Yes, this is correct. And I should clarify. I used the word 'publisher' above, but I should have just said defendant to avoid the complicated cases...;)
Although that site is a decent summary, it misses a lot. One point in particular that I'd like to clarify from your post is the issue of truth.
Truth is a possible defense to defamation, meaning that the burden of proving truth is on the _publisher_ of the statements in question. This means that if you write something on slashdot defaming me, and I sue you, and I show that it's more likely than not defamatory (which is a big issue in itself), YOU must then prove what you said is true in order to get off.
So to say that "libel requires your statements to be false" is misleading... the better statement would be "if you can prove your statements are true, you will probably not be liable for libel/slander."
Now, the issues of defamation per se, per quod, issues of public officials / figures versus private parties and the actual malice or reckless indifference to truth distinctions are quite complicated... unfortunately more than I can explain here.
But one interesting case you might want to check out is Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997), in which an anonymous party posted offers to sell distasteful t-shirts about the Oklahoma bombing, giving Zeran's name. AOL failed to timely remove the posts after Zeran's repeated requests, and eventually got off (should they have?). But Zeran was seriously harmed and had no recourse against the poster due to his anonymity.
Here's a quote:
...Zeran was inundated with death threats and other violent calls... [Over 2 weeks later,] after an Oklahoma City newspaper published a story exposing the shirt advertisements as a hoax and after KRXO made an on-air apology, the number of calls to Zeran's residence finally subsided to fifteen per day...
These are the sorts of things that we don't usually have a problem with in the real world, because it's much harder to be anonymous. Think about whether you really want total anonymity for those who would harm you. I don't think I do.
I am now nearing the end of my first year of law school. I studied CS at Carnegie Mellon and graduated in '98.
I can assure all of you that law is insane. It is very very hard and a ton of work. I suggest you go check out Vosburg v. Putney, the first case we read in Torts. Walk in the door, and you're going to read this case. You will have no frigging idea what's going on. I certainly didn't...
Here's how it goes. You read 30-60 pages of stuff like this, go into class, and the prof grills you about what this case means. What is battery? What should it be? What is right? What is wrong? Where do we draw lines, and how do we? Can we?
I might read English on this thing, but if you know Japanese, you can see from the pictures that the resolution is still crap compared to paper.
I read almost all my news online, but almost never read sites in Japanese, unless they use flash, because the resolution is just too horrible. You can see from the photos that even a not-so-complex kanji like 'yami' starts to become jumbled together on this thing.
Japanese paper printing technology is second to none on the planet. I'm still going to prefer printed Japanese for a long long time (at least 5 years;).
It's clear to me why you wrote this post from a subjective standpoint -- I thought the same way when I was 20. Even when I was 24. I don't think the same way now at 28.
Why? Because I've seen through experience that (1) most people can't learn the hard CS stuff, and (2) 95% of projects don't require it. The sad fact is that "Computer Science" is only really applicable to solving "hard problems", writing compilers, designing languages, or to AI and its kin. It is in general, not applicable to business applications.
It used to be, but what happened? Computers got faster. Here's the progression in my career...
Kudos for optimizing memory management and speed in C/C++, or even assembler.
Questioning the need for such optimizations and pushing profiling before such work if it would take a significant amount of time
Questioning the need for ever doing optimization, questioning the value of low-level languages.
Pushing high-level languages (web-based solutions / VB) for everything unless a clear need exists.
Sending everything to India.
This just wouldn't work unless most apps simply didn't need the work that we as computer scientists want to put into them. Knuth is a perfect example -- he spent years and years getting TeX perfect just so he could see his books typeset perfectly. We have that sort of perfectionist bent.
But it's all driven by money in the end, unless you're in academia, or research... A very few people are in positions doing both technically hard stuff and making money for it. These would be like Wolfram Research, google, some game companies (although I hear they're sweatshops, but what isn't nowadays?)...
