as a typical/.er I did not RTFA... but how can he claim rights to a cover? he covered a song, and he is claiming copyright on the cover of a song, that is copyritten by someone else? Am I understanding this correctly???
Coulton parodied a song and is entitled a copyright protecting only his original contributions to the parody. Someone else copying the song verbatim happens to copy his protected contributions and thus is infringement. If they simply made their own parody on the original song (without copying the Coulton parody), then we'd be having a different discussion.
Wait - my bad. He didn't parody the song, he purchased a license to cover it. Regardless, replace "parody" with "cover" and the argument still stands.
as a typical/.er I did not RTFA... but how can he claim rights to a cover? he covered a song, and he is claiming copyright on the cover of a song, that is copyritten by someone else? Am I understanding this correctly???
Coulton parodied a song and is entitled a copyright protecting only his original contributions to the parody. Someone else copying the song verbatim happens to copy his protected contributions and thus is infringement. If they simply made their own parody on the original song (without copying the Coulton parody), then we'd be having a different discussion.
Arrangements of nonprotectible elements are, in fact, copyrightable. See Reader's Digest Association, Inc. v. Conservative Digest, Inc., 821 F.2d 800 (D.C. Cir. 1987). (magazine cover made up an arrangement of nonprotectible elements was copyrightable) Note, though, that in Reader's Digest, only the arrangement was protected by that copyright. If you're talking about "arrangements" in the musical sense, those are only copyrightable after they are "fixed in a tangible medium." 17 U.S.C. 102. That is, sheet music is protected, concerts that are recorded are protected (which is one reason why audio recording is often disallowed in concerts), etc.
wouldn't it look pretty bad in court if you just let damages accrue, and only filed a case after the defendant had made a bunch of money?
Generally, no. In the specific case of trademark law, you can lose your trademark if you don't defend it, but with copyright and patents, there is no such 'problem'. Submarine patents are a real thing, look at the case of GIF.
If you know about copyright infringement and don't act on it, then infringers might be able to employ the defenses of "laches" (unreasonable delay) or "equitable estoppel" (misleading the infringers to believe you're not going to pursue them). I'm not familiar with the GIF case, but my guess is that they were able to show that they were still actively enforcing the patent (even if "actively" is an exaggeration).
In copyright law (and in most, if not all, areas of IP) there is a defense called "equitable estoppel." The copyright owner's lack of action against an alleged infringement that he or she knows about can sometimes be interpreted as permission to continue use. There's also a defense called "laches" (pronounced: "latches") which can be employed in response to unreasonable delays in prosecution.
Patent infringement occurs when another "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention." 35 U.S.C. 271(a). If the company actually held a patent on the process of scanning documents and emailing them, then they really could sue users for infringement. In this case, though, that process is clearly not patentable since the process of scanning and emailing a document "was known or used by others in this country... before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent." 35 U.S.C. 102(a). When the USPTO issues a patent, the scope of the claims is not immediately clear. This is what the patent holders here are relying on. It's difficult - even for a patent attorney - to determine the exact scope of the claims of these patents. If they make it cheaper to settle than to hire an attorney (and possibly go to court), then they win.
too many Facebook users lose or never gain the ability to use the web-proper. As soon as they move beyond the walled garden, they are lost and confused
I'm curious who you know that is like this. I can only speak for people my age (23 - 25), but having grown up with the WWW, these people have no trouble navigating the world outside of Facebook. My friends and classmates browse our university subreddit, many of them have their own domain and personal website, and Facebook is only a subset of the WWW to them. I'm not saying they don't check it, but they can do nearly anything that you and I can do w.r.t "web browsing."
...you can't even view a public wall without a Facebook account
And what purpose would that serve, exactly? Stalking? If you can interact with the people whose profile you're viewing, then what's the point? Very few people are willing to have their profile/comments/photos visible to the entire world of people who might be prospective employers or other authority figures. Your Facebook credentials let other people blacklist/whitelist you based on groups they assign you to (or specifically block you if they want). You lose that functionality when you have your profile visible to everyone and without requiring users login.
