'So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don't limit your opinion to what's the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what's right.'
Easy -- repeal the DMCA and ACTA, don't pass SOPA, PIPA, or OPEN, roll copyright back to, say, 50 years, and give that a ten year test run while we do some serious data gathering and analysis.
Most of our copyright law over the past 15 years has been "The sky is falling" stuff. Wild overstepping of the balance between copyright holders and the interests of the public. We are spending an enormous amount of money doing a lousy job of protecting something that might not need protecting, and might not work any longer. We have very little data on the cost/benefit of all this enforcement, no research on alternatives, what data we do have shows extremely poor correlation between enforcement and increased revenue, does not consider the cost of new business models foregone, and the data that we have that claims to show the cost of infringement is based on the wildly inaccurate theory that every infringement is a foregone sale.
The right answer, if you are a copyright supporter like me, is to ease back to something that the public will be less likely to revolt against while we do some serious objective research on the problem. The right answer is to find out how we can fund the progress of science and the useful arts under this new reality. Copying does not cost any money any more. That is a fundamental change that we need to adapt to. Copyright was invented based on a premise that is no longer true. Failing to consider the new reality and research how to adapt to it is as stupid as Krushchev insisting on Communism. Nice theory, except it does not work.
We need to think about that and come up with a solution, not just fire wildly into the dark. None of the legislation over the past 15 years has made a hint of a dent in infringement. Same thing we've been saying ever since the DMCA was just a twinkle in the RIAA's eye. These laws cannot work, mathematically speaking, because reality has changed. We need to stop the wishful madness and think of how to turn free copying into a win. Seeing as how it is a massive boon to society to be able to reproduce things for free, that shouldn't be too hard. We are making this harder than it needs to be.
The big deal is the failure to recoup the costs. Extradition and prosecution are big, expensive things for both our societies, and we will not get a greater return on this than it costs.
Making burglary illegal has a handsome ROI for society. So do littering laws and equal opportunity lending regulations. That's the whole purpose of law, really, is to codify all the rules that we as a society are better off with than without.
Problem is, this extradition (in the broad sense of all the enforcement it represents, and the associated cost) is a counter-case. It will not even increase the revenue to the copyright holders in question by the amount it will cost society -- let alone net, and let alone net to society.
The problem is that we are going to ever more extreme lengths to fail to solve the supposed problem. We are spending more and more money on these ill-conceived laws to fail to increase GDP by an equal amount, to fail to increase the profit of the companies to which we are pandering by an equal amount, and even to fail to increase their revenue by an equal amount. And that should be no surprise. The further you step outside of natural law (like physical property) and minimal inhibition to trade, the more friction your economy will experience. You get to a point where every additional step increases the rate at which you lose money. We pole-vaulted over that fine line more than a decade ago.
And that is not even counting the cost of all the new business models we have inhibited along the way. We should be focusing our entrepreneurial investment on new business models that capitalize on the Internet, not spending ever more executive branch funds creating minefields for the new business world to protect a good, but archaic, business model that may simply not work any more.
The big deal is that this is not a cost efficient thing for our societies to be doing. It is not in the interest of our nations. Reality has changed, and we are not adapting. We are sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting "Na Na Na I cannot Hear You. Na Na Na." It is as jaw-dropping a spectacle of willful economic ignorance as watching the Soviet Union insist on Communism in the 80s.
The stuff that is still in the bill is still completely unacceptable. It still gives the MAFIAA the power to shut down the revenue of a company based merely on accusations, and removes any liability for payment processors or advertising programs for refusing to do business with a company based exclusively on a hit list written by the MAFIAA.
Between the MAFIAA shutting down the MegaUpload song and Warner's admission in court that checking whether they actually own some copyright is too much trouble, they cannot be trusted with that kind of authority.
Moreover, we have already given them law after law after law for more than a decade. They keep saying, "We need this to stop copyright infringement, even though it is going to be costly, intrusive, and strain the bounds of civil liberties." And it keeps not working, and they keep abusing what we do grant them, and they keep asking for more.
We have given them more than we have given any other industry except maybe the investment banks, and they are still telling us they need more.
It does not make sense for us to keep going to more and more extreme lengths to protect this business model. Either it works in the Internet age, or they need to come up with some ideas for funding their production that does not rely entirely on heavy-handed interference in the marketplace. Centralized enforcement is a blunt and expensive weapon. If this particular government-granted monopoly is no longer a cost efficient means to channel revenue into science and the useful arts, we need to try some new approaches instead of just plugging holes in the failing levee.
Right, but when a huge chunk of your market is going to be businesses with 15-20 employees and no dedicated IT person, or if they have a dedicated IT person they're not actually a trained IT person, having a CLI only is utterly braindead.
