They already have. There are lots of rules regarding privacy, billing, and state licensing, which prohibit lawyers from using even the most basic types of technology. Working remotely, accepting payments over the internet, and storing documents on a cloud computers are examples of basic technological steps that face particular hurdles in the legal industry.
The article states that node.js make make this "the first cross-OS ransomware family"... sounds ludicrous considering Java has been around for decades.
I'm not sure this is accurate. If it were, why would anyone choose to be a maintainer, stuck fixing small bugs for years on end and having little to do with the movements forward?
The courts last year said they sort of can (in the 9th District). So in the 9th district Oracle
has copyrights (but it's still not their proprietary anything) and in the other districts nothing.
It was the Federal Circuit's decision, not the Ninth Circuit. While not binding on other circuits, the Federal Circuit is extremely influential.
[Uber's] founding members can't wait until the day Uber becomes a fully autonomous moneymaking machine and they can live a life of endless hedonism on the Bahamas
I think the founders are already well rich enough to do that, especially in the Bahamas.
Amazon releases a major announcement about a speculative but futuristic technology they are developing 12 hours before their biggest sale of the year. Coincidence?
You can buy Composition Notebooks by the gross, those are very popular around here. Plus they offer the integrity of not being able to remove pages if that's your cup of tea.
I heard they're incompatible with the upcoming version of Windows.
fair use relates to copyright, so the court almost certainly didn't rule it was fair use
There is fair use in trademark too. Here's the quote from the judge (page 35):
After weighing the evidence presented at trial and considering the arguments made by the parties, the Court concludes that Pintrips satisfies the first two elements of the fair use analysis in that it uses the term pin “otherwise than as a mark” and “only to describe [its] goods or services.” 15 U.S.C. 1115(b)(4).
I demand that you change the extension... only after polling every single ethnic group, subculture, and political and religious belief in the world to ensure that none of them can figure out a way in which it offends them.
This isn't about offending three people in the Congo. Women make up 50% of the population, but there is a major problem in the United States of women being underrepresented in computer science / programming. Why would you do anything that contributes to the perception of that problem?
Reading these comments are enough to indicate there's a problem.
Totally agree. There's a great piece in the nyt today about how these subtle stereotypes are keep programming a secluded all-boys club. The co-working spot I work at is covered in Star wars nerd crap, I totally get it.
This is part of a general trend that I call 'open season', basically big companies persuading naive people to do their work for nothing, under the banner 'open source
While the trend you highlight is disturbing, the alternative is worse: back-room deals between the same "big companies" to stuff this software into your phones and web-apps without your knowledge or say-so.
Commute time is a personal choice. You can choose to live closer to work, and pay more in housing / get less space, or you can live further out of the business districts, get a bigger house but have a longer commute. By making commute time count as work time, we are effectively subsidizing those who live outside of city centers, encouraging longer commutes, and wasted time.
A root of this issue is the 18th, 19th and 20th century concepts of employees / employers and an outdated set of definitions. Like so many modern issues near and dear, we will have to reassess out fundamental assumptions about all kinds of things, this being just one.
I disagree. The fundamental concepts of employee and employer are as true now as they were then. It may take some time, but modern-day legal tools are more than capable of sorting out uber's employment issues without any fundamental shift in thought.
It's not a dichotomy. Benefits are one factor tending to show that a person is an employee. Employee and independent contractors is not a black-and-white status, it's a sliding scale.
Self-driving cars will need to be compellingly more safe than human drivers before any politician allows them on their roads. It will happen, but these 5 and 10 year predictions we keep hearing are far off.
It's France, they do strange things in Europe. For instance when Muslims kill French people, the French respond by harassing Jews. It's not for us to judge, it's a part of the rich European cultural heritage.
It's Slashdot, they do strange things on the Internet. For example, when a poster discusses the use of Apple computers, the trolls respond by bringing up islamophobic ideas and allude to the holocaust. It's not for us to judge, it's a part of the rich Internet cultural heritage.
Another hated class of bugs are library bugs. These may actually be quite easy to debug, but they force you to go into someone else's spaghetti code and spend countless hours becoming a master of some library you'll never use again.
And the worst part is that often they aren't really bugs, but programming errors as a result of crappy documentation.
I had a race condition in my code, my product would crash randomly once every few days or weeks. I killed myself trying to reproduce it reliably. I wrote software that would instrument the code, adding random sleep timers between each line. That didn't work. I eventually went line-by-line trying to deduce the issue, and found two potential bugs by thinking through it. I never knew which of my two fixes fixed the issue (or if either did), but I never saw the bug again.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're flying cross-country, would be cool to send your car off a few days earlier and have it pick you up from the airport when you arrive.
lawyers will pass laws restricting that.
They already have. There are lots of rules regarding privacy, billing, and state licensing, which prohibit lawyers from using even the most basic types of technology. Working remotely, accepting payments over the internet, and storing documents on a cloud computers are examples of basic technological steps that face particular hurdles in the legal industry.
The article states that node.js make make this "the first cross-OS ransomware family"... sounds ludicrous considering Java has been around for decades.
