and instead of taking the photos, encourages (perhaps paying for the privilege) people to submit photos they took. These could be any legally taken photo by a property owner, a freelance photographer, a tourist, etc.
How would this change your response? Can people buy photos of this sort or solicit them for free?
As an important supporting point, I would add that if you go around taking all the spare change from all the give a penny/take a penny jars once a week, you are going to lose credibility and people will start treating you as a thief. This is reasonable. It would even be reasonable to pass a law against such behavior.
Now, at the same time, what I don't understand is why people feel that it is OK for people to take photos of their houses provided that it is not Google. I personally find Google Street information quite helpful when driving around unfamiliar cities.
Finally I would ask what people would think if Google changed this to be a "submit your own street photos!" system. Certainly over time, one would get a similar result. Would then it become problematic for even tourists to take photos of the neighborhood?
1) People aren't things. It is at least polite to remove photos OF PEOPLE if they object. Things perpetually visible to the public have no such considerations. This is a matter of dignity.
2) Inside vs outside. If you EXPECT to be visible from a public street, that is different than if you are in a house with blinds drawn and do not expect this. If I am taking photos of the inside of your house, that ought to be actionable on other bases.
100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.
Nothing preventing Google from indexing those photos, right?
Nothing to prevent The Internet Archive from archiving those photos, right?
Why does one private party get special status here?
No, this is not a legitimate concern. If you can take a photo of it from the public right of way, you can do so. If you don't want your stuff visible from a public right of way, don't keep it visible from a public right of way (it doesn;t take a bunker, just keep it out of public view if you don't want the public to see it....
If I take pictures of the family in my yard, the neighbors can't object to the fact that their houses might be in the photo. Same if I put those photos up on the internet. I really don't see why Google should have special status here.
As a FOSS developer, let me provide some (hopefully eye-opening) perspective. Personally, I think you have it all wrong.
I spend most of my time doing open source work for paying customers. I also reserve some time to do software development work for the community as a volunteer. Most users understand that my time is limited and don't go out demanding that their specific issues should get top priority. At the same time, we sometimes get serious bug reports from the community and fix those as quickly as we can. People sometimes provide a critical feedback and this is fine. It is quite different from placing demands on my freetime. Although it rarely happens, it has been known to happen. IMO the proper response is a polite reminder that we will get to it when time permits.
What is my goal? To produce the best software possible. We get all kinds of requests which could undermine that. So the approach is always to engage users over the lists and discuss what they really want to accomplish vs what they are requesting. Eventually we can usually come to an understanding of a solution which meets everyone's needs. Am I happy that software I am helping to build is seeing increasing adoption? Absolutely, but I won't back making changes which undermine quality in order to speed that adoption.
BTW, the next version of LedgerSMB (1.3) will be a giant step forward. We are now finally getting close to a beta on it. However, you wouldn't believe the requests we get. For example: "Please let us delete invoices" or "we want to repost invoices." The answer in these cases is "We don't generally support that because it is not in line with GAAP." The "But Quickbooks lets me do it" response is not sufficient. In these cases, however, there is a valid request by a user to make the exeperience of using the software more pleasant. It is just incorrectly tied to the experience of another product. The simple fact is sometimes matters are not ripe for action.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 1
if they use IM they use a command line client and only use the Jabber protocol.
After reading the article, I concluded that the guy's points were misdirected. This really is criticism at the article, but he complains that everyone complains about his blog entries. Reading the comments to those blog entries, I couldn't find a single example of what he was talking about. I saw some genuine disagreements (how to measure success of software development, whether he misrepresented where Macs fit into the picture, etc), but no complaining about his posts per se. In short, he largely failed to support his allegation, that people took his criticism as complaining.
In short, a lot of the issues are that some of his criticism doesn't withstand a critical analysis. The closest I saw to complaining about his criticism were simply stressing that modest strides WERE the proper way forward, and that he seemed to be asking for rapid revolutions which would be harmful to good software engineering.
Now, as for the question of freeloaders, I think you have a valid point but one which needs some clarification. The problem is that some people EXPECT volunteers to prioritize their specific concerns. In reality volunteers end up with a small amount of time compared to the concerns raised by all the users. There is a difference between a polite request or a post that "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "why won't you work on your free time to solve MY issues." There needs to be some understanding that although most volunteers DO understand that fixing as many of these issues would be good and do tend to spend time doing so, unless you expect to pay someone to make these changes, don't expect it to be done on YOUR schedule.
