You may be thinking of Harper & Row v Nation Enterprises. The publisher of President Ford's memoirs sued the publisher of a magazine for printing a review of the book that contained about a page's worth of quotations from it. That much would normally be fair use (the book is about 500 pages), but the quotations contained the only information from the book that most people were really interested in - Ford's account of why he pardoned Richard Nixon.
Good points. It sounds, then, as though the majority of people who are doing Agile wrong will only stop doing it wrong when the next shiny buzzword-compliant methodology comes along, leaving the ones who were doing it right still doing it.
You could say that about a lot of things, but yes, Agile does seem to have more than its share of "you're doing it wrong."
The notion that if you have a fixed release date, you should sacrifice features for quality, seems counterintuitive to many. It's much easier for a sales or marketing person to say, "Our next release will be on this date and have these features," (and leave unsaid, "But we have no idea how good any of them will be.") than it is to say, "Our next release will be on this date, and we don't know yet what features it will have, but we promise they'll all be really good!"
True. Fortunately we haven't found it necessary to limit an individual's speaking time - we just accept that some will be terse and some will be verbose, and it usually averages out. I sometimes deputise for our scrum master, and when I send him a report of the meeting, it's very rare that anyone gets more than one line, no matter how much they said.
I have been at places where they go for 2-3 hours a day, with people doing little each day, and using "Wah, I'm blocked" as a way to blamestorm and shift responsibilities to other parties.
Then you're doing it wrong. Our company is officially agile (though really it's more like waterfall with daily status meetings), and the meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes. If person A says they're blocked waiting for person or team B to do something, we can normally trust them to sort it out themselves. Sometimes the scrum master will set up a meeting of just A and B (plus himself, to keep them honest), and then report the outcome of that to the rest of the team at the next stand-up meeting.
To be fair, I have been on agile teams where the stand-up meeting would last 30 to 45 minutes and tended to turn into a design meeting, with two or three people doing most of the talking. This was either because we hadn't understood the requirements well enough at the start, or had just got lazy and not done enough of the design upfront. The scrum master should've set up a separate meeting for the design work, or just told the rest of us we could leave once the design discussion started. I suspect the reason he didn't was because he was partly responsible for the design, so it was convenient for him to have just the one daily meeting. (Or he was coming up to retirement and had stopped caring about not wasting other people's time...)
Now, if someone is constantly using "I'm blocked" as an excuse to not do any work, that's a matter for their manager, not the team or the scrum master.
My music collection is almost exactly that size, most of it originally bought on CD over about twenty years. If I was to play all of it non-stop, it would take about 80 days.
As others have pointed out, the person in question is a composer, so I expect a lot of his collection would be recordings of his own compositions, at the highest available quality (uncompressed or losslessly compressed). There might be multiple takes or versions of them. If he recorded them as multitrack recordings (each performer or instrument is recorded into a separate file, so he can mix and edit later), that really adds up. 192kbit/s MP3 occupies about 1.5 megabytes per minute. Uncompressed 96kHz 24-bit audio occupies about 15 megabytes per minute in mono, double that for stereo.
I'm not sure if this would help when you delete most or all of your cookies, but there is an option "Don't load tabs until selected". When combined with "restore previous session", that remembers all your open windows and tabs, and the URL that each of them was looking at, but doesn't load any of the URLs until it needs to display them. So if you're using a lot of sites where you have to log in every time you restart the browser, now you won't be prompted to log in to a site until you decide you need to use it and switch to its tab.
"Lawful intercept" is a term used in telecoms to refer to a feature of a communications system that allows the police or the government or the TLAs to monitor the communications of a specific endpoint (a person or an address or a device). The implication is that there's some judicial oversight to stop the authorities from abusing it, and some security to stop anyone who isn't the authorities from gaining access to it. The term also implies that the feature is there by design - it can't (or shouldn't) "accidentally" disappear when the vendor releases an update. Just calling it "intercept" or "interception" doesn't convey what it's for and how it works.
I agree that bragging that your product has this feature (even if it's always been there) is a pretty dumb idea, regardless of what you call it. Unless your target market is no longer the users of your product, but people who want to spy on the users and who are in a position to force them to use the product...
