One of the reasons I use Reader (and Bloglines before it) is because it's more efficient for a central service to poll the feeds of all its users once rather than have each user doing the same polling. I have at least 5 different machines (laptop, tablet, phone, work PCs etc.) that I use to visit Reader at different times, and I don't want to see stories more than once or have to maintain lists of feeds in multiple places, so I need cloud storage of where I've got to in each feed. I explicitly do not want my own client programs on each machine, unless they're querying a server which is following all my feeds for me.
Here is a CNET article that gives a list of 5 possibilities and which platforms they run on (Web, iOS, Android). I've only tried Feedly on iOS though, and as a long-time G-Reader user I wasn't too impressed, but it might work out with a bit more testing. The feedly.com website seems to be getting hammered (by all us Reader users?) just at the moment though, which could be a bad omen.
If this new court gets created, it should also accept cases of wrongful DMCA take-downs, and be able to force the notifier to compensate the victims. At least that could have a useful effect...
Glen wrote: This is exactly how open source software works: anyone can take the code and build on it, but they must give back their additions to the community so that others can build upon them in exactly the same way.
Actually that's not what the Open Source Definition says. It only requires that you provide your source code if you give your version of the software to someone else. Even for code under the GNU GPL (one of the stronger OS licenses) you can make as many private changes as you like to the code without having to give back your source for those changes. The requirement to provide your source only kicks in when you distribute your code to someone else, and even then you only have to give your source to people who have copies of your version. In general you do not have to hand your changes back to "the community" that you got the code from, although you can't stop your customers from passing copies on. [IANAL, TINLA, read the specific license for the code]
... a treaty rather than a softer non-blinding recommendation ...
Personally I would be very much against a blinding recommendation, although I can't really imagine what a recommendation that actually triggers loss of eyesight would look like.
Someone must have lost out, although we don't know who that was. If most of the money to pay the musicians came from the video budget maybe they're paying for fewer camera operators, or they'll be do less work in post-production so the result might be less polished. I'm not trying to find out the full details, but to imply that nobody has lost out because of the change is obviously incorrect.
<rant>
Mike, why can't you publish PDF files like this directly on the TD website? By all means use other services as well so people can view such files directly in their browsers if that's what they want to do, but my laptop has a much nicer PDF file viewer than any of the browser-based services, and I refuse to give out my email address just to read a document (they almost all require a sign-up nowadays before they'll let you download the original file).
</rant>
It has always struck me that the term Anonymous Coward is a bit of an insult, although I realize that it's a traditional term used across the Internet (I suspect it started at SlashDot, but I'm no historian). As Mike has always maintained there are a number of good reasons why people comment anonymously, and most are unrelated to cowardice. Maybe I'm just a bit thin-skinned, but "everyone uses that term" isn't a good reason to be derogatory towards people that you want to encourage. To take the lead in respecting anonymity maybe Techdirt should change the name that appears against unsigned comments on the site to something else, such as Anonymous Commenter (rather boring I know, but it still matches the acronym AC).
Since these licenses are to play recorded music I would think the price increase would encourage the hiring of cheap live musicians instead. That would obviously be to the advantage of those musicians, but bad for those members of PPL who charge higher fees or don't play live at all...
the purpose of copyright law is to incent the creation of new works
Unfortunately only the US constitution says that. I don't believe many (any?) EU countries have constitutions that limit what their legislative bodies can do in quite the same way as the US does, so they can make the purpose of their copyright laws be whatever they want them to be.
At my (non-US) high school creating the timetable for the whole school was a highly complicated process. Teachers and students all moved between different class-rooms for different subjects at different times each day, so I may have had Maths at 9.15 on Monday mornings, but on Tuesdays it was at 3.30, and the other year-groups (and even the other classes in my year-group) took Maths at completely different times. As a 3rd-year it wouldn't have been possible for me to take 5th-year physics because the 3rd-year physics lesson times didn't all match up with the 5th-year times.
I'm not sure how you get round that kind of problem — Hermione Granger managed it using the time-turner that let her go backwards in time, but they're rather hard to find IRL.
Apart from the more complicated vote couting, if you disenfranchise the older (retired) members of the population they aren't going to be as interested in running the polling stations. The election judges at many US polling stations are retired people who get paid very little for the very long hours they have to work on a election day. This idea would reduce their willingness to give back to society in that particular way, thus the cost of elections will go up as it would probably become necessary to increase the pay to attract enough judges.
