if you can suspend your disbelief and focus on the way characters dealt with situations, you can see some very interesting relationships and behaviors emerge.
That's not Star Trek. That's soap opera.
Sorry, what you call "interesting relationships and behaviors," I call mindless fanboy garbage.
Stan Lee inventing Spider-Man: that's pure gold. Forty years later you have 35 year old men who grew up on Stan Lee's Spider-Man writing stories in which we find out that Peter Parker has actually been a clone all this time and major events in his life have actually been a sham and it has an incredible impact on his friends and family, all of whom must face the world-shattering implications of the... BAH. That's not "sophisticated writing," that's pure garbage.
Star Trek for the past 20 years has just been splitting the same hair finer and finer. None of it has any of the joy or exuberance of the original series, and that includes the last season of Enterprise. It's all slick, overproduced, repetetive, pandering filler written by fanboys, for fanboys. That's my opinion.
It's inevitable that this will happen to any cottage industry that develops a cult fan base. The thing to do is to chuck it out and start over. What's needed is a breath of fresh air. Praise Xenu that, when Russell T. Davies chose to resurrect Doctor Who, he chucked out as much as he did. Praise Xenu that he chose to put so much humor into it. Gawd, a sci-fi show that doesn't take itself seriously?? That never once uses the term "mercs," features no space government, has a major location in a council estate in London? Unheard-of. But exactly what's needed -- not more Star Trek.
they need to do what they have always been good at, movies for action
I dunno about you, but for me, the appeal of Star Trek was always the interaction between the characters of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and to a lesser extent, Scotty and the other bridge crew. Their friendships felt genuine and it was fun to watch them tested by various forms of ridiculous melodrama. "Next Generation" was a decent show from time to time but I never got that feeling from it, and all the other series and all the movies since "Khan" -- especially when they started playing it "for action" -- seemed like mindless fanboy garbage.
Exactly. You take normal people and put them into a position of power, and it changes them. In my experience, treating them with respect instead of antagonizing them tends to soften the effect. I don't see why more people don't give it a shot.
Yeah, I'm sure those 12-year-olds must have gone real apeshit on those cops for them to get hauled in like they did. Shame on those little punks for not showing proper respect for the cops' authori-tah!
In other words, you are way too quick to assume that the only way to make liquid biofuels is from corn.
Part of the problem is that there are interests in the United States that are dedicated to preserving this impression. Agriculture companies like Archer Daniels Midland have invested heavily in, for example, genetically modified corn. Corn has become a huge cash crop for these businesses, no pun intended. If you go to a legislator and say "ethanol" in one ear, ADM will be right there whispering, "that's right, corn!" into the other.
Say I'm a hardware consumer. I decide I love some particular piece of hardware and buy it with my hard earned money. But when I try to run one particular version of open source software customized for me, it doesnt run because the hardware complains it is not validated.
Sure, but look at it this way: Say I buy a car from Manufacturer A. Then I take the car and fill up its tank at Gas Station X. But what if... OK, OK, I'll stop now.
The situation the GP was describing is a more like trying to sell yak's milk in a Bavarian beer garden. You can bring as many Nepalese sherpas as you want, each with their own entry visas, and the yak might clear customs, but unless the milk is pasteurized you're still going to run into problems. And who's to say the Germans have a taste for yak's milk anyway? It's shortsighted thinking like this that leads to posts like yours.
Again, you're making up statistics. According to CIA statistics, the literacy rate in India is not 40 percent, it is 60 percent. I think they oughtta know better than you. You claim that these statistics are based on what the Indian government reports and that the Indian government is making them up to make itself look good, but you provide not substantiation for this statement. 45 percent is not "the majority." Bottom line, if you want to stay willfully pig-ignorant, I'm not going to bother trying to educate you. Think what makes you feel good, and don't get mad when a healthy, literate Indian takes your next job.
I use the GPL, but i couldn't give a s**t about the plaudits. As a lot of people, I use the GPL simply because i'm too selfish to do otherwise. I want my work to be useful to me, and to my 'community'.
I guess that's kind of what I meant by "plaudits" -- it smacks of "hooray for us!" It doesn't sound particularly "open" in spirit -- but this is just a personal bias. I don't think there's anything "wrong" with the way you want to do things either.
The link refers to people over 15 that can read a little. This 'factbook' masks the real problem, which is that 30%+ of the population is under 15 (according to your very link), most of whom are illeterate (and die off before they ever learn).
"People over the age of 15" is more liberal than my own definition of "grownups." If you were not in fact referring to grownups then you should have not used that word.
