If I take a photograph of a page of the Necronomicon, my photograph is covered by copyright.
NO NO NO NO NO. A photograph of a page of a book is not necessarily covered by copyright. It is if you have done some creative transformation, but if what you have is a simple reproduction then you cannot claim copyright in that reproduction. This is already covered in this discussion. Copyright is for works of creativity, not mere reproduction.
Sometimes the libraries that make copies and put them up claim that they own the digital images, ("own" in the rights sense), but they don't.
Even if you don't know who owns the copyright, fair use can still apply. So if the library is thinking that its use of the images falls within fair use, they don't have to know who owns the copyright. For older items, and especially items that were never published (manuscripts, hand-drawn maps, personal photographs) one rarely knows who the copyright holder might be. Claiming fair use is a bit of a risk, but I would guess that the library has done a risk analysis on the items that it is making available.
The difference is that guys don't get their panties in a bunch because all of the male video game characters have cartoonishly large muscles.
Would they if the male video game characters had average muscles and HUGE SCHLONGS? I don't think anyone is complaining that the female character is idealized (i.e. long legs, perfect hair, pert nose). I think it's that breasts are sexual. So the equivalent would be for guys with bulging crotches, and maybe a bit showing. Which reminds me of the Heavy Metal cartoon "Den" in which both characters were naked, and both had very large sexual features. THAT was equal opportunity.
It isn't the fact of a keyboard that is the problem -- it's that we still have to type every single letter, even though our language is highly predictable. Look at the court reporter keyboard, with its 7 (or is it 9) keys, and a method for typing words without typing every letter. Court reporters now have a way to hook up their keyboard to a computer that does a simultaneous translation of the shorthand into full text. All they usually need to tweek are people's names and place names, since those are not easy to shorten. We should be able to create the same text with many fewer keystrokes.
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it. -- Terry Pratchett
But how do I evaluate the security policy you have around that pesky LDAP server:-)?
That's why I think this only works in the educational environment of Internet2. To begin with, the main interactions are based on cooperation, not competition. There also isn't the need for precision that, say, a banking or credit card transaction needs. And the licenses for the educational environment (at least the licenses that I'm familiar with) are bulk, not transaction-based, which is another reason why precision isn't necessary. It's totally different from the b2c world that is typical of e-commerce.
The only way to approximate that in a commercial environment would be to form "buyer's clubs." Sort of an online Costco (but you wouldn't have to buy everything by the dozen;-). We could belong to the club, but the club would validate us and shield us from the actual merchants. However, the attempts to create anonymous purchasing systems that were so touted five or so years ago have all been met with disinterest, something that I find fascinating from a purely sociological viewpoint.
Yes, according to their web site they are. And the Internet2 community (mainly universities) is developing a way for its users to interact anonymously with online sites that require an identity. It's called Shibboleth . The weak spot in "Shib" is that it relies on the university's LDAP server to determine your status, but the identity that goes out across the net is regenerated for each new use and is short-lived. This wouldn't work for purchases, but it can define you as a legitimate subscriber to a service once you have signed on.
"If you build this technology, they will require it." David Sobel, CFP 2000
Actually, the 800 pound gorilla is the Dep't of Defense, which is also requiring suppliers to move toward carton-level RFID in 2005 and item-level by 2007. DoD buys everything from toilets to tampons in huge quantities, and no one wants to be left off of their supplier list.
They also want them to stay there for returns. Both for the returns they put back on the shelf, but also to make sure that anything returned was actually purchased, not stolen. There's quite a "business" in returning stolen goods for cash.
Actually the number of women and girls using computers doesn't differ greatly from that of men, at least so the studies show. The difference appears to be identification with the world of computing, and participation in activities around computers (like/., or signing on to a Firefox ad). There was a time about ten years ago when I saw figures saying that the majority of computer users at work were women, probably due to jobs in data entry and other office work. So your statement "representational of how much women *like* computers" pretty much nails it.
What is generally used to make human names unique is the date of birth. It would be pretty rare to have the same exact name plus the same exact date of birth. Of course, once you have that information, you can do all kinds of nasty things like look that person up in public databases (voter registration, DMV, etc.). So in the end it isn't good to have your i-name reveal anything about you that can be used to find information you don't want to reveal (i.e. address), and definitely not to have it provide information that will connect to your real-world identity if you wish to keep those separate. That makes it an even more difficult task.
