"We're trying to educate children at a very young age about the importance of protecting copyrighted works," said Diane Smiroldo, vice president of public affairs for the BSA. "It's important to start talking to them at a very young age about creative works online and what you can and can't share with your friends."
Smiroldo compared the BSA's program to an antismoking or antilittering campaign. The curriculum doesn't talk about fair use but focuses on what are "right and wrong" behaviors online.
Hmm, lemme see, smoking harms the kid himself, littering defaces the entire community, and "pirating" copyrighted works hurts -- oh right, the Business Software Alliance.
And lemme see, these kids, having mastered all that readin', writin', and 'rithmeticin' -- ain't no child left behind no any more --, they've got plenty of time to spend learning a corporate lobbying group's version of "right and wrong".
I've never pirated music or software, and I do believe that the MPAA and the BSA should have the protection of copyright -- including the right to bring civil suit.
But when they try to co-opt the education of children and get the Department of Justice to bring their civil suits for them, and to pile criminal charges on top, well, it seems to me the corporations are getting much more than a fair shake.
Begins to remind me of the "War on Drugs" -- a "War" we'll never win but which benefits corporations building and running prisons (and the drug mafias and the prison guards' union) at the expense of cops and taxpayers and citizens.
It even makes me wonder if the "content providers" have gone so far as to forfeit their moral rights to copyright protection. There comes a time when you just have to say that the "cure" is worse than the "disease" (as for instance, the "War on Drugs") and tell those grabbing more than their fair share of money and legal power, "this far and no farther".
I'll tell you what. I'll do a study whereby you can sign up to have devices hidden in your house. These devices may or may not be active microphones and cameras, and they will be well hidden from you. If you participate, the devices may or may not be installed. If you look for them, you will be mocked on the internet.
Mod parent up.
Then print out 10 copies and post them in your neighborhood.
And for the future of freedom, for the dignity of mankind, hope that you don't get a hundred Esuas selling their birthright for a mess of pottage, signing up for it thinking you're auditioning for the newest "reality" show.
``But be warned - you need a gigabyte of memory and a lot of time to compile when you are dealing with large grammars as Spirit does all its magic with C++ templates and extensive operator overloading.''
Holy Cow!!! Give me back my LISP...
Template meta-programming actually is rather LISP like, not least because you have only values and not variables to work with. Rather than assign a value to a variable, all "meta-functions" must produce a new compile-time value.
Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design -- the most aggressive example of C++ template meta-programming -- and his Loki template library even use recursive CAR-CDR like structures to implements lists and recursive algorithms to process those lists.
So, in some ways, you have been given back your LISP.:)
This sort of forum does *not* warrant the time to proofread a comment for grammatical purity, nor do any of it's [sic] readers deserve the effort on my part.
Then what makes you think your comments warrant our spending any time reading them, or modding then up? My comments aren't deathless prose, but I do take the time to preview them (several times) to check the html and the grammar and quality if the argument I'm making, and to spell check them.
That's part of the reason I tend get modded up a lot: I care about giving those who are generous enough to me to take the time to read what I have to say, a decent value in return for their time and effort.
If we who read your comments aren't worth your efforts, if the comments don't matter to you, why are you wasting our time? Why are you wasting your own time writing the comments?
There is only one way to 100% remove all information from a hard drive. Immolate it in fires exceeding 750 degrees Celcius for more than 30 minutes. This causes the magnetic iron in the platters to lose their magnetic properties and "forget" what was written on them.
Hallelujah! So you mean there's hope for all that porn (ok, not all that much by modern standards, I admit) that I laboriously downloaded from local BBSes with one hour connection time limits at 2400 baud?
All those grainy scans from old back issues of seedy British "swingers'" magazines and amateur polaroids taken at hot-tub parties of women with big '70s hair and the occasional Playboy's Girls of the Big 10 Conference?
The thrill, once you'd finally acquired a terminal program that could swap out into XMS memory, of waiting in real time as the.gif slowly downloaded, line by line of the pixels filling in one after the other.
Fist clenched in hope (or on something, anyway), having spent 20 minutes on this single picture's download, after 40 minutes of busy signals while you anxiously waited to connect and then the hurried perusal of the list of the BBS's fifty or so pics, that it really would fulfill the description given: "Bubbly brunette bounces her bodacious beach balls"!
Only to be disappointed once again by a black-and-white of a middle-aged German woman at a "Naturist" club, knowing that you'd have to wait 24 hours or more before you could once again try to connect to this BBS and try your luck again. But who knew, perhaps tomorrow you'd find some of that rare "Swedish erotica" featuring real -- not simulated, but real -- penetration!
But nevertheless storing the.gif on a then-capacious 2MB hard drive, so that in your (daily! if not hourly!) moments of need you could look at the old nudist German woman again and again, until you'd not only memorized every wrinkle on her sun-weathered body, but every gray-scale pixel in all the different aspect ratios your.gif viewer could employ!
Ah, the carefree days of youth and erections that seemed like they never subsided! When a 1GB drive was pure fantasy, and we still had our dreams!
Is this your purpose in life? To run around and correct peoples typos?
Man you are annoying...
Since a previous poster corrected your misuse of the possessive, I'll only need mention that you're missing a comma after man.
It always amazes me that Slashdot, a site of interest to technical persons, is so rife with grammatical errors. In a programming language, a misplaced or missing comma or apostrophe means an error, at compile time if you're ("you are") lucky, at runtime if your (possessive) luck runs out. In a config file, the missing comma might open up a security vulnerability, cause a script to fail because it properly parsing the improperly formatted data, or prevent a user from logging in.
In a legal document, a missing comma can entirely alter a the meaning of a phrase, resulting in an usurprise adverse ruling, a denial of a patent, or unexpected obligations that turn profit into loss. In a scientific document, a misplaced dash or comma in an IUPAC name might result beneficial drug being replaced with in a deadly chemical; an inadvertent dash interpreted as a minus, might mean an aeronautical design that buries itself in the ground rather than taking wing as expected.
In written (or oral) communication, while one can rely to an extent on the built-in redundancies of natural language, bad grammar and misspellings result in garbled orders, misleading advice, ambiguous descriptions, and all manner of confusions.
