I was a little taken aback earlier tonight when I was shopping in a Target, and among their selection of CD-R and writable media, was an image of a teenage girl, with a quiet smile on her face, with the caption "They call me Mixtape Molly".
Presumably, Target understands that these mixtapes are most likely to be mixes of copyrighted material. It was a little odd seeing what seemed like a subtle marketing piece for a substantial market for CD-R's, but which presumably had illegal activity underpinning it, presented by one of the biggest and most highly-regarded retail chains.
I think the collision between companies purportedly harmed by piracy and those benefitting from it is going to be a lot more widespread than the mentioned case, soon. It has become a mainstream cultural phenomenon.
Really, how is this supposed to work? Even if Microsoft suppresses the clipboard for protected documents, I (or any other mildly knowledgeable user) can take a couple of screen captures and then put it into a jpg or pdf to resend. If someone can see the e-mail, there's a way to copy it.
Ah... so maybe the idea is, *they* sent it, so that it'll be on *my* machine, but *they* retroactively control what I do with it, without specifying up-front. I *knew* SCO had some marketable ideas for Microsoft in exchange for that investment...
Wow. This is actually a very rare piece of journalism, one which is entirely constructed of ad hominem and straw man arguments, while containing no actual content whatsoever.
I guess just creating arbitratry categories of people and then fancifully ascribing to each whatever comes to mind qualifies one as a "Principal Analyst".
Maybe time for a career change for me...
<job application>In my experience, there are three types of Republicans, which I'll call "Pro Republicans", "Priest Republicans", and "Zealot Republicans"; they are like this...</job application>
Hmm... interesting. But since a program can't do the inferences such as "cat" to "animal", and the spambot writer can't determine how many valid categories for a noun I could be using (nouns-to-categories being a many-to-many relationship), I think this becomes really, really hard without seeing my database.
Having two tables of nouns and categories, and from those generating a challenge of the type:
Put "silver", "oak", "water", and "cat" in the order of liquid, tree, animal, metal.
...would require tries on average half the factorial of the number of terms used, and that's after writing a parser for the challenge and assuming that's the only form of challenge the web site will give. Scale for bot-elimination effectiveness, allowed tries, and/or user convenience.
How about a text-based system based on inference? Text-only could be fed through a reader for the blind the same as any other page text.
For example:
Of "book", "cat", "tree", and "silver", which is an animal?
Of course, since a bot could try all the permutations here, one try would be all that should be allowed, but that should be enough for a human. I'm sure there's a form that couldn't be brute-forced, but I'd have to think about that a bit more.
Other factors that may affect such forward looking statements include... and claims of infringement of third-party intellectual property rights.
This is one of the few cases where "third-party" is just too singular-sounding for the thousands of parties it applies to. But at least they are stating the obvious.
Argh, not the "communism" analogy again. This loaded term has a lot of bad associations for much of the public, and it's an unfortunately an epithet that is getting effectively tossed out often by anti-Open-Source people.
In suggesting that it doesn't apply to software in the sense that you're using it, please consider that the de-facto property rights for entity X don't get eliminated under communism, the just get shifted to the Communist Party.
I think the notion you're conveying would be more well-recieved by calling it, say, "liberated" software.
Based on someone's post earlier, I gave Distributed Proofreaders a try. It's very straightforward to get started on a couple of pages done at your leisure (especially easy for those knowing basic HTML--like Slashdot posters--think standard bold and italic tags; the only mild ramp up is footnotes), and I found their scanned book choices interesting to be reading through in the process of proofing (well-done proofing interface as well).
If you're in the mood for browsing books, give it a try... you can find something interesting to read and do a little service for humanity at the same time.
Contrary to the other replies, I'll agree with you here, though for me the primary issue isn't one of legality, it's one of corporate hypocrisy.
With the position Kazaa is now taking, they are essentially wanting this model:
File trader 1: Obtain music conversion, invest time in learning how to do so and how to use the Kazaa application, make available on Kazaa, personally take all legal risk.
File trader 2: Invest time in learning Kazaa application, pay for bandwith, act as server to other peers, personally take all legal risk.
Kazaa: Take no legal risk or even controversial IP stance, have others do all the work of providing your content, charge them for the privilege.
