Oops; it's obvious that I've been doing too much coding lately.;-)
Though with a good laptop and an open access point somewhere nearby, it can be fun to code sitting out on the beach with nobody but gulls and sandpipers around as a distraction.
Keep looking, it's dreadful about 20% of the time. I do love it the other 80% to be fair.
Heh. My wife has an iPhone and I have a G1. We've used their GPS with one of us driving while the other watches our track, and it can be quite entertaining at times. Right now, we're at home in a western suburb of Boston. My G1 shows its position as about 100 miles southeast of here, well out in the ocean east of Cape Cod. Occasionally, it pops over to some woods about half a mile to the south, sits there a while, then jumps back out into the ocean. A bit earlier, I watched the iPhone track as it showed her veering back and forth between the yards on one side of the road and a pond on the other side, occasionally hopping us to the middle of the next town north.
I'd say that if these are any indication, GPS-enhanced phones have a while to go before they're very useful for targeted ads by nearby stores. Of course, there aren't many stores 20 miles east of Cape Code.
It's also funny that sometimes, either or both of the gadgets has our position correct to within a few yards. But if we don't know quite where we are, we can't trust either one's GPS to tell us to within a mile of the truth.
Yeah, me, too, plus accordion and whistle. And you're a bit behind the times. The O'Neill's Project was, as far as I can tell, the first attempt like this to put such a historical tune collection online. It was started by Dan Bornbeim in 1997, and with the help of about two dozen people, was finished in early 1999. So it took you a decade to find it.;-)
Since then, a lot of other similar projects have been organized, to transcribe other historic music collections and put them online. Most of them have been mirrored at several sites, for all the obvious reasons. I organized the project to put the Ryan/Cole collection online, and with the help of about a half dozen others, it was finished (I think;-) a couple of years ago. Others have transcribed other collections, and I have mirrors of a lot of them, as do others. There seems to be a big project underway in Sweden now to put all of Svenska Laatar online. A couple of years ago, hardly any of its tunes were online; now there are several thousand. There are about 8,000 tunes in that collection, so it'll be a few more years before they're done. Some of the world's best fiddle tunes are in that collection.
But to get more on-topic, these projects have all had similar discussions of copyright issues. The consensus seems to be that there haven't been any real problems so far with putting older music online, especially in a computer notation like ABC or LilyPond. The few problems that have popped up mostly seem to be what some poster here called "copyfraud", which is a good portmanteau term for the topic we're discussing. Publishers like to claim ownership of music by merely reprinting it and maybe doing a bit of editing to convert it to modern notation standards. But this hasn't worked out so well for them, because there are a lot of us willing to do the historical research. And see the Fiddler's Companion site for a good source of the historical data.
Meanwhile, a few publishers have cooperated, and when we reciprocate by referencing their published versions in our files, it makes everyone happy. After all, well-done music books (with a binding that lies open on a music stand) has many advantages over a computer screen. The screen is OK for small works of a few pages. But for a collection like Ryan's Mammoth Collection, most musicians who play that sort of music will want a good hard-copy version. You can download all the online tunes from any of the mirrors, convert them to PS or PDF, feed them to your printer, and put them in a binder. Or you can pay Mel Bay $22.95 (plus shipping) for a nicely-done wire-bound copy with several pages of historical notes, and spend the saved time playing music. That's an easy decision for an Irish-music addict.
Actually, it's unfortunate that they don't yet have O'Neill's three books in wire-bound editions. Maybe in a few more years.
You'd think that publishers and other copyright holders would want to encourage search sites. After all, they let you find your own work quickly, so you can easily go after the actual infringers.
Trying to shut down search sites for copyright infringement is a good example of why the phrase "shooting yourself in the foot" was invented. Why would you want to shut down the sites that are fingering infringers in such a convenient manner? Do you really want to build your own search engine, then buy a flock of machines and pay a support staff who would just be duplicating what the googlebots and other such search tools are already doing for you at no charge?
This has gotta be one of the dumbest ideas in the whole stupid copyright battle. And that's saying a lot, considering all the other dumb ideas that are being put online.
I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that you need to do significant editorial work, such as abridgement or re-organization, to a work in order to get a new copyright on it.
You're probably right. But that doesn't prevent publishers from putting a copyright notice in everything they publish, even if they added nothing but the copyright page to the document. If you have the funds to fight their lawyers, you well win, though it could be yet another case where only the lawyers really win.
In any case, it is true that there's some amount of "added value" you can put into your edition that justifies a new copyright. But it's not the original text that your copyright covers; it's your additions. All too often this is mostly just the formatting and printing in a physical form, with boilerplate at the beginning to say who published it when.
I have a number of reprints of old books,... The reprint, from 2005, claims copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor, as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
What, exactly, are Cosimo Classics copyrighting?
Their claiming copyright on their specific printed edition of the work. Even if the text is public domain, that printed version can still be covered by copyright. So if you run it through a copier and sell the copy, you'll be violating their copyright. But if you type the text into your computer and put it online (perhaps at Gutenberg.org), you won't be making a copy of their printed edition, only of the words that it contains, and you'll be legal. It'll help if you make the line breaks different, so it's obviously not a copy. Or even better, use HTML so it'll look nice on everyone's screen.
Heh. An argument I've read is that "Happy Birthday" starts with two pickup notes (D in the usual key of G), rather than just one, and this is sufficient to make it a different musical "work".
This is sorta bogus, of course, and as far as I've been able to tell, it hasn't been tested in any courts. It's doubtful that any but musical lawyers would hear the difference. But if someone would like to spend a few million dollars being the test case, we should all encourage them to go right ahead with it.
Supposedly Warner does make several millions dollars a year from royalty rights to Happy Birthday when it's used in commercial settings such as movies or those restaurants that send a flock of employees to your table to sing it to you. OTOH, they have said that they have no intention of suing anyone for singing it in the usual non-commercial way. After all, that's just good advertising for one of their reliable sources of income.
(Have there actually been any court cases that decided anything about this bizarre copyright?)
I requested a paper via interlibrary loan, and attached was the standard boilerplate that it is copyrighted work, a licensing fee had been paid for the copy to be used only for the purposes of scholarly research, additional copies were $1.25 each to be paid to XXXXXX,... blah, blah blah. The paper was written in 1869.
This is a good example of one type of sneaky wording that is probably technically true, but means something very different from what most people think it means. The claimed copyright is probably valid, but it applies to that printed edition of the work. The words themselves aren't copyrightable, but you can still get a copyright on a specific printed form of the work. But note that the publisher didn't say this; they used the common technique of just saying "copyright" or used the standard circled 'c' copyright symbol, and didn't quite say what was copyrighted. (If you misunderstood what they were claiming copyright to, well, it's not their problem that you are so ignorant of copyright law.;-)
They probably can legally charge a price for a printed copy of their specific printed edition of the work. But if you were to type the words into your computer and put them online, they'd probably be careful when making a copyright claim, because claiming that they own the words would be fraud. This is how sites like Project Gutenberg work; they ask people to type up the text of works that are out of copyright, and they put the words online formatted differently from any printed version. That way, they aren't violating the copyright on any printed edition.
