High level != "automated memory management"
on
State of the Onion 11
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Can we please stop bashing C++ memory management? I write C++ for a living, yet very rarely use what the critics typically call "manual memory management". Either it's really not that hard to do things in better ways, or I guess I must be a superhuman programmer, because according to all the checking software, I haven't introduced a memory leak since... no, actually, I've never introduced one in as long as I've worked here. If you want to talk about the advantages of garbage collection, knock yourselves out, but please stop treating C++ and C as if they're the same in terms of memory management. They are different worlds.
In any case, garbage collection is far from the biggest benefit of using a scripting language (or whatever we want to call them) over something lower level. As others are pointing out, the more important properties exhibited by most of the modern scripting languages that make them "high level" include first class data structures, first class functions, and dynamic typing.
Exactly. The fundamental difference between non-compete clauses in employment contracts and DRM is that in most jurisdictions, one of them usually doesn't hold up in law when it matters, while unfortunately the other one apparently does.
No, I'm not kidding you. As a result of my current job, I'm one of a handful of people on the entire planet who does know reliably what the figures are for just about everyone in the CAD industry, and I respectfully suggest that you are mistaken in much of what you wrote there.
If you really know the industry, you'll be able to pin down my employer to one of a very small number of companies from that statement, and I'm sure you'll understand why I can't say more on a public forum.
I think the responsibility is shared, though there is a question of how it should be split. Both the uploader and everyone in their illegal supply chain contribute to the law being broken.
Regarding your three results, the second only seems unfair because you're thinking in terms where the damaged party can successfully sue everyone involved for full damages. In practice, it is unlikely that they will even be able to sue a single link in any given chain, so IMHO the argument about them getting damages twice (or more, in general) isn't a very convincing one.
There is an obvious parallel here with going after drug dealers. Do the authorities go after every small-time dealer on a street corner, or do they focus on going after the high volume original sources who supply a whole city/state/country? Of course drugs don't multiply up in the same way as information, but in terms of an effective strategy for fighting illegal drug distribution, only prosecuting a big dealer for a minor possession offence because he didn't personally sell 99.99% of his goods to consumers is a bit naive, don't you think?
(I offer no opinion here on the ethics of the "war on drugs", but then I offer no opinion on the ethics of copyright either. In both cases, I'm just talking about effective ways to enforce the law as it stands today.)
It seems to me that, given the fact that statutory damages in copyright infringement claims, are allowed in place of actual damages in instances in which actual damages cannot actually be calculated--the statutory damages are an attempt by Congress to estimate the likely actual damages caused to the plaintiff. In this case, that amount seems to be on the side of outragiously overestimating actual damages.
That depends on whether you divide the total actual damage suffered by the plaintiff by the total number of people breaking the law, or by the number the plaintiff can realistically bring to court.
In one case, you limit the damages paid by any one defendant to what they personally caused. Since obviously the damaged party will never be able to bring every single defendant to court to recover their losses, this leaves the damaged party out of pocket.
In the other case, the damaged party recovers roughly their full actual losses, but the individuals caught pay disproportionately much to compensate for their peers who get away with it, so the ones who get caught are overcharged.
Clearly either approach is somewhat unfair to someone, but I have a lot of sympathy with the first point of view, which better protects the injured party. (Presumably so did whoever voted to introduce statutory damages.) You can't reasonably make it as difficult to enforce copyright in practice as many around here like to say it should be, but also say that in the rare event of a successful prosecution only a tiny fraction of the actual damage done will be compensated. That just isn't in the interests of justice; regardless of the ethics of the RIAA and friends in this specific area, the general principle is horrible.
Someone's being prosecuted for stuff that may or may not have happened, and may or may not ever happen, but nonetheless is regarded as damaging in the eyes of the courts. Wow.
Actually, it's more like someone is being prosecuted because something illegal happened many times, and on balance it is likely that the person's deliberate actions contributed to some of those times.
You can make a reasonable argument that the penalty here is excessive, on the basis that the number of illegal copies made is in question, so the statutory damages awarded may be so far out of proportion to any actual damage caused that the constitutional provisions become relevant.
