And why is it hard to get a hold of these things? Because people abused them and because folk got hurt.
Again, have a certification program. License people; train them to use lye and whatever else safely. Ensure they are using the chemicals in an appropriate setting and aren't just recklessly endangering people. Just because something is a hobby doesn't mean you shouldn't take it seriously. Have you seen the list of things you have to know and do to become a Ham radio operator?
And then, give these people access to the stuff they need to do what they were looking to do.
Most people fight licensing because they think they know best and don't need training. But people also die because they think they know best and don't need training.
This isn't the 1800's. You don't live in the Wild West.
"they most likely will not be posing a threat to anyone but themselves"
And anyone sharing the same domicile with them... And any emergency services personnel or good Samaritans attempting to rescue them... And anyone living in a building attached to theirs... And etc.
I take it you've never seen a chemical fire start. Or had a reaction get out of control and start to overheat. Ever get a wiff of mustard gas because someone decided to mix bleach with ammonia without a hood?
We used to have all that happen in college and those were simple labs where you were working towards known results. Even then, with the proper safety equpiment and procedures in place, people got hurt.
I'm not saying there is no place for hobbists. I'm saying that if anything, these folk need to be regulated a bit more.
Perhaps if we didn't suspect that the budding chemist was doing their work using leftover butter tubs and duct tape, with a bucket of water next to them to put out a sodium fire, they'd be able to get better access to the stuff people think is dangerous.
"I'm not sure if you realize how difficult it is to harm someone accidentally from experimenting with chemistry."
Statement B:
"there are a lot of ways to harm yourself if you are trying to make explosives or other chemicals that involve dangerous reactions"
Observation: The speaker seems to divide things into "safe experimentation" and "bomb-making".
Observation: The purpose of experimentation is to uncover knowledge not previously known, either to the experimenter directly or the world at large.
Observation: No one suddenly came up with formula of gunpowder; it was developed, through experimentation for several centuries.
Observation: If the end result of an experiment is unknown, then there is no guarantee that any reaction that will occur will be a 'safe' one. In fact in many areas of chemistry, the only real guarantee is that the reaction will be horribly unsafe.
Conclusion: Speaker isn't aware of the cognitive dissonance in his thought patterns or is truly unaware of what experimentation means and entails.
Your arguement that hobbist chemists should be completely unregulated is that even with all the regulation with 200,000,000 registered drivers, 40,000 people are still killed each year in accidents.
Or in other words two hundreths of a percent.
And therefore regulation must not work.
You then go on to add that surely there fewer chemists than drivers and thus even if they do kill someone, there would be far fewer deaths related to this than driving.
That is your arguement?
Perhaps you should consider debate strategy as your next hobby to pick up.
The reason there are only 40,000 deaths a year instead of 1,000,000 is because the government realized that driving was a dangerous occupation that required regulation. Do you honestly think that if you removed speed limits, manditory licenses, and safety inspections the number of deaths would go down?
And you need a license and insurance to drive a car. More so if you do it for a living.
The cars you drive have been designed, by law, to meet minimium safety requirements.
Plus, in most states your car is required to be inspected regularly to ensure it's still within those requirements.
So, do your hobbist chemists have to be certified or licensed? Are they required to carry extra liability insurance? Do they have lab inspections to verify that they are up to OSHA standards and have the proper saftey equipment on hand?
My guess is no.
And honestly, I hear about 80 car pileups about once a year. On the other hand, I still live in the Meth Capital state and hear about meth lab explosions, children and adults being posioned by the noxious fumes, and other misc. bad events about once a month.
Decades ago, a professor in college asked me what I considered was most desirable trait to look for in a potential hire.
My response was, "I want lazy people."
Among all other traits, maximizing laziness is the quickest way to efficiency.
If you pretend that all other traits could be rolled into a single axis of which the two extreme ends could be labeled "Stupid" and "Smart", and then figured how much work got done over the spectrum of Stupid&Smart vs Lazy&HardWorker it would look like this:
Stupid Lazy doesn't do work. You pay them and get zero units out of them. Stupid HardWorker does two units of work, wrong. You pay them and still get zero units out of them.
