Minimo needs a giant chunk of memory all its own. Like min. 32MB, and usually 64MB. It's NOT streamlined. It's barely even in beta! Why this article is here is totally beyond me.
Try running firefox in 32Mb and see how far you get. How streamlined it is depends where it came from, as much as where it is going...
IE typically requires 10Mb of RAM + about 2-3 Mb per window over & above OS overheads (on my system, OS overhead is about 7Mb). So, yes, you could use a modern version of desktop IE on a 32Mb machine. I've seen older versions running on 16Mb, although it's painful to watch.
Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain Just what percentage of the current works are public domain?
With a catalogue that size, probably most of them. The number of new books published per year isn't actually all that huge -- even if you acquired everything published in the US, I would expect it to take a long time for you to reach 15 million items.
Note that, for instance, the LoC has 29 million books, which is understood to be a significant fraction of every book published in the US since 1800.
Apparently the Bodleian only has 7.2 million volumes, so this is larger than that collection.
The British Library apparently has "150 million items" according to their web site, but a large number of these are not books (they claim, for instance, to have 8 million stamps). But, I'm pretty sure they have more than 15 million books.
Whether or not they have more books than the Library of Congress is an interesting question.
He writes one good episode of star trek, and then guy things the shit comes from his ass are gold bricks.
Please spare me any drivel about his "early good stuff". Re-read it. His stuff really does suck.
Fair point, although I'd argue that the episodes he wrote for the Outer Limits and Babylon 5 were pretty good, too. I don't think he's a brilliant writer, although he does seem to inspire a lot of people. But he does seem to have an "attitude problem" -- from what I've seen about him he is very prone to going of on long rants.
But how this is relevant to the present discussion, which is whether there is any legal recourse against ISPs who run USENET servers on which copyright material is stored, is beyond me.
There is no protection. Encryption cannot hide what you are sharing, otherwise the downloader wouldn't be able to actually use what he'd downloaded. Freenet only works because of the legal loophole that if you aren't aware of what the content you're sharing is, you can't be held responsible for it (this is present in most of the world, but not guaranteed to be true everywhere). What you're looking for is, unfortunately, impossible.
You can always make the key something like a short poem or haiku and copyright it:)
I was reading a supreme court decision recently (it was linked from slashdot) regarding the Lexmark compatible toner cartridge case. There was wording in there that specifically suggested that no copyright exists on something that performs a function and is the only possible (or even reasonable) arrangement that will perform that function. This seems to exclude the haiku-as-key argument from being valid.
Come the verdict of the case, you're held liable for infringing a MPAA member's copyright of a commercially viable product that they regularly sell copies of for not insubstantial money. Award made to them: let's say it's $10,000. Not unreasonable. I think they _can_ get more than that.
Then it comes to your case. They infringed copyright on your tiny bit of extra work added to the file (as suggested by the previous poster, a name is not enough, but you could add some graphics at the start and end of the movie, for instance). This is something that isn't commercially viable, that you don't and couldn't make a profit from, and is clearly just there so that you can claim copyright. But, the law says they did violate your copyright, and there's nothing that can be done about that. You're awarded $100 as a reasonable figure for what a license for that work might have cost.
Agreed. Although over time people with currently-hyped projects may pass over onto the first list, rather than drop off the second list. E.g., I'd currently put both Tim Bray and Guido van Rossum (and perhaps Linus Torvalds) on your second list, but I'd seriously expect them to move to the first over the next 5-10 years.
Knuth, like alot of these "top twenty", are just Ivory Tower acadamics with no real applications in industry. Where is Bill Gates? He bought computing to the people. Whoever made VB should also be mentioned.
Sorry, a lot of people consider TeX to be a very important, "real application". So what if the industry it is most important to (production of technical documents) is one that you don't consider important?
Gates' programming work is all highly derivitive. He mainly worked on MS's BASIC interpreter, I believe. Nothing brilliant. You'll note, however, that Dave Cutler, author of the Windows NT kernel (and thus Win2K and WinXP by extension) _is_ on the list. That's software to the people.
Or is there some technical reason that they can't do anything about them?
