I thought the personalized stamps were kind of cool. Then I looked at the price, and while they're cool, I'm personally not paying 80 cents for a 37 cent stamp.
Of course, I buy the cheap blue safety checks too, so hey, maybe this will be popular with some people.
Has Apple's decision to switch to Intel Chips lost the company some of its old supporters?
That decision alone won't directly affect very many people's decision. In the end Apple may lose some customers, if the transition is too difficult for the software developers, or if the Intel chips can't perform as well, or if the rate of piracy goes up. But directly, who cares what company makes the chip? A few zealots, maybe, but the vast majority of the world doesn't make this type of distinction.
building a virtual world with about 1000 virtual (AI) citizens
Wait a second... Someone managed to build 1000 virtual (AI) citizens, and they're going to use these things to play games in a virtual world? Somehow I doubt it.
"characters should be able to conjure up their very own language and communicate with others inside their world"
It took billions of years for languages to develop through random processes. This aint gonna happen in 30 years unless the programmers intentionally program the language into the "virtual citizens".
This project sounds really cool, but when you realize the description begins with "pretend we've just discovered the key to artificial intelligence" you have to realize it's vaporware.
It'd only be a pyramid scheme if the advertising revenue was coming from the the blog sites themselves. As long as the ad revenue comes from outside sources, it's not anything even remotely close to a pyramid scheme.
Google's terms of service explicitly forbit Adsense members from revealing details about how much they make.
Adsense is great, and those figures are probably accurate. But if Google finds out this person broke the TOS, they might just take those payments away.
At least it's accidental, there. Here in the US they intentionally cut off service in the NYC subway because the terrorists might use cell phones to set off a bomb.
Reminds me of the "Assassins" game we used to play back in High School. Basically a live action role-playing game where the GM would assign targets and innovative ways of ways of "killing" them like shooting them with a water pistol or planting some device which represented a bomb in their locker or whatever.
Of course, nowadays high schoolers would probably get sent to Gitmo for playing such games. Back then it was against the rules but you were only risking detention, and that only contributed to the fun.
That's a pretty naiive way to look at things. There are lots of things which aren't wrong which are still prudent to hide. Some of them are illegal. Some of them are just frowned upon by a segment of society.
The new occupant is going to have to get a certificate of occupancy, where the electrical wiring (along with lots of other things) will be inspected. If the house was sold as is, then it's up to the new occupant to fix the problems. If not, then it's up to him to fix them. Either way, without a CO, the buyer isn't supposed to live in the house.
I remember reading somewhere about someone who did something similar but hooked it up to individual circuits by acquiring spare meters and hooking them up through the circuit breaker.
Those safety codes usually don't apply to people doing work on their personal residence. If you rent out the house, or if you charge for the work, fine, but if you're just working on your own home you usually have the right to do whatever you want.
The way google describes its indexing, it gives full position information for the first X words (where X is a non-negligible portion of the work, though off hand I don't remember what it is). As you could create a large portion of the work from the index, I'd say it certainly qualifies as copying (and therefore the index would be considered a derivative work).
Whether or not this counts as fair use/fair dealing/whatever is another matter, and in most cases I would think it does. But you certainly can't create an index without doing copying, and I'd say it necessarily requires substantial copying to create a useful index (though of course this relies on what you'd consider substational and useful).
After all, all I have is a bunch of individual tokens, mixed up in a quite large data structure.
Most indexes contain at least some position information. Without either position information or a copy of the document itself, an index would be extremely limited. Multiword phrases couldn't be searched, for instance. If all you have is an index of words and urls, OK, that's a bit more of a stretch.
Now, mind you, I likewise believe that permitting the Internet Archive, Google Cache and such to function is clearly in the public interest, and that the law (and the courts' interpretation thereof) should reflect such.
As I'm sure every single legislator in Canada would agree.
Your strawmen are just that -- strawmen -- and as such don't merrit serious attention.
Actually, his point is a good one. If you want to allow archivers to archive absolutely anything without even so much as the ability to get an injunction against them, then this is exactly what people would do.
