If we as developers and contributors don't wish to withhold our work for a fee, what incentive can we offer users to care about the ecosystem?
They just want to use the stuff we've built. We have to somehow use that to bring them into the fold, develop them into supporters, awaken a sense of responsibility to the ideals that allow them to benefit from our work, groom contributors, etc.
Right now, we're offering the incentive of being able to help improve and shape our projects. Most consumers don't care. They WANT a gatekeeper to say "Here is what is new and awesome. It is what you need, and it costs $199."
We are plumbers who work for free, for reasons we can't seem to articulate effectively to the majority of the public, who don't care anyway. Our perceived value is low to them, because "really quality stuff costs money."
How do we cut the "distance" between us and the users you mention without appearing to be desperate and clingy? If developer goals are to be paramount, what happens when users want something different despite our best efforts to convince them they don't actually want that?
I'm off on a tangent or three. Sorry. I keep thinking a "serve the ideal to gain the benefit of our work" kind of thing might work. Exclusivity can be a powerful attractor to users. Unfortunately, this would seem to require a gatekeeper with sweeping powers.
Need to go off and organize my thoughts more, evidently.
Here's a thought though - is the problem really that there are gatekeepers, or that the current gatekeepers are simply *branded aggregators* at their core?
How can application developers keep aggregators from presenting their work as part of a branded, monolithic whole - without destroying the distribution network?
What I would like to do is foster a large developer community and a large user community without the gate-keepers. I think that might require less rights than you get with Open Source, specifically some terms around paid distribution and distribution as part of a support-for-pay engagement. I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
This statement really piqued my interest. Don't think I've ever agreed with "something I read on Slashdot" more wholeheartedly. Are you (or is anyone you know of) trying to work the out real-world parameters of such a system? What might it look like? How can we help?
So - Mister Shuttleworth, if you can get your sleek and graceful Ubuntu women to date some strong and burly Red hat men, you'll find this kind of tribalism slowly disappear.
See, son, when a man in a red hat loves a woman, he gives her an RPM. The RPM swims up into NEW and fertilizes a DEB. 19 months later, you entered STABLE.
What's that, son? Sure, we could have used alien. But your mom never was the adventurous type.
I quit coffee after a decade of drinking at least two cups a day. At least 4 days a week I would have three or more cups. I bought into the stereotypical "caffeinated coder" personality in the early days, and never lost the habit......until two months ago when I ditched it. A couple of weeks in, I dropped all caffeinated beverages.
Quitting was painful. Four-day headaches that never fade and don't respond to Advil. I broke once, walked down to Starbucks and ordered a coffee. One sip and the pain just vanished. I dumped the rest of the cup out on the sidewalk. The rule was "one sip of coffee is allowed if a headache lasts an hour." I only had four sips after that.
The difference is astounding. I snap asleep at night and wake up in a good mood. I've been told I smile more and am generally more pleasant to be around (your mileage may vary). Weirdly, I sweat far less at the gym. Having battled depression since my late teens, I have the odd 'down' day now, but generally I feel good about things. I don't second-guess myself at work and my confidence has soared.
Moral of story? If you're feeling shitty about life, and you're a big coffee drinker, stop drinking the stuff. Really, stop. No half measures, no "just one cup a week" attempts. There is no try, young Jedi. You'll feel much better .
Just be sure to keep going to the coffee shop or wherever you used to get your fix. Order caffeine free tea. You need to be around coffee while you quit. You'll want it less.
Also, the "caffeine" section of this is interesting.
In addition, this has turnd us from true professionals to hyper-active attention-deficit internet-addicted 'coderz', and so its no wonder management has stopped thinking of us as the boffins and started to treat us like children.
In writing, one uses English, not law. In that case you DO use the English dictionary, which defines theft both as taking something tangible, and copying words.
I just quoted you by copying your words. Oh shit, I'm a thief now! Society would be so awesome if the dictionary was the final arbiter of meaning.
Seriously though, the original poster claimed that copying code was theft, and I provided some legal context. That's called expanding the conversation, and it adds value - something your pedantic nitpicking does not.
As the speaker was writing, it only makes sense they would use words as writers use them, and thus the usage is correct.
