Bottom line is google harvests, formats and makes available this data, which makes them directly liable.
Wow. You read like an RIAA playbook. Google makes no data available, they just link to it. That's what a search engine does. Google doesn't host any copyrighted music, and I'm sure you know that.
You're making excuses for google.
No more than you or anyone else makes for your ISP, when the media conglomerates try to turn them into a private police organization with enforcement powers. Google may "facilitate" infringement (which is the same weak argument that the RIAA has used over and over) but that doesn't mean that what Google does is or should be automatically actionable. Furthermore, copyright is not just about absolute powers granted to rightsholders (although that is their interpretation of copyright's function in society): it's supposed to be about a balance of rights, with We the People intended to be the ultimate beneficiaries.
Google and similar organizations offer society tremendous benefits: should those be tossed by the wayside in order to preserve a legal fiction that serves to benefit wealthy corporations that only wish one thing: to become even more wealthy? At our expense? I don't think so. Personally, I think Google and all search engines should be completely immunized from any lawsuits resulting from their Web-crawling and indexing activities. Put it like this: if you don't want something to get noticed by a search engine... don't publish it in the first place.
Google (and all the other big boys) respect the Robot Exclusion Protocol anyway, so nothing will get indexed directly from your site if you don't wish it to be. That's been the case for a long, long time... nobody has any right to complain that a major search engine is indexing their works without authorization. So, what you're ultimately saying is that Google should be held responsible for other people publishing information on the Web without the rightsholders permission. Let the copyright holders go after those people, since they are the ones who are illegally distributing copyrighted works. What? There's hundreds of thousands of them and we can't afford to go after them all? Well... that's just too goddamn bad. These people think they see a cheap way out by suing the search engine (in the same way the MPAA has gone after Torrent indexers.) The difference here is that a. major search engines offer a lot more than just links to copyrighted material and b. tend to have billions of dollars in the bank.
The world has moved on: the music business is not what it used to be and in fact will never be the same again. If you're a traditional music publisher, take note: attempting to turn back the clock will only hurt lots of people, and won't save you anyway. You need to accept a few facts, and then replace your upper management with people who can think and operate rationally in a radically changed business environment.
Keep in mind that the bloodsuckers who have run our publishing businesses for the past hundred years or so would cheerfully run Google, Yahoo, Bing, Apple and any other major technology corporation out of business if they could, if they perceive even the slightest threat from said companies. That's because they operate criminal organizations who only see their own needs as being of any concern, who wish to continue exploiting their captive creative minds while simultaneously extracting our wallets.
And before you come back and point out that if the big copyright cartels are allowed suffer from infringement, then the little ones will too... well, that's not really the case. Smaller music businesses (ones that see modern telecommunications technology as a competitive edge and not a liability) are doing quite well. Even musicians who have bypassed the conventional route to getting their music out have found t
I agree. But that doesn't change the fact that there aren't enough top-notch people.
It's no different that it is any any field where there's a demand for more good people, but it takes talent, education and experience to create such people. The kind of mind that can be a great programmer can also be great in many other fields (a surprising number of software types are also musicians, for example.) Unless employers accept that they must make the job market attractive to them, they're simply going to go into something else, and no, "smarter" (and I use the term loosely) development tools are not going to make up the difference.
There are a lot of negative consequences to the way corporations are handling their knowledge workers in today's world. I'm not going to get into outsourcing, or H1Bs or anything like that, mainly because they're just symptoms of a greater mental malfunction on the part of our corporate leaders (I use that term even more loosely), not causative in themselves.
If you treat your best and brightest like meat, don't expect them to stick around. Don't expect them to even make the effort to get schooled and gain experience, when they know you'll fuck them over in the end. And certainly don't expect the slightest bit of loyalty. Many corporations demand it from their employees but give little in return, and when employees leave for greener pastures they truly don't understand why. Loyalty is a two-way street: if you don't give it you won't receive it.
