Why should the Pope being insulted have anything to do with whether the earth moves around the sun?
Who said it did? OP certainly didn't. He merely asserted that Galileo was an asshole. Which I don't think is much of a stretch.
The fact is that while Copernicus should be (and is) credited with the heliocentric model, he was careful to assert that it was purely a model that made calculations easier (none of the epicycle nonsense required). He never claimed it was a fact; he merely described it as a useful tool. But, if Galileo hadn't come along to turn the whole thing into a political issue, it's quite possible that the Church would have been more willing to accept that this new model worked better because it actually reflected reality, and might well have accepted it a lot sooner than they actually did. Especially when you factor in the discovery of the Galilean moons, which is something Galileo deserves full credit for.
Or we can avoid the logical fallacy of argument from authority, and remember that A) being an expert in one field does not make you an expert in others, and B) even experts can disagree. Roger Penrose may be a brilliant and gifted mathematician, but his speculations on the nature of consciousness remain purely speculative, and, until someone comes up with a testable hypothesis, all speculations on string theory remain equally plausible.
Seriously, how is this worth an entire article? This is a tiny, tiny part of logic 101.
Lawsuits are expensive, even in Canada. I'm sure that the hotel does not expect to win, it expects to intimidate future bad reviewers.
Then they picked the wrong province to be located in, because Quebec is the only province with anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law on the books--a law designed expressly to punish any such attempts to use the legal system to intimidate.
But the civil issue is covered by anti-SLAPP laws. And apparently, Quebec is the only Canadian province with an anti-SLAPP law, so this hotel may be in big trouble now. (Twenty-eight states in the US have anti-SLAPP laws. If your state or province isn't one, it's time to nag your legislators.)
One of the most common sources of the not-able-to-contact-the-author problem. I can't tell you how many times I've had emails to the address-of-record bounce, when trying to send in a patch to some little utility that I happen to like.
a lawyer called asking politely if they could use the code
Just as I expected. Some poor developer who wants to use your code is either A) going to have to get lawyers involved somehow, or B) take foolish risks. For many developers, option A is going to be seriously unappealing. Lawyers cost money. Even if your company has lawyers on retainer, getting them involved may affect your department budget. As for choice B, well, my choice of adjectives should make clear my opinion of that option.:)
Not making a big deal of things that are not a big deal is a good way to proceed.
I'm not quite sure how slapping a BSD/MIT or GPL statement on your code is a "big deal". Heck, I split up the licenses for a recent project, with an internal library using BSD, and the main app under the GPL, which was a lot more work than putting the whole thing under a single license. I may have spent a whole five minutes on it. Oh, what a big deal that was!:)
Maybe I just have a tidy mind*, but I prefer to simply license my crap** up front, rather than try to wait for the lawyers to contact me. I'm not generally fond of lawyers or dealing with the law, and taking the few seconds it normally requires to attach a license to my code helps me avoid that. But whatever floats your boat, I guess.
* Although some evidence would strongly suggest otherwise. ** The word crap may be a reasonable assessment of most of what I've actually released to the public, but that's another matter.:)
You could call the author and ask permission or do a deal.
Which may be expensive or difficult or even impossible in some cases. Ever tried to track down a random author to submit a patch? For anything but large/highly visible and/or very recent projects, it can be an utter crapshoot. Frankly, I would have to be really desperate to use that exact code to even consider attempting this. If there were any reasonable alternative, I would almost certainly use that instead.
Next, assuming there's money involved, you almost want to make sure you've got a formal contract, which is a hassle for everyone involved, but if you're a private individual or a large company, the risks of not getting your licensing terms on paper are simply too great. A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on! And if you happen to live in a different country than the author, you've got to make sure that the contract is valid under the laws of both countries. If you work for a big company, you've almost certainly got to get the company lawyers involved.... Again, any vaguely workable alternative code would be preferable.
If the third party is an individual, this is a possible, but potentially hassle-filled path. For a large company, this is going to be a huge amount of work, as big companies (especially those that do business in America) know that people love to sue them, and will insist on minimizing that risk. Smallish companies are more likely to gamble, and I'll bet that all those several companies you mentioned were small or smallish. Everyone else is likely to avoid your code like the plague. If that's what you want, great, but some people put their code out in public because they want people to use it. In which case, attaching a license is the only reasonable choice.
