Babelfish takes content it doesn't own, modifies it, and distributes it to others. They may be providing a useful service, but they are also distributing content that is derivative of content they don't own without permission.
So yes, it is tragic, but Babelfish IS violating copyrights. It's more convenient to ignore this fact because no harm is being done, but you then get bitten in the ass when someone (BofA) decides to assert their rights under the law.
You may argue that a bad precedent is being set, but if an activity violates the plain meaning of a law (and I think dialectizer is) then that is how a judge should rule.
By the way, I'm curious what part of the constitution you feel is being smashed. The constitution has no problem with people not wanting derivatives of their work distributed without permission. Fair use involves either excerpts of a work or modification for your own use. Parody involves independent creative efforts, not derivative work. Neither applies here.
What type of legal copyright use would this fall under?
My understanding is that for something to be fair use, it has to be either any kind of manipulation for your own use only (copy, modify, translate), excerpting small amounts for review or other noncompeting purposes, or parody.
In the case of the dialectizer, pages are manipulated and distributed to others, they are distributed in their entirety, and while the resulting pages are funny, for a parody to be legal, it can't be a derivative of the work it is parodying, but has to be an independent creative effort. The output of the dialectizer is definitely derivative of the input.
I'm no happier about this than anyone else here, but by my understanding, the dialectizer almost certainly violates copyrights. The way to make it legal would be to actually do the translation on the user's machine rather than send the user modified documents.
By the way, I think that Babelfish also violates copyrights. It has the same problem: It takes documents that it has no rights to, modifies them, and redistributes them.
Fitaly is a keyboard layout that you can get for Palms. It was designed for fast entry when using only a single digit (stylus, finger, mouthpiece, etc) Check out www.fitaly.com. Palm users can get 50wpm out of it. A large version would certainly be faster for typing with a mouthpiece or other implement than a conventional keyboard.
The Saitek PC Dash is a large touchpad designed for games. You program a layout into it, print an overlay on your printer, and plug it into your keyboard port. It's about $70. Check out www.saitek.com
Program the Fitaly layout into a Saitek PC Dash and you suddenly have a large, inexpensive keyboard designed for fast one digit text entry.
You're a serial killer. You must find and kill your victims in a specific ritualistic way that satisfies your particular disfunction. You must avoid the police while satisfying your evil desires. You have an urge meter which is always going up slowly, and if you let it get too high, your character will go off and do something stupid. As the game progresses, your urge meter climbs faster, the FBI gets closer, and you need to find more and better ways to hide the bodies.
For a sequel, there's always Sim Death Row. As a recently captured serial killer, you must try to get time in the prison law library, avoid ass pirates, attract lonely penpals of the opposite sex, stretch out the appeals process for as many years as possible, and watch for those rare opportunities for escape. If you do escape, you go back to SimSK with the difficulty level set to nightmare.
Why is it that otherwise excellent authors tend to start contemplating their navels as they get older?
Robert Asprin wrote a great book called Another Fine Myth. He then wrote many sequels to that book. After the first few, they started going down hill quickly. Reading the last book, Sweet Mythtery of Life, was like watching an episode in the last season of Moonlighting.
Robert Heinlein, considered by many to be one of the great authors of SF, had a habit of ending his books with about 70 pages where the heroes go through a time warp and party with all the characters of all his previous books.
Even Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, fell into that trap when he wrote a series of novels tying the robot stories to the foundation stories.
For a demonstration of this phenomenon in miniature, read The Postman. There are three sections to the book. Each one was written independently as a novella so it is really a trilogy in miniature. The first story is excellent. The second story is ok. The third story was just annoying, and I gave up when he started in with the wierd zen cyborg stuff at the end. Buy the book, rip it apart, and burn all but the first third. Treasure the first third. Read it to your grandchildren.
Incidentally, I think that as a prophylactic measure, Brin should avoid writing stories in his progenitors universe for a while.
JRR Tolkein can be forgiven since the Middle Earth stuff that's been published for the past few years has been the work of his sons ransacking his office. This is why Harlan Ellison has given instructions that when he dies, everything in his office is to be destroyed immediately. I think he made a wise decision.
