Without copyright, there wouldn't be a commercial software, movie or music industry.
Actually, there would be commercial software, movie and music industry. The only thing that would be missing from the industry are huge useless corporations which rip off both authors and customers.
Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a CS grad and I've majored from Discrete Models and Algorithms. I've had tons of classes on complexity, computability, probability, graph theory, matroid theory, algebra, mathematical analysis, combinatorial geometry and lots of other theoretical stuff. But still I've had UNIX Basics class as a freshman and I still believe that the class should be mandatory for CS freshmen. And again, UNIX shells along with standard tools are full-fledged programming languages and any UNIX class for CS freshmen should take the students way beyond mere user-level proficiency.
Introduction to Programming under UNIX at my university is all about C and POSIX system calls. UNIX shells with standard tools are full fledged programming languages and they're taught to be used as such in UNIX Basics class, which is a mandatory CS freshman subject at my university. I really doubt that the OP's class would be any different. Otherwise it'd be pointless.
Bucause then it'd take the entire department to teach one freshman subject. We're not talking about teaching lectures here. That's what the OP's professor does. The OP is teaching a lab. That means he is supposed to make 20 or so freshmen try what they heard about in the lecture for themselves on a real system. Anyone who has passed that subject in the past should be qualified to do that.
And how exactly is that supposed to give them programmer level proficiency in CLI and basic understanding of system structure, which is probably the sole point of the class?
I'd advice that anyone who would send their kid to a college where a sophomore isn't qualified to teach a lab to freshmen to pull their kid from that school.
I'm afraid that you've failed to grasp the fact that UNIX has been the industry standard for over 30 years now and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. My personal guess is that at least half of them (the half that's not going to become desktop coders) is going to work on some UNIX in the near future and at least 90% of them are completely clueless about CLI at the moment.
UNIX 101 class is not about using computers.
After you cover the basics, you should give them simple tasks which can be easily automated in shell but can take hours of clicking in GUI due to sheer amounts of data to process. These tasks can vary from sorting files from one big directory to several subdirectiories according to filename or contents to generating useful stats from a huge log file. And don't forget to make them both read and search man pages as much as possible.
Yeah, right. That's why each year, the professor who teaches UNIX Basics at our university repeats the story of the guy who thought he knew how to use Linux because he used it at home but then failed horribly at the exam and complained that the class sucks in class feedback poll.
Because plots are copyrightable, the actual functionality of code is not.
Both the text and plot of a book can be copyrighted.
Only the actual text of a program can be copyrighted(along with it's machine code version of course).
Which is rather curious, given that copyright law treats computer programs as literary works. What's so different between plot and functionality?
The facts are, Google gets copyrighted content uploaded.
I really hate when people say "copyrighted content" when they really mean "copyright infringing content". Do you understand the difference? Do you understand the fact that your own content on YouTube is also copyrighted, by you? Do you understand the fact that anyone is free to upload copyrighted content anywhere as long is they either own it, or they have proper license to do so, or the act of uploading it falls under some fair use provision of copyright law?
When you say "copyrighted content" and mean "copyright infringing content", you make it sound as if only the entertainment industry was eligible to own copyright. Maybe you haven't noticed yet, but the United States have acceded to the Berne Convention 21 years and 9 months ago as of today. That means that any content which can be copyrighted already is copyrighted at the moment it's created.
A better solution, of course, would be if the studios could find some way of approaching it where everyone wins. Like letting "Youtube quality" clips of TV shows and/or movies be uploaded and charging a nominal fee for HD. In fact I do believe Google is already working to make something like that possible.
That's not going to happen because the entertainment industry has no incentive to do so. There is no other competition except pirates that would push the entertainment industry to improve the quality of its services due to ridiculously high level of copying monopoly protection. And the entertainment industry doesn't seem to be the least interested in taking the pirates on in terms of service quality.
If you don't have decent typing speed, you have to make a mental context switch between thinking about the code and typing it in. The longer the context switch lasts, the more it breaks your train of thought. Once you get decent typing speed, you don't do any context switching anymore, you can think and type simultaneously.
