I happen to be at odds with the banishment of art from corporate image.
There's a difference between banishing art, and being appropriate with it. You don't make a knife blade out of gold on the premise that it's prettier; you make the knife out of good steel, and put ornamentation on in such a way as to not interfere with the function.
I am, among other things, a poet. But I don't write my software design docs in verse.
why do i keep seeing articles that were allready in wired.
Uh....the same reason you see articles that were already in the NYT, on MSNBC, and so on.
Except for features and reviews, every/. story was already somewhere. That's the way the site works.
No, it is a constitutional democratic republic, wherein what the majority can do (via their elected representatives) to the minority is strictly limited. One thing the majority can't do is push a religious point of view on the minority via the mechanisms of the state. Doesn't (in theory, anyway) matter if it's a minority of one.
Pleding alliegence to a piece of cloth is a dumb thing to do, but the state is permitted to encourage it. Pushing statements about metaphysics, however, is clearly out of its bailiwick.
That's exceedlying hard to believe. I'd be more willing to believe that you have the ability to flap your arms and fly than that you haven't broken some law in the past 12 months.
You never break a speed limit, or jaywalk? You comply with all tax laws? Report that $20 grandma sent you for your birthday on your 1040? Pay use taxes on stuff you get via mail order or the net?
Are you aware of all local laws on consensual sex acts, and do you follow them? (Most people with decent sex lives are criminals under Maryland laws, though those laws are not currently enforced.) And do you check the laws when you travel to other states or countries?
Don't forget our friend copyright. If you have a tape recorder, CD burner, or VCR, it's a pretty good bet that you've infringed copyright in some way.
Drink a glass of wine before you reached 21? Criminal.
Here in Maryland, we still have blasphemy laws on the books. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle, that one makes me a notorious scofflaw several times a week.
Some days I probably break six laws before breakfast, without commiting a single immoral act or harming anyone.
Of course they could if they really wanted. But why would they bother.
There are many possible reasons. Because they're self-righteous moralists who believe that anyone who disagrees with them is a Threat To The American Way Of Life. Because they're small-minded sexually frustrated people who get off on spying. Because they have to justify their bloated budget. Because there's profit to be made in tracking you.
I always find questions like "what would Thomas Jefferson do" in regards to current political questions. Thomas Jefferson would overthrow the US government with armed force.
Of course, he would probably then roll back civil rights for racial minorities, women's sufferage, etcetera.
Never base your judgement on what someone else would do.
I'm one of those believers that if you don't have anything to hide, you wouldn't be concerned about privacy. I don't do anything bad...
The problem is that your definition of "bad" may not be the same as everyone elses. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights work wasn't "bad" in any way, but that didn't stop Hoover from spying on him.
Political demonstrators aren't doing anything wrong, but that doesn't stop them from being subject to surveillance and harasssment by police.
Getting an AIDS test isn't "bad", in fact it's a laudable precaution, but that hasn't stopped some health insurance companies from denying coverage based on the mere taking of the test.
I don't think all these E911 phones would use GPS. IIRC some use some sort of triangulation or signal strength from different cell stations to figure out where you are.
If I wrote in big chalk letters on the side of your house "RAPIST INSIDE", I bet you would consider it vandalism.
Not vandalism. assuming no damage to the house. But certainly trespass, regardless of the message, and libel, regardless of whether you write that on my house, or you write "RAPIST AT " on your own.
While they're at it, howsabout some real change in the bills - like changing who's on them?
Start with the $20. Jackson. How did this genocidal maniac, who laid the seeds of the Trail of Tears, who shattered the Constitutional balance of power by ignoring rulings of the Supreme Court, who appointed Taney (who authored the Dred Scott decision) to that same court, end up honored with a place on our money?
Since the surface of the earth is about 500,000,000 km^2, the chances of it whacking
something I care about would be 1:1,000,000, which still isn't enough for me to pump another tax dollar into a search for tiny asteroids.
Taxes are justified (as common defense) based on the chance of it hitting anywhere in your country. The area of the U.S. is 9,000,000 km^2, so you've got about a 1.8% chance that the next time one of these hits the earth, it'll land in the U.S. Then you've got the very large chance that it hits ocean - kicking up killer tsunamis that devistate the coastline.