I'd hope that Slashdot users, by nature of their vocations and avocations, would better understand that natural language communication is just a much a tool as a programming language, a chemical nomenclature, or a legal construct, and that precision in our use of tools is always important to doing a decent job.
Perhaps rather than whining about your typos being corrected, you might consider that all of us who took the time to read what you wrote had to take the extra time, when out wet ware syntax parsers balked, to figure out what you meant -- and that those who corrected you did you an even bigger favor by taking even more time to point out to you your error.
Why should each one of us reading take the extra time to pay extra attention to figure out what you meant to say, when you couldn't be bothered to take an extra minute to read what you wrote with your readers in mind, to make sure that you were communicating effectively and precisely?
Is your time and effort really worth so much more than the combined time and effort of every reader that we should have to put up with your unwillingness to check your own work? It's we who should be annoyed at your thoughtless errors, and you who should be grateful for the corrections.
1. Please don't say 'passed away'. We're not in first grade. he has died
We might say (and I mean this with all due respect, Francis Crick was truly a great man to whom we owe much) with only a little poetic license, that the chemicals which constituted Francis Crick, even as we mourn the end of his life, are -- every adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine --, losing that central helical organization that made out of those disparate chemicals, the man Francis Crick.
We will also think of his wife, the artist Odile Speed, and his three children -- each of whom perpetuates one-half of Francis Cricks's genome -- and his four grandchildren -- each of whom perpetuates one quarter of that genome.
(And of course, I gave Francis Crick the traditional Slashdot salute here.)
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - DNA co-discoverer/founder of molecular biology Francis Harry Compton Crick OM (Order of Merit) was found dead in Thornton Hospital, San Diego this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to science. Truly an icon of our modern era.
At around 8:50, Soubirous's campaign manager, Brian Floyd, received a call from an election observer in Temecula informing him that the vote count had been stopped - apparently by Registrar Mischelle Townsend herself. The reason was not made clear. So Floyd and another Soubirous campaigner named Art Cassel jumped into a car and drove to Townsend's office to investigate. Sure enough, the counting area appeared to be near-deserted. But then they noticed two men huddled at one of the vote tabulation computers.
Even more amusing (or ironic) is that you cite a site that is taken entirely and verbatim from Wikipedia: Wkipedia's Woody Guthrie -- with the GNU Free Documention License printed in <font size="1"> underneath a bunch of ads.
He discontinued it because the increasing ubiquity of proprietary routers and firewalls made it less and less easy for the average user to open a port to use P2P applications like SpeakFreely.
Unlike Skype, SpeakFreely is entirely point-to-point (although at one time Walker set up a directory) which more or less means the caller must know the receiver's IP address. Skype automates this.
SpeakFreely allowed the use of theoretically arbitrary encryption, although I was never able to get it to work with PGP (I did get it to work with some built-in encryptions.
I'm not using an IUD. I never intend to, and I'm not going to live in fear of the consequences of IUD's. I for one refuse to live in fear of amenorrhea, irregular bleeding, cramping, partially expelled strings, and other side effects that can occur with progestin-releasing IUDs, which can be considered a frightening biological weapon. It's only frightening if you don't realize that you're a billion times more likely to die of a heart attack than an IUD.
I'm not usually one to feed the trolls, but yours was brilliantly subtle.
One question: did the article originally use the acronym "IUD" (intrauterine device), later corrected to "IED" (improvised explosive device) -- and thus your post was a satire on the Slashdot editors -- or did you just count on moderators not noticing the difference?
Until I read your last paragraph, I wasn't even quite sure you hadn't made the mistake and had merely coincidently written descriptions that could apply either to IUDs or IEDs (the best of course, "An actual encounter with something containing an IUD [for those who modded the parent "Interesting": IUDs are "contained" in vaginas, or, more generally, sexually active women, so this is a slam at the stereotypical Slashdot geek] might be shocking to most slashdotters, but think about why-you've [sic] never seen anything that could contain IUD."
Admittedly, you did throw in a pretty obvious clue "They can't even accept the existence of birth control. The IUD and other "dire threats" like it have become a political tool used to manipulate the masses"" but one that could be conceivably seen as a Lefty Slashdotter extending (legitimately, in my eyes) a critique of the Bush administration.
Again, most trolls are a waste of time and earn their down mods, but this construction definitely deserves +5 Funny -- but not +4 Interesting (2 "Interesting"s, one Funny), which it was when I read it.
Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML. Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements.
What! No <blink> tag?? No
No way I using it!11!1 I'm a serious web designer!
(This comment looks best at 717x913 resolution, using Internet Explorer for the security holes and that essential <marquee> tag. Page designed in Microsoft Word, because that HTML stuff makes my head swim. Enhanced with buggy JavaScript we stole off some Russian porn site, to resize your browser window, make its controls inaccessible, ensure the "security" of our images by disabling right-click, and to reject any browsers other than Netscape 4.72 and IE 5.5. Please bookmark this comment and come back when we've made the entire comment one big Flash animation completely inaccessible to anyone not running Flash or running Flash but on dial-up. PS: we appreciate your business.)
How have other major international sites dealt with the language barrier?
Você americanos sujos pensa de que você possui tudo, e Slashdot, mas é justo não assim.
Fure seu hegemony internacional e seu McDonalds e seu Hollywood onde o sol não brilha.
Pela maneira, eu sou amor o Mac Grande e esse Julia Roberts!
[Google "translation" of above: "You American dirty think of that you possess everything, and Slashdot, but is just not thus. Hegemony pierces international its and its McDonalds and its Hollywood where the sun does not shine. For the way, I am love Mac Great e this Julia Roberts!"]
[Original English source for the "Portuguese" response produced by Google "translation": "You dirty Americans think that you own everything, including Slashdot, but it's just not so. Stick your international hegemony and your McDonalds and your Hollywood where the sun doesn't shine. By the way, I'm loving it the Big Mac and that Julia Roberts!"]
My sister just got married; she negotiated an agreement with the photographer to purchase the copyright for $100-$150 over and above the cost of having the photographs taken.
Admittedly, hers was a charmingly small and intimate wedding at a spa resort (look, I have to say this, my sister might read this post, and she was a radiant bride and my brother-in-law was a proud and loving groom), and my sister tells me the photographer explained that he's have charged more for the copyright, perhaps up to $600, had the wedding party been larger.
