Rather than filing a lawsuit, I'd rather the ADA assisted the W3 define some extensions to HTML to help with the issue. Or perhaps, at minimum, an XML language to define accessible content, or for describing how to interpret a site... Something like this?
Alt tags can be used by browsers other than Netscape & MSIE (Which do the popup help). In the most common browser used by the blind (Lynx) it means the difference between this:
No, what leads to having braile at drive up ATMs is that the manufacturer isn't going to spent more money on a shorter production run with special customizations just for drive up ATMs. It's the same screen as any other ATM, it's the same card reader, so it's the same keyboard.
I think this is a good thing. There are too many websites which are totally unusable by the blind. It doesn't take a lot of effort to make a site usable by everyone, and as a bonus, it also makes it usable on palmtops and the main desktop browsers have a more pleasurable experience (Don't know what that icon is over there, mouse over it, and get a popup help)
The electric lamp threatened the revenues of lamp oil manufacturers.
The car threatened the revenues of the horse industry.
The electronic calculator threatened the revenues of the slide rule industry.
Progress marches on. If the company cannot exist in the presence of new technology, that is no reason to try to stop the new technology. Trying to do so is hopeless anyway, how well has the US restricted crypto?
When you're talking about books, cd's, videos etc I think you'll find the vast majority of people are going to buy the official product, just because the act of copying involves so much time and effort to get an inferior product (Even if the sound quality is the same, you don't get the liner notes etc). Those who do are typically going to be people with a lot of time & not much money, eg students, who probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
As another poster pointed out, the BIG revenue losses isn't someone copying at home, it's commerical pirates who make 10,000's of copies, and they're not going to be affected by the lack of home gear at all.
I really object to the implied tone that the only use for DVD-R drives is to pirate DVDs. I've got a CD-R drive and I've never pirated a CD in my life, the one (and only) time I've used it to burn an audio CD was from some public domain sources.
Restricting technology because some pirates might use it is just plain silly.
- finally, unlike the RIAA member companies, movie studios are not parasitical entities acting as a paid go-between between artists and their customers. They provide the capital, resources, and equipment for shooting films and play a very necessary role of the art form.
This is true for the most part, however more and more films are being made as independant productions & only distributed by the major studios.
This is a trend I expect to continue. With the increasing costs of movie production it shifts the risk from a single entity which can be bankrupted by a bad film onto a smallar company which can take bigger risks.
CGI is inherently slow. It's got to fork a process, usually write data cross the pipe, the program has to decode the data, process it, write some data back across the pipe, the webserver has to read that data, perhaps do some more processing, and eventually write it to the browser.
Writting CGI apps in C++ will not gain you much speed, and it definatly slows down your development process. Therefore, if you're going to do it in CGI, you might as well do it in perl.
The problem is that 'sensible' naming schemes like that break far too quickly.
I once had a naming scheme imposed upon me where the first 5 letters of the hostname would be the city where the machine was installed, followed by a letter indicating it's usage, followed by 2 digits to make it unique (usually the last octet in the ip address).
The first breakdown was when we decided to swap the usage of two systems, victm02 with victo03. If we were to install them fresh, then we'd have named them victo02 and victm03, but because the systems were not fresh installed when the usage changed, we had the 'o' system on the 'm' machine and vice versa.
The second breakdown was when we moved a system from Newark NJ to Mansfield NJ, then a system which was called newam02 wasn't actually in Newark.
If it was easy to change hostnames, then these problems wouldn't exist, but it's not that easy. There are references to the old name on many locations, including human brains which are hard to update:-).
This isn't just an example with that organization, for many years a major UUCP hub was MCVAX, which for much of it's life was a Sun.
Re:Hard science fiction is soft
on
Darwin's Radio
·
· Score: 1
We are Homo sapiens - Homo comes from latin, and means man or human.
