I seem to recall that copyright law allows you to convert any digital media you purchase from one format to another
Then you haven't looked at copyright law since the mid-1990s. Prior to the DMCA, US law worked as you remember. But post-DMCA, the mere act of decrypting your own files or any other way to circumvent a content access control is illegal. You have the right to copy, but not to break the DRM to do it.
The analogy I give my students is that when a friend has your CD you have the right to get it back. You do not, however, have the right to break into his house to get it. The analogy is imperfect, since the DMCA bans you from breaking into your own house, so to speak. But you get the point: No bypassing copy protection ever, for any reason, without explicit consent from the content provider. Oh, and it also turns out that simply downloading the tools to break DRM ("trafficking" in the law's terms) is also a felony, even if you never actually crack the DRM.
Others have already made this point, but I think I can make it better. The US has a strong current of anti-intellectualism in its political culture. Only one American President has had a PhD (Woodrow Wilson) -- and he was sandwiched between anti-intellectuals like Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. Campaigning against effete intellectuals who couldn't do an ordinary working man's (yes, there is strong gender bias in the anti-intellectual culture) job is practically an American pasttime. Even while scientists were respected for their achievements in medicine and space exploration during the 1950s, perceived egghead Adlai Stevenson lost to perceived dullard Dwight Eisenhower -- twice. Needless to say, things did not improve under the Johnson or Nixon Administrations. I'm sure anyone who noticed politics in the 1980s is aware that Reagan portrayed himself as a genial old man with a sense of down-home humor, not an intellectual prepared to discuss the details of policy. Bush I had the good fortune to run against someone even more ivory-tower than himself, the sensible but nearly robotic Michael Dukakis.
In short, there is a strain of anti-intellectualism that has dominated American culture for at least a century, and ikely much longer (anyone remember the so-called Know-Nothing Party?) In America, being perceived as "intellectual" -- educated, cosmopolitan, well-spoken, intelligent -- is quite different from being perceived as "wise" or even "smart." Intellectuals seek to change the culture around them using ideas; those who feel intimidated by them tend to resent the (real or perceived) air of superiority that comes with education and serious scholarship. And since Americans tend to think of American heroes as being virile, hard-working men rather than serious scholars and thinkers (both views have some merit), there's no counterpart to the European intellectuals that laid the foundations for human rights, democracy, and public participation. Intellectuals in America are seen as artifical constructs and not as organic producers of the national culture. This is no "phase" -- it is part of the American condition.
Yup. I had a Timex Sinclair 1000. Remember setting the mode to "fast"? It basically stopped sending anything to the TV so that the processor could spend more time running code. The only thing that made BASIC programming possible in 2K was the fact that each BASIC command was stored as a single byte, requiring only a single keypress. That is, "PRINT" was the same as "A" as far as the TS1000 was concerned. The Commodore 64 was such a luxury in comparison.
To stretch the analogy further: Colt offers a bounty for scalps. They say you're only supposed to bring in al Qaeda scalps, but they'll pay you with no questions asked for any scalps you should happen to stumble across. Obviously, they know that scalping the innocent is more proftable than scalping al Qaeda, so we would ordinarily believe they had some responsibility for the resulting massacres of innocents.
Because spyware and murder are basically the same thing:)
Besides, Republicans have been in bed with Communist China for decades. Nixon reached out to China, and Reagan was so smitten with China as a counterweight to the USSR that he actually condemned the Vietnamese (pro-USSR) for invading and overthrowing the truly genocidal (but pro-China) communist government of Cambodia. He then helped arm the perpetrators of the genocide, the Khmer Rouge, who went on to murder another 50,000 or so of their countrymen (which, to be fair, was less than the millions they killed while governing). Bush I imposed sanctions on China in public after the Tiananmen Square massacre -- and then promptly violated them in secret by sending banned high-level military missions to China. Republicans found China-bashing to be convenient politics when they were out of the White House from 1992-2000 (when Clinton pursued a similar pro-China policy, albeit not to the extreme of arming China's communist allies in Southeast Asia), but as soon as Bush II was elected it was business as usual with the Chinese Communists. That's the only thing that surprises me about these hearings -- Republicans have been big fans of "constructive engagement" with China over the past few decades. It's almost as if someone in the House didn't get the memo about Republican foreign policy in the White House.
