Most top level executives don't know DES from GPG or IDEA. What they do understand is when you send them an email with links to to three Wall Street Journal articles, Target, TJ Maxx, and Home Depot, then say "to prevent this from happening to our company, we need to have the following policies in place:".
That's a very interesting idea. I wonder what kind of responses that would get, if asked of thoughtful people. Not exactly what I had in mind, but very interesting.
I'll give you an example of something I did and try to apply it to your scenario. I wondered, are the policies of the democrats or those of the republicans better for the economy? I had an "opinion" (a guess), and I wanted to know what was actually better. We've tried both, so what would be an objective way to measure them and see which have worked better? I decided to chart economic growth under D presidents and under R presidents. I figured the president proposes and signs a budget for the next year, and the effects of that budget may not be fully felt for a couple of years, so accurate results needed some sort of lag factor. I decided I'd look at budget years, which are one year later than when they take office and leave office. In other words, Bush II would get the blame (or credit) for 2009, because he signed the 2009 budget. Obama's credit or blame would start with his first budget, 2010. Note that I did NOT look at the numbers before deciding on what criteria would be fair. I had no idea what the economic growth numbers for 2004 were, but Bush II was in office at that time, so he'd get the credit or blame for whatever happened in 2004. In other words, I chose criteria that I thought would give the right answer, not criteria that would support my opinion/guess. I did this back in 2007, and here is the chart: http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo... Of course the 2008 mortgage crash happened soon after.
So to apply that to your question, "do extremely long terms of copyright promote the progress of the arts and sciences?" You and I would probably guess "no". I bet there are some countries with short copyright terms, and we know there are some countries with long terms. Perhaps we could compare countries with short copyright vs countries with long copyright. Now we just need an objective, numerical measurement of "promote the progress of the arts and sciences". I can't think of a good one of the top of my head; perhaps you can. The best I can think of would be index of several numbers: Nobel prizes received Scientific progress should cause economic progress, so economic growth is an indirect measure. ???
I'd think we'd want to decide ahead of time how to weight those measurements, then put the numbers into Excel and click the button to generate the chart. If we do that, we'd then be able to make statements like: Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generated 40% more Nobel prize winning scientific advancements per capita Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generate 25% more literature per capita Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years have economic growth 3% higher on average.
If you happen to do any such analysis, I'd be very interested in seeing the results. Only if you choose the criteria before knowing what the results will be, though - anyone can cherry pick statistics to support any conclusion they want.
When everybody, liberals and conservatives, think I'm wrong, the first thing I do is double check - I might actually be wrong. If I could be right more than half the time, I'd go to Vegas or Wall Street and come home a billionaire.
After double and triple checking, if I'm actually right than at that point I should have clear, objective proof that I'm right. I had to prove to myself that everyone else is wrong, so I've got solid evidence now, right? So I start showing that evidence to the electorate and to the elected. I post it on my congressman's Facebook wall, I post it on Slash, and I encourage the electorate to vote in lawmakers who will make right decisions.
Google and Oracle were negotiating what the price would be for Google to copy what they did, and those negotiations were around $100 million. Google had three choices - pay $100 million, fight this lawsuit, or use another language such as Python, which has a BSD-style license. Google decided it was worth fighting this suit rather than using Python (or any of 100 other open languages). The fact that using the Java API rather than the Python API was worth fighting this lawsuit about shows that it was valuable.
The duly elected representatives of the public who are Constitutionally charged with making these decisions all think you're wrong. Liberal or conservative, everybody says you're wrong. So you find the only way to get what you want is to find an appointed official willing to exceed and abuse the power they are granted, to violate the Constitutional form of government by legislating from the bench as tiny tyrants.
When that becomes your strategy, you're doing it wrong.
> the court has to decide whether copyright protection should cover APIs.
It is perhaps worth noting that it is the job of Congress, not the courts, to decide what the law SHOULD be. The court's job is to decide whether the wording Congress used covers this case or not. Not whether it SHOULD cover this API, but whether it DOES.
