I recently set up cable and Internet service with Comcast. The phone rep asked me for my SSN, and I asked if it was required (knowing full well it's not).
He then replied with what I can only assume is complete and utter bullshit. Something about Comcast having special permission from the FCC to get SSNs, to help prevent identity theft. As if the FCC has the authority to do that?
I asked him if I could give him a code instead, and he refused. He finally got tired of me and said he could use my driver's license number.
In other news, Sony has decided to disable the second core in many of its dual-core models. Senior douchebag Joe Schmo defended the decision, saying "Often the second core just allows people to run malware in the background without noticing it."
Um, no thanks, Sony. How about you let your customers decide whether they want to turn off processor features?
Trolling on one of these boards doesn't interrupt my morning breakfast or a good wank etc.
Next time you should just keep on doing what you're doing and invite them in. I guess the breakfast might not scare them off, but I bet the wanking would.
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, GA 30033, Telephone: 404-679-4500) to award bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.
I was talking about the DX, which is the one I have. I don't think there's really any comparison to be made between a Clie (I had one a long time ago, grayscale model) and a Kindle DX.
Reading PDF journal articles on a Clie is not practical. The DX is the first device (that's not priced stratospherically, like iRex's products) that makes that practical.
Also in keeping with the government's policy (see also: Gower's Report) this advice was completely disregarded.
For those who don't know, the Gower's report was on intellectual property policy.
I wish the U.S. did something similar - getting together an independent panel of experts, not hand-picked bureaucrats, to look in-depth at important issues. And of course, actually act in keeping with the reports. Another UK report of interest to slashdot - the Byron Report, which looked at the effects of video games and the Internet on children. Quite even-handed, and makes notes about how there is a "polarisation of research paradigms" between the US and UK.
The closest thing in the U.S. I've seen is the president's council on Bioethics, and those reports never seem to make as concrete recommendations as the UK ones.
I have one, and I disagree. Compared to any other electronic reading mechanism, they are a hands-down winner.
Sure they have great battery life, a very important property for relatively static uses like books, but they also have annoyingly low contrast, low resolution, in many cases a slightly unpleasant display color, and distracting reflections from the glass
Battery life? Check. Low contrast? Check (someone compared it to dirty newspaper, which is probably about right). But it gets the job done. Low resolution? Not really... I think my Kindle is somewhere around 200 DPI, which is a hell of a lot better than an LCD, and very readable. Also, reflection from glass? Never seen it.
They've been hyped up to be almost as good as paper, but really they're not even close.
They're not paper, but they also mean I don't have to lug around thousands of pages with me.
I guess that's why Amazon's supporting PDF natively only on DX (its screen size is almost equivalent of letter page, if you remove the margins... not that Amazon's PDF reader is doing that).
You don't have a Kindle DX, do you? I do, and it actually does do something to reduce blank margins. I know, because I've converted documents to PDF with large margins, only to have the DX enlarge the document to exclude the margins.
On the contrary, the cartel (or oligopoly, however you term it) is only able to keep control of the market because of the fact that natural diamonds *are* in fact fairly rare.
Well, that, and the fact that anytime supply exceeds demand, De Beers et al. will purchase the excess to keep prices high.
Well, they would until the synthetic ones become significantly more common, anyway. Which I gather could be in the next couple of decades, potentially.
Current technology allows relatively easy production of white, gem-quality diamonds up to 0.6 carat. Above that is possible, but not yet widespread, though that will likely change within the decade. Also, currently synthetic whites are essentially just as expensive as mined whites. It also helps that every synthetic producer, as far as I am aware, laser inscribes their gems to mark them as synthetic.
Or maybe TFA actually explains how it will be printed?
One trick in transferring the material from online to print has been how to recreate the âoetitle textâ that comments on the strip when your cursor hovers over it. "It's not supposed to be a punch line, but hopefully if you didn't laugh, you'll laugh at this," he said. The title text will appear where the tiny copyright notice would appear on a traditional strip.
The big offender lately: sharing documents. We are a large enterprise, and not everyone is on Office 2007. And due to the environment, some people run Windows, and some run Mac. I work in an office, and we've found that Word doesn't always format it's own document formats the same across different versions and different platforms (Mac vs Windows.)
Indeed, I have a Windows desktop and a Mac laptop and have noticed that too. The same document when opened in Word 2007 vs Word 2008 will look different, and sometimes the changes add up enough that it actually has a different page count.