Also, you don't type in just one idea a day. If your typing context switch lasts long enough to break your train of thought, you often have to refocus from scratch on any followup ideas. That's both a waste of time and possible source of bugs.
The comparison is not braindead because you're arguing by the wrong direction of causation. Low typing speed simply screams "beginner". Good programmer with enough experience will have decent typing speed (unless there's some physical impairment involved) simply because he's spent several years typing code.
Stretching the algorithm over code as long as War and Peace isn't preferable either. You're going to forget a lot of important context when reading meaningless junk. The code has to be as short as possible to make ideas obvious but not any shorter.
If some system relies on single (or a limited number of) provider(s), you can't really call it distributed. No matter how much of the system's costs is off-loaded to the end-user, there're still only a few key points which can bring the entire network down. Don't mistake cost off-loading systems (Skype) for truly distributed and therefore robust ones (SIP, XMPP).
The point is that Sun didn't "open source too much" as McNealy says. They screwed everything up by thinking that just throwing the code in the wild once in a while is good enough. It's not, that's why Novell forked OO.o and other open source projects from Sun did as they did.
If you really believe that a living evolving organism cannot become immune to some particular substance over billions of generations, you should remember that very early in our own evolution, long before the first cyanobacteria gained the ability to do photosynthesis, oxygen was highly toxic to all of our ancestors from that period.
The most famous puzzle in Czech republic and Slovakia (in fact, even more famous than Rubik's cube) is the Hedgehog in a cage. It was made famous by a comic series and books written by Jaroslav Foglar. If you could get one, it'd make pretty unique gift outside of Czech republic and Slovakia (preferably together with the book trilogy Mystery of the Conundrum, The Shades Are Revolting and Secret of the High Vont). But I guess it won't be easy to get.
The idea is perfectly viable and I think it's the inevitable future of such services. The implementation is still lacking though and even after the implementation improves significantly, it'll take a lot of time due to snowball effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Alpaca socks? This calls for a UserFriendly comic strip featuring BitCoin and Stef!
Without copyright, there wouldn't be a commercial software, movie or music industry.
Actually, there would be commercial software, movie and music industry. The only thing that would be missing from the industry are huge useless corporations which rip off both authors and customers.
Since when does MPAA and its members produce Internet porn?
Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a CS grad and I've majored from Discrete Models and Algorithms. I've had tons of classes on complexity, computability, probability, graph theory, matroid theory, algebra, mathematical analysis, combinatorial geometry and lots of other theoretical stuff. But still I've had UNIX Basics class as a freshman and I still believe that the class should be mandatory for CS freshmen. And again, UNIX shells along with standard tools are full-fledged programming languages and any UNIX class for CS freshmen should take the students way beyond mere user-level proficiency.
Introduction to Programming under UNIX at my university is all about C and POSIX system calls. UNIX shells with standard tools are full fledged programming languages and they're taught to be used as such in UNIX Basics class, which is a mandatory CS freshman subject at my university. I really doubt that the OP's class would be any different. Otherwise it'd be pointless.
Bucause then it'd take the entire department to teach one freshman subject. We're not talking about teaching lectures here. That's what the OP's professor does. The OP is teaching a lab. That means he is supposed to make 20 or so freshmen try what they heard about in the lecture for themselves on a real system. Anyone who has passed that subject in the past should be qualified to do that.
And how exactly is that supposed to give them programmer level proficiency in CLI and basic understanding of system structure, which is probably the sole point of the class?
I'd advice that anyone who would send their kid to a college where a sophomore isn't qualified to teach a lab to freshmen to pull their kid from that school.
I'm afraid that you've failed to grasp the fact that UNIX has been the industry standard for over 30 years now and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. My personal guess is that at least half of them (the half that's not going to become desktop coders) is going to work on some UNIX in the near future and at least 90% of them are completely clueless about CLI at the moment. UNIX 101 class is not about using computers.
Which is why Eric S. Raymond wrote his famous How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
After you cover the basics, you should give them simple tasks which can be easily automated in shell but can take hours of clicking in GUI due to sheer amounts of data to process. These tasks can vary from sorting files from one big directory to several subdirectiories according to filename or contents to generating useful stats from a huge log file. And don't forget to make them both read and search man pages as much as possible.
