It's not that they just by COINCIDENCE didn't have ads. It's that they said, in writing, "we will never, ever, have ads".
Which is a promise worth about the paper it's printed on if you're not paying (or otherwise compensating them) for their service. That's exactly my point. You're not dealing with a person who has a conscience, subscribes to personal ethics, or lives by a code of honour. You're dealing with a business, whose primary job is to make money, and which is probably under no legal obligation to any users who aren't compensating the business for the service it's providing, regardless of any "social contract" they have. (How is it that people jump up and down around here when businesses use dubious pseudo-legalese in their writing, but no-one objects to nonsense terms like this?)
Anyway, the more interesting question, IMHO, is whether being granted the necessary rights to use someone's content on an ad-driven site constitutes consideration. I'll leave that one to the lawyers to resolve, but you could certainly make an argument that if they accepted the content with the "no ads" statement in place and claimed whatever rights they did to use it on their site, then that's a two-sided deal as long as they're using the content. That would presumably make using the content in violation of the original agreement an infringement of copyright.
This is the thing I don't understand here. The Slashdot write-up says:
These events raise prickly issue of user rights on such websites, and the validity of "user contracts" that can be changed at will by the provider with no subsequent compensation to affected users.
A contract, fundamentally, is a two-sided deal. There must be something in for both parties, or there is no contract. Any promise made to you by a business that has nothing in it for them is not a promise you should ever trust.
I will never understand why so many people continue to believe that because a web site happens to offer a particular facility for free at some point, they are permanently entitled to have the same people provide the same service, at the same non-cost, in perpetuity. If the site is charging for the service, and then tries to change the deal, well that's a whole different game. But for the vast majority of these social networking sites, I'd guess that few or none of their users are paying customers.
Personally, I do also have a LJ account. I mostly use it as a way to view friends-locked posts by my real-life friends, and occasionally post throw-away comments that I don't care about. But after experiencing LJ's level of integrity (or complete lack thereof, as it happens) in an earlier incident before I had the account (someone was blatantly and hurtfully defaming me and LJ staff turned a blind eye even when the specific posts were identified) I would never trust them with any content of any value to me. If they went away tomorrow, I certainly wouldn't care, and if they started splashing ads all over their pages, I would either not care or not use them any more. If you can't walk away from any social networking site you're using for free just as fast, you're a fool.
Somewhat off-topic, but last time I followed any of the pop-sci magazines, Scientific American seemed a closer to the science than the more summary articles in New Scientist, which usually struck me as decent overviews but lacking any real depth. (I'm not from the US, BTW; this isn't some sort of national pride thing.)
We get New Scientist at work these days, and some of the articles are quite interesting surveys of a particular area for those who don't study this stuff full time any more, but the general tone doesn't seem to have changed much.
How does your level of competence enter into anything that I said at all? [...] I wasn't discussing you.
I'm sorry. When you wrote:
If you could do it in PHP, you could have done it in half the number of developer-hours with Jifty or Rails or that Django thing, or you could have done it more powerfully and reliably with Catalyst or Struts, or... whatever.
in response to my personal example involving PHP, I assumed that you were in the same conversation as the rest of us. As I have explained, I most certainly could not have achieved the same results in half the number of developer-hours with any of those other tools, for at least two good reasons. Moreover, the project I mentioned is a simple counter-example to your general claim that PHP is not an efficient or effective solution to any problem.
Although I do wonder a little bit how your system could be so good and not support having a little data-driven table dropped into the middle of an existing application.:)
I appreciate the smiley, but... It did support that. That's my point. For the avoidance of doubt, the SQL queries involved are the most complicated thing, well beyond the scope of the convenient one-liners typically offered by $TRENDY_FRAMEWORK. The few lines of PHP required in most of the pages to generate the various tables were about as simple as scripting gets, and slotted right in to the existing framework we had in place. Are you really arguing that it would have been more productive for me to recreate our entire existing database with a Rails-friendly schema, redesign an entire on-line, operational web site to use RoR conventions, translate all of our templates into suitable.rhtml files and the like, and then write essentially the same logic (SQL query/ies -> loop -> output table) in Ruby anyway? I'm good, but I'm not sure I could do that in five minutes.
