Technically, everything written is copyrighted, but unless you file for copyright before you post it, it's completely and totally unenforceable. So fuck off with your troll comments, and stop perpetuating bullshit.
You spoke to a bad lawyer. Filing for copyright hasn't been necessary for something like a decade, and in many places never was.
People who post to usenet do so knowing damn well they're posting to a public forum that will be replicated to servers around the world. I don't know about you, but I think that implies that the "work" enters the public domain, or is otherwise public information.
I disagree. There is implicit permission to propagate around Usenet, and for servers to store the posts for a while. Archiving and reproducing for profit is a different question entirely. And just because something is available to the public under some circumstances doesn't mean you give up copyright over it; indeed the very purpose of copyright is to preserve your right to control it after you've let some people see it.
I wonder why the same rules don't apply for Google Cache and the Internet Archive, both products that collect and serve others' copyrighted materials unless the owners specifically opt out.
Why don't the same rules apply there? I've posted a number of arguments that those services are breaking the law in various places here before, and while I'm not a lawyer, plenty of people who know more law than me found the arguments to have legal merit.
Posting to Slashdot would be implicit permission for them to reproduce my comments on their discussion forum. They do explicitly acknowledge the poster's copyright, and don't necessarily get the right to, e.g., publish a printed archive of "Best Slashdot Posts", for example. (They have also taken down at least one post when faced with a convincing legal threat, but that doesn't really matter here.)
You're obviously trolling, but in the interest of myth-dispelling: under most jurisdictions, everything you write is your copyright by default. What matters is any permission you give (implicitly or explicitly) for it to be copied, and any exemptions to which someone copying it without permission may appeal (e.g., fair use).
There is an implicit permission for something you post to Usenet to propagate and stay around for a few days. Whether there's an implicit permission for others to archive those posts, and if so whether they are then allowed to reproduce them for commercial purposes without permission, is an untested question (but there's little or nothing in statute law to support this position in most places).
Every bearded terminal hacker with a past to hide knows that google provides an easy method to remove posts from their indexing, and if you do not wish future posts to be indexed, there are lines you can put into your header. They're actually very friendly about it.
Usenet was around before Google, and Google don't get to redefine the rules about headers retroactively.
They aren't friendly about removals at all. You try getting them to remove an old post when you can't mail them from the e-mail address it was originally posted from any more (for example, because the ISP has been gone for nearly a decade).
None of which matters, because (as was discussed at length in the other recent Google thread) even a big player like Google doesn't get to break the law on copyright just because someone didn't follow an obscure Internet standard.
While I agree with you that it's nice to have deep-linking, it isn't breaking the law not to allow it. Plenty of scholarly search services (the kinds you have to pay for) do not allow deep linking for example. [...] Google is great in that they won't disappear, however they have decided that the level of access they want to give you to their databases needs to be limited to an extent. As the gatekeepers they have that ability and it is their right. Also, since the article is in it's original form, and that Google is not claiming to be the creator of the content, and since it was originally posted publicly on the internet, I think you would find a copyright defense hard to mount.
That rather depends on where you are. It's pretty cut and dried that they have no rights to reproduce any copyrighted material without permission in many places, other than under some very specific exemptions. Such exemptions usually include, for example, academic libraries used purely for scholarly purposes. They do not usually include reproduction of works in its entirety for profit, and the fact that it was previously published does not give up the copyright owner's rights to restrict republication in this case; indeed, copyright is that right.
Google's bearded terminal hackers provide this service out of the goodness of their open source hearts, and you're going to claim that they're breaking the law?
They are in danger of breaking the law in many places: they are providing copies of copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder, pure and simple. The only relevant question is whether they have a defence under something like fair use or public interest or whatever similar allowances are called in your jurisdiction. And I'm not obligated to do anything for them either, including giving them permission to copy my Usenet posts for profit.
They've been very close several times before. But the last time I cited the other cases I was modded into oblivion (though also Insightful) and you've already been modded (-1, Offtopic) despite the fact that you're clearly not. So, you just get the quick version this time: Groups itself, Google Cache and Google's image search are all potentially (or almost certainly) illegal in many jurisdictions, and all on dubious moral ground at times, too.
For all the years of good service we've had from google, who are we to question the removal of features?
