skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's standard practice in education. It's very hard to sell new products in that market, and customers rarely switch products regardless of how badly they're treated. Acquisitions are the only way to grow quickly. Every large company serving the education market is a patchwork of milch cows acquired over the years and squeezed until dry.
Before that- in the '80s- it failed. We had "perfect" reproduction. Who was going to settle for less than that? Oh, I see, people who don't really care about perfect reproduction and want to listen to 1200 songs at the gym.

But to answer your question, I never used Napster (but I know it was popular).
From the documentation, it seems that you need to set a "from" number when sending an SMS. Does anyone know why this would be the case? Is it possible to send no-reply style SMS messages with this service?

I'm thinking along the lines of phone number verification, and I wouldn't want to be charged if people accidentally replied to the message.
The indictment:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/78786408/Mega-Indictment
> 90% piracy

Notably, that's not an actual calculated number. Even so, the unanswerable question is whether it'd have been 91 or 99% without easy distribution.
SOPA Timeline
Censorship of the top-content list is actually a valid point against them. It means Megaupload had some system to identify infringing files, but rather than flagging them for investigation or deletion, they simply removed them from the public list.
While I don't think it's good that it could be possible, their violation of a computer-usage agreement with Google could be criminal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The CFAA's prohibition on "exceeding authorized access", where you had legitimate access to a system but used it in ways that exceeded your agreed-upon authorization, has been read extremely broadly, to basically criminalize violations of computer-access agreements. So if they deleted videos that the terms of their contract with Google didn't authorize them to delete, that could be a criminal matter rather than just civil. (The chances of anyone being prosecuted in this case are another matter.)
Update: the output does validate as ePub, with a couple of exceptions.
1) The validator doesn't like the MIME type (application/x-ibooks+zip rather than application/epub+zip).
2) There are some Apple-specific object tags in there. These appear to be associated with layout flow.
Just downloaded iBooks Author and let me tell you how easy it is to create books from the templates they provide. Great piece of software indeed.

Spent no more than ten minutes doing copy/paste and now I have a beautiful digital edition of "War is a Racket" in my iPad. I'll do the same for my whole collection of Sherlock Holmes books I got from the gutenberg project.

Believe me it is that simple.
Why does megaupload have to comply with the DMCA; they're a Hong Kong company. The US simply has no jurisdiction over what they do.
> It doesn't allow one to embed a Youtube video. One can get around this by creating a Dashcode widget and using the widget to play a Youtube video but this seems like too much work.

> [...]

> I must be missing something. What?

That what you're doing is, sorry to say, absolutely stupid. Embedding a youtube video? Why not just frame wikipedia pages while you're at it? You're trying to embed not only content which may not last in time, but content which will bring down your network when 30 students launch the video at once. And you're creating a book which requires an internet connection, which is bloody terrible.

Why don't you just embed the video itself, which is surely supported?
Apple's entry into digital textbook publishing - good, bad, or agnostic?
Yes, and the price is dramatically lower as well: $2.99. I paid $19.99 on Steam three years ago. I'd be curious if they could do it all over again today, if they would do iOS first.
Slightly off-topic, but can someone explain the history and use of the word "Shutter" in this context?

Obviously it means "shut down"... I see the term fairly often on HN, but haven't really seen it used that way elsewhere.
This sounds like a somewhat clever loophole around DMCA requirements. Host the same/duplicate file at an approximately infinite number of different URLs and take them down one by one as DMCA requests come in for specific links. This seems like a someone complicated loophole to write around because even if the DMCA was changed to allow takedowns of media and it's duplicates (if it doesn't already) you could combinatorially add random junk into the stream and circumvent that as well.
From jQuery to JavaScript: A Reference
I'd think it might be the line "However, I do not believe you should profit off the content of others.". That's a blanket statement which probably has been misinterpreted as you being against any form of distributor or reseller business model.
At Twilio are focused on creating a platform that enables developers to build value-added applications for their customers. To this end, we have never offered a product that allows developers to send out messages without a number to receive replies. We believe two-way messaging offers our developers the ability to create unique application experiences and has real value to our developer community. As such, we choose to be agressive with cheap outbound pricing and charge for incoming messages.

This is our first foray in to SMS outside of North America though so please send me feedback on your thoughts at patrick [at] twilio
You would gave to think that reduced revenue from music has lead to less artists getting funding to produce an album. Of course they can still make it but it might make it harder. Book advance sizes and quantity gave gone down.
What happens if nobody pays for a copy of Windows 8? There won't be a Windows 9.

That would never happen unless MS charged an outrageous sum for it.

If any company finds itself in the position where nearly all of the users are pirating, then there's something wrong. They're charging too much or the DRM is too onerous, or something.