It is remarkable how many CEOs don't get that, their belief being that a good engineer should be thrilled to have a job, and certainly shouldn't expect any more than that. I've left a few positions over the years, and the exit interviews usually had my manager and often his or her boss evincing shock that I wasn't just ecstatically happy to be working there. "But... but.... it's a job! Why aren't you groveling at our feet and expressing your heartfelt gratitude?!" The fact that they'd repeatedly lied to me, left an unblemished record of broken promises and generally screwed me into the ground just didn't enter their collective consciousness, such as it was. Here's a hearty "FUCK YOU!" to all such humanoid parasites and their brain-damaged worldview.
America will pay a steep price for allowing our corporations and, for that matter, our schools to make the technical world unappealing and not worth the personal investment. We don't need more lawyers, we sure as Hell don't need more MBAs... we need more engineers and scientists. Or we would, if our corporate masters weren't so busy selling us all out for a buck.
When not eating meat, you have to really think about what you are eating in order to assure that you get enough protein, fats, calcium, iron, and other things that aren't present in a lot of vegetarian foods.
Actually, it's not that difficult, and if you look back at where that anti-vegetarian bias came from, I think you'll find it was deliberately encouraged (if not actually created) by our friends in the meat industry.
The unpleasant truth is that us meat-eaters should be thinking more about what we stuff our faces with: it's not hard with a plant-based diet since everything you eat is generally pretty healthy, it just a matter of having enough variety. But you're wrong about people not being nutrient-poor just because they eat meat. A typical American diet is deficient in a whole host of nutrients, rich in a number of really bad non-nutrients, not to mention the health risks of eating animal protein in general (which far outweigh the danger of a non-optimal vegetarian diet.) I know this because as an American I was raised on that diet... and I'm getting off the bullshit train. I'm hardly a vegetarian yet, but I've cut waaay back on the amount of meat I do eat, and increased the vegetable and fruit component of my intake. I look better and in truth feel better since I started taking care of myself.
The China Study is a book that offers quite a bit of insight into the pros and cons of different diets, and is well worth reading if you're interested in what's really going on in this area.
pumping out out the worst smelling egg gas you could imagine.
Yeah, if you want to go around smelling like raw sewage, eggs'll do it all right. Now, certain dairy products will also do that to me: last time I had a cheese omelette my girlfriend wouldn't talk to me for days. That night I let one off under the covers: big mistake. A couple seconds later her eyes went wide, she uttered a high-pitched screech... and lit out for the bathroom. She wouldn't come out until I'd used a fan to air out the room.
In practice, I don't think PETA's statement should be seen as having the force of a demand.
So what if it is? They don't have the force of, well... anything. They're a group of militant assholes, and there are only two ways to deal with such people: ignore them, and if that doesn't work, lock them up.
There's already plenty of proof that people are willing to pay more for grocery products viewed as superior in some way (Whole Foods for example).
No kidding. The entire "organic" craze, where millions of presumably intelligent people have been convinced, to a degree that most organized religions would envy, that they are buying superior food (as if food grown in shit and half-eaten by pests is in any way better) and are, themselves, morally superior for having made that choice. I suppose it might have made some sense back in the era of DDT and similar nastiness, but times have changed.
I would cheerfully eat vat-grown meat if it were proven safe (that will take some time, in and of itself) and didn't offend my tastes, such as they are. In a way, it's the best of both worlds: we get to eat meat without actually killing a living creature with a brain, thoughts and emotions. That doesn't bother most of us anyway, so why we should be squeamish because our foodstuff comes from a mindless hunk of flesh with no nervous system growing continuously in a tank? Seems to me, from any rational ethical perspective this is a better way to feed ourselves, if we're not to become vegetarians.
Gagh! Who the fuck cares what those militant sociopaths think? Let them stew in their own juices. They're as fundamentally psychotic as the Scientologists... both groups should be put into a room under lock and key, and then somebody should throw away the room.
