The alternative to MS Windows is an older Windows versions (it is too much trouble to upgrade). Also, increasingly, MacOS X and Linux. There are also alternatives to Photoshop, such as, for example, Photoimpact. It's true that the immediate impact might be low, but in the long-term it's a bad idea to piss off your customers...
Yes, this looks like a pretty good use of the scientific research capabilities. Now that almost all the evil human-dignity-destroying stem cell research is over, it's time to do something worthwhile. The hypocrisy is simply staggering.
The average artist incurs more costs over the term of his contract than his earnings. I think that means RIAA (labels) is safe even if people completely stop buying music. It looks like labels' core competence is in finding suckers who would give them their hard-earned money. Even if they lose customers, they still have the artists.:)
Well, you can have less than perfect and still perfectly secure code. Consider, for example, performance issues. Copy-pasting code into 10 places instead of making a function is bad coding, but it does not necessarily mean loss of security. We can even make one further step and say that you can have secure systems with insecure code. If programs are executed in managed and protected environments, they can only (a) crash themselves (b) corrupt output. If you always validate the input and do not critically depend on insecure parts, there is still no loss of security.
Examples are plentiful. There are crappy applications for Linux, like X-Windows, which may (did) crash relatively often, but that doesn't mean the system was insecure. It only had an unstable shell.
Actually, there is something more to that. Carl Sagan should have been smart enough to at least get a cryonic suspension. Too bad that many great minds are destroyed by death and will never be with us again. Sagan, Feynman, many others...:(
Even if you are not as valuable for humanity, you can still get a contract.
You are right on 3d chooser. It is a lame attempt at solving a problem the authors don't understand. 3d desktops should be first built by usability researchers and then commercialised (or OSSised) by software developers. To be usable, a 3d desktop would also need to be extremely customisable and probably script based. Just look at all the recent 3d games - does any one have a 3d interface? I certainly can't think of a good example. A hardware accelerated desktop is a necessary first step, though, but it needs to have enough extensibility to let others add features they like. Eventually we will have smart windows that interfact in mutually predictable way with the users (windows predict what the user wants and the user predicts how the windows will behave), but right now we don't have a clue how to make it.
It seems that everyone here ignores one of the main premises of marxist historical theories. Communism will become feasible when the society has sufficient production capabilities. Why do you think Soviet Union had such tremendous industrial growth? It was because they were striving to meet the "prerequisites" for communism. More tractors, more coal, more grain, more everything. The problem was that the Soviet Union was too far away from the goal and because of certain factors decided to make a switch to liberal democracy / free market economy.
When we have robots, AI and nanotechnology, communism will become the natural socio-economic order, because capital will no longer be scarce (and ultimately the ownership of capital will be abandoned). With the speed things are currently happening, we can expect communism in a few decades or so. The topic of the discussion (GPL) suddenly becomes relevant to this thread, because open source is an early model of communism and it works great. Many people will spend time working for the benefit of others when needed. The only problem is that there is still too much work required from everyone and a lot of jobs are not fun. Once you can eliminate bad jobs with automation (there are a lot of people who would refuse to do cleaning jobs, but would be happy designing software and hardware for cleaning robots) and reduce required working time to a comfortable level (let's say 10 hours per week), you can make all labour voluntary and most goods/services free. Voila! Communism is built.
And then, there is always the conspiracy theorist angle. What if subversive powers (governmental or otherwise) tapped into this type of technology to recruit and/or spread propaganda. It would completely redefine everything from armed forces and/or terrorist recruitment all the way up to presidential elections. Or they could force the people to wear magic green glasses 24h a day.:)
Amazon.com's service will make it easy. Mind-boggling easy.... I think dozens will do [it]. Well, then one can argue that writing an operating system is mind-boggling easy. After all, dozens of people do it. Sarcasm aside, there is something wrong with your definition of easy, don't you think so?