Winner, Lazy. Hardworker cost you more in materials.
NotStupid and NotSmart Lazy works just hard enough to get paid, finding a job is unpaid work. You pay them and get one unit of work. NotStupid and NotSmart Hardworker does two units of work. You pay them and get two units.
Winner, Hardworker. Lazy didn't produce as much
Smart Lazy realizes that thinking long term pays off and works out a way to produce one unit of work for less than half the effort. You pay them and get two or more units.
Smart Hardworker realizes the same and does the same and combined with their work ethic, produces more than four units. However, because management notices that Smart Hardworker is pumping out over four units of work for each you pay for, he's just been promoted to your job.
Winner, Lazy. He doesn't want your job. Plus Hardworker now needs to hire a replacement for their old position.
Of course, I was a comp sci major in an engineering school and the professor was teaching a business class, so my answer was tounge in cheek.
But on the other hand, I think you are greatly underestimating the power of pride in your work. Even if someone is lazy, they realize doing a good job means happy clients. Happy clients mean more potential for work in the future. And if they don't realize that, perhaps crap work isn't because they are lazy but because they aren't able of making anything better.
If your contractors provide you crap, you either need to review how you treat them or how you pick them.
RF connectors are good if you have somehow lucked into a bw tv that was made recently enough to have those connections. But most of the ones I've ever seen use the old school connections which involve the antenna wires ending in bare metal forks that are held in by actual screws tightened down on them. And I haven't seen any converter boxes that come with those. And before you laugh and ask how many people would actually have that sort of setup still: When my grandma took a turn for the worse and we had to finally move her to a retirement community to ensure she was around people who would take care of her instead of being alone in a house in the middle of the country with the closest neighbor being five miles away, the TV she been using in her bedroom was one of those. And that was this year.
Since the devices are specifically designed NOT to do that and the only studies that say they will are the ones published by the companies fighting tooth and nail to kill this dead, I'd say you are talking FUD. It might be well meaning FUD, but its FUD all the same.
Think about it, your TV is getting a strong enough digital signal that you aren't getting macro blocking routinely already, and yet this signal is suppose to be weak enough that the whitespace device can't see it?
Even if the TV is between the tower and the device, if the device is near enough to interfere with reception it's probably near enough to pick up SOME signal, even if it's not a signal strong enough to play.
And if we are talking about a long range signal from the device, the specs have already covered encoding your device so it knows what channels are suppose to be in use in the area and therefore will avoid them regardless of detection.
Sure the Pro Audio industry will need to make some changes to adapt, but users such as singers and corporate CEOs tend to get awful angry when their mic doesn't work...
Dear me, has no one thought of the CEO's and over paid pop stars? The humanity...
I would have more symphathy for them if they weren't using devices which were unlicensed themselves to begin with.
Shall we all bemoan the fate of the black and white TV next? After all, come Febuary, these will stop working unless their owner shells out money for a converter box. And since most BW tv's don't have modern connectors and most converters don't have legacy connectors, it'll even more messy.
That at least, bothers people I'd actually care about.
Conversely, if you have written the spec so that they must not stomp on licensed signals, why drag your feet on waiting on prototypes that are perfect?
Oh wait, I know... because really the problem is the people who are already illegally using the spectrum (i.e. broadcasters and their wireless mics) and who see this as a threat to their own monopolies want to kill the idea and playing the waiting game gives them more time to do it in.
Steam is proof that there is a working middle ground between absolutely no protection on your software and simply hoping everyone is honest enough to pay for their games and locking the games down so hard that only pirates can play your games.
While there are disadvantages to Steam, especially with games that weren't written with it in mind or adapted to it later on, on the whole Valve has done an excellent job of making their 'restrictions' reasonable and in providing extras that make up for those restrictions.
As you said, more companies need to look at what is working and emulate that. Unfortunately, like DRM on music, I don't think the actual purpose of EA's style of DRM to be the same purpose as Valves.
