If the US would respect an extradition request from Iran for whatever content is being distributed, I would imagine the American comapany would comply (although not happily). I'm not sure why you think so. I don't think many U.S. judges would bother to enforce a judgment from an Iranian court against a U.S. company that was doing business in the United States, simply because someone in Iran could get on the internet and access their stuff online, and in doing so, violate Iranian laws.
The enforcement of foreign judgments in the U.S. is governed by "Uniform Foreign Money-Judgments Recognition Act, 13 U.L.A. 149 (1986)", which I don't have time to read through at the moment, but Wikipedia claims that non-recognition of judgments can be based on any of:
# Lack of conclusiveness: if the judgment was rendered under a system which does not provide impartial tribunals or procedures compatible with the requirements of due process of law. # The foreign court did not have personal jurisdiction over the defendant. # The foreign court did not have jurisdiction over the subject matter; # The defendant in the proceedings in the foreign court did not receive notice of the proceedings in sufficient time to enable him to defend; # The judgment was obtained by fraud; # The cause of action on which the judgment is based is repugnant to the public policy of the state where enforcement is sought;
The lack of jurisdiction and repugnance to public policy would be the big ones (mostly the former), I think. Actual extradition of a person has much stricter requirements, and I doubt you could get a U.S. citizen extradited to Iran on any grounds.
Yes, but what Universal was saying is that it's the archive's responsibility to limit access to only those scores that people are legally allowed to view.
This is a bizarre stance and I don't believe there's any possible way they could get it upheld (although maybe in the E.U. and in Canada, who knows), but it was enough to scare the site owner into taking the whole thing down.
I can think of a bunch of similarly contentious issues that never were forced to go that route: up until fairly recently, you couldn't export strong crypto out of the U.S. Thus, every site that allowed you to download strong crypto required you to click on a little form certifying that you were a U.S. Citizen or located in the U.S. As long as they did that, they could pass the buck on to the user if they got accused of distributing.
And anyone who wants can go to Project Gutenberg Australia's site and get books that are still under copyright in the U.S. and the E.U., because Australia has managed to stand up to the IP lobbies and retained a death-plus-50 copyright instead of death-plus-70 like the Disney Empire's client states.
Basically, Universal wants to somehow shift liability from the user to the distributor, even though what the distributor is doing is legal, just because it's easier for them to go after distributors. It's stupid, and it's unfortunate that Canada has such a cozy relationship with the E.U. that the site operator felt threatened by their tactics. (A U.S. court, I suspect, would have laughed at a E.U. court's judgment against a U.S. firm for doing something that was legal in the U.S., simply because it was accessible through the internet by people in the E.U.; I don't understand why the Canadian courts would have done it any differently. That a Canadian citizen would feel threatened by that is pretty disgusting.)
This is the Information Age, if I can't sell information that I own then I have nothing to sell. Then you deserve to starve.
Here's a hint: you can sell your labor, just like most of the people who are alive or who have ever lived, have done. That works just as well for computer programmers as it does for plumbers, doctors, and lawyers. Negotiate a fair price for your time, get paid up front, and let the buyer do whatever the hell they want to do with the stuff you produce for them.
Welcome to the service economy; it's the same as the old economy.
The Bureau of Labor statistics, in particular their "100 Years of Consumer Spending" publication. Available here. (~500k PDF)
The graphs you want to look at are the "Expenditure Share for Non-Necessities" graphs for various regions (US generally is on p.11). It started off at a little over 20% just after WWI, and then climbed steadily and dramatically (30% after WWII, which was the real formation of the 'middle class' in the U.S., ~35% in 1960, ~40% in the early 70s) until you get to the current figure which is around 50%. Nationally, that's an all-time high.
If you look at particular areas, like New York City, there has been a small but significant hit in non-necessity spending since the mid-80s boom, probably due to increases in the cost of living due to increased rent. (But in all fairness, NYC is a lot nicer place to live now than it was then.) Spending in Boston also slumped slightly, probably for the same reason. So you get some regions that are probably feeling the pinch -- time to move.
Anyone who thought the 70s were some sort of picnic is looking at them through some seriously rose-colored glasses. The 70s were a time of instability, high unemployment (over 8%!), and out of control inflation. If people were buying things then, it's only because they knew that trying to save it was a waste of time.
It's more difficult to find good data that's correlated with income, but there are a few here and there; including this one from the Family Economics and Nutrition Review, which says flat out: "The data indicate that all household groups were better off in 1989-90 than they were in 1980-81, as measured by the amount and share of total expenditures on nonnecessities ("other")." So that would indicate that there hasn't been some sort of continuous slump from the 70s until today -- in the 80s things actually got better, and the 1980s weren't exactly known as a great period for the economy (certainly not compared to the 1990s).
In terms of cost-adjusted purchasing power (which the BLS estimates in the introduction to the big report above [1], as probably tripled in the last century), you'd be insane to want to live in any previous era, unless your metric for success is purely that of being on the same level as your neighbors. Yes, there were times when there was more income equality, but that's not necessarily an indicator of prosperity; you can still make more money, buy more, and have a better cost of living in a lower socioeconomic bracket today than you could in the past. Lower brackets haven't experienced the growth that higher ones have, but you'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face not to take advantage.
I think the major way the middle class has been 'squeezed' is that there are a lot of people there who traded up to the upper-class (with McMansions, cruise vacations, etc.) on credit, and probably quite a few people in the lower class who borrowed into middle class lifestyles (via shady mortgages) as well. And understandably, income inequality does create a social pressure to overspend. But now that the credit crunch is coming to an end, people living outside their means are going to have to find their way back to a better balance.
[1] "Between 1901 and 2003, the average U.S. household's income increased 67-fold, from $750 to $50,302. During the same period, household expenditures increased 53-fold, from $769 to $40,748. Equally dramatic is that the $40,748 would have bought more than $2,000 worth of goods in 1901 prices, indicating a tripling of purchasing power."
Yes, if only I could charge the Doctor or the Lawyer what he charges me when I fix his computer. It's a question of ease of replacement. If it was as hard to find a computer technician as it was to find a doctor or a lawyer, you would be able to charge that much.
