[I]t's easy to forgive a phone for having a single-tasking operating system. Persisting with that platform on a device approaching the size of a laptop is where the product loses me.
I agree, and it first glance it seems crazy for a company whose flagship OS is a fairly nice adapatation of microkernel architecture for GUI-land. The idea clearly is the leverage off the surprising (even to Apple) success of the iPhone appstore. I guess you can blame them for following where the customers are leading.
The main thing I dislike about modern Apple hardware are the keyboards, I like a bit of feedback, so the idea of an onscreen keyboard fills me with horror. But maybe this isn't really meant as a laptop replacement.
I would rather have a MacBook Air
I would rather have the 13" MacBook Pro... oh wait I do!;)
I use and like their MacBooks for the same reason I like Linux on my desktop machines: the ability to pull up a decent CLI in a terminal window.
A usable shell and a GUI that quite frankly whips the pants off Gnome or KDE imo, yup OSX appeals. (When the linux box at home finally gave up the ghost, I installed it on the iMac via Parallels).
Yeah we are not the target market for this particular toy. You know my wife has been eyeing off the Kindle recently, and she has zero interest in a laptop. So I wouldn't be 100% surprised if this device eventually finds its way into my house...
Struth mate, you make a good argument and it is I who is humbled by your greater knowledge on the subject. I was thinking more along the lines of the general population's tolerence level for things like police brutality, racisim, "poofta bashers", wife bashers, etc.
And that's a great point. It's a matter of perspective, you are comparing what we had achieved by 1970 to what we have now. In fact many of the battles were decisive victories. Women, for example will never tolerate being put back into their box... at least not until we become a theocracy (just can't help myself:)
It would probably be healthier for me to look at it that way, but my perspective was from a person embedded in the time looking forward with postive or negative expectation, and it seems to me the point of inflect on this 'curve of expectation' was reached in about 1980 (at least for people who share my outlook, as you apparently do). But maybe this merely reflects a personal life history, the optimism of youth vs the pessimism of middle age (if we are still allowed to call ourselves middle aged now we have our half-century).:o
I don't think the situation is hopeless, if it was that bad I wouldn't be able to read your post much less agree with it.;)
Ah yes, but can we look forward to slashdot being put on the blacklist?;) Seriously though, you are right, I'm just doing my Denethor impersonation here. Defeatism is the worst way to give the kids hope.
Contingency fee arrangement of the "no win, no fee" variety are not champertous, and have always been allowed in Queensland (my home jurisdiction) were champerty was not abolished as it was elsewhere in the Commonwealth. What is prohibited as champertous are fee arrangements under which lawyers' fees are calculated as a percentage of the final award in a proceeding. It's a fine line, but that's what comes out of the cases.
Well since I started Law at Sydney, a few years after the passage of the 1993 Act, I never read any of the cases, so I'll defer to your greater learning on the matter. OK, so I checked out a leading English case Trendtex this morning, where Wilberforce LJ cites Halsbury's to the effect that "Champerty is a particular kind of maintenance, namely maintenance of an action in consideration of a promise to give the maintainer a share in the proceeds or subject matter of the action.," which accords well with what you wrote.;)
That being said, the Act did usher a period of greater litigation down here, being I perhaps part of raft of "reforms" (if memory serves me correctly it was from that time that advertisment for legal services began to appear). Of course such reforms might not be the sole cause, as this was the time Deane's proximity doctrine had gone viral.
What you need is to make sane fucking laws, not apply laws from before the wheel to the age of the internet. That's what got us in this mess in the first place.
No what got us into this mess in the first place was not applying tried and true law, but instead being stampeded into enacting new law because "oooooh it's the internet... we need neeewwwww laws (that'll make a motza for the people I work for)." Take copyright and other so-called IP law back 25-50 years and we'd be in a much better position.
That being said, the issues surrounding maintainance and champerty (which makes working on a contingency fee basis impossible) are a little more complicated. In my jurisdiction (NSW.au) these were still torts until 1993 when the Maitainance, Champerty and Barratry Abolition Act 1993 (NSW), was passed. Until then it was difficult for ordinary people to defend their legal rights as the cost of litigation (the ultimate threat) would be prohibitive. So these torts acted in a highly anti-democratic fashion.