I dealt with it by using Word 2007 as my "official" copy - this is what I would send to others, or print out, etc. Word 2008 on the laptop was just what I used to type while at the library or away from my desk. (I actually really dislike Word 2008, and wish there wasn't such a distance between the Windows and Mac versions of Word. It really feels like using two totally different programs)
I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking. If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.
The article does have a point about not printing things out as much anymore (my thesis was actually submitted electronically, the only time I printed it out was to check for errors by hand, and to give personal copies to people). But pages are for more than print-outs. JSTOR made a decision to keep their journal articles in page format, because that's what people are used to and like. Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts. I'm not saying Word is good at typography, but even a mediocre-looking Word document is better looking than someone's crappy blog font.
There was no judgment in this case, but Amazon likely saw the writing on the wall and felt that using its control over the platform to remove the offending copies was preferable to paying a settlement to the publisher.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone else point out that Amazon's actions don't prevent the rightsholder from suing. They'd have to be real assholes, obviously, but just because Amazon deleted the copies doesn't make the original distribution magically OK.
Since they have proven that they can remove the copy from the user's device (by doing so) if they said they could not, that would not be the "correct answer", it would be a lie.
If they said they were incapable of doing so, they'd be lying. But merely saying "we cannot do that" is different. They could argue that "we cannot do that" because of the ill-will and backlash it will cause against our business, for example.
And, if the failure to remove the infringing data was a "will not", not a "can not", it would seem to be trivial to prove that any further infringement (by keeping it on the device) was wilful. (if they could remove it but _chose_ not to)
Infringement isn't an ongoing activity. The infringing activity on Amazon's part would be distribution, which already took place (and was clearly a mistake). (In fact, just because Amazon pulled the books doesn't mean the rightsholder won't sue - they could sue for the damages of people who read the book in the time that it was on their Kindles, for example). It's not as if Amazon is actively keeping the material on people's Kindles; rather, they had to take further positive action to remove it.
Indeed, if they left the books on people's devices and were sued by the rightsholder for infringement, there'd be no guessing as to damages, since presumably they'd have a record of each improper distribution. It also doesn't sound "willful", but willful infringement is a slippery thing. Probably wouldn't be attorney's fees, either, since those are typically punitive I think, and this was clearly a mistake. It's not like this is a bittorrent situation where the rightsholder can say "but 8 million people COULD have downloaded it."
Given the other absurdities of copyright law, and how the RIAA's lawyer think that disappearing purchases are normal in every area of life, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lawyer claim that the annotations are in fact a derivative work of the book, and that since Amazon had no right to sell the book, then the student had no right to create the annotations.
Also, there's probably some boilerplate legal language included with the Kindle that says they are not responsible for data loss, etc., or if it kills your grandmother or dog.
Indeed, that sort of social engineering is all about looking the part.
I once knew someone who was able to swipe an unused payphone in broad daylight at lunchtime on a busy strip with lots of outdoor seating. The trick? Navy blue pants, blue "repairman" style shirt, a tool bag, and looking like you are supposed to be doing what you are doing.
Computers and other products might wear out, but they do not have a "kill switch" that will stop them from working after a specific date, or at the request of the vendor. If you take care of computer hardware, automobiles, other physical objects, they can last a lifetime.
No kidding. This asswipe needs a vacation from lawyer-land back in the real world. Since he wants to compare DRM to computer hardware, let's take a real-life example: my Compaq LTE/386:
1. Purchased used at a computer show / hamfest. (Impossible to buy DRMed music second hand)
2. Compaq acquired by HP in 2002; support for LTE/386 dropped long before this. (If it depended on an authentication server, this would have been gone by now)
3. Clock battery, which is soldered directly to laptop motherboard, dies. I look up instructions on how to cut into the battery's plastic housing and solder a new, replaceable battery pack. (Under the DMCA, it's likely that merely defeating an encryption mechanism would be illegal; informing others how to do so would definitely be illegal).
4. I can still use my second-hand, unsupported, modified computer 19 years after it was created. (Wal-Mart's DRMed music lasted how long? Two years? One year?)
So yeah, basically his analogy utterly fails.
OH - and since you never really "owned" the music anyway, but were just "licensed" it, and since DRM (or for that matter credit card purchases) necessitates keeping records of all your purchases, they could have just given people new "licenses" to DRM-free MP3s, right? Yeah, they could have. Double fail.