In all fairness, Bolton looks qualified on paper. He's an a**hole, but he has the credentials and experience needed for the position. He just lacks the temperament needed for the position. He's a hack, but he's not necessarily an unqualified hack.
Look at the citation on the frequency distribution graphs. They source the illustration to Wikipedia. I don't think I've ever seen a respectable publication cite Wikipedia as a source for a story about something OTHER than Wikipedia itself. Granted, they didn't cite a "fact" but rather used a graphic, but that's still something of a vote of confidence form the Economist.
There is a limit to this, however. You can decrease farmers' hourly wages, but you can't decrease the per-hour charges set by the game designers. If gold farming makes less real-world cash than it costs per hour of farming, then the practice will die, even if the farmers are willing to do it for free. It starts to cost money to farm.
Of course, if you make it cheaper to buy gold than game for it, you're going to lose a lot of revenue from people that would otherwise grind for it. So the trick is to find the perfect exchange rate.
Yep, I'm saying Take 2 should have killed the BC3K project and eaten the lost development revenue. Reputable businesses do this all the time -- they kill something that isn't working out (I seem to recall Blizzard doing just that with its planned Warcraft Adventures title when it realized the game wasn't going to be any good). There's a difference between releasing a bad game that might appeal to a few people and releasing a nonfunctional game that even genre fans can't play.
I never bought the game; I waited for reviews. Still, I had a great deal of sympathy for all the kids who did. And the Take 2 logo became the software equivalent of a skull and crossbones for me. I managed to avoid them until Civ IV came out, but I was too much of a Firaxis fan and Civ fanboy to resist buying it the day it came out.
Actually, it is quite common to see judges use a "plain meaning" standard in which they look up the words of a law in a dictionary (not necessarily a law dictionary, either) and see what it says. Indeed, this textual approach seems to be the leading competitor to originalism among conservative judges. Believe it or not, Merriam-Webster does show up in the occasional opinion.
In response to #2: I agree with part of what you're saying, but there are three things to consider.
A. Looking at porn makes people want more porn. The link between porn and sexual conduct is quite controversial, but the effect of viewing porn on the demand for porn is not. Viewing porn makes people want to view more porn. So far so good. This brings us to....
B. The demand for child porn causes some child sexual abuse. Some abuse would occur anyway, but some of it is profit-motivated. Increased demand for child porn means a stronger incentive to make the stuff. Note that this is true even if no buying or selling is involved (ie trading). Open and free distribution might undercut the market to some extent -- but given that music companies continue to thrive despite widespread file-sharing, I doubt that market saturation will make child porn unprofitable.
C. Viewing child porn violates the privacy of the kids. It's like reading someone's diary or peeking in on them in the shower. Unlike grown-ups, kids didn't consent to being displayed for sexual purposes. These kids are already traumatized; how do they feel moving into adulthood, knowing that people are viewing their abuse?
I do tend to agree with your third objection, however. I suspect that if synthetic child porn were legal there would be quite a bit of substitution going on -- purveyors of real child porn would find it more profitable and less risky to just make the fake stuff and pretend it was real. There might still be an effect on demand that might outweigh this substitution, however.
Of course, if child porn causes people to want to molest kids then you don't need any of the above arguments in order to oppose it. But even if it doesn't, it may still cause harm through its effect on the market.
I have a long memory, and I still haven't forgiven Take Two for releasing BC3K before it was finished way back when in order to cut their losses (at the expense of consumers who bought a literally unplayable mess). Remember, these are the people who decided to respond to years of delay on the game Battlecruiser 3000 by simply shipping what was done (a late alpha or early beta, and that's being generous) and selling it to the public as if it was a completed game. If you don't remember that whole scandal, do a web search for Take 2 and Battlecruiser.
