"A Game of Thrones" suffers from an excess of underdeveloped characters. I counted 10-12 major characters, plus dozens of supporting cast. Daenerys, the exiled dragon princess, seemed interesting, as did Arya, the waterdancer-in-training. However, I finished the book without really caring about any of them.
In some ways, the whole book felt like nothing more than background for plot lines that won't be developed until well into the second or third novels. For example, the very first chapter introduces the the undead ghouls who are evidently gathering to invade from the North, but they're barely mentioned for the rest of the book's 800 pages, appearing only briefly in the Jon Snow arc. Likewise, the extended story of Daenerys' marriage into the Dothraki tribes seems like wind-up for an invasion from the south by the dispossessed heir, evidently for one of the later books. Though the Daenerys plot struck me as the most interesting part of the book, it really had little or nothing to do with the main plot. With so very many characters to track, there was little time to develop a rapport with any of them.
The landscape and cultures are, for the most part, stock. One glance at the map in the front will have any mildly educated person thinking "Oh, they're England and Scotland divided by Hadrian's Wall." The Dothraki are clearly based on the Mongols, only slightly more hedonistic; whereas the culture of the Seven Kingdoms is stock High Middle Ages.
In short, the material was handled poorly, with little imagination, and at much greater length than it needed. The book could have benefited greatly from the tender attentions of a stern editor.
I went on to read two or three more books in the series (checked out from the library) and finally gave up in disgust when he put an explanatory note at the end of a volume saying that he'd wound up splitting the book in two because there were so very many characters to follow. I take that as a sign of poor discipline. If the book has grown too far beyond its bounds, the correct response is to murder your darlings.
I was disappointed. Some of his other work I've enjoyed very much, particularly "Tuf Voyaging" and (to a lesser extent) "Windhaven", and I'm a major fantasy fan, so I was expecting it to be enjoyable, and it wasn't. Bummer.
No but wait, his Iphone lets him make phone calls (and apparently supports 802.11a), so it's as good or better than any other product on the market, no mater what that device does.
That's right! The iPhone really IS better than any other product on the market, regardless of function! No matter what task comes to hand, the iPhone will see me through.
Why, I use my iPhone to puree tomatoes all the time. And it's SOOO handy when I want to brush my teeth. And just ask my girlfriend what she thinks of its penis enlargement capabilities. Truly, the iPhone is the pinnacle of technological development!
I stand corrected! In future I shall be sure to write my grocery lists like cheap thrillers.
"This is a dark city. (Item: lightbulbs, 3, flourescent.) I was cleaning up from my last job (Item: Clorox; item: new scrubbie sponges; item: nitric acid) and contemplating what I'd have for dinner (Items: 5 steaks, 1 bottle steak sauce, a nice Cabernet Rosso, 1 bag potatoes, garlic, broccoli, rice) when I looked up and there she was: redheaded, green-eyed, a short compact frame and legs that went all the way down. (Item: Trojans, more Cabernet Rosso, maybe some flowers.) "Hi, gorgeous," I said. "You need anything at the grocery store?" She cocked her head prettily, and said "We're out of hand soap in the upstairs bathroom, there are only two cans of cat food left, and the kids need more pencils for school -- someone discovered our stash and reduced them all to stubs in the electric sharpener." Rinsing my hands, I asked "Are there any suspects in the case?" She glanced over her shoulder and said "The culprit, I believe, goes by the code name 'Junior.'" I nodded, checked my wallet, jotted a few notes, and headed for the door. "Well, I'll investigate, and if guilty this fiend shall be punished."
"Oh, you dashing fellow," she replied. "Don't forget the milk."
If you ask me, the current system around registrations is fine (no registration means you can only claim for actual damages, having a registration causes punitive to come into play)
But it also has a major downside in the fact that it's not clear who owns what. Also, the lack of registration has extended copyright over basically everything. The grocery list I jotted down this afternoon is subject to copyright. Heck, this post is subject to copyright.
And it's not as if registration is an inherently bad idea. There are two issues to address with it -- the cost, and the difficulty of processing registrations. The last time we tried mandatory registration, the price was set by the government, and the processing had to be done by hand on paper. We can do better than that.
I would prefer mandatory registration similar to the way the domain name system works. Thus:
The Copyright Office determines what information is needed for a copyright registration.
The Copyright Office creates a database to track that information.
The Copyright Office does not gather registration information itself. Instead, it accredits registrars to do so.
The accredited copyright registrars compete with one another to offer the lowest prices and the most convenient service for registering copyrights.
An author (or corporation) selects a registrar, pays whatever fee that registrar has settled on, and gives the registrar the required information.
The registrar transmits the information to the Copyright Office, where it is logged in the database.
In this way, we get a definitive record of who owns which copyright, and exactly when the work was registered. Because the registrars are in competition with one another, we get cheap registration fees and convenient service. And by making registration mandatory once again, we have ensured that copyright is only applied in cases where the author wants it.
It's obviously not a perfect system. I imagine we'd probably have to deal with fraudulent or competing copyright registrations. But we already have those anyway.
A bigger concern would be whether or not the market for copyright registration services would be large enough to sustain itself. Copyright terms are very, very long. The lifetime of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years for corporately owned works. Say I'm the owner of H. K. Fessenscheimer & Daughters, Copyright Registrar. If one author registers a book, that's one sale. Then I don't get any more business from that author till they've created something new to copyright, which could take years, or might never happen.
