That people would find our clear and concise messages
"pedantic/weird/irrelevant" is surreal. I suppose I'm focusing on business
email, but I certainly find that people appreciate it when I keep to the point
and use as little of their time as possible.
I don't have an "elaborate system". The simplest case is to quote nothing.
it works fine in most cases. The next and entirely optional step is "delete
everything except a sentence or a paragraph that establishes context." It's not
rocket science.
I completely understand that people are under no obligation to be polite.
That's not my point. People are under no obligation to not send their messages
ENTIRELY IN CAPS or in txt msg spk. Just because there is no obligation
doesn't mean it isn't rude.
When communicating with other people, be it in person, by telephone, in a
speech, by letter, by email, or even a Slashdot post, one should strive to be
clear and concise. This isn't some wild-eyed, bearded, Unix user
proclaimation, this is a simple extension of basic communication skills taught
in high school. In the past businesses managed to communicate by memo and
letter without quoting every single piece of prior correspondance. If
necessary for context prior correspondance might be quoted ("In your letter of
February 4rd you state..."). When facsimilies became mainstream they carried
forward existing practices. Those practices still apply to email.
(Completely random gripe: For some reason adding new technology seems to
make people forget the lessons of the past. I'm slowly unlearning my past few
years of exposure to PowerPoint hell,
and rediscovering that the public speaking class I hated in high school taught
me exactly what I needed to know to give truly compelling talks. PowerPoint is in fact a pretty good tool, but it's easy to confuse the tool for the purpose.)
The above style is sometimes called the Usenet style. I used to be a great fan of it, used it myself, until I realized how horribly choppy and snippy it is.
It's not so terrible. It's trying to capture the feel of a conversation. And while it is choppy, it's also extremely clear which points you're responding to. Your post may have been choppy, but it was crystal clear. If there is any danger to the Usenet style, it's that is very easy to fall into the trap of replying point-by-point to everything. Lots of interesting discussions on forests end up debating each individual tree. It definately has its weaknesses and can be used as a harmful crutch. Like all things it's best done in moderation.
I am, however, short on time and have better things to do than skim pages of text looking to see if someone inserted a reply. When joining an ongoing conversation, I've got better things to do than read the entire thing trying to identify which bits are relevant to the reason I was brought in.
I am, also, sometimes on a low-bandwidth or expensive-bandwidth connection like a cell phone. Long messages mean long waits, or more money. If I'm on a moderately expensive connection like a "$5 for fifteen minutes" wireless connection, while each individual long message isn't that big of a deal, but the combined effect can be.
I also sometimes read mail on various low-memory portable devices (Palm devices, cell phones again, high-end pagers), that may crop my message at some arbitrary boundary to try and compensate.
I also search the bodies of old messages to find information I needed. Perhaps I want to know exactly who sent me a particular fact so that I can ask them for further details. If their message is quoted in dozens of other messages, my search is less useful. Sure, I could open any of the messages, but them I'm digging around in the usually mangled, quoted headers looking for the sender, circumventing my email client's ability to parse and intelligently display headers.
Not all people think alike, and I came to realize my reasonable, rational arguments mostly just served to control the way other people expressed themselves -- i.e., so that they would express themselves more like myself.
I trust you're equally as accepting of those people who choose to WRITE IN ALL CAPS, or abbrvt lik u r txt mssging, or 3N463 1N 4 B17 0F 1337? (and I've seen all three by email, the first two in business email). Some forms of expression are irritating to receive and just stupid. Where you put quoted text isn't even some deep expression of your personality and life choices. It's just a freaking quotation.
Quoting text for context is an old idea with well understood techniques. Most people were taught how to do it in high school You block quote things inline, much like I've done your text.
You trim to the bare minimum so readers don't waste their time with useless junk.
Ultimately it's a matter of being polite to your recipient. You value their time, don't you? So send them a bare minimum. And for those cases where they need lots of context in the form of previous messages, top posting is an amazingly crude and rude solution. I have a powerful, modern email client for a reason. I thread my messages to keep track of context and have powerful searching and filtering capabilities. Putting the entire conversation in a single message throws that entire system away and leaves me with a stupid giant list of text, sorted in reverse historical order with signatures, Yahoo ads, and headers all intermingled. It's a mess. If I need those messages as context, forward the lot of them to me with as little mangling as possible (often called something like "bounce"). Now my powerful email client can do smart things to help keep me sane.
