I've been in the coding game a long time, and a lot of the new technologies in the last few years are just insanely wasteful of computer power. Computers are, of course, supposed to releive humans of drudgery, and this includes programmers just as much as the clerk/minions that are our end-users.
Nonetheless, having the computer repetitively recompute the exact same answers (parse that huge XML config file! JIT-compile that Java app, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!) is an exercise in keeping your hardware vendor happy, and a sign of laziness on the part of programmers. Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?
I thight this topic was pretty much mined out, so I don't expect the huge number of "USA, yeah! UN Sux!" posts that have characterized it in the past, but...
What's everyone say now? ICANN President Paul Twomey said the settlement shows that issues involving the domain-name system are best resolved within ICANN, rather than through an international bureaucratic body. Am I missing something? Big US corporation uses threat of long, expensive US litigation to bend ICANN to its will? ICANN claims that this proves the system works, sure -- what else could they say and maintain a shred of self-respect?
But now y'all have to chose your evil: VeriSign and litigation lawyers, or the UN? Bwahahahaha!
IN THE EVENT THAT WORLD OF WARCRAFT DETECTS AN UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM, BLIZZARD MAY (a) COMMUNICATE INFORMATION BACK TO BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION [...] DETAILS ABOUT THE UNAUTHORIZED THIRD PARTY PROGRAM DETECTED
Yeah, I'm thinking that might breach the third party program's EULA, contravene the DMCA, etcetera.
I'm for IP legal protections, but there's some big problems I see with the current regime:
Ring-fencing: This is the creation of a ring of patents around the primary thing you're trying to protect, so that even when the original patent expires, competitors won't be able to reproduce the invention without violating your other patents. Often used to protect chemical processes used to manufacture drugs.
The blindingly obvious: RIM's Blackberry troubles stem from patents on the wireless transmission of email. If you're an EE or a CS guy, you'd think "information is information, a channel is a channel, and every combination of information x channel isn't a novel idea waiting to be thought of, it's the obvious thing" but alas, the patent office doesn't see it that way.
And the worst thing is, large companies with large stables of IP become very resistant to change (or, if they want change, it's for more protections for the patent-holders and less quid-pro-quo for everyone else) and, with cash-fueled American politics, things only get worse. Witness the effectively perpetual copyrights that the Mouse buys.
A lot of Schmidt's points are lame. "Enhances the value of copyright holder's works" doesn't mean you can do what you like with it without permission.
His fair use argument will be very difficult to make indeed if he's making money off it -- and that can be interpreted VERY broadly. Is his plan pure altruism, or is he using the content as a traffic magnet, for ad sales, etcetera?
and the summary's VCR analogy? Lame. Home VCRs are personal use, which this isn't, and not for financial gain, which this is.
Schmidt is just trying to win in the court of public opinion a battle that can't be won in the courts, and hoping publishers will go along before he gets to the litigation stage.
It's hard to argue with success, but claiming Linux's business model is flawed? It isn't like Linux got to where it is today through tied selling (bundling), being subsidized by other business units, government mandates, being sold below the cost of production or anything else which might conceivably be called a flawed business model.
If this is the spread of a flawed business model with nearly no ad budget, just think how successful it could have been if it had followed the antitrust-attracting model of some well known competitors!
One thing you have to understand: Our legal system is normally an adversarial one. It isn't the judge's role to question one side's assertion, that's the other side's job. The judge is typically a neutral arbiter who doesn't ask hard questions, but relies on the self-interest of two warring parties to expose each other's weaknesses.
Wiretap orders are ex-parte. That is, only one party is present, and the judge, normally neutral, is expected to suddenly become a more active participant in the search for justice (like judges in civil/Napoleonic code type jurisdictions are), asking hard questions in place of the absent other party. Needless to say, a judge who normally acts in one paradigm (and indeed has no training in the other) isn't likely to suddenly change his stripes. Further, the police know full well which judges are likely to ask a question or two and which are likely to issue an order without question, so judge shopping inevitably occurs.
What percentage of search warrants and wiretap requests are denied? I challenge you to even find statistics about such things.