In the case of both law and medicine, they have professional associations that basically work to control the 'supply' of professionals in the field. (Well, the Bar Associations aren't doing too hot lately, which is why the market has flooded, but they used to be better.) If it weren't for the AMA, doctors probably wouldn't be paid all that well, either. Think of all the other people in the medical field -- nurses, technicians/technologists, etc. -- very few of them are paid as well as actual doctors, because it's hard to become a doctor and there are certain functions that are legally restricted only to doctors.
If you could get a lot of IT workers together and establish an "Information Technologists Guild" and bribe enough politicians into making it illegal for anyone not in the guild to open the case of a computer, then turn around and make it nearly impossible to join the guild, you'd probably make a fortune, too.
The KJV really isn't under "copyright" in the U.K. It's protected by royal prerogative using an different legal instrument, called a "letters patent." This is copyright-like, but it's not recognized internationally; unlike true copyrights which get extended pretty much everywhere by way of the Berne Convention, letters patent only affect people in the U.K.
In the 70s (or somewhere around then), when the original Gilbert and Sullivan copyrights were about to expire, there were some people who wanted to have them perpetually extended in the style of the KJV as a sort of 'national treasure.' Thankfully, smarter heads prevailed, and they were allowed to expire and enter the public domain, which is surely the best way to make sure they're remembered and enjoyed in the future. But the fact that such a thing was even considered, by anyone, and that the legal framework either existed or could have been created to do it, ought to be chilling.
Wikipedia also claims that J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan also falls under something similar, and while I'm sure it's well-intentioned (it gives the royalties, in perpetuity, to a children's hospital), it's a rather dangerous precedent. (There apparently is quite a debate over its ordinary copyright status in the U.S. as well. Bonus irony: Disney arguing in favor of the public domain in an intellectual-property dispute, against a children's hospital. Nice, guys, nice.)
The SUV and the white picket fence are far out of reach. If you want to stay out of debt, sure. But just looking around, there are a whole lot of people with multiple 6000-lb road monsters and McMansions, who have no business owning either, thanks to easy mortgages.
"Middle class" used to mean a small home and a single car, or a modest apartment if you lived in a city -- plus entertainment/disposable income that's a fraction of what people spend today (as a fraction of their income, but probably in absolute terms when you adjust for inflation, too). Today, people don't consider themselves successful unless they live in a large house, have two or three cars, boatloads of entertainment expenses, eat prepared food constantly, and go on jet-setting vacations: none of that was ever part of "middle class" life a few generations ago.
One of the reasons the 'middle class' has disappeared is because expectations have become unrealistically high as a result of shady credit practices. A person living debt-free and within their means on a moderate income can still be quite comfortable in many parts of the country, but they won't live as well -- to an outside observer, anyway -- as their neighbors who are racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of mortgage and consumer debt. That creates a lot of social pressure to do the same, particularly since it forces class definitions in a community to creep upwards.
Of course, the fact that trademark law exists at all says that the completely free-market solution is not likely to work. Still, it would be interesting to develop some system where the preference of the global market of users has influence on who "owns" a particular domain name. The present gold-rush first come first served system has obvious disadvantages, and little other than simplicity to recommend it. I think another 'solution' might be to just give up on DNS and let search engines do the resolution. E.g., instead of having DNS to translate from 'en.wikipedia.org' to 66.230.200.100, you just put "wikipedia" into your search engine of choice, say Google, and then use the IP address that it provides. It wouldn't work right now, because currently the search engines index URLs with domain names, but there's no reason why they have to; Google could just as easily store only server IP addresses in its index, and aside from sites using DNS load-balancing tricks, it would work just the same.
Essentially, it's like a privately operated DNS system, but there's no reason why the result that one search engine returns would be the same as the result that another does. http://googlewikipedia/ and http://yahoowikipedia/ might return two totally different sites. However, there would probably be a lot market pressure for search engines to return semantically useful results -- an engine that took you to Encyclopedia Britannica when you put in 'wikipedia' (or Apple when you put in 'Microsoft') probably wouldn't last too long. In order for this to work, your browser would need to know the addresses of a few search engines to begin with, but this could be easily preloaded or distributed out of band.
I'm not sure this is really a better system than DNS, but if DNS becomes overburdened with bureaucracy, it might be the de facto system anyway. I know some people who pretty much don't type URLs anymore, and just type everything into the Google search box that's in their browser -- even if they know exactly what the site is, it's easier to just put it into the Google box and not have to worry about formatting, since Google will work with a fuzzier match than DNS. And many browsers will default to a search engine when a badly-formatted URL is entered already. All you'd be doing is eliminating the middle layer.
I personally hate "Labels", but how will Gmail support something basic like folders? Well, since you can do everything you can do with Folders, with Labels, I expect it really won't be that hard.
All you need to do for a 'folder' is have a label that says "present in xyz folder." So to put a message in a folder you just tag it with that, and then the 'folder' itself is just a view that only shows messages with that tag. How the messages are actually stored on disk is irrelevant to the user. This means you can use database storage schemes that are much more efficient for large sites than flat files.
The obvious advantage to a user of tags vs folders is that you can have a single message in more than one psuedo-folder in a tag-based system; in a true folder-based system, you either need to make a copy of the message in order to store it in two folders, or you need to do something nasty with symlinks/pointers.
This would have been nice when I started. Now my gmail inbox is a mess. Currently, my Thunderbird inbox is clean and my gmail account has 20,000 or so unread messages. Does anyone know if it's possible to get google to replace its stuff with mine? Why wouldn't you just sync up your Gmail account to a folder in Thunderbird (once you have the option, of course), delete everything currently in your account, and then copy the contents of your Thunderbird inbox to it?
Got me excited there for a minute.
on
Free IMAP On Gmail
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I just went and checked; no IMAP option for me. Just the usual POP ones.
It'd be nice to get IMAP, though. Right now I basically only do Gmail from one machine, because when I access it from another one, either via Gmail's web interface or via a standalone POP client, everything gets screwed up. There's no tracking of which messages I read through the web interface when I later get them via POP, and emails that I send through the web pop up in my Inbox in Mail later. It's okay if I'm going to be away for a while, say on vacation or something, but it's obnoxious enough that if I'm away for a day or so, I just let it go.
