I'm duplicating this post from an unthreaded comment that I made earlier on this same article, now that threading is back on:
Some folks have been criticizing MySQL here, saying that it's MySQL's fault. I think this is a result of mis-reading the story. The "parent index" is not an SQL "index", but a column that acts as a self-referential key. Ala:
create table a (
xxx mediumint unsigned primary key,
yyy mediumint unsigned null references a.xxx ); alter table a modify column xxx bigint unsigned;
A database like Oracle, and perhaps even PostgreSQL or later versions of MySQL, might have choked on a foreign key constraint if the column types differed, but I'm not aware of any magic that would automatically extend an ALTER TABLE to alter all foreign key columns' types also, self-referential or not. Am I incorrect? Is this a magical feature in some/all databases?
Suffice to say, however, that this is a clear case of the database doing exactly what you asked for, and Slashdot has paid the price for asking for something nonsensical (hey, we've all done something similar).
PS: Note that the ALTER TABLE docs on the PostgreSQL site do seem to imply that something as extensive as the type of a foreign key column would not be updated, only indexes and "simple table constraints involving the column."
PPS: Tried this in MySQL 5.0, and it does not complain about the alter table creating a mismatched foreign key type, which is either a bug or a problematic feature that should probably be addressed if it hasn't already in 5.1.
PPPS: Of course, no one will ever see this comment, given the lack of threading;-)
Some folks have been criticizing MySQL here, saying that it's MySQL's fault. I think this is a result of mis-reading the story. The "parent index" is not an SQL "index", but a column that acts as a self-referential key. Ala:
create table a (
xxx mediumint unsigned primary key,
yyy mediumint unsigned null references a.xxx ); alter table a modify column xxx bigint unsigned;
A database like Oracle, and perhaps even PostgreSQL or later versions of MySQL, might have choked on a foreign key constraint if the column types differed, but I'm not aware of any magic that would automatically extend an ALTER TABLE to alter all foreign key columns' types also, self-referential or not. Am I incorrect? Is this a magical feature in some/all databases?
Suffice to say, however, that this is a clear case of the database doing exactly what you asked for, and Slashdot has paid the price for asking for something nonsensical (hey, we've all done something similar).
PS: Note that the ALTER TABLE docs on the PostgreSQL site do seem to imply that something as extensive as the type of a foreign key column would not be updated, only indexes and "simple table constraints involving the column."
PPS: Tried this in MySQL 5.0, and it does not complain about the alter table creating a mismatched foreign key type, which is either a bug or a problematic feature that should probably be addressed if it hasn't already in 5.1.
PPPS: Of course, no one will ever see this comment, given the lack of threading;-)
A bloody battle in a war that marked a substantial and measurable objective being reached.
Iraq, on the other hand, stopped being a war years ago. It is now an occupation with a stated goal of restoring order, a goal which slips further and further from the hands of U.S. troops every day as more and more die in a non-war with no clear way of reaching any well-defined objectives.
Iraq is a blemish on the record of the United States that compounds our having made the same mistakes in the 1960s and 1970s in Southeast Asia (through military force), South America (through assassination and support of dictators) and elsewhere. We really do have to stop imagining ourselves as competent nation-builders. It's just not something we know how to do. I think once we manage to disabuse ourselves of that notion, we'll find our role on the international stage is much more fruitful and warmly accepted.
Does anyone think that had someone else been in charge they would have brought western style democracy to Iraq?
Some of us think that, had someone else been in charge, they would have been smart enough not to try in the first place. At this juncture, all I can see as making sense is a transition plan that goes through several phases of American troops being replaced by a mix of international peacekeepers and arab nation-builders, since we've certainly a) convinced the population that they can't trust the Americans and b) destroyed the infrastructure to the point that martial law will be required for some time to come. Those two factors can be re-stated as: we broke it, and we're the only ones who can no longer fix it.
You can hardly compare the civil attacks on one piece of software that was designed to allow copying of content which the seller had restricted (no matter how right you might think that is, and I'm not arguing the point) with the systematic censorship of any political or otherwise controversial electronic communication. The fact that you would even bring that up in this context demonstrates that you MUST live in a country which is shockingly low in censorship when compared to the rest of the world.
Nice try, but I doubt the pro-piracy blowhards on this site will catch the irony. They'll just keep stealing and stealing other people's IP until there's nothing left to take. Thieves aren't the brightest of folk, after all.
Informative? Hrm...
Ok, first off: "pro-piracy blowhards"; what does that mean? Do you mean someone like myself who feels that copyright law is no longer serving its purpose as intended by the constitution, and that its abuse is harming the value of copyrights as a tool for regulation? Or, are you simply arm-waving at the teens who haven't yet considered the implications of their actions, and are just downloading whatever they want because it's the path of least resistance?
