That has nothing to do with the digital world, it just got easier. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Che and Castro all had former "friends" who happened to fall out of grace removed from pictures in their times. But of course this is going back much more, way before the availability of photography. Media was never and will never be reliable in general.
And I would argue that using raw data to is the only reliable way to inform yourself, anything that has been selected, annotated or edited is the problem, bringing over a certain point of view which is not necessarily neutral. Of course, this will seldom be possible because you dont' have access to that raw data.
But do you honestly think that Apple is encoding that specific information into each track sold through the iTunes store, making essentially every single track sold unique? Do you realize how much more expensive it would be to "imprint" that information into the audio?
Why, it's easy - instead of watermarking a DRM'ed m4p with the account information, which they are doing since the 1st day of iTMS, they add the same information to the unproteced m4a. I am pretty much sure it's just one call to a specific library function in the store code, called just before uploading the file to the user.
And for putting it onto the CD: I guess it might be possible to add coded informations to the CDA that are inaudible as essentially MP3/AAC works by cutting stuff from the audio stream that you won't hear anyway, so why not reverse this. It's only a few bytes of information, easy to hide and would be done by the AAC decoder in an Apple product (iTunes). Also, audio steganography is not a new concept at all.
But in this case, it would be easy to detect: Find a friend who buys the same track, burn both tracks to CD's, rip them back as uncompressed CDA files and run a binary diff on them - any difference is an indication for this theory.
Nevertheless, I still don't care, as I won't do filesharing.
I never understood this MS terminology. From my point of view a Release Candidate is in a shape that I could just recompile the software without the debugging symbols if no major bugs are reported. No one considers this to be even a remote possibility in case of Vista RC1. My guess is that they will also need a RC2, RC3 and maybe even RC4 and than a RRC1 (real Release Candidate) before shipping.
There is so much repetition and boredom hidden in this game it's a real wonder I finished the game twice.
One main problem is the role playing aspect - this is an action game, damnit. I don't want to spend an hour driving back and forth to see wether Millie the SM bitch is at home and go out eating with her - that's what The Sims is for. Also, this endless tours before the mission start, where ironically the journeys to the missions where longer and more complicated when the missions itself where more difficult. Think about the heist at Caligulas. You travel to the Four Dragon, enter the building, walk to the planning room, travel to the Caligulas, enter the casino, walk to the stairs, go downstairs, put the grenade into the vent, go to the back exit, open the door with the forklift and then, finally the action starts. You die? Welcome at step 1. AAARGH!
And why is it fun to have to practice swimming in an action game? During the course of the game you nearly never have to swim so, in opposition to driving or running, there is no inherent training happening - you have to go into the water and dive for half an hour before you can do that mission for Woozie.
Basically it's like a book publisher typesetting a book in a 24pt monospace font on A5 paper claiming the book consisting of 1000 pages...
Yeah, but that includes iLife, which is preinstalled with every mac. And there the amount of space is even justified because Sound loops for garage band, templates for iMovie and iDVD just take space.
Only as long as they don't try to make it mass-market compatible and just continue to develop it only for the Apple x86 platform and silently accept some people are running it on non-Apple hardware.
But, since Apple is still a hardware company that sells the overall experience, it would still be a bad idea, IMHO. And Microsoft has more than one way to put a major barrier into the adoption of OS X/x86 as an alternative to Windows. The most likely and effective way would be to cease the development of Office/X - that would be a big blow for Apple!
Part of the mess that is Windows is that Microsoft basically has to offer support for every crappy video card, mainboard chipset or whatever and because of that, the complexity of the system goes beyond anything manageable.
I firmly believe that a major reason why OS X works so well is that the engineers at Apple can test their software with every piece of hardware Apple ever built. Try that with Windows. If Apple would try to go beyond their own platform, they would face the same problems.
Nonsense. That was a consequence from the Versailles treaties at the end of World War I, and Bayer was forced to give up Trademark and Patent rights in Britain, France and the US. It had nothing whatsoever to do with national security but with damage compensation for a lost war.
Today, my less than perfect solution to the trust problem (except running around with the Powerbook all the time) is to change the passwords as soon as possible and to avoid using untrusted public terminals. Unfortunately, that's not always possible and usually gives me a bad feeling.
Thinking further, I wouldn't put my PGP keyring with the private keys onto an USB stick to use at public terminals because I couldn't be sure that the contents of the stick isn't dumped somewehere as soon as I plug it in.
