--Quote-- Suse LiVES no longer supports Suse, since Novell signed a deal with a certain well known company. If you are using Suse, please consider moving to another distribution. --EndQuote--
Just downloaded Lives as I wanted to play with video editing and noticed the above. Pretty fast update.
Interesting letter, especially with names being named, phonecalls being mentioned etc.
Good (??) way of putting a gun against the head of New Line?
Proven director, who made 3 sell out episodes in the franchise is unable to make what is likely to become another hit because New Line is too shitty to fess up that they hid serious amounts of sales under the table. Will go down great with investors in the new project looking for a bit of ROI.
On the other hand, cheap no-name director, makes lousy low budget Hobbit movie, which will still more than break even as fans will queue up anyway. Profits might even be better that way.
Peter Jackson is a little bit expensive... (he could have made the King Kong movie for a LOT less by cutting the cheap Jurrasic Park rubbish, and done me a favor by changing the ending to keep me interested during that long haul flight during which I was forced to watch it)
>> The new ICT Minister expressed his belief in censorship and said that even the most avid freedom of speech advocate >> would change his mind if he sees doctored pictures of his daughter's head on a naked body posted on the Internet.
The man had bad experiences before -- who can blame him.
I have been watching Linux boot up screens for years -- and its never usefull for anything, except when you are having trouble setting up the machine. I have setup one Ubuntu machine on a 37" display, and a quiet "Ubuntu" while the machine loads so that we can start presentations is very nice. There is no need to scare anyone with complicated language ; these machines are run by non-tech staff who don't need to know whether the DHCP address was succesfully obtained, the RAID array mounted etc.
But for the sake of configurability, they should have 3 options;-) (1) Full display (2) Some display (aka Dapper) (3) No display of messages (eg. like efty)
Ubuntu is going in the right way for me , eg. non-tech users feel comfortable with its easy interface and colours, and things that just work, and tech users (aka me) who can install & configure a new machine with minimal efford.
Having installed Edgy on a couple of computer these last few days, and upgraded a few Dapper machines, I find its artwork pretty relaxing. I didn't like the brown colors at first, but you get used to it very quickly.
Efty's new boot up logo looks much better than the old one, and I am happy that they got rid of all the boot up messages on start-up, which was just distracting crud.
Nice one -- on the computers I installed it on, it just worked and the upgrades went smootly. Your milage may vary of course.
I tried Second Life for a bit recently, they have a Linux version and I have a new graphics card. So I'd figure I'd give it a go. Its really quite nice, some of the graphics are amazing, and I had great fun playing with the various in world scripts. It is however constraint in its usefullness at the moment.
My nags at the moment:
I want to run my own server, I don't feel like paying an increasing monthly fee to just build the world I would like to share with my friends, considering how many "islands" there are, quite a few people are keen to have their own place appart. But if I would like to build something massive, like an insane bookstore that would cost a fortune.
I want to write my own scripts, that can take data from other sources and generate objects accordingly
It is a social experiment in that its has its own currency and trading mechanisms etc, fun, but closed.
Closed source -- so its not going anywhere fast
This feels a bit like the really popular early BBS services -- they are on to something here though. Instead of chatting in yellow text on a black background at 3am, you could be sitting on a virtual campfire with your chat friends next to a beach, instead of typing smilies, you set of fireworks. If this escapes into the real world, it could possibly be a similar step as from the BBS communities to the Internet
That is already happening -- last international conference (organized by American companies in the tourism industry) I went to was held in Montreal. Easier for everyone coming from outside the US to get a visa....
New Scientist is a good one, I second the economist as a teatime reader. Their Tech/Science articles are in touch with reality, and a lot of their articles end up being quoted on Slashdot weeks later.
Now this would be a nice toy for my own daughters (says father, who wouldn't mind taking this thing apart). Too bad they don't take orders below one million pieces.
