Duke Nukem Forever: A brilliant physicist spending his days masturbating pauses to download the latest copy of Duke Nukem Forever only to realize it's the worst game ever made. Unable to 'unplay' the game, he sets his mind to developing a way to travel back in time in order to prevent himself from playing the game and instead spend his time doing better things (like masturbating). Unless Duke Nukem Forever can never be released due to unexplainable problems!
Hurd: A revolutionizing operating system is delivered to MIT's labs only to allow the physicists 100% computational up time and serious efficiency. Unplagued by BSODs and kernel panics, the lab flourishes to the point of developing a way to time travel. Unless Hurd is development is never completed!
Steorn's Free Energy: Currently a large hurtle in faster than light travel is the energy required to move the tiniest amount of mass at that speed. Steorn's perpetual motion machine would have provided that energy... unless their debut in London fantastically flopped and stymied them resulting in an international laughing stock.
ReiserFS: Had nothing to do with potential time travel, Hans just got out of control and killed his wife.
Here, Defendant’s counsel should be sanctioned for forcing Plaintiffs to take many
unnecessary steps to obtain basic information, for making misleading statements, and for making
baseless discovery objections and frivolous motions which he posted on his anti-recording
industry blog. Specifically, as demonstrated above, Defendant’s counsel consistently forced
Plaintiffs to seek Court intervention for routine discovery requests and engaged in a pattern of
filing frivolous motions. For example, Plaintiffs were forced to seek the Court’s assistance to
inspect Defendant’s computer, to serve deposition subpoenas on basic fact witnesses like Woody
Raymond, Junior Lindor, and Yannick Raymond-Wright, and to compel Defendant and her son
to produce the missing hard drive. As the Court held, each of these requests was a good faith
effort to uncover evidence of copyright infringement. Similarly, Defendant’s counsel filed
frivolous motions seeking, among other things, to preclude evidence (Doc. No. 69), to exclude
Plaintiffs’ expert’s testimony (Doc. No. 165), and to compel production of a proprietary contract
with MediaSentry (Doc. Nos. 62 and 201). Defendant’s counsel’s refusal to cooperate in good
faith and repeated frivolous motions designed to thwart Plaintiffs’ discovery resulted in an
unreasonable multiplication of these proceedings.
Defendant’s counsel also made misleading statements to Plaintiffs. His assertions that
there was no computer in the home at the time of infringement and that Defendant had no way of
contacting her nephew Junior Lindor were both false, and both materially prolonged and
complicated these proceedings unnecessarily.
Finally, as this Court is aware, Defendant’s counsel has maintained an anti-recording
industry blog during the course of this case and has consistently posted virtually every one of his
baseless motions on his blog seeking to bolster his public relations campaign and embarrass
Plaintiffs. Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and
warrants this imposition of sanctions. See Galonsky, 1997 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19570, at *18-19.
Now I can't find the court case cited here (Galonsky v. Williams in 1997?) because my judicial system here likes to be the only ones able to speak latin so I rely on them to tell me what's been established and what hasn't. Otherwise, I'd give you my honest opinion of their claims from a non-lawyer perspective, of course.
Essentially they seem to be upset with him discussing this case on his blog... if you read Slashdot regularly you'd be familiar with Ray's ability to say something along the lines of: so then I asked for this and they ruled it as frivolous and here's my documents asking for it! Which I guess is the kind of actions the RIAA was appealing to the judge to find 'vexatious' as the judge is the utmost authority in these cases about what is and isn't frivolous. Not Ray's blog, not the people who read Ray's blog and not the internet. People read his blog and get upset then the RIAA (and they were hoping the judge) get upset because they feel Ray spun the material to suite his arguments. Unfortunately for the RIAA the judge seemed to react along the lines of "Yeah, that's what I did, so what? I understand how this upsets you but he's free to run for office on his free time if he wants... let alone run a political campaign against you or I. Now both of you act like adults and stop calling each other 'vexatious.'" So I'm guessing what Ray did was vexatious but apparently being vexatious isn't illegal (maybe being 'overly vexatious' is?).
The downtime lasted 30 minutes, and most domains were probably cached by nameservers anyway.
I once viddied an animated documentary about a small town in Colorado that lost the internet for 22 minutes. It was not pretty. Our hearts and minds go out to you, people of Sweden. I cannot even fathom what that would be like... I hope the looting and rioting has died down with the restoration of the internet.
I think this was tried in Florida (as the article notes) back in 2002 but was killed instantly. It seems the trial run had focused on true positives meaning that they only reported numbers on when a person who was in the database was identified correctly. But overlooked the false positives, especially regarding someone who was not in the database being identified incorrectly as being in the database of criminals. Now, that ate up so much time it was instantly canceled. Of course, the FBI have figured out how to reduce this by combining many biometrics and it's now not okay to smile when you get your license picture taken where I live (planning for the future of biometrics, I suppose).
Does anyone know what the rates are for false positives in this new system? How much time is wasted double checking results?
Did anyone else make it past this? Because nothing (not even a goatse link) makes me stop reading faster than a bad pun.
Anyway in regards to:
Why Won't Apple Sell Your iTunes LPs?
Allow me to make a guess (and all you Apple fans get your negative moderation ready): Apple is bending over for the big labels that want to charge you more for this content you don't own (and also have a sketchy license to) when you purchase it. Now, they can't really DRM it and some people loathe DRM so really it's just bundled images, lyrics and videos. In the good old spirit of security through obfuscation, they think that keeping the creation technology secret to the big five labels prevent word getting out how to 'reverse engineer' this to get the content out so that you can replicate it and use it... *SHOCKINGLY*... somewhere else (which brings us back to the unclear licensing terms you're paying for).
Bottom line is that Apple is making the customer suffer and bating them with paying more for content they're not owning in any sense nor having a clear lifetime license to. Can I print out this artwork and put it on my bedroom wall? I'm guessing not. Personally I'm buying the box set instead.
Like DRM iTunes songs, it'll fall apart. Anyways, as the summary points out, it's futile. A clever 24 year old in Uruguay just made one. And I love that. I'm betting the open source community will make some extractors if you want the images, videos, lyrics and extras.
Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.
Yeah, after reading the Sousa piece it was shockingly levelheaded and highly rational. He even admits he's an alarmist and that he has a biased view because of his personal stake in this. The last paragraph included in the Ars image is downright prophetic:
It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure.
He almost sounds like a cautious promoter or early adopter himself! Unsurprisingly the Ars article only gives us the first sheet of a lengthy opinion that can be found here. Good reading to realize that these debated issues today are nothing new.
