Actually, copyright is not that simple. It is a complex collection of rights that applies to many things. This case is the photographic equivalent of recording and selling a cover song. A cover song is not a copy of the original expression of the music, but it is a copy of the content of the music. This case involves a copy of the content of a photograph, rather than the original expression of that content.
And guess what? Cover songs are, and have long been, covered by copyright law. Recording a cover song requires a mechanical license. The judge in this case seems to be extending that concept to the world of photography.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that it's nothing new.
I've just been scanning this thread, and I just want to chime in with one comment for you. Firefox rocks. I have used it for years, and have no plan to change that. I have not experienced the problems that others around here are complaining about. For me, it just works, at least as well as any other browser I've tried, and certainly better than certain ones.
I'm sure you hear enough complaints that I thought maybe you'd want to hear from one of the great many of us who are just silently using and enjoying what you've worked so hard on.
I wish they had responded to its funnier predecessor (no link because it has expired and is no longer visible on the website):
We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.
Since these petitions are ignored apart from an occasional patronizing and inane political statement amounting to nothing more than a condescending pat on the head, we the signers would enjoy having the illusion of success. Since no other outcome to this process seems possible, we demand that the White House immediately assign a junior staffer to compose a tame and vapid response to this petition, and never attempt to take any meaningful action on this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.
True. Clicking on the 'Bookmarks' menu is much harder to figure out than that.
The bookmark example was obviously a simplistic example. The point was that this indexes functionality within applications, not just applications and documents.
I like the example in TFS: why the heck is someone too clueless to use menus going to be searching for 'radial blur' in Gimp?
It has nothing to do with being "too clueless to use menus". It has to do with applications that have tons of functionality buried in nested levels of menus. If you know what you want to do, but don't remember which 8th-level sub-menu it's buried in, then why not let the OS find it for you?
Sounds more like they are taking an existing tech, that was never really promoted, and promoting it, rather than actually producing something new.
If you watch the video, you'll see that they've expanded on the idea. It's not just an app/document finder, it's a functionality finder.
For example, I'm using Firefox right now. Let's say I can't remember how to add a bookmark. I would pop up the HUD box and start typing "bookmark", and just a few letters in I would see something like "Bookmark > Bookmark this page", which I would select.
I can't speak for OSX, but the Windows launcher functionality, while really helpful, does not do that.
Wrong. Once you legally redefine the word marriage all sorts of follow on side effects begin. Tolerance ends and acceptance on pain of government begins. Catholic Church doesn't believe it is right? Tough. Won't matter once the law changes, they will give em a full church wedding and place a child in their care through their adoption agency or the Justice Dept cornholes em.
No. No. No. No. How many times must this stupid argument be thrown around?
Look. Right now, the Catholic Church does not allow a marriage to occur if one of the partners is divorced. Similarly, Jewish synagogues will not marry a Jew to a non-Jew. However, both of these marriages are allowed by law. In your little world, where the legal requirement is forced upon the religious institutions, how is this possible? The DOJ should've forced these types of marriages on these institutions a long, long, long time ago.
But they didn't. Why? Because what the law allows is never, and has never been, forced upon religious institutions. If the law allows same-sex marriage, many churches will continue to disallow it, and the law will do nothing about that. Just like it always has.
Legalizing same sex marriage has absolutely zero impact on anyone other than adult homosexuals who choose to marry their same-sex partner. It will not impact you (assuming you're heterosexual), your church, your own marriage, or anything or anyone else. And for the record, I'm writing this from a country that already allows same-sex marriage, so I'm not just speculating here, I'm describing reality.
You're not actually arguing in favour of "goto". You're arguing in favour of structured jump constructs. In some languages, such as C, "goto" just happens to be the way that certain structured constructs are implemented. Please read my other comment in this thread. When I said that coding with a "goto" makes code more obfuscated, I was referring to unstructured jumps, which is what is actually being discussed when "goto" is being criticized.
