If I reported that someone logged into my Twitter account, and they found who did it - am I to expect he would face jail time and a fine as well?
They probably wouldn't consider it worth their time and expense to prosecute. However, at least in the US and in many other places unauthorized access to a computer account is absolutely illegal. In fact, in the US, it's a felony.
Would they prosecute? I don't know. Probably not. Could they? Absolutely.
Almost no countries on earth have recognized Taiwan as an independent country including the US.
That's not entirely true. The United States recognized Taiwan not only as an independent country, but as China, as did many other nations of the world. It leads to some awfully confusing shit when the world calls China something different than China calls China.
In any event, we apparently decided along the way that cheap stuff was fun and ended up reversing ourselves, with much of the rest of the world following suit. However, Taiwan maintains its own diplomatic relations with a handful of countries. Also, Western "support" of the "One China" policy is couched in so much political double-speak that it becomes apparent to an observer that we approve of Taiwanese independence, but just want to avoid pissing off China. (Did I mention that cheap stuff was fun?) I mean really. Our position boils down to this statement from the Shanghai Communique: "the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position." So yeah, we don't challenge what you think. Sound basis for foreign policy, really.
So while we DON'T officially recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, we DID. We also have laws requiring that we arm the Taiwanese in the event that China gets uppity, which also makes things interesting fast.
All that said, however, I very much agree with you. It is most certainly not a simple issue.
I certainly agree that "because Mac does it" is not a good reason. But that doesn't mean there isn't a good reason
Well, that's fair enough. The funny part, however, is that they actually didn't do what Mac does. Oh, sure, superficially they moved the buttons to be on the same side and that's what Mac does, but they actually reversed the button positions.
And there's no reason a design expert should be forced to explain those reasons to a layman. That's asking too much.
I suppose nobody HAS to do explain anything to anybody, but sometimes it is appropriate. For starters, when users are consistently telling you they don't like what you're doing, that sounds like a pretty good time. A lot of times it's nothing more than a general distaste for change. On the other hand, change for the sake of change is disruptive and destructive. Articulating why they should go through the short-term pain of learning a new layout may not be required, but it should be proffered.
The reason I brought up the Mac difference before is the second reason I think their decisions should be explained. I'm 99.99% sure that Apple has some seriously professional UI people working for them who weighed into the decision of where to place their buttons and in what order. I'm 95% sure that Microsoft does as well, and they reached a completely different conclusion. Apparently, Ubuntu has people who they consider to be experts working for them (in a paid capacity or not) and they have arrived at yet a third conclusion, which they apparently only defend by claiming that their users haven't proven themselves expert enough to weigh into the decision.
Two out of three sets of professionals are against their approach, and in fact they specifically altered their approach from agreeing* with Microsoft's approach to inventing one of their own. As the newest entrant into this particular battlefield, they have the advantage of time to study and evaluate the previous two approaches and they rejected them. Why? If their approach is superior to the ones that come before, let's hear it. It will be educational for everybody. Many of their users are against them, two other sets of professionals are against them -- what's wrong with asking them to articulate their reasoning? Hell, for that matter why does anybody even need to ask?
* They most likely did this just to help Windows users in the transition, but that is not my point.
It might be bunk, of course, but I don't think that's much evidence. If I had already made the decision and just hadn't announced it yet I probably would have sent a memo out to the China sales staff telling them to, you know, stop selling things because effective April 10th you'd just have to give them their money back anyway.
That said, I've also heard it on financial reports on television. Naturally that is not a great source either, but the consensus seems to be that Google is definitely leaving. Their stock even took a hit for it a few days ago. The fact that it's coming soon wouldn't surprise me.
You presume that you will always make better choices than your children will? Interesting...
I assume he thinks that at least if his decision is a poor one, it's not because his brain is not fully developed and he's mentally incapable of properly weighing the decision. That counts for something. Or at least it should.
Besides which, if the decision we're talking about is "let my kid fuck his girlfriend on the couch" or "stop him" the danger in being "wrong" there is extremely small. (Particularly since if they're really at that point they'll just find somebody else's couch to do it on, so any claims it would psychologically stunt him or something wouldn't pan out.)
If the world embraces html5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, you can be damn sure they'll fold. The same if IE9 comes out with html5 support.
People outside of Slashdot don't like switching browsers. If the world embraces HTML 5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, it's already too late. They've lost, and they're at the precipace of irrelevance from which they will likely only recover if there's also something horribly wrong, from the user's perspective, with Chrome. And even in that situation they're not necessarily going to be the beneficiary of such a problem. IE might be, or Opera, or some browser nobody's heard of or that doesn't even exist today.
If they're playing a game of brinkmanship, it's a dangerous game. If they take it too far they're done, and they won't be able to raise awareness about ANY of the issues they care about. Patents are important, but I'm not sure H264 is the issue to push it on. It's already in widespread use, it's a quality codec, people are used to and seem to like the results (even if they don't understand what's going on in the background).
It's their product, of course; it's their company. I think it's a dangerous move with no hope of a positive outcome.
