but... if you are bold enough to ignore plain-sight common sense then you are dead.
We differ about whether this falls within the realm of "plain-sight common sense". Even if the risk were significant, which I refuse to accept:
Hospitalized if you're especially unlucky, maybe. Dead? Not so likely. And if you are unlucky enough to be harmed -- well, you get to be a poster child for why people shouldn't react unreasonably (with potential for media coverage, and a succesful lawsuit on the part of yourself or your survivors to recover for wrongful death/medical costs/pain-and-suffering/etc).
My city (despite its size) doesn't have enough mass-transit options for this game -- but if it did, I'd be in. As for the potential negative consequences, (1) I don't believe it'd happen to me, and (2) if it *did* happen to me, there's a good chance that something positive [ie. a publicized example of why people shouldn't overreact] could be made out of it.
Granted, I don't overvalue my life as much as some people do.
Oh, come on now. Your chances are much, much better of being hit by a car or mugged in plain daylight while walking on the sidewalk rather than being caught in such an action. Fears on the topic (presuming you consider walking on the sidewalk a reasonable activity) are thus unreasonable -- and if you're letting the terrorists engender unreasonable fears... well, there's a tired old phrase that might be due to be trotted out yet again.
It's hard to call something stolen when you hire everyone responsible for a product.
I've written some interesting infrastructure for my employer. If someone else hired me (and the rest of my team), I couldn't very well take it with me, though -- it's a the company's property, a work-for-hire, not my own. (Of course, this doesn't apply to the open-sourced bits, which are considerable in number). Even reproducing the same product ground-up would put me on thin ice.
Linus, Alan, Ted et al actually own the IP in the code they wrote for Linux. The same is not necessarily true for the relevant team from Digital.
Google has to honor no spider requests, and will take pages out of their archive if you can prove original ownership and request it.
Out of their archive, sure -- but not necessarily out of their search results; they just won't cache the page or show exerpts of it.
Consider the context of my post: I wasn't discussing the specific proposed legislation, but rather the principal of letting a copyright holder control whether content they own may be provided as result of a search request, in response to a poster who claimed that such a restrtiction should be legitimate.
I'd like to see you create a search index without doing any copying.
No copying at all, or no copying of any substantial part of the document to be indexed? The latter is quite plausible -- I'd be more worried about my index being considered a derived work. After all, all I have is a bunch of individual tokens, mixed up in a quite large data structure. Copying those individual words isn't likely to be actionable -- but my data structure could perhaps become a derived work.
Now, if you're discussing in-memory copying of the larger document during the creation of said data structure, you might have something of a point -- maybe -- but I'd be suprised if such a theory would actually stick in court against competant opposition.
The argument is not that the bill would explicitly make search engines illegal (in which case quoting the wording of an individual section would make sense), but that its overall wording implies an underlying concept that caching data in the manner done by Google et al is not in fact fair use -- which is contrary to how cases have so far been decided -- and could be used to persuede a court that legislative intent is in favor of such being treated as infringement.
Man, you must not have read the context of my post.
I wasn't discussing the bill described in the article. I was arguing the principal of the matter, objecting to an individual who argued that, in principal, copyright owners should be able to control whether an item is searchable.
Better, government could fine more realistically for the externalized costs of CO2 emission release, thus making making the price of such techniques better reflect their true cost, and all alternatives which avoid inflicting these costs on others or society as a whole (as opposed whichever specific alternatives subsidies attached) more viable.
I'm generally a laissez-faire sorta guy, but making externalities reflected in the costs of those inflicting them is an entirely legitimate.
You're sidestepping my post. I wasn't commenting on cached content; I was responding to the parent post, who was asking specifically about search, and not about caching (even if that's what this law addresses).
Now, mind you, I likewise believe that permitting the Internet Archive, Google Cache and such to function is clearly in the public interest, and that the law (and the courts' interpretation thereof) should reflect such. Your strawmen are just that -- strawmen -- and as such don't merrit serious attention.
Shouldn't it be up to the individual holder of the copyright to decide whether or not they want their copyrighted work to be publicly searchable or not?
No, it shouldn't.
Copyright doesn't provide universal control over a work -- indeed, it's quite limited. Reproduction, public performance, preparation of derivative works; these (and perhaps some minor ones I forgot) are the actions prohibited without the copyright owner's approval. Search -- allowing a third party to answer questions by telling another third party about your copyrighted work -- is not on the list.