The latest version of Adobe PDF reader IS a dedicated ebook reader, if you accept software in that category. And you can get an Adobe reader for just about every platform. At this time there aren't any really viable dedicated hardware readers, although people keep trying. If you look on Amazon's ebook list you'll see that almost all of the books are available in PDF format. PDF is the predominant format used for lending books through libraries (and many public libraries lend them), mainly because the Adobe software is free and relatively platform neutral.
I really don't understand why the bathtub is such a big deal in these discussions, but....
I'm more comfortable taking my PDA in to the tub than a paper-based book. The PDA only takes on hand (handy for certain kinds of books), is lighter, and actually survives a bit of moisture better than paper. It's not like getting into the tub with your hairdryer or your toaster, for christsake! You can't electrocute yourself with a plastic device with two AAA batteries! Give up this argument!
Ebooks loose a certain intuitive spacial sense of location in the work that paper books provide. When you pick up a paper book, it's easy to find your place again and it's relatively easy to find former passages that one might like to refer back to from time to time.
This is an area where ebooks actually excel. When you open an ebook, it opens automatically to the place where you left off, so you can't lose your place. In every ebook format that I've encountered, you can also bookmark any passages that you want to get back to. And they all allow you to keyword search through the text, something that "real" books don't.
PDF *is* one of the formats for commercial ebooks. As a matter of fact, Adobe is one of the early entrants into ebook technology and standards. They are one of the founders of the Open eBook Forum, the main ebook industry organization. The PDFs are DRM'd with Adobe's own standard, but it's a very common format.
Because the cost of printing is actually very small, at least for "popular" books. One publisher told me that only $2 of a hard backbook and $.50 of a paperback book goes to the printing and binding. The big costs are editorial and promotion. (I don't know about distribution and warehousing, but there is money to be saved there, you would think.)
Unfortunately, that argument isn't very convincing to customers. We are used to seeing books as physical and fairly durable (I have books on my shelf that I've had for 20 years or more). An ebook, at least today, is essentially temporary because the technology will change within a few years and render that particular copy unusable. I bought about 2 dozen ebooks for my Palm Pilot, which has since died, and about ten ebooks for a Rocketbook, which was a wonderful device that is no longer being made. I tend to consider ebooks the way I consider the books I buy in airports before a long flight -- disposable.
Interesting post on a day when the quote at the bottom of the page is: "Were there no women, men might live like gods." -- Thomas Dekker
Re:authorized downloads with ads inserted?
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The difference between broadcast and download is that when a show is re-broadcast NEW ads are inserted. When you download, you re-watch it with ads that are out of date. Think about how rapidly products change -- car models last a year, household products seem to be on a six-month schedule, and there's a new frozen or boxed food-like product every week, it seems. It's of no use to the companies that you see these ads a few months later much less a year or more later. If the shows are paid for by advertising, that advertising has to be up to the minute to have any value. Downloading is the opposite of this model and requires a different kind of payment. No, I'm not trying to justify their fear of downloading, just explain why downloading with ads doesn't fit their revenue model.
It's not the card that determines the distance from the reader at which it can be read -- the cards are "passive", which means that they have no juice of their own, they just reflect back to the reader. So a more powerful reader can increase the distance that an RFID tag in the card can be read, although the various frequencies of tags (from 125 kilohertz to 2.45 gigahertz) each have their own distance limits. So it's quite possible that your card could be read from 2-3 feet away if a different reader were being used.
Although removing the SSN does remove one avenue to the identification of the individuals, it still leaves other ways. If the record still contains an address and birth date, the zip code + birth date makes a dandy identifier which can be looked up in any number of databases based on public records. Basically ALL information about the individual must be removed and replaced with a dumb identifier. If some demographic info is needed (i.e. age, area of residence) these can be given a "proprietary" code that is at least less obvious than the actual data.
From the SSN FAQ of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility:
Is it illegal for someone to ask for my SSN?
The short answer is that there are many restrictions on government agencies asking for your number, but few on individuals or companies. When someone from a government agency asks for your number, they are required to provide a Privacy Act Disclosure Notice, which is required to tell you what law allows them to ask, whether you have to provide your number, and what will happen if you don't provide the number.
Private companies aren't required to follow this law, and in general your recourse is to find another company to do business with if you don't like their policies.
