If we don't use her previous work as a lawyer as a basis of judgement, exactly how should we judge her? Or should we simply confirm her as a Supremen Court Justice and hope for the best?
My suggestion would be to not appoint her until she has shown a record of some kind that will be useful in determining whether she is appropriate. Of course, I'm not an elected representative of the US people, so I have no choice in the matter. Probably what Bush is hoping is that as there is little useful past history that can be pointed out by the opposition, few will oppose her appointment. We really don't know what her views are on any of the important issues, and she might seem a more benign appointment than some candidates we know have outspoken views.
Yes, but the point to consider is that lawyers (particularly corporate ones) really don't have much choice about the cases they take. They take the one that's presented and do the best job they can to argue it in favour of their client, or they get fired. That's basically the job description.
Now, if she had, for instance, breached client confidentiality, or had a history of losing important cases, or something like that, it might be relevant for determining how she would perform as a judge. However, I don't believe either of these is the case.
That report uses a substantially different definition of lower class (earning less than $25,000 per annum) than the post you replied to (working in a job that requires manual labour).
I think what the report you cite really means is that the middle class (by GP's definition) is earning less than they used to -- which is a likely outcome if the assertion that their numbers are growing is true.
Yeah, there are plenty of UK retailers who use Linux at POS. HSS Hire Shops run SuSE. National Tyre run some Unix variant, I'm not sure which, but I'd guess Linux: the licencing costs of any non-free Unix are going to be insane for this kind of application.
Is it just me that thinks the Windows version of GIMP is the biggest POS ever to be bundled up with a supposed compatibility layer for an OS other than the one it was written for and described as a native application?
I mean, it doesn't even make a pretence of following windows conventions:
* It puts its per-user temporary files under "c:\documents and settings\username\.gimp", including its temporary files. That's a big no-no; the user profile directory is highly likely to be located on a network server. These files should be in...\username\Application Data\Gimp and...\username\Local Settings\Gimp.
* The open and save dialog boxes don't work right. There's nowhere to type filenames, so you can't open files with a UNC filename. If you double click on a shortcut it tries to open the shortcut, not the file/folder it points to. There's no way to use a user-specified file filter in the open dialog, so if you just want to see 'a*.jpg' you're out of luck.
* While starting up, it runs hundreds of processes (one per installed filter). While this kind of behaviour is OK on most Unix systems, process startup is *very* expensive on Windows. The filters should probably be DLLs that have a main procedure that's executed in a thread; it would be a much more efficient implementation.
* It uses an MDI interface without an MDI top level window. The menu is associated with a tool palette window. Closing that window causes all of the others to close. This is utterly non-standard behaviour for Windows, which has a standard solution to this problem that GIMP doesn't use (presumably because it's very hard to implement in X).
I think GIMP is a fine application for Unix-like systems, but just because you can make it run under Windows doesn't mean it's a good Windows one.
You seem to have missed Joe Straczynski. Babylon 5 did all of the things you mention (admittedly only over 5 seasons, not 7). Go and watch it start to finish over the course of the next couple of months if you don't believe me.
I'm personally convinced that B5 was the best TV ever written. Some of Whedon's stuff comes pretty close, though.
Actually, real books are free. Get a library card.
Do you know how much it costs the public to run the public library system? In a recent survey [pdf document] of UK libraries, the cost of running them came to 66 - 147 GBP per annum per active borrower. It isn't cheap. What you're really saying is "we've already paid for a whole load of real books," which is a true enough comment.
An e-book library could be substantially cheaper to run. Each library could hold a much wider selection of titles; they'd only need to keep in enough readers for everyone likely to want to borrow one at any given time. Physical space would not be as much of an issue, as e-book cases (which would presumably be placed on shelves to allow browsers to find them, as that seems to be how people prefer to look for such things) take up much less space than books. And as the duplication cost of an e-book (even one on CD or similar media) is lower than that of a printed book, the cost of acquiring them should be reduced. Also, they should theoretically have a longer lifespan (particularly if the library is permitted to perform their own duplication for backup purposes), so will not need replacing as frequently in the case of frequently borrowed works.
Yes. For instance, note that the organisation that has issued these claims in an association of authors, not publishers. Also, read any book on the subject aimed at authors. "An Author's Guide To Publishing" by Michael Legat states: "Unless there are very special reasons for doing so, you should never surrender the copyright in your work, but instead you should grant your publisher a licence to publish"; every other book I have seen on the subject contains something similar.
Also, consider the fact that most books that are published in more than one country are handled by a different publisher in each of those countries. Also, paperback issues are frequently published by a different publisher to the hardback version. If the publisher held copyright, this kind of arrangement would be next-to-impossible.
