nstalling a software firewall on the machine it's meant to protect is like wearing a bullet-proof vest on the inside.
Nevertheless, it works (the firewall, not the vest); I've used ZoneAlarm for about 4 years on Win98 and 2k, standalone connected to a DSL broadband modem. Hundreds of probes every hour in the logs, nothing has got through. Not to seem complacent, but there are plenty of soft targets around so perhaps no one bothers targetting semi-hard ones like me.
And besides, what kind of antivirus system lets some random program delete it's files,
From TFA, it's apparently deleting registry entries, not the files. Another advantage of the monolithic Windows registry; anything can fuck up anything else.
Not everyone runs on default mod settings here at/. Genuine flamebaits and trolls are getting much rarer. I see a lot less GNAA and WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDDDDDDDDDDEEEEEEEEE crap here these days.
If it wasn't slapped down quickly you would. It would only take a few industrious trolls to make the site unreadable. The main function of the mod system is to make trollng unrewarding. The positive mods are are very loosely related to quality; if I post something fairly sensible in the first 50 posts I usually get at least 2 + mods.
Of course they are copies. The medium has changed; the words have not.
But don't argue that Google has the right to clearly violate the law
There's no "of course" or "clearly" about this. Not everyone agrees with you (not just myself, who you can discount). As you said, we're just going in circles. You make your assumptions, I make mine.
Why keep the Old Testament at all, then, if it's so horrible? It must be convenient to answer to a criticism of the bible by saying that Jesus didn't say it, so it's outdated.
It gives context. One might say, it's the Bible, but not Gospel. Jesus' message was that God had changed the rules: vengeance was out.
Sure, but the bible also has quite a number of passages in it where the slaying of non-believers is preached. Even the most radical right-wing Christians in the US (and other places) don't follow this, however much they want to deep down inside.
I don't think you'll find any actual quotes from Jesus (the ones Christians nominally follow) advocating this though. Remember, though Mohammed wrote the entire Koran, Jesus never wrote anything, and the 63 books in the Bible were written by many authors, many prior to Jesus, and deprecated by him, and all the New Testament long after his death.
Saying blatantly hypocritical things like "Yes, there should be free speech, but not for blasphemy."
How many WASPs would say the same thing about, say, burning the US flag? They even tried to make a law against it. However, though some do get overly excited about this, it rarely gets to actual violence.
They discredit the Internet, and then vcreate anti-islamic sentiment among otherwise tolerant and moderate people - who will silently back attacks on Iran and Syria.
Do you think that anyone will be persuaded to go to war because a bunch of websites were defaced? Even the CIA wouldn't waste their time on that idea. Did this even get on TV news -- I never saw it, maybe a brief mention before going into the list of riots, embassy burnings, boycotts and other, real world, responses.
If Google paid for the books they are copying, like the library did, then I think scanning and displaying excerpts for searches would be fair use.
An interesting distinction. Many publishers would like to claim that even if you did buy a book, you have no such right. In any case, the word "copying" is open to interpretation. The digital images and OCR that Google does are not "copies" of the book. Does a purely digital version that is never published or made available to anyone as a whole count as a "copy"?
Secondly, practically, many of the books scanned are out of print, i.e. can't be purchased.
The purpose of copyright was to encourage creation and dissemination of knowledge. Recent revisions of copyright law tilt to protecting the right of the owner to profit. Both ends are served by this scheme.
You're assuming that they are breaking copyright. Obviously this is arguable. Like their Google News service, they are not publishing anything that could replace the original work. The cases publishers make against it are, in my opinion, either bloody-minded obstructiveness, or atttempts to go for the deep pocket.
Similar logic to Google's has been used in the past to destory individual rights. One city police chief required every man in town to provide DNA samples to solve a rape case.
You've hit the nail on the head. Copying books out of the library is also a copyright violation. This isn't an opinion, for pete's sake. It's simple logic. The law says x is illegal. You do x. You broke the law.
I didn't say copying books wasn't a violation. I was saying that Google isn't enabling copying more than (actually, less than) libraries already do. So Google is not exposing copyright owners to new risks.
So the publishers like to think that they have the right to stop this
Exactly, these kind of statements are no more than than a EULA familiar from software, and do not have the force of law, though the publisher wants you to think so.
What I am personally worried about is requiring publishers to opt-out, not opt-in, to Book Search. I think the legal situation is clear, and Google needs to do the "non-evil" thing and ask for permission before including these books. You'd give permission, right? If I was in the publishing business, I would too, and I can't believe we're the only two people with an ounce of common sense.
