Pick a different license. Don't hide the ball. Don't explicity grant permission to do something and then complain when someone does it. That is socially undesireable behavior. If you can write complex computer code but can't figure out how to create a custom license rather than burying a contradictory comment within the source, that verges upon being rude.
I disagree. For example, such a license would prevent the overall beneficial change of making the referral link user-configurable.
I still prefer highlighting when someone does something questionable and making sure people are aware so they can choose whether or not to be OK with it. Perhaps Mint will do the right thing now and fix it to be user configurable. Perhaps this will spawn a fork of Linux Mint that does the right thing.
Not all behavior that is considered appropriate or ethical can or should be encoded in law. To do so is to make the law rigid and incapable of adapting to circumstances. The world is not a place in which there is no moral ambiguity. A law is either violated, or it isn't. There is no ambiguity.
just having a ref coded store link in a foss app is.. well. dunno, counter foss. it's pretty obvious thing to change if you do the distribution for the app anyways, even more obvious if you do some changes to the app.
I do rather agree with this.
maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they had a config option for changing it to whatever and had some popular projects as preconfigured choices?
That would've definitely been a better change. And instead of wondering whether or not it was ethical, I'd be fully behind it. As it is, given that the ref code exists, I can't decide if they were being rude or not by changing it, but still not making it configurable in the UI.
Just because something is legal does not mean it is socially desirable behavior. I wouldn't choose to legally prevent them from changing the code in this way, but that isn't the question. The question is, is it polite to do so? Are they being rude?
Classic big business blunder. It's legal, and it increases our profit, so it must be the right thing to do.
I note, with interest, that no cloud computing purveyor offers to even let me create a node of my own for my data. No, they must own it all, on their servers, and do what they see fit with it. No attempt to even let me have a regularly maintained backup in a standard format on my own system. The best option is Google's data liberation front, and while that's a laudable effort, it falls far short of letting me have a regular local backup.
And don't even get me started on my smart phone. None of the applications give me the option of installing something on my home web server and using that for my 'cloud storage'. Not even the ones I pay for.
Employers value people who crank out vaguely working code. They do not value experience. All this BS about 'obsolete skills' is silly. I've picked up and dropped more technologies than most college graduates even know exist. Learning something new is not hard, and I think it's easier for someone who already knows a whole ton of stuff. Things follow patterns. Those patterns are abstracted away in your mental toolbox over time making learning new things much easier.
No, it's all about the 'burn out and use up' mentality surrounding life in the tech industry.
Criticism to a system can be directed to the properties of the system, or to its implementation. In the second case you are right and we can stop believing in math too, because people use numbers to rob you of your belongings (aka finance tricks), or science because of the not so good effects of an atomic bomb. It's ok for me.
Fine. Christianity teaches us to believe that authority and hierarchy are paramount, so long as it's the 'right' authority. It teaches us that any action sincerely taken in God's name is a good one. It teaches us that moral judgement begins and ends with a book written by people over a thousand years ago.
Unfortunately, anybody could take each of my statements and dissect them and show that they are not universally true. This is because there is such a mish-mash of things people call 'christian' that there is no way to really say what a 'christian' value is or isn't.
But I think most people will recognize something they call 'christian' in my description.
I don't think that they are unconscionable by default. Sure the vast majority (every single one?) that I've bothered to consult has been pretty draconian, but there is nothing inherent in the idea of a EULA that makes it unconscionable.
I am not a lawyer, but I do know this... The term "unconscionable" when referring to contracts has a very specific legal meaning. And by that definition, EULAs are inherently unconscionable. They can't help it. They don't allow negotiation of terms. They are 'agreed' to after money changes hands. The signature of the party who is under the most restrictions isn't even verified. They are, by the strict legal definition of the term, inherently unconscionable.
Yes, the terms could be very nice. But whether or not the terms are good for the buyer doesn't actually strongly figure into whether or not a contract is considered 'unconscionable' from a legal standpoint.
They are an attempt to form a unconscionable (in the legal sense) contract with thousands of people. And almost invariably they try to convince you that you have less rights than you do under the law. They are basically about eliminating fair use, because every one I've seen uses the leverage of copyright law.
Now, if this were about terms of service, that would be something. I'm all for terms of service that are legible by ordinary human beings.