OTOH after the Act was passed the amount if litigation obviously increased. And it increased to the point where it was felt necessary to curtail the remedies available to individuals (via the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW)). So the abolition of these torts ultimately acted to reduce an individual's rights. Also it made lawyers unpopular as happens when a people becomes more litigious.
I was born in 1959, that is not my recollection of the 70's.
I was born in 1960, so I should perhaps bow to your greater experience, mate (you're my compatriot if I remember correctly). On the other hand I do have double History major in one of my degrees, so maybe that makes up for the few months you have on me.;)
Civil liberties in the west hit a speed bump with 911
More than a speed bump I would say! Nor was the damage limited to the US. But it was not the beginning to the decline. The surveilled society has existed at least as long as the cold war, but in that late 70s and 80s it really took off, partially as as a function of technology, but also a function of ideology. Incaceration rates and and increasingly vindictive (and arguably criminogenic) criminal justice system, to be contrasted with the growing humaneness of the previous decades culminating in Vinson's appointment as Head of Corrective Services in NSW, are similarly a product of the 80s.
If you were to take the time, as I have done (I read Criminology for my Law degree), to visit the archives and study the various newspapers for every state election since the late 60s, you will notice, in NSW at least, a seismic shift in 1988. Prior to this time crime stories are burried in the back pages of the papers, and as an election issue, Crime doesn't rate. In 1988 (Greiner vs Unsworth) that all changed, from the election on Law'n'Order has become a, perhaps the, major issue. We've had 22 years of "reforms" such as "truth in sentencing," ever expanding search powers not to mention police numbers etc. But does anyone in Sydney really feel safer now than they did in 1988? Paradoxically our obsession with stamping out crime has had, if anything, the opposite effect (and yes arguing from crime statistics and what they actually mean is fraught with danger). I may be a few months younger than you, but I'm old enough to remember when a mugging in Sydney was practically unheard of.
In other words "the good old days" were not that good.
Pull the other one mate. We never had it as good as we did under Messers Whitlam and Fraser!;)
Seriously though, if the 60s and 70s weren't perfect (they weren't of course) then there was at least the hope, even the conviction, that things were getting better and better and more and more free. The refusal to fight in Vietnam was not merely a rejection of war, it was a rebellion against traditional forms of authority over the individual. The interference of the state in private matters was being rejected, the legalisation of homosexuality, decriminalisation of cannabis in SA (and look how that has been wound back), etc, speak to this. Kids today simply don't have that kind of hope, there is no basis for them to have it.
The generation of your and my parents lived in a post WWII world in which civil liberties were continously growing. Neither you, nor I, nor our kids do.
Although they don't use the same language many writing in the Guardian hold the same opinion
Which just goes to show that the meme of 'UK as Police State' is nothing but leftist paranoia.;)
A sign that we're not quite living in a police state just yet and it's up to us vote for a party in next spring's election that will reel in some of these powers.
Don't hold your breath. So long as hoi polloi are swept up in Law'n'Order hysteria, no party will want to be seen as being "soft on crime." Nor is it likely that the advice they receive from the Police will advocate a lessining of policing powers.
Those who like to see the UK as a police state, in contradistinction to where ever they live, fail to understand that this is an international (or at least anglophone) phenomenon (witness US or Australian incarceration rates). An increasingly violent society (in part due to mere population increase), ironic* moral panic in the media, greater policing powers and harshness of the criminal justice system form a self-reinforcing loop (*ironic inasmuch as entertainment provided by the same media companies becomes increasingly violent). Nor does this appear to be cyclical. The apogee of civil liberties in Western Society was experienced in the 1970s, we're on the (long?) downhill run.
It seems to come down to a difference in degree of difficulty required to copy determining legality.
Clearly copyright holders are very concerned about the difficulty of copying, however the basic difference here is between lending and reproducing. If the library were to write out the contents of copyright protected books on vellum, in sheeps blood using ostrich feather quills and bind them in the finest pig leather, they would be in the same position vis a vis basic copyright law as they would be if they scanned and reproduced the works as pdfs.