In the end, you're correct that a lot of hard problems can only be handled by people trained in CS. These would be the things mentioned, along with parallelism, threading, and optimization issues... But it's also true that most of the products out there don't need these. We're sifting these categories apart now, and unfortunately, it's just a fact that not much yummy stuff is left.
But when you have garbage collection, a raging fast machine, and graphical IDE's, even if someone puts crappy code together, as long as they make a decent API, it's going to work after they try to compile it half a million times.
Firstly, the rhetoric about litigiousness is hype. The rhetoric about overly high damage awards however, describes a real problem.
Secondly, there is a trade-off between innovation in law and the loser-pays system. It's recognized that novel legal approaches are rarely taken in countries where the loser pays. It just makes sense that not only those with poor cases, but also those with good cases based on new interpretations or new law will be wary of bringing suit in such a system.
The U.S. is the only common law country without a loser-pays rule, but it is also recognized that such legal innovation, when eventually adopted in other common law countries, usually happens here first due to this issue.
Well, actually, it does harm the holder of the copyright in fact, even if not for profit, because it reduces the value of the product, just like counterfeiting money reduces the value of money.
True, though, if there is no remedy in the person's home country, he hasn't done anything wrong in that country, while he may still have done something wrong in the U.S. In this case, his country will probably not want to extradite him, and they have that prerogative.
criminalizing some code-breaking => math is a crime.
Obviously, that's an over-generalization. Only some math is a crime, and it's because doing some types of math can actually harm someone else. You're living in the myth that something as seemingly 'pure' as math could never cause a problem. That's just not true... Every type of expression may cause harm in some cases, and in such cases it may become a crime or a tort...
why should we be arrested and extradited for laws of other countries if we broke none in our own? (And have never stepped foot in the other country even) That would be like arresting all those downloading pr0n and extraditing them to Iran or something because it violates Islamic laws of decency...
The example you give is something that wouldn't directly harm people or companies in the U.S. Here, someone probably brought suit (copyright owner) in the U.S. claiming that he was harmed by this Australian citizen. U.S. jurisdiction could make sense if the harm was centered on a U.S. company. Now, if it's a criminal case, that doesn't make as much sense, but if it's a tort case, it probably does.
Think about the alternative -- why should the company have to go to Australia or anywhere else and petition their courts and follow their laws simply because some punk pirated their stuff over there? In this case, it probably makes more sense to handle the case where the harm occurred, which is in the company, which is in the U.S....
Although it's maybe a "harsh" result, I think when you get on the net, you have the potential to harm a lot of people all over the world, and if you intentionally pirate a foreign company's goods, you run the risk that your government will serve you up to the foreign government.
Your government probably won't do that if they don't consider your act as having actually harmed the foreign party, but if they do, they may extradite you even though they have slightly different law on the subject...
"free registration" parethetical???
on
In Google We Trust
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why the heck does every slashdot story linking to a free registration required site put it in a parenthetical after the link?
1) don't we figure it out after clicking it anyway?
2) who cares?
3) does this imply some disdain for free registration, even though it is part of the site's business model (i.e. making money)?
4) Isn't the endless repetition of these little phrases DISTRACTING and ANNOYING??!
sure, if there were a big benevolent dictator in the sky that could decide what "should" be done with the money...
Paraphrasing Socrates, you had better figure out that you don't know much. None of us does. Thus, the only way that we figure out is through competition. In the marketplace, in ideas, in biological evolution, in almost every area.
This is just part of that market competition. It may seem wasteful because the amounts are high. But what you aren't seeing is that they are fighting to determine the efficient outcome at a larger scale...
Don't always jump to conclusions based on the title or summary description of a patent.
This is probably better read as "a certain type of electronic camera utilizing a certain type of image compression together with a certain type of digital storage"...
There is absolutely nothing here that could lead you to criticize the entire patent system... aggh...
This is false. If it's a hardware solution, built into the chips, there's not going to be much you can do, at least for software. Music, etc., you can maybe get output to analog and copy...