I was never into Macs back in the day so I can't comment on old vs. new Finder or spring loaded folders, etc., but I find it telling that the only people who seem to seriously dislike the new Finder are the ones who seriously loved the old one. To everyone else it's pretty spiffy and a reasonably good model of how such things are supposed to work. That is, I'm not at all convinced that the old Finder was actually superior; it's just that people liked it that way, darnit, and anything different is inferior by definition. As someone who used the old (oops, "Classic") Mac OS from versions 6-9, while I do think there was a certain level of curmudgeonness among the people who swore they wouldn't switch, there were very legitimate concerns about the OS X Finder and GUI, which I'm not sure have really been resolved.
Don't get me wrong, I still think OS X is better overall, because of its underlying architecture and a functional CLI, but the Classic Mac GUI had been honed incrementally over almost two decades before Steve just decided to bin the whole thing and reinvent the wheel. It was that interface which made the crappiness of OS 9 worth dealing with, despite the fact that you could hang the whole system by holding down the mouse button, and had to manually allocate memory, and everything else. It was the Mac's saving grace -- perhaps its only saving grace -- throughout the 'lean years' of the platform. And that's why a lot of users just never got over its elimination; it was, for many people, the only reason why they'd stuck around for so long.
There was no real reason to change it when the old codebase was dropped for NeXT's: even if none of the code needed to be kept, the interface guidelines that had evolved as best practices, arrived at by painstaking trial-and-error by generations of Mac programmers, could have been retained. What I think happened is that Steve Jobs wanted more eye candy, and wanted to make the entire desktop reflect the OS's "newness." It was a sales tactic, and although I don't think there's any debate that it worked, it was a pretty huge cost.
OS 9 was an operating system with a great GUI and a terrible backend; OS X had a great backend, but a GUI that was almost unusable at first, and which has only very recently come back on par with the Classic OS circa System 7.5 or so. (They just recently snuck the option-click-to-close-all-Finder-windows trick back in, which I believe originated on the IIgs, and was definitely missing for a while in early OS X versions...)
(Incidentally, the interface scizophrenia isn't limited just to the Mac OS; you also see this behavior in some of the major Apple apps [e.g. iTunes] -- every time there's a whole-number version increase, some part of the interface gets changed, apparently for the sake of changing it. It's as if they realize that some people won't believe that anything is different unless the widgets change, so they scramble everything around periodically, just to keep everyone on their toes.)
Up until a few days ago, I probably would have agreed with TFA. I played my share of console and arcade games as a kid, and a computer game here and there (I even gave WoW a shot, and it admittedly keep me going for a few months), but I just don't generally find games all that engaging. Either they're too simple and I get bored, or they're too frustrating, and I get annoyed and bored. It just feels artificial -- if I want a challenge, there are enough projects on my to-do list to keep me busy for several lifetimes, and if I want escapism, there are a lot of books. I'm not denigrating people who do like games (we all have our hobbies), I just didn't really get the draw.
But that was before a few weekends ago, when the S.O. and I were at a friend's house and saw Wii Sports in person for the first time. I'd heard of it, of course, but had never really played it. Overall, I'm not sure it'll go down in the annals of videogames as more significant than Super Mario Brothers, but maybe it should: I saw more non-gamers pick up and have a good time with that game than I've ever seen before, on any system. Lots of people who normally would have just tuned it out as annoying background noise ended up taking a turn. And perhaps more significantly, we weren't the only couple leaving that night and saying "wow, we have got to get one of those" to each other. It's a video game system that doesn't feel like a 'video game' system -- it felt like poor-man's virtual reality. And a week later, despite living with one of the most anti-video-game people I know (and at their insistence, no less), I found myself rearranging the living room furniture so that there's more room to play Wii Tennis.
As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo should let Sony and Microsoft fight over the established market: they're creating a whole new one, or at least bringing a lot of people whose last console system was an NES back into it. The major question for them is whether they're going to be able to continue to produce games that maintain the very high bar for playability and group fun that Wii Sports does (so far, most of the third-party titles we've picked up from Blockbuster have been a bit disappointing). The question of whether the Wiimote is revolutionary or just a novelty will ultimately depend on whether they can get more games that use it effectively and intuitively, instead of just using it to emulate traditional controls or as an addon, rather than the platform's core and distinguishing feature. At least in my opinion, if you play it sitting down, somebody missed the point.
I've played Halo 3, and yes, the graphics are pretty amazing (it's probably the first game I've played where the flamethrower looked borderline convincing). I suspect, based on the hardware, that the Playstation's are even more impressive. But there's nothing there that makes we want to run out and drop half a grand. (When they're selling for $100, I'll buy an XBox3 so I can play through Halo for the plot.)
Wii Sports (and the ensuing sore arm) was pretty much worth $250, just for the sake of watching people whose knee-jerk response to any console system is "I don't do video games" change their minds and start to enjoy themselves within a few seconds of handling the controller.
Games are not dead. I think that the game publishers and the hardware developers just went though a very risk-averse phase where nobody wanted to take chances, and so they ground out basically the same product, to the same audience, over and over. If you liked that product and its evolutionary improvements, it was great. But if you didn't, there could be pretty long dry spells. I'm not sure whether the Wii is the beginning of something different, or just a temporary oasis, but you'd have to be an idiot not to enjoy it either way.
If, by that, you mean the rest of the world gets US copyright laws (along with extensions purchased by Disney et al) shoved down our throats, then yes. That's what it means. Right. Except that that some of the really terrible portions of U.S. copyright law were arrived at through international treaties designed to "harmonize" the U.S. with more strict locales.
And although the U.S. may have the worst laws for consumers of any first-world nation, there are places which have small portions of their laws that are worse. As I mentioned earlier, the E.U. has a database copyright that's so far been fought off and rejected in the U.S., but I fully expect the people who'd benefit most by that (the MLB has always wanted to be able to copyright collections of baseball statistics, for instance) to push for 'harmonization' of the U.S. with our 'forward thinking' international neighbors.