Also, all of the authors I know through online forums (and there are a few of them) hold copyright in their own books. None of them are self published. These people are published by companies such as Baen, Random House, Tor, Bantam, Hodder & Stoughton and other well known publishers. If you look at the statistics, you'll find that almost all of the books sold in the English-speaking world are produced by these companies and a very small number of others.
Looking at the books I have here, the only counterexamples I can find are textbooks and reference books, and media tie-in novels.
The explanation is simple. The publisher of this book has opted in to the program to allow some pages of the book to be shown, similarly to the way that pages of the same book can be downloaded from Amazon.
It would be best, of course, for Google to attempt to work out an amiable solution with authors without crippling their service to an unreasonable extent
The problem with this approach is, who do they negotatiate with? The Authors' Guild does not represent every author, nor does it claim to. In fact, they only represent a very small minority (about 8,000). Should they also negotiate with the Science Fiction Writers of America (1,500 members), Romance Writers of America (1,600 members with published books), Mystery Writers of America (no obvious stats on their web site, but undoubtedly similar to the other two mentioned), similar organisations for other genres, similar organisations for other nations, other non-genre organisations, etc?
If a book is out of print it is unlikely that the publisher will opt-in.
It isn't up to the publishers. In most cases, the copyright of books is held by the author. This would, of course, make things very difficult for google if they were to operate an opt-in scheme: rather than deal with a few hundred publishers, they have to deal with hundreds of thousands of authors, and the managers of their estates for those who are now deceased. This is impractical for obvious reasons.
Not necessarily; if all they keep is a content addressable hash which would not allow retrieval of the content except by specifying nearby content, the database may not be taken as a reproduction of the whole work, rather numerous reproductions of small portions of the work, each of which exists independently and for a different purpose. They may get away with this.
Also, reproducing the whole of a work does not exclude it from being fair use; the purpose for which the reproduction is made is taken into account. E.g., web caches make copies of pages their users request. This is considered to be fair use, despite the fact that a copy of the entire page is made.
I believe you are misreading the emphasis in that sentence:
To make good on this offer, defendant purchased tens of thousands of popular CDs in which plaintiffs held the copyrights, and, without authorization, copied their recordings onto its computer servers so as to be able to replay the [*3] recordings for its subscribers.
I've not read the US Copyright laws for some time, but most modern such laws include a forbidden activity which is to "store copyright material in an information retrieval system without the permission of the rights holder", which is generally held to be equivalent to supplying the material to any end user who has access to that "information retrieval system". i.e., no downloading is necessary for an offence to be committed, merely placing the data on a publically accessible server.
What exactly is "perfect DRM", and how is it a mathematical impossibility?
"Perfect DRM" is a system that allows the user to "play back" a digital media object of some kind (music file, video, e-book -- it doesn't matter what), but does not allow the user to directly access the data it contains.
It is impossible because there is no way of preventing the user from simulating the behaviour of the viewing system and copying the data from there.
think most publishers would settle for "cracking the DRM" to be as hard/expensive for e-books as it is for dead tree ones, and that's not hard at all as long as you control the hardware.
Not good enough. The problem is that there's a per-copy cost associated with copying dead tree books, whereas for digital books that cost is tiny. Plus, you only need to crack the DRM once and you'll have access to all of the data from all of the books that use it. This can then go onto a p2p network of some kind and then you only need one person to crack the DRM in the world.
People do photocopy books; it's just not enough of a problem for the publishers because it's a time consuming and expensive process that makes one copy, so not many people do it. The digital equivalent can quickly and easily make millions of copies of every book they've published -- it'll take more effort for somebody to work out how to do it, but the reward is *much* greater. It will happen.
Unfortunately, due to a bug that was reported a very long time ago but still hasn't been fixed, if the "most recently used window" happens to be a javascript popup window with toolbars disabled, there's no way of switching to the page you just opened. It can get very confusing...
* The Avalon API * Window scaling (which will allow the use of apps that aren't sensitive to physical display resolution with very high resolution monitors)
Now, it seems Avalon will be available for XP, so it's just the window scaling.
Yep. Because we all know and love the concept of ActiveX.
There's very little wrong with ActiveX, per se. Now the idea of extending a browser so that documents from untrusted sources have access to use it, that's a little silly. No, OK, that's really ****ing stupid. But ActiveX itself is fine.
ah, another reason NOT to upgrade. So why are they doing this? Perhaps its to try to keep people from defecting to linux, or to OSX or another of the BSDs.