If somebody wrote a Bank X Keylogger, it wouldn't. They could just watch for you to go to your bank, start tracking mouse movements and clicks, tie it to a screen resolution and reconstruct what you did.
But that almost never happens. A general-purpose keylogger sitting in the background hoping for something juicy isn't going to be tracking mouse movements. For one, it's a hell of a lot of data generated very quickly and you don't know when to start or stop. Two, since you don't know what the user is looking at you couldn't reconstruct it. On the flip side, seeing "http://wellsfargo.com[enter]bob[tab]dole[enter]" pretty much gives you all the information you need.
Most keyloggers out there simply aren't targeted, and without some degree of targeting an on-screen keyboard could help. If they know what they're looking for, you're still boned.
They're probably right; it probably would be better if they re-wrote it.
It's not because of what badasses they are or what terrible programmers their predecessors were, contrary to what most people believe in their heads. It's because it's easy to see what a program is supposed to do once it's done.
The reality is hardly any software is finished as the exact same project it started as. Requirements get changed at the worst possible times, the scope redefined, the timelines shortened. And yeah, at that point getting a working product out is the most important thing. Rewriting it probably WOULD result in better code, which may or may not be justification enough for doing it.
And hey, there's also a good chance those same things happen to them on their rewrite. Oops.
That's true, but in absence of a specific contract you haven't solved the riddle of what DID you pay for? If you believe you paid for those floor plans and he believes you paid for the work and a copy (though I fail to see why he would care), then you have a problem and you need to start looking into what the law says, or to come to an agreement amongst yourselves which probably still involves looking into what the law says.
From a software perspective, it seems from the majority of comments here that the default is the developer owns the code if they're not creating code under terms of employment (not contract). It also seems like the person who writes the article is a complete ass, though, using that fact and other peoples' ignorance to exploit the fact that he deliberately does not create a contract. In his words: "You might ask why I didn't make a contract with this client in the first place. It's because I've found, over the years, that insisting on a contract before development starts will result either in a delayed start or even a project being shelved."
Clarify everybody's expectations, put it in writing, and everybody wins. It's really not that hard. And if there is going to be a conflict, potentially a conflict that ends the project, better to get that in advance than after all the work has been done.
Unless there is a public framework somewhere to do the same thing--and you admit this is unlikely--you're doing nothing but regurgitating Apple's corporate PR speak justifying why they were completely right to do exactly what they would have done either way.
Nothing you said is untrue; in fact, you're probably even right that it is why Microsoft won't just come out and say what Linux supposedly infringes.
But it does seem to be based in a world where the system works the way it should, quickly enough to avoid collateral damage, and I'm not sure such a world exists. Even if the community dissects every one of Microsoft's patents, and they're 100% correct in a logical world, that doesn't mean courts rule that way. It doesn't mean people aren't ruined proving their innocence.
If Microsoft shows up at somebody's door and says "you're violating our patents, let's have a chat" there are very few companies who are going to stand up to them, whether they believe--whether they know--the patents to be bullshit or not.
So the OP wasn't saying that lawyers shouldn't defend people accused of murder, just those that are clearly (known to the lawyer himself) guilty.
I disagree. The people who are "known" to be guilty are most in need of a good lawyer. Not because I relish the thought of murderers getting off on technicalities, but because murderers getting off on technicalities is the only way to motivate police officers and prosecutors to do their jobs properly and respect peoples' rights.
If somebody is "known" to be guilty then the only reason they should get off is police or prosecutorial misconduct, or it obviously wasn't as known as it sounded. If they get off based on that, then they should have. Sometimes guilty men have to go free to serve the greater concept of justice. That's frankly a much more important goal than punishing an individual defender, no matter how dangerous he is.
Say that someone found a way to make serious money of prosecuting companies sending fake copyright take down notices, would we be against that as well? No.
It's easy to see where the harm is in such a case. Somebody has actually done something, most likely created something*, and they're being trampled by a company for no reason other than the company has more money than them and can likely steamroll them, right or wrong.
Who is hurt by fake patent listings? "Oh, I was going to make a Tickle Me Elmo knock-off doll but the box here says it's patented, I'd better not!" It's false advertising in the literal sense of the term; it's part of their advertising, and it's false. But false advertising is a consumer protection law, and I fail to see how consumers are being protected.
If you're arguing that it is wrong of them to do, and abusive of the system, then you're right. Both of those should be handled by government action: fines, loss of marks and other protection, etc. Instead we have some sort of legalized vigilantism where people who shouldn't have any legal standing to sue at all are granted permission to do it so the government doesn't have to do its own job.
I don't mind sometimes cheering the slime to get rid of the scum (depending on circumstances of course!) but if the two sides are "lawyers looking to get rich over violations with no harm to anybody much less themselves" and "companies claiming they have patents they don't," then frankly I see the lawyers as the scum.
* If all they did is, say, upload an mp3 then I fail to see why anybody who doesn't own rights to it would actually send notices. It's not their problem and they gain nothing.
It seemed perfectly coherent to me, and I'm an atheist, openly hostile toward religion, who has never even been drunk in my life much less used an illicit drug of any kind.
