It's even questionable whether or not violating copyright is always counter productive in the long run. Our current copyright laws are mainly the result of people with lots of money and influence getting laws passed that profit them at our expense.
The fact that it is criminal at all is ridiculous. Either my property is mine to dispose of as I wish, or it isn't. If it isn't then we should just declare ourselves communists and have the truth of it out.
See, I read UserFriendly almost out of a sense of obligation. I only sometimes find it funny, and then only mildly.
I think XKCD can be hit or miss, but when I find it funny, I frequently end up laughing uproariously for a minute or two. And sometimes I even learn things.
I think they must just be suffering from the curse of hating things just because they're popular. I know I have a tendency to do the same thing, but I generally actually do a bit of investigation to find out if it's popular for a reason I can appreciate first.
The other possibility is hating something just because everybody else discovered it and now you can't be cool for knowing about this obscure but fantastic thing that nobody else knows about. Considering this crowd, I expect that's the more likely scenario.
Your 'solution' creates a slightly softer version of the same problem. First, you realize that the law is going to find ways to increasingly broaden the scope of who has to wear ankle bracelets and when. Secondly, there are many sex offenders who have never touched a child.
You can become a sex offender for peeing in an alley, for visiting a prostitute, or for having completely consenting sex with your underage girlfriend who is perfectly capable of making her own decisions about her sexuality. I don't think making people convicted of those crimes wear an ankle bracelet is going to help anybody at all.
Secondly, you just change the scope of the stigma. They still have their scarlet letter. Now its an ankle bracelet, and only people who see it will know. But it's still, in essence, public branding.
And people don't 'insinuate' themselves into families. It's a father, a mother, an uncle, a grandfather, people who are part of the family by blood. The majority of sexual crimes against children are committed by people close to them. And, luckily, that's also the most easily treatable class of offenders.
I try hard to only use Open Source software for a wide variety of reasons. I'm definitely only willing to pay for Open Source, except for games. The Google app store does not make it possible for me to exercise this preference in a reasonable way. Licensing is not a required field for someone to fill out, and the phone shows you nothing about it.
One thing I really like about the GPL is that it is perfectly fine to charge for GPL software. I think many people forget this, or are too cautious about business models surrounding it. A lot of people want to pay for things because it makes them feel like they're getting something valuable and/or because they want to support the developer.
I thought the google app store represented an ideal environment to test this out models in which people pay for FOSS applications. But they blew it by not telling people how the software they're paying for is licensed.
Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
Bazaar is as nice as Mercurial in many respects. I find the command set to be a little less nice than Mercurial's and though I haven't seen any recent benchmarks in the past it's been a lot slower.
Re:I've been running emacs 23 for 2 years ... sort
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
I wish they would stop using CVS and start using Mercurial or something other reasonably decent DVCS so I felt like I could contribute maybe.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
The best tool I have ever seen for this kind of thing is inkscape. I've been able to do some very interesting things with that tool because I got to combine the ability to edit things with drawing tools with the ability to edit the underlying XML+SVG.
For example, making various kinds of tilings works much more nicely when can create the tilings by cloning an original into a tile and then editing the original. Because of the way SVG cloned objects reference the original that means all copies change when you change the original. You can see the tiling as you edit the original.
I might use emacs for something simple and quick if it has a nice way of quickly looking at the resulting drawing as you edit. But if I really want to work with SVG I use inkscape. It's a much better editor for that task than emacs will ever be.
You can do something similar with other kinds of symmetry. And the ability to precisely control the logical structure of the SVG with the inkscape editor that is aware of which bunch of SVG your selection represents, for example, is incredibly useful.
Don't get me wrong. emacs is my favorite tool for dealing with text in all its forms. I've never met an editor I liked better, not even the Java editors that knew which class you were working with and could pop up lists of member functions after you but in a '.'. SVG is simply not just text. I wouldn't use emacs in place of gimp either.
C++ these days is two languages. Template metaprogramming is a language all on its own that is more closely related to the various functional languages out there. The code that actually compiles to something is a procedural language with OO extensions that's a fairly grungy workhorse of a language.
I think C++ is way too complex for a first language, and the fact that it is really two languages (three if you count the preprocessor) in one is a big part of why.
I think having all the details hidden from you when you're starting out is just fine. I think all good programmers should know assembly and have a good idea of how their high level program actually translates into the computer doing what they asked. But getting there is a process, and learning that you can make the computer do things is the first step and should be happen with the friendliest language that has the expressive power to do interesting things.
