Or, if you want to optimize a whole directory of PNGs
from the command line,
you can use the open source
pngcrush.
I have used it a lot, so I can vouch that it works.
The last link has a lot of pictures, and I feel sorry for that person if
it is true, but it is strange that the actual skin lesions these fiber
clusters came from are never shown, only the "stuff" that was
supposedly pulled out of them. But the "Treatment Recommendations"
on p. 5 certainly
sounds like a testimonial/marketing brochure for "Taurox".
Taurox has been evaluated by homeopathic experts and
is registered with the FDA.
Homeopathic experts?!?
Call Sharon now and use the following Code Number
and because we are people "greatly in need," you get an
additional 15% discount off of the price.
Right, and who gets a cut from this "Code Number"? Note
that the person was already "80% better" (from standard antibiotic
treatments) before the miracle of Taurox entered the picture, apparently
providing that last 20% boost for the "fatigue" that remained after
the mainstream treatment.
And the very odd thing is that the Morgellons Research Foundation
site has no mention of Taurox at all.
Read about my late 90's
experience with SourceSafe (posted in 2002), before and
after MS bought the company. I don't know how good it
is now, but once burned, twice shy...
After learning about this fruit and its many documented benefits, I
bought into the company [goxan.net] that brought it to the market in the
US.
At first I thought you might have bought some of their stock, but
now I see that you got sucked into their MLM scheme: "This site belongs
to Robert & Kinin Taylor, Xango Independent Distributor." (goxan.net)
I think they make a valid point with fetus killing. How do you
determine exactly when a fetus has life? It is not an easy question to
answer.
The exact point is probably subject to endless debate, but how about the
following as a precisely defined, objective lower limit. Before the
first neuron fires, a fetus is just a collection of cells with only the
potential for becoming a person; it is no more a "sentient human being"
than a hair on my head (which in principle could be cloned and therefore
also has the potential for becoming a person). Certainly there can be
no consciousness before that point.
Sure it has the ability to grow, but so does a piece of my skin in
a Petri dish.
Ah, Radia Perlman. I remember her at MIT in the 70s. She was nuts.
She sold a self-published book (made from Xerox copies of a computer
printout, folded in the middle and stapled) with a table of all the
Roman numerals from 1 to 1000 or something, sorted in alphabetical
order, to make them easier to look up. Another chapter had the numbers
from 1 to 1000 spelled out in English and also sorted in alphabetical
order. I guess I was nuts too, because I actually bought a copy which I
probably still have around somewhere. I wonder if it is worth anything
- is there a "nerd" section on eBay?
LaTeX is now capable of handling UTF-8 input, which means a variety of
scripts can be typeset in the same document with little problem.
There's no reason to use older encodings like ISO-8859-1.
Perhaps that's OK if you're the only one who's going to edit the
document and you stick to one editor and platform, but the problem is
that the "rest of the world" inconsistently implements Unicode
(without even getting into the horrible default handling of advanced
math Unicode characters in Internet Explorer, that with FireFox work
fine...).
I use a variety of text editors on different platforms, from vi to
ones you've probably never heard of. One of the big advantages of LaTeX
is that I can edit a document on any of them. As soon as you start
sending me text files with UTF-8 (or UTF-16) characters, I can never be
sure if what I see on the screen is the correct character (if it
displays at all, instead of being a gray box), and even if it is, I
typically have no idea how to type it it (what 3-key combinatation of
alt/ctrl/whatever does this particular editor expect?). In fact even in
ISO-8859-1 I don't like the upper 128 because I never remember how to
type them in. 7-bit ASCII is, simply, universal and will never be
obsolete. (And even that suffers from 3 different cr/lf standards, so
I can't edit a Unix text document in Notepad without converting it, but
at least that's manageable.)
About the only thing from copyright law I agree with is the moral
rights, specifically the ability to be exclusively known as the creator
of a work. Passing someone elses ideas off as your own, should still be
prevented.
