I wasn't responding to an assertion about Google. I was responding to an assertion about "most software."
You do not need a license to use an API or even to replicate one for interoperability as that is fair use which is essentially the only reason to do so. Your assertion with regard to "most software" requiring licensing to utilize an API is incorrect. API's don't qualify for copyright. People can sue you for most anything and buying expensive and unnecessary licenses is not automatically a better answer than the risk of expensive copyright lawsuits.
The Google case is not yet over so google hasn't yet failed with their interoperability defense. The rational that their software is not interoperable with java is weak, the target is interoperability with java applications not java itself and Oracle has no rights to java applications (in general, obviously they have rights to specific apps). This is really no different than the WINE project. WINE would also fail to run some use cases and earlier in the project would fail in most cases, it doesn't change that the purpose of the effort is interoperability. One does not need to achieve interoperability to have interoperability as a fair use motive.
So many sheep who don't realize the entire point of this giant diversity push is just to flood the hiring pool and dilute down wages. These companies pushing diversity and this agenda don't actually care about women and minorities they care about making more profit by cutting or at least slowing the growth of wages.
"But that's much of what you do when you take money away from rich people and give it to poor people, because black people are still suffering from economic distress whose roots were deliberate."
But there is a very big difference. Once is racist, the other is merely a correlation. Rationale based on race is faulty and unsound, period. If it weren't racism wouldn't be bad.
"The truth is that being in either position was very much not a dice roll — white people deliberately made things worse for black people."
No, people who happened to have white skin deliberately made things worse for people who happened to have dark skin . Not because they were bad or evil but largely because of faulty information, logic, and reasoning which allowed them to justify their actions to themselves and others. Those people aren't really around anymore. Being born into either group, or none of the above IS a dice roll. Losing that roll and being born poor is really no different regardless of the reason your family is poor. Without the discrimination you speak of at least as many people would be born poor and disadvantaged it just wouldn't happen to have a correlation with a logically insignificant trait like skin color. Actually the sad reality is most likely more would be poor and disadvantaged, the slave labor and disadvantages it excused enabled huge economic opportunities in the United States and boosted the economy. Yes there are families that are wealthy and white who have benefited but there is also more overall opportunity for everyone of all colors today and a larger middle class because of the wealth that institution fed into our economy.
"In order for things to be fair now, white people are going to have to deliberately make things better for them. It doesn't matter if those white people are the ones who made it worse for them or not, it only matters that they are the only ones capable of ameliorating the current situation specifically because they are in the positions of power and wealth."
That isn't fair at all. Two wrongs don't make a right. You don't cure racism based on skin color from the past with new racism based on skin color today. You cure the underlying problem by NOT continuing to use faulty logic based on invalid criteria which have no impact on merit like skin color. You do fight the advantages of wealth with regard to future success but you do not do so in a racist manner deliberately targeting people based on skin color or race. The idea is to level the playing field and let economic disparity take care of itself in a few generations. A playing field with rules regarding race beyond a rule to not consider it isn't level.
The other problem with your logic is people you categorize as "white" don't owe any sort of debt and the people you categorize as "black" aren't owed anything. There is nothing to correct because skin color isn't logically significant. There is no downside to people who happen to have white skin being the ones with wealth and people who happen to have black skin correlating to low wealth. The same would be true if it were the other way around. How it ended up that way is historical trivia.
All the history and other factors are strawmen. It comes down to this. Does the act of being born with a given skin color entitle someone to advantage or disadvantage? What exactly "do you have coming" for the act of being born? I say no and nothing beyond whatever value we ascribe to the potential of a human life. If that is true than any policy that is contrary to that is faulty no matter how it is rationalized. What that individual is entitled to thereafter should be entirely a function of their own capability and merit. There is a lot more room for debate on how to achieve that but we can control what advantages and disadvantages we give in our society purely on the basis of inborn traits which can't be changed and don't impact merit.
More like "Gimme part of your family jewels.....cause you didn't earn them or your keep but they cost public resources to protect and maintain and so do you."
