simply stating the fact that opensourcing software means that EVERYBODY gets free access to the source, and that includes people outside the political entity
Yes, indeed, open sourcing means people "outside the political entity" can get free access to the source. One hopes that they will find it useful for learning something, understanding the benefits of sharing and cooperation, and generally improving their lot in life. Perhaps even you might understand these principles some day.
Current government policy is downright hostile, this change would make it less so. But I wouldn't characterize the resulting policy as "open source friendly"; at best it would make policy comparable to other European nations.
Whether this passes remains to be seen. This is just a committee proposal to study the issue; that might be a serious effort, or simply a way of railroading the idea. And industry in Germany is very powerful. They usually don't have to bother with inconveniences like bribery or lobbying, they just say what they want and get it.
Hmm, is the study arguing then that these students should be excluded? If so, what is the basis? Are they not really in the country?
The analysis is about policy recommendations for improving schools. If US school performance is low because of a larger proportion of lower class students in school, then the problem is not with the quality of the schools and improving the quality of the schools may not result in better student performance.
Or are they sidestepping the issue of the massive difference in standards of living in the United States?
You mean the fact that poor Americans make about as much money as middle class Europeans, yet the Americans do so much more poorly on tests? Yes, they have been sidestepping that.
If you want to argue that his actions were justified and served some purpose, you need to start with the facts. JSTOR archives lots of stuff from many sources and all over the world, including academic and artistic writings from people who actually depend on writing for a living. Swartz couldn't know which parts of those were publicly funded and which parts weren't. If he succeeded at downloading and distributing this stuff, he would necessarily have distributed a lot of files that weren't publicly funded and that had valid copyrights.
and negative viewpoints yours are normally the result of someone who hasn't used their public library in a long time.
Actually, I use public and university libraries regularly, but much less than I did a decade ago. They are physically inconvenient to get to for me, they usually don't have the books I need, and their eBook offerings are inconvenient and very limited. Many of the books that I used to go to libraries for, "the classics", are available for free now. Most of the usage I get out of the library these days is inter-library loans for old reference works that are hard to get, but I could do that by mail myself (the library is effectively just a maildrop). My impression from visiting US public libraries is that they offer a bit more e-books but otherwise aren't all that different.
I have worked in Libraries for over 20 years now, and I can tell you that we are busier now than we have EVER been.
That may be, but library usage overall is declining. People like me, who used to spend a lot of time in libraries, now only go occasionally. Many students never go to the library at all. Instead of waving your hands about how busy you are and insinuating that everybody who questions you must be illiterate, I think you need to explain better what it is that keeps you busy and what function it serves in the community.
Just to put this into perspective: US public libraries spent more than 10 billion dollars in 2009. That's enough money to give every US household an E-reader, free access to all the classic books, and a good selection of paid books every year.
You sound like you haven't been to the library in a long while. I get all my TV and movie DVDs from the library. All my e-books (which I can check-out online from home via the web). All my CDs. And free WiFi when I'm onsite. Why are you paying for free stuff?
Why haven't I "been there"? Because the selection is poor and access is inconvenient and costly (once you take time and transportation into account).
Public libraries were one of the great achievements of Western civilization. However, it seems to me their time has passed. Classic books are available freely anything, and for books still in copyright, a variety of online "for profit" lending options make more sense than somehow tying reading to a physical building. Book rentals generally are cheaper than a milkshake at McDonalds, and healthier too.
Perhaps, but the "atomic scientists", as well as a lot of the political debates, try to justify political action with supposed "existential threats" to humanity.
Homo sapiens hasn't faced an existential threat since we migrated out of Africa. You couldn't wipe out humanity if you tried with current technology.
The only existential threats to humanity are massive geological events or a huge asteroid hit. By the time our technology becomes a realistic threat, we'll already be all over the solar system.
There are plenty of viruses in the wild with high mortality rates and every combination of incubation period and contagiousness you can imagine; none of them have wiped us out yet. It seems to take a bit more to create a global pandemic, and nobody knows how to do it.
Sooner or later, there will be a serious pandemic, something that will wipe out a significant percentage of humanity. There are genetic traces of such past disasters, and we see them in animals occasionally. But it won't be cooked up deliberately, and it won't be the end of humanity or even civilization, because we have effective countermeasures.
I think to the prosecutors and many outsiders, this looked more like a case of a well-known and respected online activist challenging existing law and copyright holders, the prosecutor and the copyright holders accepting the challenge, and both sides wanting to see it through to the end to set a precedent. It just seems odd to hear now that Aaron would have wanted a quick and quiet settlement.