They just seem to have a habit of releasing things a wee bit earlier than other major publishers and then skimping on the tech support to save a few pennies. Take one of my favorite series, Civilization. 1-3 were playable out of the box, although there were some bugs (Civ III's worst bug was that air superiority missions didn't work correctly). Now look at the first one to be released after Firaxis paired up with Take 2: Civ 4 was so buggy that it was unplayable with ATI cards (ie half the market). Even for nvidia owners there were graphics glitches, random crashes to desktop, memory leaks, and all other manner of nastiness.
Take 2 has become a huge publisher by pursuing profit at the expense of consumers. Don't expect them to change what seems to be working well for their wallets. It almost seems that Firaxis as the content creators fell down to the level of Take 2, their unfortunate choice of publisher. Given how much enjoyment I've received from previous Firaxis titles, I'm willing to give them a chance to make this game what it should be -- but I really wish they'd taken the high road to begin with.
I say good riddance to Take 2; I hope the company collapses. If not, I hope the current losses prompt the ouster of top management and a new approach to game publishing and customer service.
This is a federal trial. There is no parole in federal prison. Six years means six years. Oh, and I suspect they'll insist on the standard "you can't work with a computer" clause that will keep the guy from making a decent living for another decade after he leaves prison.
Wow, that's really annoying. Do you want to annoy your more educated users? I noticed a half dozen grammatical errors and assumed that you just weren't very well educated in English (OK for a programmer but not so OK for an editor). But now I see that you knew about the errors and kept them anyway just to demonstrate something (that you can be unprofessional if you want to be? If there's some other lesson here, I'm missing it).
This is a very small step from saying "I decided to post my grocery list today to prove a point" -- the only "point" it proves is that looking and acting professional isn't important to you since your job is secure. Editors need to be willing to do copyediting. I cut non-native speakers or obviously uneducated people some slack, but it's difficult to preserve the illusion that we're all here for serious conversation when the editor is over in the corner making the grammatical equivalent of armpit noises for yuks.
Slashdot's real value isn't the stories; it's the comments. If the editors don't care about making the write-ups well-written and professional, then many user will follow the lead of the editors and shrug off standards of communication. Others will simply sigh and decide that their particular skills aren't likely to be appreciated on this site.
Why not set high standards for the initial write-up and then see what users do? I'm sure that they'll still moan and groan about something, but at least the moaning and groaning will be less justified (and hence less likely to be modded up by long-time users, taking attention away from the story itself).
That makes no difference. There is a legal duty to defend your trademarks in order to prevent them from being diluted or becoming common words. However, there is no such duty to defend copyright. The best example of this is "Happy Birthday" which was publically performed without royalty payments for something like 40 years before the copyright owner finally decided to start suing restaraunts and other venues that performed it without authorization. The rightsholders are raking in the dough to this day, despite their half century slumber.
Kids' writing skills stink, but so do those of adults. I teach grad students and their writing is terrible. However, I am more concerned by the fact that most of them (in the social sciences, at least) run away at the sight of an equation or a bit of simple algebra. At least they try to write; when they see math their brains seem to shut down. Good social science, like any science, needs clear writing to express ideas and competence with math and logic in order to derive and test hypotheses.
Oh, and now to be completely pedantic:
finihing --> finishing (you knew that, but I can't resist) "educational", --> "educational," , just --> ; they just big business, educators --> big business. Educators (the dreaded comma splice) But, there is no --> However, there is no limited in developing --> limited at developing 10 years worth. --> 10 years' worth (but it's still a sentence fragment that needs a verb)
Don't get too worked-up, laughingcoyote. You're no "Ex-MislTech" but this is a run-on if I've ever seen one: "As to your other examples, if you were taking dictation from someone and required shorthand to get everything down in time, I apologize, but do question why they didn't post on their own."