Excuse me, but their Google Groups feature is based entirely on profiting from others' work (and copyrighted work at that). If you're providing a properly searchable index, you might (might) have a public interest defence to the copyright infringement. If you're providing a useful service, most people might (might) not mind you using their work. But if you're going to take away useful searching facilities and provide a service that doesn't even allow proper citation (i.e., deep-linking to a specific post), you're going to be both unpopular and almost certainly breaking the law. I don't know about you, but personally I don't have much respect for people who are either of those things.
If you work for a company that sells weapons, your inventions will be used to kill. It's that simple. Nobody wastes loads of money just to not use what they bought.
It's never that simple. What about deterrents? Several nations have extensive stocks of WMDs that they hope never to use, because several other nations do too. Cue standard martial arts witticisms: better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, don't bring a knife to a gun fight, etc. etc.
Because everyone who knows how to make text bold in Word thinks they're a competent user.
Sure, but I said "any competent user", not "anyone who thinks they're a competent user".:-)
For example, given that I work at a software development company, it's unsurprising that a lot of the "regular staff" know Unix as well or better than the official sysadmins. Many of us quite happily run Thunderbird and Firefox rather than the regulation Outlook and IE on Windows, too. How many of us do you suspect are incompetent at installing and configuring those?
If you use C++ for its power and flexibility then some of the features in OCaml will make you cry, and realise how low-level C++ remains in some respects.
I write mathematical software all day in C++, which we use for exactly those reasons (and its good portability). Still, it hurts to think how many times 5+ lines of cluttered C++ would become a single, elegant line in a decent functional language. Obviously the work I do is particularly suited to a functional style, but I've always had a background envy of people who get to use grown-up toys like this in their programming jobs.
I totally agree with your comments about the need for a standard library. But, as you observe yourself, such things can be developed by the community: CPAN for Perl, CTAN for TeX, and Boost for C++ are all very high quality libraries that are pretty much entirely community-developed.
I think the most obvious missing thing is a figurehead for functional programming. A fair few of programming language geeks seem to be fans, but as someone posted here once before (sorry, can't remember who), functional programming has yet to find its Larry Wall. I'd like to think that the first time someone steps up and takes on that role, that will get the geeks going, and the snowball will start to form. All we need is someone qualified who wants to put in the effort, but of course there are going to be very few such people around in a relatively small corner of the programming world -- catch 22, indeed.
You mean if I buy the "special extended DVD package" I get the whole city of Minas Thirit thrown in!?!
Yep, you get the whole city, with ballistae and everything. You might want to check the number for your local "noisy neighbour" hotline before moving in, though. Apparently there are some fields nearby, and the crowd can get a bit rowdy.
Just for once, it looks like the UK is ahead of the US on this one. Amazon UK have what looks like the equivalent (albeit with a different name?) out on 10 December 2004, also the same day the extended edition of ROTK is out over here.
Am I the only one who's worried by the implicit assumption that all crimes are committed by people who've previously been arrested or charged?
Am I the only one who's worried by the assumption that someone is more likely to be a criminal just because they've been arrested, whether or not they were cautioned/tried/convicted? The police can arrest you more-or-less on a whim under the law in the UK today, and under the measures the government is pushing for, this would now be able to result in everything from a compulsory drugs test to scanning your biometrics and comparing them for any potential matches with a national database. If getting arrested now puts you on the hit list, does the fact that you were once taken in for being drunk and disorderly now make you more likely to be a suspect in a murder investigation?!
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, and the oft-quoted official line that "we won't use the new measures to go on fishing expeditions"? Of course, this is the country where out of all the arrests under the anti-terrorism legislation, there have been almost no actual convictions for terrorism-related offences (but a fair few for other minor things, so that's OK then), and where you can be held indefinitely, without trial, on suspicion of terrorist activity, if the Home Secretary doesn't like you (and you're foreign). Welcome to the UK...
So why do you think this hasn't happened in the IT industry yet?
That's an easy one: who is qualified to decide who makes a good engineer, and what is truly best practice?
In civil engineering, we have many years of experience to draw upon in deciding this. If a bridge-building technique fails, the bridge falls down. After building a few thousand bridges, you can see that some techniques are more reliable than others, and you adapt your practices accordingly. It's evolutionary, but with a huge base of experience to draw on by this point.
Software development just doesn't work that way, at least not today. For a start, almost no-one has shown they are capable of reliably developing large-scale systems on spec, on time, on budget, and with a low bug count. In the absence of many examples of things that worked, who's to say which of today's buzz-phrases, if any, represents the best approach to use on the next attempt?
Similar arguments apply on numerous other levels, everywhere from programming language design to project management and planning/estimation. IT simply has many difficult, unsolved problems, and until we start solving them with at least some significant degree of success, we can't evolve a true engineering culture that builds on that foundation.