Considering the low specs of this thing how about releasing the distribution and libraries that will run on this? It should be trivial to build a VM that allows you to play with developing software to run in this kind of environment.
To ensure that this project doesn't flop right from the start -- I presume that they would like people to develop some software for it.... (visions of US$ 100 doorstops all over Asia)
The Spanish Inquisition teaming up with RIAA , you get the best quality repression of both the new and old world in a match made in heaven!
Or maybe it will still end in utter embarrasment and ridicule for Spain as in a Monty Pythonesque fashion RIAA officers storm unsuspecting households shouting "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" and start probing them with stuffed cushions.
Interesting to see how it went in Taiwan which is a little further down the line. Entry into the top universities was for decades highly competative (and still is for the top places). You had to cram yourself to death to enter. The top schools are public , and government funded. (The top one, TaiDa, is about half way down the world top-200)
However, as the main industrial tycoons were reaching retirement age a decade ago or so, they wanted to do something about their legacy. So many private universities opened dedicated to these people's father's and mothers. Brand new facilities and pretty well endowned. At the same time the government invested money in upgrading the existing technical college's to full university status. Teachers were required to obtain PhD's to retain their positions.
So suddenly there is a glut of universities -- obviously there is also plenty of complaints about lower standards. But it is now possible for each student who has the intention and will to actually enter university. This is also brings another benefit -- with a college degree further studies abroad are hard. With a university degree from any of these schools its usually not too hard to enter into an American, Australian, Canadian or UK post-graduate programme. One result of this is a large number of world-travelled bilingual English/Chinese speakers, many of whom work for the endless trading companies in Taiwan.
Considering how many efforts any Chinese family will put into educating their next generation -- I am pretty sure things will go similary in China.
Re:So far, I'm not very impressed with the Network
on
Ubuntu 6.06 Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
The 3COM problem is an annoying one -- especially as my 3COM card used to work under Hoary out of the box.
[EDIT] It's still not fixed. I decided to add the islsm_pci driver to/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, and now the prism54 driver gets loaded correctly on boot, with eth1 being brought up automatically. As it used to under Hoary, Breezy, and earlier versions of Dapper.
The fix is to blacklist the islsm_pci driver which is loaded before the prism54 driver and assumes it can handle the 3COM card when it actually is unable to do so. This done -- the 3COM card works like before.
Since Windows Live is an online service, why not discontinue e-mail service in universities for students completely? After all, its a lot of work, money (hardware, support, licenses) and infrastructure for a very transient population.
The school for itself should downgrade its e-mail servers to a simpler setup for just staff and researchers. This is probably more for legal reasons (eg. need to keep backup copies of important communications) than for security (eg. press forward to "@gmail.com" and its gone)
Just let students fill in their own e-mail account, or ask them to create one at hotmail, yahoo, google or their own preference on enrollment; just force them to click on an "this account really works" e-mail on enrollment. Make it a requirement that students have a working e-mail account. And of course they can make a new one just for the "university" part of their life.
You mentioned:
* Student can keep using the account after graduation (+1) * Students have no need to learn "Another Stupid Broken E-mail client" TM because the university requires this * University has less need for its own infrastructure (+2) * No need to login / authenticate against university servers when outside the campus (security +1)
Issues:
* Less Privacy ? But then , the university itself is now less likely to "peak" at your e-mails (+2) * Make sure you get your free e-mail in Russia if you are paranoid about US government snooping
And I am sure that the university can get a good deal for a Google Mail hosted students.standford.edu account or something;-)
I worked an internship at a computer lab in the UK during the '90 where we had PhD students trying to get voice compression to the next stage. As I recall a lot of that was based on American military voice compression research.
Now the key point was trying to achieve "real-time" compression -- seeing a P90 taking 3-4 times real-time was seen as pretty good already.
Around the same time of course MP3 compression was also just getting off the ground, and the reference source code was more or less spread around freely (though not in a free license) and MP3 compression was certainly not realtime in that day and age.