That would probably require a lawsuit, or at least the threat of one, which would probably involve spending more on lawyers than you're ever likely to see in damages...
I'd be surprised if it was against anti-spam laws. CAN-SPAM applies specifically to messages advertising a commercial service or product, though I suppose this tactic could fall foul of other countries' laws. I'm curious as to how you'd get around them if it did. Claim you have an existing business relationship with Vimeo because you watched a video that someone posted there?
There are penalties, but only for things that aren't usually in dispute. When you send a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, you're essentially saying, "I own the copyright in work X (or am the authorised representative of the owner of X). You are hosting work Y, which infringes the copyright of work X, and I demand that you remove Y." If you're not the owner of X or his authorised representative, that's perjury. But if Y doesn't actually infringe the copyright of X, that's just, "Oh well, c'est la vie." I suppose the thinking is that the question of whether you own the copyright in X is a matter of public record (look it up at the Copyright Office), but the question of whether Y infringes on X's copyright (if X and Y aren't the same thing) is a matter for a court to decide.
So other than the overhead of doing the paperwork (very small if you program your computer to file the notices) and possible bad publicity (which probably comes out of some other department's budget), there's no disincentive to filing millions of bogus notices. Of course, since Vimeo don't seem to be doing any checking of the notices Columbia are sending, that suggests it wouldn't be too difficult for disgruntled independent filmmakers to disrupt the online publicity for Columbia's next big release...
DMCA takedown requests are made under penalty of perjury, but that only applies to the part where you declare that you're the copyright owner of the work that's being infringed (or are authorised to act on their behalf). That is, if you file a takedown that says "I am the owner of work X and I claim that work Y, which you are hosting, infringes on the copyright of X," and you're not actually the owner of X, you can go to jail for it. (Though I've never heard of that actually happening.) If you are the owner of X, but Y doesn't actually infringe on it, you're allowed to say, "Oops, sorry!" and carry on as if nothing had happened, even if it should be obvious to any reasonable person that there's no way on Earth that Y could possibly infringe on X.
I don't know anyone who uses Google Play Books either - not that I imagine my friends are a representative sample of ebook users. More than that, I don't know any authors who claim to be selling well there. (I probably know more authors than the average reader - see signature.) It's rare that the site even comes up in conversations about ebooks and where to sell them and how to market them. So even though it appears to be easy to get away with selling pirated books there, I'd be surprised if the pirates are making a large amount of money.
I'm surprised the pirates have even figured out how to upload books, to be honest. When I decided to start selling my books there, I found the publisher's interface one of the most unfriendly and ill-thought-out sites I'd used in recent years. (To give you just one example, it would allow you to upload an ePub that didn't conform to the relevant specs, which Google would refuse to sell, but didn't give you any indication of the error until you drilled into your dashboard a few days later to find out why the book wasn't live yet.) So far, it hasn't been worth the effort for the number of books I've sold there.
I live near the Thameslink line between Bedford and Brighton, and we have a similar arrangement there - two pairs of tracks, one for the express trains, one for trains that stop at all stations. Except that it goes down to one pair of tracks in the middle of London, so a late-running or non-moving train can still stop everything else. It doesn't help that the line is at 100% of capacity in rush hour, and it also didn't help that the previous operating company stopped maintaining the trains when they knew they were going to lose the franchise...
True, but then you have to worry about an express service getting stuck behind a local one if the local one is running late or has broken down. You could have the tracks fan out at the smaller stations, so the local service switches to a track that's next to a platform, while the express stays on a track that passes straight through. It doesn't help if the local train hasn't reached one of those stations yet, but at least means the express doesn't get held up for the whole of the route.
Or you build two sets of tracks along the whole route at twice the cost and probably twice the amount of NIMBY-ism...
If you ban strong encryption or make its use impractical, then anyone using it, pretty much by definition, must be using it to hide something illegal. That gives the spooks a good idea as to who they should be investigating, even if they can't crack the encryption. And if they can crack the encryption, preventing law-abiding citizens from using it drastically cuts the number of messages they have to crunch through in order to find something useful.
