Actually, I keep iCab set to always accept from one or two sites, and always reject from every tld i could think of. When I want to let something through, I'll know. It's much better than something like junkbuster, as it lets me refuse to take in graphics of particular sizes too.
Well, I'd be concerned as to whether or not they were safe, unfortunately. Check out "Toxic Sludge is Good For You" -- evidently, the industries involved have started to change the definitions so as to favor themselves.
No, most shells (that I've seen) use crappy filename completion. Compare how it does it to something better, like a good web browser's address field.
Shells make you guess if you have enough characters for the completion, and force you to hit the tab key to trigger it. Browsers bring up a most likely choice (which could be based on a variety of factors - alphabetic order, frequency of use, explicit preference, etc. as you like) as soon as they've got one, often with other choices immediately available, and selectable, but let you keep typing, overwriting the choice, refining it if you like, skipping to a relevant portion away from the current cursor location if you like, etc.
There is a FUNDEMENTAL difference between having a command line - that is, having the ability to textually describe some command or system object or whatever - and having to suffer with a half-baked virtual teletype machine to use it. Terminals make CLIs look bad, and the shells don't do much to help the situation. (it took forever for things like histories to come along, and that only mimics actual tty's!)
It is entirely possible to embrace GUI elements in a shell, provided that they are assistive in permitting you to textually describe things.
Regarding the rest of your post, your approach to HCI is all wrong. No one is perfect; no one remembers everything; and many people who might love to use CLI features are put off by this moronic insistance that they spend time learning how to use them down to their depths before they can do thing one. Even expert power users often, often find conveniences put in place for newbies to be useful. (examples: undo buffers, oxo kitchenware, consistant naming conventions)
Don't make incorrect absolute statements like this; it's annoying.
CLI's are quite inefficient when you need to do a lot of typing. E.g. if you were moving files to a path that was very long; where you have to perform operations on files that can't be selected through grep b/c there's no common rules that are applicable.
Besides which, in the real world, the time you waste trying to remember some cryptic argument and how to use it IS a factor to be weighed.
CLI's have their uses, as do GUI's. Far better for them to augment each other (e.g. right-clicking on a CLI command to select from a list of argument options with their full names; selecting files spacially with the mouse and renaming them with wildcards) than to persist in maintaining a wall.
As for the comment below re: keyboard shortcuts, testing reveals that they are for the most part slower than using the mouse. People don't consciously realize it, but unless the command is incredibly common and ingrained as only a few are, they pause and try to remember it. It's objective testing has revealed this - not people's subjective senses of time.
But therein is the trick: let us assume here, in the absence of any case law to look at on the subject, that compilation, or run-time interpretation can be done without infringing on the original developer's copyright.
If that's so, _why_ should I agree to the license? I can can compile it and use it for more than 45 days without paying you a penny, because I already have it, and your copyright doesn't extend over usage. It's great if people do out of the goodness of their hearts, sure, but it may be unlikely.
At least with the GPL, it confers rights that users _don't_ already have, and it's entirely optional anyway. (i.e. you can use software w/o it, you just can't disseminate it)
Really? I see a more serious problem - that copyright does not confer upon the copyright holder the ability to dictate the use of a work after it has been distributed to a member of the public.
If they've got the source already, you can't compel them to pay if they want to execute it. (generally - compiling might be a sufficient change to require permission, but if it were run-time interpreted, that's a different kettle of fish)
of course, this is the government. while there may be room to debate as to whether private entities can restrict certain types of information, the government - the one that is itself constrained by the 4th and 1st amendments, among others, is held to a very high standard.
Well, actually it being compatable with Unix is just a bonus; it's not strictly necessary. (I'd just hope that POSIX could be implemented decently on non-Unix systems) Further, I don't _just_ want to supplant Unix because it's old.
Unix is fundementally extremely difficult to use. So much so that I don't think that it's possible to remedy. What many people don't realize is that you simply cannot tack on UI at the last second - it must be designed at the beginning of the project, it is one of the most significant concerns, and it must dictate a lot of the technical requirements of the system.
I'm not arguing that MS has a chokehold on the market, or that it's pretty much impossible to develop other UIs on its turf. But just because Unix has held out against it this long doesn't make it particularly good at anything except being resilent against MS; that's not all that stunning on technical or usability grounds.
Sadly, I'm at school, I've bought books, but for an entirely different subject that'll have me working in a field that allows no time for such pursuits.
