First off, as others pointed out the technology will improve. I think one day it probably will replace human audiobook readers. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Unfortunately, the quality of the performer has a LOT to do with the experience of the listener. Take for example Frank Muller. He was widely known as one of the "best" audiobook readers in the business, his career ended only by a tragic accident in 2001. I knew of him because he read almost all of Stephen King's audiobooks. While I feel for the man and his family, I have to say that I found him unlistenable. I bought a recording of Black House and could not make it past the first half hour. He read things in an overwrought, almost Shakespearean tone, even for mundane bits of narration. And every sentence had the same basic pitch structure. It made me laugh, as well as everyone I played it for. The part that made me stop laughing was that I'd paid $60 for something I couldn't listen to.
Clearly he has plenty of fans, what with all his awards and accolades and such. But he was not my cup of tea. This is unfortunate, as I'm a King fan. Even if I've read a book, it's nice to go back and listen to it again later on audiobook while driving or working out. After Muller had to retire, George Guidall performed the rewrite of Gunslinger. I was dismayed to realize he used the exact same performance style. Since then I haven't even tried another King audiobook. Considering the quality of his more recent output, this hasn't really bothered me that much.
And then you get older or more obscure titles that no one is going to perform because of the costs involved. Or titles that were performed long ago and you can't find them anymore. I recently found a torrent of Heinlein's Time for the Stars. I enjoyed the story quite a bit, even though it was a fairly lousy quality copy of an old cassette and the performer was nothing special. The only other way you're going to find this recording is eBay/craiglist/garage sale.
On top of this, places like Amazon and Audible frequently don't even list the performer. I'd say "usually", in the case of the titles I look for. And when they do and it's a person you've never heard of (also frequent), good luck finding a sample of their performance.
So yeah, I see a huge market for something like this if they can improve the technology enough. Audiobooks are insanely overpriced, and I wonder what using software like this might do to that price. I would hope that there'd still be a market for certain performers, like Jim Dale. His Harry Potter performances are wonderful. And I'd miss hearing the works of Sarah Vowell or David Sedaris in any voice other than his. Of course, eventually it's likely that a computer simulation will be able to mimic them fairly accurately. I know I can already mimic the latter two in my head when I read their writing in print. Imagine if you could get the works of Twain read in a sufficiently Twain-like voice. Or set the voice to "James Earl Jones" when you listen to Lord of the Rings.
The authors have nothing to worry about. In fact, they'll probably make money on the deal. It's the performers and those who work in the recording department who are going to be out of a job. But then, they'll be jobs created for software people. Such is the way of change.
Most likely because they only have the book rights for all those books in the US. It would have been foolish to have paid extra money for worldwide rights (or even US+UK) when they were going to be testing the Kindle in the US first to see if it would flop or succeed. It may or not also be related to purchasing UK versions of books (because yeah, some books are localized even though it's kind of dumb) and purchasing a different title list based on popularity in the UK.
I would expect once they purchase book rights to your region, they'll turn on the iPhone app even before they get the Kindle out the door. Unless some exec gets nervous that somehow that will make the Kindle less likely to sell.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if no copyright would actually lead to an even worse situation. It would be even harder to get source code for a non-free program. The "service model" works ok for some commercial software, but poorly for most. Most of the companies I can think of that make money off the service model (i.e. Red Hat) are actually using a large percentage of someone else's man hours (the people who make most of the software they repackage and sell support for). So what are my options then?
Release all my programs for free with source code and hope for enough donations to pay my health insurance.
Release all my programs for free with source code and hope there's some way I can convince people to pay me for support, even though most programs short of Office and Photoshop won't need support.
Charge for my programs and release the source code. People can then buy them and freely redistribute them because there's no copyright. Since they have the source code they can also freely rip any reference to me out of them and sell them for 10% cheaper than I do (or more), since they don't have to make back the investment of time I put in creating/updating them.
Charge for my program and don't release the source code. Make my formats/protocols as obsfucated and encrypted as possible. Release new versions of the program frequently, continually adding new "features" to further obsfucate the formats/protocols and quickly drop backwards compatibility with the old versions.