Ultimately not top-posting is about not being rude to your recipients. Top posting says, "I'm lazy, and this is easiest way for me to provide context you may or may not need. I don't care that it's less convient to you, my time is more valuable than yours."
Any sort of "quote the entire freaking message I'm replying to" is wrong, be it "Microsoft spits on your pathetic standards" top-posting, or "AOL Me-Tooer" bottom-posting. Both are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Only quote the bare minimum necessary to maintain context. If someone needs the entire prior conversation, forward them the entire conversation, ideally using "bounce" or similar feature so that they have access to individual messages and can have their email client do intelligent things like threading with it.
If you need an image of a banknote your central bank is required to provide you with an appropriate image. You just need to ask.
In the United States, they say they usually respond within two weeks. And that response might be a "no." If I need an image of a bill to create a background for an advertisement, and I need it done in the next two hours, I'm not going to write a letter (they say they want the request in writing), mail it off, and hope I get a reasonably fast response. I'm going to yank a bill out of my pocket and scan it.
The situation is worse if I want to do, say, a collage of multiple bills (for a "Invest with our international investment fund" ad). Shall I write letters to countries across the world? No, I'll grab what I can online, then I'll head over to a bank that handles conversions and get a few samples.
The biggest problem is that I shouldn't need to ask some beaurocrat for permission to do something that is already legal and unregulated.
WTF are all of you doing to get on so many spammers' lists?
All sorts of crazy things. Having a valid email address in the whois records for our domain (as required by the standards, failure to have a valid address is grounds for termination). Having a valid link on our web pages so people we're working with can easily contact us. Having our email address placed on the web by an automated directory that we can't exempt ourselves from. Having our email address in public, web archived email messages to a standards list that we participate in as part of our jobs. Having multiple email addresses (personal address, old personal address, business address, postmaster/root/webmaster) Posting to Usenet in the distant past when address munging wasn't common. Not quite as technically saavy friends who sign me up for email greeting cards, joke of the day lists, and the like.
If you change email addresses every few years, and don't participate too much online with your address, perhaps you can keep the spam tide down. I think that the above is perfectly reasonable for a technical person. My reward? Over 200 spam per day.
There is no moral reason to obtain unlawful copies of music, movies, software, what have you. The motive is greed pure and simple.
Careful with the absolutes. All but the most simple of laws have grey areas.
Take for example Walt Disney's creation, Steamboat Willy, generally
held to be the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. It was created in 1928. Based on
laws of the time, Disney could expect a term of 56 years, so it would fall into
the public domain in 1984. Despite this "short" time period, he chose to make
the cartoon, suggesting that the system worked. Disney proceeded to control
the copyright through his death in 1966. By any measure, society held up our
part of the deal.
Now, thanks to several copyright extensions, Steamboat Willy enjoys
a 95 year copyright duration. Steamboat Willy remains the exclusive
property of the Disney corporation until 2023. That's 39 extra years for which the public has received no recompense. This extension is not going to increase the productivity of the creator, seeing as he's dead and all. It's a shameless handout to an industry that didn't need it.
This is theft from the public, it's only legal because of embarassing
behavior by our so-called representatives. There is no moral reason for these
extensions, so there is no moral reason to obey them.
(All that said, I agree. "This movie sucks, so I'm going to download it for free," is a pretty stupid argument. Even as a poor college student I could scrape up the cash to occasionally rent a movie (especially if I could convince a few other people to kick in). If you can afford a computer to download it on, you can afford a secondhand VCR and an occasional few bucks at the video rental store.)
What if I did press vote? What if I followed the instructions to the letter? What if a software bug caused my vote to disappear into the void?
We don't know exactly what happened for those 100 some voters, thanks in part to lack of an audit trail. To leap to the assumption that the voters screwed up is just as stupid as assuming that the machines screwed up. Right now we have no idea. One thing is clear: a paper audit trail will make it easier to track down these problems. If the audit trail reveals that the voter screwed up, so be it. But until them I'm not comfortable blaming them.
Can someone please explain to me when this became a land where we had to determine what a voter intended and not what he actualy voted for (or in this case didn't vote for).
The point (well, one of the points), is that the voter may in fact have correctly voted, following all of the instructions correctly. The vote may have been lost for other reasons. Hardware failure and software failure are the two I worry most about. Corruption on the part of the machine developer is possible. Corruption on the part of the poll workers exploiting a bug in the software is another possibility.