I disagree. Legislating morality is almost always a bad idea.
If you're going to repeal copyright law, you might as well go all the way.
Any work can be effectively "certified" as original simply by making
it public so that, say, archive.org will provide a confirmation of its
origin. Or even posting to it slashdot will provide a date stamp.:)
As for plagiarism, few can get away with it very long. It's easy
enough to prove using the method above, and no one's reputation will
hold up for very long when their claimed original work can easily be
determined not to be so with a search engine. As a trivial example,
look at how the occasional plagiarizers (of unacknowledged wikipedia
snippets, others' "insightful" posts passed off as their own, etc.) on slashdot are
quickly exposed and modded down.
First, not all states even have trade secret laws - it's not a federal
law. So what if the leaker or blogger was in one of those states?
Personally, I think such laws are absurd, and so do some states - what
amounts to NDA violation shouldn't be a crime but a civil matter. No matter what, an NDA violation shouldn't trump freedom of speech
of someone who didn't sign the NDA, whether "journalist" or not. Like
the criminalizing of copyright violation, these relatively recent laws were put
into place by big business lobbying interests and don't necessarily
benefit the public at large nor represent what the public at large
wants. The government shouldn't be involved in enforcing NDA
violations, which are essentially contract violations, as criminal
offenses.
The whole point of the concept of a trade secret is that it's up to
the company to exercise due diligence to prevent the secret from
escaping. The more people the company exposes the secret to, the bigger
the risk they take, NDAs or not, and they have to judge who they can
trust and the cost/benefit ratio of additional disclosure of the secret.
That's just part of life. Once it has escaped, it is no longer a
secret, and nothing can reverse that.
...sources are only protected in the event that it serves a greater public interest...
If publishing these trade secrets assists
Apple's competitors, that can only increase overall
competition, which ultimately will result in lower prices for the
public. Apple may not benefit, but the public will.
Beware, the method shown at Colossalstorage is essentially
crank science. It would provide instantaneous communication
(faster than the speed of light); although there is a sense in which
quantum correlations are "connected" instantaneously, it has been
mathematically proven that you cannot use them to transmit
information. The fact that these patents were even issued essentially
demonstrates the incompetence of the patent office and nothing
else. Since they won't allow patents of perpetual motion
machines, I'm surprised they let this one get through. (Or maybe
I'm not surprised.)
If you look at the "published papers" on the
Colossalstorage site, all of them are essentially press releases or
unreferreed presentations at conferences, etc. I don't see one single
peer-reviewed publication in a respectable scientific journal.
A far better reference to provide to the grandparent (who
is also mistaken, in a different way) is simply the
wikipedia entry.
I have my browser home page (in both Mozilla and IE) set to a web page
on my server that no one else knows about. Unsophisticated thieves,
when they get home or to their fence's place, will probably try it out
to make sure it works, before reinstalling the OS or whatever (if
they're even that competent). One of the first things they'll typically
do is fire up the browser. Then their IP is captured in my server's web
log.
I'm not saying this is the only precaution one should take, or that
it's guaranteed to work. But it's easy to do and increases the
likelihood that some evidence will be captured. It depends on the
stupidity of the thief, and those kinds of people often just aren't that
smart.
As for the venetian blinds, I had a corner office, and the sun was a
problem at certain times of day for seeing your terminal. So I usually
had the blinds down unless I wanted to sit back and look out the window
while mulling over new ideas or the lady who sunbathed on a nearby roof.
But
this
is what it is really like after people leave his
office. He turns down the lights and pushes a button to bring up his
tri-monitor master control center for the company, imagining himself at
the helm (ok, he is at the helm I guess) while making notes in
his captain's log.
Once he's done with that fantasy (er, sorry, reality),
I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff he can watch on those big
screens, to keep him busy. He probably has no need to look out
the real windows. I mean what's going to be out there - the parking lot?
Yeah, yeah, I made a mistake. Off by a factor of 8.
