Fact: Stored procedures, being pre-compiled, perform significantly faster than ad-hoc queries.
Fair enough. But you can pre-compile queries using embedded SQL as well.
Also fact, when you have several different applications performing the similar functions (trust me, happens a lot in large projects), it's a sure-fire way of making sure all apps are doing the same thing. Likewise, if something needs changing/optimizing, it can be changed in one place, instead of hunting down every place the functionality is performed.
That's a good argument for procedures, but it doesn't require the stored part. I'd do that with a shared library full of C functions, a C++ class or a perl module.
There are sensible uses for stored procedures, but there are other ways of centralising your business logic.
Please, Oracle has a ton of features that just aren't there in PostgreSQL
"What metric" is the right question.
But I'm not convinced that the best answer is "comparative length of feature lists". One man's feature is another man's bloat, after all.
I've been writing database apps for a living since 1984. I've worked on trading systems for stockbrokers and multinational merchant banks; I've worked for telecoms giants and for manufacturers. I can't think of a single oracle feature that I've ever needed to use that wasn't available in PostgreSQL.
Admittedly, this has a lot ot do with my style - I'm old school enough that I write my logic in C, C++ or Perl and use the database purely for storing and retrieving data. DBMS vendors (and some database researchers, to be fair) would like coders to do program purely with database packages. I've always though this a supremely boneheaded idea - I trust database designers to design databases, but not progamming langauges thank you.
However, if that approach appeals, then you probably need a lot more features than I do.
But they ain't necessary, and it most assuredly is possible to write non-trivial real-world apps using the PostgreSQL feature set.
Sitting here bitching does a few things. It allows MySQL users a chance to vent a little; it gives MySQL a means to judge user reactions to their collaboration with SCO (they had to expect controversy) and it gives users who might have been unaware of the issues useful information when deciding whether to deploy MySQL. And it gives supporters of MySQL a chance to put the other side of the story.
This is a discussion forum. The point is to discuss issues like this. A lot of that discussion, the side of it that you disagree with, is going to sound like "bitching".
Most of what you say is useful, but STFU is never helpful.
Well, they've done previous charity fundraisers it seems. I'm assuming the cash got there on those occasions. They haven't given any cash in this, but then they haven't had much of a chance what with paypal freezing the account, have they?
And the only assurance that paypal has, that they will, is cause, well, they say so?
Well, yes. Surely most of paypal's ebay
transactions fall into that category.
Does it sometimes step on a real organizations toes? Probably. Sad that they world isnt totally trustworthy.
Unfortunately, paypal has a history of such behaviour. People are beginning to add paypal to the "isn't totally trustworthy list". Personally, I lost faith in PayPal after they tried to abscond with the tip jar for the AbiWord project.
But, in a world where people DO scam, isnt it better to try and keep that a little in check?
Perhaps. But if they're going to assume responsiblity for such actions, they should also
assume responsibility for their mistakes. And they should have some sort of customer services
department. Actual people you can talk to on the phone who are empowered to sort out problems like this.
When they deliberately hide behind submission forms, people are apt to wonder if the scammers in this case are not paypal themselves.
Or is your Gripe "OMG! Paypal hasnt INSTANTLY fixed my problem, OVER THE WEEKEND?"
I think they problem is that it happened at all. And that it keeps on happpening for a lot of people.
"Indie is just another word for crappy, unmarketable, and unpresentable".
Of course, there's no shortage of "crappy" in mainstream, too, so that's a bit of a null factor,
Good music sells itself
Record companies aren't in the business of making records, and they don't need to sell them, since good music sells itself. It almost makes you wonder how these record companies justify the massive slice of the revenue they take.
Most of the people who I've met who like "indie" music are impressed with their trucker hats and "vintage" t-shirts, doing what they do simply to be "different", failing to realize they're just like every other "indie" kid in the room.
Put that waym it sounds a lot like punk. Or just about every youth music fad since Rock and Roll. Probably earlier.
Call me a communist, but I'm not entirely convinced myself that easy-to-market is a sufficent and necessary indicator of quality, talent or... well of anything except ease of marketing, really.
