"Chinatown" would have to be the most replicated town on the planet.
Except that chinatowns generally "copy" only the general style. In this case, they were aiming for a true copy of a specific earlier town.
As someone else observed, there are lots of towns (or districts) scattered around the world that were built to look stylistically like something in a different part of the world. This has often been done by immigrants, to produce a "back home" feeling. America has lots of towns like this. They are never actually replicas, though; they were just built by people in a style that was familiar. Typically they aren't "pure", but also contain structures in the local style. This happens because someone wants a cheap building, so they hire some local builders who only know the local style.
This Chinese example was clearly built as a showcase, presumably for commercial (tourism, vacationing) reasons. In this case, a charge of "infringement" isn't entirely silly. But it's unlikely that any court cases will result. It's sorta like that duplicate of a famous European castle in Disneyland, or all the scale-model copies of famous landmarks in downtown Las Vegas.
What I'd wonder is how good a job they did on small details. Did they get the cracks in the sidewalks right? How about the bird droppings on the light poles?;-)
I was under the impression that Apple had already filed for a patent on this.
Probably. At least in the US, you no longer have to have a working prototype to register a patent. All you need is an "idea" to get a patent. Then you wait until someone actually figures out how to build it. You sue them for infringement, take over their development, and market it yourself.
But you need a big legal department and enough spare cash to pay for all the court time. So don't think of doing it as an independent developer; it's a technique only workable in a big organization with lots of money.
We might also point out that the phrase "just a theory" is very useful, because it tells us that the speaker isn't speaking in scientific English. In the common speech, "theory" is basically a synonym for "guess", while in scientific speech, it means a hypothesis that has passed a lot of tests. These are essentially unrelated definitions, and anyone who uses the "just a theory" phrase in a scientific discussion tips off the listeners that they don't understand the most basic scientific terminology.
There are a lot of other common-speech terms or phrases that are useful as similar tipoffs that the speaker or writer isn't familiar with scientific terminology. One of my favorites is the phrase "quantum leap". This is similar to the physicists' phrase "quantum jump", but nearly an antonym in meaning. Again, anyone who uses "quantum leap" in a scientific setting has discredited themselves to knowledgeable listeners.
In the biological sciences, it's even easier. I've known a number of profs in bio fields who've commented that a major task in their introductory courses is eliminating the term "purpose" from their students' vocabularies. It's well understood among biologists that use of this word is a very good tipoff that the speaker/writer has little or no understanding of modern biology. Sometimes other phrasing will be used. Thus, a student may explain that giraffes grow long necks "in order to" reach the leaves of trees. This wording also shows that the speaker doesn't understand what's going on. Giraffes don't knowingly grow long necks for any purpose, any more than humans knowingly grow short necks. Neck length is determined by DNA, which is an unknowing, unthinking organic polymer, and can't be modified by intent or purpose.
Readers can probably think of other terminology that tells the listener that the speaker doesn't know much about their field(s) of expertise.
Personally I believe that a classic should be read in a classical way (on paper).
So do you have a copy of the Bible (or Koran) on a papyrus scroll?;-)
Actually, most synagogues do have what Christians call the first four books (the Torah) on a scroll, though I don't think it's often on papyrus. A parchment scroll would last a lot longer, and I think that's pretty common. It's used regularly in services, which conventionally read a passage each week, taking a year to go through the whole text. The Simchat Torah holiday celebrates the completion of the text, with rewinding the scroll to the beginning to prepare for the next year's reading.
So scrolls aren't actually obsolete. And a thousand years from now, printed and bound books probably won't be obsolete, either. For a price, you'll still be able to get documents in either of those formats, and some people will have them.
New technology rarely wipes out its predecessors completely. It's not at all unusual for an older bit of technology to be better than the newer, for certain applications.
Be wary of education lobbyists who downplay our long track record of scientific success while simultaneously asking for more money.
In scientific circles, there's a long history of doing this openly and honestly. I've seen it expressed as a joke: "The most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end saying that further research is needed." This is funny, yes, but it's also an open admission that there are still lots of things that we don't understand at all, and it'll take time and money and hard work to learn about them.
Science education echoes this. We are continually producing new children to replace the old folks who are dying. Those children are all born totally ignorant of everything, and we (i.e., society as a whole) really needs to get them educated. This costs money to do well. And in fact, we're not doing all that good a job of it. Part of the reason is simple economic competition: Anyone competent to teach a scientific subject can get much better pay working nearly anywhere else but in the school system. So science teachers are pretty much only those people who really like doing that job and are willing to take a large pay cut to do it.
