They could easily skip into a future when they do have huge resources. It would fit in with the technological advances shown in SG1, leading to their own ships with hyperdrive etc.
Copyright violations in most countries requires actual copying - i.e. if you end up with the exact same result you may technically be in the clear if you started from sources that are not copyrighted. Keep in mind, though, that the more similar the works are, the more documentation you would need to support an assertion that you didn't copy, or the similarity would likely lead a court to consider it infringement. If you actually do copy, even if you modify it, it would take a lot for it not to be infringement. I'm not a lawyer - if you do want to play that game you better consult one.
Europe sees it more as a natural right tied to the personality of the creator. This is why the Europe has much broader moral rights than the U.S. (once again some claim we aren't living up to the Berne Convention).
Actually, in many (most? I don't know) European countries there are two separate principles. Copyright has more or less the same legal protection as in the US, but what you are referring to as "moral rights" is something different. Copyright can be transferred but "moral rights" or your "rights as a creator" of a work can't be transferred.
The latter mainly centers around rights of recognition as the creator of a work and protection of your professional reputation.
Norwegian law, to take a fairly typical example, explicitly guarantee a creator of a work the right to ensure his/her name is on the work in the way normal for the type of work, and to ensure that the work is not presented or used in a way that is offensive or damaging to the professional reputation of the creator or to the reputation or public consideration of the work.
Those rights can't be lost or transferred, even when copyright is transferred, though they can be signed away for specific, limited circumstances. That does not mean your name must be on a work, but if you want it to it's your right to demand it. If the creator of a work signs away the right to control the use of a work in a limited situation possibly damaging to his reputation, he then has the right to refuse the use of his name in association with the work, and that right can't be signed away at all.
I'm not sure (IANAL) but I believe the above is one of the things that is more widespread in legal systems following the Germanic legal tradition.
Why would an employee want to do this? Because sometimes call option prices have built into them a future expectation of price appreciation. It is possible for the employee's call option to be sold for more than the current market value of company's stock.
That doesn't make any sense. If the cost of the option is above market price, then it would be cheaper for a purchaser to just buy the stock itself on the open market and hold it. The market value of a call option will always be lower than the market value of the share itself in an even remotely sane market for exactly that reason, unless the stock is highly illiquid (which definitively isn't the case for Google).
What you might have meant, is that the return for the employee of exercising the option might be lower than selling the option. For example, if the share price is $400 and the strike price is $250, then exercising the option would net $150 (less tax), while the option might perfectly well sell for $200 because a purchaser may bet on the share price rising so that the purchase price + strike price will dip below the share price at some point in the future.
You're entirely missing the point. The long load times generally have nothing to do with the level of optimization of the software run, but the sheer amount of disk seeks, disk reads and hardware probing and other processing that takes place. Optimizing the software run at boot time wouldn't save more than a couple of percent at most.
You are missing the point. You can have container library in C++ that allows storing objects directly. Technically, it is simple.
No, you are missing the point. We do have a container library in C++ that allows storing objects directly: STL.
Boost's "ptr_vector" does NOT "store objects directly" - it stores pointers to objects, hence the name. ptr_vector etc. has VERY different semantics, and is appropriate for completely different purposes than std::vector. If ptr_vector satisfies your needs, then fine, but then I don't get why you keep whining about STL - it's not meant to cover every need you might ever have, just to cover a set of the most important basics. If you need more, then there's plenty of sources of alternatives, like boost. Again, it sounds like you want to get C++ to be Java.
Personally I've never had a reason to consider ptr_vector, as it is very rarely that I want heap allocated objects that mainly have a lifetime that coincides with a vector and where I've needed value semantics, and when I do it's mostly been objects that are suitable to store by value, and ptr_vector comes with a cost: You are forced to pay for the memory allocation of every object separately regardless what you do, which is often not acceptable when you want to store small objects (depending on OS you typically get an overhead of between 12 and 20 bytes for every single allocation).
When I do use C++, it's when those things matters.
Fact is, neither the majority of Yahoo's traffic, nor the majority of Yahoo's revenues, are coming from search. Search is important, yes, but Yahoo's strength has been that they're one of the few major players that's diversified across a very broad set of services.
Some argument can be made that they've overstretched, but over the last few years Yahoo's strategy has very clearly been to ensure the company gets more legs to stand on than search in particular, and advertizing in general.
Of note is the premium services (subscriptions, product/service sales), which is rapidly growing and their access partnerships (BT in the UK for instance).
Maybe geeks tend to know Yahoo as as the old directory and a search engine based on it, but that hasn't really been what Yahoo is about since 2000/2001 at least.
(Disclaimer: I used to manage the Yahoo! Europe billing team)
No, because people are not property. Contracts must be voluntary and well-informed. Slavery is not such a contract, since it is not voluntary.
You completely missed the point. Re-read: "By that argument, laws against slavery is "judicial theft" too then, as it prevents me from exploiting my property in ways I can't afford if I have to hire people to do it."
"Property" in that statement refers to "land". The point being exactly that the fact that you have invested time and money in something does not give you any rights to infringe on the rights of others. Thank you for making my argument for me.
So, if I spent ten years making a massive work of art, I pay for my rent, clothes and food during that whole time, it belongs to "the people"?
No. The specific instance of your work of art, be it a physical book, painting or sheet music, belongs to you. However, the moment you choose to share it with anyone in public, whoever you share it with have a right to share it with whomever they please other than as restricted by law. You have no property right to the expression of that work. What you do have, is a time limited monopoly on some forms of expressing that work, to give you a better chance of making some money off it, granted to you by the public as an incentive to put effort into your work. If you don't believe you get sufficient protection from whatever copyright terms are currently allowed for by law in your country, then that is your problem and something you should take into account when you start your work. You have no inherent rights to prevent anyone else from doing things with your work once published beyond those provided by copyright law.
Welcome to reality.