First, I've never been a fan of mySQL for the simple reason that I was a 'REAL' (ACID) database guy and felt that mySQL gave database a bad name. Nonetheless, it sure beat hell out of flat files and, just as PHP might be inferior to 'industrial' computer languages, if people (who otherwise wouldn't have gotten a database at all) used PHP+mySQL to create stuff that otherwise wouldn't have gotten built, kudos to them.
Then came the debate as to whether mySQL was pure enough in Licensing. Once again, I didn't care, but thought "how can you criticize a man for giving you something for free?"
Now comes the flap about what else this company does to pay the rent. They still allow free use of mySQL, there's still other alternatives if you don't like his terms, I'm still using more industrial/ACID solutions, and others are still throwing rocks at the mySQL people.
The undisputably weird thing is that the good folks giving away mySQL are taking more abuse from the community than if they'd never given it away at all. How's that for incentive for everyone else???
Re:Great! When will it be out of beta?
on
Email Turns 34
·
· Score: 2
Do you want to address what I said, or just rebut what you're capable of by twisting my argument?
To address what YOU said, the 'beta' label implies that it's subject to change (or disappearance entirely) more than even the low standards for permanence on the web. Do you see this as an immaterial consideration in choosing services which we will come to considerably rely upon?
Great! When will it be out of beta?
on
Email Turns 34
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Pardon me for wanting to sign up for it without being 'invited' - a great way for Google to build social web information while maintaining the illusion of a clique.
I think Google's innovations are great, but the Everything's Beta syndrome, in email, in Usenet news archiving, etcetera... It's all wearing a little thin.
Screw this. The US wants me to believe that various organizations and universities own the plans to ME? And of course, through WIPO, they'll want to enforce this insanity worldwide. Slashdot kooks may well believe that this kind of foolishness will hasten the demise of the entire intellectual property system (with massive collateral damage in virtually every industry) but I'm not going to gamble by waiting the decade it'll take, if it comes to pass at all.
TAHT'S WHY I'M PORTING MYSELF TO A SILICON BASED LIFE FORM! WHO'S WITH ME?
Not that I'd want any random joe sniffing around in MY base-pairs, but it seems to me that the biggest and most obvious use for this info is to deny health "insurance" coverage to people likely to need it.
This quite simply isn't a factor in systems where everyone is entitled to health care.
Sure, other uses will be found for genetic markers. But the one everyone's worrying about is just a natural consequence of considering healthcare to be a privilege rather than a right, coupled with insurance companies' natural tendency to acquire a pool of low-risk customers.
Peering is when you agree to send traffic destined to network X directly to network X via a direct connection between you and X. If you're using X's network to send traffic to Y, that's transit, and X will naturally expect you to pay for the privilege.
Wrong. If I own a store and put out a free park bench in front, and there's a nail sticking up, and someone sits on it, I'm liable, whether or not it was malicious, money changed hands, etcetera. Why should software be different?
2. You agreed to the license.
It is accepted in law that this is generally only a defence if you had an opportunity to negotiate the license. If it's presented as "take it or leave it" then the license doesn't really represent a negotiated meeting of the minds, and courts will often find onerous terms invalid. See "ticket cases."
3. Software is different.
Sure it is -- because we all say it is. There is nothing magic about building bridges or high speed trains or cars that doesn't apply to software. Companies could just as easily have said "Physics is hard, and non-engineers just don't get it. We shouldn't be held liable for our mistakes." In fact, they often did, but THE COURTS RULED OTHERWISE. Until software hacks get off their low horse and admit that software quality is achievable, desirable and necessary, their "what, me worry?" attitude is going to plague us all with buggy software, even though there's nothing particularly special about this field of human endeavour.
Notwithstanding that the party of the first part (the submitter), of the second part (/. editors) and of the third part (all y'all) can't read, the PLAINTIFF in this case was the RIAA, and their motion was GRANTED. Further the defendant's request to award costs against the RIAA was DENIED. Further, the RIAA can always sue the little girl, which they didn't do in the first place. All y'all can quit pickin' and grinnin' now, and go back to diddlin' yer sheep.
Not to underplay the concessions that China forces out of businesses operating there, but...