All it would take for PETA to start attacking anyone that tries to mass-produce vat-grown meat is for some researcher somewhere to "prove" that said lumps of flesh have feelings (unlike the leaders of PETA, who for all intents and purposes are conscienceless.)
It's a very old idea. A. Bertram Chandler's Rim stories, for example, spoke frequently of the "tissue culture vats" that fed the crew and passengers of ships on extended tours. Occasionally, something would happen that the ship's biologist couldn't handle, and the contents would either die, or become something inedible. That was generally very bad, if the ship wasn't near a port.
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain;
Doesn't strike me as a problem. I'm sure the overlap is almost 100% between people who won't eat lab-grown meat once they see it being processed and people who won't eat animal-grown meat once they see it being processed.
Depends. I eventually got over the horror of a grade-school field trip to a hot dog processing plant. I still don't really care for the things, but at least I can consume them on occasion without blowing my lunch. Believe me, after that excursion, becoming a vegetarian seemed like a really good idea.
'Nuff said. If you're going to cite PETA (of all things) as a source then the GP doesn't have to bother refuting you: your podal extremity is already bleeding profusely. I mean, that would be like quoting the MPAA when discussing the benefits of the bit torrent protocol.
'Businesses such as ISPs want to enjoy the benefit of being able to make money out of the provision of Internet service facilities and they enjoy that benefit. But it carries with it a responsibility,' said Tony Bannon SC, the film industry's lawyer.
It's interesting how the content lobby in any country is very keen to assign responsibilities to others when it comes to milking copyrighted works for all they're worth, but when it comes to fulfilling their own responsibilities under the copyright laws of those very same countries, they invariably come up wanting. Matter of fact, they acknowledge no such responsibilities: to the collective minds of the copyright cartel, copyright is an exclusive right belonging only to themselves, not to artists, and certainly not to society as a whole. Furthermore, that right should never, ever expire because, well, they're entitled. It's sickening: the rank odor of corporate hypocrisy has been filling U.S. courtrooms for a number of years over this very issue, and I'm disappointed to see it elsewhere.
However, that particular industry drone is correct, ISPs do indeed have a responsibility: to the people who pay them to provide a quality service. I don't see the copyright cartels offering to pony up some cold, hard cash to offset the costs of all this enforcement... as usual, they want someone else to prop up their obsolete businesses. Personally, I pay some good money for a decent Internet connection, and I'll be damned if I want a single penny of that to go enforcing other people's copyrights! That's not the job of the Internet Service Provider, it's not the job of government, and it's not my job either. That task belongs to those who hold said rights. If they're incapable of enforcing them, or find themselves unable to stay afloat in a world where artificial restrictions on access to creative works have largely vanished, it's up to them to find a way to stay in business or get out of it. George Gilder called this "Creative destruction": some businesses models must go under as casualties of progress. That's the price we pay, and difficult as it is for those who suddenly find themselves left high and dry, civilization moves forward. These selfish pricks are trying to turn back the clock: they're doomed to failure, but they're causing substantial damage on their way down.
If these sociopathic assholes had their way, we'd all still be listening to Edison cylinders. They need to be stopped, and their excessive influence on big government needs to be reined in once and for all, before the damage they're doing becomes permanent.
I can't help thinking that particular grail quest comes from mistaking which part of programming is hard. I can't count how many times I've heard "I could do that if I had the time to learn the language."
Couldn't agree more. Put it this way, programming languages are tools, in the very real sense that they can only serve the needs of their owner, and do nothing on their own. Just as a brush or a pen are only as good as the mind wielding them, a computer language can be no better the programmer working in it. You're right... that's a common misunderstanding even among developers.
If you want to become a programmer, or a good programmer, or a better programmer, effort does pay off. Big time.
If software is your thing, you'll put in the effort without thinking twice. But, see, that's not enough, not if you want to be a truly good programmer, or even a great one.
There are very few great programmers, just like there are very few great painters, mathematicians, scientists of all stripes, writers, musicians, engineers or indeed, those of any creative profession. True art is something rarely achieved even by those who are capable of it. The good news for the mediocre is that, for the most part, what the business world wants is the merely serviceable.