EA wants to keep selling you the same game over again, literally. Look at how they handled the Sims series. Every time they released a bundle, it would include expansions from the previous bundles. But it wasn't as simple as "everything in the old bundle". They'd release one set with expansions 1, 2, and 3. One set with expansions 4, 5, and 6. Then the next year it'd be expansions 1, 3, 5 and 2, 4, 6 with the original game matched up with 7 and 8. (Not the actual order, I'm not that invested in looking them up on Amazon, but it is fairly close)
DRM that limits installs and prompts you to buy a new copy when you run out instead of reminding you that you can call customer support to reset the installs, works to that purpose. EA's version is designed really for only one thing, making it so that two years from now when they release the 'Game X collection', with five old games that they haven't even bothered to update to be able to run on the current version of Windows, you'll have to buy it to play any of the games in it because your orginal copy is out of installs.
Valve on the other hand wants to keep selling you new games, to the point where they allowed people who had Half-Life prior to Steam to convert to Steam versions and where they have set it up so that buying a 'box set' like the Orange Box let you re-gift the games in it that you already had. Valve's version is the real DRM, the point is to allow you to play your game almost everywhere without being able to give away free copies to all your friends.
You are 100% correct. Everybody has a right to healthcare.
Everybody has a right to walk into a doctor's office, say "I'm sick," and expect the doctor to try to heal them.
What they do NOT have a right to do is take the bill and hand-it-off to their neighbors & force the neighbors to pay the bill. That's called theft. It's YOUR bill; YOU pay for it.
And everyone in the world agrees with that till they get sick.
Till they get sick and look at their bill and realize they are paying $50 for an aspirin pill.
Till they get sick and look at their bill and realize that the reason they are paying $50 for an aspirin pill is because the hospital has to pay for the hundred million dollar piece of equipment they use to diagnose people.
Till they get sick and look at their bill and realize that the reason they are paying $50 for an aspirin pill is because the hospital has to pay for the hundred million dollar piece of equipment because the medical equipment company to cover the cost of research and development.
Till they realize that the moment they got the bill they were already paying for every other patient in that hospital and in the nation.
At which point they normally realize that your argument is full of bullshit and the only real difference between a socialized system and what we have is at least a socialized system allows to you to get out from under your medical bills should you ever get a real sickness.
About a decade ago, a friend of mine got the news that her father had just been diagnosed with cancer. He owned his own construction company, he and his wife had a nice home on the outskirts of the town they lived in. He wasn't a millionaire but it'd be hard to call him poor.
After three years of fighting it he couldn't pay for his treatments and but he was still too 'rich' to qualify for assistance. He was too proud to rack up a debt that wouldn't be paid off so before he died, he watched as almost everything he built and saved for his daughter was sold off to pay for his medical bills. His business, his home, his legacy for his daughter.
In the last month of his life, his wife was diagnosed with MS. She killed herself rather than be treated because she was afraid there would be nothing left but debt to pass along to their daughter.
The healthy can talk all the bullshit they want about paying your own way. Get sick in America and realize how expensive it actually is before you start condemning the rest of the world for considering heathcare something that should be extended to everyone without the specter of having your entire life afterwards destroyed by debt.
I also hear that with enough whitespace noise, the dead will arise and walk again. Killing and maiming the living in a never ending, ceasless desire for all to join them. Eventually we will all live in walled cities, praying for a quick death as plauge and starvation consume us from within. All because of little Suzzy's Whitespace Enabled iPod (LSWEP!).
Or maybe that was just some unsubstantiated FUD spread by someone who wanted to scare people into thinking the world was ending.
MD5 works on whatever data is fed to it. It's not a process in itself, it's a function used in the process. You can feed raw data to it, or you can pre-process that data to ensure more useful results. The function doesn't care.
And you know, given I used to use the program I was speaking of on literally millions of picture files 'harvested' out of Usenet, and it did a damn fine job of filtering out duplicates even when people had done stupid shit like converting a jpg to gif, croping and resizing, then dumping huge BBS watermarks in, I'd say it works. I'm sure these programs are a dime a dozen, but I'm fairly certain the one I used was called Odin or something similar.
