They were trying to, by making their frivilous claim against FatWallet. They're claiming their prices are copyrighted so they can use the DMCA to subpoena the identity of the person the person that violated their (silly, but legal) trade secret rights.
It's an odd case, really. The DMCA doesn't actually apply to trade secrets. They're exploiting the letter of copyright law to actively defend their frivilous trade secrets. The idea was to intimidate fatwallet into rolling over and complying.
I wonder sometimes. There are thousands of people explaining to them every little (and big) mistake they make. It should be no problem for them to learn from our critique. We're TELLING them exactly what they're doing right, and many times exactly what would be a great move for them to make right now.
No corporation explains their motivations, intentions, and tells their competition how to beat them. The crazy thing is, I think this is why Open and Free choices --software being a small subset-- will win.
More on the poetic front, there seems to be a significant difference between an individual mass of people, and a mass of individual people.
The Initiative for Software Choice was featured on Slashdot a while ago, when their opposition was formed: Sincere Choice. More than a tad tounge-in-cheek.
Don't be so surprised. When in politics, label yourself the opposite of your intention. Remember the "non-discriminatory" RANDs licensing that certain W3C members were promoting a while back? I particularly like the prefix "non-", as opposed to "anti-". Consider it.
Then there's the "homeland security" bill. A bill genuinely about "homeland security", but without the prepositional explanation of who's being secured.
Really, it's pretty easy to spot when people try this. Remember, organizations, people, or bills, act. They are not "about terrorism" or "about protecting". They do things. When someone says this [noun] is about [noun], the preposition is not the verb. When they say "[noun] is about [noun]", they're avoiding answering you by stating "[noun] is". It exists! Don't question it!
They're always actions. Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing proposed to slacken the W3C's vigilance against proprietary siezure of W3C recommendations. Initiative for Software Chioce proposes choices to improve the economic conditions of its members. Homeland Security proposes intercommunication with agencies and increased surveilance of the populace for the purpose of securing the homeland against threats. Now, I can't stress this enough. Fuck the prepositions. They're there to tell you about intentions and ideas, not about what's actually going to happen.
Ranting? You bet! I bet you never thought that high-school grammar would ever be useful!
I think everyone is taking this from the wrong angle. I don't know about most people, but I suspect they were brought up in the same public school atmospheres that I was. Every five years or so, Disney would release another one of their (excellently produced) animated classics, after leaving it on the production shelf and driving up demand. Disney made it, this was their right, and this kept these classics fresh. Good plan. You've got to admire the strategy, especially in the air of public school's cirriculum.
We're taught the same course in arithmatic every year for the first seven years. We don't even touch IP, despite it's extremely prominent centerpiece in the American economy. This should change. IP should be covered as philosophical, political, and economic issues. Legislators should stop by mid- and high-schools for Q&A, so the students can see just who is full of shit. ("Mom, Senator Hollings stopped by for Q&A today, he was an asshole, called us thieves, and gave us candy.")
The political landscape is in the mind. Most of us are blind to it until we learn the mental gears neccisary. As it is, nobody is taught these things unless they find the urge to seek it out personally.
I think a great de-inhibitor would be a high-quality non-obtuse public domain text book.
Heh. You'll like XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2.0 only deals with the markup of information for contextual representation. Paragraphs, lists, lines, links, and tables. Oh, and objects /> has been banished. All the presentational stuff is done with CSS. Check out the W3C's core stylesheets project. The object tag allows you to fall-through to the least-prefered format for an information object svg->flash->png->gif->text, if you like. Neat stuff.
1. What do you think the legal (or appropriate) uses of MP3 technology should be?
I think they should be whatever Fraufenhofer wants them to be.:P Ogg Vorbis is much better in every way that counts, and most that don't.
I suppose you're asking more about the right to translate a work to another media.
2. We all know the RIAA complains about the illegitimate uses of P2P technology. Since its most prevalent usage is (by the RIAA's definition) illegal use, what are some applications of the technology that the P2P crowd can use to swing the tide in its favor?
The answer to this is rather painfully obvious, and one of the primary purposes of the technology: Distribution of bandwidth resources. P2P technology allows the [re]distribution of data to a large number of people at a minimal bandwidth cost to any single node. I wish to ignore the implimentation problems of metadata, focusing on the theoretical that the question pulls at.