What reports of sexism have there been? Are you raising the subject of sexism just based on the fact that only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women? It takes a very special kind of person to do FOSS development -- because it's often outside of work. Which means you have to love what you do at work and then come home and do it some more. Even I get sick of coding. It's an uncommon desire and requires a special kind of insanity. So much of the stuff I write outside of work is just absolutely useless in the end. Is it possible this trait is far less common in women than men?
Present evidence of sexist attitudes and attacks and I will gladly support you. Hell, I support you right now, nothing would make me happier than more women in FOSS. I just am not sure how you promote that sort of goal -- usually it's a monetary or favorable employment reward for having ovaries but the only reward is... recognition?
Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.
People on the internet called you names? It happens. Who are these people? Probably random pigs the internet has no shortage of. Don't let it get to you, hold your summit and figure out a way to designate Female FOSS Developer of the Month on your website.
To reiterate, I'm not denying that there is an disturbingly low percentage of women in FOSS development. I'm just questioning what's causing that. It's probably a number of factors including Hollywood not showing women as the computer hacker in many of their movies (except maybe Hackers). It's predominantly the stereotypical male. Women have to overcome that and women have to realize that getting together and working on a project with your friends by just coding can be fun. But I think society tells them early on that's not what women do. If there's any sexism, I've seen no proof it's internal to FOSS.
I noticed this a while ago when I went to post a story. Mostly, it's rather nice, but I do miss one feature:
Can it be made so that my link points to something other than my email address? I used to change it on every submission to point to my website, and actually I'd like to set that as the default.
Was there a reason that choice was removed, or was it an unintended effect/feature without priority?
Click your name in the submission and a box should appear that allows you to change it from your entered e-mail address to whatever you want.
I am having a problem with the javascript bookmarklet in Firefox 3.5.2 where it is not recognizing me as logged in when I use the bookmarklet to popup the window and submit the story. And then when I click "Log In" it takes me to a blank submission page with no data (but I am logged in). Is this a known bug? Shouldn't it grab that information and log in status from a cookie or something when I'm logged in in another tab? Aside from that, it looks really slick and I'm excited I won't have to switch between windows so much while paraphrasing articles! Well done!
But it doesn't say whether the BSA distinguish between online auctions offering cracked copies for download, pirated installation media or perfectly legitimate resale of software which the seller has no further use for.
Well, from the PDF of the actual report, they run through a bunch of 'case studies' which are by and large about who they targeted on these auctions sites like iOffer:
In August 2009, BSA announced that its members won a $210,563 judgment in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Matthew Miller of Newark, Del., who sold illegal copies of software through an Internet auction site. Software programs published by Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft were at the center of the case, which stemmed from a 2008 investigation by BSA. US District Judge Susan Illston awarded the plaintiffs $195,000 in statutory damages and an additional $15,563 for filing costs and attorneys’ fees. Miller was barred from committing future acts of copyright infringement involving Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft software products, and was ordered to immediately destroy any and all infringing copies of such software in his possession or control. According to legal documents filed on behalf of BSA member companies, the defendant “admitted he had ‘downloaded software, burned and copied CDs, and sold about 200 to outsiders for $8.00 to $12.00.’” Records in the case also describe how Miller used the popular iOffer Web site to sell unlicensed copies of BSA member software. In one particular instance, Miller was accused of offering approximately $12,000 worth of software to an undercover investigator for just $52, with an agreed price of $45 after some haggling.
And another:
In early 2009, Timothy Dunaway of Wichita Falls, Texas, was sentenced to 41 months in prison by US District Court Judge Reed O’Conner for selling counterfeit computer software through the Internet. Dunaway was sentenced to two years of supervised release, ordered to pay $810,000 in restitution, and forfeit a Ferrari 348 TB and Rolex watch. From July 2004 through May 2008, Dunaway operated approximately 40 Web sites that sold a large volume of downloadable counterfeit software. He operated computer servers in Austria and Malaysia; US and foreign law enforcement agents cooperated in the investigation. Dunaway purchased advertising for his Web site on major Internet search engines and processed more than $800,000 through credit-card merchant accounts under his control. The software sold by Dunaway had a combined retail value of more than $1 million.
There are more. I didn't see anything in the report about illegitimate versus legitimate resale and replication. I'm guessing they rely on the license terms to determine whether or not it's legitimate for me to resell my Warcraft 3 CDs or Windows XP Key. I'm guessing that Blizzard & Microsoft would be the ones informing them that's not legitimate.
By and large, however, the report focuses on people who pretty blatantly violate copyright and sell them on auction sites. A guy I knew in college did this and made a couple thousand on eBay before getting a seriously nasty letter from Microsoft. This would have been in ~2001 I think. I'm sure the same crap goes on with more serious consequences.
I'm not defending the BSA but they list case studies of the kind of piracy they are targeting.
According to Gizmodo which is paraphrasing the French newspaper Le Figaro:
According to French newspaper Le Figaro, judicial sources point that the man—who has been working as a particle physics contractor since 2003—has links to Al Qaeda groups in the Islamic Maghreb. Le Figaro said that he had suggested terrorist targets in French soil. There's word if the target list also included the LHC, however.
What did he do? Well, if we are to believe Le Figaro, he made a list of targets and suggested ones on French soil... possibly even the LHC where he worked.
I like how you accuse the world of jumping on people of 'brown skin' but you do not hesitate at all to instantly question French authorities. Let's not judge either way before all the facts are in and public, okay?
The leakiest of organizations in any country is the government. Anything leaked is leaked deliberately with a concrete reasoning behind it. Most of the time it is used to float trial balloons, but sometimes it's used to mislead the public for purposes of control.
From the article:
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
What does a Bank of America CEO's hard drive have to do with the government? Leaks happen all the time that are not "trial balloons" by the government--whether it be to the public or another country. Look at Aldrich Ames, do you think he was a trial balloon?
I don't think this is a good idea at all.
You're turning this into a partisan issue when it's just about getting things out there. Most of the world doesn't care about our petty political differences here in the United States. I have learned a lot about Scientology and even things that are supposed to be available to me through Wikileaks. When these guys have a new idea, I would listen up and give them a chance.
The solution seems simple: for Apple to flush all the apps that have not submitted binaries, and to repeat periodically.