I don't see Google et al mentioned in the law. Sure, the law implies that some caching and redistribution done by a search engine might be illegal, but surely that's true. Now, it wouldn't be fair use, it'd be fair dealing, since we're talking about Canada. But copying and redistributing a whole website is unlikely to fall under fair dealing or fair use. The reason Google isn't being charged with copyright infringment is because they take down the cached sites upon request. So it would make no sense whatsoever for a company to take Google to court to get an injunction forcing Google to do something which they could get them to do just by asking. "Google et al" have no worries with this law. If anyone has to worry, it's a search engine which refuses to take a site out of its publically accessible cache when asked. But in reality, they are already breaking the law anyway, and this new law would limit their liability to simply getting an injunction, so this law would be good even for them.
The bill doesn't even make the presumption that it is already illegal, but just that it might be illegal in some situations. And I think that's the case. Google's cache is OK only because they follow robots.txt, and remove copies from their cache upon request. This law seems to be saying that even if Google didn't follow robots.txt, and even if they ignored requests to remove copies from their cache, they still wouldn't be subject to anything more than an injunction stopping them from further copying and distribution.
Do they even have fair use in Canada? I believe fair use is a uniquely US thing. Other countries have something called "fair dealing", but it's not nearly as inclusive as fair use.
Now, if I have permission to copy it and to cache it, and obviously my ISP has permission to cache it in its proxy, why shouldn't google?
Well, there's a big difference between copying and caching for private use, and copying and cashing for redistribution.
Try defining a distinction in legalese that doesn't cut on both sides.
How about this. It's legal to cache and distribute web pages unless the author specifically asks you not to.
What we're seeing now are corporations lobbying for laws to be changed pre-emptively to redress an imbalance in favor of the public that DOES NOT YET EXIST.
Actually, what we're seeing is Slashdotters lobbying against laws to redress an imbalance that doesn't exist. The law in question states that "the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter." This protects Google from a copyright infringement lawsuit. It makes the default situation that caching is allowed. It also implies that one can get an injunction for willfully redistributing someone elses copyrighted work without permission, but that was surely already the case at least some of the time, and this doesn't grant any new copyright protection for those other times when the copying/distribution would fall under fair dealing or whatever.
Section 40.3 (1) of the bill states that "the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter."
Not only does this law not say anything about searching a text without reproducing it, the law is a limitation on copyright, not an extension of it.
The alternative would be to mandate publication of all derivative works. Make a one-line patch to some software you use? Congratulations, now you have to distribute the whole thing.
Not at all. The alternative would be to require that all derivative works are licensed under the GFDL. You don't have to distribute it, just have to license it.
Yes, provided that the unlinked software isn't itself a derivative work.
If the unlinked software doesn't contain the original, then it isn't a derivative work. Doesn't seem too hard to do.
It's been tried before, most famously by NeXT with their ObjC GCC frontend, but apparently by nobody who's thought it worth the expense and risk of the guaranteed lawsuit.
Glad to see that GPLed software is protected by copyright only by vacuous legal threats (seriously, I am). I'll have to think twice before using it for anything I write, though.
I gotta agree. Interesting experiment, but I'm glad they're not experimenting on me or anyone in my family. The technology just isn't there for e-books. It's quite often that I'm at work and run across some information which doesn't quite make sense and what do I do? I print it out so I can pore over it more closely. Maybe it's just the way I was brought up, and kids today have learned to do things the e-way, but I'm sure it's at least in part the tangible benefits of paper.
The cost will likely be quite a bit higher, too, especially since the e-book data is probably not free. Hopefully they'll also provide a printer and a steady supply of ink and paper, if not to the students then at least to the teachers.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the personalized stamps were kind of cool. Then I looked at the price, and while they're cool, I'm personally not paying 80 cents for a 37 cent stamp.
Of course, I buy the cheap blue safety checks too, so hey, maybe this will be popular with some people.
Unix programmers know that they have to assume that they could be walking over someone else's session info.