To understand more about CEO's rent "Gorillas in the Mist" and pay close attention to the silverback male.
Yes, primate alpha male behaviour.
I'm not sure if you're offering this as insight or justification. In any case, here's another
piece of oddball primate social behavour to
consider:
In baboon troupes, it's been known for high ranking females to kill babies belonging to low caste females. Nasty habit, but makes sense genetically, I suppose.
But that's one primate habit we don't condone amongst outselves. So why should we excuse Ballmer acting like a prick?
You see, there are reasons, which I won't repeat here, why really big companies with monopoly powers can't "abuse" those powers. Under "greed is good"/AynRand-esque theories a company can never abuse its position in any way,
Reminds me of a business model I came up with a while back. Basically, you get into the manufacturing business. Doesn't matter what, but best if it's low skilled and labour intensive. Then you hire a bunch of guys with trucks and guns and
have them abduct a workforce for you - just round up a few hundred folk at gunpoint, herd 'em into the trucks and chain them to their posts. Then you work them to death.
When they do drop dead, you go and kidnap replacements and work them to death too. You'd want to do some studies to see if was more cost effective to feed your workforce, or let them starve to death rather than die through exhaustion.
You get cheap labour, and since anything the company does is sacrosanct, you've done nothing wrong.
Supposedly.
We don't need absolutes in order to consider the common good - just broad consensus. The sort of thing that tells us that it's a bad idea people to go around murdering other people, or that stealing should be discouraged. The same sort of consensus that lets us have broad agreement on matters of
aesthetics, even though individual tastes may differ in specific cases.
The only reason anyone reads Ayn Rand is that she supplies emotional support for people who really want to be completely shitty to everyone they meet, but who worry in case they'd feel bad about it afterwards. Interesting as a juvenile fantasy, perhaps, but as a serious way to structure a society? She's about on a level with John Norman and his Gor books, IMHO.
So many posters here seem to be obsessed with this fatalist "there's nothing you can do about it, so get used to it" meme. It's almost reminiscent of the John Carpenter film "They Live" where all the posters carry subliminal messages: Obey! Conform! Consume!
So it's nice to see another slashdotter who doesn't subscribe to the inevitability of corporate corruption.
This poster did this to me a few days back: pick a post and follow it up with a cut-and-paste of some unconnected right-wing propaganda, slightly edited replacing references to large groups with slashdot.
Check out the posting history - there's a definite pattern.
I think you're describing the ideology of capitalism, rather than capitalism in practice.
The trouble is that capitalism is, or rather should be a purely descriptive term referring to an economic system.
When people start to consider capitalism as an "ideology" if moves out of the realm of economics and into that of religion.
This is a bad thing, since economic strategy should be based on pragmatic considerations and hard facts, rather than blind faith and dogma.
On the other hand, if you ty to justify crushing the competition in terms of rational economics, it sounds silly since you are forced to confront the fact that the benefits of a capitalis system derive largely from the existence of a number of competing firms.
Sounds good, but I think we could usefully take that further.
I'd like to see software patents outlawed in their entirety; along with
business methods, interfaces, etc. I'd also like to review the entire
patent idea and see if we can do without patents altogether,
Agreed on copyright, but I'd bring the protection time down for software,
purely because the field advances so fast. Say 10 years non-renewable.
If your Unix box is a member of an Active Directory domain with lots of accounts (where "lots of" is "more than 1,000"), that user lookup takes forever. Guess what: every time you do an "ls -l", that lookup happens for each line.
Surely that's just a bug in the ls implementation. It's trivial to cache the user details. And since it already knows the output format it doesn't even have to cache the whole of struct passwd. In fact for modern architectures it should be possible to
hold/etc/passwd in memory. Admitedly, it's going to cause problems with old machines, but old machines are going to have to expect a performance hit dealing with systems with 10k users or so.
Still, I take your point. getpwent and its kin are optimised for systems that run a relatively small number of users. Still good for desktop use and most SMEs, but it may not scale gracefully to large Enterprises.
This is the first I've heard of this, and it's rather ironic.