"Property" does not mean the same thing to lawyers as it does in the common vernacular.
To a lawyer, property does not mean "physical objects." It is purely a "bundle of rights" enforced by the government for many historical and philosophical reasons. "Real property", i.e. land, is not what you think it is. It is a set of rights in land, but not all possible rights. For instance, you may not have the right to maintain extremely hazardous items or conditions on your land. You do not have the absolute right to keep people off your land. If someone uses part of your land for long enough, they may obtain a prescriptive easement on your land, a right to use it for certain well-defined purposes in a well-defined area.
You may split your "property" into time-limited interests, or defeasible interests, which may be divested automatically from the holder upon the occurrence of a specified condition.
There are tons of issues with real property that are not what they seem to the average person. The point is that real property is just a bunch of rights enforced by the government. Intellectual property is the same thing. We also refer to "property rights" or "property rules" in law in relation to our own bodies and what we may/may not do, or with respect to all sorts of other interactions...
So the moniker, in my opinion, makes perfect sense when you understand how it is meant to be used. It is a legal term... it's just like when a physicist uses the word "momentum" or "force"... You might say their usage is "misleading", but that would be a strange position in my opinion. Rather, they are using the terms in a more specific manner that is more useful and meaningful within the context of their field.
Re:Piers Anthony advocates DRM
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
unfortunately, for every person willing to pay for that free-format version, there are probably far more who would douwload it via p2p or share it...
It's very easy to be pro-free-everything until you have to make money from the thing. it's simple economics that most people will not pay for something that's free. i would be willing to bet that the vast majority of people on slashdot that advocate no DRM make their money (1) from their parents, (2) from contracting for one-off software, (3) from IT services, or (4) from software using some form of DRM, be it online activation, dongles, or other methods...
with books, the e-versions don't do all the same things for you that the paper versions do yet. what if you could download a paper version online and recreate it with a nano-assembler a la diamond age though? how many would buy a book if they could have the _exact_ same thing instantaneously for free...?
Do you even think about how many coders work for Microsoft? How many work for companies that depend on Microsoft technology? Do you think about the fact that people are busting their asses writing code, trying to make a living? Who cares about whether MS is full of crap or not? All companies have marketing. That's how business works.
You don't go and steal everything from a store just because the electricity goes out! It has repercussions! I have friends that work for Microsoft, and believe it or not, they are incredibly intelligent, honest, and good people. Each time you post a torrent link, you're helping to screw them.
You disgust me. This is NO DIFFERENT than a bunch of morons looting stores after a big game, just because they can... Can you possibly think that promoting these links on slashdot doesn't have a harmful effect? But you don't care about that. You just want to get your little jollies off thinking how neato it is that you can do something and a big corporation can't stop you.
I agree those things also have a marked effect, but I also still think that putting everyone in prison is one way to effectively lower crime rates. The fact that other approaches may achieve the same thing more easily doesn't mean that this won't actually work...
I also agree that the probability of being caught is probably the most important factor in deterrence, but reasonable minds can differ over the question as to what the deterrent effect of harsher sentences may be...:)
Actually, most 3rd party software that plays wma files probably does require the windows media COM objects. A lot of windows applications simply embed the browser or media player, rather than recoding it.
I would guess this would be a major pain for those applications -- the user would have to go and download windows media before they would work.
There are a number of theories as to why punishment is justified for crimes. Two of the major ones are utilitarian and retributive theories.
Utilitarianism has as its goal the maximization of wealth for the society as a whole. That's not just monetary wealth, but well-being in general. Under this theory, punishment is not related as much to the moral culpability of the criminal as under other theories -- it would justify punishing someone wrongly in order to pacify society as a whole.
Economic theorists believe in deterrence, but there's not a lot of evidence out there to show that harsher crimes actually deter well.