You are actually also only given that right for creative works, which undermine your earlier "money and time" argument even further. In the US a further step in this direction was made when the Supreme court in 1991 overrode what was called the "Sweat and brow" doctrine in Feist v Rural, by finding that mere time and effort was not sufficient to make a compilation of facts copyrightable - there must be a creative element.
The point being, that the court recognizes that the purpose of copyright protection is to promote creativity, not to protect your investment of money and time, and so copyright protection is granted by society only when it does actually coincide with our goals of giving an incentive to create creative works.
Nobody forces you to create. And you don't have any rights to restricts what others will do to their property, even if that means copying what you have done with your property, beyond what society has agreed in the form of laws, and which society can change.
And if I keep it - which is to say, I have permanant copyright - I'm infringing their right to free speech?
You miss the point. If you tell no-one, you legally don't actually have any rights at all. There is no copyright on an unpublished work, so if someone else creates a work that is exactly the same as yours and publishes it, they will have copyright to their work, and you would actually in the future have the burden of proving idependent creation (plagiarism cases often centers on "independent creation").
Assuming you mean that you do publish the work, and got "permanent copyright":
It places restrictions on free speech, how could it not be an infringement? The restrictions on free speech we generally accept fall clearly in two classes: Either they are "action speech", i.e. screaming "fire" in a crowded theatre is an incitement to action, and the limitation is not on the speech itself but on the venue, or they are about restricting speech which is false (i.e. libel and slander), in which case the restriction is post-facto (i.e. it can't be libel or slander until it's published - the crime is the damage to someones reputation, not the speech itself).
Copyright restricts speech purely on commercial ground
And so does everyone, which is just as central to the argument for not letting someone pass on vast quantities of wealth to their children, as it invariably through history has been one of the main factors in depriving other peoples children of the opportunities you want to secure for yours.
Speaking more intellectually; one of my rights as a human is to do what I wish with what I own.
That is very clearly not true in a long number of circumstances. For one, you are not allowed to take a gun and shoot someone else, no matter how much you own the gun and the bullet. Yes, it is an extreme example, but it clearly shows that your "right" doesn't exist in anything remotely as simple form as you stated it. Try restating it - I'm interested in seeing if you can manage to come up with a version of this "right" that doesn't still have long lists of exceptions and that will restrict it sufficiently to not allow interfering with other peoples rights.
Here's a question; if it is considered acceptable to set aside this right when someone dies, why is not acceptable to set aside that right while someone is alive?
As I pointed out above, that "right" doesn't exist in that form anyway. But assuming it did, my answer would be that any such right to (partially) do what you want with something extends to you only. Once you are dead you don't exist. You can't exercise any rights any more.
Inheritance law is not there to protect your rights. When it comes into play you don't exist anymore. It is there to protect society by creating an orderly handover of assets that otherwise would be up for grabs by anyone by being left without an owner.
In fact, many countries have legal systems that specifically does not recognize your right to divide your estate as you see fit. Norway, for example, has a legal system that very strongly favor equal distribution amongst the children of a deceased, to the extent where overriding equal distribution in a will is difficult and to some extent impossible. Dividing up personal effects can be done fairly arbitrarily, but dividing up property of any significant value can not. Courts can even go back and undo transactions happening in the last few years before your death to ensure fairness.
The argument for this arrangement is exactly that you don't have any claim to the assets after your death, and so for you to attempt to control how they should be distributed after your death is an attempt to control assets you no longer own, and that the right to decide the distribution of those assets rests with society as a whole. In this case, wills are allowed to control what specific assets are allocated to whom, but only to the extent where the value of those assets are fairly evenly distributed between your direct descendants.
More cynically, current inheritance laws are there because it benefits people with wealth, who controlled society when current forms of inheritance law were created. For physical objects there is certainly a "natural rights" or ethical argument about it: People will recognize that someone close to the deceased would have a greater claim at least to objects that have a personal connection to the deceased, and some will recognize the economical rights granted by current laws. However in the latter case, the argument has more to do with wanting to benefit. In other words, it's a selfish argument more than an ethical one.
More recently, corporation law in large part came about for much the same reason, because it became untenable for society that businesses closed down or failed due to property issues when it's original owner died.
Can I not equally ask then; why should you be given benefits over other people because you have more money than they do?
Of course you can, and it's a reasonable question. Why indeed? What gives you the right to benefits not granted to someone else?
However, there are other rights - such a private property - and violation of those rights will, as a consequence, make it impossible to be successful in certain types of business.
And the rights granted under copyright law are not "property". Without the time limited monopoly granted by copyright law as a limitation of free speech you wouldn't have any property-like rights to prevent copying at all.
It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.
Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.
Ethics is entirely subjective. Using it as an argument as to what belongs to whom only works when you talk to someone who agrees with you about what is ethical or not.
Legally on the other hand, it clearly is NOT property. Historically as well, it has never been considered property by society at large. On the contrary, the history of copyright shows very clearly that it has been assumed by most people that there was no natural property right to prevent copying, and that there were no ethical issues with doing so.
Indeed, patents arose from the same idea - that there is no inherent right to prevent copies, even of a physical object - so in addition to copyright, government also granted a temporary monopoly to give an economic incentive to publicize the internals of machines that would otherwise be hard to copy, so that once the monopoly expired, it would be easier to copy. Hence we have patents.
A similar protection was granted for trademarks. That is perhaps the one case where an ethical consideration comes in. Trademarks have two justifications: 1) That it would be unfair for someone to take advantage of the work someone else has put in to make a brand well known, 2) That it would cause consumer confusion, possibly leading consumers to pick inferior products if people could use others trademarks at will. Even in this case, property rights were only part of the consideration, and the original ethical aspects relates as much to the consumer protection issue as to protecting the trademark holder.