Simple solution needs a simple response: compile Hello World! tutorial app and name it XYZ app and upload it to your desired squatter name. Use same binary or recompile for tiny differences to avoid sum checking. You have a complex problem that no simple solution will fix. Anything short of charging a nominal fee (a la domain registration) will probably not work and the fee idea is a horrible one for people who just want to get their app out there. If it doesn't cost money, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate. Ball's in your court.
he hasn't even particularly changed foreign policy with Iraq and Afghanistan
I took this news as a sign that the Nobel committee determined that the ongoing lengthy engagements with Iraq and Afghanistan are a bloody means to a peaceful end. I don't really share this opinion and I think a lot of people in the world would (similarly) support the removal of the Taliban but not whatever you want to call Iraq right now. The interesting thing is that they should have given Bush the Nobel Prize for Peace if they felt this way last year... he started those wars after all. The only other explanation is that these wars were largely overlooked. I only draw dangerous discrediting conclusions if I look at the situation logically.
Having gotten into office he's discovered the world is more complicated that a sound bite for a political stage allows.
The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began.
I honestly have heard no word of this. I guess he got into office and things got too real too fast for him? No word on that although I haven't been scouring his speeches. Now if that's why they gave him the Peace Prize, I'd agree with them. But that was a paragraph buried in his campaign promises (and not in progress yet), not something he's done.
I'd suspect this award was given out for the purposes of sparking controversy or to put the onus on Obama to become what they want him to become -- a peacemaker. I agree this was not a prudent decision although I don't see it as critically as most people. It is just an award after all.
This game is really fun but does anyone have a driver for this peripheral? Can't get it to work yet and am looking forward to turret-based content next year.
Word of warning: you break it, you bought it. And judging by the look of that pelvis, a tap would shatter it. She looks so top heavy a gust of wind would bring 'er down. I wonder when they'll get around to advertisements for Ralph Lauren hip casts? What, not chic enough?
Yes, he suggests Microsoft is our "ally." A hilarious notion that, when he writes it, makes it clear what contempt he has for you, the reader.
He never said nor suggested that Microsoft as a whole is your ally. A more fair analysis of his blog would be that Microsoft needs to be steered in the right direction and there are some good people on the inside trying to do this. He points out CodePlex as something he feels as a sign of progress. I'm not defending de Icaza's whole message but I think you're putting words into his mouth... no one in their right mind would say Steve Ballmer is an ally of open source. He may employ people who are proponents of free and open software but he himself is definitely against it. Also keep in mind that people -- and companies -- do change. This isn't the case with Microsoft... yet.
Just keep in mind that this is pure wasted time. RMS correctly points out that the war was won long ago - by a recognition of the value of the GPL and of free software.
If I may state the obvious, RMS is a hardliner with zero tolerance or forgiveness. Fine. This appeals quite well to many people (myself included). Now, de Icaza seems to be more of a bridge builder than a bridge burner and is looking for in roads into Microsoft. Perhaps you can see this as a catalyst to speed up the process to our desired end state or you can view this as aiding the enemy. Either way I think a lot of de Icaza's efforts are great experiments in seeing just how tolerant and truly open Microsoft's standards are. Right now, why don't we all just sit and watch before we become dependent on Moonlight? I appreciate both these people in different ways and it's a shame we got this drama or war of words internal to the open source movement.
My reading is (obviously) slanted toward sci-fi over fantasy but here's some more names to consider (in no order): Stanislaw Lem, Assimov, Wells, Philip K. Dick, Orwell, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, Charles Stross, Heinlein, Vonnegut, Lois Lowry, Madeleine L'Engle, Larry Niven, Sturgeon, Huxley, Herbert, Stephenson, Douglas Adams, Rand, Anthony Burgess, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, Frederick Pohl, Harlan Ellison, Jack Williamson, E.E. Smith and Crichton. While you might feel some of them belong elsewhere (Shelley, Vonnegut, Rand, Orwell) they're still sci-fi/fantasy.
Um, what were you planning to have them do? What amount of reading per week are you aiming at? 20-30 pages? I realize a lot of the authors (Jordan especially) may be too much to ask.
I don't think that's what they meant by turning Hotel California into an adjective or analogy.
I believe the one-way street attribute would probably be the easiest way to describe it. Although there's more subtle caveats to 'Hotel California' as a lyrical work. Though interpretations have been numerous (I've heard it compared to prison), the writers describe it as an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in Southern California--especially the music industry (that we all know and love). From the Wikipedia entry:
"Don Henley and Glenn wrote most of the words. All of us kind of drove into LA at night. Nobody was from California, and if you drive into LA at night... you can just see this glow on the horizon of lights, and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have, and so it was kind of about that... what we started writing the song about. Coming into LA... and from that Life In The Fast Lane came out of it, and Wasted Time and a bunch of other songs."
So if I may elaborate the analogy may be trying to describe cloud computing as something you're kind of forced into and it would seem stupid not to take it... but then you start to realize that it's not everything it was made out to be at the beginning. You are promised success and all the resources imaginary but then at the end when you realize you don't have control over the situation and your data or privacy becomes seriously important to you, it's nowhere to be found and irreclaimable. The song's final lyrics before the guitar solo and double stop bass: "You can checkout any time you like/But you can never leave."
No, this isn't unique, Lynyrd Skynyrd felt the same way as did The Kinks and I bet if I sat and thought I'd come up with much much more. I guess you'd be better off explaining it outright than calling cloud computing Hotel California but the English language allows one to play and invent I guess. The author might consider the younger crowds though for this piece.
This is an excellent opportunity to honor Monty Python by honoring the group's mastery of shock and irreverence and stop quoting, word for word skits and films! The irony is killing me slowly.
I disagree. Because you are quoting something surreal does not make it any less surreal. Monty Python is surreal humor, not original humor. Of course, the shock and awe of seeing it the first time is very effective. But that should in no way prevent you from continually enjoying it. If it being original was a requisite to the innate humor, the very act of placing it statically on a medium would remove the humor from it.
Of course it's quotable in the same way David Lynch is quotable or Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory is replicated in anything from The Simpsons to T-shirts. I think that XKCD comic has little to no merit in claiming that Python was loved for their mastery of shock or defiance of convention. They were loved for their humor--be it unique, it was still not entirely original. Quoting Monty Python should make no one more depressed than quoting Shakespeare or Homer. Stop fretting about being unoriginal and enjoy it.
