Nonsense. 'Jew' is a religious and/or cultural affiliation only indirectly related to genetics (there are jews of all "races"). You can choose not to be a Jew anymore, same as you can choose not to be a Christian or an American (emigrate and renounce your US citizenship). You can even choose not to be a white-supremacist neo-nazi any more.
Of course to neo-nazis, he'll still be a jew and will always be a jew. with their fuckwitted ideology, the "taint" can never be removed. It's no great strecth of the imagination to guess that this is the "reasoning" behind your objection.
By contrast, you can't change your genes. You can't choose not to be black or white any more. Not that it matters that much, scientifically speaking - "race" has been conclusively proven to be primarily a cultural construct. The genetic differences are minor almost to the point of irrelevance, aside from cultural prejudices.
of course, racist fuck-knuckles will never admit or acknowledge this fact.
Ironically, the hacker is a former Jew turned neo-nazi
and thus ends the idiotic myth that "hackers" are always smart. here's proof that at least one of them is a complete fucking cretin.
neither apple nor facebook are relying on trademark law for this. they are relying on the fear of bankruptcy and a lifetime of poverty, and with good reason: it works exceptionally well for them.
by "co-operate with", I think you mean "abjectly surrender to without even a token show of resistance".
there are only two guilty parties here:
1. the arsehole lawyers / brand-management consultants who scattergunned the nastygrams to anyone using the word "kik"
2. NPM for caving without a fight and without even a snarky excuse on their web site.
The dev who pulled his software did the only thing he could to protest his shabby treatment by NPM. It also had the side-effect of making what happened public knowledge and an outrage-of-the-day for those who like to get angry about things they have no control over or direct interest in.
Recall that trademark owners are required to protect their trademark.
actually, they're not. this is complete and utter bullshit. it also happens to be commonly-believed bullshit which is why it is repeated so often.
there is no such obligation.
It is possible for a trademark owner to lose (some/all control over) their trademark because it has become generic. This has absolutely nothing to do with other companies or individuals misusing their trademark for commercial activities and everything to do with ordinary people using the trademark in a generic way in ordinary everyday conversation or writing. e.g. saying 'xerox' instead of 'photocopy' (this is mostly specific to the US, almost every other english-speaking country just uses 'photocopy'); aspirin instead ofacetylsalicylic acid ; heroin instead of diacetyl morphine ; and, much as google disapproves and fights it, googling as a generic term for searching for stuff on the internet.
And even when a trademark has become generic, that still doesn't always automatically remove all proprietary rights from the trademark holder.
I don't think there's a single open source license (copyleft or not) in existence that *requires* you to distribute the source code if you don't also distribute the binaries/executables (or with the AGPL and similar, provide a publicly-accesible service based on the code - which by their definition is just another way of distributing the binary...and you accepted both their license and their definition if/when you chose to use their code in your public server).
The GPL doesn't. The BSD and MIT licenses don't. Neither do any licenses based on them.
With any of them you're free to use the code personally or within your company/organisation with no obligation to distribute binaries to anyone else, and no obligation to distribute the source if you don't distribute binaries to third-parties (and BSD/MIT/non-copyleft licenses don't require you to distribute the source even in that case).
unfortunately for you, the rant against javascript was not equivalent to a rant against plumbing, it was equivalent to a rant against using plain cardboard for pipes rather than, say, copper or stainless steel or plastic.
It is true that dependencies are unavoidable, but I have seen things reach the point where to build something, the build tools will have to hoover the Internet and download a bunch of gunk.
build tools for projects shouldn't do this. ever. there is no excuse which justifies it.
the project should just document the requirements/dependencies and point the user at them (and their install instructions). Or rely on the fact that distros package most important libraries (and many unimportant ones) for most languages.
trying to do a distro's job is a pointless waste of time and effort on the part of project developers. also, they tend to be very bad at it, often perpetrating unforgivable coding-atrocities such as 'bundling'.
And then you have version-hell issues. [...]
It gets worse than just requiring different release versions of libraries. the 'bundling' atrocity mentioned above is often compounded by having the bundled lib be a private custom-hacked version that only works with/for the project concerned, with no attempt made to upstream any changes. at some time in the future, the upstream lib gets bug-fixes and security fixes that are unavailable to the forked/bundled version.
