No. Assuming the font is not licensed for embedding, the person who sent it to you is a "pirate". You're only in trouble if you then rip the font from the PDF, use it, and distribute the results. Most recent editions of Adobe software that generate PDFs support a no-copy bit in font files. If that bit is sent, the font will not be embedded when you create the PDF. I encountered this during a university publishing course, and it was a royal pain in the ass. I had to hack the fonts with a hex-editor just so I could work on stuff at home.
I'm drawing a parallel. The original article was about someone taking photos of other people, and posting them on MySpace. People were saying that MySpace should be held responsible for this. I said that was analagous to someone photocopying the photos and dropping them in letterboxes, and then punishing the owner of the photocopier. I said the punishment for both "crimes" should be the same, meaning that if you punish the person who made the copies in the real world, then you should punish the same person for the crime committed online; the punishment should not be shoved off on to MySpace (or PhotoBucket or any other internet middle-man).
You then made a comment about two different scales of larceny not deserving the same punishment, and the conversation deviated.
Well, you can get a decent amount of info if you click the "About" button in the main menu, available from the home page. It doesn't give you as much technical info as the page you linked does, but you'll at least find out Wengo is a SIP-compatible VoiP thingy.
Yeah, and that should be applied to the original "crime". They're both the same crime, in nature, and they should both receive the same punishment, in nature. But it's often suggested that you punish the criminal in the real world, but a third party if the crime is committed online. For some reason.
Which is why places like Australia and New Zealand are worrying about population decline on a national level. But for everyday couples, more children are a financial drain rather than a financial asset like they would be for a farming family, where more kids mean more hands to do the work. Your average suburbanite kid doesn't do much to contribute to a family economically. So you have an imbalance in regards to the value of children: good for the national economy, bad for the parents, which is why the Australian government gave tax breaks, to try and redress the balance. I don't think that's a particularly good idea myself (it's encouraged immature teenagers to have kids for the money, which ends up being an even greater drain on public resources, as they are generally not actually ready for children) but that's the rationale.
There is a limit to the number of people we can have in the world, that's just a simple fact. It would seem we are already pushing that limit too far.
The world isn't over-populated. Some parts of the world are overpopulated. I believe Japan has recently been experiencing negative population growth, and Australia is predicted to in the near future. That is why, in Australia at least, they introduced new tax breaks for new parents - because, especially as people live longer past retirement, there are not going to be enough people to keep the country running to the same standard as it is now.
Of course, compare that to countries like China, with its noted overpopulation problems, or India (not exactly sure on that one; India is heavily populated, not sure if it's overpopulated). It seems to me the countries that have large populations are generally those where it is beneficial for the family unit to have a large number of children (generally agricultural societies). In Western societies, having children is more a case of personal desire, rather than economic desirability. Therefore fewer people opt to have children, and those that do have fewer children.
I don't think it's some sort of global population "invisible hand", I think it's simply people doing what they feel is best for them. The effect that may have on the local, national or global population is incidental, not the cause of the phenomenon.
...and the current situation where adults 'hijacked' whole categories of products initially marketed for their children.
They weren't initially marketed for their children. They were initially marketed to them, when they were children. As they grew up, they simply didn't abandon the product. The product matured with its audience. You see it quite frequently in TV shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and books (Harry Potter) where the books initially start out marketed to a young audience, and keeps that audience throughout. However, as time progresses, and audience matures, and so the product has to change to keep contact with its audience. It's why people keep saying the Harry Potter series gets "darker" with each book.
They're both larceny, and they're both punished as larceny. Posting 100 photos in meatspace and posting them in a globally-accessible location in cyberspace are both the same crime, and should be treated as such. I'm not sure exactly what that crime would be - publication of photos without a model licence maybe? - but they're the same crime.
Exactly the same thing you could do if the kid in question run off a hundred photocopiers and dropped in them in mailboxes around town. And it wouldn't be complaining that the local library should somehow be made to supervise anyone using their photocopiers.
Yep, particularly when people start using javascript event handlers in otherwise harmless tags. Thats why I think a lot of sites use bbCode type stuff - [b] instead of <b. Just filter out all HTML tags, then convert bbCodes to HTML.
Did that make the BBSes insecure? I say baloney. The BBSes weren't the problem. The problem was that my software would accept such text and render it as machine code.
