In fact, the only thing observable in the world is correlation. Causation exists only in models and that model could be supported by observed correlation.
Uh, no. If I punch you in the nose and you start to nosebleed, nobody's going to question the causality of that. Sometimes it's hard to say because X leads to Y and Y leads to X or because there's some underlying factor Z leading to both X and Y, but there's usually some way to separate the effects. That said network effects are often very vital in understanding why an inferior solution is picked, a small edge in starting conditions can send the marketing spinning in another direction.
And individually watermarked and tamper-proofed, if it did happen they'll know exactly when and where. I've never heard of anyone actually getting a raw 4k rip from these things, if they did I'm sure it'd come to halt very soon. Besides, almost nobody can watch it - I guess the people with 30" displays could get 1440p but 4k televisions and projectors practically don't exist. With the price of 4k equipment you might as well license yourself as a cinema too, won't be that much more expensive. Size would be an issue too, I think for the last of the LotR movies it was 900GB, not sure about that. They're going out practically uncompressed, no artifacting there.
Reality is that the top 100 "users" - or rather feeds represent 75% of the posted content, you just have to check new users and if you want you can block them. All the MPAA got is a gigantic game of whack-a-mole trying to delete files at random as they show up in search results, the problem isn't even remotely comparable.
But they issued takedown orders based on title keywords that they don't own. You should be at least willing to put up a list of what you claim to own so that minimal verification at least can be done before obeying a takedown order.
But that is already part of a DMCA notice. Like for example:
The movie studio admits this and confirms that while searching for âThe Box (2009)â(TM) many unrelated titles were removed. âoeWarner admits that its records indicate that URLs containing the phrases âThe Box That Changed Britainâ(TM) and âCancer Step Outsider of the Boxâ(TM) were requested for takedown through use of the SRA tool.â
This would come through as a DMCA notice saying we own the copyright to the movie "The Box". We believe the file called "The Box That Changed Britain" is an unauthorized copy of "The Box". Everything you ask for is already available but nobody actually has the time to manually do the verification you ask and a database would do absolutely nothing to change that.
Media companies engaging in such scattershot tactics should therefore be required to host a database listing every copyright they own. That way if they send a takedown notice for video X to YouTube, someone at YouTube can check the video, check the database, and say "yep, that shouldn't be here" or "nope, this request must have been sent in error."
So if the database lists a movie title, YouTube is supposed to know every scene in every movie and know if the content is infringing? Or did you mean to say they have to put up a movie server so YouTube can compare clip against clip? And how exactly would it limit their scattershot practice if YouTube gets all the hard work validating or dismissing everything? The part about "we own this copyright" is right there in the DMCA notice, under penalty of perjury even. The question is if the copyright they have apply to the clip they're trying to take down or not and there's no easy compare function between List<Copyright> and List<VideoClip>. Even if they put up an "original" there's a million kind of settings and clips and compilations and whatnot that don't qualify as fair use, you try to write that fuzzy matching. Quite frankly I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't make any sense.
Re:Intel's 3g gate transistors stop all current
on
The Transistor Wars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This has been one of their major bullet points, the next round of processors will improve power consumption a lot. So if Intel's not on the right path, I don't know who is. AMD Bulldozer certainly is not. Of course sooner or later this is going to come to a halt, silicon atoms are roughly 0.235nm apart. So 22/0.235 = 93.6 atoms. The roadmap puts us at 8nm = 34 atoms in 6 years. Just extrapolating in 2023 that it'll be 12 atoms, 2029 4.5 atoms and 2035 1.6 atoms. That's not going to happen, at latest in the 2020s we will hit a brick wall and Moore's "law" will be dead. We'll hit some level of energy efficiency and most likely stay there.
That piracy has killed almost all value in the music industry? No, wait probably not it but there's no inherent disconnect here. The market price is based on the current and future cash flow from that music, if the market thinks that few pay now and less in the future and those who do pay will pay less then the market price will go down. What people "ought to" have paid won't go into the market price unless they think they can actually make people pay it in the future.
Long background, short summary: Been fiddling with Linux since 1999-2000, switched to Linux as primary desktop in 2007 and returned to Windows in April last year.
Primary reasons: 1. Applications. Games. The Linux knock-offs - and yes, that's what they mostly are - aren't nearly as good and WINE, Virtualbox is more tedious than just running them under Windows. Too many people with a reality distortion field stronger than Steve Jobs, but of the one man variety. 2. A lot of the open source applications that are actually worth having also exist for Windows, so I didn't actually lose anything much going back. It's more going back to a best of breed-solution than abandoning all open source, as long as I got rid of the sore points. 3. Less hardware/driver/version/plugin/upgrade issues. I sort of hoped the snowball would start rolling but it never really did. When I switched to Linux it was to get away from Vista, but in the years I was on Linux they went from Vista SP0 to Win7 SP1 while my Linux desktop still had glitches. 4. A change of attitude, a bigger interest in just paying my way out of problems. I still think it's fun to tinker with computers but not that kind of tinkering. Now I'm writing more code, not fixing broken systems or tweaking WINE settings. 5. Less ideology. I'm tired of being told I should just accept that it sucks because of $reason. That's an explanation, but it doesn't really change the situation. There's only so long you bother fighting the windmills, particularly when you realize they're not coming down.
