The law lists what is and what is not a "biometric identifier ":
"Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan,
fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry.
Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples,
written signatures, photographs,
You can network install most distros, starting with pxe. It's interesting to do this from 1,000 miles away, without a KVM. Set up your Anaconda bootstrap, reboot, and hope that an hour later you have a functioning system that you can ssh to.
You can also have grub fallback to a 28MB recovery image in case the remote blind install hits a hiccup.
Suppose an attacker is targeting a log in page. To load the page, your browser makes several http requests - the html page itself, a css file, a JavaScript file or two, some images that are on the page, etc. The cookie, user-agent etc are the same for all of these requests. Therefore the attacker already knows all they need to about the length of all your headers wven before you submit the login form.
By trying it themselves ahead of time, the attacker knows that a login with an 8-character password will be the SAME size as the GET request for login.php. The exact size is irrelevant, it's the relative size that matters.
Obviously high- end networking hardware DOES need to be replaced pretty often, perhaps every 5 years or so.
The claim that an enterprise storage system loses half its value in a year because drives get bigger is a bit silly, though. Several years ago I bought storage hardware for our datacenter. It was filled with 400GB drives. The same sleds now hold 4TB drives, connected to the same expanders, the same RAID cards, and the same storage logic. The actual hard drives are less than half of the cost of the total system.
Assuming a five-year lifespan, you'd figure 20% per year on your networking equipment. A bit longer on your racks, even longer for your raised floor etc.
> what is meant when we say we are guaranteed to a right of free speech is limited to being *mostly* guaranteed that the government is not supposed to interfere with our right to free speech.
You accurately described th first amendment, but not th right of free speech. The FIRST AMENDMENT says that the government may not infringe the right of free speech. Note it says "THE right of free speech, not "A new right of free speech", just as you said "our right of free speech" must not be interfered with. This is because the right of free speech was recognized at least 40 years before the first amendment was written.
You say government is prohibited from infringing your right to free speech. Government can't be prohibited from taking back something if THEY GAVE IT TO YOU. Since government is prohibited from taking them, your rights must have come from somewhere else.
The first amendment protects the right of free speech, it did not create the right. (You'll notice the wording of the Constitution doesn't ever claim to create a right. Rather it enjoins the government from infringing the rights of the people.)
This makes perfect sense if you think about the definition of a "right". Is the right of free speech mean that you can say whatever the majority approves of? The essence of a right is you can do certain things regardless of what the majority thinks! That's that's the defining characteristic of a right, the fact that it exists and the majority can't vote it out of existence (though they could -infringe- your rights) . Hmm, if your neighbors can't legitimately vote your rights away, that must mean they didn't give them to you in the first place. If rights came from the government, or from the Convention, whoever gave you those rights would be could legitimately take them away at any time. The fact that no government document can legitimately eliminate rights means that they cannot have been created by a government document. Rather, certain rights must be part of the dignity of mankind; you are Barak Obama must have the same right to speak your mind based on being human beings.
It's good that you were very clear you're not saying ALL men are this way or ALL women are that way. Certainly that wouldn't be true.
I understand there ARE studies which suggest that when men and women are "assholes", men are MORE LIKELY to be an asshole to your face, while women are MORE LIKELY to do it behind your back. It might be that some men feel more comfortable being a "tough guy", while many women prefer to maintain the illusion of being "nice", that women's social cues tend to value getting along while men's tend to value, or at least accept, a degree of machismo.
Neither is better or worse, IMHO. My wife writes the holiday cards (she can be nice) while I handle the abusive bill collectors and anyone trying to take advantage of us (I can be tough). She COULD be tough and I COULD be nice, but being a bit adversarial and brosque and comes more naturally to me and being sweet and "getting along" comes more naturally to her.
I actually read the patent application and it is bullshit; the summary isn't misleading. Normally when a Slashdot headline says "Company X trying to patent Y", that really means Company X is trying to patent some specific invention RELATED to Y. Not this time. They're actually trying to patent A/B testing of videos.
To prevent this patent from being issued, someone needs to send USPTO -printed- prior art such as a magazine or journal article describing A/B testing of educational videos. Along with the printed prior art, they need to include a "301" letter. The letter and prior art will become part of the patent file which should be examined before any patent is issued.