How about US corporations cooperating with CALEA (all wiretaps, all the time), broadcasters knuckling down on popular entertainment figures for fear of reprisals from the FCC, and ISPs who almost always say "we are cooperating fully with authorities," code for "we're not going to challenge the dodgy search warrant (or the fact that there's none at all), but will turn over subscriber records at the drop of a hat to avoid abusive regulators getting tough on us over other issues if we don't play ball. Other examples, anyone?
I'm an American, but I didn't design the thing, build it, or launch it. Nor did I vote for any of the people that did. The breadth of that brush you're trying to tar all Americans with might come back and hit you in the ass. Not all of us are militaristic mouthbreathers.
Well, to a first approximation, you are. After spending years trying to reconcile the fact that I've met many perfectly nice Americans versus the heavy boot that you collectively place on the neck of many other nations (and on your own downtrodden), I've given up. It's a democracy and yo're free to work hard to change it or, if you can't live with it, to leave. If you stay and don't work hard enough to change it, or are simply outnumbered by the mouthbreathers, don't bother crying me a river about how you're stereotyped.
I think this game sends a strong message that programming involves the rote application of crap syntax to simple problems. What kind of programmers are created by teaching that the "basics of programming" consists of memorizing a weird syntax created by fools who didn't see the obvious confusion between = and ==, made arbitrary distinctions between 'statements' and 'expressions' and who ended up trapping their victims in a miasma of non-transformable, non-intuitive syntax which is difficult for A COMPUTER to parse, never mind mere mortals.
Choose Lisp! You have nothing to lose but your shackles and +++ATH CENSORED
Slashdot Mirror
Nonetheless, having the computer repetitively recompute the exact same answers (parse that huge XML config file! JIT-compile that Java app, AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN!) is an exercise in keeping your hardware vendor happy, and a sign of laziness on the part of programmers. Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?
You could a) take your money elsewhere
b) keep giving them your money, and give them some publicity on /., too
With enemies like you, who needs friends?
What's everyone say now? ICANN President Paul Twomey said the settlement shows that issues involving the domain-name system are best resolved within ICANN, rather than through an international bureaucratic body. Am I missing something? Big US corporation uses threat of long, expensive US litigation to bend ICANN to its will? ICANN claims that this proves the system works, sure -- what else could they say and maintain a shred of self-respect?
But now y'all have to chose your evil: VeriSign and litigation lawyers, or the UN? Bwahahahaha!
Yeah, I'm thinking that might breach the third party program's EULA, contravene the DMCA, etcetera.
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/22/rtf_eula/print.h tml
It's sad but true, and we know it.
Ring-fencing: This is the creation of a ring of patents around the primary thing you're trying to protect, so that even when the original patent expires, competitors won't be able to reproduce the invention without violating your other patents. Often used to protect chemical processes used to manufacture drugs.
The blindingly obvious: RIM's Blackberry troubles stem from patents on the wireless transmission of email. If you're an EE or a CS guy, you'd think "information is information, a channel is a channel, and every combination of information x channel isn't a novel idea waiting to be thought of, it's the obvious thing" but alas, the patent office doesn't see it that way.
And the worst thing is, large companies with large stables of IP become very resistant to change (or, if they want change, it's for more protections for the patent-holders and less quid-pro-quo for everyone else) and, with cash-fueled American politics, things only get worse. Witness the effectively perpetual copyrights that the Mouse buys.
His fair use argument will be very difficult to make indeed if he's making money off it -- and that can be interpreted VERY broadly. Is his plan pure altruism, or is he using the content as a traffic magnet, for ad sales, etcetera?
and the summary's VCR analogy? Lame. Home VCRs are personal use, which this isn't, and not for financial gain, which this is.
Schmidt is just trying to win in the court of public opinion a battle that can't be won in the courts, and hoping publishers will go along before he gets to the litigation stage.
If this is the spread of a flawed business model with nearly no ad budget, just think how successful it could have been if it had followed the antitrust-attracting model of some well known competitors!
Want your party to be a cut above your average geek party? Get some real live girls to come. Bonus if they're geeks!
Ooh, a third thought: How about a real geek - i.e. someone who bites the heads off live chickens???