Maybe the people in question didn't vote intentionally or accidentally. Maybe one of the above problems occurred. If you have paper receipts and part of the voting instructions are "You must check your receipt, then deposit it in this box," you can audit the system. But right now we have no idea. The theories given in the article are all guesses.
Two of the things you asked about are already in Gimp 1.2.x.
You can "straighten image" using the "rotation, scaling, shearing, perspective" tool (it looks like a resizing window in the toolbar). Anyway, pick "rotation" and "Corrective" in the tool options. Click in the image to bring up the rotation grid and rotate the grid until the lines of the grid are parallel to known horizontal lines in the image. Corrected. (Very useful for us sloppy photographers.)
As for auto-levels, Image > Levels > Auto. Or maybe you're talking about something else.
These probably moved in 1.3.x/2.0pre1, but I'd expect them to be there. (Looking at the 2.0pre1 screenshots it looks like the rotation tool was broken into four distinct tools, probably a good call.)
As for dimming the cropped area, I agree, that would be most excellent.
would the marketing dept of the casino want to reproduce actual-size bill, or much-large-than-life? Reproductions are legal if either: partial; smaller than real; much larger than real; single sided.
The problem is that Photoshop has no idea of knowing what size I'll be producing my final image at. Maybe I want a 1200DPI scan because I'm ultimately planning on blowing up to 10 feet across for a billboard. Heck, no matter what my ultimate goal is, the scan is going to come in at exactly the official size, part of the reason I would load it into Photoshop would be to rescale it!
I use gimp often when I don't want to wait/reboot for photoshop but every single time I do I find myself swearing and cursing at that clueless UI.
Check out the
development versions of the GIMP, they've been doing lots of work overhauling the UI. Lots of rearranging of information and functionality, improved ability to customize things, and the dockable windows/tabs similar to Photoshop. They just released a 2.0rc1, so it's nearly stable. It's a little more cutting edge than I'm willing to deal with right now, but if it's driving you up a wall it might be worth checking out.
PS CS pops up dialog: "This application does not support the unauthorized processing of banknote images."
Wow, Photoshop CS is capable of determining that your processing was unauthorized? That's the most amazing AI achievement I've heard of in a long time.
I suppose counterfeiters might prefer photoshop, but what about those that prefer Gimp?
My father has gradually moved his photography from film to digital and now works entirely digitally. He's worked with a variety of software programs and was a huge fan of Corel's PhotoPaint for a long time. He eventually switched to Photoshop for one reason: dead accurate color reproduction. PhotoPaint and other tools had color correction capabilities, but they weren't as good as Photoshop which apparently Just Worked. While super-accurate color reproduction isn't terribly important for most purposes, when printing high quality artistic prints it matters.
It would seem to me that counterfeitting would be another area where people demand exceptional color reproduction. Thus, Photoshop might be the right tool. While I love the GIMP dearly (and maintain that it is suitable for most purposes including creating prints for most people and even newspaper work), it's color reproduction isn't as advanced. (Of course, maybe this is incentive to improve it. Time to start watching for GIMP patch submissions from "Big Vinnie.")
You Free Software freaks are know-nothing communists. Newsflash, the Soviet Union fell! Now I don't have a problem with Open Source Software, there is some great OSS that I'm happy to recommend. But to suggest that it's dangerous to rely on proprietary software is just stupid. Businesses and governments should use the best solution they can find. If it happens to be proprietary, so be it. That's why I use a mix of UnixWare and Linux. For some purposes Linux is the best solution and to satisfy my customers I've incorporated cutting edge versions Linux into solutions I sell. It's a key part of my business, I'd be ruined without it. I also use UnixWare because it's stable, solid software. The supplier of UnixWare has been good to me in the past and has a long history, they're no fly-by-nighters. They even embraced Linux in a big way, synergizing my two focuses. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, hey, a letter from SCO, the supplier of UnixWare, probably offering me another great deal. I love those guys!
Am I the only PERSON WHO PLAYS VIDEO GAMES who is sick of hearing the word "gamer"?
Apparently, because the term has never bothered me or my circle of friends, many of whom describe themselves as gamers.
(Although, the word does bother me a little, as it was in use by table top (role-playing and war gaming mostly) gamers long before video gamers started using it. Anyway... back to the subject at hand.)
When I hear SOMEONE WHO PLAYS VIDEO GAMES describe him/herself as a "gamer" it sounds to me like they're trying to wrap their fun hobby in a veil of credibility, as if it has social merit or importance.
