Or, possibly, because it's harder to prosecute when the government has to prove that the pedo images on someone's harddrives aren't photoshopped. So instead of having to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt, they just expand the definition of the crime to incorporate all the edge-cases. This way they don't have to do all the hard work of actually determining if someone actually did something wrong, because looking like you did something wrong is just as illegal as actually doing it.
I don't think that's quite right. Fantasy and Science-Fiction are both speculative fiction, but they take opposite tacks.
Science Fiction speculates about our world fast-forwarded in time. It (generally) takes our current world as a "seed" and time-lapses it. This also defines its focus, to a large extent - science fiction tends to focus a lot on technological and sociological trends, because they're the ones that can be examined over a long time. It focuses less on individuals because (again, generally) an individual now would tend to be dead before the time a sci-fi book was set. Sci-fi looks at long-term changes.
Fantasy takes our world and gives it a lateral twist. Not "what would it look life if we took these initial conditions into the future" (sci-fi), but "what would our world look like if we had different initial conditions". What if magic really did exist? What if history had worked out differently? Fantasy tends to work by establishing an alternative system, and dropping a "normal" person in there, and following them through. Thus fantasy tends to investigate characters, and things like destiny, individual choice, personal power and corruption.
I think they're shelved together because firstly, they're generally less popular, and bookstores thus need to give them less shelf space, and secondly, they tend (tend, not do) attract similar sorts of people (those that aren't influenced by the popular meme that anything not firmly based in reality is irrelevant to reality, and therefore childish). They're also not considered "serious literature", so they don't really need to be catered to - they're just there to amuse the poor rabble.
No, not really. If you want a 600px header image, then no amount of CSS is going to make that fit nicely on a cell phone. You're going to have to create a different design for the mobile device. I agree that CSS should be used more often, and should be used to give browsers render hints rather than force a behaviour to a specific layout, but it's not a panacea.
Dynamic HTML generally doesn't take up much more bandwidth than normal HTML - a couple of extra bytes for a few CSS rules and a few lines of javascript. It makes pages feel slow and clunky because it makes the browser work harder, not because its straining your bandwidth.
Flash too, despite the bad rep it gets here can (I stress, can be fairly small in size.
The reason these things feel clunky isn't because they're big and slow, it's because they're, well, clunky.
This would accomplish absolutely nothing. They're not inserting ads into existing pages. What they're doing is returning their own pages from domains that don't exist. So, for instance, if you went to "http://www.salsdot.org/" (a non-existant domain), you would get an advert page instead of the standard error page.
The current problem with this is that a lot of security assumptions are tied to domains. So for instance, if you run a site called "blahblah.com", and an ISP hijacks the non-existant domain "bleh.blahblah.com", certain actions that are only permissable for interactions on the same domain will suddenly become available. That is, an insecure hijacked page provide an attack vector to your own site.
The ultimate problem with this (as the above is a fairly simple problem to fix) is that the ISP is leveraging the domain of a someone who has purchased an exclusive right to that domain. In addition, some domains are also trademarks, in which case they're violating trademark law. But at no stage are they violating copyright law, or modifying the original content, so that disclaimer you recommend wouldn't apply.
A style ruling may get rid of all the cruft, but it doesn't coalesce the content onto a single page. How many times have you seen a story posted on slashdot, spread across 10 pages, only to have someone later post the print version, which has all the 10 pages together?
Now, you could do the samething with CSS, but the reason those companies split it across multiple pages (obviously its not for ad revenue, or they wouldn't provide such a basic workaround) is so people don't have to load 10 pages worth of content at one time (Which may or may not be worth it anymore with increased bandwidth availability). If you do it with CSS, you have to load all the content anyway, even if it's not rendered. Which totally negates what they were trying to do.
So Apple had mis-priced their OS such that they couldn't support themselves? They were using a discounted OS as a loss-leader to sell expensive hardware. And when people found that other people could do decent hardware cheaper than Apple, Apple exercised its monopoly powers to ensure lock-in.
The entire economy is interdependant. You might as well say that Apple is a parasite on the semiconductor industry.