Actually, your other two sentences had problems too. The first one has a superfluous comma after the quotation mark, and the last sentence needs a semicolon instead of a comma. Search Google for "comma splice" and you'll see why.
Kudos for standing up for the concept of actually trying to write in complete words, though!
I read this story earlier today on HNN. He resigned as department chair, not as a professor. He's still doing all the same stuff, but with less paperwork. I know that in many departments, chair is a generally detested position because although it carries some prestige it often carries little real authority and ALWAYS comes with scads of paperwork that prevent academics from spending time on their first love (research or teaching, as the case may be). So the guy isn't out of a job or anything; the move is largely symbolic.
My understanding was that in the US the Berne Convention's copyright only gets you actual damages. Usually, these will be pretty low since it's difficult to prove you could negotiate a high price for a short news article in an obscure paper. The statutory damages used by the recording industry and others, on the other hand, are only available to those who have registered their copyrights. So even though "everything is copyrighted" seems more or less democratic (if short-sighted) it turns out that businesses and organized groups with the resources and money to register their copyrighted works still benefit and the little guy/gal whose damages would be swamped by attorney fees get screwed.
IANAL, but I do teach a unit on copyright law so corrections are welcome.
I assume this article is really an excuse for us all to gripe about our rebate experiences. I sent in a rebate form, original receipt and UPC for a Brother all-in-one machine MFC210C which I bought at Fry's. Guess what? They notified me that the original UPC wasn't included. Then they refused to accept a photocopy (my proof of what I sent them) because only the original UPC (which I sent them) counts. Yep, I feel ripped off. I suppose I could complain to the consumer protection folks at the AG but how do I prove I sent an original UPC? As I recall, it's only $20 which is even too small for a small claims action (filing fees are more!)
It gets worse. Many sites appear broken to Opera because they detect the user agent and send different code to non-IE browsers, even though Opera can display the "IE" code just fine. As a consequence, sites appear "broken" because they ARE broken -- they send alternate buggy HTML that hasn't been updated in ages to non-IE browsers.
Wikipedia is unreliable, and I punish students who rely on it for facts. I teach political science, and while some of the entertainment and computing entries are quite good, the history and politics articles are full of misinformation and selective/accidental omissions. I tell my students that they aren't permitted to source a fact to Wikipedia. Of course, if they get an idea from it, they are required to cite it as the source of the idea -- but they must then confirm whatever facts they want to use with a more reliable source. Of course, I generally discourage encyclopedias for all but the most mundane fact-checking, since most concepts and ideas worth discussing in academe are best covered in peer-reviewed articles in academic journals (or in some cases, in books published my respectable academic presses). Still, I wish the Wikipedia project luck, because I think it has the potential to be one of the best resources on the net; they just need to find some type of fact-checking process that works. Until then, a Wikipedia entry in a student's bibliography is a near-certain route to lost points.
Others have already listed virtually every difference, but these are the ones that make me reluctant to drop Opera for Firefox (even though I drool over some FF extensions):
1. Opera's wonderful zoom feature allows me to read every web page easily. When you combine it with the user-css toggle every web page becomes crisp and clean, even though I'm using a crappy display.
2. Mouse gestures are built in and seem more responsive than FF with the plugin. Combine this with the right-click personal info and notes features and I can spend an hour browsing without every touching the keyboard. Some hate this; I love it.
There are other things here and there that add to the experience (ie built-in RSS support) but these are the things I missed when using FF this summer. Don't get me wrong: I think FF has more and better features when you count its extensions, but Opera's seem to be better integrated and snappier. I expect to switch at some point in the future, but FF isn't quite there yet.
I expected normalization: Simply match the peak volume of each song without compression. Yes, this means that the average volumes will differ -- but most of the time it's good enough for a mix.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall that copyright law allows you to convert any digital media you purchase from one format to another
Then you haven't looked at copyright law since the mid-1990s. Prior to the DMCA, US law worked as you remember. But post-DMCA, the mere act of decrypting your own files or any other way to circumvent a content access control is illegal. You have the right to copy, but not to break the DRM to do it.
