If you think Javascript is weird, try executing this in C:
"123"+1
What's weird about that? It clearly produces a pointer to that '2' in the middle of the quoted string. Isn't that what any sane programmer would expect?;-)
One of my favorite C examples is a variant on the above:
i = 257 & 0x0F;
c = "0123456789ABCDEF"[i];
Actually, my main comment about such examples is that, if you can't instantly explain what each is doing (and why the second is safe), I'd be nervous about hiring you for a C project. Unfortunately, most of the people doing such hiring can't explain either of these examples, which explains a lot of why we get so much crappy code from the computer industry.
Since your comment was so entertaining, perhaps you will tell us why you won't subscribe, if it doesn't come down to simple incompetence.
It wasn't my comment that you replied to, but I can explain why I don't subscribe to a lot of sites that I read regularly. One of the main reasons is that my file of sites/logins/passwords has grown to over 200 entries, and I'm starting to consider this a major security issue. Someone who gets their hands on this file could become a real PITA in my life. So I'm looking for ways to minimize the possible damage from this incoherent pile of security data.
The most obvious way is by minimizing its size. I no longer create logins casually; I ask myself whether this new request to make up a login id and password is really all that important to my life. Usually the answer is "No."
I do have a/. login, which I created back when my pile of logins was much smaller than it is now. If I were to run across/. today for the first time, there's a good chance that I wouldn't create an account here. Yeah, it's fun to comment (or flame or whatever), but it's not actually all that important to my life. I can understand why someone else might take the same attitude, even if they're a regular reader. I'm a regular reader of lots of sites where I don't have an account.
Why measure importance based on bits transferred, what about time spent?... I think human minutes is a better measure of importance than bits transferred.
Well, maybe, but we should be careful with such comparisons. It strikes me as similar to the common practice among management of measuring programmer productivity by counting the number of lines of code produced. It's hard to imagine any worse measure that lines of code, but "time spent" could be a good challenger. Do we really want to encourage management to measure our productivity by time spent?
After using JS on any number of projects, I'd have to say that the time I spent versus the useful results has generally been among the lowest of any of the several dozen programming languages that I'm fluent in. This isn't the fault of the language itself, of course; it's the fault of the turkeys that introduced all the niggling little incompatibilities in the JS in the most-used browsers. And the computer biz has a way of encouraging vendors to do just this. For "local" languages (like C), this may be just a minor annoyance, but the primary reason for JS's existence is to provide a way of downloading code that runs in the client's browser. If you need different code for different browsers, your language has failed at its primary task. The java people understood this, but the folks who brought us JS clearly didn't. Either that, or they introduced all those incompatibilities with malice aforethought, intentionally wasting my time trying to write JS that runs the same everywhere.
A good replacement for JS would be a language designed explicitly to minimize the time spent by all the web developers who currently are being bogged down by the difficulty of making even the simplest JS script work the same everywhere.
My general approach is to delay the use of JS as long as possible. In my experience, once you introduce JS to a project, the time to get anything running correctly goes up by orders of magnitude. So if you can find an acceptable way of providing the content without using JS, it's a big win for everyone.
It is funny how the "They don't attack X because it's not popular" meme keeps popping up, no matter how often people show how wrong it is.
My favorite approach for debunking it is to point out that apache has been the overwhelmingly dominant web server since 1996 (according to Netcraft), and web servers are one of the most inviting targets that the computer business has to offer. But how many actual exploits have ever appeared for apache? When was the last story of a worm, virus, whatever making the rounds by taking advantage of a security hole in apache? (There have been a few security holes in releases of apache, but they tend to be fixed before an exploit appears, due to the "many eyes" that are always looking at apache's code, usually for other reasons. As such things go, it's a very approachable piece of software.)
Of course, there are lots of other chunks of software that serve equally well for debunking this meme. Just recently, I ran across yet another survey that once again made the old estimate that over 50% of the world's cpu cycles are spent running one venerable chunk of code, the Simplex Algorithm. Has that code ever been a vector for malware? You'd think it would be, since manufacturing plants everywhere in the world totally depend on it for their profitability. But I doubt if you'd find very many malware authors who would even recognize its name, much less tell you what it does.
I guess it's the old problem that things like religion, politics, and apparently computer security issues don't encourage people to look at the actual facts. It's totally acceptable to just make up a theory and use it to explain everything, without bothering with even the simplest of tests against reality.
(And I do like to try to debunk the claim that the Simplex Algorithm is the main user of cpu cycles by countering that the actual winner in that ranking is the Idle Loop. But people look at me funny when I say that.;-)
People are using the wrong metaphor here. What's going on is known as a "protection racket". That term applies whenever you can just pay them off to prevent an attack.
Of course, in the business/legal world, they're not as honest about it as the criminal gangs are. With your local crime boss, once you've paid him off, he (or his people) will actively prevent others from hitting you up for the same "protection". But in the business and legal arenas, they don't do this; they just take your money and walk away. So you can be hit up for payoffs by as many people as can find you and make a credible threat.
> Hey, remember when you could install whatever software you wanted on your computer without having to jailbreak it or void the warranty?
We're not quite there yet, but I've been watching the industry a long time - since about a decade before the first home computers from Altair started showing up - and that is certainly the vector. Sadly, nobody seems to care.
It could easily backfire. A few years ago, at the (very mixed-computer) company I was working for, I was part of a team that tested various candidates for our server work. As part of the crowd that used both linux and Apple boxes at home, I tested them a lot. One report I wrote described the results when I called Apple Support for help in getting a network printer working via Apple's Airport (wireless access point). When the CS guy I was talking to learned that my current test machine included our linux-based Internet gateway box in addition to my Mac and the Airport, he insisted that I disconnect the linux gateway from the outside, and set up my Mac as the sole Internet connection. I commented that this would shut down the entire company's Internet access, and since the question was making the printer-Airport combination work, it would make more sense to disconnect them (and my Mac) from the network, so they could be tested in isolation with no possible conflict with other things on our network. He was adamant, and when I refused to shut down the company's linux-based gateway, he said he "couldn't help me".
My writeup of this incident resulted in Macs being dropped from consideration as network servers in this company. Apple clearly wasn't interested in supporting their machine as a server in a mixed-vendor testing environment, and that was the company's business, so the company obviously had to go with vendors that would support such mixed-vendor environments.
An interesting aspect was that, when I did further testing myself, the problem turned out to be that the Airport had a DHCP server enabled by default, and its address range overlapped with another on the same network. This wouldn't have happened if the Airport was isolated from the network, so the CS guy's approach would have got the printer working, but wouldn't have fixed the problem. We had to know about that DHCP server if we were ever to use an Airport in our products. Airports were also specifically excluded after that, due to the Apple's apparent unwillingness to support an environment where it was significant.