Spending tax money on asteroid detection and defense is at least as justifiable as spending on missile detection and defense - we know that a city-killer asteroid is going to hit the planet at some point.
(Oh, and re: your sig - reputable tattoo artists will kick out drunken patrons. Not only do they not want to deal with assholes, but alcohol thins the blood, thus increasing bleeding and making it harder for the tattoo to take.)
"Poverty-stricken" people are still ALIVE, though. It's really, really hard to actually starve to death today in industrialized nations.
Starve, yes. But it's not difficult to be malnourished. And it's easy to end up living on the street, sleeping on a steam grate or in a cardboard box. And it's easy to have no health care - not only being ill yourself, but being a reserviour of HIV, hepatitis, TB, or other infectious goodies.
Open Source works great for common software. Specialized software will always be propriatery
Don't confuse "open source" with "freely downloadable". There's no reason why custom and specialized software couldn't be written and sold under, say, the GPL.
How many geeks are going to write software they're not going to use themselves?
If we get paid for it, plenty.
Re:Non-thinkers call the thoughtful center "biased
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 2
the overwhelming majority of reporters identify themselves as liberals, and they tend to hire people who agree with them. In their limited world of Georgetown cocktail parties and Manhattan soirees, they see their views not
as `left of center' (which they are by any comparison with the US population as a whole), but as `reasonable'...
I'm afraid you've got your facts mixed up. Those Washington journalists of whom you speak - employed by megacorps, and having incomes well over the American median - are in fact farther to the right (i.e., more conservative on economic issues) than the average American.
As for the bestseller status of Mr. Goldberg's work, it suggests that his thesis has struck a chord with the general public
Well, by that measure, Micheal Moore's Stupid White Men is striking more of a chord. And Atkin's "New Diet Revolution" (which is a hideous thing to do to your body BTW) is the best health advice you can get, and
"Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul" is the most resonant spiritual advice now available.
Re:Non-thinkers call the thoughtful center "biased
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Indeed,if you tried to describe the broadcast networks as `center' or `mainstream' to most Americans, they would laugh at you
I'd laugh because describing megacorp-owned media as anything but rightist is ridiculous. The whole notion of a vast left-wing conspiracy in control of the media is a wonderfully effective strawman for conservatives, but has no basis in fact.
there's a reason Bernard Goldberg's book Bias is a nationwide best-seller while the broadcast networks are losing viewers hand-over-fist to Fox.
Fox is just more proof that catering to the lowest common denominator is the path to success.
As for Goldberg's Bias, since when has being a best-seller had anything to do with quality? His claim about labeling has http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/8/nunberg-g.html already been debunked (with a follow-up here).
And yet, your car has anti-lock brakes, three-point harnesses, and airbags...
Each of which brings new problems - people who aren't trained in the appropriate use of anti-lock brakes (in fact, it seems ABS doesn't make you any safer), people injured by ill-fitting seatbelts (and the personal freedom issues raised by seatbelt laws), people killed by airbags...
These techno-fixes are slightly helpful, but are at best band-aids. A real solution would at a minimum involve stronger education requirements for drivers and stronger enforcement of safety laws. (The real safety laws, not revenue-generating speeding tickets.) Deeper thought would have us asking why we're playing so much automobile roulette in the first place, and would have us making increased use of safer and more efficient rail transport.
The solution is for Computer Engineering to someday become as rigorous as other areas of Engineering.
The problem is that in software "engineering", the problem is usually one that hasn't been solved before.
When civil engineers design a new bridge, they're repeating a solved problem. Software "engineers" seldom get to do that - once the problem is solved enough times, it ends up in a library somewhere. E.g., thanks to STL I will probably never write linked-list routines again. Our software "toolbox" keeps growing.
Ten years ago, writing a simple web browser would be a major project; now HTML renderers and HTTP libraries are standard components. Meanwhile, building a bridge is just about the same sort of task it was a decade ago.
I know it's hard to believe, but some languages can actually enforce better code.
The problem with these bondage-and-discipline languages is that when you make it impossible to do dumb things, you also make it impossible to do brilliant things.