The problem I had wasn't it's failure to catch duplicates but the fact that it often tagged pictures in a series as duplicates due to their simularity. Which I again point out would not be a flaw for people using these as their preliminary fishing expedition.
>>>Otherwise, all that was shown was a brief snippet of text surrounding the search term.
Not true. I've read whole books on google. If it had been fair-use such as a single page, then you're right, it would have been okay. But google presented searchers with virtually the entire book.
Which books? Because if they did I guarantee you it was because they had the right to. Either the book was in the public domain or the rights to present it that way were already obtained.
Name the books, otherwise, I call bullshit. I've used the service and I know it only provides snippets unless it has negotiated the rights to more.
How are book previews limited? Many of the books you can preview on Google Book Search are still in copyright, and are displayed with the permission of publishers and authors. You can browse these "limited preview" titles just as you would in a bookstore, but you won't be able to see more pages than the copyright holder has made available.
When you've accessed the maximum number of pages allowed for a book, any remaining pages will be omitted from your preview. You can order full copies of any book using the "Buy this book" links to the right of the preview page.
More than likely the hashes are generated against the picture not the file data, and are 'fuzzy' enough that minute changes in the image are ignored. That was many 'Usenet duplicate image detectors' do. For instance, one of the old programs I used to use did this:
* Render image and convert it to grayscale. * Resize image to 128x128 or some other 'thumbnail' size. * Create a hash based on the thumbnail.
You'd have to mangle a picture a good amount for it not to show up as a positive match. The problem is you'd have a good number of false positives. On the other hand, if you are using this as a fishing expedition to find an excuse for a more through search, that really isn't a problem... is it?
And when you wax overly dramatic and descend into hyperbole, you become no better than a bombastic neocon like Rush Limbaugh, IMHO.
The project we are discussing did not present even a single page to the user unless rights to do so were specifically obtained.
Otherwise, all that was shown was a brief snippet of text surrounding the search term. This not only is fair use, but given the point was to highlight books that discussed a topic you were interested in, would have resulted in more money for the authors as their texts were purchased for a more through perusal.
Or in your world are used book stores and libraries also "Plantation Masters"?
Nice way to prove a point... wait... no it wasn't. Everything Google was doing would have been covered under fair use, meaning it wasn't infringment. What arguments do you have to say it was?
Slashdot Mirror
And why is it hard to get a hold of these things? Because people abused them and because folk got hurt.
Again, have a certification program. License people; train them to use lye and whatever else safely. Ensure they are using the chemicals in an appropriate setting and aren't just recklessly endangering people. Just because something is a hobby doesn't mean you shouldn't take it seriously. Have you seen the list of things you have to know and do to become a Ham radio operator?
And then, give these people access to the stuff they need to do what they were looking to do.
Most people fight licensing because they think they know best and don't need training. But people also die because they think they know best and don't need training.
This isn't the 1800's. You don't live in the Wild West.
"they most likely will not be posing a threat to anyone but themselves"
And anyone sharing the same domicile with them...
And any emergency services personnel or good Samaritans attempting to rescue them...
And anyone living in a building attached to theirs...
And etc.
I take it you've never seen a chemical fire start. Or had a reaction get out of control and start to overheat. Ever get a wiff of mustard gas because someone decided to mix bleach with ammonia without a hood?
We used to have all that happen in college and those were simple labs where you were working towards known results. Even then, with the proper safety equpiment and procedures in place, people got hurt.
I'm not saying there is no place for hobbists. I'm saying that if anything, these folk need to be regulated a bit more.
Perhaps if we didn't suspect that the budding chemist was doing their work using leftover butter tubs and duct tape, with a bucket of water next to them to put out a sodium fire, they'd be able to get better access to the stuff people think is dangerous.
Statement A:
Statement B:
Observation: The speaker seems to divide things into "safe experimentation" and "bomb-making".
Observation: The purpose of experimentation is to uncover knowledge not previously known, either to the experimenter directly or the world at large.
Observation: No one suddenly came up with formula of gunpowder; it was developed, through experimentation for several centuries.
Observation: If the end result of an experiment is unknown, then there is no guarantee that any reaction that will occur will be a 'safe' one. In fact in many areas of chemistry, the only real guarantee is that the reaction will be horribly unsafe.