Unfortunately, with the eternal divide between academic research and the pragmatism that works in the commercial industry -- currently around 20 years, it seems -- it's going to be hard to spot those successes we do have, and bring them to the front of the line on future projects. This is ultimately the difference between software "engineering" and real engineering.
Never implement anything that you don't need right now.
I'd prefer something like: "Don't bother implementing things you don't know you'll ever need." That still rules out the time-wasting feature creep, while acknowledging that it's often far more efficient to plan for likely future developments from the start rather than constantly evolving a system without any sort of "grand plan".
All evolutionary development causes overhead, most of which is unnecessary if you can anticipate major future developments with reasonable accuracy. Despite all the nay-sayers, I have never yet worked on a real project where this was not the case.
Slashdot Mirror
You spoke to a bad lawyer. Filing for copyright hasn't been necessary for something like a decade, and in many places never was.
I disagree. There is implicit permission to propagate around Usenet, and for servers to store the posts for a while. Archiving and reproducing for profit is a different question entirely. And just because something is available to the public under some circumstances doesn't mean you give up copyright over it; indeed the very purpose of copyright is to preserve your right to control it after you've let some people see it.
Why don't the same rules apply there? I've posted a number of arguments that those services are breaking the law in various places here before, and while I'm not a lawyer, plenty of people who know more law than me found the arguments to have legal merit.
Posting to Slashdot would be implicit permission for them to reproduce my comments on their discussion forum. They do explicitly acknowledge the poster's copyright, and don't necessarily get the right to, e.g., publish a printed archive of "Best Slashdot Posts", for example. (They have also taken down at least one post when faced with a convincing legal threat, but that doesn't really matter here.)
You're obviously trolling, but in the interest of myth-dispelling: under most jurisdictions, everything you write is your copyright by default. What matters is any permission you give (implicitly or explicitly) for it to be copied, and any exemptions to which someone copying it without permission may appeal (e.g., fair use).
There is an implicit permission for something you post to Usenet to propagate and stay around for a few days. Whether there's an implicit permission for others to archive those posts, and if so whether they are then allowed to reproduce them for commercial purposes without permission, is an untested question (but there's little or nothing in statute law to support this position in most places).
That rather depends on where you are. It's pretty cut and dried that they have no rights to reproduce any copyrighted material without permission in many places, other than under some very specific exemptions. Such exemptions usually include, for example, academic libraries used purely for scholarly purposes. They do not usually include reproduction of works in its entirety for profit, and the fact that it was previously published does not give up the copyright owner's rights to restrict republication in this case; indeed, copyright is that right.
They are in danger of breaking the law in many places: they are providing copies of copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder, pure and simple. The only relevant question is whether they have a defence under something like fair use or public interest or whatever similar allowances are called in your jurisdiction. And I'm not obligated to do anything for them either, including giving them permission to copy my Usenet posts for profit.
They've been very close several times before. But the last time I cited the other cases I was modded into oblivion (though also Insightful) and you've already been modded (-1, Offtopic) despite the fact that you're clearly not. So, you just get the quick version this time: Groups itself, Google Cache and Google's image search are all potentially (or almost certainly) illegal in many jurisdictions, and all on dubious moral ground at times, too.
Excuse me, but their Google Groups feature is based entirely on profiting from others' work (and copyrighted work at that). If you're providing a properly searchable index, you might (might) have a public interest defence to the copyright infringement. If you're providing a useful service, most people might (might) not mind you using their work. But if you're going to take away useful searching facilities and provide a service that doesn't even allow proper citation (i.e., deep-linking to a specific post), you're going to be both unpopular and almost certainly breaking the law. I don't know about you, but personally I don't have much respect for people who are either of those things.
It's never that simple. What about deterrents? Several nations have extensive stocks of WMDs that they hope never to use, because several other nations do too. Cue standard martial arts witticisms: better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, don't bring a knife to a gun fight, etc. etc.
Hmmm...
Do you think sending an 18-year-old soldier down into the caves in Afghanistan is a better idea?
Sure, but I said "any competent user", not "anyone who thinks they're a competent user". :-)
For example, given that I work at a software development company, it's unsurprising that a lot of the "regular staff" know Unix as well or better than the official sysadmins. Many of us quite happily run Thunderbird and Firefox rather than the regulation Outlook and IE on Windows, too. How many of us do you suspect are incompetent at installing and configuring those?