I know that we may be searched and prosecuted for making music available in the way libraries do books.
That's not basic copyright law (it's all this newfangled digital agenda 'readingright' law), nor is it universally applicable. IAAL, but I'm still unclear whether this is breach of copyright law in my jurisdiction (it seems not to be). In any case there are a number of complicating factors in play here, including without limitation that the copies we would make available are themselves infringing copies, or where they are legitimately purchased, how far fair use rights (esp. in the US) extend to making and using personal copies, or where they were purchased in electronic form just what it actually is that we are buying when we buy online music from licensed vendors (more than likely a bare license). Books clearly are chattles and libraries clearly buy them on terms otherwise then that they cannot be lent out.
Yeah, but it doesn't matter what the indent is as long as your consistent. Python 3 won't let you mix tabs and spaces so you won't run into issues. You will still run into issues with Python 2 (which I believe IronPython is still using) since Python always considers tabs to be 8 spaces regardless of what your editor is set to.
Just as well too! You wouldn't really want the compiler to react to code differently depending on what editor it was written in, and depending on what settings the particular editor had in place a the time it was written, would you?
In any case, as PEP 8 makes clear, the 8 space/tab equivalence is there for "really old code that you don't want to mess up." The official recommendation is to "[u]se 4 spaces per indentation level" and that "[f]or new projects, spaces-only are strongly recommended over tabs."
With any halfways decent editor (ie. vim instead of vi:o) one should really never feel the need to touch the [Tab] button for the sake of indenting code. Of course Visual Python would throw the cat among the pidgeons now.
Uhhh so libraries currently get permission from the author to lend their books?...huh...
If the libraries are lending books they aren't copying anything, why would they need permission? If they were to make electronic copies of books in order to make them available online, it would be obviously a different mattere.
The notion that a copyright should last for the entire life of an author is a very new thing.
Under the Copyright Act 1842 (UK), the term was 42 years or 7 years after the death of the author, whichever was longer. Under the Berne Convention 1886 the basic term was 50 years after the death of the author.
True under the original copyright statute, Copyright Act 1709, 8 Anne c19, it was a mere 14 year term, and true, it took the US a century to sign the Berne Convention, but to insist that the "notion" that "copyright should last for the entire life of an author," is "a very new thing," is, if you will pardon my language, "spreading obvious bullshit."
It's only a half step better than Disney (as corporations are essentially immortal).
Come again?
Please tell us you do realise that the mortality of a corporations is entirely irrelevant to the duration of a copyright, even given the ridiculously long terms granted under contemporary law. You do, don't you?
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 1
make that ... sites that collect the IP of Tor nodes.
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 1
It looks to me that requests to Google are made only by volunteer proxy servers and your computer is never used to forward anyone's traffic to Google.
It unnerves me that that this is never explicitly stated on a sight for paranoids, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
You computer is never used, but your IP address is. He's quite explicit about how it works "GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom." And then below:
... [Y]our request is stripped of all identifying information and replaced with the information from a GoogleSharing identity... Your next request will get a different identity, and the one you were using before will be assigned to someone else. By "sharing" these identities, all of our traffic gets mixed together and is very difficult to analyze.
What you say is true for Tor, where you're safe if you parasitically live off other people's sharing. However if you forward Tor requests you'll find yourself blacklisted by sites that collect IP node. FWIW, I was barred from viewing content on a forum I had never visited before because they subscribe to an anti-Tor site which has my home IP listed:/ So if you're thinking of helping Iranian and Chinese dissidents speak out against their government, think twice. (Yeah getting barred from some insignificant forum pales in comparison I know, but people who've made it their mission in life to kill online anonimity piss me off).
As far as "the paranoids" are concerned, the whole shebang is OSS (incl. the proxy server). I'm paranoid enough to believe that there is a certain corporation out there who has an interest in lighting the brushfire of distrust in relation to this guy, and I suspect some it it's employees might have slashdot accounts. Anyway, I've gotta go and take my meds now.;)
Re:And we're trusting you because....
on
Hiding From Google
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· Score: 1
Google doesn't see your IP address anymore.
