You can't hope to make a law that defines "human readable" as opposed to legalese
Perhaps not. I wasn't intending to write anything legally sound, just hopefully something from which a legally-sound version could be extracted. This is the short summary in front of what might end up being legalese, or simply guidelines.
Moreover, putting abusive clause (which is the case on alsmost all EULAs) should be motive to sue the company.
My point here is that if there are abusive clauses, they will be right up there, up front, in plain sight, so that people realize what they're agreeing to.
about #5 : IANAL, but I think this is already illegal (I received an email when ebay changed some of their EULA; then again, I'm in europe.)
I don't know if it's valid, but practically every agreement I've seen on a website states that it is "subject to change without notice" -- I'm saying that changing without notice should void the contract until both parties have a chance to agree on the changes.
And I'm in the US, so it is frighteningly possible for that to be the case.
about #6 : Again to vague to transcribe in legalese. Adding specific customer protection laws should do the trick, that way you can explicit those "assumptions"
That is true. I wanted to pick it as a starting point, though, so that an explicit list of assumptions can be drawn up and agreed upon. But I was trying to keep this short, and to things that I'm fairly sure are essential and won't change.
about #10 : To much of a hassle to everyone to be enforced. When I'm quoting a slashdot post, or showing a picture in a video mashup, I don't have the time to contact or acknowledge every owner.
When you're quoting a Slashdot post, most often it's in the reply to said Slashdot post -- so it's pretty implicit who you're quoting, most of the time. It's also possible that software could help here -- you're usually going to be copying/pasting from somewhere when quoting, so maybe an extension to figure out where it was copied from?
I suppose it might be enough to claim that the quote is not your own, in most circumstances.
I'm also thinking that the "You can only takedown, you can't edit without permission" part of #9 is enforceable with technology, so maybe #9 could be removed.
Well, not to mention that true web "applications" suck ass. Why would I run a browser that opens a file on my computer which loads an application in a VM sandbox... why? What's the point?
If you don't get the point, why are you on Slashdot? You are using a "web application" right now.
And talk about lock-in.. why would I want my personal data on some else's server, only able to retrieve it at thier whim?
Now that that's out of the way, the few reasons I can think of not wanting something on the Web all have to do with performance -- real performance, not simply UI latency. Which means you're down to things like games, music and video editing, and graphic design. Wait, nevermind, graphic design is almost done -- so that leaves games and music/video editing.
Actually, the argument goes: Transparency of party A with respect to party B gives B power over A. The amount of power is greater if B already has some power over A.
Your employer already has a lot more power over you than you do over them, in most circumstances. At the same time, too much information from them to you gives you too much power over them (I could burn the whole building down!)
I'm not sure what metric we use to determine who should have how much power, though. And there's also the eternal value of privacy to consider.
Sorry, this analogy doesn't work. In most cases, it is ludicrously simple to restrict access to a URL. Checking IDs for a private gym actually costs money, as you need someone there to watch the door, and a security system, etc.
Also, the private gym usually has a sign on the door that says "private". We generally consider a password prompt, at the very least, to take the place of that sign.
See folks, whether its a hack or not doesn't change the fact that its just wrong. There are too many people freeloading nowadays. The Internet makes it so much easier to freeload.
Guess what else the Internet makes it easy to do? Secure your own site!
So let's try this one:
Should Verizon and MobiTV receive revenue if they can't even lock down their own service? Maybe, being charitable.
Is it anyone's responsibility but Verizon and MobiTV to lock down their service? No.
When MobiTV fixes their stuff, I'm sure a bunch of people in these forums will yell and scream about it, but few of them will actually starting paying for the service that they started to enjoy.
If that's true, maybe the service wasn't actually worth what people are paying for it?
And you know what? I bet no one will say a word, other than "Oh, well, damn. They fixed it." Again, if they don't start paying for it, that should tell you something about how little they value that service. And if some do, then this little security breach was a net win -- it was some cheap advertising.
If someone found a link like that in a service I control, I'd shut the service down temporarily until it could be fixed. I wouldn't spam C&D letters to people who dared to point it out.
From what I read, I think part of this is nVidia assuming GPUs still stay relevant. If we ever do get to a point where raytracing -- done on a CPU -- beats out rasterization, done on a GPU, then nVidia's business model falls apart, whereas Intel suddenly becomes much more relevant (as their GPUs tend to suck).