(I'm not saying I think strong encryption should be banned, just why I think the spooks might want it to be banned.)
The Turing test is usually presented as something that a machine either passes or fails, but since no machine has yet passed it, contests have focused on how long a machine can withstand questioning before the interviewer decides it's not human, or what percentage of interviewers it can fool for, say, ten minutes. So you can say one machine is more intelligent than another, even if you don't have a definition of intelligence apart from "intelligence is the ability to convince a human that you are human". To use your GPS analogy, it's more like the GPS tells you how far from the destination you are, but not in which direction.
I agree the Turing test isn't very useful in its own right - or at any rate, attempting to build machines that can pass it isn't very useful. We already have 7 billion entities that can pass it, and making more of them is a very low-tech process. I'd rather we figure out how to build machines that can do things we want to do but can't, or aren't very good at.
So why does Amazon get to set the price, and not Apple or the publishers?
Because that's how the sale of every other product to the consumer works - the manufacturer or publisher tells the retailer "we'll sell you a crate of widgets for X dollars apiece" and the retailer is free to sell them to the consumer for whatever they think the consumer is willing to pay. Usually it's some function of X, but it doesn't have to be.
Agency pricing (so-called because the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, taking a fixed percentage of that as his profit) removes the ability of retailers to compete on price. Apple liked it because they don't want to compete on price anyway. It doesn't matter so much when you're talking about their hardware - plenty of people are willing to pay a premium for an Apple computer or phone or tablet because they perceive them as better or cooler than cheaper products with similar specs from other manufacturers. But if you're talking about ebooks, it's hard to see why you should pay $12.99 or $14.99 for the latest Stephen King or James Patterson from Apple when you could get exactly the same thing for $9.99 or less from Amazon. But if it's the same price at Amazon, you might as well get it from Apple.
The publishers liked agency pricing because it meant Amazon couldn't price ebooks at a point where it would cut into the publishers' print business. The publishers know that print is going away anyway - they're just trying to prolong it as much as they can because they know that when Barnes & Noble goes bust, there won't be anyone else they can play off against Amazon. They also know that print distribution is the last advantage they have over self-publishing. Self-published ebooks now compete on a level playing field with ebooks from the big publishers, but it's still very difficult for a self-published book to sell a lot of copies in print. (The ones that have managed it were usually picked up by a publisher after doing well as ebooks.) Everything else a publisher can offer an author can be bought from freelancers for a one-off fee, instead of most of the revenue for the life of the copyright.
Having said all that, the lawsuit was never about agency pricing as such. US competition law cares very little about protecting retailers. What was illegal was that Apple and the publishers colluded to raise prices, thus harming consumers. The fact that they used an unusual method of pricing to do it is neither here nor there, really.
Publishers might say they want everything electronically nowadays, but I imagine they'll make an exception for an author who brings in as much money as GRRM. (I wonder how much they'd have to pay someone to retype one of his books?)
You're stil going to get to the same place at the same time as the other passengers.
True, but you have a nicer seat with more room, and everything before and after the flight runs faster and smoother. You have your own check-in desk and security line, so you can arrive at the airport an hour later than the economy-class passengers. You have a bigger baggage allowance, so you might not have to put anything in the hold - and if you do, it'll probably come off the plane first. All that can make the difference between a day trip and an overnight stay, or turn a trip of n days into n-1 days.
The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees
Actually, no. That accounts for between 15% and 20% of the retail price. Most books don't make a profit for the publisher, so the costs are dominated by the overheads - the author's advance and the cost of employing everyone who's involved in making the book ready to be sold. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the major publishers that if they lowered the prices of ebooks, more titles might sell enough to make a profit. (Indie authors and smaller publishers figured it out a long time ago.)
Apparently they also do passes that are good for 30 days, which cost $96 (see the comment a few places above). The scam was to buy lots of $1 tickets and reprogram them into 30-day ones.
Slashdot Mirror
You may be thinking of Harper & Row v Nation Enterprises. The publisher of President Ford's memoirs sued the publisher of a magazine for printing a review of the book that contained about a page's worth of quotations from it. That much would normally be fair use (the book is about 500 pages), but the quotations contained the only information from the book that most people were really interested in - Ford's account of why he pardoned Richard Nixon.