Let's see. Would you rather 1) scan and clean up a book (OCR is not 100% effective) or 2) get the master quark files from someone at one of the numerous printing companies that they had churning out this book. I'm sure it was done both ways, but only one of them could start printing "same-day" and was completely indistiguishable from genunine copies. I don't know anything about Quark leaks, but OCRed version did, in fact, appear on the same day (0-day ebookz!).
All in all, I fail to see in your posts how Amazon's system would make a significant difference for book piracy. After all, there are hundreds of ways to get the content, including flying RC-helicopters with cameras to the window of Rowling's house and filming the pages from the computer screen. But most of the methods are not really very practical. Writing Perl or assembler programs, sadly, is not very practical too. The easiest ways were, are and will be for a long time (at least a few years) getting a leaked copy and OCRing a book.
I'm not interested in the whole "Information wants to be free" debate that is so prevelant here on YRO... There isn't much of a debate, IMO, just a few obvious facts: - information is much easier to copy than material objects - rules of supply and demand tell us that if something is easier (cheaper), it will be done more often, all else equal - greater access to various information generally benefits the society - creating content does not create value for the economy, copying it does The conclusions, are (although debated a lot) pretty obvious.
Well, how about checking the copyright law? I would be very surprised if it said the author owns the book. The last time I checked, you could only own the copyright, not the book itself (although you can own a physical copy of it).
Ergo, someone else owns the books. And it's the society. The society granted certain rights to the authors, but these are only temporary and do not imply that the book is owned by the author. No. Once it is published, we can say that the public owns it (although, as always with immaterial goods, using the term "own" is an oversimplification.
Regardless of what is the author's choice should be, this is irrelevant. What is important, though, is what are the current laws and what does the public think. If the public thinks that all books should be searchable through Amazon, the Congress can pass an amendment to the Copyright Law and specifically allow such use.
Amazon.com's service will make it easy. Mind-boggling easy. Yeah, I can already imagine that. Millions of Internet users writing Perl scripts to get the full text from Amazon database. Perl scripts, no shit..
which is 99% chance what happened with Harry Potter Harry Potter was, in fact, scanned by readers (100% chance). There are enough accounts of that on the net. Scanning is easy. For the average person it's probably more so than writing a Perl script.
You don't seem to understand the idea of information very well. You only need to get the text once, then it doesn't matter how protected it was, since in electronic form it can be copied indefinitely. Even if there is DRM in every letter, you can retype it and distribute freely to everyone who wants it. It's impossible to stop movie piracy by preventing filming new movies with cameras, because you only need one person to get through and do it. It's also impossible to stop book piracy by limiting access to e-texts. Guess what, electronic texts are already available for ALL books that are popular enough. If it's popular enough, someone will scan or retype it, if they can't get an e-copy somewhere. The latest Harry Potter book was available on the very day it was released and a proofread version on the next day. Instead of reading the newly acquired book, people did distributed scanning.
So it doesn't matter much for piracy whether Amazon offers this new service (or in fact free complete electronic versions). If people want to get a free copy of a particular book, they already can do it. If you sell something to thousands, there are too many weak links already. The main factor determining piracy today is not how easy it is to get a first copy, it's how easy it is to distribute it then and how easy it is to get a legit version.
Students already can scan the books manually and share the electronic text. Of course, we can't argue that this new technology will have no effect at all, but I don't think it will be significant. And in any case, we need to look at the Big Picture. Giving students free access to textbook is basically an investment into the future economy. They say every dollar you spend on education provides 10$ return in the future. That must also mean that every dollar you don't spend on education (because you get that product/service for free) also provides a 10$ return.
One of the best things would be to create a free online library of all books ever created, a feat which can probably be done for less than $100 mln. Imagine the effect of MIT free course library squared or cubed. If people everywhere would have unlimited free access to books, that would help solve a lot of our problems. "Ipsa scientia potestas est" (Knowledge itself is power), as Bacon said. Sadly, building a stealth fighter with that money is seen as more important...
