Then I'm afraid you didn't study advanced maths very well. Analysis is an important part of the field, to be sure, but it's no more fundamental than algebra, geometry, logic, and numerous other areas. The American Mathematical Society has a comprehensive classification of these subfields, and it's vast.
They just got jealous of the Engineers, you see: Software Engineering, Traffic Engineering, Social Engineering...:-)
But yes, I studied CS in academia, and I still couldn't write down a robust definition of the field, nor explain why it's a science and not a branch of mathematics. In fact, the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University here in the UK even started life as the Mathematical Laboratory.
I hate to break this to you, but no. Drawing in 3D is often heavily supported by hardware and coded using libraries like OpenGL or Direct3D. But how do you think these libraries know where to put things? Someone's doing all the modelling to decide what to draw, and the requirements for this can be quite specialised if you're working in a field like CAD, or games development, or special effects. And who did you think newer versions of the libraries themselves grow on trees?
Face it, most of us write code that has absolutely no math in it (I don't count algebra - it's just the way you write code). We make user interfaces, write database queries, and, I am sorry to say, rewrite parts of application frameworks we don't like (and there are a lot of such parts). Instead of math and algorithmic theory, these tasks would benefit from knowing how to structure your code properly, how to ensure portability and ease of localization, and, most importantly, how to correctly think about object oriented design.
OK, but we're not talking about Software Engineering, we're talking about Computer Science. We're not talking about join-the-dots programming, we're talking about how you design the dots and the ways to join them. And you'd better hope the people who are doing that have sound theoretical bases for the models they adopt. Otherwise your database is going to be slow, your garbage collector will leak, your network stack is going to be insecure, and your operating system is going to deadlock.
I can certainly agree that no approach to copyright is fully universal, but the international agreements do set down certain minimum standards. US-style fair use is about the most general provision that is allowed under these, for example. I haven't checked, but if memory serves there are minimum durations for various types of copyright, too.
As for torrents, yes, I'm aware that they do not themselves contain the data. I think the issue here is whether TPB is effectively a knowing accomplice for many people who are breaking the law.
By what metrics are things worse ? (I don't follow UK politics and economics closely, so you may well be right, but people are whinging similarly here in Australia, despite pretty much everyone being far better off in pretty much every way than they ever have been before).
OK, just to be clear and reiterate the context, my original post was commenting on the bad policies increasingly pushed by the New Labour administration under Blair as they drifted ever more towards socialism, and how these effectively did remove freedoms from people to make their own choices. Our discussions seem to have drifted a bit from this.
The most serious, and objectively demonstrable, problem is that the tax burden has gone up significantly under New Labour. They are infamous for so-called stealth taxes, of which more than 100 have been introduced in the past decade. This is the root of my objection to many of their policies, because by forcibly taking money and therefore financial freedom from the people, the government ties those in the working classes into using state-run services, even if they would be able to get better service for the same money in the private sector.
When you then look at what's really happening in the NHS, education system, public transport network, and so on, you see a picture of lots more money going in, yet strangely little of it ever reaching the front lines where it would make a difference. Education standards are slipping, and anyone in universities or industry can tell you this even though miraculously the proportion of candidates achieving top grades in school level exams goes up every year. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves, put off by the excessive bureaucracy, lack of classroom discipline and low wages that all directly result from government policy. Comparable stories of incompetence and professionals turning away from the NHS abound, with millions of people not even able to register with an NHS dentist because there aren't enough of them around, for example.
For comparison, teachers at private schools and private medical practices are doing very well, and generally provide a high quality service to those who can afford to use it. Consultants and government-funded contractors are also doing very well.
In most "socialist" countries, people *are* expected to play their part, eventually. Welfare is considered by most to be a temporary assistance. Universal health care is there so people who can't afford expensive bills can still be treated and go on to contribute to society. [...] I don't understand why you're using this line of argument. Actual implementations of "socialism" only loosely follow the doctrines you are criticising, so while your criticisms are somewhat valid from an academic perspective, they're not really applicable in real life.
This is where we really disagree. Right now, in the UK, there are literally millions of people who are doing absolutely no work, and living off state benefits — paid for by other people's taxes. Millions of them.