I've seen a bit of this from working with a group that's putting a lot of music online in a compact computerized data format. There are several formats competing now, with ABC in the lead, and formats like LilyPond, RoseGarden, and Music[X]ML with active development of interesting software. Most of the online music is old, 1800s or earlier, in great part due to copyright considerations. Still, I've read of a number of cases where some publisher sends a nasty C&D letter to someone with such music on their site. The site's owner talks a bit on some forums, then sends a reply of the form "That music was published by So-and-So in London in 1723. My file is not a scan of your publication or any other publication. How are you claiming ownership of the music?" The publisher understands that they've been caught in an attempt at consumer fraud, and so far they have always slunk away and aren't heard from again. Until we read in some forum that another user of the software has received a nasty C&D message.
Actually, sometimes it works differently. My web site has copies of the transcription of the three O'Neill's volumes (that every traditional Irish musician will know). The transcribing was done by a small team of musicians. I did a search for current printed editions, found that Mel Bay makes some very good ones (that open flat on a music stand). So I put links to melbay.com in my pages describing the collection, recommending these editions to anyone who would like a good printed copy. A few months later, I got a nice message from a Mel Bay employee, thanking me for referring people to them. There was no hint that they were unhappy with our online "edition". Someone there understood that my site was good advertising for them. Their editions of such old music also contain copyright notices at the beginning that says fairly clearly that it's their printed edition that is covered. The actual pages of music often don't even contain copyright notices, apparently because they often use copies of the original printing plates, which are out of copyright now (and hidden away in a library somewhere).
So some publishers are trying to do such things right. We should encourage them.
(I also like to use such things in discussions of how threatened publishers are by online editions. Printed editions of music that's available online are often selling pretty well. T
The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free.
This statement is an example of the same sort of "logic" used by the public-domain squatters: It's technically true, but very misleading. It doesn't matter if the Copyright Act doesn't provide penalties; there are plenty of other laws that apply. One thing these companies are guilty of is commonly called "consumer fraud", and large penalties can apply in such cases.
The real problem is the lack of prosecution, mostly because it typically takes a class-action lawsuit to get enough money behind it to challenge a company's legal budget. Local DAs tend to take a "not my job" attitude to such things, so it requires organized community action to fight such fraud.
Maybe what we should be doing is documenting cases of such fraud, and publicizing them when the topic comes up in forums like this one.
Anyone want to post a list of some of their favorite fraudulent claims of ownership of public-domain material?
According to the current (25th June 2009) draft of the HTML 5 spec:
"The user agent should obscure the value so that people other than the user cannot see it."
But if you read that carefully, you'll note that it does not say that the user can see it. It allows for implementations that totally obscure the password, and implementations that let the user see the password (as long as others can't). And it doesn't suggest how the latter might be done.
I think it was very carefully worded. Or maybe it was just an accident.
walmart itself is a fascist dictatorship if you think about it.
Close, as various people have pointed out that it satisfies one of the primary features of fascism: The close ties between the business and your local government. (Yes, people in the US do mostly use "fascist" as an epithet that's empty of meaning, but the term has a historic definition. Close ties between government and business is one of the important pieces of that definition. Use of patriotism and religion rather than logic or science are the other major pieces. Sound familiar?;-)
Part of the reason that Walmart and other "big box" stores can offer lower prices than the locally-owned stores is that in most cases, they don't pay local taxes. This was part of their agreement with the local government before they built their store. Before setting up a new store, they send people to negotiate with the local government agencies involved, and the main goal is to find the local town that will give them the best deal.
This normally means low taxes, and since they go with the lowest, it means that the towns are competing to see who can offer the lowest tax rate. Most of the time, that number is zero. This is usually specified as being for some number of years, so that the new business can "establish" themselves. But if the tax rate should go up, note that the "big box" really is just that. It's a big, cheap building that can be quickly abandoned if another nearby town should offer a better deal. This is part of why you see so many unoccupied buildings along the highways of the American landscape.
The tax-free (or nearly so) status of the big corporate stores is most of why they are able to undercut the local businesses on price and drive them out of business. If the big stores had to pay the same tax rate as the local businesses, they wouldn't be nearly so price competitive, and many of the local businesses would survive.
But the only way this can happen is if all the town governments in an area get together and agree to not give the big corporations lower taxes than local businesses. This is a version of the old "Prisoner's Dilemma" game, though. If just one town defects, it gets all the big stores. This puts subtle pressure on all the towns to defect, giving everyone the worst outcome in the PD game. And once this happens, you can't easily fix anything, because it requires everyone deciding to cooperate, and by the time that local politics gets to that point, all the local businesses have died out and the business leaders have moved away.
In many cases, of course, the local government is run by people who believe in the corporate world and think that it should be closely tied to the government. In that case, your local businesses don't really stand much of a chance; the fascists have won. Even if you can vote them out, it'll take you a long time to rebuild a local business community. It takes expertise to run a business, and if all the people with that expertise have moved away, it'll take years to train up a new set. And then it takes only one town getting into bed with a corporate giant to drive the small stores out of business yet again.
(Actually, you can learn a lot about all this by reading Adam Smith. It's not exactly a new story.;-)
So it blocks out all light from the stars behind it and somehow there are no stars in-front of it even though it's 500 LY away?
It doesn't block all the light from the stars behind it. If you look at the edges, you can see a lot of dim, reddish stars that are only somewhat blocked.
As someone else mentioned, it's only about 500 light years away and not very big. The density of stars in this part of the galaxy gives a good probability that there wouldn't be any foreground stars between us and the cloud.
BTW, this is one of the counter-arguments to Olbers' Paradox, which is based on the calculation that if the universe were big enough (or infinite), every line of sight should end at the surface of a star, and the night sky should be as bright as the sun. But astronomers say that most of the mass (at least in nearby galaxies) consists of atomic and molecular clouds which block light from the stars behind them, just as this one does. So it could be true that every straight line from your eye eventually intersects a star, but you can't see it because that line first intersects a cloud like this one.
It might be interesting to read the original report, because the Washington Post article is Silly Science at its best (or maybe worst).
The "three groups" is especially silly, because near the end, they describe it as the result of a split 70,000 years ago (the main exodus from Africa), followed by a second split 40,000 years ago (European vs. Asian). This isn't three groups, it's a three-level tree, with a two-way split in the trunk followed by a two-way split in one branch. If you were to look at more levels of the tree (say, Asian vs. Polynesian or Amerindian), you'd get more than three groups.