But Facebook is a closed universe, a walled garden.
Yes, and people like it for the same reasons they like living in a gated community. Privacy, safety, and convenience. Privacy/safety was addressed in the previous paragraph, and the convenience should be apparent. Browsing Facebook is fast because everything can be done from inside the web application. If I want to view my best friend's vacation photos, all I have to do is click on them and they load asynchronously in a pop-under. From there, I can hit my left or right arrow keys to keep viewing, or I can click "close" and continue reading the newsfeed without waiting for a full reload. If a website wants to integrate their website into Facebook, there is an API for that.
Facebook is a web application. Highly-integrated applications are always the most useful, whether it's a desktop app or a web app. Would you prefer to use Visual Studio/Eclipse/C++ Builder or would you prefer to use gedit and then alt-tab over to your terminal to compile? I prefer the former, and that's the issue here. Yes it can be done by stringing things together, but it's hardly robust and certainly not integrated. You're using the term "walled garden" as some kind of pejorative, but really it's a feature. To most people, Facebook is a highly-integrated web application that meets the majority of their needs all within the application. That's what makes it popular. You might disagree that you it's best for you, but to say that it isn't best for its core user base would be out of touch. I bet you're also trying to convince your grandmother that she should be using vim instead of Microsoft Word... I think the state of software engineering would be better if people would take the time to better understand their user base and the lives that they lead. Not everyone is going to have the technological aptitude of an engineer, but that's okay. I'm sure I wouldn't want you performing open heart surgery on me, just as I wouldn't want my surgeon writing firmware for a pacemaker.
First of all, I'm a Flickr Pro subscriber, so I'm intimately familiar with all of its features.
In re tagging: Yes, Flickr has something called "tagging," but it's a different definition of the word "tag." It's a textual field for each photo so that you can assign to it some keywords to make your image more "searchable" for Flickr's built-in search engine. It doesn't actually link the photo to a person's Facebook/Flickr user account.
In re Facebook integration: Flickr's idea of "Facebook integration" is allowing you to log in to their website with your Flickr credentials (a process that you can expedite by using your Facebook credentials, but you're still having to create a Flickr account) and subsequently letting you post a link on your own Facebook wall to a photo or an album with a tiny thumbnail. Potential viewers then have to navigate away from Facebook into Flickr to view the actual photo(s). And that's if I leave my album wide open to the entire world with no concept of privacy. (which I don't like to do since there are other people in my photos - it's a violation of their privacy) So then if I want to restrict who can see the album, (e.g. my Facebook friends), I have to instruct them to create a Flickr account and then I would have to manually whitelist each of those people. Contrastingly, with the "Facebook photos" system, my "friends" automatically have access and everyone else is blacklisted.
In re "logging in": Not everyone likes linking their Facebook account with arbitrary websites - especially not when all they want to do is view/comment [on] a photo. And even when someone does link their account, they can still only access private photos after I go in an manually whitelist them. Facebook's built-in photo system lets you view and comment on photos without having to reauthenticate and it lets you do it in situ. In addition to that, it has built-in privacy controls that let you control which groups of people can see which photos.
All things considered, yes, I could put my photos on Flickr and inconvenience my friends/family and potentially violate their privacy, but the cons simply outweigh the pros. And no, I'm not an AOL user (metaphorical or otherwise)... I'm a CS major who doesn't have a lot of free time to manage a hundred different applications strung together by shoestrings and instead prefer to use systems that are robust and integrated.
