Google has announced that Chrome is to be open source. If this has the conventional meaning of being licensed under an OSI-approved license, or anything remotely resembling one, then a EULA would be redundant and unenforceable. (Even if Google tried to exercise some implicit contractual terms around the use of Chrome, someone could simply exercise the permissions given under the open source license to repackage the code under a different name with no EULA.)
I'm not going to RTFA at this hour, but the only reasonable interpretation is that the terms in question apply only to Google's services and not the browser software itself. Anything else would be audacious even for a company without Google's mostly good reputation.
I agree too. Its style is designed to make learning fast and permanent, but since it's intended for (at least somewhat) experienced programmers, it isn't excessively dumbed-down. Informal and didactic, perhaps, but not dumbed-down. To paraphrase that great Einstein quote, it makes the subject matter as easy as possible to learn, but no easier.
So for Windows Vista, the system's latest incarnation, Microsoft created a game that awarded points for bug-testing and prizes such as wristbands for achieving certain goals. Participation quadrupled.
Your post is correct; unfortunately, "PC" is also used (famously in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, and elsewhere) to indicate, in a lawsuit-paranoid way, a computer that ships with Windows without mentioning Windows by name.
Basically, the software gets its name from the list processing functions "map" (to take every item in a list and transform it, thus producing a list of the same size) and "reduce" (to perform an operation on a list that produces a single value or smaller list).
As does my Slashdot user name. Great, now everything is going to think I'm calling on people to "filter" this software somehow, which I'd never heard of before this story. And it's "highly controversial", that's helpful.
The only reason anyone still plays Magic Online is because they're addicted to Magic and will put up with the slow, buggy, ugly UI, as well as the lag, instability, crashes, and whatever else went wrong.
Actually, I think the main reason people stick with Magic Online is because they've invested wads of money into an online cards that could, at the time, be used in a fairly stable platform (i.e., version 2). Many players, myself included, felt quite betrayed when version 2 was yanked away, and our collections were usable only on the "prettier", "integrated", and utterly broken version 3 client. The amount of perfectly functional software that was scrapped in the name of the upgrade is sickening—and that includes the secure Web-based store, which was rolled up into the closed-source client. My credit card company refuses to honor those transactions (surely doing me a favor), so the new Magic Online model is actually failing at the very basic task of accepting customers' money.
Wizards of the Coast does some brilliant game design, but they've displayed a gradually increasing level of idiocy when it comes to anything on the Internet. I can't help but enjoy some schadenfreude seeing Gleemax crash and burn.
If this proposed archive does contain information about individual players, it could turn into an interesting little case study on privacy and modern technology. Many of the newer threats to privacy are about technology that can retain and search little details of your life online: the details individually may be public, but when they're all available at once they may start to feel like a breach of privacy. An MMO is a microcosm where the technology is already sufficiently advanced for this.
This can happen with the WoW Armory, where anyone with Web access can pull up game data on any World of Warcraft character. From this, others can infer things like how much time you've spent playing lately. A player might wind up embarrassed over a WoW addiction ("Level 70 already?!"), or be bugged to play more by less casual-playing friends who want a high-level buddy to go raiding with. (I have experienced the latter and I believe there was a "Penny Arcade" strip about it once.) What's interesting is that your character level is not secret information—it's publicly visible every time you log on—but the dynamics of privacy do shift when it's a "matter of record" for anyone to look up on a website, rather than observed only by others on the same server when you're actually logged in and playing.
This article is tagged "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense", but U.S. trademark law is typically endowed with a little more common sense (a little) than copyrights and patents, the other major areas of IP law. For example, how trademarks can only be held so long as they're actually in use. Compare this to copyrights applying for the life of the author plus seventy years; as a result, abandonware sites can and often are prevented from providing software titles years after the publishers have ever tried to make them available for a profit, or at all.
I expected that Dell would lose this ridiculous trademark bid and I'm pleased that the USPTO acted appropriately. Nonetheless, I'm sure that my fellow Slashdotters will be all too happy to expose my ignorance by providing plenty of counterexamples of trademark-related idiocy.