And, of course, the other top-level branch is "African", which is actually the base of the tree of human clades. It has been understood for some time that most of the genetic variance in humans is within Africa, with European and Asian branches several levels from the top. There are several other "groups" in Africa that are higher-level splits than the Eurasion split of 70,000 years ago.
I'd be tempted to guess that the "three groups" idea was made up by the Post's writers, who probably can't count much higher. They also probably don't have any concept of a genetic tree. Possibly the researchers made a few comments about these two major splits, and the writers took it to be something terribly significant.
And it's mode much more complex when you consider that below the species level, you never have a strict tree. All those subspecies/variety/race splits can and do interbreed, so within a species, the tree structure can never be much more than a rough approximation. But this is probably too much complexity for a journalist. And it just might be a major part of the explanation for much of the homogeneity that they write about.
There was a good comment on how science journalism works in today's PHD Comics. It seems like a direct comment on this Washington Post article.
From what I can tell, the US military was under no obligation to share the data.
Yes they are. If you've been listening, you've heard over and over that the military is there to protect the population. That's the standard justification for their existence. Fact is that Mother Nature is lobbing big rocks at us, and occasionally one of them hits the planet. Damage can and does come from "foreign" threats that aren't other humans.
If the military has the tools to collect data on big rocks in space, and doesn't share the information with the civilian population, they are failing badly in their claimed job of protecting us. They don't even have to do most of the job in this case. Just making the data available to civilian scientists and engineers would be sufficient. We can take it from there, handle evacuations, etc. (Or maybe we can, despite the Bush gang's attempts to hobble FEMA and other relief agencies by appointing technically incompetent political hacks as administrators.;-)
If the DoD has information about incoming rocks, and one of them hits a population center or other critical area, they'll have a lot of answering to do. Knowing and keeping us ignorant is an inexcusable violation of their duty to protect the population against outside danger.
Myself, I intend to make use of this story the next time someone justifies things like the giant military budget as necessary to protect us from foreign threats. It's also a good example of how military secrecy can be a direct threat to their own civilian population.
(Actually, it's fairly clear that a lot of military people understand all this. I'd guess that a lot of them aren't particularly happy with this story. But part of their training is learning when to keep their mouths shut.)
...a way to make your files accessible to yourself and others through it.
Can you say "huge honking security hole"?
Um, how so? That sounds to me like a succinct description of what a web server is supposed to do. Phrased differently, the "for dummies" definition of a web server is a program that you point at a directory, and it makes everything under that directory available via the Web. This isn't a security hole; it's exactly what a web server is used for. It's only a security hole if outsiders can use it to get at files outside the server's directory.
Do you really think that outside access to files that I want made public is a security hole? That's what it sounds like people are saying.
Maybe I'm misreading something here, but so far I haven't read anything about Unite that qualifies as a security hole. I wouldn't be surprised if there were one, but it'd be nice to read some details. Calling "make your files accessible to others" a security hole is nonsense, when the tool was designed and described as doing exactly that.
Next we're going to hear email software described as a security hole because it allows others to read messages that you send to them.;-)
And, of course, the two ideas aren't opposites. After all, the opposite of "You get what you pay for" really isn't "You never get what you pay for." It's more like "You sometimes get what you pay for, and you sometimes get much less." Of course, sometimes you get more than what you paid for, but that's pretty rare in the business world.
The real problem is that the old cliche is really implying is "Sellers always sell you what you thought you were paying for." But neither party can read the other's mind, so this can't be true. And sellers have an incentive to sell their goods at the highest price the buyer will pay, so they often try to deceive the buyer into buying something that is much less than what the buyer thought the seller was selling. Once the seller has the sucker's money, it's rarely worth the buyer's effort to fight the bad deal, unless it was so over-the-top bad that the buyer feels honor-bound to Do Something About It. And when this happens, the buyer typically finds that the law is on the side of the seller.
There's also the observation that in the computer software business, there is often an inverse relationship between price and value. But that's another problem that might be OT here.
Opera could make the best damn web browser for the mobile platform ever, but if a manufacturer who is making 1 million+ devices has to decide between Opera ($$$) or Webkit (free), which would they go with if both are standards complaint enough?
There's a big chunk of the business world that believes the mantra "You get what you pay for". This is part of the explanation for all the companies that continue to use Microsoft and IBM stuff, and don't even look at cheaper products. There is a large fraction of the population who believe that high-priced goods are better than cheap goods. You can be very successful selling to this sort of people.
One of the curiosities is that price-comparisons studies keep shooting down the popular conception that Apple's products are overpriced. It seems that they are priced about the same as similar products from other companies, and the main reason you don't find many cheap Apple products is that they don't much sell the really shoddy stuff. But Apple seems to quietly encourage the idea that their stuff is "top of the line", i.e., costly. This has the effect of attracting customers who can't judge quality and just buy on price. Yeah, they're stupid customers, but their money is as good any anyone else's.
It wouldn't be surprising if Opera's sales staff are good at finding managers who believe "You get what you pay for". This is just as good a way of making sales as finding managers who know how to judge quality. The sensible approach would be to look for either kind, and sell to all of them.
. In CIS regions (Russia, Ukraine etc) Opera has 25-50% marketshare, so in many of the countries it is actually the #1 browser, kicking both IE and FF far behind.
Ah, but most of the denizens of/. live in the US or western Europe. So most of the people here, the rest of the world is utterly irrelevant. Here in the US, if you're not the top seller in the US, you're a failure.
We even have a handy auto metaphor. There's a lot of news now about the impending total failure of the US auto industry. To most of the American media, this is a total disaster. But on a world-wide basis, it's just a footnote.
Similarly, if Opera doesn't do well in the US but has significant sales elsewhere, they can continue to be successful. Even if Americans can't understand how they're doing it.
Opera is the best desktop web browser and I'd hate to see it go.
But in the computer business, being the best has rarely if ever led to being a commercial success. For that to happen, you need both a relatively free market, and you need a population that is mostly able to judge quality. With computer software, neither of these is true. Each vendor does their best to create a "walled garden", so that their customers buy only through them. Part of the game is to make it as difficult as possible to switch to the competition, typically because you lose most or all of your data when you do so. And, of course, there's Microsoft's approach of making exclusive contracts with retailers so that startups can't even sell their stuff in retail outlets without MS's permission. Plus the simple fact that it's hard for a small company to compete against others that can run billion-dollar ad campaigns. Combine all this with a customer population that is mostly utterly ignorant and just buys whatever is most advertised, and you have a good idea of what the computer "market" is really like.