Retributive theorists see punishment as somehow correcting an imbalance between the criminal and the victim... not just revenge, but taking away a 'benefit' gained by the criminal by punishing him. There are a lot of arguments against this sort of theory... but it may be how many people intuitively see criminal justice.
There is also the idea of simple incapacitation as a rationale for punishment, when it's imprisonment, for instance. Some people believe that the drop in crime rates over the last 20-30 years has been mostly due to the increased use of prisons and the simple incapacitative effect it has on crime.
All of these factors enter into criminal justice, and people argue about which rationales are more important than the others, but one thing is pretty clear -- we don't believe so strongly in deterrence that we're willing to forgo the requirement of moral culpability in the criminal, and punish him anyway for deterrence. In most cases, we require that he actually know he did something wrong in order to justify punishment.
Of course, this is just talking about punishment, not about ex ante modes of deterrence like cameras...
I agree to some extent, but it depends on what you mean.
The trend in programming from tougher to easier has been slowly occurring ever since the beginning. First it was hardware to assembler, then assembler to C... Now it's C++ to.NET.
Since you guys are mostly unix people, let me tell you how insane.NET is. It's insane. The amount of automatic code generation is staggering. Automatic generation of stored procedures. Automatic generation of data object models. Automatic generation of all UI code -- just drag and drop -- although this has been there for a while with VB... Automatic XML schema generation. And on and on...
I was a very very good C++ coder. I *knew* my job was going to go away someday, regardless of the expensive seminars that Herb Sutter et al. rake in the cash for. Those guys are plying a dying art. So few people ever even tried to understand the vagueries of proper exception handling in C++ before bailing and moving to Java or VB or C#, because it's just too damn hard. I knew the differences between char arrays, stl strings, BSTR's, _bstr_t's, and CComBSTR's like the back of my hand, but it was just way overly complicated. Some things like STL generic programming constructs are not overly complicated per se, but are too difficult for the average programmer to wield properly, and therefore the return on time investment is low...
So, will you be surprised at what I'm going to say next? These are the reasons why Americans have to think really hard about strong intellectual property protections for our future. IP is at least one of the things that will help us get over this change. Let me rephrase: the ability to maintain the rights to our innovations, to make money from them by taking advantage of cheap overseas labor such as mentioned here, is key to our continued growth. None of our creative work can be protected from outright appropriation by e.g. Chinese startups, without strongly enforced intellectual property rights...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is correct. And I should clarify. I used the word 'publisher' above, but I should have just said defendant to avoid the complicated cases... ;)
Truth is a possible defense to defamation, meaning that the burden of proving truth is on the _publisher_ of the statements in question. This means that if you write something on slashdot defaming me, and I sue you, and I show that it's more likely than not defamatory (which is a big issue in itself), YOU must then prove what you said is true in order to get off.
So to say that "libel requires your statements to be false" is misleading... the better statement would be "if you can prove your statements are true, you will probably not be liable for libel/slander."
Now, the issues of defamation per se, per quod, issues of public officials / figures versus private parties and the actual malice or reckless indifference to truth distinctions are quite complicated... unfortunately more than I can explain here.
But one interesting case you might want to check out is Zeran v. America Online, Inc., 129 F.3d 327 (4th Cir. 1997), in which an anonymous party posted offers to sell distasteful t-shirts about the Oklahoma bombing, giving Zeran's name. AOL failed to timely remove the posts after Zeran's repeated requests, and eventually got off (should they have?). But Zeran was seriously harmed and had no recourse against the poster due to his anonymity.
Here's a quote:
These are the sorts of things that we don't usually have a problem with in the real world, because it's much harder to be anonymous. Think about whether you really want total anonymity for those who would harm you. I don't think I do.Hahaha... you're funny.
I am now nearing the end of my first year of law school. I studied CS at Carnegie Mellon and graduated in '98.
I can assure all of you that law is insane. It is very very hard and a ton of work. I suggest you go check out Vosburg v. Putney, the first case we read in Torts. Walk in the door, and you're going to read this case. You will have no frigging idea what's going on. I certainly didn't...