Indeed. Their choice of name seems cynical and manipulative in light of their
publication list.
The AdTI has taken a few potshots at Linux and Open Source in general. The one that caught my attention was the paper by
Ken Brown entitled Samizdat where he claimed that Linux Torvalds based used code from Minix as the basis for Linux. Subsequent investigation showed that Brown grossly msirepresented the position of those he interviewded in his research, including Andrew Tannenbaum, the author of Minux who told Brown in no uncertain terms that this was not the case.
It is a measure of how laughably skewed the paper was that even Microsoft came ot dismiss the report as being less than helpful.
Seriously when did people get this idea that you should be able to say whatever you want and never have any consequences?
You know, the GP only contained three lines. One of them was blank and one of them was a quote.
This is what it said:
"The Internet is not your personal stump to beat up people."
Actually, that's one of the greatest strengths of the internet. True freedom of speech.
So I have to ask: what part of that did you read as saying "people should not be held accountable for acts of libel committed using the Internet"?
Why should you be allowed to go around staring negative rumours about your business competitors?
Sounds like standard practice to me. Nothing Jonathan Schwartz doesn't do fairly routinely
in his blog, as far as I can see. I'll not start on Microsoft and their sponsorship of groups like the Alexis de Tocqueville institute or I'll e here all night.
How would you like your boss to lie to a future employer that you got fired for drug abuse or for having kiddie porn?
Interesting. One moment we're talking about deating the relative merits of a competitors
product, the next: kiddie porn!
I don't really think that allowing people to
say "my product is better than that of my competitor" will open the legal floodgates for PHBs everywhere to frame slashdotters worldwide for paedophilia. Perhaps you are still trying to equate "free speech" with "anarchy".
One of the great problems with the Internet currently is that there are so many anonymous cowards, who troll, spam and lie.
And has Aaron Wall trolled, lied or spammed?
As far as the courts are concerned,
that remains to be determined.
This is a complicated case. At issue are wether Wall posted anonymosue to his own blog or not; whether anonymous posts to bulletin boards should be controlled and if so to what extent; the legality of a whole range of viral marketing and astroturfing; and of course
whether it is in anyone's interest to encourage corporations to silence (possibly legitimate) criticism with lawsuits.
Really, it's far from cut and dried.
But if your best analysis of the scenario is "Anarchy! Paedophiles! You will all become Unemployable!" then people may start to wonder
whether you have some personal stake matter.
And of course, if this case succeeds, such comments may well become actionable under law.
Or perhaps you were counting on the your slashdot alias to shield you from the consequences? I notice you provide very little in the way of personal information.
Can you do that, I wonder? I mean you can try and scare people away,
but you can't stop them wanting the goods. The only way to do that
is to offer a more attractive alternative. And if they could do that,
they wouldn't be suing people.
Oh, I know. I'm deliberately missing the point.
You mean to say that they want to reduce the
number of people using the service so that
the suppliers perceive a drop in demand.
This, in combination with the relatively
greater prospect of being sued themselves should
be enough to finally discourage the tracker
boards and volume sharers.
Is that about right?
Doesn't economic theory tell us that demand,
(in the sense of people wanting things) creates
supply? Or have I been getting too much of my econimics from web pundits and
S/F novels?
Either way, I feel a bit sceptical about their chances of success.
... and reduce demand by suing the people who only want to download, but end up
sharing what they download.
I always get the impression that most P2P users
are quite happy to share. That's what makes the P2P networks possible. I suppose there are a
percentage of them who don't understand how it
all works, but even then I think most people
are happy enough to share in turn.
I think people start to leech mainly when it
takes too much effort to make stuff available.
If the redistribution is part of the process
they don't mind that. Manly because they don't
see it as anything wrong.
Of course, these too are things the *AA will be trying to change...
So to summarise a little: They can't go after the big copyright violators because that is a criminal act and they have to ask the police in.
Therefore the only people they can sue are the small fry file sharers. Is that about right?
