Horror movies really are hard to figure out in advance. I mostly just skip them and rely on word of mouth from people who have tastes similar to my own to figure out which ones to watch later. I'm an unabashed sucker for single-room or small-setting thrillers (e.g. Cube, Killing Room, Saw, etc.), love surprising takes on the genre (e.g. Cabin in the Woods), and generally just love suspense (e.g. Alien). Unfortunately for me, I can't stand cheap scares and the torture porn sub-genre (e.g. subsequent Saw films, Human Centipede, etc.), both of which were all the rage a few years ago, so it made finding useful reviews virtually impossible.
A rating for "Good to watch once" is what I look for.
Isn't that exactly what the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is? It's basically a measure of how entertaining a movie is, even if it won't be winning any awards, come Oscar season.
It does seem as if there's a trend for low-brow films to be scored a bit lower by the overall critic consensus. I attribute that to the critics being split over how they should review them. The good reviewers seem to do exactly as you say, recognizing films that nail their genre without necessarily carrying a wide appeal, while the lousy reviewers ding films for being exactly what they're supposed to be.
Thankfully, the audience score usually does a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in those scenarios. If you see a film with a mixed critic score and a high audience score, it's usually a good indication that the film won't be winning any Oscars, but that it'll still be well worth watching for some good entertainment.
More or less. Prior to Rotten Tomatoes, our options for determining whether a film was worth seeing in theaters were all hit-and-miss. Most of us relied heavily on the tone and nature of the film's marketing to make those decisions, putting the control predominately in the hands of the studios. Every time they marketed a dud as a stud in order to profit from the gap between when a movie was released and when word of mouth spread about how bad it was, they made it clear that they valued our money more than our satisfaction.
Rotten Tomatoes changed all of that by providing consistently credible scores from day one, which, for most of us, were a much better indicator for determining whether a movie was worth seeing in theaters. They're not perfect, but they're so much more reliable than what we had before that many of us have started checking Rotten Tomatoes before heading to the theaters for anything other than a sure thing. Naturally, the studios are displeased that they can't profit on that gap between the release date and when the public catches on to how bad the film actually is.
Couple that with cheap rentals like Redbox or iTunes (as opposed to the expensive days of Blockbuster), subscription streaming like Netflix, and the dropping prices of big-screen TVs, and it's no surprise that people are skipping the theater experience when the film will be just as good/bad in a few months/years at home. When talking about upcoming films, my wife and I have even started saying, "That's a 'wait for Redbox' one" or "Maybe if it shows up on Netflix streaming someday".
I don't think I'm moving the ball, but, frankly, this is not a topic I'm interested in arguing further, so I'll concede. I think you're trying to make a distinction that's flying over my head, but we're getting into minutiae about international legal theory that I really couldn't care less about. I simply wanted to share something I found interesting with others here who may have been similarly clueless about executive agreements.
I appreciate correction when I get things wrong, even if it flies over my head.
Now they can just use the fingerprints they have on file to unlock your phone during their all-too-common border searches, rather than having to rely on your cooperation.
So, nitrogen, the most common element in the atmosphere, is also a pollutant, given that breathing it alone will kill you all the same? While I agree with what you're getting at, I can't abide the fallacious logic.
So, the UN is just going to say, "Ok, it's cool, not a prob if you want to leave"? Of course not. While what you're saying may be nice in theory, and is certainly true domestically, in practice it doesn't work that way at all. You can argue that Obama shouldn't have been able to ratify the treaty because it had this possibility, but it doesn't change that he did and that there are international consequences for revoking it.
The President is free to revoke, modify, or supersede his own orders or those issued by a predecessor.
Which is exactly what I said.
As for his being "bound by it anyway", I was referring to the fact that the international laws still apply to us on account of them already entering into effect, which would have been a bit clearer to you if you had included the second half of my sentence in that quote you pulled.
I thought you were full of it because I didn't think that was even possible, so I went to look for evidence to the contrary. Instead, it turns out that you're actually right. From The Guardian's reporting of the US ratifying the Paris Agreement last year (emphasis mine):
In Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress has questioned Obama’s legal right to ratify the accord by decree, noting that the constitution grants the Senate a role of “advice and consent” in making treaties.