Personally, I would much prefer Intel winning this. It's a hit or miss, but Intel often does provide open specs and/or open drivers. nVidia provides drivers that mostly work, except when they don't, and then you're on your own...
Producing kiddie porn is illegal because the act of pedophilia is statutory rape. That is enough -- distributing kiddie porn which has already been produced should be legal, so long as you were not involved, in any way, with producing it.
Now, libel and slander -- what we really need here is a system whereby it is easier to determine the veracity of a statement, rather than a system where it is possible to sue someone after the damage is done.
So, that said, I propose this:
Freedom of speech, period. Through channels which you are legally allowed to control, you can say anything you want, as yourself or anonymously. This includes spam.
Neutrality of the network. When providing Internet service to anyone, it is the customer's choice what is blocked, filtered, degraded, or given any special treatment with respect to other traffic.
Transparency of filtering. That is: If you run a spam filter, you must provide source code upon request. This right may be waived by the user, but it must be made clear and explicit.
Readability of contracts. The gist of any contract or agreement (for service or software -- EULAs, Terms of Service, etc) must be presented to both parties in a short, human-readable summary. (Less than a page, less than N words -- not sure how many words, but it should be a hard limit.) You may have as much legalese as you like, as long as said legalese is linked to from the human-readable summary, and said summary adequately describes it to a non-lawyer.
Stability of contracts. Contracts may never be changed without notice. In the case where a party cannot be given proper notice, the contract may be terminated, but contracts may only be altered by both parties. This right may not be waived.
Gating of contracts. Each kind of service naturally has certain built-in assumptions -- for example, it is assumed that I am allowed to read a website, send links to friends, print it out, and distribute it, so long as it is represented as close as possible to its original form. It is also assumed that scripts are allowed to visit this website, unless explicitly forbidden in a robots.txt. Any variation from common conventions like these must be gated by an agreement compliant with #4. Any gating for robots must be specified in a standard format -- if unsure, ban them in robots.txt until potential users have a chance to read the agreement.
Commitment to standards. If you are going to pretend to follow a standard, you follow it. If you're going to have a website, it should be accessable via any reasonably standard web browser, unless gated by a warning similar to #6. (This means no 100% Flash sites.) For something to be considered an open standard, it must have at least one public domain reference implementation. It is far worse to half-implement a standard than not at all -- no claiming XHTML if your document is not well-formed, for example.
The owner of a system controls that system. If any legal action must be taken against a given system, it should go to the actual owner. It may be deflected by a proxy, if possible (get the motion dismissed), but it may not be settled by a proxy. (For example: If I own a webserver, and a subscription to some ISP, no one may take down my content except me.)
The owner of content controls that content. In the case where this conflicts with #8, content may be taken down by the owner of the system -- but a notice must be left that content was removed, and, if reasonable, who removed it. (If you leave a username of "v14gr4 at spamme.com", that username may be deleted or altered, obviously.) Also, if possible, the owner must be contacted about the removal, and, if it is the result of a takedown demand, the owner must be given an opportunity to respond to that demand. (In other words, the owner of a system should not take sides in a dispute between a content creator and a takedown notice.) In cases where this conflicts with #6, #6 wins -- that is, if you released something as a public document,
Sounds like your teacher is a grade A asshat and your 'policies' are borderline RIAA/MPAA stupid.
Every single university I visited had the same policies. I know mine did. And the penalty is exactly the same, whether you're the original author or the cheater, because they can't tell, after the fact, who's who on that. It's also the same whether it was intentional or not, the assumption being that if you care about your academic career, you'll secure your computer and your university account -- which also prevents someone from using the excuse of "accidentally" letting someone else into their account.
Your best way to deal with it is to make that information 'useless' and move on.
Maybe so, but if you get caught, far as I'm concerned, you should be gone -- whether or not it was useful. What happens when you hit the Real World? Going to leak corporate secrets because "it's going to happen"?
I've been in that situation where I'm one of the only ones to actually get some assignment, but the other students aren't interested in learning, they're interested in grades. Never mind that they aren't returning any value to the group -- what pisses me off is that they are actually just writing down what I say without making any effort to learn what it means. (That, and if they actually do just write down what I say, I could get in trouble for plagiarism.)
On the other hand, we all want a free exchange of information on the Internet. We want Freenet, or the moral equivalent. Which means that teaching methodologies must be worked out such that plagiarism of answers simply doesn't work.