I don't think they'd deliberately make the product worse. (not unless they planned to release an improved model in the near future, and a) there's no evidence of that and b) such a move would almost certainly backfire by killing the market).
I do think it's possible that the demo unit was finely tuned or hacked up to work just for the demo and isn't anywhere near as good in general non-demo use.
There's a long history of this happening with computer products. The mockup demo has so long a history that it qualifies as both "traditional" and "completely normal and expected".
BTW, given that "caveat emptor" is considered an acceptable and even admirable business practice in the US, the cynical point of view is the only sensible one that a consumer can have. unless they're happy with being ripped off by scumbag conmen.
As for respecting their decision - well, i respect their right to make that decision (there's nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical about making such a decision - although I do think that Sony and their sales partners, but not the buyer, are behaving unethically in asking for and accepting pre-paid sales).
I also respect my own right to regard that decision as idiotic and don't feel obliged in any way to respect the decision itself. In fact, respecting something you think is idiotic is pretty much impossible.
And I respect and exercise my right to express my opinion on the matter.
1. it's not a product that exists and is available on the market yet. no matter how knowledgeable and generally all-round wonderful your brother is, he tested a carefully tuned demonstration model prototype. So did the journos and other developers at the conference. There's no way of knowing whether the actual released product will be the same or even similar.
Sony might even have claimed it was the actual finished product or very close to it, but (and this may come as a shock to you) marketing people and product demonstrators sometimes lie. Hardly believable of such fine and ethical professions well-known to be devoted to the truth, i know, but it happens.
1a. yes, absolutely. now that YOU'RE saying it, i can rest comfortably in the certain knowledge that your brother is no idiot. I wouldn't trust anyone else's bald assertion, but you're different so i have no choice but to believe you as you command.
2. journalists know what side their bread is buttered on. they also know that "product reviews" are basically advertorials that may generate actual paid advertising for their publication (or may even be part of a deal - so many words of advertorial to get the paid ad). They are also not generally required to pay for the products they review with their own personal money. their employers' money or a free gift doesn't cause the same level of scrutiny and critical analysis that spending their own money would.
3. in my experience, journalists rarely know what they're talking about, most can't even get the most basic facts right. that's because they don't care about facts, they're only interested in a "good story" and have a tight deadline, or they have some agenda to push which doesn't fit the facts. Maybe investigative journalists who spend months or years researching a story know their subjects well, but not journalists who spend most of their working lives pumping out advertorial trash and puff pieces.
4. maybe the PSVR does work well. it may be wonderful. it may be complete shite. it'll probably turn out to be somewhere in between, most likely tending towards expensive disappointment with unrealised potential just like all previous "VR" products.
I don't know. Neither do any of the morons pre-paying for it. That's **exactly** my point.
They should at least wait until they can try it in a shop, even if for no other reason than to find out if they're one of the fairly large percentage of people who puke from motion sickness with VR rigs.
5. They're not dumb because they want the 'dream' of VR to be fulfilled.
They're dumb because they are pre-paying 400 dollars for a product that isn't even released yet, that nobody knows anything about.
Hearing rumours and gushing praise of PR demo models don't count as "knowing".
6. who gives a fuck about "helping manufacturers know what demand there is" for an unreleased product? I wouldn't pre-pay even a small company that i liked and personally knew the owner and staff for an off-the-shelf product that doesn't exist yet. bespoke work yes, but not pre-paying for consumer goods. I'm certainly not going to bear the financial risk of a new product for a giant corporation like sony.
Assessing consumer demand is part of what they pay marketing people for. and those marketing people have come up with the brilliant plan of getting idiots to pre-pay for a product that doesn't exist yet. thus neatly pushing their marketing expenses directly onto potential customers.
i say "potential customers" rather than actual customers because these idiots haven't received the product yet.
7. if you're one of the idiots who pre-paid for the not-currently-in-existence PSVR then yes, i am laughing at you. you deserve it.
I'm glad that there are people stupid enough to be sucked in by the marketing hype and buy brand-new products before they've been reviewed or tested. They serve a useful social purpose as guinea-pigs and product testers. That way, by the time I get around to thinking "i might want one of those", there will be dozens of reviews to read on line. and most likely I'll be buying the 2nd or 3rd generation bug-fixed version (if you think that all geeks are supposed to have a "must have it NOW!" shiny new gadget fetish, don't believe the hype. that's what marketers want you to think).