The net result is that virtually all nations are involved in a race to the bottom.
usually the life of the person creating the trust, plus 18 or 21 years (figuring that's the longest possible time that it would take for their youngest-possible direct heir to reach majority).
That argumentation does make a bit of sense (you'd have to add 9 months, but that is just a minor detail). But even though I see the point in that argumentation, I do feel a problem in that approach. At least for copyright, I would much rather it was a fixed period. A fixed period of say 25 years from when the work is created would still be sufficient time to monetize the work. Oh I agree. Optimally, I'd like to have a copyright that's quite short, maybe five years at the outside, renewable once or twice, with irrevocable expiration into the public domain if it's not renewed.
Unfortunately, as I've become more aware of the issue over the last few years and discussed it with more people, I've discovered that there are a lot of people -- perhaps not the majority, but at least a large minority -- who are fairly receptive to the "author's rights" argument. (I'd put 'rights' in scare quotes there, if it didn't look so ugly.) E.g., they actually seem to fall for the stated reasoning behind things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which basically amounted to "I want my children to be able to squeeze every last drop from my works, until the end of time, and that's my right, goddamnit." Or, uglier, more self-interested, and much more believable: "I want to squeeze every last drop out of my father/mother/great-grandfather-in-law's works, and that's my right, goddamnit."
My first reaction would be to simply assume that anyone falling for that (rather than what I think is the real driving force behind that law, namely Disney's and some other large corporations' "vaults" of content) is an idiot. But some of the people seemingly swayed by this are intelligent folks. So despite the fact that I don't think that an artist has any right to commercially exploit works once they've been published -- if they want that sort of downstream control over works, then they should only ever sell them to people who've signed an NDA -- I think any copyright reform has to take this concern into account if it is to be successful.
But that's not true. They still have the freedom the original author gave them. They can easily modify the orginal public domain piece of code. The fact that someone else has a copy doesn't detract from this ability. Not necessarily. In many cases, one version of a piece of software (or anything else, for that matter, you see it with books, pieces of music, lots of things) will become popular and drive previous versions into obscurity until they're nearly impossible to find.
E.g., if I created a little piece of software and dumped it into the public domain, and someone picked it up, made a slight improved version, and marketed it widely, it might eventually take over, to the point where people forgot about its origin. (Which the 'improved' version's author might not even need to disclose.) Or something could happen by random chance to knock that one source for the original version offline. From that point on, users would have lost the freedom to look at the original version.
Think of how hard it can be to find very old versions of common software projects (or old/first editions of a book) -- sometimes they're nearly impossible to find, because they're buried in references to newer versions. Newer versions tend to subsume the old. (And this ignores the rather obvious case where a party making use of some public domain code might try intentionally to expunge the original from public sources, to protect their proprietized version.)
You can't simply assume that once information is made available, it will always be available. If not maintained and copied and actively disseminated, information dies; it fades away, for a myriad of reasons. The GPL prevents this from happening by making sure that the freedom in the original version is carried forward to all downstream variants and copies.
Actually, I wonder if there are any people out there who would stop a kid from frying a bug with a magnifying glass and then turn around and watch this episode without any qualms. I bet there are lots. There are lots of reasons to stop a kid from doing that; most of them have little to do with the bug's welfare.
I want everyone to steal my shit right away and use it for anything they can think of. This is not terribly hard to do -- just be sure to specify it in your will. I know of some people who have looked into having this done. One of them decided to direct that a portion of money should be used to make an announcement to this effect in the local newspaper, just so that it would be permanently recorded somewhere. (Since wills do not normally become part of the public record just by themselves or anything, there'd be no evidence to show that they're in the public domain unless you did something like this, and directed people where they could find the official document.) I guess a cheaper version might be Usenet?
The fellow isn't dead yet, so I don't know how it'll pan out, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
In the U.S., back a few centuries ago, some fairly bright people realized that it's not healthy to let people lock up assets in trusts that last either forever, or effectively forever. And so they created rules against these types of perpetual financial instruments, which are commonly known as 'perpetuities,' and created a hard limit on how long you can lock assets away: usually the life of the person creating the trust, plus 18 or 21 years (figuring that's the longest possible time that it would take for their youngest-possible direct heir to reach majority).
Somehow, though, we've never viewed Copyright in this same light, even though many of the same issues apply to it, and I think the same logic could be applied to the term. At most, for a work created by an individual in their own name, the term of copyright ought to be their life, plus 18 years. For a work created for a corporation or for hire, the term ought to be 50% of the average lifespan of a citizen, as defined by the latest Census. (The logic being, that's sort of the 'average' individual copyright term, using an idealized model where a person is equally able to produce a work anytime after reaching majority until after they die.)
Although personally I think a copyright term of 15 years would be more useful to the public and society at large, I think that life+18 would come closer to satisfying the number of people who believe (wrongly, IMO) that an author has a "right" to exploit their work for their entire life, and for their children's childhoods.
even when they have no legal standing in the country
I never went to the site but depending on how it worked, the labels could have had a strong argument to take the owner to court in the U.S. They'd probably use the importing the works into the U.S., "targeting" consumers that in the U.S., etc. I'm sure Canada and the U.S. have agreements to enforce judgments over the borders. I'm not really sure how you think that would work. If you allowed that, you'd open the door to any country enforcing its copyright laws on every other country, simply because the content was potentially accessible to someone in their nation. That's a hell of a can of worms to open, because copyright laws vary wildly between countries -- in the E.U., for instance, you can copyright databases in ways that are not deemed valid in the U.S.
You might be able to find a lower court judge stupid enough to rule that was initially (there are a lot of judges, and by definition, that means there are at least some really bad ones), but I can't imagine that it wouldn't be overturned on appeal.
I think the really sad thing here is that the operators of the site don't have either the will or the resources to fight this to its conclusion. So therefore, as usual, the case is not being decided on anything approaching the merits, but simply by the might of deep pockets.
I think you're underestimating how much there is to learn, even in a very limited area. Just the data from those three miles that the rovers have traveled will probably keep a generation of scientists busy, or at least give them some data to chew on.
