I think users who are disabling JavaScript are already doing themselves more harm than good. There are some genuinely good dynamic interfaces out there, and compared to the time and bandwidth savings they'll get by using them properly, the time required to install FireFox or a popup/ad blocker is negligible.
At least for intranet and company sites, there's a genuine demand for functionality that it's impossible to expose without full Javascript support. Consider a drag-and-drop interface where customer orders appear on the left-hand side, and the line items can be organized into a grid of dates and production stations (a piece of machinery or a particular set of workers) via drag-and-drop. I have a working AJAX app that does this, but I can't think how such an application would be useful in the absence of JavaScript. It would require literally hundreds of pageloads and a metric ton of typing (remember: No Javascript = No Calendar Picker) to do any meaningful analysis and manipulation, and the very act of using it would destroy the user's workflow/concentration, rendering the application less useful than the scrawled paper notes it replaces.
This is the direction the web is moving. There are a lot of consumer applications that would benefit from taking a more dynamic approach, especially when you combine the intuitiveness of drag and drop with the live feedback made possible by XMLHTTPRequest. I think that coddling to users without JavaScript is holding them back, as well as creating a lot of useless "busy-work" for web designers and developers.
We need listeners who don't seek out the latest crap from the RIAA, but actually seek the good stuff, and care about the product they pay for
I'll go one step further and say that one of the reasons for this is that people are, in fact, consumers in that they don't seek out *anything*, choosing instead to be spoonfed music from broadcast radio. It amazes me how many people are so passive in their listening that they are uninterested in any ways of discovering music except radio. Even if a friend highly recommends a band, they'll say "Cool". Then the CD their friend burned for them sits under the seat of their car until they hear one of the songs on Top 40 radio a year later, and the friend has to burn the disc again.
Radio is still, despite all its flaws, the major means of discovery for Joe Public. And the current lockout imposed by the RIAA's payola workaround doesn't just hurt us, it allows them to effectively dictate what music will become part of our popular culture.
Here's hoping that all the new Satellite-Radio gadgets and Internet Radio via iTunes and others start to loosen radio's grip on our music culture. I've lost faith that the government will do anything substantial about it.
If you already paid for the rights, you already paid for the rights. That's as simple as it gets. The media companies aren't legally allowed to tell you anything more strict than "Don't download music and movies you don't own", or Apple's pandemic "Don't Steal Music". A lot of books can be found on P2P sites, and author/series anthologies are pretty common on BitTorrent sites.
Do consider that, even if you're the publisher, there's considerable work involved in re-formatting and proofing an eBook translation. The P2P versions are mostly done via OCR and will have some typos, but if the alternative is *not* being able to carry around books that you own and want to read, well...
Personally, I've also found that the formatting of PDF's is awful for the varying screen sizes you'll encounter (Think 9pt. type on letter-sized paper, scaled down to a postcard). It's pretty easy to copy/paste the text and make a Perl/PHP script using regular expressions to parse out the divisions and re-render the book as UTF-8 XHTML.
I parsed out Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series (of which I own *all* the books in hardbound or paperback editions) into a set of XHTML files, added a common CSS file to set font and paragraph spacing, and they came out beautifully. I basically never even cracked open my copy of the newest book because it was easier to read it on the PSP or my laptop.
I can't wait for a decent WiFi-enabled reader like this.
This is exactly the sentiment that ensures the consumer will get screwed every time. Let me sum up your claim:
Sony is so big, they already ownZ0R3d j00. You can't be diligent enough to avoid buying any of their fine products, so why bother?
The logic is so flawed, it's insane. It's like saying "You can't keep all the dirt off your counters, so what's the point of cleaning, ever?", or "You can't live forever, so why live at all?". Every penny this guy, or someone else like him, can keep out of Sony's pockets, is one less penny that Sony can use to marginalize and repress the public good. Whether I agree with his choices or not, he's acting in a conscientious way, with the ultimate goal of improving our society.
You probably think everyone's overreacting, but there are always calm, contented people who wake up to a new world one day, full of regret. "Slippery Slope" isn't just a Historical Analysis tool.
