I know I'd donate. I value my rights enough to drop 50 bucks on it.
I would think that the best destination for your donations would be an EFF membership. In fact, the EFF has already set up a Newmark v. Turner page:
EFF has asked a federal court to declare that Replay TV owners have the right to digitally record television programs, fast-forward through commercials, and send shows to other devices. In numerous press statements and legal filings, the entertainment industry claims that such recording for "time-shifting" and "space-shifting" purposes is a copyright infringement and that avoiding commercials is "theft" and "stealing". Five Replay TV owners have filed a Declaratory Judgment law suit against twenty-eight entertainment companies asking that their activity be ruled lawful fair use under copyright law.
Join EFF's fight to defend the consumers' right to digital VCR's.
That someone willing to pony up $300 for a domain name is serious about it, and not some luser with a website trying to scam you. Of course, $300 isn't alot of money, but it might help filter out some of the worst bottom feeders.
Right, because the most reputable doctors and lawyers are the ones with the biggest ads in the yellow pages.
Many people, when trying to explain TiVo, end up calling it a "digital VCR" or a "VCR on steroids." After using TiVo for a month, it is clear that these methods of explaining TiVo's function are unfair...
TiVo's biggest problem is that there is no good way to explain it... Have you ever tried explaining it to your friends, geek or non-geek? All you get is blank stares. But if you *show* it to them, they seem to understand. And if they acutally get one, they quickly become converts.
When people ask me if I like it, I tell them that I would rather give up color than TiVo. I would rather watch TiVo on a B&W set than to have the nicest color HDTV set available.
And the funny thing is, people think I'm kidding...
I have no problem with outdoor advertisements. I have no problem with billboards, or bus placards, or fancy lighted neon marquees. I can avert my eyes as I drive by them in my car.
I do have a problem with graffiti. When you sneak up in the night and spray-paint "Eat at Joe's" on the side of my building, you are using MY PROPERTY without my permission. And I want to see you tarred, feathered and drowned in your own paint.
Spam is grafitti. My computer, my disk space, and my bandwidth are things that I pay for; they are my property. When you use them, without my permission, to transmit your Nigerian Bank Scams, your porno ads, your Ponzi schemes, your stock-market pump-and-dumps, and your offshore casinos, you are spray-painting on my property.
And I want to see you tarred, feathered and drowned in your own flith.
Before long, TV's will start coming with EULA's that govern what, how, when, where we watch TV and what devices we can hook up to them...
Yep. It's called HDTV. The FCC "decided" a year ago that it will be illegal to produce HDTV recorders, even if consumers retain the legal right to record shows.
Remember that the Networks and Studios didn't just "resist" the proliferation of VCRs: they fought it all the way to the Supreme Court (the Betamax decision). Since they lost that battle, they're going to fight dirty, with the DMCA and with the corrupt FCC, to try and nail-shut the time-shifting coffin.
I have one contention with latex2html--it does not follow included files. I have my document broken down to multiple files, each to a chapter. And in the main tex file, I've added the \include{chapter1} etc. where I want the chapters to appear. When I try to latex2html the main tex file, it burps and spits out an error saying it doesn't like included files.
Don't use \include{}. Use \input{} instead.
\include{} is a holdover from when LaTeXing a document would take a *long* time and use valuable and expensive CPU time on your timesharing account. With a fast, single-user desktop machine, there is no reason to use the ugly \include{} and \includeonly{} hacks.
For more on some of the things wrong with Microsoft's WIMP GUI, see A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts. Specifically, take the following quiz if you're interested in Windowing System Design:
Microsoft Toolbars offer the user the option of displaying a label below each tool. Name at least one reason why labeled tools can be accessed faster. (Assume, for this, that the user knows the tool and does not need the label just simply to identify the tool.)
You have a palette of tools in a graphics application that consists of a matrix of 16x16-pixel icons laid out as a 2x8 array that lies along the left-hand edge of the screen. Without moving the array from the left-hand side of the screen or changing the size of the icons, what steps can you take to decrease the time necessary to access the average tool?