It can be funny how often the people who make up bogus grammatical rules and try to enforce them will often unknowingly violate the pseudo-rules that they're trying to foist on the rest of us. I'd guess that very few people who object to using "gift" as a verb will use "gifted" as an adjective without giving it a thought. I wonder how they'd explain that use of an "-ed" suffix on a word that they've insisted is a noun?
One of my favorite rules about actual English grammar is "Any noun can be verbed.";-)
(Though actually, there are a few nouns that are difficult to verb, mostly nouns that have no action or relation as part of their meaning. E.g., you have to make up a pretty good shaggy-dog story to set up a valid use of "England" or "America" as a verb. Or do you? I just know someone's going to reply with a totally natural, normal-sounding example...)
'fewer choices' not 'less choices'. Less refers to a single item ('less choice'), fewer refers to the plural.
Heh; it's the old "less" vs. "fewer" silliness again.
Consult any math book (that's written in English;-). The term "less" supplanted "fewer" several centuries back, and "fewer" is only an informal synonym. The term "less (than)" is used in all technical speech for comparing any two real numbers. Similarly, "greater (than)" is used rather than "more (than)" .
You're not only fighting a losing battle; you're fighting one that was lost long before anyone living now was born. Any you're wasting our time commenting on a (semi-)technical "news for nerds" forum on such off-topic nonsense. In a technical setting, "less" is always correct.
Actually, this was alway a bit of bogus peevery. The language historians have documented the interchangable use of "less" and "fewer" going back as far as our language was called "English". And nobody has the legal authority to decree a standard for such things in the common (non-technical) speech, so you actually lost before English even existed.;-)
So how many people are there with your name in China?;-)
Actually, my wife also has a name that's unique in the US, and probably the world. But more fun is that right now it gets over a million hits on google. This is in part because her name is an English sentence. But the top hits are because her name was also a widespread news headline in 1822 in most of the English-speaking world. That should be enough of a clue to figure it out.
money = votes, so if you are a rich corp, you are automagically a majority
And in this case, the automatic response of many corporations will be to set up a new job position in charge of creating ids for all such voting, and learning how to maximize the corporation's contribution to the voting process.
I expect that this has already happened in many corporations...
There have been numerous reports from many countries about duplicate government ID numbers due to schemes like this. There was a recent story about a similar case in Canada, with two people born the same day in the same hospital that were given identical names.
Yes, the probabilities are low, but they aren't zero. If the money has any legal or financial impact, duplicates inevitably lead to lawsuits, lost time, etc, etc.
If the ID number is important, you need to guarantee that two people don't get assigned the same number. If you let this happen, you might be surprised at how quickly it happens -- and it's your fault.
I wonder if it'd be useful to collect a list of as many such ID collisions as we can find. It could serve as a warning to anyone thinking of making the same mistake in yet another "unique ID" scheme. I did a bit of googling, but didn't find any such list anywhere.
Indeed. A few years ago, I ran across a US Census Bureau web page that gave the number of people with specific first or last names, and an estimate (likely from multiplying the fractions) of the number of people in the US with a given first+last name. It said that there are about 1800 people in the US with the same name as me, and my family name isn't even Smith or Jones or any of the other top 100.
Through the years, I've seen a number of bibliographies that list things that I've written, intermixed with things written by various of those others with my name. So far, I haven't complained, since this makes us all look better than we really are.;-)
Still, it could be useful if we had a reasonable way to separate out such things and give individuals the proper acknowledgement for their contributions to our knowledge. But I'd be surprised if we could actually do this job right, within the lifetimes of people now living.
Among those of us familiar with the old music of the British Isles, one ongoing frustration is the misattribution of music written by Niel Gow or Neil Gow. One of those was the grandfather of the other; do you know which was which? The intermediate in the male line was Nathaniel Gow, who also wrote a lot of good tunes, and collectors also confuse him with his father and his son despite the different name. Somehow, I suspect that this Unique ID system won't be extended to them, any more than I expect it to be implemented accurately for living authors.
(And none of this will stop current publishers from claiming copyright for their works.;-)
It has been commented, both by a retiring senior civil servant and an experienced Minister, that the Civil Service is full of people with dumb-as-a-very-dumb-thing ideas. The usual objection is that the proponents assume that everybody is exactly like them, and so once a law is passed people will just automatically obey it, and once an agency is set up it will instantly work perfectly.