Conclusion: Speaker isn't aware of the cognitive dissonance in his thought patterns or is truly unaware of what experimentation means and entails.
So, am I getting this straight?
Your arguement that hobbist chemists should be completely unregulated is that even with all the regulation with 200,000,000 registered drivers, 40,000 people are still killed each year in accidents.
Or in other words two hundreths of a percent.
And therefore regulation must not work.
You then go on to add that surely there fewer chemists than drivers and thus even if they do kill someone, there would be far fewer deaths related to this than driving.
That is your arguement?
Perhaps you should consider debate strategy as your next hobby to pick up.
The reason there are only 40,000 deaths a year instead of 1,000,000 is because the government realized that driving was a dangerous occupation that required regulation. Do you honestly think that if you removed speed limits, manditory licenses, and safety inspections the number of deaths would go down?
And you need a license and insurance to drive a car. More so if you do it for a living.
The cars you drive have been designed, by law, to meet minimium safety requirements.
Plus, in most states your car is required to be inspected regularly to ensure it's still within those requirements.
So, do your hobbist chemists have to be certified or licensed? Are they required to carry extra liability insurance? Do they have lab inspections to verify that they are up to OSHA standards and have the proper saftey equipment on hand?
My guess is no.
And honestly, I hear about 80 car pileups about once a year. On the other hand, I still live in the Meth Capital state and hear about meth lab explosions, children and adults being posioned by the noxious fumes, and other misc. bad events about once a month.
Borders.
Boarders are guests at a Bed and Breakfast. Borders are the invisible imaginary lines people draw on maps.
Decades ago, a professor in college asked me what I considered was most desirable trait to look for in a potential hire.
My response was, "I want lazy people."
Among all other traits, maximizing laziness is the quickest way to efficiency.
If you pretend that all other traits could be rolled into a single axis of which the two extreme ends could be labeled "Stupid" and "Smart", and then figured how much work got done over the spectrum of Stupid&Smart vs Lazy&HardWorker it would look like this:
Stupid Lazy doesn't do work. You pay them and get zero units out of them.
Stupid HardWorker does two units of work, wrong. You pay them and still get zero units out of them.
Winner, Lazy. Hardworker cost you more in materials.
NotStupid and NotSmart Lazy works just hard enough to get paid, finding a job is unpaid work. You pay them and get one unit of work.
NotStupid and NotSmart Hardworker does two units of work. You pay them and get two units.
Winner, Hardworker. Lazy didn't produce as much
Smart Lazy realizes that thinking long term pays off and works out a way to produce one unit of work for less than half the effort. You pay them and get two or more units.
Smart Hardworker realizes the same and does the same and combined with their work ethic, produces more than four units. However, because management notices that Smart Hardworker is pumping out over four units of work for each you pay for, he's just been promoted to your job.
Winner, Lazy. He doesn't want your job. Plus Hardworker now needs to hire a replacement for their old position.
Of course, I was a comp sci major in an engineering school and the professor was teaching a business class, so my answer was tounge in cheek.
But on the other hand, I think you are greatly underestimating the power of pride in your work. Even if someone is lazy, they realize doing a good job means happy clients. Happy clients mean more potential for work in the future. And if they don't realize that, perhaps crap work isn't because they are lazy but because they aren't able of making anything better.
If your contractors provide you crap, you either need to review how you treat them or how you pick them.
RF connectors are good if you have somehow lucked into a bw tv that was made recently enough to have those connections. But most of the ones I've ever seen use the old school connections which involve the antenna wires ending in bare metal forks that are held in by actual screws tightened down on them. And I haven't seen any converter boxes that come with those. And before you laugh and ask how many people would actually have that sort of setup still: When my grandma took a turn for the worse and we had to finally move her to a retirement community to ensure she was around people who would take care of her instead of being alone in a house in the middle of the country with the closest neighbor being five miles away, the TV she been using in her bedroom was one of those. And that was this year.
Yes. Please.