The most obvious example would be extremely low cost distribution of exposure material. This can't be "free samples" and advertising material disgustingly disguised as a high quality representation of the work of an artist. You can't spoon dogshit (not even federally mandated dogshit) at people who've been doing much better without your interference.
The plus? P2P and its distance audio-centric cousin, webcasting, can provide wonderful exposure to EXACTLY the audience that desires it, without any marketing research and ad campaigns. The downside (for the RIAA)? A lot of new artists would be able to get enough exposure to make a living without the RIAA, changing the musician market into a seller's (artist's) market, instead of a buyer's (record company) market. For most of us on slashdot, I think we see this as an already inevitable shift, and the natural state that this market should be in.
3. The DMCA is frequently seen as a flawed piece of legislation which is easily abused and so broadly worded that such abuse is unpreventable. Despite this, what positive or useful elements can be taken from the DMCA and used to formulate a new law that would do what the media companies want without infringing on consumers' rights?
This and question #5 are flawed at the philosophical divide between art and publishers. See #5.
4. An argument frequently levied at the RIAA and MPAA is that they are more than content to label the large majority of consumers as thieves and pirates. What can the RIAA and MPAA do to change this? How can these organizations polish this image up?
Not to be entirely venomous, but the RIAA and MPAA can fuck over and die horrible deaths. The members of the RIAA have demonstrated via lobbying that they can not survive in a symbiotic relationship with their own customers. The legitimacy of their existance is nullified by this. They serve no beneficial purpose for customers or for enriching or promoting the useful Arts. Their organizations at their mutal genesis did, and their current structure precludes reversion. A complete rewrite is required.
5. With laws such as the DMCA and possible future legislation such as the CBDTPA, many consumers feel that their freedoms to enjoy the entertainment they purchase are being slowly eroded away by content companies. What rights (other than the right to listen or view) do you feel that consumers should have with media they purchase?
This question is unintentionally barbed. The natural presumption of the concept of copyright is that science and art belong, first, foremost, and forever, to civilization. To encourage this creation, modern copyright law grants temporary restrictions to benefit the authors and inventors. This is "duh" stuff to anyone reading this, of course. The trouble with these extensions to copyright power is that they attempt to further steal from the intellectual commons and grant established companies the power to sell those rights BACK. Media corporations wish to be in the business of selling the commons to the common.
Lines were drawn many times, and these corporations just kick sand over them and pretend they were a few inches back all along.
Constructive comments? That would entail outlining a bill of rights. I'm not unbiased in this, and my language would undoubtably be defensive. These issues deal with copyright, but I cover several consumer-specific issues below.
Copyright should not outlive the natural life span of the author, but should allow heirs to benefit in the event of an untimely death, such as the case with General Lee Grant's memoires.
Copyright should not ever be transferable, except in the case of dispute and decided by a court: Rights should be grantable by the author, as this is obviously agreeable, but the right of granting rights should remain with the creator until expiration.
Consumers can do whatever the hell they want to do with a purchased work for private use. The only detrimental artifact possible is if Media Group Alpha wants to sell you several copies of the same fucking work. That's bullshit. If I buy a DVD of Lord of the Rings, I should (and do) have the right to translate it to any media I want for my own viewing purposes.
Non-profit redistribution of a parody, or derivative remix, edit, etc, should be permitted.
The larger intent of copyright is to prevent another from claiming your work as theirs. Unless non-profit redistribution of a substantially complete/unaltered version of a work is harmful to the creator's incentive to create more works, it should not be denied. This much requires that the proper credit be given to the content creator. This also requires the context of distribution to be considered. e.g., giving out Janis Ian's music pretty much anywhere can arrouse interest in her works, raising concert attendance and further record sales, providing financial incentive for Janis Ian to continue. Giving out hard copies Britney Spears' latest album in front of a store that's selling it clearly can harm sales of the album, and deter the artist from making future releases. (This is academic, however, since Britney Spears is endentured to make more albums whether she wants to or not, and doesn't have the rights to them anyway.) However, giving the same album out five years later could arouse interest in her new latest album. Context becomes important, again. So does reality, which never figures much into RIAA(/Enron) financial projections.
