Sorry to break the news to you, but you can't wait 6 months in 15 seconds.
"figure out" does not mean the same thing as "accomplish." You don't actually have to wait to be done before you've decided what to do.
Nice. Implies that you have "several different ways", yet you provide none.
Perhaps you weren't reading. In fact, not only did I suggest a way that the current system could be exploited, but I claimed that that method was under regular use, named three companies with a history of it as well as a sampling of places they'd done it, and in fact suggested that it was inevitable and suggested a reparation.
Come back when you have something to say.
You're pretty angry when someone disagrees with you, aren't you?
Yeah, because nobody has ever thought of planting people ahead of time, and there isn't already a cadre of Microsoft employees, and indeed from every other major computing organization, on every major standards body. All that means is that Microsoft submarines half a dozen people onto any committee they want to work on for some up-front amount of time. It's the Price Is Right Conundrum: any amount of time you put up there on the board, Microsoft will add one dollar - pardon, day - and bid there. Why do you think Netscape, a tiny company, had so many people on the various W3 standards? Why do you think Opera does today? It's the exact same thing, and this is just how these boards work. There's no particular way around it; you can't set time limits, price limits, count of people from a company, because they're all trivially easily gamed.
Any time you make a plutocracy, it will be commercially exploited. If they want to be immune to this crap, they need to move to a meritocracy or an election. Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought. (You could have, this time, several different ways.)
If such copying really was stealing you would be able to use the usual laws for theft against it.
You do realize that we can, right?
In my country (Malaysia)
Oh, that's why you have no idea how US law works, and seem to believe everything SlashDot tells you.
Maybe in the US most people think copying is the same as theft because *AA and the media keep brainwashing you folks.
Man, you'll believe anything to feel correct, won't you?
And maybe the powers in the USA will eventually have their way and copyright infringement becomes the same as theft, and not just in the USA but worldwide.
Yeah, that day was the Brussels revision of the Berne Conventions, June 26, 1948, which Malaysia signed on October 1, 1990; on January 1 1995, Malaysia strengthened is commitment by also signing to TRIPS. Other laws of interest in Malaysia are the IP Corporation of Malaysia Act 2002, Trade Marks Act 1976, Patents Act 1983, Copyright Act 1987, Industrial Design Act 1996, Layout Designs and Integrated Circuit Act 2000, Geographical Indications Act 2000 and Optical Discs Act 2000. In particular, the the IP Corporation of Malaysia Act 2002 is actually stronger than the Berne Conventions require.
Funny how you don't even know your own country's laws, yet you're willing to lecture other people (wrongly) about theirs, isn't it?
While people rightly point out other prior art, like Microsoft's 1996 IntelliSense patent that I just read in someone else's comment, I'd like to be the first to point out that several BBSes, including Renegade, Tag, Opus and WWIV, offered this as early as the mid-1980s. The first time I personally saw predictive autocomplete was in the door.QWK reader for Hydra - a BBS so old that it thought running on an Atari was a good idea - in probably 1983 or so. That's back in the days when 600 bits per second sounded fancy, and when people still yelled at salesfeeps when they tried to quote baud (because back then, the difference was important.)
While I'm at it, get me my corn cob pipe; I'd like to talk about the civil war. *creak*
It's not stealing. It's called copyright infringement.
The popular myth that copyright infringement is not theft is deeply flawed. Under the definition of theft given by US law, copyright infringement is a cut and dried case of theft of services. This has been well established by precedent in this country for more than two hundred years, when the newspapers on the American frontier tried to get by by stealing newspaper copy. When the courts ruled that illegal, the various journalist wires that sold stories began, which led to Reuters. I'm also not sure why you waste your time attempting to draw the distinction, as if one is less illegal than the other. I've only ever heard pirates pretend there was a difference, and the only reason they don't want to call it theft is that they would then have to face being thieves.
It is both a false and a useless distinction.
Copyright is a granted limited monopoly by the Government of a country on copying.
No, it isn't. It hasn't been since the Berne conventions in the 1940s. Quit pretending to be a lawyer. Copyright is not a monopoly; monopoly is when, in the open market, a company manages to control 50% or more of a demographic. Since there is no open market on copywritten work, it clearly isn't a monopoly. Be sure to dust off that part of the constitution which uses the word monopoly, so that I can laugh at you for believing that the word means the same thing now as it did back then, in the eyes of the law.
Generally speaking, you should not assume that what you read on blogs is equivalent to a law degree.
AFAIK the _international_ "you respect my country's copyrights and I respect yours" deal somehow became part of the WTO thingy which the US Gov agreed to.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The WTO is a transactional trade jurisprudence concerned with physical stock items, and this slashdot furor notwithstanding, the WTO has no governance over copyright. The WTO is about selling bananas, steel and blue jeans. Intellectual property is not a moment of trade unless you're selling the rights to the item. The Berne Conventions assign the United Nations as the international governor of both copyright and patent disputes. The persistant idea that anything that deals with money inbetween nations is under the WTO's purview is fundamentally wrong-headed. If it's not a physical item, the WTO has nothing to do with it.
So the way I see it if the US _allegedly_ doesn't hold up it's part of the WTO deal
You might want to look up the word "alleged," as you cannot allegedly fail to do something, by definition. An allegation is an accusation of action in court. Please stop learning your legal jargon from the eleven o'clock news, and maybe dust off a copy of Bierce's Write It Right and learn ye some proper English. Of course, someone who understands the law does need to know what an allegation is, as it's a fundamental concept in law, but somehow I doubt this will dissuade you from believing yourself an expert.
