Well, yes. Levelling the playing field is exactly what government and laws are supposed to do, when there is one party so much more powerful than another that the weaker one can't reasonably protect themselves. What else did you think governments were good for?
(OK, they also play a useful role in standardisation and co-ordination. But when you think about it, almost everything valuable that governments do ultimately comes down to helping people interact fairly and efficiently.)
Perhaps you should take the "brave" out of your username.
Why, because I don't feel like living in coastal Somalia?
Seriously, just stop wanting what other people have, that's really all there is to it.
And what happens next week, when the health insurance people jump on the bandwagon? Shall we also not worry about not being able to get healthcare at affordable prices because a disproportionate number of our Facebook friends smoke/drink/sleep around/enjoy high risk sports? After all, you could just die instead of getting treatment, right?
The fact is, modern society often works on the assumption that people can get credit under reasonable conditions. If you want to take a principled stand that credit is unnecessary then you should advocate prohibiting giving credit on commercial terms at all. Of course, if you do it to everyone equally then you'll have to accept the resulting economic collapse as your nation's house prices drop by 75% overnight and a large, useful, skilled section of the labour market becomes mostly unemployable.
Or we could do the sensible thing, by allowing commercial credit arrangements but regulating them to prevent lenders from abusing their disproportionate power such that some borrowers suffer unfairly. As with any other essential industry that gets regulated, the price of playing the game becomes having to play by fair rules.
You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.
If we had just "dealt with it" every time those with power abused their position, black people would still be slaves, women would still not have the vote, children would still be down in the mines, and manual labourers would still barely earn enough wages to live while working crazy hours under conditions that would seriously damage their health.
We have a long way to go, even in the first world, in terms of respecting each other as human beings. We aren't going to get much further if we adopt your attitude every time essential services that make society work start taking advantage of asymmetric power relationships with the ultimate goal of making more money no matter what.
You can run my code through a code formatter if you don't like my choice of coding convention.
Sure you can, as long as you promise to convert it back again perfectly before you commit, so anyone looking at the diffs later doesn't have to wade through 657 whitespace-related changes to spot the one line where you changes some behaviour.
Languages with syntactic whitespace are vulnerable to misrepresentation, but in practice 99% of that misrepresentation happens under exactly one condition: the code is being presented on a web page by someone who either doesn't know basic HTML or uses a crappy CMS that doesn't render proper HTML.
If you're going to depend on a set of public libraries instead of an included set, they you had better verify them for quality. This is why Python's "batteries included" stance is so good. You can depend on the basic libraries.
Ironically, that's actually one of my biggest concerns about using Python. IME, the included batteries aren't very good, once you get past the first few parts of the library reference that everyone uses all the time. A lot of the later parts -- things like file and directory manipulation, data formats and compression tools, process control, networking, even some of the date/time functionality -- have elements that are horribly slow, platform-dependent, or simply too bug-ridden to trust in production.
It's unfortunate that package management in Python is such a mess, mostly for historical reasons. There's quite a bit of good stuff on PyPI these days, and if we were starting over, I think we'd do better to limit the standard library to a much smaller set of essential foundations, and to promote the best libraries from outside sources via the standardised package repository and tools.
Re:Ballmer's replacement - a possible strategy?
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Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 1
I don't really want to get into the politics here, but objectively, any private cloud solution where you're storing data and communicating only inside your own network and you can run independent tools to monitor/control data coming in/out is naturally more easily secured than a public cloud solution. As you point out, vendors in the latter case can and do allow data monitoring without your consent, and it's not as if that problem is unique either to Microsoft as a vendor or to security services in the US. If you really are a big enough business that commercial espionage via this route is a credible threat, basically no-one outside your network is a trustworthy vendor in the sense you're talking about.
Re:Ballmer's replacement - a possible strategy?
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Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure what any of that had to do with this thread. We're talking about a potential commercial strategy for Microsoft. As a matter of fact, MS have the dominant desktop OS, a substantial portfolio of server OS and back office products that includes all of the essential server applications, and well-established sales channels into most businesses. How does this not make them the best-placed company in the world to promote a private cloud model?
Private clouds: done, but not done well so far
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Ballmer To Retire
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They do promote private clouds.