Unfortunately, they're reviews written mostly by people stupid enough to fall for marketing hype, but you can't have everything. with enough reviews, all flaws are exposed. and hopefully fixed.
But even I can't get my head around the existence of people stupid enough to pre-pay hundreds of dollars for over-hyped products that aren't even on the market yet. WTF?
But then, I also can't fathom people dumb enough to take on all the risks of small investors, without any of the protections or potential returns that small investors get in a regulated market....instead of any of that, they might one day get a product that they can use and enjoy - if the crowdfunded project don't run out of money (or just plain abscond with it), or fail to deliver, or the product gets changed to something much crappier, or just turns out to be a broken POS.
I do get the idea that some people are willing to effectively donate to or gamble on something they want. fair enough....but never gamble more than you can afford to lose, because gambling is a mug's game and you will almost certainly lose.
However, pre-paying to a huge company like sony is even dumber than crowdfunding a small indy team - sony has no excuse for asking their customers to bear any of the up-front development costs, they're a multi-billion dollar company.
Except, of course, the only excuse that matters to corporate execs - their customers are dumb enough to go along with it.
An arsehole like this is inevitably going to replace all his workers when machines become cheaper than humans anyway, regardless of whether the minimum wage is increased or not.
he's just:
a) propagandising an excuse for doing so
and
b) pushing propaganda against raising the minimum wage in order to minimise his wage expenses until machines are cheaper than humans.
They're amateurs only because they haven't got everyone to "upgrade" to Windows 10 yet.
As well as creating their own Apple-like app store that locks out third-party developers that don't pay a percentage to be "vetted", they also want to undermine Google and take over their business.
They're already embedding ad-delivery into the OS itself, so you get ads in the screensaver (and yes, you can turn that off for now. you won't be able to in future. and they'll probably do more evil shit like modifying the title bar and/or status bar so that they display animated ads)
MS will also have far more information to profile individuals with because they'll have access to *everything* on their computer(s), not just whatever can be spied upon via a web-browser.
And, unlike google where users can choose not to use google services and/or use ad-blockers and no-script to defeat tracking and spying, *every* Windows 10 user will be subject to microsoft spyware with no way to opt out.
> How are they going to monetize finding your medical file?
by analysing it and adding it to your profile, and then sellling that to whoever wants it (including insurance companies and potential employers and employment agencies and others who use medical information to discriminate against individuals)
They want to destroy that established software market so that all software has to be bought on their app store (this, BTW, is why Valve has become so interested in Linux in recent years - they need an OS to jump ship to if/when MS destroys their business by abusing their control over the Windows OS to lock out competitors).
and MS will claim they're doing it for security - installing third party software that hasn't been vetted by microsoft is "too dangerous".
of course, they won't acecpt any responsibility or liability for their "vetting" process.
Oh, it's much better than that. Keeping the population ignorant and un/under-educated makes it hard for them to detect when they're being sucked in by an astro-turfed mass-movement designed to make them believe (with the strength of religious faith) that what's good for corporations is good for them, dressing it all up in cynically bogus catchphrases and sloganeering that make routine use of the word 'freedom'.
> but then added a sarcastic comment at the end in the same style, > so there is no clear cue that it is a sarcastic comment.
Only americans need a clear cue. To the rest of the English-speaking world, it's fucking obvious.
Presumably, that's why you invented the devastatingly ingenious sarcasm style of saying something stupid or obviously false, pausing for a few seconds and then yelling "NOT!!!!"
most likely he'll turn out to be some marketing scumbag trying to dress up a rather ordinary press release with some bullshit about "hacking" and sup3r-s3kr3t codez!!! that need to be decrypted.
those who do not understand the concept that publicly funded research at universities should belong to the public are propertarian nutcases.
the researcher was paid a wage and a research grant to do this work. If it was a business paying their wage and paying for the research, you'd be arguing that the business owns their research....but it's the public, via the govt, that funded the research so the public should own it.
