Yet what I've heard recently (somebody correct me if I've been misinformed) is that the actual utility of Braille in our society is so limited these days that most blind people do not bother to learn it. It's a tool that seems useful on the surface but is gradually growing extinct -- like shorthand, which at one time all journalists were required to use, but now is seldom even taught.
According to Lucasfilm, first you'll have to wait for the special edition, then reruns of the original, and then the next three series of cartoons. Then they'll put out DVDs of everything, except the DVD of Clone Wars will only be the special edition, not the one you watched.
A Beowulf cluster of Prothon-based Web servers could never survive the slashdotting of our new Natalie Portman overlords, to whom all our base now belong!
G4 never had potential. Games are an interactive media. Why in God's name would you want to read news and view clips of other people playing games when you could be playing them yourself?
I guess you could say the same of... like... computers.
Hmm, then again I could be wrong here. I've never watched TechTV.
Umm, I didn't read anything that said they'd be shipping Linux pre-installed. All I saw was that they will "ensure that its business customers can use the fast-growing software on its desktop and notebook computers by providing support and testing." (Emphasis mine.)
The US DoJ looked set to implement a proper solution just a few years ago, but the election of President Bush put an end to that.
Changes of government in European states are not infrequent and can change the direction of the whole loose alliance that is the EU. Don't overlook the possibility that if the EU's governments move to the right, this case may be damaged.
Don't worry -- President Bush is doing everything he can to prevent that happening.
But when you buy a set of clothes, you should be able to get any and all ID tags contained within that clothing deactivated, to prevent you becoming a walking RF billboard.
Why? I mean, who cares if you're walking around with clothes that scream "I am a shirt from the Gap," "I am a pair of pants from Levi's" every time you walk past an RFID scanner? Seems to me if you're paranoid about RFID then having twenty conflicting tags on your person, all babbling away at once, is the way to go.
Tons of textbook publishers still use Framemaker, as another poster mentioned. Quark (and to a lesser degree, Indesign) owns most of the rest of publishing (magazines etc.)
You know, I actually don't really have a problem with this... except that because we're relying on information that's "in the computer," there's a risk that information will be categorized as somehow more "infallible" than other information in the eyes of a jury.
For example, this case would be no different if it were a small mom-and-pop grocery in a one-horse town somewhere. Except in that case, it would be the clerk who always sees the customer buying beer who gives the testimony in court. The jury would then have to decide: Is this accurate testimony? Is the witness biased? Is the testimony complete? Is he hiding other information?
In Safeway's case it's not an eyewitness giving spoken testimony on the stand... it's the computer records being submitted and tagged into evidence. I can picture eldery jurors sitting there thinking: "Well, it's the computer. They've got all the records right there. It says he bought beer all these times. Must be true. Computer wouldn't lie -- it's a machine!" (Yet, as we all know... lies, damn lies, and statistics, and all that.)
How is this a good thing? If these songs or poems are not marketable, then all your copyright is doing is preventing anyone from ever seeing them. Copyright is supposed to serve us, not enslave us. The current system bankrupts the public domain for no obvious value to anyone.
I just don't get this argument about "public value" etc. I will say flat-out, right now: I do not believe that the unwashed masses have some kind of God-given right to have access to every work ever created.
Suppose these poems this guy wrote described in intimate detail what it's like to have sex with his wife. And she's still alive, and he's still alive. Doesn't he have a right to not want people to see them? Can't he write them down simply for his own enjoyment, or publish them for the select audience of his choosing, without being forced to give them up to these so-called "public commons" everyone's yammering about?
As far as I'm concerned, one of the core principles of freedom of speech is the freedom to tell you to mind your own business. Copyright, in its way, contributes to making that possible.
If you don't want a work published, the solution is simple: Don't publish. If you have published it, but later decided you didn't want to... Well, it's too late, in any event.
I'm sorry, but you're being too simplistic. Current copyright law protects even unpublished works. Every work I create is protected automatically, whether I publish it or not. If I'm walking down the street and an article I've written flies out of my briefcase and lands on the ground, you cannot pick it up and publish it in your magazine. So in a sense, copyright law is what allows me to decide that I'm not going to publish something in the first place.
And yes, I am the public. So the public does benefit.
Can you then see the possible benefit of having a central repository of contact information for copyright holders? If it is the responsibility of the user to obtain permission from a copyright holder, shouldn't it at least be possible to contact that person?