Absolutely. Making "public" records available universally is a different meaning to "public" in public records in situ. Although the word "public" was used, it really meant the local community. When you change that to "everyone in the world with internet access" you change the context in which the data resides... and for data, context is everything. For one thing, it narrows the scope to a small portion of the population so that accurate identification (or, conversely, less mistaken identity) is facilitated.
Making it difficult to get to the records DOES provide some privacy, and that is the level of privacy to which we've become accustomed. It's like the difference between your Aunt Mable having a listed phone in the phone book for her town of 2,000, and having her phone listed in the internet white pages. She allowed her phone to be listed because she is a part of that community and feels secure there. She probably doesn't feel the same way about being "visible" beyond that community.
What this means is that we are going to have to either revise how we define "public", or we're going to have to get used to a different view on privacy. I'd prefer the former.
Remember that Internet access is more than web sites. It can be used to transmit radio, to make phone calls, to get news, to exchange email with a medical expert. In other words, the Internet can bring a number of important services to a rural area. You want people to have clean water? Well, they need to know what they can do to promote cleaner water (a few drops of bleach, boiling, etc.). International agencies, like the UN, the World Bank, etc., promote information campaigns for developing countries. Internet access could be part of that.
What always strikes me as interesting about this topic is that people find it so "interesting" - as though there is something surprising or inconsistent about it. In fact most conservatives are quite explicit about the fact that male homosexuality is worse than female homosexuality.
OK, here's my theory. It's all about the number of penises involved in the sex act. If there are two or more, it's outrageous, should be banned, there outta be a law. If there's only one penis, then it's dirty, no one should talk about it, but it's legal. If there are no penises, then it isn't a sex act. Just count the dicks and you have your answer.
"She was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman." -- Voltaire
Alice series, for sexual content, using offensive language, and being unsuited to age group.
Harry Potter series, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, for using offensive language.
"Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy.
"Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, sexual content, offensive language, drugs and violence.
"Go Ask Alice" by Anonymous, for drugs.
"It's Perfectly Normal" by Robie Harris, for homosexuality, nudity, sexual content and sex education.
"We All Fall Down" by Robert Cormier, for offensive language and sexual content.
"King and King" by Linda de Haan, for homosexuality.
"Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language and occult/satanism.
Slashdot Mirror
If I take a photograph of a page of the Necronomicon, my photograph is covered by copyright.
NO NO NO NO NO. A photograph of a page of a book is not necessarily covered by copyright. It is if you have done some creative transformation, but if what you have is a simple reproduction then you cannot claim copyright in that reproduction. This is already covered in this discussion. Copyright is for works of creativity, not mere reproduction.
Sometimes the libraries that make copies and put them up claim that they own the digital images, ("own" in the rights sense), but they don't.
Even if you don't know who owns the copyright, fair use can still apply. So if the library is thinking that its use of the images falls within fair use, they don't have to know who owns the copyright. For older items, and especially items that were never published (manuscripts, hand-drawn maps, personal photographs) one rarely knows who the copyright holder might be. Claiming fair use is a bit of a risk, but I would guess that the library has done a risk analysis on the items that it is making available.
The difference is that guys don't get their panties in a bunch because all of the male video game characters have cartoonishly large muscles.
Would they if the male video game characters had average muscles and HUGE SCHLONGS? I don't think anyone is complaining that the female character is idealized (i.e. long legs, perfect hair, pert nose). I think it's that breasts are sexual. So the equivalent would be for guys with bulging crotches, and maybe a bit showing. Which reminds me of the Heavy Metal cartoon "Den" in which both characters were naked, and both had very large sexual features. THAT was equal opportunity.
It isn't the fact of a keyboard that is the problem -- it's that we still have to type every single letter, even though our language is highly predictable. Look at the court reporter keyboard, with its 7 (or is it 9) keys, and a method for typing words without typing every letter. Court reporters now have a way to hook up their keyboard to a computer that does a simultaneous translation of the shorthand into full text. All they usually need to tweek are people's names and place names, since those are not easy to shorten. We should be able to create the same text with many fewer keystrokes.
The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it. -- Terry Pratchett
But how do I evaluate the security policy you have around that pesky LDAP server :-)?
That's why I think this only works in the educational environment of Internet2. To begin with, the main interactions are based on cooperation, not competition. There also isn't the need for precision that, say, a banking or credit card transaction needs. And the licenses for the educational environment (at least the licenses that I'm familiar with) are bulk, not transaction-based, which is another reason why precision isn't necessary. It's totally different from the b2c world that is typical of e-commerce.
