With copyright, I can code a novel solution to a problem, and prevent you from using my code. You can still solve the problem the same way, as long as you write your own code.
With patents, I can code a novel solution to a problem, and prevent you from solving the problem at all (potentially), or at the very least in the same way that I solved it.
I really fail to see how the latter is better than the former, for anyone other than the patent holder.
Yes, patents expire faster than copyright - for now. How long do you think it will be before organisations start lobbying for an extension to patent lengths, citing increasing research costs or even disparity with the length of protection of copyright?
Also, you can go to jail for violating copyright, but just be shut down for violating patent (in the US, and probably soon in the EU).
True, but in general, violating copyright is willful - you must take code and use/distribute it without permission. You can violate a patent (and thus be shut down) even if you're completely unaware that the patent exists. Say I manage to get a patent on caching data from a database in RAM in order to reduce the number of DB lookups. If you do the same, even if you don't know about my patent, you're screwed. With copyright, you're fine, as long as you don't take the code that I wrote and use that.
In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
And you would be lying to yourself. The guy who draws the arrow is as guilty as the guy who presses the button, who is as guilty as the guy who gives the order, and so on.
I agree that that's the way people rationalise it to themselves, but convincing yourself that you're 100% innocent doesn't make it true.
Of course, were I ever to find myself in the same situation, doubtless I would act in the same way; I'm not saying I'm any better. We're all human in the end.
Let's not pretend that some ways of making war are better than others.
While I agree with you in principle, speaking as a civillian, I would be tempted to argue that ways of making war that seek to keep civillian casualties to a minimum are better than those that pay such things little or no heed.
The allies where attacking civilian populations through out most of the war. Look at what they did to cities like Dresden.
Take a walk through the right parts of London, and you'll see buildings that still have bomb damage from the Blitz. *Both* sides acted reprehensively, but that doesn't make it right.
Of course, talking of right and wrong when discussing war is generally redundant.
It's one thing to destroy a mountain -- it's another thing to destroy a city.
But destroying the mountain may actually have made a bigger impression. The city is man-made, and has grown over time, even within a person's lifetime. What man can make, man can destroy. The mountain, in contrast, would seem to be eternal; I think you underestimate the impression such an act would have made.
You also seem to be forgetting that even if it *didn't* have the desired effect, you still have the destruction of the cities to fall back on.
And when dropping two atomic weapons on population centers is the 'minimum of casualties,' think about the other end of the spectrum.
I think part of the problem is that even if not dropping the bombs resulted in more casualties, they would (presumably) have been mostly *military* casualties. While I deplore all killing, at least the armed forces should expect it, given their line of work*. They also have more of a chance to defend themselves; pitting armed men (and women) against each other seems a little more sporting than pitting them against unarmed civillians.
(* I realise that this breaks down in the face of compulsory service, but I didn't say it was ok, just less bad - the lesser of two evils is still evil)
1) it's perfectly possible for someone (or a country) to do something (especially in a time of crisis), see the effects it has, and repent. Having realised their own mistake, they may well seek to prevent others from making it
2) the people in command at the time are not in command now, so no real hypocrisy is involved, as the people decrying these weapons are not the ones that previously sanctioned their use
3) as you suggest, it's only natural to want to be exposed to as little risk as possible, and other nations/groups having these weapons increases the risk of them being used against the US, so of course they would rather no-one else has them
Oh, and I forgot to mention - despite having the NHS here in the UK, we still have a thriving private healthcare system, for those who have the money to pay for it.
Just because the government provides something for the good of all, doesn't mean that companies will find it impossible to make money providing the same thing. It's just like any other form of competition - you just have to find a way to differentiate your offering, and make it more compelling to some section of the target demographic.
should we also accept that it is the government's job to provide that medicine?
Speaking as someone who has benefited directly and indirectly from a nationalised health service, I say yes, most certainly it is.