Wiretap orders are ex-parte. That is, only one party is present, and the judge, normally neutral, is expected to suddenly become a more active participant in the search for justice (like judges in civil/Napoleonic code type jurisdictions are), asking hard questions in place of the absent other party. Needless to say, a judge who normally acts in one paradigm (and indeed has no training in the other) isn't likely to suddenly change his stripes. Further, the police know full well which judges are likely to ask a question or two and which are likely to issue an order without question, so judge shopping inevitably occurs.
What percentage of search warrants and wiretap requests are denied? I challenge you to even find statistics about such things.
Parte on, dudes.
Then came the debate as to whether mySQL was pure enough in Licensing. Once again, I didn't care, but thought "how can you criticize a man for giving you something for free?"
Now comes the flap about what else this company does to pay the rent. They still allow free use of mySQL, there's still other alternatives if you don't like his terms, I'm still using more industrial/ACID solutions, and others are still throwing rocks at the mySQL people.
The undisputably weird thing is that the good folks giving away mySQL are taking more abuse from the community than if they'd never given it away at all. How's that for incentive for everyone else???
To address what YOU said, the 'beta' label implies that it's subject to change (or disappearance entirely) more than even the low standards for permanence on the web. Do you see this as an immaterial consideration in choosing services which we will come to considerably rely upon?
I think Google's innovations are great, but the Everything's Beta syndrome, in email, in Usenet news archiving, etcetera... It's all wearing a little thin.
Wikipedia says so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_problems_here
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package. YMMV
TAHT'S WHY I'M PORTING MYSELF TO A SILICON BASED LIFE FORM! WHO'S WITH ME?
YHBT, YHL, HAND
This quite simply isn't a factor in systems where everyone is entitled to health care.
Sure, other uses will be found for genetic markers. But the one everyone's worrying about is just a natural consequence of considering healthcare to be a privilege rather than a right, coupled with insurance companies' natural tendency to acquire a pool of low-risk customers.
Peering is when you agree to send traffic destined to network X directly to network X via a direct connection between you and X. If you're using X's network to send traffic to Y, that's transit, and X will naturally expect you to pay for the privilege.
Wrong. If I own a store and put out a free park bench in front, and there's a nail sticking up, and someone sits on it, I'm liable, whether or not it was malicious, money changed hands, etcetera. Why should software be different?
2. You agreed to the license.
It is accepted in law that this is generally only a defence if you had an opportunity to negotiate the license. If it's presented as "take it or leave it" then the license doesn't really represent a negotiated meeting of the minds, and courts will often find onerous terms invalid. See "ticket cases."
3. Software is different.
Sure it is -- because we all say it is. There is nothing magic about building bridges or high speed trains or cars that doesn't apply to software. Companies could just as easily have said "Physics is hard, and non-engineers just don't get it. We shouldn't be held liable for our mistakes." In fact, they often did, but THE COURTS RULED OTHERWISE. Until software hacks get off their low horse and admit that software quality is achievable, desirable and necessary, their "what, me worry?" attitude is going to plague us all with buggy software, even though there's nothing particularly special about this field of human endeavour.
Notwithstanding that the party of the first part (the submitter), of the second part (/. editors) and of the third part (all y'all) can't read, the PLAINTIFF in this case was the RIAA, and their motion was GRANTED. Further the defendant's request to award costs against the RIAA was DENIED. Further, the RIAA can always sue the little girl, which they didn't do in the first place. All y'all can quit pickin' and grinnin' now, and go back to diddlin' yer sheep.
How about US corporations cooperating with CALEA (all wiretaps, all the time), broadcasters knuckling down on popular entertainment figures for fear of reprisals from the FCC, and ISPs who almost always say "we are cooperating fully with authorities," code for "we're not going to challenge the dodgy search warrant (or the fact that there's none at all), but will turn over subscriber records at the drop of a hat to avoid abusive regulators getting tough on us over other issues if we don't play ball. Other examples, anyone?
Well, to a first approximation, you are. After spending years trying to reconcile the fact that I've met many perfectly nice Americans versus the heavy boot that you collectively place on the neck of many other nations (and on your own downtrodden), I've given up. It's a democracy and yo're free to work hard to change it or, if you can't live with it, to leave. If you stay and don't work hard enough to change it, or are simply outnumbered by the mouthbreathers, don't bother crying me a river about how you're stereotyped.
Choose Lisp! You have nothing to lose but your shackles and +++ATH CENSORED