The W3C is not concerned with free software. It's concerned with standardizing browser features so that the same web page will work the same in IE as it does in Firefox as it does in Chrome as it does in whatever other browser somebody made that conforms to the standard. The W3C would like to see that everything done on the internet is implemented in the web browser, including any proprietary code necessary to render a web site (such as minified JavaScript). The W3C specifically opposes the kind of Internet we had when lots of web sites used Microsoft-owned patent-encumbered ActiveX in IE5 because it had all the features they needed.
Except with W3C standardization, you can make 1 plugin for all browsers instead of having to navigate the interfaces for IE, Mozilla, and Webkit, and probably just completely ignore all of the less popular browsers like Opera and Konqueror (don't think that everybody using Linux is willing to forego closed-source device drivers and software packages for ideological reasons and just not get decent graphics performance or Flash videos).
Neither can be used on a free platform, so what's the difference? How are platform specific encryption modules any better than platform specific native apps?
The point is that it's not any worse. Platform-specific decryption modules may not be any better than native apps if you want everything you use to be open-source, but they have the practical advantage that if you don't need Flash or Silverlight to decrypt it anymore, you can just use a web browser. The interface is consistent and cheaper to build than having to make a native app for every platform instead of just recompiling the decryption module.
...but without any patents, why would people invest money in inventing something that can be easily copied? Evilness aside, drug companies are really the best example for why patents must exist. It takes millions of dollars in research to discover and test a new drug, but the manufacturing cost is usually quite tiny. If a generic drug could come out immediately once you've proved the compound is useful and safe, what financial incentive do you have to spend money on that research in the first place? The original purpose of patents was also to promote public disclosure. Without patent protection, early computers would likely not have been sold but their computations would have been leased out so nobody could disassemble and recreate them. With patent protection, those computers could be sold off without losing the monopoly, and the invention is publicly described for other people to improve upon.
Clearly there needs to be room for the "weekend builders" and if they need to use something still patented (or are improving upon the design), that's when FRAND is supposed to come in. The real problem is that patents have become too broad and non-specific, and often patents are granted for inventions that were already patented by someone else. In these cases it definitely has become legal business more than anything else, but just because there are several hundred patents on the Internet and another several hundred for every single little online thing that was actually invented in the 80's (as well as "doing X, but on the internet") doesn't mean the whole system is invalid.
Why XKCD? Why not just a normal cartoon? Either you wanted to post a Slashdot meme but couldn't find any hot grits (you insensitive clod), or you're secretly Randall Munroe suggesting that everybody must hire you to describe their patents for them.
It looks to me like the judges are finally deciding not against software patents in general, but patents of the type "doing X, but on a computer" or "doing X, but on a smartphone". The judgement is basically that you cannot patent something that's already patented, or is a natural law, or is an abstract concept not specific to any particular application, just because you describe it in an unusual way or put it in a new context, i.e. "turning a page, but on a touchscreen instead of an actual page" or in this particular case, "hedging risk, but by a computer algorithm instead of by bankers". Also not allowed would be "the browning of grain-based spongy material through local application of heat", also known as "making toast".
It's certainly true that the Libertarian ideology is in some part socially liberal, because it advocates that the government should get out of social issues. A pure Libertarian would say that government has no business outlawing gay sex or liquor sales on Sundays (abortion is slightly different because if you believe it's equivalent to murder, Libertarians usually still support outlawing murder). A pure Libertarian would also want to abolish welfare as well as every government service that works to reduce the impact of poverty. For that matter, a pure Libertarian would also want to shrink the military to 19th century levels and get the hell out of world politics. I think Ron Paul is the closest to pure Libertarian that I've ever seen, and he's actually too libertarian for most tea partiers.
As I understand it, the Tea Party is more of an ultraconservative response (by the anti-elite everyman Republicans, as opposed to the evil businessman Republicans) to the frankly corrupt and exploitative ideology of "neo-conservatism". Bush pays for a huge unnecessary war (Iraq) with catastrophic debt and expands the role of government in our daily lives (TSA et al) and as soon as the "mainstream media" ends its love affair with Karl Rove those Republicans are left scratching their heads thinking, "This is not what I thought I voted for..."