The analogy I give my students is that when a friend has your CD you have the right to get it back. You do not, however, have the right to break into his house to get it. The analogy is imperfect, since the DMCA bans you from breaking into your own house, so to speak. But you get the point: No bypassing copy protection ever, for any reason, without explicit consent from the content provider. Oh, and it also turns out that simply downloading the tools to break DRM ("trafficking" in the law's terms) is also a felony, even if you never actually crack the DRM.
It's a brave new world, folks.
Others have already made this point, but I think I can make it better. The US has a strong current of anti-intellectualism in its political culture. Only one American President has had a PhD (Woodrow Wilson) -- and he was sandwiched between anti-intellectuals like Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. Campaigning against effete intellectuals who couldn't do an ordinary working man's (yes, there is strong gender bias in the anti-intellectual culture) job is practically an American pasttime. Even while scientists were respected for their achievements in medicine and space exploration during the 1950s, perceived egghead Adlai Stevenson lost to perceived dullard Dwight Eisenhower -- twice. Needless to say, things did not improve under the Johnson or Nixon Administrations. I'm sure anyone who noticed politics in the 1980s is aware that Reagan portrayed himself as a genial old man with a sense of down-home humor, not an intellectual prepared to discuss the details of policy. Bush I had the good fortune to run against someone even more ivory-tower than himself, the sensible but nearly robotic Michael Dukakis.
In short, there is a strain of anti-intellectualism that has dominated American culture for at least a century, and ikely much longer (anyone remember the so-called Know-Nothing Party?) In America, being perceived as "intellectual" -- educated, cosmopolitan, well-spoken, intelligent -- is quite different from being perceived as "wise" or even "smart." Intellectuals seek to change the culture around them using ideas; those who feel intimidated by them tend to resent the (real or perceived) air of superiority that comes with education and serious scholarship. And since Americans tend to think of American heroes as being virile, hard-working men rather than serious scholars and thinkers (both views have some merit), there's no counterpart to the European intellectuals that laid the foundations for human rights, democracy, and public participation. Intellectuals in America are seen as artifical constructs and not as organic producers of the national culture. This is no "phase" -- it is part of the American condition.
Yup. I had a Timex Sinclair 1000. Remember setting the mode to "fast"? It basically stopped sending anything to the TV so that the processor could spend more time running code. The only thing that made BASIC programming possible in 2K was the fact that each BASIC command was stored as a single byte, requiring only a single keypress. That is, "PRINT" was the same as "A" as far as the TS1000 was concerned. The Commodore 64 was such a luxury in comparison.
To stretch the analogy further: Colt offers a bounty for scalps. They say you're only supposed to bring in al Qaeda scalps, but they'll pay you with no questions asked for any scalps you should happen to stumble across. Obviously, they know that scalping the innocent is more proftable than scalping al Qaeda, so we would ordinarily believe they had some responsibility for the resulting massacres of innocents.
:)
Because spyware and murder are basically the same thing
Besides, Republicans have been in bed with Communist China for decades. Nixon reached out to China, and Reagan was so smitten with China as a counterweight to the USSR that he actually condemned the Vietnamese (pro-USSR) for invading and overthrowing the truly genocidal (but pro-China) communist government of Cambodia. He then helped arm the perpetrators of the genocide, the Khmer Rouge, who went on to murder another 50,000 or so of their countrymen (which, to be fair, was less than the millions they killed while governing). Bush I imposed sanctions on China in public after the Tiananmen Square massacre -- and then promptly violated them in secret by sending banned high-level military missions to China. Republicans found China-bashing to be convenient politics when they were out of the White House from 1992-2000 (when Clinton pursued a similar pro-China policy, albeit not to the extreme of arming China's communist allies in Southeast Asia), but as soon as Bush II was elected it was business as usual with the Chinese Communists. That's the only thing that surprises me about these hearings -- Republicans have been big fans of "constructive engagement" with China over the past few decades. It's almost as if someone in the House didn't get the memo about Republican foreign policy in the White House.
