Digital Personal Property? Why the fuck is anyone trying to apply real-world realities to something that is fundamentally different? What would be productive, and for the long-term benefit of society, would be to educate people about the differences, the reality of digital information, and the inescapable reality that duplication costs are zero.
Copyright is a social contract which has time, and time, and time again been abused and violated by large corporations and their lobbying groups. This DPP nonsense is a sop to their war on the public domain and the rights we are used to enjoying.
This proposal? Well, let's smoke some MPAA/RIAA crack and spend a fortune making computers work in a way that suits their old business models.
you'll find adverts laying out skills requirements (in terms of x years use) for new programming languages that could only be gained if you'd been one of the developers writing the damn language.
I had one company tell me that they did this on purpose, so that they could tell when people were lying to them. The liars always said they had the requirements, even though it was impossible. The good techs immediately pointed out that it was impossible to have that many years experience in C#.
And then the morons at the recruitment company exclude all but the liars from the selection process. Go figure.
When I was at school, we were taught binary arithmetic. Computers, we were told, couldn't do arithmetic in decimal numbers, only in binary, and if we ever wanted to work with computers we would have to be able to do binary arithmetic. Meantime, many of the girls in the school spent hours every week learning to use mechanical tabulator machines, because, as everyone knows, every business in the world needs an army of girls with mechanical tabulators to keep their accounts in order...
Binary is useful, because that really is how the computer does its calculations. Sure, for your convenience the machine has been set to work in base 10, but if you don't know binary you're clueless about the limitations of various types of numbers it uses and their binary representation. A classic example of this I encountered was a scientific application that had been enhanced by programmers from a financial background with a really, really strange error. Lots of different people looked at the problem, lots of them were baffled, but the damn problem wasn't going to be understood - or fixed - until you actually looked at the underlying numbers and their manipulation. Binary is useful, and is a cornerstone of computing. If you think it's useless, go back to writing tic-tac-toe programs.
Both these skills were completely obsolete before we even left school. Similarly with touch typing. Voice recognition and speech to text is now at a level where it's extremely unlikely that keyboards will be more than a vague memory for mainstream users by the time people now in school are thirty.
Bullcrap. As I commented above, you don't know enough about computers if you think knowledge of binary is useless. Touch-typing? Well, it *is* useful, and nobody in their right mind wants an office full of people trying to use speech recognition software.
For heaven's sake don't waste people's time in school teaching them to use ephemeral, obsolescent technologies. Teach them to use their brains, and teach them fundamental principles. Teach them to learn. Workplace skills can be taught in the workplace, and will in any case change far too rapidly for schools to keep pace.
The technology is not obsolete, as I and others have explained. As to "skills to be taught in the workplace"? Get real! Most companies do not want to spend any money on training people to do anything. Just trawl the IT jobs market for proof of this, you'll find adverts laying out skills requirements (in terms of x years use) for new programming languages that could only be gained if you'd been one of the developers writing the damn language.
No, you don't know much about video codecs - or the browser wars.
The huge headache everyone wants to avoid is content providers having to code around, and store duplicate copies of video, to cater to all the browsers.
This is before you get into all the bullshit about codecs that are really rootkits and the like. You do not want your browser saying, "I cannot cope with the computationally intensive task to render this video without 'magic software' from goatse.cx".
Nineteenth century capitalism collapses when everything you make can be copied and shared at will. Government funding all research isn't such a bad idea, comparing to the pharma monopolies we have now.
In a lot of cases it isn't pharma monopolies doing the research. Taxpayers fund a lot then a patent gets applied for and the pharma company monetises all that government research.
Yes, that patent will be the use of drug foo in the treatment of condition bar.
Thats because western media are showing a very biased story of the Iran issues. Were the western reporters and observers able to see any solid evidence of rigging the election ? I doubt. The reason Nejad won the election with such a huge margin is because of his popularity among rural mass. The so called "reformist's" influence is confined to Tehran and surrounding areas only.
Catch up to today's events. The Guardian Council has had to admit that in 50 cities there were more votes cast than people eligible to vote. Other sources say the figure may be as high as 120 cities and 110% of the total electorate.
All to elect a puppet. Yes, a puppet. The power remains with the clerics, they decide who are acceptable candidates after making it quite clear what boundaries are acceptable for those seeking the position.