However, you cannot credibly argue that if someone is known to have made many songs available on a popular P2P network, it is likely on balance that those songs were never downloaded at all.
Now, I see absolutely no reason why someone should be held liable for the infringement caused by others.
I disagree. The real damage potential from casual (that is, non-commercial) copyright infringement comes from the snowball effect, not the first isolated copy, and anyone putting up a track on P2P knows they are inviting that effect to start. The rest can't happen without that first person breaking the rules, so I think the first person is at least partially responsible for what follows as a consequence of their illegal act.
Otherwise we should be suing the record shops for ingringement because there's no way of knowing how many buyers will copy the CDs.
The (rather fundamental) difference is that the record shop isn't committing an illegal act by selling a legitimate copy of the CD.
I find that rather hard to believe. The industry move has started, but a heavy majority of CAD is still running on Windows, and only a relatively small number of the big name packages have actually released Linux versions so far.
As with much to do with Linux, in a few years' time the picture might be very different, but right now, Windows has a clear advantage in the number of big name apps available. As far as I'm aware, there's no-one among the big names in the CAD industry who's actually releasing more functionality or sooner on Linux.
I actually work in mathematical software development, and yes, in our world there certainly are some excellent bits of software available from non-commercial sources. Actually, most of the ones I can think of now are libraries rather than end user software, but in this case, fair enough, your example is certainly a valid one.
I guess we have different perspectives. I would argue precisely that it is precisely the commercial heavy-hitters like Microsoft's Office and Exchange Server, Adobe's creative apps, recent PC games like Supreme Commander, various heavyweight business management applications, and specialist software like CAD that set the Windows world apart from the Linux world.
Sure, Linux has apps like OpenOffice, Scribus and the GIMP, but for serious professional use, they really are only toys by comparison. If you just need to write a letter or remove a touch of red-eye, sure, they're fine for that. However, they lack the power, flexibility, and (perhaps most importantly) the supporting culture of their commercial brethren. I won't go into specifics here, but I have written several detailed Slashdot posts in the past supporting this position, which you can readily find with a search engine if you're interested.
Some of the other applications you mentioned, such as Thunderbird and Firefox, are available on both platforms, but even then, they are also bordering on the toy category. Thunderbird is crippled for many businesses by its refusal to play nicely with Exchange. Firefox is crippled for many businesses by its stubborn insistence that everything work according to standards and the developers' view of safety, with no pragmatic concessions to the way browsers are actually used on corporate intranets. I've used both apps at home for some time, but even then I'm looking to switch because of horrendous bugs I've encountered and daft missing features.
As you say, in the server space Linux is a serious challenger for Windows, thanks to the likes of Apache and the big name DB servers. But really, this is the only area where I would put the Linux world on a par or ahead of the Windows world.
That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS.
Name a few of them, please.
I get very bored of reading comments like the above, yet never seeing specific examples. I defy anyone to name even one dozen native Linux apps that really are as good at what they do as serious commercial apps that cost $1000s. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps three or four that are at least comparable, but they're all toys for geeks rather than toys for your average end user who might be looking for an alternative to Vista.
As much as I dislike certain aspects of Windows, and while acknowledging that I'll not put Vista anywhere near any PC I build, you are still wrong about much of that rant.
For one thing, some of us don't want 2,000 applications installed as part of a distro, when approximately 1,974 of them are crap we'll never use and most of the remainder are clearly inferior to the popular commercial alternatives on Windows or OS/X. I'd rather choose a small number of high quality applications for myself, and if that means either coughing up real money for them or spending a little time to download them, so be it: I'd rather pay the asking price and have better quality.
For another thing, ClearType is available to do subpixel AA in font rendering on any Windows XP system, and has been since pretty much forever, with no download required. Perhaps you're confusing that with the ClearType Tuner application that lets you fine tune some of the settings? In any case, anyone who criticises either Windows or OS/X for anything to do with typography while themselves using Linux and related apps can surely look forward to a rewarding career as a comedian.