The headline is misleading. Obviously, reading a document aloud or taking a picture of it doesn't make the information no longer classified. Why? Because it's the INFORMATION that's classified, not the document in it is in. The document may be MARKED "contains classified information ", but it's the information that's secret.
Most (but not all) classified information is classified based on its source. For example, all photos from spy satellites are classified, so the classification is decided before a particular image is even taken. Clinton did two things. She sent out classified via an unsecured system, and she failed to properly mark those emails as containing classified information. Because she didn't mark the classification of the information in the emails when she sent them, State is doing that now. They are "retroactively" MARKING them to indicate which classification the information is - and always has been.
So it's not that the classification changed, they simply weren't properly marked before. State is going back and adding the markings that the emails should have had from the beginning, because they contain information which has always been classified.
>> Primary categories that -can- be fair use include
> Your list is bogus.
Let's have a look at the statute. It's half a page, not too hard to read. Quoting 17 U.S. Code  107:
for purposes such as criticism, comment, news
reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for
classroom use), scholarship, or research
That list looks familiar. You may not like the list, but it's the list that Congress put in the law. The list isn't comprehensive, but it is law - statutory federal law.
> No it's not. Fair use is an exception to copyright.
Unanimous SCOTUS opinion in Campbell vs Acuff-Rose "fair use is an affirmative defense".
That bears repeating, the unanimous opinion of the nine justices is "fair use is an affirmative defense".
You'll note also that both sides, in their original pleadings in the case, referred to "the affirmative defense of fair use". This had already been decided by SCOTUS in Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises (1992).
In case there was any question, Chief Justice Rehnquist asked defendants attorney during oral argument if defendant wished to argue that point: Chief Justice Rehnquist: Is fair use an affirmative defense? Mr. Rogow: It is.
I think you'll find that I don't shoot my mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about. When I say "the law is...", I'm probably quoting either the statute or SCOTUS.
Thanks for the compliment. I might have been more clear had I said fair use is a "valid excuse" for copying - raised only after you've already admitted to copying. The person copying admits they did copy, so then it's on them to provide evidence of a good excuse. The legal term for a good excuse that you have to prove is "affirmative defense ".
Since you notice who posts what, note I post only on my tiny phone, with auto-complete, auto-correct, etc. Half of my typos and incorrect words are courtesy of my phone. It may look like English isn't my native language, but that's just my choice of device.
If they were basing their claim of the amount of DAMAGES on lost revenue, they'd need to prove the damages. But they probably would use statutory damages instead.
What we're talking about here is separate from damages. Fair use is something called an "affirmative defense". In other words, it is a valid excuse. An affirmative defense is to be proved by the one claiming it. They admit they did the thing (copying), but say it's excusable because...
To give an example from criminal law, consider a simple speeding ticket. The speeder claims that they were rushing an injured friend to the hospital. They admit that they were speeding. That's all that the prosecution has to prove. If you want to use the "rushing to the hospital" excuse, you have to produce evidence that you were rushing to the hospital. The prosecution does not have to disprove every possible excuse for every speeding ticket. The issue only arises after the one claiming the excuse presents evidence of the excuse.
Btw this is a good way to surprise the prosecution and get a not-guilty verdict in traffic and misdemeanor cases. The prosecution doesn't arrive prepared to disprove every possible defense, so if you have reasonable evidence of any legal defense you can win.
For some time it wasn't 100% clear which type of defense fair use was, or if it was perhaps an element of the tort. It was clearly ruled to be an affirmative defense in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
I posted the above before including the fourth test, competition with the original. Does the new work effect the market for the original work or derivative works by the author?
A professionally produced "Star Trek" film certainly COULD compete with Paramount's 2016 Star Trek Film, "Star Trek Beyond". In fact, if it's available on Amazon, consider someone tells their spouse or parents they want the Star Trek DVD for Christmas. It's entirely possible the gift-giver (who isn't a Star Trek fan) would buy the wrong one, buying the unauthorized movie rather than Paramount's official Star Trek.
Note that fair use is a "defense". That means if you choose to copy someone else's work, it's up to the person copying to prove the facts of fair use. The original copyright holder doesn't have to prove harm, the person copying has to show there was no harm.
Any derivative work (copying) that competes commercially with the original is unlikely to be fair use under US law.
Primary categories that -can- be fair use include: Criticism and comment -- quoting a work in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment.
News reporting -- summarizing an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report.
Research and scholarship -- for example, quoting a short passage in a scholarly, scientific, or technical work for clarification of the author's observations.