In some cases, this is reasonably possible -- anything that requires a paper or a project should be obvious when it was copied and pasted from something else. But in others -- take math, where there often really is one right answer, and not very many ways of arriving at it -- I really don't know how to bulletproof that against cheating, other than to ensure that exams are a big enough chunk of your grade that if you've been cheating the rest of the semester, the exam will flunk you.
But at the same time, exams can't test everything that a homework assignment can -- often, they also test whether you're good at taking exams.
So I don't really have a solution. About the only thing I can know for sure is that I'm not cheating. Which is, maybe, valuable enough -- a word of advice, to anyone who likes to copy and paste, or simply write down answers -- just what do you think you're going to do when you get out into the Real World and don't know shit, other than how to copy and paste? If you're lucky, you'll last a month before you enter the exciting world of fast food.
Oh, also: IM and IRC can have archives, and can just as easily be copied/pasted from as email. It's not about time of retention.
"But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials," he said.
So, the university runs tutoring and mentoring programs. Were it not for that, I'd think it was just an overly-strict school, but as it turns out, they're hypocritical, too.
can do, if I'm reading right, everything the other claims to be able to do already?
Well, if I'm reading right, Silverlight lets you program it in pretty much any.NET language. That's something Flash doesn't do -- yet -- although they are coordinating with Mozilla to develop a common runtime which would make JavaScript fast, and also support other languages.
I would much rather see both of them go away, though. SVG and JavaScript, please.
Every "anti-piracy' technique i have seen, hurts the legitimate "consumers" (i hate that word) but does nothing to deter those who would "pirate", in fact, the pirated versions are way less cumbersome. (and now will be slightly cheaper to produce)
In this case, I don't think it hurts legitimate customers (I like that word better) any more than the current market of proprietary chips does. And I'm not really sure if it's possible for there to ever be an open chip community anything like the current open source community.
I'm not sure it would actually work, but from the summary, it looks entirely harmless, other than the wasted effort spent developing it. Not at all like DRM on media, which actually prevents legitimate uses that customers might have.
Your second is jumping into a philosophical debate with something that doesn't make much sense -- the whole point of calling it "intellectual property" is so that there can be a concept of theft, right?
Well, I didn't steal the copyright, and can't.
Richard Stallman may have told you that it's thoughtcrime to think such a thing
I disagree with Stallman about many things. He did point out that Intellectual Property isn't a completely sound term, as it covers two or three completely separate branches of law.
But he didn't have a problem with the concept of copyright itself, which makes you an idiot for bringing him up in the first place. The GPL works through copyright. It could not work without copyright.
the fact is that in our legal system it *is* property.
It ever occur to you that our legal system might be wrong? And that this might be the whole point of these discussions?
All this sophistry about scarcity is completely missing the point.
All this "sophistry" is very relevant to the point, which is this:
You can post as many Slashdot comments as you want. You can let the RIAA and the MPAA sue as many people as it can. You can pass as much legislation as you want.
But all of that is pissing in the wind. Piracy is a fact. It is real, it is happening, and it is not going away.
So, the question of whether or not to legitimize something that a large portion of the population is already doing anyway is a good one. Think Prohibition.
And think very carefully about how you'd like copyrights, trademarks, and patents to work.
Fortunately, at work, this isn't a problem, as we do everything in Rails. It's a small feature that I'm starting to see in more and more places -- the database is abstracted away.
Let me clarify: I just recently had to do a bit of restructuring of the corporate website. I developed and tested my changes locally on a sqlite database, then deployed to MySQL.
Which means that, as I'm also our admin, if I want to switch us over to Postgres, the app will be fine. It's the data I'd worry about...
Personnally because I'm so used to brackets. I mean all languages I know (c++,java,c#,perl,php and even Javascript) use them.
Probably the single biggest thing that helped me get over that (and similar quirks) is good syntax highlighting. That, and, well, on dvorak, both "do" and "end" are on the home row, whereas { and } are a long reach -- so it's actually faster to type the other way.
First, I do this for a living. There are four other Rails programmers here. I doubt they want to become Python programmers.
Second, there's a lot more to the languages than indentation. I like Python indentation, but I like too much more about Ruby.
On second thought, textmate *can* insert the end statements for you. Your editor should be able to, as well.
I don't mind typing them (I type some 80 wpm), I mind having them there. In short blocks, they're nice, but when there are four or five 'end's in a row, it's not telling me anything new -- but it is wasting space, and looking weird.