If Microsoft pulls another Vista then I wouldn't mind trying again when Win7 is approaching EOL, I'm not in the "never again" category. But I'm on a platform now that works really well, simple as that. I've got no plans to upgrade to Metro or to a Mac or back to Linux any time soon. Testing, switching and getting used to everything has its costs and they're just not worth doing too often.
Yeah, the summary is wildly optimistic. I suspect the opt-in will be more like a one way nag-in with update buttons, pop-ups and incompatibilities so to socialize with someone that has upgraded you must too. Still it's better than the "Accept the new policy or we'll remove your pages" policy they used to have, my Facebook profile is more barren now than when I first registered as a result.
If the author/copyright holder says the headers are not a copyright violation, then regardless of the license that would seem to indicate permission.
Yes, but one copyright holder can't give his permission to use the project in a non-GPL compliant way, because it would still violate the license on the rest of the code. If Linus owned the copyright on all the code in the kernel it'd be a different matter but he has 1-2% of it. Even if the header is his, he can't give permission to let people use the other 98-99% as they want because it forms a whole work. You're not just using his interface, you are using all the code behind it.
This has been covered many times, perhaps the most common is if you can write a shim layer like this: Proprietary code <-> BSD shim <-> GPL project. The proprietary code complies with the BSD license, the BSD license complies with the GPL license, is this then kosher? No. The same goes with: Any non-GPL activity <-> header Linus gave special permission to <-> GPL project.
The GPL mutually binds everybody, they'd all have to agree to make any form of exception (or as has been discussed, re-licensing to GPLv3 if Linus even wanted to). I guess the closest you can come is some form of promissory estoppel, in that you could have good faith reason to believe you had permission. OTOH it's not certain a court will accept that because the person suing presumably made no such promises, it may depend on whether Linus gave the impression of speaking for everyone rather than issuing a personal opinion and so on. Nor may all jurisdictions have similar principles.
In short, it's not Linus that defines what a derivative work is, it's the law. And under the GPL all derivative works are covered. Are these headers a derived work? I'd lean towards no. But if they are, I don't think anyone has the authority to free them from their obligations under the GPL. At best they'll avoid paying any damages due to estoppel, but they still would have to stop using them. Or comply with the GPL, whichever is easier.
A genius enjoys making something that looks hard easy to understand - that takes insight, even a "stroke of genius". I think what you encountered wasn't genius, but BROs (Bipedal Rectal Orifices a.k.a. walking ass-holes
Yes, but not just to dumb it down so you can have the illusion of understanding while you actually understand less than 10% of what's really going on. Sometimes the problem is really complex and just because a genius is able to work with that complexity doesn't mean it goes away. But I guess it's a really cheap shot of anti-intellectualism to put all the fault on person trying to explain it and that any failure on your part to understand is due to him not being smart enough to explain it. I just wasn't aware it was a popular opinion here on slashdot.
but the helpdesk manager im told was a complete asshole. he alientated the seasoned pro's by treating them like kids and before we knew it, they had all quit.
There's a few of those in the military, I remember some friends of mine talking about a colonel. They were to gather firewood and he was to instruct them in it and he was talking to them as if they were eight year olds on a camping trip. They being fairly fresh recruits and the military being tough on discipline and frowning at talking back at your superiors they let it pass, but they'd never do that in civilian life from their boss. Fortunately most such people have the good sense to stay in the military.
So what would be so revolutionary about that? If someone makes a photobook with 100 licensed photographs but doesn't care one bit about stopping copyright infringement, then of course the owners of each photograph can go after them instead. It's only legally risky if you violate the license, and between having one mega-corporation with lawyers and a real "lost income" claim as opposed to thousands of mostly harmless OSS pundits, I'd take the FSF over Microsoft, Apple or Oracle on my ass any day.
Because the above choices are more realistic than expecting the human race to put short-term greed aside to save the planet.
I would say especially now. Five years ago you could have had people listen, but right now if there's a choice between jobs and the environment then the US and almost all of Europe would say give me jobs, screw the environment. I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been more civil unrest than there has, given countries with 20% unemployment. If it had been 30 years ago I'd not be surprised if we'd seen several socialist revolutions already, on the simple reason that it can't be any worse.