I think you are looking at the wrong kind of trains -- the Japanese have lots of commuter trains connecting smaller cities, and literally millions of miles of track, don't think Tokyo, think outback.
These trains are actually more like busses, they have maybe 2-4 cars and run infrequencly, so electrifying these tracks doesn't make much economic sense; or is just downright ugly and expensive to maintain. They are mostly diesel powered (with the engines located below the passenger compartments, there is no seperate loc).
For these, replacing a noisy diesel engine with much quieter electrical ones makes very good sense.
Since this code goes back a long time, what exactly was/is Windows using WMF's for ? If this code is around since before 1992 ; then a computer environment in those days would be a couple of computers networked to a company server, and a printer server. No or little e-mail, WWW etc.
* Inside Word documents
Put an official looking document on a company network server, user opens the document and code is executed on his/her terminal. Nice for installing spy tools & keyloggers, even if the user rabitly protects his/her computer.
* Printer drivers ?
WMF's are for print job preparation, did any every get executed inside a network server before handing it off to the laser printer? Probably not? since windows printer drivers on the clients do most of the formatting/raster work. Would be nice if you could get a Windows NT server to execute your code by just printing a file on the network, completely wiping out any security.
> So I buy a book as a gift, and give it away, but I get to keep the online copy? > Cool for me, rats for the author.
So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.
If the service allows you to go back it actually good for the auther -- he/she has another opportunity to convince you buy that next episode of the series.
I cleaned up my book collection the other day -- nearly all of them I have read about once and then they started gathering dust. Nearly all books out there are read at most once , if they are that lucky. Plenty of books I started to read only to decide half way through that it wasn't worth my time (though that happens most with library books where I tend to pick and choose books beyond my usual favorites )
Ahh, but its a win win situation where the copyright holder (who was innocently assuming that they held the right to copy, surely they worked tirelessly and spend endless bribes in effords to nail it down for so many years) wasn't informed in advance that Google started ripping their print collection.
And that is why they are so pissed off.
They are probably actually not too afraid of Google starting to "leak" information,.. they go to some length to safeguard their procedures.
But how about the 13,000 websites that follow them doing the same thing? With Google's precedent, they can follow and start scanning to their hearts desire. They are sure to follow, funded by some entrepreneurial investors who will quickly fill the niches that Google deems unworthy for now.
One of them goes bust or gets hacked, and suddenly you have black market DVD's with every single SF novel published since 1950 appearing from China... (oh the horror!) Once the information bird is free from its cage it will fly.
Which brings me back to my earlier point of a copyright free zone, Google could get its sites certified and licenced to warehouse copyrighted knowlegde following proper safeguards to avoid such "radioactive" leaks.
Let us hope that they lose this one big time. It seems Google already has plenty of safeguards in place.
Sure, with the convuleted interest ridden mess the copyright system is the Writer Guild might actually win this.
Because, why would Google be allowed to copy all these books to their hard disks, and then make a mint from advertising by showing peeks of it to searchers.
They sure aren't paying anyone for the priviledge.
In university they have pretty big posters against wholesale copying of library books above the photocopiers, with all the usual heavy handed copyright warnings.
It seems technology, is as per usual, ahead of the law. Google would have to establish some kind of copyright free zone (bit like a tax free export zone) where they can safely process search actions on this huge Alexandria library.
Better beat around some congress critters to support this as the potential benefit to mankind ( access to all written knowlegde current and past, no matter how insightful or inane) would probably be worthy of "World Wonder" status, and give the society that has it a serious scientific advantage.
I thought of it only last week, of course, I didn't patent it. Bugger. So pick my brain for prior art.
But I figured that I could more rapidly, and non-destructively scan my dead-wood collection of books if I could use the USB Cam attached to my computer. Much faster than a flatbed scanner.