Well, I have a DX, but the only thing I've been reading on it so far is PDFs. Haven't spent a penny on content from the Kindle store. I did try a sample just to see how it rendered. But as to this article, here's what I posted at another site:
An important issue, but not a great write-up. The author claims that "tethered systems provide significant advantages to the consumer. Companies can keep their own records of what people buy and restore the content if it is inadvertently lost," but neglects to mention that one of the most widely-used DRM platforms, the iTunes store, had no such mechanism for restoring lost purchases (and as far as I know, they still don't, despite dropping the DRM but maintaining records of purchases).
Also, Prof. Picker's comment that "âoeBecause copyright infringement [sic] was poor and lax in the offline world, it should also be that way in the online world? I donâ(TM)t understand that logic,â simply fails to grasp that the only way copyright has functioned at all for the past few centuries has been with poor and lax enforcement. Perfect enforcement comes with too many costs; just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea.
It's not like checking the ram is seated properly is the first thing you'd check and it's not like the BIOS will come up with a "RAMs not seated properly" message.
How true... one of my RAM sticks was failing yesterday, so I was messing around with seating. As I put one back in, I unwittingly caught a thin fan speed wire behind it. Didn't feel any different when I put it in the socket, and the computer booted, but memtest was giving loads of errors. When I finally got around to taking the chip out again, I noticed the severed wire, and a small bit of insulation stuck in the RAM slot! I'm surprised the computer even booted.
Wow, that is incompetent. Since the problem is most likely the RAM chip itself, re-installing XP almost certainly wouldn't help, and replacing the motherboard probably wouldn't help either. The first thing to do would be to test the chip, see if it's faulty, and replace it. Probably 1 hr to download, burn, and run memtest86 to figure that out, and maybe $25 to get a new chip.
If someone gets new errors/BSODs after installing or changing RAM configuration, problems with the RAM should be the first thing you think of!
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I recently set up cable and Internet service with Comcast. The phone rep asked me for my SSN, and I asked if it was required (knowing full well it's not).
He then replied with what I can only assume is complete and utter bullshit. Something about Comcast having special permission from the FCC to get SSNs, to help prevent identity theft. As if the FCC has the authority to do that?
I asked him if I could give him a code instead, and he refused. He finally got tired of me and said he could use my driver's license number.
In other news, Sony has decided to disable the second core in many of its dual-core models. Senior douchebag Joe Schmo defended the decision, saying "Often the second core just allows people to run malware in the background without noticing it."
Um, no thanks, Sony. How about you let your customers decide whether they want to turn off processor features?
Trolling on one of these boards doesn't interrupt my morning breakfast or a good wank etc.
Next time you should just keep on doing what you're doing and invite them in. I guess the breakfast might not scare them off, but I bet the wanking would.
You know, when you make assumptions like that without actually checking the facts, you're not helping.
From their site:
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (1866 Southern Lane, Decatur, GA 30033, Telephone: 404-679-4500) to award bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools is a regional accreditation agency recognized by the DOE.
We might not like the fact that they are accredited (and they're aren't lying either, I looked it up), but that doesn't make it not true.
I was talking about the DX, which is the one I have. I don't think there's really any comparison to be made between a Clie (I had one a long time ago, grayscale model) and a Kindle DX.
Reading PDF journal articles on a Clie is not practical. The DX is the first device (that's not priced stratospherically, like iRex's products) that makes that practical.
Also in keeping with the government's policy (see also: Gower's Report) this advice was completely disregarded.
For those who don't know, the Gower's report was on intellectual property policy.
I wish the U.S. did something similar - getting together an independent panel of experts, not hand-picked bureaucrats, to look in-depth at important issues. And of course, actually act in keeping with the reports. Another UK report of interest to slashdot - the Byron Report, which looked at the effects of video games and the Internet on children. Quite even-handed, and makes notes about how there is a "polarisation of research paradigms" between the US and UK.
The closest thing in the U.S. I've seen is the president's council on Bioethics, and those reports never seem to make as concrete recommendations as the UK ones.
I think "awesome" is overstating it quite a bit.
I have one, and I disagree. Compared to any other electronic reading mechanism, they are a hands-down winner.
Sure they have great battery life, a very important property for relatively static uses like books, but they also have annoyingly low contrast, low resolution, in many cases a slightly unpleasant display color, and distracting reflections from the glass
Battery life? Check. Low contrast? Check (someone compared it to dirty newspaper, which is probably about right). But it gets the job done. Low resolution? Not really... I think my Kindle is somewhere around 200 DPI, which is a hell of a lot better than an LCD, and very readable. Also, reflection from glass? Never seen it.
They've been hyped up to be almost as good as paper, but really they're not even close.
