What's wrong with this case is that it's an example of a judge ruling for a religion (the atheists), and not because there was anything wrong with the stickers.
Obviously this is the work of the Christians, but the sticker is wrong because, the text of the sticker is using the shifting meaning of an ambiguous expression "Theory", which has multiple definitions, and by that, jumps to the conclusion that a theory is not a fact. It's misleading. Something can be a theory and a fact at the same time. In order for them to say that it "is not a fact", they must have proof against it.
13,000 titles stolen and warezed out to the world. Do you know how many jobs that may have negtively impacted?
And how many jobs are lost when I sneeze? Since Copying IP is easier today, I would think that when technology eliminates scarcity that a business model based on it would be obsolete. The real question here is Luddism.
but, think about this: the money that was not spent on the software would surely have been spent on other goods. Sure, some developers didn't receive this money, but someone else sure did.
Yes, in fact, you could say that software is stealing money from the people.
murderers, rapists, and thieves [are] a bigger priority. Those crimes cause actual harm....there are a hell of a lot more important things that the police need to be focusing on than the fifteen seconds of your life that you wasted deleting... spam...
Murder is more harmful physically, and "a bigger priority", but surely spam would have some degree of harm, however small it is. Be it time wasted, or stress which is physically bad for the body. The last thing we need is more harm from murder or spam. There is also no reason we can't work on both problems at the same time.
Make them MP3 CDs, then, which can fit many books on one CD that most new, cheap CD players can play. The blind people aren't being exploited here, except as inducement for everyone to pay the designated beneficiary of the National Library Service extra bucks for an unnecessarily specialized technology.
Tax payers are going to be saving money because it costs more to provide 20 CDs/15 90min. cassettes, and replace the defective CDs and tapes that have to be done continually due to scratches, when they could simply be compressed and distributed on flash media, or hopefully CDRs that are cheaper and reliable, although bulky.
I didn't hear anything about an overly specialized exclusive technology, in fact, I bet they will go with MP3 due to the ubiquity of the technology. If they go exclusive tech, the only people to blame is the copyright holders who fear piracy.
Audiobooks for blind people benefit sighted people who can't look at the page, like when driving. But none of us should have to pay extra when existing technology works.... Let's make the technologies more efficient and inclusive, rather than go the other way just because we can. Then we'll all benefit.
But who is "going the other way" here? I got the impression that the technology would be inclusive and easy to use. If you want access to this media, go to your library and take out the materials. I've borrowed audio books on both cassettes and CD. They don't require you to prove that you're disabled. You don't even have to be blind, they don't know, maybe you're illiterate.. They don't care.
It would be unfortunate and stupid if they go with an exclusive flash player, but I'm sure someone will find a hack for fair use extraction, and with the exception of car radios without input jacks, the sighted could still listen to them everywhere else.
...the social benefits to using existing tech for audiobooks for visually impaired people. When they can use regular CDs, they can exchange them with sighted people. That fosters socializing across the arbitrary divide of sightedness...
Exchanging and talking about audiobooks with just anyone will give some visually impaired people a chance to star in social groups, because the imagination is where the action is, with sight merely a biotechnology to achieve it. I am mindful of the most successful "audiobook" performer in history: a Greek, without sight, named Homer. If only other blind people circulated the medium in which his stories lived, we'd never have heard of him.
First of all, these audiobooks are not intended to convert the blind into super-stars socialites by exchanging audiobooks, even still, there is nothing here to stop them from doing so, unless they care about violating the copyright exemption; Second, the blind have imaginations without sight; and third, as far as I know, Audio recording technology didn't exist in the era of Homer like it does today, nor would it be the responsibility of the blind to archive and distribute other peoples' works.
This is a ridiculous waste. Why don't they just use regular CDs, with regular CDDA audio, and have special CD players with Braille "displays" and big buttons? The media doesn't have to be special; all their blind/disabled audience requirements can be met with special players, which aren't that expensive. And the rest of us can share the media on existing devices.
Have you ever listened to an unabridged audio book. Often times it's over 20CDs.. It's more of a waste to use CDs. At lower bit rates you can fit 60 times the information of one CD on to the same space, an that just with MP3, and Red Book Audio is very prone to errors due to scratches. 90min. cassettes can hold more than a CD but get mangled. I don't think this is going to be something exclusively for the blind. Anyone can take out audio books at the library, so it's not an issue.
