Capitalism* didn't put Professor Liu in prison. Communism** did.
*As an economic system, capitalism doesn't acknowledge the existence of dissidence. You're a worker or a capital owner.
**Communism functions (poorly) as an economic system, but in practice it has always functioned primarily as a political system. In China and the former Soviet bloc, as an authoritarian political system, where dissident speech is a crime. This has nothing to do with economic-theoretic capitalism. (Practical capitalism loves to have authoritarian political power at its disposal, of course, since that makes many economic frictions and externalities disappear like magic.)
I know that current policy communications massively favors the short, low-content, high-impact format known as "sound bite"... but really, compressing your message to 8 bits is just too much. You can't even get much (acoustic) noise out of one measly octet, let alone anything resembling spin, hype, or fearmongery.
the people they're sending notifications to are tethering, and how AT&T will know when they've stopped.
If we donâ(TM)t hear from you, weâ(TM)ll plan to automatically enroll you into DataPro 4GB after March 27, 2011. The new plan â" whether you sign up on your own or we automatically enroll you â" will replace your current smartphone data plan, including if you are on an unlimited data plan.
If you discontinue tethering, no changes to your current plan will be required.
Doesn't that sound like ED-209?
ED-209: [menacingly] Please put down your tethering applications. You have 20 seconds to comply.
AT&T Contract VP: I think you better do as he says, Mr. Customer.
[Mr. Kinney uninstalls the tethering app. ED-209 advances, growling]
ED-209: You now have 15 seconds to comply.
[Mr. Customer turns to AT&T VP, who looks nervous]
ED-209: You are in direct violation of Contract Code 1.13, Section 9.
[entire room of people in full panic trying to stay out of the line of fire, especially Mr. Customer]
ED-209: You have 5 seconds to comply.
Customer: Help me!
ED-209: Four... three... two... one... I am now authorized to use contractual force!
[ED-209 opens fire and shreds Mr. Customer]
Or not. In fact, I throw the card away as soon as I discreetly can (no point pissing off someone needlessly, especially someone with whom I'm clearly never going to have any future contact with.)
I don't play "clever you" and "come and get me" games.
Yeah. But the copyright in dispute is not attached to the Android library include file. As you say, that's a product of automation.
The putative copyright in dispute is associated with the INPUT of that automated process: the original Linux kernel include file.
First of all, there is the question of whether that file was copyrighted. Blog-level survey of US case law is a mixed bag there. I contend that just because a file is written in preprocessor language and its filename ends with ".h", it doesn't necessarily lose copyright protection.
If the answer to the first question is determined to be "yes, the original include files were copyrighted", then the follow-on question is "is the automatically-produced Android library include file a derivative work of the original Linux include file, and therefore subject to the original GPL2 license as well?"
I've heard a few unconvincing arguments that question 1 should be answered "no". I think the answer is otherwise, in the sense that the includes probably contain stuff beyond simple API descriptors, and therefore copyrightable elements.
If question 1 is answered "yes", then question 2 boils down to "if I remove all the copyrightable elements of a work, does the residue escape being defined as a derived work?" Seems like a horrible end-around, but practically speaking, if someone had just manually transcribed the same uncopyrightable API signature information into a new.h file, I suspect it wouldn't constitute a derived work, even if character-for-character identical, because of the special exception space carved out for APIs.
iOS applications should start as quickly as possible so that people can begin using them without delay. When starting, iOS apps should:
Display a launch image that closely resembles the first screen of the application. This practice decreases the perceived launch time of your application.
Avoid displaying an About window or a splash screen. In general, try to avoid providing any type of startup experience that prevents people from using your application immediately.
Now, the "guidelines" never seem to use the word "must". But given Apple's arbitrary and non-transparent application acceptance criteria, intentionally ignoring the "strongly recommended 'should'" seems to be risky.