I'm sure there are records of copyright holders even now. Keeping them up to date, though, would be a logistical nightmare. Suppose I die? What am I supposed to do, update my copyright records? Or are my heirs expected to be thinking about that at my funeral?
Also, making copyright holders' contact info a matter of public record is a privacy boondoggle waiting to happen.
If I copyright a work, it's unfortunately your responsibility to assume that you're not allowed to make any use of it. If you can't track me down and ask me about it, maybe that's because I went into hiding because too many people were bugging me with copyright requests? Does that make my copyright any less valid? Or for that matter, what if I were in the witness protection program?
In cases like these, you go by the circle-C to know where the copyright holder stands on the issue (and under current law, you don't even need to post that to be protected).
So, again, we're back to the real problem: copyright terms are already too long, and the fact that Congress keeps extending them makes them virtually indefinite. I don't agree with that. But I do believe copyright law serves a purpose, in the form that it exists today.
Yeah, I'm not sure I get his arguments here. The idea that authors' works are "locked up" against their will seems ludicrous at the face of it.
I've created works that I have specifically registered with the copyright office. An example is the comic strip, below. I registered this work to protect myself from people reprinting the strip against my will for financial gain. For instance, I don't want to be browsing through a book in a bookstore and come across my strip printed there, and I want to have the full benefit of the tools of financial restitution available to me should that occur.
If, on the other hand, you, Joe Blow, wanted to use the very same strip for your own purposes and you weren't planning to really make money off it and your use really wouldn't do any damage to my ability to "profit" off the strip, in my opinion, then I might just allow you to use it. In fact, even if you never contacted me for permission to use it (but I'd prefer you did), there'd be nothing stopping you. All I'd have to do to "unlock" that terribly "locked up," copyrighted work is.... (drum roll please)... finish this cup of coffee and read the paper.
Follow me? One common misconception about copyrights is that they "go away" if you don't defend them. That can be true of trademarks, but not of copyrights. If it's my personal policy to sue Disney when they infringe my copyright, but not sue individuals like you, then that's my business and nobody else's.
On the other hand, he seems to be saying that we should go back to mandatory registration, because at least then works that nobody remembers to register will be public domain. Well, where's the fairness in that?
Who do you think is more likely to register everything they produce: Disney, with its army of lawyers? Or me?
So the end result of mandatory registration is that companies like Disney continue to amass their ivory towers of intellectual property, while people like you and me lose out. That is, Disney would be able to make use of our works with impunity, because nobody took the time to educate us to be diligent about registering our works if we believe in the protections of copyright.
P.S. And I shouldn't need to remind you that most of us here do believe in the protections of copyright. Copyright law is the very backbone of licensing structures like the GPL.
Yeah, great -- and if I say "we should have a reasonable expectation that this building should not be filled with cyanide gas," and you do a s/cyanide/air/g, all of a sudden the statement does sound pretty ridiculous. Because you changed the words.
(Actually, I am hoping beyond hope that your post is actually the most brilliant GNAA troll ever.)
While I agree that a.sex TLD is 1.) a dumb idea, and 2.) a potential legal and regulatory morass, I think it's shortsighted to just roll your eyes and write it off as another "won't someone think of the children" proposal.
Some people just don't like being inundated by porn when they use the Internet. Period.
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some porn -- or reference to porn -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever. Half the spam you receive -- and you can't help receiving it -- falls under most people's definition of porn.
So why is that? We don't put up with it in the rest of our day to day lives.
Most communities regulate porn theaters, porn magazines, etc., very strictly. Even if you, personally, like and consume porn in the privacy of your own home, if you leased an office building, you probably wouldn't want a porn theater opening up on either side of you. If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving porn there. Very few people would vote to let their city accept advertising from porn companies on park benches and bus stops.
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing porn. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
It seems to me that the porn industry has a lot of money, and they're willing to pay it to people to get their advertising and their products out there to where people will pay to consume them. If that's the root of the problem, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose possible ways of regulating the way the porn industry does business. The.sex domain is one such idea.
Not the best one, perhaps, but a legitimate one nonetheless.
What's next - Developers having to pick up 'code malpractice' insurance?
