The problems are that individuals don't consider intellectual property to be actual property...
That's not a bug, that's a feature. A song is not the same type of thing as a guitar, and
the sooner we stop lumping them both under the rubric of "property", the sooner we can start thinking clearly about better policy.
they also give a reason for buying the drm encumbered discs. higher quality!
Which almost no one cares about.
Most eople are willing to settle for MP3 quality.
we won't be able to copy everything easily forever.
Yes, we will. It's called digital technology and it's not going to go away, even if the government attempts oppressive tactics like the SSSCA. The sooner we realize that the genie is out of the bootle and get past useless copy-protection schemes, the sooner we can move on to figuring out how to get artists paid without a pay-per-copy model.
You see. It's not the electrical nature of the reading proces that makes the diference. It's the human involvment.
Ah, you're trying to apply common sense here. But remember that we're dealing with the area of human endeavor that gave us the DCMA.
In your murder example, the law explicitly makes a distinction between human and non-human. But there's nothing in the constitutional clause authorizing copyright law, nor so far as I know in copyright law itself, that mentions a distinction between living and non-living, human and non-human, media for copying.
This means they may be charging people to transfer ownership of the software....
... even though the software has already been paid for?
Yep. Welcome the bizarre world of software "licencing", based on the concept that reading parts of a program into memory as they are needed is making a copy, and thus subject to regulation by copyright. You can own the disk but, under this bogus theory, not have the right to "copy" it into memory.
Since we humans read text by copying it from the page to our short-term memory (via our eyes), I'm waiting for someone to apply this to books...until you no longer have the right to read. After all, how is copying from printed text to synapse structure and electrical potential any different than copying from magentic alignments to electrical potential?
I claim they will be cheaper, which is the only meaningful economic measurement of scarcity.
Which is the sort of erroneous assumption that makes most current economic theories so detached from reality.
Price has more to do with perceptions about scarcity than actual long-term supply.
If actual supply is decreasing - as it is for every non-renewable resource - and price is not increasing, that's not something to brag about, that just shows that your economic system does not reflect reality. And therefore cannot allocate resources efficiently.
Non-renewable and non-sustainable technology - i.e., most of modern industry - is not providing long-term solutions to our problems. This is like a consumer saying that he's not broke because he still as several thousand dollars of credit line left on his Visa account...eventually, just like consumer debt and the national debt, this "ecological debt" it going to have to be paid - and the longer we put that off, the more interest accrues.
Modifying genes to make people more intelligent strikes me as a universally good thing.
Problem is, how do you define "intelligent"?
Who's more intelligent, someone who (like my girlfriend) speaks eight languages but can't figure a 20% tip, or someone who can do vector calculus in their head but has poor skills in their native language, let alone any others?
Part of the danger we face is creating a "monoculture" of intelligence.
and if you don't believe me, just look at how many fat people there are who would be a great deal better off being thin.
There's a difference between "healthy" and thin. People should strive for the former, not the latter. Some people would be healthies if they were thinner, some people would be healthier if they were less thin.
if we can improve on nature, I feel we should.
If you want to make that choice for yourself, hey, go for it. But when you start forcing it on children who can't choose for themselves - and who, in the absence of your tampering, might have grown up into adults who would have choosen differently - that's a different kettle of fish.
Yes, I'm glad my parents chose to get my twisted legs straightened out when I was an infant, and years later to pay for braces to re-arrange my teeth to fit into my head. Some things are inarguably defects and should be repaired.
But I'm glad they didn't have the option to mess with my brain to make me better fit their idea of a "perfect" kid.
What's unethical about making your kids (or yourself) happier, smarter and thinner?
What if others don't share your definition of "happier" or "smarter"? Or don't think thinner is
a virtue?
If you are changing yourself, hey, go for it - it is every competent adult's right to transform themselves in any manner they choose.
But manipulating children - not merely leading them, as a parent should, but forcing them into your constraints - is a different matter. You're not letting them grow into competent adults, not letting them explore their own natures.
get rid of copyright - create royalty rights
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
We can't successsfully regulate copying anymore.
Any law that is based on restriciting the right to copy is therefore fundamentally flawed.
We should drop the notion of copyright, and replace it with royalites on for-profit use of a work.