OK, let's severely compress those MP3's down to tinny sounding 500K each,
so we can still make the 640K infringements per sec to keep
the RIAA happy.
That's what they would do to compute their "lost revenue", right?
No, no, no... It's $37,500,000 per second. ($125,000 per infringement)
Remember that the MPAA thinks in dollars.
No, no, you're still not thinking like the **AAs. At 4MB each, we have
640000 MP3s per second. At $125,000 each, that's $80,000,000,000 per
second, or about 1.6 Bill Gates per second
(who was overheard to say that we'll never, ever need anything faster, since
"640K infringements per second ought to
be enough for anybody").
"I don't think we've gained anything from the.biz or.info domains -
only that a few companies have benefited financially"
Oh, man. My
boss got sucked up in the hype around that and had me (over my
objections) enter the lotteries, sometimes several times through
different domain name services, for a dozen variations on our
company name, plus a bunch of other words somewhat related, for both.info and.biz. All of the ones that we won he has now let lapse.
Thousands of dollars spent for nothing.
The only thing I got out of it was my email address on every
domain-name spam list in existence.
Repeated several times for each domain name I applied for.
Big mistake not to use a temporary address for that.
The lesson here is that you probably shouldn't use
"Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike" for anything,
because "commercial" is often not a clearly defined concept,
and it's up to the whim of a court to decide that.
For example, suppose you use it on a personal web page.
In exchange for a free web page from an ISP, you agree to
put up with Google ads on the page. Certainly, if the
page becomes popular because of the "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike"
work, the provider will benefit financially via increased ad
exposure. So is this
commercial or noncommercial?
There are other problems. You cannot put a
"Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike" work, e.g. an icon for your app,
in open-source software under GPL, BSD, etc.,
since it would defeat the whole purpose of those licences.
Imagine if Linux were under "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike" -
then it would have barely developed to become a
hobbyist toy for a few hackers, if even that.
For this reason, I personally steer clear of anything with a "noncommercial"
restriction, treating it as if it were covered by standard
copyright. It's just not worth the risk.
Have they told HOW all those poor people are buying $150K-$300K houses?
From the GP:
Over three-quarters of a million "poor" persons own homes worth over
$150,000; and nearly 200,000 "poor" persons own homes worth over
$300,000.
Note that of 36.5 million "poor", these are 2% and 0.5% respectively.
They don't use percentages (like in the other
factoids) because it doesn't sound as impressive,
and this is a nice example of how what numbers you choose to display
can convey a misleading impression without actually lying.
These are exceptional cases, probably people who just weren't
working the year of the survey, and thus met the income
criterion, but really aren't that "poor" (yet).
In any case that still leaves 98% who aren't in these categories.
Actually, I take that back. IBM certainly had
possibilities for the true nerd of that time. In the mid-70's I had the opportunity to
buy a used IBM business computer - I think the model
number was 700-something, perhaps 702 (if my memory is correct) -
that used vacuum tubes! It was offered to me for
$600 by a salvage dealer. That is the honest-to-god truth. I was
actually seriously considering it for a while, but the thought
of the impact it would
have had on my electric bill eventually made me decide not to.
Instead, I bought from the same dealer
32K of core memory from MIT's 1958 TX-1 computer
that used transistors, for around $200, contained in 4 huge racks with 8K each,
each with its own voltage meter to monitor the supply voltage.
I had complete documentation and everything, and
my idea was that I would build my own computer around it.
(It was never finished though, and eventually I had to pay a scrap
dealer to haul them away.)
Nobody over 30 spent their allowance at age 15 on anything AMD, junior! Try "Commodore", "Apple", or maybe "IBM".
Wrong. "Commodore", "Apple", or maybe "IBM" was for the
great unwashed masses. A real nerd would have built
a custom computer out of AMD2900 bit slices (circa 1975).
If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.
So you think the FDA would allow Pfizer to sell drugs without full
disclosure of their ingredients?
I don't think so.