A right-handed user is known to be within 10 pixels of the exact center of a large, 1600 X 1200 screen. You will place a single-pixel target on the screen that the user must point to exactly. List the five pixel locations on the screen that the user can access fastest. For extra credit, list them in order from fastest to slowest access.
Microsoft offers a Taskbar which can be oriented along the top, side or bottom of the screen, enabling users to get to hidden windows and applications. This Taskbar may either be hidden or constantly displayed. Describe at least two reasons why the method of triggering an auto-hidden Microsoft Taskbar is grossly inefficient.
Explain why a Macintosh pull-down menu can be accessed at least five times faster than a typical Windows pull-down menu. For extra credit, suggest at least two reasons why Microsoft made such an apparently stupid decision.
What is the bottleneck in hierarchical menus and what technique used on the Macintosh, but not on Windows, makes that bottleneck less of a problem? Can you think of other techniques that could be applied?
Name at least one advantage circular popup menus have over standard, linear popup menus.
What can you do to linear popup menus to better balance access time for all items?
The industrial designers let loose on the iMac not only screwed up the mouse by making it round, they screwed up the keyboard by cutting the command keys in half so the total depth of the keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?
What do the primary solutions to all these questions have in common?
You can make nice pdf and print version. Yes it takes some time to get use to and most WYSIWYG people don't like it but it rocks in CVS.
In addition to producing HTML and PDF with latex2html and pdflatex, there are some other features in TeX/LaTeX that appeal to code monkeys like me.
1. Real include files. For example, you can write a mission statement page that gets included in the front of all your documents. When the mission statement changes, you only have to update it in one place, and all your documents reflect the change.
2. \ifthenelse{}{}{} conditionals. This is really handy when combined with the include files above. I have one set of source files that produce three completely different (but related) documents based on a few \def statements. For example, one's for internal use only and one's for wide release, but I only have to fix typos once.
3. Define (\def) statements. I keep version numbers and product names here. PHB says "We just changed the product name from "iCrap" to "eCrap". No problem. It's even easier than search-and-replace.
4. Comments. I comment the source files the my LaTeX documents. Most the time it's just snide remarks, but sometimes I leave useful comments behind.
%% The behavior described in the next paragraph
%% used to be a bug. Now we charge extra for it.
Ten Reasons Why TeX/LaTeX is Better than Word
on
Writing Documentation
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
LaTeX math mode is a thing of beauty. Equations come out looking
correct. Mathematical expressions in Word are treated as an
afterthought. Equation editor is evil.
TeX is guaranteed to be bug free. The author, Stanford Professor
Donald Knuth, will send you a reward check is you find a bug. The
reward is currently $327.68 (that is, 2^15 cents).
TeX is free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).
TeX has real comments. Anyone who doesn't comment their code is an
ass.
TeX provides a full, turing-complete, language. The text produced
by your input file can be the result of conditionals (which I use to
reuse sections in different documents) or the result of complicated
calculations. In the TeXbook, Knuth demonstrates the power of the TeX
language by defining the \primes{n} command, which
calculates and print the first n primes (see page 218).
There are no LaTeX "macro" viruses. You can safely receive LaTeX
documents by email and not worry about it reading your OutLook address
book and mailing copies of itself to all your friends.
LaTeX has no GUID (Globally Unique Identifier). Word documents are
embedded with a code than can be traced back to your computer (the
police captued the author of the Melissa virus by tracing his GUID).
Big brother Bill is watching!
LaTeX versions are not incompatible. The file format has never
changed. I have LaTeX files from 1989 that work without problem in the
latest version of LaTeX.
There is no undo feature in TeX. This is a good thing. No one can
ever seen earlier versions of your TeX document by pressing the Undo
button.
LaTeX documents are small and lean. What's the smallest Word file on
your computer?
Celeron is a PIII Tulatin with a 100MHz bus and built on the.13 micron process
By the way, that's "0.13 microns."
As my Nobel-Laureate physics lab professor used to say, "ALWAYS use leading zeros with decimal points; that way your readers can tell the difference between a fraction and fly shit."
Go ahead and mod me down, but I'm not a grammar nazi, I'm a math nazi!
Is the new DVD burner the same as the old Apple DVD burner? The one that won't actually let you do anything as useful as a CD burner will?