Good points. It sounds, then, as though the majority of people who are doing Agile wrong will only stop doing it wrong when the next shiny buzzword-compliant methodology comes along, leaving the ones who were doing it right still doing it.
You could say that about a lot of things, but yes, Agile does seem to have more than its share of "you're doing it wrong."
The notion that if you have a fixed release date, you should sacrifice features for quality, seems counterintuitive to many. It's much easier for a sales or marketing person to say, "Our next release will be on this date and have these features," (and leave unsaid, "But we have no idea how good any of them will be.") than it is to say, "Our next release will be on this date, and we don't know yet what features it will have, but we promise they'll all be really good!"
True. Fortunately we haven't found it necessary to limit an individual's speaking time - we just accept that some will be terse and some will be verbose, and it usually averages out. I sometimes deputise for our scrum master, and when I send him a report of the meeting, it's very rare that anyone gets more than one line, no matter how much they said.
I have been at places where they go for 2-3 hours a day, with people doing little each day, and using "Wah, I'm blocked" as a way to blamestorm and shift responsibilities to other parties.
Then you're doing it wrong. Our company is officially agile (though really it's more like waterfall with daily status meetings), and the meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes. If person A says they're blocked waiting for person or team B to do something, we can normally trust them to sort it out themselves. Sometimes the scrum master will set up a meeting of just A and B (plus himself, to keep them honest), and then report the outcome of that to the rest of the team at the next stand-up meeting.
To be fair, I have been on agile teams where the stand-up meeting would last 30 to 45 minutes and tended to turn into a design meeting, with two or three people doing most of the talking. This was either because we hadn't understood the requirements well enough at the start, or had just got lazy and not done enough of the design upfront. The scrum master should've set up a separate meeting for the design work, or just told the rest of us we could leave once the design discussion started. I suspect the reason he didn't was because he was partly responsible for the design, so it was convenient for him to have just the one daily meeting. (Or he was coming up to retirement and had stopped caring about not wasting other people's time...)
Now, if someone is constantly using "I'm blocked" as an excuse to not do any work, that's a matter for their manager, not the team or the scrum master.
My music collection is almost exactly that size, most of it originally bought on CD over about twenty years. If I was to play all of it non-stop, it would take about 80 days.
As others have pointed out, the person in question is a composer, so I expect a lot of his collection would be recordings of his own compositions, at the highest available quality (uncompressed or losslessly compressed). There might be multiple takes or versions of them. If he recorded them as multitrack recordings (each performer or instrument is recorded into a separate file, so he can mix and edit later), that really adds up. 192kbit/s MP3 occupies about 1.5 megabytes per minute. Uncompressed 96kHz 24-bit audio occupies about 15 megabytes per minute in mono, double that for stereo.
I'm not sure if this would help when you delete most or all of your cookies, but there is an option "Don't load tabs until selected". When combined with "restore previous session", that remembers all your open windows and tabs, and the URL that each of them was looking at, but doesn't load any of the URLs until it needs to display them. So if you're using a lot of sites where you have to log in every time you restart the browser, now you won't be prompted to log in to a site until you decide you need to use it and switch to its tab.
"Lawful intercept" is a term used in telecoms to refer to a feature of a communications system that allows the police or the government or the TLAs to monitor the communications of a specific endpoint (a person or an address or a device). The implication is that there's some judicial oversight to stop the authorities from abusing it, and some security to stop anyone who isn't the authorities from gaining access to it. The term also implies that the feature is there by design - it can't (or shouldn't) "accidentally" disappear when the vendor releases an update. Just calling it "intercept" or "interception" doesn't convey what it's for and how it works.
I agree that bragging that your product has this feature (even if it's always been there) is a pretty dumb idea, regardless of what you call it. Unless your target market is no longer the users of your product, but people who want to spy on the users and who are in a position to force them to use the product...
That would probably require a lawsuit, or at least the threat of one, which would probably involve spending more on lawyers than you're ever likely to see in damages...