Perhaps, idiotic attacks based on capitalization aside, people are simply allowed to have different experiences and different viewpoints than you? Could it be? Perhaps ridiculous ad hominem attacks based on nothing but supposition and a lack of capital letters makes one's argument stupider than anything that person is criticizing?
Sorry, no. Stupid laws are bad, but destroying the separation of powers is equally bad. Determining if a law is unconstitutional is a matter for the judiciary who are, at least supposedly, legal experts qualified to make such judgments and largely immune from retaliation for those decisions. Passing it off to elected officials is silly, particularly in a two-party system where laws are likely to be struck down just based on who's in power at any given moment.
What I would like to see, however, is a method of challenging laws--perhaps even going so far as to get a ruling on constitutionality before the law is even passed--that can be requested by parties without other standing. At the very least, allow politicians to do so; I'm sure the opposition party will take advantage many times. I remember cases in the warrantless wiretapping debacle being thrown out because people who didn't know they were spied on didn't have legal standing to sue for information about whether or not they had been spied on. Talk about retardedly circular logic. Luckily a handful of judges saw through it, but I digress.
The problem, of course, is that it would seriously overwork an already overtaxed judicial system and it might delay passage of important bills. (How long, I wonder, would an average judicial pass over a bill take to complete?) I still think it would be worthwhile to set up some sort of constitutional court and pay some judges to do nothing but examine the constitutionality of legislation without prior prompting. Why should people have to be hurt (arrested, fined, jailed, shamed, etc) by a law that is unconstitutional before it can be declared such? It would also stop legislatures passing clearly unconstitutional laws, either due to disregard of the Constitution or just so they can talk about how tough on _X_ they are. It also opens up the possibility to completely block laws from being passed if they're determined to be unconstitutional in the drafting/debate stages.
As an added benefit, I think it's hard to vote against. The only real argument I can see against it is delay on legislation, which I think can be worked around with some clever language amounting to "we can pass this while the review takes place, but if it comes back unconstitutional it's automatically void" (perhaps with a larger majority?). Which is, really, quite like the system we have right now -- just significantly faster. The decision would be, of course, appealable up to the USSC, but like the current situation most of them would not see a hearing there. There would also probably need to be an intermediate appeal, probably working like current appeals courts: A judge or panel or judges hears the original case, which can then be appealed up to a panel (if a single judge started it) or the full court before going up to the USSC.
Anyway, the idea is rough in details, but the jist is pretty simple: Don't hurt people with an unconstitutional law before it is struck down.
Look, I think the decision is as stupid as everybody else does. But unless you are an expert on Italian law, don't go yammering about how an Italian judge doesn't know how to apply the law of a country you probably don't even live in.
Enforcing stupid laws does not make him a bad judge, nor does it make his decision a mistake. If you have evidence to the contrary other than "well I don't like this very much and therefore it must be wrong!" then by all means, point it out and let's have a look.
Putting aside the specific example of Apple, if that is your definition of censorship then there is no such thing. After all, the government deciding that pictures of naked adult women being illegal isn't censorship because Canada is just a short drive away and I can see them there.
At some point, for the definition to have any meaning at all, we need to allow for the fact that entities can only control their own sphere of influence. Such that, while I can move to Canada to see boobies if the US government oversteps its bounds we can accept that the US is still performing censorship. And of course, that Apple is doing the same thing.
Of course there are degrees. A government doing something is far worse than a private company you don't have to do business with doing that same thing. A company doing something they said they wouldn't is worse than one that wiggles "agreement" into the fine print of their EULA with a "PS we can do anything we want" clause. It still doesn't change the fact that they're all engaging in censorship of their particular domains of influence.
How severe you think what an entity is doing is up to you, as well of course as your reaction to their doing it. It just doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
More than likely they hope to bury it. It's not exactly a shining-star moment in the Olympics. I'm sure they'd prefer people forgot about it and moved on.
By allowing gay marriage you are opening the can of worms where the catholic church would have to allow the marriage of people.
Why would it?
You and your friend are right about the problem being terminology. When we talk about whether or not to allow gay marriage, we're talking about the institution of marriage. That is, the government's recognition of a partnership conferring a certain status, certain set of benefits (and drawbacks), etc. This is the same whether you choose to have a big church wedding with an elaborate ceremony or if you walk into your local clerk's office, hand them a few bucks and sign a marriage certificate. (In fact, I'm pretty sure you hand a few bucks and sign a marriage certificate either way; only the location changes.)
None of this has anything to do with the sacrament of marriage, as defined by the Catholic Church or any other church. No church is forced to perform marriages; they are not a government body, so I see no reason they can't enforce whatever rules they chose. The church can choose not to do the ceremony. What they can NOT do is prevent that couple from walking down to the courthouse and getting the exact same set of benefits as if the church has done it for them. Assuming it were legalized, that is.