I still can't help wondering (and this has got nothing to do with your explanation) why the MPAA and RIAA sue small time sharers at all. I mean it's not as if they went targetting little old ladies and six year old girls by accident. They seem to have done so deliberately in order to to set an example and to send the message that no one will be spared.
Even accepting that they have law on their side, such tactics make it difficult to view their case with any sympathy. It's like TheStupidOne said: they come across as bullies.
So, you're *basically* agreeing with this guy, yet you insult him a number of times on unrelated matters such as capitalization.
Sorry. My fault; I should have supplied a bit more background detail.
Eriksonial hypnosis is a hypnotic technique used by the late Milton Erikson. Do a google - there are some fascinating stories told about him. Erikson had some very covert approaches to hypnosis including the use of presuppositions and embedded commands to influnce entrain the conciousness of his subjects. This work was picked up by Richard Bandler and John Grinder who used it as the basis of something called Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP for short.
The embedded command technique in particular gets used a lot by fledgeling NLPers in email. Basically, it involves marking out certain phrases in a body of text so that the subconcious will give them special consideration and thereby come to AGREE. WITH ME, NOW, I think that irrespective of the effeciveness of the technique when spoken, I think you'll AGREE WITH ME that it looks pretty silly on discussion forum. Feel free to disAGREE WITH ME on this.
Anyway, the point of all this is, that when I see
a post that embeds
DON'T CC IT!
DON'T CC IT!
DON'T CC IT!
Then I do begin to wonder if the poster might
prehaps be trying to propagate an anti CC
message whilst pretending sympathy to the cause.
In NLP they call that "pacing".
Now, keeping that in mind, ("all the way to the *back* of your mind" as Richard Bandler might have said), go and reread the post I first commented on. I don't know how quickly you'll begin to notice all the little incongruencies between his surface message and the and the way in he tries to present his arguments, but I do know that, as you begin to notice these things, you'll find yourself amazed by all the ways he is trying to influence your thinking against the CC licence:D
And then re-read mine, and see if you still think I agree with him.
Hopefully, with a bit of context, you can see where I'm coming from, now.:) And don't mind the pattern language it's all purely for illustrative purposes:)
It seems to me that the people who support the idea of the Creative
Commons license are the people who believe very strongly in this idea of
"the commons."
Some of them, certainly.
As far as I can tell, this seems to be an idealistic doctrine which
says that the sum total of human creative endeavour is the birthright
of every human being...
I believe you are describing the basis for US copyright law. The
"commons" is more usually taken to refer to that set of resources, both
material and intellectual, that may be freely exploited in some way by
everyone for the benefit of all.
...and that everybody should ideally have access to every creative work
(either now, or at some point in the future). This ideology...
I suppose you could describe it as an "ideology", although the word has
extremist/marginalist overtones not usually associated with long standing
legislation. Still, let us not be needlessly picky...
... naturally makes anyone who wants to profit off his/her own creative
works tend to bristle.
I've been known to profit from my own creativity from time to time, so I
question the use of the words "anyone" and "naturally".
You don't think you might be projecting,
just a little here, do you?
the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want
to spread their own creative works...
No argument there
... in some kind of "viral" way.
Oops, spoke too soon. Hey, maybe they just made something nice and wanted to let others enjoy it without surrendering the work into the public
domain. That isn't such a complicated concept.
I think we can understand it without recourse
to micro-organisms.
The license is a public statement: Go ahead and take this, use it, don't worry about it,
I won't sue you. (And there may be a couple
of additional clauses, such as "I won't sue you
unless you try to profit from it.")
When you put it like that, you make it sound
just like the EULA for the copy of Windows
that came "free" with my computer. Except of
course that the EULA was a lot scarier.
And harder to understand. And
it had all sorts of nasty stuff hidden away too.
Still, Slashdot's then thousand corporate trolls can't all be wrong, and
they've assured us time and again that MS' EULA is fair practice. So I
guess that would make the far more permissive CC licence OK as well. Sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander and all that...
But how do you define "profit"?
Well, the CC doesn't. What it does have is a non-commercial clause
which the licensor may elect to include in a licence.
The CC defines "non-commercial" to mean that the work is not
licenced for commercial distribution. That's about
as straight forward as it gets.