I'd say it did make the BBSes insecure. The BBSes were vulnerable to an attack made by a malicious user. That attack may not have been in sufficiently common usage to make it a concern, but it is a flaw. Writing an online application, and expecting users to "just behave" is naieve to the extreme today. Never trust that the user will give you what you expect, verify everything, and develop secure solutions.
With the BBS situation, you created a tool that allowed people to distribute executable code via BBS. The BBS was designed for content, not executable code. Allowing it to distribute code made it insecure.
These websites are designed for distributing content, the same as your bog-standard BBS. People upload content, website displays it. All that is needed to secure it, is to get it to treat code as text, rather than as code. In terms of HTML, that's easy. Just run a regexp on all user-supplied data to convert to >, and the content will be treated as text.
It only gets to be a security issue when you try and do what you did; allow distribution of arbitrary code. That's not what most of these sites do, but since the primary langauge of the web is a human-readable, ascii-text based language, it's possible to sneak executable code on to them disguised as content.
There's a difference between that example and XSS attacks on a website.
In your example, the BBS was expecting code. It couldn't verify which code was good, and which code was bad, so it created an insecurity. On a website, the site expects textual content. It doesn't expect code. As long as you escape all user input properly, there's no chance of an XSS vulnerability. If you setup a website that allowed random users to upload javascript to be run on the site (rather than simply display the code as content) then that would be analogous to your BBS situation.
Conditional comments leads to the same sort of problems maintaining multiple CSS files as the browser sniffing. If all I want to do is change the width of an element from 170 in normal browsers to 165 in IE (something I have to do a lot for some reason; things are always a few pixels different in IE), I'd much rather be able to just use width: 170px; _width: 165px; than create a whole new stylesheet. That way next year when I need to change something, open up the CSS file, and change the width value, I won't be scratching my head wondering why it's not working in IE.
I'd much rather something that confuses the validator, but is easy for humans to parse, instead of something that the validator ticks, but drives humans crazy.
My problem is mostly with the CSS model. AFAIK, there are three ways to handle it. Firstly, you can do some browser sniffing and redirect to an appropriate CSS sheet. This is ok, but I find accurate browser sniffing to be a constant game of catch-up, and it can make maintenance a bit tricky, as you need to know when to update the base CSS file, when to update the browser-specific ones, and which browsers need what updates.
Another is to take advantage of IE's broken comment handling in CSS, by using something like:
[code]
width/* */:/**/100px;
width:/**/100px;
[/code]
I find that to be messy, and often hard to understand. I generally use the underscore hack to define IE-specific CSS. That means when I verify, I get a whole bunch of "property _width does not exist" errors. Also, there are a number of non-standard CSS properties IE uses instead of standard ones that generate the same type of error.
So there are ways to get IE to work correctly and validate at the same time, but they both have other, real world disadvantages, whereas the sort of validation errors the underscore hack produces are fairly shallow, and have no effect on real browsers.
Then you would have probably got a website that wouldn't render in IE. I've developed a stack of sites, and most of then wouldn't pass W3C once they were complete. They would while they were in development, however, before I had to hack them up so IE could render them correctly.
For example, which is standard wrench or spanner? Boot or trunk? Bubble or fountain? Soda or Pop or Coke or Sodapop or cola or whatever else is actually used? "The team are..." or "the team is..."?
That's part of my point. You talk to someone from Australia about the trunk of your car, and they will take a second to understand what you're talking about - and then they'll only know because we're quite exposed to American English over here. There is a difference in the standard of language, and that divergence from the standard creates confusion and ambiguity - even if only a small amount. As I said above, a small amount of deviation doesn't really matter in a human language, because most of the time, meaning can be derived from context.
And you're right that "you" to "u" probably isn't that significant, mostly because there aren't many homophones for "you". But consider dropping the apostrophe from we'll, or misusing their/there/they're, or you're/your. Bundle a bunch of these into a sentance, and you create a whole lot of ambiguity. Your ability to communicate with clarity suffers because of them.
Language is naturally spoken (or signed), and written forms are a needless abstraction if communcation is the sole purpose of language.
