It might make more sense to you if you find yourself troubleshooting a failure from a cell phone. Using vi via issh on an iPhone sucks, but is possible. Launching some crappy Java applet isn't. The rule of thumb that makes the most sense to me is that the GUI should be a tool for issuing command line statements. If you can't do it on the command line, you can't do it.
Sometimes people get shot while fleeing - but the impulse to shoot takes 2-3 seconds to enable, and once it has begun, the officer will probably end up shooting, even if the perp has turned to flee in the time that the decision was made to shoot.
I think what you may be missing is that the desired outcome is not some sort of rules of engagement under which we accept, or not, the deaths of people that shouldn't have been killed. The goal is to minimize the number of times the cops entrusted (and paid by) regular people get shot, tortured and killed by the cops.
There is a place for considering justification, considering reaction speed, etc. and that is a court (even if courts really suck at a lot this; this is how we do it, and that's even less mutable than other things).
But true friends of cops should be considering how to make unjustified actions taken by cops happen less often. This includes training (for all sorts of things, including teaching people away from the panic effect you refer to if at all possible), policy (knowing when not to pull the fucking gun, not encouraging the use of tasers as a substitute for keeping one's temper, knowing when not to pursue, many others), leadership changes (at least in some cities, get away from promotion by statistics, as just one of many problems), tactical changes (there's a lot of evidence that beat cops that know their territory have much more positive effects on crime than rovers that swoop in), intelligence changes (you're sick of parentheticals, and so am I), and so on.
But really, the low-hanging fruit are the cops that shake people down, work with dealers to entrap, eat steroids and freak out under stress, have personality problems that make them react poorly, and so on. And there are a lot of those that lead to marginal cases that never see the light of day because of slack in the judicial system. I'm not even talking about "shortcuts to get a bad, bad man", I'm talking illegal behavior on the part of cops that is routinely excused. There is a lot of it that doesn't rise above the baseline noise.
We should not tolerate it. I don't care if it is the blue line, or stickers on the car that lead to warnings, or a judge ignoring excessive force, or worse.
You are missing my point. The overarching suggestion was, "show some interest in something", not "iPhone developers make a lot of money right now."
I happen to be a developer making decent money right now doing iPhone dev, but that's because I was interested in where the ball was bouncing to, not where it is right now.
I do suggest that bottom-feeders look at Objective-C, or Andoid-Java. It won't be a bad place to feed a family and get on with whatever it is that programmers that just work a day job care about. The interesting difference is that if what you care about is tech, you would have already known that and picked up the API, because the implications of, say, the eventual marginalization of the mouse, or location, or the actual personalization of computing, or the kitchenization via the iPad, or... is interesting. Some of it, three years ago. We're now starting to see what that all means, because this has been interesting to some people.
So yeah, if you want to pee in a cup and write mobile HR applications, by all means, look at where the ball is. Enjoy the condo association meetings.
I am being sarcastic, but there's really nothing wrong with that. I'm living in a condo right now.
If you like web dev, don't look at a language, look at a path. If you want to stay relevant in the front-end coding, Javascript, getting good with HTML5, and one or more of the various things that feeds both (Python, Ruby) is good. Do it via learning some widely used package of functionality. Write something missing, and release it (Django tagging system, with a Canvas tag cloud?) Having released code makes you much more employable. On the back end, well, Python or Ruby + knowing the oddities of one of the NoSQL tools is nice. (And by "knowing", I don't mean read the O'Reilly book, I mean put them under pressure and see how they fail.)
If you want to become a better programmer, learn Lisp. Really, no shit. It changes how you look at things.
If you want to become a better programmer, but don't want to invest in Lisp, pick pick up a functional language, like Haskell or ML. But do Lisp first.
If you hate the idea of either of the above, get better with your current language of choice. Write an ORM, or a templating language. Nobody will care, but you'll learn why everyone hates but still uses the ones we have.
