That's an interesting point of view. I mean, I agree, though I fall in the category of "too dumb to properly operate a cell phone". I didn't have a cell phone until last year or so; before that, I always used analog, corded phones (or wireless phones, but with the base station still connected to the analog line). One nice feature there is that you hear your own voice, so you can immediately know if your are talking too loudly. I miss that with the cell phone. With one of my ears covered (or both if I'm using a headset), I have little feedback to control my volume: I unconsciously rise the volume until I hear it "normally", but at that point I'm already way past "normal" (same effect as shouting when you have headphones on). So I need to consciously lower my voice below what my ears detect as a 'normal' volume. It took me a while to figure out what was happening.

The result is that I avoid using the phone in public, and try to whisper into it when I do. Well, that's my theory anyway... I wish I could actually test it, or at least have a my cellphone pass through the sounds it captures from the microphone. If I only hadn't grown up with noisy analog phone lines...

(A bit more related: when part of the line is analog and noisy, or your own environment is noisy, speaking loudly can help a lot.)

I had a similar experience. In high school, I managed to get the /etc/shadow file of one of my ISPs servers (it was a misplaced backup). Not believing what I just found, I decoded a few passwords, tried them, and immediately emailed them (the file, where it was, and the list of passwords I decoded) + my account and phone number. A couple of hours later I got a call from the CEO[1] thanking me for the report and telling me that they fixed the issue. And then he invited me for a tour of their offices to meet the IT staff and to a dinner party they were having.

But now that I'm no longer in Cuba... I fear discovering/reporting a vulnerability and finding myself in the wrong end of a lawsuit.

[1] We don't really have CEOs there... he was/is the top official.

Because, for a site like I mentioned to be useful, it would have to display lots of information about the listings, not merely point to the original website with an excerpt of the content. Think a "comparison" website. I don't know about you, but I think that displaying the information side by side is much more useful than going back and forth between different tabs, specially if the formatting of those tabs is different. But that would fall completely in the "scrap and display the factual data with a new formatting" category.

Re: the robots.txt, I didn't even think about that. Another reason to not go through the trouble of building the site: if a couple of the listings websites "opt out" of being crawled, I'm back to having to search in different websites and do the comparisons by hand. I agree with obeying robots.txt, so that means that I couldn't do it even if it was only for my private use and I didn't publish the website. It makes little sense to go through the trouble of building an incomplete database for comparison and then having to manually search the sites that opted out.

Did you read the rest of my post? In the sentence right after that one I said why I didn't see a difference: because the end result would be the same, a phone book with exactly the same contents as the original. And then I went on to ask why would copying factual information from one website and presenting it in another with a completely new design was worse than copying the data from a phone book and publishing it. The web scraping scenario even has a creative component missing from the phonebook-entry-copying scenario. Btw, I was not being antagonistic.

I don't understand the difference between those scenarios. The final result is the same - both contain the same information, in the same order. I just don't see where to draw the line between "copying the facts in the phone book" and "copying the phone book". At the font and page design, perhaps? That seem awfully narrow...

If anything, in this case, I suspect that the "expression" of those facts is very different - the same set of facts (real state listings) in a different website design, probably without any inherent order and hopefully mixed with "facts" from other sources. I know, IANAL, I'm just trying to figure out why, if what can be copyrighted is the expression and not the facts, getting a final result almost exactly like the original work (phone book case) is more acceptable than aggregating several sources and presenting it in a new design (this case).

Last time I was looking for a place to rent, I felt tempted to do something like this. There are several rental websites out there, and you are lucky if their listing overlap... Comparing locations, prices, what was being offered, etc, was a pain. Some sites would at least let you right-click and open in a new tab, but others wouldn't. The maps, sometimes they were google's, sometimes they were bing, and they would never let you overlay the public transit lines on top... And instead of letting you chose a location and radius on the map, some would ask you for the postal code!

So, I toyed with the idea of scraping those sites and build my own database, and build a website from it for others like me (probably sticking some google ads to try to pay for the hosting). I guess it is a good thing I didn't. And it is a shame to know that I can't (and no one else can either). I don't like Rogers and part of me is smiling about this ruling... but if this means that there will be no "google news"-like service for rent hunting, this is another case of copyright preventing useful services from coming to life.

Not all other assertions regarding "gods" fail at logic. You can assert that some descriptions of some beings are self-contradictory, and thus there is no being that accurately matches those descriptions (reductio ad absurdum). One such description is of a benevolent, truthful being, who claims that killing is evil, and yet murders people.

This is different from claiming that there are no gods (which as you point out, is "unknowable" and "irrelevant"). This is claiming that "this particular god that you are telling me about cannot logically exist". Risking a holy war here, two concrete examples are the IPU (invisible and pink simultaneously, cannot exist) and the FSM (afaik, the his noodliness is not contradictory, he is merely irrelevant).

The claim that the IPU doesn't exist is logically sound, even if it is a statement regarding the existence of a god.

Crappy slashdot ate my opening question mark.

Déjame ayudarte con eso. Qué te sale? Yo te lo puedo traducir :D.

No, I said "where did I mention patented technologies". I mentioned patents - that is the problem with h.264, and you somehow figured out that jpeg would be a counter example. But jpeg clearly isn't h.264, neither is the wheel. Of course I was referring to "patents" in my post! And in every reply to it! /me is baffled. And apparently, too "paranoid" to continue.

(except MPEG-LA, evidently - because they /do not/ license their patents in a free software compatible way. But I know, "that's free software's fault".)

Anyway, to summarize my point instead of keep following your detours:
* There are patents covering h.264.
* Mozilla can't license those patents and keep firefox free.
* Mozilla can't ignore the patents, because it is breaking the law.
* Mozilla can't leave it to the OS, because doing so will alienate part of their users (linux users who are not violating the patents)
* Mozilla (and me and others) prefer an open web, rather than a web controlled by a few companies --- this is the "ideology" and "paranoia" parts, I suppose.

So, clearly, this is all Mozilla's fault, because they can either make parts of firefox non-free, break the law, or ignore a chunk of their users. All that rant about calling me paranoid, and Linus and the iPad, RMS, the BBC, you not caring about ideology, and $$$, has nothing to do with the discussion, and doesn't change the fact that Mozilla would have to take one of these three paths to support h.264.

I just tried to point out that it wasn't a matter of "ideology" but "legality" and you replied with and ad-hominem. Given that this thread will have 0 influence in Mozilla's decisions, I'll stop, right now.