It's obvious that the current intellectual properly system in North America is fundamentally flawed. It was a good idea, at one point in time, when the length of the term was it's original 19 (or was it 17?) years.
I hear there's some small island nations without very many laws that welcome all kinds of questionable software developers.. =)
It takes so much money, often US$500,000 in legal fees, to defend an infringement case that the Free Software developer will have to settle within days of the start of a trial.
I send 10% of all donations to my SourceForge project straight to the EFF. If a few more developers pulled their head out of their asses and did the same, maybe we wouldn't have to be such pushovers.
On a side note, sourceforge now owes me $25 in donations they're hoarding. What the hell? $5 donations make it through fine, the day of. $20 and $10 donations just.. dissapear!? I'm hoping this is temporary..
There are a number of open/free projects that make it a priority to not step on anyone's patents (for example, gdlib dropping gif support a few versions ago) and other restrictions (such as most crypto software that's developed offshore). My point was that you should look to people that have already tried to do something similar to what you have done, and work from there.
And if a patent is later granted for something you wrote, what you wrote is prior art, and the patent is invalidated.
Most software are built on existing code, and the only way programmers can avoid patent infringements is by paying for a patent search, which is an expensive and lengthy process.
Hello? Ever heard of Open Source or Free Software? Both offer vast ammounts of patent-free code for budding programmers to build upon..
Oh, you had meant COMMERCIAL, closed source software developers? If you're planning on making money with your product, you always have to spend some money first.. that's how capitalism works.
If this was extended to also search pages in your history ("What was that really good site about fixing roof leaks I found 2 days ago?") it would be even handier. I don't always have the foresight to bookmark every useful page I stumble upon, but I have my history set to go back 2 weeks (I really don't care if someone sees what sites I've been to, I'm not ashamed:)
At least in Canada, most marking is not done by profs themselves, but by their TAs. Said TAs don't really give a rat's ass about the guy who's paper they're marking.
One time in first year, I had written a calculus test and thought I did fairly well on it. I was shocked to find I received only 60% when the marks came out. I showed up on test review day, and my test was mysteriously nowhere to be found.. they told me to e-mail my prof. A few days later, the prof finally tracked down my test and called me in for a remark. The TA marking had simply given me 60% on each of the 4 questions.. no actual marking went on. Maybe he thought nobody would notice, maybe for some people they'd be happy with 60% and let it go.. I ended up with 85% after the remark, but the whole experience left me rather jaded about how easy it is to get cheated by markers who just don't care.
To make matters worse, most English teachers are female, and at least in the classes I took there was a definite skew toward books that are torture for normal teenage males (eg. Emma).
I made the mistake of taking English 1A01 (Long Genres) in my first year of university. My prof was a black feminist. She's come in 15 minutes late every other day with her hair all over the place blaming her shower.. anyway. Some of the books she had us read were PAINFUL.
The most pain of the lot, was by far, Pride and Prejudice. I don't care about the lives of upper middle class women in the late 19th century. I just don't. I never made it past page 40, saw the movie instead and wrote my essay off that.
On the flipside of the coin, was a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God (by Zora Neale Hurston). It was about, of all things, the life story of a poor(ish) american black girl. And you know what? I enjoyed in thoroughly. The characters were far, far easier to relate to then the pompous, snobby, upper class white women of P&P. There was actually a plot (more involved then the mad desire to get married of P&P), things actually happened.
So.. even though I still hate that prof for subjecting me to the horrors of P&P, I also have to like her for broadening my horizons with a very interesting novel that I would never have picked up on my own... it's all about balance.
I have these rechargeable AA NiMH batteries that claim 2.1AH @ 1.2V. I just know they last FOREVER.. I get about 3x the rated playtime on my cd player with them. I think 2 of these, maybe one on each side of the shirt for balance, would provide more then sufficient power for an evening out.
If that isn't enough, I've seen rechargeable C cells come in up to 4.5AH, and rechargeable D cells are available up to 9AH (check eBay).
