the problem is the companies are attracted to the WalMart prices for labor [. ..] If [China] were to raise their standards, they would be more expensive and suddenly less attractive
And Apple would move operations to Indonesia or Vietnam or wherever the next exploitable labor market is. The point of a potential boycott of Apple is not to raise Chinese labor standards; no disrespect to the Chinese, but the point isn't making things better for them by trying to hit a moving target. Rather, the purpose is to get American companies like Apple not to travel the world looking for exploitable labor in the first place. If that means they bring some jobs back to America, so much the better.
Now, there are still plenty of criticisms to offer. Primarily, as you mentioned, people want low prices -- historically people are not willing to pay increased product costs at a level sufficient to justify increased labor costs. There are also arguments to be made about world markets and that the people employed by these companies, while exploited by our standards, actually live fairly well by their own local standards. They're valid arguments; they may even be the right arguments, but they are not relevant in terms of who consumers should boycott if they want to try to enact change anyway.
Further, Apple is probably the perfect target. They do not deal in commodity-priced goods; if people are going to plunk down $200 or more for a new iPhone, I doubt they're going to balk at paying $20 more every few years when they upgrade, not the same way people would balk when we're talking about necessities like food or clothing in any event. Likewise, we just had an article about Apple posting something like an 18 billion dollar profit in one quarter. I'm not suggesting that companies are not entitled to profits or that it would be healthy for them to operate at 0 profit, but let's be realistic here: If there's a company who can afford to eat some higher manufacturing costs without passing them on if they wanted, it's Apple. And they could probably get some incredibly good PR for it, too. "It's not our job to solve America's problems" ends up with, well, thoughts of organizing boycotts. Instead they could have latched on to an issue that could have silenced a lot of their critics in one fell swoop.
its always handy to have a 'fools identification' device of some kind or another, isn't it?
Yes. For example, I have had much success identifying self-important twats with superiority compelxes by their incessant need to talk about how much smarter they are than anybody who uses Facebook or Twitter.
Was there a takedown order involved? Admittedly I only read the summary, but all it mentions is YouTube's automated software. Universal may be infringing this groups copyright with regard to the music, but they DO have a copyright on their own video and they could argue--very easily--that they did not request any takedown nor did they make any affirmation that would fall under perjury.
And in fact, regardless of the specific facts of this case, there's your loophole. Labels will just get sites like YouTube to run some software to do the dirty work for them, dumping some cash to them to help "defray operating expenses" and operate under plausible deniability with regards to any such law or the perjury provisions of the DMCA. After all, YouTube is free to have whatever policies they want with regard to what material they host on their own website, so they don't need a DMCA request. Sufficient bags of money under the table solves it nicely for everybody.
Apparently, the reporting is bad. It's slow. it's biased. It's a hive-mind. Antiquated. Outdated. Hypocritical. A bubble. A linux advocacy masquerading as a news site. The moderation system has been openly subverted by trolls and the site itself infiltrated by Google and Google well-wishers. No commenters come here except to reaffirm their opinions with the rest of the hive.
Yet here you are. I don't understand it.
only comes here to pat themselves on the back for thinking a certain way
...ooh. Got it. By the way, that over there is a mirror bud, give it a shot some time.
It's not the same thing, as other posters have mentioned, but hell, I'll do it: Time for a windfall profits tax.
This, on the heels of their attempt to pretend outsourcing most of their work force is about "making the best product" despite giving absolutely no examples other than things that save them money or make their little abuse-the-workers penises big, like the idea of corporate dormitories that the Chinese will wake up for them at any hour and force their employees into a twelve hour shift.
Really, guys? Somewhere in your 14 BILLION dollar profit--last quarter--you couldn't find the funds to hire a couple of Americans? Fuck you. Time to go Robin Hood on fucks like this.
In my opinion, which isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on, this should hinge on whether or not it can be shown that the accused knows the password.
That sounds good, but in practice how do you show that somebody knows something? Even if you can show that they used to know something, and that could be hard enough, it is no guarantee that they still do. Particularly under the stress of interrogation and potentially devastating legal consequences. There is a not-insignificant portion of the US population who undergoes test anxiety, or more generically performance anxiety. Can you imagine somebody like that under questioning? And it's not hard to believe that the ridiculously ramped up level of stress between "my history exam!" and "life imprisonment!" would create a whole swath of people who suddenly have performance anxiety who never did before. And I mean legitimately, not people claiming it.
In essence, it is like the legal concept that ignorance is not a defense. I think if we're being truly fair, truly impartial and truly in the pursuit of justice that there are quite a number of situations where ignorance should be an excuse. But it's too easy to simply say "I didn't know!" whether you did or not, and too hard to prove to the contrary, so we as a society just wrap the whole thing up in a ball and throw it out. Ignorance is no excuse; if we believe you, maybe we will choose to reflect it in sentencing (depending on whether or not your DA is running for that Senate seat next year, most likely). I don't see the situation with a password as any different.
The bottom line is, for some reason geeks (or maybe just the Slashdotter subset) loves technicalities. "I'll just tell them I don't remember, how can they prove it? rofl rofl rofl." Actually the best example of that probably comes about with file sharing. Most of us will admit that, technically speaking, the best you can hope for is to track infringement to a specific IP address and no further. "What if I had house guests? What if I have an open WAP? What if there are multiple people living in the house?" They're valid in their own ways, but the courts really aren't going to give a shit. They are not going to let a loophole that large, and that simple, go by. Justice is justice for both sides; making certain types of crimes (or torts) literally impossible to pursue is just not going to happen. Best case, the onus will be on you to prove something like that, for all of the "innocent until proven guilty!" complaints that will raise.