Amen, and good work. Google telling them this is great; Other companies should do the same, but unless we've already become a fascist/corporate state where our government and corporations are functionally indistiguishable from one another, the customers still have a duty to act and quell this type of behavior. Then again, I'm not so sure we aren't already living in a fascist state.
Exactly. It can be done server-side, very cleanly, and easily. No Javascript needed. Consider the following schema:
CREATE TABLE Links(name VARCHAR(32) PRIMARY KEY, url VARCHAR(255));
CREATE TABLE Subscriptions(ID SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, name VARCHAR(32) REFERENCES Links(name), server VARCHAR(255));
You send the browser a link to/?name, where your script redirects the user, and spawns or notifies an asynchronous thread to ping all the server URLs in the Subscriptions table. The user won't even notice a delay.
Jasin Natael
Re:What if we sandbox major apps like browsers?
on
Future Trends of Malware
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah. One flaw: You're assuming that the host operating system has support for UNIX-style user account restrictions. Windows could do something similar if they were to add an "Always Run As..." option, and users were smart enough to set it up, but it would be a hack at best. My guess is that as soon as support for this approach is implemented, even if the security part itself were *bug-free*, it would be a week at most before someone found an exploit to allow them to march out of the sandbox and into the system account.
Running even the best-designed software on top of Windows is like building a nice house on a plot of land that is prone to develop sinkholes. You can keep filling in the holes, and you can keep patching up the house, but eventually the whole thing is going to cave in, or break the bank. And it won't be very comfortable to live in.
With the above analogy, the current state of Windows is that things have gotten so bad, you're paying the crew foreman to live in your guest bedroom full-time. He (and his boss) keep telling you, "You should have used better plaster so it wouldn't crack", "You should have used steel beams in the floor slab", "You really needed stronger mortar to hold those bricks together". But what you really should have done, is put your house on a f***ing solid piece of land. It defeats the point of having an operating system when you can't depend on any of its facilities.
I pay about $80, between the $60 (including taxes) for Cable Internet, and the $20 I pay for unlimited GPRS on my mobile. I tend to access the GPRS through my Powerbook via Bluetooth -- phone browsers don't quite cut it yet.
If someone has a version of FireFox in the works for Symbian Q (Sony-Ericsson P-series), I need to know about it. And that's not some sissy request; That means if I find out you're hiding a more convenient channel for internet access from me, I'll do what it takes to make sure it doesn't happen again. I *needz* my internets.
The real story is, why is Japan more willing to spend billions of dollars for absurd pie-in-the-sky visions of robots becoming your friend, and unwilling to grant citizenship to other ethnicities, to increase the labor force and make up for a shrinking population?
This is a problem that it literally takes several generations to overcome. You can see progress; This isn't an area where it's easy to "catch-up" to the ideals of another group. The younger generation, while they welcome foreigners, still seem very aware of, and interested in, everyone's ethnicity. If you are naturalized in Japan, you have to take a Japanese name. And even if you do, you often will be ostracized if you try to write it with ideographs.
I had a friend at University whose mother is Japanese and her father is from the US. Her name is Japanese and she was born in Japan, but she was literally disciplined in school if she wrote her name in anything but Katakana (the angular phonetic alphabet used for foreign words).
It still happens in the US, too, but it's on the decline. I know a guy whose grandfather used to beat him if he used anything except for racial epithets when referring to African-Americans. And this was only 10 years ago.
I think the DS is a good option (it's what I have), but the screen on the new GBA's is absolutely incredible. It kicks the DS up one screen and down the other.
Actually, it's true. There are plenty of Stereo-Component CD recorders that only accept "Audio" CD-Rs. Simple players don't make the distinction, but home-theater recording and copying devices will only read/write certified "Audio" CD-Rs.
Wait, so you already have two (or more) tiered access in your country, and the world hasn't ended?
That's so not the same definition of "Two-Tiered". You're talking about pricing tiers, and TFA is actually talking about a physical divergence of the Internet. We're discussing a separation of the Internet itself into "Content Tiers" based on the ISP you're using. ISPs are trying to produce a model under which access to content on external networks is prohibited or severely limited, selectively, so that they can influence you to consume their content instead of any others'. They'll give traffic that stays local to their network higher priority, and probably block a lot of technologies completely when they compete with paid offerings from the ISP.
