What non-intellectual property based job do you know of in which a person can perform a service once not only get paid for their whole life but also most of their children's lives?
Nit: You actually understate it. Life + 50 means that anything I create in my lifetime is likely to still be under copyright when my children die, and will still be so as my grandchildren enter their old age. Assume a life expectancy of 70 years (and that's putting it on the low side). I had my youngest child when I turned 30. Assuming she has a kid at 30, that means I'm 60. So my grandchild is 10 years old when I die, and the copyright lasts until that kid is 60. Not to mention that I'm in the US where the term is Life + 70, which would mean that the copyright is still valid when my *grandchildren* die.
Where I work headphones are banned for all employees. Why? Because it would be "unfair" to the customer service staff if everyone else was allowed to wear headphones and they were unable to.
I've encountered this position before and it's infuriating. One department can't wear headphones? Okay, compensate them some other way then, either monetarily, or with some small office perk that isn't granted to the rest of the staff. Or tell them to suck it up and get a job doing something else. Different departments *should* be treated differently.
so do we sue time warner for giving me the internet connection That I use to upload the dirivitive to yourtube? where does it end? with the user, one of the many middlemen?
My gut answer is just YouTube and the end user. YouTube is the one directly profiting from the infringement. Your ISP gets paid whether you infringe or not, but YouTube potentially derives greater revenue from users who infringe. That said, if YouTube is making a good faith effort to prescreen content, their liability should be limited at most to real damages and not the absurd per infringement rate that would put them out of business in short order.
YouTube is not the one performing the copyright infringement.
The infringer would be the person who uploaded the content. I believe YouTube however could be considered to be involved in contributory infringement as they provide a platform for infringement and can be seen to directly profit via advertising revenues from that infringement.
To say that YouTube needs to verify every single possible iota of content for proper use of legal entitlements is just plain crazy. That would be like IHOP being required to frisk you down, take your smartphone and tablets, and then somehow check to see if you have the legal entitlements to all IP on your person.
The distinction here is that IHOP does not profit from any infringing IP you might possess when you enter their establishment.
At some point, enough is enough, and it no longer serves the original purpose, which was to enrich society by providing a stream of valuable content for the Public Domain.
I agree completely that copyright in its current form has many flaws and needs to be rethought, but I view that as a distinct discussion.
So your argument here, is that poisoning and killing people is the same as copyright infringement?
No, that's not his argument. His argument is that the cost of preventing infringement does not excuse the decision not to prevent, nor removes the liability incurred from infringing.
The collision appears to be caused by negligence, and was not simply an accident. "Accident" is a euphamism, a weasel word designed to make the violation appear less severe.
Please stop politicizing the headlines, Slashdot.
I've generally heard (and used) the word accident to describe pretty much any collision other than one where the driver was deliberately aiming to hit someone.
There are plenty of fields where people could produce good work, but there isn't a customer base to support that work. How many skilled pot makers can make a living throwing pots?
I'm not saying we need to prop up an industry. My starting point is that there is a demand for said product. People will always produce beautiful things for the sheer love of doing so. I don't dispute this.
The argument I'm trying to make is that if I get paid enough to make a living for doing it, then I am able to spend more time doing it, and therefore my fans have more of my stuff to enjoy. My main complaint was with the idea that artists who want to be paid are greedy.
you should me making music for the love of it, anything else and you're greedy
Here's the thing about it though:
Let's say I make good music. Right now I have a full time job to support my family, which means that any music I make is in the spare time between work and sleep and whatnot. If I can't make money off of the music I create, it will continue to be made only in the spare time I have. I will produce it slowly and sparingly. I won't be able to do that many live shows.
We don't need a system where I become a millionaire, but it does need to be enough that I can make music (or books, or any other form of art) my occupation rather than my hobby, if I'm good enough.
My understanding, and I should have mentioned this originally, but I slipped on the editing, is that the fundamentalist Jews don't feel a need to convert non-Jews, but believe that other Jews should observe the same way they do. In Jerusalem this probably manifests itself differently than it does in the US.
For what it's worth, that's only because you're not Jewish.