You may want to welcome them already. Recent research shows now that phytoplankton were/are consumers of poisonous ammonia in our oceans. And they produced out of it what plants crave. 'Lytes! No wait, I mean Nitrogen. I'm not a biologist but this latest research seems to imply that our designation of bacterial nitrifiers as most important to the nitrogen cycle is wrong and should be given to Archaea. From that research:
The new experiments show that the organism can survive on a mere whiff of ammonia - 10 nanomolar concentration, equivalent to a teaspoon of ammonia salt in 10 million gallons of water. In the deep ocean there is no light and little carbon, so this trace amount of ammonia is the organism's only source of energy.
So I wouldn't be surprised that phytoplankton would be the first to recover after an asteroid strike. Not much needed for them to survive. Apparently if all of this is true, a lot of ecology is going to be rewritten. Exciting times if you're in that field I guess.
The patent component of this news aside, we've seen iPhones turned into web servers, iPhones running PHP and Apache and even playing reduced frame rate WoW on your iPhone. So, when we saw these articles it is easily suspected that they could be an abuse to the network. But how could an Apache server on my iPhone be anymore of an abuse than an Apache server on my home computer connected to Comcast? I mean, the networks are probably different but can't they institute a cap and just let my phone slow to a crawl due to limited bandwidth while everyone else doesn't even notice my usage? Are the cell phone networks really that helpless in that they cannot cap usages on cell phones?
Either there's something about the potential abuse of cell phones on networks or Apple just wants another patent. Probably both.
All I ask of Apple (or anyone really) is that -- if they implement this patent on a phone -- they advertise this "feature" and stay true to the numbers of what you can expect out of your potentially crippled device. My biggest problem with my ISP is that they flat out lie to me about what I'm paying for. When I see things like "unlimited data plan" on cell phones I can only laugh...
In September Zawinski was called by Joe Hayashi from Palm, formerly Senior Director of Product Management for Yahoo!. Despite the treatment from Palm over this matter Hayashi said "We aren't asking that you remove the binaries or source of your apps from your web site, and we aren't restricting anyone from distributing their source code, open source license or otherwise."
Yet the Palm SDK License (as linked to in the article) states under section 4. Developers' Ownership and Ability to Distribute its Applications:
4.3 Applications Can Only Be Distributed Through the Palm Application Catalog. Developer acknowledges and agrees, that absent a separate written agreement with Palm, Developer may not distribute any Application except as allowed by Palm's formal approved distribution process and channel (the "Application Catalog"). Developer acknowledges and agrees that (a) distribution of Applications will be subject to further terms and conditions, which may include a share of the revenue generated from sale of the Applications to be paid to Palm by Developer, where such terms and conditions shall be presented to Developer upon or before Developer's request for distribution of any Application, (b) because of certain laws, regulations, as well as contractual or other restrictions, Palm may refuse to allow the distribution of certain types of Applications, and (c) distributed Applications may be viewable or inspectable by third parties, and Palm is not obligated to take any steps to obfuscate the code associated with the Applications or take any other steps to prevent third parties from viewing or inspecting Application code.
Now this is assuming Jamie Zawinski used the SDK to produce the Palm Pre programs (I'm not sure what the Pre can run and these programs seem to be merely ports). After searching around for the terms of service for the application store for the Palm Pre, I came up pretty empty handed aside from the Developer SDK License. The fact that it says 'Beta' on the app store may make this forgivable but I'm not seeing a clear distinction on the fine details and legal on what you may or may not do when submitting an application. It appears there may be some internal conflicting views also -- considering what Hayashi said and what Palm did.
That's nothing. You can use the Core Location Framework to figure out where they are. So I sold an application to celebrities only that shows them where the paparazzi are, it's called iAvoidPaparazzi. Then iAvoidPaparazzi sends my server their location which gets fed into another application called iMolestCelebs that I sell to tabloids and paparazzi. Then their information comes back to my server and gets fed out to iAvoidPaparazzi. Yeah it took me a few weeks to prime the pump so to speak but once this gets rolling I'm sure I'll make some huge bank off of it... at least until I get shutdown after I take the heat for a few Princess Dianas. *sigh* A man can't make an honest living these days...
When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate.
Copyright was used to get the material out of the book but was that the motive? I know little of Lucia Joyce despite being a big fan of James Joyce. And a lot of what was in the New Yorker's well written lengthy article was news to me. At the bottom of the second page they state that Carol Shloss believes Lucia's insanity and mental instability was mishandled or even cruelly worsened by many actions. And that as Joyce worked tirelessly to finish Finnegan's Wake, he had to rely on others and institutions to take care of his delicate daughter. Shloss concludes that Lucia was a price paid for one of the greatest books written. And then the interesting part:
But, as Shloss tells it, the silencing of Lucia went further than that. Her story was erased. After Joyce's death, many of his friends and relatives, in order to cover over this sad (and reputation-beclouding) episode, destroyed Lucia's letters, together with Joyce's letters to and about her. Shloss says that Giorgio's son, Stephen Joyce, actually removed letters from a public collection in the National Library of Ireland. When Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora was in galleys, Maddox was required to delete her epilogue on Lucia in return for permission to quote various Joyce materials.
Shloss claims go so far as to state that Lucia was a pioneering artist squashed and erased from history by her relatives. The New Yorker sounds dubious to Shloss' claims and she has little evidence. It's possible that the Joyce Estate would rather keep Lucia under wraps and un-speculated about... and the only route they had to suppress this work was copyright. I do not think censorship is copyright's intended use and that may very well be why this case failed. Although it's often misused like this, this in no way seems to have any motivation to protect the original copyright holder and their designated livelihood from their art.
Would you think less of Joyce if you agreed that he sacrificed the mental stability and well being of his daughter to complete a novel? Would you think less of him if it was confirmed that he had contracted syphilis or that that is what caused him to go blind? Or that he wrote dirty letters to his wife? All these things may or may not be true. James Joyce was very human and I think this may be a case of his estate attempting to keep private matters about his daughter Lucia private.
No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet...
I don't know if we'll ever have what you're thinking of as everything we've designed has a finite shelf life. There might even be some fundamental law about entropy increasing in a closed system that could prove you'll never be 100% okay.
But instead what I would offer them is a plan as a solution, not a type of media. Offer to deliver it on whatever they are most comfortable handling. You could deliver a DVD or Solid State Storage device such as an SD card or USB stick and suggest they store that offsite in a vault or something fireproof while you give them additional copies to retain and use locally that they can put on a networked RAID. Then at the end of the proposed shelf life, routine maintenance is performed on the stored media in the vault to bring it up to date while the local copies are still good. If they maintain this sort of redundancy and check the status of the media, they should be okay. They might even hire someone like Iron Mountain or another storage solution to maintain their backups.