EDIT: if you charge a fair price and make something available, people will buy it rather than pirate it. Louis CK and lots of other people have shown this.
The exact analogy in FSF terms which you were careful to avoid is - An executable created by a GPL compiler will have to be GPL licensed. This is where your analogy breaks down because this is explicitly not the case.
Don't forget that these guys came from Romania, i.e. initially it was Romania -> Canada brain drain. :-)
I'm still not sure why so many people care if its "right" or "wrong" to pirate stuff like this. It gets pirated. Making the product easier to buy would mean it gets pirated less, not more. Companies don't seem to get it. This fact is interesting.

The pirate is a datapoint, not a moral lesson.
Google+ will be successful because it attracts meaningful conversations and motivated users. It took the best from Twitter and Facebook and added its own flair, making it the most contagious, fun and informative social network I have ever participated in.
Yeah, its the "day after the blackout" which I think is a favor to the MPAA/RIAA folks. "Let's erase these 'sopa is bad' stories from the nightly news and replace them with a good evil pirates tale."
When a shop closes down, or even closes for the night, the shutters are pulled down over the windows, hence it is 'shuttered.'

I think it's an Americanism. I used the term once in a news story for a (British) radio station I worked for, and it was edited out by management and replaced with (I think) 'closed down.' I hadn't realised it was a foreign term until then!
You can certainly put anything you want in a EULA. Whether or not this is enforceable is another matter. Has any court ever upheld this kind of contract?
This is pretty innovative, but one big issue come to mind.

You're going to have to make sure students don't use this to browse the internet and/or play games during class. Let's say the teacher is giving the students a lecture, and refers them to a page in the textbook for more information. They're not going to be able to check if ever student is gaming or browsing the web on their iPad.

Right now students can still play games using their other devices, but in that case, the teacher can take it away for the day. Here, the iPad contains all their textbooks. If they take away, the student can longer use their textbooks.

Obviously, not every student is going to to do this, but it brings in another opportunity for the student to not pay attention.
Myers Briggs is a descriptive, not prescriptive, categorization of personality types; belief doesn't enter into it. Like all categorizations, it's merely a useful description of people with a fixed precision of 16. If 16 is an accurate enough categorization for a particular need, then Myers Briggs is sufficient. And like all categorizations, it's just a single way of looking at things, it's not in any way authoritative. You can't dis-believe in a categorization system.
All messages from twilio MUST originate from a real phone number that you have purchased from twilio.

If you do not wish to receive replies you can clear the URL associated with your number.
Somebody'll try to steal your company before you realize what you have
That's an excellent point, and in fact that's why I think people should cease consuming this content altogether rather than pirating it. If that was the focus of the argument, it would be great. But sadly, everyone who might listen will be turned off by the bit that goes, "you can't just choose to pirate stuff, because you just can't."
This is ridiculous. What is the point of DMCA if you arrest sites that comply with DMCA requests? The onus is on the copyright holder to find infringing content and report it. The concept is a simple one.

"No one is coming to see my movie because they're all downloading it via this link that I've just reported and thus everyone will come and see my movie again."

That is the concept everyone agreed to, so why now is that not enough? The US Government is laughable in this regards, they handle something as simple as this so completely and utterly poorly and then think to themselves, that's too hard, let's take a sledgehammer to it all in the name of SOPA. This is everything that's wrong with the Anti-Piracy movement.
I thought the burning need for SOPA/PIPA was that there was no way for American legal processes to deal with international criminals? Have the MPAA and RIAA misled me about their sponsored legislation?!?
That's nonsense - people don't NEVER have no incentive not to help anyone.

Bam! Quad-negative! Top that.
It's a nice design (in particular Trigram Index), but overall product still failed.

My guess is that regular expression search is not as useful as full-text search that general Google Search does.
I'd imagine it'd go the other way: the burden of proof would be on UMG to prove the claims made by the anonymous commenter. That would be easier to do if they could get the anonymous commenter to testify.
Btw, this same software can be used to create beautiful magazines, which I believe can be a whole new market on itself, even to compete with newsstand or at least to provide renewable content by subscription.
What we do know is that many companies who do put out software are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly as in Gates quote elsewhere in this thread, okay with some users pirating as long as their main revenue streams are not threatened.
> Now, if Apple has put a real DRM/Encryption in there, it would be quite another story.

I'm pretty sure iBookStore ebooks are DRM'd (same as Kindle files) (EPUB has a provision specifically for DRM, FWIW) but according to an other commenter the .ibook output of iBook Author is an epub3 book, you can just change the file extension and drop it into an ebook reader (though Apple has apparently added e.g. CSS extensions for nifty effects, which your ebook reader likely won't support).
Its not a huge issue, but we found some customers were getting confused and since the majority of our customer base is still in the U.S. right now we're trying to make things as clear as possible. In the ideal world, you'd be able to seamlessly send text messages anywhere in the world, but that's now how it works with Twilio... yet.
Way more immoral than auto-posting some annoying comments? Really?