Nonprofit educational uses --photocopying of limited portions of written works by teachers for classroom use.
Parody -- a work that ridicules another, usually well-known, work by imitating it in a comic way.
The four tests used by the courts are: the purpose and character of the use (is the new work of a different type than the old. Dramatic movie -> review is okay, dramatic movie -> dramatic movie probably isn't)
the nature of the copyrighted work (it's okay to copy pure facts, not okay to copy pure art, with lots of gray in between)
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken (copying the most important characters and plot points is less likely to be allowed than borrowing unimportant parts)
Copyright does last a very long time, so I don't think most people -want- objects to be copyright protected rather than patent.
The four classes are:
Utility patent: the functional implementation of a functional thing, a machine. Does not cover artistic / decorative elements.
Design patent: Cosmetic design elements of a functional thing. Covers only non-functional decorative / artistic choices.
Copyright: Artistic works which have no functional purpose, things which are only viewed/heard, not used (other than for viewing/reading/hearing).
Trademark: A brand name or symbol indicating who makes or sells the product.
Delorean couldn't get any copyright on the artistic design elements of the Delorean car because a car is a functional thing. They could possibly get a design patent covering unique appearance features, but only to the extent that they aren't required for proper function of the car. So you could probably design patent "a hexagon steering wheel with blah blah blah...", because a round one works as well. But the patent would cover only a _hexagon_steering_wheel_ with those other features, not "steering wheel" (functional) or "hexagon".
If you think the "problems" caused by the industrial revolution were prevented by WWII, you're about a century off. The industrial revolution is 1760-1820. So a hundred and twenty years before WWII.
Ps - Please don't vote, clueless voters are how we end up with Obama and Bush.
> Are you making a value judgement that Wikipedia has more useful merit, and streaming Hulu would be a recreational misallocation of bandwidth?
Yes. Wikipedia it's more useful to struggling people in a third world country than Hulu is. It's been said "be open minded, but not so open that your brains fall out".
> if content providers are allowed to partner with ISPs... then the open and free internet died that day --- from then on, only billion $$$ megacorporations could become a sponsor and have their website included in the public internet by the end of the decade
Not a terrible guess, but we've actually already been there and done that. In the early years, ISPs actually did only carry content from partner companies. The major ISPs included AOL, MSN, and Prodigy. "By the end of the decade" they all had to change their business model to providing full internet access because people like MORE. That's Americans' favorite thing, "more". It didn't take long for ISPs who offered full unfettered access to everything to win out over those with content partnerships. Again, not a bad guess, not knowing how that actually turned out. But it does in fact turn out the opposite of what you guessed.
If they were selling a light-use internet service, sure. They are not. They are giving, at no charge, access to educational materials (and their own site, of course). They are fully within their rights to decide what they want to pay for, to give away.
It never ceases to amaze me what a bunch of self-entitled little spoiled brats Slashdot readers are, as they bitch about people giving things away.
In terms of bandwidth, a picture really is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a million. In other words, it costs about the same to deliver one video or a million wikipedia pages.
It does have costs. Fiber lines don't build themselves and upgrade themselves every few years. Cisco routers don't magically appear. Just as importantly for the mobile providers, the backbone providers don't give them free bandwidth. The backbones charge.
So $1 can deliver X number of videos, or X million number of wikipedia views.
Is there some government subsidy here, or are you completely making shit up? From what I've seen, Facebook and the carriers are the ones subsidizing consumers' access.
Obviously Facebook isn't being entirely altruistic here, they are providing access to Wikipedia, local news, weather, Google search, health information etc. and FACEBOOK.
Having said that, you're right the reason a library doesn't have every book ever published is primarily an economic constraint - it doesn't make sense to pay to buy and house everything ever published.
Exactly the same constraint applies to Facebook or a mobile carrier paying for internet access - it has costs, and it doesn't make sense for FB to pay for everyone to stream porn videos from Xvideos.com. It does make sense that someone would offer to pay for your "free" access to Wikipedia, but not offer to pay for your Hulu and Girls Gone Wild surfing. Furthermore, because there is a finite amount of money, if FB DID spend it subsidizing Xvideos in one area, that would exhaust the budget and mean the budget would not also provide free access to Wikipedia in another area.
That's already happened a few times. At one time, most people worked in agriculture- mankind spent most of our time feeding ourselves. An "economic downturn ", therefore, was when a lot of people starved to death.