Learn Objective C, or the Android API, and write something for a phone. We're just past the "here's my todo list, here's my Tetris clone" phase, and it is new territory, and one of the few genuinely interesting things to come about since the mid-90s. If you show some initiative, you can land a safe spot doing this. By about '15, I expect most folks to have a smart phone and be sorted as to expectations, so that's about three years to get good at things and maybe do something interesting to set yourself apart, at the most.
If all you care about is shooting for the center of mass, learn either Microsoft or get good with PLSQL + the weird crap Oracle makes you do to bundle Java up for database deployment. I don't know what Microsofties do, but if you get good with server-side Oracle code, know your shit with performance issues, memorize various oerr codes, and can parrot back whatever whitepapers Oracle released recently about X And The Enterprise (you know, Private Enterprise Cloud Computing, or whatever), you're very employable. Bonus if you've lived a clean enough life to get a security clearance. Check your ego with the receptionist and pee in this cup, please.
Understanding that the entire toolchain and widespread adoption is the most important part of getting it. We all (at least, if we were there for it) know how Java happened - the short version is that Sun positioned it as an alternative to the MS Borganism that many companies were rightly afraid of back then.
I still think Java pretty much sucks. But it has the tools, and perhaps more importantly, a huge number of able bodied code monkeys who can write it.
Enter Oracle. The entire strategy that they've pursued forever is not much different than what Microsoft tried - build or buy essential parts of the stack, and then march up and down it to dominate your category, then extract as much rent as possible. It works better in the enterprise space and is bloodier because there are fewer players. (Microsoft's ecology was too varied with too many players to really dominate like Oracle can.)
So, Oracle's strategy is obvious. They own Java, and thus indirectly can manipulate the terms of output of thousands of developers. They don't care about people liking them, and inertia means they can extract rent for a long time (Even if a second Sun/Java moment happened - say, Parrot v. Java, ramp-up for Parrot to fill the niches, get solid, debugged libraries for everything, get widely deployed, and get thousands of developers up to speed takes how long?)
They don't give a shit about Apache, or developer goodwill. The for-profit players like IBM have different strategies, but keep in mind that their goals are profit maximization, too.
So there are some potentially interesting strategic plays to be made between the various players, but anyone with a bit of experience with the business side of the industry has seen this show before.
In related news, I believe that people don't like shell scripts for what amounts to aesthetics. If you think a custom-rolled 30K-line C app built by some in house programmer is somhow inherently more robust than what an experienced unix geek throws together, please explain which is more likely to change in the next apt-get:
glibc
libmysqlclient.so.*
Some fucking thing in that import com.sun.jndi.* statement
The commandline params on split
The original article by this Dziuba guy is typical of new geeks that suddenly discover the wisdom of Unix design - he knows he's clever, and thinks he's now way more clever because he noticed that pipelines make sense. In ten more years, he might learn to be a bit more humble. Old bearded unix geeks who seem really smug to new hotshot coders who are going to change the world are smug for a reason.
You are correct about federal law. State copyright law is a very different kettle of snapping turtles with regards to audio copyrights. Due to weirdness in the way federal copyright law is constructed, audio recordings made before 1972 are not covered, and so federal copyright law does not preempt state law, and so audio works made prior to then are covered by state common law copyright. In most states, this affords protection until 2049. Some states passed anti-copying and other laws, making it a huge minefield to figure out what the exact legal status is.
There's an excellent paper explaining this available, if you want the details.
You do realize that there's no exploitable pattern in a proper OTP, yes?
This means that for a sufficiently long OTP encrypted text, both your comment and my comment look like "valid" decryptions. As are bomb making instructions, the menu for Obama's dinner last night, whatever your password to/. is, and the combination to your bank's vault.
iTunes is a decent operating system, but it really needs a good MP3 player.
Seriously, I love OSX and use two macs, I'm relatively happy with my iPhone (I like it, modulo ATT, and even that has gotten better), but iTunes is a bucket of spit.
I get the strategy. It just sucks for my usage model.
