Don't try to make it a crime? If you take something that doesn't belong to you then you have committed a crime. Full stop. If you purchase something knowing that it was probably stolen then you have also committed a crime, one we uncreatively call "receiving stolen property." Both of these apply in the Case of the Purloined Prototype.
If someone breaks into your house and steals all your property, we aren't going to blame you for having inadequate security. That includes if "breaking in" means "walking in the front door that you left unlocked." We might think you're an idiot, but that doesn't shift the onus of the crime off the, er, criminals.
You're kidding, right? PDF is a document format designed to preserve the layout of a paper book. It doesn't reflow for different screen sizes. At all. This makes it less than useless for the current eBook market, where you have a hojillion different devices, each with its own display resolution, dimensions, and layout format.
And encoding text characters (the job of ASCII and Unicode) is just one of a million different things that need to happen to communicate information through text. If we'd listened to you 30 years ago we'd all still be reading 80-column green text in vi, or [shudder] ed.
ePub is the open, easy standard for electronic books. It's a no-brainer.
Wow, you really are in love with how much better you think you are than everyone else, aren't you? From what I can glean from your Slashdot history you seemtobelong pretty firmly with those billion people immature people. I do too, but I'm man enough to admit that.
That other article on Slashdot about people lacking empathy these days seems more credible every time I read a comments thread. Go on mods, start your "-1 I don't like you." Seems to be the going rate around here.
There is no reason why the internet should be provided without the necessary restrictive mechanisms built into it.
He's exactly right. This is why we print newspapers and books on flash paper, for instance, in case the ideas they contain are found to be dangerous and need to be restricted. The same logic also explains the censors who sit in on university classes to cover students' ears and hum loudly when the professor expresses views which are not in the mainstream.
And unless you want to write commercial software, or use more than a handful of APIs available on Windows, or basically do anything more than kiddie stuff. For all that you need to shell out the full price for Visual Studio.
What I'm espousing here basically amounts to critical reasoning skills. Who's making these claims? What is their motivation for doing so? What other possible explanations exist for the alleged facts, and are they more or less credible than what is being claimed? What's the background to this accusation?
Whenever I have a "gut feeling" about something I always do my damnedest to try to disprove it, because "gut feelings" are invariably based in emotions rather than rationality.
On this same comment thread you just cited a bunch of games theory (the ultimatum game, etc.) to prove that human beings are inherently irrational actors and that they irrationally (i.e., emotionally) punish unfairness even when it's to their detriment to do so. Then you spin around to tell me that you don't have an emotional reaction to this news, even though you justified yourself by saying "We hate undeserved success." Hate is an emotion, last I checked, and unless you don't count yourself as part of the "we" (i.e. a human being) you're subject to your own claim.
I don't pretend I'm not a human being and that I can emotionlessly evaluate controversial issues. I happen to like Facebook and agree with the motives of its CEO. The difference between us is that I'm at least capable of pushing past my initial "gut feeling" to find out more about the issues involved. In this instance it appears as though this "securities fraud" is another salvo in a case that was supposed to have been settled. The adverse party is trying to drum up some publicity by making Facebook's board look greedy and manipulative. You seem to have fallen for that hook, line, and sinker.
"We hate undeserved success" sounds more like a CPUSA slogan than an anthropological or social-psychological principle. Given your comment history I can't say I'm surprised. I'm sure your definition of "undeserved" encompasses more or less any highly successful business venture.
As a last point, I think it's telling that among the people society "loves" you didn't include engineers, builders, innovators, inventors, captains of industry, or any of the other real drivers of human progress.
No, humans pretty much hate seeing other humans succeed in general, deserved or not. It's an emotion allied with envy. The Germans actually have a word for the good feeling you get from seeing successful people screw up: "Schadenfreude."
You're trying to rationalize your emotional reaction to this news rather than interrogate its validity.
The key word there is the "allegedly." And no, there is absolutely no truth to the allegation. The Winklevosses are upset about how the settlement turned out for them and they're rattling the cage to see if any more money will fall out. They're being dunned by their lawyers for non-payment of legal fees.