C'mon, if we ever want to overcome the limits of general relativity and make interstellar travel commonplace, we should be trying to invent ways to make light go faster, not slower!
The one that is several pages of convoluted legalese...
Convoluted language != convoluted legalese.
...written by a lawyer (who then went on to write the CC licenses you seem to think so highly of)?
Which lawyer is this? The GPL and the CC licenses are both written collaboratively. The authorship of the GPL is overseen by Richard Stallman (and if Wikipedia is correct, he was the sole author of version 1), who is not a lawyer and wants nothing to do with Creative Commons.
...that is probably how it would start. It would end with the Men's 1500 meters being won by a chap in a Formula 1 car, or perhaps a helicopter. Afterall - why not?
This is a slippery slope fallacy. You cannot assume without proof that one small change will lead to another small change in the same direction, and then another, and so on to the point of ridiculousness. Sure, this pattern occurs sometimes, but sometimes one small change is just one small change. (Not that permitting steroid abuse would be a small change.)
It is interesting that the Artistic License has passed a legal test of sorts, considering that it has been criticized as one of the more shoddily-written licenses out there—at least, version 1.0. I mean, look at this (from the "Definitions" section of 1.0):
"You" is you, if you're thinking about copying or distributing this Package.
That reads like someone tried to satirize the "legalese" present in most licenses rather than create a working license for themselves. Also, the license is automatically binding for anyone who is thinking about using the license? Compare to a Creative Commons license, where
"You" means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License...
You'd think programmers would know better than to let ambiguities like that by. (And incidentally, some people have similar concerns about the language in the GPL: it has a conspicuous lack of "legalese", which might make it easy to read, but also risks ambiguity popping up in a court case down the road.)
Call it silver-backing, that will be a smashing buzzword.
Hmmm... "silver-backed backups" or simply "silver backups" actually would be a pretty cool name for the "process" described by this quote attributed to Linus Torvalds: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
Some applications have macro capture similar to what you describe. It's a good idea, but you'd be stuck programming in an ad hoc "language" consisting of a set of buttons designed for interactive use by a human. Text-based commands are more often designed with scripting in mind, operating on input all at once, hence those highly flexible (and sometimes frighteningly complex) pipelines you see sometimes.
A generally scriptable GUI implemented across an entire desktop environment would be an interesting problem to see solved. (I'll bet people have already worked on it for GNOME and KDE.) Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever macro capabilities are in any given application.
Let's face it, text was invented for a purpose. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but they may not be exactly *the* thousand words you need to convey your information.
Indeed, this is related to text-based computing in a very direct way. Shell scripting (like all programming) is the practice of describing to the computer exactly what you want it to do—word for word, so to speak. Graphic UIs, for all their advantages, don't let the user give such specific instructions, forcing them to perform the individual steps themselves: click that file, move it here, click that file, move it there, executing the algorithm yourself instead of describing to the computer. Like the summary says, "illiterate computing" pretty much nails it on the head.
Not that I'm bashing GUIs or saying that anyone who uses one is non-metaphorically "illiterate". Good GUIs are obviously indispensable in modern software, and with good reason. But they can never fully replace the expressive abilities of the command line. To swing back on-topic, a fully graphical UI for people who really are fully illiterate is a noble idea, but considering the limitations of a normal GUI, it would suffer serious drawbacks, to say the least.
The literacy metaphor in comparing text-based and graphical interfaces is explored very nicely in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.
The sign reminds me more of the story behind ELO's album No Answer, which is (according to Snopes) actually true: a request for a name receives a reply saying the information is unavailable, and the reply itself is mistaken for the requested name. No one notices until it's already gone to the printer.
What's really unfortunate is that many of the regular Scrabulous players will probably assume that Hasbro was within their legal rights. "Oh well, playing an illegal knock-off of Scrabble was fun while it lasted, but now that the 'real' Scrabble has asserted its rights to the game, we'll have to make do with that inferior client." I wonder what percentage of Scrabulous players understand (as many Slashdot posters have explained) that Hasbro did not, in fact, have any exclusive rights to the rules of the game, and that Scrabulous was shut down over a trademark issue.