But your stance is easily debatable. Should one not have the right to one's creations? What gives you the right to claim them as your own or as the public's? Are the consequences of your claim - both in the decision of those who create works to continue to create them, and of the precedent your claim makes - are the consequences desirable or constitute a net benefit?
You have every right to create or not as you see fit. But do not have any rights at all to your creations. At least not natural rights.
If you supplied someone with all the materials for a house and they built a house with them on property you owned, would they have a right to the house just because they built it? If you improve your landlord's property with materials your landlord supplies are you then entitled to charge the landlord for your improvements because you have a right to them?
No, people have a right not to create unless they are recompensed. But they have no natural right to their creations, just the property used to make them.
I'm willing to entertain the notion that we should create a system of incentives to encourage people to create things for the general betterment of everyone. But predicating a system on the notion that people have a right to their creations is a terrible mistake.
Really? I thought NP-Complete problems all had a very particular structure to them, and it was known that factoring didn't have that structure. But, I'm not a mathematician, and I will happily admit that I'm wrong in this regard.
I find it a natural consequence of holding people responsible for their actions and finances in inverse proportion to the amount of money they have or are in control of.
The only hard part I see about this is that it's typically very difficult to make sure you've got the new job guaranteed before going to your current employer and telling them what they'll have to pay to match your offer. (The commuting cost needs to be made up with money.) There's always the risk that the new employer changes their mind and won't hire you, unless you've already got a contract from them in which case they'll be real pissy if you tell them that *after* you interviewed and told them you'd accept their offer and got an offer letter, you went back to your current employer and gave them a chance to match it.
The commuting cost does not have to be made up with money. The commuting cost could be made up for any number of ways. An agreement to let you telecommute would be an example.
Actually, no, I was trying to find a good porn app on an iPhone, and all I could find was the stupid playboy and sports illustrated garbage. Guess Steve Jobs doesn't want me to see any decent porn.
I've never heard of someone's phone taking over their car. What planet are you from?
I do not like the company he built. I like some of the products that company has made, though most try too hard to control me. I feel that he has made an overall positive contribution, and cannot deny that he had vision. I'm sad to see him go.
I know the people involved in writing Tor. And the EFF is involved in writing it. No, that's not what it's for. The people I know would be shouting that from the rooftops if the project they were working on had been turned to that purpose.
It might be that it has been used for that purpose because of some Iranians being incautious about how they're using Tor. Tor isn't magic, and you can destroy your anonymity while using it fairly easily.
I would like to see how Google's results compared to Amazon and other sites where you could actually buy the products. It sounds like when people search for a product Google is trying to find a place to actually buy the product.
The difficulty is going to be getting software for POS systems that accept money from my virtual wallet. It wouldn't be too hard if they also had an Android device, but some niceties for merchants would be missing from that solution.
I use this software as my virtual wallet. It works pretty well. I've sent money to friends and gotten it back. It's slightly more cumbersome than handing them cash in some ways, and slightly less in others. But it does work already. I don't need Google or PayPal taking their cut.
There is a pretty strong population of non-MS programmers here too. I've l been mostly a Unix hacker, though I did do some work with Microsoft garbage a long time ago, and in the bad old days of MS-DOS when you couldn't get a machine on your desk that ran Unix for less than 10k USD.
Now that's an interesting twist on things. Holding them accountable for not being truthful with the public. Depending on the details, I would generally consider the government official significantly more accountable than the seismologists. That is, unless the seismologists were complicit (rather than merely compliant) in the government official's attempt to make things seems more rosy than they were.
It's not about agreeing, it's about having even a modicum of civility and tact. People commit suicide over the kind of behavior that guy exhibited, and while I think anybody committing suicide is doing something fairly stupid most of the time, I think we should discourage people from actively engaging in behavior that's likely to push people like that.
I know that if I knew who he was I would never go to a party he was invited to. I don't need that kind of jerk anywhere nearby me, and nobody else does either.
Slashdot Mirror
They're all made up. Now, how nonsensical they are is another question. And I would agree that Scientology is even more nonsensical than jediism. :-)
Expecting Slashdot to do anything more than criticize and pick apart your awesome house is likely wishful thinking. :-)
Pick a different license. Don't hide the ball. Don't explicity grant permission to do something and then complain when someone does it. That is socially undesireable behavior. If you can write complex computer code but can't figure out how to create a custom license rather than burying a contradictory comment within the source, that verges upon being rude.