On ruby is good, thanks. And actually, I type fast enough that it's not that I don't want to type 'end' -- it's that I think it makes the code look cluttered.
Oh, and I don't really like ERB much, either -- hooked on Haml.
Here, go read. Find me a newer one if you like, but I can pretty much guarantee it's going to have something like Section 6 and Section 7.
The only difference is, with Apple, it's very likely you'll have to pay for it, or have advertising served by it, as I can't even submit an app (which they can still refuse) without paying something.
It depends on the app. Most of the "big name" apps ship as an installer (a.mpkg, if you're lucky), rather than a simple.app folder in a DMG.
And then, of course, there are the more interesting hacks, which install a kext, or drivers...
However, this is hardly the first time -- haven't checked lately (as I no longer own a working Mac), but it seemed like for very basic stuff, there was always some kind of shareware app out there, often by one person. All of it basic stuff.
And you may not know this, but many uninstallers -- games, especially -- will ask specifically if you want to delete savegames (as they can get kind of big), preferences, clean out registry entries, etc. Many will clean certain registry entries so as not to conflict with a second install, even if they are only settings -- or to provide the uninstall/reinstall process as a last-ditch effort to fix some problem with it.
Of course, I come from Linux, so I consider a package manager to be "essential system software". Neither Windows nor OS X provides this. I think BSD might be the closest...
Most (all?) code is laid out as a vertical thread of logical progressive statements, so this does seem different: Excel allows you to visually lay out the relationships between variable in a spatial way.
It is different in that it's spatial, but code is not necessarily a single thread. Most (all, please God) large programs are going to be broken up into logical structures called "functions". In most languages, these functions are composed of a (very short) vertical thread of imperative statements. In some languages (so-called "functional programming"), these functions are composed of nothing but other function calls.
And yes, Excel is a declarative language, so that's one difference.
While not physically spatial, a program which is organized well isn't really linear anymore. If you're insane, yes, you can probably follow a linear thread of statements, but think of those function calls as references to other cells -- I am not sure how I would describe this space, or if there even is a good description.
You could lay out a spreadsheet as a single list of mathematical operations, but it would obviously suck in comparison to a a spreadsheet.
Not really. It depends how you lay it out, of course...
I started my current job hourly, and moved up to salaried. While it was hourly, I kept a timesheet as a Google spreadsheet. I didn't mind it so much, as it was a web app (so no waste of an Office license), but I did comment about it...
He argued that it was the "ideal spreadsheet app".
Now, let's think about this. All it's really doing is finding the difference between when I punched in and punched out, for a given number of days. And then it's summing those for a given week. As a spreadsheet, I often have to click on cells to make sure that the formula got copied (and not just some number), and it's cumbersome if I need more space -- say, if I take a lunch break and some other break (the spreadsheet only works for lunch breaks).
Compare it to some equivalent actual code:
time_periods = [] current_time = nil def punch_in current_time = Time.now end def punch_out time_periods.push Time.now - current_time current_time = nil end # then, throughout the week... punch_in punch_out punch_in punch_out #... # then, to sum them all: time_periods.inject(0) { |sum, n| sum + n }
Now, that's not the most elegant way of doing this. I used a global variable, I didn't do any logging, that program won't actually do anything, etc. But personally, I find it more readable this way. Sure, the table that a spreadsheet produces is a nice report, and that's more readable -- but the actual logic is buried under it. In the simplest case, the logic is right where you'd expect, next to where its result is -- in which case, it's effectively copied and pasted everywhere, and any change to that logic must be search-and-replace'd everywhere. There's a reason we prefer to not repeat ourselves in code.
Here, the logic is all collected and readable. If I'd done it properly, it'd be separated from the data, making it easier to work with on its own. And of course, if you're not a programmer, it makes no sense to you, but to most programmers, it actually looks good.
And that is the real reason spreadsheets exist, I think. It's not because spreadsheets are a better way of doing things -- they're not. It's because spreadsheets have less of a learning curve, and your boss already knows how to create them. And it's because, for some very simple tasks (like the above system), it's often quicker and easier to build a spreadsheet than a program.
The danger of spreadsheets is stuff exactly like this 3D engine. Ok, the engine is cool, but it's also just wrong; either the code is going to be ugly and difficult to read (buried in the cells of the
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps not. I wasn't intending to write anything legally sound, just hopefully something from which a legally-sound version could be extracted. This is the short summary in front of what might end up being legalese, or simply guidelines.
