Well it depends on what type of legal protection you are referring to. There is no law, for example, ensuring the right of people with Down Syndrome to get into college. College is created to provide benefits for people with the mental capacity to achieve higher education. One could make the argument that marriage exists for the benefit of people with the physio/psychological capacity to reproduce and/or raise a child in a home with both a mother and father. The fact that complete dumbasses are sometimes admitted to college and that heterosexual wife-beaters are allowed to marry doesn't change the purpose of those institutions, and it doesn't require the people who control those institutions to make infinite allowances to people who are unable to fulfil the purpose of the institutions for genetic reasons.
That is good thought! The thing software which is the simple problem where existing translation that it is developed applies algorithm to speech of real time very is healthy! Gorgeousness!
Do you know of any people who hyperventilate constantly because air is free?
No, but I know plenty of people who pump poisonous fumes out of their tailpipes because air is free. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that air not be free. I've seen Total Recall!
Besides, the grandparent post was obviously meant to be hyperbole, a "worst case" scenario meant to point out how things would be if we took our water as much for granted as we took our roads.
This isn't food, it's entertainment, and the government shouldn't get involved in what entertainment costs.
I'm not sure that I entirely agree that the government should get involved at all, but I agree with your basic idea whole-heartedly. Anti-monopoly laws were enacted to deal with companies that could abuse their stranglehold on American business interests at large. Railroad monopolies hurt everyone that needed transportation, as did oil monopolies. Steel monopolies held back construction of the machinery needed to produce and distribute many products. Microsoft has become a good contemporary example because their software has permeated American business and government to such a degree that the software company could negatively impact the entire country by making a change in their business plan.
Entertainment, on the other hand, is not a necessity, as the parent poster said (even if you were to make the case that humans need entertainment to survive, we have many avenues for obtaining it that don't involve copyrighted materials). A monopoly on movie-making would at worst inconvenience everyone who wanted to watch movies and lead to an industry with crappy movies due to lack of competition. This is not life- or even economy-threatening. Sure, this would Suck(TM), but it's not a matter of "we need legislation to correct this now, now, NOW!"
The complication, and the point where I might disagree with the parent, come where entertainment companies are not limited to one medium these days. Often, the same conglomerate selling those DVDs is the conglomerate that puts the news on TV and possibly even in your local newspaper. Failing to regulate the companies in the matter of DVD pricing or region encoding could set a bad precedent for when news media monopolies become an issue that Congress or the courts want to deal with.
I am not a developer, so I'm interested to know if this idea is possible. Darwine will use a custom library for Win32 applications. How much power does that afford developers to change the way the libraries work? Could an OS X version of the Darwine libraries "intercept" the calls from the.exe and, for example, display the app's menu options in the menu bar instead of in the application window? How about replacing boring gray buttons in dialog windows with aquafied buttons? How about scroll bars?
If this is possible, I can see the potential for running windows apps while maintaining the Look & Feel of OS X in certain areas. Of course, this may be much, much more complicated than I am imagining. Could someone tell me if I'm on to something or just fantasizing?
But seriously, in my mind this is akin to hardware "spyware"
There is a serious difference here. The word "spy" implies that someone is being monitored without their consent. This program is completely voluntary and does not hide its practices from the end users. If you don't want to be monitored, don't let them monitor you. Think of it like the following situation:
Spy: Can I put cameras in your bedroom and shower? You: I guess that would be okay. One week later Spy: You really shouldn't eat all those crackers in bed. You: What the-- you mean you were using the cameras to take pictures?!
All joking aside, sometimes the knowledge that your preferences may end up affecting change somewhere is enough incentive to give up a little privacy. If I could have saved Angel by having a Nielson box on my TV, that would be more than worth having some pollsters know that I sit at home every Friday night watching sleazy dating shows on cable.
Look, back in the eighties, when the net started, we had visions of software and content being distributed instantly. Hell, by 1889 all drivers I needed for my job were.
Yeah, those were good times. Remember how hard it was in 1887 to get drivers for those bicycles with the big front wheel? And the railroad unions fought tooth and nail against releasing their drivers to the public.
They've effectively protected themselves from the threat of you buying a copy. Is that the copy protection they were going for?
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 1
It's true! If you play the scene in the special edition where they dubbed in Luke's scream backwards and at half speed, you can clearly hear a voice saying "George is dead." In the disputed scene where Luke is rumored to shout "Carrie!" he was actually saying "I buried George," but it was obscured by the music.
