My Rule for laptops: Never let them out of your sight, unless a friend is watching them for you.
I go to a cafe, I take my laptop to the bathroom when I have to go. I can leave my books, etc., but not the laptop.
Don't leave it on the seat of a car either. Easy to see and easy to get with just a broken window. (happened to me.) Put it in the trunk or take it with you.
That's why I have a light one. If it's light, you'll just carry it.
Hmmm. I think that maybe a male in your situation in high school or college would simply have disregarded the teacher and learned what he wanted to anyway.
Maybe women just need some sort of social approval or maybe they are more sensitive to social disapproval. Most hackers I know couldn't give a rat's ass whether a teacher "encouraged" them or not. It was like scratching an itch. They were going to scratch it and that was that. I know that was the case for me...
Dvorak really rocks. I learned it in college (7 years back) and it was tough, but I forced myself to learn it. Since then, I've converted at least 5 friends over to the D side.;)
I can still type querty if I have to, but I almost never have to anymore, unless I'm just showing someone something on their machine, and don't want to bother adding a new keyboard setting...
There's much much less movement of the fingers, so it's just a lot more comfortable in general...
Arrow keys in vi don't make any sense though.;) I've always used emacs, which is better since the key combos are not tied to the keyboard layout.
Re:Headline dissappointed me....
on
Lawyers In Space...
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"complex without good reason..."
Well, that's the problem. Most of the time, it becomes complex for very very good reasons, but neither you nor most people out there have the time to bother with those intricacies, so you don't see the reasons...
This is similar to a situation many of us as developers are familiar with -- you come into a new project, see the code, and it seems waaay too complex for what it's doing. Your initial reaction is always to junk it and rewrite everything.
Then you start looking at the comments (if there are any) and you see that there's a bug in apple's font rendering code, etc., ad nauseum... In the end, maybe most of the complexity has to be there, and the best you can hope for is to modularize it or compartmentalize it.
The law is similar. This is why our common law system is so smart. It allows us to start with simple rules or statutes, to which the courts slowly add special cases, clarifications, and exceptions, so that the underlying intent and goals of the law are achieved.
Lawyers nitpick over these complexities, but if the complexities weren't there, a lot of people would be worse off.
Sure, sometimes things get overly arcane and complex, and need to be fixed, but generally, it works, and it's a good system.
Electronica sounds lame because the labels invented it and tried to market all sorts of non-electronic stuff under it, since they thought what we really wanted to hear was guitar like everybody else, with a little synthesized voice in the back... argh.
I've listened to strictly electronic music since about '93 or so... Trance rocks for coding. I'm sure you'll all agree.
BTW, itunes store has crap for electronic music...
RIAA: Ok, guys, we know a bunch of your students are serving boatloads of music. How about a deal?
School: Yeah, we know they're doing it. We can't stop them. But since it looks crappy for our students to be sued all the time, ok, we'll go for a deal... if you make it sweet for us...
But you fail to mention that what you can legally get away with _is_ based on ethics.
The RIAA has valid claims against a lot of students, under our copyright law, passed by our representatives. If you have a problem with the law or the process, that's one thing. But for a company to settle a suit because they have a valid claim under the law is not unethical. To exercise their rights under the law is not unethical.
Now, people saying they want to choose how to spend their own money have a good point. Presumably, they'd rather go to a university that doesn't do this, and leave it up to the RIAA to target individual students. If most students prefer this route, many universities will go that way, but they also have to consider the possibility that they'll look bad when their students get sued...
No, the people are not the real owners, even in a 'natural law' sense. If I compose a song, I don't have to give it to _anyone_. That is real ownership. Creators of content always have absolute discretion as to whether they will reveal their content.
So if we didn't give them broader ownership, most of them would charge an exorbitant price for their work, but could only sell it once. Surely in this situation, the buyer would have an impossible time making his money back, since as soon as he started to sell it, it would be copied ad infinitum.
So, yes, legally, you are right, but at a deeper level, you are wrong.
(I'm not a lawyer, just a law student. This is not legal advice. Don't rely on it as such.)
First, you're right that you can't contract out of criminal law.
Second, you can contract out of civil law, most of the time. The issue here is that it's not 'theft' if two parties agree to something. The only issue is whether the contract itself is valid...
FYI, legal settlements are basically contracts wherein the plaintiff promises not to sue over a civil offense, in return for stuff...
In the case of property though, we have the concept of title, so a contractual promise not to sue over use of property is not the same thing as granting title to the property. You can still do it though, imho...;)
With patents, I believe license agreements run with the patent, so sale of a patent to a 3rd party binds the 3rd party to any previously existing promises not to sue...