BTW, property is not the only incentive or motivation available to human beings. amonst many other motivations, there is also job satisfaction, and even (in rare cases) the good feelings that come from contributing something worthwhile that will benefit humanity as a whole, rather than just benefitting some rich cunts who want to tie up the research in a patent so they can own it exclusively.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I didn't. Fuck 'em, they deserve it. For https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and many other atrocities.
Nonsense. 'Jew' is a religious and/or cultural affiliation only indirectly related to genetics (there are jews of all "races"). You can choose not to be a Jew anymore, same as you can choose not to be a Christian or an American (emigrate and renounce your US citizenship). You can even choose not to be a white-supremacist neo-nazi any more.
Of course to neo-nazis, he'll still be a jew and will always be a jew. with their fuckwitted ideology, the "taint" can never be removed. It's no great strecth of the imagination to guess that this is the "reasoning" behind your objection.
By contrast, you can't change your genes. You can't choose not to be black or white any more. Not that it matters that much, scientifically speaking - "race" has been conclusively proven to be primarily a cultural construct. The genetic differences are minor almost to the point of irrelevance, aside from cultural prejudices.
of course, racist fuck-knuckles will never admit or acknowledge this fact.
and thus ends the idiotic myth that "hackers" are always smart. here's proof that at least one of them is a complete fucking cretin.
this is bullshit. he does not need to "defend" his trademark. at all, let alone by "picking on somebody".
he needs to find lawyers who aren't intent on ripping him off.
or (if it's him and not his lawyers behind this) he needs to either stop being an arsehole or stop pretending that he's not one.
neither apple nor facebook are relying on trademark law for this. they are relying on the fear of bankruptcy and a lifetime of poverty, and with good reason: it works exceptionally well for them.
by "co-operate with", I think you mean "abjectly surrender to without even a token show of resistance".
there are only two guilty parties here:
1. the arsehole lawyers / brand-management consultants who scattergunned the nastygrams to anyone using the word "kik"
2. NPM for caving without a fight and without even a snarky excuse on their web site.
The dev who pulled his software did the only thing he could to protest his shabby treatment by NPM. It also had the side-effect of making what happened public knowledge and an outrage-of-the-day for those who like to get angry about things they have no control over or direct interest in.
fuck i hate that you can't edit your own posts on slashdot to fix stupid mistakes like not ending a blockquote properly.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't think there's a single open source license (copyleft or not) in existence that *requires* you to distribute the source code if you don't also distribute the binaries/executables (or with the AGPL and similar, provide a publicly-accesible service based on the code - which by their definition is just another way of distributing the binary...and you accepted both their license and their definition if/when you chose to use their code in your public server).
The GPL doesn't. The BSD and MIT licenses don't. Neither do any licenses based on them.
With any of them you're free to use the code personally or within your company/organisation with no obligation to distribute binaries to anyone else, and no obligation to distribute the source if you don't distribute binaries to third-parties (and BSD/MIT/non-copyleft licenses don't require you to distribute the source even in that case).
well said. this needs to be modded up.
unfortunately for you, the rant against javascript was not equivalent to a rant against plumbing, it was equivalent to a rant against using plain cardboard for pipes rather than, say, copper or stainless steel or plastic.
build tools for projects shouldn't do this. ever. there is no excuse which justifies it.
the project should just document the requirements/dependencies and point the user at them (and their install instructions). Or rely on the fact that distros package most important libraries (and many unimportant ones) for most languages.
trying to do a distro's job is a pointless waste of time and effort on the part of project developers. also, they tend to be very bad at it, often perpetrating unforgivable coding-atrocities such as 'bundling'.
It gets worse than just requiring different release versions of libraries. the 'bundling' atrocity mentioned above is often compounded by having the bundled lib be a private custom-hacked version that only works with/for the project concerned, with no attempt made to upstream any changes. at some time in the future, the upstream lib gets bug-fixes and security fixes that are unavailable to the forked/bundled version.
I don't think they'd deliberately make the product worse. (not unless they planned to release an improved model in the near future, and a) there's no evidence of that and b) such a move would almost certainly backfire by killing the market).
I do think it's possible that the demo unit was finely tuned or hacked up to work just for the demo and isn't anywhere near as good in general non-demo use.
There's a long history of this happening with computer products. The mockup demo has so long a history that it qualifies as both "traditional" and "completely normal and expected".