Might be it's time for 15-20 person companies that have a need to run a server to learn that having a skilled IT person is about as important as having a person who makes good business decisions. They don't call this the "information age" for nothing. Business today runs in information every bit as much as it runs on cashflow. Most companies wouldn't trust their cashflow to someone who doesn't know their way around a spreadsheet. Perhaps it doesn't make any more sense to trust their informationflow to someone who doesn't know their way around a command line.
'Course, it's not a big leap from that realization to "We should be using *nix for this.":)
"the Irish Finance minister has announced that they are now 'worthless'.... after a confidential report expressed serious concern over the security of the voting machines.... the integrity of the ballot could not be guaranteed"
Come on, Ireland, where's your sense of tenacity? On this side of the pond we have shown over and over again that voting machines are insecure -- we even had a CEO of one of the voting machine companies promise to deliver his home state of Ohio to to GWB, then had a precinct in Ohio that was using his machines report more votes in favor of GWB than the number of people in the precinct -- and we are still using them.
You can't let a little thing like "failing to provide an accurate and trustworthy tally of votes" keep you from insisting that voting machines provide an accurate and trustworthy tally of votes. There are corporate profits and lobbying money to consider. Are you going to ignore the will of the lobbyists who represent the voting machine companies just because they stand directly opposed to the best interests of the nation? You would not last a second in American politics.
2002: "We should hire third worlders to do this stuff."
2012: "We should get the unemployed to do this stuff."
It's all good, go for it. Some of them will be able to do it, and do it well, and communicate about it with others, and not go stark raving mad. Most won't. The ones who do will be a boon to our field. The rest will learn that we are actually worth more than our current considerable compensation. Average people knowing more about programming, by trying to do it, means more people who grok that what we do is far out of the ordinary.
Admittedly, there will be another five year period when lots of pretty hairstyles with empty suits under them will think we can be replaced easily -- this time by homeless people or something -- and those empty suits will crash and burn. Just learn to recognize them and get out of the fallout zone.
Gee, government, not fondling the MAFIAA's nuts enough, so they hit you. Now, are you going to say "I walked into a door" and let them do it again, or are you going to man up?
You know what happens when you give a bully your lunch money? He threatens you for it the next day.
Know what happens when you give the MAFIAA a yard? They take a mile.
There is only one way to stop a bully. Stand up to him.
There is only one way to stop the MAFIAA. Cut copyright to 50 years, and tell them if they don't back the fuck off, you're going to cut it to 20 years.
Sales and marketing does indeed have a "hard", finely-honed skillset - At self-deception. They need to convince themselves that their customer "needs" rockstar vibes, before they can convince the world of it.
Reading that, I can't help getting an image of Gil Gunderson. A sales guy who has spent his life convincing himself that shit is Shinola. Waking up each day, stiffening his spine, and going out there to do it one more time. Each day, the wall around his soul wearing a little thinner and his ability to ignore the truth getting a little more frayed. The lines in his forehead growing deeper as the shame becomes unbearable.
Maybe Willy Loman is a better icon on which to hang the image.
'Programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books,' the article laments.
Given? We're being "given" this?
I don't know how it works in the ebook industry, but in my fifteen years of professional programming in a variety of other industries, I've found that when they "give" me free reign to design the UI, it really means they rejected my suggestion that they hire a designer (if they even asked).
You're pointing at the wrong target, bud -- it's the chucklehead manager, with the designer clothes and designer watch, who thinks designers are a waste of money.
What does Moglen propose to this woman and reporter as a solution to the problem? Why, that she and by extension everyone else simply not network, not share, perhaps not even have relationships... because the logical conclusion of those relationships is always the sharing of information that might prove useful to someone else for control or profit.
Actually, Eben did not propose that she not network. He proposed that she not network using Facebook or Twitter.
The real conundrum here, which Moglen seems to ignore for convenience, is that when information is set free then that information is now free for everyone, for any purpose or intent, good or bad.
That statement is not germaine to the topic at hand. The information in question is not being set free. It is being gathered into private, for-profit stores, and being sold to other private and government interests. You cannot see the time and URL of most of the web pages that your Mother (or some other representative person if your Mother is not a good example case) has viewed this week. Google can.
I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.
I've done it. I worked for an online advertising company in San Francisco. They were all about human-based targeting, done by our placement specialists. I wanted to show them what collaborative filtering could do, so I wrote a running an algorithm similar to what Netflix uses. Ran it in a one month randomized A/B test against ads targeted by our pros using demographics. For every dollar they sold during the run, I sold 3.8 dollars.
I present this to ICE or FTC or whoever is supposed to be enforcing this thing.