As for your final point, yes, it's a shame there isn't a centralised auto-updater that everyone can use in Windows. In fact, the mess that is installing software for many Windows applications (and OS/X ones too, in some cases) is one of the worst aspects of the OS for everyday users. But your comments about getting notifications in Ubuntu are a bit misleading, too: those are available because of the distribution you're using, and I'll wager they only cover tools that are part of that distribution. Anyone who's writing something independent can't benefit from the same framework, can they?
Also, while they are reportedly killing the "kill switch" that WGA uses (in some unspecified way), they aren't killing the basic product activation mess or phone-home behaviour.
In other words, they aren't actually stopping Vista being a user-hostile operating system in this respect, but they're toning down the draconian anti-piracy features enough that people prepared to put up with the nagware could use it (presumably until they bother to get a cracked, nag-free version instead).
Am I the only person who can't see how this is really good for anyone?
So, the idea that "foreigners" deserve second-class treatment is a FANTASY cooked up by a president who never studied in college.
That may be true, but unfortunately, the people of the United States seem to have elected that man to be their President (twice, no less). I don't challenge the quotations you cited, but the practical reality is that the US Constitution is only being used to protect US Citizens. This has been demonstrated repeatedly, from the illegal wiretapping fiascos to Gitmo.
There's a whole interesting discussion on ethics, rights, freedoms and responsibility that we could spin off to here, but I suspect it would be drifting too far off-topic.
Instead, as food for thought, I simply offer you these two questions:
What is the ethical thing to do when two people's rights come into conflict?
Did any of the examples you give not ultimately arise because of a conflict between some important freedom of the "bad guys" and some important freedom of the "good guys"?
Ouch, whacked with a Troll mod for giving an honest reply to presumably an honest question. Well, sorry Mr Moderator, but it's still true.
Actually, I used to submit quite a few stories to Slashdot when I came across them in other media, but it seemed like most of the time I just got rejected and then someone else's version of the same story got posted a day or two later. I've pretty much stopped submitting new stories from any mainstream sources now, since it seems a lot of people do, but I occasionally still submit interesting ideas I find elsewhere. I don't just copy half the original article text verbatim, though.
In any case, it doesn't take a genius to observe that most stories that get linked from places like Slashdot and Digg come from relatively few sources. Since I follow many of those sources directly anyway, is it really so hard to believe I might see a lot of the original articles before they hit the front page of Slashdot?
Do you have a source for that, please? I was thinking of travelling by one of those means in a few weeks, but the only way they will collect biometric information from me is by studying my dead body.
<sigh> One would hope the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd might finally get it after HMRC leaked confidential information about roughly half the people in the UK the other week, and we might start to see this sort of idiocy getting curtailed. I guess not.:-(
I can't speak for anyone else, but I come to Slashdot for the discussions. I've usually heard any big news long before it hits the front page here, because I also read original sources.
It might be the case now, but let's see how things stand in 20-30 years.
Oh, I think if you ask around, you'll find a great many non-US citizens don't take the view you described even now. I, for one, have actively refused to travel to the United States simply because I object to the government's treatment of foreigners as second-class humans, not deserving of the same basic rights and respect as a US citizen, starting with the whole fingerprinting and photography thing the moment you arrive. Welcome to the United States, suspect #1,075,375!
It's interesting how often on Slashdot we get some discussion going on about infringement of privacy or the like, and a load of US citizens pipe up with how it's an infringement of their Constitutional rights. Screwing over the foreigners is apparently OK, because they don't have any rights under the US Constitution. The rest of the civilised world calls them human rights, and extends them to everyone; draw your own conclusions about how US policy looks to the rest of the civilised world.
I wouldn't know. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who actually uses these services. Pretty much everyone I see using the web just goes straight to their favourite source(s).
Well, for what it's worth, I admire your dedication and willingness to give it a shot. I can't help but suspect it will only be a drop in the ocean, but best of luck to you. If you make it and in five years we're all having a very different discussion, I will be more than happy to concede that I was wrong today.
You're imposing blanket assumptions on a specialist niche, which is never a smart thing to do. TFA is talking about news sources, and so is everyone else in this discussion. What anyone else on the web does is pretty much irrelevant here.