Also, if you prefer empirical evidence, there was a time when I posted all of my photos straight to a Gallery2 installation on my web server and would post a link to it on my Facebook page. (essentially the same solution as you're proposing) I ended up switching back to the built-in Facebook gallery because comments and views were virtually non-existent. It's very inconvenient to have to leave Facebook to casually view some photos. In case you're unfamiliar with Facebook, photos that are either new or have had lots of recent activity show up in your friends' news feeds. So when they log in, they will see something of this nature: "[friend a] and [friend b] commented on [friend c]'s photo," along with the actual photo. It also shows some of the comments and lets other people join the conversation. That level of interaction isn't present when you just post a link to an external website. My guess is that you've never used Facebook and thus have no knowledge of the distinction, but it's definitely there and it was very apparent to me from my Gallery2 migration experiment.
Well it's not so much the lack of ability. It's just that outsourcing photos to another website makes viewing them inconvenient and lacks the "social" part of social networking. There's no tagging and nobody wants to have to create an account just so that they can leave a comment. And personally, I don't blame them. It's a pain. The integrated "photos" feature is very convenient and definitely serves a purpose. I just wish it wouldn't suck. (bad compression and lack of features)
Two billion dollars for a photo sharing social network with no business model/facepalm.
As a photography enthusiast (or whatever), I absolutely hate facebook's current photo sharing system. They force really bad lossy-compression on all images resulting in large blocky artifacts all over your images. It lacks the option to fix a problem with a picture without deleting the photo and reuploading (thus removing all of the comments). And those are just the worst problems.
I've been wanting to switch to Flickr, but it would be too difficult to explain to certain family members and friends. (and it would eliminate the ability to tag friends) I suspect that I'm not alone in this position (especially among photographers) and if facebook can fix it by purchasing a company, then it might actually be worth a billion or two USD.
(replying to myself because I thought of something else)
My guess is that by allowing everyone to switch over whenever they want and then randomly forcing certain people to switch over, they're trying to use "peer pressure" to make the transition easier. (e.g. "everyone else is switching to timeline so I should too"... it's better for facebook if people think they're doing it voluntarily)
They're pushing it out randomly to people, giving them about a week's notice before they automatically switch you over. I got a notice about a month ago that said they were going to switch me over in a week and that I should prepare by choosing a cover photo, etc. And now I have timeline. (whether I like it or not)
This is typical male arrogance. Females are shut out of tech carees by this structural patriarcy and you blame us women? This is bull. It's the fault of the males.
Well then enlighten us. What do you want CS students and CS departments to do in order to attract more female students? What exactly is being done to shut them out?
I tend to agree with you, as your reason is more aligned with Google's interests. However, Google+ doesn't have ads (right now, at least). It seems to me as though all of Google's products start out ad-free while Google throws all of its resources at them to make them successful. Finally, when their place in the market is secure, they start plastering ads all over them. The Google+ search results are probably part of the strategy to help Google+ gain some ground against Facebook. I don't know how they're going to overtake Facebook, but I don't think it wouldn't surprise me.
If you think about back when Google search overtook its competitors, the product wasn't really that much better than any of the other search engines... and yet somehow "google" turned into a verb for "web search." Same thing with Gmail. Gmail wasn't really any better than any of the other email providers. Sure, it had significantly more storage, but I don't think that was really an issue for most people. Could all of this really have been a result of the Google brand name? I have a hard time coming up with any other reason for all of this success. Really good marketing and PR combined with engineering talent (which they got by providing the best perks).
Patents are a time-limited right to exclude in exchange for publishing your process/invention. Patent applications are public and can be "invented around" even during the term of the patent. (because the patent holders are forced to publish, and as a result that information is in the public domain). These inventions create jobs and introduce new technology into society. And after the life of the patent, it's free for anyone to make, use, sell, offer to sell, or import. The application is required by law to be "enabling" such that the invention can be reproduced from the patent description "without undue experimentation." The public absolutely benefits from that. That new information in the public domain leads to new inventions. Without patents, companies would have absolutely no reason to publish their trade secrets and innovation would only happen in huge corporations. Patents give the proverbial "little guy" the opportunity to compete, and we all know the benefits of additional competition.