Personally, I think the two are connected. I think the average teens that download music or movies or whatever, in violation of copyright, are doing so because the copyright system has never seemed like something that matters to anyone they know. It's not equitable, so there's no sense that you are "stealing" or depriving anyone of anything. Artists tell us that they're not being compensated for their work (in fact many of them go into debt when producing music specifically), and we constantly hear of large studios (for film, television and music) abusing their power in order to manipulate markets and deprive artists of the fruits of their work.
Under that sort of system, how is it shocking that most people would rather "steal" than pay to support the system? Now, if we had a system of automatic licensing, and zero penalties for revenueless electronic duplication, THEN I think you would see an increase in the number of people who wanted to support the system. After all, if you know an artist or two who really benefit from the system, you're going to feel that it's worth it. If you know an artist for two who get screwed by the system....
As for theft vs. infringement: there are three offenses. The first is a violation of federal law, such as the DMCA. That's a federal crime, but it's not theft. There is copyright infringement. That's a sort of logical theft, but under the law, the two are very distinct. Be clear about which you are talking about: the law or the common expression. Then there is license violation. That's a strictly civil matter between two parties over an agreement which is broken, and which is theft in exactly no ways. Theft under the law has nothing to do with copyright infringement. That's just the way it is.
It's important to point out that words like "theft" simply muddy the watrer, and combine concepts which should not be combined.
No, I have to disagree. On hardware platforms where Linux support is solid, everything has always gone as smooth as you could want for me. On platforms where it wasn't well supported, it has been a nightmare. Same deal for Windows. Try cramming XP onto an older (pre-XP) box -- even one that meets the memory requirements -- sometime, and you'll see what I mean.
That may be true in California, but I'm pretty sure that in MA (where I live), it's not. Either that, or I've seen abuses of the law, which is also possible.
You are incorrect, and from the WP article you cited (intro section, even): "assault refers only to the threat of violence, while the actual violence is battery."
Threats of violence are a crime, and that crime is called assault.
When political correctness and simple correct usage agree, I have no problem with political correctness. In this case, "minor attracted adult" includes damn-near every adult male that I've ever had a serious conversation with about sexual attraction. Why do you think Married With Children was so popular with the 20-25 heterosexual (and bi-sexual for that matter) male crowd? It wasn't because of the wife....
Men (regardless of sexual orientation) tend to be attracted to people younger than themselves, and I'll be honest, I can't tell the difference between a 17 and 18 year old in most situations. So, a support group for the 2-sigma or so crowd (those attracted to younger people, slightly outside of the range of "normal") aren't really "pedophiles" (which means you're attracted to someone in their early teens or less) but might well feel they need some help in avoiding questionable interactions with younger people.
I'm mostly guessing, here, since I've never seen the site. It could be that the site was simply a teen porn dumping ground, or it could have been a directory of support groups. There's no way for me to know.
It's all too often that someone will jump to the term, "political correctness," when what's really going on is an attempt to disambiguate a more complex situation than most people understand.
I'm going to rape you, then kill you while your family watches. Then I will kill them.
Just words. Doesn't mean a thing. Not a crime, right?
Nope, that's a crime. The crime is called assault. However, it's grey (as it should be) and subject to interpretation. You did not commit assault, for example, because from context, it's clear that you were making an example. If you sent that comment as email to a particular recipient, without any context that indicated that you were being hypothetical, THEN it would be assault.
The simple version is: if a reasonable person would assume that the comment constituted a credible threat of violence, then it's assault.
IANAL, as you may have guessed, but I've had to look into what does and does not constitute assault and/or battery in the past.
Which would be fine, except that the kind of damage potentially caused during the period between the infringement starting, and the rightsholder noticing and going through the motions to get the material taken down, is staggering in the Internet age. Copyright can no longer realistically be enforced as a civil matter in an age of near-instantaneous, near-zero-cost mass-distribution. Protecting the principle of copyright requires a faster, more direct approach.
Not at all. When someone does something like that, if they're making a profit, then, as described in my OP, you would owe some percentage of your revenue to the artist (or copyright owner, though I'd rather see a system where there's some chunk of ownership that you can never remove from the artist, even by contract).
There's no "damage," here. It's a win-win.
Thanks. I'd like the rights to the Linux kernel, OpenOffice, Firefox and everything the FSF has ever provided, please. Where shall I send the cheque?
You're confusing automatic licensing (what I was suggesting) with automatic reliquishing of control of rights. Such a scheme WOULD break the GPL somewhat, but not much. It would mean that a company that wanted to embed emacs in its proprietary product, and not contribute back changes could just do so, and fork some cash over to the FSF. The FSF would hate this, but I'm not so sure it would be too much of a price to pay for a more fluid and enriching copyright model. Also, while this hurts the GPL slightly, it does nothing to licenses like the BSD license, which already gives you these rights without paying.