Extending that franchise is a big step -- a very big step. You're taking actions which are presently available to the public at large, and imposing restrictions upon them -- and, in doing so, making for lots of extra beurocracy in the process. Search, in particular, is a case where this kind of legal restriction simply isn't in the public interest: Why should I be restricted by a 3rd party from telling you about a resource? There are already laws on the books regarding contributory copyright infringement, so telling you about how to access a resource illegally is already out of the question (except in cases where making such actionable would have a chilling effect on legitimate activities; hence the manner in which Grokster's big loss was tied to their intentional promotion of infringing activities by their userbase).
The legal balance already overwhelmingly favors copyright holders over the general public -- the DMCA and similar legislation being largely responsible for that -- and moving it even further in that direction does the public as a whole an unjustified level of harm.
The scores are public domain. The recorded performances aren't, unless they're either really old recordings or are released intentionally (as the BBC has done in this case).
There are valid reasons to use Oracle. Those reasons aren't always technical ones, though.
(There are *certainly* good technical reasons for using a real, enterprise-level DBMS; I'm not disputing that. Further, there are few folks I hold in lower esteem than those willing to use for mission critical work a database developed by folks who once said in public that such features as referential integrity were not worth having).
The reason my employer is spending big bucks on enterprise Linux (well, not quite so big now that we switched to SLES9) is simple: Oracle (the company, not the product) supports RHEL or SLES, and nothing else. Sure, we could run our databases on Gentoo if we wanted -- it works fine in practice -- but Oracle's terms prohibit that in a production environment, and we'd rather like to continue being able to use the expensive support we're paying for.
If these folks get Oracle certification, I'll be thrilled to have them in the marketplace. Otherwise, as far as my employer and I are concerned, they're "enterprise" in name alone.
(Oh -- and if you're considering Oracle, count the extra cost of a certified OS in as part of what you'll be paying for it. That, and the hair loss and headaches).
It's power storage, and an extremely inefficient kind at that due to inadequacies of the technology used to generate it. The huge amounts of power needed to generate the antimatter still have to come from somewhere, and given the energy crisis we're going to hit when the oil runs out, that's a problem.
Robert Forward, a longtime proponent of antimatter rocket engines, is in favor of huge space-based solar power generation facilities for antimatter generation; it's not a bad idea. The point remains, though: Antimatter isn't power generation, just storage, and generation is still an open (and increasingly important) issue.
Note that the parent specified "proper reparations". The current theoretical market price (as opposed to the price at which the owner is genuinely willing to sell) is arguably improper, at least in cases where genuine public use does not exist.
They're a big company, and if it's their habit to pose puzzles, that's what they'll do.
Well, sure. That's fine and dandy in most cases -- but if you're sure enough that you want to hire someone as to ask them to come in to talk about job they didn't submit an application for, you'd better be sure enough to bypass the questions; otherwise, you're showing your willingness to waste the time of someone whose time you should consider valuable (if, again, they're expert enough that you ask them to come by in place of all the people who actually applied for the position).
No, I don't like MS' practices, but it's still the hands-down best place to work in the field of applied computer science.
What the hell are you smoking? If I wanted somewhere big-name, I'd apply with Google. The times I've personally (as opposed to professionally) met folks from Microsoft, they've been assholes -- and the sort prone to hero-worship (ie. appeals to authority rather than actual arguments when in a technical debate) to boot.
Some of us prefer to work at startups. You know, small companies doing innovative things, staffed by motivated people (since unmotivated people will take the job security and higher guaranteed pay of going elsewhere [as opposed to the potential payoff associated w/ a startup's stock options]). The best place I ever worked was MontaVista Software -- an embedded Linux house, quite small when I first joined on. Absolutely brilliant dev team, including a number of kernel maintainers. Right now I'm with a startup making medical software, and I am personally responsible for a much larger portion of the product than any one non-managerial person could ever be at a larger company; my technical suggestions are taken seriously all the way up to the CEO.
You can take your big companies and smoke 'em -- I'll stay with my startups, thank you kindly. If the wife insists that I start spending some time away from work (as she probably will at some point), I might think of moving up to carefully selected established small businesses -- but nothing so large that 5 layers of beurocratic approval are needed to get a design change pushed through.
