Facebook's main staying power is that two apps handle everything. Groups, messaging, calendaring, blogs, file downloads, movies, pictures, and many other items.
I disagree. Facebook's main staying power is that it's where the people are. Most people that I know who use Facebook are using it for three purposes. They're posting and reading posts, like twitter except the audience is your friends and not a bunch of strangers. They're using messenger as an alternative for SMS, since they don't necessarily have the cell phone numbers for all of their Facebook friends. And then some people are using Facebook to promote their work, art, band, or whatever.
For all of these things, having the right people in your network is the whole value of it. Having yet another microblogging platform is easy, but it's hard to get your friends and family to use it. Having an messenger app is easy, but getting random acquaintances to sign onto it isn't going to be easy. If you're trying to promote something, then you have to go where your audience is, or else you have to promote an alternate platform first before you can promote yourself.
I know Facebook can be used for all kinds of other things, but I'm not aware of anyone I know really using it for anything else. For example, you mention calendaring. I don't really know anyone who tries to use Facebook to keep track of their calendar. To send and receive invites, sure, but that can be done through any messaging platform. But I don't know anyone who says, "I need to check what I'm doing next week. I'll look at Facebook to find out."
Anyway, back to my larger point, the main feature of Facebook isn't any of the features. The main feature is the audience. I don't think the solution is to get everyone to move to a particular new platform, but to devise a way where people on different platforms can connect to their whole audience. The real problem that nobody is trying to fix is, why can't I use my Twitter account to subscribe to Facebook feeds? Why can't I use my Hangouts account to message Facebook users? Why isn't there interoperability between platforms?
We don't require that you have a Gmail account to send emails to Gmail users. We don't require that your site be hosted on DreamHost to link to sites listed on DreamHost. We developed a set of standards that lets each service communicate with different hosts managed by different people, using a set of open protocols. That's how the Internet works. The whole Internet was built on the idea that people were going to do that, to use standard protocols allowing different hosts to communicate with each other.
The problem is, we don't demand that anymore. We don't even ask for it or expect it. Facebook makes its microblogging platform and its messaging platform, and lock it down to require a Facebook account, and Google makes their competing service, and they can't talk to each other, and nobody even thinks that's strange. The answer isn't a new proprietary platform, but a new set of protocols that can be used by all the platforms.
Well it's not quite that simple. Whether it's because of explicit terms of service or it's users making assumptions, people had some expectations of how the data that they'd given to Facebook would be shared. Cambridge Analytica "got dinged" because they mislead people by claiming they were performing academic research and because they violated Facebook's terms of service.
Also because their behavior was unethical and disturbing in any case. It doesn't help that they'd been approached by Putin's stooges to influence American elections, and then went to work on the Trump campaign, thereby creating yet another suspicious tie between Trump and Putin.
I think you're misunderstanding what an "argument from authority" is, and why its' considered bad. The real problem is that the support or agreement of an authority figure is used in place of a logical argument.
So let's say that I are arguing, and you're saying that we should do [X] and I'm saying we should do [Y]. We're both presenting an argument, and I say, "Well Joe thinks I'm right, and Joe's very smart. Therefore, I must be right." That would be an improper argument from authority. However, the recognition of that as a logical fallacy doesn't mean it's unreasonable to recognize authority, or to consider the reputation of information when assessing an argument. When considering a simple statement of fact, there's often not any kind of logical argument to be had.
Consider the question, "Was Joe at the store yesterday afternoon?" How are you going to argue that logically? Let's assume Joe isn't wearing a tracking device, and there aren't cameras or any other particular hard evidence to consult. It's not as though you're going to find an argument relying totally on a priori principles to prove whether he went to the store or not. You're going to consult a bunch of evidence. Does Joe say he went to the store? Does anyone else claim to have seen him at the store? Does he have any photographs or physical evidence of being at the store yesterday?
But people can lie, and evidence can be fakes. Different accounts may seem to contradict each other. You're forced to assess the trustworthiness of the witnesses and evidence. Maybe Joe says he didn't go to the store, but Bob says he saw Joe there. You know Joe is a compulsive liar, and that Bob has a reputation for being honest to a fault. In this case, it's not unreasonable to place higher confidence in Bob's statements. In fact, it is unreasonable to say, "We have to treat both of their stories as equally reputable because trusting Bob would be an argument from authority."
That's not to say that Bob couldn't be lying or mistaken. It's just to say that, when relying on information from a third party, it makes sense to evaluate their authority and reputation. When there's nothing to judge their statements by except their authority and reputation, then having an accurate assessment of their authority and character is extremely important.
And as much as I love to be logical about things, for much of the information we get, we're relying on some authority. Even when someone publishes the result of a scientific experiment that could be repeated, they generally aren't repeated. In many cases, you or I wouldn't have the resources to repeat them. If someone at CERN reports the results from an experiment with a particle accelerator, I pretty much need to trust them (at least to some extent), or I need to give up on the possibility of knowing anything about that realm of science. I'm not going to be able to build my own particle accelerator and repeat their experiment. And maybe someone else has those resources and repeats the experiment, then I'd just be trusting their authority as well.
From CERN experiments to whether your friend went to the store yesterday, most of your knowledge comes from the reports of others, and not from your own empirical observation. And even when you have your own observations, you yourself are not above deceiving yourself or making mistakes.
