if DRM existed that preserved your fair-use rights while taking away your non-right to mass distribute copyrighted material, they would fine with it.
I have a hard time imagining an instance where having the computer read it aloud, wouldn't be fair use. (You're not only going to do a public performance by reading a book, but you're going to do it through some crappy speech synth?) But Adobe eBook Reader has an option not to let you read it aloud. Since they currently restrict free use rights, it's obvious that the intent behind DRM extends to more than just copyright violations.
for( int i = 0; i < strlen( str ); i++ ) {
str[i] = toupper( str[i] ); }
In this case we know what we're doing, there's nothing to exploit, and we saved ourselves strlen( str ) * 2 instructions at least. Perhaps not a tremendous boon, but it can add up. In higher level languages we don't have that option, but it's nice because we don't have to work about it either.
But in
for I in Str'First.. Str'Last loop
Str (I) = To_Upper (Str (I)); end loop;
no half-decent Ada compiler will do any bounds-checking either, as it can be trivially inferred from loop bounds that everything inside is in bound.
There is a downside to bounds checking though: The natural evolution of the idea is [...]
But that's just a slippery slope argument. You have to pick the abstractions you can afford - bounds checking is on by default in Ada, but garbage collection is a mostly-unoffered option - but BC doesn't imply GC, anymore than a lack of bounds checking implies machine language.
including garbage collection which is, to me, an absolutely ridiculous idea
Why? It catches another huge class of bugs - memory leaks - and simplifies programming - you no longer have to worry about whose responsibility it is to delete every little bit of memory. It seemed to work well enough back in the eighties, on Lisp Machinese - somehow, with a thousand times the computational power, we no longer have the power to spare?
If a criminal can claim that evidence should be thrown out because it wasn't secure, you bet the judge will side with him.
Right. The public defender who writes The Law is a Ass says that he's near the top of his office having got evidence thrown out twice, and that judges hate to throw out evidence just like anyone else would.
Enhancing a photograph is no different then using a microscope to make the image more clear.
Once you put something under the microscope, you can play with a couple knobs, but what you see is what's there. There's no such guarentee with Photoshop -- you could load it into Photoshop, erase it, and draw a new fingerprint. "Enhanced" photographs shouldn't be accepted until it's passed the scientific acceptance test (like microscopes have), and even then it's important to tell what was done to a picture.
taking options away from users is a side-effect of most of the DRM schemes out there
It's not a side effect - it's the main effect. The point of most DRM is to prevent the copying of material; whether or not that copying is illegal, it's still an option of the user.
How much time, compared to hand bounds checking? And how much CPU time is worth a weekend of admin time cleaning up after a break-in?
Nor will programs that do heavy duty graphics
Most programs that do heavy duty graphics offloaded most of their code to the graphics card.
Sometimes even C++ has too much overhead.
Gee, like when? C++ was designed to have no overhead except when you use the new features. And metatemplate programming can massively beat procedural programming by doing at compile time what the procedural program does at execution time (or writes the same code a dozen times.)
Switching from c/c++ is simply not an option for many projects.
We've gone from OS's and heavy duty graphics to many projects. Furthermore, assembly has less overhead than C; you can frequently write the code in whatever language, and then take the 5% that actually takes time, and rewrite it in assembly, and beat anything that's straight C.
It is really not that much of a chore to write safe string-handling code in C; the problem is that most C programmers aren't taught how to do so. That's an education problem, not a language problem.
Is that your solution to all mine fields? When most users are having a problem with something, it's easier and far more reliable to fix it at the computer then to try and educate every user.
C is great because it has, AFAIK, the least overhead of any "high" level programming language out there.
So your box is owned, but the people who own it get the most speed possible. Thanks.
C lets you write to the metal. Ada, and many other languages, lets the compiler write to the metal; even if you're writing to just one platform, it's likely the compiler writers knew more about how to get the best out of that metal then you do, and if you're writing to more than one platform, you can't optimize on the level that the compiler can. And a compiler can optimize "A : Integer range 1..10;" better then it can "int A;", because the first tells it more information. Higher level, an APL compiler can compile a matrix multiplication to the the most accurate and fast possible on the platform, whereas a C compiler can't change your implementation of the same.