IMHO, this is a fundamental problem with this kind of non-transactional pricing scheme. Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions. Once you try to divy up a share of profits among a variety of things that people are accessing with their bandwidth, there are no objective criteria by which to separate one from another. It becomes an issue of who is making the most noise and can muscle their way into greater (non)-market-share, which is why this issue is being discussed in relation to music in the first place. The determination of who gets what share becomes a contest of politics, rather than quality. It becomes rather like the attempts of socialist governments to control pricing; even with the best of intentions there is no way to make this fair. Either we vote with our dollars or let someone else vote with them, based on their perceptions.
Okay, it might be way too late at night for me to be posting, but...
I wonder if the advent of multimedia paper, as it were, will create a sea-change in the nature of all types of advertising.
As it stands now, most every box/can/available-surface of products is in some way branded advertising for the product, like, your coke can says, naturally, "Coca-Cola". This advertising must translate into some approximately-calculable value for the Coca-Cola company, in terms of more coke sales.
But... is there an inflection point at which an ad for something else (say, Porsche cars) would be more valuable than the advertisement for coke? If so, might companies sell space on all manner of products wrapped in this multimedia-paper like banner ads?
It might be interesting to open my refrigerator and see a few-dozen multimedia presentations on various consumer goods, changing every morning, but... well, maybe a final trip in that Porsche to some Amish community might be more sanity-preserving.
This may be. But the thread has gone from different languages means no copyright violation, to if this idea is true Linux violates SCO, to "Unix" is broader than SCO, to broad-usage-of-something-like-copyright-or-patent means SCO violation. There's a bunch of semi-direct inferences here, in a very conceptually complex and debatable area. I'm not going to argue something I can't fully present right now, but I still feel the original post in this thread is probably jumping to conclusions.
Navitaire was arguing that BulletProof Technologies had studied the Openres system closely and produced a system that operated in the same way.
Okay, so the case has only been declared tryable, not that there was infringement. And though I don't agree that "studying closely" is an issue, I'm not sure we can say that the fact that they're written in a different language automatically disqualifies it from an IP violation.
If I take your Fortran application, use g77 to convert it to C++, change your name to mine and search-and-replace a few things, wouldn't I still be violating your IP?
Ah, yes... it's copyright case... but, Henry Potter and the Room of Mysteries, anyone?
Good... Verisign's actions here are a particularly heinous form of "embrace-and-extend". Here, they're "embracing" an entire technology freely provided to them, and "extending" it in a blatantly proprietary manner, with no significant work at all on their part. Taking the whole DNS stack and turning it into a profit center by redirecting it at your whim across the entire internet, is outrageous.
Re:Implications for Phonics vs. Whole-word Debate?
on
Can You Raed Tihs?
·
· Score: 1
My 2 cents...
I've always treated every single word as a unique entity in terms of spelling, and it has served me pretty well (Natl. Merit Scholar, blah blah).
My father, on the other hand, learned via phonics, and his spelling is horrible. Maybe the techniques have advanced since then.
Don't the number of exceptions to the phonics generalizations hamper it greatly as a tool? It almost seems like cognitive misdirection.
Thanks. I was thinking of claiming it was a deliberate attempt to make the reader consider the implications of "your" (possessive) versus "you are", in this context of intellectual "property", but, nah...
No, but perhaps grammar skills should be required to work for the Associated Press...
Seriously, this is a terrible idea. This would open up chicken-and-egg problems across the whole range of learning endeavor computers and the internet offers.
The analogy of needing a license to drive a car is used repeatedly in the article, but I think that's not quite the right analogy; maybe requiring you to know how to rebuild an engine before you ever drive would be more accurate. One of the expectations mentioned is that you must know how to set up a firewall; is this really realistic to require before any unsupervised on-line time?
The internet is growing because it's accessible, reasonably. If I needed a license to buy a book, I might never have started reading--and a book is a more accurate analogy than a car.
Put the responsibility for viruses where it belongs, on the network admins and software vendors, not the newbies. Everybody's got to start somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I was a little taken aback earlier tonight when I was shopping in a Target, and among their selection of CD-R and writable media, was an image of a teenage girl, with a quiet smile on her face, with the caption "They call me Mixtape Molly".