Also, please show me a reference at the CIA site where it defines literacy as "can read a little." It says quite plainly on the link that literacy is defined as "can read and write," so you're already leaving one part out, and the definition does not include your subjective qualifier.
There was no statistic on that page about the literacy rate of children under 15, so your statement about youth literacy is unsupported. I would expect, however, that the literacy rate of children under 15 is considerably lower than that of adults -- as is the case the entire world over.
Finally, your comment that most children under 15 "die off before they ever learn," is also rubbish. The average life expectancy of the entire population of India (according to the same data) is roughly 65. That means they don't "die off" until well after they reach adulthood, at which time they presumably join the roughly 70 percent of grownups who are literate.
Your hand-wringing and sympathy for the people of India is touching, and India does face many social and economic challenges, but I'm afraid your portrayal is a distortion of the facts.
If your current marketable resource is cheap labour, why would you educate your populous with access to world media? Would this not just increase their expectations regarding an acceptable standard of living ?
Some governments may think this way but you certainly cannot say this of India. India over the last century has moved more aggressively in the area of education than perhaps any developing nation. Moreover it has a very strong educational and literary tradition going back centuries, if not millenia. Check out the Wikipedia article on Education in India.
No laptops, no business. 60% of grownups in India cannot read
Exaggeration. According to the CIA World Factbook, about 60 percent of adults in India can read. The figure weighs disproportionately in favor of men -- 70 percent are literate. In women the figure is less than 50 percent, but still not as low as the 40 percent you suggest.
These licenses [X11, BSD, MIT] don't do enough to protect the contributions of the people that made the code -- they essentially enable legalized plagiarism.
Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?
I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.
Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.
Of course we want to see Hotel Rwanda, or the new almodovar film, because we are advanced, modern intellectuals. In reality, after a 12 hour day of re-factoring someone else's messy code, would you rather open a beer and collapse in front of Hotel Rwanda or Super Troopers?
The truth? I got "Hotel Rwanda" and I watched it right away. On the other hand, I exhibit the properties the article talks about also -- "House of Wax" (the Paris Hilton one) is still sitting on my coffee table, and has been for weeks. The difference? I'm reasonably certain that "Hotel Rwanda" is going to be a good movie, one that I'll enjoy watching. "House of Wax" is probably going to be a steaming pile of shit -- which means I'm going to get bored and start fiddling around with something else while I tune out the movie. If the goal is grabbing a beer and collapsing in front of the TV, then "House of Wax" isn't going to cut it. I need a movie that's actually worth seeing.
how much overhead does virtualization take up? At what point do you actually need another box because of the performance hit?
It's a subjective question. Virtualization is especially good for improving utilization on certain types of servers, for example Web servers. You might have some kind of intranet application running on a Web server that only gets used every so often. The rest of the time it's sitting there idle. So if you add another virtual server to the same machine, sure, in a strict technical sense there's some kind of performance hit, but in a practical sense there's not really any performance hit to the first server at all, because it was sitting idle anyway. By making each server its own virtual machine, though, you're retaining more flexibility than if you just hung multiple Web applications off the same instance of a Web server, because it's always easy to migrate one of those virtual servers to dedicated hardware if its utilization goes up.
Likewise, I always have to remove the arms from my office chair. Whenever I get a new chair it's always the same. It might be a few months before I start to notice that I'm slumping into the arms of the chair, putting all my weight onto my elbows, and it starts to give me pains in my arms. Remove the arms of the chair and I can't do that anymore. Everyone's mileage varies, but that's one I have to do.
Something else a lot of people don't understand is that the word "ergonomic," as it's applied to office furniture, is frequently abused and is often totally meaningless. I once had an office with a desk where I would bang my knees into the top of the desk every time I would roll my chair into it. I called the company facilities people to raise the desk but they were really reluctant to do that because, they claimed, the desk was "official ergonomic height." In the end they actually took a saw and sawed off the part of the desk I was banging my legs into, rather than give me a higher desk.
Now, think about that for a second. Obviously it's totally crazy -- I'm six foot three inches tall. It would be physically impossible to have some kind of official, "ergonomically correct" desk height that would suit me the same as it would a five foot tall person.
Not to mention the fact that ANY kind of activity or posture that you take repeatedly can be the cause of repeat stress injuries (notice that R-word in there). The ONLY type of furniture that is truly "ergonomic" is furniture that allows you to adjust your position whenever you feel like it and as often as you want. Maybe up, maybe down, maybe tilted, maybe over to the left today, maybe over to the right tomorrow. If you can adapt the position of how you sit/work to what makes your muscles, bones, tendons etc. comfortable RIGHT NOW, you're probably doing OK.
