not allege copyright infringement. A material breach of a copyright license can give rise to an infringement claim, so this is an interesting move. While the plaintiffs’ attorney indicated that an infringement claim might be added later, I suspect that this was done to avoid a messy fair use dispute. The complaint includes a statement by GitHub asserting an expansive, almost global fair use assertion which is at odds with explicit relevant law in many countries and frankly at odds even with US law. Nonetheless, fair use as a defense is expensive and complicated to litigate, so perhaps they chose to focus on something that is beyond factual dispute, and still provides the same damages.
PORTLAND, Ore. – On January 1, 2023, NuScale Power Corporation (NYSE: SMR) completed submission of a Standard Design Approval (SDA) application to the U.S Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for its updated small modular reactor (SMR) design, which is based on a VOYGR™-6 (6-module) configuration powered by an uprated 250 MWt (77 MWe) module. The design features the same fundamental safety case and totally passive safety features approved by the NRC in 2020, with a power uprate and select design changes to support customers’ capacity needs and further improve economics.
At its peak in the second century, the Roman Empire dominated nearly two million square miles of the world. As with most such grand achievements, it couldn’t have happened without the development of certain technologies. The long reach of the Eternal City was made possible in large part by the humble technology of the road — or at least it looks like a humble technology here in the twenty-first century. Roads existed before the Roman Empire, of course, but the Romans built them to new standards of length, capacity, and durability. How they did it so gets explained in the short video above. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1aFWtBXHII
On a representative stretch of Roman-road-to be, says the narrator, a “wide area would be deforested.” Then “the topsoil would be removed until a solid base was found.” Atop that base, workers laid down curbs at the width determined by the road plan, then filled the gap between them with a foundation of large stones.
Atop the large stones went a layer of smaller stones mixed with fine aggregates, and finally the gravel, sand, and clay that made up the surface. All of this was accomplished with the old-fashioned power of man and animal, using tipper carts to pour out the materials and other tools to spread and compact them.
On September 22, 2022 NASA and SpaceX announced that they were investigating the possibility of using a Dragon spacecraft—of the kind used to ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station—to go visit Hubble. On Dec. 22 NASA issued a request for other commercial space companies to get involved. //
The idea is that Hubble could be boosted to a higher orbit to continue its work for many more years. There’s also the tantalising prospect that it could also be serviced and refurbished—and its optics improved. //
A general servicing would be crucial because whether or not Hubble avoids re-entry this decade it is getting old. Launched in 1990 and last serviced by a space shuttle crew in 2009, it’s beginning to have technical problems. The latest was in July 2021 when it spent a month out of action because its payload computer failed before the problem was fixed.
However, from a science point of view an upgrade to its optics would be a game-changer. The reflecting telescope has a 2.4 meter mirror that can’t be upgraded, but its cameras could be. //
If the feasibility studies suggests it’s a go-er it would be the sixth time Hubble has been visited since its launch from Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. //
Almost immediately after its launch it was discovered that its mirror had an aberration causing images to be blurry, so it was visited in orbit by astronauts aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1993. They installed corrective optics. More servicing missions took place in 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2009 to upgrade various components, notably adding the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3.
Hubble now has six cameras and sensors to gather data on and take spectacular images of deep sky targets previously beyond the reach of astronomers. There are larger ground-based telescopes, but their view of the cosmos is limited by Earth’s atmosphere, which blocks infrared and ultraviolet light.
Hubble remains valuable to astronomers—and continues to make incredible observations—because it sees the universe in ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light. The new James Webb Space Telescope deals only in near and far-infrared light. Since Webb orbits the Sun a million miles from Earth it can likely never be serviced—despite repeated strikes by micrometeoroids already.
Nothing can go faster than light. It's a rule of physics woven into the very fabric of Einstein's special theory of relativity. The faster something goes, the closer it gets to its perspective of time freezing to a standstill.
Go faster still, and you run into issues of time reversing, messing with notions of causality.
But researchers from the University of Warsaw in Poland and the National University of Singapore have now pushed the limits of relativity to come up with a system that doesn't run afoul of existing physics, and might even point the way to new theories.
What they've come up with is an "extension of special relativity" that combines three time dimensions with a single space dimension ("1+3 space-time"), as opposed to the three spatial dimensions and one time dimension that we're all used to.
Rather than creating any major logical inconsistencies, this new study adds more evidence to back up the idea that objects might well be able to go faster than light without completely breaking our current laws of physics.
The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.
Even today, one of their structures – the infamous Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.
The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete.
But that, as it turns out, is not the whole story. An international team of researchers led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that not only are the materials slightly different from what we may have thought, but the techniques used to mix them were also different.
The smoking guns were small, white chunks of lime that can be found in what seems to be otherwise well-mixed concrete.
Just before the end of the year, Ethiopian investigators published their final report on the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302. Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa Bole Airport on 10 March 2019. Operated by Boeing 737-8 MAX ET-AVJ, it was the second crash of a 737 MAX in just over four months and led to a worldwide 20 month grounding of the MAX while Boeing and regulators made changes to the aircraft.
Following the publication of the final report, both the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) took the highly unusual step of publishing separate comments on the report.
Ethiopian investigators’ probable cause: MCAS
In their final report, Ethiopian investigators solely focus on the activation of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System as the probable cause of the accident.