If you use C++ for its power and flexibility then some of the features in OCaml will make you cry, and realise how low-level C++ remains in some respects.
I write mathematical software all day in C++, which we use for exactly those reasons (and its good portability). Still, it hurts to think how many times 5+ lines of cluttered C++ would become a single, elegant line in a decent functional language. Obviously the work I do is particularly suited to a functional style, but I've always had a background envy of people who get to use grown-up toys like this in their programming jobs.
No. That sentence can be parsed two ways, and presumably was meant the other way to the way you interpreted it...
I totally agree with your comments about the need for a standard library. But, as you observe yourself, such things can be developed by the community: CPAN for Perl, CTAN for TeX, and Boost for C++ are all very high quality libraries that are pretty much entirely community-developed.
I think the most obvious missing thing is a figurehead for functional programming. A fair few of programming language geeks seem to be fans, but as someone posted here once before (sorry, can't remember who), functional programming has yet to find its Larry Wall. I'd like to think that the first time someone steps up and takes on that role, that will get the geeks going, and the snowball will start to form. All we need is someone qualified who wants to put in the effort, but of course there are going to be very few such people around in a relatively small corner of the programming world -- catch 22, indeed.
No, it wasn't. Some idiot went and told me what happens on the way into the film and spoiled it.
Standard version missing basic functionality: check.
Enterprise edition includes essential missing features: check.
Enterprise edition costs a lot more: check.
Enterprise edition comes on more discs: check.
Sounds about right so far...
Yep, you get the whole city, with ballistae and everything. You might want to check the number for your local "noisy neighbour" hotline before moving in, though. Apparently there are some fields nearby, and the crowd can get a bit rowdy.
Just for once, it looks like the UK is ahead of the US on this one. Amazon UK have what looks like the equivalent (albeit with a different name?) out on 10 December 2004, also the same day the extended edition of ROTK is out over here.
Am I the only one who's worried by the assumption that someone is more likely to be a criminal just because they've been arrested, whether or not they were cautioned/tried/convicted? The police can arrest you more-or-less on a whim under the law in the UK today, and under the measures the government is pushing for, this would now be able to result in everything from a compulsory drugs test to scanning your biometrics and comparing them for any potential matches with a national database. If getting arrested now puts you on the hit list, does the fact that you were once taken in for being drunk and disorderly now make you more likely to be a suspect in a murder investigation?!
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty, and the oft-quoted official line that "we won't use the new measures to go on fishing expeditions"? Of course, this is the country where out of all the arrests under the anti-terrorism legislation, there have been almost no actual convictions for terrorism-related offences (but a fair few for other minor things, so that's OK then), and where you can be held indefinitely, without trial, on suspicion of terrorist activity, if the Home Secretary doesn't like you (and you're foreign). Welcome to the UK...
That's an easy one: who is qualified to decide who makes a good engineer, and what is truly best practice?
In civil engineering, we have many years of experience to draw upon in deciding this. If a bridge-building technique fails, the bridge falls down. After building a few thousand bridges, you can see that some techniques are more reliable than others, and you adapt your practices accordingly. It's evolutionary, but with a huge base of experience to draw on by this point.
Software development just doesn't work that way, at least not today. For a start, almost no-one has shown they are capable of reliably developing large-scale systems on spec, on time, on budget, and with a low bug count. In the absence of many examples of things that worked, who's to say which of today's buzz-phrases, if any, represents the best approach to use on the next attempt?
Similar arguments apply on numerous other levels, everywhere from programming language design to project management and planning/estimation. IT simply has many difficult, unsolved problems, and until we start solving them with at least some significant degree of success, we can't evolve a true engineering culture that builds on that foundation.
Unfortunately, with the eternal divide between academic research and the pragmatism that works in the commercial industry -- currently around 20 years, it seems -- it's going to be hard to spot those successes we do have, and bring them to the front of the line on future projects. This is ultimately the difference between software "engineering" and real engineering.
In many parts of the software industry, there are only a few players. It's just that there are many, many more parts of the softare industry.
I'd prefer something like: "Don't bother implementing things you don't know you'll ever need." That still rules out the time-wasting feature creep, while acknowledging that it's often far more efficient to plan for likely future developments from the start rather than constantly evolving a system without any sort of "grand plan".
All evolutionary development causes overhead, most of which is unnecessary if you can anticipate major future developments with reasonable accuracy. Despite all the nay-sayers, I have never yet worked on a real project where this was not the case.