You would need an algorithm that ensures that you can scan the whole page as you hold the camera, stitching the parts together, and ignoring things outside the page area. Then feed the result into an OCR routine to get a text version.
Most (nearly) books are high contrast, black on white (or yellowish depending on book age) so the page boundaries shouldn't be too hard to detect.
Now make a nice little programme to wrap this in, and you can "quickly" convert your favorite books into a format that can be read on a PDA, most of which will never be realised in any usefull digital form anyway.
Plan B was just to use a digital camera to fotograph each page, and then feed the memory card into the OCR algorithm. Probably a lot easier.
This seems to be an idea along very similar lines; I predict that we reach the pre-MP3 stage for books very soon now (when it took 10+ minutes to encode a single CD track on a P90) Camera's are everywhere, and you can probably download a half-decent (for European scripts) OCR library for the hard work.
I sincerely hope so, as I would like my dead-wood to be as accessible as my music collection. (and to be honest, the dead wood is just gathering dust, wheras on my PDA i might actually get to re-read them in the train)
Anyone who still has the illusion that the Dutch have any better record, or are any less incompetent than other nations in handling things like child protection should read this article in this mornings Volkskrant newspaper on all the mistakes made in a murder-suspect case.
It can't become any lonelier for a boy of 11. Your girlfriend has been murdered, the police doesn't believe you, and think you are responsible. The inspector assigned to assist him becomes a hard-cop interagator. The child phychologist there to protect him secrectly tapes "confidential" conversations and passes them on to the police.
A first child phychologist supports the boys story , but is then ignored and replaced by another who then continues to support the police in their interogations for days on end -- for crying out loud, the kid is 11.
Even when the police had already already arrested another suspect for the murder, the statements don't match the police "picture" of what happened and the boy is continuedly pressured to modify his story.
And does this system come with an auto-destruct build in? In case of invasion for example. So nice to have Scape-Goat Catagory A come out in handy alphabatized lists.
Maybe not likely at the moment, but the one of the things people gave their lives trying to do following the German invasion of the Netherlands was to make sure as many public records were destroyed, all paperbased then, but still very usefull for tracking down "unwanted" elements for deportation.
Far fetched? It happened before for crying out loud. Doesn't have be an invasion, a change of government for the worse would be enough. Oh, sure, we are in an enlightned "post" war society these days. Crap.
Safeguards mean nothing on a system where a government is able to give it self unlimited access at any time in the future.
Wouldn't it be nice to filter out each potential future muslim extremist, and assign a stasi member for regular check ups? Sure, they can already do that, but its probably not as easy yet.
Thing is, this process is unstopable, as of course its the next thing todo, and hey, its good for the children themselves.
We already do the same thing with cows. Might as well give children one of those big yellow plastic ID tags in their ears for easy tracking between farms/schools.
I suggest we do away with names altogether; just numbers for each person. No names, sex, religion or any other easily filtered information is to be stored. Be very suspicious when someone is saying "you are more than a number to us"
I (loc: Taipei) regular receive the weirdest phonecalls on my mobile, people have tried to:
Borrow me money (several) ["do you have a credit problem", we at borrow 50% no questions asked"]
Tried get my address in return for free gifts ["now free handbook to Hong Kong Disneyland"]
Told me my son had been kidnapped, and that I should transfer money by bank (sidenote; thankfully I have no son)
I could earn lots of money by just going to a cash machine and entering a few numbers (various versions, "tax refund" application, immediate money return "investment",...)
Most people I know & work with get these calls, and of course its usually elderly who fall for these scams. The kidnap story scares the hell out of anyone who gets it.
Most cash machines have warning stickers against these kind of practices. Its all psychology of course, it works wonderfully with fear & greed.
Massive thefts of private information (banks have lost all credit card info through employee heft) make it possible to "personalise" these stories. (Its sounds damned real if they have your bank account number)
Volume is about 3-4 calls per person per week, so with 23 million mobile phones you'd figure somebody would notice these calls.
