I posted a very tiny excerpt from a large book in a highly visited site in a relevant topic for free. She is more likely to thank me for the free advertisement than to sue me for infringement. That RDR took their entire website and tried to print it for profit. Totally different.
Well, it would just take a few minutes for the asian counter party to create a colluding third party entity to escape the restrictions of the contract. The only way for the US publishing house to stop that is deny the asian counter parties the first sale doctrine.
BTW, the EEE books are not done by "distributors". They are printed locally. Probably the original publisher gives out the content electronically. But the EEE books are printed locally using crappy paper, bad ink and then bound lackadaisically. I have the Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Erwin Kreyzig, fifth edition bought for 80 Rs in 1988, on my desk right now. Utter crap in terms of print/binding/paper quality. But content! It is the content dummy.
It just means all those servers by all those ISPs that forward the mail can not read the mail. Especially the ISP of the sender can not read the email. It is very unlikely the user would let his local ISP, who is collecting monthly fees to read his emails. In fact I hope some user groups sue to make sure the Gateway ISP does not record your browsing history.
But here Google is not acting as a mere ISP. Google is the email service provider. No body can snoop on email till it is safely delivered to the mail servers of Google. The contract between Google and its users is, "service is free, but I will read your email". Users have agreed. So there is no easy way to use privacy laws to sue Google.
But they can try to get to Google by monopoly and restrictive trade practices act or something. Once Google has a market share above a certain threshold, someone can try to force Google to stop leveraging its market share in email to adversely affect other players in the advertising market. Sort of like, Microsoft should not be able to use its market share in OS to leverage the Office document market. Or the dominance of its market share in Office to force PC makers to kill competing browsers.
The big difference is, the switching costs for going from one Office file format to another is very very high. The switching cost of going away from Gmail is (or used to be) low. Nor is Google having a virtual monopoly status in email. So they are not really the same. But lawyers could try to argue along these lines anyway. Not often we get judges who teach themselves Java to understand how easy/difficult it is write a trivial string comparison function.
All emails are property of the recipient. And Google has permission to read the email of its users. So it can read any email sent by anybody. In fact it might even have additional rights to enforce spam filters.
That is very inconsistent with the view of JK Rowling I have. She said in a 2010 interview, "scarper[ing] to the West Indies [to avoid taxes] at the first sign of a seven figure royalty cheque would be contemptible". She pays taxes in UK because, "it is my notion of patriotism". She believes, like Warren Buffet, the rich should pay to contribute to the social safety net, because she herself was a beneficiary of the safety net at one time. She does not sound like one who would come dunning for money from some poor engineer whose code has finished building in the next window and should be running the code right now instead of typing a comment in slashdot.
Many book publishers license their books to be published in India, Thailand etc cheaply. I have bought many "Eastern Economy Edition" (EEE) in IISc Bangalore and IIT Madras when I was a student there. Though the price is very cheap compared to the dollar prices, it is still comparable on purchasing power parity exchange rate. For example the the book Engineering Statics and Dynamics by Shames cost me 65 Rupees or about 8 USD (exchange rate was 8 Rs per USD back in the 80s). My dad, a civil servant comparable to a sergeant in the US armed forces, had a take home pay of about 500 Rs then.
Imported books, not reprinted as EEE, would easily run into 50 USD to 60 USD. It would have beeen one month pay for my dad.
Some student from Thailand imported the EEE books from Thailand, sold them on E-Bay and made 1.2 million dollars. He is claiming immunity under First Sale doctrine. The EEE contract with the Asian publishers prohibit them from selling it to the lucrative western markets. But once the book has been bought in those markets, can they be imported and sold in USA? The appellate court ruled it can't be brought in sold.
I am not a lawyer, but I expect the Supreme Court to rule more narrowly. "When a copyright/intellectual property right originating from USA, is licensed to foreigners under some restrictive license, the foreigners can not use first sale doctrine and third parties/subsidiaries to circumvent the license restrictions". That is the kind of ruling I expect. That is, not all foreign made objects would be exempted from first sale doctrine. Those items made abroad under restrictive licenses from ip-holders in USA alone would be exempted. But I am not sure they will rule this way. I am an engineer most comfortable calculating intersections between triangles and tetrahedrons. I find them very easy compared to US laws.
