Our two chief weapons are trolling and casting nasturtiums
Our three chief weapons are trolling and casting nasturtiums and not paying attention to what we're saying....
So your favorite language is whitespace neutral - completely so, right?
No preprocessor lines (C, C++) that terminate on an end of line (which I consider whitespace).
No comments that terminate on the end of line? (Java, C#, C++, Perl, and so on )
How about end of line embedded in strings? Is that legal (in which case is the newline part of the string or not)?
Extra credit to anyone who can name a language that
treats whitespace either as completely neutral in all situation (including tabs and end of line markers), or as meaningful in all cases. (And for slashdot regulars I'll rule out WHITESPACE up front).
And, of course, there is a solution. Just use
#begin
at the beginning of a block and
#end
at the end of the block. Of course, like any sensible programmer you'll indent the block as
you do.
And while you are at it, if you like semicolons,
you can always add #; to the end of statements.
There is to be a recall election for the governor of california and the rules for this election are not quite the same as the usual election rules.
To put a candidate on the ballot does not require much -- either 10,000 signatures or 65 signatures and a $3500 filing fee. The Democratic party has stated it will not be putting a candidate on the ballot which will also change the dynamics of the pre-election media coverage.
In contrast to the usual election process a relatively smallish investment in money and time could
get the right candidate media coverage and an opportunity to raise issues of interest in the public eye. Given the national and international coverage of this election and the short timespan until the election, that investment could potentially be leveraged into far more visibility
than would usually be the case.
So might it be worthwhile for the Open Source community (and its friends and cousins) to somehow sponsor a candidate for governor?
Such a candidate would have to have a good computer system for a website or the slashdot effect might make actually reading about the issues a bit difficult.
I'm not sure how such an audit could be done and mean anything. Suppose you have a code fragment that "George Shrub" claims authorship to. You contact Mr. Shrub and get his statement that he wrote the code, was not looking at SCO code when he did and so on. You believe him (especially since you see that the code looks right, fits in the code being changed, has the right date, is commented on in the LKML and so on).
Now SCO says that it is theirs. They have (possibly forged) timestamps on code, someone else (in their employ) who swears to have written it, and so on. They go to court and persuade a technophobe judge and a jury specifically selected for ignorance.
The best case the linux community can put together is things like the LKML, web archives, dated Redhat (and other vendor) CDs and so on. Dated copies of the code in a number of independent sites is probably the best proof around that independent Linux coders produced the code in question. It may be worthwhile though to start collecting kernel code on web archives of code, of the LKML, of commentary on the code, with cryptographic timestamps and so on - just in case.
But we don't know what code is in question and until we do, collecting it all may be pointless.
It may be anyway -- SCO could just claim that one of their employees had written the code and emailed it to the nominal contributor.
I bet that 99.9% of this code is already copyright, and SCO can't go re-copyrighting it.
I believe that the law says that the code is copyright as soon as it is registered, or published for the first time. And that copyright is by the author.
It seems to me that there are four major possibilities for linux kernel code :
-- It was written and posted to the kernel mailing list, or put online by a linux contributor. In which case the copyright does not belong to SCO. Dates for this should be verifyable by the lkml mailing list, or other mailing lists, or by web archives.
-- It was written by an SCO employeee and they have verifiable proof of that fact (something that seems a bit tough to me - would a timestamp on an SCM system work? I can suggest several ways to fake that. ) And has been kept completely secret. In which case it belongs to SCO and since it was kept secret, can't be in the kernel. So SCO claims against the kernel are baseless.
-- Neither of the above can be proved completely. In which case I can't see how SCO can claim ownership. This might occur if the date on their code and the date of first publication are very close or the same. If there is good evidence of this code being published by a non SCO employee, evidence that SCO produced it on that date or even a day or two before would be very suspect in my eyes (imagine setting the time on the SCM server to be a week behind the real date).
-- It was written by an SCO employee, can be proved to be written by an SCO employee and was deliberately (a very interesting notion) or inadvertently included in code that is otherwise GPL'ed. In which case I think the GPL should take precedence.
The burden of proof on SCO seems pretty high to me.
Anyone else wonder if SCO's strategy might well be to just keep making these claims to boost stock prices, sell as much stock at those prices as they can, then go into court, present a cheezy case and lose.
Then, just in case IBM tries to countersue, declare bankruptcy quickly and go away.
(Or should that be "A License of which one could be proud")
Every so often I look at these things closely to see what amusements lie therein. This one has some fun bits. Some of these seem to stem from an attempt to build a license for every possible product and combination of products - thus in this single license you're agreeing to licenses for Clip Art, iGrafx (or IGRAFX - possibly a different product, who knows), Trellix, some SDK and in every country possible. So, here are a couple excerpts from the license that I found amusing....
YOU MAY:
(i) install and use one (1) copy of the Product on a Computer up to the Permitted Number of Computers. You may also make and use a second copy of the Product on a home or portable computer provided that copy is never loaded in the RAM of the home or portable computer at the same time it is loaded in the RAM of the primary computer;
What if the OS keeps things loaded till the memory is claimed by another process?
And the "a Computer up to the Permitted Number of Computers" makes me believe that lawyers are indeed talking a different language entirely. (Leaving aside the Capitalization, of course.)
There is a whole paragraph on GIF licensing from Unisys. Did that patent expire or not?
In reference to clip-art images :
The image shall...
not be made available for downloading separately or in a format designed or intended for permanent storage or re-use by others;
Like jpeg?
You may only download, install and/or Use the Product if: (i) you are not a citizen, national or resident of, and are not under the control of, the government of: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Serbia, Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan,
Does that mean that there are Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan? I thought the shrubbery and the rummy had forbidden that.
And isn't the government of Iran now the group that the US put in place?
If you are a business in Germany or Austria, the courts of the Province of Ontario, Canada shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any matter arising hereunder.
Not the courts of Germany or Austria? Interesting idea that. And who has jurisdiction if you live in (say) Belgium?
You agree that this Agreement and all documents contemplated hereby be drawn up in English. Vous consentez à ce que cette entente et tous autres documents envisagés par les présentes soient rédigés en anglais.
You must admit that saying that all the documents be drawn up in English and then saying the same thing in French is just a bit self-contradictory.
But I also quite like the "All documents contemplated hereby". Does that include this slashdot posting?
Several paragraphs are in ALL CAPS. Does the case of a character imbue in it Special Significance?
Still, I think SVG is likely to be a sufficiently valuable addition to browsers that it is worth pushing for.
not the same, but different
on
Mutating Animations
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I managed to finally put my genetic grammar program grammidity up on sourceforge. It should work pretty much as packed up, on linux - though it does require povray for the 3d examples and timidity for the sound example.
It doesn't evolve moving critters, but one of the included examples evolves 3d plants that compete for sunlight (kind of, sort of).
Another of the examples included allows the user to evolve midi files - with seriously odd results. Things may get odder though, I'm currently trying to figure out how to decompile midi files into source grammars then do crossover and mutation on them. Imagine Mozart crossed with Metallica....
Beethoven with the Brittany, or... I'd better not say, likely to get attacked.
sodaplay always looks to me just like xspringies - an x windows spring/mass simulation thats been around for quite a while. Its quite a fun thing to play with - you can take one of the defined models and change gravity, the strength of the springs and so on and see how it works.
If thats the case, let me propose a much cleaner solution. Lets just shoot anyone who does any file sharing - avoid the cost of a trial and the cost of keeping someone in prison.
In fact, lets make it even more effective. Do the same thing for anyone selling or giving away a book, or cd or dvd. In fact, if anyone remembers, copyright has been claimed on the images of some buildings (the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the one I remember first), so lets shoot anyone who takes a picture of such a building. The baseball teams are peeved about people sitting on the tops of buildings and watching games over stadium walls - so lets hire helicopters to shoot them all. I'll bet that with a couple of hours of thinking I could find ways to kill off most of the world - including KalvinB.
"Let them die then and decrease the surplus population" (Charles Dickens)
Actually prison is getting to be big business so perhaps the PIAA (hypothetical Prison Industry Association of America) is getting together with the RIAA to find new and exiting ways to put people in prison.
The sad part is that this guarantees support not only by the RIAA and their principle stockholders (likely other big businesses with lots of money to spend on bribes (er, campaign contributions)), but also by the prison guards unions and the communities that make a pile of money from putting people in jail.
The linked article was pretty good (though I agree with the poster who would prefer it not be in pdf, a format that I find seriously hard to read - especially with two column layouts).
It really comes down to how much it will cost to do DRM and the cost of getting around it. The costs are not just monetary - but may include a complex tradeoff of penalties and benefits in many areas - including culture, the legal system, personal privacy, fundamental human rights and so on.
Since corporations and hence their hired thugs in government don't much care about things like human rights, personal privacy or culture (realisticly, things are not set up to encourage them to do so, so why would we expect it), they will always make their decisions on the basis of corporate self interest - which is usually short term profit these days.
There is almost certainly a place for DRM on some level - it encourages and rewards creative artists of all sorts (though the best artists seem to do their thing anyway). The problem is that as soon as we allow any serious IP protections (as DRM or whatever), there's no control on what the people who want to make profits can do with it.
I worked for a company whose game plan was to sell a product for less than $100 - the product was in large part IP of one sort or another. Once the marketers got hold of it, the price was inflated to the $1500 range. Not because it was worth that - but they thought they could charge that much and get away with it. I had figured out how to do a cheap DRM scheme that would be just hard enough to break to make it cheaper to just buy the product (at the $100 mark). Shortly thereafter I left the company - with the DRM scheme still unimplemented.
That kind of thinking "We can get away with charging that much" is pervasive. But its also problematic - just by charging that kind of inflated price, the marketers are providing higher motivation for people to find ways around paying the prices. Monopolistic practices (even in the small - one company holds the contract for the current top musical sensation) tend to exacerbate the problem. Now they want to impose DRM - worse yet they want to do it with the government's legal system - which means that they get the benefits (ability to raise prices, impose conditions...) but everyone else gets to pay the price.
If there were no serious DRM, but downloading a permanent copy of a song cost (say) a dime, there'd be no incentive to break DRM - and most people (I suspect) would go along with it and its not hard to believe that the music industry would be the better and with smaller distribution costs, the artists would probably be better off.
But when we allow and legally support DRM it is both an incentive to the industry to charge as much as it can, and an incentive to consumers to find ways to break it.
Worse yet, we now have corporations that seem to have determined that they are owed a certain amount of money every year - and who are willing to pass laws to ensure that they get it. Essentially they want to tax us to ensure that their incomes stay where they'd like them to be.
Given all this, I see no reasonable alternative but to ban DRM completely - but I suspect the corporations will have their own way and we'll end up spending $10 to listen to a single song three or four times. The interesting thing is going to be the underground that springs up to counter them - who knows what that will result in?
I do quite love the law of unintended consequences.
Given that the internet spans borders more easily than any previous technology, what do you expect can (or should) be done to provide IP protection at an international level? It seems to be all too likely that any such attempt will result in a least common denominator set of regulations that grant IP rights along the lines of the strictest rules in any affected country. At the same time there is a risk that IP protections could be used to seriously restrict free speech.
I heard someone (and someone with some technical savvy too) the other day bemoan the fact that macromedia doesn't make a browser. There were a number of reasons - but reliable Flash was a big one.
I have not measured (time to do that, I think) but I suspect now that around three percent of web sites I visit are now flash only and probably about three times that have a signficant flash component.
Designers like flash - it gives them lots of power and lots of ways to restrict the user into seeing a web site the way the designer (or the marketroid who owns the designer) wants. Then too, its a standard. And finally it is certainly browser neutral (modulo the usual problems where it doesn't run on this machine or that - which is, of course, the users fault for choosing such non-standard platforms).
So, I think the article has it wrong. None of the current browsers will survive long. Someone will build a flash/shockwave platform that manages to display html and take over the world.
I have seen the future and it is unstoppable flash popups!
"Use only the latest version of IE and IIS and.NET and C# and let us here at MS define the standards. No need for you all to worry your foolish little heads about any of it."
The books need a good map. The maps provided are a bit on the minimal side. Ideally I'd like a good big map to put on a wall so I can figure out where things are when the wall is nearby, and a smaller - but still good sized - map for keeping with the book.
Excellent, Unforgettable, Compelling....
on
A Game of Thrones
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I must agree that "A Song of Ice and Fire" (consisting of "A Game of Thrones", "A Clash of Kings" and "A Storm of Swords") is excellent. But "excellent" doesn't do the work justice by far. (All the good words have been used up by critics in saying nice things about second rate works.)
How about just "Gosh, Golly, Wow..."
I picked the first volume up on a recommendation and found myself trapped by it. I ended up buying the second volume before I finished the first so I could continue without a break. I thought it might (as second volumes often do) disappoint a bit - but before I finished the second volume I was buying the third. Now I get to wait for the fourth.
Worse yet, by the time I was approaching the end of the third volume I was rationing myself to one chapter a day. If you knew how I tend to read, you'd know how rare that is.
The story is wonderful, with twists and turns and complications in abundance - but knowing how things are going to do does not ruin your enjoyment. This is not just a simple, one dimensional tale, instead it reads like real history (I was reminded of "Les Rois Maudits" a multi volume fictionalized history of a series of French kings).
The characters, too, are fascinating - all are mixes of good and bad - and all have the ability to act in ways that make you shake your head a bit - sometimes in surprise, sometimes in recognition. And I found myself caring about the characters (at least some of them) more than I would have guessed possible.
The writing is not fancy or overly self conscious nor is it sloppy or careless. Its
just right - doing its job and staying out of the way.
There is magic here - and while it is powerful , it does not take over the book as magic does in many fantasy novels. And very often, that magic is double edged - with the ability to hurt its weilder as much as to help.
Finally, the world itself is varied and vividly described. Most of the action takes place on Westeros, either a very large island, or a small continent. At the north there are icy mountains, mountains that shield a major threat - behind a wall of ice 700 feet high. There are warmer lands too, great rivers (very important, those rivers), and the sea. Off Westeros there are strange lands that one of the characters is wandering through on the way back to Westeros - she visits strange cities with strong magic.
If you like fantasy, or history - these are very much worth reading.
No, let me restate that. If you like reading good stories, with good character this is very much worth reading.
One of the best books (taken as a whole) I've read in a very long time. Not just "best fantasy books" or "best genre books" - but best books.
I've played with something like this on and off for a while - but its not yet congealed into anything usuable.
In particular the fact that mozilla/firebird do not make page visits, referrers, times visited and the like easy to get at make this a bit tougher. I can read the file (history.dat) ok, but it just doesn't reliably have what I want (to be fair, it didn't have it the last time i worked on this which was a few months back).
I do save all the bookmarks and as much of the visited stuff in a database as I can in the hopes of finding what I want.
Eventually I'd like to build a directed graph of pages with various kinds of "related to by..." links that I can rearrange, rate sites in, and otherwise use to help make my browsing more productive.
Try the mozilla/firebird radial context extension. Its not gestures - but has lots of the advantages of gestures (with a bit of use the mouse movements needed to do something are easily learned) but also has the advantage that a pause will put up a menu around your cursor.
Following the suggestions of the government, we should all go out, purchase plastic sheeting and duct tape and carefully enclose Windows in the sheeting, seal completely with the duct tape and dispose of safely. I imagine that your local recycling center can find "Hazardous Materials" stickers for you to label it with.
Currently SCO is just threatening by themselves. If a court got involved and said that all linux distributions would have to be shut down in the US, it would be like the DeCSS thing where anyone running a site that did distributions (or for that matter wearing a t-shirt with the distro printed on it) could be compelled to shut it down or go to jail for contempt.
So, it is possible that all distribution sites could be shut down.
I thought of something the other day that kind of bothered me. IANAL (ever note how "ANAL" is the most important part of that?) but it seems to me that it might be possible for SCO to request the judge hearing the case to issue an injunction forbidding distribution of the software mentioned in the dispute (ie Linux) while the case is being heard. While the obvious target is IBM, it doesn't seem (given SCO's recent behavior) unlikely that they would try to get such a ban extended to all linux distributions.
Slashdot Mirror
Our two chief weapons are trolling and casting nasturtiums
Our three chief weapons are trolling and casting nasturtiums and not paying attention to what we're saying....
So your favorite language is whitespace neutral - completely so, right?
No preprocessor lines (C, C++) that terminate on an end of line (which I consider whitespace).
No comments that terminate on the end of line? (Java, C#, C++, Perl, and so on )
How about end of line embedded in strings? Is that legal (in which case is the newline part of the string or not)?
Extra credit to anyone who can name a language that treats whitespace either as completely neutral in all situation (including tabs and end of line markers), or as meaningful in all cases. (And for slashdot regulars I'll rule out WHITESPACE up front).
And, of course, there is a solution. Just use
#begin
at the beginning of a block and
#end at the end of the block. Of course, like any sensible programmer you'll indent the block as you do.
And while you are at it, if you like semicolons, you can always add #; to the end of statements.
So might it be worthwhile for the Open Source community (and its friends and cousins) to somehow sponsor a candidate for governor?
Such a candidate would have to have a good computer system for a website or the slashdot effect might make actually reading about the issues a bit difficult.
Now SCO says that it is theirs. They have (possibly forged) timestamps on code, someone else (in their employ) who swears to have written it, and so on. They go to court and persuade a technophobe judge and a jury specifically selected for ignorance.
The best case the linux community can put together is things like the LKML, web archives, dated Redhat (and other vendor) CDs and so on. Dated copies of the code in a number of independent sites is probably the best proof around that independent Linux coders produced the code in question. It may be worthwhile though to start collecting kernel code on web archives of code, of the LKML, of commentary on the code, with cryptographic timestamps and so on - just in case.
But we don't know what code is in question and until we do, collecting it all may be pointless. It may be anyway -- SCO could just claim that one of their employees had written the code and emailed it to the nominal contributor.
How do you know?
I understand that you know that it doesn't crash. But how do you know that your vote can't be audited, that votes are not being changed ....
I believe that the law says that the code is copyright as soon as it is registered, or published for the first time. And that copyright is by the author.
It seems to me that there are four major possibilities for linux kernel code :
-- It was written and posted to the kernel mailing list, or put online by a linux contributor. In which case the copyright does not belong to SCO. Dates for this should be verifyable by the lkml mailing list, or other mailing lists, or by web archives.
-- It was written by an SCO employeee and they have verifiable proof of that fact (something that seems a bit tough to me - would a timestamp on an SCM system work? I can suggest several ways to fake that. ) And has been kept completely secret. In which case it belongs to SCO and since it was kept secret, can't be in the kernel. So SCO claims against the kernel are baseless.
-- Neither of the above can be proved completely. In which case I can't see how SCO can claim ownership. This might occur if the date on their code and the date of first publication are very close or the same. If there is good evidence of this code being published by a non SCO employee, evidence that SCO produced it on that date or even a day or two before would be very suspect in my eyes (imagine setting the time on the SCM server to be a week behind the real date).
-- It was written by an SCO employee, can be proved to be written by an SCO employee and was deliberately (a very interesting notion) or inadvertently included in code that is otherwise GPL'ed. In which case I think the GPL should take precedence.
The burden of proof on SCO seems pretty high to me.
Then, just in case IBM tries to countersue, declare bankruptcy quickly and go away.
Every so often I look at these things closely to see what amusements lie therein. This one has some fun bits. Some of these seem to stem from an attempt to build a license for every possible product and combination of products - thus in this single license you're agreeing to licenses for Clip Art, iGrafx (or IGRAFX - possibly a different product, who knows), Trellix, some SDK and in every country possible. So, here are a couple excerpts from the license that I found amusing....
YOU MAY: (i) install and use one (1) copy of the Product on a Computer up to the Permitted Number of Computers. You may also make and use a second copy of the Product on a home or portable computer provided that copy is never loaded in the RAM of the home or portable computer at the same time it is loaded in the RAM of the primary computer;
What if the OS keeps things loaded till the memory is claimed by another process?
And the "a Computer up to the Permitted Number of Computers" makes me believe that lawyers are indeed talking a different language entirely. (Leaving aside the Capitalization, of course.)
There is a whole paragraph on GIF licensing from Unisys. Did that patent expire or not?
In reference to clip-art images : ...
not be made available for downloading separately or in a format designed or intended for permanent storage or re-use by others;
The image shall
Like jpeg?
You may only download, install and/or Use the Product if: (i) you are not a citizen, national or resident of, and are not under the control of, the government of: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Serbia, Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan,
Does that mean that there are Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan? I thought the shrubbery and the rummy had forbidden that.
And isn't the government of Iran now the group that the US put in place?
If you are a business in Germany or Austria, the courts of the Province of Ontario, Canada shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any matter arising hereunder.
Not the courts of Germany or Austria? Interesting idea that. And who has jurisdiction if you live in (say) Belgium?
You agree that this Agreement and all documents contemplated hereby be drawn up in English. Vous consentez à ce que cette entente et tous autres documents envisagés par les présentes soient rédigés en anglais.
You must admit that saying that all the documents be drawn up in English and then saying the same thing in French is just a bit self-contradictory.
But I also quite like the "All documents contemplated hereby". Does that include this slashdot posting?
Several paragraphs are in ALL CAPS. Does the case of a character imbue in it Special Significance?
Still, I think SVG is likely to be a sufficiently valuable addition to browsers that it is worth pushing for.
It doesn't evolve moving critters, but one of the included examples evolves 3d plants that compete for sunlight (kind of, sort of).
Another of the examples included allows the user to evolve midi files - with seriously odd results. Things may get odder though, I'm currently trying to figure out how to decompile midi files into source grammars then do crossover and mutation on them. Imagine Mozart crossed with Metallica.... Beethoven with the Brittany, or... I'd better not say, likely to get attacked.
sodaplay always looks to me just like xspringies - an x windows spring/mass simulation thats been around for quite a while. Its quite a fun thing to play with - you can take one of the defined models and change gravity, the strength of the springs and so on and see how it works.
If thats the case, let me propose a much cleaner solution. Lets just shoot anyone who does any file sharing - avoid the cost of a trial and the cost of keeping someone in prison.
In fact, lets make it even more effective. Do the same thing for anyone selling or giving away a book, or cd or dvd. In fact, if anyone remembers, copyright has been claimed on the images of some buildings (the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the one I remember first), so lets shoot anyone who takes a picture of such a building. The baseball teams are peeved about people sitting on the tops of buildings and watching games over stadium walls - so lets hire helicopters to shoot them all. I'll bet that with a couple of hours of thinking I could find ways to kill off most of the world - including KalvinB.
"Let them die then and decrease the surplus population" (Charles Dickens)
The sad part is that this guarantees support not only by the RIAA and their principle stockholders (likely other big businesses with lots of money to spend on bribes (er, campaign contributions)), but also by the prison guards unions and the communities that make a pile of money from putting people in jail.
It really comes down to how much it will cost to do DRM and the cost of getting around it. The costs are not just monetary - but may include a complex tradeoff of penalties and benefits in many areas - including culture, the legal system, personal privacy, fundamental human rights and so on.
Since corporations and hence their hired thugs in government don't much care about things like human rights, personal privacy or culture (realisticly, things are not set up to encourage them to do so, so why would we expect it), they will always make their decisions on the basis of corporate self interest - which is usually short term profit these days.
There is almost certainly a place for DRM on some level - it encourages and rewards creative artists of all sorts (though the best artists seem to do their thing anyway). The problem is that as soon as we allow any serious IP protections (as DRM or whatever), there's no control on what the people who want to make profits can do with it.
I worked for a company whose game plan was to sell a product for less than $100 - the product was in large part IP of one sort or another. Once the marketers got hold of it, the price was inflated to the $1500 range. Not because it was worth that - but they thought they could charge that much and get away with it. I had figured out how to do a cheap DRM scheme that would be just hard enough to break to make it cheaper to just buy the product (at the $100 mark). Shortly thereafter I left the company - with the DRM scheme still unimplemented.
That kind of thinking "We can get away with charging that much" is pervasive. But its also problematic - just by charging that kind of inflated price, the marketers are providing higher motivation for people to find ways around paying the prices. Monopolistic practices (even in the small - one company holds the contract for the current top musical sensation) tend to exacerbate the problem. Now they want to impose DRM - worse yet they want to do it with the government's legal system - which means that they get the benefits (ability to raise prices, impose conditions...) but everyone else gets to pay the price.
If there were no serious DRM, but downloading a permanent copy of a song cost (say) a dime, there'd be no incentive to break DRM - and most people (I suspect) would go along with it and its not hard to believe that the music industry would be the better and with smaller distribution costs, the artists would probably be better off. But when we allow and legally support DRM it is both an incentive to the industry to charge as much as it can, and an incentive to consumers to find ways to break it.
Worse yet, we now have corporations that seem to have determined that they are owed a certain amount of money every year - and who are willing to pass laws to ensure that they get it. Essentially they want to tax us to ensure that their incomes stay where they'd like them to be.
Given all this, I see no reasonable alternative but to ban DRM completely - but I suspect the corporations will have their own way and we'll end up spending $10 to listen to a single song three or four times. The interesting thing is going to be the underground that springs up to counter them - who knows what that will result in? I do quite love the law of unintended consequences.
Given that the internet spans borders more easily than any previous technology, what do you expect can (or should) be done to provide IP protection at an international level? It seems to be all too likely that any such attempt will result in a least common denominator set of regulations that grant IP rights along the lines of the strictest rules in any affected country. At the same time there is a risk that IP protections could be used to seriously restrict free speech.
I have not measured (time to do that, I think) but I suspect now that around three percent of web sites I visit are now flash only and probably about three times that have a signficant flash component.
Designers like flash - it gives them lots of power and lots of ways to restrict the user into seeing a web site the way the designer (or the marketroid who owns the designer) wants. Then too, its a standard. And finally it is certainly browser neutral (modulo the usual problems where it doesn't run on this machine or that - which is, of course, the users fault for choosing such non-standard platforms).
So, I think the article has it wrong. None of the current browsers will survive long. Someone will build a flash/shockwave platform that manages to display html and take over the world.
I have seen the future and it is unstoppable flash popups!
And the response from the mountaintop is firm....
"No standards wars!"
"Just follow the One True Path!"
"Use only the latest version of IE and IIS and .NET and C# and let us here at MS define the standards. No need for you all to worry your foolish little heads about any of it."
The books need a good map. The maps provided are a bit on the minimal side. Ideally I'd like a good big map to put on a wall so I can figure out where things are when the wall is nearby, and a smaller - but still good sized - map for keeping with the book.
How about just "Gosh, Golly, Wow..."
I picked the first volume up on a recommendation and found myself trapped by it. I ended up buying the second volume before I finished the first so I could continue without a break. I thought it might (as second volumes often do) disappoint a bit - but before I finished the second volume I was buying the third. Now I get to wait for the fourth.
Worse yet, by the time I was approaching the end of the third volume I was rationing myself to one chapter a day. If you knew how I tend to read, you'd know how rare that is.
The story is wonderful, with twists and turns and complications in abundance - but knowing how things are going to do does not ruin your enjoyment. This is not just a simple, one dimensional tale, instead it reads like real history (I was reminded of "Les Rois Maudits" a multi volume fictionalized history of a series of French kings).
The characters, too, are fascinating - all are mixes of good and bad - and all have the ability to act in ways that make you shake your head a bit - sometimes in surprise, sometimes in recognition. And I found myself caring about the characters (at least some of them) more than I would have guessed possible.
The writing is not fancy or overly self conscious nor is it sloppy or careless. Its just right - doing its job and staying out of the way.
There is magic here - and while it is powerful , it does not take over the book as magic does in many fantasy novels. And very often, that magic is double edged - with the ability to hurt its weilder as much as to help.
Finally, the world itself is varied and vividly described. Most of the action takes place on Westeros, either a very large island, or a small continent. At the north there are icy mountains, mountains that shield a major threat - behind a wall of ice 700 feet high. There are warmer lands too, great rivers (very important, those rivers), and the sea. Off Westeros there are strange lands that one of the characters is wandering through on the way back to Westeros - she visits strange cities with strong magic.
If you like fantasy, or history - these are very much worth reading.
No, let me restate that. If you like reading good stories, with good character this is very much worth reading.
One of the best books (taken as a whole) I've read in a very long time. Not just "best fantasy books" or "best genre books" - but best books.
Speaking of cool xul, check out robin . I have no idea what to do with it (yet) but it is certainly cool.
In particular the fact that mozilla/firebird do not make page visits, referrers, times visited and the like easy to get at make this a bit tougher. I can read the file (history.dat) ok, but it just doesn't reliably have what I want (to be fair, it didn't have it the last time i worked on this which was a few months back).
I do save all the bookmarks and as much of the visited stuff in a database as I can in the hopes of finding what I want.
Eventually I'd like to build a directed graph of pages with various kinds of "related to by..." links that I can rearrange, rate sites in, and otherwise use to help make my browsing more productive.
Most excellent stuff!
Following the suggestions of the government, we should all go out, purchase plastic sheeting and duct tape and carefully enclose Windows in the sheeting, seal completely with the duct tape and dispose of safely. I imagine that your local recycling center can find "Hazardous Materials" stickers for you to label it with.
So, it is possible that all distribution sites could be shut down.
But, again, IANAL and this is just speculation.
That could be unpleasant.