They're not paper, but they also mean I don't have to lug around thousands of pages with me.
I guess that's why Amazon's supporting PDF natively only on DX (its screen size is almost equivalent of letter page, if you remove the margins ... not that Amazon's PDF reader is doing that).
You don't have a Kindle DX, do you? I do, and it actually does do something to reduce blank margins. I know, because I've converted documents to PDF with large margins, only to have the DX enlarge the document to exclude the margins.
Probably because us coastal liberal yuppies are also socialists, meaning we pirate everything instead of buying it.
(It's a joke, people)
I guess you've never heard of pilots landing in enemy territory?
But that would be because you put it in quotes? And the guy writing the article didn't.
On the contrary, the cartel (or oligopoly, however you term it) is only able to keep control of the market because of the fact that natural diamonds *are* in fact fairly rare.
Well, that, and the fact that anytime supply exceeds demand, De Beers et al. will purchase the excess to keep prices high.
Well, they would until the synthetic ones become significantly more common, anyway. Which I gather could be in the next couple of decades, potentially.
Current technology allows relatively easy production of white, gem-quality diamonds up to 0.6 carat. Above that is possible, but not yet widespread, though that will likely change within the decade. Also, currently synthetic whites are essentially just as expensive as mined whites. It also helps that every synthetic producer, as far as I am aware, laser inscribes their gems to mark them as synthetic.
Or maybe TFA actually explains how it will be printed?
One trick in transferring the material from online to print has been how to recreate the âoetitle textâ that comments on the strip when your cursor hovers over it. "It's not supposed to be a punch line, but hopefully if you didn't laugh, you'll laugh at this," he said. The title text will appear where the tiny copyright notice would appear on a traditional strip.
The big offender lately: sharing documents. We are a large enterprise, and not everyone is on Office 2007. And due to the environment, some people run Windows, and some run Mac. I work in an office, and we've found that Word doesn't always format it's own document formats the same across different versions and different platforms (Mac vs Windows.)
Indeed, I have a Windows desktop and a Mac laptop and have noticed that too. The same document when opened in Word 2007 vs Word 2008 will look different, and sometimes the changes add up enough that it actually has a different page count.
I dealt with it by using Word 2007 as my "official" copy - this is what I would send to others, or print out, etc. Word 2008 on the laptop was just what I used to type while at the library or away from my desk. (I actually really dislike Word 2008, and wish there wasn't such a distance between the Windows and Mac versions of Word. It really feels like using two totally different programs)
I know it's popular to hate on Word around here, but if you know what you're doing, it's not all that bad. I used Word to write my master's thesis, and by consistently using styles, along with Zotero, cross-referenced fields, and bookmarks, it came out very nice looking. If I had been in a different field, I'm sure that LaTeX would have made more sense, but if I sent anything but Word to my instructors asking for comments, their heads would have exploded.
The article does have a point about not printing things out as much anymore (my thesis was actually submitted electronically, the only time I printed it out was to check for errors by hand, and to give personal copies to people). But pages are for more than print-outs. JSTOR made a decision to keep their journal articles in page format, because that's what people are used to and like. Also, properly formatted pages look better than wikis or blog posts. I'm not saying Word is good at typography, but even a mediocre-looking Word document is better looking than someone's crappy blog font.
There was no judgment in this case, but Amazon likely saw the writing on the wall and felt that using its control over the platform to remove the offending copies was preferable to paying a settlement to the publisher.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone else point out that Amazon's actions don't prevent the rightsholder from suing. They'd have to be real assholes, obviously, but just because Amazon deleted the copies doesn't make the original distribution magically OK.
Since they have proven that they can remove the copy from the user's device (by doing so) if they said they could not, that would not be the "correct answer", it would be a lie.
If they said they were incapable of doing so, they'd be lying. But merely saying "we cannot do that" is different. They could argue that "we cannot do that" because of the ill-will and backlash it will cause against our business, for example.
And, if the failure to remove the infringing data was a "will not", not a "can not", it would seem to be trivial to prove that any further infringement (by keeping it on the device) was wilful. (if they could remove it but _chose_ not to)
Infringement isn't an ongoing activity. The infringing activity on Amazon's part would be distribution, which already took place (and was clearly a mistake). (In fact, just because Amazon pulled the books doesn't mean the rightsholder won't sue - they could sue for the damages of people who read the book in the time that it was on their Kindles, for example). It's not as if Amazon is actively keeping the material on people's Kindles; rather, they had to take further positive action to remove it.