"So all the things you worked for/earned cannot be benefited to your own kin without them paying some penalty to keep it constantly?"
The alternative is everyone else pays a penalty to enable them to keep them. Also just because you accumulated wealth doesn't mean it was in proportion to what you rightfully had coming. People have earned billions while making less contribution than people who've earned minimum wage and no person contribute a billion dollars worth of effort to society in their lifetime, they've accumulated wealth from the efforts of others. Which is fine to some extent, you don't want to punish working hard and kill the american dream and also we don't really have a better system for determining the custodians of our wealth at this point. But the idea that children of those who have shown merit to be custodians of wealth translate to their children through breeding like thoroughbreds has been debunked. More commonly the children of the extraordinary are mundane and sometimes the apple falls very very far from the tree.
The system is far better for the economy as a whole and would seriously alleviate the treadmill that stands in the way of the success of those with merit working toward wealth. Seriously if you have enough wealth it almost grows on its own anyway. This doesn't really hurt those with a great deal of wealth even if does attack the way the wealthy like Buffett dodge taxes. What it does do is stop punishing productive merit and success.
The problem is that software falls in this grey area between discovery, invention, and creative work. However, the creative work aspect is weak despite the code as art examples because you can make an artistic toaster without toasters generally falling under copyright.
Being what it is functionally, an API should not be copyright-able and neither should software. Most software shouldn't be patent-able either. Very little is actually inventive and most algorithms are better argued as a discovery than an invention. Complicated math was true before you stumbled on it and the same is true of algorithms. None-the-less I doubt that is what the court will rule.
"I've never understood this. Code will work exactly as it is coded. Why does one need to see a trace to see how it "might" move through the code and how each line of code "might" change the data."
That makes little sense to me as well but I do use those tools see how it actually did move through rather than how I intended for it to move.
"Nearly every programmer I've dealt with has issues with thought experiments."
Not just thought programmers I've seen the same with computing and networking problems as well. Some of the people I've worked with in different areas of computing basically seem to have a big memory bank of problems and solutions/questions and answers/rules/syntax etc. And hey, they work much more quickly than I do most of the time. In some cases they learn more quickly as well because they just take everything on faith whereas I have to test, explore, and actually understand it. The difference is that I'm building a model of how it works in my head, lots and lots of little models. I'm slower to answer because I'm running a little simulation in my brain when something goes wrong to determine where the problem might be and similarly plugging a potential solution into such a model. Where the information wasn't provided at some point the model is complete enough that I can fill in the holes on my own. The more models I learn the better many of the existing ones become because computing and digital logic problems are solved along patterns.
At the end of the day though the memory learners run into roadblocks and walls they can't get past because they don't have anything in their memory that solves it. My mental models don't depend on already knowing the answer, in fact, they lead to answers I never learned anywhere but can apply with a high degree of confidence. Thought experiments as you put it are ultimately why I'm a high school dropout with a few college courses earning a solid six figures.
Even the 24hrs learning books being discussed weren't suppose to literally be 24hrs but rather 24 chapters.
They varied in quality but I worked through the C++ one some time ago and by the time I was done with it I'd combined it with online material and written a very simple little "game" with small pixel creatures that moved and ate in two dimensions. They had small neural nets controlling their behavior, a simple genetic code I devised, and an evolutionary algorithm. All written from scratch except for the graphics libraries. Of course, the book didn't prompt me to do that either I just needed ways to utilize and cement what I was learning that weren't contrived and were interesting to me.
Libraries and frameworks are what takes all the time. There are so many competing answers out there and so many outdated answers out there that it is tough to wade through them and now many of such large scope that you are basically programming in the framework and not the language.
"commenting on a story about CS?!" "In the US, no qualified applicant is unable to get accepted to a CS degree program. None."
A story about how everybody is not getting access.
"There are good reasons for giving disadvantaged groups a higher percent of the seats at "prestigious" institutions"
An accident of birth is not a good reason to give anyone anything.
