Whereas most phonetic alphabets consist of ideograms recycled as phonetic symbols, Hangul seems to be the only one to consist of symbols constructed purely for phonetic meaning.
If you like hangul, you'll probably also like J.R.R. Tolkien's tengwar. Regular changes to the shapes of the consonants denote stop/fric/nasal and voiced/less. The structure of the script is such that unused letters (after t series, p series, and k series) can be used to represent sounds unique to a given language. It's available in both vowel-pointed (like devanagari and biblical hebrew) and vowel-letter (like greek/latin/cyrillic) modes.
I'm not 100% sure about the legal status of a post-1923 script. Can a script be copyrighted or trademarked? Probably not. (Patents don't apply; it's been more than 20 years since the entire system was disclosed in RotK.)
rough translation of this Quenya Elvish phrase which is a derivative of the Tengwar elven language
Script != language. The word tengwar is Quenya for "letters." Calling the tengwar script a language is like calling the cyrillic script (used for Russian), the katakana and hiragana scripts (used for Japanese), or the latin-1 script (used for many Western European languages) a language.
Find Tolkien's tengwar and more in the conscript registry, which uses the 'private use' area of the Unicode space for scripts invented in modern times (all scripts are invented at some time or other). And there are "surrogate" codes in Unicode UTF-16 for a million additional code positions.
Printed recipes are as copyrightable as any other text; with that out of the way, let's discuss patents.
Should my recipe for chocolate-chip cookies be patentable?
I haven't looked that deeply into it, but I'd think the food produced by following a recipe is probably a patentable composition of materials under patent law. Many materials patents include a recipe, that is, a method (methods are patentable) for producing the material.
Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.
One of the nifty new features is the ability to DnD.ogg files into the track window and have them burn out to normal CD Audio files. Is this the first burning app to offer this feature?
Roxio's Easy CD Creator claims to do this with MPEG layer 3 audio files (and could probably do ogg vorbis with a plugin), but it has never worked properly for me (dies on the slightest corruption that Winamp skips right over), so I just use AOL's Winamp to turn the OGGs and MP3s into wav files and then fix and mix them with some audio editing software.
Napster is only useless if you don't have WinMX, a Win32-based client that not only connects to unfiltered OpenNap servers but also has its own decentralized network. And there are always audiogalaxy, bearshare, and kazaa.
You need PANTONE, and PANTONE is patented.
on
GIMP And OS X
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· Score: 3
color separation just a well-defined linear transformation of RGB values?
This old Slashdot thread discusses extensively the problems with adding CMYK support to GIMP. Primarily, you need to handle dot gain and nonlinear mixing of inks on each particular make and model of expensive printer, and patents held by PANTONE and other companies. This is one reason why the stripped-down Photoshop that comes with Mac scanners doesn't cost that much more than Paint Shop Pro; it includes everything but the expensive CMYK library.
vi/Emacs don't have THAT long of learning curve
on
GIMP And OS X
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· Score: 2
[GIMP is like vi because it's] very powerful but has a learning curve measured in years.
I agree on the vi side, but here's what I do for people who are just fed up with MS Paint: I give them a cheat sheet, telling where the ten most common commands are. (Right click pulls up menu bar. Shift key makes a straight line.) I do the same for people who want to learn Emacs; it helps them get up to speed that much faster.
TurboTop lets Win32 GIMP's menus float
on
GIMP And OS X
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· Score: 2
What, that thing that behaves like a mode-less window and disappears behind all the others
Savard Software's TurboTop (shared-source freebeerware) for Windows lets you keep any window (such as commonly used GIMP menus) Always On Top. I'm not sure if there's something similar for Mac or not.
Few swpat applications contain a working implementation, most do not even give enough information for a skilled programmer to implement what is described.
That may be true for some software patents, but (for example) the United States patent on Nintendo's Dr. Mario game gives a full description of every variable and subroutine. Of course, I stumbled upon this patent after I had worked it out in my head after about two days of non-stop Dr. M play and after I released my clones of Tetris and Puyo Puyo.
The first claim of the patent also seems to cover Tetris 2, Blastris B, and some popular variations on Columns and Klax. Prior art? Not only that, the recent Dr. Mario 64 doesn't mention a patent number on the box, in the manual, or in the credits. (Dr. Mario 64 sucks anyway.)