It has been oft-observed that you cannot successfully apply a technological solution to a social problem. The problems of inadequately-trained programmers, over-commitment on features, overly "aggressive" schedules, failure to follow good practices like code reviews, and so on, will not be solved by changing our tools.
In the US legal system, the judge actually has the final word, just like in most places.
That's not correct. Under the US system, a judge cannot overturn a jury's acquital. The only time a judge can override a jury's verdict is if he or she finds that a conviction is not substantiated by the evidence.
I.e., the logic of judge and jury forms a sort of AND gate for conviction.
I really don't understand the difference between a person seeing and hearing something in public versus a camera observing the same thing.
And I can't understand how people can't understand the difference.:-)
First, there's permenance to photographic images (digital or analogue, still or moving) that's not there in a person's memory. Second, a photograph can be copied, or shown to others, while a memory can't. Third, a camera can be easily set to watch you 24/7, while personal surveillance takes a lot of time and effort.
Fourth, a camera can be concealed much more easily than a human watcher.
As far as Brin's idea of a "transparent society", it rests on the fundamental misapprehension that the masses will keep authorities from abusing the right of minorities (racial, cultural, or ideological). But the masses are often the ones calling for a crackdown on those outsiders". You can't rely on the majority to protect the right of the minority; you have to set up rules ahead of time.
If I included 10 lines of GPL code in a closed source app of 500,000 my 500,000 lines of code suddenly come under the GPL license.
If those 10 lines make your work a derivative work, yes. If those 10 lines don't make your program a derivative, but fall under fair use, then you don't have to GPL it. That question is outside the purview of the GPL, and would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts.
It would depend not only on how many lines of code are involved, but on what those lines do, and what the new program does.
The issue of whether a work is derivative is not specific to software. For example, if I write a 10 line poem and you include it in an anthology without my permission, you're violated copyright. But if you quote 10 lines of a 200 page novel in a paper, you're almost certainly engaged in fair use.
Just in the quoted portion, there are major errors:
As opposed to proprietary vendors, open source is freely downloaded. However, software in the public domain could contain a critical problem, a backdoor or worse, a dangerous virus.
Strike 1: Open source and free sfotware are not in the public domain. Public domain means material on which copyright claims have been relinquished, and anyone can do as they please with it. Totally different concept.
Strike 2: Trusted distribution is an issue for both proprietary and free software. The old TCSEC (Orange Book) addressed this, and I presume the newer Common Critera do too. If security is important, you don't download from the public internet or buy a CD in a box from some easily-compromised retailer; you have a trusted courier take the software or data from point A to point B.
If a software application representing 5000 hours uses GPL code that reflects only 100 hours, is the GPL fair in its argument that the entire product is GPL?
Strike 3. This is not a argument of the GPL - the GPL makes no arguments, it states conditions under which copying may be done, or a derivative work may be created. The issue of whether a work which incorpoates all or part of another work is a derivate is a question of copyright law, not specific to the GPL; and to that issue there is no general solution.
Three strikes. They're out. (Of touch with reality, I think.)
You know, 1984 was a book of fiction. The planes colliding with the World Trade Center and Pentagon really happened.
Other things that really happened include concentration camps for Americans of the wrong ancestry, criminalization of anti-war and anti-capitalist beliefs, a "free" nation with the world's highest prison population per-capita. Other things that are really happening right now are secret arrests and tribunals.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between banishing art, and being appropriate with it. You don't make a knife blade out of gold on the premise that it's prettier; you make the knife out of good steel, and put ornamentation on in such a way as to not interfere with the function.
I am, among other things, a poet. But I don't write my software design docs in verse.
Uh....the same reason you see articles that were already in the NYT, on MSNBC, and so on. Except for features and reviews, every /. story was already somewhere. That's the way the site works.
No, it is a constitutional democratic republic, wherein what the majority can do (via their elected representatives) to the minority is strictly limited. One thing the majority can't do is push a religious point of view on the minority via the mechanisms of the state. Doesn't (in theory, anyway) matter if it's a minority of one.
Pleding alliegence to a piece of cloth is a dumb thing to do, but the state is permitted to encourage it. Pushing statements about metaphysics, however, is clearly out of its bailiwick.