Having to prove what knowledge is in somebody's mind is just not a tenable strategy, and "oop, guess encryption just wins in all cases where it contains the primary evidence" is never going to fly. Frankly if we want anything less than "you must decrypt the drive in all circumstances, period," we had better get on the ball in coming up with a more realistic test, because that's what we're likely to get otherwise.
The authorities can make you hand over the key to a safe, but not the combination. If the safe is locked with a combination, they must crack open the safe if they want its contents.
I'm going to join the other poster in requesting a source, because my understanding has always been that while they may not be able to demand the combination from you, they can instead demand that you open the safe (assuming a valid court order of course). The analogy is perfect with our encryption key situation, but the conclusion is directly opposite depending on which of us is correct.
I haven't forgotten my passwords per se (though sometimes I don't remember which one I used for a specific site; hey guys, how about you tell me your fucking password requirements when I'm trying to log in and I'll remember?).
But I do have one particular password that I actually couldn't write down for you. I can type it, based largely on muscle memory. I can even tell you what the password is, but I will screw up the capitalization every time. If, say, I'm laying on my bed with my laptop and trying to one-hand-peck the password in, I'll get it wrong. I have to sit up and let both hands do their things. It's a really strange mental block.
Yup, you're right. In fact I remember a discussion about exactly this phenomenon in a Telecommunications Economics class I took in college. The class was about six years ago but the study dated a few decades back from that.
Basically, there was a study that showed people preferred unlimited talk plans (this was pre-mainstream-internet/pre-mobile-phone) even if somebody could sit down with them and prove demonstrably that they would pay less on a metered plan, with their own usage data and not some hypothetical average use case. They valued the potential ability to talk to their friends and family as long as they wanted without worrying about how many minutes they had left or feeling like they needed to end the call soon more than they did the general surplus cash it was proven to them that they would have -- even with occasional bursts of overages.
I wouldn't say that it "overrides logic" per se, but it is certainly a psychological thing. There's value to that too; I don't think that one should underestimate the power of "psychological things."
If you don't understand why he picked five Supreme Court justices as not believing bribing politicians is wrong, you have no leg to stand on to call people stupid.
"'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
Let's assume that's a perfectly fair position and take everything else they said at face value just to avoid the argument.
Did anybody else notice that absolutely nothing they said was an advantage of foreign workers has anything to do with a better product and everything to do with what they are denying--namely, that it is all about the money? Diligence and industrial skills? These are essentially assembly line workers, give me a break. Even if they were somehow superior at putting Widget A into Slot A, all that affects is the number of returns Apple would have to deal with. Annoying, yes. Costly, yes. A better product? No. Everybody receiving a properly-assembled product would receive a product of identical quality either way.
Flexibility, and their little story? Cute I guess, if you think a society where workers sleep at their jobs and are at their boss' beck and call literally 24/7 is something to be proud of. Still, again, nothing about quality. With American workers Apple would have had to... what? Wait until morning? Hell, let's call it significantly worse and say they would have had to wait for re-training or something and it would have taken a month. Better product? Again, no. Just better timing -- for Apple.
None of their comments are about a better product, but all of them, even just at a cursory examination, are very much about money. Returns and defective products hurt the bottom line. Delays hurt the bottom line, especially if it causes them to miss an event like Christmas or their little Apple love-fest get-togethers. Paying more for workers obviously hurts the bottom line. And that is, of course, just setting aside the question of whether anything they said is actually true.
Maybe that's good enough. I'm not here to argue it. I simply don't enjoy being lied to by corporate shills. Of course it's about the money. If you care nothing about American workers and just maximizing your profits, fine -- but have the fucking balls to say so. Don't spew some bullshit and hope you fool people who aren't paying attention.
The Slashdot Double-Standard will be in full effect.
I'm not sure that it is a double standard. Corporations--believe it or not--are supposed to exist for the public good. It used to be that that meant more than just "sell products that people like enough not to go out of business." Insofar as the corporations are serving what I consider to be the public good, why should I oppose them? If they are not serving the public good, the reasons to oppose them should be crystal clear.
I do believe "corporations + politics = bad," for the same reason that I believe a dictatorship is bad: Even if it is going great now --think of how much good a benevolent and insightful dictator could do--there is no guarantee it will be good tomorrow. If all corporations ever did was promote the public good, I'd love for them to be involved. I think it is an admirable goal. Unfortunately, we all know otherwise.
"Corporations + politics = bad" is a safety net, it is the broad-stroke cut, it is the recognition of the fact that one bad apple spoils the bunch. It is the utterly unnuanced opinion. I for one would love to take a more nuanced opinion, but unfortunately nuance tends to turn into loophole and get abused. It's safer this way.
So yeah, my general position is that corporations should be kept out of politics. They should not have free speech rights. They should not be able to donate to political campaigns or set up or participate in PACs or any other process intended to influence governance. But I'm also not going to give a shit if Microsoft wants to support gay rights, because my goal was never to keep corporations out of politics -- my goal was to ensure corporations create and promote public good or at least do not harm it (and yes, I realize that evaluation is subjective). Keeping corporations out of politics was the means, not the end.
I'm not a purist. I don't believe there is anything in a programming language that works fine and yet should never, ever be used. If it is appropriate, use it.
Obviously I only see the fragment of code you put there (and in all probability you made it up on the spot rather than taking it from an existing codebase) but when I see that level of nesting and then you're still not happy with where the code ends up my first instinct isn't "gosh, a goto would work great here." It's "is this program really structured well?" I'm honestly having trouble thinking of why you would need to nest three levels deep and yet do so in a function without a return value. It sounds like a goto here would just be taking the place of a return value and a switch.
In any event, my main objection is your attitude. You dismiss calls that it may be sloppy and then declare you use a goto because you want to do exactly what goto does (well no shit, why else would you use it?) and then go on some rant about potential moderations and insult people who might disagree with you as girlie parrots incapable of arriving at a conclusion without regurgitating something they were told by a professor and yet don't understand. I wonder if there is any kind of middle ground to be had? Naaaah.
