Why changing font size on some sites has no effect
on
Another $99 Web Terminal
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
For some reason though, I've run into a lot of sites where changing the font size in my browser had no effect.
This is a problem with CSS. The CSS standard has no common way to specify font sizes for each monitor resolution. Specifying font sizes in points makes fonts look tiny on Macintosh computers, whose default logical display resolution is 72 dpi instead of 96 dpi. Specifying font sizes in pixels disables the "larger/smaller" buttons.
WTF that was a cheap ad for his site what's up with that?
Don't jump to conclusions. 1. I'm not the owner of gbadev.org, and 2. I didn't intend for my comment to come off as a mere ad for gbadev.org. I was just demonstrating the easy availability of devices for writing cartridges for a popular video game system.
I'm a little surprised that none of the arcade game manufacturers have taken the "use your hands and feet" concept and created a fighting game using the same technology.
This was tried on the Sega Genesis, and it failed.
How many people did you see pirating N64 games? Hardly anyone has the ability to write to a cartridge, so if these papers took their input from a cartridge piracy would not be easy.
Nintendo 64 piracy was hard because every official cartridge in a territory had an identical "key" chip. The mechanism by which the Nintendo cartridge lock/key system (used on NES, Super NES, and N64) works is patented (until about 2005), and it relies on a program that's copyrighted (effectively forever), letting Nintendo go after backup devices.
Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, has no encryption and no lockout. The only checks its BIOS does are checks for the Nintendo logo (legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade) and a simple checksum on the ROM header. Its cartridge interface (multiplexed address bus and data bus) has the Intellivision's system as prior art. And you can get a development kit with a cartridge writer and a flash cartridge that holds 256 megabits (enough for four to eight official ROMs or even more independently produced ROMs) for under $200. Go to gbadev.org for details.
Don't steal games. Just because piracy is easy doesn't mean you should do it. Instead, download games released under a free software (or even just free-beer) license. In the future, I will be releasing some free GBA games here.
There are 2 things that will help him - the quality of the work ie will people enjoy it, and his copyright over the work. If the work is good, and people enjoy it, there may be a return. However, if the copyright is reduced and after a few years he has no rights on it at all ( ie anyone can copy it ) then the chances of making a return are reduced.
If he hasn't made a return by ten years, the chance of making a return after that period is further reduced by market demand for the latest and greatest.
Now, how does that help with increasing the number of authors / books? Simple, it doesn't! In fact it is the exact opposite!
Not always. We need to maximize the total utility function (i.e. utility of work in copyright + utility of work in public domain), somewhere between "no copyprivilege" and "perpetual copyprivilege." I don't see how a 95-year copyright term is closer to this maximum than the 28-year term of the Copyright Act of 1790. In fact, long-term copyprivileges make it harder to create a musical work without accidentally stepping on somebody else's privileges (see also the short story "Melancholy Elephants" and the Yes! We have no bananas! case).
You propose to limit the financial reward to authors.
Patent law already limits the financial reward to inventors. I propose consistency in the limits.
The simple economics of the western world... means that perhaps, some authors will not be able to write full time, and it will be far more difficult for new authors to be published at all, whether self published or not. So, you argue that reducing copyright will increase the number of authors / books, when you argument supports the opposite.
Justify this. What percent of books published nowadays do not make 90% of their total gross revenue within ten years after first publication? What percent of Hollywood motion pictures (not counting remakes that add significant original content) make any significant amount of money after even two years on the market?
Why don't you just admit it. You do not want to pay for it that's it, something for nothing. Simple!
Or I can't afford to pay for it. Or the author's estate refuses to license it at any price. Or I accidentally independently created it, and I can't afford an attorney to convince a judge of this.
How is life + 10 years less than reasonable?
on
Electronic Paper
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· Score: 1
Easy...whoever inherits the right to receive royalties gets the money. Legally, the heir is the same person as the author, for that specific situation.
But why for 70 years, subject to further extensions?
Actually, it's also used (in GBA mode) as the "sound cpu".