Yeah, and in this case there's an even worse aspect to the problem: This is a law pertaining to the actions not of people, but of software. All the AI dreaming to the contrary, software doesn't act the least bit like a human mind. The chance of any software being written that satisfies this and other laws will differ only infinitesimally from zero. We have a lot of software people here on/., and they should all be a bit nervous about being held responsible for their software that tries to satisfy this and other laws.
The few passages I've seen quoted from this UK law make it pretty clear to me that there's no way I could possibly implement it correctly, in any of the dozen or so programming languages that I know well. This is because it's written in a mixture of legalese and bureaucratese, which are languages that I know well enough to know that I don't stand a chance of interpreting them well enough to do the job correctly. (And having them explained by the typical B-school graduate isn't going to help me do the job correctly, either.;-)
Except people didn't think of this as simply a statistical system. It is thought of as a unique identifier.
"Hey, we can build equipment to compare photos of people's irises. We can tell everyone that this is reliable and irises never change. They'll believe us, because who would both with a literature search to see if any research has been done or that it's true. It has worked for over a century with fingerprints, even though the textbooks contain lists of all the known problems they have, plus examples of fingerprints that aren't at all unique. So they'll accept the same uniqueness claims for iris patterns. We can make a pile of money off this."
The opera mobile browser works by offloading a lot of work to a server run by opera. This would give facebook access to everything which goes through every mobile opera browser.
As far as I've been able to determine, this includes setting up https links. So we're talking about facebook getting a copy of all your login credentials, and you bank-account info if you use your phone for any financial purposes.
If this isn't true (i.e., the encryption is done in the phone with the ids and passwords not available to the Opera servers), it'd be interesting reading about how we'd verify it. Otherwise, we should assume that logins and passwords are known to the browser's owners. Opera seems to have a very good reputation about such things, but how far do you trust facebook?
... Search engines in particular are covered under 17 USC 512(d)
Well, with the usual IANAL qualification, I'd have to observe that that section (d) seems to fairly clearly say when a "service provider shall not be liable...". It doesn't seem to actually state when a service provider shall be liable for anything. Presumably that's stated elsewhere, but I haven't seen it yet.
Section (d) does say "except as provided in subsection (j)", but that section turns out to deal with situations where a court injunction exists, and I haven't read of such an injunction being delivered to google. Does anyone know of such an injunction?
I do have a good number of web pages that include "References" sections, similar to what you find in most wikipedia pages (and pretty much all scholarly publications). Since these usually include keywords describing the reason for the link, such pages could presumably be considered to legally constitute a "search site". Am I really in danger of being sent to a federal prison for using hyperlinks in scholarly and other reference sections of my sites? I'd always sorta thought that I was honoring others by referencing or linking to their documents, but perhaps the legal system is trying to end this long-standing practice in the online environment.
Google is just a search engine. Shouldn't the take-down notices be sent to the website host instead? Let search engines just do what they are intended to do, which is locate content.
Yeah, I've been wondering this myself. What laws actually require removing a link to something on a different site?
Also, what's the sense in trying to shut down links to your material? If I found a link to something for which I'm the copyright owner, I'd follow the link, and send the takedown notice to the infringing site. Then I'd send a thank-you message to the linking site to thank them for tipping me off about the infringement. (This isn't hypothetical; I've actually done it. I've also thanked people for telling me about security holes in my sites' software. Am I stupid for doing this, and not threatening to sue them instead?;-)
It sounds like Microsoft (and the RIAA, etc.) actually want the infringement to stay online, and are trying to stop the sites that finger the infringers. Is there some sort of twisted business plan for which this makes sense?
But more to the point, can anyone explain the legality of the story? If I link to (or otherwise report) an infringing file on another site, why can I be attacked as the infringer? Why am I not the benefactor who reported the crime? What laws support attacking the person who reports an infringement, while ignoring the actual infringer?
Ok, infringement obviously needs to be taken down quickly, but I can see there being a huge issue here later.
Except that the topic isn't infringment; it's claimed infringement. Counts for the two could easily differ by orders of magnitude.
I don't think it would be difficult to write a script that wanders around a target site, picking pages at random, and generating a "takedown" message. I could probably produce such a script in under a day that targets google. The most time-consuming part of the task would probably be getting the template for the message from our company's legal department.
When google is reporting millions of such messages per year from a single source, it's pretty obvious that it's not individual humans doing it by hand. What I'd wonder is whether google has developed software for automating the handling of takedown notices, as they've done with news stories. I'd be surprised if they've hired the hundreds of thousands of people with legal training in copyright law that would be needed to handle such a flood.