Please, that's just ridiculous. Let's try to approach this with some clarity of thought.
Notice: The message contained in this posting is under investigation by the legal team of Apple Computers, Inc. for the infringing use of the word "clarity".
I disagree. The tag for a link is an "a"? That only made sense before documents could be linked together (which means pre-version 3.0). Until Netscape muddied the waters, the only way to make text bold was with the "strong" tag, and italics were defined by the "em" tag. Neither of those were intuitive to anyone used to word processing or typesetting of any kind.
Besides, if you can use the same code you used in HTML 3 on your web page today and get the same results, what are you complaining about? If you want your page to be fancier, naturally that will involve learning more complex markup. You can't have it both ways.
"Vaccine" to prevent getting high from cocaine: Think of the potential for abuse! Keep your fascist, controlling technology away from me, you pleasure Nazis!
Pumping information directly into the brain: Sweet! Lay it on me! What could possibly go wrong?
It's still easy to make a web page that looks like it was made in 1996...if that's what you really want. The problem isn't that coding is harder than it used to be, the problem is that people's expectations have started to exceed their abilities more and more.
Back in 1996, the really "fancy" pages tended to suck, either because they were poorly designed or bloated and slow. The really streamlined, simple pages tended to be really nice and accessible, and even if they weren't pretty, they weren't ugly either.
Guess what? In 2004 those same streamlined pages still look just as good as they did in 1996. The fancy ones have all been replaced because they were so god-awful. Want to make an easy site that doesn't make people's eyes bleed? Stick to one font, a light background color (preferably white) with NO background image, and avoid all of the blinking, scrolling, and music-playing pageantry that is so popular among newbies. Surprise! You'll find that a page like that is really really easy to make - even now in the age of XML.
This is only a problem for pre-existing code and for people who already know HTML. If I were teaching a brand new user to write markup, this method makes just as much sense as the img tag, if not more.
I've given people introductory "crash courses" in HTML before, and they often go something like this: "A tag is used to format content. Except for the img tag. That one IS content. And you should always close your tags. Except the img tag. It stands alone because it's an object not a formatting tag."
Not terribly confusing, but it is inconsistent that tags in HTML represent formatting in some cases and content in others. This new method makes more sense to me, especially coming from a CSS-heavy background.
For me, it's really a question of: do I want to work hard, feel good about myself, and have something to be proud of?
This works for you because when you're programming, you're "working hard". For me, a graphics professional, programming is screwing around for fun and making graphics is "working hard".
Photoshop was designed by graphics professionals for graphics professionals. Most people don't know half of what it can do. I know maybe 3/4 of what it can do, but I use almost all of that 3/4 on a regular basis.
The GIMP was designed by programmers for...well they think it's for graphic designers, but it's really for programmers who need to do some graphic design.
The "OSS is better because I can add my own features" argument doesn't hold up unless: A.) You know how to add features (I sure don't) and B.) All the features you ever need get added. I know that I need high quality text tools and solid CMYK support in the GIMP. The fact that it is OSS has not provided these things yet, and it often takes years for new features to get implemented. Photoshop is not OSS, yet they add new features with every release.
The time between Photoshop 7.0 and 8.0 was about a year and a half. The GIMP has taken at least five years to get from version 1.0 to version 2.0. Admittedly, version increments tend to be different for OSS, but still! How much improvement has been made in the GIMP in five years compared to Photoshop?
Okay, I'm meandering now. Back to my basic point: rather than making a strong case for OSS as viable end-user software, you're pushing it even farther into the hobbyist zone by insisting that part of the value in OSS is how rewarding it is to mess with the code.
You may think you're joking, but according to the article, famed graphic designer and author of Envisioning Information Edward Tufte said just that. Of course, they buried his reply in the Googlemaniacs section of the article instead of putting it on the redesigns page.
I disagree. The computer industry isn't about making computers easy to use, it's about making them useful. Sometimes those two concepts are mutually exclusive, and you just can't continue to cater to the willfully ignorant forever.
Example: I'm a computer graphics professional working for a university's web department. Every so often, an administrative assistant who has been tasked with "updating the department web site" will call me up and ask me how to do something, like put an image on the site.
"Okay," I say. "It's pretty easy. You know how you would add a link to the page? It's kind of like that."
"Oh..." they reply. "How do you add a link?"
"Um, all right. Well, you use a tag, just like you would to make text bold or italic."
"Tag?"
"Do you know any HTML at all?"