I'd be surprised if it was against anti-spam laws. CAN-SPAM applies specifically to messages advertising a commercial service or product, though I suppose this tactic could fall foul of other countries' laws. I'm curious as to how you'd get around them if it did. Claim you have an existing business relationship with Vimeo because you watched a video that someone posted there?
I haven't looked into the counter-notice procedure much, but it's apparently not as effective as it might be. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are penalties, but only for things that aren't usually in dispute. When you send a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube or Vimeo or wherever, you're essentially saying, "I own the copyright in work X (or am the authorised representative of the owner of X). You are hosting work Y, which infringes the copyright of work X, and I demand that you remove Y." If you're not the owner of X or his authorised representative, that's perjury. But if Y doesn't actually infringe the copyright of X, that's just, "Oh well, c'est la vie." I suppose the thinking is that the question of whether you own the copyright in X is a matter of public record (look it up at the Copyright Office), but the question of whether Y infringes on X's copyright (if X and Y aren't the same thing) is a matter for a court to decide.
So other than the overhead of doing the paperwork (very small if you program your computer to file the notices) and possible bad publicity (which probably comes out of some other department's budget), there's no disincentive to filing millions of bogus notices. Of course, since Vimeo don't seem to be doing any checking of the notices Columbia are sending, that suggests it wouldn't be too difficult for disgruntled independent filmmakers to disrupt the online publicity for Columbia's next big release...
Fair point, but the relevant authorities don't seem to be interested in prosecuting perjury by resident citizens either...
DMCA takedown requests are made under penalty of perjury, but that only applies to the part where you declare that you're the copyright owner of the work that's being infringed (or are authorised to act on their behalf). That is, if you file a takedown that says "I am the owner of work X and I claim that work Y, which you are hosting, infringes on the copyright of X," and you're not actually the owner of X, you can go to jail for it. (Though I've never heard of that actually happening.) If you are the owner of X, but Y doesn't actually infringe on it, you're allowed to say, "Oops, sorry!" and carry on as if nothing had happened, even if it should be obvious to any reasonable person that there's no way on Earth that Y could possibly infringe on X.
I don't know anyone who uses Google Play Books either - not that I imagine my friends are a representative sample of ebook users. More than that, I don't know any authors who claim to be selling well there. (I probably know more authors than the average reader - see signature.) It's rare that the site even comes up in conversations about ebooks and where to sell them and how to market them. So even though it appears to be easy to get away with selling pirated books there, I'd be surprised if the pirates are making a large amount of money.
I'm surprised the pirates have even figured out how to upload books, to be honest. When I decided to start selling my books there, I found the publisher's interface one of the most unfriendly and ill-thought-out sites I'd used in recent years. (To give you just one example, it would allow you to upload an ePub that didn't conform to the relevant specs, which Google would refuse to sell, but didn't give you any indication of the error until you drilled into your dashboard a few days later to find out why the book wasn't live yet.) So far, it hasn't been worth the effort for the number of books I've sold there.
I live near the Thameslink line between Bedford and Brighton, and we have a similar arrangement there - two pairs of tracks, one for the express trains, one for trains that stop at all stations. Except that it goes down to one pair of tracks in the middle of London, so a late-running or non-moving train can still stop everything else. It doesn't help that the line is at 100% of capacity in rush hour, and it also didn't help that the previous operating company stopped maintaining the trains when they knew they were going to lose the franchise...
True, but then you have to worry about an express service getting stuck behind a local one if the local one is running late or has broken down. You could have the tracks fan out at the smaller stations, so the local service switches to a track that's next to a platform, while the express stays on a track that passes straight through. It doesn't help if the local train hasn't reached one of those stations yet, but at least means the express doesn't get held up for the whole of the route.
Or you build two sets of tracks along the whole route at twice the cost and probably twice the amount of NIMBY-ism...
If you ban strong encryption or make its use impractical, then anyone using it, pretty much by definition, must be using it to hide something illegal. That gives the spooks a good idea as to who they should be investigating, even if they can't crack the encryption. And if they can crack the encryption, preventing law-abiding citizens from using it drastically cuts the number of messages they have to crunch through in order to find something useful.