If nobody would benefit in any way from the use
of your work, then why
would they want to use it in the first place? To my mind, benefit and
profit are synonymous here.
You've already distorted the motivations of the CC supporters and
misrepresented the CC's "non-commercial" clause as "not for profit". Now
all you need do is redefine "profit" to mean "benefit", and you're
all set to demolish the CC based upon these
same false premises.
You seem sincere enough, but really this is a classic
Straw Man
argument
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough. But you can pre-compile queries using embedded SQL as well.
Also fact, when you have several different applications performing the similar functions (trust me, happens a lot in large projects), it's a sure-fire way of making sure all apps are doing the same thing. Likewise, if something needs changing/optimizing, it can be changed in one place, instead of hunting down every place the functionality is performed.
That's a good argument for procedures, but it doesn't require the stored part. I'd do that with a shared library full of C functions, a C++ class or a perl module.
There are sensible uses for stored procedures, but there are other ways of centralising your business logic.
Please, Oracle has a ton of features that just aren't there in PostgreSQL
"What metric" is the right question. But I'm not convinced that the best answer is "comparative length of feature lists". One man's feature is another man's bloat, after all.
I've been writing database apps for a living since 1984. I've worked on trading systems for stockbrokers and multinational merchant banks; I've worked for telecoms giants and for manufacturers. I can't think of a single oracle feature that I've ever needed to use that wasn't available in PostgreSQL.
Admittedly, this has a lot ot do with my style - I'm old school enough that I write my logic in C, C++ or Perl and use the database purely for storing and retrieving data. DBMS vendors (and some database researchers, to be fair) would like coders to do program purely with database packages. I've always though this a supremely boneheaded idea - I trust database designers to design databases, but not progamming langauges thank you. However, if that approach appeals, then you probably need a lot more features than I do.
But they ain't necessary, and it most assuredly is possible to write non-trivial real-world apps using the PostgreSQL feature set.
Sitting here bitching does a few things. It allows MySQL users a chance to vent a little; it gives MySQL a means to judge user reactions to their collaboration with SCO (they had to expect controversy) and it gives users who might have been unaware of the issues useful information when deciding whether to deploy MySQL. And it gives supporters of MySQL a chance to put the other side of the story.
This is a discussion forum. The point is to discuss issues like this. A lot of that discussion, the side of it that you disagree with, is going to sound like "bitching".
Most of what you say is useful, but STFU is never helpful.
Well, they've done previous charity fundraisers it seems. I'm assuming the cash got there on those occasions. They haven't given any cash in this, but then they haven't had much of a chance what with paypal freezing the account, have they?
And the only assurance that paypal has, that they will, is cause, well, they say so?
Well, yes. Surely most of paypal's ebay transactions fall into that category.
Does it sometimes step on a real organizations toes? Probably. Sad that they world isnt totally trustworthy.
Unfortunately, paypal has a history of such behaviour. People are beginning to add paypal to the "isn't totally trustworthy list". Personally, I lost faith in PayPal after they tried to abscond with the tip jar for the AbiWord project.
But, in a world where people DO scam, isnt it better to try and keep that a little in check?
Perhaps. But if they're going to assume responsiblity for such actions, they should also assume responsibility for their mistakes. And they should have some sort of customer services department. Actual people you can talk to on the phone who are empowered to sort out problems like this.
When they deliberately hide behind submission forms, people are apt to wonder if the scammers in this case are not paypal themselves.
Or is your Gripe "OMG! Paypal hasnt INSTANTLY fixed my problem, OVER THE WEEKEND?"
I think they problem is that it happened at all. And that it keeps on happpening for a lot of people.
Of course, there's no shortage of "crappy" in mainstream, too, so that's a bit of a null factor,
Good music sells itself
Record companies aren't in the business of making records, and they don't need to sell them, since good music sells itself. It almost makes you wonder how these record companies justify the massive slice of the revenue they take.
Most of the people who I've met who like "indie" music are impressed with their trucker hats and "vintage" t-shirts, doing what they do simply to be "different", failing to realize they're just like every other "indie" kid in the room.