Slashdot Mirror
--Quote--
Suse
LiVES no longer supports Suse, since Novell signed a deal with a certain well known company.
If you are using Suse, please consider moving to another distribution.
--EndQuote--
Just downloaded Lives as I wanted to play with video editing and noticed the above. Pretty fast update.
Interesting letter, especially with names being named, phonecalls being mentioned etc.
Good (??) way of putting a gun against the head of New Line?
Proven director, who made 3 sell out episodes in the franchise is unable to make what is likely to become another hit because New Line is too shitty to fess up that they hid serious amounts of sales under the table. Will go down great with investors in the new project looking for a bit of ROI.
On the other hand, cheap no-name director, makes lousy low budget Hobbit movie, which will still more than break even as fans will queue up anyway. Profits might even be better that way.
Peter Jackson is a little bit expensive... (he could have made the King Kong movie for a LOT less by cutting the cheap Jurrasic Park rubbish, and done me a favor by changing the ending to keep me interested during that long haul flight during which I was forced to watch it)
Ok, mod this as flamebait... its getting late.
>> The new ICT Minister expressed his belief in censorship and said that even the most avid freedom of speech advocate
>> would change his mind if he sees doctored pictures of his daughter's head on a naked body posted on the Internet.
The man had bad experiences before -- who can blame him.
I have been watching Linux boot up screens for years -- and its never usefull for anything, except when you are having trouble setting up the machine. I have setup one Ubuntu machine on a 37" display, and a quiet "Ubuntu" while the machine loads so that we can start presentations is very nice. There is no need to scare anyone with complicated language ; these machines are run by non-tech staff who don't need to know whether the DHCP address was succesfully obtained, the RAID array mounted etc.
;-) (1) Full display (2) Some display (aka Dapper) (3) No display of messages (eg. like efty)
But for the sake of configurability, they should have 3 options
Ubuntu is going in the right way for me , eg. non-tech users feel comfortable with its easy interface and colours, and things that just work, and tech users (aka me) who can install & configure a new machine with minimal efford.
>> Ubuntu doesn't work under any version of Virtual PC.
Neither did Windows run under DR-DOS, it gave same horrible made up error to stop you from using non-microsoft OS software.
Why should it be any different this time around?
On the bright side, Ubuntu runs fine under VMWare, and even Windows XP runs nicely under VMware under Ubuntu.
Having installed Edgy on a couple of computer these last few days, and upgraded a few Dapper machines, I find its artwork pretty relaxing. I didn't like the brown colors at first, but you get used to it very quickly.
Efty's new boot up logo looks much better than the old one, and I am happy that they got rid of all the boot up messages on start-up, which was just distracting crud.
Nice one -- on the computers I installed it on, it just worked and the upgrades went smootly. Your milage may vary of course.
How about some pictures? The Business Week article doesn't have any...
http://www.presslink.nl/philipssimplicity/
I tried Second Life for a bit recently, they have a Linux version and I have a new graphics card. So I'd figure I'd give it a go. Its really quite nice, some of the graphics are amazing, and I had great fun playing with the various in world scripts. It is however constraint in its usefullness at the moment.
My nags at the moment:This feels a bit like the really popular early BBS services -- they are on to something here though. Instead of chatting in yellow text on a black background at 3am, you could be sitting on a virtual campfire with your chat friends next to a beach, instead of typing smilies, you set of fireworks. If this escapes into the real world, it could possibly be a similar step as from the BBS communities to the Internet
That is already happening -- last international conference (organized by American companies in the tourism industry) I went to was held in Montreal. Easier for everyone coming from outside the US to get a visa....
New Scientist is a good one, I second the economist as a teatime reader. Their Tech/Science articles are in touch with reality, and a lot of their articles end up being quoted on Slashdot weeks later.