Still, you would be able to use, modifiy and distribute emacs under the GPL just as you do now (note that I discussed the idea of making the auto-licensing fees high, but not prohibitive, specifically to incent people to continue to write their own licenses under better terms for whatever reasons they choose).
What this would do, however, is make it reasonable for people to share their music, videos, whatever over file-sharing networks, but those networks would continue to have the problems they have today (difficult to index well, lots of crap, etc.) A centralized, well-funded effort will still continue to make sense, and profit artists, as iTunes does today.
You must be using a version of XP that I'm not familiar with. Even if you are building a system from scratch running XP, it is generally as easy as installing XP from the CD, and putting a CD with drivers into the CDROM drive that came with the motherboard.
After that, if updates are turned on, XP grabs patches and service packs, and getting Nvidia or ATI drivers updated is straightforward.
Yep, you just re-stated my case. The smoothness of the installation and support are directly connected with how well your hardware vendor supports your OS. When that breaks down, both Windows and Linux suck to install from scratch, but are equally usable when pre-installed by someone who goes through all of that for you (OEM).
It most certainly is the government's responsibility! Copyright law is there to serve the public good by promoting work that is of a benefit to everyone. Copyright is failing to do that in some stunning ways, and has instead become a vehicle for large corporations to continue to milk profits out of their OLD work more than a generation after it was created. That's actually contrary to the stated purpose in the Constitution.
IMHO, the laws should be written such that "violation" of copyright is always permitted unless someone complains (thus, you can't be put in jail for violating the DMCA or sued for other copyright related laws) and sent you a cese and decist letter first, which you ignored. Second, licensing should be automatic. That is, You Tube should be able to pay the copyright-holder-of-record or put aside a fund for a copyright holder to claim from, in an amount that is based on a percentage of the gross revenue associated with the infringement. This amount should be high, but not punative (maybe 25-30%), essentially allowing You Tube (only as a single example) to operate, but incenting licensing negotiation for better deals.
Of course, we all know that life+n years is unworkable, as we've all read far too many very thoughtful people write essays on the subject of the harm that that does to the commons. I think it's prety obvious, based on that, that Byrne and other treaties need to be re-negotiated, and laws changed to reflect a more reasonable period. I could see a case for 40 years, but I think the scale needs to be more flexible for those elements that are part of our cultural makeup. Perhaps 20 years, renewable twice, but with an automatic expiration if it is determined to be one of the top 1000 or so most circulated items after the first renewal period starts. That way, if a movie becomes so iconic that nearly everyone owns a copy (e.g. Star Wars), then it would expire around 20 years later, after the owner has clearly made enough money to have rewarded his or her investment of time and energy, and it is now of more value to the culture to release it than to continue to reward one person. Think about that. Star Wars: A New Hope, under this scheme, would have been public domain starting in 1997. Empire in 2000. Lucas was stupidly rich by that point, and would only lose the copyright IF he was stupidly rich. It's a perfect, self-correcting system, lacking only a government system of tracking the most widely circulated copyrighted works, which would also be a boon for the consumer and artist (as current industry tracking is designed to promote specific items and limit rewards to artists).
But the main point is valid, and I think it extends to the Linux experts.
I don't think the main point is valid. Installing and tweeking Windows sucks just as hard as Linux. The thing is, you don't do that. You get it pre-installed on your box by an OEM who did all the work. Then your graphics card comes with drivers that the card manufacturer and the OS company have worked together on to make sure the OS gets the most out of the card. Then, you might download some piece of software, and the vendor of that software has worked with the OS vendor to make sure that it installs cleanly and uses all of the features of the OS.
Linux is hurting on the desktop side, not becuase it is hard to use, but because there isn't an army of companies working with any OS vendor to make sure that you don't really have to "use" it at all. The situation is improving, though. The number of people who run the most popular games under Wine or Cedega and use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice natively on Linux is climbing, and as that happens, more and more vendors will be pushing major commercial vendors to provide hooks for the smooth installation and use of their software across platforms. OEMs were more common for Linux desktops in the early 2000s, but they died quickly. That trend will rise again as the user-base begins to grow.
Oracle and Microsoft's recent moves to compete with Red Hat have lit up the industry, and while most of the action is on the server-side right now, it's going to spill over onto the desktop.
There is a vast chasm of difference between anonymous voting and pseudononymous voting. You are suggesting pseudononymous voting where you must trust that a) those who administer the system do not retain information linking you to your vote and b) there is no flaw in the system (potentially in an outlying part of it that isn't as carefully checked) which allows your vote to be determined later.
What happens when a flaw is found next year that lets last year's voter records be viewed?