I believe Harlan Ellison successfully sued somebody who was posting copies of his stories to alt.binaries.e-books (or similar). He also tried to sue AOL, who settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
See details here: http://www.authorslawyer.com/c-ellison.shtml
Encrypt the file (breaking it would violate their own laws, should they pass)
No it wouldn't. It's only illegal to break encryption if it forms an effective copyright protection measure (I forget the exact terminology, but that's close enough). In this case, it wouldn't actually be protecting anyone's copyright, so they would be legally entitled to break it.
and give out the key in a special license, so that anyone/anycorporation/anyorganization that uses the key in any way forfeits all ability to punish anyone/anocorporation/anyorganization for it's contents.
The legality of such a license is questionable, at best. First of all, can an encryption key (a purely functional item, usually automatically designed) be considered copyrightable? If not, then you do not need a license to use it. Secondly, can a license take away a person's rights to their own IP? I wouldn't have thought so.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. TALK TO SOMEBODY QUALIFIED IN YOUR JURISDICTION IF UNCERTAIN.
There are potential legal problems from using a file sharing network that does not allow you to prevent automatic uploads. BitTorrent is not the only such network: I'm also aware that ED2K has the same system, and some modern Gnutella clients (although it can be disabled in these).
That said, it has been suggested that as the uploading in the case of these networks is an automatic function of the software you are using, and does not require any explicit action on your behalf, you are less likely to be held legally accountable for it than if (e.g.) you were to share the file on networks where this does not happen, or were to seed a new torrent, etc.
This of course depends on how sympathetic your local judicial system is to downloaders, etc.
You see... having a sense of humour means finding things funny when they are.
I don't believe this is funny. The netcraft/korea/soviet russia jokes were all funny to start with. OK, so they've been regurgitated too many times (and the korean one's only been around for a week or two and is already old). But what's funny about using 666 with no context around it to make it amusing? It just comes across as odd.
The interesting thing is that both DS9 and B5 tried the "soap opera" class of sci fi, but DS9 pulled it off.
The first half of DS9 was single show format with occasional character changes, by the time they switched in seasons 4-5 they already had a dedicated set of viewers watching it.
B5 tried to do it from the beginning and it's very difficult to see every ep of a new show when it comes on (unless you have mythtv or whatever) so most people would miss an episode or two and just toss the show.
Whereas I gave up on watching DS9 before it got good. Seriously, the first couple of series were dreadful. I got to thinking that if I watched another episode about Sisko's kid (what's his name? been a while since I watched any) doing something he shouldn't and getting into trouble I'd probably have to destroy my TV, so I stopped.
And it is quite possible to watch B5 without seeing every episode, particularly of the first series, most of which was rather episodic. You might find something further down the line (either in the next few episodes, or somewhere in the next couple of series) you don't entirely understand, but it's a tolerable loss.
Same problem with 24, hard to get new people into it unless they really want to put the effort:)
Whereas all I find with 24 is you have to see the first episode of a series and the general reaction is "ok, do you have a copy of the next one?" Turn up at a friend's house with a DVD-R with 5 episodes on it, and you won't be doing anything else for the next 4 hours. I seriously don't know how to stop watching that show, even if the plot is ridiculously flawed (some of those twists just defy logic), their technology ridiculously inept (how long did it take for them to trace that phone call in series 1? and someone encrypted data with a system where you could _partially_ reconstruct the original?), and the technobabble using jargon in wierd and painful ways (often making me want to shout at the scriptwriters, "you don't know what a socket is, so stop using the word that way!").
Put that way, I'm not sure why I like it. But I do. Hmmm.
That'd be one of the "normal steps of the publishing process" -- having an editor who knows what they're doing read your book and decide whether it's good enough or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Minimo needs a giant chunk of memory all its own. Like min. 32MB, and usually 64MB.
It's NOT streamlined. It's barely even in beta! Why this article is here is totally beyond me.
Try running firefox in 32Mb and see how far you get. How streamlined it is depends where it came from, as much as where it is going...
anyone who uses Opera knows that even firefox is bloatware
Hell, anyone who uses IE knows that firefox is bloatware. 48 megs on my system, to keep 4 tabs open.
4 open IE windows takes 27 megs. That's only slightly over half as much memory to do the same job.
Firefox has a long way to go.