Seriously, this kind of argument, and the kind of general "PHP sucks" statements you made elsewhere, don't sound like the thoughts of an objective observer who's interested in picking the right tool for the job. They're more like the rants of someone who once worked on a bad project and blames the tool, or the evangelism of someone so enthusiastic about his favourite framework that he sees it through rose-tinted glasses.
Your implicit assumption is that I am incompetent. I suggest to you, with no malice intended, that you will gain more from your experiences on boards like this if you seek to find out someone's level of competence before judging them.
In fact, our entire web site is already generated using a customised, home-grown framework based on XML/XSLT and standard scripting tools, which serves our needs far better than any of the cookie-cutter frameworks you mentioned. All we needed was a way to drop a quick database-driven table into a web page, where the rest of the page is already generated by that existing framework. I did this in PHP in about five minutes, and two of those were modifying the build scripts to put.php files in the right place. I couldn't have achieved the same results with any of the other technologies you mentioned without (a) rewriting most of the system from scratch, and (b) learning more about one or another programming language with which I'm only passingly familiar at present.
Maybe PHP isn't an efficient or effective solution to any of your problems. That's fine, go ahead and use whatever tool is best in your circumstances. Maybe if we were designing our whole system from scratch, with no existing framework, we'd have chosen another option as well. But in our current circumstances, PHP was just what we needed: a simple way to embed a little database scripting into web pages that are already generated using our existing tools.
I feel like repeating my previous comment. Who says PHP is dead? That same database system I mentioned before has to provide some web access. After looking at the available options, it made far more sense to code that up using PHP than using "pure CGI" with a language like Perl. Again, it may not be the flashiest language on the planet, but it got the job done efficiently and effectively.
You seem to equate a project that is no longer being significantly or quickly developed with a project that is pointless. Some of us would call tools like Perl 5 and CVS "tried and tested", "stable and reliable", or perhaps even "established standards".
Now, me, I've followed Perl 6 development from a safe distance, reading the odd article here and there, but not spending too much time on all the details. I get the feeling that it's going to be too complicated to be worth the effort to switch, but I'll reserve judgement until there's a stable, polished implementation to experiment with.
However, that didn't stop me using Perl 5 to develop a whole load of scripts to drive a new database system I was writing last weekend, or for that matter to write a couple of 50-liners to process some diagnostic output from the app I'm developing at work yesterday. I don't care that I didn't use the latest AJAXified web 2.0 technologies; I had a job to do, and Perl 5 let me do it quickly and correctly, which is all I ask of a programming tool.
Incidentally, if Perl had its day 3-5 years ago, and Ruby 2-4 years ago, what do you think are the cutting edge programming languages of today?
Er, except for one difference... Google's making money.
Google's main business is surely very profitable, but how many of the little, random-idea things are making money for them? How many of their services don't carry that all-important advertising? What's underwriting the various accumulation/caching/republishing services to fight off the inevitable lawsuits when they step too far over the line? The biggest difference between a lot of Google's offerings and a lot of failing start-ups is that Google has a huge reserve bank account to back-up the non-profitable things.
Google today is acting like a cross between a VC firm and an advertising agency for its own brand. Perhaps this is a shrewd management decision, on the basis that the amount of money they make from the one idea that comes good covers the rest (VC strategy) or the increased profile they gain from the non-profit-making services boosts their revenue from the mainstream offerings (ad agency strategy). Then again, perhaps it's just the same kind of wishful thinking that leads many a start-up with a great idea but no business model to fail. Time will tell.
In any case, one thing that certainly is true is that the vast majority of software companies couldn't work the way Google do, because if other companies were doing the same thing at the same sort of level, then Google's approach wouldn't work.
For what it's worth, design by contract is *very* useful when you are writing software for things that absolutely need to work, guaranteed (eg; medical, aviation, energy, etc).
But the language feature in such contexts is of limited value unless the checks are done at compile-time. Discovering at run-time that you're about to fry a patient is good only in the sense that you can diagnose that you screwed up and kick off any emergency shut-down procedure that is available. That's still better than not noticing and frying the patient, of course!
For example any accessor method can, by specifying invariants, be guaranteed not to change any of an object's state.
No. Invariant conditions define what constitutes valid state for an object of the type in question. All objects should therefore satisfy their type's invariant conditions at all times, other than during updates when the object is in between two valid states. However, this is a very different concept from saying that the object's state must not vary.