That's exceedlying hard to believe. I'd be more willing to believe that you have the ability to flap your arms and fly than that you haven't broken some law in the past 12 months.
You never break a speed limit, or jaywalk? You comply with all tax laws? Report that $20 grandma sent you for your birthday on your 1040? Pay use taxes on stuff you get via mail order or the net?
Are you aware of all local laws on consensual sex acts, and do you follow them? (Most people with decent sex lives are criminals under Maryland laws, though those laws are not currently enforced.) And do you check the laws when you travel to other states or countries?
Don't forget our friend copyright. If you have a tape recorder, CD burner, or VCR, it's a pretty good bet that you've infringed copyright in some way.
Drink a glass of wine before you reached 21? Criminal.
Here in Maryland, we still have blasphemy laws on the books. Jesus fucking Christ on a bicycle, that one makes me a notorious scofflaw several times a week.
Some days I probably break six laws before breakfast, without commiting a single immoral act or harming anyone.
There are many possible reasons. Because they're self-righteous moralists who believe that anyone who disagrees with them is a Threat To The American Way Of Life. Because they're small-minded sexually frustrated people who get off on spying. Because they have to justify their bloated budget. Because there's profit to be made in tracking you.
Of course, he would probably then roll back civil rights for racial minorities, women's sufferage, etcetera.
Never base your judgement on what someone else would do.
The problem is that your definition of "bad" may not be the same as everyone elses. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights work wasn't "bad" in any way, but that didn't stop Hoover from spying on him.
Political demonstrators aren't doing anything wrong, but that doesn't stop them from being subject to surveillance and harasssment by police.
Getting an AIDS test isn't "bad", in fact it's a laudable precaution, but that hasn't stopped some health insurance companies from denying coverage based on the mere taking of the test.
I don't think all these E911 phones would use GPS. IIRC some use some sort of triangulation or signal strength from different cell stations to figure out where you are.
Not vandalism. assuming no damage to the house. But certainly trespass, regardless of the message, and libel, regardless of whether you write that on my house, or you write "RAPIST AT " on your own.
Ahhh...the simple goodness of trn.
While they're at it, howsabout some real change in the bills - like changing who's on them?
Start with the $20. Jackson. How did this genocidal maniac, who laid the seeds of the Trail of Tears, who shattered the Constitutional balance of power by ignoring rulings of the Supreme Court, who appointed Taney (who authored the Dred Scott decision) to that same court, end up honored with a place on our money?
Taxes are justified (as common defense) based on the chance of it hitting anywhere in your country. The area of the U.S. is 9,000,000 km^2, so you've got about a 1.8% chance that the next time one of these hits the earth, it'll land in the U.S. Then you've got the very large chance that it hits ocean - kicking up killer tsunamis that devistate the coastline.
Spending tax money on asteroid detection and defense is at least as justifiable as spending on missile detection and defense - we know that a city-killer asteroid is going to hit the planet at some point.
(Oh, and re: your sig - reputable tattoo artists will kick out drunken patrons. Not only do they not want to deal with assholes, but alcohol thins the blood, thus increasing bleeding and making it harder for the tattoo to take.)
Starve, yes. But it's not difficult to be malnourished. And it's easy to end up living on the street, sleeping on a steam grate or in a cardboard box. And it's easy to have no health care - not only being ill yourself, but being a reserviour of HIV, hepatitis, TB, or other infectious goodies.
Blurry fonts are not better. Anti-aliasing is a bad way to compensate for poor font design. Don't blur your desktop; choose fonts that work well when rendered as pixels.
Don't confuse "open source" with "freely downloadable". There's no reason why custom and specialized software couldn't be written and sold under, say, the GPL.
If we get paid for it, plenty.
I'm afraid you've got your facts mixed up. Those Washington journalists of whom you speak - employed by megacorps, and having incomes well over the American median - are in fact farther to the right (i.e., more conservative on economic issues) than the average American.
Well, by that measure, Micheal Moore's Stupid White Men is striking more of a chord. And Atkin's "New Diet Revolution" (which is a hideous thing to do to your body BTW) is the best health advice you can get, and "Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul" is the most resonant spiritual advice now available.I'd laugh because describing megacorp-owned media as anything but rightist is ridiculous. The whole notion of a vast left-wing conspiracy in control of the media is a wonderfully effective strawman for conservatives, but has no basis in fact.