We're already halfway there because of US carriers' tendencies to offer massive downstream and almost no upstream. It makes it harder to get into the content-providing business because you can't host a fast website from your home or business without paying extra fees. Ergo, casual users don't produce and distribute online content, at least not in volume. This doesn't even count traffic shaping and port blocking, which cause more serious problems.
And now the companies that own the fiber want to lock out each other. This is the next step in virtual serfdom. A website hosted through a different ISP will be significantly slower. Websites in other countries will be significantly slower. And they're asking Congress to allow them to do it.
I will have to qualify your statement, and say that strong should refer only to the strictness of enforcement, not the lengthening of period. This is a mistake that the US legislature has made time and again.
When a company can get licensing fees from a patent or copyright past the end of my lifetime, or when the creator's grandchildren can collect royalties throughout their lifetimes, we have done the opposite of what IP law should do. We have *exempted* the entity in question from ever needing to contribute to society again, when the point should be to *tempt* them with the benefits of further innovation after their temporary monopoly has expired.
I'll take a stab at it. I'm exactly 25, but I've got plenty of younger, still college-age friends. Here's what I see (roughly in order of appearance):
Lots of complaining that current bands are crap
An interest in bands that I know, from 8-10 years ago
A feeling that the back-catalogs of music companies are exorbitantly overpriced
Derision of the RIAA, MPAA, and their tactics
Purchases of secondhand CD's, which are ripped and stored in a closet somewhere.
Nobody is to the point of buying completely indie yet, but there has even been decreased interest in going to the concerts of big-name acts because of their alliance with the RIAA.
I think that in light of what's happened in the past few years, young people are understandably disappointed and disinterested in music altogether. Indepenedent music (as a whole; don't mod me down) doesn't offer the buyer the convenience, production quality, or the far-reaching social context of national and international distribution.
Jasin Natael
Re:The real 90s versus outdated 00s software
on
Java Is So 90s
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· Score: 1
Exactly. PHP is like, four different languages all rolled into one. Move from 3.0 through 5.1, and you'll see it go from being a simple, kind-of-crappy scripting language, to a platform where you can implement most Java classes as PHP classes, and get similar performance characteristics (if you use a cache/optimizer).
The reason it <quotey_fingers>doesn't encourage good coding</quotey_fingers> is because it hasn't thrown out the simple, linear scripting. It probably never will, because it was designed to meet a wide range of needs with a single scripting language. There's value in dropping out a text file of some statistic you need, and there's also a lot of value if you write a class with all the modern features to turn a raw SQL Query Result into a JPG Bar Graph. You could do either with Java -- but reducing the amount of work for the simple task is a noble ambition, and (IMO) the second task is much easier as well.
For the record, I use Java for server apps, too. If I had a team of programmers, I'd probably insist on Java. But for 1- or 2-person projects, PHP is a timesaver and a lot less problematic in the long run.
I have one, but not in so many words. Here's what you do:
Output a table, with one input (or select) in each cell. Give each input a unique id of the form "prefix-column-row".
Set the onchange event for each input to one function that takes a control as the argument and does the following:
Split the ID: var parts = control.id.split(/-/);
Send the row,column,value as GET arguments: AJAXGet(url, 'c='+parts[1]+'&r='+parts[2]+'&v='+control.value);
Set up your CSS so the inputs are unbordered and grow to fill their cell.
Add some code to indicate that a control is dirty (I use a css class called 'dirty' that sets a background image), and then clear the control when the server response comes in.
Sorry I don't have a working example to show off, all my current projects are kind of locked down, but you can get the idea. Lots of discrete 'save' calls to the database, each field has a visual indication of whether it's saved or not, and there's minimal addition to the markup: just an ID and an onchange handler.