So what you're saying is, you think that conversations that begin with a narrow-minded and potentially untrue statement in a limited context should be constrained to that context? Kind of a polished, facile, and locked-down colloquy?
1. Was the property provably taken without consent?
2. Was the property provably taken with the intent of depriving its rightful owner of said property?
Are you sure about the second criterion? For example, if I steal an apple from someone, the intent is not to deprive the other person of an apple, it's merely to get an apple for myself.
Intention to permanently deprive is defined at s.73(12) of the Australian Crimes Act as treating property as if it belongs to the accused, rather than the owner.
It's all definitions. Even "intent" might legally mean something other than you'd expect, depending on where you live.
They took the code without Google's consent, hence they stole it.
Not quite. In most jurisdictions, the question "Is it theft?" is answered by the following tests.
1. Was the property provably taken without consent?
2. Was the property provably taken with the intent of depriving its rightful owner of said property?
If both of those tests are true, it's theft. In this case, Google still has a copy of their code, so the crime would not be considered theft in most jurisdictions.
Of course, in the USA there is no national definition of theft, since it's defined and prosecuted at the state level. Talk about confusing.
"Theft" is a concept that really varies in meaning from place to place. I guess that's why so many people jump on their high horse, wave their hands madly, and proclaim that various petty infringements are "stealing". They are probably right in the context of some banana republic somewhere.
KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used.
One neat thing about GVFS, the GNOME abstraction, is that part of it wraps FUSE filesystem modules. Any application, not just GNOME applications, can use filesystems mounted with GNOME's 'connect to server' feature, for instance. I think it's more desirable to write a FUSE module than a KDE-specific KIOSlave.
GNOME sometimes comes across as a hodgepodge of bindings and semi-coherent libraries, but there has been a great deal of work to consolidate and even eliminate core libraries, tighten up coding standards, get rid of deprecatedsymbols in GTK+ and GLib... At least they're trying to get things right, right up and down the stack.
GNOME 3 will be a big shift. I can't say I'm crazy about the new shell, and the Task Pooper scares the shit out of me (ha ha).
They'd have to screw it up really badly to make me go back to KDE. Even then, I'd go to 3.x.
Nobody denies that Java is used everywhere; the point is that it is no longer (if it ever was) a cutting-edge language, the kind that "pierced programmers" get excited about.
*My* point was that "pierced programmers" who can't get excited about new and diverse ways of doing things (in ANY language, regardless of age) are missing out on the best part of their job.
Using the word "play" shows that you have no idea just how much real work is being done in these languages.
No it doesn't. I'm a software guy, through and through. Languages are play to me. As I alluded in my original post, I don't live in the ironic, sarcastic Hipsterverse. You have no idea what tools I've used in the course of my Real Work.
It seems I hit a nerve! Piercings are painful at first, aren't they.
After all, if the kinds of "practical" concerns you mentioned (ubiquity, performance, libraries) were the only things that mattered then we'd all still be using FORTRAN, COBOL, or C.
I make a lot of money working with Java. I have piercings. I've been known to have hair in a primary color.
Seriously though. Android applications. Eclipse. Adsense, GMail, Wave - in fact, just about every big Google web application (yes, even the client side stuff is written in Java and translated to Javascript). Openfire XMPP. Tomcat. Geronimo. ActiveMQ. Azureus.
You can badmouth Java all you want, but performance and tooling are excellent and there seems to be an infinite supply of libraries and sample code. It runs in lots of different places. There are 100% open source implementations. You can compile it to native code. You can run it in the CLR.
I know it's trendy to play with Ruby and Python, and that's fine. I'm a big fan of Scala, which runs on the JVM. I believe Twitter's backend is at least partially built on Scala. El Reg, I know, I know.
Anyone who thinks Java is fossilizing needs to give their head a shake. It's everywhere, and it's being used in very diverse ways.
If that doesn't excite this mythical "pierced programmer", then said idiot is too busy practicing the Hipster Doctrine - studied disinterest.
By reasonable I mean the concept that if you would like to view a recent movie, it's reasonable to pay a small sum in exchange rather than freeload.
