Although Varmus appears to go out of his way to be even handed, it's clear that he has a problem suspending disbelief on a topic (virology) that is near and dear to him.
Whenever a slashdotter refers to "suspension of disbelief", usually what they really mean is "I enjoyed that movie/novel/manga, and it isn't fair of you to destroy my enjoyment by picking scientific nits." Come on, people. When you tell a story, you can't just ignore the real world. If somebody made a movie in which Julius Caesar and Daniel Boone got together to battle Nazis from the Bermuda dimension, nobody would "suspend disbelief". That fact is that a lot of science fiction relies not on "suspension of disbelief", but the credulity and ignorance of the audience or reader. I happen to think it's the main cause of the downfall of the Star Trek franchise, where most fans seem to be rather better educated than anybody who works for Paramount.
Which is not to say that movies can't ever stretch reality to fit. In point of fact, they pretty much have to, because that's the only way to fit a reasonable story into 90 to 120 minutes of narrative. I have no problem with this, as long as they don't through out the rules every time they get inconvenient. When an SF writer works that way, it's not "suspension of disbelief" it's just ignorance and/or lazyiness.
It seems to me that Vamus is at pains not to be judgmental about these issues. If you read his review without being so defensive, you'll note he title's his review: "Virus as Metaphor" and praises the movie for the social issues it tries to raise.
When Vamus points out the scientific flaws in the movie, he's not being pendantic or spoil-sporty. He's just helping to educate the public as to some serious scientific issues. A very appropriate thing for a Nobel laureate to be doing.
Things generally become "rights" when somebody tries to prevent you from having them. Have a look at the U.S. Bill of Rights. When the U.S. was founded, every one of these rights had an active anti-constituency that would have liked to take them away. (Most of them still do.) The purpose of the BoR is to prevent this.
It's hardly suprising that as former Soviet republic would latch on to information technology as a fundamental right. It's a simple reaction to Soviet policy, which even restricted access to photocopiers. Indeed, the revolution in network and media technology played a big role in bringing down the U.S.S.R. -- much bigger than anything Ronald Reagan did. It's only natural for the Estonians to seize on this technology as a safeguard against a return to totalitarianism.
Except that Yahoo no longer pretends they can make a profit just by selling advertising. They're hard-selling "premium" mail services: larger mailboxes, access to an smtp server that doesn't append tag lines, etc. Secure access would be an obvious way to generate fees. But they've never been that clueful.
I hadn't noticed that. But that convention isn't followed consistently. Of the last 10 files posted from DP, only 7 follow this convention. And I haven't seen it documented anywhere.
I shouldn't have spoken categorically about the Gutenberg people. Somebody is aware of this issue, because recent posts from DP say "Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1", which I guess is some help. My assumption of ignorance was based on the DP Proofing Guidelines, which refers to 8-bit characters as "Upper ASCII". But I guess all that means is that people tend to confuse ASCII with Latin1 -- a confusion that doesn't matter except when it does.
Since a fair amount of the important pieces of literature come from mainland Europe (actually even the British £ sign isn't in ASCII), it is clearly not up to the job and should be replaced.
As a matter of fact, the DP web interface allows you to enter the pound sterling symbol even if you don't have it on your keyboard. It also has a lot of accented characters that aren't in English. The fact is that the Gutenberg people think they're using ASCII, but are actually using Latin1. So Gutenberg texts will display correctly on any system that's localized for the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe. But not elsewhere.
You made a similar mistake when you entered that character, since you just entered it from your keyboard. (A natural mistake if you have a British keyboard, as I assume you do.) On some web sites, this would only read correctly on systems similarly configured. However, Slashdot puts out the header:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
which should prevent that. Still, the character entity £ is more portable, and will work even when the web page doesn't specify a character set -- and most do not.
On the other hand, Slashcode sometimes mangles eight-bit characters when it archives them. So if you seek true immortality, use the character entity!
... that plain old ASCII is one constant that hasn't needed changing.
I think you're a little unclear as to what ASCII is. As the "A" in "ASCII" indicates, it's oriented towards American applications. And it consists of a mere 127 characters, which includes 32 control characters that you don't use in text.