I'd have to disagree there. Communication is the sole purpose of the language, but there are many times when communicating vocally is impossible, and we need the abstraction of the written word. Like this conversation, writing a friend a letter or an email, writing reports for your boss, etc. While communicating verbally, we can use inflection, pauses and body language to overcome some of the ambiguities in our language, such as homophones. When restricted to the written word, however, we don't have access to those techniques and need to use spelling and punctuation to convey that sort of thing.
Whyt sdgpj fyuoij dfuynbder ofpgk a jsdf, flnghidmv kjsafdmdposmf?
Sorry, didn't you understand that? I was just using a more modern form of English. Language exists to facilitate communication. The point of a language is that it's a standard. It's just like a software protocol or API. It only works if all parties adhere to the standard. When you start to ignore the standard, you introduce misunderstandings and vagaries. English is somewhat redundant; when you have a few such ambiguities, they can be overcome by looking at the context. But as you start to throw away more and more of the standard, you become less and less able to communicate, because those you're communicating with don't know what you're saying - you're not using the standard any more.
Languages change. They adapt to new developments. The addition of words like "gay" and "google" represent new concepts that need new words (or in the case of gay, a concept that until recently was taboo). The change in meaning of the word "computer" represents a shift in society and technology. Language changes to more accurately communicate in a changed world.
Languages don't change because people these days find it quicker to type "u" and can't tell the difference between "their", "they're" and "there". Losing these sorts of distinctions makes English less effective at communicating, and thus there is no reason for it to "evolve" in that direction.
I'm illiterate in Middle English. I'm also illiterate in French, German, Japanese and Spanish. That's why I write my posts in Modern English, not Middle English, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. According to the grammar and definitions of Modern English, my posts are literate and correct.
The submitter purports to write in Modern English, and yet their writings don't follow Modern English definitions.
Are you _really_ suggesting MS could save time by throwing the kernel out and replacing it with something else?
No, I'm saying the claim that Microsoft's OSes are the largest software developments projects in human history is bogus. Other things that do the same job have been done, done better, and done ages ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you have to feel sorry for Milne? Because she can't freeload off work her grandmother did a century ago?
No. Assuming the font is not licensed for embedding, the person who sent it to you is a "pirate". You're only in trouble if you then rip the font from the PDF, use it, and distribute the results. Most recent editions of Adobe software that generate PDFs support a no-copy bit in font files. If that bit is sent, the font will not be embedded when you create the PDF. I encountered this during a university publishing course, and it was a royal pain in the ass. I had to hack the fonts with a hex-editor just so I could work on stuff at home.
Does the fact that it's easier make it them any less responsible?
I'm drawing a parallel. The original article was about someone taking photos of other people, and posting them on MySpace. People were saying that MySpace should be held responsible for this. I said that was analagous to someone photocopying the photos and dropping them in letterboxes, and then punishing the owner of the photocopier. I said the punishment for both "crimes" should be the same, meaning that if you punish the person who made the copies in the real world, then you should punish the same person for the crime committed online; the punishment should not be shoved off on to MySpace (or PhotoBucket or any other internet middle-man).
You then made a comment about two different scales of larceny not deserving the same punishment, and the conversation deviated.
Well, you can get a decent amount of info if you click the "About" button in the main menu, available from the home page. It doesn't give you as much technical info as the page you linked does, but you'll at least find out Wengo is a SIP-compatible VoiP thingy.
Yeah, and that should be applied to the original "crime". They're both the same crime, in nature, and they should both receive the same punishment, in nature. But it's often suggested that you punish the criminal in the real world, but a third party if the crime is committed online. For some reason.
Which is why places like Australia and New Zealand are worrying about population decline on a national level. But for everyday couples, more children are a financial drain rather than a financial asset like they would be for a farming family, where more kids mean more hands to do the work. Your average suburbanite kid doesn't do much to contribute to a family economically. So you have an imbalance in regards to the value of children: good for the national economy, bad for the parents, which is why the Australian government gave tax breaks, to try and redress the balance. I don't think that's a particularly good idea myself (it's encouraged immature teenagers to have kids for the money, which ends up being an even greater drain on public resources, as they are generally not actually ready for children) but that's the rationale.
There is a limit to the number of people we can have in the world, that's just a simple fact. It would seem we are already pushing that limit too far.
The world isn't over-populated. Some parts of the world are overpopulated. I believe Japan has recently been experiencing negative population growth, and Australia is predicted to in the near future. That is why, in Australia at least, they introduced new tax breaks for new parents - because, especially as people live longer past retirement, there are not going to be enough people to keep the country running to the same standard as it is now.