... unless you have another class right afterwards, or you forget one of the 10 points he outlined in class.
Helping memory recall is a secondary reason to take notes. The primary is to have a complete reference for when you forget.
That's what I was thinking, as well. Some teachers will post notes after class, though, and that's where his advice would be relevant. In those classes, focus on the material and how you're going to remember it. Then try and reproduce it all after class, on paper. Then compare it against the actual notes that were posted online and pay extra time learning the stuff that you forgot.
I'm curious how you know that those specific accounts are from Waggener Edstrom. That link you referenced only says that they monitor social media as a means for gauging public opinion. (and so that if a PR "crisis," as they put it, is about to happen, they can know quicker so that they can spin it in their favor via traditional media outlets) This sort of thing is not new (or even wrong), they're just adding "social media" to the list of sources they monitor.
I suppose it's possible that someone at Slashdot with access to logs matched their IP addresses to Waggener Edstrom, but my guess is that these "sockpuppets" are actually just regular people with an unhealthy obsession with Microsoft.
Another possible source of skew could be that the subset of programmers who create these materials happen to prefer language X over language Y. The entire set of all programmers (which is much larger than the aforementioned "writers" subset) might all be learning language Y, but since the "writers" prefer writing about X, it's possible that X would be at a higher position on the TIOBE index than the actual fastest growing language Y.
If all that index does is count web pages that mention a language then isn't it more likely to be a measure of how many problems people are having with a language? Languages which "just work" would get fewer hits than those which don't.
Citation?
The GP brought up a perfectly rational argument. If you find it flawed, then, in a constructive way, tell us how it's flawed. Don't complain about a lack of citation. This is not Wikipedia.
The problem with this is that you're not considering the total number of questions per tag. The tags you said "none" for at the bottom are (1) not actually "none", and (2) not very popular tags.
Here is a full table with percentages, where you can see that there isn't much of a difference between languages with respect to the percentage of unanswered questions: (in order of ascending percentage)
Also, who's to say that Objective-C questions are the same level of difficulty as all of the others. Also not considered is the type of programmer who answers questions on Stack Overflow. Perhaps it's mostly professional C++ and C# developers (which would explain why there are lots of C# and C++ questions with a small percentage of unanswered questions) that mostly answer languages they know but occasionally answer some of the other languages that they may not know as well.
I just now mentioned in another post that I once had a teacher who supplemented his regular lectures with a single weekly online lecture where he worked out homework problems for anyone who was having difficulty with the homework. (it was a type of calculus-based physics, so the answer wasn't always immediately obvious) I surely wouldn't want to convert all the lectures to an online-only format, but it was very nice having the option to "attend" the online instructor-led homework-help lecture if I had questions about any of the homework problems. If you had already finished the homework and didn't have any difficulty completing it, you didn't feel obligated to attend since it was an optional online session. Also, he archived the lecture so that, afterwards, we could go back and re-watch anything if we needed to.
Of course you could always send him an email, attend his office hours, or ask him in class, but it was still a nice alternative.
A similar option is Adobe Connect. My Statics/Dynamics professor, in addition to the regular in-class lectures, had a Monday night online-only lecture where he had a headset microphone and a Fujitsu convertible tablet where, via live screen capture, he worked out homework/review problems on our screens and talked us through it. If we had questions, we would type it into the chat area and he would answer them through the microphone. I don't know how expensive it is, though. (I imagine it's not cheap)
Slashdot Mirror
as a typical /.er I did not RTFA... but how can he claim rights to a cover? he covered a song, and he is claiming copyright on the cover of a song, that is copyritten by someone else? Am I understanding this correctly???
Coulton parodied a song and is entitled a copyright protecting only his original contributions to the parody. Someone else copying the song verbatim happens to copy his protected contributions and thus is infringement. If they simply made their own parody on the original song (without copying the Coulton parody), then we'd be having a different discussion.