What was the point of Aaron's copying of those journal articles then in the first place? It's not like JSTOR is a greedy academic publisher, it's a not-for-profit that has been trying to make academic content available more cheaply and probably has been walking a tightrope between cheap access and dealing with unpleasant and greedy copyright holders.
Slow phones are slow, fast ones are fast, and occasionally things stick on Android, but no more than on comparably priced hardware using "the other" platform. You know, the platform whose fanbois try to smear Android by placing stories about supposed fixes for supposed problems on Android.
when i first got my permit, my employer had to pay me *more* than he would pay a local worker,
Yes. Government policies try to make it harder to hire foreign workers in preference to domestic ones for the subset of jobs that are actually available to foreigners. Cultural and social barriers effectively limit a significant number of jobs to domestic workers. Switzerland also isn't shy about changing the rules when it needs to. Native born Swiss benefit significantly from this system. It's a legitimate system, but SerpentMage went off on a nationalistic rant about how the Swiss were so successful because they were such superior and insightful human beings, and that's nonsense.
Switzerland has been benefitting from its location and status in Europe. But that's coming to an end anyway as the EU demands reciprocity and the aftereffects of WWII and the cold war fade into memory. That's why you have a lot more freedom in Switzerland now than I did when I was working there... and why Switzerland isn't as rich anymore either. The Swiss model can't be replicated, and even if it could be, you wouldn't want to because it's just not a sustainable model for economic prosperity.
Yes, you got that straight: when you're in pain and suffering from a terminal disease, a quick and simple suicide is "more fun" (as in "less painful") than continued suffering.
A number of my older relatives owned guns illegally for that very reason. I'd prefer if they (or I) didn't have to break the law in order to have the option.
Well, after a few decades of programming experience, I usually don't know how to get it right the first time. If you think you do, either the problems you are tackling are boring, or you are overestimating your abilities.
Nearly a quarter of the workforce in Switzerland is foreign and, as far as the Swiss are concerned, effectively disposable. When unemployment goes up in Switzerland, the Swiss just lay off some foreign workers. Working conditions and pay are considerably worse for foreign workers, at least in my experience (I don't know whether they are supposed to be). And unlike the US, the Swiss are very efficient at keeping track of foreigners in the country (regular registration and "papers please") and presumably at getting rid of them when they are no longer needed. It's no wonder that with such a system, the Swiss themselves mostly end up with the secure, high-paying jobs.
How do I know? I was working as a guest worker in Switzerland for a few years. Someone even accidentally made me an offer for the same kind of job I was doing, thinking I was a Swiss citizen, which gave me a better idea of the job market for Swiss citizens, and then quickly retracted it when I told them that I was not.
Despite the differences in pay and conditions, Switzerland is still a nice country to work in for foreigners, and fortunately most Swiss are more modest and polite than you seem to be. But Switzerland doesn't have a magic solution to the problems of economic development, unless you consider using the rest of the world as a cheap and disposable labor pool a magic solution.
In the US, sports like off-road biking, flying small airplanes etc. are common. Many people can commit suicide easily with guns. Here in, Germany it's a lot harder to engage in those activities. Committing suicide requires a lot more effort than simply putting a gun in my mouth. Even getting a motorcycle license is much more involved and costly (it costs many thousands of Euros). If you know German food, it's not surprising obesity rates are a bit lower too. And Germans generally seem a bit verklemmt when it comes to sex, so STD rates are lower too. If you look at US causes of deaths, that does explain a lot of the difference in life expectancy. Does that make life in Germany "better" than in the US? I don't think so. Having fun carries a certain amount of risk, and I'd rather have more fun instead of living a couple years longer in my 80s.
Symbian was popular, but it was a disaster in terms of technology: hard to program with one of the worst mobile user interfaces ever conceived. Nokia needed to change to something else. Windows 8 is actually not that bad in principle, but it was too little too late, and Microsoft has failed to establish it as a viable and popular platform for app developers.
Nokia should have gone with a dual Android (cash cow) and Meego (risky bet, high payoff) strategy. Nokia could have made fantastic Android phones. By now, they have lost their sales channels and their brand name, and lots of other companies have figured out how to make good hardware, so they are basically toast.
If the probability is 10% that you will touch it again and you invest 100h on rewriting it, then, on average, you wasted 90h of programming time for no good reason. As long as the APIs are reasonable, there is no benefit to cleaning up code preemptively.
Code needs to be cleaned up or rewritten only if it causes actual problems, and the person to do it is the person who actually needs it cleaned up.
