Actually it's *because* of the search features that I haven't switched. Gmail doesn't allow partial string matches in searches. So if you search for the word 'vacation' and your e-mail contains 'vacations', it doesn't find the e-mail. Very annoying. Especially in the context of google's noted expertise in search.
My pet issue with gmail that made me switch back to yahoo after a while is that gmail deliberately doesn't support wildcard searches or partial string matches. I wind up having to waste time constructing boolean queries in order to find messages which I *know* exist. (i.e. you search for 'vacation' and it doesn't return an e-mail with 'vacations' in it.) Maddening!
This is definitely one case where the search functionality doesn't "just work" the way a user would expect it to. Quite frustrating in light of Google's branding as the premier search technologists.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
This quote is interesting in this context. You left out his other famous quote from the same notebook:
"Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble."
Twain was a very vocal lobbyist and perhaps instrumental in getting the US to adopt international copyright protection. He was strongly in favour of perpetual copyright. (He was annoyed that publishers were ignoring American works in favour of English ones which were cheap, having no royalty costs) (since int'l copyrights weren't being respected by the publishers)
I say the quote is interesting in this context because Twain had been burned by Canadian 'pirate' publishers, who reprinted some of his early works without compensation. He wound up spending a few weeks in Montreal trying to meet a residency requirement so that he could claim a canadian copyright on the prince and the pauper.
Anyway -- the inclusion of a Twain quote detracts from your argument that copying is not stealing, specifically because I think Twain would disagree with you. In his view, copying *did* equate to stealing. He viewed even the existence of a limitation on copyright to be stealing. (see his address to Congress, for example. He argues that ideas are property). His intended meaning with that quote was that the existing copyright law wasn't strong enough to support his ownership rights as an author, not that having copyrights was nonsensical.
This ruling may only be a temporary setback for the CRIA -- it talks about copyright holders "being robbed of the fruit of their efforts", and seems to give guidelines for better evidence collection practices for future litigation...
The Case for the Empire Everything you think you know about Star Wars is wrong. by Jonathan V. Last 05/16/2002 12:00:00 AM
Jonathan V. Last, online editor
STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.
It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.
First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.
If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.
I. The Problems with the Galactic Republic
At the beginning of the Star Wars saga, the known universe is governed by the Galactic Republic. The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.
Scores of thousands of planets are represented in the Galactic Senate, and as we first encounter it, it is sclerotic and ineffectual. The Republic has grown over many millennia to the point where there are so many factions and disparate interests, that it is simply too big to be governable. Even the Republic's staunchest supporters recognize this failing: In "The Phantom Menace," Queen Amidala admits, "It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions." In "Attack of the Clones," young Anakin Skywalker observes that it simply "doesn't work."
The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states. In "The Phantom Menace" a supra-planetary alliance, the Trade Federation (think of it as OPEC to the Galactic Republic's United Nations), invades a planet and all the Senate can agree to do is call for an investigation.
Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.
What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.
And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we mee
Parent: "I also find the quality of open source products much higher then that of commercial software, irfanview I reccomend to anyone wanting to make minor changes to digital pics, and in batches, works well and is free."
AFAIK irfanview is freeware. It is not open source. It is a great utility written and supported by one guy - but just that one guy; there is no mention of source code being available. In his usage agreement Skiljan writes: "I want to continue working on this program, therefore, your registration will be an incentive for me to add new functions and increase the program's quality."
This statement seems to imply that he's the only one with access to the code to do modifications. Not open source.
correction: no war was going on during the Christie Pits race riot in Toronto in 1933. (Seems I'm doing some historical revisionism of my own!) But Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, and Nazism was definitely on the rise.
Well, the Cdn. ill usage of Metis (and other native peoples) did lead to the Red River & North West rebellions. To this day you still get historians vehemently exercised over whether to consider Louis Riel a dastardly traitor or a true patriot (i.e. 'the father of Manitoba').