Also, it's no good to get the least overhead if you don't use it. I wrote an Ada version of strings that was ten times faster then GNU strings. (It didn't have all the fancy binutils options, but I needed to extract the strings from a 10 GB hard drive image.) It was a simple matter of a slight algorithmic improvement, but they never made it. Until you're willing to go through and make all those improvements, you've lost the slight advantage that C would give you.
This isn't the fault of the language, it's the fault of the programmer. How hard is it to do bounds checking?
Right. Blame the programmer. Back in real life, we have no perfect programmers, and only a few excellent programmers, and are left with the average programmer to write most programs, and the average programmer very frequently forgets bounds checking. It seems better to fix the machines to work with the users, rather than try an obviously futile job of fixing every programmer out there.
they do not fully control the situation so they are evil
I never said evil. But giving up control over a situation is always a perilous decision, and I don't see why I should have mercy on them because they made some wrong decisions.
Now just for the sake of argument here
Just for the sake of argument, you want me to take one case favorable to you and massively generalize it? Man, I wish I could have gotten away with that in debate.
I had a radeon using the GPL drivers and this is what I experienced again and again.
And I take it you filed a bug report? Because it's considered tacky to trash Free software if you didn't bother to file a bug report.
they appear in practice to suck hard in the physical world.
So 3d-accelerated video cards is the physical world? Not mice, or keyboards, or RAID cards, or SCSI adaptors? Just 3d-accelerated video cards?
The context was "locked-down box". If I walk up to your secured linux system with a statically linked, suid copy of Vi on a floppy and you "misconfigured" your fstab such that I could mount and run it, that's the same problem.
There would be no problem running it. But the floppy drive is usually set nosuid, so it would just ignore the suidness of the file. Nonprivliged users can't preserve the suidness of a file while copying, either.
And what's the first thing you have to do with a patent? You publish the details of how it works! What's the point of keeping it hidden, if you've already revealed it, and have the law keeping people from using it without your permission?
the hypocrisy of the Linux kernel devs taking away choices from the people that use their kernel.
This isn't BSD; there have always been restrictions on the use of Linux, in order to encourage people to share their changes back with Linux, instead of every two-bit propretary distribution having their own secret patches.
they MUST protect their legit property (their hardware).
At best, you could argue that they should protect thier legit property; they are under no obligation to do so. It also does not follow the best way to protect the value of their property is by only releasing binary drivers.
the kernel developers, over philosphical nonsense, have decided to shoot linux in the face and try to drive it back into obscurity.
So some hardware doesn't run with Linux because the hardware company isn't willing to work with Linux people in supporting it. Boo-hoo. You should buy your hardware, keeping in mind what you want to do with it. If you want to use Linux, then buy a card that works well with Linux.
More realistically, when you see the text "and then millions died..." that's us.
I was listening to the last of the Lord of the Rings on tape last night, and heard of the battle over the Shire. The hobbits fought the thugs, and some 30 nameless hobbits died, and a like number of nameless thugs. Then they go into to deal with the leader, and find Saurman and Wormtongue. Even after Saurman tried killing Frodo, they still let them go! Somehow, the potential for these repeat offenders to do good was more important then any of those who died in the battle. (Of course, Wormtongue kills Saurman, to be just, but their great blood can't land on our heros hand's, oh no.)
The earth couldn't be millions of years old because God created it about 6000 years ago. If the creation of the earth about 6000 years ago is accepted as truth, then we use this to eliminate the question of the age of the earth being 4.5 billion of year old.
If we start with the assumption that the world is 6000 years old, then given that assumption, it's 6000 years old. If you start without any assumption of Christianity's truth, it looks like the world is roughly 5 billion years old. If you start by assuming the Bible is true, and the information of our senses is true, then you have a fairly complex question, with different answers depending on the believer.
it is impossible to be a true Christian and not believe that God created the world.