In all fairness, Bolton looks qualified on paper. He's an a**hole, but he has the credentials and experience needed for the position. He just lacks the temperament needed for the position. He's a hack, but he's not necessarily an unqualified hack.
Look at the citation on the frequency distribution graphs. They source the illustration to Wikipedia. I don't think I've ever seen a respectable publication cite Wikipedia as a source for a story about something OTHER than Wikipedia itself. Granted, they didn't cite a "fact" but rather used a graphic, but that's still something of a vote of confidence form the Economist.
There is a limit to this, however. You can decrease farmers' hourly wages, but you can't decrease the per-hour charges set by the game designers. If gold farming makes less real-world cash than it costs per hour of farming, then the practice will die, even if the farmers are willing to do it for free. It starts to cost money to farm.
Of course, if you make it cheaper to buy gold than game for it, you're going to lose a lot of revenue from people that would otherwise grind for it. So the trick is to find the perfect exchange rate.
Yep, I'm saying Take 2 should have killed the BC3K project and eaten the lost development revenue. Reputable businesses do this all the time -- they kill something that isn't working out (I seem to recall Blizzard doing just that with its planned Warcraft Adventures title when it realized the game wasn't going to be any good). There's a difference between releasing a bad game that might appeal to a few people and releasing a nonfunctional game that even genre fans can't play.
I never bought the game; I waited for reviews. Still, I had a great deal of sympathy for all the kids who did. And the Take 2 logo became the software equivalent of a skull and crossbones for me. I managed to avoid them until Civ IV came out, but I was too much of a Firaxis fan and Civ fanboy to resist buying it the day it came out.
Actually, it is quite common to see judges use a "plain meaning" standard in which they look up the words of a law in a dictionary (not necessarily a law dictionary, either) and see what it says. Indeed, this textual approach seems to be the leading competitor to originalism among conservative judges. Believe it or not, Merriam-Webster does show up in the occasional opinion.
In response to #2: I agree with part of what you're saying, but there are three things to consider.
A. Looking at porn makes people want more porn. The link between porn and sexual conduct is quite controversial, but the effect of viewing porn on the demand for porn is not. Viewing porn makes people want to view more porn. So far so good. This brings us to....
B. The demand for child porn causes some child sexual abuse. Some abuse would occur anyway, but some of it is profit-motivated. Increased demand for child porn means a stronger incentive to make the stuff. Note that this is true even if no buying or selling is involved (ie trading). Open and free distribution might undercut the market to some extent -- but given that music companies continue to thrive despite widespread file-sharing, I doubt that market saturation will make child porn unprofitable.
C. Viewing child porn violates the privacy of the kids. It's like reading someone's diary or peeking in on them in the shower. Unlike grown-ups, kids didn't consent to being displayed for sexual purposes. These kids are already traumatized; how do they feel moving into adulthood, knowing that people are viewing their abuse?
I do tend to agree with your third objection, however. I suspect that if synthetic child porn were legal there would be quite a bit of substitution going on -- purveyors of real child porn would find it more profitable and less risky to just make the fake stuff and pretend it was real. There might still be an effect on demand that might outweigh this substitution, however.
Of course, if child porn causes people to want to molest kids then you don't need any of the above arguments in order to oppose it. But even if it doesn't, it may still cause harm through its effect on the market.
I have a long memory, and I still haven't forgiven Take Two for releasing BC3K before it was finished way back when in order to cut their losses (at the expense of consumers who bought a literally unplayable mess). Remember, these are the people who decided to respond to years of delay on the game Battlecruiser 3000 by simply shipping what was done (a late alpha or early beta, and that's being generous) and selling it to the public as if it was a completed game. If you don't remember that whole scandal, do a web search for Take 2 and Battlecruiser.