The title of this article is totally misleading. The Winklevosses agreed to a settlement involving a payment of cash and a quantity of Facebook stock assuming a certain valuation. That valuation was based on the Microsoft purchase of a small chunk of the company that, if you bought all the stock at the same price, would make it work $15 billion.
Obviously that valuation was unrealistic, but the Winklevosses agreed to it *because their lawyers told them to.* Their law firm didn't complete their due diligence or else they may have wanted to renegotiate the deal. But that's not even remotely Facebook's fault.
The reason for this accusation is that the Winklevosses have to pay their lawyers a contingency fee based on the higher valuation of the stock. This will result in a net loss to them. They're pissed off at this turn of events, so they're casting aspersions on Facebook's CEO and demanding a securities investigation. But don't forget that they're a pair of moneyed aristocrats from a family of moneyed aristocrats (read: spoiled brats). So don't think of them as wronged parties because they're not.
Facebook was no more the Winklevosses' idea than Windows Aero or Mac OS Aqua or Enlightenment or KDE were the ideas of Xerox PARC.
Probably it just means corporate and national security outfits will have all sensitive data pass through a nice strong VPN connection. The laptop you carry through customs will be freshly formatted and ready for any amount of probing.
If you're not afraid of retribution you could have a text document sitting on your computer's desktop explaining the situation and advising their nanny state to please sod off. Include a link to here.
Sure, if by "documented" and "proven" you mean "a judge literally laughed the plaintiffs out of court." But please, don't let the facts get in the way of your emotional outbursts.
If you can think of a way to "manipulate" or embarrass me because I like Into Thin Air and How to Train Your Dragon, then go nuts. You could maybe tell my DGS about the children's movie but he'll probably just ask me if his kids will like it. You know how nine year-olds are (the kids, not the DGS).
Your world is paranoid, hostile, and generally malevolent. That tells me a lot more about you than your Facebook profile would have.
[quote]That is the problem which eats away at the core of facebook. [/quote]
"Eats away at the core?" What specifically is the core and what is it that's getting eaten away? Privacy? The whole notion of Facebook is that you share information about yourself with other people. It is by its nature an collectivized exercise in voluntary and controlled loss of privacy. The question marks are the "voluntary" and the "controlled," but not really because you always have the choice _not to use Facebook_ or in the alternative _not to put up any personal information and use it as a glorified IM client_. In the end you always control your loss of information.
I do think in this most recent shenanigan that all users should have been given the option to strip their profiles automagically rather than have their interests transmuted into Pages. I don't really understand what the uproar is about though because I definitely got that option myself. Maybe that policy wasn't implemented consistently. They should have an oversight board to make sure slipups like that don't happen.
A brief tangent. One of the criticisms I hear a lot about social networking is that it's narcissistic because "nobody is that interesting. If that's true, why do people get so bent out of shape about privacy? If nothing about you is that interesting, who cares who else knows it?
Unless you've changed your mind recently, you're veryanti-OOXML for all the same reasons I'm very anti-Flash.
Let's face it. You don't like Microsoft or Apple. Quit rationalizing.
You do realize that by far the majority of Flash content on the Web is videos and video-based ads, right? But whatever. Keep chasing Adobe's incomplete and inconsistent publication of specs on each new iteration of Flash (which usually lags by at least a year) and tie yourself to a spec that can be disappeared at any moment.
At least Microsoft had the courtesy to put OOXML in the hands of Ecma and offer the Covenant Not to Sue. With the Flash spec you don't have either of those things.
Slashdot Mirror
This is clearly a well thought-out plan. Why, what could possibly go wrong?
Except that he didn't steal the idea. A judge called the Winklevosses' claim "evanescent," and when shown their evidence said, "is that all there is?"
Since you're such a fair-minded user when it comes to the rights of defendants, I'm sure you'll agree with me.
Screw you guys! I'm gonna build my own space launcher, with blackjack and hookers! In fact, forget the blackjack!
