Perhaps we could even further enhance the system by allowing the symptoms to be transmitted as an email attachment to the doctor. He could then diagnose your illness, and call a prescription in to your pharmacy without ever having to see you. As the technology progressed, we could have the diagnosis made automatically by a computer.
Eventually, you would just take your readings to the pharmacy, put them in a machine, and receive your prescription. Drug interactions, body weight/type, and past conditions could all be factored to obtain an optimal medical diagnosis.
The issue seems to be primarily dealing with "orphan works", by which the article refers to works that were initially marked with a copyright notice but whose owners cannot now be determined. Obviously if the work contains a means of contacting the owner, it should be fairly simple to determine whether that owner minds if the work is used. It is when the owner cannot be contacted that long unrequested copyright terms become a problem.
In the case of your comic, twenty years from now you probably won't care much if someone wants to archive it for a non-profit use. In the intervening time though, any contact information that the comic contains on it may no longer be valid. Can you then see the possible benefit of having a central repository of contact information for copyright holders? If it is the responsibility of the user to obtain permission from a copyright holder, shouldn't it at least be possible to contact that person?
The issue they are questioning is whether the work should be protected if the author doesn't care. The suit is stating that for a work to be protected, the author ought to be required to express a desire for it to be protected. Also, the author could then provide some means for contact so that permission can be requested.
I agree that difficulty of access does not make it permissible to use without authorization, but see little value in restricting access to works where the author doesn't care. Requiring the author to request and renew copyright merely ensures that they are still interested in maintaining the rights to their work.
While the example given by splume is a little silly, the concept is accurate. A huge cost in implementing new solutions is that of training and time to get the solution implemented. It can often be more cost effective to pay for a solution that is faster to implement and easier to use.
The real cost to the company comes by way of saleries paid to employees. Hardware, and even software costs are generally relatively low compared to the wages paid to employees who set up the solution, use the solution, and maintain the solution. As a result, if a program is much easier to set up, maintain, and use, a higher initial cost may well be justified.
I'm not saying that Microsoft does this, but I have found that many "Free" alternatives can be a real hassle to set up and have a steep learning curve for new users. If you want to achieve top "value", ensure that the additional time/experience/knowledge required to use it are less valuable than the cost of buying an easier to use tool.
Many open source developers do not include enough documentation to easily learn the software. There are many programs that I use that were a real headache at first, and required far too much digging for me to find tools I want. (I have this problem with some Microsoft tools too. Finding advanced features can be a pain.) Better documentation that can be understood by a low-level user is essential to obtain high value.
I am also a student, and I also use Star Office. There is indeed a less expensive Student Edition of MS Office, but $99 is still somewhat costly. The main funtionality I need out of a word processor is the ability to read and save documents in the Microsoft Word format. Other perks are nice, but with the huge number of documents written in Word, I need the ability to open the latest version.
How AOL can block Trillian
on
AOL vs. Trillian
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· Score: 2, Informative
I thought when Trillian 7.0 came out, that Cerulean was making an error in their policies toward AIM.
In version 6.x, Trillian did not have any non-AIM features for AIM chat windows. With the release of 7.0, Cerulean added secure 128 bit encryption to AIM connenctions between two Trillian users, and possibly other features. This of course required that two Trillian clients be able to identify each other as Trillian clients. Whatever mechanism was used to determine this could easily have been used to lock Trillian out of the AIM networks.
Companies having a database of all your preferences may make life a little easier sometimes, but I personally prefer customization to personalization. As long as I can pick the seat I want, I don't particularly mind the additional hassle of doing it each time I make a reservation. One airline (I can't remember which) had a diagram of the plane on their online reservations page. All open seats were the same color, and I was able to click the exact seat I wanted. This is not an ability any degree of personalization can provide. Personization pickes up tendancies, but not specific preferences. Sure, let me save my preferences if I want to, but I always want the right to decide who can keeping a database on me. If I don't give permission to save preferences, I don't want you to have them. And that includes seating preferences on the airplane.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps we could even further enhance the system by allowing the symptoms to be transmitted as an email attachment to the doctor. He could then diagnose your illness, and call a prescription in to your pharmacy without ever having to see you. As the technology progressed, we could have the diagnosis made automatically by a computer.