Indeed, if they left the books on people's devices and were sued by the rightsholder for infringement, there'd be no guessing as to damages, since presumably they'd have a record of each improper distribution. It also doesn't sound "willful", but willful infringement is a slippery thing. Probably wouldn't be attorney's fees, either, since those are typically punitive I think, and this was clearly a mistake. It's not like this is a bittorrent situation where the rightsholder can say "but 8 million people COULD have downloaded it."
Given the other absurdities of copyright law, and how the RIAA's lawyer think that disappearing purchases are normal in every area of life, I wouldn't be surprised to see a lawyer claim that the annotations are in fact a derivative work of the book, and that since Amazon had no right to sell the book, then the student had no right to create the annotations.
Also, there's probably some boilerplate legal language included with the Kindle that says they are not responsible for data loss, etc., or if it kills your grandmother or dog.
Indeed, that sort of social engineering is all about looking the part.
I once knew someone who was able to swipe an unused payphone in broad daylight at lunchtime on a busy strip with lots of outdoor seating. The trick? Navy blue pants, blue "repairman" style shirt, a tool bag, and looking like you are supposed to be doing what you are doing.
Computers and other products might wear out, but they do not have a "kill switch" that will stop them from working after a specific date, or at the request of the vendor. If you take care of computer hardware, automobiles, other physical objects, they can last a lifetime.
No kidding. This asswipe needs a vacation from lawyer-land back in the real world. Since he wants to compare DRM to computer hardware, let's take a real-life example: my Compaq LTE/386:
1. Purchased used at a computer show / hamfest. (Impossible to buy DRMed music second hand)
2. Compaq acquired by HP in 2002; support for LTE/386 dropped long before this. (If it depended on an authentication server, this would have been gone by now)
3. Clock battery, which is soldered directly to laptop motherboard, dies. I look up instructions on how to cut into the battery's plastic housing and solder a new, replaceable battery pack. (Under the DMCA, it's likely that merely defeating an encryption mechanism would be illegal; informing others how to do so would definitely be illegal).
4. I can still use my second-hand, unsupported, modified computer 19 years after it was created. (Wal-Mart's DRMed music lasted how long? Two years? One year?)
So yeah, basically his analogy utterly fails.
OH - and since you never really "owned" the music anyway, but were just "licensed" it, and since DRM (or for that matter credit card purchases) necessitates keeping records of all your purchases, they could have just given people new "licenses" to DRM-free MP3s, right? Yeah, they could have. Double fail.
Maybe I'm wrong, and at the purchase of every book there is an Eula that says they get to fuck you in the ass and have the resulting baby from it too.
Ah, the sad state of sex education today...
Well, I have a DX, but the only thing I've been reading on it so far is PDFs. Haven't spent a penny on content from the Kindle store. I did try a sample just to see how it rendered. But as to this article, here's what I posted at another site:
An important issue, but not a great write-up. The author claims that "tethered systems provide significant advantages to the consumer. Companies can keep their own records of what people buy and restore the content if it is inadvertently lost," but neglects to mention that one of the most widely-used DRM platforms, the iTunes store, had no such mechanism for restoring lost purchases (and as far as I know, they still don't, despite dropping the DRM but maintaining records of purchases).
Also, Prof. Picker's comment that "âoeBecause copyright infringement [sic] was poor and lax in the offline world, it should also be that way in the online world? I donâ(TM)t understand that logic,â simply fails to grasp that the only way copyright has functioned at all for the past few centuries has been with poor and lax enforcement. Perfect enforcement comes with too many costs; just because it's possible doesn't make it a good idea.
It's not like checking the ram is seated properly is the first thing you'd check and it's not like the BIOS will come up with a "RAMs not seated properly" message.
How true... one of my RAM sticks was failing yesterday, so I was messing around with seating. As I put one back in, I unwittingly caught a thin fan speed wire behind it. Didn't feel any different when I put it in the socket, and the computer booted, but memtest was giving loads of errors. When I finally got around to taking the chip out again, I noticed the severed wire, and a small bit of insulation stuck in the RAM slot! I'm surprised the computer even booted.
Wow, that is incompetent. Since the problem is most likely the RAM chip itself, re-installing XP almost certainly wouldn't help, and replacing the motherboard probably wouldn't help either. The first thing to do would be to test the chip, see if it's faulty, and replace it. Probably 1 hr to download, burn, and run memtest86 to figure that out, and maybe $25 to get a new chip.
If someone gets new errors/BSODs after installing or changing RAM configuration, problems with the RAM should be the first thing you think of!