BTW, this dynamic is not limited to open source software. People complain all the time about Microsoft not fixing some bug fast enough, etc. The dynamic is the same, but such people actually have a stronger case, since they are paying customers. At the same time, my experience is that, since resources are still limited, people don't understand that these resources need to be shared.
At the same time, I have seen open source projects respond HOSTILLY towards other parties meeting user demands that they were not meeting. This is totally inexcusable, but is not the responsibility of the full open source community to respond to it.
Sure. Except, crappy as the Javascript "encryption" is, now you're in violation of the DMCA by reverse engineering a copy protection mechanism.
I don't think so. In this case the circumvention tool is the javascript they are providing. If you are importing it in violation of the DMCA, they are distributing it also in violation of the DMCA.
Running a standard javascript engine against the javascript/obfuscated html does not seem to my mind to be a circumvention device any more than a standard web browser is. After all, I could use firebug to do pretty much all the same things inside the web browser....
That isn't quite right. Some wireless cards work ok (for example Intel or Atheros chipsets). The thing is that there are usually firmware-level interfaces that have to be distributed as well. That is a fully separate problem from being forced to run a Windows driver on Linux, extract firmware code from the driver, etc.
I disagree. I think code system analysis probably does happen at big companies involved in Linux development (Cray, IBM, etc). I would be willing to bet there is a lot more detatched review than people give credit for.
Also I would add that user experience studies are not all that uncommon, and articles about "I tried Linux, and this is why it didn't work for me" occur frequently. Some of these are actually taken fairly seriously.
However, one of the issues here which I think muddies the waters considerably is the dispersed target problem. If I criticize Linux chances are, I am really criticizing one distro. This makes it easy for the Fedora folks to ignore desktop Linux complaints made against OpenSuSE, etc.
I think the argument for FOSS in the sense that it can be changed is actually a good one but is generally misplaced. I.e. businesses get a LOT of flexibility in being able to do all sorts of things they couldn't do otherwise, but the smaller the business the less that matters (fewer resources to spend on it), and hence individuals are largely left out of the process.
Right now, the thing to note is that there are folks using Linux on the desktop who want to be using Linux on the desktop. They generally buy compatible hardware from the get-go etc. Then there are people who don't have that drive, so the hardware issues are a big deal to them. Now, I think that Linux is clearly good enough for the desktop for the first group of people, but clearly not for the second, and these groups will remain separate until hardware vendors throw their support behind Linux en masse. Little steps in the mean time are great because they mean that SOME people in the second group will slowly migrate to the first group, but this is going to be a long process.
The fact is, if you WANT to run Linux on the desktop, it is quite good enough. It isn't good enough for the rest, however.
One of my big beefs right now is wireless cards. I really shouldn't have to rely on ndiswrapper to get decent support for wireless with most cards. However I do. Because I WANT to run Linux on the desktop, it is fine. If I didn't want to do so, I would probably switch to Windows.
Er, so why can't we also send a message to teens that being dumbasses and taking naked pics of themselves is probably not the smartest fucking thing to do?
Sure. Send a message. Send the information to the parents and have them figure out what to do.
BTW, of this, only one of the photos even approached being a "naked pic" anyway. The others were underwear pics, from the waist up (no real nudity). Furthermore, merely having breasts exposed seems to push the limits of the child pornography 1A exception to new levels, and I don't think that would fly in court either.
The prosecutor even threatened to prosecute a kid over child pornography over having a picture taken of her in a bathing suit. Get that....
Under this standard, JC Penny's and Sears are distributing child pornography and need to be stopped!
As a funny aside, in Massacheussets, there is an attempt to amend child pornography laws to also include disabled persons and persons over 60 years old.
If that one gets passed, I really want to watch hearings on its Constitutionality, especially if it gets to the Supreme Court. I want to see how the justices will respond to being told that consent is irrelevent for folks over 60 years old, given that Roberts is 54, Alito is 58, and everyone else on the court is over 60.
Finally, a law SO blatantly Unconstitutional that the Supreme Court would have to declare themselves legally incompetent NOT to strike it down.....
Still, you have to wonder whether a software developer building inhouse applications for a company in Japan really needs to know English to a reasoanble fluency, and whether the effort gaining the language skill will pay off by itself.