My point here is that if there are abusive clauses, they will be right up there, up front, in plain sight, so that people realize what they're agreeing to.
I don't know if it's valid, but practically every agreement I've seen on a website states that it is "subject to change without notice" -- I'm saying that changing without notice should void the contract until both parties have a chance to agree on the changes.
And I'm in the US, so it is frighteningly possible for that to be the case.
That is true. I wanted to pick it as a starting point, though, so that an explicit list of assumptions can be drawn up and agreed upon. But I was trying to keep this short, and to things that I'm fairly sure are essential and won't change.
When you're quoting a Slashdot post, most often it's in the reply to said Slashdot post -- so it's pretty implicit who you're quoting, most of the time. It's also possible that software could help here -- you're usually going to be copying/pasting from somewhere when quoting, so maybe an extension to figure out where it was copied from?
I suppose it might be enough to claim that the quote is not your own, in most circumstances.
I'm also thinking that the "You can only takedown, you can't edit without permission" part of #9 is enforceable with technology, so maybe #9 could be removed.
If you don't get the point, why are you on Slashdot? You are using a "web application" right now.
We're working on it.
Now that that's out of the way, the few reasons I can think of not wanting something on the Web all have to do with performance -- real performance, not simply UI latency. Which means you're down to things like games, music and video editing, and graphic design. Wait, nevermind, graphic design is almost done -- so that leaves games and music/video editing.
The point is not that the OS will become irrelevant, but rather, that it will become as relevant as the CPU microcode.
That is: Absolutely essential, and absolutely off any user's radar.
He's wrong, of course, but it's not a wholly bad idea.
Actually, the argument goes: Transparency of party A with respect to party B gives B power over A. The amount of power is greater if B already has some power over A.
Your employer already has a lot more power over you than you do over them, in most circumstances. At the same time, too much information from them to you gives you too much power over them (I could burn the whole building down!)
I'm not sure what metric we use to determine who should have how much power, though. And there's also the eternal value of privacy to consider.
Sorry, this analogy doesn't work. In most cases, it is ludicrously simple to restrict access to a URL. Checking IDs for a private gym actually costs money, as you need someone there to watch the door, and a security system, etc.
Also, the private gym usually has a sign on the door that says "private". We generally consider a password prompt, at the very least, to take the place of that sign.
Guess what else the Internet makes it easy to do? Secure your own site!
So let's try this one:
Should Verizon and MobiTV receive revenue if they can't even lock down their own service? Maybe, being charitable.
Is it anyone's responsibility but Verizon and MobiTV to lock down their service? No.
If that's true, maybe the service wasn't actually worth what people are paying for it?
And you know what? I bet no one will say a word, other than "Oh, well, damn. They fixed it." Again, if they don't start paying for it, that should tell you something about how little they value that service. And if some do, then this little security breach was a net win -- it was some cheap advertising.
If someone found a link like that in a service I control, I'd shut the service down temporarily until it could be fixed. I wouldn't spam C&D letters to people who dared to point it out.
From what I read, I think part of this is nVidia assuming GPUs still stay relevant. If we ever do get to a point where raytracing -- done on a CPU -- beats out rasterization, done on a GPU, then nVidia's business model falls apart, whereas Intel suddenly becomes much more relevant (as their GPUs tend to suck).
Personally, I would much prefer Intel winning this. It's a hit or miss, but Intel often does provide open specs and/or open drivers. nVidia provides drivers that mostly work, except when they don't, and then you're on your own...
Producing kiddie porn is illegal because the act of pedophilia is statutory rape. That is enough -- distributing kiddie porn which has already been produced should be legal, so long as you were not involved, in any way, with producing it.
Now, libel and slander -- what we really need here is a system whereby it is easier to determine the veracity of a statement, rather than a system where it is possible to sue someone after the damage is done.
So, that said, I propose this:
Bullshit. It is always your choice to copy them or not.
Which they rightly deserve, if they're simply copying answers and not learning anything.
And if they do OK on the exams, figure they did actually learn something, copying answers or not. Since that's the goal, no problem, right?
With one difference: If the student somehow makes it out of there with a degree, we're the ones who have to deal with them.
Oh, and it's far easier to prevent than DRM.
Every single university I visited had the same policies. I know mine did. And the penalty is exactly the same, whether you're the original author or the cheater, because they can't tell, after the fact, who's who on that. It's also the same whether it was intentional or not, the assumption being that if you care about your academic career, you'll secure your computer and your university account -- which also prevents someone from using the excuse of "accidentally" letting someone else into their account.