NINTENDO: THIS IS YOUR INVITATION TO SUE ME UNDER U.S. PATENT 5,265,888. HERE'S THE EVIDENCE!
Amazing that people will pay $70 to register a domain to point at goatse.cx.
.org.com.net domains for under $12 per year at GANDI. Services offered include URL-rewriting redirection and email redirection with NO ads. The terms of service are among the best in the industry.
Why pay more? Register your domain at www.gandi.net before it's squatted.
Yes, because we all know that Ogg is easily played on any PC since most people already have support for it installed.
These Windows platform media players support Ogg Vorbis audio: FreeAMP (natively), Sonique (natively), and Winamp (with a plugin). Winamp, from AOL Nullsoft, is the most popular audio player on the Windows platform. A drag-and-drop Ogg Vorbis encoder is also available.
You have all the margin you want at Everything, the Internet's most popular collaboratively filtered database and writing community. (See also what I've written.)
It would be nice if we could convince enough people to operate that way. Then the artist would be paid for their work
See also MP3.com's D.A.M. system. An MP3.com artist makes several albums available, and when a consumer buys an album for USD $8 + S&H, the artist gets half of that, the rest going to duplication of the CD and of the box art.
How many songs do you know with the same titles in them?
Lots. When looking for an artist-title pair, I use Google with a few lyrics. For instance, I heard a song that went "Isn't it time... falling in love could be your mistake" and a quick Google search turned up "Isn't It Time" by The Babys.
But there has to be a better way to get copies of singles without the "$17 for one good song and get 11 filler songs ABSOLUTELY FREE!" bullshit the RIAA labels pull.
Say your an American in Europe or vice versa and have little access to the songs you favored in your home town. Why shouldn't you be able to find it on mp3 for your own enjoyment?
Because RIAA labels such as AOL have partnered (i.e. stock-swapped) with overseas air shipping companies such as FedEx. "If you want the music, pay for Sony Shipping! Only $40 for 7-day shipping of the entire works of $IMPORT_ARTIST!"
$0.85 -- Co-op advertising and discounts to retailers
The labels can do away with these by selling directly to the consumer. Mail-order music subscription services such as Bertelsmann's BMG and Columbia House already do something similar.
$3.34 -- Company Overhead, Distribution, and Shipping
If they ever decided to get a Clue and sell their albums online as 192 Kbps Ogg Vorbis secure downloads, they could reduce this to the cost of Akamaized bandwidth.
Some restrictions are necessary for freedom
on
XFree 4.1.0 Out
·
· Score: 2
What you speak of is called a restriction, which means that the freedom in restricted in one form or another.
If you lived in an area such as Afghanistan, with nothing restricting guerrillas from the other side from killing you, would you consider yourself free? In order to have freedom from, say, being murdered, people need restrictions on them such that they do not murder each other. Those in charge must balance freedom and security to create an optimal symbiosis.
story submitter could check an option that would allow for "Google" style mirroring of the page(s)
A very frequent suggestion. Here's how to implement it: When you're submitting a story that links to a low-monthly-bandwidth web site, insert www.google.com/search?q=cache: right after the http:// in the URL. That way, viewers get a Google cached version with a link at the top to the most current version.
Assuming I were to live forever, why should I want to?
Every 20 years, DisneyCo lobbies the world's major powers for yet another 20-year retroactive extension on its monopolies under copyright law. Assuming you live longer than DisneyCo, you'll finally get to see copyrights expire into the public domain.
Anyway, on to my question:
Say I'm buying rings for aging patients in the hospital. Would you guarantee that they wouldn't die in the next 90 days with the rings on? Would you guarantee that you'd have enough money in the bank to cover all the refund checks?
More than once I've got a clear signal that was obviously extra terrstrial in nature. The distribution was so far away from random noise that it had to be artificial. I run the data through the Seti program, and what does it come out with? Nothing.
SETI@home beams known signals to the radio telescope as a check to make sure the whole system is still working properly and to call out clients that give false negatives. There are a few on constant frequencies; there are probably others on frequencies that change daily.
How many votes does a political donor get? 1. How many votes does a $1 million dollar donor get? 1.
