a) Baen publishes terrible military science fiction and fantasy, not non-fiction. b) Baen also accepts unsolicited manuscripts, no literary agent required. c) They'd have published the book with a hilariously bad pulp cover of a well-muscled barbarian posing with anatomically unlikely slave girls and a blurb of dubious accuracy.
You do get a lot of deliberate obfuscation, though. The biggest one in Australia is YourTV; they're using JavaScript obfuscation like String.fromCharCode(149-(50*2))+ '.' + '3' + '0' + String.fromCharCode(120-8) + 'm'. Easily foiled, but still.
According to Amazon, Office 2003 Standard is $400 retail; Professional is $500. It's only the Student edition that's $150. Assuming 2-4 years between versions, $15 a month isn't actually a bad price.
Your house analogy ignores the fact that a) some people don't have $3000 and can't get it, but *can* find $300/m; and b) there might be a good reason not to buy. If you were leaving the country in a month, for example, or if having that kind of asset would have implications for your tax or social security situation.
Or the capital might be better-used elsewhere. If you were starting a new business, it'd make a lot more sense to pay by the month for an Office subscription than it would to buy copies -- you need every cent you can spare, and there's a pretty good chance the business will have folded long before the rent reached the amount it would have cost to buy.
As to the question at hand, I think providing the service would be a bad idea, but for different reasons; students need to learn to solve problems themselves, and not wait for some deus ex machina in the form of an ad-supported service to solve it for them.
The student who asked is trying, quite ingeniously, to solve the problem. He found a workaround for the school's filter (PHPProxy), but he can't host it himself, probably for financial reasons, so he sought out someone who already has the resources and proposed a mutually beneficial partnership. It's not the kind of nerdcore technical approach we appreciate around here, but it's still problem solving.
"Side note, and unrelated to this discussion: has anyone noticed that the same people who defend the GPL's validity as a legally binding agreement tend to deny the validity of EULAs?"
The position isn't inconsistent.
If a book comes with a license agreement allowing the recipient to freely distribute copies (and modified copies) according to certain conditions, they don't have to agree to the license. They can believe that it's invalid, and are still entitled to use (i.e., read) the book to their heart's content. If they want to distribute copies, however, they either agree to the license or commit copyright infringement.
That is, claiming that they accepted the license would be a defense against a charge of copyright infringement. The distributor had offered the terms and they had agreed to them, receiving the additional rights granted by the license agreement.
If the book came shrink-wrapped with an EULA claiming that it was prohibited to use as a fly-swatter, it would be (deservedly) ridiculed. It's ridiculous that software EULAs purport to impose similar conditions, like not publishing benchmarks or criticism. If you publish a benchmark and claim that the EULA was invalid, what do they sue you for? Even if you didn't agree to the terms -- and clicking "agree" really doesn't cut it -- you haven't done anything that a reasonable person wouldn't believe you already had the right to do as a result of buying the software.
Researcher Alex Malik, working for the AIC under a commission from the Attorney-General's Department and IP Australia, was particularly critical of the use of statistics in court.
"Of greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law," the draft reads.
Mr Malik declined to speak to The Australian, citing a confidentiality agreement.
The "epistemologically unreliable" thing made me think that he might've been a recently-hired philosophy major, maybe even an intern, given the report to do as a research project.
From 1997 to 2000 he was a Senior Legal Officer at the Australian Communications Authority, based in Canberra. From 2000 to 2002 Malik was ARIA's Legal Counsel. In 2001 Malik participated in the Consultative Forum of the Copyright Law Review Committee examining Copyright and Contract, representing ARIA, PPCA and IFPI.
Assuming it's the same guy, I can hardly think of a better resumé. He used to be a lawyer for the other side. (You just know he still has keys to the Death Star.) When he says that the "greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law", he really knows what he's talking about: he spent two years presenting them on behalf of the recording industry, when they probably went unqualified...
It really has very little to do with release quality. There were plenty of high-quality VHS fansubs out there, especially late in the game.
Even just a few years ago, though, the major fansub groups would finish almost any series they started -- even if it was licensed quickly, it wouldn't happen until well after it finished screening in Japan. It was easy for fansubbers and hard-core fans to take the moral high-ground, because their involvement was already over by the time they had to stop distributing. It was only new fans who had to be lectured on how evil they were for wanting free copies.
