Its true that you can copyright a language. But to use the Languages of Middle-Earth as an example is not the best argument. The Tolkien Languages' copyrights are not heavily enforced. For instance the word "Orc", decidedly a Tolkien invention,
Not it's not, it's an old english word, used in beowulf for instance... Tolkien did not invent the word orc any more than he invented the word elf. OTOH, the orcs and elves of modern fantasy obviously owe a lot to how Tolkien imagined them.
See Baker, 101 U.S. at 102 (“But'
there is a clear distinction between the book, as such, and the art which it is intended to illustrate.
The mere statement of the proposition is so evident, that it requires hardly any argument to
support it.”); cf. René Magritte, La trahison des images.
And, by quoting Magritte in his argument this lawyer has increased my respect of the entire profession by 7%...
Crap. I wasn't logged in. My comment. Great book for those interested. Kind of like The Running Man, but in many ways, much crueler.
And a complete rip-off of Battle Royale. Skip it and just watch that instead.
And all of the above got the idea from Robert Scheckley's 1958 short story "The Prize of Peril", which is not only the first depiction of this type of game, but also of any form of reality television in fiction, decades before it materialized in the real world. I have not read the hunger games, but I wonder how much all of these add to the original concept...
These are not the main cost in producing/selling a book, the main cost is the 50-60% retailer cut of the cover price.
Mind if I ask for the source of this piece of info?
But I agree: online shops selling digital goods save huge amounts of money, compared to a physical shop selling physical goods that I can walk into and browse. So they should charge a lot less, otherwise I will keep walking in and browsing so long as there is one last bookstore in town.
No, he called the cheapo cameras and, by extension, their manufacturers a commodity. But this is slashdot, let's not let reality get in the way of a good rant;-)
And if, after they've rung it in and had the cash register tell them how much change to give, you try to give them a little extra change so that they'll give you back a nice round bill instead, then they'll just stare at you like you're trying to pay with live snails.
This is also the case, for different reasons, in Japan. If you give someone extra money to make the change a round number, they give it back to you first, and then give you change. And the most hilarious thing is that vending machines there have the exact same behavior.
Disclairmer: I am no expert on japan, but this was the experience I had on a short trip there several years ago.
people who are so troubled by Unity are in minority.
Have you noticed that Unbuntu has been overtaken by other distros?
No, because it hasn't. On distrowatch, mint has caught up with ubuntu, but Distrowatch has a niche public of linux geeks. For the general public, ubuntu is more well known than all other linux distros combined. Try google trends "linux ubuntu" versus "linux mint". Or take a look at this article:
http://www.starryhope.com/ubuntu-most-popular-linux-distro/. ubuntu gets twice as much google queries as the other top 9 distributions *combined*.
C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all.
I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel.
And, of course, a good concept with an incompatible implementation could never, ever be reimplemented to work on a different operating system or programming language.
The point is that if you are programming in java, you can offer arbitrary security models to applications running inside the VM, without the need for any special operating system support. The hard part is enriching the security model in a useful and backwards-compatible way for applications that run natively on the hardware, which is what capsicum does.
What design persona did you create this feature for?
We have a range of personas, mapping to different kinds of user of Ubuntu. Initially the HUD started as a power user feature, aimed at improving the experience of tech-savvy users who make full use of applications but use too many apps (and adopt new apps too quickly) to remember every shortcut key.
As the design progressed and developed, we expanded the scope of the design conversation to embrace all of our personas. We noticed in testing that new users found the HUD faster than the old menu, as did power users who hadn’t memorised the shortcut for a given function.
That's right. When I learn a new program, I don't know what command I'm looking for. I haven't yet memorized all the commands, and I want to look at all the menu commands to find the one I vaguely remember. Or to find the one I didn't know about.
Menus are still there, just in the top bar. Guess what, these guys did think about it, they are not complete idiots:http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939
There’s still a lot of design and code still to do. For a start, we haven’t addressed the secondary aspect of the menu, as a visible map of the functionality in an app. That discoverability is of course entirely absent from the HUD; the old menu is still there for now,
After I've learned the commands, I use the keyboard shortcuts. I don't use the menus much, but they're there when I need them.
What's the alternative? Am I supposed to read the manual and put post-it notes on my monitor? Do I watch an instructional video?
This is like keyboard shortcuts, except you don't have to memorize an arbitrary combination of keys, but vaguely remember one of several possible wordings for the thing you want to do, and can immediately browse through related actions if there are more than one. And as I quoted below, for discoverability it still relies on menus to some extent, since the HUD does not provide full discoverability.