Neanderthal's are Homo neanderthalensis or Home sapiens neanderthalensis, depending on if you currently belive them to be a seperate species or subspecies. In either case, they are in the genus Homo, and are therefore humans. If you read any book discussing human evolution, then they will use a term like 'modern humans' when informally discussing homo sapiens.
Ponies and horses are of the same species, Equus caballus. The only difference between the two is that ponies are smaller, and really this is a very minor difference which is maintained for no particular good reason. Dogs come in a very large range of sizes, and we don't call small dogs a different name to large dogs.
The differences you give between parents and child are very minor differences. Dwarfism isn't always genetic, it can be developmental as well, autism has unknown cause at the moment, and hair and eye colour vary in almost all mamalian species (And invisible when comparing skeletons).
The virus idea causing speciation doesn't stop it being totally silly! If speciation happened like that, then every birth would be a new species.
Re:Hard science fiction is soft
on
Darwin's Radio
·
· Score: 1
Does " a mummified Neanderthal man and woman with a human baby." consitute an example of accuracy?
I didn't think so. Lets check the flaws: 1) Neanderthal's are humans, just of a difference species or subspecies.
2) The 'hopeful monster' approach described above is like something from the worst excesses of creationist misunderstandings. Parents will be very similar to their children.
3) If really this was the speciation event, then there wouldn't be a homo sapiens species, because the baby died!
The SCOMP, a Multics based system built by Honeywell Aerospace (Now Bull) in Tampa, Florida was the first to get A1 rating. The NSA document of the evalulation is CSC-EPL-85/001, $3 using this order form.
In practical terms, there isn't must difference between B3 & A1, they have the same security setup, but A1 has been formally proven to be secure, while that's not a requirement for B3. However, I'm pretty sure that most B3 systems have been formally proven, just not in the documentation & verbosity to get certified for A1.
Actually, software written in the US before 1976 which wasn't expressly copyrighted was public domain.
Strange laws in the US before it signed the Berne convention said that anything copyrighted must contain the words "copyright xxxx Copyright Owner" and be registered at the Copyright office. If you didn't do that, it was public domain. Since 1976, anything copyrightable is born copyrighted.
They invest in R&D to get new products, which no-one else is selling.
You'll see the pattern if you look at drugs where the patent has expired, for example Beta2 antagonists. The company which first created them has the largest marketshare with Salbutamol (sold as Ventalin), while other B2 antagonists and generic Salbutamol trail behind.
3. No patents = No Silicon Valley. Silicon valley exists because of patents. Otherwise, MS or Sun would keep a group of engineers on standby just to clone every interesting piece of software. Err, they do. If the competition can't be bought, then they'll be cloned.
talking about "The" European system is about as meaningful as talking about "The" US weather.
However, there is the story about Alexander Graham Bell having to rush to the patent office to file suit on the telephone. Why would he have to do this if it's first to invent?
Software and the processes that patents were designed for are fundementally different
If you have a process to create widgets, you cannot derive the process from a finished widget. With software, you can reverse engineer it and work out how it's doing the effect. In a lot of cases, the implementation is obvious simply from looking at the behaviour of the program.
BTW, before anyone gets to set against patents, remember that teh alternative is copyright protection. That lasts 50 years, and no one gets to see what is copyrighted. That was Oracle's solutions, which everyone on this list thought was a great alternative view. IT IS NOT. It would be much worse for everyone if all software was completely proprietary for 50 years, and you didn't get to see it until that period was up. If someone patents something, you can see the patent and improve on it. Some food for thought
Copyright is much better than patent protection.
Last year there were two films about asteroids hitting the earth. They both had the same basic idea, but the implementation was different. This is legal under copyright law, but would be illegal if someone could patent the idea of the asteroid hitting earth movie.
This is the problem with software patents. They prevent innovation. If I happen to be the patent holder to some feature of a certain type of program, then I control who can and cannot create those programs. If I want to create an image manipulator, then I have to give Unisys money. If I want to create a program which implements SSL, then I have to give RSA money. If I cannot afford it, or if the patent owner refuses to license me, then I cannot create the program I wish to create.