Who are "they", and what constitutes a "spy"? Certainly information flows from local government to fedral governmetns in every nation on Earth. Typically, this is a good thing (land records and other data are very useful when running a country). In what specific cases that you can cite, are you saying there is a problem?
Wealthy corporations hire criminals or corrupt officials, military men, "ex-spies", etc to spy on populations in "democractic" nations.
Can you cite any specific cases, and if so, can you point to any evidence that this is widespread? I've not run into such evidence myself, outside of Internet-based forums where people rarely cite any specifics, and if they do, make overly broad generalizations on them. Really, give me a solid example that we can legitimately generalize from, and we can talk. I'm certainly not of the opinion that large, international conglomerates are run by the cream of society, out to do good for me. On the other hand, I'm unwilling to buy that there's a financial win in "managing" the population in the way that you describe (focus groups and mass marketing are a much more viable return on investment).
Governments co-operate to spy on their own people to manage dissent and document instabilities, people, etc.
Your initial assertion is correct. Programs like USA/UK and others have been widely known about for decades now. Your assertion of intent is shaky at best. You would be better off saying that these programs are not subject to sufficient international oversight, and thus laws and oversight in one country can be subverted by using partner nations in ways that can be readily abused. Australia had someone go public, claiming that USA/UK was doing just this about 4-5 years ago. If pressed, I'm sure I can find a link on the Net, but go look for "australia echelon" and I think you'll find it.
Random rants based on paranoia are rarely as effective as a cogent analysis of the risks presented by a specific program.
Many internet providers and other internet businesses are subsidiaries of larger parent companies that collect as much data as they can, illegally or legally
This is widely true, but you're implying some intent that I don't think is there. Largely this is a result of the immature state of Internet businesses, and the fact that regulations are difficult to interpret (much less enforce) in a rapidly changing industry). Having dome some things for such businesses in previous jobs that I considered to be ethically dubious at the time in terms of data-gathering, I can say that the POTENTIAL for abuse is rarely matched with the COORDINATION and PLANNING that would be required to execute that abuse in a meaningful way. That said, I never accept cookies from CNN or any CNN-related site, and there are reasons for that....
Free email services are not private
Of course, they're not. You expected otherwise?
Web boards and google, many people on the internet "anonymously" post the intimate details of their personal and professional life to web-boards around the internet to get answers, or whatever they are looking for (sympathy, cheer oneself up, the intellectual stimulation, etc).
I post information "anonymously" when I want to say something that I don't want to affect my reputation, or don't want to be associated with my company by the public. Making any further assumptions is invalid.
Data mining and Crawlers that crawl the internet and hack into sites (backdoors)
Now, you're just being silly. No one in their right minds goes about data mining non-public information this way. There are much easier ways, especially if you are a government. For example, in China, they simply use routers that scan the traffic for useful
This is probably aimed at improving the build environment for PHP on Windows, OS integration (deeper integration with.Net, etc). These things are important to Windows developers, though not as much to PHP developers who don't think in terms of what box the code runs on.
Please, for the love of god, stop spamming the MBTA. Have you seen the redline lately?
The scary part is that none of those people are models. Each and every one of them sits in the same building as I do, and have the job titles that are shown on those ads. We'll stop making fun of them eventually.;-)
I and a bunch of other people who do 'real computer science' as you call it (bioinformatics analysis) we quite amused by the "we'll overwork you like a startup, but we'll make sure our CEO gets rich" add campaign.
Well, we are a start-up in spirit, and while I'm sure that our CEO will get rich, since he's a programmer who paid his dues writing code, I have no problem with that (side note: so is our COO and many other members of our management team). Our engineers are well-compensated for the inhuman productivity that they generate, and any one of them could walk into a slow-and-easy job at a Fortune 500 company tomorrow if they wanted. Not shockingly, that's not what they want. Being in an environment that's social and yet actively changing an industry from the ground up is exciting stuff, and I say that as a developer, myself.
BTW: About "real CS"... I don't use that phrase to put down other companies. I understand that there are many companies out there that do want to do real CS, some moreso and some less. However, let me note that I constantly hear new employees talkinig about the fact that they never thought they would be able to use the skills that they had learned, and thought that they would be doomed to a life of cranking out boring code where a knowledge of sorting algorithms was about as much as they needed. When you work in an environment that rewards working solutions to hard problems, it's a new ball game (as I hope you know, based on your comments about your workplace).
Good luck, and I'm sorry if you find the T ads bothersome. Drop me some email sometime, and you and I can get together for lunch and talk about how the MBTA should be an efficient operation that doesn't need ads to survive.;-)
Hey, more power to you! I'm glad you found work so quickly. Like I say, I'm not a recruiter, and I'm glad to see the industry in an up-swing even if it means that hiring gets harder for ITA.