I disagree with the earlier poster who said it was difficult to delete data once it was cached. That is not true. A data "cache" by its very nature is transitory; once the cache is routinely updated, "cached" data that has been deleted goes away.
That is one way of using cache, but not the only way. For example you could have an image cache that works on a LRU principle, give a hash get a picture in return. There's no "routinely updated", just that what hasn't been used in a long time falls off the cache. If a user deletes a picture - or what is really the reference to a picture, how long until you can be absolutely sure it's fallen off every cache and you've complied with the deletion request? Answer: You can't. You have to explicitly send all commands to every cache that if you have this picture, drop it. And that doesn't account for any and all backups you might have with it, that isn't cache but can also be very complicated.
Of course, if you delete the reference then in theory people can't reach it, but if the server is compromised then an attacker could get access to all of them, even "unlinked" pictures. Maybe it's obvious from the content, maybe you can find some logs showing what account it used to belong to, whatever. In any case you can't really say with certainty that the data really is gone until the picture itself has been deleted (or possibly wiped). And that can be a non-trivial thing to do on a huge infrastructure.
Even in a poor economy, there are companies doing well and presumably those who are hiring are. If you're hired then shortly after fired someone will have to explain why they spent all that money on recruitment and training just to show you the door. It's not certain that your current job is any more safe. As for getting a job, well you are always more attractive already having a job than not. You may consider that silly, but remember that while a lot of good people are out of work, the companies also took the opportunity to get rid of many poor workers. A lot of desperate people will exaggerate their skills more than usual. That you're still on staff is an indicator that you're the kind of guy they keep. Of course there's wage pressure going on, they are now looking to hire on the cheap. On the other hand many bosses still believe in "you get what you pay for" so if you're willing to work for minimum wage they assume your skills must be very bad when you are willing to work for so little. Or perhaps "If you pay peanuts, you get monkies" is a less polite way of saying it. Just make a reasonable demand, and if you get passed up you already have a job so forget it and move on to the next one. You'd be surprised how employers react to prospective employees turning them down, of course some go full retard on some realize you're actually an attractive worker they have to chase, even in this economy.
Even good companies with good bosses - and yes they're still around - make poor hires. If everybody just gets up quietly and leaves, it's very easy to be a bad boss. At least take their measure and see if you think the boss of the boss seems approachable. Don't expect him to listen if you just come across as whiny and your boss drivers you too hard, you have to make the case that your boss is really a bad boss that is ruining the productivity and motivation of the people working there and causing turnover. Even to a sociopath it's possible to argue that his sociopath underling is hurting him more than helping him. Though a plan B of alternative work wouldn't be a bad idea...
If someone takes a shot at you, how likely is it that you'll be able to hold on to that clipboard in a position where it actually protects something? Better than just dropping the clipboard and running/diving for the nearest cover, exit or whatnot. The only way I can see you manage to keep this in a reasonable position is if you're standing still, in which case you'll look like Adam with the fig leaf because it's hardly a riot shield. What's next, a bullet proof donut box?
To put it this way, I still haven't run into a graphics designer that took "Here's all the items laid out exactly how they should be, you get to pick colors and icon designs but you can't change the layout" easily as an assignment. More often than not the work distribution is that you choose how it should work, I choose how it should look. At the very least they are going to have suggestions based simply on aesthetics.
My impression is that HCI designers are not so much concerned about superficial appearance, but mostly about workflows. Like say "You are a photographer with a camera full of pictures. What should your workflow be until you have a wedding album ready?" It's not so much about the graphics, more that the relevant functions, dialogs and workspaces are there at the right time in the right context. You interface both with the developer that makes sure all the functions are there and the graphics designer on how it all looks, but I wouldn't be surprised if the looks were still left to the graphics designer.
Why do they do so especially when they are aware of the driver issues that their member base constantly faces? Most GUI projects only want to look "cool" and seem new, not actually provide a usable product.
Well, I think it's easier to keep a unified front when things aren't working at all. You want X and I want Y but if we don't all pull in the same direction now it won't be usable to do neither X nor Y. Now that we're finally there where you can do X and Y, we get people on power trips that want to decide that everyone should use Y because Y is better. What these people seem to fail to understand is that if I should let myself be dictated by someone else, why not Redmond or Cupertino? They don't always listen to their users either, but voting with your wallet helps.
And I think that goes for the rest too, many aren't that interested in fixing other people's problems anymore. I am currently trying to clean up a library I wrote for an OSS release, and as I'm writing documentation and test cases as well as completing the functionality I didn't need and so didn't bother with and it turns out to be a lot more work than I thought. It worked for me in exactly the way I needed it to work, it'd be very easy to declare it doen and say WORKS4ME, any problems are your own. Same for them I guess, they work on their thing and your crappy drivers aren't their problem.