Gotos usually are sloppy. If there really is no way to refactor something into a way that doesn't need one, or it is really so egregiously difficult to do that it is not worth the time to do so at any point, so be it -- use it. Usually they are a crutch for bad flow. Insulting people for acknowledging that does not change it. If you are one of those magical programmers who use gotos and yet never misuse them, congratulations. Without knowing you or anything about you, though, I am more inclined to think it's a case of illusory superiority.
The only way to fix this issue, is to go on the offensive, and passing legislation that will prevent such crap, and neutralizing the content industry and its assaults.
There is no way to prevent such crap. Even if by some miracle they did exactly what you wanted, the only change SOPA 2 would have to see would be a line at the top saying: "This law supercedes and nullifies, in all respects, the No SOPA Ever We Promise Act of 2012." Why do you think it will magically go away if one set of corporate powers wins instead of another? The RIAA isn't going to slink off with its tail between its legs, it's just going to try again until it succeeds.
Pitting one corporate power against another is better than nothing, I guess, but it is hardly a solution. The good thing about SOPA--for those who opposed it--is that it was just such a bad bill. I don't know what happens when a largely identical but slightly less retarded version shows up a year from now. Will these companies continue to stand against it? Can they?
Frankly I'm not even sure what a solution would be. There are a lot of reforms we could (hypothetically) make to our political system, many to great effect, but I'm not sure how you combat this. It's easy to call this corruption, that groups like the RIAA buy themselves some congressmen and go to town, but I don't think it is. I think it's ignorance. Huge companies that make metric ass-tons of money and employ a lot of people--in a country that products very little aside from IP--says they need some laws enacted to help protect their bottom line and the jobs and tax money they provide. That is going to get a lot of support right out of the gate, and it puts the onus on others to explain why it's bad. It looks like we may have done so, for current iterations of SOPA -- but as soon as a less retarded version comes along, it's going to pass and I just don't know what you do about that.
Your statements are extremely loaded ones. They are like a slippery slope argument, except that you have skipped over the slippery slope entirely and simply found yourself at the bottom of the hill going "shit, that happened fast."
The point being that there probably should be an attempt made to hinder online piracy in some way.
I might agree with you.
We can't just let it spiral completely out of control, to the point where it's no longer lucrative to produce anything.
But then you lost me. For starters, can you provide some evidence that piracy is spiraling completely out of control? To be sure, the widespread adoption of the Internet and the increasingly quick download speeds were a boon to piracy, but I see no evidence that things are "spiraling out of control." If anything I think we're close to an equalibrium point.
Second, the idea that it is not lucrative to produce anything, or even that we may one day arrive at such a point, is so far-fetched that it is really not even worth addressing. Crap like Farmville and Maffia Wars are making a mint. Good, independent games like Magicka are too -- even when they are on nearly perpetual sale through avenues like Steam (which, by the way, the wider adoption of high-speed Internet also made possible). Modern Warfare 3 made over a billion dollars in two weeks. Battlefield 3 has sold eight million copies in its first month. Games like World of Warcraft keep on chugging, bringing in millions of dollars in subscription fees alone. If you want to claim people are only buying them because of the heavy multiplayer value, look no further than a game like Batman: Arkham City bringing in 1.5 million units in sales in its first month. There is no shortage of money to be made with decent games that people want, and if you think that is going to magically change then the onus is on you to prove it.
the fact they buy games as well as pirate them simply suggests that they like games so much that they acquire them by any means possible
Actually, I agree completely with you. A lot of piracy is a collector mentality. What I can't understand is why you start there and leap to some sort of need for technological means to censor the Internet. If these collector-types had to pay for every game they had, do you really think they would do so? I don't. They're going to pay for roughly the same amount of games as they did before, since that is obviously the point at which they have decided they can afford to purchase. The rest they will simply do without. You may consider that a win; "if you don't want to pay for it, you don't deserve it." In its own way, that's certainly fair enough. But when we have to enact legislation to protect that model, where nobody is being harmed to begin with and suddenly we have Internet censorship and life-destroying lawsuits flying around--not to mention the incredible costs of doing so, both to the publishers, the pirates, society as a whole and the opportunity costs of everything we're doing (Congress really has nothing better to debate for months? I thought our economy might be sucking, but I guess I'm wrong), I do not consider it to be a very good idea at all. Getting over the indignation and realizing they were never going to pay you for those games to begin with, now that is a good idea.
If the RIAA, MPAA et al wanted to increase their profits, that's easy: Reduce the prices. No, it will not eliminate piracy; nothing will, including these proposed laws (Piracy up in France despite three strikes law"). It will bring them more buyers. Piracy is, like almost everything else, at least partially a supply and demand issue, but publishers are unwilling to consider the idea that gambling on getting a huge chunk of an entertainment budget rather than virtually guaranteeing a s
Because, assuming the bill is permanent (instead of a one-off authorization) you have created $400,000 in government debt hoping that you recover that much from the TSA. Any year they recover less, you're in the hole. And of course there would need to be another portion of the bill directing the TSA to return what it does collect to the government at large, since they are currently keeping it in their own coffers.
Now granted, $400,000 in the scope of the government is a rounding error, but why let a problem exist when the solution is as simple as "however much you collect, donate that?"--which is basically what this bill says.
on the other hand, some would say he had balls for standing up to the oppressors.
He does.
he stands up for what he thinks is right, and you say "well, it's your own fault" when he gets deported?
It is. They are not mutually exclusive.