That's part of the fun of SOPA too -- while the government does have to get involved with enforced takedowns, the bill also removes any liability for voluntary takedowns by ISPs. So if Warner Cable decides to censor any website hosting information on how to rip DVDs, they cannot be held liable despite the fact that they operate a communications service with the benefit of government granted easements (like cable rights of way) and, in many markets, government granted monopolies.
Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...
Good -- maybe all the rustic folk out in the hinterlands will complain enough to get a few sites to use less than 19 external sources of javascript tracking bugs, and to only have four or five layers of external scripts that load external scripts that load external scripts.
Bradley Manning provided access to U.S. government secrets to everyone, because (or ostensibly because) the U.S. government was not duly informing the United States Citizens of the military's actions in their name.
Apple(*) provided access to U.S. government secrets to a foreign national government, because they wanted that foreign national government to give them quid pro quo access to a lucrative market.
Seems pretty clear Apple will be facing more severe charges than Bradley Manning, right?... Or, at least, it's going to be in the same ballpark, right?... Well, OK, at least, same kind of national debate, where questions of treason get raised, right?... No?... OK, then, well, umm, WTF?!?
* Note: RIM and Nokia are foreign -- an interesting angle to consider, but not as similar to Manning as Apple.
Does the MPAA/RIAA block have more lobby-power than all those companies combined?
Yes, the MAFIAA gives more campaign money than the tech companies, but that's not all. There is another huge factor at work.
Once SOPA passes, precedent will have been set for censoring the Internet. With the MAFIAA taking most of the heat for the censorship wrap, the politicians can pass the bill under the guise of not understanding how the Internet works. Then, a year or two from now, they pass the law that lets them do the same for terr'rists. Actually, correction, they attach an amendment of the PATRIOT act to the defense budget bill, and they do it in the panic'd last minutes to avert a budget shutdown (that they fabricated). It will happen on a Friday, or the Thursday before a holiday weekend, to give the public he whole weekend to forget.
Only thing I might be wrong about is the "year or two" part. Things have been moving faster and faster -- might happen before Summer's out.
have you seen correlation between interview puzzle success and job competency?
The point of brain teasers is not so much whether the candidate gets the right answer, it is getting them to show you how they work a problem that is outside their standard frame of reference. The worthwhile insight you can glean is whether they ask you to guide them or come up with their own approach to solve the problem.
Depending on the position, you may want either candidate. Some positions call for independent problem solving, others are better having a person who detects problems and raises them to the team before proceeding.
Nice -- I love the comparison to Sarbanes Oxley. It puts the costs of DMCA or SOPA in a mental frame that most companies can grasp, because most companies experienced the transition from pre-SOX to post-SOX.
I worked on the SOX team at a Fortune 500, and it as horrifying. Out of every dollar we spent, we got ten cents of real value, twenty-five cents of something between numb step-following and malicious compliance, and maybe thirty cents worth of PWC checking our work to make sure the numb step-following was sufficiently pedantic. The other thirty-five cents seemed to disappear in little puffs of acrid smoke during the interminable thirty person meetings with no agenda.
Step back from the question of copyright in the Internet age, fair use, quantity displayed, etc. Think about the meta-concepts, and it just doesn't feel right.
Here's how the free market that is all sunshine and puppies is supposed to work: Joe makes something that he thinks people will enjoy. He puts it out on the market, and asks for some price. Bill walks by and decides he'd like to have that thing. So he looks at the price, compares it to his perceived value, maybe makes a counter offer, eventually he gives Joe more than it cost Joe to make it, and gets a product that is worth more to Bill than it cost. They both win, and they both decide to do it of their own free will. They're both so pleased with the transaction that they start thinking of ways to make it happen again. Bill goes and collects more dollars (by starting his own thing-making operation). Joe uses that money to make more stuff (by going out and giving his dollars to other people who sell materials). It's this crazy self-catalyzing engine of productivity.
Now we have content. Bill decides not to pay the creator, but to profit from the content. It may be legal, but he's making a profit without paying the person who put the stuff together in the first place. Meanwhile, Joe doesn't start where he should, either. Instead of thinking, "Gee, there's a whole new way to distribute news. Maybe I could find a new way to package and sell this stuff. Maybe make it easier for new guys who are going to compete with Bill. Might even be a disruptive competitor will come along, pay me for access through this new system, and put Bill out of business. I should put out a press release saying that I'm looking to develop new kinds of relationships with entrepreneurs who are willing to pay for privileged access." No, instead of trying to innovate and compete Bill into irrelevance, he sues. I figure this largely boils down to Joe not wanting to develop a new product or new customers, he wants to take money from the companies that already have a lot of it because it is easier.