Since the devices are specifically designed NOT to do that and the only studies that say they will are the ones published by the companies fighting tooth and nail to kill this dead, I'd say you are talking FUD. It might be well meaning FUD, but its FUD all the same.
Think about it, your TV is getting a strong enough digital signal that you aren't getting macro blocking routinely already, and yet this signal is suppose to be weak enough that the whitespace device can't see it?
Even if the TV is between the tower and the device, if the device is near enough to interfere with reception it's probably near enough to pick up SOME signal, even if it's not a signal strong enough to play.
And if we are talking about a long range signal from the device, the specs have already covered encoding your device so it knows what channels are suppose to be in use in the area and therefore will avoid them regardless of detection.
Dear me, has no one thought of the CEO's and over paid pop stars? The humanity...
I would have more symphathy for them if they weren't using devices which were unlicensed themselves to begin with.
Shall we all bemoan the fate of the black and white TV next? After all, come Febuary, these will stop working unless their owner shells out money for a converter box. And since most BW tv's don't have modern connectors and most converters don't have legacy connectors, it'll even more messy.
That at least, bothers people I'd actually care about.
Conversely, if you have written the spec so that they must not stomp on licensed signals, why drag your feet on waiting on prototypes that are perfect?
Oh wait, I know... because really the problem is the people who are already illegally using the spectrum (i.e. broadcasters and their wireless mics) and who see this as a threat to their own monopolies want to kill the idea and playing the waiting game gives them more time to do it in.
Actually, that's standard verbage and would be far more acceptable than claiming ownership.
EA's EULA simply says that you are giving them permission to use your work. Sony's is actually claiming your work is theirs.
The difference is, with EA you still own your work and theoretically could do whatever else you wanted with it.
Steam is proof that there is a working middle ground between absolutely no protection on your software and simply hoping everyone is honest enough to pay for their games and locking the games down so hard that only pirates can play your games.
While there are disadvantages to Steam, especially with games that weren't written with it in mind or adapted to it later on, on the whole Valve has done an excellent job of making their 'restrictions' reasonable and in providing extras that make up for those restrictions.
As you said, more companies need to look at what is working and emulate that. Unfortunately, like DRM on music, I don't think the actual purpose of EA's style of DRM to be the same purpose as Valves.
EA wants to keep selling you the same game over again, literally. Look at how they handled the Sims series. Every time they released a bundle, it would include expansions from the previous bundles. But it wasn't as simple as "everything in the old bundle". They'd release one set with expansions 1, 2, and 3. One set with expansions 4, 5, and 6. Then the next year it'd be expansions 1, 3, 5 and 2, 4, 6 with the original game matched up with 7 and 8. (Not the actual order, I'm not that invested in looking them up on Amazon, but it is fairly close)
DRM that limits installs and prompts you to buy a new copy when you run out instead of reminding you that you can call customer support to reset the installs, works to that purpose. EA's version is designed really for only one thing, making it so that two years from now when they release the 'Game X collection', with five old games that they haven't even bothered to update to be able to run on the current version of Windows, you'll have to buy it to play any of the games in it because your orginal copy is out of installs.
Valve on the other hand wants to keep selling you new games, to the point where they allowed people who had Half-Life prior to Steam to convert to Steam versions and where they have set it up so that buying a 'box set' like the Orange Box let you re-gift the games in it that you already had. Valve's version is the real DRM, the point is to allow you to play your game almost everywhere without being able to give away free copies to all your friends.
And then the first time there is a fire in the neighborhood, you suddenly become a cop/fireman killer....
And everyone in the world agrees with that till they get sick.
Till they get sick and look at their bill and realize they are paying $50 for an aspirin pill.
Till they get sick and look at their bill and realize that the reason they are paying $50 for an aspirin pill is because the hospital has to pay for the hundred million dollar piece of equipment they use to diagnose people.
Till they get sick and look at their bill and realize that the reason they are paying $50 for an aspirin pill is because the hospital has to pay for the hundred million dollar piece of equipment because the medical equipment company to cover the cost of research and development.
Till they realize that the moment they got the bill they were already paying for every other patient in that hospital and in the nation.