Ironically, this can be one of the reasons for draconian contracts a la "all your rights are belong to us". Publishers don't want to lose their rights when new technologies appear and so choose to claim all rights forever and ever.:)
The idea that an author could remove their book, after some elaborate procedure, if they are aware their book is indexed in the first place, is less than compelling. There is a difference between spam in your mailbox and access to your books. All books belong to the public once they are, well, published. The only things the author retains are the right to be acknowledged as the author and a limited monopoly on distribution. Ultimately he has no right to deny people access to his book through any mechanism - that goes again the very purpose for the existence of copyright (to promote the progress of useful Sciences and Arts).
AuthorsGuild people write: We believe readers will do this, and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title -- and the presumptive increase in sales -- offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it. Yeah, of course lost sales of reference books would be immense. Surely every person interested in Tuscany would buy every book about Italy or Europe available. There is no reason to think that he would somehow manage with freely available on the Web info. And if the person wants a fish recipe, he would have bought every cookbook on Amazon if not for this pesky search feature. We all know that Amazon doesn't know anything about profits, it's just a piracy organisation that doesn't really want to increase its book sales. Of course, if we let them do what they want, book sales will drop to zero and authors will...
Oh, at least these people use words such as "risk" and do not claim outright that authors will starve because of this search function.
To tell you the truth, I would be much more interested in Hawking's view on human augmentation... I've never read anything about his long-term plans - surely he doesn't want to spend all his time in that wheelchair.
That's just another illustration. When journalists write about new sub-$1M submarine, they talk about using it to fight terrorism. When they talk about augmentation, they speak about space flight. When they talk about research in anabiosys, they again speak about space flight and ignore other practical uses (cryonics). The reason is that most people are idiots and they can only react to keywords (). So journalists take a new item, think a second about appropriate category and add required keywords.
Personally, of course, I am sure that once the technologies are developed, they will very soon be applied to medicine and entertainment. We will have all that agumentations simply because we want them. The real problem is that because most people do not understand this yet, the funding for R&D is lower than it should be.
Why throw the pen away? Just swing it around you or open it and blow in the tube. It would work. If it still doesn't work, you can remove the tip, blow again and place the tip back, but it can be a bit messy and is generally too much trouble.
In Russia we do not believe in copyrights. Soviet Union didn't sign the Gevena treaty - that's why foreign countries could print books of Soviet authors without paying any royalties. Everything the professional artists, directors or writers made in Russia ultimately belonged to the people. Of course, the state paid to the authors, but all distribution rights did not belong to them. Not surprisingly, the quality and quantity of books and music, for example, was much better then. Today you have pulp detectives and love stories occupy most of the market, just like everywhere. Of course, there are good book, but they aren't very profitable or popular.
Times changed, but Russian people still do not like copyrights and do not believe in them. As someone succinclty put it, "Russians believe that they have a birthright to use MS Windows and MS Office for free". And it is not far from truth. In one foreign TV program about piracy they interviewed a police officer. He explained that Russian people were oppressed for so long that they hold dearly their newly acquired freedoms, including freedom of access to information. And you will have to take it from our cold dead hands.
The US is trying to force our culture to change to accomodate the dieing business models of American monopolies. Where is the respects for our beliefs that you are talking about? There is no respect whatsoever. But you will not subdue our nature, we will not tolerate insane "life+70 years" copyright terms, we will not tolerate copyrights at all, until you can offer us what we want. In case of music, videos and software we want it to be released here at the same time as worldwide and with prices only a bit higher than for pirated copies. Those companies who do it, enjoy the loyalty of their customers. Those who try to fight this, die.
Have it ever occured to you that "samizdat" is just another name for piracy? The Party and KGB could not succeed and RIAA, MPAA and BSA can suck our collective dicks as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The alternative to MS Windows is an older Windows versions (it is too much trouble to upgrade). Also, increasingly, MacOS X and Linux. There are also alternatives to Photoshop, such as, for example, Photoimpact. It's true that the immediate impact might be low, but in the long-term it's a bad idea to piss off your customers...
