Even if you happen to like the blocklists and agree with their methods, it's clearly irresponsible to assume they're being attacked by spammers -- there are a lot of non-spammers who would love to take them out.
This is based on discussions with people at other universities as well. Some of them report some minor MSN usage, but none of the rest.
And certainly I've never heard of anywhere where Jabber is the norm. Most people don't even know Jabber exists. And I wouldn't call its userbase "huge," at least not compared to MSN, AIM, or Yahoo. It's basically only used by open-source types.
See, I know many people who were those tech-illiterate teenagers not too many years ago. And they all used AIM, 'cause it's what everybody did, and was less geeky than ICQ. So they all still use AIM. I guess people who are now teenagers mostly pick MSN then?
It got there first of the "easy to use for non-techies" clients (which I'd consider to be AIM, MSN, and Yahoo Chat). ICQ did get there first, but it never really was widely used by non-computer-people, at least that I know of.
ICQ's interface struck me as kind of an intermediary between IM and email -- you send short messages back and forth. I personally don't find that very useful -- generally I either want to send a message (for which I use email), or I want to have a conversation (for which I use IM). Conversations over ICQ were particularly tedious in comparison to other IM services.
I actually don't know anyone who uses MSN. And most of my friends aren't very computer-savvy. Everyone I know uses AIM, simply because it got their first. They all signed up for AIM accounts in high school 5-6 years ago before MSN existed (or before it was big anyway), and so they've all kept them now. The people at my college pretty much exclusively use AIM too -- it's assumed you have an AIM account, 'cause otherwise you won't be able to talk to anyone, since that's what pretty much every single person at the college uses.
Really I was under the impression that nobody used MSN/Yahoo/Jabber/whatever. But I suppose this might vary regionally.
Nope, humans are still much better at that. Computers are better only in the special case where you're recognizing exact patterns -- then a huge lookup table on the computer's part beats human performance. But in more "fuzzy" situations, humans do a much better job. One often-cited example is face recognition -- humans can do it nearly instantly, while computers have a very difficult time of it.
Most people are exceedingly bad at Go as well. The top Go players are invariably those who have been doing essentially nothing but playing Go since they were 3 years old, leading many to hypothesize that the root of good Go play is essentially astoundingly good pattern recognition.
How about both the plaintiffs and their lawyers get paid in cash? $12 isn't much, but a $12 check (or even a $5 check) is a hell of a lot better than $12 vouchers. Compensating real damages with fake currency should be prohibited in class action suits.
1) There's really no reason to pay a lawyer $150k/year. 2) If you have twenty lawyers working full-time on these suits, plus paralegals, you need to get better lawyers. You should certainly be able to make do with many fewer per suit.
I thought that guy had disappeared from the face of the earth. He used to have the world's most thorough description of reverse-engineering techniques until it inexplicably went away.
If you've seen how black Americans are treated, and compared it to how black immigrants from Nigeria or Kenya in the United States are treated, the latter escape much of the prejudice directed at the former. So it really has nothing to do with prejudice against black people per se, but prejudice against a certain culture. Sort of like how making fun of "white trash" isn't racism per se, because it's directed at a certain culture -- that happens to be made up of white people, but isn't synonymous with white people.
The real reason though, in my mind, is that the RIAA already has the Democrats in their pockets. The Democrats have long historical and monetary connections to Hollywood and the content industry in general. It is Senator Hollings (D) who is known as "Senator Disney," after all.
So this is bad because the Republicans on the whole were less in bed with the RIAA/MPAA types than the Democrats were. With the RIAA catering more towards them, that won't really leave any opposition, unless this move spurs the Democrats to stop kissing Hollywood's ass.
You can probably safely ignore it. If it's simply an accurate scan of the pages, then it is simply a reproduction of someone else's work (namely, Gutenberg's), not an independent creative work, and as such is only subject to Gutenberg's copyright, not an independent copyright. As the original copyright has obviously long expired, you can safely reproduce the work.
A similar principle applies to ignoring claims of copyright on digitized paintings painted before 1923 -- if it's simply an accurate copy of the painting, only the original (expired) copyright is in effect.
A huge percentage of audiophile nonsense is focused on speaker cables, and thus far no double-blind test has shown a discernible difference between speaker cables, unless you are comparing with some particularly horrid wire you purposedly made as bad as possible.
They don't have to try to force Lexmark to allow others to use their copyrights (which would be an attempt to supersede federal copyright law) -- instead they can simply say that it is illegal for printer manufacturers to make their cartridges such that copyrighted material is necessary for their operation. Then nobody could copy Lexmark's cartridges, but they couldn't legally sell them in the state either. But their copyright would still be protected.
I've found myself occasionally thinking "hey, this article is toned-down enough that I can send it to other people," and then having them ask me what sort of crazy rabid nonsense I'm sending them. But hey, compared to what I could've sent them, it was calmly-written.
You can do that exact thing on UNIX by running multiple X-servers on different virtual consoles. ALT-F# to switch, and voila, you've got a different user with all their apps still running. Optionally you can lock the console before switching (using xscreensaver-command -lock, among other options) so you need the user's password to switch back.
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A good idea, but I'll let you in a secret: all those tech jobs being shipped overseas aren't being shipped to Stockholm.
Even if you happen to like the blocklists and agree with their methods, it's clearly irresponsible to assume they're being attacked by spammers -- there are a lot of non-spammers who would love to take them out.
This is based on discussions with people at other universities as well. Some of them report some minor MSN usage, but none of the rest.