Yeah, right. That's why each year, the professor who teaches UNIX Basics at our university repeats the story of the guy who thought he knew how to use Linux because he used it at home but then failed horribly at the exam and complained that the class sucks in class feedback poll.
Because plots are copyrightable, the actual functionality of code is not. Both the text and plot of a book can be copyrighted. Only the actual text of a program can be copyrighted(along with it's machine code version of course).
Which is rather curious, given that copyright law treats computer programs as literary works. What's so different between plot and functionality?
The facts are, Google gets copyrighted content uploaded.
I really hate when people say "copyrighted content" when they really mean "copyright infringing content". Do you understand the difference? Do you understand the fact that your own content on YouTube is also copyrighted, by you? Do you understand the fact that anyone is free to upload copyrighted content anywhere as long is they either own it, or they have proper license to do so, or the act of uploading it falls under some fair use provision of copyright law?
When you say "copyrighted content" and mean "copyright infringing content", you make it sound as if only the entertainment industry was eligible to own copyright. Maybe you haven't noticed yet, but the United States have acceded to the Berne Convention 21 years and 9 months ago as of today. That means that any content which can be copyrighted already is copyrighted at the moment it's created.
A better solution, of course, would be if the studios could find some way of approaching it where everyone wins. Like letting "Youtube quality" clips of TV shows and/or movies be uploaded and charging a nominal fee for HD. In fact I do believe Google is already working to make something like that possible.
That's not going to happen because the entertainment industry has no incentive to do so. There is no other competition except pirates that would push the entertainment industry to improve the quality of its services due to ridiculously high level of copying monopoly protection. And the entertainment industry doesn't seem to be the least interested in taking the pirates on in terms of service quality.
Copyrighted material on youtube is an issue that needs a resolution.
And that resolution should be fundamental overhaul of the Berne convention and national copyright laws.
If you don't have decent typing speed, you have to make a mental context switch between thinking about the code and typing it in. The longer the context switch lasts, the more it breaks your train of thought. Once you get decent typing speed, you don't do any context switching anymore, you can think and type simultaneously. Also, you don't type in just one idea a day. If your typing context switch lasts long enough to break your train of thought, you often have to refocus from scratch on any followup ideas. That's both a waste of time and possible source of bugs.
The most important thing in programming is not to lose your train of thought. Decent typing speed helps a lot.
The comparison is not braindead because you're arguing by the wrong direction of causation. Low typing speed simply screams "beginner". Good programmer with enough experience will have decent typing speed (unless there's some physical impairment involved) simply because he's spent several years typing code.
Stretching the algorithm over code as long as War and Peace isn't preferable either. You're going to forget a lot of important context when reading meaningless junk. The code has to be as short as possible to make ideas obvious but not any shorter.
If some system relies on single (or a limited number of) provider(s), you can't really call it distributed. No matter how much of the system's costs is off-loaded to the end-user, there're still only a few key points which can bring the entire network down. Don't mistake cost off-loading systems (Skype) for truly distributed and therefore robust ones (SIP, XMPP).
The point is that Sun didn't "open source too much" as McNealy says. They screwed everything up by thinking that just throwing the code in the wild once in a while is good enough. It's not, that's why Novell forked OO.o and other open source projects from Sun did as they did.
If you really believe that a living evolving organism cannot become immune to some particular substance over billions of generations, you should remember that very early in our own evolution, long before the first cyanobacteria gained the ability to do photosynthesis, oxygen was highly toxic to all of our ancestors from that period.
The most famous puzzle in Czech republic and Slovakia (in fact, even more famous than Rubik's cube) is the Hedgehog in a cage. It was made famous by a comic series and books written by Jaroslav Foglar. If you could get one, it'd make pretty unique gift outside of Czech republic and Slovakia (preferably together with the book trilogy Mystery of the Conundrum, The Shades Are Revolting and Secret of the High Vont). But I guess it won't be easy to get.
The idea is perfectly viable and I think it's the inevitable future of such services. The implementation is still lacking though and even after the implementation improves significantly, it'll take a lot of time due to snowball effect.
Because that's the inevitable future of all network services affected by the snowball effect.