Programming always involves trade-offs. Coding with a "goto" makes code more obfuscated. However, if your project prioritizes performance over maintainability of code, and a "goto" increases performance, then it's the right trade-off to make.
People misunderstand the point of the whole "goto is evil" thing. It's not that jumping around in code is evil. No program of any real value can run sequentially from start to finish. You have to jump around to do anything useful. Conditional processing, iteration, function calls, and exception handling all involve jumps of one kind or another. Whether the language calls it "goto" or gives it a different name doesn't change the fact that it's a jump.
However, there are a set of logical, structured jump patterns that have been well defined over the decades which produce readable, understandable, debuggable, extendable, logical code. These patterns include the constructs I described previously. Some languages have specific keywords for these constructs, while others rely on the keyword "goto" for their implementation. There's nothing wrong with using "goto" to implement one of these logical patterns, if that's how the pattern is implemented in that particular language.
However, it is possible in languages that have a "goto", to execute a jump that is outside of these known patterns. These illogical, seemingly random jumps result in code that is confusingly obfuscated, and consequently more error-prone, as well as harder to extend.
So, when people say "goto is evil", they're really saying "unstructured jumps are evil". Using such a construct might accomplish what you're trying to accomplish, but it will generally do so at the expense of readability, maintainability, and extendability of the code.
And yes, any language, whether it has a "goto" or not, can be abused by a properly (un)skilled programmer to create a chaotic mess of spaghetti code.
However, it sounds like the [thieves?] just re-shrinkwrapped it and returned it, so they didn't open it to check.
Shrink-wrapped or not, they don't always check the merchandise being returned. I bought a camcorder from Future Shop once, tried it out a bit, then decided to return it. The clerk barely glanced at the box, and definitely didn't open it. As it happens, someone else was trying to return the exact same camcorder right next to me because it was defective, but the store was out of that camcorder, so they didn't have another one to exchange with— except for the one that I was returning. I pointed out to the clerk handling them that I was returning the same camcorder, so they could exchange for it, which they did. Neither the clerk handling my return nor the clerk handling the other customer's exchange opened the box. I could've been returning a box full of rocks, and they would've happily sold it to this other customer right in front of me with no questions asked.
Future Shop is one of the few remaining stores that doesn't require you to give name/address/phone# on every return (they ask for it, but they accept "no" as an answer with no further questions). I hope scams like this don't cause them to get tougher on that policy.
Why is slashdot ignoring the blackout? With so many links to questionable content, this illegal news source seems like a hive of crime.
Get it right, it's not "a hive of crime," it's "a wretched hive of scum and villany."
A filthy hole in the wall frequented by anarchists, atheists, hackers, and Microsoft haters who would like nothing more than to bring about the fall of democracy and ruin denobug's slashdot experience.
I see it as more of a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.
Actually, I think a lot of politicians these days are bought on a "try before you buy" basis. The way it works is that the politician does the bidding of a particular organization while he's in power, then when he's no longer in power, he finds a really nice high-pay/low-work executive job waiting for him at, coincidentally, that same organization.
If (well, when) that happens, all of those who are blacking out today simply need to do it again. And again. And again. Eventually, people will start to get really annoyed with the politicians writing bills that keep blacking out the interwebs, and those politicians will start worrying about their reelection prospects.
Activism is like dieting. If you just try it once, then continue living your life the way you were before, nothing will change. All of those who are serious about stopping SOPA need to stay serious about it.
That's not what "security through obscurity" means. That's just damage control and PR. "Security through obscurity" means that the system's security is designed such that it only works if its implementation is unknown to attackers. Unfortunately, people frequently throw the phrase around whenever a situation like this occurs, further diluting the phrase to the point that it has become almost meaningless.
This isn't security through obscurity. This is an attempt to mitigate the damage while the flaw is being patched. Security through obscurity would be if they chose not to solve it, relying instead on nobody figuring it out.