Maybe so, but if you get caught, far as I'm concerned, you should be gone -- whether or not it was useful. What happens when you hit the Real World? Going to leak corporate secrets because "it's going to happen"?
Ok, what if you just sat in the original group, and didn't interact, and wrote down answers?
Seems to me, the time isn't a factor, it's the participation.
I can see both sides here...
I've been in that situation where I'm one of the only ones to actually get some assignment, but the other students aren't interested in learning, they're interested in grades. Never mind that they aren't returning any value to the group -- what pisses me off is that they are actually just writing down what I say without making any effort to learn what it means. (That, and if they actually do just write down what I say, I could get in trouble for plagiarism.)
On the other hand, we all want a free exchange of information on the Internet. We want Freenet, or the moral equivalent. Which means that teaching methodologies must be worked out such that plagiarism of answers simply doesn't work.
In some cases, this is reasonably possible -- anything that requires a paper or a project should be obvious when it was copied and pasted from something else. But in others -- take math, where there often really is one right answer, and not very many ways of arriving at it -- I really don't know how to bulletproof that against cheating, other than to ensure that exams are a big enough chunk of your grade that if you've been cheating the rest of the semester, the exam will flunk you.
But at the same time, exams can't test everything that a homework assignment can -- often, they also test whether you're good at taking exams.
So I don't really have a solution. About the only thing I can know for sure is that I'm not cheating. Which is, maybe, valuable enough -- a word of advice, to anyone who likes to copy and paste, or simply write down answers -- just what do you think you're going to do when you get out into the Real World and don't know shit, other than how to copy and paste? If you're lucky, you'll last a month before you enter the exciting world of fast food.
Oh, also: IM and IRC can have archives, and can just as easily be copied/pasted from as email. It's not about time of retention.
From TFA:
So, the university runs tutoring and mentoring programs. Were it not for that, I'd think it was just an overly-strict school, but as it turns out, they're hypocritical, too.
Well, if I'm reading right, Silverlight lets you program it in pretty much any .NET language. That's something Flash doesn't do -- yet -- although they are coordinating with Mozilla to develop a common runtime which would make JavaScript fast, and also support other languages.
I would much rather see both of them go away, though. SVG and JavaScript, please.
There's at least one decent lawyer out there...
No, before they're manufacturered.
As in, take the blueprint, make the change there, then give the blueprint to a pirate shop, who then fabricates unlocked chips.
Although... that is still a pretty funny picture
In this case, I don't think it hurts legitimate customers (I like that word better) any more than the current market of proprietary chips does. And I'm not really sure if it's possible for there to ever be an open chip community anything like the current open source community.
I'm not sure it would actually work, but from the summary, it looks entirely harmless, other than the wasted effort spent developing it. Not at all like DRM on media, which actually prevents legitimate uses that customers might have.
Calling us "idiots" was your first mistake.
Your second is jumping into a philosophical debate with something that doesn't make much sense -- the whole point of calling it "intellectual property" is so that there can be a concept of theft, right?
Well, I didn't steal the copyright, and can't.
I disagree with Stallman about many things. He did point out that Intellectual Property isn't a completely sound term, as it covers two or three completely separate branches of law.
But he didn't have a problem with the concept of copyright itself, which makes you an idiot for bringing him up in the first place. The GPL works through copyright. It could not work without copyright.
It ever occur to you that our legal system might be wrong? And that this might be the whole point of these discussions?
All this "sophistry" is very relevant to the point, which is this:
You can post as many Slashdot comments as you want. You can let the RIAA and the MPAA sue as many people as it can. You can pass as much legislation as you want.
But all of that is pissing in the wind. Piracy is a fact. It is real, it is happening, and it is not going away.
So, the question of whether or not to legitimize something that a large portion of the population is already doing anyway is a good one. Think Prohibition.
And think very carefully about how you'd like copyrights, trademarks, and patents to work.
Fortunately, at work, this isn't a problem, as we do everything in Rails. It's a small feature that I'm starting to see in more and more places -- the database is abstracted away.
Let me clarify: I just recently had to do a bit of restructuring of the corporate website. I developed and tested my changes locally on a sqlite database, then deployed to MySQL.
Which means that, as I'm also our admin, if I want to switch us over to Postgres, the app will be fine. It's the data I'd worry about...