Of course, if you're so desperate for human contact that you'll do anything just to hear a human voice, but too horribly shy to ever call out, I suppose that making it so that people need to call you to use your software is one way to try to bring some human contact into your sad, pathetic life. But aside from that, I can't think of any reason why deliberately omitting a license from your code could possibly be a good thing.:)
Indeed, that's the only reason that people started using free software licenses. Who but developers would have been informing people about them? It's pretty much developers all the way down.
If it's animated, it's a movie. I don't see why we need to overload our image formats with movie features. If you're going to show a movie, use a movie format, and stop pretending its a static image. This crap may have made sense back when Compuserve was bigger than the Internet, but that was a long time ago.
Name me one reason why a movie-format-pretending-to-be-a-static-image-format is a useful thing today.
So my habit of reading no more than one out of every two articles on the topic (and actually, it's a lot less than that) has bitten me in the ass. Fine. Doesn't make Slashdot's "editors" look any more professional, does it?
No, I haven't been following the story particularly obsessively. Haven't been following it particularly at all. I've seen plenty of political scandals over the decades, and this one really wasn't much of a surprise to me. I remember Hoover, and I'm pretty sure I've been on watchlists as various points in my life, considering some of the people I've associated with/worked with. I hoped the government wasn't this bad, but I'm not a bit surprised to find out they are. But I still don't feel a need to obsess about it. I have a large network of friends, and if there's something I need to do, one will let me know.
But that's not the point. Explaining your acronyms for the sake of people like me is still something that professional editors do. Even if you think the should know it. Of course, I've also been following Slashdot long enough to know that there's no hope of seeing any professionalism here, but every so often, the urge to tweak them for their ongoing, constant incompetence just rises up and bursts out.
A-a-and...the Slashdot "editors" are earning the scare quotes around their titles once again. The NSA has been all overs the new lately, and you'd pretty much have to be hiding under a barrel not to know what that stands for, yet the summary carefully explains what it means. But as for GCHQ? Nope. Nothing. After checking with Google, I was able to ascertain that it does not stand for Google Corporate HeadQuarters, which was my first guess. If I were a nice guy, I'd tell you what it does stand for, but that would be doing the "editors" jobs for them, and, unlike them, I'm not paid for this crap.:)
But "begging the question X" is not synonymous with "raising the question X". It has a whole separate set of implications. It doesn't just mean "the question X appears". It means "the question X deserves to be asked.
And yes, it's idiomatic, and almost certainly became widespread in its current form because of the older stock phrase, but its current meaning becomes fairly clear if you simply insert the word "for" after the "beg{s|ging}.
And appeals to logic when discussing language is nearly as silly as appeals to logic when discussion people's sexual fetishes. Language comes from people, and people aren't particularly logical.
Prescriptivism is to the science of linguistics as Creationism is to the science of biology.
But tweaking the FP to ensure reproducibility doesn't improve the accuracy of the model. In fact, it hides the inaccuracies of the model. So, while I completely agree with you in principle, I think that what you said has no bearing on this particular case.
That would be a case of solving the wrong problem. Getting the exact same result every time doesn't much matter if that result is dominated by noise and rounding errors. In fact, the diverging results are a good thing, since, once they start to diverge, you know you've reached the point where you can no longer trust any of the results. If all the machines worked exactly the same, you could figure the same thing out, but it would require some very advanced mathematical analysis. With the build-the-machines-slightly-differently approach, the point where your results are becoming meaningless leaps out at you.
Remember, the desired result here is not a set of identical numbers everywhere. It is an accurate simulation. Getting the same results everywhere would not make the simulation one bit more accurate. So really, this is a good thing.
There's a big difference between "you can choose to use DRM or not" and "DRM should be incorporated directly into an open-ended standard". The former is a perfectly reasonable position. The latter is just stupid. HTTP supports plugins and add-ons, so why should DRM be part of the HTML standard? It (Netflix DRM) was working just fine without being part of the standard.
Don't get me wrong; I understand where you're coming from. This clearly does Turing no good at this point. But at the same time, if I lived on Adolph Hitlerstrasse, I might be very happy to have the government change the name. There's a thin line between trying to hide the past, and not wanting to celebrate past misdeeds that were once considered good.