Windows programmers always seem to assume they are alone in the computing ether.
Isn't the whole point of an operating system to allow programmers to make that assumption?
What are the differences between Windows, Unix, and mainframe programmers?
Windows programmers live in Redmond, Unix programmers live in California or Texas, and mainframe programmers live off unemployment checks.
OK, I'm just a bitter former unix programmer.
Has Apple's decision to switch to Intel Chips lost the company some of its old supporters?
That decision alone won't directly affect very many people's decision. In the end Apple may lose some customers, if the transition is too difficult for the software developers, or if the Intel chips can't perform as well, or if the rate of piracy goes up. But directly, who cares what company makes the chip? A few zealots, maybe, but the vast majority of the world doesn't make this type of distinction.
building a virtual world with about 1000 virtual (AI) citizens
Wait a second... Someone managed to build 1000 virtual (AI) citizens, and they're going to use these things to play games in a virtual world? Somehow I doubt it.
"characters should be able to conjure up their very own language and communicate with others inside their world"
It took billions of years for languages to develop through random processes. This aint gonna happen in 30 years unless the programmers intentionally program the language into the "virtual citizens".
This project sounds really cool, but when you realize the description begins with "pretend we've just discovered the key to artificial intelligence" you have to realize it's vaporware.
It'd only be a pyramid scheme if the advertising revenue was coming from the the blog sites themselves. As long as the ad revenue comes from outside sources, it's not anything even remotely close to a pyramid scheme.
Google's terms of service explicitly forbit Adsense members from revealing details about how much they make.
Adsense is great, and those figures are probably accurate. But if Google finds out this person broke the TOS, they might just take those payments away.
cell phone reception in the tube: ass.
At least it's accidental, there. Here in the US they intentionally cut off service in the NYC subway because the terrorists might use cell phones to set off a bomb.
Reminds me of the "Assassins" game we used to play back in High School. Basically a live action role-playing game where the GM would assign targets and innovative ways of ways of "killing" them like shooting them with a water pistol or planting some device which represented a bomb in their locker or whatever.
Of course, nowadays high schoolers would probably get sent to Gitmo for playing such games. Back then it was against the rules but you were only risking detention, and that only contributed to the fun.
That's a pretty naiive way to look at things. There are lots of things which aren't wrong which are still prudent to hide. Some of them are illegal. Some of them are just frowned upon by a segment of society.
The new occupant is going to have to get a certificate of occupancy, where the electrical wiring (along with lots of other things) will be inspected. If the house was sold as is, then it's up to the new occupant to fix the problems. If not, then it's up to him to fix them. Either way, without a CO, the buyer isn't supposed to live in the house.
A second set of eyes never hurts.
Even if that were true, something not hurting and something being legally mandated are two very different things.
I remember reading somewhere about someone who did something similar but hooked it up to individual circuits by acquiring spare meters and hooking them up through the circuit breaker.
Those safety codes usually don't apply to people doing work on their personal residence. If you rent out the house, or if you charge for the work, fine, but if you're just working on your own home you usually have the right to do whatever you want.
The way google describes its indexing, it gives full position information for the first X words (where X is a non-negligible portion of the work, though off hand I don't remember what it is). As you could create a large portion of the work from the index, I'd say it certainly qualifies as copying (and therefore the index would be considered a derivative work).
Whether or not this counts as fair use/fair dealing/whatever is another matter, and in most cases I would think it does. But you certainly can't create an index without doing copying, and I'd say it necessarily requires substantial copying to create a useful index (though of course this relies on what you'd consider substational and useful).
After all, all I have is a bunch of individual tokens, mixed up in a quite large data structure.
Most indexes contain at least some position information. Without either position information or a copy of the document itself, an index would be extremely limited. Multiword phrases couldn't be searched, for instance. If all you have is an index of words and urls, OK, that's a bit more of a stretch.
Now, mind you, I likewise believe that permitting the Internet Archive, Google Cache and such to function is clearly in the public interest, and that the law (and the courts' interpretation thereof) should reflect such.