Amen. That's the way it is already. Posts about a specific RFC or patch digress quickly into a political / technological debate about the merits of the underlying technology, the fix, or the fallacy of penetrate-and-patch. Any story containing "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" turns into a philosophical melee about the direction of Internet content, Applications, and inevitably ends with posters deriding the buzzword simply because they can't put it on their resume. Stories about aviation and space exploration digress into discussions of interplanetary flight, colonization, terraforming, the long-since dead X25, and the over-political nature of state-sponsored flight. Biology and evolution stories turn into religious flamewars faster than you can say "bang".
I've been here for a long time (I'm apparently missing a digit in my UID), and it's never been any different. I don't expect it will. You can't stop the community from discussing the topics that are interesting to it. But, the articles are usually good enough to bring out an informative, relevant discussion on the topic. Enough posters put up links to relevant materials online that sometimes it's better to read their links instead of the actual FA. At least the editors don't post every dot-zero-one update of the Linux Kernel anymore. Or maybe I set my preferences to filter those out. I can't remember.
Exactly. The BSA has to spin this. China, for example, would benefit massively from reasonable (read: similar to our constitution, not our laws) copyright enforcement. Performers would be able to make money from their albums or movies, and they would be higher quality. A lot of people who aren't willing to take the risk of being artists, or creative software developers, or even just inventors, would. The poor would still pirate content, but the middle and upper classes would be fueling an economic revolution.
The BSA has to make the point that a foreign economy would benefit more if they had an IP industry to compete on a global scale, or at least lock out foreign competition. Notice that they're not trying to claim any benefit from obliterating software piracy -- I don't think anyone would really benefit there -- but if they could just get more people to pay for software it would give them an incentive to create something locally. Then there really would be a benefit.
I doubt it's so altruistic, though. The BSA doesn't want reasonable copyright laws. They want to sell patents to the burgeoning foreign industries, and there's nothing ethical about that.
In truth, I wouldn't put the altruism on the foreign governments either. At the moment, they've got to be thrilled to let all the investment come from outside the country, and basically not have the burden of another domestic industry... Maybe the idealists on Slashdot are the only ones willing to do something to fix this broken system and make a better world (wrt Technology and IP Law, at least).
The GP's point seems to be that it's not important for bloggers to "enforce their rights", since they can exploit such copying to their own ends more effectively than newspapers can exploit such copy-and-pasting to suit theirs. Therefore, the blogger needs no legal protections from the state -- they already have the upper hand in a copyright-free world.
That's the thing. The teenagers are ostracized. And then the media -- who gets a hundred times the exposure to their malleable brains that their parents do -- tells them that they can fit in by being consumerist whores. Their minds aren't yet ready to reject that hollow twist of logic, so they spend everything they earn.
This is a relatively new thing. In the past, a young man or woman would have saved every penny they could make so they could start their married life with property, or at least a little savings. Now, they can spend 100% of their income from working at the pretzel stand as if it were discretionary. I've known a lot of people (including a younger version of myself) who have had a hard time saving money because of these habits encouraged by corporate america.
By the way, I'm 25, and I've recently outgrown a lot of the consumerism, started saving more money, and living financially responsibly... Now, if I could just break free of the gadget-buying habits!
There's a way to prevent that. For the first 24 hours a website is available, make the contents visible to the Class C that the owner last logged in from, and put up a 'coming soon' page for everyone else. Then, once the details have been verified and maybe someone has looked at the site, remove the restriction.
That's why all the power ultimately rests with the citizens. The constitution was designed to make sure the Government knew that if the people objected to what they were doing, the people could just regain control. No special oversight body called for.
Seems the problem is that the citizens have been slacking off. We knew what to expect from the politicians.
This doesn't seem like counterpoint at all. It looks like the politicians have noticed two concurrent behaviors of a specific group of politically active, freedom-loving citizens that support the constitution. There is far from a 100% corrolation, but I would venture to guess that anyone willing to consider revolution would rather fight without bloodshed, therefore it would be safe to say most members of the NRA vote and have political opinions. From the other direction, there's no reason to fight unless you have some underlying political or moral ideal to adhere to. That is, unless they are really the nuts the politicians make them out to be.
Politicians are targeting this group for two reasons: (1)To discredit opposing political activists who are members of this group, and (2)to put a bad taste in the mouths of the citizenry about the use, or threat, of violence to achieve political means.