That isn't true anymore, because many series are licensed while they're being shown in Japan. The result is that there's much less reward for "ethical" fansubbing, which is why some groups have changed to, e.g., stopping distribution only when a show is actually available, or (in the case of mangled Funimation licenses or dub-only releases) available un-cut. Or not stopping distribution at all, which seems fair enough to me given that they're all downloading Battlestar Galactica too.
It's either be unethical or stick to subbing unpopular titles, and who wants to do that?
The problem is that difficulty levels in most games are broken. Just one example: many 3D platformers have less/weaker enemies in easy mode. I usually die by falling down holes, so the "difficulty" setting is worthless.
There's no reason why quicksave can't be part of the difficulty scale. You and the other dedicated players have to suffer through long and painful levels; people playing on the n00b difficulty level can save+load to their hearts' content. At "normal" level we might get one or two saves.
I have a fair amount of dedication with hard games, but I *hate* to finally finish one really hard part, after ten plus tries, only to face an even harder part beyond that. If I'm still only making it past the first obstacle in one out of ten tries, I'm going to give up (and grind the game disc into a poisonous but eminently satisfying condiment).
The actual draft legislation hasn't even been released, yet alone enacted, so there are a lot of grey areas.
Format shifting is allowed, but in effect it's only for CDs/vinyl/audio cassettes. They say they'll be monitoring the situation with DVDs, so that might be legalised in a year or two (i.e., once all the cool kids are already routinely watching copies on their iPod Videos the way they play CDs now). The Q&A document explicitly says that software is excluded, so you're out of luck if you want to transfer those Apple II programs off a type of media that hasn't been made in a decade. We also don't yet know precisely what is included under "format shift": they've said that you can't just make a backup copy of a CD to another CD, say, but not whether that includes ISO disc images or other lossless transcoding.
There are various other copyright problems right now which, going by their talking points, it doesn't address -- things like search engine image thumbnails and the Google Library project.
Time shifting is allowed, but you can only watch the program once -- no taping shows to keep. A family of five can't watch a taped program at different times. That particular idiocy is completely unenforceable, but puts us right back where we were before in terms of half the country routinely committing violations.
They say that uploading your format-shifted music to the internet will be illegal, but without enough details to say whether that includes online backup/storage/search services like Xdrive or Google Desktop Search. Again, we'll have to wait for the legislation to see.
The nastiest thing is that they're making it easier for copyright holders to sue, specifically by granting the courts powers to impose greater fines and penalties on infringers. I fully expect a wave of lawsuits from ARIA against grandmothers who don't own computers, etc., just as in the US. Bad news.
e.g.: If you're commuting an hour and a half each way on the train or bus every day, you get bored fast. At peak times it's too cramped to work, assuming you'd want to, and not everyone wants to read.
It's not like the "cinematic experience" is important to, say, the latest crappy comedy.
In the Australian Capital Territory, telemarketers are covered by the Door-to-Door Trading Act anyway, with the same hours as listed above. Some things (e.g. charities) are exempt, but that'll probably be the case with this list too. Getting calls inside those hours is still f$%(*&$ annoying; if it can't get them to leave you alone during the day as well then I don't see the point.
Also worth noting that the Australian Direct Marketing Assocation already has an opt-out form. A compulsory govt.-run one would be better, but in practical terms I doubt it'd make much of a difference.
The OED's earliest citation for this usage of "less" is from circa 888AD. Hilarious as it is to see prescriptivists still picking at it, don't you think it's time to give it a rest?
Most textads are served in iframes, and the src attribute is checked against the Adblock blacklist.
I don't think you can block non-iframe textads with Adblock, but it's trivial to do on specific sites with custom Greasemonkey scripts. If you're that desperate.
Q: So, does this decision settle Australian law when it comes to the legality of circumventing 'technical measures' like those used by Sony in this case?
A: No, the law isn't settled, because under the FTA we have to change our anti-circumvention laws by 1 January 2007. In fact, the new laws are currently being drafted, and discussed by a Parliamentary Committee
Q: Well, does this decision at least mean mod-chipping is legal in the meantime?