The only author I can think of who has a long series of books which are still consistently good is Terry Pratchett. I see signs, however, that he may be slowly succumbing to the same illness. If he wants to avoid this fate, he should probably not write any more Rincewind novels.
Orson Scott Card is an excellent author as well. I've stopped reading his books mostly because I got tired of watching a 10 year old boy save the universe in EVERY SINGLE BOOK. Also, while I believe in the value of family, I don't need to be hit over the head with it constantly. However, the Ender series has fallen into the same trap as the others. I gave up on the last Ender book I read when Ender's children appeared out of thin air when Ender merely thought about them while in hyperspace. Willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far. Now he is going back and filling in the blanks. There are probably a few die hard Ender fans who are looking forward to the book, but what they really want is more of the same, just reshuffled, and that is exactly what they will get.
Readers: If a series is more than a trilogy, wait for the reviews.
Authors: If a story has been completed, and a publisher comes to you and offers you lots of money to write another book in the same series, do so if you must, but remember, you are too close to make a good decision, your fans want more of the same, your publisher can get more money out of the same series, and your family likes you too much. Ask yourself: If someone who has never read your work before read this book, would they go out and buy another of your books?
Please support your local chapter of the American Society for the Prevention of Sequelitis.
Re:how good is the human eye?
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 1
100 is the average fps. When things get really busy, that number drops dramatically. Ideally, you want a system which gives you >30fps when the shit hits the fan at the absolute best possible resolution. This usually means >100fps on the benchmarks.
What series did you watch? V had two miniseries: V and V: The Final Battle. The series was 8-10 episodes. At its best, the series sometimes hit Battlestar Galactica quality. They had one special effect. The half breed girl would occasionally stick a red piece of cellophane in her mouth and call it a forked tongue. Oh yes, and the one time they showed a guy with a rubber lizard head and a bathrobe.
That's no excuse. They could just use copyright traps. Maps have had them for years. They just put a few made up names or geographical features or some deliberate misspellings. Anyone who copies their map rather than doing the research and developing their own gets caught with their pants down.
The same thing could be done by cyberpatrol. They just sprinkle the database with a few false url's. They could even provide websites at those locations so a simple search for 404's will fail. Anyone who tries to copy their database will get nailed for copyright infringement.
If my brakes work 99.5% of the time, are they a success?
If you are trying to sell a product meant for families and YOUR website is blocked, and as a result you go out of business and declare bankruptcy, is 99.5% a success?
If you are a college student and you want your parents to see your website but they can't and they get upset with you because their filter software says its porn, is 99.5% a success?
Out of 1 million sites, 5000 will be blocked incorrectly. If your site is one of the 5000, is 99.5% a success?
When I played as a fighter, I found a spiked club of the bear with something like +70% to hit, +100% speed, and +170% damage.
That meant I could swing over and over again with no delay between swings. Almost every time I swung I hit. Every time I hit, my opponent took damage and got knocked back.
Maybe it was a fluke or a bug of some kind, but I ended up killing Diablo with a 2x4 with a nail in it.
The universe does in fact revolve around me, but in the interest of reducing the complexity of the math involved, It is reasonable to assume that the earth and planets revolve around the sun, and that the "solar system", (an imaginary but useful mathematical artifact which appears only when the above assumption is used to simplify the problem) exists in one of the arms of a spiral "galaxy".
The value of a theory lies in its ability to produce useful results. Ask an architect how often he uses a Lorentz transformation when calculating stress.
If you can find one, the best split keyboard is the Omnikey Evolution. It has the split keyboard design, but also has the high quality clicky keys from the IBM keyboards and other Omnikey keyboards. I have noticed a huge improvement in my speed, accuracy, and comfort ever since I got mine.
My one big gripe is that they put the `6' key on the left side instead of the right. If you touch type, then you know that God meant for the `6' key to be typed with the right index finger.
