Every time I expand my social circle, your argument dies a little inside.:)
Again, not everyone knows a programmer, or even knows someone who does.
Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick. How's this instead: "Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who could program a freaking HTML parser."
The point is the ability to program is not the kind of wizardry it used to be, and shouldn't be seen as some kind of barrier to using open data and source.
Not everyone knows a programmer with infinite free time and willingness to take on all the "it would be nice if the software or online service I use offered this feature, but it doesn't, please implement for me" requests for free.
You missed the point of my post by confusing gratis with libre; and "infinite free time" is a logical black hole. Newsflash: nothing is free. For a service to implement a feature you want, they had to spend money and time they could have spent on something else. Costs that any MBA-run business will try to make back from you, the user. If you organize a bunch of users and advocate for a change, you're investing your collective time (and the goodwill of people you petition) in creating goal alignment, which may result in the win-win situation that eludes people who too often think in zero-sum terms. "Open" is all about win-win- the provider generates loyalty/goodwill, the user gains freedom.
If you want something custom-made, it'll cost you, whether in time spent doing it yourself, cash as a feature bounty, or the goodwill of geeks if you're excessively demanding of their time. It's cost-beneficial when your goals align such that benefits and costs are spread, but that's not necessarily the case. It's on you to determine how much it's worth to you.
First, don't confuse giving gifts with building a social network which includes gift-giving. The former isn't covered by the patent, only the latter.
Second, acts are not protected because they are yours, not in the USA at least. You do not have the right to go on a killing spree. You do not have the right to rob a bank. Likewise, you do not have the right to capitalize on someone else's patented invention or copyrighted work, no matter how hard you thump on your chest with a copy of the constitution. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 explicitly states that congress has (a certain amount of) power to legislate on behalf of inventors and authors.
Of course none of that definitively means Facebook should be able to restrict you from competing in the space. That's why there's a patent office which should have determined that Facebook should not have gotten a patent, a court system which should invalidate the patent grant due to lack of being novel and a massive amount of prior art, and a legislative branch which should toss out all software patents.
Your post makes it clear why governments suck: people who base their opinions on bad arguments are idiots and political hacks.
Just because I didn't describe it well doesn't mean it *can't* be described well. I'm not Google and I'm not trying to sell the product - just to answer a very limited question from a confused bystander. That's why I told people to go find a decent source of information. You opted instead to be a dick by taking a cheap shot at me and Google. I hope it helped you feel better about your shitty life.
So now, my act of giving gifts to other people in different settings, can be owned by someone OTHER than me...
No. You as the gift giver would not be in violation of this idiotic patent. The supposed infringing party would be the group who built the "social network" on which you did.
Building a parser to grab the HTML document into a database or spreadsheet would be trivial.
Trivial as in my grandmother could do it?
No, but her grand-kid could. And also trivial enough that even Facebook coders could implement an import feature in case she wanted to migrate over there.
Why is the riposte to open source or open data always "not everyone is a programmer"? Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who does.
Circles is one component of Plus- the one that deals with the different groups of people you connect with. I think the submitter was confused about terminology.
You'll want to read a more comprehensive post about Google Plus by an actual tech journalist (as opposed to an "anonymous reader"), possibly waiting a few days while people figure it out themselves.
The point was that pot being illegal is a terrible situation for him where his life could be go back to being shitty despite how well he's doing on the stuff. Your counter, "pot is illegal", was silly. We should be grateful there are still employers who don't treat their employees like convicted criminals, not encourage the others to trample on our rights.
So, in Apocolyse Now, when the air cavalry was flying in with the rising sun on their backs, they should have played Elton John's "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" instead?
No, that's not a good argument for many reasons, one being that it (and you) confused the concept "work for" with "devote" and "serve" which are key to my point. Another being I didn't say government and its employees never lie, which is the suggested strawman. Following these, I was not talking about absolute truth, but of a standard sufficient to the government itself, regardless of the opinions of biased outside observers. It's also a single, oversimplified counter-example, which further does very little to undermine my point, other than demonstrate that the world isn't as simple as I suggested conspiracy theorists think.
Now, did you have anything useful to contribute, or are you just here to be argumentative like the troll?