And in any case, you're wrong about the value. In the US, which has one of the most liberal fair use regimes in any jurisdiction today, whether the copy being made affects the value for the original is a major question when deciding whether the copy constitutes fair use. In most other places, the restrictions are far tighter anyway, which I suspect explains the settlements referred to in the article.
If the news and book sites wanted to keep the search engines out, they would just set up their robots.txt files to block all access. Then they would never show up on Google. The don't want to do that because they know it would be death to them.
I'm not at all convinced that's really true. To borrow a related copyright-area theme, it's like the RIAA saying that they have to use DRM, because otherwise no-one will buy legal copies of their stuff. It's just an assumption, which they aren't yet willing to risk violating in case it goes wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean that if they had no choice but to work on a different basis, they'd lose out.
But you contradict yourself as well. You say that if the search engines disappeared, the internet would just create more, but then you say that if the big news services stopped providing news, the search engines would die. No they wouldn't. The internet would create more, filling the need.
Actually, I said the community would create alternatives. I have been rather sceptical about the real benefits brought by the search engines for a long time, principally because of their tendency to leech off the most valuable content from others, without ever giving any back themselves. I'm also not convinced they're particularly useful anyway these days; they are so frequently gamed by sites taking advantage of SEO that I find fewer and fewer useful sites on there and turn more and more to following links from other sites, recommendations from friends, and so on.
For an idea of how far this can scale, consider the nature of linking in the world of blogs: popular articles get widely cited very fast, and the quality of links is generally equal or better than the source site since the links are all hand-picked. A good blog can develop a huge readership in a matter of months, and the whole system is one big meritocracy right down to the level of individual articles.
The question I have is how much are they willing to pay the search engines for this functionality?
I think you have it backwards. The real question is how much the search engines are willing to pay the news sources they rely on for continued permission to reproduce their work in any form at all.
And for those about to comment about how for some magical reason copyright doesn't apply here, please note the details in TFA about the settlements between Google and a couple of major sources that have already taken place. Someone who's checked with the lawyers doesn't think it's as cut and dried as that.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we please stop bashing C++ memory management? I write C++ for a living, yet very rarely use what the critics typically call "manual memory management". Either it's really not that hard to do things in better ways, or I guess I must be a superhuman programmer, because according to all the checking software, I haven't introduced a memory leak since... no, actually, I've never introduced one in as long as I've worked here. If you want to talk about the advantages of garbage collection, knock yourselves out, but please stop treating C++ and C as if they're the same in terms of memory management. They are different worlds.
In any case, garbage collection is far from the biggest benefit of using a scripting language (or whatever we want to call them) over something lower level. As others are pointing out, the more important properties exhibited by most of the modern scripting languages that make them "high level" include first class data structures, first class functions, and dynamic typing.
Exactly. The fundamental difference between non-compete clauses in employment contracts and DRM is that in most jurisdictions, one of them usually doesn't hold up in law when it matters, while unfortunately the other one apparently does.
No, I'm not kidding you. As a result of my current job, I'm one of a handful of people on the entire planet who does know reliably what the figures are for just about everyone in the CAD industry, and I respectfully suggest that you are mistaken in much of what you wrote there.
If you really know the industry, you'll be able to pin down my employer to one of a very small number of companies from that statement, and I'm sure you'll understand why I can't say more on a public forum.
I think the responsibility is shared, though there is a question of how it should be split. Both the uploader and everyone in their illegal supply chain contribute to the law being broken.
Regarding your three results, the second only seems unfair because you're thinking in terms where the damaged party can successfully sue everyone involved for full damages. In practice, it is unlikely that they will even be able to sue a single link in any given chain, so IMHO the argument about them getting damages twice (or more, in general) isn't a very convincing one.
There is an obvious parallel here with going after drug dealers. Do the authorities go after every small-time dealer on a street corner, or do they focus on going after the high volume original sources who supply a whole city/state/country? Of course drugs don't multiply up in the same way as information, but in terms of an effective strategy for fighting illegal drug distribution, only prosecuting a big dealer for a minor possession offence because he didn't personally sell 99.99% of his goods to consumers is a bit naive, don't you think?