I smell corporate welfare, cloaked in sympathy for the "disabled", who will be served worse by having their own audiobook ghetto that doesn't benefit from the economies of scale, and social interactions, of integration with the general population.
Audio books are already available for the blind, and if anything, it's helpful to them, and society. I don't know what you're going on about? Obviously blind people are not the biggest contributers to the economies of scale when it comes to book sales; hence the economy doesn't provide books for the blind sufficiently or at a reasonable price, (at $200 a pop,) that's why the government has to. And there is simply not enough blind people to destroy the economy or the availability of audio books for "the rest of us". If that's corporate welfare then so be it.
I think it would be quite easy. It's probably easier to have audio books on one small flash player, at low bit rates, than to have it scattered over 20 scratched CDs, or 15 mangled, twisted cassettes. The only thing that might be a problem here is the media player itself. Will it be able to fast forward, support 24 or 32kbps mono, or be easy to use?
"I found the tapes frustrating at times," Terri Uttermohlen said. "The sound quality isn't consistent. And I also found myself getting all excited at the end of side four but forgetting where I set down the box containing side five."
I don't know why they don't make MP3s and burn them to CD-R, that's cheaper than flash media, and you can get an MP3-CD player for less than a flash player, but they often don't have fast-forward.
the state will not have the ability, or desire, to monitor drivers' traveling habits... --[James Whitty] they couldn't tell where these people have been. That's just not going to be there," [Joan Borucki] said. --http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2004/08/19/secti on s/news/news/article_208035
Obviously they can track driving habits, and admittedly that's why they want to use it. Now you can call it a "glorified compass", and you can even have the easter bunny install it, but that doesn't change the fact that it tracks your global position. That's what a global positioning system does.
Yes, it's a mythological doctrine, and an overly simplified generalization. So is it wrong to steal a gun from a criminal? Would it be wrong for Africa, or any Government to steal the formula of an AIDS vaccine from America if they were charging too much for it?
Another part of the analogy that's wrong is that Cognac glass makers are not blocking the rights of consumers to mold glass, and it would be wrong for them to outlaw glass blowing, even if technology made it cheap and easy to do in consumer' homes.
I think B and I tags are frowned upon because people use them for the wrong reasons, and I understand this problem when I make user stylesheets, but that's hardly a reason to recode the spec. I think B and I tags are fine for use in forums like/..
The workaround for me has been to designate a wider font for Bold. body{font-family:"Arial Narrow"} b{font-family:Arial}
The w3c deprecated B in favor of strong, and now people simply abuse the strong tag.
I would still like to see/. get rid of the table-based layout, because that DOES make the pages 12 times larger!
If you are logged in, you can enable the Lighter/. Version in your preferences. This will reduce things somewhat. At this point you can enable a user style sheet for your viewing pleasure. I provide one in my journal.
Slashdot doesn't need to switch to XHTML simply to use CSS. They can add CSS without changing much of anything, in much the same way I use my User Stylesheet in Opera, along with slashdot's Lighter version in Slashdot preferences, available when logged in.
So you think/. should set an example by replacing B and I with meaningless idiotic tags that are 12 times larger than they need to be?!? If anything, Doesn't that send the message that/. is stupid?! There is absolutely no benefit to adding the style attribute to span tags. All meaning is lost, all benefit is lost. There is nothing wrong with using the B and I tags.
Slashdot isn't even valid regular HTML, let alone XHTML, and they're running a story on why we should be using XHTML? I'd laugh if it weren't so sad.
The difference was that story was not "WHY YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO PHP 5", now was it?
No, the difference is that/. isn't saying that you should switch to anything, the w3c is. If/. ran an article about why bill gates wants you to switch to windows, that wouldn't mean that they agree with him.
Slashdot could achieve bandwidth reduction by adding CSS to their Light version without switching to XHTML. This is what I do with my personal CSS found on my journal. Switching to XHTML for a forum is stupid and wrong.
The real problem is that people have been getting away with sloppy HTML. No closing TD, TR, TABLE tags because, hey, the browser allows it, and it works. Don't close italics in a TD cell? No problem!
Get your facts straight. It was part of the specification that closing tags are not needed. This included P, LI, TD, TR, HTML, HEAD and BODY. Even the start tags of HTML, HEAD and BODY could be omitted.
According to you, that means that the W3C was wrong, even though people coded to the specification. And they could also be wrong about something in XHTML. We don't need to follow them blindly, after all, this could be dropped just like HTML 3.0, and then what good is it. When they come out with the next thing, I guess that would mean that all webpages are wrong?