They just seem to have a habit of releasing things a wee bit earlier than other major publishers and then skimping on the tech support to save a few pennies. Take one of my favorite series, Civilization. 1-3 were playable out of the box, although there were some bugs (Civ III's worst bug was that air superiority missions didn't work correctly). Now look at the first one to be released after Firaxis paired up with Take 2: Civ 4 was so buggy that it was unplayable with ATI cards (ie half the market). Even for nvidia owners there were graphics glitches, random crashes to desktop, memory leaks, and all other manner of nastiness.
Take 2 has become a huge publisher by pursuing profit at the expense of consumers. Don't expect them to change what seems to be working well for their wallets. It almost seems that Firaxis as the content creators fell down to the level of Take 2, their unfortunate choice of publisher. Given how much enjoyment I've received from previous Firaxis titles, I'm willing to give them a chance to make this game what it should be -- but I really wish they'd taken the high road to begin with.
I say good riddance to Take 2; I hope the company collapses. If not, I hope the current losses prompt the ouster of top management and a new approach to game publishing and customer service.
This is a federal trial. There is no parole in federal prison. Six years means six years. Oh, and I suspect they'll insist on the standard "you can't work with a computer" clause that will keep the guy from making a decent living for another decade after he leaves prison.
Not that I have any sympathy for the scum.
Wow, that's really annoying. Do you want to annoy your more educated users? I noticed a half dozen grammatical errors and assumed that you just weren't very well educated in English (OK for a programmer but not so OK for an editor). But now I see that you knew about the errors and kept them anyway just to demonstrate something (that you can be unprofessional if you want to be? If there's some other lesson here, I'm missing it).
This is a very small step from saying "I decided to post my grocery list today to prove a point" -- the only "point" it proves is that looking and acting professional isn't important to you since your job is secure. Editors need to be willing to do copyediting. I cut non-native speakers or obviously uneducated people some slack, but it's difficult to preserve the illusion that we're all here for serious conversation when the editor is over in the corner making the grammatical equivalent of armpit noises for yuks.
Slashdot's real value isn't the stories; it's the comments. If the editors don't care about making the write-ups well-written and professional, then many user will follow the lead of the editors and shrug off standards of communication. Others will simply sigh and decide that their particular skills aren't likely to be appreciated on this site.
Why not set high standards for the initial write-up and then see what users do? I'm sure that they'll still moan and groan about something, but at least the moaning and groaning will be less justified (and hence less likely to be modded up by long-time users, taking attention away from the story itself).
That makes no difference. There is a legal duty to defend your trademarks in order to prevent them from being diluted or becoming common words. However, there is no such duty to defend copyright. The best example of this is "Happy Birthday" which was publically performed without royalty payments for something like 40 years before the copyright owner finally decided to start suing restaraunts and other venues that performed it without authorization. The rightsholders are raking in the dough to this day, despite their half century slumber.
Kids' writing skills stink, but so do those of adults. I teach grad students and their writing is terrible. However, I am more concerned by the fact that most of them (in the social sciences, at least) run away at the sight of an equation or a bit of simple algebra. At least they try to write; when they see math their brains seem to shut down. Good social science, like any science, needs clear writing to express ideas and competence with math and logic in order to derive and test hypotheses.
Oh, and now to be completely pedantic:
finihing --> finishing (you knew that, but I can't resist)
"educational", --> "educational,"
, just --> ; they just
big business, educators --> big business. Educators (the dreaded comma splice)
But, there is no --> However, there is no
limited in developing --> limited at developing
10 years worth. --> 10 years' worth (but it's still a sentence fragment that needs a verb)
Don't get too worked-up, laughingcoyote. You're no "Ex-MislTech" but this is a run-on if I've ever seen one:
"As to your other examples, if you were taking dictation from someone and required shorthand to get everything down in time, I apologize, but do question why they didn't post on their own."