So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals. Say, a copyright registration lasts for five or ten years, and then you (or your estate) has to re-register. If you don't, then you get a grace period of maybe six months, and then the copyright expires and cannot be renewed.
Of course, large institutions which do a lot of copyright registrations (corporations, universities) would be free to establish in-house registrars which would handle all registrations and renewals for their own copyrights without involving a third party. Hell, they could even write their own software to do it. Amortized over time, their costs for registering and renewing copyrights would be extremely low.
I'm sure that the existing copyright holders will scream bloody murder at the idea. They worked really hard to get rid of registration. They wouldn't be happy to see it come back.
Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.
Education is, and always will be, a two way process. The lecturer delivers a lecture, the students ask questions, the lecturer answers said questions, and as a result the lecturer may change/modify/update his material to better reflect the needs of his/her students. I used to lecture a few years ago, and the students have a tendancy to keep you on your toes, and as a result you are always refining and improving your materials.
This is exactly right, and I'm giving up mod points to say so. Education is a reciprocal experience. Particularly with more abstract concepts. When one of my students is having a difficult time understanding a concept, I have to explain it again, but differently. It's not unusual to explain the same concept six or seven different ways before it clicks. During that time I rely on cues from the student (or students), many of which are non-verbal. Looks of puzzlement, rolled eyes, pursed lips, glazed eyes, eyebrow furrows, impatient twitches, overall body posture -- take those away and it gets a lot harder to reformulate explanations.
It can be done in a strictly online environment, but it's freaking hard. Writing messages online strips away so much of the non-verbal feedback I rely on.
Video chat might be able to help, but it might also cause problems. When I'm in a room with 25 freshmen, I can watch them easily enough. If I were confronted with a screen full 25 different video windows, and every student is in a different location, that's going to be difficult to use. At current screen resolutions, the amount of details I would see of each student's face would be vastly reduced. The bandwidth requirements would be pretty stiff. If every student is in a different location, that's 25 different contexts to keep track of, and what happens when Susy O's cat jumps on the computer and knocks her webcam into the trash can?
I've been teaching in classrooms equipped with computers for each student the last few years, and I love it. The pedagogical approaches that enables are really cool. Completely online classes are good, and useful, particularly for adult education. But they're basically like correspondence courses -- useful, but not a viable replacement for face-to-face instruction in the near future.
I'm in Austin, so I stand to be affected by this in the near future.
I wouldn't be opposed to a metered plan if it was really a metered plan.
The electric company doesn't care how many toasters I own, or how often I make toast, or anything. They charge me an activation fee when I start service, and then they bill me for the electricity I use. THAT is a metered plan. If I could do that with bandwidth (at a reasonable rate per GB), I'd be perfectly happy.
This Time Warner crap is NOT like that. They want to charge me an activation fee, a monthly usage fee, AND a dollar per gigabyte for every GB over their arbitrarily imposed limit. That's NOT cool.
The basic point of the pricing structure appears to be to control my behavior online, and it irritates me no end.
You've already received a formal takedown notice from a genuine lawyer; you need to consult a lawyer of your own. ASAP. The Slashdot community's thoughts may well be interesting/insightful/flamebait/overrated, but they're no substitute for trained legal counsel.
Look up your local bar and see if you can find an IP lawyer with reasonable rates for a consultation. Failing that, contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation; perhaps they can help, or at least point you in the right direction.
Agreed. Her goal is to prevent cheating. That may be laudable in and of itself, but this is a stupid way to go about it, for all kinds of reasons. It's probably illegal. And ineffective at stopping cheating.
Also, the teacher has put herself into a lousy position. If she gives the student a poor grade at the end of the term, then he can file a grievance claiming that she actively prevented him from earning a higher grade by destroying his notes. That's solid grounds for a complaint. Furthermore, it sounds as if she did this to the entire class. They've all got grounds for that claim.
By destroying the notes, the teacher has also destroyed any trust the students might have had in her, and seriously undermined her own credibility. She's lost any claim to impartiality here. No one can teach effectively under those circumstances, even an otherwise good teacher. It's stupid.
And worse, it's destructive. She's actively preventing her students from learning. As a college teacher myself, I am outraged. This is not acceptable professional conduct.
The student should immediately file a formal complaint with the teacher's department and the dean. I strongly suspect that the teacher will be removed from the class and replaced by someone else, as she is in no position to finish out the term now.
It's too early to file a legal challenge, but the student would be well advised to consult a lawyer immediately to discover what the legal options are in case things go badly.
The New Scientist article on this topic is more informative. Among other things, it's got a video of the test mini-robot boat in action.
The water in the testing tank is very still -- there are few or no ripples. I wonder if the approach will actually work on, say, the ocean? If your propulsion system depends on steady contact with the water surface, waves are going to be a problem.
It's definitely ready for card games, and probably some 2D tile-based type games. You know, like, say, [url=http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile3/winexile3.html]Exile III[/url]. That was an excellent game, due mostly to its interesting writing and vast scope, because the graphics sure weren't carrying the day. You could probably put together a web-based version of that without too much trouble.
But nobody's going to be rewriting World of Warcraft for JS in the foreseeable future.
Part of the nature of "culture" is that it is not under the control of any one person.
The grandparent poster wrote:
The choice of playing with dolls, tea sets or cars is CULTURAL and not genetic.