You're confusing the GBA with the Sega Nomad. I have written some software for the Game Boy Advance. The technique of letting a second cheap CPU handle some sound chores is common on Sega Genesis and necessary on Super NES (which has very little bandwidth between the sound side and the CPU side of the system), but in Advance mode, the GBA completely cuts power to its GBZ80 processor.
Go read Von Neumann and Turing. You can do ANYTHING with an 8-bit microcontroller. It just isn't necessarily easy.
Alan Turing worked on theoretical machines with a bounded program but unbounded data memory. I don't see Photoshop running on a machine with an address space of 64 kilobytes unless there's some heavy bankswitching going on.
I think many people consider software to be abandoned when it is no longer available for purchase, and there is no competing product.
Define "competing product." Castlevania for Game Boy Advance competes with eBay'd copies of Castlevania for NES. Heck, Pinobee for Game Boy Advance competes with not only the Sonic series but also every side-scrolling platform game ever released on any platform.
If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?
No. Copyright law does not work like trademark law.
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware
Software created as a work for hire (including most commercial software) becomes abandonware 95 years after first publication. Relevant case: Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?
Unlike trademark law, copyright law allows monopoly owners to make implied licenses by refusing to enforce a copyright, and the owner can pull those licenses at any time.
No, it's different. What sucks about USB is that it does everything that IEEE 1394 does, but a little worse.
And the cost per unit of USB hardware is much cheaper than that of 1394 hardware. The asymptotic law of hardware cost states that if you reduce the cost of one component or set of components that contributes say 3/4 of the cost of a device, you can't reduce the total cost lower than 1/4 of the original cost. USB and USB 2 are both licensed on a royalty-free relevant-patent-swap basis; 1394 requires payment of a 25c per device royalty. After three layers of markup (manufacturer, distributor, and dealer), this royalty can become significant.
How is 28 years less than reasonable?
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 2
A major problem here is that you're not distinguishing between really old books, and brand newly published ones. So, where is the cutoff line where its ok to redistribute someone's copyright?
The purpose of copyright (often ignored even by the courts) is to reward creation. A work should fall into the public domain once the author has been given a reasonable chance to receive a reward for creating the work. How is twenty-eight years (as specified in the original Copyright Act of 1790) not a reasonable chance?
How can an author receive anything after the author is dead?
I also have issues over control of derivative works such as fan fiction, but that's another discussion.
Encouragement is done by giving them exclusive copyrights to the work they create, protected by law, for a limited time.
Limited? Every 20 years, the US Congress accepts $6 million from Disney employees and amends copyright law to extend all terms by 20 more years. They get away with this because courts currently consider "the lifetime of the universe less one day" a valid limit because they don't consider the preamble "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" to limit the power of Congress in any way. For more info, see Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Distributing a work over the internet without the author's permission or even knowledge isn't just illegal, it's immoral.
How is an author morally entitled to royalties 50 years after the author is dead and buried in the ground?
libraries do not republish material, they lend a specific copy.
What is the digital equivalent of such an action?
(of course, having the 'limited time' being shorter than a human lifespan would be nice)
Nice, but unless you have more than $6 million to bribe Congress to repeal the Bono Act, it's not gonna happen.
If I remember correctly, even the 68000 processor series used single-word instructions.
The 680x0 processor series (used in Sega Genesis, the slightly modified Genesis that was Neo-Geo, pre-PPC Macs, and Palm OS devices) used a 16-bit instruction word followed by 0 to 4 words of address or data depending on the addressing mode. You must be thinking of Thumb (scaled-down version of ARM instruction set used in Game Boy Advance) or KIPS (scaled-down version of MIPS instruction set used in many undergraduate computer engineering projects)
and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire.
USB 1.x can pump 1.2 megabytes per second (12 megabits, divided by 10 bits per byte counting comms overhead). That's the same as an 8x CD-ROM, or 50x realtime for a 192 kbps MP3. That's only five or six seconds per song. How is this slow for incrementally changing what's on your device when you get a new CD? Can't you spare one minute to copy the new album that you picked up at Best Buy to the device?
USB 2.x, on the other hand, is about as fast as a FireWire brand IEEE-1394 connection.
the names stop here (unless something's
changed since I learned this in middle school) except for google and googleplex.