Now this would be a nice toy for my own daughters (says father, who wouldn't mind taking this thing apart). Too bad they don't take orders below one million pieces.
Considering the low specs of this thing how about releasing the distribution and libraries that will run on this? It should be trivial to build a VM that allows you to play with developing software to run in this kind of environment.
To ensure that this project doesn't flop right from the start -- I presume that they would like people to develop some software for it.... (visions of US$ 100 doorstops all over Asia)
The Spanish Inquisition teaming up with RIAA , you get the best quality repression of both the new and old world in a match made in heaven!
Or maybe it will still end in utter embarrasment and ridicule for Spain as in a Monty Pythonesque fashion RIAA officers storm unsuspecting households shouting "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" and start probing them with stuffed cushions.
Interesting to see how it went in Taiwan which is a little further down the line. Entry into the top universities was for decades highly competative (and still is for the top places). You had to cram yourself to death to enter. The top schools are public , and government funded. (The top one, TaiDa, is about half way down the world top-200)
However, as the main industrial tycoons were reaching retirement age a decade ago or so, they wanted to do something about their legacy. So many private universities opened dedicated to these people's father's and mothers. Brand new facilities and pretty well endowned. At the same time the government invested money in upgrading the existing technical college's to full university status. Teachers were required to obtain PhD's to retain their positions.
So suddenly there is a glut of universities -- obviously there is also plenty of complaints about lower standards. But it is now possible for each student who has the intention and will to actually enter university. This is also brings another benefit -- with a college degree further studies abroad are hard. With a university degree from any of these schools its usually not too hard to enter into an American, Australian, Canadian or UK post-graduate programme. One result of this is a large number of world-travelled bilingual English/Chinese speakers, many of whom work for the endless trading companies in Taiwan.
Considering how many efforts any Chinese family will put into educating their next generation -- I am pretty sure things will go similary in China.
The 3COM problem is an annoying one -- especially as my 3COM card used to work under Hoary out of the box.
2 5&highlight=3com+dapper
/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist, and now the prism54 driver gets loaded correctly on boot, with eth1 being brought up automatically. As it used to under Hoary, Breezy, and earlier versions of Dapper.
Relevant discussion is:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1560
[EDIT] It's still not fixed. I decided to add the islsm_pci driver to
The fix is to blacklist the islsm_pci driver which is loaded before the prism54 driver and assumes it can handle the 3COM card when it actually is unable to do so. This done -- the 3COM card works like before.
Since Windows Live is an online service, why not discontinue e-mail service in universities for students completely? After all, its a lot of work, money (hardware, support, licenses) and infrastructure for a very transient population.
;-)
The school for itself should downgrade its e-mail servers to a simpler setup for just staff and researchers. This is probably more for legal reasons (eg. need to keep backup copies of important communications) than for security (eg. press forward to "@gmail.com" and its gone)
Just let students fill in their own e-mail account, or ask them to create one at hotmail, yahoo, google or their own preference on enrollment; just force them to click on an "this account really works" e-mail on enrollment. Make it a requirement that students have a working e-mail account. And of course they can make a new one just for the "university" part of their life.
You mentioned:
* Student can keep using the account after graduation (+1)
* Students have no need to learn "Another Stupid Broken E-mail client" TM because the university requires this
* University has less need for its own infrastructure (+2)
* No need to login / authenticate against university servers when outside the campus (security +1)
Issues:
* Less Privacy ? But then , the university itself is now less likely to "peak" at your e-mails (+2)
* Make sure you get your free e-mail in Russia if you are paranoid about US government snooping
And I am sure that the university can get a good deal for a Google Mail hosted students.standford.edu account or something
I worked an internship at a computer lab in the UK during the '90 where we had PhD students trying to get voice compression to the next stage. As I recall a lot of that was based on American military voice compression research.
Now the key point was trying to achieve "real-time" compression -- seeing a P90 taking 3-4 times real-time was seen as pretty good already.