You gotta love how people take something and blow it completely out of proportion simply for outrage effect.
The cameras used for CCTV or at your convenience store are NOT GOING TO USE THIS PATENT. A surveillance device has no reason to implement a camera-disabling mechanism. If you buy one that does or you're a criminal who assumes an infrared signal is going to save your ass, you're a blithering idiot.
You're certainly correct in that they're capable. 'No, I don't know where we slid the bastard off the deck' is a core value they are trained to uphold. But that value conflicts with 'no, I haven't participated in a government conspiracy in which we pretended to kill a terrorist so the president could net a few points in the polls'.
There's a world of difference between the two and in the balance lies a smart soldier's morale.
Or, wow, how about the US military takes his photos next to something that could only be recent, to prove that he was dead and when he died *before* dumping him in the ocean. DUH.
Short answer: those photos would simply be claimed to be Photoshopped.
Longer answer: The problem is there is no such thing as sufficient proof for someone who refuses to accept any evidence that contradicts their belief. No matter what the government does, it will be accused by a small number of people of lying and fabricating evidence.
Within the US government and the military specifically you don't need to satisfy the impossible demand for proof that characterizes conspiracy theorists. If a team of highly decorated SEALs who devoted their lives to serving the nation confirm the report, it's the truth. While that doesn't make for a great Hollywood flick, neither does most of real life. Random crazies who have done nothing to deserve our trust are unworthy of such credibility and are not worth the hassle.
When a man makes a conscious decision that he wants to die, and asks them to film it so as to spread his political beliefs, they're hardly taking advantage of him.
The death is happening regardless of it being filmed. You make it sound like the BBC offered to pay a family a million dollars for exclusive rights to make a movie so that they would change their minds and pull the plug. Western culture is doing just fine, despite countries like Britain and fundamentalists like you who can't handle letting people with a different view make their own minds.
Do you backstab people at work? Steal from your family? Rape your neighbor's daughter? Of course not (or at least the rest of us don't). You have to make a conscious choice to ignore social conventions to be a dick. And the only reason people do is because they convince themselves that it would provide them a net gain (at low risk) which is patently false in the long run. There's nothing wrong with "playing nice." It's actually the norm, and we have plenty of examples where that "actually works" even when scaled up beyond tiny social units.
People fail to understand that the difficulty is not at the end result, but with the transition towards it. It's simpletons standing in the way of progress towards a better society because they are incapable of evolving beyond their upbringing in a society where selfishness is accepted. The problem is worse in the US where greed and short-term thinking are institutionalized, rewarded and even admired. That's why Lennon is so admired- he was more insightful than the average schmucks around him, and sadly, even those who came decades later.
For unions, once safe workplaces and decent wages are established, the next growth area for them is politics and that's the problem.
I don't accept the premise that workplaces are as safe as they'll ever be (since we're continuously learning about things that cause humans various forms of harm). Even if that were the case it's still only the first part of the battle- the second part is maintaining those gains. As is abundantly clear today, corporations are more than happy to grow in politics in order to bust unions and go back to a time where unions didn't exist and child labor saved them money (e.g. in Maine they nearly got a minimum wage loophole, where they could pay kids just $5.25/hr by calling them "trainees").
One could argue that unionization should be cyclical, disbanding and reforming after corporations buy enough votes in congress to repeal union gains, but that would put them at such a huge disadvantage you'd sooner get union members to agree not to occasionally abuse their collective bargaining power. Considering their negotiating partners, I find it hard to blame them for playing hardball too.
In case you're actually as clueless as that, we're talking about people who need to work at the Apple store to scrape by, not engineers making cushy 6-figure salaries. There's a huge chasm between having recruiters calling daily to poach you and not being able to take take off an hour in the middle of the workday because rent is due. You're one of the lucky few to be completely oblivious to how most Americans actually live. Work retail for a few months without using your current assets and credit- you'll get a real education. It ain't pretty.
These people come to complain here to post their knee-jerk paranoia-inspired reactions, not think coherently and produce something actually interesting to read.