Regarding the accent confusion - thanks for the hint, but will you believe me I only forgot to press the shift key while composing the letter?;)
BTW, I even can differentiate between viola and violin, although for me as a cellist it's merely the difference in the kind of annoyance both create;)
I don't use it but I easily see the advantage. I have 5 different IMAP accounts configured in my mailer. All of those are needed for different purposes. Without my notebook, I have to check five different webmail pages when I am at friends places or at an internet café and I can't send gpg signed mails at all. With this program, I just use the USB port, open the app and voilá - there is my mail.
A PDA is not an option because it won't work when there is no connectivity for external devices (like in most non-geek homes) and it's much bigger than a USB stick.
No, he is wrong, as everyone here, IMHO (but IANAL). A true type or type 1 font can be considered a program, and embedding it in i.e. a PDF file could be considered as linking to a program library.
It's not about OpenOffice files with fonts set to "GPL Arial" or whatever, or a rendered image of the text "RMS is a moron" in a JPG created with Gimp.
Again, IANAL, but that's the way I would interpret it.
but about embedding them. If I create a PDF file and embed a GPLed font, that may (IANAL) lead to the obligation to license the entire document under the GPL.
This is not important for private documents you don't publish, since you are not obliged to publish private modifcations you do to any GPL software, but maybe for every document you publish with fonts included.
Is a font a program? IMHO yes, for vector fonts (TrueType, Type 1), since they include instructions that are interpreted by the font rendering engine of the OS or whatever to render the font on the screen or printer.
Of course, the idea that I install GPLed fonts on my system, use them in OpenOffice (without embedding them) would force me to license the document under the GPL is nonsense - the document still works without the font on another machine.
Wrong. Totally so. One word: Usability. Webforums sucks at it. Most offer no usable threading, the archives and searchabilty are limited at best and really, reading forum posts with a web browser is as painful as reading mail with web frontends.
In fact, I fail to see any convincing reason that would favor web forums over usenet.
finishing FrameMaker for Linux, which was nearly finished at one point some years ago and then dropped.
And while they are at it, they could port it to MacOS X as well.
There is simply no program available that is working so good and stable for large structured (scientifc) texts (and, no, the TeX family isn't always a viable option).
Good question: I don't know wether is was sold in Germany, but if yes, it would have to be a modifed version without symbols like the "Hakenkreuz" (swastika).
The same is true for every game which is staged during the Nazi era - Adventures (Indy comes to mind) as well as strategy games (Commandos) or whatever.
Thank god they don't demand the same for movies or we would never had the chance to see i.e. ndiana Jones, but I guess that is because it is indeed very easy to remove symbols from a game, just modify some textures and you are done.
Nazis as enemy is not a problem per se, as long as they don't wear the swastika or other symbols of that regime.
But, you until a year or two ago you had to be careful not to be too violent, or your game would have landed on the index (meaning you don't can advertise for it and don't send it via post etc.). To avoid that, designers took some strange countermeasures. All soldiers in Command & Conquer were robots with black oil instead of red blood. If that didn't work, they altered the blood color to green instead of red (!!). (System Shock II was peopled with vulcans and/or romulans, apparently...) In recent times, this problem is somewhat less dramatic, because we now have official Age ratings for games and if they are rated 18+ you can't sell them to underage people but you can advertise them and send them via (registered) mail.
I haven't read it and really have no idea what's in it but as far as I have heard, this book has the most significance for psychatrists trying to understand what went wrong in Hitlers head.
Nevertheless, I wholly agree with you that we should do everything possible to not let things like that ever happen again, especially in our times.
I understood that following the ongoing discussion after posting my text, nevertheless, thanks for the hint.
Still, I have trouble understanding how anyone can really demand that children don't read Tom Sawyer or Harry Potter. But, comparing that to the fact that AFAIK some school districts (or even states?) in the USA disallow the teaching of the Evolution theory in favor of the creation according to the book Genesis, I should stop wondering:)
The actual term I am referring to is "Freiheitlich-Demokratische Grundordnung", I have no idea how to translate that into english. You won't get intro trouble if you demand i.e . some kind of parliamentary monarchy, but if you wan't to re-establish the Nazi system or Stalins Soviet-Union, you call for trouble.
The kind of discussion you mention would be no problem at all, as long as your better system don't include enforcing someones decisions onto that bunch of relatively uninformed people against their will (which is undemocratic).
BTW, in germany we have at least four parties that play a significant role in politics. Only two of them are big enough to get enough votes to decide who will be the chancellor (the chancellor is elected by the parliament), but they usually have to form coalitions with at least one other party to form the government (with the notable exception of the state of Bavaria which is running a de-facto single party system for 50 years now).
