I think that the Coop in Harvard Square is cracking down on the people doing research for CrimsonReading. It makes it super easy to buy all your books on Half.com in about 3 minutes, so I imagine that the Coop isn't pleased.
I think you've interpreted this all wrong. I think that what these people are really saying is that by taking their beautiful work of HTML art and hiding all those cleverly placed >'s and <'s, and adding "colors" or applying "fonts" or any such other acts of vandalism are violations of his copyright by creating derivative works. Even by reading this right now using your web browser, you are violating my right as the artist to have you view my work of HTML in it's original raw text form. In fact, by displaying < instead of > in the above text, you have fundamentally altered my work and rob me of my law given right to force you to read my text as I wrote it. (Yes I uploaded this as HTML Formatted thank you very much. And that was an &, not an &)
By the way, you have to go look at this site too, now that you have read this comment. If you don't, you have created a derivative work without permission and I will have my lawyers contact you shortly.
It seems here that the issue is that the plaintiff was paying for a service and had the terms of a contract between him and a phone company changed without his notice. In Google's case, users of Google's services are not entering into a contract as much as they are accepting a license. Particularly, users of the search tool, who don't need to log in to use the tool, are essentially re-accepting the terms each and every time they use the service. Sure Google could e-mail all of its customers with accounts if they decided to change the TOS for those services, but Google can't tell the difference between a returning user from an older TOS and a new user accepting the new TOS with regard to the search tool. It would be interesting to see if the court ruled that Google and similar companies had to put a revision date next to their TOS link, but I don't think that this decision goes quite that far.
Actually, this is one of the major things that drove me away from OpenOffice and AbiWord. I couldn't get my documents to print properly. The fonts always came out looking funny, with letters shifted slightly to one side or the other, sometimes overlapping a little with other letters. Maybe I am not using these products properly, but before I finally decided to buy Office 2004 for my Mac, the only way I could get a paper printed properly was to typeset it with LaTeX, which is a little bit overkill for a writing seminar paper if I do say so myself.
Actually, several tests have been done on young animals (either birds or rodents, I forget which) raised in captivity where the animals show fear responses to silhouettes with short necks (like might resemble a hawk) but show no fear responses to silhouettes with long necks (like might resemble a swan. The animals had never experienced an interaction with a hawk or other bird of prey before, and they all experienced the response, indicating that they were instinctual or innately afraid of these particular types of shadows. It is quite possible that similar fears exist in humans.
Indeed, I'm sure the boys were horrified when they had to tolerate pop-up porn after being able to view the stuff they'd bought with their mom's credit card.... The law may seem silly in that light, but there are certainly good reasons to have it. I'm sure you wouldn't want some weirdo with a laptop showing porn to small children in playground. The issue here is not whether showing porn willfully to minors should be a crime, but whether this teacher was showing porn willfully to minors, which it doesn't seem she was doing. Please criticize the courts for failing to find the truth here, but don't suggest that it should be okay for a teacher to willfully show porn to her students.
People don't realize it, but it makes sense. Is a child molester more likely to get caught kidnapping people and causing a big commotion, or abusing his own niece when she gets left with him as a baby sitter? We just hear about the kidnappings because they are high profile; most cases of incest go unreported because of the shame and family pressure involved.
Producing child pornography is a heinous crime that takes advantage of children. But there are a lot more sickos doing a lot more sick things to their own flesh and blood, and no one is doing anything about it. It's a hard problem to solve, but it needs more attention if we are ever going to solve it.
I cannot believe that people would mark something like this as 'informative.' First of all, this view is only partially relevant when talking about America and perhaps Western Europe. If you look at other nations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, hunger is a problem now, even without drastic climate change, because there isn't enough food produced for all the people there. Imagine if climate change caused the desert of the Sahara to shift south, or if longer rainy seasons destroyed fragile ecosystems, causing crops to fail. The entire continent could starve, and little could be done about it.
Looking back at the United States, particularly at Katrina, it is unfair to say that only the local government was to blame. Other areas are not as bad off as New Orleans because New Orleans is an urban area, with a much higher population density and less sturdy construction, in addition to being below sea-level, allowing it to flood. Furthermore, state emergence planning for catastrophes is based on what might be called a good-neighbor policy. If one parish or community is destroyed by a natural disaster, others nearby are supposed to come to its aid. In the case of Katrina, the entire area surrounding New Orleans was devastated, so of course the state was unable to respond. In such a situation, it is the obligation of the Federal government to step in and provide the necessary aid. Even with some delay in calling for FEMA, FEMA should have had a more realistic view of what was going on and been better prepared to handle this particular emergency, which many people have predicted for decades.
Ultimately, the reason that climate change is such a big problem is that its effects are unpredictable. Governments are not fast enough to react to unanticipated disasters, as evidenced by Katrina, because they don't have crisis plans ready to put into action. Combine a many sided die and very poor coverage of the possible outcomes, and it is very likely that global climate change could cause not just one but several national and international emergencies in the coming years.