What you described is a specific algorithm, something already covered by copyright law.
No, it's the implementation of the algorithm that's covered by copyright.
A patent would not only "protect" the specific key sequence you're talking of, it would also protect a lot of related sequences trying to solve the same problem. That's very bad because, being math, they may well be discovered independently by unrelated people.
Patents are only supposed to be granted for original, non-obvious things. If it's that easy for someone else to invent it independently, it shouldn't be patentable regardless of whether it's algorithmic or physical.
Not sharing work, having fear of criticism or fighting for attribution are all orthogonal to patenting.
Not really. If you hold a patent on something then it's been formally acknowledged that you were the person who originally invented it, and there was no relevant prior art.
Patents can't do much to help if someone is unwilling to share their work for fear of criticism, but they can certainly help if someone is unwilling to share their work for fear of others taking advantage and not giving due credit.
All of this does rely on patents being properly allocated, of course. I am actually against software patents as things stand today, because they evidently don't work as intended in practice. But all patents ultimately come down to the recognition that inventing/discovering/researching new and useful things can be hard work, and in order to motivate others to share the fruits of their labour for all to benefit, there needs to be some kind of protection offered in return. I really don't see how this principle applies any differently to a physical invention that took you five years to design, or a complex mathematical algorithm that took you five years to research.
There's no need to grant monopoly to people to come up with good software ideas
Perhaps for mainstream applications. But there is a world full of niche software markets, where products are neither mainstream nor bespoke. I've worked in that world on many occasions, for different types of business and with different types of software. I would bet that little or none of that software would ever get written if the entire burden of doing so fell on individual customers. The economics just aren't there. The result would simply be that all of the customers' offerings were weaker, but since they're all in competition and at the same disadvantage by not having the niche software, the economics say that's what they would do.
That's all it is. A program is just a series of mathematical operations performed by a computer. Now the computer is an invention. But the software is just a calculation. Patenting a software algorithm is like patenting a sequence of button pushes on your calculator, and by "like" I mean "is very literally the same".
OK, let's consider the implications of your analogy.
Suppose you're in a field that requires the performance of very complicated calculations. To compute the result, you must press a few hundred thousand calculator buttons, all of them correctly and in the right order. Would having a calculator where instead you could push just a single button to give you the answer reliably have any value to you?
Your argument is effectively saying that it wouldn't. After all, it's just maths, right? Anyone can do it and we know it all already, so there's no no need to incentivise new research.
By the way, as another poster pointed out, your choice of Newton as an example is rather ironic. Try reading a little of the history of Newton and Leibniz, particularly the extensive delay in Newton publishing his work on calculus, the allegations of plagiarism, and the divide in the mathematical community that resulted.
The approach Microsoft appears to be taking is the "frog in a pot" story - gradually turn up the heat, and the victim won't realise they're in trouble until it's far too late. Some time around now, all those CDs you bought way back when CDs first came out will fail - the media will start to delaminate, the aluminium film will start to oxidise, and the CDs will become unreadable. How then will you re-record your favourite tracks from Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation"?
By the time people realise they're trapped in DRM hell, it will be too late to go back and re-rip their music to an open standard format.
Yes, exactly.
In a sense, I actually want this to happen. To borrow your metaphor, I would rather the heat was turned up faster, since then the industry would face a huge consumer backlash and Joe Public would become aware of the issue and more enlightened in his future decision-making.
At this point, people who didn't read the small print are likely to get screwed to some extent anyway, so the best we can do is (a) minimise the period of time during which this happens, and (b) hope that the scale of the problem is enough for Big Media to be forced to respond. A successful lawsuit for misleading advertising that resulted in Big Media having to pay back the costs of all the non-CD CDs ever sold would go a long way, for example.
Absolutely. I have been arguing for a while that since things will inevitably get worse before they get better, we should hope that Big Media get draconian as fast as possible. The sooner it's not small, separate groups of people who are really inconvenienced but the population as a whole, the sooner the whole concept of DRM will be seen for the unethical and one-sided power grab that it is, and the sooner the public voting with their wallets will view it as a dirty word and kill it for good.
Afterall, most people who do are casual users who would simply like things to work without thinking about "better alternatives". The kind that uses Internet Explorer.
