I'm the sort of person who likes to take up a ridiculously large amount of road space, but the problem is that there are too many other people like me! What should I do?
Answer: Traffic is not a problem if you don't drive. Ride a bike, walk, or catch public transport. If you live in a place where this is difficult, move somewhere where it isn't.
The corporate form is a legal entity that has been created by government. Companies don't exist "in the wild" - they exist because the government decided that it was a good idea to create a legal entity that made it easier for people to come together and create productive enterprises.
Companies are in no position to complain about government regulation as they exist solely at the mercy of the government.
Your fears are unfounded. For a start, how many "little people" successfully sue "big companies" under the current US system of tort law? Pretty much none, huh? Big companies are already practically untouchable by ordinary folks - a "loser pays" system doesn't change this one way or another.
Look at countries that have a loser pays system (Australia is one). Ask yourself which system works better.
This is pretty harsh, because not everybody will have access to an XHTML 1.0 compliant browser. The browser in my cell phone sure aint XHTML 1.0.
But I agree with the requirement for CSS2 compliance, because a browser that ignores all CSS is, according to the CSS specifications, CSS compliant. Your CSS requirement only rules out the poor CSS implementations, not older browsers that do nothing with CSS.
It describes how to break a Bayesian filter by finding out which random words match a particular person's ham. This is done by sending thousands of messages to an individual, with each message containing a different set of random words. If a message gets through the filter, it reports back to the sender using HTML, and so the sender can therefore compile a set of words that will be guaranteed to get past a particular person's Bayesian filter.
The HTML email you get in newsletters and from clueless friends will almost certainly not be Content-type:text/html. It will be Content-type:multipart/alternative.
I have found it completely safe to filter on Content-type:text/html. In addition, any Content-type:multipart/alternative messages that do not have a text/plain section are guaranteed to be spam. Just using these two filters can cut your spam by about half.
Currently a lot of spam (at least the stuff I'm seeing) is HTML only (no plaintext multipart alternative)
True, and it's a good thing to filter on. I block anything with a Content-type of text/html, as well as anything with a Content-type of multipart/alternative if it doesn't have a text/plain section.
Japanese-English dictionaries are all designed for Japanese people, as they massively outnumber English speakers trying to learn Japanese. As such, the dictionaries assume that you know kanji. This is problem number 1.
So, you type in an English word, and you mostly get kanji in return. Some of the Canon wordtank models give you a list of search "hits" in hiragana/katakana, but then once you choose your hit, it takes you to the word definition page, and you're all in kanji again.
But, most models have a "jump" feature, that lets you select some kanji, and then "jump" to the hiragana reading, or even to an English definition. It's kinda circular, and not very convenient, but you can manage to get from English to Japanese this way.
As for entering hiragana, most Japanese people use romaji, even for typing Japanese.
It's not theft, it's unauthorised copying, and in the vast majority of cases nobody actually loses anything because of it. The only possible loss is the potential loss of a sale, but what proportion of illegal copying is done for content that the copier would never have bought anyway? I know in my case that proportion is close to 100%.
You have just described the theory of network effects, which states that the more people that use a product, the more valuable that product becomes to those that use it.
Every new Linux user makes Linux more valuable to all the other Linux users, and Windows less valuable to all the Windows users. Eventually you reach a tipping point where the extra value of Linux is sufficient to offset the cost of switching from Windows, and then voila! - everybody switches almost at once.
Most text editors don't show you how your text looks with the images, for example, or how the layout will look.
And this is something that no one browser or WYSIJOPR* editor can show you either.
That's because the layout of the page is ultimately controlled by the user's browser, and in most cases you do not know what that is, or how it is configured. If you think that you, as the author, can exert absolute control over the look of a web page, then you are wrong.
As such, the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor simply doesn't make sense as it is quite irrelevant what You Get - the important thing is what your users get, and that will always differ. In fact, that's the point.
Due to induced traffic, this is not true. The amount of traffic represents the equilibrium point between people's desire to live further "away", and their desire to get places quickly. If you increase the amount and width of roads, people will satisfy their desire to live further "away" (ie, they will travel further), and the level of traffic will quickly rise to the level of the previous equilibrium.