I was actually aware of this, and meant to express it in my original post. It mostly manifested itself during passover, when they'd get rid of all the stuff they weren't allowed to have in their houses for the week. Much of it would end up with me (candy, random foods, and one year a case of beer), and specifically not with some of the other, less religious Jews who worked with us. When I asked about it, the answer I was given was something along the lines of "You're not Jewish."
Fundies are notorious for limiting other people's choices because they find them disagreeable. You make it sound like we don't already have plenty of experience with people of this mindset.
I used to work with several Jews of varying degrees of fundamentalism. All of them were at a minimum of the 'cannot do anything that resembles work, including using electricity during the sabbath' variety. And me, being completely non-religious, got along fine with most of them (one guy was just a total asshole, but that had nothing to do with his beliefs. The other Jews didn't like him either). Jewish fundamentalists tend not to be of the evangelical sort. They have their rules, and they abide by them, but they didn't give a damn whether or not I followed them.
I have no objection to a group that wants to organize an opt-in censorship system for their own use.
I wasn't aware that it taught math at all. Well, it teaches students how to memorize formulas, but that's about it. Let's try to improve schools before we "accelerate" any of the material.
I remember sitting in my HS Calculus class, listening to the teacher explain a topic to the class that I already grasped. As she went over the specifics, I started to wonder why anyone would explain it that way. It was such a bizarre approach to the material. And then it hit me. She didn't actually understand what she was teaching, she had simply memorized it. It was a "This method will solve this problem for you. I don't know why though" approach. Rather unsettling experience.
As always seems to happen during debates around trade tariffs and regulation, you're considering only one side of the equation (American workers) and not the other (American consumers). The majority of us who are not workers manufacturing solar cells benefit greatly from having a supply of cheap, foreign-made solar cells rather than expensive, domestic-made cells, which on the whole balances out the negative impact on American workers.
In the short term. When there's no competition left, the Chinese will stop selling them below cost.
Cop: You are under arrest! Man: What for? Cop, pointing at the man's collar: Do you see this stitching right here? Man: Yes? Cop: This is a terrorist thread!
With Ruby, I need to *realize* that there's a child class I need to modify. With Java, the compiler does that for me.
A missing method exception is no different than a compiler complaining about an unimplemented method. I can add in a bogus implementation to silence either one. But if I'm unlucky, if I haven't tested my stuff quite as well as I thought, a customer might discover that missing method error before I do. The compiler tests everything.
I'll concede that the compiler will help you find certain categories of mistakes and/or oversights. I'm less willing to concede the point I originally objected to several posts up the chain, which is that a large and unpleasant chunk of your debugging time will be spent chasing these things down when working with dynamic languages.
To me, that's a matter of adequate testing, regardless of your language choice. If a missing method doesn't blow your tests up, you either need better tests, or the method is superfluous in which case you're just writing stub code to keep the compiler happy.
Really? You want to write a unit test checking for the existence of each method on every class in your class hierarchy? What about a language like Scala, where classes can have type parameters or bounds and define methods whose type signature depends on the type parameters or bounds? You're going to end up writing a massive number of unit tests if you write one for every possible parameterization of every class. I'm perfectly happy to use dynamic languages when warranted, but it's just silly to say static typing gives you nothing more than adequate testing would.
I can't speak towards Scala, I'm not familiar with it.
I'll trim it down to two languages to make the comparison simpler. I'll use ruby and java. If you add a method to a java interface, every objects which implements said interface will be required by the compiler to have the method. The rough equivalent in ruby is not true, and the lack of the method will go unnoticed until some point during runtime when something actually tries to execute it. The argument I'm trying to make is that if you have equivalent unit tests in each language, and it doesn't turn up the problem in ruby, then the method has only been added to the java code to satisfy the compiler, and not to serve some specific actual need. Or, alternately, your unit tests need work.
Do you have any idea how a compiler actually works? Have you ever actually used a statically typed language? I think it's unlikely, otherwise you'd realize that he's talking straight.
A few years of C, less in java. FWIW, I hate perl with a passion, though it represents about 90% of my current workload.
Change an interface in Java, and the compiler mandates you change all the objects that implement it. You don't end up with a missing method down the hierarchy. That's just one frustration of many with dynamic languages.
