I think you're thinking in the wrong direction. I think you should wonder if link shorteners have just discovered a new business model --- when generating shortened URLs for an IP address which has historically generated a lot of previous hits, always use a string which, when mangled, often leads one to somewhere which generates a bit of extra income (for the link shortener).
Or if it actually isn't realistic to generate income this way, this is still at least is a kind of strange sort of side-channel-routing-influence-power on the net. Interesting!
Oh, another Slashdotter who is judge, jury, and executioner! I smell hubris!
> The picture in the postcard (in your example) of whatever object is copyrighted.
Er, you didn't even specify in which jurisdiction you're ruling. If it is the US, then as long as the picture is a faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art, which does not allow for its creation including significant additional creative work such as composition (something which probably always is significant if the original object is largely three-dimensional, like a sculpture), than Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. probably is applicable. In which case, if the work being reproduced is in the public domain, the reproduction is also.
Notice the weasel words. They are there because, all legal actions, to some extent, are a crapshoot.
I think you're missing the point of the post you reply to: he's talking about the copyright on the sheet music, and you are talking about the copyright on the musical composition itself.
> The copyright has expired whether we can read the original or not.
Unfortunately, the way the law works now, no matter how trivial an addition someone makes to a public domain work, he can, without penalty, claim it to be a new derivative work protected by his copyright, and threaten you with big legal guns even though he probably has no case.
Good luck finding a postcard in an art museum gift shop, of a classic public domain painting, which doesn't claim to be under copyright of the museum!
> used to be cool, 10 years ago. Now Gimp sucks,.... and not one of them lets you just select a single object.
Last time I checked, the only objects, besides pixels (and layers, and channels --- which, BTW are easily selectable, in some sense), there were in the Gimp were text objects. And they were added less than 10 years ago, IIRC. Your complaint is kind of like bitching that your car doesn't bake cookies, and makes you sound clueless.
Use the right tool for the job. The only reason you thought Gimp was cool 10 years ago for what you do, is because Inkscape didn't exist, and you didn't want to pay for programs from Adobe.
Gimp is still plenty "cool" for doing what it's meant to do. It's not meant to be a replacement for a vector drawing program.
> Whether or not 0.99999... is just a different way of spelling 1
By this I understand you mean "whether or not 0.9999... and 1 necessarily both represent the same number" (and that 0.999... is a representation of an infinite sum).
> is entirely a matter of what set of numbers your talking about.
OK, sounds interesting.
> Rationals? Certainly. Computable reals? Yes, but not as obvious.
I fail to understand what the difference is, here.
> Non-computable reals? Definitely not.
I really lose you here. What kind of structure do the non-computable reals have which can lead to interesting mathematics? They're not even closed under addition!
> But the Israelis do start cycles of killings and revenge.
Aren't cycles, well, cyclic? I find it interesting that you think you know where the circle starts. How did you figure that out?
And you also have all the answers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. How wonderful!
> You're defending the Israelis.
No, I was attacking your argument. There's a difference. It's obvious to me that there's enough "yecch" in the extended conflict there so that no side gets to feel righteous. You, on the other hand, seem to believe otherwise, it seems?
In light of this other "evidence", I suspect you are totally correct that a handful of people throwing stones are not a real threat against a much larger number of properly equipped soldiers, but I am skeptical about your generalization that a very large number of stone throwers could never be a real threat against a small number of properly equipped soldiers.
> private key is in a central computer, with no record linking it to the public key (thus preserving anonymity).
Interesting. How is the encrypted ballot going to get to the correct person, then? I think you meant to say that the public key isn't linked to the identity of the person to whom it was issued.
BTW, one presumes that these keys will be reused, since otherwise there is no extra convenience to the voter. And if the keys are reused, it is possible that a previous voting pattern could be correlated with a voter's disclosing information about his past votes. Another problem is that it is impossible to immediately revoke the voting privileges of felons, you'd have to wait until they need to be reissued new public keys (some people might find this a feature rather than a problem). Another, much much more significant problem is that it is possible to buy a voter's vote using money or intimidation (well, that could possibly be "fixed" if the central computer just doesn't complain about trying to vote more than once --- which has its own problem in that the rightful voter can never be sure if his vote actually was counted or someone else somehow used his key before him).