In the sense of having a product or two that are aimed at that market? Sure. In the sense of spending some marketing budget on it? Probably. In the sense of throwing the weight of an 800lb industry gorilla solidly behind it with the goal of shifting the entire market? Not even close.
My take is that with the right person at the helm, private cloud could be Microsoft's iPhone/iPad. It's a big enough potential market to move an entire industry, it's certainly not a new idea and some companies have dipped their toes in the water, but no-one has really done it well yet. I think Microsoft are uniquely well-positioned to attack that market, just as a lot of the hype about external cloud is giving way to some harsh realities, and as the mobile device market is starting to settle down now that much of the market that wants a smartphone or tablet already has one.
Ballmer's replacement - a possible strategy?
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Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Perhaps they'll grow some spines and fight for a better leader, not yet-another-BFF-of-Bill.
Unfortunately for them, a significant number of senior leadership figures at Microsoft who might have been credible candidates have instead left the company in recent years. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, that limits the talent pool from in-house.
It will be interesting to see whether they can attract someone good from outside. Big tech firms don't seem to have a great track record in that respect lately, though perhaps that perception is partly because we hear about the spectacular failures at places like HP but modest success stories go mostly unreported.
Either way, MS still has an effective monopoly on desktops, a significant presence in business server rooms, a substantial war chest, and a lot of smart people. Someone with a better vision for how to use those assets than "It's like Apple but for people who didn't buy Apple yet" might do well there.
I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds. It looks like a much more natural fit for their portfolio and expertise, it plays on competitors' weaknesses, and it plays to their strengths as an established provider on both client and server ends for business. It even gives them a potential way into the mobile market, via consumer-friendly devices with integral BYOD features for those who also want to use them for business but don't want to hand over the root password to corporate sysadmins. Any takers?:-)
Again, I acknowledge that your point is justified and anything simulated is potentially different to reality.
However, for most people in most contexts, good simulations have proven to be reasonably accurate approximations of reality, even in high stress environments such as training airline pilots. They're also the best approximation we've got right now, unless you consider it ethical to test an activity for real when the theory you're testing is that the activity is dangerous.
Given we have hard data showing that a disproportionate number of actual accidents involve mobile device usage, and the consistency of the results from studies that would support a causal relationship, I still maintain that it's reasonable to assume most people can not, in fact, multitask effectively without degrading their driving performance.
I meant my previous post as a figurative "you" referring to your hypothetical distracted driver, rather than "you, personally". Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Sure, and the double-blind point you made is also fair. That said, I've seen multiple studies that did not take the format you mentioned where it's some sort of unusual/challenging course.
For example, the most obvious one I can recall watched people driving a simulator set to represent realistic conditions (i.e., not dramatic, sudden hazards everywhere) and at times the testers would start talking casually with the subject. They monitored general car control and reactions, monitoring things like distance from the vehicle in front, position within the lane, and behaviour approaching lights and reaction time if they started to change.
The results were very obvious correlations between behaviours like drifting too close, drifting out of lane or tendency to go through yellow/red lights, and holding a conversation. In other words, driver behaviour that is well known to increase the risk of having an accident increased during conversation times.
They might also have done some of the sudden panic reaction stuff later, but the interesting part for me was the degradation of basic car control.
A distracted driver can, so some degree, compensate. Everyone has limits, I too have asked people to shut up or told the person on the phone "hold on a second, I need to drive" when a situation got precarious.
The problem is that when you're distracted by a remote conversation, you don't realise that the situation is getting precarious, and therefore you also don't start to compensate, until significantly later than you otherwise would.
As a point of interest, statistically it seems to be about 96-98% can't. It depends on which study you look at. Of the more activity-specific ones I've read, the incidence of people whose driving performance was not significantly impaired while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with a remote party has been around 2-4%.
Some of the studies suggested that the same subjects also tend to exhibit their extraordinary ability to perform multiple simultaneous activities effectively in other contexts. Curiously, so far there seems little evidence of correlation between this ability and other factors we might expect to be relevant, such as other measures of intelligence.
If anyone here is a real psychologist with experience of the field, please feel free to chime in with more concrete data, as the above is just based on some personal research as an interested observer.
If you actually had lawyers in your family, and you had learned anything from them, you would know better than to claim things like "those are real numbers for a simple copyright case" without citing that case properly. You would also know that patents and copyright are completely different legal areas, and that "simple patent case" is pretty much an oxymoron.