Not necessarily. Just because many once-competent news organizations followed Fox News to the dark side doesn't mean it's not possible to maintain standards. It's when "for profit" turns to "profit at any cost" that you cease to be a journalist (or any other noble profession- e.g. doctors who perform unnecessary procedures, corrupt policemen, and... well, pretty much all lawyers). I think NPR is a good example of where non-for-profit makes it easier to maintain journalistic integrity, but even they suffer from catering to the demand for tabloid news.
A more intelligent news consumer would help, just as a smarter voting public is necessary for campaign finance reform.
You're overthinking the problem and absolving Alaska's government of their responsibility to comply with their own law. They don't have to build the equivalent of the Library of Congress' high-tech and user-friendly website (that would have been useful back then, or for implementing for future email, but nobody is expecting that here). They just need to provide a data dump to several groups who have raised concerns about this information. This isn't even strange or obscure information on which they'd have to spend months pulling hundreds of boxes out of storage- it's electronic email of official correspondence by their chief executive, who served (well, sorta-kinda, ya know) less than a decade ago. Short of pulling a Bush, there is no excuse to being unable to put the information together at reasonable cost to their tax-payers who are the prime beneficiaries (that's assuming this isn't being done for tabloid or political reasons, of course), not just the bill-footers.
All those "problems" can be solved by today's smart 14 year-old: Data Export - write a ten-line script. You don't have to hand-format the text- just pull it out of Outlook (VBA) or wherever. The value in digital is being searchable, not in looking pretty. Limit access- burn CD, FedEx only to the newspapers. Those who make FOIA requests are under no obligation to keep that stuff secret. Not even from those evil North Koreans, who are just itching to... invade Alaska? Redaction concerns are irrelevant to distribution. If North Korea mustn't know, neither should the public. Storage & distribution - Bittorrent, or wikileaks will host it for you for free. Govt doesn't have to limit its response to only the parties who made the request- it's in the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to exapnd your social circle...
Every time I expand my social circle, your argument dies a little inside. :)
Again, not everyone knows a programmer, or even knows someone who does.
Nitpick, nitpick, nitpick. How's this instead:
"Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who could program a freaking HTML parser."
The point is the ability to program is not the kind of wizardry it used to be, and shouldn't be seen as some kind of barrier to using open data and source.
Not everyone knows a programmer with infinite free time and willingness to take on all the "it would be nice if the software or online service I use offered this feature, but it doesn't, please implement for me" requests for free.
You missed the point of my post by confusing gratis with libre; and "infinite free time" is a logical black hole. Newsflash: nothing is free. For a service to implement a feature you want, they had to spend money and time they could have spent on something else. Costs that any MBA-run business will try to make back from you, the user. If you organize a bunch of users and advocate for a change, you're investing your collective time (and the goodwill of people you petition) in creating goal alignment, which may result in the win-win situation that eludes people who too often think in zero-sum terms. "Open" is all about win-win- the provider generates loyalty/goodwill, the user gains freedom.
If you want something custom-made, it'll cost you, whether in time spent doing it yourself, cash as a feature bounty, or the goodwill of geeks if you're excessively demanding of their time. It's cost-beneficial when your goals align such that benefits and costs are spread, but that's not necessarily the case. It's on you to determine how much it's worth to you.
First, don't confuse giving gifts with building a social network which includes gift-giving. The former isn't covered by the patent, only the latter.
Second, acts are not protected because they are yours, not in the USA at least. You do not have the right to go on a killing spree. You do not have the right to rob a bank. Likewise, you do not have the right to capitalize on someone else's patented invention or copyrighted work, no matter how hard you thump on your chest with a copy of the constitution. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 explicitly states that congress has (a certain amount of) power to legislate on behalf of inventors and authors.
Of course none of that definitively means Facebook should be able to restrict you from competing in the space. That's why there's a patent office which should have determined that Facebook should not have gotten a patent, a court system which should invalidate the patent grant due to lack of being novel and a massive amount of prior art, and a legislative branch which should toss out all software patents.
Your post makes it clear why governments suck: people who base their opinions on bad arguments are idiots and political hacks.
