Logs? They were able to reprogram the firmware. You can't trust the logs - they say whatever the attackers want them to say. (Presuming the logs aren't being stored in a way that prevents them from being rewritten... but if their security is this bad, what's the chance that they did that?)
Time he died? Again, they were able to reprogram the firmware. Don't kill him right then - insert a "kill him at time X", with X being days, weeks, or months away. Note that you can also do things like "deliver the shock at time X, but don't log that you did, and after you deliver it, patch your own firmware to erase the reprogramming". I'm guessing that these devices are most likely using some form of flash memory for storage instead of magnetic memory... so if you do it properly, there's no trace at all that the code ever existed by the time someone tries to find out what happened.
Proximity? With a good amplifier and antenna, you could extend that to hundreds of meters. Let's be conservative and call it up to a hundred meters. But remember that radio waves travel through things that light doesn't -- the device doing the reprogramming could be in the trunk of a car, a nearby house, etc. You can't clear everyone away from hundreds of meters around every hotel room, house, etc. every major figure with a pacemaker is in, all the time.
So it becomes "profile everyone who's been within a hundred meters of this person since they ( had the pacemaker implanted / did whatever made them a target )". When that's a period of months or years, and the person involved is a major public figure, that's going to be minimum thousands of people, more likely tens of thousands.
Actually, you don't even have to pay both participants. You just have to film it, and write the contract in such a way that the participant being paid is being paid for their 'performance', not for the sex act itself. There's quite a few porn producers who cast themselves as the male 'talent', and don't pay themselves a salary. There have also been porn films done where doing the sex scene with the actress is the prize that a contest winner gets. The contest winner isn't directly paid, but does have to sign various forms, and may have their transportation and lodging paid.
This does make me wonder, though... if, say, you were writing a book that featured a sex scene with unusual sex, and paid someone to assist you in research, with the assistance involving having sex, how would that fall? Seems like the same thing, only the product is written rather than filmed....
Selling winning a contest is certainly legal, so long as you're not making false claims that the contest is fair, not fixed, etc. Indeed, it's so legal and common that there's a specific name for it -- "auction".
And how is that working out for you? Between the "Don't steal that DVD" and about 10-20 minutes of un-skippable previews and sometimes even commercials, I feel that I get at least a decent dose of ads from most DVDs.
Not the previous poster, but even where the previews and commercials aren't skippable on DVDs, they're often fast-forwardable. And where they aren't, I tend to simply leave the room and do things that need doing around the house (clothes or dish washing, generally), checking back every five minutes or so until I see that the menu is up.
No preview is 'unskippable' when you can simply leave the room until it's over.
Calling something that could fit on a business card without much squeezing a "manifesto" feels like stretching it to me... but I guess "mission statement" would sound too corporate. I was expecting something more on the scale of the GNU Manifesto.
Unfortunately, sign languages are natural languages, with the full complexity of natural languages - so you'd need to have good translation of natural languages first. To give a quick example, in ASL, the equivalent to the English "I went to Sarah's house," would be signed as something that could be represented in words as "*past-tense* Sarah possessive house I go". (The asterisks there are to indicate that ASL's past-tense indicator is a single sign, but doesn't really correspond directly to any single word in English.)
For extra fun in translation, it's common in ASL to indicate people who are around you by pointing to them with the appropriate sign. Thus, if Sarah was in the room with me, I'd sign "*past-tense* possessive house I go", making the "possessive" sign toward Sarah. (And note too that the same "possessive" hand position can mean English's "my", "your", "his", "her", "their", "our", etc., depending on who you gesture toward while making it.) For still more fun, arbitrary positions can be used as pronouns in ASL. For example, if I was going to be mentioning Sarah a lot in a conversation, but she wasn't there, I might sign "Sarah" off to my left, then later gesture in that direction to indicate that I'm talking about Sarah -- assuming, of course, that there wasn't someone standing there that you might confuse my gesture as being toward.
There is such a thing as "Signed English", which is essentially English "signed out" by using slightly modified versions of the ASL signs. Deaf people who have grown up with ASL often find Signed English to be cumbersome and slow, though - for them, it's still speaking a foreign language, since the signs are slightly different from what they're used to, and the sentence structure is completely different.
And that's just ASL -- linguists count somewhere upward of 50 different sign languages in use in the world. About two-thirds of them fall into five major families, and there's some mutual intelligibility between languages in the same family. Family relationships aren't always what you'd expect going by analogy with spoken languages, though - for example ASL (American Sign Language) and BSL (British Sign Language) are in two different families, and bear about as much relationship to each other as, say, Japanese and English.