To me, that's a matter of adequate testing, regardless of your language choice. If a missing method doesn't blow your tests up, you either need better tests, or the method is superfluous in which case you're just writing stub code to keep the compiler happy.
I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, trying to revive a career that I once had but spent the last 15 years removed from coding. I looked around a lot and asked a bunch of people stuff. I have chosen Ruby because it looks like it's strong, gaining popularity, and has a big demand in jobs right now. It seems everybody and their brother already knows Python and the PHP framework, so you'll get a lot of 'be one of us' posts, but I recommend you figure out your goal, besides just personal hobby stuff which you can do in any language. Looking for employ-ability? You might find what I did, that Ruby, then Ruby on Rails will be a good fit.
Seconded-ish.
I'm also a ruby fan. I've tried python and didn't like it, but I know some people who love it, which suggests that it's at least partly a matter of taste. Try a few different things. Come up with a fairly simple (but not TOO simple) program, and then try to implement it in a few different languages. Some of them may click for you, and some of them may feel wrong. Go with the one that offers the fewest surprises when you try to do something.
When working on larger projects, especially involving many developers, any time saved due to the capabilities of dynamic languages will be lost debugging problems that the compiler would've caught when using Java, C#, or C++.
That's got to be one of the dumber things I've ever read.
Compilers catch syntax errors. Logical errors are still free to roam about. perl and ruby both have a -c option that will perform a syntax check for you, it should catch more or less the same things that a compiler will. If you're reliant on the compiler to find your bugs, you'll have debugging problems no matter what language you choose.
If the NFL went back to the type of padding/helmets they had just 20 years ago the players wouldn't be doing this damage to one another. The "armor" has evolved substantially over that time to minimize (cause?) damage, but humans have not.
Slashdot Mirror
"President Obama tied to Florida cannibal"
Somehow I can't help but read this one literally.
What non-intellectual property based job do you know of in which a person can perform a service once not only get paid for their whole life but also most of their children's lives?
Nit: You actually understate it. Life + 50 means that anything I create in my lifetime is likely to still be under copyright when my children die, and will still be so as my grandchildren enter their old age. Assume a life expectancy of 70 years (and that's putting it on the low side). I had my youngest child when I turned 30. Assuming she has a kid at 30, that means I'm 60. So my grandchild is 10 years old when I die, and the copyright lasts until that kid is 60. Not to mention that I'm in the US where the term is Life + 70, which would mean that the copyright is still valid when my *grandchildren* die.
Where I work headphones are banned for all employees. Why? Because it would be "unfair" to the customer service staff if everyone else was allowed to wear headphones and they were unable to.
I've encountered this position before and it's infuriating. One department can't wear headphones? Okay, compensate them some other way then, either monetarily, or with some small office perk that isn't granted to the rest of the staff. Or tell them to suck it up and get a job doing something else. Different departments *should* be treated differently.
so do we sue time warner for giving me the internet connection That I use to upload the dirivitive to yourtube? where does it end? with the user, one of the many middlemen?
My gut answer is just YouTube and the end user. YouTube is the one directly profiting from the infringement. Your ISP gets paid whether you infringe or not, but YouTube potentially derives greater revenue from users who infringe. That said, if YouTube is making a good faith effort to prescreen content, their liability should be limited at most to real damages and not the absurd per infringement rate that would put them out of business in short order.
YouTube is not the one performing the copyright infringement.
The infringer would be the person who uploaded the content. I believe YouTube however could be considered to be involved in contributory infringement as they provide a platform for infringement and can be seen to directly profit via advertising revenues from that infringement.
To say that YouTube needs to verify every single possible iota of content for proper use of legal entitlements is just plain crazy. That would be like IHOP being required to frisk you down, take your smartphone and tablets, and then somehow check to see if you have the legal entitlements to all IP on your person.
The distinction here is that IHOP does not profit from any infringing IP you might possess when you enter their establishment.
At some point, enough is enough, and it no longer serves the original purpose, which was to enrich society by providing a stream of valuable content for the Public Domain.
I agree completely that copyright in its current form has many flaws and needs to be rethought, but I view that as a distinct discussion.
So your argument here, is that poisoning and killing people is the same as copyright infringement?