Well, we do "power cycle" the government every 4 years (or 2 years for Congress). But when we plug it back in, we tend to power up the same power-slurping setup that we'd previously installed.
Sometimes you just need to retire the old components, and replace them with others that (we hope) are more functional.
Thanks. I've seen references to CSS3 Media Queries, of course, but so far I haven't found a sample of code that actually does the job I described.
Actually, this one didn't quite work, either. The URL gets the response:
502 - Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy server.
There is a problem with the page you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed. When the Web server (while acting as a gateway or proxy) contacted the upstream content server, it received an invalid response from the content server.
Maybe it's been slashdotted?;-) The error messages aren't very helpful.
Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.
Yeah, you can get it, but there are still discussions about how the iPhone's Safari screws up ordinary text. My wife has an iPhone, but doesn't use Safari much because of this. The problem, of course, is Safari's practice of formatting a text page for a window a lot bigger than the iPhone's screen, then shrinking it to fit, making the font size so tiny as to be illegible. Or you can enlarge it, but then you have to pan left and right for every line of text, making reading it a PITA.
When the first iPhone came out, I noticed this quickly while testing sites formatted for mobile devices, and asked about it on a number of forums. The only "solution" anyone knew was to test the UA string for "iPhone", and if found, add a <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> to the header section. This worked as long as all iPhones had the same screen width, though it only worked for portrait layout, and gave an too-large font size for landscape. But eventually, new iPhones appeared with smaller pixels, so that kludge no longer works.
So is there a known fix for this problem with current iPhones? If the web had been developed by a sane community, we'd have long ago required that graphical apps like browsers send their window size to the server, but that has never been done. We'd also refuse to call things that misrender text this badly a "browser", since the primary design goal of the original browser was to format text legibly in whatever screen space they had available, but that seems to have been forgotten.
In any case, the iPhone's default browser fails the "It Just Works" test for ordinary text, and nobody seems to know how to fix it. Of course, I could be wrong, and a fix exists now. I'd be happy to hear this, if someone could tell me (or my wife;-) how to make it work right.
(I've heard rumors that with html5, JS can detect the window size and adjust for it. I'm currently trying to discover how this can be done, but I haven't yet stumbled across anything more that claims that it's possible. That isn't very useful if you can't find the details that make it work. If it is doable, that would be yet another reason to switch to html5 right now.;-)
(I've also encouraged iPhone users to install Opera, which doesn't have this problem, but only a few have paid any attention. "I don't listen to Opera music.";-)
Heh. Here in New England, many of the locals have experience talking into nor'easters. Of course they actually pronounce it noath-eastah, but never mind. Maybe part (paht) of the reason they did away with most/r/ phonemes is that such weak sounds don't survive for more than a few feet during a winter storm (wintah stoam).
Anway, I've seen that site before. There are some good observations about minimal vs. practical languages, and a healthy attitude that it's all in good fun.
Heh. I've had fun with a few friends who showed off their Siri's behavior. I'd ask them if they can turn it off. They'd do so, and I'd ask "How do you know that it's actually turned off?" Typically, they'd turn off the phone, and I'd ask "How do you know that it's actually off, and not listening right now? But by then, they'll typically get really mad at me.;-)
Actually, I have a Android phone in my pocket, and I don't know if I could actually verify that it's not listening and sending sound from my environment (or my location) to some remote database. Yes, I have a terminal emulator installed, and I can run a ps command. But I know that ps typically has options to show or not show various subsets of the running processes. I don't have the source for my phone company's version of ps, so while I can show that certain programs are running, I can't actually prove that any particular program isn't running.
Of course, the phone companies are all open and honest about such things, right? They wouldn't monitor us without telling us, would they?;-)
My immediate thought was something like this, but I haven't figured out what it has to do with a mike (mic?) stand. Yeah, you can mount some of them on such stands, like you can mount all sorts of other things on mike stands. But that's orthogonal to the parcan's functionality, which has nothing in particular to do with what's holding it in its position.
Don't forget even Ben Franklin wrote under pseudonym,...
And he regularly used several different pseudonyms to start a public discussion. He was one of history's better-documented "trolls" in this regard, since he often did this to get an argument going. He'd salt the discussion with letters from different viewpoints, then print the interesting replies that came in.
That's a whole lot easier nowadays, with online forums...
Slashdot Mirror
"Chinatown" would have to be the most replicated town on the planet.
Except that chinatowns generally "copy" only the general style. In this case, they were aiming for a true copy of a specific earlier town.