If this guy really wans to study something like this, he needs to sit down and read some friggin' articles and come up with a metric to say whether an article is revolutionary. For example, Field's medals only honor Mathematicians younger than 40, and are only awards to one person ever some odd years, so that if two "revolutionary" papers are written in the same period, one gets nothing. In general the sample size of this "study", namely thee dozen prestigious awards of the past decade or two, is laughably small, and the only real result of his work is the suggestion that their should be more awards like the Nobels. To say that any one university tops any other from the information presented is foolish at best.
Will someone honestly answer me this. Do they put 2 weeks of food in a cooler? Do they sit with their best pal and take turns waiting in line? Does Best Buy obligate me to respect their encampment and let them buy first? What if I just waltz in on the appropriate day and put my tent in front of theirs? Can they be arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk? Can Best Buy kick them out? How does this work?
You know. That isn't such a bad idea. Why not surround the site with a load of skeletons. That would keep people away. What do they do with the skeletons of those folks who donate their bodies to science anyway? It's perfect.
Say they install this broadcast flag. Say they make you watch DTV. Say they force the commercials not to be muted. People will just give up on TV. Your attitude will be more rampant than you think. Only when the government mandates that you leave your TV on all day will we have a problem (a la 1984.) People will not feel that it is worth the hassle to watch Jerry Bruckheimer's (or however you spell it) latest Reality TV Show or Drama if it just pisses them off to no end. Television is still a business that derives its income from viewers, albeit indirectly. If people stop watching, then the advertisers stop paying. Also, all these FCC regulations can only apply to Broadcast stuff. I am sure that eventually some entrepeneur (maybe you or me) will come along and offer subscriber programming without ads and without flags. And he will make a boatload of money. The market is still driven by the consumer.
Why not give people the option of being anonymous if they are willing to provide alternative collateral? It doesn't have to be manditory. Someone who doesn't think its worth the interest or can't afford it could simply get a library card as is the status quo.
You could argue that this unfairly infringes on the search and seizure rights of the poor, but then again, maybe keeping a government record of checked out books does the same thing.
Actually, when we deorbited Skylab, we rained debris over Australia, killing a cow. We had to play for the cow, in addition to international littering fees to the Australian government. The Russians did better with Mir.
Slashdot Mirror
CIA != NSA.
Just saying.
I think that the Coop in Harvard Square is cracking down on the people doing research for CrimsonReading. It makes it super easy to buy all your books on Half.com in about 3 minutes, so I imagine that the Coop isn't pleased.
Well then you'd have to use CamelCase. create_foo would still be the same as create_bar.
Doh!
It seems from the story that there wasn't even a copy of the GPL or a link to the GPL with the software, which is a requirement of the GPL.
I think you've interpreted this all wrong. I think that what these people are really saying is that by taking their beautiful work of HTML art and hiding all those cleverly placed >'s and <'s, and adding "colors" or applying "fonts" or any such other acts of vandalism are violations of his copyright by creating derivative works. Even by reading this right now using your web browser, you are violating my right as the artist to have you view my work of HTML in it's original raw text form. In fact, by displaying < instead of > in the above text, you have fundamentally altered my work and rob me of my law given right to force you to read my text as I wrote it. (Yes I uploaded this as HTML Formatted thank you very much. And that was an &, not an &)
By the way, you have to go look at this site too, now that you have read this comment. If you don't, you have created a derivative work without permission and I will have my lawyers contact you shortly.
Do I create a derivative work if I rip the ads out of a magazine I'm reading?
This is exactly the same thing, only automated. Isn't that what we have computers for? Automating mindless tasks?
Some might call that iGoogle. ;-)
It seems here that the issue is that the plaintiff was paying for a service and had the terms of a contract between him and a phone company changed without his notice. In Google's case, users of Google's services are not entering into a contract as much as they are accepting a license. Particularly, users of the search tool, who don't need to log in to use the tool, are essentially re-accepting the terms each and every time they use the service. Sure Google could e-mail all of its customers with accounts if they decided to change the TOS for those services, but Google can't tell the difference between a returning user from an older TOS and a new user accepting the new TOS with regard to the search tool. It would be interesting to see if the court ruled that Google and similar companies had to put a revision date next to their TOS link, but I don't think that this decision goes quite that far.
IANAL and all that jazz.
Actually, this is one of the major things that drove me away from OpenOffice and AbiWord. I couldn't get my documents to print properly. The fonts always came out looking funny, with letters shifted slightly to one side or the other, sometimes overlapping a little with other letters. Maybe I am not using these products properly, but before I finally decided to buy Office 2004 for my Mac, the only way I could get a paper printed properly was to typeset it with LaTeX, which is a little bit overkill for a writing seminar paper if I do say so myself.
... Consumers confused by where to place the stickers.
