In your example, only one person is asking who he is.
Imagine someone not asking for the waiver, but instead of telling Bob, he puts it in the 6'o'clock news, that Larry was in the infertility section of the bookstore.
It's the scope of how many people potentially know, without justification and without any control on the part of the person.
There's no reason for this, and all the excuses trotted out can be dealt with better. This opens itself up to abuse... I could easily fake a consumer-grade fingerprint scanner any time I chose. I was already thinking about making a small plotter with needle that could carve decent looking 3d fingerprints into bakable clay. You could probably also do negative carves, and use them as a mold for latex if so needed. The other counter-measures I currently read about are so stupid anyone hear could defeat them (Oh? It senses normal body temperature? You mean we can't heat it to ~98 too?). Not only will people still steal identities, but the common perception of it as bullet-proof will only see innocent people put in jail for child porn and the like.
So was circuit city's Divx. How much do you want to bet the second generation of DVD's will be just like this, though? The first is always a trial balloon, after which they spend a few years propagandizing... the second, or sometimes third attempt, goes through without a hitch.
They perform as regular SCSI drives when plugged into a generic controller. But you can't put a generic SCSI drive into a proprietary high end controller with fancy RAID options.
Sure, they use an IDE or SCSI interface. Same size, same mounting points. But they will have Compaq or IBM firmware on the drives. It's possible to substitute generic stuff, but weird things happen.
I've never held a job where I've been able to play with the cool toys. Desktop support or helpdesk, rollouts and whatnot. But even I know this. Christ.
Hey you snotty-inventors of civilization before europeans ever did anything important!
I was hoping that a few runnerups got to work for google or ibm too... but just for that attitude, I hope all 5000 get shipped off to the code sweatshops in Redmond. Bwhahahahaha.
You do if you plan on making the trip routinely. If a person goes up the moutain once a decade, put up a tent. However, if 25 ascend per week, maybe something a bit more permanent is in order...
Typesetting software combined with text editors != office applications. They can both produce the same results. But both take different paths to get there. Some of the uses that people put Word through would be difficult or inconvenient to do in tex.
No offense, but your attitude bugs me too. Just because it hasn't advanced, people assume that there is some fundamental law of the universe that prevents it. Or that it has reached as far as it can.
I see no reason why a word processor (ignoring the other suite components) could not be made as a mozilla-based app. The rendering of pretty text is there, and Firefox's CSS is so nice we get everything we need now. Even columns, just recently. Doubt you'd need to write new XPCOM for it. (maybe only for importing msword, even pdf export will be possible with cairo)
The big question is, if we can easily and quickly make a world class word processor, how do we make it? Do we mindlessly ape Word down to the last little toolbar button placement? How do we make it sensible, instead of doing only what has been done before?
I am working on just such a project myself. Finally have it using data URIs for embedded pictures/objects. Formatting is still wonky. Splitting paragraphs across a page still doesn't work right either. Unlike OOo though, mine outputs plain XHTML files, can be opened up in notepad. No zip archives of a thousand file components (sorry, but I do not like binary formats).
Sorry, but I don't use linux because it's 0.0001% less iritating. I don't use Firefox because it's 0.000001% more secure. That wouldn't have been enough to make me want to bother.
I'm not sure them being open is enough either. I like the idea of tinkering, and I even do that from time to time, but it's icing on the cake.
They are better, so much better that it's laughable to think that people still struggle with windows and IE.
OpenOffice does not come anywhere close to that. Being slightly better should not be the criteria we aim for, and it shouldn't be enough to deserve all the hype we're giving it.
Firefox is the success, and openoffice isn't even close to being a firefox. It's not even a pre-firefox mozilla... it might not even be the netscape 2 that would wait 2 more versions before being opened up to become the mozilla project.
Open Office illustrates my greatest fear for open source, that it will be so hyped that anything claiming open source status is put up against the likes of commercial software, and that this will be used to show just how amateurish we are.
Misguided? Hardly. It doesn't serve the purpose of their religion, no matter what their beliefs are. This is provable. But it does serve the political purposes of those in charge of these religions. That they've allowed people who are their "spiritual leaders" to co-opt their faith, and use it for political gain, I'd say that makes them less than smart.