One interesting tit bit was that, when I came to USA as a student with F-1 Visa, I was scared by the EEE books I was bringing in. I used some 75% of my baggage allowance with books. I knew how serious copyright law was in USA. I knew my books are cheaper in India. I was worried the immigration officer would reject my visa and send me back! Seriously. I was worried about everything from the turmeric powder in my hand baggage to the loose staple on the sealed I-20 form issued by the university attached to my passport! Once inside the USA, I was just relieved. I never even thought for a moment to buy millions dollars worth of EEE books and selling them cheap in the USA. There have been hundreds of thousands of students from Asia who knew the price differentials. None of us thought of exploiting it by arbitrage, because we knew it was "wrong". This creep from Thailand did just that. If the courts do not rule narrowly and uphold first sale doctrine for these EEE books, the publishers will simply stop licensing EEE books under cheap terms. Millions of Asian students will be affected.
If we don't have an explicit treaty with the Goblins, everything made by Goblins would be exempted from the First Sale doctrine. Citation provided:
From The Deathly Hallows by JKRowling:
"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with the goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is its maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."
"But if it was bought — "
" — then they would consider it rented by one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [snip] I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft."
I like the concept of program manager window even now. In fact I use something close to it in my win7 machines at work. Created a tool bar, added two levels of short cuts to launch applications. CommandWindows (cygwin, cmd), browsers (chrome, firefox), editors (emacs, slickedit), others (clearcase, exceed). I need a place where every body and his brother does not add stuff. It should have my stuff, and only my stuff. It should be easy for me to move anything I don't want there out of sight, safely and painlessly.
Two weeks back I installed a webcam in my Win7 machine to use some video chat application. An old webcam salvaged from some discarded old pc in the basement. Then Win7 refused to sleep. The monitor dutifully goes to sleep in 15 minutes of inactivity. The computer should follow in another 5 minutes. But the machine would not go to sleep. I knew it is always the device drivers that keep the machine up.
Turns out this web cam launches Windows Live Messenger service, which keeps the machine up. Even if I close all windows and kill it, it would not let the machine sleep. Ended up having to uninstall Windows Live Messenger and everything named "Windows Live" to get my machine to sleep correctly.
Do you know the vendor of that webcam that screwed up so badly and gave such a bad name to Microsoft despite all the hard work they are doing?
It was Microsoft! (The windows live is a dead give away and the punch line does not punch). Before the go about rooting out all those hardware vendors who damage Microsoft's reputation by their shoddy work, may be Microsoft should first make sure its devices work correctly and try not to pitch services in my face like some despo street hawker in the bazzaars of Baghdad.
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
>
And nine women can produce a baby in just one month. In China they actually use 270 women to produce a new baby in one day. Hones! I read it on the internets.
It is the group of individuals who believe in "America, Rebecoming The Great Nation We Once Weren't". Wonder what we can call them? Republicanodon? Republicanosarus?
I read in Microwave Journal an interesting experiment done using Mobius strip antenna. They found that the mobius strip antenna behaves as though it is twice the diameter of a plain loop antenna. Have you heard about it? Is it now a common technique to shrink the antenna size?
However, as science grows more powerful and government more technocratic, the stakes of correlation — of counterfeit relationships and bogus findings — grow larger."
Well is science growing powerful finds all these false correlations? Or these correlations always existed and now we know enough to say they were false. Anyway correlation is not causation.
In December the nations of the world will gather in Dubai for the UN-convened World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT – pronounced 'wicket').
It is pronounced wicked despite the T in the acronym to reflect the evil intentions and ulterior motives of them. And also to pretentiously sound like some organization that is the mortal enemy of some super hero.
I have bad eyes. And the only thing that works is a gas permeable semi hard contact lens. Not the flexi use-and-throw kind. Nor the extended wear kind. I spend five minutes every morning diligently rubbing cleaning solution on the lens, wash it many times before changing my status from legal-blind to perfect 20/20 visionary:-)
I just wish I could print a brand new ready to wear set of contacts every morning!