Presumably, Target understands that these mixtapes are most likely to be mixes of copyrighted material. It was a little odd seeing what seemed like a subtle marketing piece for a substantial market for CD-R's, but which presumably had illegal activity underpinning it, presented by one of the biggest and most highly-regarded retail chains.
I think the collision between companies purportedly harmed by piracy and those benefitting from it is going to be a lot more widespread than the mentioned case, soon. It has become a mainstream cultural phenomenon.
(click)(drag)(Copy)(launch Mozilla)(Paste)(Send)
Really, how is this supposed to work? Even if Microsoft suppresses the clipboard for protected documents, I (or any other mildly knowledgeable user) can take a couple of screen captures and then put it into a jpg or pdf to resend. If someone can see the e-mail, there's a way to copy it.
Ah... so maybe the idea is, *they* sent it, so that it'll be on *my* machine, but *they* retroactively control what I do with it, without specifying up-front. I *knew* SCO had some marketable ideas for Microsoft in exchange for that investment...
Wow. This is actually a very rare piece of journalism, one which is entirely constructed of ad hominem and straw man arguments, while containing no actual content whatsoever.
I guess just creating arbitratry categories of people and then fancifully ascribing to each whatever comes to mind qualifies one as a "Principal Analyst".
Maybe time for a career change for me...
<job application>In my experience, there are three types of Republicans, which I'll call "Pro Republicans", "Priest Republicans", and "Zealot Republicans"; they are like this...</job application>
Hmm... interesting. But since a program can't do the inferences such as "cat" to "animal", and the spambot writer can't determine how many valid categories for a noun I could be using (nouns-to-categories being a many-to-many relationship), I think this becomes really, really hard without seeing my database.
Okay, I thought about it more.
...would require tries on average half the factorial of the number of terms used, and that's after writing a parser for the challenge and assuming that's the only form of challenge the web site will give. Scale for bot-elimination effectiveness, allowed tries, and/or user convenience.
Having two tables of nouns and categories, and from those generating a challenge of the type:
Put "silver", "oak", "water", and "cat" in the order of liquid, tree, animal, metal.
How about a text-based system based on inference? Text-only could be fed through a reader for the blind the same as any other page text.
For example:
Of "book", "cat", "tree", and "silver", which is an animal?
Of course, since a bot could try all the permutations here, one try would be all that should be allowed, but that should be enough for a human. I'm sure there's a form that couldn't be brute-forced, but I'd have to think about that a bit more.
Other factors that may affect such forward looking statements include ... and claims of infringement of third-party intellectual property rights.
This is one of the few cases where "third-party" is just too singular-sounding for the thousands of parties it applies to. But at least they are stating the obvious.
Argh, not the "communism" analogy again. This loaded term has a lot of bad associations for much of the public, and it's an unfortunately an epithet that is getting effectively tossed out often by anti-Open-Source people.
In suggesting that it doesn't apply to software in the sense that you're using it, please consider that the de-facto property rights for entity X don't get eliminated under communism, the just get shifted to the Communist Party.
I think the notion you're conveying would be more well-recieved by calling it, say, "liberated" software.
Based on someone's post earlier, I gave Distributed Proofreaders a try. It's very straightforward to get started on a couple of pages done at your leisure (especially easy for those knowing basic HTML--like Slashdot posters--think standard bold and italic tags; the only mild ramp up is footnotes), and I found their scanned book choices interesting to be reading through in the process of proofing (well-done proofing interface as well).
If you're in the mood for browsing books, give it a try... you can find something interesting to read and do a little service for humanity at the same time.
I doubt this has anything to do with SCO's "satisfaction" with the level of response, but rather with the advice of their lawyers.
Generally, invoicing for other people's work is not held in high regard by the law.
New Total Information Awareness chip?
Contrary to the other replies, I'll agree with you here, though for me the primary issue isn't one of legality, it's one of corporate hypocrisy.
With the position Kazaa is now taking, they are essentially wanting this model:
File trader 1: Obtain music conversion, invest time in learning how to do so and how to use the Kazaa application, make available on Kazaa, personally take all legal risk.
File trader 2: Invest time in learning Kazaa application, pay for bandwith, act as server to other peers, personally take all legal risk.
Kazaa: Take no legal risk or even controversial IP stance, have others do all the work of providing your content, charge them for the privilege.