I support people standing up for whatever they believe in, and I certainly support this guy's cause. At the same time, I have no idea where this notion that one should be free from consequences if they are doing what they feel is right has come from. It is not a thing to be proud of, but it is a reality. Black people were arrested and beaten constantly standing up for their rights in the civil rights area. I'm sure none of them wanted to be, and but I also don't remember them going on about how they were in disbelief that they were arrested for breaking the law. They expected it. That was their way of standing up and drawing attention to how bad things were.
So yes, he is welcome to stand up to oppressors, but he has to also be willing to accept the consequences of doing so. That's pretty much the crux of the whole "taking a stand" thing; if you're only doing it with the expectation there will never be consequences, you're not exactly going out on a limb are you? Frankly he should be quite happy with the results. Things aren't too bad for him and he has made the news nationally and internationally. That's damn close to a best case scenario for people hoping to effect change.
Don't get me wrong, I think the whole thing is stupid, especially over something as stupid as SOPA.
But do you have a source for calling an embargo an act of war? If it were a blockade that would certainly be an act of war, but refusing to let people in your country buy/sell another country's products seems to be within sovereign discretion.
My reasoning is really much simpler than that: Price.
I have used Windows 7. I like it. I would prefer it, particularly as I will be building a new PC in the new week or two and do not particularly relish dropping XP back on it. But I also want Professional, and so the question becomes not "is Windows 7 better than XP?" but "do I want Windows 7 $140 worth?" Thus far, the answer has been no.
Ironically, they offer a full upgrade version (download only) with a student discount for $64.95. I am not a student, unfortunately, and do not have a EDU email to make it through their verification process. If they wanted to offer me that price anyway, I would take it. Instead they want double, and for at least the last year and possibly into the future are simply missing a sale instead.
I'd say I'm 50-50. If I had to try to explain it simply, I would say that I am much more likely to document why code is doing something (and increasingly so the less obvious that gets) than what it is doing. In most cases I expect the what to be evident from the code. The why may or may not be depending on the complexity of the task and system.
I don't think that evaluating the elegance of the code is entirely unreasonable. If nothing else, it aids maintainability, particularly as the original developers of projects move on and new people have to get up to speed with the code base.
However, it should not be a primary concern. Those would probably be performance/scalability and speed of development, the order of which varies person to person and project to project.
To the OP: PHP is a fine language overall. It is not particularly elegant, but it does scale pretty well compared to alternatives and it also is easy to get started with, and has very good documentation. The most frustrating part of it is probably that there are some annoying internal inconsistencies. The one that always ends up getting to me is stristr( $haystack, $needle ) for checking if one string is contained in another versus in_array( $needle, $haystack ) for checking if an element is contained in an array. The argument reversal is just frustrating.
So far as PHP frameworks, the one I have used the most is CodeIgniter. It is not bad, neither in features nor in learning curve, and it is reasonably fast. I have also heard some good things about Yii, but do not have personal experience with it.
I personally really enjoy Ruby and Ruby on Rails as language/framework, but I can not deny that there are scalability issues sooner than with PHP, and it is also harder to find cheap web hosts that support it well if that is a factor. It is a beautiful language though, and you can get a basic website up and running at lightning speed. In my experience it is also a very hot language with good job prospects if that is a goal. Some people worry about using it for their projects because of the comparably small number of developers for it, but those that do typically pay quite well.
Bottom line: If the only reason you are not using PHP is other peoples' disdain, screw them. It is a fine choice. If you want somebody else to pick the best choice for you and your project, we can not do it; we lack the information, if nothing else, and all you will get is a bunch of replies about peoples' pet frameworks. You seem to like PHP, so go with that. Google "best PHP frameworks" and I am sure you will turn up a chart somewhere comparing a bunch of them for you and you can make the choice from there. All I would really concern myself with is a nice bit of database abstraction (so that it can handle SQL injection issues for you) and performance; the rest is choice or gravy on top. I personally prefer ones that do not have a specific template language and instead just allow me to continue to use PHP in my views. I do not see the advantage of learning yet another "language" and abstracting further away from the code that is ultimately going to be run, but if you do that is your choice.
You are really going to try to draw some kind of equivalence between "the left and mainstream media" labeling people racist, crazy or what-have-you and the government labeling people terrorists?
Are you really that naive, or did you think nobody would notice?
Completely legal? If you're going to make a statement like that, you really ought to have more to back it up than "I can practically guarantee [it] is in their terms of service." Even if that were true (and it probably is), one can not write a terms of service that allows violation of federal law and declare it perfectly legal.
To me, this sounds an awful lot like election tampering: The coordinated effort of a group of companies/individuals to deny access to voting information in an effort to deny the vote. If you do not believe that is the intention, what is the point? Why were there comments about how the candidates were going to go apeshit over it? There is a very real case to be made here, and these companies are not going to be so stupid as to do it much less try to hide behind their TOS.
Maybe they would get away with it. They are big, powerful companies, and some politicians may worry that pursuing it in the first place would make them look bad (particularly if they lost the primary/caucus). But it is certainly not "game, set, match." It is extremely risky, and from my personal perspective also downright immoral. I am not much of a fan of politics or elections in the US, and I oppose SOPA, but I do not support tampering with the voting process regardless of the means or the rationale.
But it seems to me as if in our society we preferred that people stick to their decisions, rather than change their mind if there's overwhelming evidence that they've been wrong. Does it make sense?
No. I agree with you. I've often thought the same about politics; how "flip-flopper" has become one of the most dirty words in politics, as if changing ones mind was reprehensible.
However, the kind of change of mind that you're referring to is usually accompanied by two things: First, an admission that you were wrong. There is really no way to change your mind based on the facts without admitting that you had the wrong, or incomplete, facts, or at the very least that you weighed them improperly. Politicians almost always fail here, which is why I think they get tagged as "flip-flopping" rather than changing their mind.
