Yes. I retract that one statement. I thought I had done that already. I don't know how I got it in my head that the law was focused on distribution as a key element in infringement. The very first things it lists is making copies as part of list. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Do you have some evidence to support the idea that taping TV shows is not necessarily fair use? On what would it depend? I thought time-shifting (via format-shifting-- since obviously you are taking a broadcast signal and converting it to an anolog recording, or now a digital recording with Tivo) was an established fair use. Does it make any sense at all to you that we would be allowed to audiotape our LPs, but not transcode DVDs for PDA or laptop use? Does it make sense that I can tape a movie off TV and watch is many times as I want, but I can't take the movie from a DVD and put it on my portable to watch on the bus, train, or airplane?
Bill Joy probably made those statements because he isn't familiar with Linux.
Well, except that grandparent post misquoted Bill Joy, I think. The Wired article quote is: "Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux."
I don't see anything there as any ringing endorsement of GUI over CLI. The fact that Mac OS X has a terminal just makes it a whole system, in my view. Just like I wouldn't run GNOME without having a terminal window open, neither would I want to be confined to just a BASH shell.
If I can tape my records, or record from TV broadcasts, certainly PDA-izing my DVDs is an allowed Fair Use as well. In any case, how will they know I'm doing this unless they violate my 4th Amendment rights? The only real way to prevent it is what they have done: gone after the tools.
I stand corrected. Not that I think undo is a bad idea or anything. I could see it being very cool to have some sort of undo command in BASH that would track the effects of the commands in.bash_history and allow for the same kinds of "oops" recoveries. I'd also be happy to see rm move files to a "recycle bin" where they would sit until you ran a `cleanrb` command or ran out of space or they had been in the bin for x amount of time.
The problem isn't people doing it for themselves. Without violating the 4th amendment it would be impossible to know who was ripping DVDs and who wasn't. Besides, copyright law allows you to make all the copies you want in the privacy of your own home (some lawyer can correct me, but that's my reading of Title 17).
The problem is making and selling tools that allow people to do this. These tools may violate the DMCA and stuff. Look at the mess surrounding DeCSS. Here we have the maker of the tool being acquitted in Norway, but aren't the U.S. lawsuits against groups like 2600 still ongoing?
And as for criminal vs. civil, who cares? Your life will probably be easier if it's a criminal offense. Civil trials have a lower standard of proof and could be very expensive in terms of damage awards. At least if you go to prison you get free room and board for the duration.;)
Side-effects make it not a dialog? You give one example where a GUI might be better, but that's it. And how is that different from dragging a file from one "folder" to another and then having to open up the target folder to see what's in it? If you want to watch mv in action use the -v flag.
Discoverability? You're kidding right? All those menus and submenus. That's not any better than tab completion in my book. And running most CLI commands with the -h or -? or --help flags gets you summarized help on a specific command. Plus, man pages for many commands include helpful "See also" sections.
Undo command? Is there an "undo" command for "Empty trash"? How about an undo command for moving files around? Or renaming? No? I didn't think so. Some applications might have useful undo commands, but the GUI shell does not.
GUI super-what? This whole paragraph doesn't even make sense.
Learning curve? Did you RTFA? He said total newbies felt their learning curve was quite acceptable. CLI version of Photoshop is a total red herring, although I do found it interesting that it is almost as easy (for me) to do 3D modelling by scripting scenes rather than by using a GUI. The point is: no one expects to do graphics-intensive work from a command line. Although it sure is easy to do things like create thumbnails of entire galleries of JPGs and set up a web gallery from a command line. That would take all day to open each picture in Photoshop, crop it, resize it, and resave the thumbnail with a tn_*.jpg naming convention.
Config files don't have embedded help? Almost every config file I've seen uses # to mark comments and uses this to embed notes and likely non-default options.
Pathnames are a waste of time? Even with tab completion? I'd much rather have a tab-complete pathname entry field (think BASH or emacs) than any open/save dialog you can name. The only time I find GUI file browsers valuable is when I'm viewing directories full of images and the files are shown as thumbnails. But I don't think I've really seen this used well outside of GQView and some shareware apps. Most GUI file dialogs are "one at a time" in this respect. Not very helpful.