Around the same time of course MP3 compression was also just getting off the ground, and the reference source code was more or less spread around freely (though not in a free license) and MP3 compression was certainly not realtime in that day and age.
I think you are looking at the wrong kind of trains -- the Japanese have lots of commuter trains connecting smaller cities, and literally millions of miles of track, don't think Tokyo, think outback.
These trains are actually more like busses, they have maybe 2-4 cars and run infrequencly, so electrifying these tracks doesn't make much economic sense; or is just downright ugly and expensive to maintain. They are mostly diesel powered (with the engines located below the passenger compartments, there is no seperate loc).
For these, replacing a noisy diesel engine with much quieter electrical ones makes very good sense.
Since this code goes back a long time, what exactly was/is Windows using WMF's for ? If this code is around since before 1992 ; then a computer environment in those days would be a couple of computers networked to a company server, and a printer server. No or little e-mail, WWW etc.
* Inside Word documents
Put an official looking document on a company network server, user opens the document and code is executed on his/her terminal. Nice for installing spy tools & keyloggers, even if the user rabitly protects his/her computer.
* Printer drivers ?
WMF's are for print job preparation, did any every get executed inside a network server before handing it off to the laser printer? Probably not? since windows printer drivers on the clients do most of the formatting/raster work. Would be nice if you could get a Windows NT server to execute your code by just printing a file on the network, completely wiping out any security.
Just some thoughts without ANY fact checking.
> So I buy a book as a gift, and give it away, but I get to keep the online copy?
> Cool for me, rats for the author.
So what? What are the changes you keep going back to a book you already finished anyway? You should give away books after you finish them,.. somebody else might enjoy it.
If the service allows you to go back it actually good for the auther -- he/she has another opportunity to convince you buy that next episode of the series.
I cleaned up my book collection the other day -- nearly all of them I have read about once and then they started gathering dust. Nearly all books out there are read at most once , if they are that lucky. Plenty of books I started to read only to decide half way through that it wasn't worth my time (though that happens most with library books where I tend to pick and choose books beyond my usual favorites )
Ahh, but its a win win situation where the copyright holder (who was innocently assuming that they held the right to copy, surely they worked tirelessly and spend endless bribes in effords to nail it down for so many years) wasn't informed in advance that Google started ripping their print collection.
And that is why they are so pissed off.
They are probably actually not too afraid of Google starting to "leak" information,.. they go to some length to safeguard their procedures.
But how about the 13,000 websites that follow them doing the same thing? With Google's precedent, they can follow and start scanning to their hearts desire. They are sure to follow, funded by some entrepreneurial investors who will quickly fill the niches that Google deems unworthy for now.
One of them goes bust or gets hacked, and suddenly you have black market DVD's with every single SF novel published since 1950 appearing from China... (oh the horror!) Once the information bird is free from its cage it will fly.
Which brings me back to my earlier point of a copyright free zone, Google could get its sites certified and licenced to warehouse copyrighted knowlegde following proper safeguards to avoid such "radioactive" leaks.
Either that, or give up on copyright completely.
Let us hope that they lose this one big time. It seems Google already has plenty of safeguards in place.
Sure, with the convuleted interest ridden mess the copyright system is the Writer Guild might actually win this.
Because, why would Google be allowed to copy all these books to their hard disks, and then make a mint from advertising by showing peeks of it to searchers.
They sure aren't paying anyone for the priviledge.
In university they have pretty big posters against wholesale copying of library books above the photocopiers, with all the usual heavy handed copyright warnings.
It seems technology, is as per usual, ahead of the law. Google would have to establish some kind of copyright free zone (bit like a tax free export zone) where they can safely process search actions on this huge Alexandria library.
Better beat around some congress critters to support this as the potential benefit to mankind ( access to all written knowlegde current and past, no matter how insightful or inane) would probably be worthy of "World Wonder" status, and give the society that has it a serious scientific advantage.