I disagree. For example, such a license would prevent the overall beneficial change of making the referral link user-configurable.
I still prefer highlighting when someone does something questionable and making sure people are aware so they can choose whether or not to be OK with it. Perhaps Mint will do the right thing now and fix it to be user configurable. Perhaps this will spawn a fork of Linux Mint that does the right thing.
Not all behavior that is considered appropriate or ethical can or should be encoded in law. To do so is to make the law rigid and incapable of adapting to circumstances. The world is not a place in which there is no moral ambiguity. A law is either violated, or it isn't. There is no ambiguity.
just having a ref coded store link in a foss app is.. well. dunno, counter foss. it's pretty obvious thing to change if you do the distribution for the app anyways, even more obvious if you do some changes to the app.
I do rather agree with this.
maybe it wouldn't be so bad if they had a config option for changing it to whatever and had some popular projects as preconfigured choices?
That would've definitely been a better change. And instead of wondering whether or not it was ethical, I'd be fully behind it. As it is, given that the ref code exists, I can't decide if they were being rude or not by changing it, but still not making it configurable in the UI.
Just because something is legal does not mean it is socially desirable behavior. I wouldn't choose to legally prevent them from changing the code in this way, but that isn't the question. The question is, is it polite to do so? Are they being rude?
Classic big business blunder. It's legal, and it increases our profit, so it must be the right thing to do.
I note, with interest, that no cloud computing purveyor offers to even let me create a node of my own for my data. No, they must own it all, on their servers, and do what they see fit with it. No attempt to even let me have a regularly maintained backup in a standard format on my own system. The best option is Google's data liberation front, and while that's a laudable effort, it falls far short of letting me have a regular local backup.
And don't even get me started on my smart phone. None of the applications give me the option of installing something on my home web server and using that for my 'cloud storage'. Not even the ones I pay for.
Employers value people who crank out vaguely working code. They do not value experience. All this BS about 'obsolete skills' is silly. I've picked up and dropped more technologies than most college graduates even know exist. Learning something new is not hard, and I think it's easier for someone who already knows a whole ton of stuff. Things follow patterns. Those patterns are abstracted away in your mental toolbox over time making learning new things much easier.
No, it's all about the 'burn out and use up' mentality surrounding life in the tech industry.
Criticism to a system can be directed to the properties of the system, or to its implementation. In the second case you are right and we can stop believing in math too, because people use numbers to rob you of your belongings (aka finance tricks), or science because of the not so good effects of an atomic bomb. It's ok for me.
Fine. Christianity teaches us to believe that authority and hierarchy are paramount, so long as it's the 'right' authority. It teaches us that any action sincerely taken in God's name is a good one. It teaches us that moral judgement begins and ends with a book written by people over a thousand years ago.
Unfortunately, anybody could take each of my statements and dissect them and show that they are not universally true. This is because there is such a mish-mash of things people call 'christian' that there is no way to really say what a 'christian' value is or isn't.
But I think most people will recognize something they call 'christian' in my description.
I don't think that they are unconscionable by default. Sure the vast majority (every single one?) that I've bothered to consult has been pretty draconian, but there is nothing inherent in the idea of a EULA that makes it unconscionable.
I am not a lawyer, but I do know this... The term "unconscionable" when referring to contracts has a very specific legal meaning. And by that definition, EULAs are inherently unconscionable. They can't help it. They don't allow negotiation of terms. They are 'agreed' to after money changes hands. The signature of the party who is under the most restrictions isn't even verified. They are, by the strict legal definition of the term, inherently unconscionable.
Yes, the terms could be very nice. But whether or not the terms are good for the buyer doesn't actually strongly figure into whether or not a contract is considered 'unconscionable' from a legal standpoint.
They are an attempt to form a unconscionable (in the legal sense) contract with thousands of people. And almost invariably they try to convince you that you have less rights than you do under the law. They are basically about eliminating fair use, because every one I've seen uses the leverage of copyright law.
Now, if this were about terms of service, that would be something. I'm all for terms of service that are legible by ordinary human beings.