CLI is faster is you use CLI? So is GUI. Obviously whatever you use the most is what you're going to be good at and when you step away from something for a while you're going to need to readjust.
Bill Joy chose the Mac because it "just works"? Tell that to my friend-- a complete newbie-- who found himself being told by tech support to reinstall his entire Mac OS X system because he couldn't get the modem to work! Then ask him how frustrating it was to get the printer to work. He had no idea which of the wierd little files on the CD that came with his printer he was supposed to use. Bill Joy is a computing genius. His idea of what "just works" hardly applies to the discussion at hand.
I don't know about that. Up until last week, when the bus drivers here went on strike, I found I listened to more of "other people's" music as a result of walkman radios being played too loudly on the bus than all other sources of "external" music combined.
For myself I realized that wearing headphones was not a good idea since the tendency was to drown out external stimuli.
Anyway... was it just me or did this "article" read more like an ad for iPod than anything else?
To be sure, the ability to double-click a document and open it in the proper application has been available since at least 1984 (at least on certain systems). Personally I'd never notice if this was implemented in GNOME because I don't use the Nautilus file browser. What you're describing sounds terrible though. Just more times I have to move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse to do something I've traditionally been able to do with a very few keystrokes.
There's far too much DWIM which is not clearly defined anywhere.
Seems to me that this is more of a problem with the language design than a problem with the documentation-- most operations are somewhat ambiguous when used in odd ways (like trying to add two strings even though the manual clearly states that + wants to add two numbers). Do you really expect the docs to attempt to cover every possible thing that might happen as a result of using the + operator? Personally I'd prefer the language throw an error if + isn't a defined operator for the data types in question, but Perl will happily convert your string to a number (which is amusingly bad, because if the string contains digits, you get a number, if the string contains letters, you get nothing).
By the way, the POD page mentioned 'perlop' clearly states that + is performed left to right. There is a whole section at the very beginning that talks about associativity and precedence.
That's the first time I've seen graduating from Yale and getting an MBA from Harvard called a "lack" of academic achievement. It seems a laughably partisan comment when considered alongside your assertion that a Rhodes scholarship is undeniable evidence of "intelligence".
From 'perldoc perlop': Additive Operators, Binary "+" returns the sum of two numbers. Not to be argumentative, but what else do you need to know? There are a lot of potential subtleties due to the fact that $b and $c could be references to all kinds of things, but do you really expect some sort of essay on the topic when reading all the other documentation around this makes it clear what those subtleties might be?
There are lots of "direct to video" movies out there-- especially popular in the children's market. And it seems common for anime studios to come out with OAVs, direct to video serials. These allow the studio to play with the format a bit (shorter or longer shows and stuff like that) and not have to commit to whole seasons worth of programming. You'd think that sort of thing would be possible with live-action.
Is there a large market for direct-to-DVD? I don't know. I know I'm definitely in it though. I'm already paying a subscription for $10/month to a good USENET feed so I can download binaries of Japanese TV shows (some anime, some not). And I'm also paying the $50/month for cable internet. But this is all legally questionable, and if I could buy the DVDs of the shows I would (as I normally do when anime I want is released in the U.S.) Plus, while I'm not in love with CSS, I love DVDs for what they are: a great format for motion picture delivery. Alternate languages, subtitle tracks, random access, extras, etc, are all great stuff.
But even better would be a merger between what I'm doing now and the DVD format. Just like I find it annoying to buy CDs because I have an MP3 server, soon I won't need my VCR or DVD player either (Freevo/MythTV coming right up). At that point, all I'd like is a legal to buy only programs I want. Think iTunes, but for video files.
Will it actually be illegal for private individuals/companies to own and operate those buses, or are they just being phased out for the public system? I've seen some double-deckers being used as tour buses here in Minneapolis, smack in the middle of North America. Although from your post it sounds like you're talking about a slightly different make.
That last comment wasn't directed at tiled_rainbows personally, just at the discussion in general. No intention of personally insulting anyone this time around.:)
based on my limited knowledge of US culture (mainly informed by Hollywood), I think there might be a greater fear of them over your side of the pond.