ITA was founded by people for whom solutions to hard problems are a thing of passion. If you look at those puzzles and aren't compelled to have fun solving them, then your mindset is probably not quite in line with those of our developers. This is a company, after all, that started when some folks at MIT said, "the airline industry is running on 30 year old mainframe code... I'll bet it would be fun to fix that."
Turns out they were right, and if you can't put our puzzles down until you have what you consider to be an optimal solution, then you probably would have done the same.;-)
PS: Note that I speak for myself here, and I'm not a recuiter or executive at ITA, just a technical guy.
It's hard to get people to really look at your company. For example, I work for ITA Software, and we're probably one of the best options for the superstar programmer on the east coast. We do real computer science (you know, that stuff you thought you'd never do for real work again after your PhD? One thing that works out is that we have programming puzzles on each of our job's pages like this one: Computer Scientist/Programmer. These puzzles are fun, and just hard enough that your average Java Certified Web flunky will get weeded out. It really helps.
Of course, for operations and other areas of the company, it's still hard to attract the right eyes.
in most cases where you'd want to use Oracle instead of the open source choices, it's running on a dedicated machine. So why not give customers complete support all the way down to the iron?
Because supporting your own Linux distribution is a nightmare, and something that Oracle certainly doesn't want to do. IMHO, this move was meant to engage Red Hat in a price-war which they could not win, culminating in a deal over JBoss (which Red Hat purchased, putting them in direct competition with Oracle for the lucractive middleware development market). Red Hat's refusal to engage the price-war has to be bringing home to Oracle what they've just done: become the "budget enterprise Linux solution."
Slashdot Mirror
Some folks have been criticizing MySQL here, saying that it's MySQL's fault. I think this is a result of mis-reading the story. The "parent index" is not an SQL "index", but a column that acts as a self-referential key. Ala:A database like Oracle, and perhaps even PostgreSQL or later versions of MySQL, might have choked on a foreign key constraint if the column types differed, but I'm not aware of any magic that would automatically extend an ALTER TABLE to alter all foreign key columns' types also, self-referential or not. Am I incorrect? Is this a magical feature in some/all databases?
Suffice to say, however, that this is a clear case of the database doing exactly what you asked for, and Slashdot has paid the price for asking for something nonsensical (hey, we've all done something similar).
PS: Note that the ALTER TABLE docs on the PostgreSQL site do seem to imply that something as extensive as the type of a foreign key column would not be updated, only indexes and "simple table constraints involving the column."
PPS: Tried this in MySQL 5.0, and it does not complain about the alter table creating a mismatched foreign key type, which is either a bug or a problematic feature that should probably be addressed if it hasn't already in 5.1.
PPPS: Of course, no one will ever see this comment, given the lack of threading
PPPPS: Ok, now they might
Can you explain the Novell deal to me? How does it hurt their customers?
I'm honestly curious. I've only heard that Novell would be supporting Microsoft virtualization under Linux as a result.
Suffice to say, however, that this is a clear case of the database doing exactly what you asked for, and Slashdot has paid the price for asking for something nonsensical (hey, we've all done something similar).
PS: Note that the ALTER TABLE docs on the PostgreSQL site do seem to imply that something as extensive as the type of a foreign key column would not be updated, only indexes and "simple table constraints involving the column."
PPS: Tried this in MySQL 5.0, and it does not complain about the alter table creating a mismatched foreign key type, which is either a bug or a problematic feature that should probably be addressed if it hasn't already in 5.1.
PPPS: Of course, no one will ever see this comment, given the lack of threading
A bloody battle in a war that marked a substantial and measurable objective being reached.
Iraq, on the other hand, stopped being a war years ago. It is now an occupation with a stated goal of restoring order, a goal which slips further and further from the hands of U.S. troops every day as more and more die in a non-war with no clear way of reaching any well-defined objectives.
Iraq is a blemish on the record of the United States that compounds our having made the same mistakes in the 1960s and 1970s in Southeast Asia (through military force), South America (through assassination and support of dictators) and elsewhere. We really do have to stop imagining ourselves as competent nation-builders. It's just not something we know how to do. I think once we manage to disabuse ourselves of that notion, we'll find our role on the international stage is much more fruitful and warmly accepted.
Some of us think that, had someone else been in charge, they would have been smart enough not to try in the first place. At this juncture, all I can see as making sense is a transition plan that goes through several phases of American troops being replaced by a mix of international peacekeepers and arab nation-builders, since we've certainly a) convinced the population that they can't trust the Americans and b) destroyed the infrastructure to the point that martial law will be required for some time to come. Those two factors can be re-stated as: we broke it, and we're the only ones who can no longer fix it.
You can hardly compare the civil attacks on one piece of software that was designed to allow copying of content which the seller had restricted (no matter how right you might think that is, and I'm not arguing the point) with the systematic censorship of any political or otherwise controversial electronic communication. The fact that you would even bring that up in this context demonstrates that you MUST live in a country which is shockingly low in censorship when compared to the rest of the world.