Further, your argument that something is ethically the creator's property just because "he invested the time and money to make it" is quite obviously flawed. No right arises just because one has spent time and money on something: If I spend time and money to make public land look prettier, the land doesn't suddenly become mine, and I get no other special rights to it. In fact, if I spend time and money to do just about anything, it only gives me ownership within the confines of a very restricted set of circumstances:
If I create something out of material I own, on my own time I own it, and this is recognized by most people both as a natural right, and by most countries as a legal right
If I create something out of material someone else owns, or on time when I'm paid to be employed by someone else, it doesn't matter if I spent time and (my own) money creating it, the object will in most cases belong to the owner of the material I used or my employer.
If I create a new form of device or an idea expressable as a device, I may apply for a patent as a temporary monopoly. I don't own the idea, but temporary rights to exploit the idea economically, and property rights to whatever physical devices I create according to the idea.
If I create a copyrightable work, I don't own the expression of the work, but a set of temporary rights to control the economic exploitation of that work by limiting access to copying it and any physical expressions of the work I create myself
The idea that using your time and money to create something somehow automatically makes it yours certainly has no basis in the legal or ethical frameworks most of us live under and by. It might do in your ethical framework, but don't expect the rest of the world to care.
If anything, contrary to your view, the ethics of restrict
Of std::vector<Object> over std::vector>Object *> with manual deletes.
Your point being? STL has absolutely nothing to do with this - the performance impact in this case more or less the same as if you use a plain old array to do the same things, and is a trade off between the size and copy cost of the object in question vs. the convenience of storing the object instead of a pointer.
In C++ you have the choice. In for example Java you don't (you always store the pointer - as much as Java tries to pretend it's "pointer free" - unless the implementation happens to do otherwise behind your back). As a result, in C++ you have the tool to shoot yourself in the foot, but you also have the ability to pick a more efficient alternative depending on what is appropriate (and whether you want copy or reference semantics).
std::vector< shared_ptr<Object> > vs. std::vector<Object>
Again, this has nothing to do with the STL containers, and everything to do with your choice of what to put in it. In this case, of course there will be a difference, since one is storing a pointer and a reference count and the other is storing a copy of the object. Which is faster depends on your compiler and the size of the object and the shared_ptr implementation you are using. The only thing this shows is the flexibility you have when you get to pick different semantics by providing different typed arguments.
Frankly, to me it sounds like you're expecting Java when you are programming C++. If you are more comfortable with how Java works, then use Java. Personally I'd pick C++ (over Java) any day, but these days I prefer Ruby despite far worse performance. It just doesn't matter most of the time.
If I had an ancestor who built a house and my family lived in it for six hundred years, would it be wrong for my family to continue to benefit from it after such a long time? so that the house should now be in the public domain?
Frankly, I am greatly in favor of far more aggressive inheritance tax. Why should you be given benefits over other people because your ancestor built a house? Why exactly does your blood line have anything to do with your rights as a human?
This is where the capitalist fantasy of equal opportunities to success falls apart. As long as inheritance so massively dictate someones access to money, education and a proper childhood, there will never be anything of the sort.
And in fact, if you look to England, if it had not been exactly for reform of the inheritance tax system, large estates would still have owned almost all of London (and in fact most of England) - until the 1500's at least, that was the case. It was only with reforms to inheritance tax that the large estates started getting split up, with the result being massive development, as the owners could no longer afford to keep the estates intact because the rates of returns they generated from the land was so low. After all they had enough money, and so had no incentive to do much with the land.
If you go around London, you might notice the names of many of these estates - London is one of very few cities in the world where place names are very often the names of developers, estate owners or their wives and family. Names in London including Russell,Cadogan, Portman, Grosvenor, Southampton, Berkeley, Cavendish, Leicester, Montagu, Sloane etc. almost all refer to the original or early estate holders.
Some of the larger estates (most notably Grosvernor and Portman) STILL owns large percentages of the land in the most expensive parts of London, and the families profit mainly not from their own work but from essentially being handed anything from millions to billions worth of property on a platter because of DNA.
In this case, forcing the estates hands in this way achieved two important things for society: 1) it required the owners to seek ways to profit from the land to generate sufficient revenue to allow financing inheritance taxes to keep the estate together, 2) it forced those that couldn't profit from the land to sell off parts to people prepared to try harder.
Without it, London would still be a backwater today.
Of course it does; if anyone can make a copy of the item for free, how can you recapture the time and money you invested in creating it?
By that argument, laws against slavery is "judicial theft" too then, as it prevents me from exploiting my property in ways I can't afford if I have to hire people to do it.
You don't have a right to make a profit - only to try.
Copyright deprives the public of free speech in order to give someone an artificial monopoly to enable them to profit from it.
That artificial monopoly is ONLY there as a temporary incentive to promote the arts and sciences. It is a monopoly granted by the public to get something back, and it is the peoples full right to decide what rights are to be given and for how long. That is the only thing that prevents copyright from being a massive infringement of the right to free speech - it is a voluntary trade off.
You don't have a right to make money. You certainly have a right to try, but if you fail that is your problem - maybe your business plan depended on rights you don't have.
Copyright law is there explicitly because the legal system recognize that there is no such thing as "intellectual property". I.e. copyright law is needed because "intellectual property" isn't property, and as a result, copying an idea or expression of that idea isn't theft.
Yes, I know the RIAA wants you to think it is, but it isn't. Copying without permission is copyright infringement, not theft.
The difference being that copyright in modern legal systems is explicitly there to give a temporary monopoly to a creator of a work to promote the advances of the arts and science by granting a (time) limited set of rights that you as a creator would not otherwise have.
Copyright is in any case a "recent" legal construction - it's original intent was to enrich people friendly to the British Crown by handing out artificial monopolies, and now we see corporations trying to move copyright back to that from it's more recent goal of promoting the arts and sciences.
I'd also like to point out that most great art through history was made without any form of copyright protection at all. Artists still created works, and still made a living, in much the same way as all but a tiny minority of the most successfull make most of their money now: By selling originals to wealthy patrons or by performing.
It might not be illegal, but it certainly is dishonest. If the petition listed "the estate of..." as supporting it, then that would be fine. As it is, the ad about the petition is an attempt to make the public believe those persons supported the petition, while in some cases they obviously were never able to make any decision about it.