No where in the Bible does it say the world was created 6000 years ago. I think the Bible has pretty good evidence that the Hebrews didn't view large numbers with the precision we did - notice the symbolic use of 70, 70 times 70, and 144,000 at various places in the bible. It would have been very hard to explain to them that the world was five billion years old. Christians* believe God created the world; but they don't necessarily believe that he felt compelled to give the exact blow by blow to the Hebrews, instead of giving them some version they could understand.
And you'll probably even win, after you spend a few thousand dollars to defend yourself.
Anybody can sue over anything, and force you to spend a few thousand dollars to defend yourself. Because,
That's the way it works in practice.
The intentional mistakes are put there as fingerprints to show it was *their* page you imaged.
The problem is, the intentional mistakes are there as fingerprints, like fingerprints on a Van Gogh. They may not be easy to notice, but if they are, they will look bad, and people will get annoyed.
What they're concerned about is that someone might print copies of Walden by simply photocopying the pages of "their" book.
Why would they be concerned about that? It would look like crap; if you had a brain, you'd take the text and dump it into a word processor, and get a half decent copy.
*Editions* of works in the public domain can still be copyrighted. Many publishers introduce intentional mistakes into their editions to make them "protected."
I don't believe it. They use overbroad copyright statements - putting Copyright 1999 on a copy of 1912 book where they only thing they added was the introduction - but minor changes in the US don't matter - from the copyright office's FAQ:
For instance, simply making spelling corrections throughout a work does not warrant a new registration -- adding an additional chapter would.
You have no right to demand something in a particular format.
We aren't demanding that they change their format; we demanding the right to write programs that read their format, if we can figure it out. They can release anything they want, so long as we can also.
and i bet there are indian films made cheaper than any of the films mentioned here.
There are lots of films made cheaper, especially as Joe Blow can take a camera out and make a film for practically nothing. I wouldn't bet on a decent quality Indian film being made much cheaper; there are certain costs - like actors and film and gas and costumes - that you can't cut without going the Blair Witch Project route, which used its low quality for a very deliberate effect.
The question is the ratio of cost to profit; how many of those films made 100 million dollars? If they made 100 million dollars, then someone would start making better Indian films on more money (and/or Indian stars would start demanding a larger cut) and the Indian market would demading higher quality films.
Ah, but are those numbers inflated? Movies cost more now than they did then.
The original Mad Max was made on a very low budget. It was the highest profit to cost ratio movie until Blair Witch. So cheap that the only actor to wear real leather was Mel Gibson - the other characters had to do with fake leather.
(All from the pop-up-video type notes on the DVD.)
Here's what I could find: [a list of names of Unicode characters]
The name of a Unicode character never tells you everything about it. In this instance, Apostrophe is merely a legacy backlash - if you were reading the standard (available for free at the Unicode website), you would see the note below apostrophe noting this, and the note below the single right quote noting that it was the real apostrophe.
If your accessibility software requires alt tags for my meaningless shim images (not that I use any) then your accessibility software sucks.
If you don't have alt tags for your meaningless shim images (which are required by the latest HTML standards), your HTML sucks. How is accessibility software supposted to know whether you didn't bother to add ALT tags (and it should try to read the graphic name so the reader has some idea what's there) or if it's a meaningless image? It could guess, but wouldn't it much better if you just told it?
I know what the current Unicode recommendation is. I just wonder why they recommend it.
As you said, this is common practice in the typesetting business. Unicode is not in the practice of making typesetting policy; furthermore, Unicode tries not to seperate characters by function unless they're clearly distinct characters. The Latin 'o' and the Cyrillic 'o' get seperate codepoints because they're in different scripts.
Yep, this is an example of someone disliking the look of the "correct" glyph (the apostrophe, or ' ) and choosing to use a totally different character instead (the right single-quote) because it looks more appropriate.
No. As noted by the AC below,
U+0027 APSOTROPHE is the most commonly used character for apostrophe. However, it has ambiguous semantics and direction. When text is set, U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK is preferred as apostrophe. Word processors commonly offer a facility for automatically converting the U+0027 APOSTROPHE to a contextually-selected curly quotation glyph.