Exactly, this is being targeted to beginners, the same users that are afraid to use the keyboard for commands, the same users that do nothing without a mouse.
Says who? From mark shuttleworth's blog post on this:
We’re doing a lot of user testing on heavy multitaskers, developers and all-day-at-the-workstation personas for Unity in 12.04, polishing off loose ends in the experience that frustrated some in this audience in 11.04-10. If that describes you, the results should be delightful. And the HUD should be particularly empowering.
on specific. That means that every application will have this feature implemented downstream, at Canonical. That seams like an awfully large piece of beef jerky to bite off right there.
No, it's not application specific. From mark shutlleworth's blog:
In 12.04 LTS, the HUD is a smart look-ahead search through the app and system (indicator) menus. The image is showing Inkscape, but of course it works everywhere the global menu works. No app modifications are needed to get this level of experience
Of course, you may want to tweak the tree and names on your menus to make them better suited to this type of usage, but the basic functionality is there with no explicit application support (I assume, so long as you are using gtk or qt and did not hack your own menus).
Offensive content, on the other hand, is near impossible to police on a world-wide level. It is impossible to know who is offended by what, the number of things that offend someone somewhere is much greater than those that do not offend anyone anywhere, the policing is horribly expensive, false positives abound and the benefits gained from this approach are unknown at best.
That's why Google's approach is wrong, again.
No. It is wrong because freedom of expression includes the right to offend others. Or to put it clearly, freedom of expression does not stop just because what I am saying is offensive to some people.
The fact that a prohibition on "offensive content" cannot practically be enforced on a social network is a relief, but the thing is, they shouldn't be trying. If you don't want to see someone's posts, just kick him out of your circles.
To my knowledge, Gnote doesn't do sync like Tomboy does.
+1 to this. Personally, I think banshee's interface is a bit nicer than rhythmbox, but I could happily live with either. But so long as I don't have a replacement for Tomboy (an intuitive, usable notes application with sync functionality), my PC will have mono on it.
I cant even buy their nook outside the US. Dear god let this walled garden crap be over soon.
It is already over. Just don't buy into their crap.
Option 1: Google for whatever you are looking for it in ripped epub. Download it. Read it on wherever gadget you want.
Option 2: Google for whatever you are looking for in an ebook shop. Find out it is not available without DRM. Look for it in the DRMed format that your gadget of the day supports. Pay for it, assuming the billing address on your card is in the right zone for the particular web shop to sell you the particular content. Enjoy it only on that gadget and its hopefully compatible successors.
Option 3: Buy into one of the walled gardens, and always get the content from them. If they don't have it, you're toast. If they decide to squeeze you by raising prices, you're toast. If they stop supporting the format for whatever reason, you're toast.
Option 2b/3b: Like options 2 or 3, but throw it into your favorite program to strip the DRM and convert it to epub.
Personally, until ebooks are DRM-free I see no reason to buy any, just like I never bought online music until recently (now that I can have it in mp3).
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Modern religion is mostly orthogonal to science, only because in the last few centuries it has retreated away from a number of fields it used to occupy where science won the cultural battle (e.g.: no, the earth was not created 5000 years ago, thank you).
What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ ).
So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.
Iif they put themselves as a man in the middle that sees your banking account credentials, credit card numbers, etc, all their servers that are involved in this should be subject to the kind of security standards and regulations that are required of sites that handle credit card numbers...
Googling for some of these books that I had never heard of finds some interesting tidbits on what people consider censorship-worthy nowadays...
The most common reason for the basis of the challenges is the poem “Ice Capades” which describes how Sophie is fascinated by her breasts’ reaction to a cold window pane
To follow up on my own comment about the success of these challenges, I read the Wikipedia page on And Tango Makes Three, #1 on this year's list and also #1 for 5 of the last 6 years. It's based on a true story where two male penguins formed a couple and were given an egg to raise.
To summarize the list of challenges on the linked page, which is hopefully representative of the challenges that went particularly far, there were...
3 failed requests to restrict the book
2 failed removal requests
1 successful request to move it to non-fiction
1 successful removal, oddly based on no requests; the removal was reviewed and at least temporarily reversed, though I didn't find the ultimate outcome
This is the mildest form of censorship I can think of.
Only because people are standing up against this kind of censorship, and giving schools, libraries and districts that indulge in it bad publicity. Without this kind of attention, the no risk option would be knee-jerk censoring of anything that a parent opposes...
We are what we are; i.e. the mechanic, who comes out from under the ship deck once in a while, dressed in rather unfashionable and perhaps even dirty clothes, to tell the capitan "I've giv'n her all she's got captain, an' I canna give her no more..."