The performance impact over what? There is NO performance impact in adding copy constructors unless you use them, and if you use them there will be no more performance impact over doing it in the copy constructor than over copying your objects in other ways, assuming you don't aim to write your copy constructors in brain-dead ways and use a compiler that will inline when it can.
In most cases using std::vector is not much slower than using a native array, assuming you know how and when to set the capacity, and use a compiler that isn't so ancient that it doesn't do any reasonable level of optimizations.
Do you think std::vector > is easier to use and maintain than std::vector?
Slashdot ate parts of your text... You need to escape your less than and greater than.
Argh... I messed up the "em" tags.. If it's not clear, the quoted paragraphs are the ones starting "Golly!" and "At any rate, I think you answered my question; not about MIT, [...]".
Golly! I'm either an asshole because you've put your own words in my mouth, or I have a limited view of how quickly kids in Dhaka, Bangladesh pick up new technology? Ok Norway, you know all about working in third world slum conditions, and I'm naive. However interesting the fact that you and your droogs were coding in your cribs, this doesn't exactly convince me you know what you're talking about, nor demonstate the universal propositions that you think me naive for not believing despite years of first hand experience. Maybe the expat gang just hated me so much they wouldn't tell me where all the pre-teen programmers hung out.
So in other words, are you saying that you think that kids in Bangladesh would have a harder time learning to pick up new technology if it was handed to them than what children in a first world country like Norway would?
If you truly think that, then yes, I absolutely stand by what I said. I've seen enough kids pick up technology to know that kids pick this stuff up fast anywhere (adults don't, no matter where they are in the world, but with adults past experience with similar technology makes a difference so there's a lot of differences between people). I've seen absolutely no indication whatsoever that this differs based on race, culture, economy or where they live. I haven't been to Bangladesh, so forgive me if kids there are particularly stupid, though I choose to assume that they are no different from the other places - third world or first world - I have seen kids pick up technology.
The difference between adults and children is also pronounced enough that environment (i.e. access to an adult that understands the technology for instance, or exposure to other technology) makes little difference - where the adults don't spend much time with technology kids invariably overtake them quickly, and where adults hardly want to touch technology kids still pick it up quickly.
Children down to 2-3 years will pick up technology skills easily if they have the chance. I've had the pleasure of watching a 3 year old and a 4 year old team up to navigate computer systems better than most adults would, based purely on what they picked up from their own experimentation. It's quite entertaining to watch kids that young lecture even parents that work with computers on a daily basis on how to do things they've learned that their parents would never pick up because they're too used to using technology in the ways they've already gotten used to.
Even game systems provide a good foundation from what I've seen of kids in that age range having detailed discussions about correlations between different choices and how different strategies work in the game - it's particularly hilarious when the kids in question still haven't even learned to speak well enough to pronounce words properly, but still are capable of expressing and discussing how everything works.
At any rate, I think you answered my question; not about MIT, but certainly about the attitude and arrogance that might motivate their faith. Lack of documentation must have been a real burden. Good for you for overcoming such a handicap. If Roelvaarg were alive he'd write a novel...
Really... Because to me, YOU are the one showing the arrogance by clearly making the assumption that kids will have problems picking this up, while several generations of kids from the developed world, as well as the lucky few ones in the developing world that has been able to get access to technology, has shown that it's not an issue at all and does boil down to access.
Not all will pick it up to the same level - some of my peers "only" learned how to use computers, not to program them, but we all learned the basics and in many or even most cases the difference was down to level of interest not skill. I specifically brought up "my generation", as when I first learned to use a co
Really. Almost all objects I work with are copyable. Perhaps because I 1) know how to use smart pointers that have sane copying behaviour when I need to, 2) know how to write copy constructors when I need to.
It's hard to discuss C++ with you when you obviously don't know the language.
If they sell it on E-bay for 100 times their value, then their local government should keep buying and distributing them for free. Heck, even if they only sell them for a 10% markup, the local governments should consider buying and distributing as many as they can afford, or work with whoever wants to buy and resell theme to help finance it, as it would improve their trade balance significantly and pump extra foreign capital into the local economy.
Of course if there's such a booming market for them at above cost then there will be competition from very quickly driving the cost down, which would also be good.
Depends. If they are purchased at cost, then they shouldn't really care beyond making a complaint and possibly working with local NGO's instead, as it doesn't affect the viability of the project - it should be up to the local government to take care of it. If it's being sold at subsidized prices, they should refuse to deal with those countries governments until they've cleaned up their act.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, more than 25,000 people die of starvation every day, and more than 800 million people are chronically undernourished. On average, every five seconds a child dies from starvation. ^
Which means that 12-13% of the worlds population are undernourished. How exactly does that contradict my claim that only a tiny percentage of people are starving?
So I guess the countries that won't be signing up any time soon are the ones that include the 800M people quoted above? Sux to be them, huh?
That is up to the local governments, but presumably the local governments in those countries have more pressing concerns than paying for laptops. Yes, it sucks to be them. How that affects the value of this project for the countries that CAN afford these laptops and that DO want them, and that DON'T have significant starvation problems is something I can't see. Or are you saying countries like Nigeria should spend their money on food aid instead?
You also conveniently ignore that access to technology has been shown to be a major factor in improving the local economy in many developing countries by improving access to farming information, information on market prices etc.
And you make the oft-repeated mistake of assuming "starvation" has to look like this to constitute a valid argument. You obviously have no idea what it is to live on 400 calories a day. But hey, at whomever does is not "starving", right?
No. YOU are jumping to conclusions about what I consider starvation. Your own number validated my argument: Only a tiny minority is starving. And yes, I would consider living on 400 calories a day to be starving.
I could program BASIC before I could read or write my native language (Norwegian). Either you are assuming that kids in the developing world are less intelligent than kids in the developed world - if so you're an asshole - or you have a very limited view of how quickly kids pick up new technology, in which case you're only naive.