Would it be nicer if we had a rover that could do 25MPH over rough terrain, on another planet? Sure, I'm sure that'd be awesome. But there are a lot of technical problems doing that, and if you want to go faster you have to spend more weight on motors, solar panels, batteries, etc., and less on scientific instrumentation -- I'm sure that what's up there now is a balance. Since we know so little, we might as well not worry about covering a huge area, and concentrate on learning whatever we can from a small area at a time. It's not like the planet is going anywhere.
And as long as they're bringing in new data, even if they're just wandering around in a few square miles of Mars' version of the Sahara, it makes sense to use them as long as they're there.
No fonts were removed in Vista. All the "Web core fonts" are still there, and so is Tahoma and other Win-specific fonts. They have only added the 7 new ones (the "C*" bunch, and Segoe UI). Segoe UI is the new default UI font instead of Tahoma (though this isn't consistent even in Windows system dialogs - some still use Tahoma, and some still use MS Sans Serif). Calibri is used as a default document font in Office 2007 applications. IE7 on Vista still uses Arial as a generic sans-serif font and Times New Roman as serif font, by default. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I don't understand this article, though; if the regular web core fonts are still there, why would the issue of these new fonts ever come up? Since most web designers mention at least one or two of the core fonts in each of their font families, these new Vista ones will never be used.
The summary made it sound as though users on Vista would see web pages with these new fonts, instead of the traditional web core ones, automatically -- but that seems totally wrong. As long as you specify one of the old core fonts, that's what Vista users will see. These new ones won't come into play.
they've removed *all* the standard core fonts that people usually mention by name, so that this new thing comes up as the generic default for 'sans-serif'? (And 'serif', 'monotype', 'script', etc.) Because I doubt a lot of people are going to start putting these new fonts into their CSS explicitly.
I think a lot of users are going to be annoyed when they find out that the fonts they're used to (Verdana, Georgia, etc.) are missing and have been "replaced" by ones with different names... I can imagine a lot of secretaries and other non-technical people who'll be thrown for a loop with that -- and all because Microsoft wants to have change for the sake of change.
I use a Mac so I use TextMate as my editor (worth every goddamn penny, just in case anyone's on the fence); it's similar to jEdit in a lot of ways. I keep GoLive around because it has some nice features for working with CSS, mostly. It also has some nice organizational/management features.
I'm not against text editors but it's sort of a straight-editor vs. IDE thing. GoLive is sort of like an IDE for HTML, and that's useful sometimes. Also, I got the version I use a while ago under some special pricing; I don't think I paid $100 for it. At that price I think it's a decent deal; at $400 or whatever their retail price is, I think you're absolutely right -- you'd be better off using a good text editor with syntax highlighting and then doing the organizational stuff separately.
I suspect that Adobe is going to kill GoLive one of these days, maybe after the current version, in order to promote Dreamweaver. I'm a little surprised they haven't done it already, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
The enforcement of foreign judgments in the U.S. is governed by "Uniform Foreign Money-Judgments Recognition Act, 13 U.L.A. 149 (1986)", which I don't have time to read through at the moment, but Wikipedia claims that non-recognition of judgments can be based on any of:
# Lack of conclusiveness: if the judgment was rendered under a system which does not provide impartial tribunals or procedures compatible with the requirements of due process of law.
# The foreign court did not have personal jurisdiction over the defendant.
# The foreign court did not have jurisdiction over the subject matter;
# The defendant in the proceedings in the foreign court did not receive notice of the proceedings in sufficient time to enable him to defend;
# The judgment was obtained by fraud;
# The cause of action on which the judgment is based is repugnant to the public policy of the state where enforcement is sought;
The lack of jurisdiction and repugnance to public policy would be the big ones (mostly the former), I think. Actual extradition of a person has much stricter requirements, and I doubt you could get a U.S. citizen extradited to Iran on any grounds.
Yes, but what Universal was saying is that it's the archive's responsibility to limit access to only those scores that people are legally allowed to view.
This is a bizarre stance and I don't believe there's any possible way they could get it upheld (although maybe in the E.U. and in Canada, who knows), but it was enough to scare the site owner into taking the whole thing down.
I can think of a bunch of similarly contentious issues that never were forced to go that route: up until fairly recently, you couldn't export strong crypto out of the U.S. Thus, every site that allowed you to download strong crypto required you to click on a little form certifying that you were a U.S. Citizen or located in the U.S. As long as they did that, they could pass the buck on to the user if they got accused of distributing.
And anyone who wants can go to Project Gutenberg Australia's site and get books that are still under copyright in the U.S. and the E.U., because Australia has managed to stand up to the IP lobbies and retained a death-plus-50 copyright instead of death-plus-70 like the Disney Empire's client states.
Basically, Universal wants to somehow shift liability from the user to the distributor, even though what the distributor is doing is legal, just because it's easier for them to go after distributors. It's stupid, and it's unfortunate that Canada has such a cozy relationship with the E.U. that the site operator felt threatened by their tactics. (A U.S. court, I suspect, would have laughed at a E.U. court's judgment against a U.S. firm for doing something that was legal in the U.S., simply because it was accessible through the internet by people in the E.U.; I don't understand why the Canadian courts would have done it any differently. That a Canadian citizen would feel threatened by that is pretty disgusting.)
Here's a hint: you can sell your labor, just like most of the people who are alive or who have ever lived, have done. That works just as well for computer programmers as it does for plumbers, doctors, and lawyers. Negotiate a fair price for your time, get paid up front, and let the buyer do whatever the hell they want to do with the stuff you produce for them.
Welcome to the service economy; it's the same as the old economy.
The Bureau of Labor statistics, in particular their "100 Years of Consumer Spending" publication. Available here. (~500k PDF)
The graphs you want to look at are the "Expenditure Share for Non-Necessities" graphs for various regions (US generally is on p.11). It started off at a little over 20% just after WWI, and then climbed steadily and dramatically (30% after WWII, which was the real formation of the 'middle class' in the U.S., ~35% in 1960, ~40% in the early 70s) until you get to the current figure which is around 50%. Nationally, that's an all-time high.