They also have 3G USB dongles for netbooks and tablets. I was using my sister's account. Worked everywhere, without problems. Was able to use maps.google.co.in to find directions amazing even the local auto-rickshaw drivers. Never found out the plans and price of that service. It is considered a status symbol to own post-paid phones and get a monthly bill instead of using prepaid phones. This 3G USB dongle serviced by a company called Tata Photon was used by my sis. She would not tell me how much charges I raked up. "It is alright, foggetabout it". The newspaper ads seemed to suggest 4000 Rs for the dongle and account set up, and probably 5000 Rs a month for an unlimited data service. 200 Rs per GB as far as I could figure out.
Even if I was willing to pay it myself, I could not have gotten account for myself. Lots of security and physical address verification before they give you an account. Police are worried about terrorists and rabble rousers using disposable accounts. Would not say their fears are totally off base.
BTW typical airtime charges for prepaid phones: 1 Rupee per minute for out going calls. Incoming calls are free. Incoming texts are free. Outgoing texts are 0.5 Rs per text. Data charges are typically 100 Rs for 2 GB. Consider 1 Rupee to be 2 cents in USA. International calls were 6 Rs per minute. But this trip they had a promotion and I got USA for 2 Rs per minute.
According the the law, the phone companies can not charge for airtime of incoming calls. Most people use prepaid phones, with just enough money to keep the phone active. But they would not dial out any calls. Many very poor people use these phones. Street vegetable vendors, unofficial jitney taxis, servant maids, low paid gate security fellas....
And they have developed some social customs regarding "missed call etiquette". Typically it is understood that you never accept a call from certain classes of people, drivers, maids, delivery boys etc. They call, let it ring once, and they hang up. You return the call. Sometimes I have answered these calls and they would go, "Sir, why did you answer the call? I was giving you a missed call, sir". Usually I give them a few rupees to make amends.
Very typical conversation is:
"Mom, going to the dance class".
"OK, dear, do give me a missed call as soon as you get there"
Well, Brigadier General, you are driving a hard bargain. Here's what I'm gonna do? The trim line and the auto dimming mirrors are going to be totally free. I am taking them off. Also free floor mats. Free. Totally free. I had already taken ADM and DPC off. Now what do you want me to do? Oxygen flow control for high altitudes? Man, I will go and talk to the manager. But you know what, he is not going to give in. These things are 100K, for Pete's sake. We can't keep throwing things in and still put food on the table for missus and kids, you know. Just consider it. The number I gave you, 190 million that is probably the lowest we are gonna go and we can't go any lower. OK? And another thing, this deal is off after 5PM today. We got a deadline and you shop around all you want. But if I am not getting the order in before 5PM I am not making quota, and this quarter is gone and we need wait for new pricing promotion data from the factory for the next quarter. OK General. 5PM today. Final. And this is the last trip I am making to the manager. And I am telling you. He is not throwing in the oxygen flow control for free. Definite. I'm positive.
When you use google doc or an online doc tool, importing documents would be called "uploading". The file on your disk is uploaded into google doc. Once it is in google, doc you could keep it in google doc format in the cloud. Or at some point you want to export it back to your disk. That will be downloading. Google is removing the ability to export google docs to pre 2003 (or pre1997 not very clear) versions of the doc file format. You can continue to import/upload doc files into google docs. The ability to be backward compatible is not compromised or removed.
Only thing you can't do is if you download a google doc in into a.doc file, your old pre 2003 version of MS-Word may not be able to read it correctly. That is all.
Slashdot Mirror
The law, ostensibly to "shield" children, would apply to a fairly broad definition of child — anyone under 18
Since broads call everyone "baby!", it affects everyone.
I posted a very tiny excerpt from a large book in a highly visited site in a relevant topic for free. She is more likely to thank me for the free advertisement than to sue me for infringement. That RDR took their entire website and tried to print it for profit. Totally different.
I don't know. I have to ask my code.