Another problem which you are overlooking is that, on the voter side, most voters would be using unsecured computers to contact this central computer (and in addition, most voters are incapable of securing their own computers). One suspects that it will just become a big competition as to who can infect as many as possible computers of the opposing candidate with their custom Trojan designed to undermine the results of the election.
There's tons of academic papers about remote electronic voting, and the conclusion of most people (including Rivest, it seems) is that yes, it can theoretically be done securely but in practice it is no better than the current system, and probably worse.
> The chicken comes first in creationism and the egg comes first in evolution.
The egg obviously comes first in evolution, since very primitive animals laid eggs millions of years before birds evolved. This is, of course, merely a pedantic quibble.
The real dilemma is whether the meaning of the "egg" in the question is "an egg laid by a chicken" or "an egg out of which hatches a chicken". The choice of interpretation has nothing whatsoever to do with accepting evolution, either interpretation of the language is still possible in that case, and each interpretation yields a different answer.
Funny, I have them opted out and blocked (more or less --- I never enable third-party advertising domains in NoScript). Does that mean I'm managing to waste even more of their resources than ordinary blockers?
Who cares what it means, what I want to know is, does he claim to have a copyright on it which will last until his greatgrandchildren die? Is he in the pockets of corporate IP interests?
Hmm, maybe he's on the "other side" and that is the secret key to the next great DRM scheme, still in secret alpha testing?
I wonder when goo.gl will stop letting people make recursive shortenings of goo.gl (and other shortening service) URLs. It takes delving two levels to figure out where that link goes (hint: add an extra/info level in the URL path before the random string --- which works for bit.ly also, last time I checked).
> The specific reasons for this aren't important, the fact that those reasons cannot be changed is.
"cannot be changed"? You meant this in the greater context of the discussion which centers on Bittorrent?
Because I can see that it might be possible to fix this latency under certain specific circumstances which might come about in the future. If we assume that most Linux users in this future have constant availability of their net connection and are willing to run some kind of specialized P2P protocol server, then the protocol would merely have to randomly query N peers from a locally cached peer list, and fallback on centralized servers in case of failure. For small N this would only add a very small latency for the very first downloaders (assuming such an N is still large enough to give good connectivity to the generated graph).
> Most substances that are water soluble result in a clear liquid which > is more or less indistinguishable from water.
Most substances that are water soluble can be dissolved into the water which can be readily obtained once one boards the airplane. In light of this, your post seems rather silly. BTW, the TSA appears to be trying to prevent taking (pure) nitromethane on board, and it's not very water-soluble.
To the outside observer, rather than the supposedly easy-going, patient, humble, thrifty LiMux user, half a decade is too long.
And yet this shouldn't even make a competent manager blink, considering the scale of the project: O(10^4) workstations and Office macros. Microsoft is good enough at "spinning" this as a failure, so if you're not on their side, there's no reason to help them at it.
there still is no leadership, no face to Linux deployed in government-- save for those locals
And this is a structural feature of FOSS adoption. I don't see how it can be avoided. As I pointed out, the success of the Munich transition might largely be attributed to whichever FOSS advocate managed to sell "lack of lock-in" to the Munich government. OTOH, after the transition is totally finished, if other German cities think about transitions, they will know who to consult.
Slashdot Mirror
A pity, however, that the GP didn't add (on a second line, of course):
"You're confusing him with Generalissimo Francisco Franco."
> but it is impossible to log in to most social networks without HTTPS
Maybe someone should tell him about Slashdot? If he were to restrict himself to only infringing on copyrights, it would be a big improvement overall!
> on every unit sold
and even more if you include all of the specialty controllers. A much better business model until matter duplicators come around. :-)
I think you're thinking in the wrong direction. I think you should wonder if link shorteners have just discovered a new business model --- when generating shortened URLs for an IP address which has historically generated a lot of previous hits, always use a string which, when mangled, often leads one to somewhere which generates a bit of extra income (for the link shortener).
Or if it actually isn't realistic to generate income this way, this is still at least is a kind of strange sort of side-channel-routing-influence-power on the net. Interesting!
Dear English Heritage,
We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.