It sounds to me like you're hearing things. I suggest having a doctor check
on that. I've never heard someone user the term with that intent. Gamer is a
useful way to categorize people with similar interests. That's it. One who
reads (typically books) is a reader, one who sees films is a movie-goer, one
who watches TV is a viewer, one who shops is a shopper. It's just natural that
one who plays games would be a gamer. None of these terms are intended to
glorify the activity, just to label the participants.
Just try to relax. No one is trying to manipulate language to give ourselves
an aura of respectibility. When you start hearing people describe themselves
as digital era storytelling and simulation enthusists you'll know people have overinflated views of themselves.
Let's see, Jon has been completely acquitted on the previous charges and it seems likely that attacking him in court on this issue will fail just as badly. So, he's relatively safe. Furthermore, he's still young, he can probably afford the in court.
What's the up side? Fame. He becomes known as someone who can break DRM
systems. That suggests a high level of technical competance. While his
efforts will turn off some potential employers, it will appeal to many very
interesting employers who value skill.
As a happy side effect the world gets some potentially useful software (that may very well be illegal in the United States, but will remain available in Jon's home country).
Doing this now was an extremely smart move. Doing it anonymously would have been the stupid action.
Richard, I agree with your pitch on free software to some extent, but how exactly are we in the IT business going to make a living if all (or most) of the software is free in the future?
If all software becomes free, the need for software will vanish? Of course not.
The first important point: most software written is written for internal company use only. Most programmers write software that is never sold, just used by the company that hired them. Great, the custom billing software I wrote for MegaCorp is open source. Does it change anything? Nope. Their jobs aren't going to change, open source doesn't change anything.
There will still be demand for software. Someone will figure out a way to charge for it. I suspect a combination of methods of various forms. Perhaps donations will work. Perhaps they'll use a variant on the Street Performer Protocol. Perhaps users desiring features will pledge money to contracts for developers (on a small level a web site might collect small pledges from end users and the first developer to finish gets the money. On a large level, a group of companies requiring software might pool the money they're willing to spend and simply contract someone to write the software.) A wealthy individual might front a large amount of money on a product or feature they want.
Finally some software can be tied to non-free content. For example, maybe the DoomQuake 47 engine is free, but the actual game content (the level design, monsters, etc) will cost you money.
Ultimately I have faith in the market, and it's that faith that leaves me confident that there will be jobs for programmers. People want software and are willing to pay for it. Programmers want money and can write software. Something will be worked out. It may be new and different. It may, regrettably, shrink the market, but that's the nature of many mature markets. Things will work themselves out.
I respect RMS for his work and some of his views, but I think that his notion that only OSS is right contracdicts his beliefs. By saying everybody should shun non-FS he's limiting their freedom of choice is he not.
No, that's just silly. If I tell you that shouldn't spend so much time on Slashdot I'm not limiting your freedom of choice, I'm trying to convince you to change your viewpoint. RMS is just trying to spread his view point. If RMS is elected to government and starts passing laws forcing the use of Free Software, I'd agree with you, but not quite yet.
(And your statement that RMS's belief is "only OSS is right" suggests it time to re-read "Why 'Free Software' is better than 'Open Source'". RMS does not promote OSS and feels that OSS is a regrettable step backward.)
I have always seen FS/OSS as choice rather then a need. I introduce people to it and leave them to choose if they want to use it or not. I think the FS should promote Freedom of Choice when using software, and point out the advantages of choosing FS rather then promoting using only Free Software to promote freedom.
Perhaps you'll find the beliefs of the Open Source Initiative more in line with yours. This is a key reason that Free Software and Open Source Software are slightly different (if often allied) camps. The Free Software camp (to the extent you can point to such a beast) has always placed a high value on the morality of the situation.
The Perl language has built-in "taint-checking" enabled via the -T command line switch which causes Perl to automatically keep track of all information that possibly came from a user input and not allow any of it to do anything harmful (basically end up on a command line or in a file name).
Taint checking isn't perfect, may have bugs in its implementation, and can't cover all possible cases. Taint checking is a wonderful tool, but it should only be one layer in a multi-layered defense. Don't view it as a one stop solution, just view it as extra-paranoid defense on top of your already securely designed code.
For all those that are undoubtely going to post something about how America and President Bush in particular are evil for doing something like this here's a little factoid:
Europe did it first to Spain for it's SUPPORT of the Iraq war.
Oh, gosh, if Europe did it first, it must be okay!