And if they continue down the road described in TFA, that's what they're going to get. The problems, suits are going to expect great results from this particular brand of snake oil (you know how it's going to go: "We just spent thousands of dollars on these tools, and that's the best you can do?") In the end, they will have to pay for the talent they needed, but they'll be out all the time and money they spent trying to avoid hiring said talent in the first place. But that's entirely okay... it just gives any smarter competition a leg up, that's all.
So Entergy's got little reason to concern itself with whether Yankee will work as advertised after relicensing.
That's not really true. It's not the way the legal system works in this country, and you probably know that. Look, if there is an incident under the new ownership, you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll do everything they can to shift liability, at least partially, back to the original owner. That's the way it works, and odds are that they'll be able to do it too, especially if they can show that they performed their own due diligence after the acquisition. It would take years, enrich more than a few trial attorneys, but Entergy would be unlikely to get away unscathed. Consequently, it would behoove the new operators to keep their noses clean.
People have been saying this since FORTRAN meant you didn't need to know assembly language to make use of a computer.
Yes, they have. But at least FORTRAN, for the things that it did do, it did very well. However, in a more modern context dumbed-down languages invariably have severe restrictions on performance and capability, which makes makes them unsuitable for many purposes. Putting that aside for the moment, the reality is that unless you're coding mindlessly-simple applications, coding is hard. It just is, and it takes both skill and talent to pull off a well-written application, and I don't care what language you're talking about. Furthermore, to a skilled developer a dumbed-down language is a liability... it just gets in the way. A better approach to this problem is to identify and train more good programmers, but that costs money and time. Certain people think they see a cheap way out by replacing sophisticated developers and their tools with sophisticated tools and simpleminded developers. Good luck with that.
This all comes down to one faulty but cherished premise (one of many held by today's business community, I might add): that complex, reliable applications can be built by minimally-skilled developers if we can, somehow, just put enough power into the tools. The problem is, the tools aren't the problem, it's the people. In the end, software development is as much an art as it is a science, and there really aren't enough artists to go around.
All such attempts to short-circuit the need for skilled developers are doomed to failure until such time as computers truly can program themselves. Of course, at that point it won't really matter, and most of us software engineers will be slapping burgers anyway.
and hinted that the format of Dymovsky's complaint was a problem, using a medium that remains largely free of government control.
This from the "people who completely miss the point" department. If government control was working so well, this officer would have had no reason not to stay within the (ahem!) "proper" channels.
... and it be far more useful to check for credit card fraud.
Precisely, and that's exactly what the Big Three don't want. If people started checking their credit record at will, and as a matter ordinary household economics, the credit bureaus would be under a lot more pressure to clean up their respective acts. That will cost them lots of money, and they're perfectly happy that 'x" number of us get screwed out of our savings and our credit every year. Otherwise, they would have to actually fix the broken system they've built. There's no incentive whatsoever for them to treat us decently in this respect, mainly because there's no downside to them if we get shafted. Congress, of course, could fix that very easily with effective regulation and enforcement, but it's unlikely that will ever come to pass... too many billions (of our money) on the line.
Furthermore, the corporations that depend upon the credit system (banks and credit-card issuers, for example) want millions of people who don't understand the system, don't understand how to improve their score, or what affects it. That way they can keep milking those people with high interest rates, late charges, and so forth. It's no small potatoes, my friend.
Slashdot Mirror
Bottom line is google harvests, formats and makes available this data, which makes them directly liable.
Wow. You read like an RIAA playbook. Google makes no data available, they just link to it. That's what a search engine does. Google doesn't host any copyrighted music, and I'm sure you know that.
You're making excuses for google.
No more than you or anyone else makes for your ISP, when the media conglomerates try to turn them into a private police organization with enforcement powers. Google may "facilitate" infringement (which is the same weak argument that the RIAA has used over and over) but that doesn't mean that what Google does is or should be automatically actionable. Furthermore, copyright is not just about absolute powers granted to rightsholders (although that is their interpretation of copyright's function in society): it's supposed to be about a balance of rights, with We the People intended to be the ultimate beneficiaries.