Now, sure, a few of those people are genuinely unlucky. Perhaps they can't work because of disability, or they are doing worthy things that don't pay, like looking after relatives who can't take care of themselves. I have no problem with providing a safety net for these people, and this is one of the good things about socialist policies. I don't think I've ever claimed that such policies were always bad in principle, or never brought benefits for anyone.
But millions of benefit claimants have no such redeeming feature. In fact, our economy has been set up for much of the past decade so that it was more financially sensible for someone to take no work at all and claim benefits accordingly than to get back into paying work at a relatively low wage and give up the benefits. Gordy "fixed" this to some extent by inventing a whole system of so-called tax credits, whereby people going back into
Seriously, if you're 7 (or more) levels deep in your indentation, then you probably need to refactor your code.
While there is a valid point in there, and I do note that you said "probably", I really dislike this argument. I'm biased, because I deal with heavily nested code a lot of the time at work. It's heavily nested because that's in the nature of the algorithms we use. And before anyone says it, no, arbitrarily extracting the innermost loops into separate functions would not be an improvement: the logic makes no sense out of context, it would mess up all the tidy scoping of local variables, and it would force the reader to jump around reading disconnected functions when the logic only makes sense as a coherent whole. I'll grant that this is not typical for most code I've ever worked with, but in some contexts, it really is the most natural way to do things.
Smart-assedness aside, your point is dead on. Self-commenting code is here to stay, and with it comes 120+ column widths.
Sure, but self-documenting does not imply verbose. In fact, super-verbose languages like Java pretty much suck for writing readable code. Today, I reckon the sweet spot is probably somewhere around the more popular scripting and functional programming languages, where there's a certain amount of syntactic sugar and clever tricks with the language grammar, and therefore identifiers tend to be kept for identifying meaningful things.
Well, we'd like to reply to that, but unfortunately you didn't put the right characters in the first few columns so we couldn't understand the rest of your post at all. Sorry.
It's easiest to read stuff at about 10-12pt, normal reading distance, 60-70 characters.
I wish we could get away from this arbitrary counting of characters, or lines x inches wide, or n alphabets stuff.
There are perfectly good, and pretty well understood now, reasons that humans read prose text (NB: not the same as code) better when it is typeset in certain ways. For one thing, the human eye can naturally rotate through a certain, surprisingly small, range horizontally. It will go further, but will tire rapidly beyond this fairly narrow angular range.
Also, you don't read a line of English text linearly from left to right, you read it by scanning ahead in short jumps and occasionally backtracking a bit. It is easier for the eye to do this without losing track if text is set with suitable leading for the font size and line length.
So, a bit of basic trig involving the horizontal range and a typical reading distance will tell you a reasonable maximum width to use in a given media. Since typical comfortable reading distance varies by media, so will this reading width.
This does not relate to a fixed width in terms of characters, not least because we haven't even considered font size yet. That could be a major factor if you tend to use very large fonts, as with children or those with impaired vision, or very small ones, as used by many programmers. It's usually easiest to work out that reading width and a comfortable font size, and then set the line spacing to match.
But again, this is how people read prose text. How a trained developer reads code in a programming language is a different question, and there's much less research about that.
It's true that there are IP treaties in place. I think the point with "software patents" is that most jurisdictions don't recognise them as patents in the normal sense of the word: things like algorithms and business processes are not considered inventions and therefore not within the scope of patent protection.
There is also provision for some differences in scope under the treaties. For example, the appearance of a font may explicitly not be subject to copyright in the United States, though if it's an electronic font then the code that generates it can be, and the recognised name of a font may be a protected mark. This is why there have been numerous cloned fonts with generic names like Swiss 12345 in the US. In many other places, the appearance itself can be protected as well.
I don't see that this is particularly relevant here, though, since pretty much everyone agrees that copyright applies to things like music recordings and movies anyway.
We've had 132-column terminals for a long time, but what I generally tend to jones for is taller, not wider. With a taller screen, you see more code. Then there's the whole issue of saccades, which is why for example newspapers do not run sentences horizontally across the entire page, but rather split the page up into columns. Your eye gets confused when the line gets too long - it's easier to read when there are fewer words on the screen.