How much could it possibly save the company to take away maternity leave? Certainly not anywhere near the disparity in salaries. And women complain about being underpaid because they are underpaid. In our day and age it's not (usually) a conscious decision by management to pay women less. Often it's actually women themselves simply not being as assertive looking for raises and accepting the disparity as unchangeable. The few voices complaining about the disparity are simply trying to get everyone involved to take a look at their own situations and figure out if women are being paid less at their workplace and if those women actually deserve to be paid less.
Maternity leave (and paternity leave) is a benefit like package health insurance, company cars, paid vacation, etc. It's offered by employers trying either to create a happy workplace and attract the best employees or to satisfy the demands of a labor union. I think that most people would agree that more maternity AND paternity leave would be good for everyone. But men have fewer opportunities to be involved with their children because there's still a prevalent idea in America that the women are responsible for giving up their lives to become primary caregivers. Most men are happy with that and so will not fight for paternity leave, and enough women have accepted it that they do fight for maternity leave.
As for "changing diapers or cleaning up code," yes both are messy, but I'd leave these smells for somebody else to clean up any day.
You're right, we're only talking care of other people's parents. But for that matter we should really be talking care of babies. That's what we're here to take about right?
hedwards, you have no idea what you're talking about.
1. Mothers normally need at least 2 weeks to physically recover from having a ~5" diameter baby pass through a normally ~1.5" tube, to say nothing of the cervix which before childbirth is normally dilated less that 1/8" and the sore abdominal muscles that forced that baby through. In case of Caesarean section, it can take months for the mother to physically recover.
2. Babies need attention to properly develop. A mother's (or father's) love is vital to a child's emotional and psychological development. The lack of such attention can lead to serious and permanent relationship deficiencies.
3. Newborns need to eat every 2 hours, even through the night, until they are anywhere between 3 and 9 months old. The best food for them is breastmilk, providing superior immune support and brain development to formula. In order for the mother to maintain adequate milk production she must either feed the newborn or pump out the milk every 2 hours. Otherwise she will be painfully swollen and will produce less milk thereafter.
4. Even after the mother has physically recovered, she still has a newborn baby that needs constant attention. You can't get daycare for newborns unless you have at least middle class income. Even then there is a severe shortage of care providers because in most areas there are laws severely limiting the number of infants a single daycare worker is allowed to watch at any one time. This is for good reason because infants really need constant attention not divided between a dozen babies in order to develop normally.
5. Remembering that newborns eat every 2 hours, parents of newborns get very little sleep. Assuming you could get daycare for your newborn, both parents will still be sleep deprived for months unless they are rich enough to afford a nanny.
6. Finally, despite all of this difficulty, parents want to be with their new baby. Mom didn't live through 9 months of random nausea, general fatigue, severe mood swings, and discomfort due to carrying an extra 20 lbs. between her legs, followed by the most painful experience the most women will ever have to live through (and far more painful than anything most men will experience), just to drop the baby off with somebody else and go back to work. Parenting is a special joy and will be the single most gratifying experience in the lives of most people. All people have a natural right to pursue happiness. It is immoral to even suggest that staying home with your children for even the few months when they are most vulnerable is an unnecessary indulgence. Any company not willing to give you that is devouring your soul and will leave you spent, poor, and deprived of any source of true happiness.
P.S. Slashdot, if I use an <ol> it's because I want my list items to have numbers in front of them without having to add them myself. Otherwise I'd just use <ul> or a series of <p>s.
So Stallman thinks that if DRM is a standard part of HTML, it will be "easy" and "convenient" and so smaller time web sites will end up using it. Which they wouldn't do anyway because DRM is hard? Because they didn't think of it? Is it really that easy to piggyback on a standard method of embedding decryption codes? How much cheaper is it really to do this with web standards than with Flash or Silverlight? Cheap enough to make a brand new market catering to all of those video sites that don't already use DRM? Which ones are those again?