Sadly, we've come to accept most modern corporations as pretty much ammoral when it comes to stuff like this, and they're rarely ever held accountable in any meaningful way. The bulk of the population will no more hold this against Nokia/Seimens than they will hold Volkswagon responsible for its early Nazi roots (does it invoke Godwin's Law to mention that?), Yahoo/Google responsible for selling out dissidents in China, etc., etc.
Yes, look at the whole concept of "corporate personhood" and how it works out.
Look at this as an example, the oil industry in Nigeria, or the Military-Industrial complex. Corporate personhood is a collective psychopath.
It is unfortunate, but Nokia and Siemens selling to Iran isn't up the sharp end of misdemeanours. If I had to think of one example, I'd say "Union Carbide". After their disaster in India I believe corporate personhood should allow for corporate execution. In reality you can't even hold company officers personally liable for enough responsibility to jail them.
I've developed mainframe software in COBOL. It isn't difficult, but you've obviously no clue as to what is involved.
Are your enthusiastic students going to read all the legislation that impacts this new system? Are they going to document all the contractual obligations that do not fit into a cookie-cutter formula? Are they going to write functional specifications from poorly-documented parts of the old system?
No, a few law students aren't going to cut it
Besides, you don't want CS students. You want competent software engineers.
What I do not get, is why the public are paying for an extra home in the first place. Even more so for buyng a second home vs renting one.
I have heard about this case, only from our local reporters (a live in Denmark, Scandinavia) and they talked of different remedies proposed. And all I could here, was more and more bureaucracy.
Here's a simple solution: don't pay for a second home at all. If politicians need somewhere to stay during work-related trips, put them up in a damn hotel for the duration. Alternatively, for places where large numbers of politicians frequently gather (ie: parliament) take out some long-term leases on nearby serviced apartments.
I cannot even begin to comprehend the thinking behind the idea that taxpayers should be funding anyone's second home. I find it incomprehensible that everyone is arguing about the semantics of first vs second home, without even taking a second to think about the fundamental principle.
I believe the Queen has an appropriate second home for UK MPs. It's called The Tower of London.
The joys of X86 assembler? You're kidding, right? Nothing wrong with assembler where it is appropriate -- say in programming a coffee pot, paperweight, or washing machine. But the X86 instruction set is the most abominable, chaotic, shambles ever conceived by the mind of man.
I so agree with this. Old assembly languages like Z80 or VAX make sense to programmers. X86 was a partial birth abortion that was put on life support.
At this time, it is low. OTH, if the current vaccine does not work against it, then we are likely to see that trend change. And most likely this week.
Vaccine? I get flu shots, they are a cocktail of bits to stimulate your immune system to resist the predicted common viruses of the year. This? It's new. Not covered.
True, the combination of Netflix, Netflix, and online news can replace films, scripted TV series, and news on cable TV. But what replaces live sports on cable TV?
The satisfaction of not seeing a bunch of jocks demonstrating why the college dean fiddled the entrance criteria to get them on the team.
I would agree, if general-purpose captcha-beating software were available. But that isn't so. Each captcha system was beaten by custom code, individually written for that system. So in effect, it is not much different than adding a new font to existing OCR software.
Most of them don't actually beat the captcha with a program. This is how it gets done.
Without much more than a speculative sentence in the summary, what is slashdot going to talk about? We're not going to RTFA no matter how hard you try!!
*WE SHALL WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED!!*
You quit that reverse-psychology crap right now! I will not read the article!
What's ironic, is this getting posted just after the story on the first RFC turning 40.
What's "brassy" is the balls of the legal wingnuts at Apple fucking about with the advance of open standards.
W3C should not be having to waste people's time picking through this patent and designing around it. The idea might have been mildly innovative in 1998, but now it's sorta "well-duh!" and I am sure has been implemented in a number of independent cases where there was no reliance on Apple's patent.
P.S. Apple - your Windows software update tool sucks donkey balls. Even after I thought I'd got rid of it there is still something that periodically bugs me to update QuickTime.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital Personal Property? Why the fuck is anyone trying to apply real-world realities to something that is fundamentally different? What would be productive, and for the long-term benefit of society, would be to educate people about the differences, the reality of digital information, and the inescapable reality that duplication costs are zero.
Copyright is a social contract which has time, and time, and time again been abused and violated by large corporations and their lobbying groups. This DPP nonsense is a sop to their war on the public domain and the rights we are used to enjoying.