"Even people who are not very good students and have too low a GPA for admission to their local State University can get a 2 year degree at a local Community College and have a 100% chance of then being accepted to that same State University."
Of course they'll be at a disadvantage to get grants and pay for it. They'll also be at a disadvantage to get hired afterward and to retain their employment when layoff time comes around. All because of an accident of birth.
"from being so toxic that the girls don't want to take classes with them"
It's high school. The boys are far more toxic to other boys to the point of literally beating them. It doesn't stop the boys taking the course.
Has it occurred to anyone that girls just aren't particularly interested in CS? Billions of dollars have been spent by tech companies providing these courses to women and minorities, much on efforts that don't merely target them but explicitly exclude white males.
"Perhaps girls and boys tend to choose different courses in high school, but that's a free will choice of each student."
Agreed.
"schools with resources like advanced programming courses"
Which again is actually an advantage for minorities because tech companies have been spending billions on pumping these courses out to minorities and women.
"While most rich people are white, most white people aren't rich, as most black people are not violent criminals and so forth."
And just as importantly, the sins don't pass from father to son. White people born today aren't guilty of a crime or owe any sort of debt to people randomly born with dark skin. Just like people randomly born wealthy with dark skin don't owe any debt. There is no score to settle and nothing to correct, the people who committed the crimes and the victims are all dead or so old as to be irrelevant. Your grandparents might have had something coming but you aren't entitled to collect it from the grandchildren of the people who owed it because being in either position was a dice roll. That's the whole point, you can't change what you are born as and that is what makes discrimination on those traits so evil. It is the same lesson we learned about thrones and positions passed from parent to child.
Frankly the wealth shouldn't pass down either. The sensible thing would just be a tax on wealth rather than income. If you can't bring in enough to cover the taxes on your built up wealth you sell it and pay the bill. After all if you can't grow enough to cover the tax the wealth should be in the hands of those doing a better job. Merit.
Entitlement to lost wealth and blame for how it was acquired are not. You don't have any say in whether you are born rich or poor or what color your skin is. The son doesn't inherit the sins of the father and he doesn't inherit a legitimate complaint of his father's either.
"How did they do it in the past before there were computers and email?"
They saw there co-workers, they were in the same building and not a different state or even country. Jesus, isn't it bad enough they maximize the number of contract and visa workers to crush their staff and prevent fair pay?
Maybe it is hard to sympathize with complaints about pay from people making in the low six figures but when their job should by all reasonable metrics be paying at least the mid 200's and it is underpaid nationwide in a massive industry it is something of a big issue. Especially when many of these staff are being forced to work insane hours to meet unrealistic deadlines because of a blatantly bought and paid for exception to overtime requirements under labor law.
Such as? By all means tell me just one concrete thing a poor white kid from a broken home gets when he tries to climb out of his government assisted housing and go to college? I mean other than discriminated against for grants, funding, and admissions?
"in no way whatsoever excuses the misbehavior of the American government"
This story isn't about alleged misbehavior on the part of the American government. If Chinese companies do not fight government requests then what is to stop the government from gaining access to American trade secrets those companies become privy to including their own trade secrets where the companies are branches of US companies operating in China?
"At some schools, the shortage is creating an undergraduate divide of computing haves and have-nots -- potentially narrowing a path for some minority and female students to an industry that has struggled with diversity."
Given that white males are the only ones who face institutional discrimination on college admission and women and minorities are given explicit advantage and automatically beat out equally qualified white males how is this an issue?
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I wasn't responding to an assertion about Google. I was responding to an assertion about "most software."
You do not need a license to use an API or even to replicate one for interoperability as that is fair use which is essentially the only reason to do so. Your assertion with regard to "most software" requiring licensing to utilize an API is incorrect. API's don't qualify for copyright. People can sue you for most anything and buying expensive and unnecessary licenses is not automatically a better answer than the risk of expensive copyright lawsuits.