Look at it this way: if they don't pardon Turing, then people might object to erecting a statue or naming a street after him, on the basis that he was a convicted criminal, and the government shouldn't be honoring him because it sets an unfortunate precedent. Silly as the objection might be, homophobic nutjobs might well make it a cause célèbre. Pardoning him takes the wind out of any potential problems along that line.
the Arabs didn't change or enhance anything that the Indians did
Unless you count the invention of algebra or codifying the algorithm, or any of the other great advancements in mathematics that came out of the Islamic Golden Age, of course....
Except that it leaves you stuck with javascript, while libmicrohttpd is in C, which means both much better performance, and access to some of the largest and best-tested libraries in the world to create the rest of your app. And, of course, C also allows you to embed perl, python, ruby, lua, tcl, and even, yes, javascript, in your app as well. Heck, even more than one of those, should you be so inclined. In fact, a C library opens you up to using just about any language you can imagine, compiled or interpreted.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the guy, yet I still think that accessing a public website should not be illegal. Which, unfortunately, is what they're trying to convict the asshole for. If being a jerkwad were a crime, there would be a whole lot more people in prison. But it is not, at least yet, actually a crime.
The question here is not, is this jerk sympathetic (he's not). The question is, should accessing a public website be considered a crime simply because the owner neglected to publicize the address? I admit that it's--maybe--not a black-and-white question, but I think it's pretty hard to argue that it should be.
AT&T wants to head off lawsuits for posting people's email addresses in public, so they obviously disagree. I'm not at all convinced they should get off scott-free for their ridiculous attempt to implement security through (mild) obscurity. Especially given how mild the obscurity was.
The issue here is not this one admittedly unpleasant defendant. The issue is the unfortunate precedent it will set if this jerk is forced to take the blame for AT&T's own stupidity.
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Why should the Pope being insulted have anything to do with whether the earth moves around the sun?
Who said it did? OP certainly didn't. He merely asserted that Galileo was an asshole. Which I don't think is much of a stretch.
The fact is that while Copernicus should be (and is) credited with the heliocentric model, he was careful to assert that it was purely a model that made calculations easier (none of the epicycle nonsense required). He never claimed it was a fact; he merely described it as a useful tool. But, if Galileo hadn't come along to turn the whole thing into a political issue, it's quite possible that the Church would have been more willing to accept that this new model worked better because it actually reflected reality, and might well have accepted it a lot sooner than they actually did. Especially when you factor in the discovery of the Galilean moons, which is something Galileo deserves full credit for.
Or we can avoid the logical fallacy of argument from authority, and remember that A) being an expert in one field does not make you an expert in others, and B) even experts can disagree. Roger Penrose may be a brilliant and gifted mathematician, but his speculations on the nature of consciousness remain purely speculative, and, until someone comes up with a testable hypothesis, all speculations on string theory remain equally plausible.
Seriously, how is this worth an entire article? This is a tiny, tiny part of logic 101.
Lawsuits are expensive, even in Canada. I'm sure that the hotel does not expect to win, it expects to intimidate future bad reviewers.
Then they picked the wrong province to be located in, because Quebec is the only province with anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law on the books--a law designed expressly to punish any such attempts to use the legal system to intimidate.
But the civil issue is covered by anti-SLAPP laws. And apparently, Quebec is the only Canadian province with an anti-SLAPP law, so this hotel may be in big trouble now. (Twenty-eight states in the US have anti-SLAPP laws. If your state or province isn't one, it's time to nag your legislators.)
Nope, even that doesn't excuse it. -- voice of experience
So, did it work? Do you feel smarter than yourself? ;)
Actually, my email was in the code.
One of the most common sources of the not-able-to-contact-the-author problem. I can't tell you how many times I've had emails to the address-of-record bounce, when trying to send in a patch to some little utility that I happen to like.
a lawyer called asking politely if they could use the code
Just as I expected. Some poor developer who wants to use your code is either A) going to have to get lawyers involved somehow, or B) take foolish risks. For many developers, option A is going to be seriously unappealing. Lawyers cost money. Even if your company has lawyers on retainer, getting them involved may affect your department budget. As for choice B, well, my choice of adjectives should make clear my opinion of that option. :)
Not making a big deal of things that are not a big deal is a good way to proceed.