I can't see either side as being the noble bastion of what is in the best interests of advancing the progress of science and the useful arts. Seems like both sides are total ponces who should be tossed under the bus at earliest convenience. Bill not paying, and Joe not innovating -- they're both consigning themselves to certain death. If Bill were paying, Joe wouldn't be pissed off and looking for ways to sue. If Joe were coming up with ways to package and sell his media to partner distributors that was a value-add compared to scraping (and I can sit here and come up with half a dozen ways off the top of my head), he wouldn't be getting his lunch eaten by a total elimination of the operational principle that made copyright work (copying used to have a non-zero cost).
Right? Wrong? They're both idiots, and neither side has come up with a remotely acceptable answer to this new reality. The sooner we can get over our addiction to what worked 20 years ago and come up with some new answers for funding the creators of content, the better. Until then, this whole mess is fundamentally broken and I would rather see both sides crash and burn, see what comes from the ashes, than continue the charade that something good can come of this.
4. There are virtually NO U.S. corporations that would not benefit from the enactment of SOPA, in some way. Virtually none would suffer any damages from enactment of SOPA. Even Internet-based corporations would benefit from having clear rules to follow. Ambiguity is not always profitable.
3.5% of the US GDP is media, in the broadest sense. The other 96.5% benefits from an unrestricted Internet. "Having clear rules to follow" means having to hire people and build systems to enact those rules.
SOPA will be as costly to US corporations as the DMCA was. it's a giant extra bit of friction that only helps a tiny corner of the economy. Either you know nothing about economics or you are a shill.
They'll fix any well-defined problem, but the solution can only meet two of three criteria: fast, cheap, and high-quality. But voters (like customers) will want all three, and won't define the problem well.
And politicians, like the charlatan with all the certifications and no grasp of how to build a cost effective system, will promise all three and win the [project lead / election].
"Law Enforcement Agencies of all countries should actively flag and encourage the use of flagging among end users as much as possible as a way of notification to the ISP that they are hosting content which might be illegal or unwanted."
Pressure the ISP to remove speech, and you don't have to bother with those annoying free speech questions.
Common carrier or catalyzing oligarchy -- binary options. We know which side the government is going to come down on, so it's going to be an uphill battle. Sooner we get started, the sooner it's over.
People with practically any ability or profession can look down upon about others that don't share that trait... Someone that finds a task a dull hassle is preserving/improving their quality of life by asking someone skilled in that field to do so for them, as it means they can focus their energy on something more suited to them.
In the early 90's I was cutting code that not many people wanted while I worked at a coffee shop to pay the bills. My brother was trading commodities with the world at his feet. Some skills are more valuable than others. Now I bring home a big paycheck, and while he is retired, his associates who are still doing human-to-human investment banking mostly aren't making the ridiculous bonuses any more. Recognizing that one of your skill sets is one of the expensive ones at some moment in time doesn't mean you are looking down on others (that is an orthogonal question; whether you are an asshole), but not looking down on others doesn't mean all skills have equal value.
I was as good or better at making fancy coffee drinks as I am at writing systems, but people aren't willing to pay more than a couple bucks premium for a better cup of coffee (and most don't know the difference between a better cup of coffee and mediocre coffee with lots of sugar and fat in it). What I enjoy most is high end woodworking, but there aren't many people who would spend a few thousand bucks on a table. Brain surgery is harder, rarer, so it earns still more money than writing software, but I don't have the training or dexterity.
All people are equally worthy of respect, regardless of their abilities. Respect is about content of character, not size of wallet. And without going into detail, progressive taxation is right for purely objective reasons, regardless of the moral question (empirical economic analysis is another of my hobbies). But how much money a customer is willing to pay a tradesman is a matter of the customer's desire for the product and how rare the skill is. Being good at a trade that is worth more is a competitive advantage, and getting paid more to do it is what compensates a tradesman for satisfying the customer's greater wants instead of making a fancy cup of coffee or a pretty table.
Nor is it going away. It is what it is; not useful for most visual-oriented tasks, and filling the space between writing your own code and using a stock gui for data-oriented tasks.
When the stock gui won't do what you need to do, the CLI can often get the job done without writing your own full toolkit.
The CLI will remain a nerd's tool.
You damn skippy it will! Users just give up when the GUI won't do it. Pretty much leaves them either relying on a nerd to help, or up shit creek. Must be a horrible way to live -- if you can even call that living.
It is, after all, the information age. Seems being an information tool-maker is up there with having opposable thumbs on the "competitive advantage" scale, right? Using "nerd" in the pejorative sense is archaic.
Slashdot Mirror
'So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don't limit your opinion to what's the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what's right.'
Easy -- repeal the DMCA and ACTA, don't pass SOPA, PIPA, or OPEN, roll copyright back to, say, 50 years, and give that a ten year test run while we do some serious data gathering and analysis.