But the chamber does not ratify treaties, and the US also has increasingly relied on “executive agreements” since the second world war. Those agreements are not submitted to the Senate but are also considered binding in international law.
Wikipedia talks about ratification in the US in a bit more detail, since it's apparently more nuanced than I even realized as an American (again, emphasis mine):
Treaty power is a co-ordinated effort between the Executive branch and the Senate. The President may form and negotiate, but the treaty must be advised and consented to by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Only after the Senate approves the treaty can the President ratify it. [...]
The US can also enter into international agreements by way of executive agreements. They are not made under the Treaty Clause and do not require ratification of two thirds of the Senate. [...] If the agreement is completely within the President's constitutional powers, it can be made by the President alone without Congressional approval, but it will have the force of an executive order and can be unilaterally revoked by a future President. All types of agreements are treated internationally as "treaties".
So, basically, a President has the authority to make executive agreements that bind their office, inasmuch as those agreements do not extend beyond their authority. Without having looked into the specifics of the Paris Agreement, I don't know if any of its requirements go beyond the authority of what the President alone can do, but if they don't, then Obama's actions were entirely legal, even if they commit future Presidents, such as Trump, to abiding by the terms of the agreement lest they face consequences.
Of course, if the Paris Agreement required anything beyond the President's authority, then you're quite correct about it being an illegal ratification, in which case...well...nothing really changes. Trump would still have the authority to revoke it, but his office would still be bound by it anyway, given that it has already entered into force internationally.
Thankfully, it's a self-correcting problem. The students potentially using the Internet to disseminate the information will soon be the once-students who are leading the country and are aware that it's absolutely insane to shut off the Internet to an entire country for something this insignificant.
I wish, But Apple disagrees with you. Round corners.
You've been misinformed if you think that's copyright. That rounded corners thing is a design patent. Not a utility patent and certainly not a copyright.
A "Retina" display is any display with a density between 300ppi and 325ppi. A "Retina HD" display is any display with a density >= 326ppi.
None of that is even remotely correct.
Your definition for "Retina" excludes the 4K and 5K Retina iMacs (218-219 PPI), all of the Retina iPads (264 PPI), and all of the Retina MacBook Pros (220-226 PPI). And that example you gave of the iPhone 7 being "HD" because it has 326 PPI? It can be applied equally well to literally every single Retina iPhone, all of which are 326 PPI, not to mention Retina iPod Touches (326 PPI), Retina iPad Minis (326 PPI), and Apple Watches (330-333 PPI), none of which are labeled as "Retina HD" by Apple.
So, no, that's not the definition for "Retina".
The way it was originally described by Jobs, a Retina display is any display where the pixels are small enough that they can no longer be individually perceived from a typical viewing distance. Simple as that. We can express the relationship between pixel density and viewing distance as pixels per degree (PPD), which is how you can measure the "Retina-ness" of a display. According to Jobs, a 300 PPI display at 10" qualified as Retina, so that gives us a PPD of 57 as a threshold for what qualifies as Retina.
As such, with a viewing distance of 10" and a PPI of 326, the iPhone 4's PPD of 57.9 made it the first device to qualify. The Retina MacBook Pro that failed to meet your standard? It has a PPD of around 81, given a 20" viewing distance. The Retina iPads that you say aren't Retina? They have PPDs between 72-86 if you assume a 15" viewing distance.
It's arguable that Apple set the bar too low by suggesting that 300 PPI at 10" was sufficient to hit the limits of human vision. After all, people with vision better than 20/20 (a.k.a. 6/6) can still perceive individual pixels at 57 PPD, and even people with average eyesight who can't do so may still able to perceive jagginess on account of Vernier acuity helping us recognize misaligned pixels. Even so, we're nearing the point where none of this will matter, in much the same way that the printer DPI wars became pointless once they surpassed our ability to perceive any difference.