And what about books published 50 years ago, author dead, publisher bankrupt, but in copyright still for another or so? The book can't be bought new, or republished; but you may want to find a copy used or in a library if a Google search points you to it. If you disallow this, no one wins.
The authors might retain some kind of copyright, but the publishers retain sole publishing rights. This is why many authors get frustrated when their books go out of print and the publisher still shows no interest in giving back publishing rights so said author can go elsewhere.
Every author/publisher contract should contain a termination clause; generally it says something like when a book is "out of print" (defined in the contract, but certainly if the book is not on sale it's "out of print") for a defined period, say 6 months, the publisher's rights are terminated and the author is free to find a new publisher. More rarely the publisher may have bought the copyright outright and permanently, say for a commissioned work, but in that case they usually pay up front considerably more than the derisory advance authors usually get.
Some sleazy publishers though, particularly vanity presses, omit this in the hope of forcing the author to pay to terminate their contracts, so always read the fine print.
What's to stop someone from writing a bot that downloads the whole book by using the last words in a blurb as the next search term and concatenating the blurbs?
Try it. Google won't let you get more than a few pages from any one book. You could set up elaborate proxies and thousands of Google identities (you need to be signed in to do most of this). But these books are in libraries. There's nothing (except geography) stopping you borrowing the books and scanning them yourself. Every current bestseller and many textbooks are already scanned, OCRed (more or less) and online if you look around a little.
Google's book scanning shouldn't be an Opt-Out kind of deal. Copyright laws specifically make it an Opt-In issue. Like anyone else, Google can use a portion of the material for fair use.
On a strictly legalistic sense, you may be right; thouigh I assume Google has lawyers who could dispute it somehow. However:
The most valuable use of this is exactly those books for whom the copyright owner, who could give permission, is unresponsive/dead/bankrupt/no forwarding address. These books and the information in them would be lost to the world.
"Fair use" -- While they are making a copy for their database, that isn't published. I think it's more like a scholar reading a book and making notes, which is what the idea of fair use is designed to permit, than a publisher duplicating a book.
When penalties are assessed in a copyright case the yardstick is the harm done to the copyright holder. I can't see how the publisher loses financially through having his book indexed.
We should not even be thinking about going to the moon. We went before. Been there, done that. There's nothing there that can justify the cost of going there.
It'll cost annually a few percent of what's being spent on Iraq now. Or in non-government terms, roughly twice what is spent on bubblegum ($2.8 billion). Space should not be the highest priority; and it won't be. But there's a lot of other things I would prioritise lower than space.
The main thing I'm skeptical about, is whether the sheer scale makes it impractical.
I assume that, being a scientist, he did make some calculations and not just doodle on the back of an envelope. TFA says it would cost $50 billion (per year?).
If you should accidentally visit the Asta-killer search engine, it classifies warez sites with these codes:
"Legend: P - porn, U - popups, I - installs, F - non english language, C - clear". Virtually all of them are "PUI". However, disabling javascript and popups and not using IE make them benign.
Why is it that the same stupid question gets modded insighful?
THAT'S NOT THE POINT, JACKASS.
And yet among all the puerile abuse, you never answered the question:
SO WHO IS MORE QUALIFIED JACKASS?
Well, fun as that was, perhaps you should study the policy-making process. You'll find that it's composed of committees who call experts and ASK THEM FOR THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS. Of course, they often go ahead and ignore them, nevertheless, it IS the duty of a scientist to make sure his research is understood and acted upon appropriately. It's not just an academic game.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, it works (the firewall, not the vest); I've used ZoneAlarm for about 4 years on Win98 and 2k, standalone connected to a DSL broadband modem. Hundreds of probes every hour in the logs, nothing has got through. Not to seem complacent, but there are plenty of soft targets around so perhaps no one bothers targetting semi-hard ones like me.
From TFA, it's apparently deleting registry entries, not the files. Another advantage of the monolithic Windows registry; anything can fuck up anything else.
You have two months' holidays?
If it wasn't slapped down quickly you would. It would only take a few industrious trolls to make the site unreadable. The main function of the mod system is to make trollng unrewarding. The positive mods are are very loosely related to quality; if I post something fairly sensible in the first 50 posts I usually get at least 2 + mods.
But don't argue that Google has the right to clearly violate the law
There's no "of course" or "clearly" about this. Not everyone agrees with you (not just myself, who you can discount). As you said, we're just going in circles. You make your assumptions, I make mine.