Wait - my bad. He didn't parody the song, he purchased a license to cover it. Regardless, replace "parody" with "cover" and the argument still stands.
as a typical /.er I did not RTFA... but how can he claim rights to a cover? he covered a song, and he is claiming copyright on the cover of a song, that is copyritten by someone else? Am I understanding this correctly???
Coulton parodied a song and is entitled a copyright protecting only his original contributions to the parody. Someone else copying the song verbatim happens to copy his protected contributions and thus is infringement. If they simply made their own parody on the original song (without copying the Coulton parody), then we'd be having a different discussion.
Arrangements of nonprotectible elements are, in fact, copyrightable. See Reader's Digest Association, Inc. v. Conservative Digest, Inc., 821 F.2d 800 (D.C. Cir. 1987). (magazine cover made up an arrangement of nonprotectible elements was copyrightable) Note, though, that in Reader's Digest, only the arrangement was protected by that copyright. If you're talking about "arrangements" in the musical sense, those are only copyrightable after they are "fixed in a tangible medium." 17 U.S.C. 102. That is, sheet music is protected, concerts that are recorded are protected (which is one reason why audio recording is often disallowed in concerts), etc.
wouldn't it look pretty bad in court if you just let damages accrue, and only filed a case after the defendant had made a bunch of money?
Generally, no. In the specific case of trademark law, you can lose your trademark if you don't defend it, but with copyright and patents, there is no such 'problem'. Submarine patents are a real thing, look at the case of GIF.
If you know about copyright infringement and don't act on it, then infringers might be able to employ the defenses of "laches" (unreasonable delay) or "equitable estoppel" (misleading the infringers to believe you're not going to pursue them). I'm not familiar with the GIF case, but my guess is that they were able to show that they were still actively enforcing the patent (even if "actively" is an exaggeration).
In copyright law (and in most, if not all, areas of IP) there is a defense called "equitable estoppel." The copyright owner's lack of action against an alleged infringement that he or she knows about can sometimes be interpreted as permission to continue use. There's also a defense called "laches" (pronounced: "latches") which can be employed in response to unreasonable delays in prosecution.
Patent infringement occurs when another "makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention." 35 U.S.C. 271(a). If the company actually held a patent on the process of scanning documents and emailing them, then they really could sue users for infringement. In this case, though, that process is clearly not patentable since the process of scanning and emailing a document "was known or used by others in this country ... before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent." 35 U.S.C. 102(a). When the USPTO issues a patent, the scope of the claims is not immediately clear. This is what the patent holders here are relying on. It's difficult - even for a patent attorney - to determine the exact scope of the claims of these patents. If they make it cheaper to settle than to hire an attorney (and possibly go to court), then they win.
(replying to self)
too many Facebook users lose or never gain the ability to use the web-proper. As soon as they move beyond the walled garden, they are lost and confused
I'm curious who you know that is like this. I can only speak for people my age (23 - 25), but having grown up with the WWW, these people have no trouble navigating the world outside of Facebook. My friends and classmates browse our university subreddit, many of them have their own domain and personal website, and Facebook is only a subset of the WWW to them. I'm not saying they don't check it, but they can do nearly anything that you and I can do w.r.t "web browsing."
...you can't even view a public wall without a Facebook account
And what purpose would that serve, exactly? Stalking? If you can interact with the people whose profile you're viewing, then what's the point? Very few people are willing to have their profile/comments/photos visible to the entire world of people who might be prospective employers or other authority figures. Your Facebook credentials let other people blacklist/whitelist you based on groups they assign you to (or specifically block you if they want). You lose that functionality when you have your profile visible to everyone and without requiring users login.
But Facebook is a closed universe, a walled garden.