As someone else observed, there are lots of towns (or districts) scattered around the world that were built to look stylistically like something in a different part of the world. This has often been done by immigrants, to produce a "back home" feeling. America has lots of towns like this. They are never actually replicas, though; they were just built by people in a style that was familiar. Typically they aren't "pure", but also contain structures in the local style. This happens because someone wants a cheap building, so they hire some local builders who only know the local style.
This Chinese example was clearly built as a showcase, presumably for commercial (tourism, vacationing) reasons. In this case, a charge of "infringement" isn't entirely silly. But it's unlikely that any court cases will result. It's sorta like that duplicate of a famous European castle in Disneyland, or all the scale-model copies of famous landmarks in downtown Las Vegas.
What I'd wonder is how good a job they did on small details. Did they get the cracks in the sidewalks right? How about the bird droppings on the light poles? ;-)
I was under the impression that Apple had already filed for a patent on this.
Probably. At least in the US, you no longer have to have a working prototype to register a patent. All you need is an "idea" to get a patent. Then you wait until someone actually figures out how to build it. You sue them for infringement, take over their development, and market it yourself.
But you need a big legal department and enough spare cash to pay for all the court time. So don't think of doing it as an independent developer; it's a technique only workable in a big organization with lots of money.
We might also point out that the phrase "just a theory" is very useful, because it tells us that the speaker isn't speaking in scientific English. In the common speech, "theory" is basically a synonym for "guess", while in scientific speech, it means a hypothesis that has passed a lot of tests. These are essentially unrelated definitions, and anyone who uses the "just a theory" phrase in a scientific discussion tips off the listeners that they don't understand the most basic scientific terminology.
There are a lot of other common-speech terms or phrases that are useful as similar tipoffs that the speaker or writer isn't familiar with scientific terminology. One of my favorites is the phrase "quantum leap". This is similar to the physicists' phrase "quantum jump", but nearly an antonym in meaning. Again, anyone who uses "quantum leap" in a scientific setting has discredited themselves to knowledgeable listeners.
In the biological sciences, it's even easier. I've known a number of profs in bio fields who've commented that a major task in their introductory courses is eliminating the term "purpose" from their students' vocabularies. It's well understood among biologists that use of this word is a very good tipoff that the speaker/writer has little or no understanding of modern biology. Sometimes other phrasing will be used. Thus, a student may explain that giraffes grow long necks "in order to" reach the leaves of trees. This wording also shows that the speaker doesn't understand what's going on. Giraffes don't knowingly grow long necks for any purpose, any more than humans knowingly grow short necks. Neck length is determined by DNA, which is an unknowing, unthinking organic polymer, and can't be modified by intent or purpose.
Readers can probably think of other terminology that tells the listener that the speaker doesn't know much about their field(s) of expertise.
Personally I believe that a classic should be read in a classical way (on paper).
So do you have a copy of the Bible (or Koran) on a papyrus scroll? ;-)
Actually, most synagogues do have what Christians call the first four books (the Torah) on a scroll, though I don't think it's often on papyrus. A parchment scroll would last a lot longer, and I think that's pretty common. It's used regularly in services, which conventionally read a passage each week, taking a year to go through the whole text. The Simchat Torah holiday celebrates the completion of the text, with rewinding the scroll to the beginning to prepare for the next year's reading.
So scrolls aren't actually obsolete. And a thousand years from now, printed and bound books probably won't be obsolete, either. For a price, you'll still be able to get documents in either of those formats, and some people will have them.
New technology rarely wipes out its predecessors completely. It's not at all unusual for an older bit of technology to be better than the newer, for certain applications.
Be wary of education lobbyists who downplay our long track record of scientific success while simultaneously asking for more money.
In scientific circles, there's a long history of doing this openly and honestly. I've seen it expressed as a joke: "The most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end saying that further research is needed." This is funny, yes, but it's also an open admission that there are still lots of things that we don't understand at all, and it'll take time and money and hard work to learn about them.
Science education echoes this. We are continually producing new children to replace the old folks who are dying. Those children are all born totally ignorant of everything, and we (i.e., society as a whole) really needs to get them educated. This costs money to do well. And in fact, we're not doing all that good a job of it. Part of the reason is simple economic competition: Anyone competent to teach a scientific subject can get much better pay working nearly anywhere else but in the school system. So science teachers are pretty much only those people who really like doing that job and are willing to take a large pay cut to do it.
Nice retort. You are truly gifted.
Heh.
