That sounds about right to me. I think the top-half-earning programmers will likely get to one or two million dollars in total net worth by retirement. A million dollars isn't a hell of a lot of money.
Give the liberals some credit. The reason the 2nd Amendment is difficult to interpret literally is because the literal reading is absurd. The plain text clearly gives every convicted death row inmate the right to take hydrogen bombs into their high-security prison cells -- because what else does "shall not be infringed" mean?. So, since we can't possibly look to the text to figure out its limits, we pretty much have to find the limits by applying reason -- and reasonable people sometimes disagree.
You have made the mistake of assuming other people are as capable and conscientious as you are (and I am assuming you are). We don't live in a magical fantasyland where everyone is suddenly a responsible gun owner just because they are in a classroom while something is being taught. If a bit of education solved society's ills, society wouldn't have ills. When considering policy consider the heterogeneity of the population, don't project your own strengths (or weaknesses) necessarily onto others.
I took a little online Mongo class and I actually liked it a lot. I thought it was pretty well designed and easy to use, although totally different than all the traditional databases I'd ever used. There's a lot of nerd-hate out there for Mongo and I don't really get it, I think those people can't even stretch the boundaries of their mental jail cells a little bit.
If you use Mongo, use JSON everywhere in your app. That will make your life easier.
I graduated from Dartmouth in 2002 with a CS degree. Let me tell you, the reason they are throwing this big party for BASIC is because that department hasn't done shit since 1964. If I had to do it again, I would do it at a different school. The only good thing I can say about Dartmouth is that I found refuge in a gentle, fostering fraternity -- and that is the one thing that the Dartmouth administration has been bent on destroying. That campus is a wasteland of feuding heartless conservatives and asinine liberals. Good riddance.
BASIC was kind of cool, though. I used it in middle school to print endless streams of naughty words. I don't know if it can do anything besides that.
No. What we agree on is that there is an obviousness standard in the books. What we disagree on is whether the courts have upheld that standard. It is exactly what you quoted me as saying: the courts have failed to uphold the obviousness standard. You can't fail to uphold a standard that doesn't exist. Courts have long since decided that "obvious" means something other than the common meaning, thus they have failed to uphold the standard. This is not the only area of law where lawyers have taken a statutory phrase and bent it so far as to be a travesty of its original meaning, but it's one of the best examples.
obvious / adjective
easily perceived or understood; clear, self-evident, or apparent
You ask a good question based on a bad premise. As I stated, slide-to-unlock was "commercially implemented" thousands of years ago when the first deadbolts were exchanged in commerce, so nobody was copying Apple so much as they joined Apple in copying a longstanding use of fingers.
Imagine a future technology allowing the manipulation of space around a person. Given that technology, which itself would be patentable, would it further be patentable to use that technology to keep you dry in the rain by making a pitched-shape roof over your head? No! We've had roofs for thousands of years, and using such a technology to keep rain off of your head is obvious. How about keeping rain off your head in the shape of an umbrella? No! Umbrellas are prior art for that.
Imagine a future technology allowing the arbitrary control of small bodies of water. Given that technology, which itself would be patentable, would it further be patentable to cause the water to stream up in a gentle arc for the purpose of drinking? No! We already have drinking fountains.
Imagine a technology, available for about a hundred years now, allowing voices to be communicated across a long distance. Given telephones, which were patentable, would it further be patentable to use a phone to say good morning to your mom? No! Saying good morning to your mom is obvious.
Now, imagine a technology, available since 2007 (before, really), where a little box accepts finger input. Given the iPhone, which itself is patentable in a few ways, is it further patentable to use your finger to make a little swipe motion in order to toggle states on the little box? No! It is both obvious and something that fingers have been doing for a long time.
You are right that there is a well-developed body of law on the obviousness standard -- and that body of law is fucking retarded! We have long since lost any connection between that body of law and any meaning of "obvious" which is understood by normal people including the people who passed that law in the first place. I can't blame lawyers for advocating for their clients; I can only blame judges for siding with those lawyers. You can say "hindsight" if you want to, but there must have been a first guy who said good morning to his mom on his telephone, and the fact that "others flocked to copy him" is totally irrelevant to the fact that it is an obvious use of telephones.