-Unicode Standard
The ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated in Unicode; it's used for at least five different other characters in Unicode, so they decided just to replace it completely.
Slashdot Mirror
if DRM existed that preserved your fair-use rights while taking away your non-right to mass distribute copyrighted material, they would fine with it.
I have a hard time imagining an instance where having the computer read it aloud, wouldn't be fair use. (You're not only going to do a public performance by reading a book, but you're going to do it through some crappy speech synth?) But Adobe eBook Reader has an option not to let you read it aloud. Since they currently restrict free use rights, it's obvious that the intent behind DRM extends to more than just copyright violations.
But inno half-decent Ada compiler will do any bounds-checking either, as it can be trivially inferred from loop bounds that everything inside is in bound.
There is a downside to bounds checking though: The natural evolution of the idea is [...]
But that's just a slippery slope argument. You have to pick the abstractions you can afford - bounds checking is on by default in Ada, but garbage collection is a mostly-unoffered option - but BC doesn't imply GC, anymore than a lack of bounds checking implies machine language.
including garbage collection which is, to me, an absolutely ridiculous idea
Why? It catches another huge class of bugs - memory leaks - and simplifies programming - you no longer have to worry about whose responsibility it is to delete every little bit of memory. It seemed to work well enough back in the eighties, on Lisp Machinese - somehow, with a thousand times the computational power, we no longer have the power to spare?
If a criminal can claim that evidence should be thrown out because it wasn't secure, you bet the judge will side with him.
Right. The public defender who writes The Law is a Ass says that he's near the top of his office having got evidence thrown out twice, and that judges hate to throw out evidence just like anyone else would.
Enhancing a photograph is no different then using a microscope to make the image more clear.
Once you put something under the microscope, you can play with a couple knobs, but what you see is what's there. There's no such guarentee with Photoshop -- you could load it into Photoshop, erase it, and draw a new fingerprint. "Enhanced" photographs shouldn't be accepted until it's passed the scientific acceptance test (like microscopes have), and even then it's important to tell what was done to a picture.
taking options away from users is a side-effect of most of the DRM schemes out there
It's not a side effect - it's the main effect. The point of most DRM is to prevent the copying of material; whether or not that copying is illegal, it's still an option of the user.
automatic bounds checking take overheard
How much time, compared to hand bounds checking? And how much CPU time is worth a weekend of admin time cleaning up after a break-in?
Nor will programs that do heavy duty graphics
Most programs that do heavy duty graphics offloaded most of their code to the graphics card.
Sometimes even C++ has too much overhead.
Gee, like when? C++ was designed to have no overhead except when you use the new features. And metatemplate programming can massively beat procedural programming by doing at compile time what the procedural program does at execution time (or writes the same code a dozen times.)
Switching from c/c++ is simply not an option for many projects.
We've gone from OS's and heavy duty graphics to many projects. Furthermore, assembly has less overhead than C; you can frequently write the code in whatever language, and then take the 5% that actually takes time, and rewrite it in assembly, and beat anything that's straight C.
It is really not that much of a chore to write safe string-handling code in C; the problem is that most C programmers aren't taught how to do so. That's an education problem, not a language problem.
Is that your solution to all mine fields? When most users are having a problem with something, it's easier and far more reliable to fix it at the computer then to try and educate every user.
C is great because it has, AFAIK, the least overhead of any "high" level programming language out there.
So your box is owned, but the people who own it get the most speed possible. Thanks.
C lets you write to the metal. Ada, and many other languages, lets the compiler write to the metal; even if you're writing to just one platform, it's likely the compiler writers knew more about how to get the best out of that metal then you do, and if you're writing to more than one platform, you can't optimize on the level that the compiler can. And a compiler can optimize "A : Integer range 1..10;" better then it can "int A;", because the first tells it more information. Higher level, an APL compiler can compile a matrix multiplication to the the most accurate and fast possible on the platform, whereas a C compiler can't change your implementation of the same.