Yes, this looks like a pretty good use of the scientific research capabilities. Now that almost all the evil human-dignity-destroying stem cell research is over, it's time to do something worthwhile. The hypocrisy is simply staggering.
The average artist incurs more costs over the term of his contract than his earnings. :)
I think that means RIAA (labels) is safe even if people completely stop buying music. It looks like labels' core competence is in finding suckers who would give them their hard-earned money. Even if they lose customers, they still have the artists.
Well, you can have less than perfect and still perfectly secure code. Consider, for example, performance issues. Copy-pasting code into 10 places instead of making a function is bad coding, but it does not necessarily mean loss of security. We can even make one further step and say that you can have secure systems with insecure code. If programs are executed in managed and protected environments, they can only (a) crash themselves (b) corrupt output. If you always validate the input and do not critically depend on insecure parts, there is still no loss of security.
Examples are plentiful. There are crappy applications for Linux, like X-Windows, which may (did) crash relatively often, but that doesn't mean the system was insecure. It only had an unstable shell.
Here you are.
P.S. It was extremely difficult, practically impossible, to ignore another brilliant example
Actually, there is something more to that. Carl Sagan should have been smart enough to at least get a cryonic suspension. Too bad that many great minds are destroyed by death and will never be with us again. Sagan, Feynman, many others... :(
Even if you are not as valuable for humanity, you can still get a contract.
Well, they have a new 3D interface called Aero... A not so subtle hint to stealing from Apple again, may be?
You are right on 3d chooser. It is a lame attempt at solving a problem the authors don't understand. 3d desktops should be first built by usability researchers and then commercialised (or OSSised) by software developers. To be usable, a 3d desktop would also need to be extremely customisable and probably script based. Just look at all the recent 3d games - does any one have a 3d interface? I certainly can't think of a good example. A hardware accelerated desktop is a necessary first step, though, but it needs to have enough extensibility to let others add features they like. Eventually we will have smart windows that interfact in mutually predictable way with the users (windows predict what the user wants and the user predicts how the windows will behave), but right now we don't have a clue how to make it.
It seems that everyone here ignores one of the main premises of marxist historical theories. Communism will become feasible when the society has sufficient production capabilities. Why do you think Soviet Union had such tremendous industrial growth? It was because they were striving to meet the "prerequisites" for communism. More tractors, more coal, more grain, more everything. The problem was that the Soviet Union was too far away from the goal and because of certain factors decided to make a switch to liberal democracy / free market economy.
When we have robots, AI and nanotechnology, communism will become the natural socio-economic order, because capital will no longer be scarce (and ultimately the ownership of capital will be abandoned). With the speed things are currently happening, we can expect communism in a few decades or so. The topic of the discussion (GPL) suddenly becomes relevant to this thread, because open source is an early model of communism and it works great. Many people will spend time working for the benefit of others when needed. The only problem is that there is still too much work required from everyone and a lot of jobs are not fun. Once you can eliminate bad jobs with automation (there are a lot of people who would refuse to do cleaning jobs, but would be happy designing software and hardware for cleaning robots) and reduce required working time to a comfortable level (let's say 10 hours per week), you can make all labour voluntary and most goods/services free. Voila! Communism is built.
And then, there is always the conspiracy theorist angle. What if subversive powers (governmental or otherwise) tapped into this type of technology to recruit and/or spread propaganda. It would completely redefine everything from armed forces and/or terrorist recruitment all the way up to presidential elections. :)
Or they could force the people to wear magic green glasses 24h a day.
Amazon.com's service will make it easy. Mind-boggling easy.... I think dozens will do [it]. Well, then one can argue that writing an operating system is mind-boggling easy. After all, dozens of people do it. Sarcasm aside, there is something wrong with your definition of easy, don't you think so?
Let's see. Would you rather 1) scan and clean up a book (OCR is not 100% effective) or 2) get the master quark files from someone at one of the numerous printing companies that they had churning out this book. I'm sure it was done both ways, but only one of them could start printing "same-day" and was completely indistiguishable from genunine copies.