The parent poster wrote:
When my daughter was born, my wife and I were very adamant that she wouldn't have any cultural stereotypes imposed on her. Everything was very gender neutral, but she still ended up being obsessed with Barbie and pink stuff.
That actually demonstrates exactly what the grandparent post was talking about. It's a cultural thing. Individual parents cannot control acculturation effectively. The girl described above learned about Barbie and pink stuff from all kinds of different sources:
1) Her friends; 2) Her friends' parents; 3) Advertising; 4) Television shows; 5) Movies; 6) Books; 7) Other stuff I can't think of right now.
The only way to insulate a child from all "cultural stereotypes" is to isolate the child from any and every source of cultural information. That means: no books, no television, no movies, no stories of any kind, and, basically, no contact with another human being. Ever.
That said, parents are a powerful influence on their childrens' behavior. They cannot control exactly how their child thinks and acts, but they have a greater chance than anyone else to influence them. The girl who likes Barbies and pink now may very well grow up to despise them, and will likely have opinions very similar to her parents' once she's grown up.
Neither candidate will make the next generation smarter. Either one might put policies in place to help the next generation get education, but ultimately learning happens inside the heads of the students.
That said, Obama looks a lot more tuned-in when it comes to educational issues. His keynote address to the American Library Association's conference in Chicago (2005) pretty clearly demonstrates his commitment to education, particularly literacy programs and such.
Whereas McCain is, well, not. Remember that McCain proposed a governmental spending freeze as a remedy for the fiscal crisis? With a few exceptions, such as Defense. Well, education was not on the list of exceptions.
You can use a Cue Cat for zapping books into LibraryThing, the social book-cataloging site. It's a lot faster than adding everything manually, and it works even if encryption hasn't been disabled.
I bought a USB model for a whopping 10 USD. Then I declawed it by severing the fifth leg from the left on the bottom of the microchip, using a pair of fingernail trimmers (full declawing instructions (pdf), scroll down to page 5). It works nicely in Windows and Linux, no drivers, and I can zap pretty much any barcode and get the actual text read out. It's surprising how often you can zap a barcode into Google and get highly relevant search results.
So, basically, the company's business model may have been crap, but as a cheap barcode scanner their hardware ain't bad. Aside from the dumb encryption part, and the cat shape is silly.
Or it will be once the openoffice.org sysadmin fixes their server. Major egg on the face there.
Anyway, this release has one feature that I've been longing after for years now: proper support for marginal comments.
While OO.o has long been capable of opening documents with comments in them, the user interface for reading those comments sucked HARD. The presence of a note was indicated by a tiny, light yellow rectangle at the end of the sentence. Easy to miss. And then if you wanted to actually read the comment, you had to hover your mouse over it to trigger a small yellow pop-up box containing the comment text (which would be cut off if it was a long comment). Basically, actually READING a commented document in OO.o was not practical.
This new version is much, much better. I tried it out using one of the copies that hit the mirrors before the official release, and it's soooo much better. Comments now actually show up in the margins, they've got little lines connecting them to the section of the document they apply to, and they're color coded by author. Hallelujah! Now I can finally quit depending on Word for grading student papers.
In English English, fag means cigarette. The previous poster is probably not involved in human trafficking.
Except when it means spicy pork meatballs. One time in Leeds I came across a wonderful advertisement depicting a family of four in bright 1950s-era style -- the stern father in the back, with smiling mother and a bright-eyed boy and girl arrayed in front of him, all standing in front of table with a plate of meatballs on it. The caption read:
"There's no family like a faggot family!"
I had to laugh at that. I wish I'd had a camera to take a picture, though.
Unless they have created some industrial strength Miracle Grow, this is going to remain in the realm of park benches, custom picnic tables and cheesy 3D graphics programs.
So it'll take a long time. Didn't stop Konstantin Kirsch from planting tree domes several years back. The oldest video on that page dates to 2001, and it'll be years yet before the walls he's woven out of separate trees grow together enough to form a solid surface. But it's entirely feasible. All it takes is a green thumb and lots of patience.
Mind you, it'd be cool if we had some way to accelerate the process, but that'd be tough.
I beg pardon for the misunderstanding -- I'm not happy about Microsoft's push for cruddy DRM on downloadable fonts. I'm just happy that there's finally some serious effort to make fonts downloadable at all. It's been such a long wait.
But I'd strongly prefer it to happen without any dumb DRM getting tacked on.
I'm not sure why your comment is a reply to mine, since it doesn't respond to any of the points I made. But what the heck, may as well.
... it seems the point of the article is that to get this fancy fontness (great, even more "sizzle" on the Web) you're presently going to have to get down with some MSFT DRM.
Well, no. That wasn't the point of the article at all. Actually, there were so many links in the submitted summary that I'm not actually sure which one was supposed to BE "the article". But the issue runs something like this:
In the '90s Microsoft added downloadable font support to Internet Explorer. Nobody really used it, because it had crappy DRM, it was hard to use, it only worked in IE, and the fonts generally were rendered badly.
Fast forward ten years.
Last March when Safari 3.1 came out, it had support for proper non-DRMed font files. It supports plain old TrueType fonts, and also OpenType fonts (.ttf and.otf, respectively). If you happen to be using Safari, you can look at a demo. In general this made people happy (though not everyone, even among the people who don't live in mortal fear of anything more outre than Verdana).
