Presumably because the requirements of the DMCA legislation in the US is so onerous on services like Dropbox that an automated system is the only reasonable way to go. I'm not sure, being a Canadian (and waiting with great anticipation for our new government to slap our own version of the DMCA down on us)...
Seems to me that if I were the coder in question, I might be tempted to say "okay, the only reason we're ever going to block anything from public sharing is because someone filed a DMCA complaint... so let's just fire off the automatic notification when we block the file. There, three lines of code and a template email, and I can go grab a coffee". Yes, it's a shortcut, but it's also not completely out-of-the-realm-of-reasonability.
Well, intentionality would seem to be missing. As I quoted in a comment below, the update at the bottom of the article now reads as follows:
Update: I want clear up a few things. As far as I’m aware all of the Dropship repositories and archives that were taken down was done so voluntarily. Dropbox never made threats, legal or otherwise. It appears the DMCA notice was automatically sent to me when the file was banned from public sharing. There was no real DMCA takedown issued. It was an edge case bug in their file removal system.
Okay, according to the update at the bottom of the link (I know, I RTFA, weird, eh?),
Update: I want clear up a few things. As far as I’m aware all of the Dropship repositories and archives that were taken down was done so voluntarily. Dropbox never made threats, legal or otherwise. It appears the DMCA notice was automatically sent to me when the file was banned from public sharing. There was no real DMCA takedown issued. It was an edge case bug in their file removal system.
Apparently, Dropbox is asking nicely, but when they flagged the file it triggered an accidental DMCA notice, for which they seem to be apologizing.
I love my iPad, but I'd love it even more if there were a stylus. I'm in education, and so it gets used all the time for reading - I keep all my notes (which were created elsewhere) on it, and refer to them as I teach. The amount of material I can now avoid lugging around the school is rather a lot, so from that perspective, it's great.
If it had a stylus (and now that it has proper video-out), I'd use it in place of the Tablet-PC I keep for writing notes on. That would really make me happy, since the Tablet-PC is expensive, clunky, and I either have to choose between bloat-ware (OneNote) in Windows or mild driver issues in Linux.
Yes, I know there's a stylus or two available for the iPad, but they're completely useless when legibility and speed are both required.
So, I feel your pain (even though I'm not in a commercial environment)...
Candy and soda? Why? I let my students bring in as much pie as they want, and we share it around the class. Usually, we also pull out the string and the rulers, and we see who can calculate the closest value for pi from their pie. And if they're lucky, they get a special lecture from me on the historical importance of the value of pi. And pie.
Of course, nothing stops me from doing that at other times in the semester, either. I love pie!:)
What's wrong? You have to scroll down a ridiculously long page to get to your answers. There are other sites that put the answer, you know, somewhere where you can see them.
Funny... I just blacklisted Experts-Exchange on my very first search... before I read this article/summary. Apparently I'm not alone in thinking it is the main scourge of the internet.:)
Really? "Kids are kids" is the reason why it's okay for one to accuse a teacher of being a pedophile? Really?
I overhear (and see) a lot of student conversations. "Mr. So-and-so is a loser" isn't that uncommon. "I hate Mrs. X" happens fairly regularly. But "Mr. Y is a pedophile" is and should be in a whole different category (e.g. a criminal one).
Most of the time, disciplinary decisions aren't made in a vacuum. One would need to know what else the kid who made the "bipolar" statement has been disciplined for lately to make decisions about the fairness of the punishment. It could be, for example, that the kid was on a "behavior contract", and this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. It could be that the other two kids were "first-time offenders", hence the less severe punishment. Without knowing the full history, worrying about whether individual punishments were fair or not is a waste of time.
Hmm. I haven't heard of any software like that... but it sounds like that would be the way to go. When I was researching sudoku generation for my application, it looked to me like most of the "experts" were really just using pen and paper, working "backwards" from the solution to a puzzle. It would be really useful to have a program that would tell you things like "to solve this puzzle, you'll need to use 2 X-wings and a swordfish, and this squares can be solved right off the bat by simple elimination".
I haven't heard of such an app, but it would be an interesting challenge. Unfortunately, I suspect the market would be a bit on the small side.
I think I remember hearing during my CS university days that solving Sudoku was relatively easy compared to actually coming up with puzzles that satisfied the rules of Sudoku.
True enough... although it's not really that hard to generate puzzles that satisfy the rules of Sudoku, either. What is a bit more challenging is coming up with interesting puzzles that solve the rules of sudoku, as is assigning a difficulty rating to them. I still haven't found a Sudoku app (including my own, unfortunately!) that generates puzzles as interesting as a skillfully hand-created puzzle. Some are better than others (one hopes mine is on the upper end, of course), but it's still hard to write an algorithm for making really good Sudoku puzzles.