If you should chance into an entirely new field, or, more likely, a fusion of two previously disparate fields, it is not necessary for you to have the sum of all knowledge of everything that has ever been known before in the related areas for you to contribute entirely new things to the world. It might help, more often, it seems like a waste of effort.
Of course not, it's not like you have to know all physics to improve one sub-branch of physics either. On the positive side if there's n fields there n*(n-1) combination of fields so there's less chance someone has picked all the hanging low fruit, on the other hand you now have to understand two fields in some depth. Still, with an ever expanding body of knowledge it becomes more and more probable that's been done before too. Sure there's biology and chemistry but biochemistry has been an established crossover for a very long time. Same with geology and physics leading to geophysics, psychology and sociology leading to group dynamics and so on. Computers and X is fairly new because computers are "new", but say physics and computers leading to robotics is starting to have a pretty big bulk of its own.
You can also see it on the tech requirements just to have a job. Not longer than 50-100 years ago plenty people were farm hands, people who'd do simple manual labor. Today you need a few trained operators of high-tech tractors, I think pretty much the last hold-out is taxi drivers that mostly just take directions from a GPS. If we finally get automated cars, I think many of them will have problems finding other work. We are already applying science everywhere creating practical tools, not just the pure branches of science. That trend will go on I think, the requirements just to use are going way up and the requirements to improve upon it going even further.
That said, if you're just looking for money I'm sure there'll be opportunities to be another Mark Zuckerberg, just like before that people were saying Bill Gates was there at the right time and nobody could go from garage man to multi-billionaire today. But if you're going to become another Einstein, well I don't really see it. Maybe if you have new data like for example from exoplanets, because then you have the chance to find things nobody had the chance to find before. But I don't think you'll just randomly run into something big in your average college lab anymore, it's mostly big dedicated teams on specialized equipment. Even research itself is specializing.
For many people's desktop requirements, the fact that Apple refuses to make a sucky-but-wildly-inexpensive tower isn't actually a huge deal. The server market is a whole lot less forgiving of deviations from reasonable form factors and common redundancy and management features...
Actually for people's desktop requirements I think they are, but most people now use laptops and the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are pretty much "normal". With Thunderbird I guess I could get what I want with an iMac + external RAID, but it sure is pricey. Plus updating my graphics card isn't that easy anymore. In short their desktop lineup sucks almost as bad as the server lineup, but we're also no longer a very important market segment.
How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this
I think you're the arrogant one thinking everything they did was to be some kind of accurate historical record. Lots of modern day humans draw mythological or other fictional creatures too, maybe someone told a tall tale and a shaman decided to paint it on a cave wall. It would be foolish to take it all as fact.
When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.
What's funny to me is that we've bred wolves to dogs, yet deny that humans can be bred. It might not be a society that we want, but it's no myth that through directed reproduction we could change humanity. And that perhaps there are genetic variations on the inside too, clearly you can see them in size and appearance so why not in intelligence, disposition and so on? Surely nobody denies it in dogs, yet humans are all exactly the same except for individual variations? Sane with gender, you can have gender equality but don't tell me men and women are the same. Despite all the attempts to rewrite reality it turns out men and women make different choices and want different things and it's systematic. It's just gotten very politically incorrect to say anything but that we're all perfectly identical and there's absolutely no linking any trait to any particular ethnic group.
... but the government needs to overhaul the system of taxation to a simple system without loopholes, and stop trying to figure out a way to tax everything we do. Once upon a time we didn't even need income taxes; times change, but having the government intrude on every aspect of our lives so that they can tax every little thing is not the way to go.
Unfortunately, the government isn't the only problem here. Here in Norway we have an oil fund yet at the same time lots of toll roads and toll circles around cities. We're taking up debt so loaning and saving at the same time, while adding a bunch of overhead to boot and really the result is often unjust all the same. We'd do a lot better just adding to the petrol tax and saying that yes we're maintaining a road network, some of you get a new road and others don't but it even outs over time. Instead we have to try millimeter-measuring out costs with tolls. But you'd also get a shitstorm of people feeling this is unfair. People are very much there that "I don't want to pay for that road, let those that use it do" and then you have to keep track of who's using it and who's not. Now it's just electronic pass keys and photo identification, no anonymous cash payments. Somewhere there's a record of every car passing every toll point, which supposedly gets deleted but it certainly is collected.
The SSU (Swedish Social Democratic Youth League) are still allowed to attend the event, and they support the decriminalization of non-commercial file sharing, so I don't buy the political exclusion claim.
This is the reason it's a story IMO. If they don't want political organizations there, that's fine. Allowing some political groups and not others is not so kosher. Of course it's a private event so they decide, but it makes it newsworthy.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, the only thing observable in the world is correlation. Causation exists only in models and that model could be supported by observed correlation.