That's exactly the problem. The US gov't is going to keep enacting laws to make things illegal, and to make it easier and easier for them to come after "terrorists" until EVERYONE is a criminal. Scary (and getting scarier by the day) but relevant quote follows.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
Personally I think he will just decide to walk once he hits $1000000.
Ken has himself said (on the 23rd show I think it was; where a the lady got ~$1800 taken away retrospectivelly for saying 'Olympics' instead of 'Summer Olympics' and didn't end up with enough $$ to challenge him) that his goal is to be invited to become a writer for Jeopardy. All Jeopardy writers are previous contestants (according to Trebek).
I publish my content (see sig) for the sheer joy of watching the numbers on my statistics page slowly go up every day when I wake up. I have a job, and I don't expect to see any money from my music for a long time to come (looking into getting the gear together for live performances), if ever.
It seriously makes my day to learn that even 30 people listened to my songs yesterday, and 10 of them decided they were good enough to download an MP3! Watching your chart ranking is damn fun as well..
(vvvv So click the damn link already, and get listening vvvvv)
Does anybody realize just how hard it is to make people change their browser or OS?
Huh? I find it's really easy to make people switch.. the conversation goes something like this:
Them: "Why is my computer running so slow? And Why do I have all these popups when I'm not doing anything?" Me: "Your system is infected with malware.. I will clean it" [an hour or so passes as Spybot and Adaware do their thing, and I do my thing with Toolbarcop] Them: "How do I keep this from happening again?" Me: "Internet Explorer is not secure. If you use it, this WILL happen again, and there is nothing you can do about it. Oh, and Russian Hackers will steal your passwords and credit cards. The only thing you can do is switch browsers to this new one called Firefox." Them: "What does it look like? Does it have a googlebar? Will my popup blocker still work?" Me: "Looks pretty much the same as IE, except Favorites are called Bookmarks." Them: "Bookmarks! I remember those from Netscape" Me: "You'll feel right at home then. Google search and pop-up blocker are built into the browser" Them: "Sign me up!" [I set IE to high security, add windowsupdate to trusted sites, and install Firefox making it default browser. Remove all IE icons, put Firefox icons in their place.]
I've converted 5 people in the last week.
I have 1 suggestions for the firefox people: Bundle (or at least provide an installation page that opens when you first run the browser with links to install) Flash, Shockwave, and Java.. With those 3 things installed, there is no reason to open IE again.
Internet Explorer's BHOs are like Firefox's Extensions. The idea is a good one.. allow third party programs to add features to the browser (Google Bar anyone? it's a BHO!)
In Microsoft's case, the problem is the interfaces into the BHO system. Firefox has a nice pretty Extensions manager, and asks you to confirm the installation of every extension. Internet Explorer has.. registry keys! The most wonderful invention ever. Things can install themselves in there silently using any other exploit in the browser or operating system.
I read it as "You can have the data, but not until we've removed anything you may be remotely interested in".
Relevant quote from article: Ashcroft's policy lets officials withhold information on any "sound legal basis." Under looser policies issued in 1993, agencies could hold back information to prevent "foreseeable harm."
They certainly get moved around a hell of a lot more than physical addresses.
We have a confused AC.
IPs don't get "moved around" a hell of a lot. They change hands often, yes, but think of these as new tenants moving in. The IP addresses themselves almost always stay with the provider it was assigned to, which then rents them out to websites. No "moving" of IPs is taking place..
The key difference here is that everyone knows you by your phone number, and nobody knows your website by it's IP address. Does anyone visit http://66.35.250.151/ ? (Other then maybe a few folks with too much time on their hands). Moving a webhost is already pretty transparent.. when dns updates propagate, your same hostname works again.
In this sense, your hostname is a phone number, not your IP.
Interesting paralell.. lets fix it up, and it'll be usable.