There are groups working on the idea, though - one group that was mentioned in a story recently here on Slashdot has created a system using a glove to track finger positions which "understands" ASL-based manual spelling. That's still a long way from full ASL understanding, though - manual spelling is where the speaker signs out each letter, spelling out each word in English that way. While ASL users are used to doing that for names, it's comparatively slow. In general, it's slower than simply typing out the same message for even an average typist.
He added that the prototype had been built using existing off-the-shelf components, but there was scope to improve the equipment with customised parts.
"Ultimately we would like to reduce Digits to the size of a watch that can be worn all the time," he said.
Lots of people wear watches all the time - so when they can get it down to watch size (not if, when, given the way miniaturization of computers, cameras, etc. has progressed), I don't see any reason to suppose that people would find wearing a gesture sensor to be a burden.
And, for that matter, since the actual workings of a digital watch are tiny now, the gesture sensor could also be a watch.
Goodwill's web site says to check with your area's branch of Goodwill Industries to see what electronics they will and won't accept. Most Goodwills do take computers, though, as long as they're still working - indeed, Goodwill has partnered with Dell to help handle their computer recycling.
He didn't say anything about dumping the used motor oil; all he said was that the DNR is smarter than to charge for disposing of it at the landfill. Now, I don't know about where you live, but where I live, the local landfill also accepts motor oil, flourescent light bulbs, electronics, etc. for recycling. That's also "disposing of it" from the point of view of the person who's getting rid of it.
Well, leaving aside hunting, where the purpose of the weapon is still to kill things, many (but admittedly not all) sport 'weapons' have been modified in ways that make it hard for them to inflict significant damage. For example, fencing 'swords' have blunt tips, blunt edges, and 'blades' that are very flexible -- all to make it difficult for them to actually inflict damage. Similarly with a Kendo shinai. Paint ball guns shoot paint balls instead of solid projectiles, and shoot them at a much lower velocity than real guns shoot their projectiles.
Things like those I wouldn't consider to be a real weapon -- but yeah, I have to agree that a hunting bow is still a real weapon.
My high school set up a computer lab between my senior and junior year. The computers were C64s, and the only class taught was called "Computer Math". We learned about binary, octal, and hexadecimal, a little about binary coded decimal, what ASCII was, what an algorithm was, and did some programming in BASIC, mostly oriented around math. If I remember right, the most advanced thing we did was an implementation of Newton's Method for finding solutions to equations.
It was considered an advanced class, and there were no computer classes for "average" kids at the school at that time. We probably could have learned a lot more, but the teacher didn't really seem to know much about the subject. C64 assembly would have been an interesting thing to delve into, and would have given us an actual use for the stuff about binary and hex, at least - instead, we got to do programs in BASIC to convert between them. Bleh.
Things were actually a bit better in junior high. There, we had a course called "The Wheel" which was six six-week sessions on different topics. One of those was computers, and we learned a bit about hardware, history of computers, and that sort of thing, and got to do some BASIC programming on Commodore PETs. The teacher there was one of those ex-military types who ran his class like it was some kind of Basic Training, though, with pushups for talking back and all that kind of thing.
So the actual class wasn't so great, but the kids in Gifted were allowed to come to the computer lab after school and hang out and play around with the computers. I got to play my first actual computer game (Miser's Mansion), and, since it was in BASIC, was able to list it out and try to figure out how it worked. We were also mostly unsupervised there, with just a teacher who went in and out and made sure we weren't destroying the computers or doing anything to each other we shouldn't... so I was able to do "playing around" programming. Unfortunately, I had no access to any storage medium, so I had to type in the programs fresh each time, and never did anything terribly long because of that.
Why is it irrelevant? I'm not saying anything about how easy it is to get hired - I'm answering the poster's question of "Am I too old to learn new things?"
I understood what he said just fine. What I'm pointing out is that what he should be concerned about is toxic chemicals, period. It doesn't matter whether they're man-made or not.
It depends on the stuff in question. For example, for expensive, proprietary hardware and software, sometimes it's not possible to just go practice on your own, because you can't get the stuff. I've had training from EMC that was like that -- proprietary software that ran on proprietary hardware, so the only way to get any practice with it at all before the stuff got there was to go to their training. Thankfully, that's becoming more and more rare.