Quote:
What it quietly neglects to say is that you can't use it to copy or time-shift or record any audio or video copyrighted by major companies. Even if you have the legal right to do so, the technology will prevent you. They don't say that you can't use it to mix and match video tracks from various artists, the way your CD burner will. It doesn't say that you can't copy-protect your own disks that it burns; that's a right the big manufacturers have reserved to themselves. They're not selling you a DVD-Authoring drive, which is for "professional use only". They're selling you a DVD-General drive, which cannot record the key-blocks needed to copy-protect your own recordings, nor can a DVD-General disc be used as a master to press your own DVDs in quantity. These distinctions are not even glossed over; they are simply ignored, not mentioned, invisible until after you buy the product.
What's even more annoying is equipment that requires the Audio (read: royalty) CD-Rs, even when there's no reason to... Like that nifty Terapin VCD recorder that they sell at Thinkgeek. It requires the digital audio consumer CD-Rs (which is another royal step, I think) when I make a Audio CD or a VCD. Not all Audio CD-Rs work in it, only ones that say "for consumer".
In other words, I have to give money to support N'Suck, even if I'm making a VCD of a broadcast TV programs. The Supreme Court (in the BetaMax decision) says I have the right to timeshift Buffy episodes by recording them... but somebody got to Terapin, and now I have to pay a DART royalty to the Backstreet Boys in order to do so.
I say "somebody got to Terapin" because the VCD feature didn't always require consumer audio CD-Rs. It looks like a recent change. Some of the manual says you can use computer (no royalty) CD-Rs or consumer CD-R, and some of the manual is stickered over so that it says you can only use consumer CD-Rs.
It's like what John Gilmore says in What's Wrong With Copy Protection... the RIAA and the MPAA are conspiring to make sure that equipment that lets us fully exercise our fair use rights never reaches the market. Or if it does, that they are least get a big cut.
However, despite all this, the Terapin recorder is still the greatest Christmas present I got, even if the blank "audio CD-R's for consumer" are $0.80.
Now all I need to do it hack it so that it accepts regular (read: no royalty) CD-Rs. Anybody working on new PROMs for this thing?
You don't. I assume you used at least one piece of proprietary music in the wedding program. I feel justified in making this assumption because most weddings I've attended have used at least one piece of proprietary music.
Bzzt. Wrong. My wedding program didn't include any music composed after Bach's death (1750). Despite the long arm reach of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act, I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear here.
minidisc was the eventual format of choice, if any
Which is sad, really, because there's an unwritten agreement that DAT and MiniDisc recorders will treat analog inputs as if they contained copyrighted materials which the user has no rights in.
What's even more annoying is equipment that requires the Audio (read: royalty) CD-Rs, even when there's no reason to... Like that nifty Terapin VCD recorder that they sell at Thinkgeek. It requires the digital audio consumer CD-Rs (which is another royal step, I think) when I make a Audio CD or a VCD. Not all Audio CD-Rs work in it, only ones that say "for consumer".
In other words, I have to give money to support N'Suck, even if I'm making a VCD of a broadcast TV programs. The Supreme Court (in the BetaMax decision) says I have the right to timeshift Buffy episodes by recording them... but somebody got to Terapin, and now I have to pay a DART royalty to the Backstreet Boys in order to do so.
I say "somebody got to Terapin" because the VCD feature didn't always require consumer audio CD-Rs. It looks like a recent change. Some of the manual says you can use computer (no royalty) CD-Rs or consumer CD-R, and some of the manual is stickered over so that it says you can only use consumer CD-Rs.
It's like what John Gilmore says in What's Wrong With Copy Protection... the RIAA and the MPAA are conspiring to make sure that equipment that lets us fully exercise our fair use rights never reaches the market. Or if it does, that they are least get a big cut.
However, despite all this, the Terapin recorder is still the greatest Christmas present I got, even if the blank "audio CD-R's for consumer" are $0.80.
Now all I need to do it hack it so that it accepts regular (read: no royalty) CD-Rs. Anybody working on new PROMs for this thing?
The patent was granted in 1989 but applied for over 10 years earlier. The patent application seems to have been amended after initial filing so I'm not sure which of the dates listed really counts, but if you're looking for prior art then you need something further back (unless Xanadu was mostly formed by 1974).
Of course, filing a patent and then amending it to death is the great Lemelson patent-process-exploitation trick. There was an article in Fortune magazine about it.
The book "Dream Machines" is a little fuzzy about what-was-written-when... The style of the book is a little disjointed (and it has been heavily revised) but that's not surprising, considering the author (Ted Nelson) coined the word "hypertext" in 1965.
This link: Ted Nelson and Xanadu seems to imply that Ted had fleshed out most of the Xanadu system by 1974. The page talks about "xanalogical storage" (basically hyperlinking), unique-IDs for pages, and the "docuverse," a cool word we don't use often enough.
I've got a copy of Ted Nelson's 1974/1987 two-sided book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" on my desk that includes a section about his "Xanadu Project" which not only talks about hyperlinks, but also micropayments and "Xanadu stands" (basically internet cafes).
Even if all of the Xanadu stuff was written in 1987 (and it wasn't), wouldn't that be prior art for this 1989 patent?
Yes, and according to your link, "Microsoft Windows was announced November, 1983" but wasn't actually released until November 1985.
TWO YEARS of amazing Microsoft VaporWare(tm), and the marketing machine still rolls on, flattening all in its path. It's the one thing that UNIX has never figured out how to do... even in thirty years...
So bid away! Bid a billion! Offers to buy real estate aren't binding until you sign a Purchase and Sale Agreement, no matter what your feedback rating is.
Seriously, each and every one of us should make a small donation to the EFF so we can fight this miscarriage of justice. We don't have to put up with bad laws! Just because Congress has been bought and paid for by the members of the MPAA, the RIAA, and the BSA doesn't mean we have to bend over and take it.
Slashdot Mirror
I gave $1000 to the EFF last month.
What have you done?
I would think that the best destination for your donations would be an EFF membership. In fact, the EFF has already set up a Newmark v. Turner page:
And yes, the EFF takes PayPal.But I'm not gonna spit out extra syllables and keystrokes just to appease anyone.
Let it be known that henceforth, I will be simply referring to all things as *grunt*.
Thank you for your *grunt*.
That someone willing to pony up $300 for a domain name is serious about it, and not some luser with a website trying to scam you. Of course, $300 isn't alot of money, but it might help filter out some of the worst bottom feeders.
Right, because the most reputable doctors and lawyers are the ones with the biggest ads in the yellow pages.
Oh, no, wait...
Many people, when trying to explain TiVo, end up calling it a "digital VCR" or a "VCR on steroids." After using TiVo for a month, it is clear that these methods of explaining TiVo's function are unfair...
TiVo's biggest problem is that there is no good way to explain it... Have you ever tried explaining it to your friends, geek or non-geek? All you get is blank stares. But if you *show* it to them, they seem to understand. And if they acutally get one, they quickly become converts.
When people ask me if I like it, I tell them that I would rather give up color than TiVo. I would rather watch TiVo on a B&W set than to have the nicest color HDTV set available.
And the funny thing is, people think I'm kidding...
I have no problem with outdoor advertisements. I have no problem with
billboards, or bus placards, or fancy lighted neon marquees. I can
avert my eyes as I drive by them in my car.
I do have a problem with graffiti. When you sneak up in the night and
spray-paint "Eat at Joe's" on the side of my building, you are using MY
PROPERTY without my permission. And I want to see you tarred, feathered
and drowned in your own paint.
Spam is grafitti. My computer, my disk space, and my bandwidth are
things that I pay for; they are my property. When you use them, without
my permission, to transmit your Nigerian Bank Scams, your porno ads,
your Ponzi schemes, your stock-market pump-and-dumps, and your offshore
casinos, you are spray-painting on my property.
And I want to see you tarred, feathered and drowned in your own flith.
Being nominated is fine and such, but the real test will be on oscar night.
What ever happened to "It's an honor just to be nominated"?
Before long, TV's will start coming with EULA's that govern what, how, when, where we watch TV and what devices we can hook up to them...
Yep. It's called HDTV. The FCC "decided" a year ago that it will be illegal to produce HDTV recorders, even if consumers retain the legal right to record shows.
Remember that the Networks and Studios didn't just "resist" the proliferation of VCRs: they fought it all the way to the Supreme Court (the Betamax decision). Since they lost that battle, they're going to fight dirty, with the DMCA and with the corrupt FCC, to try and nail-shut the time-shifting coffin.
Standard equipment should include a bumper sticker that says I'm changing the climate. Ask me how!
I have one contention with latex2html--it does not follow included files. I have my document broken down to multiple files, each to a chapter. And in the main tex file, I've added the \include{chapter1} etc. where I want the chapters to appear. When I try to latex2html the main tex file, it burps and spits out an error saying it doesn't like included files.
Don't use \include{}. Use \input{} instead.
\include{} is a holdover from when LaTeXing a document would take a *long* time and use valuable and expensive CPU time on your timesharing account. With a fast, single-user desktop machine, there is no reason to use the ugly \include{} and \includeonly{} hacks.
latex2html works just fine with \input{}.
You can make nice pdf and print version. Yes it takes some time to get use to and most WYSIWYG people don't like it but it rocks in CVS.
In addition to producing HTML and PDF with latex2html and pdflatex, there are some other features in TeX/LaTeX that appeal to code monkeys like me.
1. Real include files. For example, you can write a mission statement page that gets included in the front of all your documents. When the mission statement changes, you only have to update it in one place, and all your documents reflect the change.
2. \ifthenelse{}{}{} conditionals. This is really handy when combined with the include files above. I have one set of source files that produce three completely different (but related) documents based on a few \def statements. For example, one's for internal use only and one's for wide release, but I only have to fix typos once.
3. Define (\def) statements. I keep version numbers and product names here. PHB says "We just changed the product name from "iCrap" to "eCrap". No problem. It's even easier than search-and-replace.
4. Comments. I comment the source files the my LaTeX documents. Most the time it's just snide remarks, but sometimes I leave useful comments behind.
%% The behavior described in the next paragraph
%% used to be a bug. Now we charge extra for it.
Celeron is a PIII Tulatin with a 100MHz bus and built on the .13 micron process
By the way, that's "0.13 microns."
As my Nobel-Laureate physics lab professor used to say, "ALWAYS use leading zeros with decimal points; that way your readers can tell the difference between a fraction and fly shit."
Go ahead and mod me down, but I'm not a grammar nazi, I'm a math nazi!
Quote:
From John Gilmore's What's Wrong With Copy Protection
What's even more annoying is equipment that requires the Audio (read: royalty) CD-Rs, even when there's no reason to... Like that nifty Terapin VCD recorder that they sell at Thinkgeek. It requires the digital audio consumer CD-Rs (which is another royal step, I think) when I make a Audio CD or a VCD. Not all Audio CD-Rs work in it, only ones that say "for consumer".
In other words, I have to give money to support N'Suck, even if I'm making a VCD of a broadcast TV programs. The Supreme Court (in the BetaMax decision) says I have the right to timeshift Buffy episodes by recording them... but somebody got to Terapin, and now I have to pay a DART royalty to the Backstreet Boys in order to do so.
I say "somebody got to Terapin" because the VCD feature didn't always require consumer audio CD-Rs. It looks like a recent change. Some of the manual says you can use computer (no royalty) CD-Rs or consumer CD-R, and some of the manual is stickered over so that it says you can only use consumer CD-Rs.
It's like what John Gilmore says in What's Wrong With Copy Protection... the RIAA and the MPAA are conspiring to make sure that equipment that lets us fully exercise our fair use rights never reaches the market. Or if it does, that they are least get a big cut.
However, despite all this, the Terapin recorder is still the greatest Christmas present I got, even if the blank "audio CD-R's for consumer" are $0.80.
Now all I need to do it hack it so that it accepts regular (read: no royalty) CD-Rs. Anybody working on new PROMs for this thing?
You don't. I assume you used at least one piece of proprietary music in the wedding program. I feel justified in making this assumption because most weddings I've attended have used at least one piece of proprietary music.
Bzzt. Wrong. My wedding program didn't include any music composed after Bach's death (1750). Despite the long arm reach of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act, I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear here.