Yes, here in Germany you basically only get into trouble with old Nazi literature ("Mein Kampf" from Hitler comes to mind) or when you glorify the time or deny the crimes happened during '33-'45. Related to that, books can be banned (only from courts!!!) when they are "hate inspiring", call for some kind of nondemocratic/nonfree society or don't respect the honor of living persons (or persons that are not so long dead).
Nevertheless, even if it is no ban, you are not allowed to make works available to children that are rated as unsuitable for them. This is true for all kind of media, from books to movies, music or computer games. Except when it comes to violence in computer games, this ratings usually make sense (you don't want your kids to see a porn movie, do you?), but it can be quite a hassle nevertheless, because you can't just deliver them with standard mail, you are not allowed to do any advertisement that kids could see and so on.
Bottom line is: If someone here would call for a ban on works like Huck Finn, Harry Potter or "The Catcher in the Rye" he woud get laughed at from 95% of the society, but 50-70% would agree to a ban on Doom3....
Otherwise I could see myself in a few years, playing cello with geeks around that keep steeling my gut strings because "my gut is full".
Disclaimer: I am not yet playing on gut string, but plan to do so when being advanced enough. My current set is Jargar Medium A+D and Dominant G+C. Not that anyone here would care:)
Yes, it is simple, but that means one may be unable to fix that typo after two minutes, when the first reply or moderation comes in while others have hours or days. Of course, if no one replies there is little reason to edit, but still.
The best solution appears to be the history function mentioned by athakur, but I never dared to look how this is actually implemented by wikipedia and how many resources are used by that.
The footnote option is, IMHO, not better than just replying to yourself with a correction or and additonal comment.
Editing posts is evil! It may seem like a good idea for fixing that stupid typo or the wrong link, but it usually ends in deleted/edited posts where people just don't stand up to their words and nobody can follow what the reason for the discussion/flamewar was.
I see it all the time on other discussion forums, it's no fun!
Taco, all you do is describe what the current design (step of evolution) is, but what are the changes?. Obviously, you will have removed those restrictions, but you don't say so.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll retract Che, as I couldn't find an example, but for the rest:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
I don't want to google more, but I remember seeing many more examples over the years.
You don't need to be a head of state to have photos edited, btw. It just need some devoted followers in the press or something like that.
That has nothing to do with the digital world, it just got easier. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Che and Castro all had former "friends" who happened to fall out of grace removed from pictures in their times. But of course this is going back much more, way before the availability of photography. Media was never and will never be reliable in general.
And I would argue that using raw data to is the only reliable way to inform yourself, anything that has been selected, annotated or edited is the problem, bringing over a certain point of view which is not necessarily neutral. Of course, this will seldom be possible because you dont' have access to that raw data.
But do you honestly think that Apple is encoding that specific information into each track sold through the iTunes store, making essentially every single track sold unique? Do you realize how much more expensive it would be to "imprint" that information into the audio?
Why, it's easy - instead of watermarking a DRM'ed m4p with the account information, which they are doing since the 1st day of iTMS, they add the same information to the unproteced m4a. I am pretty much sure it's just one call to a specific library function in the store code, called just before uploading the file to the user.
And for putting it onto the CD: I guess it might be possible to add coded informations to the CDA that are inaudible as essentially MP3/AAC works by cutting stuff from the audio stream that you won't hear anyway, so why not reverse this. It's only a few bytes of information, easy to hide and would be done by the AAC decoder in an Apple product (iTunes). Also, audio steganography is not a new concept at all.
But in this case, it would be easy to detect: Find a friend who buys the same track, burn both tracks to CD's, rip them back as uncompressed CDA files and run a binary diff on them - any difference is an indication for this theory.
Nevertheless, I still don't care, as I won't do filesharing.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/30/2014222
I think it's OK. Even if I really buy from iTunes to burn a cd as gift, at that point the account info will be gone, so what's the matter?
I never understood this MS terminology. From my point of view a Release Candidate is in a shape that I could just recompile the software without the debugging symbols if no major bugs are reported. No one considers this to be even a remote possibility in case of Vista RC1. My guess is that they will also need a RC2, RC3 and maybe even RC4 and than a RRC1 (real Release Candidate) before shipping.
There is so much repetition and boredom hidden in this game it's a real wonder I finished the game twice.
...
One main problem is the role playing aspect - this is an action game, damnit. I don't want to spend an hour driving back and forth to see wether Millie the SM bitch is at home and go out eating with her - that's what The Sims is for. Also, this endless tours before the mission start, where ironically the journeys to the missions where longer and more complicated when the missions itself where more difficult. Think about the heist at Caligulas. You travel to the Four Dragon, enter the building, walk to the planning room, travel to the Caligulas, enter the casino, walk to the stairs, go downstairs, put the grenade into the vent, go to the back exit, open the door with the forklift and then, finally the action starts. You die? Welcome at step 1. AAARGH!