The basic idea is similar to how songwriter royalties work today - I can sing in the shower and not pay anyone a cent, but when I sing at the bar and (theoretically) attract more business, or record and sell CDs of music other people wrote, the songwriters gets paid. (Theoretically. The current implementation is rather corrupt - we are dealing with the record industry here, one of the greatest concentrations of human scum on the planet.)
Sharing information has become as easy and almost as commonplace as singing in the shower. We have to stop trying to regulate sharing, and instead focus on regulating selling.
Because Orwell spoke out against Communism in Animal Farm he was infected with McCarthyism?
Uh, no. That's not even close to what I said.
Let me try again: many people who vehemently (and rightfully) oppose totalitarianism like to quote Orwell (and to a lesser degree, Shaw). Many of these people hold an incorrect concept of socialism and beleive it to be identical with, or a step along the path to, totalitarianism. (This is partly because people take one sort of socialism - state socialism - to be the whole; attempts to discuss socialism to dispell this notion often encounter lingering poisons of McCarthyism. Reading on "libertarian socialism" is recommended.) As Orwell was a socialist, this is ironic.
Bringing this to people's attention may prompt them to re-examine
their concept of socialism.
RMS had nothing to do with XFree86, which is arguably as important to Linux today as the command-line tools.
No, not very arguably at all. You can choose not to install X and still have a useful system.
while GNU tools have been an important part of the total Linux experience, it isn't the total Linux experience.
RMS's point is that, if we use our terms properly, the "Linux experience" means that you have a kernel. What you put around that kernel to make a functional system - i.e., the rest of the operating system - is GNU. Then on top of that you might install X, Mozilla, etcetera.
GNU's contribution certainly isn't enough to deserve equal mention in the name of the operating system.
Linux (in the strict sense) is the kernel, not the whole OS. RMS's whole point is that GNU had been working for many years to create a free (as in speech) OS, had it all together except for the kernel (IMHO because they got too ambitious with the HURD), along came Linus and provided that kernel.
But look at anybody running Linux today. What's the first thing you see on their screen? An X sesson...
Not on a server. You know, all those HTTP and Samba servers out there? The initial footholds for (GNU/)Linux in many companies? And there are even a few people out there running personal machines without X.
(Really, you can get stuff done without it. Way back when - 10 or 15 years ago, when Linux was just a gleam in Linus's eye but GNU was already on the march - we had these things called "terminals"...)
Dammit, I'm really peeved that so many people in this thread keep getting this wrong.
THE X WINDOW SYSTEM IS NOT PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM.
YOU CAN CHOOSE NOT TO INSTALL X AND STILL HAVE A WORKING, USEFUL SYSTEM.
...doesn't involve bouncing around bewteen files...
Well, excessive bouncing around within one file is bad enough.:-). But I was recalling one C project where the (poor, IMHO) code control practice dictated one function per file. Ugh.
If it's a complex decision, then it should be abstracted to a separate place to hide that complexity.
Agreed, so long as in the place where you're calling it's clear in the abstract what the decision is. I.e.
if (condition(x)) { ... }
versus
if (is_valid_id(x)) { ... }
Don't just move it, abstract it. I think we agree, just wanted to bring that out.
you need to become acquainted with the use of CTRL-] in vim...
Being an emacs guy, I have no idea what that is.:-) (Some sort of tag facility?) But I know it won't help me at all when looking are hardcopy.
Yes, hardcopy. Still one of the best methods of reviewing code; print it out, get a big conference table all to yourself, a pencil, and spread that sucker out. I always do this with code I've just taken over, and with code I've finished writing.
I've never seen a method over 20 lines that really needed to be that long.
The question is not how long does it need to be - you could make every line of code a method of its own, or put everything in main(). The question is what division of methods best encapsulates the operations that are happening.
Long methods are usually the result of poor design.
I would say that too many methods which are only invoked at one place are usually the result of poor design.
If a method has more than a screen full of code (i.e. about 20 lines), split the method into multiple methods
I strongly disagree. The proper delineation of a function or method is the operation that it abstracts, not how long it is.
If a subroutine is only called once, and doesn't cleanly abstract some idea (i.e., if you can't tell me what it does in one simple sentance), it should not be in a separate subroutine.