Sometimes, though, "training" is essentially an excuse to give you a week off your normal job to go somewhere that you will have the tools available, and can play with them, plus get a book on how to do it. My Spring framework training was like that -- much of the time the trainer was lecturing, I just read ahead in the book and did the labs. Finished it all a day early, so when he did the "Okay, the last half of the last day is for you guys to finish up the labs" thing, I got to go sightsee instead.
I'm 42. I've been a Unix/Linux sysadmin since I was in college -- about twenty years now. Or I was. You see, last year, I got a job with a new company, and after I'd been there about four months, my boss came to me and said, "Hey, you know how we've been looking for a new programmer? Well, we noticed you'd done some programming in the past (which I had, in college for my CS degree, as a hobby, and writing Perl and Bash as a sysadmin), and we're having a much easier time finding sysadmins than programmers, so we're wondering if you'd consider trying being a programmer."
I said yes -- with the agreement that if I wound up really hating it, I could go back to my old job. In the six months since then, I've gotten up to speed with modern Java (last time I'd touched it was way back when Sun was originally introducing it) and the Spring framework. The programmer who did most of our DBA stuff left in the course of that, and since I was the guy who was least important on the programming side of things, I also got tasked with taking over that -- so I'm learning MySQL administration now.
It's working out fine. I've found that I can't do like I used to in college, and read a book on a new subject and retain a ton of it without any real effort... but I don't need to. I've got enough general tech background knowledge that I can quickly find out what I need to know, when I need to know it. The stuff I do on a regular basis starts to stick pretty quickly -- and for the minutiae, it's really enough that I can remember "Oh, I read something about that." These days, with Google, if I remember that much, I've generally got the answer within ten minutes. Often less.
Some of the stuff I'm learning, I'm having fun with it. Some of it I'm not, but hey, it's a job -- if I enjoyed it all, they'd make me pay them to come here. And my old knowledge is still coming in handy -- when the systems crew can't figure something out, they come to me to ask about it. My old non-Java programming experience still applies in a lot of ways, and my knowledge of networks and Linux is often useful as well.
Honestly, unless something goes physically wrong with my brain, I can't see me ever stopping learning -- hell, my dad's in his 70s, and he's still learning new things keeping up his hobby of restoring and working on cars. It might get slower, but really, the big thing is just to keep going. If you give up and stop, you definitely won't learn whatever new thing you're trying to learn.
In my case I consider something "better" if it contains as few man made toxic chemicals as possible.
So, organically-grown deadly nightshade is "better" than inorganically-grown blueberries? After all, the toxic chemicals in the nightshade weren't man-made....
Making a digital copy of an entire book and re-publishing it online for profit doesn't seem like "fair" use to me. So, while I'll be the first to point out that copyright law is flawed, I'm pleased to see that Google is going to comply with it just like every other company (and individual) has to.
Sure, but Google wasn't ever doing that, and never had any intention to.
(1) They weren't ever re-publishing the entire book online, except for books that were either out of copyright, or no longer in-print and not available at reasonable prices. (See more about this below.) Only up to 20% of it, and they were choosing that 20% in a way that made it more useful for determining whether a book had information you wanted, but less useful for actually getting that information (e.g., table of contents was always included in that 20%).
(2) For most of the books, they were making no profit beyond any advertising revenue they might be getting from ads on those pages. To be more specific, they were not selling copies of the books.
US law already covers this, in section 108 of the Copyright Act. That section covers libraries and archives allowing copying of works and making copies themselves. Among its provisions, it states that any publicly-accessible library or archive can allow copying of works it has and is not liable for such copying, so long as they display notices on the copying equipment saying certain things about copyright law. (The individual doing the copying may be liable, but the library/archive is not.) This is what allows libraries to have copy machines and let you make copies of works they have, without having to have someone stationed there to make sure you're not copying too much, or to query you about the purpose for which you're copying the material.
Also, libraries/archives are explicitly allowed to make full copies of works, if the work in question is no longer available at a reasonable price. The section in question doesn't define what a "reasonable price" is, but that may be somewhere else in the Copyright Act.
Now, the law does say that libraries/archives can't get "direct or indirect commercial advantage" from the copying. I'm not 100% sure what that includes, but I'll note that quite a few libraries do accept money from advertisers to put up posters, etc., so simple advertising might not qualify.