I agree that content creators who wish to charge for access to their content should be paid. Content creators have the right to decide how to sell their work.
The problem is, if you want to sell "access to content", you need to control that access. That's impossible to do by technical means as long as movies are sold in stores on physical media.
And yet, content producers keep trying to sell access to stuff that's already out there, opening the doors to ripping and file sharing. Why? Because they make a lot more money selling copies on physical media than they do on broadcast or theater runs, regardless of piracy.
Piracy and duplication go hand in hand with physical media sales. That's the reality of the business model, no matter what the law says. If the associated risk/reward ratio is unacceptable, a reasonable company should FIND A NEW BUSINESS MODEL.
There really should be a legal test that weighs realities in society against a company's business model before a case is accepted. If a case is substantially tilted towards defending a business model against societal reality, it should be thrown out.
For all the bitching and whining coming out of Hollywood about so-called "lost sales" due to piracy, they keep on rolling out the films and making truckloads of money. They aren't hurting. Their business model is working just fine.
Thus there needs to be a system by which the creators can be fairly paid for that work. We have developed such a system. It's called copyright law. It's not perfect, but it's what our society has enshrined in the law as our solution. And that system says if you want to watch the movie before its copyright expires, you have to pay the price the movie maker asks.
When "not perfect" means destroy family finances and threaten the population with obscene penalties for the minor misdemeanor of watching a 90-minute sci-fi for free, that makes copyright law unworthy of respect, thank you very much.
The more people that break the law in this case, the better. These companies can't sue everyone, and the legal system is supposed to be about balancing common rights among all parties, not bludgeoning the poor into compliance with arbitrary rules designed to make the rich richer.
For your reference, I bought the Battlestar Galactica DVD set because it was awesome, and I downloaded Stargate Universe Season 1 because I couldn't find someone to pay for it (and it's offered for free anyway on the TV network's site).
Should I now be summarily hauled into court for the Finest Verdict Money Can Buy for my non-criminal audacity? All because of this "not-perfect-but-hey-it's-the-best-we-have" copyright law?
What I don't understand is where this entitlement mentality comes from that says just because you can get a copy without paying for it, that it's OK to do.
Big entertainment gets plenty of my money every year. They've even convinced my government to tax blank media and devices containing flash memory just in case they might be used for piracy. They sue fellow citizens into oblivion for non-criminal acts.
Fuck them, and fuck the sheep that defend them on legal technicalities. "Right" and "wrong" don't have anything to do with "legality", until the day comes that we replace the "legal system" with a "justice system".
Perhaps it's not so much an "entitlement" mentality as a "we don't care that you don't like the consequences of your business model, and we don't like being bullied" mentality.
Fundamentally you don't have the right to demand somebody else work for you for free. Which is what you're doing when you consume their hard work - a film - without following the (perfectly reasonable) license terms.
I don't think the word "consume" means what you've been told to think it means. I won't even touch your concept of "reasonable".
You can "consume" a burger. After that last swallow, no one else can consume it. You alone get the calories and the flab around your middle, and only you. You could consume someone else's burger when they weren't looking, and that would be theft, because then they would have to purchase another burger.
You can't "consume" a movie unless you somehow manage to steal the first master from the production floor before duplication begins, quickly film a "Will It Blend?" episode, and shovel the result into your gaping maw.
Is reading a sign on the street "consuming" the sign? Of course not. When you're done, other people can still read the sign. You have not consumed it.
How about taking a photo of the sign with your phone, then going home and reading it? Is that "consuming" the sign? No?
What if you took a photo of a sign on the street which had a footnote saying "FBI WARNING, SERIOUS CRIMINAL PENALTIES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING THIS SIGN TO READ LATER", then went home and read it? Has the sign been consumed?
Stories, ideas, music and movies are not consumables. Time to stop trying to monetize them as such. The only thing that matters is that I can get the content I want by paying for a method of delivery. Right now, my ISP connection and a torrent client seem to do it.
I'm Canadian and 29 years old. I don't remember the real event, but I still tear up a bit when I see the Challenger break apart on video. Part of me hopes it won't each time, of all things.