Put that waym it sounds a lot like punk. Or just about every youth music fad since Rock and Roll. Probably earlier.
Call me a communist, but I'm not entirely convinced myself that easy-to-market is a sufficent and necessary indicator of quality, talent or ... well of anything except ease of marketing, really.
Yes, primate alpha male behaviour.
I'm not sure if you're offering this as insight or justification. In any case, here's another piece of oddball primate social behavour to consider:
In baboon troupes, it's been known for high ranking females to kill babies belonging to low caste females. Nasty habit, but makes sense genetically, I suppose.
But that's one primate habit we don't condone amongst outselves. So why should we excuse Ballmer acting like a prick?
Reminds me of a business model I came up with a while back. Basically, you get into the manufacturing business. Doesn't matter what, but best if it's low skilled and labour intensive. Then you hire a bunch of guys with trucks and guns and have them abduct a workforce for you - just round up a few hundred folk at gunpoint, herd 'em into the trucks and chain them to their posts. Then you work them to death.
When they do drop dead, you go and kidnap replacements and work them to death too. You'd want to do some studies to see if was more cost effective to feed your workforce, or let them starve to death rather than die through exhaustion.
You get cheap labour, and since anything the company does is sacrosanct, you've done nothing wrong.
Supposedly.
We don't need absolutes in order to consider the common good - just broad consensus. The sort of thing that tells us that it's a bad idea people to go around murdering other people, or that stealing should be discouraged. The same sort of consensus that lets us have broad agreement on matters of aesthetics, even though individual tastes may differ in specific cases.
The only reason anyone reads Ayn Rand is that she supplies emotional support for people who really want to be completely shitty to everyone they meet, but who worry in case they'd feel bad about it afterwards. Interesting as a juvenile fantasy, perhaps, but as a serious way to structure a society? She's about on a level with John Norman and his Gor books, IMHO.
So many posters here seem to be obsessed with this fatalist "there's nothing you can do about it, so get used to it" meme. It's almost reminiscent of the John Carpenter film "They Live" where all the posters carry subliminal messages: Obey! Conform! Consume!
So it's nice to see another slashdotter who doesn't subscribe to the inevitability of corporate corruption.
Keep up the good work.
Check out the posting history - there's a definite pattern.
The trouble is that capitalism is, or rather should be a purely descriptive term referring to an economic system.
When people start to consider capitalism as an "ideology" if moves out of the realm of economics and into that of religion.
This is a bad thing, since economic strategy should be based on pragmatic considerations and hard facts, rather than blind faith and dogma.
On the other hand, if you ty to justify crushing the competition in terms of rational economics, it sounds silly since you are forced to confront the fact that the benefits of a capitalis system derive largely from the existence of a number of competing firms.
I'd like to see software patents outlawed in their entirety; along with business methods, interfaces, etc. I'd also like to review the entire patent idea and see if we can do without patents altogether,
Agreed on copyright, but I'd bring the protection time down for software, purely because the field advances so fast. Say 10 years non-renewable.
Valid points all. So, are you arguing for the status quo? Did you have a better idea?
Or are you just picking holes?
Surely that's just a bug in the ls implementation. It's trivial to cache the user details. And since it already knows the output format it doesn't even have to cache the whole of struct passwd. In fact for modern architectures it should be possible to hold /etc/passwd in memory. Admitedly, it's going to cause problems with old machines, but old machines are going to have to expect a performance hit dealing with systems with 10k users or so.
Still, I take your point. getpwent and its kin are optimised for systems that run a relatively small number of users. Still good for desktop use and most SMEs, but it may not scale gracefully to large Enterprises.
So: what's the problems with NIS and PAM?
No?
Then where do you draw the line?
Actually it (TFA) is dumb for precisely the reason the GP suggests.
Which doesn't mean that you're wrong: just that TFA is wrong on multiple levels.
Indeed. Their choice of name seems cynical and manipulative in light of their publication list.