I can't believe any unbiased court is going to fall for that. There are numerous obvious and fundamental differences, starting with the facts that Google is ultimately doing it for profit, not just to provide a public service, and that an automated on-line system that offers easy access to large parts of a work is far more accessible that a system that requires physically attending a library and manually copying every page, which surely amplifies any argument about damaging the value of the original work.
The law in question, however, does not require the library or archive in question to not be for-profit. It simply has to either provide public access, or, if it's a subject-specialized library, provide access to any researchers doing research in the field. The law also doesn't say anything about how accessible the library/archive in question can or can't be
Also, Google could quite reasonably argue that they were being much more restrictive than the law requires - a library or archive doesn't have to implement any protections to prevent patrons from copying whole books. But Google did that. Indeed, Google won't even let its patrons read the whole work; they only provide access to 20% of it. (And note that that's a fixed 20% - you can't, say, read the first fifth of the book, then come back on another account and read the second fifth.)
I suspect that Google's real leverage was that a lot of publishers privately wonder whether this is really doing their bottom line any harm and whether it might not be in their long term interests to turn a blind eye even if their copyrights are technically being infringed. As long as Google is required to provide an opt-out, thus giving the publishers a safety net if they accept the practice and then the data shows that they really are losing out, the publishers have relatively little to lose by agreeing AFAICS.
I'd agree that if the publishers are being rational, that should certainly be another consideration. Relating to that, from my limited experience with Google's copies of books, it seems that Google tries to pick the 20% they show in a very smart way. The table of contents and other front matter are always there, and at least part of any introduction. Beyond that, pages are sampled from throughout the book, generally seeming to take the first few pages of each chapter or article. Thus, someone reading through can get a good idea of what the book covers, but will generally won't be able to read any particular chapter or article in full. If they are indeed deliberately doing it this way, that would be another argument for them to trot out in favor of this being fair use, since it increases the chance that a patron can see whether the book would be one they'd want to read, while keeping low the chance that they'd be able to simply read everything they want from Google.
If the publishers were sure that what Google was doing wouldn't come under fair use, they could have taken Google to court. They chose not to, which means that they aren't sure that it wouldn't be considered fair use by a court.
To give the physical analogy that Google would undoubtedly use, it's common practice for libraries to buy books and allow anyone to browse them in order to determine whether the book is one they're interested in. It's also common practice for libraries to have photocopiers available at a nominal charge, so that people can make copies of portions of the available books. Both of these things are perfectly legal under US copyright law. Indeed, Section 108 of the Copyright Act states that public libraries and public archives may allow patrons to freely copy materials, and cannot be held liable for such copying so long as they display a specific notice on each piece of copying equipment. The end user can be held liable, but the library or archive cannot.
Thus, there's ample precedent that what Google is allowing through their online archive is, in fact, perfectly legal. This is why the publishers chose to settle rather than go to court - they were afraid that a court might allow Google even greater leeway.
Actually, no - I don't agree to anything. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publishers tried exactly what you're talking about - they put a notice in the front of their books stating that you were only licensed this copy of the book, not sold it, and that you were not allowed to resell it. (In some cases, simply that you were not allowed to sell it below a certain price). The Supreme Court held this to be illegal, leading to what's called "The Doctrine of First Sale".
The reason that you're not allowed to copy a book has nothing to do with agreeing with terms - it's because copyright law makes it illegal. It doesn't matter whether the book has a notice saying that you can't copy it, simply has a bare copyright notice, or has no copyright notice at all - it's equally illegal either way.
Now, from a technical point of view, Google is allowing the making copies of copyright material. So that's copyright infringement, right? Well, maybe and maybe not. There are fair use exemptions, and there are precedents in things like libraries having photocopiers so that people can copy portions of books. If Google is making a good effort to set up things in such a way that people can't just copy whole books and make off with them, then there's a good chance that a court might hold that what they're doing is no more illegal than, say, the New York Public Library having lots of book and having photocopiers that people can take them to.
That's what the publishers are afraid of, and that was Google's leverage to negotiate with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Logs? They were able to reprogram the firmware. You can't trust the logs - they say whatever the attackers want them to say. (Presuming the logs aren't being stored in a way that prevents them from being rewritten... but if their security is this bad, what's the chance that they did that?)
Time he died? Again, they were able to reprogram the firmware. Don't kill him right then - insert a "kill him at time X", with X being days, weeks, or months away. Note that you can also do things like "deliver the shock at time X, but don't log that you did, and after you deliver it, patch your own firmware to erase the reprogramming". I'm guessing that these devices are most likely using some form of flash memory for storage instead of magnetic memory... so if you do it properly, there's no trace at all that the code ever existed by the time someone tries to find out what happened.