Another thing that's easy is claiming your personal views are facts while not giving anything verifiable to back them up, but that also doesn't make a very convincing argument.
If your $275/hour lawyer can't resolve a simple copyright case without spending a year of near full-time work on it, your lawyer isn't worth $275/hour. The essential facts in the case are unlikely to be disputed, so the result is likely to depend on two fundamental questions of law, at least in the US: roughly speaking, can they escape via fair use, and can they escape via the DMCA safe harbor provisions? Even if you litigated it all the way, you should still be done in no more than a few hours of court time + preparation. The situation would be similar in Europe, e.g., considering fair dealing and the EUCD in the UK.
Obviously that might still not be worthwhile if you're talking about a minor case of infringement with little demonstrable actual damage, little expectation of other forms of damages, and a legal system where you wind up paying your own fees even if you win. That's why measures like the DMCA and EUCD provide for lighter weight takedown actions, and put anyone who counters at greater and more explicit risk if they choose to dispute the takedown and litigation follows.
But as you say, tough talk is easy. So is posting random numbers on Slashdot, but it doesn't make a very convincing argument.
(IANAL, if you get legal advice on the Internet you're crazy, etc.)
Not quite. The cost to REproduce has come down dramatically. The cost to PRODUCE works in the first place is higher than ever.
That is almost certainly due in part to celebrity stars and their demanding agents, at least in some creative industries. However, it is also because many of the works that are produced today have far greater production values than anything we produced as a society even a few years ago.
I think any case against copyright as a principle (as distinct from abusively distorted copyright in practice) needs to include a plausible alternative model that doesn't throw away all of those valuable works. So far, the most successful experiments in alternative business models have seen only isolated successes, and usually under highly favourable conditions that would not generalise.
The man lied to Congress and is participating in illegal unconstitutional mass surveillance and seizure of every American's private data
It seems clear that they're doing it to us non-Americans even more. While that might be no immediate problem to US representatives who only have their own electorates to worry about, the damage to the US reputation abroad has already started. I imagine it will only get worse as people start to realise how much control and monitoring of the Internet and the wider technology industry one country has been allowed to have for so long. The catalyst for this might have been Snowden, and the fall guy might be the NSA, but no organisation could have achieved all of this alone.
The persistent trivialisation of the US spying abroad, even in public statements by very senior officials, is not going to do any favours for allied governments who are found to have been complicit in the whole deal or whose own questionable monitoring practices come to light, either. Angela Merkel could be in a lot of trouble, with Germany for obvious reasons being culturally more sensitive about this sort of thing than most. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a more overt backlash against it here in the UK, particularly given the key role of The Guardian in recent disclosures, but I wonder how much of this is just the chilling effect at work and/or the media here taking a bit longer to realise that the tides of public opinion are shifting and playing their collective cards close to their chests after some rough arguments with government in recent years.
Ultimately the US government can defend that mass surveillance of foreign citizens as if it's somehow defending its people. Maybe in a few cases that is even true; after all, there obviously are some actually bad people in the world, and security services were formed for a reason, so it's important to keep a level head and not to lose context and perspective when debating these issues. However, I think we can all imagine what the same US officials would be calling it if the tables were turned, though I suppose they might flip between "cyber-terrorism" and "act of war" depending on the strength of the other party.
A government must be limited in its powers at a constitutional level, because you never know who will be running the show in the future. Limits on things they can legally do that no-one else can are necessary, but they need to be beyond the power of the administration of the day to change without further consent or the protections are meaningless.
For the rest, in theory normal laws should suffice. The government itself should legislate to ensure that, for example, businesses must respect privacy to a reasonable extent, because telling a health insurance company that you've been having lots of discussions with people who have cancer lately could potentially have serious consequences too.
The catch here is that when politicians and lawyers are involved, the distinction between government and non-government authority and restrictions can get blurred, so I am increasingly of the view that basic rights must be protected at a constitutional level against anyone who might infringe them unjustly.
None of it matters anyway if your judicial system declines to enforce the law, of course, but at least this removes any ambiguity regarding whether those fundamental rights are legally protected.
Those corporations exist to make money, not to look after the interests of people.
Sure, but they make money from people, and for better or worse, voting with your wallet often proves to be more effective than voting for your representatives.