The package manager should be under the admins conyrol. That might sometimes be the user, but not always.
Yeah, my point wasn't that Microsoft should enable any user to control the package manager no matter what. Security is important, which means that an administrator should be able to set restrictions for a user.
Absent a separate administrator, the users should be able to control their own systems. There should be sensible defaults, and I'm fine with making user's jump through a few hoops in order to do something stupid, but the user should have control. Microsoft shouldn't be in the position of blocking technically competent users from operating their computer they way they want.
Yes, when there's some other administrator, the administrator should be able to set the rules. The administrator should have control over allowing or disallowing users from doing what they want. In that case, Microsoft shouldn't be in the position to blocking competent administrators from controlling the update schedule or controlling which apps are installed.
First, WSUS is designed for working in a corporate network, not for managing thousands of computers spread across hundreds of completely disconnected networks. Second, apparently Microsoft has a "feature" in Windows 10 where, if you don't approve the updates fast enough, it'll bypass the WSUS server and install updates anyway.
In any case, why is Microsoft spending its resources making Windows harder to manage, instead of making it easier to manage?
If you're talking to people in LA and London from New York, and you say '2pm' without specifying a time zone, then you have the exact same problem.
No, you have the partially-same problem. You need to still figure out what time zone they're talking about, and then do the math to line up the times, but the math is extremely easy. Doing continuum of time zones based on longitude means you have to know someone's precise location instead of approximate location, and then do a calculation that's going to be more complex than adding or subtracting a set number of hours.
That doesn't even address the problem of travel. If I set my watch to a precise time, and then start traveling east or west, my watch will quickly become wrong. Instead of waiting until you cross into a new time zone and then setting your watch backwards or forwards by an hour, you'll have to adjust it by a few seconds or minutes because you've travelled a relatively small number of miles.
Yeah, I've been using Macs for a while, but I also use Windows and Linux for various things. I've been slowly weening myself off of Windows because Microsoft has been losing its mind. They force updates, and you can't even set a schedule for when they install. They try to force you to use Cortana, and they put ads in the Start Menu.
Personally, I think all operating systems should come with a package manager that operates under the user's control. I don't mind Microsoft setting some adaptive schedule that forces updates as their "default setting", but the process should be customizable if you're technical enough. Make it so you have to change some obscure registry setting. That's fine. But make that customization possible.
If Microsoft is going to continue down this path of taking control away from both the users and the system administrators, I'm going to work on moving myself and everyone I know away from using Windows.
Unfortunately, that's not super-easy to do on a large scale. If you're managing thousands of computers, for example, it'd be cumbersome to coordinate the process of starting Windows Update, installing all the updates, rebooting, and then disabling the service again. Don't forget that you'll also want to monitor the whole process and ensure that it's working for every machine.
There are third-party tools to install Windows updates, but they generally still use the Windows Update service to figure out which updates to install. If you disable Windows Update, the 3rd party tool stops working. It might be nice if the makers of those third-party tools could only enable the Windows Update service when it comes time to install updates, but I'm sure that's easier said than done.
we have continual time adjustments based on one's coordinates?
There's a simple problem with that: Coordinating activities between distant locations.
Let's say I work in Chicago, and I want to schedule a conference call with people in New York, Los Angeles, and London. I say, "Let's have the call at 2pm." Ok, so what time 2pm Chicago time in these other locations? Instead of just knowing a small number of time zones, you have to know the longitude of each location and then do math to figure out what the time difference is. Also, the time differences aren't likely to be nice even numbers. Instead of just knowing that one location is 2 hours different than another, you might have to remember that it's 1 hour, 37 minutes, and 23 seconds different.
That's all kind of arbitrary. People might say, "Why not just change the clocks so 9am is earlier so we get more daylight?" and you can say, "Why not just go to work earlier regardless of what the clock says?" In any case, the issue is cultural conventions. Convincing everyone to start their work 6am to 2pm isn't any easier than convincing everyone to change the time to 3 hours earlier.
They also open sourced powershell and released it for Linux/Mac.
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft's priorities have changed. It used to be that they were all about selling licenses to Office and Windows, and they'd leverage their other products to push you to buy those two products. Now their focus is on selling hardware and subscription services. The importance of Windows is more of a way of providing easy access to their services, and even pushing people toward their services. For example, when you install Windows 10, you now get OneDrive built in and difficult to remove, along with advertising in the Start Menu for Office 365 and for purchasing software in their app store.
But if you don't want to use Windows, they seem to be taking the attitude of "Whatever, we don't care. Just as long as you buy an Office 365 subscription!"
If running WSL is good enough for most, will there be as much impetus to resolve these issues?
People not wanting to deal with Windows. It costs money, requires that you give up control, has privacy issues, etc. People aren't going to buy and run Windows just so they can run Linux.
How do you extinguish something that is free, open, and worked on by thousands of volunteers?
Also, in terms of the "extend" step, their extensions also have to be released under the GPL. So they can embrace and extend, but then we can all use their extensions. I don't see room for extinguishing.