Most of our copyright law over the past 15 years has been "The sky is falling" stuff. Wild overstepping of the balance between copyright holders and the interests of the public. We are spending an enormous amount of money doing a lousy job of protecting something that might not need protecting, and might not work any longer. We have very little data on the cost/benefit of all this enforcement, no research on alternatives, what data we do have shows extremely poor correlation between enforcement and increased revenue, does not consider the cost of new business models foregone, and the data that we have that claims to show the cost of infringement is based on the wildly inaccurate theory that every infringement is a foregone sale.
The right answer, if you are a copyright supporter like me, is to ease back to something that the public will be less likely to revolt against while we do some serious objective research on the problem. The right answer is to find out how we can fund the progress of science and the useful arts under this new reality. Copying does not cost any money any more. That is a fundamental change that we need to adapt to. Copyright was invented based on a premise that is no longer true. Failing to consider the new reality and research how to adapt to it is as stupid as Krushchev insisting on Communism. Nice theory, except it does not work.
We need to think about that and come up with a solution, not just fire wildly into the dark. None of the legislation over the past 15 years has made a hint of a dent in infringement. Same thing we've been saying ever since the DMCA was just a twinkle in the RIAA's eye. These laws cannot work, mathematically speaking, because reality has changed. We need to stop the wishful madness and think of how to turn free copying into a win. Seeing as how it is a massive boon to society to be able to reproduce things for free, that shouldn't be too hard. We are making this harder than it needs to be.
So what's the big deal?
The big deal is the failure to recoup the costs. Extradition and prosecution are big, expensive things for both our societies, and we will not get a greater return on this than it costs.
Making burglary illegal has a handsome ROI for society. So do littering laws and equal opportunity lending regulations. That's the whole purpose of law, really, is to codify all the rules that we as a society are better off with than without.
Problem is, this extradition (in the broad sense of all the enforcement it represents, and the associated cost) is a counter-case. It will not even increase the revenue to the copyright holders in question by the amount it will cost society -- let alone net, and let alone net to society.
The problem is that we are going to ever more extreme lengths to fail to solve the supposed problem. We are spending more and more money on these ill-conceived laws to fail to increase GDP by an equal amount, to fail to increase the profit of the companies to which we are pandering by an equal amount, and even to fail to increase their revenue by an equal amount. And that should be no surprise. The further you step outside of natural law (like physical property) and minimal inhibition to trade, the more friction your economy will experience. You get to a point where every additional step increases the rate at which you lose money. We pole-vaulted over that fine line more than a decade ago.
And that is not even counting the cost of all the new business models we have inhibited along the way. We should be focusing our entrepreneurial investment on new business models that capitalize on the Internet, not spending ever more executive branch funds creating minefields for the new business world to protect a good, but archaic, business model that may simply not work any more.
The big deal is that this is not a cost efficient thing for our societies to be doing. It is not in the interest of our nations. Reality has changed, and we are not adapting. We are sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting "Na Na Na I cannot Hear You. Na Na Na." It is as jaw-dropping a spectacle of willful economic ignorance as watching the Soviet Union insist on Communism in the 80s.
The stuff that is still in the bill is still completely unacceptable. It still gives the MAFIAA the power to shut down the revenue of a company based merely on accusations, and removes any liability for payment processors or advertising programs for refusing to do business with a company based exclusively on a hit list written by the MAFIAA.
Between the MAFIAA shutting down the MegaUpload song and Warner's admission in court that checking whether they actually own some copyright is too much trouble, they cannot be trusted with that kind of authority.
Moreover, we have already given them law after law after law for more than a decade. They keep saying, "We need this to stop copyright infringement, even though it is going to be costly, intrusive, and strain the bounds of civil liberties." And it keeps not working, and they keep abusing what we do grant them, and they keep asking for more.
We have given them more than we have given any other industry except maybe the investment banks, and they are still telling us they need more.
It does not make sense for us to keep going to more and more extreme lengths to protect this business model. Either it works in the Internet age, or they need to come up with some ideas for funding their production that does not rely entirely on heavy-handed interference in the marketplace. Centralized enforcement is a blunt and expensive weapon. If this particular government-granted monopoly is no longer a cost efficient means to channel revenue into science and the useful arts, we need to try some new approaches instead of just plugging holes in the failing levee.
Right, but when a huge chunk of your market is going to be businesses with 15-20 employees and no dedicated IT person, or if they have a dedicated IT person they're not actually a trained IT person, having a CLI only is utterly braindead.