It can be funny how often the people who make up bogus grammatical rules and try to enforce them will often unknowingly violate the pseudo-rules that they're trying to foist on the rest of us. I'd guess that very few people who object to using "gift" as a verb will use "gifted" as an adjective without giving it a thought. I wonder how they'd explain that use of an "-ed" suffix on a word that they've insisted is a noun?
One of my favorite rules about actual English grammar is "Any noun can be verbed." ;-)
(Though actually, there are a few nouns that are difficult to verb, mostly nouns that have no action or relation as part of their meaning. E.g., you have to make up a pretty good shaggy-dog story to set up a valid use of "England" or "America" as a verb. Or do you? I just know someone's going to reply with a totally natural, normal-sounding example ...)
'fewer choices' not 'less choices'. Less refers to a single item ('less choice'), fewer refers to the plural.
Heh; it's the old "less" vs. "fewer" silliness again.
Consult any math book (that's written in English ;-). The term "less" supplanted "fewer" several centuries back, and "fewer" is only an informal synonym. The term "less (than)" is used in all technical speech for comparing any two real numbers. Similarly, "greater (than)" is used rather than "more (than)" .
You're not only fighting a losing battle; you're fighting one that was lost long before anyone living now was born. Any you're wasting our time commenting on a (semi-)technical "news for nerds" forum on such off-topic nonsense. In a technical setting, "less" is always correct.
Actually, this was alway a bit of bogus peevery. The language historians have documented the interchangable use of "less" and "fewer" going back as far as our language was called "English". And nobody has the legal authority to decree a standard for such things in the common (non-technical) speech, so you actually lost before English even existed. ;-)
There is 1 person with my name in the U.S.A.
So how many people are there with your name in China? ;-)
Actually, my wife also has a name that's unique in the US, and probably the world. But more fun is that right now it gets over a million hits on google. This is in part because her name is an English sentence. But the top hits are because her name was also a widespread news headline in 1822 in most of the English-speaking world. That should be enough of a clue to figure it out.
There are lots of fun obscure facts about names.
money = votes, so if you are a rich corp, you are automagically a majority
And in this case, the automatic response of many corporations will be to set up a new job position in charge of creating ids for all such voting, and learning how to maximize the corporation's contribution to the voting process.
I expect that this has already happened in many corporations ...
Why cant they just do "Researchername,DOB"?
There have been numerous reports from many countries about duplicate government ID numbers due to schemes like this. There was a recent story about a similar case in Canada, with two people born the same day in the same hospital that were given identical names.
Yes, the probabilities are low, but they aren't zero. If the money has any legal or financial impact, duplicates inevitably lead to lawsuits, lost time, etc, etc.
If the ID number is important, you need to guarantee that two people don't get assigned the same number. If you let this happen, you might be surprised at how quickly it happens -- and it's your fault.
I wonder if it'd be useful to collect a list of as many such ID collisions as we can find. It could serve as a warning to anyone thinking of making the same mistake in yet another "unique ID" scheme. I did a bit of googling, but didn't find any such list anywhere.
Full names are not necessarily unique either.
Indeed. A few years ago, I ran across a US Census Bureau web page that gave the number of people with specific first or last names, and an estimate (likely from multiplying the fractions) of the number of people in the US with a given first+last name. It said that there are about 1800 people in the US with the same name as me, and my family name isn't even Smith or Jones or any of the other top 100.
Through the years, I've seen a number of bibliographies that list things that I've written, intermixed with things written by various of those others with my name. So far, I haven't complained, since this makes us all look better than we really are. ;-)
Still, it could be useful if we had a reasonable way to separate out such things and give individuals the proper acknowledgement for their contributions to our knowledge. But I'd be surprised if we could actually do this job right, within the lifetimes of people now living.
Among those of us familiar with the old music of the British Isles, one ongoing frustration is the misattribution of music written by Niel Gow or Neil Gow. One of those was the grandfather of the other; do you know which was which? The intermediate in the male line was Nathaniel Gow, who also wrote a lot of good tunes, and collectors also confuse him with his father and his son despite the different name. Somehow, I suspect that this Unique ID system won't be extended to them, any more than I expect it to be implemented accurately for living authors.
(And none of this will stop current publishers from claiming copyright for their works. ;-)
It has been commented, both by a retiring senior civil servant and an experienced Minister, that the Civil Service is full of people with dumb-as-a-very-dumb-thing ideas. The usual objection is that the proponents assume that everybody is exactly like them, and so once a law is passed people will just automatically obey it, and once an agency is set up it will instantly work perfectly.