But you will NEVER find that "magic position" into which you can place a desk and a chair and expect to be able to keep it that way every day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, without any kind of discomfort. There is no such magic ergonomic formula. Free motion is the key, including stretching, moving around as much as possible, and adjusting the position of your furniture as often as you feel like it.
Seriously. He should try putting the mouse on the floor and moving it around with his foot. Manipulating mouse buttons doesn't really require a lot of manual dexterity.
On the whole, though, this is a very tricky issue. A friend of mine has really bad repeat stress injury and there's no easy way to "fix" it. The way to get better is to cease doing the activity that messed you up to begin with. In this modern world it seems a little inconceivable that you'd go without using a computer -- perhaps for years -- but that might be what it takes. Lousy, but would he rather stay injured the rest of hia life?
That just means you write too much and don't sit back and look at the impact it has.
Uh... you wanna explain that? Nothing you write has any "impact" until after it's published. Whether you write "too much" is completely subjective; it depends on the subject matter. I could argue that somebody who's writing with page layout in mind is going to write "too much," because they're going to spend their time filling pages instead of concentrating on good writing.
It means what you write has no substance.
This, from the guy who advocates having writers spend their time doing page layout? How are you going to write anything of substance when you're busy fretting over surface details?
Or that you have a dedicated team of dozens of people working to support your work.
You mean like a professional would.
My point of starting this thread was to make people think about the tasks Word is used for, for which it was not meant. Mostly to avoid the whole MSFT bashing theme common to these threads.
No, your point was to say that anybody who said that commercial software is used more often for publishing than open source software was some kind of anti-OSS troll, and you're wrong. The fact is, the publishing industry uses way more commercial software than open source. All you keep doing is reiterating that you exist in the niche that doesn't.
Heh. That reminds me of something -- For a while I edited Randall Schwartz's monthly Perl column for Web Techniques magazine, and he submitted every single column in PerlDoc format. Even funnier was that, before I got there, nobody even knew WHAT it was. They just told me, "He sends it in some weird format, so you'll have to do a little extra work." What that meant was that they would regularly strip out all his formatting and start over from scratch, using his plain text document as a starting point. Alas, there was no PerlDoc-to-Word plug-in.
This is typical anti-OSS flamebait but I'll respond anyways.
TeX is a 30 yr old system still used today for a reason. Not saying the commercial side is bad but if you're working on a budget and need precision nothing beats TeX.
Joking, right? The parent is absolutely correct -- in professional environments, Quark, InDesign and Framemaker are used far more often than TeX. In fact, outside of publishing long documents with complex formatting requirements (e.g. academic texts), almost nobody uses TeX. I can tell you with certainty that magazine publishers uniformly use Quark (and, in increasing numbers, InDesign). No flames required; these are the facts.
And to add to that, writing a book in Word is cruel. You never get to see the final product and the flow/layout is just awful.
Any time a professional author spends worrying about what the final product is going to look like is wasted time. As an author you should be concentrating on what you're writing. You're not paid to be a book designer.
It seems obvious from your comments that you're talking about the specific niche that the parent poster mentioned (academic texts). Why argue?
It seems to me like the company is buying a DVD, modifying it, and then reselling it (not a copy of it), which should be allowed under the first-sale doctrine.
Obviously they're not doing that because that would be impossible. DVDs are permanent, immutable. If you scratch the surface of a DVD you don't get rid of pieces of content, you just make it unplayable. To modify a DVD you have to make a copy (to a computer most likely), modify the duplicate version, then master a new DVD with the modified version of the content. It's a copy. Then, if you have 1,000 customers, you've made a whole lot of copies.
I think the point that the vast majority of people are missing, is that at it's essence, this third party company is creating a derivative work For Profit. If this was a non-profit group, such as a church this would be 100% legal.
This is a common fallacy. There is no "100 percent legal" when it comes to copyright infringement, and you are not immune from being charged with infringement just because you didn't monetarily profit. The courts are empowered to take into account the nature of the use to determine whether it was actually infringeing. But if it's illegal for a private company to make its own derivative version of a work like a movie, it's unlikely that the court would uphold the same action just because it was performed by a church.