This, of course, is because the larger the wedding party, the more people who want to buy copies of the pictures, and by retaining copyright the photographer has a monopoly on those pictures. While he can't, simply for market reasons, charge outrageous prices, he can certainly make sure that he's the one paid for copyright, developing, printing, and mailing the pictures, and add all those fees to the final price.
That being said, my sister's wedding was held at an out of the way ("exclusive and secluded") resort, so the photographer's normal business includes stuff like local college and university publicity pictures, and -- according to his daughter, who was also taking pictures -- executive retreats. So basically he's selling the copyright to my sister for the price he'd charge business clients for copyright to their promotional pictures. (And speaking of local colleges, the excellent wedding violinist was a local college professor of music - and really good.) Prices might -- or might not -- differ in metropolitan areas, and no doubt vary from one photographer to another.
What this comes down to is negotiation: you're the one shelling out the major cash, and the photographer is the guy looking for a gig. Explain that you're shopping for his time and the copyright, and that you're willing to pay a bit more for it, as you understand the copyright has monetary value to him if he keeps it. But also explain that if he keeps it, it's speculative value, based on who may or may not purchase copies over the months and years ahead, whereas a fee is cash money is his pocket now. Google on "Time Value of Money", and see what I mean.
Finally, whenever I've been hired as a programmer, it's been taken for granted that I'm doing "work for hire", and my (copyrighted) source code belongs to the business hiring me for no additional consideration. Not only that, I'm expected to assign any patents I design on the job to the corporation hiring me.
While the case of a photographer is not entirely parallel -- he provides his own tools, and takes the risk of badly developed photos -- I'll maintain that the most important tool used to write code isn't a computer or a compiler, it's in the 1400 grams of brain I bring with me to the task. And if it's a question of creativity, I'll submit that a code writer -- any good code writer -- is as much an artist as any wedding photographer.
Your wedding photographer should be there to commemorate the day, not to cynically calculate how to separate you from your shekels by squeezing your sentimentality down through the years. Recognize that he's a professional, and let him know you're not a chump, and work out a price that is fair to him and gives you the rights to your own memorabilia.
PS: I've written a number of Slashdot comments, and I've gotten a decent amount of praise for them: a bunch of +5 mods, and even some encouraging replies ("occasionally, just occasionally... there should be a +6... to memorably mark such insightful posts.", "one of the greatest and most interesting posts I have ever read on Slashdot"), but I have to say I was absolutely blown away by the love letter my sister had written to her future husband, which she read to us at the wedding dinner. All my cleverness and ranting and fulminating, about Ashcroft and civil liberties and how to write code the right way, is so much ephemera next to my sister's amaranthine words of love.
Sis, I wish you and my brother-in-law -- and "Percy" -- the best for years and years to come.
Seems like if he were out to help, he should have responded with a tutorial detailing what is wrong with their site, and how to fix it.
That would certainly have been easier for him, but not necessarily more effective. Tutorials don't produce the needed changes; code does.
I had something similar happen with emusic.com.
Emusic.com allows subscribers to view every track they've downloaded throughout out their subscription, but at one time the interface was flawed and slow. Tracks were arranged by Album, and Albums by artist, so to see the tracks, one had to "expand" a hierarchical tree. First the Artist would be expanded (an HTML POST) and then the Album (another POST), and there was no way, via the interface, to expand more than one Album or Artist at a time.
Invariably, a user session would time out after ten or so expansions were made, and then one had to start over. And with each expansion, more data was displayed, so GETting and loading took longer and longer, even though most data on each GET was a repeat of the data in the last GET, except for whatever had just been expended.
So I wrote a Perl program to fetch all tracks for all albums for all artists, and I even wrote it so that it expanded several artists and albums on each POST, so it did more while making fewer requests and fewer repetitive GETs for a smaller total number of bytes downloaded. Them the program spit out all the artist and albums and tracks as a HTML page on the user's local hard drive.
Since emusic requires a login (recall that each users "collection" accrued throughout the subscription is different), my program has to get the login and password and pas it along to emusic's site, just as site that "piggy-backed" on Odeon's site. (If you read the article, you saw that one of Odeon's principle complaints was about user information passing through the third-party site -- not that you read the article, being Slashdotters.)
While I wanted to have my program "phone home" to the distribution website so that I could track its use, I decided not to -- since users were trusting my program with their logins and passwords, I wanted to avoid doing anything that might look like I could be intercepting that information, even if all that would be phoned home was innocuous usage data.
I also took great care to make my program not strain emusics.com's website, both by aggregating "expansions" into single POSTs and GETs, and by forcing it to pause between requests. I even made the pause time random, to prevent any deadlocks if several users were using my program simultaneously. My program also had to deal with session time outs and know to re-login after each. In order to ensure the pauses were preserved, and to prevent anyone from producing trojan'd copies of my program that might steal login information from users, I did not release source code to my program.
And I made sure to mention on each page of the distribution web site, in each of the program help files, on stdout at runtime, and in the produced files, that my program was in no way affiliated with emusic.com and that all trademarks were the property of their owners.
My program was enthusiastically received by emusic subscribers, some of whom even said that having my program kept them from ending their subscriptions. emusic.com never contacted me, but emusic also didn't stop other people from recommending my program on emusic's message boards.
But about a month after I released my program, emusic rolled out an upgrade to their site. Among other things, the upgrade eliminated the clunky "expansion" style collection list. Unfortunately, the new version wasn't compatible with my code, either in layout or in the data ex
I'm curious as to why some companies make it so difficult to ship to Canada (from the U.S.A.).
I don't know why, either, but I can suggest a practical work-around:
1. Find an elderly person in the Lower 48 states who takes a bunch of expensive prescriptions drugs. That's nearly any old person, so this part is easy.
2. Offer to ship the old fart some of your cheap Canadian versions of prescription drugs. Given the exorbitant prices of the same drugs in the U.S. will immediately agree to your proposal. Then have gramps ship you cheap American electronic products in exchange.