Of course, I worked in design, including user interface design, for some years already, so it's not unusual for me to give directions to programmers. Most people find a division of effort to be quite useful. Although it must be remembered, there are _no_ qualifications needed to justly complain about something. Hell, imagine complaining b/c your doctor cut off your leg, and being told to shut up until you've gotten a medical degree. No, while in UI it's often best not to take a user's advice as to how to fix things, it is always worth listening to their complaints, and trying to deal with them as best as possible. They're the ones that are supposed to be happy; I don't care if the developers are, that's just a bonus factor.
Heh. You ought to read some of the Mac boards. On MacNN particularly, I've got a reputation for attacking OS X. Believe me, I'm not trying to praise it now.
There's a lot of different reasons why, but among others, they _didn't_ tear things down, look at the successes and failures of the past, and build something that was a great leap ahead of everything else. It's fundementally still Unix, and while I'm all for having an OS as reliable as Unix, one that's as flexible as Unix, one that can run Unix software, I'd much rather prefer that it _wasn't_ Unix.
It's useful to look towards the past for examples; but we need to keep moving ahead, not reheating what was once cutting edge. That Unix is over thirty years old means no one's done much good in the past several decades - not that Unix is the paragon of operating systems.
Again, everything pretty much sucks. At least Be had the right idea in starting from a clean slate, even if their lack of funding did them in in the end. Imagine if someone with resources like Microsoft did that. (which to a certain extent, they did do with NT) Or Apple. (which tried with Pink, but that died for mostly political reasons - Copland was more of a reworking of the old MacOS, and not a good example)
Boycotts are part of the normal process. Ultimately, it's little different than people who won't buy it for any other reason (e.g. price too high) and yields the same sorts of results.
Unless of course, you're in a monopolistic situation, in which simply not offering alternatives such as W2K, WME or W98, or colluding with or pressuring hardware and software developers will ultimately force capitulation by an otherwise defiant market.
Actually, it is quite unusual for a finding of fact to be overturned by an appellate court. As they are not interacting directly with the evidentary process, they're usually quite reluctant to get into that unless there's exceptionally gross errors.
In 99.44% cases, they have to determine that the lower court applied the law to facts incorrectly. MS's monopoly status is not likely to go away any time soon.
Just because there is a logical order to it does not mean that it is easy to use or worth keeping around.
I've got to agree with the previous poster - Unix is in no shape to be used by mere mortals. However, I don't really think that it can be saved.
This isn't to say that I'm a big fan of anything else currently on the market - everything sucks. But it is far far better to develop a system where usability is a core concern from day one than to keep trying to add a facade onto Unix, or worse yet, just giving to people as is. The former option, if solidly built, if designed to have a compatability layer through which it can still run Unix software, strikes me as being a far far better option.
As it happens, it doesn't work out very well. If users aren't presented with the options at the beginning, they'll never know to look for them in the first place. Often, IIRC, they'll tend to never try to do more elaborate things, or try and give up. Very few will succeed.
Games rely on terrible UI. You're not allowed to do anything you're capable of at the beginning. In the real world, I do not want to have to create 200 documents before I level up and can change the tabs.
There's actually more to it than that. Slander, as you correctly point out, as well as it's brother libel are not protected under the aegis of the First Amendment.
Additionally, if your speech can be considered a form of conduct, it too may be unprotected. E.g., you can say "The US government ought to be overthrown," and that's speech. But something more specific such as, "Let's start by killing that guy over there, right now," is a little too close for comfort, particularly if people follow through with it. So we don't really want people who arrange a murder, incite a riot, etc. to be able to get off for not having in fact performed any action when they so clearly brought that action about intentionally and specifically. The courts aren't really stupid, you know.
Additionally, copyrights are directly opposed to the First Amendment. This is skirted around by claiming that 1) the First Amendment did not amend Congress' power to establish copyright if they choose to do so; 2) that as a function of copyright, people have consented through the government to a small infringement of their free speech in return for the benefits of having the material produced (for which the copyright is assured to go away after a time anyway) but that this is generally pretty narrow. In short, the courts have not found there to be, for their purposes, an actual tension.
Lastly there are issues revolving around self-accepted limitations. E.g., if you reveal a trade secret you were given in confidence, if you breech a contract requiring you not to say something, etc. the First Amendment doesn't work so well.
So you can see where this is going... the government can claim that his speech induced action, and is therefore unprotected, and that the action was to induce copyright infringements and those are also (generally) unprotected.
Hopefully the courts will put the smackdown on the prosecution, and the law.
I'll have to check that out. But I've gotta say, I'm amazed at how people have ignored improving CLIs for so long, often while still maintaining that they're good.
E.g. typing commandname --help is alright, when you can't quite remember what it was that you needed to type. But damn, if I wouldn't rather right click on the commandname and be able to select anything from a help window popping up alongsides to a graphical dialog (perhaps like one of Apple's 'sheets') that just contained the damn options within it.