So I don't see a reasonable argument that EVERY SINGLE developer needs to know English. However, I think that global collaboration is facilitated by an international standard.
Not to mention so many affixes that a single word and a sentence might generally be identical. Imagine a language where you have a following word that means:
"I like to eat eggs for breakfast."
Ok, that is a manufactured example, but in some of the polysynthetic Native American languages, it gets pretty close to that.
IANAL, but I thought that a permanent order of this sort would have to be determined on the basis of a trial (in this case, presumably a bench trial). Or am I missing something?
Or are you characterizing a trial as "maybe a few hearings?"
This REALLY needs to be decided on Constitutional grounds. A little research will show that these sorts of threats and even charges are becoming commonplace against teens. This is one reason this needs to go to trial. Let's send a CLEAR message to prosecutors that this is fundamentally a violation of teens' protected speech and outside the (narrow) child pornography exception.
Note that in other cases obscenity charges are used. However, this poses extremely problematic issues as well. Normal obscenity law depends on a jury to decide a relevant contemporary community standard. Since there are no jury trials in juvenile court, the judge gets to decide what is obscene and what is not and thus IMO this makes the law as applied to juveniles unconstitutionally vague (because a judge alone decides matters in what would fundamentally be an arbitrary way).
In which case, I would agree that you are right. MySQL is an alternative to db's like MS Access..... Anything beyond what you SHOULD use Access for complexity-wise you can't use MySQL for either because you can run into many of the same basic problems. This means MySQL is really great at some things (like lightweight CMS stuff, maybe also one-off line of business tools) but these aren't really where the commercial RDBMS market really is. In those cases, usually you have a single db with many, many applications accessing the same data. Even the most recent versions of MySQL make this impossible in terms of validating data integrity as well as an RDBMS should.
Which brings me back to the idea that MySQL is OK for single-app db's. It is totally inadequate for multi-app db's.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you get sued for fraudulantly sending DMCA takedown notices!
One reasonable provision in the DMCA is that it allows such action.
and instead of taking the photos, encourages (perhaps paying for the privilege) people to submit photos they took. These could be any legally taken photo by a property owner, a freelance photographer, a tourist, etc.
How would this change your response? Can people buy photos of this sort or solicit them for free?
It would certainly scare ME away....
As an important supporting point, I would add that if you go around taking all the spare change from all the give a penny/take a penny jars once a week, you are going to lose credibility and people will start treating you as a thief. This is reasonable. It would even be reasonable to pass a law against such behavior.
Now, at the same time, what I don't understand is why people feel that it is OK for people to take photos of their houses provided that it is not Google. I personally find Google Street information quite helpful when driving around unfamiliar cities.
Finally I would ask what people would think if Google changed this to be a "submit your own street photos!" system. Certainly over time, one would get a similar result. Would then it become problematic for even tourists to take photos of the neighborhood?
1) People aren't things. It is at least polite to remove photos OF PEOPLE if they object. Things perpetually visible to the public have no such considerations. This is a matter of dignity.
2) Inside vs outside. If you EXPECT to be visible from a public street, that is different than if you are in a house with blinds drawn and do not expect this. If I am taking photos of the inside of your house, that ought to be actionable on other bases.
100's of sets of tourist photos randomly scattered across the internet, being added and removed and reorganized by their takers at their whim is not remetely the same thing as a single permanent indexed geo-tagged database filled with photos that were carefully and systematically taken and stitched together.
Nothing preventing Google from indexing those photos, right?
Nothing to prevent The Internet Archive from archiving those photos, right?
Why does one private party get special status here?
No, this is not a legitimate concern. If you can take a photo of it from the public right of way, you can do so. If you don't want your stuff visible from a public right of way, don't keep it visible from a public right of way (it doesn;t take a bunker, just keep it out of public view if you don't want the public to see it....
If I take pictures of the family in my yard, the neighbors can't object to the fact that their houses might be in the photo. Same if I put those photos up on the internet. I really don't see why Google should have special status here.
the government always has everyone's best interest at heart! More surveillance is good, as long as the government does it, right?
As a FOSS developer, let me provide some (hopefully eye-opening) perspective. Personally, I think you have it all wrong.