(I'm not saying I think strong encryption should be banned, just why I think the spooks might want it to be banned.)
The Turing test is usually presented as something that a machine either passes or fails, but since no machine has yet passed it, contests have focused on how long a machine can withstand questioning before the interviewer decides it's not human, or what percentage of interviewers it can fool for, say, ten minutes. So you can say one machine is more intelligent than another, even if you don't have a definition of intelligence apart from "intelligence is the ability to convince a human that you are human". To use your GPS analogy, it's more like the GPS tells you how far from the destination you are, but not in which direction.
I agree the Turing test isn't very useful in its own right - or at any rate, attempting to build machines that can pass it isn't very useful. We already have 7 billion entities that can pass it, and making more of them is a very low-tech process. I'd rather we figure out how to build machines that can do things we want to do but can't, or aren't very good at.
Too lazy to RTFP (read the fine PDF), but I assume the point is that some humans can pass the Lovelace test, whereas few or no machines currently can.
So why does Amazon get to set the price, and not Apple or the publishers?
Because that's how the sale of every other product to the consumer works - the manufacturer or publisher tells the retailer "we'll sell you a crate of widgets for X dollars apiece" and the retailer is free to sell them to the consumer for whatever they think the consumer is willing to pay. Usually it's some function of X, but it doesn't have to be.
Agency pricing (so-called because the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer acts as an agent of the publisher, taking a fixed percentage of that as his profit) removes the ability of retailers to compete on price. Apple liked it because they don't want to compete on price anyway. It doesn't matter so much when you're talking about their hardware - plenty of people are willing to pay a premium for an Apple computer or phone or tablet because they perceive them as better or cooler than cheaper products with similar specs from other manufacturers. But if you're talking about ebooks, it's hard to see why you should pay $12.99 or $14.99 for the latest Stephen King or James Patterson from Apple when you could get exactly the same thing for $9.99 or less from Amazon. But if it's the same price at Amazon, you might as well get it from Apple.
The publishers liked agency pricing because it meant Amazon couldn't price ebooks at a point where it would cut into the publishers' print business. The publishers know that print is going away anyway - they're just trying to prolong it as much as they can because they know that when Barnes & Noble goes bust, there won't be anyone else they can play off against Amazon. They also know that print distribution is the last advantage they have over self-publishing. Self-published ebooks now compete on a level playing field with ebooks from the big publishers, but it's still very difficult for a self-published book to sell a lot of copies in print. (The ones that have managed it were usually picked up by a publisher after doing well as ebooks.) Everything else a publisher can offer an author can be bought from freelancers for a one-off fee, instead of most of the revenue for the life of the copyright.
Having said all that, the lawsuit was never about agency pricing as such. US competition law cares very little about protecting retailers. What was illegal was that Apple and the publishers colluded to raise prices, thus harming consumers. The fact that they used an unusual method of pricing to do it is neither here nor there, really.
Mercury and Venus don't have moons either, and I don't think anyone would seriously argue that we shouldn't call them planets.
Publishers might say they want everything electronically nowadays, but I imagine they'll make an exception for an author who brings in as much money as GRRM. (I wonder how much they'd have to pay someone to retype one of his books?)
True, but you have a nicer seat with more room, and everything before and after the flight runs faster and smoother. You have your own check-in desk and security line, so you can arrive at the airport an hour later than the economy-class passengers. You have a bigger baggage allowance, so you might not have to put anything in the hold - and if you do, it'll probably come off the plane first. All that can make the difference between a day trip and an overnight stay, or turn a trip of n days into n-1 days.
The big cost in publishing is the printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution of the dead trees
Actually, no. That accounts for between 15% and 20% of the retail price. Most books don't make a profit for the publisher, so the costs are dominated by the overheads - the author's advance and the cost of employing everyone who's involved in making the book ready to be sold. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the major publishers that if they lowered the prices of ebooks, more titles might sell enough to make a profit. (Indie authors and smaller publishers figured it out a long time ago.)
Apparently they also do passes that are good for 30 days, which cost $96 (see the comment a few places above). The scam was to buy lots of $1 tickets and reprogram them into 30-day ones.