Personally, I hold my country to higher standards. If we're going to be a shining beacon of goodness and freedom, we should strive to be above petty politicking. It's hard to lead the world out of the muck when you're busy rooting around in it with everyone else.
Or perhaps you'll ignore it since it fits into your worldview.
Or perhaps he'll ignore it because he isn't a citizen of France, Spain, or any of the other EU member nations, and as such doesn't feel it's his place to rebuke them? Maybe he's just focusing on removing the plank from his own country's eye before pointing out the lumber in the eyes of other nations?
I've been working with high-energy physicists for the last year or so. They have some great (if apocryphal) stories. Apparently there is a great deal of old Fortran code that has been untouched since the 70s, but is still linked into modern programs. The reason? The code was written by someone in the 70s. That person then went on to win a Nobel prize for their work. They they died. No one feels competant to replace it.
I don't know if it's true, but I believe that the physicists I know believe it.
For a while a healthy chunk of my incoming spam was "Cable TV Descrambler, perfectly legal" junk. I always assumed it was legal, just highly deceptive. My understanding is that it is legal to own a digital cable TV decoder box (arguably a "descrambler"), but that said box was useless unless that cable company did something to hook you up. In essence they were offering to sell you the exact same box your cable company is willing to sell you, but at a huge price increase because they hinted that you get get cable for free (but notably the spam never actually said as much). You get a worthless box that you're not going to return because claiming, "Returning because I couldn't steal cable service" is stupid. So are these the same guys? The article doesn't provide alot of detail. Heck, one of the key charges appears to be money laundering according the article. The quoted sheriff says that common sense says it's illegal, but never actually says that it is illegal (and common sense is sometimes wrong about such things). It's a real shame that the article doesn't have more details on the specific charges.
Slashdot Mirror
That people would find our clear and concise messages "pedantic/weird/irrelevant" is surreal. I suppose I'm focusing on business email, but I certainly find that people appreciate it when I keep to the point and use as little of their time as possible.
I don't have an "elaborate system". The simplest case is to quote nothing. it works fine in most cases. The next and entirely optional step is "delete everything except a sentence or a paragraph that establishes context." It's not rocket science.
I completely understand that people are under no obligation to be polite. That's not my point. People are under no obligation to not send their messages ENTIRELY IN CAPS or in txt msg spk. Just because there is no obligation doesn't mean it isn't rude.
When communicating with other people, be it in person, by telephone, in a speech, by letter, by email, or even a Slashdot post, one should strive to be clear and concise. This isn't some wild-eyed, bearded, Unix user proclaimation, this is a simple extension of basic communication skills taught in high school. In the past businesses managed to communicate by memo and letter without quoting every single piece of prior correspondance. If necessary for context prior correspondance might be quoted ("In your letter of February 4rd you state..."). When facsimilies became mainstream they carried forward existing practices. Those practices still apply to email.
(Completely random gripe: For some reason adding new technology seems to make people forget the lessons of the past. I'm slowly unlearning my past few years of exposure to PowerPoint hell, and rediscovering that the public speaking class I hated in high school taught me exactly what I needed to know to give truly compelling talks. PowerPoint is in fact a pretty good tool, but it's easy to confuse the tool for the purpose.)
It's not so terrible. It's trying to capture the feel of a conversation. And while it is choppy, it's also extremely clear which points you're responding to. Your post may have been choppy, but it was crystal clear. If there is any danger to the Usenet style, it's that is very easy to fall into the trap of replying point-by-point to everything. Lots of interesting discussions on forests end up debating each individual tree. It definately has its weaknesses and can be used as a harmful crutch. Like all things it's best done in moderation.
No, of course not, that would be silly.
I am, however, short on time and have better things to do than skim pages of text looking to see if someone inserted a reply. When joining an ongoing conversation, I've got better things to do than read the entire thing trying to identify which bits are relevant to the reason I was brought in.
I am, also, sometimes on a low-bandwidth or expensive-bandwidth connection like a cell phone. Long messages mean long waits, or more money. If I'm on a moderately expensive connection like a "$5 for fifteen minutes" wireless connection, while each individual long message isn't that big of a deal, but the combined effect can be.
I also sometimes read mail on various low-memory portable devices (Palm devices, cell phones again, high-end pagers), that may crop my message at some arbitrary boundary to try and compensate.