LOL made my day... had many a discussion with colleagues on whether what we do (publishing papers on applied CS topics) is science or engineering... And I mostly share your point of view...
Dictionaries list common usage; they often do not contain technical definitions.
A pure (or direct as you say) democracy is a government in which everybody votes on everything. What we have can be called "representative democracy", but that is not technically accurate. Its true name is "republic".
I did not make that up, or pull it from thin air. Look it up yourself.
I get your distinction, and from the number of people who post this on slashdot, I also believe you did not make it up yourself. I just think it is a US invention (probably invented by a specific part of the US political spectrum, for reasons I cannot fathom): the rest of the world disagrees, and uses the word democracy mostly to indicate a representative democracy. The wikipedia page on republic offers some insight into this:
A distinct set of definitions for the word republic evolved in the United States. In common parlance a republic is a state that does not practice direct democracy but rather has a government indirectly controlled by the people. This is known as representative democracy. This understanding of the term was originally developed by James Madison, and notably employed in Federalist Paper No. 10. This meaning was widely adopted early in the history of the United States, including in Noah Webster's dictionary of 1828.
So this is not such a recent redefinition of the term, but it is indeed a US redefinition of the term. Or in other words: every time you correct people on slashdot for not using the word as you think it should be, you only betray your provincialism.
By the way: if you want to nitpick about definitions, a "phallacy" would actually mean "a quality of, or state of being, penis". I think you meant fallacy.
Democracies have always failed, and always quickly. We do not have a democracy. And I don't mean that in a snide way... it simply isn't. It's a representative Republic.
This commonly held phallacy is rather perplexing to non americans. In fact, the US is a democracy. It is not a direct democracy (where citizens vote on each individual issue) but a representative democracy. Let's try to look it up in a dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy):
a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
(emphasis mine).
Of course, if you come up with your own definition of words you can argue just about anything, but making up the language as you go does not help communication.
Slashdot Mirror
Its true that you can copyright a language. But to use the Languages of Middle-Earth as an example is not the best argument. The Tolkien Languages' copyrights are not heavily enforced. For instance the word "Orc", decidedly a Tolkien invention,
Not it's not, it's an old english word, used in beowulf for instance... Tolkien did not invent the word orc any more than he invented the word elf. OTOH, the orcs and elves of modern fantasy obviously owe a lot to how Tolkien imagined them.
See Baker, 101 U.S. at 102 (“But' there is a clear distinction between the book, as such, and the art which it is intended to illustrate. The mere statement of the proposition is so evident, that it requires hardly any argument to support it.”); cf. René Magritte, La trahison des images.
And, by quoting Magritte in his argument this lawyer has increased my respect of the entire profession by 7%...
Didn't Sun already win this case against Microsoft?
AFAIK they won a trademark case, not a copyright case: Microsoft could not fork their own bastardization of Java and still call it Java.
Crap. I wasn't logged in. My comment. Great book for those interested. Kind of like The Running Man, but in many ways, much crueler.
And a complete rip-off of Battle Royale. Skip it and just watch that instead.
And all of the above got the idea from Robert Scheckley's 1958 short story "The Prize of Peril", which is not only the first depiction of this type of game, but also of any form of reality television in fiction, decades before it materialized in the real world. I have not read the hunger games, but I wonder how much all of these add to the original concept...
These are not the main cost in producing/selling a book, the main cost is the 50-60% retailer cut of the cover price.
Mind if I ask for the source of this piece of info?
But I agree: online shops selling digital goods save huge amounts of money, compared to a physical shop selling physical goods that I can walk into and browse. So they should charge a lot less, otherwise I will keep walking in and browsing so long as there is one last bookstore in town.
Did he really just say that?
No, he called the cheapo cameras and, by extension, their manufacturers a commodity. But this is slashdot, let's not let reality get in the way of a good rant ;-)
And if, after they've rung it in and had the cash register tell them how much change to give, you try to give them a little extra change so that they'll give you back a nice round bill instead, then they'll just stare at you like you're trying to pay with live snails.
This is also the case, for different reasons, in Japan. If you give someone extra money to make the change a round number, they give it back to you first, and then give you change. And the most hilarious thing is that vending machines there have the exact same behavior.
Disclairmer: I am no expert on japan, but this was the experience I had on a short trip there several years ago.
people who are so troubled by Unity are in minority.
Have you noticed that Unbuntu has been overtaken by other distros?