Things I think are crappy:
Phone/pod sync should be transparent when plugged in, without launching iTunes. If installing apps/upgrading IOS/whatever absolutely has to be in iTunes, then only require me to futz with it when I'm installing an app or upgrading. There's no sane reason to make me launch a media player to back up my phone.
A small, lightweight player for music, along the lines of the old Winamp, is the right UI for music. Perhaps the full UI for ripping/geeking out on adding composer information/rating songs/whatever makes sense, but a simple, unobtrusive controller for music, ideally one with just keyboard controls as an option, would be ideal. The "mini-controller" isn't bad, but loading all of iTunes to get it is annoying.
I get that pushing the store is important to Apple. Although I've never bought music from it, I have bought phone apps. All fine. But the hooks creeping in throughout the app are becoming annoying.
I refuse to use Facebook, and Ping is even less useful to me. Maybe it is an age thing, but I really couldn't care less about what music people I know are buying, and find the idea of sharing that info creepy and invasive. Not for me. It is typical of the creeping intrusiveness that the "hide" buttons to collapse left-hand categories work for the silly "genius" function and playlists, but not for the store and Ping - gotta keep that in your face.
One Thing that would make it nicer, and aren't just fixing crappy bloat, would include more flexible volume spanning for libraries. I have a lot of music - it took a long time, but I've ripped my entire collection, which I've accumulated over ~20 years. I don't want or ever need 260G of music on my laptop. I keep a large amount of it on a network drive and put up with iTunes freaking out when it discovers a track is on a drive that isn't connected, but the whole thing is annoying, and keeping it working it needlessly tedious, especially for an Apple product.
Sorry for the rant - this isn't so much a reply to you anymore - I started this out just to get the refurbished emacs quip out, and it turned into this. I just find it remarkable that Apple has created such a monstrosity that it central to their ongoing strategy. They've created real duds before, but iTunes is... just a mess. They usually eventually get it right, but I'm wondering on this one. I think His Steveness actually likes how fucked up iTunes is.
Also, from the summary:"it's against the law to sell a product that's marked with an expired patent number."
Do I smell legislatively forced obsolescence? Does this mean I can't sell old tools in a garage sale, without the mentioned patent trolls coming after me?
Tis why you don't make business decisions on a comment on a summary of a summary.
To answer your question: no. This is similar to legislative bounties on other business practices that the state doesn't like, such as the ADA. I'm not going to get in to whether or not it is a good idea, but the notion that grandma selling dead gramp's tools is going to be hauled up on patent charges at her garage sale is silly. This is about claiming false "ownership" of IP.
There may be good policy reasons why we don't want to put a bounty on people who falsely claim to be in possession of state-sponsored idea rights. But it is important to cast what is going on here correctly: it is about (mostly, as in any IP, this is complex) about companies falsely claiming to own IP that they don't.
Some complaints in the original article ring true - manufacturing from an old mold, simple forgetfulness, etc.
Well, those arguments don't work well for most categories of business (try the "I forgot" argument in your next contract dispute). I don't see why there should be a difference for people claiming government protection on objects they sell.
Some of the hinted arguments I've seen (to be fair, not so much in that article) are even more bullshit - this should be allowed because they were true at one time, so we should be able to keep claiming it.
Bite me. Insofar as using a state-imprimatur for a monopoly on something should be allowed at all, it has to be honest. Even hippies should like this - state ain't gettin' no (or at least suboptimal) rent.
Libertarians should be much more up in arms. I guess anarcho-capitalists should applaud the chumming of the waters.
Anyone who live in the present world, however, should think this a good thing. It is pretty narrow: don't claim you have a government monopoly that you don't, and we're enabling bounty hunters to fuck you up if you do. Real producers with a problem on their etching molds will fix it; those that are exploiting it won't.
And for anyone who wants to claim "ZOMB, this will raise costs!", get back to me when you've come up with accounting that internalizes the overall cost of patents, before you start worrying about the costs of correcting lies about patents.