Exactly. Partly, I'm sure, that's because Apple's recommendations involve writing decidely non-Cocoa-ish code that's a little hard to understand if you've never done any crypto before, and they don't (for obvious reasons of security) provide sample "here it's all done for you, just copy and paste" code but describe the process and tell you to do it yourself in your own unique way. My guess, having looked at the quality of some of the apps on there, that a bunch of these apps were either a) written in a hurry to get submitted before the deadline or b) written by someone who simply couldn't implement Apple's guidelines due to their own capabilities (or lack thereof).
On the flip side, they probably wouldn't have written any better DRM if they were distributing it through any other channel, anyways.
I really can't see doing this (I'm a Mac developer myself)... I'd much rather sell "directly" through my existing payment processor (about 10-11% fees in total) than through the App Store (30%), but I'd still like to have the App Store as an option, since it will undoubtedly provide me better exposure. But I'm certainly not looking at going to an App Store-only model.
The one unfortunate thing - I'll have to have parallel releases of my app, as the App Store version can't have any home-brewed copy protection or automatic update checking in it (in fact, my app was just rejected because I forgot to strip out the "Check for Updates" menu item... whoops!). I obviously want my "traditional-channel" version to still be able to check for updates, so that means keeping an "AppStore version" and a "regular version" for the time being.
I think usually people are "proud" to be of a specific nationality because they are proud of the "choice of actions" of that nation. I could say that I'm proud to be Canadian because of the actions taken by my nation, in much the same way that I could tell my child I'm proud of them for choosing right over wrong, for working hard on their piano practice, or for sticking up for a friend. Pride doesn't have to be completely centered around my own choices.
I'm pretty sure you've hit the nail on the head. The only problem - this isn't new and publishable like a "router in your brain". Miller's Magical Number Seven (Plus or Minus Two) was published way back in 1956. It's easy to see how it applies to a multiple-step calculation like this.
Then there's the fact that the sheet music is a byproduct of the process of making music. To make the "easy piano" version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" takes extra work, but the full version of the guitar part was already written for the song. By the same token, do you think Elton John never would have produced sheet music for "Candle in the Wind" if he didn't want to sell the sheet music? He would have made it either way.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. I know a lot of guitarists who barely (if at all) read music. I also know a few transcriptionists, who get paid to take stuff that guitarists play in the studio and come up with the written parts. I'm not sure what Elton John's process looks like, but I doubt very much that he's writing out parts like those you see on the average "Candle in the Wind" sheet music. More likely, he's jotting down a few phrases and chord changes, and improvising the rest - and again, most likely a transcriptionist / arranger is being paid to actually come up with the sheet music as you buy it. I know of very few musicians outside of the classical realm who actually produce fully-realized scores.
So, essentially, I don't believe for a second, that he is "just a guy trying to make a living." He is manipulative; he is self-centred, and, now that is suits him, he is trying to play the role of the innocent bystander.
Heh... I'm doing a show by JRB right now (The Last 5 Years), which is an autobiographical sketch of his failed marriage. It was, in fact, so autobiographical that his ex-wife sued over it. Interestingly, the male character in the show is completely manipulative and self-centred.
I did my thesis in LaTeX - and I don't believe there was a single mathematical equation in it. I chose to use it so that I could focus on the structure of the document, rather than formatting. There's lots of good things about it beyond just math!
Of course, I may have been the only person in the Faculty of Education at my university ever to use LaTeX for their thesis - at least outside of the math education folks. I had to use a LaTeX style from our computer science department - only CS, physics, and math seem to have LaTeX thesis styles at my school.
Yes, it's really, really cool. I'm a choir director, and we performed this piece a year or two ago. It's incredibly ambitious to even think of doing something like this across social media - it's not an easy piece to conduct, so it wouldn't be easy to keep the singers synced with each other. You can hear a bit of that any time there's an ending consonant (e.g. on "lux" throughout the piece). Nevertheless, he's created some amazing art with this already great composition.
And, to echo someone else's sentiments below - the piece is "Lux Aurumque", not "Sleep".
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably because the requirements of the DMCA legislation in the US is so onerous on services like Dropbox that an automated system is the only reasonable way to go. I'm not sure, being a Canadian (and waiting with great anticipation for our new government to slap our own version of the DMCA down on us)...