The end all be all of CLIs is not a perfectly emulated teletype machine, guys. A text-only solution is something you have to bear in mind, like designing a web page for lynx. Someone ought to be able to get by with that, with no actual loss of functionality. That's _fine_. But most of the time, you ought to be accepting inputs through any of the very meager methods we have for that on computers, and blasting your output across multiple ways of getting that out. (e.g. graphical output, dialogs, etc. of CLI commands)
Otherwise things are being made harder than they need to be.
Which leads to something I've been saying for a while. The GUI and CLIs should be extremely tightly integrated. That isn't to say that it would ever, ever, be required that a user use an interface he was uncomfortable with. The two different methods would be alternatives of each other, but which would be more than the sum of their parts when used in tandem.
Having three or four terminals open in XWindows is _not_ an example of this, by any means.
For example, imagine that you want to move all your object files, plus a few others that don't have anything in common. (save to you - i.e. not the same name, or file type, etc.)
You could quickly navigate to the appropriate directory in the GUI - it's faster unless you remember the precise (short) path. Type a command along the lines of "select *.o" into the cli parser of that _very_ GUI directory window, and the appropriate _icons_ highlight, and are selected. Quickly mouse around to the other couple of icons you want, and shift-click to add them to the selection.
Then drag the icons from the window into another folder visible onscreen (which may be easier than having to remember and type in another pathname), change over to that window and enter a command like "rename * *.backup" to rename all of the moved files.
(n.b. command names would likely exist in several forms, with the full name of the command being the easiest to understand - for consistancy's sake, it would be precisely the same name as used in the GUI.)
Both pointing & grunting at things, as well as talking about them are good ways to control a computer. In the real world, we recognize the usefulness of using them in conjunction, rather than either exclusively. There's a place for that here too.
Quite true: Why then does the Australian government see fit to restrict their citizen's rights to exercise their political opinions freely? (in a way that does not harm anyone) That is, if there's really no difference, why should one be legal and another illegal?
Civic responsibility has little to do with the intracacies of a specific method of government. If I felt that a government that exercised power over me was wholly illegitimate, the appropriate course of action for me to undertake would be to ignore it. Should I be compelled to behave in a way that makes it appear as though I willfully acknowledge its legitimacy when in fact this is not the case? (e.g. would you vote for the Russians if they had taken over the country and mandated it? would it be appropriate to do so?)
I can see governments mandating action when a person would prefer inaction in some sitatutions. Tortious conduct, for example. Certain criminal acts. There is no public benefit to be gained by requiring that people who do not want to vote must do so, perhaps incurring harm and expense upon themselves, just to not vote at the destination.
Really? I love the series Escaflowne, but I never much cared for the title. Escaflowne is not the focus of the series, and while exotic, is a little to so for pretty much everyone I've encountered. (i.e. 'that sounds gay, and by gay, I mean bad')
Cowboy Bebop also gets little well-earned respect b/c of the title, in my experience.
As for Lucas, remember he also came up with THX-1138. (the George Lucas in Love short has some real fun at his expense here...)
Well, again, this depends entirely on the rationale your particular locality has regarding patents.
In the US (which I am most familiar with, whose utilitarian system I most prefer) patents are only granted in accordance with the intent of promoting the progress of the sciences. This is clearly a public benefit, though any private member of the public will benefit from it as well, and accomplishing this may take some interesting turns.
It's not really intended to keep capitalism going - it's intended to improve the position humanity occupies. Capitalism is a potential tool, but the entire system is optional at any rate, and need not be implemented at all, or could be in a different manner whilst still remaining Constitutional.
Again, I can't say much about the Brasilian patent system, so I've been avoiding talking about it, save for the generality that it is up to Brazil to decide how they will treat inventors; if the inventors are citizens of that nation, then they have no more substantial weight than any other citizen, and if foreign have no more than any other foreigner. Having invented something accords no special powers or rights on its own.
Well, regardless of the right of property being a societal construct, even it does not extend to the realm of information as in copyrights and patents. For if they did, why is it that so many human cultures could develop notions of property, independently and millenia ago, but it took until the 18th century for there to be any real laws we'd recognize with regards to copyrights and patents to start to come about, and many more years before they were widely adopted?
I rather doubt that the people who first promulgated such laws had woken up one day and suddenly realized that everyone, everywhere, was infringing on others' property rights without a care in the world.
To my knowledge, there is a three part test to determine if something is property. First, the alleged owner has to be able to enjoy the use of it; Second, they have to be able to permit or prevent others from enjoying the use of it at will; Third, they have to be able to dispose of it at will.