Have you ever been? It is the population density of a city, modulo the multistory units (except for the nuts who do build those). I don't know what the plan this year is (I'm missing it this year, sniff), but last year, the camp radius was 2100 feet, putting the vast bulk of those 50K people in a 1-mile diameter area. Not many people camp in "deep playa" (the burner term for the area outside of the radial roads but inside the trash perimeter).
Back on topic, there's been signal there for at least the last three years, but it became useless once the gates opened and the hordes descended. My take is that cell service during the main event is going to be a net negative, but it is inevitable. It will become something akin to the ongoing war on glow sticks - a bunch of us will mercilessly mock glow-stuck cellphone users and try to shame them into putting the fucking things down and be present, and it mostly won't work.
Those of us who do LNT (Leave No Trace, the massive cleanup effort post event) will get to ground score cellphones, though. People lose everything else.
The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Try this:
"The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a proprietary license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights."
In other words, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that intellectual property rights in general are not bought and sold and pass through tons of hands. Witness the entire orphan-work problem. Liberal licenses like CC make it easier to manage these problems, because the entire issue of ownership from the point of the CC license is very straightforward. (It is likely easier backwards as well, because, contrary to the fever dreams of grabby middlemen, there are not, in fact, hordes of eyepatched 14 year olds slapping CC licenses on Elvis mp3.)
Also, I don't know how this works in the Czech Republic, but in the U.S. the government's cost is court time. In civil suits, the litigating parties pays for their own discovery (subject, of course, to outcomes and sometimes other rules). I don't see how the state's costs go up because a license is CC.
Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.
The main reason isn't technical. Mindshare matters. Programmers are as fashion-conscious as any group of teens, and, for various good and not-so-good reasons, are far more herd-like. Sad to say, I think if they changed the name it would have a better chance of getting a chance. As is, people are playing with a new batch of languages, young programmers will mostly only run into Perl when they brush against system administration or legacy systems, and the name typically elicits a (frequently uninformed) "Yuck!" from a lot of people.
All of which I find sad - I love Perl. I still write most of my personal stuff in it, because it scales so insanely well from one-liners to complex apps. And it was a great, if only partial, counterpoint to the bondage-and-discipline bullshit Java got way too many people used to. But so i goes.
And you could do to learn how to behave like a grownup. I'm not going to dickwave about it, but have written rather a lot of code against the relevant specs; if you're working in this space, you're probably using some of my code.
I think we're suffering from a difference of semantics. I wouldn't call PDF Postscript. Because it isn't. Once upon a time, one could be forgiven for confusing the two, and there were even PoC valid-PDF documents that you could pipe to a printer, but they're quite divergent how. Similarly, I don't think that, because they share imperatives, calling Canvas the same as SVG is right, because they are different things and will become more different over time.
I think the answer is, you don't, without a schema that tells you what to expect, at least if you want to do it right.
More generally, you can guess how people embed it, and probably even be right a lot. But considering what a clusterfuck "XML" and things-that-look-like-XML-but-aren't, and things-that-don't-even-come-close-except-for-containing->-and-<, I'd hate to try for any general purpose use that anyone cared about.
I think life would be better for everyone if they stopped thinking about XML as something like a format, and instead looked at is more as a convention. Sometimes, life is good and SAX can parse it. Other times, some ca. 1998 system is emitting something that the marketing literature buried in a filing cabinet somewhere called something that ended in 'ML', and it doesn't have '|' or '::' in it.
SVG is one displayable object type within a canvas.
SVG is something that I wish had taken off, but I think it is doomed. It is a wonderful format - I've written a few SVG generators for various purposes, and it is clean, easy and beautiful. I think it was missing a champion - Adobe dabbled with it, but it seems like it was a hedged bet for them - they always prefer things over which they have more control, which I guess should be expected behavior by now.
Or maybe the problem is that it is too general-purpose, so support has been diffuse, with no clear niche to really win in.