The AdTI has taken a few potshots at Linux and Open Source in general. The one that caught my attention was the paper by Ken Brown entitled Samizdat where he claimed that Linux Torvalds based used code from Minix as the basis for Linux. Subsequent investigation showed that Brown grossly msirepresented the position of those he interviewded in his research, including Andrew Tannenbaum, the author of Minux who told Brown in no uncertain terms that this was not the case.
It is a measure of how laughably skewed the paper was that even Microsoft came ot dismiss the report as being less than helpful.
Slashdot has discussed the AdTI before as well.
You know, the GP only contained three lines. One of them was blank and one of them was a quote.
This is what it said:
So I have to ask: what part of that did you read as saying "people should not be held accountable for acts of libel committed using the Internet"?Why should you be allowed to go around staring negative rumours about your business competitors?
Sounds like standard practice to me. Nothing Jonathan Schwartz doesn't do fairly routinely in his blog, as far as I can see. I'll not start on Microsoft and their sponsorship of groups like the Alexis de Tocqueville institute or I'll e here all night.
How would you like your boss to lie to a future employer that you got fired for drug abuse or for having kiddie porn?
Interesting. One moment we're talking about deating the relative merits of a competitors product, the next: kiddie porn!
I don't really think that allowing people to say "my product is better than that of my competitor" will open the legal floodgates for PHBs everywhere to frame slashdotters worldwide for paedophilia. Perhaps you are still trying to equate "free speech" with "anarchy".
One of the great problems with the Internet currently is that there are so many anonymous cowards, who troll, spam and lie.
And has Aaron Wall trolled, lied or spammed? As far as the courts are concerned, that remains to be determined.
This is a complicated case. At issue are wether Wall posted anonymosue to his own blog or not; whether anonymous posts to bulletin boards should be controlled and if so to what extent; the legality of a whole range of viral marketing and astroturfing; and of course whether it is in anyone's interest to encourage corporations to silence (possibly legitimate) criticism with lawsuits.
Really, it's far from cut and dried.
But if your best analysis of the scenario is "Anarchy! Paedophiles! You will all become Unemployable!" then people may start to wonder whether you have some personal stake matter. And of course, if this case succeeds, such comments may well become actionable under law.
Or perhaps you were counting on the your slashdot alias to shield you from the consequences? I notice you provide very little in the way of personal information.
Can you do that, I wonder? I mean you can try and scare people away, but you can't stop them wanting the goods. The only way to do that is to offer a more attractive alternative. And if they could do that, they wouldn't be suing people.
Oh, I know. I'm deliberately missing the point. You mean to say that they want to reduce the number of people using the service so that the suppliers perceive a drop in demand. This, in combination with the relatively greater prospect of being sued themselves should be enough to finally discourage the tracker boards and volume sharers.
Is that about right?
Doesn't economic theory tell us that demand, (in the sense of people wanting things) creates supply? Or have I been getting too much of my econimics from web pundits and S/F novels?
Either way, I feel a bit sceptical about their chances of success.
I always get the impression that most P2P users are quite happy to share. That's what makes the P2P networks possible. I suppose there are a percentage of them who don't understand how it all works, but even then I think most people are happy enough to share in turn.
I think people start to leech mainly when it takes too much effort to make stuff available. If the redistribution is part of the process they don't mind that. Manly because they don't see it as anything wrong.
Of course, these too are things the *AA will be trying to change...
I still can't help wondering (and this has got nothing to do with your explanation) why the MPAA and RIAA sue small time sharers at all. I mean it's not as if they went targetting little old ladies and six year old girls by accident. They seem to have done so deliberately in order to to set an example and to send the message that no one will be spared.
Even accepting that they have law on their side, such tactics make it difficult to view their case with any sympathy. It's like TheStupidOne said: they come across as bullies.
Ah, but there isn't. Not always.
Mow which ones would you sooner be inspecting?
I see what you mean about inserting references to slashdot. That'd almost be clever if it wasn't so pitiful,
Fair enough. That's why I asked the question. I know my own grammar gets unintentionally convoluted sometimes.
And my apologies if I seemed over aggressive; I think I went into autopilot. Flame wars on NLP discussion lists can get seriously weird sometimes.