Here's how it goes. You read 30-60 pages of stuff like this, go into class, and the prof grills you about what this case means. What is battery? What should it be? What is right? What is wrong? Where do we draw lines, and how do we? Can we?
This is definitely not programming.
I might read English on this thing, but if you know Japanese, you can see from the pictures that the resolution is still crap compared to paper. I read almost all my news online, but almost never read sites in Japanese, unless they use flash, because the resolution is just too horrible. You can see from the photos that even a not-so-complex kanji like 'yami' starts to become jumbled together on this thing. Japanese paper printing technology is second to none on the planet. I'm still going to prefer printed Japanese for a long long time (at least 5 years ;).
Only Geeks. ;)
Why? Because I've seen through experience that (1) most people can't learn the hard CS stuff, and (2) 95% of projects don't require it. The sad fact is that "Computer Science" is only really applicable to solving "hard problems", writing compilers, designing languages, or to AI and its kin. It is in general, not applicable to business applications.
It used to be, but what happened? Computers got faster. Here's the progression in my career...
- Kudos for optimizing memory management and speed in C/C++, or even assembler.
- Questioning the need for such optimizations and pushing profiling before such work if it would take a significant amount of time
- Questioning the need for ever doing optimization, questioning the value of low-level languages.
- Pushing high-level languages (web-based solutions / VB) for everything unless a clear need exists.
- Sending everything to India.
This just wouldn't work unless most apps simply didn't need the work that we as computer scientists want to put into them. Knuth is a perfect example -- he spent years and years getting TeX perfect just so he could see his books typeset perfectly. We have that sort of perfectionist bent.But it's all driven by money in the end, unless you're in academia, or research... A very few people are in positions doing both technically hard stuff and making money for it. These would be like Wolfram Research, google, some game companies (although I hear they're sweatshops, but what isn't nowadays?)...
In the end, you're correct that a lot of hard problems can only be handled by people trained in CS. These would be the things mentioned, along with parallelism, threading, and optimization issues... But it's also true that most of the products out there don't need these. We're sifting these categories apart now, and unfortunately, it's just a fact that not much yummy stuff is left.
But when you have garbage collection, a raging fast machine, and graphical IDE's, even if someone puts crappy code together, as long as they make a decent API, it's going to work after they try to compile it half a million times.
Secondly, there is a trade-off between innovation in law and the loser-pays system. It's recognized that novel legal approaches are rarely taken in countries where the loser pays. It just makes sense that not only those with poor cases, but also those with good cases based on new interpretations or new law will be wary of bringing suit in such a system.
The U.S. is the only common law country without a loser-pays rule, but it is also recognized that such legal innovation, when eventually adopted in other common law countries, usually happens here first due to this issue.
Uhhh. Aolers would still make the same mistakes if they were all on unix systems...
True, though, if there is no remedy in the person's home country, he hasn't done anything wrong in that country, while he may still have done something wrong in the U.S. In this case, his country will probably not want to extradite him, and they have that prerogative.
criminalizing some code-breaking => math is a crime.
Obviously, that's an over-generalization. Only some math is a crime, and it's because doing some types of math can actually harm someone else. You're living in the myth that something as seemingly 'pure' as math could never cause a problem. That's just not true... Every type of expression may cause harm in some cases, and in such cases it may become a crime or a tort...
The example you give is something that wouldn't directly harm people or companies in the U.S. Here, someone probably brought suit (copyright owner) in the U.S. claiming that he was harmed by this Australian citizen. U.S. jurisdiction could make sense if the harm was centered on a U.S. company. Now, if it's a criminal case, that doesn't make as much sense, but if it's a tort case, it probably does.
Think about the alternative -- why should the company have to go to Australia or anywhere else and petition their courts and follow their laws simply because some punk pirated their stuff over there? In this case, it probably makes more sense to handle the case where the harm occurred, which is in the company, which is in the U.S. ...