As for "Retina HD", it's a straight-up marketing term that Apple is (incorrectly, if you ask me) slapping on the iPhone 6 and 7 lines as a reference to other improvements they made in terms of color accuracy and contrast. It has nothing to do with pixel density.
Are you suggesting that all code has existed forever but was waiting to be discovered?
Nope. There's a distinction between algorithms, which are ideas that are discovered, and code, which are expressions of those ideas.
Algorithms are just a series of mathematical steps, so whether we're talking about the algorithm for integration in calculus or the algorithm for the search of a binary tree, they are indeed discovered. So far as utility patent law is concerned, software is merely a collection of algorithms, so there's no basis for thinking we should be able to use utility patents to protect software.
Code, however, is not the same thing as an algorithm. Code is an implementation of an algorithm: an expression of an idea. In much the same way that I can express a sunset in paint or in prose, I can express an algorithm via code, a diagram, or by building it in Minecraft. Code is neither discovered nor invented: it's written. Which comes back around to why it can be, and is, protected by copyright.
Same here. I used to have a group of students (from a part of the world where plagiarism is more culturally accepted) sit in the lab and work together. With me sitting just a few feet from them, I watched them as they copied code back and forth from each other's screens, so I made it clear that while they could work together in figuring out the algorithm, it was up to each of them to actually implement the algorithm. They nodded, made a gesture of following what I said, and then went right back to it again.
So, since their code ended up being identical, I gave them 0s.
After that, they stopped copying from each other while sitting in the lab, and instead took their cheating out of class. Thankfully, that was even easier to detect, since they'd have signature traits, such as the same number of irrelevant trailing spaces at the ends of specific lines. They started changing variable names and intentionally adding whitespace in irrelavant places, just to make their code look distinct. What they didn't know is that I had a plagiarism detection tool that accounted for those sorts of changes, and sure enough their code always came out as a 100% match for someone else in the class, while everyone else's would be around 20-50% (which was expected, given that there are only so many ways to implement simple tasks).
Much to my disappointment the professor refused to act on any of it, so the best I could do was give them 0s when it was abundantly clear they were cheating. Eventually they started changing the implementation enough that the tool I used no longer showed a 100% match, but at that point they were effectively re-implementing it themselves anyway, which was exactly what we wanted from them in the first place.
That was my initial reaction too, but this is doubtless going to be the decision that pushing them over to licensing/renting cartridges, rather than selling them. The decision itself says that if Lexmark wants to enforce these sorts of restrictions, it can't do so via patent law after the initial sale, but it can do so via contract law. Which is basically just a way of saying, "Lexmark, follow the software industry's lead if you want to screw customers".
Again, the decision was a good one, but I don't look forward to what comes next.
No, that is not at all how copyright works. Maybe you confused them with patents?
Copyright's role is more or less to protect expressions of ideas. You can't copyright facts, but you can copyright the way you displayed those facts. You can't copyright putting paint on a canvas, but you can copyright a particular painting done on canvas. You can't copyright a feature in software, but you can copyright the code comprising your implementation for that feature.
In the case of software, copyright is what keeps someone from selling your code as their own, but it does nothing to keep them from implementing a feature you thought of first. Registering a trademark (or design patent, which functions similarly to a trademark) may keep someone else from making software that's indistinguishable from yours, but it can't be used to protect features that do anything useful (i.e. provide utility), so it basically only be used to protect eye candy features. Utility patents can be used to keep someone else from implementing your invention, but given that math is disallowed from being patented (it can only be discovered, not invented), most of us would contend that software patents are invalid, simply because software = algorithms = math.
Hey, I'm the one who submitted the story a few days back. I am neither the creator of the format, nor do I have no relation to the guys who created JSON Feed, nor do I have any relation to whoever submitted this summary today. Check my comment history. I'm just a guy who's been around Slashdot for way too long and thought it was weird that this format I was seeing reported everywhere else for an entire week hadn't yet been reported on Slashdot. While I had heard of the two guys behind JSON Feed prior to its announcement, I don't know either of them personally or professionally; I don't follow either of them via blogs, podcasts, Twitter, or anything else; and I don't have any vested interests in the format, other than liking that we finally have some movement in that space. Believe me or not. It's no skin off my nose.