If you look at particular areas, like New York City, there has been a small but significant hit in non-necessity spending since the mid-80s boom, probably due to increases in the cost of living due to increased rent. (But in all fairness, NYC is a lot nicer place to live now than it was then.) Spending in Boston also slumped slightly, probably for the same reason. So you get some regions that are probably feeling the pinch -- time to move.
Anyone who thought the 70s were some sort of picnic is looking at them through some seriously rose-colored glasses. The 70s were a time of instability, high unemployment (over 8%!), and out of control inflation. If people were buying things then, it's only because they knew that trying to save it was a waste of time.
It's more difficult to find good data that's correlated with income, but there are a few here and there; including this one from the Family Economics and Nutrition Review, which says flat out: "The data indicate that all household groups were better off in 1989-90 than they were in 1980-81, as measured by the amount and share of total expenditures on nonnecessities ("other")." So that would indicate that there hasn't been some sort of continuous slump from the 70s until today -- in the 80s things actually got better, and the 1980s weren't exactly known as a great period for the economy (certainly not compared to the 1990s).
In terms of cost-adjusted purchasing power (which the BLS estimates in the introduction to the big report above [1], as probably tripled in the last century), you'd be insane to want to live in any previous era, unless your metric for success is purely that of being on the same level as your neighbors. Yes, there were times when there was more income equality, but that's not necessarily an indicator of prosperity; you can still make more money, buy more, and have a better cost of living in a lower socioeconomic bracket today than you could in the past. Lower brackets haven't experienced the growth that higher ones have, but you'd be cutting off your nose to spite your face not to take advantage.
I think the major way the middle class has been 'squeezed' is that there are a lot of people there who traded up to the upper-class (with McMansions, cruise vacations, etc.) on credit, and probably quite a few people in the lower class who borrowed into middle class lifestyles (via shady mortgages) as well. And understandably, income inequality does create a social pressure to overspend. But now that the credit crunch is coming to an end, people living outside their means are going to have to find their way back to a better balance.
[1] "Between 1901 and 2003, the average U.S. household's income increased 67-fold, from $750 to $50,302. During the same period, household expenditures increased 53-fold, from $769 to $40,748. Equally dramatic is that the $40,748 would have bought more than $2,000 worth of goods in 1901 prices, indicating a tripling of purchasing power."
In the case of both law and medicine, they have professional associations that basically work to control the 'supply' of professionals in the field. (Well, the Bar Associations aren't doing too hot lately, which is why the market has flooded, but they used to be better.) If it weren't for the AMA, doctors probably wouldn't be paid all that well, either. Think of all the other people in the medical field -- nurses, technicians/technologists, etc. -- very few of them are paid as well as actual doctors, because it's hard to become a doctor and there are certain functions that are legally restricted only to doctors.
If you could get a lot of IT workers together and establish an "Information Technologists Guild" and bribe enough politicians into making it illegal for anyone not in the guild to open the case of a computer, then turn around and make it nearly impossible to join the guild, you'd probably make a fortune, too.
The KJV really isn't under "copyright" in the U.K. It's protected by royal prerogative using an different legal instrument, called a "letters patent." This is copyright-like, but it's not recognized internationally; unlike true copyrights which get extended pretty much everywhere by way of the Berne Convention, letters patent only affect people in the U.K.
In the 70s (or somewhere around then), when the original Gilbert and Sullivan copyrights were about to expire, there were some people who wanted to have them perpetually extended in the style of the KJV as a sort of 'national treasure.' Thankfully, smarter heads prevailed, and they were allowed to expire and enter the public domain, which is surely the best way to make sure they're remembered and enjoyed in the future. But the fact that such a thing was even considered, by anyone, and that the legal framework either existed or could have been created to do it, ought to be chilling.
Wikipedia also claims that J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan also falls under something similar, and while I'm sure it's well-intentioned (it gives the royalties, in perpetuity, to a children's hospital), it's a rather dangerous precedent. (There apparently is quite a debate over its ordinary copyright status in the U.S. as well. Bonus irony: Disney arguing in favor of the public domain in an intellectual-property dispute, against a children's hospital. Nice, guys, nice.)
"Middle class" used to mean a small home and a single car, or a modest apartment if you lived in a city -- plus entertainment/disposable income that's a fraction of what people spend today (as a fraction of their income, but probably in absolute terms when you adjust for inflation, too). Today, people don't consider themselves successful unless they live in a large house, have two or three cars, boatloads of entertainment expenses, eat prepared food constantly, and go on jet-setting vacations: none of that was ever part of "middle class" life a few generations ago.
One of the reasons the 'middle class' has disappeared is because expectations have become unrealistically high as a result of shady credit practices. A person living debt-free and within their means on a moderate income can still be quite comfortable in many parts of the country, but they won't live as well -- to an outside observer, anyway -- as their neighbors who are racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of mortgage and consumer debt. That creates a lot of social pressure to do the same, particularly since it forces class definitions in a community to creep upwards.
Essentially, it's like a privately operated DNS system, but there's no reason why the result that one search engine returns would be the same as the result that another does. http://googlewikipedia/ and http://yahoowikipedia/ might return two totally different sites. However, there would probably be a lot market pressure for search engines to return semantically useful results -- an engine that took you to Encyclopedia Britannica when you put in 'wikipedia' (or Apple when you put in 'Microsoft') probably wouldn't last too long. In order for this to work, your browser would need to know the addresses of a few search engines to begin with, but this could be easily preloaded or distributed out of band.
I'm not sure this is really a better system than DNS, but if DNS becomes overburdened with bureaucracy, it might be the de facto system anyway. I know some people who pretty much don't type URLs anymore, and just type everything into the Google search box that's in their browser -- even if they know exactly what the site is, it's easier to just put it into the Google box and not have to worry about formatting, since Google will work with a fuzzier match than DNS. And many browsers will default to a search engine when a badly-formatted URL is entered already. All you'd be doing is eliminating the middle layer.