I've seen 3-4 year olds operate computers better than their parents. Most of my friends picked up computer skills at between 5-8, and we very quickly exchanged tips and tricks. A reasonable percentage of us learned to program - mostly self directed. Our MAIN limitation was the lack of documentation - we couldn't afford or find books on assembly programming until we were much older, for instance. That is much less of a problem these days.
If anything, these kids will be in a much better position to learn computing than I was when I was a kid.
Yes it's three times the price but it's also 10X the machine and it runs Windows which for all it's downsides is the world standard.
It's also: A machine that will break easily (disk drive with mechanical movements), requires far to much electricity to be viable in areas with unreliable electrical supply, isn't rugged enough to withstand rough treatment from children etc.
The far bigger problem is what's the point of giving some one starving a $100 laptop then telling them they can't sell it when that much money would feed some poor families for 4 months? Seems criminal in some ways. 90% have zero hope of making a living with computers so it seems well intentioned but a real let them eat cake program. Trust me they'd rather have the cake, or some rice, than a computer.
And you are yet another one of the people falling in the trap of assuming that this is being given to starving people. Get it into your head: ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE of people in developing countries are starving. MOST have enough to eat. MOST have somewhere to live. This isn't targeted at those who have nothing, but at those who can sustain themselves and who are in a situation where anything that can help their children get a better education to improve their life is high priority.
NONE of the countries signed up so far have any significant starvation problem. NONE of them are among the most desperately poor.
All you've done is yet again repeat stereotypes of the developing world that has no root in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
They could easily skip into a future when they do have huge resources. It would fit in with the technological advances shown in SG1, leading to their own ships with hyperdrive etc.
Copyright violations in most countries requires actual copying - i.e. if you end up with the exact same result you may technically be in the clear if you started from sources that are not copyrighted. Keep in mind, though, that the more similar the works are, the more documentation you would need to support an assertion that you didn't copy, or the similarity would likely lead a court to consider it infringement. If you actually do copy, even if you modify it, it would take a lot for it not to be infringement. I'm not a lawyer - if you do want to play that game you better consult one.
Actually, in many (most? I don't know) European countries there are two separate principles. Copyright has more or less the same legal protection as in the US, but what you are referring to as "moral rights" is something different. Copyright can be transferred but "moral rights" or your "rights as a creator" of a work can't be transferred.
The latter mainly centers around rights of recognition as the creator of a work and protection of your professional reputation.
Norwegian law, to take a fairly typical example, explicitly guarantee a creator of a work the right to ensure his/her name is on the work in the way normal for the type of work, and to ensure that the work is not presented or used in a way that is offensive or damaging to the professional reputation of the creator or to the reputation or public consideration of the work.
Those rights can't be lost or transferred, even when copyright is transferred, though they can be signed away for specific, limited circumstances. That does not mean your name must be on a work, but if you want it to it's your right to demand it. If the creator of a work signs away the right to control the use of a work in a limited situation possibly damaging to his reputation, he then has the right to refuse the use of his name in association with the work, and that right can't be signed away at all.
I'm not sure (IANAL) but I believe the above is one of the things that is more widespread in legal systems following the Germanic legal tradition.
That doesn't make any sense. If the cost of the option is above market price, then it would be cheaper for a purchaser to just buy the stock itself on the open market and hold it. The market value of a call option will always be lower than the market value of the share itself in an even remotely sane market for exactly that reason, unless the stock is highly illiquid (which definitively isn't the case for Google).
What you might have meant, is that the return for the employee of exercising the option might be lower than selling the option. For example, if the share price is $400 and the strike price is $250, then exercising the option would net $150 (less tax), while the option might perfectly well sell for $200 because a purchaser may bet on the share price rising so that the purchase price + strike price will dip below the share price at some point in the future.
How much of your boot time is spent in the BIOS? On my machine it's at most 5-10% of the total boot time, probably less.
You're entirely missing the point. The long load times generally have nothing to do with the level of optimization of the software run, but the sheer amount of disk seeks, disk reads and hardware probing and other processing that takes place. Optimizing the software run at boot time wouldn't save more than a couple of percent at most.
No, you are missing the point. We do have a container library in C++ that allows storing objects directly: STL.
Boost's "ptr_vector" does NOT "store objects directly" - it stores pointers to objects, hence the name. ptr_vector etc. has VERY different semantics, and is appropriate for completely different purposes than std::vector. If ptr_vector satisfies your needs, then fine, but then I don't get why you keep whining about STL - it's not meant to cover every need you might ever have, just to cover a set of the most important basics. If you need more, then there's plenty of sources of alternatives, like boost. Again, it sounds like you want to get C++ to be Java.
Personally I've never had a reason to consider ptr_vector, as it is very rarely that I want heap allocated objects that mainly have a lifetime that coincides with a vector and where I've needed value semantics, and when I do it's mostly been objects that are suitable to store by value, and ptr_vector comes with a cost: You are forced to pay for the memory allocation of every object separately regardless what you do, which is often not acceptable when you want to store small objects (depending on OS you typically get an overhead of between 12 and 20 bytes for every single allocation).
When I do use C++, it's when those things matters.
Who are these "everyone" of which you speak?
Fact is, neither the majority of Yahoo's traffic, nor the majority of Yahoo's revenues, are coming from search. Search is important, yes, but Yahoo's strength has been that they're one of the few major players that's diversified across a very broad set of services.
Some argument can be made that they've overstretched, but over the last few years Yahoo's strategy has very clearly been to ensure the company gets more legs to stand on than search in particular, and advertizing in general.
Of note is the premium services (subscriptions, product/service sales), which is rapidly growing and their access partnerships (BT in the UK for instance).
Maybe geeks tend to know Yahoo as as the old directory and a search engine based on it, but that hasn't really been what Yahoo is about since 2000/2001 at least.
(Disclaimer: I used to manage the Yahoo! Europe billing team)
You completely missed the point. Re-read: "By that argument, laws against slavery is "judicial theft" too then, as it prevents me from exploiting my property in ways I can't afford if I have to hire people to do it."