I'm now curious if, as half pint hal suggests, you code a lot of JavaScript, which auto corrects missing semicolons at the ends of lines. If the terminating semicolon is implied, it is logical that the terminating period would be implied.
Ever sense I read The Design of Everyday Things I've been interested in the psychology of error.
I should apply the same set of rules to everyone first because that's the first fundamental basis of fairness. Is there any logical reason my stuff should be protected and not theirs? Maybe there is and maybe there isn't, but "mine should be protected because it's mine, theirs shouldn't because it's theirs" doesn't make any sense.
Secondly, unintended consequences. Suppose we formulate the rule that "anything which describes functionality can not be protected " in order to not protect Oracle's interests. That rule is going to effect thousands of other situations, now and in the future. We don't know what situations it might effect- it might have major negative effects on an organization I like, such as Apache or the Linux foundation. If you can't copyright something, that means you can't apply the GPL or other open-source license to it. I should be careful to support good rules because the rules make sense, not because the new rule will allow my favored part to win this one dispute. A bad rule will likely have far more significant bad consequences later.
That's an interesting thing to think about - any exceptions on copyright designed to prohibit restrictive licensing will equally prohibit CCL and BSD licensing. Either the author controls the licensing or they don't. I like having the right to license my work under GPLv2.
If it's illegal to do that, they aren't supposed to do that. They are allowed to do that with Perl instead. Someone suggested that I implement export of Excel spreadsheets in an open source project I work on. That format is covered by Microsoft patents, so I instead export csv, which Excel can open.
If a company wants to lock things up and not allow me to contribute to an ecosystem around their product that's fine - I'll implement something based on open standards instead. I don't like it when companies do that, but they don't have to do what I want.
That fact that it was clearly valuable to Google refutes the claim that it's nothing, that it's worthless. That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable. What I try to avoid listening to is what my preference of outcome is for this particular case. Great cases make bad law. Instead, I should seek to apply the same fair rules to everyone. If I want my valuable property to be protected from unlawful taking, I have to apply the same rules to Oracle- even though I dislike Oracle.
> Imagine if The Open Group had been able to enforce the rule that you couldn't ship anything that implements any of the POSIX APIs unless you implemented the full set and paid them for certification.
Maybe they could have, that's the question being answered now. Certainly I'm glad they didn't, and I'm very glad Microsoft and others have not similarly controlled specifications / APIs they've developed. That can't decide my thinking on the matter, though. I'd like it if you gave me $10,000; I recognize that you have the right to keep your money. I want Oracle to completely open all of their stuff; that doesn't mean they don't have the right to do other than what I prefer.
I'm just curious, is your keyboard broken, no period key? I ask because you seem like a native English speaker, don't seem like a moron, and used other punctuation such as commas and - wtf ellipsis. How do you type an ellipsis but not periods?
It's kind of tough to define "SCO" in a way that predates 1988, but okay.
Yes, Android implements both the Java Language Specification and some lower level stuff (is a copy of Java, arguably) . So let's have a look at the license related to that: https://docs.oracle.com/javase...
Note it says you may not implement the spec because that would be copying Java, you may make copies of the documentation for certain purposes.
Linux implements part of POSIX. Have a look at that license.
Check out the graph of IE market share versus murder rate.
This is precisely the same thing. They picked two things that changed over the last 20 years and reported them as if this would test a cause and effect relationship. If you chart Obama's age vs atmospheric CO2 levels, you'll see that the older Obama gets, the higher CO2 there are. To save the planet, we must kill Obama now before he gets any older, thereby increasing CO2.
Over the last 30 years, speed limits on highways have increased. Also, the speed of the "information superhighway " has increased. Therefore, for faster internet just raise freeway speed limits.
POSIX is explicitly an open set of standards, Richard Stallman of GNU chose the name. As an open standard, the copyright allows both SCO and Red Hat to implement them.
Also, POSIX predates SCO (barely), so both implementations derive from the standards, POSIX is not derived from SCO.
