Thanks for sharing your experience.
We’ll try our best to address these issues in the next major release.

Please feel to report any issues you face with Adobe Reader on Unix at:
http://adobeforums.com/webx/.3bbf42f7.3bc433df/

Thanks!

@Foo, you wrote, “You had time to write a whole blog post, but not enough time to click ‘Print Pages’ a second time?” Well, first of all, if you had read the article, you’d note that clicking “Print Pages” again would have resulted in the same exact problem But aside from that, the real issue is that the print shop was closed; it was too late to get them recopied.

@Karl, thanks for posting here. It’s a small internet world! I knew your article was available online, but it wouldn’t print very nicely from my browser — too many page breaks at the wrong places. Well, it probably would have printed better than it ended up printing from acroread!

I did a little research about Fair Use, and since the article content itself was available via Creative Commons Attribution, I figured printing out the chapter from the ebook itself wouldn’t be an infringement. Even aside from that, Fair Use generally allows for distribution of multiple copies of a portion of a book for classroom use. The rule of thumb is that one chapter or 10% of the book is OK, whichever is less. This is just a rule of thumb I had from my university days. In this case, given that the article is actually specifically distributed under the CC license, I doubt my fair use of the ebook would be pursued by O’Reilly as an infringement. I’m glad Karl agrees.

@Johan, that’s an interesting point. I think one of the problems is that in some development shops, requirements gathering / design is done in an ivory tower, and then the artifacts that are the result of that work are “thrown over the wall” to developers, who are mere implementors. It’s this kind of separation that often leads to bugs like the one described. That’s why I called this bug “anti-social”. I believe bugs like these are the result of a lack of collaboration among developers. I’m just speculating, but my feeling is that no group of developers — like Karl, Ben and Jim, discussing and debating the SVN delta editor — would have let this bug enter the mainline of acroread’s source code.

The requirements are rarely “done” when they get to the developers. That should be the beginning of the next part of the conversation, when more consequences are revealed as things turn into design and code.

In a tech design meeting last month our team rejected the whole premise of a feature when we realized it would result in a really complicated and awkward solution. We could only do that once we realized that the “why?” was actually that the user wanted a _simpler_ and _more_convenient_ way to use our service. So whatever we did would in fact not lead to the that goal.

Without the “why?”, we would have wasted a lot of time creating something useless.

You might be interested in http://questioncopyright.org/. Not everyone — not even every author! — agrees that restricting the spread of knowledge and culture is a good business model, let alone good social policy. Historically, the business copyright was designed to support was actually *distribution*, that is, publishing. It wasn’t invented for artists or by artists. It was designed by the publishing industry to support the inherently high up-front costs and the risk structure of publishing. It probably made some sense, too, back when applying ink to dead tree pulp (or cutting grooves in vinyl platters) was the only way to distribute information.

Now we have a way of distributing information that is essentially zero-cost and 100% reliable (the copies are indistinguishable from the masters). Copyright law is beginning to look rather silly.

Remember, it’s not about attribution: artists deserve credit for their work, but that can be protected by separate laws. Also, having lots of copies spread around the Internet actually protects attribution more effectively than any law could. That’s why we don’t have attribution problems in the open source world, for example. Quite the opposite: open source is one of the most conscientious crediting communities ever.

Justin’s point about “fair use” is good, though the law is unfortunately quite fuzzy on exactly what constitutes fair use. But it would be even nicer for that phrase to go away entirely, and for all uses to be fair.

http://www.red-bean.com/kfogel/beautiful-code/bc-chapter-02.html

It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so basically you can do whatever you want with it.

(I think I have a PDF somewhere too; I could dig it up if you want.)

I’m so glad you liked the chapter. And I completely agree with you about the book as a whole — it’s one of my favorite programming books now!

Are you really that unaware of copyright laws?

That’s a bit of hyperbole there. You had time to write a whole blog post, but not enough time to click “Print Pages” a second time?