You know how Amazon is putting "CONTENT PROTECTED" in big letters above
DRM'ed CDs? Now I'm no marketing genius, but I'd bet this designation
cuts into the sales of such CDs. (I for one would never buy such a CD.)
In this case, a DRM-free CD is a definite selling point, at least for
me. An amusing experiment would be for Amazon to offer DRM'ed and
DRM-free versions of the same CD at the same price, or even a premium
for the DRM-free version, and see which sells the most.
Currently there is no "CONTENT PROTECTED" designation on iTunes,
since all content is protected by default. But I hope that eventually
artists, presumably independent ones at first, will start to release
DRM-free works on iTunes. When a critical mass is reached, this could
become an important selling point, encouraging other artists/companies
to do the same. I believe people will still buy the works because of
the low price, convenience, and guaranteed quality. Most of their
DRM-protected songs are available on P2P for anyone who puts in the
effort, yet iTunes is still successful. DRM has nothing to do with it,
other than possibly making it less successful than it could be. For
example, I am not a customer because of their DRM but would be for
DRM-free works. As people become more savvy, and as more choices are
offered (initially by independent artists), I think more people will
become like me.
All I hope is that Congress stays out of it and lets the
free market do its thing.
...so you can read books you've purchased on your PC as well as on the Reader, but apparently you can only "share" your copy of the book with up to six other devices.
I assume that means a DRM management program will be automatically installed
on your PC (probably before you even agree to the EULA) as soon as
you plug it in, maybe phoning home as part of the enforcement
process. Will the program try to intercept downloads of
of non-DRM'ed books? Given Sony's track record for such things, I would be
very hesitant to plug this thing into my PC. I wouldn't put it beneath them
to block even public-domain Project Gutenberg classics if Sony also
happens to offer an e-book version.
(As an off-topic aside,
why is it that p.d. works in
paperback always seem carry a copyright of some recent year?
Perhaps the custom-written preface is copyrighted, but the misleading
suggestion is that the entire work is. Does such sleaziness
really serve a purpose for the publisher, other than to give people like me a
negative opinion of them?)
-- we asked whether a Mac version of the BBeB-reading software would be released but no word on that either.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, if you want to optimize a whole directory of PNGs from the command line, you can use the open source pngcrush. I have used it a lot, so I can vouch that it works.
Taurox has been evaluated by homeopathic experts and is registered with the FDA.
Homeopathic experts?!?
Call Sharon now and use the following Code Number and because we are people "greatly in need," you get an additional 15% discount off of the price.
Right, and who gets a cut from this "Code Number"? Note that the person was already "80% better" (from standard antibiotic treatments) before the miracle of Taurox entered the picture, apparently providing that last 20% boost for the "fatigue" that remained after the mainstream treatment.
And the very odd thing is that the Morgellons Research Foundation site has no mention of Taurox at all.
Read about my late 90's experience with SourceSafe (posted in 2002), before and after MS bought the company. I don't know how good it is now, but once burned, twice shy...
After learning about this fruit and its many documented benefits, I bought into the company [goxan.net] that brought it to the market in the US.
At first I thought you might have bought some of their stock, but now I see that you got sucked into their MLM scheme: "This site belongs to Robert & Kinin Taylor, Xango Independent Distributor." (goxan.net)
The exact point is probably subject to endless debate, but how about the following as a precisely defined, objective lower limit. Before the first neuron fires, a fetus is just a collection of cells with only the potential for becoming a person; it is no more a "sentient human being" than a hair on my head (which in principle could be cloned and therefore also has the potential for becoming a person). Certainly there can be no consciousness before that point. Sure it has the ability to grow, but so does a piece of my skin in a Petri dish.
Hi, Radia.
Perhaps that's OK if you're the only one who's going to edit the document and you stick to one editor and platform, but the problem is that the "rest of the world" inconsistently implements Unicode (without even getting into the horrible default handling of advanced math Unicode characters in Internet Explorer, that with FireFox work fine...).