What I really want to know is that if these web site owners are so stupid that they will start using DRM because it's more convenient, how much could they possibly understand about DRM? Couldn't we as open source evangelists just make something open source and call it DRM and hand it out to those dumbasses? It doesn't matter that it isn't really secure (was it ever secure in the first place?). It sounds like Stallman's concern is that once DRM is standardized it will become popular. All that being popular means in the technology world is that the name turns into a buzzword and everybody gets to claim they do DRM now.
Just like it is with Bluray today, it will likely be that most if not all content distribution platforms will require you to use hardware DRM.
Hello AC, got something to say? Requiring hardware DRM for Netflix or Hulu or BBC on a computer would be suicide for those businesses. The only time when you can make that kind of demand is when the hardware is brand new and it's built-in from the very first device, like Blu-Ray. Otherwise, Netflix gets a hoard of angry customers who are not willing to go down to the store and buy a physical piece of hardware just to use their service.
Even if it's as simple as a USB dongle, the content provider suddenly has to manage physical distribution. Netflix could probably handle it if they give the things away through their existing mail service, but hardly anyone else has any kind of distribution channel like that so such a requirement would instantly kill their profit margins.
The sensible thing to do is to stand by an open Web, with open standards.
Open culture is not the same thing as open standards. Standardizing DRM in HTML5 may conceivably hurt open culture (in my opinion it won't, since everyone that wants DRM - Netflix et al. - is already doing it). However, it will definitely help open standards. DRM is a "feature" of flash/silverlight/whatever. Adding the "feature" to standard web technologies will take away one more reason for content providers to use those decidedly closed-source closed-standard third-party blobs of unknown binary. Those that don't want to run the new blobs of DRM-decrypting binary on their computers aren't actually suffering any loss, since that's how Netflix already works anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I understand why some people think DRM will protect the content, but I also understand why it doesn't. Almost everyone here on Slashdot knows that DRM makes legitimate sources worth less than pirated sources while doing nothing to diminish access to pirated sources. DRM causes more people to pirate, not fewer. And I'm completely on board with open culture and doing away with the worthless middle-men businesses that are strangling the dissemination of culture in order to cling to pre-Internet business models. At least, as soon as we can figure out how otherwise provide funding and distribution to an above-average subset of those ideas that need funding and distribution to be successful (hint: all of them not from people who are independently wealthy). But I think that standardizing DRM in HTML5 doesn't actually hurt open culture and could have the very beneficial effect of finally killing off Flash and Silverlight.
Outsourcing is a terrible idea. I assume parent is being sarcastic about "guarenteed [sic] results, low bugs per line count". East Asia outsourced software developers are famous for producing buggy code, or the wrong code, past deadlines.
24 and 60 were not arbitrary. They were chosen by ancient Babylonians because they are cleanly divisible by many numbers; 24 by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12, and 60 by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. It was important to be able to divide time cleanly because they didn't have fractions or decimals at the time. Citation needed, of course, but I don't have time to find a source and this is something I remember from when I was a kid.
I did not mean to say that $6,000-$40,000 is middle class. I was describing a separate situation. Unfortunately I wrote it in a way that didn't make that distinction clear. Also, I said "most", not all. The rest of my post dealt with the situations you described: shielding assets from taxation in ways that take time and money.
Now, it may be different where you live, but in Iowa it's possible for a family of four to live fairly comfortably and even contribute to the consumer economy on $25,000 a year. In fact, I know it's different in denser parts of the country. I guess that (and the impact global warming has had on almost eliminating winter around here) would be a good reason to move to Des Moines?
I really wish somebody would just link to an original story. This may be Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to know about everything going on with copyright, but I can't be the only one who doesn't know off-hand what the story is with Aaron Swartz. I'm even at least 50% sure I am aware of this story, but the name alone doesn't bring the whole thing back. In the future, please, just a little reminder at least.
The point is that everyone gets tax breaks and the reason why is that our tax code is crazy complicated.
This is the definite truth. I can personally vouch for the fact that the federal government just loves giving huge tax credits to incomes between $6000 and about $40,000 a year. Middle class people can generally find enough deductions to drop their tax burden and they also have most of the same "loopholes" available to them that rich people do.
The real problem with the tax code is that it's so complicated that a person has to be able to pay good money to shield their money from taxes, mostly by paying an expert to deal with the labyrinthine tax code. It just doesn't become economical to do so until that person has some serious assets.