Copyrightable content and patentable inventions fail the second and third tests due entirely to their nature. In order for human beings to understand or be aware of an idea, the idea itself must be made available to them, but it is impossible to dispose of it. For example, if I describe to you my invention for a widget, or read to you from my book, I can not compel you, and you can probably not cause yourself, to forget it on command.
Nor can I do the same myself, even if I attempted to sell it to someone else, promising to divest myself of any copies.
Therefore, copyrights and patents, at least in the US (as previously mentioned) are not founded in property law. (if they were, they'd not warrant mention in the Constitution, for starters) They're founded in absolutely nothing, in fact, but are just considered something that Congress may or may not choose to permit to exist here. (with certain constraints, the presence of which without conflict with eminent domain, again clearly shows their nature as non-properties)
The confusion comes about for, I believe, two reasons. 1) Copyrights and patents are property. No, I'm not contradicting myself. The copyrighted _content_ or patented _invention_ are not property, but the rights optionally granted an author or inventor by the government (if it desires to do so) may be treated as intangible property. 2) Copyrights and patent rights are not rights, but are really the infringement - temporarily - of rights for virtually all of the populace. This infringement ceases when the term expires, and everyone can again enjoy the use of the work or invention as though it were never copyrighted or patented, and without governmental intervention as is needed to maintain the infringement.
The natural state of information is one of freedom, and it tends towards this (the quote "Information wants to be free" is not a demand, it is an anthropomorphization, rather like "Water seeks its own level." It describes what information usually does in the absence of a counteracting force.)
No one, however, deserves the right to the fruits of their labors so long as we're discussing copyrights or patents. They are a grant to an author or inventor, made by the government, at the direction of the public. And the government gets to set the terms, and acts only in its own (and its peoples at large) best interests. It is for this reason that you do not find in the US Constitution language to the effect of authors et al having natural rights or deserving rights to control these things. It instead justifies these structures as promoting the arts and sciences; a public benefit.
(kind of like the public benefit in having secret bids for government contracts, very often. Sure, the contractor gets paid, but the public gets a good price)
Additionally, written language is a digital technology, and publishers have always had problems with their competitors using the same methods and techniques to duplicate their efforts. There's little new under the sun.
Your argument is bogus - if you can prove that authors or inventors deserve rights beyond what we're prepared in general to give them or take away at our pleasure, do so. No one has yet, AFAIK.
I'm not advocating the abolishment of these systems, though I do advocate their reformation. But I don't delude myself as to their origins or purposes. Incidently, for a decade, just until a week or two ago, when I went back to school, I made my living as an artist. I have a decent idea where I'm coming from.
Uh huh. You're assuming that all chemicals are equally easy to make, when in fact there may be a process involved in the development that you will have to puzzle out on your own. Secondly, the chemicals themselves may be obfuscated somehow. Thirdly, the original developer may have made exclusive arrangements with sellers before releasing it at all, and thus before you could get your mitts on it. (at least without violating laws regarding trade secrets and corporate espionage, which are different kettles of fish)
But just wait until we have nanotech assemblers that can anaylze a car, or a pill, or a piece of food and replicate it perfectly. (given time, energy and raw materials) It's going to utterly destroy the economy, and require a new one built on top of it (because so few goods will remain scarce) and can be previewed with regards to the current battles with copyright and patent law.
Patents are not international, they are national. At best countries may choose to reciprocally recognize one anothers' patents, but they are not required to do so, and do still maintain their soverignty.
On what grounds do you believe that patents have any existance internationally without some national recognition? Or to put it another way, if you started your own country somewhere, would you have to recognize the existance of patents everywhere? What's making you? Theats of violence if you don't aren't a particularly strong answer here, as that would mean the patent has no force aside from the military force of those who wish it to be enforced. Gimme something better - I dare you.
Of course, without people who can afford the drugs, or who are dead because they didn't have the drug, there is ALSO no incentive.
Neither absolutist position - a total lack of patents, nor a uniform existance of patents is viable. There's a middle ground within which the best interests of the people (to whom the government is beholden always) may be served. If Brazil is only doing this where the lives of their people are very much at stake, I applaud it.
Yes, without patents it is unlikely (but not certain!) that the research would be performed. (I rather think that there is still enough money to be made that it would be, in the same manner that there are computer manufacturers at every niche of profit margin from pennies per system on up) And this would be harmful, because there might be no medicine at all. But people's lives are also at stake, and it is a very difficult position to defend letting people die for financial gain.
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Actually, I keep iCab set to always accept from one or two sites, and always reject from every tld i could think of. When I want to let something through, I'll know. It's much better than something like junkbuster, as it lets me refuse to take in graphics of particular sizes too.