I use a variety of text editors on different platforms, from vi to ones you've probably never heard of. One of the big advantages of LaTeX is that I can edit a document on any of them. As soon as you start sending me text files with UTF-8 (or UTF-16) characters, I can never be sure if what I see on the screen is the correct character (if it displays at all, instead of being a gray box), and even if it is, I typically have no idea how to type it it (what 3-key combinatation of alt/ctrl/whatever does this particular editor expect?). In fact even in ISO-8859-1 I don't like the upper 128 because I never remember how to type them in. 7-bit ASCII is, simply, universal and will never be obsolete. (And even that suffers from 3 different cr/lf standards, so I can't edit a Unix text document in Notepad without converting it, but at least that's manageable.)
I disagree. Legislating morality is almost always a bad idea. If you're going to repeal copyright law, you might as well go all the way.
Any work can be effectively "certified" as original simply by making it public so that, say, archive.org will provide a confirmation of its origin. Or even posting to it slashdot will provide a date stamp. :)
As for plagiarism, few can get away with it very long. It's easy enough to prove using the method above, and no one's reputation will hold up for very long when their claimed original work can easily be determined not to be so with a search engine. As a trivial example, look at how the occasional plagiarizers (of unacknowledged wikipedia snippets, others' "insightful" posts passed off as their own, etc.) on slashdot are quickly exposed and modded down.
The whole point of the concept of a trade secret is that it's up to the company to exercise due diligence to prevent the secret from escaping. The more people the company exposes the secret to, the bigger the risk they take, NDAs or not, and they have to judge who they can trust and the cost/benefit ratio of additional disclosure of the secret. That's just part of life. Once it has escaped, it is no longer a secret, and nothing can reverse that.
If publishing these trade secrets assists Apple's competitors, that can only increase overall competition, which ultimately will result in lower prices for the public. Apple may not benefit, but the public will.
If you look at the "published papers" on the Colossalstorage site, all of them are essentially press releases or unreferreed presentations at conferences, etc. I don't see one single peer-reviewed publication in a respectable scientific journal.
A far better reference to provide to the grandparent (who is also mistaken, in a different way) is simply the wikipedia entry.
I'm not saying this is the only precaution one should take, or that it's guaranteed to work. But it's easy to do and increases the likelihood that some evidence will be captured. It depends on the stupidity of the thief, and those kinds of people often just aren't that smart.
But this is what it is really like after people leave his office. He turns down the lights and pushes a button to bring up his tri-monitor master control center for the company, imagining himself at the helm (ok, he is at the helm I guess) while making notes in his captain's log.
Once he's done with that fantasy (er, sorry, reality), I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff he can watch on those big screens, to keep him busy. He probably has no need to look out the real windows. I mean what's going to be out there - the parking lot?
Yeah, yeah, I made a mistake. Off by a factor of 8. OK, let's severely compress those MP3's down to tinny sounding 500K each, so we can still make the 640K infringements per sec to keep the RIAA happy. That's what they would do to compute their "lost revenue", right?
No, no, you're still not thinking like the **AAs. At 4MB each, we have 640000 MP3s per second. At $125,000 each, that's $80,000,000,000 per second, or about 1.6 Bill Gates per second (who was overheard to say that we'll never, ever need anything faster, since "640K infringements per second ought to be enough for anybody").
Oh, man. My boss got sucked up in the hype around that and had me (over my objections) enter the lotteries, sometimes several times through different domain name services, for a dozen variations on our company name, plus a bunch of other words somewhat related, for both .info and .biz. All of the ones that we won he has now let lapse.
Thousands of dollars spent for nothing.
The only thing I got out of it was my email address on every domain-name spam list in existence. Repeated several times for each domain name I applied for. Big mistake not to use a temporary address for that.
For example, suppose you use it on a personal web page. In exchange for a free web page from an ISP, you agree to put up with Google ads on the page. Certainly, if the page becomes popular because of the "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike" work, the provider will benefit financially via increased ad exposure. So is this commercial or noncommercial?