They probably will drive things to a point that violence is the only answer, if more people don't start voting and educating themselves on the important issues. I think the current goal is to make people more fearful and less willing to take up arms against an oppressive regime at home. For the record, I'm not part of the NRA, and haven't supported them financially or otherwise. I personally dread that the day might come when citizens will have to die to re-institute the founding principles of this country, but I will concede that we're headed in that direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I think users who are disabling JavaScript are already doing themselves more harm than good. There are some genuinely good dynamic interfaces out there, and compared to the time and bandwidth savings they'll get by using them properly, the time required to install FireFox or a popup/ad blocker is negligible.
At least for intranet and company sites, there's a genuine demand for functionality that it's impossible to expose without full Javascript support. Consider a drag-and-drop interface where customer orders appear on the left-hand side, and the line items can be organized into a grid of dates and production stations (a piece of machinery or a particular set of workers) via drag-and-drop. I have a working AJAX app that does this, but I can't think how such an application would be useful in the absence of JavaScript. It would require literally hundreds of pageloads and a metric ton of typing (remember: No Javascript = No Calendar Picker) to do any meaningful analysis and manipulation, and the very act of using it would destroy the user's workflow/concentration, rendering the application less useful than the scrawled paper notes it replaces.
This is the direction the web is moving. There are a lot of consumer applications that would benefit from taking a more dynamic approach, especially when you combine the intuitiveness of drag and drop with the live feedback made possible by XMLHTTPRequest. I think that coddling to users without JavaScript is holding them back, as well as creating a lot of useless "busy-work" for web designers and developers.
Jasin NataelI'll go one step further and say that one of the reasons for this is that people are, in fact, consumers in that they don't seek out *anything*, choosing instead to be spoonfed music from broadcast radio. It amazes me how many people are so passive in their listening that they are uninterested in any ways of discovering music except radio. Even if a friend highly recommends a band, they'll say "Cool". Then the CD their friend burned for them sits under the seat of their car until they hear one of the songs on Top 40 radio a year later, and the friend has to burn the disc again.
Radio is still, despite all its flaws, the major means of discovery for Joe Public. And the current lockout imposed by the RIAA's payola workaround doesn't just hurt us, it allows them to effectively dictate what music will become part of our popular culture.
Here's hoping that all the new Satellite-Radio gadgets and Internet Radio via iTunes and others start to loosen radio's grip on our music culture. I've lost faith that the government will do anything substantial about it.
Jasin NataelIf you already paid for the rights, you already paid for the rights. That's as simple as it gets. The media companies aren't legally allowed to tell you anything more strict than "Don't download music and movies you don't own", or Apple's pandemic "Don't Steal Music". A lot of books can be found on P2P sites, and author/series anthologies are pretty common on BitTorrent sites.
Do consider that, even if you're the publisher, there's considerable work involved in re-formatting and proofing an eBook translation. The P2P versions are mostly done via OCR and will have some typos, but if the alternative is *not* being able to carry around books that you own and want to read, well...
Personally, I've also found that the formatting of PDF's is awful for the varying screen sizes you'll encounter (Think 9pt. type on letter-sized paper, scaled down to a postcard). It's pretty easy to copy/paste the text and make a Perl/PHP script using regular expressions to parse out the divisions and re-render the book as UTF-8 XHTML.
I parsed out Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time series (of which I own *all* the books in hardbound or paperback editions) into a set of XHTML files, added a common CSS file to set font and paragraph spacing, and they came out beautifully. I basically never even cracked open my copy of the newest book because it was easier to read it on the PSP or my laptop.
I can't wait for a decent WiFi-enabled reader like this.
Jasin NataelThis is exactly the sentiment that ensures the consumer will get screwed every time. Let me sum up your claim:
The logic is so flawed, it's insane. It's like saying "You can't keep all the dirt off your counters, so what's the point of cleaning, ever?", or "You can't live forever, so why live at all?". Every penny this guy, or someone else like him, can keep out of Sony's pockets, is one less penny that Sony can use to marginalize and repress the public good. Whether I agree with his choices or not, he's acting in a conscientious way, with the ultimate goal of improving our society.