I think you're buying the stereotypes a bit too much there.
I shall use myself as a textbook example. I'm a reasonably informed guy when it comes to IT. I write software for a living, build my own PCs, and all that jazz.
I run a Windows XP machine by choice. The disadvantages of Linux currently outweigh the advantages for me. (If you're curious: at the time I bought the machine, several of the hardware components didn't have good Linux support, and while they now do, I don't see enough benefit to mess around with a working configuration just go get a dual-boot system set up. My next machine will probably be dual-boot from the start, but that's a different question.)
Now, I use Firefox as my web browser, and Thunderbird for my e-mail. I have seen enough damage done to various people by IE and Outlook Express to last a lifetime, and have no desire to become the next casualty. I use OpenOffice for basic word processing and spreadsheet stuff. That's not because it's better than MS Office -- IMNSHO, it's not, by a long shot -- but simply because I don't want to pay for MS Office and as a matter of principle I won't rip it illegally.
For media, however, my needs are limited. Up to this point, WMP has met them just fine. Moreover, unlike the browser or office apps markets, there doesn't seem to be a well-established, tried-and-tested, free-as-in-sensible leading alternative for media jobs. For a long time the Serious Alternative(TM) was Real Player, which was even worse. I've tried a few free alternatives to Media Player, and I've yet to find one that lasted more than an hour, due to stupid UI flaws, bugs, and other rubbish that life is too short to tolerate.
This may well be the thing that convinces me to give alternative players another look. I strongly disagree with the ideas behind DRM, on both ethical and practical grounds. I have downloaded a grand total of one DRM'd song in my life, and that was just an experiment to see how the system worked. There is no way I will ever pay lots of money to download lots of songs if I can't do reasonable and legal things with them.
But please don't assume that because I use WMP, I'm a stoopid luser. I'm simply bored of trying to find more open alternatives, when WMP has (to this point) met my limited needs, and the alternatives I've tried have all been crap. To borrow an expression, media software has yet to find its Firefox.
(If you think you have found a genuinely good media application, that can do things like ripping/burning CDs, converting video formats so I can import data from my PVR and digital camcorder, building DVD menus and burning DVD-Rs, then please suggest it here. Bonus points are available if it's not tied to one specific platform.)
I could care less about inline if statements - I assume that those are only for people who either are the dangerous kind of lazy, like to write hard-to-read code or don't use emacs
Or who just understand the difference between expressions and statements/command/whatever your language calls them.
Leaving aside the debate over da Vinci, I think the idea that you can't be good both artistically and technically is daft. It's simply a numbers game: if 10% of the population is good at art, and 10% is good technically, then we would expect only 1% of the population to be good at both.
If we take those made up numbers and put them in context, that would mean around 1 in 5 people would have some talent at one or the other. However, only 1 in 20 of those talented people would be good at both. It's not that such people don't exist, simply that they are rare in comparison to those who are talented in only one of the two areas.
If you insist on taxing by vehicle type, then it makes far more sense to apply a tax at the time a new car is first purchased, thus incentivising people who are buying a new car anyway to switch to more economic models. As we've seen with safety improvements in the past, that will result in the vast majority of cars on the road following the new rules within a relatively small number of years. But that's not what's being proposed, at least by any of the major political parties here.
At this point, it seems I owe an apology to the Lib Dems. Having tracked down their official policy document, rather than relying further on misleading summaries of it, it sounds like they are indeed proposing to apply these rates to new car purchases only. I still think it's the wrong policy, but at least it's not screwing those whose choice has already been made.
Look at the car I drive again, and ask whether you really think I don't know anything about engine displacement.:-)
If you're from somewhere like the US, 2l probably does seem small. In the UK, it's towards the upper end of the spectrum, and I'm talking about a turbo-charged AWD model, which makes its emissions a little higher than a typical 2l saloon. (Of course, it's still not that much higher than say a 1.6l mid-sized family car, which is kinda my point.)
Now, ask yourself whether it's serving the stated goal for someone who drives that 1.6l mid-sized family car and emits around 75% of the CO2 that my car does to pay only 10% of the road tax that I'd have to pay. That's what would happen under the Liberal Democrat proposals in the UK, where my car is well into the second highest band. While you're thinking about that, remember that you can easily make 20% difference to your fuel economy just with the electrics/air con...