I spend most of my time doing open source work for paying customers. I also reserve some time to do software development work for the community as a volunteer. Most users understand that my time is limited and don't go out demanding that their specific issues should get top priority. At the same time, we sometimes get serious bug reports from the community and fix those as quickly as we can. People sometimes provide a critical feedback and this is fine. It is quite different from placing demands on my freetime. Although it rarely happens, it has been known to happen. IMO the proper response is a polite reminder that we will get to it when time permits.
What is my goal? To produce the best software possible. We get all kinds of requests which could undermine that. So the approach is always to engage users over the lists and discuss what they really want to accomplish vs what they are requesting. Eventually we can usually come to an understanding of a solution which meets everyone's needs. Am I happy that software I am helping to build is seeing increasing adoption? Absolutely, but I won't back making changes which undermine quality in order to speed that adoption.
BTW, the next version of LedgerSMB (1.3) will be a giant step forward. We are now finally getting close to a beta on it. However, you wouldn't believe the requests we get. For example: "Please let us delete invoices" or "we want to repost invoices." The answer in these cases is "We don't generally support that because it is not in line with GAAP." The "But Quickbooks lets me do it" response is not sufficient. In these cases, however, there is a valid request by a user to make the exeperience of using the software more pleasant. It is just incorrectly tied to the experience of another product. The simple fact is sometimes matters are not ripe for action.
Also done within Emacs....
After reading the article, I concluded that the guy's points were misdirected. This really is criticism at the article, but he complains that everyone complains about his blog entries. Reading the comments to those blog entries, I couldn't find a single example of what he was talking about. I saw some genuine disagreements (how to measure success of software development, whether he misrepresented where Macs fit into the picture, etc), but no complaining about his posts per se. In short, he largely failed to support his allegation, that people took his criticism as complaining.
In short, a lot of the issues are that some of his criticism doesn't withstand a critical analysis. The closest I saw to complaining about his criticism were simply stressing that modest strides WERE the proper way forward, and that he seemed to be asking for rapid revolutions which would be harmful to good software engineering.
Now, as for the question of freeloaders, I think you have a valid point but one which needs some clarification. The problem is that some people EXPECT volunteers to prioritize their specific concerns. In reality volunteers end up with a small amount of time compared to the concerns raised by all the users. There is a difference between a polite request or a post that "wouldn't it be cool if..." and "why won't you work on your free time to solve MY issues." There needs to be some understanding that although most volunteers DO understand that fixing as many of these issues would be good and do tend to spend time doing so, unless you expect to pay someone to make these changes, don't expect it to be done on YOUR schedule.
BTW, this dynamic is not limited to open source software. People complain all the time about Microsoft not fixing some bug fast enough, etc. The dynamic is the same, but such people actually have a stronger case, since they are paying customers. At the same time, my experience is that, since resources are still limited, people don't understand that these resources need to be shared.
At the same time, I have seen open source projects respond HOSTILLY towards other parties meeting user demands that they were not meeting. This is totally inexcusable, but is not the responsibility of the full open source community to respond to it.
Sure. Except, crappy as the Javascript "encryption" is, now you're in violation of the DMCA by reverse engineering a copy protection mechanism.
I don't think so. In this case the circumvention tool is the javascript they are providing. If you are importing it in violation of the DMCA, they are distributing it also in violation of the DMCA.
Running a standard javascript engine against the javascript/obfuscated html does not seem to my mind to be a circumvention device any more than a standard web browser is. After all, I could use firebug to do pretty much all the same things inside the web browser....
I used to provide tech support for MS Access at Microsoft. I could tell you horror stories....
That isn't quite right. Some wireless cards work ok (for example Intel or Atheros chipsets). The thing is that there are usually firmware-level interfaces that have to be distributed as well. That is a fully separate problem from being forced to run a Windows driver on Linux, extract firmware code from the driver, etc.
I disagree. I think code system analysis probably does happen at big companies involved in Linux development (Cray, IBM, etc). I would be willing to bet there is a lot more detatched review than people give credit for.
Also I would add that user experience studies are not all that uncommon, and articles about "I tried Linux, and this is why it didn't work for me" occur frequently. Some of these are actually taken fairly seriously.
However, one of the issues here which I think muddies the waters considerably is the dispersed target problem. If I criticize Linux chances are, I am really criticizing one distro. This makes it easy for the Fedora folks to ignore desktop Linux complaints made against OpenSuSE, etc.
I think the argument for FOSS in the sense that it can be changed is actually a good one but is generally misplaced. I.e. businesses get a LOT of flexibility in being able to do all sorts of things they couldn't do otherwise, but the smaller the business the less that matters (fewer resources to spend on it), and hence individuals are largely left out of the process.
