Core Dump

If the networks should have learned one thing from the popularity of VCRs, TiVo's, video stores, NetFlix, and similar things, it is that people want to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it. In other words, the whole concept of broadcasting is obsolete, and maintaining a huge and costly infrastructure to support that broadcast mechanism is senseless. Instead, the networks and other content distributors should be focusing on direct delivery.

Want the latest episode of Left Wing? That'll be $0.50, please. You want an episode from the first season? Fine, we discount our backlist to $0.25 per episode. Or how about the entire first season, which is on special this week? You can download all 22 episodes for only $3.99. No DRM. No commercials. We earn our money from our customers, period.

ListFixer converts automatic numbers and bullets into real numbers and bullets in the active document, all open documents, or all documents in a folder. In addition, it can be used instead of the Bullets and Numbering buttons on the Formatting toolbar, making it possible to select text and instantly apply or remove real numbers and bullets as you work.

Several observations can be made regarding the examined font types. First, no significant differences in reading efficiency were detected between the font types at any size. There were, however, significant differences in reading time. Generally, Times and Arial were read faster than Courier, Schoolbook, and Georgia. Fonts at the 12-point size were read faster than fonts at the 10-point size. In addition, a font type x size interaction was found for the perception of font legibility. In general, however, Arial, Courier, and Georgia were perceived as the most legible.

First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you’re not ready to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool by a chip.

The sections that people who are not operating a printing press will consult most often are the two devoted to Documentation. But Documentation is where the “Manual”’s ecumenism starts to shade into anarchism (the condition, not the party). Consider the subsection on Series (that is, books published in a series with, usually, a general editor). The editor of the series, the “Manual” says, is “usually omitted, but see 17.92-93.” Abbreviations for volume and number “may be omitted.” The series title “may be omitted to save space.” Some works “may be treated bibliographically either as multivolume works or as a series of volumes,” depending on “the emphasis.” And when a series has gone on so long that the editors re-start the numbering as “new series” or “second series,” we learn that “books in the old series are identified by o.s., 1st ser., or whatever fits.” At which point the sleep-deprived might decide that, on due and balanced consideration, nothing is what fits, and move on.

Word is the most ubiquitous--and probably the most
annoying--word processor on the planet. If any members of
your group have annoyances they'd like to see solved, have
them email marsee@oreilly.com with "Word Annoyances" in the
subject line. Just have them note what version of Word and
Windows they're using.

Of course people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the
country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to
drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship,
or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the
people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is
easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country
to a greater danger."

Copyright is a system for regulating technology -- it regulates technologies used to make and distribute copies. We have lots of technology regulation in the world: there are rules that govern the operation of automobiles and rules that govern the marketing of electrical appliances. This isn't per se wrong.

But when the 20 horsepower locomotive was invented, the blacksmiths weren't able to successfully lobby to have 80 horseshoes welded to each engine, despite the rule that said that every "horse" used for transport needed four shoes. When you invent a railroad, you need railroad-rules for it, not horse-and-buggy rules. The facts that the railroad doesn't need shoes, or oats, or curry-combs don't reflect bugs in railroading: they are the feautres of railroading.

The Internet has one overarching feature that makes it superior to the technologies that preceded it: it can copy arbitrary blobs of data from one place to another at virtually no cost, in virutally no time, with virtually no control. This is not a bug. This is what the Internet is supposed to do.

It was really foresighted in 1996 for WIPO to sit down to update copyright law to suit the Internet. They recognised that the Internet was a fundamentally different thing from the technologies that came before it, and of course, a new technology needs new rules and regulation.

But WIPO got it horribly wrong. The approach that WIPO took to regulating the net was to create a set of rules that tried to make the Internet act more like radio, or TV, or photocopiers -- like all the things that it had already made rules for. The WIPO approach treated the ease of copying on the net as a bug, and set out to fix it.

Notice-and-takedown is an area where WIPO got it drastically, terribly wrong.

If you own a restaurant, you're not responsible for policing your customers to ensure that none of them are carrying stolen bank-loot. If someone burst in and pointed at the guy at the back table and said, "He's wearing my hat!" no one would blame you if you didn't wrestle the hat away from him and give it back to the accuser.

But under notice-and-takedown, this is what we ask of our ISPs. If you allow users to host stuff, you're responsible for what they host. If they put an infringing file on your server, you're required to know what they've put online, and you'll share in their punishment if you fail to block them from posting infringing material.

Now what is and isn't a copyright infringement isn't anything like a clearcut issue. ISPs aren't equipped to evaluate what's infringing and what isn't -- hell, even Supreme Court judges have a hard time figuring it out. Operating a server doesn't qualify you to understand and evaluate copyright law.

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If Canada wants to "solve" the problems of the Internet, it should be looking to find "Internet-native" solutions. Canada's Internet laws should treat copying as a feature, not a bug. It should empirically evaluate which sectors are negatively impacted by file-sharing (mounting evidence suggests that almost none of the entertainment industry's woes can be blamed on the net) and then solve those industries' problems with blanket licenses and other tools that don't seek to regulate copying, something that's impossible to do without breaking the Internet.

Solutions that approach the Internet as a problem are no solutions at all.