Probably the single biggest thing that helped me get over that (and similar quirks) is good syntax highlighting. That, and, well, on dvorak, both "do" and "end" are on the home row, whereas { and } are a long reach -- so it's actually faster to type the other way.
Two problems:
First, I do this for a living. There are four other Rails programmers here. I doubt they want to become Python programmers.
Second, there's a lot more to the languages than indentation. I like Python indentation, but I like too much more about Ruby.
I don't mind typing them (I type some 80 wpm), I mind having them there. In short blocks, they're nice, but when there are four or five 'end's in a row, it's not telling me anything new -- but it is wasting space, and looking weird.
On ruby is good, thanks. And actually, I type fast enough that it's not that I don't want to type 'end' -- it's that I think it makes the code look cluttered.
Oh, and I don't really like ERB much, either -- hooked on Haml.
And how, exactly, is Apple any different?
Here, go read. Find me a newer one if you like, but I can pretty much guarantee it's going to have something like Section 6 and Section 7.
The only difference is, with Apple, it's very likely you'll have to pay for it, or have advertising served by it, as I can't even submit an app (which they can still refuse) without paying something.
It depends on the app. Most of the "big name" apps ship as an installer (a .mpkg, if you're lucky), rather than a simple .app folder in a DMG.
And then, of course, there are the more interesting hacks, which install a kext, or drivers...
However, this is hardly the first time -- haven't checked lately (as I no longer own a working Mac), but it seemed like for very basic stuff, there was always some kind of shareware app out there, often by one person. All of it basic stuff.
And you may not know this, but many uninstallers -- games, especially -- will ask specifically if you want to delete savegames (as they can get kind of big), preferences, clean out registry entries, etc. Many will clean certain registry entries so as not to conflict with a second install, even if they are only settings -- or to provide the uninstall/reinstall process as a last-ditch effort to fix some problem with it.
Of course, I come from Linux, so I consider a package manager to be "essential system software". Neither Windows nor OS X provides this. I think BSD might be the closest...
It is different in that it's spatial, but code is not necessarily a single thread. Most (all, please God) large programs are going to be broken up into logical structures called "functions". In most languages, these functions are composed of a (very short) vertical thread of imperative statements. In some languages (so-called "functional programming"), these functions are composed of nothing but other function calls.
And yes, Excel is a declarative language, so that's one difference.
While not physically spatial, a program which is organized well isn't really linear anymore. If you're insane, yes, you can probably follow a linear thread of statements, but think of those function calls as references to other cells -- I am not sure how I would describe this space, or if there even is a good description.
Not really. It depends how you lay it out, of course...
I started my current job hourly, and moved up to salaried. While it was hourly, I kept a timesheet as a Google spreadsheet. I didn't mind it so much, as it was a web app (so no waste of an Office license), but I did comment about it...
He argued that it was the "ideal spreadsheet app".
Now, let's think about this. All it's really doing is finding the difference between when I punched in and punched out, for a given number of days. And then it's summing those for a given week. As a spreadsheet, I often have to click on cells to make sure that the formula got copied (and not just some number), and it's cumbersome if I need more space -- say, if I take a lunch break and some other break (the spreadsheet only works for lunch breaks).
Compare it to some equivalent actual code:
Now, that's not the most elegant way of doing this. I used a global variable, I didn't do any logging, that program won't actually do anything, etc. But personally, I find it more readable this way. Sure, the table that a spreadsheet produces is a nice report, and that's more readable -- but the actual logic is buried under it. In the simplest case, the logic is right where you'd expect, next to where its result is -- in which case, it's effectively copied and pasted everywhere, and any change to that logic must be search-and-replace'd everywhere. There's a reason we prefer to not repeat ourselves in code.
Here, the logic is all collected and readable. If I'd done it properly, it'd be separated from the data, making it easier to work with on its own. And of course, if you're not a programmer, it makes no sense to you, but to most programmers, it actually looks good.
And that is the real reason spreadsheets exist, I think. It's not because spreadsheets are a better way of doing things -- they're not. It's because spreadsheets have less of a learning curve, and your boss already knows how to create them. And it's because, for some very simple tasks (like the above system), it's often quicker and easier to build a spreadsheet than a program.
The danger of spreadsheets is stuff exactly like this 3D engine. Ok, the engine is cool, but it's also just wrong; either the code is going to be ugly and difficult to read (buried in the cells of the