Informative? Hrm...
Ok, first off: "pro-piracy blowhards"; what does that mean? Do you mean someone like myself who feels that copyright law is no longer serving its purpose as intended by the constitution, and that its abuse is harming the value of copyrights as a tool for regulation? Or, are you simply arm-waving at the teens who haven't yet considered the implications of their actions, and are just downloading whatever they want because it's the path of least resistance?
Personally, I think the two are connected. I think the average teens that download music or movies or whatever, in violation of copyright, are doing so because the copyright system has never seemed like something that matters to anyone they know. It's not equitable, so there's no sense that you are "stealing" or depriving anyone of anything. Artists tell us that they're not being compensated for their work (in fact many of them go into debt when producing music specifically), and we constantly hear of large studios (for film, television and music) abusing their power in order to manipulate markets and deprive artists of the fruits of their work.
Under that sort of system, how is it shocking that most people would rather "steal" than pay to support the system? Now, if we had a system of automatic licensing, and zero penalties for revenueless electronic duplication, THEN I think you would see an increase in the number of people who wanted to support the system. After all, if you know an artist or two who really benefit from the system, you're going to feel that it's worth it. If you know an artist for two who get screwed by the system....
As for theft vs. infringement: there are three offenses. The first is a violation of federal law, such as the DMCA. That's a federal crime, but it's not theft. There is copyright infringement. That's a sort of logical theft, but under the law, the two are very distinct. Be clear about which you are talking about: the law or the common expression. Then there is license violation. That's a strictly civil matter between two parties over an agreement which is broken, and which is theft in exactly no ways. Theft under the law has nothing to do with copyright infringement. That's just the way it is.
It's important to point out that words like "theft" simply muddy the watrer, and combine concepts which should not be combined.
No, I have to disagree. On hardware platforms where Linux support is solid, everything has always gone as smooth as you could want for me. On platforms where it wasn't well supported, it has been a nightmare. Same deal for Windows. Try cramming XP onto an older (pre-XP) box -- even one that meets the memory requirements -- sometime, and you'll see what I mean.
That may be true in California, but I'm pretty sure that in MA (where I live), it's not. Either that, or I've seen abuses of the law, which is also possible.
You are incorrect, and from the WP article you cited (intro section, even): "assault refers only to the threat of violence, while the actual violence is battery."
Threats of violence are a crime, and that crime is called assault.
When political correctness and simple correct usage agree, I have no problem with political correctness. In this case, "minor attracted adult" includes damn-near every adult male that I've ever had a serious conversation with about sexual attraction. Why do you think Married With Children was so popular with the 20-25 heterosexual (and bi-sexual for that matter) male crowd? It wasn't because of the wife....
Men (regardless of sexual orientation) tend to be attracted to people younger than themselves, and I'll be honest, I can't tell the difference between a 17 and 18 year old in most situations. So, a support group for the 2-sigma or so crowd (those attracted to younger people, slightly outside of the range of "normal") aren't really "pedophiles" (which means you're attracted to someone in their early teens or less) but might well feel they need some help in avoiding questionable interactions with younger people.
I'm mostly guessing, here, since I've never seen the site. It could be that the site was simply a teen porn dumping ground, or it could have been a directory of support groups. There's no way for me to know.
It's all too often that someone will jump to the term, "political correctness," when what's really going on is an attempt to disambiguate a more complex situation than most people understand.
Nope, that's a crime. The crime is called assault. However, it's grey (as it should be) and subject to interpretation. You did not commit assault, for example, because from context, it's clear that you were making an example. If you sent that comment as email to a particular recipient, without any context that indicated that you were being hypothetical, THEN it would be assault.
The simple version is: if a reasonable person would assume that the comment constituted a credible threat of violence, then it's assault.
IANAL, as you may have guessed, but I've had to look into what does and does not constitute assault and/or battery in the past.
Not at all. When someone does something like that, if they're making a profit, then, as described in my OP, you would owe some percentage of your revenue to the artist (or copyright owner, though I'd rather see a system where there's some chunk of ownership that you can never remove from the artist, even by contract).
There's no "damage," here. It's a win-win.
You're confusing automatic licensing (what I was suggesting) with automatic reliquishing of control of rights. Such a scheme WOULD break the GPL somewhat, but not much. It would mean that a company that wanted to embed emacs in its proprietary product, and not contribute back changes could just do so, and fork some cash over to the FSF. The FSF would hate this, but I'm not so sure it would be too much of a price to pay for a more fluid and enriching copyright model. Also, while this hurts the GPL slightly, it does nothing to licenses like the BSD license, which already gives you these rights without paying.