So has Techdirt improved in the search rankings since the Google change? I do remember Mike talking about how there were other sites copying content from here that Google ranked higher, has this now stopped?
It's not teaching these students journalism at all. It's teaching them about a paranoid administration that wants to hide from the truth.
On the other hand though, isn't that teaching them about the real world? The students do seem to be getting round some of the road-blocks — if they hadn't, this story wouldn't be here at all...
If a regime decides to continue to allow Flickr despite this, it sounds like they could use Collage themselves to detect and decode the hidden material. Once they know which pictures contain censored information they log any downloads of those images against the user's IP address and use that as information about who in their own population is reading it. I would want the program to need the right key to even be able to detect that there is hidden material present before I used something like this.
There has to be a connection with atmospheric pressure, the professor is not completely right. A siphon cannot work if the hump is significantly larger than the equivalent height of the atmospheric pressure for the liquid, i.e. about 34 feet for water at 1 atm, 30 inches for mercury. It is the pressure of the atmosphere that is pushing the water up the pipe, although gravity does pull it down the lower side causing the liquid to flow. If you try to make the hump any bigger than that height, you'll get a void (vacuum) forming at the top of the hump and the flow will stop.
The Wikipedia entry for Atmospheric Pressure says "This is also the maximum height to which a column of water can be drawn up by suction" which is exactly what a siphon does, it uses gravity to generate suction that pulls the liquid over the hump. Surface tension might have some effect on the maximum height of the hump, but it couldn't be very big and would depend on the diameter of the pipe.
Do any of the mobile browsers support a View Source option? I'm guessing not, as that would only be needed by people wanting to use the devices for creative purposes; the functionality is irrelevant for consumptive users. This supports Tim Wu's concerns to a small extent.
Re: RSS Reader
One of the reasons I use Reader (and Bloglines before it) is because it's more efficient for a central service to poll the feeds of all its users once rather than have each user doing the same polling. I have at least 5 different machines (laptop, tablet, phone, work PCs etc.) that I use to visit Reader at different times, and I don't want to see stories more than once or have to maintain lists of feeds in multiple places, so I need cloud storage of where I've got to in each feed. I explicitly do not want my own client programs on each machine, unless they're querying a server which is following all my feeds for me.
Replacements
Here is a CNET article that gives a list of 5 possibilities and which platforms they run on (Web, iOS, Android). I've only tried Feedly on iOS though, and as a long-time G-Reader user I wasn't too impressed, but it might work out with a bit more testing. The feedly.com website seems to be getting hammered (by all us Reader users?) just at the moment though, which could be a bad omen.
DMCA take-down mis-use correction?
If this new court gets created, it should also accept cases of wrongful DMCA take-downs, and be able to force the notifier to compensate the victims. At least that could have a useful effect...
Read the OS Definition
Glen wrote: This is exactly how open source software works: anyone can take the code and build on it, but they must give back their additions to the community so that others can build upon them in exactly the same way.
Actually that's not what the Open Source Definition says. It only requires that you provide your source code if you give your version of the software to someone else. Even for code under the GNU GPL (one of the stronger OS licenses) you can make as many private changes as you like to the code without having to give back your source for those changes. The requirement to provide your source only kicks in when you distribute your code to someone else, and even then you only have to give your source to people who have copies of your version. In general you do not have to hand your changes back to "the community" that you got the code from, although you can't stop your customers from passing copies on. [IANAL, TINLA, read the specific license for the code]
Medusa?
... a treaty rather than a softer non-blinding recommendation ...
Personally I would be very much against a blinding recommendation, although I can't really imagine what a recommendation that actually triggers loss of eyesight would look like.
Works out for everybody?
Someone must have lost out, although we don't know who that was. If most of the money to pay the musicians came from the video budget maybe they're paying for fewer camera operators, or they'll be do less work in post-production so the result might be less polished. I'm not trying to find out the full details, but to imply that nobody has lost out because of the change is obviously incorrect.
I hate sites like docstoc
<rant>
Mike, why can't you publish PDF files like this directly on the TD website? By all means use other services as well so people can view such files directly in their browsers if that's what they want to do, but my laptop has a much nicer PDF file viewer than any of the browser-based services, and I refuse to give out my email address just to read a document (they almost all require a sign-up nowadays before they'll let you download the original file).
