It's quite a bit more than that, at least if you're talking about pure functional programming. You also have to get rid of most all of your old notions of flow control. Imperative programming is about defining sequences of steps, some of which are conditional. Functional programming is all done with nested transformations; there are no sequential steps, there are no branches, there is no iteration.
If you think about it, those are inevitable consequences of the constraints I mentioned. However, it's good that you highlighted them.
If this sounds freakish and impossible to someone raised on imperative programming paradigms... yes, it is. Functional programming requires thinking in an entirely new way.
Yep, both recursion and constructs like map/filter are incredibly useful (even in procedural/OO languages) once you get the hang of them.
Yes, it means your functions aren't allowed to have side effects (i.e., all parameters are passed by value and the only result is the value returned to the caller).
Personally, I like it because it's a good way to manage complexity -- kind of like the encapsulation of object-oriented programming, except applied to the verbs instead of the nouns.
The other thing which bugs me is the white washing of old news articles how often that trick gets pulled, I might personally remember an event but find the contemporary records are missing that happens a lot especially in Politics when a past stance becomes embarrassing and then you get told black was white...
This is the single most important reason there could ever be!
Bullshit. The GPL is about freedom; the difference is that it treats freedom as a positive right while things like the BSD license treat it as a negative right.
Yeah, this is a choice between the possibility of malware vs. the certainty of it.
(The real right answer is "Linux," of course. And the other right answer is to avoid the newer Intel chips that are infected with the Intel Management Engine backdoor and the newer AMD chips that are infected with the Platform Security Processor backdoor to begin with.)
Lots of people value various forms of art, and are willing to pay for them. In order for this to work there has to be some way of sending money people are willing to part with to people who create the art.
Good -- they can do that whether copyright exists or not! All copyright does is force people to pay, and since you were talking about the people who would pay voluntarily, that categorically excludes them from your argument.
This would lower people's quality of life.
In other words, you're saying "some people's quality of life is more important than other people's human rights." I have more than a little problem with that sentiment!
Because "unauthorized" has nothing to do ability, and everything to do with permission. It's the same way it works for lots of other crimes: rape is predicated on whether the other person consents, not whether he or she resists; giving a neighbor a key to your house for emergencies does not give them the right to go in your house any time they feel like it, etc.
The real key here is whether the access is "unauthorized". Given that the access code is published for the world to see, It's going to be really hard to claim the access is unauthorized.
Nah, it works for hacking the same way it does for rape: it's entirely the owner's opinion.
We use [Javascript] because it's pragmatic to use the lingua franca of programming.
LOL, bless your heart.
You just go right on thinking that and having fun playing in your browser sandbox.
Pay no mind to all the C/C++ that implements that browser, and the server daemon on the other end, and the operating systems they both run on, and the libraries your code ends up calling to actually accomplish anything....
I wonder what percentage of Australian judicial system workers end up in prison because they hear that joke one too many times, flip out, and murder the person who said it? I'm guessing it's gotta be at least 20%.
Well too fucking bad, because I'm reposting it instead. COME AT ME BRO!
Stupid Patent of the Month: Storage Cabinets on a Computer
How do you store your paper files? Perhaps you leave them scattered on your desk or piled on the floor. If you're more organized, you might keep them in a cabinet. This month's stupid patent, US Patent No. 6,690,400 (the '400 patent), claims the idea of using "virtual cabinets" to graphically represent data storage and organization. While this is bad, the worse news is that the patent's owner is suing just about anyone who runs a website.
The '400 patent is owned by Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. ("GEMSA") which seems to be a classic patent troll. GEMSA is incorporated in Australia and appears to have no business other than patent litigation. The patent began its life with a company called Flash VOS. This company once offered a product that allowed users to run multiple operating systems on personal computers with x86-compatible processors. The '400 patent describes a graphical user interface for this system. The interface allows users to interact with "graphical depictions of cabinets" that represent memory partitions and different operating systems.
