Yes, we've been at that point for a while now. And yet I see there's no shortage of wealthy artists... even if their music sucks.
Really? Just out of interest:
How do you define "wealthy"?
How many artists in absolute terms do you think reach this threshold?
What proportion of all artists who publish their work do you think this represents?
The other point you're completely ignoring is that arguing that a system where a lot of people break the law is still economically viable because some people do obey the law is disingenuous. Why should those who obey the law and respect artists' rights subsidise freeloaders?
I hate to say it, but you've made a common mistake MS Word users make. A word processor is not designed for creating high quality print materials, it's not designed for doing page layout, hell it's not really intended for doing anything beyond what a typewriter could do.
No, that's a text editor, and you get one or more free with every mainstream OS on the planet.
Word processors -- as defined by the marketing of every major brand currently in existence, from MS Word to OSS tools like AbiWord and OOo Writer -- are far more than simple text editors. One of the major distinctions is that they offer formatting capabilities, such as choosing different typefaces for your text.
You may not accept this definition, and that's your prerogative, but it is how those people who claim to supply word processors advertise them, and it is what the users of those products expect.
I would imagine this is why the OOo developers are ignoring this at the moment, it is indeed a feature and not a bug.
That's just silly. OOo made a huge deal out of the fact that (until recently, at least) they could export to PDF but Microsoft Word could not. Countless past Slashdot discussions have seen OSS evangelists cite this as OOo Writer's "killer feature" advantage over Word.
And yet, the simple facts are that (a) the feature does not work in a trivial use case (changing fonts) in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., pretty much all pro quality fonts supplied by Adobe today are affected), and (b) the first you hear about this is when you've finished creating your document and decide to print to PDF (for on-line distribution, sending to a professional print shop, or whatever). This single bug renders the entire PDF export facility a joke, something that cannot be trusted by anyone who cares what their document looks like and makes the effort to format it nicely. This isn't a new feature, it's a show-stopping bug, and the comments on the official bug report make it pretty clear that I'm not the only one who sees it this way.
Try Scribus, it's free and open source, and works quite well once you get the hang of using a desktop publishing application instead of a word processor.
I did try Scribus, several times, since it was ported to Windows. Its interface is horrible, and its reliability was so poor that I was lucky to get through five minutes of work without a crash. I abandoned each attempt before I had been able to complete a single page of work using it. No disrespect to the development team, I'm sure it's got a lot of potential, but it simply isn't ready for production use yet.
As far as commercial apps are concerned, if you are developing single page content, Pagemaker or even Illustrator are pretty good. If your formatting books or manuals I like Framemaker.
<OSS Newbie> So the downside of OpenOffice is that it just doesn't work, the suggested OSS alternative is something that doesn't work, and failing those I should spend hundreds on a professional DTP package? I think I'll stick to Word, thanks. </OSS Newbie>
And for the record, I have been involved in serious document production for many years, using just about every big name commercial and OSS word processor, DTP package and typesetting system there is at some point. I have nothing against free packages -- for what they do, I think TeX and friends are fine products, for example -- but I also don't have rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to OSS and make excuses when the quality is poor. And in this case, no matter how much the developers are concerned about portability and different systems on different OSes and all that jazz, the simple fact is that from a user's point of view, this bug sucks.
Our experience was just the opposite. We recently gave up using Purify entirely, because it wasn't finding anything that tools like Valgrind didn't find more reliably and much faster. YMMV.
No one DLL or application should be 500k lines of code. If it is, it's either a lot of tables, or shitty code that finds new and inventive ways of doing things you don't need.
That's a very bold statement! Is there some reason for adopting that particular magic number?
I agree that much code is far longer than it needs to be, but I don't think it's fair to equate this with large projects.
IME, large projects (over a million lines, say) often get that way because they have been built around some sort of framework, and the boilerplate code pushes the line count up. When you get past a certain scale -- more than a handful of developers, or with the team split across multiple geographic locations, that sort of thing -- such frameworks can be very valuable in retaining a sane, structured overall design. Since most of it is typically generated rather than hand-crafted, it doesn't really impact on developer productivity; if anything, it helps it, by maintaining some kind of order in systems that are otherwise too large for any one individual to fully comprehend. (This assumes the framework is well designed and not itself wasteful and overcomplicated, of course.)