Seems to me that if I were the coder in question, I might be tempted to say "okay, the only reason we're ever going to block anything from public sharing is because someone filed a DMCA complaint... so let's just fire off the automatic notification when we block the file. There, three lines of code and a template email, and I can go grab a coffee". Yes, it's a shortcut, but it's also not completely out-of-the-realm-of-reasonability.
Well, intentionality would seem to be missing. As I quoted in a comment below, the update at the bottom of the article now reads as follows:
Update: I want clear up a few things. As far as I’m aware all of the Dropship repositories and archives that were taken down was done so voluntarily. Dropbox never made threats, legal or otherwise. It appears the DMCA notice was automatically sent to me when the file was banned from public sharing. There was no real DMCA takedown issued. It was an edge case bug in their file removal system.
Okay, according to the update at the bottom of the link (I know, I RTFA, weird, eh?),
Update: I want clear up a few things. As far as I’m aware all of the Dropship repositories and archives that were taken down was done so voluntarily. Dropbox never made threats, legal or otherwise. It appears the DMCA notice was automatically sent to me when the file was banned from public sharing. There was no real DMCA takedown issued. It was an edge case bug in their file removal system.
Apparently, Dropbox is asking nicely, but when they flagged the file it triggered an accidental DMCA notice, for which they seem to be apologizing.
Pretty sure it's not the knees that you should be most concerned about...
Just sayin!
I love my iPad, but I'd love it even more if there were a stylus. I'm in education, and so it gets used all the time for reading - I keep all my notes (which were created elsewhere) on it, and refer to them as I teach. The amount of material I can now avoid lugging around the school is rather a lot, so from that perspective, it's great.
If it had a stylus (and now that it has proper video-out), I'd use it in place of the Tablet-PC I keep for writing notes on. That would really make me happy, since the Tablet-PC is expensive, clunky, and I either have to choose between bloat-ware (OneNote) in Windows or mild driver issues in Linux.
Yes, I know there's a stylus or two available for the iPad, but they're completely useless when legibility and speed are both required.
So, I feel your pain (even though I'm not in a commercial environment)...
Candy and soda? Why? I let my students bring in as much pie as they want, and we share it around the class. Usually, we also pull out the string and the rulers, and we see who can calculate the closest value for pi from their pie. And if they're lucky, they get a special lecture from me on the historical importance of the value of pi. And pie.
Of course, nothing stops me from doing that at other times in the semester, either. I love pie! :)
(Looking forward to my class later today!)
What's wrong? You have to scroll down a ridiculously long page to get to your answers. There are other sites that put the answer, you know, somewhere where you can see them.
Funny... I just blacklisted Experts-Exchange on my very first search... before I read this article/summary. Apparently I'm not alone in thinking it is the main scourge of the internet. :)
Really? "Kids are kids" is the reason why it's okay for one to accuse a teacher of being a pedophile? Really?
I overhear (and see) a lot of student conversations. "Mr. So-and-so is a loser" isn't that uncommon. "I hate Mrs. X" happens fairly regularly. But "Mr. Y is a pedophile" is and should be in a whole different category (e.g. a criminal one).
Most of the time, disciplinary decisions aren't made in a vacuum. One would need to know what else the kid who made the "bipolar" statement has been disciplined for lately to make decisions about the fairness of the punishment. It could be, for example, that the kid was on a "behavior contract", and this was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. It could be that the other two kids were "first-time offenders", hence the less severe punishment. Without knowing the full history, worrying about whether individual punishments were fair or not is a waste of time.
Hmm. I haven't heard of any software like that... but it sounds like that would be the way to go. When I was researching sudoku generation for my application, it looked to me like most of the "experts" were really just using pen and paper, working "backwards" from the solution to a puzzle. It would be really useful to have a program that would tell you things like "to solve this puzzle, you'll need to use 2 X-wings and a swordfish, and this squares can be solved right off the bat by simple elimination".
I haven't heard of such an app, but it would be an interesting challenge. Unfortunately, I suspect the market would be a bit on the small side.
(has bing been verbed yet?)
I'm getting old. I hadn't realized that "verb" had been verbed yet.
I think I remember hearing during my CS university days that solving Sudoku was relatively easy compared to actually coming up with puzzles that satisfied the rules of Sudoku.
True enough... although it's not really that hard to generate puzzles that satisfy the rules of Sudoku, either. What is a bit more challenging is coming up with interesting puzzles that solve the rules of sudoku, as is assigning a difficulty rating to them. I still haven't found a Sudoku app (including my own, unfortunately!) that generates puzzles as interesting as a skillfully hand-created puzzle. Some are better than others (one hopes mine is on the upper end, of course), but it's still hard to write an algorithm for making really good Sudoku puzzles.
