Agreed. When I first saw the writeup, my thought was "how is this fair use?". It is the same original photo, but pixelated and while it's essentially an impression of a public figure, it is not a political figure and it is an impression directly based on someone else's work of that figure. He shows a list of photos of increasing pixelation at the end of the article and asks "at what point does this become acceptable?". Well, I would say the last four photographs would have been acceptable. Everything above that is about the same as taking any other copyrighted photo and applying the "charcoal" filter in photoshop and nothing more.
As for artistic value . . . I'm not sure that it being on a canvas on a wall in an art gallery where someone could offer you $500 for it is any different than putting it on the cover of an album of tributes and selling *that*. If one is wrong, then both are. Both are "artistic" as well as commercial (art is rarely done merely for art's sake).
The question is whether there were chances to deal with this much earlier? It seems that a rational person might have said "please stop doing this" and that would have been it. Taking it as far as tens of thousands of dollars in compensation seems a little unfair and money-grubbing. It's not like it was used on some corporate billboard somewhere.
Nope. Anything created between 1950 and 1963 has a 28 year copyright, which means that copyright on this image would have expired in 1987. However, if you renewed your copyright from between those years in 1976, you're granted another 67 years, which means this image will likely not be in the public domain until 2054.
Anything after 1978 is copyrighted until 70 years after its creator's death or for 95-120 years for items created for hire or anonymously. For example, if I hired you to take a photo for my record album today, it would be a "fore hire" gig and the item should not reach public domain until 2132.
I don't see how this solves anything. A big corporation or anyone with a lot of money is in a far better position to take that risk than the average person for whom that would be financially devastating. Especially since so much of an outcome often depends on the quality of counsel you can afford, to begin with.
Wait, what is the luxury part of having groceries delivered? All the stores I've ordered from have always charged $5 or $10. That's not "lots of money" when you factor in the fact that I don't have to use my car. Don't have to use gas. And don't have to spend an hour or two every week doing it. Fuck, it costs at least $5 in tips and fees just to have a pizza delivered.
Good for you, but I don't care for shopping one bit. I consider it a waste of time. The women in my family really enjoy going to the mall and spending six hours shopping for shoes or even just shopping for nothing and just spending time looking around. I, however, do not. Instead of spending a bunch of time doing a chore that I hate, I spend five minutes doing it online and not thinking about it again and instead of spending time out shopping for shoes, I just go to zappos and spend five minutes buying a new pair of shoes or boots or slippers.
Hell, one of the reasons I hate shopping is people who go shopping with their six fucking children in tow. Now, imagine... what if those people with a brood of children didn't have to go to the store. They could make life easier for the rest of society and for their children and for themselves and I'm sure with so many children, they don't have a lot of free time in the first place. They could have their groceries delivered by the local store, too, instead of packing up their fleet of snots and having a huge inconvenient outing. If I had kids, there is no way I wouldn't use this service. It is fucking fantastic and I wonder how much longer it will be before home delivery transforms the grocery market the same way it did the computer market (that is, you know, how I can no longer find a real physical place to go buy parts to build a computer, because online options like newegg and amazon have pretty much pushed the physical stores out of the market).
Occasionally they'll deliver something that has a short expiration date or they'll make a dumb substitution of one product for another. That's inconvenient, but so what. *shrug*. I just tell them I don't want it and they don't charge me for it. Not a big deal.
How many times can it succeed? Here in the UK every major supermarket chain has online-order-and-deliver models and they work out just fine.
Agreed. Same in the states. I'm sure less populated regions have less likelihood of this, but since about 1999-ish, I have always lived in Portland, San Francisco, or Denver and since that time I have always been able to order groceries online. I don't see why people make such a big deal about it. It's the same food from the same stores and the same grocery chains that you'd be shopping at, anyway. The only difference is that instead of going to the store and bringing the groceries home myself, a guy comes to me from the store in a van and puts the same damn groceries in my kitchen.
If you're talking about ordering your groceries through the mail (which kind of really *does* sound like a hassle), then yes. However, if you order groceries from a service in your city - say from your local grocery chain - then of course they deliver everything. They won't deliver if you aren't home, but you can order any fruit, veggies, pet supplies, kitchen supplies, cleaning supplies, food, frozen food, refrigerated food, or even alcohol.