Still, you would be able to use, modifiy and distribute emacs under the GPL just as you do now (note that I discussed the idea of making the auto-licensing fees high, but not prohibitive, specifically to incent people to continue to write their own licenses under better terms for whatever reasons they choose).
What this would do, however, is make it reasonable for people to share their music, videos, whatever over file-sharing networks, but those networks would continue to have the problems they have today (difficult to index well, lots of crap, etc.) A centralized, well-funded effort will still continue to make sense, and profit artists, as iTunes does today.
Yep, you just re-stated my case. The smoothness of the installation and support are directly connected with how well your hardware vendor supports your OS. When that breaks down, both Windows and Linux suck to install from scratch, but are equally usable when pre-installed by someone who goes through all of that for you (OEM).
It most certainly is the government's responsibility! Copyright law is there to serve the public good by promoting work that is of a benefit to everyone. Copyright is failing to do that in some stunning ways, and has instead become a vehicle for large corporations to continue to milk profits out of their OLD work more than a generation after it was created. That's actually contrary to the stated purpose in the Constitution.
IMHO, the laws should be written such that "violation" of copyright is always permitted unless someone complains (thus, you can't be put in jail for violating the DMCA or sued for other copyright related laws) and sent you a cese and decist letter first, which you ignored. Second, licensing should be automatic. That is, You Tube should be able to pay the copyright-holder-of-record or put aside a fund for a copyright holder to claim from, in an amount that is based on a percentage of the gross revenue associated with the infringement. This amount should be high, but not punative (maybe 25-30%), essentially allowing You Tube (only as a single example) to operate, but incenting licensing negotiation for better deals.
Of course, we all know that life+n years is unworkable, as we've all read far too many very thoughtful people write essays on the subject of the harm that that does to the commons. I think it's prety obvious, based on that, that Byrne and other treaties need to be re-negotiated, and laws changed to reflect a more reasonable period. I could see a case for 40 years, but I think the scale needs to be more flexible for those elements that are part of our cultural makeup. Perhaps 20 years, renewable twice, but with an automatic expiration if it is determined to be one of the top 1000 or so most circulated items after the first renewal period starts. That way, if a movie becomes so iconic that nearly everyone owns a copy (e.g. Star Wars), then it would expire around 20 years later, after the owner has clearly made enough money to have rewarded his or her investment of time and energy, and it is now of more value to the culture to release it than to continue to reward one person. Think about that. Star Wars: A New Hope, under this scheme, would have been public domain starting in 1997. Empire in 2000. Lucas was stupidly rich by that point, and would only lose the copyright IF he was stupidly rich. It's a perfect, self-correcting system, lacking only a government system of tracking the most widely circulated copyrighted works, which would also be a boon for the consumer and artist (as current industry tracking is designed to promote specific items and limit rewards to artists).
I don't think the main point is valid. Installing and tweeking Windows sucks just as hard as Linux. The thing is, you don't do that. You get it pre-installed on your box by an OEM who did all the work. Then your graphics card comes with drivers that the card manufacturer and the OS company have worked together on to make sure the OS gets the most out of the card. Then, you might download some piece of software, and the vendor of that software has worked with the OS vendor to make sure that it installs cleanly and uses all of the features of the OS.
Linux is hurting on the desktop side, not becuase it is hard to use, but because there isn't an army of companies working with any OS vendor to make sure that you don't really have to "use" it at all. The situation is improving, though. The number of people who run the most popular games under Wine or Cedega and use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice natively on Linux is climbing, and as that happens, more and more vendors will be pushing major commercial vendors to provide hooks for the smooth installation and use of their software across platforms. OEMs were more common for Linux desktops in the early 2000s, but they died quickly. That trend will rise again as the user-base begins to grow.
Oracle and Microsoft's recent moves to compete with Red Hat have lit up the industry, and while most of the action is on the server-side right now, it's going to spill over onto the desktop.
There is a vast chasm of difference between anonymous voting and pseudononymous voting. You are suggesting pseudononymous voting where you must trust that a) those who administer the system do not retain information linking you to your vote and b) there is no flaw in the system (potentially in an outlying part of it that isn't as carefully checked) which allows your vote to be determined later.
What happens when a flaw is found next year that lets last year's voter records be viewed?
Who are "they", and what constitutes a "spy"? Certainly information flows from local government to fedral governmetns in every nation on Earth. Typically, this is a good thing (land records and other data are very useful when running a country). In what specific cases that you can cite, are you saying there is a problem?
Can you cite any specific cases, and if so, can you point to any evidence that this is widespread? I've not run into such evidence myself, outside of Internet-based forums where people rarely cite any specifics, and if they do, make overly broad generalizations on them. Really, give me a solid example that we can legitimately generalize from, and we can talk. I'm certainly not of the opinion that large, international conglomerates are run by the cream of society, out to do good for me. On the other hand, I'm unwilling to buy that there's a financial win in "managing" the population in the way that you describe (focus groups and mass marketing are a much more viable return on investment).