While this is less important, I am also fairly sure that God wanted the Enter key to be a horizontal bar with a large `\' key above it, and the Control key to the immediate left of the `A' key.
PS. If anyone knows how to program macros on it, I have been trying to figure it out.
That's what I thought until I started using it about a year ago. I think it would really annoy me if I didn't use an editor which could understand it. As it is, I found out that with python mode under Emacs, it easier and more comfortable than having to type all those braces and semicolons.
If you think the indentation is annoying, I urge you to try it a few times with an editor which has a good python mode. You might still find it annoying, but then again, you might not.
Everyone already knows that their distribution is just other's work with minimal changes. In fact, this information is being spread far and wide. Suppose that sometime soon they release a new distribution. Many people will look it over if only out of a sense of morbid fascination. If they then discover a truly innovative product which sets LinuxOne out ahead of the rest, and LinuxOne suddenly starts to play well with others, they will have a ready made market share.
How do you distinguish yourself from the others when there is a long list of distributions already available? If they just release a new product, it will just be one in a field of many. If they earn hatred first and then reform spectacularly, they will then have Kermit the Frog's undivided attention.
I like Pratchett and my beard isn't small or silly. Furthermore, I have never smoked a fruit roll up and I resent the implication that I have. They are far too difficult to ignite.
Seriously though, opinions vary. I liked the Hitchhikers books. I thought the Dirk Gently books were fantastic, and I thought the radio series was ok.
Slashdot Mirror
Hm. The good old days. SLS was the quantum leap over all the previous nastiness that convinced me to give up my 3b1 in favor of Linux.
Right now, I feel like buying 50 floppies and doing it all over again.
Nah, the next big y2k scare will be the unix date rollover in 2038 I think.
Babelfish takes content it doesn't own, modifies it, and distributes it to others. They may be providing a useful service, but they are also distributing content that is derivative of content they don't own without permission.
So yes, it is tragic, but Babelfish IS violating copyrights. It's more convenient to ignore this fact because no harm is being done, but you then get bitten in the ass when someone (BofA) decides to assert their rights under the law.
You may argue that a bad precedent is being set, but if an activity violates the plain meaning of a law (and I think dialectizer is) then that is how a judge should rule.
By the way, I'm curious what part of the constitution you feel is being smashed. The constitution has no problem with people not wanting derivatives of their work distributed without permission. Fair use involves either excerpts of a work or modification for your own use. Parody involves independent creative efforts, not derivative work. Neither applies here.
What type of legal copyright use would this fall under?
My understanding is that for something to be fair use, it has to be either any kind of manipulation for your own use only (copy, modify, translate), excerpting small amounts for review or other noncompeting purposes, or parody.
In the case of the dialectizer, pages are manipulated and distributed to others, they are distributed in their entirety, and while the resulting pages are funny, for a parody to be legal, it can't be a derivative of the work it is parodying, but has to be an independent creative effort. The output of the dialectizer is definitely derivative of the input.
I'm no happier about this than anyone else here, but by my understanding, the dialectizer almost certainly violates copyrights. The way to make it legal would be to actually do the translation on the user's machine rather than send the user modified documents.
By the way, I think that Babelfish also violates copyrights. It has the same problem: It takes documents that it has no rights to, modifies them, and redistributes them.
It isn't saying that you are forbidden to distribute source code to your programs, it is saying you are allowed to distribute binaries without source.
It can be read either way, and as such is poorly worded, but since you own the code you wrote, it only makes sense one way.
Besides, isn't ambiguity in a license legally supposed to be interpreted in favor of the licensee?
If it stops bears and other nasties then it is ok with me if it only goes click.
Lame Am [an] Mp3 Encoder
Lame Are [an] Mp3 Encoder
Fitaly is a keyboard layout that you can get for Palms. It was designed for fast entry when using only a single digit (stylus, finger, mouthpiece, etc) Check out www.fitaly.com. Palm users can get 50wpm out of it. A large version would certainly be faster for typing with a mouthpiece or other implement than a conventional keyboard.