Sure you can find studies either way. Most studies show that what we see and hear affects what we do, but sure you can find some that look at a completely spurious correlation and claim otherwise. Check out "Internet Explorer vs murder". It's hilarious, and very similar to this study - comparing trends over time rather than comparing groups who have/do one thing with groups who don't.
Rather than using spurious correlations with literally thousands of other factors in play, a study can do the obvious- compare kids who do watch crap vs kids who don't. Duh. When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Have you ever been to a country other than your own? You may have noticed that people in Iran have a different outlook and act differently from people in the Netherlands. That could be genetic, or it could be that what people see and hear as they grow up affects them, that they tend to be similar to what they see. I'm betting on the latter.
Hmm, so they'd know HOW, mechanically , to screw everything up, but not know why what they're doing is wrong and dangerous? I'm not sure I'd want that. I'd prefer that they be very good at their job, I be very good at mine, and both of us clearly understand that we don't know each other's fields.
IT people, perhaps- it's probably good if the sysadmin can do: for file in *.spam do
mv $file spam/ do
I don't want my accountant trying to write a payroll system as a shit ton of Excel macros, though.
My strong support of free speech makes me wish that were true. However, I've seen that kids who grow up watching violence and vulgarity tend to be inclined to violence and vulgarity, while people like my wife who grew up on G-rated material tend to act in G-rated ways, and be uncomfortable around that which they haven't been exposed to.
When we were dating, my foul language was a major turnoff to my wife, who had grown up around more polite language and thus didn't cuss herself. I had to clean up my language if I wanted to be with her, which I did. Other kids of friends and family are exposed to, and desensitized to, stuff that makes my wife quite uncomfortable.
Common sense is that what we continuously feed into our minds will of course have an effect. That in no way implies that the GOVERNMENT should adopt any particular policy. It does mean that just as parents are mindful of not letting kids fill their bodies with junk food, we parents should be mindful of how much junk is fed to our kids' minds.
Google had a choice to either develop their own API, license the Java API, or take the Java API and fight a law suit about it. When license negotiations didn't work out, they decided that using the Java API rather than their own was worth fighting this suit over. So clearly the API was worth a lot to Google.
> A version 2.0 which is also under a renewed copyright, since the guts were re-written. I'm failing to understand the point.
I'm not GP, but I think their point is you end up with version 2.0 OF THE SAME SOFTWARE. Since it's essentially a next version of the same software, and heavily based on the design of the first version, it is a copy or derivative work of v1. Since it is a copy, the copy-rights of the v1 author should be respected.
GP reasons that in the Oracle / Google case, Google essentially made a v2 COPY of Java. To have the right to make such a copy, they needed a copy right license.
It is unfortunate that the precedent- setting case involves such well-known companies that most of us have significant feelings about. It clouds the actual issue under discussion. I wanted Google to win because I like Google better than I like Oracle, but given that Google started by trying to negotiate a license, that indicates they thought they needed a license.
It seems that reports of the death of PowerShell were exaggerated. Given that, I wonder why it is while most *nix admins use ssh, which has snappy response even with a kbps connection, I've never heard of a Windows admin able to work with anything less than a full gui remote desktop - even when it was on their 3G phone. Why have they spent hours tediously waiting for the screen to refresh between clicks when they're remote if there was a perfectly usable console shell?
My impression has been that the many different shell environments haven't been perfectly usable. That makes sense given Microsoft keeps tossing them out and replacing them with a completely different one. Are they in fact perfectly usable, but Windows admins just aren't smart enough to use the right tool for the job? That would surprise me.
Slashdot Mirror
The word "bing" means a heaping pile. I'd like to ask Microsoft "your search engine is a heaping pile of, exactly? "
Most top level executives don't know DES from GPG or IDEA.
What they do understand is when you send them an email with links to to three Wall Street Journal articles, Target, TJ Maxx, and Home Depot, then say "to prevent this from happening to our company, we need to have the following policies in place:".