Yeah, and I don't think it's just that the new features for new smartphones aren't very useful. I think there's a danger that they make the phones worse. Extra features tend to take storage space, RAM, and processing power. They clutter the interface, and pop up at inopportune moments. They make the experience of using it more confusing and frustrating.
The same thing has been going on with laptops and desktops. They've reached a point where, for the things that people use computers, tablets, and smartphones for, there haven't been significant improvements in several years. So instead they try to make you use things like Siri and Cortana, and they try to leverage the OS into making you use their online services. Why can't the OS just be the OS, and let you install the apps and add-ons that you want.
Maybe there's some disagreement about this among users. For example, maybe there are people who are genuinely happy that Cortana is so prominent in Windows 10 now. However, I think it's largely that vendors have run out of useful ideas, and they're just cramming random gimmicks into their products and hoping something will stick.
If you don't know how to secure your system from malware or how to take proper backups, that's you're fault. WORM media can be a part of a proper backup scheme, but you're foolish if you trust that archival WORM media will necessarily hold up. I've seen DVDs that were supposed to last 1,000 become completely unreadable after 3 years because... oops, there's was a manufacturing defect and the media wasn't as "archival" as advertised.
Twitter isn't liable if a user posts protected material and other people view it; Twitter still doesn't have "a wide license to distribute that material", they just aren't liable for damages.
Well no, you're mixing up two things. What you're talking about protects Twitter from liability for copyright violation in cases where a Twitter user posts something that violates copyright. If a user uploads pirated material, for example, Twitter is not liable as long as they take the content down when notified of the violation. That's one thing.
Then, on a separate subject, there's the question of why Twitter isn't liable for copyright violations when a copyright holder tweets his own material. The answer is, Twitter's terms of service provides a wide license for Twitter to redistribute that content.
That is also different from the case in this article, though, where web sites are purposefully using a photograph that they don't have a license to use.
No, they're purposefully embedding a tweet that they have no reason to believe is a copyright violation. Whoever posted to Twitter gave Twitter a license to distribute the photo, including allowing Twitter to allow others to distribute the photo. Twitter gives license to others to embed tweets, under certain conditions (e.g. tweets can't be modified). So here's a general question: Given that the poster licenses Twitter's distribution, and Twitter licenses the tweet's embedding, what is the responsibility of the person embedding a tweet to ensure that the tweet is not a copyright violation?
I agree that we've hit the point where, for most people most of the time, a phone from 3 years ago serves just as well as the brand new model. And here's the thing about that: I wish vendors would let that be.
Because what tends to happen is they stop making meaningful and useful improvements, and instead focus on cramming in useless "improvements" that make the whole thing harder to deal with. Windows 7 was good enough, and so we got Windows 8 that ruined the UI, followed by Windows 10 which keeps cramming more and more advertising into vital functions while stripping away useful controls. Every version of Windows moves has new "features" and moves around the controls, but none of them actually improve it. Meanwhile, Apple has started forcing Siri into everything and putting that touch bar at the top of the keyboard, which are also pretty useless.
Screw the gimmicks. If you can come up with a real improvement that makes things easier and more effective, great. Otherwise, just focus on refinements. Make it a little faster. Make the battery last longer. Start looking at the problems that users actually have, the annoyances and pesky bugs, and work on fixing those.
There's nothing wrong with reaching the point where the innovation has dried up. Accept it, and make continual incremental improvements and refinements.
Words are only protected by copyright when they are put in a fixed, tangible medium.
Speeches are often written down first, and news agencies can still quote them. They can also quote books and other "fixed, tangible media".
If it's a small percentage of the work shown for the purpose of criticism or analysis, then yes, there would be a fair use exemption.
That's not exactly true. I'm not a lawyer, but this is my understanding:
Fair Use doesn't necessarily require that it's used for "criticism or analysis". There are a bunch of different purposes that can justify a fair use exemption, one of them being the news. Also, it's not exactly true that the reproduction must only be a small percentage of the work. The reproduction should not include more of the original work than is necessary for the Fair Use purpose. There are some legal rule-of-thumb guidelines, e.g. a video should be limited to [x] seconds, but there's not a hard limit to the percentage of the work that can be shown.
And there are other rules and guidelines that determine whether or not something is fair use or not. It's just not as simple as you're painting it to be.
On a practical level, it can't work that way. If Twitter is responsible for verifying that the photos in tweets aren't violating copyright, then Twitter can't allow people to post photos. In addition, you could use that logic to argue that Google is responsible for making sure that they don't index or cache any copyrighted data, and ISPs might be responsible for making sure that they don't allow copyrighted information to pass over their network.
My understanding of how it works is that each of these companies are excluded from responsibility for verifying such things because they're basically open platforms. The nature of the services they provide are that that they don't post data themselves, but they allow users to post/transmit data in a relatively unfiltered way. They can still have terms of service that bar certain kinds of behavior or data, but they're not exercising a fine-grained control over what's posted.
By being that kind of service, they're essentially allowed to disavow responsibility for the content of their site. A copyright holder can notify Twitter or Google that there's infringing material on their site, and request that it be taken down. Twitter and Google are then legally required to comply with the request, but assuming they comply, they're not liable for the violation.
I only skimmed the decision, but I didn't actually see where the judge made that distinction.
