Clive Robinson • January 27, 2018 9:09 PM

@ JG4,

It wouldn’t be wrong for you (or anyone else, as copyright is not asserted)

The law changed some years ago, I get the primary copyright as author implicitly, I would actually have to assign it into the public domain.

But @Bruce also gets a copyright because my comnents form part of a collection within his published work. Effectively a derived work.

The problem is the WTO rules and other legislation all vary from place to place…

As for,

I was slow to realize that you already have written enough to fill several or many books.

You need to remember the old saw,

“Quantity alone does not a banquet make”

That is whilst somebody could scrape my comments, they are in the main responsive snipits to others comments etc. You would have to go through two mote distinct processes,

1, Strip out the essentials and sort/collate them.

2, Bridge them into a coheareant whole that gives them context.

As those who have written factual / technical books will tell you in the average book 10% or less is “the essentials” the rest makes them both readable and usefull to the widest number of readers.

In some cases it can be a lot less, think of the worlds most well known equation E=MCC just how many words directly and derivative works have there been?

(I’ve just added another 28 in the above, and I suspect a day does not go by when others are adding their’s 😉

Having written “education/training” guides for various organisations in the past, the skill is not in gathering the knowledge, but presenting it so that people of varying abilities can use it.

I’m actually in the process of writting traing information for my Son to kick his backside along the path of learning as an engineer. I might just publish it in a more widely available form the problem is the disemination even in just electronic form requires money to be spent. Which unless you are doing it for vanity means making a return, which acts as it’s own barrier to disemination… Not quite a Catch22 but you get the idea.

There are also crazy crazy details you have to watch out for. Say I want to write a guide to wiring a plug for a domestic mains power socket. It’s realy quite simple till you get to the illustrations… A quick hack would be to just photograph a plug as you do it add a couple of red arrows or similar to highlight what you are describing. But you cannot do that as somebody already has copyright on the plug and you would be required to seek their permission… So you have to either do something to the plug to make it sufficiently different to be “generic” or spend considerable time comming up with new drawings that you own the copyright on… Going down the “make it generic” route is quite risky, as it has it’s own problems. Not just the investment in time but also some one will at some point make a claim it’s not –sufficiently– generic thus derived from their work just to be a nuisance… Which is why publishers are known to use “stock images” that only require a modest fee (look at the covers of paperback books to see identical images but under different colour washes etc). Oh and somebody else will also come along to claim you stole their idea of their guide etc. The better you do it the more likely this is to happen. It you know a successful popular author sufficiently well ask them about the perils of “fan fiction”, “it’s enough to make your beard white over night”.

It’s actually worse with technical guides, because of patents and processes. If you look in a School Chemistry book you will see formulars for turning one set of molecules into another. However when you go up a level you start talking about the processes involved with feedstock and efficiency etc. The clasic one you see is the Nobel Prize winning work of chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch[1]. What you get given is “The Haber Process” which whilst it works is not “prime time” by any stretch of the imagination. It took the work of Carl Bosch to “industrialize” it into the “Haber-Bosch” process which was a very valuable “trade secret” at one point.

Which brings you into an interesting problem. Without going into technical information in depth you stymie your attempt to provide a usefull work to others so that they can learn. However if you do give detailed technical information you are in effect “revealing trade secrets” which in turn leaves you open to charges of “industrial espionage” in a number of countries of which South Korea has been notable in prosecuting and seeking to prosecute people.

And that’s just some of the easy stuff, think about previous employers. Most don’t care about previous employees and what they now do but some are greedy or vengful and have the attitude of the Devil in that they believe they own your soul in perpetuity.

I’ve experienced this a couple of times, one was a company designing electronic security devices. Specifically a very crap fingerprint reader. They were deaply unhappy about what I could do with red wax from Edam cheese, a fridge/freezer, WD40 oil an bottle of Copydex rubber solution glue and optionally a rubber glove finger. They have long since gone out of business. Another company was not happy about the fact that I had already designed built and tested a hybrid Class D/H RF amplifier that used Walsh Transforms to get rid of filter issues whilst working part time at a previous company. The “bossman” was not happy that someone had “Been there done that got the tee-shirt and a style award” but worse still had done it way better than he had thought up… For some reason people get NIH syndrome or worse “Kill the Golden Goose” syndrome. Why I have no idea because it’s always both petty and realy short sighted, and in the long run hurts them more than anyone else…

[1] What you rarely hear about is that it was not Fritz Haber who actually did the work of coming up with the actual “Haber Process” he was kind of an ideas man. The real work of finding the actuall process was done by the British Chemist Robert Le Rossignol, as the patents actually show. Rossignol was unlucky in that he did his work in Germany before WWI and got intered by the German Authorities in 1914. To get out he had to work for the German’s which in effect made him a traitor. He returned to Britain after the war and moved into designing electronic components for GEC (thermionic valves in particular) which became vital in WWII in which both his sons died.

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2018 10:39 PM

@ CallMeLate…,

the sight of the name here conjures …. a bearded Donald Sutherland. And I have no idea why that is.

I’d love the voice, and be a little nearer his physique than my own. Also the charm and gentle whit would be improvments over my own.

As has been mentioned before I look a little worse than a Klingon having a bad hair day most of the time. Though my beard has both softened and aged my looks. And now with a little badger looks distinguished in a sort of Russian way as a charming Russian young lady told me at party a couple of months back while pulling on it gently 😉

Like many physically large but not overweight people I used to be very light on my toes –when they were not broken– and could sneek up on a mouse with little difficulty[1].