Might be it's time for 15-20 person companies that have a need to run a server to learn that having a skilled IT person is about as important as having a person who makes good business decisions. They don't call this the "information age" for nothing. Business today runs in information every bit as much as it runs on cashflow. Most companies wouldn't trust their cashflow to someone who doesn't know their way around a spreadsheet. Perhaps it doesn't make any more sense to trust their informationflow to someone who doesn't know their way around a command line.
'Course, it's not a big leap from that realization to "We should be using *nix for this." :)
"the Irish Finance minister has announced that they are now 'worthless'. ... after a confidential report expressed serious concern over the security of the voting machines. ... the integrity of the ballot could not be guaranteed"
Come on, Ireland, where's your sense of tenacity? On this side of the pond we have shown over and over again that voting machines are insecure -- we even had a CEO of one of the voting machine companies promise to deliver his home state of Ohio to to GWB, then had a precinct in Ohio that was using his machines report more votes in favor of GWB than the number of people in the precinct -- and we are still using them.
You can't let a little thing like "failing to provide an accurate and trustworthy tally of votes" keep you from insisting that voting machines provide an accurate and trustworthy tally of votes. There are corporate profits and lobbying money to consider. Are you going to ignore the will of the lobbyists who represent the voting machine companies just because they stand directly opposed to the best interests of the nation? You would not last a second in American politics.
2002: "We should hire third worlders to do this stuff."
2012: "We should get the unemployed to do this stuff."
It's all good, go for it. Some of them will be able to do it, and do it well, and communicate about it with others, and not go stark raving mad. Most won't. The ones who do will be a boon to our field. The rest will learn that we are actually worth more than our current considerable compensation. Average people knowing more about programming, by trying to do it, means more people who grok that what we do is far out of the ordinary.
Admittedly, there will be another five year period when lots of pretty hairstyles with empty suits under them will think we can be replaced easily -- this time by homeless people or something -- and those empty suits will crash and burn. Just learn to recognize them and get out of the fallout zone.
Gee, government, not fondling the MAFIAA's nuts enough, so they hit you. Now, are you going to say "I walked into a door" and let them do it again, or are you going to man up?
You know what happens when you give a bully your lunch money? He threatens you for it the next day.
Know what happens when you give the MAFIAA a yard? They take a mile.
There is only one way to stop a bully. Stand up to him.
There is only one way to stop the MAFIAA. Cut copyright to 50 years, and tell them if they don't back the fuck off, you're going to cut it to 20 years.
Sales and marketing does indeed have a "hard", finely-honed skillset - At self-deception. They need to convince themselves that their customer "needs" rockstar vibes, before they can convince the world of it.
Reading that, I can't help getting an image of Gil Gunderson. A sales guy who has spent his life convincing himself that shit is Shinola. Waking up each day, stiffening his spine, and going out there to do it one more time. Each day, the wall around his soul wearing a little thinner and his ability to ignore the truth getting a little more frayed. The lines in his forehead growing deeper as the shame becomes unbearable.
Maybe Willy Loman is a better icon on which to hang the image.
"Rein" is the "correct" term,
Good info. Thanks for the heads up.
'Programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books,' the article laments.
Given? We're being "given" this?
I don't know how it works in the ebook industry, but in my fifteen years of professional programming in a variety of other industries, I've found that when they "give" me free reign to design the UI, it really means they rejected my suggestion that they hire a designer (if they even asked).
You're pointing at the wrong target, bud -- it's the chucklehead manager, with the designer clothes and designer watch, who thinks designers are a waste of money.
What does Moglen propose to this woman and reporter as a solution to the problem? Why, that she and by extension everyone else simply not network, not share, perhaps not even have relationships... because the logical conclusion of those relationships is always the sharing of information that might prove useful to someone else for control or profit.
Actually, Eben did not propose that she not network. He proposed that she not network using Facebook or Twitter.
The real conundrum here, which Moglen seems to ignore for convenience, is that when information is set free then that information is now free for everyone, for any purpose or intent, good or bad.
That statement is not germaine to the topic at hand. The information in question is not being set free. It is being gathered into private, for-profit stores, and being sold to other private and government interests. You cannot see the time and URL of most of the web pages that your Mother (or some other representative person if your Mother is not a good example case) has viewed this week. Google can.
I remain skeptical. I'm a regular FB poster, and not even FB can target ads to me that I care about.
I've done it. I worked for an online advertising company in San Francisco. They were all about human-based targeting, done by our placement specialists. I wanted to show them what collaborative filtering could do, so I wrote a running an algorithm similar to what Netflix uses. Ran it in a one month randomized A/B test against ads targeted by our pros using demographics. For every dollar they sold during the run, I sold 3.8 dollars.
I present this to ICE or FTC or whoever is supposed to be enforcing this thing.