They were carrying humanity's banner into space. They didn't make it. It's as if a top athlete were shot as they carried their nation's banner into an Olympic stadium.
I always thought I'd make a buck in this business because I consider myself a superior engineer, and I'd take that skill and use it to help a company create a product that other people don't have the skills to create. In short, I can't help but see open source as something that devalues software engineers.
You must be kidding. Are you suddenly an Inferior Superior Software Engineer if you use a tool that's freely available, or link to an open-source-licensed shared library? Most people don't have the skills to do that.
Or if there's an open-source clone of your company's software, surely there's nothing stopping your company from, er, competing with it? If your company were so threatened by that clone, surely they would want to hire and fill the pockets of many Superior Software Engineers to get them back on top?
Open source lets developers like myself stand on the shoulders of giants and make a really, really excellent living.
In return, I try to contribute wherever I can. I owe the community more than I'll ever be able to give back.
Slashdot Mirror
If we as developers and contributors don't wish to withhold our work for a fee, what incentive can we offer users to care about the ecosystem?
They just want to use the stuff we've built. We have to somehow use that to bring them into the fold, develop them into supporters, awaken a sense of responsibility to the ideals that allow them to benefit from our work, groom contributors, etc.
Right now, we're offering the incentive of being able to help improve and shape our projects. Most consumers don't care. They WANT a gatekeeper to say "Here is what is new and awesome. It is what you need, and it costs $199."
We are plumbers who work for free, for reasons we can't seem to articulate effectively to the majority of the public, who don't care anyway. Our perceived value is low to them, because "really quality stuff costs money."
How do we cut the "distance" between us and the users you mention without appearing to be desperate and clingy? If developer goals are to be paramount, what happens when users want something different despite our best efforts to convince them they don't actually want that?
I'm off on a tangent or three. Sorry. I keep thinking a "serve the ideal to gain the benefit of our work" kind of thing might work. Exclusivity can be a powerful attractor to users. Unfortunately, this would seem to require a gatekeeper with sweeping powers.
Need to go off and organize my thoughts more, evidently.
Here's a thought though - is the problem really that there are gatekeepers, or that the current gatekeepers are simply *branded aggregators* at their core?
How can application developers keep aggregators from presenting their work as part of a branded, monolithic whole - without destroying the distribution network?
What I would like to do is foster a large developer community and a large user community without the gate-keepers. I think that might require less rights than you get with Open Source, specifically some terms around paid distribution and distribution as part of a support-for-pay engagement. I don't want to make either impossible, but I'd like to have a system where the goals of the developers are paramount over those of gate-keepers.
This statement really piqued my interest. Don't think I've ever agreed with "something I read on Slashdot" more wholeheartedly. Are you (or is anyone you know of) trying to work the out real-world parameters of such a system? What might it look like? How can we help?
So - Mister Shuttleworth, if you can get your sleek and graceful Ubuntu women to date some strong and burly Red hat men, you'll find this kind of tribalism slowly disappear.
See, son, when a man in a red hat loves a woman, he gives her an RPM. The RPM swims up into NEW and fertilizes a DEB. 19 months later, you entered STABLE.
What's that, son? Sure, we could have used alien. But your mom never was the adventurous type.
Ok, I do have ONE regret about my switch: a unified mailbox. There's probably one in the android market..
Try K-9 mail. It's in the Android Market, and is open source.
Bonus: it supports IMAP IDLE, so you get push email rather than having to poll all the time. And multiple identities. And folder classes. And...
I hope they hire a UI designer who isn't an Apple admirer. We need fresh ideas...
I quit coffee after a decade of drinking at least two cups a day. At least 4 days a week I would have three or more cups. I bought into the stereotypical "caffeinated coder" personality in the early days, and never lost the habit... ...until two months ago when I ditched it. A couple of weeks in, I dropped all caffeinated beverages.
Quitting was painful. Four-day headaches that never fade and don't respond to Advil. I broke once, walked down to Starbucks and ordered a coffee. One sip and the pain just vanished. I dumped the rest of the cup out on the sidewalk. The rule was "one sip of coffee is allowed if a headache lasts an hour." I only had four sips after that.