Hell, it's rare that I actually require its services, but I don't bergudge the tax I pay to support it at all. Just because *I* don't need it, doesn't mean that my friends and loved ones don't. Even if they don't, people will, and I for one don't mind paying a little extra every month to help make society that little bit better.
Let me ask yo ua question: why must everything be about profit? Why can some things not be done simply because it is the right thing to do?
1) the MSH shell will have command completion, so in practice you'll mostly type the first couple of letters of a command and hit tab (like you generally do with filenames now)
2) I type fast, and prefer readablity, rememberability and maintainability of terseness any day of the week
3) I've been using a variety of flavours of UNIX and Linux for more than 10 years now, and I can never remember the syntax of sed and awk
4) as others have pointed out, change the parameters to ps and your second example breaks, but with get-process you're *always* filtering on the same piece of output
If you find yourself typing "get-process" a million times, learn to type faster or alias it to something shorter.
Or learn to type just enough of it then hit tab for autocompletion to work its magic.
That's one thing I hate about most anti-Java rants, they always pick on the verbosity of the API, ignoring the fact that any decent IDE (and that includes vim!) will allow you to type a few characters then autocomplete it. Same thing will be/is true of MSH.
No license can impose restrictions on the output of running a program.
Not so - the publisher of a software program can put whatever restrictions they want in the EULA. You are correct in stating that copyright does not cover the output (although arguably, *you* own copyright of the output, as you produced it (or caused it to be produced)), but that's not the same thing as a licence not applying.
I could easily add a clause in a licence that states that I own all output of the software and that you're not allowed to publish screenshots, etc. The validity of such a clause would be on the same basis as the validity of most clauses in an EULA - ie I'd have to sue and hope the cour upheld it.
I agree with you on the CMS thing, and at least partly on the "seperate patches" thing, but not the insistence on obeying the coding guidelines. Any code that is going to be maintained by more than just the author needs to have a coding style. It doesn't really matter what the style is, as long as there is one and it's properly enforced.
Trust me on this - having different parts of a codebase in different styles makes maintenance a lot harder, and increases the risk of introducing subtle, hard to spot bugs. It also makes it look like arse.
No, I've seen the police enforce the law by preventing the mess from happening in the first place a number of times (eg by preventing a fight before it starts)
Also, you seem to be forgetting that there will always be *someone* that you can't protect yourself from, be it a bigger person or a group of people. Unless you're advocating that everyone carry automatic weapons and instigate a strict "shoot first" policy - and even then, you've got to hope that your attacker doesn't also shoot first...
Digital wiretapping is more akin to photocopying a bunch of papers but not necessarily ever reading them. Unless I'm mistaken, the law only calls for the information to be logged, not to be logged and trawled through for any interesting tid-bits.
Yes, obviously the point of the law is to enable people to do so if they wish, but the actual act of logging itself does not do it.
Actually, no I don't. I don't see that anything is being seized, at least not in the traditional sense of taking it (possibly by force or under threat of force) from my possession. Likewise, merely recording the information cannot possibly qualify as "search".
Now, if those logs were actually searched or data mined, then perhaps it would fall foul of the "unlawful search" clause, but failing that, I don't see that it does violate that particular Amendment.
Could someone explain why this is a violation of the Constition? All I know is the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not give evidence in court that would incriminate you and the right to be free of unlawful search and seizure, but this doesn't seem to violate any of those...
Re:Can We Get Firefox Developers To Do This, Too?
on
Hackers, Meet Microsoft
·
· Score: 2, Informative
- case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames)
How so? You can't create (for example) readme, README and ReAdMe all in the same directory on Windows, so you can't cause ambiguity like that.
- writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
Normal users don't have write access to the Windows of Program Files directories. Now, you can argue that MS hasn't exactly made it easy for people to run as normal users, but that's only partly true. NT has had ACLs from the beginning, and was released towards the tail end of the 90s - developers have had what, a decade to get used to the idea of user permissions on Windows? Even only counting from the release of XP, they've had 3 years or so. Yes, user-based security on Win 9x was non-exsitant, but come on.