Yes, and people like it for the same reasons they like living in a gated community. Privacy, safety, and convenience. Privacy/safety was addressed in the previous paragraph, and the convenience should be apparent. Browsing Facebook is fast because everything can be done from inside the web application. If I want to view my best friend's vacation photos, all I have to do is click on them and they load asynchronously in a pop-under. From there, I can hit my left or right arrow keys to keep viewing, or I can click "close" and continue reading the newsfeed without waiting for a full reload. If a website wants to integrate their website into Facebook, there is an API for that.
Facebook is a web application. Highly-integrated applications are always the most useful, whether it's a desktop app or a web app. Would you prefer to use Visual Studio/Eclipse/C++ Builder or would you prefer to use gedit and then alt-tab over to your terminal to compile? I prefer the former, and that's the issue here. Yes it can be done by stringing things together, but it's hardly robust and certainly not integrated. You're using the term "walled garden" as some kind of pejorative, but really it's a feature. To most people, Facebook is a highly-integrated web application that meets the majority of their needs all within the application. That's what makes it popular. You might disagree that you it's best for you, but to say that it isn't best for its core user base would be out of touch. I bet you're also trying to convince your grandmother that she should be using vim instead of Microsoft Word... I think the state of software engineering would be better if people would take the time to better understand their user base and the lives that they lead. Not everyone is going to have the technological aptitude of an engineer, but that's okay. I'm sure I wouldn't want you performing open heart surgery on me, just as I wouldn't want my surgeon writing firmware for a pacemaker.
First of all, I'm a Flickr Pro subscriber, so I'm intimately familiar with all of its features.
In re tagging:
Yes, Flickr has something called "tagging," but it's a different definition of the word "tag." It's a textual field for each photo so that you can assign to it some keywords to make your image more "searchable" for Flickr's built-in search engine. It doesn't actually link the photo to a person's Facebook/Flickr user account.
In re Facebook integration:
Flickr's idea of "Facebook integration" is allowing you to log in to their website with your Flickr credentials (a process that you can expedite by using your Facebook credentials, but you're still having to create a Flickr account) and subsequently letting you post a link on your own Facebook wall to a photo or an album with a tiny thumbnail. Potential viewers then have to navigate away from Facebook into Flickr to view the actual photo(s). And that's if I leave my album wide open to the entire world with no concept of privacy. (which I don't like to do since there are other people in my photos - it's a violation of their privacy) So then if I want to restrict who can see the album, (e.g. my Facebook friends), I have to instruct them to create a Flickr account and then I would have to manually whitelist each of those people. Contrastingly, with the "Facebook photos" system, my "friends" automatically have access and everyone else is blacklisted.
In re "logging in":
Not everyone likes linking their Facebook account with arbitrary websites - especially not when all they want to do is view/comment [on] a photo. And even when someone does link their account, they can still only access private photos after I go in an manually whitelist them. Facebook's built-in photo system lets you view and comment on photos without having to reauthenticate and it lets you do it in situ. In addition to that, it has built-in privacy controls that let you control which groups of people can see which photos.
All things considered, yes, I could put my photos on Flickr and inconvenience my friends/family and potentially violate their privacy, but the cons simply outweigh the pros. And no, I'm not an AOL user (metaphorical or otherwise)... I'm a CS major who doesn't have a lot of free time to manage a hundred different applications strung together by shoestrings and instead prefer to use systems that are robust and integrated.
Also, if you prefer empirical evidence, there was a time when I posted all of my photos straight to a Gallery2 installation on my web server and would post a link to it on my Facebook page. (essentially the same solution as you're proposing) I ended up switching back to the built-in Facebook gallery because comments and views were virtually non-existent. It's very inconvenient to have to leave Facebook to casually view some photos. In case you're unfamiliar with Facebook, photos that are either new or have had lots of recent activity show up in your friends' news feeds. So when they log in, they will see something of this nature: "[friend a] and [friend b] commented on [friend c]'s photo," along with the actual photo. It also shows some of the comments and lets other people join the conversation. That level of interaction isn't present when you just post a link to an external website. My guess is that you've never used Facebook and thus have no knowledge of the distinction, but it's definitely there and it was very apparent to me from my Gallery2 migration experiment.
