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Slashdot points us to this wonderful blog post on the Got Medieval blog about how monks and scribes in the middle ages "copy protected" their books with "book curses" inscribed within the book.
I almost wonder if those were more effective than today's DRM attempts.
The blog has a nice image of one such curse, but here are a couple that I find amusing:
Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed.
--attributed to a 16th-century French missal belonging to a man named Robert
Thys boke is one And Godes kors ys anoder; They take the ton, God gefe them the toder.
[This book is one (thing), And God's curse is another; They that take the one, God gives them the other.]
--found in various Middle English books.
Perhaps the most clever one though, is described as follows:
But far and away my favorite curse is found in a collection of English court transcripts made by William Easingwold around 1491. It takes the form of a clever Latin code. If you read the top two lines together it says "May he who wrote this book procure the joys of life supernal", but the bottom two together produce "May he who steals this book endure the pangs of death infernal" (Drogin's translation). I don't have an image of the manuscript, but this is a close approximation:
All of this reminds me of an even older story of books and attempts to stop copying, which we wrote about last year, concerning Saint Columba -- also known as Colmcille or Colum Cille -- who in the 6th century, decided to copy some religious books in an attempt to "share" the faith with others. He did so with a Latin translation of the Bible and it created quite the mess, with a debate over the legality of copying a book, and whether or not it counted as "property." You see, these arguments aren't particularly new...Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
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Logitech, like McDonalds of long ago, can now claim "over 100 million served," only Logitech is referring to wireless mouse shipments and not the number of flipped burgers.
"Logitech mice have played an integral role in improving the computing experience for millions of people, and our wireless mice build on that heritage," said Rory Dooley, Logitech senior vice president and general manager of the Control Devices business unit. "Today, our wireless mice deliver a robust feature set combined with unparalleled ease of use and precision. And the new mice we offer in a variety of colors and patterns provide consumers with an element of self expression while they use their laptop and mouse to seamlessly navigate their favorite content."
For those of you who like a little history thrown in with your milestone news, Logitech points out that it introduced the world's first radio-frequency (RF) rodent for PCs back in 1991, sparking a revolution of many more IR-based mice to follow.
What do you use as your primary mouse? Tell us in the comments section below!
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Excuse us a moment while we die a little inside, an inevitable result of learning that teen pop idol Justin Bieber consumes 3 percent of Twitter's resources at any given time. Dude even has his own servers.
"Any any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. - Twitter employee," Dustin Curtis tweeted.
Gizmodo claims that Dustin Curtis, a designer and blogger, was given his info by a real Twitter employee and that "his tweet is not a joke." But is that really true?
"At the moment, we are not making our user statistics public," Twitter insists.
Fair enough, but if it wasn't true, the microblogging service could have debunked the tweet and still held firm to its policy of not sharing user statistics. If this were an episode of Mythbusters, we'd have to at least rank this one as "Plausible."
For what it's worth, a followup tweet by Curtis claims that Justin Bieber isn't the only one with his own racks, and in fact "Most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts."
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