So the way I see it if the US _allegedly_ doesn't hold up it's part of the WTO deal, Antigua is well within its rights to request the WTO to "redo the deal" accordingly, which in this case could mean Antiguans get to copy stuff.
What? Did you even try to figure out if this made sense before you said it? There is no point at which Antigua gets to break UN law if the WTO finds that the United States has raised unfair barriers to commercial entry. The WTO isn't even part of the UN. It's not even on the same continent as the UN. Less than two thirds of the world are under WTO governance, yet all but six countries on Earth are signatories of the Berne Conventions. Hell, the WTO didn't even exist until 1995; Antigua signed the Berne Conventions in 1956.
Umm, just how do you think Antigua is going to apply anything to the US government without applying it to US citizens?
This is the last time I'm going to explain it to you. If you fail again to understand, I will give up on you.
If a trade sanction is levied against a government, that sanction is levied against existing government tariffs. If, for example, I sell a ton of steel girders to China, the US taxes me to the tune of about 1.24% . That means that when I accept $260 for my ton of steel, I have to give $3.22 to the government. If a trade sanction was levied against the government, the money would be taken out of the $3.22 . The price to the Chinese buyer does not change. The profit to the seller does not change. The tariff does not change. The only thing that changes is what amount of that tariff goes to the US government. It is the US government paying the tab, because it's coming out of their money.
If Antigua was allowed to ignore copyright, the money they would be taking would not be that of the US government. It would be the money from the record labels, the software producers, the film studios and the book producers which was being taken. The WTO does not have the right to do that; whereas they govern trade, they do not govern IP. It is not within the WTO's purvey to take intellectual property rights, because they belong to companies and individuals instead of the federal government.
There is nothing wrong with the WTO taking money from the federal government. Trying to take money from companies and private citizens is criminal. If you really don't understand the distinction, then you need to quit telling other people what they do and do not grasp.
Well, considering as how that language fairly clearly suggests that the appropriate target of between the complaining body and the offending body, I should think that the concessions and obligations would be those to the offending body. I don't know why it is that you believe that's individual software developers; it most certainly is not. Please, help me understand what part of this is difficult: "if you have a problem with the US government, the appropriate response will target the government, not its citizens." I personally have neither the ethical, the legal nor the moral obligation to personally support trade tariffs.
It's not like Antigua can extract billions of dollars by placing restrictions on how its citizens may use US gambling services.
Yeah, that's what the WTO is for. I know, you just wrote WTO after that, but you've already made the critical error; saying WTO afterwards doesn't make you correct. It is immensely important to understand that at no point does the complainant have any part in the adjudication or enforcement of the law. That false presumption turns this whole thing on its head. If the WTO finds for Antigua, it starts taxing US stuff across the board. Want to send steel to China? The export levy that's been held against the US since the 1930s, well, a little tiny fraction of that goes to Antigua. Accepting a shipment of oranges from Brazil? That massive orange tax? Hey, guess where it's going, too? The point that matters here is that in those two cases, as well as dozens of other fairly easy to cook up scenarios, the money is coming out of the pockets of the US Government. It's not coming out of the pockets of the supplier, it's not coming out of the pockets of the purchaser, and it's not coming out of the pockets of the shipper. ONLY THE GOVERNMENT.
Look at it from a perspective that doesn't focus on your personal bugbears, and it becomes much simpler. Let's say we have two countries, and in the comic book tradition, we will give them thinly veiled eastern European names - Kreplachistan (ok, so that's Disney) and Latveria. So, Latveria - since it's run by Dr. Doom - has been engaging in a variety of ill trade practices with Kreplachistan. In response, Kreplachistan has gone to the WTO, who finds in their favor. Now, we have to construct a way for Kreplachistan to acquire reparations. Now remember, this is Doctor Doom we're talking about, so the people in Latveria are balls-on-poor. Who should the WTO extract payment from? The Latverian citizens, or the Latverian government? These people are starving, and Doctor Doom is throwing away billions to give himself a repeating platform to swear at Reed Richards.
So, you're a Latverian turnip farmer. You don't even know which direction Kreplachistan is, because Doom sees compasses as a challenge to his mighty sense of national direction. Suddenly some WTO geek comes down in a helicopter and says "pay up, dick, Doom screwed some casinos to the East." Does that really seem right to you? That is exactly what's going on here: the Antiguan lawyer is asking for permission to act against private individuals, not against the government that they are complaining against. At no point does the WTO have the authority to release my personal copyrights, under any fantasy reading of the law. I'm not sure why you think what you quoted says that they do; it even explicitly says "other sectors under the same agreement." Are you under the false presumption that my personal copyright for my personal work is governed by the American WTO treaty regarding international trade?
Do you think copyright is governed by trade law? If you do, I think we're pretty done here; that's a bit like trying to explain car theft in terms of manslaughter. This just isn't how the law works.
There are, in fact, two reasons to enact tariff against the United States; you seem to only recognize o
Actually, that's a very significant difference to me. Thank you for pointing out that error. I will amend it when speaking in the future. (You just saved me some egg-on-face in a future project; I appreciate it.)
I'm sure the Antiguans would argue that the United States' violation of WTO rules is hurting the Antiguans' small businesses.
For one, a casino is not a small business. For two, so what? What, because they believe our government is screwing them, they get to screw us back? That's not how these things work. "He did it first" is not a justification for breaking the law.