The difference is astounding. I snap asleep at night and wake up in a good mood. I've been told I smile more and am generally more pleasant to be around (your mileage may vary). Weirdly, I sweat far less at the gym. Having battled depression since my late teens, I have the odd 'down' day now, but generally I feel good about things. I don't second-guess myself at work and my confidence has soared.
Moral of story? If you're feeling shitty about life, and you're a big coffee drinker, stop drinking the stuff. Really, stop. No half measures, no "just one cup a week" attempts. There is no try, young Jedi. You'll feel much better .
Just be sure to keep going to the coffee shop or wherever you used to get your fix. Order caffeine free tea. You need to be around coffee while you quit. You'll want it less.
Also, the "caffeine" section of this is interesting.
In addition, this has turnd us from true professionals to hyper-active attention-deficit internet-addicted 'coderz', and so its no wonder management has stopped thinking of us as the boffins and started to treat us like children.
1. Hit nail on head
2. Sit back
3. ????
4. Karma!
In writing, one uses English, not law. In that case you DO use the English dictionary, which defines theft both as taking something tangible, and copying words.
I just quoted you by copying your words. Oh shit, I'm a thief now! Society would be so awesome if the dictionary was the final arbiter of meaning.
Seriously though, the original poster claimed that copying code was theft, and I provided some legal context. That's called expanding the conversation, and it adds value - something your pedantic nitpicking does not.
As the speaker was writing, it only makes sense they would use words as writers use them, and thus the usage is correct.
So what you're saying is, you think that conversations that begin with a narrow-minded and potentially untrue statement in a limited context should be constrained to that context? Kind of a polished, facile, and locked-down colloquy?
You must be a writer. Or an Apple customer.
1. Was the property provably taken without consent?
2. Was the property provably taken with the intent of depriving its rightful owner of said property?
Are you sure about the second criterion? For example, if I steal an apple from someone, the intent is not to deprive the other person of an apple, it's merely to get an apple for myself.
Intention to permanently deprive is defined at s.73(12) of the Australian Crimes Act as treating property as if it belongs to the accused, rather than the owner.
It's all definitions. Even "intent" might legally mean something other than you'd expect, depending on where you live.
There's a quick rundown on the encyclopedia in the sky if you're interested.
They took the code without Google's consent, hence they stole it.
Not quite. In most jurisdictions, the question "Is it theft?" is answered by the following tests.
1. Was the property provably taken without consent?
2. Was the property provably taken with the intent of depriving its rightful owner of said property?
If both of those tests are true, it's theft. In this case, Google still has a copy of their code, so the crime would not be considered theft in most jurisdictions.
Of course, in the USA there is no national definition of theft, since it's defined and prosecuted at the state level. Talk about confusing.
"Theft" is a concept that really varies in meaning from place to place. I guess that's why so many people jump on their high horse, wave their hands madly, and proclaim that various petty infringements are "stealing". They are probably right in the context of some banana republic somewhere.
(__)
(oo)
/ -----\/
/ | . .
* .
~~ ~~
KIOSlaves are awesome, and while there are GNOME counterparts they aren't as used.
One neat thing about GVFS, the GNOME abstraction, is that part of it wraps FUSE filesystem modules. Any application, not just GNOME applications, can use filesystems mounted with GNOME's 'connect to server' feature, for instance. I think it's more desirable to write a FUSE module than a KDE-specific KIOSlave.
GNOME sometimes comes across as a hodgepodge of bindings and semi-coherent libraries, but there has been a great deal of work to consolidate and even eliminate core libraries, tighten up coding standards, get rid of deprecated symbols in GTK+ and GLib... At least they're trying to get things right, right up and down the stack.
GNOME 3 will be a big shift. I can't say I'm crazy about the new shell, and the Task Pooper scares the shit out of me (ha ha).
They'd have to screw it up really badly to make me go back to KDE. Even then, I'd go to 3.x.
Nobody denies that Java is used everywhere; the point is that it is no longer (if it ever was) a cutting-edge language, the kind that "pierced programmers" get excited about.
*My* point was that "pierced programmers" who can't get excited about new and diverse ways of doing things (in ANY language, regardless of age) are missing out on the best part of their job.
