But it does change the fundamental issues. It is part of a bigger trend that computers and networks cause: the disassociation of content from any fixed medium...The problem is that all copyright laws were written under the assumption that content is always fixed in a physical and furthermore, transfer of any physical medium is burdensom. This is no longer true, and will become less true in the future.
Maybe I'm missing something. I thought that this was about books, you know, those paper-based thingies with little squiggles all over them that you probably had to buy en masse back in kawl-edge. Since when did either the author's guild or Bezos mention anything about electronic media? How in the hell are your statements germane to this discussion? I'd mod down your post as off-topic, but I can't moderate discussions that I'm participating in.
To bring things back on-topic: you may not like it, but Amazon isn't doing a damn thing wrong here. If anything, they're simply an easy target. Sure, authors may say that it's okay if some mom and pop pulp peddler sells some used titles here and there, but when a company with a global reach puts links to used books right on its high-traffic new book pages, well, then, that's another story. You may have an ethical beef with large, multinational corporations (and I'm certainly not defending them), but that doesn't change the fact that Amazon has done nothing unethical here.
I wonder how many of these authors drive used cars, bought used textbooks in college, buy knick-knacks at garage sales, or give or accept hand-me-down clothing for their kids. In none of these cases is the original manufacturer/creator necessarily making anything off of the resale. If these authors really think that each used purchase represents a lost new purchase for them, then they're sorely mistaken. I hope that none of the anti-MS, anti-patent, anti-copyright, anti-RIAA Slashdotters take the authors' side in this particular argument.
Personally, I love Amazon's prominent posting of used titles. I've sold a number of my books that way, and I value the convenience of being able to digest a lot of information about a title (sample pages, even customer reviews), and then have the option of picking up a cheaper used copy. It's clear that Amazon pushes used books because, like cars, their profit margin on them is higher than it is on new texts.
I don't know Japanese myself, but I'm in the middle of reading The Japanese Language (no link; not carried by Amazon). One of the things that's discussed is how little mouth movement is required in Japanese, in contrast to other languages. So it's somewhat ironic that DoCoMo, a Japanese company, is leading the charge in this field.
Even in non-Japanese languages, guttural sounds like 'g', 'k', and German 'ch' cause very little muscular change--just watch yourself in a mirror some time. The article didn't go into much detail, but it may be infinitely more useful if the sensors paid attention to tongue movements instead of cheek ones.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but lately Linux and open source aren't "ruling" at the university level.
I'll second that. My university was a hodgepodge of technologies, but almost all lab computers were NT boxen and the compiler of choice in the low-level courses was VC++. As an instructor of some of the 100-level courses there, however, I can attest that nobody was learning MS-specific stuff (like MFC) in those courses, but the technology was there.
You may not want to believe this, but most students are looking for the skills/terminology that will get them the most coin, not necessarily the ones that are the "purest" or "most interesting," from either a theoretical or aesthetic standpoint.
Note that I'm not condoning any of the above. I couldn't wait to get out of a university that presented such a confused picture to its faculty and students.)
...but rather in identifying multiple documents that appear to be talking about the same thing. Summarization is a well-researched (but not well-perfected) NLP topic, but finding inter-document similarities is quite a bit more challenging. This is easy for me and you to do when we read something, but think about what it takes to get a machine to do this. Take a look at some of the examples--you'll find that although large chunks may be verbatim from document to document (especially ones that rehash standard news feeds like Reuters and AP), most articles have a different wording or spin on each idea.
I'm sure that NYT writers research their facts thoroughly (blah, blah), but according to Steven Levy's awesome Hackers, it was actually at the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that everyone met.
We wouldn't want a reconstructionist history of hackerdom's finest moments, would we? (Is Eddie Bauer a sponsor of the Times?)
The same thing can be said for humans. When human cloning is legalized (and I say "when," not "if"), think about what will happen if the cost of producing a clone of yourself or your partner is less than the cost of adoption or fertility drugs. There are already more children available for adoption than there are people who want to adopt them.
More food for thought: what if a surrogate mother carrying the cloned embryo wanted to keep the baby?
That's fantastic! For about $100 less than a dual-1GHz PowerMac and 17" LCD monitor, I can get a bare board that can take up to a 133MHz G3?!? Finally, I don't have to pay a premium for the "Apple style" factor. Thank goodness.
Just about every dot-com these days can boast a 100:1 compression ratio. Unfortunately, the "random data" that they're compressing is usually their share price.
Now that the highest-end iMac is hitting 800MHz, where's the speed bump (not to mention all-out redesign) for the G4 towers? This can't be the last word for the keynote.