I don't think the issue is that the embedded tweet is appearing as an image, and someone is claiming that reproducing the exact image of the tweet's text is a copyright violation. Rather, newspapers are being sued because they embedded a tweet that includes a photo, and the copyright owner of that photo is claiming infringement.
So then I was making the point that, although words can be copyrighted, if I say, "Tom Brady looks stupid," and a newspaper quotes me as saying that, I can't sue them for copyright infringement. They're just quoting me to report what I said, and I think that's clear enough. But in the world of Twitter, I might tweet, "Look at how stupid Tom Brady looks!" and the tweet might then include a photo. It's still a statement that news agencies should be able to quote, but meanwhile the photo that I've included is part of the content of that statement. Therefore, if the newspaper doesn't include the photo, then they are, in a sense, misquoting me. They're taking the words out of context. The photo is part of the quote.
So I'm not really making a legal argument here, but I'm appealing to how we should reasonably expect things to work. If a photo can be part of a quote, and newspapers should be allowed to quote someone without a copyright license, then they should be able to reprint a "quoted" photo.
But I also recognize that it's a potentially complicated issue and there's room for abuse on both sides.
Is this guy a paid shill or just a moron? To paraphrase:
Hello fellow Mac users! I too use a Mac, just like you. Twitter is pulling support for their app, and though that may upset you, Twitter says that using the website is better. And boy are they right! The web experience is great on any platform! You should be using it right now, instead of that stupid app.
I know, some other Mac users are going to say that they like native apps, but they're wrong. They don't like native apps. If you really want native apps, you can buy one of these native apps! But please don't like native apps. The correct way to use Twitter is through the website. And that's great, because you can get a better Twitter experience on a cheap Chromebook instead of an expensive stupid Mac. I mean... I like Macs, just like you, fellow Mac user.
Words are also protected by copyright. However, you can still quote people. Movies are protected by copyright, but the news can still show clips.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, posting material on Twitter already gives Twitter a wide license to distribute that material. However, all of that aside, if Twitter is selling itself as a public forum and source of news, and it's encouraging news organizations to embed and report on their tweets, then I don't think you can blame news organizations for reporting, "Here's a tweet" and showing the full content of that tweet. If there's a violator, it's Twitter for distributing that content.
Copyright is all about controling others ability to reproduce the data, and the owner of the copyright putting some data into a public forum like Twitter or whatever does not change that right.
Posting your content to Twitter actually does change that. It has to. If you don't give a social media company some rights to reproduce your work, then they simply can't host it. All of their data is reproduced, cached, and distributed constantly, so you need to grant some kind of license for them to do that.
More specifically, from Twitter's terms of service:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.
So that's still a bit vague. You can look at phrases like, "subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use", which would lead you to review all of their rules about "Content use". You could argue about how enforceable it is. But the general idea is pretty clear: By using Twitter, you're granting Twitter a license to reproduce and distribute your content, to to make it available to other companies for broadcast.
I didn't see a discussion of the Twitter terms of service in the judgement (admittedly I skimmed most of it), which I'm a bit surprised by. I don't know if there's a legal precedent that says that they're not enforceable, or if it was already determined that because the original copyright holder didn't post it to Twitter, he didn't agree to those terms. In either case, it seems to me that the people responsible for the violation are the poster, and arguably Twitter.
Honestly, basically... yes. I think if the New York Times tweets something, then as a public statement, it should be able to be "quoted" as an issue of fair use-- especially for the purpose of reporting news. It's like if I go out into a public forum and make a statement, and then the news reports exactly what I said, word for word, I shouldn't be allowed to sue them for copyright violation.
Now it's not as simple as all that. There can be and should be limits. A public figure shouldn't be able to sue a news agency for copyright violation for accurately reporting what they say. However, if you write a play and have a public performance, I think it's fair to say that it's a copyright violation to reproduce the entire play, publishing the entire script or performing the play in full. However, I don't think it's a copyright violation to quote a line from the play. It's not a copyright violation for the news to show a picture of the play, or to report what happens in a scene of the play.
And that's where this gets a bit dicey: Can a picture be part of a quote? If a newspaper can quote a public statement, and I make a public statement with a photo attached as an integral part of that statement, can the picture be "quoted" under fair use? I would say yes, that makes sense to me. I don't know if there's a particular law or precedent that addresses it specifically, but given the multimedia nature of modern computing, I would think a news organization should be able to report a "quote" that includes an image or even a video clip, under fair use.
So under that logic, a newspaper shouldn't be able to simply take a staff photographer's image from a NYT twitter post, and post it as their own on the front page. However, they should be able to write a story that includes that tweet, reporting "The New York Times tweeted this picture."
And I think it gets even harder to argue it's inappropriate when it's an embedded tweet. If the New York Times knowingly posts a picture onto a platform that allows an encourages people to embed content in other sites, then they should expect that it will be embedded. Twitter's Terms of Service includes this:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.
Given all of this, I don't think news agencies should be held responsible for embedding an entire tweet, reporting "someone has tweeted this." If the someone else posted your copyrighted content on Twitter, then the person who posted it should be responsible for copyright violation. Or perhaps you could argue that Twitter is responsible because they have inadequate copyright protections.
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Facebook's main staying power is that two apps handle everything. Groups, messaging, calendaring, blogs, file downloads, movies, pictures, and many other items.