Also, it's no good to get the least overhead if you don't use it. I wrote an Ada version of strings that was ten times faster then GNU strings. (It didn't have all the fancy binutils options, but I needed to extract the strings from a 10 GB hard drive image.) It was a simple matter of a slight algorithmic improvement, but they never made it. Until you're willing to go through and make all those improvements, you've lost the slight advantage that C would give you.
This isn't the fault of the language, it's the fault of the programmer. How hard is it to do bounds checking?
Right. Blame the programmer. Back in real life, we have no perfect programmers, and only a few excellent programmers, and are left with the average programmer to write most programs, and the average programmer very frequently forgets bounds checking. It seems better to fix the machines to work with the users, rather than try an obviously futile job of fixing every programmer out there.
they do not fully control the situation so they are evil
I never said evil. But giving up control over a situation is always a perilous decision, and I don't see why I should have mercy on them because they made some wrong decisions.
Now just for the sake of argument here
Just for the sake of argument, you want me to take one case favorable to you and massively generalize it? Man, I wish I could have gotten away with that in debate.
I had a radeon using the GPL drivers and this is what I experienced again and again.
And I take it you filed a bug report? Because it's considered tacky to trash Free software if you didn't bother to file a bug report.
they appear in practice to suck hard in the physical world.
So 3d-accelerated video cards is the physical world? Not mice, or keyboards, or RAID cards, or SCSI adaptors? Just 3d-accelerated video cards?
It'd help if you stopped with the rhetoric.
The context was "locked-down box". If I walk up to your secured linux system with a statically linked, suid copy of Vi on a floppy and you "misconfigured" your fstab such that I could mount and run it, that's the same problem.
There would be no problem running it. But the floppy drive is usually set nosuid, so it would just ignore the suidness of the file. Nonprivliged users can't preserve the suidness of a file while copying, either.
Patents exist on [...]
And what's the first thing you have to do with a patent? You publish the details of how it works! What's the point of keeping it hidden, if you've already revealed it, and have the law keeping people from using it without your permission?
the hypocrisy of the Linux kernel devs taking away choices from the people that use their kernel.
This isn't BSD; there have always been restrictions on the use of Linux, in order to encourage people to share their changes back with Linux, instead of every two-bit propretary distribution having their own secret patches.
they MUST protect their legit property (their hardware).
At best, you could argue that they should protect thier legit property; they are under no obligation to do so. It also does not follow the best way to protect the value of their property is by only releasing binary drivers.
the kernel developers, over philosphical nonsense, have decided to shoot linux in the face and try to drive it back into obscurity.
So some hardware doesn't run with Linux because the hardware company isn't willing to work with Linux people in supporting it. Boo-hoo. You should buy your hardware, keeping in mind what you want to do with it. If you want to use Linux, then buy a card that works well with Linux.
More realistically, when you see the text "and then millions died..." that's us.
I was listening to the last of the Lord of the Rings on tape last night, and heard of the battle over the Shire. The hobbits fought the thugs, and some 30 nameless hobbits died, and a like number of nameless thugs. Then they go into to deal with the leader, and find Saurman and Wormtongue. Even after Saurman tried killing Frodo, they still let them go! Somehow, the potential for these repeat offenders to do good was more important then any of those who died in the battle. (Of course, Wormtongue kills Saurman, to be just, but their great blood can't land on our heros hand's, oh no.)
The earth couldn't be millions of years old because God created it about 6000 years ago. If the creation of the earth about 6000 years ago is accepted as truth, then we use this to eliminate the question of the age of the earth being 4.5 billion of year old.
If we start with the assumption that the world is 6000 years old, then given that assumption, it's 6000 years old. If you start without any assumption of Christianity's truth, it looks like the world is roughly 5 billion years old. If you start by assuming the Bible is true, and the information of our senses is true, then you have a fairly complex question, with different answers depending on the believer.
it is impossible to be a true Christian and not believe that God created the world.