Signed,
Everyone else
> Design an open system without copy protection, raised the price of the console slightly and drop the price of the games to $20.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3#Sales_and_production_costs and understand the idiocy of Sony's business model for the PS3. There was no way they could have raised the price "slightly".
> No, I had it right.
Oh, another Slashdotter who is judge, jury, and executioner! I smell hubris!
> The picture in the postcard (in your example) of whatever object is copyrighted.
Er, you didn't even specify in which jurisdiction you're ruling. If it is the US, then as long as the picture is a faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art, which does not allow for its creation including significant additional creative work such as composition (something which probably always is significant if the original object is largely three-dimensional, like a sculpture), than Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. probably is applicable. In which case, if the work being reproduced is in the public domain, the reproduction is also.
Notice the weasel words. They are there because, all legal actions, to some extent, are a crapshoot.
I think you're missing the point of the post you reply to: he's talking about the copyright on the sheet music, and you are talking about the copyright on the musical composition itself.
> The copyright has expired whether we can read the original or not.
Unfortunately, the way the law works now, no matter how trivial an addition someone makes to a public domain work, he can, without penalty, claim it to be a new derivative work protected by his copyright, and threaten you with big legal guns even though he probably has no case.
Good luck finding a postcard in an art museum gift shop, of a classic public domain painting, which doesn't claim to be under copyright of the museum!
Yeah, we all know that it's ninja software which takes down drones (but only when you're not looking, of course).
> used to be cool, 10 years ago. Now Gimp sucks, .... and not one of them lets you just select a single object.
Last time I checked, the only objects, besides pixels (and layers, and channels --- which, BTW are easily selectable, in some sense), there were in the Gimp were text objects. And they were added less than 10 years ago, IIRC. Your complaint is kind of like bitching that your car doesn't bake cookies, and makes you sound clueless.
Use the right tool for the job. The only reason you thought Gimp was cool 10 years ago for what you do, is because Inkscape didn't exist, and you didn't want to pay for programs from Adobe.
Gimp is still plenty "cool" for doing what it's meant to do. It's not meant to be a replacement for a vector drawing program.
> Whether or not 0.99999... is just a different way of spelling 1
By this I understand you mean "whether or not 0.9999... and 1 necessarily both represent the same number" (and that 0.999... is a representation of an infinite sum).
> is entirely a matter of what set of numbers your talking about.
OK, sounds interesting.
> Rationals? Certainly. Computable reals? Yes, but not as obvious.
I fail to understand what the difference is, here.
> Non-computable reals? Definitely not.
I really lose you here. What kind of structure do the non-computable reals have which can lead to interesting mathematics? They're not even closed under addition!
Ah, I see that "infinitely approximate" is the new "equals"?
> But the Israelis do start cycles of killings and revenge.
Aren't cycles, well, cyclic? I find it interesting that you think you know where the circle starts. How did you figure that out?
And you also have all the answers to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. How wonderful!
> You're defending the Israelis.
No, I was attacking your argument. There's a difference. It's obvious to me that there's enough "yecch" in the extended conflict there so that no side gets to feel righteous. You, on the other hand, seem to believe otherwise, it seems?
I find it interesting that you're posting this on more or less exactly the tenth anniversary of the Ramallah lynch of two unarmed Israeli army reservists.
In light of this other "evidence", I suspect you are totally correct that a handful of people throwing stones are not a real threat against a much larger number of properly equipped soldiers, but I am skeptical about your generalization that a very large number of stone throwers could never be a real threat against a small number of properly equipped soldiers.
> private key is in a central computer, with no record linking it to the public key (thus preserving anonymity).
Interesting. How is the encrypted ballot going to get to the correct person, then? I think you meant to say that the public key isn't linked to the identity of the person to whom it was issued.
BTW, one presumes that these keys will be reused, since otherwise there is no extra convenience to the voter. And if the keys are reused, it is possible that a previous voting pattern could be correlated with a voter's disclosing information about his past votes. Another problem is that it is impossible to immediately revoke the voting privileges of felons, you'd have to wait until they need to be reissued new public keys (some people might find this a feature rather than a problem). Another, much much more significant problem is that it is possible to buy a voter's vote using money or intimidation (well, that could possibly be "fixed" if the central computer just doesn't complain about trying to vote more than once --- which has its own problem in that the rightful voter can never be sure if his vote actually was counted or someone else somehow used his key before him).