Google is taking it a little further than my browser does, but its not really much different.
It's a whole world different, for several reasons.
For one thing, Google's cache still doesn't seem to cache images, so they get the bonus points for a genuine page hit but you get the bandwidth hit. That used to be regarded as pretty much a cardinal sin of web development. No, wait, actually it still is.
Secondly, that genuine page hit Google is taking away may be robbing the site of support through ads. (Don't start on the "well don't have a sucky business model" route unless you want to advocate a web where you have to pay to subscribe to every worthwhile web page, please.)
And of course there are minor collateral effects like messing up the original site's statistics, which in turn may make it harder for them to improve the site's design.
The web has been established for a while now and the rules on caching are well defined. If you publish stuff on the Internet and are ignorant of those rules, that's your problem not Google's or anyone else that is browsing, spidering or linking.
That is highly debatable. Internet "rules" do not trump the law. At best, you can argue that there was implied consent or fair use applies, and both points could be strongly challenged by any lawyer worth the title.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is a promise worth about the paper it's printed on if you're not paying (or otherwise compensating them) for their service. That's exactly my point. You're not dealing with a person who has a conscience, subscribes to personal ethics, or lives by a code of honour. You're dealing with a business, whose primary job is to make money, and which is probably under no legal obligation to any users who aren't compensating the business for the service it's providing, regardless of any "social contract" they have. (How is it that people jump up and down around here when businesses use dubious pseudo-legalese in their writing, but no-one objects to nonsense terms like this?)
Anyway, the more interesting question, IMHO, is whether being granted the necessary rights to use someone's content on an ad-driven site constitutes consideration. I'll leave that one to the lawyers to resolve, but you could certainly make an argument that if they accepted the content with the "no ads" statement in place and claimed whatever rights they did to use it on their site, then that's a two-sided deal as long as they're using the content. That would presumably make using the content in violation of the original agreement an infringement of copyright.
This is the thing I don't understand here. The Slashdot write-up says:
A contract, fundamentally, is a two-sided deal. There must be something in for both parties, or there is no contract. Any promise made to you by a business that has nothing in it for them is not a promise you should ever trust.
I will never understand why so many people continue to believe that because a web site happens to offer a particular facility for free at some point, they are permanently entitled to have the same people provide the same service, at the same non-cost, in perpetuity. If the site is charging for the service, and then tries to change the deal, well that's a whole different game. But for the vast majority of these social networking sites, I'd guess that few or none of their users are paying customers.
Some of them also claim the rights to anything you post on their systems. Slashdot explicitly doesn't ("Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2006 OSTG.") which is why I don't mind posting somewhat in-depth stuff here. But posting a first take of a home-made movie that might be worth something on $VIDEO_SITE without reading the small print is just naive, as is posting your whole life story in any form where you can be identified on any public web site (whether or not that site actually makes your posts available to the entire public at that time), and so on.
Personally, I do also have a LJ account. I mostly use it as a way to view friends-locked posts by my real-life friends, and occasionally post throw-away comments that I don't care about. But after experiencing LJ's level of integrity (or complete lack thereof, as it happens) in an earlier incident before I had the account (someone was blatantly and hurtfully defaming me and LJ staff turned a blind eye even when the specific posts were identified) I would never trust them with any content of any value to me. If they went away tomorrow, I certainly wouldn't care, and if they started splashing ads all over their pages, I would either not care or not use them any more. If you can't walk away from any social networking site you're using for free just as fast, you're a fool.
Somewhat off-topic, but last time I followed any of the pop-sci magazines, Scientific American seemed a closer to the science than the more summary articles in New Scientist, which usually struck me as decent overviews but lacking any real depth. (I'm not from the US, BTW; this isn't some sort of national pride thing.)
We get New Scientist at work these days, and some of the articles are quite interesting surveys of a particular area for those who don't study this stuff full time any more, but the general tone doesn't seem to have changed much.
I'm sorry. When you wrote:
in response to my personal example involving PHP, I assumed that you were in the same conversation as the rest of us. As I have explained, I most certainly could not have achieved the same results in half the number of developer-hours with any of those other tools, for at least two good reasons. Moreover, the project I mentioned is a simple counter-example to your general claim that PHP is not an efficient or effective solution to any problem.