(I offer no opinion here on the ethics of the "war on drugs", but then I offer no opinion on the ethics of copyright either. In both cases, I'm just talking about effective ways to enforce the law as it stands today.)
It seems to me that, given the fact that statutory damages in copyright infringement claims, are allowed in place of actual damages in instances in which actual damages cannot actually be calculated--the statutory damages are an attempt by Congress to estimate the likely actual damages caused to the plaintiff. In this case, that amount seems to be on the side of outragiously overestimating actual damages.
That depends on whether you divide the total actual damage suffered by the plaintiff by the total number of people breaking the law, or by the number the plaintiff can realistically bring to court.
In one case, you limit the damages paid by any one defendant to what they personally caused. Since obviously the damaged party will never be able to bring every single defendant to court to recover their losses, this leaves the damaged party out of pocket.
In the other case, the damaged party recovers roughly their full actual losses, but the individuals caught pay disproportionately much to compensate for their peers who get away with it, so the ones who get caught are overcharged.
Clearly either approach is somewhat unfair to someone, but I have a lot of sympathy with the first point of view, which better protects the injured party. (Presumably so did whoever voted to introduce statutory damages.) You can't reasonably make it as difficult to enforce copyright in practice as many around here like to say it should be, but also say that in the rare event of a successful prosecution only a tiny fraction of the actual damage done will be compensated. That just isn't in the interests of justice; regardless of the ethics of the RIAA and friends in this specific area, the general principle is horrible.
Someone's being prosecuted for stuff that may or may not have happened, and may or may not ever happen, but nonetheless is regarded as damaging in the eyes of the courts. Wow.
Actually, it's more like someone is being prosecuted because something illegal happened many times, and on balance it is likely that the person's deliberate actions contributed to some of those times.
You can make a reasonable argument that the penalty here is excessive, on the basis that the number of illegal copies made is in question, so the statutory damages awarded may be so far out of proportion to any actual damage caused that the constitutional provisions become relevant.
However, you cannot credibly argue that if someone is known to have made many songs available on a popular P2P network, it is likely on balance that those songs were never downloaded at all.
Now, I see absolutely no reason why someone should be held liable for the infringement caused by others.
I disagree. The real damage potential from casual (that is, non-commercial) copyright infringement comes from the snowball effect, not the first isolated copy, and anyone putting up a track on P2P knows they are inviting that effect to start. The rest can't happen without that first person breaking the rules, so I think the first person is at least partially responsible for what follows as a consequence of their illegal act.
Otherwise we should be suing the record shops for ingringement because there's no way of knowing how many buyers will copy the CDs.
The (rather fundamental) difference is that the record shop isn't committing an illegal act by selling a legitimate copy of the CD.
I find that rather hard to believe. The industry move has started, but a heavy majority of CAD is still running on Windows, and only a relatively small number of the big name packages have actually released Linux versions so far.
As with much to do with Linux, in a few years' time the picture might be very different, but right now, Windows has a clear advantage in the number of big name apps available. As far as I'm aware, there's no-one among the big names in the CAD industry who's actually releasing more functionality or sooner on Linux.
I actually work in mathematical software development, and yes, in our world there certainly are some excellent bits of software available from non-commercial sources. Actually, most of the ones I can think of now are libraries rather than end user software, but in this case, fair enough, your example is certainly a valid one.
I guess we have different perspectives. I would argue precisely that it is precisely the commercial heavy-hitters like Microsoft's Office and Exchange Server, Adobe's creative apps, recent PC games like Supreme Commander, various heavyweight business management applications, and specialist software like CAD that set the Windows world apart from the Linux world.
Sure, Linux has apps like OpenOffice, Scribus and the GIMP, but for serious professional use, they really are only toys by comparison. If you just need to write a letter or remove a touch of red-eye, sure, they're fine for that. However, they lack the power, flexibility, and (perhaps most importantly) the supporting culture of their commercial brethren. I won't go into specifics here, but I have written several detailed Slashdot posts in the past supporting this position, which you can readily find with a search engine if you're interested.
