Not all web piracy is the sexy stuff, like games and movies. Julis Schorzman notes that one of his college textbooks recently showed up as a BitTorrent.
The book the UW uses to teach Calculus showed up on Suprnova the other day. Here’s the link. (Wish we had Bit Torrent around when I was a freshman in college. We had to pay all $140.00 for the [tome]! Spoiled kids!
You’d think someone would have to put a lot of work into pirating a calc book, since they contain so many symbols that an OCR system would have problems with.
Interesting side note: Julis’ blog contains a tag (I think) he made up, <liblink>. Firefox reads that as <liblink>, resurrecting that Internet horror of ages past, the blink tag. Odd that such a progressive browser is so eager to enable useless old tags that it even does it where it isn’t supposed to.
I haven't seen many textbooks, but Kazaa is full of books from every genre, especially programming books. I think every O'Reilly book is on Kazaa as a PDF.
The tag actually has text-decoration: blink in its css.
So he MEANT to do it! I'm wicked offended. But thank God Firefox isn't busted...
Type about:config in the address bar, then browser.blink_allowed in the Filter bar, then double-click the pref to change it to false. No more blink.
(It's there because it and marquee are absolute requirements for a browser to function in large parts of Asia. Doesn't mean you have to leave it on, though.)
It's fine to support the blink tag, if someone puts on their page. But this guy put . Why did it make the tag blink for that one?
Joe: The blinking was done with CSS. See Neil's comment above.