As for the replies to the story, frankly, most of the replies were clearly from people, such as yourself, who hadn't bothered following the links I provided, since they latched onto the incorrect notion that it's just a reimplementation of RSS in JSON. I'll grant that I should've done a better job of making it clear that wasn't the case in my summary (also worth noting: I simply wouldn't have submitted the (non-)story if all it was was RSS in JSON), and I think it's unfortunate that the name of the format is "JSON Feed", since that seems to be driving much of the confusion, but there IS more to it than just "wannabe-rss-replacement-in-json", which you'd know if you had actually read any of the stuff I linked.
Not that I expected you or anyone else to do so, of course. After all, this is still Slashdot, and no one here reads the articles.;)
Not just us. A few weeks back when the initial ban went into effect, the UK enacted nearly the same ban on laptops flying into the country (though only from 6 countries, rather than the US' 8) at the same time the US did. This isn't just a US thing, sadly.
You're right to say "no", but for other reasons. For instance, many apps require that their users create Github accounts in order to submit bug reports and feature requests. If you look through issues on user-facing apps, particularly smaller ones with no other channels for submitting feedback, it's usually pretty evident that the majority of people have no background in programming.
Then there are the students and hobbyists who create an account to work on things on a rare basis. They may be in the pool of potential professional developers, but calling them professionals, suggesting they're currently employed in the field, would likely be a gross overstatement .
And that's before we even consider the huge number of students who are forced to create an account for intro courses they are required to take as part of their school's curriculum. Most of them never pursue programming any further and will never enter the field's professional workforce, yet they'd still count towards those 21M accounts.
Finally, there's the question of what that 21M is actually measuring. The provided quote says "[active] users", but I can't find the original quote to confirm that it really was active users, and not just users in general. If it wasn't, and that 21M is really for ALL users, then it's safe to say that 21M is an inflated number.
This vulnerability has been well known and documented far earlier as well. For instance, military networks (used to? still do?) fill most of the remaining capacity in their channels with junk data that's designed to be indistinguishable from real data that's been encrypted, that way an adversary listening passively can't tell when there's more activity.
Yeah...I don't view income inequality as a problem for any of the reasons your article talks about; I view it as a matter of survival for me. As income inequality becomes more extreme, the costs to live in the nation inevitably exceed the capability for many of those living there. At some point, violence becomes their only viable means for recourse/survival, and that's a problem I care about.
History is rife with examples of the poor masses rising up against the privileged when too much of the wealth and power is concentrated at the top. Democracy itself was born out of the push against monarchies and oligarchies that had concentrated the power and wealth in the hands of a few.
The rise of automation in the workforce is hastening the date when we reach that point once again. We're set for an Automation Revolution surpassing the size and scope of the Industrial Revolution, and just as with the previous revolution there will be a period of unrest, uncertainty, and likely even violence as global society adjusts to the new way of living. But unlike the Industrial Revolution, there may not be any jobs available for some people once the Automation Revolution is in full swing. What do you realistically expect those unskilled people with too much time on their hands to do if they think their survival is on the line?
As such, I view UBI (or something similar) as a necessity, not because I think it's unfair that some people have less while others have more, but rather because I firmly believe that someone will collect that money, and I'd much rather it be a government backed by guns than a desperate person pointing a gun at me.
He wants other people's wealth to be "spread around" at gun-point...
Where does the wealth come from for the people who receive more from UBI than they put into the system? It can only come from people like him who will be putting more into the system than they receive back from UBI. Mind you, that group of people will likely include many of us as well, who make more than the median income and will thus end up slightly net negative in terms of what we pay in versus what we get out, but still, it'll be those making far more than most of us who must, by necessity, bear the brunt of the UBI burden, since it simply doesn't work otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Horror movies really are hard to figure out in advance. I mostly just skip them and rely on word of mouth from people who have tastes similar to my own to figure out which ones to watch later. I'm an unabashed sucker for single-room or small-setting thrillers (e.g. Cube, Killing Room, Saw, etc.), love surprising takes on the genre (e.g. Cabin in the Woods), and generally just love suspense (e.g. Alien). Unfortunately for me, I can't stand cheap scares and the torture porn sub-genre (e.g. subsequent Saw films, Human Centipede, etc.), both of which were all the rage a few years ago, so it made finding useful reviews virtually impossible.
