If nothing else, a self-signed certificate presents a smaller attack surface, and it's a single point of verification if I do care about secure communications.
No, the author probably has this inherent mindset that there aren't really other countries, and has to take a split second of thought to realize this. (It's easy to do in the US, and I'd suspect other geographically large countries like Russia and China have the same issue.) It's like seeing a comment about a software bug in the OS: when they don't say what the OS is, it's Windows because lots of Windows users have a similar mindset.
I ran my iPod Nano through a washer-drier cycle quite a few years ago, and for some odd reason it wouldn't work afterwards. I sent it in to Apple Repair, figuring that they'd quote me a repair price and I'd decide what to do then (the iPod was from my mother and engraved with my name, so it had sentimental value), and they sent me back what was apparently a new one, with the engraving formatted differently.
Doesn't matter. Making good APIs is a creative act, and therefore they can be copyrighted. The copyright had better not prevent people from copying the APIs to write software that communicates by the API, or we're in real real trouble, but everybody just assumed that that sort of copying was legal and nobody argued about it. (There was an argument about API copyrightability, and I think it reached a reasonable conclusion.) Oracle argued that Google wasn't copying the APIs to write software that used or implemented the functionality, since the idea was not to have normal Java programs run on Dalvik or Android Java programs run on the JVM, and therefore that Google needs to provide a more conventional fair use defense.
The commercial use of copyrighted APIs is usually based on interoperability. Copyright (at least in the US) is not intended to stop people from doing things, but to stop them from doing things in the same form. If I'm writing software that lives on one side or the other of an API, I have to implement the API, so that's OK. I don't get the right to copy code that I can rewrite my own way.
The problem with this from Google's point of view is that Android Java wasn't designed to be interoperable with Oracle's Java, in the sense that people don't usually write Java programs with the intention that they'll run on the JVM and on Dalvik without change. Oracle argued that Google was copying the APIs in order to give programmers a more familiar environment, rather than allowing interoperability, and this means that Google's fair use argument is weaker than usual.
I'd be reasonably happy with a ruling that APIs are copyrightable, and that they may be copied freely for interoperability. That would allow us to use them as we normally do. That would also leave Google in trouble. The only downside is that it would help Oracle.
That's one reason I went Apple. Before the iPhone, I had a choice of four carriers to screw me. After Apple came in, I had an additional choice, and figured that I'd get a better dinner and show out of Apple.
It's a big company that can afford to spend money on expensive lawyers to go over every customer agreement and make sure it's legal. They can't safely break the law, but they know what's legal or not better than little people do.
Except that contracts have to conform to the law to be valid. I can't contract with you to perform an illegal action or provide certain otherwise legal sexual services, and it happens that we can't form a legal contract that violates Magnusson-Moss.
The fact is that contracts are not self-enforcing, and the only means we have to enforce contracts is the government. The government will enforce certain contracts and not others. Even a libertarian utopia would have to deal with this.
What you seem to be saying is that copyright should go away if the copyright holder refuses to do arbitrarily much additional work on the software. Should third-party copyrights be forfeited also, because they licensed the use of code in a software product that someone else decided to give up on?
How broken is the democratic process as demonstrated by the leaks?
Lots of people talk about the leaks, and how bad they are. Nobody gets specific. Nobody gives me a link to a specific leaked item and says "look here", and I'm not inclined to go through 20K emails myself.
What I've read about them suggests typical internal party politics, which do indeed look ugly. Politics of any sort can get ugly: von Bismarck said "Those who like laws and sausages should watch neither be made". Politics isn't going to be transparent and by-the-book, but it has the distinct advantage of not getting people killed. Right now, there are organizations that want me to give them money, and want me to vote a particular way on a secret ballot. That's a whole lot better than issuing orders or using weapons.
I'm pretty sure that, given similar leaks from other large political organizations, they'd look about as ugly.
Nope. There's evidence that the DNC hack had Russian involvement. It isn't conclusive, but we may never get conclusive evidence on this. I don't think there's actual evidence of Russian state involvement, although it seems like reasonable speculation to me.