Actually, several tests have been done on young animals (either birds or rodents, I forget which) raised in captivity where the animals show fear responses to silhouettes with short necks (like might resemble a hawk) but show no fear responses to silhouettes with long necks (like might resemble a swan. The animals had never experienced an interaction with a hawk or other bird of prey before, and they all experienced the response, indicating that they were instinctual or innately afraid of these particular types of shadows. It is quite possible that similar fears exist in humans.
I know! They should have applied the fuel tax to Gatorade. Only certain colors are legal for highway use!
People don't realize it, but it makes sense. Is a child molester more likely to get caught kidnapping people and causing a big commotion, or abusing his own niece when she gets left with him as a baby sitter? We just hear about the kidnappings because they are high profile; most cases of incest go unreported because of the shame and family pressure involved. Producing child pornography is a heinous crime that takes advantage of children. But there are a lot more sickos doing a lot more sick things to their own flesh and blood, and no one is doing anything about it. It's a hard problem to solve, but it needs more attention if we are ever going to solve it.
I cannot believe that people would mark something like this as 'informative.' First of all, this view is only partially relevant when talking about America and perhaps Western Europe. If you look at other nations, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, hunger is a problem now, even without drastic climate change, because there isn't enough food produced for all the people there. Imagine if climate change caused the desert of the Sahara to shift south, or if longer rainy seasons destroyed fragile ecosystems, causing crops to fail. The entire continent could starve, and little could be done about it.
Looking back at the United States, particularly at Katrina, it is unfair to say that only the local government was to blame. Other areas are not as bad off as New Orleans because New Orleans is an urban area, with a much higher population density and less sturdy construction, in addition to being below sea-level, allowing it to flood. Furthermore, state emergence planning for catastrophes is based on what might be called a good-neighbor policy. If one parish or community is destroyed by a natural disaster, others nearby are supposed to come to its aid. In the case of Katrina, the entire area surrounding New Orleans was devastated, so of course the state was unable to respond. In such a situation, it is the obligation of the Federal government to step in and provide the necessary aid. Even with some delay in calling for FEMA, FEMA should have had a more realistic view of what was going on and been better prepared to handle this particular emergency, which many people have predicted for decades.
Ultimately, the reason that climate change is such a big problem is that its effects are unpredictable. Governments are not fast enough to react to unanticipated disasters, as evidenced by Katrina, because they don't have crisis plans ready to put into action. Combine a many sided die and very poor coverage of the possible outcomes, and it is very likely that global climate change could cause not just one but several national and international emergencies in the coming years.
If this guy really wans to study something like this, he needs to sit down and read some friggin' articles and come up with a metric to say whether an article is revolutionary. For example, Field's medals only honor Mathematicians younger than 40, and are only awards to one person ever some odd years, so that if two "revolutionary" papers are written in the same period, one gets nothing. In general the sample size of this "study", namely thee dozen prestigious awards of the past decade or two, is laughably small, and the only real result of his work is the suggestion that their should be more awards like the Nobels. To say that any one university tops any other from the information presented is foolish at best.
Will someone honestly answer me this. Do they put 2 weeks of food in a cooler? Do they sit with their best pal and take turns waiting in line? Does Best Buy obligate me to respect their encampment and let them buy first? What if I just waltz in on the appropriate day and put my tent in front of theirs? Can they be arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk? Can Best Buy kick them out? How does this work?
You know. That isn't such a bad idea. Why not surround the site with a load of skeletons. That would keep people away. What do they do with the skeletons of those folks who donate their bodies to science anyway? It's perfect.
Say they install this broadcast flag. Say they make you watch DTV. Say they force the commercials not to be muted. People will just give up on TV. Your attitude will be more rampant than you think. Only when the government mandates that you leave your TV on all day will we have a problem (a la 1984.) People will not feel that it is worth the hassle to watch Jerry Bruckheimer's (or however you spell it) latest Reality TV Show or Drama if it just pisses them off to no end. Television is still a business that derives its income from viewers, albeit indirectly. If people stop watching, then the advertisers stop paying. Also, all these FCC regulations can only apply to Broadcast stuff. I am sure that eventually some entrepeneur (maybe you or me) will come along and offer subscriber programming without ads and without flags. And he will make a boatload of money. The market is still driven by the consumer.
Why not give people the option of being anonymous if they are willing to provide alternative collateral? It doesn't have to be manditory. Someone who doesn't think its worth the interest or can't afford it could simply get a library card as is the status quo. You could argue that this unfairly infringes on the search and seizure rights of the poor, but then again, maybe keeping a government record of checked out books does the same thing.
Actually, when we deorbited Skylab, we rained debris over Australia, killing a cow. We had to play for the cow, in addition to international littering fees to the Australian government. The Russians did better with Mir.
What wikipedia needs is some UPS technology between the wall and those critical servers they are spending hours restoring.
Note that the DHS is also responsible for enforcing laws concerning Chilean mushrooms illegally imported into the US. Go figure.
It was hella cool. Mod him up.
Does anyone remember reading a book entitled "Invitation to the Game"?