How many votes can $1 million worth of Big Media-funded commercials on TV buy? More than 1. Politicians do what it takes to get themselves re-elected, even if it means turning back on their campaign promises and selling out to Big Media.
If you don't like what is happening, run for office yourself.
I am constitutionally prohibited from running for federal office on account of my age, even though I am a natural-born United States citizen who has never set foot outside United States soil.
If you don't like a candidate, donate money to his/her opponent.
What if no candidate for a given office makes a promise that "I will not let campaign contributions from big ugly corporations influence my voting patterns in any way whatsoever"?
Write your Congressman, your Senators
Do you think they'd listen to somebody who is not old enough to purchase or consume alcoholic beverages?
Never forget, representatives DO represent the will of the people. If they fail to, they get replaced by those next in line who claim to. It's the beauty of the american democracy
If that were true, we wouldn't have a DMCA or a Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The United States of America is not a democracy but a plutocracy, which Webster defines as "government by the rich." Our representatives have learned that campaign money is more powerful than integrity in getting a fellow elected; a Congresscritter generally represents her constituents up until the day after inauguration, after which she represents special intere$t groups such as RIAA and MPAA.
But in a slightly more sinister sense, special interest groups do represent the will of the people. The pure capitalist would say that "if consumers don't want effectively perpetual copyright terms, they wouldn't buy from producers that funnel their money into lobbying for such laws." The public voices its approval of loss of rights by buying tickets to Disney's Pearl Harbor and Atlantis. There just isn't that much economic demand among consumers for freedom.
Firewalls don't help against valid traffic flood attacks. In a VTF DOS (such as a ping flood, port 80 SYN flood, or Slashdot effect), RFC-conforming packets (not mal-formed packets as in ping of death) disguised as legitimate requests are sent to the target; so many packets are sent that the pipe fills up and the server has trouble fielding requests. Such attacks take advantage of the client-server nature of the commercial Internet as we know it at the turn of the century by using lots and lots of underpowered connections (56K, ISDN, low-end DSL) to take down fat pipes (high-end DSL or cable, T1, even T3).
Slashdot Mirror
Whereas most phonetic alphabets consist of ideograms recycled as phonetic symbols, Hangul seems to be the only one to consist of symbols constructed purely for phonetic meaning.
If you like hangul, you'll probably also like J.R.R. Tolkien's tengwar. Regular changes to the shapes of the consonants denote stop/fric/nasal and voiced/less. The structure of the script is such that unused letters (after t series, p series, and k series) can be used to represent sounds unique to a given language. It's available in both vowel-pointed (like devanagari and biblical hebrew) and vowel-letter (like greek/latin/cyrillic) modes.
I'm not 100% sure about the legal status of a post-1923 script. Can a script be copyrighted or trademarked? Probably not. (Patents don't apply; it's been more than 20 years since the entire system was disclosed in RotK.)
rough translation of this Quenya Elvish phrase which is a derivative of the Tengwar elven language
Script != language. The word tengwar is Quenya for "letters." Calling the tengwar script a language is like calling the cyrillic script (used for Russian), the katakana and hiragana scripts (used for Japanese), or the latin-1 script (used for many Western European languages) a language.
Find Tolkien's tengwar and more in the conscript registry, which uses the 'private use' area of the Unicode space for scripts invented in modern times (all scripts are invented at some time or other). And there are "surrogate" codes in Unicode UTF-16 for a million additional code positions.
Should my recipe for chocolate-chip cookies be patentable?
I haven't looked that deeply into it, but I'd think the food produced by following a recipe is probably a patentable composition of materials under patent law. Many materials patents include a recipe, that is, a method (methods are patentable) for producing the material.
Of course, nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.My old CD burning software
My old CD burning
One of the nifty new features is the ability to DnD .ogg files into the track window and have them burn out to normal CD Audio files. Is this the first burning app to offer this feature?
Roxio's Easy CD Creator claims to do this with MPEG layer 3 audio files (and could probably do ogg vorbis with a plugin), but it has never worked properly for me (dies on the slightest corruption that Winamp skips right over), so I just use AOL's Winamp to turn the OGGs and MP3s into wav files and then fix and mix them with some audio editing software.
Now(or rather then; Napster is useless now)
Napster is only useless if you don't have WinMX, a Win32-based client that not only connects to unfiltered OpenNap servers but also has its own decentralized network. And there are always audiogalaxy, bearshare, and kazaa.
color separation just a well-defined linear transformation of RGB values?