Generally, a database flaw like this is of relatively minor concern for exactly that reason. In order for the flaw to be exploited, the attacker has to already have gotten past other layers of security. However, there is a pretty damaging aspect to this flaw: you don't need admin access to exploit it. Anyone with the ability to query the database can do damage. Obviously, anyone who gets that far is already in a position to do some serious damage even without this flaw, but it does add some insult to injury.
Personally, I think the use of an explicit boolean to flag the "not found" condition makes the code much clearer. That's actually one of the main arguments against unstructured use of GOTO. The code is generally more readable and maintainable if you don't use GOTO. In your Java example, it is quite clear, even without looking at the loop code, that the code after the loop will only execute if the item is not found. This is not clear in the C/C++ example using GOTO, where it is necessary to look at the loop code to understand the code that follows it.
Obviously this is a simple example, but it does demonstrate how an unstructured jump provides at least a little obfuscation, where a more structured approach provides clarity.
The Python case just looks odd to me. There's nothing about a loop construct that necessitates an "else" condition. Obviously, I understand what you're doing in that example thanks to the previous two examples, but if I were to just look at the Python code on its own, I'd be at a loss to figure out what the "else" even means. Logically, the "else" should belong to the "if", which would indicate that the string literal would be printed each time that X was not equal to 12 (meaning it prints 10 times). The indentation suggests that it belongs with the "for", but given that "for" is a loop construct, not a conditional construct, what does "else" even mean in that context? It's very bizarre.
Basically, I can see some (limited) value in the construct, but I disagree with that implementation.
I doubt my house would even show up on the ground texture, but that'd be fun, too.
I never played the last version of Flight Sim, but it seems to me that for at least a handful of cities, they used satellite (or maybe just aerial) photos of the cities for ground texture, so if your city happens to be one of those, then yes, your house would be visible.
Of course, photorealistic cities are probably among the items you would have to purchase for the new Flight.
The problem is that nobody knows those numbers in advance, so it takes some estimation followed by tinkering with the prices to finally find that optimal price. For any new product, this takes time. However, each movie is a new product that will not stay on the market (i.e. in the cinema) long enough to determine that optimal price. So they take the lazy way out and charge the same price across the board, and hope that it more or less optimizes in the aggregate.
Once you look at video, which has a much longer life, you'll notice that prices suddenly do start to vary depending on the expected saleability of the particular product.
In short, supply and demand don't factor at the box office, and the studios make so much money off the blockbusters that it's not worth the effort to optimize price for the bombs. Especially when they use Hollywood Accounting(tm) to screw over everyone who has a financial interest in the film anyway.
Xerox PARC hasn't existed for a long time. PARC was sold off. It is not affiliated with Xerox and lacks most of what made Xerox PARC cool in the first place.
PARC is now an independent entity, which is not the same as being sold off. It now researches on behalf of other entities besides Xerox, but Xerox remains its largest customer.
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
Bingo. Remove P2P from the equation, and people will share copyright videos using other means (just like they did before P2P).
Why not just encrypt the database files on HDD and memory directly? That way database can still act really fast and you can use any existing database software.
A few key phrases from TFA: "...a trick that keeps the info safe from hackers, accidental loss and even snooping administrators... a useful trick if you need to perform operations on health care or financial data in a situation like cloud computing, where the computer (or the IT administrator) doing the calculations can’t always be trusted to access the private numbers being crunched".
Kind of reminds me of a couple of times as I'm being hired on, being asked by the H.R. personnel "So, how much did you make at your last position? We need to know so your pay can stay aligned, and remain comfortable with your payscale."
The correct answer is "not enough, which is why I'm here."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, copyright is not that simple. It is a complex collection of rights that applies to many things. This case is the photographic equivalent of recording and selling a cover song. A cover song is not a copy of the original expression of the music, but it is a copy of the content of the music. This case involves a copy of the content of a photograph, rather than the original expression of that content.