Building roads therefore does not ease traffic in the medium term. It increases travel distances, thereby further entrenching car travel as the only practical means of transport.
A more sensible solution is to recognise that the level of traffic cannot be reduced, and that a higher level of traffic has certain advantages - it can encourage greater population densities, and the healthier lifestyles that these encourage (walking, cycling, and greater social interaction).
I know a couple of ex-junkies who also smoke cigarettes. They both claim that quitting heroin was far easier than quitting nicotine. One even used to use heroin to help with his nicotine cravings when trying to quit smoking.
The report "addresses" this criticism. From the report:
The most criticised element of copyright extension is that existing
copyright owners will benefit from an additional 20 years copyright
protection for works that already exist. The argument goes that term
extension is designed to encourage the creation of new works, and that
providing the extension to existing works is incompatible with copyright's
incentive rational. The consequence will be a transfer from consumers t o
copyright owners. While this is often considered to be a very significant
cost, such considerations tend to forget that the commercial value of most
copyright works decreases significantly with time. As a result, we estimate
the transfer to existing rights holders to be in the vicinity of $8 million in
the 5 th year after extension, $16 million in the 10 th year after extension,
$28 million in the 15 th year after extension, and $43 million in the 20 th year
after extension. Of course, these values will be significantly lower if brought
into Net Present Value (NPV) terms.
IOW, it's only a relatively small theft from the public domain, so don't worry about it.
I receive 250 spams per day, but that is rising at an alarming rate. Soon it will be 1,000 per day, and then 10,000 per day. If I don't check my email for a few days my inbox at my ISP overflows, and I miss regular correspondence.
So, the occasional door-to-door salesman or telemarketing call is far easier to deal with. If they were lining up outside my door, or if the phone never stopped ringing, then I would agree with you.
I sometimes ride a skateboard to work - a distance of 5 km, and flat all the way. It is more work than cycling, and similar to walking, but much faster. My 5 km trip takes about 22 minutes, and the roads I skate on are not particularly smooth.
If you are a coordinated/athletic person you should be able to learn "pumping", which is a skating technique that allows you to propel yourself without pushing with one foot. If the road is smooth it's even possible to propel yourself up slight hills, although this is seriously hard work.
Ideally you will want a longboard rather than the sort of skateboard you see every day. But don't go too long! A long longboard is good for going fast, but is harder to pump at slower speeds. The best "commuting" board would be something similar to a GS board - around 25 " wheelbase, and with large (~70 mm) and soft (~78a) wheels. Check out NCDSA for more info.
Skating is a seriously fun method of transport, although not nearly as practical as a bicycle.
Regular bus commuters might be familar with the phenomenon where buses tend to come in groups - often in threes. For example, instead of 1 bus every 10 minutes you get 3 every 30 minutes.
Why? My theory is that as the system becomes crowded, a bus will be delayed by having to pick up and drop off extra passengers. As it gets slower, two things happen:
People have to wait longer at the bus stops. This causes the first bus to have to deal with a greater number of passengers, and makes the bus slow down even more.
The bus behind it starts to catch up. This occurs partly due to the slower speed of the first bus, but is amplified by the fact that as the second bus gets closer, there will be less passengers waiting at the stops, thus allowing the second bus to travel even faster.
The solution would be for the first bus to deliberately miss stops wherever possible so as to keep some distance between it and the next bus, and to even up the passenger load.
Just because somebody understands the concepts behind a filing cabinet does not mean that they can apply those concepts to a computer. Analogies simply don't work for some people. They can't transfer their understanding of something in one realm (filing cabinets) to another realm (a file system on a hard disk inside a computer).
This is probably due to a refusal to accept the appropriateness of the analogy - "A filing cabinet is NOT a computer", and "Pieces of paper on a desk are NOT the same as anything that appears on a computer". You and I might think the analogy fits perfectly, but a lot of people probably think that you are comparing donuts with nuclear power stations.
...but the biggest hold back is that unless you are a medium level linux user you CANNOT install software without a fight.
Amen.