Eventually, you would just take your readings to the pharmacy, put them in a machine, and receive your prescription. Drug interactions, body weight/type, and past conditions could all be factored to obtain an optimal medical diagnosis.
The issue seems to be primarily dealing with "orphan works", by which the article refers to works that were initially marked with a copyright notice but whose owners cannot now be determined. Obviously if the work contains a means of contacting the owner, it should be fairly simple to determine whether that owner minds if the work is used. It is when the owner cannot be contacted that long unrequested copyright terms become a problem.
In the case of your comic, twenty years from now you probably won't care much if someone wants to archive it for a non-profit use. In the intervening time though, any contact information that the comic contains on it may no longer be valid. Can you then see the possible benefit of having a central repository of contact information for copyright holders? If it is the responsibility of the user to obtain permission from a copyright holder, shouldn't it at least be possible to contact that person?
The issue they are questioning is whether the work should be protected if the author doesn't care. The suit is stating that for a work to be protected, the author ought to be required to express a desire for it to be protected. Also, the author could then provide some means for contact so that permission can be requested.
I agree that difficulty of access does not make it permissible to use without authorization, but see little value in restricting access to works where the author doesn't care. Requiring the author to request and renew copyright merely ensures that they are still interested in maintaining the rights to their work.
While the example given by splume is a little silly, the concept is accurate. A huge cost in implementing new solutions is that of training and time to get the solution implemented. It can often be more cost effective to pay for a solution that is faster to implement and easier to use.
The real cost to the company comes by way of saleries paid to employees. Hardware, and even software costs are generally relatively low compared to the wages paid to employees who set up the solution, use the solution, and maintain the solution. As a result, if a program is much easier to set up, maintain, and use, a higher initial cost may well be justified.
I'm not saying that Microsoft does this, but I have found that many "Free" alternatives can be a real hassle to set up and have a steep learning curve for new users. If you want to achieve top "value", ensure that the additional time/experience/knowledge required to use it are less valuable than the cost of buying an easier to use tool.
Many open source developers do not include enough documentation to easily learn the software. There are many programs that I use that were a real headache at first, and required far too much digging for me to find tools I want. (I have this problem with some Microsoft tools too. Finding advanced features can be a pain.) Better documentation that can be understood by a low-level user is essential to obtain high value.
I am also a student, and I also use Star Office. There is indeed a less expensive Student Edition of MS Office, but $99 is still somewhat costly. The main funtionality I need out of a word processor is the ability to read and save documents in the Microsoft Word format. Other perks are nice, but with the huge number of documents written in Word, I need the ability to open the latest version.
I thought when Trillian 7.0 came out, that Cerulean was making an error in their policies toward AIM.
In version 6.x, Trillian did not have any non-AIM features for AIM chat windows. With the release of 7.0, Cerulean added secure 128 bit encryption to AIM connenctions between two Trillian users, and possibly other features. This of course required that two Trillian clients be able to identify each other as Trillian clients. Whatever mechanism was used to determine this could easily have been used to lock Trillian out of the AIM networks.
Companies having a database of all your preferences may make life a little easier sometimes, but I personally prefer customization to personalization. As long as I can pick the seat I want, I don't particularly mind the additional hassle of doing it each time I make a reservation. One airline (I can't remember which) had a diagram of the plane on their online reservations page. All open seats were the same color, and I was able to click the exact seat I wanted. This is not an ability any degree of personalization can provide. Personization pickes up tendancies, but not specific preferences. Sure, let me save my preferences if I want to, but I always want the right to decide who can keeping a database on me. If I don't give permission to save preferences, I don't want you to have them. And that includes seating preferences on the airplane.