I disagree. Facebook's main staying power is that it's where the people are. Most people that I know who use Facebook are using it for three purposes. They're posting and reading posts, like twitter except the audience is your friends and not a bunch of strangers. They're using messenger as an alternative for SMS, since they don't necessarily have the cell phone numbers for all of their Facebook friends. And then some people are using Facebook to promote their work, art, band, or whatever.
For all of these things, having the right people in your network is the whole value of it. Having yet another microblogging platform is easy, but it's hard to get your friends and family to use it. Having an messenger app is easy, but getting random acquaintances to sign onto it isn't going to be easy. If you're trying to promote something, then you have to go where your audience is, or else you have to promote an alternate platform first before you can promote yourself.
I know Facebook can be used for all kinds of other things, but I'm not aware of anyone I know really using it for anything else. For example, you mention calendaring. I don't really know anyone who tries to use Facebook to keep track of their calendar. To send and receive invites, sure, but that can be done through any messaging platform. But I don't know anyone who says, "I need to check what I'm doing next week. I'll look at Facebook to find out."
Anyway, back to my larger point, the main feature of Facebook isn't any of the features. The main feature is the audience. I don't think the solution is to get everyone to move to a particular new platform, but to devise a way where people on different platforms can connect to their whole audience. The real problem that nobody is trying to fix is, why can't I use my Twitter account to subscribe to Facebook feeds? Why can't I use my Hangouts account to message Facebook users? Why isn't there interoperability between platforms?
We don't require that you have a Gmail account to send emails to Gmail users. We don't require that your site be hosted on DreamHost to link to sites listed on DreamHost. We developed a set of standards that lets each service communicate with different hosts managed by different people, using a set of open protocols. That's how the Internet works. The whole Internet was built on the idea that people were going to do that, to use standard protocols allowing different hosts to communicate with each other.
The problem is, we don't demand that anymore. We don't even ask for it or expect it. Facebook makes its microblogging platform and its messaging platform, and lock it down to require a Facebook account, and Google makes their competing service, and they can't talk to each other, and nobody even thinks that's strange. The answer isn't a new proprietary platform, but a new set of protocols that can be used by all the platforms.
Well it's not quite that simple. Whether it's because of explicit terms of service or it's users making assumptions, people had some expectations of how the data that they'd given to Facebook would be shared. Cambridge Analytica "got dinged" because they mislead people by claiming they were performing academic research and because they violated Facebook's terms of service.
Also because their behavior was unethical and disturbing in any case. It doesn't help that they'd been approached by Putin's stooges to influence American elections, and then went to work on the Trump campaign, thereby creating yet another suspicious tie between Trump and Putin.
I think you're misunderstanding what an "argument from authority" is, and why its' considered bad. The real problem is that the support or agreement of an authority figure is used in place of a logical argument.
So let's say that I are arguing, and you're saying that we should do [X] and I'm saying we should do [Y]. We're both presenting an argument, and I say, "Well Joe thinks I'm right, and Joe's very smart. Therefore, I must be right." That would be an improper argument from authority. However, the recognition of that as a logical fallacy doesn't mean it's unreasonable to recognize authority, or to consider the reputation of information when assessing an argument. When considering a simple statement of fact, there's often not any kind of logical argument to be had.
Consider the question, "Was Joe at the store yesterday afternoon?" How are you going to argue that logically? Let's assume Joe isn't wearing a tracking device, and there aren't cameras or any other particular hard evidence to consult. It's not as though you're going to find an argument relying totally on a priori principles to prove whether he went to the store or not. You're going to consult a bunch of evidence. Does Joe say he went to the store? Does anyone else claim to have seen him at the store? Does he have any photographs or physical evidence of being at the store yesterday?
But people can lie, and evidence can be fakes. Different accounts may seem to contradict each other. You're forced to assess the trustworthiness of the witnesses and evidence. Maybe Joe says he didn't go to the store, but Bob says he saw Joe there. You know Joe is a compulsive liar, and that Bob has a reputation for being honest to a fault. In this case, it's not unreasonable to place higher confidence in Bob's statements. In fact, it is unreasonable to say, "We have to treat both of their stories as equally reputable because trusting Bob would be an argument from authority."
That's not to say that Bob couldn't be lying or mistaken. It's just to say that, when relying on information from a third party, it makes sense to evaluate their authority and reputation. When there's nothing to judge their statements by except their authority and reputation, then having an accurate assessment of their authority and character is extremely important.
And as much as I love to be logical about things, for much of the information we get, we're relying on some authority. Even when someone publishes the result of a scientific experiment that could be repeated, they generally aren't repeated. In many cases, you or I wouldn't have the resources to repeat them. If someone at CERN reports the results from an experiment with a particle accelerator, I pretty much need to trust them (at least to some extent), or I need to give up on the possibility of knowing anything about that realm of science. I'm not going to be able to build my own particle accelerator and repeat their experiment. And maybe someone else has those resources and repeats the experiment, then I'd just be trusting their authority as well.
From CERN experiments to whether your friend went to the store yesterday, most of your knowledge comes from the reports of others, and not from your own empirical observation. And even when you have your own observations, you yourself are not above deceiving yourself or making mistakes.