Greater fear, yes. Greater risk? Maybe not so much. Probably what is fair to say about both sides of the Atlantic is that we all spend too much time worrying about things that have very low probabilities but are shocking, rather than worrying about more realistic and common dangers that we have more control over.
In any case, I don't have a car (by choice, you can't imagine how much money I save). So I guess I'll have to wait for the girls to make a bike where the gears are all encased in metal and where the seats come in different colors to match my riding gloves before I can get in on the smugness and macho superiority trip.
Except that this law does not propose to protect facts and this law is not a "copyright". What it prevents is using only someone else's database to make a derivative database rather than collecting the facts from source materials independently.
Personally I don't agree with any law that uses the force of government to interfere with how I use my physical property in favor of someone else's "intellectual property rights", so of course I oppose this law. But when taking the existing copyright laws as assumptions, I see this law as a perfectly logical conclusion.
Are you kidding me? In your example, the Perl is the easiest to read. Which is a sure sign of a contrived example-- but, oddly, one which contradicts your assertion. Furthermore I think including the #!/usr/bin/perl bit is unfair, it's not necessary depending on how you call the script... and certainly you've left out the compile step for the other three examples, if they aren't interpreted at runtime.
I will grant that the Scheme is likely to have the easiest syntax to learn, but conceptually it's tougher. It's more like calculus and less like following a recipe. Most of us learn how to follow recipes (i.e. imperative programs) in the real world long before we learn higher mathematics.
If you want a simple, easy-to-read language with a fairly straight-forward syntax, check out Ruby. Of course, raw assembly is pretty easy to read too (BRK, JMP, AND, XOR, etc are not exactly hard on the eyes) and has almost no syntax at all! So measures like "syntax" and "readability" aren't always all that informative.
I'm sure with a little effort a system without any sigils at all could be worked out for Ruby. Indeed, if you set up accessors for all your instance and class variables right off the bat, you needn't ever use the sigils at all outside the initialize method. The only thing the sigils buy you is not having to declare non-local variables to be class or instance variables. In this respect Ruby could stand to learn something from Perl, especially with regards to local(). That said, I much prefer Ruby to Perl in all other respects.
So, is anyone still reading who is familiar enough with Rubyx to tell me if I can bootstrap this onto an existing system, or will this require me to reinstall from scratch? Am I getting this right that it can create a bootable CD image?
You started it yourself with the whole "find something better to do" quip! I wasn't going to say anything about the spelling because your post was otherwise brilliant. But that comment sounded to me like you're proud to misspell. How could I resist?
Are you saying that the Democrats, as a party, support Free Software? I should think that most campaign or political web sites end up on GNU/Linux or BSD because that's what many of the larger hosting companies use, not because of any well-thought out plan by the candidates. While lots of people know what Linux is (i.e. some alternative to MS Windows), almost no one who isn't a geek knows or understands what Free Software is at all.
As far as I can tell the major parties are about equal on intellectual property issues. For every Orrin Hatch there's a Fritz Hollings. The Republicans even have Norm Coleman asking questions about the RIAA's subpoena frenzy. I don't see any Democrats rushing to do anything at all. Look at Eldred v. Ashcroft and tell me if the Democratic appointees were any help in a landmark case on copyright. Well?
anyone correcting my spelling should find something better to do.
Good idea. I'll add you to my foes list, too. You're aware of the problem and refuse to take corrective action. Do yourself a favor and learn to spell.
Right, except that Joe Lunchbucket gains when the funds make money. And Joe Lunchbucket probably couldn't do as well for himself picking individual equities as he can just buying shares in an indexed, no-load mutual fund anyway. If Joe wants to beat the index or be directly involved in capitalism, that's all out there. Most of those multinationals you mentioned even have direct investment programs that make it easy to buy their shares. But it's work and takes time, education, and discipline. We're in a country where half the population won't even vote for a president and you expect me to show concern that they are being disenfranchised as investors?