Using the word "play" shows that you have no idea just how much real work is being done in these languages.
No it doesn't. I'm a software guy, through and through. Languages are play to me. As I alluded in my original post, I don't live in the ironic, sarcastic Hipsterverse. You have no idea what tools I've used in the course of my Real Work.
It seems I hit a nerve! Piercings are painful at first, aren't they.
After all, if the kinds of "practical" concerns you mentioned (ubiquity, performance, libraries) were the only things that mattered then we'd all still be using FORTRAN, COBOL, or C.
I don't believe I said that. Here, have a read.
I make a lot of money working with Java. I have piercings. I've been known to have hair in a primary color.
Seriously though. Android applications. Eclipse. Adsense, GMail, Wave - in fact, just about every big Google web application (yes, even the client side stuff is written in Java and translated to Javascript). Openfire XMPP. Tomcat. Geronimo. ActiveMQ. Azureus.
You can badmouth Java all you want, but performance and tooling are excellent and there seems to be an infinite supply of libraries and sample code. It runs in lots of different places. There are 100% open source implementations. You can compile it to native code. You can run it in the CLR.
I know it's trendy to play with Ruby and Python, and that's fine. I'm a big fan of Scala, which runs on the JVM. I believe Twitter's backend is at least partially built on Scala. El Reg, I know, I know.
Anyone who thinks Java is fossilizing needs to give their head a shake. It's everywhere, and it's being used in very diverse ways.
If that doesn't excite this mythical "pierced programmer", then said idiot is too busy practicing the Hipster Doctrine - studied disinterest.
By reasonable I mean the concept that if you would like to view a recent movie, it's reasonable to pay a small sum in exchange rather than freeload.
I agree that content creators who wish to charge for access to their content should be paid. Content creators have the right to decide how to sell their work.
The problem is, if you want to sell "access to content", you need to control that access. That's impossible to do by technical means as long as movies are sold in stores on physical media.
And yet, content producers keep trying to sell access to stuff that's already out there, opening the doors to ripping and file sharing. Why? Because they make a lot more money selling copies on physical media than they do on broadcast or theater runs, regardless of piracy.
Piracy and duplication go hand in hand with physical media sales. That's the reality of the business model, no matter what the law says. If the associated risk/reward ratio is unacceptable, a reasonable company should FIND A NEW BUSINESS MODEL.
There really should be a legal test that weighs realities in society against a company's business model before a case is accepted. If a case is substantially tilted towards defending a business model against societal reality, it should be thrown out.
For all the bitching and whining coming out of Hollywood about so-called "lost sales" due to piracy, they keep on rolling out the films and making truckloads of money. They aren't hurting. Their business model is working just fine.
Thus there needs to be a system by which the creators can be fairly paid for that work. We have developed such a system. It's called copyright law. It's not perfect, but it's what our society has enshrined in the law as our solution. And that system says if you want to watch the movie before its copyright expires, you have to pay the price the movie maker asks.
When "not perfect" means destroy family finances and threaten the population with obscene penalties for the minor misdemeanor of watching a 90-minute sci-fi for free, that makes copyright law unworthy of respect, thank you very much.
The more people that break the law in this case, the better. These companies can't sue everyone, and the legal system is supposed to be about balancing common rights among all parties, not bludgeoning the poor into compliance with arbitrary rules designed to make the rich richer.
For your reference, I bought the Battlestar Galactica DVD set because it was awesome, and I downloaded Stargate Universe Season 1 because I couldn't find someone to pay for it (and it's offered for free anyway on the TV network's site).
Should I now be summarily hauled into court for the Finest Verdict Money Can Buy for my non-criminal audacity? All because of this "not-perfect-but-hey-it's-the-best-we-have" copyright law?
What I don't understand is where this entitlement mentality comes from that says just because you can get a copy without paying for it, that it's OK to do.
Big entertainment gets plenty of my money every year. They've even convinced my government to tax blank media and devices containing flash memory just in case they might be used for piracy. They sue fellow citizens into oblivion for non-criminal acts.