He thought he'd poke some fun at idiots. He might have expected some pranks, or even an assault.
What he discovered was a bit more than that, though. Not some semi-random beating from idiots who recognized him. Rather, that it's a bit more organized than that. Maybe they told him his national press was really, really unappreciated, and that if he didn't start backing down, he was in for worse.
Supposing something like that happened, might not you also resign?
to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
"Copies" in this sense refer to actual published, readable copies. Collections of bits stored as hashes in google's search index do not count, just as my memories don't count after reading the damned news stories. You are missing an essential nuance of the word. Maybe it's because little tiny brains like yours are incapable of a decent vocabulary, or maybe any vocabulary beyond a few million words becomes inconvenient.
Either way, "copy" has several flavors. One means an intentional word-for-word reproduction manufactured in such a way that it can be sold just like the original one. Google does not do this. The other "copy" means a less exact reproduction, or one completed in such a way as to not be useful the same way as the original.
Copying Reuters stories by printing them out and selling them on a streetcorner for a nickel apiece violates copyright because it is the type of copying meant to be prohibited. Using a quote in a term paper is not, because it's the second type of copying. Now, stay with me here, if google indexes all the the words in the story, so people can search for them, but are still directed to Reuters original copy to actually read it... just which type do you call this?
Back when copyright was originally written into law in the US, the second type of copying was less obvious, or maybe seen as so innocent that it wasn't necessary to put in a literal exception. Later, the courts somehow got ahold of wisdom long enough to put a few of the most obvious exceptions into case law. They did not recognize all of them, or put all of the exceptions into case law at that time... these exceptions still exist. More may become obvious later.
Oh really? All sorts of things change meaning over time. Ever hear that the 2nd ammendment's "well regulated militia" means well-trained? I don't really agree with gun nuts, but it's true... "regulated" means something different in that context. Of course it meant copying hundreds of years ago... the only way to publish something *was* to copy it. As they understood "copying" to mean, anyway.
You copy things into your brain all the time. It's call neurological memory. Wasn't understood to be copying at the time, of course.
But if you want to act like a fool, be my guest.
"Exclusive rights" is at best a euphemism. It can't be a "right", if it's wrong. Not to mention that carefully bribed politicians eliminated every single restriction put into place on those rights... american copyright law is morally void. I neither obey morally void law, nor do I clumsily disobey it.
Astro-turfing is when you're paid to do a fake "grassroots campaign". Unless you are suggesting Google (do no evil!) is paying me, then what you really mean is that I'm just an idiot. But suggesting that I'm the astroturfer, that's just dumb.
Second, copyright protects against others publishing your work, not against copying. I can't print up the latest stephen king novel at kinko's and then sell the thing for $0.50 at the local flea market. If recent addendums to the law word it differently, then you might wonder what that is the case... or maybe you don't. You do seem rather unintelligent.
I just made a neurally based copy of your post as I read it. Does this count? Does it not count because of "fair use"? You're another of the retards.
Google is a librarian. It's making a card catalog, not printing out extra copies of the expensive books. Get over it.
Unless you specifically like less-sophisticated card catalogs. I suspect you might.
No, this is a astro-turfed meme. Maybe the parent poster isn't a shill himself, but when people who don't even know what copyright is, are standing around the coffee machine at work, and the subject comes up about how google is stealing from people who write books, something fishy is going on.
Google sends business to these retards, if anything. Those that can't make that simple connection need to do us all a favor, and stop breathing.
The point is that to build the functional equivalent of a fruit fly is easier than actually making a fruit fly.
Well, duh. What do fruit flies do? They buzz around flying, they eat, they shit, and then they die after a few days. The functional equivalent of a fruit fly (minus reproduction) could be engineered out of balsa wood, rubber bands, and some sort of noisemaker.
While fruit flies are not known for their genius, it is possible within even a single generation, for some sort of novel or abberant behavior to creep up. Do you really think that's possible if We can also take designed shortcuts that save processor because something always works one way and doesn't need to be learned ?