I don't associate Scheme with 'the hacker ethic'. I don't strongly associate any language with hacker sensibilities. I do associate Scheme with the intellectual rigor required for a programmer who really has a clue about programming.
I think Scheme is an excellent language to teach college students who think that they know how to program because they managed to smoosh together a bunch of working PHP code and make a website. I think it is a poor language to teach high school students who are learning their first language.
The association of technical knowledge with competence irritates me. A competent painter needs to know about brushes and mixing paint, the difference between oil and acrylic, and a whole host of other technical details. But that's not how you get a good painting.
One of my reasons for feeling that Scheme is a good language for people who think they know how to program is that such people frequently know all about paint but do not have the depth of understanding to be a good painter. Scheme is a language that forces you to think about programming differently than you did before. And if you understand it you are on the path to being a good programmer rather than just a code monkey.
But I would not recommend it as a first language. I would recommend Python for that. Clean, concise, expressive and powerful. It's my favorite language for a reason.:-)
The thing I like about Skein is its tree mode. I've been working on a parallelizing version of sha256sum to see if I can speed up the generation of hashes 4-fold with my dual-core dual-processor system.
I also like the ways you can make it unique for a given usage. This will help make it more resistant to various kinds of attacks when used in particular applications and mitigate the effect of certain kinds of algorithm weaknesses if they're discovered.
But yeah, there are other candidates, and I'm more interested in the highest possible quality algorithm coming out of the process than I am in having my particular horse win.
I consider Bruce Scheier as a cryptographer to be sort of like Carl Sagan as an astronomer. I think he is a competent cryptographer, but I think he has much greater value as a person who can speak cogently about the issues surrounding cryptography.
In this case, my guess is that he led the overall vision of how Skein should work but that the other people who worked on the algorithm filled in the details. In particular, I strongly suspect that Niels Ferguson is principally responsible for the core algorithm. Of course, pulling apart any particular collaboration and looking for the efforts of individuals can be tricky and error prone at best.
I was a little worried by the plethora of submissions. I was worried it would take them forever to decide. But luckily they've been rather ruthless in culling for the third round. Given the data available on the The SHA-3 Zoo they chose wisely.
Personally, I think Skein is interestingly feature rich, which both worries and intrigues me. Looking it appears that all the features are built on a core in which the real security lies, so I'm not too worried. Skein's core in fact appears to be extremely simple.
I think he is a little extreme. One of my huge complaints about my G1 is that I can't tell what license the software I get is under. If I want to prefer Open Source, I can't.
I think that websites or other directories that distribute or redirect you to downloads of software should make the nature of the license of the software you're about to download clear.
It would make it less evil, but not non-evil. In order for it to be non-evil there would have to also be a 'buy' option, even if it was astronomically expensive, so people had a choice.
I like this idea too. Copyright was originally conceived of as a balance. People agree to give up their right to copy in exchange for the hopeful encouragement of publishing companies to publish and authors to write.
People who want copyright on their software should have to give something up to get it. There must be a balance for taking away people's right to copy.
DRM is a way for companies to control the behavior of users after they've bought the product. It's a way to lease things to people rather than sell them. It's a crime that companies are allowed to 'sell' you DRM things. It's a lease. You don't own it.
Stallman is completely correct in calling DRM evil. Witness Amazon forcing people to return their books when the fact that they 'own' them is inconvenient for Amazon.
A patent-like right for software that lasts for a much shorter time than an ordinary patent that has as its requirement that the source code for the software be released. Basically reward companies for releasing source code by granting a short term exclusive right of some kind for doing it.
But I like the new index. I managed to banish idle stories from the classic index, how do I banish them from the new index? I don't care how newsworthy some random editor thinks they are. I do not want to ever see them.
Well, yes it does.:-) Apple's only virtue is that they are not big enough to make it stick except in certain (currently smallish (well, OK, the iPod/iTunes store is not that small)) markets.
For some bizarre reasons technology companies consider free markets to be incredibly scary and avoid them at all costs, which is kinda funny given the rhetoric they usually spew.
It has indeed, and non-Oracle versions of MySQL will not be able to be released under a dual license, they will only be able to be released under the GPL. So I ask again, who controls MySQL? Oracle, or the people who work on it?
The GPL is about maintaining control huh? Tell that to Oracle. Who has control over the future of MySQL? Oracle or the people who are contributing code to it?
Slashdot Mirror
It's even questionable whether or not violating copyright is always counter productive in the long run. Our current copyright laws are mainly the result of people with lots of money and influence getting laws passed that profit them at our expense.