Your initial assertion is correct. Programs like USA/UK and others have been widely known about for decades now. Your assertion of intent is shaky at best. You would be better off saying that these programs are not subject to sufficient international oversight, and thus laws and oversight in one country can be subverted by using partner nations in ways that can be readily abused. Australia had someone go public, claiming that USA/UK was doing just this about 4-5 years ago. If pressed, I'm sure I can find a link on the Net, but go look for "australia echelon" and I think you'll find it.
Random rants based on paranoia are rarely as effective as a cogent analysis of the risks presented by a specific program.
This is widely true, but you're implying some intent that I don't think is there. Largely this is a result of the immature state of Internet businesses, and the fact that regulations are difficult to interpret (much less enforce) in a rapidly changing industry). Having dome some things for such businesses in previous jobs that I considered to be ethically dubious at the time in terms of data-gathering, I can say that the POTENTIAL for abuse is rarely matched with the COORDINATION and PLANNING that would be required to execute that abuse in a meaningful way. That said, I never accept cookies from CNN or any CNN-related site, and there are reasons for that....
Of course, they're not. You expected otherwise?
I post information "anonymously" when I want to say something that I don't want to affect my reputation, or don't want to be associated with my company by the public. Making any further assumptions is invalid.
Now, you're just being silly. No one in their right minds goes about data mining non-public information this way. There are much easier ways, especially if you are a government. For example, in China, they simply use routers that scan the traffic for useful
This is probably aimed at improving the build environment for PHP on Windows, OS integration (deeper integration with .Net, etc). These things are important to Windows developers, though not as much to PHP developers who don't think in terms of what box the code runs on.
The scary part is that none of those people are models. Each and every one of them sits in the same building as I do, and have the job titles that are shown on those ads. We'll stop making fun of them eventually.
Well, we are a start-up in spirit, and while I'm sure that our CEO will get rich, since he's a programmer who paid his dues writing code, I have no problem with that (side note: so is our COO and many other members of our management team). Our engineers are well-compensated for the inhuman productivity that they generate, and any one of them could walk into a slow-and-easy job at a Fortune 500 company tomorrow if they wanted. Not shockingly, that's not what they want. Being in an environment that's social and yet actively changing an industry from the ground up is exciting stuff, and I say that as a developer, myself.
BTW: About "real CS"... I don't use that phrase to put down other companies. I understand that there are many companies out there that do want to do real CS, some moreso and some less. However, let me note that I constantly hear new employees talkinig about the fact that they never thought they would be able to use the skills that they had learned, and thought that they would be doomed to a life of cranking out boring code where a knowledge of sorting algorithms was about as much as they needed. When you work in an environment that rewards working solutions to hard problems, it's a new ball game (as I hope you know, based on your comments about your workplace).
Good luck, and I'm sorry if you find the T ads bothersome. Drop me some email sometime, and you and I can get together for lunch and talk about how the MBTA should be an efficient operation that doesn't need ads to survive.
Hey, more power to you! I'm glad you found work so quickly. Like I say, I'm not a recruiter, and I'm glad to see the industry in an up-swing even if it means that hiring gets harder for ITA.
ITA was founded by people for whom solutions to hard problems are a thing of passion. If you look at those puzzles and aren't compelled to have fun solving them, then your mindset is probably not quite in line with those of our developers. This is a company, after all, that started when some folks at MIT said, "the airline industry is running on 30 year old mainframe code... I'll bet it would be fun to fix that."
;-)
Turns out they were right, and if you can't put our puzzles down until you have what you consider to be an optimal solution, then you probably would have done the same.
PS: Note that I speak for myself here, and I'm not a recuiter or executive at ITA, just a technical guy.
It's hard to get people to really look at your company. For example, I work for ITA Software, and we're probably one of the best options for the superstar programmer on the east coast. We do real computer science (you know, that stuff you thought you'd never do for real work again after your PhD? One thing that works out is that we have programming puzzles on each of our job's pages like this one: Computer Scientist/Programmer. These puzzles are fun, and just hard enough that your average Java Certified Web flunky will get weeded out. It really helps.
Of course, for operations and other areas of the company, it's still hard to attract the right eyes.
I know it's just coincidence, but it's amusing that the URL in your signature gives a database error right now ;-)
Because supporting your own Linux distribution is a nightmare, and something that Oracle certainly doesn't want to do. IMHO, this move was meant to engage Red Hat in a price-war which they could not win, culminating in a deal over JBoss (which Red Hat purchased, putting them in direct competition with Oracle for the lucractive middleware development market). Red Hat's refusal to engage the price-war has to be bringing home to Oracle what they've just done: become the "budget enterprise Linux solution."