Mind you, I don't actually think the comparison is in any way apt. You're attempting to contrast lost opportunity to stolen work. By the same logic, if I own a whiskey distillery, I should be able to go looting in Muslim nations. That just doesn't make sense. Antiguans do not have the right to steal the software I wrote because George Bush decided that he didn't want offshore gambling. I really don't care how they feel about what George Bush is doing. At no point is there a reasonable response involved in Antiguans beginning to steal from individual Americans because they're angry about lost business opportunities. The idea that we're somehow discriminating against them is absurd; the reason they can't do business here is that they don't honor state laws. We do allow international gambling, under limited circumstances, but the recipient of the funds has extensive reporting requirements that they have to make. You can, in fact, gamble the French Riviera from the internet, or to Monaco, or to Prince Edward Island, or to Luxembourg.
Antigua is getting the short end of the stick because they refuse to own up to regulations, because they're difficult and expensive. Boo fucking hoo, if you won't do the job right, you don't get the job. That doesn't give them the right to steal from me at any level, moral, ethical, legal or otherwise.
At no point is it my fault that they won't mail in some goddamned forms, and if an Antiguan ever gets caught stealing my software, I'm hauling their ass into court to prove the point.
Given that there's no entity with the power enforce "justice" in international trade disputes
I'm sorry, are you confused about what "WTO" stands for, or why Antigua thinks they get to control American trade practices? At least get a basic familiarity with how things work before lecturing that they don't.
, tit-for-tat is all that wronged parties have available to them.
Where did you get this idea? Embargoes, bans, fines, taxes, levies, inspections, braces, taps, caps, freight blockage, and literally dozens of other options are available, and have been used against the United States in the past. Please do not confuse your understanding of the situation with the actual situation; just because you personally don't know what other options there are doesn't mean there are none.
It would be foolish for the Antiguans to let their economy be severely damaged without a fight.
If only they were fighting the right people. I'm sorry, but you seem to have entirely missed the point of what I said. Please brush up on the basics before you reply anew; it's a little annoying to have to point this stuff out.
Whereas the current state of things leaves a lot to desired, it's nowhere near as bad as C; that's why ETS and DETS are effectively polymorphisms of one another.
metaprogramming is hard (and badly needed; patterns like synchronous message sending or futures require a lot of copy-and-pasting).
I see no reason that synchronous message passing needs any cut and pasting; why not just make a module to implement it? As far as futures, frankly I think they're misguided; allowing the compiler to wait for a return and to keep going is cute and all, but the only latency that prevents is the latency in naïve design, and doing the checking per-variable per-access introduces enormous overhead. Erlang is a soft-realtime language; you cannot implement futures without trashing all sorts of very important guarantees.
Variables are single static assignment, which is a cheap cop-out for the compiler writer
No, it isn't. This has a lot to do with functional language optimization, and the perceived "correctness" of side effects. The language's original designer, Joe Armstrong, takes the position that mutability is a bad idea, that it leads to bugs, and so on; that's why, in his book, he tries really hard to discourage the use of the process dictionary. The language may not strictly forbid side effects, but immutability is a hell of a step towards it, without screwing around with implementing sockets and dictionaries as monads, or what have you. Mind you, I disagree with the choice, but that doesn't mean that it's a cheap cop-out. They chose to do that for a reason which they believed had to do with bug resistance and reliable design.
Message sending and function call syntax is very different for no good reason.
You think the syntax for sending a message to a process should necessarily be similar? They're not particularly related.
You are meant to wrap exposed (public) messages in function, which makes things even more messy.
I have a hard time understanding this belief. Please explain further.
Calling code in other languages is a colossal pain.
This is just downright false. You can load.DLLs or.sos directly into the virtual machine. You can use ports (which C calls stdin/stdout.) You can use sockets. You can use unix named pipes. You can use externalised message passing. Hell, Erlang even ships with a library to load your application as a fully fledged node in the Erlang network, which only takes five lines of code. I have a hard time imagining a language being easier to integrate into other languages, and I'm an experienced developer who speaks more than 40 languages, including several glue languages.
Sorry, but that's exactly how WTO works and is supposed to work.
There is no point at which the charter of the WTO says "if a government disobeys you, screw that government's citizens." It's cute to say that that's how it's supposed to work, but given the other misapprehensions that run around SlashDot from people who genuinely believe they know what they're talking about, I'll just have to wait until you provide something at least vaguely resembling citation before I discard common sense. There are dozens of legitimate ways for the WTO to approach this. Stealing from individuals who've nothing to do with the matter does not address the situation in any way, and has no basis in law - even if you insist otherwise.
Feel free to give a link supporting your claims at any point. Until then, I don't believe you know what you're talking about.
Copyright protection for a work in the US is granted by the US government (it's in the constitution, IIRC). What the Antiguans are saying is, since the US government isn't playing by the rules they agreed to, the US government should lose the right to grant those protections, where Antigua is concerned.
Those rights are also guaranteed by the same set of World Trade Organization laws that they're trying to leverage in the first place. They can't have it both ways. Either they obey the WTO, and those copyrights are rock solid, or they disobey the WTO, at which point they haven't a leg to stand on.
I don't know why they're going after movie and software copyrights, though, I would have thought drug patents would be a far more lucrative target.
The US is not subordinate to international patent law, though we are subordinate to international copyright law. Antigua has no way to even pretend to attack our patents.