We found many other reasons that Apple was becoming unacceptable in a mixed-vendor environment. The "walled garden" mentality was clear to us at that time, and it's becoming more blatant these days. I'd imagine that many other organizations are learning the same lesson. No sensible organization of any sort will tie themselves to a single vendor for all time. (Yes; I know that many do. Note my use of the work "sensible".;-). I'd guess that Apple will have growing problems with this in the world that's getting more and more networked. Maybe they'll figure it out and become more cooperative. But Sun didn't, and Apple doesn't have to, either. We'll just have to watch and see how things develop.
Which is why i like my mobile phone to remain a mobile phone and not a mini-computer subject to the same problems that plague PCs. We already have malware and other crap for mobile devices and the need for firewalls.... bet the anti-virus companies are wetting their pants over the move from mobile phones to mobile computers.
So you still have an analog mobile phone? Do they still make those?;-)
Seriously; all digital phones are small computers. If one has a UI that only does phone calls, that's fine for customers that want that, but inside, there's still a cpu chip and a pile of software. It may be slow and have not much memory, but it's still a programmable computer. With a phone-only UI, it really just means that you have no way of discovering what other software the vendor might have filled it with.
One of the other stories today is about a new video camera that's only a millimeter wide. It's probably just a matter of time before we're reading a story about someone's "phone only" device that contains this camera, with its pics or videos ending up on youtube. So be careful about where you set your phone down while you're doing something nearby.;-)
I just said "Yes, I believe in God." And I got slammed by at least a dozen people belittling me for my "creationism myths," "church slavery," etc etc. I wasn't try to push any of my beliefs on anyone. Seriously, why does anyone care what I believe?
They're trying to ascertain that you believe in the same god as they do.;-)
Next time, be more specific. Tell them that you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and see their reaction. Act very serious, and try to convert them. You might learn a lot about them (the people, that is, not the FSM or the IPU).
I've seen an interesting case of this phenomenon, but in a different direction, over the last decade. Here in the US, after the WTC attack whose decade anniversary is fast approaching, we've seen the media full of all sorts of anti-Muslim propaganda. Of course, we've always had that in the background, but it has been really pushed on the American population by the politicians and the media for these 10 years. And lots of people I know have responded just as the article suggests: They've gone online to find out about "This Moslem thing". In addition to all the hysteria, there's also lots of good information about the topic online. The result is that a significant portion of the American population has a great deal of sympathy for the Muslim community, if not for the leaders of the Muslim countries.
It's obviously true that a lot of people will look online for support for their nutty preconceived beliefs. It's equally clear that others will take a "Wait a minute..." attitude, and use the internet for information about all the "sides" of an issue. While it has become easier to seek out the propaganda, it has also become much easier to find the actual facts. Of course, we don't know which approach will become the dominant force in our society. But at least we can say that people no longer have a very good excuse for not knowing the facts about a situation.
I heard that Osama had been killed a week ago on MSNBC.
Osama was killed on MSNBC? Do they have the video?
;-)
Seriously; I've read about his death nearly every month for the past decade. It wouldn't be surprising if a news service covered the story of his death last week. And we'll probably still be reading stories saying he's just been killed for at least another decade.
Yeah; the Florida story was about a guy who booby-trapped his window, so that if someone opened it, a shotgun would fire through the opening. And what bothered the firemen wasn't that one guy did this. Their problem was that a lot of people in the Miami area seemed to be arguing that there was nothing wrong with his booby trap. The firemen took the reasonable attitude that, if a significant percentage of Miamians (at least of those that called talk shows;-) thought that booby-trapping entrances to a house was a good idea, well, maybe firemen shouldn't be entering houses. You never know whether that house giving off smoke might belong to one of those people who think it's a good idea to booby-trap the entrances.
But it seems that most of the listeners got the message. At least, they stopped calling in an voicing support for what the idiot had done. One would like to think that they gave the firemen's comments some thought, and then understood that sometimes you might want a stranger to "break into" your house.
If we had freedom no knock warrants would not exist. You come through the door unannounced, I should be legally in the clear when I send as much lead as I can in your direction at high velocity.
Back in the early 1980s, I lived in Florida (Fort Lauderdale), where there was an interesting discussion on this topic. It was triggered by a fellow who booby-trapped the windows and doors of his house at night, to injure people such as burglars who tried to get into his house. When his trap actually caught and injured a would-be burglar, the home owner was arrested on a criminal charge. The Miami-area talk shows were all over the story for several weeks, and lots of people responded similarly to the above.
Then one day, some guys at the local fire departments started calling the talk shows. They said they'd been listening to the discussion, and had decided that there were obviously many people in the area that felt it was OK to shoot first and ask questions later (if at all) if someone came through their windows or doors. So until the issue was settled, they would no longer be entering burning houses until they had written permission from the owners.
The discussion died almost instantly.
(The guy who started it was prosecuted, but I don't recall what the outcome of his trial(s) was. And it turned out the firemen were "just kidding", as there were soon several highly-publicized rescues of people by firemen who could have been shot and killed under the above policy. So I guess it worked out. But apparently some people haven't got the message yet.)
It's always interesting (and sometimes amusing) to try to think of ways that a rule change can be "gamed" by its victims. So how could the students undermine this idea?
Back when I was an undergrad, I took a lot of classes in both math and music, and ended up graduating with exactly the same number of credits in both of them. And, although I'd satisfied the requirements for both degrees, a second degree required more credits, and I didn't want a second B.A. enough to stick around for another year. So I chose the math degree, of course, because who needs a degree in music (unless you want to teach music at a university)?
With the proposed variable tuition rates, I could see a student like me (which includes a lot of math majors) being officially a music major, and then changing their major to math during their last semester. That way, (to explain it to the math impaired;-) they'd get charged the low rate for a music major, but they'd get the high-value math degree.
Now, I'd imagine that the administration would wise up to this after a few years. But again, note that I'd actually satisfied the requirements for both degrees. Music wasn't a "fake" subject; it was something I was interested in. In a different world (where the recording industry hadn't destroyed the profession of musician for all but a handful of top stars), I'd likely have become a professional musician. Georg Telemann did this, for example, and during his lifetime, it was a practical career decision.
So the administration couldn't reasonably argue that I was "gaming the system" by registering as a music major when I was also interested in math. I'd guess they'd find some bureaucratic way to deal with students like me. So maybe we should be talking about this situation before it becomes a major problem.
I'd give you a "funny" mod if it weren't for the silly limitation about modding in discussions where you've posted something. So I guess I'll just have to post this reply instead.