(There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb, like when people leaving the company are involved or when the code isn't merely messy but truly obscure, but that goes beyond merely "bad code".)
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Yes, indeed, open sourcing means people "outside the political entity" can get free access to the source. One hopes that they will find it useful for learning something, understanding the benefits of sharing and cooperation, and generally improving their lot in life. Perhaps even you might understand these principles some day.
Current government policy is downright hostile, this change would make it less so. But I wouldn't characterize the resulting policy as "open source friendly"; at best it would make policy comparable to other European nations.
Whether this passes remains to be seen. This is just a committee proposal to study the issue; that might be a serious effort, or simply a way of railroading the idea. And industry in Germany is very powerful. They usually don't have to bother with inconveniences like bribery or lobbying, they just say what they want and get it.
The analysis is about policy recommendations for improving schools. If US school performance is low because of a larger proportion of lower class students in school, then the problem is not with the quality of the schools and improving the quality of the schools may not result in better student performance.
You mean the fact that poor Americans make about as much money as middle class Europeans, yet the Americans do so much more poorly on tests? Yes, they have been sidestepping that.
If you want to argue that his actions were justified and served some purpose, you need to start with the facts. JSTOR archives lots of stuff from many sources and all over the world, including academic and artistic writings from people who actually depend on writing for a living. Swartz couldn't know which parts of those were publicly funded and which parts weren't. If he succeeded at downloading and distributing this stuff, he would necessarily have distributed a lot of files that weren't publicly funded and that had valid copyrights.
Actually, I use public and university libraries regularly, but much less than I did a decade ago. They are physically inconvenient to get to for me, they usually don't have the books I need, and their eBook offerings are inconvenient and very limited. Many of the books that I used to go to libraries for, "the classics", are available for free now. Most of the usage I get out of the library these days is inter-library loans for old reference works that are hard to get, but I could do that by mail myself (the library is effectively just a maildrop). My impression from visiting US public libraries is that they offer a bit more e-books but otherwise aren't all that different.
That may be, but library usage overall is declining. People like me, who used to spend a lot of time in libraries, now only go occasionally. Many students never go to the library at all. Instead of waving your hands about how busy you are and insinuating that everybody who questions you must be illiterate, I think you need to explain better what it is that keeps you busy and what function it serves in the community.
Just to put this into perspective: US public libraries spent more than 10 billion dollars in 2009. That's enough money to give every US household an E-reader, free access to all the classic books, and a good selection of paid books every year.
Why haven't I "been there"? Because the selection is poor and access is inconvenient and costly (once you take time and transportation into account).
And it's not "free stuff", tax payers pay for it.
Public libraries were one of the great achievements of Western civilization. However, it seems to me their time has passed. Classic books are available freely anything, and for books still in copyright, a variety of online "for profit" lending options make more sense than somehow tying reading to a physical building. Book rentals generally are cheaper than a milkshake at McDonalds, and healthier too.
Perhaps, but the "atomic scientists", as well as a lot of the political debates, try to justify political action with supposed "existential threats" to humanity.
Homo sapiens hasn't faced an existential threat since we migrated out of Africa. You couldn't wipe out humanity if you tried with current technology.
The only existential threats to humanity are massive geological events or a huge asteroid hit. By the time our technology becomes a realistic threat, we'll already be all over the solar system.
There are plenty of viruses in the wild with high mortality rates and every combination of incubation period and contagiousness you can imagine; none of them have wiped us out yet. It seems to take a bit more to create a global pandemic, and nobody knows how to do it.
Sooner or later, there will be a serious pandemic, something that will wipe out a significant percentage of humanity. There are genetic traces of such past disasters, and we see them in animals occasionally. But it won't be cooked up deliberately, and it won't be the end of humanity or even civilization, because we have effective countermeasures.
I'm a night owl.
This is going to revolutionize nutrition and eating, just like the Ginger/Segway has revolutionized transportation in our cities.
No, I say it based on my iPod and my Galaxy S3.
I think to the prosecutors and many outsiders, this looked more like a case of a well-known and respected online activist challenging existing law and copyright holders, the prosecutor and the copyright holders accepting the challenge, and both sides wanting to see it through to the end to set a precedent. It just seems odd to hear now that Aaron would have wanted a quick and quiet settlement.
What was the point of Aaron's copying of those journal articles then in the first place? It's not like JSTOR is a greedy academic publisher, it's a not-for-profit that has been trying to make academic content available more cheaply and probably has been walking a tightrope between cheap access and dealing with unpleasant and greedy copyright holders.