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Yes. I retract that one statement. I thought I had done that already. I don't know how I got it in my head that the law was focused on distribution as a key element in infringement. The very first things it lists is making copies as part of list. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Do you have some evidence to support the idea that taping TV shows is not necessarily fair use? On what would it depend? I thought time-shifting (via format-shifting-- since obviously you are taking a broadcast signal and converting it to an anolog recording, or now a digital recording with Tivo) was an established fair use. Does it make any sense at all to you that we would be allowed to audiotape our LPs, but not transcode DVDs for PDA or laptop use? Does it make sense that I can tape a movie off TV and watch is many times as I want, but I can't take the movie from a DVD and put it on my portable to watch on the bus, train, or airplane?
Bill Joy probably made those statements because he isn't familiar with Linux.
Well, except that grandparent post misquoted Bill Joy, I think. The Wired article quote is: "Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth. It's a cultural phenomenon and a business phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux."
I don't see anything there as any ringing endorsement of GUI over CLI. The fact that Mac OS X has a terminal just makes it a whole system, in my view. Just like I wouldn't run GNOME without having a terminal window open, neither would I want to be confined to just a BASH shell.
If I can tape my records, or record from TV broadcasts, certainly PDA-izing my DVDs is an allowed Fair Use as well. In any case, how will they know I'm doing this unless they violate my 4th Amendment rights? The only real way to prevent it is what they have done: gone after the tools.
I stand corrected. Not that I think undo is a bad idea or anything. I could see it being very cool to have some sort of undo command in BASH that would track the effects of the commands in .bash_history and allow for the same kinds of "oops" recoveries. I'd also be happy to see rm move files to a "recycle bin" where they would sit until you ran a `cleanrb` command or ran out of space or they had been in the bin for x amount of time.
The problem isn't people doing it for themselves. Without violating the 4th amendment it would be impossible to know who was ripping DVDs and who wasn't. Besides, copyright law allows you to make all the copies you want in the privacy of your own home (some lawyer can correct me, but that's my reading of Title 17).
;)
The problem is making and selling tools that allow people to do this. These tools may violate the DMCA and stuff. Look at the mess surrounding DeCSS. Here we have the maker of the tool being acquitted in Norway, but aren't the U.S. lawsuits against groups like 2600 still ongoing?
And as for criminal vs. civil, who cares? Your life will probably be easier if it's a criminal offense. Civil trials have a lower standard of proof and could be very expensive in terms of damage awards. At least if you go to prison you get free room and board for the duration.
Side-effects make it not a dialog? You give one example where a GUI might be better, but that's it. And how is that different from dragging a file from one "folder" to another and then having to open up the target folder to see what's in it? If you want to watch mv in action use the -v flag.
Discoverability? You're kidding right? All those menus and submenus. That's not any better than tab completion in my book. And running most CLI commands with the -h or -? or --help flags gets you summarized help on a specific command. Plus, man pages for many commands include helpful "See also" sections.
Undo command? Is there an "undo" command for "Empty trash"? How about an undo command for moving files around? Or renaming? No? I didn't think so. Some applications might have useful undo commands, but the GUI shell does not.
GUI super-what? This whole paragraph doesn't even make sense.
Learning curve? Did you RTFA? He said total newbies felt their learning curve was quite acceptable. CLI version of Photoshop is a total red herring, although I do found it interesting that it is almost as easy (for me) to do 3D modelling by scripting scenes rather than by using a GUI. The point is: no one expects to do graphics-intensive work from a command line. Although it sure is easy to do things like create thumbnails of entire galleries of JPGs and set up a web gallery from a command line. That would take all day to open each picture in Photoshop, crop it, resize it, and resave the thumbnail with a tn_*.jpg naming convention.
Config files don't have embedded help? Almost every config file I've seen uses # to mark comments and uses this to embed notes and likely non-default options.
Pathnames are a waste of time? Even with tab completion? I'd much rather have a tab-complete pathname entry field (think BASH or emacs) than any open/save dialog you can name. The only time I find GUI file browsers valuable is when I'm viewing directories full of images and the files are shown as thumbnails. But I don't think I've really seen this used well outside of GQView and some shareware apps. Most GUI file dialogs are "one at a time" in this respect. Not very helpful.
CLI is faster is you use CLI? So is GUI. Obviously whatever you use the most is what you're going to be good at and when you step away from something for a while you're going to need to readjust.