That's a very interesting idea. I wonder what kind of responses that would get, if asked of thoughtful people. Not exactly what I had in mind, but very interesting.
I'll give you an example of something I did and try to apply it to your scenario. I wondered, are the policies of the democrats or those of the republicans better for the economy? I had an "opinion" (a guess), and I wanted to know what was actually better. We've tried both, so what would be an objective way to measure them and see which have worked better? I decided to chart economic growth under D presidents and under R presidents. I figured the president proposes and signs a budget for the next year, and the effects of that budget may not be fully felt for a couple of years, so accurate results needed some sort of lag factor. I decided I'd look at budget years, which are one year later than when they take office and leave office. In other words, Bush II would get the blame (or credit) for 2009, because he signed the 2009 budget. Obama's credit or blame would start with his first budget, 2010. Note that I did NOT look at the numbers before deciding on what criteria would be fair. I had no idea what the economic growth numbers for 2004 were, but Bush II was in office at that time, so he'd get the credit or blame for whatever happened in 2004. In other words, I chose criteria that I thought would give the right answer, not criteria that would support my opinion/guess. I did this back in 2007, and here is the chart:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
Of course the 2008 mortgage crash happened soon after.
So to apply that to your question, "do extremely long terms of copyright promote the progress of the arts and sciences?" You and I would probably guess "no". I bet there are some countries with short copyright terms, and we know there are some countries with long terms. Perhaps we could compare countries with short copyright vs countries with long copyright. Now we just need an objective, numerical measurement of "promote the progress of the arts and sciences". I can't think of a good one of the top of my head; perhaps you can. The best I can think of would be index of several numbers:
Nobel prizes received
Scientific progress should cause economic progress, so economic growth is an indirect measure.
???
I'd think we'd want to decide ahead of time how to weight those measurements, then put the numbers into Excel and click the button to generate the chart. If we do that, we'd then be able to make statements like:
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generated 40% more Nobel prize winning scientific advancements per capita
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generate 25% more literature per capita
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years have economic growth 3% higher on average.
If you happen to do any such analysis, I'd be very interested in seeing the results. Only if you choose the criteria before knowing what the results will be, though - anyone can cherry pick statistics to support any conclusion they want.
When everybody, liberals and conservatives, think I'm wrong, the first thing I do is double check - I might actually be wrong. If I could be right more than half the time, I'd go to Vegas or Wall Street and come home a billionaire.
After double and triple checking, if I'm actually right than at that point I should have clear, objective proof that I'm right. I had to prove to myself that everyone else is wrong, so I've got solid evidence now, right? So I start showing that evidence to the electorate and to the elected. I post it on my congressman's Facebook wall, I post it on Slash, and I encourage the electorate to vote in lawmakers who will make right decisions.
With just the API, you've got _nothing_.
Except nobody with a brain is making that claim.
Agreed.
Google and Oracle were negotiating what the price would be for Google to copy what they did, and those negotiations were around $100 million. Google had three choices - pay $100 million, fight this lawsuit, or use another language such as Python, which has a BSD-style license. Google decided it was worth fighting this suit rather than using Python (or any of 100 other open languages). The fact that using the Java API rather than the Python API was worth fighting this lawsuit about shows that it was valuable.
In other words:
The duly elected representatives of the public who are Constitutionally charged with making these decisions all think you're wrong. Liberal or conservative, everybody says you're wrong. So you find the only way to get what you want is to find an appointed official willing to exceed and abuse the power they are granted, to violate the Constitutional form of government by legislating from the bench as tiny tyrants.
When that becomes your strategy, you're doing it wrong.
> the court has to decide whether copyright protection should cover APIs.
It is perhaps worth noting that it is the job of Congress, not the courts, to decide what the law SHOULD be. The court's job is to decide whether the wording Congress used covers this case or not. Not whether it SHOULD cover this API, but whether it DOES.