We aren't talking a win32 style message pump kind of message passing mechanism, are we?
No. Many people have also raised the question of whether MSMQ, the new OS-level messaging service, is modelled on Erlang's; again, the answer is no.
The problem is, it's hard to explain why. The overhead of using things like that is tremendous; Erlang's message system is used for quite literally all communication between processes, and a system like Windows Events or MSMQ would reduce Erlang applications to a crawl. Erlang uses an ordered, staged mailbox model, much like Smalltalk's. If you haven't used Smalltalk, then frankly I'm not aware of another parallel.
It's important to understand just how fundamental message passing is in Erlang. Send and receive are fundamental operators, and this is a language that doesn't have for loops, because it thinks they're too high level and inspecific (you can make them yourself; I know, that must sound crazy, but once you get it, it makes perfect sense.)
I truly can't stand the message pump in win32 - it always feels like such a 'hack'; I don't have a better solution, though, so I've been waiting for a better form of IPC.
You're about to see a completely different approach. I'm not saying it's the best, or the most flexible, but I really like it, and it genuinely is very different. What Erlang does can relatively straightforwardly be imitated with blocking and callbacks in C, but that involves system threads, and then you start getting locking and imperative behavior back, which is one of the things it's so awesome to get rid of (imagine - no more locks, mutexes, spin controls and so forth. Completely unnessecary, both in workload, debugging and in CPU time spent. It's a huge change.)
Really, it's a whole different approach. You've just got to learn it to get it.
Yet Raven64 said there is no shared memory, so I'm confused on how the message passing happens.
No, I said that. I wrote some code to help explain it to you, though of course slashdot's retarded lameness filters wouldn't pass it, so I put it behind this link. Sorry it's not inline.
Hopefully that will help. Sorry about the lack of whitespace; SlashDot's amazingly lame lameness filter is triggering on clean, readable code.
No. I left in disgust because of the behavior of several regulars. I started #erlang on blitzed, but its population (so far) is modest. (That will change soon, though I decline to explain why.)
So, because some jackass wants to shut down gambling, suddenly Antiguans think they are able to steal my software and pass it around? Absolutely not. That would be punishing American companies and private citizens for government gambling policies. There is no part of international law which works that way; this is a smoke screen. And, if by some perversion of law that does go through, I forsee a whole *lot* of network software starting to check IP addresses and refusing to run in Antigua. When they cry about how unfair it is that they're not allowed to steal our software, we'll just cry back that it isn't fair that they should take money out of our pockets because two governments can't decide how to handle gambling.
There is absolutely no direction from which this is ethical. Take off the RIAA/MPAA hate blinders, and think about what this would do to small software vendors. This has to be stopped dead in its tracks, right now, or the number of companies growing to work on the web and to fight companies you hate like Microsoft will drop sharply.
Get it through your heads: these things hurt small businesses, not large businesses. This is revenge, not justice, and they're exacting it on the wrong people.
This is a bit like saying "auto mechanics is a matter of turning a wrench," and when someone points out to them that there's a lot more to it, saying "well then maybe you could teach me to be a mechanic in your reply." If scalability was an issue simple enough to explain in a slashdot post, people wouldn't have trouble with it. Scalability isn't a problem; it's a family of problems. Suggesting that a single algorithm from a single library magically waves away the issues involved in a heavily parallel server is simply an exposition that you aren't aware what goes into scalable servers.
The Macy's Door Problem is a great example of a Scalability 101 problem that map_reduce has no way to address. In the early 30s, when most department stores were making big, flashy front entrances to their stores with big glass walls and paths for 12 groups of people at a time, doormen, signage, the whole lot, Macy's elected to take a different approach. They set up a small door with a sign above it. The idea was simple: if there was just the one door, it would be a hassle to get in and out of the store; thus, it would always look like there was a crowd struggling to get in - as if the store was just so popular that they couldn't keep up with customer foot traffic. The idea worked famously well.
In server design, we use that as a metaphor for near-redline usage. There's a problem that's common in naïve server design, where the server will perform just fine right up to 99%. Then, there'll be a tiny usage spike, and it'll hit 101% very briefly. However, the act of queueing and disqueueing withheld users is more expensive than processing a user, meaning that even though the usage drops back to 99%, by the time those 2% overqueue have been processed, a new 3% overqueue has formed, and performance progressively drops through the floor on a load the application ought to be able to handle. I should point out that Apache has this problem, and that until six years ago, so did the Linux TCP stack. It's a much more common scalability flaw than most people expect.
Now, that's just one issue in scalability; there are dozens of others. However, map_reduce has literally nothing to say to that problem. Do I need to rattle off others too, or maybe is that good enough? I mean, we have the exponential growth of client interconnections (Metcalfe's Law, which is easily solved with a hub process;) we have making sure that processing workloads is linear growth (that is, o(1) as opposed to o(lg n) or worse), which means no std::map, no std::set, no std::list, only pre-sized std::vector and very careful use of hash tables; we have packet fragmentation throttling; we have making sure that you process all clients in order, to prevent response-time clustering (like when you load an apache site and it sits there for five seconds, so you hit reload and it comes up instantly,) all sorts of stuff. Most scalability issues are hard to explain, but maybe that brief list will give you the idea that scalability is a whole lot bigger of an issue than some silly little google library.
Talk to someone who's tried to write an IRC server. Those things hit lots of scalability problems very early on. That community knows the basics very, very well.