Another problem which you are overlooking is that, on the voter side, most voters would be using unsecured computers to contact this central computer (and in addition, most voters are incapable of securing their own computers). One suspects that it will just become a big competition as to who can infect as many as possible computers of the opposing candidate with their custom Trojan designed to undermine the results of the election.
There's tons of academic papers about remote electronic voting, and the conclusion of most people (including Rivest, it seems) is that yes, it can theoretically be done securely but in practice it is no better than the current system, and probably worse.
> The chicken comes first in creationism and the egg comes first in evolution.
The egg obviously comes first in evolution, since very primitive animals laid eggs millions of years before birds evolved. This is, of course, merely a pedantic quibble.
The real dilemma is whether the meaning of the "egg" in the question is "an egg laid by a chicken" or "an egg out of which hatches a chicken". The choice of interpretation has nothing whatsoever to do with accepting evolution, either interpretation of the language is still possible in that case, and each interpretation yields a different answer.
> and try to shut you down, usually successfully.
Yes, I remember another poster complaining about a local bar which attempted to only play non-BMI and non-ASCAP music and still had to close down because the owner just couldn't afford to pay the enormous legal fees necessary to try to fight the collection agencies.
Wow, that was an extraordinary post, even from a three-digit-er.
Assuming, of course, that you pulled that geeky reference from your memory rather than just found it via a Google search.
That's the downside to the power of the net, when we do something without using it we don't get as much credit anymore as we would have, before.
3DV Systems, an Israeli company, so it seems: http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/03/microsofts-project-natal-roots-revealed-3dv-systems-zcam/
Probably find more info with a search on "3DV Systems" on the GOOG.
Funny, I have them opted out and blocked (more or less --- I never enable third-party advertising domains in NoScript). Does that mean I'm managing to waste even more of their resources than ordinary blockers?
Who cares what it means, what I want to know is, does he claim to have a copyright on it which will last until his greatgrandchildren die? Is he in the pockets of corporate IP interests?
Hmm, maybe he's on the "other side" and that is the secret key to the next great DRM scheme, still in secret alpha testing?
:-)
I wonder when goo.gl will stop letting people make recursive shortenings of goo.gl (and other shortening service) URLs. It takes delving two levels to figure out where that link goes (hint: add an extra /info level in the URL path before the random string --- which works for bit.ly also, last time I checked).
> The specific reasons for this aren't important, the fact that those reasons cannot be changed is.
"cannot be changed"? You meant this in the greater context of the discussion which centers on Bittorrent?
Because I can see that it might be possible to fix this latency under certain specific circumstances which might come about in the future. If we assume that most Linux users in this future have constant availability of their net connection and are willing to run some kind of specialized P2P protocol server, then the protocol would merely have to randomly query N peers from a locally cached peer list, and fallback on centralized servers in case of failure. For small N this would only add a very small latency for the very first downloaders (assuming such an N is still large enough to give good connectivity to the generated graph).
> Most substances that are water soluble result in a clear liquid which
> is more or less indistinguishable from water.
Most substances that are water soluble can be dissolved into the water which can be readily obtained once one boards the airplane. In light of this, your post seems rather silly. BTW, the TSA appears to be trying to prevent taking (pure) nitromethane on board, and it's not very water-soluble.
To the outside observer, rather than the supposedly easy-going, patient, humble, thrifty LiMux user, half a decade is too long.
And yet this shouldn't even make a competent manager blink, considering the scale of the project: O(10^4) workstations and Office macros. Microsoft is good enough at "spinning" this as a failure, so if you're not on their side, there's no reason to help them at it.
there still is no leadership, no face to Linux deployed in government-- save for those locals
And this is a structural feature of FOSS adoption. I don't see how it can be avoided. As I pointed out, the success of the Munich transition might largely be attributed to whichever FOSS advocate managed to sell "lack of lock-in" to the Munich government. OTOH, after the transition is totally finished, if other German cities think about transitions, they will know who to consult.