After machines such as plows and later GPS-guided combines with largely automated food processing plants did most of the work of producing food, inexpensive food was therefore readily available and humans had time to do things not strictly necessary for survival, like education, producing consumer goods, writing and printing books, comfortable clothes, and creating washing machines and dishwashers. With the efficiency of machines, consumer goods including books, and conveniences like washing machines and refrigerators became readily available to the masses.
No longer scrubbing our clothes on a washboard, we then had time to make and play video games.
The replacement of human labor with machines has been a continuous process for over a thousand years, peaking about 200 years ago. In the process, our standard of living has gone from digging for anything we could eat in the winter to stopping by Walmart to select which of the 160 different fruit and vegetable varieties we want to munch on while we enjoy our Netflix movie.
> "Anyone looking for something to worry about in the near future might want to consider the opposite of superintelligence: superstupidity"
At least we know what superstupidity looks like and what it does, based on observing Washington, DC. One lesson is to minimize the control and possible impact from failures of these complex but inherently stupid systems. See, for example the office of the vice president - a VP might say some stupid things, but it doesn't really do too much damage.
The new crop of candidates provide another lesson in superstupidity. They aren't exactly a bunch of brain surgeons either.
Although I don't have the answer to the exact question you asked, I can point out on thing. It's easy to convert from djvu to pdf if, at some point in time, you want a pdf copy for some reason. The reverse isn't so true. If you archive it as pdf, you can't readily convert to anything else without losing information.
Overall, pdf is reasonable for viewing (right now), but not good for editing, manipulating, and archiving. Even for viewing, pdf at its heart assumes it is being printed on letter- sized paper, and that's the layout you'll always get. It doesn't flow or scale well or work well on widescreen displays. This is because pdf is essentially the Postscript printer language, zipped. It's designed for printing, not for screens of varying sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios.
Slashdot Mirror
The law under which the suit was filed:
http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio...
The law lists what is and what is not a "biometric identifier ":
"Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan,
fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry.
Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples,
written signatures, photographs,
You can network install most distros, starting with pxe. It's interesting to do this from 1,000 miles away, without a KVM. Set up your Anaconda bootstrap, reboot, and hope that an hour later you have a functioning system that you can ssh to.
You can also have grub fallback to a 28MB recovery image in case the remote blind install hits a hiccup.
Suppose an attacker is targeting a log in page. To load the page, your browser makes several http requests - the html page itself, a css file, a JavaScript file or two, some images that are on the page, etc. The cookie, user-agent etc are the same for all of these requests. Therefore the attacker already knows all they need to about the length of all your headers wven before you submit the login form.
By trying it themselves ahead of time, the attacker knows that a login with an 8-character password will be the SAME size as the GET request for login.php. The exact size is irrelevant, it's the relative size that matters.
Obviously high- end networking hardware DOES need to be replaced pretty often, perhaps every 5 years or so.
The claim that an enterprise storage system loses half its value in a year because drives get bigger is a bit silly, though. Several years ago I bought storage hardware for our datacenter. It was filled with 400GB drives. The same sleds now hold 4TB drives, connected to the same expanders, the same RAID cards, and the same storage logic. The actual hard drives are less than half of the cost of the total system.
Assuming a five-year lifespan, you'd figure 20% per year on your networking equipment. A bit longer on your racks, even longer for your raised floor etc.
> what is meant when we say we are guaranteed to a right of free speech is limited to being *mostly* guaranteed that the government is not supposed to interfere with our right to free speech.
You accurately described th first amendment, but not th right of free speech. The FIRST AMENDMENT says that the government may not infringe the right of free speech. Note it says "THE right of free speech, not "A new right of free speech", just as you said "our right of free speech" must not be interfered with. This is because the right of free speech was recognized at least 40 years before the first amendment was written.
You say government is prohibited from infringing your right to free speech. Government can't be prohibited from taking back something if THEY GAVE IT TO YOU. Since government is prohibited from taking them, your rights must have come from somewhere else.
The first amendment protects the right of free speech, it did not create the right. (You'll notice the wording of the Constitution doesn't ever claim to create a right. Rather it enjoins the government from infringing the rights of the people.)