But your stance is easily debatable. Should one not have the right to one's creations? What gives you the right to claim them as your own or as the public's? Are the consequences of your claim - both in the decision of those who create works to continue to create them, and of the precedent your claim makes - are the consequences desirable or constitute a net benefit?
You have every right to create or not as you see fit. But do not have any rights at all to your creations. At least not natural rights.
If you supplied someone with all the materials for a house and they built a house with them on property you owned, would they have a right to the house just because they built it? If you improve your landlord's property with materials your landlord supplies are you then entitled to charge the landlord for your improvements because you have a right to them?
No, people have a right not to create unless they are recompensed. But they have no natural right to their creations, just the property used to make them.
I'm willing to entertain the notion that we should create a system of incentives to encourage people to create things for the general betterment of everyone. But predicating a system on the notion that people have a right to their creations is a terrible mistake.
Really? I thought NP-Complete problems all had a very particular structure to them, and it was known that factoring didn't have that structure. But, I'm not a mathematician, and I will happily admit that I'm wrong in this regard.
As for the point about O(n^a), you're right.
Factoring is known to not be NP-complete. In fact, the complexity is known to be less than O(2^n), though larger than O(n^a) for any value of a.
I find it a natural consequence of holding people responsible for their actions and finances in inverse proportion to the amount of money they have or are in control of.
The only hard part I see about this is that it's typically very difficult to make sure you've got the new job guaranteed before going to your current employer and telling them what they'll have to pay to match your offer. (The commuting cost needs to be made up with money.) There's always the risk that the new employer changes their mind and won't hire you, unless you've already got a contract from them in which case they'll be real pissy if you tell them that *after* you interviewed and told them you'd accept their offer and got an offer letter, you went back to your current employer and gave them a chance to match it.
The commuting cost does not have to be made up with money. The commuting cost could be made up for any number of ways. An agreement to let you telecommute would be an example.
Actually, no, I was trying to find a good porn app on an iPhone, and all I could find was the stupid playboy and sports illustrated garbage. Guess Steve Jobs doesn't want me to see any decent porn.
I've never heard of someone's phone taking over their car. What planet are you from?
I do not like the company he built. I like some of the products that company has made, though most try too hard to control me. I feel that he has made an overall positive contribution, and cannot deny that he had vision. I'm sad to see him go.
I know the people involved in writing Tor. And the EFF is involved in writing it. No, that's not what it's for. The people I know would be shouting that from the rooftops if the project they were working on had been turned to that purpose.
It might be that it has been used for that purpose because of some Iranians being incautious about how they're using Tor. Tor isn't magic, and you can destroy your anonymity while using it fairly easily.
I would like to see how Google's results compared to Amazon and other sites where you could actually buy the products. It sounds like when people search for a product Google is trying to find a place to actually buy the product.
The difficulty is going to be getting software for POS systems that accept money from my virtual wallet. It wouldn't be too hard if they also had an Android device, but some niceties for merchants would be missing from that solution.
I use this software as my virtual wallet. It works pretty well. I've sent money to friends and gotten it back. It's slightly more cumbersome than handing them cash in some ways, and slightly less in others. But it does work already. I don't need Google or PayPal taking their cut.
There is a pretty strong population of non-MS programmers here too. I've l been mostly a Unix hacker, though I did do some work with Microsoft garbage a long time ago, and in the bad old days of MS-DOS when you couldn't get a machine on your desk that ran Unix for less than 10k USD.
I think we, in many ways, have a better environment for startups than the SF area. There's a lot of good talent up here.
And it's not rainy year round. The summers are gorgeous and sunny. The SF area is pretty rainy in the winter too.
Now that's an interesting twist on things. Holding them accountable for not being truthful with the public. Depending on the details, I would generally consider the government official significantly more accountable than the seismologists. That is, unless the seismologists were complicit (rather than merely compliant) in the government official's attempt to make things seems more rosy than they were.
I predict that this legal penalty will have absolute no effect whatsoever on the person's behavior.
It's not about agreeing, it's about having even a modicum of civility and tact. People commit suicide over the kind of behavior that guy exhibited, and while I think anybody committing suicide is doing something fairly stupid most of the time, I think we should discourage people from actively engaging in behavior that's likely to push people like that.
I know that if I knew who he was I would never go to a party he was invited to. I don't need that kind of jerk anywhere nearby me, and nobody else does either.