All you need to do for a 'folder' is have a label that says "present in xyz folder." So to put a message in a folder you just tag it with that, and then the 'folder' itself is just a view that only shows messages with that tag. How the messages are actually stored on disk is irrelevant to the user. This means you can use database storage schemes that are much more efficient for large sites than flat files.
The obvious advantage to a user of tags vs folders is that you can have a single message in more than one psuedo-folder in a tag-based system; in a true folder-based system, you either need to make a copy of the message in order to store it in two folders, or you need to do something nasty with symlinks/pointers.
I just went and checked; no IMAP option for me. Just the usual POP ones.
It'd be nice to get IMAP, though. Right now I basically only do Gmail from one machine, because when I access it from another one, either via Gmail's web interface or via a standalone POP client, everything gets screwed up. There's no tracking of which messages I read through the web interface when I later get them via POP, and emails that I send through the web pop up in my Inbox in Mail later. It's okay if I'm going to be away for a while, say on vacation or something, but it's obnoxious enough that if I'm away for a day or so, I just let it go.
IMAP would be a huge step up.
Don't get me wrong, I still think OS X is better overall, because of its underlying architecture and a functional CLI, but the Classic Mac GUI had been honed incrementally over almost two decades before Steve just decided to bin the whole thing and reinvent the wheel. It was that interface which made the crappiness of OS 9 worth dealing with, despite the fact that you could hang the whole system by holding down the mouse button, and had to manually allocate memory, and everything else. It was the Mac's saving grace -- perhaps its only saving grace -- throughout the 'lean years' of the platform. And that's why a lot of users just never got over its elimination; it was, for many people, the only reason why they'd stuck around for so long.
There was no real reason to change it when the old codebase was dropped for NeXT's: even if none of the code needed to be kept, the interface guidelines that had evolved as best practices, arrived at by painstaking trial-and-error by generations of Mac programmers, could have been retained. What I think happened is that Steve Jobs wanted more eye candy, and wanted to make the entire desktop reflect the OS's "newness." It was a sales tactic, and although I don't think there's any debate that it worked, it was a pretty huge cost.
OS 9 was an operating system with a great GUI and a terrible backend; OS X had a great backend, but a GUI that was almost unusable at first, and which has only very recently come back on par with the Classic OS circa System 7.5 or so. (They just recently snuck the option-click-to-close-all-Finder-windows trick back in, which I believe originated on the IIgs, and was definitely missing for a while in early OS X versions...)
(Incidentally, the interface scizophrenia isn't limited just to the Mac OS; you also see this behavior in some of the major Apple apps [e.g. iTunes] -- every time there's a whole-number version increase, some part of the interface gets changed, apparently for the sake of changing it. It's as if they realize that some people won't believe that anything is different unless the widgets change, so they scramble everything around periodically, just to keep everyone on their toes.)
Up until a few days ago, I probably would have agreed with TFA. I played my share of console and arcade games as a kid, and a computer game here and there (I even gave WoW a shot, and it admittedly keep me going for a few months), but I just don't generally find games all that engaging. Either they're too simple and I get bored, or they're too frustrating, and I get annoyed and bored. It just feels artificial -- if I want a challenge, there are enough projects on my to-do list to keep me busy for several lifetimes, and if I want escapism, there are a lot of books. I'm not denigrating people who do like games (we all have our hobbies), I just didn't really get the draw.
But that was before a few weekends ago, when the S.O. and I were at a friend's house and saw Wii Sports in person for the first time. I'd heard of it, of course, but had never really played it. Overall, I'm not sure it'll go down in the annals of videogames as more significant than Super Mario Brothers, but maybe it should: I saw more non-gamers pick up and have a good time with that game than I've ever seen before, on any system. Lots of people who normally would have just tuned it out as annoying background noise ended up taking a turn. And perhaps more significantly, we weren't the only couple leaving that night and saying "wow, we have got to get one of those" to each other. It's a video game system that doesn't feel like a 'video game' system -- it felt like poor-man's virtual reality. And a week later, despite living with one of the most anti-video-game people I know (and at their insistence, no less), I found myself rearranging the living room furniture so that there's more room to play Wii Tennis.
As far as I'm concerned, Nintendo should let Sony and Microsoft fight over the established market: they're creating a whole new one, or at least bringing a lot of people whose last console system was an NES back into it. The major question for them is whether they're going to be able to continue to produce games that maintain the very high bar for playability and group fun that Wii Sports does (so far, most of the third-party titles we've picked up from Blockbuster have been a bit disappointing). The question of whether the Wiimote is revolutionary or just a novelty will ultimately depend on whether they can get more games that use it effectively and intuitively, instead of just using it to emulate traditional controls or as an addon, rather than the platform's core and distinguishing feature. At least in my opinion, if you play it sitting down, somebody missed the point.
I've played Halo 3, and yes, the graphics are pretty amazing (it's probably the first game I've played where the flamethrower looked borderline convincing). I suspect, based on the hardware, that the Playstation's are even more impressive. But there's nothing there that makes we want to run out and drop half a grand. (When they're selling for $100, I'll buy an XBox3 so I can play through Halo for the plot.)
Wii Sports (and the ensuing sore arm) was pretty much worth $250, just for the sake of watching people whose knee-jerk response to any console system is "I don't do video games" change their minds and start to enjoy themselves within a few seconds of handling the controller.
Games are not dead. I think that the game publishers and the hardware developers just went though a very risk-averse phase where nobody wanted to take chances, and so they ground out basically the same product, to the same audience, over and over. If you liked that product and its evolutionary improvements, it was great. But if you didn't, there could be pretty long dry spells. I'm not sure whether the Wii is the beginning of something different, or just a temporary oasis, but you'd have to be an idiot not to enjoy it either way.
And although the U.S. may have the worst laws for consumers of any first-world nation, there are places which have small portions of their laws that are worse. As I mentioned earlier, the E.U. has a database copyright that's so far been fought off and rejected in the U.S., but I fully expect the people who'd benefit most by that (the MLB has always wanted to be able to copyright collections of baseball statistics, for instance) to push for 'harmonization' of the U.S. with our 'forward thinking' international neighbors.
The net result is that virtually all nations are involved in a race to the bottom.