At which point they normally realize that your argument is full of bullshit and the only real difference between a socialized system and what we have is at least a socialized system allows to you to get out from under your medical bills should you ever get a real sickness.
About a decade ago, a friend of mine got the news that her father had just been diagnosed with cancer. He owned his own construction company, he and his wife had a nice home on the outskirts of the town they lived in. He wasn't a millionaire but it'd be hard to call him poor.
After three years of fighting it he couldn't pay for his treatments and but he was still too 'rich' to qualify for assistance. He was too proud to rack up a debt that wouldn't be paid off so before he died, he watched as almost everything he built and saved for his daughter was sold off to pay for his medical bills. His business, his home, his legacy for his daughter.
In the last month of his life, his wife was diagnosed with MS. She killed herself rather than be treated because she was afraid there would be nothing left but debt to pass along to their daughter.
The healthy can talk all the bullshit they want about paying your own way. Get sick in America and realize how expensive it actually is before you start condemning the rest of the world for considering heathcare something that should be extended to everyone without the specter of having your entire life afterwards destroyed by debt.
Perhaps, they just read your post and realized it was mostly unsubstantiated bullshiting in the fine fashion of Microsoft/Neocon/Fox News FUD.
Perhaps, they aren't modding you down because they disagree with you but because you didn't add squat to the discussion.
I also hear that with enough whitespace noise, the dead will arise and walk again. Killing and maiming the living in a never ending, ceasless desire for all to join them. Eventually we will all live in walled cities, praying for a quick death as plauge and starvation consume us from within. All because of little Suzzy's Whitespace Enabled iPod (LSWEP!).
Or maybe that was just some unsubstantiated FUD spread by someone who wanted to scare people into thinking the world was ending.
Who knows.
Or at least scans money....
MD5 works on whatever data is fed to it. It's not a process in itself, it's a function used in the process. You can feed raw data to it, or you can pre-process that data to ensure more useful results. The function doesn't care.
And you know, given I used to use the program I was speaking of on literally millions of picture files 'harvested' out of Usenet, and it did a damn fine job of filtering out duplicates even when people had done stupid shit like converting a jpg to gif, croping and resizing, then dumping huge BBS watermarks in, I'd say it works. I'm sure these programs are a dime a dozen, but I'm fairly certain the one I used was called Odin or something similar.
The problem I had wasn't it's failure to catch duplicates but the fact that it often tagged pictures in a series as duplicates due to their simularity. Which I again point out would not be a flaw for people using these as their preliminary fishing expedition.
Which books? Because if they did I guarantee you it was because they had the right to. Either the book was in the public domain or the rights to present it that way were already obtained.
Name the books, otherwise, I call bullshit. I've used the service and I know it only provides snippets unless it has negotiated the rights to more.
From Google:
More than likely the hashes are generated against the picture not the file data, and are 'fuzzy' enough that minute changes in the image are ignored. That was many 'Usenet duplicate image detectors' do. For instance, one of the old programs I used to use did this:
* Render image and convert it to grayscale.
* Resize image to 128x128 or some other 'thumbnail' size.
* Create a hash based on the thumbnail.
You'd have to mangle a picture a good amount for it not to show up as a positive match. The problem is you'd have a good number of false positives. On the other hand, if you are using this as a fishing expedition to find an excuse for a more through search, that really isn't a problem... is it?
And when you wax overly dramatic and descend into hyperbole, you become no better than a bombastic neocon like Rush Limbaugh, IMHO.
The project we are discussing did not present even a single page to the user unless rights to do so were specifically obtained.
Otherwise, all that was shown was a brief snippet of text surrounding the search term. This not only is fair use, but given the point was to highlight books that discussed a topic you were interested in, would have resulted in more money for the authors as their texts were purchased for a more through perusal.
Or in your world are used book stores and libraries also "Plantation Masters"?
Nice way to prove a point... wait... no it wasn't. Everything Google was doing would have been covered under fair use, meaning it wasn't infringment. What arguments do you have to say it was?
Except that it wasn't infringment. This was just another mosquito attempting to suck blood from what it saw as a rich target.