I'm in Ohio. Ohio's a big place. How come nobody mentions a city? What "school"? What police dept. was notified? Why go public on the internet and not call the local media?
If true, this is very disturbing, but I too am skeptical.
And no, it's not impossible. The Shah's agents were here in OH in the 1970s. Seriously.
What I don't understand, as an author who holds copyright in at least one book that is out of print, is: how can a lawsuit to which I am not a party give *my* rights under copyright law to someone else?
That seems to be fundamentally wrong.
Bingo. The Authors Guild (of which I used to be a member) convinced an idiot judge that they represent your interests. Then they "settled" with Google by taking a huge bribe in return for agreeing to Google creating a huge monopoly on digitized books. It's the American way.
Tangentially, I find it somewhere between interesting and amusing (or perhaps scary) that Google appears to have made no attempt to contact me, despite the fact that I'm hardly the most difficult person to find.
Even more tangentially, there doesn't seem to be any place to go to see if google has actually digitized a book in which I have rights. Someone please correct me if there's a way to do that. (But in any case, why should I be the one who has to go and see if they've infringed rights? They are the ones who are supposed to seek permission from me.)
Frankly, this whole "settlement" seems utterly unconscionable.
Yeah, essentially Google bribed a bunch of spineless quislings and rewrote US Copyright law.
Are your books still in print? If so, you probably won't hear from Google directly because the agreement requires affirmative consent by both the author and publisher of "in print" works. If it's out of print, they will notify you, but then assume consent unless you opt out.
All you can do is go to Google Books and search under your name. If they show anything, they've done your book in toto. They may just show "snippets," but they've scanned the whole thing.
Right. I'm not seeing the difference, except that Google -- says -- they use the contextual system of adsense ads on a page to categorize it as to "interests," so they are only tracking your route between pages that carry Google ads, not the whole web. They wouldn't take note of your visit to a government agency page, for instance, supposedly.
A distinction without a difference in practical terms at best.
Unfortunately, viewers, especially of cable news channels, have gotten used to seeing intentionally vague commercials for brokerages, data networks, etc., and have learned to disregard them entirely. Remember the ING commercials from the past few years? How many viewers do you suppose had a hint as to what ING is and does? The commercials may have struck investors as cool and raised the company's profile, but they taught most people to ignore that weird category of "mystery" commercials.
At this point, most people would simply ignore this ad.
I have ms and I find the weight of the keys actually helps when I'm having trouble with my fingers. I also have intention tremors in my hands, and with a lighter-touch keyboard (e.g., one of the Alps keyswitches Dells) I get far more errors than on the Model M.
It was called AOL, and it didn't work. It became, in fact, what Congressional investigators called "a magnet for pedophiles."
This isn't about safety. It's about control. Control of piracy, control of political agitation, and control of the truth. For all its faults, the net has created a populace that at least has the opportunity to be far better informed about the real world than our parents' generation.
I once worked at the word processing traffic desk at a major NYC law firm -- it was a madhouse -- and switched the mice on the two logging PCs one Friday afternoon.
It was awful. My poor co-workers couldn't figure out what was wrong and the lawyers were having coronaries.
I finally made a "helpful suggestion" that they check the connections.
You know what really "weakens our gene pool"? Allowing the children of the rich to inherit money or positions of power. It stifles innovation and clogs the top spots so the serfs don't even try to excel. The only solution is shooting the little snots when they reach, say, 16.
At a minimum, these are the first kids we should send to Iraq, et seq.
Re:There is only one true keyboard...
on
Review of Das Keyboard
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The Lenovo M's keep popping up on eBay, factory sealed for ~$30. I have a stockpile in boxes that will puzzle my grandchildren.
We live in a rural area with just "the road" on which to walk our dogs. You'd have to walk almost two miles to find a corner to turn. But every walk seems like a fresh experience to the dogs. My guess, backed up by observation, is that it's all about the smells (i.e., what critter has been by there recently), and has little to do with the unchanging scenery.
Of course, since my sense of smell is seriously deficient even by human standards (and I have never been particularly attracted to groundhog pancakes), it bores the hell out of me.
We live in a rural area. Response time for the County Sheriff is on the order of 30 minutes, if you're lucky. Relying on the cops in an emergency is not a realistic option, and meth has made burglaries and even home invasions far more common around here.
Every one of my neighbors has multiple guns, and I'm glad they do. Personally I have multiple dogs.
There is an element of truth to this. The practical effect of this is to spread fear and apprehension among "innocent nobodies" who happen to be paying attention. The myth of government omniscience (and, by extension, omnipotence) is a powerful tool of preemptive social control.
It's like torture. Newsflash: the people who torture know it doesn't really "work" on (i.e., produce valuable information from) the victims. It's a form of state terrorism -- it works best on the rest of us.
Traitor? Uh, no, that would be the little turd who ripped the guts out of the constitution and started a war to make his friends rich. Hey, I hear he's starting another. We'll be expecting you to enlist this time.
"Look who's complaining. The whiners are all second-tier essayists, pundits, or worse. The article itself is by "RU Sirius". Complaints are by people like Erik Davis, who used to write music articles for Details and Spin. That's groupie journalism. Mark Dery wrote psuedo-journalistic crap like "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink". John Shirley was an early cyberpunk author, and not one of the better ones. These guys are no great loss.