Broadcast television is probably (hopefully) on the way out, so this is probably a moot point, as well as being a rant. Timeshifting programming. I do it. I love it. I can't stand the stupid time slots and slot shifting networks do. I want to appreciate witty dialog, special effects art, or clever plot, not some marketer's clever insight into the 14-25 year old $25,000->$35,000 income bracket and coorolation with some time on a certain day of the week. Timeshifting invalidates the house of cards of tv advertising timeslot brackets. I say good riddance. I'd much rather if advertisers support GOOD shows, instead of shows on Fridays at 9pm.
Well, you're writing the thesis. I'll cut my rambling right about here.
This is part of the Bern Convention. This is an international treaty on Copyright policy. The policy favors inherited royalties (lifetime plus 50 years) on all works, and sets a standard for which works are still covered by copyright. Realistically, it clears up if heirs should still recieve royalties.
The US would have to break from the Bern Convention for meaningful copyright reform, though we only signed on in the last two decades. This itself is pretty encumberant, but it's the least of our troubles. The US is also a member state of the WIPO and WTO, each of which have the power to repeal (without popular vote) laws which impeed international trade. Google for the Clean Air Act.
I'll not dwell too long on this; Your analogy to Esperanto is flawed. Mozilla speak's the Queen's HTML/CSS/DOM/etc, while IE speaks a slang popularlized by MTV & friends. Those who understand the slang might not understand all your fancy words or be confused when you respond positively to a double negative, but you're speaking pure English.
I see you don't claim to be a web designer. A casual speaker of English wouldn't care at the misuse of a semicolon. A professional writer wishing to write to a casual audience might curse that he can't convey the exact meaning a semicolon would bring, because the causal audience wouldn't pick up on it. So he curses and writes longer sentences that everyone will grasp.
Web designers writing for the causal, apathetic, audience have to write so that IE understands. IE is the 7th-grade English level that novels need to be written for. IE doesn't understand what a comma splice is, but it understands "UR K-KOOL DUDE", even though "UR" should be "U R".
I see many pages that IE renders blatantly wrongly, but then, like most web designers, I've usually written those pages: The next 75% of my job is getting IE to display it the way my other 7-10 browsers do. Successful web designs are done this way because it is impossible to start with an IE-specific design and go to a design everyone can use.
Your last paragraph is curious. The standards are set, and people build implimentations off those standards. Because I impliment the standard in a sub-par way, but I market well, should the quality of the standard be lowered and invalidate the work of dozens of higher quality projects?
It has been a long time since I saw a web site Mozilla does not render properly, by the way. css/edge is one I usually point out when arguing for standards acceptance. These designs are beautiful and elegant, but fail in IE and old versions of Opera. These are simple things. This copy of the OGF's SRD demonstrates one of the simpler things IE just can't grasp.
Anyhow, I understand your run-with-mob perspective, but I don't believe it can apply rationally in this case. It's a quick step to communication lockdown if we allow our method of communication to be controlled entirely by a single corporate entity, whoever the hell they are.
So... let me get this straight. You're suggesting that the OP choose a different university because the one in question offers deep student discounts on Microsoft software?
Actually, he's saying that his tuition was inflated some $100 minimum to pay for that "deal".
The quirks are not simply quirks. They are Flat-Out-Absolutely-Wrong implimentations of web standards. There are more than a few web browsers out there: Opera, Mozilla (phoenix, chimera, k-meleon), Omniweb, Konqueror, even Links (lynx does not parse CSS). All of them, except IE5 and IE6 (and only on Windows... IE5:mac is correct), calculate css width, margins, border, and padding the exact same way. IE[5,6]:Win, however, conclude that border and padding are included in width, in direct literal contradiction with the CSS1 and CSS2 W3C recomendations.
Quirks like that I do not want to see Mozilla adopt. It's incorrect, and it doesn't even make sense to do it that way, unless you include margins, which is impossible because of the way margin-top and margin-bottom interact. It'd be a quirk if there weren't a spec. IE is, however, wrong, and there are ten other implimentations of the same standard that prove it.
It's not that odd. Forgive the icon of the analogy, but this is pretty spot-on: People wanted to elect George Washington as King after the Revolutionary War was won. Washington was all for freedom of choice, but to chose a King would destroy that very freedom in a short time.