... don't publish it in the first place.
... nobody has any right to complain that a major search engine is indexing their works without authorization. So, what you're ultimately saying is that Google should be held responsible for other people publishing information on the Web without the rightsholders permission. Let the copyright holders go after those people, since they are the ones who are illegally distributing copyrighted works. What? There's hundreds of thousands of them and we can't afford to go after them all? Well ... that's just too goddamn bad. These people think they see a cheap way out by suing the search engine (in the same way the MPAA has gone after Torrent indexers.) The difference here is that a. major search engines offer a lot more than just links to copyrighted material and b. tend to have billions of dollars in the bank.
... well, that's not really the case. Smaller music businesses (ones that see modern telecommunications technology as a competitive edge and not a liability) are doing quite well. Even musicians who have bypassed the conventional route to getting their music out have found t
Google and similar organizations offer society tremendous benefits: should those be tossed by the wayside in order to preserve a legal fiction that serves to benefit wealthy corporations that only wish one thing: to become even more wealthy? At our expense? I don't think so. Personally, I think Google and all search engines should be completely immunized from any lawsuits resulting from their Web-crawling and indexing activities. Put it like this: if you don't want something to get noticed by a search engine
Google (and all the other big boys) respect the Robot Exclusion Protocol anyway, so nothing will get indexed directly from your site if you don't wish it to be. That's been the case for a long, long time
The world has moved on: the music business is not what it used to be and in fact will never be the same again. If you're a traditional music publisher, take note: attempting to turn back the clock will only hurt lots of people, and won't save you anyway. You need to accept a few facts, and then replace your upper management with people who can think and operate rationally in a radically changed business environment.
Keep in mind that the bloodsuckers who have run our publishing businesses for the past hundred years or so would cheerfully run Google, Yahoo, Bing, Apple and any other major technology corporation out of business if they could, if they perceive even the slightest threat from said companies. That's because they operate criminal organizations who only see their own needs as being of any concern, who wish to continue exploiting their captive creative minds while simultaneously extracting our wallets.
And before you come back and point out that if the big copyright cartels are allowed suffer from infringement, then the little ones will too
Which raises the question: Is a lawsuit against the two biggest companies in technology cheaper than buying some ads?
Probably, but it's also substantially more dangerous.
So I say to give great developers great tools.
I agree. But that doesn't change the fact that there aren't enough top-notch people.
... but .... it's a job! Why aren't you groveling at our feet and expressing your heartfelt gratitude?!" The fact that they'd repeatedly lied to me, left an unblemished record of broken promises and generally screwed me into the ground just didn't enter their collective consciousness, such as it was. Here's a hearty "FUCK YOU!" to all such humanoid parasites and their brain-damaged worldview.
... we need more engineers and scientists. Or we would, if our corporate masters weren't so busy selling us all out for a buck.
It's no different that it is any any field where there's a demand for more good people, but it takes talent, education and experience to create such people. The kind of mind that can be a great programmer can also be great in many other fields (a surprising number of software types are also musicians, for example.) Unless employers accept that they must make the job market attractive to them, they're simply going to go into something else, and no, "smarter" (and I use the term loosely) development tools are not going to make up the difference.
There are a lot of negative consequences to the way corporations are handling their knowledge workers in today's world. I'm not going to get into outsourcing, or H1Bs or anything like that, mainly because they're just symptoms of a greater mental malfunction on the part of our corporate leaders (I use that term even more loosely), not causative in themselves.
If you treat your best and brightest like meat, don't expect them to stick around. Don't expect them to even make the effort to get schooled and gain experience, when they know you'll fuck them over in the end. And certainly don't expect the slightest bit of loyalty. Many corporations demand it from their employees but give little in return, and when employees leave for greener pastures they truly don't understand why. Loyalty is a two-way street: if you don't give it you won't receive it.
