You're the second person who's responded to my comment without actually reading what I said. I'm honestly not sure why, because I tried to be very explicit about the point I was making.
Allow me to reiterate:
I'm offended by what he said, in the context of why he said it, because even though he explicitly states that it is only in his own experience... he presents such anecdotal evidence as if it were a generalization of reality.
In other words, the political correctness or incorrectness of his statement is wholly irrellevant. What the real problem is that somebody that is supposedly a recognized scientist is trying to pass off anecdotal evidence as if it were a reflection of a universal truth. He draws what is actually an invalid conclusion because his sample data set is biased, and any scientist worthy to be called such would realize that.
It's perfectly fine to say that something your experiences have been a certain way... what is invalid is to assume that your own experiences are necessarily going to be true for everyone else, particularly when there's no shortage of people who are prepared to say that such experiences are not shared by everyone.
The things that he claims about happening in a lab with mixed genders only even have the smallest chance of happening if the people who were working in the lab are utterly incapable of conducting themselves maturely and professionally, and such behavior, while possibly not uncommon, should be viewed as the exception among professionals in any real-world industry, and not the rule.
My offense is not at the political incorrectness of his statements, it is at his gross abuse of his position as a recognized scientist to make what he appears to present as objective claims about reality, specifically that what are by his own admission his own personal experiences should somehow be a taken as a reflection of a universal scientific truth. It's called anecdotal evidence, and is not anything even remotely resembling a basis for making scientifically valid conclusions.
If you are offended by what he said, in the context of why he said it, it says more about ridiculous you are, than he is. Political Correctness is a disease, not the cure for what ails us.
I'm offended by what he said, in the context of why he said it, because even though he explicitly states that it is only in his own experience...
, "Let me tell you about my trouble with girls three things happen when they are in the lab You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry."
... he presents such anecdotal evidence as if it were a generalization of reality.
And this is somebody that the world sees as a scientist?
Facts exist... plenty of them, for that matter. For example, it is a fact that pigs do not possess the ability to fly, insomuch as flying is considered an act of volition that is considered distinct from being launched from a stationary position relative to the ground as a projectile, or else simply "falling".
... of vowing something when you aren't going to be held accountable for it?
In 85 years, I could all but guarantee that practically everyone will have forgotten that they ever "vowed" to do this, and in reality, this so-called promise is a just a whole lot of hot air.
While it's true that he might not have had any explicit permission to publish their source code on the web, I think an argument could be made that such permission was implicit.... since the company was already pushing the source code to every single person that used the serviice anyways (being javascript, and it needing to run in the client's web browser).... and it's not like he was publishing something that he was never entitled to access to, nor had any obligation to keep confidential.
That the name of a method may be an english verb does not change the fact that it is still a name and therefore a noun in that context.
Although designing the API requires creativity, what an API really amounts to when complete is a collection of factual statements of the form "such-and-such exists", which is a task that even a mindless computer can carry out.
Because only literary works and works with sentences having proper grammar can be copyrighted?
I didn't suggest that was the case... I only said it would take more than just reciting nouns. The nouns would actually need to be *USED* in some kind of creative fashion, and facts (such as saying that a particular noun exists, which is what the human-readable form of an API is) are not creative.
Except those words, because they are only *names*, are not collectively an expression of any kind of creative idea.. Alien languages such as what was presented in the ST:TNG episode "Darmok" notwithstanding, one generally needs to use far more than just nouns or proper nouns to produce a copyrightable creative work.
First, foremost, always and finally, API's are ultimately a collection of names. Names are not copyrightable entities.
The only way you can infringe on somebody's IP for copying a name of something is if that name was trademarked.... but trademark and copyright are two different things. Java may be trademarked, but that's not what Google copied... they copied the
NAMES
of the functions that are in Java. Unless Oracle can show they've trademarked the names that Google copied, I can't see how they can really win this one. There are also pretty strict rules on what is even allowed to be trademarked in the first place, and I would dare say that even *IF* Oracle tries to use that tactic, they would probably find that virtually none of the alleged infringements are actually trademarkable.
I saw it as even less than copying of a trivial function, but rather simply copying the *name* of that function to do the same thing.
Copyright doesn't protect the names of things... trademarks do. Is Oracle planning on arguing that they have trademarked the names of every Java api function that Google happens to have used the same name for?
If an API is copyrightable... then using an API is a derivative work.
Only in the same sense that someone who learns how to speak English by watching television shows, which are copyrighted, is making a derivative work of multiple sources every time he or she says anything.