Which of these means I can make a standard of living that doesn't involve cardboard housing? This is a serious question. Please use some actual figures for income to show a business model that means I can continue to make a living as a computer programmer in this post copyright world.
If that's not enough, I'll have to live in a world where almost every programmer is going through this same problem and be stuck with a limited selection of software that will likely suck much more in comparison to what we have today.
First, I don't think you've read many of his comments over the years. One of the thrusts of his disgruntlement over software is when source code isn't provided, because the user can't improve or change the software to meet his needs. He also seems to get quite pissed off when companies take a GPL piece of code and wrap it in a bunch more closed source code. This is a guy who will stop you in mid-sentence and berate you if "GNU" isn't put in front of the word "Linux."
No copyright would not level the playing field. Microsoft's dominance has a lot more to do with keeping things proprietary and closed and constantly adding new proprietary and closed features just as soon as people reverse-engineer the old ones.
Plus, there's the issue that plenty of people that use the GPL != RMS. The GPL is used by a large variety of people with a large variety of philosophies.
Yes, the designed it this way. It's definitely not a perfect system. But it's a decent system and works that doesn't try to pretend that human nature doesn't exist. It's based on "the wisdom of crowds." Look it up, sometime, it's an interesting theory. Basically, at any given point in time, the system may not come up with the correct result. But the theory is that, given some time, it will work itself out.
You might want to read the section starting "Moderation seems restrictive. Is it really necessary?" on this page. First off, users are randomly given a handful of moderation points. Second, if they post a comment on an article, all of their moderation on other people's comments on that article are undone and they can't moderate that article anymore. This helps keep people who are really vocal about a topic from also being the one to moderate their debate opponents.
Now, this doesn't always work if you have a crowd with a bias and they have to moderate someone who takes the opposite opinion. Unfortunately, the way the summary has been written has created an automatic bias against you. I can imagine an alternate version of the summary where it was spun to present you as the underdog going after fraudulent content repackaging middleman, and how you were a shining example to the RIAA of the way they should be working because you never go after end users of your content, only middleman (at least, based on your claims in your post).
Yet another problem you're having is related to being a new user. Every logged in user (as opposed to anonymous posters that show up as "Anonymous Coward") have a score called "karma." This is based on whether people have generally moderated their comments up or down. Since your very first posts were unpopular, you've gotten bad karma already and your new posts start out at a score of 0 instead of the normal neutral score of 1. Since most people seem to default to viewing only comments at score 1 or higher, this may also make it take a bit more time for you to be moderated up.
The last wrinkle here is "meta-moderation." This is where random users of the system are chose to moderate someone else's moderation. So basically, it's another check and balance. These people will review random situations of moderation and say "this user moderated this comment right/wrong." I'm not sure on the details, but this may determine how often the original moderator is allowed to moderate discussions in the future.
Again, not a perfect system but one with some checks and balances. It's very difficult to have discussion groups on the internet and have them not overrun by crap. Slashdot actually does one of the best jobs out there, I think.
Sadly, some idiot has modded your quite informative post as Flamebait. This means your post disappeared for anyone reading this site with their comment threshold set at 1. The comment is the thing near the top of the discussion. It lets you weed out comment moderated below a certain score. Unfortunately, there are too many people in the world who are willing to do such a thing.
Be patient, though, as hopefully someone else will come along and moderate your post back up. Until then, you may need to change the threshold to find it. You'll want to make sure you click on the "Reply To This" button under the post, otherwise your post will show up out of place, like the one you just made (don't worry, I know you said you're new here).
This response sounds far more reasonable and rational than almost all of the people attacking the guy on the summary links.
As a programmer, I frequently need to find icons for stuff. I've done searches for "free icons" before and looked very skeptically on some sites with thousands of images, none of them attributed in any way. How could I tell they're legit? Answer, you can't. Some people in the comments keep harping about watermarking, but how do you watermark a 32x32 pixel x 256 color icon? How do you watermark a simple vector graphic? And aren't we generally against watermarking anyway, due to a) possible quality depredation due to wedging non-image data in there and b) the NSA being able to track all our images?