This makes perfect sense if you think about the definition of a "right". Is the right of free speech mean that you can say whatever the majority approves of? The essence of a right is you can do certain things regardless of what the majority thinks! That's that's the defining characteristic of a right, the fact that it exists and the majority can't vote it out of existence (though they could -infringe- your rights) . Hmm, if your neighbors can't legitimately vote your rights away, that must mean they didn't give them to you in the first place. If rights came from the government, or from the Convention, whoever gave you those rights would be could legitimately take them away at any time. The fact that no government document can legitimately eliminate rights means that they cannot have been created by a government document. Rather, certain rights must be part of the dignity of mankind; you are Barak Obama must have the same right to speak your mind based on being human beings.
It's good that you were very clear you're not saying ALL men are this way or ALL women are that way. Certainly that wouldn't be true.
I understand there ARE studies which suggest that when men and women are "assholes", men are MORE LIKELY to be an asshole to your face, while women are MORE LIKELY to do it behind your back. It might be that some men feel more comfortable being a "tough guy", while many women prefer to maintain the illusion of being "nice", that women's social cues tend to value getting along while men's tend to value, or at least accept, a degree of machismo.
Neither is better or worse, IMHO. My wife writes the holiday cards (she can be nice) while I handle the abusive bill collectors and anyone trying to take advantage of us (I can be tough). She COULD be tough and I COULD be nice, but being a bit adversarial and brosque and comes more naturally to me and being sweet and "getting along" comes more naturally to her.
I actually read the patent application and it is bullshit; the summary isn't misleading. Normally when a Slashdot headline says "Company X trying to patent Y", that really means Company X is trying to patent some specific invention RELATED to Y. Not this time. They're actually trying to patent A/B testing of videos.
To prevent this patent from being issued, someone needs to send USPTO -printed- prior art such as a magazine or journal article describing A/B testing of educational videos. Along with the printed prior art, they need to include a "301" letter. The letter and prior art will become part of the patent file which should be examined before any patent is issued.
The headline is misleading. Obviously, reading a document aloud or taking a picture of it doesn't make the information no longer classified. Why? Because it's the INFORMATION that's classified, not the document in it is in. The document may be MARKED "contains classified information ", but it's the information that's secret.
Most (but not all) classified information is classified based on its source. For example, all photos from spy satellites are classified, so the classification is decided before a particular image is even taken. Clinton did two things. She sent out classified via an unsecured system, and she failed to properly mark those emails as containing classified information. Because she didn't mark the classification of the information in the emails when she sent them, State is doing that now. They are "retroactively" MARKING them to indicate which classification the information is - and always has been.
So it's not that the classification changed, they simply weren't properly marked before. State is going back and adding the markings that the emails should have had from the beginning, because they contain information which has always been classified.
You make a fair point regarding substitution.
>> Primary categories that -can- be fair use include
> Your list is bogus.
Let's have a look at the statute. It's half a page, not too hard to read. Quoting 17 U.S. Code  107:
for purposes such as criticism, comment, news
reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for
classroom use), scholarship, or research
That list looks familiar. You may not like the list, but it's the list that Congress put in the law. The list isn't comprehensive, but it is law - statutory federal law.
> No it's not. Fair use is an exception to copyright.
Unanimous SCOTUS opinion in Campbell vs Acuff-Rose "fair use is an affirmative defense".
That bears repeating, the unanimous opinion of the nine justices is "fair use is an affirmative defense".
You'll note also that both sides, in their original pleadings in the case, referred to "the affirmative defense of fair use". This had already been decided by SCOTUS in Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises (1992).
In case there was any question, Chief Justice Rehnquist asked defendants attorney during oral argument if defendant wished to argue that point:
Chief Justice Rehnquist: Is fair use an affirmative defense?
Mr. Rogow: It is.
I think you'll find that I don't shoot my mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about. When I say "the law is ...", I'm probably quoting either the statute or SCOTUS.
Thanks for the compliment. I might have been more clear had I said fair use is a "valid excuse" for copying - raised only after you've already admitted to copying. The person copying admits they did copy, so then it's on them to provide evidence of a good excuse. The legal term for a good excuse that you have to prove is "affirmative defense ".
I added a bit more info here.
http://m.slashdot.org/thread/5...
Since you notice who posts what, note I post only on my tiny phone, with auto-complete, auto-correct, etc. Half of my typos and incorrect words are courtesy of my phone. It may look like English isn't my native language, but that's just my choice of device.