"Oh, no! I don't know how to program or any of that stuff. I just know how to change the text that's already there and I need to know how to insert an image."
There are several solutions to this person's problem. The most useful would be to teach them HTML. Once they were familiar with it, they'd never have problems editing a simple, static web page.
They could also use a WYSIWYG web editor. That's easier, but still not easy. Most of the time, people who use them that don't know HTML as well end up compromising because they can't figure out how to make Dreamweaver do exactly what they need.
The easiest solution would be to make all web pages text-only and update them with "Plain Old Text" interfaces. Line breaks would be automatically detected, white space would be recognized, and everything would make perfect sense to the user. The problem is, it's not useful.
In the end, the only way to make things easy for a technophobe is to strip away features. That's not our job. Our job is to balance usefulness with ease of use. A better term would be "usability".
It looks pretty cool, in a science fictiony way, but why build something with four legs? Popular wisdom states that, when building a walking robot, six legs or more is preferable. And that's under ordinary circumstances, such as walking across uneven terrain. What happens when a mortar takes off one of its legs?
Unless it needs to climb stairs or hop up into vehicles, it seems like tank treads would be the most practical solution. On the other hand, a robotic dog might be effective in psychological intimidation.
When I said "head scarves in public institutions," that was a broad statement that covered several situations. Most of the laws do refer to any and all conspicuous religious symbols, which I still just as intolerant as if head scarves were the only thing banned. They are discriminating against anyone who practices a religion instead of against a particular religion.
My examples are: France, with the law you mentioned. Germany, who is dealing with similar laws (I admit ignorance as to whether the laws already exist or if they're just being proposed) The Netherlands, where hospital workers in Brussels are forbidden for wearing religious clothing on the job.
And most American schools don't teach creationism. We have something called "states' rights", under which individual states can set their own public school curriculum, so you need to examine that issue on a state-by-state basis, not as an "American" issue.
If I had mod points, I would give them to you. Thank you for providing some context and a perspective from someone that has actually experienced these countries in person. Many of us enjoy writing our own dissertations about how the world "is" and how it "ought to be" without ever experiencing it firsthand. I appreciate your insight.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it depends on what type of legal protection you are referring to. There is no law, for example, ensuring the right of people with Down Syndrome to get into college. College is created to provide benefits for people with the mental capacity to achieve higher education. One could make the argument that marriage exists for the benefit of people with the physio/psychological capacity to reproduce and/or raise a child in a home with both a mother and father. The fact that complete dumbasses are sometimes admitted to college and that heterosexual wife-beaters are allowed to marry doesn't change the purpose of those institutions, and it doesn't require the people who control those institutions to make infinite allowances to people who are unable to fulfil the purpose of the institutions for genetic reasons.
Quicker? Not if they have to keep stopping at gas stations along the way!
You mean Bill Gates beat him to death?
No, no, no, no! He didn't beat him to death, he "bought him out".
That is good thought! The thing software which is the simple problem where existing translation that it is developed applies algorithm to speech of real time very is healthy! Gorgeousness!
P.S. I used Babelfish for translating this post.
There goes my excuse to yell at the TV whenever Captain Picard says "magnify and enhance"!
No, but I know plenty of people who pump poisonous fumes out of their tailpipes because air is free. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that air not be free. I've seen Total Recall!
Besides, the grandparent post was obviously meant to be hyperbole, a "worst case" scenario meant to point out how things would be if we took our water as much for granted as we took our roads.
Hell yes, I've heard of The Turtles!
Oh, you meant the band? Well I've heard of them too, and most likely, so have you.
This should come as good news to the Girl Scouts of America, who in 1996 stopped singing "This Land is Your Land" at campfire events along with all other copyrighted music, at least officially.
I'm not sure that I entirely agree that the government should get involved at all, but I agree with your basic idea whole-heartedly. Anti-monopoly laws were enacted to deal with companies that could abuse their stranglehold on American business interests at large. Railroad monopolies hurt everyone that needed transportation, as did oil monopolies. Steel monopolies held back construction of the machinery needed to produce and distribute many products. Microsoft has become a good contemporary example because their software has permeated American business and government to such a degree that the software company could negatively impact the entire country by making a change in their business plan.
Entertainment, on the other hand, is not a necessity, as the parent poster said (even if you were to make the case that humans need entertainment to survive, we have many avenues for obtaining it that don't involve copyrighted materials). A monopoly on movie-making would at worst inconvenience everyone who wanted to watch movies and lead to an industry with crappy movies due to lack of competition. This is not life- or even economy-threatening. Sure, this would Suck(TM), but it's not a matter of "we need legislation to correct this now, now, NOW!"