"Property" in that statement refers to "land". The point being exactly that the fact that you have invested time and money in something does not give you any rights to infringe on the rights of others. Thank you for making my argument for me.
So, if I spent ten years making a massive work of art, I pay for my rent, clothes and food during that whole time, it belongs to "the people"?
No. The specific instance of your work of art, be it a physical book, painting or sheet music, belongs to you. However, the moment you choose to share it with anyone in public, whoever you share it with have a right to share it with whomever they please other than as restricted by law. You have no property right to the expression of that work. What you do have, is a time limited monopoly on some forms of expressing that work, to give you a better chance of making some money off it, granted to you by the public as an incentive to put effort into your work. If you don't believe you get sufficient protection from whatever copyright terms are currently allowed for by law in your country, then that is your problem and something you should take into account when you start your work. You have no inherent rights to prevent anyone else from doing things with your work once published beyond those provided by copyright law.
Welcome to reality.
You are actually also only given that right for creative works, which undermine your earlier "money and time" argument even further. In the US a further step in this direction was made when the Supreme court in 1991 overrode what was called the "Sweat and brow" doctrine in Feist v Rural, by finding that mere time and effort was not sufficient to make a compilation of facts copyrightable - there must be a creative element.
The point being, that the court recognizes that the purpose of copyright protection is to promote creativity, not to protect your investment of money and time, and so copyright protection is granted by society only when it does actually coincide with our goals of giving an incentive to create creative works.
Nobody forces you to create. And you don't have any rights to restricts what others will do to their property, even if that means copying what you have done with your property, beyond what society has agreed in the form of laws, and which society can change.
And if I keep it - which is to say, I have permanant copyright - I'm infringing their right to free speech?
You miss the point. If you tell no-one, you legally don't actually have any rights at all. There is no copyright on an unpublished work, so if someone else creates a work that is exactly the same as yours and publishes it, they will have copyright to their work, and you would actually in the future have the burden of proving idependent creation (plagiarism cases often centers on "independent creation").
Assuming you mean that you do publish the work, and got "permanent copyright":
It places restrictions on free speech, how could it not be an infringement? The restrictions on free speech we generally accept fall clearly in two classes: Either they are "action speech", i.e. screaming "fire" in a crowded theatre is an incitement to action, and the limitation is not on the speech itself but on the venue, or they are about restricting speech which is false (i.e. libel and slander), in which case the restriction is post-facto (i.e. it can't be libel or slander until it's published - the crime is the damage to someones reputation, not the speech itself).
Copyright restricts speech purely on commercial ground
And so does everyone, which is just as central to the argument for not letting someone pass on vast quantities of wealth to their children, as it invariably through history has been one of the main factors in depriving other peoples children of the opportunities you want to secure for yours.
Speaking more intellectually; one of my rights as a human is to do what I wish with what I own.
That is very clearly not true in a long number of circumstances. For one, you are not allowed to take a gun and shoot someone else, no matter how much you own the gun and the bullet. Yes, it is an extreme example, but it clearly shows that your "right" doesn't exist in anything remotely as simple form as you stated it. Try restating it - I'm interested in seeing if you can manage to come up with a version of this "right" that doesn't still have long lists of exceptions and that will restrict it sufficiently to not allow interfering with other peoples rights.
Here's a question; if it is considered acceptable to set aside this right when someone dies, why is not acceptable to set aside that right while someone is alive?
As I pointed out above, that "right" doesn't exist in that form anyway. But assuming it did, my answer would be that any such right to (partially) do what you want with something extends to you only. Once you are dead you don't exist. You can't exercise any rights any more.
Inheritance law is not there to protect your rights. When it comes into play you don't exist anymore. It is there to protect society by creating an orderly handover of assets that otherwise would be up for grabs by anyone by being left without an owner.
In fact, many countries have legal systems that specifically does not recognize your right to divide your estate as you see fit. Norway, for example, has a legal system that very strongly favor equal distribution amongst the children of a deceased, to the extent where overriding equal distribution in a will is difficult and to some extent impossible. Dividing up personal effects can be done fairly arbitrarily, but dividing up property of any significant value can not. Courts can even go back and undo transactions happening in the last few years before your death to ensure fairness.
The argument for this arrangement is exactly that you don't have any claim to the assets after your death, and so for you to attempt to control how they should be distributed after your death is an attempt to control assets you no longer own, and that the right to decide the distribution of those assets rests with society as a whole. In this case, wills are allowed to control what specific assets are allocated to whom, but only to the extent where the value of those assets are fairly evenly distributed between your direct descendants.
More cynically, current inheritance laws are there because it benefits people with wealth, who controlled society when current forms of inheritance law were created. For physical objects there is certainly a "natural rights" or ethical argument about it: People will recognize that someone close to the deceased would have a greater claim at least to objects that have a personal connection to the deceased, and some will recognize the economical rights granted by current laws. However in the latter case, the argument has more to do with wanting to benefit. In other words, it's a selfish argument more than an ethical one.
More recently, corporation law in large part came about for much the same reason, because it became untenable for society that businesses closed down or failed due to property issues when it's original owner died.
Can I not equally ask then; why should you be given benefits over other people because you have more money than they do?
Of course you can, and it's a reasonable question. Why indeed? What gives you the right to benefits not granted to someone else?
However
And the rights granted under copyright law are not "property". Without the time limited monopoly granted by copyright law as a limitation of free speech you wouldn't have any property-like rights to prevent copying at all.
It is wrong to say the holder "would not otherwise have" this right.
Ethically, it belongs to him - he invested the time and money to make it; it is *his property*.
Ethics is entirely subjective. Using it as an argument as to what belongs to whom only works when you talk to someone who agrees with you about what is ethical or not.
Legally on the other hand, it clearly is NOT property. Historically as well, it has never been considered property by society at large. On the contrary, the history of copyright shows very clearly that it has been assumed by most people that there was no natural property right to prevent copying, and that there were no ethical issues with doing so.