And why is it fun to have to practice swimming in an action game? During the course of the game you nearly never have to swim so, in opposition to driving or running, there is no inherent training happening - you have to go into the water and dive for half an hour before you can do that mission for Woozie.
Basically it's like a book publisher typesetting a book in a 24pt monospace font on A5 paper claiming the book consisting of 1000 pages
Yeah, but that includes iLife, which is preinstalled with every mac. And there the amount of space is even justified because Sound loops for garage band, templates for iMovie and iDVD just take space.
But there is nothing like that in Vista.
Only as long as they don't try to make it mass-market compatible and just continue to develop it only for the Apple x86 platform and silently accept some people are running it on non-Apple hardware.
But, since Apple is still a hardware company that sells the overall experience, it would still be a bad idea, IMHO. And Microsoft has more than one way to put a major barrier into the adoption of OS X/x86 as an alternative to Windows. The most likely and effective way would be to cease the development of Office/X - that would be a big blow for Apple!
Part of the mess that is Windows is that Microsoft basically has to offer support for every crappy video card, mainboard chipset or whatever and because of that, the complexity of the system goes beyond anything manageable.
I firmly believe that a major reason why OS X works so well is that the engineers at Apple can test their software with every piece of hardware Apple ever built. Try that with Windows. If Apple would try to go beyond their own platform, they would face the same problems.
Sven
Nonsense. That was a consequence from the Versailles treaties at the end of World War I, and Bayer was forced to give up Trademark and Patent rights in Britain, France and the US. It had nothing whatsoever to do with national security but with damage compensation for a lost war.
Today, my less than perfect solution to the trust problem (except running around with the Powerbook all the time) is to change the passwords as soon as possible and to avoid using untrusted public terminals. Unfortunately, that's not always possible and usually gives me a bad feeling.
;)
;)
Thinking further, I wouldn't put my PGP keyring with the private keys onto an USB stick to use at public terminals because I couldn't be sure that the contents of the stick isn't dumped somewehere as soon as I plug it in.
Regarding the accent confusion - thanks for the hint, but will you believe me I only forgot to press the shift key while composing the letter?
BTW, I even can differentiate between viola and violin, although for me as a cellist it's merely the difference in the kind of annoyance both create
I don't use it but I easily see the advantage. I have 5 different IMAP accounts configured in my mailer. All of those are needed for different purposes. Without my notebook, I have to check five different webmail pages when I am at friends places or at an internet café and I can't send gpg signed mails at all. With this program, I just use the USB port, open the app and voilá - there is my mail.
A PDA is not an option because it won't work when there is no connectivity for external devices (like in most non-geek homes) and it's much bigger than a USB stick.
Maybe he is suffering from the Kirk-Syndrome? Never wanting to be promoted from the center chair .
No, he is wrong, as everyone here, IMHO (but IANAL). A true type or type 1 font can be considered a program, and embedding it in i.e. a PDF file could be considered as linking to a program library.
It's not about OpenOffice files with fonts set to "GPL Arial" or whatever, or a rendered image of the text "RMS is a moron" in a JPG created with Gimp.
Again, IANAL, but that's the way I would interpret it.
Sven
but about embedding them. If I create a PDF file and embed a GPLed font, that may (IANAL) lead to the obligation to license the entire document under the GPL.
This is not important for private documents you don't publish, since you are not obliged to publish private modifcations you do to any GPL software, but maybe for every document you publish with fonts included.
Is a font a program? IMHO yes, for vector fonts (TrueType, Type 1), since they include instructions that are interpreted by the font rendering engine of the OS or whatever to render the font on the screen or printer.
Of course, the idea that I install GPLed fonts on my system, use them in OpenOffice (without embedding them) would force me to license the document under the GPL is nonsense - the document still works without the font on another machine.
Sven
Wrong. Totally so. One word: Usability. Webforums sucks at it. Most offer no usable threading, the archives and searchabilty are limited at best and really, reading forum posts with a web browser is as painful as reading mail with web frontends.
In fact, I fail to see any convincing reason that would favor web forums over usenet.
Sven
finishing FrameMaker for Linux, which was nearly finished at one point some years ago and then dropped.
And while they are at it, they could port it to MacOS X as well.
There is simply no program available that is working so good and stable for large structured (scientifc) texts (and, no, the TeX family isn't always a viable option).