The Google case is not yet over so google hasn't yet failed with their interoperability defense. The rational that their software is not interoperable with java is weak, the target is interoperability with java applications not java itself and Oracle has no rights to java applications (in general, obviously they have rights to specific apps). This is really no different than the WINE project. WINE would also fail to run some use cases and earlier in the project would fail in most cases, it doesn't change that the purpose of the effort is interoperability. One does not need to achieve interoperability to have interoperability as a fair use motive.
So many sheep who don't realize the entire point of this giant diversity push is just to flood the hiring pool and dilute down wages. These companies pushing diversity and this agenda don't actually care about women and minorities they care about making more profit by cutting or at least slowing the growth of wages.
"But that's much of what you do when you take money away from rich people and give it to poor people, because black people are still suffering from economic distress whose roots were deliberate."
But there is a very big difference. Once is racist, the other is merely a correlation. Rationale based on race is faulty and unsound, period. If it weren't racism wouldn't be bad.
"The truth is that being in either position was very much not a dice roll — white people deliberately made things worse for black people."
No, people who happened to have white skin deliberately made things worse for people who happened to have dark skin . Not because they were bad or evil but largely because of faulty information, logic, and reasoning which allowed them to justify their actions to themselves and others. Those people aren't really around anymore. Being born into either group, or none of the above IS a dice roll. Losing that roll and being born poor is really no different regardless of the reason your family is poor. Without the discrimination you speak of at least as many people would be born poor and disadvantaged it just wouldn't happen to have a correlation with a logically insignificant trait like skin color. Actually the sad reality is most likely more would be poor and disadvantaged, the slave labor and disadvantages it excused enabled huge economic opportunities in the United States and boosted the economy. Yes there are families that are wealthy and white who have benefited but there is also more overall opportunity for everyone of all colors today and a larger middle class because of the wealth that institution fed into our economy.
"In order for things to be fair now, white people are going to have to deliberately make things better for them. It doesn't matter if those white people are the ones who made it worse for them or not, it only matters that they are the only ones capable of ameliorating the current situation specifically because they are in the positions of power and wealth."
That isn't fair at all. Two wrongs don't make a right. You don't cure racism based on skin color from the past with new racism based on skin color today. You cure the underlying problem by NOT continuing to use faulty logic based on invalid criteria which have no impact on merit like skin color. You do fight the advantages of wealth with regard to future success but you do not do so in a racist manner deliberately targeting people based on skin color or race. The idea is to level the playing field and let economic disparity take care of itself in a few generations. A playing field with rules regarding race beyond a rule to not consider it isn't level.
The other problem with your logic is people you categorize as "white" don't owe any sort of debt and the people you categorize as "black" aren't owed anything. There is nothing to correct because skin color isn't logically significant. There is no downside to people who happen to have white skin being the ones with wealth and people who happen to have black skin correlating to low wealth. The same would be true if it were the other way around. How it ended up that way is historical trivia.
All the history and other factors are strawmen. It comes down to this. Does the act of being born with a given skin color entitle someone to advantage or disadvantage? What exactly "do you have coming" for the act of being born? I say no and nothing beyond whatever value we ascribe to the potential of a human life. If that is true than any policy that is contrary to that is faulty no matter how it is rationalized. What that individual is entitled to thereafter should be entirely a function of their own capability and merit. There is a lot more room for debate on how to achieve that but we can control what advantages and disadvantages we give in our society purely on the basis of inborn traits which can't be changed and don't impact merit.
More like "Gimme part of your family jewels.....cause you didn't earn them or your keep but they cost public resources to protect and maintain and so do you."
"So all the things you worked for/earned cannot be benefited to your own kin without them paying some penalty to keep it constantly?"
The alternative is everyone else pays a penalty to enable them to keep them. Also just because you accumulated wealth doesn't mean it was in proportion to what you rightfully had coming. People have earned billions while making less contribution than people who've earned minimum wage and no person contribute a billion dollars worth of effort to society in their lifetime, they've accumulated wealth from the efforts of others. Which is fine to some extent, you don't want to punish working hard and kill the american dream and also we don't really have a better system for determining the custodians of our wealth at this point. But the idea that children of those who have shown merit to be custodians of wealth translate to their children through breeding like thoroughbreds has been debunked. More commonly the children of the extraordinary are mundane and sometimes the apple falls very very far from the tree.