Are algorithms for pushing targeted ads and useless web applications that never get out of beta really worth depleting the industry of so many of its best?
The targeted ads aren't necessarily a total waste. If Google weren't pulling down so much ad money, we might have to pay for subscriptions, or at least deal with some kind of "premium service" nonsense, in order to use their services. And I prefer text ads of any kind to carpet-bombing-style graphical banners. Perhaps it's not the best use of Silicon Valley talent, but it does serve a purpose of sorts.
As for the web apps, I'm not such a big fan of Google Docs and the like either. However, it's good that it will help to prevent Microsoft from getting a de facto monopoly on the software-as-a-service thing, since that model allows for so much lock-in.
"Cuil" is a really dumb name. "Google" is a dumb name too, but at least its pronounciation is obvious to anyone reading the name. Can't say the same for "Cuil".
Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned this service is called "kweel".
Exactly. This law is audacious when you consider how little precedent it really has. American society may be used to everything—movies, TV shows, music albums, video games—having some manner of content rating or parental advisory, but (as other posters have pointed out) those were all done voluntarily by industry associations. If I'm not mistaken, the government's content-rating has historically been limited to distinguishing between obscene and non-obscene, but for some reason the New York legislature now thinks it's within the law's purview to make, or at least back up, judgments like, "This is too violent for anyone under 13", "This is too sexual for anyone under 18", and so on.
Even with today's apathy and fearmongering, I doubt they could suggest "regulating" the printed word like that without a major public backlash. But too many people are content to place video games in a different category of speech. This labeling law may not be censorship per se, but it definitely isn't free, unfettered speech either. A society that values its freedom of speech should insist that the government take a hands-off approach to all forms of creative expression including video games, even if video games are nothing but mind-numbing prostitute-murder-simulators. (Which, of course, they aren't.)
Slashdot Mirror
Google has announced that Chrome is to be open source. If this has the conventional meaning of being licensed under an OSI-approved license, or anything remotely resembling one, then a EULA would be redundant and unenforceable. (Even if Google tried to exercise some implicit contractual terms around the use of Chrome, someone could simply exercise the permissions given under the open source license to repackage the code under a different name with no EULA.)
I'm not going to RTFA at this hour, but the only reasonable interpretation is that the terms in question apply only to Google's services and not the browser software itself. Anything else would be audacious even for a company without Google's mostly good reputation.
I agree too. Its style is designed to make learning fast and permanent, but since it's intended for (at least somewhat) experienced programmers, it isn't excessively dumbed-down. Informal and didactic, perhaps, but not dumbed-down. To paraphrase that great Einstein quote, it makes the subject matter as easy as possible to learn, but no easier.
My money is on '5'. I've got a good feeling about this...
So for Windows Vista, the system's latest incarnation, Microsoft created a game that awarded points for bug-testing and prizes such as wristbands for achieving certain goals. Participation quadrupled.
And nothing of value was gained.
Your post is correct; unfortunately, "PC" is also used (famously in the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads, and elsewhere) to indicate, in a lawsuit-paranoid way, a computer that ships with Windows without mentioning Windows by name.
Basically, the software gets its name from the list processing functions "map" (to take every item in a list and transform it, thus producing a list of the same size) and "reduce" (to perform an operation on a list that produces a single value or smaller list).
As does my Slashdot user name. Great, now everything is going to think I'm calling on people to "filter" this software somehow, which I'd never heard of before this story. And it's "highly controversial", that's helpful.
The only reason anyone still plays Magic Online is because they're addicted to Magic and will put up with the slow, buggy, ugly UI, as well as the lag, instability, crashes, and whatever else went wrong.
Actually, I think the main reason people stick with Magic Online is because they've invested wads of money into an online cards that could, at the time, be used in a fairly stable platform (i.e., version 2). Many players, myself included, felt quite betrayed when version 2 was yanked away, and our collections were usable only on the "prettier", "integrated", and utterly broken version 3 client. The amount of perfectly functional software that was scrapped in the name of the upgrade is sickening—and that includes the secure Web-based store, which was rolled up into the closed-source client. My credit card company refuses to honor those transactions (surely doing me a favor), so the new Magic Online model is actually failing at the very basic task of accepting customers' money.