IE typically requires 10Mb of RAM + about 2-3 Mb per window over & above OS overheads (on my system, OS overhead is about 7Mb). So, yes, you could use a modern version of desktop IE on a 32Mb machine. I've seen older versions running on 16Mb, although it's painful to watch.
Not to mention the British Library, which is larger than the Library of Congress.
But of course, that doesn't come after the LoC, so whether that makes the story factually inaccurate, or just misleading, is an interesting question.
Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain Just what percentage of the current works are public domain?
With a catalogue that size, probably most of them. The number of new books published per year isn't actually all that huge -- even if you acquired everything published in the US, I would expect it to take a long time for you to reach 15 million items.
Note that, for instance, the LoC has 29 million books, which is understood to be a significant fraction of every book published in the US since 1800.
Apparently the Bodleian only has 7.2 million volumes, so this is larger than that collection.
The British Library apparently has "150 million items" according to their web site, but a large number of these are not books (they claim, for instance, to have 8 million stamps). But, I'm pretty sure they have more than 15 million books.
Whether or not they have more books than the Library of Congress is an interesting question.
He writes one good episode of star trek, and then guy things the shit comes from his ass are gold bricks.
Please spare me any drivel about his "early good stuff". Re-read it. His stuff really does suck.
Fair point, although I'd argue that the episodes he wrote for the Outer Limits and Babylon 5 were pretty good, too. I don't think he's a brilliant writer, although he does seem to inspire a lot of people. But he does seem to have an "attitude problem" -- from what I've seen about him he is very prone to going of on long rants.
But how this is relevant to the present discussion, which is whether there is any legal recourse against ISPs who run USENET servers on which copyright material is stored, is beyond me.
There is no protection. Encryption cannot hide what you are sharing, otherwise the downloader wouldn't be able to actually use what he'd downloaded. Freenet only works because of the legal loophole that if you aren't aware of what the content you're sharing is, you can't be held responsible for it (this is present in most of the world, but not guaranteed to be true everywhere). What you're looking for is, unfortunately, impossible.
I already responded to this suggestion when another poster made it. I don't think it works, sorry.
See this response to somebody else suggesting the same approach
You can always make the key something like a short poem or haiku and copyright it :)
I was reading a supreme court decision recently (it was linked from slashdot) regarding the Lexmark compatible toner cartridge case. There was wording in there that specifically suggested that no copyright exists on something that performs a function and is the only possible (or even reasonable) arrangement that will perform that function. This seems to exclude the haiku-as-key argument from being valid.
Specifically state that users are not allowed to reverse engineer the app, ect
No, sorry. In much of the world reverse engineering is a protected right. Won't work.
OK, you could take this approach.
Come the verdict of the case, you're held liable for infringing a MPAA member's copyright of a commercially viable product that they regularly sell copies of for not insubstantial money. Award made to them: let's say it's $10,000. Not unreasonable. I think they _can_ get more than that.
Then it comes to your case. They infringed copyright on your tiny bit of extra work added to the file (as suggested by the previous poster, a name is not enough, but you could add some graphics at the start and end of the movie, for instance). This is something that isn't commercially viable, that you don't and couldn't make a profit from, and is clearly just there so that you can claim copyright. But, the law says they did violate your copyright, and there's nothing that can be done about that. You're awarded $100 as a reasonable figure for what a license for that work might have cost.
How does that help you?
Agreed. Although over time people with currently-hyped projects may pass over onto the first list, rather than drop off the second list. E.g., I'd currently put both Tim Bray and Guido van Rossum (and perhaps Linus Torvalds) on your second list, but I'd seriously expect them to move to the first over the next 5-10 years.
Knuth, like alot of these "top twenty", are just Ivory Tower acadamics with no real applications in industry. Where is Bill Gates? He bought computing to the people. Whoever made VB should also be mentioned.
Sorry, a lot of people consider TeX to be a very important, "real application". So what if the industry it is most important to (production of technical documents) is one that you don't consider important?
Gates' programming work is all highly derivitive. He mainly worked on MS's BASIC interpreter, I believe. Nothing brilliant. You'll note, however, that Dave Cutler, author of the Windows NT kernel (and thus Win2K and WinXP by extension) _is_ on the list. That's software to the people.
Yet they, struggling to find a token woman for their list, come up with some venture capitalist that nobody has ever heard of outside of Silly Valley?