'It's an economic disincentive for internet use,' said Matt Stein, vice-president of network services for Primus.
Translation: "We are discouraging you from using our product." What VP in their right mind says that?
Umm, a VP who is upset with the company he's renting bandwidth from. Primus is making Bell out to be the "bad guys", hence the comment.
Exactly. Partly, I'm sure, that's because Apple's recommendations involve writing decidely non-Cocoa-ish code that's a little hard to understand if you've never done any crypto before, and they don't (for obvious reasons of security) provide sample "here it's all done for you, just copy and paste" code but describe the process and tell you to do it yourself in your own unique way. My guess, having looked at the quality of some of the apps on there, that a bunch of these apps were either a) written in a hurry to get submitted before the deadline or b) written by someone who simply couldn't implement Apple's guidelines due to their own capabilities (or lack thereof).
On the flip side, they probably wouldn't have written any better DRM if they were distributing it through any other channel, anyways.
The app store has it's own update management, like on the iPhone...
Whoops.. the "this" I referred to in my parent comment was "going to the developers website and it just linked back to the app store to buy it".
I really can't see doing this (I'm a Mac developer myself)... I'd much rather sell "directly" through my existing payment processor (about 10-11% fees in total) than through the App Store (30%), but I'd still like to have the App Store as an option, since it will undoubtedly provide me better exposure. But I'm certainly not looking at going to an App Store-only model.
The one unfortunate thing - I'll have to have parallel releases of my app, as the App Store version can't have any home-brewed copy protection or automatic update checking in it (in fact, my app was just rejected because I forgot to strip out the "Check for Updates" menu item... whoops!). I obviously want my "traditional-channel" version to still be able to check for updates, so that means keeping an "AppStore version" and a "regular version" for the time being.
I think usually people are "proud" to be of a specific nationality because they are proud of the "choice of actions" of that nation. I could say that I'm proud to be Canadian because of the actions taken by my nation, in much the same way that I could tell my child I'm proud of them for choosing right over wrong, for working hard on their piano practice, or for sticking up for a friend. Pride doesn't have to be completely centered around my own choices.
Umm, you realize Pine is an email client, right? Perhaps you meant pico?
I'm pretty sure you've hit the nail on the head. The only problem - this isn't new and publishable like a "router in your brain". Miller's Magical Number Seven (Plus or Minus Two) was published way back in 1956. It's easy to see how it applies to a multiple-step calculation like this.
Then there's the fact that the sheet music is a byproduct of the process of making music. To make the "easy piano" version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" takes extra work, but the full version of the guitar part was already written for the song. By the same token, do you think Elton John never would have produced sheet music for "Candle in the Wind" if he didn't want to sell the sheet music? He would have made it either way.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. I know a lot of guitarists who barely (if at all) read music. I also know a few transcriptionists, who get paid to take stuff that guitarists play in the studio and come up with the written parts. I'm not sure what Elton John's process looks like, but I doubt very much that he's writing out parts like those you see on the average "Candle in the Wind" sheet music. More likely, he's jotting down a few phrases and chord changes, and improvising the rest - and again, most likely a transcriptionist / arranger is being paid to actually come up with the sheet music as you buy it. I know of very few musicians outside of the classical realm who actually produce fully-realized scores.
So, essentially, I don't believe for a second, that he is "just a guy trying to make a living." He is manipulative; he is self-centred, and, now that is suits him, he is trying to play the role of the innocent bystander.
Heh... I'm doing a show by JRB right now (The Last 5 Years), which is an autobiographical sketch of his failed marriage. It was, in fact, so autobiographical that his ex-wife sued over it. Interestingly, the male character in the show is completely manipulative and self-centred.
So, at least he knows it! :)
I did my thesis in LaTeX - and I don't believe there was a single mathematical equation in it. I chose to use it so that I could focus on the structure of the document, rather than formatting. There's lots of good things about it beyond just math!
Of course, I may have been the only person in the Faculty of Education at my university ever to use LaTeX for their thesis - at least outside of the math education folks. I had to use a LaTeX style from our computer science department - only CS, physics, and math seem to have LaTeX thesis styles at my school.
Yes, it's really, really cool. I'm a choir director, and we performed this piece a year or two ago. It's incredibly ambitious to even think of doing something like this across social media - it's not an easy piece to conduct, so it wouldn't be easy to keep the singers synced with each other. You can hear a bit of that any time there's an ending consonant (e.g. on "lux" throughout the piece). Nevertheless, he's created some amazing art with this already great composition.
And, to echo someone else's sentiments below - the piece is "Lux Aurumque", not "Sleep".