Of course, corporate tax code is completely from individual tax code. I personally clicked into this article to see if anyone who knows more than I do had yet addressed the claim that offering stock options doesn't cost Facebook anything. No matter how much all of us - myself included - would like to see corporations pay more taxes, the fact is that most of the ways they avoid paying up (but certainly not all) involve giving the money to their employees or charities instead. And no matter what anyone else on Slashdot seems to think, anyone cashing out stock options for Facebook is (now) a rich person paying taxes on that income.
The carriers don't "allow" it, they are required by law to support customers keeping their existing phone numbers. That service costs money and as we all know (it's the gist of this entire discussion) cell providers really hate to spend money in any way that might create customer loyalty.
Unlike in school, finding code off the internet isn't cheating, it's being efficient. It's also not without skill. A given person needs to really understand the problem to not only find a solution but be able to recognize whether it will work and tinker with the inputs and outputs to suit the particular problem.
Slashdot Mirror
The W3C is not concerned with free software. It's concerned with standardizing browser features so that the same web page will work the same in IE as it does in Firefox as it does in Chrome as it does in whatever other browser somebody made that conforms to the standard. The W3C would like to see that everything done on the internet is implemented in the web browser, including any proprietary code necessary to render a web site (such as minified JavaScript). The W3C specifically opposes the kind of Internet we had when lots of web sites used Microsoft-owned patent-encumbered ActiveX in IE5 because it had all the features they needed.
Except with W3C standardization, you can make 1 plugin for all browsers instead of having to navigate the interfaces for IE, Mozilla, and Webkit, and probably just completely ignore all of the less popular browsers like Opera and Konqueror (don't think that everybody using Linux is willing to forego closed-source device drivers and software packages for ideological reasons and just not get decent graphics performance or Flash videos).
The point is that it's not any worse. Platform-specific decryption modules may not be any better than native apps if you want everything you use to be open-source, but they have the practical advantage that if you don't need Flash or Silverlight to decrypt it anymore, you can just use a web browser. The interface is consistent and cheaper to build than having to make a native app for every platform instead of just recompiling the decryption module.
...but without any patents, why would people invest money in inventing something that can be easily copied? Evilness aside, drug companies are really the best example for why patents must exist. It takes millions of dollars in research to discover and test a new drug, but the manufacturing cost is usually quite tiny. If a generic drug could come out immediately once you've proved the compound is useful and safe, what financial incentive do you have to spend money on that research in the first place? The original purpose of patents was also to promote public disclosure. Without patent protection, early computers would likely not have been sold but their computations would have been leased out so nobody could disassemble and recreate them. With patent protection, those computers could be sold off without losing the monopoly, and the invention is publicly described for other people to improve upon.
Clearly there needs to be room for the "weekend builders" and if they need to use something still patented (or are improving upon the design), that's when FRAND is supposed to come in. The real problem is that patents have become too broad and non-specific, and often patents are granted for inventions that were already patented by someone else. In these cases it definitely has become legal business more than anything else, but just because there are several hundred patents on the Internet and another several hundred for every single little online thing that was actually invented in the 80's (as well as "doing X, but on the internet") doesn't mean the whole system is invalid.
Why XKCD? Why not just a normal cartoon? Either you wanted to post a Slashdot meme but couldn't find any hot grits (you insensitive clod), or you're secretly Randall Munroe suggesting that everybody must hire you to describe their patents for them.
It looks to me like the judges are finally deciding not against software patents in general, but patents of the type "doing X, but on a computer" or "doing X, but on a smartphone". The judgement is basically that you cannot patent something that's already patented, or is a natural law, or is an abstract concept not specific to any particular application, just because you describe it in an unusual way or put it in a new context, i.e. "turning a page, but on a touchscreen instead of an actual page" or in this particular case, "hedging risk, but by a computer algorithm instead of by bankers". Also not allowed would be "the browning of grain-based spongy material through local application of heat", also known as "making toast".