Well, I'd be concerned as to whether or not they were safe, unfortunately. Check out "Toxic Sludge is Good For You" -- evidently, the industries involved have started to change the definitions so as to favor themselves.
No, most shells (that I've seen) use crappy filename completion. Compare how it does it to something better, like a good web browser's address field.
Shells make you guess if you have enough characters for the completion, and force you to hit the tab key to trigger it. Browsers bring up a most likely choice (which could be based on a variety of factors - alphabetic order, frequency of use, explicit preference, etc. as you like) as soon as they've got one, often with other choices immediately available, and selectable, but let you keep typing, overwriting the choice, refining it if you like, skipping to a relevant portion away from the current cursor location if you like, etc.
There is a FUNDEMENTAL difference between having a command line - that is, having the ability to textually describe some command or system object or whatever - and having to suffer with a half-baked virtual teletype machine to use it. Terminals make CLIs look bad, and the shells don't do much to help the situation. (it took forever for things like histories to come along, and that only mimics actual tty's!)
It is entirely possible to embrace GUI elements in a shell, provided that they are assistive in permitting you to textually describe things.
Regarding the rest of your post, your approach to HCI is all wrong. No one is perfect; no one remembers everything; and many people who might love to use CLI features are put off by this moronic insistance that they spend time learning how to use them down to their depths before they can do thing one. Even expert power users often, often find conveniences put in place for newbies to be useful. (examples: undo buffers, oxo kitchenware, consistant naming conventions)
Don't make incorrect absolute statements like this; it's annoying.
CLI's are quite inefficient when you need to do a lot of typing. E.g. if you were moving files to a path that was very long; where you have to perform operations on files that can't be selected through grep b/c there's no common rules that are applicable.
Besides which, in the real world, the time you waste trying to remember some cryptic argument and how to use it IS a factor to be weighed.
CLI's have their uses, as do GUI's. Far better for them to augment each other (e.g. right-clicking on a CLI command to select from a list of argument options with their full names; selecting files spacially with the mouse and renaming them with wildcards) than to persist in maintaining a wall.
As for the comment below re: keyboard shortcuts, testing reveals that they are for the most part slower than using the mouse. People don't consciously realize it, but unless the command is incredibly common and ingrained as only a few are, they pause and try to remember it. It's objective testing has revealed this - not people's subjective senses of time.
But therein is the trick: let us assume here, in the absence of any case law to look at on the subject, that compilation, or run-time interpretation can be done without infringing on the original developer's copyright.
If that's so, _why_ should I agree to the license? I can can compile it and use it for more than 45 days without paying you a penny, because I already have it, and your copyright doesn't extend over usage. It's great if people do out of the goodness of their hearts, sure, but it may be unlikely.
At least with the GPL, it confers rights that users _don't_ already have, and it's entirely optional anyway. (i.e. you can use software w/o it, you just can't disseminate it)
Really? I see a more serious problem - that copyright does not confer upon the copyright holder the ability to dictate the use of a work after it has been distributed to a member of the public.
If they've got the source already, you can't compel them to pay if they want to execute it. (generally - compiling might be a sufficient change to require permission, but if it were run-time interpreted, that's a different kettle of fish)
of course, this is the government. while there may be room to debate as to whether private entities can restrict certain types of information, the government - the one that is itself constrained by the 4th and 1st amendments, among others, is held to a very high standard.
Well, actually it being compatable with Unix is just a bonus; it's not strictly necessary. (I'd just hope that POSIX could be implemented decently on non-Unix systems) Further, I don't _just_ want to supplant Unix because it's old.
Unix is fundementally extremely difficult to use. So much so that I don't think that it's possible to remedy. What many people don't realize is that you simply cannot tack on UI at the last second - it must be designed at the beginning of the project, it is one of the most significant concerns, and it must dictate a lot of the technical requirements of the system.
I'm not arguing that MS has a chokehold on the market, or that it's pretty much impossible to develop other UIs on its turf. But just because Unix has held out against it this long doesn't make it particularly good at anything except being resilent against MS; that's not all that stunning on technical or usability grounds.
Sadly, I'm at school, I've bought books, but for an entirely different subject that'll have me working in a field that allows no time for such pursuits.
Of course, I worked in design, including user interface design, for some years already, so it's not unusual for me to give directions to programmers. Most people find a division of effort to be quite useful. Although it must be remembered, there are _no_ qualifications needed to justly complain about something. Hell, imagine complaining b/c your doctor cut off your leg, and being told to shut up until you've gotten a medical degree. No, while in UI it's often best not to take a user's advice as to how to fix things, it is always worth listening to their complaints, and trying to deal with them as best as possible. They're the ones that are supposed to be happy; I don't care if the developers are, that's just a bonus factor.