He basically has a job offer handed to him on a golden platter, and he starts nit-picking.
Huh? They call him in -- instead of all the people who actually wanted the job with them enough to submit applications -- and then they waste his time with questions? If they didn't know he was competant enough to hire, they shouldn't have imposed upon his time -- and since he hadn't submitted an application, they shouldn't have assumed he would take the job without a great deal of persuesion.
If they didn't know he was good enough to hire, why should they have wasted his time by calling him in for an interview instead of calling on someone who actually submitted an application?
Usually when interviewing a candidate for a position, the candidate has to prove that they are capable and worthy of the job.
Usually. But not when they're someone you asked to interview with you, without them expressing interest first.
Why? Because if you're going to make a request of someone's time for them to come to an interview for a job they didn't ask for, you'd damn well better not be wasting their time by making that request without being certain they're the person you want for the job. Otherwise, you're wasting the time of people who are experts in their fields (if they weren't, you'd have called in someone who actually submitted an application, right?), and the time of such people is by definition valuable.
Seriously, I think the arrogance is on the part of this Sorkin guy.
Either you want the job, so you apply and they test your aptitude -- or they know they want you, so they try to persuede you to take the job.
Asking you to come in and then testing your aptitude -- particularly when you're an acknowledged expert in your field -- is insulting. If they didn't already know they wanted you for the job, they shouldn't have wasted your time by calling you in the first place.
What's the benefit of running a blog on an https server?
First off, increasing the total amount of encrypted traffic on the Internet decreases the percent chance of any particular piece of encrypted traffic being sensitive, thus preventing folks doing traffic analysis from being able to draw conclusions about content. (This is substantially more true about email, but it's still not an entirely ineffective argument here as well: If everyone used PGP, it couldn't be used to draw the conclusion that an individual using it has something to hide).
Second, it prevents monkey-in-the-middle attacks from altering content. Once upon a time I modified my school's proxy server (on April 1st) to translate all traffic to an individual machine into Pig Latin. Imagine, instead, that I had made the proxy server display inaccurate or scandelous content under someone else's name; having the server authenticate itself prevents such an attack from happening from behind it.
Third, folks presumably post to this blog as well, no? They authenticate themselves to do so, right? Those authentication tokens are valuable, no? Also, any blog posts which they create and mark as private or viewable only by a limited subset of people -- those shouldn't be transmitted in plaintext. And so forth.
Slashdot Mirror
Hospitalized if you're especially unlucky, maybe. Dead? Not so likely. And if you are unlucky enough to be harmed -- well, you get to be a poster child for why people shouldn't react unreasonably (with potential for media coverage, and a succesful lawsuit on the part of yourself or your survivors to recover for wrongful death/medical costs/pain-and-suffering/etc).
My city (despite its size) doesn't have enough mass-transit options for this game -- but if it did, I'd be in. As for the potential negative consequences, (1) I don't believe it'd happen to me, and (2) if it *did* happen to me, there's a good chance that something positive [ie. a publicized example of why people shouldn't overreact] could be made out of it.
Granted, I don't overvalue my life as much as some people do.
damnit.
Oh, come on now. Your chances are much, much better of being hit by a car or mugged in plain daylight while walking on the sidewalk rather than being caught in such an action. Fears on the topic (presuming you consider walking on the sidewalk a reasonable activity) are thus unreasonable -- and if you're letting the terrorists engender unreasonable fears... well, there's a tired old phrase that might be due to be trotted out yet again.
as long as he didn't cut-and-paste
Not necessarily. There's also patent and trade secret laws to comply with.
It's hard to call something stolen when you hire everyone responsible for a product.
I've written some interesting infrastructure for my employer. If someone else hired me (and the rest of my team), I couldn't very well take it with me, though -- it's a the company's property, a work-for-hire, not my own. (Of course, this doesn't apply to the open-sourced bits, which are considerable in number). Even reproducing the same product ground-up would put me on thin ice.
Linus, Alan, Ted et al actually own the IP in the code they wrote for Linux. The same is not necessarily true for the relevant team from Digital.
Consider the context of my post: I wasn't discussing the specific proposed legislation, but rather the principal of letting a copyright holder control whether content they own may be provided as result of a search request, in response to a poster who claimed that such a restrtiction should be legitimate.