3. Profit!
(This comment is a satiric joke about the American health "care" system. It is not advocacy for or instruction in black market cross-border transactions. orthogonal is not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. orthogonal is not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Void where prohibited. orthogonal loves America and its great Christian Leaders King George Bush, Failed Marshall von Rumsfeld, and Inquisitor General John Ashcroft. Scaring peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty... only aid[s] terrorists [by eroding] our national unity and diminish[ing] our resolve. We have always been at war with Eastasia!)
Homeland security soons [sic] hopes, through coersion [sic], fear, FUD, false warnings and money, to install trackable microchips in every Mexican by the year 2020.
I suppose you intended this a humor, but I fear you're right. I suspect Homeland Security -- or actually, the U.S. Treasury, may even be behind this.
From the article: The chip can't be removed, but will be deactivated after Macedo's term as attorney general expires, he said.
Now, did Mexico implant 160 government employees with non-removable chips at the behest of the Bush Administration?
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration announced Tuesday [6 July 2004] that it has resumed sharing a wide range of financial information with Mexico with the aim of trying to catch money launderers (search), drug dealers and terrorist financiers.
In April, the United States had suspended sharing such information with Mexico, dealing a blow to cross-border crime fighting, which had resulted in the arrests of several high-profile drug lords.
The U.S. government did so after sensitive information provided by the [U.S.] Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network was leaked by Mexican officials. After the suspension, the network outlined a set of steps that Mexico should take before the United States would agree to resume information-sharing.
The Treasury Department said Tuesday that Mexico has since taken steps to safeguard sensitive financial information it receives from the United States and other countries.
Were employees told to get the chip or to find another job? Especially bad is that the chip can be "deactivated" but not removed. Even deactivated, can it be detected? Conversely, if it can't be detected after detection because it has its, for instance, own power source which is turned off by deactivation -- unlike RFID chips which reflect the powered signal of a detector --, what do you do when the power runs out? Stick in yet another chip?
I realize the price of dealing with a superpower can be high, but I never imagined that it would be as high as treating your country's citizens like livestock.
This is terribly dehumanizing. Employees no longer just have an employee number, then have serial number like any animal on a feedlot, like any other cog in a machine -- and they don't just have it, they have it inside them. This is dystopian science fiction reified.
The chip is reminiscent of the terrible and also un-removable serial number tattoos that Nazis forced on Jews and other concentration camp inmates.
Regardless of the recollections that spring to mind, this is a horrible defeat for humans and for humanity, and a great victory for the omnipresent, omnipotent "Big Brother" State.
Shout out against this now -- shout to the roof tops -- or in ten years you'll have to decide between getting a chip of your own or losing your job -- and in twenty years, some bland man from Homeland Security will tell you that for "security reasons, you understand" you have no choice at all to refuse a chip.
I don't think you understand the intent of doing this:
Putting RFID tags on the kids is done to save Michael Jackson time at the cash register when he shops at the Japanese affiliates of "Kid 'R Us" or "Boys 4 Men".
It's pretty difficult, all at the same time, for Michal Jackson to grab the kid, sedate him "Jesus Juice" (what Michael calls wine), get his hands down the boy's pants, and reach into his own pants for his wallet in order to give the parents $20 million to look the other way and his own lawyer $5 million to broker the deal.
An RFID tag and a reader at the cash register streamlines the whole process. another triumph for technology.
Have any of you tried *registering* these domains? They're $100 per year!
Then it becomes more clear why the U.S. Dept. of Commerce is backing this: "kids.us" will be shorthand for "kids.advertised.to.by.us.corporations".
$100 is nothing for a company, but it's a bit steep for individuals or even not-for-profit sites.
So we will see "disney.kids.us" and "mattel.barbie.kids.us" and "sugary.breakfast.cereals.kids.us", but not "teach.yourself.origami.kids.us." or even "intractive.math.kids.us".
Eventually, a few non-profit sites will gets grants to set themselves up in the kids.us TLD, as fig-leaf to "prove" it's not purely for corporations.
Then you'll see astro-turfing groups funded by corporations and fronted by "Parents'" and "Christian" organizations agitate to restrict most library and public school machines to the "kids.us" TLD -- and a lot of schools (libraries tend to be a bit more thoughtful) will do this just to make life easier for lazy computer admins and controversy-fearing school system bureaucrats.
And then lazy parents will spend $59.95 on software filters that restrict home browsing to "kids.us".
Pretty soon, many homes and most schools and libraries will be locked down, and kids locked into, an internet that presents only approved corporate beliefs and, of course, massive amounts of advertising -- traditional and "product placement" -- directed at the captive audience of kids.
Then any site that desires to have kids as at audience at all will have to get a "kids.us" domain, and submit to the periodic governmental review of content that entails. Unpopular minority viewpoints will of course not be allowed "kids.us" domains: gays, minority religions, neo-Nazis, sex education, pro-gun, pro-abortion, all will be kept out "for the good of the children".
Even "disturbing" sites, like those with pictures of Nazi atrocities at death camps (not to mention the less terrible but still terrible U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib), or those discussing banned books will have to be toned down, made more bland and "life affirming". Just as pornography on the net is regulated by the "community standards" of the most restrictive communities, the Dept. of Commerce will come under pressure to apply Podunk's standards to the entire "kids.us" TLD.
Just as "[f]our members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee (1983) called for the rejection of [The Diary of Anne Frank] because it is a "real downer", school boards in Alabama, Tennessee and rural Pennsylvania will lobby the Dept. of Commerce censors to exclude web sites about Anne Frank or evolution or gay rights or Wicca. A careful blandness and a spurious "balance of opinions" will reign, just as it does in U.S. high school textbooks, the publishers of which must cater to the large and largely conservative Texas State Schoolboard's opinions: "evolution is an unproven theory, and many believe that an Intellgent Designer created mankind".
Since inclusion in the "kids.us" TLD will be voluntary, it will be claimed that government review of content isn't censorship, but sites will learn to self-censor to avoid attracting the government censors' attention. As more and more sites get involved in "kids.us", it will become taken for granted that government review of site content is normal and even good. Sites that don't submit to governmental content review will be marginalized and tainted by association: "if there is nothing bad on that site, how come they won't let the government check for it?" the typical parent or school principal will ask.
Effectively, "kids.us" will become a means for corporations to advertise to children, another place where dissenting opinions are tidied up and swept under the rug "for the children", a vehicle for producing another generation of safely bland and unopinionated consumers.
