I don't think it's very likely that you'd be able to find a body to transplant your head onto.
The donor body would have to be a brain-dead (or persistent vegetative state) living body. (We don't know how to revive a body after it's been dead for a few hours.) Brain-death is not all that common, especially with a healthy body. Now find the families of those brain-dead folks who would not object to their loved one's head being sawed off for their body to be attached to another person's head. Not gonna happen.
Yes, really. There's a big difference between none/zero/zilch and even something small.
If your statement were correct, then the author of a book would be able to sell you a copy and then tell you that you're not able to read it. Or that you're not able to sell or give that copy of the book to someone else for them to read.
Whether you find those limited rights useful is another question. I might find it useful to read and understand some published code, so that I can make something similar, or something that interoperates better. That's better than nothing.
Also, your response seems to imply that I could somehow view a picture or video without having a copy of that picture or video. I can assure you that that is not the case -- all the bits have to be on my computer for my computer to be able to display it to my screen.
Anyway, my point was to be careful when talking about copyright. There are some finer points that many people don't realize, which gives the owner of a legitimate copy some rights.
Without an explicit license you have absolutely ZERO legal right to do *anything* with anyone else's code. As such I hope you're not using such code for anything important.
This is NOT TRUE. Why do people have such trouble understanding this?
Without a license, you have absolutely zero legal right to COPY anyone else's copyrighted works. Why do you think they call it "copyright"? It's the right to make copies, make modified copies, and distribute copies. It is NOT the right to use. Copyright does not prevent you from reading a book that you already own a copy of (which would be using the book).
Your obligations under copyright law are not to use someone else's code that they have not given you a license for. Your permissions are none. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Not true. You may use a copy of copyrighted material that you've been given. But you may not copy it, distribute copies of it, or create a modified copy of it. Just like you may read (use) a book that someone gives you a copy of -- copyright does not prevent that.
So the next question is whether the author is giving you a copy by publishing it on the Internet. I can't think of any other reason that anyone would publish something publicly on the Internet than to give you a copy to read (i.e. use), I think you'd have a hard time making an argument in court that that was not the intention.
Of course, since you're not allowed to make additional copies or modifications under copyright law, you would not be able to use the code in any other projects. So a library would not be very useful.
Yes, but international doctrines don't usually apply to one nation and not another, especially if those 2 nations are equal in power.
Which is why the Bush Doctrine really scares me. By that doctrine, if China feels threatened by the USA, and if the USA has weapons of mass destruction (which we do), then China has the right to invade the USA. It's sad when you set a precedent that could lead to your own demise.
It wasn't meant to compare 2 equal situations. It was meant to imply that Americans think this is an encroachment on our "rights", but it's not nearly as bad as what we're doing regarding Taiwan, when viewed from the perspective of a disinterested party.
I find it highly unlikely that the mostly white power structure in this country is bound and determined to exterminate white people. That's just not how powerful people behave. Powerful people behave in a way that preserves and increases their power (and the power of those like them), not destroys it. The whole point of the US Constitution is that this is natural human behavior, so we need to make sure to limit such power.
Look at your own interests in your post, Eravnrekaree. You're interested in ensuring people like yourself continue to prosper. Why would more powerful people have strongly different interests? Can you find any historical evidence of other situations where a group of people were intent on eliminating people like themselves? History is replete with the opposite case, but I can't think of anything like what you think is happening.
The JonBenét Ramsey case is one you should think about. The police accused the parents, and the parents got lawyers and refused to cooperate with the police. To everyone, it looked like the parents were guilty, or trying to cover something up. But the reason they stopped talking is that the police were making accusations against them, and turning the circumstantial evidence against them.
It took almost 10 years, but eventually the family was proven NOT to have been involved.
Many people in this country don't understand why we (still) have the 2nd Amendment. But we do. And while it's still our law, we need to enforce it. It's there to protect us, like the other rights. I think you could make a better argument against the 2nd Amendment than the 5th -- the 2nd was meant for the people to be able to rise up against their government to overthrow it, which is not practically possible today with guns -- so what's the point?
There are quiet a few things in the Constitution that might not make sense to you. But they are our rights and our laws, and we are a nation of laws. So we enforce those rights, even if you don't understand them or think we should have them.
Besides, as many others have pointed out, the 5th Amendment does serve a useful and necessary purpose.
BBC doesn't want to [...] automatically determine which time zone any particular visitor to the site happens to be in
How do they handle this for their TV broadcasts?
Um, exactly how would you propose that a broadcast TV signal adapt to the time zone of the TV receiving it? They display the time of the broadcast location, since there's no other possibility.
I get tired of the "experts" here coming up with what they think is the obvious solution - different to everyone else's and mostly just made up BS.
Please Slashdot, if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, STFU!