I'd like to see you create a search index without doing any copying.
No copying at all, or no copying of any substantial part of the document to be indexed? The latter is quite plausible -- I'd be more worried about my index being considered a derived work. After all, all I have is a bunch of individual tokens, mixed up in a quite large data structure. Copying those individual words isn't likely to be actionable -- but my data structure could perhaps become a derived work.
Now, if you're discussing in-memory copying of the larger document during the creation of said data structure, you might have something of a point -- maybe -- but I'd be suprised if such a theory would actually stick in court against competant opposition.
But then, if I did want to discuss the article...
The argument is not that the bill would explicitly make search engines illegal (in which case quoting the wording of an individual section would make sense), but that its overall wording implies an underlying concept that caching data in the manner done by Google et al is not in fact fair use -- which is contrary to how cases have so far been decided -- and could be used to persuede a court that legislative intent is in favor of such being treated as infringement.
Man, you must not have read the context of my post.
I wasn't discussing the bill described in the article. I was arguing the principal of the matter, objecting to an individual who argued that, in principal, copyright owners should be able to control whether an item is searchable.
Better, government could fine more realistically for the externalized costs of CO2 emission release, thus making making the price of such techniques better reflect their true cost, and all alternatives which avoid inflicting these costs on others or society as a whole (as opposed whichever specific alternatives subsidies attached) more viable.
I'm generally a laissez-faire sorta guy, but making externalities reflected in the costs of those inflicting them is an entirely legitimate.
You're sidestepping my post. I wasn't commenting on cached content; I was responding to the parent post, who was asking specifically about search, and not about caching (even if that's what this law addresses).
Now, mind you, I likewise believe that permitting the Internet Archive, Google Cache and such to function is clearly in the public interest, and that the law (and the courts' interpretation thereof) should reflect such. Your strawmen are just that -- strawmen -- and as such don't merrit serious attention.
Copyright doesn't provide universal control over a work -- indeed, it's quite limited. Reproduction, public performance, preparation of derivative works; these (and perhaps some minor ones I forgot) are the actions prohibited without the copyright owner's approval. Search -- allowing a third party to answer questions by telling another third party about your copyrighted work -- is not on the list.
Extending that franchise is a big step -- a very big step. You're taking actions which are presently available to the public at large, and imposing restrictions upon them -- and, in doing so, making for lots of extra beurocracy in the process. Search, in particular, is a case where this kind of legal restriction simply isn't in the public interest: Why should I be restricted by a 3rd party from telling you about a resource? There are already laws on the books regarding contributory copyright infringement, so telling you about how to access a resource illegally is already out of the question (except in cases where making such actionable would have a chilling effect on legitimate activities; hence the manner in which Grokster's big loss was tied to their intentional promotion of infringing activities by their userbase).
The legal balance already overwhelmingly favors copyright holders over the general public -- the DMCA and similar legislation being largely responsible for that -- and moving it even further in that direction does the public as a whole an unjustified level of harm.
The scores are public domain. The recorded performances aren't, unless they're either really old recordings or are released intentionally (as the BBC has done in this case).
I know enough not to bet against human stupidity -- but I have enough idealism not to bet in its favor, either.
Heh.
There are valid reasons to use Oracle. Those reasons aren't always technical ones, though.
(There are *certainly* good technical reasons for using a real, enterprise-level DBMS; I'm not disputing that. Further, there are few folks I hold in lower esteem than those willing to use for mission critical work a database developed by folks who once said in public that such features as referential integrity were not worth having).
The reason my employer is spending big bucks on enterprise Linux (well, not quite so big now that we switched to SLES9) is simple: Oracle (the company, not the product) supports RHEL or SLES, and nothing else. Sure, we could run our databases on Gentoo if we wanted -- it works fine in practice -- but Oracle's terms prohibit that in a production environment, and we'd rather like to continue being able to use the expensive support we're paying for.
If these folks get Oracle certification, I'll be thrilled to have them in the marketplace. Otherwise, as far as my employer and I are concerned, they're "enterprise" in name alone.
(Oh -- and if you're considering Oracle, count the extra cost of a certified OS in as part of what you'll be paying for it. That, and the hair loss and headaches).