The fact that it is criminal at all is ridiculous. Either my property is mine to dispose of as I wish, or it isn't. If it isn't then we should just declare ourselves communists and have the truth of it out.
See, I read UserFriendly almost out of a sense of obligation. I only sometimes find it funny, and then only mildly.
I think XKCD can be hit or miss, but when I find it funny, I frequently end up laughing uproariously for a minute or two. And sometimes I even learn things.
I think they must just be suffering from the curse of hating things just because they're popular. I know I have a tendency to do the same thing, but I generally actually do a bit of investigation to find out if it's popular for a reason I can appreciate first.
The other possibility is hating something just because everybody else discovered it and now you can't be cool for knowing about this obscure but fantastic thing that nobody else knows about. Considering this crowd, I expect that's the more likely scenario.
Your 'solution' creates a slightly softer version of the same problem. First, you realize that the law is going to find ways to increasingly broaden the scope of who has to wear ankle bracelets and when. Secondly, there are many sex offenders who have never touched a child.
You can become a sex offender for peeing in an alley, for visiting a prostitute, or for having completely consenting sex with your underage girlfriend who is perfectly capable of making her own decisions about her sexuality. I don't think making people convicted of those crimes wear an ankle bracelet is going to help anybody at all.
Secondly, you just change the scope of the stigma. They still have their scarlet letter. Now its an ankle bracelet, and only people who see it will know. But it's still, in essence, public branding.
And people don't 'insinuate' themselves into families. It's a father, a mother, an uncle, a grandfather, people who are part of the family by blood. The majority of sexual crimes against children are committed by people close to them. And, luckily, that's also the most easily treatable class of offenders.
I try hard to only use Open Source software for a wide variety of reasons. I'm definitely only willing to pay for Open Source, except for games. The Google app store does not make it possible for me to exercise this preference in a reasonable way. Licensing is not a required field for someone to fill out, and the phone shows you nothing about it.
One thing I really like about the GPL is that it is perfectly fine to charge for GPL software. I think many people forget this, or are too cautious about business models surrounding it. A lot of people want to pay for things because it makes them feel like they're getting something valuable and/or because they want to support the developer.
I thought the google app store represented an ideal environment to test this out models in which people pay for FOSS applications. But they blew it by not telling people how the software they're paying for is licensed.
Bazaar is as nice as Mercurial in many respects. I find the command set to be a little less nice than Mercurial's and though I haven't seen any recent benchmarks in the past it's been a lot slower.
I wish they would stop using CVS and start using Mercurial or something other reasonably decent DVCS so I felt like I could contribute maybe.
The best tool I have ever seen for this kind of thing is inkscape. I've been able to do some very interesting things with that tool because I got to combine the ability to edit things with drawing tools with the ability to edit the underlying XML+SVG.
For example, making various kinds of tilings works much more nicely when can create the tilings by cloning an original into a tile and then editing the original. Because of the way SVG cloned objects reference the original that means all copies change when you change the original. You can see the tiling as you edit the original.
I might use emacs for something simple and quick if it has a nice way of quickly looking at the resulting drawing as you edit. But if I really want to work with SVG I use inkscape. It's a much better editor for that task than emacs will ever be.
You can do something similar with other kinds of symmetry. And the ability to precisely control the logical structure of the SVG with the inkscape editor that is aware of which bunch of SVG your selection represents, for example, is incredibly useful.
Don't get me wrong. emacs is my favorite tool for dealing with text in all its forms. I've never met an editor I liked better, not even the Java editors that knew which class you were working with and could pop up lists of member functions after you but in a '.'. SVG is simply not just text. I wouldn't use emacs in place of gimp either.
I assert that the object-oriented portion of C++ isn't so much a second language as it is a tool for hiding complexity.
I'm not calling C++'s object oriented features a second language. I'm calling its template metaprogramming system a second language.
C++ these days is two languages. Template metaprogramming is a language all on its own that is more closely related to the various functional languages out there. The code that actually compiles to something is a procedural language with OO extensions that's a fairly grungy workhorse of a language.
I think C++ is way too complex for a first language, and the fact that it is really two languages (three if you count the preprocessor) in one is a big part of why.
I think having all the details hidden from you when you're starting out is just fine. I think all good programmers should know assembly and have a good idea of how their high level program actually translates into the computer doing what they asked. But getting there is a process, and learning that you can make the computer do things is the first step and should be happen with the friendliest language that has the expressive power to do interesting things.