The "learning curve" metaphor is perhaps not the best for this sort of thing. Such curves are normally drawn with time as the horizontal axis, and amount learned is the vertical. People usually use "steep learning curve" to mean "difficult to learn". But the graph would show that a "steep" curve means that you learn a lot in a short time. A "reduced" learning curve would presumably mean that you learn less in the same time.
Or maybe I'm just the odd one. People seem to agree that Drupal has a long, gently sloping learning curve. That is, it takes a very long time to learn just a little. While this may make some people comfortable, I find it just frustrating. I wasted a month of "learning", and I learned very little (as indicated by my failure to produce what the clients wanted).
I'd personally prefer a very steep learning curve. That is, I'd prefer documentation that teaches me a lot in a very short time. A couple of decades ago, I learned C and was producing useful code in a few days. This is presumably an extremely steep learning curve, and I've seen people describe it (disparagingly) with just that metaphor. Similarly, I learned perl well enough to produce significantly useful programs in about a week of half-time study, presumably another very steep learning curve.
Am I interpreting the metaphor correctly? If so, I suppose I'm the odd one, who prefers things that involve learning a lot very quickly.
Are you saying that stuff like Drupal won't even let you use your own CSS? That's pretty awful.
It's more like, if you want to write your own CSS (or HTML), you're fighting what the package wants to send to the client, It can be very difficult and time consuming to debug the interactions and get it working the way you want. Then, when you try making a small change to one part of a page, "unrelated" parts of other pages change in unpredictable ways. For small stuff like borders, you eventually give up and just let it do things the way it wants, and tell the clients that you can't control that stuff. I suspect that Drupal is no better or worse at this than the various "framework" packages. But I don't know, since in my month-long experiment with Drupal, I never even got close to making anything work the way I wanted.
I think the problem is, as others have suggested, that it simply takes years to learn to really use Drupal well. The various replies seem to say that it's good for total novices who don't want to learn the details. If you just want to build something quickly, it comes with a lot of pre-built modules that will do a lot of web stuff "out of the box". But if you want to do anything slightly differently that how those modules do it, you'll be tearing your hair out and muttering "WTF???" a lot.
Still, I think the main problem is really the documentation. If you read the discussion I seem to have triggered, you can see that at least some of the more experienced users seem to enjoy mocking the incompetence of a n00b like me. This tells me that the state of the documentation is probably not an accident. A common part of human psychology is "It took me a long time to reach my level of expertise, and you'd damn well better spend as much time as I did learning it". As some of them have clearly stated, it'll take me years to learn to use Drupal effectively. They clearly consider this a feature, not a bug.
I'd conclude that it's not an appropriate tool for something that I can do in a week, especially since I now have a package that I can tweak in minutes. In fact, I have on several occasions typed in changes while listening to a client talk over the phone, said "Try it again now", and grinned at their astonishment that the change they wanted was done and worked. (Part of the reason I can do this is that my coding style is about 50% comments, which I view as messages to my future self when I'm revisiting something that I wrote in the distant past.;-)
CSS is a special problem. That "C" stands for "Cascading", referring to the ways that multiple CSS files can be used to control parts of the formatting. But if these multiple CSS files come from different sources, the results can often be unpredictable and difficult to debug. It's common to add a style on some detail, test it, and find that nothing changes at all. Or something unrelated changes in a different tag or on a different page. Or the change works in some browsers but not others. This is because your change overlaps with some other CSS off in another file, browsers implement the interactions differently, etc.. With a package like Drupal or the various "frameworks", there are zillions of little chunks of CSS scattered around, and you never know which are going to be used. Making a change to the CSS on one page of your setup can invoke part of a package whose CSS overlaps with what you did on another page, changing that other page's appearance. Getting these interactions straight can be a real nightmare. If your clients are like I've described, and pay attention to the cosmetic details, debugging even small changes can take exorbitant amounts of time.
Very detailed requirements are a nightmare to implement in any framework
Maybe; that's probably why I've done most of my web programming in perl, python or C (or PHP when I have to;-). Of course, those are languages, not "frameworks" (which seems to be a euphemism for totally different things when implemented by different teams of framework developers;-).
One of the problems I've come across repeatedly is that, when I present my first rough drafts of something on the Web, the clients rarely have any material criticisms. Their criticisms are mostly on the order of "That border is slightly too wide/narrow; can you make it a bit narrower/wider?" or "Can you make that red border not quite so bright?" With most "sophisticated" Web development packages, whatever they're called, the answer is usually "No; the package you wanted me to use doesn't seem to have any (documentsed) way to control such fine details." With an actual programming language, I can say "That's easy; it'll just take a bit of testing to see how to persuade all the common browsers to show it the way you want."
(Fine color changes are a universal problem, since they depend partly on the hardware of the client's screen.)
Nah; I'd remove all of them. I don't put up political signs on my lawn, because they're really no better than bumper stickers. You can't say anything meaningful with them without making the font too small for people driving by to read. I tend not to make political comments unless the medium makes it possible to express complete thoughts without being shouted down.
(Actually, during one election, when both the major candidates for a local office were equally unacceptable, I did put up one of those "Don't vote. It just encourages them." signs. But that was a very special case.;-)
You do not get to pound your fist about free speech and then deny it on your own website.
Yes, I do. For the same reason that, if you come to my house and start putting up political signs all over the lawn and walls, I'll remove them. If you persist, I may file charges.
Web sites aren't free (in the $ sense). It costs me money to run a web site, and part of the cost is disk space. If you and your buddies descend on my web site and start filling up my disks with garbage (as defined by me, of course), I'm going to remove it. I can't afford the unbounded disk space that all the political nutcases in the world would happily fill.
Actually, I'm involved with running a number of web sites for organizations, some of them political. I've discussed how open the site should be with all of them. I tend to err on the "open" side, but in every case so far, they've all been quite concerned with the potential problems with unlimited "free speech", i.e., permanent support for the disk space for whatever nonsense any troll may want to post on their site. Even the "liberal" groups are worried about this, and often push some fairly strict controls on what can be posted. I do encourage openness as the default, but I also give them the tools they need to limit the damage of trolls and vandals.
Oh, and I should add "and marketers". It turns out that one of the main problems running online forums is being discovered by a marketer. When this happens, you often find your disk(s) completely filled with gigabytes of advertising. The tools that the marketers have for this can be impressive. Overnight, you can find that every message in your forum has hundreds or thousands of replies, each one an "I agree" statement and a link to a commercial web site.