Just because I didn't describe it well doesn't mean it *can't* be described well. I'm not Google and I'm not trying to sell the product - just to answer a very limited question from a confused bystander. That's why I told people to go find a decent source of information. You opted instead to be a dick by taking a cheap shot at me and Google. I hope it helped you feel better about your shitty life.
Shhh! Don't give SCO any ideas!
So now, my act of giving gifts to other people in different settings, can be owned by someone OTHER than me ...
No. You as the gift giver would not be in violation of this idiotic patent. The supposed infringing party would be the group who built the "social network" on which you did.
Building a parser to grab the HTML document into a database or spreadsheet would be trivial.
Trivial as in my grandmother could do it?
No, but her grand-kid could. And also trivial enough that even Facebook coders could implement an import feature in case she wanted to migrate over there.
Why is the riposte to open source or open data always "not everyone is a programmer"? Today, most everyone knows a programmer, or at least knows someone who does.
Circles is one component of Plus- the one that deals with the different groups of people you connect with. I think the submitter was confused about terminology.
You'll want to read a more comprehensive post about Google Plus by an actual tech journalist (as opposed to an "anonymous reader"), possibly waiting a few days while people figure it out themselves.
Whoosh.
The point was that pot being illegal is a terrible situation for him where his life could be go back to being shitty despite how well he's doing on the stuff. Your counter, "pot is illegal", was silly. We should be grateful there are still employers who don't treat their employees like convicted criminals, not encourage the others to trample on our rights.
That was Wilson, not Barton.
So, in Apocolyse Now, when the air cavalry was flying in with the rising sun on their backs, they should have played Elton John's "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" instead?
Only if they had a time machine.
No, that's not a good argument for many reasons, one being that it (and you) confused the concept "work for" with "devote" and "serve" which are key to my point. Another being I didn't say government and its employees never lie, which is the suggested strawman. Following these, I was not talking about absolute truth, but of a standard sufficient to the government itself, regardless of the opinions of biased outside observers. It's also a single, oversimplified counter-example, which further does very little to undermine my point, other than demonstrate that the world isn't as simple as I suggested conspiracy theorists think.
Now, did you have anything useful to contribute, or are you just here to be argumentative like the troll?
Go away, troll. No food for you here.
You gotta love how people take something and blow it completely out of proportion simply for outrage effect.
The cameras used for CCTV or at your convenience store are NOT GOING TO USE THIS PATENT. A surveillance device has no reason to implement a camera-disabling mechanism. If you buy one that does or you're a criminal who assumes an infrared signal is going to save your ass, you're a blithering idiot.
You're certainly correct in that they're capable. 'No, I don't know where we slid the bastard off the deck' is a core value they are trained to uphold. But that value conflicts with 'no, I haven't participated in a government conspiracy in which we pretended to kill a terrorist so the president could net a few points in the polls'.
There's a world of difference between the two and in the balance lies a smart soldier's morale.
Or, wow, how about the US military takes his photos next to something that could only be recent, to prove that he was dead and when he died *before* dumping him in the ocean. DUH.
Short answer: those photos would simply be claimed to be Photoshopped.
Longer answer:
The problem is there is no such thing as sufficient proof for someone who refuses to accept any evidence that contradicts their belief. No matter what the government does, it will be accused by a small number of people of lying and fabricating evidence.
Within the US government and the military specifically you don't need to satisfy the impossible demand for proof that characterizes conspiracy theorists. If a team of highly decorated SEALs who devoted their lives to serving the nation confirm the report, it's the truth. While that doesn't make for a great Hollywood flick, neither does most of real life. Random crazies who have done nothing to deserve our trust are unworthy of such credibility and are not worth the hassle.
When a man makes a conscious decision that he wants to die, and asks them to film it so as to spread his political beliefs, they're hardly taking advantage of him.
The death is happening regardless of it being filmed. You make it sound like the BBC offered to pay a family a million dollars for exclusive rights to make a movie so that they would change their minds and pull the plug. Western culture is doing just fine, despite countries like Britain and fundamentalists like you who can't handle letting people with a different view make their own minds.
That's a strawman.
Do you backstab people at work? Steal from your family? Rape your neighbor's daughter? Of course not (or at least the rest of us don't). You have to make a conscious choice to ignore social conventions to be a dick. And the only reason people do is because they convince themselves that it would provide them a net gain (at low risk) which is patently false in the long run. There's nothing wrong with "playing nice." It's actually the norm, and we have plenty of examples where that "actually works" even when scaled up beyond tiny social units.
People fail to understand that the difficulty is not at the end result, but with the transition towards it. It's simpletons standing in the way of progress towards a better society because they are incapable of evolving beyond their upbringing in a society where selfishness is accepted. The problem is worse in the US where greed and short-term thinking are institutionalized, rewarded and even admired. That's why Lennon is so admired- he was more insightful than the average schmucks around him, and sadly, even those who came decades later.
For unions, once safe workplaces and decent wages are established, the next growth area for them is politics and that's the problem.
I don't accept the premise that workplaces are as safe as they'll ever be (since we're continuously learning about things that cause humans various forms of harm). Even if that were the case it's still only the first part of the battle- the second part is maintaining those gains. As is abundantly clear today, corporations are more than happy to grow in politics in order to bust unions and go back to a time where unions didn't exist and child labor saved them money (e.g. in Maine they nearly got a minimum wage loophole, where they could pay kids just $5.25/hr by calling them "trainees").
One could argue that unionization should be cyclical, disbanding and reforming after corporations buy enough votes in congress to repeal union gains, but that would put them at such a huge disadvantage you'd sooner get union members to agree not to occasionally abuse their collective bargaining power. Considering their negotiating partners, I find it hard to blame them for playing hardball too.
That was a joke, right?
In case you're actually as clueless as that, we're talking about people who need to work at the Apple store to scrape by, not engineers making cushy 6-figure salaries. There's a huge chasm between having recruiters calling daily to poach you and not being able to take take off an hour in the middle of the workday because rent is due. You're one of the lucky few to be completely oblivious to how most Americans actually live. Work retail for a few months without using your current assets and credit- you'll get a real education. It ain't pretty.
and I doubt most of us could imagine a world without capitalism.
It's easy if you try.
You seem to be new here.
These people come to complain here to post their knee-jerk paranoia-inspired reactions, not think coherently and produce something actually interesting to read.
Not necessarily. Just because many once-competent news organizations followed Fox News to the dark side doesn't mean it's not possible to maintain standards. It's when "for profit" turns to "profit at any cost" that you cease to be a journalist (or any other noble profession- e.g. doctors who perform unnecessary procedures, corrupt policemen, and... well, pretty much all lawyers). I think NPR is a good example of where non-for-profit makes it easier to maintain journalistic integrity, but even they suffer from catering to the demand for tabloid news.
A more intelligent news consumer would help, just as a smarter voting public is necessary for campaign finance reform.
You're overthinking the problem and absolving Alaska's government of their responsibility to comply with their own law. They don't have to build the equivalent of the Library of Congress' high-tech and user-friendly website (that would have been useful back then, or for implementing for future email, but nobody is expecting that here). They just need to provide a data dump to several groups who have raised concerns about this information. This isn't even strange or obscure information on which they'd have to spend months pulling hundreds of boxes out of storage- it's electronic email of official correspondence by their chief executive, who served (well, sorta-kinda, ya know) less than a decade ago. Short of pulling a Bush, there is no excuse to being unable to put the information together at reasonable cost to their tax-payers who are the prime beneficiaries (that's assuming this isn't being done for tabloid or political reasons, of course), not just the bill-footers.
All those "problems" can be solved by today's smart 14 year-old:
Data Export - write a ten-line script. You don't have to hand-format the text- just pull it out of Outlook (VBA) or wherever. The value in digital is being searchable, not in looking pretty.
Limit access- burn CD, FedEx only to the newspapers. Those who make FOIA requests are under no obligation to keep that stuff secret. Not even from those evil North Koreans, who are just itching to... invade Alaska? Redaction concerns are irrelevant to distribution. If North Korea mustn't know, neither should the public.
Storage & distribution - Bittorrent, or wikileaks will host it for you for free. Govt doesn't have to limit its response to only the parties who made the request- it's in the public domain.