This proposal? Well, let's smoke some MPAA/RIAA crack and spend a fortune making computers work in a way that suits their old business models.
I had one company tell me that they did this on purpose, so that they could tell when people were lying to them. The liars always said they had the requirements, even though it was impossible. The good techs immediately pointed out that it was impossible to have that many years experience in C#.
And then the morons at the recruitment company exclude all but the liars from the selection process. Go figure.
When I was at school, we were taught binary arithmetic. Computers, we were told, couldn't do arithmetic in decimal numbers, only in binary, and if we ever wanted to work with computers we would have to be able to do binary arithmetic. Meantime, many of the girls in the school spent hours every week learning to use mechanical tabulator machines, because, as everyone knows, every business in the world needs an army of girls with mechanical tabulators to keep their accounts in order...
Binary is useful, because that really is how the computer does its calculations. Sure, for your convenience the machine has been set to work in base 10, but if you don't know binary you're clueless about the limitations of various types of numbers it uses and their binary representation. A classic example of this I encountered was a scientific application that had been enhanced by programmers from a financial background with a really, really strange error. Lots of different people looked at the problem, lots of them were baffled, but the damn problem wasn't going to be understood - or fixed - until you actually looked at the underlying numbers and their manipulation. Binary is useful, and is a cornerstone of computing. If you think it's useless, go back to writing tic-tac-toe programs.
Both these skills were completely obsolete before we even left school. Similarly with touch typing. Voice recognition and speech to text is now at a level where it's extremely unlikely that keyboards will be more than a vague memory for mainstream users by the time people now in school are thirty.
Bullcrap. As I commented above, you don't know enough about computers if you think knowledge of binary is useless. Touch-typing? Well, it *is* useful, and nobody in their right mind wants an office full of people trying to use speech recognition software.
For heaven's sake don't waste people's time in school teaching them to use ephemeral, obsolescent technologies. Teach them to use their brains, and teach them fundamental principles. Teach them to learn. Workplace skills can be taught in the workplace, and will in any case change far too rapidly for schools to keep pace.
The technology is not obsolete, as I and others have explained. As to "skills to be taught in the workplace"? Get real! Most companies do not want to spend any money on training people to do anything. Just trawl the IT jobs market for proof of this, you'll find adverts laying out skills requirements (in terms of x years use) for new programming languages that could only be gained if you'd been one of the developers writing the damn language.
Quite.
I seem to remember some floating-point error with Pentium processors.
I suppose the healthcare equivalent would be the 'wonder drug' Thalidomide.
Good password policy...
Strong, not written down, regularly changed
Pick Two.
No, you don't know much about video codecs - or the browser wars.
The huge headache everyone wants to avoid is content providers having to code around, and store duplicate copies of video, to cater to all the browsers.
This is before you get into all the bullshit about codecs that are really rootkits and the like. You do not want your browser saying, "I cannot cope with the computationally intensive task to render this video without 'magic software' from goatse.cx".
Fuck. Right. Off.
I can be polite and professional without smiling.
Nineteenth century capitalism collapses when everything you make can be copied and shared at will. Government funding all research isn't such a bad idea, comparing to the pharma monopolies we have now.
In a lot of cases it isn't pharma monopolies doing the research. Taxpayers fund a lot then a patent gets applied for and the pharma company monetises all that government research.
Yes, that patent will be the use of drug foo in the treatment of condition bar.
Thats because western media are showing a very biased story of the Iran issues. Were the western reporters and observers able to see any solid evidence of rigging the election ? I doubt. The reason Nejad won the election with such a huge margin is because of his popularity among rural mass. The so called "reformist's" influence is confined to Tehran and surrounding areas only.
Catch up to today's events. The Guardian Council has had to admit that in 50 cities there were more votes cast than people eligible to vote. Other sources say the figure may be as high as 120 cities and 110% of the total electorate.
All to elect a puppet. Yes, a puppet. The power remains with the clerics, they decide who are acceptable candidates after making it quite clear what boundaries are acceptable for those seeking the position.
Sadly, we've come to accept most modern corporations as pretty much ammoral when it comes to stuff like this, and they're rarely ever held accountable in any meaningful way. The bulk of the population will no more hold this against Nokia/Seimens than they will hold Volkswagon responsible for its early Nazi roots (does it invoke Godwin's Law to mention that?), Yahoo/Google responsible for selling out dissidents in China, etc., etc.