Some of the other applications you mentioned, such as Thunderbird and Firefox, are available on both platforms, but even then, they are also bordering on the toy category. Thunderbird is crippled for many businesses by its refusal to play nicely with Exchange. Firefox is crippled for many businesses by its stubborn insistence that everything work according to standards and the developers' view of safety, with no pragmatic concessions to the way browsers are actually used on corporate intranets. I've used both apps at home for some time, but even then I'm looking to switch because of horrendous bugs I've encountered and daft missing features.
As you say, in the server space Linux is a serious challenger for Windows, thanks to the likes of Apache and the big name DB servers. But really, this is the only area where I would put the Linux world on a par or ahead of the Windows world.
That doesn't discount the fact that there are dozens of high quality, professional, industry grade apps available, which would cost 1000s of $ in addition to the OS.
Name a few of them, please.
I get very bored of reading comments like the above, yet never seeing specific examples. I defy anyone to name even one dozen native Linux apps that really are as good at what they do as serious commercial apps that cost $1000s. Off the top of my head, I can think of perhaps three or four that are at least comparable, but they're all toys for geeks rather than toys for your average end user who might be looking for an alternative to Vista.
As much as I dislike certain aspects of Windows, and while acknowledging that I'll not put Vista anywhere near any PC I build, you are still wrong about much of that rant.
For one thing, some of us don't want 2,000 applications installed as part of a distro, when approximately 1,974 of them are crap we'll never use and most of the remainder are clearly inferior to the popular commercial alternatives on Windows or OS/X. I'd rather choose a small number of high quality applications for myself, and if that means either coughing up real money for them or spending a little time to download them, so be it: I'd rather pay the asking price and have better quality.
For another thing, ClearType is available to do subpixel AA in font rendering on any Windows XP system, and has been since pretty much forever, with no download required. Perhaps you're confusing that with the ClearType Tuner application that lets you fine tune some of the settings? In any case, anyone who criticises either Windows or OS/X for anything to do with typography while themselves using Linux and related apps can surely look forward to a rewarding career as a comedian.
As for your final point, yes, it's a shame there isn't a centralised auto-updater that everyone can use in Windows. In fact, the mess that is installing software for many Windows applications (and OS/X ones too, in some cases) is one of the worst aspects of the OS for everyday users. But your comments about getting notifications in Ubuntu are a bit misleading, too: those are available because of the distribution you're using, and I'll wager they only cover tools that are part of that distribution. Anyone who's writing something independent can't benefit from the same framework, can they?
Also, while they are reportedly killing the "kill switch" that WGA uses (in some unspecified way), they aren't killing the basic product activation mess or phone-home behaviour.
In other words, they aren't actually stopping Vista being a user-hostile operating system in this respect, but they're toning down the draconian anti-piracy features enough that people prepared to put up with the nagware could use it (presumably until they bother to get a cracked, nag-free version instead).
Am I the only person who can't see how this is really good for anyone?
Quoth the AC:
So, the idea that "foreigners" deserve second-class treatment is a FANTASY cooked up by a president who never studied in college.
That may be true, but unfortunately, the people of the United States seem to have elected that man to be their President (twice, no less). I don't challenge the quotations you cited, but the practical reality is that the US Constitution is only being used to protect US Citizens. This has been demonstrated repeatedly, from the illegal wiretapping fiascos to Gitmo.
There's a whole interesting discussion on ethics, rights, freedoms and responsibility that we could spin off to here, but I suspect it would be drifting too far off-topic.
Instead, as food for thought, I simply offer you these two questions:
Ouch, whacked with a Troll mod for giving an honest reply to presumably an honest question. Well, sorry Mr Moderator, but it's still true.
Actually, I used to submit quite a few stories to Slashdot when I came across them in other media, but it seemed like most of the time I just got rejected and then someone else's version of the same story got posted a day or two later. I've pretty much stopped submitting new stories from any mainstream sources now, since it seems a lot of people do, but I occasionally still submit interesting ideas I find elsewhere. I don't just copy half the original article text verbatim, though.