It is remarkable how many CEOs don't get that, their belief being that a good engineer should be thrilled to have a job, and certainly shouldn't expect any more than that. I've left a few positions over the years, and the exit interviews usually had my manager and often his or her boss evincing shock that I wasn't just ecstatically happy to be working there. "But
America will pay a steep price for allowing our corporations and, for that matter, our schools to make the technical world unappealing and not worth the personal investment. We don't need more lawyers, we sure as Hell don't need more MBAs
We genetically modified sentient meat into producing it's own cheese
I think I'm going to be sick.
BRB.
When not eating meat, you have to really think about what you are eating in order to assure that you get enough protein, fats, calcium, iron, and other things that aren't present in a lot of vegetarian foods.
Actually, it's not that difficult, and if you look back at where that anti-vegetarian bias came from, I think you'll find it was deliberately encouraged (if not actually created) by our friends in the meat industry.
... and I'm getting off the bullshit train. I'm hardly a vegetarian yet, but I've cut waaay back on the amount of meat I do eat, and increased the vegetable and fruit component of my intake. I look better and in truth feel better since I started taking care of myself.
The unpleasant truth is that us meat-eaters should be thinking more about what we stuff our faces with: it's not hard with a plant-based diet since everything you eat is generally pretty healthy, it just a matter of having enough variety. But you're wrong about people not being nutrient-poor just because they eat meat. A typical American diet is deficient in a whole host of nutrients, rich in a number of really bad non-nutrients, not to mention the health risks of eating animal protein in general (which far outweigh the danger of a non-optimal vegetarian diet.) I know this because as an American I was raised on that diet
The China Study is a book that offers quite a bit of insight into the pros and cons of different diets, and is well worth reading if you're interested in what's really going on in this area.
This is why the Tenure system was instituted. To prevent dismissals due to political or idealogical reasons.
I'd say it's more along the lines of preventing dismissals for reasons of gross incompetence.
pumping out out the worst smelling egg gas you could imagine.
Yeah, if you want to go around smelling like raw sewage, eggs'll do it all right. Now, certain dairy products will also do that to me: last time I had a cheese omelette my girlfriend wouldn't talk to me for days. That night I let one off under the covers: big mistake. A couple seconds later her eyes went wide, she uttered a high-pitched screech ... and lit out for the bathroom. She wouldn't come out until I'd used a fan to air out the room.
In practice, I don't think PETA's statement should be seen as having the force of a demand.
So what if it is? They don't have the force of, well ... anything. They're a group of militant assholes, and there are only two ways to deal with such people: ignore them, and if that doesn't work, lock them up.
There's already plenty of proof that people are willing to pay more for grocery products viewed as superior in some way (Whole Foods for example).
No kidding. The entire "organic" craze, where millions of presumably intelligent people have been convinced, to a degree that most organized religions would envy, that they are buying superior food (as if food grown in shit and half-eaten by pests is in any way better) and are, themselves, morally superior for having made that choice. I suppose it might have made some sense back in the era of DDT and similar nastiness, but times have changed.
I would cheerfully eat vat-grown meat if it were proven safe (that will take some time, in and of itself) and didn't offend my tastes, such as they are. In a way, it's the best of both worlds: we get to eat meat without actually killing a living creature with a brain, thoughts and emotions. That doesn't bother most of us anyway, so why we should be squeamish because our foodstuff comes from a mindless hunk of flesh with no nervous system growing continuously in a tank? Seems to me, from any rational ethical perspective this is a better way to feed ourselves, if we're not to become vegetarians.
PETA could demand it
Gagh! Who the fuck cares what those militant sociopaths think? Let them stew in their own juices. They're as fundamentally psychotic as the Scientologists ... both groups should be put into a room under lock and key, and then somebody should throw away the room.
All it would take for PETA to start attacking anyone that tries to mass-produce vat-grown meat is for some researcher somewhere to "prove" that said lumps of flesh have feelings (unlike the leaders of PETA, who for all intents and purposes are conscienceless.)