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for a library that should take 1,000 lines in a couple of files to expand to 10,000 lines across five different files. This sort of thing can be a killer, with cluttered interfaces to modules, inefficient algorithms written in verbose style, and so on.
I'd agree with the recommendation, and FWIW I work on a project with over 1,000,000 lines of C++ code.
I also agree with the warnings from others about Lint being a bit verbose until you shut off a few stylistic things you might not care about, which fortunately is easy to do.
I also also agree with the caveat about false positives with non-trivial C++ code: sometimes it just plain misunderstands and gives incorrect warning/error messages. It's been improving steadily in recent versions, though, and the version we use is a little out of date now so I imagine the latest version is unlikely to cause much irritation here unless you're really pushing the frontiers with template metaprogramming and the like.
A "clear case" of fair use? It's copying the entire work, and it's doing it for commercial purposes. That's the worst possible result on two of the four criteria, before we even start on the others.
And how is this at all the same as Google's book search?
As far as straight-out-of-box conditions go, both Microsoft's Windows and Apple's OS X are ripe with remotely accessible vulnerabilities... The UNIX and Linux variants present a much more robust exterior to the outside.
Hmm... MacOS X bad... UNIX good.
Presumably this contradiction is resolved by noting that on MacOS X, the vulnerable services are off by default, so MacOS X is in fact ripe with vulnerabilities out of the box, yet still presenting a robust exterior?
It is ironic that the parent post is modded off-topic. If you read the C and C++ newsgroups, you will soon discover that many regulars dislike the term "C/C++". It is ambiguous, and often used (deliberately or inadvertently) by those who don't understand the differences between the languages to hide their lack of knowledge.
The SANS sample test here is guilty of exactly that crime, demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding of the differences between how you program in C and how you do it in C++ if you want to write software as secure as possible. Thus the term "C/C++" carries its usual significance to those in the on-line C and C++ communities: it is a warning flag that the person using it probably doesn't know what they're talking about.
And why would we value any qualification awarded by a group who don't know what they're talking about?
I agree. They have BrainBench syndrome: they take it upon themselves to judge others, yet clearly don't understand much of the subject themselves. You can tell this from the way the "C/C++" exam (as if security concerns are even close to the same in those two languages) focusses pretty much entirely on C library functions that most security-conscious programmers would avoid entirely, with a random concurrency question at the end. Strangely, it doesn't even reference ideas like using containers rather than raw strings/arrays in C++, avoiding fixed-size buffers and magic numbers in the first place, and other routine programming practices.
For the record, I scored only 7/10 according to them. This is odd, considering my experience. (I could name drop and list qualifications, but you can't verify them anyway, so for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that I'm technically competent and none of the answers I gave was actually wrong given my understanding of the question.)
The sample assessment report (PDF) that gives some headings for a C/C++ test is not reassuring, either.
Well, since I'm neither a FSF leader nor member of the OpenSSH team, I don't really see that the behaviour in your examples should be any reflection on me or my post. I guess YMMV. It's a free world... mostly.:-)
It's fascinating to see an argument like this made about a licence whose supporters often claim that it would be unnecessary if copyright were abolished.:-)
In any case, I don't think your analogy (nor the more dramatic-sounding alternatives) is at all fair. If your code is truly free for others to use, then they should be able to do anything they want with it. Nothing any one person does with it will remove the ability of any other person to use your code in any other ways they see fit. There is no cost -- financial, legal or otherwise -- to one person, just because another took your code and did something using it. Where is the infringement of their freedom?
The simple fact is that with GPL'd code, restrictions are imposed by the author on someone else. Now, that is a perfectly valid position to adopt both ethically and legally, but it's not giving something freely, it's giving something with strings attached.