Well it's not so much the lack of ability. It's just that outsourcing photos to another website makes viewing them inconvenient and lacks the "social" part of social networking. There's no tagging and nobody wants to have to create an account just so that they can leave a comment. And personally, I don't blame them. It's a pain. The integrated "photos" feature is very convenient and definitely serves a purpose. I just wish it wouldn't suck. (bad compression and lack of features)
Two billion dollars for a photo sharing social network with no business model /facepalm.
As a photography enthusiast (or whatever), I absolutely hate facebook's current photo sharing system. They force really bad lossy-compression on all images resulting in large blocky artifacts all over your images. It lacks the option to fix a problem with a picture without deleting the photo and reuploading (thus removing all of the comments). And those are just the worst problems.
I've been wanting to switch to Flickr, but it would be too difficult to explain to certain family members and friends. (and it would eliminate the ability to tag friends)
I suspect that I'm not alone in this position (especially among photographers) and if facebook can fix it by purchasing a company, then it might actually be worth a billion or two USD.
(replying to myself because I thought of something else)
My guess is that by allowing everyone to switch over whenever they want and then randomly forcing certain people to switch over, they're trying to use "peer pressure" to make the transition easier. (e.g. "everyone else is switching to timeline so I should too"... it's better for facebook if people think they're doing it voluntarily)
They're pushing it out randomly to people, giving them about a week's notice before they automatically switch you over. I got a notice about a month ago that said they were going to switch me over in a week and that I should prepare by choosing a cover photo, etc. And now I have timeline. (whether I like it or not)
This is typical male arrogance. Females are shut out of tech carees by this structural patriarcy and you blame us women? This is bull. It's the fault of the males.
Well then enlighten us. What do you want CS students and CS departments to do in order to attract more female students? What exactly is being done to shut them out?
I tend to agree with you, as your reason is more aligned with Google's interests. However, Google+ doesn't have ads (right now, at least). It seems to me as though all of Google's products start out ad-free while Google throws all of its resources at them to make them successful. Finally, when their place in the market is secure, they start plastering ads all over them. The Google+ search results are probably part of the strategy to help Google+ gain some ground against Facebook. I don't know how they're going to overtake Facebook, but I don't think it wouldn't surprise me.
If you think about back when Google search overtook its competitors, the product wasn't really that much better than any of the other search engines... and yet somehow "google" turned into a verb for "web search." Same thing with Gmail. Gmail wasn't really any better than any of the other email providers. Sure, it had significantly more storage, but I don't think that was really an issue for most people. Could all of this really have been a result of the Google brand name? I have a hard time coming up with any other reason for all of this success. Really good marketing and PR combined with engineering talent (which they got by providing the best perks).
Patents are a time-limited right to exclude in exchange for publishing your process/invention. Patent applications are public and can be "invented around" even during the term of the patent. (because the patent holders are forced to publish, and as a result that information is in the public domain). These inventions create jobs and introduce new technology into society. And after the life of the patent, it's free for anyone to make, use, sell, offer to sell, or import. The application is required by law to be "enabling" such that the invention can be reproduced from the patent description "without undue experimentation." The public absolutely benefits from that. That new information in the public domain leads to new inventions. Without patents, companies would have absolutely no reason to publish their trade secrets and innovation would only happen in huge corporations. Patents give the proverbial "little guy" the opportunity to compete, and we all know the benefits of additional competition.
(sorry, ignore that comma splice in the first sentence)
... unless you have another class right afterwards, or you forget one of the 10 points he outlined in class.
Helping memory recall is a secondary reason to take notes. The primary is to have a complete reference for when you forget.
That's what I was thinking, as well. Some teachers will post notes after class, though, and that's where his advice would be relevant. In those classes, focus on the material and how you're going to remember it. Then try and reproduce it all after class, on paper. Then compare it against the actual notes that were posted online and pay extra time learning the stuff that you forgot.