Expensive? Very. Your other option is to do the same on your end and (don't promise this or tell them to rely on you) hopefully your kids will continue with it to persist your life's work.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, Defendant’s counsel should be sanctioned for forcing Plaintiffs to take many unnecessary steps to obtain basic information, for making misleading statements, and for making baseless discovery objections and frivolous motions which he posted on his anti-recording industry blog. Specifically, as demonstrated above, Defendant’s counsel consistently forced Plaintiffs to seek Court intervention for routine discovery requests and engaged in a pattern of filing frivolous motions. For example, Plaintiffs were forced to seek the Court’s assistance to inspect Defendant’s computer, to serve deposition subpoenas on basic fact witnesses like Woody Raymond, Junior Lindor, and Yannick Raymond-Wright, and to compel Defendant and her son to produce the missing hard drive. As the Court held, each of these requests was a good faith effort to uncover evidence of copyright infringement. Similarly, Defendant’s counsel filed frivolous motions seeking, among other things, to preclude evidence (Doc. No. 69), to exclude Plaintiffs’ expert’s testimony (Doc. No. 165), and to compel production of a proprietary contract with MediaSentry (Doc. Nos. 62 and 201). Defendant’s counsel’s refusal to cooperate in good faith and repeated frivolous motions designed to thwart Plaintiffs’ discovery resulted in an unreasonable multiplication of these proceedings. Defendant’s counsel also made misleading statements to Plaintiffs. His assertions that there was no computer in the home at the time of infringement and that Defendant had no way of contacting her nephew Junior Lindor were both false, and both materially prolonged and complicated these proceedings unnecessarily. Finally, as this Court is aware, Defendant’s counsel has maintained an anti-recording industry blog during the course of this case and has consistently posted virtually every one of his baseless motions on his blog seeking to bolster his public relations campaign and embarrass Plaintiffs. Such vexatious conduct demeans the integrity of these judicial proceedings and warrants this imposition of sanctions. See Galonsky, 1997 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19570, at *18-19.
Now I can't find the court case cited here (Galonsky v. Williams in 1997?) because my judicial system here likes to be the only ones able to speak latin so I rely on them to tell me what's been established and what hasn't. Otherwise, I'd give you my honest opinion of their claims from a non-lawyer perspective, of course.
... if you read Slashdot regularly you'd be familiar with Ray's ability to say something along the lines of: so then I asked for this and they ruled it as frivolous and here's my documents asking for it! Which I guess is the kind of actions the RIAA was appealing to the judge to find 'vexatious' as the judge is the utmost authority in these cases about what is and isn't frivolous. Not Ray's blog, not the people who read Ray's blog and not the internet. People read his blog and get upset then the RIAA (and they were hoping the judge) get upset because they feel Ray spun the material to suite his arguments. Unfortunately for the RIAA the judge seemed to react along the lines of "Yeah, that's what I did, so what? I understand how this upsets you but he's free to run for office on his free time if he wants ... let alone run a political campaign against you or I. Now both of you act like adults and stop calling each other 'vexatious.'" So I'm guessing what Ray did was vexatious but apparently being vexatious isn't illegal (maybe being 'overly vexatious' is?).
Essentially they seem to be upset with him discussing this case on his blog
The downtime lasted 30 minutes, and most domains were probably cached by nameservers anyway.
I once viddied an animated documentary about a small town in Colorado that lost the internet for 22 minutes. It was not pretty. Our hearts and minds go out to you, people of Sweden. I cannot even fathom what that would be like ... I hope the looting and rioting has died down with the restoration of the internet.
I think this was tried in Florida (as the article notes) back in 2002 but was killed instantly. It seems the trial run had focused on true positives meaning that they only reported numbers on when a person who was in the database was identified correctly. But overlooked the false positives, especially regarding someone who was not in the database being identified incorrectly as being in the database of criminals. Now, that ate up so much time it was instantly canceled. Of course, the FBI have figured out how to reduce this by combining many biometrics and it's now not okay to smile when you get your license picture taken where I live (planning for the future of biometrics, I suppose).
Does anyone know what the rates are for false positives in this new system? How much time is wasted double checking results?
I'm on the record (ha ha, "record," get it?)
Did anyone else make it past this? Because nothing (not even a goatse link) makes me stop reading faster than a bad pun.
Anyway in regards to:
Why Won't Apple Sell Your iTunes LPs?
Allow me to make a guess (and all you Apple fans get your negative moderation ready): Apple is bending over for the big labels that want to charge you more for this content you don't own (and also have a sketchy license to) when you purchase it. Now, they can't really DRM it and some people loathe DRM so really it's just bundled images, lyrics and videos. In the good old spirit of security through obfuscation, they think that keeping the creation technology secret to the big five labels prevent word getting out how to 'reverse engineer' this to get the content out so that you can replicate it and use it ... *SHOCKINGLY* ... somewhere else (which brings us back to the unclear licensing terms you're paying for).
Bottom line is that Apple is making the customer suffer and bating them with paying more for content they're not owning in any sense nor having a clear lifetime license to. Can I print out this artwork and put it on my bedroom wall? I'm guessing not. Personally I'm buying the box set instead.
Like DRM iTunes songs, it'll fall apart. Anyways, as the summary points out, it's futile. A clever 24 year old in Uruguay just made one. And I love that. I'm betting the open source community will make some extractors if you want the images, videos, lyrics and extras.
Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.
Yeah, after reading the Sousa piece it was shockingly levelheaded and highly rational. He even admits he's an alarmist and that he has a biased view because of his personal stake in this. The last paragraph included in the Ars image is downright prophetic:
It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure.
He almost sounds like a cautious promoter or early adopter himself! Unsurprisingly the Ars article only gives us the first sheet of a lengthy opinion that can be found here. Good reading to realize that these debated issues today are nothing new.
Raise the subject of sexism ...
What reports of sexism have there been? Are you raising the subject of sexism just based on the fact that only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women? It takes a very special kind of person to do FOSS development -- because it's often outside of work. Which means you have to love what you do at work and then come home and do it some more. Even I get sick of coding. It's an uncommon desire and requires a special kind of insanity. So much of the stuff I write outside of work is just absolutely useless in the end. Is it possible this trait is far less common in women than men?
... recognition?