OTOH, it's not always necessary to be the market leader. Reports are that Opera is financially a success, and this is also true for many other small companies that make a good product and can sell it to people who understand and pay for quality. If they don't do anything totally stupid, chances are that they can survive and keep paying their people for a long time.
After all, our mammalian ancestors survived for a hundred million years in the shadows of the big dinosaurs. Being the biggest isn't always a long-term survival strategy. Hereabouts, there are several "farm stand" stores that are doing quite well against the big supermarket chains, by selling quality produce to people who want it and will pay for it (typically less than what the supermarkets charge for inferior produce). Examples abound of the little guys prospering while the big guys fight their dominance battles. Maybe Opera can continue to do the same.
If this works, it will be pulling us out of a hole that was dug over many years. The ISPs who use IPV4 dynamic IPs... The DNS organizations who decided to make having an entry in the registry something that costs an unreasonable amount of money... Microsofts decision to cripple the web server on every consumer version of their OS ever released... The cloud computing initiatives... are sabotaging the network. So are the social networking sites.
Right. And they're mostly doing this in an attempt to take control of what was designed to be an open network that connects every networked device to every other, so that they can charge you money for every connection. The cell phone companies are especially culpable here. The cell-phone system could have been what finally gave total interconnection to everyone, but they restrict customers to a small set of machines that are locked down and controlled by the phone companies, so they can charge you separately for every new sort of communication. As a result, the cell-phone system is nearly unusable as part of the Internet.
For several years, my wife and I have had web servers running on our laptops. But they have been only usable as test systems for the web content, because no matter where we go, they are unreachable from the Internet. If we are traveling and putting our "content" online, it sits there unavailable to anyone but us until we can transfer it to a wired machine with a public address. This wasn't at all how the Internet was designed to work. If you dig up the early designs (which are online), you'll see lots of nice drawings of equipment moving around the landscape while communicating fully with each other.
This was mostly military equipment, of course, because that's who funded the original ARPAnet that led to the Internet. But it applies just as well to our current civilian portable electronics. An especially useful comparison was that the military design was wireless, fully distributed, and multiply interconnected because they were thinking of enemies that would shoot at any critical nodes to disable communication. So they wanted a system without critical nodes. Today in the civilian world, we have the same situation, except that the enemy is things like government and corporate censors that want to disable our communications. And the really effective enemy has been the comm companies, who have successfully restricted us to their locked-down devices with single-link communication systems, for the express purpose of limiting our communication. Their excuse has been a "need" to block copyrighted and pornographic content, but the real motive has been that they want to monetize every comm link.
If opera can break this chokehold and enable true communication for our growing population of mobile devices (such as this laptop that I'm typing on whose web server you can't reach), I'll be among the crowd that will cheer them on. I already have opera installed on all my gadgets that will support it, mostly for testing my web stuff, but I also use it frequently. I think this story is very interesting, and I intend to be one of the early testers.
I wonder if it'll work on the G1 or iPhone? I have a G1 and my wife has an iPhone. It'd be really handy to be able to give friends a URL for web files on our phones no matter where we happen to be. Just sending a URL and letting people download things as they like is a lot better than packing up everything into a giant email message and sending N copies to friends who may not actually want all of it.
Of course, with cell-phone costs what they are, we'll probably want to prevent access to all the search bots that are over 90% of the traffic to our wired web sites.;-)
"I need to get some eggs at the supermarket" could conceal loads of information, without ever raising suspicions.
Good point. So? Is everyone in America going to start speaking in codes? Keep in mind you can eventually break them in context AND by using those codes you are standing out against everyone not using them.
Sure, we do. I used a statement like that just a few days ago, in a message to my wife. I also said that we needed milk (both skim and 2%), and an outsider looking for code words might really pick up on that. While eating breakfast half an hour ago, I noticed that we're already low on skim milk and eggs, and I should get more. Maybe I'll get them at the local farm stand instead, later today. Oops; I just made another encoded statement, possibly implicating myself in all sorts of subversive and/or illegal activities.
We all talk like that, all the time. That's part of the problem. Without even knowing it, we could be tripping all sorts of monitoring software, by our use of known code words. Any sort of everyday speech could be implicating us in the eyes of the watchers.
That's why we in the general population like private communication. We don't want our everyday speech about things like groceries to be archived and used as evidence against us because we happened to use everyday words that others are using to encode their speech.
There's the old saying, "If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras".
It's always fun to see people using old sayings that turn out to be bogus. In this case, the bogosity is because, if you are looking for a horse, you are in fact also looking for a zebra. If you see a horse, you are also seeing a special case of a zebra.
People usually distinguish them, mostly because of the superficial difference in their appearance. But the domestic horse (Equus caballus) is in the same Equus genus that includes the zebras. Of the three surviving zebra species, one (E. zebra, the mountain or Hartmann's zebra) is more closely related to the domestic horse than either is to the other two zebra species. As the cladists would express it, the term "zebra" is biologically nonsensical unless it includes horses, because any clade that includes all three zebras also includes horses.
Actually, it turns out that there is some small debate over the exact relation between these four species, and the best approach would be to wait for further DNA research. But the current classification based on partial data says that horses are a species within the group of zebras, and chances are pretty good that it's correct. Horses are an odd kind of zebra, since horses usually don't show stripes, but that was also true of the quagga, which has been extinct for about a century. Quaggas had stripes only on their necks and front legs, but they were still considered zebras. And breeders will tell you that crosses between very different strains of horse often produced offspring with visible stripes, so the pattern genes are lurking in the horse genome.
Old sayings can be fun to use, and often have some sort of factual basis. But if the saying turns out to be based on incorrect information, and some of your audience knows this, it can sorta detract from the effectiveness.
I wouldn't want to live in a country where baby bathtime pictures are considered pornographic...
So what country do you live in, where this isn't true?
If you live in the US, such pictures have led to arrests and prosecution on pornography charges. It wouldn't be surprising if this were true in most other countries, too. It could be interesting to read about the laws in countries where it isn't true. How are the laws there phrased? How are false arrests prevented? Are police and/or prosecutors punished for bringing such false charges?
Eh, you'd be amazed what you can learn to live with while going through something like that. Once upon a time I was charged with crimes (felonies) I didn't commit. It took eight months to clear my name. During that time frame life was surprisingly normal -- other than the occasional court appearance and the checks I was writing to my attorney.
So did you get a refund for all those checks?
Part of the story is that legal defenses can easily wipe out a family's life savings, even when they are acquitted. Even more worrying is all the cases where the charges are dropped, leading to the very real possibility that the intent behind the prosecution was to drain the defendant's finances and then say "Oops; sorry; I guess you didn't commit any crime after all; have a nice day."