The implications for space travel are cool.
It's a very old idea. A. Bertram Chandler's Rim stories, for example, spoke frequently of the "tissue culture vats" that fed the crew and passengers of ships on extended tours. Occasionally, something would happen that the ship's biologist couldn't handle, and the contents would either die, or become something inedible. That was generally very bad, if the ship wasn't near a port.
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain;
Doesn't strike me as a problem. I'm sure the overlap is almost 100% between people who won't eat lab-grown meat once they see it being processed and people who won't eat animal-grown meat once they see it being processed.
Depends. I eventually got over the horror of a grade-school field trip to a hot dog processing plant. I still don't really care for the things, but at least I can consume them on occasion without blowing my lunch. Believe me, after that excursion, becoming a vegetarian seemed like a really good idea.
I can point to PETA's web site ...
'Nuff said. If you're going to cite PETA (of all things) as a source then the GP doesn't have to bother refuting you: your podal extremity is already bleeding profusely. I mean, that would be like quoting the MPAA when discussing the benefits of the bit torrent protocol.
'Businesses such as ISPs want to enjoy the benefit of being able to make money out of the provision of Internet service facilities and they enjoy that benefit. But it carries with it a responsibility,' said Tony Bannon SC, the film industry's lawyer.
It's interesting how the content lobby in any country is very keen to assign responsibilities to others when it comes to milking copyrighted works for all they're worth, but when it comes to fulfilling their own responsibilities under the copyright laws of those very same countries, they invariably come up wanting. Matter of fact, they acknowledge no such responsibilities: to the collective minds of the copyright cartel, copyright is an exclusive right belonging only to themselves, not to artists, and certainly not to society as a whole. Furthermore, that right should never, ever expire because, well, they're entitled. It's sickening: the rank odor of corporate hypocrisy has been filling U.S. courtrooms for a number of years over this very issue, and I'm disappointed to see it elsewhere.
... as usual, they want someone else to prop up their obsolete businesses. Personally, I pay some good money for a decent Internet connection, and I'll be damned if I want a single penny of that to go enforcing other people's copyrights! That's not the job of the Internet Service Provider, it's not the job of government, and it's not my job either. That task belongs to those who hold said rights. If they're incapable of enforcing them, or find themselves unable to stay afloat in a world where artificial restrictions on access to creative works have largely vanished, it's up to them to find a way to stay in business or get out of it. George Gilder called this "Creative destruction": some businesses models must go under as casualties of progress. That's the price we pay, and difficult as it is for those who suddenly find themselves left high and dry, civilization moves forward. These selfish pricks are trying to turn back the clock: they're doomed to failure, but they're causing substantial damage on their way down.
However, that particular industry drone is correct, ISPs do indeed have a responsibility: to the people who pay them to provide a quality service. I don't see the copyright cartels offering to pony up some cold, hard cash to offset the costs of all this enforcement
If these sociopathic assholes had their way, we'd all still be listening to Edison cylinders. They need to be stopped, and their excessive influence on big government needs to be reined in once and for all, before the damage they're doing becomes permanent.
I can't help thinking that particular grail quest comes from mistaking which part of programming is hard. I can't count how many times I've heard "I could do that if I had the time to learn the language."
Couldn't agree more. Put it this way, programming languages are tools, in the very real sense that they can only serve the needs of their owner, and do nothing on their own. Just as a brush or a pen are only as good as the mind wielding them, a computer language can be no better the programmer working in it. You're right ... that's a common misunderstanding even among developers.
If you want to become a programmer, or a good programmer, or a better programmer, effort does pay off. Big time.
If software is your thing, you'll put in the effort without thinking twice. But, see, that's not enough, not if you want to be a truly good programmer, or even a great one.
... it just gives any smarter competition a leg up, that's all.