So, until we all have an infinite amount of free disk space available on our servers, we have little choice but to limit what can be posted to our sites. And yes, we can support "free speech" while doing this without being hypocrites. Free speech doesn't include the right to mob a site and bury it under piles of garbage (as defined by the site's owners).
When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.
Yeah, me too. A couple of years ago, some clients wanted a drupal-based web site, and I thought it looked interesting, so I, uh, "volunteered" to learn to use it. I bought a couple of textbooks, and found online teaching sites. A month later, I'd produced nothing useful. I'd asked a good number of "How do you...?" questions on the forum, and the people there were very nice -- but they never actually answered my questions. All sorts of things I tried didn't do at all what I expected, and often I couldn't figure out just what they did instead. Finally, the client was getting tired of saying "We need something soon", so I spent a week building their site by hand, mostly by writing a bunch of perl CGI programs that generated the site from their data. They liked it, started asking for more features, and they're still clients (though the site mostly runs itself now).
Since then, I've had occasion to advise others looking at drupal to "Don't bother." Or sometimes "You'll be sorry." And I've read a lot of similar comments from others, so I guess it hasn't gotten much better.
Drupal does have some good PR, though, and they're pretty good at impressing non-techie managers. And they might have some good stuff, if you can figure out how to make it do what you want it to do. I can't tell whether it's good or not, because I seem to be too dumb to understand how to make it work.
How does the U make a profit on your idea if it never sees the light of day? Doesn't the profit motive give the U incentive to get your innovations out to the world?
There have been any number of histories written explaining that the primary effect of patent law has always been to block further progress until the patents expire. There was a widely-quoted example a few years back, explaining why James Watt didn't make any profit from his improvements to the steam engine during the time he held several critical patents. He spent all his time and money on legal battles with other inventors, with the result that none of them were able to actually implement the steam-powered railroad engines that were to become so important in the next (19th) century. Rather than licensing each others' inventions to each other and combining them into a good engine, they each wanted total control, and refused to license their inventions to the others. Watt finally set up a profitable business after all the critical inventions became public domain. This was in part because he managed to hire a lot of the people with the needed expertise.
This story includes a nice example of how interlocking discoveries can work. Watt did build a much better (more powerful, safer) steam engine. But its power went into a piston, which produced back-and-forth linear motion. Another inventor discovered a linkage that translated this linear motion into a smooth rotary motion, which was needed if the engine were to drive vehicles with wheels. But patent law and the courts prevented these two inventions from being combined in the same mechanism, because neither inventor would license his invention to the other. So one had a good engine that delivered jerky motion to a vehicle's wheels; the other had a linkage that gave smooth rotary motion, but could only use the primitive steam engines of earlier decades.
Copyright law isn't as disastrous to progress as patent law, since copyright mostly limits the words you can use to describe something. This does interfere with communication, and encourages the development of disparate incompatible jargons. But patent law blocks the use of the actual ideas and discoveries, so it can easily become a total barrier to further progress. And historians have been telling us that this is mostly what has happened in the past.
"A major point of the Protestant Reformation was the demand for Bibles written in the local languages"
Though this sort of blatant DRM violation was initially prosecuted quite vigorously...
There are some interesting comments on an earlier instance of this in James Chambers' "The Devil's Horsemen", a history of the Mongol invasion(s) during the 13th century. Part of the story was that the first expedition, led by a young Genghis (not yet Khan), was basically exploratory. They'd heard some horror stories about the far West, and wanted to learn if the people there were as evil and warlike as reported. So they sent out a team of explorers, linguists, and soldiers to protect them, to learn what they could and send back a report.
One of the things the expedition did to help pay their way was to bring along a troop of Korean printers, who had the world's most advanced printing presses in their wagons, and could set up print runs of whatever texts were popular in the areas they were approaching. Note that this was several centuries before Gutenberg. It turned out that they mostly printed Korans and Bibles, in both the standard versions and in the local languages (to keep their linguists busy and happy). Sales were good enough to pay for the troop's needs -- and this outraged the local authorities in most areas. The Mongols' illegal publications were much of the reason why the Mongols were characterized as "demons" and attacked. Remember that this was an exploratory troop, not the armies that were to come decades later. When the Mongols were attacked, it was in great part at attempt to enforce local religious copyright law, and at that time and place, copyright violation was a capital offense. The local authorities considered it right and proper to execute (without trial) anyone caught selling illicit copies of their religious texts. However, the soldiers that Genghis had brought along were easily able to handle the much larger attacking forces, and usually won with few casualties.
So maybe we should be grateful that the RIAA and MPAA aren't successfully imposing the death penalty on the children and grandmothers they're suing for "stealing" millions of copies of their albums and movies. Copyright law has become much more lenient since those days.
(Spoiler: Genghis and most of his troop survived, and reported that the West was indeed full of warlike people who would attack peaceful visitors like his troop without warning. He also reported that the West was divided into a great many tiny principalities, that were at constant war with each other. His advice was that if the West ever got its act together, it could be a serious threat to the civilized people of the East. So the West should be conquered and subdued before they got organized on a large scale. The attack force was organized, and Genghis was promoted to the leader position. The rest, as they say, is history.)
Certainly not only should schools add to the public domain but patents and copyrights should belong to the creators of that intellectual property.
It might be worth noting that some high-profile journals, notably Nature and Science, require that the submitter of the paper hold the copyright. If your university or research institute claims the copyright on your papers, you can't get them published in Nature or Science.
This sorta makes sense, since to publish them, the journal has to have a license from the copyright owner. Both of these journals have decided that they won't accept a copyright license from a corporation (and a university is a corporation); they will only accept the license from the author(s), who must have the legal right to give the journal a license to publish.
They have learned another lesson, too: Their agreements are worded so that after publication, any transfer of copyright must be approved by both the author(s) and the publisher. So Nature and Science can prevent the employer from claiming the copyright after publication. But I don't think I've actually read anything about how often they actually do this. Anyone know?
It might be interesting to get a list of journals that have adopted similar rules. I've heard of a few others that have done so, but I don't have any idea how common it is.
There's also the related topic of patents, which are often used to prevent researchers from building on each others' work. I'd wonder whether this might be the really serious threat to scientific progress. With copyright, you can buy a publication and then use any knowledge that it contains, as long as you don't plagiarize the wording. But with patent, you can't legally use the knowledge without permission from the patent owner. This is routinely used by drug companies to prevent competitors from developing improved versions of a drug. Without the patent owner's permission, you can't legally do the testing that's needed to compare the effect of your drug and theirs.