This is why I generally just stuck to the crappy icons provided with my IDE. When I found the various CC icon packs (my favorite is silk), it was a godsend. Attribution is a very small price to pay.
I'd say the system we have now (and have had for quite some time). If a copyright holder observes their copyrighted material being used, they ask the person in question to show ownership.
The main issue I have with the current system is on the value of the penalties imposed.
So, what is your suggestion? No copyrights at all?
Dude. I'm going to have to stop defending if you don't format your posts better. Seriously, it's a giant block of text. Most people won't read more than a half-dozen sentences like that. I'd suggest reformatting this with paragraph breaks and posting it as a reply to your original comment.
You're basically proposing we go off the honor system. We might as well scrap the entire copyright system in that case. Not that I'd be opposed to that. But I do understand that you can't have copyright and just trust someone when they say they bought it at some point.
claiming the majority of clip art online infringes a copyright
I'm actually fairly willing to believe this.
Of course, that's not the same as proving that HIS clip-art is being used at all the sites he sues. If it is, then I'd find it hard to actually get mad at him.
Did anyone read the linked to "rant"? It's actually fairly cogent. First he basically says "If I was to steal your copyrighted stuff, you'd sue me into the ground because you're a huge company. Yet you steal mine all the time. That's rather unfair." Doesn't this sound like the Official Slashdot Position? Next he goes on to say he's mad at Google and Microsoft's image search tools because they continue to cache the image even after the site has removed it. Microsoft claimed they weren't caching them and he showed them an example that proved them wrong. Isn't this also a very Slashdot thing to do?
All in all, it sounds like he wasn't pissed that the image search features exist, but that they kept caching them even when he got people to yank his clipart off their server. Then they get money for ads on pages with the cached picture. And then people would copy the clipart again from the returned image results, making it easier for people to continue copying his clipart.
I've went to the links in the summary and they actually make me sympathize with the guy MORE. And I'm a bittorrenting fiend. One of them posts a picture of him accompanied by "Maybe if he makes enough money, he can go on a diet course, or at least buy a bigger belt to hold up that fat, obese stomach." Especially petty considering he looks like just about any old man his age, not actually spectacularly obese or anything.
I haven't been able to find widespread claims that he sues over clipart he doesn't own the copyrights to. Just that he's a jerk because his letters say "you put our clipart on your page, pay up" and don't give the target a chance to say "I'm sorry, I'll just take it off and we can pretend it never happened." The only other thing I can find other than personal insults was that they claim his clipart sucks anyway (sour grapes, anyone?). True, he does sell a lot of clipart that looks straight from the 80s, but there's also things like this:
This looks like prime fodder for a lot of business use today. It looks better than 90% of what I see in powerpoint presentations even now.
And the last point I can find people make against him is that he has clipart of the UN flag and the Sydney Opera House and those have some very specific copyrights attached to them. First, the UN flag is not protected by copyright but simply by a UN resolution that says "don't use our flag." A resolution that has no actual legal backing. And the question of how much the SOH can legally limit the use of their image is murky at best: http://www.freedomtodiffer.com/freedom_to_differ/2007/06/photographing_t.html
So really, I just don't get the uproar. Yeah, I wish copyright law was MUCH different to align penalties with actual profit being made by the infringer. But this guy hardly seems to be in the same league as the RIAA and their whole "making available" bullshit.
Do you have a citation for this? Because I'm skeptical. They don't need to know this if they're going to keep using the code the way it's always been used. They only need to know this if they're going to do something radically different, like open source it.
As the other poster (rather harshly) pointed out, it's a matter of time and money. Id wasn't a bankrupt company. Having worked on a number of projects in the past, it can be a bit easy for proprietary components to get weave themselves into a project in a way that's a significant chunk of effort to disentangle. Especially when you have the source code to those components. Gotta make sure you get every single unit you don't own out of there or you could get sued. Think management is going to okay that? Well, if there's any management around to okay it. And, as said before, if there are any coders around to ask for an okay.
In addition to what the other posters said, there's also the issue of proprietary third party code. They may have a large chunk of that in there that they don't have the rights to release. Happens with a lot of closed source.