In point of fact, Project Gutenberg has long outgrown the 96 graphic characters in ASCII, though I think they themselves are ignorant of the fact. The seem to have experimented with characters until they found a set that displays the same on "normal" Windows, Macs and Unix/Linux. The result is something they call "extended ASCII" but that's actually subset of both ISO's Latin1 character set and Microsoft's Latin1 code page.
When is this an issue? Well, I'm a DP volunteer, and I'm concentrating on the Britannica 11th edition. Lots of geographic entries, all of which contain degree symbols. This symbol is not in ASCII! If you follow the DP instructions, you end up entering byte 186 (decimal). If you're using the ISO or Microsoft Latin1 set (and if your computer is localized for the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe, you probably are) then 186 does in fact display as a degree symbol. But if your system is localized for Eastern Europe, you're probably using Latin2, and this byte stands for an S with a cedilla accent!
In short, "ASCII" is actually less universal than well-formed HTML. In which you represent the degree symbol with a character entity (°) that's the same everywhere.
Indeed, you can open up the original Declaration of Independence document with your standard web browser, and you can still read it just fine.
Hardly a representative example. The Declaration of Independence was hand-written, and thus doesn't include a lot of fancy fonts or formatting. A better example is a contemporary novel, such as 1984.
As it happens I just finished re-reading this one. I read a Plucker file that somebody had transformed from an HTML version, which in turn came from the Project Gutenberg "ASCII" version. Readable enough. But all the typographic nicities -- italics, boldface, etc. -- were reduced to ALL CAPS in the text version, and that was retained in the HTML version. Pretty distracting -- made me feel like somebody was shouting at me. Double Plus Ungood! Thoughtcrime!
...once the data is put into ASCII text format, projects like this [XML] can and are being done.
You make it sound easy. A lot of information is lost when your primary version is "ASCII". It all has to be put back by hand. There's no avoiding this for the large body of existing Gutenberg texts. And of course as recently as 5 years ago, there wasn't a real choice anyway. Even HTML had issues, and serious XML tools didn't exist.
But now XML technology is pretty mature. It makes sense to store new Gutenberg texts in XML. If people still want "ASCII" copies, the XML is easily transformed into that. Though I a lot more people will want the HTML version -- a format which is actually accessible to more people than "ASCII".
There are two reasons this won't happen soon.
The first is that somebody will have to design and implement the necessary XML apps for inputing and proofreading the texts. (Which would alsio elminate a lot of the errors proofreaders make, like entering [Greek: Tau] when they mean [Greek: T].) A huge project. As it stands, the people who maintain the DP web site have their work cut out just to keep the existing software working. That's a vali
The whole point of ASCII is that it can be accessed simply, by almost any machine.
Just because you store something in XML, doesn't mean people have to use XML to read it. The whole point of XML is to have a format that you can easily transform. Transforming in ASCII is particularly easy.
XML markup that can be easily translated into LaTeX
If it's a good content-oriented XML app, it's easily transformed into LaTeX, or anything else. If it isn't a good content-oriented XML app (the StarOffice native format comes to mind) then it shouldn't be used for an online document repository.
I think the basic problem with the Guttenberg/DP people is that they've been doing things a certain way for so long, and they don't want to retool. And I can see their point -- changing over to XML is a lot of work. And the core DP team already seems pretty busy keeping the web site going.
On the other hand, I do wish they'd make it a priority. Right now I'm a volunteer proofreader, concentrating on getting out the famous Britannica 11th edition. The amount of information that gets lost in scanning in Greek and other text with weird phonological conventions is just appalling. And the conventions for math and science formulas and equations produces a complex linear format I can't believe anyone would actually want to read.
Then again, it wouldn't be that hard to go back and insert proper markup. For 90% of the text there's a simple transform between the Gutenberg conventions and a reasonable XML format. The other 10% probably need another look anyway, and wouldn't be hard to do if they've saved the scan images. I haven't had the heart to ask if they do.
Yeah, Netscape is the standard browser at Sun, but that doesn't make it their standard mail client. Basically, they don't have one
Official standards may have changed since I worked there in 1998, but I doubt if the culture has changed. Which worked like this: we had a choice of two desktop environments Open Look and CDE. Most old Sun hands used Open Look, but IS was trying to end-of-life it, mainly because they didn't want to support mail clients that directly access the mailbox file, as all the Open Look clients do. Open Look users were fighting this change tooth-and-nail.