Don't try to make it a crime? If you take something that doesn't belong to you then you have committed a crime. Full stop. If you purchase something knowing that it was probably stolen then you have also committed a crime, one we uncreatively call "receiving stolen property." Both of these apply in the Case of the Purloined Prototype.
If someone breaks into your house and steals all your property, we aren't going to blame you for having inadequate security. That includes if "breaking in" means "walking in the front door that you left unlocked." We might think you're an idiot, but that doesn't shift the onus of the crime off the, er, criminals.
In other news, something surprising happened.
Coming up next: are angry hobos stalking your Facebook account? What you don't know might eat you. Film at 11.
You're kidding, right? PDF is a document format designed to preserve the layout of a paper book. It doesn't reflow for different screen sizes. At all. This makes it less than useless for the current eBook market, where you have a hojillion different devices, each with its own display resolution, dimensions, and layout format.
And encoding text characters (the job of ASCII and Unicode) is just one of a million different things that need to happen to communicate information through text. If we'd listened to you 30 years ago we'd all still be reading 80-column green text in vi, or [shudder] ed.
ePub is the open, easy standard for electronic books. It's a no-brainer.
Wow, you really are in love with how much better you think you are than everyone else, aren't you? From what I can glean from your Slashdot history you seem to belong pretty firmly with those billion people immature people. I do too, but I'm man enough to admit that.
That other article on Slashdot about people lacking empathy these days seems more credible every time I read a comments thread. Go on mods, start your "-1 I don't like you." Seems to be the going rate around here.
He's exactly right. This is why we print newspapers and books on flash paper, for instance, in case the ideas they contain are found to be dangerous and need to be restricted. The same logic also explains the censors who sit in on university classes to cover students' ears and hum loudly when the professor expresses views which are not in the mainstream.
Is Ed "Too-Tall" Jones too tall?
I never got any of this newfangled philotic physics. Half of it nobody understands anyway.
And unless you want to write commercial software, or use more than a handful of APIs available on Windows, or basically do anything more than kiddie stuff. For all that you need to shell out the full price for Visual Studio.
Well, I mean, a judge called the alleged contractual obligations "evanescent.". But you seem to be taking them as factual, and that they happened more or less the way the Winklevosses claim they did. Why are you doing that?
What I'm espousing here basically amounts to critical reasoning skills. Who's making these claims? What is their motivation for doing so? What other possible explanations exist for the alleged facts, and are they more or less credible than what is being claimed? What's the background to this accusation?
Whenever I have a "gut feeling" about something I always do my damnedest to try to disprove it, because "gut feelings" are invariably based in emotions rather than rationality.
On this same comment thread you just cited a bunch of games theory (the ultimatum game, etc.) to prove that human beings are inherently irrational actors and that they irrationally (i.e., emotionally) punish unfairness even when it's to their detriment to do so. Then you spin around to tell me that you don't have an emotional reaction to this news, even though you justified yourself by saying "We hate undeserved success." Hate is an emotion, last I checked, and unless you don't count yourself as part of the "we" (i.e. a human being) you're subject to your own claim.
I don't pretend I'm not a human being and that I can emotionlessly evaluate controversial issues. I happen to like Facebook and agree with the motives of its CEO. The difference between us is that I'm at least capable of pushing past my initial "gut feeling" to find out more about the issues involved. In this instance it appears as though this "securities fraud" is another salvo in a case that was supposed to have been settled. The adverse party is trying to drum up some publicity by making Facebook's board look greedy and manipulative. You seem to have fallen for that hook, line, and sinker.
"We hate undeserved success" sounds more like a CPUSA slogan than an anthropological or social-psychological principle. Given your comment history I can't say I'm surprised. I'm sure your definition of "undeserved" encompasses more or less any highly successful business venture.
As a last point, I think it's telling that among the people society "loves" you didn't include engineers, builders, innovators, inventors, captains of industry, or any of the other real drivers of human progress.
No, humans pretty much hate seeing other humans succeed in general, deserved or not. It's an emotion allied with envy. The Germans actually have a word for the good feeling you get from seeing successful people screw up: "Schadenfreude."