Proximity? With a good amplifier and antenna, you could extend that to hundreds of meters. Let's be conservative and call it up to a hundred meters. But remember that radio waves travel through things that light doesn't -- the device doing the reprogramming could be in the trunk of a car, a nearby house, etc. You can't clear everyone away from hundreds of meters around every hotel room, house, etc. every major figure with a pacemaker is in, all the time.
So it becomes "profile everyone who's been within a hundred meters of this person since they ( had the pacemaker implanted / did whatever made them a target )". When that's a period of months or years, and the person involved is a major public figure, that's going to be minimum thousands of people, more likely tens of thousands.
Actually, you don't even have to pay both participants. You just have to film it, and write the contract in such a way that the participant being paid is being paid for their 'performance', not for the sex act itself. There's quite a few porn producers who cast themselves as the male 'talent', and don't pay themselves a salary. There have also been porn films done where doing the sex scene with the actress is the prize that a contest winner gets. The contest winner isn't directly paid, but does have to sign various forms, and may have their transportation and lodging paid.
This does make me wonder, though... if, say, you were writing a book that featured a sex scene with unusual sex, and paid someone to assist you in research, with the assistance involving having sex, how would that fall? Seems like the same thing, only the product is written rather than filmed....
Selling winning a contest is certainly legal, so long as you're not making false claims that the contest is fair, not fixed, etc. Indeed, it's so legal and common that there's a specific name for it -- "auction".
QWOP. It should keep him away from computers for the next several years.
He actually did pay taxes to Great Britain... which is part of the reason that Great Britain never bothered taking Sealand away from him.
And how is that working out for you? Between the "Don't steal that DVD" and about 10-20 minutes of un-skippable previews and sometimes even commercials, I feel that I get at least a decent dose of ads from most DVDs.
Not the previous poster, but even where the previews and commercials aren't skippable on DVDs, they're often fast-forwardable. And where they aren't, I tend to simply leave the room and do things that need doing around the house (clothes or dish washing, generally), checking back every five minutes or so until I see that the menu is up.
No preview is 'unskippable' when you can simply leave the room until it's over.
Really? I thought the goal of Gnome was to remove features and break shit.
No, no, you're misunderstanding completely - the goal of Gnome is to add shit and break features!
Calling something that could fit on a business card without much squeezing a "manifesto" feels like stretching it to me... but I guess "mission statement" would sound too corporate. I was expecting something more on the scale of the GNU Manifesto.
Unfortunately, sign languages are natural languages, with the full complexity of natural languages - so you'd need to have good translation of natural languages first. To give a quick example, in ASL, the equivalent to the English "I went to Sarah's house," would be signed as something that could be represented in words as "*past-tense* Sarah possessive house I go". (The asterisks there are to indicate that ASL's past-tense indicator is a single sign, but doesn't really correspond directly to any single word in English.)
For extra fun in translation, it's common in ASL to indicate people who are around you by pointing to them with the appropriate sign. Thus, if Sarah was in the room with me, I'd sign "*past-tense* possessive house I go", making the "possessive" sign toward Sarah. (And note too that the same "possessive" hand position can mean English's "my", "your", "his", "her", "their", "our", etc., depending on who you gesture toward while making it.) For still more fun, arbitrary positions can be used as pronouns in ASL. For example, if I was going to be mentioning Sarah a lot in a conversation, but she wasn't there, I might sign "Sarah" off to my left, then later gesture in that direction to indicate that I'm talking about Sarah -- assuming, of course, that there wasn't someone standing there that you might confuse my gesture as being toward.
There is such a thing as "Signed English", which is essentially English "signed out" by using slightly modified versions of the ASL signs. Deaf people who have grown up with ASL often find Signed English to be cumbersome and slow, though - for them, it's still speaking a foreign language, since the signs are slightly different from what they're used to, and the sentence structure is completely different.
And that's just ASL -- linguists count somewhere upward of 50 different sign languages in use in the world. About two-thirds of them fall into five major families, and there's some mutual intelligibility between languages in the same family. Family relationships aren't always what you'd expect going by analogy with spoken languages, though - for example ASL (American Sign Language) and BSL (British Sign Language) are in two different families, and bear about as much relationship to each other as, say, Japanese and English.