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If you think Javascript is weird, try executing this in C: "123"+1
What's weird about that? It clearly produces a pointer to that '2' in the middle of the quoted string. Isn't that what any sane programmer would expect? ;-)
One of my favorite C examples is a variant on the above:
i = 257 & 0x0F;
c = "0123456789ABCDEF"[i];
Actually, my main comment about such examples is that, if you can't instantly explain what each is doing (and why the second is safe), I'd be nervous about hiring you for a C project. Unfortunately, most of the people doing such hiring can't explain either of these examples, which explains a lot of why we get so much crappy code from the computer industry.
Since your comment was so entertaining, perhaps you will tell us why you won't subscribe, if it doesn't come down to simple incompetence.
It wasn't my comment that you replied to, but I can explain why I don't subscribe to a lot of sites that I read regularly. One of the main reasons is that my file of sites/logins/passwords has grown to over 200 entries, and I'm starting to consider this a major security issue. Someone who gets their hands on this file could become a real PITA in my life. So I'm looking for ways to minimize the possible damage from this incoherent pile of security data.
The most obvious way is by minimizing its size. I no longer create logins casually; I ask myself whether this new request to make up a login id and password is really all that important to my life. Usually the answer is "No."
I do have a /. login, which I created back when my pile of logins was much smaller than it is now. If I were to run across /. today for the first time, there's a good chance that I wouldn't create an account here. Yeah, it's fun to comment (or flame or whatever), but it's not actually all that important to my life. I can understand why someone else might take the same attitude, even if they're a regular reader. I'm a regular reader of lots of sites where I don't have an account.
Why measure importance based on bits transferred, what about time spent? ... I think human minutes is a better measure of importance than bits transferred.
Well, maybe, but we should be careful with such comparisons. It strikes me as similar to the common practice among management of measuring programmer productivity by counting the number of lines of code produced. It's hard to imagine any worse measure that lines of code, but "time spent" could be a good challenger. Do we really want to encourage management to measure our productivity by time spent?
After using JS on any number of projects, I'd have to say that the time I spent versus the useful results has generally been among the lowest of any of the several dozen programming languages that I'm fluent in. This isn't the fault of the language itself, of course; it's the fault of the turkeys that introduced all the niggling little incompatibilities in the JS in the most-used browsers. And the computer biz has a way of encouraging vendors to do just this. For "local" languages (like C), this may be just a minor annoyance, but the primary reason for JS's existence is to provide a way of downloading code that runs in the client's browser. If you need different code for different browsers, your language has failed at its primary task. The java people understood this, but the folks who brought us JS clearly didn't. Either that, or they introduced all those incompatibilities with malice aforethought, intentionally wasting my time trying to write JS that runs the same everywhere.
A good replacement for JS would be a language designed explicitly to minimize the time spent by all the web developers who currently are being bogged down by the difficulty of making even the simplest JS script work the same everywhere.
My general approach is to delay the use of JS as long as possible. In my experience, once you introduce JS to a project, the time to get anything running correctly goes up by orders of magnitude. So if you can find an acceptable way of providing the content without using JS, it's a big win for everyone.
It is funny how the "They don't attack X because it's not popular" meme keeps popping up, no matter how often people show how wrong it is.
My favorite approach for debunking it is to point out that apache has been the overwhelmingly dominant web server since 1996 (according to Netcraft), and web servers are one of the most inviting targets that the computer business has to offer. But how many actual exploits have ever appeared for apache? When was the last story of a worm, virus, whatever making the rounds by taking advantage of a security hole in apache? (There have been a few security holes in releases of apache, but they tend to be fixed before an exploit appears, due to the "many eyes" that are always looking at apache's code, usually for other reasons. As such things go, it's a very approachable piece of software.)
Of course, there are lots of other chunks of software that serve equally well for debunking this meme. Just recently, I ran across yet another survey that once again made the old estimate that over 50% of the world's cpu cycles are spent running one venerable chunk of code, the Simplex Algorithm. Has that code ever been a vector for malware? You'd think it would be, since manufacturing plants everywhere in the world totally depend on it for their profitability. But I doubt if you'd find very many malware authors who would even recognize its name, much less tell you what it does.
I guess it's the old problem that things like religion, politics, and apparently computer security issues don't encourage people to look at the actual facts. It's totally acceptable to just make up a theory and use it to explain everything, without bothering with even the simplest of tests against reality.
(And I do like to try to debunk the claim that the Simplex Algorithm is the main user of cpu cycles by countering that the actual winner in that ranking is the Idle Loop. But people look at me funny when I say that. ;-)
unix is where the term root for #1 user, hence rootkit comes from.
Minor correction: On unix systems, root is always the #0 user. The #1 user is typically "daemon", though not always.
(Unix was written by -- and for -- C programmers, who always start counting at 0. ;-)
People are using the wrong metaphor here. What's going on is known as a "protection racket". That term applies whenever you can just pay them off to prevent an attack.
Of course, in the business/legal world, they're not as honest about it as the criminal gangs are. With your local crime boss, once you've paid him off, he (or his people) will actively prevent others from hitting you up for the same "protection". But in the business and legal arenas, they don't do this; they just take your money and walk away. So you can be hit up for payoffs by as many people as can find you and make a credible threat.
> Hey, remember when you could install whatever software you wanted on your computer without having to jailbreak it or void the warranty?
We're not quite there yet, but I've been watching the industry a long time - since about a decade before the first home computers from Altair started showing up - and that is certainly the vector. Sadly, nobody seems to care.
It could easily backfire. A few years ago, at the (very mixed-computer) company I was working for, I was part of a team that tested various candidates for our server work. As part of the crowd that used both linux and Apple boxes at home, I tested them a lot. One report I wrote described the results when I called Apple Support for help in getting a network printer working via Apple's Airport (wireless access point). When the CS guy I was talking to learned that my current test machine included our linux-based Internet gateway box in addition to my Mac and the Airport, he insisted that I disconnect the linux gateway from the outside, and set up my Mac as the sole Internet connection. I commented that this would shut down the entire company's Internet access, and since the question was making the printer-Airport combination work, it would make more sense to disconnect them (and my Mac) from the network, so they could be tested in isolation with no possible conflict with other things on our network. He was adamant, and when I refused to shut down the company's linux-based gateway, he said he "couldn't help me".
My writeup of this incident resulted in Macs being dropped from consideration as network servers in this company. Apple clearly wasn't interested in supporting their machine as a server in a mixed-vendor testing environment, and that was the company's business, so the company obviously had to go with vendors that would support such mixed-vendor environments.
An interesting aspect was that, when I did further testing myself, the problem turned out to be that the Airport had a DHCP server enabled by default, and its address range overlapped with another on the same network. This wouldn't have happened if the Airport was isolated from the network, so the CS guy's approach would have got the printer working, but wouldn't have fixed the problem. We had to know about that DHCP server if we were ever to use an Airport in our products. Airports were also specifically excluded after that, due to the Apple's apparent unwillingness to support an environment where it was significant.