This old Slashdot thread discusses extensively the problems with adding CMYK support to GIMP. Primarily, you need to handle dot gain and nonlinear mixing of inks on each particular make and model of expensive printer, and patents held by PANTONE and other companies. This is one reason why the stripped-down Photoshop that comes with Mac scanners doesn't cost that much more than Paint Shop Pro; it includes everything but the expensive CMYK library.
[GIMP is like vi because it's] very powerful but has a learning curve measured in years.
I agree on the vi side, but here's what I do for people who are just fed up with MS Paint: I give them a cheat sheet, telling where the ten most common commands are. (Right click pulls up menu bar. Shift key makes a straight line.) I do the same for people who want to learn Emacs; it helps them get up to speed that much faster.
What, that thing that behaves like a mode-less window and disappears behind all the others
Savard Software's TurboTop (shared-source freebeerware) for Windows lets you keep any window (such as commonly used GIMP menus) Always On Top. I'm not sure if there's something similar for Mac or not.
Few swpat applications contain a working implementation, most do not even give enough information for a skilled programmer to implement what is described.
That may be true for some software patents, but (for example) the United States patent on Nintendo's Dr. Mario game gives a full description of every variable and subroutine. Of course, I stumbled upon this patent after I had worked it out in my head after about two days of non-stop Dr. M play and after I released my clones of Tetris and Puyo Puyo.
The first claim of the patent also seems to cover Tetris 2, Blastris B, and some popular variations on Columns and Klax. Prior art? Not only that, the recent Dr. Mario 64 doesn't mention a patent number on the box, in the manual, or in the credits. (Dr. Mario 64 sucks anyway.)
NINTENDO: THIS IS YOUR INVITATION TO SUE ME UNDER U.S. PATENT 5,265,888. HERE'S THE EVIDENCE!
Amazing that people will pay $70 to register a domain to point at goatse.cx.
Why pay more? Register your domain at www.gandi.net before it's squatted.
disclaimer: they're not paying for this plug; i just have two domains (pineight.com and misunderestimated.net) with them.Yes, because we all know that Ogg is easily played on any PC since most people already have support for it installed.
These Windows platform media players support Ogg Vorbis audio: FreeAMP (natively), Sonique (natively), and Winamp (with a plugin). Winamp, from AOL Nullsoft, is the most popular audio player on the Windows platform. A drag-and-drop Ogg Vorbis encoder is also available.
but the margin is too small to contain it...
You have all the margin you want at Everything, the Internet's most popular collaboratively filtered database and writing community. (See also what I've written.)
It would be nice if we could convince enough people to operate that way. Then the artist would be paid for their work
See also MP3.com's D.A.M. system. An MP3.com artist makes several albums available, and when a consumer buys an album for USD $8 + S&H, the artist gets half of that, the rest going to duplication of the CD and of the box art.
How many songs do you know with the same titles in them?
Lots. When looking for an artist-title pair, I use Google with a few lyrics. For instance, I heard a song that went "Isn't it time ... falling in love could be your mistake" and a quick Google search turned up "Isn't It Time" by The Babys.
But there has to be a better way to get copies of singles without the "$17 for one good song and get 11 filler songs ABSOLUTELY FREE!" bullshit the RIAA labels pull.
Say your an American in Europe or vice versa and have little access to the songs you favored in your home town. Why shouldn't you be able to find it on mp3 for your own enjoyment?
Because RIAA labels such as AOL have partnered (i.e. stock-swapped) with overseas air shipping companies such as FedEx. "If you want the music, pay for Sony Shipping! Only $40 for 7-day shipping of the entire works of $IMPORT_ARTIST!"
The labels can do away with these by selling directly to the consumer. Mail-order music subscription services such as Bertelsmann's BMG and Columbia House already do something similar.
If they ever decided to get a Clue and sell their albums online as 192 Kbps Ogg Vorbis secure downloads, they could reduce this to the cost of Akamaized bandwidth.
What you speak of is called a restriction, which means that the freedom in restricted in one form or another.