There are groups working on the idea, though - one group that was mentioned in a story recently here on Slashdot has created a system using a glove to track finger positions which "understands" ASL-based manual spelling. That's still a long way from full ASL understanding, though - manual spelling is where the speaker signs out each letter, spelling out each word in English that way. While ASL users are used to doing that for names, it's comparatively slow. In general, it's slower than simply typing out the same message for even an average typist.
even the "experts" apparently aren't reading TFA.
He added that the prototype had been built using existing off-the-shelf components, but there was scope to improve the equipment with customised parts.
"Ultimately we would like to reduce Digits to the size of a watch that can be worn all the time," he said.
Lots of people wear watches all the time - so when they can get it down to watch size (not if, when, given the way miniaturization of computers, cameras, etc. has progressed), I don't see any reason to suppose that people would find wearing a gesture sensor to be a burden.
And, for that matter, since the actual workings of a digital watch are tiny now, the gesture sensor could also be a watch.
Goodwill's web site says to check with your area's branch of Goodwill Industries to see what electronics they will and won't accept. Most Goodwills do take computers, though, as long as they're still working - indeed, Goodwill has partnered with Dell to help handle their computer recycling.
He didn't say anything about dumping the used motor oil; all he said was that the DNR is smarter than to charge for disposing of it at the landfill. Now, I don't know about where you live, but where I live, the local landfill also accepts motor oil, flourescent light bulbs, electronics, etc. for recycling. That's also "disposing of it" from the point of view of the person who's getting rid of it.
Actually, crossbow deaths still happen - there are a fair number of crossbow hunters in the US, and they're just as likely as mistakenly shoot a person as hunters using guns. One happened last month, in fact: http://www.local12.com/mostpopular/story/Owen-County-Woman-Dies-in-Crossbow-Accident/UzDm7-_IV0Wh7jV5dy_Ydw.cspx
Murder by crossbow happens as well, though it's less common: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bradford-west-yorkshire-10801054 and http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/crime/article/900745--man-shot-dead-with-crossbow-inside-main-st-library are two murders-by-crossbow from 2010.
Well, leaving aside hunting, where the purpose of the weapon is still to kill things, many (but admittedly not all) sport 'weapons' have been modified in ways that make it hard for them to inflict significant damage. For example, fencing 'swords' have blunt tips, blunt edges, and 'blades' that are very flexible -- all to make it difficult for them to actually inflict damage. Similarly with a Kendo shinai. Paint ball guns shoot paint balls instead of solid projectiles, and shoot them at a much lower velocity than real guns shoot their projectiles.
Things like those I wouldn't consider to be a real weapon -- but yeah, I have to agree that a hunting bow is still a real weapon.
My high school set up a computer lab between my senior and junior year. The computers were C64s, and the only class taught was called "Computer Math". We learned about binary, octal, and hexadecimal, a little about binary coded decimal, what ASCII was, what an algorithm was, and did some programming in BASIC, mostly oriented around math. If I remember right, the most advanced thing we did was an implementation of Newton's Method for finding solutions to equations.
It was considered an advanced class, and there were no computer classes for "average" kids at the school at that time. We probably could have learned a lot more, but the teacher didn't really seem to know much about the subject. C64 assembly would have been an interesting thing to delve into, and would have given us an actual use for the stuff about binary and hex, at least - instead, we got to do programs in BASIC to convert between them. Bleh.
Things were actually a bit better in junior high. There, we had a course called "The Wheel" which was six six-week sessions on different topics. One of those was computers, and we learned a bit about hardware, history of computers, and that sort of thing, and got to do some BASIC programming on Commodore PETs. The teacher there was one of those ex-military types who ran his class like it was some kind of Basic Training, though, with pushups for talking back and all that kind of thing.
So the actual class wasn't so great, but the kids in Gifted were allowed to come to the computer lab after school and hang out and play around with the computers. I got to play my first actual computer game (Miser's Mansion), and, since it was in BASIC, was able to list it out and try to figure out how it worked. We were also mostly unsupervised there, with just a teacher who went in and out and made sure we weren't destroying the computers or doing anything to each other we shouldn't... so I was able to do "playing around" programming. Unfortunately, I had no access to any storage medium, so I had to type in the programs fresh each time, and never did anything terribly long because of that.
Why is it irrelevant? I'm not saying anything about how easy it is to get hired - I'm answering the poster's question of "Am I too old to learn new things?"
Tomatoes are in the nightshade family, but they are not deadly nightshade.