In any case, it doesn't take a genius to observe that most stories that get linked from places like Slashdot and Digg come from relatively few sources. Since I follow many of those sources directly anyway, is it really so hard to believe I might see a lot of the original articles before they hit the front page of Slashdot?
Thanks. Let's hope it never gets as far as biometrics. A story about a girl named Pandora is coming to mind...
Do you have a source for that, please? I was thinking of travelling by one of those means in a few weeks, but the only way they will collect biometric information from me is by studying my dead body.
<sigh> One would hope the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd might finally get it after HMRC leaked confidential information about roughly half the people in the UK the other week, and we might start to see this sort of idiocy getting curtailed. I guess not. :-(
I can't speak for anyone else, but I come to Slashdot for the discussions. I've usually heard any big news long before it hits the front page here, because I also read original sources.
It might be the case now, but let's see how things stand in 20-30 years.
Oh, I think if you ask around, you'll find a great many non-US citizens don't take the view you described even now. I, for one, have actively refused to travel to the United States simply because I object to the government's treatment of foreigners as second-class humans, not deserving of the same basic rights and respect as a US citizen, starting with the whole fingerprinting and photography thing the moment you arrive. Welcome to the United States, suspect #1,075,375!
It's interesting how often on Slashdot we get some discussion going on about infringement of privacy or the like, and a load of US citizens pipe up with how it's an infringement of their Constitutional rights. Screwing over the foreigners is apparently OK, because they don't have any rights under the US Constitution. The rest of the civilised world calls them human rights, and extends them to everyone; draw your own conclusions about how US policy looks to the rest of the civilised world.
I wouldn't know. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who actually uses these services. Pretty much everyone I see using the web just goes straight to their favourite source(s).
Well, for what it's worth, I admire your dedication and willingness to give it a shot. I can't help but suspect it will only be a drop in the ocean, but best of luck to you. If you make it and in five years we're all having a very different discussion, I will be more than happy to concede that I was wrong today.
You're imposing blanket assumptions on a specialist niche, which is never a smart thing to do. TFA is talking about news sources, and so is everyone else in this discussion. What anyone else on the web does is pretty much irrelevant here.
And in any case, you're wrong about the value. In the US, which has one of the most liberal fair use regimes in any jurisdiction today, whether the copy being made affects the value for the original is a major question when deciding whether the copy constitutes fair use. In most other places, the restrictions are far tighter anyway, which I suspect explains the settlements referred to in the article.
If the news and book sites wanted to keep the search engines out, they would just set up their robots.txt files to block all access. Then they would never show up on Google. The don't want to do that because they know it would be death to them.
I'm not at all convinced that's really true. To borrow a related copyright-area theme, it's like the RIAA saying that they have to use DRM, because otherwise no-one will buy legal copies of their stuff. It's just an assumption, which they aren't yet willing to risk violating in case it goes wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean that if they had no choice but to work on a different basis, they'd lose out.
But you contradict yourself as well. You say that if the search engines disappeared, the internet would just create more, but then you say that if the big news services stopped providing news, the search engines would die. No they wouldn't. The internet would create more, filling the need.
Actually, I said the community would create alternatives. I have been rather sceptical about the real benefits brought by the search engines for a long time, principally because of their tendency to leech off the most valuable content from others, without ever giving any back themselves. I'm also not convinced they're particularly useful anyway these days; they are so frequently gamed by sites taking advantage of SEO that I find fewer and fewer useful sites on there and turn more and more to following links from other sites, recommendations from friends, and so on.
For an idea of how far this can scale, consider the nature of linking in the world of blogs: popular articles get widely cited very fast, and the quality of links is generally equal or better than the source site since the links are all hand-picked. A good blog can develop a huge readership in a matter of months, and the whole system is one big meritocracy right down to the level of individual articles.
The question I have is how much are they willing to pay the search engines for this functionality?
I think you have it backwards. The real question is how much the search engines are willing to pay the news sources they rely on for continued permission to reproduce their work in any form at all.
And for those about to comment about how for some magical reason copyright doesn't apply here, please note the details in TFA about the settlements between Google and a couple of major sources that have already taken place. Someone who's checked with the lawyers doesn't think it's as cut and dried as that.