Fox is just more proof that catering to the lowest common denominator is the path to success.
As for Goldberg's Bias, since when has being a best-seller had anything to do with quality? His claim about labeling has http://www.prospect.org/print/V13/8/nunberg-g.html already been debunked (with a follow-up here).
Each of which brings new problems - people who aren't trained in the appropriate use of anti-lock brakes (in fact, it seems ABS doesn't make you any safer), people injured by ill-fitting seatbelts (and the personal freedom issues raised by seatbelt laws), people killed by airbags...
These techno-fixes are slightly helpful, but are at best band-aids. A real solution would at a minimum involve stronger education requirements for drivers and stronger enforcement of safety laws. (The real safety laws, not revenue-generating speeding tickets.) Deeper thought would have us asking why we're playing so much automobile roulette in the first place, and would have us making increased use of safer and more efficient rail transport.
The problem is that in software "engineering", the problem is usually one that hasn't been solved before.
When civil engineers design a new bridge, they're repeating a solved problem. Software "engineers" seldom get to do that - once the problem is solved enough times, it ends up in a library somewhere. E.g., thanks to STL I will probably never write linked-list routines again. Our software "toolbox" keeps growing.
Ten years ago, writing a simple web browser would be a major project; now HTML renderers and HTTP libraries are standard components. Meanwhile, building a bridge is just about the same sort of task it was a decade ago.
The problem with these bondage-and-discipline languages is that when you make it impossible to do dumb things, you also make it impossible to do brilliant things.
It has been oft-observed that you cannot successfully apply a technological solution to a social problem. The problems of inadequately-trained programmers, over-commitment on features, overly "aggressive" schedules, failure to follow good practices like code reviews, and so on, will not be solved by changing our tools.
That's not correct. Under the US system, a judge cannot overturn a jury's acquital. The only time a judge can override a jury's verdict is if he or she finds that a conviction is not substantiated by the evidence.
I.e., the logic of judge and jury forms a sort of AND gate for conviction.
And I can't understand how people can't understand the difference. :-)
First, there's permenance to photographic images (digital or analogue, still or moving) that's not there in a person's memory. Second, a photograph can be copied, or shown to others, while a memory can't. Third, a camera can be easily set to watch you 24/7, while personal surveillance takes a lot of time and effort. Fourth, a camera can be concealed much more easily than a human watcher.
As far as Brin's idea of a "transparent society", it rests on the fundamental misapprehension that the masses will keep authorities from abusing the right of minorities (racial, cultural, or ideological). But the masses are often the ones calling for a crackdown on those outsiders". You can't rely on the majority to protect the right of the minority; you have to set up rules ahead of time.
If those 10 lines make your work a derivative work, yes. If those 10 lines don't make your program a derivative, but fall under fair use, then you don't have to GPL it. That question is outside the purview of the GPL, and would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis in the courts.
It would depend not only on how many lines of code are involved, but on what those lines do, and what the new program does.
The issue of whether a work is derivative is not specific to software. For example, if I write a 10 line poem and you include it in an anthology without my permission, you're violated copyright. But if you quote 10 lines of a 200 page novel in a paper, you're almost certainly engaged in fair use.
Just in the quoted portion, there are major errors:
Strike 1: Open source and free sfotware are not in the public domain. Public domain means material on which copyright claims have been relinquished, and anyone can do as they please with it. Totally different concept.
Strike 2: Trusted distribution is an issue for both proprietary and free software. The old TCSEC (Orange Book) addressed this, and I presume the newer Common Critera do too. If security is important, you don't download from the public internet or buy a CD in a box from some easily-compromised retailer; you have a trusted courier take the software or data from point A to point B.
Strike 3. This is not a argument of the GPL - the GPL makes no arguments, it states conditions under which copying may be done, or a derivative work may be created. The issue of whether a work which incorpoates all or part of another work is a derivate is a question of copyright law, not specific to the GPL; and to that issue there is no general solution.
Three strikes. They're out. (Of touch with reality, I think.)