Actually, your other two sentences had problems too. The first one has a superfluous comma after the quotation mark, and the last sentence needs a semicolon instead of a comma. Search Google for "comma splice" and you'll see why.
Kudos for standing up for the concept of actually trying to write in complete words, though!
What cduffy said. But I'll add one thing:
If you worked on them in a technical capacity, I hope you knew they weren't
"Misls"
I read this story earlier today on HNN. He resigned as department chair, not as a professor. He's still doing all the same stuff, but with less paperwork. I know that in many departments, chair is a generally detested position because although it carries some prestige it often carries little real authority and ALWAYS comes with scads of paperwork that prevent academics from spending time on their first love (research or teaching, as the case may be). So the guy isn't out of a job or anything; the move is largely symbolic.
My understanding was that in the US the Berne Convention's copyright only gets you actual damages. Usually, these will be pretty low since it's difficult to prove you could negotiate a high price for a short news article in an obscure paper. The statutory damages used by the recording industry and others, on the other hand, are only available to those who have registered their copyrights. So even though "everything is copyrighted" seems more or less democratic (if short-sighted) it turns out that businesses and organized groups with the resources and money to register their copyrighted works still benefit and the little guy/gal whose damages would be swamped by attorney fees get screwed.
IANAL, but I do teach a unit on copyright law so corrections are welcome.
I assume this article is really an excuse for us all to gripe about our rebate experiences. I sent in a rebate form, original receipt and UPC for a Brother all-in-one machine MFC210C which I bought at Fry's. Guess what? They notified me that the original UPC wasn't included. Then they refused to accept a photocopy (my proof of what I sent them) because only the original UPC (which I sent them) counts. Yep, I feel ripped off. I suppose I could complain to the consumer protection folks at the AG but how do I prove I sent an original UPC? As I recall, it's only $20 which is even too small for a small claims action (filing fees are more!)
It gets worse. Many sites appear broken to Opera because they detect the user agent and send different code to non-IE browsers, even though Opera can display the "IE" code just fine. As a consequence, sites appear "broken" because they ARE broken -- they send alternate buggy HTML that hasn't been updated in ages to non-IE browsers.
Wikipedia is unreliable, and I punish students who rely on it for facts. I teach political science, and while some of the entertainment and computing entries are quite good, the history and politics articles are full of misinformation and selective/accidental omissions. I tell my students that they aren't permitted to source a fact to Wikipedia. Of course, if they get an idea from it, they are required to cite it as the source of the idea -- but they must then confirm whatever facts they want to use with a more reliable source. Of course, I generally discourage encyclopedias for all but the most mundane fact-checking, since most concepts and ideas worth discussing in academe are best covered in peer-reviewed articles in academic journals (or in some cases, in books published my respectable academic presses). Still, I wish the Wikipedia project luck, because I think it has the potential to be one of the best resources on the net; they just need to find some type of fact-checking process that works. Until then, a Wikipedia entry in a student's bibliography is a near-certain route to lost points.
Others have already listed virtually every difference, but these are the ones that make me reluctant to drop Opera for Firefox (even though I drool over some FF extensions):
1. Opera's wonderful zoom feature allows me to read every web page easily. When you combine it with the user-css toggle every web page becomes crisp and clean, even though I'm using a crappy display.
2. Mouse gestures are built in and seem more responsive than FF with the plugin. Combine this with the right-click personal info and notes features and I can spend an hour browsing without every touching the keyboard. Some hate this; I love it.
There are other things here and there that add to the experience (ie built-in RSS support) but these are the things I missed when using FF this summer. Don't get me wrong: I think FF has more and better features when you count its extensions, but Opera's seem to be better integrated and snappier. I expect to switch at some point in the future, but FF isn't quite there yet.
I expected normalization: Simply match the peak volume of each song without compression. Yes, this means that the average volumes will differ -- but most of the time it's good enough for a mix.