That's part of the fun of SOPA too -- while the government does have to get involved with enforced takedowns, the bill also removes any liability for voluntary takedowns by ISPs. So if Warner Cable decides to censor any website hosting information on how to rip DVDs, they cannot be held liable despite the fact that they operate a communications service with the benefit of government granted easements (like cable rights of way) and, in many markets, government granted monopolies.
Ever try to load Gmail over a high latency connection? Anything with a lot of redirects will cause an issue - and that is a lot more stuff than you think...
Good -- maybe all the rustic folk out in the hinterlands will complain enough to get a few sites to use less than 19 external sources of javascript tracking bugs, and to only have four or five layers of external scripts that load external scripts that load external scripts.
Good follow-up info. Thank you!
Bradley Manning provided access to U.S. government secrets to everyone, because (or ostensibly because) the U.S. government was not duly informing the United States Citizens of the military's actions in their name.
Apple(*) provided access to U.S. government secrets to a foreign national government, because they wanted that foreign national government to give them quid pro quo access to a lucrative market.
Seems pretty clear Apple will be facing more severe charges than Bradley Manning, right? ... Or, at least, it's going to be in the same ballpark, right? ... Well, OK, at least, same kind of national debate, where questions of treason get raised, right? ... No? ... OK, then, well, umm, WTF?!?
* Note: RIM and Nokia are foreign -- an interesting angle to consider, but not as similar to Manning as Apple.
Does the MPAA/RIAA block have more lobby-power than all those companies combined?
Yes, the MAFIAA gives more campaign money than the tech companies, but that's not all. There is another huge factor at work.
Once SOPA passes, precedent will have been set for censoring the Internet. With the MAFIAA taking most of the heat for the censorship wrap, the politicians can pass the bill under the guise of not understanding how the Internet works. Then, a year or two from now, they pass the law that lets them do the same for terr'rists. Actually, correction, they attach an amendment of the PATRIOT act to the defense budget bill, and they do it in the panic'd last minutes to avert a budget shutdown (that they fabricated). It will happen on a Friday, or the Thursday before a holiday weekend, to give the public he whole weekend to forget.
Only thing I might be wrong about is the "year or two" part. Things have been moving faster and faster -- might happen before Summer's out.
have you seen correlation between interview puzzle success and job competency?
The point of brain teasers is not so much whether the candidate gets the right answer, it is getting them to show you how they work a problem that is outside their standard frame of reference. The worthwhile insight you can glean is whether they ask you to guide them or come up with their own approach to solve the problem.
Depending on the position, you may want either candidate. Some positions call for independent problem solving, others are better having a person who detects problems and raises them to the team before proceeding.
Nice -- I love the comparison to Sarbanes Oxley. It puts the costs of DMCA or SOPA in a mental frame that most companies can grasp, because most companies experienced the transition from pre-SOX to post-SOX.
I worked on the SOX team at a Fortune 500, and it as horrifying. Out of every dollar we spent, we got ten cents of real value, twenty-five cents of something between numb step-following and malicious compliance, and maybe thirty cents worth of PWC checking our work to make sure the numb step-following was sufficiently pedantic. The other thirty-five cents seemed to disappear in little puffs of acrid smoke during the interminable thirty person meetings with no agenda.
Step back from the question of copyright in the Internet age, fair use, quantity displayed, etc. Think about the meta-concepts, and it just doesn't feel right.
Here's how the free market that is all sunshine and puppies is supposed to work: Joe makes something that he thinks people will enjoy. He puts it out on the market, and asks for some price. Bill walks by and decides he'd like to have that thing. So he looks at the price, compares it to his perceived value, maybe makes a counter offer, eventually he gives Joe more than it cost Joe to make it, and gets a product that is worth more to Bill than it cost. They both win, and they both decide to do it of their own free will. They're both so pleased with the transaction that they start thinking of ways to make it happen again. Bill goes and collects more dollars (by starting his own thing-making operation). Joe uses that money to make more stuff (by going out and giving his dollars to other people who sell materials). It's this crazy self-catalyzing engine of productivity.
Now we have content. Bill decides not to pay the creator, but to profit from the content. It may be legal, but he's making a profit without paying the person who put the stuff together in the first place. Meanwhile, Joe doesn't start where he should, either. Instead of thinking, "Gee, there's a whole new way to distribute news. Maybe I could find a new way to package and sell this stuff. Maybe make it easier for new guys who are going to compete with Bill. Might even be a disruptive competitor will come along, pay me for access through this new system, and put Bill out of business. I should put out a press release saying that I'm looking to develop new kinds of relationships with entrepreneurs who are willing to pay for privileged access." No, instead of trying to innovate and compete Bill into irrelevance, he sues. I figure this largely boils down to Joe not wanting to develop a new product or new customers, he wants to take money from the companies that already have a lot of it because it is easier.