The thing I don't understand about all these controversial security measures, whether it's monitoring communications or intrusive airport security procedures or detention without trial or whatever else, is that governments and supportive media always seem quick to tell us that most people do want the claimed security benefits and are willing to accept the unpleasantness as a result even if a small minority of civil liberties campaigners object, yet apparently the people whose bottom line is riding on most of the population actually taking that sort of tolerant position don't seem very willing to bank on it.
The people who belong in this environment already know and accept the risks that come along with the prestige of working on the core of the greatest community achievement in computer history.
If you really believe that, you have an extremely narrow perspective on computer history, though judging by some of the other comments in this discussion you're certainly not alone.
Please see my earlier post for some other examples of exceptionally impressive community achievements, including another computer-related one that surely has at least as big a claim to be the top of the list as the Linux kernel.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that LKML is just another forum for people to wander around in like Slashdot.
The LKML is certainly a forum where smart people discuss sometimes tricky issues relating to an important piece of software. I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. However, the idea that it is special in that respect or that Linux is exceptional as a software project is bizarre. Do you not realise that there are other software projects, some of which are much bigger, longer-lasting and/or more widely used than Linux? Do you not think that everyone working on those projects also engages in thoughtful discussions and wants to produce software of very high quality? Of course they do, and many of them manage to do it without having prominent figures in their community repeatedly lose their cool in public.
I'd rather only have people who are mentally stable enough to withstand Linus's flames develop code for the Linux kernel.
To each their own. Personally, I'd rather have good Linux kernel developers develop code for the Linux kernel.
Also, your implication that anyone who doesn't want to work in an unpleasant environment is mentally unstable is obvious hyperbole.
This is not about a small experimental project where nobody cares about stability, but one of the largest truly collaborative endeavors ever made by humankind
And again, your hyperbole is unfounded. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind.
Linux is a relatively large software project. There are plenty of other relatively large software projects, written by plenty of other smart people who also care about stability and quality.
billions of dollars in worldwide economic growth hinge on its future development
In what way, exactly? Systems that include Linux surely have a collective value on that scale, but that value wouldn't disappear if someone made a small mistake in a kernel commit, or if Linus retired tomorrow.
To give you some perspective, I'm pretty sure that the astronaut program performs stricter tests for mental stability than being able to take some guy's rants not too personal
You are giving me some perspective, by comparing a programme that develops one relatively large piece of software to a programme that puts humans in space? Physician, heal thyself!
Oh, come on. Linus is not the boss of any of the people on LKML.
Are you suggesting that he's just an ordinary poster on the list, with no special authority compared to kernel contributors and no special status as a leader that newcomers might look to?
If you're a n00b who posts something stupid on LKML, you are not going to get massive old-school-Usenet-style flames.
I wonder how many n00bs never get that far, because they see how the leader of the community treats others and decide to go do something else instead. Maybe Linus does personally know the recipients of his infamous rants, but on a high-profile public forum not everyone watching might realise that.
If you walked into an office for a job interview, and the first thing you saw was some management type openly berating a subordinate, what tone would that set before you even started the discussion you were there for? Some conversations are best held privately, as much for the benefit of the community as for the participants themselves.
I have often seen this same "enforced politeness" tried on other mailing lists, and the result is always the same. The "wizards" soon migrate somewhere else
Then wish them well and send them on their way.
I find your implied association between smart people who get useful things done and rude people who can't act like adults unlikely. I know plenty of smart people, and the overwhelming majority of them would prefer to work with others in civilised fashion. Sure, when people are passionate about something then occasionally someone might cross the line, but then they apologise and everyone carries on.
I know plenty of blustery people as well, and a lot of them bluster to cover the fact that they aren't nearly as smart or valuable as they would like everyone else to believe. As with any bad apple, the best management decision for the project as a whole is usually to fire such people at the earliest opportunity rather than let them contaminate things any further or dig in any deeper.
Sometimes doing that will hurt in the short term, but no-one is irreplaceable. Once the bad ones are out of the way you can get on with bringing in other smart people to replace them. That can now include all the smart people you couldn't bring in before because they had no interest in working in a hostile environment and, being smart, they had plenty of other choices.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay! More laws! Government will protect you!