People like Apples OS; they want to buy it. But if Apple priced it at what it cost, it wouldn't sell as well - it'd just be too expensive. Apple want to get a slice of the OS market, so they discount their OS. But they don't want to actually have to give up the income that comes with that discount, so they force people to use their hardware so they can make a profit. It's like the old razor/razorblades thing - except if someone comes along that makes a razor that's compatible with Apple's razorblades, out come the lawyers.
So what you're saying is that back in the day, there was actual competition propelling innovation and improvements in the industry, and Apple should put a stop to that right quick?
Yes, it is, and I'd object to that assumption as well. People who hold it seem to believe that the universe is not only deterministic, but that people are rational, which seems contrary to all evidence - car thieves are more likely to be kids out for a cheap thrill and a joyride than a down-and-out destitute looking for a quick buck.
But more than that, when you assume a purely deterministic model like the one presented, it totally removes any sense of personal responsibility for your actions - all your actions are pre-ordained, and therefore, not under your control. This means that, as the grandparent posted, it's not actually just to punish anyone, because you're punishing them for things they had no control over. The removal of a judicial system alters the set of factors that influence people (in the purely deterministic model), so that they are now more likely to commit crimes.
That model just leads to social collapse. So, like others have said, even if reality is purely deterministic, actually letting that influence your actions or your policy is counterproductive.
The average temperature during the Cretaceous period was also about 10 degrees higher than now. All you prove (which is something that I agree with, BTW) is that reducing carbon emissions has bugger all to do with "saving the planet" - the planet's been through an ice age, it's been through eras of high volcanic activity, it's not going to give a stuff about climate change.
Climate change is purely and simply about making things easier for humans. If there is a significant climate shift, it'll be a pain in the butt. For us, and probably for some animal species, but then, for other species it'll probably be a boost.
We are all atheists with respect to specific theologies and gods we don't believe in. You know that feeling you get when people start talking to you in all earnestness about how great Poseidon is?
That's nonsense. Atheism is a specific term, not just another word for "doesn't believe in". Someone who doesn't believe in the Christian god isn't an "atheist in regards to Christianity", they're a non-Christian. A-theism: no gods. You can't be an atheist and still believe in a single specific god - it means "no gods".
Interestingly enough, you can still be religious and atheistic - any religion that centers around a non-personified cosmic force is atheistic.
Whether there was a need for a God to start it all 13.7 billion years ago is irrelevant today.
Now there's a rational, scientific perspective for you. Guys, stop thinking about evolution and the beginning of existence, it's all irrelevant today. Sorry Hawking, you've been wasting your time.
I wish there was a "-1, Cannot Read" mod. The bit about pennies was an example. American currency is legal tender for debts, not compulsory for purchases.
The government's already in there, by granting regional monopolies to telcos. In their defense, the last mile is a natural monopoly - you really don't want five different companies all digging up your property to lay their cables. The problem is, the government has granted this monopoly, which puts the telcos outside normal market forces, and then not bothered to keep a check on them. So the telcos have monopoly powers bestowed on them, with no governmental restraints. Economic theory basically guarantees the customer will get screwed at this point.
There's no possible ability to prevent a document OF ANY TYPE to be modified and changed so that it looks original.
Yes, there is. It's called public key cryptography. You generate something, sign it with your private key, and send it along with your public key. Anyone can read it. Nobody can change it, because they'd need your private key to sign it. Yes, they can rip it and stuff it into another format, but they can't sign it with your private key, so it's immediately obvious that it isn't your original document.
There's a difference between making a copy of a document and editing a document. What is really wanted in this case is the ability to publish a definitive version of the document, where it can be determined that the document was published by you, and hasn't been edited by anyone else. Public key cryptography should be able to manage that.
Of course, anyone can copy it and distribute it in a non-authenticated file format. So it would still depend on people actually checking that the file is properly authenticated (or automated popup warnings in the viewing software if this sort of thing becomes widespread).
I'm not really an expert, but it might be possible to have some sort of public key thing happening - you have the public key (embedded in the document, for public documents), you can read it. But you can't write to the file unless you have the private key.
Of course, this won't stop people cut-and-pasting, or even just re-typing the document. At that stage you're getting into DRM which is, as many have pointed out here, futile. Someone could copy your document - but they couldn't re-encrypt it with your private key, they'd have to encrypt it with one of their own.