If someone had a patent over 'text documents containing embeded markup instructions sent over a network for local formattting on a client' then perhaps no-one would have been able to make the first free webbrowsers. Without Mosaic, there would have been no Netscape, no MSIE (no cheering) , no web industry at all. Who can tell what other world changing ideas are out there, but undeveloped because of software patents?
One possible result of a world without patents is a wider range of drugs.
Right now, a company creates a new drug, and gets a patent on it. It's competitors cannot make that drug, so they spend their research money making a 'copycat' drug. These are drugs which work in the same basic way, but have had enough of their chemistry tweaked to be seperately patentable.
In a world without patents, then they would have less incentive to create a copycat drug, and a greater incentive to create novel drugs.
The first company to create a drug would still have the advantages of first to market & brand name recognition, so they still have the incentive to create new drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
How is a relay service meant to handle a site without suitable Alt tags, non-graphical naviagation etc?
Rather than filing a lawsuit, I'd rather the ADA assisted the W3 define some extensions to HTML to help with the issue. Or perhaps, at minimum, an XML language to define accessible content, or for describing how to interpret a site... Something like this?
For example, try to browse www.lotus.com with lynx - it's unusable.
[LINK]
[LINK]
and this
Slashdot
AOL
No, what leads to having braile at drive up ATMs is that the manufacturer isn't going to spent more money on a shorter production run with special customizations just for drive up ATMs. It's the same screen as any other ATM, it's the same card reader, so it's the same keyboard.
I think this is a good thing. There are too many websites which are totally unusable by the blind. It doesn't take a lot of effort to make a site usable by everyone, and as a bonus, it also makes it usable on palmtops and the main desktop browsers have a more pleasurable experience (Don't know what that icon is over there, mouse over it, and get a popup help)
The car threatened the revenues of the horse industry.
The electronic calculator threatened the revenues of the slide rule industry.
Progress marches on. If the company cannot exist in the presence of new technology, that is no reason to try to stop the new technology. Trying to do so is hopeless anyway, how well has the US restricted crypto?
When you're talking about books, cd's, videos etc I think you'll find the vast majority of people are going to buy the official product, just because the act of copying involves so much time and effort to get an inferior product (Even if the sound quality is the same, you don't get the liner notes etc). Those who do are typically going to be people with a lot of time & not much money, eg students, who probably wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
As another poster pointed out, the BIG revenue losses isn't someone copying at home, it's commerical pirates who make 10,000's of copies, and they're not going to be affected by the lack of home gear at all.
Restricting technology because some pirates might use it is just plain silly.
This is true for the most part, however more and more films are being made as independant productions & only distributed by the major studios.
This is a trend I expect to continue. With the increasing costs of movie production it shifts the risk from a single entity which can be bankrupted by a bad film onto a smallar company which can take bigger risks.
The rest of the world signed the Berne convention on copyright in the 1887-1920 period. The US held out until 1976.
Actually, the last DES cracking contest (DES-III) was cracked in under 24 hours
Writting CGI apps in C++ will not gain you much speed, and it definatly slows down your development process. Therefore, if you're going to do it in CGI, you might as well do it in perl.
I once had a naming scheme imposed upon me where the first 5 letters of the hostname would be the city where the machine was installed, followed by a letter indicating it's usage, followed by 2 digits to make it unique (usually the last octet in the ip address).
The first breakdown was when we decided to swap the usage of two systems, victm02 with victo03. If we were to install them fresh, then we'd have named them victo02 and victm03, but because the systems were not fresh installed when the usage changed, we had the 'o' system on the 'm' machine and vice versa.
The second breakdown was when we moved a system from Newark NJ to Mansfield NJ, then a system which was called newam02 wasn't actually in Newark.
If it was easy to change hostnames, then these problems wouldn't exist, but it's not that easy. There are references to the old name on many locations, including human brains which are hard to update :-).