I'm a new Linux user, and installing software is pissing me off. Here's how I spent a few hours last night:
Decided I wanted to install giFT. The sourceforge page has only tar files, no rpms (I run Red Hat). So I download and do the./configure, make, make install dance. That doesn't bother me too much.
Then I need to get a frontend for giFT. I decide on Apollon. Hey, it's got an rpm, so I download that. Oh, but when I install it it doesn't seem to know about giFT, probably because the giFT install wasn't also rpm. So I download and install the tar file for Apollon, and install it. But damn, it won't run because it's missing some library or other.
OK, I'm impatient, so I forget about Apollon, and decide to install another giFT frontend. Again, library problems. So I try another frontend. This time it's problems due to some environment variable not being right. I try a third frontend, and again it fails for some reason or other.
Of course I try and figure out whether I've actually got the suppoosedly missing library, and if not where to download it from, but neither of those questions have obvious answers to me, and it all gets too hard quite quickly.
Damn damn damn! I'm just trying to install some software here! On Windows I could be 99% sure that after downloading something I could have it up and running within 2 minutes.
Admittedly I'm much better at solving problems in Windows than problems in Linux due to a decade of using Windows, but you just don't get that many installation problems in Windows.
So people here rave about apt-get. Will it really solve my problems? Will it have all the software that I want to install?
I would suggest that if you want to increase the chances of "possible answer #2" being accepted, you should share more than just copyrighted music. Sharing every file on your PC (if you run all free software) would be a great way to indicate that you have no INTENT to distribute copyrighted music. Alternatively, get a bunch of freely copyable music (mp3.com?) and share that along with the copyrighted tunes.
But when you knowingly place copyrighted music into a public forum via the internet, that's the same as you using your own casette recorder to make copies and giving them away.
No it's not. The downloaders are the ones making the copies. They use your PC to do so.
The original article claims that it is the uploader who does the copying because the uploader is responsible for what their computer does, but I can't see how this differs from my being responsible for what my CD-burner does if I let you use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Translated:
Answer: Traffic is not a problem if you don't drive. Ride a bike, walk, or catch public transport. If you live in a place where this is difficult, move somewhere where it isn't.
The corporate form is a legal entity that has been created by government. Companies don't exist "in the wild" - they exist because the government decided that it was a good idea to create a legal entity that made it easier for people to come together and create productive enterprises.
Companies are in no position to complain about government regulation as they exist solely at the mercy of the government.
I like to pick up where I left off, so my start page is the set of tabs I was viewing when I last shut down the browser.
Using the Multizilla extension in Mozilla.
Your fears are unfounded. For a start, how many "little people" successfully sue "big companies" under the current US system of tort law? Pretty much none, huh? Big companies are already practically untouchable by ordinary folks - a "loser pays" system doesn't change this one way or another.
Look at countries that have a loser pays system (Australia is one). Ask yourself which system works better.
This is pretty harsh, because not everybody will have access to an XHTML 1.0 compliant browser. The browser in my cell phone sure aint XHTML 1.0.
But I agree with the requirement for CSS2 compliance, because a browser that ignores all CSS is, according to the CSS specifications, CSS compliant. Your CSS requirement only rules out the poor CSS implementations, not older browsers that do nothing with CSS.
There's literally millions of web sites out there. Find one with a colour scheme you like, view the source, and copy the colours!
You didn't read the article did you?
It describes how to break a Bayesian filter by finding out which random words match a particular person's ham. This is done by sending thousands of messages to an individual, with each message containing a different set of random words. If a message gets through the filter, it reports back to the sender using HTML, and so the sender can therefore compile a set of words that will be guaranteed to get past a particular person's Bayesian filter.
The HTML email you get in newsletters and from clueless friends will almost certainly not be Content-type:text/html. It will be Content-type:multipart/alternative.
I have found it completely safe to filter on Content-type:text/html. In addition, any Content-type:multipart/alternative messages that do not have a text/plain section are guaranteed to be spam. Just using these two filters can cut your spam by about half.
