Re:Who's really looses out here?
on
Who Owns The Facts?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I will probably vote Libertarian in the next election. The only thing that turns me off is the Libertarian polits whose main platform is the legalization of marijuana as a recreational drug. This platform, although popular in certain subcultures, scares the daylights out of so many people that it will never be a winning platform.
I know it's offtopic (mods, hammer away), but SO MANY PEOPLE smoke marijuana (and so many people use other drugs (many illegal) too), that it really ought not be a losing platform. The liberals are already for decriminalization, mostly; the conservatives ought to give it whirl based on the tax savings alone.
So true. EV's are the most creative nags I've ever seen. I've registered EV multiple times, once, years ago, for myself, and again for my little brother who I know would dig the game.
I'm always torn when I hear people badmouth shareware. It's a tired observation, but those of us who give away code need to understand that it just doesn't work for some people. Shareware is pleasant commericial practice. A little prodding is often necessary to get someone perfectly capable and willing to support the developer to actually get off their ass and pull out the plastic.
I remember meeting the Ambrosia guys at a MacWorld conference a few years back. They were swell.
Or they're conservatives wondering why the hell we're spending all this blood and money to topple a fairly insignificant dictator who hasn't attacked us.
Readibility. There might be more than one way to do it in PHP, but whichever way you pick, it'll be possible for me to read it. I can give my PHP programs to other, less experienced programmers, and they can figure out what's going on.
With Perl, it's quite easy to write programs with constructs that will completely confuse a non-expert.
Huh? How do you know it's "just some text"? Looking at the span tag in Zeldman's "dirty" example, it's class is header. So maybe this is a header, and maybe every header on the site gets that same treatment.
My solution would be like zeldmans, either to use <hX> and put a selector fot that <hX> in my stylesheet, or maybe a <P class="mainPageTitle"> or something like that.
In the applications I write, I usually have a set of CSS selectors for applying styles to tables that layout forms. Something like:
.formTitle - for big text at the top.
.formInstructions - for general information about the form, usually right under the title
.formRowLabel - usually bolded, right-justified labels for the form fields
.formField - for the cell containing the actual form elements
.formHelp - maybe a third column on the right, generally small, italicized stuff. These cells might contain text like "use appropriate abbreviation" for a state/province text input.
And voila, I can essentially "skin" my whole application whenever the need arises. Client want's to offer some co-branded version of their app as part of some dumbass illconceived Biz Dev deal? No problem, I'll be back in an hour with the new version.
Let's think about what greed is for a second. When does simple self-interest cross into greed?
when you work hard for something? - probably not when you hurt someone else to get something - probably.
There's no reason people living in a capitalist society can't do fine without stealing from/stabbing/shooting someone. Most of us don't do those things.
Now, if you had a system where you got a nice basic labor/money bargain, and could live comfortably, and didn't have advertising manipulating your desires at every turn, what would be wrong with socialism.
It's not like any socialist state pays doctors the same wage that it pays cashiers.
Some say soviet socialism is dumb because it tried to comprimise too much. Tried to appeal to the worker's self interest, using capital (wages).
Look at a Maoist like Che. He thought about "the revolution" in social (not socialist) terms. He realized that while weath was in people's self interest, it's not the sole item. A feeling of self-worth is worth more than gold. Che worked two jobs for fidel's government, and did volunteer labor on Saturdays, and refused any more than his meager military salary. (His other job (some bank or economic development post) would have paid about 4x that).
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
In short, greed motivates me personally, but it's usually mitigated by a moral conscience and a desire to feel good about myself. Ayn Rand would think that is greed, but she's full of shit.
Do you really think greed is so much more nature than nurture?
I can rent PS2 games at blockbuster, so what's the problem here?
THe problem here is that the man on the street understands renting a CD or cartdridge containing software, but he understands it on the physical level. Once you start talking about transmitting that copy in electronic (not physical) form, it starts to sound sinister enough to Jonny Q that the RIAA et al can have their way.
Wrong again. If I have your SSN, and your name, and maybe a little tax data, I can get a card in your name. Card issuers don't check amongst themselves to make sure everything goes to your address or phone number. A roomate of mine gets countless card applications in his mother's name since she used this address for something once upon a time.
There is pretty much nothing stopping me from getting cards in her name, if I had her SSN and mother's maiden name. I could put any phone number and address I wanted on the app, and she'd never hear anything about it until I ran up the super-platinum card to 40 grand or so and split.
They wouldn't go calling her house or mailing anything there, they'd only have the info I gave them.
This doesn't raise red flags, for a while, I had two sets of contact info I used for my own cards, and my creditors never questioned it. They didn't know that I had other cards with a different address.
And if blizzard says no, Then you cant host it. Whats this court case about? You have the right to play the game, read the terms of agreement, it doesnt say you have the right to host a server!
Who says I don't? If I Write Snat_BNetD - without anyone's help. Alone in my basement, I reverse engineer the protocol between the client and a battlenet server, and I write my own server. My server implements blizzard's PROTOCOL, but that's allowed!