Although it's maybe a "harsh" result, I think when you get on the net, you have the potential to harm a lot of people all over the world, and if you intentionally pirate a foreign company's goods, you run the risk that your government will serve you up to the foreign government.
Your government probably won't do that if they don't consider your act as having actually harmed the foreign party, but if they do, they may extradite you even though they have slightly different law on the subject...
Why the heck does every slashdot story linking to a free registration required site put it in a parenthetical after the link? 1) don't we figure it out after clicking it anyway? 2) who cares? 3) does this imply some disdain for free registration, even though it is part of the site's business model (i.e. making money)? 4) Isn't the endless repetition of these little phrases DISTRACTING and ANNOYING??!
sure, if there were a big benevolent dictator in the sky that could decide what "should" be done with the money...
Paraphrasing Socrates, you had better figure out that you don't know much. None of us does. Thus, the only way that we figure out is through competition. In the marketplace, in ideas, in biological evolution, in almost every area.
This is just part of that market competition. It may seem wasteful because the amounts are high. But what you aren't seeing is that they are fighting to determine the efficient outcome at a larger scale...
Don't always jump to conclusions based on the title or summary description of a patent.
This is probably better read as "a certain type of electronic camera utilizing a certain type of image compression together with a certain type of digital storage"...
There is absolutely nothing here that could lead you to criticize the entire patent system... aggh...
This is false. If it's a hardware solution, built into the chips, there's not going to be much you can do, at least for software. Music, etc., you can maybe get output to analog and copy...
I guess it would have been impossible to make a deal with Edison...
Or, maybe they just wanted to take the product of his labors and use them for free...
"Property" does not mean the same thing to lawyers as it does in the common vernacular.
To a lawyer, property does not mean "physical objects." It is purely a "bundle of rights" enforced by the government for many historical and philosophical reasons. "Real property", i.e. land, is not what you think it is. It is a set of rights in land, but not all possible rights. For instance, you may not have the right to maintain extremely hazardous items or conditions on your land. You do not have the absolute right to keep people off your land. If someone uses part of your land for long enough, they may obtain a prescriptive easement on your land, a right to use it for certain well-defined purposes in a well-defined area.
You may split your "property" into time-limited interests, or defeasible interests, which may be divested automatically from the holder upon the occurrence of a specified condition.
There are tons of issues with real property that are not what they seem to the average person. The point is that real property is just a bunch of rights enforced by the government. Intellectual property is the same thing. We also refer to "property rights" or "property rules" in law in relation to our own bodies and what we may/may not do, or with respect to all sorts of other interactions...
So the moniker, in my opinion, makes perfect sense when you understand how it is meant to be used. It is a legal term... it's just like when a physicist uses the word "momentum" or "force"... You might say their usage is "misleading", but that would be a strange position in my opinion. Rather, they are using the terms in a more specific manner that is more useful and meaningful within the context of their field.
unfortunately, for every person willing to pay for that free-format version, there are probably far more who would douwload it via p2p or share it...
It's very easy to be pro-free-everything until you have to make money from the thing. it's simple economics that most people will not pay for something that's free. i would be willing to bet that the vast majority of people on slashdot that advocate no DRM make their money (1) from their parents, (2) from contracting for one-off software, (3) from IT services, or (4) from software using some form of DRM, be it online activation, dongles, or other methods...
with books, the e-versions don't do all the same things for you that the paper versions do yet. what if you could download a paper version online and recreate it with a nano-assembler a la diamond age though? how many would buy a book if they could have the _exact_ same thing instantaneously for free...?
What in God's name is wrong with you people?
Do you even think about how many coders work for Microsoft? How many work for companies that depend on Microsoft technology? Do you think about the fact that people are busting their asses writing code, trying to make a living? Who cares about whether MS is full of crap or not? All companies have marketing. That's how business works.