1. You can't fight supply and demand. Just because you're smart or do hard work doesn't mean you necessarily make cash.
2. You can characterize them as vultures, or you can view their fees as an incentive for overcoming the huge transaction costs of bringing together a large number of potentially harmed investors, and developing and presenting a convincing argument, based on the evidence, statutory law, and synthesis of numerous decisions in past cases.
3. As you surely know from recent corporate scandals, any corporation may deceive its investors, and those investors should have legal remedies. This is the same thing that happens to every other company that presents some potential evidence of deceit. People want to know whether they're being screwed.
4. Law suits, along with the glacial democratic process, are the only real check against corporate abuse.
I'm an IP law student... Japan doesn't use juries either, and although they have other problems, it's more efficient and probably fair enough.
It seems to be the general opinion among IP lawyers that it's tough for juries to understand, and they usually are unpredictable, sometimes downright clueless.
I think I read an AIPLA statement recently that came out in support of dropping juries for patent cases, but I can't find it now...
Yes, doing it in realtime would probably be silly.
I'd probably implement this as a logging mechanism, storing usage stats. Later, you could take that data and recompile or reconfigure periodically. But you might still be able to put some learning algorithms such as simulated annealing or neural nets to good use on this problem...
It would likely not be worth it to do something like that in realtime, _except_ maybe for a server app. I could see maybe some servers benefiting from this if they periodically changed roles, e.g. from a supernode on a p2p network to a regular node, or somesuch...
You're right -- that's the argument he's making. I agree with it though, to some extent.
IMHO, there are a lot of porky government programs that start out with good wishes, and just end up destroying a market because they remove all competition by making something too cheap through government subsidies...
Here's my idea:
Use machine learning to figure out the most-often-used code paths, and thereby allow users to optimize their browsers by removing or unloading from memory the least-needed functions, or rearranging the code to allow fastest access to those functions...
Maybe you could still leave stubs in the UI so that code could be dynamically loaded if someone eventually decided to use something they rarely used.
A self-optimizing browser that sheds the code you don't give a crap about. Now that would rock.
Translation: Software manufacturers CLAIM $29bn in losses due to piracy.
Sure. Fine.
... Translation: We assume that 100% of all people running pirated software would have paid full retail had they not found it for less in some other venue.
And should we assume that none of them would? Or that the price wouldn't be lowered? There is such a thing as supply and demand, even for software, unless people break the law.
...Translation: We also assume that 100% of all piracy is via peer-to-peer networks.
p2p networks have made piracy accessible to aolers. Previously, it was only accessible to the small number of geeks on IRC who traded for ftp sites.
...Translation: Sure sucks to be us.
Or the programmers who work for any of us. I actually tend to think that a legal copyright regime (that's not for overly long terms) is a good thing, as it allows us to make money from more types of software work. This is a good effect, not a bad one.
...Translation: Places with excruciatingly low per-capita incomes, for some reason don't want to spend the equivalent of a years salary for a substantially defective product.
No, they don't. But this is beside the point. If they don't want to pay, they shouldn't get the good. It's a quid pro quo, my friend. I don't write software for people unless they pay me. If they won't pay, I will reduce the price until (1) they're willing to pay, or (2) I don't make anything, so I give it up.
...Translation: I bet governments in these places are cheap.
Actually, the translation should be that U.S. businesses want to get paid for their software. Incredible concept....
...Translation: Poor people don't buy software.
Again, you leave out the important point that they get it anyway. Capitalism is about trade. How can there be a trade if there's widespread piracy? And again, I think there should be a trade. Getting the software without paying, when a company only offers it for a cost, is unfair. Some legitimate companies that would make money cannot survive then....
...Translation: The best way for Asian governments to improve their IT sector is to ship major amounts of capital to Poughkeepsie, Redmond and Cupertino.
The point here is being missed. The point is that if asian economies want to succeed selling software, they will have to protect their own software companies against piracy. This will also benefit foreign software companies.
...Translation: We are pleased with our rent-to-own program with these governments.
Yes, no sane government would want to develop a software industry, because copyright law is required for it to work the way it works in the U.S., and copyright law is evil, right? Therefore, the only way to convince them is through bribes? Actually, I think you'll be surprised to find that, even though the U.S. is pressuring asian economies to strengthen IP laws, they'll do it themselves as soon as a few nascent software companies there start to clamor for it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a great opportunity for companies that actually value their workers.
Caterpillar is one such company, and they're making bank. Their workers love the company, and their lives.