Of course, compare that to countries like China, with its noted overpopulation problems, or India (not exactly sure on that one; India is heavily populated, not sure if it's overpopulated). It seems to me the countries that have large populations are generally those where it is beneficial for the family unit to have a large number of children (generally agricultural societies). In Western societies, having children is more a case of personal desire, rather than economic desirability. Therefore fewer people opt to have children, and those that do have fewer children.
I don't think it's some sort of global population "invisible hand", I think it's simply people doing what they feel is best for them. The effect that may have on the local, national or global population is incidental, not the cause of the phenomenon.
...and the current situation where adults 'hijacked' whole categories of products initially marketed for their children.
They weren't initially marketed for their children. They were initially marketed to them, when they were children. As they grew up, they simply didn't abandon the product. The product matured with its audience. You see it quite frequently in TV shows (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and books (Harry Potter) where the books initially start out marketed to a young audience, and keeps that audience throughout. However, as time progresses, and audience matures, and so the product has to change to keep contact with its audience. It's why people keep saying the Harry Potter series gets "darker" with each book.
They're both larceny, and they're both punished as larceny. Posting 100 photos in meatspace and posting them in a globally-accessible location in cyberspace are both the same crime, and should be treated as such. I'm not sure exactly what that crime would be - publication of photos without a model licence maybe? - but they're the same crime.
They have the same effect (albeit on a different scale), therefore they should have the same punishment.
Exactly the same thing you could do if the kid in question run off a hundred photocopiers and dropped in them in mailboxes around town. And it wouldn't be complaining that the local library should somehow be made to supervise anyone using their photocopiers.
Yep, particularly when people start using javascript event handlers in otherwise harmless tags. Thats why I think a lot of sites use bbCode type stuff - [b] instead of <b. Just filter out all HTML tags, then convert bbCodes to HTML.
Take anything that can be interpreted as browser-executable code, and transform it into something that ain't.
Did that make the BBSes insecure? I say baloney. The BBSes weren't the problem. The problem was that my software would accept such text and render it as machine code.
I'd say it did make the BBSes insecure. The BBSes were vulnerable to an attack made by a malicious user. That attack may not have been in sufficiently common usage to make it a concern, but it is a flaw. Writing an online application, and expecting users to "just behave" is naieve to the extreme today. Never trust that the user will give you what you expect, verify everything, and develop secure solutions.
I think you're missing what I'm saying.
With the BBS situation, you created a tool that allowed people to distribute executable code via BBS. The BBS was designed for content, not executable code. Allowing it to distribute code made it insecure.
These websites are designed for distributing content, the same as your bog-standard BBS. People upload content, website displays it. All that is needed to secure it, is to get it to treat code as text, rather than as code. In terms of HTML, that's easy. Just run a regexp on all user-supplied data to convert to >, and the content will be treated as text.
It only gets to be a security issue when you try and do what you did; allow distribution of arbitrary code. That's not what most of these sites do, but since the primary langauge of the web is a human-readable, ascii-text based language, it's possible to sneak executable code on to them disguised as content.
There's a difference between that example and XSS attacks on a website.
In your example, the BBS was expecting code. It couldn't verify which code was good, and which code was bad, so it created an insecurity. On a website, the site expects textual content. It doesn't expect code. As long as you escape all user input properly, there's no chance of an XSS vulnerability. If you setup a website that allowed random users to upload javascript to be run on the site (rather than simply display the code as content) then that would be analogous to your BBS situation.
Conditional comments leads to the same sort of problems maintaining multiple CSS files as the browser sniffing. If all I want to do is change the width of an element from 170 in normal browsers to 165 in IE (something I have to do a lot for some reason; things are always a few pixels different in IE), I'd much rather be able to just use width: 170px; _width: 165px; than create a whole new stylesheet. That way next year when I need to change something, open up the CSS file, and change the width value, I won't be scratching my head wondering why it's not working in IE.
I'd much rather something that confuses the validator, but is easy for humans to parse, instead of something that the validator ticks, but drives humans crazy.