Uh, no. If I punch you in the nose and you start to nosebleed, nobody's going to question the causality of that. Sometimes it's hard to say because X leads to Y and Y leads to X or because there's some underlying factor Z leading to both X and Y, but there's usually some way to separate the effects. That said network effects are often very vital in understanding why an inferior solution is picked, a small edge in starting conditions can send the marketing spinning in another direction.
And individually watermarked and tamper-proofed, if it did happen they'll know exactly when and where. I've never heard of anyone actually getting a raw 4k rip from these things, if they did I'm sure it'd come to halt very soon. Besides, almost nobody can watch it - I guess the people with 30" displays could get 1440p but 4k televisions and projectors practically don't exist. With the price of 4k equipment you might as well license yourself as a cinema too, won't be that much more expensive. Size would be an issue too, I think for the last of the LotR movies it was 900GB, not sure about that. They're going out practically uncompressed, no artifacting there.
Reality is that the top 100 "users" - or rather feeds represent 75% of the posted content, you just have to check new users and if you want you can block them. All the MPAA got is a gigantic game of whack-a-mole trying to delete files at random as they show up in search results, the problem isn't even remotely comparable.
But they issued takedown orders based on title keywords that they don't own. You should be at least willing to put up a list of what you claim to own so that minimal verification at least can be done before obeying a takedown order.
But that is already part of a DMCA notice. Like for example:
The movie studio admits this and confirms that while searching for âThe Box (2009)â(TM) many unrelated titles were removed. âoeWarner admits that its records indicate that URLs containing the phrases âThe Box That Changed Britainâ(TM) and âCancer Step Outsider of the Boxâ(TM) were requested for takedown through use of the SRA tool.â
This would come through as a DMCA notice saying we own the copyright to the movie "The Box". We believe the file called "The Box That Changed Britain" is an unauthorized copy of "The Box". Everything you ask for is already available but nobody actually has the time to manually do the verification you ask and a database would do absolutely nothing to change that.
Media companies engaging in such scattershot tactics should therefore be required to host a database listing every copyright they own. That way if they send a takedown notice for video X to YouTube, someone at YouTube can check the video, check the database, and say "yep, that shouldn't be here" or "nope, this request must have been sent in error."
So if the database lists a movie title, YouTube is supposed to know every scene in every movie and know if the content is infringing? Or did you mean to say they have to put up a movie server so YouTube can compare clip against clip? And how exactly would it limit their scattershot practice if YouTube gets all the hard work validating or dismissing everything? The part about "we own this copyright" is right there in the DMCA notice, under penalty of perjury even. The question is if the copyright they have apply to the clip they're trying to take down or not and there's no easy compare function between List<Copyright> and List<VideoClip>. Even if they put up an "original" there's a million kind of settings and clips and compilations and whatnot that don't qualify as fair use, you try to write that fuzzy matching. Quite frankly I'm not sure what you're trying to suggest, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't make any sense.
This has been one of their major bullet points, the next round of processors will improve power consumption a lot. So if Intel's not on the right path, I don't know who is. AMD Bulldozer certainly is not. Of course sooner or later this is going to come to a halt, silicon atoms are roughly 0.235nm apart. So 22/0.235 = 93.6 atoms. The roadmap puts us at 8nm = 34 atoms in 6 years. Just extrapolating in 2023 that it'll be 12 atoms, 2029 4.5 atoms and 2035 1.6 atoms. That's not going to happen, at latest in the 2020s we will hit a brick wall and Moore's "law" will be dead. We'll hit some level of energy efficiency and most likely stay there.
That piracy has killed almost all value in the music industry? No, wait probably not it but there's no inherent disconnect here. The market price is based on the current and future cash flow from that music, if the market thinks that few pay now and less in the future and those who do pay will pay less then the market price will go down. What people "ought to" have paid won't go into the market price unless they think they can actually make people pay it in the future.
Long background, short summary: Been fiddling with Linux since 1999-2000, switched to Linux as primary desktop in 2007 and returned to Windows in April last year.
Primary reasons:
1. Applications. Games. The Linux knock-offs - and yes, that's what they mostly are - aren't nearly as good and WINE, Virtualbox is more tedious than just running them under Windows. Too many people with a reality distortion field stronger than Steve Jobs, but of the one man variety.
2. A lot of the open source applications that are actually worth having also exist for Windows, so I didn't actually lose anything much going back. It's more going back to a best of breed-solution than abandoning all open source, as long as I got rid of the sore points.
3. Less hardware/driver/version/plugin/upgrade issues. I sort of hoped the snowball would start rolling but it never really did. When I switched to Linux it was to get away from Vista, but in the years I was on Linux they went from Vista SP0 to Win7 SP1 while my Linux desktop still had glitches.