So if everyone starts beating the shit out of each other, i guess we should get rid of the assault and battery laws...
My Rule for laptops: Never let them out of your sight, unless a friend is watching them for you. I go to a cafe, I take my laptop to the bathroom when I have to go. I can leave my books, etc., but not the laptop. Don't leave it on the seat of a car either. Easy to see and easy to get with just a broken window. (happened to me.) Put it in the trunk or take it with you. That's why I have a light one. If it's light, you'll just carry it.
All you have to do is have one rule: pay it off every month.
My way to handle it? I have an American Express card, and that was my only card in college.
No limit, but you _have_ to pay it off every month. No exceptions. Get that card and you'll be golden.
especially for math.
"There's already few places on the web..."
^^
should be
"There're already a few places on the web..."
Distinguishing between 'is' and 'are' is not that hard.
Hmmm. I think that maybe a male in your situation in high school or college would simply have disregarded the teacher and learned what he wanted to anyway.
Maybe women just need some sort of social approval or maybe they are more sensitive to social disapproval. Most hackers I know couldn't give a rat's ass whether a teacher "encouraged" them or not. It was like scratching an itch. They were going to scratch it and that was that. I know that was the case for me...
Dvorak really rocks. I learned it in college (7 years back) and it was tough, but I forced myself to learn it. Since then, I've converted at least 5 friends over to the D side. ;)
;) I've always used emacs, which is better since the key combos are not tied to the keyboard layout.
I can still type querty if I have to, but I almost never have to anymore, unless I'm just showing someone something on their machine, and don't want to bother adding a new keyboard setting...
There's much much less movement of the fingers, so it's just a lot more comfortable in general...
Arrow keys in vi don't make any sense though.
"complex without good reason..."
Well, that's the problem. Most of the time, it becomes complex for very very good reasons, but neither you nor most people out there have the time to bother with those intricacies, so you don't see the reasons...
This is similar to a situation many of us as developers are familiar with -- you come into a new project, see the code, and it seems waaay too complex for what it's doing. Your initial reaction is always to junk it and rewrite everything.
Then you start looking at the comments (if there are any) and you see that there's a bug in apple's font rendering code, etc., ad nauseum... In the end, maybe most of the complexity has to be there, and the best you can hope for is to modularize it or compartmentalize it.
The law is similar. This is why our common law system is so smart. It allows us to start with simple rules or statutes, to which the courts slowly add special cases, clarifications, and exceptions, so that the underlying intent and goals of the law are achieved.
Lawyers nitpick over these complexities, but if the complexities weren't there, a lot of people would be worse off.
Sure, sometimes things get overly arcane and complex, and need to be fixed, but generally, it works, and it's a good system.
Right. If someone wants to do something, and the only way they can do it is illegal, they have no choice but to break the law?
Rethink that and call me in the morning.
Electronica sounds lame because the labels invented it and tried to market all sorts of non-electronic stuff under it, since they thought what we really wanted to hear was guitar like everybody else, with a little synthesized voice in the back... argh.
I've listened to strictly electronic music since about '93 or so... Trance rocks for coding. I'm sure you'll all agree.
BTW, itunes store has crap for electronic music...
Here's how it probably goes:
RIAA: Ok, guys, we know a bunch of your students are serving boatloads of music. How about a deal?
School: Yeah, we know they're doing it. We can't stop them. But since it looks crappy for our students to be sued all the time, ok, we'll go for a deal... if you make it sweet for us...
[negotiations]
But you fail to mention that what you can legally get away with _is_ based on ethics.
The RIAA has valid claims against a lot of students, under our copyright law, passed by our representatives. If you have a problem with the law or the process, that's one thing. But for a company to settle a suit because they have a valid claim under the law is not unethical. To exercise their rights under the law is not unethical.
Now, people saying they want to choose how to spend their own money have a good point. Presumably, they'd rather go to a university that doesn't do this, and leave it up to the RIAA to target individual students. If most students prefer this route, many universities will go that way, but they also have to consider the possibility that they'll look bad when their students get sued...
Right. He said that where?
Dude. All he said was that it "would be really terrible" not to have an increase after such a crappy 2003 showing.
No, the people are not the real owners, even in a 'natural law' sense. If I compose a song, I don't have to give it to _anyone_. That is real ownership. Creators of content always have absolute discretion as to whether they will reveal their content.
So if we didn't give them broader ownership, most of them would charge an exorbitant price for their work, but could only sell it once. Surely in this situation, the buyer would have an impossible time making his money back, since as soon as he started to sell it, it would be copied ad infinitum.