Bill Joy chose the Mac because it "just works"? Tell that to my friend-- a complete newbie-- who found himself being told by tech support to reinstall his entire Mac OS X system because he couldn't get the modem to work! Then ask him how frustrating it was to get the printer to work. He had no idea which of the wierd little files on the CD that came with his printer he was supposed to use. Bill Joy is a computing genius. His idea of what "just works" hardly applies to the discussion at hand.
In some situations it's a handicap. In others a benefit. I find for myself that headphones are great at work and not-so-great on the bus. YMMV.
I don't know about that. Up until last week, when the bus drivers here went on strike, I found I listened to more of "other people's" music as a result of walkman radios being played too loudly on the bus than all other sources of "external" music combined.
For myself I realized that wearing headphones was not a good idea since the tendency was to drown out external stimuli.
Anyway... was it just me or did this "article" read more like an ad for iPod than anything else?
To be sure, the ability to double-click a document and open it in the proper application has been available since at least 1984 (at least on certain systems). Personally I'd never notice if this was implemented in GNOME because I don't use the Nautilus file browser. What you're describing sounds terrible though. Just more times I have to move my hand from the keyboard to the mouse to do something I've traditionally been able to do with a very few keystrokes.
There's far too much DWIM which is not clearly defined anywhere.
Seems to me that this is more of a problem with the language design than a problem with the documentation-- most operations are somewhat ambiguous when used in odd ways (like trying to add two strings even though the manual clearly states that + wants to add two numbers). Do you really expect the docs to attempt to cover every possible thing that might happen as a result of using the + operator? Personally I'd prefer the language throw an error if + isn't a defined operator for the data types in question, but Perl will happily convert your string to a number (which is amusingly bad, because if the string contains digits, you get a number, if the string contains letters, you get nothing).
By the way, the POD page mentioned 'perlop' clearly states that + is performed left to right. There is a whole section at the very beginning that talks about associativity and precedence.
That's the first time I've seen graduating from Yale and getting an MBA from Harvard called a "lack" of academic achievement. It seems a laughably partisan comment when considered alongside your assertion that a Rhodes scholarship is undeniable evidence of "intelligence".
From 'perldoc perlop': Additive Operators, Binary "+" returns the sum of two numbers. Not to be argumentative, but what else do you need to know? There are a lot of potential subtleties due to the fact that $b and $c could be references to all kinds of things, but do you really expect some sort of essay on the topic when reading all the other documentation around this makes it clear what those subtleties might be?
There are lots of "direct to video" movies out there-- especially popular in the children's market. And it seems common for anime studios to come out with OAVs, direct to video serials. These allow the studio to play with the format a bit (shorter or longer shows and stuff like that) and not have to commit to whole seasons worth of programming. You'd think that sort of thing would be possible with live-action.
Is there a large market for direct-to-DVD? I don't know. I know I'm definitely in it though. I'm already paying a subscription for $10/month to a good USENET feed so I can download binaries of Japanese TV shows (some anime, some not). And I'm also paying the $50/month for cable internet. But this is all legally questionable, and if I could buy the DVDs of the shows I would (as I normally do when anime I want is released in the U.S.) Plus, while I'm not in love with CSS, I love DVDs for what they are: a great format for motion picture delivery. Alternate languages, subtitle tracks, random access, extras, etc, are all great stuff.
But even better would be a merger between what I'm doing now and the DVD format. Just like I find it annoying to buy CDs because I have an MP3 server, soon I won't need my VCR or DVD player either (Freevo/MythTV coming right up). At that point, all I'd like is a legal to buy only programs I want. Think iTunes, but for video files.
Will it actually be illegal for private individuals/companies to own and operate those buses, or are they just being phased out for the public system? I've seen some double-deckers being used as tour buses here in Minneapolis, smack in the middle of North America. Although from your post it sounds like you're talking about a slightly different make.
That last comment wasn't directed at tiled_rainbows personally, just at the discussion in general. No intention of personally insulting anyone this time around. :)
based on my limited knowledge of US culture (mainly informed by Hollywood), I think there might be a greater fear of them over your side of the pond.