It gives context. One might say, it's the Bible, but not Gospel. Jesus' message was that God had changed the rules: vengeance was out.
I don't think you'll find any actual quotes from Jesus (the ones Christians nominally follow) advocating this though. Remember, though Mohammed wrote the entire Koran, Jesus never wrote anything, and the 63 books in the Bible were written by many authors, many prior to Jesus, and deprecated by him, and all the New Testament long after his death.
How many WASPs would say the same thing about, say, burning the US flag? They even tried to make a law against it. However, though some do get overly excited about this, it rarely gets to actual violence.
Do you think that anyone will be persuaded to go to war because a bunch of websites were defaced? Even the CIA wouldn't waste their time on that idea. Did this even get on TV news -- I never saw it, maybe a brief mention before going into the list of riots, embassy burnings, boycotts and other, real world, responses.
An interesting distinction. Many publishers would like to claim that even if you did buy a book, you have no such right. In any case, the word "copying" is open to interpretation. The digital images and OCR that Google does are not "copies" of the book. Does a purely digital version that is never published or made available to anyone as a whole count as a "copy"?
Secondly, practically, many of the books scanned are out of print, i.e. can't be purchased.
The purpose of copyright was to encourage creation and dissemination of knowledge. Recent revisions of copyright law tilt to protecting the right of the owner to profit. Both ends are served by this scheme.
Well, what new risks?
You're assuming that they are breaking copyright. Obviously this is arguable. Like their Google News service, they are not publishing anything that could replace the original work. The cases publishers make against it are, in my opinion, either bloody-minded obstructiveness, or atttempts to go for the deep pocket.
Extremely poor analogy.
I didn't say copying books wasn't a violation. I was saying that Google isn't enabling copying more than (actually, less than) libraries already do. So Google is not exposing copyright owners to new risks.
Exactly, these kind of statements are no more than than a EULA familiar from software, and do not have the force of law, though the publisher wants you to think so.
And what about books published 50 years ago, author dead, publisher bankrupt, but in copyright still for another or so? The book can't be bought new, or republished; but you may want to find a copy used or in a library if a Google search points you to it. If you disallow this, no one wins.
Every author/publisher contract should contain a termination clause; generally it says something like when a book is "out of print" (defined in the contract, but certainly if the book is not on sale it's "out of print") for a defined period, say 6 months, the publisher's rights are terminated and the author is free to find a new publisher. More rarely the publisher may have bought the copyright outright and permanently, say for a commissioned work, but in that case they usually pay up front considerably more than the derisory advance authors usually get.
Some sleazy publishers though, particularly vanity presses, omit this in the hope of forcing the author to pay to terminate their contracts, so always read the fine print.
Try it. Google won't let you get more than a few pages from any one book. You could set up elaborate proxies and thousands of Google identities (you need to be signed in to do most of this). But these books are in libraries. There's nothing (except geography) stopping you borrowing the books and scanning them yourself. Every current bestseller and many textbooks are already scanned, OCRed (more or less) and online if you look around a little.
On a strictly legalistic sense, you may be right; thouigh I assume Google has lawyers who could dispute it somehow. However:
It'll cost annually a few percent of what's being spent on Iraq now. Or in non-government terms, roughly twice what is spent on bubblegum ($2.8 billion). Space should not be the highest priority; and it won't be. But there's a lot of other things I would prioritise lower than space.
It doesn't emit anything, including energy, yet.
I assume that, being a scientist, he did make some calculations and not just doodle on the back of an envelope. TFA says it would cost $50 billion (per year?).
If you should accidentally visit the Asta-killer search engine, it classifies warez sites with these codes:
"Legend: P - porn, U - popups, I - installs, F - non english language, C - clear". Virtually all of them are "PUI". However, disabling javascript and popups and not using IE make them benign.
Your granny would probably be happier using OSX, which is definitely a "Unix-like OS", so this is on topic and serious.
Anyway, TFA is a troll. He sets up a straw man: "People say *ix is invulnerable", then says why it isn't. Well, no one says it is, (not even OSX).
And yet among all the puerile abuse, you never answered the question:
SO WHO IS MORE QUALIFIED JACKASS?
Well, fun as that was, perhaps you should study the policy-making process. You'll find that it's composed of committees who call experts and ASK THEM FOR THEIR RECOMMENDATIONS. Of course, they often go ahead and ignore them, nevertheless, it IS the duty of a scientist to make sure his research is understood and acted upon appropriately. It's not just an academic game.