RMS advocates freedoms, but he personally can not advocate a choice which removes fundamental freedoms. For RMS, Free Software is the only way for freedom in software. Anything less only pretends to advocate freedom. There was a similar situation with the founding of our government. Many only wanted the land owners to have votes. The closest analogies in the software world are MS' Shared Source policy and Apple's APSL license.
I'll grant that RMS has a bit of a self-centric perspective. Or, at least he comes off that way publicly. The man lacks charismatic speech in writing.
In fact, I would testify that the ability to "try before you buy" has led to my purchasing several CDs that I normally would not have even known about, let alone bought.
To the RIAA's point of view, that very thing costs them money, because you should be buying pop-star-of-the-week's CD that was overproduced. They think it costs them money because instead of turning a 90% profit, they'll only turn a 60% profit on your alternative choice. You've just cost the RIAA 40% of the cover price of the pop CD, and you're now a thief.
Audiosyncs can never be fully avoided with RIFF (AVI), because the streams are not timestamped. If you hit a bottleneck for any reason at least one stream is going to fall out of sync. A really good system can avoid this 99% of the time, but it's a fundamental flaw.
This is (briefly) why application/x-ogg is being so readily adopted to replace AVI for packaging video with audio.
It's kind of annoying, really. Mozilla ignores inline type="" attributes on everything except elements, vying instead for the HTTP server's assessment. IE ignores MIME types in all their forms, instead simply looking at the letters after a period.
Isn't there an RFC or something about this?
<img/> has been an oddball in HTML, introduced by Netscape. Note the use of src="" instead of href. There's a fairly unanimous opinion among those I know that <img alt="my dog"/> should always have been <img>my dog</img>.
Object is a far more useful element, and you can still write it as an empty element (<object data="mydog.jpg"/>) if you chose to leave out alt-text. The nesting fallback mechanism means that you can include a GIF inside a PNG, or a JPEG inside of an SVG, which could provide greatly for the acceptance of new standards. I like having one element for any sort of logical object. I've taken to using CSS' background-image for any fluffy images.
As horrible as it sounds, XHTML2 and a very basic XSL could make this nightmare of yours an extremely simple and automated proccess.
Luckily, server-side scripting and web servers have advanced since iplanet. Two lines of PHP could sniff the client's browser and then fill xhtml2 or fail-safe to xhtml1.1, without the user ever knowing.
The point, however, is that it is almost no trouble to do an XSL translation from XHTML2 to XHTML1 or even HTML4. The reverse is not true. Website back-ends can be updated to take advantage of XHTML2's more concise and descriptive format, while XSL produces an antique but perfectly valid HTML4.01 public face. The results are easier maintenance, modulized structure, and enough context to generate valid markup for any earlier version of HTML.
Backwards compatibility? XSL with XHTML2 gives you the ultimate in backwards compatibility! It can give you valid markup for EVERY version of HTML, as appropriate for your public site's demographic.
The apparently agree with you, because the 2-season discs of Season 1 were droped to $19.99 about six months ago. Season 2 is being released in 4-episode packs for $29.99 (25% better price than the NEW 2-episode pricing), and Season 1 is being re-released in the 4-episode form. See amazon.com for details.
Slashdot Mirror
They were trying to, by making their frivilous claim against FatWallet. They're claiming their prices are copyrighted so they can use the DMCA to subpoena the identity of the person the person that violated their (silly, but legal) trade secret rights.
It's an odd case, really. The DMCA doesn't actually apply to trade secrets. They're exploiting the letter of copyright law to actively defend their frivilous trade secrets. The idea was to intimidate fatwallet into rolling over and complying.
The bigger the better. Place nearby. Portable! If block becomes warm, or starts to smoke, run away and find cover. Do not taunt copper block.
I wonder sometimes. There are thousands of people explaining to them every little (and big) mistake they make. It should be no problem for them to learn from our critique. We're TELLING them exactly what they're doing right, and many times exactly what would be a great move for them to make right now.
No corporation explains their motivations, intentions, and tells their competition how to beat them. The crazy thing is, I think this is why Open and Free choices --software being a small subset-- will win.