It's not something you can cram into an elevator pitch; erlang is an entirely different approach to parallelism. If you know how mozart-oz, smalltalk or twisted python work, you've got the basics.
Basically, processes are primitives, there's no shared memory, communication is through message passing, fault tolerance is ridiculously simple to put together, it's soft realtime, and since it was originally designed for network stuff, not only is network stuff trivially simple to write, but the syntax (once you get used to it) is basically a godsend. Throw pattern matching a la Prolog on top of that, dust with massive soft-realtime scalability which makes a joke of well-thought-of major applications (that YAWS vs Apache image comes to mind,) a soft-realtime clustered database and processes with 300 bytes of overhead and no CPU overhead when inactive (literally none,) and you have a language with such a tremendously different set of tools that any attempt to explain it without the listener actually trying the language is doomed to fall flat on its face.
In Erlang, you can run millions of processes concurrently without problems. (Linux is proud of tens of thousands, and rightfully so.) Having extra processes that are essentially free has a radical impact on design; things like work loops are no longer nessecary, since you just spin off a new process. In many ways it's akin to the unix daemon concept, except at the efficiency level you'd expect from a single compiled application. Every client gets a process. Every application feature gets a process. Every subsystem gets a process. Suddenly, applications become trees of processes pitching data back and forth in messages. Suddenly, if one goes down, its owner just restarts it, and everything is kosher.
It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread; there are a lot of things that Erlang isn't good for. However, what you're asking for is Erlang's original problem domain. This is what Erlang is for. I know, it's a pretty big time investiture to pick up a new language. Trust me: you will make all your time back in writing far shorter, far more obvious code than you did in learning the language. You can pick up the basics in 20 hours. It's a good gamble.
Developing servers becomes *really* different when you can start thinking of them as swarms.
You'll find that Erlang doesn't even blink at those volumes, and that Erlang's entire reason to exist is scalability/reliability. Granted, it's a little severe to pick up a new language, but the benefits are enormous, and it's one of those boons you can't really understand until you've learned it. It is, however, worth noting that transactions on an MNesia database in the multiple gigabytes are typically faster than PHP just invoking MySQL in the first place, let alone doing any work with it.
Right now if you want to distribute content like the cable stations produce, you need a ton of money to buy time on a satellite.
No, you don't. Several television shows have been brought to the internet by amateurs. The ton of money is there to make the video in the first place. It takes a bunch of people and a bunch of equipment to make the kind of film you're talking about.
An internet TV revolution would eliminate that need and open up an entirely different means of content distribution.
Yes, it did. That's why that Argentinian station moved to YouTube - it needed a different infrastructure, because the state took away their means, and the internet was mature enough to handle it. The lack of high quality content that you are correctly observing has nothing to do with the internet. It has to do with the difficulty of production. Most people just don't put that kind of work into their hobbies. The near-infinite variety of content on the internet exists because standards are low. If you move to high quality professional standards, you don't have that flow anymore.
Do not confuse your crap filter for infrastructure issues. Many television stations use the internet as an infrastructure adequately. Movies are distributed over it commercially. Video phones have been working fine for almost a decade now. The internet does require that you have a good solid connection at the server end to pull it off, but any Joe Average can get a ten meg unmetered line with a box for around $1200/y; that's not exactly huge scratch.
Moving to the internet reduces costs dramatically. If anything, it makes the kind of broad, high availability content you're currently desiring easier, in that the people who have the means to pull off two big things can focus on funding and production, and leave distribution to the world wide wank. Look what's happened with gaming for a similar clear example.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because nobody has ever thought of planting people ahead of time, and there isn't already a cadre of Microsoft employees, and indeed from every other major computing organization, on every major standards body. All that means is that Microsoft submarines half a dozen people onto any committee they want to work on for some up-front amount of time. It's the Price Is Right Conundrum: any amount of time you put up there on the board, Microsoft will add one dollar - pardon, day - and bid there. Why do you think Netscape, a tiny company, had so many people on the various W3 standards? Why do you think Opera does today? It's the exact same thing, and this is just how these boards work. There's no particular way around it; you can't set time limits, price limits, count of people from a company, because they're all trivially easily gamed.
Any time you make a plutocracy, it will be commercially exploited. If they want to be immune to this crap, they need to move to a meritocracy or an election. Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought. (You could have, this time, several different ways.)
Funny how you don't even know your own country's laws, yet you're willing to lecture other people (wrongly) about theirs, isn't it?
While people rightly point out other prior art, like Microsoft's 1996 IntelliSense patent that I just read in someone else's comment, I'd like to be the first to point out that several BBSes, including Renegade, Tag, Opus and WWIV, offered this as early as the mid-1980s. The first time I personally saw predictive autocomplete was in the door .QWK reader for Hydra - a BBS so old that it thought running on an Atari was a good idea - in probably 1983 or so. That's back in the days when 600 bits per second sounded fancy, and when people still yelled at salesfeeps when they tried to quote baud (because back then, the difference was important.)
While I'm at it, get me my corn cob pipe; I'd like to talk about the civil war. *creak*
The popular myth that copyright infringement is not theft is deeply flawed. Under the definition of theft given by US law, copyright infringement is a cut and dried case of theft of services. This has been well established by precedent in this country for more than two hundred years, when the newspapers on the American frontier tried to get by by stealing newspaper copy. When the courts ruled that illegal, the various journalist wires that sold stories began, which led to Reuters. I'm also not sure why you waste your time attempting to draw the distinction, as if one is less illegal than the other. I've only ever heard pirates pretend there was a difference, and the only reason they don't want to call it theft is that they would then have to face being thieves.