So, yes, legally, you are right, but at a deeper level, you are wrong.
That would be bukkake...
^^
BTW, this isn't actually funny.
(I'm not a lawyer, just a law student. This is not legal advice. Don't rely on it as such.)
;)
First, you're right that you can't contract out of criminal law.
Second, you can contract out of civil law, most of the time. The issue here is that it's not 'theft' if two parties agree to something. The only issue is whether the contract itself is valid...
FYI, legal settlements are basically contracts wherein the plaintiff promises not to sue over a civil offense, in return for stuff...
In the case of property though, we have the concept of title, so a contractual promise not to sue over use of property is not the same thing as granting title to the property. You can still do it though, imho...
With patents, I believe license agreements run with the patent, so sale of a patent to a 3rd party binds the 3rd party to any previously existing promises not to sue...
1. You can't fight supply and demand. Just because you're smart or do hard work doesn't mean you necessarily make cash. 2. You can characterize them as vultures, or you can view their fees as an incentive for overcoming the huge transaction costs of bringing together a large number of potentially harmed investors, and developing and presenting a convincing argument, based on the evidence, statutory law, and synthesis of numerous decisions in past cases. 3. As you surely know from recent corporate scandals, any corporation may deceive its investors, and those investors should have legal remedies. This is the same thing that happens to every other company that presents some potential evidence of deceit. People want to know whether they're being screwed. 4. Law suits, along with the glacial democratic process, are the only real check against corporate abuse.
I'm an IP law student... Japan doesn't use juries either, and although they have other problems, it's more efficient and probably fair enough.
It seems to be the general opinion among IP lawyers that it's tough for juries to understand, and they usually are unpredictable, sometimes downright clueless.
I think I read an AIPLA statement recently that came out in support of dropping juries for patent cases, but I can't find it now...
Yes, doing it in realtime would probably be silly.
I'd probably implement this as a logging mechanism, storing usage stats. Later, you could take that data and recompile or reconfigure periodically. But you might still be able to put some learning algorithms such as simulated annealing or neural nets to good use on this problem...
It would likely not be worth it to do something like that in realtime, _except_ maybe for a server app. I could see maybe some servers benefiting from this if they periodically changed roles, e.g. from a supernode on a p2p network to a regular node, or somesuch...
You're right -- that's the argument he's making. I agree with it though, to some extent.
IMHO, there are a lot of porky government programs that start out with good wishes, and just end up destroying a market because they remove all competition by making something too cheap through government subsidies...
Here's my idea: Use machine learning to figure out the most-often-used code paths, and thereby allow users to optimize their browsers by removing or unloading from memory the least-needed functions, or rearranging the code to allow fastest access to those functions... Maybe you could still leave stubs in the UI so that code could be dynamically loaded if someone eventually decided to use something they rarely used. A self-optimizing browser that sheds the code you don't give a crap about. Now that would rock.
Yep. :)
Only a longer-term trend could provide anything to rely on here...
Sure. Fine.
And should we assume that none of them would? Or that the price wouldn't be lowered? There is such a thing as supply and demand, even for software, unless people break the law.
p2p networks have made piracy accessible to aolers. Previously, it was only accessible to the small number of geeks on IRC who traded for ftp sites.
Or the programmers who work for any of us. I actually tend to think that a legal copyright regime (that's not for overly long terms) is a good thing, as it allows us to make money from more types of software work. This is a good effect, not a bad one.
No, they don't. But this is beside the point. If they don't want to pay, they shouldn't get the good. It's a quid pro quo, my friend. I don't write software for people unless they pay me. If they won't pay, I will reduce the price until (1) they're willing to pay, or (2) I don't make anything, so I give it up.
Actually, the translation should be that U.S. businesses want to get paid for their software. Incredible concept.
Again, you leave out the important point that they get it anyway. Capitalism is about trade. How can there be a trade if there's widespread piracy? And again, I think there should be a trade. Getting the software without paying, when a company only offers it for a cost, is unfair. Some legitimate companies that would make money cannot survive then.
The point here is being missed. The point is that if asian economies want to succeed selling software, they will have to protect their own software companies against piracy. This will also benefit foreign software companies.
Yes, no sane government would want to develop a software industry, because copyright law is required for it to work the way it works in the U.S., and copyright law is evil, right? Therefore, the only way to convince them is through bribes? Actually, I think you'll be surprised to find that, even though the U.S. is pressuring asian economies to strengthen IP laws, they'll do it themselves as soon as a few nascent software companies there start to clamor for it.
Yes, but in this case, the copying is tied to the lack of payment. You can only get the file without paying by copying it.