When I started, I was told to use the IMAP client that's built into CDE. Which was probably as close to a "standard client" as anything that was then in use. It was only after I got sick of the limitations of this program (especially its lack of directory support) that I switched to the Netscape IMAP client all on my own.
I know why. They don't think in terms of individual titles. Any given title probably has zero economic value, but if they renew the copyright of every title they published in 1962 odds are they'll make a buck or too.
It's just like the photos mentioned in that AH editorial you linked too. I don't suppose Corbis thinks it will get rich out of some old photo of tourists in Venice. But if they restrict access to all their photos odds are that one or two will turn out to be worth all the trouble.
I basically agree with you. I just wouldn't single out Mr. Bill as a special culprit here. He's just one of many entities indulging in IP hoarding.
Consider publishing, print, video, and audio. There are thousands of titles nobody can read, watch, or listen to, because they belong to media monopolies that don't find it profitable to keep them in print. You might think it reasonable for them to allow on-demand publishing, from which they'd collect a small royalty. Nah, not worth the trouble. The best they'll do is offer to sell the IP back to the person who created it, often at prohibitive rates. And if the musician or writer or director tries to distribute his or her own work, they get the same C&D order any other "pirate" gets -- for distributing their own work! Unacceptable.
My opinion is that if they want to offset the cost of billing by taking 50%, that's cool, but they should let people co-op; after all sharing and working together as a team are those old fashioned American Virtues we learned about in kindergarten...
I don't see what they can do to regulate informal sharing arrangements. If two or three families are sharing a DSL connection, and Speakeasy notices, all the prime customer has to do is claim that he's not taking any money. It wouldn't be worth the effort to prove him wrong.
On the other hand, without this clause, anybody could use his T1 connection to Speakeasy to start his own ISP, without compensating Speakeasy for the extra strain on their network. No ISP can afford to tolerate that.
Funny, they don't seem to always know where to deliver so-called first-class mail...
I suppose that was meant humorously, but there's a serious point here. It doesn't matter whether the PDF (they better find some other initials) accurately describes the person it's issued to. You can take it for granted their will be a high fraud rate -- as there already is in the domain registry records.
What's important is that the PDF is unique. Once it becomes clear that a PDF is associated with a spammer, the PDF will become useless, no matter who it claims to belong to.
Do you have any reason to believe I'm not writing this from a net cafe in a 3rd world country? (Granted, I'm not, but how do you know?)
Only a middle-class person from a major industrial company would have your prejudices. You consider one house per family in a non-gated community to be your birthright. Anything more is excess. People in the developing world don't take that for granted. And they have to live with economic disparities that make you and MADCOWbezerk look like siblings.
I'm certainly making a better effort to live a sustainable life than mister "gated community, house in the keys also" above.
Hmm. Do you own a car? A TV set? Buy fast food? How much non-reusable stuff do you buy? Do you recycle absolutely everything that you could? I know you own a computer. Even if you're trying hard to reuse and not buy stuff you don't need, a first-world life style is profoundly unsustainable. One house or two is not going to make that much difference. Driving a 500-hp SUV, on the other hand...
Hey guy, you're in no position to sneer. 90% of the folks on the planet consume less than you do. A good many of them could make a living just by going through your garbage. Face it, you're closer to this overpriviliged guy than you are to most of the human race.
I'm a Fred Astaire fan. A couple years ago, I decided I wanted a picture of him on my office wall. None of the pics or poster I could find suited. Then I discovered that various press companies were selling copies of their photos online. Found the one (can't remember which one) that owned the rights to Fred's image. Paid a small fee, agreed not to use the image commercially. Downloaded it, printed it out, stuck it up. Cool.
Now that same image belongs to Corbis. It's on their web site, but before they quote a price on an image, they make you specify what you're going to do with it. All their uses seem to be commericial. The closest I could come to my needs was to specify that I intended to put it up in the lobby of my business.
And after I go through all this, I'm told that online pricing for this image isn't available! Lame.
I try it again with an image of a person that doesn't have a greedy estate. I end up with a photo of this statue. A download will cost me $1700!