I just finished watching Into the Wild Green Yonder. Yeah, not great. Not as bad as the first and third movie, though. Better than the second. It's weird, I've noticed two types of Futurama fans since the movies came out. Those to whom the pacing and joke density of the original 30 minute shows was key, and those who are just interested in the characters and are fine with having about the same amount of jokes spread out over a whole hour and a half.
I would certainly hope they get a shot at the 30 minute format again. It is pretty much the same people creating it, and they've proven before that they can create great material in that format.
Boy, people just can't wait to get up in arms over this, can they. First off, as has been pointed out multiple times, they're no actual "design" going on here, just "selection." Second, do people actually think they'll be more than a tiny percentage of babies conceived using this method? Are you missing that this must be carried out using IVF, with all the fertilization outside of the womb and embryo re-implantation? It will be a huge hassle and quite expensive. For many couples, it can already be a long experience just trying to conceive in the regular way. Some people will do this, but you'll never know anyone who did, unless maybe they were already getting IVF.
Call me when they get an IUD that can screen the sperm and the egg and possibly do in-utero genetic manipulation. Then maybe I'll go protest with you.
Exactly my thought. The media, religion and anti-genetic engineering groups built up such a scare over a horrible future in which we had genetically modified human babies that they couldn't wait for that particular inevitability to actually happen. They'd made the word "designer baby" into such a scare word that they wanted to use it now, dammit.
I'm in favor of someone easily being able to tell if a website is on the blacklist (in as much as I'm in favor of this whole concept to begin with), but "notifying" websites? How? Send them email to webmaster@soandsosite.com? We all no that's not overrun with spam. And no one would send spam to that address in the same format as a blacklist notification, right? What if it's a subsite? Do they dig up each sites author's email address? Do they edit for people putting weird things in their email to avoid spammers?
This just really doesn't seem feasible. Maybe they could have a site where anyone can register for notification for a wildcard URL string. But that brings up a whole different set of issues.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, as others pointed out the technology will improve. I think one day it probably will replace human audiobook readers. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Unfortunately, the quality of the performer has a LOT to do with the experience of the listener. Take for example Frank Muller. He was widely known as one of the "best" audiobook readers in the business, his career ended only by a tragic accident in 2001. I knew of him because he read almost all of Stephen King's audiobooks. While I feel for the man and his family, I have to say that I found him unlistenable. I bought a recording of Black House and could not make it past the first half hour. He read things in an overwrought, almost Shakespearean tone, even for mundane bits of narration. And every sentence had the same basic pitch structure. It made me laugh, as well as everyone I played it for. The part that made me stop laughing was that I'd paid $60 for something I couldn't listen to.
Clearly he has plenty of fans, what with all his awards and accolades and such. But he was not my cup of tea. This is unfortunate, as I'm a King fan. Even if I've read a book, it's nice to go back and listen to it again later on audiobook while driving or working out. After Muller had to retire, George Guidall performed the rewrite of Gunslinger. I was dismayed to realize he used the exact same performance style. Since then I haven't even tried another King audiobook. Considering the quality of his more recent output, this hasn't really bothered me that much.
And then you get older or more obscure titles that no one is going to perform because of the costs involved. Or titles that were performed long ago and you can't find them anymore. I recently found a torrent of Heinlein's Time for the Stars. I enjoyed the story quite a bit, even though it was a fairly lousy quality copy of an old cassette and the performer was nothing special. The only other way you're going to find this recording is eBay/craiglist/garage sale.
On top of this, places like Amazon and Audible frequently don't even list the performer. I'd say "usually", in the case of the titles I look for. And when they do and it's a person you've never heard of (also frequent), good luck finding a sample of their performance.
So yeah, I see a huge market for something like this if they can improve the technology enough. Audiobooks are insanely overpriced, and I wonder what using software like this might do to that price. I would hope that there'd still be a market for certain performers, like Jim Dale. His Harry Potter performances are wonderful. And I'd miss hearing the works of Sarah Vowell or David Sedaris in any voice other than his. Of course, eventually it's likely that a computer simulation will be able to mimic them fairly accurately. I know I can already mimic the latter two in my head when I read their writing in print. Imagine if you could get the works of Twain read in a sufficiently Twain-like voice. Or set the voice to "James Earl Jones" when you listen to Lord of the Rings.