I wouldn't shop at a Trader Joes or Whole Foods, even if they were right next door, though. I eat like a human being. I'm not a hipster. I'm not going to pay $5/lb for "organic bananas". The 25c/lb regular old bananas are just fine for me.:)
You must do your shopping at a 7-11, because when I was growing up, trips to the grocery store were usually weekly and the time between stepping out onto the driveway and coming back home and unloading the groceries into the kitchen was easily up to two hours all around. Not to mention writing down the shopping list, etc.
I have never gone grocery shopping in my adult life. For twelve years, I have used the delivery service available in my city (pretty much all the main grocery stores like Safeway, Albertsons, Kingsoopers, etc offer delivery unless you live in the middle of nowhere). While it was an enormous chore, growing up, it is a five minute process as an adult. I literally log in to the website, click the button that adds my regular list of groceries, make any tweaks I want this particular delivery, select a window when I want the delivery (I can choose a 30m window or a 2hr window -- seven days a week -- from about 8am to 8pm).
You clearly have never even used it, either, because of your whole idea that "you'll come home and the ice cream will be melted on your steps". That's why you have them delivered when you will be home. Also, they don't deliver if you're not there. Duh.
I have no interest in shopping. It's a chore. It's a hassle. It's like going to the dentist. It is an inconvenience that most would rather do without. As much of that time a I can regain for myself, the better. Even if I just waste that time. At least it's my option. After twelve years of having groceries delivered in three different cities and states, I would never ever consider going back to the whole traditional shopping experience of my parents and grandparents.
Also, having groceries delivered makes a car much less necessary. I telecommute. And I have my groceries delivered. I'm used to an even bigger city with bad traffic, where a car is more of a liability than a convenience, so if I can avoid all that and have someone just drop them off in my kitchen, that's pretty awesome. I now use my car so rarely that I'm considering selling it.
The submission is positioned as if the idea of delivering groceries is a concept that has repeatedly failed. I'd like to know what justification there is for that statement. Yeah, Webvan/Homeshop and Peapod seem to have failed years ago, but I and plenty of other people have been ordering our groceries online from Albertsons, Safeway, and Kingsoopers for at least a decade, now. When I lived in San Francisco, I used Webvan in the late 90s. When I moved back to Portland, I used Albertsons and Safeway until the mid 2000's. And since I've moved to Denver, I've used Kingsoopers for the last six years.
If Amazon can do a great job, I'd consider using them. I'll at least give them a shot. But the idea that delivering groceries is a dumb one is just absurd. Not every experience over the past dozen years has been perfect, but the few problems I've had here and there with Safeway/Albertsons/Kingsoopers are far outweighed by the fact that I don't have to set aside a couple hours a week to drive to the store, find parking, get a cart, go up and down the aisles, deal with people and their tantrum-throwing kids, wait through lines, load up the car, come back home, unload and put away the groceries. All I have to do is click a button that adds everything from my list to a cart, make any changes I need, click a button and then my groceries will just magically appear - delivered right into my kitchen - in a 30m or 2hr window of my choice. I literally spend around five minutes per week dealing with groceries. Period. It's fucking fantastic.
I got tired of hitting the bandwidth cap every month and worrying about being disconnected ever since a certain ****astic! provider sent me a warning letter that I was using too much bandwidth, but wouldn't tell me what limit I had gone over or what limit I had to keep it under. Only a vague threat that if it happened again within another year, they would disconnect me.
So, for two years, I had to be very careful on my network. See, I get all my entertainment and do all my work online. If your household watches two or three netflix movies a day on average and listens to streaming radio and podcasts and downloads high quality video podcasts on a regular basis, uses Steam, uses online backup services, uses VPN into work and other reasonable things, it consumes hundreds of gigabytes per month.
My frustration was that when I would call up and say "okay, so I need more bandwidth -- how do I get that? I have money waiting here to pay you for it" and their answer was "you can't - there are no other options that we provide".
But, recently, I moved across town and found that it's actually not difficult to get a business account with them. I'd looked into it previously, on my own, but it was hard to find the information and requirements. After they updated their site and things were very easy to understand, I called them up and had 22mbps down 10mbps up service installed within 24 hours for $100/mo. On top of that, while they certainly wouldn't allow me to use unlimited amounts of data, they have not complained when I have consistently used 1tb or even as much as 2tb a month.
If you ask me, it's worth the extra $35 to $40 to increase my potential use from 250gb to 1-2tb. Problem solved.