You probably think everyone's overreacting, but there are always calm, contented people who wake up to a new world one day, full of regret. "Slippery Slope" isn't just a Historical Analysis tool.
Jasin NataelAmen, and good work. Google telling them this is great; Other companies should do the same, but unless we've already become a fascist/corporate state where our government and corporations are functionally indistiguishable from one another, the customers still have a duty to act and quell this type of behavior. Then again, I'm not so sure we aren't already living in a fascist state.
Jasin NataelExactly. It can be done server-side, very cleanly, and easily. No Javascript needed. Consider the following schema:
CREATE TABLE Links(name VARCHAR(32) PRIMARY KEY, url VARCHAR(255));CREATE TABLE Subscriptions(ID SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, name VARCHAR(32) REFERENCES Links(name), server VARCHAR(255));
You send the browser a link to /?name, where your script redirects the user, and spawns or notifies an asynchronous thread to ping all the server URLs in the Subscriptions table. The user won't even notice a delay.
Jasin NataelYeah. One flaw: You're assuming that the host operating system has support for UNIX-style user account restrictions. Windows could do something similar if they were to add an "Always Run As..." option, and users were smart enough to set it up, but it would be a hack at best. My guess is that as soon as support for this approach is implemented, even if the security part itself were *bug-free*, it would be a week at most before someone found an exploit to allow them to march out of the sandbox and into the system account.
Running even the best-designed software on top of Windows is like building a nice house on a plot of land that is prone to develop sinkholes. You can keep filling in the holes, and you can keep patching up the house, but eventually the whole thing is going to cave in, or break the bank. And it won't be very comfortable to live in.
With the above analogy, the current state of Windows is that things have gotten so bad, you're paying the crew foreman to live in your guest bedroom full-time. He (and his boss) keep telling you, "You should have used better plaster so it wouldn't crack", "You should have used steel beams in the floor slab", "You really needed stronger mortar to hold those bricks together". But what you really should have done, is put your house on a f***ing solid piece of land. It defeats the point of having an operating system when you can't depend on any of its facilities.
Jasin NataelSorry it took so long to respond. Here's your FAQ:
What is the difference between "music" and "audio" CD-R's?
Jasin NataelI pay about $80, between the $60 (including taxes) for Cable Internet, and the $20 I pay for unlimited GPRS on my mobile. I tend to access the GPRS through my Powerbook via Bluetooth -- phone browsers don't quite cut it yet.
If someone has a version of FireFox in the works for Symbian Q (Sony-Ericsson P-series), I need to know about it. And that's not some sissy request; That means if I find out you're hiding a more convenient channel for internet access from me, I'll do what it takes to make sure it doesn't happen again. I *needz* my internets.
Jasin NataelEthnocentrism?
This is a problem that it literally takes several generations to overcome. You can see progress; This isn't an area where it's easy to "catch-up" to the ideals of another group. The younger generation, while they welcome foreigners, still seem very aware of, and interested in, everyone's ethnicity. If you are naturalized in Japan, you have to take a Japanese name. And even if you do, you often will be ostracized if you try to write it with ideographs.
I had a friend at University whose mother is Japanese and her father is from the US. Her name is Japanese and she was born in Japan, but she was literally disciplined in school if she wrote her name in anything but Katakana (the angular phonetic alphabet used for foreign words).
It still happens in the US, too, but it's on the decline. I know a guy whose grandfather used to beat him if he used anything except for racial epithets when referring to African-Americans. And this was only 10 years ago.
Jasin NataelOr you could just be incredibly elitist about it and shame bad coders into never publishing stupid crap for other people to see or maintain...
Jasin NataelI think the DS is a good option (it's what I have), but the screen on the new GBA's is absolutely incredible. It kicks the DS up one screen and down the other.
Jasin NataelActually, it's true. There are plenty of Stereo-Component CD recorders that only accept "Audio" CD-Rs. Simple players don't make the distinction, but home-theater recording and copying devices will only read/write certified "Audio" CD-Rs.