The authors have nothing to worry about. In fact, they'll probably make money on the deal. It's the performers and those who work in the recording department who are going to be out of a job. But then, they'll be jobs created for software people. Such is the way of change.
Most likely because they only have the book rights for all those books in the US. It would have been foolish to have paid extra money for worldwide rights (or even US+UK) when they were going to be testing the Kindle in the US first to see if it would flop or succeed. It may or not also be related to purchasing UK versions of books (because yeah, some books are localized even though it's kind of dumb) and purchasing a different title list based on popularity in the UK.
I would expect once they purchase book rights to your region, they'll turn on the iPhone app even before they get the Kindle out the door. Unless some exec gets nervous that somehow that will make the Kindle less likely to sell.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if no copyright would actually lead to an even worse situation. It would be even harder to get source code for a non-free program. The "service model" works ok for some commercial software, but poorly for most. Most of the companies I can think of that make money off the service model (i.e. Red Hat) are actually using a large percentage of someone else's man hours (the people who make most of the software they repackage and sell support for). So what are my options then?
Which of these means I can make a standard of living that doesn't involve cardboard housing? This is a serious question. Please use some actual figures for income to show a business model that means I can continue to make a living as a computer programmer in this post copyright world.
If that's not enough, I'll have to live in a world where almost every programmer is going through this same problem and be stuck with a limited selection of software that will likely suck much more in comparison to what we have today.
First, I don't think you've read many of his comments over the years. One of the thrusts of his disgruntlement over software is when source code isn't provided, because the user can't improve or change the software to meet his needs. He also seems to get quite pissed off when companies take a GPL piece of code and wrap it in a bunch more closed source code. This is a guy who will stop you in mid-sentence and berate you if "GNU" isn't put in front of the word "Linux."
No copyright would not level the playing field. Microsoft's dominance has a lot more to do with keeping things proprietary and closed and constantly adding new proprietary and closed features just as soon as people reverse-engineer the old ones.
Plus, there's the issue that plenty of people that use the GPL != RMS. The GPL is used by a large variety of people with a large variety of philosophies.
Yes, the designed it this way. It's definitely not a perfect system. But it's a decent system and works that doesn't try to pretend that human nature doesn't exist. It's based on "the wisdom of crowds." Look it up, sometime, it's an interesting theory. Basically, at any given point in time, the system may not come up with the correct result. But the theory is that, given some time, it will work itself out.
You might want to read the section starting "Moderation seems restrictive. Is it really necessary?" on this page. First off, users are randomly given a handful of moderation points. Second, if they post a comment on an article, all of their moderation on other people's comments on that article are undone and they can't moderate that article anymore. This helps keep people who are really vocal about a topic from also being the one to moderate their debate opponents.
Now, this doesn't always work if you have a crowd with a bias and they have to moderate someone who takes the opposite opinion. Unfortunately, the way the summary has been written has created an automatic bias against you. I can imagine an alternate version of the summary where it was spun to present you as the underdog going after fraudulent content repackaging middleman, and how you were a shining example to the RIAA of the way they should be working because you never go after end users of your content, only middleman (at least, based on your claims in your post).
Yet another problem you're having is related to being a new user. Every logged in user (as opposed to anonymous posters that show up as "Anonymous Coward") have a score called "karma." This is based on whether people have generally moderated their comments up or down. Since your very first posts were unpopular, you've gotten bad karma already and your new posts start out at a score of 0 instead of the normal neutral score of 1. Since most people seem to default to viewing only comments at score 1 or higher, this may also make it take a bit more time for you to be moderated up.
The last wrinkle here is "meta-moderation." This is where random users of the system are chose to moderate someone else's moderation. So basically, it's another check and balance. These people will review random situations of moderation and say "this user moderated this comment right/wrong." I'm not sure on the details, but this may determine how often the original moderator is allowed to moderate discussions in the future.