A rating for "Good to watch once" is what I look for.
Isn't that exactly what the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is? It's basically a measure of how entertaining a movie is, even if it won't be winning any awards, come Oscar season.
It does seem as if there's a trend for low-brow films to be scored a bit lower by the overall critic consensus. I attribute that to the critics being split over how they should review them. The good reviewers seem to do exactly as you say, recognizing films that nail their genre without necessarily carrying a wide appeal, while the lousy reviewers ding films for being exactly what they're supposed to be.
Thankfully, the audience score usually does a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff in those scenarios. If you see a film with a mixed critic score and a high audience score, it's usually a good indication that the film won't be winning any Oscars, but that it'll still be well worth watching for some good entertainment.
More or less. Prior to Rotten Tomatoes, our options for determining whether a film was worth seeing in theaters were all hit-and-miss. Most of us relied heavily on the tone and nature of the film's marketing to make those decisions, putting the control predominately in the hands of the studios. Every time they marketed a dud as a stud in order to profit from the gap between when a movie was released and when word of mouth spread about how bad it was, they made it clear that they valued our money more than our satisfaction.
Rotten Tomatoes changed all of that by providing consistently credible scores from day one, which, for most of us, were a much better indicator for determining whether a movie was worth seeing in theaters. They're not perfect, but they're so much more reliable than what we had before that many of us have started checking Rotten Tomatoes before heading to the theaters for anything other than a sure thing. Naturally, the studios are displeased that they can't profit on that gap between the release date and when the public catches on to how bad the film actually is.
Couple that with cheap rentals like Redbox or iTunes (as opposed to the expensive days of Blockbuster), subscription streaming like Netflix, and the dropping prices of big-screen TVs, and it's no surprise that people are skipping the theater experience when the film will be just as good/bad in a few months/years at home. When talking about upcoming films, my wife and I have even started saying, "That's a 'wait for Redbox' one" or "Maybe if it shows up on Netflix streaming someday".
I don't think I'm moving the ball, but, frankly, this is not a topic I'm interested in arguing further, so I'll concede. I think you're trying to make a distinction that's flying over my head, but we're getting into minutiae about international legal theory that I really couldn't care less about. I simply wanted to share something I found interesting with others here who may have been similarly clueless about executive agreements.
I appreciate correction when I get things wrong, even if it flies over my head.
Now they can just use the fingerprints they have on file to unlock your phone during their all-too-common border searches, rather than having to rely on your cooperation.
So, nitrogen, the most common element in the atmosphere, is also a pollutant, given that breathing it alone will kill you all the same? While I agree with what you're getting at, I can't abide the fallacious logic.
So, the UN is just going to say, "Ok, it's cool, not a prob if you want to leave"? Of course not. While what you're saying may be nice in theory, and is certainly true domestically, in practice it doesn't work that way at all. You can argue that Obama shouldn't have been able to ratify the treaty because it had this possibility, but it doesn't change that he did and that there are international consequences for revoking it.
Actually, it does. From page 7 of your own link:
The President is free to revoke, modify, or supersede his own orders or those issued by a predecessor.
Which is exactly what I said.
As for his being "bound by it anyway", I was referring to the fact that the international laws still apply to us on account of them already entering into effect, which would have been a bit clearer to you if you had included the second half of my sentence in that quote you pulled.
I thought you were full of it because I didn't think that was even possible, so I went to look for evidence to the contrary. Instead, it turns out that you're actually right. From The Guardian's reporting of the US ratifying the Paris Agreement last year (emphasis mine):
In Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress has questioned Obama’s legal right to ratify the accord by decree, noting that the constitution grants the Senate a role of “advice and consent” in making treaties.