I've seen too much code written in the manner you suggest, that makes the reader bounce around from function to function to function for no reason other than "otherwise that function would be more than 30 lines".
Which is useful if it that block is used many times, but otherwise it means someone reading the code has to jump around. Keep doing that and you make the reader bounce around between files like a ping-pong ball.
Only separate blocks out if they cleanly abstract a concept.
I allways (when applicable) add a
prefix to my variables that identifies the type.
Hungarian notation is a bad idea. It's just too common for things to change type. "Oh, I need a pointer, not a reference, to work with that API." "We should use unsigned int for that, not int." "You should use a string, not a char *, for that." And so on.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a bug, that's a feature. A song is not the same type of thing as a guitar, and the sooner we stop lumping them both under the rubric of "property", the sooner we can start thinking clearly about better policy.
Which almost no one cares about. Most eople are willing to settle for MP3 quality.
Yes, we will. It's called digital technology and it's not going to go away, even if the government attempts oppressive tactics like the SSSCA. The sooner we realize that the genie is out of the bootle and get past useless copy-protection schemes, the sooner we can move on to figuring out how to get artists paid without a pay-per-copy model.Ah, you're trying to apply common sense here. But remember that we're dealing with the area of human endeavor that gave us the DCMA.
In your murder example, the law explicitly makes a distinction between human and non-human. But there's nothing in the constitutional clause authorizing copyright law, nor so far as I know in copyright law itself, that mentions a distinction between living and non-living, human and non-human, media for copying.
If that's all there was to it, copyright law wouldn't restrict hand-written copies.
Yep. Welcome the bizarre world of software "licencing", based on the concept that reading parts of a program into memory as they are needed is making a copy, and thus subject to regulation by copyright. You can own the disk but, under this bogus theory, not have the right to "copy" it into memory.
Since we humans read text by copying it from the page to our short-term memory (via our eyes), I'm waiting for someone to apply this to books...until you no longer have the right to read. After all, how is copying from printed text to synapse structure and electrical potential any different than copying from magentic alignments to electrical potential?
I can see it now - "Fear and First-Posting in Las Slashdot"....
"We can't stop here! This is troll country!"
"As your sysadmin, I advise you to take this mescaline."
Which is the sort of erroneous assumption that makes most current economic theories so detached from reality.
Price has more to do with perceptions about scarcity than actual long-term supply.
If actual supply is decreasing - as it is for every non-renewable resource - and price is not increasing, that's not something to brag about, that just shows that your economic system does not reflect reality. And therefore cannot allocate resources efficiently.
Non-renewable and non-sustainable technology - i.e., most of modern industry - is not providing long-term solutions to our problems. This is like a consumer saying that he's not broke because he still as several thousand dollars of credit line left on his Visa account...eventually, just like consumer debt and the national debt, this "ecological debt" it going to have to be paid - and the longer we put that off, the more interest accrues.
Problem is, how do you define "intelligent"?
Who's more intelligent, someone who (like my girlfriend) speaks eight languages but can't figure a 20% tip, or someone who can do vector calculus in their head but has poor skills in their native language, let alone any others?
Part of the danger we face is creating a "monoculture" of intelligence.
There's a difference between "healthy" and thin. People should strive for the former, not the latter. Some people would be healthies if they were thinner, some people would be healthier if they were less thin.
If you want to make that choice for yourself, hey, go for it. But when you start forcing it on children who can't choose for themselves - and who, in the absence of your tampering, might have grown up into adults who would have choosen differently - that's a different kettle of fish.
Yes, I'm glad my parents chose to get my twisted legs straightened out when I was an infant, and years later to pay for braces to re-arrange my teeth to fit into my head. Some things are inarguably defects and should be repaired.
But I'm glad they didn't have the option to mess with my brain to make me better fit their idea of a "perfect" kid.
What if others don't share your definition of "happier" or "smarter"? Or don't think thinner is a virtue?
If you are changing yourself, hey, go for it - it is every competent adult's right to transform themselves in any manner they choose.
But manipulating children - not merely leading them, as a parent should, but forcing them into your constraints - is a different matter. You're not letting them grow into competent adults, not letting them explore their own natures.