(From a wider viewpoint, it could be argued that our dealings of native peoples (also incl. Inuit) through our entire history has been filled with colossal blunders, incompetence and outright betrayals. (cf. the Indian Act))
When we built the Canadian Pacific railway we built it over land controlled by the Blackfoot. In return we gave Crowfoot (the chief) a lifetime pass on the railroad. (That's the canadian version of buying manhattan for some beads, I guess).
Also we built the CPR (at least the BC chunk) on the backs of thousands of imported Chinese navvies... who were paid less, did the most dangerous jobs, and weren't compensated for injury or death. But their role is kinda glossed over when discussing the key role the CPR had in linking canada 'a mari usque ad mare'.
There's also our treatment/forced internment of Japanese Canadians during the second world war.
We also have a long history of anti-semitism. The Christie Pits race riot seems to have become largely forgotten (of course there was a war on at the time, but that's no excuse...).
More recently, we had martial law declared and totally suppressed individual rights during the FLQ/October crisis in Quebec.
So sure, Canada has a long history of this sort of thing.
... And partial string searches still don't work.
on
Gmail's Birthday Presents
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What bugs me is that for a search company, they have certainly implemented search within gmail oddly.
You can't do partial text searches (i.e. search for 'vacation*' (or variations thereof) to return e-mails with 'vacations'). It's highly vexing to be trying to find an e-mail that you KNOW exists, only to discover in the end that it wasn't getting returned because your search string was incomplete!
Why store all your e-mails if you can't search for them easily/intuitively? Very odd. Does anyone know why this is the case? Performance?
This design choice is acknowledged in the help (it's one of their FAQs), but they don't give a reason for why they made that choice.
Speaking as someone unschooled in the respective anarchist, socialist, libertarian, communist dogmas, I found all of the political stuff in the other three Macleod books a painful muddle to get through.
I enjoyed *The Cassini Division* because at least it went to the end-game and spelled out the 'what if' implications. In the other novels I simply wasn't interested in listening to various associates of Dave Reid argue about politics, or conspire to bring about whatever counter-counter-counter-revolution they were involved in.
Can't be done. To "monitor" the whole internet would require that all traffic pass through a central point
But it can be attempted. Maybe you don't have 100% coverage. But the fact of the matter is, large chunks of the net do flow through finite points. Witness the concern in previous months over Worldcom's business problems -- their pipes carry a significant percentage of internet traffic.
Besides, it would be against the Canadian Constitution's provisions on privacy and security of the person. Any citizen could then sue their ISP and require that all packets not specifically bound for the US not be routed through an American-monitored node.
And how that has stopped CSIS (the canadian security equivalent to the CIA) in the past? Or, for that matter, how would that stop a US government agency operating outside of the jurisdiction of Canada? And, finally, how many citizens would have the time, resources, and commitment to 'sue their ISP'?
Third point - this will just spur people to use encryption and/or anonymizers.
I seem to recall people claiming this point when PGP first came out. Has widespread adoption of encryption tools come about? No. Will it? Don't think so -- it's too inconvenient for regular usage.
Slightly OT, but there is a similar effort regarding the Total Information Awareness initiative being run by John Pointdexter. (I mean, Pointdexter is running the initiative, not the similar effort).
Basically the idea is that Matt Smith is going to publish in a consolidated place all information on John Pointdexter that is available publicly/legally, in order to demonstrate just how thoroughly scary the TIA project could be.
(Background: the TIA is yet another US government database project to track "undesirables", with the definition of undesirables being left alarmingly vague, and without a defined scope as to the usage of the gathered information...)
it's kind of ironic that his name gets invoked in a sarcastic sense to denigrate someone. i.e. "What do you mean you didn't think we'd need it? Nice move, Einstein."
why not just put your phone on vibrate?...i personally want my phone to be a phone...
i agree 100% that convergence sucks where there's no good reason for it. i can't count the number of times i've accidentally put my vibrator on 'phone', and had to answer a call:
"Umm, hi, kind of busy right now, talk to you later."