I can't see either side as being the noble bastion of what is in the best interests of advancing the progress of science and the useful arts. Seems like both sides are total ponces who should be tossed under the bus at earliest convenience. Bill not paying, and Joe not innovating -- they're both consigning themselves to certain death. If Bill were paying, Joe wouldn't be pissed off and looking for ways to sue. If Joe were coming up with ways to package and sell his media to partner distributors that was a value-add compared to scraping (and I can sit here and come up with half a dozen ways off the top of my head), he wouldn't be getting his lunch eaten by a total elimination of the operational principle that made copyright work (copying used to have a non-zero cost).
Right? Wrong? They're both idiots, and neither side has come up with a remotely acceptable answer to this new reality. The sooner we can get over our addiction to what worked 20 years ago and come up with some new answers for funding the creators of content, the better. Until then, this whole mess is fundamentally broken and I would rather see both sides crash and burn, see what comes from the ashes, than continue the charade that something good can come of this.
4. There are virtually NO U.S. corporations that would not benefit from the enactment of SOPA, in some way. Virtually none would suffer any damages from enactment of SOPA. Even Internet-based corporations would benefit from having clear rules to follow. Ambiguity is not always profitable.
3.5% of the US GDP is media, in the broadest sense. The other 96.5% benefits from an unrestricted Internet. "Having clear rules to follow" means having to hire people and build systems to enact those rules.
SOPA will be as costly to US corporations as the DMCA was. it's a giant extra bit of friction that only helps a tiny corner of the economy. Either you know nothing about economics or you are a shill.
They'll fix any well-defined problem, but the solution can only meet two of three criteria: fast, cheap, and high-quality. But voters (like customers) will want all three, and won't define the problem well.
And politicians, like the charlatan with all the certifications and no grasp of how to build a cost effective system, will promise all three and win the [project lead / election].
From TFA:
"Law Enforcement Agencies of all countries should actively flag and encourage the use of flagging among end users as much as possible as a way of notification to the ISP that they are hosting content which might be illegal or unwanted."
Pressure the ISP to remove speech, and you don't have to bother with those annoying free speech questions.
Common carrier or catalyzing oligarchy -- binary options. We know which side the government is going to come down on, so it's going to be an uphill battle. Sooner we get started, the sooner it's over.
People with practically any ability or profession can look down upon about others that don't share that trait ... Someone that finds a task a dull hassle is preserving/improving their quality of life by asking someone skilled in that field to do so for them, as it means they can focus their energy on something more suited to them.
In the early 90's I was cutting code that not many people wanted while I worked at a coffee shop to pay the bills. My brother was trading commodities with the world at his feet. Some skills are more valuable than others. Now I bring home a big paycheck, and while he is retired, his associates who are still doing human-to-human investment banking mostly aren't making the ridiculous bonuses any more. Recognizing that one of your skill sets is one of the expensive ones at some moment in time doesn't mean you are looking down on others (that is an orthogonal question; whether you are an asshole), but not looking down on others doesn't mean all skills have equal value.
I was as good or better at making fancy coffee drinks as I am at writing systems, but people aren't willing to pay more than a couple bucks premium for a better cup of coffee (and most don't know the difference between a better cup of coffee and mediocre coffee with lots of sugar and fat in it). What I enjoy most is high end woodworking, but there aren't many people who would spend a few thousand bucks on a table. Brain surgery is harder, rarer, so it earns still more money than writing software, but I don't have the training or dexterity.
All people are equally worthy of respect, regardless of their abilities. Respect is about content of character, not size of wallet. And without going into detail, progressive taxation is right for purely objective reasons, regardless of the moral question (empirical economic analysis is another of my hobbies). But how much money a customer is willing to pay a tradesman is a matter of the customer's desire for the product and how rare the skill is. Being good at a trade that is worth more is a competitive advantage, and getting paid more to do it is what compensates a tradesman for satisfying the customer's greater wants instead of making a fancy cup of coffee or a pretty table.
The command line is not coming back
Nor is it going away. It is what it is; not useful for most visual-oriented tasks, and filling the space between writing your own code and using a stock gui for data-oriented tasks.
When the stock gui won't do what you need to do, the CLI can often get the job done without writing your own full toolkit.
The CLI will remain a nerd's tool.
You damn skippy it will! Users just give up when the GUI won't do it. Pretty much leaves them either relying on a nerd to help, or up shit creek. Must be a horrible way to live -- if you can even call that living.
It is, after all, the information age. Seems being an information tool-maker is up there with having opposable thumbs on the "competitive advantage" scale, right? Using "nerd" in the pejorative sense is archaic.