Yup, to the extent that the US decided that it needed to ensure that UK libel law could not be enforced against US writers: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-10940211
There's a line in there that really stands out to me:
>McDonald's spent several million pounds, while Steel and Morris spent £30,000; this disparity in funds meant Steel and Morris were not able to call all the witnesses they wanted, especially witnesses from South America who were intended to support their claims about McDonald's activities in that continent's rainforests.
It's pretty galling that the justice system, which is a public tool, being gamed in this way by a party with vastly greater assets. It's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this, since you don't really want to just give each side a court-appointed lawyer: you really should get to pick your own lawyer. But what to do about the fact that you might want to pick an expensive lawyer?
It seems to me that one compromise would be to recognize that you can legitimately have a strong interest in the case having a just outcome, and thus want to spend more money fighting it, while at the same time not allowing one side to outspend the other.
One way to achieve this would be requiring that each side can only pay into a common pool of money, which is then split equally between the defence and prosecution.
The practical difficulty in implementing this is that a large company (e.g. McDonalds) will have in-house counsel who are not just hired for solely this case, and it would be hard to dis-entangle just how much of their salary should be counted as being for this particular case.
"It's a bit tricky to see exactly how to fix this, since you don't really want to just give each side a court-appointed lawyer: you really should get to pick your own lawyer."
I don't know the details of it, but in England while you can pick your solicitor (the person you meet with out of court, who does research, puts together briefs, etc), you do not get to choose your Barrister (the person who represents you in court and argues before the judge. While this has changed to allow for some selection in the past few decades I believe you still don't have full choice.
They indicate plans to sell hardware on Crowdsupply which is based in the US. Presumably this is going to be FPGA-based which brings up all the fun questions of how ITAR applies to software.
Would adding a speed restriction in their VHDL that could be trivially bypassed by patching out one line of code satisfy ITAR requirements?
Crypto is its own category in the ITAR, one whose impact decreased over time as events made the restrictions less relevant. Most crypto is now EAR not ITAR, but treated as a special category. I'm not sure the software classification lessons are going to apply.
US law applies worldwide when it comes to this sort of stuff... You can bet if you started producing these chips and selling them to Iran, you would either be arrested and child porn found on your laptop, or have an 'accident'.
> One of those weird copyright decisions, like the one where Owens-Corning trademarked PINK
Trademarks and copyright are NOT the same thing. That trademark would only give them rights to the branding PINK in the context of insulation. Copyright is more expansive - and I think you should be more worried about copyright than trademark.
Right, PINK is a trademark of Owens-Corning, associated with licensed copyright rights from the use of The Pink Panther cartoon character in some long-forgotten ads.[1][2]
This is very cool. I've actually been trying to do something similar is rust, but I'm nowhere near as far along (I basically just have load instructions working at this stage): https://github.com/harrybraviner/mix
I love Knuth's books for the fact that they teach you advanced algorithm features 'from the ground up', as it were - it's great to see someone else make an emulator too.