And when the MP3 player's on too? even Barry White sounds odd...
Free tuition and housing. Sounds like a tasty deal!
Makes you wonder if there's an agenda. What kind of grads will this place really churn out? How does the college pay for its operations? There's some big bucks involved: A $400 million pledge from the FW Olin Foundation. (Not my intention to sound critical -- but if, say, Microsoft were to sponsor parts of a university program, it does raise eyebrows...)
I guess my question is, how will the market value (the holder of) a free degree? I scraped through countless crap jobs and jumped through inane scholarship hoops to pay my way through. Guess I feel a bit jealous.
Eventually, space colonies might not be organized/driven by nationality, but rather by religion.
Hey, this sort of thing has happened before in history... (i.e. America)
As a side comment, there are some weird consequences of extending faith onto another planet.
Like, suppose your religion requires you to face Mecca when you pray. "geez, where the hell's earth now in the sky?"
Or suppose you are supposed to pray at certain times in the day, or your activities are constrained by rules regarding sunrise/sunset -- what do you do if a day is no longer 24 hours?
(Ilan Ramon (Israeli astronaut) has a similar dilemma on the ISS -- the sun rises an unnatural # of times in a 24 hour period...)
Slashdot Mirror
Is this really Lessig writing or is he just regurgitating Ray Bradbury?
I'm not sure I fully understand this comment. Are you referencing Ray Bradbury's remarks about how Michael Moore "stole" the title for Fahrenheit 911?
"He stole my title and changed the numbers without ever asking me for permission."
"despite the search features I didn't switch"
Actually it's *because* of the search features that I haven't switched. Gmail doesn't allow partial string matches in searches. So if you search for the word 'vacation' and your e-mail contains 'vacations', it doesn't find the e-mail. Very annoying. Especially in the context of google's noted expertise in search.
My pet issue with gmail that made me switch back to yahoo after a while is that gmail deliberately doesn't support wildcard searches or partial string matches. I wind up having to waste time constructing boolean queries in order to find messages which I *know* exist. (i.e. you search for 'vacation' and it doesn't return an e-mail with 'vacations' in it.) Maddening!
This is definitely one case where the search functionality doesn't "just work" the way a user would expect it to. Quite frustrating in light of Google's branding as the premier search technologists.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
This quote is interesting in this context. You left out his other famous quote from the same notebook:
"Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble."
Twain was a very vocal lobbyist and perhaps instrumental in getting the US to adopt international copyright protection. He was strongly in favour of perpetual copyright. (He was annoyed that publishers were ignoring American works in favour of English ones which were cheap, having no royalty costs) (since int'l copyrights weren't being respected by the publishers)
I say the quote is interesting in this context because Twain had been burned by Canadian 'pirate' publishers, who reprinted some of his early works without compensation. He wound up spending a few weeks in Montreal trying to meet a residency requirement so that he could claim a canadian copyright on the prince and the pauper.
Anyway -- the inclusion of a Twain quote detracts from your argument that copying is not stealing, specifically because I think Twain would disagree with you. In his view, copying *did* equate to stealing. He viewed even the existence of a limitation on copyright to be stealing. (see his address to Congress, for example. He argues that ideas are property). His intended meaning with that quote was that the existing copyright law wasn't strong enough to support his ownership rights as an author, not that having copyrights was nonsensical.
Here's the text of the ruling.
This ruling may only be a temporary setback for the CRIA -- it talks about copyright holders "being robbed of the fruit of their efforts", and seems to give guidelines for better evidence collection practices for future litigation...
The parent post reminds me of this article (along a similar line of thought)by Jonathan Last (written regarding the previous installment)...
(original text found at http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Artic les/000/000/001/248ipzbt.asp )
The Case for the Empire Everything you think you know about Star Wars is wrong. by Jonathan V. Last 05/16/2002 12:00:00 AM
Jonathan V. Last, online editor
STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.