That's true, but there is a fundamental difference that most people are ignoring in this discussion so far, between the width of an entire file/screenful of code and the maximum length of any given line.
For example, code in most languages uses indentation to denote some form of block structure. I suggest that a useful metric is the maximum width of one line of code plus a level or two of indentation, because this is what a developer working with the code typically needs to read at once. It doesn't really matter if a block of code being read is all indented by 20 characters at the start of the line, because the eye isn't going back to the start of that space every time it moves to the next line of code.
However, it's often awkward to scroll horizontally in an editor, and alignment/indentation does matter when you're scanning larger blocks of code so you probably wouldn't want to scroll even if it were easy. So, if you want the actual code on any given line no longer than 80 characters, and you allow for, say, half a dozen levels of indentation at four characters each, then that gives you 104 characters altogether. Adjust maximum code length per line, tab size, and maximum typical indentation to match your programming language and house style, and that's a good editor width.
A direct corollary to this is that there is no sensible standard width for code editing, because the needs of different programming languages and the layout preferences of different development teams vary widely. Don't even ask what the best width is if you're programming in Whitespace.:-)
I agree it's hard to be black and white about this, since the BitTorrent technology itself is as neutral as something like the technology to index the web for a search engine. However, it seems to me that there are some fundamental and pretty clear differences between TPB and Google.
For one thing, most users of Google are legal, and most material it indexes is legal content. I've never got into BitTorrent, but I'm guessing from what I've read that most of the content that TPB identifies is illegal and its user base is mainly people wanting to infringe copyright.
For another thing, Google pitches itself as a general search engine. TPB pitches itself squarely as a service for... well, pirates.
Finally, Google appears willing to comply with lawful requests made of it by the authorities. TPB isn't exactly known for supporting its local administration officials in fighting copyright infringement carried out by its users.
I would say the first of those is a grey area, but the other two are reasonable grounds for revoking any common-carrier-type protection for TPB.
The nice thing about discussions about copyright is that there is no absolute right or wrong... it's all opinion. If the people of Sweden don't think that it's a problem to host torrents, then that is their right. They aren't stealing anyone's property.
I'm not going near the copyright is/isn't theft argument here. However, by hosting a site that both facilitates the committing of acts in other places that are against the law in those places and reduces the market for imported goods within Sweden itself, there is no little doubt that Sweden's laws here are damaging to economic parties in the outside world.
Now, that's their prerogative. As others have noted, Swedish law is what matters here. But international treaties exist for a reason, and Sweden is a signatory to the major copyright treaties along with most other nations in the West. If they don't live up to their obligations, they shouldn't be surprised when the rest of the world reacts unfavourably. Given the economic significance of becoming a copyright haven in a first world country, that could be very unfavourably indeed: things like trade sanctions, restrictions on connectivity to the Internet, or everyone else ignoring copyrights claimed in Sweden aren't unrealistic prospects if it goes far enough. Given that it's a safe bet Sweden needs trade with the rest of the world more than the rest of the world needs trade with Sweden, what do you think they're going to do?
It's fascinating how when European administrations punish Microsoft — one of the most powerful US corporations in existence — significantly for their monopoly abuse, there is a string of comments saying it's great that Europe can do what the US DoJ didn't because Microsoft aren't so influential here; yet when one European nation's government acts against a site that is flagrantly helping people to violate all kinds of laws that are recognised almost everywhere in the developed world, there's a whole string of comments claiming it's only doing so because it's forced to by some mighty US Big Media group.
Great. Let's allow governments to censor the internet not based on any illegality, but because "you would like to see those kinds of torrents gone from pirate bay."
The thing is, there is a problem here. A lot of people do hide behind anonymity using systems like BitTorrent and sites like TPB because what they're doing is immoral and/or illegal.
Now, as a matter of principle, I don't support banning a technology or service that may be used for bad purposes but that is also used for legitimate reasons. I believe such a policy to be unfairly restrictive on people who would oppose those bad purposes but who, by the nature of their technology or service, cannot readily control it. Think of communications service providers, or search engines, or for that matter, public transport providers and gas stations.