GEMSA says that Flash VOS moved the computer industry a "quantum leap forwarded in the late 90's when it invented Systems Virtualization." But Flash VOS didn't invent partitions, didn't invent virtual machines, and didn't invent running multiple operating systems on a single computer. All of these concepts predate its patent application, some by decades. In any event, the '400 patent claims only a very specific, and in our view, quite mundane user interface.
Importantly, the '400 patent's claims require very specific structures. For example, claim 1 requires "a secondary storage partitions window" and "at least one visible cabinet representing a discrete operating system." A user interface must have all of these features to infringe the claim.
In the past year, GEMSA has sued dozens of companies, ranging from Airbnb to Zillow. In each case, it makes the bare assertion that the defendant's website infringes the '400 patent. For example, it simply states that "AIRBNB maintains, controls and/or operates a website with a graphical user interface ("GUI") at www.airbnb.com that infringes one or more claims of the '400 patent."
GEMSA doesn't explain how Airbnb's website satisfies highly specific claim limitations like "a virtual cabinet representing a discrete operating system." In fact, the accused website bears almost no similarity to GEMSA's supposed invention:
As far as we can tell, GEMSA seems to think that anyone with a website that links to hosted content infringes its patent. Complaints with such sparse, and implausible, infringement allegations should be thrown out immediately for failure to state a claim.
There will be no prizes for guessing where GEMSA has filed its litigation. Every one of its cases was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, where we have long complained that local rules favor patent trolls like GEMSA. Venue reform legislation currently before Congress would stop trolls flocking to the Eastern District of Texas. That might help reduce abusive patent trolling. But we still need broader patent reform to ensure that such weak patents don't lead to abusive troll litigation.
Until the CFAA is repealed or amended, it is. I agree that it shouldn't be, but I'm calling this "hacking" in part to highlight the absurdity of the law itself, as well as it's unjustly discriminatory enforcement.
First of all, "protected" is a legal term, not a technical one. If the device was in the owner's house (or on his person) and intended only for the owner's use (as opposed to the public's use) then I'm pretty sure a prosecutor could stretch the definition of "protected" enough to apply.
Second, even if "protected" did refer to a technical restriction, any nominal restriction counts, even if it's trivially useless. It's like the front door of a house: even if it has no lock, the mere fact that it's closed is enough to make passing through it count as "breaking and entering."
Third, note the fact that "protected" modifies only one of the two listed conditions, either of which can trigger the law by itself. Even if the "knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization" clause doesn't apply, the "knowingly and with intent to defraud... exceeds authorized access" clause still can.
First of all, remember that Burger King themselves vandalized the Wikipedia page first, inserting advertisements into it.
Second, So what? Prosecutors don't care how minor the damage is. For example, this guy got two years in prison for something not all that different. The point is, I'm not claiming this sort of thing should be illegal; I'm claiming that it is illegal. As long as that's the case, then the least we should be asking of the "justice" system is that it applies the law evenly instead of compounding the injustice by only using it to persecute the weak!
In other words, putting a multimillionaire CEO in prison for bullshit reasons is the quickest route to repealing or amending the law, and doing so less unjust than failing to prosecute him because of his status while continuing to charge lower-status people for the same sorts of acts.
For both Wikipedia and the Google device... someone (in fact the same someone) is taking advantage of it for their own ends
I think you misread the context of my post. I wasn't comparing Burger King's Wikipedia vandalism to Burger King's Google Home hack; I was comparing Burger King's Wikipedia vandalism to other people's retaliatory Wikipedia vandalism.
I don't think I could handle the levels of cognitive dissonance required to see one as "vandalising" and the other as "hilarious".
So with the frame of reference sorted out, it should be clear that there is no cognitive dissonance because the clear difference is intent. The initial Burger King-sanctioned vandalism was done for selfish advantage, while the later vandalism was done as vigilante justice. Vigilantism may or may not be "good," but in this case it's clearly less bad than the wrong it is attempting to correct.