Slide-to-unlock has been used for literally, not figuratively, thousands of years. To think this could be patentable is preposterous. Can anyone explain why dead bolts are not sufficient prior art? How about the sliding locks on drill bit cases?
The problem with patents is the failure of courts to uphold the obviousness standard. If you asked a retarded seamonkey in what way could a touch-screen device prevent unwanted input during periods of non-use, the retarded seamonkey would say "uh, hmmm, well, how about by putting the device into a locked-down state that can only be dismissed by sliding your finger around in a predeterminded pattern unlikely to match random input?" That would cover this stupid slide-to-unlock idea, the idea of entering a predefined secret code, and other similar gestures.
For goodness sake, can't device companies come up with any clever ideas that are not obvious? The fraction of patents that I hear about that I think are truly clever is something like two percent. I blame the courts for this problem. Congress gave the courts perfectly reasonable standards, and the courts have steadfastly refused to make reasonable judgements.
Correct. And the reason all that is correct is because that is what is best for the most people, which is the entire point of democracy and the entire point of copyright.
Agreed. This is the answer. Copyright should depend on your willingness to sell the work and to support it if it is the kind of thing that requires support. You could easily escape the sale/support requirements by releasing the copyright. Done; you and GP are the winners of this discussion. Someone turn out the lights, because this thread is finished.
I just came here to point the unreligious to the notion of philosophical naturalism. If you are unreligious, naturalism might help crystalize your worldview.
I'm not clear on your point. How does this affect freedom of speech? Did I miss the part of the story where the government arrested Eich and persecuted him for his speech?
Pfft. Whatevs. You guys both missed the point which is that homeopaths "tap the bottle". That's how it works, with the tapping. Sheesh, you guys are ignorant.
That analogy isn't right either. You can charge more for an 18 wheeler than a 4 wheeler, and maybe you can charge more for a 20 ton vehicle than an 18 ton vehicle, but you can't charge more for an 18-wheeler 20-ton vehicle built by Mack versus an 18-wheeler 20-ton vehicle built by a competitor.
They're both trucks. They both carry the same thing, you should charge the same.
Netflix and its competitors all use IP packets. They all carry the same thing, binary digits, so you should charge the same thing. If someone sends more digits, then you can charge them more, but you can't charge more based on what order the digits are in (meaning, in the order of a movie instead of the order of a web page).
Because you drive a clown car but you don't publicly acknowledge yourself to be a clown. Closeted clowns are not funny, they are embarrassing. Therefore you should be embarrassed.
(I'm kidding. I couldn't fit in that little sardine can, but that just puts the Mini Cooper on the short list of things that make tall men jealous of short men.)
No. You aren't asking the right question. The question is "Where should I go if I want to find high-quality journalism?"
So, where? Where do you go? Do you go to Cable News which is non-amateur but also tepid quality? If you do that, you'll get tepid quality.
Or do you go to the blogs, find good ones, and then read high-quality news? If you do that, you'll get high quality.
Either way you have to tune out BuzzFeed on the blogs and you have to tune out Entertainment Tonite and Glenn Beck on TV. I don't think anyone is going to BuzzFeed or Beck for high-quality news, so they aren't really part of the "sample" set you are trying to make.
I agree with your headline but not with your post. The answer is no, bloggers and journalists are not equal, because blogs are the source of most high-quality journalism. Especially for science and politics, "professional" journalists in the Western world produce lamentably bad stories. The bloggers routinely have to fact-check and provide appropriate context for stories that a journalist could have corrected with five minutes on Ask Jeeves.
It is true that there are a small number of very good pro journalists, and it might be true that the 'average' blog post is lower quality than the 'average' newspaper article, but neither of those is the right measure of quality.
The right question to ask is, what is the source of MOST of the HIGH QUALITY news, and the answer to that is blogs. If you ignore all the low-quality stuff from all sources, and focus on the high quality stuff from all sources, then among that high-quality set, most of that will be from blogs.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds about right to me. I think the top-half-earning programmers will likely get to one or two million dollars in total net worth by retirement. A million dollars isn't a hell of a lot of money.
Yeah. I actually don't even understand what his point is because I can't parse the sentence. What is he trying to say?