No, it's quite simple: they've put a significant investment into a new API ('Avalon'), and they want developers to start using it. Now the developers have had a chance to play with the beta version, they're all saying, "that's nice -- maybe I'll start using it some time in about 5 years when most people already have Vista". But MS wants the developers to start using it now, because it will undoubtedly work *better* on Vista than previous Windows versions, and when apps start using it it will therefore provide more incentive to switch. Simple really.
real books require no power, are cheap, have excellent contrast, great form factor, are durable, and last a long time
why do we even need e-books?
"Real" books are *not* cheap. Production and distribution costs for a paperback book are typically $3-$5 US. Production and distribution costs of an e-book are almost zero, except that the reader needs a display device (~ $50 production and distribution cost). So if the average reader will purchase more than 10 books there are cost savings to be had.
The problem is, at present, those savings are not being passed on to the reader. That needs to start happening before the public will consider e-books seriously.
No. Perfect DRM is a mathematical impossibility. Imperfect DRM will be cracked, eventually, if enough people care about it. It only needs to be cracked once and it is then nearly useless.
I buy programming books like candy. I've noticed that recently the quality of the printed texts are going way, way down. More errors in code, more misspellings, cheaper paper, etc.
I don't think quality is declining -- your standards are improving. I recently reread a few of the C / C++ programming books I bought 10-15 years ago. Most of them included program listings that wouldn't compile. All but one recommended blatantly bad practices, such as declaring 'void main(void)' or discussed in-depth how to use nonstandard extensions provided by one compiler vendor or another, with hardly a word of warning about portability implications.
Completely built on top of.NET for Avalon, Sparkle is a (even more than a) UI development tool for creating vector based interfaces. The beautiful thing is, everything you create is just a.NET object that can be manipulated by the developer.
Yes & No. It creates XAML objects, which can be used by.NET applications, but will also apparently be supported by IE7 for developing web interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
If we don't use her previous work as a lawyer as a basis of judgement, exactly how should we judge her? Or should we simply confirm her as a Supremen Court Justice and hope for the best?
My suggestion would be to not appoint her until she has shown a record of some kind that will be useful in determining whether she is appropriate. Of course, I'm not an elected representative of the US people, so I have no choice in the matter. Probably what Bush is hoping is that as there is little useful past history that can be pointed out by the opposition, few will oppose her appointment. We really don't know what her views are on any of the important issues, and she might seem a more benign appointment than some candidates we know have outspoken views.
Yes, but the point to consider is that lawyers (particularly corporate ones) really don't have much choice about the cases they take. They take the one that's presented and do the best job they can to argue it in favour of their client, or they get fired. That's basically the job description.
Now, if she had, for instance, breached client confidentiality, or had a history of losing important cases, or something like that, it might be relevant for determining how she would perform as a judge. However, I don't believe either of these is the case.
That report uses a substantially different definition of lower class (earning less than $25,000 per annum) than the post you replied to (working in a job that requires manual labour).
I think what the report you cite really means is that the middle class (by GP's definition) is earning less than they used to -- which is a likely outcome if the assertion that their numbers are growing is true.
Yeah, there are plenty of UK retailers who use Linux at POS. HSS Hire Shops run SuSE. National Tyre run some Unix variant, I'm not sure which, but I'd guess Linux: the licencing costs of any non-free Unix are going to be insane for this kind of application.
Is it just me that thinks the Windows version of GIMP is the biggest POS ever to be bundled up with a supposed compatibility layer for an OS other than the one it was written for and described as a native application?
...\username\Application Data\Gimp and ...\username\Local Settings\Gimp.
I mean, it doesn't even make a pretence of following windows conventions:
* It puts its per-user temporary files under "c:\documents and settings\username\.gimp", including its temporary files. That's a big no-no; the user profile directory is highly likely to be located on a network server. These files should be in
* The open and save dialog boxes don't work right. There's nowhere to type filenames, so you can't open files with a UNC filename. If you double click on a shortcut it tries to open the shortcut, not the file/folder it points to. There's no way to use a user-specified file filter in the open dialog, so if you just want to see 'a*.jpg' you're out of luck.
* While starting up, it runs hundreds of processes (one per installed filter). While this kind of behaviour is OK on most Unix systems, process startup is *very* expensive on Windows. The filters should probably be DLLs that have a main procedure that's executed in a thread; it would be a much more efficient implementation.
* It uses an MDI interface without an MDI top level window. The menu is associated with a tool palette window. Closing that window causes all of the others to close. This is utterly non-standard behaviour for Windows, which has a standard solution to this problem that GIMP doesn't use (presumably because it's very hard to implement in X).
I think GIMP is a fine application for Unix-like systems, but just because you can make it run under Windows doesn't mean it's a good Windows one.