Google is not a number; it's a search engine. Googleplex is not a number; it's the building that Google operates from. You're thinking of googol and googolplex.
wow, for once the US has a consistent, well thought out naming scheme, and the rest of the world uses something equally bizzare as the imperial system of measures...
They're both pretty well defined. Given n as the prefix-number (mi=1, bi=2, tri=3, quadri=4, quinti=5...):
The U.S. system: n-llion == 10^(3n+3).
The continental system: n-llion == 10^(6n); n-lliard == 10^(6n+3).
Moores law says nothing about computer speed doubling. It refers to the transistor count doubling.
Distributed.net relies on the fact that all other factors being equal, brute-forcing a key (decrypting a message with all possible keys) scales linearly with the number of processors involved because of the inherent parallelism. If transistor density doubles, the number of crypto datapaths you can put on a given-sized die doubles. Therefore, Moore's law of gate density translates directly into speed increases.
Also, the processor time and memory is roughly proportional to key length
In other words, the time to decrypt a message with an n-bit key is O(n). The time to bruteforce a message (decrypt a message with all n-bit keys) is thus O(n*2^n) which is still O(2^n) at high values of n. So you still lose a bit of key length to Moore's law of transistor density every 18 months.
So if you double the capabilities of your computer then you can double the key length without taking a performance hit.
But then you and everybody you communicate with would have to make new keys. And even then, you often can't use more than 128-bit keys across national borders.
Well computers probably got fast enough in the last 80s, but encryption-for-everybody still hasn't really taken off. I guess social factors are harder to model than CPU speeds!
Another problem is that PGP/GnuPG "web of trust" model requires you to know somebody face-to-face who is already part of the web of trust so that you can validate her key and gain access to the rest of the keys. In fact, there must be a path in the graph of PGP users that leads to Phil Zimmermann or to Richard M. Stallman (see also Oracle of Bacon).
There are official standards (say, 802.11) and de facto standards (of which Excel is a good example).
Excel is not a standard. By definition, a standard includes human-readable documentation of what meets or does not meet the standard. Excel is a proprietary format with a widely available reference implementation, and this implementation likes to segfault (instead of failing gracefully) whenever an Excel document contains anything invalid.
Sometimes the marketplace runs ahead of the standards bureaucracy.
I remember when applications came with complete file format documentation. If they didn't, it was available cheap from the app publisher.
businesses need to inter-operate with their partners, and if it means (say) exchanging Word documents to do it, that's what they'll settle for.
If, in a fit of altruism, I transcoded popular movie trailers from Sorenson and put them on the web would I be guilty of something?
Guilty of something, but it probably wouldn't be copyright infringement. United States copyright law, 17 USC 107, provides exceptions for "fair use" of a copyrighted work. As ichimunki pointed out, because you would normally post the trailers for the purpose of promoting the movie (criterion 1), because the trailer is expressly designed for such use (criterion 2), and because the trailers were free anyway (no economic market; criterion 4), a judge with sense would find that transcoding and posting the trailers does not infringe on the studio's bottom line.
However, to cover your @$$, please ask first. Tell the studio that millions of users of BSD and Linux operating systems cannot run QuickTime Player and will have more of a chance of seeing the film if they can see the trailer, and that your mirror of the trailer will help save on their Akamai mirroring bill. If you ask, and the studio declines, then you can post your "Disney Sucks!" or "AOL Pictures Sucks!" page explaining exactly why the trailers are not available.
DMCA Disclaimer: Current interpretations of 17 USC 1201 treat circumvention and infringement as orthogonal offences. Whether a work is eligible for Section 1201 restrictions against circumvention depends only on if a copyright exists (term determined by the Bono Act), not on whether the circumvention is also an act of infringement.
Anyway, with the Crossover plugin (or just use wine), you can look at Quicktime.
Because Wine is not an emulator, Wine based products such as the Crossover product work only on x86 architecture, so it won't help at all on machines based around Sparc, Alpha, SGI MIPS, etc. If Wine were integrated with Bochs, on the other hand...
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For some reason though, I've run into a lot of sites where changing the font size in my browser had no effect.