Hm, I've seen a lot of economists differ on the interpretation of data. This is no different. Lots of ISPs ban connection sharing. Lots of others don't care. (Perhaps they assume that most people who use shared connections couldn't afford their own DSL anyway. Which might true.) Before now, I've never heard of an ISP trying to turn it into a new business model. Unsuprising that Speakeasy is the first. If a less geeky ISP is the second, that would be significant.
You may be overestimating the way extra users impact an ISP. Speakeasy itself charges $20 for dialup access. Some no-frills ISPs charge half that. Now, the cheapest possible NetShare account costs $20, of which Speakeasy keeps $10. For this, they're actually doing a lot less than they have to do for a dialup customer. In particular they don't have to provide a local Point of Presence. I don't know much this costs, but it must be a pretty big fraction of an ISP's budget.
Another economic consideration. When somebody decides to become a SpeakEasy admin, they're extending SpeakEasy's customer base and taking all the economic risk of said extension. If it turns out that you can't sell enough NetShare accounts to cover the cost of your T1 connection, you're the only one that's out of pocket. SpeakEasy isn't out a penny -- in fact, they've made a few bucks on that T1.
That's something to think about before you drop $700 on a T1 router. And you should also consider the customer support that your "customers" should expect you to provide.
A more mundane example: you can make an ordinary PC in an AT-style case overheat by leaving the cover off. The fan in a conventional PC power supply doesn't supply cool air -- the PS itself is a major source of heat -- but just having the air flow properly past the components makes a lot of difference.
No, Activision just wants Viacom to fire that idiot Berman, and hire some decent writers!
Viacom probably doesn't care much about the Trek franchise any more, because it's part of that big white elephant known as UPN. Paramount started UPN because it had a theory that studios should own networks. (Same theory that made Disney buy ABC and Time-Warner start The WB.) I've always suspected that they cancelled TNG, despite high ratings, just to get out of syndication contracts that prevented them from moving the show to a network.
Now Paramount is part of Viacom, which owns CBS. They'd unload UPN if they could, and they're not going to give it much attention in the meantime. But if they could be forced to spare some attention for this tiny part of their empire known as Star Trek, they could make some changes that would bring the fans back.
Unfortunately, you're right. In trying to provide an alternative to Microsoft, the open-source community has managed to replicate a lot of Microsoft stupidity. Still, there's an important difference: with no central control of the platform, a few people manage to swim against the tide and do work that's simple, elegent, and useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is not to say that movies can't ever stretch reality to fit. In point of fact, they pretty much have to, because that's the only way to fit a reasonable story into 90 to 120 minutes of narrative. I have no problem with this, as long as they don't through out the rules every time they get inconvenient. When an SF writer works that way, it's not "suspension of disbelief" it's just ignorance and/or lazyiness.
It seems to me that Vamus is at pains not to be judgmental about these issues. If you read his review without being so defensive, you'll note he title's his review: "Virus as Metaphor" and praises the movie for the social issues it tries to raise.
When Vamus points out the scientific flaws in the movie, he's not being pendantic or spoil-sporty. He's just helping to educate the public as to some serious scientific issues. A very appropriate thing for a Nobel laureate to be doing.
It's hardly suprising that as former Soviet republic would latch on to information technology as a fundamental right. It's a simple reaction to Soviet policy, which even restricted access to photocopiers. Indeed, the revolution in network and media technology played a big role in bringing down the U.S.S.R. -- much bigger than anything Ronald Reagan did. It's only natural for the Estonians to seize on this technology as a safeguard against a return to totalitarianism.
Except that Yahoo no longer pretends they can make a profit just by selling advertising. They're hard-selling "premium" mail services: larger mailboxes, access to an smtp server that doesn't append tag lines, etc. Secure access would be an obvious way to generate fees. But they've never been that clueful.
I shouldn't have spoken categorically about the Gutenberg people. Somebody is aware of this issue, because recent posts from DP say "Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1", which I guess is some help. My assumption of ignorance was based on the DP Proofing Guidelines, which refers to 8-bit characters as "Upper ASCII". But I guess all that means is that people tend to confuse ASCII with Latin1 -- a confusion that doesn't matter except when it does.