Or both. But this has happened before - a great technology that through historic accident and/or failing to have a compelling story to carry it doesn't quite get the combination of attention and demand that drives adoption. It is too bad - the combination of SVG and JS are really quite elegant for a broad class of neato things. (Which might be the problem- it see like the rule is when given the option, always use elegant for yourself, but bet against it. Enjoy the sushi, but put your money in fast food.)
I get the complaint. And I do realize that hypochondriacs and their less obsessive "I feel bad, give me a pill" types eat an unfortunate amount of medical resources. But there is a pathological strain (excuse me) of thought in the medical community that holds that patients should stay completely medically ignorant, else they complicate the healing process. Some take this way too far (I'm sure many folks here have had an experience with a doctor that should really have become a vet), and turn it in to a weird combination of guild behavior information hoarding and personal ego trip. That really needs to be stamped out.
Again, I'm not an anarchist on these things, but denying people the ability to investigate their own bodies because they didn't apprentice in the trade is wrong.
What gives US the right to seize domains of companies based in other countries and force their laws, views and things like ACTA and banning of internet casinos to citizens of other countries?
That would be 'might'.
Not the way I would prefer things to be run, but nobody's asking me.
Think of it as last-stage empire overreach. The U.S. (where I live), as I see it, has just about jumped the shark, and your kids (I'm assuming you're not a USian), or maybe grandkids, will get to chuckle about the hubris. But it is likely to be ugly in the meantime - historically, empires don't die quietly, and the U.S. has a particularly hard case of entitlement, because it hasn't really ever had a serious setback. Yet. (Vietnam doesn't count, as these things go - ask an older German what it is like to lose a war that actually entailed risks for the loser.)
It seems like the lesson has to be relearned periodically.
This same debate reappears like sunspots. Full Disclosure v. Responsible Disclosure. Black/Gray/White hats.
The funny part here is that Microsoft itself seems to have forgotten how the script goes.
Researcher finds exploit.
Researcher notified vendor.
Vendor stalls for far longer than is reasonable.
Researcher becomes frustrated, because
In the mean time, systems are vulnerable,
Making your name with your discoveries is very important career-wise for some types of researchers, and if a blackhat finds it before the vendor stops stalling, they lose that cred.
Researcher feels played by vendor, who at least seems (and usually is) lying and stalling. So,
Researcher starts releasing exploits either without contacting, or after giving non-negotiable windows of time.
Maybe some less responsible types do some damage.
Everyone wrings their hands over what to do, what to do. Slashdot posts occur. Some hack makes quota their article quota for the month at Computerworld.
Repeat.
MS, Sun, Oracle, Cisco, HP, they've all been through this cycle. You'd think they'd figure out that mission critical software requires a responsive, competent security response team. And they do figure it out. It just seems that the lesson has to be relearned every so often - prying the PRarnicles off the hull, so to speak.
Yes, they produced an edited video that demonstrated a point of view. Quelle horreur! That's completely unlike the Washington Post, the IHT, the Economist, the NYT... Ahem.
In fact, what is completely unlike them, Wikileaks published the unedited video at the same time. Unlike establishment journalism, Wikileaks offered source material from which you can form your own opinions.
Given the choice between an organization that offers an opinion and also the unedited information from which they formed that opinion, and one that only offers the opinion while withholding the unedited information, which one do you want to call a "propaganda group"?
You (and just about everyone who makes this argument) keep missing the forest for the trees.
Read my post again. Nowhere am I asserting that there is no potential revenue impact due to infringement.
I am simply asserting, correctly, that the mantra "infringement == theft" is factually incorrect.
Just doing my part to unmuddle the sort of fuzzy thinking that makes it impossible to have a reasonable discussion about the issue. (And leads to being eaten.)
Slashdot Mirror
You mean all that oil on the moon, from the decaying space-dinosaurs, right?
It is true - you can transmit a virus via /.