More on the poetic front, there seems to be a significant difference between an individual mass of people, and a mass of individual people.
The Initiative for Software Choice was featured on Slashdot a while ago, when their opposition was formed: Sincere Choice . More than a tad tounge-in-cheek.
Don't be so surprised. When in politics, label yourself the opposite of your intention. Remember the "non-discriminatory" RANDs licensing that certain W3C members were promoting a while back? I particularly like the prefix "non-", as opposed to "anti-". Consider it.
Then there's the "homeland security" bill. A bill genuinely about "homeland security", but without the prepositional explanation of who's being secured.
Really, it's pretty easy to spot when people try this. Remember, organizations, people, or bills, act. They are not "about terrorism" or "about protecting". They do things. When someone says this [noun] is about [noun], the preposition is not the verb. When they say "[noun] is about [noun]", they're avoiding answering you by stating "[noun] is". It exists! Don't question it!
They're always actions. Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing proposed to slacken the W3C's vigilance against proprietary siezure of W3C recommendations. Initiative for Software Chioce proposes choices to improve the economic conditions of its members. Homeland Security proposes intercommunication with agencies and increased surveilance of the populace for the purpose of securing the homeland against threats. Now, I can't stress this enough. Fuck the prepositions. They're there to tell you about intentions and ideas, not about what's actually going to happen.
Ranting? You bet! I bet you never thought that high-school grammar would ever be useful!
I think everyone is taking this from the wrong angle. I don't know about most people, but I suspect they were brought up in the same public school atmospheres that I was. Every five years or so, Disney would release another one of their (excellently produced) animated classics, after leaving it on the production shelf and driving up demand. Disney made it, this was their right, and this kept these classics fresh. Good plan. You've got to admire the strategy, especially in the air of public school's cirriculum.
I wasn't even aware of IP until after I got out of school, when I started wondering about restrictions, and exactly what ©, ® and (TM) meant--why were they different? What would I apply to my own works?
We're taught the same course in arithmatic every year for the first seven years. We don't even touch IP, despite it's extremely prominent centerpiece in the American economy. This should change. IP should be covered as philosophical, political, and economic issues. Legislators should stop by mid- and high-schools for Q&A, so the students can see just who is full of shit. ("Mom, Senator Hollings stopped by for Q&A today, he was an asshole, called us thieves, and gave us candy.")
The political landscape is in the mind. Most of us are blind to it until we learn the mental gears neccisary. As it is, nobody is taught these things unless they find the urge to seek it out personally.
I think a great de-inhibitor would be a high-quality non-obtuse public domain text book.
Heh. You'll like XHTML 2.0. XHTML 2.0 only deals with the markup of information for contextual representation. Paragraphs, lists, lines, links, and tables. Oh, and objects/> has been banished. All the presentational stuff is done with CSS. Check out the W3C's core stylesheets project. The object tag allows you to fall-through to the least-prefered format for an information object svg->flash->png->gif->text, if you like. Neat stuff.
You'll want to read this article, about the concept of The Commons: http://bostonreview.mit.edu/BR27.3/bollier.html
I think they should be whatever Fraufenhofer wants them to be. :P Ogg Vorbis is much better in every way that counts, and most that don't.
I suppose you're asking more about the right to translate a work to another media.
The answer to this is rather painfully obvious, and one of the primary purposes of the technology: Distribution of bandwidth resources. P2P technology allows the [re]distribution of data to a large number of people at a minimal bandwidth cost to any single node. I wish to ignore the implimentation problems of metadata, focusing on the theoretical that the question pulls at.
The most obvious example would be extremely low cost distribution of exposure material. This can't be "free samples" and advertising material disgustingly disguised as a high quality representation of the work of an artist. You can't spoon dogshit (not even federally mandated dogshit) at people who've been doing much better without your interference.
The plus? P2P and its distance audio-centric cousin, webcasting, can provide wonderful exposure to EXACTLY the audience that desires it, without any marketing research and ad campaigns. The downside (for the RIAA)? A lot of new artists would be able to get enough exposure to make a living without the RIAA, changing the musician market into a seller's (artist's) market, instead of a buyer's (record company) market. For most of us on slashdot, I think we see this as an already inevitable shift, and the natural state that this market should be in.