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I wrote: ... 20 miles east of Cape Code.
Oops; it's obvious that I've been doing too much coding lately. ;-)
Though with a good laptop and an open access point somewhere nearby, it can be fun to code sitting out on the beach with nobody but gulls and sandpipers around as a distraction.
Keep looking, it's dreadful about 20% of the time. I do love it the other 80% to be fair.
Heh. My wife has an iPhone and I have a G1. We've used their GPS with one of us driving while the other watches our track, and it can be quite entertaining at times. Right now, we're at home in a western suburb of Boston. My G1 shows its position as about 100 miles southeast of here, well out in the ocean east of Cape Cod. Occasionally, it pops over to some woods about half a mile to the south, sits there a while, then jumps back out into the ocean. A bit earlier, I watched the iPhone track as it showed her veering back and forth between the yards on one side of the road and a pond on the other side, occasionally hopping us to the middle of the next town north.
I'd say that if these are any indication, GPS-enhanced phones have a while to go before they're very useful for targeted ads by nearby stores. Of course, there aren't many stores 20 miles east of Cape Code.
It's also funny that sometimes, either or both of the gadgets has our position correct to within a few yards. But if we don't know quite where we are, we can't trust either one's GPS to tell us to within a mile of the truth.
O'neills - online? oooh... (Am a fiddle-player).
Yeah, me, too, plus accordion and whistle. And you're a bit behind the times. The O'Neill's Project was, as far as I can tell, the first attempt like this to put such a historical tune collection online. It was started by Dan Bornbeim in 1997, and with the help of about two dozen people, was finished in early 1999. So it took you a decade to find it. ;-)
Since then, a lot of other similar projects have been organized, to transcribe other historic music collections and put them online. Most of them have been mirrored at several sites, for all the obvious reasons. I organized the project to put the Ryan/Cole collection online, and with the help of about a half dozen others, it was finished (I think ;-) a couple of years ago. Others have transcribed other collections, and I have mirrors of a lot of them, as do others. There seems to be a big project underway in Sweden now to put all of Svenska Laatar online. A couple of years ago, hardly any of its tunes were online; now there are several thousand. There are about 8,000 tunes in that collection, so it'll be a few more years before they're done. Some of the world's best fiddle tunes are in that collection.
But to get more on-topic, these projects have all had similar discussions of copyright issues. The consensus seems to be that there haven't been any real problems so far with putting older music online, especially in a computer notation like ABC or LilyPond. The few problems that have popped up mostly seem to be what some poster here called "copyfraud", which is a good portmanteau term for the topic we're discussing. Publishers like to claim ownership of music by merely reprinting it and maybe doing a bit of editing to convert it to modern notation standards. But this hasn't worked out so well for them, because there are a lot of us willing to do the historical research. And see the Fiddler's Companion site for a good source of the historical data.
Meanwhile, a few publishers have cooperated, and when we reciprocate by referencing their published versions in our files, it makes everyone happy. After all, well-done music books (with a binding that lies open on a music stand) has many advantages over a computer screen. The screen is OK for small works of a few pages. But for a collection like Ryan's Mammoth Collection, most musicians who play that sort of music will want a good hard-copy version. You can download all the online tunes from any of the mirrors, convert them to PS or PDF, feed them to your printer, and put them in a binder. Or you can pay Mel Bay $22.95 (plus shipping) for a nicely-done wire-bound copy with several pages of historical notes, and spend the saved time playing music. That's an easy decision for an Irish-music addict.
Actually, it's unfortunate that they don't yet have O'Neill's three books in wire-bound editions. Maybe in a few more years.
Great analogy! ;-)
You'd think that publishers and other copyright holders would want to encourage search sites. After all, they let you find your own work quickly, so you can easily go after the actual infringers.
Trying to shut down search sites for copyright infringement is a good example of why the phrase "shooting yourself in the foot" was invented. Why would you want to shut down the sites that are fingering infringers in such a convenient manner? Do you really want to build your own search engine, then buy a flock of machines and pay a support staff who would just be duplicating what the googlebots and other such search tools are already doing for you at no charge?
This has gotta be one of the dumbest ideas in the whole stupid copyright battle. And that's saying a lot, considering all the other dumb ideas that are being put online.
I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that you need to do significant editorial work, such as abridgement or re-organization, to a work in order to get a new copyright on it.
You're probably right. But that doesn't prevent publishers from putting a copyright notice in everything they publish, even if they added nothing but the copyright page to the document. If you have the funds to fight their lawyers, you well win, though it could be yet another case where only the lawyers really win.
In any case, it is true that there's some amount of "added value" you can put into your edition that justifies a new copyright. But it's not the original text that your copyright covers; it's your additions. All too often this is mostly just the formatting and printing in a physical form, with boilerplate at the beginning to say who published it when.
I have a number of reprints of old books, ... The reprint, from 2005, claims copyright, even though the original author (long since dead) had nothing to do with it, nor, as far as I can tell, did his estate or descendants.
What, exactly, are Cosimo Classics copyrighting?
Their claiming copyright on their specific printed edition of the work. Even if the text is public domain, that printed version can still be covered by copyright. So if you run it through a copier and sell the copy, you'll be violating their copyright. But if you type the text into your computer and put it online (perhaps at Gutenberg.org), you won't be making a copy of their printed edition, only of the words that it contains, and you'll be legal. It'll help if you make the line breaks different, so it's obviously not a copy. Or even better, use HTML so it'll look nice on everyone's screen.
Good Morning to you; ...
Heh. An argument I've read is that "Happy Birthday" starts with two pickup notes (D in the usual key of G), rather than just one, and this is sufficient to make it a different musical "work".
This is sorta bogus, of course, and as far as I've been able to tell, it hasn't been tested in any courts. It's doubtful that any but musical lawyers would hear the difference. But if someone would like to spend a few million dollars being the test case, we should all encourage them to go right ahead with it.
Supposedly Warner does make several millions dollars a year from royalty rights to Happy Birthday when it's used in commercial settings such as movies or those restaurants that send a flock of employees to your table to sing it to you. OTOH, they have said that they have no intention of suing anyone for singing it in the usual non-commercial way. After all, that's just good advertising for one of their reliable sources of income.
(Have there actually been any court cases that decided anything about this bizarre copyright?)
I requested a paper via interlibrary loan, and attached was the standard boilerplate that it is copyrighted work, a licensing fee had been paid for the copy to be used only for the purposes of scholarly research, additional copies were $1.25 each to be paid to XXXXXX, ... blah, blah blah. The paper was written in 1869.