You can have a Pipe object, and call function like Pipe.calculateFlowrate(12,43,23), then you could have a subclass SquarePipe, and call the function SquarePipe.calculateFlowrate(12,12,43,23). Essentially, you could have 10 objects each with 10 functions to do 100 different tasks, rather than 100 different functions to do 100 different tasks.
While I agree in principle with this example (since mechanical engineering deals with real-world objects which can be quite easily modeled using OO design), I find fault with the example's implementation. The SquarePipe doesn't inherit anything useful from a Pipe, especially because the calculateFlowrate() methods have different signatures. Perhaps a better model would look like this:
class Pipe {
public:
virtual float getFlowRate( float& x, float& y ) = 0;
}
class RoundPipe : public virtual Pipe {
private:
float _diameter;
public:
RoundPipe( float& d ) : _diameter( d ) { ; }
getFlowRate( float& x, float& y ) const { // i don't know the flowrate formula
return ( _diameter * x * y );
}
}
class RectangularPipe : public virtual Pipe {
private:
float _height;
float _width;
public:
RectangularPipe( float& h, float& w ) : _height( h ), _width( w ) { ; }
float getFlowRate( float& x, float& y ) const {
return ( _height * _width * x * y );
}
// now use them polymorphically to find the flow rates
Pipe round = new RoundPipe( 30.0 );
std::cout << "Round pipe flow rate: " << round.getFlowRate( 12.0, 9.0 ) << std::endl;
Pipe rect = new RectangularPipe( 4.0, 40.0 );
std::cout << "Rectangular pipe flow rate: " << rect.getFlowRate( 12.0, 9.0 ) << std::endl;
Add support for things like pipe length, and you can now use high-level Pipe objects without having to always pay attention to whether they're round or rectangular. (In other applications, such as positioning pipes in a predefined space, the specifics may be more important.)
While I agree, in principle, that today's cars are much more complex for amateur mechanics, I think that this example is completely inapplicable. Quite honestly, wouldn't you have been worried if you could buy a remote starter that completely bypassed the anti-theft device? Instead, you returned the item to the store, whining that a pretty convenient but absolutely unnecessary device wasn't completely compatible with another add-on!
And how big is the remote starter, anyway? If it's something that you carry on you, or have it somewhere in your house, then what's the problem with leaving a key in it?
Even if there weren't stagging bureaucratic obstacles to bringing more of the US goverment's functions online, you'd have a hard time convincing the paranoid in government to do so. When the National Security Adviser asks the media not to play Bin Laden's speeches on the news, when the FAA, NRC, and other agencies are pulling all but the most basic information from their web sites, the last thing on any lawmaker's or agency's agendas is to put more information online.
Sure, it won't be the same as the original. But without an Americanized version, where would you expect to see things like Battle Tall Double Latté, Battle Meatloaf, Battle Po Boy, or Battle Succotash?
This kind of thing happens all the time in university research labs, no matter what field it's in. Part of the problem is that in certain fields, such as CS or engineering, research can be translated directly into dollars, which raises the stakes for protecting one's own innovations. But university politics being what they are, it's often very difficult for a student to distance him/herself from the advising professor. Sure, a student may sue a professor for falsely taking credit for an invention, but what good is that going to be if the department then refuses to grant the student a Ph.D.? Is the invention worth more than the lambskin?
Another wrinkle to this argument is that it's often rather difficult to really know who invented what. Even if a student does come up with something that the professor hadn't thought of, what's the likelihood that the professor had nothing to do with it? In other words, what if an adviser's guidance contributed to 95% of the student's way of thinking? In that, it's like taxes: nobody wants to pay them, because they feel that they earned the money and deserve to keep it. But how many people could earn the money that they earn without the help of the social/governmental/business infrastructure in which they live and work?
With the passing of MS/DOS, I wonder whether any code actually written by the World's Richest Man himself is still part of the operating system. I once picked up a book at a thrift store called Programmers At Work. I got it expecting a blank book, but I was amazed to discover that not only did it have interviews with several programming heavyweights circa the mid-80s (like Dan Bricklin, etc.), but it also had actual code samples from many of the authors. It even had a few pages from Gates's original implementation of MS-DOS, and you'd be amazed at how clean and well-commented the code is. I won't vouch for the algorithms and design, but the coding itself was far cleaner than anything that I've ever seen in an open-source project.
If my memory serves me correctly, Disney has a corporate policy that doesn't allow non-Disney-connected trailers to be shown before their films. I'd be especially surprised that they'd allow Lucasfilm to do it. Anybody here work for a theater and can verify this, or have the internecine goings-on of the multimedia industry gone fuzzy in my mind?
There's a delicious irony to the idea that Slashdaughters would look to copyright law to protect themselves against MS making changes to content for MS's own purposes, while claming that the same laws don't necessarily apply to DeCSS and other reverse-engineered source. You may believe that it's fair use when you reverse-engineer something, but that it's not when MS "enhances" your content.