The package manager should be under the admins conyrol. That might sometimes be the user, but not always.
Yeah, my point wasn't that Microsoft should enable any user to control the package manager no matter what. Security is important, which means that an administrator should be able to set restrictions for a user.
Absent a separate administrator, the users should be able to control their own systems. There should be sensible defaults, and I'm fine with making user's jump through a few hoops in order to do something stupid, but the user should have control. Microsoft shouldn't be in the position of blocking technically competent users from operating their computer they way they want.
Yes, when there's some other administrator, the administrator should be able to set the rules. The administrator should have control over allowing or disallowing users from doing what they want. In that case, Microsoft shouldn't be in the position to blocking competent administrators from controlling the update schedule or controlling which apps are installed.
First, WSUS is designed for working in a corporate network, not for managing thousands of computers spread across hundreds of completely disconnected networks. Second, apparently Microsoft has a "feature" in Windows 10 where, if you don't approve the updates fast enough, it'll bypass the WSUS server and install updates anyway.
In any case, why is Microsoft spending its resources making Windows harder to manage, instead of making it easier to manage?
If you're talking to people in LA and London from New York, and you say '2pm' without specifying a time zone, then you have the exact same problem.
No, you have the partially-same problem. You need to still figure out what time zone they're talking about, and then do the math to line up the times, but the math is extremely easy. Doing continuum of time zones based on longitude means you have to know someone's precise location instead of approximate location, and then do a calculation that's going to be more complex than adding or subtracting a set number of hours.
That doesn't even address the problem of travel. If I set my watch to a precise time, and then start traveling east or west, my watch will quickly become wrong. Instead of waiting until you cross into a new time zone and then setting your watch backwards or forwards by an hour, you'll have to adjust it by a few seconds or minutes because you've travelled a relatively small number of miles.
Yeah, I've been using Macs for a while, but I also use Windows and Linux for various things. I've been slowly weening myself off of Windows because Microsoft has been losing its mind. They force updates, and you can't even set a schedule for when they install. They try to force you to use Cortana, and they put ads in the Start Menu.
Personally, I think all operating systems should come with a package manager that operates under the user's control. I don't mind Microsoft setting some adaptive schedule that forces updates as their "default setting", but the process should be customizable if you're technical enough. Make it so you have to change some obscure registry setting. That's fine. But make that customization possible.
If Microsoft is going to continue down this path of taking control away from both the users and the system administrators, I'm going to work on moving myself and everyone I know away from using Windows.
Unfortunately, that's not super-easy to do on a large scale. If you're managing thousands of computers, for example, it'd be cumbersome to coordinate the process of starting Windows Update, installing all the updates, rebooting, and then disabling the service again. Don't forget that you'll also want to monitor the whole process and ensure that it's working for every machine.
There are third-party tools to install Windows updates, but they generally still use the Windows Update service to figure out which updates to install. If you disable Windows Update, the 3rd party tool stops working. It might be nice if the makers of those third-party tools could only enable the Windows Update service when it comes time to install updates, but I'm sure that's easier said than done.
we have continual time adjustments based on one's coordinates?
There's a simple problem with that: Coordinating activities between distant locations.
Let's say I work in Chicago, and I want to schedule a conference call with people in New York, Los Angeles, and London. I say, "Let's have the call at 2pm." Ok, so what time 2pm Chicago time in these other locations? Instead of just knowing a small number of time zones, you have to know the longitude of each location and then do math to figure out what the time difference is. Also, the time differences aren't likely to be nice even numbers. Instead of just knowing that one location is 2 hours different than another, you might have to remember that it's 1 hour, 37 minutes, and 23 seconds different.
That's all kind of arbitrary. People might say, "Why not just change the clocks so 9am is earlier so we get more daylight?" and you can say, "Why not just go to work earlier regardless of what the clock says?" In any case, the issue is cultural conventions. Convincing everyone to start their work 6am to 2pm isn't any easier than convincing everyone to change the time to 3 hours earlier.
They also open sourced powershell and released it for Linux/Mac.
I think it's pretty clear that Microsoft's priorities have changed. It used to be that they were all about selling licenses to Office and Windows, and they'd leverage their other products to push you to buy those two products. Now their focus is on selling hardware and subscription services. The importance of Windows is more of a way of providing easy access to their services, and even pushing people toward their services. For example, when you install Windows 10, you now get OneDrive built in and difficult to remove, along with advertising in the Start Menu for Office 365 and for purchasing software in their app store.
But if you don't want to use Windows, they seem to be taking the attitude of "Whatever, we don't care. Just as long as you buy an Office 365 subscription!"
If running WSL is good enough for most, will there be as much impetus to resolve these issues?
People not wanting to deal with Windows. It costs money, requires that you give up control, has privacy issues, etc. People aren't going to buy and run Windows just so they can run Linux.
How do you extinguish something that is free, open, and worked on by thousands of volunteers?
Also, in terms of the "extend" step, their extensions also have to be released under the GPL. So they can embrace and extend, but then we can all use their extensions. I don't see room for extinguishing.
Yeah, and I don't think it's just that the new features for new smartphones aren't very useful. I think there's a danger that they make the phones worse. Extra features tend to take storage space, RAM, and processing power. They clutter the interface, and pop up at inopportune moments. They make the experience of using it more confusing and frustrating.