It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.
First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.
If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.
I. The Problems with the Galactic Republic
At the beginning of the Star Wars saga, the known universe is governed by the Galactic Republic. The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.
Scores of thousands of planets are represented in the Galactic Senate, and as we first encounter it, it is sclerotic and ineffectual. The Republic has grown over many millennia to the point where there are so many factions and disparate interests, that it is simply too big to be governable. Even the Republic's staunchest supporters recognize this failing: In "The Phantom Menace," Queen Amidala admits, "It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions." In "Attack of the Clones," young Anakin Skywalker observes that it simply "doesn't work."
The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states. In "The Phantom Menace" a supra-planetary alliance, the Trade Federation (think of it as OPEC to the Galactic Republic's United Nations), invades a planet and all the Senate can agree to do is call for an investigation.
Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.
What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.
And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we mee
Parent: "I also find the quality of open source products much higher then that of commercial software, irfanview I reccomend to anyone wanting to make minor changes to digital pics, and in batches, works well and is free."
AFAIK irfanview is freeware. It is not open source. It is a great utility written and supported by one guy - but just that one guy; there is no mention of source code being available. In his usage agreement Skiljan writes: "I want to continue working on this program, therefore, your registration will be an incentive for me to add new functions and increase the program's quality."
This statement seems to imply that he's the only one with access to the code to do modifications. Not open source.
correction: no war was going on during the Christie Pits race riot in Toronto in 1933. (Seems I'm doing some historical revisionism of my own!) But Adolf Hitler had taken power in Germany, and Nazism was definitely on the rise.
Well, the Cdn. ill usage of Metis (and other native peoples) did lead to the Red River & North West rebellions. To this day you still get historians vehemently exercised over whether to consider Louis Riel a dastardly traitor or a true patriot (i.e. 'the father of Manitoba').
(From a wider viewpoint, it could be argued that our dealings of native peoples (also incl. Inuit) through our entire history has been filled with colossal blunders, incompetence and outright betrayals. (cf. the Indian Act))
When we built the Canadian Pacific railway we built it over land controlled by the Blackfoot. In return we gave Crowfoot (the chief) a lifetime pass on the railroad. (That's the canadian version of buying manhattan for some beads, I guess).
Also we built the CPR (at least the BC chunk) on the backs of thousands of imported Chinese navvies... who were paid less, did the most dangerous jobs, and weren't compensated for injury or death. But their role is kinda glossed over when discussing the key role the CPR had in linking canada 'a mari usque ad mare'.
There's also our treatment/forced internment of Japanese Canadians during the second world war.
We also have a long history of anti-semitism. The Christie Pits race riot seems to have become largely forgotten (of course there was a war on at the time, but that's no excuse...).
More recently, we had martial law declared and totally suppressed individual rights during the FLQ/October crisis in Quebec.
So sure, Canada has a long history of this sort of thing.
What bugs me is that for a search company, they have certainly implemented search within gmail oddly.
You can't do partial text searches (i.e. search for 'vacation*' (or variations thereof) to return e-mails with 'vacations'). It's highly vexing to be trying to find an e-mail that you KNOW exists, only to discover in the end that it wasn't getting returned because your search string was incomplete!
Why store all your e-mails if you can't search for them easily/intuitively? Very odd. Does anyone know why this is the case? Performance?
This design choice is acknowledged in the help (it's one of their FAQs), but they don't give a reason for why they made that choice.
Would you want the Google guys to set you up on a blind date?
That's what the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is for.
This sounds rather like the recent California election...
Speaking as someone unschooled in the respective anarchist, socialist, libertarian, communist dogmas, I found all of the political stuff in the other three Macleod books a painful muddle to get through.
I enjoyed *The Cassini Division* because at least it went to the end-game and spelled out the 'what if' implications. In the other novels I simply wasn't interested in listening to various associates of Dave Reid argue about politics, or conspire to bring about whatever counter-counter-counter-revolution they were involved in.