Present evidence of sexist attitudes and attacks and I will gladly support you. Hell, I support you right now, nothing would make me happier than more women in FOSS. I just am not sure how you promote that sort of goal -- usually it's a monetary or favorable employment reward for having ovaries but the only reward is
Because I took a feminist stance in public, I have been abused in every way possible — being called irrelevant, a saboteur, coward, homosexual, and even a betrayer of the community.
People on the internet called you names? It happens. Who are these people? Probably random pigs the internet has no shortage of. Don't let it get to you, hold your summit and figure out a way to designate Female FOSS Developer of the Month on your website.
To reiterate, I'm not denying that there is an disturbingly low percentage of women in FOSS development. I'm just questioning what's causing that. It's probably a number of factors including Hollywood not showing women as the computer hacker in many of their movies (except maybe Hackers). It's predominantly the stereotypical male. Women have to overcome that and women have to realize that getting together and working on a project with your friends by just coding can be fun. But I think society tells them early on that's not what women do. If there's any sexism, I've seen no proof it's internal to FOSS.
I noticed this a while ago when I went to post a story. Mostly, it's rather nice, but I do miss one feature:
Can it be made so that my link points to something other than my email address? I used to change it on every submission to point to my website, and actually I'd like to set that as the default.
Was there a reason that choice was removed, or was it an unintended effect/feature without priority?
Click your name in the submission and a box should appear that allows you to change it from your entered e-mail address to whatever you want.
I am having a problem with the javascript bookmarklet in Firefox 3.5.2 where it is not recognizing me as logged in when I use the bookmarklet to popup the window and submit the story. And then when I click "Log In" it takes me to a blank submission page with no data (but I am logged in). Is this a known bug? Shouldn't it grab that information and log in status from a cookie or something when I'm logged in in another tab? Aside from that, it looks really slick and I'm excited I won't have to switch between windows so much while paraphrasing articles! Well done!
But it doesn't say whether the BSA distinguish between online auctions offering cracked copies for download, pirated installation media or perfectly legitimate resale of software which the seller has no further use for.
Well, from the PDF of the actual report, they run through a bunch of 'case studies' which are by and large about who they targeted on these auctions sites like iOffer:
In August 2009, BSA announced that its members won a $210,563 judgment in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against Matthew Miller of Newark, Del., who sold illegal copies of software through an Internet auction site. Software programs published by Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft were at the center of the case, which stemmed from a 2008 investigation by BSA. US District Judge Susan Illston awarded the plaintiffs $195,000 in statutory damages and an additional $15,563 for filing costs and attorneys’ fees. Miller was barred from committing future acts of copyright infringement involving Adobe, Autodesk, and Microsoft software products, and was ordered to immediately destroy any and all infringing copies of such software in his possession or control. According to legal documents filed on behalf of BSA member companies, the defendant “admitted he had ‘downloaded software, burned and copied CDs, and sold about 200 to outsiders for $8.00 to $12.00.’” Records in the case also describe how Miller used the popular iOffer Web site to sell unlicensed copies of BSA member software. In one particular instance, Miller was accused of offering approximately $12,000 worth of software to an undercover investigator for just $52, with an agreed price of $45 after some haggling.
And another:
In early 2009, Timothy Dunaway of Wichita Falls, Texas, was sentenced to 41 months in prison by US District Court Judge Reed O’Conner for selling counterfeit computer software through the Internet. Dunaway was sentenced to two years of supervised release, ordered to pay $810,000 in restitution, and forfeit a Ferrari 348 TB and Rolex watch. From July 2004 through May 2008, Dunaway operated approximately 40 Web sites that sold a large volume of downloadable counterfeit software. He operated computer servers in Austria and Malaysia; US and foreign law enforcement agents cooperated in the investigation. Dunaway purchased advertising for his Web site on major Internet search engines and processed more than $800,000 through credit-card merchant accounts under his control. The software sold by Dunaway had a combined retail value of more than $1 million.
There are more. I didn't see anything in the report about illegitimate versus legitimate resale and replication. I'm guessing they rely on the license terms to determine whether or not it's legitimate for me to resell my Warcraft 3 CDs or Windows XP Key. I'm guessing that Blizzard & Microsoft would be the ones informing them that's not legitimate.
By and large, however, the report focuses on people who pretty blatantly violate copyright and sell them on auction sites. A guy I knew in college did this and made a couple thousand on eBay before getting a seriously nasty letter from Microsoft. This would have been in ~2001 I think. I'm sure the same crap goes on with more serious consequences.
I'm not defending the BSA but they list case studies of the kind of piracy they are targeting.
According to French newspaper Le Figaro, judicial sources point that the man—who has been working as a particle physics contractor since 2003—has links to Al Qaeda groups in the Islamic Maghreb. Le Figaro said that he had suggested terrorist targets in French soil. There's word if the target list also included the LHC, however.
What did he do? Well, if we are to believe Le Figaro, he made a list of targets and suggested ones on French soil ... possibly even the LHC where he worked.
I like how you accuse the world of jumping on people of 'brown skin' but you do not hesitate at all to instantly question French authorities. Let's not judge either way before all the facts are in and public, okay?
The leakiest of organizations in any country is the government. Anything leaked is leaked deliberately with a concrete reasoning behind it. Most of the time it is used to float trial balloons, but sometimes it's used to mislead the public for purposes of control.
From the article:
"At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive's hard drives," he said. "Now how do we present that? It's a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it."
What does a Bank of America CEO's hard drive have to do with the government? Leaks happen all the time that are not "trial balloons" by the government--whether it be to the public or another country. Look at Aldrich Ames, do you think he was a trial balloon?
I don't think this is a good idea at all.
You're turning this into a partisan issue when it's just about getting things out there. Most of the world doesn't care about our petty political differences here in the United States. I have learned a lot about Scientology and even things that are supposed to be available to me through Wikileaks. When these guys have a new idea, I would listen up and give them a chance.
The solution seems simple: for Apple to flush all the apps that have not submitted binaries, and to repeat periodically.
Simple solution needs a simple response: compile Hello World! tutorial app and name it XYZ app and upload it to your desired squatter name. Use same binary or recompile for tiny differences to avoid sum checking. You have a complex problem that no simple solution will fix. Anything short of charging a nominal fee (a la domain registration) will probably not work and the fee idea is a horrible one for people who just want to get their app out there. If it doesn't cost money, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate. Ball's in your court.
he hasn't even particularly changed foreign policy with Iraq and Afghanistan
I took this news as a sign that the Nobel committee determined that the ongoing lengthy engagements with Iraq and Afghanistan are a bloody means to a peaceful end. I don't really share this opinion and I think a lot of people in the world would (similarly) support the removal of the Taliban but not whatever you want to call Iraq right now. The interesting thing is that they should have given Bush the Nobel Prize for Peace if they felt this way last year ... he started those wars after all. The only other explanation is that these wars were largely overlooked. I only draw dangerous discrediting conclusions if I look at the situation logically.