Unfortunately, as I've become more aware of the issue over the last few years and discussed it with more people, I've discovered that there are a lot of people -- perhaps not the majority, but at least a large minority -- who are fairly receptive to the "author's rights" argument. (I'd put 'rights' in scare quotes there, if it didn't look so ugly.) E.g., they actually seem to fall for the stated reasoning behind things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which basically amounted to "I want my children to be able to squeeze every last drop from my works, until the end of time, and that's my right, goddamnit." Or, uglier, more self-interested, and much more believable: "I want to squeeze every last drop out of my father/mother/great-grandfather-in-law's works, and that's my right, goddamnit."
My first reaction would be to simply assume that anyone falling for that (rather than what I think is the real driving force behind that law, namely Disney's and some other large corporations' "vaults" of content) is an idiot. But some of the people seemingly swayed by this are intelligent folks. So despite the fact that I don't think that an artist has any right to commercially exploit works once they've been published -- if they want that sort of downstream control over works, then they should only ever sell them to people who've signed an NDA -- I think any copyright reform has to take this concern into account if it is to be successful.
E.g., if I created a little piece of software and dumped it into the public domain, and someone picked it up, made a slight improved version, and marketed it widely, it might eventually take over, to the point where people forgot about its origin. (Which the 'improved' version's author might not even need to disclose.) Or something could happen by random chance to knock that one source for the original version offline. From that point on, users would have lost the freedom to look at the original version.
Think of how hard it can be to find very old versions of common software projects (or old/first editions of a book) -- sometimes they're nearly impossible to find, because they're buried in references to newer versions. Newer versions tend to subsume the old. (And this ignores the rather obvious case where a party making use of some public domain code might try intentionally to expunge the original from public sources, to protect their proprietized version.)
You can't simply assume that once information is made available, it will always be available. If not maintained and copied and actively disseminated, information dies; it fades away, for a myriad of reasons. The GPL prevents this from happening by making sure that the freedom in the original version is carried forward to all downstream variants and copies.
The fellow isn't dead yet, so I don't know how it'll pan out, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
In the U.S., back a few centuries ago, some fairly bright people realized that it's not healthy to let people lock up assets in trusts that last either forever, or effectively forever. And so they created rules against these types of perpetual financial instruments, which are commonly known as 'perpetuities,' and created a hard limit on how long you can lock assets away: usually the life of the person creating the trust, plus 18 or 21 years (figuring that's the longest possible time that it would take for their youngest-possible direct heir to reach majority).
Somehow, though, we've never viewed Copyright in this same light, even though many of the same issues apply to it, and I think the same logic could be applied to the term. At most, for a work created by an individual in their own name, the term of copyright ought to be their life, plus 18 years. For a work created for a corporation or for hire, the term ought to be 50% of the average lifespan of a citizen, as defined by the latest Census. (The logic being, that's sort of the 'average' individual copyright term, using an idealized model where a person is equally able to produce a work anytime after reaching majority until after they die.)
Although personally I think a copyright term of 15 years would be more useful to the public and society at large, I think that life+18 would come closer to satisfying the number of people who believe (wrongly, IMO) that an author has a "right" to exploit their work for their entire life, and for their children's childhoods.
I never went to the site but depending on how it worked, the labels could have had a strong argument to take the owner to court in the U.S. They'd probably use the importing the works into the U.S., "targeting" consumers that in the U.S., etc. I'm sure Canada and the U.S. have agreements to enforce judgments over the borders. I'm not really sure how you think that would work. If you allowed that, you'd open the door to any country enforcing its copyright laws on every other country, simply because the content was potentially accessible to someone in their nation. That's a hell of a can of worms to open, because copyright laws vary wildly between countries -- in the E.U., for instance, you can copyright databases in ways that are not deemed valid in the U.S.
You might be able to find a lower court judge stupid enough to rule that was initially (there are a lot of judges, and by definition, that means there are at least some really bad ones), but I can't imagine that it wouldn't be overturned on appeal.
I think the really sad thing here is that the operators of the site don't have either the will or the resources to fight this to its conclusion. So therefore, as usual, the case is not being decided on anything approaching the merits, but simply by the might of deep pockets.
I think you're underestimating how much there is to learn, even in a very limited area. Just the data from those three miles that the rovers have traveled will probably keep a generation of scientists busy, or at least give them some data to chew on.
Would it be nicer if we had a rover that could do 25MPH over rough terrain, on another planet? Sure, I'm sure that'd be awesome. But there are a lot of technical problems doing that, and if you want to go faster you have to spend more weight on motors, solar panels, batteries, etc., and less on scientific instrumentation -- I'm sure that what's up there now is a balance. Since we know so little, we might as well not worry about covering a huge area, and concentrate on learning whatever we can from a small area at a time. It's not like the planet is going anywhere.
And as long as they're bringing in new data, even if they're just wandering around in a few square miles of Mars' version of the Sahara, it makes sense to use them as long as they're there.
The summary made it sound as though users on Vista would see web pages with these new fonts, instead of the traditional web core ones, automatically -- but that seems totally wrong. As long as you specify one of the old core fonts, that's what Vista users will see. These new ones won't come into play.
I think a lot of users are going to be annoyed when they find out that the fonts they're used to (Verdana, Georgia, etc.) are missing and have been "replaced" by ones with different names
Ridiculous.
I use a Mac so I use TextMate as my editor (worth every goddamn penny, just in case anyone's on the fence); it's similar to jEdit in a lot of ways. I keep GoLive around because it has some nice features for working with CSS, mostly. It also has some nice organizational/management features.
I'm not against text editors but it's sort of a straight-editor vs. IDE thing. GoLive is sort of like an IDE for HTML, and that's useful sometimes. Also, I got the version I use a while ago under some special pricing; I don't think I paid $100 for it. At that price I think it's a decent deal; at $400 or whatever their retail price is, I think you're absolutely right -- you'd be better off using a good text editor with syntax highlighting and then doing the organizational stuff separately.
I suspect that Adobe is going to kill GoLive one of these days, maybe after the current version, in order to promote Dreamweaver. I'm a little surprised they haven't done it already, actually.