Again, not a perfect system but one with some checks and balances. It's very difficult to have discussion groups on the internet and have them not overrun by crap. Slashdot actually does one of the best jobs out there, I think.
Sadly, some idiot has modded your quite informative post as Flamebait. This means your post disappeared for anyone reading this site with their comment threshold set at 1. The comment is the thing near the top of the discussion. It lets you weed out comment moderated below a certain score. Unfortunately, there are too many people in the world who are willing to do such a thing.
Be patient, though, as hopefully someone else will come along and moderate your post back up. Until then, you may need to change the threshold to find it. You'll want to make sure you click on the "Reply To This" button under the post, otherwise your post will show up out of place, like the one you just made (don't worry, I know you said you're new here).
Hey, yeah, that'd be awesome. We'd get rid of that pesky GPL overnight!
Much better formatted!
This response sounds far more reasonable and rational than almost all of the people attacking the guy on the summary links.
As a programmer, I frequently need to find icons for stuff. I've done searches for "free icons" before and looked very skeptically on some sites with thousands of images, none of them attributed in any way. How could I tell they're legit? Answer, you can't. Some people in the comments keep harping about watermarking, but how do you watermark a 32x32 pixel x 256 color icon? How do you watermark a simple vector graphic? And aren't we generally against watermarking anyway, due to a) possible quality depredation due to wedging non-image data in there and b) the NSA being able to track all our images?
This is why I generally just stuck to the crappy icons provided with my IDE. When I found the various CC icon packs (my favorite is silk), it was a godsend. Attribution is a very small price to pay.
Nice strawman you got there.
I'd say the system we have now (and have had for quite some time). If a copyright holder observes their copyrighted material being used, they ask the person in question to show ownership.
The main issue I have with the current system is on the value of the penalties imposed.
So, what is your suggestion? No copyrights at all?
Turns out two can play the strawman game.
Dude. I'm going to have to stop defending if you don't format your posts better. Seriously, it's a giant block of text. Most people won't read more than a half-dozen sentences like that. I'd suggest reformatting this with paragraph breaks and posting it as a reply to your original comment.
You're basically proposing we go off the honor system. We might as well scrap the entire copyright system in that case. Not that I'd be opposed to that. But I do understand that you can't have copyright and just trust someone when they say they bought it at some point.
claiming the majority of clip art online infringes a copyright
I'm actually fairly willing to believe this.
Of course, that's not the same as proving that HIS clip-art is being used at all the sites he sues. If it is, then I'd find it hard to actually get mad at him.
Did anyone read the linked to "rant"? It's actually fairly cogent. First he basically says "If I was to steal your copyrighted stuff, you'd sue me into the ground because you're a huge company. Yet you steal mine all the time. That's rather unfair." Doesn't this sound like the Official Slashdot Position? Next he goes on to say he's mad at Google and Microsoft's image search tools because they continue to cache the image even after the site has removed it. Microsoft claimed they weren't caching them and he showed them an example that proved them wrong. Isn't this also a very Slashdot thing to do?
All in all, it sounds like he wasn't pissed that the image search features exist, but that they kept caching them even when he got people to yank his clipart off their server. Then they get money for ads on pages with the cached picture. And then people would copy the clipart again from the returned image results, making it easier for people to continue copying his clipart.
I've went to the links in the summary and they actually make me sympathize with the guy MORE. And I'm a bittorrenting fiend. One of them posts a picture of him accompanied by "Maybe if he makes enough money, he can go on a diet course, or at least buy a bigger belt to hold up that fat, obese stomach." Especially petty considering he looks like just about any old man his age, not actually spectacularly obese or anything.
I haven't been able to find widespread claims that he sues over clipart he doesn't own the copyrights to. Just that he's a jerk because his letters say "you put our clipart on your page, pay up" and don't give the target a chance to say "I'm sorry, I'll just take it off and we can pretend it never happened." The only other thing I can find other than personal insults was that they claim his clipart sucks anyway (sour grapes, anyone?). True, he does sell a lot of clipart that looks straight from the 80s, but there's also things like this:
http://www.imageline2.com/pages/ipics2_LOGOSNature.htm
http://www.imageline2.com/pages/ipics2_OTHERWorldRel2.htm
http://www.imageline2.com/pages/PRESENT_Index.htm
This looks like prime fodder for a lot of business use today. It looks better than 90% of what I see in powerpoint presentations even now.