Jasin NataelThat's so not the same definition of "Two-Tiered". You're talking about pricing tiers, and TFA is actually talking about a physical divergence of the Internet. We're discussing a separation of the Internet itself into "Content Tiers" based on the ISP you're using. ISPs are trying to produce a model under which access to content on external networks is prohibited or severely limited, selectively, so that they can influence you to consume their content instead of any others'. They'll give traffic that stays local to their network higher priority, and probably block a lot of technologies completely when they compete with paid offerings from the ISP.
We're already halfway there because of US carriers' tendencies to offer massive downstream and almost no upstream. It makes it harder to get into the content-providing business because you can't host a fast website from your home or business without paying extra fees. Ergo, casual users don't produce and distribute online content, at least not in volume. This doesn't even count traffic shaping and port blocking, which cause more serious problems.
And now the companies that own the fiber want to lock out each other. This is the next step in virtual serfdom. A website hosted through a different ISP will be significantly slower. Websites in other countries will be significantly slower. And they're asking Congress to allow them to do it.
Jasin NataelI will have to qualify your statement, and say that strong should refer only to the strictness of enforcement, not the lengthening of period. This is a mistake that the US legislature has made time and again.
When a company can get licensing fees from a patent or copyright past the end of my lifetime, or when the creator's grandchildren can collect royalties throughout their lifetimes, we have done the opposite of what IP law should do. We have *exempted* the entity in question from ever needing to contribute to society again, when the point should be to *tempt* them with the benefits of further innovation after their temporary monopoly has expired.
Jasin NataelI'll take a stab at it. I'm exactly 25, but I've got plenty of younger, still college-age friends. Here's what I see (roughly in order of appearance):
Nobody is to the point of buying completely indie yet, but there has even been decreased interest in going to the concerts of big-name acts because of their alliance with the RIAA.
I think that in light of what's happened in the past few years, young people are understandably disappointed and disinterested in music altogether. Indepenedent music (as a whole; don't mod me down) doesn't offer the buyer the convenience, production quality, or the far-reaching social context of national and international distribution.
Jasin NataelExactly. PHP is like, four different languages all rolled into one. Move from 3.0 through 5.1, and you'll see it go from being a simple, kind-of-crappy scripting language, to a platform where you can implement most Java classes as PHP classes, and get similar performance characteristics (if you use a cache/optimizer).
The reason it <quotey_fingers>doesn't encourage good coding</quotey_fingers> is because it hasn't thrown out the simple, linear scripting. It probably never will, because it was designed to meet a wide range of needs with a single scripting language. There's value in dropping out a text file of some statistic you need, and there's also a lot of value if you write a class with all the modern features to turn a raw SQL Query Result into a JPG Bar Graph. You could do either with Java -- but reducing the amount of work for the simple task is a noble ambition, and (IMO) the second task is much easier as well.
For the record, I use Java for server apps, too. If I had a team of programmers, I'd probably insist on Java. But for 1- or 2-person projects, PHP is a timesaver and a lot less problematic in the long run.
--Jasin NataelI have one, but not in so many words. Here's what you do:
var parts = control.id.split(/-/);
AJAXGet(url, 'c='+parts[1]+'&r='+parts[2]+'&v='+control.value)
Sorry I don't have a working example to show off, all my current projects are kind of locked down, but you can get the idea. Lots of discrete 'save' calls to the database, each field has a visual indication of whether it's saved or not, and there's minimal addition to the markup: just an ID and an onchange handler.
--Jasin NataelAmen. That's the way it is already. Posts about a specific RFC or patch digress quickly into a political / technological debate about the merits of the underlying technology, the fix, or the fallacy of penetrate-and-patch. Any story containing "Web 2.0" or "AJAX" turns into a philosophical melee about the direction of Internet content, Applications, and inevitably ends with posters deriding the buzzword simply because they can't put it on their resume. Stories about aviation and space exploration digress into discussions of interplanetary flight, colonization, terraforming, the long-since dead X25, and the over-political nature of state-sponsored flight. Biology and evolution stories turn into religious flamewars faster than you can say "bang".