TFA says:
The Golzen family believes the display will live up to Frank’s original goal of making the site available to the public.
I was comparing real-world road driving I've seen reported. Is that 6.9L figure a government estimate based on a synthetic formula?
I'm now curious if, as half pint hal suggests, you code a lot of JavaScript, which auto corrects missing semicolons at the ends of lines. If the terminating semicolon is implied, it is logical that the terminating period would be implied.
Ever sense I read The Design of Everyday Things I've been interested in the psychology of error.
I should apply the same set of rules to everyone first because that's the first fundamental basis of fairness. Is there any logical reason my stuff should be protected and not theirs? Maybe there is and maybe there isn't, but "mine should be protected because it's mine, theirs shouldn't because it's theirs" doesn't make any sense.
Secondly, unintended consequences. Suppose we formulate the rule that "anything which describes functionality can not be protected " in order to not protect Oracle's interests. That rule is going to effect thousands of other situations, now and in the future. We don't know what situations it might effect- it might have major negative effects on an organization I like, such as Apache or the Linux foundation. If you can't copyright something, that means you can't apply the GPL or other open-source license to it. I should be careful to support good rules because the rules make sense, not because the new rule will allow my favored part to win this one dispute. A bad rule will likely have far more significant bad consequences later.
That's an interesting thing to think about - any exceptions on copyright designed to prohibit restrictive licensing will equally prohibit CCL and BSD licensing. Either the author controls the licensing or they don't. I like having the right to license my work under GPLv2.
If it's illegal to do that, they aren't supposed to do that. They are allowed to do that with Perl instead. Someone suggested that I implement export of Excel spreadsheets in an open source project I work on. That format is covered by Microsoft patents, so I instead export csv, which Excel can open.
If a company wants to lock things up and not allow me to contribute to an ecosystem around their product that's fine - I'll implement something based on open standards instead. I don't like it when companies do that, but they don't have to do what I want.
That fact that it was clearly valuable to Google refutes the claim that it's nothing, that it's worthless. That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable. What I try to avoid listening to is what my preference of outcome is for this particular case. Great cases make bad law. Instead, I should seek to apply the same fair rules to everyone. If I want my valuable property to be protected from unlawful taking, I have to apply the same rules to Oracle- even though I dislike Oracle.
> Imagine if The Open Group had been able to enforce the rule that you couldn't ship anything that implements any of the POSIX APIs unless you implemented the full set and paid them for certification.
Maybe they could have, that's the question being answered now. Certainly I'm glad they didn't, and I'm very glad Microsoft and others have not similarly controlled specifications / APIs they've developed. That can't decide my thinking on the matter, though. I'd like it if you gave me $10,000; I recognize that you have the right to keep your money. I want Oracle to completely open all of their stuff; that doesn't mean they don't have the right to do other than what I prefer.
You've expressed the positive possibilities well.
I'm just curious, is your keyboard broken, no period key? I ask because you seem like a native English speaker, don't seem like a moron, and used other punctuation such as commas and - wtf ellipsis. How do you type an ellipsis but not periods?
It's kind of tough to define "SCO" in a way that predates 1988, but okay.
Yes, Android implements both the Java Language Specification and some lower level stuff (is a copy of Java, arguably) .
So let's have a look at the license related to that:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase...
Note it says you may not implement the spec because that would be copying Java, you may make copies of the documentation for certain purposes.
Linux implements part of POSIX. Have a look at that license.
Check out the graph of IE market share versus murder rate.
This is precisely the same thing. They picked two things that changed over the last 20 years and reported them as if this would test a cause and effect relationship. If you chart Obama's age vs atmospheric CO2 levels, you'll see that the older Obama gets, the higher CO2 there are. To save the planet, we must kill Obama now before he gets any older, thereby increasing CO2.
Over the last 30 years, speed limits on highways have increased. Also, the speed of the "information superhighway " has increased. Therefore, for faster internet just raise freeway speed limits.