It's certainly true that the Libertarian ideology is in some part socially liberal, because it advocates that the government should get out of social issues. A pure Libertarian would say that government has no business outlawing gay sex or liquor sales on Sundays (abortion is slightly different because if you believe it's equivalent to murder, Libertarians usually still support outlawing murder). A pure Libertarian would also want to abolish welfare as well as every government service that works to reduce the impact of poverty. For that matter, a pure Libertarian would also want to shrink the military to 19th century levels and get the hell out of world politics. I think Ron Paul is the closest to pure Libertarian that I've ever seen, and he's actually too libertarian for most tea partiers.
As I understand it, the Tea Party is more of an ultraconservative response (by the anti-elite everyman Republicans, as opposed to the evil businessman Republicans) to the frankly corrupt and exploitative ideology of "neo-conservatism". Bush pays for a huge unnecessary war (Iraq) with catastrophic debt and expands the role of government in our daily lives (TSA et al) and as soon as the "mainstream media" ends its love affair with Karl Rove those Republicans are left scratching their heads thinking, "This is not what I thought I voted for..."
Is there a mod for +1 Pedantic?
He/she is about culture, not biology. Unless you're in a biology class, I suppose...
...but if you're talking about plugs in an electronics class...?
If an inside joke is told and nobody knows what it means, does it make anybody laugh?
How much could it possibly save the company to take away maternity leave? Certainly not anywhere near the disparity in salaries. And women complain about being underpaid because they are underpaid. In our day and age it's not (usually) a conscious decision by management to pay women less. Often it's actually women themselves simply not being as assertive looking for raises and accepting the disparity as unchangeable. The few voices complaining about the disparity are simply trying to get everyone involved to take a look at their own situations and figure out if women are being paid less at their workplace and if those women actually deserve to be paid less.
Maternity leave (and paternity leave) is a benefit like package health insurance, company cars, paid vacation, etc. It's offered by employers trying either to create a happy workplace and attract the best employees or to satisfy the demands of a labor union. I think that most people would agree that more maternity AND paternity leave would be good for everyone. But men have fewer opportunities to be involved with their children because there's still a prevalent idea in America that the women are responsible for giving up their lives to become primary caregivers. Most men are happy with that and so will not fight for paternity leave, and enough women have accepted it that they do fight for maternity leave.
As for "changing diapers or cleaning up code," yes both are messy, but I'd leave these smells for somebody else to clean up any day.
You're right, we're only talking care of other people's parents. But for that matter we should really be talking care of babies. That's what we're here to take about right?
Lol somebody's got a 1950s fantasy of women's role in society.
hedwards, you have no idea what you're talking about.
P.S. Slashdot, if I use an <ol> it's because I want my list items to have numbers in front of them without having to add them myself. Otherwise I'd just use <ul> or a series of <p>s.
So Stallman thinks that if DRM is a standard part of HTML, it will be "easy" and "convenient" and so smaller time web sites will end up using it. Which they wouldn't do anyway because DRM is hard? Because they didn't think of it? Is it really that easy to piggyback on a standard method of embedding decryption codes? How much cheaper is it really to do this with web standards than with Flash or Silverlight? Cheap enough to make a brand new market catering to all of those video sites that don't already use DRM? Which ones are those again?
What I really want to know is that if these web site owners are so stupid that they will start using DRM because it's more convenient, how much could they possibly understand about DRM? Couldn't we as open source evangelists just make something open source and call it DRM and hand it out to those dumbasses? It doesn't matter that it isn't really secure (was it ever secure in the first place?). It sounds like Stallman's concern is that once DRM is standardized it will become popular. All that being popular means in the technology world is that the name turns into a buzzword and everybody gets to claim they do DRM now.
Hello AC, got something to say? Requiring hardware DRM for Netflix or Hulu or BBC on a computer would be suicide for those businesses. The only time when you can make that kind of demand is when the hardware is brand new and it's built-in from the very first device, like Blu-Ray. Otherwise, Netflix gets a hoard of angry customers who are not willing to go down to the store and buy a physical piece of hardware just to use their service.
Even if it's as simple as a USB dongle, the content provider suddenly has to manage physical distribution. Netflix could probably handle it if they give the things away through their existing mail service, but hardly anyone else has any kind of distribution channel like that so such a requirement would instantly kill their profit margins.