How fucking hard is it really to have accurate time displayed on a webpage ?
I haven't tried it myself, I don't claim to have the ultimate solution, but it does appear to be a no-brainer.
Um, WTF? Did you even read what you wrote?
It turns out it is actually difficult to get time zones right, especially when you need to coordinate between web clients and servers. I know -- I've done it. The amount of time we spent debugging it (after we thought several times that we had everything figured out) was ridiculous.
The BBC news programmes that they play on local NPR radio stations always states the time in GMT. Seems very reasonable for an international service that's based in the UK.
I think embracing reality is why Agile works so well.
Instead of pretending that we can plan everything up front, we plan only for a few weeks. This allows us to adapt more quickly when we see that we're going down the wrong path.
Instead of pretending that we can estimate how long it will take, we use relative story sizes/points and translate the points into time, based on previous performance. Because the fact is people are very bad at estimating, and we're best off recognizing that and compensating for it.
Instead of pretending that we know when we're done, we automate acceptance tests to show it.
Instead of pretending that we think our code works like we expect it to, we force ourselves to prove it with TDD and unit tests.
You have a single point of failure, and that point of failure is the product owner.
I'm pretty sure the product owner will be a serious point of failure no matter what methodology you use. I've been on a couple Agile teams with bad product owners/managers, and felt like we succeeded despite them.
your dev team would do better by actually making the decisions as a team. Agile does not promote teamwork, it pays lip service to it, and in the process, it removes any incentive for the team to work as a team.
Wow. That's weird. The Agile practices of teamwork, team room, pair programming, and collective ownership would seem to be very much about making a team cohesive and empowered. And retrospectives (to me the most important part of Agile) should have been a place to address such problems. If you were not using those tools, then I don't think you can blame the tool set.
In your car analogy, it's a lot easier to make the 2nd car than the 1st.
The problem is, I've never been asked to write a piece of software exactly like another that I've written. That's why we can't tell you how long it will take. We're not building cars, we're designing them. We could easily tell you how long it would take to make each additional copy.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's very likely that you'd be able to find a body to transplant your head onto.
The donor body would have to be a brain-dead (or persistent vegetative state) living body. (We don't know how to revive a body after it's been dead for a few hours.) Brain-death is not all that common, especially with a healthy body. Now find the families of those brain-dead folks who would not object to their loved one's head being sawed off for their body to be attached to another person's head. Not gonna happen.
The Internet is the culmination of all human knowledge, plus porn.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to add industrial control systems to that mix was an idiot, and should be shot.
Yes, really. There's a big difference between none/zero/zilch and even something small.
If your statement were correct, then the author of a book would be able to sell you a copy and then tell you that you're not able to read it. Or that you're not able to sell or give that copy of the book to someone else for them to read.
Whether you find those limited rights useful is another question. I might find it useful to read and understand some published code, so that I can make something similar, or something that interoperates better. That's better than nothing.
Also, your response seems to imply that I could somehow view a picture or video without having a copy of that picture or video. I can assure you that that is not the case -- all the bits have to be on my computer for my computer to be able to display it to my screen.
Anyway, my point was to be careful when talking about copyright. There are some finer points that many people don't realize, which gives the owner of a legitimate copy some rights.
Without an explicit license you have absolutely ZERO legal right to do *anything* with anyone else's code. As such I hope you're not using such code for anything important.
This is NOT TRUE. Why do people have such trouble understanding this?
Without a license, you have absolutely zero legal right to COPY anyone else's copyrighted works. Why do you think they call it "copyright"? It's the right to make copies, make modified copies, and distribute copies. It is NOT the right to use. Copyright does not prevent you from reading a book that you already own a copy of (which would be using the book).
Your obligations under copyright law are not to use someone else's code that they have not given you a license for. Your permissions are none. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Not true. You may use a copy of copyrighted material that you've been given. But you may not copy it, distribute copies of it, or create a modified copy of it. Just like you may read (use) a book that someone gives you a copy of -- copyright does not prevent that.
So the next question is whether the author is giving you a copy by publishing it on the Internet. I can't think of any other reason that anyone would publish something publicly on the Internet than to give you a copy to read (i.e. use), I think you'd have a hard time making an argument in court that that was not the intention.
Of course, since you're not allowed to make additional copies or modifications under copyright law, you would not be able to use the code in any other projects. So a library would not be very useful.
Yes, but international doctrines don't usually apply to one nation and not another, especially if those 2 nations are equal in power.
Which is why the Bush Doctrine really scares me. By that doctrine, if China feels threatened by the USA, and if the USA has weapons of mass destruction (which we do), then China has the right to invade the USA. It's sad when you set a precedent that could lead to your own demise.