For clarity purposes, you can refer to the institution as a union and the sacrament as marriage. Legally speaking, that's a much murkier approach. To tell people A and B that they're married and C and D that they're not, they're just in a union (wow, we need a new term here) because A and B are opposite sex and C and D are the same sex smacks of gender discrimination. From an equal protection (Fourteenth Amendment) standpoint, it IS important -- and it may be unconstitutional to do so. Separate is inherently unequal, according to the US Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education--at least in education. I fail to see why that would not also apply to government services, of which the institution of marriage is clearly one.
Frankly, I don't think there should be a debate -- not about legality. Bans on gay marriage should be clobbered as quickly as they're passed. It's really cut-and-dried. But apparently that's just me.
With all due respect, how much do you think the airlines would lose by decreasing their seating to improve the spacing like the OP suggested?
I was going to offer what I consider a fairly conservative estimate of about a 20% loss in seats (and thus potential revenue) -- but then I realized, if they really were to do this they basically eliminate the main allure of First Class seating, and thus they're going to see a huge dropoff in revenue from that as well even if the number of fliers stayed the same.
So, what, say 40% loss in revenue? Are you willing to pay nearly double for all of your tickets? And is everybody else willing to do the same? Because if not, the suggestion is quite a bad one from the airline's perspective, particularly if they're operating on small profits to begin with. I don't know of anybody who doesn't fly because of the cramped seating, particularly when flying and comfort would matter the most (long/overseas flights that aren't practical or are outright impossible to drive instead) so I'm not convinced there would be much of an uptick in passengers. And even if there were, more passengers in fewer seats means more planes, more crews, more fuel, more maintenance -- more expenses.
Four times the price is probably on the high end of where it needs to be, but I wouldn't have any trouble believing the answer would be substantially more than two times.
Let me preface by saying that this case was actually a settlement and not a judgment, so my comments don't necessarily apply directly to this one case.
What's so wrong about suing? Nothing. The problem most people have is how bogus and utterly life-ruining the amounts are. Most people won't be able to pay something like $1.5MM. Ever. Whether an individual cares about piracy or not, right there we have to stop and question whether or not literally ruining a person's life is justice being served. Just because somebody did something wrong does not mean they don't deserve justice to be on their side, it must remain a two-way street.
Second, they just invent numbers. $1.5MM at, say, $50 retail, they're saying 30,000 people downloaded it in a week. Possible? Yes. Likely? I don't know. Accurate? Definitely not. The number was just pulled out of thin air, and even if the person admitted to what they did they can't defend against a fabricated number. Any defense that "well yes I did exactly what they're accusing me of, but I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY THAT MUCH!" is going to be ill-received. A person essentially has to defend themselves against evidence that doesn't actually exist.
Third, even if we had exact numbers of people who pirated a given piece of software, the damages are still unknown. This case is actually a perfect example of this. This is not a PC game, where you pirate it, press install and laugh as you saved yourself retail price. This is a Wii game. The only people who can pirate it are those with emulators or some modern-day equivalent of mod chips (are they outdated these days?). Let's say that 30,000 people is exactly correct for how many people downloaded it. You're talking 30,000 people all of whom belong to an audience who has to go well out of their way to pirate this game, not somebody who merely presses download. How many of these people do you honestly believe would have bought this game? These are people who literally are invested in their pirating setup, whether through the time (software download/setup) or actual expenses (potentially software, mod chips, etc). I guarantee the answer isn't 30,000. Beyond that, nobody knows. We can make an educated guess that it is much closer to 0 than 30,000 given our circumstances, but that's about it. Obviously not all cases present a scenario this extreme, but the question of what damages ACTUALLY are remain in every single one of these cases.
Fourth, a lot of us are uncomfortable or outright angry about the disproportionate resources at play. It's certainly not Nintendo's fault or problem that they're a relatively rich corporation and their lawsuit targets are almost always average joes, but it makes it almost impossible for somebody who didn't do what they're being accused of to defend themselves. It makes the lawsuits seem almost extortionate. The RIAA is a great example of this, as they basically send you settlement terms at the same moment they serve you and the settlements are always vastly under the amount they claim they're going to sue you for. It's a legally-permissible threat. "Pay us $X or we'll bring our hordes of lawyers to crush you for fifty times more." Even if you're innocent, you're going to pause and think long and hard about whether or not it's worth the fight. For that matter, even if you win your lawsuit (or they drop it--tack that on to the list of things that piss people off about lawsuits like this) you may ruin yourself financially. The costs to you will almost certainly be more than the settlement would have cost, and the odds of you recouping that money as part of a judgment have been slim thus far.
And fifth, if you're looking for explanations you can throw in the oft-heard differences between physical and digital goods, and mesh in the disproportionate punishments. You're almost better off actually stealing a physical good these days; the punishments are probably going to be less severe.
Put it all together and even people who might agree that p
Then again, the Python community is generally made of more experienced professionals interested in developing high-quality software applications, rather than 18-year-old college students "rebelling" against PHP to develop Web-2.0-buzzword-compliant web sites.
You clearly gave Rails a fair chance there, didn't you?
Perhaps your really silly reasoning for "taking Ruby on Rails off [your] resume" was really nothing more than self-selecting against a platform you had already decided was worse than one you clearly think more of?