Evidence? I've seen so much crap posted about Clinton that I discount it automatically.
Also, "ruined political discourse on the internet"? What internet are you connecting in from? On the one I hang out on, having a large group of people spamming the party line is called "Tuesday", if not one of the six alternate names.
Clinton's connection with the uranium sale is well known. At a time when Russia was acting friendlier than it is now, Clinton, along with several other people, approved a sale that benefited Russia. It was an overt and legal act. I've seen speculation on Clinton's motives, but not on the other participant's motives, so I discount it.
In contrast, we've got a much less friendly Russia, and (inconclusive) evidence that it's committing crimes to influence a US election. I completely fail to see the similarity.
It's a matter of new capabilities, more than new tech, although the tech enables capabilities. Computer advances have reached the point where a five-year-old laptop will do pretty much anything a user wants, so unless the user has a special need (I want to be able to compile as fast as possible, for example) it will do nicely. That doesn't mean advancement has stopped, just that it's largely irrelevant.
With iPhones, I think the advancements have been less in raw power (which is adequate in mine) but better and more hardware. If a 7 was going to be basically a somewhat souped-up version of my 5S, I'd just get my battery changed. Once "they" stop adding major features, there's going to be a lot less interest in upgrading.
The problem with keeping phone models more stable is that the technology changes too fast. My iPhone is about three years old (two generations behind, about to become three), and the current iPhones are significantly more capable machines.
Clear guidelines? There's the Liskov substitution principle. It's expressed technically, but if you're going to do an inheritance hierarchy you do need to know and apply it. Call it an advanced technique if you like, since you can certainly screw things up in an inheritance hierarchy (classes in a hierarchy are VERY closely coupled). The best way to learn it is not to get things wrong until you figure it out, but to learn from more experienced developers.
As far as refactoring goes, things in our domain change (as we add new capabilities, for example), and refactoring is necessary to adapt to that. Having some very good people on staff who get involved in these things, we generally do it right.
You're speculating, unless you have mass telepathic powers. There was no global cooling scare in climate science (there was something of one in the mass media). You refer to "climate scientists in the mass media", but there's lots of climate scientists who are not mentioned, don't get public recognition, are going to get research money, and agree that we're warming the surface of the planet up and it's going to be bad. The less apparent climate scientists are mostly motivated by curiosity, a sense of fun (which I found I couldn't quite get into) and reputation, and the fastest way to gain reputation is to challenge something that looks like settled science and prove yourself right.
You aren't remembering scientific articles, you're remembering scientific journalism at best and probably mostly mass media. There was scientific speculation about global cooling, but it was never anywhere near accepted. There have been mass media reports that are greatly exaggerated, but I don't know of any credible scientific speculation about warming up like Venus. There currently are sensationalistic media reports, because those attract eyeballs.
Before you speculate on the motives of climate scientists, you really need to pay attention to what they themselves are saying, not what people who are going for click-bait say they're saying.
AGW skeptics aren't being censored. Idiots who screw up the facts and think that minor discrepancies that are likely already reconciled disprove the whole science do get downmodded.
No. Given lots of readings with random errors, the average will be much more precise than individual readings, and it makes sense to use the data to more decimal places. Look up the Law of Large Numbers, and pick up a bit of statistics.
That's not how science works. I suspect scientists are more honest than the general population, but one of the really neat things about science is that it has ways to deal with liars. The only way to blame AGW on liars is to assume, without evidence, that almost all climate scientists and most other scientists are liars for some reason, and agree on the same lie. These scientists are from all over the world, from countries with varied political systems, and there's no obvious reason why they'd all agree on the same lie. It's not like there's one central planetary source of scientific funding, for example.
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If nothing else, a self-signed certificate presents a smaller attack surface, and it's a single point of verification if I do care about secure communications.
Did your hack cause the autopilot to malfunction? What would the liability be if you hadn't hacked it and got careless with autopilot?