It might make more sense to you if you find yourself troubleshooting a failure from a cell phone. Using vi via issh on an iPhone sucks, but is possible. Launching some crappy Java applet isn't. The rule of thumb that makes the most sense to me is that the GUI should be a tool for issuing command line statements. If you can't do it on the command line, you can't do it.
Sometimes people get shot while fleeing - but the impulse to shoot takes 2-3 seconds to enable, and once it has begun, the officer will probably end up shooting, even if the perp has turned to flee in the time that the decision was made to shoot.
I think what you may be missing is that the desired outcome is not some sort of rules of engagement under which we accept, or not, the deaths of people that shouldn't have been killed. The goal is to minimize the number of times the cops entrusted (and paid by) regular people get shot, tortured and killed by the cops.
There is a place for considering justification, considering reaction speed, etc. and that is a court (even if courts really suck at a lot this; this is how we do it, and that's even less mutable than other things).
But true friends of cops should be considering how to make unjustified actions taken by cops happen less often. This includes training (for all sorts of things, including teaching people away from the panic effect you refer to if at all possible), policy (knowing when not to pull the fucking gun, not encouraging the use of tasers as a substitute for keeping one's temper, knowing when not to pursue, many others), leadership changes (at least in some cities, get away from promotion by statistics, as just one of many problems), tactical changes (there's a lot of evidence that beat cops that know their territory have much more positive effects on crime than rovers that swoop in), intelligence changes (you're sick of parentheticals, and so am I), and so on.
But really, the low-hanging fruit are the cops that shake people down, work with dealers to entrap, eat steroids and freak out under stress, have personality problems that make them react poorly, and so on. And there are a lot of those that lead to marginal cases that never see the light of day because of slack in the judicial system. I'm not even talking about "shortcuts to get a bad, bad man", I'm talking illegal behavior on the part of cops that is routinely excused. There is a lot of it that doesn't rise above the baseline noise.
We should not tolerate it. I don't care if it is the blue line, or stickers on the car that lead to warnings, or a judge ignoring excessive force, or worse.
Watch the watchers.
Sigh.
You are missing my point. The overarching suggestion was, "show some interest in something", not "iPhone developers make a lot of money right now."
I happen to be a developer making decent money right now doing iPhone dev, but that's because I was interested in where the ball was bouncing to, not where it is right now.
I do suggest that bottom-feeders look at Objective-C, or Andoid-Java. It won't be a bad place to feed a family and get on with whatever it is that programmers that just work a day job care about. The interesting difference is that if what you care about is tech, you would have already known that and picked up the API, because the implications of, say, the eventual marginalization of the mouse, or location, or the actual personalization of computing, or the kitchenization via the iPad, or... is interesting. Some of it, three years ago. We're now starting to see what that all means, because this has been interesting to some people.
So yeah, if you want to pee in a cup and write mobile HR applications, by all means, look at where the ball is. Enjoy the condo association meetings.
I am being sarcastic, but there's really nothing wrong with that. I'm living in a condo right now.
Pick a direction.
If you like web dev, don't look at a language, look at a path. If you want to stay relevant in the front-end coding, Javascript, getting good with HTML5, and one or more of the various things that feeds both (Python, Ruby) is good. Do it via learning some widely used package of functionality. Write something missing, and release it (Django tagging system, with a Canvas tag cloud?) Having released code makes you much more employable. On the back end, well, Python or Ruby + knowing the oddities of one of the NoSQL tools is nice. (And by "knowing", I don't mean read the O'Reilly book, I mean put them under pressure and see how they fail.)
If you want to become a better programmer, learn Lisp. Really, no shit. It changes how you look at things.
If you want to become a better programmer, but don't want to invest in Lisp, pick pick up a functional language, like Haskell or ML. But do Lisp first.
If you hate the idea of either of the above, get better with your current language of choice. Write an ORM, or a templating language. Nobody will care, but you'll learn why everyone hates but still uses the ones we have.