If they lose, there's a Supreme Court precedent that allows them to clone any small competitor's products (patent considerations notwithstanding) at a 100% API compatible level and use Oracle integration and consulting to ram them out of business
Ironically, if the competitor is small, then it probably doesn't generate enough competition for Oracle to waste their time trying to be compatible with them.... if the competitor is large enough that oracle does care, then they will probably have to overcome what may already be a strong loyalty base... Google wasn't necessarily trying to initially compete with Oracle with Android, and so they didn't really face any public stigma for being thought of as a copycat In fact, about the closest thing of Oracle's that Android competed with was JavaME, which have similarities, but the design goals for these two are so vastly different that it's hard to really consider either any competition for the other. If Oracle loses this case, and as a result does decide to copy a competitor in this way in the hopes trying to push an established competitor out of business, they will really have to do it in a way that opens up entirely new or at least largely unheard of markets (where there isn't really any competition in the first place), and hope that the success in those areas bleeds over into those that they may have a more immediate interest in.
Oracle, the appeals court, and the Department of Justice think that owning a copyright on a language isnâ(TM)t a big deal, because others can always invent new words rather than copying
Of course, the enormous flaw in this notion is that if you always have to invent new words simply to avoid copying anyone else, then nobody else is actually going to understand you. This is particularly true for things like spoken or written languages, but carries an element of truth to it for computer languages as well. While inventing any language can arguably already be challenging, inventing one that other people will actually use or adopt is usually either a function of the notoriety of the inventor, a matter of blind luck, or some combination of the two.
Since it can be argued that copyright provides a mechanism for otherwise possibly unknown artists to publish their works on the same relatively level playing field as those who may have already gained some notoriety, it seems I think that suggesting that such things should somehow be copyrightable is even at best wholly counter-productive.
... don't run *ANY* flash content on a page until a user has expressly allowed it to run.
Which I believe is what adblock does. Pretty good at halting those annoying "autoplay" videos.
Now if only they would just make a similar feature that could always strip the autoplay attribute from the html5 video tag unless you want to allow it for a page, that would be perfect.
if everybody else is doing it, and you might not fare as well by not doing it, you'll probably find yourself doing it or suffering for not having done so.
Using the Ethics Scoreboard as a reference point, I find that the only real difference between the Futility Illusion (point #10) and this argument is that where the former typically tends to imply that it is all but inevitable that someone else will behave badly even if one tries to behave ethically, this argument actually fallaciously attempts to strengthen its own position through an appeal to emotion by alleging that it should be considered futile to act ethically because some personal harm or suffering is likely, or at least is more likely, to befall one who chooses to act in such a manner. It further suffers from some of the same weaknesses as the Futility Illusion itself.
Also, I'm not sure why you have the perception that I'm trying to be a "smug ass" about this, or have been trying to talk down to anyone. If that's your perception, then I can only suggest that you are wrongly projecting some preconceived idea that you may have about what my agenda supposedly is for saying what I did.
Yeah... my point being that even *IF* you give governments the benefit of every conceivable doubt that is within the realm of possibility, the notion that the governments should be able to break everyone's encryption is a bad idea. It only gets worse from there.
Even if there weren't... even if the government was 100% benign and did not have an iota of corruption, they cannot possibly catch everyone who might try to break the law before they have caused any real harm,
My comparison of encryption to clothes was deliberate... nudists notwithstanding, we wear generally clothes to cover our bodies because there are parts of our bodies that are private and we do typically not wish others to see... In other words, we have something to hide.
But having something to hide does not mean that there is anything necessarily wrong. This is the point that really needs to be hammered into those who think that encryption that the government does not have the tools to break should be done away with.
No matter how benign or well intentioned the governments might be (and I don't allege that they are, but even if they were)... they cannot stop absolutely everyone who is intent on disregarding the law from doing so before they have potentially caused damage or done real harm.
Utilizing encryption that the government cannot break is no more of an announcement that one might be doing something illegal than wearing clothes in public is necessarily an announcement that there is something somehow physically wrong with a person's body (leaving aside the notion that there might be something wrong, my point is only that it is not a remotely infallible conclusion from the premise).
I was pointing out what I find to be a considerable benefit to living with integrity as not necessarily an incentive for anyone to do so, rather I was suggesting that that the notion that there is an alleged lack thereof as an disincentive to live honestly was mistaken.
And "screwing them" isn't even really an option in how I approach life, last or otherwise, except to the extent that those whose paths cross mine and who might live more dishonestly may possibly find themselves getting judged as less trustworthy... but that will not be on account of anything wrong that *I* have done. About the closest I get to "screw them" is my conviction that how other people might live their lives, whether they do so morally or not, is ultimately wholly irrelevant to my efforts to simply being the best person that *I* can be.