Well, yes. Levelling the playing field is exactly what government and laws are supposed to do, when there is one party so much more powerful than another that the weaker one can't reasonably protect themselves. What else did you think governments were good for?
(OK, they also play a useful role in standardisation and co-ordination. But when you think about it, almost everything valuable that governments do ultimately comes down to helping people interact fairly and efficiently.)
Perhaps you should take the "brave" out of your username.
Why, because I don't feel like living in coastal Somalia?
Seriously, just stop wanting what other people have, that's really all there is to it.
And what happens next week, when the health insurance people jump on the bandwagon? Shall we also not worry about not being able to get healthcare at affordable prices because a disproportionate number of our Facebook friends smoke/drink/sleep around/enjoy high risk sports? After all, you could just die instead of getting treatment, right?
The fact is, modern society often works on the assumption that people can get credit under reasonable conditions. If you want to take a principled stand that credit is unnecessary then you should advocate prohibiting giving credit on commercial terms at all. Of course, if you do it to everyone equally then you'll have to accept the resulting economic collapse as your nation's house prices drop by 75% overnight and a large, useful, skilled section of the labour market becomes mostly unemployable.
Or we could do the sensible thing, by allowing commercial credit arrangements but regulating them to prevent lenders from abusing their disproportionate power such that some borrowers suffer unfairly. As with any other essential industry that gets regulated, the price of playing the game becomes having to play by fair rules.
You are judged by the company you keep. Deal with it.
If we had just "dealt with it" every time those with power abused their position, black people would still be slaves, women would still not have the vote, children would still be down in the mines, and manual labourers would still barely earn enough wages to live while working crazy hours under conditions that would seriously damage their health.
We have a long way to go, even in the first world, in terms of respecting each other as human beings. We aren't going to get much further if we adopt your attitude every time essential services that make society work start taking advantage of asymmetric power relationships with the ultimate goal of making more money no matter what.
You can run my code through a code formatter if you don't like my choice of coding convention.
Sure you can, as long as you promise to convert it back again perfectly before you commit, so anyone looking at the diffs later doesn't have to wade through 657 whitespace-related changes to spot the one line where you changes some behaviour.
Languages with syntactic whitespace are vulnerable to misrepresentation, but in practice 99% of that misrepresentation happens under exactly one condition: the code is being presented on a web page by someone who either doesn't know basic HTML or uses a crappy CMS that doesn't render proper HTML.
If you're going to depend on a set of public libraries instead of an included set, they you had better verify them for quality. This is why Python's "batteries included" stance is so good. You can depend on the basic libraries.
Ironically, that's actually one of my biggest concerns about using Python. IME, the included batteries aren't very good, once you get past the first few parts of the library reference that everyone uses all the time. A lot of the later parts -- things like file and directory manipulation, data formats and compression tools, process control, networking, even some of the date/time functionality -- have elements that are horribly slow, platform-dependent, or simply too bug-ridden to trust in production.
It's unfortunate that package management in Python is such a mess, mostly for historical reasons. There's quite a bit of good stuff on PyPI these days, and if we were starting over, I think we'd do better to limit the standard library to a much smaller set of essential foundations, and to promote the best libraries from outside sources via the standardised package repository and tools.
I don't really want to get into the politics here, but objectively, any private cloud solution where you're storing data and communicating only inside your own network and you can run independent tools to monitor/control data coming in/out is naturally more easily secured than a public cloud solution. As you point out, vendors in the latter case can and do allow data monitoring without your consent, and it's not as if that problem is unique either to Microsoft as a vendor or to security services in the US. If you really are a big enough business that commercial espionage via this route is a credible threat, basically no-one outside your network is a trustworthy vendor in the sense you're talking about.
I'm not sure what any of that had to do with this thread. We're talking about a potential commercial strategy for Microsoft. As a matter of fact, MS have the dominant desktop OS, a substantial portfolio of server OS and back office products that includes all of the essential server applications, and well-established sales channels into most businesses. How does this not make them the best-placed company in the world to promote a private cloud model?
They do promote private clouds.
In the sense of having a product or two that are aimed at that market? Sure. In the sense of spending some marketing budget on it? Probably. In the sense of throwing the weight of an 800lb industry gorilla solidly behind it with the goal of shifting the entire market? Not even close.
