I'm not sure where the idea came from that aesthetic quality is the measure of constitutionally protected speech. Whether or not code is or can be beautiful is not at issue. All that matters is that, in addition to providing instructions for a machine, it can (and does) function as a means of communication . If source code were not intended to communicate it would not contain comments or use actual words (e.g., if, until, include, etc.).
I would think those who claim source code does not constitute protected speech have the difficult case to make. Unfortunately, most people (including judges) don't understand the difference between code and software. In essence, they argue that software doesn't constitute speech (and I don't really have an opinion on that one way or another) without really knowing what source code is.
Would people argue that sheet music is not speech? After all, it's just a set of instructions most people don't understand.
Braille terminals have been around for quite some time, as have screen "readers" that use speech synthesis. The easiest (and best) way to make pages accessible to the blind is to make them easily navigable with lynx.
It's AOL's choice as to which consumers they support
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice." Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out. I'm surprised it took this long for a lawsuit.
It's AOL's choice as to which consumers they support
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice. Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out.
No. I'm someone who doesn't take an artist seriously if his paintings suck. Good argument requires some skill. Someone who writes an argumentative piece and has no rhetorical skill risks not being taken seriously. Mr. Parish claims he's not being taken seriously because of a conspiracy to silence him; I'm suggesting he's not being taken seriously because his prose makes him sound like a "kook." So my suggestion was, he should get help from someone who knows how to turn a big tub of data into a concise and convincing argument, one that's free from attempts at self-promotion (like plugging his business in the FAQ) and ad hominem bluster (that's like when you call someone a "arrogant fuck" and then say something that doesn't really make sense). Then he might get the attention he claims to deserve.
I agree (re. paranoid rant). Fact is, even if the author is correct in all his particulars, his argument is not credible because of his lack of basic rhetorical skill. Rather than coming across as a meticulous, objective fact-finder, he sounds like a self-promoting lunatic. Suggestions like "invite me to appear on your talk show" and personal digs like the following message to Steve Ballmer really make the whole argument look specious:
To Steve Ballmer I would say, perhaps we could have a brief discussion regarding some ways to manage this situation. By now it should be clear that farming me off to your legal staff was not a good decision.
If Mr. Parish's research is solid and his facts are credible, he needs to work with a real writer to help him get the word out. As it stands, he's his own worst enemy.
I'm not sure I follow you're argument. Are you saying Windows is unstable because it supports more hardware (i.e., has more drivers)? If so, how come machines with dual boot will run great under Linux (all the hardware pinging along just fine) but crash daily under Windows? I've had this experience time and again, as I know many others have.
I'll concede your point that this announcement was not as bad as it could have been. But we should really hold corporations to a certain degree of truth and frankness. If a Pinto explodes when hit from behind and Ford says "you may have heard about some service issues with one of our vehicles that raised some quesitons about safety; we assure you we've fixed it" we wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) stand for it. They need to release specifics about the problem and how they fixed it.
It would be absurd to suggest MS should say "we suck." In fact, that would be just as bad because it would still obscure (or at least not reveal) the facts. At the very least, they should have a link from the PR letter to a technical description of the problem and exactly what steps they took to fix it.
If consumers don't hold corporations to standards of disclosure, corporations will continue to evade and obscure responsibility.
If my Ford got stolen in this manner, sure, I'd be mad at the thief and want him caught and prosecuted. But I'd also be mad as hell if I found out the theft was due to oversight on Ford's part that made it simple to circumvent the car's security.
Right. And to take a step further, if you didn't own a Ford but had lots of friends who did, you'd want to tell them. And if you're a responsible person and not just a grandstanding rumor-monger, you'd go to your neighbor's house first (he has a Ford) and the two of you would "break in" to his Ford to see for yourself how it's done so you could give your friends accurate information.
I add this because I'm responsible to a large user base, many of whom use services like Hotmail. When I read the story, I felt obligated to do at least a little research before sending out the alarm. So my friend and I "broke in" to his Hotmail account. Was that illegal? Oh, come on! The problem with some kind of "Big Brother" database like AC suggested is, it wouldn't differentiate between malicious cracking and what I consider responsible behavior.
I think anything short of full disclosure in a situation like this is insulting. It's clear from the exploit that a "back door" was designed into the system; the "crack" was that someone simply "leaked" the argument string to open it. For all we know, their "fix" was to change the backdoor password from "eh" to "he." I think a corporation has a responsibility to say exactly what happened, why it happened, and what they did specifically to fix the problem. Pretending that the system suffered a little glitch but it's all better now just doesn't cut it.
I'm guessing Harvard was referring to the "Back Orifice 2000" ad. Notice, they didn't say "sexually explicit"; they said "sexually related." Though I'm not particularly offended by it, I wouldn't want the banner on the college site I maintain.
I've never had trouble finding information on how to get things running better on a PC -- even going back to the dark ages of '94 when I first started running Linux. It looks to me like the issue is these huge "enterprise" machines (which seem to have been invented to keep NT from sucking so bad).