Look at it this way: "Profit" doesn't necessarily mean monetary gain. If you and all your friends want a censored version of a movie and you don't know where to get one, so you make one yourself and give copies of it to all your friends, then you and all your friends have profited. In such cases, the studio could still sue you for punitive damages if it was able to prove that you knowingly and willfully made the derivative work when you knew it was copyrighted.
What about the building the concrete is in front of? Isn't the sign like a giant advertisement to come inside, should those be allowed? Should we only allow a certain typeface a certain size, a certain number of lights?
Yes, yes, and YES! In fact most cities have such ordinances. Outdoor advertising of the likes of Times Square is illegal almost everywhere else, barring maybe Las Vegas. You certainly can't do it in my hometown (San Francisco). All billboards have to be licensed by the municipality -- this is true even in New York. These are community standards that under all circumstances should be determined by the residents, not corporate interests.
Also, I don't much care if my kids see 10,000 ads on their walk home from school. They'll just learn to tune it out or they'll get used to the ad being in the same place, and it no longer becomes an ad it becomes a marker.
Suppose the ads were pornographic images? Would the kids "tune them out" then?
I really don't think you've thought this issue through.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not Star Trek. That's soap opera.
Sorry, what you call "interesting relationships and behaviors," I call mindless fanboy garbage.
Stan Lee inventing Spider-Man: that's pure gold. Forty years later you have 35 year old men who grew up on Stan Lee's Spider-Man writing stories in which we find out that Peter Parker has actually been a clone all this time and major events in his life have actually been a sham and it has an incredible impact on his friends and family, all of whom must face the world-shattering implications of the ... BAH. That's not "sophisticated writing," that's pure garbage.
Star Trek for the past 20 years has just been splitting the same hair finer and finer. None of it has any of the joy or exuberance of the original series, and that includes the last season of Enterprise. It's all slick, overproduced, repetetive, pandering filler written by fanboys, for fanboys. That's my opinion.
It's inevitable that this will happen to any cottage industry that develops a cult fan base. The thing to do is to chuck it out and start over. What's needed is a breath of fresh air. Praise Xenu that, when Russell T. Davies chose to resurrect Doctor Who, he chucked out as much as he did. Praise Xenu that he chose to put so much humor into it. Gawd, a sci-fi show that doesn't take itself seriously?? That never once uses the term "mercs," features no space government, has a major location in a council estate in London? Unheard-of. But exactly what's needed -- not more Star Trek.
I dunno about you, but for me, the appeal of Star Trek was always the interaction between the characters of Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and to a lesser extent, Scotty and the other bridge crew. Their friendships felt genuine and it was fun to watch them tested by various forms of ridiculous melodrama. "Next Generation" was a decent show from time to time but I never got that feeling from it, and all the other series and all the movies since "Khan" -- especially when they started playing it "for action" -- seemed like mindless fanboy garbage.
Yeah, I'm sure those 12-year-olds must have gone real apeshit on those cops for them to get hauled in like they did. Shame on those little punks for not showing proper respect for the cops' authori-tah!
Part of the problem is that there are interests in the United States that are dedicated to preserving this impression. Agriculture companies like Archer Daniels Midland have invested heavily in, for example, genetically modified corn. Corn has become a huge cash crop for these businesses, no pun intended. If you go to a legislator and say "ethanol" in one ear, ADM will be right there whispering, "that's right, corn!" into the other.
...I was pushed Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 earlier this morning, too.
Sure, but look at it this way: Say I buy a car from Manufacturer A. Then I take the car and fill up its tank at Gas Station X. But what if ... OK, OK, I'll stop now.
Your analogy misses the point entirely.
The situation the GP was describing is a more like trying to sell yak's milk in a Bavarian beer garden. You can bring as many Nepalese sherpas as you want, each with their own entry visas, and the yak might clear customs, but unless the milk is pasteurized you're still going to run into problems. And who's to say the Germans have a taste for yak's milk anyway? It's shortsighted thinking like this that leads to posts like yours.
Again, you're making up statistics. According to CIA statistics, the literacy rate in India is not 40 percent, it is 60 percent. I think they oughtta know better than you. You claim that these statistics are based on what the Indian government reports and that the Indian government is making them up to make itself look good, but you provide not substantiation for this statement. 45 percent is not "the majority." Bottom line, if you want to stay willfully pig-ignorant, I'm not going to bother trying to educate you. Think what makes you feel good, and don't get mad when a healthy, literate Indian takes your next job.
I guess that's kind of what I meant by "plaudits" -- it smacks of "hooray for us!" It doesn't sound particularly "open" in spirit -- but this is just a personal bias. I don't think there's anything "wrong" with the way you want to do things either.