Yes, look at the whole concept of "corporate personhood" and how it works out.
Look at this as an example, the oil industry in Nigeria, or the Military-Industrial complex. Corporate personhood is a collective psychopath .
It is unfortunate, but Nokia and Siemens selling to Iran isn't up the sharp end of misdemeanours. If I had to think of one example, I'd say "Union Carbide". After their disaster in India I believe corporate personhood should allow for corporate execution. In reality you can't even hold company officers personally liable for enough responsibility to jail them.
I've developed mainframe software in COBOL. It isn't difficult, but you've obviously no clue as to what is involved.
Are your enthusiastic students going to read all the legislation that impacts this new system? Are they going to document all the contractual obligations that do not fit into a cookie-cutter formula? Are they going to write functional specifications from poorly-documented parts of the old system?
No, a few law students aren't going to cut it
Besides, you don't want CS students. You want competent software engineers.
What I do not get, is why the public are paying for an extra home in the first place. Even more so for buyng a second home vs renting one.
I have heard about this case, only from our local reporters (a live in Denmark, Scandinavia) and they talked of different remedies proposed. And all I could here, was more and more bureaucracy.
Here's a simple solution: don't pay for a second home at all. If politicians need somewhere to stay during work-related trips, put them up in a damn hotel for the duration. Alternatively, for places where large numbers of politicians frequently gather (ie: parliament) take out some long-term leases on nearby serviced apartments.
I cannot even begin to comprehend the thinking behind the idea that taxpayers should be funding anyone's second home. I find it incomprehensible that everyone is arguing about the semantics of first vs second home, without even taking a second to think about the fundamental principle.
I believe the Queen has an appropriate second home for UK MPs. It's called The Tower of London.
The joys of X86 assembler? You're kidding, right? Nothing wrong with assembler where it is appropriate -- say in programming a coffee pot, paperweight, or washing machine. But the X86 instruction set is the most abominable, chaotic, shambles ever conceived by the mind of man.
I so agree with this. Old assembly languages like Z80 or VAX make sense to programmers. X86 was a partial birth abortion that was put on life support.
At this time, it is low. OTH, if the current vaccine does not work against it, then we are likely to see that trend change. And most likely this week.
Vaccine? I get flu shots, they are a cocktail of bits to stimulate your immune system to resist the predicted common viruses of the year. This? It's new. Not covered.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
-- George Orwell, Animal Farm.
Indeed. Many of us will be dead before the works our parents enjoyed during our conception enter the public domain.
Fixed that for you.
True, the combination of Netflix, Netflix, and online news can replace films, scripted TV series, and news on cable TV. But what replaces live sports on cable TV?
The satisfaction of not seeing a bunch of jocks demonstrating why the college dean fiddled the entrance criteria to get them on the team.
It *does* show the spammers that the account is active and you're looking at the email...
Which is why I check the opt-out URL for an ID - strip it - then tell them, "please don't send anymore email to uce@ftc.gov".
I would agree, if general-purpose captcha-beating software were available. But that isn't so. Each captcha system was beaten by custom code, individually written for that system. So in effect, it is not much different than adding a new font to existing OCR software.
Most of them don't actually beat the captcha with a program. This is how it gets done.
Well?
What, exactly, is "a bottom-up Linux install"?
Forgive me for thinking it sounds like giving a piece of hardware an enema.
Without much more than a speculative sentence in the summary, what is slashdot going to talk about? We're not going to RTFA no matter how hard you try!! *WE SHALL WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED!!*
You quit that reverse-psychology crap right now! I will not read the article!
Try poking about on getafreelancer.com
Lots of peanuts pay jobs for Captcha 'data entry'.
...until you have read The Outsider.
This is just scientists trying to figure out how to get to the land of Oz.
What's ironic, is this getting posted just after the story on the first RFC turning 40.
What's "brassy" is the balls of the legal wingnuts at Apple fucking about with the advance of open standards.
W3C should not be having to waste people's time picking through this patent and designing around it. The idea might have been mildly innovative in 1998, but now it's sorta "well-duh!" and I am sure has been implemented in a number of independent cases where there was no reliance on Apple's patent.
P.S. Apple - your Windows software update tool sucks donkey balls. Even after I thought I'd got rid of it there is still something that periodically bugs me to update QuickTime.