Re: [Fsfe-uk] Trying to pull a fast one in the Office

[Chris Croughton]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2003 at 10:21:08PM +0000, Simon Waters wrote:

> That was the point of the European Copyright directive and the DMCA,
> there are "NO EFFECTIVE" technical measures, in the sense you can't make
> a program display information and make it technically impossible to copy
> the information so displayed.

By pencil and paper if necessary.  Or have they outlawed those as well?

> The pragmatic course of action is of course to carry on as if the new
> law didn't exist, and demonstrate it's absurdity if and when a rights
> holder sues you.

iIf you can afford to take the risk.  Many will, I think (just as many
ignore the law about saving TV programmes on video tape), but I suspect
a number of companies won't take the risk.

> Strangely I think you are wrong on the "junk" question, some of the
> "junk" is useful when you write the document. You just want to remove it
> before publishing it, the problem is that users aren't aware of the junk
> or how to go about removing it. Lack of clear division between authoring
> and publishing.

I think you've correctly spotted the problem.  To many people (including
many professional authors who should know better) publishing is just the
"next step" from authoring (or authoring is just the prerequisite for
publishing, depending which end you're at).  So once the document is
"finished" according to the author, they wash their hands of it and
leave it to the publisher to "do the necessary".  But the publisher
doesn't know about the 'junk' the author has left in there...

> Perhaps it should be saved in a seperate log file? A vim "undo" which
> works between saves would have saved me a good few minutes today, I
> realy ought to read the manual and see if it has one.

Between sessions (i.e. program loads), no.  And if you reload the file
(using :e for instance) it deletes the undo file.  If, however, you
leave vim open and just do a save (:w) the undo information is kept.
I do this frequently to test a change temporarily (like inserting a
print for tracing), open the file, make the change, save it, shell out
(or go to another window) and test the change, then reactivate the vim
session and undo the change and save again.

Chris C