IMHO, this is a fundamental problem with this kind of non-transactional pricing scheme. Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions. Once you try to divy up a share of profits among a variety of things that people are accessing with their bandwidth, there are no objective criteria by which to separate one from another. It becomes an issue of who is making the most noise and can muscle their way into greater (non)-market-share, which is why this issue is being discussed in relation to music in the first place. The determination of who gets what share becomes a contest of politics, rather than quality. It becomes rather like the attempts of socialist governments to control pricing; even with the best of intentions there is no way to make this fair. Either we vote with our dollars or let someone else vote with them, based on their perceptions.
Okay, it might be way too late at night for me to be posting, but...
I wonder if the advent of multimedia paper, as it were, will create a sea-change in the nature of all types of advertising.
As it stands now, most every box/can/available-surface of products is in some way branded advertising for the product, like, your coke can says, naturally, "Coca-Cola". This advertising must translate into some approximately-calculable value for the Coca-Cola company, in terms of more coke sales.
But... is there an inflection point at which an ad for something else (say, Porsche cars) would be more valuable than the advertisement for coke? If so, might companies sell space on all manner of products wrapped in this multimedia-paper like banner ads?
It might be interesting to open my refrigerator and see a few-dozen multimedia presentations on various consumer goods, changing every morning, but... well, maybe a final trip in that Porsche to some Amish community might be more sanity-preserving.
This may be. But the thread has gone from different languages means no copyright violation, to if this idea is true Linux violates SCO, to "Unix" is broader than SCO, to broad-usage-of-something-like-copyright-or-patent means SCO violation. There's a bunch of semi-direct inferences here, in a very conceptually complex and debatable area. I'm not going to argue something I can't fully present right now, but I still feel the original post in this thread is probably jumping to conclusions.
infringe "Unix" != infringe SCO
So, how is the example irrelevant to what it addresses, the idea that two applications in different languages cannot be a violation?
Er... where does it clearly state that?
Navitaire was arguing that BulletProof Technologies had studied the Openres system closely and produced a system that operated in the same way.
Okay, so the case has only been declared tryable, not that there was infringement. And though I don't agree that "studying closely" is an issue, I'm not sure we can say that the fact that they're written in a different language automatically disqualifies it from an IP violation.
If I take your Fortran application, use g77 to convert it to C++, change your name to mine and search-and-replace a few things, wouldn't I still be violating your IP?
Ah, yes... it's copyright case... but, Henry Potter and the Room of Mysteries, anyone?
Good... Verisign's actions here are a particularly heinous form of "embrace-and-extend". Here, they're "embracing" an entire technology freely provided to them, and "extending" it in a blatantly proprietary manner, with no significant work at all on their part. Taking the whole DNS stack and turning it into a profit center by redirecting it at your whim across the entire internet, is outrageous.
My 2 cents...
I've always treated every single word as a unique entity in terms of spelling, and it has served me pretty well (Natl. Merit Scholar, blah blah).
My father, on the other hand, learned via phonics, and his spelling is horrible. Maybe the techniques have advanced since then.
Don't the number of exceptions to the phonics generalizations hamper it greatly as a tool? It almost seems like cognitive misdirection.
Long live anecdotal evidence...
Cool... Open Encryption!
Thanks. I was thinking of claiming it was a deliberate attempt to make the reader consider the implications of "your" (possessive) versus "you are", in this context of intellectual "property", but, nah...
"So, you see... we're associated with a Unix, and, you're associated with a Unix... well, you're financial obligations here should be obvious."
Should License Be Required to Go Online?
No, but perhaps grammar skills should be required to work for the Associated Press...
Seriously, this is a terrible idea. This would open up chicken-and-egg problems across the whole range of learning endeavor computers and the internet offers.
The analogy of needing a license to drive a car is used repeatedly in the article, but I think that's not quite the right analogy; maybe requiring you to know how to rebuild an engine before you ever drive would be more accurate. One of the expectations mentioned is that you must know how to set up a firewall; is this really realistic to require before any unsupervised on-line time?
The internet is growing because it's accessible, reasonably. If I needed a license to buy a book, I might never have started reading--and a book is a more accurate analogy than a car.
Put the responsibility for viruses where it belongs, on the network admins and software vendors, not the newbies. Everybody's got to start somewhere.