All crimes are equally wrong--theft is as bad as murder is as bad as rape is as bad as vandalism is as bad as burglary is as bad as assault is as bad as fraud
Is as bad as possessing 0.4 grams of marijuana, with a prescription?
Is as bad as publicly performing a song written in 1925?
Such a broadening of trade secret "protection" will eliminate the need for patents
Oh really? Nowadays, United States patents are primarily used not to obtain a monopoly on an invention in exchange for public disclosure but rather to obtain a monopoly on an invention that is obvious to anybody who looks at the product. Just look at Amazon's "one click shopping" patent on sending billing and shipping information along with a request to buy. It's so simple and obvious given the product's outward appearance that anybody could hack up a clone.
And look at some of the other bad patents found by the League for Programming Freedom: drawing and undrawing an image with XOR, topologically sorting statements in a spreadsheet program, and other things that any competent software engineer could have come up with after looking at the problem for ten minutes.
Large corporations in the United States use patents to 1. stop copying, and 2. stop independent invention. The disclosure of the contents of a patent is almost redundant in 2003.
Are you sure? I'd figure that Congress has set out a pretty broad definition of "doing business with the government", just like the government tries and usually succeeds to classify virtually all commerce as "interstate commerce".
Besides, a blind person could always get a sighted person to help them with the one-time account signup.
Likewise, a person using a wheelchair could always get a walking person to help them with climbing the landlord's stairway to sign up to rent an apartment.
How would a conversion to analog and back preserve such a "Broadcast Flag"?
Anything you make has that same bit set to "recordable, copyable."
The MPAA's argument against allowing serial copies of a work fixed from an analog source (even a microphone or camera) is that the pirates have used and will continue to use such behavior to camcord theatrical movies and plays, making a camcorder an "analog hole". The RIAA successfully made that argument in the Divided States of Embarrassment with respect to DAT decks, which by law must follow SCMS.
Links to previous Slashdot stories on CAPTCHA
on
Turing Tests to Stop Spam
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Warning to Malda & Co.: Now that Slashdot uses a visual CAPTCHA as the only way to create a new account, blind users have no way to sign up for an account. Thus, Slashdot is not accessible to blind people and not compliant with Section 508, a US law that requires web sites of companies that do business with the US government to be accessible to the disabled.
I think that the ideal solution would be for the population to be able to record, in High Definition, an original copy. However, I think that Hollywood could say that I cannot make a digital copy of that copy. If I wanted to down-convert (to a normal VCR), of course I would be able to. I want that one digital copy, though.
They tried that with DAT, requiring recorders to implement a serial copy prevention system that refuses to make a digital copy of a digital copy. Recording artists found that they couldn't circumvent the system even for recordings that they made legitimately.
Implementing a serial copy prevention system on a digital video format will only make that format unsuitable for use by families making home movies. "What? I can't make copies of this wedding tape for the family? That's bullshit. I'm not buying Sony again."
but a cartoon is a comic that has motion --a moving picture.
Definitions 1, 2, and 4 from "cartoon" in the American Heritage(R) dictionary refer to still cartoons. Definition 3 refers to "animated cartoons", which do have motion. "Political cartoons" most often do not. "Cartoonists" aren't always animators. Heck, even some of the material on the AOL Cartoon Network moves with such a low frame rate that it might as well almost be individual panels.
or he believes the use of Flash is going to improve radically soon enough
Flash 6 aka Flash MX has introduced new features that greatly improve usability when used as directed. I don't have Flash because I can't afford it, but I'd expect that Nielsen has written a chapter in the Flash 6 manual about usability techniques. Expect Nielsen to rant against abuse of the Flash product once Flash 6 content becomes more widespread.
Don't consider it as bias. Consider it as preaching not to the choir but to those who have the power to change things, that is, Flash content developers.
Maybe the guy does design work at very high resolution and can't be bothered to turn it down for occasional web browsing.
Or maybe the operating system that came bundled with his computer assumes a resolution of 72 virtual dpi, even if his monitor actually runs at 96 dpi, and offers no way to change it except to magnify the whole screen to 48 real dpi by doubling the pixels.