No, because it hasn't. On distrowatch, mint has caught up with ubuntu, but Distrowatch has a niche public of linux geeks. For the general public, ubuntu is more well known than all other linux distros combined. Try google trends "linux ubuntu" versus "linux mint". Or take a look at this article: http://www.starryhope.com/ubuntu-most-popular-linux-distro/. ubuntu gets twice as much google queries as the other top 9 distributions *combined*.
C applications and modules in Android can only use and link against the NDK, which doesn't expose any operating system interfaces at all.
I doubt it will pick up steam because the necessary underpinnings will never be adopted in the Linux kernel.
And, of course, a good concept with an incompatible implementation could never, ever be reimplemented to work on a different operating system or programming language.
The point is that if you are programming in java, you can offer arbitrary security models to applications running inside the VM, without the need for any special operating system support. The hard part is enriching the security model in a useful and backwards-compatible way for applications that run natively on the hardware, which is what capsicum does.
What design persona did you create this feature for?
We have a range of personas, mapping to different kinds of user of Ubuntu. Initially the HUD started as a power user feature, aimed at improving the experience of tech-savvy users who make full use of applications but use too many apps (and adopt new apps too quickly) to remember every shortcut key. As the design progressed and developed, we expanded the scope of the design conversation to embrace all of our personas. We noticed in testing that new users found the HUD faster than the old menu, as did power users who hadn’t memorised the shortcut for a given function.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/hud-new-unity-feature/
That's right. When I learn a new program, I don't know what command I'm looking for. I haven't yet memorized all the commands, and I want to look at all the menu commands to find the one I vaguely remember. Or to find the one I didn't know about.
Menus are still there, just in the top bar. Guess what, these guys did think about it, they are not complete idiots:http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/939
There’s still a lot of design and code still to do. For a start, we haven’t addressed the secondary aspect of the menu, as a visible map of the functionality in an app. That discoverability is of course entirely absent from the HUD; the old menu is still there for now,
After I've learned the commands, I use the keyboard shortcuts. I don't use the menus much, but they're there when I need them.
What's the alternative? Am I supposed to read the manual and put post-it notes on my monitor? Do I watch an instructional video?
This is like keyboard shortcuts, except you don't have to memorize an arbitrary combination of keys, but vaguely remember one of several possible wordings for the thing you want to do, and can immediately browse through related actions if there are more than one. And as I quoted below, for discoverability it still relies on menus to some extent, since the HUD does not provide full discoverability.
Exactly, this is being targeted to beginners, the same users that are afraid to use the keyboard for commands, the same users that do nothing without a mouse.
Says who? From mark shuttleworth's blog post on this:
We’re doing a lot of user testing on heavy multitaskers, developers and all-day-at-the-workstation personas for Unity in 12.04, polishing off loose ends in the experience that frustrated some in this audience in 11.04-10. If that describes you, the results should be delightful. And the HUD should be particularly empowering.
on specific. That means that every application will have this feature implemented downstream, at Canonical. That seams like an awfully large piece of beef jerky to bite off right there.
No, it's not application specific. From mark shutlleworth's blog:
In 12.04 LTS, the HUD is a smart look-ahead search through the app and system (indicator) menus. The image is showing Inkscape, but of course it works everywhere the global menu works. No app modifications are needed to get this level of experience
Of course, you may want to tweak the tree and names on your menus to make them better suited to this type of usage, but the basic functionality is there with no explicit application support (I assume, so long as you are using gtk or qt and did not hack your own menus).
Offensive content, on the other hand, is near impossible to police on a world-wide level. It is impossible to know who is offended by what, the number of things that offend someone somewhere is much greater than those that do not offend anyone anywhere, the policing is horribly expensive, false positives abound and the benefits gained from this approach are unknown at best.
That's why Google's approach is wrong, again.
No. It is wrong because freedom of expression includes the right to offend others. Or to put it clearly, freedom of expression does not stop just because what I am saying is offensive to some people.
The fact that a prohibition on "offensive content" cannot practically be enforced on a social network is a relief, but the thing is, they shouldn't be trying. If you don't want to see someone's posts, just kick him out of your circles.
Judging by google trends, it doesn't seem like Mint is even a blip on the radar compared to ubuntu: http://www.google.com/trends?q=linux+ubuntu%2C+ubuntu%2C+mint%2C+linux+mint&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Tomboy. I live by Tomboy.
To my knowledge, Gnote doesn't do sync like Tomboy does.
+1 to this. Personally, I think banshee's interface is a bit nicer than rhythmbox, but I could happily live with either. But so long as I don't have a replacement for Tomboy (an intuitive, usable notes application with sync functionality), my PC will have mono on it.
I cant even buy their nook outside the US. Dear god let this walled garden crap be over soon.
It is already over. Just don't buy into their crap.