If I fly into Bali and find someone has sneaked 4.1Kg of marijuana into my boogie bag without my knowledge, am I guilty of illegal importation?
No, you're not, but that doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not the prosecution can prove that you are guilty when the case goes to court. If your only defence is "It's not mine, I've never seen it before, please you've got to believe me!" then you're probably up shit creek, as you would be anywhere (not just in Bali).
The principle is that Walker County can charge you with possession even if you have never requested the images or viewed them. The images could be preloads, popups, or even downloaded via mal-ware. They don't care.
I suspect it's that they don't *understand*, rather than that they don't care.
This sort of thing is a highly emotive issue (both for the "protect the children!!" brigade and the "no thought crimes!!"), which tends to negate clear, considered thinking, which is precisely what's needed on matters involving new technology. As an example, some users of my current project (all police employees) can't handle hitting back after a POST request, the "you need to resubmit the information" message confuses and frightens them. Do you really expect them to understand caching, prefetching, etc?
Once I drop a spammer into the system blacklist they're there for life. I don't have the time or energy to audit my block list, and what would be my motivation anyway?
How about jsut not being a twat? IPs change hands; today's spammer is tomorrow's innocent victim of your tendency to be an arsehole.
Troll? Funny perhaps (especially for me, given how much money I'm paid to write Java, and how much more our clients pay my company for me to do it), but troll?
No, it's not particularly level, but what would you suggest as the alternative? That the IE group not be allowed to submit bug reports?
Obviously, in an ideal world *everyone* would be able to submit bug reports and have them treated on their individual merits. Failing that though, at least *some* groups have the power to get stuff fixed. That's got to be better than the bugs remaining unfixed.
Slashdot Mirror
With copyright, I can code a novel solution to a problem, and prevent you from using my code. You can still solve the problem the same way, as long as you write your own code.
With patents, I can code a novel solution to a problem, and prevent you from solving the problem at all (potentially), or at the very least in the same way that I solved it.
I really fail to see how the latter is better than the former, for anyone other than the patent holder.
Yes, patents expire faster than copyright - for now. How long do you think it will be before organisations start lobbying for an extension to patent lengths, citing increasing research costs or even disparity with the length of protection of copyright?
Also, you can go to jail for violating copyright, but just be shut down for violating patent (in the US, and probably soon in the EU).
True, but in general, violating copyright is willful - you must take code and use/distribute it without permission. You can violate a patent (and thus be shut down) even if you're completely unaware that the patent exists. Say I manage to get a patent on caching data from a database in RAM in order to reduce the number of DB lookups. If you do the same, even if you don't know about my patent, you're screwed. With copyright, you're fine, as long as you don't take the code that I wrote and use that.
In your own conscience, you would feel 100% innocent.
And you would be lying to yourself. The guy who draws the arrow is as guilty as the guy who presses the button, who is as guilty as the guy who gives the order, and so on.
I agree that that's the way people rationalise it to themselves, but convincing yourself that you're 100% innocent doesn't make it true.
Of course, were I ever to find myself in the same situation, doubtless I would act in the same way; I'm not saying I'm any better. We're all human in the end.
Let's not pretend that some ways of making war are better than others.
While I agree with you in principle, speaking as a civillian, I would be tempted to argue that ways of making war that seek to keep civillian casualties to a minimum are better than those that pay such things little or no heed.
The allies where attacking civilian populations through out most of the war. Look at what they did to cities like Dresden.
Take a walk through the right parts of London, and you'll see buildings that still have bomb damage from the Blitz. *Both* sides acted reprehensively, but that doesn't make it right.
Of course, talking of right and wrong when discussing war is generally redundant.
That's all deplorable, of course, but what exactly does any of it have to do with the people who died because of these bombs?
If my country commits attrocities, it doesn't give you the right to kill me.
It's one thing to destroy a mountain -- it's another thing to destroy a city.