Indeed, patents arose from the same idea - that there is no inherent right to prevent copies, even of a physical object - so in addition to copyright, government also granted a temporary monopoly to give an economic incentive to publicize the internals of machines that would otherwise be hard to copy, so that once the monopoly expired, it would be easier to copy. Hence we have patents.
A similar protection was granted for trademarks. That is perhaps the one case where an ethical consideration comes in. Trademarks have two justifications: 1) That it would be unfair for someone to take advantage of the work someone else has put in to make a brand well known, 2) That it would cause consumer confusion, possibly leading consumers to pick inferior products if people could use others trademarks at will. Even in this case, property rights were only part of the consideration, and the original ethical aspects relates as much to the consumer protection issue as to protecting the trademark holder.
Further, your argument that something is ethically the creator's property just because "he invested the time and money to make it" is quite obviously flawed. No right arises just because one has spent time and money on something: If I spend time and money to make public land look prettier, the land doesn't suddenly become mine, and I get no other special rights to it. In fact, if I spend time and money to do just about anything, it only gives me ownership within the confines of a very restricted set of circumstances:
The idea that using your time and money to create something somehow automatically makes it yours certainly has no basis in the legal or ethical frameworks most of us live under and by. It might do in your ethical framework, but don't expect the rest of the world to care.
If anything, contrary to your view, the ethics of restrict
Your point being? STL has absolutely nothing to do with this - the performance impact in this case more or less the same as if you use a plain old array to do the same things, and is a trade off between the size and copy cost of the object in question vs. the convenience of storing the object instead of a pointer.
In C++ you have the choice. In for example Java you don't (you always store the pointer - as much as Java tries to pretend it's "pointer free" - unless the implementation happens to do otherwise behind your back). As a result, in C++ you have the tool to shoot yourself in the foot, but you also have the ability to pick a more efficient alternative depending on what is appropriate (and whether you want copy or reference semantics).
std::vector< shared_ptr<Object> > vs. std::vector<Object>
Again, this has nothing to do with the STL containers, and everything to do with your choice of what to put in it. In this case, of course there will be a difference, since one is storing a pointer and a reference count and the other is storing a copy of the object. Which is faster depends on your compiler and the size of the object and the shared_ptr implementation you are using. The only thing this shows is the flexibility you have when you get to pick different semantics by providing different typed arguments.
Frankly, to me it sounds like you're expecting Java when you are programming C++. If you are more comfortable with how Java works, then use Java. Personally I'd pick C++ (over Java) any day, but these days I prefer Ruby despite far worse performance. It just doesn't matter most of the time.
Frankly, I am greatly in favor of far more aggressive inheritance tax. Why should you be given benefits over other people because your ancestor built a house? Why exactly does your blood line have anything to do with your rights as a human?
This is where the capitalist fantasy of equal opportunities to success falls apart. As long as inheritance so massively dictate someones access to money, education and a proper childhood, there will never be anything of the sort.
And in fact, if you look to England, if it had not been exactly for reform of the inheritance tax system, large estates would still have owned almost all of London (and in fact most of England) - until the 1500's at least, that was the case. It was only with reforms to inheritance tax that the large estates started getting split up, with the result being massive development, as the owners could no longer afford to keep the estates intact because the rates of returns they generated from the land was so low. After all they had enough money, and so had no incentive to do much with the land.
If you go around London, you might notice the names of many of these estates - London is one of very few cities in the world where place names are very often the names of developers, estate owners or their wives and family. Names in London including Russell,Cadogan, Portman, Grosvenor, Southampton, Berkeley, Cavendish, Leicester, Montagu, Sloane etc. almost all refer to the original or early estate holders.
Some of the larger estates (most notably Grosvernor and Portman) STILL owns large percentages of the land in the most expensive parts of London, and the families profit mainly not from their own work but from essentially being handed anything from millions to billions worth of property on a platter because of DNA.
In this case, forcing the estates hands in this way achieved two important things for society: 1) it required the owners to seek ways to profit from the land to generate sufficient revenue to allow financing inheritance taxes to keep the estate together, 2) it forced those that couldn't profit from the land to sell off parts to people prepared to try harder.
Without it, London would still be a backwater today.
By that argument, laws against slavery is "judicial theft" too then, as it prevents me from exploiting my property in ways I can't afford if I have to hire people to do it.
You don't have a right to make a profit - only to try.
Copyright deprives the public of free speech in order to give someone an artificial monopoly to enable them to profit from it.
That artificial monopoly is ONLY there as a temporary incentive to promote the arts and sciences. It is a monopoly granted by the public to get something back, and it is the peoples full right to decide what rights are to be given and for how long. That is the only thing that prevents copyright from being a massive infringement of the right to free speech - it is a voluntary trade off.
Copyright law is there explicitly because the legal system recognize that there is no such thing as "intellectual property". I.e. copyright law is needed because "intellectual property" isn't property, and as a result, copying an idea or expression of that idea isn't theft.
Yes, I know the RIAA wants you to think it is, but it isn't. Copying without permission is copyright infringement, not theft.
The difference being that copyright in modern legal systems is explicitly there to give a temporary monopoly to a creator of a work to promote the advances of the arts and science by granting a (time) limited set of rights that you as a creator would not otherwise have.
Copyright is in any case a "recent" legal construction - it's original intent was to enrich people friendly to the British Crown by handing out artificial monopolies, and now we see corporations trying to move copyright back to that from it's more recent goal of promoting the arts and sciences.
I'd also like to point out that most great art through history was made without any form of copyright protection at all. Artists still created works, and still made a living, in much the same way as all but a tiny minority of the most successfull make most of their money now: By selling originals to wealthy patrons or by performing.
It might not be illegal, but it certainly is dishonest. If the petition listed "the estate of ..." as supporting it, then that would be fine. As it is, the ad about the petition is an attempt to make the public believe those persons supported the petition, while in some cases they obviously were never able to make any decision about it.