Greater fear, yes. Greater risk? Maybe not so much. Probably what is fair to say about both sides of the Atlantic is that we all spend too much time worrying about things that have very low probabilities but are shocking, rather than worrying about more realistic and common dangers that we have more control over.
In any case, I don't have a car (by choice, you can't imagine how much money I save). So I guess I'll have to wait for the girls to make a bike where the gears are all encased in metal and where the seats come in different colors to match my riding gloves before I can get in on the smugness and macho superiority trip.
Except that this law does not propose to protect facts and this law is not a "copyright". What it prevents is using only someone else's database to make a derivative database rather than collecting the facts from source materials independently.
Personally I don't agree with any law that uses the force of government to interfere with how I use my physical property in favor of someone else's "intellectual property rights", so of course I oppose this law. But when taking the existing copyright laws as assumptions, I see this law as a perfectly logical conclusion.
Are you kidding me? In your example, the Perl is the easiest to read. Which is a sure sign of a contrived example-- but, oddly, one which contradicts your assertion. Furthermore I think including the #!/usr/bin/perl bit is unfair, it's not necessary depending on how you call the script... and certainly you've left out the compile step for the other three examples, if they aren't interpreted at runtime.
I will grant that the Scheme is likely to have the easiest syntax to learn, but conceptually it's tougher. It's more like calculus and less like following a recipe. Most of us learn how to follow recipes (i.e. imperative programs) in the real world long before we learn higher mathematics.
If you want a simple, easy-to-read language with a fairly straight-forward syntax, check out Ruby. Of course, raw assembly is pretty easy to read too (BRK, JMP, AND, XOR, etc are not exactly hard on the eyes) and has almost no syntax at all! So measures like "syntax" and "readability" aren't always all that informative.
See this table for a rough idea.
I'm sure with a little effort a system without any sigils at all could be worked out for Ruby. Indeed, if you set up accessors for all your instance and class variables right off the bat, you needn't ever use the sigils at all outside the initialize method. The only thing the sigils buy you is not having to declare non-local variables to be class or instance variables. In this respect Ruby could stand to learn something from Perl, especially with regards to local(). That said, I much prefer Ruby to Perl in all other respects.
So, is anyone still reading who is familiar enough with Rubyx to tell me if I can bootstrap this onto an existing system, or will this require me to reinstall from scratch? Am I getting this right that it can create a bootable CD image?
You started it yourself with the whole "find something better to do" quip! I wasn't going to say anything about the spelling because your post was otherwise brilliant. But that comment sounded to me like you're proud to misspell. How could I resist?
Are you saying that the Democrats, as a party, support Free Software? I should think that most campaign or political web sites end up on GNU/Linux or BSD because that's what many of the larger hosting companies use, not because of any well-thought out plan by the candidates. While lots of people know what Linux is (i.e. some alternative to MS Windows), almost no one who isn't a geek knows or understands what Free Software is at all.
As far as I can tell the major parties are about equal on intellectual property issues. For every Orrin Hatch there's a Fritz Hollings. The Republicans even have Norm Coleman asking questions about the RIAA's subpoena frenzy. I don't see any Democrats rushing to do anything at all. Look at Eldred v. Ashcroft and tell me if the Democratic appointees were any help in a landmark case on copyright. Well?
metallic, argument, article, surveillance, triggered, tightly, nearly, exploding, terribly, already
anyone correcting my spelling should find something better to do.
Good idea. I'll add you to my foes list, too. You're aware of the problem and refuse to take corrective action. Do yourself a favor and learn to spell.
Right, except that Joe Lunchbucket gains when the funds make money. And Joe Lunchbucket probably couldn't do as well for himself picking individual equities as he can just buying shares in an indexed, no-load mutual fund anyway. If Joe wants to beat the index or be directly involved in capitalism, that's all out there. Most of those multinationals you mentioned even have direct investment programs that make it easy to buy their shares. But it's work and takes time, education, and discipline. We're in a country where half the population won't even vote for a president and you expect me to show concern that they are being disenfranchised as investors?
Insourcing (the opposite of outsourcing) is actually increasing more quickly than outsourcing is. Over half of all Americans own equities (i.e. stocks or mutual funds). So either you have a better source for your facts than I do, or you don't. But the information I have flatly contradicts your concerns.