Sorry. My fault; I should have supplied a bit more background detail.
Eriksonial hypnosis is a hypnotic technique used by the late Milton Erikson. Do a google - there are some fascinating stories told about him. Erikson had some very covert approaches to hypnosis including the use of presuppositions and embedded commands to influnce entrain the conciousness of his subjects. This work was picked up by Richard Bandler and John Grinder who used it as the basis of something called Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP for short.
The embedded command technique in particular gets used a lot by fledgeling NLPers in email. Basically, it involves marking out certain phrases in a body of text so that the subconcious will give them special consideration and thereby come to AGREE. WITH ME, NOW, I think that irrespective of the effeciveness of the technique when spoken, I think you'll AGREE WITH ME that it looks pretty silly on discussion forum. Feel free to disAGREE WITH ME on this.
Anyway, the point of all this is, that when I see a post that embeds
Then I do begin to wonder if the poster might prehaps be trying to propagate an anti CC message whilst pretending sympathy to the cause. In NLP they call that "pacing".Now, keeping that in mind, ("all the way to the *back* of your mind" as Richard Bandler might have said), go and reread the post I first commented on. I don't know how quickly you'll begin to notice all the little incongruencies between his surface message and the and the way in he tries to present his arguments, but I do know that, as you begin to notice these things, you'll find yourself amazed by all the ways he is trying to influence your thinking against the CC licence :D
And then re-read mine, and see if you still think I agree with him.
Hopefully, with a bit of context, you can see where I'm coming from, now. :) And don't mind the pattern language it's all purely for illustrative purposes :)
Without endorsing that characterisation, you might have mroe luck if you did it in smaller chunks.
So would I be correct in assuming that it wasn't response to any specific point I made? Just pick a post at random and *SPAM!* right?
If so, I'll not bother commenting further.
Incidentally, where'd you cut and paste it from? It looks like an introduction to a book or a PhD thesis. Certainly it wasn't written for Slashdot.
Some of them, certainly.
As far as I can tell, this seems to be an idealistic doctrine which says that the sum total of human creative endeavour is the birthright of every human being...
I believe you are describing the basis for US copyright law. The "commons" is more usually taken to refer to that set of resources, both material and intellectual, that may be freely exploited in some way by everyone for the benefit of all.
I suppose you could describe it as an "ideology", although the word has extremist/marginalist overtones not usually associated with long standing legislation. Still, let us not be needlessly picky...
I've been known to profit from my own creativity from time to time, so I question the use of the words "anyone" and "naturally". You don't think you might be projecting, just a little here, do you?
the Creative Commons license seems to mainly appeal to people who want to spread their own creative works...
No argument there
Oops, spoke too soon. Hey, maybe they just made something nice and wanted to let others enjoy it without surrendering the work into the public domain. That isn't such a complicated concept. I think we can understand it without recourse to micro-organisms.
The license is a public statement: Go ahead and take this, use it, don't worry about it, I won't sue you. (And there may be a couple of additional clauses, such as "I won't sue you unless you try to profit from it.")
When you put it like that, you make it sound just like the EULA for the copy of Windows that came "free" with my computer. Except of course that the EULA was a lot scarier. And harder to understand. And it had all sorts of nasty stuff hidden away too.
Still, Slashdot's then thousand corporate trolls can't all be wrong, and they've assured us time and again that MS' EULA is fair practice. So I guess that would make the far more permissive CC licence OK as well. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and all that...
But how do you define "profit"?
Well, the CC doesn't. What it does have is a non-commercial clause which the licensor may elect to include in a licence. The CC defines "non-commercial" to mean that the work is not licenced for commercial distribution. That's about as straight forward as it gets.
If nobody would benefit in any way from the use of your work, then why would they want to use it in the first place? To my mind, benefit and profit are synonymous here.
You've already distorted the motivations of the CC supporters and misrepresented the CC's "non-commercial" clause as "not for profit". Now all you need do is redefine "profit" to mean "benefit", and you're all set to demolish the CC based upon these same false premises.
You seem sincere enough, but really this is a classic Straw Man argument