4. A change of attitude, a bigger interest in just paying my way out of problems. I still think it's fun to tinker with computers but not that kind of tinkering. Now I'm writing more code, not fixing broken systems or tweaking WINE settings.
5. Less ideology. I'm tired of being told I should just accept that it sucks because of $reason. That's an explanation, but it doesn't really change the situation. There's only so long you bother fighting the windmills, particularly when you realize they're not coming down.
If Microsoft pulls another Vista then I wouldn't mind trying again when Win7 is approaching EOL, I'm not in the "never again" category. But I'm on a platform now that works really well, simple as that. I've got no plans to upgrade to Metro or to a Mac or back to Linux any time soon. Testing, switching and getting used to everything has its costs and they're just not worth doing too often.
Yeah, the summary is wildly optimistic. I suspect the opt-in will be more like a one way nag-in with update buttons, pop-ups and incompatibilities so to socialize with someone that has upgraded you must too. Still it's better than the "Accept the new policy or we'll remove your pages" policy they used to have, my Facebook profile is more barren now than when I first registered as a result.
If the author/copyright holder says the headers are not a copyright violation, then regardless of the license that would seem to indicate permission.
Yes, but one copyright holder can't give his permission to use the project in a non-GPL compliant way, because it would still violate the license on the rest of the code. If Linus owned the copyright on all the code in the kernel it'd be a different matter but he has 1-2% of it. Even if the header is his, he can't give permission to let people use the other 98-99% as they want because it forms a whole work. You're not just using his interface, you are using all the code behind it.
This has been covered many times, perhaps the most common is if you can write a shim layer like this:
Proprietary code <-> BSD shim <-> GPL project.
The proprietary code complies with the BSD license, the BSD license complies with the GPL license, is this then kosher? No. The same goes with:
Any non-GPL activity <-> header Linus gave special permission to <-> GPL project.
The GPL mutually binds everybody, they'd all have to agree to make any form of exception (or as has been discussed, re-licensing to GPLv3 if Linus even wanted to). I guess the closest you can come is some form of promissory estoppel, in that you could have good faith reason to believe you had permission. OTOH it's not certain a court will accept that because the person suing presumably made no such promises, it may depend on whether Linus gave the impression of speaking for everyone rather than issuing a personal opinion and so on. Nor may all jurisdictions have similar principles.
In short, it's not Linus that defines what a derivative work is, it's the law. And under the GPL all derivative works are covered. Are these headers a derived work? I'd lean towards no. But if they are, I don't think anyone has the authority to free them from their obligations under the GPL. At best they'll avoid paying any damages due to estoppel, but they still would have to stop using them. Or comply with the GPL, whichever is easier.
A genius enjoys making something that looks hard easy to understand - that takes insight, even a "stroke of genius". I think what you encountered wasn't genius, but BROs (Bipedal Rectal Orifices a.k.a. walking ass-holes
Yes, but not just to dumb it down so you can have the illusion of understanding while you actually understand less than 10% of what's really going on. Sometimes the problem is really complex and just because a genius is able to work with that complexity doesn't mean it goes away. But I guess it's a really cheap shot of anti-intellectualism to put all the fault on person trying to explain it and that any failure on your part to understand is due to him not being smart enough to explain it. I just wasn't aware it was a popular opinion here on slashdot.
but the helpdesk manager im told was a complete asshole. he alientated the seasoned pro's by treating them like kids and before we knew it, they had all quit.
There's a few of those in the military, I remember some friends of mine talking about a colonel. They were to gather firewood and he was to instruct them in it and he was talking to them as if they were eight year olds on a camping trip. They being fairly fresh recruits and the military being tough on discipline and frowning at talking back at your superiors they let it pass, but they'd never do that in civilian life from their boss. Fortunately most such people have the good sense to stay in the military.
So what would be so revolutionary about that? If someone makes a photobook with 100 licensed photographs but doesn't care one bit about stopping copyright infringement, then of course the owners of each photograph can go after them instead. It's only legally risky if you violate the license, and between having one mega-corporation with lawyers and a real "lost income" claim as opposed to thousands of mostly harmless OSS pundits, I'd take the FSF over Microsoft, Apple or Oracle on my ass any day.
Because the above choices are more realistic than expecting the human race to put short-term greed aside to save the planet.
I would say especially now. Five years ago you could have had people listen, but right now if there's a choice between jobs and the environment then the US and almost all of Europe would say give me jobs, screw the environment. I'm actually surprised that there hasn't been more civil unrest than there has, given countries with 20% unemployment. If it had been 30 years ago I'd not be surprised if we'd seen several socialist revolutions already, on the simple reason that it can't be any worse.
I disagree with the earlier poster who said it was difficult to delete data once it was cached. That is not true. A data "cache" by its very nature is transitory; once the cache is routinely updated, "cached" data that has been deleted goes away.
