STORACUTA

There are manifold problems with the way the legalization of monopolies operates around the world.  One of those problems is the continual pushing of extremist positions on legal monopolies, in order for a not quite as extreme “compromise” position to be reached, which is just pushed further out in the next round of lobbying.  Instead of just opposing the SOPA, it would be more appropriate to propose alternative legislation as a counter balance to attempt to achieve a moderate position.

Provisions which could be included might be:

* express limitation of damages in monopoly infringement cases to damages actually incurred, abolition of presumed or statutory damages – per Tim O’Reilly (and many others, but Mr O’Reilly has been noteworthy recently);

* repeal of any provision which enables geographical market segmentation;

* prohibition on the use of monopolies to restrict speech;

* repeal of any provision which enables aftermarket control of goods – eg rental rights and DRM;

* an offence for a public official to call the infringement of any monopoly “theft”

* prohibition on claiming lack of sale as losses

* express application of anti-trust law to the exercise of any monopoly?

Ideas?  What would you like to see included in STORACUTA?

Note:

Tim OReilly, is The Man, by the way.   A few years ago I figured I wanted to learn Python.  I googled around for what resources were out there and, in the course of so doing, I stumbled across “free” downloads of some of the O’Reilly Python books.  I didn’t actually use the “free” versions – I bought them from O’Reilly anyway, largely because O’Reilly e-books were DRM free. Strangely, buying those first ebooks from O’Reilly was a thoroughly enjoyable experience.  I have since almost gone out of my way to buy stuff from them (Algorithms in a Nutshell? WtH?), this, despite being aware I could probably pick up a “free” copy somewhere.

At every stage, the industry has simply evolved a better infringer.  SOPA, should it be passed, will be no different.  Other countries or private ventures will set up their own DNS to route around those controlled by the US.

A while ago the hinge on our DS Lite broke, so i swapped over another case.  However, during reassembly I managed to break “EM10″.  I tried to order one of these from overseas (since they identified it as an EM10 rather than as a 600 MOhm common choke, which is what it apparently is).  That money just went into the ether many months ago, never to be seen again.  Yesterday I remembered that the DS Lite was still broke so began a more intensive web search, discovering the identity of the broken component. I found another overseas site, but they only accepted paypal <sigh>

I decided to see if I could find something closer to home, knowing now what the component was.  I found RS Components.  They have the chokes – and they offer free shipping in AU(!)  I ordered a new choke, and a couple of other things (flip flops – I want to do demonstrate some basic computer memory circuits) at about 19:30 last night.  They have just arrived on my doorstep – by courier (!) – at 14:00 today.  Wow! I’m impressed: +1 to RS Components.

If you have an Android phone and are looking for something to help you manage the process of getting gift ideas, through to deciding on what to get, through buying them and managing your budget, take a look at my Xmas List Manager application for android:

https://market.android.com/details?id=biz.opensourcelaw&feature=search_result

My xmas list application comes with tons of features:

* multiple gift lists – have one for friends, one for family, one for neighbors

* budgets per list

* track bought vs confirmed gifts, separate subtotal for “good idea” entries

* take photos of your gift ideas

* show gift ideas per recipient

* export your ideas by email, tab delimited so you can cut and paste into a spreadsheet

* progress bars show how many confirmed gifts are left to buy – readout for the whole list and per person

* days to go readout (argh!)

The app is free (as in no ads, no premium version to buy) but if you like it, please give it a good review!

The High Court is set to hear the iiNet appeal at the end of this week.  Stan Beer at iTWire reports that the foreign studios pushing the appeal are likely to go down 80-20, and that this is because the foreign studios didn’t offer to pay iiNet to investigate the infringements.

I think that the foreign studios are likely to lose and it’s probably 80% (maybe a little less – as a rule of thumb, if you are entirely certain of the strength of a case, you would rate its success rate at around 70% – there are no 100% cases).   However, it’s not because the foreign movie studios did anything wrong in setting up the initial action (offering to pay for iiNet to investigate infringements would not change whether or not iiNet was authorizing as the purported infringement predates the investigation).

Rather, it’s because their authorization argument is simply a poor argument.   A calm reading of the authorities finds it without support. The Full Court decision and cases like Jain and Metro on George are flawed basically because they have focussed overly on whether the alleged authorizer had power to control.  However, it is well established in the cases that the power to control is not sufficient for authorization.  That control is only relevant in the context of the relationship between the alleged authorizer and the primary infringer – the primary infringer must be able to draw some inference from the failure to exercise control.  In the iiNet case, the primary infringer is not able to draw any conclusion from the absence of action by iiNet.  It is not possible for iiNet’s inaction to play any causal role in the infringer’s actions/decision making.  For this reason iiNet cannot possibly be authorizing them.  Cowdroy’s decision at first instance is basically right. [See here and here and my as yet unpublished paper on the topic]

It is for this reason that the recent announcement by the Comms Alliance (see SMH report here) seems to be brave.  The announcement proposes that ISPs will give notices to their users over a 12 month period warning them of infringements.   So why is this an extremely courageous thing to do?  (And why should people like FoxTel be overjoyed, rather than annoyed as in the SMH report?).  Simple.  At the moment, an infringing user cannot form any opinion one way or another about their carrier’s inaction when the user infringes copyright.  What happens when a carrier establishes a practice of sending out notices?  Well, there are now grounds to argue that inaction is “sanction, approval or countenance”.   They will say the user, since they didn’t get any notice when they should have, believed that the carrier thought it was all right for them to infringe.  Hey presto authorization!  Establishing a practice of taking any action against users alleged to be infringing completes the foreign media companies’ bootstrap argument for them.  While the proposal does not include sanctions by the carrier, authorization by inaction will become a possible argument and it will be a slippery slope from there.