As quite a few people found out when I was “wearing the green” I could just appear as if by magic and the first they knew was a quiet cough or word from just behind their ear. One “roughty-toughty” officer had a close encounter I doubt he has forgoton. He was trying to sneek up on our position in the dark. He was not happy when crawling up on his belly to find a thunderflash with struck fuse land in front of his eyes and me saying quietly “You might want to do something with that”. I don’t think I’ve seen somebody roll over a few times and curl up in a ball so fast in my life before. He was somewhat enraged, and when it did not go off, lets just say he was not molified to find out it was one I had “modified earlier” so it would behave just as it did…

It was just as well he was enraged because he forgot to ask the obvious question of what I had done with the charge I had taken out of it, or the other five for that matter… His happy little squad did find out later as I’d wired them to the ignition systems of their land rovers… But as they say “all things are fair in love and war”, so why should war games be any different 😉

The MT staffie told me a few days latter I’d made a hell of a mess of the engine compartments and owed her a drink or three for cleaning up the mess… I said jokingly “make it dinner and your on” she said yes thus bonus points all round B-)

[1] Which always gives you a problem… having snuck up on a mouse and caught it, what do you do with it? Although I can look mean and ferocious and could actually kick your head off[2] I’ve a soft spot for small creatures and don’t believe in harming or killing them without very good reason.

[2] I still can kick the tops of door frames but lack the power I once had when I physically broke a martial arts dummy with a single kick. I had made a half joking comment along the lines of “Do you call that a kick” to somebody I knew who was practicing their martial arts in their dads garage. Instead of treating it like the light hearted joke it was ment to be, they gave me the “If you think you can do any better” line… well I did and broke a couple of toes in the process, but did not let on (when you play rugby breaking fingers and toes is not an occupational hazzard but near normal occurance, often a source of pride of a game well played). I used to be a keen cyclist till ill health stopped me a few years back and cycling a hundred miles or so on a whim was a way of curing boredom, hence I had very strong legs. A girl friend of the time used to tell her friends that my thigh measurment was bigger than her waist, what she did not tell them though was how dam difficult it was to get trousers that would go around thirty inch thighs, hence my habit of wearing “work trousers” when not wearing shorts.

Clive Robinson • January 27, 2018 11:18 PM

@ Bong Smoking Primitive Monkey Brained Spook,

That would be me. I hate it when you drag me into this stuff, bud!

Hmm would that be “drag” as in smoking a bong, crossdressing or just pulling your stuff along?

There’s an old joke about a bloke who has a dog with no legs. Somebody asks him why he calls it “cigarette” and he replies “Because every night I take it out for a drag”.

Which is almost as bad as the one about a dog with no nose, when asked “How’s it smell?” The owner replies “Terrible” (which before I am asked by “hmm” can be found on a Skiffle record by Lonnie Donegan called “My old Man’s a Dustman”).

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2018 9:04 AM

@ CallMeLate…,

Being a coder myself, once I learned that JS is essentially Code Cutting Lite for kiddies and for others we don’t know and can’t trust, I ripped JS out of my OS (by the roots!; no flag silliness).

Just to give you the feeling you’ve made the right choice 😉

Have a read of,

https://www.rdegges.com/2018/please-stop-using-local-storage/

Then ask yourself “What else could possibly go wrong in the hands of a school kiddy self learning to be a Web designer?” after all experience tells us the tools we turn to first are the ones we first learnt…

I won’t prophesie doom on this, because as far as I can see it’s a done deal with the Devil collecting wanabe code cutting lite souls already :-S

I think the designers of all that extended crap in HTML5 should have their feet turned to the fire untill they self combust.

But then I’m old fashioned “Fire and soul stealing” still have oldSkol style about them that never seams to age, like little black dresses and small imps in red with outsized toasting foks to prod buttock 😉

Clive Robinson • January 28, 2018 5:36 PM

@ Anony,

A new randomness generator designed for counterfeit protection

The idea is not new, back in the days of SALT a similar system using strands of glass fiber and flecks of bright metal in a clear appoxy resin was talked about as a both unique and unforgable serial number.

Clive Robinson • January 29, 2018 1:13 PM

@ Cassandra,

Oddly enough, I can’t find a reference to this easily via Internet search.

Yes it’s the problem with the “Colective amnesia” that Internet search engines have as searches look for older records.

You could try looking for either Simmons or Lampson and SALT I, as they should bring you into the “covert channel” work of Gus Simmons that came out through the SALT II discussions.

Clive Robinson • January 29, 2018 8:01 PM

@ VinyG, Cassandra,

does this write-up bear any similarity to what you were seeking?

It’s exactly the same idea as that from the 1970’s proposed as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) to create tamper proof serial numbers that even State Level attackers could not forge.

Oh there are a couple of things missing from their description to ensure you get a suitable photograph. A datum point and a way of ensuring correct distance and that the camera and serial number blob are at the same physical relationship.

If you have ever seen one of the Minnox “spy” cameras, you might have seen the chain on them. The purpose of this was to ensure the correct focus setting quickly. It acts like a “plumb bob” to give the correct distance from the camera lense.

To ensure that you have the correct physical relationship you need a datum point for the plumb bob to point to and away of ensuring that both the camera and serial number blob are parallel to each other. As you are using gravity with the plumb bob you might as well also use gravity to ensure the that they are both level by using a “spirt level”, (that you can buy in many photography shops). First to ensure the object with the serial number blob is “level” then on the camera to ensure it is “level”, when the plumb bob hangs directly over the datum point mark.