Having gotten into office he's discovered the world is more complicated that a sound bite for a political stage allows.
I think every president discovers this. Obama's Responsible, Phased Withdrawal from Iraq (biggest of many reasons I voted for him) reads thusly:
The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began.
I honestly have heard no word of this. I guess he got into office and things got too real too fast for him? No word on that although I haven't been scouring his speeches. Now if that's why they gave him the Peace Prize, I'd agree with them. But that was a paragraph buried in his campaign promises (and not in progress yet), not something he's done.
I'd suspect this award was given out for the purposes of sparking controversy or to put the onus on Obama to become what they want him to become -- a peacemaker. I agree this was not a prudent decision although I don't see it as critically as most people. It is just an award after all.
This game is really fun but does anyone have a driver for this peripheral? Can't get it to work yet and am looking forward to turret-based content next year.
I'd tap it, photoshopped or not!
Word of warning: you break it, you bought it. And judging by the look of that pelvis, a tap would shatter it. She looks so top heavy a gust of wind would bring 'er down. I wonder when they'll get around to advertisements for Ralph Lauren hip casts? What, not chic enough?
Yes, he suggests Microsoft is our "ally." A hilarious notion that, when he writes it, makes it clear what contempt he has for you, the reader.
He never said nor suggested that Microsoft as a whole is your ally. A more fair analysis of his blog would be that Microsoft needs to be steered in the right direction and there are some good people on the inside trying to do this. He points out CodePlex as something he feels as a sign of progress. I'm not defending de Icaza's whole message but I think you're putting words into his mouth ... no one in their right mind would say Steve Ballmer is an ally of open source. He may employ people who are proponents of free and open software but he himself is definitely against it. Also keep in mind that people -- and companies -- do change. This isn't the case with Microsoft ... yet.
Just keep in mind that this is pure wasted time. RMS correctly points out that the war was won long ago - by a recognition of the value of the GPL and of free software.
If I may state the obvious, RMS is a hardliner with zero tolerance or forgiveness. Fine. This appeals quite well to many people (myself included). Now, de Icaza seems to be more of a bridge builder than a bridge burner and is looking for in roads into Microsoft. Perhaps you can see this as a catalyst to speed up the process to our desired end state or you can view this as aiding the enemy. Either way I think a lot of de Icaza's efforts are great experiments in seeing just how tolerant and truly open Microsoft's standards are. Right now, why don't we all just sit and watch before we become dependent on Moonlight? I appreciate both these people in different ways and it's a shame we got this drama or war of words internal to the open source movement.
My reading is (obviously) slanted toward sci-fi over fantasy but here's some more names to consider (in no order): Stanislaw Lem, Assimov, Wells, Philip K. Dick, Orwell, Mary Shelley, H. P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, Charles Stross, Heinlein, Vonnegut, Lois Lowry, Madeleine L'Engle, Larry Niven, Sturgeon, Huxley, Herbert, Stephenson, Douglas Adams, Rand, Anthony Burgess, Philip Jose Farmer, Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison, Frederick Pohl, Harlan Ellison, Jack Williamson, E.E. Smith and Crichton. While you might feel some of them belong elsewhere (Shelley, Vonnegut, Rand, Orwell) they're still sci-fi/fantasy.
Um, what were you planning to have them do? What amount of reading per week are you aiming at? 20-30 pages? I realize a lot of the authors (Jordan especially) may be too much to ask.
If you mean a big hit that everyone knows.
I don't think that's what they meant by turning Hotel California into an adjective or analogy.
I believe the one-way street attribute would probably be the easiest way to describe it. Although there's more subtle caveats to 'Hotel California' as a lyrical work. Though interpretations have been numerous (I've heard it compared to prison), the writers describe it as an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in Southern California--especially the music industry (that we all know and love). From the Wikipedia entry:
"Don Henley and Glenn wrote most of the words. All of us kind of drove into LA at night. Nobody was from California, and if you drive into LA at night... you can just see this glow on the horizon of lights, and the images that start running through your head of Hollywood and all the dreams that you have, and so it was kind of about that... what we started writing the song about. Coming into LA... and from that Life In The Fast Lane came out of it, and Wasted Time and a bunch of other songs."
So if I may elaborate the analogy may be trying to describe cloud computing as something you're kind of forced into and it would seem stupid not to take it ... but then you start to realize that it's not everything it was made out to be at the beginning. You are promised success and all the resources imaginary but then at the end when you realize you don't have control over the situation and your data or privacy becomes seriously important to you, it's nowhere to be found and irreclaimable. The song's final lyrics before the guitar solo and double stop bass: "You can checkout any time you like/But you can never leave."
No, this isn't unique, Lynyrd Skynyrd felt the same way as did The Kinks and I bet if I sat and thought I'd come up with much much more. I guess you'd be better off explaining it outright than calling cloud computing Hotel California but the English language allows one to play and invent I guess. The author might consider the younger crowds though for this piece.
This is an excellent opportunity to honor Monty Python by honoring the group's mastery of shock and irreverence and stop quoting, word for word skits and films! The irony is killing me slowly.
Highly apropos XKCD comic on the subject.
I disagree. Because you are quoting something surreal does not make it any less surreal. Monty Python is surreal humor, not original humor. Of course, the shock and awe of seeing it the first time is very effective. But that should in no way prevent you from continually enjoying it. If it being original was a requisite to the innate humor, the very act of placing it statically on a medium would remove the humor from it.
Of course it's quotable in the same way David Lynch is quotable or Salvador Dali's Persistence of Memory is replicated in anything from The Simpsons to T-shirts. I think that XKCD comic has little to no merit in claiming that Python was loved for their mastery of shock or defiance of convention. They were loved for their humor--be it unique, it was still not entirely original. Quoting Monty Python should make no one more depressed than quoting Shakespeare or Homer. Stop fretting about being unoriginal and enjoy it.
The new experiments show that the organism can survive on a mere whiff of ammonia - 10 nanomolar concentration, equivalent to a teaspoon of ammonia salt in 10 million gallons of water. In the deep ocean there is no light and little carbon, so this trace amount of ammonia is the organism's only source of energy.