Freedom under the GPL has always been complicated, because it means free-as-in-FSF. As I've observed before, that isn't the same as "free" by any English language definition, which would be more akin to a BSD-style licence.
The problem we're now seeing is that the FSF is redefining its own concept of free to match whatever behaviour it currently perceives to be in conflict with the ethics of those driving it. They're welcome to do that, of course, but it's beyond me why anyone else (including those who distribute their code under GPL2) would care, unless their personal ethics happen to match the FSF's exactly. Then again, I also rather suspect that a lot of people who distribute their code under the GPL do so because it's trendy in certain circles rather than because they've ever read the fine print anyway, so I'm already doomed to unhealthy karma oblivion.;-)
Unfortunately they have a blanket policy stating that certain things must remain as installed in order not to void your warranty.
Of course, whether they can legally do that is a different question entirely. I don't know what, if any, serious consumer protection laws are available in the US. However, I'm guessing there are things like fitness for purpose implied in a sale of new goods that can't be disclaimed.
(In the UK, which I do know something about, there's effectively a minimum one year warranty required on everything, and under some circumstances you can go after someone for anything up to six years if the goods don't do what you might reasonably have expected.)
As for the whole "going for the cheapest" point in your post, she was told the box was "Linux ready" before buying it. That pretty much rules out any ethical leg the vendor had to stand on, though her grievance might be with the shop rather than HP.
For your specific examples there, I wouldn't necessarily disagree. I'm just looking at the wider problem, e.g., use of manual formatting instead of styles and templates, hard-coded numbers instead of using numbered lists or cross-references, etc. There comes a point, pretty early on IME, where things are not completely obvious to a naive user, simply because the user may not appreciate the facilities that are available to do things automatically.
I don't know enough about the development of OpenOffice to establish for myself whether your criticisms are fair, but your point is well taken nonetheless. Personally, my biggest concern at the moment is the the increasing evangelism of the ODF file format. Justifications always seem to come down to the idea that you should use a document, "open standard" format. Even governments are now signing up to the mantra.
Unfortunately, what this means in practice is just swapping one effective vendor lock-in for another, less well supported one. If you don't believe me and think ODF is really the highly-portable panacea of future document formats, just look at the comments made by senior OO developers on bug reports, where they note that such-and-such an obvious fix can't yet be made because it requires a change to the ODF format. The ODF standardisation effort is demonstrably holding back the development of OO itself, and for what? Does anyone really think one word processor's document format is ever going to be flexible enough for every other word processor's (or similar tool's) needs? Will the ODF format constantly change to support the latest OO needs, and will the same be true of any other software that adopts the format?
When it comes to file formats, I'll buy being fully and openly documented as a clear advantage: it facilitates interoperability. But the whole "open standard" thing for ODF seems just a sham to me, and little better than Microsoft's "standard" formats.
Telling them to press CTL+ENTER when they want to insert a hard page break ("what's a hard page break?") is a waste of time.
<shrug> Some people are too incompetent or lazy to use a word processor properly. More often, I suspect, it's simple ignorance because employers are too tight to cough up a little money to send staff who use these software tools on a basic half-day training course. Their managers erroneously believe that such money is wasted, and remain ignorant of the costs they pay later on when the sort of problems we're discussing come up.
None of that means the rest of the world should have to suffer the "least common denominator" solution, though.
At the end of the day it's about file formats. People need to be able to read MS Word and Excel documents accurately; you argue against it as much as you like, but this is the requirement.
But what do you mean by "accurately"?
When we get documents sent to us at work, what we care about is the content. We want the text and things like tables and document structure to be preserved. We really don't care if the pagination is marginally different. After all, we get that every time someone from the US sends us a document laid out on US Letter paper and we print it on A4.
I don't think the minor pagination differences matter nearly as much as everyone makes out. Even different versions of Word aren't consistent on this count. Personally, I wish they'd develop a grown-up paragraph justification algorithm. I'd gladly trade the odd bit of reformatting (if it really matters) for more readable documents.
The most recent studies most definitely do show that people who daily have a high intake of sugar through drinks like soda have a higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Perhaps you'd care to cite those studies, then?