The only way to approximate that in a commercial environment would be to form "buyer's clubs." Sort of an online Costco (but you wouldn't have to buy everything by the dozen ;-). We could belong to the club, but the club would validate us and shield us from the actual merchants. However, the attempts to create anonymous purchasing systems that were so touted five or so years ago have all been met with disinterest, something that I find fascinating from a purely sociological viewpoint.
Yes, according to their web site they are. And the Internet2 community (mainly universities) is developing a way for its users to interact anonymously with online sites that require an identity. It's called Shibboleth . The weak spot in "Shib" is that it relies on the university's LDAP server to determine your status, but the identity that goes out across the net is regenerated for each new use and is short-lived. This wouldn't work for purchases, but it can define you as a legitimate subscriber to a service once you have signed on.
"If you build this technology, they will require it." David Sobel, CFP 2000
Actually, the 800 pound gorilla is the Dep't of Defense, which is also requiring suppliers to move toward carton-level RFID in 2005 and item-level by 2007. DoD buys everything from toilets to tampons in huge quantities, and no one wants to be left off of their supplier list.
They also want them to stay there for returns. Both for the returns they put back on the shelf, but also to make sure that anything returned was actually purchased, not stolen. There's quite a "business" in returning stolen goods for cash.
Actually the number of women and girls using computers doesn't differ greatly from that of men, at least so the studies show. The difference appears to be identification with the world of computing, and participation in activities around computers (like /., or signing on to a Firefox ad). There was a time about ten years ago when I saw figures saying that the majority of computer users at work were women, probably due to jobs in data entry and other office work. So your statement "representational of how much women *like* computers" pretty much nails it.
What is generally used to make human names unique is the date of birth. It would be pretty rare to have the same exact name plus the same exact date of birth. Of course, once you have that information, you can do all kinds of nasty things like look that person up in public databases (voter registration, DMV, etc.). So in the end it isn't good to have your i-name reveal anything about you that can be used to find information you don't want to reveal (i.e. address), and definitely not to have it provide information that will connect to your real-world identity if you wish to keep those separate. That makes it an even more difficult task.
The latest version of Adobe PDF reader IS a dedicated ebook reader, if you accept software in that category. And you can get an Adobe reader for just about every platform. At this time there aren't any really viable dedicated hardware readers, although people keep trying. If you look on Amazon's ebook list you'll see that almost all of the books are available in PDF format. PDF is the predominant format used for lending books through libraries (and many public libraries lend them), mainly because the Adobe software is free and relatively platform neutral.
I really don't understand why the bathtub is such a big deal in these discussions, but....
I'm more comfortable taking my PDA in to the tub than a paper-based book. The PDA only takes on hand (handy for certain kinds of books), is lighter, and actually survives a bit of moisture better than paper. It's not like getting into the tub with your hairdryer or your toaster, for christsake! You can't electrocute yourself with a plastic device with two AAA batteries! Give up this argument!
This is an area where ebooks actually excel. When you open an ebook, it opens automatically to the place where you left off, so you can't lose your place. In every ebook format that I've encountered, you can also bookmark any passages that you want to get back to. And they all allow you to keyword search through the text, something that "real" books don't.
PDF *is* one of the formats for commercial ebooks. As a matter of fact, Adobe is one of the early entrants into ebook technology and standards. They are one of the founders of the Open eBook Forum, the main ebook industry organization. The PDFs are DRM'd with Adobe's own standard, but it's a very common format.
Because the cost of printing is actually very small, at least for "popular" books. One publisher told me that only $2 of a hard backbook and $.50 of a paperback book goes to the printing and binding. The big costs are editorial and promotion. (I don't know about distribution and warehousing, but there is money to be saved there, you would think.)
Unfortunately, that argument isn't very convincing to customers. We are used to seeing books as physical and fairly durable (I have books on my shelf that I've had for 20 years or more). An ebook, at least today, is essentially temporary because the technology will change within a few years and render that particular copy unusable. I bought about 2 dozen ebooks for my Palm Pilot, which has since died, and about ten ebooks for a Rocketbook, which was a wonderful device that is no longer being made. I tend to consider ebooks the way I consider the books I buy in airports before a long flight -- disposable.
Don't forget that some of the geeks ARE chicks.