The top-tier essayists, like John McPhee, are doing fine. The top-tier political writers are getting their books published. Novelists continue to flood bookstores with paperbacks. Even romance novel sales are up. "
Thank you. My jaw dropped when I saw the selection of "writers" surveyed. "No great loss" is putting it mildly. Now how do we get "RU Sirius" to STFU?
I think you're onto something. Don't underestimate the passivity of the average Windows user. They use IE because it's there. They see ads on every web page. They're used to pop-ups. They open and read spam. They are, in other words, my sister-in-law.
If you sold her a Dell with Vista Free Edition on it (which Dell would be happy to do) and told her that she could make the ads go away by inputting her credit card number and hitting a button to "upgrade," she might do it. Ka-ching. Or she might not, and MS could sell her eyeballs to advertisers.
It would never occur to her that her last computer (the one she threw away because it got slow...) came with ad-free XP. The price of mayonnaise went up, the interest rate on her cards went up a lot, things change. No biggie.
Just another boiled froggy victim of cannibal capitalism.
I write a syndicated newspaper column that I also post online (a couple of thousand at last count). I give blanket permission to any educator that wants to use my stuff in a classroom, and I have heard from hundreds who do. I also have a Google email alert set up on my web site title (www.word-detective.com), and I get 6-7 alerts per day from people reproducing my columns on their websites. If it's just one column at a time, once in a while, I don't care, especially if I get a link. Usually it's just a case of somebody with a blog who finds something especially interesting. I think that's reasonable fair use.
Copy my whole page (as has happened), however, and I'll call a lawyer.
"You were given the opportunity to view the ad. You are not required to do so, just that you are given the opportunity for an advertiser to get your attention. If they fail to do so, that's their problem."
And if web advertisers have adopted increasingly obnoxious and offensive methods of advertising, making me unwilling to look at their ads at all, is that not their problem too?
And if I have learned that most web advertisers are selling crap that no one wants or needs (Free Spyware scan, anyone?), and have a reputation for cheating their customers, haven't they themselves, as a class, killed the golden goose? There were popup ads long before ad blocking became popular. Let's not confuse cause and effect.
I don't block Google text ads. If you want to reach me, there's your avenue of access. Flash? Javascript? Not on my machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Ayn? Is that you? Alan said you'd come back to save us.
I'm in Ohio. Ohio's a big place. How come nobody mentions a city? What "school"? What police dept. was notified? Why go public on the internet and not call the local media?
If true, this is very disturbing, but I too am skeptical.
And no, it's not impossible. The Shah's agents were here in OH in the 1970s. Seriously.
Bingo. The Authors Guild (of which I used to be a member) convinced an idiot judge that they represent your interests. Then they "settled" with Google by taking a huge bribe in return for agreeing to Google creating a huge monopoly on digitized books. It's the American way.
Yeah, essentially Google bribed a bunch of spineless quislings and rewrote US Copyright law.
Are your books still in print? If so, you probably won't hear from Google directly because the agreement requires affirmative consent by both the author and publisher of "in print" works. If it's out of print, they will notify you, but then assume consent unless you opt out.
All you can do is go to Google Books and search under your name. If they show anything, they've done your book in toto. They may just show "snippets," but they've scanned the whole thing.
Right. I'm not seeing the difference, except that Google -- says -- they use the contextual system of adsense ads on a page to categorize it as to "interests," so they are only tracking your route between pages that carry Google ads, not the whole web. They wouldn't take note of your visit to a government agency page, for instance, supposedly.
A distinction without a difference in practical terms at best.
Unfortunately, viewers, especially of cable news channels, have gotten used to seeing intentionally vague commercials for brokerages, data networks, etc., and have learned to disregard them entirely. Remember the ING commercials from the past few years? How many viewers do you suppose had a hint as to what ING is and does? The commercials may have struck investors as cool and raised the company's profile, but they taught most people to ignore that weird category of "mystery" commercials.
At this point, most people would simply ignore this ad.
I have ms and I find the weight of the keys actually helps when I'm having trouble with my fingers. I also have intention tremors in my hands, and with a lighter-touch keyboard (e.g., one of the Alps keyswitches Dells) I get far more errors than on the Model M.
We have Tim Horton's in the US. Their coffee tastes vaguely of fish. No kidding. Honest Canadians will admit this.
The Dell AT-101W used Alps keyswitches. You can find lots of them on eBay.
Like I tell people in China; if you don't like communism then either leave the country or assassinate its leaders.
You tell them that to their faces? How do you get the air time?
I ask because I think they'd really go for some Amish-built space heaters I have.
It was called AOL, and it didn't work. It became, in fact, what Congressional investigators called "a magnet for pedophiles."
This isn't about safety. It's about control. Control of piracy, control of political agitation, and control of the truth. For all its faults, the net has created a populace that at least has the opportunity to be far better informed about the real world than our parents' generation.
I once worked at the word processing traffic desk at a major NYC law firm -- it was a madhouse -- and switched the mice on the two logging PCs one Friday afternoon.