No, I'd agree, but I'd say that it'd be better to have a security mechanism in place to guarantee that a document can't be edited, rather than just not publishing any editing tools - which is why PDF is not commonly edited. The file format is well known, and there is no built-in mechanism to protect the content - if you rely on a PDF to be tamper-proof, you'll probably get stung in the end.
PDFs aren't designed to be non-editable (it's trivial to edit them). They're designed to be portable. The grandparents author (sort of) stands - if OOXML was a successful standard, they wouldn't need to output it as PDF to make sure everyone could read it. Of course, this whole issue is about whether OOXML should be a standard - it's only after that's been passed, and people have implemented that you will be able to tell categorically whether it was a failure or not.
Any company that doesn't run their own hosting is in this situation, though. If you use shared hosting, managed hosting, or even run your own dedicated server in a third-party colo plant, someone else has access to it.
The only difference in this case is what data is being stored.
Any product which takes significant production costs but can be gained for the use of a user's time (read: free) will lose money if the product is sold at marginal cost--or, if the product is offered at some rate above marginal cost but that cost is avoided for most users.
Probably true. But the question is, does having copyright protection change the number of users who would avoid paying the game significantly? This guys argument is that it doesn't. The people whom copyright protection thwarts are the people who probably wouldn't try to pirate it anyway. Anyone who is even marginally determined can google a crack pretty quickly.
As far as I can tell, piracy rates have only increased along with increased copy protection. Now, there have been other factors of course: the growth of the internet, the growth of the gaming industry, the increasing technical competence of the average user. But still, I've never seen copyright protection suddenly stop game piracy, and I've been playing computer games since the C64 was around.
The point of the article is, it's going to happen. You can try to stop it, but you won't. So fighting the perpetual copy protection arms race just costs you money (and the opinion of those who do pay for your software if it becomes too intrusive).
I still don't expect games companies to follow it, but I wouldn't expect it to make much of a difference to their bottom line if they did.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, possibly, because it's harder to prosecute when the government has to prove that the pedo images on someone's harddrives aren't photoshopped. So instead of having to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt, they just expand the definition of the crime to incorporate all the edge-cases. This way they don't have to do all the hard work of actually determining if someone actually did something wrong, because looking like you did something wrong is just as illegal as actually doing it.
Yeah, that's why I used (generally) in the following sentance.
I don't think that's quite right. Fantasy and Science-Fiction are both speculative fiction, but they take opposite tacks.
Science Fiction speculates about our world fast-forwarded in time. It (generally) takes our current world as a "seed" and time-lapses it. This also defines its focus, to a large extent - science fiction tends to focus a lot on technological and sociological trends, because they're the ones that can be examined over a long time. It focuses less on individuals because (again, generally) an individual now would tend to be dead before the time a sci-fi book was set. Sci-fi looks at long-term changes.
Fantasy takes our world and gives it a lateral twist. Not "what would it look life if we took these initial conditions into the future" (sci-fi), but "what would our world look like if we had different initial conditions". What if magic really did exist? What if history had worked out differently? Fantasy tends to work by establishing an alternative system, and dropping a "normal" person in there, and following them through. Thus fantasy tends to investigate characters, and things like destiny, individual choice, personal power and corruption.
I think they're shelved together because firstly, they're generally less popular, and bookstores thus need to give them less shelf space, and secondly, they tend (tend, not do) attract similar sorts of people (those that aren't influenced by the popular meme that anything not firmly based in reality is irrelevant to reality, and therefore childish). They're also not considered "serious literature", so they don't really need to be catered to - they're just there to amuse the poor rabble.
No, not really. If you want a 600px header image, then no amount of CSS is going to make that fit nicely on a cell phone. You're going to have to create a different design for the mobile device. I agree that CSS should be used more often, and should be used to give browsers render hints rather than force a behaviour to a specific layout, but it's not a panacea.
Dynamic HTML generally doesn't take up much more bandwidth than normal HTML - a couple of extra bytes for a few CSS rules and a few lines of javascript. It makes pages feel slow and clunky because it makes the browser work harder, not because its straining your bandwidth.
Flash too, despite the bad rep it gets here can (I stress, can be fairly small in size.