You're trying to rationalize your emotional reaction to this news rather than interrogate its validity.
The key word there is the "allegedly." And no, there is absolutely no truth to the allegation. The Winklevosses are upset about how the settlement turned out for them and they're rattling the cage to see if any more money will fall out. They're being dunned by their lawyers for non-payment of legal fees.
The title of this article is totally misleading. The Winklevosses agreed to a settlement involving a payment of cash and a quantity of Facebook stock assuming a certain valuation. That valuation was based on the Microsoft purchase of a small chunk of the company that, if you bought all the stock at the same price, would make it work $15 billion.
Obviously that valuation was unrealistic, but the Winklevosses agreed to it *because their lawyers told them to.* Their law firm didn't complete their due diligence or else they may have wanted to renegotiate the deal. But that's not even remotely Facebook's fault.
The reason for this accusation is that the Winklevosses have to pay their lawyers a contingency fee based on the higher valuation of the stock. This will result in a net loss to them. They're pissed off at this turn of events, so they're casting aspersions on Facebook's CEO and demanding a securities investigation. But don't forget that they're a pair of moneyed aristocrats from a family of moneyed aristocrats (read: spoiled brats). So don't think of them as wronged parties because they're not.
Facebook was no more the Winklevosses' idea than Windows Aero or Mac OS Aqua or Enlightenment or KDE were the ideas of Xerox PARC.
Probably it just means corporate and national security outfits will have all sensitive data pass through a nice strong VPN connection. The laptop you carry through customs will be freshly formatted and ready for any amount of probing.
If you're not afraid of retribution you could have a text document sitting on your computer's desktop explaining the situation and advising their nanny state to please sod off. Include a link to here.
Yes, Ted, that was the joke.
2.29 miles isn't even 1 league! I thought the ocean was 20,000 leagues deep!
Sure, if by "documented" and "proven" you mean "a judge literally laughed the plaintiffs out of court." But please, don't let the facts get in the way of your emotional outbursts.
If you can think of a way to "manipulate" or embarrass me because I like Into Thin Air and How to Train Your Dragon, then go nuts. You could maybe tell my DGS about the children's movie but he'll probably just ask me if his kids will like it. You know how nine year-olds are (the kids, not the DGS).
Your world is paranoid, hostile, and generally malevolent. That tells me a lot more about you than your Facebook profile would have.
Font was a screwup (selected Extrans by mistake).
[quote]That is the problem which eats away at the core of facebook. [/quote]
"Eats away at the core?" What specifically is the core and what is it that's getting eaten away? Privacy? The whole notion of Facebook is that you share information about yourself with other people. It is by its nature an collectivized exercise in voluntary and controlled loss of privacy. The question marks are the "voluntary" and the "controlled," but not really because you always have the choice _not to use Facebook_ or in the alternative _not to put up any personal information and use it as a glorified IM client_. In the end you always control your loss of information.
I do think in this most recent shenanigan that all users should have been given the option to strip their profiles automagically rather than have their interests transmuted into Pages. I don't really understand what the uproar is about though because I definitely got that option myself. Maybe that policy wasn't implemented consistently. They should have an oversight board to make sure slipups like that don't happen.
A brief tangent. One of the criticisms I hear a lot about social networking is that it's narcissistic because "nobody is that interesting. If that's true, why do people get so bent out of shape about privacy? If nothing about you is that interesting, who cares who else knows it?
Will someone please explain to me how my post is a troll? You may think I'm wrong, but how am I a troll?
Unless you've changed your mind recently, you're very anti-OOXML for all the same reasons I'm very anti-Flash. Let's face it. You don't like Microsoft or Apple. Quit rationalizing.
You do realize that by far the majority of Flash content on the Web is videos and video-based ads, right? But whatever. Keep chasing Adobe's incomplete and inconsistent publication of specs on each new iteration of Flash (which usually lags by at least a year) and tie yourself to a spec that can be disappeared at any moment.
At least Microsoft had the courtesy to put OOXML in the hands of Ecma and offer the Covenant Not to Sue. With the Flash spec you don't have either of those things.