My take is that with the right person at the helm, private cloud could be Microsoft's iPhone/iPad. It's a big enough potential market to move an entire industry, it's certainly not a new idea and some companies have dipped their toes in the water, but no-one has really done it well yet. I think Microsoft are uniquely well-positioned to attack that market, just as a lot of the hype about external cloud is giving way to some harsh realities, and as the mobile device market is starting to settle down now that much of the market that wants a smartphone or tablet already has one.
Perhaps they'll grow some spines and fight for a better leader, not yet-another-BFF-of-Bill.
Unfortunately for them, a significant number of senior leadership figures at Microsoft who might have been credible candidates have instead left the company in recent years. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, that limits the talent pool from in-house.
It will be interesting to see whether they can attract someone good from outside. Big tech firms don't seem to have a great track record in that respect lately, though perhaps that perception is partly because we hear about the spectacular failures at places like HP but modest success stories go mostly unreported.
Either way, MS still has an effective monopoly on desktops, a significant presence in business server rooms, a substantial war chest, and a lot of smart people. Someone with a better vision for how to use those assets than "It's like Apple but for people who didn't buy Apple yet" might do well there.
I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds. It looks like a much more natural fit for their portfolio and expertise, it plays on competitors' weaknesses, and it plays to their strengths as an established provider on both client and server ends for business. It even gives them a potential way into the mobile market, via consumer-friendly devices with integral BYOD features for those who also want to use them for business but don't want to hand over the root password to corporate sysadmins. Any takers? :-)
Again, I acknowledge that your point is justified and anything simulated is potentially different to reality.
However, for most people in most contexts, good simulations have proven to be reasonably accurate approximations of reality, even in high stress environments such as training airline pilots. They're also the best approximation we've got right now, unless you consider it ethical to test an activity for real when the theory you're testing is that the activity is dangerous.
Given we have hard data showing that a disproportionate number of actual accidents involve mobile device usage, and the consistency of the results from studies that would support a causal relationship, I still maintain that it's reasonable to assume most people can not, in fact, multitask effectively without degrading their driving performance.
I meant my previous post as a figurative "you" referring to your hypothetical distracted driver, rather than "you, personally". Sorry if that wasn't clear.
It really depends on the study you're looking at.
Sure, and the double-blind point you made is also fair. That said, I've seen multiple studies that did not take the format you mentioned where it's some sort of unusual/challenging course.
For example, the most obvious one I can recall watched people driving a simulator set to represent realistic conditions (i.e., not dramatic, sudden hazards everywhere) and at times the testers would start talking casually with the subject. They monitored general car control and reactions, monitoring things like distance from the vehicle in front, position within the lane, and behaviour approaching lights and reaction time if they started to change.
The results were very obvious correlations between behaviours like drifting too close, drifting out of lane or tendency to go through yellow/red lights, and holding a conversation. In other words, driver behaviour that is well known to increase the risk of having an accident increased during conversation times.
They might also have done some of the sudden panic reaction stuff later, but the interesting part for me was the degradation of basic car control.
A distracted driver can, so some degree, compensate. Everyone has limits, I too have asked people to shut up or told the person on the phone "hold on a second, I need to drive" when a situation got precarious.
The problem is that when you're distracted by a remote conversation, you don't realise that the situation is getting precarious, and therefore you also don't start to compensate, until significantly later than you otherwise would.
As a point of interest, statistically it seems to be about 96-98% can't. It depends on which study you look at. Of the more activity-specific ones I've read, the incidence of people whose driving performance was not significantly impaired while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with a remote party has been around 2-4%.
Some of the studies suggested that the same subjects also tend to exhibit their extraordinary ability to perform multiple simultaneous activities effectively in other contexts. Curiously, so far there seems little evidence of correlation between this ability and other factors we might expect to be relevant, such as other measures of intelligence.
If anyone here is a real psychologist with experience of the field, please feel free to chime in with more concrete data, as the above is just based on some personal research as an interested observer.
If you actually had lawyers in your family, and you had learned anything from them, you would know better than to claim things like "those are real numbers for a simple copyright case" without citing that case properly. You would also know that patents and copyright are completely different legal areas, and that "simple patent case" is pretty much an oxymoron.
Another thing that's easy is claiming your personal views are facts while not giving anything verifiable to back them up, but that also doesn't make a very convincing argument.