The problem is it does. It's just that your IP address is claiming responsibility for someone else's clandestine actions.
You sir have it backwards - it is a monopoly that can only exist because of a the fact that government has a monopoly on the use of force
No, that is not the reverse of what I'm saying. I just go further, not only a market monopoly, but any ownership of property over and above what you are personally able to defend, depends on the monopoly of force being excercised by the state in favour of legal property relations.
lacking force free markets reign
Reign what? In any case, the free (or even the 'competitive,' as I should have written) market, does have force, it has the force of the state.
In the theoretical free market, everyone has perfect knowledge of the values involved.
Just to get our nomenclature correct. As I conceded in a post further down, "some people (myself included) are conflating the definitions of 'free market' and 'competitive market'" There's a little water under the bridge since I last sat in an Econ class (though Competition Law classes were more recent), so I can be forgiven for making this mistake. If memory serves me correctly what you are describing here is technically called the 'perfect(ly) competitive market' as opposed the the merely 'competitive market' which Competition Law (aka Anti-Trust Law) seeks to maintain (or at least did until Bork, Posner et. al. got hold of it).
State involvement is a fundamental method of getting and preserving free markets, not an anti-market force.
s/free/competitive/ and yes, that's exactly what I was pointing out. It probably goes without saying, but like most things in life there is a cost-benefit problem. Too little intervention and the "free" market degenerates into an oligopoly ridden generator of unfreedom, too much and the efficiency and information which markets bequeath are defeated. Again not B&W.
The theory behind antitrust law is the government has to step in when a monopoly is being abused, not merely because it exists.
Yes that is true, but it's actually a fairly modern, post-Chicago school view of role of antitrust law. As is clear from reading the speeches which accompanied the passing of the Sherman Act, for example, the very existence of cartels and monopolies was the mischief intended to be cured. The framers of this legislation were apparently motivated by a, perhaps romantic, vision of a capitalism or more of less equal craftsmen-proprietors (a nation of Joe-the-Plumbers) willingly bound in contract to one and other, in contradistinction to the emerging reality of a nation of employees facing big capital, in what can barely be described as a free choice to contract.
There is, despite the modern view that monopoly is not bad per se, a reasonable economic argument, that the ability, in the absence of competition, to charge way above the marginal cost of production (ie. the "monopoly rent"), is of itself a dangerous distortion of market mechanisms.
Your definition of a free market is the commonly accepted one by economists
Yes, I think what is happening here is that some people (myself included) are conflating the definitions of 'free market' and 'competitive market,' perhaps because of the greater freedom a competitive market ensures.
That's because the real world comes in shades of grey. A free market cannot exist without some intervention of the state. Minimally a state has to defend against Viking raiders and to establish legal property relations.
Moreover the free market obeys the dialectic of things tending towards their own negation. That is to say the goal of participants in the free market is to eliminate the competition creating a monopoly in a market and thus to defeat the freedom of that market. Rather cruelly, this is when the state is once again required to step in move the goal posts. You've got to feel sorry for successful corporations, don't you?
Try running python and then this statement from __future__ import braces
Honestly, I had philosophical issues with significant leading whitespace when I started using python, but nowadays I find having to use braces elsewhere somewhat annoying. If nothing else indentation as syntax forces the other guy to format his code nicely.
These days I'm working in Python, so tabs, spaces, and whatnot are both crucial and infuriating.
They are until you elimate all tabs from your code. Which editor are you using? I'm a vi* guy, and vi has an annoying habit of mixing tabs and spaces to accomplish various level of indentation. Luckily in vim you can set expandtab, which will automagically convert all inserted tabs to whatever your shiftwidth value is set to. Not that you would never touch the tab or spacebar to create indentation, of course.
Creepy stuff for sure. OTOH if we all stubbornly refuse ever to look at them, we could make 'em disappear. Not that that would happen in a world where people respond to spam.
Slashdot Mirror
err... "can't blame them"
[I]t's easy to forgive a phone for having a single-tasking operating system. Persisting with that platform on a device approaching the size of a laptop is where the product loses me.