Rails isn't for everybody, and it isn't for every project. But "ZOMG SOME RANDOM RAILS CONFERENCE HAD A BAD SPEAKER MAKE A BAD ANALOGY ABOUT TEH PRONZ!!!" is about the stupidest possible rationale for not using it.
Work with whatever you want, but don't pretend you gave it a fair evaluation.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably wouldn't consider it worth their time and expense to prosecute. However, at least in the US and in many other places unauthorized access to a computer account is absolutely illegal. In fact, in the US, it's a felony.
Would they prosecute? I don't know. Probably not. Could they? Absolutely.
Well, so what? Just because it doesn't solve every possible problem for all possible users doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
That's not entirely true. The United States recognized Taiwan not only as an independent country, but as China, as did many other nations of the world. It leads to some awfully confusing shit when the world calls China something different than China calls China.
In any event, we apparently decided along the way that cheap stuff was fun and ended up reversing ourselves, with much of the rest of the world following suit. However, Taiwan maintains its own diplomatic relations with a handful of countries. Also, Western "support" of the "One China" policy is couched in so much political double-speak that it becomes apparent to an observer that we approve of Taiwanese independence, but just want to avoid pissing off China. (Did I mention that cheap stuff was fun?) I mean really. Our position boils down to this statement from the Shanghai Communique: "the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States does not challenge that position." So yeah, we don't challenge what you think. Sound basis for foreign policy, really.
So while we DON'T officially recognize Taiwan as an independent nation, we DID. We also have laws requiring that we arm the Taiwanese in the event that China gets uppity, which also makes things interesting fast.
All that said, however, I very much agree with you. It is most certainly not a simple issue.
Well, that's fair enough. The funny part, however, is that they actually didn't do what Mac does. Oh, sure, superficially they moved the buttons to be on the same side and that's what Mac does, but they actually reversed the button positions.
I suppose nobody HAS to do explain anything to anybody, but sometimes it is appropriate. For starters, when users are consistently telling you they don't like what you're doing, that sounds like a pretty good time. A lot of times it's nothing more than a general distaste for change. On the other hand, change for the sake of change is disruptive and destructive. Articulating why they should go through the short-term pain of learning a new layout may not be required, but it should be proffered.
The reason I brought up the Mac difference before is the second reason I think their decisions should be explained. I'm 99.99% sure that Apple has some seriously professional UI people working for them who weighed into the decision of where to place their buttons and in what order. I'm 95% sure that Microsoft does as well, and they reached a completely different conclusion. Apparently, Ubuntu has people who they consider to be experts working for them (in a paid capacity or not) and they have arrived at yet a third conclusion, which they apparently only defend by claiming that their users haven't proven themselves expert enough to weigh into the decision.
Two out of three sets of professionals are against their approach, and in fact they specifically altered their approach from agreeing* with Microsoft's approach to inventing one of their own. As the newest entrant into this particular battlefield, they have the advantage of time to study and evaluate the previous two approaches and they rejected them. Why? If their approach is superior to the ones that come before, let's hear it. It will be educational for everybody. Many of their users are against them, two other sets of professionals are against them -- what's wrong with asking them to articulate their reasoning? Hell, for that matter why does anybody even need to ask?
* They most likely did this just to help Windows users in the transition, but that is not my point.
It might be bunk, of course, but I don't think that's much evidence. If I had already made the decision and just hadn't announced it yet I probably would have sent a memo out to the China sales staff telling them to, you know, stop selling things because effective April 10th you'd just have to give them their money back anyway.
That said, I've also heard it on financial reports on television. Naturally that is not a great source either, but the consensus seems to be that Google is definitely leaving. Their stock even took a hit for it a few days ago. The fact that it's coming soon wouldn't surprise me.
I assume he thinks that at least if his decision is a poor one, it's not because his brain is not fully developed and he's mentally incapable of properly weighing the decision. That counts for something. Or at least it should.
Besides which, if the decision we're talking about is "let my kid fuck his girlfriend on the couch" or "stop him" the danger in being "wrong" there is extremely small. (Particularly since if they're really at that point they'll just find somebody else's couch to do it on, so any claims it would psychologically stunt him or something wouldn't pan out.)
People outside of Slashdot don't like switching browsers. If the world embraces HTML 5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, it's already too late. They've lost, and they're at the precipace of irrelevance from which they will likely only recover if there's also something horribly wrong, from the user's perspective, with Chrome. And even in that situation they're not necessarily going to be the beneficiary of such a problem. IE might be, or Opera, or some browser nobody's heard of or that doesn't even exist today.
If they're playing a game of brinkmanship, it's a dangerous game. If they take it too far they're done, and they won't be able to raise awareness about ANY of the issues they care about. Patents are important, but I'm not sure H264 is the issue to push it on. It's already in widespread use, it's a quality codec, people are used to and seem to like the results (even if they don't understand what's going on in the background).
It's their product, of course; it's their company. I think it's a dangerous move with no hope of a positive outcome.