I also search the bodies of old messages to find information I needed. Perhaps I want to know exactly who sent me a particular fact so that I can ask them for further details. If their message is quoted in dozens of other messages, my search is less useful. Sure, I could open any of the messages, but them I'm digging around in the usually mangled, quoted headers looking for the sender, circumventing my email client's ability to parse and intelligently display headers.
I trust you're equally as accepting of those people who choose to WRITE IN ALL CAPS, or abbrvt lik u r txt mssging, or 3N463 1N 4 B17 0F 1337? (and I've seen all three by email, the first two in business email). Some forms of expression are irritating to receive and just stupid. Where you put quoted text isn't even some deep expression of your personality and life choices. It's just a freaking quotation.
Quoting text for context is an old idea with well understood techniques. Most people were taught how to do it in high school You block quote things inline, much like I've done your text. You trim to the bare minimum so readers don't waste their time with useless junk.
Ultimately it's a matter of being polite to your recipient. You value their time, don't you? So send them a bare minimum. And for those cases where they need lots of context in the form of previous messages, top posting is an amazingly crude and rude solution. I have a powerful, modern email client for a reason. I thread my messages to keep track of context and have powerful searching and filtering capabilities. Putting the entire conversation in a single message throws that entire system away and leaves me with a stupid giant list of text, sorted in reverse historical order with signatures, Yahoo ads, and headers all intermingled. It's a mess. If I need those messages as context, forward the lot of them to me with as little mangling as possible (often called something like "bounce"). Now my powerful email client can do smart things to help keep me sane.
Ultimately not top-posting is about not being rude to your recipients. Top posting says, "I'm lazy, and this is easiest way for me to provide context you may or may not need. I don't care that it's less convient to you, my time is more valuable than yours."
Any sort of "quote the entire freaking message I'm replying to" is wrong, be it "Microsoft spits on your pathetic standards" top-posting, or "AOL Me-Tooer" bottom-posting. Both are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Only quote the bare minimum necessary to maintain context. If someone needs the entire prior conversation, forward them the entire conversation, ideally using "bounce" or similar feature so that they have access to individual messages and can have their email client do intelligent things like threading with it.
In the United States, they say they usually respond within two weeks. And that response might be a "no." If I need an image of a bill to create a background for an advertisement, and I need it done in the next two hours, I'm not going to write a letter (they say they want the request in writing), mail it off, and hope I get a reasonably fast response. I'm going to yank a bill out of my pocket and scan it.
The situation is worse if I want to do, say, a collage of multiple bills (for a "Invest with our international investment fund" ad). Shall I write letters to countries across the world? No, I'll grab what I can online, then I'll head over to a bank that handles conversions and get a few samples.
The biggest problem is that I shouldn't need to ask some beaurocrat for permission to do something that is already legal and unregulated.
All sorts of crazy things. Having a valid email address in the whois records for our domain (as required by the standards, failure to have a valid address is grounds for termination). Having a valid link on our web pages so people we're working with can easily contact us. Having our email address placed on the web by an automated directory that we can't exempt ourselves from. Having our email address in public, web archived email messages to a standards list that we participate in as part of our jobs. Having multiple email addresses (personal address, old personal address, business address, postmaster/root/webmaster) Posting to Usenet in the distant past when address munging wasn't common. Not quite as technically saavy friends who sign me up for email greeting cards, joke of the day lists, and the like.
If you change email addresses every few years, and don't participate too much online with your address, perhaps you can keep the spam tide down. I think that the above is perfectly reasonable for a technical person. My reward? Over 200 spam per day.
Careful with the absolutes. All but the most simple of laws have grey areas.
Take for example Walt Disney's creation, Steamboat Willy, generally held to be the first Mickey Mouse cartoon. It was created in 1928. Based on laws of the time, Disney could expect a term of 56 years, so it would fall into the public domain in 1984. Despite this "short" time period, he chose to make the cartoon, suggesting that the system worked. Disney proceeded to control the copyright through his death in 1966. By any measure, society held up our part of the deal.
Now, thanks to several copyright extensions, Steamboat Willy enjoys a 95 year copyright duration. Steamboat Willy remains the exclusive property of the Disney corporation until 2023. That's 39 extra years for which the public has received no recompense. This extension is not going to increase the productivity of the creator, seeing as he's dead and all. It's a shameless handout to an industry that didn't need it.
This is theft from the public, it's only legal because of embarassing behavior by our so-called representatives. There is no moral reason for these extensions, so there is no moral reason to obey them.