The same thing has been going on with laptops and desktops. They've reached a point where, for the things that people use computers, tablets, and smartphones for, there haven't been significant improvements in several years. So instead they try to make you use things like Siri and Cortana, and they try to leverage the OS into making you use their online services. Why can't the OS just be the OS, and let you install the apps and add-ons that you want.
Maybe there's some disagreement about this among users. For example, maybe there are people who are genuinely happy that Cortana is so prominent in Windows 10 now. However, I think it's largely that vendors have run out of useful ideas, and they're just cramming random gimmicks into their products and hoping something will stick.
If you don't know how to secure your system from malware or how to take proper backups, that's you're fault. WORM media can be a part of a proper backup scheme, but you're foolish if you trust that archival WORM media will necessarily hold up. I've seen DVDs that were supposed to last 1,000 become completely unreadable after 3 years because... oops, there's was a manufacturing defect and the media wasn't as "archival" as advertised.
You're safer storing them as ISO files and backing them up than actually writing DVDs.
Twitter isn't liable if a user posts protected material and other people view it; Twitter still doesn't have "a wide license to distribute that material", they just aren't liable for damages.
Well no, you're mixing up two things. What you're talking about protects Twitter from liability for copyright violation in cases where a Twitter user posts something that violates copyright. If a user uploads pirated material, for example, Twitter is not liable as long as they take the content down when notified of the violation. That's one thing.
Then, on a separate subject, there's the question of why Twitter isn't liable for copyright violations when a copyright holder tweets his own material. The answer is, Twitter's terms of service provides a wide license for Twitter to redistribute that content.
That is also different from the case in this article, though, where web sites are purposefully using a photograph that they don't have a license to use.
No, they're purposefully embedding a tweet that they have no reason to believe is a copyright violation. Whoever posted to Twitter gave Twitter a license to distribute the photo, including allowing Twitter to allow others to distribute the photo. Twitter gives license to others to embed tweets, under certain conditions (e.g. tweets can't be modified). So here's a general question: Given that the poster licenses Twitter's distribution, and Twitter licenses the tweet's embedding, what is the responsibility of the person embedding a tweet to ensure that the tweet is not a copyright violation?
I agree that we've hit the point where, for most people most of the time, a phone from 3 years ago serves just as well as the brand new model. And here's the thing about that: I wish vendors would let that be.
Because what tends to happen is they stop making meaningful and useful improvements, and instead focus on cramming in useless "improvements" that make the whole thing harder to deal with. Windows 7 was good enough, and so we got Windows 8 that ruined the UI, followed by Windows 10 which keeps cramming more and more advertising into vital functions while stripping away useful controls. Every version of Windows moves has new "features" and moves around the controls, but none of them actually improve it. Meanwhile, Apple has started forcing Siri into everything and putting that touch bar at the top of the keyboard, which are also pretty useless.
Screw the gimmicks. If you can come up with a real improvement that makes things easier and more effective, great. Otherwise, just focus on refinements. Make it a little faster. Make the battery last longer. Start looking at the problems that users actually have, the annoyances and pesky bugs, and work on fixing those.
There's nothing wrong with reaching the point where the innovation has dried up. Accept it, and make continual incremental improvements and refinements.
Words are only protected by copyright when they are put in a fixed, tangible medium.
Speeches are often written down first, and news agencies can still quote them. They can also quote books and other "fixed, tangible media".
If it's a small percentage of the work shown for the purpose of criticism or analysis, then yes, there would be a fair use exemption.
That's not exactly true. I'm not a lawyer, but this is my understanding:
Fair Use doesn't necessarily require that it's used for "criticism or analysis". There are a bunch of different purposes that can justify a fair use exemption, one of them being the news. Also, it's not exactly true that the reproduction must only be a small percentage of the work. The reproduction should not include more of the original work than is necessary for the Fair Use purpose. There are some legal rule-of-thumb guidelines, e.g. a video should be limited to [x] seconds, but there's not a hard limit to the percentage of the work that can be shown.
And there are other rules and guidelines that determine whether or not something is fair use or not. It's just not as simple as you're painting it to be.
On a practical level, it can't work that way. If Twitter is responsible for verifying that the photos in tweets aren't violating copyright, then Twitter can't allow people to post photos. In addition, you could use that logic to argue that Google is responsible for making sure that they don't index or cache any copyrighted data, and ISPs might be responsible for making sure that they don't allow copyrighted information to pass over their network.
My understanding of how it works is that each of these companies are excluded from responsibility for verifying such things because they're basically open platforms. The nature of the services they provide are that that they don't post data themselves, but they allow users to post/transmit data in a relatively unfiltered way. They can still have terms of service that bar certain kinds of behavior or data, but they're not exercising a fine-grained control over what's posted.
By being that kind of service, they're essentially allowed to disavow responsibility for the content of their site. A copyright holder can notify Twitter or Google that there's infringing material on their site, and request that it be taken down. Twitter and Google are then legally required to comply with the request, but assuming they comply, they're not liable for the violation.
I only skimmed the decision, but I didn't actually see where the judge made that distinction.