It's power storage, and an extremely inefficient kind at that due to inadequacies of the technology used to generate it. The huge amounts of power needed to generate the antimatter still have to come from somewhere, and given the energy crisis we're going to hit when the oil runs out, that's a problem.
Robert Forward, a longtime proponent of antimatter rocket engines, is in favor of huge space-based solar power generation facilities for antimatter generation; it's not a bad idea. The point remains, though: Antimatter isn't power generation, just storage, and generation is still an open (and increasingly important) issue.
Note that the parent specified "proper reparations". The current theoretical market price (as opposed to the price at which the owner is genuinely willing to sell) is arguably improper, at least in cases where genuine public use does not exist.
Nobody ass kisses in interviews. Its very likely that you'll get a jerk interviewing you for any sort of CS-related position at any company.
We obviously have substantially different experiences with regard to job interviews.
They're a big company, and if it's their habit to pose puzzles, that's what they'll do.
Well, sure. That's fine and dandy in most cases -- but if you're sure enough that you want to hire someone as to ask them to come in to talk about job they didn't submit an application for, you'd better be sure enough to bypass the questions; otherwise, you're showing your willingness to waste the time of someone whose time you should consider valuable (if, again, they're expert enough that you ask them to come by in place of all the people who actually applied for the position).
Some of us prefer to work at startups. You know, small companies doing innovative things, staffed by motivated people (since unmotivated people will take the job security and higher guaranteed pay of going elsewhere [as opposed to the potential payoff associated w/ a startup's stock options]). The best place I ever worked was MontaVista Software -- an embedded Linux house, quite small when I first joined on. Absolutely brilliant dev team, including a number of kernel maintainers. Right now I'm with a startup making medical software, and I am personally responsible for a much larger portion of the product than any one non-managerial person could ever be at a larger company; my technical suggestions are taken seriously all the way up to the CEO.
You can take your big companies and smoke 'em -- I'll stay with my startups, thank you kindly. If the wife insists that I start spending some time away from work (as she probably will at some point), I might think of moving up to carefully selected established small businesses -- but nothing so large that 5 layers of beurocratic approval are needed to get a design change pushed through.
Huh? They call him in -- instead of all the people who actually wanted the job with them enough to submit applications -- and then they waste his time with questions? If they didn't know he was competant enough to hire, they shouldn't have imposed upon his time -- and since he hadn't submitted an application, they shouldn't have assumed he would take the job without a great deal of persuesion.If they didn't know he was good enough to hire, why should they have wasted his time by calling him in for an interview instead of calling on someone who actually submitted an application?
Why? Because if you're going to make a request of someone's time for them to come to an interview for a job they didn't ask for, you'd damn well better not be wasting their time by making that request without being certain they're the person you want for the job. Otherwise, you're wasting the time of people who are experts in their fields (if they weren't, you'd have called in someone who actually submitted an application, right?), and the time of such people is by definition valuable.
Seriously, I think the arrogance is on the part of this Sorkin guy.
Either you want the job, so you apply and they test your aptitude -- or they know they want you, so they try to persuede you to take the job.
Asking you to come in and then testing your aptitude -- particularly when you're an acknowledged expert in your field -- is insulting. If they didn't already know they wanted you for the job, they shouldn't have wasted your time by calling you in the first place.
What's the benefit of running a blog on an https server?
First off, increasing the total amount of encrypted traffic on the Internet decreases the percent chance of any particular piece of encrypted traffic being sensitive, thus preventing folks doing traffic analysis from being able to draw conclusions about content. (This is substantially more true about email, but it's still not an entirely ineffective argument here as well: If everyone used PGP, it couldn't be used to draw the conclusion that an individual using it has something to hide).
Second, it prevents monkey-in-the-middle attacks from altering content. Once upon a time I modified my school's proxy server (on April 1st) to translate all traffic to an individual machine into Pig Latin. Imagine, instead, that I had made the proxy server display inaccurate or scandelous content under someone else's name; having the server authenticate itself prevents such an attack from happening from behind it.
Third, folks presumably post to this blog as well, no? They authenticate themselves to do so, right? Those authentication tokens are valuable, no? Also, any blog posts which they create and mark as private or viewable only by a limited subset of people -- those shouldn't be transmitted in plaintext. And so forth.