IP is not a phone number. It's an address. Such as "123 Baker St, State, Country". IPv4 can be thought of as being of the form Country.State.Street.Number (except with numbers from 1-255 for each field).
IRL, Hostname is like a name in a guide to the city, like "Joe's pizzaria", that you want to get to. On the net, it's a website like "www.yahoo.com" that you want to get to.
IRL, a DNS server would be an addressbook. It tells you Joe's pizzaria is at 123 Baker St. If Joe's pizzaria moves, the addressbook can be updated, and can tell subsequent users that Joe's pizzaria is at 456 Main St. Likewise, it will tell you that "www.yahoo.com" is at 15.234.43.23
With the above descriptions, even the n00bs can feel smart, and think they understand the whole interweb thing..:)
ISOBuster is my software of choice, for when you just need to access the CDROM directly (under Windows). I haven't yet come across a copy protection it hasn't "defeated".
I can confirm this from hits to my personal webserver (to be fair, my traffic has increased a lot in the last year, to around 10k uniques daily of mostly Windows users):
August 2003:
343010 81.93% Microsoft Internet Exploder 31331 7.48% Mozilla 3529 0.84% Opera
June 2004 (so far):
603687 74.77% Microsoft Internet Exploder 87947 10.89% Mozilla 5855 0.73% Opera
IE is -definitely- loosing marketshare. Note that the above stats are skewed, lots of people use Mozilla that's set to identify as IE.
This is moderated Funny, but I'd give it Insightful..
I don't know a single person who uses YahooIM.. almost everyone I know uses MSN (for it's nice webcam support, built-in games, etc..), with a few old-timers holding onto the ICQ accounts they've had since 1997.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious that the current intellectual properly system in North America is fundamentally flawed. It was a good idea, at one point in time, when the length of the term was it's original 19 (or was it 17?) years.
I hear there's some small island nations without very many laws that welcome all kinds of questionable software developers.. =)
It takes so much money, often US$500,000 in legal fees, to defend an infringement case that the Free Software developer will have to settle within days of the start of a trial.
I send 10% of all donations to my SourceForge project straight to the EFF. If a few more developers pulled their head out of their asses and did the same, maybe we wouldn't have to be such pushovers.
On a side note, sourceforge now owes me $25 in donations they're hoarding. What the hell? $5 donations make it through fine, the day of. $20 and $10 donations just.. dissapear!? I'm hoping this is temporary..
There are a number of open/free projects that make it a priority to not step on anyone's patents (for example, gdlib dropping gif support a few versions ago) and other restrictions (such as most crypto software that's developed offshore). My point was that you should look to people that have already tried to do something similar to what you have done, and work from there.
And if a patent is later granted for something you wrote, what you wrote is prior art, and the patent is invalidated.
IE5.5 is no longer a supported browser... you can't even download it anymore. You can bet it's full of unpatched holes.
486s are not for Windows, they're for running Linux.. which has more then it's share of lightweight browsers.
Most software are built on existing code, and the only way programmers can avoid patent infringements is by paying for a patent search, which is an expensive and lengthy process.
Hello? Ever heard of Open Source or Free Software? Both offer vast ammounts of patent-free code for budding programmers to build upon..
Oh, you had meant COMMERCIAL, closed source software developers? If you're planning on making money with your product, you always have to spend some money first.. that's how capitalism works.
If this was extended to also search pages in your history ("What was that really good site about fixing roof leaks I found 2 days ago?") it would be even handier. I don't always have the foresight to bookmark every useful page I stumble upon, but I have my history set to go back 2 weeks (I really don't care if someone sees what sites I've been to, I'm not ashamed :)
At least in Canada, most marking is not done by profs themselves, but by their TAs. Said TAs don't really give a rat's ass about the guy who's paper they're marking.