"People over the age of 15" is more liberal than my own definition of "grownups." If you were not in fact referring to grownups then you should have not used that word.
Also, please show me a reference at the CIA site where it defines literacy as "can read a little." It says quite plainly on the link that literacy is defined as "can read and write," so you're already leaving one part out, and the definition does not include your subjective qualifier.
There was no statistic on that page about the literacy rate of children under 15, so your statement about youth literacy is unsupported. I would expect, however, that the literacy rate of children under 15 is considerably lower than that of adults -- as is the case the entire world over.
Finally, your comment that most children under 15 "die off before they ever learn," is also rubbish. The average life expectancy of the entire population of India (according to the same data) is roughly 65. That means they don't "die off" until well after they reach adulthood, at which time they presumably join the roughly 70 percent of grownups who are literate.
Your hand-wringing and sympathy for the people of India is touching, and India does face many social and economic challenges, but I'm afraid your portrayal is a distortion of the facts.
Some governments may think this way but you certainly cannot say this of India. India over the last century has moved more aggressively in the area of education than perhaps any developing nation. Moreover it has a very strong educational and literary tradition going back centuries, if not millenia. Check out the Wikipedia article on Education in India.
Exaggeration. According to the CIA World Factbook, about 60 percent of adults in India can read. The figure weighs disproportionately in favor of men -- 70 percent are literate. In women the figure is less than 50 percent, but still not as low as the 40 percent you suggest.
Sounds like a good argument in favor of distance learning -- or self-directed study based on electronic lesson plans, maybe.
Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?
I question the motives of open source developers who use the GPL because it affords them plaudits for the authorship of their code. The GPL doesn't really care about any developers' desire to receive credit and accolades for their efforts. The only real reason the GPL requires that works derived from GPL-licensed works must also be GPL-licensed is political. The GNU Foundation wants to spread the political cause of Free Software. The GPL is one way to do this.
Many other developers lack these political ambitions, however. For them, the BSD style license is perfectly fine. It protects them in various ways, like limiting the developers' liability, without the entanglements of Richard Stallman's political agenda. At the same time, it allows them to offer some code to the community, without any selfish motives of social status.
The truth? I got "Hotel Rwanda" and I watched it right away. On the other hand, I exhibit the properties the article talks about also -- "House of Wax" (the Paris Hilton one) is still sitting on my coffee table, and has been for weeks. The difference? I'm reasonably certain that "Hotel Rwanda" is going to be a good movie, one that I'll enjoy watching. "House of Wax" is probably going to be a steaming pile of shit -- which means I'm going to get bored and start fiddling around with something else while I tune out the movie. If the goal is grabbing a beer and collapsing in front of the TV, then "House of Wax" isn't going to cut it. I need a movie that's actually worth seeing.
It's a subjective question. Virtualization is especially good for improving utilization on certain types of servers, for example Web servers. You might have some kind of intranet application running on a Web server that only gets used every so often. The rest of the time it's sitting there idle. So if you add another virtual server to the same machine, sure, in a strict technical sense there's some kind of performance hit, but in a practical sense there's not really any performance hit to the first server at all, because it was sitting idle anyway. By making each server its own virtual machine, though, you're retaining more flexibility than if you just hung multiple Web applications off the same instance of a Web server, because it's always easy to migrate one of those virtual servers to dedicated hardware if its utilization goes up.
Likewise, I always have to remove the arms from my office chair. Whenever I get a new chair it's always the same. It might be a few months before I start to notice that I'm slumping into the arms of the chair, putting all my weight onto my elbows, and it starts to give me pains in my arms. Remove the arms of the chair and I can't do that anymore. Everyone's mileage varies, but that's one I have to do.
Something else a lot of people don't understand is that the word "ergonomic," as it's applied to office furniture, is frequently abused and is often totally meaningless. I once had an office with a desk where I would bang my knees into the top of the desk every time I would roll my chair into it. I called the company facilities people to raise the desk but they were really reluctant to do that because, they claimed, the desk was "official ergonomic height." In the end they actually took a saw and sawed off the part of the desk I was banging my legs into, rather than give me a higher desk.
Now, think about that for a second. Obviously it's totally crazy -- I'm six foot three inches tall. It would be physically impossible to have some kind of official, "ergonomically correct" desk height that would suit me the same as it would a five foot tall person.