Give the liberals some credit. The reason the 2nd Amendment is difficult to interpret literally is because the literal reading is absurd. The plain text clearly gives every convicted death row inmate the right to take hydrogen bombs into their high-security prison cells -- because what else does "shall not be infringed" mean?. So, since we can't possibly look to the text to figure out its limits, we pretty much have to find the limits by applying reason -- and reasonable people sometimes disagree.
You have made the mistake of assuming other people are as capable and conscientious as you are (and I am assuming you are). We don't live in a magical fantasyland where everyone is suddenly a responsible gun owner just because they are in a classroom while something is being taught. If a bit of education solved society's ills, society wouldn't have ills. When considering policy consider the heterogeneity of the population, don't project your own strengths (or weaknesses) necessarily onto others.
It's not even a butchering so much as a complete 180-degree reversal from its meaning today.
I'd love to read your original comment but I can't because this beta bullshit doesn't have any parent links. Fuck you, beta!
I took a little online Mongo class and I actually liked it a lot. I thought it was pretty well designed and easy to use, although totally different than all the traditional databases I'd ever used. There's a lot of nerd-hate out there for Mongo and I don't really get it, I think those people can't even stretch the boundaries of their mental jail cells a little bit.
If you use Mongo, use JSON everywhere in your app. That will make your life easier.
I graduated from Dartmouth in 2002 with a CS degree. Let me tell you, the reason they are throwing this big party for BASIC is because that department hasn't done shit since 1964. If I had to do it again, I would do it at a different school. The only good thing I can say about Dartmouth is that I found refuge in a gentle, fostering fraternity -- and that is the one thing that the Dartmouth administration has been bent on destroying. That campus is a wasteland of feuding heartless conservatives and asinine liberals. Good riddance.
BASIC was kind of cool, though. I used it in middle school to print endless streams of naughty words. I don't know if it can do anything besides that.
No. What we agree on is that there is an obviousness standard in the books. What we disagree on is whether the courts have upheld that standard. It is exactly what you quoted me as saying: the courts have failed to uphold the obviousness standard. You can't fail to uphold a standard that doesn't exist. Courts have long since decided that "obvious" means something other than the common meaning, thus they have failed to uphold the standard. This is not the only area of law where lawyers have taken a statutory phrase and bent it so far as to be a travesty of its original meaning, but it's one of the best examples.
obvious / adjective
easily perceived or understood; clear, self-evident, or apparent
You ask a good question based on a bad premise. As I stated, slide-to-unlock was "commercially implemented" thousands of years ago when the first deadbolts were exchanged in commerce, so nobody was copying Apple so much as they joined Apple in copying a longstanding use of fingers.
Imagine a future technology allowing the manipulation of space around a person. Given that technology, which itself would be patentable, would it further be patentable to use that technology to keep you dry in the rain by making a pitched-shape roof over your head? No! We've had roofs for thousands of years, and using such a technology to keep rain off of your head is obvious. How about keeping rain off your head in the shape of an umbrella? No! Umbrellas are prior art for that.
Imagine a future technology allowing the arbitrary control of small bodies of water. Given that technology, which itself would be patentable, would it further be patentable to cause the water to stream up in a gentle arc for the purpose of drinking? No! We already have drinking fountains.
Imagine a technology, available for about a hundred years now, allowing voices to be communicated across a long distance. Given telephones, which were patentable, would it further be patentable to use a phone to say good morning to your mom? No! Saying good morning to your mom is obvious.
Now, imagine a technology, available since 2007 (before, really), where a little box accepts finger input. Given the iPhone, which itself is patentable in a few ways, is it further patentable to use your finger to make a little swipe motion in order to toggle states on the little box? No! It is both obvious and something that fingers have been doing for a long time.
You are right that there is a well-developed body of law on the obviousness standard -- and that body of law is fucking retarded! We have long since lost any connection between that body of law and any meaning of "obvious" which is understood by normal people including the people who passed that law in the first place. I can't blame lawyers for advocating for their clients; I can only blame judges for siding with those lawyers. You can say "hindsight" if you want to, but there must have been a first guy who said good morning to his mom on his telephone, and the fact that "others flocked to copy him" is totally irrelevant to the fact that it is an obvious use of telephones.