Slashdot Mirror
"We're trying to educate children at a very young age about the importance of protecting copyrighted works," said Diane Smiroldo, vice president of public affairs for the BSA. "It's important to start talking to them at a very young age about creative works online and what you can and can't share with your friends."
Smiroldo compared the BSA's program to an antismoking or antilittering campaign. The curriculum doesn't talk about fair use but focuses on what are "right and wrong" behaviors online.
Hmm, lemme see, smoking harms the kid himself, littering defaces the entire community, and "pirating" copyrighted works hurts -- oh right, the Business Software Alliance.
And lemme see, these kids, having mastered all that readin', writin', and 'rithmeticin' -- ain't no child left behind no any more --, they've got plenty of time to spend learning a corporate lobbying group's version of "right and wrong".
I've never pirated music or software, and I do believe that the MPAA and the BSA should have the protection of copyright -- including the right to bring civil suit.
But when they try to co-opt the education of children and get the Department of Justice to bring their civil suits for them, and to pile criminal charges on top, well, it seems to me the corporations are getting much more than a fair shake.
Begins to remind me of the "War on Drugs" -- a "War" we'll never win but which benefits corporations building and running prisons (and the drug mafias and the prison guards' union) at the expense of cops and taxpayers and citizens.
It even makes me wonder if the "content providers" have gone so far as to forfeit their moral rights to copyright protection. There comes a time when you just have to say that the "cure" is worse than the "disease" (as for instance, the "War on Drugs") and tell those grabbing more than their fair share of money and legal power, "this far and no farther".
I'll tell you what. I'll do a study whereby you can sign up to have devices hidden in your house. These devices may or may not be active microphones and cameras, and they will be well hidden from you. If you participate, the devices may or may not be installed. If you look for them, you will be mocked on the internet.
Mod parent up.
Then print out 10 copies and post them in your neighborhood.
And for the future of freedom, for the dignity of mankind, hope that you don't get a hundred Esuas selling their birthright for a mess of pottage, signing up for it thinking you're auditioning for the newest "reality" show.
``But be warned - you need a gigabyte of memory and a lot of time to compile when you are dealing with large grammars as Spirit does all its magic with C++ templates and extensive operator overloading.''
:)
Holy Cow!!! Give me back my LISP...
Template meta-programming actually is rather LISP like, not least because you have only values and not variables to work with. Rather than assign a value to a variable, all "meta-functions" must produce a new compile-time value.
Alexandrescu's Modern C++ Design -- the most aggressive example of C++ template meta-programming -- and his Loki template library even use recursive CAR-CDR like structures to implements lists and recursive algorithms to process those lists.
So, in some ways, you have been given back your LISP.
This sort of forum does *not* warrant the time to proofread a comment for grammatical purity, nor do any of it's [sic] readers deserve the effort on my part.
Then what makes you think your comments warrant our spending any time reading them, or modding then up? My comments aren't deathless prose, but I do take the time to preview them (several times) to check the html and the grammar and quality if the argument I'm making, and to spell check them.
That's part of the reason I tend get modded up a lot: I care about giving those who are generous enough to me to take the time to read what I have to say, a decent value in return for their time and effort.
If we who read your comments aren't worth your efforts, if the comments don't matter to you, why are you wasting our time? Why are you wasting your own time writing the comments?
There is only one way to 100% remove all information from a hard drive. Immolate it in fires exceeding 750 degrees Celcius for more than 30 minutes. This causes the magnetic iron in the platters to lose their magnetic properties and "forget" what was written on them.
.gif slowly downloaded, line by line of the pixels filling in one after the other.
.gif on a then-capacious 2MB hard drive, so that in your (daily! if not hourly!) moments of need you could look at the old nudist German woman again and again, until you'd not only memorized every wrinkle on her sun-weathered body, but every gray-scale pixel in all the different aspect ratios your .gif viewer could employ!
Hallelujah! So you mean there's hope for all that porn (ok, not all that much by modern standards, I admit) that I laboriously downloaded from local BBSes with one hour connection time limits at 2400 baud?
All those grainy scans from old back issues of seedy British "swingers'" magazines and amateur polaroids taken at hot-tub parties of women with big '70s hair and the occasional Playboy's Girls of the Big 10 Conference?
The thrill, once you'd finally acquired a terminal program that could swap out into XMS memory, of waiting in real time as the
Fist clenched in hope (or on something, anyway), having spent 20 minutes on this single picture's download, after 40 minutes of busy signals while you anxiously waited to connect and then the hurried perusal of the list of the BBS's fifty or so pics, that it really would fulfill the description given: "Bubbly brunette bounces her bodacious beach balls"!
Only to be disappointed once again by a black-and-white of a middle-aged German woman at a "Naturist" club, knowing that you'd have to wait 24 hours or more before you could once again try to connect to this BBS and try your luck again. But who knew, perhaps tomorrow you'd find some of that rare "Swedish erotica" featuring real -- not simulated, but real -- penetration!
But nevertheless storing the
Ah, the carefree days of youth and erections that seemed like they never subsided! When a 1GB drive was pure fantasy, and we still had our dreams!
I can have that back?
Is this your purpose in life? To run around and correct peoples typos?
Man you are annoying...
Since a previous poster corrected your misuse of the possessive, I'll only need mention that you're missing a comma after man.
It always amazes me that Slashdot, a site of interest to technical persons, is so rife with grammatical errors. In a programming language, a misplaced or missing comma or apostrophe means an error, at compile time if you're ("you are") lucky, at runtime if your (possessive) luck runs out. In a config file, the missing comma might open up a security vulnerability, cause a script to fail because it properly parsing the improperly formatted data, or prevent a user from logging in.
In a legal document, a missing comma can entirely alter a the meaning of a phrase, resulting in an usurprise adverse ruling, a denial of a patent, or unexpected obligations that turn profit into loss. In a scientific document, a misplaced dash or comma in an IUPAC name might result beneficial drug being replaced with in a deadly chemical; an inadvertent dash interpreted as a minus, might mean an aeronautical design that buries itself in the ground rather than taking wing as expected.