Option 1: Google for whatever you are looking for it in ripped epub. Download it. Read it on wherever gadget you want.
Option 2: Google for whatever you are looking for in an ebook shop. Find out it is not available without DRM. Look for it in the DRMed format that your gadget of the day supports. Pay for it, assuming the billing address on your card is in the right zone for the particular web shop to sell you the particular content. Enjoy it only on that gadget and its hopefully compatible successors.
Option 3: Buy into one of the walled gardens, and always get the content from them. If they don't have it, you're toast. If they decide to squeeze you by raising prices, you're toast. If they stop supporting the format for whatever reason, you're toast.
Option 2b/3b: Like options 2 or 3, but throw it into your favorite program to strip the DRM and convert it to epub.
Personally, until ebooks are DRM-free I see no reason to buy any, just like I never bought online music until recently (now that I can have it in mp3).
I'd say religion and science are pretty orthogonal.
Modern religion is mostly orthogonal to science, only because in the last few centuries it has retreated away from a number of fields it used to occupy where science won the cultural battle (e.g.: no, the earth was not created 5000 years ago, thank you).
Cross posting from my old comment. As per their help:
What about handling secure (https) connections? We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ ).
So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.
Iif they put themselves as a man in the middle that sees your banking account credentials, credit card numbers, etc, all their servers that are involved in this should be subject to the kind of security standards and regulations that are required of sites that handle credit card numbers...
The most common reason for the basis of the challenges is the poem “Ice Capades” which describes how Sophie is fascinated by her breasts’ reaction to a cold window pane
To follow up on my own comment about the success of these challenges, I read the Wikipedia page on And Tango Makes Three, #1 on this year's list and also #1 for 5 of the last 6 years. It's based on a true story where two male penguins formed a couple and were given an egg to raise.
To summarize the list of challenges on the linked page, which is hopefully representative of the challenges that went particularly far, there were... 3 failed requests to restrict the book 2 failed removal requests 1 successful request to move it to non-fiction 1 successful removal, oddly based on no requests; the removal was reviewed and at least temporarily reversed, though I didn't find the ultimate outcome
This is the mildest form of censorship I can think of.
Only because people are standing up against this kind of censorship, and giving schools, libraries and districts that indulge in it bad publicity. Without this kind of attention, the no risk option would be knee-jerk censoring of anything that a parent opposes...
We are what we are; i.e. the mechanic, who comes out from under the ship deck once in a while, dressed in rather unfashionable and perhaps even dirty clothes, to tell the capitan "I've giv'n her all she's got captain, an' I canna give her no more ..."
LOL made my day... had many a discussion with colleagues on whether what we do (publishing papers on applied CS topics) is science or engineering... And I mostly share your point of view...
Dictionaries list common usage; they often do not contain technical definitions. A pure (or direct as you say) democracy is a government in which everybody votes on everything. What we have can be called "representative democracy", but that is not technically accurate. Its true name is "republic". I did not make that up, or pull it from thin air. Look it up yourself.
I get your distinction, and from the number of people who post this on slashdot, I also believe you did not make it up yourself. I just think it is a US invention (probably invented by a specific part of the US political spectrum, for reasons I cannot fathom): the rest of the world disagrees, and uses the word democracy mostly to indicate a representative democracy. The wikipedia page on republic offers some insight into this:
A distinct set of definitions for the word republic evolved in the United States. In common parlance a republic is a state that does not practice direct democracy but rather has a government indirectly controlled by the people. This is known as representative democracy. This understanding of the term was originally developed by James Madison, and notably employed in Federalist Paper No. 10. This meaning was widely adopted early in the history of the United States, including in Noah Webster's dictionary of 1828.
So this is not such a recent redefinition of the term, but it is indeed a US redefinition of the term. Or in other words: every time you correct people on slashdot for not using the word as you think it should be, you only betray your provincialism.
By the way: if you want to nitpick about definitions, a "phallacy" would actually mean "a quality of, or state of being, penis". I think you meant fallacy.
LOL, you win!..
Democracies have always failed, and always quickly. We do not have a democracy. And I don't mean that in a snide way... it simply isn't. It's a representative Republic.
This commonly held phallacy is rather perplexing to non americans. In fact, the US is a democracy. It is not a direct democracy (where citizens vote on each individual issue) but a representative democracy. Let's try to look it up in a dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy):
a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
(emphasis mine). Of course, if you come up with your own definition of words you can argue just about anything, but making up the language as you go does not help communication.
I hate the Facebook,
It's not the facebook, you know?
Drop the "The." Just "Facebook." It's cleaner
.