No, you don't have to make it exactly like the original. Silicon is fine, running it at 1000s the speed of the organic model is fine too. But until you can tell me that the other changes that have been made are provably of no consequence, I have to play skeptic and assume that there is at least a possibility that something unseen is happening.
Natural intelligence does all kinds of cool tricks, and I've yet to see any of our functional equivalents do the same.
Number of neurons, and the computer powerful enough to run a comparable neural net at practical speeds. Add to that a way to train it to something comparable to an insect, and consider that baby bugs don't spend the first 2 weeks of life being trained at the academy.
Are there sophisticated flying robots? Yes. Do I consider them comparable? No.
No one wants "artificial intelligence". Who wants a military AI that suddenly becomes enlightened and decides that killing is wrong (unlike the crippled brains that built it, there are no flaws preventing it from figuring this out in record time) ?
Who wants a corporate AI that suddenly decides that crass commercialism is a poor way for society to do the work that needs to be done, and the work that we want done? (I'm sorry CEO Roberts, but taking this course of action could affect our stock prices in ways where many retirees pension funds are ruined.)
No, what the world needs is "Artificial Stupidity". We have plenty of natural stupidity, but there is little doubt that an "artificial stupidity" would be the concentrated essence of this admirable quality. We need AS now, and we need it in a hurry. I fear though that we may be delaying it indefinitely by continuing to pursue AI, which is nothing more than the pipedream of some misinformed hippies. Computer scientists of the world, I urge you, give up this unholy quest for a perfect living machine that continues to think flawlessly, learning ever more... And instead, give to us the imperfect one that would help Dubya plot one botched occupation after another, never really winning any of them.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding. Or else, haven't looked at a mainlogic board since the 386.
There are usually less than 5 chips on a new board, all of which are essential (ignoring the odd surface mount 74xx here and there).
Imagine someone not asking for the waiver, but instead of telling Bob, he puts it in the 6'o'clock news, that Larry was in the infertility section of the bookstore.
It's the scope of how many people potentially know, without justification and without any control on the part of the person.
There's no reason for this, and all the excuses trotted out can be dealt with better. This opens itself up to abuse... I could easily fake a consumer-grade fingerprint scanner any time I chose. I was already thinking about making a small plotter with needle that could carve decent looking 3d fingerprints into bakable clay. You could probably also do negative carves, and use them as a mold for latex if so needed. The other counter-measures I currently read about are so stupid anyone hear could defeat them (Oh? It senses normal body temperature? You mean we can't heat it to ~98 too?). Not only will people still steal identities, but the common perception of it as bullet-proof will only see innocent people put in jail for child porn and the like.
No...because it was a colossal FAILURE!
So was circuit city's Divx. How much do you want to bet the second generation of DVD's will be just like this, though? The first is always a trial balloon, after which they spend a few years propagandizing... the second, or sometimes third attempt, goes through without a hitch.
And if each citizen asks for their own proprietary format, they should be forced to provide them? All the untold millions of formats?
... will cost them hundreds per desktop
Your argument is absurd, go sit in the troll corner for 15 minutes.
My customers are fearful that this mandate
Really? So are they stupid, are you misinforming them, or just overcharging them for what is free software?
They perform as regular SCSI drives when plugged into a generic controller. But you can't put a generic SCSI drive into a proprietary high end controller with fancy RAID options.
Christ, I think I typed that at 3am local time. Ever notice how the 9 and 0 keys are close together?
Who uses proprietary hard drives?!??!
Sure, they use an IDE or SCSI interface. Same size, same mounting points. But they will have Compaq or IBM firmware on the drives. It's possible to substitute generic stuff, but weird things happen.
I've never held a job where I've been able to play with the cool toys. Desktop support or helpdesk, rollouts and whatnot. But even I know this. Christ.
Hey you snotty-inventors of civilization before europeans ever did anything important!
I was hoping that a few runnerups got to work for google or ibm too... but just for that attitude, I hope all 5000 get shipped off to the code sweatshops in Redmond. Bwhahahahaha.
BWHAHAHHAHAH.
You do if you plan on making the trip routinely. If a person goes up the moutain once a decade, put up a tent. However, if 25 ascend per week, maybe something a bit more permanent is in order...