You might care to pass them on to the American Diabetes Association and Diabetes UK, both of which seem pretty clear that we're talking about a myth here. A quick Google will also turn up several recent research papers that do not show the link you assert.
Fix that diabetes crap and I will be a programming god with an unlimited fuel source.
There are many good reasons to avoid excessive consumption of sugar/caffeine drinks, not least, avoiding the need for replacement teeth such as those we're discussing here. However, it's an urban legend that excessive sugar consumption causes diabetes (though of course it can lead to being overweight, which is associated with triggering type 2 diabetes)./p
Why bother? Just convert it to PDF or print it to postscript.
Unfortunately, there is a rather fundamental bug in OpenOffice Writer that means that a large class of professional grade fonts don't get used properly when saving as PDF. This has been well documented for several years, but the OO team show no great interest in fixing it; they laughably classify it as a feature rather than a bug, and it's scheduled for "OOo Later". Meanwhile, the first you know about it is when your carefully crafted report/flyer/whatever using high quality fonts exports as garbage instead of a PDF your print bureau can use.
You know that there are these things called "time zones", right? The middle of the working day in the US is the time I'm settling in at home, grabbing a drink and surfing for a while to relax. Is there some way you can tell the GPP isn't in a similar position?
I have thought that perhaps there should be a legal distinction between copyright infringement for monetary gain and copyright infringement not for monetary gain. For instance, it seems to me that there's a big difference between making a copy of a DVD for a friend and selling a bootleg DVD on ebay.
I take a different view: the distinction to me should be whether or not making the copy harms the copyright holder. In both of those cases, it does, since it reduces the size of the target market by one (leaving aside the old "would they have bought it anyway?" argument for now, though for the record I think that's a fundamentally flawed argument anyway). Thus I believe copyright should not cover things like making back-ups, format-shifting, and such personal uses of data that has been legitimately obtained, but I do believe it should cover making copies to give to other people so they don't have to obtain an original copy from the source.
However, it appears that the law is merely shifting the liability away from the people who are actually committing the copyright violation to the people that sell the products that they might use to that end (ISPs, hardware manufacturers, whatever). So it then becomes illegal for a company to help (or fail to hinder) their users from doing something that is for the user perfectly legal? That doesn't make any sense.
As it stands, no it doesn't, but I can see why they're going down that route. Historically, prohibition has not been an effective control of illegal activity. However, going after the source/infrastructure/resources necessary to commit the illegal act has. A lot of people today take the free and transparent Internet for granted, but there is a big house of cards here, and there are many powerful organisations with vested interests in knocking it down and rebuilding it in a slightly different shape that suits them better.
Personally, I think they're naive not to try and take advantage of the possibilities offered by the modern Internet. I expect that rising stars who are smart enough to do so will start to take over the market soon, and with that, the power will shift to those who don't really mind the open nature of the Internet because on balance the system supports their business model. But if the old guard get their blows in quickly enough, they might just prevent this from happening for a few more years.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Just out of interest:
The other point you're completely ignoring is that arguing that a system where a lot of people break the law is still economically viable because some people do obey the law is disingenuous. Why should those who obey the law and respect artists' rights subsidise freeloaders?
No, that's a text editor, and you get one or more free with every mainstream OS on the planet.
Word processors -- as defined by the marketing of every major brand currently in existence, from MS Word to OSS tools like AbiWord and OOo Writer -- are far more than simple text editors. One of the major distinctions is that they offer formatting capabilities, such as choosing different typefaces for your text.
You may not accept this definition, and that's your prerogative, but it is how those people who claim to supply word processors advertise them, and it is what the users of those products expect.
That's just silly. OOo made a huge deal out of the fact that (until recently, at least) they could export to PDF but Microsoft Word could not. Countless past Slashdot discussions have seen OSS evangelists cite this as OOo Writer's "killer feature" advantage over Word.