You seem to have missed Joe Straczynski. Babylon 5 did all of the things you mention (admittedly only over 5 seasons, not 7). Go and watch it start to finish over the course of the next couple of months if you don't believe me.
I'm personally convinced that B5 was the best TV ever written. Some of Whedon's stuff comes pretty close, though.
How do you get around the stuff that likes root to be r-w, like /etc/mtab?
/var/etc, or something like that.
/var anyway; it's only in /etc for historic reasons/because of bad design.
Symlink these files to copies in
Really, this stuff should be in
Actually, real books are free. Get a library card.
Do you know how much it costs the public to run the public library system? In a recent survey [pdf document] of UK libraries, the cost of running them came to 66 - 147 GBP per annum per active borrower. It isn't cheap. What you're really saying is "we've already paid for a whole load of real books," which is a true enough comment.
An e-book library could be substantially cheaper to run. Each library could hold a much wider selection of titles; they'd only need to keep in enough readers for everyone likely to want to borrow one at any given time. Physical space would not be as much of an issue, as e-book cases (which would presumably be placed on shelves to allow browsers to find them, as that seems to be how people prefer to look for such things) take up much less space than books. And as the duplication cost of an e-book (even one on CD or similar media) is lower than that of a printed book, the cost of acquiring them should be reduced. Also, they should theoretically have a longer lifespan (particularly if the library is permitted to perform their own duplication for backup purposes), so will not need replacing as frequently in the case of frequently borrowed works.
Yes. For instance, note that the organisation that has issued these claims in an association of authors, not publishers. Also, read any book on the subject aimed at authors. "An Author's Guide To Publishing" by Michael Legat states: "Unless there are very special reasons for doing so, you should never surrender the copyright in your work, but instead you should grant your publisher a licence to publish"; every other book I have seen on the subject contains something similar.
Also, consider the fact that most books that are published in more than one country are handled by a different publisher in each of those countries. Also, paperback issues are frequently published by a different publisher to the hardback version. If the publisher held copyright, this kind of arrangement would be next-to-impossible.
Also, all of the authors I know through online forums (and there are a few of them) hold copyright in their own books. None of them are self published. These people are published by companies such as Baen, Random House, Tor, Bantam, Hodder & Stoughton and other well known publishers. If you look at the statistics, you'll find that almost all of the books sold in the English-speaking world are produced by these companies and a very small number of others.
Looking at the books I have here, the only counterexamples I can find are textbooks and reference books, and media tie-in novels.
Want some direct proof? Here is a simple example:
f
http://img394.imageshack.us/img394/1103/aaa9lo.gi
The explanation is simple. The publisher of this book has opted in to the program to allow some pages of the book to be shown, similarly to the way that pages of the same book can be downloaded from Amazon.
It would be best, of course, for Google to attempt to work out an amiable solution with authors without crippling their service to an unreasonable extent
The problem with this approach is, who do they negotatiate with? The Authors' Guild does not represent every author, nor does it claim to. In fact, they only represent a very small minority (about 8,000). Should they also negotiate with the Science Fiction Writers of America (1,500 members), Romance Writers of America (1,600 members with published books), Mystery Writers of America (no obvious stats on their web site, but undoubtedly similar to the other two mentioned), similar organisations for other genres, similar organisations for other nations, other non-genre organisations, etc?
If a book is out of print it is unlikely that the publisher will opt-in.
It isn't up to the publishers. In most cases, the copyright of books is held by the author. This would, of course, make things very difficult for google if they were to operate an opt-in scheme: rather than deal with a few hundred publishers, they have to deal with hundreds of thousands of authors, and the managers of their estates for those who are now deceased. This is impractical for obvious reasons.
And like with robots.txt, Google offers publishers the ability to opt out of this scheme too.
What have the publishers to do with this? The copyrights of most books are held by their authors, not their publishers.
Not necessarily; if all they keep is a content addressable hash which would not allow retrieval of the content except by specifying nearby content, the database may not be taken as a reproduction of the whole work, rather numerous reproductions of small portions of the work, each of which exists independently and for a different purpose. They may get away with this.
Also, reproducing the whole of a work does not exclude it from being fair use; the purpose for which the reproduction is made is taken into account. E.g., web caches make copies of pages their users request. This is considered to be fair use, despite the fact that a copy of the entire page is made.
I believe you are misreading the emphasis in that sentence:
To make good on this offer, defendant purchased tens of thousands of popular CDs in which plaintiffs held the copyrights, and, without authorization, copied their recordings onto its computer servers so as to be able to replay the [*3] recordings for its subscribers.