Currently a lot of spam (at least the stuff I'm seeing) is HTML only (no plaintext multipart alternative)
True, and it's a good thing to filter on. I block anything with a Content-type of text/html, as well as anything with a Content-type of multipart/alternative if it doesn't have a text/plain section.
That's a significant proportion of spam.
Japanese-English dictionaries are all designed for Japanese people, as they massively outnumber English speakers trying to learn Japanese. As such, the dictionaries assume that you know kanji. This is problem number 1.
So, you type in an English word, and you mostly get kanji in return. Some of the Canon wordtank models give you a list of search "hits" in hiragana/katakana, but then once you choose your hit, it takes you to the word definition page, and you're all in kanji again.
But, most models have a "jump" feature, that lets you select some kanji, and then "jump" to the hiragana reading, or even to an English definition. It's kinda circular, and not very convenient, but you can manage to get from English to Japanese this way.
As for entering hiragana, most Japanese people use romaji, even for typing Japanese.
It's not theft, it's unauthorised copying, and in the vast majority of cases nobody actually loses anything because of it. The only possible loss is the potential loss of a sale, but what proportion of illegal copying is done for content that the copier would never have bought anyway? I know in my case that proportion is close to 100%.
Umm, mplayer plays dvds just fine out of the box, and noone I know has had a problem with it if they just read the docs first.
Well, you just ruled out 95% of the population right there.
Blaming such users for being ignorant or stupid is missing the point - if you don't provide for these users they will go elsewhere.
You have just described the theory of network effects, which states that the more people that use a product, the more valuable that product becomes to those that use it.
Every new Linux user makes Linux more valuable to all the other Linux users, and Windows less valuable to all the Windows users. Eventually you reach a tipping point where the extra value of Linux is sufficient to offset the cost of switching from Windows, and then voila! - everybody switches almost at once.
Same applies for Open Office vs. MS Office.
Most text editors don't show you how your text looks with the images, for example, or how the layout will look.
And this is something that no one browser or WYSIJOPR* editor can show you either.
That's because the layout of the page is ultimately controlled by the user's browser, and in most cases you do not know what that is, or how it is configured. If you think that you, as the author, can exert absolute control over the look of a web page, then you are wrong.
As such, the idea of a WYSIWYG HTML editor simply doesn't make sense as it is quite irrelevant what You Get - the important thing is what your users get, and that will always differ. In fact, that's the point.
* What You See Is Just One Possible Rendering
An abundance of traffic is a scarcity of roads.
Due to induced traffic, this is not true. The amount of traffic represents the equilibrium point between people's desire to live further "away", and their desire to get places quickly. If you increase the amount and width of roads, people will satisfy their desire to live further "away" (ie, they will travel further), and the level of traffic will quickly rise to the level of the previous equilibrium.
Building roads therefore does not ease traffic in the medium term. It increases travel distances, thereby further entrenching car travel as the only practical means of transport.
A more sensible solution is to recognise that the level of traffic cannot be reduced, and that a higher level of traffic has certain advantages - it can encourage greater population densities, and the healthier lifestyles that these encourage (walking, cycling, and greater social interaction).
I know a couple of ex-junkies who also smoke cigarettes. They both claim that quitting heroin was far easier than quitting nicotine. One even used to use heroin to help with his nicotine cravings when trying to quit smoking.
The report "addresses" this criticism. From the report:
IOW, it's only a relatively small theft from the public domain, so don't worry about it.
It's all about volume.
I receive 250 spams per day, but that is rising at an alarming rate. Soon it will be 1,000 per day, and then 10,000 per day. If I don't check my email for a few days my inbox at my ISP overflows, and I miss regular correspondence.
So, the occasional door-to-door salesman or telemarketing call is far easier to deal with. If they were lining up outside my door, or if the phone never stopped ringing, then I would agree with you.
I sometimes ride a skateboard to work - a distance of 5 km, and flat all the way. It is more work than cycling, and similar to walking, but much faster. My 5 km trip takes about 22 minutes, and the roads I skate on are not particularly smooth.
If you are a coordinated/athletic person you should be able to learn "pumping", which is a skating technique that allows you to propel yourself without pushing with one foot. If the road is smooth it's even possible to propel yourself up slight hills, although this is seriously hard work.