Hakon Wium Lie, the CTO for Opera, has been agitating for this kind of support for years, and promptly announced that Opera will be supporting that in the near future. There's a link for that in the article above. Shortly Firefox got on board as well -- support for downloadable fonts is scheduled to be released in Firefox 3.1.
After years of waiting, it looks as though web designers are finally, FINALLY going to have the ability to use any font they want, not just the nine fonts from Microsoft's "Web Core Fonts" project. Not everyone thinks that's a good idea, particularly those who tremble at the thought of such power being put in the hands of crappy web designers. And I'll happily admit that there are lots of crappy web designers. But downloadable fonts appear to be on the verge of becoming a reality even so.
The DRM angle comes in because Microsoft has begun trying to get their crappy DRMed format adopted as a W3C standard. Part of their argument is that font foundries won't accept a non-DRM solution, and so Microsoft's solution needs to be the standard everyone uses. Of course that's thoroughly undercut by the fact that Microsoft themselves allow font linking in Silverlight, without DRM, though they do restrict it to same-domain linking.
It's the same old song Microsoft has been singing for years -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Actually, they probably won't get to the "Extinguish" part with this particular gambit. It's more likely that they'll fail to get EOT standardized, but refuse to support non-DRMed TTF/OTF files, so that it will be harder to use downloadable fonts in a cross-browser way. That is, the designer will have to generate a new font file in EOT format, and then re-generate the same EOT font file for every different domain it's needed on, and finally added a separate IE-only style sheet.
Most sites with modern CSS-based designs already have IE-only style sheets using conditional comments, so adding one more chunk of code there isn't a large resource drain if you're not using multiple domains. But it would be much nicer if they would just support non-DRMed font files that would work wherever. Fat chance of that, though.
Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.
SARCASM Ah! That explains why word processing software like MS Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord only offer those same nine fonts, and there is no more advanced print design software. The next time I see Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign running, I'll be sure to treat them as the hallucinations they are. Thanks for clearing up those mysteries. END SARCASM
I direct your attention to the following:
1) The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird. He has formal graphic design training, wrote a book on the topic, and does not appreciate having his options limited to nine fonts. 2) The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Typography Book, both by Robin Williams. She's not only a trained graphic designer who has written several books on the topic, but one who works primarily in print. She loves her typography, and really hates the limited nature of fonts on the web (see The Non-Designer's Web Design Book for that).
I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.
Sure. People will make crappy web pages with crappy designs that hurt your eyes. Guess what? They already do. I'd tell you to go browse MySpace for a couple hours, but I'm not that cruel.
Meanwhile, the good designers who know what they're doing are crippled.
Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.
The list is that way because of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web program, initiated in 1996. The basic aim of the program was to give web designers some kind of consistent control over the typography in their sites -- prior to that time, you just had to pick a font and take your chances.
Readability was one consideration in the list of fonts they settled on, sure. But the basic aim was to improve designer's control over the default fonts. It achieved that goal well. And now it's time to move on.
Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.
You don't need to be a print designer to want more fonts. The list of "safe" fonts that can be expected to work reliably in most web browsers includes:
Arial Arial Black Comic Sans MS Courier New Georgia Impact Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana
That's it. NINE fonts for BILLIONS of web sites.
I'm not a print designer. But I make lots of web pages, and damn it, nine fonts is not enough. Typography is the single most powerful and versatile design tool in existence. You can use it to convey emotion, to highlight important bits of a page, to subtly improve reading comprehensibility, and on and on.
Not to mention the specialty uses. Have you ever tried to transliterate Egyptian hieroglyphs on the web? I have, and I had to go the sIFR route to represent characters which are just not available, such as the character shaped like a 3 representing a palatal A sound.
And then there's stuff like medieval transcriptions. How can I post a good transcription of a Middle English romance without the characters thorn, eth, yogh, and wynn? Some of those are available in standard fonts, especially thorn and eth, but yogh and wynn are a lot harder to come by. You can get them using Junicode, but only if your visitor happens to have that particular font installed, which 99.99999% of people do not. sIFR isn't really a solution in that case, because you only need four damn characters, repeated at intervals throughout a fairly lengthy text.
With the way things are going very soon the Bible will be the only book that's out of copyright....
Some versions of the Bible are copyrighted. Any translation undertaken in the last eighty years or so.
Oh, and in Britain the Authorized King James version is subject to Crown copyright, which is perpetual. It's never going to enter the public domain. Probably not even if the monarchy were to be abolished -- any British government which saw fit to abolish the monarchy would likely retain its privileges for the state. Not that it seems like the monarchy's going away any time soon.
This is really cool. Long LONG term backup for a huge number of languages. I approve of the long-term thinking behind it.
I hope they can bring the price down, though -- the article says it currently costs $25,000 for a copy, which is a bit steep for a thing where you can't even read most of it without an extremely high-powered microscope. The article also refers to the LOCKS principle which archivists use: Lots Of Copies Keeps 'em Safe. At 25K a pop, it's going to be hard to get the "Lots" part of that working. Get the price down to a hundred dollars and I bet lots of geeks all over the planet would buy one as a conversation piece.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to dissent.
"A Game of Thrones" suffers from an excess of underdeveloped characters. I counted 10-12 major characters, plus dozens of supporting cast. Daenerys, the exiled dragon princess, seemed interesting, as did Arya, the waterdancer-in-training. However, I finished the book without really caring about any of them.