It wasn't meant to compare 2 equal situations. It was meant to imply that Americans think this is an encroachment on our "rights", but it's not nearly as bad as what we're doing regarding Taiwan, when viewed from the perspective of a disinterested party.
The USA is here to help!
We will gladly start a war with any 3rd World country to help reduce the population. We really can't afford it, but we'll do it if we have to.
You're welcome!
Holy racism, Batman!
I find it highly unlikely that the mostly white power structure in this country is bound and determined to exterminate white people. That's just not how powerful people behave. Powerful people behave in a way that preserves and increases their power (and the power of those like them), not destroys it. The whole point of the US Constitution is that this is natural human behavior, so we need to make sure to limit such power.
Look at your own interests in your post, Eravnrekaree. You're interested in ensuring people like yourself continue to prosper. Why would more powerful people have strongly different interests? Can you find any historical evidence of other situations where a group of people were intent on eliminating people like themselves? History is replete with the opposite case, but I can't think of anything like what you think is happening.
It will cost something like 15 billion to clean up the plant, and another $110 billion to decontaminate the surrounding area.
That's four orders of magnitude over "mega", so "Megadisaster" applies IMHO.
Wait, what? You consider a loss of $1 a disaster?
Most employees have a bias for good bosses, and against bad bosses.
Who said anything about mid-level? Same shit works all the way up to the CEO level, for the most part.
It's not like a philologist should never consult a dictionary, for example.
I had to look up "philologist" in a dictionary. (Which is a bit ironic, now that I know what it means.)
So the USA can meddle in Taiwan, but China cannot meddle in Central America? Seems fair...
The JonBenét Ramsey case is one you should think about. The police accused the parents, and the parents got lawyers and refused to cooperate with the police. To everyone, it looked like the parents were guilty, or trying to cover something up. But the reason they stopped talking is that the police were making accusations against them, and turning the circumstantial evidence against them.
It took almost 10 years, but eventually the family was proven NOT to have been involved.
Many people in this country don't understand why we (still) have the 2nd Amendment. But we do. And while it's still our law, we need to enforce it. It's there to protect us, like the other rights. I think you could make a better argument against the 2nd Amendment than the 5th -- the 2nd was meant for the people to be able to rise up against their government to overthrow it, which is not practically possible today with guns -- so what's the point?
There are quiet a few things in the Constitution that might not make sense to you. But they are our rights and our laws, and we are a nation of laws. So we enforce those rights, even if you don't understand them or think we should have them.
Besides, as many others have pointed out, the 5th Amendment does serve a useful and necessary purpose.
BBC doesn't want to [...] automatically determine which time zone any particular visitor to the site happens to be in
How do they handle this for their TV broadcasts?
Um, exactly how would you propose that a broadcast TV signal adapt to the time zone of the TV receiving it? They display the time of the broadcast location, since there's no other possibility.
I get tired of the "experts" here coming up with what they think is the obvious solution - different to everyone else's and mostly just made up BS.
Please Slashdot, if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, STFU!
How fucking hard is it really to have accurate time displayed on a webpage ?
I haven't tried it myself, I don't claim to have the ultimate solution, but it does appear to be a no-brainer.
Um, WTF? Did you even read what you wrote?
It turns out it is actually difficult to get time zones right, especially when you need to coordinate between web clients and servers. I know -- I've done it. The amount of time we spent debugging it (after we thought several times that we had everything figured out) was ridiculous.
The BBC news programmes that they play on local NPR radio stations always states the time in GMT. Seems very reasonable for an international service that's based in the UK.
Agile is the ability to change the process to meet the needs of the team. There's a reason they chose the word "Agile", you know.
Agile is designed to be pure chaos.
No, Agile realizes that software development involves chaos. It provides tools to deal with the reality of that chaos.
I think embracing reality is why Agile works so well.
You have a single point of failure, and that point of failure is the product owner.
I'm pretty sure the product owner will be a serious point of failure no matter what methodology you use. I've been on a couple Agile teams with bad product owners/managers, and felt like we succeeded despite them.
your dev team would do better by actually making the decisions as a team. Agile does not promote teamwork, it pays lip service to it, and in the process, it removes any incentive for the team to work as a team.
Wow. That's weird. The Agile practices of teamwork, team room, pair programming, and collective ownership would seem to be very much about making a team cohesive and empowered. And retrospectives (to me the most important part of Agile) should have been a place to address such problems. If you were not using those tools, then I don't think you can blame the tool set.
In your car analogy, it's a lot easier to make the 2nd car than the 1st.
The problem is, I've never been asked to write a piece of software exactly like another that I've written. That's why we can't tell you how long it will take. We're not building cars, we're designing them. We could easily tell you how long it would take to make each additional copy.
so your telling me you deeply care about your great-great-(twenty times) grandchildren?
Of course I care about them. Why else would I need my copyright to last so long?