Heh. You ought to read some of the Mac boards. On MacNN particularly, I've got a reputation for attacking OS X. Believe me, I'm not trying to praise it now.
There's a lot of different reasons why, but among others, they _didn't_ tear things down, look at the successes and failures of the past, and build something that was a great leap ahead of everything else. It's fundementally still Unix, and while I'm all for having an OS as reliable as Unix, one that's as flexible as Unix, one that can run Unix software, I'd much rather prefer that it _wasn't_ Unix.
It's useful to look towards the past for examples; but we need to keep moving ahead, not reheating what was once cutting edge. That Unix is over thirty years old means no one's done much good in the past several decades - not that Unix is the paragon of operating systems.
Again, everything pretty much sucks. At least Be had the right idea in starting from a clean slate, even if their lack of funding did them in in the end. Imagine if someone with resources like Microsoft did that. (which to a certain extent, they did do with NT) Or Apple. (which tried with Pink, but that died for mostly political reasons - Copland was more of a reworking of the old MacOS, and not a good example)
Boycotts are part of the normal process. Ultimately, it's little different than people who won't buy it for any other reason (e.g. price too high) and yields the same sorts of results.
Unless of course, you're in a monopolistic situation, in which simply not offering alternatives such as W2K, WME or W98, or colluding with or pressuring hardware and software developers will ultimately force capitulation by an otherwise defiant market.
Actually, it is quite unusual for a finding of fact to be overturned by an appellate court. As they are not interacting directly with the evidentary process, they're usually quite reluctant to get into that unless there's exceptionally gross errors.
In 99.44% cases, they have to determine that the lower court applied the law to facts incorrectly. MS's monopoly status is not likely to go away any time soon.
Just because there is a logical order to it does not mean that it is easy to use or worth keeping around.
I've got to agree with the previous poster - Unix is in no shape to be used by mere mortals. However, I don't really think that it can be saved.
This isn't to say that I'm a big fan of anything else currently on the market - everything sucks. But it is far far better to develop a system where usability is a core concern from day one than to keep trying to add a facade onto Unix, or worse yet, just giving to people as is. The former option, if solidly built, if designed to have a compatability layer through which it can still run Unix software, strikes me as being a far far better option.
As it happens, it doesn't work out very well. If users aren't presented with the options at the beginning, they'll never know to look for them in the first place. Often, IIRC, they'll tend to never try to do more elaborate things, or try and give up. Very few will succeed.
Games rely on terrible UI. You're not allowed to do anything you're capable of at the beginning. In the real world, I do not want to have to create 200 documents before I level up and can change the tabs.
Brrr... Sorry to bring up a spelling nit, I don't usually do this, but for some reason I felt compelled to. It is 'Okeechobee.'
('course, I'm from Tallahassee originally, and until last winter, virtually no one knew what it was, where it was, or how to spell it)
There's actually more to it than that. Slander, as you correctly point out, as well as it's brother libel are not protected under the aegis of the First Amendment.
Additionally, if your speech can be considered a form of conduct, it too may be unprotected. E.g., you can say "The US government ought to be overthrown," and that's speech. But something more specific such as, "Let's start by killing that guy over there, right now," is a little too close for comfort, particularly if people follow through with it. So we don't really want people who arrange a murder, incite a riot, etc. to be able to get off for not having in fact performed any action when they so clearly brought that action about intentionally and specifically. The courts aren't really stupid, you know.
Additionally, copyrights are directly opposed to the First Amendment. This is skirted around by claiming that 1) the First Amendment did not amend Congress' power to establish copyright if they choose to do so; 2) that as a function of copyright, people have consented through the government to a small infringement of their free speech in return for the benefits of having the material produced (for which the copyright is assured to go away after a time anyway) but that this is generally pretty narrow. In short, the courts have not found there to be, for their purposes, an actual tension.
Lastly there are issues revolving around self-accepted limitations. E.g., if you reveal a trade secret you were given in confidence, if you breech a contract requiring you not to say something, etc. the First Amendment doesn't work so well.
So you can see where this is going... the government can claim that his speech induced action, and is therefore unprotected, and that the action was to induce copyright infringements and those are also (generally) unprotected.
Hopefully the courts will put the smackdown on the prosecution, and the law.
I'll have to check that out. But I've gotta say, I'm amazed at how people have ignored improving CLIs for so long, often while still maintaining that they're good.