No, that's not his argument. His argument is that the cost of preventing infringement does not excuse the decision not to prevent, nor removes the liability incurred from infringing.
...was open the good book to find that God created the Universe. Finding this fact need only a couple of seconds of processing time. Silly scientists!
The 'good book' is a tad shy on the specifics though. It's really written for more of a physics layperson.
The collision appears to be caused by negligence, and was not simply an accident. "Accident" is a euphamism, a weasel word designed to make the violation appear less severe.
Please stop politicizing the headlines, Slashdot.
I've generally heard (and used) the word accident to describe pretty much any collision other than one where the driver was deliberately aiming to hit someone.
There are plenty of fields where people could produce good work, but there isn't a customer base to support that work.
How many skilled pot makers can make a living throwing pots?
I'm not saying we need to prop up an industry. My starting point is that there is a demand for said product. People will always produce beautiful things for the sheer love of doing so. I don't dispute this.
The argument I'm trying to make is that if I get paid enough to make a living for doing it, then I am able to spend more time doing it, and therefore my fans have more of my stuff to enjoy. My main complaint was with the idea that artists who want to be paid are greedy.
You win :)
you should me making music for the love of it, anything else and you're greedy
Here's the thing about it though:
Let's say I make good music. Right now I have a full time job to support my family, which means that any music I make is in the spare time between work and sleep and whatnot. If I can't make money off of the music I create, it will continue to be made only in the spare time I have. I will produce it slowly and sparingly. I won't be able to do that many live shows.
We don't need a system where I become a millionaire, but it does need to be enough that I can make music (or books, or any other form of art) my occupation rather than my hobby, if I'm good enough.
My understanding, and I should have mentioned this originally, but I slipped on the editing, is that the fundamentalist Jews don't feel a need to convert non-Jews, but believe that other Jews should observe the same way they do. In Jerusalem this probably manifests itself differently than it does in the US.
For what it's worth, that's only because you're not Jewish.
I was actually aware of this, and meant to express it in my original post. It mostly manifested itself during passover, when they'd get rid of all the stuff they weren't allowed to have in their houses for the week. Much of it would end up with me (candy, random foods, and one year a case of beer), and specifically not with some of the other, less religious Jews who worked with us. When I asked about it, the answer I was given was something along the lines of "You're not Jewish."
Fundies are notorious for limiting other people's choices because they find them disagreeable. You make it sound like we don't already have plenty of experience with people of this mindset.
I used to work with several Jews of varying degrees of fundamentalism. All of them were at a minimum of the 'cannot do anything that resembles work, including using electricity during the sabbath' variety. And me, being completely non-religious, got along fine with most of them (one guy was just a total asshole, but that had nothing to do with his beliefs. The other Jews didn't like him either). Jewish fundamentalists tend not to be of the evangelical sort. They have their rules, and they abide by them, but they didn't give a damn whether or not I followed them.
I have no objection to a group that wants to organize an opt-in censorship system for their own use.
High School just doesn't teach enough Math
I wasn't aware that it taught math at all. Well, it teaches students how to memorize formulas, but that's about it. Let's try to improve schools before we "accelerate" any of the material.
I remember sitting in my HS Calculus class, listening to the teacher explain a topic to the class that I already grasped. As she went over the specifics, I started to wonder why anyone would explain it that way. It was such a bizarre approach to the material. And then it hit me. She didn't actually understand what she was teaching, she had simply memorized it. It was a "This method will solve this problem for you. I don't know why though" approach. Rather unsettling experience.
That was very much the mode in those days.
Self taught also, as no classes were available for me until high school. I wonder if my experience is average?
As always seems to happen during debates around trade tariffs and regulation, you're considering only one side of the equation (American workers) and not the other (American consumers). The majority of us who are not workers manufacturing solar cells benefit greatly from having a supply of cheap, foreign-made solar cells rather than expensive, domestic-made cells, which on the whole balances out the negative impact on American workers.
In the short term. When there's no competition left, the Chinese will stop selling them below cost.
'terorist thread'
Cop: You are under arrest!
Man: What for?
Cop, pointing at the man's collar: Do you see this stitching right here?
Man: Yes?