But destroying the mountain may actually have made a bigger impression. The city is man-made, and has grown over time, even within a person's lifetime. What man can make, man can destroy. The mountain, in contrast, would seem to be eternal; I think you underestimate the impression such an act would have made.
You also seem to be forgetting that even if it *didn't* have the desired effect, you still have the destruction of the cities to fall back on.
And when dropping two atomic weapons on population centers is the 'minimum of casualties,' think about the other end of the spectrum.
I think part of the problem is that even if not dropping the bombs resulted in more casualties, they would (presumably) have been mostly *military* casualties. While I deplore all killing, at least the armed forces should expect it, given their line of work*. They also have more of a chance to defend themselves; pitting armed men (and women) against each other seems a little more sporting than pitting them against unarmed civillians.
(* I realise that this breaks down in the face of compulsory service, but I didn't say it was ok, just less bad - the lesser of two evils is still evil)
It's not necessarily hypocrisy:
1) it's perfectly possible for someone (or a country) to do something (especially in a time of crisis), see the effects it has, and repent. Having realised their own mistake, they may well seek to prevent others from making it
2) the people in command at the time are not in command now, so no real hypocrisy is involved, as the people decrying these weapons are not the ones that previously sanctioned their use
3) as you suggest, it's only natural to want to be exposed to as little risk as possible, and other nations/groups having these weapons increases the risk of them being used against the US, so of course they would rather no-one else has them
Oh, and I forgot to mention - despite having the NHS here in the UK, we still have a thriving private healthcare system, for those who have the money to pay for it.
Just because the government provides something for the good of all, doesn't mean that companies will find it impossible to make money providing the same thing. It's just like any other form of competition - you just have to find a way to differentiate your offering, and make it more compelling to some section of the target demographic.
should we also accept that it is the government's job to provide that medicine?
Speaking as someone who has benefited directly and indirectly from a nationalised health service, I say yes, most certainly it is.
Hell, it's rare that I actually require its services, but I don't bergudge the tax I pay to support it at all. Just because *I* don't need it, doesn't mean that my friends and loved ones don't. Even if they don't, people will, and I for one don't mind paying a little extra every month to help make society that little bit better.
Let me ask yo ua question: why must everything be about profit? Why can some things not be done simply because it is the right thing to do?
A few things:
1) the MSH shell will have command completion, so in practice you'll mostly type the first couple of letters of a command and hit tab (like you generally do with filenames now)
2) I type fast, and prefer readablity, rememberability and maintainability of terseness any day of the week
3) I've been using a variety of flavours of UNIX and Linux for more than 10 years now, and I can never remember the syntax of sed and awk
4) as others have pointed out, change the parameters to ps and your second example breaks, but with get-process you're *always* filtering on the same piece of output
If you find yourself typing "get-process" a million times, learn to type faster or alias it to something shorter.
Or learn to type just enough of it then hit tab for autocompletion to work its magic.
That's one thing I hate about most anti-Java rants, they always pick on the verbosity of the API, ignoring the fact that any decent IDE (and that includes vim!) will allow you to type a few characters then autocomplete it. Same thing will be/is true of MSH.
No license can impose restrictions on the output of running a program.
Not so - the publisher of a software program can put whatever restrictions they want in the EULA. You are correct in stating that copyright does not cover the output (although arguably, *you* own copyright of the output, as you produced it (or caused it to be produced)), but that's not the same thing as a licence not applying.
I could easily add a clause in a licence that states that I own all output of the software and that you're not allowed to publish screenshots, etc. The validity of such a clause would be on the same basis as the validity of most clauses in an EULA - ie I'd have to sue and hope the cour upheld it.
I agree with you on the CMS thing, and at least partly on the "seperate patches" thing, but not the insistence on obeying the coding guidelines. Any code that is going to be maintained by more than just the author needs to have a coding style. It doesn't really matter what the style is, as long as there is one and it's properly enforced.
Trust me on this - having different parts of a codebase in different styles makes maintenance a lot harder, and increases the risk of introducing subtle, hard to spot bugs. It also makes it look like arse.