Not to mention the fact that ANY kind of activity or posture that you take repeatedly can be the cause of repeat stress injuries (notice that R-word in there). The ONLY type of furniture that is truly "ergonomic" is furniture that allows you to adjust your position whenever you feel like it and as often as you want. Maybe up, maybe down, maybe tilted, maybe over to the left today, maybe over to the right tomorrow. If you can adapt the position of how you sit/work to what makes your muscles, bones, tendons etc. comfortable RIGHT NOW, you're probably doing OK.
But you will NEVER find that "magic position" into which you can place a desk and a chair and expect to be able to keep it that way every day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, without any kind of discomfort. There is no such magic ergonomic formula. Free motion is the key, including stretching, moving around as much as possible, and adjusting the position of your furniture as often as you feel like it.
Seriously. He should try putting the mouse on the floor and moving it around with his foot. Manipulating mouse buttons doesn't really require a lot of manual dexterity.
On the whole, though, this is a very tricky issue. A friend of mine has really bad repeat stress injury and there's no easy way to "fix" it. The way to get better is to cease doing the activity that messed you up to begin with. In this modern world it seems a little inconceivable that you'd go without using a computer -- perhaps for years -- but that might be what it takes. Lousy, but would he rather stay injured the rest of hia life?
Uh ... you wanna explain that? Nothing you write has any "impact" until after it's published. Whether you write "too much" is completely subjective; it depends on the subject matter. I could argue that somebody who's writing with page layout in mind is going to write "too much," because they're going to spend their time filling pages instead of concentrating on good writing.
This, from the guy who advocates having writers spend their time doing page layout? How are you going to write anything of substance when you're busy fretting over surface details?
You mean like a professional would.
No, your point was to say that anybody who said that commercial software is used more often for publishing than open source software was some kind of anti-OSS troll, and you're wrong. The fact is, the publishing industry uses way more commercial software than open source. All you keep doing is reiterating that you exist in the niche that doesn't.Hey, if you read this, track down my e-mail address at the bottom of my homepage and drop me a note. I'd like to talk to you more about ESX etc.
Heh. That reminds me of something -- For a while I edited Randall Schwartz's monthly Perl column for Web Techniques magazine, and he submitted every single column in PerlDoc format. Even funnier was that, before I got there, nobody even knew WHAT it was. They just told me, "He sends it in some weird format, so you'll have to do a little extra work." What that meant was that they would regularly strip out all his formatting and start over from scratch, using his plain text document as a starting point. Alas, there was no PerlDoc-to-Word plug-in.
Joking, right? The parent is absolutely correct -- in professional environments, Quark, InDesign and Framemaker are used far more often than TeX. In fact, outside of publishing long documents with complex formatting requirements (e.g. academic texts), almost nobody uses TeX. I can tell you with certainty that magazine publishers uniformly use Quark (and, in increasing numbers, InDesign). No flames required; these are the facts.
Any time a professional author spends worrying about what the final product is going to look like is wasted time. As an author you should be concentrating on what you're writing. You're not paid to be a book designer.
It seems obvious from your comments that you're talking about the specific niche that the parent poster mentioned (academic texts). Why argue?
Obviously they're not doing that because that would be impossible. DVDs are permanent, immutable. If you scratch the surface of a DVD you don't get rid of pieces of content, you just make it unplayable. To modify a DVD you have to make a copy (to a computer most likely), modify the duplicate version, then master a new DVD with the modified version of the content. It's a copy. Then, if you have 1,000 customers, you've made a whole lot of copies.
This is a common fallacy. There is no "100 percent legal" when it comes to copyright infringement, and you are not immune from being charged with infringement just because you didn't monetarily profit. The courts are empowered to take into account the nature of the use to determine whether it was actually infringeing. But if it's illegal for a private company to make its own derivative version of a work like a movie, it's unlikely that the court would uphold the same action just because it was performed by a church.
Look at it this way: "Profit" doesn't necessarily mean monetary gain. If you and all your friends want a censored version of a movie and you don't know where to get one, so you make one yourself and give copies of it to all your friends, then you and all your friends have profited. In such cases, the studio could still sue you for punitive damages if it was able to prove that you knowingly and willfully made the derivative work when you knew it was copyrighted.
Yes, yes, and YES! In fact most cities have such ordinances. Outdoor advertising of the likes of Times Square is illegal almost everywhere else, barring maybe Las Vegas. You certainly can't do it in my hometown (San Francisco). All billboards have to be licensed by the municipality -- this is true even in New York. These are community standards that under all circumstances should be determined by the residents, not corporate interests.
Suppose the ads were pornographic images? Would the kids "tune them out" then?
I really don't think you've thought this issue through.