I agree, and it first glance it seems crazy for a company whose flagship OS is a fairly nice adapatation of microkernel architecture for GUI-land. The idea clearly is the leverage off the surprising (even to Apple) success of the iPhone appstore. I guess you can blame them for following where the customers are leading.
The main thing I dislike about modern Apple hardware are the keyboards, I like a bit of feedback, so the idea of an onscreen keyboard fills me with horror. But maybe this isn't really meant as a laptop replacement.
I would rather have a MacBook Air
I would rather have the 13" MacBook Pro ... oh wait I do! ;)
I use and like their MacBooks for the same reason I like Linux on my desktop machines: the ability to pull up a decent CLI in a terminal window.
A usable shell and a GUI that quite frankly whips the pants off Gnome or KDE imo, yup OSX appeals. (When the linux box at home finally gave up the ghost, I installed it on the iMac via Parallels).
Yeah we are not the target market for this particular toy. You know my wife has been eyeing off the Kindle recently, and she has zero interest in a laptop. So I wouldn't be 100% surprised if this device eventually finds its way into my house ...
Struth mate, you make a good argument and it is I who is humbled by your greater knowledge on the subject. I was thinking more along the lines of the general population's tolerence level for things like police brutality, racisim, "poofta bashers", wife bashers, etc.
And that's a great point. It's a matter of perspective, you are comparing what we had achieved by 1970 to what we have now. In fact many of the battles were decisive victories. Women, for example will never tolerate being put back into their box ... at least not until we become a theocracy (just can't help myself :)
It would probably be healthier for me to look at it that way, but my perspective was from a person embedded in the time looking forward with postive or negative expectation, and it seems to me the point of inflect on this 'curve of expectation' was reached in about 1980 (at least for people who share my outlook, as you apparently do). But maybe this merely reflects a personal life history, the optimism of youth vs the pessimism of middle age (if we are still allowed to call ourselves middle aged now we have our half-century). :o
I don't think the situation is hopeless, if it was that bad I wouldn't be able to read your post much less agree with it. ;)
Ah yes, but can we look forward to slashdot being put on the blacklist? ;) Seriously though, you are right, I'm just doing my Denethor impersonation here. Defeatism is the worst way to give the kids hope.
Civil trials take way too long, and there is incentives by lawyers to keep the system flooded with needless, useless and pointless lawsuits.
In my jurisdiction practitioners are prohibited from acting in cases in which we cannot demonstrate a "reasonable prospect of success," on pain of unintentionally working pro bono or worse.
Contingency fee arrangement of the "no win, no fee" variety are not champertous, and have always been allowed in Queensland (my home jurisdiction) were champerty was not abolished as it was elsewhere in the Commonwealth. What is prohibited as champertous are fee arrangements under which lawyers' fees are calculated as a percentage of the final award in a proceeding. It's a fine line, but that's what comes out of the cases.
Well since I started Law at Sydney, a few years after the passage of the 1993 Act, I never read any of the cases, so I'll defer to your greater learning on the matter. OK, so I checked out a leading English case Trendtex this morning, where Wilberforce LJ cites Halsbury's to the effect that "Champerty is a particular kind of maintenance, namely maintenance of an action in consideration of a promise to give the maintainer a share in the proceeds or subject matter of the action.," which accords well with what you wrote. ;)
That being said, the Act did usher a period of greater litigation down here, being I perhaps part of raft of "reforms" (if memory serves me correctly it was from that time that advertisment for legal services began to appear). Of course such reforms might not be the sole cause, as this was the time Deane's proximity doctrine had gone viral.
So power hungry that it gets 10-hour battery life. Geeez
Yeah, my 1980s digital watch gets more than that. ;)
What you need is to make sane fucking laws, not apply laws from before the wheel to the age of the internet. That's what got us in this mess in the first place.
No what got us into this mess in the first place was not applying tried and true law, but instead being stampeded into enacting new law because "oooooh it's the internet ... we need neeewwwww laws (that'll make a motza for the people I work for)." Take copyright and other so-called IP law back 25-50 years and we'd be in a much better position.