Anybody can understand any webpage made in XHTML strict, but not any made on html.
What?! I can understand HTML fine. HTML can be used properly, and XHTML can be used improperly to make pages that are hard to understand. You can't force people to make good webpages. There will always be people who screw up HTML and XHTML.
HTML is not going anywhere, and it's still useful, such as on forums.
If there is a Ford dealership close to my house and all I ever do is buy Fords, should Ford be held liable when all my cars fall apart?
Yes Ford should be held liable, otherwise you open the doors for fraud.
Do you have any idea about the history of the car industry? Car makers had to be forced to make safer cars by the government, not by consumers becoming rocket scientists to re manufacture their cars, or buy alternatives.
If uninformed people buy cars that explode, it is not evidence that consumers are in favor of exploding cars. And even if consumers wanted exploding cars, does that mean you should give it to them? Maybe next we can have flesh-eating computers, because after all, consumers want that, and our hands are tied.
Yet ATRAC files are better sounding than MP3's. What difference does it make what format the player holds the files in anyway? If it's easy to transfer MP3s to the player, and the player plays them back to the listener at a high quality - whats the problem?
The problem is that it's not "easy", it's more complicated to have to transcode your music from MP3 to ATRAC, and the procedure, only accomplished with Sony's software, is irreversible and only playable in Sony portables. Yes, ATRAC is Not playable on any computer or anything anywhere but SONY portables, and DRM may limit that farther in the future. Mean while everyone is supporting MP3.
break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences
Not sure if this is the same thing, but Opera browser lets you highlight links, headings, and each individual tag -- such as paragraph, list-item, etc. -- using the A-Q, S-W, and D-E keys to move Down and up respectively. The highlighted text can be copied using Ctrl+C or used with the context menu to do a search, translation, or whatever else they've added to the context menu.
"They went in the Sphere one by one, and they became more and more afraid of each other until they killed each other off, and we're doing the same thing."
Slashdot Mirror
What's wrong with this case is that it's an example of a judge ruling for a religion (the atheists), and not because there was anything wrong with the stickers.
Obviously this is the work of the Christians, but the sticker is wrong because, the text of the sticker is using the shifting meaning of an ambiguous expression "Theory", which has multiple definitions, and by that, jumps to the conclusion that a theory is not a fact. It's misleading. Something can be a theory and a fact at the same time. In order for them to say that it "is not a fact", they must have proof against it.
13,000 titles stolen and warezed out to the world. Do you know how many jobs that may have negtively impacted?
And how many jobs are lost when I sneeze? Since Copying IP is easier today, I would think that when technology eliminates scarcity that a business model based on it would be obsolete. The real question here is Luddism.
but, think about this: the money that was not spent on the software would surely have been spent on other goods. Sure, some developers didn't receive this money, but someone else sure did.
Yes, in fact, you could say that software is stealing money from the people.
murderers, rapists, and thieves [are] a bigger priority. Those crimes cause actual harm. ...there are a hell of a lot more important things that the police need to be focusing on than the fifteen seconds of your life that you wasted deleting ... spam...
Murder is more harmful physically, and "a bigger priority", but surely spam would have some degree of harm, however small it is. Be it time wasted, or stress which is physically bad for the body. The last thing we need is more harm from murder or spam. There is also no reason we can't work on both problems at the same time.
Make them MP3 CDs, then, which can fit many books on one CD that most new, cheap CD players can play. The blind people aren't being exploited here, except as inducement for everyone to pay the designated beneficiary of the National Library Service extra bucks for an unnecessarily specialized technology.
Tax payers are going to be saving money because it costs more to provide 20 CDs/15 90min. cassettes, and replace the defective CDs and tapes that have to be done continually due to scratches, when they could simply be compressed and distributed on flash media, or hopefully CDRs that are cheaper and reliable, although bulky.
I didn't hear anything about an overly specialized exclusive technology, in fact, I bet they will go with MP3 due to the ubiquity of the technology. If they go exclusive tech, the only people to blame is the copyright holders who fear piracy.
Audiobooks for blind people benefit sighted people who can't look at the page, like when driving. But none of us should have to pay extra when existing technology works.... Let's make the technologies more efficient and inclusive, rather than go the other way just because we can. Then we'll all benefit.
But who is "going the other way" here? I got the impression that the technology would be inclusive and easy to use. If you want access to this media, go to your library and take out the materials. I've borrowed audio books on both cassettes and CD. They don't require you to prove that you're disabled. You don't even have to be blind, they don't know, maybe you're illiterate.. They don't care.