Morality is a social construct, a contract that we all essentially buy into. Immorality is the violation of that.

If anything is immoral it's stealing 100s of 1000s of people's precious time (multiple times per day) with robotic systems--simply so you can make a few bucks, by providing no social value whatsoever. It undermine the fabric of what holds us together.

Personally, the response seems elegant and appropriate. A highly targeted activity that is likely to affect only the intended target. Maybe someone that lives in Latvia will go buy a cream pie and throw it in his face as he leaves his house!
The tepid responses to both here and in the comments section of the authors blog are pretty shocking to me.

Or maybe not actually.

Apple seems to be defended almost as a reflex action these days.
You cannot equate taking a cd and lending it to a friend to taking the contents of a cd and giving it away to a million people that you do not know. Sharing involves one party having to sacrifice and the other having to benefit, not both parties benefiting with absolutely no loss. You know, like sharing your lunch with someone. One sacrifices something so another can benefit. Stop redefining the meaning of the word.
We still can discuss it, and argue whether such contracts should be enforceable. The fact that there is already a practice of doing what Apple is doing doesn't mean that we should stop debates.

We may be not entitled to demand people to produce things for our benefit, but we're certainly entitled to demand the freedom to do what we want with already produced things.
Jimmy wales Vs Copyright Alliance - Sopa debate on democracy now
Just reminds me of more usability/security concerns in GNOME.

If you have any popup dialog box open anywhere, it completely inhibits the screensaver. Try it. Open Rhythmbox and open the volume slider and walk away from your computer. Open Chrome and open the Google Voice popopen box. Your computer will not go to sleep. Also, it breaks mouse focus and more. The GNOME developers don't seem to care at all.
Pay Per View Videos sharing
I guess the difference is private versus public.

If people were uploading pirated movies to their 37 signals account, who cares because that link can't be used for sharing with the world. But with megaupload, the link is designed for sharing.
About the only thing I can think of that would be worse than the current textbook industry is a textbook industry controlled by a company like Apple.
Microsoft Sucks - Breaking the Cliche
My Indie Story So Far
Twitter only acquires companies that match /^Summi\w+$/i
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
What about MegaUpload's legitimate users? Surely some people used it to store backups and other important (legal) data and are now denied access to it. It is unlikely they will ever be able to get their files back.
It's an American colloquialism:

shuttered is a form of:
shut·ter
verb /ˈSHətər/
shuttered, past participle; shuttered, past tense; shuttering, present participle; shutters, 3rd person singular present

Close the shutters of (a window or building)
- the windows were shuttered against the afternoon heat
- barred and shuttered stores

Close (a business)
- the city was gripped by economic forces that were squeezing its tax base and shuttering its factories
College Campus Network Still Infected by a Computer Virus from 1999
It's usually .gitkeep from what I've seen. .gitignore usually lives in the repo root.
I think that the real difference between git and mercurial is allowing multiple heads in the same branch. Everything else is just an API difference, but from high level point of view -- they're just trees if commits, that's all.
It seems that the whole SOPA/PIPA fight is useless, it already happens without the new regulations
Slopes aren't always as slippery as you may believe. The point of this is that the site actively promoted and profited from piracy. This isn't Facebook with someone posting a few lines from a song, this is The Pirate Bay.

Think of it like this: have you ever successfully argued to a cop that you only drive over the limit 10% of the time? What matters is the deliberateness of the speed you were doing when you got caught.
Listening to the earnings call. Did Larry just say that 60% of members use the service daily, with 80% engaging at least once a week? Wow.
Merriam-Webster:
"Definition of IMMORAL
: not moral; broadly : conflicting with generally or traditionally held moral principles"

Based on this, whether piracy is moral or not depends on people's opinions. I would argue that society does not consider copyright infringement to be especially immoral.

Sing 'Happy Birthday' in public without paying the guy who bought the company holding the copyright to it. Is your audience disgusted by this immoral act?

Now the owner of the company holding the copyright sues you for your unauthorized use of 'his' song. Would more people think that you acted immorally, or that the copyright holder is acting immorally?
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices"
I would be extremely interested to find the source of Assange's idea that the prisons in Sweden are the worst in Europe. I've tried searching http://www.ipcaworldwide.org/, but perhaps my Google-skills are failing me.

I'm probably not objective since I am from Sweden, but his description is very far from my perception of the Swedish judicial system. I don't agree with every verdict I read about, but I guess that would be the case in which ever country I lived in. In general it seems quite fair to me.