No where in the Bible does it say the world was created 6000 years ago. I think the Bible has pretty good evidence that the Hebrews didn't view large numbers with the precision we did - notice the symbolic use of 70, 70 times 70, and 144,000 at various places in the bible. It would have been very hard to explain to them that the world was five billion years old. Christians* believe God created the world; but they don't necessarily believe that he felt compelled to give the exact blow by blow to the Hebrews, instead of giving them some version they could understand.
* Well, most Christians, at least.
And you'll probably even win, after you spend a few thousand dollars to defend yourself.
Anybody can sue over anything, and force you to spend a few thousand dollars to defend yourself. Because,
That's the way it works in practice.
The intentional mistakes are put there as fingerprints to show it was *their* page you imaged.
The problem is, the intentional mistakes are there as fingerprints, like fingerprints on a Van Gogh. They may not be easy to notice, but if they are, they will look bad, and people will get annoyed.
What they're concerned about is that someone might print copies of Walden by simply photocopying the pages of "their" book.
Why would they be concerned about that? It would look like crap; if you had a brain, you'd take the text and dump it into a word processor, and get a half decent copy.
Ever actually read a Project Gutenberg title?
Yes - I've actually created a few, like The Lamp and the Bell.
so long as you remove all of their original content and make no claims that it's a Project Gutenberg(tm) text
It's basically a trademake license, with a copyright on the license text. So? No need to fingerprint for that.
I don't believe it. They use overbroad copyright statements - putting Copyright 1999 on a copy of 1912 book where they only thing they added was the introduction - but minor changes in the US don't matter - from the copyright office's FAQ:
You have no right to demand something in a particular format.
We aren't demanding that they change their format; we demanding the right to write programs that read their format, if we can figure it out. They can release anything they want, so long as we can also.
and i bet there are indian films made cheaper than any of the films mentioned here.
There are lots of films made cheaper, especially as Joe Blow can take a camera out and make a film for practically nothing. I wouldn't bet on a decent quality Indian film being made much cheaper; there are certain costs - like actors and film and gas and costumes - that you can't cut without going the Blair Witch Project route, which used its low quality for a very deliberate effect.
The question is the ratio of cost to profit; how many of those films made 100 million dollars? If they made 100 million dollars, then someone would start making better Indian films on more money (and/or Indian stars would start demanding a larger cut) and the Indian market would demading higher quality films.
See the comment "Profit to cost ratios" above; Mad Max made 250 times the orignal investment.
Ah, but are those numbers inflated? Movies cost more now than they did then.
The original Mad Max was made on a very low budget. It was the highest profit to cost ratio movie until Blair Witch. So cheap that the only actor to wear real leather was Mel Gibson - the other characters had to do with fake leather.
(All from the pop-up-video type notes on the DVD.)
As I said, it can guess. But most of your suggestions require the program to download the image, which is a waste of time if you can't display it.
Here's what I could find: [a list of names of Unicode characters]
The name of a Unicode character never tells you everything about it. In this instance, Apostrophe is merely a legacy backlash - if you were reading the standard (available for free at the Unicode website), you would see the note below apostrophe noting this, and the note below the single right quote noting that it was the real apostrophe.
If your accessibility software requires alt tags for my meaningless shim images (not that I use any) then your accessibility software sucks.
If you don't have alt tags for your meaningless shim images (which are required by the latest HTML standards), your HTML sucks. How is accessibility software supposted to know whether you didn't bother to add ALT tags (and it should try to read the graphic name so the reader has some idea what's there) or if it's a meaningless image? It could guess, but wouldn't it much better if you just told it?
I know what the current Unicode recommendation is. I just wonder why they recommend it.
As you said, this is common practice in the typesetting business. Unicode is not in the practice of making typesetting policy; furthermore, Unicode tries not to seperate characters by function unless they're clearly distinct characters. The Latin 'o' and the Cyrillic 'o' get seperate codepoints because they're in different scripts.
No. As noted by the AC below,
The ASCII apostrophe is basically deprecated in Unicode; it's used for at least five different other characters in Unicode, so they decided just to replace it completely.