The Saitek PC Dash is a large touchpad designed for games. You program a layout into it, print an overlay on your printer, and plug it into your keyboard port. It's about $70. Check out www.saitek.com
Program the Fitaly layout into a Saitek PC Dash and you suddenly have a large, inexpensive keyboard designed for fast one digit text entry.
Does anyone know about vertical space for the hard drive? The 12G is probably 9.5mm. Will it take 12.5mm? How about IBM's 25G 18mm?
USB ethernet adapters give you 5 megabits. T1 is 1.5 megabits. It's not ideal, but it would be usable where space is a major consideration.
What about as a dedicated Quake server for parties. You bring it with you along with your main PC and let the little guy serve the games.
You're a serial killer. You must find and kill your victims in a specific ritualistic way that satisfies your particular disfunction. You must avoid the police while satisfying your evil desires. You have an urge meter which is always going up slowly, and if you let it get too high, your character will go off and do something stupid. As the game progresses, your urge meter climbs faster, the FBI gets closer, and you need to find more and better ways to hide the bodies.
For a sequel, there's always Sim Death Row. As a recently captured serial killer, you must try to get time in the prison law library, avoid ass pirates, attract lonely penpals of the opposite sex, stretch out the appeals process for as many years as possible, and watch for those rare opportunities for escape. If you do escape, you go back to SimSK with the difficulty level set to nightmare.
Marvin, of course. He would talk Data into committing suicide.
However, he would not derive any satisfaction from his victory.
Why is it that otherwise excellent authors tend to start contemplating their navels as they get older?
Robert Asprin wrote a great book called Another Fine Myth. He then wrote many sequels to that book. After the first few, they started going down hill quickly. Reading the last book, Sweet Mythtery of Life, was like watching an episode in the last season of Moonlighting.
Robert Heinlein, considered by many to be one of the great authors of SF, had a habit of ending his books with about 70 pages where the heroes go through a time warp and party with all the characters of all his previous books.
Even Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, fell into that trap when he wrote a series of novels tying the robot stories to the foundation stories.
For a demonstration of this phenomenon in miniature, read The Postman. There are three sections to the book. Each one was written independently as a novella so it is really a trilogy in miniature. The first story is excellent. The second story is ok. The third story was just annoying, and I gave up when he started in with the wierd zen cyborg stuff at the end. Buy the book, rip it apart, and burn all but the first third. Treasure the first third. Read it to your grandchildren.
Incidentally, I think that as a prophylactic measure, Brin should avoid writing stories in his progenitors universe for a while.
JRR Tolkein can be forgiven since the Middle Earth stuff that's been published for the past few years has been the work of his sons ransacking his office. This is why Harlan Ellison has given instructions that when he dies, everything in his office is to be destroyed immediately. I think he made a wise decision.
The only author I can think of who has a long series of books which are still consistently good is Terry Pratchett. I see signs, however, that he may be slowly succumbing to the same illness. If he wants to avoid this fate, he should probably not write any more Rincewind novels.
Orson Scott Card is an excellent author as well. I've stopped reading his books mostly because I got tired of watching a 10 year old boy save the universe in EVERY SINGLE BOOK. Also, while I believe in the value of family, I don't need to be hit over the head with it constantly. However, the Ender series has fallen into the same trap as the others. I gave up on the last Ender book I read when Ender's children appeared out of thin air when Ender merely thought about them while in hyperspace. Willing suspension of disbelief only goes so far. Now he is going back and filling in the blanks. There are probably a few die hard Ender fans who are looking forward to the book, but what they really want is more of the same, just reshuffled, and that is exactly what they will get.
Readers: If a series is more than a trilogy, wait for the reviews.
Authors: If a story has been completed, and a publisher comes to you and offers you lots of money to write another book in the same series, do so if you must, but remember, you are too close to make a good decision, your fans want more of the same, your publisher can get more money out of the same series, and your family likes you too much. Ask yourself: If someone who has never read your work before read this book, would they go out and buy another of your books?
Please support your local chapter of the American Society for the Prevention of Sequelitis.