Not even Grace Hopper, developer of the first compiled high level programming language? Sheesh.
Or is there some technical reason that they can't do anything about them?
I believe Harlan Ellison successfully sued somebody who was posting copies of his stories to alt.binaries.e-books (or similar). He also tried to sue AOL, who settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
See details here: http://www.authorslawyer.com/c-ellison.shtml
Encrypt the file (breaking it would violate their own laws, should they pass)
No it wouldn't. It's only illegal to break encryption if it forms an effective copyright protection measure (I forget the exact terminology, but that's close enough). In this case, it wouldn't actually be protecting anyone's copyright, so they would be legally entitled to break it.
and give out the key in a special license, so that anyone/anycorporation/anyorganization that uses the key in any way forfeits all ability to punish anyone/anocorporation/anyorganization for it's contents.
The legality of such a license is questionable, at best. First of all, can an encryption key (a purely functional item, usually automatically designed) be considered copyrightable? If not, then you do not need a license to use it. Secondly, can a license take away a person's rights to their own IP? I wouldn't have thought so.
IANAL, etc.
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. TALK TO SOMEBODY QUALIFIED IN YOUR JURISDICTION IF UNCERTAIN.
There are potential legal problems from using a file sharing network that does not allow you to prevent automatic uploads. BitTorrent is not the only such network: I'm also aware that ED2K has the same system, and some modern Gnutella clients (although it can be disabled in these).
That said, it has been suggested that as the uploading in the case of these networks is an automatic function of the software you are using, and does not require any explicit action on your behalf, you are less likely to be held legally accountable for it than if (e.g.) you were to share the file on networks where this does not happen, or were to seed a new torrent, etc.
This of course depends on how sympathetic your local judicial system is to downloaders, etc.
You see... having a sense of humour means finding things funny when they are.
I don't believe this is funny. The netcraft/korea/soviet russia jokes were all funny to start with. OK, so they've been regurgitated too many times (and the korean one's only been around for a week or two and is already old). But what's funny about using 666 with no context around it to make it amusing? It just comes across as odd.
Actually, I think the reason for a contest for designing the splash screen was so that the programmers didn't have to spend their time designing one.
Is it? Doesn't seem it to me. :)
More than... how many?
That's weird. I mean, "more than 600" I could understand. "Nearly 700" would probably be more precise and less wordy. But more than 666? Why?
The interesting thing is that both DS9 and B5 tried the "soap opera" class of sci fi, but DS9 pulled it off.
:)
The first half of DS9 was single show format with occasional character changes, by the time they switched in seasons 4-5 they already had a dedicated set of viewers watching it.
B5 tried to do it from the beginning and it's very difficult to see every ep of a new show when it comes on (unless you have mythtv or whatever) so most people would miss an episode or two and just toss the show.
Whereas I gave up on watching DS9 before it got good. Seriously, the first couple of series were dreadful. I got to thinking that if I watched another episode about Sisko's kid (what's his name? been a while since I watched any) doing something he shouldn't and getting into trouble I'd probably have to destroy my TV, so I stopped.
And it is quite possible to watch B5 without seeing every episode, particularly of the first series, most of which was rather episodic. You might find something further down the line (either in the next few episodes, or somewhere in the next couple of series) you don't entirely understand, but it's a tolerable loss.
Same problem with 24, hard to get new people into it unless they really want to put the effort
Whereas all I find with 24 is you have to see the first episode of a series and the general reaction is "ok, do you have a copy of the next one?" Turn up at a friend's house with a DVD-R with 5 episodes on it, and you won't be doing anything else for the next 4 hours. I seriously don't know how to stop watching that show, even if the plot is ridiculously flawed (some of those twists just defy logic), their technology ridiculously inept (how long did it take for them to trace that phone call in series 1? and someone encrypted data with a system where you could _partially_ reconstruct the original?), and the technobabble using jargon in wierd and painful ways (often making me want to shout at the scriptwriters, "you don't know what a socket is, so stop using the word that way!").
Put that way, I'm not sure why I like it. But I do. Hmmm.
That'd be one of the "normal steps of the publishing process" -- having an editor who knows what they're doing read your book and decide whether it's good enough or not.