Wizards of the Coast does some brilliant game design, but they've displayed a gradually increasing level of idiocy when it comes to anything on the Internet. I can't help but enjoy some schadenfreude seeing Gleemax crash and burn.
How is XP a downgrade?
I heard a salesman at a major electronics store mention "downgrading" a computer from Vista to Linux. That was good for a bitter laugh.
And the Mindstorms version only works with Silverlight, probably.
If this proposed archive does contain information about individual players, it could turn into an interesting little case study on privacy and modern technology. Many of the newer threats to privacy are about technology that can retain and search little details of your life online: the details individually may be public, but when they're all available at once they may start to feel like a breach of privacy. An MMO is a microcosm where the technology is already sufficiently advanced for this.
This can happen with the WoW Armory, where anyone with Web access can pull up game data on any World of Warcraft character. From this, others can infer things like how much time you've spent playing lately. A player might wind up embarrassed over a WoW addiction ("Level 70 already?!"), or be bugged to play more by less casual-playing friends who want a high-level buddy to go raiding with. (I have experienced the latter and I believe there was a "Penny Arcade" strip about it once.) What's interesting is that your character level is not secret information—it's publicly visible every time you log on—but the dynamics of privacy do shift when it's a "matter of record" for anyone to look up on a website, rather than observed only by others on the same server when you're actually logged in and playing.
This article is tagged "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense", but U.S. trademark law is typically endowed with a little more common sense (a little) than copyrights and patents, the other major areas of IP law. For example, how trademarks can only be held so long as they're actually in use. Compare this to copyrights applying for the life of the author plus seventy years; as a result, abandonware sites can and often are prevented from providing software titles years after the publishers have ever tried to make them available for a profit, or at all.
I expected that Dell would lose this ridiculous trademark bid and I'm pleased that the USPTO acted appropriately. Nonetheless, I'm sure that my fellow Slashdotters will be all too happy to expose my ignorance by providing plenty of counterexamples of trademark-related idiocy.
C'mon, if we ever want to overcome the limits of general relativity and make interstellar travel commonplace, we should be trying to invent ways to make light go faster, not slower!
You know, like on Futurama... right?
The one that is several pages of convoluted legalese...
Convoluted language != convoluted legalese.
...written by a lawyer (who then went on to write the CC licenses you seem to think so highly of)?
Which lawyer is this? The GPL and the CC licenses are both written collaboratively. The authorship of the GPL is overseen by Richard Stallman (and if Wikipedia is correct, he was the sole author of version 1), who is not a lawyer and wants nothing to do with Creative Commons.
...that is probably how it would start. It would end with the Men's 1500 meters being won by a chap in a Formula 1 car, or perhaps a helicopter. Afterall - why not?
This is a slippery slope fallacy. You cannot assume without proof that one small change will lead to another small change in the same direction, and then another, and so on to the point of ridiculousness. Sure, this pattern occurs sometimes, but sometimes one small change is just one small change. (Not that permitting steroid abuse would be a small change.)
I for one welcome our new Rat-Brained Robot overlords!
As do I. With our mighty ape brains, they should be pretty easy to overthrow, right?
"You" is you, if you're thinking about copying or distributing this Package.
That reads like someone tried to satirize the "legalese" present in most licenses rather than create a working license for themselves. Also, the license is automatically binding for anyone who is thinking about using the license? Compare to a Creative Commons license, where
"You" means an individual or entity exercising rights under this License...
You'd think programmers would know better than to let ambiguities like that by. (And incidentally, some people have similar concerns about the language in the GPL: it has a conspicuous lack of "legalese", which might make it easy to read, but also risks ambiguity popping up in a court case down the road.)
Call it silver-backing, that will be a smashing buzzword.
Hmmm... "silver-backed backups" or simply "silver backups" actually would be a pretty cool name for the "process" described by this quote attributed to Linus Torvalds: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
Some other freeware encryption that still uses a published algorithm?
If this made any difference, the algorithm would suck anyway.
Some applications have macro capture similar to what you describe. It's a good idea, but you'd be stuck programming in an ad hoc "language" consisting of a set of buttons designed for interactive use by a human. Text-based commands are more often designed with scripting in mind, operating on input all at once, hence those highly flexible (and sometimes frighteningly complex) pipelines you see sometimes.
A generally scriptable GUI implemented across an entire desktop environment would be an interesting problem to see solved. (I'll bet people have already worked on it for GNOME and KDE.) Otherwise, you're stuck with whatever macro capabilities are in any given application.
Let's face it, text was invented for a purpose. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but they may not be exactly *the* thousand words you need to convey your information.
Indeed, this is related to text-based computing in a very direct way. Shell scripting (like all programming) is the practice of describing to the computer exactly what you want it to do—word for word, so to speak. Graphic UIs, for all their advantages, don't let the user give such specific instructions, forcing them to perform the individual steps themselves: click that file, move it here, click that file, move it there, executing the algorithm yourself instead of describing to the computer. Like the summary says, "illiterate computing" pretty much nails it on the head.
Not that I'm bashing GUIs or saying that anyone who uses one is non-metaphorically "illiterate". Good GUIs are obviously indispensable in modern software, and with good reason. But they can never fully replace the expressive abilities of the command line. To swing back on-topic, a fully graphical UI for people who really are fully illiterate is a noble idea, but considering the limitations of a normal GUI, it would suffer serious drawbacks, to say the least.
The literacy metaphor in comparing text-based and graphical interfaces is explored very nicely in "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.
The sign reminds me more of the story behind ELO's album No Answer , which is (according to Snopes) actually true: a request for a name receives a reply saying the information is unavailable, and the reply itself is mistaken for the requested name. No one notices until it's already gone to the printer.
What's really unfortunate is that many of the regular Scrabulous players will probably assume that Hasbro was within their legal rights. "Oh well, playing an illegal knock-off of Scrabble was fun while it lasted, but now that the 'real' Scrabble has asserted its rights to the game, we'll have to make do with that inferior client." I wonder what percentage of Scrabulous players understand (as many Slashdot posters have explained) that Hasbro did not, in fact, have any exclusive rights to the rules of the game, and that Scrabulous was shut down over a trademark issue.
Are algorithms for pushing targeted ads and useless web applications that never get out of beta really worth depleting the industry of so many of its best?
The targeted ads aren't necessarily a total waste. If Google weren't pulling down so much ad money, we might have to pay for subscriptions, or at least deal with some kind of "premium service" nonsense, in order to use their services. And I prefer text ads of any kind to carpet-bombing-style graphical banners. Perhaps it's not the best use of Silicon Valley talent, but it does serve a purpose of sorts.
As for the web apps, I'm not such a big fan of Google Docs and the like either. However, it's good that it will help to prevent Microsoft from getting a de facto monopoly on the software-as-a-service thing, since that model allows for so much lock-in.
"Cuil" is a really dumb name. "Google" is a dumb name too, but at least its pronounciation is obvious to anyone reading the name. Can't say the same for "Cuil".
Absolutely. As far as I'm concerned this service is called "kweel".
So, should we tag this "whatcouldhavepossiblygonewrong"?
Exactly. This law is audacious when you consider how little precedent it really has. American society may be used to everything—movies, TV shows, music albums, video games—having some manner of content rating or parental advisory, but (as other posters have pointed out) those were all done voluntarily by industry associations. If I'm not mistaken, the government's content-rating has historically been limited to distinguishing between obscene and non-obscene, but for some reason the New York legislature now thinks it's within the law's purview to make, or at least back up, judgments like, "This is too violent for anyone under 13", "This is too sexual for anyone under 18", and so on.
Even with today's apathy and fearmongering, I doubt they could suggest "regulating" the printed word like that without a major public backlash. But too many people are content to place video games in a different category of speech. This labeling law may not be censorship per se, but it definitely isn't free, unfettered speech either. A society that values its freedom of speech should insist that the government take a hands-off approach to all forms of creative expression including video games, even if video games are nothing but mind-numbing prostitute-murder-simulators. (Which, of course, they aren't.)