As I'm sure every single legislator in Canada would agree.
Your strawmen are just that -- strawmen -- and as such don't merrit serious attention.
Actually, his point is a good one. If you want to allow archivers to archive absolutely anything without even so much as the ability to get an injunction against them, then this is exactly what people would do.
I don't see Google et al mentioned in the law. Sure, the law implies that some caching and redistribution done by a search engine might be illegal, but surely that's true. Now, it wouldn't be fair use, it'd be fair dealing, since we're talking about Canada. But copying and redistributing a whole website is unlikely to fall under fair dealing or fair use. The reason Google isn't being charged with copyright infringment is because they take down the cached sites upon request. So it would make no sense whatsoever for a company to take Google to court to get an injunction forcing Google to do something which they could get them to do just by asking. "Google et al" have no worries with this law. If anyone has to worry, it's a search engine which refuses to take a site out of its publically accessible cache when asked. But in reality, they are already breaking the law anyway, and this new law would limit their liability to simply getting an injunction, so this law would be good even for them.
I'd like to see you create a search index without doing any copying.
The bill doesn't even make the presumption that it is already illegal, but just that it might be illegal in some situations. And I think that's the case. Google's cache is OK only because they follow robots.txt, and remove copies from their cache upon request. This law seems to be saying that even if Google didn't follow robots.txt, and even if they ignored requests to remove copies from their cache, they still wouldn't be subject to anything more than an injunction stopping them from further copying and distribution.
Fair use.
Do they even have fair use in Canada? I believe fair use is a uniquely US thing. Other countries have something called "fair dealing", but it's not nearly as inclusive as fair use.
Now, if I have permission to copy it and to cache it, and obviously my ISP has permission to cache it in its proxy, why shouldn't google?
Well, there's a big difference between copying and caching for private use, and copying and cashing for redistribution.
Try defining a distinction in legalese that doesn't cut on both sides.
How about this. It's legal to cache and distribute web pages unless the author specifically asks you not to.
What we're seeing now are corporations lobbying for laws to be changed pre-emptively to redress an imbalance in favor of the public that DOES NOT YET EXIST.
Actually, what we're seeing is Slashdotters lobbying against laws to redress an imbalance that doesn't exist. The law in question states that "the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter." This protects Google from a copyright infringement lawsuit. It makes the default situation that caching is allowed. It also implies that one can get an injunction for willfully redistributing someone elses copyrighted work without permission, but that was surely already the case at least some of the time, and this doesn't grant any new copyright protection for those other times when the copying/distribution would fall under fair dealing or whatever.
it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines.
Somehow I doubt it. 99.9% of the web is copyrighted, after all.
The alternative would be to mandate publication of all derivative works. Make a one-line patch to some software you use? Congratulations, now you have to distribute the whole thing.
Not at all. The alternative would be to require that all derivative works are licensed under the GFDL. You don't have to distribute it, just have to license it.
Yes, provided that the unlinked software isn't itself a derivative work.
If the unlinked software doesn't contain the original, then it isn't a derivative work. Doesn't seem too hard to do.
It's been tried before, most famously by NeXT with their ObjC GCC frontend, but apparently by nobody who's thought it worth the expense and risk of the guaranteed lawsuit.
Glad to see that GPLed software is protected by copyright only by vacuous legal threats (seriously, I am). I'll have to think twice before using it for anything I write, though.
I gotta agree. Interesting experiment, but I'm glad they're not experimenting on me or anyone in my family. The technology just isn't there for e-books. It's quite often that I'm at work and run across some information which doesn't quite make sense and what do I do? I print it out so I can pore over it more closely. Maybe it's just the way I was brought up, and kids today have learned to do things the e-way, but I'm sure it's at least in part the tangible benefits of paper.
The cost will likely be quite a bit higher, too, especially since the e-book data is probably not free. Hopefully they'll also provide a printer and a steady supply of ink and paper, if not to the students then at least to the teachers.
Apparently it has to be said in 25 different ways before you get it.