You don't go and steal everything from a store just because the electricity goes out! It has repercussions! I have friends that work for Microsoft, and believe it or not, they are incredibly intelligent, honest, and good people. Each time you post a torrent link, you're helping to screw them.
You disgust me. This is NO DIFFERENT than a bunch of morons looting stores after a big game, just because they can... Can you possibly think that promoting these links on slashdot doesn't have a harmful effect? But you don't care about that. You just want to get your little jollies off thinking how neato it is that you can do something and a big corporation can't stop you.
Congratulations.
I agree those things also have a marked effect, but I also still think that putting everyone in prison is one way to effectively lower crime rates. The fact that other approaches may achieve the same thing more easily doesn't mean that this won't actually work...
:)
I also agree that the probability of being caught is probably the most important factor in deterrence, but reasonable minds can differ over the question as to what the deterrent effect of harsher sentences may be...
Actually, most 3rd party software that plays wma files probably does require the windows media COM objects. A lot of windows applications simply embed the browser or media player, rather than recoding it.
I would guess this would be a major pain for those applications -- the user would have to go and download windows media before they would work.
There are a number of theories as to why punishment is justified for crimes. Two of the major ones are utilitarian and retributive theories.
Utilitarianism has as its goal the maximization of wealth for the society as a whole. That's not just monetary wealth, but well-being in general. Under this theory, punishment is not related as much to the moral culpability of the criminal as under other theories -- it would justify punishing someone wrongly in order to pacify society as a whole.
Economic theorists believe in deterrence, but there's not a lot of evidence out there to show that harsher crimes actually deter well.
Retributive theorists see punishment as somehow correcting an imbalance between the criminal and the victim... not just revenge, but taking away a 'benefit' gained by the criminal by punishing him. There are a lot of arguments against this sort of theory... but it may be how many people intuitively see criminal justice.
There is also the idea of simple incapacitation as a rationale for punishment, when it's imprisonment, for instance. Some people believe that the drop in crime rates over the last 20-30 years has been mostly due to the increased use of prisons and the simple incapacitative effect it has on crime.
All of these factors enter into criminal justice, and people argue about which rationales are more important than the others, but one thing is pretty clear -- we don't believe so strongly in deterrence that we're willing to forgo the requirement of moral culpability in the criminal, and punish him anyway for deterrence. In most cases, we require that he actually know he did something wrong in order to justify punishment.
Of course, this is just talking about punishment, not about ex ante modes of deterrence like cameras...
I agree to some extent, but it depends on what you mean.
.NET.
.NET is. It's insane. The amount of automatic code generation is staggering. Automatic generation of stored procedures. Automatic generation of data object models. Automatic generation of all UI code -- just drag and drop -- although this has been there for a while with VB... Automatic XML schema generation. And on and on...
The trend in programming from tougher to easier has been slowly occurring ever since the beginning. First it was hardware to assembler, then assembler to C... Now it's C++ to
Since you guys are mostly unix people, let me tell you how insane
I was a very very good C++ coder. I *knew* my job was going to go away someday, regardless of the expensive seminars that Herb Sutter et al. rake in the cash for. Those guys are plying a dying art. So few people ever even tried to understand the vagueries of proper exception handling in C++ before bailing and moving to Java or VB or C#, because it's just too damn hard. I knew the differences between char arrays, stl strings, BSTR's, _bstr_t's, and CComBSTR's like the back of my hand, but it was just way overly complicated. Some things like STL generic programming constructs are not overly complicated per se, but are too difficult for the average programmer to wield properly, and therefore the return on time investment is low...
So, will you be surprised at what I'm going to say next? These are the reasons why Americans have to think really hard about strong intellectual property protections for our future. IP is at least one of the things that will help us get over this change. Let me rephrase: the ability to maintain the rights to our innovations, to make money from them by taking advantage of cheap overseas labor such as mentioned here, is key to our continued growth. None of our creative work can be protected from outright appropriation by e.g. Chinese startups, without strongly enforced intellectual property rights...