It is both a false and a useless distinction.
No, it isn't. It hasn't been since the Berne conventions in the 1940s. Quit pretending to be a lawyer. Copyright is not a monopoly; monopoly is when, in the open market, a company manages to control 50% or more of a demographic. Since there is no open market on copywritten work, it clearly isn't a monopoly. Be sure to dust off that part of the constitution which uses the word monopoly, so that I can laugh at you for believing that the word means the same thing now as it did back then, in the eyes of the law.
Generally speaking, you should not assume that what you read on blogs is equivalent to a law degree.
You have no idea what you're talking about. The WTO is a transactional trade jurisprudence concerned with physical stock items, and this slashdot furor notwithstanding, the WTO has no governance over copyright. The WTO is about selling bananas, steel and blue jeans. Intellectual property is not a moment of trade unless you're selling the rights to the item. The Berne Conventions assign the United Nations as the international governor of both copyright and patent disputes. The persistant idea that anything that deals with money inbetween nations is under the WTO's purview is fundamentally wrong-headed. If it's not a physical item, the WTO has nothing to do with it.
You might want to look up the word "alleged," as you cannot allegedly fail to do something, by definition. An allegation is an accusation of action in court. Please stop learning your legal jargon from the eleven o'clock news, and maybe dust off a copy of Bierce's Write It Right and learn ye some proper English. Of course, someone who understands the law does need to know what an allegation is, as it's a fundamental concept in law, but somehow I doubt this will dissuade you from believing yourself an expert.
What? Did you even try to figure out if this made sense before you said it? There is no point at which Antigua gets to break UN law if the WTO finds that the United States has raised unfair barriers to commercial entry. The WTO isn't even part of the UN. It's not even on the same continent as the UN. Less than two thirds of the world are under WTO governance, yet all but six countries on Earth are signatories of the Berne Conventions. Hell, the WTO didn't even exist until 1995; Antigua signed the Berne Conventions in 1956.
"The Deal" doesn't
If a trade sanction is levied against a government, that sanction is levied against existing government tariffs. If, for example, I sell a ton of steel girders to China, the US taxes me to the tune of about 1.24% . That means that when I accept $260 for my ton of steel, I have to give $3.22 to the government. If a trade sanction was levied against the government, the money would be taken out of the $3.22 . The price to the Chinese buyer does not change. The profit to the seller does not change. The tariff does not change. The only thing that changes is what amount of that tariff goes to the US government. It is the US government paying the tab, because it's coming out of their money.
If Antigua was allowed to ignore copyright, the money they would be taking would not be that of the US government. It would be the money from the record labels, the software producers, the film studios and the book producers which was being taken. The WTO does not have the right to do that; whereas they govern trade, they do not govern IP. It is not within the WTO's purvey to take intellectual property rights, because they belong to companies and individuals instead of the federal government.
There is nothing wrong with the WTO taking money from the federal government. Trying to take money from companies and private citizens is criminal. If you really don't understand the distinction, then you need to quit telling other people what they do and do not grasp.
Well, considering as how that language fairly clearly suggests that the appropriate target of between the complaining body and the offending body, I should think that the concessions and obligations would be those to the offending body. I don't know why it is that you believe that's individual software developers; it most certainly is not. Please, help me understand what part of this is difficult: "if you have a problem with the US government, the appropriate response will target the government, not its citizens." I personally have neither the ethical, the legal nor the moral obligation to personally support trade tariffs.
Yeah, that's what the WTO is for. I know, you just wrote WTO after that, but you've already made the critical error; saying WTO afterwards doesn't make you correct. It is immensely important to understand that at no point does the complainant have any part in the adjudication or enforcement of the law. That false presumption turns this whole thing on its head. If the WTO finds for Antigua, it starts taxing US stuff across the board. Want to send steel to China? The export levy that's been held against the US since the 1930s, well, a little tiny fraction of that goes to Antigua. Accepting a shipment of oranges from Brazil? That massive orange tax? Hey, guess where it's going, too? The point that matters here is that in those two cases, as well as dozens of other fairly easy to cook up scenarios, the money is coming out of the pockets of the US Government. It's not coming out of the pockets of the supplier, it's not coming out of the pockets of the purchaser, and it's not coming out of the pockets of the shipper. ONLY THE GOVERNMENT.
Look at it from a perspective that doesn't focus on your personal bugbears, and it becomes much simpler. Let's say we have two countries, and in the comic book tradition, we will give them thinly veiled eastern European names - Kreplachistan (ok, so that's Disney) and Latveria. So, Latveria - since it's run by Dr. Doom - has been engaging in a variety of ill trade practices with Kreplachistan. In response, Kreplachistan has gone to the WTO, who finds in their favor. Now, we have to construct a way for Kreplachistan to acquire reparations. Now remember, this is Doctor Doom we're talking about, so the people in Latveria are balls-on-poor. Who should the WTO extract payment from? The Latverian citizens, or the Latverian government? These people are starving, and Doctor Doom is throwing away billions to give himself a repeating platform to swear at Reed Richards.