And yet, the simple facts are that (a) the feature does not work in a trivial use case (changing fonts) in a wide variety of contexts (e.g., pretty much all pro quality fonts supplied by Adobe today are affected), and (b) the first you hear about this is when you've finished creating your document and decide to print to PDF (for on-line distribution, sending to a professional print shop, or whatever). This single bug renders the entire PDF export facility a joke, something that cannot be trusted by anyone who cares what their document looks like and makes the effort to format it nicely. This isn't a new feature, it's a show-stopping bug, and the comments on the official bug report make it pretty clear that I'm not the only one who sees it this way.
I did try Scribus, several times, since it was ported to Windows. Its interface is horrible, and its reliability was so poor that I was lucky to get through five minutes of work without a crash. I abandoned each attempt before I had been able to complete a single page of work using it. No disrespect to the development team, I'm sure it's got a lot of potential, but it simply isn't ready for production use yet.
<OSS Newbie> So the downside of OpenOffice is that it just doesn't work, the suggested OSS alternative is something that doesn't work, and failing those I should spend hundreds on a professional DTP package? I think I'll stick to Word, thanks. </OSS Newbie>
And for the record, I have been involved in serious document production for many years, using just about every big name commercial and OSS word processor, DTP package and typesetting system there is at some point. I have nothing against free packages -- for what they do, I think TeX and friends are fine products, for example -- but I also don't have rose-tinted spectacles when it comes to OSS and make excuses when the quality is poor. And in this case, no matter how much the developers are concerned about portability and different systems on different OSes and all that jazz, the simple fact is that from a user's point of view, this bug sucks.
Our experience was just the opposite. We recently gave up using Purify entirely, because it wasn't finding anything that tools like Valgrind didn't find more reliably and much faster. YMMV.
That's a very bold statement! Is there some reason for adopting that particular magic number?
I agree that much code is far longer than it needs to be, but I don't think it's fair to equate this with large projects.
IME, large projects (over a million lines, say) often get that way because they have been built around some sort of framework, and the boilerplate code pushes the line count up. When you get past a certain scale -- more than a handful of developers, or with the team split across multiple geographic locations, that sort of thing -- such frameworks can be very valuable in retaining a sane, structured overall design. Since most of it is typically generated rather than hand-crafted, it doesn't really impact on developer productivity; if anything, it helps it, by maintaining some kind of order in systems that are otherwise too large for any one individual to fully comprehend. (This assumes the framework is well designed and not itself wasteful and overcomplicated, of course.)
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for a library that should take 1,000 lines in a couple of files to expand to 10,000 lines across five different files. This sort of thing can be a killer, with cluttered interfaces to modules, inefficient algorithms written in verbose style, and so on.
I'd agree with the recommendation, and FWIW I work on a project with over 1,000,000 lines of C++ code.
I also agree with the warnings from others about Lint being a bit verbose until you shut off a few stylistic things you might not care about, which fortunately is easy to do.
I also also agree with the caveat about false positives with non-trivial C++ code: sometimes it just plain misunderstands and gives incorrect warning/error messages. It's been improving steadily in recent versions, though, and the version we use is a little out of date now so I imagine the latest version is unlikely to cause much irritation here unless you're really pushing the frontiers with template metaprogramming and the like.
That's true, but it's true of any exploit list. After all, how would the list maintainers know if something were secretly being exploited for years?
A "clear case" of fair use? It's copying the entire work, and it's doing it for commercial purposes. That's the worst possible result on two of the four criteria, before we even start on the others.
And how is this at all the same as Google's book search?
Hmm... MacOS X bad... UNIX good.
Presumably this contradiction is resolved by noting that on MacOS X, the vulnerable services are off by default, so MacOS X is in fact ripe with vulnerabilities out of the box, yet still presenting a robust exterior?
It is ironic that the parent post is modded off-topic. If you read the C and C++ newsgroups, you will soon discover that many regulars dislike the term "C/C++". It is ambiguous, and often used (deliberately or inadvertently) by those who don't understand the differences between the languages to hide their lack of knowledge.