Good question: I don't know wether is was sold in Germany, but if yes, it would have to be a modifed version without symbols like the "Hakenkreuz" (swastika).
...)
The same is true for every game which is staged during the Nazi era - Adventures (Indy comes to mind) as well as strategy games (Commandos) or whatever.
Thank god they don't demand the same for movies or we would never had the chance to see i.e. ndiana Jones, but I guess that is because it is indeed very easy to remove symbols from a game, just modify some textures and you are done.
Nazis as enemy is not a problem per se, as long as they don't wear the swastika or other symbols of that regime.
But, you until a year or two ago you had to be careful not to be too violent, or your game would have landed on the index (meaning you don't can advertise for it and don't send it via post etc.). To avoid that, designers took some strange countermeasures. All soldiers in Command & Conquer were robots with black oil instead of red blood. If that didn't work, they altered the blood color to green instead of red (!!). (System Shock II was peopled with vulcans and/or romulans, apparently
In recent times, this problem is somewhat less dramatic, because we now have official Age ratings for games and if they are rated 18+ you can't sell them to underage people but you can advertise them and send them via (registered) mail.
I haven't read it and really have no idea what's in it but as far as I have heard, this book has the most significance for psychatrists trying to understand what went wrong in Hitlers head.
Nevertheless, I wholly agree with you that we should do everything possible to not let things like that ever happen again, especially in our times.
I understood that following the ongoing discussion after posting my text, nevertheless, thanks for the hint.
:)
Still, I have trouble understanding how anyone can really demand that children don't read Tom Sawyer or Harry Potter. But, comparing that to the fact that AFAIK some school districts (or even states?) in the USA disallow the teaching of the Evolution theory in favor of the creation according to the book Genesis, I should stop wondering
The actual term I am referring to is "Freiheitlich-Demokratische Grundordnung", I have no idea how to translate that into english. You won't get intro trouble if you demand i.e . some kind of parliamentary monarchy, but if you wan't to re-establish the Nazi system or Stalins Soviet-Union, you call for trouble.
The kind of discussion you mention would be no problem at all, as long as your better system don't include enforcing someones decisions onto that bunch of relatively uninformed people against their will (which is undemocratic).
BTW, in germany we have at least four parties that play a significant role in politics. Only two of them are big enough to get enough votes to decide who will be the chancellor (the chancellor is elected by the parliament), but they usually have to form coalitions with at least one other party to form the government (with the notable exception of the state of Bavaria which is running a de-facto single party system for 50 years now).
Yes, here in Germany you basically only get into trouble with old Nazi literature ("Mein Kampf" from Hitler comes to mind) or when you glorify the time or deny the crimes happened during '33-'45. Related to that, books can be banned (only from courts!!!) when they are "hate inspiring", call for some kind of nondemocratic/nonfree society or don't respect the honor of living persons (or persons that are not so long dead).
Nevertheless, even if it is no ban, you are not allowed to make works available to children that are rated as unsuitable for them. This is true for all kind of media, from books to movies, music or computer games. Except when it comes to violence in computer games, this ratings usually make sense (you don't want your kids to see a porn movie, do you?), but it can be quite a hassle nevertheless, because you can't just deliver them with standard mail, you are not allowed to do any advertisement that kids could see and so on.
Bottom line is: If someone here would call for a ban on works like Huck Finn, Harry Potter or "The Catcher in the Rye" he woud get laughed at from 95% of the society, but 50-70% would agree to a ban on Doom3....
Thank god it is cow and not sheep gut.
:)
Otherwise I could see myself in a few years, playing cello with geeks around that keep steeling my gut strings because "my gut is full".
Disclaimer: I am not yet playing on gut string, but plan to do so when being advanced enough. My current set is Jargar Medium A+D and Dominant G+C. Not that anyone here would care
Yes, it is simple, but that means one may be unable to fix that typo after two minutes, when the first reply or moderation comes in while others have hours or days. Of course, if no one replies there is little reason to edit, but still.
The best solution appears to be the history function mentioned by athakur, but I never dared to look how this is actually implemented by wikipedia and how many resources are used by that.
The footnote option is, IMHO, not better than just replying to yourself with a correction or and additonal comment.
Editing posts is evil! It may seem like a good idea for fixing that stupid typo or the wrong link, but it usually ends in deleted/edited posts where people just don't stand up to their words and nobody can follow what the reason for the discussion/flamewar was.
I see it all the time on other discussion forums, it's no fun!
Taco, all you do is describe what the current design (step of evolution) is, but what are the changes?. Obviously, you will have removed those restrictions, but you don't say so. :)