If they were basing their claim of the amount of DAMAGES on lost revenue, they'd need to prove the damages. But they probably would use statutory damages instead.
What we're talking about here is separate from damages. Fair use is something called an "affirmative defense". In other words, it is a valid excuse. An affirmative defense is to be proved by the one claiming it. They admit they did the thing (copying), but say it's excusable because ...
To give an example from criminal law, consider a simple speeding ticket. The speeder claims that they were rushing an injured friend to the hospital. They admit that they were speeding. That's all that the prosecution has to prove. If you want to use the "rushing to the hospital" excuse, you have to produce evidence that you were rushing to the hospital. The prosecution does not have to disprove every possible excuse for every speeding ticket. The issue only arises after the one claiming the excuse presents evidence of the excuse.
Btw this is a good way to surprise the prosecution and get a not-guilty verdict in traffic and misdemeanor cases. The prosecution doesn't arrive prepared to disprove every possible defense, so if you have reasonable evidence of any legal defense you can win.
For some time it wasn't 100% clear which type of defense fair use was, or if it was perhaps an element of the tort. It was clearly ruled to be an affirmative defense in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
I posted the above before including the fourth test, competition with the original. Does the new work effect the market for the original work or derivative works by the author?
A professionally produced "Star Trek" film certainly COULD compete with Paramount's 2016 Star Trek Film, "Star Trek Beyond". In fact, if it's available on Amazon, consider someone tells their spouse or parents they want the Star Trek DVD for Christmas. It's entirely possible the gift-giver (who isn't a Star Trek fan) would buy the wrong one, buying the unauthorized movie rather than Paramount's official Star Trek.
Note that fair use is a "defense". That means if you choose to copy someone else's work, it's up to the person copying to prove the facts of fair use. The original copyright holder doesn't have to prove harm, the person copying has to show there was no harm.
Any derivative work (copying) that competes commercially with the original is unlikely to be fair use under US law.
Primary categories that -can- be fair use include:
Criticism and comment -- quoting a work in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment.
News reporting -- summarizing an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report.
Research and scholarship -- for example, quoting a short passage in a scholarly, scientific, or technical work for clarification of the author's observations.
Nonprofit educational uses --photocopying of limited portions of written works by teachers for classroom use.
Parody -- a work that ridicules another, usually well-known, work by imitating it in a comic way.
The four tests used by the courts are:
the purpose and character of the use (is the new work of a different type than the old. Dramatic movie -> review is okay, dramatic movie -> dramatic movie probably isn't)
the nature of the copyrighted work (it's okay to copy pure facts, not okay to copy pure art, with lots of gray in between)
the amount and substantiality of the portion taken (copying the most important characters and plot points is less likely to be allowed than borrowing unimportant parts)
Copyright does last a very long time, so I don't think most people -want- objects to be copyright protected rather than patent.
The four classes are:
Utility patent: the functional implementation of a functional thing, a machine. Does not cover artistic / decorative elements.
Design patent: Cosmetic design elements of a functional thing. Covers only non-functional decorative / artistic choices.
Copyright: Artistic works which have no functional purpose, things which are only viewed/heard, not used (other than for viewing/reading/hearing).
Trademark: A brand name or symbol indicating who makes or sells the product.
Delorean couldn't get any copyright on the artistic design elements of the Delorean car because a car is a functional thing. They could possibly get a design patent covering unique appearance features, but only to the extent that they aren't required for proper function of the car. So you could probably design patent "a hexagon steering wheel with blah blah blah...", because a round one works as well. But the patent would cover only a _hexagon_steering_wheel_ with those other features, not "steering wheel" (functional) or "hexagon".
It's the stupid ones that make for entertaining reading.
The 500 perfectly good patents processed today don't make news.
If you think the "problems" caused by the industrial revolution were prevented by WWII, you're about a century off. The industrial revolution is 1760-1820. So a hundred and twenty years before WWII.
Ps - Please don't vote, clueless voters are how we end up with Obama and Bush.
> > it doesn't make sense for FB to pay for everyone to stream porn videos from Xvideos.com.
> This is in part a strawman and in part false.
Okay explain to me why Facebook should pay for your porn streaming. Go ahead, and listening.
> Are you making a value judgement that Wikipedia has more useful merit, and streaming Hulu would be a recreational misallocation of bandwidth?
Yes. Wikipedia it's more useful to struggling people in a third world country than Hulu is. It's been said "be open minded, but not so open that your brains fall out".