The system is far better for the economy as a whole and would seriously alleviate the treadmill that stands in the way of the success of those with merit working toward wealth. Seriously if you have enough wealth it almost grows on its own anyway. This doesn't really hurt those with a great deal of wealth even if does attack the way the wealthy like Buffett dodge taxes. What it does do is stop punishing productive merit and success.
"Sun sued, won, and we are better for it. Java was neither fractured nor destroyed."
In what way are we better for that? Java is only used so widely because schools pumped it out to legions of students.
Java is slow and shitty, software written in it almost always leaks and it's a nightmare to support.
Do you know why people use java? Because schools were obsessed with teaching java.
Which was actually a great way to get acquired by Oracle and make money for shareholders. Mission accomplished.
The problem is that software falls in this grey area between discovery, invention, and creative work. However, the creative work aspect is weak despite the code as art examples because you can make an artistic toaster without toasters generally falling under copyright.
Being what it is functionally, an API should not be copyright-able and neither should software. Most software shouldn't be patent-able either. Very little is actually inventive and most algorithms are better argued as a discovery than an invention. Complicated math was true before you stumbled on it and the same is true of algorithms. None-the-less I doubt that is what the court will rule.
Or they are very confident they own a lot of APIs and it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if they had to take a hit.
Google's recent behavior is pretty much loaded with horrible fuckery.
"For most software, it's a good idea to not use an API unless you have a license."
According to whom? Clean room implemented APIs are everywhere.
"I've never understood this. Code will work exactly as it is coded. Why does one need to see a trace to see how it "might" move through the code and how each line of code "might" change the data."
That makes little sense to me as well but I do use those tools see how it actually did move through rather than how I intended for it to move.
"Nearly every programmer I've dealt with has issues with thought experiments."
Not just thought programmers I've seen the same with computing and networking problems as well. Some of the people I've worked with in different areas of computing basically seem to have a big memory bank of problems and solutions/questions and answers/rules/syntax etc. And hey, they work much more quickly than I do most of the time. In some cases they learn more quickly as well because they just take everything on faith whereas I have to test, explore, and actually understand it. The difference is that I'm building a model of how it works in my head, lots and lots of little models. I'm slower to answer because I'm running a little simulation in my brain when something goes wrong to determine where the problem might be and similarly plugging a potential solution into such a model. Where the information wasn't provided at some point the model is complete enough that I can fill in the holes on my own. The more models I learn the better many of the existing ones become because computing and digital logic problems are solved along patterns.
At the end of the day though the memory learners run into roadblocks and walls they can't get past because they don't have anything in their memory that solves it. My mental models don't depend on already knowing the answer, in fact, they lead to answers I never learned anywhere but can apply with a high degree of confidence. Thought experiments as you put it are ultimately why I'm a high school dropout with a few college courses earning a solid six figures.
Even the 24hrs learning books being discussed weren't suppose to literally be 24hrs but rather 24 chapters.
They varied in quality but I worked through the C++ one some time ago and by the time I was done with it I'd combined it with online material and written a very simple little "game" with small pixel creatures that moved and ate in two dimensions. They had small neural nets controlling their behavior, a simple genetic code I devised, and an evolutionary algorithm. All written from scratch except for the graphics libraries. Of course, the book didn't prompt me to do that either I just needed ways to utilize and cement what I was learning that weren't contrived and were interesting to me.
Libraries and frameworks are what takes all the time. There are so many competing answers out there and so many outdated answers out there that it is tough to wade through them and now many of such large scope that you are basically programming in the framework and not the language.
I guess that depends on how you learned to program. I didn't find Verilog to be all that difficult.
"commenting on a story about CS?!" "In the US, no qualified applicant is unable to get accepted to a CS degree program. None."