There are very few great programmers, just like there are very few great painters, mathematicians, scientists of all stripes, writers, musicians, engineers or indeed, those of any creative profession. True art is something rarely achieved even by those who are capable of it. The good news for the mediocre is that, for the most part, what the business world wants is the merely serviceable.
And if they continue down the road described in TFA, that's what they're going to get. The problems, suits are going to expect great results from this particular brand of snake oil (you know how it's going to go: "We just spent thousands of dollars on these tools, and that's the best you can do?") In the end, they will have to pay for the talent they needed, but they'll be out all the time and money they spent trying to avoid hiring said talent in the first place. But that's entirely okay
So Entergy's got little reason to concern itself with whether Yankee will work as advertised after relicensing.
That's not really true. It's not the way the legal system works in this country, and you probably know that. Look, if there is an incident under the new ownership, you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll do everything they can to shift liability, at least partially, back to the original owner. That's the way it works, and odds are that they'll be able to do it too, especially if they can show that they performed their own due diligence after the acquisition. It would take years, enrich more than a few trial attorneys, but Entergy would be unlikely to get away unscathed. Consequently, it would behoove the new operators to keep their noses clean.
a jar full of fanboy wank
Thanks for the image.
Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
Yes, well, you'll do until he shows up.
People have been saying this since FORTRAN meant you didn't need to know assembly language to make use of a computer.
Yes, they have. But at least FORTRAN, for the things that it did do, it did very well. However, in a more modern context dumbed-down languages invariably have severe restrictions on performance and capability, which makes makes them unsuitable for many purposes. Putting that aside for the moment, the reality is that unless you're coding mindlessly-simple applications, coding is hard. It just is, and it takes both skill and talent to pull off a well-written application, and I don't care what language you're talking about. Furthermore, to a skilled developer a dumbed-down language is a liability ... it just gets in the way. A better approach to this problem is to identify and train more good programmers, but that costs money and time. Certain people think they see a cheap way out by replacing sophisticated developers and their tools with sophisticated tools and simpleminded developers. Good luck with that.
This all comes down to one faulty but cherished premise (one of many held by today's business community, I might add): that complex, reliable applications can be built by minimally-skilled developers if we can, somehow, just put enough power into the tools. The problem is, the tools aren't the problem, it's the people. In the end, software development is as much an art as it is a science, and there really aren't enough artists to go around.
All such attempts to short-circuit the need for skilled developers are doomed to failure until such time as computers truly can program themselves. Of course, at that point it won't really matter, and most of us software engineers will be slapping burgers anyway.
Wow. Talk about swallowing the propaganda.
Wow. Talk about having no sense of humor.
Ah well. Less hypocrisy is not necessarily an improvement. Russia's government is what it is.
your basic local cop is usually not corrupt.
True ... but among those basic uncorrupted officials are some serious assholes. But that's another story.
and hinted that the format of Dymovsky's complaint was a problem, using a medium that remains largely free of government control.
This from the "people who completely miss the point" department. If government control was working so well, this officer would have had no reason not to stay within the (ahem!) "proper" channels.
Typosquirting is also a money making scheme
Yes, I believe that was a feature of the original Zune.
... and it be far more useful to check for credit card fraud.
Precisely, and that's exactly what the Big Three don't want. If people started checking their credit record at will, and as a matter ordinary household economics, the credit bureaus would be under a lot more pressure to clean up their respective acts. That will cost them lots of money, and they're perfectly happy that 'x" number of us get screwed out of our savings and our credit every year. Otherwise, they would have to actually fix the broken system they've built. There's no incentive whatsoever for them to treat us decently in this respect, mainly because there's no downside to them if we get shafted. Congress, of course, could fix that very easily with effective regulation and enforcement, but it's unlikely that will ever come to pass ... too many billions (of our money) on the line.
Furthermore, the corporations that depend upon the credit system (banks and credit-card issuers, for example) want millions of people who don't understand the system, don't understand how to improve their score, or what affects it. That way they can keep milking those people with high interest rates, late charges, and so forth. It's no small potatoes, my friend.