We found many other reasons that Apple was becoming unacceptable in a mixed-vendor environment. The "walled garden" mentality was clear to us at that time, and it's becoming more blatant these days. I'd imagine that many other organizations are learning the same lesson. No sensible organization of any sort will tie themselves to a single vendor for all time. (Yes; I know that many do. Note my use of the work "sensible". ;-). I'd guess that Apple will have growing problems with this in the world that's getting more and more networked. Maybe they'll figure it out and become more cooperative. But Sun didn't, and Apple doesn't have to, either. We'll just have to watch and see how things develop.
Which is why i like my mobile phone to remain a mobile phone and not a mini-computer subject to the same problems that plague PCs. We already have malware and other crap for mobile devices and the need for firewalls.... bet the anti-virus companies are wetting their pants over the move from mobile phones to mobile computers.
So you still have an analog mobile phone? Do they still make those? ;-)
Seriously; all digital phones are small computers. If one has a UI that only does phone calls, that's fine for customers that want that, but inside, there's still a cpu chip and a pile of software. It may be slow and have not much memory, but it's still a programmable computer. With a phone-only UI, it really just means that you have no way of discovering what other software the vendor might have filled it with.
One of the other stories today is about a new video camera that's only a millimeter wide. It's probably just a matter of time before we're reading a story about someone's "phone only" device that contains this camera, with its pics or videos ending up on youtube. So be careful about where you set your phone down while you're doing something nearby. ;-)
I just said "Yes, I believe in God." And I got slammed by at least a dozen people belittling me for my "creationism myths," "church slavery," etc etc. I wasn't try to push any of my beliefs on anyone. Seriously, why does anyone care what I believe?
They're trying to ascertain that you believe in the same god as they do. ;-)
Next time, be more specific. Tell them that you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn, and see their reaction. Act very serious, and try to convert them. You might learn a lot about them (the people, that is, not the FSM or the IPU).
Oh, that's an easy one. It's turtles all the way down.
Or, in this case, it's gods all the way up.
I've seen an interesting case of this phenomenon, but in a different direction, over the last decade. Here in the US, after the WTC attack whose decade anniversary is fast approaching, we've seen the media full of all sorts of anti-Muslim propaganda. Of course, we've always had that in the background, but it has been really pushed on the American population by the politicians and the media for these 10 years. And lots of people I know have responded just as the article suggests: They've gone online to find out about "This Moslem thing". In addition to all the hysteria, there's also lots of good information about the topic online. The result is that a significant portion of the American population has a great deal of sympathy for the Muslim community, if not for the leaders of the Muslim countries.
It's obviously true that a lot of people will look online for support for their nutty preconceived beliefs. It's equally clear that others will take a "Wait a minute ..." attitude, and use the internet for information about all the "sides" of an issue. While it has become easier to seek out the propaganda, it has also become much easier to find the actual facts. Of course, we don't know which approach will become the dominant force in our society. But at least we can say that people no longer have a very good excuse for not knowing the facts about a situation.
I heard that Osama had been killed a week ago on MSNBC.
Osama was killed on MSNBC? Do they have the video?
Seriously; I've read about his death nearly every month for the past decade. It wouldn't be surprising if a news service covered the story of his death last week. And we'll probably still be reading stories saying he's just been killed for at least another decade.
Yeah; the Florida story was about a guy who booby-trapped his window, so that if someone opened it, a shotgun would fire through the opening. And what bothered the firemen wasn't that one guy did this. Their problem was that a lot of people in the Miami area seemed to be arguing that there was nothing wrong with his booby trap. The firemen took the reasonable attitude that, if a significant percentage of Miamians (at least of those that called talk shows ;-) thought that booby-trapping entrances to a house was a good idea, well, maybe firemen shouldn't be entering houses. You never know whether that house giving off smoke might belong to one of those people who think it's a good idea to booby-trap the entrances.
But it seems that most of the listeners got the message. At least, they stopped calling in an voicing support for what the idiot had done. One would like to think that they gave the firemen's comments some thought, and then understood that sometimes you might want a stranger to "break into" your house.
If we had freedom no knock warrants would not exist. You come through the door unannounced, I should be legally in the clear when I send as much lead as I can in your direction at high velocity.
Back in the early 1980s, I lived in Florida (Fort Lauderdale), where there was an interesting discussion on this topic. It was triggered by a fellow who booby-trapped the windows and doors of his house at night, to injure people such as burglars who tried to get into his house. When his trap actually caught and injured a would-be burglar, the home owner was arrested on a criminal charge. The Miami-area talk shows were all over the story for several weeks, and lots of people responded similarly to the above.
Then one day, some guys at the local fire departments started calling the talk shows. They said they'd been listening to the discussion, and had decided that there were obviously many people in the area that felt it was OK to shoot first and ask questions later (if at all) if someone came through their windows or doors. So until the issue was settled, they would no longer be entering burning houses until they had written permission from the owners.
The discussion died almost instantly.
(The guy who started it was prosecuted, but I don't recall what the outcome of his trial(s) was. And it turned out the firemen were "just kidding", as there were soon several highly-publicized rescues of people by firemen who could have been shot and killed under the above policy. So I guess it worked out. But apparently some people haven't got the message yet.)
It's always interesting (and sometimes amusing) to try to think of ways that a rule change can be "gamed" by its victims. So how could the students undermine this idea?
Back when I was an undergrad, I took a lot of classes in both math and music, and ended up graduating with exactly the same number of credits in both of them. And, although I'd satisfied the requirements for both degrees, a second degree required more credits, and I didn't want a second B.A. enough to stick around for another year. So I chose the math degree, of course, because who needs a degree in music (unless you want to teach music at a university)?
With the proposed variable tuition rates, I could see a student like me (which includes a lot of math majors) being officially a music major, and then changing their major to math during their last semester. That way, (to explain it to the math impaired ;-) they'd get charged the low rate for a music major, but they'd get the high-value math degree.
Now, I'd imagine that the administration would wise up to this after a few years. But again, note that I'd actually satisfied the requirements for both degrees. Music wasn't a "fake" subject; it was something I was interested in. In a different world (where the recording industry hadn't destroyed the profession of musician for all but a handful of top stars), I'd likely have become a professional musician. Georg Telemann did this, for example, and during his lifetime, it was a practical career decision.
So the administration couldn't reasonably argue that I was "gaming the system" by registering as a music major when I was also interested in math. I'd guess they'd find some bureaucratic way to deal with students like me. So maybe we should be talking about this situation before it becomes a major problem.