Notable is the absence of stories in the paper claiming how many industries have been eliminated by copyright infringement.  These always mysteriously come out immediately before notable court events related to copyright infringement.   There are still a few days left though I suppose.

My “solution” is to:

install cups-pdf, print to it

use gs to convert to greyscale

use lp (yes lp!) to print the thing how I like it.

Hello 1993.

Commands are:

gs -sOutputFile=output.pdf -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -sPAPERSIZE=A4 -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 input.pdf

lp -d samsungRubbish -o media=A4   -o sides=two-sided-short-edge -o number-up=2    output.pdf

Aliased of course.  Next I’d need to work out how to do a kde4 action (apparently different from kde3) <sigh>

“I will just add a date formatted string for Christmas this year,” I thought.  How hard could that be?  Much later, this code:

        SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
        GregorianCalendar gcdate = new GregorianCalendar(2011, 12, 25);
        java.util.Date date = new Date();
        gcdate.set(GregorianCalendar.ERA, GregorianCalendar.AD);
        date.setYear(2011);
        date.setMonth(12);
        date.setDate(25);
        Log.d(TAG, "GCdate = "+gcdate.toString());
        Log.d(TAG, "date = "+dateFormat.format(date));
        long millis =  gcdate.getTimeInMillis();
        date = new Date( millis);
        Log.d(TAG, "date now is "+dateFormat.format(date));

Gives these log entries:

GCdate = java.util.GregorianCalendar[time=?,areFieldsSet=false,lenient=true,
zone=org.apache.harmony.luni.internal.util.ZoneInfo@310bdfd6,firstDayOfWeek=1,
minimalDaysInFirstWeek=1,ERA==1,YEAR==2011,MONTH==12,WEEK_OF_YEAR==?,
WEEK_OF_MONTH==?,DAY_OF_MONTH==25,DAY_OF_YEAR==?,DAY_OF_WEEK==?,
DAY_OF_WEEK_IN_MONTH==?,AM_PM==?,HOUR==?,HOUR_OF_DAY=?,MINUTE==?,
SECOND==?,MILLISECOND==?,ZONE_OFFSET==?,DST_OFFSET==?]
date = 3912-01-25 // ?!
date now is 2012-01-25 // What a Terrible Failure.

Obviously, I could just use “2011-12-25″ and be done with it, but I will be working with other dates and need to understand why this lunacy. Surely any sane implementation would allow you to set the year, month and date using numbers? How hard can it be to set a Date object to a specific date??

Time and again I have this “how hard could it be?” experience with java ending up being something of a soul destroying experience.

The answer, by the way, appears to be that GregorianCalendar runs from 1-12, but Calendar, from which GregorianCalendar is subclassed, runs from 0-11 for the months.  If lenient is true, then values which are out of bounds are rolled into the following month etc.

Hmmmm….

I could either pay $500 for a new fuser for my (not so) old (maybe 4 or 5 years) HP printer or I could pay a little less and buy a complete, largely equivalent new laser printer.

Overall KDE4 doesn’t limit my working overly compared to KDE 3.5 (although, so far as I can remember, it doesn’t improve it).  One area where it particularly falls down is in printing.  I have remarked earlier on the absence of kprinter.

One consequence is that it is quite difficult to print to a pdf from an application (in particular MS Word running from crossover) which, previously, was a breeze with kprinter.  The practical consequence is that I can’t print a document with colours in it as b/w on my (admittedly brain damaged, since it doesn’t allow forcing b/w only mode and therefore probably wastes colour toner) Samsung colour printer.   If necessary I could do this by printing to pdf, then using the print greyscale option on the pdf reader.

Not any more.  Printing to pdf is not supported by cups out of the box (forever why not?) although apparently cups-pdf will allow this.  Now I have to hunt for cups-pdf.  Tch!

The absence of kprinter from kde4 is a major major pain such that KDE4 is still a net negative for me compared to KDE3.5.

Edit 28/9/11: cups-pdf installation was comparatively easy.  Noticed some print dialogs for my samsung do have a grayscale option, while others don’t.  cups-pdf dumps to a spool directory.  With kprinter I always printed to the same file print.pdf so I could (eg) include a link to it.  Not sure if cups-pdf allows this (seems to calculate output name based on input name).

Edit: See my “Back to the Future” solution here.

The ABC Reports:

Online gamers have achieved a feat beyond the realm of Second Life or World of Warcraft: they have deciphered the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus that had thwarted scientists for a decade.

So, who gets to lodge the patent on this?