You might as well just forget about trying to boycott the RIAA/MPAA. Let's be realistic here.
It'd be akin to declaring a boycott on all Microsoft products out of the blue -- the zealots would gladly play along(or may already be..), but they'd be few and far between compared to the masses who would ignore you.
Want a real solution to combatting the power of the RIAA/MPAA? Give them some competition. Incidentally, same goes for Microsoft. Any kind of boycott, be it of buses or of media conglomerates, is centered on there being some kind of competition to turn to. If want to boycott British wool, weave yourself. Want to boycott a racist bus system? -- Organize carpools with friends. Want to defeat an international monopolistic media company? -- Set up competition that will pay the big bucks for rights to movies, and effectively market them via traditional theaters or even the Internet. Imagine if the MPAA didn't just take the rights to LotR for granted, but had to compete with a more benevolent media corporation that was actually -liked- by geeks.
Plus, then the RIAA/MPAA won't be able to blame everything on piracy, and might actually be tempted to shape up. Who knows, maybe even Valenti/Rosen would take a clue after having a run for their money from serious competition.
I signed up for an account, and did a bit of proofing. One page was a bibliography with lots of numbers -- the OCR software made a few errors here and there, sometimes confusing "1" with "!".
Another page was in old German. Since many old German characters look so different than their modern-day counterparts, I was quite impressed when it translated them flawlessly into their proper ASCII counterparts. The OCR software even got the umlauts right. Only problem was it sometimes mistook an end of line "-" for a "=".
One problem I did have was that most of the scans seemed to be pretty low resolution. This causes problems when comparing the scanned text to the original image, as it can create difficulties for the proofreader. The software also had trouble translating the low-res blocks.
most obfuscated..
on
Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 2, Interesting
what are the most obfuscated few lines of Perl you've ever seen~?
Your fears about people falsely sharing on p2p networks have come true (well, sort of) on another p2p network, called Direct Connect (Linux client available also). Basically, one selects from a pulic list of nodes, each of which has its own rules regarding the min. shared content, upload slots, and connection speed required to gain access. Although there are occassionally people who try to cheat the system, with fake shares, or shares of installed program directories, etc., the small size of most hubs -- just about all less than 1000 people, allows for effective self-policing by the ops. All in all, it works very effectively, and a great source for obscure files. Something to think about .
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You might as well just forget about trying to boycott the RIAA/MPAA. Let's be realistic here.
It'd be akin to declaring a boycott on all Microsoft products out of the blue -- the zealots would gladly play along(or may already be..), but they'd be few and far between compared to the masses who would ignore you.
Want a real solution to combatting the power of the RIAA/MPAA? Give them some competition. Incidentally, same goes for Microsoft. Any kind of boycott, be it of buses or of media conglomerates, is centered on there being some kind of competition to turn to. If want to boycott British wool, weave yourself. Want to boycott a racist bus system? -- Organize carpools with friends. Want to defeat an international monopolistic media company? -- Set up competition that will pay the big bucks for rights to movies, and effectively market them via traditional theaters or even the Internet. Imagine if the MPAA didn't just take the rights to LotR for granted, but had to compete with a more benevolent media corporation that was actually -liked- by geeks.
Plus, then the RIAA/MPAA won't be able to blame everything on piracy, and might actually be tempted to shape up. Who knows, maybe even Valenti/Rosen would take a clue after having a run for their money from serious competition.
What a ridiculous notion. CD-R's aren't used to pirate music, they're used to burn downloaded DVD rips.
I signed up for an account, and did a bit of proofing. One page was a bibliography with lots of numbers -- the OCR software made a few errors here and there, sometimes confusing "1" with "!". Another page was in old German. Since many old German characters look so different than their modern-day counterparts, I was quite impressed when it translated them flawlessly into their proper ASCII counterparts. The OCR software even got the umlauts right. Only problem was it sometimes mistook an end of line "-" for a "=". One problem I did have was that most of the scans seemed to be pretty low resolution. This causes problems when comparing the scanned text to the original image, as it can create difficulties for the proofreader. The software also had trouble translating the low-res blocks.
what are the most obfuscated few lines of Perl you've ever seen~?
Your fears about people falsely sharing on p2p networks have come true (well, sort of) on another p2p network, called Direct Connect (Linux client available also). Basically, one selects from a pulic list of nodes, each of which has its own rules regarding the min. shared content, upload slots, and connection speed required to gain access. Although there are occassionally people who try to cheat the system, with fake shares, or shares of installed program directories, etc., the small size of most hubs -- just about all less than 1000 people, allows for effective self-policing by the ops. All in all, it works very effectively, and a great source for obscure files. Something to think about .