This is a good example of one type of sneaky wording that is probably technically true, but means something very different from what most people think it means. The claimed copyright is probably valid, but it applies to that printed edition of the work. The words themselves aren't copyrightable, but you can still get a copyright on a specific printed form of the work. But note that the publisher didn't say this; they used the common technique of just saying "copyright" or used the standard circled 'c' copyright symbol, and didn't quite say what was copyrighted. (If you misunderstood what they were claiming copyright to, well, it's not their problem that you are so ignorant of copyright law. ;-)
They probably can legally charge a price for a printed copy of their specific printed edition of the work. But if you were to type the words into your computer and put them online, they'd probably be careful when making a copyright claim, because claiming that they own the words would be fraud. This is how sites like Project Gutenberg work; they ask people to type up the text of works that are out of copyright, and they put the words online formatted differently from any printed version. That way, they aren't violating the copyright on any printed edition.
I've seen a bit of this from working with a group that's putting a lot of music online in a compact computerized data format. There are several formats competing now, with ABC in the lead, and formats like LilyPond, RoseGarden, and Music[X]ML with active development of interesting software. Most of the online music is old, 1800s or earlier, in great part due to copyright considerations. Still, I've read of a number of cases where some publisher sends a nasty C&D letter to someone with such music on their site. The site's owner talks a bit on some forums, then sends a reply of the form "That music was published by So-and-So in London in 1723. My file is not a scan of your publication or any other publication. How are you claiming ownership of the music?" The publisher understands that they've been caught in an attempt at consumer fraud, and so far they have always slunk away and aren't heard from again. Until we read in some forum that another user of the software has received a nasty C&D message.
Actually, sometimes it works differently. My web site has copies of the transcription of the three O'Neill's volumes (that every traditional Irish musician will know). The transcribing was done by a small team of musicians. I did a search for current printed editions, found that Mel Bay makes some very good ones (that open flat on a music stand). So I put links to melbay.com in my pages describing the collection, recommending these editions to anyone who would like a good printed copy. A few months later, I got a nice message from a Mel Bay employee, thanking me for referring people to them. There was no hint that they were unhappy with our online "edition". Someone there understood that my site was good advertising for them. Their editions of such old music also contain copyright notices at the beginning that says fairly clearly that it's their printed edition that is covered. The actual pages of music often don't even contain copyright notices, apparently because they often use copies of the original printing plates, which are out of copyright now (and hidden away in a library somewhere).
So some publishers are trying to do such things right. We should encourage them.
(I also like to use such things in discussions of how threatened publishers are by online editions. Printed editions of music that's available online are often selling pretty well. T
The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free.
This statement is an example of the same sort of "logic" used by the public-domain squatters: It's technically true, but very misleading. It doesn't matter if the Copyright Act doesn't provide penalties; there are plenty of other laws that apply. One thing these companies are guilty of is commonly called "consumer fraud", and large penalties can apply in such cases.
The real problem is the lack of prosecution, mostly because it typically takes a class-action lawsuit to get enough money behind it to challenge a company's legal budget. Local DAs tend to take a "not my job" attitude to such things, so it requires organized community action to fight such fraud.
Maybe what we should be doing is documenting cases of such fraud, and publicizing them when the topic comes up in forums like this one.
Anyone want to post a list of some of their favorite fraudulent claims of ownership of public-domain material?
But if you read that carefully, you'll note that it does not say that the user can see it. It allows for implementations that totally obscure the password, and implementations that let the user see the password (as long as others can't). And it doesn't suggest how the latter might be done.
I think it was very carefully worded. Or maybe it was just an accident.
walmart itself is a fascist dictatorship if you think about it.
Close, as various people have pointed out that it satisfies one of the primary features of fascism: The close ties between the business and your local government. (Yes, people in the US do mostly use "fascist" as an epithet that's empty of meaning, but the term has a historic definition. Close ties between government and business is one of the important pieces of that definition. Use of patriotism and religion rather than logic or science are the other major pieces. Sound familiar? ;-)
Part of the reason that Walmart and other "big box" stores can offer lower prices than the locally-owned stores is that in most cases, they don't pay local taxes. This was part of their agreement with the local government before they built their store. Before setting up a new store, they send people to negotiate with the local government agencies involved, and the main goal is to find the local town that will give them the best deal.
This normally means low taxes, and since they go with the lowest, it means that the towns are competing to see who can offer the lowest tax rate. Most of the time, that number is zero. This is usually specified as being for some number of years, so that the new business can "establish" themselves. But if the tax rate should go up, note that the "big box" really is just that. It's a big, cheap building that can be quickly abandoned if another nearby town should offer a better deal. This is part of why you see so many unoccupied buildings along the highways of the American landscape.
The tax-free (or nearly so) status of the big corporate stores is most of why they are able to undercut the local businesses on price and drive them out of business. If the big stores had to pay the same tax rate as the local businesses, they wouldn't be nearly so price competitive, and many of the local businesses would survive.
But the only way this can happen is if all the town governments in an area get together and agree to not give the big corporations lower taxes than local businesses. This is a version of the old "Prisoner's Dilemma" game, though. If just one town defects, it gets all the big stores. This puts subtle pressure on all the towns to defect, giving everyone the worst outcome in the PD game. And once this happens, you can't easily fix anything, because it requires everyone deciding to cooperate, and by the time that local politics gets to that point, all the local businesses have died out and the business leaders have moved away.
In many cases, of course, the local government is run by people who believe in the corporate world and think that it should be closely tied to the government. In that case, your local businesses don't really stand much of a chance; the fascists have won. Even if you can vote them out, it'll take you a long time to rebuild a local business community. It takes expertise to run a business, and if all the people with that expertise have moved away, it'll take years to train up a new set. And then it takes only one town getting into bed with a corporate giant to drive the small stores out of business yet again.
(Actually, you can learn a lot about all this by reading Adam Smith. It's not exactly a new story. ;-)
So it blocks out all light from the stars behind it and somehow there are no stars in-front of it even though it's 500 LY away?
It doesn't block all the light from the stars behind it. If you look at the edges, you can see a lot of dim, reddish stars that are only somewhat blocked.
As someone else mentioned, it's only about 500 light years away and not very big. The density of stars in this part of the galaxy gives a good probability that there wouldn't be any foreground stars between us and the cloud.
BTW, this is one of the counter-arguments to Olbers' Paradox, which is based on the calculation that if the universe were big enough (or infinite), every line of sight should end at the surface of a star, and the night sky should be as bright as the sun. But astronomers say that most of the mass (at least in nearby galaxies) consists of atomic and molecular clouds which block light from the stars behind them, just as this one does. So it could be true that every straight line from your eye eventually intersects a star, but you can't see it because that line first intersects a cloud like this one.
It might be interesting to read the original report, because the Washington Post article is Silly Science at its best (or maybe worst).