A: Well, no. Even that is not clear, because the meaning of 'reproduction' has changed from 1 January 2005, so that it's possible to argue now, post FTA, that a 'reproduction' of the computer program is made in a Sony console when a pirated game is played. And that means it could be argued that the Sony measure is now a technological protection measure, even though on 31 December 2004 it wasn't
Q: So, the law isn't settled by this High Court decision, and it's even possible that Stevens' activities are illegal under the new law. So is this the least important High Court decision ever rendered on copyright law?
Check out the commentary from Kim Weatherall (expert in Australian IP law and lecturer at Melbourne University).
The KaZaA operators were held to have authorised copyright infringement. If you don't market your FTP client as "zomg download free music here!!1" and ship it with a list of anonymous music servers, you'll probably be right.
This is his summary from the ruling:
i) despite the fact that the Kazaa website contains warnings against the sharing of copyright files, and an end user licence agreement under which users are made to agree not to infringe copyright, it has long been obvious that those measures are ineffective to prevent, or even substantially to curtail, copyright infringements by users. The respondents have long known that the Kazaa system is widely used for the sharing of copyright files;
(ii) there are technical measures (keyword filtering and gold file flood filtering) that would enable the respondents to curtail - although probably not totally to prevent - the sharing of copyright files. The respondents have not taken any action to implement those measures. It would be against their financial interest to do so. It is in the respondents' financial interest to maximise, not to minimise, music file-sharing. Advertising provides the bulk of the revenue earned by the Kazaa system, which revenue is shared between Sharman Networks and Altnet.
(iii) far from taking steps that are likely effectively to curtail copyright file-sharing, Sharman Networks and Altnet have included on the Kazaa website exhortations to users to increase their file-sharing and a webpage headed 'Join the Revolution' that criticises record companies for opposing peer-to-peer file-sharing. They also sponsored a 'Kazaa Revolution' campaign attacking the record companies. The revolutionary material does not expressly advocate the sharing of copyright files. However, to a young audience, and it seems that Kazaa users are predominantly young people, the effect of this webpage would be to encourage visitors to think it 'cool' to defy the record companies by ignoring copyright constraints.
As for the billions and billions in damages, Weatherall notes that: "Australia does not have statutory damages (unlike the US) - the copyright owners can't argue that they should just get a fixed amount 'per infringement'." With any luck they'll get called out on their "a download is a lost sale" bull.
Most interesting to me was that the judge ordered that the record companies provide a list of items to be filtered, because -- from memory -- they'd previously refused to provide one.
I was hoping for some good multiplayer applications -- 16 players on 4 screens and 4 consoles, say. With the dual TV output, maybe even on 8 screens...
I looked at Weasel Words in the bookshop when it first came out, and it's incredibly dull. Honestly, if someone needs an entire book on weasel words in order to recognize them, they're already a lost cause.
A while back I bought a pack of 10 movies for $10 Australian -- what's that, US$7.50? And three of them are in the IMDb top 250. There's some amazingly good stuff out there.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes more sense in context. The wordpress.org server was compromised once, but that was before they hired Barry as full-time "systems wrangler".
You came home unexpectedly one night to find her lover being taken away in an ambulance?
a) Baen publishes terrible military science fiction and fantasy, not non-fiction.
b) Baen also accepts unsolicited manuscripts, no literary agent required.
c) They'd have published the book with a hilariously bad pulp cover of a well-muscled barbarian posing with anatomically unlikely slave girls and a blurb of dubious accuracy.
You do get a lot of deliberate obfuscation, though. The biggest one in Australia is YourTV; they're using JavaScript obfuscation like String.fromCharCode(149-(50*2))+ '.' + '3' + '0' + String.fromCharCode(120-8) + 'm'. Easily foiled, but still.
Every single listing has the same comment in it: <!-- PLEASE DON'T RIP. http://yourtv.com.au/legal/?action=copyright -->. (At least they're polite with their threats.)
Network Ten goes to absurd lengths to hide theirs, in the process making the site completely inaccessible to the blind.
I think someone (Yahoo?) uses a JSON API, though, so that one is easy.
According to Amazon, Office 2003 Standard is $400 retail; Professional is $500. It's only the Student edition that's $150. Assuming 2-4 years between versions, $15 a month isn't actually a bad price.