BTW, given that "caveat emptor" is considered an acceptable and even admirable business practice in the US, the cynical point of view is the only sensible one that a consumer can have. unless they're happy with being ripped off by scumbag conmen.
As for respecting their decision - well, i respect their right to make that decision (there's nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical about making such a decision - although I do think that Sony and their sales partners, but not the buyer, are behaving unethically in asking for and accepting pre-paid sales).
I also respect my own right to regard that decision as idiotic and don't feel obliged in any way to respect the decision itself. In fact, respecting something you think is idiotic is pretty much impossible.
And I respect and exercise my right to express my opinion on the matter.
what anger are you talking about?
i'm not angry at all, not emotionally involved in any way.
sorry that you feel so offended by someone pointing out the obvious truths about the idiocy of pre-paying for non-existent products.
1. it's not a product that exists and is available on the market yet. no matter how knowledgeable and generally all-round wonderful your brother is, he tested a carefully tuned demonstration model prototype. So did the journos and other developers at the conference. There's no way of knowing whether the actual released product will be the same or even similar.
Sony might even have claimed it was the actual finished product or very close to it, but (and this may come as a shock to you) marketing people and product demonstrators sometimes lie. Hardly believable of such fine and ethical professions well-known to be devoted to the truth, i know, but it happens.
1a. yes, absolutely. now that YOU'RE saying it, i can rest comfortably in the certain knowledge that your brother is no idiot. I wouldn't trust anyone else's bald assertion, but you're different so i have no choice but to believe you as you command.
2. journalists know what side their bread is buttered on. they also know that "product reviews" are basically advertorials that may generate actual paid advertising for their publication (or may even be part of a deal - so many words of advertorial to get the paid ad). They are also not generally required to pay for the products they review with their own personal money. their employers' money or a free gift doesn't cause the same level of scrutiny and critical analysis that spending their own money would.
3. in my experience, journalists rarely know what they're talking about, most can't even get the most basic facts right. that's because they don't care about facts, they're only interested in a "good story" and have a tight deadline, or they have some agenda to push which doesn't fit the facts. Maybe investigative journalists who spend months or years researching a story know their subjects well, but not journalists who spend most of their working lives pumping out advertorial trash and puff pieces.
4. maybe the PSVR does work well. it may be wonderful. it may be complete shite. it'll probably turn out to be somewhere in between, most likely tending towards expensive disappointment with unrealised potential just like all previous "VR" products.
I don't know. Neither do any of the morons pre-paying for it. That's **exactly** my point.
They should at least wait until they can try it in a shop, even if for no other reason than to find out if they're one of the fairly large percentage of people who puke from motion sickness with VR rigs.
5. They're not dumb because they want the 'dream' of VR to be fulfilled.
They're dumb because they are pre-paying 400 dollars for a product that isn't even released yet, that nobody knows anything about.
Hearing rumours and gushing praise of PR demo models don't count as "knowing".
6. who gives a fuck about "helping manufacturers know what demand there is" for an unreleased product? I wouldn't pre-pay even a small company that i liked and personally knew the owner and staff for an off-the-shelf product that doesn't exist yet. bespoke work yes, but not pre-paying for consumer goods. I'm certainly not going to bear the financial risk of a new product for a giant corporation like sony.
Assessing consumer demand is part of what they pay marketing people for. and those marketing people have come up with the brilliant plan of getting idiots to pre-pay for a product that doesn't exist yet. thus neatly pushing their marketing expenses directly onto potential customers.
i say "potential customers" rather than actual customers because these idiots haven't received the product yet.
7. if you're one of the idiots who pre-paid for the not-currently-in-existence PSVR then yes, i am laughing at you. you deserve it.
I'm glad that there are people stupid enough to be sucked in by the marketing hype and buy brand-new products before they've been reviewed or tested. They serve a useful social purpose as guinea-pigs and product testers. That way, by the time I get around to thinking "i might want one of those", there will be dozens of reviews to read on line. and most likely I'll be buying the 2nd or 3rd generation bug-fixed version (if you think that all geeks are supposed to have a "must have it NOW!" shiny new gadget fetish, don't believe the hype. that's what marketers want you to think).
Unfortunately, they're reviews written mostly by people stupid enough to fall for marketing hype, but you can't have everything. with enough reviews, all flaws are exposed. and hopefully fixed.