Anything you sign cannot waive your legal rights, ever. If your lawyer said you couldn't sue after signing a severance agreement, then either he was mistaken, or the employer wasn't actually doing something illegal in the first place.
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You're the second person who's responded to my comment without actually reading what I said. I'm honestly not sure why, because I tried to be very explicit about the point I was making.
Allow me to reiterate:
In other words, the political correctness or incorrectness of his statement is wholly irrellevant. What the real problem is that somebody that is supposedly a recognized scientist is trying to pass off anecdotal evidence as if it were a reflection of a universal truth. He draws what is actually an invalid conclusion because his sample data set is biased, and any scientist worthy to be called such would realize that.
It's perfectly fine to say that something your experiences have been a certain way... what is invalid is to assume that your own experiences are necessarily going to be true for everyone else, particularly when there's no shortage of people who are prepared to say that such experiences are not shared by everyone.
The things that he claims about happening in a lab with mixed genders only even have the smallest chance of happening if the people who were working in the lab are utterly incapable of conducting themselves maturely and professionally, and such behavior, while possibly not uncommon, should be viewed as the exception among professionals in any real-world industry, and not the rule.
My offense is not at the political incorrectness of his statements, it is at his gross abuse of his position as a recognized scientist to make what he appears to present as objective claims about reality, specifically that what are by his own admission his own personal experiences should somehow be a taken as a reflection of a universal scientific truth. It's called anecdotal evidence, and is not anything even remotely resembling a basis for making scientifically valid conclusions.
I'm offended by what he said, in the context of why he said it, because even though he explicitly states that it is only in his own experience...
And this is somebody that the world sees as a scientist?
Our planet is doomed.
Facts exist... plenty of them, for that matter. For example, it is a fact that pigs do not possess the ability to fly, insomuch as flying is considered an act of volition that is considered distinct from being launched from a stationary position relative to the ground as a projectile, or else simply "falling".
In 85 years, I could all but guarantee that practically everyone will have forgotten that they ever "vowed" to do this, and in reality, this so-called promise is a just a whole lot of hot air.
While it's true that he might not have had any explicit permission to publish their source code on the web, I think an argument could be made that such permission was implicit.... since the company was already pushing the source code to every single person that used the serviice anyways (being javascript, and it needing to run in the client's web browser).... and it's not like he was publishing something that he was never entitled to access to, nor had any obligation to keep confidential.
That the name of a method may be an english verb does not change the fact that it is still a name and therefore a noun in that context.
Although designing the API requires creativity, what an API really amounts to when complete is a collection of factual statements of the form "such-and-such exists", which is a task that even a mindless computer can carry out.
Names are a subject for trademarks, not copyright.
Instead, they imitated Java so that it would be easier for programmers to adapt to.
Kind of like how as children when we are learning how to talk, we copy what we hear other people say so that they understand us.
I didn't suggest that was the case... I only said it would take more than just reciting nouns. The nouns would actually need to be *USED* in some kind of creative fashion, and facts (such as saying that a particular noun exists, which is what the human-readable form of an API is) are not creative.
Except those words, because they are only *names*, are not collectively an expression of any kind of creative idea.. Alien languages such as what was presented in the ST:TNG episode "Darmok" notwithstanding, one generally needs to use far more than just nouns or proper nouns to produce a copyrightable creative work.
First, foremost, always and finally, API's are ultimately a collection of names. Names are not copyrightable entities.
The only way you can infringe on somebody's IP for copying a name of something is if that name was trademarked.... but trademark and copyright are two different things. Java may be trademarked, but that's not what Google copied... they copied the
of the functions that are in Java. Unless Oracle can show they've trademarked the names that Google copied, I can't see how they can really win this one. There are also pretty strict rules on what is even allowed to be trademarked in the first place, and I would dare say that even *IF* Oracle tries to use that tactic, they would probably find that virtually none of the alleged infringements are actually trademarkable.
Copying the *name* of something is not ever a copyright infringement. Names are not copyrightable.
It may be a trademark infringement, however.
I saw it as even less than copying of a trivial function, but rather simply copying the *name* of that function to do the same thing.
Copyright doesn't protect the names of things... trademarks do. Is Oracle planning on arguing that they have trademarked the names of every Java api function that Google happens to have used the same name for?
Only in the same sense that someone who learns how to speak English by watching television shows, which are copyrighted, is making a derivative work of multiple sources every time he or she says anything.