It was awful. My poor co-workers couldn't figure out what was wrong and the lawyers were having coronaries.
I finally made a "helpful suggestion" that they check the connections.
You know what really "weakens our gene pool"? Allowing the children of the rich to inherit money or positions of power. It stifles innovation and clogs the top spots so the serfs don't even try to excel. The only solution is shooting the little snots when they reach, say, 16.
At a minimum, these are the first kids we should send to Iraq, et seq.
The Lenovo M's keep popping up on eBay, factory sealed for ~$30. I have a stockpile in boxes that will puzzle my grandchildren.
We live in a rural area with just "the road" on which to walk our dogs. You'd have to walk almost two miles to find a corner to turn. But every walk seems like a fresh experience to the dogs. My guess, backed up by observation, is that it's all about the smells (i.e., what critter has been by there recently), and has little to do with the unchanging scenery.
Of course, since my sense of smell is seriously deficient even by human standards (and I have never been particularly attracted to groundhog pancakes), it bores the hell out of me.
There was a guy on eBay about six months ago who had a whole buncha Model Ms new in the box for sale. I bought two for $28 bucks apiece.
But still, when my wife gets me to go to a thrift store, I still make a beeline for the pile of keyboards in the back.
We live in a rural area. Response time for the County Sheriff is on the order of 30 minutes, if you're lucky. Relying on the cops in an emergency is not a realistic option, and meth has made burglaries and even home invasions far more common around here.
Every one of my neighbors has multiple guns, and I'm glad they do. Personally I have multiple dogs.
There is an element of truth to this. The practical effect of this is to spread fear and apprehension among "innocent nobodies" who happen to be paying attention. The myth of government omniscience (and, by extension, omnipotence) is a powerful tool of preemptive social control.
It's like torture. Newsflash: the people who torture know it doesn't really "work" on (i.e., produce valuable information from) the victims. It's a form of state terrorism -- it works best on the rest of us.
I have three low-end Dells running Linux.
They say they'll be waiting for you in the parking lot.
Most home Windows users have no idea of what OS they're using. As my sister-in-law says, "I just use my Dell." And Ubuntu would work fine for her.
Traitor? Uh, no, that would be the little turd who ripped the guts out of the constitution and started a war to make his friends rich. Hey, I hear he's starting another. We'll be expecting you to enlist this time.
"Look who's complaining. The whiners are all second-tier essayists, pundits, or worse. The article itself is by "RU Sirius". Complaints are by people like Erik Davis, who used to write music articles for Details and Spin. That's groupie journalism. Mark Dery wrote psuedo-journalistic crap like "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink". John Shirley was an early cyberpunk author, and not one of the better ones. These guys are no great loss.
The top-tier essayists, like John McPhee, are doing fine. The top-tier political writers are getting their books published. Novelists continue to flood bookstores with paperbacks. Even romance novel sales are up. "
Thank you. My jaw dropped when I saw the selection of "writers" surveyed. "No great loss" is putting it mildly. Now how do we get "RU Sirius" to STFU?
That's adorable. The Free Market (tm) Panopticon is gonna save us.
Try this: there is no symmetry of rights in a class society. They get to watch you; watching them is a crime. FOIA compliance is already disappearing.
I think you're onto something. Don't underestimate the passivity of the average Windows user. They use IE because it's there. They see ads on every web page. They're used to pop-ups. They open and read spam. They are, in other words, my sister-in-law.
If you sold her a Dell with Vista Free Edition on it (which Dell would be happy to do) and told her that she could make the ads go away by inputting her credit card number and hitting a button to "upgrade," she might do it. Ka-ching. Or she might not, and MS could sell her eyeballs to advertisers.
It would never occur to her that her last computer (the one she threw away because it got slow...) came with ad-free XP. The price of mayonnaise went up, the interest rate on her cards went up a lot, things change. No biggie.
Just another boiled froggy victim of cannibal capitalism.
I write a syndicated newspaper column that I also post online (a couple of thousand at last count). I give blanket permission to any educator that wants to use my stuff in a classroom, and I have heard from hundreds who do. I also have a Google email alert set up on my web site title (www.word-detective.com), and I get 6-7 alerts per day from people reproducing my columns on their websites. If it's just one column at a time, once in a while, I don't care, especially if I get a link. Usually it's just a case of somebody with a blog who finds something especially interesting. I think that's reasonable fair use.
Copy my whole page (as has happened), however, and I'll call a lawyer.
"You were given the opportunity to view the ad. You are not required to do so, just that you are given the opportunity for an advertiser to get your attention. If they fail to do so, that's their problem."
And if web advertisers have adopted increasingly obnoxious and offensive methods of advertising, making me unwilling to look at their ads at all, is that not their problem too?
And if I have learned that most web advertisers are selling crap that no one wants or needs (Free Spyware scan, anyone?), and have a reputation for cheating their customers, haven't they themselves, as a class, killed the golden goose? There were popup ads long before ad blocking became popular. Let's not confuse cause and effect.
I don't block Google text ads. If you want to reach me, there's your avenue of access. Flash? Javascript? Not on my machine.