The winners get to go work for a real company right? And the other 4990 are shipped off to redmond as h1b slaves?
Maybe because the people who are enthusiastic about an OSS office application enough to try and make one are not clever enough to realize this?
Typesetting software combined with text editors != office applications. They can both produce the same results. But both take different paths to get there. Some of the uses that people put Word through would be difficult or inconvenient to do in tex.
No offense, but your attitude bugs me too. Just because it hasn't advanced, people assume that there is some fundamental law of the universe that prevents it. Or that it has reached as far as it can.
How would you fix office software?
I see no reason why a word processor (ignoring the other suite components) could not be made as a mozilla-based app. The rendering of pretty text is there, and Firefox's CSS is so nice we get everything we need now. Even columns, just recently. Doubt you'd need to write new XPCOM for it. (maybe only for importing msword, even pdf export will be possible with cairo)
The big question is, if we can easily and quickly make a world class word processor, how do we make it? Do we mindlessly ape Word down to the last little toolbar button placement? How do we make it sensible, instead of doing only what has been done before?
I am working on just such a project myself. Finally have it using data URIs for embedded pictures/objects. Formatting is still wonky. Splitting paragraphs across a page still doesn't work right either. Unlike OOo though, mine outputs plain XHTML files, can be opened up in notepad. No zip archives of a thousand file components (sorry, but I do not like binary formats).
Sorry, but I don't use linux because it's 0.0001% less iritating. I don't use Firefox because it's 0.000001% more secure. That wouldn't have been enough to make me want to bother.
I'm not sure them being open is enough either. I like the idea of tinkering, and I even do that from time to time, but it's icing on the cake.
They are better, so much better that it's laughable to think that people still struggle with windows and IE.
OpenOffice does not come anywhere close to that. Being slightly better should not be the criteria we aim for, and it shouldn't be enough to deserve all the hype we're giving it.
Just the only (bad) alternative.
Firefox is the success, and openoffice isn't even close to being a firefox. It's not even a pre-firefox mozilla... it might not even be the netscape 2 that would wait 2 more versions before being opened up to become the mozilla project.
Open Office illustrates my greatest fear for open source, that it will be so hyped that anything claiming open source status is put up against the likes of commercial software, and that this will be used to show just how amateurish we are.
Misguided? Hardly. It doesn't serve the purpose of their religion, no matter what their beliefs are. This is provable. But it does serve the political purposes of those in charge of these religions. That they've allowed people who are their "spiritual leaders" to co-opt their faith, and use it for political gain, I'd say that makes them less than smart.
He thought he'd poke some fun at idiots. He might have expected some pranks, or even an assault.
What he discovered was a bit more than that, though. Not some semi-random beating from idiots who recognized him. Rather, that it's a bit more organized than that. Maybe they told him his national press was really, really unappreciated, and that if he didn't start backing down, he was in for worse.
Supposing something like that happened, might not you also resign?
to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
"Copies" in this sense refer to actual published, readable copies. Collections of bits stored as hashes in google's search index do not count, just as my memories don't count after reading the damned news stories. You are missing an essential nuance of the word. Maybe it's because little tiny brains like yours are incapable of a decent vocabulary, or maybe any vocabulary beyond a few million words becomes inconvenient.
Either way, "copy" has several flavors. One means an intentional word-for-word reproduction manufactured in such a way that it can be sold just like the original one. Google does not do this. The other "copy" means a less exact reproduction, or one completed in such a way as to not be useful the same way as the original.
Copying Reuters stories by printing them out and selling them on a streetcorner for a nickel apiece violates copyright because it is the type of copying meant to be prohibited. Using a quote in a term paper is not, because it's the second type of copying. Now, stay with me here, if google indexes all the the words in the story, so people can search for them, but are still directed to Reuters original copy to actually read it... just which type do you call this?
Back when copyright was originally written into law in the US, the second type of copying was less obvious, or maybe seen as so innocent that it wasn't necessary to put in a literal exception. Later, the courts somehow got ahold of wisdom long enough to put a few of the most obvious exceptions into case law. They did not recognize all of them, or put all of the exceptions into case law at that time... these exceptions still exist. More may become obvious later.