I don't know anything about Quark leaks, but OCRed version did, in fact, appear on the same day (0-day ebookz!).
All in all, I fail to see in your posts how Amazon's system would make a significant difference for book piracy. After all, there are hundreds of ways to get the content, including flying RC-helicopters with cameras to the window of Rowling's house and filming the pages from the computer screen. But most of the methods are not really very practical. Writing Perl or assembler programs, sadly, is not very practical too. The easiest ways were, are and will be for a long time (at least a few years) getting a leaked copy and OCRing a book.
I'm not interested in the whole "Information wants to be free" debate that is so prevelant here on YRO...
There isn't much of a debate, IMO, just a few obvious facts:
- information is much easier to copy than material objects
- rules of supply and demand tell us that if something is easier (cheaper), it will be done more often, all else equal
- greater access to various information generally benefits the society
- creating content does not create value for the economy, copying it does
The conclusions, are (although debated a lot) pretty obvious.
Well, how about checking the copyright law? I would be very surprised if it said the author owns the book. The last time I checked, you could only own the copyright, not the book itself (although you can own a physical copy of it).
Ergo, someone else owns the books. And it's the society. The society granted certain rights to the authors, but these are only temporary and do not imply that the book is owned by the author. No. Once it is published, we can say that the public owns it (although, as always with immaterial goods, using the term "own" is an oversimplification.
Regardless of what is the author's choice should be, this is irrelevant. What is important, though, is what are the current laws and what does the public think. If the public thinks that all books should be searchable through Amazon, the Congress can pass an amendment to the Copyright Law and specifically allow such use.
Amazon.com's service will make it easy. Mind-boggling easy.
Yeah, I can already imagine that. Millions of Internet users writing Perl scripts to get the full text from Amazon database. Perl scripts, no shit..
which is 99% chance what happened with Harry Potter
Harry Potter was, in fact, scanned by readers (100% chance). There are enough accounts of that on the net. Scanning is easy. For the average person it's probably more so than writing a Perl script.
You know the world is fucked up when an author is concerned about people actually reading his book...
You don't seem to understand the idea of information very well. You only need to get the text once, then it doesn't matter how protected it was, since in electronic form it can be copied indefinitely. Even if there is DRM in every letter, you can retype it and distribute freely to everyone who wants it. It's impossible to stop movie piracy by preventing filming new movies with cameras, because you only need one person to get through and do it. It's also impossible to stop book piracy by limiting access to e-texts. Guess what, electronic texts are already available for ALL books that are popular enough. If it's popular enough, someone will scan or retype it, if they can't get an e-copy somewhere. The latest Harry Potter book was available on the very day it was released and a proofread version on the next day. Instead of reading the newly acquired book, people did distributed scanning.
So it doesn't matter much for piracy whether Amazon offers this new service (or in fact free complete electronic versions). If people want to get a free copy of a particular book, they already can do it. If you sell something to thousands, there are too many weak links already. The main factor determining piracy today is not how easy it is to get a first copy, it's how easy it is to distribute it then and how easy it is to get a legit version.
Students already can scan the books manually and share the electronic text. Of course, we can't argue that this new technology will have no effect at all, but I don't think it will be significant. And in any case, we need to look at the Big Picture. Giving students free access to textbook is basically an investment into the future economy. They say every dollar you spend on education provides 10$ return in the future. That must also mean that every dollar you don't spend on education (because you get that product/service for free) also provides a 10$ return.
One of the best things would be to create a free online library of all books ever created, a feat which can probably be done for less than $100 mln. Imagine the effect of MIT free course library squared or cubed. If people everywhere would have unlimited free access to books, that would help solve a lot of our problems. "Ipsa scientia potestas est" (Knowledge itself is power), as Bacon said. Sadly, building a stealth fighter with that money is seen as more important...