On the other hand, I have no problem with expecting people who provide such services or technology to take reasonable steps to prevent the abuse of their service or technology. TPB quite blatantly don't do that. The site has been used extensively in support of activities that are illegal, unethical and/or damaging to others, and the operators are well aware of this. So in this case, while I don't in any way condone the abuse of targetted laws for purposes other than their original intent, I'm afraid I'm lacking in sympathy for TPB that somebody screwed them.
That is certainly a problem, though sadly not unpredictable. It seems you can do anything in government these days by claiming to support $HIGH_PROFILE_CAUSE: it used to be fighting child abuse, then it was fighting terrorism, then it was saving the planet. Naturally, most actions taken in the name of these causes do nothing of the sort.
On the other hand, one can't help but notice that if they had copyright laws that effectively prevented the abuse of copyright in the first place, then it wouldn't be necessary to abuse other laws to do it instead.
Sorry, but I'm increasingly of the view that the Lib Dems are an even worse idea than the biggest two parties. They talk a good talk and I actually agree with many of the principles they claim to value. Unfortunately, when you look at what their real, concrete policies are, they're frequently flawed, and the Lib Dem spin machine covers up the downsides for a great many people just as much as the other parties. In particular, their approaches on taxation and the environment/transport are unrealistic: they'll help a few people, screw a few more pretty badly, but ultimately they could never achieve what they say they want to with the policies they've got, and that's not the kind of party I want in government.
Nope, sorry, already got that one. Protest within a mile or Parliament and you're breaking the law. Heckle at a Labour Party conference and you're a terrorist!
Most industrialised nations are quite "socialist", especially if your benchmark is America. Universal healthcare, welfare and minimum wages you can actually live on, strong worker protections, etc. None of these things seem to have caused countries like Australia, the UK, Canada, Switzerland and the like significantly more grief than the more capitalist "every man for himself" direction of the USA. Quite the contrary, if anything. I certainly know there's a long list of countries I'd move (away from Australia) to before the US.
I live in the UK. We have a relatively capitalist economy. Sure, we have some nationalised industries and a legal minimum wage, but in practice a lot of things that ought to be provided by the state according to the rules of the game and the taxes we pay aren't, and businesses are mostly unregulated in practice. This is one reason why a lot of people are upset at Blair's administration: the more we've tended towards outright socialism in recent years, the worse things have got for almost everyone except the millions of benefits scroungers. But even with the recent tax hikes and giving out bazillions in benefits, we're still a long way from the collective ownership ideal of socialism. Try looking the the former USSR or China if you want to see serious socialist tendencies. Remind me again how they've been doing relative to the West?
That's socialism, for any useful definition of the word. Co-operation and individual compromise for the greater benefit of all.
There is no individual compromise in doing your fair part and getting your fair reward. That has nothing to do with socialism.
In your example, socialism would be four members of a tribe getting together to hunt a lion, and then sharing the results with a load of other tribesmen who sat around all day doing nothing in return.
Like, say, the women who sat back in the hut doing nothing because they were pregnant? Or maybe the 3 men who were injured on the last hunt and still recovering? Or maybe the children who were too young to do anything except play? Or the tribe elder who can barely walk?
Not really. The wife is raising the children, and the children are not yet strong enough to work but will be expected to when they have grown enough, so protecting and feeding them is very much in the interests of the hunting males. Families taking care of their own has been a human trait for a very long time.
Looking after the injured or elderly is closer to real socialism, but again, these people would generally be expected to play their part when they could. After all, a tribe with too many mouths to feed and not enough hunters would not eat well and eventually the weak would die.
The real test is how many tribes can you find where someone wasn't pulling their weight for no particular reason, yet was carried along by the others anyway? I think you'll find that in most cases, this has been frowned upon, so while the bounty from the hunt might be shared among the collective, those who did not contribute fairly were still effectively excluded.
Their paranoia on this front is legendary, and for good reason when you hear the GPL crowd react to actual or perceived violations of the GPL.