In some ways, the whole book felt like nothing more than background for plot lines that won't be developed until well into the second or third novels. For example, the very first chapter introduces the the undead ghouls who are evidently gathering to invade from the North, but they're barely mentioned for the rest of the book's 800 pages, appearing only briefly in the Jon Snow arc. Likewise, the extended story of Daenerys' marriage into the Dothraki tribes seems like wind-up for an invasion from the south by the dispossessed heir, evidently for one of the later books. Though the Daenerys plot struck me as the most interesting part of the book, it really had little or nothing to do with the main plot. With so very many characters to track, there was little time to develop a rapport with any of them.
The landscape and cultures are, for the most part, stock. One glance at the map in the front will have any mildly educated person thinking "Oh, they're England and Scotland divided by Hadrian's Wall." The Dothraki are clearly based on the Mongols, only slightly more hedonistic; whereas the culture of the Seven Kingdoms is stock High Middle Ages.
In short, the material was handled poorly, with little imagination, and at much greater length than it needed. The book could have benefited greatly from the tender attentions of a stern editor.
I went on to read two or three more books in the series (checked out from the library) and finally gave up in disgust when he put an explanatory note at the end of a volume saying that he'd wound up splitting the book in two because there were so very many characters to follow. I take that as a sign of poor discipline. If the book has grown too far beyond its bounds, the correct response is to murder your darlings.
I was disappointed. Some of his other work I've enjoyed very much, particularly "Tuf Voyaging" and (to a lesser extent) "Windhaven", and I'm a major fantasy fan, so I was expecting it to be enjoyable, and it wasn't. Bummer.
No but wait, his Iphone lets him make phone calls (and apparently supports 802.11a), so it's as good or better than any other product on the market, no mater what that device does.
That's right! The iPhone really IS better than any other product on the market, regardless of function! No matter what task comes to hand, the iPhone will see me through.
Why, I use my iPhone to puree tomatoes all the time. And it's SOOO handy when I want to brush my teeth. And just ask my girlfriend what she thinks of its penis enlargement capabilities. Truly, the iPhone is the pinnacle of technological development!
I stand corrected! In future I shall be sure to write my grocery lists like cheap thrillers.
"This is a dark city. (Item: lightbulbs, 3, flourescent.) I was cleaning up from my last job (Item: Clorox; item: new scrubbie sponges; item: nitric acid) and contemplating what I'd have for dinner (Items: 5 steaks, 1 bottle steak sauce, a nice Cabernet Rosso, 1 bag potatoes, garlic, broccoli, rice) when I looked up and there she was: redheaded, green-eyed, a short compact frame and legs that went all the way down. (Item: Trojans, more Cabernet Rosso, maybe some flowers.) "Hi, gorgeous," I said. "You need anything at the grocery store?" She cocked her head prettily, and said "We're out of hand soap in the upstairs bathroom, there are only two cans of cat food left, and the kids need more pencils for school -- someone discovered our stash and reduced them all to stubs in the electric sharpener." Rinsing my hands, I asked "Are there any suspects in the case?" She glanced over her shoulder and said "The culprit, I believe, goes by the code name 'Junior.'" I nodded, checked my wallet, jotted a few notes, and headed for the door. "Well, I'll investigate, and if guilty this fiend shall be punished."
"Oh, you dashing fellow," she replied. "Don't forget the milk."
If you ask me, the current system around registrations is fine (no registration means you can only claim for actual damages, having a registration causes punitive to come into play)
But it also has a major downside in the fact that it's not clear who owns what. Also, the lack of registration has extended copyright over basically everything. The grocery list I jotted down this afternoon is subject to copyright. Heck, this post is subject to copyright.
And it's not as if registration is an inherently bad idea. There are two issues to address with it -- the cost, and the difficulty of processing registrations. The last time we tried mandatory registration, the price was set by the government, and the processing had to be done by hand on paper. We can do better than that.
I would prefer mandatory registration similar to the way the domain name system works. Thus:
In this way, we get a definitive record of who owns which copyright, and exactly when the work was registered. Because the registrars are in competition with one another, we get cheap registration fees and convenient service. And by making registration mandatory once again, we have ensured that copyright is only applied in cases where the author wants it.
It's obviously not a perfect system. I imagine we'd probably have to deal with fraudulent or competing copyright registrations. But we already have those anyway.
A bigger concern would be whether or not the market for copyright registration services would be large enough to sustain itself. Copyright terms are very, very long. The lifetime of the author plus 70 years, or 95 years for corporately owned works. Say I'm the owner of H. K. Fessenscheimer & Daughters, Copyright Registrar. If one author registers a book, that's one sale. Then I don't get any more business from that author till they've created something new to copyright, which could take years, or might never happen.
So in order to generate enough business to sustain a strongly competitive registration market, we'd probably have to require renewal at shorter intervals. Say, a copyright registration lasts for five or ten years, and then you (or your estate) has to re-register. If you don't, then you get a grace period of maybe six months, and then the copyright expires and cannot be renewed.
Of course, large institutions which do a lot of copyright registrations (corporations, universities) would be free to establish in-house registrars which would handle all registrations and renewals for their own copyrights without involving a third party. Hell, they could even write their own software to do it. Amortized over time, their costs for registering and renewing copyrights would be extremely low.
I'm sure that the existing copyright holders will scream bloody murder at the idea. They worked really hard to get rid of registration. They wouldn't be happy to see it come back.