BTW, the EEE books are not done by "distributors". They are printed locally. Probably the original publisher gives out the content electronically. But the EEE books are printed locally using crappy paper, bad ink and then bound lackadaisically. I have the Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Erwin Kreyzig, fifth edition bought for 80 Rs in 1988, on my desk right now. Utter crap in terms of print/binding/paper quality. But content! It is the content dummy.
There was flooding in Thailand. Factories were disturbed. This company tried to grab as much of the drives already in the pipeline as it could.
But here Google is not acting as a mere ISP. Google is the email service provider. No body can snoop on email till it is safely delivered to the mail servers of Google. The contract between Google and its users is, "service is free, but I will read your email". Users have agreed. So there is no easy way to use privacy laws to sue Google.
But they can try to get to Google by monopoly and restrictive trade practices act or something. Once Google has a market share above a certain threshold, someone can try to force Google to stop leveraging its market share in email to adversely affect other players in the advertising market. Sort of like, Microsoft should not be able to use its market share in OS to leverage the Office document market. Or the dominance of its market share in Office to force PC makers to kill competing browsers.
The big difference is, the switching costs for going from one Office file format to another is very very high. The switching cost of going away from Gmail is (or used to be) low. Nor is Google having a virtual monopoly status in email. So they are not really the same. But lawyers could try to argue along these lines anyway. Not often we get judges who teach themselves Java to understand how easy/difficult it is write a trivial string comparison function.
All emails are property of the recipient. And Google has permission to read the email of its users. So it can read any email sent by anybody. In fact it might even have additional rights to enforce spam filters.
That is very inconsistent with the view of JK Rowling I have. She said in a 2010 interview, "scarper[ing] to the West Indies [to avoid taxes] at the first sign of a seven figure royalty cheque would be contemptible". She pays taxes in UK because, "it is my notion of patriotism". She believes, like Warren Buffet, the rich should pay to contribute to the social safety net, because she herself was a beneficiary of the safety net at one time. She does not sound like one who would come dunning for money from some poor engineer whose code has finished building in the next window and should be running the code right now instead of typing a comment in slashdot.
Some student from Thailand imported the EEE books from Thailand, sold them on E-Bay and made 1.2 million dollars. He is claiming immunity under First Sale doctrine. The EEE contract with the Asian publishers prohibit them from selling it to the lucrative western markets. But once the book has been bought in those markets, can they be imported and sold in USA? The appellate court ruled it can't be brought in sold.
I am not a lawyer, but I expect the Supreme Court to rule more narrowly. "When a copyright/intellectual property right originating from USA, is licensed to foreigners under some restrictive license, the foreigners can not use first sale doctrine and third parties/subsidiaries to circumvent the license restrictions". That is the kind of ruling I expect. That is, not all foreign made objects would be exempted from first sale doctrine. Those items made abroad under restrictive licenses from ip-holders in USA alone would be exempted. But I am not sure they will rule this way. I am an engineer most comfortable calculating intersections between triangles and tetrahedrons. I find them very easy compared to US laws.
One interesting tit bit was that, when I came to USA as a student with F-1 Visa, I was scared by the EEE books I was bringing in. I used some 75% of my baggage allowance with books. I knew how serious copyright law was in USA. I knew my books are cheaper in India. I was worried the immigration officer would reject my visa and send me back! Seriously. I was worried about everything from the turmeric powder in my hand baggage to the loose staple on the sealed I-20 form issued by the university attached to my passport! Once inside the USA, I was just relieved. I never even thought for a moment to buy millions dollars worth of EEE books and selling them cheap in the USA. There have been hundreds of thousands of students from Asia who knew the price differentials. None of us thought of exploiting it by arbitrage, because we knew it was "wrong". This creep from Thailand did just that. If the courts do not rule narrowly and uphold first sale doctrine for these EEE books, the publishers will simply stop licensing EEE books under cheap terms. Millions of Asian students will be affected.
From The Deathly Hallows by JKRowling:
"You don't understand, Harry, nobody could understand unless they have lived with the goblins. To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is its maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs."
"But if it was bought — "
" — then they would consider it rented by one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. [snip] I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft."