No, you have to remember. Squirting out one of your own makes you a wise sage and quite nearly a saint for looking after your own responsibility for the next eighteen years. It's everyone else who doesn't squirt one out and demand to replicate their genetic structure like wild dogs that are selfish and self-centered. Media outlets act like the people in this family are a cross between victims and heroes, when the real admirable thing to do would be to put all that money and energy spent trying to reproduce those faulty genes into helping some poor child out there who would be delighted to have a family of their own.
Fucking adopt. Seriously. Instead of being a bunch of selfish fuckwads demanding to xerox as exact a copy of yourself as possible, how about you save all the money involved in this process and just adopt a kid or two? For the price most people spend in various attempts to squirt one of their own out (aside from this particular incident, of course), they could adopt someone and have their entire college fund taken care of from day one.
I know I'm supposed to feel sorry for people like this. Boo hoo, you can't replicate like a ferrel cat. Tough shit. All those kids without families have it a hell of a lot harder than that.
This is why we have three branches of government. If one misbehaves or missteps, the other two keep it in check. Unfortunately, Congress has been castrated for years (decades?) and pretty much do whatever their party and president wants. The other two should be flipping their fucking lids over the current actions. Both the idea that the president doesn't need The US Congress to give permission to send the US Military to conduct actions, because NATO gave him permission and the idea that military action isn't military action. Instead, a few are complaining and much of the media and populace are looking at those loud few as nutcases much the same way everyone looks at, say, Ron Paul... and in the end, the president will have too many friends to counter his wishes.
Indeed. And I never saw any media outlet actually question anything about him or his role or his background. They just reported the appointment with glee and moved on.
The transcript of Vivek Kundra's infamous speech to the FCC (I think it was in 2010?).
“And think about this, I know there are people on Second Life right now, but imagine a Universe where you have the Star-Trek holodeck where you could literally ask the computer, err, to act or ask questions to get answers. In the same way, if you look at some of these software companies they’ve made it sooo complicated to interact with their technologies. Ah and, err, at the same time the underlying architecture and the platform, it’s almost a chicken and egg question because a lot of it was built and architected around bandwidth constraints therefore you had to deploy technologies that were much more complicated in terms of interacting and communicating. Now, as broadband deployment, and more importantly, err, if you look at the megabits-per-second, err, how much, err, how much information can we get through the pipeline is going to be so important and, as new and new software and techologies are being introduced, what you going to see is huuuge-change from how applications are architected from skip-logic to video and much more human ways of interacting with these applications rather than, err, binary or COBOL ways of interacting.”
Wow, you are way off. The "In Korea, Only Old People" meme is almost eight years old. It came from a story about how only old people used email in Korea around 2003 or 2004.
That's a poor assertion, though. When people are conned into buying things they don't need, it's their lack of reason. It's like saying that if you outsmart me, it's the use of intelligence that is to blame rather than my lack of intelligence. Reason is application of a process of logic. Reason isn't to blame for one's poor "process of logic" any more than "math" is to blame for someone's sucking at math.
However, the extrapolation one can and likely will make to serve their greater purpose is that we created guns as a way to help us defend ourselves as well as attack others. A weapon that serves a purpose, but has to be controlled, limited, regulated. Like rational thinking. Rational thinking is the enemy of government, religion, media, and advertising. We already see society treating people who appreciate rationality and critical thinking, to a degree, the way society treats "gun nuts". A certain discomfort, uneasiness, and disdain.
This is all leading to the eventual inclusion of "rationality" as a diagnosable disorder in the DSM. We'll have to diagnose it and treat it with drugs, because being rational and thinking critically and having the capacity to think and see the world in abstracts rather than a narrow and often blissfully naive limited scope that makes the success of your local professional sports team the most pressing concern in your life makes you generally less happy than someone who just worries about sticking their dick in something occasionally and having a six pack while watching Dane Cooke give you the superfinger.
Perl remains extremely powerful and one of the most versatile languages, even today. That said, the heavily trafficked and fairly complex 15,000 lines of code service I wrote when I was a kid (well, before drinking age) from scratch in 1998-2000 that powered everything up until 2011 is probably not the choice I would make if I were doing it all over again, today. At least, not if I were still starting out as I mostly was, back then. I made the mistake of choosing it as my first real language that I really did anything of significance with. Bad move for a language that makes it so easy to blow your own foot off with (and yet incredibly robust and flexible if you're experienced and it's just another tool you're adding to your belt). Over those many years, I considered another language a few times, but it always came down to not finding any other community that was as large and active as Perl's nor with the extensive public library of code to solve so many problems.