So if I sell a drug that doesn't work and I use television to advertise my drug, it's the fault of everyone who advertised my drug?
If the advertisers knew or should have known that the drugs were fake, then yes, it's the advertiser's fault too. Same with Google.
I'm not sure this is accurate. If it were, why would anyone choose to be a maintainer, stuck fixing small bugs for years on end and having little to do with the movements forward?
The courts last year said they sort of can (in the 9th District). So in the 9th district Oracle has copyrights (but it's still not their proprietary anything) and in the other districts nothing.
It was the Federal Circuit's decision, not the Ninth Circuit. While not binding on other circuits, the Federal Circuit is extremely influential.
Could someone explain the summary in plain English?
Techdirt's heart may be in the right place, but they are pretty infamous for putting out incomprehensible garbage on intellectual property issues.
[Uber's] founding members can't wait until the day Uber becomes a fully autonomous moneymaking machine and they can live a life of endless hedonism on the Bahamas
I think the founders are already well rich enough to do that, especially in the Bahamas.
Amazon releases a major announcement about a speculative but futuristic technology they are developing 12 hours before their biggest sale of the year. Coincidence?
You can buy Composition Notebooks by the gross, those are very popular around here. Plus they offer the integrity of not being able to remove pages if that's your cup of tea.
I heard they're incompatible with the upcoming version of Windows.
fair use relates to copyright, so the court almost certainly didn't rule it was fair use
There is fair use in trademark too. Here's the quote from the judge (page 35):
After weighing the evidence presented at trial and considering the arguments made by the parties, the Court concludes that Pintrips satisfies the first two elements of the fair use analysis in that it uses the term pin “otherwise than as a mark” and “only to describe [its] goods or services.” 15 U.S.C. 1115(b)(4).
I demand that you change the extension ... only after polling every single ethnic group, subculture, and political and religious belief in the world to ensure that none of them can figure out a way in which it offends them.
This isn't about offending three people in the Congo. Women make up 50% of the population, but there is a major problem in the United States of women being underrepresented in computer science / programming. Why would you do anything that contributes to the perception of that problem?
Reading these comments are enough to indicate there's a problem.
Totally agree. There's a great piece in the nyt today about how these subtle stereotypes are keep programming a secluded all-boys club. The co-working spot I work at is covered in Star wars nerd crap, I totally get it.
the paper trail should be completely clear. Right?
Not if someone intentionally destroyed that paper trail.
This is part of a general trend that I call 'open season', basically big companies persuading naive people to do their work for nothing, under the banner 'open source
While the trend you highlight is disturbing, the alternative is worse: back-room deals between the same "big companies" to stuff this software into your phones and web-apps without your knowledge or say-so.
Commute time is a personal choice. You can choose to live closer to work, and pay more in housing / get less space, or you can live further out of the business districts, get a bigger house but have a longer commute. By making commute time count as work time, we are effectively subsidizing those who live outside of city centers, encouraging longer commutes, and wasted time.
He also has two versions of the letter:
http://img.deusm.com/informati...
http://about.lettrs.com/wp-con...
Smells fishy.
Why is the letter dated September 10, 2014?
A root of this issue is the 18th, 19th and 20th century concepts of employees / employers and an outdated set of definitions. Like so many modern issues near and dear, we will have to reassess out fundamental assumptions about all kinds of things, this being just one.
I disagree. The fundamental concepts of employee and employer are as true now as they were then. It may take some time, but modern-day legal tools are more than capable of sorting out uber's employment issues without any fundamental shift in thought.
Many employees do not get benefits.
It's not a dichotomy. Benefits are one factor tending to show that a person is an employee. Employee and independent contractors is not a black-and-white status, it's a sliding scale.
Self-driving cars will need to be compellingly more safe than human drivers before any politician allows them on their roads. It will happen, but these 5 and 10 year predictions we keep hearing are far off.
Can't wait for this device to be hacked, such that a hacker can turn on the lock whenever even a sober person is riding along... crash.
It's France, they do strange things in Europe. For instance when Muslims kill French people, the French respond by harassing Jews. It's not for us to judge, it's a part of the rich European cultural heritage.
It's Slashdot, they do strange things on the Internet. For example, when a poster discusses the use of Apple computers, the trolls respond by bringing up islamophobic ideas and allude to the holocaust. It's not for us to judge, it's a part of the rich Internet cultural heritage.
Another hated class of bugs are library bugs. These may actually be quite easy to debug, but they force you to go into someone else's spaghetti code and spend countless hours becoming a master of some library you'll never use again.
And the worst part is that often they aren't really bugs, but programming errors as a result of crappy documentation.
I had a race condition in my code, my product would crash randomly once every few days or weeks. I killed myself trying to reproduce it reliably. I wrote software that would instrument the code, adding random sleep timers between each line. That didn't work. I eventually went line-by-line trying to deduce the issue, and found two potential bugs by thinking through it. I never knew which of my two fixes fixed the issue (or if either did), but I never saw the bug again.