I've not read the US Copyright laws for some time, but most modern such laws include a forbidden activity which is to "store copyright material in an information retrieval system without the permission of the rights holder", which is generally held to be equivalent to supplying the material to any end user who has access to that "information retrieval system". i.e., no downloading is necessary for an offence to be committed, merely placing the data on a publically accessible server.
What exactly is "perfect DRM", and how is it a mathematical impossibility?
"Perfect DRM" is a system that allows the user to "play back" a digital media object of some kind (music file, video, e-book -- it doesn't matter what), but does not allow the user to directly access the data it contains.
It is impossible because there is no way of preventing the user from simulating the behaviour of the viewing system and copying the data from there.
think most publishers would settle for "cracking the DRM" to be as hard/expensive for e-books as it is for dead tree ones, and that's not hard at all as long as you control the hardware.
Not good enough. The problem is that there's a per-copy cost associated with copying dead tree books, whereas for digital books that cost is tiny. Plus, you only need to crack the DRM once and you'll have access to all of the data from all of the books that use it. This can then go onto a p2p network of some kind and then you only need one person to crack the DRM in the world.
People do photocopy books; it's just not enough of a problem for the publishers because it's a time consuming and expensive process that makes one copy, so not many people do it. The digital equivalent can quickly and easily make millions of copies of every book they've published -- it'll take more effort for somebody to work out how to do it, but the reward is *much* greater. It will happen.
Unfortunately, due to a bug that was reported a very long time ago but still hasn't been fixed, if the "most recently used window" happens to be a javascript popup window with toolbars disabled, there's no way of switching to the page you just opened. It can get very confusing...
Up until this announcement there were two things:
:)
* The Avalon API
* Window scaling (which will allow the use of apps that aren't sensitive to physical display resolution with very high resolution monitors)
Now, it seems Avalon will be available for XP, so it's just the window scaling.
Oh, well.
What I want to know is when they'll separate the virus, bug and backdoor bits of windows into layers, so I can use them on other platforms.
Huh? Internet Explorer is already available for MacOS and Solaris.
Yep. Because we all know and love the concept of ActiveX.
There's very little wrong with ActiveX, per se. Now the idea of extending a browser so that documents from untrusted sources have access to use it, that's a little silly. No, OK, that's really ****ing stupid. But ActiveX itself is fine.
Also, from the article:
... older versions of Windows
eventually ported to
ah, another reason NOT to upgrade. So why are they doing this? Perhaps its to try to keep people from defecting to linux, or to OSX or another of the BSDs.
No, it's quite simple: they've put a significant investment into a new API ('Avalon'), and they want developers to start using it. Now the developers have had a chance to play with the beta version, they're all saying, "that's nice -- maybe I'll start using it some time in about 5 years when most people already have Vista". But MS wants the developers to start using it now, because it will undoubtedly work *better* on Vista than previous Windows versions, and when apps start using it it will therefore provide more incentive to switch. Simple really.
real books require no power, are cheap, have excellent contrast, great form factor, are durable, and last a long time
why do we even need e-books?
"Real" books are *not* cheap. Production and distribution costs for a paperback book are typically $3-$5 US. Production and distribution costs of an e-book are almost zero, except that the reader needs a display device (~ $50 production and distribution cost). So if the average reader will purchase more than 10 books there are cost savings to be had.
The problem is, at present, those savings are not being passed on to the reader. That needs to start happening before the public will consider e-books seriously.
Is DRM the answer?
No. Perfect DRM is a mathematical impossibility. Imperfect DRM will be cracked, eventually, if enough people care about it. It only needs to be cracked once and it is then nearly useless.
I buy programming books like candy. I've noticed that recently the quality of the printed texts are going way, way down. More errors in code, more misspellings, cheaper paper, etc.
I don't think quality is declining -- your standards are improving. I recently reread a few of the C / C++ programming books I bought 10-15 years ago. Most of them included program listings that wouldn't compile. All but one recommended blatantly bad practices, such as declaring 'void main(void)' or discussed in-depth how to use nonstandard extensions provided by one compiler vendor or another, with hardly a word of warning about portability implications.
The XML header isn't mandatory, at least for XML 1.0. The parent's post is fine.
::= XMLDecl? Misc* (doctypedecl Misc*)?
[22] prolog
source
Sparkle != Flash
.NET for Avalon, Sparkle is a (even more than a) UI development tool for creating vector based interfaces. The beautiful thing is, everything you create is just a .NET object that can be manipulated by the developer.
.NET applications, but will also apparently be supported by IE7 for developing web interfaces.
Completely built on top of
Yes & No. It creates XAML objects, which can be used by
So it can do both.