Interesting post on a day when the quote at the bottom of the page is: "Were there no women, men might live like gods." -- Thomas Dekker
The difference between broadcast and download is that when a show is re-broadcast NEW ads are inserted. When you download, you re-watch it with ads that are out of date. Think about how rapidly products change -- car models last a year, household products seem to be on a six-month schedule, and there's a new frozen or boxed food-like product every week, it seems. It's of no use to the companies that you see these ads a few months later much less a year or more later. If the shows are paid for by advertising, that advertising has to be up to the minute to have any value. Downloading is the opposite of this model and requires a different kind of payment. No, I'm not trying to justify their fear of downloading, just explain why downloading with ads doesn't fit their revenue model.
It's not the card that determines the distance from the reader at which it can be read -- the cards are "passive", which means that they have no juice of their own, they just reflect back to the reader. So a more powerful reader can increase the distance that an RFID tag in the card can be read, although the various frequencies of tags (from 125 kilohertz to 2.45 gigahertz) each have their own distance limits. So it's quite possible that your card could be read from 2-3 feet away if a different reader were being used.
Although removing the SSN does remove one avenue to the identification of the individuals, it still leaves other ways. If the record still contains an address and birth date, the zip code + birth date makes a dandy identifier which can be looked up in any number of databases based on public records. Basically ALL information about the individual must be removed and replaced with a dumb identifier. If some demographic info is needed (i.e. age, area of residence) these can be given a "proprietary" code that is at least less obvious than the actual data.
From the SSN FAQ of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility:
Is it illegal for someone to ask for my SSN?
The short answer is that there are many restrictions on government agencies asking for your number, but few on individuals or companies. When someone from a government agency asks for your number, they are required to provide a Privacy Act Disclosure Notice, which is required to tell you what law allows them to ask, whether you have to provide your number, and what will happen if you don't provide the number.
Private companies aren't required to follow this law, and in general your recourse is to find another company to do business with if you don't like their policies.
Absolutely. Making "public" records available universally is a different meaning to "public" in public records in situ. Although the word "public" was used, it really meant the local community. When you change that to "everyone in the world with internet access" you change the context in which the data resides... and for data, context is everything. For one thing, it narrows the scope to a small portion of the population so that accurate identification (or, conversely, less mistaken identity) is facilitated.
Making it difficult to get to the records DOES provide some privacy, and that is the level of privacy to which we've become accustomed. It's like the difference between your Aunt Mable having a listed phone in the phone book for her town of 2,000, and having her phone listed in the internet white pages. She allowed her phone to be listed because she is a part of that community and feels secure there. She probably doesn't feel the same way about being "visible" beyond that community.
What this means is that we are going to have to either revise how we define "public", or we're going to have to get used to a different view on privacy. I'd prefer the former.
no sig, .sig
Wow, now I know why it was so hard to open that case -- I forgot the balls! Stupid me, I was using a screw driver.
Remember that Internet access is more than web sites. It can be used to transmit radio, to make phone calls, to get news, to exchange email with a medical expert. In other words, the Internet can bring a number of important services to a rural area. You want people to have clean water? Well, they need to know what they can do to promote cleaner water (a few drops of bleach, boiling, etc.). International agencies, like the UN, the World Bank, etc., promote information campaigns for developing countries. Internet access could be part of that.
What always strikes me as interesting about this topic is that people find it so "interesting" - as though there is something surprising or inconsistent about it. In fact most conservatives are quite explicit about the fact that male homosexuality is worse than female homosexuality.
OK, here's my theory. It's all about the number of penises involved in the sex act. If there are two or more, it's outrageous, should be banned, there outta be a law. If there's only one penis, then it's dirty, no one should talk about it, but it's legal. If there are no penises, then it isn't a sex act. Just count the dicks and you have your answer.
"She was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman." -- Voltaire
The top 10 from 2003 are:
Alice series, for sexual content, using offensive language, and being unsuited to age group. Harry Potter series, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck, for using offensive language.
"Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture" by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy.
"Fallen Angels" by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, sexual content, offensive language, drugs and violence.
"Go Ask Alice" by Anonymous, for drugs.
"It's Perfectly Normal" by Robie Harris, for homosexuality, nudity, sexual content and sex education.
"We All Fall Down" by Robert Cormier, for offensive language and sexual content.
"King and King" by Linda de Haan, for homosexuality.
"Bridge to Terabithia" by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language and occult/satanism.
Link