And guess what? Cover songs are, and have long been, covered by copyright law. Recording a cover song requires a mechanical license. The judge in this case seems to be extending that concept to the world of photography.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just that it's nothing new.
I've just been scanning this thread, and I just want to chime in with one comment for you. Firefox rocks. I have used it for years, and have no plan to change that. I have not experienced the problems that others around here are complaining about. For me, it just works, at least as well as any other browser I've tried, and certainly better than certain ones.
I'm sure you hear enough complaints that I thought maybe you'd want to hear from one of the great many of us who are just silently using and enjoying what you've worked so hard on.
I wish they had responded to its funnier predecessor (no link because it has expired and is no longer visible on the website):
We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.
Since these petitions are ignored apart from an occasional patronizing and inane political statement amounting to nothing more than a condescending pat on the head, we the signers would enjoy having the illusion of success. Since no other outcome to this process seems possible, we demand that the White House immediately assign a junior staffer to compose a tame and vapid response to this petition, and never attempt to take any meaningful action on this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.
True. Clicking on the 'Bookmarks' menu is much harder to figure out than that.
The bookmark example was obviously a simplistic example. The point was that this indexes functionality within applications, not just applications and documents.
I like the example in TFS: why the heck is someone too clueless to use menus going to be searching for 'radial blur' in Gimp?
It has nothing to do with being "too clueless to use menus". It has to do with applications that have tons of functionality buried in nested levels of menus. If you know what you want to do, but don't remember which 8th-level sub-menu it's buried in, then why not let the OS find it for you?
Sounds more like they are taking an existing tech, that was never really promoted, and promoting it, rather than actually producing something new.
If you watch the video, you'll see that they've expanded on the idea. It's not just an app/document finder, it's a functionality finder.
For example, I'm using Firefox right now. Let's say I can't remember how to add a bookmark. I would pop up the HUD box and start typing "bookmark", and just a few letters in I would see something like "Bookmark > Bookmark this page", which I would select.
I can't speak for OSX, but the Windows launcher functionality, while really helpful, does not do that.
Wrong. Once you legally redefine the word marriage all sorts of follow on side effects begin. Tolerance ends and acceptance on pain of government begins. Catholic Church doesn't believe it is right? Tough. Won't matter once the law changes, they will give em a full church wedding and place a child in their care through their adoption agency or the Justice Dept cornholes em.
No. No. No. No. How many times must this stupid argument be thrown around?
Look. Right now, the Catholic Church does not allow a marriage to occur if one of the partners is divorced. Similarly, Jewish synagogues will not marry a Jew to a non-Jew. However, both of these marriages are allowed by law. In your little world, where the legal requirement is forced upon the religious institutions, how is this possible? The DOJ should've forced these types of marriages on these institutions a long, long, long time ago.
But they didn't. Why? Because what the law allows is never, and has never been, forced upon religious institutions. If the law allows same-sex marriage, many churches will continue to disallow it, and the law will do nothing about that. Just like it always has.
Legalizing same sex marriage has absolutely zero impact on anyone other than adult homosexuals who choose to marry their same-sex partner. It will not impact you (assuming you're heterosexual), your church, your own marriage, or anything or anyone else. And for the record, I'm writing this from a country that already allows same-sex marriage, so I'm not just speculating here, I'm describing reality.
You're not actually arguing in favour of "goto". You're arguing in favour of structured jump constructs. In some languages, such as C, "goto" just happens to be the way that certain structured constructs are implemented. Please read my other comment in this thread. When I said that coding with a "goto" makes code more obfuscated, I was referring to unstructured jumps, which is what is actually being discussed when "goto" is being criticized.
Programming always involves trade-offs. Coding with a "goto" makes code more obfuscated. However, if your project prioritizes performance over maintainability of code, and a "goto" increases performance, then it's the right trade-off to make.