Sounds great to me. Every place I've ever done contract programming for has a clause in their contract that basically says, "If somebody sues us, they sue you." Some of them are nicer about it, and pretty much just require you to appear in court if there's ever a problem. Others want you named as a defendant. Saying "don't screw up" wouldn't make me feel as comforted as a good insurance policy -- if such a thing exists?
And I thank God you never graded any of my papers, because I don't see a single word in the quote you cited that says anything about the number of good patents vs. the number of bad ones -- just that there is a lot of discussion about how many bad patents are being passed (and there is).
Maybe you'd be better off marking papers at a community college.
I once bought a leather jacket from a store that seemed full of Indians. I looked at the label on the jacket and it said, "Made in India." Laughing, I said to the guy, "Wait a minute! What's this? They don't kill cows in India!"
The guy looked at me gravely and, with a little smile, said, "Oh, sir. We do all kinds of things these days, you would be surprised."
Aha! Awesome to hear from you. I've used dvdauthor under Mac OS X (yes kids, recent versions compile just fine) but I've observed some weird artifacts at the same time.
May as well own up to what I'm doing: I suck a bunch of chapters off a commercial DVD, filtered through a DeCSS algorithm. Then I ran all the resulting VOB files through dvdauthor, to create a disc image with no menus.
The artifacts I mention are in the chapter stops. Sometimes there's a very brief pause as my player goes from chapter to chapter, and fast forward and rewind behave really crazy.
I'm not so much asking when you're going to fix that, though (in fact, I think it's already been fixed) -- I'm just wondering about the DVD format itself. How complicated is it?? How can things like this show up... I mean, isn't it simply a mechanism for playing MPEG-2 streams? If so, why should commercial authoring software be able to create discs that traverse chapter stops with no problem, but dvdauthor-authored movies have trouble?
I'm just really curious about this format and why there should be so many hurdles in creating DVDs with open source software (since after all, unlike CD audio, a data DVD uses the same filesystem as a movie DVD).
Go to my Web site and grab my email address if you're willing to talk about it in private.
You Europeans are getting way ahead of yourselves. "Legal" MP3s are not proven technology yet. Stick to the file-sharing for now, and leave the other stuff to the early adopters in the U.S., at least until the bugs get ironed out.
(I post this here because maybe you've been around long enough to remember when ARC vs. ZIP vs. LZH vs. some others was a big deal.)
Back in the days of the "archive format wars" somebody made a program called NaBob that was pretty funny. It made archives that were so perfectly compressed that they approached singularity. That is, every archive turned out to be one byte long.
The various compression methods, it was said, were named after different types of quarks. So, as the files were compressed, it would report, "upping," "downing", "charming," "stranging," etc.
The file extension was.BOB.
When you ran the uncompress process, all your files would be mysteriously "extracted" from the archive again. Amazing! It really stored all that data in a single byte!
Of course, all it was really doing was setting the hidden file bit on all your files and creating a one-byte file with the.BOB extension, but hey, as they say, there's one born every minute.
That program always cracked me up, so I just thought I'd share.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet what I've heard recently (somebody correct me if I've been misinformed) is that the actual utility of Braille in our society is so limited these days that most blind people do not bother to learn it. It's a tool that seems useful on the surface but is gradually growing extinct -- like shorthand, which at one time all journalists were required to use, but now is seldom even taught.
According to Lucasfilm, first you'll have to wait for the special edition, then reruns of the original, and then the next three series of cartoons. Then they'll put out DVDs of everything, except the DVD of Clone Wars will only be the special edition, not the one you watched.
A Beowulf cluster of Prothon-based Web servers could never survive the slashdotting of our new Natalie Portman overlords, to whom all our base now belong!
Hmm, then again I could be wrong here. I've never watched TechTV.
Oh yeah. Heh. See point 1.
Umm, I didn't read anything that said they'd be shipping Linux pre-installed. All I saw was that they will "ensure that its business customers can use the fast-growing software on its desktop and notebook computers by providing support and testing." (Emphasis mine.)
Why? I mean, who cares if you're walking around with clothes that scream "I am a shirt from the Gap," "I am a pair of pants from Levi's" every time you walk past an RFID scanner? Seems to me if you're paranoid about RFID then having twenty conflicting tags on your person, all babbling away at once, is the way to go.
Tons of textbook publishers still use Framemaker, as another poster mentioned. Quark (and to a lesser degree, Indesign) owns most of the rest of publishing (magazines etc.)