Your house analogy ignores the fact that a) some people don't have $3000 and can't get it, but *can* find $300/m; and b) there might be a good reason not to buy. If you were leaving the country in a month, for example, or if having that kind of asset would have implications for your tax or social security situation.
Or the capital might be better-used elsewhere. If you were starting a new business, it'd make a lot more sense to pay by the month for an Office subscription than it would to buy copies -- you need every cent you can spare, and there's a pretty good chance the business will have folded long before the rent reached the amount it would have cost to buy.
The student who asked is trying, quite ingeniously, to solve the problem. He found a workaround for the school's filter (PHPProxy), but he can't host it himself, probably for financial reasons, so he sought out someone who already has the resources and proposed a mutually beneficial partnership. It's not the kind of nerdcore technical approach we appreciate around here, but it's still problem solving.
"Side note, and unrelated to this discussion: has anyone noticed that the same people who defend the GPL's validity as a legally binding agreement tend to deny the validity of EULAs?"
The position isn't inconsistent.
If a book comes with a license agreement allowing the recipient to freely distribute copies (and modified copies) according to certain conditions, they don't have to agree to the license. They can believe that it's invalid, and are still entitled to use (i.e., read) the book to their heart's content. If they want to distribute copies, however, they either agree to the license or commit copyright infringement.
That is, claiming that they accepted the license would be a defense against a charge of copyright infringement. The distributor had offered the terms and they had agreed to them, receiving the additional rights granted by the license agreement.
If the book came shrink-wrapped with an EULA claiming that it was prohibited to use as a fly-swatter, it would be (deservedly) ridiculed. It's ridiculous that software EULAs purport to impose similar conditions, like not publishing benchmarks or criticism. If you publish a benchmark and claim that the EULA was invalid, what do they sue you for? Even if you didn't agree to the terms -- and clicking "agree" really doesn't cut it -- you haven't done anything that a reasonable person wouldn't believe you already had the right to do as a result of buying the software.
The "epistemologically unreliable" thing made me think that he might've been a recently-hired philosophy major, maybe even an intern, given the report to do as a research project.
Google says otherwise:
Assuming it's the same guy, I can hardly think of a better resumé. He used to be a lawyer for the other side. (You just know he still has keys to the Death Star.) When he says that the "greatest concern is the potentially unqualified use of these statistics in courts of law", he really knows what he's talking about: he spent two years presenting them on behalf of the recording industry, when they probably went unqualified...
Because with Google you can do it faster and easier, with pretty reports showing you the results, and put your time into other projects.
Why use Postnuke instead of writing your own "ugly portal site" software?
It really has very little to do with release quality. There were plenty of high-quality VHS fansubs out there, especially late in the game.
Even just a few years ago, though, the major fansub groups would finish almost any series they started -- even if it was licensed quickly, it wouldn't happen until well after it finished screening in Japan. It was easy for fansubbers and hard-core fans to take the moral high-ground, because their involvement was already over by the time they had to stop distributing. It was only new fans who had to be lectured on how evil they were for wanting free copies.
That isn't true anymore, because many series are licensed while they're being shown in Japan. The result is that there's much less reward for "ethical" fansubbing, which is why some groups have changed to, e.g., stopping distribution only when a show is actually available, or (in the case of mangled Funimation licenses or dub-only releases) available un-cut. Or not stopping distribution at all, which seems fair enough to me given that they're all downloading Battlestar Galactica too.
It's either be unethical or stick to subbing unpopular titles, and who wants to do that?
The problem is that difficulty levels in most games are broken. Just one example: many 3D platformers have less/weaker enemies in easy mode. I usually die by falling down holes, so the "difficulty" setting is worthless.
There's no reason why quicksave can't be part of the difficulty scale. You and the other dedicated players have to suffer through long and painful levels; people playing on the n00b difficulty level can save+load to their hearts' content. At "normal" level we might get one or two saves.
I have a fair amount of dedication with hard games, but I *hate* to finally finish one really hard part, after ten plus tries, only to face an even harder part beyond that. If I'm still only making it past the first obstacle in one out of ten tries, I'm going to give up (and grind the game disc into a poisonous but eminently satisfying condiment).
Oh, it's much worse than that! $foo="bar", $bar="foo", $$foo="foo", $$$foo="bar, $$$$$$$$$foo="bar"...
I don't think there's any limit to it other than memory.