I don't think the issue is that the embedded tweet is appearing as an image, and someone is claiming that reproducing the exact image of the tweet's text is a copyright violation. Rather, newspapers are being sued because they embedded a tweet that includes a photo, and the copyright owner of that photo is claiming infringement.
So then I was making the point that, although words can be copyrighted, if I say, "Tom Brady looks stupid," and a newspaper quotes me as saying that, I can't sue them for copyright infringement. They're just quoting me to report what I said, and I think that's clear enough. But in the world of Twitter, I might tweet, "Look at how stupid Tom Brady looks!" and the tweet might then include a photo. It's still a statement that news agencies should be able to quote, but meanwhile the photo that I've included is part of the content of that statement. Therefore, if the newspaper doesn't include the photo, then they are, in a sense, misquoting me. They're taking the words out of context. The photo is part of the quote.
So I'm not really making a legal argument here, but I'm appealing to how we should reasonably expect things to work. If a photo can be part of a quote, and newspapers should be allowed to quote someone without a copyright license, then they should be able to reprint a "quoted" photo.
But I also recognize that it's a potentially complicated issue and there's room for abuse on both sides.
Is this guy a paid shill or just a moron? To paraphrase:
Hello fellow Mac users! I too use a Mac, just like you. Twitter is pulling support for their app, and though that may upset you, Twitter says that using the website is better. And boy are they right! The web experience is great on any platform! You should be using it right now, instead of that stupid app.
I know, some other Mac users are going to say that they like native apps, but they're wrong. They don't like native apps. If you really want native apps, you can buy one of these native apps! But please don't like native apps. The correct way to use Twitter is through the website. And that's great, because you can get a better Twitter experience on a cheap Chromebook instead of an expensive stupid Mac. I mean... I like Macs, just like you, fellow Mac user.
Tell me your thoughts in the comments below!
Words are also protected by copyright. However, you can still quote people. Movies are protected by copyright, but the news can still show clips.
As I've pointed out elsewhere, posting material on Twitter already gives Twitter a wide license to distribute that material. However, all of that aside, if Twitter is selling itself as a public forum and source of news, and it's encouraging news organizations to embed and report on their tweets, then I don't think you can blame news organizations for reporting, "Here's a tweet" and showing the full content of that tweet. If there's a violator, it's Twitter for distributing that content.
Copyright is all about controling others ability to reproduce the data, and the owner of the copyright putting some data into a public forum like Twitter or whatever does not change that right.
Posting your content to Twitter actually does change that. It has to. If you don't give a social media company some rights to reproduce your work, then they simply can't host it. All of their data is reproduced, cached, and distributed constantly, so you need to grant some kind of license for them to do that.
More specifically, from Twitter's terms of service:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use. Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.
So that's still a bit vague. You can look at phrases like, "subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use", which would lead you to review all of their rules about "Content use". You could argue about how enforceable it is. But the general idea is pretty clear: By using Twitter, you're granting Twitter a license to reproduce and distribute your content, to to make it available to other companies for broadcast.
I didn't see a discussion of the Twitter terms of service in the judgement (admittedly I skimmed most of it), which I'm a bit surprised by. I don't know if there's a legal precedent that says that they're not enforceable, or if it was already determined that because the original copyright holder didn't post it to Twitter, he didn't agree to those terms. In either case, it seems to me that the people responsible for the violation are the poster, and arguably Twitter.
Honestly, basically... yes. I think if the New York Times tweets something, then as a public statement, it should be able to be "quoted" as an issue of fair use-- especially for the purpose of reporting news. It's like if I go out into a public forum and make a statement, and then the news reports exactly what I said, word for word, I shouldn't be allowed to sue them for copyright violation.
Now it's not as simple as all that. There can be and should be limits. A public figure shouldn't be able to sue a news agency for copyright violation for accurately reporting what they say. However, if you write a play and have a public performance, I think it's fair to say that it's a copyright violation to reproduce the entire play, publishing the entire script or performing the play in full. However, I don't think it's a copyright violation to quote a line from the play. It's not a copyright violation for the news to show a picture of the play, or to report what happens in a scene of the play.
And that's where this gets a bit dicey: Can a picture be part of a quote? If a newspaper can quote a public statement, and I make a public statement with a photo attached as an integral part of that statement, can the picture be "quoted" under fair use? I would say yes, that makes sense to me. I don't know if there's a particular law or precedent that addresses it specifically, but given the multimedia nature of modern computing, I would think a news organization should be able to report a "quote" that includes an image or even a video clip, under fair use.
So under that logic, a newspaper shouldn't be able to simply take a staff photographer's image from a NYT twitter post, and post it as their own on the front page. However, they should be able to write a story that includes that tweet, reporting "The New York Times tweeted this picture."
And I think it gets even harder to argue it's inappropriate when it's an embedded tweet. If the New York Times knowingly posts a picture onto a platform that allows an encourages people to embed content in other sites, then they should expect that it will be embedded. Twitter's Terms of Service includes this:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed). This license authorizes us to make your Content available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.
Given all of this, I don't think news agencies should be held responsible for embedding an entire tweet, reporting "someone has tweeted this." If the someone else posted your copyrighted content on Twitter, then the person who posted it should be responsible for copyright violation. Or perhaps you could argue that Twitter is responsible because they have inadequate copyright protections.