Oh really? All sorts of things change meaning over time. Ever hear that the 2nd ammendment's "well regulated militia" means well-trained? I don't really agree with gun nuts, but it's true... "regulated" means something different in that context. Of course it meant copying hundreds of years ago... the only way to publish something *was* to copy it. As they understood "copying" to mean, anyway.
You copy things into your brain all the time. It's call neurological memory. Wasn't understood to be copying at the time, of course.
But if you want to act like a fool, be my guest.
"Exclusive rights" is at best a euphemism. It can't be a "right", if it's wrong. Not to mention that carefully bribed politicians eliminated every single restriction put into place on those rights... american copyright law is morally void. I neither obey morally void law, nor do I clumsily disobey it.
Astro-turfing is when you're paid to do a fake "grassroots campaign". Unless you are suggesting Google (do no evil!) is paying me, then what you really mean is that I'm just an idiot. But suggesting that I'm the astroturfer, that's just dumb.
Second, copyright protects against others publishing your work, not against copying. I can't print up the latest stephen king novel at kinko's and then sell the thing for $0.50 at the local flea market. If recent addendums to the law word it differently, then you might wonder what that is the case... or maybe you don't. You do seem rather unintelligent.
I just made a neurally based copy of your post as I read it. Does this count? Does it not count because of "fair use"? You're another of the retards.
Google is a librarian. It's making a card catalog, not printing out extra copies of the expensive books. Get over it.
Unless you specifically like less-sophisticated card catalogs. I suspect you might.
No, this is a astro-turfed meme. Maybe the parent poster isn't a shill himself, but when people who don't even know what copyright is, are standing around the coffee machine at work, and the subject comes up about how google is stealing from people who write books, something fishy is going on.
Google sends business to these retards, if anything. Those that can't make that simple connection need to do us all a favor, and stop breathing.
The point is that to build the functional equivalent of a fruit fly is easier than actually making a fruit fly.
Well, duh. What do fruit flies do? They buzz around flying, they eat, they shit, and then they die after a few days. The functional equivalent of a fruit fly (minus reproduction) could be engineered out of balsa wood, rubber bands, and some sort of noisemaker.
While fruit flies are not known for their genius, it is possible within even a single generation, for some sort of novel or abberant behavior to creep up. Do you really think that's possible if We can also take designed shortcuts that save processor because something always works one way and doesn't need to be learned ?
No, you don't have to make it exactly like the original. Silicon is fine, running it at 1000s the speed of the organic model is fine too. But until you can tell me that the other changes that have been made are provably of no consequence, I have to play skeptic and assume that there is at least a possibility that something unseen is happening.
Natural intelligence does all kinds of cool tricks, and I've yet to see any of our functional equivalents do the same.
Number of neurons, and the computer powerful enough to run a comparable neural net at practical speeds. Add to that a way to train it to something comparable to an insect, and consider that baby bugs don't spend the first 2 weeks of life being trained at the academy.
Are there sophisticated flying robots? Yes. Do I consider them comparable? No.
No one wants "artificial intelligence". Who wants a military AI that suddenly becomes enlightened and decides that killing is wrong (unlike the crippled brains that built it, there are no flaws preventing it from figuring this out in record time) ?
Who wants a corporate AI that suddenly decides that crass commercialism is a poor way for society to do the work that needs to be done, and the work that we want done? (I'm sorry CEO Roberts, but taking this course of action could affect our stock prices in ways where many retirees pension funds are ruined.)
No, what the world needs is "Artificial Stupidity". We have plenty of natural stupidity, but there is little doubt that an "artificial stupidity" would be the concentrated essence of this admirable quality. We need AS now, and we need it in a hurry. I fear though that we may be delaying it indefinitely by continuing to pursue AI, which is nothing more than the pipedream of some misinformed hippies. Computer scientists of the world, I urge you, give up this unholy quest for a perfect living machine that continues to think flawlessly, learning ever more... And instead, give to us the imperfect one that would help Dubya plot one botched occupation after another, never really winning any of them.