Learn Objective C, or the Android API, and write something for a phone. We're just past the "here's my todo list, here's my Tetris clone" phase, and it is new territory, and one of the few genuinely interesting things to come about since the mid-90s. If you show some initiative, you can land a safe spot doing this. By about '15, I expect most folks to have a smart phone and be sorted as to expectations, so that's about three years to get good at things and maybe do something interesting to set yourself apart, at the most.
If all you care about is shooting for the center of mass, learn either Microsoft or get good with PLSQL + the weird crap Oracle makes you do to bundle Java up for database deployment. I don't know what Microsofties do, but if you get good with server-side Oracle code, know your shit with performance issues, memorize various oerr codes, and can parrot back whatever whitepapers Oracle released recently about X And The Enterprise (you know, Private Enterprise Cloud Computing, or whatever), you're very employable. Bonus if you've lived a clean enough life to get a security clearance. Check your ego with the receptionist and pee in this cup, please.
Understanding that the entire toolchain and widespread adoption is the most important part of getting it. We all (at least, if we were there for it) know how Java happened - the short version is that Sun positioned it as an alternative to the MS Borganism that many companies were rightly afraid of back then.
I still think Java pretty much sucks. But it has the tools, and perhaps more importantly, a huge number of able bodied code monkeys who can write it.
Enter Oracle. The entire strategy that they've pursued forever is not much different than what Microsoft tried - build or buy essential parts of the stack, and then march up and down it to dominate your category, then extract as much rent as possible. It works better in the enterprise space and is bloodier because there are fewer players. (Microsoft's ecology was too varied with too many players to really dominate like Oracle can.)
So, Oracle's strategy is obvious. They own Java, and thus indirectly can manipulate the terms of output of thousands of developers. They don't care about people liking them, and inertia means they can extract rent for a long time (Even if a second Sun/Java moment happened - say, Parrot v. Java, ramp-up for Parrot to fill the niches, get solid, debugged libraries for everything, get widely deployed, and get thousands of developers up to speed takes how long?)
They don't give a shit about Apache, or developer goodwill. The for-profit players like IBM have different strategies, but keep in mind that their goals are profit maximization, too.
So there are some potentially interesting strategic plays to be made between the various players, but anyone with a bit of experience with the business side of the industry has seen this show before.
That's exactly right.
In related news, I believe that people don't like shell scripts for what amounts to aesthetics. If you think a custom-rolled 30K-line C app built by some in house programmer is somhow inherently more robust than what an experienced unix geek throws together, please explain which is more likely to change in the next apt-get:
The original article by this Dziuba guy is typical of new geeks that suddenly discover the wisdom of Unix design - he knows he's clever, and thinks he's now way more clever because he noticed that pipelines make sense. In ten more years, he might learn to be a bit more humble. Old bearded unix geeks who seem really smug to new hotshot coders who are going to change the world are smug for a reason.
You are correct about federal law. State copyright law is a very different kettle of snapping turtles with regards to audio copyrights. Due to weirdness in the way federal copyright law is constructed, audio recordings made before 1972 are not covered, and so federal copyright law does not preempt state law, and so audio works made prior to then are covered by state common law copyright. In most states, this affords protection until 2049. Some states passed anti-copying and other laws, making it a huge minefield to figure out what the exact legal status is.
There's an excellent paper explaining this available, if you want the details.
You do realize that there's no exploitable pattern in a proper OTP, yes?
This means that for a sufficiently long OTP encrypted text, both your comment and my comment look like "valid" decryptions. As are bomb making instructions, the menu for Obama's dinner last night, whatever your password to /. is, and the combination to your bank's vault.
They merely purged the heretics.
Well, of course. That's how closed-loop political tribes roll. See, also, too, the American Lysenkoists.
Speed limits are far more about revenue than safety.
If you want to disagree, compare reactions between this and, say, drunk driving passes.
iTunes is a decent operating system, but it really needs a good MP3 player.