No, I've seen the police enforce the law by preventing the mess from happening in the first place a number of times (eg by preventing a fight before it starts)
Also, you seem to be forgetting that there will always be *someone* that you can't protect yourself from, be it a bigger person or a group of people. Unless you're advocating that everyone carry automatic weapons and instigate a strict "shoot first" policy - and even then, you've got to hope that your attacker doesn't also shoot first...
Digital wiretapping is more akin to photocopying a bunch of papers but not necessarily ever reading them. Unless I'm mistaken, the law only calls for the information to be logged, not to be logged and trawled through for any interesting tid-bits.
Yes, obviously the point of the law is to enable people to do so if they wish, but the actual act of logging itself does not do it.
Actually, no I don't. I don't see that anything is being seized, at least not in the traditional sense of taking it (possibly by force or under threat of force) from my possession. Likewise, merely recording the information cannot possibly qualify as "search".
Now, if those logs were actually searched or data mined, then perhaps it would fall foul of the "unlawful search" clause, but failing that, I don't see that it does violate that particular Amendment.
(Of course, IANAL, etc)
Could someone explain why this is a violation of the Constition? All I know is the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not give evidence in court that would incriminate you and the right to be free of unlawful search and seizure, but this doesn't seem to violate any of those...
- case insensitive but case-preserving filesystem (ambiguities in filenames)
How so? You can't create (for example) readme, README and ReAdMe all in the same directory on Windows, so you can't cause ambiguity like that.
- writeable windows\system and other writeable directories. ACLs are nice, but you do have to set sensible defaults..
Normal users don't have write access to the Windows of Program Files directories. Now, you can argue that MS hasn't exactly made it easy for people to run as normal users, but that's only partly true. NT has had ACLs from the beginning, and was released towards the tail end of the 90s - developers have had what, a decade to get used to the idea of user permissions on Windows? Even only counting from the release of XP, they've had 3 years or so. Yes, user-based security on Win 9x was non-exsitant, but come on.
If I fly into Bali and find someone has sneaked 4.1Kg of marijuana into my boogie bag without my knowledge, am I guilty of illegal importation?
No, you're not, but that doesn't matter. What matters is whether or not the prosecution can prove that you are guilty when the case goes to court. If your only defence is "It's not mine, I've never seen it before, please you've got to believe me!" then you're probably up shit creek, as you would be anywhere (not just in Bali).
The principle is that Walker County can charge you with possession even if you have never requested the images or viewed them. The images could be preloads, popups, or even downloaded via mal-ware. They don't care.
I suspect it's that they don't *understand*, rather than that they don't care.
This sort of thing is a highly emotive issue (both for the "protect the children!!" brigade and the "no thought crimes!!"), which tends to negate clear, considered thinking, which is precisely what's needed on matters involving new technology. As an example, some users of my current project (all police employees) can't handle hitting back after a POST request, the "you need to resubmit the information" message confuses and frightens them. Do you really expect them to understand caching, prefetching, etc?
Once I drop a spammer into the system blacklist they're there for life. I don't have the time or energy to audit my block list, and what would be my motivation anyway?
How about jsut not being a twat? IPs change hands; today's spammer is tomorrow's innocent victim of your tendency to be an arsehole.
Troll? Funny perhaps (especially for me, given how much money I'm paid to write Java, and how much more our clients pay my company for me to do it), but troll?
I dunno, mods these days, no sense of humour...
No, it's not particularly level, but what would you suggest as the alternative? That the IE group not be allowed to submit bug reports?
Obviously, in an ideal world *everyone* would be able to submit bug reports and have them treated on their individual merits. Failing that though, at least *some* groups have the power to get stuff fixed. That's got to be better than the bugs remaining unfixed.
I would throw the blame in the direction of the person/group that called it javascript rather than come up with a better name for it.
That would be Netscape. The actual standard is called ECMAScript, but the JavaScript name has stuck.
Because my first name is Tim, and my surname begins with C.
:-)
Nice try though