People misunderstand the point of the whole "goto is evil" thing. It's not that jumping around in code is evil. No program of any real value can run sequentially from start to finish. You have to jump around to do anything useful. Conditional processing, iteration, function calls, and exception handling all involve jumps of one kind or another. Whether the language calls it "goto" or gives it a different name doesn't change the fact that it's a jump.
However, there are a set of logical, structured jump patterns that have been well defined over the decades which produce readable, understandable, debuggable, extendable, logical code. These patterns include the constructs I described previously. Some languages have specific keywords for these constructs, while others rely on the keyword "goto" for their implementation. There's nothing wrong with using "goto" to implement one of these logical patterns, if that's how the pattern is implemented in that particular language.
However, it is possible in languages that have a "goto", to execute a jump that is outside of these known patterns. These illogical, seemingly random jumps result in code that is confusingly obfuscated, and consequently more error-prone, as well as harder to extend.
So, when people say "goto is evil", they're really saying "unstructured jumps are evil". Using such a construct might accomplish what you're trying to accomplish, but it will generally do so at the expense of readability, maintainability, and extendability of the code.
And yes, any language, whether it has a "goto" or not, can be abused by a properly (un)skilled programmer to create a chaotic mess of spaghetti code.
However, it sounds like the [thieves?] just re-shrinkwrapped it and returned it, so they didn't open it to check.
Shrink-wrapped or not, they don't always check the merchandise being returned. I bought a camcorder from Future Shop once, tried it out a bit, then decided to return it. The clerk barely glanced at the box, and definitely didn't open it. As it happens, someone else was trying to return the exact same camcorder right next to me because it was defective, but the store was out of that camcorder, so they didn't have another one to exchange with— except for the one that I was returning. I pointed out to the clerk handling them that I was returning the same camcorder, so they could exchange for it, which they did. Neither the clerk handling my return nor the clerk handling the other customer's exchange opened the box. I could've been returning a box full of rocks, and they would've happily sold it to this other customer right in front of me with no questions asked.
Future Shop is one of the few remaining stores that doesn't require you to give name/address/phone# on every return (they ask for it, but they accept "no" as an answer with no further questions). I hope scams like this don't cause them to get tougher on that policy.
Why is slashdot ignoring the blackout?
With so many links to questionable content, this illegal news source seems like a hive of crime.
Get it right, it's not "a hive of crime," it's "a wretched hive of scum and villany."
A filthy hole in the wall frequented by anarchists, atheists, hackers, and Microsoft haters who would like nothing more than to bring about the fall of democracy and ruin denobug's slashdot experience.
I see it as more of a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.
There's also a negative side.
Actually, I think a lot of politicians these days are bought on a "try before you buy" basis. The way it works is that the politician does the bidding of a particular organization while he's in power, then when he's no longer in power, he finds a really nice high-pay/low-work executive job waiting for him at, coincidentally, that same organization.
If (well, when) that happens, all of those who are blacking out today simply need to do it again. And again. And again. Eventually, people will start to get really annoyed with the politicians writing bills that keep blacking out the interwebs, and those politicians will start worrying about their reelection prospects.
Activism is like dieting. If you just try it once, then continue living your life the way you were before, nothing will change. All of those who are serious about stopping SOPA need to stay serious about it.
That's not what "security through obscurity" means. That's just damage control and PR. "Security through obscurity" means that the system's security is designed such that it only works if its implementation is unknown to attackers. Unfortunately, people frequently throw the phrase around whenever a situation like this occurs, further diluting the phrase to the point that it has become almost meaningless.
This isn't security through obscurity. This is an attempt to mitigate the damage while the flaw is being patched. Security through obscurity would be if they chose not to solve it, relying instead on nobody figuring it out.
Generally, a database flaw like this is of relatively minor concern for exactly that reason. In order for the flaw to be exploited, the attacker has to already have gotten past other layers of security. However, there is a pretty damaging aspect to this flaw: you don't need admin access to exploit it. Anyone with the ability to query the database can do damage. Obviously, anyone who gets that far is already in a position to do some serious damage even without this flaw, but it does add some insult to injury.
Personally, I think the use of an explicit boolean to flag the "not found" condition makes the code much clearer. That's actually one of the main arguments against unstructured use of GOTO. The code is generally more readable and maintainable if you don't use GOTO. In your Java example, it is quite clear, even without looking at the loop code, that the code after the loop will only execute if the item is not found. This is not clear in the C/C++ example using GOTO, where it is necessary to look at the loop code to understand the code that follows it.
Obviously this is a simple example, but it does demonstrate how an unstructured jump provides at least a little obfuscation, where a more structured approach provides clarity.
The Python case just looks odd to me. There's nothing about a loop construct that necessitates an "else" condition. Obviously, I understand what you're doing in that example thanks to the previous two examples, but if I were to just look at the Python code on its own, I'd be at a loss to figure out what the "else" even means. Logically, the "else" should belong to the "if", which would indicate that the string literal would be printed each time that X was not equal to 12 (meaning it prints 10 times). The indentation suggests that it belongs with the "for", but given that "for" is a loop construct, not a conditional construct, what does "else" even mean in that context? It's very bizarre.
Basically, I can see some (limited) value in the construct, but I disagree with that implementation.
I doubt my house would even show up on the ground texture, but that'd be fun, too.
I never played the last version of Flight Sim, but it seems to me that for at least a handful of cities, they used satellite (or maybe just aerial) photos of the cities for ground texture, so if your city happens to be one of those, then yes, your house would be visible.
Of course, photorealistic cities are probably among the items you would have to purchase for the new Flight.
The problem is that nobody knows those numbers in advance, so it takes some estimation followed by tinkering with the prices to finally find that optimal price. For any new product, this takes time. However, each movie is a new product that will not stay on the market (i.e. in the cinema) long enough to determine that optimal price. So they take the lazy way out and charge the same price across the board, and hope that it more or less optimizes in the aggregate.
Once you look at video, which has a much longer life, you'll notice that prices suddenly do start to vary depending on the expected saleability of the particular product.
In short, supply and demand don't factor at the box office, and the studios make so much money off the blockbusters that it's not worth the effort to optimize price for the bombs. Especially when they use Hollywood Accounting(tm) to screw over everyone who has a financial interest in the film anyway.
This. We need to stop calling them smartphones. It's a pocket computer. And I got one because I wanted one, not because I needed one.
Hell, I don't really need my home computer, either. But I want it, so I have it.
But the tool that enables piracy on the current scale and scope is not P2P, it's the Internet.
Xerox PARC hasn't existed for a long time. PARC was sold off. It is not affiliated with Xerox and lacks most of what made Xerox PARC cool in the first place.
PARC is now an independent entity, which is not the same as being sold off. It now researches on behalf of other entities besides Xerox, but Xerox remains its largest customer.
The fact that people ignore copyright laws and share copyrighted videos over P2P systems has nothing to do with P2P, and everything to do with the general public's attitudes about copyrights.
Bingo. Remove P2P from the equation, and people will share copyright videos using other means (just like they did before P2P).
Why not just encrypt the database files on HDD and memory directly? That way database can still act really fast and you can use any existing database software.
A few key phrases from TFA: "...a trick that keeps the info safe from hackers, accidental loss and even snooping administrators ... a useful trick if you need to perform operations on health care or financial data in a situation like cloud computing, where the computer (or the IT administrator) doing the calculations can’t always be trusted to access the private numbers being crunched".
Kind of reminds me of a couple of times as I'm being hired on, being asked by the H.R. personnel "So, how much did you make at your last position? We need to know so your pay can stay aligned, and remain comfortable with your payscale."
The correct answer is "not enough, which is why I'm here."