But even I can't get my head around the existence of people stupid enough to pre-pay hundreds of dollars for over-hyped products that aren't even on the market yet. WTF?
But then, I also can't fathom people dumb enough to take on all the risks of small investors, without any of the protections or potential returns that small investors get in a regulated market....instead of any of that, they might one day get a product that they can use and enjoy - if the crowdfunded project don't run out of money (or just plain abscond with it), or fail to deliver, or the product gets changed to something much crappier, or just turns out to be a broken POS.
I do get the idea that some people are willing to effectively donate to or gamble on something they want. fair enough....but never gamble more than you can afford to lose, because gambling is a mug's game and you will almost certainly lose.
However, pre-paying to a huge company like sony is even dumber than crowdfunding a small indy team - sony has no excuse for asking their customers to bear any of the up-front development costs, they're a multi-billion dollar company.
Except, of course, the only excuse that matters to corporate execs - their customers are dumb enough to go along with it.
An arsehole like this is inevitably going to replace all his workers when machines become cheaper than humans anyway, regardless of whether the minimum wage is increased or not.
he's just:
a) propagandising an excuse for doing so
and
b) pushing propaganda against raising the minimum wage in order to minimise his wage expenses until machines are cheaper than humans.
They're amateurs only because they haven't got everyone to "upgrade" to Windows 10 yet.
As well as creating their own Apple-like app store that locks out third-party developers that don't pay a percentage to be "vetted", they also want to undermine Google and take over their business.
They're already embedding ad-delivery into the OS itself, so you get ads in the screensaver (and yes, you can turn that off for now. you won't be able to in future. and they'll probably do more evil shit like modifying the title bar and/or status bar so that they display animated ads)
MS will also have far more information to profile individuals with because they'll have access to *everything* on their computer(s), not just whatever can be spied upon via a web-browser.
And, unlike google where users can choose not to use google services and/or use ad-blockers and no-script to defeat tracking and spying, *every* Windows 10 user will be subject to microsoft spyware with no way to opt out.
> How are they going to monetize finding your medical file?
by analysing it and adding it to your profile, and then sellling that to whoever wants it (including insurance companies and potential employers and employment agencies and others who use medical information to discriminate against individuals)
That's exactly why MS are doing it.
They want to destroy that established software market so that all software has to be bought on their app store (this, BTW, is why Valve has become so interested in Linux in recent years - they need an OS to jump ship to if/when MS destroys their business by abusing their control over the Windows OS to lock out competitors).
and MS will claim they're doing it for security - installing third party software that hasn't been vetted by microsoft is "too dangerous".
of course, they won't acecpt any responsibility or liability for their "vetting" process.
or convincing uneducated morons to vote for those policies.
Oh, it's much better than that. Keeping the population ignorant and un/under-educated makes it hard for them to detect when they're being sucked in by an astro-turfed mass-movement designed to make them believe (with the strength of religious faith) that what's good for corporations is good for them, dressing it all up in cynically bogus catchphrases and sloganeering that make routine use of the word 'freedom'.
> but then added a sarcastic comment at the end in the same style,
> so there is no clear cue that it is a sarcastic comment.
Only americans need a clear cue. To the rest of the English-speaking world, it's fucking obvious.
Presumably, that's why you invented the devastatingly ingenious sarcasm style of saying something stupid or obviously false, pausing for a few seconds and then yelling "NOT!!!!"
yeah, restricting voting to the "educated" is a great way of ensuring that the plebs can't vote in public education for themselves.
most likely he'll turn out to be some marketing scumbag trying to dress up a rather ordinary press release with some bullshit about "hacking" and sup3r-s3kr3t codez!!! that need to be decrypted.
those who do not understand the concept that publicly funded research at universities should belong to the public are propertarian nutcases.
the researcher was paid a wage and a research grant to do this work. If it was a business paying their wage and paying for the research, you'd be arguing that the business owns their research....but it's the public, via the govt, that funded the research so the public should own it.
BTW, property is not the only incentive or motivation available to human beings. amonst many other motivations, there is also job satisfaction, and even (in rare cases) the good feelings that come from contributing something worthwhile that will benefit humanity as a whole, rather than just benefitting some rich cunts who want to tie up the research in a patent so they can own it exclusively.