Yeah, and in this case there's an even worse aspect to the problem: This is a law pertaining to the actions not of people, but of software. All the AI dreaming to the contrary, software doesn't act the least bit like a human mind. The chance of any software being written that satisfies this and other laws will differ only infinitesimally from zero. We have a lot of software people here on /., and they should all be a bit nervous about being held responsible for their software that tries to satisfy this and other laws.
The few passages I've seen quoted from this UK law make it pretty clear to me that there's no way I could possibly implement it correctly, in any of the dozen or so programming languages that I know well. This is because it's written in a mixture of legalese and bureaucratese, which are languages that I know well enough to know that I don't stand a chance of interpreting them well enough to do the job correctly. (And having them explained by the typical B-school graduate isn't going to help me do the job correctly, either. ;-)
Except people didn't think of this as simply a statistical system. It is thought of as a unique identifier.
"Hey, we can build equipment to compare photos of people's irises. We can tell everyone that this is reliable and irises never change. They'll believe us, because who would both with a literature search to see if any research has been done or that it's true. It has worked for over a century with fingerprints, even though the textbooks contain lists of all the known problems they have, plus examples of fingerprints that aren't at all unique. So they'll accept the same uniqueness claims for iris patterns. We can make a pile of money off this."
The opera mobile browser works by offloading a lot of work to a server run by opera. This would give facebook access to everything which goes through every mobile opera browser.
As far as I've been able to determine, this includes setting up https links. So we're talking about facebook getting a copy of all your login credentials, and you bank-account info if you use your phone for any financial purposes.
If this isn't true (i.e., the encryption is done in the phone with the ids and passwords not available to the Opera servers), it'd be interesting reading about how we'd verify it. Otherwise, we should assume that logins and passwords are known to the browser's owners. Opera seems to have a very good reputation about such things, but how far do you trust facebook?
... Search engines in particular are covered under 17 USC 512(d)
Well, with the usual IANAL qualification, I'd have to observe that that section (d) seems to fairly clearly say when a "service provider shall not be liable ...". It doesn't seem to actually state when a service provider shall be liable for anything. Presumably that's stated elsewhere, but I haven't seen it yet.
Section (d) does say "except as provided in subsection (j)", but that section turns out to deal with situations where a court injunction exists, and I haven't read of such an injunction being delivered to google. Does anyone know of such an injunction?
I do have a good number of web pages that include "References" sections, similar to what you find in most wikipedia pages (and pretty much all scholarly publications). Since these usually include keywords describing the reason for the link, such pages could presumably be considered to legally constitute a "search site". Am I really in danger of being sent to a federal prison for using hyperlinks in scholarly and other reference sections of my sites? I'd always sorta thought that I was honoring others by referencing or linking to their documents, but perhaps the legal system is trying to end this long-standing practice in the online environment.
Google is just a search engine. Shouldn't the take-down notices be sent to the website host instead? Let search engines just do what they are intended to do, which is locate content.
Yeah, I've been wondering this myself. What laws actually require removing a link to something on a different site?
Also, what's the sense in trying to shut down links to your material? If I found a link to something for which I'm the copyright owner, I'd follow the link, and send the takedown notice to the infringing site. Then I'd send a thank-you message to the linking site to thank them for tipping me off about the infringement. (This isn't hypothetical; I've actually done it. I've also thanked people for telling me about security holes in my sites' software. Am I stupid for doing this, and not threatening to sue them instead? ;-)
It sounds like Microsoft (and the RIAA, etc.) actually want the infringement to stay online, and are trying to stop the sites that finger the infringers. Is there some sort of twisted business plan for which this makes sense?
But more to the point, can anyone explain the legality of the story? If I link to (or otherwise report) an infringing file on another site, why can I be attacked as the infringer? Why am I not the benefactor who reported the crime? What laws support attacking the person who reports an infringement, while ignoring the actual infringer?
Ok, infringement obviously needs to be taken down quickly, but I can see there being a huge issue here later.
Except that the topic isn't infringment; it's claimed infringement. Counts for the two could easily differ by orders of magnitude.
I don't think it would be difficult to write a script that wanders around a target site, picking pages at random, and generating a "takedown" message. I could probably produce such a script in under a day that targets google. The most time-consuming part of the task would probably be getting the template for the message from our company's legal department.
When google is reporting millions of such messages per year from a single source, it's pretty obvious that it's not individual humans doing it by hand. What I'd wonder is whether google has developed software for automating the handling of takedown notices, as they've done with news stories. I'd be surprised if they've hired the hundreds of thousands of people with legal training in copyright law that would be needed to handle such a flood.
Yup; it's there now. Maybe I should try to capture the pages that seem informative, so they don't go away again ...