This is a problem with CSS. The CSS standard has no common way to specify font sizes for each monitor resolution. Specifying font sizes in points makes fonts look tiny on Macintosh computers, whose default logical display resolution is 72 dpi instead of 96 dpi. Specifying font sizes in pixels disables the "larger/smaller" buttons.
WTF that was a cheap ad for his site what's up with that?
Don't jump to conclusions. 1. I'm not the owner of gbadev.org, and 2. I didn't intend for my comment to come off as a mere ad for gbadev.org. I was just demonstrating the easy availability of devices for writing cartridges for a popular video game system.
I'm a little surprised that none of the arcade game manufacturers have taken the "use your hands and feet" concept and created a fighting game using the same technology.
This was tried on the Sega Genesis, and it failed.
Ah, the idea that every person, regardless of creed, color, nation, toaster and porpoise can make total fools of themselves on DDR machines
How many people did you see pirating N64 games? Hardly anyone has the ability to write to a cartridge, so if these papers took their input from a cartridge piracy would not be easy.
Nintendo 64 piracy was hard because every official cartridge in a territory had an identical "key" chip. The mechanism by which the Nintendo cartridge lock/key system (used on NES, Super NES, and N64) works is patented (until about 2005), and it relies on a program that's copyrighted (effectively forever), letting Nintendo go after backup devices.
Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, has no encryption and no lockout. The only checks its BIOS does are checks for the Nintendo logo (legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade) and a simple checksum on the ROM header. Its cartridge interface (multiplexed address bus and data bus) has the Intellivision's system as prior art. And you can get a development kit with a cartridge writer and a flash cartridge that holds 256 megabits (enough for four to eight official ROMs or even more independently produced ROMs) for under $200. Go to gbadev.org for details.
Don't steal games. Just because piracy is easy doesn't mean you should do it. Instead, download games released under a free software (or even just free-beer) license. In the future, I will be releasing some free GBA games here.
There are 2 things that will help him - the quality of the work ie will people enjoy it, and his copyright over the work. If the work is good, and people enjoy it, there may be a return. However, if the copyright is reduced and after a few years he has no rights on it at all ( ie anyone can copy it ) then the chances of making a return are reduced.
If he hasn't made a return by ten years, the chance of making a return after that period is further reduced by market demand for the latest and greatest.
Now, how does that help with increasing the number of authors / books? Simple, it doesn't! In fact it is the exact opposite!
Not always. We need to maximize the total utility function (i.e. utility of work in copyright + utility of work in public domain), somewhere between "no copyprivilege" and "perpetual copyprivilege." I don't see how a 95-year copyright term is closer to this maximum than the 28-year term of the Copyright Act of 1790. In fact, long-term copyprivileges make it harder to create a musical work without accidentally stepping on somebody else's privileges (see also the short story "Melancholy Elephants" and the Yes! We have no bananas! case).
You propose to limit the financial reward to authors.
Patent law already limits the financial reward to inventors. I propose consistency in the limits.
The simple economics of the western world ... means that perhaps, some authors will not be able to write full time, and it will be far more difficult for new authors to be published at all, whether self published or not. So, you argue that reducing copyright will increase the number of authors / books, when you argument supports the opposite.
Justify this. What percent of books published nowadays do not make 90% of their total gross revenue within ten years after first publication? What percent of Hollywood motion pictures (not counting remakes that add significant original content) make any significant amount of money after even two years on the market?
Why don't you just admit it. You do not want to pay for it that's it, something for nothing. Simple!
Or I can't afford to pay for it. Or the author's estate refuses to license it at any price. Or I accidentally independently created it, and I can't afford an attorney to convince a judge of this.
Easy...whoever inherits the right to receive royalties gets the money. Legally, the heir is the same person as the author, for that specific situation.
But why for 70 years, subject to further extensions?
Actually, it's also used (in GBA mode) as the "sound cpu".
You're confusing the GBA with the Sega Nomad. I have written some software for the Game Boy Advance. The technique of letting a second cheap CPU handle some sound chores is common on Sega Genesis and necessary on Super NES (which has very little bandwidth between the sound side and the CPU side of the system), but in Advance mode, the GBA completely cuts power to its GBZ80 processor.
Read more about the GBA hardware here.