(All that said, I agree. "This movie sucks, so I'm going to download it for free," is a pretty stupid argument. Even as a poor college student I could scrape up the cash to occasionally rent a movie (especially if I could convince a few other people to kick in). If you can afford a computer to download it on, you can afford a secondhand VCR and an occasional few bucks at the video rental store.)
What if I did press vote? What if I followed the instructions to the letter? What if a software bug caused my vote to disappear into the void?
We don't know exactly what happened for those 100 some voters, thanks in part to lack of an audit trail. To leap to the assumption that the voters screwed up is just as stupid as assuming that the machines screwed up. Right now we have no idea. One thing is clear: a paper audit trail will make it easier to track down these problems. If the audit trail reveals that the voter screwed up, so be it. But until them I'm not comfortable blaming them.
The point (well, one of the points), is that the voter may in fact have correctly voted, following all of the instructions correctly. The vote may have been lost for other reasons. Hardware failure and software failure are the two I worry most about. Corruption on the part of the machine developer is possible. Corruption on the part of the poll workers exploiting a bug in the software is another possibility.
Maybe the people in question didn't vote intentionally or accidentally. Maybe one of the above problems occurred. If you have paper receipts and part of the voting instructions are "You must check your receipt, then deposit it in this box," you can audit the system. But right now we have no idea. The theories given in the article are all guesses.
Two of the things you asked about are already in Gimp 1.2.x.
You can "straighten image" using the "rotation, scaling, shearing, perspective" tool (it looks like a resizing window in the toolbar). Anyway, pick "rotation" and "Corrective" in the tool options. Click in the image to bring up the rotation grid and rotate the grid until the lines of the grid are parallel to known horizontal lines in the image. Corrected. (Very useful for us sloppy photographers.)
As for auto-levels, Image > Levels > Auto. Or maybe you're talking about something else.
These probably moved in 1.3.x/2.0pre1, but I'd expect them to be there. (Looking at the 2.0pre1 screenshots it looks like the rotation tool was broken into four distinct tools, probably a good call.)
As for dimming the cropped area, I agree, that would be most excellent.
The problem is that Photoshop has no idea of knowing what size I'll be producing my final image at. Maybe I want a 1200DPI scan because I'm ultimately planning on blowing up to 10 feet across for a billboard. Heck, no matter what my ultimate goal is, the scan is going to come in at exactly the official size, part of the reason I would load it into Photoshop would be to rescale it!
It's a stupid, broken feature.
Check out the development versions of the GIMP, they've been doing lots of work overhauling the UI. Lots of rearranging of information and functionality, improved ability to customize things, and the dockable windows/tabs similar to Photoshop. They just released a 2.0rc1, so it's nearly stable. It's a little more cutting edge than I'm willing to deal with right now, but if it's driving you up a wall it might be worth checking out.
Wow, Photoshop CS is capable of determining that your processing was unauthorized? That's the most amazing AI achievement I've heard of in a long time.
My father has gradually moved his photography from film to digital and now works entirely digitally. He's worked with a variety of software programs and was a huge fan of Corel's PhotoPaint for a long time. He eventually switched to Photoshop for one reason: dead accurate color reproduction. PhotoPaint and other tools had color correction capabilities, but they weren't as good as Photoshop which apparently Just Worked. While super-accurate color reproduction isn't terribly important for most purposes, when printing high quality artistic prints it matters.
It would seem to me that counterfeitting would be another area where people demand exceptional color reproduction. Thus, Photoshop might be the right tool. While I love the GIMP dearly (and maintain that it is suitable for most purposes including creating prints for most people and even newspaper work), it's color reproduction isn't as advanced. (Of course, maybe this is incentive to improve it. Time to start watching for GIMP patch submissions from "Big Vinnie.")
Hmmmm, what's this? *Grph*choke*Agle*
Is Mr. Stallman accepting disciples?
Apparently, because the term has never bothered me or my circle of friends, many of whom describe themselves as gamers.
(Although, the word does bother me a little, as it was in use by table top (role-playing and war gaming mostly) gamers long before video gamers started using it. Anyway... back to the subject at hand.)
It sounds to me like you're hearing things. I suggest having a doctor check on that. I've never heard someone user the term with that intent. Gamer is a useful way to categorize people with similar interests. That's it. One who reads (typically books) is a reader, one who sees films is a movie-goer, one who watches TV is a viewer, one who shops is a shopper. It's just natural that one who plays games would be a gamer. None of these terms are intended to glorify the activity, just to label the participants.