One time in first year, I had written a calculus test and thought I did fairly well on it. I was shocked to find I received only 60% when the marks came out. I showed up on test review day, and my test was mysteriously nowhere to be found.. they told me to e-mail my prof. A few days later, the prof finally tracked down my test and called me in for a remark. The TA marking had simply given me 60% on each of the 4 questions.. no actual marking went on. Maybe he thought nobody would notice, maybe for some people they'd be happy with 60% and let it go.. I ended up with 85% after the remark, but the whole experience left me rather jaded about how easy it is to get cheated by markers who just don't care.
To make matters worse, most English teachers are female, and at least in the classes I took there was a definite skew toward books that are torture for normal teenage males (eg. Emma).
I made the mistake of taking English 1A01 (Long Genres) in my first year of university. My prof was a black feminist. She's come in 15 minutes late every other day with her hair all over the place blaming her shower.. anyway. Some of the books she had us read were PAINFUL.
The most pain of the lot, was by far, Pride and Prejudice. I don't care about the lives of upper middle class women in the late 19th century. I just don't. I never made it past page 40, saw the movie instead and wrote my essay off that.
On the flipside of the coin, was a book called Their Eyes Were Watching God (by Zora Neale Hurston). It was about, of all things, the life story of a poor(ish) american black girl. And you know what? I enjoyed in thoroughly. The characters were far, far easier to relate to then the pompous, snobby, upper class white women of P&P. There was actually a plot (more involved then the mad desire to get married of P&P), things actually happened.
So.. even though I still hate that prof for subjecting me to the horrors of P&P, I also have to like her for broadening my horizons with a very interesting novel that I would never have picked up on my own... it's all about balance.
I have these rechargeable AA NiMH batteries that claim 2.1AH @ 1.2V. I just know they last FOREVER .. I get about 3x the rated playtime on my cd player with them. I think 2 of these, maybe one on each side of the shirt for balance, would provide more then sufficient power for an evening out.
If that isn't enough, I've seen rechargeable C cells come in up to 4.5AH, and rechargeable D cells are available up to 9AH (check eBay).
That's exactly the problem. The US gov't is going to keep enacting laws to make things illegal, and to make it easier and easier for them to come after "terrorists" until EVERYONE is a criminal. Scary (and getting scarier by the day) but relevant quote follows.
Personally I think he will just decide to walk once he hits $1000000.
Ken has himself said (on the 23rd show I think it was; where a the lady got ~$1800 taken away retrospectivelly for saying 'Olympics' instead of 'Summer Olympics' and didn't end up with enough $$ to challenge him) that his goal is to be invited to become a writer for Jeopardy. All Jeopardy writers are previous contestants (according to Trebek).
Why will they publish?
I publish my content (see sig) for the sheer joy of watching the numbers on my statistics page slowly go up every day when I wake up. I have a job, and I don't expect to see any money from my music for a long time to come (looking into getting the gear together for live performances), if ever.
It seriously makes my day to learn that even 30 people listened to my songs yesterday, and 10 of them decided they were good enough to download an MP3! Watching your chart ranking is damn fun as well..
(vvvv So click the damn link already, and get listening vvvvv)
How did this get modded so high?
Everyone knows what a GIF is, and they view them every day on their favorite websites, if they like it or not..
Almost nobody knows, and even less cares, about LZW.
If you're going to write an article on the topic.. which would you focus on?
Fortunately, the Gutenberg press came along and changed all that about 500 years ago..
Now the internet is promising to do the same, and for more then just bibles..
techincally the equivalent to stealing Bibles
NO, it's "technically" the equivillant to setting up your own printing press, manufacturing bibles, and giving them away.
Stealing is when you deprive someone of something they had. They had it.. you stole it, now you have it, and they don't.
Does anybody realize just how hard it is to make people change their browser or OS?
Huh? I find it's really easy to make people switch.. the conversation goes something like this:
Them: "Why is my computer running so slow? And Why do I have all these popups when I'm not doing anything?"
Me: "Your system is infected with malware.. I will clean it"
[an hour or so passes as Spybot and Adaware do their thing, and I do my thing with Toolbarcop]
Them: "How do I keep this from happening again?"