Fuck them, and fuck the sheep that defend them on legal technicalities. "Right" and "wrong" don't have anything to do with "legality", until the day comes that we replace the "legal system" with a "justice system".
Perhaps it's not so much an "entitlement" mentality as a "we don't care that you don't like the consequences of your business model, and we don't like being bullied" mentality.
Perhaps that is more understandable for you?
Fundamentally you don't have the right to demand somebody else work for you for free. Which is what you're doing when you consume their hard work - a film - without following the (perfectly reasonable) license terms.
I don't think the word "consume" means what you've been told to think it means. I won't even touch your concept of "reasonable".
You can "consume" a burger. After that last swallow, no one else can consume it. You alone get the calories and the flab around your middle, and only you. You could consume someone else's burger when they weren't looking, and that would be theft, because then they would have to purchase another burger.
You can't "consume" a movie unless you somehow manage to steal the first master from the production floor before duplication begins, quickly film a "Will It Blend?" episode, and shovel the result into your gaping maw.
Is reading a sign on the street "consuming" the sign? Of course not. When you're done, other people can still read the sign. You have not consumed it.
How about taking a photo of the sign with your phone, then going home and reading it? Is that "consuming" the sign? No?
What if you took a photo of a sign on the street which had a footnote saying "FBI WARNING, SERIOUS CRIMINAL PENALTIES FOR PHOTOGRAPHING THIS SIGN TO READ LATER", then went home and read it? Has the sign been consumed?
Stories, ideas, music and movies are not consumables. Time to stop trying to monetize them as such. The only thing that matters is that I can get the content I want by paying for a method of delivery. Right now, my ISP connection and a torrent client seem to do it.
Single-bit errors shouldn't send the car out of control... there should be some checksum that shouldn't add up.
What if the cosmic rays corrupted the checksum routine?
The mind boggles!
Pedometers! Think of the children! Don't let these meters anywhere near our kids.
Pedobear probably used one during his Olympic appearance.
Poor Quatchi, Miga, and Sumi.
"When computers can reliably manage their own device drivers, I'll start taking future predictions about AI seriously."
I'm still waiting.
Haven't you tried Ubuntu yet?
Tee hee.
And at which point he will stiffen. Which brings us to the less known Newton's law:
"The angle of the dangle is proportional to the heat of the meat." - Newton
I'm pretty sure this law has applications in the field of quantum teledildonics.
Now to find a sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hdonor^H^H^H^H^Hhorny single with a webcam to fund a 15-minute study of the implications.
The researchers have programmed Shelley to handle like a racecar by using a set of computer calculations called algorithms
See what happens when you let Liberal Arts majors playing journalist direct the public's understanding of technical things?
Soon: "John's car rolled out of his driveway all by itself and hit a fire hydrant, honey! He should sue General Motors for faulty algorithms!"
I'm Canadian and 29 years old. I don't remember the real event, but I still tear up a bit when I see the Challenger break apart on video. Part of me hopes it won't each time, of all things.
They were carrying humanity's banner into space. They didn't make it. It's as if a top athlete were shot as they carried their nation's banner into an Olympic stadium.
That either resonates with you, or it doesn't.
Hero worship has nothing to do with it.
Parent is Informative. Mods?
This post is Insightful. Or at least Funny, in a sad, "iPad" kind of way.
I always thought I'd make a buck in this business because I consider myself a superior engineer, and I'd take that skill and use it to help a company create a product that other people don't have the skills to create. In short, I can't help but see open source as something that devalues software engineers.
You must be kidding. Are you suddenly an Inferior Superior Software Engineer if you use a tool that's freely available, or link to an open-source-licensed shared library? Most people don't have the skills to do that.
Or if there's an open-source clone of your company's software, surely there's nothing stopping your company from, er, competing with it? If your company were so threatened by that clone, surely they would want to hire and fill the pockets of many Superior Software Engineers to get them back on top?
Open source lets developers like myself stand on the shoulders of giants and make a really, really excellent living.
In return, I try to contribute wherever I can. I owe the community more than I'll ever be able to give back.
There's plenty of scientists who can discuss these topics rationally and humbly, they just make for really boring television.
The LHC webcams, on the other hand, make for really panic-inducing television.