That being said, the issues surrounding maintainance and champerty (which makes working on a contingency fee basis impossible) are a little more complicated. In my jurisdiction (NSW.au) these were still torts until 1993 when the Maitainance, Champerty and Barratry Abolition Act 1993 (NSW), was passed. Until then it was difficult for ordinary people to defend their legal rights as the cost of litigation (the ultimate threat) would be prohibitive. So these torts acted in a highly anti-democratic fashion.
OTOH after the Act was passed the amount if litigation obviously increased. And it increased to the point where it was felt necessary to curtail the remedies available to individuals (via the Civil Liability Act 2002 (NSW)). So the abolition of these torts ultimately acted to reduce an individual's rights. Also it made lawyers unpopular as happens when a people becomes more litigious.
Difficult.
I was born in 1959, that is not my recollection of the 70's.
I was born in 1960, so I should perhaps bow to your greater experience, mate (you're my compatriot if I remember correctly). On the other hand I do have double History major in one of my degrees, so maybe that makes up for the few months you have on me. ;)
Civil liberties in the west hit a speed bump with 911
More than a speed bump I would say! Nor was the damage limited to the US. But it was not the beginning to the decline. The surveilled society has existed at least as long as the cold war, but in that late 70s and 80s it really took off, partially as as a function of technology, but also a function of ideology. Incaceration rates and and increasingly vindictive (and arguably criminogenic) criminal justice system, to be contrasted with the growing humaneness of the previous decades culminating in Vinson's appointment as Head of Corrective Services in NSW, are similarly a product of the 80s.
If you were to take the time, as I have done (I read Criminology for my Law degree), to visit the archives and study the various newspapers for every state election since the late 60s, you will notice, in NSW at least, a seismic shift in 1988. Prior to this time crime stories are burried in the back pages of the papers, and as an election issue, Crime doesn't rate. In 1988 (Greiner vs Unsworth) that all changed, from the election on Law'n'Order has become a, perhaps the, major issue. We've had 22 years of "reforms" such as "truth in sentencing," ever expanding search powers not to mention police numbers etc. But does anyone in Sydney really feel safer now than they did in 1988? Paradoxically our obsession with stamping out crime has had, if anything, the opposite effect (and yes arguing from crime statistics and what they actually mean is fraught with danger). I may be a few months younger than you, but I'm old enough to remember when a mugging in Sydney was practically unheard of.
In other words "the good old days" were not that good.
Pull the other one mate. We never had it as good as we did under Messers Whitlam and Fraser! ;)
Seriously though, if the 60s and 70s weren't perfect (they weren't of course) then there was at least the hope, even the conviction, that things were getting better and better and more and more free. The refusal to fight in Vietnam was not merely a rejection of war, it was a rebellion against traditional forms of authority over the individual. The interference of the state in private matters was being rejected, the legalisation of homosexuality, decriminalisation of cannabis in SA (and look how that has been wound back), etc, speak to this. Kids today simply don't have that kind of hope, there is no basis for them to have it.
The generation of your and my parents lived in a post WWII world in which civil liberties were continously growing. Neither you, nor I, nor our kids do.
Although they don't use the same language many writing in the Guardian hold the same opinion
Which just goes to show that the meme of 'UK as Police State' is nothing but leftist paranoia. ;)
A sign that we're not quite living in a police state just yet and it's up to us vote for a party in next spring's election that will reel in some of these powers.
Don't hold your breath. So long as hoi polloi are swept up in Law'n'Order hysteria, no party will want to be seen as being "soft on crime." Nor is it likely that the advice they receive from the Police will advocate a lessining of policing powers.
Those who like to see the UK as a police state, in contradistinction to where ever they live, fail to understand that this is an international (or at least anglophone) phenomenon (witness US or Australian incarceration rates). An increasingly violent society (in part due to mere population increase), ironic* moral panic in the media, greater policing powers and harshness of the criminal justice system form a self-reinforcing loop (*ironic inasmuch as entertainment provided by the same media companies becomes increasingly violent). Nor does this appear to be cyclical. The apogee of civil liberties in Western Society was experienced in the 1970s, we're on the (long?) downhill run.
But don't mind me, I'm just being negative.
It seems to come down to a difference in degree of difficulty required to copy determining legality.