The presence of your "anapp" on the store, in spite of the guidelines themselves? A sample of one. Quite possibly an aberration. "The singular of data is not anecdote."
the binary compiled doesn't really contain any machine instructions produced from those files
You're forgetting preprocessor macros, which often DO produce compiled code. And also, comments, which are the expressive and creative products of the mind of the author. (Of course those are copyrighted; O'Reilly made an entire industry publishing and selling copyrighted books full of exactly the same kind of information.)
So... headers aren't copyrighted, unless they are?
Actual practitioners of the law, people who don't have to say "IANAL" like you obviously should have, say that the answer is unsettled. There is precedent that header files, in general, may be copyrightable. Header files that express APIs, perhaps less so, because the API itself is not copyrightable. (But again, the idea of a big white whale and and obsessive whaler hunting each other isn't copyrighted, but I'm pretty sure Moby Dick certainly was.
But let me put your central assertion to the most obvious test. I write the Great American Novel. It's an awesome novel. It's breathtaking, ground-breaking, and lots of other "aking" things. But I'm eccentric. So I write it entirely as a C++ comment block, and in a file called "GreatAmericanNovel.hpp".
Meanwhile, the early mammals saw this coming and hid in their burrows until it was all over.
A time-honored, deeply cherished survival technique still used by the most intelligent descendants of those same mammals, in spite of vicious and unprovoked mockery.
Yes, that's right. Living in Mom's basement is a mark of extremely advanced evolution.
Alas, then, you're not going far enough with "I want a pony!". Ponies exist. Wanting one may, as improbable as it seems result in getting one. (Not that I'd ever admit that to my daughter.)
The scenario you're describing is more like "I want a pink sparkle pony with a unicorn horn, time travel, and the ability to fart rainbows and Krugerrands."
THIS is why the engineering department of Sirius Cybernetics will be the second against the wall when the revolution comes, right after the marketing department of the same.
Yeah, I'm guessing it's evaporative cooling towers or forced-air evaporators. That would work a treat in the summer time there. (I looked at a humidity trend chart for the town; summertime relative humidities are in the 20-25% range. It's the proverbial "dry heat" you hear about.)
I guess if the town wants its water they'll have to set up vaporator fields downwind of the cooling plant and buy astromech and protocol droids to maintain and program them.
Well, first, although the quote from The Jargon File is unattributed, most of the contents of that document are from MIT or CalTech lore, and edited (and commented on) by Eric S. Raymond. If I were to consider whom I'd trust more to general matters of technology, I would have to weigh in their favor, rather than some random slashdotter who has to borrow the name of a minor Tolkien character. Therefore, I think we can dismiss the validity of the entire "Anyone who argues this way is a moron" argument.
Ok. I've gotten the ad hominem part of the discussion out of the way. Now for the part where I tell you what you're clearly not understanding.
Redundancy for robustness is terrific. But it doesn't change the fact: increase the number of participating components you are automatically increasing the number of possible component failures. High-availability design masks the overall system impact of component failure by allowing non-failed components to carry on and preserve system function, but not every system has the right kind of redundancy for that. In the airplane example, if the twin-engine aircraft is heavily (but permissibly) loaded, it will be within performance specifications with both engines functioning, but fall outside the envelope if one engine fails. That's a redundancy design not for reliability, but performance; if your system functional behavior is dependent on all redundant components simultaneously (A "and" B), redundancy isn't for reliability, and the "better basket" argument applies.
So yeah, you're definitely thinking about the "redundancy for robustness" thing, and you're right as far as you go. But.... not every redundancy design is for robustness (think multiple CPU cores on a single chip... where's the robustness redundancy there?)... and also, designs that start with high-availability redundancy often cannibalize the redundancy reserve for performance (bad management decisions, but that's what management is for).
On balance, it's still better to have a single super basket.
That's like arguing we should be attracting dinosaur-killer meteor strikes to weed out the weak and unfit. A reply-all storm that size obliterates communication for the affected infrastructure for days. That's followed up by a fair bit of forensics, trying to backtrack the crapstorm to its initiating email, THEN followed by executing the guilty. Or not. If it's an executive secretary, it's probably just a mild talking-to.