I'd give you a "funny" mod if it weren't for the silly limitation about modding in discussions where you've posted something. So I guess I'll just have to post this reply instead.
The "learning curve" metaphor is perhaps not the best for this sort of thing. Such curves are normally drawn with time as the horizontal axis, and amount learned is the vertical. People usually use "steep learning curve" to mean "difficult to learn". But the graph would show that a "steep" curve means that you learn a lot in a short time. A "reduced" learning curve would presumably mean that you learn less in the same time.
Or maybe I'm just the odd one. People seem to agree that Drupal has a long, gently sloping learning curve. That is, it takes a very long time to learn just a little. While this may make some people comfortable, I find it just frustrating. I wasted a month of "learning", and I learned very little (as indicated by my failure to produce what the clients wanted).
I'd personally prefer a very steep learning curve. That is, I'd prefer documentation that teaches me a lot in a very short time. A couple of decades ago, I learned C and was producing useful code in a few days. This is presumably an extremely steep learning curve, and I've seen people describe it (disparagingly) with just that metaphor. Similarly, I learned perl well enough to produce significantly useful programs in about a week of half-time study, presumably another very steep learning curve.
Am I interpreting the metaphor correctly? If so, I suppose I'm the odd one, who prefers things that involve learning a lot very quickly.
Are you saying that stuff like Drupal won't even let you use your own CSS? That's pretty awful.
It's more like, if you want to write your own CSS (or HTML), you're fighting what the package wants to send to the client, It can be very difficult and time consuming to debug the interactions and get it working the way you want. Then, when you try making a small change to one part of a page, "unrelated" parts of other pages change in unpredictable ways. For small stuff like borders, you eventually give up and just let it do things the way it wants, and tell the clients that you can't control that stuff. I suspect that Drupal is no better or worse at this than the various "framework" packages. But I don't know, since in my month-long experiment with Drupal, I never even got close to making anything work the way I wanted.
I think the problem is, as others have suggested, that it simply takes years to learn to really use Drupal well. The various replies seem to say that it's good for total novices who don't want to learn the details. If you just want to build something quickly, it comes with a lot of pre-built modules that will do a lot of web stuff "out of the box". But if you want to do anything slightly differently that how those modules do it, you'll be tearing your hair out and muttering "WTF???" a lot.
Still, I think the main problem is really the documentation. If you read the discussion I seem to have triggered, you can see that at least some of the more experienced users seem to enjoy mocking the incompetence of a n00b like me. This tells me that the state of the documentation is probably not an accident. A common part of human psychology is "It took me a long time to reach my level of expertise, and you'd damn well better spend as much time as I did learning it". As some of them have clearly stated, it'll take me years to learn to use Drupal effectively. They clearly consider this a feature, not a bug.
I'd conclude that it's not an appropriate tool for something that I can do in a week, especially since I now have a package that I can tweak in minutes. In fact, I have on several occasions typed in changes while listening to a client talk over the phone, said "Try it again now", and grinned at their astonishment that the change they wanted was done and worked. (Part of the reason I can do this is that my coding style is about 50% comments, which I view as messages to my future self when I'm revisiting something that I wrote in the distant past. ;-)
CSS is a special problem. That "C" stands for "Cascading", referring to the ways that multiple CSS files can be used to control parts of the formatting. But if these multiple CSS files come from different sources, the results can often be unpredictable and difficult to debug. It's common to add a style on some detail, test it, and find that nothing changes at all. Or something unrelated changes in a different tag or on a different page. Or the change works in some browsers but not others. This is because your change overlaps with some other CSS off in another file, browsers implement the interactions differently, etc.. With a package like Drupal or the various "frameworks", there are zillions of little chunks of CSS scattered around, and you never know which are going to be used. Making a change to the CSS on one page of your setup can invoke part of a package whose CSS overlaps with what you did on another page, changing that other page's appearance. Getting these interactions straight can be a real nightmare. If your clients are like I've described, and pay attention to the cosmetic details, debugging even small changes can take exorbitant amounts of time.
Very detailed requirements are a nightmare to implement in any framework
Maybe; that's probably why I've done most of my web programming in perl, python or C (or PHP when I have to ;-). Of course, those are languages, not "frameworks" (which seems to be a euphemism for totally different things when implemented by different teams of framework developers ;-).
One of the problems I've come across repeatedly is that, when I present my first rough drafts of something on the Web, the clients rarely have any material criticisms. Their criticisms are mostly on the order of "That border is slightly too wide/narrow; can you make it a bit narrower/wider?" or "Can you make that red border not quite so bright?" With most "sophisticated" Web development packages, whatever they're called, the answer is usually "No; the package you wanted me to use doesn't seem to have any (documentsed) way to control such fine details." With an actual programming language, I can say "That's easy; it'll just take a bit of testing to see how to persuade all the common browsers to show it the way you want."
(Fine color changes are a universal problem, since they depend partly on the hardware of the client's screen.)
Nah; I'd remove all of them. I don't put up political signs on my lawn, because they're really no better than bumper stickers. You can't say anything meaningful with them without making the font too small for people driving by to read. I tend not to make political comments unless the medium makes it possible to express complete thoughts without being shouted down.
(Actually, during one election, when both the major candidates for a local office were equally unacceptable, I did put up one of those "Don't vote. It just encourages them." signs. But that was a very special case. ;-)
You do not get to pound your fist about free speech and then deny it on your own website.
Yes, I do. For the same reason that, if you come to my house and start putting up political signs all over the lawn and walls, I'll remove them. If you persist, I may file charges.
Web sites aren't free (in the $ sense). It costs me money to run a web site, and part of the cost is disk space. If you and your buddies descend on my web site and start filling up my disks with garbage (as defined by me, of course), I'm going to remove it. I can't afford the unbounded disk space that all the political nutcases in the world would happily fill.
Actually, I'm involved with running a number of web sites for organizations, some of them political. I've discussed how open the site should be with all of them. I tend to err on the "open" side, but in every case so far, they've all been quite concerned with the potential problems with unlimited "free speech", i.e., permanent support for the disk space for whatever nonsense any troll may want to post on their site. Even the "liberal" groups are worried about this, and often push some fairly strict controls on what can be posted. I do encourage openness as the default, but I also give them the tools they need to limit the damage of trolls and vandals.
Oh, and I should add "and marketers". It turns out that one of the main problems running online forums is being discovered by a marketer. When this happens, you often find your disk(s) completely filled with gigabytes of advertising. The tools that the marketers have for this can be impressive. Overnight, you can find that every message in your forum has hundreds or thousands of replies, each one an "I agree" statement and a link to a commercial web site.