Also, we might not be able to do anything like this without violating the Berne Treaty. So perhaps it's just a fantasy. But I really wish we could.
Education is, and always will be, a two way process. The lecturer delivers a lecture, the students ask questions, the lecturer answers said questions, and as a result the lecturer may change/modify/update his material to better reflect the needs of his/her students. I used to lecture a few years ago, and the students have a tendancy to keep you on your toes, and as a result you are always refining and improving your materials.
This is exactly right, and I'm giving up mod points to say so. Education is a reciprocal experience. Particularly with more abstract concepts. When one of my students is having a difficult time understanding a concept, I have to explain it again, but differently. It's not unusual to explain the same concept six or seven different ways before it clicks. During that time I rely on cues from the student (or students), many of which are non-verbal. Looks of puzzlement, rolled eyes, pursed lips, glazed eyes, eyebrow furrows, impatient twitches, overall body posture -- take those away and it gets a lot harder to reformulate explanations.
It can be done in a strictly online environment, but it's freaking hard. Writing messages online strips away so much of the non-verbal feedback I rely on.
Video chat might be able to help, but it might also cause problems. When I'm in a room with 25 freshmen, I can watch them easily enough. If I were confronted with a screen full 25 different video windows, and every student is in a different location, that's going to be difficult to use. At current screen resolutions, the amount of details I would see of each student's face would be vastly reduced. The bandwidth requirements would be pretty stiff. If every student is in a different location, that's 25 different contexts to keep track of, and what happens when Susy O's cat jumps on the computer and knocks her webcam into the trash can?
I've been teaching in classrooms equipped with computers for each student the last few years, and I love it. The pedagogical approaches that enables are really cool. Completely online classes are good, and useful, particularly for adult education. But they're basically like correspondence courses -- useful, but not a viable replacement for face-to-face instruction in the near future.
I'm in Austin, so I stand to be affected by this in the near future.
I wouldn't be opposed to a metered plan if it was really a metered plan.
The electric company doesn't care how many toasters I own, or how often I make toast, or anything. They charge me an activation fee when I start service, and then they bill me for the electricity I use. THAT is a metered plan. If I could do that with bandwidth (at a reasonable rate per GB), I'd be perfectly happy.
This Time Warner crap is NOT like that. They want to charge me an activation fee, a monthly usage fee, AND a dollar per gigabyte for every GB over their arbitrarily imposed limit. That's NOT cool.
The basic point of the pricing structure appears to be to control my behavior online, and it irritates me no end.
You've already received a formal takedown notice from a genuine lawyer; you need to consult a lawyer of your own. ASAP. The Slashdot community's thoughts may well be interesting/insightful/flamebait/overrated, but they're no substitute for trained legal counsel.
Look up your local bar and see if you can find an IP lawyer with reasonable rates for a consultation. Failing that, contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation; perhaps they can help, or at least point you in the right direction.
Agreed. Her goal is to prevent cheating. That may be laudable in and of itself, but this is a stupid way to go about it, for all kinds of reasons. It's probably illegal. And ineffective at stopping cheating.
Also, the teacher has put herself into a lousy position. If she gives the student a poor grade at the end of the term, then he can file a grievance claiming that she actively prevented him from earning a higher grade by destroying his notes. That's solid grounds for a complaint. Furthermore, it sounds as if she did this to the entire class. They've all got grounds for that claim.
By destroying the notes, the teacher has also destroyed any trust the students might have had in her, and seriously undermined her own credibility. She's lost any claim to impartiality here. No one can teach effectively under those circumstances, even an otherwise good teacher. It's stupid.
And worse, it's destructive. She's actively preventing her students from learning. As a college teacher myself, I am outraged. This is not acceptable professional conduct.
The student should immediately file a formal complaint with the teacher's department and the dean. I strongly suspect that the teacher will be removed from the class and replaced by someone else, as she is in no position to finish out the term now.
It's too early to file a legal challenge, but the student would be well advised to consult a lawyer immediately to discover what the legal options are in case things go badly.
The New Scientist article on this topic is more informative. Among other things, it's got a video of the test mini-robot boat in action.
The water in the testing tank is very still -- there are few or no ripples. I wonder if the approach will actually work on, say, the ocean? If your propulsion system depends on steady contact with the water surface, waves are going to be a problem.
Ah, crap. I have been using too damn many forums. CURSE YOU, bbCODE!
It's definitely ready for card games, and probably some 2D tile-based type games. You know, like, say, [url=http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile3/winexile3.html]Exile III[/url]. That was an excellent game, due mostly to its interesting writing and vast scope, because the graphics sure weren't carrying the day. You could probably put together a web-based version of that without too much trouble.
But nobody's going to be rewriting World of Warcraft for JS in the foreseeable future.
Part of the nature of "culture" is that it is not under the control of any one person.
The grandparent poster wrote:
The choice of playing with dolls, tea sets or cars is CULTURAL and not genetic.
The parent poster wrote:
When my daughter was born, my wife and I were very adamant that she wouldn't have any cultural stereotypes imposed on her. Everything was very gender neutral, but she still ended up being obsessed with Barbie and pink stuff.
That actually demonstrates exactly what the grandparent post was talking about. It's a cultural thing. Individual parents cannot control acculturation effectively. The girl described above learned about Barbie and pink stuff from all kinds of different sources:
1) Her friends;
2) Her friends' parents;
3) Advertising;
4) Television shows;
5) Movies;
6) Books;
7) Other stuff I can't think of right now.