Just try to relax. No one is trying to manipulate language to give ourselves an aura of respectibility. When you start hearing people describe themselves as digital era storytelling and simulation enthusists you'll know people have overinflated views of themselves.
Let's see, Jon has been completely acquitted on the previous charges and it seems likely that attacking him in court on this issue will fail just as badly. So, he's relatively safe. Furthermore, he's still young, he can probably afford the in court.
What's the up side? Fame. He becomes known as someone who can break DRM systems. That suggests a high level of technical competance. While his efforts will turn off some potential employers, it will appeal to many very interesting employers who value skill.
As a happy side effect the world gets some potentially useful software (that may very well be illegal in the United States, but will remain available in Jon's home country).
Doing this now was an extremely smart move. Doing it anonymously would have been the stupid action.
If all software becomes free, the need for software will vanish? Of course not.
The first important point: most software written is written for internal company use only. Most programmers write software that is never sold, just used by the company that hired them. Great, the custom billing software I wrote for MegaCorp is open source. Does it change anything? Nope. Their jobs aren't going to change, open source doesn't change anything.
There will still be demand for software. Someone will figure out a way to charge for it. I suspect a combination of methods of various forms. Perhaps donations will work. Perhaps they'll use a variant on the Street Performer Protocol. Perhaps users desiring features will pledge money to contracts for developers (on a small level a web site might collect small pledges from end users and the first developer to finish gets the money. On a large level, a group of companies requiring software might pool the money they're willing to spend and simply contract someone to write the software.) A wealthy individual might front a large amount of money on a product or feature they want.
Finally some software can be tied to non-free content. For example, maybe the DoomQuake 47 engine is free, but the actual game content (the level design, monsters, etc) will cost you money.
Ultimately I have faith in the market, and it's that faith that leaves me confident that there will be jobs for programmers. People want software and are willing to pay for it. Programmers want money and can write software. Something will be worked out. It may be new and different. It may, regrettably, shrink the market, but that's the nature of many mature markets. Things will work themselves out.
No, that's just silly. If I tell you that shouldn't spend so much time on Slashdot I'm not limiting your freedom of choice, I'm trying to convince you to change your viewpoint. RMS is just trying to spread his view point. If RMS is elected to government and starts passing laws forcing the use of Free Software, I'd agree with you, but not quite yet.
(And your statement that RMS's belief is "only OSS is right" suggests it time to re-read "Why 'Free Software' is better than 'Open Source'". RMS does not promote OSS and feels that OSS is a regrettable step backward.)
Perhaps you'll find the beliefs of the Open Source Initiative more in line with yours. This is a key reason that Free Software and Open Source Software are slightly different (if often allied) camps. The Free Software camp (to the extent you can point to such a beast) has always placed a high value on the morality of the situation.
Taint checking isn't perfect, may have bugs in its implementation, and can't cover all possible cases. Taint checking is a wonderful tool, but it should only be one layer in a multi-layered defense. Don't view it as a one stop solution, just view it as extra-paranoid defense on top of your already securely designed code.
Oh, gosh, if Europe did it first, it must be okay!
Personally, I hold my country to higher standards. If we're going to be a shining beacon of goodness and freedom, we should strive to be above petty politicking. It's hard to lead the world out of the muck when you're busy rooting around in it with everyone else.
Or perhaps he'll ignore it because he isn't a citizen of France, Spain, or any of the other EU member nations, and as such doesn't feel it's his place to rebuke them? Maybe he's just focusing on removing the plank from his own country's eye before pointing out the lumber in the eyes of other nations?
I don't know if it's true, but I believe that the physicists I know believe it.
For a while a healthy chunk of my incoming spam was "Cable TV Descrambler, perfectly legal" junk. I always assumed it was legal, just highly deceptive. My understanding is that it is legal to own a digital cable TV decoder box (arguably a "descrambler"), but that said box was useless unless that cable company did something to hook you up. In essence they were offering to sell you the exact same box your cable company is willing to sell you, but at a huge price increase because they hinted that you get get cable for free (but notably the spam never actually said as much). You get a worthless box that you're not going to return because claiming, "Returning because I couldn't steal cable service" is stupid. So are these the same guys? The article doesn't provide alot of detail. Heck, one of the key charges appears to be money laundering according the article. The quoted sheriff says that common sense says it's illegal, but never actually says that it is illegal (and common sense is sometimes wrong about such things). It's a real shame that the article doesn't have more details on the specific charges.