Regardless of whether the nefariousness (nefarity? Nefertiti?) of Smart Tags is being overblown, when will something be done about making opt-in the law of the land, whether it be for the Web, phone service, cable, or whatnot? It's not enough for MS (or whoever) to say that a feature can be explicitly turned off. How well would MS stand up in court if a suit were filed against them on the grounds of copyright law?
I really hate to admit this, especially to Slashdotters, but Slashdot's banner ads are just about the only ones that I've ever clicked through. Not that it's tough to target to the Slashdot audience or anything...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm missing something. I thought that this was about books, you know, those paper-based thingies with little squiggles all over them that you probably had to buy en masse back in kawl-edge. Since when did either the author's guild or Bezos mention anything about electronic media? How in the hell are your statements germane to this discussion? I'd mod down your post as off-topic, but I can't moderate discussions that I'm participating in.
To bring things back on-topic: you may not like it, but Amazon isn't doing a damn thing wrong here. If anything, they're simply an easy target. Sure, authors may say that it's okay if some mom and pop pulp peddler sells some used titles here and there, but when a company with a global reach puts links to used books right on its high-traffic new book pages, well, then, that's another story. You may have an ethical beef with large, multinational corporations (and I'm certainly not defending them), but that doesn't change the fact that Amazon has done nothing unethical here.
I wonder how many of these authors drive used cars, bought used textbooks in college, buy knick-knacks at garage sales, or give or accept hand-me-down clothing for their kids. In none of these cases is the original manufacturer/creator necessarily making anything off of the resale. If these authors really think that each used purchase represents a lost new purchase for them, then they're sorely mistaken. I hope that none of the anti-MS, anti-patent, anti-copyright, anti-RIAA Slashdotters take the authors' side in this particular argument.
Personally, I love Amazon's prominent posting of used titles. I've sold a number of my books that way, and I value the convenience of being able to digest a lot of information about a title (sample pages, even customer reviews), and then have the option of picking up a cheaper used copy. It's clear that Amazon pushes used books because, like cars, their profit margin on them is higher than it is on new texts.
Yes. As a matter of fact, that was the sound of the marketing drone belching up.
I don't know Japanese myself, but I'm in the middle of reading The Japanese Language (no link; not carried by Amazon). One of the things that's discussed is how little mouth movement is required in Japanese, in contrast to other languages. So it's somewhat ironic that DoCoMo, a Japanese company, is leading the charge in this field.
Even in non-Japanese languages, guttural sounds like 'g', 'k', and German 'ch' cause very little muscular change--just watch yourself in a mirror some time. The article didn't go into much detail, but it may be infinitely more useful if the sensors paid attention to tongue movements instead of cheek ones.
As if to prove its point, the article brought up one of those big pop-under ads. That earns the article an immediate right click->'Back' in my book.
I'll second that. My university was a hodgepodge of technologies, but almost all lab computers were NT boxen and the compiler of choice in the low-level courses was VC++. As an instructor of some of the 100-level courses there, however, I can attest that nobody was learning MS-specific stuff (like MFC) in those courses, but the technology was there.
You may not want to believe this, but most students are looking for the skills/terminology that will get them the most coin, not necessarily the ones that are the "purest" or "most interesting," from either a theoretical or aesthetic standpoint.
Note that I'm not condoning any of the above. I couldn't wait to get out of a university that presented such a confused picture to its faculty and students.)
...but rather in identifying multiple documents that appear to be talking about the same thing. Summarization is a well-researched (but not well-perfected) NLP topic, but finding inter-document similarities is quite a bit more challenging. This is easy for me and you to do when we read something, but think about what it takes to get a machine to do this. Take a look at some of the examples--you'll find that although large chunks may be verbatim from document to document (especially ones that rehash standard news feeds like Reuters and AP), most articles have a different wording or spin on each idea.
I'm sure that NYT writers research their facts thoroughly (blah, blah), but according to Steven Levy's awesome Hackers , it was actually at the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that everyone met.
We wouldn't want a reconstructionist history of hackerdom's finest moments, would we? (Is Eddie Bauer a sponsor of the Times?)
The same thing can be said for humans. When human cloning is legalized (and I say "when," not "if"), think about what will happen if the cost of producing a clone of yourself or your partner is less than the cost of adoption or fertility drugs. There are already more children available for adoption than there are people who want to adopt them.
More food for thought: what if a surrogate mother carrying the cloned embryo wanted to keep the baby?
That's fantastic! For about $100 less than a dual-1GHz PowerMac and 17" LCD monitor, I can get a bare board that can take up to a 133MHz G3?!? Finally, I don't have to pay a premium for the "Apple style" factor. Thank goodness.