You made a similar mistake when you entered that character, since you just entered it from your keyboard. (A natural mistake if you have a British keyboard, as I assume you do.) On some web sites, this would only read correctly on systems similarly configured. However, Slashdot puts out the header:
which should prevent that. Still, the character entity £ is more portable, and will work even when the web page doesn't specify a character set -- and most do not.On the other hand, Slashcode sometimes mangles eight-bit characters when it archives them. So if you seek true immortality, use the character entity!
I think you're a little unclear as to what ASCII is. As the "A" in "ASCII" indicates, it's oriented towards American applications. And it consists of a mere 127 characters, which includes 32 control characters that you don't use in text.
In point of fact, Project Gutenberg has long outgrown the 96 graphic characters in ASCII, though I think they themselves are ignorant of the fact. The seem to have experimented with characters until they found a set that displays the same on "normal" Windows, Macs and Unix/Linux. The result is something they call "extended ASCII" but that's actually subset of both ISO's Latin1 character set and Microsoft's Latin1 code page.
When is this an issue? Well, I'm a DP volunteer, and I'm concentrating on the Britannica 11th edition. Lots of geographic entries, all of which contain degree symbols. This symbol is not in ASCII! If you follow the DP instructions, you end up entering byte 186 (decimal). If you're using the ISO or Microsoft Latin1 set (and if your computer is localized for the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe, you probably are) then 186 does in fact display as a degree symbol. But if your system is localized for Eastern Europe, you're probably using Latin2, and this byte stands for an S with a cedilla accent!
In short, "ASCII" is actually less universal than well-formed HTML. In which you represent the degree symbol with a character entity (°) that's the same everywhere.
Hardly a representative example. The Declaration of Independence was hand-written, and thus doesn't include a lot of fancy fonts or formatting. A better example is a contemporary novel, such as 1984.
As it happens I just finished re-reading this one. I read a Plucker file that somebody had transformed from an HTML version, which in turn came from the Project Gutenberg "ASCII" version. Readable enough. But all the typographic nicities -- italics, boldface, etc. -- were reduced to ALL CAPS in the text version, and that was retained in the HTML version. Pretty distracting -- made me feel like somebody was shouting at me. Double Plus Ungood! Thoughtcrime!
You make it sound easy. A lot of information is lost when your primary version is "ASCII". It all has to be put back by hand. There's no avoiding this for the large body of existing Gutenberg texts. And of course as recently as 5 years ago, there wasn't a real choice anyway. Even HTML had issues, and serious XML tools didn't exist.
But now XML technology is pretty mature. It makes sense to store new Gutenberg texts in XML. If people still want "ASCII" copies, the XML is easily transformed into that. Though I a lot more people will want the HTML version -- a format which is actually accessible to more people than "ASCII".
There are two reasons this won't happen soon.
The first is that somebody will have to design and implement the necessary XML apps for inputing and proofreading the texts. (Which would alsio elminate a lot of the errors proofreaders make, like entering [Greek: Tau] when they mean [Greek: T].) A huge project. As it stands, the people who maintain the DP web site have their work cut out just to keep the existing software working. That's a vali
I think the basic problem with the Guttenberg/DP people is that they've been doing things a certain way for so long, and they don't want to retool. And I can see their point -- changing over to XML is a lot of work. And the core DP team already seems pretty busy keeping the web site going.
On the other hand, I do wish they'd make it a priority. Right now I'm a volunteer proofreader, concentrating on getting out the famous Britannica 11th edition. The amount of information that gets lost in scanning in Greek and other text with weird phonological conventions is just appalling. And the conventions for math and science formulas and equations produces a complex linear format I can't believe anyone would actually want to read.
Then again, it wouldn't be that hard to go back and insert proper markup. For 90% of the text there's a simple transform between the Gutenberg conventions and a reasonable XML format. The other 10% probably need another look anyway, and wouldn't be hard to do if they've saved the scan images. I haven't had the heart to ask if they do.
When was the last time you tried it? Mozilla used to have lots of speed issues, but not for a couple of years now.
Official standards may have changed since I worked there in 1998, but I doubt if the culture has changed. Which worked like this: we had a choice of two desktop environments Open Look and CDE. Most old Sun hands used Open Look, but IS was trying to end-of-life it, mainly because they didn't want to support mail clients that directly access the mailbox file, as all the Open Look clients do. Open Look users were fighting this change tooth-and-nail.