> if content providers are allowed to partner with ISPs ... then the open and free internet died that day --- from then on, only billion $$$ megacorporations could become a sponsor and have their website included in the public internet by the end of the decade
Not a terrible guess, but we've actually already been there and done that. In the early years, ISPs actually did only carry content from partner companies. The major ISPs included AOL, MSN, and Prodigy. "By the end of the decade" they all had to change their business model to providing full internet access because people like MORE. That's Americans' favorite thing, "more". It didn't take long for ISPs who offered full unfettered access to everything to win out over those with content partnerships. Again, not a bad guess, not knowing how that actually turned out. But it does in fact turn out the opposite of what you guessed.
> to provide a "light" srvice block multimedia
If they were selling a light-use internet service, sure. They are not. They are giving, at no charge, access to educational materials (and their own site, of course). They are fully within their rights to decide what they want to pay for, to give away.
It never ceases to amaze me what a bunch of self-entitled little spoiled brats Slashdot readers are, as they bitch about people giving things away.
In terms of bandwidth, a picture really is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a million. In other words, it costs about the same to deliver one video or a million wikipedia pages.
It does have costs. Fiber lines don't build themselves and upgrade themselves every few years. Cisco routers don't magically appear. Just as importantly for the mobile providers, the backbone providers don't give them free bandwidth. The backbones charge.
So $1 can deliver X number of videos, or X million number of wikipedia views.
Is there some government subsidy here, or are you completely making shit up? From what I've seen, Facebook and the carriers are the ones subsidizing consumers' access.
Obviously Facebook isn't being entirely altruistic here, they are providing access to Wikipedia, local news, weather, Google search, health information etc. and FACEBOOK.
Having said that, you're right the reason a library doesn't have every book ever published is primarily an economic constraint - it doesn't make sense to pay to buy and house everything ever published.
Exactly the same constraint applies to Facebook or a mobile carrier paying for internet access - it has costs, and it doesn't make sense for FB to pay for everyone to stream porn videos from Xvideos.com. It does make sense that someone would offer to pay for your "free" access to Wikipedia, but not offer to pay for your Hulu and Girls Gone Wild surfing. Furthermore, because there is a finite amount of money, if FB DID spend it subsidizing Xvideos in one area, that would exhaust the budget and mean the budget would not also provide free access to Wikipedia in another area.
> making most jobs obsolete.
That's already happened a few times. At one time, most people worked in agriculture- mankind spent most of our time feeding ourselves. An "economic downturn ", therefore, was when a lot of people starved to death.
After machines such as plows and later GPS-guided combines with largely automated food processing plants did most of the work of producing food, inexpensive food was therefore readily available and humans had time to do things not strictly necessary for survival, like education, producing consumer goods, writing and printing books, comfortable clothes, and creating washing machines and dishwashers. With the efficiency of machines, consumer goods including books, and conveniences like washing machines and refrigerators became readily available to the masses.
No longer scrubbing our clothes on a washboard, we then had time to make and play video games.
The replacement of human labor with machines has been a continuous process for over a thousand years, peaking about 200 years ago. In the process, our standard of living has gone from digging for anything we could eat in the winter to stopping by Walmart to select which of the 160 different fruit and vegetable varieties we want to munch on while we enjoy our Netflix movie.
> "Anyone looking for something to worry about in the near future might want to consider the opposite of superintelligence: superstupidity"
At least we know what superstupidity looks like and what it does, based on observing Washington, DC. One lesson is to minimize the control and possible impact from failures of these complex but inherently stupid systems. See, for example the office of the vice president - a VP might say some stupid things, but it doesn't really do too much damage.
The new crop of candidates provide another lesson in superstupidity. They aren't exactly a bunch of brain surgeons either.
Although I don't have the answer to the exact question you asked, I can point out on thing. It's easy to convert from djvu to pdf if, at some point in time, you want a pdf copy for some reason. The reverse isn't so true. If you archive it as pdf, you can't readily convert to anything else without losing information.
Overall, pdf is reasonable for viewing (right now), but not good for editing, manipulating, and archiving. Even for viewing, pdf at its heart assumes it is being printed on letter- sized paper, and that's the layout you'll always get. It doesn't flow or scale well or work well on widescreen displays. This is because pdf is essentially the Postscript printer language, zipped. It's designed for printing, not for screens of varying sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios.