But facebook is a pre-existing term for a yearbook. So Facebook started off as being an online facebook. Teachbook is a facebook for teachers.
I see no evidence that Facebook have promoted the use of "book" as a suffix - perhaps if they had a range of foo-book sites or products, that would be different.
And where does it say that Teachbook is a social networking site, or anything like Facebook, anyway?
I'm waiting for a company to bring out a phone with "phone" in the title, and for Apple to then sue them... Would be no less ridiculous than many of these cases!
I agree. Here in the UK, we have to pay £140 a year for the TV licence if we watch any broadcast TV, plus there's the £10 a month I pay for TV. Yet watching via the Internet is far more convenient than remembering when something is on.
So that's £260 a year that's up for grabs if a company was to offer a legal Internet-based TV service. The technology is already here. Instead the companies would rather not offer it, shut down any sites offering it (I remember when TV Links I think it was called was shut down by police here in the UK), and then whine that piracy is killing their industry - despite the fact that people like me are still paying them £260 a year, and they're the ones refusing to offer what people want.
Does the Iphone behave anything like the Ipod btw? That's terrible - aside from being forced to use Itunes, when using on another computer, all the files appear as random gibberish (and using it through Itunes on another machine has risks of syncing issues). With normal devices like the Sandisk Sansa and 5800, they just work out of the box, and present themselves as an ordinary external drive, without corrupting the filenames.
Word games? Well by that logic, Nokia has smartphones like the 5800 entirely for "free".
Would you like to do a deal? I give you £5, and you pay me back £30 a month for the next two years. Since you're carrying a phone with you anyway, that's a great deal for you - you've just got £5 for free, right?
Since the poster ALREADY stated he "would carry a phone anyway" that rendered the subsidy point moot, since he would BE PAYING FOR PHONE SERVICE ANYWAY.
Really? I carry a phone anyway, and don't pay any contract. My phone only cost £180 in total - that's actually in total, not your pretend "word games" in total. I only pay for services I want, as opposed to paying for the phone.
As for apps - Symbian and Android all have the apps that anyone needs as far as I've seen. What examples of killer must have apps are only available on the Iphones? (And even if there are some, the same can be said in reverse - e.g., Nokia Maps which gives decent offline mapping as standard; Google Sky Maps is a cool astronomy tool only available on Android; both of these are far better than 100,000 apps that just make a stupid noise or display a logo, usually with you having to pay for the privilege.)
I can't help thinking that mp3 players have stalled, or at least, the ones that get all the hype. Years ago, you had a 20GB Ipod. But now, for the same price, people are getting excited over devices that have, wow, 16GB, or at most 32GB. I know, they have extra things like Internet and video, but if you just want an mp3 player? And the problem is that most of the cheap mp3 only players also only have even smaller amounts, like 1-8GB.
However, Sandisk's Sansa Clip thankfully has a microSD slot - at UK prices, you can get an 8GB player for £25, shove in a 32GB microSD, and have a 40GB player for £110. For mp3 playing, it beats an Ipod touch hands down (as well as a Shuffle). If you want more than that, well, an Ipod touch lacks any phone capability, and since I need a phone anyway, I might as well use that for Internet access etc.
What matters is that Apple is finally starting to get some real competition.
There was competition before Apple came along. You could just as easily say Archos or Nokia are finally starting to get real competition (not to mention other similar devices, such as touch netbooks from ASUS etc - the fact that they have a keyboard as well doesn't make them a different market).
Now what may change is that, finally the media will start covering something other than Apple devices.
Is England the only country in the world where we still, you know, have school punishments rather than shipping young children off to prison because they stole a pencil or whatever?
But what seems more odd to me that this sort of thing results in criminal charges.
Yes, in my day, if you did something like this and bragged about it, you'd be caught and given something like a detention. (Police would only be involved if it was something very serious, and at the least, something involving harm to others.)
I understand that Facebook is the modern analogy to telling everyone about it. I don't understand how police and criminal charges are now the modern analogy to school punishments.
I agree - it's a commercial usage, it's using the word in a similar context, and it's a word (AFAIK) solely created by LucasFilm.
For other examples of LucasFilm trademarks, I think the trademark over "Droid" is far more dubious, given that this is an obvious shortening of an existing English word, and although English words can be trademarked, they seem to try to enforce this even on things nothing to do with Star Wars (e.g., I believe that Motorola needed to license the trademark for their Droid, even though the name is clearly an obvious shortening of the Android operating system it runs, and nothing to do with Star Wars). The idea that a company can own - in any context - words in our language that are obvious derivations of existing words seems mad. (Just think, in years to come when perhaps robotics becomes commonplace, we won't be allowed to call them droids without infringing...)
Not on their system. In the attack scenario the user's current directory, by whatever means, is a foreign system. Maybe it's a PC on the local network, maybe it's a Webdav share on some server in another country.
Yes I was wondering if it was more the possibility of non-local loading. But in that case, I'd still say it's an OS flaw, not an application flaw - surely it's the OSs job to set the allowed DLL paths up correctly and securely, so that the local disk and trusted networks are included, but things like webdav shares or downloading from a web page in general aren't.
Thanks for the info, I was wondering if that was the case. Although given that the standard linking case allows for DLLs to be anywhere in the search path, it's still unclear to me why specifying a DLL in LoadLibrary without a specific path is bad, and if it has different behaviour, shouldn't that be an OS flaw? (I.e., ideally an application should be able to use LoadLibrary with the same paths being searched as in the standard linking case when a DLL is needed for the application to start.)
But if it's true that the folder of the data file is included in the search path for DLLs (as opposed to the folder of the application), isn't that something that Microsoft should fix?
How would an application developer fix it to avoid this problem, whilst still allowing the possibility of loading DLLs from the application folder (honest question, I'm not saying it isn't possible, just curious of the solution)?
Do you know how things work with linking the usual way with a lib file (as opposed to manually calling LoadLibrary)?
You mean of the ebook (text) itself, or the physical ebook reader? Either way, I don't see how that makes anything illegal.
You don't agree to a contract before buying these things; contracts are a civil not criminal issue; and I don't see how that should prevent someone producing a screen reader, even if someone else had "agreed" to not use one on "their" device.
Sorry, you're confusing Microsoft, with PCs. Yes, one advantage PCs had over other platforms was that they could be made by anyone, and worked to a common standard.
But that would still be true, with or without Microsoft, and whether we had a monopoly OS company or not. There were other OSs you could run on any PC.
And, for that matter, would any other company be better than MS? Apple is all about lock-in.
Well, I agree that Apple are far worse in this respect (look at the IPRODUCTS), but equally, it's wrong to claim that Microsoft are responsible for creating interoperability. They've done plenty to resist open standards regarding their operating system and file formats, too (e.g., restricting use of NTFS).
Well, PCs had already achieved dominance in business in the 80s, and there were other operating systems for PCs. Some of them were dire, but then so was DOS, and there were better alternatives to DOS (e.g., OS/2 - yes we laugh now, and I laughed at the time when I compared it to AmigaOS, and saw how they were bragging about 32-bit and multitasking in 1994, but they were still ahead of Microsoft, who did the same thing in 1995).
So most likely we'd still be using PCs, running some other operating system.
And even though other platforms may have benefitted from a lack of Microsoft, there was far more than Apple - e.g., the Amiga, BeOS, Linux - who also would have benefitted.
I agree - it's unclear to me what the "fault" of the developer is here, and which applications are at fault. I thought that loading a DLL by name without a specific path was standard practice? And how does it work with linking - in my experience, all applications I've written and used can either use a DLL in the standard path, or be overridden by a local DLL, so surely that's standard practice too? And wouldn't this affect almost every Windows program that uses DLL?
But then, I'm not sure that this is a bad system anyway. Well, if it's possible to include a DLL loaded off a web page as being the standard path, that seems a gaping hole. However, if this flaw requires an attacker to already install a dodgy DLL in the user's path on their system, surely that would already be the security flaw? I mean, it's a bit like saying "It's a flaw that people can run exes by double clicking, there could be malicious code" - the flaw isn't in running exes, the flaw is how they got there in the first place.
What is the proposed fix for applications that link to DLLs? And how do other operating systems work - again, I thought that having a path system allowing multiple possible locations for shared libraries wasn't uncommon?
Yet you're happy to sign up for a Slashdot account, using a 3rd party server. Are you seriously saying that that's just as weird as if "North Korea" had an account to post on here?
The point is, if he did want that, there are many phones to consider besides the Iphone. Even sticking with Nokia, they have the number one smartphone platform, Symbian.
Stop trying to treat your phone like a desktop... or even a sub notebook and you'll be a lot happier AND more productive.
If you just want a phone, get a locked down feature phone that does Internet access and apps, and is way cheaper than Apple's. But the point of a smartphone is, or was before Apple redefined the term, to provide something more like a mobile handheld computer.
If you had 15 mod points all in one go, I presume you must have multiple sockpuppet accounts, which you're using to mod down people for liking the N900, and then you come and violate the spirit of the rules by posting in the same thread.
And you accuse them of being fanatical?
(And yes, it is a once in a blue moon thread about Nokia, the number one phone company. If you don't like people praising devices and being unable to cope with any criticism, why not have a go on the many Iphone stories?)
That would be like me saying I can't put a GPS on my car to keep tabs on where it goes when my son drives it.
What if you were running a hire car business, and kept a big database on every customer and where they drove to in the cars you hired out?
I mean, there's an uproar on places like here about the possibility of Google doing similar things with search queries - I don't hear the "But it's their server" argument then. And rightly so - the issue of privacy rights is separate to who owns what.
And an employee should have every right to monitor everything about the company, after all, they're giving up their time to work for that company? I don't think that logic follows.
Should a company put cameras in in toilet cubicles and changing rooms because they own the premises? Sometimes the issue of privacy still exists (as Germany has decided), even if someone owns the equipment. Yes, an employee is choosing to work there and use said equipment, but equally, the employer chooses to hire people, and let them use that equipment.
The problem is that erecting a big fence (or forest, as you suggest) on your own land to hide it would likely breach regulations such as planning permission (which probably wouldn't be allowed, for something that significantly changes how it looks).
So I think there should be some balance here. If we're saying it's fair game to publish anything you can from a public street, in any way, we should also allow people to take whatever steps they like on their own private land.
But if society is saying that people should be limited in what they can do, even on their private land, because it affects how it looks when viewed from other people's land, then it's also a fair balance to say that you don't necessarily have blanket rights to do absolutely whatever you like with data that's taken of private land.
(With windows, we can close the curtains. If there was a law saying you couldn't close the curtains without permission, I'd also expect laws controlling stalkers who might point a camera through the window all day long.)
FWIW, I think that Google have the right balance (not just legally, but also ethically - Don't Be Evil, remember?), in that they put the images up, but remove them if people object. This photographer may have a legal right to take photos, but others also have a legal right to criticise him for doing so.
Well, once you have taken the photograph, you then own the copyright on it. This entitles you to do pretty much whatever you like with it.
No - copyright means you can stop others from copying it. It's a necessity for being able to publish, but not a sufficiency. If there's another reason why you can't publish it (which could be anything from model rights as we're discussing here, or other things like defamation, or indeed, if the photograph is itself of a copyrighted work of someone else's), then owning the copyright isn't always sufficient for you to publish.
Slashdot Mirror
But facebook is a pre-existing term for a yearbook. So Facebook started off as being an online facebook. Teachbook is a facebook for teachers.
I see no evidence that Facebook have promoted the use of "book" as a suffix - perhaps if they had a range of foo-book sites or products, that would be different.
And where does it say that Teachbook is a social networking site, or anything like Facebook, anyway?
I'm waiting for a company to bring out a phone with "phone" in the title, and for Apple to then sue them... Would be no less ridiculous than many of these cases!
I agree. Here in the UK, we have to pay £140 a year for the TV licence if we watch any broadcast TV, plus there's the £10 a month I pay for TV. Yet watching via the Internet is far more convenient than remembering when something is on.
So that's £260 a year that's up for grabs if a company was to offer a legal Internet-based TV service. The technology is already here. Instead the companies would rather not offer it, shut down any sites offering it (I remember when TV Links I think it was called was shut down by police here in the UK), and then whine that piracy is killing their industry - despite the fact that people like me are still paying them £260 a year, and they're the ones refusing to offer what people want.
Given that teachbook is a social networking site but for a specialized niche
Is it, though? The article only says:
"the Northbrook, Ill.-based company, which provides tools for teachers to manage their classrooms and share lesson plans and other resources"
Not sure that implies social networking, unless you're diluting the term to mean any website where people can sign up for an account.
Not to mention that "facebook" was a pre-existing term to mean a school yearbook.
Can also do all of that on my Nokia 5800.
Does the Iphone behave anything like the Ipod btw? That's terrible - aside from being forced to use Itunes, when using on another computer, all the files appear as random gibberish (and using it through Itunes on another machine has risks of syncing issues). With normal devices like the Sandisk Sansa and 5800, they just work out of the box, and present themselves as an ordinary external drive, without corrupting the filenames.
Word games? Well by that logic, Nokia has smartphones like the 5800 entirely for "free".
Would you like to do a deal? I give you £5, and you pay me back £30 a month for the next two years. Since you're carrying a phone with you anyway, that's a great deal for you - you've just got £5 for free, right?
Since the poster ALREADY stated he "would carry a phone anyway" that rendered the subsidy point moot, since he would BE PAYING FOR PHONE SERVICE ANYWAY.
Really? I carry a phone anyway, and don't pay any contract. My phone only cost £180 in total - that's actually in total, not your pretend "word games" in total. I only pay for services I want, as opposed to paying for the phone.
As for apps - Symbian and Android all have the apps that anyone needs as far as I've seen. What examples of killer must have apps are only available on the Iphones? (And even if there are some, the same can be said in reverse - e.g., Nokia Maps which gives decent offline mapping as standard; Google Sky Maps is a cool astronomy tool only available on Android; both of these are far better than 100,000 apps that just make a stupid noise or display a logo, usually with you having to pay for the privilege.)
I can't help thinking that mp3 players have stalled, or at least, the ones that get all the hype. Years ago, you had a 20GB Ipod. But now, for the same price, people are getting excited over devices that have, wow, 16GB, or at most 32GB. I know, they have extra things like Internet and video, but if you just want an mp3 player? And the problem is that most of the cheap mp3 only players also only have even smaller amounts, like 1-8GB.
However, Sandisk's Sansa Clip thankfully has a microSD slot - at UK prices, you can get an 8GB player for £25, shove in a 32GB microSD, and have a 40GB player for £110. For mp3 playing, it beats an Ipod touch hands down (as well as a Shuffle). If you want more than that, well, an Ipod touch lacks any phone capability, and since I need a phone anyway, I might as well use that for Internet access etc.
What matters is that Apple is finally starting to get some real competition.
There was competition before Apple came along. You could just as easily say Archos or Nokia are finally starting to get real competition (not to mention other similar devices, such as touch netbooks from ASUS etc - the fact that they have a keyboard as well doesn't make them a different market).
Now what may change is that, finally the media will start covering something other than Apple devices.
Is England the only country in the world where we still, you know, have school punishments rather than shipping young children off to prison because they stole a pencil or whatever?
But what seems more odd to me that this sort of thing results in criminal charges.
Yes, in my day, if you did something like this and bragged about it, you'd be caught and given something like a detention. (Police would only be involved if it was something very serious, and at the least, something involving harm to others.)
I understand that Facebook is the modern analogy to telling everyone about it. I don't understand how police and criminal charges are now the modern analogy to school punishments.
I agree - it's a commercial usage, it's using the word in a similar context, and it's a word (AFAIK) solely created by LucasFilm.
For other examples of LucasFilm trademarks, I think the trademark over "Droid" is far more dubious, given that this is an obvious shortening of an existing English word, and although English words can be trademarked, they seem to try to enforce this even on things nothing to do with Star Wars (e.g., I believe that Motorola needed to license the trademark for their Droid, even though the name is clearly an obvious shortening of the Android operating system it runs, and nothing to do with Star Wars). The idea that a company can own - in any context - words in our language that are obvious derivations of existing words seems mad. (Just think, in years to come when perhaps robotics becomes commonplace, we won't be allowed to call them droids without infringing...)
Not on their system. In the attack scenario the user's current directory, by whatever means, is a foreign system. Maybe it's a PC on the local network, maybe it's a Webdav share on some server in another country.
Yes I was wondering if it was more the possibility of non-local loading. But in that case, I'd still say it's an OS flaw, not an application flaw - surely it's the OSs job to set the allowed DLL paths up correctly and securely, so that the local disk and trusted networks are included, but things like webdav shares or downloading from a web page in general aren't.
Thanks for the info, I was wondering if that was the case. Although given that the standard linking case allows for DLLs to be anywhere in the search path, it's still unclear to me why specifying a DLL in LoadLibrary without a specific path is bad, and if it has different behaviour, shouldn't that be an OS flaw? (I.e., ideally an application should be able to use LoadLibrary with the same paths being searched as in the standard linking case when a DLL is needed for the application to start.)
But if it's true that the folder of the data file is included in the search path for DLLs (as opposed to the folder of the application), isn't that something that Microsoft should fix?
How would an application developer fix it to avoid this problem, whilst still allowing the possibility of loading DLLs from the application folder (honest question, I'm not saying it isn't possible, just curious of the solution)?
Do you know how things work with linking the usual way with a lib file (as opposed to manually calling LoadLibrary)?
You mean of the ebook (text) itself, or the physical ebook reader? Either way, I don't see how that makes anything illegal.
You don't agree to a contract before buying these things; contracts are a civil not criminal issue; and I don't see how that should prevent someone producing a screen reader, even if someone else had "agreed" to not use one on "their" device.
Sorry, you're confusing Microsoft, with PCs. Yes, one advantage PCs had over other platforms was that they could be made by anyone, and worked to a common standard.
But that would still be true, with or without Microsoft, and whether we had a monopoly OS company or not. There were other OSs you could run on any PC.
And, for that matter, would any other company be better than MS? Apple is all about lock-in.
Well, I agree that Apple are far worse in this respect (look at the IPRODUCTS), but equally, it's wrong to claim that Microsoft are responsible for creating interoperability. They've done plenty to resist open standards regarding their operating system and file formats, too (e.g., restricting use of NTFS).
Heaven forbid...
Well, PCs had already achieved dominance in business in the 80s, and there were other operating systems for PCs. Some of them were dire, but then so was DOS, and there were better alternatives to DOS (e.g., OS/2 - yes we laugh now, and I laughed at the time when I compared it to AmigaOS, and saw how they were bragging about 32-bit and multitasking in 1994, but they were still ahead of Microsoft, who did the same thing in 1995).
So most likely we'd still be using PCs, running some other operating system.
And even though other platforms may have benefitted from a lack of Microsoft, there was far more than Apple - e.g., the Amiga, BeOS, Linux - who also would have benefitted.
I agree - it's unclear to me what the "fault" of the developer is here, and which applications are at fault. I thought that loading a DLL by name without a specific path was standard practice? And how does it work with linking - in my experience, all applications I've written and used can either use a DLL in the standard path, or be overridden by a local DLL, so surely that's standard practice too? And wouldn't this affect almost every Windows program that uses DLL?
But then, I'm not sure that this is a bad system anyway. Well, if it's possible to include a DLL loaded off a web page as being the standard path, that seems a gaping hole. However, if this flaw requires an attacker to already install a dodgy DLL in the user's path on their system, surely that would already be the security flaw? I mean, it's a bit like saying "It's a flaw that people can run exes by double clicking, there could be malicious code" - the flaw isn't in running exes, the flaw is how they got there in the first place.
What is the proposed fix for applications that link to DLLs? And how do other operating systems work - again, I thought that having a path system allowing multiple possible locations for shared libraries wasn't uncommon?
Yet you're happy to sign up for a Slashdot account, using a 3rd party server. Are you seriously saying that that's just as weird as if "North Korea" had an account to post on here?
The point is, if he did want that, there are many phones to consider besides the Iphone. Even sticking with Nokia, they have the number one smartphone platform, Symbian.
Stop trying to treat your phone like a desktop ... or even a sub notebook and you'll be a lot happier AND more productive.
If you just want a phone, get a locked down feature phone that does Internet access and apps, and is way cheaper than Apple's. But the point of a smartphone is, or was before Apple redefined the term, to provide something more like a mobile handheld computer.
If you had 15 mod points all in one go, I presume you must have multiple sockpuppet accounts, which you're using to mod down people for liking the N900, and then you come and violate the spirit of the rules by posting in the same thread.
And you accuse them of being fanatical?
(And yes, it is a once in a blue moon thread about Nokia, the number one phone company. If you don't like people praising devices and being unable to cope with any criticism, why not have a go on the many Iphone stories?)
That would be like me saying I can't put a GPS on my car to keep tabs on where it goes when my son drives it.
What if you were running a hire car business, and kept a big database on every customer and where they drove to in the cars you hired out?
I mean, there's an uproar on places like here about the possibility of Google doing similar things with search queries - I don't hear the "But it's their server" argument then. And rightly so - the issue of privacy rights is separate to who owns what.
And an employee should have every right to monitor everything about the company, after all, they're giving up their time to work for that company? I don't think that logic follows.
Should a company put cameras in in toilet cubicles and changing rooms because they own the premises? Sometimes the issue of privacy still exists (as Germany has decided), even if someone owns the equipment. Yes, an employee is choosing to work there and use said equipment, but equally, the employer chooses to hire people, and let them use that equipment.
The problem is that erecting a big fence (or forest, as you suggest) on your own land to hide it would likely breach regulations such as planning permission (which probably wouldn't be allowed, for something that significantly changes how it looks).
So I think there should be some balance here. If we're saying it's fair game to publish anything you can from a public street, in any way, we should also allow people to take whatever steps they like on their own private land.
But if society is saying that people should be limited in what they can do, even on their private land, because it affects how it looks when viewed from other people's land, then it's also a fair balance to say that you don't necessarily have blanket rights to do absolutely whatever you like with data that's taken of private land.
(With windows, we can close the curtains. If there was a law saying you couldn't close the curtains without permission, I'd also expect laws controlling stalkers who might point a camera through the window all day long.)
FWIW, I think that Google have the right balance (not just legally, but also ethically - Don't Be Evil, remember?), in that they put the images up, but remove them if people object. This photographer may have a legal right to take photos, but others also have a legal right to criticise him for doing so.
Well, once you have taken the photograph, you then own the copyright on it. This entitles you to do pretty much whatever you like with it.
No - copyright means you can stop others from copying it. It's a necessity for being able to publish, but not a sufficiency. If there's another reason why you can't publish it (which could be anything from model rights as we're discussing here, or other things like defamation, or indeed, if the photograph is itself of a copyrighted work of someone else's), then owning the copyright isn't always sufficient for you to publish.