A story about how everybody is not getting access.
"There are good reasons for giving disadvantaged groups a higher percent of the seats at "prestigious" institutions"
An accident of birth is not a good reason to give anyone anything.
"Even people who are not very good students and have too low a GPA for admission to their local State University can get a 2 year degree at a local Community College and have a 100% chance of then being accepted to that same State University."
Of course they'll be at a disadvantage to get grants and pay for it. They'll also be at a disadvantage to get hired afterward and to retain their employment when layoff time comes around. All because of an accident of birth.
"It is bad enough to be a racist asshole"
Yes but you seem to be good with it.
"from being so toxic that the girls don't want to take classes with them"
It's high school. The boys are far more toxic to other boys to the point of literally beating them. It doesn't stop the boys taking the course.
Has it occurred to anyone that girls just aren't particularly interested in CS? Billions of dollars have been spent by tech companies providing these courses to women and minorities, much on efforts that don't merely target them but explicitly exclude white males.
"Perhaps girls and boys tend to choose different courses in high school, but that's a free will choice of each student."
Agreed.
"schools with resources like advanced programming courses"
Which again is actually an advantage for minorities because tech companies have been spending billions on pumping these courses out to minorities and women.
In other words, Pell grants are a wash and not an advantage.
"While most rich people are white, most white people aren't rich, as most black people are not violent criminals and so forth."
And just as importantly, the sins don't pass from father to son. White people born today aren't guilty of a crime or owe any sort of debt to people randomly born with dark skin. Just like people randomly born wealthy with dark skin don't owe any debt. There is no score to settle and nothing to correct, the people who committed the crimes and the victims are all dead or so old as to be irrelevant. Your grandparents might have had something coming but you aren't entitled to collect it from the grandchildren of the people who owed it because being in either position was a dice roll. That's the whole point, you can't change what you are born as and that is what makes discrimination on those traits so evil. It is the same lesson we learned about thrones and positions passed from parent to child.
Frankly the wealth shouldn't pass down either. The sensible thing would just be a tax on wealth rather than income. If you can't bring in enough to cover the taxes on your built up wealth you sell it and pay the bill. After all if you can't grow enough to cover the tax the wealth should be in the hands of those doing a better job. Merit.
Entitlement to lost wealth and blame for how it was acquired are not. You don't have any say in whether you are born rich or poor or what color your skin is. The son doesn't inherit the sins of the father and he doesn't inherit a legitimate complaint of his father's either.
He said 1%ers, the 1% is mostly more successful and educated workers. Maybe he meant the 0.1%
"How did they do it in the past before there were computers and email?"
They saw there co-workers, they were in the same building and not a different state or even country. Jesus, isn't it bad enough they maximize the number of contract and visa workers to crush their staff and prevent fair pay?
Maybe it is hard to sympathize with complaints about pay from people making in the low six figures but when their job should by all reasonable metrics be paying at least the mid 200's and it is underpaid nationwide in a massive industry it is something of a big issue. Especially when many of these staff are being forced to work insane hours to meet unrealistic deadlines because of a blatantly bought and paid for exception to overtime requirements under labor law.
What do rich white 1%ers have to do with Google? I think you meant to say high income indian 1%ers.
Such as? By all means tell me just one concrete thing a poor white kid from a broken home gets when he tries to climb out of his government assisted housing and go to college? I mean other than discriminated against for grants, funding, and admissions?
"in no way whatsoever excuses the misbehavior of the American government"
This story isn't about alleged misbehavior on the part of the American government. If Chinese companies do not fight government requests then what is to stop the government from gaining access to American trade secrets those companies become privy to including their own trade secrets where the companies are branches of US companies operating in China?
"At some schools, the shortage is creating an undergraduate divide of computing haves and have-nots -- potentially narrowing a path for some minority and female students to an industry that has struggled with diversity."
Given that white males are the only ones who face institutional discrimination on college admission and women and minorities are given explicit advantage and automatically beat out equally qualified white males how is this an issue?