The second is some explanation as to what changed their mind. In the case of GoDaddy, for example, it wasn't as if the necessary facts about SOPA weren't out there or weren't known to them, and thus it is difficult to believe that even their professed--and wholly disingenuous--change of mind is actually a change of mind. They've changed no opinion. This is, quite literally, folding to pressure, and that is not the same thing. (In GoDaddy's case they haven't even really done that, but that is neither here nor there.)
Yes, I want people, and corporations, to be able to change their mind and admit then they were wrong. But step #1 in that process is changing their mind, not just saying so.
Slashdot Mirror
And Apple would move operations to Indonesia or Vietnam or wherever the next exploitable labor market is. The point of a potential boycott of Apple is not to raise Chinese labor standards; no disrespect to the Chinese, but the point isn't making things better for them by trying to hit a moving target. Rather, the purpose is to get American companies like Apple not to travel the world looking for exploitable labor in the first place. If that means they bring some jobs back to America, so much the better.
Now, there are still plenty of criticisms to offer. Primarily, as you mentioned, people want low prices -- historically people are not willing to pay increased product costs at a level sufficient to justify increased labor costs. There are also arguments to be made about world markets and that the people employed by these companies, while exploited by our standards, actually live fairly well by their own local standards. They're valid arguments; they may even be the right arguments, but they are not relevant in terms of who consumers should boycott if they want to try to enact change anyway.
Further, Apple is probably the perfect target. They do not deal in commodity-priced goods; if people are going to plunk down $200 or more for a new iPhone, I doubt they're going to balk at paying $20 more every few years when they upgrade, not the same way people would balk when we're talking about necessities like food or clothing in any event. Likewise, we just had an article about Apple posting something like an 18 billion dollar profit in one quarter. I'm not suggesting that companies are not entitled to profits or that it would be healthy for them to operate at 0 profit, but let's be realistic here: If there's a company who can afford to eat some higher manufacturing costs without passing them on if they wanted, it's Apple. And they could probably get some incredibly good PR for it, too. "It's not our job to solve America's problems" ends up with, well, thoughts of organizing boycotts. Instead they could have latched on to an issue that could have silenced a lot of their critics in one fell swoop.
Yes. For example, I have had much success identifying self-important twats with superiority compelxes by their incessant need to talk about how much smarter they are than anybody who uses Facebook or Twitter.
Was there a takedown order involved? Admittedly I only read the summary, but all it mentions is YouTube's automated software. Universal may be infringing this groups copyright with regard to the music, but they DO have a copyright on their own video and they could argue--very easily--that they did not request any takedown nor did they make any affirmation that would fall under perjury.
And in fact, regardless of the specific facts of this case, there's your loophole. Labels will just get sites like YouTube to run some software to do the dirty work for them, dumping some cash to them to help "defray operating expenses" and operate under plausible deniability with regards to any such law or the perjury provisions of the DMCA. After all, YouTube is free to have whatever policies they want with regard to what material they host on their own website, so they don't need a DMCA request. Sufficient bags of money under the table solves it nicely for everybody.
So why are you here?
Apparently, the reporting is bad. It's slow. it's biased. It's a hive-mind. Antiquated. Outdated. Hypocritical. A bubble. A linux advocacy masquerading as a news site. The moderation system has been openly subverted by trolls and the site itself infiltrated by Google and Google well-wishers. No commenters come here except to reaffirm their opinions with the rest of the hive.
Yet here you are. I don't understand it.
...ooh. Got it. By the way, that over there is a mirror bud, give it a shot some time.
It's not the same thing, as other posters have mentioned, but hell, I'll do it: Time for a windfall profits tax.
This, on the heels of their attempt to pretend outsourcing most of their work force is about "making the best product" despite giving absolutely no examples other than things that save them money or make their little abuse-the-workers penises big, like the idea of corporate dormitories that the Chinese will wake up for them at any hour and force their employees into a twelve hour shift.
Really, guys? Somewhere in your 14 BILLION dollar profit-- last quarter --you couldn't find the funds to hire a couple of Americans? Fuck you. Time to go Robin Hood on fucks like this.
That sounds good, but in practice how do you show that somebody knows something? Even if you can show that they used to know something, and that could be hard enough, it is no guarantee that they still do. Particularly under the stress of interrogation and potentially devastating legal consequences. There is a not-insignificant portion of the US population who undergoes test anxiety, or more generically performance anxiety. Can you imagine somebody like that under questioning? And it's not hard to believe that the ridiculously ramped up level of stress between "my history exam!" and "life imprisonment!" would create a whole swath of people who suddenly have performance anxiety who never did before. And I mean legitimately, not people claiming it.
In essence, it is like the legal concept that ignorance is not a defense. I think if we're being truly fair, truly impartial and truly in the pursuit of justice that there are quite a number of situations where ignorance should be an excuse. But it's too easy to simply say "I didn't know!" whether you did or not, and too hard to prove to the contrary, so we as a society just wrap the whole thing up in a ball and throw it out. Ignorance is no excuse; if we believe you, maybe we will choose to reflect it in sentencing (depending on whether or not your DA is running for that Senate seat next year, most likely). I don't see the situation with a password as any different.
The bottom line is, for some reason geeks (or maybe just the Slashdotter subset) loves technicalities. "I'll just tell them I don't remember, how can they prove it? rofl rofl rofl." Actually the best example of that probably comes about with file sharing. Most of us will admit that, technically speaking, the best you can hope for is to track infringement to a specific IP address and no further. "What if I had house guests? What if I have an open WAP? What if there are multiple people living in the house?" They're valid in their own ways, but the courts really aren't going to give a shit. They are not going to let a loophole that large, and that simple, go by. Justice is justice for both sides; making certain types of crimes (or torts) literally impossible to pursue is just not going to happen. Best case, the onus will be on you to prove something like that, for all of the "innocent until proven guilty!" complaints that will raise.
Having to prove what knowledge is in somebody's mind is just not a tenable strategy, and "oop, guess encryption just wins in all cases where it contains the primary evidence" is never going to fly. Frankly if we want anything less than "you must decrypt the drive in all circumstances, period," we had better get on the ball in coming up with a more realistic test, because that's what we're likely to get otherwise.
I'm going to join the other poster in requesting a source, because my understanding has always been that while they may not be able to demand the combination from you, they can instead demand that you open the safe (assuming a valid court order of course). The analogy is perfect with our encryption key situation, but the conclusion is directly opposite depending on which of us is correct.
Most worthless reply I have ever seen on Slashdot. Congratulations sir.
I haven't forgotten my passwords per se (though sometimes I don't remember which one I used for a specific site; hey guys, how about you tell me your fucking password requirements when I'm trying to log in and I'll remember?).
But I do have one particular password that I actually couldn't write down for you. I can type it, based largely on muscle memory. I can even tell you what the password is, but I will screw up the capitalization every time. If, say, I'm laying on my bed with my laptop and trying to one-hand-peck the password in, I'll get it wrong. I have to sit up and let both hands do their things. It's a really strange mental block.
Yup, you're right. In fact I remember a discussion about exactly this phenomenon in a Telecommunications Economics class I took in college. The class was about six years ago but the study dated a few decades back from that.
Basically, there was a study that showed people preferred unlimited talk plans (this was pre-mainstream-internet/pre-mobile-phone) even if somebody could sit down with them and prove demonstrably that they would pay less on a metered plan, with their own usage data and not some hypothetical average use case. They valued the potential ability to talk to their friends and family as long as they wanted without worrying about how many minutes they had left or feeling like they needed to end the call soon more than they did the general surplus cash it was proven to them that they would have -- even with occasional bursts of overages.
I wouldn't say that it "overrides logic" per se, but it is certainly a psychological thing. There's value to that too; I don't think that one should underestimate the power of "psychological things."
If you don't understand why he picked five Supreme Court justices as not believing bribing politicians is wrong, you have no leg to stand on to call people stupid.
"'We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
Let's assume that's a perfectly fair position and take everything else they said at face value just to avoid the argument.
Did anybody else notice that absolutely nothing they said was an advantage of foreign workers has anything to do with a better product and everything to do with what they are denying--namely, that it is all about the money? Diligence and industrial skills? These are essentially assembly line workers, give me a break. Even if they were somehow superior at putting Widget A into Slot A, all that affects is the number of returns Apple would have to deal with. Annoying, yes. Costly, yes. A better product? No. Everybody receiving a properly-assembled product would receive a product of identical quality either way.
Flexibility, and their little story? Cute I guess, if you think a society where workers sleep at their jobs and are at their boss' beck and call literally 24/7 is something to be proud of. Still, again, nothing about quality. With American workers Apple would have had to... what? Wait until morning? Hell, let's call it significantly worse and say they would have had to wait for re-training or something and it would have taken a month. Better product? Again, no. Just better timing -- for Apple.
None of their comments are about a better product, but all of them, even just at a cursory examination, are very much about money. Returns and defective products hurt the bottom line. Delays hurt the bottom line, especially if it causes them to miss an event like Christmas or their little Apple love-fest get-togethers. Paying more for workers obviously hurts the bottom line. And that is, of course, just setting aside the question of whether anything they said is actually true.
Maybe that's good enough. I'm not here to argue it. I simply don't enjoy being lied to by corporate shills. Of course it's about the money. If you care nothing about American workers and just maximizing your profits, fine -- but have the fucking balls to say so. Don't spew some bullshit and hope you fool people who aren't paying attention.
I'm not sure that it is a double standard. Corporations--believe it or not--are supposed to exist for the public good. It used to be that that meant more than just "sell products that people like enough not to go out of business." Insofar as the corporations are serving what I consider to be the public good, why should I oppose them? If they are not serving the public good, the reasons to oppose them should be crystal clear.
I do believe "corporations + politics = bad," for the same reason that I believe a dictatorship is bad: Even if it is going great now --think of how much good a benevolent and insightful dictator could do--there is no guarantee it will be good tomorrow. If all corporations ever did was promote the public good, I'd love for them to be involved. I think it is an admirable goal. Unfortunately, we all know otherwise.
"Corporations + politics = bad" is a safety net, it is the broad-stroke cut, it is the recognition of the fact that one bad apple spoils the bunch. It is the utterly unnuanced opinion. I for one would love to take a more nuanced opinion, but unfortunately nuance tends to turn into loophole and get abused. It's safer this way.
So yeah, my general position is that corporations should be kept out of politics. They should not have free speech rights. They should not be able to donate to political campaigns or set up or participate in PACs or any other process intended to influence governance. But I'm also not going to give a shit if Microsoft wants to support gay rights, because my goal was never to keep corporations out of politics -- my goal was to ensure corporations create and promote public good or at least do not harm it (and yes, I realize that evaluation is subjective). Keeping corporations out of politics was the means, not the end.
Double standard? Maybe. I don't see it that way.
I'm not a purist. I don't believe there is anything in a programming language that works fine and yet should never, ever be used. If it is appropriate, use it.
Obviously I only see the fragment of code you put there (and in all probability you made it up on the spot rather than taking it from an existing codebase) but when I see that level of nesting and then you're still not happy with where the code ends up my first instinct isn't "gosh, a goto would work great here." It's "is this program really structured well?" I'm honestly having trouble thinking of why you would need to nest three levels deep and yet do so in a function without a return value. It sounds like a goto here would just be taking the place of a return value and a switch.
In any event, my main objection is your attitude. You dismiss calls that it may be sloppy and then declare you use a goto because you want to do exactly what goto does (well no shit, why else would you use it?) and then go on some rant about potential moderations and insult people who might disagree with you as girlie parrots incapable of arriving at a conclusion without regurgitating something they were told by a professor and yet don't understand. I wonder if there is any kind of middle ground to be had? Naaaah.
Gotos usually are sloppy. If there really is no way to refactor something into a way that doesn't need one, or it is really so egregiously difficult to do that it is not worth the time to do so at any point, so be it -- use it. Usually they are a crutch for bad flow. Insulting people for acknowledging that does not change it. If you are one of those magical programmers who use gotos and yet never misuse them, congratulations. Without knowing you or anything about you, though, I am more inclined to think it's a case of illusory superiority.
There is no way to prevent such crap. Even if by some miracle they did exactly what you wanted, the only change SOPA 2 would have to see would be a line at the top saying: "This law supercedes and nullifies, in all respects, the No SOPA Ever We Promise Act of 2012." Why do you think it will magically go away if one set of corporate powers wins instead of another? The RIAA isn't going to slink off with its tail between its legs, it's just going to try again until it succeeds.
Pitting one corporate power against another is better than nothing, I guess, but it is hardly a solution. The good thing about SOPA--for those who opposed it--is that it was just such a bad bill. I don't know what happens when a largely identical but slightly less retarded version shows up a year from now. Will these companies continue to stand against it? Can they?
Frankly I'm not even sure what a solution would be. There are a lot of reforms we could (hypothetically) make to our political system, many to great effect, but I'm not sure how you combat this. It's easy to call this corruption, that groups like the RIAA buy themselves some congressmen and go to town, but I don't think it is. I think it's ignorance. Huge companies that make metric ass-tons of money and employ a lot of people--in a country that products very little aside from IP--says they need some laws enacted to help protect their bottom line and the jobs and tax money they provide. That is going to get a lot of support right out of the gate, and it puts the onus on others to explain why it's bad. It looks like we may have done so, for current iterations of SOPA -- but as soon as a less retarded version comes along, it's going to pass and I just don't know what you do about that.
Your statements are extremely loaded ones. They are like a slippery slope argument, except that you have skipped over the slippery slope entirely and simply found yourself at the bottom of the hill going "shit, that happened fast."
I might agree with you.
But then you lost me. For starters, can you provide some evidence that piracy is spiraling completely out of control? To be sure, the widespread adoption of the Internet and the increasingly quick download speeds were a boon to piracy, but I see no evidence that things are "spiraling out of control." If anything I think we're close to an equalibrium point.
Second, the idea that it is not lucrative to produce anything, or even that we may one day arrive at such a point, is so far-fetched that it is really not even worth addressing. Crap like Farmville and Maffia Wars are making a mint. Good, independent games like Magicka are too -- even when they are on nearly perpetual sale through avenues like Steam (which, by the way, the wider adoption of high-speed Internet also made possible). Modern Warfare 3 made over a billion dollars in two weeks. Battlefield 3 has sold eight million copies in its first month. Games like World of Warcraft keep on chugging, bringing in millions of dollars in subscription fees alone. If you want to claim people are only buying them because of the heavy multiplayer value, look no further than a game like Batman: Arkham City bringing in 1.5 million units in sales in its first month. There is no shortage of money to be made with decent games that people want, and if you think that is going to magically change then the onus is on you to prove it.
Actually, I agree completely with you. A lot of piracy is a collector mentality. What I can't understand is why you start there and leap to some sort of need for technological means to censor the Internet. If these collector-types had to pay for every game they had, do you really think they would do so? I don't. They're going to pay for roughly the same amount of games as they did before, since that is obviously the point at which they have decided they can afford to purchase. The rest they will simply do without. You may consider that a win; "if you don't want to pay for it, you don't deserve it." In its own way, that's certainly fair enough. But when we have to enact legislation to protect that model, where nobody is being harmed to begin with and suddenly we have Internet censorship and life-destroying lawsuits flying around--not to mention the incredible costs of doing so, both to the publishers, the pirates, society as a whole and the opportunity costs of everything we're doing (Congress really has nothing better to debate for months? I thought our economy might be sucking, but I guess I'm wrong), I do not consider it to be a very good idea at all. Getting over the indignation and realizing they were never going to pay you for those games to begin with, now that is a good idea.
If the RIAA, MPAA et al wanted to increase their profits, that's easy: Reduce the prices. No, it will not eliminate piracy; nothing will, including these proposed laws (Piracy up in France despite three strikes law"). It will bring them more buyers. Piracy is, like almost everything else, at least partially a supply and demand issue, but publishers are unwilling to consider the idea that gambling on getting a huge chunk of an entertainment budget rather than virtually guaranteeing a s
Because, assuming the bill is permanent (instead of a one-off authorization) you have created $400,000 in government debt hoping that you recover that much from the TSA. Any year they recover less, you're in the hole. And of course there would need to be another portion of the bill directing the TSA to return what it does collect to the government at large, since they are currently keeping it in their own coffers.
Now granted, $400,000 in the scope of the government is a rounding error, but why let a problem exist when the solution is as simple as "however much you collect, donate that?"--which is basically what this bill says.
He does.
It is. They are not mutually exclusive.
I support people standing up for whatever they believe in, and I certainly support this guy's cause. At the same time, I have no idea where this notion that one should be free from consequences if they are doing what they feel is right has come from. It is not a thing to be proud of, but it is a reality. Black people were arrested and beaten constantly standing up for their rights in the civil rights area. I'm sure none of them wanted to be, and but I also don't remember them going on about how they were in disbelief that they were arrested for breaking the law. They expected it. That was their way of standing up and drawing attention to how bad things were.
So yes, he is welcome to stand up to oppressors, but he has to also be willing to accept the consequences of doing so. That's pretty much the crux of the whole "taking a stand" thing; if you're only doing it with the expectation there will never be consequences, you're not exactly going out on a limb are you? Frankly he should be quite happy with the results. Things aren't too bad for him and he has made the news nationally and internationally. That's damn close to a best case scenario for people hoping to effect change.
Don't get me wrong, I think the whole thing is stupid, especially over something as stupid as SOPA.
But do you have a source for calling an embargo an act of war? If it were a blockade that would certainly be an act of war, but refusing to let people in your country buy/sell another country's products seems to be within sovereign discretion.
Lost an equal sign there; your code is incrementing every day in month 5 (and also every year).
My reasoning is really much simpler than that: Price.
I have used Windows 7. I like it. I would prefer it, particularly as I will be building a new PC in the new week or two and do not particularly relish dropping XP back on it. But I also want Professional, and so the question becomes not "is Windows 7 better than XP?" but "do I want Windows 7 $140 worth?" Thus far, the answer has been no.
Ironically, they offer a full upgrade version (download only) with a student discount for $64.95. I am not a student, unfortunately, and do not have a EDU email to make it through their verification process. If they wanted to offer me that price anyway, I would take it. Instead they want double, and for at least the last year and possibly into the future are simply missing a sale instead.
I'd say I'm 50-50. If I had to try to explain it simply, I would say that I am much more likely to document why code is doing something (and increasingly so the less obvious that gets) than what it is doing. In most cases I expect the what to be evident from the code. The why may or may not be depending on the complexity of the task and system.
I don't think that evaluating the elegance of the code is entirely unreasonable. If nothing else, it aids maintainability, particularly as the original developers of projects move on and new people have to get up to speed with the code base.
However, it should not be a primary concern. Those would probably be performance/scalability and speed of development, the order of which varies person to person and project to project.
To the OP: PHP is a fine language overall. It is not particularly elegant, but it does scale pretty well compared to alternatives and it also is easy to get started with, and has very good documentation. The most frustrating part of it is probably that there are some annoying internal inconsistencies. The one that always ends up getting to me is stristr( $haystack, $needle ) for checking if one string is contained in another versus in_array( $needle, $haystack ) for checking if an element is contained in an array. The argument reversal is just frustrating.
So far as PHP frameworks, the one I have used the most is CodeIgniter. It is not bad, neither in features nor in learning curve, and it is reasonably fast. I have also heard some good things about Yii, but do not have personal experience with it.
I personally really enjoy Ruby and Ruby on Rails as language/framework, but I can not deny that there are scalability issues sooner than with PHP, and it is also harder to find cheap web hosts that support it well if that is a factor. It is a beautiful language though, and you can get a basic website up and running at lightning speed. In my experience it is also a very hot language with good job prospects if that is a goal. Some people worry about using it for their projects because of the comparably small number of developers for it, but those that do typically pay quite well.
Bottom line: If the only reason you are not using PHP is other peoples' disdain, screw them. It is a fine choice. If you want somebody else to pick the best choice for you and your project, we can not do it; we lack the information, if nothing else, and all you will get is a bunch of replies about peoples' pet frameworks. You seem to like PHP, so go with that. Google "best PHP frameworks" and I am sure you will turn up a chart somewhere comparing a bunch of them for you and you can make the choice from there. All I would really concern myself with is a nice bit of database abstraction (so that it can handle SQL injection issues for you) and performance; the rest is choice or gravy on top. I personally prefer ones that do not have a specific template language and instead just allow me to continue to use PHP in my views. I do not see the advantage of learning yet another "language" and abstracting further away from the code that is ultimately going to be run, but if you do that is your choice.
You are really going to try to draw some kind of equivalence between "the left and mainstream media" labeling people racist, crazy or what-have-you and the government labeling people terrorists?
Are you really that naive, or did you think nobody would notice?
Completely legal? If you're going to make a statement like that, you really ought to have more to back it up than "I can practically guarantee [it] is in their terms of service." Even if that were true (and it probably is), one can not write a terms of service that allows violation of federal law and declare it perfectly legal.
To me, this sounds an awful lot like election tampering: The coordinated effort of a group of companies/individuals to deny access to voting information in an effort to deny the vote. If you do not believe that is the intention, what is the point? Why were there comments about how the candidates were going to go apeshit over it? There is a very real case to be made here, and these companies are not going to be so stupid as to do it much less try to hide behind their TOS.
Maybe they would get away with it. They are big, powerful companies, and some politicians may worry that pursuing it in the first place would make them look bad (particularly if they lost the primary/caucus). But it is certainly not "game, set, match." It is extremely risky, and from my personal perspective also downright immoral. I am not much of a fan of politics or elections in the US, and I oppose SOPA, but I do not support tampering with the voting process regardless of the means or the rationale.
No. I agree with you. I've often thought the same about politics; how "flip-flopper" has become one of the most dirty words in politics, as if changing ones mind was reprehensible.
However, the kind of change of mind that you're referring to is usually accompanied by two things: First, an admission that you were wrong. There is really no way to change your mind based on the facts without admitting that you had the wrong, or incomplete, facts, or at the very least that you weighed them improperly. Politicians almost always fail here, which is why I think they get tagged as "flip-flopping" rather than changing their mind.
The second is some explanation as to what changed their mind. In the case of GoDaddy, for example, it wasn't as if the necessary facts about SOPA weren't out there or weren't known to them, and thus it is difficult to believe that even their professed--and wholly disingenuous--change of mind is actually a change of mind. They've changed no opinion. This is, quite literally, folding to pressure, and that is not the same thing. (In GoDaddy's case they haven't even really done that, but that is neither here nor there.)
Yes, I want people, and corporations, to be able to change their mind and admit then they were wrong. But step #1 in that process is changing their mind, not just saying so.