Go read Von Neumann and Turing. You can do ANYTHING with an 8-bit microcontroller. It just isn't necessarily easy.
Alan Turing worked on theoretical machines with a bounded program but unbounded data memory. I don't see Photoshop running on a machine with an address space of 64 kilobytes unless there's some heavy bankswitching going on.
Actaully, it was a 6510, not 8502 (or 6502)
6510 was in the C=64. 8502 was in the 128. Atari had a 6507, and NES had a 2A03 (6502 without decimal mode and with a few tone generators on-die).
I think many people consider software to be abandoned when it is no longer available for purchase, and there is no competing product.
Define "competing product." Castlevania for Game Boy Advance competes with eBay'd copies of Castlevania for NES. Heck, Pinobee for Game Boy Advance competes with not only the Sonic series but also every side-scrolling platform game ever released on any platform.
If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?
No. Copyright law does not work like trademark law.
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware
Software created as a work for hire (including most commercial software) becomes abandonware 95 years after first publication. Relevant case: Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?
Unlike trademark law, copyright law allows monopoly owners to make implied licenses by refusing to enforce a copyright, and the owner can pull those licenses at any time.
No, it's different. What sucks about USB is that it does everything that IEEE 1394 does, but a little worse.
And the cost per unit of USB hardware is much cheaper than that of 1394 hardware. The asymptotic law of hardware cost states that if you reduce the cost of one component or set of components that contributes say 3/4 of the cost of a device, you can't reduce the total cost lower than 1/4 of the original cost. USB and USB 2 are both licensed on a royalty-free relevant-patent-swap basis; 1394 requires payment of a 25c per device royalty. After three layers of markup (manufacturer, distributor, and dealer), this royalty can become significant.
A major problem here is that you're not distinguishing between really old books, and brand newly published ones. So, where is the cutoff line where its ok to redistribute someone's copyright?
The purpose of copyright (often ignored even by the courts) is to reward creation. A work should fall into the public domain once the author has been given a reasonable chance to receive a reward for creating the work. How is twenty-eight years (as specified in the original Copyright Act of 1790) not a reasonable chance?
How can an author receive anything after the author is dead?
I also have issues over control of derivative works such as fan fiction, but that's another discussion.
Encouragement is done by giving them exclusive copyrights to the work they create, protected by law, for a limited time.
Limited? Every 20 years, the US Congress accepts $6 million from Disney employees and amends copyright law to extend all terms by 20 more years. They get away with this because courts currently consider "the lifetime of the universe less one day" a valid limit because they don't consider the preamble "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" to limit the power of Congress in any way. For more info, see Eldred v. Ashcroft.
Distributing a work over the internet without the author's permission or even knowledge isn't just illegal, it's immoral.
How is an author morally entitled to royalties 50 years after the author is dead and buried in the ground?
libraries do not republish material, they lend a specific copy.
What is the digital equivalent of such an action?
(of course, having the 'limited time' being shorter than a human lifespan would be nice)
Nice, but unless you have more than $6 million to bribe Congress to repeal the Bono Act, it's not gonna happen.
If I remember correctly, even the 68000 processor series used single-word instructions.
The 680x0 processor series (used in Sega Genesis, the slightly modified Genesis that was Neo-Geo, pre-PPC Macs, and Palm OS devices) used a 16-bit instruction word followed by 0 to 4 words of address or data depending on the addressing mode. You must be thinking of Thumb (scaled-down version of ARM instruction set used in Game Boy Advance) or KIPS (scaled-down version of MIPS instruction set used in many undergraduate computer engineering projects)
and uses a much slower USB connection instead of FireWire.
USB 1.x can pump 1.2 megabytes per second (12 megabits, divided by 10 bits per byte counting comms overhead). That's the same as an 8x CD-ROM, or 50x realtime for a 192 kbps MP3. That's only five or six seconds per song. How is this slow for incrementally changing what's on your device when you get a new CD? Can't you spare one minute to copy the new album that you picked up at Best Buy to the device?
USB 2.x, on the other hand, is about as fast as a FireWire brand IEEE-1394 connection.
the names stop here (unless something's changed since I learned this in middle school) except for google and googleplex.