POSIX is explicitly an open set of standards, Richard Stallman of GNU chose the name. As an open standard, the copyright allows both SCO and Red Hat to implement them.
Also, POSIX predates SCO (barely), so both implementations derive from the standards, POSIX is not derived from SCO.
Sure you can find studies either way. Most studies show that what we see and hear affects what we do, but sure you can find some that look at a completely spurious correlation and claim otherwise. Check out "Internet Explorer vs murder". It's hilarious, and very similar to this study - comparing trends over time rather than comparing groups who have/do one thing with groups who don't.
Rather than using spurious correlations with literally thousands of other factors in play, a study can do the obvious- compare kids who do watch crap vs kids who don't. Duh. When you compare kids who see a lot of crap vs those who don't, shockingly the kids who see crap tend to do crap.
Have you ever been to a country other than your own? You may have noticed that people in Iran have a different outlook and act differently from people in the Netherlands. That could be genetic, or it could be that what people see and hear as they grow up affects them, that they tend to be similar to what they see. I'm betting on the latter.
Hmm, so they'd know HOW, mechanically , to screw everything up, but not know why what they're doing is wrong and dangerous? I'm not sure I'd want that. I'd prefer that they be very good at their job, I be very good at mine, and both of us clearly understand that we don't know each other's fields.
IT people, perhaps- it's probably good if the sysadmin can do:
for file in *.spam
do
mv $file spam/
do
I don't want my accountant trying to write a payroll system as a shit ton of Excel macros, though.
The Sprinter is LESS efficient, it gets WORSE mileage.
My strong support of free speech makes me wish that were true. However, I've seen that kids who grow up watching violence and vulgarity tend to be inclined to violence and vulgarity, while people like my wife who grew up on G-rated material tend to act in G-rated ways, and be uncomfortable around that which they haven't been exposed to.
When we were dating, my foul language was a major turnoff to my wife, who had grown up around more polite language and thus didn't cuss herself. I had to clean up my language if I wanted to be with her, which I did. Other kids of friends and family are exposed to, and desensitized to, stuff that makes my wife quite uncomfortable.
Common sense is that what we continuously feed into our minds will of course have an effect. That in no way implies that the GOVERNMENT should adopt any particular policy. It does mean that just as parents are mindful of not letting kids fill their bodies with junk food, we parents should be mindful of how much junk is fed to our kids' minds.
> With just the API, you've got _nothing_.
Google had a choice to either develop their own API, license the Java API, or take the Java API and fight a law suit about it. When license negotiations didn't work out, they decided that using the Java API rather than their own was worth fighting this suit over. So clearly the API was worth a lot to Google.
> A version 2.0 which is also under a renewed copyright, since the guts were re-written. I'm failing to understand the point.
I'm not GP, but I think their point is you end up with version 2.0 OF THE SAME SOFTWARE. Since it's essentially a next version of the same software, and heavily based on the design of the first version, it is a copy or derivative work of v1. Since it is a copy, the copy-rights of the v1 author should be respected.
GP reasons that in the Oracle / Google case, Google essentially made a v2 COPY of Java. To have the right to make such a copy, they needed a copy right license.
It is unfortunate that the precedent- setting case involves such well-known companies that most of us have significant feelings about. It clouds the actual issue under discussion. I wanted Google to win because I like Google better than I like Oracle, but given that Google started by trying to negotiate a license, that indicates they thought they needed a license.
It seems that reports of the death of PowerShell were exaggerated. Given that, I wonder why it is while most *nix admins use ssh, which has snappy response even with a kbps connection, I've never heard of a Windows admin able to work with anything less than a full gui remote desktop - even when it was on their 3G phone. Why have they spent hours tediously waiting for the screen to refresh between clicks when they're remote if there was a perfectly usable console shell?
My impression has been that the many different shell environments haven't been perfectly usable. That makes sense given Microsoft keeps tossing them out and replacing them with a completely different one. Are they in fact perfectly usable, but Windows admins just aren't smart enough to use the right tool for the job? That would surprise me.