Yeah, my friend works for a company that sets up porn sites, and he said when I.T. implemented Net filtering, productivity went down the tubes... :-)
because then he would have wound up with a
NUCLEAR POWERED TELEVISION SET!!
now that's a plasma screen worth looking at...
Can't be done. To "monitor" the whole internet would require that all traffic pass through a central point
But it can be attempted. Maybe you don't have 100% coverage. But the fact of the matter is, large chunks of the net do flow through finite points. Witness the concern in previous months over Worldcom's business problems -- their pipes carry a significant percentage of internet traffic.
Besides, it would be against the Canadian Constitution's provisions on privacy and security of the person. Any citizen could then sue their ISP and require that all packets not specifically bound for the US not be routed through an American-monitored node.
And how that has stopped CSIS (the canadian security equivalent to the CIA) in the past? Or, for that matter, how would that stop a US government agency operating outside of the jurisdiction of Canada? And, finally, how many citizens would have the time, resources, and commitment to 'sue their ISP'?
Third point - this will just spur people to use encryption and/or anonymizers.
I seem to recall people claiming this point when PGP first came out. Has widespread adoption of encryption tools come about? No. Will it? Don't think so -- it's too inconvenient for regular usage.
Slightly OT, but there is a similar effort regarding the Total Information Awareness initiative being run by John Pointdexter. (I mean, Pointdexter is running the initiative, not the similar effort).
Basically the idea is that Matt Smith is going to publish in a consolidated place all information on John Pointdexter that is available publicly/legally, in order to demonstrate just how thoroughly scary the TIA project could be.
(Background: the TIA is yet another US government database project to track "undesirables", with the definition of undesirables being left alarmingly vague, and without a defined scope as to the usage of the gathered information...)
(an OT english usage comment)
it's kind of ironic that his name gets invoked in a sarcastic sense to denigrate someone. i.e. "What do you mean you didn't think we'd need it? Nice move, Einstein."
why not just put your phone on vibrate?...i personally want my phone to be a phone...
i agree 100% that convergence sucks where there's no good reason for it. i can't count the number of times i've accidentally put my vibrator on 'phone', and had to answer a call:
"Umm, hi, kind of busy right now, talk to you later."
And when the MP3 player's on too? even Barry White sounds odd...
when you shell out $100... you're getting 3 to 4 gigs of applications...
This (file size of distro) is not a good measure of the value provided. (i.e. maybe this distro is just really bloated.)
The focus should be on functionality, ease of use, TCO, quality of documentation, etc.
Free tuition and housing. Sounds like a tasty deal!
Makes you wonder if there's an agenda. What kind of grads will this place really churn out? How does the college pay for its operations? There's some big bucks involved: A $400 million pledge from the FW Olin Foundation. (Not my intention to sound critical -- but if, say, Microsoft were to sponsor parts of a university program, it does raise eyebrows...)
I guess my question is, how will the market value (the holder of) a free degree? I scraped through countless crap jobs and jumped through inane scholarship hoops to pay my way through. Guess I feel a bit jealous.
guess I better not rent any music DVDs about professional flautists...
i'll settle for seven of nine.
And its name is Walmart.
At least, if your measure is by sales. And their info system isn't too shabby either.
Eventually, space colonies might not be organized/driven by nationality, but rather by religion.
Hey, this sort of thing has happened before in history... (i.e. America)
As a side comment, there are some weird consequences of extending faith onto another planet.
Like, suppose your religion requires you to face Mecca when you pray. "geez, where the hell's earth now in the sky?"
Or suppose you are supposed to pray at certain times in the day, or your activities are constrained by rules regarding sunrise/sunset -- what do you do if a day is no longer 24 hours?
(Ilan Ramon (Israeli astronaut) has a similar dilemma on the ISS -- the sun rises an unnatural # of times in a 24 hour period...)