OTOH, I've forgotten how many lulz there are to be had trolling in such a mailstorm, if you can get away with it.
Oh, BTW, epic fail DHS, but good work flushing out the Iranian spy*. Not that he was that good of a spy; if surreptitiously monitoring a DHS email list is equivalent to the Monty Python "How Not to be Seen sketch, asking the group "'Is this being a joke?" while signing your email with your real-world credentials ("Amir Ferdosi Sazeman-e Sana'et-e Defa' Qom Iran") is the same as the guy at the beginning of the aforementioned sketch who stands up from behind cover when asked to (and gets shot).
*Yeah, I know, he's probably not really a spy. But seriously, Homeland Security, why are you letting foreign nationals from adversary nations subscribe to your email lists? WTF?
of the penny dreadful.. Although not aimed specifically at the juvenile market, like the historical precedent was.
I wonder if the big publishing pigocracies will find some wild-assed way to try to intervene in this process? The mindset of the large media incumbents seems to be that if money is being made and they're not getting some of it, it's wrong and bad and evil and piracy.
Compare, for instance, various attacks (such as improper DMCA takedowns) on indie music distributed directly from performer to purchaser.
And that's good advice. But you have to make a clear distinction between altruism and enabling co-dependence.
There's the nice, sane, reasonably intelligent people (like your family) for whom providing a little technical support is non-onerous. Then there're the pinheaded droolers who rush from trojan to trojan, steal every bit of software they run, and plug USB cables into network ports...and make them fit
The latter class far exceeds the bounds of kindness, unless your definition of kindness also extends to running down to the local crackhouse to pick up your brother's latest order.
Some people shouldn't have computers any more than they should have children or any kind of metabolic protection against intoxicants.
I've converted more than a dozen individuals and families to the Mac. All have lived happily ever after.
That's the power of Saint Steve's RDF. FEEL THE POWER!
Actually, that was the slightly less dickish thing to say than what I was going to say: "All have lived happily ever after, until they decided they actually didn't like something about Apple or iOS, at which point the Apple Customer Relations ninjas assassinated them. But they died before they could fall away from the faith, so that's good."
"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane."
By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really good basket.
Slashdot Mirror
Zinc Chromate Green. Corrosion inhibition coating for aluminum. The heraldic color of the aerospace industry since the 1940s.
Now look back at the definition of "googol". It's on a horse.
Capitalism* didn't put Professor Liu in prison. Communism** did.
*As an economic system, capitalism doesn't acknowledge the existence of dissidence. You're a worker or a capital owner.
**Communism functions (poorly) as an economic system, but in practice it has always functioned primarily as a political system. In China and the former Soviet bloc, as an authoritarian political system, where dissident speech is a crime. This has nothing to do with economic-theoretic capitalism. (Practical capitalism loves to have authoritarian political power at its disposal, of course, since that makes many economic frictions and externalities disappear like magic.)
I know that current policy communications massively favors the short, low-content, high-impact format known as "sound bite"... but really, compressing your message to 8 bits is just too much. You can't even get much (acoustic) noise out of one measly octet, let alone anything resembling spin, hype, or fearmongery.
Doesn't that sound like ED-209?
And then you google him.
Or not. In fact, I throw the card away as soon as I discreetly can (no point pissing off someone needlessly, especially someone with whom I'm clearly never going to have any future contact with.)
I don't play "clever you" and "come and get me" games.
Yeah. But the copyright in dispute is not attached to the Android library include file. As you say, that's a product of automation.
The putative copyright in dispute is associated with the INPUT of that automated process: the original Linux kernel include file.
First of all, there is the question of whether that file was copyrighted. Blog-level survey of US case law is a mixed bag there. I contend that just because a file is written in preprocessor language and its filename ends with ".h", it doesn't necessarily lose copyright protection.
If the answer to the first question is determined to be "yes, the original include files were copyrighted", then the follow-on question is "is the automatically-produced Android library include file a derivative work of the original Linux include file, and therefore subject to the original GPL2 license as well?"