The reason these things feel clunky isn't because they're big and slow, it's because they're, well, clunky.
This would accomplish absolutely nothing. They're not inserting ads into existing pages. What they're doing is returning their own pages from domains that don't exist. So, for instance, if you went to "http://www.salsdot.org/" (a non-existant domain), you would get an advert page instead of the standard error page.
The current problem with this is that a lot of security assumptions are tied to domains. So for instance, if you run a site called "blahblah.com", and an ISP hijacks the non-existant domain "bleh.blahblah.com", certain actions that are only permissable for interactions on the same domain will suddenly become available. That is, an insecure hijacked page provide an attack vector to your own site.
The ultimate problem with this (as the above is a fairly simple problem to fix) is that the ISP is leveraging the domain of a someone who has purchased an exclusive right to that domain. In addition, some domains are also trademarks, in which case they're violating trademark law. But at no stage are they violating copyright law, or modifying the original content, so that disclaimer you recommend wouldn't apply.
A style ruling may get rid of all the cruft, but it doesn't coalesce the content onto a single page. How many times have you seen a story posted on slashdot, spread across 10 pages, only to have someone later post the print version, which has all the 10 pages together?
Now, you could do the samething with CSS, but the reason those companies split it across multiple pages (obviously its not for ad revenue, or they wouldn't provide such a basic workaround) is so people don't have to load 10 pages worth of content at one time (Which may or may not be worth it anymore with increased bandwidth availability). If you do it with CSS, you have to load all the content anyway, even if it's not rendered. Which totally negates what they were trying to do.
Well, if they weren't before the nuke testing, now's their chance.
So Apple had mis-priced their OS such that they couldn't support themselves? They were using a discounted OS as a loss-leader to sell expensive hardware. And when people found that other people could do decent hardware cheaper than Apple, Apple exercised its monopoly powers to ensure lock-in.
The entire economy is interdependant. You might as well say that Apple is a parasite on the semiconductor industry.
People like Apples OS; they want to buy it. But if Apple priced it at what it cost, it wouldn't sell as well - it'd just be too expensive. Apple want to get a slice of the OS market, so they discount their OS. But they don't want to actually have to give up the income that comes with that discount, so they force people to use their hardware so they can make a profit. It's like the old razor/razorblades thing - except if someone comes along that makes a razor that's compatible with Apple's razorblades, out come the lawyers.
So what you're saying is that back in the day, there was actual competition propelling innovation and improvements in the industry, and Apple should put a stop to that right quick?
Yes, it is, and I'd object to that assumption as well. People who hold it seem to believe that the universe is not only deterministic, but that people are rational, which seems contrary to all evidence - car thieves are more likely to be kids out for a cheap thrill and a joyride than a down-and-out destitute looking for a quick buck. But more than that, when you assume a purely deterministic model like the one presented, it totally removes any sense of personal responsibility for your actions - all your actions are pre-ordained, and therefore, not under your control. This means that, as the grandparent posted, it's not actually just to punish anyone, because you're punishing them for things they had no control over. The removal of a judicial system alters the set of factors that influence people (in the purely deterministic model), so that they are now more likely to commit crimes. That model just leads to social collapse. So, like others have said, even if reality is purely deterministic, actually letting that influence your actions or your policy is counterproductive.
I don't know about better, but I'm pretty sure it would be a world with a lot more car thieves.
The average temperature during the Cretaceous period was also about 10 degrees higher than now. All you prove (which is something that I agree with, BTW) is that reducing carbon emissions has bugger all to do with "saving the planet" - the planet's been through an ice age, it's been through eras of high volcanic activity, it's not going to give a stuff about climate change.
Climate change is purely and simply about making things easier for humans. If there is a significant climate shift, it'll be a pain in the butt. For us, and probably for some animal species, but then, for other species it'll probably be a boost.
We are all atheists with respect to specific theologies and gods we don't believe in. You know that feeling you get when people start talking to you in all earnestness about how great Poseidon is?
That's nonsense. Atheism is a specific term, not just another word for "doesn't believe in". Someone who doesn't believe in the Christian god isn't an "atheist in regards to Christianity", they're a non-Christian. A-theism: no gods. You can't be an atheist and still believe in a single specific god - it means "no gods".