I wouldn't worry if I were Microsoft. Even if MS flagrantly violated the GPL, based on this discussion it's unlikely anyone who likes the GPL could actually find a court, never mind know how to bring a lawsuit or actually make a coherent case. I don't think I've ever seen so much ill-informed crap written in such an authoritative tone in a legal discussion before.
Note that IANAL and that this is not valid legal advice not an endorsement of any practices explictiely forbidden by EULAs.
No kidding.
There are some fascinating arguments, in various jurisdictions, about whether EULAs have legal weight. But they are often way more complicated than you make out and not nearly as clear-cut, and the case law isn't definitive in many places either yet.
By what measure ? What reasonable quality-of-life measure are you claiming has declined over time (and especially "very recently") ?
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. My point is that most of human evolution has happened without the need for socialism.
Socialism is a very recent invention in the grand scheme of things.
So are long lifespans, widespread good health, free society and large-scale prosperity. Correlation or causation?
Interesting question. Given that most of the industrialised nations run with capitalist tendencies over the past few decades are doing considerably better by just about any metric than most of the industrialised nations run with a heavily socialist philosophy, would you like to continue?
There are uncountable examples of four members of a tribe getting together to *hunt* a lion, so it wouldn't eat the slowest one for dinner.
That's not socialism; it's simply groups of people working together for mutual advantage. In your example, socialism would be four members of a tribe getting together to hunt a lion, and then sharing the results with a load of other tribesmen who sat around all day doing nothing in return. I suspect historical examples of that are not so easy to come by.
i wonder how many of this guys peers, if not himself, were getting stoned in the back of a car listening to "we don't need no education..." and other wonders of pink floyd's "the wall" 25 years ago
I guess they forgot the next line, too. How unfortunate.
Slashdot Mirror
Then I'm afraid you didn't study advanced maths very well. Analysis is an important part of the field, to be sure, but it's no more fundamental than algebra, geometry, logic, and numerous other areas. The American Mathematical Society has a comprehensive classification of these subfields, and it's vast.
They just got jealous of the Engineers, you see: Software Engineering, Traffic Engineering, Social Engineering... :-)
But yes, I studied CS in academia, and I still couldn't write down a robust definition of the field, nor explain why it's a science and not a branch of mathematics. In fact, the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge University here in the UK even started life as the Mathematical Laboratory.
I hate to break this to you, but no. Drawing in 3D is often heavily supported by hardware and coded using libraries like OpenGL or Direct3D. But how do you think these libraries know where to put things? Someone's doing all the modelling to decide what to draw, and the requirements for this can be quite specialised if you're working in a field like CAD, or games development, or special effects. And who did you think newer versions of the libraries themselves grow on trees?
OK, but we're not talking about Software Engineering, we're talking about Computer Science. We're not talking about join-the-dots programming, we're talking about how you design the dots and the ways to join them. And you'd better hope the people who are doing that have sound theoretical bases for the models they adopt. Otherwise your database is going to be slow, your garbage collector will leak, your network stack is going to be insecure, and your operating system is going to deadlock.
I can certainly agree that no approach to copyright is fully universal, but the international agreements do set down certain minimum standards. US-style fair use is about the most general provision that is allowed under these, for example. I haven't checked, but if memory serves there are minimum durations for various types of copyright, too.
As for torrents, yes, I'm aware that they do not themselves contain the data. I think the issue here is whether TPB is effectively a knowing accomplice for many people who are breaking the law.
OK, just to be clear and reiterate the context, my original post was commenting on the bad policies increasingly pushed by the New Labour administration under Blair as they drifted ever more towards socialism, and how these effectively did remove freedoms from people to make their own choices. Our discussions seem to have drifted a bit from this.
The most serious, and objectively demonstrable, problem is that the tax burden has gone up significantly under New Labour. They are infamous for so-called stealth taxes, of which more than 100 have been introduced in the past decade. This is the root of my objection to many of their policies, because by forcibly taking money and therefore financial freedom from the people, the government ties those in the working classes into using state-run services, even if they would be able to get better service for the same money in the private sector.