Clearly copyright holders are very concerned about the difficulty of copying, however the basic difference here is between lending and reproducing. If the library were to write out the contents of copyright protected books on vellum, in sheeps blood using ostrich feather quills and bind them in the finest pig leather, they would be in the same position vis a vis basic copyright law as they would be if they scanned and reproduced the works as pdfs.
I know that we may be searched and prosecuted for making music available in the way libraries do books.
That's not basic copyright law (it's all this newfangled digital agenda 'readingright' law), nor is it universally applicable. IAAL, but I'm still unclear whether this is breach of copyright law in my jurisdiction (it seems not to be). In any case there are a number of complicating factors in play here, including without limitation that the copies we would make available are themselves infringing copies, or where they are legitimately purchased, how far fair use rights (esp. in the US) extend to making and using personal copies, or where they were purchased in electronic form just what it actually is that we are buying when we buy online music from licensed vendors (more than likely a bare license). Books clearly are chattles and libraries clearly buy them on terms otherwise then that they cannot be lent out.
Yeah, but it doesn't matter what the indent is as long as your consistent. Python 3 won't let you mix tabs and spaces so you won't run into issues. You will still run into issues with Python 2 (which I believe IronPython is still using) since Python always considers tabs to be 8 spaces regardless of what your editor is set to.
Just as well too! You wouldn't really want the compiler to react to code differently depending on what editor it was written in, and depending on what settings the particular editor had in place a the time it was written, would you?
In any case, as PEP 8 makes clear, the 8 space/tab equivalence is there for "really old code that you don't want to mess up." The official recommendation is to "[u]se 4 spaces per indentation level" and that "[f]or new projects, spaces-only are strongly recommended over tabs."
With any halfways decent editor (ie. vim instead of vi :o) one should really never feel the need to touch the [Tab] button for the sake of indenting code. Of course Visual Python would throw the cat among the pidgeons now.
Uhhh so libraries currently get permission from the author to lend their books? ...huh...
If the libraries are lending books they aren't copying anything, why would they need permission? If they were to make electronic copies of books in order to make them available online, it would be obviously a different mattere.
The notion that a copyright should last for the entire life of an author is a very new thing.
Under the Copyright Act 1842 (UK), the term was 42 years or 7 years after the death of the author, whichever was longer. Under the Berne Convention 1886 the basic term was 50 years after the death of the author.
True under the original copyright statute, Copyright Act 1709, 8 Anne c19, it was a mere 14 year term, and true, it took the US a century to sign the Berne Convention, but to insist that the "notion" that "copyright should last for the entire life of an author," is "a very new thing," is, if you will pardon my language, "spreading obvious bullshit."
It's only a half step better than Disney (as corporations are essentially immortal).
Come again?
Please tell us you do realise that the mortality of a corporations is entirely irrelevant to the duration of a copyright, even given the ridiculously long terms granted under contemporary law. You do, don't you?
make that ... sites that collect the IP of Tor nodes.
It looks to me that requests to Google are made only by volunteer proxy servers and your computer is never used to forward anyone's traffic to Google. It unnerves me that that this is never explicitly stated on a sight for paranoids, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
You computer is never used, but your IP address is. He's quite explicit about how it works "GoogleSharing is a system that mixes the requests of many different users together, such that Google is not capable of telling what is coming from whom." And then below:
What you say is true for Tor, where you're safe if you parasitically live off other people's sharing. However if you forward Tor requests you'll find yourself blacklisted by sites that collect IP node. FWIW, I was barred from viewing content on a forum I had never visited before because they subscribe to an anti-Tor site which has my home IP listed :/ So if you're thinking of helping Iranian and Chinese dissidents speak out against their government, think twice. (Yeah getting barred from some insignificant forum pales in comparison I know, but people who've made it their mission in life to kill online anonimity piss me off).
As far as "the paranoids" are concerned, the whole shebang is OSS (incl. the proxy server). I'm paranoid enough to believe that there is a certain corporation out there who has an interest in lighting the brushfire of distrust in relation to this guy, and I suspect some it it's employees might have slashdot accounts. Anyway, I've gotta go and take my meds now. ;)
Google doesn't see your IP address anymore.