I appreciate the smiley, but... It did support that. That's my point. For the avoidance of doubt, the SQL queries involved are the most complicated thing, well beyond the scope of the convenient one-liners typically offered by $TRENDY_FRAMEWORK. The few lines of PHP required in most of the pages to generate the various tables were about as simple as scripting gets, and slotted right in to the existing framework we had in place. Are you really arguing that it would have been more productive for me to recreate our entire existing database with a Rails-friendly schema, redesign an entire on-line, operational web site to use RoR conventions, translate all of our templates into suitable .rhtml files and the like, and then write essentially the same logic (SQL query/ies -> loop -> output table) in Ruby anyway? I'm good, but I'm not sure I could do that in five minutes.
Seriously, this kind of argument, and the kind of general "PHP sucks" statements you made elsewhere, don't sound like the thoughts of an objective observer who's interested in picking the right tool for the job. They're more like the rants of someone who once worked on a bad project and blames the tool, or the evangelism of someone so enthusiastic about his favourite framework that he sees it through rose-tinted glasses.
Your implicit assumption is that I am incompetent. I suggest to you, with no malice intended, that you will gain more from your experiences on boards like this if you seek to find out someone's level of competence before judging them.
In fact, our entire web site is already generated using a customised, home-grown framework based on XML/XSLT and standard scripting tools, which serves our needs far better than any of the cookie-cutter frameworks you mentioned. All we needed was a way to drop a quick database-driven table into a web page, where the rest of the page is already generated by that existing framework. I did this in PHP in about five minutes, and two of those were modifying the build scripts to put .php files in the right place. I couldn't have achieved the same results with any of the other technologies you mentioned without (a) rewriting most of the system from scratch, and (b) learning more about one or another programming language with which I'm only passingly familiar at present.
Maybe PHP isn't an efficient or effective solution to any of your problems. That's fine, go ahead and use whatever tool is best in your circumstances. Maybe if we were designing our whole system from scratch, with no existing framework, we'd have chosen another option as well. But in our current circumstances, PHP was just what we needed: a simple way to embed a little database scripting into web pages that are already generated using our existing tools.
I feel like repeating my previous comment. Who says PHP is dead? That same database system I mentioned before has to provide some web access. After looking at the available options, it made far more sense to code that up using PHP than using "pure CGI" with a language like Perl. Again, it may not be the flashiest language on the planet, but it got the job done efficiently and effectively.
You seem to equate a project that is no longer being significantly or quickly developed with a project that is pointless. Some of us would call tools like Perl 5 and CVS "tried and tested", "stable and reliable", or perhaps even "established standards".
Now, me, I've followed Perl 6 development from a safe distance, reading the odd article here and there, but not spending too much time on all the details. I get the feeling that it's going to be too complicated to be worth the effort to switch, but I'll reserve judgement until there's a stable, polished implementation to experiment with.
However, that didn't stop me using Perl 5 to develop a whole load of scripts to drive a new database system I was writing last weekend, or for that matter to write a couple of 50-liners to process some diagnostic output from the app I'm developing at work yesterday. I don't care that I didn't use the latest AJAXified web 2.0 technologies; I had a job to do, and Perl 5 let me do it quickly and correctly, which is all I ask of a programming tool.
Incidentally, if Perl had its day 3-5 years ago, and Ruby 2-4 years ago, what do you think are the cutting edge programming languages of today?
And the scary thing is, I suspect they're still right.
Google's main business is surely very profitable, but how many of the little, random-idea things are making money for them? How many of their services don't carry that all-important advertising? What's underwriting the various accumulation/caching/republishing services to fight off the inevitable lawsuits when they step too far over the line? The biggest difference between a lot of Google's offerings and a lot of failing start-ups is that Google has a huge reserve bank account to back-up the non-profitable things.
Google today is acting like a cross between a VC firm and an advertising agency for its own brand. Perhaps this is a shrewd management decision, on the basis that the amount of money they make from the one idea that comes good covers the rest (VC strategy) or the increased profile they gain from the non-profit-making services boosts their revenue from the mainstream offerings (ad agency strategy). Then again, perhaps it's just the same kind of wishful thinking that leads many a start-up with a great idea but no business model to fail. Time will tell.