The performance impact over what? There is NO performance impact in adding copy constructors unless you use them, and if you use them there will be no more performance impact over doing it in the copy constructor than over copying your objects in other ways, assuming you don't aim to write your copy constructors in brain-dead ways and use a compiler that will inline when it can.
In most cases using std::vector is not much slower than using a native array, assuming you know how and when to set the capacity, and use a compiler that isn't so ancient that it doesn't do any reasonable level of optimizations. Do you think std::vector > is easier to use and maintain than std::vector?
Slashdot ate parts of your text... You need to escape your less than and greater than.
Argh... I messed up the "em" tags.. If it's not clear, the quoted paragraphs are the ones starting "Golly!" and "At any rate, I think you answered my question; not about MIT, [...]".
So in other words, are you saying that you think that kids in Bangladesh would have a harder time learning to pick up new technology if it was handed to them than what children in a first world country like Norway would?
If you truly think that, then yes, I absolutely stand by what I said. I've seen enough kids pick up technology to know that kids pick this stuff up fast anywhere (adults don't, no matter where they are in the world, but with adults past experience with similar technology makes a difference so there's a lot of differences between people). I've seen absolutely no indication whatsoever that this differs based on race, culture, economy or where they live. I haven't been to Bangladesh, so forgive me if kids there are particularly stupid, though I choose to assume that they are no different from the other places - third world or first world - I have seen kids pick up technology.
The difference between adults and children is also pronounced enough that environment (i.e. access to an adult that understands the technology for instance, or exposure to other technology) makes little difference - where the adults don't spend much time with technology kids invariably overtake them quickly, and where adults hardly want to touch technology kids still pick it up quickly.
Children down to 2-3 years will pick up technology skills easily if they have the chance. I've had the pleasure of watching a 3 year old and a 4 year old team up to navigate computer systems better than most adults would, based purely on what they picked up from their own experimentation. It's quite entertaining to watch kids that young lecture even parents that work with computers on a daily basis on how to do things they've learned that their parents would never pick up because they're too used to using technology in the ways they've already gotten used to.
Even game systems provide a good foundation from what I've seen of kids in that age range having detailed discussions about correlations between different choices and how different strategies work in the game - it's particularly hilarious when the kids in question still haven't even learned to speak well enough to pronounce words properly, but still are capable of expressing and discussing how everything works.
At any rate, I think you answered my question; not about MIT, but certainly about the attitude and arrogance that might motivate their faith. Lack of documentation must have been a real burden. Good for you for overcoming such a handicap. If Roelvaarg were alive he'd write a novel...
Really... Because to me, YOU are the one showing the arrogance by clearly making the assumption that kids will have problems picking this up, while several generations of kids from the developed world, as well as the lucky few ones in the developing world that has been able to get access to technology, has shown that it's not an issue at all and does boil down to access.
Not all will pick it up to the same level - some of my peers "only" learned how to use computers, not to program them, but we all learned the basics and in many or even most cases the difference was down to level of interest not skill. I specifically brought up "my generation", as when I first learned to use a co
It's hard to discuss C++ with you when you obviously don't know the language.
Of course if there's such a booming market for them at above cost then there will be competition from very quickly driving the cost down, which would also be good.
Depends. If they are purchased at cost, then they shouldn't really care beyond making a complaint and possibly working with local NGO's instead, as it doesn't affect the viability of the project - it should be up to the local government to take care of it. If it's being sold at subsidized prices, they should refuse to deal with those countries governments until they've cleaned up their act.
Which means that 12-13% of the worlds population are undernourished. How exactly does that contradict my claim that only a tiny percentage of people are starving?
So I guess the countries that won't be signing up any time soon are the ones that include the 800M people quoted above? Sux to be them, huh?
That is up to the local governments, but presumably the local governments in those countries have more pressing concerns than paying for laptops. Yes, it sucks to be them. How that affects the value of this project for the countries that CAN afford these laptops and that DO want them, and that DON'T have significant starvation problems is something I can't see. Or are you saying countries like Nigeria should spend their money on food aid instead?
You also conveniently ignore that access to technology has been shown to be a major factor in improving the local economy in many developing countries by improving access to farming information, information on market prices etc.
And you make the oft-repeated mistake of assuming "starvation" has to look like this to constitute a valid argument. You obviously have no idea what it is to live on 400 calories a day. But hey, at whomever does is not "starving", right?
No. YOU are jumping to conclusions about what I consider starvation. Your own number validated my argument: Only a tiny minority is starving. And yes, I would consider living on 400 calories a day to be starving.
I've seen 3-4 year olds operate computers better than their parents. Most of my friends picked up computer skills at between 5-8, and we very quickly exchanged tips and tricks. A reasonable percentage of us learned to program - mostly self directed. Our MAIN limitation was the lack of documentation - we couldn't afford or find books on assembly programming until we were much older, for instance. That is much less of a problem these days.
If anything, these kids will be in a much better position to learn computing than I was when I was a kid.
It's also: A machine that will break easily (disk drive with mechanical movements), requires far to much electricity to be viable in areas with unreliable electrical supply, isn't rugged enough to withstand rough treatment from children etc.
The far bigger problem is what's the point of giving some one starving a $100 laptop then telling them they can't sell it when that much money would feed some poor families for 4 months? Seems criminal in some ways. 90% have zero hope of making a living with computers so it seems well intentioned but a real let them eat cake program. Trust me they'd rather have the cake, or some rice, than a computer.
And you are yet another one of the people falling in the trap of assuming that this is being given to starving people. Get it into your head: ONLY A TINY PERCENTAGE of people in developing countries are starving. MOST have enough to eat. MOST have somewhere to live. This isn't targeted at those who have nothing, but at those who can sustain themselves and who are in a situation where anything that can help their children get a better education to improve their life is high priority.
NONE of the countries signed up so far have any significant starvation problem. NONE of them are among the most desperately poor.
All you've done is yet again repeat stereotypes of the developing world that has no root in reality.