So, until we all have an infinite amount of free disk space available on our servers, we have little choice but to limit what can be posted to our sites. And yes, we can support "free speech" while doing this without being hypocrites. Free speech doesn't include the right to mob a site and bury it under piles of garbage (as defined by the site's owners).
When I read the title I thought it was about being forced to use Drupal at all.
Yeah, me too. A couple of years ago, some clients wanted a drupal-based web site, and I thought it looked interesting, so I, uh, "volunteered" to learn to use it. I bought a couple of textbooks, and found online teaching sites. A month later, I'd produced nothing useful. I'd asked a good number of "How do you ...?" questions on the forum, and the people there were very nice -- but they never actually answered my questions. All sorts of things I tried didn't do at all what I expected, and often I couldn't figure out just what they did instead. Finally, the client was getting tired of saying "We need something soon", so I spent a week building their site by hand, mostly by writing a bunch of perl CGI programs that generated the site from their data. They liked it, started asking for more features, and they're still clients (though the site mostly runs itself now).
Since then, I've had occasion to advise others looking at drupal to "Don't bother." Or sometimes "You'll be sorry." And I've read a lot of similar comments from others, so I guess it hasn't gotten much better.
Drupal does have some good PR, though, and they're pretty good at impressing non-techie managers. And they might have some good stuff, if you can figure out how to make it do what you want it to do. I can't tell whether it's good or not, because I seem to be too dumb to understand how to make it work.
How does the U make a profit on your idea if it never sees the light of day? Doesn't the profit motive give the U incentive to get your innovations out to the world?
There have been any number of histories written explaining that the primary effect of patent law has always been to block further progress until the patents expire. There was a widely-quoted example a few years back, explaining why James Watt didn't make any profit from his improvements to the steam engine during the time he held several critical patents. He spent all his time and money on legal battles with other inventors, with the result that none of them were able to actually implement the steam-powered railroad engines that were to become so important in the next (19th) century. Rather than licensing each others' inventions to each other and combining them into a good engine, they each wanted total control, and refused to license their inventions to the others. Watt finally set up a profitable business after all the critical inventions became public domain. This was in part because he managed to hire a lot of the people with the needed expertise.
This story includes a nice example of how interlocking discoveries can work. Watt did build a much better (more powerful, safer) steam engine. But its power went into a piston, which produced back-and-forth linear motion. Another inventor discovered a linkage that translated this linear motion into a smooth rotary motion, which was needed if the engine were to drive vehicles with wheels. But patent law and the courts prevented these two inventions from being combined in the same mechanism, because neither inventor would license his invention to the other. So one had a good engine that delivered jerky motion to a vehicle's wheels; the other had a linkage that gave smooth rotary motion, but could only use the primitive steam engines of earlier decades.
Copyright law isn't as disastrous to progress as patent law, since copyright mostly limits the words you can use to describe something. This does interfere with communication, and encourages the development of disparate incompatible jargons. But patent law blocks the use of the actual ideas and discoveries, so it can easily become a total barrier to further progress. And historians have been telling us that this is mostly what has happened in the past.
"A major point of the Protestant Reformation was the demand for Bibles written in the local languages"
Though this sort of blatant DRM violation was initially prosecuted quite vigorously ...
There are some interesting comments on an earlier instance of this in James Chambers' "The Devil's Horsemen", a history of the Mongol invasion(s) during the 13th century. Part of the story was that the first expedition, led by a young Genghis (not yet Khan), was basically exploratory. They'd heard some horror stories about the far West, and wanted to learn if the people there were as evil and warlike as reported. So they sent out a team of explorers, linguists, and soldiers to protect them, to learn what they could and send back a report.
One of the things the expedition did to help pay their way was to bring along a troop of Korean printers, who had the world's most advanced printing presses in their wagons, and could set up print runs of whatever texts were popular in the areas they were approaching. Note that this was several centuries before Gutenberg. It turned out that they mostly printed Korans and Bibles, in both the standard versions and in the local languages (to keep their linguists busy and happy). Sales were good enough to pay for the troop's needs -- and this outraged the local authorities in most areas. The Mongols' illegal publications were much of the reason why the Mongols were characterized as "demons" and attacked. Remember that this was an exploratory troop, not the armies that were to come decades later. When the Mongols were attacked, it was in great part at attempt to enforce local religious copyright law, and at that time and place, copyright violation was a capital offense. The local authorities considered it right and proper to execute (without trial) anyone caught selling illicit copies of their religious texts. However, the soldiers that Genghis had brought along were easily able to handle the much larger attacking forces, and usually won with few casualties.
So maybe we should be grateful that the RIAA and MPAA aren't successfully imposing the death penalty on the children and grandmothers they're suing for "stealing" millions of copies of their albums and movies. Copyright law has become much more lenient since those days.
(Spoiler: Genghis and most of his troop survived, and reported that the West was indeed full of warlike people who would attack peaceful visitors like his troop without warning. He also reported that the West was divided into a great many tiny principalities, that were at constant war with each other. His advice was that if the West ever got its act together, it could be a serious threat to the civilized people of the East. So the West should be conquered and subdued before they got organized on a large scale. The attack force was organized, and Genghis was promoted to the leader position. The rest, as they say, is history.)
Certainly not only should schools add to the public domain but patents and copyrights should belong to the creators of that intellectual property.
It might be worth noting that some high-profile journals, notably Nature and Science, require that the submitter of the paper hold the copyright. If your university or research institute claims the copyright on your papers, you can't get them published in Nature or Science.
This sorta makes sense, since to publish them, the journal has to have a license from the copyright owner. Both of these journals have decided that they won't accept a copyright license from a corporation (and a university is a corporation); they will only accept the license from the author(s), who must have the legal right to give the journal a license to publish.
They have learned another lesson, too: Their agreements are worded so that after publication, any transfer of copyright must be approved by both the author(s) and the publisher. So Nature and Science can prevent the employer from claiming the copyright after publication. But I don't think I've actually read anything about how often they actually do this. Anyone know?
It might be interesting to get a list of journals that have adopted similar rules. I've heard of a few others that have done so, but I don't have any idea how common it is.
There's also the related topic of patents, which are often used to prevent researchers from building on each others' work. I'd wonder whether this might be the really serious threat to scientific progress. With copyright, you can buy a publication and then use any knowledge that it contains, as long as you don't plagiarize the wording. But with patent, you can't legally use the knowledge without permission from the patent owner. This is routinely used by drug companies to prevent competitors from developing improved versions of a drug. Without the patent owner's permission, you can't legally do the testing that's needed to compare the effect of your drug and theirs.