E.g. typing commandname --help is alright, when you can't quite remember what it was that you needed to type. But damn, if I wouldn't rather right click on the commandname and be able to select anything from a help window popping up alongsides to a graphical dialog (perhaps like one of Apple's 'sheets') that just contained the damn options within it.
The end all be all of CLIs is not a perfectly emulated teletype machine, guys. A text-only solution is something you have to bear in mind, like designing a web page for lynx. Someone ought to be able to get by with that, with no actual loss of functionality. That's _fine_. But most of the time, you ought to be accepting inputs through any of the very meager methods we have for that on computers, and blasting your output across multiple ways of getting that out. (e.g. graphical output, dialogs, etc. of CLI commands)
Otherwise things are being made harder than they need to be.
Which leads to something I've been saying for a while. The GUI and CLIs should be extremely tightly integrated. That isn't to say that it would ever, ever, be required that a user use an interface he was uncomfortable with. The two different methods would be alternatives of each other, but which would be more than the sum of their parts when used in tandem.
Having three or four terminals open in XWindows is _not_ an example of this, by any means.
For example, imagine that you want to move all your object files, plus a few others that don't have anything in common. (save to you - i.e. not the same name, or file type, etc.)
You could quickly navigate to the appropriate directory in the GUI - it's faster unless you remember the precise (short) path. Type a command along the lines of "select *.o" into the cli parser of that _very_ GUI directory window, and the appropriate _icons_ highlight, and are selected. Quickly mouse around to the other couple of icons you want, and shift-click to add them to the selection.
Then drag the icons from the window into another folder visible onscreen (which may be easier than having to remember and type in another pathname), change over to that window and enter a command like "rename * *.backup" to rename all of the moved files.
(n.b. command names would likely exist in several forms, with the full name of the command being the easiest to understand - for consistancy's sake, it would be precisely the same name as used in the GUI.)
Both pointing & grunting at things, as well as talking about them are good ways to control a computer. In the real world, we recognize the usefulness of using them in conjunction, rather than either exclusively. There's a place for that here too.
Quite true: Why then does the Australian government see fit to restrict their citizen's rights to exercise their political opinions freely? (in a way that does not harm anyone) That is, if there's really no difference, why should one be legal and another illegal?
Civic responsibility has little to do with the intracacies of a specific method of government. If I felt that a government that exercised power over me was wholly illegitimate, the appropriate course of action for me to undertake would be to ignore it. Should I be compelled to behave in a way that makes it appear as though I willfully acknowledge its legitimacy when in fact this is not the case? (e.g. would you vote for the Russians if they had taken over the country and mandated it? would it be appropriate to do so?)
I can see governments mandating action when a person would prefer inaction in some sitatutions. Tortious conduct, for example. Certain criminal acts. There is no public benefit to be gained by requiring that people who do not want to vote must do so, perhaps incurring harm and expense upon themselves, just to not vote at the destination.
Really? I love the series Escaflowne, but I never much cared for the title. Escaflowne is not the focus of the series, and while exotic, is a little to so for pretty much everyone I've encountered. (i.e. 'that sounds gay, and by gay, I mean bad')
Cowboy Bebop also gets little well-earned respect b/c of the title, in my experience.
As for Lucas, remember he also came up with THX-1138. (the George Lucas in Love short has some real fun at his expense here...)
Well, again, this depends entirely on the rationale your particular locality has regarding patents.
In the US (which I am most familiar with, whose utilitarian system I most prefer) patents are only granted in accordance with the intent of promoting the progress of the sciences. This is clearly a public benefit, though any private member of the public will benefit from it as well, and accomplishing this may take some interesting turns.
It's not really intended to keep capitalism going - it's intended to improve the position humanity occupies. Capitalism is a potential tool, but the entire system is optional at any rate, and need not be implemented at all, or could be in a different manner whilst still remaining Constitutional.
Again, I can't say much about the Brasilian patent system, so I've been avoiding talking about it, save for the generality that it is up to Brazil to decide how they will treat inventors; if the inventors are citizens of that nation, then they have no more substantial weight than any other citizen, and if foreign have no more than any other foreigner. Having invented something accords no special powers or rights on its own.
Well, regardless of the right of property being a societal construct, even it does not extend to the realm of information as in copyrights and patents. For if they did, why is it that so many human cultures could develop notions of property, independently and millenia ago, but it took until the 18th century for there to be any real laws we'd recognize with regards to copyrights and patents to start to come about, and many more years before they were widely adopted?
I rather doubt that the people who first promulgated such laws had woken up one day and suddenly realized that everyone, everywhere, was infringing on others' property rights without a care in the world.