I've heard a few unconvincing arguments that question 1 should be answered "no". I think the answer is otherwise, in the sense that the includes probably contain stuff beyond simple API descriptors, and therefore copyrightable elements.
If question 1 is answered "yes", then question 2 boils down to "if I remove all the copyrightable elements of a work, does the residue escape being defined as a derived work?" Seems like a horrible end-around, but practically speaking, if someone had just manually transcribed the same uncopyrightable API signature information into a new .h file, I suspect it wouldn't constitute a derived work, even if character-for-character identical, because of the special exception space carved out for APIs.
IANAL, but that's just how this seems to me.
Oversensitive, much?
From the iOS Human Interface Guidelines:
Now, the "guidelines" never seem to use the word "must". But given Apple's arbitrary and non-transparent application acceptance criteria, intentionally ignoring the "strongly recommended 'should'" seems to be risky.
The presence of your "anapp" on the store, in spite of the guidelines themselves? A sample of one. Quite possibly an aberration. "The singular of data is not anecdote."
the binary compiled doesn't really contain any machine instructions produced from those files
You're forgetting preprocessor macros, which often DO produce compiled code. And also, comments, which are the expressive and creative products of the mind of the author. (Of course those are copyrighted; O'Reilly made an entire industry publishing and selling copyrighted books full of exactly the same kind of information.)
So... headers aren't copyrighted, unless they are?
Ah. Concise. To-the-point. Quite possibly completely wrong.
Read and learn.
Actual practitioners of the law, people who don't have to say "IANAL" like you obviously should have, say that the answer is unsettled. There is precedent that header files, in general, may be copyrightable. Header files that express APIs, perhaps less so, because the API itself is not copyrightable. (But again, the idea of a big white whale and and obsessive whaler hunting each other isn't copyrighted, but I'm pretty sure Moby Dick certainly was.
But let me put your central assertion to the most obvious test. I write the Great American Novel. It's an awesome novel. It's breathtaking, ground-breaking, and lots of other "aking" things. But I'm eccentric. So I write it entirely as a C++ comment block, and in a file called "GreatAmericanNovel.hpp".
Why isn't it copyrighted, again?
Meanwhile, the early mammals saw this coming and hid in their burrows until it was all over.
A time-honored, deeply cherished survival technique still used by the most intelligent descendants of those same mammals, in spite of vicious and unprovoked mockery.
Yes, that's right. Living in Mom's basement is a mark of extremely advanced evolution.
Alas, then, you're not going far enough with "I want a pony!". Ponies exist. Wanting one may, as improbable as it seems result in getting one. (Not that I'd ever admit that to my daughter.)
The scenario you're describing is more like "I want a pink sparkle pony with a unicorn horn, time travel, and the ability to fart rainbows and Krugerrands."
Most people look at SI and wonder when the Swimsuit Edition is coming out.
Share (your personal details) and enjoy!
THIS is why the engineering department of Sirius Cybernetics will be the second against the wall when the revolution comes, right after the marketing department of the same.
Geez.
Protip: Never mention "chocolatey goodness" and "discharge your rectum" in the same sentence. EVER.
Hope is not a strategy. Hope that Slashdot will fix egregious editing errors, even less so.
When you spell it that way, you realize what Snookiee really is.... a mostly-depilated bronzer-slathered Ewok. (Can't be a wookie; too short.)
At 1kW (or 1MW, whichever), the future's so bright, I gotta wear... MY EYES! THE SHADES DO NOTHING!
Yeah, I'm guessing it's evaporative cooling towers or forced-air evaporators. That would work a treat in the summer time there. (I looked at a humidity trend chart for the town; summertime relative humidities are in the 20-25% range. It's the proverbial "dry heat" you hear about.)
I guess if the town wants its water they'll have to set up vaporator fields downwind of the cooling plant and buy astromech and protocol droids to maintain and program them.