I like the concept of program manager window even now. In fact I use something close to it in my win7 machines at work. Created a tool bar, added two levels of short cuts to launch applications. CommandWindows (cygwin, cmd), browsers (chrome, firefox), editors (emacs, slickedit), others (clearcase, exceed). I need a place where every body and his brother does not add stuff. It should have my stuff, and only my stuff. It should be easy for me to move anything I don't want there out of sight, safely and painlessly.
Two weeks back I installed a webcam in my Win7 machine to use some video chat application. An old webcam salvaged from some discarded old pc in the basement. Then Win7 refused to sleep. The monitor dutifully goes to sleep in 15 minutes of inactivity. The computer should follow in another 5 minutes. But the machine would not go to sleep. I knew it is always the device drivers that keep the machine up.
Turns out this web cam launches Windows Live Messenger service, which keeps the machine up. Even if I close all windows and kill it, it would not let the machine sleep. Ended up having to uninstall Windows Live Messenger and everything named "Windows Live" to get my machine to sleep correctly.
Do you know the vendor of that webcam that screwed up so badly and gave such a bad name to Microsoft despite all the hard work they are doing?
It was Microsoft! (The windows live is a dead give away and the punch line does not punch). Before the go about rooting out all those hardware vendors who damage Microsoft's reputation by their shoddy work, may be Microsoft should first make sure its devices work correctly and try not to pitch services in my face like some despo street hawker in the bazzaars of Baghdad.
If there are 2 people working 60 hours a week, it could also be 3 people working 40 and most likely more efficient as they won't be burned out.
>
And nine women can produce a baby in just one month. In China they actually use 270 women to produce a new baby in one day. Hones! I read it on the internets.
It is the group of individuals who believe in "America, Rebecoming The Great Nation We Once Weren't". Wonder what we can call them? Republicanodon? Republicanosarus?
I read in Microwave Journal an interesting experiment done using Mobius strip antenna. They found that the mobius strip antenna behaves as though it is twice the diameter of a plain loop antenna. Have you heard about it? Is it now a common technique to shrink the antenna size?
However, as science grows more powerful and government more technocratic, the stakes of correlation — of counterfeit relationships and bogus findings — grow larger."
Well is science growing powerful finds all these false correlations? Or these correlations always existed and now we know enough to say they were false. Anyway correlation is not causation.
In December the nations of the world will gather in Dubai for the UN-convened World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT – pronounced 'wicket').
It is pronounced wicked despite the T in the acronym to reflect the evil intentions and ulterior motives of them. And also to pretentiously sound like some organization that is the mortal enemy of some super hero.
What was that thing Microsoft used to do that was called? Something like Embrace, Extend and Extinguish?
I just wish I could print a brand new ready to wear set of contacts every morning!
Indians typically say "missed call" faster than you can say "beep" in Romania ;-)
Even if I was willing to pay it myself, I could not have gotten account for myself. Lots of security and physical address verification before they give you an account. Police are worried about terrorists and rabble rousers using disposable accounts. Would not say their fears are totally off base.
BTW typical airtime charges for prepaid phones: 1 Rupee per minute for out going calls. Incoming calls are free. Incoming texts are free. Outgoing texts are 0.5 Rs per text. Data charges are typically 100 Rs for 2 GB. Consider 1 Rupee to be 2 cents in USA. International calls were 6 Rs per minute. But this trip they had a promotion and I got USA for 2 Rs per minute.
And they have developed some social customs regarding "missed call etiquette". Typically it is understood that you never accept a call from certain classes of people, drivers, maids, delivery boys etc. They call, let it ring once, and they hang up. You return the call. Sometimes I have answered these calls and they would go, "Sir, why did you answer the call? I was giving you a missed call, sir". Usually I give them a few rupees to make amends.
Very typical conversation is:
"Mom, going to the dance class".
"OK, dear, do give me a missed call as soon as you get there"
ADM = Additional Dealer Markup
DPC = Deal promotional charges
Only thing you can't do is if you download a google doc in into a .doc file, your old pre 2003 version of MS-Word may not be able to read it correctly. That is all.