But the chamber does not ratify treaties, and the US also has increasingly relied on “executive agreements” since the second world war. Those agreements are not submitted to the Senate but are also considered binding in international law.
Wikipedia talks about ratification in the US in a bit more detail, since it's apparently more nuanced than I even realized as an American (again, emphasis mine):
Treaty power is a co-ordinated effort between the Executive branch and the Senate. The President may form and negotiate, but the treaty must be advised and consented to by a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Only after the Senate approves the treaty can the President ratify it. [...]
The US can also enter into international agreements by way of executive agreements. They are not made under the Treaty Clause and do not require ratification of two thirds of the Senate. [...] If the agreement is completely within the President's constitutional powers, it can be made by the President alone without Congressional approval, but it will have the force of an executive order and can be unilaterally revoked by a future President. All types of agreements are treated internationally as "treaties".
So, basically, a President has the authority to make executive agreements that bind their office, inasmuch as those agreements do not extend beyond their authority. Without having looked into the specifics of the Paris Agreement, I don't know if any of its requirements go beyond the authority of what the President alone can do, but if they don't, then Obama's actions were entirely legal, even if they commit future Presidents, such as Trump, to abiding by the terms of the agreement lest they face consequences.
Of course, if the Paris Agreement required anything beyond the President's authority, then you're quite correct about it being an illegal ratification, in which case...well...nothing really changes. Trump would still have the authority to revoke it, but his office would still be bound by it anyway, given that it has already entered into force internationally.
Thankfully, it's a self-correcting problem. The students potentially using the Internet to disseminate the information will soon be the once-students who are leading the country and are aware that it's absolutely insane to shut off the Internet to an entire country for something this insignificant.
I wish, But Apple disagrees with you. Round corners.
You've been misinformed if you think that's copyright. That rounded corners thing is a design patent. Not a utility patent and certainly not a copyright.
A "Retina" display is any display with a density between 300ppi and 325ppi. A "Retina HD" display is any display with a density >= 326ppi.
None of that is even remotely correct.
Your definition for "Retina" excludes the 4K and 5K Retina iMacs (218-219 PPI), all of the Retina iPads (264 PPI), and all of the Retina MacBook Pros (220-226 PPI). And that example you gave of the iPhone 7 being "HD" because it has 326 PPI? It can be applied equally well to literally every single Retina iPhone, all of which are 326 PPI, not to mention Retina iPod Touches (326 PPI), Retina iPad Minis (326 PPI), and Apple Watches (330-333 PPI), none of which are labeled as "Retina HD" by Apple.
So, no, that's not the definition for "Retina".
The way it was originally described by Jobs, a Retina display is any display where the pixels are small enough that they can no longer be individually perceived from a typical viewing distance. Simple as that. We can express the relationship between pixel density and viewing distance as pixels per degree (PPD), which is how you can measure the "Retina-ness" of a display. According to Jobs, a 300 PPI display at 10" qualified as Retina, so that gives us a PPD of 57 as a threshold for what qualifies as Retina.
As such, with a viewing distance of 10" and a PPI of 326, the iPhone 4's PPD of 57.9 made it the first device to qualify. The Retina MacBook Pro that failed to meet your standard? It has a PPD of around 81, given a 20" viewing distance. The Retina iPads that you say aren't Retina? They have PPDs between 72-86 if you assume a 15" viewing distance.
It's arguable that Apple set the bar too low by suggesting that 300 PPI at 10" was sufficient to hit the limits of human vision. After all, people with vision better than 20/20 (a.k.a. 6/6) can still perceive individual pixels at 57 PPD, and even people with average eyesight who can't do so may still able to perceive jagginess on account of Vernier acuity helping us recognize misaligned pixels. Even so, we're nearing the point where none of this will matter, in much the same way that the printer DPI wars became pointless once they surpassed our ability to perceive any difference.
As for "Retina HD", it's a straight-up marketing term that Apple is (incorrectly, if you ask me) slapping on the iPhone 6 and 7 lines as a reference to other improvements they made in terms of color accuracy and contrast. It has nothing to do with pixel density.