I don't associate Scheme with 'the hacker ethic'. I don't strongly associate any language with hacker sensibilities. I do associate Scheme with the intellectual rigor required for a programmer who really has a clue about programming.
I think Scheme is an excellent language to teach college students who think that they know how to program because they managed to smoosh together a bunch of working PHP code and make a website. I think it is a poor language to teach high school students who are learning their first language.
The association of technical knowledge with competence irritates me. A competent painter needs to know about brushes and mixing paint, the difference between oil and acrylic, and a whole host of other technical details. But that's not how you get a good painting.
One of my reasons for feeling that Scheme is a good language for people who think they know how to program is that such people frequently know all about paint but do not have the depth of understanding to be a good painter. Scheme is a language that forces you to think about programming differently than you did before. And if you understand it you are on the path to being a good programmer rather than just a code monkey.
But I would not recommend it as a first language. I would recommend Python for that. Clean, concise, expressive and powerful. It's my favorite language for a reason. :-)
The thing I like about Skein is its tree mode. I've been working on a parallelizing version of sha256sum to see if I can speed up the generation of hashes 4-fold with my dual-core dual-processor system.
I also like the ways you can make it unique for a given usage. This will help make it more resistant to various kinds of attacks when used in particular applications and mitigate the effect of certain kinds of algorithm weaknesses if they're discovered.
But yeah, there are other candidates, and I'm more interested in the highest possible quality algorithm coming out of the process than I am in having my particular horse win.
I consider Bruce Scheier as a cryptographer to be sort of like Carl Sagan as an astronomer. I think he is a competent cryptographer, but I think he has much greater value as a person who can speak cogently about the issues surrounding cryptography.
In this case, my guess is that he led the overall vision of how Skein should work but that the other people who worked on the algorithm filled in the details. In particular, I strongly suspect that Niels Ferguson is principally responsible for the core algorithm. Of course, pulling apart any particular collaboration and looking for the efforts of individuals can be tricky and error prone at best.
I was a little worried by the plethora of submissions. I was worried it would take them forever to decide. But luckily they've been rather ruthless in culling for the third round. Given the data available on the The SHA-3 Zoo they chose wisely.
Personally, I think Skein is interestingly feature rich, which both worries and intrigues me. Looking it appears that all the features are built on a core in which the real security lies, so I'm not too worried. Skein's core in fact appears to be extremely simple.
I think he is a little extreme. One of my huge complaints about my G1 is that I can't tell what license the software I get is under. If I want to prefer Open Source, I can't.
I think that websites or other directories that distribute or redirect you to downloads of software should make the nature of the license of the software you're about to download clear.
It would make it less evil, but not non-evil. In order for it to be non-evil there would have to also be a 'buy' option, even if it was astronomically expensive, so people had a choice.
I like this idea too. Copyright was originally conceived of as a balance. People agree to give up their right to copy in exchange for the hopeful encouragement of publishing companies to publish and authors to write.
People who want copyright on their software should have to give something up to get it. There must be a balance for taking away people's right to copy.
DRM is a way for companies to control the behavior of users after they've bought the product. It's a way to lease things to people rather than sell them. It's a crime that companies are allowed to 'sell' you DRM things. It's a lease. You don't own it.
Stallman is completely correct in calling DRM evil. Witness Amazon forcing people to return their books when the fact that they 'own' them is inconvenient for Amazon.
A patent-like right for software that lasts for a much shorter time than an ordinary patent that has as its requirement that the source code for the software be released. Basically reward companies for releasing source code by granting a short term exclusive right of some kind for doing it.
But I like the new index. I managed to banish idle stories from the classic index, how do I banish them from the new index? I don't care how newsworthy some random editor thinks they are. I do not want to ever see them.
Well, yes it does. :-) Apple's only virtue is that they are not big enough to make it stick except in certain (currently smallish (well, OK, the iPod/iTunes store is not that small)) markets.
For some bizarre reasons technology companies consider free markets to be incredibly scary and avoid them at all costs, which is kinda funny given the rhetoric they usually spew.
It has indeed, and non-Oracle versions of MySQL will not be able to be released under a dual license, they will only be able to be released under the GPL. So I ask again, who controls MySQL? Oracle, or the people who work on it?
Who said they had a choice? If they don't, someone else will and that person will become the de-facto maintainer.
The GPL is about maintaining control.
The GPL is about maintaining control huh? Tell that to Oracle. Who has control over the future of MySQL? Oracle or the people who are contributing code to it?