If somebody wrote a Bank X Keylogger, it wouldn't. They could just watch for you to go to your bank, start tracking mouse movements and clicks, tie it to a screen resolution and reconstruct what you did.
But that almost never happens. A general-purpose keylogger sitting in the background hoping for something juicy isn't going to be tracking mouse movements. For one, it's a hell of a lot of data generated very quickly and you don't know when to start or stop. Two, since you don't know what the user is looking at you couldn't reconstruct it. On the flip side, seeing "http://wellsfargo.com[enter]bob[tab]dole[enter]" pretty much gives you all the information you need.
Most keyloggers out there simply aren't targeted, and without some degree of targeting an on-screen keyboard could help. If they know what they're looking for, you're still boned.
They're probably right; it probably would be better if they re-wrote it.
It's not because of what badasses they are or what terrible programmers their predecessors were, contrary to what most people believe in their heads. It's because it's easy to see what a program is supposed to do once it's done.
The reality is hardly any software is finished as the exact same project it started as. Requirements get changed at the worst possible times, the scope redefined, the timelines shortened. And yeah, at that point getting a working product out is the most important thing. Rewriting it probably WOULD result in better code, which may or may not be justification enough for doing it.
And hey, there's also a good chance those same things happen to them on their rewrite. Oops.
That's true, but in absence of a specific contract you haven't solved the riddle of what DID you pay for? If you believe you paid for those floor plans and he believes you paid for the work and a copy (though I fail to see why he would care), then you have a problem and you need to start looking into what the law says, or to come to an agreement amongst yourselves which probably still involves looking into what the law says.
From a software perspective, it seems from the majority of comments here that the default is the developer owns the code if they're not creating code under terms of employment (not contract). It also seems like the person who writes the article is a complete ass, though, using that fact and other peoples' ignorance to exploit the fact that he deliberately does not create a contract. In his words: "You might ask why I didn't make a contract with this client in the first place. It's because I've found, over the years, that insisting on a contract before development starts will result either in a delayed start or even a project being shelved."
Clarify everybody's expectations, put it in writing, and everybody wins. It's really not that hard. And if there is going to be a conflict, potentially a conflict that ends the project, better to get that in advance than after all the work has been done.
Unless there is a public framework somewhere to do the same thing--and you admit this is unlikely--you're doing nothing but regurgitating Apple's corporate PR speak justifying why they were completely right to do exactly what they would have done either way.
Nothing you said is untrue; in fact, you're probably even right that it is why Microsoft won't just come out and say what Linux supposedly infringes.
But it does seem to be based in a world where the system works the way it should, quickly enough to avoid collateral damage, and I'm not sure such a world exists. Even if the community dissects every one of Microsoft's patents, and they're 100% correct in a logical world, that doesn't mean courts rule that way. It doesn't mean people aren't ruined proving their innocence.
If Microsoft shows up at somebody's door and says "you're violating our patents, let's have a chat" there are very few companies who are going to stand up to them, whether they believe--whether they know--the patents to be bullshit or not.
individual OFFENDER, that is.
I disagree. The people who are "known" to be guilty are most in need of a good lawyer. Not because I relish the thought of murderers getting off on technicalities, but because murderers getting off on technicalities is the only way to motivate police officers and prosecutors to do their jobs properly and respect peoples' rights.
If somebody is "known" to be guilty then the only reason they should get off is police or prosecutorial misconduct, or it obviously wasn't as known as it sounded. If they get off based on that, then they should have. Sometimes guilty men have to go free to serve the greater concept of justice. That's frankly a much more important goal than punishing an individual defender, no matter how dangerous he is.
It's easy to see where the harm is in such a case. Somebody has actually done something, most likely created something*, and they're being trampled by a company for no reason other than the company has more money than them and can likely steamroll them, right or wrong.
Who is hurt by fake patent listings? "Oh, I was going to make a Tickle Me Elmo knock-off doll but the box here says it's patented, I'd better not!" It's false advertising in the literal sense of the term; it's part of their advertising, and it's false. But false advertising is a consumer protection law, and I fail to see how consumers are being protected.
If you're arguing that it is wrong of them to do, and abusive of the system, then you're right. Both of those should be handled by government action: fines, loss of marks and other protection, etc. Instead we have some sort of legalized vigilantism where people who shouldn't have any legal standing to sue at all are granted permission to do it so the government doesn't have to do its own job.
I don't mind sometimes cheering the slime to get rid of the scum (depending on circumstances of course!) but if the two sides are "lawyers looking to get rich over violations with no harm to anybody much less themselves" and "companies claiming they have patents they don't," then frankly I see the lawyers as the scum.
* If all they did is, say, upload an mp3 then I fail to see why anybody who doesn't own rights to it would actually send notices. It's not their problem and they gain nothing.
It seemed perfectly coherent to me, and I'm an atheist, openly hostile toward religion, who has never even been drunk in my life much less used an illicit drug of any kind.
Perhaps, idiotic attacks based on capitalization aside, people are simply allowed to have different experiences and different viewpoints than you? Could it be? Perhaps ridiculous ad hominem attacks based on nothing but supposition and a lack of capital letters makes one's argument stupider than anything that person is criticizing?