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;
Burger King made three unauthorized accesses: to the device, then to Google, then to Wikipedia. The access to the device was not authorized by the owner for obvious reasons. The access to Google was not authorized both because it did not have the owner's permission and because, by impersonating the owner, BK very likely violated Google's ToS. The access to Wikipedia was not authorized because Wikipedia's ToS requires "lawful behavior," and this was not. The object of the fraud was spamming and the ad impression delivered was a "thing of value" obtained separate from use of the device. The use of Google's voice search service was also obtained, of course, and while any single instance of that would have much less than a $5000 value, it's possible that in aggregate -- in the thousands of people affected by the ad, all accessing Google's servers to parse the audio -- the use could cost more than $5000.
I'm not saying that it would be a good thing for a prosecutor to successfully make this kind of argument. I'm saying that I think it's plausible because it's an over-broad law. But even if the law is bad, I'd rather see it applied to the strong (i.e., corporations), not just the weak (i.e., individual people), because that motivates the strong to help get it fixed.
If it can be controlled completely by Free Software then it becomes interesting. If there are any binary blobs -- or worse, blobs that cannot be replaced due to DRM -- then it's utterly worthless.
Laws must be applied fairly and impartially. If the FBI fails to prosecute the Burger King executives responsible for hacking, then it is that much more evidence that the CFAA is an unjust law that must be repealed, overturned or nullified.
Second, we need to take a step back and consider how we got in this situation in the first place. Consider all the shit wrong here:
If this sort of unauthorized access to a computer system is a felony -- and under the CFAA, it is -- then we shouldn't be laughing it off in this case just because a corporation did it; the FBI should be raiding BK's headquarters and arresting executives.
This sort of thing shouldn't be a felony in the first place; the CFAA is a bad law.
Google shouldn't be allowed to abuse its near-monopoly by censoring, tampering with, or editorializing search results.
Google shouldn't be able to censor the results because we should all be using something we control ourselves (like YaCy) instead of handing so much control of the Internet over to Google in the first place.
Devices with voice recognition should process it locally, not send everyone's private utterances to third-parties (which are inherently untrustworthy).
People should not want to infect their homes with always-listening surveillance devices anyway!
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. We'd better scrape and mirror it anyway, just in case.
If you think about it, those are inevitable consequences of the constraints I mentioned. However, it's good that you highlighted them.
Yep, both recursion and constructs like map/filter are incredibly useful (even in procedural/OO languages) once you get the hang of them.
Yes, it means your functions aren't allowed to have side effects (i.e., all parameters are passed by value and the only result is the value returned to the caller).
Personally, I like it because it's a good way to manage complexity -- kind of like the encapsulation of object-oriented programming, except applied to the verbs instead of the nouns.
Raspberry Pi has proprietary binary blobs; it is not a solution.
This is the single most important reason there could ever be!
No, copyright is for promot[ing] the progress of science and the useful arts. Enabling the creator to profit is only a means to that end.
So what? Merely being a derivative work is not a sufficient condition to make it "illegal;" it should have been ruled to be Fair Use.
Bullshit. The GPL is about freedom; the difference is that it treats freedom as a positive right while things like the BSD license treat it as a negative right.
Windows is only viable if:
In other words, if you can't deal with Mac OS or Linux, there is no "viable" OS anymore.
Yeah, this is a choice between the possibility of malware vs. the certainty of it.
(The real right answer is "Linux," of course. And the other right answer is to avoid the newer Intel chips that are infected with the Intel Management Engine backdoor and the newer AMD chips that are infected with the Platform Security Processor backdoor to begin with.)
Good -- they can do that whether copyright exists or not! All copyright does is force people to pay, and since you were talking about the people who would pay voluntarily, that categorically excludes them from your argument.
In other words, you're saying "some people's quality of life is more important than other people's human rights." I have more than a little problem with that sentiment!
Because "unauthorized" has nothing to do ability, and everything to do with permission. It's the same way it works for lots of other crimes: rape is predicated on whether the other person consents, not whether he or she resists; giving a neighbor a key to your house for emergencies does not give them the right to go in your house any time they feel like it, etc.
Nah, it works for hacking the same way it does for rape: it's entirely the owner's opinion.
LOL, bless your heart.