Then you have to collect, which probably isn't too onerous for a large established company that has assets that are easily found.
No, the author probably has this inherent mindset that there aren't really other countries, and has to take a split second of thought to realize this. (It's easy to do in the US, and I'd suspect other geographically large countries like Russia and China have the same issue.) It's like seeing a comment about a software bug in the OS: when they don't say what the OS is, it's Windows because lots of Windows users have a similar mindset.
I ran my iPod Nano through a washer-drier cycle quite a few years ago, and for some odd reason it wouldn't work afterwards. I sent it in to Apple Repair, figuring that they'd quote me a repair price and I'd decide what to do then (the iPod was from my mother and engraved with my name, so it had sentimental value), and they sent me back what was apparently a new one, with the engraving formatted differently.
Doesn't matter. Making good APIs is a creative act, and therefore they can be copyrighted. The copyright had better not prevent people from copying the APIs to write software that communicates by the API, or we're in real real trouble, but everybody just assumed that that sort of copying was legal and nobody argued about it. (There was an argument about API copyrightability, and I think it reached a reasonable conclusion.) Oracle argued that Google wasn't copying the APIs to write software that used or implemented the functionality, since the idea was not to have normal Java programs run on Dalvik or Android Java programs run on the JVM, and therefore that Google needs to provide a more conventional fair use defense.
The commercial use of copyrighted APIs is usually based on interoperability. Copyright (at least in the US) is not intended to stop people from doing things, but to stop them from doing things in the same form. If I'm writing software that lives on one side or the other of an API, I have to implement the API, so that's OK. I don't get the right to copy code that I can rewrite my own way.
The problem with this from Google's point of view is that Android Java wasn't designed to be interoperable with Oracle's Java, in the sense that people don't usually write Java programs with the intention that they'll run on the JVM and on Dalvik without change. Oracle argued that Google was copying the APIs in order to give programmers a more familiar environment, rather than allowing interoperability, and this means that Google's fair use argument is weaker than usual.
I'd be reasonably happy with a ruling that APIs are copyrightable, and that they may be copied freely for interoperability. That would allow us to use them as we normally do. That would also leave Google in trouble. The only downside is that it would help Oracle.
That's one reason I went Apple. Before the iPhone, I had a choice of four carriers to screw me. After Apple came in, I had an additional choice, and figured that I'd get a better dinner and show out of Apple.
It's a big company that can afford to spend money on expensive lawyers to go over every customer agreement and make sure it's legal. They can't safely break the law, but they know what's legal or not better than little people do.
Except that contracts have to conform to the law to be valid. I can't contract with you to perform an illegal action or provide certain otherwise legal sexual services, and it happens that we can't form a legal contract that violates Magnusson-Moss.
The fact is that contracts are not self-enforcing, and the only means we have to enforce contracts is the government. The government will enforce certain contracts and not others. Even a libertarian utopia would have to deal with this.
Here in the US, it can cost extra to buy your own phone independently from your carrier. I don't know how it works in First World nations.
What you seem to be saying is that copyright should go away if the copyright holder refuses to do arbitrarily much additional work on the software. Should third-party copyrights be forfeited also, because they licensed the use of code in a software product that someone else decided to give up on?
How broken is the democratic process as demonstrated by the leaks?
Lots of people talk about the leaks, and how bad they are. Nobody gets specific. Nobody gives me a link to a specific leaked item and says "look here", and I'm not inclined to go through 20K emails myself.
What I've read about them suggests typical internal party politics, which do indeed look ugly. Politics of any sort can get ugly: von Bismarck said "Those who like laws and sausages should watch neither be made". Politics isn't going to be transparent and by-the-book, but it has the distinct advantage of not getting people killed. Right now, there are organizations that want me to give them money, and want me to vote a particular way on a secret ballot. That's a whole lot better than issuing orders or using weapons.
I'm pretty sure that, given similar leaks from other large political organizations, they'd look about as ugly.
Nope. There's evidence that the DNC hack had Russian involvement. It isn't conclusive, but we may never get conclusive evidence on this. I don't think there's actual evidence of Russian state involvement, although it seems like reasonable speculation to me.
Evidence? I've seen so much crap posted about Clinton that I discount it automatically.
Also, "ruined political discourse on the internet"? What internet are you connecting in from? On the one I hang out on, having a large group of people spamming the party line is called "Tuesday", if not one of the six alternate names.
Got any evidence for the false equivalence?
Clinton's connection with the uranium sale is well known. At a time when Russia was acting friendlier than it is now, Clinton, along with several other people, approved a sale that benefited Russia. It was an overt and legal act. I've seen speculation on Clinton's motives, but not on the other participant's motives, so I discount it.
In contrast, we've got a much less friendly Russia, and (inconclusive) evidence that it's committing crimes to influence a US election. I completely fail to see the similarity.
It's a matter of new capabilities, more than new tech, although the tech enables capabilities. Computer advances have reached the point where a five-year-old laptop will do pretty much anything a user wants, so unless the user has a special need (I want to be able to compile as fast as possible, for example) it will do nicely. That doesn't mean advancement has stopped, just that it's largely irrelevant.
With iPhones, I think the advancements have been less in raw power (which is adequate in mine) but better and more hardware. If a 7 was going to be basically a somewhat souped-up version of my 5S, I'd just get my battery changed. Once "they" stop adding major features, there's going to be a lot less interest in upgrading.
The problem with keeping phone models more stable is that the technology changes too fast. My iPhone is about three years old (two generations behind, about to become three), and the current iPhones are significantly more capable machines.
Clear guidelines? There's the Liskov substitution principle. It's expressed technically, but if you're going to do an inheritance hierarchy you do need to know and apply it. Call it an advanced technique if you like, since you can certainly screw things up in an inheritance hierarchy (classes in a hierarchy are VERY closely coupled). The best way to learn it is not to get things wrong until you figure it out, but to learn from more experienced developers.
As far as refactoring goes, things in our domain change (as we add new capabilities, for example), and refactoring is necessary to adapt to that. Having some very good people on staff who get involved in these things, we generally do it right.
You're speculating, unless you have mass telepathic powers. There was no global cooling scare in climate science (there was something of one in the mass media). You refer to "climate scientists in the mass media", but there's lots of climate scientists who are not mentioned, don't get public recognition, are going to get research money, and agree that we're warming the surface of the planet up and it's going to be bad. The less apparent climate scientists are mostly motivated by curiosity, a sense of fun (which I found I couldn't quite get into) and reputation, and the fastest way to gain reputation is to challenge something that looks like settled science and prove yourself right.
You aren't remembering scientific articles, you're remembering scientific journalism at best and probably mostly mass media. There was scientific speculation about global cooling, but it was never anywhere near accepted. There have been mass media reports that are greatly exaggerated, but I don't know of any credible scientific speculation about warming up like Venus. There currently are sensationalistic media reports, because those attract eyeballs.
Before you speculate on the motives of climate scientists, you really need to pay attention to what they themselves are saying, not what people who are going for click-bait say they're saying.
AGW skeptics aren't being censored. Idiots who screw up the facts and think that minor discrepancies that are likely already reconciled disprove the whole science do get downmodded.
No. Given lots of readings with random errors, the average will be much more precise than individual readings, and it makes sense to use the data to more decimal places. Look up the Law of Large Numbers, and pick up a bit of statistics.
That's not how science works. I suspect scientists are more honest than the general population, but one of the really neat things about science is that it has ways to deal with liars. The only way to blame AGW on liars is to assume, without evidence, that almost all climate scientists and most other scientists are liars for some reason, and agree on the same lie. These scientists are from all over the world, from countries with varied political systems, and there's no obvious reason why they'd all agree on the same lie. It's not like there's one central planetary source of scientific funding, for example.
The software I mostly work on is complicated, and has many thousands of lines. If you'd rather not work on it, that's fine, but somebody's got to.