It would be unfortunate and stupid if they go with an exclusive flash player, but I'm sure someone will find a hack for fair use extraction, and with the exception of car radios without input jacks, the sighted could still listen to them everywhere else.
...the social benefits to using existing tech for audiobooks for visually impaired people. When they can use regular CDs, they can exchange them with sighted people. That fosters socializing across the arbitrary divide of sightedness...
Exchanging and talking about audiobooks with just anyone will give some visually impaired people a chance to star in social groups, because the imagination is where the action is, with sight merely a biotechnology to achieve it. I am mindful of the most successful "audiobook" performer in history: a Greek, without sight, named Homer. If only other blind people circulated the medium in which his stories lived, we'd never have heard of him.
First of all, these audiobooks are not intended to convert the blind into super-stars socialites by exchanging audiobooks, even still, there is nothing here to stop them from doing so, unless they care about violating the copyright exemption; Second, the blind have imaginations without sight; and third, as far as I know, Audio recording technology didn't exist in the era of Homer like it does today, nor would it be the responsibility of the blind to archive and distribute other peoples' works.
All of your problems solved.
This is a ridiculous waste. Why don't they just use regular CDs, with regular CDDA audio, and have special CD players with Braille "displays" and big buttons? The media doesn't have to be special; all their blind/disabled audience requirements can be met with special players, which aren't that expensive. And the rest of us can share the media on existing devices.
Have you ever listened to an unabridged audio book. Often times it's over 20CDs.. It's more of a waste to use CDs. At lower bit rates you can fit 60 times the information of one CD on to the same space, an that just with MP3, and Red Book Audio is very prone to errors due to scratches. 90min. cassettes can hold more than a CD but get mangled. I don't think this is going to be something exclusively for the blind. Anyone can take out audio books at the library, so it's not an issue.
I smell corporate welfare, cloaked in sympathy for the "disabled", who will be served worse by having their own audiobook ghetto that doesn't benefit from the economies of scale, and social interactions, of integration with the general population.
Audio books are already available for the blind, and if anything, it's helpful to them, and society. I don't know what you're going on about? Obviously blind people are not the biggest contributers to the economies of scale when it comes to book sales; hence the economy doesn't provide books for the blind sufficiently or at a reasonable price, (at $200 a pop,) that's why the government has to. And there is simply not enough blind people to destroy the economy or the availability of audio books for "the rest of us". If that's corporate welfare then so be it.
- "I found the tapes frustrating at times," Terri Uttermohlen said. "The sound quality isn't consistent. And I also found myself getting all excited at the end of side four but forgetting where I set down the box containing side five."
- From the article.
I don't know why they don't make MP3s and burn them to CD-R, that's cheaper than flash media, and you can get an MP3-CD player for less than a flash player, but they often don't have fast-forward.erm, kids don't have rights. thats why we don't let them vote.
Oh, man! What a Nazi with an ax to grind. Hey, why stop at RFID tags? Why not chain gang the children and make school a prison. It's for the children!
- the state will not have the ability, or desire, to monitor drivers' traveling habits...
i on s/news/news/article_208035
Obviously they can track driving habits, and admittedly that's why they want to use it. Now you can call it a "glorified compass", and you can even have the easter bunny install it, but that doesn't change the fact that it tracks your global position. That's what a global positioning system does.--[James Whitty]
they couldn't tell where these people have been. That's just not going to be there," [Joan Borucki] said.
--http://www.ocregister.com/ocr/2004/08/19/sect
Does "thou shalt not steal" ring any bell :) ?
Yes, it's a mythological doctrine, and an overly simplified generalization. So is it wrong to steal a gun from a criminal? Would it be wrong for Africa, or any Government to steal the formula of an AIDS vaccine from America if they were charging too much for it?
Hmm, isn't filing a false police report a felony? I hope they will do more than have a laugh...
But what if the guy truly believes what he is reporting, due to mental illness or something?
Another part of the analogy that's wrong is that Cognac glass makers are not blocking the rights of consumers to mold glass, and it would be wrong for them to outlaw glass blowing, even if technology made it cheap and easy to do in consumer' homes.
I think B and I tags are frowned upon because people use them for the wrong reasons, and I understand this problem when I make user stylesheets, but that's hardly a reason to recode the spec. I think B and I tags are fine for use in forums like /. .
/. get rid of the table-based layout, because that DOES make the pages 12 times larger!