Slow phones are slow, fast ones are fast, and occasionally things stick on Android, but no more than on comparably priced hardware using "the other" platform. You know, the platform whose fanbois try to smear Android by placing stories about supposed fixes for supposed problems on Android.
Yes. Government policies try to make it harder to hire foreign workers in preference to domestic ones for the subset of jobs that are actually available to foreigners. Cultural and social barriers effectively limit a significant number of jobs to domestic workers. Switzerland also isn't shy about changing the rules when it needs to. Native born Swiss benefit significantly from this system. It's a legitimate system, but SerpentMage went off on a nationalistic rant about how the Swiss were so successful because they were such superior and insightful human beings, and that's nonsense.
Switzerland has been benefitting from its location and status in Europe. But that's coming to an end anyway as the EU demands reciprocity and the aftereffects of WWII and the cold war fade into memory. That's why you have a lot more freedom in Switzerland now than I did when I was working there... and why Switzerland isn't as rich anymore either. The Swiss model can't be replicated, and even if it could be, you wouldn't want to because it's just not a sustainable model for economic prosperity.
Berlin and a few other large cities perhaps are open about sex, but much of Germany is quite conservative (it certainly is around here).
Yes, you got that straight: when you're in pain and suffering from a terminal disease, a quick and simple suicide is "more fun" (as in "less painful") than continued suffering.
A number of my older relatives owned guns illegally for that very reason. I'd prefer if they (or I) didn't have to break the law in order to have the option.
Well, after a few decades of programming experience, I usually don't know how to get it right the first time. If you think you do, either the problems you are tackling are boring, or you are overestimating your abilities.
Nearly a quarter of the workforce in Switzerland is foreign and, as far as the Swiss are concerned, effectively disposable. When unemployment goes up in Switzerland, the Swiss just lay off some foreign workers. Working conditions and pay are considerably worse for foreign workers, at least in my experience (I don't know whether they are supposed to be). And unlike the US, the Swiss are very efficient at keeping track of foreigners in the country (regular registration and "papers please") and presumably at getting rid of them when they are no longer needed. It's no wonder that with such a system, the Swiss themselves mostly end up with the secure, high-paying jobs.
How do I know? I was working as a guest worker in Switzerland for a few years. Someone even accidentally made me an offer for the same kind of job I was doing, thinking I was a Swiss citizen, which gave me a better idea of the job market for Swiss citizens, and then quickly retracted it when I told them that I was not.
Despite the differences in pay and conditions, Switzerland is still a nice country to work in for foreigners, and fortunately most Swiss are more modest and polite than you seem to be. But Switzerland doesn't have a magic solution to the problems of economic development, unless you consider using the rest of the world as a cheap and disposable labor pool a magic solution.
In the US, sports like off-road biking, flying small airplanes etc. are common. Many people can commit suicide easily with guns. Here in, Germany it's a lot harder to engage in those activities. Committing suicide requires a lot more effort than simply putting a gun in my mouth. Even getting a motorcycle license is much more involved and costly (it costs many thousands of Euros). If you know German food, it's not surprising obesity rates are a bit lower too. And Germans generally seem a bit verklemmt when it comes to sex, so STD rates are lower too. If you look at US causes of deaths, that does explain a lot of the difference in life expectancy. Does that make life in Germany "better" than in the US? I don't think so. Having fun carries a certain amount of risk, and I'd rather have more fun instead of living a couple years longer in my 80s.
Symbian was popular, but it was a disaster in terms of technology: hard to program with one of the worst mobile user interfaces ever conceived. Nokia needed to change to something else. Windows 8 is actually not that bad in principle, but it was too little too late, and Microsoft has failed to establish it as a viable and popular platform for app developers.
Nokia should have gone with a dual Android (cash cow) and Meego (risky bet, high payoff) strategy. Nokia could have made fantastic Android phones. By now, they have lost their sales channels and their brand name, and lots of other companies have figured out how to make good hardware, so they are basically toast.
If the probability is 10% that you will touch it again and you invest 100h on rewriting it, then, on average, you wasted 90h of programming time for no good reason. As long as the APIs are reasonable, there is no benefit to cleaning up code preemptively.
Code needs to be cleaned up or rewritten only if it causes actual problems, and the person to do it is the person who actually needs it cleaned up.
(There are some exceptions to this rule of thumb, like when people leaving the company are involved or when the code isn't merely messy but truly obscure, but that goes beyond merely "bad code".)
Just because a junior programmer believes that the code would be improved by changing doesn't mean he is right.
Usually, as part of metrication, countries redefine traditional units. So, you might define: a pound = 500 g, a gallon = 4 l, and a pint = 1/2 l.