So basically, I have a piece of software that I wrote all by myself, and it interacts nicely with a piece of software blizzard wrote (Warcraft). I don't need a note from blizzard telling me it's ok to run my own program!
The IP in question is open source, and as such belongs to everyone.
Incorrect. Open Source is NOT equivalent to public domain. Linus, for example, owns the coypright of the linux kernel. He is kind enough to share HIS IP with the world via a nice licensce.
The CD-Key issue is ACCESS protection, not coyp protection. The CD-Key is not what prevents me from copying the disc. it makes my copied disc (sans key) unusable for playing on their network.
Besides, don't you have to show that a device's sole purpose (or even pricinpal purpose) is to circumvent protections?
Is that really happening, though? I don't know much about the law, and I see a lot of people saying this, but is this bill, if passed, gonna make wav files illegal?
wav->mp3 converters illegal?
I mean, what is to stop up-and-comers to continue using current technologies, and open technologies that evolve from them?
just because a machine has DRM, I don't think that necissarily means that it won't play unprotected media. it should simply keep you from un-protecting protected media, no?
why do we have cars that can exceed the speed limit? We already have a law against speeding, but it's trivial to exceed 75MPH, just give it some mroe gas!
The automobile must be compelled by legislation to limit the speed of automobiles via some governer system. We better make a law that says you can't modify it, without a note from the guvment, too.
Except, nobody would profit from such a law, certainly not your local PD.
Re:Not the end of infantry
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2
Tanks, planes, and machine guns were grossly underestimated by respected military types at the time of their introduciton. I was just reading some quotes from "the experts speak" about each of those inventions. Of course, none of them removed men from war, and drones won't do that either. Some great quotes about the foolishness of trying to sink ships with planes, how stupid tanks are, etc, can be found attributed to various european generals.
My favorite (just before WWI) was that the machine gun would have a negligable effect on tactics. Oops.
If anyone else were likely to take the lead, then I might take your position on this. But piracy does nothing to US companies that it doesn't do to foreign ones. In other words, it might be that innovation in the software field is at stake, but American Leadership in that field is not at stake.
If you and I are in a race, and I'm winning, and Loki moves us both back ten feet, Loki's actions have not put my lead "at stake". That only happens if he moves me back but not you.
Slashdot Mirror
I will probably vote Libertarian in the next election. The only thing that turns me off is the Libertarian polits whose main platform is the legalization of marijuana as a recreational drug. This platform, although popular in certain subcultures, scares the daylights out of so many people that it will never be a winning platform.
I know it's offtopic (mods, hammer away), but SO MANY PEOPLE smoke marijuana (and so many people use other drugs (many illegal) too), that it really ought not be a losing platform. The liberals are already for decriminalization, mostly; the conservatives ought to give it whirl based on the tax savings alone.
The legal system would have done just fine if the LAPD wasn't rife with racist guys who tried to frame an already guilty man
So true. EV's are the most creative nags I've ever seen. I've registered EV multiple times, once, years ago, for myself, and again for my little brother who I know would dig the game.
I'm always torn when I hear people badmouth shareware. It's a tired observation, but those of us who give away code need to understand that it just doesn't work for some people. Shareware is pleasant commericial practice. A little prodding is often necessary to get someone perfectly capable and willing to support the developer to actually get off their ass and pull out the plastic.
I remember meeting the Ambrosia guys at a MacWorld conference a few years back. They were swell.
Or they're conservatives wondering why the hell we're spending all this blood and money to topple a fairly insignificant dictator who hasn't attacked us.
Readibility. There might be more than one way to do it in PHP, but whichever way you pick, it'll be possible for me to read it. I can give my PHP programs to other, less experienced programmers, and they can figure out what's going on.
With Perl, it's quite easy to write programs with constructs that will completely confuse a non-expert.
You fix that by having a nice templating language like smarty, for example.
Smarty outputs a value stored in foo: {$foo}
Smarty loops over an array of hashes:
{section loop=$foo name=var}
{$foo[var].baz}
{/section}
The downside is that your templates sometimes end up looking like an uglier version of some ColdFusion page written by a drunken 6 year old.
these are not dirty hippies, but people with 4 year CS degree's.
Hey! Some of us are both!
Huh? How do you know it's "just some text"? Looking at the span tag in Zeldman's "dirty" example, it's class is header. So maybe this is a header, and maybe every header on the site gets that same treatment.
My solution would be like zeldmans, either to use <hX> and put a selector fot that <hX> in my stylesheet, or maybe a <P class="mainPageTitle"> or something like that.
In the applications I write, I usually have a set of CSS selectors for applying styles to tables that layout forms. Something like:
.formTitle - for big text at the top.
.formInstructions - for general information about the form, usually right under the title
.formRowLabel - usually bolded, right-justified labels for the form fields
.formField - for the cell containing the actual form elements
.formHelp - maybe a third column on the right, generally small, italicized stuff. These cells might contain text like "use appropriate abbreviation" for a state/province text input.