In an ideal universe, the people actually running Linux (or SAMBA, Apache, etc.) on these big boxes should "repay" the community by contributing documentation on tuning in an enterprise context. Unfortunately, most of us who are interested in "giving back" can't afford the hardware, and I suspect that altruism is not a high priority for the mostly big companies who would run such boxes.
What's more, there is nothing in GPL that prevents people from selling their free software. In the early days after he left MIT AI lab, Richard Stallman supported himself and later FSF by selling copies of emacs for US$150 each.
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I'm not sure where the idea came from that aesthetic quality is the measure of constitutionally protected speech. Whether or not code is or can be beautiful is not at issue. All that matters is that, in addition to providing instructions for a machine, it can (and does) function as a means of communication . If source code were not intended to communicate it would not contain comments or use actual words (e.g., if, until, include, etc.).
I would think those who claim source code does not constitute protected speech have the difficult case to make. Unfortunately, most people (including judges) don't understand the difference between code and software. In essence, they argue that software doesn't constitute speech (and I don't really have an opinion on that one way or another) without really knowing what source code is.
Would people argue that sheet music is not speech? After all, it's just a set of instructions most people don't understand.
Braille terminals have been around for quite some time, as have screen "readers" that use speech synthesis. The easiest (and best) way to make pages accessible to the blind is to make them easily navigable with lynx.
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice." Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out. I'm surprised it took this long for a lawsuit.
That's exactly the kind of thinking that led to the Civil Rights movement and then the ADA. Store owers used to say "if I don't want black people in my store, that's my choice. Well, the Supreme Court saw it differently.
This whole attitude of "what are blind people doing on the Web" is just ridiculous. It's like saying people in wheel chairs shouldn't be allowed on the bus because it takes them too long to get on. As it turns out, the computer industry used to be one of the primary sources of employment for blind professionals before the advent of GUI started freezing them out.
No. I'm someone who doesn't take an artist seriously if his paintings suck. Good argument requires some skill. Someone who writes an argumentative piece and has no rhetorical skill risks not being taken seriously. Mr. Parish claims he's not being taken seriously because of a conspiracy to silence him; I'm suggesting he's not being taken seriously because his prose makes him sound like a "kook." So my suggestion was, he should get help from someone who knows how to turn a big tub of data into a concise and convincing argument, one that's free from attempts at self-promotion (like plugging his business in the FAQ) and ad hominem bluster (that's like when you call someone a "arrogant fuck" and then say something that doesn't really make sense). Then he might get the attention he claims to deserve.
I'm not sure I follow you're argument. Are you saying Windows is unstable because it supports more hardware (i.e., has more drivers)? If so, how come machines with dual boot will run great under Linux (all the hardware pinging along just fine) but crash daily under Windows? I've had this experience time and again, as I know many others have.
It would be absurd to suggest MS should say "we suck." In fact, that would be just as bad because it would still obscure (or at least not reveal) the facts. At the very least, they should have a link from the PR letter to a technical description of the problem and exactly what steps they took to fix it.
If consumers don't hold corporations to standards of disclosure, corporations will continue to evade and obscure responsibility.
Right. And to take a step further, if you didn't own a Ford but had lots of friends who did, you'd want to tell them. And if you're a responsible person and not just a grandstanding rumor-monger, you'd go to your neighbor's house first (he has a Ford) and the two of you would "break in" to his Ford to see for yourself how it's done so you could give your friends accurate information.
I add this because I'm responsible to a large user base, many of whom use services like Hotmail. When I read the story, I felt obligated to do at least a little research before sending out the alarm. So my friend and I "broke in" to his Hotmail account. Was that illegal? Oh, come on! The problem with some kind of "Big Brother" database like AC suggested is, it wouldn't differentiate between malicious cracking and what I consider responsible behavior.
I think anything short of full disclosure in a situation like this is insulting. It's clear from the exploit that a "back door" was designed into the system; the "crack" was that someone simply "leaked" the argument string to open it. For all we know, their "fix" was to change the backdoor password from "eh" to "he." I think a corporation has a responsibility to say exactly what happened, why it happened, and what they did specifically to fix the problem. Pretending that the system suffered a little glitch but it's all better now just doesn't cut it.
I'm guessing Harvard was referring to the "Back Orifice 2000" ad. Notice, they didn't say "sexually explicit"; they said "sexually related." Though I'm not particularly offended by it, I wouldn't want the banner on the college site I maintain.
I've never had trouble finding information on how to get things running better on a PC -- even going back to the dark ages of '94 when I first started running Linux. It looks to me like the issue is these huge "enterprise" machines (which seem to have been invented to keep NT from sucking so bad).
In an ideal universe, the people actually running Linux (or SAMBA, Apache, etc.) on these big boxes should "repay" the community by contributing documentation on tuning in an enterprise context. Unfortunately, most of us who are interested in "giving back" can't afford the hardware, and I suspect that altruism is not a high priority for the mostly big companies who would run such boxes.
What's more, there is nothing in GPL that prevents people from selling their free software. In the early days after he left MIT AI lab, Richard Stallman supported himself and later FSF by selling copies of emacs for US$150 each.
... and I'd rather he grow up gay than grow up listening to idiots like Jerry Falwell.