The problem is it does. It's just that your IP address is claiming responsibility for someone else's clandestine actions.
You sir have it backwards - it is a monopoly that can only exist because of a the fact that government has a monopoly on the use of force
No, that is not the reverse of what I'm saying. I just go further, not only a market monopoly, but any ownership of property over and above what you are personally able to defend, depends on the monopoly of force being excercised by the state in favour of legal property relations.
lacking force free markets reign
Reign what? In any case, the free (or even the 'competitive,' as I should have written) market, does have force, it has the force of the state.
In the theoretical free market, everyone has perfect knowledge of the values involved.
Just to get our nomenclature correct. As I conceded in a post further down, "some people (myself included) are conflating the definitions of 'free market' and 'competitive market'" There's a little water under the bridge since I last sat in an Econ class (though Competition Law classes were more recent), so I can be forgiven for making this mistake. If memory serves me correctly what you are describing here is technically called the 'perfect(ly) competitive market' as opposed the the merely 'competitive market' which Competition Law (aka Anti-Trust Law) seeks to maintain (or at least did until Bork, Posner et. al. got hold of it).
State involvement is a fundamental method of getting and preserving free markets, not an anti-market force.
s/free/competitive/ and yes, that's exactly what I was pointing out. It probably goes without saying, but like most things in life there is a cost-benefit problem. Too little intervention and the "free" market degenerates into an oligopoly ridden generator of unfreedom, too much and the efficiency and information which markets bequeath are defeated. Again not B&W.
The theory behind antitrust law is the government has to step in when a monopoly is being abused, not merely because it exists.
Yes that is true, but it's actually a fairly modern, post-Chicago school view of role of antitrust law. As is clear from reading the speeches which accompanied the passing of the Sherman Act, for example, the very existence of cartels and monopolies was the mischief intended to be cured. The framers of this legislation were apparently motivated by a, perhaps romantic, vision of a capitalism or more of less equal craftsmen-proprietors (a nation of Joe-the-Plumbers) willingly bound in contract to one and other, in contradistinction to the emerging reality of a nation of employees facing big capital, in what can barely be described as a free choice to contract.
There is, despite the modern view that monopoly is not bad per se, a reasonable economic argument, that the ability, in the absence of competition, to charge way above the marginal cost of production (ie. the "monopoly rent"), is of itself a dangerous distortion of market mechanisms.
Your definition of a free market is the commonly accepted one by economists
Yes, I think what is happening here is that some people (myself included) are conflating the definitions of 'free market' and 'competitive market,' perhaps because of the greater freedom a competitive market ensures.
I'm really confused...
That's because the real world comes in shades of grey. A free market cannot exist without some intervention of the state. Minimally a state has to defend against Viking raiders and to establish legal property relations.
Moreover the free market obeys the dialectic of things tending towards their own negation. That is to say the goal of participants in the free market is to eliminate the competition creating a monopoly in a market and thus to defeat the freedom of that market. Rather cruelly, this is when the state is once again required to step in move the goal posts. You've got to feel sorry for successful corporations, don't you?
If only Python could grow up too...
Try running python and then this statement from __future__ import braces
Honestly, I had philosophical issues with significant leading whitespace when I started using python, but nowadays I find having to use braces elsewhere somewhat annoying. If nothing else indentation as syntax forces the other guy to format his code nicely.
These days I'm working in Python, so tabs, spaces, and whatnot are both crucial and infuriating.
They are until you elimate all tabs from your code. Which editor are you using? I'm a vi* guy, and vi has an annoying habit of mixing tabs and spaces to accomplish various level of indentation. Luckily in vim you can set expandtab, which will automagically convert all inserted tabs to whatever your shiftwidth value is set to. Not that you would never touch the tab or spacebar to create indentation, of course.
Also useful are the -t and -tt switches?
[Drake calculated that] of the 30 million women in the UK, only 26 would be suitable girlfriends for him.
There comes a point where being too particular about a mate becomes an evolutionary disadvantage.
Who wouldn't want a billboard watching them?
Creepy stuff for sure. OTOH if we all stubbornly refuse ever to look at them, we could make 'em disappear. Not that that would happen in a world where people respond to spam.