In written (or oral) communication, while one can rely to an extent on the built-in redundancies of natural language, bad grammar and misspellings result in garbled orders, misleading advice, ambiguous descriptions, and all manner of confusions.
I'd hope that Slashdot users, by nature of their vocations and avocations, would better understand that natural language communication is just a much a tool as a programming language, a chemical nomenclature, or a legal construct, and that precision in our use of tools is always important to doing a decent job.
Perhaps rather than whining about your typos being corrected, you might consider that all of us who took the time to read what you wrote had to take the extra time, when out wet ware syntax parsers balked, to figure out what you meant -- and that those who corrected you did you an even bigger favor by taking even more time to point out to you your error.
Why should each one of us reading take the extra time to pay extra attention to figure out what you meant to say, when you couldn't be bothered to take an extra minute to read what you wrote with your readers in mind, to make sure that you were communicating effectively and precisely?
Is your time and effort really worth so much more than the combined time and effort of every reader that we should have to put up with your unwillingness to check your own work? It's we who should be annoyed at your thoughtless errors, and you who should be grateful for the corrections.
includes "crazy, tripped out imagery and music, complete with Mr. Pants singing between levels"
Yeah, that's not going to get old fast.
"Mr. Pants, that's the name -- the name again is Mr. Pants!")
1. Please don't say 'passed away'. We're not in first grade. he has died
We might say (and I mean this with all due respect, Francis Crick was truly a great man to whom we owe much) with only a little poetic license, that the chemicals which constituted Francis Crick, even as we mourn the end of his life, are -- every adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine --, losing that central helical organization that made out of those disparate chemicals, the man Francis Crick.
We will also think of his wife, the artist Odile Speed, and his three children -- each of whom perpetuates one-half of Francis Cricks's genome -- and his four grandchildren -- each of whom perpetuates one quarter of that genome.
(And of course, I gave Francis Crick the traditional Slashdot salute here.)
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - DNA co-discoverer/founder of molecular biology Francis Harry Compton Crick OM (Order of Merit) was found dead in Thornton Hospital, San Diego this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to science. Truly an icon of our modern era.
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Woody_Guthrie
Even more amusing (or ironic) is that you cite a site that is taken entirely and verbatim from Wikipedia: Wkipedia's Woody Guthrie -- with the GNU Free Documention License printed in <font size="1"> underneath a bunch of ads.
I am amazed that nobody has built an open source VoIP application
John Walker, of Autodesk fame, did, back in 1991.
He discontinued it because the increasing ubiquity of proprietary routers and firewalls made it less and less easy for the average user to open a port to use P2P applications like SpeakFreely.
Unlike Skype, SpeakFreely is entirely point-to-point (although at one time Walker set up a directory) which more or less means the caller must know the receiver's IP address. Skype automates this.
SpeakFreely allowed the use of theoretically arbitrary encryption, although I was never able to get it to work with PGP (I did get it to work with some built-in encryptions.
Sound quality was pretty good.
I was so broke, I couldn't even afford to feed my cat let alone myself.
There's such an obvious solution [WARNING: the squeamish should not click this link] sharing you in the face here....
Pick from the following and reply to this post with your favorite:,?i>
I like:
"Star Wars Episode III: You are still nerds, and you will still die alone."
(or, alternatively: "Star Wars Episode III: You will never use your 'lightsaber' with any woman not a comic book character."
(With apologies to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Robert Smigel.)
I'm not using an IUD. I never intend to, and I'm not going to live in fear of the consequences of IUD's. I for one refuse to live in fear of amenorrhea, irregular bleeding, cramping, partially expelled strings, and other side effects that can occur with progestin-releasing IUDs, which can be considered a frightening biological weapon. It's only frightening if you don't realize that you're a billion times more likely to die of a heart attack than an IUD.
I'm not usually one to feed the trolls, but yours was brilliantly subtle.
One question: did the article originally use the acronym "IUD" (intrauterine device), later corrected to "IED" (improvised explosive device) -- and thus your post was a satire on the Slashdot editors -- or did you just count on moderators not noticing the difference?
Until I read your last paragraph, I wasn't even quite sure you hadn't made the mistake and had merely coincidently written descriptions that could apply either to IUDs or IEDs (the best of course, "An actual encounter with something containing an IUD [for those who modded the parent "Interesting": IUDs are "contained" in vaginas, or, more generally, sexually active women, so this is a slam at the stereotypical Slashdot geek] might be shocking to most slashdotters, but think about why-you've [sic] never seen anything that could contain IUD."
Admittedly, you did throw in a pretty obvious clue "They can't even accept the existence of birth control. The IUD and other "dire threats" like it have become a political tool used to manipulate the masses"" but one that could be conceivably seen as a Lefty Slashdotter extending (legitimately, in my eyes) a critique of the Bush administration.
Again, most trolls are a waste of time and earn their down mods, but this construction definitely deserves +5 Funny -- but not +4 Interesting (2 "Interesting"s, one Funny), which it was when I read it.
Also they have a FAQ about why you should use XHTML over HTML.
Meaning it is to be used for document structuring which is why it does not have presentation elements.
What! No <blink> tag?? No
No way I using it!11!1 I'm a serious web designer!
(This comment looks best at 717x913 resolution, using Internet Explorer for the security holes and that essential <marquee> tag. Page designed in Microsoft Word, because that HTML stuff makes my head swim. Enhanced with buggy JavaScript we stole off some Russian porn site, to resize your browser window, make its controls inaccessible, ensure the "security" of our images by disabling right-click, and to reject any browsers other than Netscape 4.72 and IE 5.5. Please bookmark this comment and come back when we've made the entire comment one big Flash animation completely inaccessible to anyone not running Flash or running Flash but on dial-up. PS: we appreciate your business.)
Ever heard of VMWare or Virtual PC?
Or consider the Free alternative of coLinux, which allows you to run several linux distrubtions under MS-Windows.
Você americanos sujos pensa de que você possui tudo, e Slashdot, mas é justo não assim.
Fure seu hegemony internacional e seu McDonalds e seu Hollywood onde o sol não brilha.
Pela maneira, eu sou amor o Mac Grande e esse Julia Roberts!
My sister just got married; she negotiated an agreement with the photographer to purchase the copyright for $100-$150 over and above the cost of having the photographs taken.