I understood what he said just fine. What I'm pointing out is that what he should be concerned about is toxic chemicals, period. It doesn't matter whether they're man-made or not.
It depends on the stuff in question. For example, for expensive, proprietary hardware and software, sometimes it's not possible to just go practice on your own, because you can't get the stuff. I've had training from EMC that was like that -- proprietary software that ran on proprietary hardware, so the only way to get any practice with it at all before the stuff got there was to go to their training. Thankfully, that's becoming more and more rare.
Sometimes, though, "training" is essentially an excuse to give you a week off your normal job to go somewhere that you will have the tools available, and can play with them, plus get a book on how to do it. My Spring framework training was like that -- much of the time the trainer was lecturing, I just read ahead in the book and did the labs. Finished it all a day early, so when he did the "Okay, the last half of the last day is for you guys to finish up the labs" thing, I got to go sightsee instead.
I'm 42. I've been a Unix/Linux sysadmin since I was in college -- about twenty years now. Or I was. You see, last year, I got a job with a new company, and after I'd been there about four months, my boss came to me and said, "Hey, you know how we've been looking for a new programmer? Well, we noticed you'd done some programming in the past (which I had, in college for my CS degree, as a hobby, and writing Perl and Bash as a sysadmin), and we're having a much easier time finding sysadmins than programmers, so we're wondering if you'd consider trying being a programmer."
I said yes -- with the agreement that if I wound up really hating it, I could go back to my old job. In the six months since then, I've gotten up to speed with modern Java (last time I'd touched it was way back when Sun was originally introducing it) and the Spring framework. The programmer who did most of our DBA stuff left in the course of that, and since I was the guy who was least important on the programming side of things, I also got tasked with taking over that -- so I'm learning MySQL administration now.
It's working out fine. I've found that I can't do like I used to in college, and read a book on a new subject and retain a ton of it without any real effort... but I don't need to. I've got enough general tech background knowledge that I can quickly find out what I need to know, when I need to know it. The stuff I do on a regular basis starts to stick pretty quickly -- and for the minutiae, it's really enough that I can remember "Oh, I read something about that." These days, with Google, if I remember that much, I've generally got the answer within ten minutes. Often less.
Some of the stuff I'm learning, I'm having fun with it. Some of it I'm not, but hey, it's a job -- if I enjoyed it all, they'd make me pay them to come here. And my old knowledge is still coming in handy -- when the systems crew can't figure something out, they come to me to ask about it. My old non-Java programming experience still applies in a lot of ways, and my knowledge of networks and Linux is often useful as well.
Honestly, unless something goes physically wrong with my brain, I can't see me ever stopping learning -- hell, my dad's in his 70s, and he's still learning new things keeping up his hobby of restoring and working on cars. It might get slower, but really, the big thing is just to keep going. If you give up and stop, you definitely won't learn whatever new thing you're trying to learn.
In my case I consider something "better" if it contains as few man made toxic chemicals as possible.
So, organically-grown deadly nightshade is "better" than inorganically-grown blueberries? After all, the toxic chemicals in the nightshade weren't man-made....
Making a digital copy of an entire book and re-publishing it online for profit doesn't seem like "fair" use to me. So, while I'll be the first to point out that copyright law is flawed, I'm pleased to see that Google is going to comply with it just like every other company (and individual) has to.
Sure, but Google wasn't ever doing that, and never had any intention to.
(1) They weren't ever re-publishing the entire book online, except for books that were either out of copyright, or no longer in-print and not available at reasonable prices. (See more about this below.) Only up to 20% of it, and they were choosing that 20% in a way that made it more useful for determining whether a book had information you wanted, but less useful for actually getting that information (e.g., table of contents was always included in that 20%).
(2) For most of the books, they were making no profit beyond any advertising revenue they might be getting from ads on those pages. To be more specific, they were not selling copies of the books.
US law already covers this, in section 108 of the Copyright Act. That section covers libraries and archives allowing copying of works and making copies themselves. Among its provisions, it states that any publicly-accessible library or archive can allow copying of works it has and is not liable for such copying, so long as they display notices on the copying equipment saying certain things about copyright law. (The individual doing the copying may be liable, but the library/archive is not.) This is what allows libraries to have copy machines and let you make copies of works they have, without having to have someone stationed there to make sure you're not copying too much, or to query you about the purpose for which you're copying the material.