When I started, I was told to use the IMAP client that's built into CDE. Which was probably as close to a "standard client" as anything that was then in use. It was only after I got sick of the limitations of this program (especially its lack of directory support) that I switched to the Netscape IMAP client all on my own.
It's just like the photos mentioned in that AH editorial you linked too. I don't suppose Corbis thinks it will get rich out of some old photo of tourists in Venice. But if they restrict access to all their photos odds are that one or two will turn out to be worth all the trouble.
And yeah, this sucks!
Jeez. Apathy sure is a lot of work, isn't it?
Consider publishing, print, video, and audio. There are thousands of titles nobody can read, watch, or listen to, because they belong to media monopolies that don't find it profitable to keep them in print. You might think it reasonable for them to allow on-demand publishing, from which they'd collect a small royalty. Nah, not worth the trouble. The best they'll do is offer to sell the IP back to the person who created it, often at prohibitive rates. And if the musician or writer or director tries to distribute his or her own work, they get the same C&D order any other "pirate" gets -- for distributing their own work! Unacceptable.
-1 Redundant!!!!
Duhhhhhhhhhhhh!
On the other hand, without this clause, anybody could use his T1 connection to Speakeasy to start his own ISP, without compensating Speakeasy for the extra strain on their network. No ISP can afford to tolerate that.
Self-righteous assholes, on the other hand, are all too common.
What's important is that the PDF is unique. Once it becomes clear that a PDF is associated with a spammer, the PDF will become useless, no matter who it claims to belong to.
Hey guy, you're in no position to sneer. 90% of the folks on the planet consume less than you do. A good many of them could make a living just by going through your garbage. Face it, you're closer to this overpriviliged guy than you are to most of the human race.
Now that same image belongs to Corbis. It's on their web site, but before they quote a price on an image, they make you specify what you're going to do with it. All their uses seem to be commericial. The closest I could come to my needs was to specify that I intended to put it up in the lobby of my business.
And after I go through all this, I'm told that online pricing for this image isn't available! Lame.
I try it again with an image of a person that doesn't have a greedy estate. I end up with a photo of this statue. A download will cost me $1700!
This is IP hoarding of the worst kind.
You may be overestimating the way extra users impact an ISP. Speakeasy itself charges $20 for dialup access. Some no-frills ISPs charge half that. Now, the cheapest possible NetShare account costs $20, of which Speakeasy keeps $10. For this, they're actually doing a lot less than they have to do for a dialup customer. In particular they don't have to provide a local Point of Presence. I don't know much this costs, but it must be a pretty big fraction of an ISP's budget.
Another economic consideration. When somebody decides to become a SpeakEasy admin, they're extending SpeakEasy's customer base and taking all the economic risk of said extension. If it turns out that you can't sell enough NetShare accounts to cover the cost of your T1 connection, you're the only one that's out of pocket. SpeakEasy isn't out a penny -- in fact, they've made a few bucks on that T1.
That's something to think about before you drop $700 on a T1 router. And you should also consider the customer support that your "customers" should expect you to provide.
Talk about kneejerk Posts!
A more mundane example: you can make an ordinary PC in an AT-style case overheat by leaving the cover off. The fan in a conventional PC power supply doesn't supply cool air -- the PS itself is a major source of heat -- but just having the air flow properly past the components makes a lot of difference.
Viacom probably doesn't care much about the Trek franchise any more, because it's part of that big white elephant known as UPN. Paramount started UPN because it had a theory that studios should own networks. (Same theory that made Disney buy ABC and Time-Warner start The WB.) I've always suspected that they cancelled TNG, despite high ratings, just to get out of syndication contracts that prevented them from moving the show to a network.
Now Paramount is part of Viacom, which owns CBS. They'd unload UPN if they could, and they're not going to give it much attention in the meantime. But if they could be forced to spare some attention for this tiny part of their empire known as Star Trek, they could make some changes that would bring the fans back.
Unfortunately, you're right. In trying to provide an alternative to Microsoft, the open-source community has managed to replicate a lot of Microsoft stupidity. Still, there's an important difference: with no central control of the platform, a few people manage to swim against the tide and do work that's simple, elegent, and useful.