You must go to a lot of cheesy weddings.
Which is sad, really, because there's an unwritten agreement that DAT and MiniDisc recorders will treat analog inputs as if they contained copyrighted materials which the user has no rights in.
In his What's Wrong With Copy Protection, John Gilmore says
So much for fair use.
What's even more annoying is equipment that requires the Audio (read: royalty) CD-Rs, even when there's no reason to... Like that nifty Terapin VCD recorder that they sell at Thinkgeek. It requires the digital audio consumer CD-Rs (which is another royal step, I think) when I make a Audio CD or a VCD. Not all Audio CD-Rs work in it, only ones that say "for consumer".
In other words, I have to give money to support N'Suck, even if I'm making a VCD of a broadcast TV programs. The Supreme Court (in the BetaMax decision) says I have the right to timeshift Buffy episodes by recording them... but somebody got to Terapin, and now I have to pay a DART royalty to the Backstreet Boys in order to do so.
I say "somebody got to Terapin" because the VCD feature didn't always require consumer audio CD-Rs. It looks like a recent change. Some of the manual says you can use computer (no royalty) CD-Rs or consumer CD-R, and some of the manual is stickered over so that it says you can only use consumer CD-Rs.
It's like what John Gilmore says in What's Wrong With Copy Protection... the RIAA and the MPAA are conspiring to make sure that equipment that lets us fully exercise our fair use rights never reaches the market. Or if it does, that they are least get a big cut.
However, despite all this, the Terapin recorder is still the greatest Christmas present I got, even if the blank "audio CD-R's for consumer" are $0.80.
Now all I need to do it hack it so that it accepts regular (read: no royalty) CD-Rs. Anybody working on new PROMs for this thing?
The patent was granted in 1989 but applied for over 10 years earlier. The patent application seems to have been amended after initial filing so I'm not sure which of the dates listed really counts, but if you're looking for prior art then you need something further back (unless Xanadu was mostly formed by 1974).
Of course, filing a patent and then amending it to death is the great Lemelson patent-process-exploitation trick. There was an article in Fortune magazine about it.
The book "Dream Machines" is a little fuzzy about what-was-written-when... The style of the book is a little disjointed (and it has been heavily revised) but that's not surprising, considering the author (Ted Nelson) coined the word "hypertext" in 1965.
This link: Ted Nelson and Xanadu seems to imply that Ted had fleshed out most of the Xanadu system by 1974. The page talks about "xanalogical storage" (basically hyperlinking), unique-IDs for pages, and the "docuverse," a cool word we don't use often enough.
I've got a copy of Ted Nelson's 1974/1987 two-sided book "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" on my desk that includes a section about his "Xanadu Project" which not only talks about hyperlinks, but also micropayments and "Xanadu stands" (basically internet cafes).
Even if all of the Xanadu stuff was written in 1987 (and it wasn't), wouldn't that be prior art for this 1989 patent?
and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985
Yes, and according to your link, "Microsoft Windows was announced November, 1983" but wasn't actually released until November 1985.
TWO YEARS of amazing Microsoft VaporWare(tm), and the marketing machine still rolls on, flattening all in its path. It's the one thing that UNIX has never figured out how to do... even in thirty years...
Damn! Can they leave him a zillion negative feedbacks at once for backing out of such an expensive auction?!
t ml
Actually, real estate auctions on Ebay aren't binding... You need to read the polices and conduct page, buddy:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/png-estate.h
So bid away! Bid a billion! Offers to buy real estate aren't binding until you sign a Purchase and Sale Agreement, no matter what your feedback rating is.
Where's my checkbook?
It's time to make anothe donation to the EFF.
Seriously, each and every one of us should make a small donation to the EFF so we can fight this miscarriage of justice. We don't have to put up with bad laws! Just because Congress has been bought and paid for by the members of the MPAA, the RIAA, and the BSA doesn't mean we have to bend over and take it.
This DMCA crap has got to be stopped.
Besides, the EFF raid hats are really cool.
The scary thing is that the Sci-Fi channel has finally edged out Comedy Central and Cartoon Network on my Tivo for disk space.
You have limited disk space on your TiVo?
Some weak hacker you are!