That is one way of using cache, but not the only way. For example you could have an image cache that works on a LRU principle, give a hash get a picture in return. There's no "routinely updated", just that what hasn't been used in a long time falls off the cache. If a user deletes a picture - or what is really the reference to a picture, how long until you can be absolutely sure it's fallen off every cache and you've complied with the deletion request? Answer: You can't. You have to explicitly send all commands to every cache that if you have this picture, drop it. And that doesn't account for any and all backups you might have with it, that isn't cache but can also be very complicated.
Of course, if you delete the reference then in theory people can't reach it, but if the server is compromised then an attacker could get access to all of them, even "unlinked" pictures. Maybe it's obvious from the content, maybe you can find some logs showing what account it used to belong to, whatever. In any case you can't really say with certainty that the data really is gone until the picture itself has been deleted (or possibly wiped). And that can be a non-trivial thing to do on a huge infrastructure.
Even in a poor economy, there are companies doing well and presumably those who are hiring are. If you're hired then shortly after fired someone will have to explain why they spent all that money on recruitment and training just to show you the door. It's not certain that your current job is any more safe. As for getting a job, well you are always more attractive already having a job than not. You may consider that silly, but remember that while a lot of good people are out of work, the companies also took the opportunity to get rid of many poor workers. A lot of desperate people will exaggerate their skills more than usual. That you're still on staff is an indicator that you're the kind of guy they keep. Of course there's wage pressure going on, they are now looking to hire on the cheap. On the other hand many bosses still believe in "you get what you pay for" so if you're willing to work for minimum wage they assume your skills must be very bad when you are willing to work for so little. Or perhaps "If you pay peanuts, you get monkies" is a less polite way of saying it. Just make a reasonable demand, and if you get passed up you already have a job so forget it and move on to the next one. You'd be surprised how employers react to prospective employees turning them down, of course some go full retard on some realize you're actually an attractive worker they have to chase, even in this economy.
Even good companies with good bosses - and yes they're still around - make poor hires. If everybody just gets up quietly and leaves, it's very easy to be a bad boss. At least take their measure and see if you think the boss of the boss seems approachable. Don't expect him to listen if you just come across as whiny and your boss drivers you too hard, you have to make the case that your boss is really a bad boss that is ruining the productivity and motivation of the people working there and causing turnover. Even to a sociopath it's possible to argue that his sociopath underling is hurting him more than helping him. Though a plan B of alternative work wouldn't be a bad idea...
If someone takes a shot at you, how likely is it that you'll be able to hold on to that clipboard in a position where it actually protects something? Better than just dropping the clipboard and running/diving for the nearest cover, exit or whatnot. The only way I can see you manage to keep this in a reasonable position is if you're standing still, in which case you'll look like Adam with the fig leaf because it's hardly a riot shield. What's next, a bullet proof donut box?
To put it this way, I still haven't run into a graphics designer that took "Here's all the items laid out exactly how they should be, you get to pick colors and icon designs but you can't change the layout" easily as an assignment. More often than not the work distribution is that you choose how it should work, I choose how it should look. At the very least they are going to have suggestions based simply on aesthetics.
My impression is that HCI designers are not so much concerned about superficial appearance, but mostly about workflows. Like say "You are a photographer with a camera full of pictures. What should your workflow be until you have a wedding album ready?" It's not so much about the graphics, more that the relevant functions, dialogs and workspaces are there at the right time in the right context. You interface both with the developer that makes sure all the functions are there and the graphics designer on how it all looks, but I wouldn't be surprised if the looks were still left to the graphics designer.
Why do they do so especially when they are aware of the driver issues that their member base constantly faces? Most GUI projects only want to look "cool" and seem new, not actually provide a usable product.
Well, I think it's easier to keep a unified front when things aren't working at all. You want X and I want Y but if we don't all pull in the same direction now it won't be usable to do neither X nor Y. Now that we're finally there where you can do X and Y, we get people on power trips that want to decide that everyone should use Y because Y is better. What these people seem to fail to understand is that if I should let myself be dictated by someone else, why not Redmond or Cupertino? They don't always listen to their users either, but voting with your wallet helps.
And I think that goes for the rest too, many aren't that interested in fixing other people's problems anymore. I am currently trying to clean up a library I wrote for an OSS release, and as I'm writing documentation and test cases as well as completing the functionality I didn't need and so didn't bother with and it turns out to be a lot more work than I thought. It worked for me in exactly the way I needed it to work, it'd be very easy to declare it doen and say WORKS4ME, any problems are your own. Same for them I guess, they work on their thing and your crappy drivers aren't their problem.
If you should chance into an entirely new field, or, more likely, a fusion of two previously disparate fields, it is not necessary for you to have the sum of all knowledge of everything that has ever been known before in the related areas for you to contribute entirely new things to the world. It might help, more often, it seems like a waste of effort.