Such a system exists and is called Mac OS Classic. (I don't know whether or not Mac OS X has solved this by letting the user change the system resolution.)
You mean the same guy who does the ads in the back of the stereo and camera magazines is now doing web pages?
I read somewhere that the $CALL$ prices are not listed in the catalog because of a contract with the supplier of the goods: "Either you don't advertise a price under $999, or you don't get our goods at all."
The user got to your website, so it's reasonable to assume they're familiar with standard navigation.
Not my about-60 grandma. She has trouble comprehending even the most basic concept of the back button stack. She just types in the URL she gets from a government office. Heck, I have to re-explain what a "right click" is every day.
When you give directions to your place of business, do you feel the need to instruct someone how to drive?
No, because driving an automobile is more entrenched in American culture than using the Web.
A webpage should use standard, familiar methods of navigation.
Agreed. But a site operator still has to make a site idiot-proof.
what if the reason you want them to go back a page is because they forgot a field in a form?
My experience with HTML forms in Microsoft Internet Explorer is that IE often forgets what the user has entered into a form even if the user did use the browser's back button.
Actually, CSS relative font sizing is the SOLUTION.
Then how does that solve for the fact that Mac monitors and Windows monitors are physically the same size, but Windows treats the monitor as 96dpi, whereas Mac OS treats the monitor as 72dpi? IE for Mac, Netscape 4 for Mac, and Netscape 4 for Linux will render "12pt" or "100%" text as 12px by default, whereas IE for Windows, Netscape for Windows, and all versions of Mozilla will render it at 16px.
Ech tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot oh arr gee
Nowadays, when I tell a fellow who has had at least a couple months of web experience to "pull up a web browser and go to slash dot dadorg", 99% know what I'm talking about.
"The fee does not include a broadband connection, which is required to subscribe."
And then the banner at the top of the page points you directly to MSN Broadband at $50/mo, which is $28/mo more than MSN's dial-up offering. Add that to the $50/year ($4/mo) Xbox Live subscription, and you get a grand total of $32 per month, available only to select residents of the United States of America. It's not even available to 1. households where neither the cable monopoly nor the telephone monopoly provides high-speed access (cable company: "don't like it? move to a different town!"), or 2. households with at least one child under the age of 13 (COPPA threshold) who likes to play video games.
For example, on a medical page, its quite possible they want you to acknowledge that using their website does NOT constitute actual medical advice, and that you should seek a doctor's professional opinion if you are having issues.
What's wrong with placing something along the lines of "This is not medical advice nor legal advice. This document is provided under these disclaimers" at the top of the page? (Or was that just a bad example?)
If the operators of a web site really want to authenticate users who have read and agreed to a contract, they should set up nick/pass authentication and serve all pages with SSL.
And it need to be agreed upon by a standards body.
Define "standards body". Many Slashdot trolls define "standards body" to exclude, say, the World Wide Web Consortium because unlike ISO, the W3C doesn't have statutory or regulatory support from any sovereign government.
too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.
How would you fix this in a way acceptable to corporate attorneys? The copyright and trademark notices are in there for a reason.
character separation should use optional hyphens.
What's the HTML code for "optional hyphen"? And how can you make it handle words that are spelled differently when hyphenated or not, such as German <Zucker>, <Zuk-ker> = "sugar"?
Content Proprietarily Encoded
What free, patent-free video codec would you suggest?
For all languages? If nobody at my company can read and write Portuguese, then you're not going to get a web site in Portuguese unless you contact me about doing the translation yourself.
All browsers request a preferred language.
Then what is a server supposed to send when the user agent has set preferred language to Navajo?
Slashdot Mirror
The HU cards still work
So I can play my old TurboGrafx-16 games on a DirecTV box? The TG16 stores its software on "HuCard" media.
And by doing so, they could wind up putting enough information in the public record
Unless the record of the trial is sealed. Would that apply?
All crimes are equally wrong--theft is as bad as murder is as bad as rape is as bad as vandalism is as bad as burglary is as bad as assault is as bad as fraud
Is as bad as possessing 0.4 grams of marijuana, with a prescription?