My problem is mostly with the CSS model. AFAIK, there are three ways to handle it. Firstly, you can do some browser sniffing and redirect to an appropriate CSS sheet. This is ok, but I find accurate browser sniffing to be a constant game of catch-up, and it can make maintenance a bit tricky, as you need to know when to update the base CSS file, when to update the browser-specific ones, and which browsers need what updates.
/**/100px;
[/code]
Another is to take advantage of IE's broken comment handling in CSS, by using something like: [code] width/* */:/**/100px; width:
I find that to be messy, and often hard to understand. I generally use the underscore hack to define IE-specific CSS. That means when I verify, I get a whole bunch of "property _width does not exist" errors. Also, there are a number of non-standard CSS properties IE uses instead of standard ones that generate the same type of error.
So there are ways to get IE to work correctly and validate at the same time, but they both have other, real world disadvantages, whereas the sort of validation errors the underscore hack produces are fairly shallow, and have no effect on real browsers.
W3C CSS Validator Results for http://www.alistapart.com/
To work as intended, your CSS style sheet needs a correct document parse tree. This means you should use valid HTML.
Errors
URI : http://www.alistapart.com/css/base.css
* Line: 2 Context : body
Invalid number : line-height Parse Error - [empty string]
Then you would have probably got a website that wouldn't render in IE. I've developed a stack of sites, and most of then wouldn't pass W3C once they were complete. They would while they were in development, however, before I had to hack them up so IE could render them correctly.
For example, which is standard wrench or spanner? Boot or trunk? Bubble or fountain? Soda or Pop or Coke or Sodapop or cola or whatever else is actually used? "The team are..." or "the team is..."?
That's part of my point. You talk to someone from Australia about the trunk of your car, and they will take a second to understand what you're talking about - and then they'll only know because we're quite exposed to American English over here. There is a difference in the standard of language, and that divergence from the standard creates confusion and ambiguity - even if only a small amount. As I said above, a small amount of deviation doesn't really matter in a human language, because most of the time, meaning can be derived from context.
And you're right that "you" to "u" probably isn't that significant, mostly because there aren't many homophones for "you". But consider dropping the apostrophe from we'll, or misusing their/there/they're, or you're/your. Bundle a bunch of these into a sentance, and you create a whole lot of ambiguity. Your ability to communicate with clarity suffers because of them.
Language is naturally spoken (or signed), and written forms are a needless abstraction if communcation is the sole purpose of language.
I'd have to disagree there. Communication is the sole purpose of the language, but there are many times when communicating vocally is impossible, and we need the abstraction of the written word. Like this conversation, writing a friend a letter or an email, writing reports for your boss, etc. While communicating verbally, we can use inflection, pauses and body language to overcome some of the ambiguities in our language, such as homophones. When restricted to the written word, however, we don't have access to those techniques and need to use spelling and punctuation to convey that sort of thing.
Whyt sdgpj fyuoij dfuynbder ofpgk a jsdf, flnghidmv kjsafdmdposmf?
Sorry, didn't you understand that? I was just using a more modern form of English. Language exists to facilitate communication. The point of a language is that it's a standard. It's just like a software protocol or API. It only works if all parties adhere to the standard. When you start to ignore the standard, you introduce misunderstandings and vagaries. English is somewhat redundant; when you have a few such ambiguities, they can be overcome by looking at the context. But as you start to throw away more and more of the standard, you become less and less able to communicate, because those you're communicating with don't know what you're saying - you're not using the standard any more.
Languages change. They adapt to new developments. The addition of words like "gay" and "google" represent new concepts that need new words (or in the case of gay, a concept that until recently was taboo). The change in meaning of the word "computer" represents a shift in society and technology. Language changes to more accurately communicate in a changed world.
Languages don't change because people these days find it quicker to type "u" and can't tell the difference between "their", "they're" and "there". Losing these sorts of distinctions makes English less effective at communicating, and thus there is no reason for it to "evolve" in that direction.
I'm illiterate in Middle English. I'm also illiterate in French, German, Japanese and Spanish. That's why I write my posts in Modern English, not Middle English, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. According to the grammar and definitions of Modern English, my posts are literate and correct.
The submitter purports to write in Modern English, and yet their writings don't follow Modern English definitions.
Are you _really_ suggesting MS could save time by throwing the kernel out and replacing it with something else?
No, I'm saying the claim that Microsoft's OSes are the largest software developments projects in human history is bogus. Other things that do the same job have been done, done better, and done ages ago.