Google is not a number; it's a search engine. Googleplex is not a number; it's the building that Google operates from. You're thinking of googol and googolplex.
wow, for once the US has a consistent, well thought out naming scheme, and the rest of the world uses something equally bizzare as the imperial system of measures...
They're both pretty well defined. Given n as the prefix-number (mi=1, bi=2, tri=3, quadri=4, quinti=5...):
The U.S. system: n-llion == 10^(3n+3).
The continental system: n-llion == 10^(6n); n-lliard == 10^(6n+3).
According to the above page [10^15] might be a thousand billion or billiard in continental Europe
What does 10^15 have to do with the game of pool?
Moores law says nothing about computer speed doubling. It refers to the transistor count doubling.
Distributed.net relies on the fact that all other factors being equal, brute-forcing a key (decrypting a message with all possible keys) scales linearly with the number of processors involved because of the inherent parallelism. If transistor density doubles, the number of crypto datapaths you can put on a given-sized die doubles. Therefore, Moore's law of gate density translates directly into speed increases.
Also, the processor time and memory is roughly proportional to key length
In other words, the time to decrypt a message with an n-bit key is O(n). The time to bruteforce a message (decrypt a message with all n-bit keys) is thus O(n*2^n) which is still O(2^n) at high values of n. So you still lose a bit of key length to Moore's law of transistor density every 18 months.
So if you double the capabilities of your computer then you can double the key length without taking a performance hit.
But then you and everybody you communicate with would have to make new keys. And even then, you often can't use more than 128-bit keys across national borders.
Well computers probably got fast enough in the last 80s, but encryption-for-everybody still hasn't really taken off. I guess social factors are harder to model than CPU speeds!
Another problem is that PGP/GnuPG "web of trust" model requires you to know somebody face-to-face who is already part of the web of trust so that you can validate her key and gain access to the rest of the keys. In fact, there must be a path in the graph of PGP users that leads to Phil Zimmermann or to Richard M. Stallman (see also Oracle of Bacon).
There are official standards (say, 802.11) and de facto standards (of which Excel is a good example).
Excel is not a standard. By definition, a standard includes human-readable documentation of what meets or does not meet the standard. Excel is a proprietary format with a widely available reference implementation, and this implementation likes to segfault (instead of failing gracefully) whenever an Excel document contains anything invalid.
Sometimes the marketplace runs ahead of the standards bureaucracy.
I remember when applications came with complete file format documentation. If they didn't, it was available cheap from the app publisher.
businesses need to inter-operate with their partners, and if it means (say) exchanging Word documents to do it, that's what they'll settle for.
Why can't they exchange HTML documents instead?
If, in a fit of altruism, I transcoded popular movie trailers from Sorenson and put them on the web would I be guilty of something?
Guilty of something, but it probably wouldn't be copyright infringement. United States copyright law, 17 USC 107, provides exceptions for "fair use" of a copyrighted work. As ichimunki pointed out, because you would normally post the trailers for the purpose of promoting the movie (criterion 1), because the trailer is expressly designed for such use (criterion 2), and because the trailers were free anyway (no economic market; criterion 4), a judge with sense would find that transcoding and posting the trailers does not infringe on the studio's bottom line.
However, to cover your @$$, please ask first. Tell the studio that millions of users of BSD and Linux operating systems cannot run QuickTime Player and will have more of a chance of seeing the film if they can see the trailer, and that your mirror of the trailer will help save on their Akamai mirroring bill. If you ask, and the studio declines, then you can post your "Disney Sucks!" or "AOL Pictures Sucks!" page explaining exactly why the trailers are not available.
DMCA Disclaimer: Current interpretations of 17 USC 1201 treat circumvention and infringement as orthogonal offences. Whether a work is eligible for Section 1201 restrictions against circumvention depends only on if a copyright exists (term determined by the Bono Act), not on whether the circumvention is also an act of infringement.
Anyway, with the Crossover plugin (or just use wine), you can look at Quicktime.
Because Wine is not an emulator, Wine based products such as the Crossover product work only on x86 architecture, so it won't help at all on machines based around Sparc, Alpha, SGI MIPS, etc. If Wine were integrated with Bochs, on the other hand...