Well, first, although the quote from The Jargon File is unattributed, most of the contents of that document are from MIT or CalTech lore, and edited (and commented on) by Eric S. Raymond. If I were to consider whom I'd trust more to general matters of technology, I would have to weigh in their favor, rather than some random slashdotter who has to borrow the name of a minor Tolkien character. Therefore, I think we can dismiss the validity of the entire "Anyone who argues this way is a moron" argument.
Ok. I've gotten the ad hominem part of the discussion out of the way. Now for the part where I tell you what you're clearly not understanding.
Redundancy for robustness is terrific. But it doesn't change the fact: increase the number of participating components you are automatically increasing the number of possible component failures. High-availability design masks the overall system impact of component failure by allowing non-failed components to carry on and preserve system function, but not every system has the right kind of redundancy for that. In the airplane example, if the twin-engine aircraft is heavily (but permissibly) loaded, it will be within performance specifications with both engines functioning, but fall outside the envelope if one engine fails. That's a redundancy design not for reliability, but performance; if your system functional behavior is dependent on all redundant components simultaneously (A "and" B), redundancy isn't for reliability, and the "better basket" argument applies.
So yeah, you're definitely thinking about the "redundancy for robustness" thing, and you're right as far as you go. But.... not every redundancy design is for robustness (think multiple CPU cores on a single chip... where's the robustness redundancy there?)... and also, designs that start with high-availability redundancy often cannibalize the redundancy reserve for performance (bad management decisions, but that's what management is for).
On balance, it's still better to have a single super basket.
That's like arguing we should be attracting dinosaur-killer meteor strikes to weed out the weak and unfit. A reply-all storm that size obliterates communication for the affected infrastructure for days. That's followed up by a fair bit of forensics, trying to backtrack the crapstorm to its initiating email, THEN followed by executing the guilty. Or not. If it's an executive secretary, it's probably just a mild talking-to.
OTOH, I've forgotten how many lulz there are to be had trolling in such a mailstorm, if you can get away with it.
Oh, BTW, epic fail DHS, but good work flushing out the Iranian spy*. Not that he was that good of a spy; if surreptitiously monitoring a DHS email list is equivalent to the Monty Python "How Not to be Seen sketch, asking the group "'Is this being a joke?" while signing your email with your real-world credentials ("Amir Ferdosi Sazeman-e Sana'et-e Defa' Qom Iran") is the same as the guy at the beginning of the aforementioned sketch who stands up from behind cover when asked to (and gets shot).
*Yeah, I know, he's probably not really a spy. But seriously, Homeland Security, why are you letting foreign nationals from adversary nations subscribe to your email lists? WTF?
of the penny dreadful.. Although not aimed specifically at the juvenile market, like the historical precedent was.
I wonder if the big publishing pigocracies will find some wild-assed way to try to intervene in this process? The mindset of the large media incumbents seems to be that if money is being made and they're not getting some of it, it's wrong and bad and evil and piracy.
Compare, for instance, various attacks (such as improper DMCA takedowns) on indie music distributed directly from performer to purchaser.
And that's good advice. But you have to make a clear distinction between altruism and enabling co-dependence.
There's the nice, sane, reasonably intelligent people (like your family) for whom providing a little technical support is non-onerous. Then there're the pinheaded droolers who rush from trojan to trojan, steal every bit of software they run, and plug USB cables into network ports...and make them fit
The latter class far exceeds the bounds of kindness, unless your definition of kindness also extends to running down to the local crackhouse to pick up your brother's latest order.
Some people shouldn't have computers any more than they should have children or any kind of metabolic protection against intoxicants.
I've converted more than a dozen individuals and families to the Mac. All have lived happily ever after.
That's the power of Saint Steve's RDF. FEEL THE POWER!
Actually, that was the slightly less dickish thing to say than what I was going to say: "All have lived happily ever after, until they decided they actually didn't like something about Apple or iOS, at which point the Apple Customer Relations ninjas assassinated them. But they died before they could fall away from the faith, so that's good."
Yeah, I'm kidding.
i use 4 web browsers
Jargon File