Is as bad as publicly performing a song written in 1925?
Bad troll. Bad. Go to your room.
Such a broadening of trade secret "protection" will eliminate the need for patents
Oh really? Nowadays, United States patents are primarily used not to obtain a monopoly on an invention in exchange for public disclosure but rather to obtain a monopoly on an invention that is obvious to anybody who looks at the product. Just look at Amazon's "one click shopping" patent on sending billing and shipping information along with a request to buy. It's so simple and obvious given the product's outward appearance that anybody could hack up a clone.
And look at some of the other bad patents found by the League for Programming Freedom: drawing and undrawing an image with XOR, topologically sorting statements in a spreadsheet program, and other things that any competent software engineer could have come up with after looking at the problem for ten minutes.
Large corporations in the United States use patents to 1. stop copying, and 2. stop independent invention. The disclosure of the contents of a patent is almost redundant in 2003.
AFAIK, /. doesn't do business with the government.
Are you sure? I'd figure that Congress has set out a pretty broad definition of "doing business with the government", just like the government tries and usually succeeds to classify virtually all commerce as "interstate commerce".
Besides, a blind person could always get a sighted person to help them with the one-time account signup.
Likewise, a person using a wheelchair could always get a walking person to help them with climbing the landlord's stairway to sign up to rent an apartment.
Have a bit set in each broadcast
How would a conversion to analog and back preserve such a "Broadcast Flag"?
Anything you make has that same bit set to "recordable, copyable."
The MPAA's argument against allowing serial copies of a work fixed from an analog source (even a microphone or camera) is that the pirates have used and will continue to use such behavior to camcord theatrical movies and plays, making a camcorder an "analog hole". The RIAA successfully made that argument in the Divided States of Embarrassment with respect to DAT decks, which by law must follow SCMS.
Warning to Malda & Co.: Now that Slashdot uses a visual CAPTCHA as the only way to create a new account, blind users have no way to sign up for an account. Thus, Slashdot is not accessible to blind people and not compliant with Section 508, a US law that requires web sites of companies that do business with the US government to be accessible to the disabled.
I think that the ideal solution would be for the population to be able to record, in High Definition, an original copy. However, I think that Hollywood could say that I cannot make a digital copy of that copy. If I wanted to down-convert (to a normal VCR), of course I would be able to. I want that one digital copy, though.
They tried that with DAT, requiring recorders to implement a serial copy prevention system that refuses to make a digital copy of a digital copy. Recording artists found that they couldn't circumvent the system even for recordings that they made legitimately.
Implementing a serial copy prevention system on a digital video format will only make that format unsuitable for use by families making home movies. "What? I can't make copies of this wedding tape for the family? That's bullshit. I'm not buying Sony again."
but a cartoon is a comic that has motion --a moving picture.
Definitions 1, 2, and 4 from "cartoon" in the American Heritage(R) dictionary refer to still cartoons. Definition 3 refers to "animated cartoons", which do have motion. "Political cartoons" most often do not. "Cartoonists" aren't always animators. Heck, even some of the material on the AOL Cartoon Network moves with such a low frame rate that it might as well almost be individual panels.
or he believes the use of Flash is going to improve radically soon enough
Flash 6 aka Flash MX has introduced new features that greatly improve usability when used as directed. I don't have Flash because I can't afford it, but I'd expect that Nielsen has written a chapter in the Flash 6 manual about usability techniques. Expect Nielsen to rant against abuse of the Flash product once Flash 6 content becomes more widespread.
Don't consider it as bias. Consider it as preaching not to the choir but to those who have the power to change things, that is, Flash content developers.
It's a matter or WHO you host with.
Let's see... $10/mo, $10/mo, $10/mo, Slashdot finds me $1000/mo, $10/mo, $10/mo...
Maybe the guy does design work at very high resolution and can't be bothered to turn it down for occasional web browsing.
Or maybe the operating system that came bundled with his computer assumes a resolution of 72 virtual dpi, even if his monitor actually runs at 96 dpi, and offers no way to change it except to magnify the whole screen to 48 real dpi by doubling the pixels.