This and question #5 are flawed at the philosophical divide between art and publishers. See #5.
Not to be entirely venomous, but the RIAA and MPAA can fuck over and die horrible deaths. The members of the RIAA have demonstrated via lobbying that they can not survive in a symbiotic relationship with their own customers. The legitimacy of their existance is nullified by this. They serve no beneficial purpose for customers or for enriching or promoting the useful Arts. Their organizations at their mutal genesis did, and their current structure precludes reversion. A complete rewrite is required.
This question is unintentionally barbed. The natural presumption of the concept of copyright is that science and art belong, first, foremost, and forever, to civilization. To encourage this creation, modern copyright law grants temporary restrictions to benefit the authors and inventors. This is "duh" stuff to anyone reading this, of course. The trouble with these extensions to copyright power is that they attempt to further steal from the intellectual commons and grant established companies the power to sell those rights BACK. Media corporations wish to be in the business of selling the commons to the common.
Lines were drawn many times, and these corporations just kick sand over them and pretend they were a few inches back all along.
Constructive comments? That would entail outlining a bill of rights. I'm not unbiased in this, and my language would undoubtably be defensive. These issues deal with copyright, but I cover several consumer-specific issues below.
Well, you're writing the thesis. I'll cut my rambling right about here.
The best part is that the DMCA adversly affects noninfringing uses of software, digital music, and is pretty much the death sentence for ebooks.
What exactly is the DMCA good for besides these things? With these exemptions, would the DMCA services the public Good? Without them, does it?
This is part of the Bern Convention. This is an international treaty on Copyright policy. The policy favors inherited royalties (lifetime plus 50 years) on all works, and sets a standard for which works are still covered by copyright. Realistically, it clears up if heirs should still recieve royalties.
The US would have to break from the Bern Convention for meaningful copyright reform, though we only signed on in the last two decades. This itself is pretty encumberant, but it's the least of our troubles. The US is also a member state of the WIPO and WTO, each of which have the power to repeal (without popular vote) laws which impeed international trade. Google for the Clean Air Act.
I'll not dwell too long on this; Your analogy to Esperanto is flawed. Mozilla speak's the Queen's HTML/CSS/DOM/etc, while IE speaks a slang popularlized by MTV & friends. Those who understand the slang might not understand all your fancy words or be confused when you respond positively to a double negative, but you're speaking pure English.
I see you don't claim to be a web designer. A casual speaker of English wouldn't care at the misuse of a semicolon. A professional writer wishing to write to a casual audience might curse that he can't convey the exact meaning a semicolon would bring, because the causal audience wouldn't pick up on it. So he curses and writes longer sentences that everyone will grasp.
Web designers writing for the causal, apathetic, audience have to write so that IE understands. IE is the 7th-grade English level that novels need to be written for. IE doesn't understand what a comma splice is, but it understands "UR K-KOOL DUDE", even though "UR" should be "U R".
I see many pages that IE renders blatantly wrongly, but then, like most web designers, I've usually written those pages: The next 75% of my job is getting IE to display it the way my other 7-10 browsers do. Successful web designs are done this way because it is impossible to start with an IE-specific design and go to a design everyone can use.
Your last paragraph is curious. The standards are set, and people build implimentations off those standards. Because I impliment the standard in a sub-par way, but I market well, should the quality of the standard be lowered and invalidate the work of dozens of higher quality projects?
It has been a long time since I saw a web site Mozilla does not render properly, by the way. css/edge is one I usually point out when arguing for standards acceptance. These designs are beautiful and elegant, but fail in IE and old versions of Opera. These are simple things. This copy of the OGF's SRD demonstrates one of the simpler things IE just can't grasp.
Anyhow, I understand your run-with-mob perspective, but I don't believe it can apply rationally in this case. It's a quick step to communication lockdown if we allow our method of communication to be controlled entirely by a single corporate entity, whoever the hell they are.
Actually, he's saying that his tuition was inflated some $100 minimum to pay for that "deal".
The quirks are not simply quirks. They are Flat-Out-Absolutely-Wrong implimentations of web standards. There are more than a few web browsers out there: Opera, Mozilla (phoenix, chimera, k-meleon), Omniweb, Konqueror, even Links (lynx does not parse CSS). All of them, except IE5 and IE6 (and only on Windows... IE5:mac is correct), calculate css width, margins, border, and padding the exact same way. IE[5,6]:Win, however, conclude that border and padding are included in width, in direct literal contradiction with the CSS1 and CSS2 W3C recomendations.