In any case, one thing that certainly is true is that the vast majority of software companies couldn't work the way Google do, because if other companies were doing the same thing at the same sort of level, then Google's approach wouldn't work.
But the language feature in such contexts is of limited value unless the checks are done at compile-time. Discovering at run-time that you're about to fry a patient is good only in the sense that you can diagnose that you screwed up and kick off any emergency shut-down procedure that is available. That's still better than not noticing and frying the patient, of course!
No. Invariant conditions define what constitutes valid state for an object of the type in question. All objects should therefore satisfy their type's invariant conditions at all times, other than during updates when the object is in between two valid states. However, this is a very different concept from saying that the object's state must not vary.
No, it's the implementation of the algorithm that's covered by copyright.
Patents are only supposed to be granted for original, non-obvious things. If it's that easy for someone else to invent it independently, it shouldn't be patentable regardless of whether it's algorithmic or physical.
Not really. If you hold a patent on something then it's been formally acknowledged that you were the person who originally invented it, and there was no relevant prior art.
Patents can't do much to help if someone is unwilling to share their work for fear of criticism, but they can certainly help if someone is unwilling to share their work for fear of others taking advantage and not giving due credit.
All of this does rely on patents being properly allocated, of course. I am actually against software patents as things stand today, because they evidently don't work as intended in practice. But all patents ultimately come down to the recognition that inventing/discovering/researching new and useful things can be hard work, and in order to motivate others to share the fruits of their labour for all to benefit, there needs to be some kind of protection offered in return. I really don't see how this principle applies any differently to a physical invention that took you five years to design, or a complex mathematical algorithm that took you five years to research.
Perhaps for mainstream applications. But there is a world full of niche software markets, where products are neither mainstream nor bespoke. I've worked in that world on many occasions, for different types of business and with different types of software. I would bet that little or none of that software would ever get written if the entire burden of doing so fell on individual customers. The economics just aren't there. The result would simply be that all of the customers' offerings were weaker, but since they're all in competition and at the same disadvantage by not having the niche software, the economics say that's what they would do.
OK, let's consider the implications of your analogy.
Suppose you're in a field that requires the performance of very complicated calculations. To compute the result, you must press a few hundred thousand calculator buttons, all of them correctly and in the right order. Would having a calculator where instead you could push just a single button to give you the answer reliably have any value to you?
Your argument is effectively saying that it wouldn't. After all, it's just maths, right? Anyone can do it and we know it all already, so there's no no need to incentivise new research.
By the way, as another poster pointed out, your choice of Newton as an example is rather ironic. Try reading a little of the history of Newton and Leibniz, particularly the extensive delay in Newton publishing his work on calculus, the allegations of plagiarism, and the divide in the mathematical community that resulted.
Yes, exactly.
In a sense, I actually want this to happen. To borrow your metaphor, I would rather the heat was turned up faster, since then the industry would face a huge consumer backlash and Joe Public would become aware of the issue and more enlightened in his future decision-making.
At this point, people who didn't read the small print are likely to get screwed to some extent anyway, so the best we can do is (a) minimise the period of time during which this happens, and (b) hope that the scale of the problem is enough for Big Media to be forced to respond. A successful lawsuit for misleading advertising that resulted in Big Media having to pay back the costs of all the non-CD CDs ever sold would go a long way, for example.
Absolutely. I have been arguing for a while that since things will inevitably get worse before they get better, we should hope that Big Media get draconian as fast as possible. The sooner it's not small, separate groups of people who are really inconvenienced but the population as a whole, the sooner the whole concept of DRM will be seen for the unethical and one-sided power grab that it is, and the sooner the public voting with their wallets will view it as a dirty word and kill it for good.
I think you're buying the stereotypes a bit too much there.
I shall use myself as a textbook example. I'm a reasonably informed guy when it comes to IT. I write software for a living, build my own PCs, and all that jazz.
I run a Windows XP machine by choice. The disadvantages of Linux currently outweigh the advantages for me. (If you're curious: at the time I bought the machine, several of the hardware components didn't have good Linux support, and while they now do, I don't see enough benefit to mess around with a working configuration just go get a dual-boot system set up. My next machine will probably be dual-boot from the start, but that's a different question.)