So I wouldn't be surprised that phytoplankton would be the first to recover after an asteroid strike. Not much needed for them to survive. Apparently if all of this is true, a lot of ecology is going to be rewritten. Exciting times if you're in that field I guess.
The patent component of this news aside, we've seen iPhones turned into web servers, iPhones running PHP and Apache and even playing reduced frame rate WoW on your iPhone. So, when we saw these articles it is easily suspected that they could be an abuse to the network. But how could an Apache server on my iPhone be anymore of an abuse than an Apache server on my home computer connected to Comcast? I mean, the networks are probably different but can't they institute a cap and just let my phone slow to a crawl due to limited bandwidth while everyone else doesn't even notice my usage? Are the cell phone networks really that helpless in that they cannot cap usages on cell phones?
...
Either there's something about the potential abuse of cell phones on networks or Apple just wants another patent. Probably both.
All I ask of Apple (or anyone really) is that -- if they implement this patent on a phone -- they advertise this "feature" and stay true to the numbers of what you can expect out of your potentially crippled device. My biggest problem with my ISP is that they flat out lie to me about what I'm paying for. When I see things like "unlimited data plan" on cell phones I can only laugh
In September Zawinski was called by Joe Hayashi from Palm, formerly Senior Director of Product Management for Yahoo!. Despite the treatment from Palm over this matter Hayashi said "We aren't asking that you remove the binaries or source of your apps from your web site, and we aren't restricting anyone from distributing their source code, open source license or otherwise."
Yet the Palm SDK License (as linked to in the article) states under section 4. Developers' Ownership and Ability to Distribute its Applications:
4.3 Applications Can Only Be Distributed Through the Palm Application Catalog. Developer acknowledges and agrees, that absent a separate written agreement with Palm, Developer may not distribute any Application except as allowed by Palm's formal approved distribution process and channel (the "Application Catalog"). Developer acknowledges and agrees that (a) distribution of Applications will be subject to further terms and conditions, which may include a share of the revenue generated from sale of the Applications to be paid to Palm by Developer, where such terms and conditions shall be presented to Developer upon or before Developer's request for distribution of any Application, (b) because of certain laws, regulations, as well as contractual or other restrictions, Palm may refuse to allow the distribution of certain types of Applications, and (c) distributed Applications may be viewable or inspectable by third parties, and Palm is not obligated to take any steps to obfuscate the code associated with the Applications or take any other steps to prevent third parties from viewing or inspecting Application code.
Now this is assuming Jamie Zawinski used the SDK to produce the Palm Pre programs (I'm not sure what the Pre can run and these programs seem to be merely ports). After searching around for the terms of service for the application store for the Palm Pre, I came up pretty empty handed aside from the Developer SDK License. The fact that it says 'Beta' on the app store may make this forgivable but I'm not seeing a clear distinction on the fine details and legal on what you may or may not do when submitting an application. It appears there may be some internal conflicting views also -- considering what Hayashi said and what Palm did.
That's nothing. You can use the Core Location Framework to figure out where they are. So I sold an application to celebrities only that shows them where the paparazzi are, it's called iAvoidPaparazzi. Then iAvoidPaparazzi sends my server their location which gets fed into another application called iMolestCelebs that I sell to tabloids and paparazzi. Then their information comes back to my server and gets fed out to iAvoidPaparazzi. Yeah it took me a few weeks to prime the pump so to speak but once this gets rolling I'm sure I'll make some huge bank off of it ... at least until I get shutdown after I take the heat for a few Princess Dianas. *sigh* A man can't make an honest living these days ...
When Shloss used copyrighted materials in her biography of Joyce's daughter Lucia, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, she had to excise a substantial amount of source material from the book in response to threats from the Joyce Estate.
Copyright was used to get the material out of the book but was that the motive? I know little of Lucia Joyce despite being a big fan of James Joyce. And a lot of what was in the New Yorker's well written lengthy article was news to me. At the bottom of the second page they state that Carol Shloss believes Lucia's insanity and mental instability was mishandled or even cruelly worsened by many actions. And that as Joyce worked tirelessly to finish Finnegan's Wake, he had to rely on others and institutions to take care of his delicate daughter. Shloss concludes that Lucia was a price paid for one of the greatest books written. And then the interesting part:
But, as Shloss tells it, the silencing of Lucia went further than that. Her story was erased. After Joyce's death, many of his friends and relatives, in order to cover over this sad (and reputation-beclouding) episode, destroyed Lucia's letters, together with Joyce's letters to and about her. Shloss says that Giorgio's son, Stephen Joyce, actually removed letters from a public collection in the National Library of Ireland. When Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora was in galleys, Maddox was required to delete her epilogue on Lucia in return for permission to quote various Joyce materials.
Shloss claims go so far as to state that Lucia was a pioneering artist squashed and erased from history by her relatives. The New Yorker sounds dubious to Shloss' claims and she has little evidence. It's possible that the Joyce Estate would rather keep Lucia under wraps and un-speculated about ... and the only route they had to suppress this work was copyright. I do not think censorship is copyright's intended use and that may very well be why this case failed. Although it's often misused like this, this in no way seems to have any motivation to protect the original copyright holder and their designated livelihood from their art.
Would you think less of Joyce if you agreed that he sacrificed the mental stability and well being of his daughter to complete a novel? Would you think less of him if it was confirmed that he had contracted syphilis or that that is what caused him to go blind? Or that he wrote dirty letters to his wife? All these things may or may not be true. James Joyce was very human and I think this may be a case of his estate attempting to keep private matters about his daughter Lucia private.
No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet ...
I don't know if we'll ever have what you're thinking of as everything we've designed has a finite shelf life. There might even be some fundamental law about entropy increasing in a closed system that could prove you'll never be 100% okay.
But instead what I would offer them is a plan as a solution, not a type of media. Offer to deliver it on whatever they are most comfortable handling. You could deliver a DVD or Solid State Storage device such as an SD card or USB stick and suggest they store that offsite in a vault or something fireproof while you give them additional copies to retain and use locally that they can put on a networked RAID. Then at the end of the proposed shelf life, routine maintenance is performed on the stored media in the vault to bring it up to date while the local copies are still good. If they maintain this sort of redundancy and check the status of the media, they should be okay. They might even hire someone like Iron Mountain or another storage solution to maintain their backups.
Expensive? Very. Your other option is to do the same on your end and (don't promise this or tell them to rely on you) hopefully your kids will continue with it to persist your life's work.