Of course not, it's not like you have to know all physics to improve one sub-branch of physics either. On the positive side if there's n fields there n*(n-1) combination of fields so there's less chance someone has picked all the hanging low fruit, on the other hand you now have to understand two fields in some depth. Still, with an ever expanding body of knowledge it becomes more and more probable that's been done before too. Sure there's biology and chemistry but biochemistry has been an established crossover for a very long time. Same with geology and physics leading to geophysics, psychology and sociology leading to group dynamics and so on. Computers and X is fairly new because computers are "new", but say physics and computers leading to robotics is starting to have a pretty big bulk of its own.
You can also see it on the tech requirements just to have a job. Not longer than 50-100 years ago plenty people were farm hands, people who'd do simple manual labor. Today you need a few trained operators of high-tech tractors, I think pretty much the last hold-out is taxi drivers that mostly just take directions from a GPS. If we finally get automated cars, I think many of them will have problems finding other work. We are already applying science everywhere creating practical tools, not just the pure branches of science. That trend will go on I think, the requirements just to use are going way up and the requirements to improve upon it going even further.
That said, if you're just looking for money I'm sure there'll be opportunities to be another Mark Zuckerberg, just like before that people were saying Bill Gates was there at the right time and nobody could go from garage man to multi-billionaire today. But if you're going to become another Einstein, well I don't really see it. Maybe if you have new data like for example from exoplanets, because then you have the chance to find things nobody had the chance to find before. But I don't think you'll just randomly run into something big in your average college lab anymore, it's mostly big dedicated teams on specialized equipment. Even research itself is specializing.
For many people's desktop requirements, the fact that Apple refuses to make a sucky-but-wildly-inexpensive tower isn't actually a huge deal. The server market is a whole lot less forgiving of deviations from reasonable form factors and common redundancy and management features...
Actually for people's desktop requirements I think they are, but most people now use laptops and the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are pretty much "normal". With Thunderbird I guess I could get what I want with an iMac + external RAID, but it sure is pricey. Plus updating my graphics card isn't that easy anymore. In short their desktop lineup sucks almost as bad as the server lineup, but we're also no longer a very important market segment.
How fucking arrogant do you have to be to believe that they were just making up something like this
I think you're the arrogant one thinking everything they did was to be some kind of accurate historical record. Lots of modern day humans draw mythological or other fictional creatures too, maybe someone told a tall tale and a shaman decided to paint it on a cave wall. It would be foolish to take it all as fact.
When you look at what many of the "scientifically-minded" believed in the 19th and early 20th century like phrenology, eugenics, "the noble savage" and a host of other things it is downright shocking that any remotely history-literate person can be so arrogant.
What's funny to me is that we've bred wolves to dogs, yet deny that humans can be bred. It might not be a society that we want, but it's no myth that through directed reproduction we could change humanity. And that perhaps there are genetic variations on the inside too, clearly you can see them in size and appearance so why not in intelligence, disposition and so on? Surely nobody denies it in dogs, yet humans are all exactly the same except for individual variations? Sane with gender, you can have gender equality but don't tell me men and women are the same. Despite all the attempts to rewrite reality it turns out men and women make different choices and want different things and it's systematic. It's just gotten very politically incorrect to say anything but that we're all perfectly identical and there's absolutely no linking any trait to any particular ethnic group.
... but the government needs to overhaul the system of taxation to a simple system without loopholes, and stop trying to figure out a way to tax everything we do. Once upon a time we didn't even need income taxes; times change, but having the government intrude on every aspect of our lives so that they can tax every little thing is not the way to go.
Unfortunately, the government isn't the only problem here. Here in Norway we have an oil fund yet at the same time lots of toll roads and toll circles around cities. We're taking up debt so loaning and saving at the same time, while adding a bunch of overhead to boot and really the result is often unjust all the same. We'd do a lot better just adding to the petrol tax and saying that yes we're maintaining a road network, some of you get a new road and others don't but it even outs over time. Instead we have to try millimeter-measuring out costs with tolls. But you'd also get a shitstorm of people feeling this is unfair. People are very much there that "I don't want to pay for that road, let those that use it do" and then you have to keep track of who's using it and who's not. Now it's just electronic pass keys and photo identification, no anonymous cash payments. Somewhere there's a record of every car passing every toll point, which supposedly gets deleted but it certainly is collected.
The SSU (Swedish Social Democratic Youth League) are still allowed to attend the event, and they support the decriminalization of non-commercial file sharing, so I don't buy the political exclusion claim.
This is the reason it's a story IMO. If they don't want political organizations there, that's fine. Allowing some political groups and not others is not so kosher. Of course it's a private event so they decide, but it makes it newsworthy.