/. Version in your preferences. This will reduce things somewhat. At this point you can enable a user style sheet for your viewing pleasure. I provide one in my journal.
e ;
The workaround for me has been to designate a wider font for Bold.
body{font-family:"Arial Narrow"}
b{font-family:Arial}
The w3c deprecated B in favor of strong, and now people simply abuse the strong tag.
I would still like to see
If you are logged in, you can enable the Lighter
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,a[name] b{display:block;
background:#336699;
color:whit
font-family:sans-serif;}
I actually fear what the results will be if they switch to XHTML.
Slashdot doesn't need to switch to XHTML simply to use CSS. They can add CSS without changing much of anything, in much the same way I use my User Stylesheet in Opera, along with slashdot's Lighter version in Slashdot preferences, available when logged in.
Slashdot doesn't need fixing when it comes to B and I tags.
/. should set an example by replacing B and I with meaningless idiotic tags that are 12 times larger than they need to be?!? If anything, Doesn't that send the message that /. is stupid?! There is absolutely no benefit to adding the style attribute to span tags. All meaning is lost, all benefit is lost. There is nothing wrong with using the B and I tags.
As a representation of the Internet community, Slashdot needs to set the example for the rest of the community to follow.
<span style="font-weight:bold">
<span style="font-style: italic">
So you think
The difference was that story was not "WHY YOU SHOULD SWITCH TO PHP 5", now was it?
No, the difference is that
Slashdot could achieve bandwidth reduction by adding CSS to their Light version without switching to XHTML. This is what I do with my personal CSS found on my journal. Switching to XHTML for a forum is stupid and wrong.
The real problem is that people have been getting away with sloppy HTML. No closing TD, TR, TABLE tags because, hey, the browser allows it, and it works. Don't close italics in a TD cell? No problem!
Get your facts straight. It was part of the specification that closing tags are not needed. This included P, LI, TD, TR, HTML, HEAD and BODY. Even the start tags of HTML, HEAD and BODY could be omitted.
According to you, that means that the W3C was wrong, even though people coded to the specification. And they could also be wrong about something in XHTML. We don't need to follow them blindly, after all, this could be dropped just like HTML 3.0, and then what good is it. When they come out with the next thing, I guess that would mean that all webpages are wrong?
Anybody can understand any webpage made in XHTML strict, but not any made on html.
What?! I can understand HTML fine. HTML can be used properly, and XHTML can be used improperly to make pages that are hard to understand. You can't force people to make good webpages. There will always be people who screw up HTML and XHTML.
HTML is not going anywhere, and it's still useful, such as on forums.
You know what else kills jobs? Microsoft.
Bill? How many jobs did you kill at Netscape? etc. etc..
If we need a monopoly to create jobs, then we don't deserve jobs.
If there is a Ford dealership close to my house and all I ever do is buy Fords, should Ford be held liable when all my cars fall apart?
Yes Ford should be held liable, otherwise you open the doors for fraud.
Do you have any idea about the history of the car industry? Car makers had to be forced to make safer cars by the government, not by consumers becoming rocket scientists to re manufacture their cars, or buy alternatives.
If uninformed people buy cars that explode, it is not evidence that consumers are in favor of exploding cars. And even if consumers wanted exploding cars, does that mean you should give it to them? Maybe next we can have flesh-eating computers, because after all, consumers want that, and our hands are tied.
Yet ATRAC files are better sounding than MP3's. What difference does it make what format the player holds the files in anyway? If it's easy to transfer MP3s to the player, and the player plays them back to the listener at a high quality - whats the problem?
The problem is that it's not "easy", it's more complicated to have to transcode your music from MP3 to ATRAC, and the procedure, only accomplished with Sony's software, is irreversible and only playable in Sony portables. Yes, ATRAC is Not playable on any computer or anything anywhere but SONY portables, and DRM may limit that farther in the future. Mean while everyone is supporting MP3.
break web pages down into sentences, and then have the browser walk through sentences
Not sure if this is the same thing, but Opera browser lets you highlight links, headings, and each individual tag -- such as paragraph, list-item, etc. -- using the A-Q, S-W, and D-E keys to move Down and up respectively. The highlighted text can be copied using Ctrl+C or used with the context menu to do a search, translation, or whatever else they've added to the context menu.
"Answer me. Did you go inside the Sphere?"
"They went in the Sphere one by one, and they became more and more afraid of each other until they killed each other off, and we're doing the same thing."