My guess is that Assange will be cleared of all charges or worst case senteced to a conditional sentence if he ever stands trial (which will not necessarily happen even). It seem to me that he is a man of dubious moral standards regarding women (trying to have sex with someone without a condom when they explicitly wanted to use a condom), but that will generally not make you go to prison (and probably rightfully so).

I'm a bit depressed that his behavior has damaged Wikileaks and their cause which is important.

edit: Would appreciate a comment from people down-voting me.
it does because I'm fairly sure they aren't deduping at the file level - which means they're doing significant introspection into exactly how different copies of the same file are. This is why dropbox is so fast - they only need to send unique diffs.
Oh, I see. Thank you for pointing that out to me. My intention was to say that I do not believe that you should create a business-model around earning money on only pirated content. Helping artists getting their name and songs out there is a good thing, but without their approval I don't think you should profit off it.
simple as googling http://css-infos.net/property/-webkit-backface-visibility
I completely disagree with 'nirvana' here. He/she is just wrong. Apple is going far above and behind reasonable practices with this EULA.

But I did NOT downvote him/her on HN and I'm sad to see that his/her post has been downvoted. That's just wrong. If you don't agree say way, don't downvote.
Apple would be smart to change this ASAP. It's bad PR to have this kind of problem present on your launch day. Not to mention a really bad clause to have in the first place.
I think this guy is wrong. He's mixing apples and oranges when it comes to who owns what. Apple is requiring people who use its software to create an e-book to give Apple a cut of the proceeds of the Apple created e-book. The author still owns his or her content. If you want to sell your book, just don't sell the form of the book made by Apple's software. You can still sell a PDF, for example. Or you can sell your Word file. You can sell anything really.
But if you want to sell the nice design Apple lets you make, you have to give them money.

I believe you can simultaneously sell an e-book in the iBookstore and sell a non-Apple created e-book with the exact same content somewhere else. For example, a word document turned into an e-book on Amazon. Just don't try and sell your Apple created e-book on Amazon, that's all.
The RIAA represents WMG, UMG and Sony Music. Each of those has a bunch labels. They themselves are not labels. For instance, WMG corporate has no A&R staff.

The business of music is different than the practice of it, and lumping it all into the "label" itself is disingenuous. The politics within those companies usually means the labels at the very edge (where marketing and A&R are) are often at odds with corporate/RIAA.

When I'm on better a better connection I'll post some examples.

I don't mean to be pedantic about it, but the ecosystem around music is much more complex than "sue them all"
How Hollywood drives people to piracy — Online Video News
Thanks for the clarification.

Just to confirm (as it's a real number), if a user sends an SMS to that number, but no URL is associated with it, will I be charged? I would assume not, but worth checking!
Microsoft Sucks: Breaking the Cliche
How I stopped worrying and learned to love Microsoft.
Multiple people upload the same file with the same name and the same content. The file is hashed as it comes in and only one copy is kept.

If the provided link is private, not index by megaupload or search engines, then it can be thought of a private locker with the key being the link. In this case it should not be Megaupload's job to know who is supposed to have the key and who does not and it seems reasonable that they would only remove the link complained about and not the content. Those other links after all could be for personal backup/use which is allowed.

Can anyone verify/deny that the links Megaupload provided were private?
Embedding GDB breakpoints in C source code
It would likely be enforceable unless the term is "unreasonable" or "unconscionable"... although we certainly may not like it, I don't think it would necessarily meet those thresholds in a court of law because there are other alternatives to publishing using iBook.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD_v._Zeidenberg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion#Contracts_...
What about GPL-licensed javascript code used in a web app? (Or in, say, a desktop application that uses a WebView for part of its interface, in which it uses the GPL-licensed javascript).

There may be some content or code from Apple that gets baked into your iBooks to enable some functionality or other. Maybe bits of Apple-developed javascript that get stuck in to mediate between the HTML and the iBooks application.
Blizzard deals with the redownload and key issue well, you can login to your account and download the game or any platform and access any key that you need.
Here's my point of view: "intellectual property" exists as a solution to the under provisioning of public goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

It's not perfect; indeed, it's a 'messy compromise'. Currently, one that's tilted too far in favor of producers. However, consumers should also realize that producers can't just create stuff for free: it takes time to write books, lots of money to do movies, and selling music helps bands do what they do full-time, rather than as a hobby, and thus create more music that you, a fan, presumably are happy with.

I'm not sure what the 'right' answer is, but I have a feeling that it won't be simple and 'easy', but rather a bit messy. I think that easy access to 'legit' stuff is definitely part of the solution though. By making the legal route the easiest one, it takes away a big excuse.

Something more people need to think about is life "at the margin", in the economics sense of the term. Don't think about Lady Gaga and Windows and stuff like that: think about people who are on the edge between making a living with some form of IP and having to pursue it only as a hobby.