Such a system exists and is called Mac OS Classic. (I don't know whether or not Mac OS X has solved this by letting the user change the system resolution.)
You mean the same guy who does the ads in the back of the stereo and camera magazines is now doing web pages?
I read somewhere that the $CALL$ prices are not listed in the catalog because of a contract with the supplier of the goods: "Either you don't advertise a price under $999, or you don't get our goods at all."
The user got to your website, so it's reasonable to assume they're familiar with standard navigation.
Not my about-60 grandma. She has trouble comprehending even the most basic concept of the back button stack. She just types in the URL she gets from a government office. Heck, I have to re-explain what a "right click" is every day.
When you give directions to your place of business, do you feel the need to instruct someone how to drive?
No, because driving an automobile is more entrenched in American culture than using the Web.
A webpage should use standard, familiar methods of navigation.
Agreed. But a site operator still has to make a site idiot-proof.
what if the reason you want them to go back a page is because they forgot a field in a form?
My experience with HTML forms in Microsoft Internet Explorer is that IE often forgets what the user has entered into a form even if the user did use the browser's back button.
Actually, CSS relative font sizing is the SOLUTION.
Then how does that solve for the fact that Mac monitors and Windows monitors are physically the same size, but Windows treats the monitor as 96dpi, whereas Mac OS treats the monitor as 72dpi? IE for Mac, Netscape 4 for Mac, and Netscape 4 for Linux will render "12pt" or "100%" text as 12px by default, whereas IE for Windows, Netscape for Windows, and all versions of Mozilla will render it at 16px.
Ech tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot oh arr gee
Nowadays, when I tell a fellow who has had at least a couple months of web experience to "pull up a web browser and go to slash dot dadorg", 99% know what I'm talking about.
"The fee does not include a broadband connection, which is required to subscribe."
And then the banner at the top of the page points you directly to MSN Broadband at $50/mo, which is $28/mo more than MSN's dial-up offering. Add that to the $50/year ($4/mo) Xbox Live subscription, and you get a grand total of $32 per month, available only to select residents of the United States of America. It's not even available to 1. households where neither the cable monopoly nor the telephone monopoly provides high-speed access (cable company: "don't like it? move to a different town!"), or 2. households with at least one child under the age of 13 (COPPA threshold) who likes to play video games.
Incoming phone calls are WAY more expensive than page views or incoming email.
What about incoming instant messages?
For example, on a medical page, its quite possible they want you to acknowledge that using their website does NOT constitute actual medical advice, and that you should seek a doctor's professional opinion if you are having issues.
What's wrong with placing something along the lines of "This is not medical advice nor legal advice. This document is provided under these disclaimers" at the top of the page? (Or was that just a bad example?)
If the operators of a web site really want to authenticate users who have read and agreed to a contract, they should set up nick/pass authentication and serve all pages with SSL.
If you are underage or do not consent to viewing such material, please click here. [Walt Disney Company web site]
Why do so many erotic web sites link to the one entertainment company that had the most to do with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?
Nothing is a standard until it has at least two independent, interoperable implementations.
Agreed, even if I can't convince Twirlip of the Mists of this.
And it need to be agreed upon by a standards body.
Define "standards body". Many Slashdot trolls define "standards body" to exclude, say, the World Wide Web Consortium because unlike ISO, the W3C doesn't have statutory or regulatory support from any sovereign government.
too much header information: impossible to read in my Orange SPV Smartphone 2.002. Project Gutenberg is an offender.
How would you fix this in a way acceptable to corporate attorneys? The copyright and trademark notices are in there for a reason.
character separation should use optional hyphens.
What's the HTML code for "optional hyphen"? And how can you make it handle words that are spelled differently when hyphenated or not, such as German <Zucker>, <Zuk-ker> = "sugar"?
Content Proprietarily Encoded
What free, patent-free video codec would you suggest?
Not offering the preferred language requested.
For all languages? If nobody at my company can read and write Portuguese, then you're not going to get a web site in Portuguese unless you contact me about doing the translation yourself.
All browsers request a preferred language.
Then what is a server supposed to send when the user agent has set preferred language to Navajo?