You know, I actually don't really have a problem with this ... except that because we're relying on information that's "in the computer," there's a risk that information will be categorized as somehow more "infallible" than other information in the eyes of a jury.
... it's the computer records being submitted and tagged into evidence. I can picture eldery jurors sitting there thinking: "Well, it's the computer. They've got all the records right there. It says he bought beer all these times. Must be true. Computer wouldn't lie -- it's a machine!" (Yet, as we all know ... lies, damn lies, and statistics, and all that.)
For example, this case would be no different if it were a small mom-and-pop grocery in a one-horse town somewhere. Except in that case, it would be the clerk who always sees the customer buying beer who gives the testimony in court. The jury would then have to decide: Is this accurate testimony? Is the witness biased? Is the testimony complete? Is he hiding other information?
In Safeway's case it's not an eyewitness giving spoken testimony on the stand
You forgot to say IANAL.
Suppose these poems this guy wrote described in intimate detail what it's like to have sex with his wife. And she's still alive, and he's still alive. Doesn't he have a right to not want people to see them? Can't he write them down simply for his own enjoyment, or publish them for the select audience of his choosing, without being forced to give them up to these so-called "public commons" everyone's yammering about?
As far as I'm concerned, one of the core principles of freedom of speech is the freedom to tell you to mind your own business. Copyright, in its way, contributes to making that possible.
And yes, I am the public. So the public does benefit.
Also, making copyright holders' contact info a matter of public record is a privacy boondoggle waiting to happen.
If I copyright a work, it's unfortunately your responsibility to assume that you're not allowed to make any use of it. If you can't track me down and ask me about it, maybe that's because I went into hiding because too many people were bugging me with copyright requests? Does that make my copyright any less valid? Or for that matter, what if I were in the witness protection program?
In cases like these, you go by the circle-C to know where the copyright holder stands on the issue (and under current law, you don't even need to post that to be protected).
So, again, we're back to the real problem: copyright terms are already too long, and the fact that Congress keeps extending them makes them virtually indefinite. I don't agree with that. But I do believe copyright law serves a purpose, in the form that it exists today.
Yeah, I'm not sure I get his arguments here. The idea that authors' works are "locked up" against their will seems ludicrous at the face of it.
.... (drum roll please) ... finish this cup of coffee and read the paper.
I've created works that I have specifically registered with the copyright office. An example is the comic strip, below. I registered this work to protect myself from people reprinting the strip against my will for financial gain. For instance, I don't want to be browsing through a book in a bookstore and come across my strip printed there, and I want to have the full benefit of the tools of financial restitution available to me should that occur.
If, on the other hand, you, Joe Blow, wanted to use the very same strip for your own purposes and you weren't planning to really make money off it and your use really wouldn't do any damage to my ability to "profit" off the strip, in my opinion, then I might just allow you to use it. In fact, even if you never contacted me for permission to use it (but I'd prefer you did), there'd be nothing stopping you. All I'd have to do to "unlock" that terribly "locked up," copyrighted work is
Follow me? One common misconception about copyrights is that they "go away" if you don't defend them. That can be true of trademarks, but not of copyrights. If it's my personal policy to sue Disney when they infringe my copyright, but not sue individuals like you, then that's my business and nobody else's.
On the other hand, he seems to be saying that we should go back to mandatory registration, because at least then works that nobody remembers to register will be public domain. Well, where's the fairness in that?
Who do you think is more likely to register everything they produce: Disney, with its army of lawyers? Or me?
So the end result of mandatory registration is that companies like Disney continue to amass their ivory towers of intellectual property, while people like you and me lose out. That is, Disney would be able to make use of our works with impunity, because nobody took the time to educate us to be diligent about registering our works if we believe in the protections of copyright.
P.S. And I shouldn't need to remind you that most of us here do believe in the protections of copyright. Copyright law is the very backbone of licensing structures like the GPL.
Are you totally insane?
Yeah, great -- and if I say "we should have a reasonable expectation that this building should not be filled with cyanide gas," and you do a s/cyanide/air/g, all of a sudden the statement does sound pretty ridiculous. Because you changed the words.
(Actually, I am hoping beyond hope that your post is actually the most brilliant GNAA troll ever.)