100 is the average fps. When things get really busy, that number drops dramatically. Ideally, you want a system which gives you >30fps when the shit hits the fan at the absolute best possible resolution. This usually means >100fps on the benchmarks.
No, you're wrong. But then again...
What series did you watch? V had two miniseries: V and V: The Final Battle. The series was 8-10 episodes. At its best, the series sometimes hit Battlestar Galactica quality. They had one special effect. The half breed girl would occasionally stick a red piece of cellophane in her mouth and call it a forked tongue. Oh yes, and the one time they showed a guy with a rubber lizard head and a bathrobe.
That's no excuse. They could just use copyright traps. Maps have had them for years. They just put a few made up names or geographical features or some deliberate misspellings. Anyone who copies their map rather than doing the research and developing their own gets caught with their pants down.
The same thing could be done by cyberpatrol. They just sprinkle the database with a few false url's. They could even provide websites at those locations so a simple search for 404's will fail. Anyone who tries to copy their database will get nailed for copyright infringement.
If my brakes work 99.5% of the time, are they a success?
If you are trying to sell a product meant for families and YOUR website is blocked, and as a result you go out of business and declare bankruptcy, is 99.5% a success?
If you are a college student and you want your parents to see your website but they can't and they get upset with you because their filter software says its porn, is 99.5% a success?
Out of 1 million sites, 5000 will be blocked incorrectly. If your site is one of the 5000, is 99.5% a success?
When I played as a fighter, I found a spiked club of the bear with something like +70% to hit, +100% speed, and +170% damage.
That meant I could swing over and over again with no delay between swings. Almost every time I swung I hit. Every time I hit, my opponent took damage and got knocked back.
Maybe it was a fluke or a bug of some kind, but I ended up killing Diablo with a 2x4 with a nail in it.
But... But... KryoTech got there first didn't they?
The universe does in fact revolve around me, but in the interest of reducing the complexity of the math involved, It is reasonable to assume that the earth and planets revolve around the sun, and that the "solar system", (an imaginary but useful mathematical artifact which appears only when the above assumption is used to simplify the problem) exists in one of the arms of a spiral "galaxy".
The value of a theory lies in its ability to produce useful results. Ask an architect how often he uses a Lorentz transformation when calculating stress.
If you can find one, the best split keyboard is the Omnikey Evolution. It has the split keyboard design, but also has the high quality clicky keys from the IBM keyboards and other Omnikey keyboards. I have noticed a huge improvement in my speed, accuracy, and comfort ever since I got mine.
My one big gripe is that they put the `6' key on the left side instead of the right. If you touch type, then you know that God meant for the `6' key to be typed with the right index finger.
While this is less important, I am also fairly sure that God wanted the Enter key to be a horizontal bar with a large `\' key above it, and the Control key to the immediate left of the `A' key.
PS. If anyone knows how to program macros on it, I have been trying to figure it out.
That's what I thought until I started using it about a year ago. I think it would really annoy me if I didn't use an editor which could understand it. As it is, I found out that with python mode under Emacs, it easier and more comfortable than having to type all those braces and semicolons.
If you think the indentation is annoying, I urge you to try it a few times with an editor which has a good python mode. You might still find it annoying, but then again, you might not.
Consider this scenario:
Everyone already knows that their distribution is just other's work with minimal changes. In fact, this information is being spread far and wide. Suppose that sometime soon they release a new distribution. Many people will look it over if only out of a sense of morbid fascination. If they then discover a truly innovative product which sets LinuxOne out ahead of the rest, and LinuxOne suddenly starts to play well with others, they will have a ready made market share.
How do you distinguish yourself from the others when there is a long list of distributions already available? If they just release a new product, it will just be one in a field of many. If they earn hatred first and then reform spectacularly, they will then have Kermit the Frog's undivided attention.
I like Pratchett and my beard isn't small or silly. Furthermore, I have never smoked a fruit roll up and I resent the implication that I have. They are far too difficult to ignite.
Seriously though, opinions vary. I liked the Hitchhikers books. I thought the Dirk Gently books were fantastic, and I thought the radio series was ok.