What surprises me is that someone half my age would have such an interest in Perl, in 2011. It's not sexy and python and ruby and everything else is being pushed non-stop, these days. Hell, Haskell seems more popular if you just go by the number of stories about it on tech news aggregators.
As to this kid "identifying fools and parting them from their money" . . . I don't get where you're coming from. He sold to ActiveState. It sounds more like he identified a possible demand to fulfill for people who use Perl. ActiveState is a Perl shop and their customers are primarily Perl people. It doesn't sound like he suckered anyone, but rather found a niche and filled it. In fact, it's one of the most suggested startup strategies. He didn't invent the wheel, but found a niche where he could apply a slightly modified wheel for a different audience. And it paid off.
Actually, selling it is probably a wise move whether arrived at on his own or by counsel of those advising him. Better to reap what benefits you can, now, rather than try and balance it and all of high school and hope that it all "just works out". Instead, he seems to have parlayed not only a short term success and reward, but an opportunity at ActiveState, which could be more valuable to him in the long run. Especially as they appear considerate of his age and obligations.
Not to mention, this builds a track record for him to refer to in the future. After high school, he'll already have a leg-up with this on his resume.
Right, the only response acceptable is "wow, amazing". It's certainly not worth pushing the point that the kid next door to you with less accomplished and connected parents won't have any such opportunity.
Like this kid, I found an opportunity and exploited it at a young age, which I was able to make into a great and very fulfilling career. I didn't have the parents aspect, but I did benefit from rare fortunate circumstances that do not fall most teenagers who *do* have an interest or even a passion in something like this.
Nobody is discounting accomplishments here and it's ridiculous for you to assume so. Pointing out the obvious (which nobody needed to read the article to even conclude, based on prior history of such stories) does nothing to discount the kid. However, when do we get the stories about the other kids? Where are the stories of kids who somehow accomplish similarly cool things without the same benefits as those in every story I recall reading here and on HN over the years? Do they exist?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. When I first saw the writeup, my thought was "how is this fair use?". It is the same original photo, but pixelated and while it's essentially an impression of a public figure, it is not a political figure and it is an impression directly based on someone else's work of that figure. He shows a list of photos of increasing pixelation at the end of the article and asks "at what point does this become acceptable?". Well, I would say the last four photographs would have been acceptable. Everything above that is about the same as taking any other copyrighted photo and applying the "charcoal" filter in photoshop and nothing more.
As for artistic value . . . I'm not sure that it being on a canvas on a wall in an art gallery where someone could offer you $500 for it is any different than putting it on the cover of an album of tributes and selling *that*. If one is wrong, then both are. Both are "artistic" as well as commercial (art is rarely done merely for art's sake).
The question is whether there were chances to deal with this much earlier? It seems that a rational person might have said "please stop doing this" and that would have been it. Taking it as far as tens of thousands of dollars in compensation seems a little unfair and money-grubbing. It's not like it was used on some corporate billboard somewhere.
Nope. Anything created between 1950 and 1963 has a 28 year copyright, which means that copyright on this image would have expired in 1987. However, if you renewed your copyright from between those years in 1976, you're granted another 67 years, which means this image will likely not be in the public domain until 2054.
Anything after 1978 is copyrighted until 70 years after its creator's death or for 95-120 years for items created for hire or anonymously. For example, if I hired you to take a photo for my record album today, it would be a "fore hire" gig and the item should not reach public domain until 2132.
I don't see how this solves anything. A big corporation or anyone with a lot of money is in a far better position to take that risk than the average person for whom that would be financially devastating. Especially since so much of an outcome often depends on the quality of counsel you can afford, to begin with.
I've been using lucyphone.com to do this for a couple years, now.
She's like twelve years old, right? What the hell doe she know about "Weird Al"? I doubt she's ever even heard of him.
Anyway, this isn't really news. This was all reported in the press weeks ago. Actually, it might have been months ago.
Wait, what is the luxury part of having groceries delivered? All the stores I've ordered from have always charged $5 or $10. That's not "lots of money" when you factor in the fact that I don't have to use my car. Don't have to use gas. And don't have to spend an hour or two every week doing it. Fuck, it costs at least $5 in tips and fees just to have a pizza delivered.
Good for you, but I don't care for shopping one bit. I consider it a waste of time. The women in my family really enjoy going to the mall and spending six hours shopping for shoes or even just shopping for nothing and just spending time looking around. I, however, do not. Instead of spending a bunch of time doing a chore that I hate, I spend five minutes doing it online and not thinking about it again and instead of spending time out shopping for shoes, I just go to zappos and spend five minutes buying a new pair of shoes or boots or slippers.
Hell, one of the reasons I hate shopping is people who go shopping with their six fucking children in tow. Now, imagine... what if those people with a brood of children didn't have to go to the store. They could make life easier for the rest of society and for their children and for themselves and I'm sure with so many children, they don't have a lot of free time in the first place. They could have their groceries delivered by the local store, too, instead of packing up their fleet of snots and having a huge inconvenient outing. If I had kids, there is no way I wouldn't use this service. It is fucking fantastic and I wonder how much longer it will be before home delivery transforms the grocery market the same way it did the computer market (that is, you know, how I can no longer find a real physical place to go buy parts to build a computer, because online options like newegg and amazon have pretty much pushed the physical stores out of the market).
Occasionally they'll deliver something that has a short expiration date or they'll make a dumb substitution of one product for another. That's inconvenient, but so what. *shrug*. I just tell them I don't want it and they don't charge me for it. Not a big deal.
How many times can it succeed? Here in the UK every major supermarket chain has online-order-and-deliver models and they work out just fine.
Agreed. Same in the states. I'm sure less populated regions have less likelihood of this, but since about 1999-ish, I have always lived in Portland, San Francisco, or Denver and since that time I have always been able to order groceries online. I don't see why people make such a big deal about it. It's the same food from the same stores and the same grocery chains that you'd be shopping at, anyway. The only difference is that instead of going to the store and bringing the groceries home myself, a guy comes to me from the store in a van and puts the same damn groceries in my kitchen.
If you're talking about ordering your groceries through the mail (which kind of really *does* sound like a hassle), then yes. However, if you order groceries from a service in your city - say from your local grocery chain - then of course they deliver everything. They won't deliver if you aren't home, but you can order any fruit, veggies, pet supplies, kitchen supplies, cleaning supplies, food, frozen food, refrigerated food, or even alcohol.
I wouldn't shop at a Trader Joes or Whole Foods, even if they were right next door, though. I eat like a human being. I'm not a hipster. I'm not going to pay $5/lb for "organic bananas". The 25c/lb regular old bananas are just fine for me. :)
You must do your shopping at a 7-11, because when I was growing up, trips to the grocery store were usually weekly and the time between stepping out onto the driveway and coming back home and unloading the groceries into the kitchen was easily up to two hours all around. Not to mention writing down the shopping list, etc.
I have never gone grocery shopping in my adult life. For twelve years, I have used the delivery service available in my city (pretty much all the main grocery stores like Safeway, Albertsons, Kingsoopers, etc offer delivery unless you live in the middle of nowhere). While it was an enormous chore, growing up, it is a five minute process as an adult. I literally log in to the website, click the button that adds my regular list of groceries, make any tweaks I want this particular delivery, select a window when I want the delivery (I can choose a 30m window or a 2hr window -- seven days a week -- from about 8am to 8pm).
You clearly have never even used it, either, because of your whole idea that "you'll come home and the ice cream will be melted on your steps". That's why you have them delivered when you will be home. Also, they don't deliver if you're not there. Duh.
I have no interest in shopping. It's a chore. It's a hassle. It's like going to the dentist. It is an inconvenience that most would rather do without. As much of that time a I can regain for myself, the better. Even if I just waste that time. At least it's my option. After twelve years of having groceries delivered in three different cities and states, I would never ever consider going back to the whole traditional shopping experience of my parents and grandparents.
Also, having groceries delivered makes a car much less necessary. I telecommute. And I have my groceries delivered. I'm used to an even bigger city with bad traffic, where a car is more of a liability than a convenience, so if I can avoid all that and have someone just drop them off in my kitchen, that's pretty awesome. I now use my car so rarely that I'm considering selling it.
The submission is positioned as if the idea of delivering groceries is a concept that has repeatedly failed. I'd like to know what justification there is for that statement. Yeah, Webvan/Homeshop and Peapod seem to have failed years ago, but I and plenty of other people have been ordering our groceries online from Albertsons, Safeway, and Kingsoopers for at least a decade, now. When I lived in San Francisco, I used Webvan in the late 90s. When I moved back to Portland, I used Albertsons and Safeway until the mid 2000's. And since I've moved to Denver, I've used Kingsoopers for the last six years.
If Amazon can do a great job, I'd consider using them. I'll at least give them a shot. But the idea that delivering groceries is a dumb one is just absurd. Not every experience over the past dozen years has been perfect, but the few problems I've had here and there with Safeway/Albertsons/Kingsoopers are far outweighed by the fact that I don't have to set aside a couple hours a week to drive to the store, find parking, get a cart, go up and down the aisles, deal with people and their tantrum-throwing kids, wait through lines, load up the car, come back home, unload and put away the groceries. All I have to do is click a button that adds everything from my list to a cart, make any changes I need, click a button and then my groceries will just magically appear - delivered right into my kitchen - in a 30m or 2hr window of my choice. I literally spend around five minutes per week dealing with groceries. Period. It's fucking fantastic.
I got tired of hitting the bandwidth cap every month and worrying about being disconnected ever since a certain ****astic! provider sent me a warning letter that I was using too much bandwidth, but wouldn't tell me what limit I had gone over or what limit I had to keep it under. Only a vague threat that if it happened again within another year, they would disconnect me.
So, for two years, I had to be very careful on my network. See, I get all my entertainment and do all my work online. If your household watches two or three netflix movies a day on average and listens to streaming radio and podcasts and downloads high quality video podcasts on a regular basis, uses Steam, uses online backup services, uses VPN into work and other reasonable things, it consumes hundreds of gigabytes per month.
My frustration was that when I would call up and say "okay, so I need more bandwidth -- how do I get that? I have money waiting here to pay you for it" and their answer was "you can't - there are no other options that we provide".
But, recently, I moved across town and found that it's actually not difficult to get a business account with them. I'd looked into it previously, on my own, but it was hard to find the information and requirements. After they updated their site and things were very easy to understand, I called them up and had 22mbps down 10mbps up service installed within 24 hours for $100/mo. On top of that, while they certainly wouldn't allow me to use unlimited amounts of data, they have not complained when I have consistently used 1tb or even as much as 2tb a month.
If you ask me, it's worth the extra $35 to $40 to increase my potential use from 250gb to 1-2tb. Problem solved.
No, you have to remember. Squirting out one of your own makes you a wise sage and quite nearly a saint for looking after your own responsibility for the next eighteen years. It's everyone else who doesn't squirt one out and demand to replicate their genetic structure like wild dogs that are selfish and self-centered. Media outlets act like the people in this family are a cross between victims and heroes, when the real admirable thing to do would be to put all that money and energy spent trying to reproduce those faulty genes into helping some poor child out there who would be delighted to have a family of their own.
Fucking adopt. Seriously. Instead of being a bunch of selfish fuckwads demanding to xerox as exact a copy of yourself as possible, how about you save all the money involved in this process and just adopt a kid or two? For the price most people spend in various attempts to squirt one of their own out (aside from this particular incident, of course), they could adopt someone and have their entire college fund taken care of from day one.
I know I'm supposed to feel sorry for people like this. Boo hoo, you can't replicate like a ferrel cat. Tough shit. All those kids without families have it a hell of a lot harder than that.
This is why we have three branches of government. If one misbehaves or missteps, the other two keep it in check. Unfortunately, Congress has been castrated for years (decades?) and pretty much do whatever their party and president wants. The other two should be flipping their fucking lids over the current actions. Both the idea that the president doesn't need The US Congress to give permission to send the US Military to conduct actions, because NATO gave him permission and the idea that military action isn't military action. Instead, a few are complaining and much of the media and populace are looking at those loud few as nutcases much the same way everyone looks at, say, Ron Paul... and in the end, the president will have too many friends to counter his wishes.
And I'm replying to the wrong person in the read above, because clearly he was not qualified.
Indeed. And I never saw any media outlet actually question anything about him or his role or his background. They just reported the appointment with glee and moved on.
The transcript of Vivek Kundra's infamous speech to the FCC (I think it was in 2010?).
“And think about this, I know there are people on Second Life right now, but imagine a Universe where you have the Star-Trek holodeck where you could literally ask the computer, err, to act or ask questions to get answers. In the same way, if you look at some of these software companies they’ve made it sooo complicated to interact with their technologies. Ah and, err, at the same time the underlying architecture and the platform, it’s almost a chicken and egg question because a lot of it was built and architected around bandwidth constraints therefore you had to deploy technologies that were much more complicated in terms of interacting and communicating. Now, as broadband deployment, and more importantly, err, if you look at the megabits-per-second, err, how much, err, how much information can we get through the pipeline is going to be so important and, as new and new software and techologies are being introduced, what you going to see is huuuge-change from how applications are architected from skip-logic to video and much more human ways of interacting with these applications rather than, err, binary or COBOL ways of interacting.”
Wow, you are way off. The "In Korea, Only Old People" meme is almost eight years old. It came from a story about how only old people used email in Korea around 2003 or 2004.
Then, the way to one-up people who are interested in logic, reasoning, and facts is to discount logic, facts, and reason.
That's a poor assertion, though. When people are conned into buying things they don't need, it's their lack of reason. It's like saying that if you outsmart me, it's the use of intelligence that is to blame rather than my lack of intelligence. Reason is application of a process of logic. Reason isn't to blame for one's poor "process of logic" any more than "math" is to blame for someone's sucking at math.
However, the extrapolation one can and likely will make to serve their greater purpose is that we created guns as a way to help us defend ourselves as well as attack others. A weapon that serves a purpose, but has to be controlled, limited, regulated. Like rational thinking. Rational thinking is the enemy of government, religion, media, and advertising. We already see society treating people who appreciate rationality and critical thinking, to a degree, the way society treats "gun nuts". A certain discomfort, uneasiness, and disdain.
This is all leading to the eventual inclusion of "rationality" as a diagnosable disorder in the DSM. We'll have to diagnose it and treat it with drugs, because being rational and thinking critically and having the capacity to think and see the world in abstracts rather than a narrow and often blissfully naive limited scope that makes the success of your local professional sports team the most pressing concern in your life makes you generally less happy than someone who just worries about sticking their dick in something occasionally and having a six pack while watching Dane Cooke give you the superfinger.
Perl remains extremely powerful and one of the most versatile languages, even today. That said, the heavily trafficked and fairly complex 15,000 lines of code service I wrote when I was a kid (well, before drinking age) from scratch in 1998-2000 that powered everything up until 2011 is probably not the choice I would make if I were doing it all over again, today. At least, not if I were still starting out as I mostly was, back then. I made the mistake of choosing it as my first real language that I really did anything of significance with. Bad move for a language that makes it so easy to blow your own foot off with (and yet incredibly robust and flexible if you're experienced and it's just another tool you're adding to your belt). Over those many years, I considered another language a few times, but it always came down to not finding any other community that was as large and active as Perl's nor with the extensive public library of code to solve so many problems.
What surprises me is that someone half my age would have such an interest in Perl, in 2011. It's not sexy and python and ruby and everything else is being pushed non-stop, these days. Hell, Haskell seems more popular if you just go by the number of stories about it on tech news aggregators.
As to this kid "identifying fools and parting them from their money" . . . I don't get where you're coming from. He sold to ActiveState. It sounds more like he identified a possible demand to fulfill for people who use Perl. ActiveState is a Perl shop and their customers are primarily Perl people. It doesn't sound like he suckered anyone, but rather found a niche and filled it. In fact, it's one of the most suggested startup strategies. He didn't invent the wheel, but found a niche where he could apply a slightly modified wheel for a different audience. And it paid off.
Actually, selling it is probably a wise move whether arrived at on his own or by counsel of those advising him. Better to reap what benefits you can, now, rather than try and balance it and all of high school and hope that it all "just works out". Instead, he seems to have parlayed not only a short term success and reward, but an opportunity at ActiveState, which could be more valuable to him in the long run. Especially as they appear considerate of his age and obligations.
Not to mention, this builds a track record for him to refer to in the future. After high school, he'll already have a leg-up with this on his resume.
Right, the only response acceptable is "wow, amazing". It's certainly not worth pushing the point that the kid next door to you with less accomplished and connected parents won't have any such opportunity.
Like this kid, I found an opportunity and exploited it at a young age, which I was able to make into a great and very fulfilling career. I didn't have the parents aspect, but I did benefit from rare fortunate circumstances that do not fall most teenagers who *do* have an interest or even a passion in something like this.
Nobody is discounting accomplishments here and it's ridiculous for you to assume so. Pointing out the obvious (which nobody needed to read the article to even conclude, based on prior history of such stories) does nothing to discount the kid. However, when do we get the stories about the other kids? Where are the stories of kids who somehow accomplish similarly cool things without the same benefits as those in every story I recall reading here and on HN over the years? Do they exist?