If your $275/hour lawyer can't resolve a simple copyright case without spending a year of near full-time work on it, your lawyer isn't worth $275/hour. The essential facts in the case are unlikely to be disputed, so the result is likely to depend on two fundamental questions of law, at least in the US: roughly speaking, can they escape via fair use, and can they escape via the DMCA safe harbor provisions? Even if you litigated it all the way, you should still be done in no more than a few hours of court time + preparation. The situation would be similar in Europe, e.g., considering fair dealing and the EUCD in the UK.
Obviously that might still not be worthwhile if you're talking about a minor case of infringement with little demonstrable actual damage, little expectation of other forms of damages, and a legal system where you wind up paying your own fees even if you win. That's why measures like the DMCA and EUCD provide for lighter weight takedown actions, and put anyone who counters at greater and more explicit risk if they choose to dispute the takedown and litigation follows.
But as you say, tough talk is easy. So is posting random numbers on Slashdot, but it doesn't make a very convincing argument.
(IANAL, if you get legal advice on the Internet you're crazy, etc.)
The cost to produce has gotten cheaper
Not quite. The cost to REproduce has come down dramatically. The cost to PRODUCE works in the first place is higher than ever.
That is almost certainly due in part to celebrity stars and their demanding agents, at least in some creative industries. However, it is also because many of the works that are produced today have far greater production values than anything we produced as a society even a few years ago.
I think any case against copyright as a principle (as distinct from abusively distorted copyright in practice) needs to include a plausible alternative model that doesn't throw away all of those valuable works. So far, the most successful experiments in alternative business models have seen only isolated successes, and usually under highly favourable conditions that would not generalise.
The man lied to Congress and is participating in illegal unconstitutional mass surveillance and seizure of every American's private data
It seems clear that they're doing it to us non-Americans even more. While that might be no immediate problem to US representatives who only have their own electorates to worry about, the damage to the US reputation abroad has already started. I imagine it will only get worse as people start to realise how much control and monitoring of the Internet and the wider technology industry one country has been allowed to have for so long. The catalyst for this might have been Snowden, and the fall guy might be the NSA, but no organisation could have achieved all of this alone.
The persistent trivialisation of the US spying abroad, even in public statements by very senior officials, is not going to do any favours for allied governments who are found to have been complicit in the whole deal or whose own questionable monitoring practices come to light, either. Angela Merkel could be in a lot of trouble, with Germany for obvious reasons being culturally more sensitive about this sort of thing than most. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been a more overt backlash against it here in the UK, particularly given the key role of The Guardian in recent disclosures, but I wonder how much of this is just the chilling effect at work and/or the media here taking a bit longer to realise that the tides of public opinion are shifting and playing their collective cards close to their chests after some rough arguments with government in recent years.
Ultimately the US government can defend that mass surveillance of foreign citizens as if it's somehow defending its people. Maybe in a few cases that is even true; after all, there obviously are some actually bad people in the world, and security services were formed for a reason, so it's important to keep a level head and not to lose context and perspective when debating these issues. However, I think we can all imagine what the same US officials would be calling it if the tables were turned, though I suppose they might flip between "cyber-terrorism" and "act of war" depending on the strength of the other party.
Only wimps use the NSA for backup. Real men just upload their important stuff on FTP and let the rest of the world mirror it. ;-)
A government must be limited in its powers at a constitutional level, because you never know who will be running the show in the future. Limits on things they can legally do that no-one else can are necessary, but they need to be beyond the power of the administration of the day to change without further consent or the protections are meaningless.
For the rest, in theory normal laws should suffice. The government itself should legislate to ensure that, for example, businesses must respect privacy to a reasonable extent, because telling a health insurance company that you've been having lots of discussions with people who have cancer lately could potentially have serious consequences too.
The catch here is that when politicians and lawyers are involved, the distinction between government and non-government authority and restrictions can get blurred, so I am increasingly of the view that basic rights must be protected at a constitutional level against anyone who might infringe them unjustly.
None of it matters anyway if your judicial system declines to enforce the law, of course, but at least this removes any ambiguity regarding whether those fundamental rights are legally protected.
Those corporations exist to make money, not to look after the interests of people.
Sure, but they make money from people, and for better or worse, voting with your wallet often proves to be more effective than voting for your representatives.