It's possible. You should give it some thought.
Sorry, no. Stupid laws are bad, but destroying the separation of powers is equally bad. Determining if a law is unconstitutional is a matter for the judiciary who are, at least supposedly, legal experts qualified to make such judgments and largely immune from retaliation for those decisions. Passing it off to elected officials is silly, particularly in a two-party system where laws are likely to be struck down just based on who's in power at any given moment.
What I would like to see, however, is a method of challenging laws--perhaps even going so far as to get a ruling on constitutionality before the law is even passed--that can be requested by parties without other standing. At the very least, allow politicians to do so; I'm sure the opposition party will take advantage many times. I remember cases in the warrantless wiretapping debacle being thrown out because people who didn't know they were spied on didn't have legal standing to sue for information about whether or not they had been spied on. Talk about retardedly circular logic. Luckily a handful of judges saw through it, but I digress.
The problem, of course, is that it would seriously overwork an already overtaxed judicial system and it might delay passage of important bills. (How long, I wonder, would an average judicial pass over a bill take to complete?) I still think it would be worthwhile to set up some sort of constitutional court and pay some judges to do nothing but examine the constitutionality of legislation without prior prompting. Why should people have to be hurt (arrested, fined, jailed, shamed, etc) by a law that is unconstitutional before it can be declared such? It would also stop legislatures passing clearly unconstitutional laws, either due to disregard of the Constitution or just so they can talk about how tough on _X_ they are. It also opens up the possibility to completely block laws from being passed if they're determined to be unconstitutional in the drafting/debate stages.
As an added benefit, I think it's hard to vote against. The only real argument I can see against it is delay on legislation, which I think can be worked around with some clever language amounting to "we can pass this while the review takes place, but if it comes back unconstitutional it's automatically void" (perhaps with a larger majority?). Which is, really, quite like the system we have right now -- just significantly faster. The decision would be, of course, appealable up to the USSC, but like the current situation most of them would not see a hearing there. There would also probably need to be an intermediate appeal, probably working like current appeals courts: A judge or panel or judges hears the original case, which can then be appealed up to a panel (if a single judge started it) or the full court before going up to the USSC.
Anyway, the idea is rough in details, but the jist is pretty simple: Don't hurt people with an unconstitutional law before it is struck down.
Look, I think the decision is as stupid as everybody else does. But unless you are an expert on Italian law, don't go yammering about how an Italian judge doesn't know how to apply the law of a country you probably don't even live in.
Enforcing stupid laws does not make him a bad judge, nor does it make his decision a mistake. If you have evidence to the contrary other than "well I don't like this very much and therefore it must be wrong!" then by all means, point it out and let's have a look.
Putting aside the specific example of Apple, if that is your definition of censorship then there is no such thing. After all, the government deciding that pictures of naked adult women being illegal isn't censorship because Canada is just a short drive away and I can see them there.
At some point, for the definition to have any meaning at all, we need to allow for the fact that entities can only control their own sphere of influence. Such that, while I can move to Canada to see boobies if the US government oversteps its bounds we can accept that the US is still performing censorship. And of course, that Apple is doing the same thing.
Of course there are degrees. A government doing something is far worse than a private company you don't have to do business with doing that same thing. A company doing something they said they wouldn't is worse than one that wiggles "agreement" into the fine print of their EULA with a "PS we can do anything we want" clause. It still doesn't change the fact that they're all engaging in censorship of their particular domains of influence.
How severe you think what an entity is doing is up to you, as well of course as your reaction to their doing it. It just doesn't mean they aren't doing it.
More than likely they hope to bury it. It's not exactly a shining-star moment in the Olympics. I'm sure they'd prefer people forgot about it and moved on.
Why would it?
You and your friend are right about the problem being terminology. When we talk about whether or not to allow gay marriage, we're talking about the institution of marriage. That is, the government's recognition of a partnership conferring a certain status, certain set of benefits (and drawbacks), etc. This is the same whether you choose to have a big church wedding with an elaborate ceremony or if you walk into your local clerk's office, hand them a few bucks and sign a marriage certificate. (In fact, I'm pretty sure you hand a few bucks and sign a marriage certificate either way; only the location changes.)
None of this has anything to do with the sacrament of marriage, as defined by the Catholic Church or any other church. No church is forced to perform marriages; they are not a government body, so I see no reason they can't enforce whatever rules they chose. The church can choose not to do the ceremony. What they can NOT do is prevent that couple from walking down to the courthouse and getting the exact same set of benefits as if the church has done it for them. Assuming it were legalized, that is.
For clarity purposes, you can refer to the institution as a union and the sacrament as marriage. Legally speaking, that's a much murkier approach. To tell people A and B that they're married and C and D that they're not, they're just in a union (wow, we need a new term here) because A and B are opposite sex and C and D are the same sex smacks of gender discrimination. From an equal protection (Fourteenth Amendment) standpoint, it IS important -- and it may be unconstitutional to do so. Separate is inherently unequal, according to the US Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education--at least in education. I fail to see why that would not also apply to government services, of which the institution of marriage is clearly one.