When you then look at what's really happening in the NHS, education system, public transport network, and so on, you see a picture of lots more money going in, yet strangely little of it ever reaching the front lines where it would make a difference. Education standards are slipping, and anyone in universities or industry can tell you this even though miraculously the proportion of candidates achieving top grades in school level exams goes up every year. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves, put off by the excessive bureaucracy, lack of classroom discipline and low wages that all directly result from government policy. Comparable stories of incompetence and professionals turning away from the NHS abound, with millions of people not even able to register with an NHS dentist because there aren't enough of them around, for example.
For comparison, teachers at private schools and private medical practices are doing very well, and generally provide a high quality service to those who can afford to use it. Consultants and government-funded contractors are also doing very well.
This is where we really disagree. Right now, in the UK, there are literally millions of people who are doing absolutely no work, and living off state benefits — paid for by other people's taxes. Millions of them.
Now, sure, a few of those people are genuinely unlucky. Perhaps they can't work because of disability, or they are doing worthy things that don't pay, like looking after relatives who can't take care of themselves. I have no problem with providing a safety net for these people, and this is one of the good things about socialist policies. I don't think I've ever claimed that such policies were always bad in principle, or never brought benefits for anyone.
But millions of benefit claimants have no such redeeming feature. In fact, our economy has been set up for much of the past decade so that it was more financially sensible for someone to take no work at all and claim benefits accordingly than to get back into paying work at a relatively low wage and give up the benefits. Gordy "fixed" this to some extent by inventing a whole system of so-called tax credits, whereby people going back into
While there is a valid point in there, and I do note that you said "probably", I really dislike this argument. I'm biased, because I deal with heavily nested code a lot of the time at work. It's heavily nested because that's in the nature of the algorithms we use. And before anyone says it, no, arbitrarily extracting the innermost loops into separate functions would not be an improvement: the logic makes no sense out of context, it would mess up all the tidy scoping of local variables, and it would force the reader to jump around reading disconnected functions when the logic only makes sense as a coherent whole. I'll grant that this is not typical for most code I've ever worked with, but in some contexts, it really is the most natural way to do things.
Sure, but self-documenting does not imply verbose. In fact, super-verbose languages like Java pretty much suck for writing readable code. Today, I reckon the sweet spot is probably somewhere around the more popular scripting and functional programming languages, where there's a certain amount of syntactic sugar and clever tricks with the language grammar, and therefore identifiers tend to be kept for identifying meaningful things.
Well, we'd like to reply to that, but unfortunately you didn't put the right characters in the first few columns so we couldn't understand the rest of your post at all. Sorry.
Love 'n' hugs,
The COBOL guys
I wish we could get away from this arbitrary counting of characters, or lines x inches wide, or n alphabets stuff.
There are perfectly good, and pretty well understood now, reasons that humans read prose text (NB: not the same as code) better when it is typeset in certain ways. For one thing, the human eye can naturally rotate through a certain, surprisingly small, range horizontally. It will go further, but will tire rapidly beyond this fairly narrow angular range.
Also, you don't read a line of English text linearly from left to right, you read it by scanning ahead in short jumps and occasionally backtracking a bit. It is easier for the eye to do this without losing track if text is set with suitable leading for the font size and line length.
So, a bit of basic trig involving the horizontal range and a typical reading distance will tell you a reasonable maximum width to use in a given media. Since typical comfortable reading distance varies by media, so will this reading width.
This does not relate to a fixed width in terms of characters, not least because we haven't even considered font size yet. That could be a major factor if you tend to use very large fonts, as with children or those with impaired vision, or very small ones, as used by many programmers. It's usually easiest to work out that reading width and a comfortable font size, and then set the line spacing to match.
But again, this is how people read prose text. How a trained developer reads code in a programming language is a different question, and there's much less research about that.
Given the apparently lack of progress on LaTeX3 for the past decade or more, you could well be right. :-(
It's true that there are IP treaties in place. I think the point with "software patents" is that most jurisdictions don't recognise them as patents in the normal sense of the word: things like algorithms and business processes are not considered inventions and therefore not within the scope of patent protection.
There is also provision for some differences in scope under the treaties. For example, the appearance of a font may explicitly not be subject to copyright in the United States, though if it's an electronic font then the code that generates it can be, and the recognised name of a font may be a protected mark. This is why there have been numerous cloned fonts with generic names like Swiss 12345 in the US. In many other places, the appearance itself can be protected as well.