And voila, I can essentially "skin" my whole application whenever the need arises. Client want's to offer some co-branded version of their app as part of some dumbass illconceived Biz Dev deal? No problem, I'll be back in an hour with the new version.
+1 Funny
Feh.
People are greedy, fine.
Let's think about what greed is for a second. When does simple self-interest cross into greed?
when you work hard for something? - probably not
when you hurt someone else to get something - probably.
There's no reason people living in a capitalist society can't do fine without stealing from/stabbing/shooting someone. Most of us don't do those things.
Now, if you had a system where you got a nice basic labor/money bargain, and could live comfortably, and didn't have advertising manipulating your desires at every turn, what would be wrong with socialism.
It's not like any socialist state pays doctors the same wage that it pays cashiers.
Some say soviet socialism is dumb because it tried to comprimise too much. Tried to appeal to the worker's self interest, using capital (wages).
Look at a Maoist like Che. He thought about "the revolution" in social (not socialist) terms. He realized that while weath was in people's self interest, it's not the sole item. A feeling of self-worth is worth more than gold. Che worked two jobs for fidel's government, and did volunteer labor on Saturdays, and refused any more than his meager military salary. (His other job (some bank or economic development post) would have paid about 4x that).
Don't forget that even though people always say "the USSR proves socialism doesn't work", it's not true. The USSR was #2 to the US while it was around, and the #1 (US) was trying to kick them in the eye the whole time. Hardly ideal circumstances to establish a utopia.
In short, greed motivates me personally, but it's usually mitigated by a moral conscience and a desire to feel good about myself. Ayn Rand would think that is greed, but she's full of shit.
Do you really think greed is so much more nature than nurture?
It can't happen here
It can't happen here
I'm telling you my dear
That it can't hap pen heeeeere!
-FZ
I can rent PS2 games at blockbuster, so what's the problem here?
THe problem here is that the man on the street understands renting a CD or cartdridge containing software, but he understands it on the physical level. Once you start talking about transmitting that copy in electronic (not physical) form, it starts to sound sinister enough to Jonny Q that the RIAA et al can have their way.
It's dumb simple.
but they bought exclusive rights
Maybe you'd like a testimonial
No, that's not their job. But sometimes they think it is, and that is pretty god-damned unfortunate.
There is pretty much nothing stopping me from getting cards in her name, if I had her SSN and mother's maiden name. I could put any phone number and address I wanted on the app, and she'd never hear anything about it until I ran up the super-platinum card to 40 grand or so and split.
They wouldn't go calling her house or mailing anything there, they'd only have the info I gave them.
This doesn't raise red flags, for a while, I had two sets of contact info I used for my own cards, and my creditors never questioned it. They didn't know that I had other cards with a different address.
I mean, really...
I've come to expect hypocrasy almost everwhere, but "Et Tu, Slashdot?"
Who says I don't? If I Write Snat_BNetD - without anyone's help. Alone in my basement, I reverse engineer the protocol between the client and a battlenet server, and I write my own server. My server implements blizzard's PROTOCOL, but that's allowed!
So basically, I have a piece of software that I wrote all by myself, and it interacts nicely with a piece of software blizzard wrote (Warcraft). I don't need a note from blizzard telling me it's ok to run my own program!
Incorrect. Open Source is NOT equivalent to public domain. Linus, for example, owns the coypright of the linux kernel. He is kind enough to share HIS IP with the world via a nice licensce.
The CD-Key issue is ACCESS protection, not coyp protection. The CD-Key is not what prevents me from copying the disc. it makes my copied disc (sans key) unusable for playing on their network.
Besides, don't you have to show that a device's sole purpose (or even pricinpal purpose) is to circumvent protections?
Is that really happening, though? I don't know much about the law, and I see a lot of people saying this, but is this bill, if passed, gonna make wav files illegal?
wav->mp3 converters illegal?
I mean, what is to stop up-and-comers to continue using current technologies, and open technologies that evolve from them?
just because a machine has DRM, I don't think that necissarily means that it won't play unprotected media. it should simply keep you from un-protecting protected media, no?
-
Or,
why do we have cars that can exceed the speed limit? We already have a law against speeding, but it's trivial to exceed 75MPH, just give it some mroe gas!
The automobile must be compelled by legislation to limit the speed of automobiles via some governer system. We better make a law that says you can't modify it, without a note from the guvment, too.
Except, nobody would profit from such a law, certainly not your local PD.
My favorite (just before WWI) was that the machine gun would have a negligable effect on tactics. Oops.
If anyone else were likely to take the lead, then I might take your position on this. But piracy does nothing to US companies that it doesn't do to foreign ones. In other words, it might be that innovation in the software field is at stake, but American Leadership in that field is not at stake.
If you and I are in a race, and I'm winning, and Loki moves us both back ten feet, Loki's actions have not put my lead "at stake". That only happens if he moves me back but not you.
Dig?