Admittedly, hers was a charmingly small and intimate wedding at a spa resort (look, I have to say this, my sister might read this post, and she was a radiant bride and my brother-in-law was a proud and loving groom), and my sister tells me the photographer explained that he's have charged more for the copyright, perhaps up to $600, had the wedding party been larger.
This, of course, is because the larger the wedding party, the more people who want to buy copies of the pictures, and by retaining copyright the photographer has a monopoly on those pictures. While he can't, simply for market reasons, charge outrageous prices, he can certainly make sure that he's the one paid for copyright, developing, printing, and mailing the pictures, and add all those fees to the final price.
That being said, my sister's wedding was held at an out of the way ("exclusive and secluded") resort, so the photographer's normal business includes stuff like local college and university publicity pictures, and -- according to his daughter, who was also taking pictures -- executive retreats. So basically he's selling the copyright to my sister for the price he'd charge business clients for copyright to their promotional pictures. (And speaking of local colleges, the excellent wedding violinist was a local college professor of music - and really good.) Prices might -- or might not -- differ in metropolitan areas, and no doubt vary from one photographer to another.
What this comes down to is negotiation: you're the one shelling out the major cash, and the photographer is the guy looking for a gig. Explain that you're shopping for his time and the copyright, and that you're willing to pay a bit more for it, as you understand the copyright has monetary value to him if he keeps it. But also explain that if he keeps it, it's speculative value, based on who may or may not purchase copies over the months and years ahead, whereas a fee is cash money is his pocket now. Google on "Time Value of Money", and see what I mean.
Finally, whenever I've been hired as a programmer, it's been taken for granted that I'm doing "work for hire", and my (copyrighted) source code belongs to the business hiring me for no additional consideration. Not only that, I'm expected to assign any patents I design on the job to the corporation hiring me.
While the case of a photographer is not entirely parallel -- he provides his own tools, and takes the risk of badly developed photos -- I'll maintain that the most important tool used to write code isn't a computer or a compiler, it's in the 1400 grams of brain I bring with me to the task. And if it's a question of creativity, I'll submit that a code writer -- any good code writer -- is as much an artist as any wedding photographer.
Your wedding photographer should be there to commemorate the day, not to cynically calculate how to separate you from your shekels by squeezing your sentimentality down through the years. Recognize that he's a professional, and let him know you're not a chump, and work out a price that is fair to him and gives you the rights to your own memorabilia.
PS: I've written a number of Slashdot comments, and I've gotten a decent amount of praise for them: a bunch of +5 mods, and even some encouraging replies ("occasionally, just occasionally... there should be a +6... to memorably mark such insightful posts.", "one of the greatest and most interesting posts I have ever read on Slashdot"), but I have to say I was absolutely blown away by the love letter my sister had written to her future husband, which she read to us at the wedding dinner. All my cleverness and ranting and fulminating, about Ashcroft and civil liberties and how to write code the right way, is so much ephemera next to my sister's amaranthine words of love.
Sis, I wish you and my brother-in-law -- and "Percy" -- the best for years and years to come.
Seems like if he were out to help, he should have responded with a tutorial detailing what is wrong with their site, and how to fix it.
That would certainly have been easier for him, but not necessarily more effective. Tutorials don't produce the needed changes; code does.
I had something similar happen with emusic.com.
Emusic.com allows subscribers to view every track they've downloaded throughout out their subscription, but at one time the interface was flawed and slow. Tracks were arranged by Album, and Albums by artist, so to see the tracks, one had to "expand" a hierarchical tree. First the Artist would be expanded (an HTML POST) and then the Album (another POST), and there was no way, via the interface, to expand more than one Album or Artist at a time.
Invariably, a user session would time out after ten or so expansions were made, and then one had to start over. And with each expansion, more data was displayed, so GETting and loading took longer and longer, even though most data on each GET was a repeat of the data in the last GET, except for whatever had just been expended.
So I wrote a Perl program to fetch all tracks for all albums for all artists, and I even wrote it so that it expanded several artists and albums on each POST, so it did more while making fewer requests and fewer repetitive GETs for a smaller total number of bytes downloaded. Them the program spit out all the artist and albums and tracks as a HTML page on the user's local hard drive.
Since emusic requires a login (recall that each users "collection" accrued throughout the subscription is different), my program has to get the login and password and pas it along to emusic's site, just as site that "piggy-backed" on Odeon's site. (If you read the article, you saw that one of Odeon's principle complaints was about user information passing through the third-party site -- not that you read the article, being Slashdotters.)
While I wanted to have my program "phone home" to the distribution website so that I could track its use, I decided not to -- since users were trusting my program with their logins and passwords, I wanted to avoid doing anything that might look like I could be intercepting that information, even if all that would be phoned home was innocuous usage data.
I also took great care to make my program not strain emusics.com's website, both by aggregating "expansions" into single POSTs and GETs, and by forcing it to pause between requests. I even made the pause time random, to prevent any deadlocks if several users were using my program simultaneously. My program also had to deal with session time outs and know to re-login after each. In order to ensure the pauses were preserved, and to prevent anyone from producing trojan'd copies of my program that might steal login information from users, I did not release source code to my program.
And I made sure to mention on each page of the distribution web site, in each of the program help files, on stdout at runtime, and in the produced files, that my program was in no way affiliated with emusic.com and that all trademarks were the property of their owners.
My program was enthusiastically received by emusic subscribers, some of whom even said that having my program kept them from ending their subscriptions. emusic.com never contacted me, but emusic also didn't stop other people from recommending my program on emusic's message boards.
But about a month after I released my program, emusic rolled out an upgrade to their site. Among other things, the upgrade eliminated the clunky "expansion" style collection list. Unfortunately, the new version wasn't compatible with my code, either in layout or in the data ex
I'm curious as to why some companies make it so difficult to ship to Canada (from the U.S.A.).
I don't know why, either, but I can suggest a practical work-around:
1. Find an elderly person in the Lower 48 states who takes a bunch of expensive prescriptions drugs. That's nearly any old person, so this part is easy.
2. Offer to ship the old fart some of your cheap Canadian versions of prescription drugs. Given the exorbitant prices of the same drugs in the U.S. will immediately agree to your proposal. Then have gramps ship you cheap American electronic products in exchange.