There are other problems. You cannot put a "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike" work, e.g. an icon for your app, in open-source software under GPL, BSD, etc., since it would defeat the whole purpose of those licences. Imagine if Linux were under "Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike" - then it would have barely developed to become a hobbyist toy for a few hackers, if even that.
For this reason, I personally steer clear of anything with a "noncommercial" restriction, treating it as if it were covered by standard copyright. It's just not worth the risk.
From the GP:
Over three-quarters of a million "poor" persons own homes worth over $150,000; and nearly 200,000 "poor" persons own homes worth over $300,000.
Note that of 36.5 million "poor", these are 2% and 0.5% respectively. They don't use percentages (like in the other factoids) because it doesn't sound as impressive, and this is a nice example of how what numbers you choose to display can convey a misleading impression without actually lying. These are exceptional cases, probably people who just weren't working the year of the survey, and thus met the income criterion, but really aren't that "poor" (yet). In any case that still leaves 98% who aren't in these categories.
Actually, I take that back. IBM certainly had possibilities for the true nerd of that time. In the mid-70's I had the opportunity to buy a used IBM business computer - I think the model number was 700-something, perhaps 702 (if my memory is correct) - that used vacuum tubes! It was offered to me for $600 by a salvage dealer. That is the honest-to-god truth. I was actually seriously considering it for a while, but the thought of the impact it would have had on my electric bill eventually made me decide not to. Instead, I bought from the same dealer 32K of core memory from MIT's 1958 TX-1 computer that used transistors, for around $200, contained in 4 huge racks with 8K each, each with its own voltage meter to monitor the supply voltage. I had complete documentation and everything, and my idea was that I would build my own computer around it. (It was never finished though, and eventually I had to pay a scrap dealer to haul them away.)
Wrong. "Commodore", "Apple", or maybe "IBM" was for the great unwashed masses. A real nerd would have built a custom computer out of AMD2900 bit slices (circa 1975).
Uh, dude, my (admittedly overweight) house-cat eats more meat than me. And I'm no vegetarian (nor an El Salvadorean (IIRC)).
So you think the FDA would allow Pfizer to sell drugs without full disclosure of their ingredients? I don't think so.
You mean, exciting AJAXified unhyperlinkability!!
Currently there is no "CONTENT PROTECTED" designation on iTunes, since all content is protected by default. But I hope that eventually artists, presumably independent ones at first, will start to release DRM-free works on iTunes. When a critical mass is reached, this could become an important selling point, encouraging other artists/companies to do the same. I believe people will still buy the works because of the low price, convenience, and guaranteed quality. Most of their DRM-protected songs are available on P2P for anyone who puts in the effort, yet iTunes is still successful. DRM has nothing to do with it, other than possibly making it less successful than it could be. For example, I am not a customer because of their DRM but would be for DRM-free works. As people become more savvy, and as more choices are offered (initially by independent artists), I think more people will become like me.
All I hope is that Congress stays out of it and lets the free market do its thing.
I assume that means a DRM management program will be automatically installed on your PC (probably before you even agree to the EULA) as soon as you plug it in, maybe phoning home as part of the enforcement process. Will the program try to intercept downloads of of non-DRM'ed books? Given Sony's track record for such things, I would be very hesitant to plug this thing into my PC. I wouldn't put it beneath them to block even public-domain Project Gutenberg classics if Sony also happens to offer an e-book version.
(As an off-topic aside, why is it that p.d. works in paperback always seem carry a copyright of some recent year? Perhaps the custom-written preface is copyrighted, but the misleading suggestion is that the entire work is. Does such sleaziness really serve a purpose for the publisher, other than to give people like me a negative opinion of them?)
-- we asked whether a Mac version of the BBeB-reading software would be released but no word on that either.
Linux? Don't even bother to ask, I guess.
And they wonder why e-books don't sell.