So, you're a Latverian turnip farmer. You don't even know which direction Kreplachistan is, because Doom sees compasses as a challenge to his mighty sense of national direction. Suddenly some WTO geek comes down in a helicopter and says "pay up, dick, Doom screwed some casinos to the East." Does that really seem right to you? That is exactly what's going on here: the Antiguan lawyer is asking for permission to act against private individuals, not against the government that they are complaining against. At no point does the WTO have the authority to release my personal copyrights, under any fantasy reading of the law. I'm not sure why you think what you quoted says that they do; it even explicitly says "other sectors under the same agreement." Are you under the false presumption that my personal copyright for my personal work is governed by the American WTO treaty regarding international trade?
Do you think copyright is governed by trade law? If you do, I think we're pretty done here; that's a bit like trying to explain car theft in terms of manslaughter. This just isn't how the law works.
There are, in fact, two reasons to enact tariff against the United States; you seem to only recognize o
Actually, that's a very significant difference to me. Thank you for pointing out that error. I will amend it when speaking in the future. (You just saved me some egg-on-face in a future project; I appreciate it.)
In other words, you have nothing actual and worthwhile to say, so you're going to troll.
Mind you, I don't actually think the comparison is in any way apt. You're attempting to contrast lost opportunity to stolen work. By the same logic, if I own a whiskey distillery, I should be able to go looting in Muslim nations. That just doesn't make sense. Antiguans do not have the right to steal the software I wrote because George Bush decided that he didn't want offshore gambling. I really don't care how they feel about what George Bush is doing. At no point is there a reasonable response involved in Antiguans beginning to steal from individual Americans because they're angry about lost business opportunities. The idea that we're somehow discriminating against them is absurd; the reason they can't do business here is that they don't honor state laws. We do allow international gambling, under limited circumstances, but the recipient of the funds has extensive reporting requirements that they have to make. You can, in fact, gamble the French Riviera from the internet, or to Monaco, or to Prince Edward Island, or to Luxembourg.
Antigua is getting the short end of the stick because they refuse to own up to regulations, because they're difficult and expensive. Boo fucking hoo, if you won't do the job right, you don't get the job. That doesn't give them the right to steal from me at any level, moral, ethical, legal or otherwise.
At no point is it my fault that they won't mail in some goddamned forms, and if an Antiguan ever gets caught stealing my software, I'm hauling their ass into court to prove the point.I'm sorry, are you confused about what "WTO" stands for, or why Antigua thinks they get to control American trade practices? At least get a basic familiarity with how things work before lecturing that they don't.Where did you get this idea? Embargoes, bans, fines, taxes, levies, inspections, braces, taps, caps, freight blockage, and literally dozens of other options are available, and have been used against the United States in the past. Please do not confuse your understanding of the situation with the actual situation; just because you personally don't know what other options there are doesn't mean there are none.If only they were fighting the right people. I'm sorry, but you seem to have entirely missed the point of what I said. Please brush up on the basics before you reply anew; it's a little annoying to have to point this stuff out.
Feel free to give a link supporting your claims at any point. Until then, I don't believe you know what you're talking about.
The problem is, it's hard to explain why. The overhead of using things like that is tremendous; Erlang's message system is used for quite literally all communication between processes, and a system like Windows Events or MSMQ would reduce Erlang applications to a crawl. Erlang uses an ordered, staged mailbox model, much like Smalltalk's. If you haven't used Smalltalk, then frankly I'm not aware of another parallel.
It's important to understand just how fundamental message passing is in Erlang. Send and receive are fundamental operators, and this is a language that doesn't have for loops, because it thinks they're too high level and inspecific (you can make them yourself; I know, that must sound crazy, but once you get it, it makes perfect sense.)You're about to see a completely different approach. I'm not saying it's the best, or the most flexible, but I really like it, and it genuinely is very different. What Erlang does can relatively straightforwardly be imitated with blocking and callbacks in C, but that involves system threads, and then you start getting locking and imperative behavior back, which is one of the things it's so awesome to get rid of (imagine - no more locks, mutexes, spin controls and so forth. Completely unnessecary, both in workload, debugging and in CPU time spent. It's a huge change.)
Really, it's a whole different approach. You've just got to learn it to get it.No, I said that. I wrote some code to help explain it to you, though of course slashdot's retarded lameness filters wouldn't pass it, so I put it behind this link. Sorry it's not inline.
Hopefully that will help. Sorry about the lack of whitespace; SlashDot's amazingly lame lameness filter is triggering on clean, readable code.
No. I left in disgust because of the behavior of several regulars. I started #erlang on blitzed, but its population (so far) is modest. (That will change soon, though I decline to explain why.)
So, because some jackass wants to shut down gambling, suddenly Antiguans think they are able to steal my software and pass it around? Absolutely not. That would be punishing American companies and private citizens for government gambling policies. There is no part of international law which works that way; this is a smoke screen. And, if by some perversion of law that does go through, I forsee a whole *lot* of network software starting to check IP addresses and refusing to run in Antigua. When they cry about how unfair it is that they're not allowed to steal our software, we'll just cry back that it isn't fair that they should take money out of our pockets because two governments can't decide how to handle gambling.
There is absolutely no direction from which this is ethical. Take off the RIAA/MPAA hate blinders, and think about what this would do to small software vendors. This has to be stopped dead in its tracks, right now, or the number of companies growing to work on the web and to fight companies you hate like Microsoft will drop sharply.
Get it through your heads: these things hurt small businesses, not large businesses. This is revenge, not justice, and they're exacting it on the wrong people.
And you get that idea from what, exactly?