Ironically, this can be one of the reasons for draconian contracts a la "all your rights are belong to us". Publishers don't want to lose their rights when new technologies appear and so choose to claim all rights forever and ever. :)
The idea that an author could remove their book, after some elaborate procedure, if they are aware their book is indexed in the first place, is less than compelling.
There is a difference between spam in your mailbox and access to your books. All books belong to the public once they are, well, published. The only things the author retains are the right to be acknowledged as the author and a limited monopoly on distribution. Ultimately he has no right to deny people access to his book through any mechanism - that goes again the very purpose for the existence of copyright (to promote the progress of useful Sciences and Arts).
AuthorsGuild people write:
We believe readers will do this, and the perplexing question is whether the additional exposure for a title -- and the presumptive increase in sales -- offsets sales lost from those who just use the Amazon system to look up the section of a book when they need it.
Yeah, of course lost sales of reference books would be immense. Surely every person interested in Tuscany would buy every book about Italy or Europe available. There is no reason to think that he would somehow manage with freely available on the Web info. And if the person wants a fish recipe, he would have bought every cookbook on Amazon if not for this pesky search feature. We all know that Amazon doesn't know anything about profits, it's just a piracy organisation that doesn't really want to increase its book sales. Of course, if we let them do what they want, book sales will drop to zero and authors will...
Oh, at least these people use words such as "risk" and do not claim outright that authors will starve because of this search function.
You forgot to add "stupid". Quite a lame troll, really, but thanks for the honesty.
To tell you the truth, I would be much more interested in Hawking's view on human augmentation... I've never read anything about his long-term plans - surely he doesn't want to spend all his time in that wheelchair.
That's just another illustration. When journalists write about new sub-$1M submarine, they talk about using it to fight terrorism. When they talk about augmentation, they speak about space flight. When they talk about research in anabiosys, they again speak about space flight and ignore other practical uses (cryonics). The reason is that most people are idiots and they can only react to keywords (). So journalists take a new item, think a second about appropriate category and add required keywords.
Personally, of course, I am sure that once the technologies are developed, they will very soon be applied to medicine and entertainment. We will have all that agumentations simply because we want them. The real problem is that because most people do not understand this yet, the funding for R&D is lower than it should be.
Use Proxomitron with a simple web filter:
replace:
<P>*terroris*</P>
with
"" (nothing)
Voila!
Why throw the pen away? Just swing it around you or open it and blow in the tube. It would work. If it still doesn't work, you can remove the tip, blow again and place the tip back, but it can be a bit messy and is generally too much trouble.
In Russia we do not believe in copyrights. Soviet Union didn't sign the Gevena treaty - that's why foreign countries could print books of Soviet authors without paying any royalties. Everything the professional artists, directors or writers made in Russia ultimately belonged to the people. Of course, the state paid to the authors, but all distribution rights did not belong to them. Not surprisingly, the quality and quantity of books and music, for example, was much better then. Today you have pulp detectives and love stories occupy most of the market, just like everywhere. Of course, there are good book, but they aren't very profitable or popular.
Times changed, but Russian people still do not like copyrights and do not believe in them. As someone succinclty put it, "Russians believe that they have a birthright to use MS Windows and MS Office for free". And it is not far from truth. In one foreign TV program about piracy they interviewed a police officer. He explained that Russian people were oppressed for so long that they hold dearly their newly acquired freedoms, including freedom of access to information. And you will have to take it from our cold dead hands.
The US is trying to force our culture to change to accomodate the dieing business models of American monopolies. Where is the respects for our beliefs that you are talking about? There is no respect whatsoever. But you will not subdue our nature, we will not tolerate insane "life+70 years" copyright terms, we will not tolerate copyrights at all, until you can offer us what we want. In case of music, videos and software we want it to be released here at the same time as worldwide and with prices only a bit higher than for pirated copies. Those companies who do it, enjoy the loyalty of their customers. Those who try to fight this, die.
Have it ever occured to you that "samizdat" is just another name for piracy? The Party and KGB could not succeed and RIAA, MPAA and BSA can suck our collective dicks as well.