The complication, and the point where I might disagree with the parent, come where entertainment companies are not limited to one medium these days. Often, the same conglomerate selling those DVDs is the conglomerate that puts the news on TV and possibly even in your local newspaper. Failing to regulate the companies in the matter of DVD pricing or region encoding could set a bad precedent for when news media monopolies become an issue that Congress or the courts want to deal with.
I am not a developer, so I'm interested to know if this idea is possible. Darwine will use a custom library for Win32 applications. How much power does that afford developers to change the way the libraries work? Could an OS X version of the Darwine libraries "intercept" the calls from the .exe and, for example, display the app's menu options in the menu bar instead of in the application window? How about replacing boring gray buttons in dialog windows with aquafied buttons? How about scroll bars?
If this is possible, I can see the potential for running windows apps while maintaining the Look & Feel of OS X in certain areas. Of course, this may be much, much more complicated than I am imagining. Could someone tell me if I'm on to something or just fantasizing?
There is a serious difference here. The word "spy" implies that someone is being monitored without their consent. This program is completely voluntary and does not hide its practices from the end users. If you don't want to be monitored, don't let them monitor you. Think of it like the following situation:
Spy: Can I put cameras in your bedroom and shower?
You: I guess that would be okay.
One week later
Spy: You really shouldn't eat all those crackers in bed.
You: What the-- you mean you were using the cameras to take pictures?!
All joking aside, sometimes the knowledge that your preferences may end up affecting change somewhere is enough incentive to give up a little privacy. If I could have saved Angel by having a Nielson box on my TV, that would be more than worth having some pollsters know that I sit at home every Friday night watching sleazy dating shows on cable.
Yeah, those were good times. Remember how hard it was in 1887 to get drivers for those bicycles with the big front wheel? And the railroad unions fought tooth and nail against releasing their drivers to the public.
They've effectively protected themselves from the threat of you buying a copy. Is that the copy protection they were going for?
It's true! If you play the scene in the special edition where they dubbed in Luke's scream backwards and at half speed, you can clearly hear a voice saying "George is dead." In the disputed scene where Luke is rumored to shout "Carrie!" he was actually saying "I buried George," but it was obscured by the music.
Please, that's just ridiculous. Let's try to approach this with some clarity of thought.
Notice: The message contained in this posting is under investigation by the legal team of Apple Computers, Inc. for the infringing use of the word "clarity".
I disagree. The tag for a link is an "a"? That only made sense before documents could be linked together (which means pre-version 3.0). Until Netscape muddied the waters, the only way to make text bold was with the "strong" tag, and italics were defined by the "em" tag. Neither of those were intuitive to anyone used to word processing or typesetting of any kind.
Besides, if you can use the same code you used in HTML 3 on your web page today and get the same results, what are you complaining about? If you want your page to be fancier, naturally that will involve learning more complex markup. You can't have it both ways.
"Vaccine" to prevent getting high from cocaine: Think of the potential for abuse! Keep your fascist, controlling technology away from me, you pleasure Nazis!
Pumping information directly into the brain: Sweet! Lay it on me! What could possibly go wrong?
It's still easy to make a web page that looks like it was made in 1996...if that's what you really want. The problem isn't that coding is harder than it used to be, the problem is that people's expectations have started to exceed their abilities more and more.
Back in 1996, the really "fancy" pages tended to suck, either because they were poorly designed or bloated and slow. The really streamlined, simple pages tended to be really nice and accessible, and even if they weren't pretty, they weren't ugly either.
Guess what? In 2004 those same streamlined pages still look just as good as they did in 1996. The fancy ones have all been replaced because they were so god-awful. Want to make an easy site that doesn't make people's eyes bleed? Stick to one font, a light background color (preferably white) with NO background image, and avoid all of the blinking, scrolling, and music-playing pageantry that is so popular among newbies. Surprise! You'll find that a page like that is really really easy to make - even now in the age of XML.
This is only a problem for pre-existing code and for people who already know HTML. If I were teaching a brand new user to write markup, this method makes just as much sense as the img tag, if not more.
I've given people introductory "crash courses" in HTML before, and they often go something like this: "A tag is used to format content. Except for the img tag. That one IS content. And you should always close your tags. Except the img tag. It stands alone because it's an object not a formatting tag."