Right now, the thing to note is that there are folks using Linux on the desktop who want to be using Linux on the desktop. They generally buy compatible hardware from the get-go etc. Then there are people who don't have that drive, so the hardware issues are a big deal to them. Now, I think that Linux is clearly good enough for the desktop for the first group of people, but clearly not for the second, and these groups will remain separate until hardware vendors throw their support behind Linux en masse. Little steps in the mean time are great because they mean that SOME people in the second group will slowly migrate to the first group, but this is going to be a long process.
The fact is, if you WANT to run Linux on the desktop, it is quite good enough. It isn't good enough for the rest, however.
One of my big beefs right now is wireless cards. I really shouldn't have to rely on ndiswrapper to get decent support for wireless with most cards. However I do. Because I WANT to run Linux on the desktop, it is fine. If I didn't want to do so, I would probably switch to Windows.
http://volokh.com/posts/1238285248.shtml
Now we can wait for all of the similar trolls to be rewritten according to this story.
Er, so why can't we also send a message to teens that being dumbasses and taking naked pics of themselves is probably not the smartest fucking thing to do?
Sure. Send a message. Send the information to the parents and have them figure out what to do.
BTW, of this, only one of the photos even approached being a "naked pic" anyway. The others were underwear pics, from the waist up (no real nudity). Furthermore, merely having breasts exposed seems to push the limits of the child pornography 1A exception to new levels, and I don't think that would fly in court either.
The prosecutor even threatened to prosecute a kid over child pornography over having a picture taken of her in a bathing suit. Get that....
Under this standard, JC Penny's and Sears are distributing child pornography and need to be stopped!
As a funny aside, in Massacheussets, there is an attempt to amend child pornography laws to also include disabled persons and persons over 60 years old.
If that one gets passed, I really want to watch hearings on its Constitutionality, especially if it gets to the Supreme Court. I want to see how the justices will respond to being told that consent is irrelevent for folks over 60 years old, given that Roberts is 54, Alito is 58, and everyone else on the court is over 60.
Finally, a law SO blatantly Unconstitutional that the Supreme Court would have to declare themselves legally incompetent NOT to strike it down.....
Still, you have to wonder whether a software developer building inhouse applications for a company in Japan really needs to know English to a reasoanble fluency, and whether the effort gaining the language skill will pay off by itself.
So I don't see a reasonable argument that EVERY SINGLE developer needs to know English. However, I think that global collaboration is facilitated by an international standard.
Not to mention so many affixes that a single word and a sentence might generally be identical. Imagine a language where you have a following word that means:
"I like to eat eggs for breakfast."
Ok, that is a manufactured example, but in some of the polysynthetic Native American languages, it gets pretty close to that.
Ummmm..
IANAL, but I thought that a permanent order of this sort would have to be determined on the basis of a trial (in this case, presumably a bench trial). Or am I missing something?
Or are you characterizing a trial as "maybe a few hearings?"
This REALLY needs to be decided on Constitutional grounds. A little research will show that these sorts of threats and even charges are becoming commonplace against teens. This is one reason this needs to go to trial. Let's send a CLEAR message to prosecutors that this is fundamentally a violation of teens' protected speech and outside the (narrow) child pornography exception.
Note that in other cases obscenity charges are used. However, this poses extremely problematic issues as well. Normal obscenity law depends on a jury to decide a relevant contemporary community standard. Since there are no jury trials in juvenile court, the judge gets to decide what is obscene and what is not and thus IMO this makes the law as applied to juveniles unconstitutionally vague (because a judge alone decides matters in what would fundamentally be an arbitrary way).
Umm..... Only if you include the lowest end.
In which case, I would agree that you are right. MySQL is an alternative to db's like MS Access..... Anything beyond what you SHOULD use Access for complexity-wise you can't use MySQL for either because you can run into many of the same basic problems. This means MySQL is really great at some things (like lightweight CMS stuff, maybe also one-off line of business tools) but these aren't really where the commercial RDBMS market really is. In those cases, usually you have a single db with many, many applications accessing the same data. Even the most recent versions of MySQL make this impossible in terms of validating data integrity as well as an RDBMS should.
Which brings me back to the idea that MySQL is OK for single-app db's. It is totally inadequate for multi-app db's.