This is a bit like saying "auto mechanics is a matter of turning a wrench," and when someone points out to them that there's a lot more to it, saying "well then maybe you could teach me to be a mechanic in your reply." If scalability was an issue simple enough to explain in a slashdot post, people wouldn't have trouble with it. Scalability isn't a problem; it's a family of problems. Suggesting that a single algorithm from a single library magically waves away the issues involved in a heavily parallel server is simply an exposition that you aren't aware what goes into scalable servers.
The Macy's Door Problem is a great example of a Scalability 101 problem that map_reduce has no way to address. In the early 30s, when most department stores were making big, flashy front entrances to their stores with big glass walls and paths for 12 groups of people at a time, doormen, signage, the whole lot, Macy's elected to take a different approach. They set up a small door with a sign above it. The idea was simple: if there was just the one door, it would be a hassle to get in and out of the store; thus, it would always look like there was a crowd struggling to get in - as if the store was just so popular that they couldn't keep up with customer foot traffic. The idea worked famously well.
In server design, we use that as a metaphor for near-redline usage. There's a problem that's common in naïve server design, where the server will perform just fine right up to 99%. Then, there'll be a tiny usage spike, and it'll hit 101% very briefly. However, the act of queueing and disqueueing withheld users is more expensive than processing a user, meaning that even though the usage drops back to 99%, by the time those 2% overqueue have been processed, a new 3% overqueue has formed, and performance progressively drops through the floor on a load the application ought to be able to handle. I should point out that Apache has this problem, and that until six years ago, so did the Linux TCP stack. It's a much more common scalability flaw than most people expect.
Now, that's just one issue in scalability; there are dozens of others. However, map_reduce has literally nothing to say to that problem. Do I need to rattle off others too, or maybe is that good enough? I mean, we have the exponential growth of client interconnections (Metcalfe's Law, which is easily solved with a hub process;) we have making sure that processing workloads is linear growth (that is, o(1) as opposed to o(lg n) or worse), which means no std::map, no std::set, no std::list, only pre-sized std::vector and very careful use of hash tables; we have packet fragmentation throttling; we have making sure that you process all clients in order, to prevent response-time clustering (like when you load an apache site and it sits there for five seconds, so you hit reload and it comes up instantly,) all sorts of stuff. Most scalability issues are hard to explain, but maybe that brief list will give you the idea that scalability is a whole lot bigger of an issue than some silly little google library.
Talk to someone who's tried to write an IRC server. Those things hit lots of scalability problems very early on. That community knows the basics very, very well.
It's not something you can cram into an elevator pitch; erlang is an entirely different approach to parallelism. If you know how mozart-oz, smalltalk or twisted python work, you've got the basics.
Basically, processes are primitives, there's no shared memory, communication is through message passing, fault tolerance is ridiculously simple to put together, it's soft realtime, and since it was originally designed for network stuff, not only is network stuff trivially simple to write, but the syntax (once you get used to it) is basically a godsend. Throw pattern matching a la Prolog on top of that, dust with massive soft-realtime scalability which makes a joke of well-thought-of major applications (that YAWS vs Apache image comes to mind,) a soft-realtime clustered database and processes with 300 bytes of overhead and no CPU overhead when inactive (literally none,) and you have a language with such a tremendously different set of tools that any attempt to explain it without the listener actually trying the language is doomed to fall flat on its face.
In Erlang, you can run millions of processes concurrently without problems. (Linux is proud of tens of thousands, and rightfully so.) Having extra processes that are essentially free has a radical impact on design; things like work loops are no longer nessecary, since you just spin off a new process. In many ways it's akin to the unix daemon concept, except at the efficiency level you'd expect from a single compiled application. Every client gets a process. Every application feature gets a process. Every subsystem gets a process. Suddenly, applications become trees of processes pitching data back and forth in messages. Suddenly, if one goes down, its owner just restarts it, and everything is kosher.
It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread; there are a lot of things that Erlang isn't good for. However, what you're asking for is Erlang's original problem domain. This is what Erlang is for. I know, it's a pretty big time investiture to pick up a new language. Trust me: you will make all your time back in writing far shorter, far more obvious code than you did in learning the language. You can pick up the basics in 20 hours. It's a good gamble.
Developing servers becomes *really* different when you can start thinking of them as swarms.
People who think map reduce is the same thing as scalability have no idea what scalability is.
You'll find that Erlang doesn't even blink at those volumes, and that Erlang's entire reason to exist is scalability/reliability. Granted, it's a little severe to pick up a new language, but the benefits are enormous, and it's one of those boons you can't really understand until you've learned it. It is, however, worth noting that transactions on an MNesia database in the multiple gigabytes are typically faster than PHP just invoking MySQL in the first place, let alone doing any work with it.
Erlang is difficult to learn from what's on the web; consider starting with Joe's book.
The torrent guys are complaining that people are using their software in ways other than they'd like. Bitter and yet somehow appropriate, one thinks.
Do not confuse your crap filter for infrastructure issues. Many television stations use the internet as an infrastructure adequately. Movies are distributed over it commercially. Video phones have been working fine for almost a decade now. The internet does require that you have a good solid connection at the server end to pull it off, but any Joe Average can get a ten meg unmetered line with a box for around $1200/y; that's not exactly huge scratch.
Moving to the internet reduces costs dramatically. If anything, it makes the kind of broad, high availability content you're currently desiring easier, in that the people who have the means to pull off two big things can focus on funding and production, and leave distribution to the world wide wank. Look what's happened with gaming for a similar clear example.