Based on what I know, they have already forced French ISPs to keep logs of connections. After a number of downloads from well-known sites (The Pirate's Bay comes to mind)
As I understand it (believe it or not, I don't do BT, because here, in Hong Kong, people actually have gone to jail for that) TPB does not host any files, except torrent files, a few kb.
In any case, obviously what this would mean is that in very short order everyone would be using proxies and encryption. Unless thay make that illegal too.
In a city where even McDonald's offer free wifi for the price of a cheeseburger (not to mention the schweet municipal wifi project rumored to be in the works), this typically represents what De Gaulle said about the French right-wing politicians: the most stupid in the world.
Perhaps you have some idea of how they plan to discriminate between illegal and other large downloads? Are they going to try to Carnivore and analyse everything? Or just assume big download = pirate and cut you off?
And 20 minutes after the first one is sold, it is in the wild being downloaded by every jerk
All the jerks already downloaded the screener a month ago.
O.k., you solved what problem again?
Exactly. This does not "solve" the availability of movies to pirates. It does however give a legal alternative to some who might prefer a nicely packaged DVD to messing around with BitTorrent and hoping they get a clean rip.
Who actually uses that button? I can say that most of my searches, I don't end up going to the first result.
But sometimes you know what the top result is, you just can't remember the URL exactly. So it's more like a searching through your bookmarks; if you already have Google as your start page it takes no longer. Eg: I want to go to the home page of Adobe, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Slashdot, the "lucky" button takes me there with just one word. For slightly less mnemonic sites too: "new york times". Obviously it's less likely to be useful when searching for an obscure fact than a big company. It also tends to work despite typos: "salshdot" gets me here instead of to some bogus typosquatter site.
They are valid, I think, in context. "Office" in the context of a software productivity suite can probably be upheld. I don't see "Joe's Office" in Detroit selling printer consumables being a threat to the trademark. "Office Online", a software productivity suite, might.
The question is not whether it's a "threat" to the trademark, that begs the question of whether the trademark is valid to begin with. In any case, the name of the application is "Microsoft Office", not "Office". If you have installed it, have a look at the ridiculously long names of the shortcuts and folders, all using "Microsoft Office..."
I can think of a half-dozen "Office" suites: Lotus, Wordperfect, Star, etc. Even a few wordprocessors called "Word" for that matter. Just because MS likes to use generic terms to imply that they are the one and only standard, doesn't mean the rest of the world has to meekly allow them to assume control of the language.
1) Only VERY rarely have I encountered data entry clerks who know enough
True. But someone in the company, an IT guy if they're big enough, will be. One might hope (perhaps naively) that the IT department would be be trying to support their staff.
Prying off keycaps of course is inelegant. My friend who does this was an executive so in no danger of being fired for "vandalising" a $10 piece of hardware.
I spent most of my working life in very small companies (currently, just me) and have got used to fixing things myself. Though not hired as an IT person, I was often the closest thing to that around. The hoops people in corporate environments have to jump through to do the most trivial things are hard for me to appreciate. When I was working in a dotcom, I just did things under the radar to make my life easier. I'm probably the kind of person IT departments hate, impatient with arbitrary rules (You can't install...) and just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous.
Average people (who care) are used to adjusting their clocks periodically to correct for drift, so an extra second either way is neither here nor though. Most folks won't notice a leap second (or much else) at midnight January 1, anyway.
I have my PC set to sync time with the local observatory's time server on every boot. Most days the correction is about 1 second. An indication of how sloppy average hardware is when it comes to accuracy. The people who care about time down to the microsecond are a tiny, tiny minority of the world and they are welcome to set up their own standard, and not let the time the rest of the world uses drift out of phase with the real world (of sunrise and seasons) to make their calculations simpler.
I take it you've never seen someone doing pages of data entry on forms they know off by heard without looking at the screen barely at all and their eyes permanently glued to the data (on paper) that they're inputting?
If it's a problem that occurs more than once a month, fix it, it's easy.
Someone doing data entry would be a touch typist already, and would have optimised their keyboard, and remapped the shift-lock if it was causing problems. Takes all of two minutes, including finding, downloading and installing an app. Even faster, a guy I know used to solve his caps-lock problem by prying off the offending key on all his keyboards.
Without access to the uncensored real Internet, how exactly do you think Chinese people will find out about the atrocities committed by their government in their name?
Maybe you've heard of this Austrian guy, Adolf Hitler? He committed a lot of atrocities 60 years ago, but sadly no one ever heard of them because there was no Internet back then. Only those cutting-edge tech nerds who read "newspapers" and "books" or listened to the "radio" had any clue as to what had happened. If only there was a way to put information in a non-electronic form, so people without computers could read it. Perhaps Negroponte could start a "One book per child" program?
'All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. '
Two descriptions of Fascism by Benito Mussolini which apply to today's China perfectly.
Only if you know nothing about modern China. A great deal of China's economy is now controlled by businessmen. Successful businessmen keep close links with government, but to the end of greasing their way rather than the state controlling them. And in rural areas, peasants have been doing pretty much what they want for a few decades now. There is less "within the state" in China every year.
Actually, this may well be how Fascist Italy really worked (I know less about Italy than China), but in both cases the ideals, like the Communist ideals in China before that, are just empty slogans. You take them at face value at your peril.
Did I imply otherwise? My response was about whether PDF is open or editable, not whether Slashdot should have linked to it.
An interesting point tangent to this discussion is whether pdf, flash, and similar formats will survive as more than historic curiosities five years from now.
PDF will be around for decades. It is deeply embedded in the publishing industry regardless of what happens online.
Re:speaking of proprietary
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The article (which is actually a PDF, thanks for the warning) uses proprietary fonts (LucidaBright). While it was typeset with TeX (open), only the PDF (closed and uneditable) is provided.
I think (hope) you're joking, but several people who responded seem to be taking this at face value. It's wrong in several ways. PDF is an open format, and if you look at the file info, you see that this particular PDF was generated with Ghostscript. And it's quite simple to edit PDFs. Not as easy as, say HTML, but much easier than if it were, say, a TIFF file. I personally use Adobe Acrobat, but a great many free and commercial apps can read, write, and manipulate PDF files. That's why the format was created, for use in DTP, not a locked document format as some business people seem to imagine.
what's cringewothy about any of that? you talk about ethics and morals, when what was ethically and morally wrong was the perp getting away with this heinous crime, and no punishment in sight... until the blogosphere went nuts. so it was a good thing that the internet went nuts over the story, not cringeworthy
The DA is going to "review" the case. Just a way to placate the bloggers. It'll be months before the DA reports on his "review" (if ever), and I guarantee that the result will be "no case to answer, no punishment. But by then the bloggers will have long forgotten their outrage. Just spin control, not justice, will be the result.
And personally, while the rival parents' actions were abhorrent, I can't think that they are guilty of a real crime, in the legal sense. They obviously had no intention of killing the girl. It was an act of cruelty that had a far greater effect than could have been expected.
We are 'up with the play' though, as we're allowed to print out the letter, sign it, then scan it as a PDF and e-mail the scan.
If you're actually serious, why don't you just have an image of your signature you can paste into the document and then print directly to PDF? For that matter, 99% of PDF (or worse, DOC) attachments I get could just as easily, and a lot more conveniently for me, just be plain text emails, incidentally taking up just 1 kb in my mailbox instead of 1 MB.
Time saving feature request: take everything that I just inadvertently typed with the caps lock on, and with a simple keystroke combination turn it to lowercase.
Well, you can do that in MS Word or any other wordprocessor for that matter.
Otherwise, you should learn to touchtype. You should be looking at the screen, not the keyboard. It will pay back the time investment in a very short time.
Nonsense. Go to any major media city (New York and LA come to mind) and look at how many hopeful dancers....
I didn't say there weren't "hopeful" artistes in every media. My point is that there have ALWAYS been many, many more "hopeful" artistes/authors/screenwriters than "successful" ones. Long before the Internet. And I personally have knowledge of book publishing, and can say that DTP + Internet has led to an explosion of published books. But the market, the number of books bought, is relatively static. Thus much harder to make a buck. Filesharing has a negligible impact, possibly even a positive one, as for instance see Baen Books free downloads. For music, there has been free-to-air radio for a century. And the music industry a century ago was terribly concerned about that, no doubt creating similar heat-wrenching tales of starving songsters.
The point is this. Anyone who takes another persons hard work....>
No, that's a completely different point. Your victim, so eloquently described before, is just a fantasy. He, and no one like him, does not exist. Morality, which you invoke this time, is quite a different argument, and one not subject to logic, so I leave you to it.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages_for_copyright_infringement
This false dichotomy comes up every fucking time the OLPC is mentioned.
As I understand it (believe it or not, I don't do BT, because here, in Hong Kong, people actually have gone to jail for that) TPB does not host any files, except torrent files, a few kb.
In any case, obviously what this would mean is that in very short order everyone would be using proxies and encryption. Unless thay make that illegal too.
Perhaps you have some idea of how they plan to discriminate between illegal and other large downloads? Are they going to try to Carnivore and analyse everything? Or just assume big download = pirate and cut you off?
All the jerks already downloaded the screener a month ago.
O.k., you solved what problem again?
Exactly. This does not "solve" the availability of movies to pirates. It does however give a legal alternative to some who might prefer a nicely packaged DVD to messing around with BitTorrent and hoping they get a clean rip.
But sometimes you know what the top result is, you just can't remember the URL exactly. So it's more like a searching through your bookmarks; if you already have Google as your start page it takes no longer. Eg: I want to go to the home page of Adobe, Microsoft, Wikipedia, Slashdot, the "lucky" button takes me there with just one word. For slightly less mnemonic sites too: "new york times". Obviously it's less likely to be useful when searching for an obscure fact than a big company. It also tends to work despite typos: "salshdot" gets me here instead of to some bogus typosquatter site.
The question is not whether it's a "threat" to the trademark, that begs the question of whether the trademark is valid to begin with. In any case, the name of the application is "Microsoft Office", not "Office". If you have installed it, have a look at the ridiculously long names of the shortcuts and folders, all using "Microsoft Office ..."
I can think of a half-dozen "Office" suites: Lotus, Wordperfect, Star, etc. Even a few wordprocessors called "Word" for that matter. Just because MS likes to use generic terms to imply that they are the one and only standard, doesn't mean the rest of the world has to meekly allow them to assume control of the language.
At least I didn't get Gilligan and the Professor in the mix.
I thought it was supposed to be e) funny. In the sense of Defoe's A Modest Proposal. Similarly hoping to provoke discussion.
True. But someone in the company, an IT guy if they're big enough, will be. One might hope (perhaps naively) that the IT department would be be trying to support their staff.
Prying off keycaps of course is inelegant. My friend who does this was an executive so in no danger of being fired for "vandalising" a $10 piece of hardware.
I spent most of my working life in very small companies (currently, just me) and have got used to fixing things myself. Though not hired as an IT person, I was often the closest thing to that around. The hoops people in corporate environments have to jump through to do the most trivial things are hard for me to appreciate. When I was working in a dotcom, I just did things under the radar to make my life easier. I'm probably the kind of person IT departments hate, impatient with arbitrary rules (You can't install...) and just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous.
I have my PC set to sync time with the local observatory's time server on every boot. Most days the correction is about 1 second. An indication of how sloppy average hardware is when it comes to accuracy. The people who care about time down to the microsecond are a tiny, tiny minority of the world and they are welcome to set up their own standard, and not let the time the rest of the world uses drift out of phase with the real world (of sunrise and seasons) to make their calculations simpler.
No you didn't. And that you can't remember the correct number shows that it wasn't as simple as you fondly believe.
If it's a problem that occurs more than once a month, fix it, it's easy.
Someone doing data entry would be a touch typist already, and would have optimised their keyboard, and remapped the shift-lock if it was causing problems. Takes all of two minutes, including finding, downloading and installing an app. Even faster, a guy I know used to solve his caps-lock problem by prying off the offending key on all his keyboards.
Maybe you've heard of this Austrian guy, Adolf Hitler? He committed a lot of atrocities 60 years ago, but sadly no one ever heard of them because there was no Internet back then. Only those cutting-edge tech nerds who read "newspapers" and "books" or listened to the "radio" had any clue as to what had happened. If only there was a way to put information in a non-electronic form, so people without computers could read it. Perhaps Negroponte could start a "One book per child" program?
Only if you know nothing about modern China. A great deal of China's economy is now controlled by businessmen. Successful businessmen keep close links with government, but to the end of greasing their way rather than the state controlling them. And in rural areas, peasants have been doing pretty much what they want for a few decades now. There is less "within the state" in China every year.
Actually, this may well be how Fascist Italy really worked (I know less about Italy than China), but in both cases the ideals, like the Communist ideals in China before that, are just empty slogans. You take them at face value at your peril.
Did I imply otherwise? My response was about whether PDF is open or editable, not whether Slashdot should have linked to it.
An interesting point tangent to this discussion is whether pdf, flash, and similar formats will survive as more than historic curiosities five years from now.
PDF will be around for decades. It is deeply embedded in the publishing industry regardless of what happens online.
I think (hope) you're joking, but several people who responded seem to be taking this at face value. It's wrong in several ways. PDF is an open format, and if you look at the file info, you see that this particular PDF was generated with Ghostscript. And it's quite simple to edit PDFs. Not as easy as, say HTML, but much easier than if it were, say, a TIFF file. I personally use Adobe Acrobat, but a great many free and commercial apps can read, write, and manipulate PDF files. That's why the format was created, for use in DTP, not a locked document format as some business people seem to imagine.
The DA is going to "review" the case. Just a way to placate the bloggers. It'll be months before the DA reports on his "review" (if ever), and I guarantee that the result will be "no case to answer, no punishment. But by then the bloggers will have long forgotten their outrage. Just spin control, not justice, will be the result.
And personally, while the rival parents' actions were abhorrent, I can't think that they are guilty of a real crime, in the legal sense. They obviously had no intention of killing the girl. It was an act of cruelty that had a far greater effect than could have been expected.
If you're actually serious, why don't you just have an image of your signature you can paste into the document and then print directly to PDF? For that matter, 99% of PDF (or worse, DOC) attachments I get could just as easily, and a lot more conveniently for me, just be plain text emails, incidentally taking up just 1 kb in my mailbox instead of 1 MB.
Well, you can do that in MS Word or any other wordprocessor for that matter.
Otherwise, you should learn to touchtype. You should be looking at the screen, not the keyboard. It will pay back the time investment in a very short time.
That's what makes Slashdot great, random kibbitzing from smarmy know-it-alls.
Obviously (I thought) I meant free as in beer, to the listener. Supported by advertising usually.
Anyway, you keep running off in different directions. My post was objecting to your original, heart-rending scenario. Which is complete fantasy.
I didn't say there weren't "hopeful" artistes in every media. My point is that there have ALWAYS been many, many more "hopeful" artistes/authors/screenwriters than "successful" ones. Long before the Internet. And I personally have knowledge of book publishing, and can say that DTP + Internet has led to an explosion of published books. But the market, the number of books bought, is relatively static. Thus much harder to make a buck. Filesharing has a negligible impact, possibly even a positive one, as for instance see Baen Books free downloads. For music, there has been free-to-air radio for a century. And the music industry a century ago was terribly concerned about that, no doubt creating similar heat-wrenching tales of starving songsters.
No, that's a completely different point. Your victim, so eloquently described before, is just a fantasy. He, and no one like him, does not exist. Morality, which you invoke this time, is quite a different argument, and one not subject to logic, so I leave you to it.