I'm curious how you know that those specific accounts are from Waggener Edstrom. That link you referenced only says that they monitor social media as a means for gauging public opinion. (and so that if a PR "crisis," as they put it, is about to happen, they can know quicker so that they can spin it in their favor via traditional media outlets) This sort of thing is not new (or even wrong), they're just adding "social media" to the list of sources they monitor.
I suppose it's possible that someone at Slashdot with access to logs matched their IP addresses to Waggener Edstrom, but my guess is that these "sockpuppets" are actually just regular people with an unhealthy obsession with Microsoft.
Another possible source of skew could be that the subset of programmers who create these materials happen to prefer language X over language Y. The entire set of all programmers (which is much larger than the aforementioned "writers" subset) might all be learning language Y, but since the "writers" prefer writing about X, it's possible that X would be at a higher position on the TIOBE index than the actual fastest growing language Y.
If all that index does is count web pages that mention a language then isn't it more likely to be a measure of how many problems people are having with a language? Languages which "just work" would get fewer hits than those which don't.
Citation?
The GP brought up a perfectly rational argument. If you find it flawed, then, in a constructive way, tell us how it's flawed. Don't complain about a lack of citation. This is not Wikipedia.
The problem with this is that you're not considering the total number of questions per tag. The tags you said "none" for at the bottom are (1) not actually "none", and (2) not very popular tags.
Here is a full table with percentages, where you can see that there isn't much of a difference between languages with respect to the percentage of unanswered questions: (in order of ascending percentage)
Objective-C Unanswered: 11,735 / 68,034 = 17.25% Javascript Unanswered: 26,932 / 165,543 = 16.27% BASIC Unanswered: 10 / 67 = 14.93% PHP Unanswered: 26,697 / 181,413 = 14.72% Java Unanswered: 28,050 / 195,957 = 14.31% Ruby Unanswered: 5,074 / 37,266 = 13.62% C# Unanswered: 31,934 / 255,266 = 12.51% Python Unanswered: 9,065 / 88,496 = 10.24% C++ Unanswered: 8,012 / 104,647 = 7.66% C Unanswered: 3,006 / 48,720 = 6.17% Perl Unanswered: 879 / 15,600 = 5.63% Lisp Unanswered: 28 / 1,629 = 1.72%Also, who's to say that Objective-C questions are the same level of difficulty as all of the others. Also not considered is the type of programmer who answers questions on Stack Overflow. Perhaps it's mostly professional C++ and C# developers (which would explain why there are lots of C# and C++ questions with a small percentage of unanswered questions) that mostly answer languages they know but occasionally answer some of the other languages that they may not know as well.
I just now mentioned in another post that I once had a teacher who supplemented his regular lectures with a single weekly online lecture where he worked out homework problems for anyone who was having difficulty with the homework. (it was a type of calculus-based physics, so the answer wasn't always immediately obvious) I surely wouldn't want to convert all the lectures to an online-only format, but it was very nice having the option to "attend" the online instructor-led homework-help lecture if I had questions about any of the homework problems. If you had already finished the homework and didn't have any difficulty completing it, you didn't feel obligated to attend since it was an optional online session. Also, he archived the lecture so that, afterwards, we could go back and re-watch anything if we needed to.
Of course you could always send him an email, attend his office hours, or ask him in class, but it was still a nice alternative.
A similar option is Adobe Connect. My Statics/Dynamics professor, in addition to the regular in-class lectures, had a Monday night online-only lecture where he had a headset microphone and a Fujitsu convertible tablet where, via live screen capture, he worked out homework/review problems on our screens and talked us through it. If we had questions, we would type it into the chat area and he would answer them through the microphone. I don't know how expensive it is, though. (I imagine it's not cheap)
My bad, I think I was thinking of C#.net... Let me try again:
Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("./scriptname.sh")