The "three groups" is especially silly, because near the end, they describe it as the result of a split 70,000 years ago (the main exodus from Africa), followed by a second split 40,000 years ago (European vs. Asian). This isn't three groups, it's a three-level tree, with a two-way split in the trunk followed by a two-way split in one branch. If you were to look at more levels of the tree (say, Asian vs. Polynesian or Amerindian), you'd get more than three groups.
And, of course, the other top-level branch is "African", which is actually the base of the tree of human clades. It has been understood for some time that most of the genetic variance in humans is within Africa, with European and Asian branches several levels from the top. There are several other "groups" in Africa that are higher-level splits than the Eurasion split of 70,000 years ago.
I'd be tempted to guess that the "three groups" idea was made up by the Post's writers, who probably can't count much higher. They also probably don't have any concept of a genetic tree. Possibly the researchers made a few comments about these two major splits, and the writers took it to be something terribly significant.
And it's mode much more complex when you consider that below the species level, you never have a strict tree. All those subspecies/variety/race splits can and do interbreed, so within a species, the tree structure can never be much more than a rough approximation. But this is probably too much complexity for a journalist. And it just might be a major part of the explanation for much of the homogeneity that they write about.
There was a good comment on how science journalism works in today's PHD Comics. It seems like a direct comment on this Washington Post article.
From what I can tell, the US military was under no obligation to share the data.
Yes they are. If you've been listening, you've heard over and over that the military is there to protect the population. That's the standard justification for their existence. Fact is that Mother Nature is lobbing big rocks at us, and occasionally one of them hits the planet. Damage can and does come from "foreign" threats that aren't other humans.
If the military has the tools to collect data on big rocks in space, and doesn't share the information with the civilian population, they are failing badly in their claimed job of protecting us. They don't even have to do most of the job in this case. Just making the data available to civilian scientists and engineers would be sufficient. We can take it from there, handle evacuations, etc. (Or maybe we can, despite the Bush gang's attempts to hobble FEMA and other relief agencies by appointing technically incompetent political hacks as administrators. ;-)
If the DoD has information about incoming rocks, and one of them hits a population center or other critical area, they'll have a lot of answering to do. Knowing and keeping us ignorant is an inexcusable violation of their duty to protect the population against outside danger.
Myself, I intend to make use of this story the next time someone justifies things like the giant military budget as necessary to protect us from foreign threats. It's also a good example of how military secrecy can be a direct threat to their own civilian population.
(Actually, it's fairly clear that a lot of military people understand all this. I'd guess that a lot of them aren't particularly happy with this story. But part of their training is learning when to keep their mouths shut.)
Um, how so? That sounds to me like a succinct description of what a web server is supposed to do. Phrased differently, the "for dummies" definition of a web server is a program that you point at a directory, and it makes everything under that directory available via the Web. This isn't a security hole; it's exactly what a web server is used for. It's only a security hole if outsiders can use it to get at files outside the server's directory.
Do you really think that outside access to files that I want made public is a security hole? That's what it sounds like people are saying.
Maybe I'm misreading something here, but so far I haven't read anything about Unite that qualifies as a security hole. I wouldn't be surprised if there were one, but it'd be nice to read some details. Calling "make your files accessible to others" a security hole is nonsense, when the tool was designed and described as doing exactly that.
Next we're going to hear email software described as a security hole because it allows others to read messages that you send to them. ;-)
And, of course, the two ideas aren't opposites. After all, the opposite of "You get what you pay for" really isn't "You never get what you pay for." It's more like "You sometimes get what you pay for, and you sometimes get much less." Of course, sometimes you get more than what you paid for, but that's pretty rare in the business world.
The real problem is that the old cliche is really implying is "Sellers always sell you what you thought you were paying for." But neither party can read the other's mind, so this can't be true. And sellers have an incentive to sell their goods at the highest price the buyer will pay, so they often try to deceive the buyer into buying something that is much less than what the buyer thought the seller was selling. Once the seller has the sucker's money, it's rarely worth the buyer's effort to fight the bad deal, unless it was so over-the-top bad that the buyer feels honor-bound to Do Something About It. And when this happens, the buyer typically finds that the law is on the side of the seller.
There's also the observation that in the computer software business, there is often an inverse relationship between price and value. But that's another problem that might be OT here.
Opera could make the best damn web browser for the mobile platform ever, but if a manufacturer who is making 1 million+ devices has to decide between Opera ($$$) or Webkit (free), which would they go with if both are standards complaint enough?
There's a big chunk of the business world that believes the mantra "You get what you pay for". This is part of the explanation for all the companies that continue to use Microsoft and IBM stuff, and don't even look at cheaper products. There is a large fraction of the population who believe that high-priced goods are better than cheap goods. You can be very successful selling to this sort of people.
One of the curiosities is that price-comparisons studies keep shooting down the popular conception that Apple's products are overpriced. It seems that they are priced about the same as similar products from other companies, and the main reason you don't find many cheap Apple products is that they don't much sell the really shoddy stuff. But Apple seems to quietly encourage the idea that their stuff is "top of the line", i.e., costly. This has the effect of attracting customers who can't judge quality and just buy on price. Yeah, they're stupid customers, but their money is as good any anyone else's.
It wouldn't be surprising if Opera's sales staff are good at finding managers who believe "You get what you pay for". This is just as good a way of making sales as finding managers who know how to judge quality. The sensible approach would be to look for either kind, and sell to all of them.
. In CIS regions (Russia, Ukraine etc) Opera has 25-50% marketshare, so in many of the countries it is actually the #1 browser, kicking both IE and FF far behind.
Ah, but most of the denizens of /. live in the US or western Europe. So most of the people here, the rest of the world is utterly irrelevant. Here in the US, if you're not the top seller in the US, you're a failure.
We even have a handy auto metaphor. There's a lot of news now about the impending total failure of the US auto industry. To most of the American media, this is a total disaster. But on a world-wide basis, it's just a footnote.
Similarly, if Opera doesn't do well in the US but has significant sales elsewhere, they can continue to be successful. Even if Americans can't understand how they're doing it.
Opera is the best desktop web browser and I'd hate to see it go.
But in the computer business, being the best has rarely if ever led to being a
commercial success. For that to happen, you need both a relatively free market,
and you need a population that is mostly able to judge quality. With computer
software, neither of these is true. Each vendor does their best to create a
"walled garden", so that their customers buy only through them. Part of the game
is to make it as difficult as possible to switch to the competition, typically
because you lose most or all of your data when you do so. And, of course, there's
Microsoft's approach of making exclusive contracts with retailers so that startups
can't even sell their stuff in retail outlets without MS's permission. Plus the
simple fact that it's hard for a small company to compete against others that can
run billion-dollar ad campaigns. Combine all this with a customer population that
is mostly utterly ignorant and just buys whatever is most advertised, and you have
a good idea of what the computer "market" is really like.