Better article here.
The actual draft legislation hasn't even been released, yet alone enacted, so there are a lot of grey areas.
Format shifting is allowed, but in effect it's only for CDs/vinyl/audio cassettes. They say they'll be monitoring the situation with DVDs, so that might be legalised in a year or two (i.e., once all the cool kids are already routinely watching copies on their iPod Videos the way they play CDs now). The Q&A document explicitly says that software is excluded, so you're out of luck if you want to transfer those Apple II programs off a type of media that hasn't been made in a decade. We also don't yet know precisely what is included under "format shift": they've said that you can't just make a backup copy of a CD to another CD, say, but not whether that includes ISO disc images or other lossless transcoding.
There are various other copyright problems right now which, going by their talking points, it doesn't address -- things like search engine image thumbnails and the Google Library project.
Time shifting is allowed, but you can only watch the program once -- no taping shows to keep. A family of five can't watch a taped program at different times. That particular idiocy is completely unenforceable, but puts us right back where we were before in terms of half the country routinely committing violations.
They say that uploading your format-shifted music to the internet will be illegal, but without enough details to say whether that includes online backup/storage/search services like Xdrive or Google Desktop Search. Again, we'll have to wait for the legislation to see.
The nastiest thing is that they're making it easier for copyright holders to sue, specifically by granting the courts powers to impose greater fines and penalties on infringers. I fully expect a wave of lawsuits from ARIA against grandmothers who don't own computers, etc., just as in the US. Bad news.
Google is your friend.
e.g.: If you're commuting an hour and a half each way on the train or bus every day, you get bored fast. At peak times it's too cramped to work, assuming you'd want to, and not everyone wants to read.
It's not like the "cinematic experience" is important to, say, the latest crappy comedy.
In the Australian Capital Territory, telemarketers are covered by the Door-to-Door Trading Act anyway, with the same hours as listed above. Some things (e.g. charities) are exempt, but that'll probably be the case with this list too. Getting calls inside those hours is still f$%(*&$ annoying; if it can't get them to leave you alone during the day as well then I don't see the point.
Also worth noting that the Australian Direct Marketing Assocation already has an opt-out form. A compulsory govt.-run one would be better, but in practical terms I doubt it'd make much of a difference.
The OED's earliest citation for this usage of "less" is from circa 888AD. Hilarious as it is to see prescriptivists still picking at it, don't you think it's time to give it a rest?
That's not true. You can add JavaScript to entries, but it will never be displayed on the page. The HTML cleaner strips it out.
Occasionally someone finds a new security hole, but they're patched pretty quickly.
Most textads are served in iframes, and the src attribute is checked against the Adblock blacklist.
I don't think you can block non-iframe textads with Adblock, but it's trivial to do on specific sites with custom Greasemonkey scripts. If you're that desperate.
See this post at Weatherall's Law.
Check out the commentary from Kim Weatherall (expert in Australian IP law and lecturer at Melbourne University).
The KaZaA operators were held to have authorised copyright infringement. If you don't market your FTP client as "zomg download free music here!!1" and ship it with a list of anonymous music servers, you'll probably be right.
This is his summary from the ruling:
As for the billions and billions in damages, Weatherall notes that: "Australia does not have statutory damages (unlike the US) - the copyright owners can't argue that they should just get a fixed amount 'per infringement'." With any luck they'll get called out on their "a download is a lost sale" bull.
Most interesting to me was that the judge ordered that the record companies provide a list of items to be filtered, because -- from memory -- they'd previously refused to provide one.
See here.
e.g., if you need to select DOM elements, see if the document.getElementById method exists, rather than checking for IE >= 5.
It's no use for sites using browser detection to send working CSS rules, though, since they need to work even if JavaScript is turned off.
I was hoping for some good multiplayer applications -- 16 players on 4 screens and 4 consoles, say. With the dual TV output, maybe even on 8 screens...
Yes, and he wrote it much, much better.
I looked at Weasel Words in the bookshop when it first came out, and it's incredibly dull. Honestly, if someone needs an entire book on weasel words in order to recognize them, they're already a lost cause.
A while back I bought a pack of 10 movies for $10 Australian -- what's that, US$7.50? And three of them are in the IMDb top 250. There's some amazingly good stuff out there.