If you lived in an area such as Afghanistan, with nothing restricting guerrillas from the other side from killing you, would you consider yourself free? In order to have freedom from, say, being murdered, people need restrictions on them such that they do not murder each other. Those in charge must balance freedom and security to create an optimal symbiosis.
(Insanely long copyright duration is not balance.)
"Windows XP: eXtremely Pathetic." -- Anonymous Cowardstory submitter could check an option that would allow for "Google" style mirroring of the page(s)
A very frequent suggestion. Here's how to implement it: When you're submitting a story that links to a low-monthly-bandwidth web site, insert www.google.com/search?q=cache: right after the http:// in the URL. That way, viewers get a Google cached version with a link at the top to the most current version.
Assuming I were to live forever, why should I want to?
Every 20 years, DisneyCo lobbies the world's major powers for yet another 20-year retroactive extension on its monopolies under copyright law. Assuming you live longer than DisneyCo, you'll finally get to see copyrights expire into the public domain.
Anyway, on to my question:
Say I'm buying rings for aging patients in the hospital. Would you guarantee that they wouldn't die in the next 90 days with the rings on? Would you guarantee that you'd have enough money in the bank to cover all the refund checks?
In the year 3535
DisneyCo will begin its next three-year lobbying campaign for yet another 20-year copyright extension, bringing the total term to 1,635 years of government-granted monopoly for all works for hire and life plus 1,610 for freelance works. (Sure, the US won't be around anymore by then, but whatever federation takes over its job will probably be just as easy to buy off.)
ObQuestion: Mr. Chiu, what's your opinion on retroactive copyright extensions? Good or bad thing?
More than once I've got a clear signal that was obviously extra terrstrial in nature. The distribution was so far away from random noise that it had to be artificial. I run the data through the Seti program, and what does it come out with? Nothing.
SETI@home beams known signals to the radio telescope as a check to make sure the whole system is still working properly and to call out clients that give false negatives. There are a few on constant frequencies; there are probably others on frequencies that change daily.
How many votes does a political donor get? 1. How many votes does a $1 million dollar donor get? 1.
How many votes can $1 million worth of Big Media-funded commercials on TV buy? More than 1. Politicians do what it takes to get themselves re-elected, even if it means turning back on their campaign promises and selling out to Big Media.
If you don't like what is happening, run for office yourself.
I am constitutionally prohibited from running for federal office on account of my age, even though I am a natural-born United States citizen who has never set foot outside United States soil.
If you don't like a candidate, donate money to his/her opponent.
What if no candidate for a given office makes a promise that "I will not let campaign contributions from big ugly corporations influence my voting patterns in any way whatsoever"?
Write your Congressman, your Senators
Do you think they'd listen to somebody who is not old enough to purchase or consume alcoholic beverages?
Never forget, representatives DO represent the will of the people. If they fail to, they get replaced by those next in line who claim to. It's the beauty of the american democracy
If that were true, we wouldn't have a DMCA or a Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The United States of America is not a democracy but a plutocracy, which Webster defines as "government by the rich." Our representatives have learned that campaign money is more powerful than integrity in getting a fellow elected; a Congresscritter generally represents her constituents up until the day after inauguration, after which she represents special intere$t groups such as RIAA and MPAA.
But in a slightly more sinister sense, special interest groups do represent the will of the people. The pure capitalist would say that "if consumers don't want effectively perpetual copyright terms, they wouldn't buy from producers that funnel their money into lobbying for such laws." The public voices its approval of loss of rights by buying tickets to Disney's Pearl Harbor and Atlantis. There just isn't that much economic demand among consumers for freedom.
Cable Modem users need to learn about firewalls
Firewalls don't help against valid traffic flood attacks. In a VTF DOS (such as a ping flood, port 80 SYN flood, or Slashdot effect), RFC-conforming packets (not mal-formed packets as in ping of death) disguised as legitimate requests are sent to the target; so many packets are sent that the pipe fills up and the server has trouble fielding requests. Such attacks take advantage of the client-server nature of the commercial Internet as we know it at the turn of the century by using lots and lots of underpowered connections (56K, ISDN, low-end DSL) to take down fat pipes (high-end DSL or cable, T1, even T3).
Floods MUST be blocked upstream.
Never mind that source almost never gets run
Perl, JavaScript, PHP, they're source and they get run. And yes, qrpff is an implementation of decss in Perl.