What we need is a "Kill Switch" ...
Well, we do "power cycle" the government every 4 years (or 2 years for Congress). But when we plug it back in, we tend to power up the same power-slurping setup that we'd previously installed.
Sometimes you just need to retire the old components, and replace them with others that (we hope) are more functional.
Thanks. I've seen references to CSS3 Media Queries, of course, but so far I haven't found a sample of code that actually does the job I described.
Actually, this one didn't quite work, either. The URL gets the response:
502 - Web server received an invalid response while acting as a gateway or proxy server. There is a problem with the page you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed. When the Web server (while acting as a gateway or proxy) contacted the upstream content server, it received an invalid response from the content server.
Maybe it's been slashdotted? ;-) The error messages aren't very helpful.
Also . . . I can get EVERYTHING via my iPhone, as long as it doesn't use flash.
Yeah, you can get it, but there are still discussions about how the iPhone's Safari screws up ordinary text. My wife has an iPhone, but doesn't use Safari much because of this. The problem, of course, is Safari's practice of formatting a text page for a window a lot bigger than the iPhone's screen, then shrinking it to fit, making the font size so tiny as to be illegible. Or you can enlarge it, but then you have to pan left and right for every line of text, making reading it a PITA.
When the first iPhone came out, I noticed this quickly while testing sites formatted for mobile devices, and asked about it on a number of forums. The only "solution" anyone knew was to test the UA string for "iPhone", and if found, add a <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> to the header section. This worked as long as all iPhones had the same screen width, though it only worked for portrait layout, and gave an too-large font size for landscape. But eventually, new iPhones appeared with smaller pixels, so that kludge no longer works.
So is there a known fix for this problem with current iPhones? If the web had been developed by a sane community, we'd have long ago required that graphical apps like browsers send their window size to the server, but that has never been done. We'd also refuse to call things that misrender text this badly a "browser", since the primary design goal of the original browser was to format text legibly in whatever screen space they had available, but that seems to have been forgotten.
In any case, the iPhone's default browser fails the "It Just Works" test for ordinary text, and nobody seems to know how to fix it. Of course, I could be wrong, and a fix exists now. I'd be happy to hear this, if someone could tell me (or my wife ;-) how to make it work right.
(I've heard rumors that with html5, JS can detect the window size and adjust for it. I'm currently trying to discover how this can be done, but I haven't yet stumbled across anything more that claims that it's possible. That isn't very useful if you can't find the details that make it work. If it is doable, that would be yet another reason to switch to html5 right now. ;-)
(I've also encouraged iPhone users to install Opera, which doesn't have this problem, but only a few have paid any attention. "I don't listen to Opera music." ;-)
Heh. Here in New England, many of the locals have experience talking into nor'easters. Of course they actually pronounce it noath-eastah, but never mind. Maybe part (paht) of the reason they did away with most /r/ phonemes is that such weak sounds don't survive for more than a few feet during a winter storm (wintah stoam).
Anway, I've seen that site before. There are some good observations about minimal vs. practical languages, and a healthy attitude that it's all in good fun.
Heh. I've had fun with a few friends who showed off their Siri's behavior. I'd ask them if they can turn it off. They'd do so, and I'd ask "How do you know that it's actually turned off?" Typically, they'd turn off the phone, and I'd ask "How do you know that it's actually off, and not listening right now? But by then, they'll typically get really mad at me. ;-)
Actually, I have a Android phone in my pocket, and I don't know if I could actually verify that it's not listening and sending sound from my environment (or my location) to some remote database. Yes, I have a terminal emulator installed, and I can run a ps command. But I know that ps typically has options to show or not show various subsets of the running processes. I don't have the source for my phone company's version of ps, so while I can show that certain programs are running, I can't actually prove that any particular program isn't running.
Of course, the phone companies are all open and honest about such things, right? They wouldn't monitor us without telling us, would they? ;-)
My immediate thought was something like this, but I haven't figured out what it has to do with a mike (mic?) stand. Yeah, you can mount some of them on such stands, like you can mount all sorts of other things on mike stands. But that's orthogonal to the parcan's functionality, which has nothing in particular to do with what's holding it in its position.
Don't forget even Ben Franklin wrote under pseudonym, ...
And he regularly used several different pseudonyms to start a public discussion. He was one of history's better-documented "trolls" in this regard, since he often did this to get an argument going. He'd salt the discussion with letters from different viewpoints, then print the interesting replies that came in.
That's a whole lot easier nowadays, with online forums ...