Me: "Internet Explorer is not secure. If you use it, this WILL happen again, and there is nothing you can do about it. Oh, and Russian Hackers will steal your passwords and credit cards. The only thing you can do is switch browsers to this new one called Firefox."
Them: "What does it look like? Does it have a googlebar? Will my popup blocker still work?"
Me: "Looks pretty much the same as IE, except Favorites are called Bookmarks."
Them: "Bookmarks! I remember those from Netscape"
Me: "You'll feel right at home then. Google search and pop-up blocker are built into the browser"
Them: "Sign me up!"
[I set IE to high security, add windowsupdate to trusted sites, and install Firefox making it default browser. Remove all IE icons, put Firefox icons in their place.]
I've converted 5 people in the last week.
I have 1 suggestions for the firefox people: Bundle (or at least provide an installation page that opens when you first run the browser with links to install) Flash, Shockwave, and Java.. With those 3 things installed, there is no reason to open IE again.
Internet Explorer's BHOs are like Firefox's Extensions. The idea is a good one.. allow third party programs to add features to the browser (Google Bar anyone? it's a BHO!)
.. registry keys! The most wonderful invention ever. Things can install themselves in there silently using any other exploit in the browser or operating system.
In Microsoft's case, the problem is the interfaces into the BHO system. Firefox has a nice pretty Extensions manager, and asks you to confirm the installation of every extension. Internet Explorer has
I read it as "You can have the data, but not until we've removed anything you may be remotely interested in".
Relevant quote from article: Ashcroft's policy lets officials withhold information on any "sound legal basis." Under looser policies issued in 1993, agencies could hold back information to prevent "foreseeable harm."
They certainly get moved around a hell of a lot more than physical addresses.
We have a confused AC.
IPs don't get "moved around" a hell of a lot. They change hands often, yes, but think of these as new tenants moving in. The IP addresses themselves almost always stay with the provider it was assigned to, which then rents them out to websites. No "moving" of IPs is taking place..
The key difference here is that everyone knows you by your phone number, and nobody knows your website by it's IP address. Does anyone visit http://66.35.250.151/ ? (Other then maybe a few folks with too much time on their hands). Moving a webhost is already pretty transparent.. when dns updates propagate, your same hostname works again.
In this sense, your hostname is a phone number, not your IP.
Interesting paralell.. lets fix it up, and it'll be usable.
:)
IP is not a phone number. It's an address. Such as "123 Baker St, State, Country". IPv4 can be thought of as being of the form Country.State.Street.Number (except with numbers from 1-255 for each field).
IRL, Hostname is like a name in a guide to the city, like "Joe's pizzaria", that you want to get to. On the net, it's a website like "www.yahoo.com" that you want to get to.
IRL, a DNS server would be an addressbook. It tells you Joe's pizzaria is at 123 Baker St. If Joe's pizzaria moves, the addressbook can be updated, and can tell subsequent users that Joe's pizzaria is at 456 Main St. Likewise, it will tell you that "www.yahoo.com" is at 15.234.43.23
With the above descriptions, even the n00bs can feel smart, and think they understand the whole interweb thing..
Main Entry: trivial
Function: adjective
1 : COMMONPLACE, ORDINARY
Definitely not fixed, I just saw it.
/. is set as your homepage, and you fire up a fresh browser.
Only seems to happen if
ISOBuster is my software of choice, for when you just need to access the CDROM directly (under Windows). I haven't yet come across a copy protection it hasn't "defeated".
August 2003:June 2004 (so far):IE is -definitely- loosing marketshare. Note that the above stats are skewed, lots of people use Mozilla that's set to identify as IE.
This is moderated Funny, but I'd give it Insightful..
I don't know a single person who uses YahooIM.. almost everyone I know uses MSN (for it's nice webcam support, built-in games, etc..), with a few old-timers holding onto the ICQ accounts they've had since 1997.