Ideally you will want a longboard rather than the sort of skateboard you see every day. But don't go too long! A long longboard is good for going fast, but is harder to pump at slower speeds. The best "commuting" board would be something similar to a GS board - around 25 " wheelbase, and with large (~70 mm) and soft (~78a) wheels. Check out NCDSA for more info.
Skating is a seriously fun method of transport, although not nearly as practical as a bicycle.
Regular bus commuters might be familar with the phenomenon where buses tend to come in groups - often in threes. For example, instead of 1 bus every 10 minutes you get 3 every 30 minutes.
Why? My theory is that as the system becomes crowded, a bus will be delayed by having to pick up and drop off extra passengers. As it gets slower, two things happen:
People have to wait longer at the bus stops. This causes the first bus to have to deal with a greater number of passengers, and makes the bus slow down even more.
The bus behind it starts to catch up. This occurs partly due to the slower speed of the first bus, but is amplified by the fact that as the second bus gets closer, there will be less passengers waiting at the stops, thus allowing the second bus to travel even faster.
The solution would be for the first bus to deliberately miss stops wherever possible so as to keep some distance between it and the next bus, and to even up the passenger load.
Just because somebody understands the concepts behind a filing cabinet does not mean that they can apply those concepts to a computer. Analogies simply don't work for some people. They can't transfer their understanding of something in one realm (filing cabinets) to another realm (a file system on a hard disk inside a computer).
This is probably due to a refusal to accept the appropriateness of the analogy - "A filing cabinet is NOT a computer", and "Pieces of paper on a desk are NOT the same as anything that appears on a computer". You and I might think the analogy fits perfectly, but a lot of people probably think that you are comparing donuts with nuclear power stations.
Amen.
I'm a new Linux user, and installing software is pissing me off. Here's how I spent a few hours last night:
Decided I wanted to install giFT. The sourceforge page has only tar files, no rpms (I run Red Hat). So I download and do the ./configure, make, make install dance. That doesn't bother me too much.
Then I need to get a frontend for giFT. I decide on Apollon. Hey, it's got an rpm, so I download that. Oh, but when I install it it doesn't seem to know about giFT, probably because the giFT install wasn't also rpm. So I download and install the tar file for Apollon, and install it. But damn, it won't run because it's missing some library or other.
OK, I'm impatient, so I forget about Apollon, and decide to install another giFT frontend. Again, library problems. So I try another frontend. This time it's problems due to some environment variable not being right. I try a third frontend, and again it fails for some reason or other.
Of course I try and figure out whether I've actually got the suppoosedly missing library, and if not where to download it from, but neither of those questions have obvious answers to me, and it all gets too hard quite quickly.
Damn damn damn! I'm just trying to install some software here! On Windows I could be 99% sure that after downloading something I could have it up and running within 2 minutes.
Admittedly I'm much better at solving problems in Windows than problems in Linux due to a decade of using Windows, but you just don't get that many installation problems in Windows.
So people here rave about apt-get. Will it really solve my problems? Will it have all the software that I want to install?
Thanks for this clear analysis.
I would suggest that if you want to increase the chances of "possible answer #2" being accepted, you should share more than just copyrighted music. Sharing every file on your PC (if you run all free software) would be a great way to indicate that you have no INTENT to distribute copyrighted music. Alternatively, get a bunch of freely copyable music (mp3.com?) and share that along with the copyrighted tunes.
But when you knowingly place copyrighted music into a public forum via the internet, that's the same as you using your own casette recorder to make copies and giving them away.
No it's not. The downloaders are the ones making the copies. They use your PC to do so.
The original article claims that it is the uploader who does the copying because the uploader is responsible for what their computer does, but I can't see how this differs from my being responsible for what my CD-burner does if I let you use it.
-- if you code XHTML, then all XHTML compliant browsers should render the same.
Isn't this what standards are all about?
No. You misunderstand the nature of XHTML, which is a semantic markup language, and does little to define how a document is rendered.
A valid XHTML document can (and should!) be rendered differently on different browsers. That is one of the central design features of XHTML.