I don't see that this is particularly relevant here, though, since pretty much everyone agrees that copyright applies to things like music recordings and movies anyway.
That's true, but there is a fundamental difference that most people are ignoring in this discussion so far, between the width of an entire file/screenful of code and the maximum length of any given line.
For example, code in most languages uses indentation to denote some form of block structure. I suggest that a useful metric is the maximum width of one line of code plus a level or two of indentation, because this is what a developer working with the code typically needs to read at once. It doesn't really matter if a block of code being read is all indented by 20 characters at the start of the line, because the eye isn't going back to the start of that space every time it moves to the next line of code.
However, it's often awkward to scroll horizontally in an editor, and alignment/indentation does matter when you're scanning larger blocks of code so you probably wouldn't want to scroll even if it were easy. So, if you want the actual code on any given line no longer than 80 characters, and you allow for, say, half a dozen levels of indentation at four characters each, then that gives you 104 characters altogether. Adjust maximum code length per line, tab size, and maximum typical indentation to match your programming language and house style, and that's a good editor width.
A direct corollary to this is that there is no sensible standard width for code editing, because the needs of different programming languages and the layout preferences of different development teams vary widely. Don't even ask what the best width is if you're programming in Whitespace. :-)
I agree it's hard to be black and white about this, since the BitTorrent technology itself is as neutral as something like the technology to index the web for a search engine. However, it seems to me that there are some fundamental and pretty clear differences between TPB and Google.
For one thing, most users of Google are legal, and most material it indexes is legal content. I've never got into BitTorrent, but I'm guessing from what I've read that most of the content that TPB identifies is illegal and its user base is mainly people wanting to infringe copyright.
For another thing, Google pitches itself as a general search engine. TPB pitches itself squarely as a service for... well, pirates.
Finally, Google appears willing to comply with lawful requests made of it by the authorities. TPB isn't exactly known for supporting its local administration officials in fighting copyright infringement carried out by its users.
I would say the first of those is a grey area, but the other two are reasonable grounds for revoking any common-carrier-type protection for TPB.
I'm not going near the copyright is/isn't theft argument here. However, by hosting a site that both facilitates the committing of acts in other places that are against the law in those places and reduces the market for imported goods within Sweden itself, there is no little doubt that Sweden's laws here are damaging to economic parties in the outside world.
Now, that's their prerogative. As others have noted, Swedish law is what matters here. But international treaties exist for a reason, and Sweden is a signatory to the major copyright treaties along with most other nations in the West. If they don't live up to their obligations, they shouldn't be surprised when the rest of the world reacts unfavourably. Given the economic significance of becoming a copyright haven in a first world country, that could be very unfavourably indeed: things like trade sanctions, restrictions on connectivity to the Internet, or everyone else ignoring copyrights claimed in Sweden aren't unrealistic prospects if it goes far enough. Given that it's a safe bet Sweden needs trade with the rest of the world more than the rest of the world needs trade with Sweden, what do you think they're going to do?
It's fascinating how when European administrations punish Microsoft — one of the most powerful US corporations in existence — significantly for their monopoly abuse, there is a string of comments saying it's great that Europe can do what the US DoJ didn't because Microsoft aren't so influential here; yet when one European nation's government acts against a site that is flagrantly helping people to violate all kinds of laws that are recognised almost everywhere in the developed world, there's a whole string of comments claiming it's only doing so because it's forced to by some mighty US Big Media group.
And people wonder why governments impose draconian laws allowing them to spy on and record people's personal use of the Internet...
The thing is, there is a problem here. A lot of people do hide behind anonymity using systems like BitTorrent and sites like TPB because what they're doing is immoral and/or illegal.
Now, as a matter of principle, I don't support banning a technology or service that may be used for bad purposes but that is also used for legitimate reasons. I believe such a policy to be unfairly restrictive on people who would oppose those bad purposes but who, by the nature of their technology or service, cannot readily control it. Think of communications service providers, or search engines, or for that matter, public transport providers and gas stations.