Frankly, I don't think there should be a debate -- not about legality. Bans on gay marriage should be clobbered as quickly as they're passed. It's really cut-and-dried. But apparently that's just me.
With all due respect, how much do you think the airlines would lose by decreasing their seating to improve the spacing like the OP suggested?
I was going to offer what I consider a fairly conservative estimate of about a 20% loss in seats (and thus potential revenue) -- but then I realized, if they really were to do this they basically eliminate the main allure of First Class seating, and thus they're going to see a huge dropoff in revenue from that as well even if the number of fliers stayed the same.
So, what, say 40% loss in revenue? Are you willing to pay nearly double for all of your tickets? And is everybody else willing to do the same? Because if not, the suggestion is quite a bad one from the airline's perspective, particularly if they're operating on small profits to begin with. I don't know of anybody who doesn't fly because of the cramped seating, particularly when flying and comfort would matter the most (long/overseas flights that aren't practical or are outright impossible to drive instead) so I'm not convinced there would be much of an uptick in passengers. And even if there were, more passengers in fewer seats means more planes, more crews, more fuel, more maintenance -- more expenses.
Four times the price is probably on the high end of where it needs to be, but I wouldn't have any trouble believing the answer would be substantially more than two times.
Let me preface by saying that this case was actually a settlement and not a judgment, so my comments don't necessarily apply directly to this one case.
What's so wrong about suing? Nothing. The problem most people have is how bogus and utterly life-ruining the amounts are. Most people won't be able to pay something like $1.5MM. Ever. Whether an individual cares about piracy or not, right there we have to stop and question whether or not literally ruining a person's life is justice being served. Just because somebody did something wrong does not mean they don't deserve justice to be on their side, it must remain a two-way street.
Second, they just invent numbers. $1.5MM at, say, $50 retail, they're saying 30,000 people downloaded it in a week. Possible? Yes. Likely? I don't know. Accurate? Definitely not. The number was just pulled out of thin air, and even if the person admitted to what they did they can't defend against a fabricated number. Any defense that "well yes I did exactly what they're accusing me of, but I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY THAT MUCH!" is going to be ill-received. A person essentially has to defend themselves against evidence that doesn't actually exist.
Third, even if we had exact numbers of people who pirated a given piece of software, the damages are still unknown. This case is actually a perfect example of this. This is not a PC game, where you pirate it, press install and laugh as you saved yourself retail price. This is a Wii game. The only people who can pirate it are those with emulators or some modern-day equivalent of mod chips (are they outdated these days?). Let's say that 30,000 people is exactly correct for how many people downloaded it. You're talking 30,000 people all of whom belong to an audience who has to go well out of their way to pirate this game, not somebody who merely presses download. How many of these people do you honestly believe would have bought this game? These are people who literally are invested in their pirating setup, whether through the time (software download/setup) or actual expenses (potentially software, mod chips, etc). I guarantee the answer isn't 30,000. Beyond that, nobody knows. We can make an educated guess that it is much closer to 0 than 30,000 given our circumstances, but that's about it. Obviously not all cases present a scenario this extreme, but the question of what damages ACTUALLY are remain in every single one of these cases.
Fourth, a lot of us are uncomfortable or outright angry about the disproportionate resources at play. It's certainly not Nintendo's fault or problem that they're a relatively rich corporation and their lawsuit targets are almost always average joes, but it makes it almost impossible for somebody who didn't do what they're being accused of to defend themselves. It makes the lawsuits seem almost extortionate. The RIAA is a great example of this, as they basically send you settlement terms at the same moment they serve you and the settlements are always vastly under the amount they claim they're going to sue you for. It's a legally-permissible threat. "Pay us $X or we'll bring our hordes of lawyers to crush you for fifty times more." Even if you're innocent, you're going to pause and think long and hard about whether or not it's worth the fight. For that matter, even if you win your lawsuit (or they drop it--tack that on to the list of things that piss people off about lawsuits like this) you may ruin yourself financially. The costs to you will almost certainly be more than the settlement would have cost, and the odds of you recouping that money as part of a judgment have been slim thus far.
And fifth, if you're looking for explanations you can throw in the oft-heard differences between physical and digital goods, and mesh in the disproportionate punishments. You're almost better off actually stealing a physical good these days; the punishments are probably going to be less severe.
Put it all together and even people who might agree that p
You clearly gave Rails a fair chance there, didn't you?
Perhaps your really silly reasoning for "taking Ruby on Rails off [your] resume" was really nothing more than self-selecting against a platform you had already decided was worse than one you clearly think more of?
Rails isn't for everybody, and it isn't for every project. But "ZOMG SOME RANDOM RAILS CONFERENCE HAD A BAD SPEAKER MAKE A BAD ANALOGY ABOUT TEH PRONZ!!!" is about the stupidest possible rationale for not using it.
Work with whatever you want, but don't pretend you gave it a fair evaluation.
Then somebody with a bit of money to play with should definitely do it, since they would almost surely get their asses handed to them on that lawsuit.