Slide-to-unlock has been used for literally, not figuratively, thousands of years. To think this could be patentable is preposterous. Can anyone explain why dead bolts are not sufficient prior art? How about the sliding locks on drill bit cases?
The problem with patents is the failure of courts to uphold the obviousness standard. If you asked a retarded seamonkey in what way could a touch-screen device prevent unwanted input during periods of non-use, the retarded seamonkey would say "uh, hmmm, well, how about by putting the device into a locked-down state that can only be dismissed by sliding your finger around in a predeterminded pattern unlikely to match random input?" That would cover this stupid slide-to-unlock idea, the idea of entering a predefined secret code, and other similar gestures.
For goodness sake, can't device companies come up with any clever ideas that are not obvious? The fraction of patents that I hear about that I think are truly clever is something like two percent. I blame the courts for this problem. Congress gave the courts perfectly reasonable standards, and the courts have steadfastly refused to make reasonable judgements.
What do you think is the threshold for such a requirement? I'd propose, oh, something like about five percent.
Correct. And the reason all that is correct is because that is what is best for the most people, which is the entire point of democracy and the entire point of copyright.
Agreed. This is the answer. Copyright should depend on your willingness to sell the work and to support it if it is the kind of thing that requires support. You could easily escape the sale/support requirements by releasing the copyright. Done; you and GP are the winners of this discussion. Someone turn out the lights, because this thread is finished.
I just came here to point the unreligious to the notion of philosophical naturalism. If you are unreligious, naturalism might help crystalize your worldview.
Among trees? You obviously have never read 1984.
/shrug/ How do you claim to know anything at all?
I'm not clear on your point. How does this affect freedom of speech? Did I miss the part of the story where the government arrested Eich and persecuted him for his speech?
Pfft. Whatevs. You guys both missed the point which is that homeopaths "tap the bottle". That's how it works, with the tapping. Sheesh, you guys are ignorant.
For those who don't know, that comment is a direct lift from the lyrics of Tim Minchin's Storm. Listen at 6:05 to 6:15.
"Sorry Charlie, but you can't do that."
Alas. If only.
That analogy isn't right either. You can charge more for an 18 wheeler than a 4 wheeler, and maybe you can charge more for a 20 ton vehicle than an 18 ton vehicle, but you can't charge more for an 18-wheeler 20-ton vehicle built by Mack versus an 18-wheeler 20-ton vehicle built by a competitor.
They're both trucks. They both carry the same thing, you should charge the same.
Netflix and its competitors all use IP packets. They all carry the same thing, binary digits, so you should charge the same thing. If someone sends more digits, then you can charge them more, but you can't charge more based on what order the digits are in (meaning, in the order of a movie instead of the order of a web page).
Because you drive a clown car but you don't publicly acknowledge yourself to be a clown. Closeted clowns are not funny, they are embarrassing. Therefore you should be embarrassed.
(I'm kidding. I couldn't fit in that little sardine can, but that just puts the Mini Cooper on the short list of things that make tall men jealous of short men.)
No. You aren't asking the right question. The question is "Where should I go if I want to find high-quality journalism?"
So, where? Where do you go? Do you go to Cable News which is non-amateur but also tepid quality? If you do that, you'll get tepid quality.
Or do you go to the blogs, find good ones, and then read high-quality news? If you do that, you'll get high quality.
Either way you have to tune out BuzzFeed on the blogs and you have to tune out Entertainment Tonite and Glenn Beck on TV. I don't think anyone is going to BuzzFeed or Beck for high-quality news, so they aren't really part of the "sample" set you are trying to make.
I agree with your headline but not with your post. The answer is no, bloggers and journalists are not equal, because blogs are the source of most high-quality journalism. Especially for science and politics, "professional" journalists in the Western world produce lamentably bad stories. The bloggers routinely have to fact-check and provide appropriate context for stories that a journalist could have corrected with five minutes on Ask Jeeves.
It is true that there are a small number of very good pro journalists, and it might be true that the 'average' blog post is lower quality than the 'average' newspaper article, but neither of those is the right measure of quality.
The right question to ask is, what is the source of MOST of the HIGH QUALITY news, and the answer to that is blogs. If you ignore all the low-quality stuff from all sources, and focus on the high quality stuff from all sources, then among that high-quality set, most of that will be from blogs.