The SANS sample test here is guilty of exactly that crime, demonstrating a fundamental lack of understanding of the differences between how you program in C and how you do it in C++ if you want to write software as secure as possible. Thus the term "C/C++" carries its usual significance to those in the on-line C and C++ communities: it is a warning flag that the person using it probably doesn't know what they're talking about.
And why would we value any qualification awarded by a group who don't know what they're talking about?
I agree. They have BrainBench syndrome: they take it upon themselves to judge others, yet clearly don't understand much of the subject themselves. You can tell this from the way the "C/C++" exam (as if security concerns are even close to the same in those two languages) focusses pretty much entirely on C library functions that most security-conscious programmers would avoid entirely, with a random concurrency question at the end. Strangely, it doesn't even reference ideas like using containers rather than raw strings/arrays in C++, avoiding fixed-size buffers and magic numbers in the first place, and other routine programming practices.
For the record, I scored only 7/10 according to them. This is odd, considering my experience. (I could name drop and list qualifications, but you can't verify them anyway, so for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that I'm technically competent and none of the answers I gave was actually wrong given my understanding of the question.)
The sample assessment report (PDF) that gives some headings for a C/C++ test is not reassuring, either.
Well, since I'm neither a FSF leader nor member of the OpenSSH team, I don't really see that the behaviour in your examples should be any reflection on me or my post. I guess YMMV. It's a free world... mostly. :-)
It's fascinating to see an argument like this made about a licence whose supporters often claim that it would be unnecessary if copyright were abolished. :-)
In any case, I don't think your analogy (nor the more dramatic-sounding alternatives) is at all fair. If your code is truly free for others to use, then they should be able to do anything they want with it. Nothing any one person does with it will remove the ability of any other person to use your code in any other ways they see fit. There is no cost -- financial, legal or otherwise -- to one person, just because another took your code and did something using it. Where is the infringement of their freedom?
The simple fact is that with GPL'd code, restrictions are imposed by the author on someone else. Now, that is a perfectly valid position to adopt both ethically and legally, but it's not giving something freely, it's giving something with strings attached.
Freedom under the GPL has always been complicated, because it means free-as-in-FSF. As I've observed before, that isn't the same as "free" by any English language definition, which would be more akin to a BSD-style licence.
The problem we're now seeing is that the FSF is redefining its own concept of free to match whatever behaviour it currently perceives to be in conflict with the ethics of those driving it. They're welcome to do that, of course, but it's beyond me why anyone else (including those who distribute their code under GPL2) would care, unless their personal ethics happen to match the FSF's exactly. Then again, I also rather suspect that a lot of people who distribute their code under the GPL do so because it's trendy in certain circles rather than because they've ever read the fine print anyway, so I'm already doomed to unhealthy karma oblivion. ;-)
Of course, whether they can legally do that is a different question entirely. I don't know what, if any, serious consumer protection laws are available in the US. However, I'm guessing there are things like fitness for purpose implied in a sale of new goods that can't be disclaimed.
(In the UK, which I do know something about, there's effectively a minimum one year warranty required on everything, and under some circumstances you can go after someone for anything up to six years if the goods don't do what you might reasonably have expected.)
As for the whole "going for the cheapest" point in your post, she was told the box was "Linux ready" before buying it. That pretty much rules out any ethical leg the vendor had to stand on, though her grievance might be with the shop rather than HP.
For your specific examples there, I wouldn't necessarily disagree. I'm just looking at the wider problem, e.g., use of manual formatting instead of styles and templates, hard-coded numbers instead of using numbered lists or cross-references, etc. There comes a point, pretty early on IME, where things are not completely obvious to a naive user, simply because the user may not appreciate the facilities that are available to do things automatically.
I don't know enough about the development of OpenOffice to establish for myself whether your criticisms are fair, but your point is well taken nonetheless. Personally, my biggest concern at the moment is the the increasing evangelism of the ODF file format. Justifications always seem to come down to the idea that you should use a document, "open standard" format. Even governments are now signing up to the mantra.