Not terribly confusing, but it is inconsistent that tags in HTML represent formatting in some cases and content in others. This new method makes more sense to me, especially coming from a CSS-heavy background.
This works for you because when you're programming, you're "working hard". For me, a graphics professional, programming is screwing around for fun and making graphics is "working hard".
Photoshop was designed by graphics professionals for graphics professionals. Most people don't know half of what it can do. I know maybe 3/4 of what it can do, but I use almost all of that 3/4 on a regular basis.
The GIMP was designed by programmers for...well they think it's for graphic designers, but it's really for programmers who need to do some graphic design.
The "OSS is better because I can add my own features" argument doesn't hold up unless:
A.) You know how to add features (I sure don't) and B.) All the features you ever need get added. I know that I need high quality text tools and solid CMYK support in the GIMP. The fact that it is OSS has not provided these things yet, and it often takes years for new features to get implemented. Photoshop is not OSS, yet they add new features with every release.
The time between Photoshop 7.0 and 8.0 was about a year and a half. The GIMP has taken at least five years to get from version 1.0 to version 2.0. Admittedly, version increments tend to be different for OSS, but still! How much improvement has been made in the GIMP in five years compared to Photoshop?
Okay, I'm meandering now. Back to my basic point: rather than making a strong case for OSS as viable end-user software, you're pushing it even farther into the hobbyist zone by insisting that part of the value in OSS is how rewarding it is to mess with the code.
You may think you're joking, but according to the article, famed graphic designer and author of Envisioning Information Edward Tufte said just that. Of course, they buried his reply in the Googlemaniacs section of the article instead of putting it on the redesigns page.
I disagree. The computer industry isn't about making computers easy to use, it's about making them useful. Sometimes those two concepts are mutually exclusive, and you just can't continue to cater to the willfully ignorant forever.
Example: I'm a computer graphics professional working for a university's web department. Every so often, an administrative assistant who has been tasked with "updating the department web site" will call me up and ask me how to do something, like put an image on the site.
"Okay," I say. "It's pretty easy. You know how you would add a link to the page? It's kind of like that."
"Oh..." they reply. "How do you add a link?"
"Um, all right. Well, you use a tag, just like you would to make text bold or italic."
"Tag?"
"Do you know any HTML at all?"
"Oh, no! I don't know how to program or any of that stuff. I just know how to change the text that's already there and I need to know how to insert an image."
There are several solutions to this person's problem. The most useful would be to teach them HTML. Once they were familiar with it, they'd never have problems editing a simple, static web page.
They could also use a WYSIWYG web editor. That's easier, but still not easy. Most of the time, people who use them that don't know HTML as well end up compromising because they can't figure out how to make Dreamweaver do exactly what they need.
The easiest solution would be to make all web pages text-only and update them with "Plain Old Text" interfaces. Line breaks would be automatically detected, white space would be recognized, and everything would make perfect sense to the user. The problem is, it's not useful.
In the end, the only way to make things easy for a technophobe is to strip away features. That's not our job. Our job is to balance usefulness with ease of use. A better term would be "usability".
It looks pretty cool, in a science fictiony way, but why build something with four legs? Popular wisdom states that, when building a walking robot, six legs or more is preferable. And that's under ordinary circumstances, such as walking across uneven terrain. What happens when a mortar takes off one of its legs?
Unless it needs to climb stairs or hop up into vehicles, it seems like tank treads would be the most practical solution. On the other hand, a robotic dog might be effective in psychological intimidation.
When I said "head scarves in public institutions," that was a broad statement that covered several situations. Most of the laws do refer to any and all conspicuous religious symbols, which I still just as intolerant as if head scarves were the only thing banned. They are discriminating against anyone who practices a religion instead of against a particular religion.
My examples are:
France, with the law you mentioned.
Germany, who is dealing with similar laws (I admit ignorance as to whether the laws already exist or if they're just being proposed)
The Netherlands, where hospital workers in Brussels are forbidden for wearing religious clothing on the job.
And most American schools don't teach creationism. We have something called "states' rights", under which individual states can set their own public school curriculum, so you need to examine that issue on a state-by-state basis, not as an "American" issue.
If I had mod points, I would give them to you. Thank you for providing some context and a perspective from someone that has actually experienced these countries in person. Many of us enjoy writing our own dissertations about how the world "is" and how it "ought to be" without ever experiencing it firsthand. I appreciate your insight.