And certainly I've never heard of anywhere where Jabber is the norm. Most people don't even know Jabber exists. And I wouldn't call its userbase "huge," at least not compared to MSN, AIM, or Yahoo. It's basically only used by open-source types.
See, I know many people who were those tech-illiterate teenagers not too many years ago. And they all used AIM, 'cause it's what everybody did, and was less geeky than ICQ. So they all still use AIM. I guess people who are now teenagers mostly pick MSN then?
It got there first of the "easy to use for non-techies" clients (which I'd consider to be AIM, MSN, and Yahoo Chat). ICQ did get there first, but it never really was widely used by non-computer-people, at least that I know of.
ICQ's interface struck me as kind of an intermediary between IM and email -- you send short messages back and forth. I personally don't find that very useful -- generally I either want to send a message (for which I use email), or I want to have a conversation (for which I use IM). Conversations over ICQ were particularly tedious in comparison to other IM services.
I actually don't know anyone who uses MSN. And most of my friends aren't very computer-savvy. Everyone I know uses AIM, simply because it got their first. They all signed up for AIM accounts in high school 5-6 years ago before MSN existed (or before it was big anyway), and so they've all kept them now. The people at my college pretty much exclusively use AIM too -- it's assumed you have an AIM account, 'cause otherwise you won't be able to talk to anyone, since that's what pretty much every single person at the college uses.
Really I was under the impression that nobody used MSN/Yahoo/Jabber/whatever. But I suppose this might vary regionally.
Nope, humans are still much better at that. Computers are better only in the special case where you're recognizing exact patterns -- then a huge lookup table on the computer's part beats human performance. But in more "fuzzy" situations, humans do a much better job. One often-cited example is face recognition -- humans can do it nearly instantly, while computers have a very difficult time of it.
"I swear, it's the Northeastern power outage that caused the Omaha routers to go down."
Most people are exceedingly bad at Go as well. The top Go players are invariably those who have been doing essentially nothing but playing Go since they were 3 years old, leading many to hypothesize that the root of good Go play is essentially astoundingly good pattern recognition.
I was led to believe everyone in San Francisco is a pot-smoking tree-hugging hippie. You mean they have cars there now? Damn right-wingers.
How about both the plaintiffs and their lawyers get paid in cash? $12 isn't much, but a $12 check (or even a $5 check) is a hell of a lot better than $12 vouchers. Compensating real damages with fake currency should be prohibited in class action suits.
1) There's really no reason to pay a lawyer $150k/year.
2) If you have twenty lawyers working full-time on these suits, plus paralegals, you need to get better lawyers. You should certainly be able to make do with many fewer per suit.
I've got about 900 skydives, and have jumped several times from 50km, and I was not cold at all.
I thought that guy had disappeared from the face of the earth. He used to have the world's most thorough description of reverse-engineering techniques until it inexplicably went away.
Their press release covering this ruling is headlined Consumers Lose in Playstation Decision, which hardly sounds conciliatory.
They can't really go after users sharing songs whose copyrights aren't owned by RIAA members.
If you've seen how black Americans are treated, and compared it to how black immigrants from Nigeria or Kenya in the United States are treated, the latter escape much of the prejudice directed at the former. So it really has nothing to do with prejudice against black people per se, but prejudice against a certain culture. Sort of like how making fun of "white trash" isn't racism per se, because it's directed at a certain culture -- that happens to be made up of white people, but isn't synonymous with white people.
You mean the same Canada that charges a tax on blank CD-R's as "reparations for piracy"?
The real reason though, in my mind, is that the RIAA already has the Democrats in their pockets. The Democrats have long historical and monetary connections to Hollywood and the content industry in general. It is Senator Hollings ( D ) who is known as "Senator Disney," after all.
So this is bad because the Republicans on the whole were less in bed with the RIAA/MPAA types than the Democrats were. With the RIAA catering more towards them, that won't really leave any opposition, unless this move spurs the Democrats to stop kissing Hollywood's ass.
You can probably safely ignore it. If it's simply an accurate scan of the pages, then it is simply a reproduction of someone else's work (namely, Gutenberg's), not an independent creative work, and as such is only subject to Gutenberg's copyright, not an independent copyright. As the original copyright has obviously long expired, you can safely reproduce the work.
A similar principle applies to ignoring claims of copyright on digitized paintings painted before 1923 -- if it's simply an accurate copy of the painting, only the original (expired) copyright is in effect.
A huge percentage of audiophile nonsense is focused on speaker cables, and thus far no double-blind test has shown a discernible difference between speaker cables, unless you are comparing with some particularly horrid wire you purposedly made as bad as possible.
They don't have to try to force Lexmark to allow others to use their copyrights (which would be an attempt to supersede federal copyright law) -- instead they can simply say that it is illegal for printer manufacturers to make their cartridges such that copyrighted material is necessary for their operation. Then nobody could copy Lexmark's cartridges, but they couldn't legally sell them in the state either. But their copyright would still be protected.
I've found myself occasionally thinking "hey, this article is toned-down enough that I can send it to other people," and then having them ask me what sort of crazy rabid nonsense I'm sending them. But hey, compared to what I could've sent them, it was calmly-written.
You can do that exact thing on UNIX by running multiple X-servers on different virtual consoles. ALT-F# to switch, and voila, you've got a different user with all their apps still running. Optionally you can lock the console before switching (using xscreensaver-command -lock, among other options) so you need the user's password to switch back.