We can't successsfully regulate copying anymore. Any law that is based on restriciting the right to copy is therefore fundamentally flawed.
We should drop the notion of copyright, and replace it with royalites on for-profit use of a work.
The basic idea is similar to how songwriter royalties work today - I can sing in the shower and not pay anyone a cent, but when I sing at the bar and (theoretically) attract more business, or record and sell CDs of music other people wrote, the songwriters gets paid. (Theoretically. The current implementation is rather corrupt - we are dealing with the record industry here, one of the greatest concentrations of human scum on the planet.)
Sharing information has become as easy and almost as commonplace as singing in the shower. We have to stop trying to regulate sharing, and instead focus on regulating selling.
No, it doesn't. Like an X server, Apaache and Samba are applications, not part of the OS.
Uh, no. That's not even close to what I said.
Let me try again: many people who vehemently (and rightfully) oppose totalitarianism like to quote Orwell (and to a lesser degree, Shaw). Many of these people hold an incorrect concept of socialism and beleive it to be identical with, or a step along the path to, totalitarianism. (This is partly because people take one sort of socialism - state socialism - to be the whole; attempts to discuss socialism to dispell this notion often encounter lingering poisons of McCarthyism. Reading on "libertarian socialism" is recommended.) As Orwell was a socialist, this is ironic.
Bringing this to people's attention may prompt them to re-examine their concept of socialism.
No, not very arguably at all. You can choose not to install X and still have a useful system.
RMS's point is that, if we use our terms properly, the "Linux experience" means that you have a kernel. What you put around that kernel to make a functional system - i.e., the rest of the operating system - is GNU. Then on top of that you might install X, Mozilla, etcetera.
Linux (in the strict sense) is the kernel, not the whole OS. RMS's whole point is that GNU had been working for many years to create a free (as in speech) OS, had it all together except for the kernel (IMHO because they got too ambitious with the HURD), along came Linus and provided that kernel.
Not on a server. You know, all those HTTP and Samba servers out there? The initial footholds for (GNU/)Linux in many companies? And there are even a few people out there running personal machines without X.
(Really, you can get stuff done without it. Way back when - 10 or 15 years ago, when Linux was just a gleam in Linus's eye but GNU was already on the march - we had these things called "terminals"...)
Dammit, I'm really peeved that so many people in this thread keep getting this wrong.
THE X WINDOW SYSTEM IS NOT PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM.
YOU CAN CHOOSE NOT TO INSTALL X AND STILL HAVE A WORKING, USEFUL SYSTEM.
X is not part of the operating system.
You can choose not to install X and still have a useful, working system.
As was George Orwell. Perhaps that might be a hint to those still infected with McCarthyism to re-examine just what socialism means...
Um, no. Where the hell did you hear this? They were designed to be easy to type.
Yes. But I've seen it "in the wild".
Agreed, so long as in the place where you're calling it's clear in the abstract what the decision is. I.e.
versusDon't just move it, abstract it. I think we agree, just wanted to bring that out.
Being an emacs guy, I have no idea what that is. :-) (Some sort of tag facility?) But I know it won't help me at all when looking are hardcopy.
Yes, hardcopy. Still one of the best methods of reviewing code; print it out, get a big conference table all to yourself, a pencil, and spread that sucker out. I always do this with code I've just taken over, and with code I've finished writing.
The question is not how long does it need to be - you could make every line of code a method of its own, or put everything in main(). The question is what division of methods best encapsulates the operations that are happening.
I would say that too many methods which are only invoked at one place are usually the result of poor design.
But the debugger does.
I strongly disagree. The proper delineation of a function or method is the operation that it abstracts, not how long it is.
If a subroutine is only called once, and doesn't cleanly abstract some idea (i.e., if you can't tell me what it does in one simple sentance), it should not be in a separate subroutine.
I've seen too much code written in the manner you suggest, that makes the reader bounce around from function to function to function for no reason other than "otherwise that function would be more than 30 lines".
If I have to maintain such code I always refactor it into one subroutine.
Which is useful if it that block is used many times, but otherwise it means someone reading the code has to jump around. Keep doing that and you make the reader bounce around between files like a ping-pong ball.
Only separate blocks out if they cleanly abstract a concept.