While I agree that a .sex TLD is 1.) a dumb idea, and 2.) a potential legal and regulatory morass, I think it's shortsighted to just roll your eyes and write it off as another "won't someone think of the children" proposal.
.sex domain is one such idea.
Some people just don't like being inundated by porn when they use the Internet. Period.
I mean, come on -- we all know that if you spend time randomly surfing the Web, you can hardly go an hour or two without randomly stumbling across some porn -- or reference to porn -- in the form of an advertisement or a pop-up or a joke site or whatever. Half the spam you receive -- and you can't help receiving it -- falls under most people's definition of porn.
So why is that? We don't put up with it in the rest of our day to day lives.
Most communities regulate porn theaters, porn magazines, etc., very strictly. Even if you, personally, like and consume porn in the privacy of your own home, if you leased an office building, you probably wouldn't want a porn theater opening up on either side of you. If your office had a magazine-swap rack in the break room, you probably wouldn't want your employees leaving porn there. Very few people would vote to let their city accept advertising from porn companies on park benches and bus stops.
I don't think it's out of line to have a reasonable expectation of being able to spend your day without viewing porn. So how to tackle that problem on the Internet?
It seems to me that the porn industry has a lot of money, and they're willing to pay it to people to get their advertising and their products out there to where people will pay to consume them. If that's the root of the problem, then it does not seem unreasonable to me to propose possible ways of regulating the way the porn industry does business. The
Not the best one, perhaps, but a legitimate one nonetheless.
WOW! Just imagine how much completely legal, free or open source DVD ripping software you could store on one of those!
And I thank God you never graded any of my papers, because I don't see a single word in the quote you cited that says anything about the number of good patents vs. the number of bad ones -- just that there is a lot of discussion about how many bad patents are being passed (and there is).
Maybe you'd be better off marking papers at a community college.
The same will be true for the 90nm Penium Ms.
I once bought a leather jacket from a store that seemed full of Indians. I looked at the label on the jacket and it said, "Made in India." Laughing, I said to the guy, "Wait a minute! What's this? They don't kill cows in India!"
The guy looked at me gravely and, with a little smile, said, "Oh, sir. We do all kinds of things these days, you would be surprised."
Aha! Awesome to hear from you. I've used dvdauthor under Mac OS X (yes kids, recent versions compile just fine) but I've observed some weird artifacts at the same time.
... I mean, isn't it simply a mechanism for playing MPEG-2 streams? If so, why should commercial authoring software be able to create discs that traverse chapter stops with no problem, but dvdauthor-authored movies have trouble?
May as well own up to what I'm doing: I suck a bunch of chapters off a commercial DVD, filtered through a DeCSS algorithm. Then I ran all the resulting VOB files through dvdauthor, to create a disc image with no menus.
The artifacts I mention are in the chapter stops. Sometimes there's a very brief pause as my player goes from chapter to chapter, and fast forward and rewind behave really crazy.
I'm not so much asking when you're going to fix that, though (in fact, I think it's already been fixed) -- I'm just wondering about the DVD format itself. How complicated is it?? How can things like this show up
I'm just really curious about this format and why there should be so many hurdles in creating DVDs with open source software (since after all, unlike CD audio, a data DVD uses the same filesystem as a movie DVD).
Go to my Web site and grab my email address if you're willing to talk about it in private.
Ha Ha! Joke's on you, Jack! Mono is written in ... C#!!!
You Europeans are getting way ahead of yourselves. "Legal" MP3s are not proven technology yet. Stick to the file-sharing for now, and leave the other stuff to the early adopters in the U.S., at least until the bugs get ironed out.
(I post this here because maybe you've been around long enough to remember when ARC vs. ZIP vs. LZH vs. some others was a big deal.)
.BOB.
.BOB extension, but hey, as they say, there's one born every minute.
Back in the days of the "archive format wars" somebody made a program called NaBob that was pretty funny. It made archives that were so perfectly compressed that they approached singularity. That is, every archive turned out to be one byte long.
The various compression methods, it was said, were named after different types of quarks. So, as the files were compressed, it would report, "upping," "downing", "charming," "stranging," etc.
The file extension was
When you ran the uncompress process, all your files would be mysteriously "extracted" from the archive again. Amazing! It really stored all that data in a single byte!
Of course, all it was really doing was setting the hidden file bit on all your files and creating a one-byte file with the
That program always cracked me up, so I just thought I'd share.