Cop: This is a terrorist thread!
*cough* bullshit *cough*
You first have to realize that there are exactly two programming languages in all existence: ruby and python.
The rest makes more sense if you start from there.
With Ruby, I need to *realize* that there's a child class I need to modify. With Java, the compiler does that for me.
A missing method exception is no different than a compiler complaining about an unimplemented method. I can add in a bogus implementation to silence either one. But if I'm unlucky, if I haven't tested my stuff quite as well as I thought, a customer might discover that missing method error before I do. The compiler tests everything.
I'll concede that the compiler will help you find certain categories of mistakes and/or oversights. I'm less willing to concede the point I originally objected to several posts up the chain, which is that a large and unpleasant chunk of your debugging time will be spent chasing these things down when working with dynamic languages.
To me, that's a matter of adequate testing, regardless of your language choice. If a missing method doesn't blow your tests up, you either need better tests, or the method is superfluous in which case you're just writing stub code to keep the compiler happy.
Really? You want to write a unit test checking for the existence of each method on every class in your class hierarchy? What about a language like Scala, where classes can have type parameters or bounds and define methods whose type signature depends on the type parameters or bounds? You're going to end up writing a massive number of unit tests if you write one for every possible parameterization of every class. I'm perfectly happy to use dynamic languages when warranted, but it's just silly to say static typing gives you nothing more than adequate testing would.
I can't speak towards Scala, I'm not familiar with it.
I'll trim it down to two languages to make the comparison simpler. I'll use ruby and java. If you add a method to a java interface, every objects which implements said interface will be required by the compiler to have the method. The rough equivalent in ruby is not true, and the lack of the method will go unnoticed until some point during runtime when something actually tries to execute it. The argument I'm trying to make is that if you have equivalent unit tests in each language, and it doesn't turn up the problem in ruby, then the method has only been added to the java code to satisfy the compiler, and not to serve some specific actual need. Or, alternately, your unit tests need work.
Do you have any idea how a compiler actually works? Have you ever actually used a statically typed language? I think it's unlikely, otherwise you'd realize that he's talking straight.
A few years of C, less in java. FWIW, I hate perl with a passion, though it represents about 90% of my current workload.
Change an interface in Java, and the compiler mandates you change all the objects that implement it. You don't end up with a missing method down the hierarchy. That's just one frustration of many with dynamic languages.
To me, that's a matter of adequate testing, regardless of your language choice. If a missing method doesn't blow your tests up, you either need better tests, or the method is superfluous in which case you're just writing stub code to keep the compiler happy.
I'm pretty much in the same boat as you, trying to revive a career that I once had but spent the last 15 years removed from coding. I looked around a lot and asked a bunch of people stuff. I have chosen Ruby because it looks like it's strong, gaining popularity, and has a big demand in jobs right now. It seems everybody and their brother already knows Python and the PHP framework, so you'll get a lot of 'be one of us' posts, but I recommend you figure out your goal, besides just personal hobby stuff which you can do in any language. Looking for employ-ability? You might find what I did, that Ruby, then Ruby on Rails will be a good fit.
Seconded-ish.
I'm also a ruby fan. I've tried python and didn't like it, but I know some people who love it, which suggests that it's at least partly a matter of taste. Try a few different things. Come up with a fairly simple (but not TOO simple) program, and then try to implement it in a few different languages. Some of them may click for you, and some of them may feel wrong. Go with the one that offers the fewest surprises when you try to do something.
When working on larger projects, especially involving many developers, any time saved due to the capabilities of dynamic languages will be lost debugging problems that the compiler would've caught when using Java, C#, or C++.
That's got to be one of the dumber things I've ever read.
Compilers catch syntax errors. Logical errors are still free to roam about. perl and ruby both have a -c option that will perform a syntax check for you, it should catch more or less the same things that a compiler will. If you're reliant on the compiler to find your bugs, you'll have debugging problems no matter what language you choose.
If the NFL went back to the type of padding/helmets they had just 20 years ago the players wouldn't be doing this damage to one another. The "armor" has evolved substantially over that time to minimize (cause?) damage, but humans have not.
Junior Seau started playing over 20 years ago.
Dave Duerson retired 19 years ago.