I'm not quite sure how slapping a BSD/MIT or GPL statement on your code is a "big deal". Heck, I split up the licenses for a recent project, with an internal library using BSD, and the main app under the GPL, which was a lot more work than putting the whole thing under a single license. I may have spent a whole five minutes on it. Oh, what a big deal that was! :)
Maybe I just have a tidy mind*, but I prefer to simply license my crap** up front, rather than try to wait for the lawyers to contact me. I'm not generally fond of lawyers or dealing with the law, and taking the few seconds it normally requires to attach a license to my code helps me avoid that. But whatever floats your boat, I guess.
* Although some evidence would strongly suggest otherwise. :)
** The word crap may be a reasonable assessment of most of what I've actually released to the public, but that's another matter.
Really? Name a country that's an exception. (And I'll show you a country that's not a Berne signator.) :)
You could call the author and ask permission or do a deal.
Which may be expensive or difficult or even impossible in some cases. Ever tried to track down a random author to submit a patch? For anything but large/highly visible and/or very recent projects, it can be an utter crapshoot. Frankly, I would have to be really desperate to use that exact code to even consider attempting this. If there were any reasonable alternative, I would almost certainly use that instead.
Next, assuming there's money involved, you almost want to make sure you've got a formal contract, which is a hassle for everyone involved, but if you're a private individual or a large company, the risks of not getting your licensing terms on paper are simply too great. A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's printed on! And if you happen to live in a different country than the author, you've got to make sure that the contract is valid under the laws of both countries. If you work for a big company, you've almost certainly got to get the company lawyers involved.... Again, any vaguely workable alternative code would be preferable.
If the third party is an individual, this is a possible, but potentially hassle-filled path. For a large company, this is going to be a huge amount of work, as big companies (especially those that do business in America) know that people love to sue them, and will insist on minimizing that risk. Smallish companies are more likely to gamble, and I'll bet that all those several companies you mentioned were small or smallish. Everyone else is likely to avoid your code like the plague. If that's what you want, great, but some people put their code out in public because they want people to use it. In which case, attaching a license is the only reasonable choice.
Of course, if you're so desperate for human contact that you'll do anything just to hear a human voice, but too horribly shy to ever call out, I suppose that making it so that people need to call you to use your software is one way to try to bring some human contact into your sad, pathetic life. But aside from that, I can't think of any reason why deliberately omitting a license from your code could possibly be a good thing. :)
Indeed, that's the only reason that people started using free software licenses. Who but developers would have been informing people about them? It's pretty much developers all the way down.
If it's animated, it's a movie. I don't see why we need to overload our image formats with movie features. If you're going to show a movie, use a movie format, and stop pretending its a static image. This crap may have made sense back when Compuserve was bigger than the Internet, but that was a long time ago.
Name me one reason why a movie-format-pretending-to-be-a-static-image-format is a useful thing today.
So my habit of reading no more than one out of every two articles on the topic (and actually, it's a lot less than that) has bitten me in the ass. Fine. Doesn't make Slashdot's "editors" look any more professional, does it?
No, I haven't been following the story particularly obsessively. Haven't been following it particularly at all. I've seen plenty of political scandals over the decades, and this one really wasn't much of a surprise to me. I remember Hoover, and I'm pretty sure I've been on watchlists as various points in my life, considering some of the people I've associated with/worked with. I hoped the government wasn't this bad, but I'm not a bit surprised to find out they are. But I still don't feel a need to obsess about it. I have a large network of friends, and if there's something I need to do, one will let me know.
But that's not the point. Explaining your acronyms for the sake of people like me is still something that professional editors do. Even if you think the should know it. Of course, I've also been following Slashdot long enough to know that there's no hope of seeing any professionalism here, but every so often, the urge to tweak them for their ongoing, constant incompetence just rises up and bursts out.
A-a-and...the Slashdot "editors" are earning the scare quotes around their titles once again. The NSA has been all overs the new lately, and you'd pretty much have to be hiding under a barrel not to know what that stands for, yet the summary carefully explains what it means. But as for GCHQ? Nope. Nothing. After checking with Google, I was able to ascertain that it does not stand for Google Corporate HeadQuarters, which was my first guess. If I were a nice guy, I'd tell you what it does stand for, but that would be doing the "editors" jobs for them, and, unlike them, I'm not paid for this crap. :)
But "begging the question X" is not synonymous with "raising the question X". It has a whole separate set of implications. It doesn't just mean "the question X appears". It means "the question X deserves to be asked.
And yes, it's idiomatic, and almost certainly became widespread in its current form because of the older stock phrase, but its current meaning becomes fairly clear if you simply insert the word "for" after the "beg{s|ging}.
And appeals to logic when discussing language is nearly as silly as appeals to logic when discussion people's sexual fetishes. Language comes from people, and people aren't particularly logical.
Prescriptivism is to the science of linguistics as Creationism is to the science of biology.
But tweaking the FP to ensure reproducibility doesn't improve the accuracy of the model. In fact, it hides the inaccuracies of the model. So, while I completely agree with you in principle, I think that what you said has no bearing on this particular case.
That would be a case of solving the wrong problem. Getting the exact same result every time doesn't much matter if that result is dominated by noise and rounding errors. In fact, the diverging results are a good thing, since, once they start to diverge, you know you've reached the point where you can no longer trust any of the results. If all the machines worked exactly the same, you could figure the same thing out, but it would require some very advanced mathematical analysis. With the build-the-machines-slightly-differently approach, the point where your results are becoming meaningless leaps out at you.
Remember, the desired result here is not a set of identical numbers everywhere. It is an accurate simulation. Getting the same results everywhere would not make the simulation one bit more accurate. So really, this is a good thing.
There's a big difference between "you can choose to use DRM or not" and "DRM should be incorporated directly into an open-ended standard". The former is a perfectly reasonable position. The latter is just stupid. HTTP supports plugins and add-ons, so why should DRM be part of the HTML standard? It (Netflix DRM) was working just fine without being part of the standard.
Don't get me wrong; I understand where you're coming from. This clearly does Turing no good at this point. But at the same time, if I lived on Adolph Hitlerstrasse, I might be very happy to have the government change the name. There's a thin line between trying to hide the past, and not wanting to celebrate past misdeeds that were once considered good.
Look at it this way: if they don't pardon Turing, then people might object to erecting a statue or naming a street after him, on the basis that he was a convicted criminal, and the government shouldn't be honoring him because it sets an unfortunate precedent. Silly as the objection might be, homophobic nutjobs might well make it a cause célèbre. Pardoning him takes the wind out of any potential problems along that line.
Well, dang, if you weren't already at 5, I'd mod you up. That's exactly what they should do.
the Arabs didn't change or enhance anything that the Indians did
Unless you count the invention of algebra or codifying the algorithm, or any of the other great advancements in mathematics that came out of the Islamic Golden Age, of course....
Says the person who uses arabic numerals instead of the more cultured roman ones.
Except, of course, that the name is somewhat of a misnomer; since they actually come from India, and are known as "Hindu numbers" in the middle east.
Except that it leaves you stuck with javascript, while libmicrohttpd is in C, which means both much better performance, and access to some of the largest and best-tested libraries in the world to create the rest of your app. And, of course, C also allows you to embed perl, python, ruby, lua, tcl, and even, yes, javascript, in your app as well. Heck, even more than one of those, should you be so inclined. In fact, a C library opens you up to using just about any language you can imagine, compiled or interpreted.
Or skip having a separate, standalone server, and just embed libmicrohttpd directly in your app.
I'm finding trouble having sympathy for this guy.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the guy, yet I still think that accessing a public website should not be illegal. Which, unfortunately, is what they're trying to convict the asshole for. If being a jerkwad were a crime, there would be a whole lot more people in prison. But it is not, at least yet, actually a crime.
The question here is not, is this jerk sympathetic (he's not). The question is, should accessing a public website be considered a crime simply because the owner neglected to publicize the address? I admit that it's--maybe--not a black-and-white question, but I think it's pretty hard to argue that it should be.
AT&T wants to head off lawsuits for posting people's email addresses in public, so they obviously disagree. I'm not at all convinced they should get off scott-free for their ridiculous attempt to implement security through (mild) obscurity. Especially given how mild the obscurity was.
The issue here is not this one admittedly unpleasant defendant. The issue is the unfortunate precedent it will set if this jerk is forced to take the blame for AT&T's own stupidity.