Unfortunately, what this means in practice is just swapping one effective vendor lock-in for another, less well supported one. If you don't believe me and think ODF is really the highly-portable panacea of future document formats, just look at the comments made by senior OO developers on bug reports, where they note that such-and-such an obvious fix can't yet be made because it requires a change to the ODF format. The ODF standardisation effort is demonstrably holding back the development of OO itself, and for what? Does anyone really think one word processor's document format is ever going to be flexible enough for every other word processor's (or similar tool's) needs? Will the ODF format constantly change to support the latest OO needs, and will the same be true of any other software that adopts the format?
When it comes to file formats, I'll buy being fully and openly documented as a clear advantage: it facilitates interoperability. But the whole "open standard" thing for ODF seems just a sham to me, and little better than Microsoft's "standard" formats.
<shrug> Some people are too incompetent or lazy to use a word processor properly. More often, I suspect, it's simple ignorance because employers are too tight to cough up a little money to send staff who use these software tools on a basic half-day training course. Their managers erroneously believe that such money is wasted, and remain ignorant of the costs they pay later on when the sort of problems we're discussing come up.
None of that means the rest of the world should have to suffer the "least common denominator" solution, though.
But what do you mean by "accurately"?
When we get documents sent to us at work, what we care about is the content. We want the text and things like tables and document structure to be preserved. We really don't care if the pagination is marginally different. After all, we get that every time someone from the US sends us a document laid out on US Letter paper and we print it on A4.
I don't think the minor pagination differences matter nearly as much as everyone makes out. Even different versions of Word aren't consistent on this count. Personally, I wish they'd develop a grown-up paragraph justification algorithm. I'd gladly trade the odd bit of reformatting (if it really matters) for more readable documents.
Perhaps you'd care to cite those studies, then?
You might care to pass them on to the American Diabetes Association and Diabetes UK, both of which seem pretty clear that we're talking about a myth here. A quick Google will also turn up several recent research papers that do not show the link you assert.
There are many good reasons to avoid excessive consumption of sugar/caffeine drinks, not least, avoiding the need for replacement teeth such as those we're discussing here. However, it's an urban legend that excessive sugar consumption causes diabetes (though of course it can lead to being overweight, which is associated with triggering type 2 diabetes)./p
Unfortunately, there is a rather fundamental bug in OpenOffice Writer that means that a large class of professional grade fonts don't get used properly when saving as PDF. This has been well documented for several years, but the OO team show no great interest in fixing it; they laughably classify it as a feature rather than a bug, and it's scheduled for "OOo Later". Meanwhile, the first you know about it is when your carefully crafted report/flyer/whatever using high quality fonts exports as garbage instead of a PDF your print bureau can use.
You know that there are these things called "time zones", right? The middle of the working day in the US is the time I'm settling in at home, grabbing a drink and surfing for a while to relax. Is there some way you can tell the GPP isn't in a similar position?
You must be mistaken. I just looked on Amazon, and there's no book called "Blade Runner"! :-)
I take a different view: the distinction to me should be whether or not making the copy harms the copyright holder. In both of those cases, it does, since it reduces the size of the target market by one (leaving aside the old "would they have bought it anyway?" argument for now, though for the record I think that's a fundamentally flawed argument anyway). Thus I believe copyright should not cover things like making back-ups, format-shifting, and such personal uses of data that has been legitimately obtained, but I do believe it should cover making copies to give to other people so they don't have to obtain an original copy from the source.
As it stands, no it doesn't, but I can see why they're going down that route. Historically, prohibition has not been an effective control of illegal activity. However, going after the source/infrastructure/resources necessary to commit the illegal act has. A lot of people today take the free and transparent Internet for granted, but there is a big house of cards here, and there are many powerful organisations with vested interests in knocking it down and rebuilding it in a slightly different shape that suits them better.
Personally, I think they're naive not to try and take advantage of the possibilities offered by the modern Internet. I expect that rising stars who are smart enough to do so will start to take over the market soon, and with that, the power will shift to those who don't really mind the open nature of the Internet because on balance the system supports their business model. But if the old guard get their blows in quickly enough, they might just prevent this from happening for a few more years.