3. Profit!
(This comment is a satiric joke about the American health "care" system. It is not advocacy for or instruction in black market cross-border transactions. orthogonal is not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. orthogonal is not a doctor and this is not medical advice. Void where prohibited. orthogonal loves America and its great Christian Leaders King George Bush, Failed Marshall von Rumsfeld, and Inquisitor General John Ashcroft. Scaring peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty... only aid[s] terrorists [by eroding] our national unity and diminish[ing] our resolve. We have always been at war with Eastasia!)
I suppose you intended this a humor, but I fear you're right. I suspect Homeland Security -- or actually, the U.S. Treasury, may even be behind this.
From the article: The chip can't be removed, but will be deactivated after Macedo's term as attorney general expires, he said.
Now, did Mexico implant 160 government employees with non-removable chips at the behest of the Bush Administration?
According to Fox News (emphasis orthogonal's):
Were employees told to get the chip or to find another job? Especially bad is that the chip can be "deactivated" but not removed. Even deactivated, can it be detected? Conversely, if it can't be detected after detection because it has its, for instance, own power source which is turned off by deactivation -- unlike RFID chips which reflect the powered signal of a detector --, what do you do when the power runs out? Stick in yet another chip?
I realize the price of dealing with a superpower can be high, but I never imagined that it would be as high as treating your country's citizens like livestock.
This is terribly dehumanizing. Employees no longer just have an employee number, then have serial number like any animal on a feedlot, like any other cog in a machine -- and they don't just have it, they have it inside them. This is dystopian science fiction reified.
The chip is reminiscent of the terrible and also un-removable serial number tattoos that Nazis forced on Jews and other concentration camp inmates.
And I'm sure certain Christians will recall the "Number of the Beast" in the Christian Book of Revelation.
Regardless of the recollections that spring to mind, this is a horrible defeat for humans and for humanity, and a great victory for the omnipresent, omnipotent "Big Brother" State.
Shout out against this now -- shout to the roof tops -- or in ten years you'll have to decide between getting a chip of your own or losing your job -- and in twenty years, some bland man from Homeland Security will tell you that for "security reasons, you understand" you have no choice at all to refuse a chip.
.. if it saves one kid, then it's worth it...
I don't think you understand the intent of doing this:
Putting RFID tags on the kids is done to save Michael Jackson time at the cash register when he shops at the Japanese affiliates of "Kid 'R Us" or "Boys 4 Men".
It's pretty difficult, all at the same time, for Michal Jackson to grab the kid, sedate him "Jesus Juice" (what Michael calls wine), get his hands down the boy's pants, and reach into his own pants for his wallet in order to give the parents $20 million to look the other way and his own lawyer $5 million to broker the deal.
An RFID tag and a reader at the cash register streamlines the whole process. another triumph for technology.
contrasutra writes, I never looked at pornography (I honestly never felt the need)
He's named contra sutra ("The Kama Sutra is an Indian sacred text on sex") and yet he doesn't look at porn.
Only on Slashdot does it get as nerdy as that.
Have any of you tried *registering* these domains? They're $100 per year!
Then it becomes more clear why the U.S. Dept. of Commerce is backing this: "kids.us" will be shorthand for "kids.advertised.to.by.us.corporations".
$100 is nothing for a company, but it's a bit steep for individuals or even not-for-profit sites.
So we will see "disney.kids.us" and "mattel.barbie.kids.us" and "sugary.breakfast.cereals.kids.us", but not "teach.yourself.origami.kids.us." or even "intractive.math.kids.us".
Eventually, a few non-profit sites will gets grants to set themselves up in the kids.us TLD, as fig-leaf to "prove" it's not purely for corporations.
Then you'll see astro-turfing groups funded by corporations and fronted by "Parents'" and "Christian" organizations agitate to restrict most library and public school machines to the "kids.us" TLD -- and a lot of schools (libraries tend to be a bit more thoughtful) will do this just to make life easier for lazy computer admins and controversy-fearing school system bureaucrats.
And then lazy parents will spend $59.95 on software filters that restrict home browsing to "kids.us".
Pretty soon, many homes and most schools and libraries will be locked down, and kids locked into, an internet that presents only approved corporate beliefs and, of course, massive amounts of advertising -- traditional and "product placement" -- directed at the captive audience of kids.
Then any site that desires to have kids as at audience at all will have to get a "kids.us" domain, and submit to the periodic governmental review of content that entails. Unpopular minority viewpoints will of course not be allowed "kids.us" domains: gays, minority religions, neo-Nazis, sex education, pro-gun, pro-abortion, all will be kept out "for the good of the children".
Even "disturbing" sites, like those with pictures of Nazi atrocities at death camps (not to mention the less terrible but still terrible U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib), or those discussing banned books will have to be toned down, made more bland and "life affirming". Just as pornography on the net is regulated by the "community standards" of the most restrictive communities, the Dept. of Commerce will come under pressure to apply Podunk's standards to the entire "kids.us" TLD.
Just as "[f]our members of the Alabama State Textbook Committee (1983) called for the rejection of [The Diary of Anne Frank] because it is a "real downer", school boards in Alabama, Tennessee and rural Pennsylvania will lobby the Dept. of Commerce censors to exclude web sites about Anne Frank or evolution or gay rights or Wicca. A careful blandness and a spurious "balance of opinions" will reign, just as it does in U.S. high school textbooks, the publishers of which must cater to the large and largely conservative Texas State Schoolboard's opinions: "evolution is an unproven theory, and many believe that an Intellgent Designer created mankind".
Since inclusion in the "kids.us" TLD will be voluntary, it will be claimed that government review of content isn't censorship, but sites will learn to self-censor to avoid attracting the government censors' attention. As more and more sites get involved in "kids.us", it will become taken for granted that government review of site content is normal and even good. Sites that don't submit to governmental content review will be marginalized and tainted by association: "if there is nothing bad on that site, how come they won't let the government check for it?" the typical parent or school principal will ask.
Effectively, "kids.us" will become a means for corporations to advertise to children, another place where dissenting opinions are tidied up and swept under the rug "for the children", a vehicle for producing another generation of safely bland and unopinionated consumers.