OTOH, it's not always necessary to be the market leader. Reports are that Opera
is financially a success, and this is also true for many other small companies that
make a good product and can sell it to people who understand and pay for quality.
If they don't do anything totally stupid, chances are that they can survive and
keep paying their people for a long time.
After all, our mammalian ancestors survived for a hundred million years in the
shadows of the big dinosaurs. Being the biggest isn't always a long-term survival
strategy. Hereabouts, there are several "farm stand" stores that are doing quite
well against the big supermarket chains, by selling quality produce to people who
want it and will pay for it (typically less than what the supermarkets charge for
inferior produce). Examples abound of the little guys prospering while the big
guys fight their dominance battles. Maybe Opera can continue to do the same.
If this works, it will be pulling us out of a hole that was dug over many years. The ISPs who use IPV4 dynamic IPs ... The DNS organizations who decided to make having an entry in the registry something that costs an unreasonable amount of money ... Microsofts decision to cripple the web server on every consumer version of their OS ever released ... The cloud computing initiatives ... are sabotaging the network. So are the social networking sites.
Right. And they're mostly doing this in an attempt to take control of what was designed to be an open network that connects every networked device to every other, so that they can charge you money for every connection. The cell phone companies are especially culpable here. The cell-phone system could have been what finally gave total interconnection to everyone, but they restrict customers to a small set of machines that are locked down and controlled by the phone companies, so they can charge you separately for every new sort of communication. As a result, the cell-phone system is nearly unusable as part of the Internet.
For several years, my wife and I have had web servers running on our laptops. But they have been only usable as test systems for the web content, because no matter where we go, they are unreachable from the Internet. If we are traveling and putting our "content" online, it sits there unavailable to anyone but us until we can transfer it to a wired machine with a public address. This wasn't at all how the Internet was designed to work. If you dig up the early designs (which are online), you'll see lots of nice drawings of equipment moving around the landscape while communicating fully with each other.
This was mostly military equipment, of course, because that's who funded the original ARPAnet that led to the Internet. But it applies just as well to our current civilian portable electronics. An especially useful comparison was that the military design was wireless, fully distributed, and multiply interconnected because they were thinking of enemies that would shoot at any critical nodes to disable communication. So they wanted a system without critical nodes. Today in the civilian world, we have the same situation, except that the enemy is things like government and corporate censors that want to disable our communications. And the really effective enemy has been the comm companies, who have successfully restricted us to their locked-down devices with single-link communication systems, for the express purpose of limiting our communication. Their excuse has been a "need" to block copyrighted and pornographic content, but the real motive has been that they want to monetize every comm link.
If opera can break this chokehold and enable true communication for our growing population of mobile devices (such as this laptop that I'm typing on whose web server you can't reach), I'll be among the crowd that will cheer them on. I already have opera installed on all my gadgets that will support it, mostly for testing my web stuff, but I also use it frequently. I think this story is very interesting, and I intend to be one of the early testers.
I wonder if it'll work on the G1 or iPhone? I have a G1 and my wife has an iPhone. It'd be really handy to be able to give friends a URL for web files on our phones no matter where we happen to be. Just sending a URL and letting people download things as they like is a lot better than packing up everything into a giant email message and sending N copies to friends who may not actually want all of it.
Of course, with cell-phone costs what they are, we'll probably want to prevent access to all the search bots that are over 90% of the traffic to our wired web sites. ;-)
Good point. So? Is everyone in America going to start speaking in codes? Keep in mind you can eventually break them in context AND by using those codes you are standing out against everyone not using them.
Sure, we do. I used a statement like that just a few days ago, in a message to my wife. I also said that we needed milk (both skim and 2%), and an outsider looking for code words might really pick up on that. While eating breakfast half an hour ago, I noticed that we're already low on skim milk and eggs, and I should get more. Maybe I'll get them at the local farm stand instead, later today. Oops; I just made another encoded statement, possibly implicating myself in all sorts of subversive and/or illegal activities.
We all talk like that, all the time. That's part of the problem. Without even knowing it, we could be tripping all sorts of monitoring software, by our use of known code words. Any sort of everyday speech could be implicating us in the eyes of the watchers.
That's why we in the general population like private communication. We don't want our everyday speech about things like groceries to be archived and used as evidence against us because we happened to use everyday words that others are using to encode their speech.
There's the old saying, "If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras".
It's always fun to see people using old sayings that turn out to be bogus. In this case, the bogosity is because, if you are looking for a horse, you are in fact also looking for a zebra. If you see a horse, you are also seeing a special case of a zebra.
People usually distinguish them, mostly because of the superficial difference in their appearance. But the domestic horse (Equus caballus) is in the same Equus genus that includes the zebras. Of the three surviving zebra species, one (E. zebra, the mountain or Hartmann's zebra) is more closely related to the domestic horse than either is to the other two zebra species. As the cladists would express it, the term "zebra" is biologically nonsensical unless it includes horses, because any clade that includes all three zebras also includes horses.
Actually, it turns out that there is some small debate over the exact relation between these four species, and the best approach would be to wait for further DNA research. But the current classification based on partial data says that horses are a species within the group of zebras, and chances are pretty good that it's correct. Horses are an odd kind of zebra, since horses usually don't show stripes, but that was also true of the quagga, which has been extinct for about a century. Quaggas had stripes only on their necks and front legs, but they were still considered zebras. And breeders will tell you that crosses between very different strains of horse often produced offspring with visible stripes, so the pattern genes are lurking in the horse genome.
Old sayings can be fun to use, and often have some sort of factual basis. But if the saying turns out to be based on incorrect information, and some of your audience knows this, it can sorta detract from the effectiveness.
I wouldn't want to live in a country where baby bathtime pictures are considered pornographic...
So what country do you live in, where this isn't true?
If you live in the US, such pictures have led to arrests and prosecution on pornography charges. It wouldn't be surprising if this were true in most other countries, too. It could be interesting to read about the laws in countries where it isn't true. How are the laws there phrased? How are false arrests prevented? Are police and/or prosecutors punished for bringing such false charges?
Eh, you'd be amazed what you can learn to live with while going through something like that. Once upon a time I was charged with crimes (felonies) I didn't commit. It took eight months to clear my name. During that time frame life was surprisingly normal -- other than the occasional court appearance and the checks I was writing to my attorney.
So did you get a refund for all those checks?
Part of the story is that legal defenses can easily wipe out a family's life savings, even when they are acquitted. Even more worrying is all the cases where the charges are dropped, leading to the very real possibility that the intent behind the prosecution was to drain the defendant's finances and then say "Oops; sorry; I guess you didn't commit any crime after all; have a nice day."