This isn't just an example with that organization, for many years a major UUCP hub was MCVAX, which for much of it's life was a Sun.
Neanderthal's are Homo neanderthalensis or Home sapiens neanderthalensis, depending on if you currently belive them to be a seperate species or subspecies. In either case, they are in the genus Homo, and are therefore humans. If you read any book discussing human evolution, then they will use a term like 'modern humans' when informally discussing homo sapiens.
Ponies and horses are of the same species, Equus caballus. The only difference between the two is that ponies are smaller, and really this is a very minor difference which is maintained for no particular good reason. Dogs come in a very large range of sizes, and we don't call small dogs a different name to large dogs.
The differences you give between parents and child are very minor differences. Dwarfism isn't always genetic, it can be developmental as well, autism has unknown cause at the moment, and hair and eye colour vary in almost all mamalian species (And invisible when comparing skeletons).
The virus idea causing speciation doesn't stop it being totally silly! If speciation happened like that, then every birth would be a new species.
I didn't think so. Lets check the flaws:
1) Neanderthal's are humans, just of a difference species or subspecies.
2) The 'hopeful monster' approach described above is like something from the worst excesses of creationist misunderstandings. Parents will be very similar to their children.
3) If really this was the speciation event, then there wouldn't be a homo sapiens species, because the baby died!
In practical terms, there isn't must difference between B3 & A1, they have the same security setup, but A1 has been formally proven to be secure, while that's not a requirement for B3. However, I'm pretty sure that most B3 systems have been formally proven, just not in the documentation & verbosity to get certified for A1.
Strange laws in the US before it signed the Berne convention said that anything copyrighted must contain the words "copyright xxxx Copyright Owner" and be registered at the Copyright office. If you didn't do that, it was public domain. Since 1976, anything copyrightable is born copyrighted.
You'll see the pattern if you look at drugs where the patent has expired, for example Beta2 antagonists. The company which first created them has the largest marketshare with Salbutamol (sold as Ventalin), while other B2 antagonists and generic Salbutamol trail behind.
3. No patents = No Silicon Valley. Silicon valley exists because of patents. Otherwise, MS or Sun would keep a group of engineers on standby just to clone every interesting piece of software. Err, they do. If the competition can't be bought, then they'll be cloned.
However, there is the story about Alexander Graham Bell having to rush to the patent office to file suit on the telephone. Why would he have to do this if it's first to invent?
If you have a process to create widgets, you cannot derive the process from a finished widget. With software, you can reverse engineer it and work out how it's doing the effect. In a lot of cases, the implementation is obvious simply from looking at the behaviour of the program.
Copyright is much better than patent protection.
Last year there were two films about asteroids hitting the earth. They both had the same basic idea, but the implementation was different. This is legal under copyright law, but would be illegal if someone could patent the idea of the asteroid hitting earth movie.
This is the problem with software patents. They prevent innovation. If I happen to be the patent holder to some feature of a certain type of program, then I control who can and cannot create those programs. If I want to create an image manipulator, then I have to give Unisys money. If I want to create a program which implements SSL, then I have to give RSA money. If I cannot afford it, or if the patent owner refuses to license me, then I cannot create the program I wish to create.
If someone had a patent over 'text documents containing embeded markup instructions sent over a network for local formattting on a client' then perhaps no-one would have been able to make the first free webbrowsers. Without Mosaic, there would have been no Netscape, no MSIE (no cheering) , no web industry at all. Who can tell what other world changing ideas are out there, but undeveloped because of software patents?
Right now, a company creates a new drug, and gets a patent on it. It's competitors cannot make that drug, so they spend their research money making a 'copycat' drug. These are drugs which work in the same basic way, but have had enough of their chemistry tweaked to be seperately patentable.
In a world without patents, then they would have less incentive to create a copycat drug, and a greater incentive to create novel drugs.
The first company to create a drug would still have the advantages of first to market & brand name recognition, so they still have the incentive to create new drugs.