I thought of it only last week, of course, I didn't patent it. Bugger. So pick my brain for prior art.
But I figured that I could more rapidly, and non-destructively scan my dead-wood collection of books if I could use the USB Cam attached to my computer. Much faster than a flatbed scanner.
You would need an algorithm that ensures that you can scan the whole page as you hold the camera, stitching the parts together, and ignoring things outside the page area. Then feed the result into an OCR routine to get a text version.
Most (nearly) books are high contrast, black on white (or yellowish depending on book age) so the page boundaries shouldn't be too hard to detect.
Now make a nice little programme to wrap this in, and you can "quickly" convert your favorite books into a format that can be read on a PDA, most of which will never be realised in any usefull digital form anyway.
Plan B was just to use a digital camera to fotograph each page, and then feed the memory card into the OCR algorithm. Probably a lot easier.
This seems to be an idea along very similar lines; I predict that we reach the pre-MP3 stage for books very soon now (when it took 10+ minutes to encode a single CD track on a P90) Camera's are everywhere, and you can probably download a half-decent (for European scripts) OCR library for the hard work.
I sincerely hope so, as I would like my dead-wood to be as accessible as my music collection. (and to be honest, the dead wood is just gathering dust, wheras on my PDA i might actually get to re-read them in the train)
Now back to reality....
Anyone who still has the illusion that the Dutch have any better record, or are any less incompetent than other nations in handling things like child protection should read this article in this mornings Volkskrant newspaper on all the mistakes made in a murder-suspect case.
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http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/1126760833908
Just to translate the first paragraph:
It can't become any lonelier for a boy of 11. Your girlfriend has been murdered, the police doesn't believe you, and think you are responsible. The inspector assigned to assist him becomes a hard-cop interagator. The child phychologist there to protect him secrectly tapes "confidential" conversations and passes them on to the police.
A first child phychologist supports the boys story , but is then ignored and replaced by another who then continues to support the police in their interogations for days on end -- for crying out loud, the kid is 11.
Even when the police had already already arrested another suspect for the murder, the statements don't match the police "picture" of what happened and the boy is continuedly pressured to modify his story.
And does this system come with an auto-destruct build in? In case of invasion for example. So nice to have Scape-Goat Catagory A come out in handy alphabatized lists.
Maybe not likely at the moment, but the one of the things people gave their lives trying to do following the German invasion of the Netherlands was to make sure as many public records were destroyed, all paperbased then, but still very usefull for tracking down "unwanted" elements for deportation.
Far fetched? It happened before for crying out loud. Doesn't have be an invasion, a change of government for the worse would be enough. Oh, sure, we are in an enlightned "post" war society these days. Crap.
Safeguards mean nothing on a system where a government is able to give it self unlimited access at any time in the future.
Wouldn't it be nice to filter out each potential future muslim extremist, and assign a stasi member for regular check ups? Sure, they can already do that, but its probably not as easy yet.
Thing is, this process is unstopable, as of course its the next thing todo, and hey, its good for the children themselves.
We already do the same thing with cows. Might as well give children one of those big yellow plastic ID tags in their ears for easy tracking between farms/schools.
I suggest we do away with names altogether; just numbers for each person. No names, sex, religion or any other easily filtered information is to be stored. Be very suspicious when someone is saying "you are more than a number to us"
Ok, enough paranoia, some tea is in order.
Most people I know & work with get these calls, and of course its usually elderly who fall for these scams. The kidnap story scares the hell out of anyone who gets it.
Most cash machines have warning stickers against these kind of practices. Its all psychology of course, it works wonderfully with fear & greed.
Massive thefts of private information (banks have lost all credit card info through employee heft) make it possible to "personalise" these stories. (Its sounds damned real if they have your bank account number)
Volume is about 3-4 calls per person per week, so with 23 million mobile phones you'd figure somebody would notice these calls.