On the other hand, I have no problem with expecting people who provide such services or technology to take reasonable steps to prevent the abuse of their service or technology. TPB quite blatantly don't do that. The site has been used extensively in support of activities that are illegal, unethical and/or damaging to others, and the operators are well aware of this. So in this case, while I don't in any way condone the abuse of targetted laws for purposes other than their original intent, I'm afraid I'm lacking in sympathy for TPB that somebody screwed them.
That is certainly a problem, though sadly not unpredictable. It seems you can do anything in government these days by claiming to support $HIGH_PROFILE_CAUSE: it used to be fighting child abuse, then it was fighting terrorism, then it was saving the planet. Naturally, most actions taken in the name of these causes do nothing of the sort.
On the other hand, one can't help but notice that if they had copyright laws that effectively prevented the abuse of copyright in the first place, then it wouldn't be necessary to abuse other laws to do it instead.
Sorry, but I'm increasingly of the view that the Lib Dems are an even worse idea than the biggest two parties. They talk a good talk and I actually agree with many of the principles they claim to value. Unfortunately, when you look at what their real, concrete policies are, they're frequently flawed, and the Lib Dem spin machine covers up the downsides for a great many people just as much as the other parties. In particular, their approaches on taxation and the environment/transport are unrealistic: they'll help a few people, screw a few more pretty badly, but ultimately they could never achieve what they say they want to with the policies they've got, and that's not the kind of party I want in government.
Nope, sorry, already got that one. Protest within a mile or Parliament and you're breaking the law. Heckle at a Labour Party conference and you're a terrorist!
I live in the UK. We have a relatively capitalist economy. Sure, we have some nationalised industries and a legal minimum wage, but in practice a lot of things that ought to be provided by the state according to the rules of the game and the taxes we pay aren't, and businesses are mostly unregulated in practice. This is one reason why a lot of people are upset at Blair's administration: the more we've tended towards outright socialism in recent years, the worse things have got for almost everyone except the millions of benefits scroungers. But even with the recent tax hikes and giving out bazillions in benefits, we're still a long way from the collective ownership ideal of socialism. Try looking the the former USSR or China if you want to see serious socialist tendencies. Remind me again how they've been doing relative to the West?
There is no individual compromise in doing your fair part and getting your fair reward. That has nothing to do with socialism.
Not really. The wife is raising the children, and the children are not yet strong enough to work but will be expected to when they have grown enough, so protecting and feeding them is very much in the interests of the hunting males. Families taking care of their own has been a human trait for a very long time.
Looking after the injured or elderly is closer to real socialism, but again, these people would generally be expected to play their part when they could. After all, a tribe with too many mouths to feed and not enough hunters would not eat well and eventually the weak would die.
The real test is how many tribes can you find where someone wasn't pulling their weight for no particular reason, yet was carried along by the others anyway? I think you'll find that in most cases, this has been frowned upon, so while the bounty from the hunt might be shared among the collective, those who did not contribute fairly were still effectively excluded.
I wouldn't worry if I were Microsoft. Even if MS flagrantly violated the GPL, based on this discussion it's unlikely anyone who likes the GPL could actually find a court, never mind know how to bring a lawsuit or actually make a coherent case. I don't think I've ever seen so much ill-informed crap written in such an authoritative tone in a legal discussion before.
No kidding.
There are some fascinating arguments, in various jurisdictions, about whether EULAs have legal weight. But they are often way more complicated than you make out and not nearly as clear-cut, and the case law isn't definitive in many places either yet.
I think we're talking at cross-purposes. My point is that most of human evolution has happened without the need for socialism.
Interesting question. Given that most of the industrialised nations run with capitalist tendencies over the past few decades are doing considerably better by just about any metric than most of the industrialised nations run with a heavily socialist philosophy, would you like to continue?
That's not socialism; it's simply groups of people working together for mutual advantage. In your example, socialism would be four members of a tribe getting together to hunt a lion, and then sharing the results with a load of other tribesmen who sat around all day doing nothing in return. I suspect historical examples of that are not so easy to come by.
I guess they forgot the next line, too. How unfortunate.