Quirks like that I do not want to see Mozilla adopt. It's incorrect, and it doesn't even make sense to do it that way, unless you include margins, which is impossible because of the way margin-top and margin-bottom interact. It'd be a quirk if there weren't a spec. IE is, however, wrong, and there are ten other implimentations of the same standard that prove it.
It's not that odd. Forgive the icon of the analogy, but this is pretty spot-on: People wanted to elect George Washington as King after the Revolutionary War was won. Washington was all for freedom of choice, but to chose a King would destroy that very freedom in a short time.
RMS advocates freedoms, but he personally can not advocate a choice which removes fundamental freedoms. For RMS, Free Software is the only way for freedom in software. Anything less only pretends to advocate freedom. There was a similar situation with the founding of our government. Many only wanted the land owners to have votes. The closest analogies in the software world are MS' Shared Source policy and Apple's APSL license.
I'll grant that RMS has a bit of a self-centric perspective. Or, at least he comes off that way publicly. The man lacks charismatic speech in writing.
To the RIAA's point of view, that very thing costs them money, because you should be buying pop-star-of-the-week's CD that was overproduced. They think it costs them money because instead of turning a 90% profit, they'll only turn a 60% profit on your alternative choice. You've just cost the RIAA 40% of the cover price of the pop CD, and you're now a thief.
I fucking LOVE, RIAA's... uh... logic.
That letter takes 47 strokes and in most contexts means "you're fucked."
I'm still waiting. :(
Audiosyncs can never be fully avoided with RIFF (AVI), because the streams are not timestamped. If you hit a bottleneck for any reason at least one stream is going to fall out of sync. A really good system can avoid this 99% of the time, but it's a fundamental flaw.
This is (briefly) why application/x-ogg is being so readily adopted to replace AVI for packaging video with audio.
Proof of concept, anyway. This page doesn't work entirely in IE, because of IE's horrible <object> bugs. Works great in Mozilla, pretty good in Opera.
It's kind of annoying, really. Mozilla ignores inline type="" attributes on everything except elements, vying instead for the HTTP server's assessment. IE ignores MIME types in all their forms, instead simply looking at the letters after a period. Isn't there an RFC or something about this?
<img /> has been an oddball in HTML, introduced by Netscape. Note the use of src="" instead of href. There's a fairly unanimous opinion among those I know that <img alt="my dog"/> should always have been <img>my dog</img>.
Object is a far more useful element, and you can still write it as an empty element (<object data="mydog.jpg"/>) if you chose to leave out alt-text. The nesting fallback mechanism means that you can include a GIF inside a PNG, or a JPEG inside of an SVG, which could provide greatly for the acceptance of new standards. I like having one element for any sort of logical object. I've taken to using CSS' background-image for any fluffy images.
As horrible as it sounds, XHTML2 and a very basic XSL could make this nightmare of yours an extremely simple and automated proccess.
Luckily, server-side scripting and web servers have advanced since iplanet. Two lines of PHP could sniff the client's browser and then fill xhtml2 or fail-safe to xhtml1.1, without the user ever knowing.
The point, however, is that it is almost no trouble to do an XSL translation from XHTML2 to XHTML1 or even HTML4. The reverse is not true. Website back-ends can be updated to take advantage of XHTML2's more concise and descriptive format, while XSL produces an antique but perfectly valid HTML4.01 public face. The results are easier maintenance, modulized structure, and enough context to generate valid markup for any earlier version of HTML.
Backwards compatibility? XSL with XHTML2 gives you the ultimate in backwards compatibility! It can give you valid markup for EVERY version of HTML, as appropriate for your public site's demographic.
Some "archaic" words never existed.
Which is why you get your HUBCAPS stolen.
The apparently agree with you, because the 2-season discs of Season 1 were droped to $19.99 about six months ago. Season 2 is being released in 4-episode packs for $29.99 (25% better price than the NEW 2-episode pricing), and Season 1 is being re-released in the 4-episode form. See amazon.com for details.