The only way to insulate a child from all "cultural stereotypes" is to isolate the child from any and every source of cultural information. That means: no books, no television, no movies, no stories of any kind, and, basically, no contact with another human being. Ever.
That said, parents are a powerful influence on their childrens' behavior. They cannot control exactly how their child thinks and acts, but they have a greater chance than anyone else to influence them. The girl who likes Barbies and pink now may very well grow up to despise them, and will likely have opinions very similar to her parents' once she's grown up.
Neither candidate will make the next generation smarter. Either one might put policies in place to help the next generation get education, but ultimately learning happens inside the heads of the students.
That said, Obama looks a lot more tuned-in when it comes to educational issues. His keynote address to the American Library Association's conference in Chicago (2005) pretty clearly demonstrates his commitment to education, particularly literacy programs and such.
Whereas McCain is, well, not. Remember that McCain proposed a governmental spending freeze as a remedy for the fiscal crisis? With a few exceptions, such as Defense. Well, education was not on the list of exceptions.
You can use a Cue Cat for zapping books into LibraryThing, the social book-cataloging site. It's a lot faster than adding everything manually, and it works even if encryption hasn't been disabled.
I bought a USB model for a whopping 10 USD. Then I declawed it by severing the fifth leg from the left on the bottom of the microchip, using a pair of fingernail trimmers (full declawing instructions (pdf), scroll down to page 5). It works nicely in Windows and Linux, no drivers, and I can zap pretty much any barcode and get the actual text read out. It's surprising how often you can zap a barcode into Google and get highly relevant search results.
So, basically, the company's business model may have been crap, but as a cheap barcode scanner their hardware ain't bad. Aside from the dumb encryption part, and the cat shape is silly.
Or it will be once the openoffice.org sysadmin fixes their server. Major egg on the face there.
Anyway, this release has one feature that I've been longing after for years now: proper support for marginal comments.
While OO.o has long been capable of opening documents with comments in them, the user interface for reading those comments sucked HARD. The presence of a note was indicated by a tiny, light yellow rectangle at the end of the sentence. Easy to miss. And then if you wanted to actually read the comment, you had to hover your mouse over it to trigger a small yellow pop-up box containing the comment text (which would be cut off if it was a long comment). Basically, actually READING a commented document in OO.o was not practical.
This new version is much, much better. I tried it out using one of the copies that hit the mirrors before the official release, and it's soooo much better. Comments now actually show up in the margins, they've got little lines connecting them to the section of the document they apply to, and they're color coded by author. Hallelujah! Now I can finally quit depending on Word for grading student papers.
Quick! Before it hits -- how did you manage to type that message with flippers? O_O
In English English, fag means cigarette. The previous poster is probably not involved in human trafficking.
Except when it means spicy pork meatballs. One time in Leeds I came across a wonderful advertisement depicting a family of four in bright 1950s-era style -- the stern father in the back, with smiling mother and a bright-eyed boy and girl arrayed in front of him, all standing in front of table with a plate of meatballs on it. The caption read:
"There's no family like a faggot family!"
I had to laugh at that. I wish I'd had a camera to take a picture, though.
Unless they have created some industrial strength Miracle Grow, this is going to remain in the realm of park benches, custom picnic tables and cheesy 3D graphics programs.
So it'll take a long time. Didn't stop Konstantin Kirsch from planting tree domes several years back. The oldest video on that page dates to 2001, and it'll be years yet before the walls he's woven out of separate trees grow together enough to form a solid surface. But it's entirely feasible. All it takes is a green thumb and lots of patience.
Mind you, it'd be cool if we had some way to accelerate the process, but that'd be tough.
I beg pardon for the misunderstanding -- I'm not happy about Microsoft's push for cruddy DRM on downloadable fonts. I'm just happy that there's finally some serious effort to make fonts downloadable at all. It's been such a long wait.
But I'd strongly prefer it to happen without any dumb DRM getting tacked on.
I'm not sure why your comment is a reply to mine, since it doesn't respond to any of the points I made. But what the heck, may as well.
... it seems the point of the article is that to get this fancy fontness (great, even more "sizzle" on the Web) you're presently going to have to get down with some MSFT DRM.
Well, no. That wasn't the point of the article at all. Actually, there were so many links in the submitted summary that I'm not actually sure which one was supposed to BE "the article". But the issue runs something like this:
In the '90s Microsoft added downloadable font support to Internet Explorer. Nobody really used it, because it had crappy DRM, it was hard to use, it only worked in IE, and the fonts generally were rendered badly.
Fast forward ten years.
Last March when Safari 3.1 came out, it had support for proper non-DRMed font files. It supports plain old TrueType fonts, and also OpenType fonts (.ttf and .otf, respectively). If you happen to be using Safari, you can look at a demo. In general this made people happy (though not everyone, even among the people who don't live in mortal fear of anything more outre than Verdana).
Hakon Wium Lie, the CTO for Opera, has been agitating for this kind of support for years, and promptly announced that Opera will be supporting that in the near future. There's a link for that in the article above. Shortly Firefox got on board as well -- support for downloadable fonts is scheduled to be released in Firefox 3.1.
After years of waiting, it looks as though web designers are finally, FINALLY going to have the ability to use any font they want, not just the nine fonts from Microsoft's "Web Core Fonts" project. Not everyone thinks that's a good idea, particularly those who tremble at the thought of such power being put in the hands of crappy web designers. And I'll happily admit that there are lots of crappy web designers. But downloadable fonts appear to be on the verge of becoming a reality even so.