To my knowledge, there is a three part test to determine if something is property. First, the alleged owner has to be able to enjoy the use of it; Second, they have to be able to permit or prevent others from enjoying the use of it at will; Third, they have to be able to dispose of it at will.
Copyrightable content and patentable inventions fail the second and third tests due entirely to their nature. In order for human beings to understand or be aware of an idea, the idea itself must be made available to them, but it is impossible to dispose of it. For example, if I describe to you my invention for a widget, or read to you from my book, I can not compel you, and you can probably not cause yourself, to forget it on command.
Nor can I do the same myself, even if I attempted to sell it to someone else, promising to divest myself of any copies.
Therefore, copyrights and patents, at least in the US (as previously mentioned) are not founded in property law. (if they were, they'd not warrant mention in the Constitution, for starters) They're founded in absolutely nothing, in fact, but are just considered something that Congress may or may not choose to permit to exist here. (with certain constraints, the presence of which without conflict with eminent domain, again clearly shows their nature as non-properties)
The confusion comes about for, I believe, two reasons. 1) Copyrights and patents are property. No, I'm not contradicting myself. The copyrighted _content_ or patented _invention_ are not property, but the rights optionally granted an author or inventor by the government (if it desires to do so) may be treated as intangible property. 2) Copyrights and patent rights are not rights, but are really the infringement - temporarily - of rights for virtually all of the populace. This infringement ceases when the term expires, and everyone can again enjoy the use of the work or invention as though it were never copyrighted or patented, and without governmental intervention as is needed to maintain the infringement.
The natural state of information is one of freedom, and it tends towards this (the quote "Information wants to be free" is not a demand, it is an anthropomorphization, rather like "Water seeks its own level." It describes what information usually does in the absence of a counteracting force.)
No one, however, deserves the right to the fruits of their labors so long as we're discussing copyrights or patents. They are a grant to an author or inventor, made by the government, at the direction of the public. And the government gets to set the terms, and acts only in its own (and its peoples at large) best interests. It is for this reason that you do not find in the US Constitution language to the effect of authors et al having natural rights or deserving rights to control these things. It instead justifies these structures as promoting the arts and sciences; a public benefit.
(kind of like the public benefit in having secret bids for government contracts, very often. Sure, the contractor gets paid, but the public gets a good price)
Additionally, written language is a digital technology, and publishers have always had problems with their competitors using the same methods and techniques to duplicate their efforts. There's little new under the sun.
Your argument is bogus - if you can prove that authors or inventors deserve rights beyond what we're prepared in general to give them or take away at our pleasure, do so. No one has yet, AFAIK.
I'm not advocating the abolishment of these systems, though I do advocate their reformation. But I don't delude myself as to their origins or purposes. Incidently, for a decade, just until a week or two ago, when I went back to school, I made my living as an artist. I have a decent idea where I'm coming from.
Uh huh. You're assuming that all chemicals are equally easy to make, when in fact there may be a process involved in the development that you will have to puzzle out on your own. Secondly, the chemicals themselves may be obfuscated somehow. Thirdly, the original developer may have made exclusive arrangements with sellers before releasing it at all, and thus before you could get your mitts on it. (at least without violating laws regarding trade secrets and corporate espionage, which are different kettles of fish)
But just wait until we have nanotech assemblers that can anaylze a car, or a pill, or a piece of food and replicate it perfectly. (given time, energy and raw materials) It's going to utterly destroy the economy, and require a new one built on top of it (because so few goods will remain scarce) and can be previewed with regards to the current battles with copyright and patent law.
Patents are not international, they are national. At best countries may choose to reciprocally recognize one anothers' patents, but they are not required to do so, and do still maintain their soverignty.
On what grounds do you believe that patents have any existance internationally without some national recognition? Or to put it another way, if you started your own country somewhere, would you have to recognize the existance of patents everywhere? What's making you? Theats of violence if you don't aren't a particularly strong answer here, as that would mean the patent has no force aside from the military force of those who wish it to be enforced. Gimme something better - I dare you.
Of course, without people who can afford the drugs, or who are dead because they didn't have
the drug, there is ALSO no incentive.
Neither absolutist position - a total lack of patents, nor a uniform existance of patents is
viable. There's a middle ground within which the best interests of the people (to whom the
government is beholden always) may be served. If Brazil is only doing this where the lives
of their people are very much at stake, I applaud it.
Yes, without patents it is unlikely (but not certain!) that the research would be performed.
(I rather think that there is still enough money to be made that it would be, in the same
manner that there are computer manufacturers at every niche of profit margin from pennies
per system on up) And this would be harmful, because there might be no medicine at all. But
people's lives are also at stake, and it is a very difficult position to defend letting
people die for financial gain.