Are you suggesting that all code has existed forever but was waiting to be discovered?
Nope. There's a distinction between algorithms, which are ideas that are discovered, and code, which are expressions of those ideas.
Algorithms are just a series of mathematical steps, so whether we're talking about the algorithm for integration in calculus or the algorithm for the search of a binary tree, they are indeed discovered. So far as utility patent law is concerned, software is merely a collection of algorithms, so there's no basis for thinking we should be able to use utility patents to protect software.
Code, however, is not the same thing as an algorithm. Code is an implementation of an algorithm: an expression of an idea. In much the same way that I can express a sunset in paint or in prose, I can express an algorithm via code, a diagram, or by building it in Minecraft. Code is neither discovered nor invented: it's written. Which comes back around to why it can be, and is, protected by copyright.
Same here. I used to have a group of students (from a part of the world where plagiarism is more culturally accepted) sit in the lab and work together. With me sitting just a few feet from them, I watched them as they copied code back and forth from each other's screens, so I made it clear that while they could work together in figuring out the algorithm, it was up to each of them to actually implement the algorithm. They nodded, made a gesture of following what I said, and then went right back to it again.
So, since their code ended up being identical, I gave them 0s.
After that, they stopped copying from each other while sitting in the lab, and instead took their cheating out of class. Thankfully, that was even easier to detect, since they'd have signature traits, such as the same number of irrelevant trailing spaces at the ends of specific lines. They started changing variable names and intentionally adding whitespace in irrelavant places, just to make their code look distinct. What they didn't know is that I had a plagiarism detection tool that accounted for those sorts of changes, and sure enough their code always came out as a 100% match for someone else in the class, while everyone else's would be around 20-50% (which was expected, given that there are only so many ways to implement simple tasks).
Much to my disappointment the professor refused to act on any of it, so the best I could do was give them 0s when it was abundantly clear they were cheating. Eventually they started changing the implementation enough that the tool I used no longer showed a 100% match, but at that point they were effectively re-implementing it themselves anyway, which was exactly what we wanted from them in the first place.
Why sign a contract at the register, when you can just seal the cartridge in a bag that says, "Opening this seal constitutes agreement with the EULA"?
That was my initial reaction too, but this is doubtless going to be the decision that pushing them over to licensing/renting cartridges, rather than selling them. The decision itself says that if Lexmark wants to enforce these sorts of restrictions, it can't do so via patent law after the initial sale, but it can do so via contract law. Which is basically just a way of saying, "Lexmark, follow the software industry's lead if you want to screw customers".
Again, the decision was a good one, but I don't look forward to what comes next.
Unfortunately that is how copyright works.
No, that is not at all how copyright works. Maybe you confused them with patents?
Copyright's role is more or less to protect expressions of ideas. You can't copyright facts, but you can copyright the way you displayed those facts. You can't copyright putting paint on a canvas, but you can copyright a particular painting done on canvas. You can't copyright a feature in software, but you can copyright the code comprising your implementation for that feature.
In the case of software, copyright is what keeps someone from selling your code as their own, but it does nothing to keep them from implementing a feature you thought of first. Registering a trademark (or design patent, which functions similarly to a trademark) may keep someone else from making software that's indistinguishable from yours, but it can't be used to protect features that do anything useful (i.e. provide utility), so it basically only be used to protect eye candy features. Utility patents can be used to keep someone else from implementing your invention, but given that math is disallowed from being patented (it can only be discovered, not invented), most of us would contend that software patents are invalid, simply because software = algorithms = math.
Oops, typo. Instead of...
nor do I have no relation to the guys who created JSON Feed
...it should instead be...
nor do I have a relation to the guys who created JSON Feed
Obviously, the distinction is important.
Hey, I'm the one who submitted the story a few days back. I am neither the creator of the format, nor do I have no relation to the guys who created JSON Feed, nor do I have any relation to whoever submitted this summary today. Check my comment history. I'm just a guy who's been around Slashdot for way too long and thought it was weird that this format I was seeing reported everywhere else for an entire week hadn't yet been reported on Slashdot. While I had heard of the two guys behind JSON Feed prior to its announcement, I don't know either of them personally or professionally; I don't follow either of them via blogs, podcasts, Twitter, or anything else; and I don't have any vested interests in the format, other than liking that we finally have some movement in that space. Believe me or not. It's no skin off my nose.