Interestingly enough, you can still be religious and atheistic - any religion that centers around a non-personified cosmic force is atheistic.
Whether there was a need for a God to start it all 13.7 billion years ago is irrelevant today.
Now there's a rational, scientific perspective for you. Guys, stop thinking about evolution and the beginning of existence, it's all irrelevant today. Sorry Hawking, you've been wasting your time.
I wish there was a "-1, Cannot Read" mod. The bit about pennies was an example. American currency is legal tender for debts, not compulsory for purchases.
The government's already in there, by granting regional monopolies to telcos. In their defense, the last mile is a natural monopoly - you really don't want five different companies all digging up your property to lay their cables. The problem is, the government has granted this monopoly, which puts the telcos outside normal market forces, and then not bothered to keep a check on them. So the telcos have monopoly powers bestowed on them, with no governmental restraints. Economic theory basically guarantees the customer will get screwed at this point.
realistic looking toy guns
http://www.adorablekidsdressup.com/Cloud%20Nine%20Images/Shooting_Gallery/Nerf_Maverick.jpg
There's no possible ability to prevent a document OF ANY TYPE to be modified and changed so that it looks original.
Yes, there is. It's called public key cryptography. You generate something, sign it with your private key, and send it along with your public key. Anyone can read it. Nobody can change it, because they'd need your private key to sign it. Yes, they can rip it and stuff it into another format, but they can't sign it with your private key, so it's immediately obvious that it isn't your original document.
There's a difference between making a copy of a document and editing a document. What is really wanted in this case is the ability to publish a definitive version of the document, where it can be determined that the document was published by you, and hasn't been edited by anyone else. Public key cryptography should be able to manage that.
Of course, anyone can copy it and distribute it in a non-authenticated file format. So it would still depend on people actually checking that the file is properly authenticated (or automated popup warnings in the viewing software if this sort of thing becomes widespread).
I'm not really an expert, but it might be possible to have some sort of public key thing happening - you have the public key (embedded in the document, for public documents), you can read it. But you can't write to the file unless you have the private key.
Of course, this won't stop people cut-and-pasting, or even just re-typing the document. At that stage you're getting into DRM which is, as many have pointed out here, futile. Someone could copy your document - but they couldn't re-encrypt it with your private key, they'd have to encrypt it with one of their own.
No, I'd agree, but I'd say that it'd be better to have a security mechanism in place to guarantee that a document can't be edited, rather than just not publishing any editing tools - which is why PDF is not commonly edited. The file format is well known, and there is no built-in mechanism to protect the content - if you rely on a PDF to be tamper-proof, you'll probably get stung in the end.
PDFs aren't designed to be non-editable (it's trivial to edit them). They're designed to be portable. The grandparents author (sort of) stands - if OOXML was a successful standard, they wouldn't need to output it as PDF to make sure everyone could read it. Of course, this whole issue is about whether OOXML should be a standard - it's only after that's been passed, and people have implemented that you will be able to tell categorically whether it was a failure or not.
Any company that doesn't run their own hosting is in this situation, though. If you use shared hosting, managed hosting, or even run your own dedicated server in a third-party colo plant, someone else has access to it.
The only difference in this case is what data is being stored.
Any product which takes significant production costs but can be gained for the use of a user's time (read: free) will lose money if the product is sold at marginal cost--or, if the product is offered at some rate above marginal cost but that cost is avoided for most users.
Probably true. But the question is, does having copyright protection change the number of users who would avoid paying the game significantly? This guys argument is that it doesn't. The people whom copyright protection thwarts are the people who probably wouldn't try to pirate it anyway. Anyone who is even marginally determined can google a crack pretty quickly.
As far as I can tell, piracy rates have only increased along with increased copy protection. Now, there have been other factors of course: the growth of the internet, the growth of the gaming industry, the increasing technical competence of the average user. But still, I've never seen copyright protection suddenly stop game piracy, and I've been playing computer games since the C64 was around.
The point of the article is, it's going to happen. You can try to stop it, but you won't. So fighting the perpetual copy protection arms race just costs you money (and the opinion of those who do pay for your software if it becomes too intrusive).
I still don't expect games companies to follow it, but I wouldn't expect it to make much of a difference to their bottom line if they did.