I've been here for a long time (I'm apparently missing a digit in my UID), and it's never been any different. I don't expect it will. You can't stop the community from discussing the topics that are interesting to it. But, the articles are usually good enough to bring out an informative, relevant discussion on the topic. Enough posters put up links to relevant materials online that sometimes it's better to read their links instead of the actual FA. At least the editors don't post every dot-zero-one update of the Linux Kernel anymore. Or maybe I set my preferences to filter those out. I can't remember.
Jasin NataelExactly. The BSA has to spin this. China, for example, would benefit massively from reasonable (read: similar to our constitution, not our laws) copyright enforcement. Performers would be able to make money from their albums or movies, and they would be higher quality. A lot of people who aren't willing to take the risk of being artists, or creative software developers, or even just inventors, would. The poor would still pirate content, but the middle and upper classes would be fueling an economic revolution.
The BSA has to make the point that a foreign economy would benefit more if they had an IP industry to compete on a global scale, or at least lock out foreign competition. Notice that they're not trying to claim any benefit from obliterating software piracy -- I don't think anyone would really benefit there -- but if they could just get more people to pay for software it would give them an incentive to create something locally. Then there really would be a benefit.
I doubt it's so altruistic, though. The BSA doesn't want reasonable copyright laws. They want to sell patents to the burgeoning foreign industries, and there's nothing ethical about that.
In truth, I wouldn't put the altruism on the foreign governments either. At the moment, they've got to be thrilled to let all the investment come from outside the country, and basically not have the burden of another domestic industry... Maybe the idealists on Slashdot are the only ones willing to do something to fix this broken system and make a better world (wrt Technology and IP Law, at least).
Jasin NataelThe GP's point seems to be that it's not important for bloggers to "enforce their rights", since they can exploit such copying to their own ends more effectively than newspapers can exploit such copy-and-pasting to suit theirs. Therefore, the blogger needs no legal protections from the state -- they already have the upper hand in a copyright-free world.
Jasin NataelThat's the thing. The teenagers are ostracized. And then the media -- who gets a hundred times the exposure to their malleable brains that their parents do -- tells them that they can fit in by being consumerist whores. Their minds aren't yet ready to reject that hollow twist of logic, so they spend everything they earn.
This is a relatively new thing. In the past, a young man or woman would have saved every penny they could make so they could start their married life with property, or at least a little savings. Now, they can spend 100% of their income from working at the pretzel stand as if it were discretionary. I've known a lot of people (including a younger version of myself) who have had a hard time saving money because of these habits encouraged by corporate america.
By the way, I'm 25, and I've recently outgrown a lot of the consumerism, started saving more money, and living financially responsibly... Now, if I could just break free of the gadget-buying habits!
Jasin NataelThere's a way to prevent that. For the first 24 hours a website is available, make the contents visible to the Class C that the owner last logged in from, and put up a 'coming soon' page for everyone else. Then, once the details have been verified and maybe someone has looked at the site, remove the restriction.
Jasin NataelThat's why all the power ultimately rests with the citizens. The constitution was designed to make sure the Government knew that if the people objected to what they were doing, the people could just regain control. No special oversight body called for.
Seems the problem is that the citizens have been slacking off. We knew what to expect from the politicians.
Jasin NataelThis doesn't seem like counterpoint at all. It looks like the politicians have noticed two concurrent behaviors of a specific group of politically active, freedom-loving citizens that support the constitution. There is far from a 100% corrolation, but I would venture to guess that anyone willing to consider revolution would rather fight without bloodshed, therefore it would be safe to say most members of the NRA vote and have political opinions. From the other direction, there's no reason to fight unless you have some underlying political or moral ideal to adhere to. That is, unless they are really the nuts the politicians make them out to be.
Politicians are targeting this group for two reasons: (1)To discredit opposing political activists who are members of this group, and (2)to put a bad taste in the mouths of the citizenry about the use, or threat, of violence to achieve political means.
They probably will drive things to a point that violence is the only answer, if more people don't start voting and educating themselves on the important issues. I think the current goal is to make people more fearful and less willing to take up arms against an oppressive regime at home. For the record, I'm not part of the NRA, and haven't supported them financially or otherwise. I personally dread that the day might come when citizens will have to die to re-institute the founding principles of this country, but I will concede that we're headed in that direction.
Jasin Natael