Now, I use Firefox as my web browser, and Thunderbird for my e-mail. I have seen enough damage done to various people by IE and Outlook Express to last a lifetime, and have no desire to become the next casualty. I use OpenOffice for basic word processing and spreadsheet stuff. That's not because it's better than MS Office -- IMNSHO, it's not, by a long shot -- but simply because I don't want to pay for MS Office and as a matter of principle I won't rip it illegally.
For media, however, my needs are limited. Up to this point, WMP has met them just fine. Moreover, unlike the browser or office apps markets, there doesn't seem to be a well-established, tried-and-tested, free-as-in-sensible leading alternative for media jobs. For a long time the Serious Alternative(TM) was Real Player, which was even worse. I've tried a few free alternatives to Media Player, and I've yet to find one that lasted more than an hour, due to stupid UI flaws, bugs, and other rubbish that life is too short to tolerate.
This may well be the thing that convinces me to give alternative players another look. I strongly disagree with the ideas behind DRM, on both ethical and practical grounds. I have downloaded a grand total of one DRM'd song in my life, and that was just an experiment to see how the system worked. There is no way I will ever pay lots of money to download lots of songs if I can't do reasonable and legal things with them.
But please don't assume that because I use WMP, I'm a stoopid luser. I'm simply bored of trying to find more open alternatives, when WMP has (to this point) met my limited needs, and the alternatives I've tried have all been crap. To borrow an expression, media software has yet to find its Firefox.
(If you think you have found a genuinely good media application, that can do things like ripping/burning CDs, converting video formats so I can import data from my PVR and digital camcorder, building DVD menus and burning DVD-Rs, then please suggest it here. Bonus points are available if it's not tied to one specific platform.)
Ironically, your example is exactly why I don't like this syntax much. I read that as
Or who just understand the difference between expressions and statements/command/whatever your language calls them.
Leaving aside the debate over da Vinci, I think the idea that you can't be good both artistically and technically is daft. It's simply a numbers game: if 10% of the population is good at art, and 10% is good technically, then we would expect only 1% of the population to be good at both.
If we take those made up numbers and put them in context, that would mean around 1 in 5 people would have some talent at one or the other. However, only 1 in 20 of those talented people would be good at both. It's not that such people don't exist, simply that they are rare in comparison to those who are talented in only one of the two areas.
Hey! There's mutherf****n clip-art in this mutherf****n office suite!
At this point, it seems I owe an apology to the Lib Dems. Having tracked down their official policy document, rather than relying further on misleading summaries of it, it sounds like they are indeed proposing to apply these rates to new car purchases only. I still think it's the wrong policy, but at least it's not screwing those whose choice has already been made.
No offence, but I think your understanding of sarcasm is flawed.
Look at the car I drive again, and ask whether you really think I don't know anything about engine displacement. :-)
If you're from somewhere like the US, 2l probably does seem small. In the UK, it's towards the upper end of the spectrum, and I'm talking about a turbo-charged AWD model, which makes its emissions a little higher than a typical 2l saloon. (Of course, it's still not that much higher than say a 1.6l mid-sized family car, which is kinda my point.)
Now, ask yourself whether it's serving the stated goal for someone who drives that 1.6l mid-sized family car and emits around 75% of the CO2 that my car does to pay only 10% of the road tax that I'd have to pay. That's what would happen under the Liberal Democrat proposals in the UK, where my car is well into the second highest band. While you're thinking about that, remember that you can easily make 20% difference to your fuel economy just with the electrics/air con...
It's a whole world different, for several reasons.
For one thing, Google's cache still doesn't seem to cache images, so they get the bonus points for a genuine page hit but you get the bandwidth hit. That used to be regarded as pretty much a cardinal sin of web development. No, wait, actually it still is.
Secondly, that genuine page hit Google is taking away may be robbing the site of support through ads. (Don't start on the "well don't have a sucky business model" route unless you want to advocate a web where you have to pay to subscribe to every worthwhile web page, please.)
And of course there are minor collateral effects like messing up the original site's statistics, which in turn may make it harder for them to improve the site's design.
That is highly debatable. Internet "rules" do not trump the law. At best, you can argue that there was implied consent or fair use applies, and both points could be strongly challenged by any lawyer worth the title.