Open culture is not the same thing as open standards. Standardizing DRM in HTML5 may conceivably hurt open culture (in my opinion it won't, since everyone that wants DRM - Netflix et al. - is already doing it). However, it will definitely help open standards. DRM is a "feature" of flash/silverlight/whatever. Adding the "feature" to standard web technologies will take away one more reason for content providers to use those decidedly closed-source closed-standard third-party blobs of unknown binary. Those that don't want to run the new blobs of DRM-decrypting binary on their computers aren't actually suffering any loss, since that's how Netflix already works anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I understand why some people think DRM will protect the content, but I also understand why it doesn't. Almost everyone here on Slashdot knows that DRM makes legitimate sources worth less than pirated sources while doing nothing to diminish access to pirated sources. DRM causes more people to pirate, not fewer. And I'm completely on board with open culture and doing away with the worthless middle-men businesses that are strangling the dissemination of culture in order to cling to pre-Internet business models. At least, as soon as we can figure out how otherwise provide funding and distribution to an above-average subset of those ideas that need funding and distribution to be successful (hint: all of them not from people who are independently wealthy). But I think that standardizing DRM in HTML5 doesn't actually hurt open culture and could have the very beneficial effect of finally killing off Flash and Silverlight.
Outsourcing is a terrible idea. I assume parent is being sarcastic about "guarenteed [sic] results, low bugs per line count". East Asia outsourced software developers are famous for producing buggy code, or the wrong code, past deadlines.
There are 3600 seconds in an hour, not 360.
24 and 60 were not arbitrary. They were chosen by ancient Babylonians because they are cleanly divisible by many numbers; 24 by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 12, and 60 by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. It was important to be able to divide time cleanly because they didn't have fractions or decimals at the time. Citation needed, of course, but I don't have time to find a source and this is something I remember from when I was a kid.
I did not mean to say that $6,000-$40,000 is middle class. I was describing a separate situation. Unfortunately I wrote it in a way that didn't make that distinction clear. Also, I said "most", not all. The rest of my post dealt with the situations you described: shielding assets from taxation in ways that take time and money.
Now, it may be different where you live, but in Iowa it's possible for a family of four to live fairly comfortably and even contribute to the consumer economy on $25,000 a year. In fact, I know it's different in denser parts of the country. I guess that (and the impact global warming has had on almost eliminating winter around here) would be a good reason to move to Des Moines?
I really wish somebody would just link to an original story. This may be Slashdot, where everyone is supposed to know about everything going on with copyright, but I can't be the only one who doesn't know off-hand what the story is with Aaron Swartz. I'm even at least 50% sure I am aware of this story, but the name alone doesn't bring the whole thing back. In the future, please, just a little reminder at least.
This is the definite truth. I can personally vouch for the fact that the federal government just loves giving huge tax credits to incomes between $6000 and about $40,000 a year. Middle class people can generally find enough deductions to drop their tax burden and they also have most of the same "loopholes" available to them that rich people do.
The real problem with the tax code is that it's so complicated that a person has to be able to pay good money to shield their money from taxes, mostly by paying an expert to deal with the labyrinthine tax code. It just doesn't become economical to do so until that person has some serious assets.
Of course, corporate tax code is completely from individual tax code. I personally clicked into this article to see if anyone who knows more than I do had yet addressed the claim that offering stock options doesn't cost Facebook anything. No matter how much all of us - myself included - would like to see corporations pay more taxes, the fact is that most of the ways they avoid paying up (but certainly not all) involve giving the money to their employees or charities instead. And no matter what anyone else on Slashdot seems to think, anyone cashing out stock options for Facebook is (now) a rich person paying taxes on that income.
The carriers don't "allow" it, they are required by law to support customers keeping their existing phone numbers. That service costs money and as we all know (it's the gist of this entire discussion) cell providers really hate to spend money in any way that might create customer loyalty.
Unlike in school, finding code off the internet isn't cheating, it's being efficient. It's also not without skill. A given person needs to really understand the problem to not only find a solution but be able to recognize whether it will work and tinker with the inputs and outputs to suit the particular problem.