Just about every dot-com these days can boast a 100:1 compression ratio. Unfortunately, the "random data" that they're compressing is usually their share price.
To get the full 1930s effect, just imagine a Bakelite Mac, à la Art Deco telephones.
Now that the highest-end iMac is hitting 800MHz, where's the speed bump (not to mention all-out redesign) for the G4 towers? This can't be the last word for the keynote.
Anything that gets more teenage girls into a film that I want to watch can only be a Good Thing.
While I agree in principle with this example (since mechanical engineering deals with real-world objects which can be quite easily modeled using OO design), I find fault with the example's implementation. The SquarePipe doesn't inherit anything useful from a Pipe, especially because the calculateFlowrate() methods have different signatures. Perhaps a better model would look like this:
Add support for things like pipe length, and you can now use high-level Pipe objects without having to always pay attention to whether they're round or rectangular. (In other applications, such as positioning pipes in a predefined space, the specifics may be more important.)
While I agree, in principle, that today's cars are much more complex for amateur mechanics, I think that this example is completely inapplicable. Quite honestly, wouldn't you have been worried if you could buy a remote starter that completely bypassed the anti-theft device? Instead, you returned the item to the store, whining that a pretty convenient but absolutely unnecessary device wasn't completely compatible with another add-on!
And how big is the remote starter, anyway? If it's something that you carry on you, or have it somewhere in your house, then what's the problem with leaving a key in it?
Even if there weren't stagging bureaucratic obstacles to bringing more of the US goverment's functions online, you'd have a hard time convincing the paranoid in government to do so. When the National Security Adviser asks the media not to play Bin Laden's speeches on the news, when the FAA, NRC, and other agencies are pulling all but the most basic information from their web sites, the last thing on any lawmaker's or agency's agendas is to put more information online.
Sure, it won't be the same as the original. But without an Americanized version, where would you expect to see things like Battle Tall Double Latté, Battle Meatloaf, Battle Po Boy, or Battle Succotash?
This kind of thing happens all the time in university research labs, no matter what field it's in. Part of the problem is that in certain fields, such as CS or engineering, research can be translated directly into dollars, which raises the stakes for protecting one's own innovations. But university politics being what they are, it's often very difficult for a student to distance him/herself from the advising professor. Sure, a student may sue a professor for falsely taking credit for an invention, but what good is that going to be if the department then refuses to grant the student a Ph.D.? Is the invention worth more than the lambskin?
Another wrinkle to this argument is that it's often rather difficult to really know who invented what. Even if a student does come up with something that the professor hadn't thought of, what's the likelihood that the professor had nothing to do with it? In other words, what if an adviser's guidance contributed to 95% of the student's way of thinking? In that, it's like taxes: nobody wants to pay them, because they feel that they earned the money and deserve to keep it. But how many people could earn the money that they earn without the help of the social/governmental/business infrastructure in which they live and work?
With the passing of MS/DOS, I wonder whether any code actually written by the World's Richest Man himself is still part of the operating system. I once picked up a book at a thrift store called Programmers At Work . I got it expecting a blank book, but I was amazed to discover that not only did it have interviews with several programming heavyweights circa the mid-80s (like Dan Bricklin, etc.), but it also had actual code samples from many of the authors. It even had a few pages from Gates's original implementation of MS-DOS, and you'd be amazed at how clean and well-commented the code is. I won't vouch for the algorithms and design, but the coding itself was far cleaner than anything that I've ever seen in an open-source project.
If my memory serves me correctly, Disney has a corporate policy that doesn't allow non-Disney-connected trailers to be shown before their films. I'd be especially surprised that they'd allow Lucasfilm to do it. Anybody here work for a theater and can verify this, or have the internecine goings-on of the multimedia industry gone fuzzy in my mind?
Is the "it" the shower curtain or your skin? Perhaps both...
There's a delicious irony to the idea that Slashdaughters would look to copyright law to protect themselves against MS making changes to content for MS's own purposes, while claming that the same laws don't necessarily apply to DeCSS and other reverse-engineered source. You may believe that it's fair use when you reverse-engineer something, but that it's not when MS "enhances" your content.
Regardless of whether the nefariousness (nefarity? Nefertiti?) of Smart Tags is being overblown, when will something be done about making opt-in the law of the land, whether it be for the Web, phone service, cable, or whatnot? It's not enough for MS (or whoever) to say that a feature can be explicitly turned off. How well would MS stand up in court if a suit were filed against them on the grounds of copyright law?
I really hate to admit this, especially to Slashdotters, but Slashdot's banner ads are just about the only ones that I've ever clicked through. Not that it's tough to target to the Slashdot audience or anything...