The thing I don't understand about all these controversial security measures, whether it's monitoring communications or intrusive airport security procedures or detention without trial or whatever else, is that governments and supportive media always seem quick to tell us that most people do want the claimed security benefits and are willing to accept the unpleasantness as a result even if a small minority of civil liberties campaigners object, yet apparently the people whose bottom line is riding on most of the population actually taking that sort of tolerant position don't seem very willing to bank on it.
The people who belong in this environment already know and accept the risks that come along with the prestige of working on the core of the greatest community achievement in computer history.
If you really believe that, you have an extremely narrow perspective on computer history, though judging by some of the other comments in this discussion you're certainly not alone.
Please see my earlier post for some other examples of exceptionally impressive community achievements, including another computer-related one that surely has at least as big a claim to be the top of the list as the Linux kernel.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that LKML is just another forum for people to wander around in like Slashdot.
The LKML is certainly a forum where smart people discuss sometimes tricky issues relating to an important piece of software. I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. However, the idea that it is special in that respect or that Linux is exceptional as a software project is bizarre. Do you not realise that there are other software projects, some of which are much bigger, longer-lasting and/or more widely used than Linux? Do you not think that everyone working on those projects also engages in thoughtful discussions and wants to produce software of very high quality? Of course they do, and many of them manage to do it without having prominent figures in their community repeatedly lose their cool in public.
I'd rather only have people who are mentally stable enough to withstand Linus's flames develop code for the Linux kernel.
To each their own. Personally, I'd rather have good Linux kernel developers develop code for the Linux kernel.
Also, your implication that anyone who doesn't want to work in an unpleasant environment is mentally unstable is obvious hyperbole.
This is not about a small experimental project where nobody cares about stability, but one of the largest truly collaborative endeavors ever made by humankind
And again, your hyperbole is unfounded. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind. This is one of the largest collaborative endeavours ever made by humankind.
Linux is a relatively large software project. There are plenty of other relatively large software projects, written by plenty of other smart people who also care about stability and quality.
billions of dollars in worldwide economic growth hinge on its future development
In what way, exactly? Systems that include Linux surely have a collective value on that scale, but that value wouldn't disappear if someone made a small mistake in a kernel commit, or if Linus retired tomorrow.
To give you some perspective, I'm pretty sure that the astronaut program performs stricter tests for mental stability than being able to take some guy's rants not too personal
You are giving me some perspective, by comparing a programme that develops one relatively large piece of software to a programme that puts humans in space? Physician, heal thyself!
Oh, come on. Linus is not the boss of any of the people on LKML.
Are you suggesting that he's just an ordinary poster on the list, with no special authority compared to kernel contributors and no special status as a leader that newcomers might look to?
If you're a n00b who posts something stupid on LKML, you are not going to get massive old-school-Usenet-style flames.
I wonder how many n00bs never get that far, because they see how the leader of the community treats others and decide to go do something else instead. Maybe Linus does personally know the recipients of his infamous rants, but on a high-profile public forum not everyone watching might realise that.
If you walked into an office for a job interview, and the first thing you saw was some management type openly berating a subordinate, what tone would that set before you even started the discussion you were there for? Some conversations are best held privately, as much for the benefit of the community as for the participants themselves.
I have often seen this same "enforced politeness" tried on other mailing lists, and the result is always the same. The "wizards" soon migrate somewhere else
Then wish them well and send them on their way.
I find your implied association between smart people who get useful things done and rude people who can't act like adults unlikely. I know plenty of smart people, and the overwhelming majority of them would prefer to work with others in civilised fashion. Sure, when people are passionate about something then occasionally someone might cross the line, but then they apologise and everyone carries on.
I know plenty of blustery people as well, and a lot of them bluster to cover the fact that they aren't nearly as smart or valuable as they would like everyone else to believe. As with any bad apple, the best management decision for the project as a whole is usually to fire such people at the earliest opportunity rather than let them contaminate things any further or dig in any deeper.
Sometimes doing that will hurt in the short term, but no-one is irreplaceable. Once the bad ones are out of the way you can get on with bringing in other smart people to replace them. That can now include all the smart people you couldn't bring in before because they had no interest in working in a hostile environment and, being smart, they had plenty of other choices.