The DRM angle comes in because Microsoft has begun trying to get their crappy DRMed format adopted as a W3C standard. Part of their argument is that font foundries won't accept a non-DRM solution, and so Microsoft's solution needs to be the standard everyone uses. Of course that's thoroughly undercut by the fact that Microsoft themselves allow font linking in Silverlight, without DRM, though they do restrict it to same-domain linking.
It's the same old song Microsoft has been singing for years -- Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Actually, they probably won't get to the "Extinguish" part with this particular gambit. It's more likely that they'll fail to get EOT standardized, but refuse to support non-DRMed TTF/OTF files, so that it will be harder to use downloadable fonts in a cross-browser way. That is, the designer will have to generate a new font file in EOT format, and then re-generate the same EOT font file for every different domain it's needed on, and finally added a separate IE-only style sheet.
Most sites with modern CSS-based designs already have IE-only style sheets using conditional comments, so adding one more chunk of code there isn't a large resource drain if you're not using multiple domains. But it would be much nicer if they would just support non-DRMed font files that would work wherever. Fat chance of that, though.
Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.
SARCASM
Ah! That explains why word processing software like MS Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord only offer those same nine fonts, and there is no more advanced print design software. The next time I see Quark XPress or Adobe InDesign running, I'll be sure to treat them as the hallucinations they are. Thanks for clearing up those mysteries. END SARCASM
I direct your attention to the following:
1) The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, by Jason Beaird. He has formal graphic design training, wrote a book on the topic, and does not appreciate having his options limited to nine fonts.
2) The Non-Designer's Design Book and The Non-Designer's Typography Book, both by Robin Williams. She's not only a trained graphic designer who has written several books on the topic, but one who works primarily in print. She loves her typography, and really hates the limited nature of fonts on the web (see The Non-Designer's Web Design Book for that).
I wouldn't WANT anything else used as the primary font. Imagine having to read paragraphs of crap using FancySwirlyCrap.ttf, because some designer thought it was cool. Ugh, no f'ing thanks.
Sure. People will make crappy web pages with crappy designs that hurt your eyes. Guess what? They already do. I'd tell you to go browse MySpace for a couple hours, but I'm not that cruel.
Meanwhile, the good designers who know what they're doing are crippled.
Use the standard fonts, that's why that list is exactly what it is.
The list is that way because of Microsoft's Core Fonts for the Web program, initiated in 1996. The basic aim of the program was to give web designers some kind of consistent control over the typography in their sites -- prior to that time, you just had to pick a font and take your chances.
Readability was one consideration in the list of fonts they settled on, sure. But the basic aim was to improve designer's control over the default fonts. It achieved that goal well. And now it's time to move on.
Happily, it looks to me as though this is going to happen, regardless of whether everyone likes it or not. I'm sure they'll give you a configuration setting to turn off web fonts, though, so you can go on reading Times New Roman and Arial until the end of your days if you'd like.
You don't need to be a print designer to want more fonts. The list of "safe" fonts that can be expected to work reliably in most web browsers includes:
Arial
Arial Black
Comic Sans MS
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
That's it. NINE fonts for BILLIONS of web sites.
I'm not a print designer. But I make lots of web pages, and damn it, nine fonts is not enough. Typography is the single most powerful and versatile design tool in existence. You can use it to convey emotion, to highlight important bits of a page, to subtly improve reading comprehensibility, and on and on.
Not to mention the specialty uses. Have you ever tried to transliterate Egyptian hieroglyphs on the web? I have, and I had to go the sIFR route to represent characters which are just not available, such as the character shaped like a 3 representing a palatal A sound.
And then there's stuff like medieval transcriptions. How can I post a good transcription of a Middle English romance without the characters thorn, eth, yogh, and wynn? Some of those are available in standard fonts, especially thorn and eth, but yogh and wynn are a lot harder to come by. You can get them using Junicode, but only if your visitor happens to have that particular font installed, which 99.99999% of people do not. sIFR isn't really a solution in that case, because you only need four damn characters, repeated at intervals throughout a fairly lengthy text.
But hey, 640K should be enough for anyone!
With the way things are going very soon the Bible will be the only book that's out of copyright....
Some versions of the Bible are copyrighted. Any translation undertaken in the last eighty years or so.
Oh, and in Britain the Authorized King James version is subject to Crown copyright, which is perpetual. It's never going to enter the public domain. Probably not even if the monarchy were to be abolished -- any British government which saw fit to abolish the monarchy would likely retain its privileges for the state. Not that it seems like the monarchy's going away any time soon.
This is really cool. Long LONG term backup for a huge number of languages. I approve of the long-term thinking behind it.
I hope they can bring the price down, though -- the article says it currently costs $25,000 for a copy, which is a bit steep for a thing where you can't even read most of it without an extremely high-powered microscope. The article also refers to the LOCKS principle which archivists use: Lots Of Copies Keeps 'em Safe. At 25K a pop, it's going to be hard to get the "Lots" part of that working. Get the price down to a hundred dollars and I bet lots of geeks all over the planet would buy one as a conversation piece.
You mean Zoe, not Chloe.
Yeah, that's the one. Well, I said she failed to engage my interest. See? I didn't even remember her name right. ^_^;