You just go right on thinking that and having fun playing in your browser sandbox.
Pay no mind to all the C/C++ that implements that browser, and the server daemon on the other end, and the operating systems they both run on, and the libraries your code ends up calling to actually accomplish anything....
I wonder what percentage of Australian judicial system workers end up in prison because they hear that joke one too many times, flip out, and murder the person who said it? I'm guessing it's gotta be at least 20%.
Well too fucking bad, because I'm reposting it instead. COME AT ME BRO!
Until the CFAA is repealed or amended, it is. I agree that it shouldn't be, but I'm calling this "hacking" in part to highlight the absurdity of the law itself, as well as it's unjustly discriminatory enforcement.
First of all, "protected" is a legal term, not a technical one. If the device was in the owner's house (or on his person) and intended only for the owner's use (as opposed to the public's use) then I'm pretty sure a prosecutor could stretch the definition of "protected" enough to apply.
Second, even if "protected" did refer to a technical restriction, any nominal restriction counts, even if it's trivially useless. It's like the front door of a house: even if it has no lock, the mere fact that it's closed is enough to make passing through it count as "breaking and entering."
Third, note the fact that "protected" modifies only one of the two listed conditions, either of which can trigger the law by itself. Even if the "knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization" clause doesn't apply, the "knowingly and with intent to defraud... exceeds authorized access" clause still can.
First of all, remember that Burger King themselves vandalized the Wikipedia page first, inserting advertisements into it.
Second, So what? Prosecutors don't care how minor the damage is. For example, this guy got two years in prison for something not all that different. The point is, I'm not claiming this sort of thing should be illegal; I'm claiming that it is illegal. As long as that's the case, then the least we should be asking of the "justice" system is that it applies the law evenly instead of compounding the injustice by only using it to persecute the weak!
In other words, putting a multimillionaire CEO in prison for bullshit reasons is the quickest route to repealing or amending the law, and doing so less unjust than failing to prosecute him because of his status while continuing to charge lower-status people for the same sorts of acts.
I think you misread the context of my post. I wasn't comparing Burger King's Wikipedia vandalism to Burger King's Google Home hack; I was comparing Burger King's Wikipedia vandalism to other people's retaliatory Wikipedia vandalism.
So with the frame of reference sorted out, it should be clear that there is no cognitive dissonance because the clear difference is intent. The initial Burger King-sanctioned vandalism was done for selfish advantage, while the later vandalism was done as vigilante justice. Vigilantism may or may not be "good," but in this case it's clearly less bad than the wrong it is attempting to correct.
How can you ever trust that it's really disabled?
Burger King made three unauthorized accesses: to the device, then to Google, then to Wikipedia. The access to the device was not authorized by the owner for obvious reasons. The access to Google was not authorized both because it did not have the owner's permission and because, by impersonating the owner, BK very likely violated Google's ToS. The access to Wikipedia was not authorized because Wikipedia's ToS requires "lawful behavior," and this was not. The object of the fraud was spamming and the ad impression delivered was a "thing of value" obtained separate from use of the device. The use of Google's voice search service was also obtained, of course, and while any single instance of that would have much less than a $5000 value, it's possible that in aggregate -- in the thousands of people affected by the ad, all accessing Google's servers to parse the audio -- the use could cost more than $5000.
I'm not saying that it would be a good thing for a prosecutor to successfully make this kind of argument. I'm saying that I think it's plausible because it's an over-broad law. But even if the law is bad, I'd rather see it applied to the strong (i.e., corporations), not just the weak (i.e., individual people), because that motivates the strong to help get it fixed.
If it can be controlled completely by Free Software then it becomes interesting. If there are any binary blobs -- or worse, blobs that cannot be replaced due to DRM -- then it's utterly worthless.
Laws must be applied fairly and impartially. If the FBI fails to prosecute the Burger King executives responsible for hacking, then it is that much more evidence that the CFAA is an unjust law that must be repealed, overturned or nullified.
First of all, exactly.
Second, we need to take a step back and consider how we got in this situation in the first place. Consider all the shit wrong here: