No it wouldn't. Both lawyers would respond 'yes'. Part of Oracle's claim is that Google took some classes from Oracle's GPL'd Java implementation, stripped off the GPL and comments, added an APSL, tweaked a few variable names, and called it original code. The examples that I've seen are pretty ambiguous - there aren't many different ways of implementing some parts of Java, and even two completely independent implementations working from the same spec would be pretty similar and determining if one was a derived work would still be difficult.
Have you ever tried to create a dynamic Windows GUI? There's a reason that a lot of apps came to the conclusion it was simpler to just embed some HTML forms...
The problem with this is that a lot of employers seem to regard time spent working outside the industry as worse than time spent unemployed. Workers don't have control over this perception, but they do have control over whether they choose to accept a different job.
In some parts of the world, the incentives are also massively wrong. I'm not sure what it's like in the US, but in North Devon in the UK, where my mother lives, it's fairly easy to get £20K/year from various benefits, but very difficult to make this much from a job. After tax, someone making minimum wage at a full time job earns £9,727.55/year. Two people doing this make less than they can claim in unemployment, housing, and child benefits for doing nothing (unemployed people also get exemptions from council tax [property tax] and a few other things). Why would you get a minimum wage job if you could make more by not working? You need a serious work ethic to decide that it's better to work hard and have less money than to not work at all and have more.
That's rather the point. Any economic theory that a sufficient number of people accept as true is wrong. As soon as people (especially people in power) accept an economic theory, they will start acting differently and invalidating some of the axioms behind said theory. For a theory to make accurate predictions, then it must cover the case when everyone else is using that theory to determine their actions. It must therefore be more complicated than itself. (Note: this is more elegant when expressed mathematically, and the proof has been known for several decades, making Slashdot even more late with the story than normal).
If everyone had listened to the economists talking about the future mortgage crisis, the crisis would have been averted. And those economists would have been called frauds for predicting something that didn't happen.
'Still' is the important word. I would hope that you aren't still writing K&R C (or, if you are, that I never have to maintain your code). If you had not kept the skill up to date, then being able to write K&R C would not be much of an advantage today. I'd rather hire a Java programmer than a K&R C programmer to write C99, because I've had to maintain code written by people who still thought K&R was the best before...
HTML has been around... well... since the Internet
Ignoring the fact that you are about two or three decades off with that, have you looked at HTML 1.0 recently? Even HTML 2.0 from 1994 didn't have CSS or any semantic markup. HTML 4 is still pretty relevant, but that's only from 1997 and web development for the past few years has really required JavaScript (which has changed significantly over the years by the way) and asynchronous HTML requests - which weren't mentioned at all in HTML 4.
In short, your post make me think that you've never done any development. If you think knowing Java 1.0 will mean you have nothing to learn to program in Java 1.7, then you are an idiot. Java has had a new version every couple of years, and each one of those has required a lot of learning. If you learned Java 1.2 in 1998, then when 1.3 came out in 2000 your skills would have been more marketable if you had kept them up to date. In 2002, when Java 1.4 came out, only knowing 1.2 would have been a lot less useful. When 1.5 came out in 2004, again, your old skills became less useful.
C has evolved over the years. C99 updated the language a little and updated the libraries a lot more, especially things like stdint.h. POSIX has grown threading APIs, and various other things that weren't present in the mid '90s.
I don't see many ads for Ada or Lisp these days
Look at Rolls Royce. They're hiring SPARK Ada programmers like crazy, as are a lot of other aerospace companies. It doesn't really have any competitors for systems where failure is not an option. As for Lisp, the last job offer I got to write Lisp was for an investment bank.
Did you look at the same picture as me? It showed Apple suing HTC and Nokia, but being sued by ELAN, NTP, Motorola, Acacia, Kodak and Nokia. Since then, Apple has filed countersuits against most of these. Companies that were suing more of the other than Apple include NTP, Kodak and Nokia. Samsung has also joined in the suing game, while they were purely defensive a year ago.
It doesn't do either of those. It slides it from a predefined location, to anywhere outside of that is a valid unlock place. The path can be anything that ends outside of a circle.
Not even remotely true. Take a look at this picture to see the tangled mess of lawsuits a year ago - it's got worse since then, but I couldn't find an updated image.
We're already in that situation. Unfortunately, rather than just cross-licensing the patents they're all suing each other and using temporary injunctions to gain first-mover advantage.
My (WebOS) TouchPad doesn't do slide to unlock. To unlock, you have to drag a little padlock ball out of a small circle at one end of the screen. I find it a much nicer mechanism than Apple's, which requires a slide in a particular direction.
That was the NeXT philosophy, and it was only true for a very small subset of people (as shown by the fact that NeXT shipped about 50K computers in the company's entire life). A lot of the NeXT people came to Apple with Steve Jobs and took fairly senior positions. They've mostly retired now. Unfortunately, so have all of the competent pre-merger HCI people that Apple used to employ.
To be fair to modern garbage collectors, the algorithm that early Lisp implementations used (Dijkstra) was pretty crappy. Basically, stop the program, walk the entire heap, delete everything else. It introduced long pauses at semi-random intervals and did nothing to avoid memory fragmentation. Generational and incremental collectors made GC generally usable. I think both of these showed up in Lisp before any other language, but neither was present in 1959.
As long as the repayment terms don't change, it doesn't really matter how big the student loan gets in the UK though. It just works out at a 4-10% extra income tax for graduates, depending on their income (well, 0% for incomes under £21K). I actually have no idea how much of my student loan is left, because it doesn't matter to me (until it's paid off and I need to stop ticking the 'calculate student loans with this' button on my tax return).
On the other hand, why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance? They could hire people for less money if they didn't require a degree,
Because they can't actually pay less for not requiring a degree, and requiring a degree is a vaguely good way of cutting down the pool of applicants.
How do student loans work in the USA? I didn't find Wikipedia particularly informative. In the UK, they accumulate interest at the rate of inflation and are paid back by a mechanism that effectively makes them a temporary graduate tax: repayments start when you are earning £21K and gradually increase. They are automatically deducted along with your income tax. They generally aren't counted towards your credit rating - you can't default on them because no payments are due when you have no (or low) income and payments are a relatively small fraction of the income that you have. Most people can effectively ignore them, and just treat their income tax rate as being a couple of percent higher.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they were tourists?
No it wouldn't. Both lawyers would respond 'yes'. Part of Oracle's claim is that Google took some classes from Oracle's GPL'd Java implementation, stripped off the GPL and comments, added an APSL, tweaked a few variable names, and called it original code. The examples that I've seen are pretty ambiguous - there aren't many different ways of implementing some parts of Java, and even two completely independent implementations working from the same spec would be pretty similar and determining if one was a derived work would still be difficult.
Have you ever tried to create a dynamic Windows GUI? There's a reason that a lot of apps came to the conclusion it was simpler to just embed some HTML forms...
The problem with this is that a lot of employers seem to regard time spent working outside the industry as worse than time spent unemployed. Workers don't have control over this perception, but they do have control over whether they choose to accept a different job.
In some parts of the world, the incentives are also massively wrong. I'm not sure what it's like in the US, but in North Devon in the UK, where my mother lives, it's fairly easy to get £20K/year from various benefits, but very difficult to make this much from a job. After tax, someone making minimum wage at a full time job earns £9,727.55/year. Two people doing this make less than they can claim in unemployment, housing, and child benefits for doing nothing (unemployed people also get exemptions from council tax [property tax] and a few other things). Why would you get a minimum wage job if you could make more by not working? You need a serious work ethic to decide that it's better to work hard and have less money than to not work at all and have more.
How many of those 'now hiring' posters will accept someone with no relevant skills and train them on the job?
That's rather the point. Any economic theory that a sufficient number of people accept as true is wrong. As soon as people (especially people in power) accept an economic theory, they will start acting differently and invalidating some of the axioms behind said theory. For a theory to make accurate predictions, then it must cover the case when everyone else is using that theory to determine their actions. It must therefore be more complicated than itself. (Note: this is more elegant when expressed mathematically, and the proof has been known for several decades, making Slashdot even more late with the story than normal).
If everyone had listened to the economists talking about the future mortgage crisis, the crisis would have been averted. And those economists would have been called frauds for predicting something that didn't happen.
'Still' is the important word. I would hope that you aren't still writing K&R C (or, if you are, that I never have to maintain your code). If you had not kept the skill up to date, then being able to write K&R C would not be much of an advantage today. I'd rather hire a Java programmer than a K&R C programmer to write C99, because I've had to maintain code written by people who still thought K&R was the best before...
HTML has been around ... well ... since the Internet
Ignoring the fact that you are about two or three decades off with that, have you looked at HTML 1.0 recently? Even HTML 2.0 from 1994 didn't have CSS or any semantic markup. HTML 4 is still pretty relevant, but that's only from 1997 and web development for the past few years has really required JavaScript (which has changed significantly over the years by the way) and asynchronous HTML requests - which weren't mentioned at all in HTML 4.
In short, your post make me think that you've never done any development. If you think knowing Java 1.0 will mean you have nothing to learn to program in Java 1.7, then you are an idiot. Java has had a new version every couple of years, and each one of those has required a lot of learning. If you learned Java 1.2 in 1998, then when 1.3 came out in 2000 your skills would have been more marketable if you had kept them up to date. In 2002, when Java 1.4 came out, only knowing 1.2 would have been a lot less useful. When 1.5 came out in 2004, again, your old skills became less useful.
I don't think swapping jobs would work. The way you're meant to do it is to get a large golden parachute on your way out...
I'm still employed using skills I learnt in 1980.
How many skills are you using that you learned in the 1980s but didn't use at all in the 1990s? I bet it's a much lower number.
I don't see many ads for Ada or Lisp these days
Look at Rolls Royce. They're hiring SPARK Ada programmers like crazy, as are a lot of other aerospace companies. It doesn't really have any competitors for systems where failure is not an option. As for Lisp, the last job offer I got to write Lisp was for an investment bank.
Did you look at the same picture as me? It showed Apple suing HTC and Nokia, but being sued by ELAN, NTP, Motorola, Acacia, Kodak and Nokia. Since then, Apple has filed countersuits against most of these. Companies that were suing more of the other than Apple include NTP, Kodak and Nokia. Samsung has also joined in the suing game, while they were purely defensive a year ago.
It doesn't do either of those. It slides it from a predefined location, to anywhere outside of that is a valid unlock place. The path can be anything that ends outside of a circle.
Not even remotely true. Take a look at this picture to see the tangled mess of lawsuits a year ago - it's got worse since then, but I couldn't find an updated image.
Let the RIAA and MPAA start suing Google and then we might see some real reform...
We're already in that situation. Unfortunately, rather than just cross-licensing the patents they're all suing each other and using temporary injunctions to gain first-mover advantage.
My (WebOS) TouchPad doesn't do slide to unlock. To unlock, you have to drag a little padlock ball out of a small circle at one end of the screen. I find it a much nicer mechanism than Apple's, which requires a slide in a particular direction.
That was the NeXT philosophy, and it was only true for a very small subset of people (as shown by the fact that NeXT shipped about 50K computers in the company's entire life). A lot of the NeXT people came to Apple with Steve Jobs and took fairly senior positions. They've mostly retired now. Unfortunately, so have all of the competent pre-merger HCI people that Apple used to employ.
Yes, China definitely doesn't have its own nuclear power plant or aircraft carrier designs...
Didn't we already? I'm pretty sure that this would violate the EU Data Protection Directive.
To be fair to modern garbage collectors, the algorithm that early Lisp implementations used (Dijkstra) was pretty crappy. Basically, stop the program, walk the entire heap, delete everything else. It introduced long pauses at semi-random intervals and did nothing to avoid memory fragmentation. Generational and incremental collectors made GC generally usable. I think both of these showed up in Lisp before any other language, but neither was present in 1959.
As long as the repayment terms don't change, it doesn't really matter how big the student loan gets in the UK though. It just works out at a 4-10% extra income tax for graduates, depending on their income (well, 0% for incomes under £21K). I actually have no idea how much of my student loan is left, because it doesn't matter to me (until it's paid off and I need to stop ticking the 'calculate student loans with this' button on my tax return).
On the other hand, why would employers be demanding a college education if they didn't see that it actually makes a significant difference in employee performance? They could hire people for less money if they didn't require a degree,
Because they can't actually pay less for not requiring a degree, and requiring a degree is a vaguely good way of cutting down the pool of applicants.
How do student loans work in the USA? I didn't find Wikipedia particularly informative. In the UK, they accumulate interest at the rate of inflation and are paid back by a mechanism that effectively makes them a temporary graduate tax: repayments start when you are earning £21K and gradually increase. They are automatically deducted along with your income tax. They generally aren't counted towards your credit rating - you can't default on them because no payments are due when you have no (or low) income and payments are a relatively small fraction of the income that you have. Most people can effectively ignore them, and just treat their income tax rate as being a couple of percent higher.