</rant>
Rename "Anonymous Coward"?
It has always struck me that the term Anonymous Coward is a bit of an insult, although I realize that it's a traditional term used across the Internet (I suspect it started at SlashDot, but I'm no historian). As Mike has always maintained there are a number of good reasons why people comment anonymously, and most are unrelated to cowardice. Maybe I'm just a bit thin-skinned, but "everyone uses that term" isn't a good reason to be derogatory towards people that you want to encourage. To take the lead in respecting anonymity maybe Techdirt should change the name that appears against unsigned comments on the site to something else, such as Anonymous Commenter (rather boring I know, but it still matches the acronym AC).
PPL = Phonographic Performance Licenses
Since these licenses are to play recorded music I would think the price increase would encourage the hiring of cheap live musicians instead. That would obviously be to the advantage of those musicians, but bad for those members of PPL who charge higher fees or don't play live at all...
Similar thread
My local patch.com site has been having a similar argument about anonymous comments recently.
The EU is not subject to the US constitution
the purpose of copyright law is to incent the creation of new works
Unfortunately only the US constitution says that. I don't believe many (any?) EU countries have constitutions that limit what their legislative bodies can do in quite the same way as the US does, so they can make the purpose of their copyright laws be whatever they want them to be.
Timetabling clashes?
At my (non-US) high school creating the timetable for the whole school was a highly complicated process. Teachers and students all moved between different class-rooms for different subjects at different times each day, so I may have had Maths at 9.15 on Monday mornings, but on Tuesdays it was at 3.30, and the other year-groups (and even the other classes in my year-group) took Maths at completely different times. As a 3rd-year it wouldn't have been possible for me to take 5th-year physics because the 3rd-year physics lesson times didn't all match up with the 5th-year times.
I'm not sure how you get round that kind of problem — Hermione Granger managed it using the time-turner that let her go backwards in time, but they're rather hard to find IRL.
Re: Taking Pictures in a Zoo.
Note: The British Commonwealth hasn't existed since 1949, when it was renamed the Commonwealth of Nations. Try to keep up with the times old chap!
5 or 6?
Why is Ars Technica calling this a "six strikes" plan?
It will cost more
Apart from the more complicated vote couting, if you disenfranchise the older (retired) members of the population they aren't going to be as interested in running the polling stations. The election judges at many US polling stations are retired people who get paid very little for the very long hours they have to work on a election day. This idea would reduce their willingness to give back to society in that particular way, thus the cost of elections will go up as it would probably become necessary to increase the pay to attract enough judges.
Effect on Techdirt?
So has Techdirt improved in the search rankings since the Google change? I do remember Mike talking about how there were other sites copying content from here that Google ranked higher, has this now stopped?
Real Life?
It's not teaching these students journalism at all. It's teaching them about a paranoid administration that wants to hide from the truth.
On the other hand though, isn't that teaching them about the real world? The students do seem to be getting round some of the road-blocks — if they hadn't, this story wouldn't be here at all...
Could still be dangerous if the steganography is detectable
If a regime decides to continue to allow Flickr despite this, it sounds like they could use Collage themselves to detect and decode the hidden material. Once they know which pictures contain censored information they log any downloads of those images against the user's IP address and use that as information about who in their own population is reading it. I would want the program to need the right key to even be able to detect that there is hidden material present before I used something like this.
Re: Vacuum
There has to be a connection with atmospheric pressure, the professor is not completely right. A siphon cannot work if the hump is significantly larger than the equivalent height of the atmospheric pressure for the liquid, i.e. about 34 feet for water at 1 atm, 30 inches for mercury. It is the pressure of the atmosphere that is pushing the water up the pipe, although gravity does pull it down the lower side causing the liquid to flow. If you try to make the hump any bigger than that height, you'll get a void (vacuum) forming at the top of the hump and the flow will stop.
The Wikipedia entry for Atmospheric Pressure says "This is also the maximum height to which a column of water can be drawn up by suction" which is exactly what a siphon does, it uses gravity to generate suction that pulls the liquid over the hump. Surface tension might have some effect on the maximum height of the hump, but it couldn't be very big and would depend on the diameter of the pipe.
View Page Source?
Do any of the mobile browsers support a View Source option? I'm guessing not, as that would only be needed by people wanting to use the devices for creative purposes; the functionality is irrelevant for consumptive users. This supports Tim Wu's concerns to a small extent.