And the last point I can find people make against him is that he has clipart of the UN flag and the Sydney Opera House and those have some very specific copyrights attached to them. First, the UN flag is not protected by copyright but simply by a UN resolution that says "don't use our flag." A resolution that has no actual legal backing. And the question of how much the SOH can legally limit the use of their image is murky at best:
http://www.freedomtodiffer.com/freedom_to_differ/2007/06/photographing_t.html
So really, I just don't get the uproar. Yeah, I wish copyright law was MUCH different to align penalties with actual profit being made by the infringer. But this guy hardly seems to be in the same league as the RIAA and their whole "making available" bullshit.
Yeah, damn that "Slashdot culture" and it's culture-specific bias.
Again, if you work as a professional programmer long enough, you'll stop being so surprised at the plausibility of such a situation.
Do you have a citation for this? Because I'm skeptical. They don't need to know this if they're going to keep using the code the way it's always been used. They only need to know this if they're going to do something radically different, like open source it.
I'm wondering if you've ever used much commercial third-party code. There are frequently no copyright notices on individual units.
As the other poster (rather harshly) pointed out, it's a matter of time and money. Id wasn't a bankrupt company. Having worked on a number of projects in the past, it can be a bit easy for proprietary components to get weave themselves into a project in a way that's a significant chunk of effort to disentangle. Especially when you have the source code to those components. Gotta make sure you get every single unit you don't own out of there or you could get sued. Think management is going to okay that? Well, if there's any management around to okay it. And, as said before, if there are any coders around to ask for an okay.
In addition to what the other posters said, there's also the issue of proprietary third party code. They may have a large chunk of that in there that they don't have the rights to release. Happens with a lot of closed source.
Yes. This can also be phrased as "the least terrible."
I just finished watching Into the Wild Green Yonder. Yeah, not great. Not as bad as the first and third movie, though. Better than the second. It's weird, I've noticed two types of Futurama fans since the movies came out. Those to whom the pacing and joke density of the original 30 minute shows was key, and those who are just interested in the characters and are fine with having about the same amount of jokes spread out over a whole hour and a half.
I would certainly hope they get a shot at the 30 minute format again. It is pretty much the same people creating it, and they've proven before that they can create great material in that format.
Boy, people just can't wait to get up in arms over this, can they. First off, as has been pointed out multiple times, they're no actual "design" going on here, just "selection." Second, do people actually think they'll be more than a tiny percentage of babies conceived using this method? Are you missing that this must be carried out using IVF, with all the fertilization outside of the womb and embryo re-implantation? It will be a huge hassle and quite expensive. For many couples, it can already be a long experience just trying to conceive in the regular way. Some people will do this, but you'll never know anyone who did, unless maybe they were already getting IVF.
Call me when they get an IUD that can screen the sperm and the egg and possibly do in-utero genetic manipulation. Then maybe I'll go protest with you.
Exactly my thought. The media, religion and anti-genetic engineering groups built up such a scare over a horrible future in which we had genetically modified human babies that they couldn't wait for that particular inevitability to actually happen. They'd made the word "designer baby" into such a scare word that they wanted to use it now, dammit.
The keyword in the OP was "home automation." This wouldn't go the same place the wireless hub/router would.
Perhaps he should have been specific and said "need a Windows Mobile phone for this feature."
I'm in favor of someone easily being able to tell if a website is on the blacklist (in as much as I'm in favor of this whole concept to begin with), but "notifying" websites? How? Send them email to webmaster@soandsosite.com? We all no that's not overrun with spam. And no one would send spam to that address in the same format as a blacklist notification, right? What if it's a subsite? Do they dig up each sites author's email address? Do they edit for people putting weird things in their email to avoid spammers?
This just really doesn't seem feasible. Maybe they could have a site where anyone can register for notification for a wildcard URL string. But that brings up a whole different set of issues.