Ironically, if the competitor is small, then it probably doesn't generate enough competition for Oracle to waste their time trying to be compatible with them.... if the competitor is large enough that oracle does care, then they will probably have to overcome what may already be a strong loyalty base... Google wasn't necessarily trying to initially compete with Oracle with Android, and so they didn't really face any public stigma for being thought of as a copycat In fact, about the closest thing of Oracle's that Android competed with was JavaME, which have similarities, but the design goals for these two are so vastly different that it's hard to really consider either any competition for the other. If Oracle loses this case, and as a result does decide to copy a competitor in this way in the hopes trying to push an established competitor out of business, they will really have to do it in a way that opens up entirely new or at least largely unheard of markets (where there isn't really any competition in the first place), and hope that the success in those areas bleeds over into those that they may have a more immediate interest in.
Of course, the enormous flaw in this notion is that if you always have to invent new words simply to avoid copying anyone else, then nobody else is actually going to understand you. This is particularly true for things like spoken or written languages, but carries an element of truth to it for computer languages as well. While inventing any language can arguably already be challenging, inventing one that other people will actually use or adopt is usually either a function of the notoriety of the inventor, a matter of blind luck, or some combination of the two.
Since it can be argued that copyright provides a mechanism for otherwise possibly unknown artists to publish their works on the same relatively level playing field as those who may have already gained some notoriety, it seems I think that suggesting that such things should somehow be copyrightable is even at best wholly counter-productive.
Which I believe is what adblock does. Pretty good at halting those annoying "autoplay" videos.
Now if only they would just make a similar feature that could always strip the autoplay attribute from the html5 video tag unless you want to allow it for a page, that would be perfect.
Using the Ethics Scoreboard as a reference point, I find that the only real difference between the Futility Illusion (point #10) and this argument is that where the former typically tends to imply that it is all but inevitable that someone else will behave badly even if one tries to behave ethically, this argument actually fallaciously attempts to strengthen its own position through an appeal to emotion by alleging that it should be considered futile to act ethically because some personal harm or suffering is likely, or at least is more likely, to befall one who chooses to act in such a manner. It further suffers from some of the same weaknesses as the Futility Illusion itself.
Also, I'm not sure why you have the perception that I'm trying to be a "smug ass" about this, or have been trying to talk down to anyone. If that's your perception, then I can only suggest that you are wrongly projecting some preconceived idea that you may have about what my agenda supposedly is for saying what I did.
Yeah... my point being that even *IF* you give governments the benefit of every conceivable doubt that is within the realm of possibility, the notion that the governments should be able to break everyone's encryption is a bad idea. It only gets worse from there.
Even if there weren't... even if the government was 100% benign and did not have an iota of corruption, they cannot possibly catch everyone who might try to break the law before they have caused any real harm,
My comparison of encryption to clothes was deliberate... nudists notwithstanding, we wear generally clothes to cover our bodies because there are parts of our bodies that are private and we do typically not wish others to see... In other words, we have something to hide.
But having something to hide does not mean that there is anything necessarily wrong. This is the point that really needs to be hammered into those who think that encryption that the government does not have the tools to break should be done away with.
No matter how benign or well intentioned the governments might be (and I don't allege that they are, but even if they were)... they cannot stop absolutely everyone who is intent on disregarding the law from doing so before they have potentially caused damage or done real harm.
Utilizing encryption that the government cannot break is no more of an announcement that one might be doing something illegal than wearing clothes in public is necessarily an announcement that there is something somehow physically wrong with a person's body (leaving aside the notion that there might be something wrong, my point is only that it is not a remotely infallible conclusion from the premise).
I was pointing out what I find to be a considerable benefit to living with integrity as not necessarily an incentive for anyone to do so, rather I was suggesting that that the notion that there is an alleged lack thereof as an disincentive to live honestly was mistaken.
And "screwing them" isn't even really an option in how I approach life, last or otherwise, except to the extent that those whose paths cross mine and who might live more dishonestly may possibly find themselves getting judged as less trustworthy... but that will not be on account of anything wrong that *I* have done. About the closest I get to "screw them" is my conviction that how other people might live their lives, whether they do so morally or not, is ultimately wholly irrelevant to my efforts to simply being the best person that *I* can be.
To my understanding, Islam originated in the middle east, not Europe
Anything you sign cannot waive your legal rights, ever. If your lawyer said you couldn't sue after signing a severance agreement, then either he was mistaken, or the employer wasn't actually doing something illegal in the first place.