As for the replies to the story, frankly, most of the replies were clearly from people, such as yourself, who hadn't bothered following the links I provided, since they latched onto the incorrect notion that it's just a reimplementation of RSS in JSON. I'll grant that I should've done a better job of making it clear that wasn't the case in my summary (also worth noting: I simply wouldn't have submitted the (non-)story if all it was was RSS in JSON), and I think it's unfortunate that the name of the format is "JSON Feed", since that seems to be driving much of the confusion, but there IS more to it than just "wannabe-rss-replacement-in-json", which you'd know if you had actually read any of the stuff I linked.
Not that I expected you or anyone else to do so, of course. After all, this is still Slashdot, and no one here reads the articles. ;)
Not just us. A few weeks back when the initial ban went into effect, the UK enacted nearly the same ban on laptops flying into the country (though only from 6 countries, rather than the US' 8) at the same time the US did. This isn't just a US thing, sadly.
You're right to say "no", but for other reasons. For instance, many apps require that their users create Github accounts in order to submit bug reports and feature requests. If you look through issues on user-facing apps, particularly smaller ones with no other channels for submitting feedback, it's usually pretty evident that the majority of people have no background in programming.
Then there are the students and hobbyists who create an account to work on things on a rare basis. They may be in the pool of potential professional developers, but calling them professionals, suggesting they're currently employed in the field, would likely be a gross overstatement .
And that's before we even consider the huge number of students who are forced to create an account for intro courses they are required to take as part of their school's curriculum. Most of them never pursue programming any further and will never enter the field's professional workforce, yet they'd still count towards those 21M accounts.
Finally, there's the question of what that 21M is actually measuring. The provided quote says "[active] users", but I can't find the original quote to confirm that it really was active users, and not just users in general. If it wasn't, and that 21M is really for ALL users, then it's safe to say that 21M is an inflated number.
This vulnerability has been well known and documented far earlier as well. For instance, military networks (used to? still do?) fill most of the remaining capacity in their channels with junk data that's designed to be indistinguishable from real data that's been encrypted, that way an adversary listening passively can't tell when there's more activity.
Yeah...I don't view income inequality as a problem for any of the reasons your article talks about; I view it as a matter of survival for me. As income inequality becomes more extreme, the costs to live in the nation inevitably exceed the capability for many of those living there. At some point, violence becomes their only viable means for recourse/survival, and that's a problem I care about.
History is rife with examples of the poor masses rising up against the privileged when too much of the wealth and power is concentrated at the top. Democracy itself was born out of the push against monarchies and oligarchies that had concentrated the power and wealth in the hands of a few.
The rise of automation in the workforce is hastening the date when we reach that point once again. We're set for an Automation Revolution surpassing the size and scope of the Industrial Revolution, and just as with the previous revolution there will be a period of unrest, uncertainty, and likely even violence as global society adjusts to the new way of living. But unlike the Industrial Revolution, there may not be any jobs available for some people once the Automation Revolution is in full swing. What do you realistically expect those unskilled people with too much time on their hands to do if they think their survival is on the line?
As such, I view UBI (or something similar) as a necessity, not because I think it's unfair that some people have less while others have more, but rather because I firmly believe that someone will collect that money, and I'd much rather it be a government backed by guns than a desperate person pointing a gun at me.
He wants other people's wealth to be "spread around" at gun-point...
Where does the wealth come from for the people who receive more from UBI than they put into the system? It can only come from people like him who will be putting more into the system than they receive back from UBI. Mind you, that group of people will likely include many of us as well, who make more than the median income and will thus end up slightly net negative in terms of what we pay in versus what we get out, but still, it'll be those making far more than most of us who must, by necessity, bear the brunt of the UBI burden, since it simply doesn't work otherwise.