Also, libraries/archives are explicitly allowed to make full copies of works, if the work in question is no longer available at a reasonable price. The section in question doesn't define what a "reasonable price" is, but that may be somewhere else in the Copyright Act.
Now, the law does say that libraries/archives can't get "direct or indirect commercial advantage" from the copying. I'm not 100% sure what that includes, but I'll note that quite a few libraries do accept money from advertisers to put up posters, etc., so simple advertising might not qualify.
I can't believe any unbiased court is going to fall for that. There are numerous obvious and fundamental differences, starting with the facts that Google is ultimately doing it for profit, not just to provide a public service, and that an automated on-line system that offers easy access to large parts of a work is far more accessible that a system that requires physically attending a library and manually copying every page, which surely amplifies any argument about damaging the value of the original work.
The law in question, however, does not require the library or archive in question to not be for-profit. It simply has to either provide public access, or, if it's a subject-specialized library, provide access to any researchers doing research in the field. The law also doesn't say anything about how accessible the library/archive in question can or can't be
Also, Google could quite reasonably argue that they were being much more restrictive than the law requires - a library or archive doesn't have to implement any protections to prevent patrons from copying whole books. But Google did that. Indeed, Google won't even let its patrons read the whole work; they only provide access to 20% of it. (And note that that's a fixed 20% - you can't, say, read the first fifth of the book, then come back on another account and read the second fifth.)
I suspect that Google's real leverage was that a lot of publishers privately wonder whether this is really doing their bottom line any harm and whether it might not be in their long term interests to turn a blind eye even if their copyrights are technically being infringed. As long as Google is required to provide an opt-out, thus giving the publishers a safety net if they accept the practice and then the data shows that they really are losing out, the publishers have relatively little to lose by agreeing AFAICS.
I'd agree that if the publishers are being rational, that should certainly be another consideration. Relating to that, from my limited experience with Google's copies of books, it seems that Google tries to pick the 20% they show in a very smart way. The table of contents and other front matter are always there, and at least part of any introduction. Beyond that, pages are sampled from throughout the book, generally seeming to take the first few pages of each chapter or article. Thus, someone reading through can get a good idea of what the book covers, but will generally won't be able to read any particular chapter or article in full. If they are indeed deliberately doing it this way, that would be another argument for them to trot out in favor of this being fair use, since it increases the chance that a patron can see whether the book would be one they'd want to read, while keeping low the chance that they'd be able to simply read everything they want from Google.
If the publishers were sure that what Google was doing wouldn't come under fair use, they could have taken Google to court. They chose not to, which means that they aren't sure that it wouldn't be considered fair use by a court.
To give the physical analogy that Google would undoubtedly use, it's common practice for libraries to buy books and allow anyone to browse them in order to determine whether the book is one they're interested in. It's also common practice for libraries to have photocopiers available at a nominal charge, so that people can make copies of portions of the available books. Both of these things are perfectly legal under US copyright law. Indeed, Section 108 of the Copyright Act states that public libraries and public archives may allow patrons to freely copy materials, and cannot be held liable for such copying so long as they display a specific notice on each piece of copying equipment. The end user can be held liable, but the library or archive cannot.
Thus, there's ample precedent that what Google is allowing through their online archive is, in fact, perfectly legal. This is why the publishers chose to settle rather than go to court - they were afraid that a court might allow Google even greater leeway.
Actually, no - I don't agree to anything. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, publishers tried exactly what you're talking about - they put a notice in the front of their books stating that you were only licensed this copy of the book, not sold it, and that you were not allowed to resell it. (In some cases, simply that you were not allowed to sell it below a certain price). The Supreme Court held this to be illegal, leading to what's called "The Doctrine of First Sale".
The reason that you're not allowed to copy a book has nothing to do with agreeing with terms - it's because copyright law makes it illegal. It doesn't matter whether the book has a notice saying that you can't copy it, simply has a bare copyright notice, or has no copyright notice at all - it's equally illegal either way.
Now, from a technical point of view, Google is allowing the making copies of copyright material. So that's copyright infringement, right? Well, maybe and maybe not. There are fair use exemptions, and there are precedents in things like libraries having photocopiers so that people can copy portions of books. If Google is making a good effort to set up things in such a way that people can't just copy whole books and make off with them, then there's a good chance that a court might hold that what they're doing is no more illegal than, say, the New York Public Library having lots of book and having photocopiers that people can take them to.
That's what the publishers are afraid of, and that was Google's leverage to negotiate with them.