Seriously, I love OSX and use two macs, I'm relatively happy with my iPhone (I like it, modulo ATT, and even that has gotten better), but iTunes is a bucket of spit.
I get the strategy. It just sucks for my usage model.
Things I think are crappy:
One Thing that would make it nicer, and aren't just fixing crappy bloat, would include more flexible volume spanning for libraries. I have a lot of music - it took a long time, but I've ripped my entire collection, which I've accumulated over ~20 years. I don't want or ever need 260G of music on my laptop. I keep a large amount of it on a network drive and put up with iTunes freaking out when it discovers a track is on a drive that isn't connected, but the whole thing is annoying, and keeping it working it needlessly tedious, especially for an Apple product.
Sorry for the rant - this isn't so much a reply to you anymore - I started this out just to get the refurbished emacs quip out, and it turned into this. I just find it remarkable that Apple has created such a monstrosity that it central to their ongoing strategy. They've created real duds before, but iTunes is... just a mess. They usually eventually get it right, but I'm wondering on this one. I think His Steveness actually likes how fucked up iTunes is.
Also, from the summary:"it's against the law to sell a product that's marked with an expired patent number." Do I smell legislatively forced obsolescence? Does this mean I can't sell old tools in a garage sale, without the mentioned patent trolls coming after me?
Tis why you don't make business decisions on a comment on a summary of a summary.
To answer your question: no. This is similar to legislative bounties on other business practices that the state doesn't like, such as the ADA. I'm not going to get in to whether or not it is a good idea, but the notion that grandma selling dead gramp's tools is going to be hauled up on patent charges at her garage sale is silly. This is about claiming false "ownership" of IP.
There may be good policy reasons why we don't want to put a bounty on people who falsely claim to be in possession of state-sponsored idea rights. But it is important to cast what is going on here correctly: it is about (mostly, as in any IP, this is complex) about companies falsely claiming to own IP that they don't.
Some complaints in the original article ring true - manufacturing from an old mold, simple forgetfulness, etc.
Well, those arguments don't work well for most categories of business (try the "I forgot" argument in your next contract dispute). I don't see why there should be a difference for people claiming government protection on objects they sell.
Some of the hinted arguments I've seen (to be fair, not so much in that article) are even more bullshit - this should be allowed because they were true at one time, so we should be able to keep claiming it.
Bite me. Insofar as using a state-imprimatur for a monopoly on something should be allowed at all, it has to be honest. Even hippies should like this - state ain't gettin' no (or at least suboptimal) rent.
Libertarians should be much more up in arms. I guess anarcho-capitalists should applaud the chumming of the waters.
Anyone who live in the present world, however, should think this a good thing. It is pretty narrow: don't claim you have a government monopoly that you don't, and we're enabling bounty hunters to fuck you up if you do. Real producers with a problem on their etching molds will fix it; those that are exploiting it won't.
And for anyone who wants to claim "ZOMB, this will raise costs!", get back to me when you've come up with accounting that internalizes the overall cost of patents, before you start worrying about the costs of correcting lies about patents.
Have you ever been? It is the population density of a city, modulo the multistory units (except for the nuts who do build those). I don't know what the plan this year is (I'm missing it this year, sniff), but last year, the camp radius was 2100 feet, putting the vast bulk of those 50K people in a 1-mile diameter area. Not many people camp in "deep playa" (the burner term for the area outside of the radial roads but inside the trash perimeter).
Back on topic, there's been signal there for at least the last three years, but it became useless once the gates opened and the hordes descended. My take is that cell service during the main event is going to be a net negative, but it is inevitable. It will become something akin to the ongoing war on glow sticks - a bunch of us will mercilessly mock glow-stuck cellphone users and try to shame them into putting the fucking things down and be present, and it mostly won't work.
Those of us who do LNT (Leave No Trace, the massive cleanup effort post event) will get to ground score cellphones, though. People lose everything else.
The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a CC license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights.
Try this:
"The government cannot take for granted that you just post some code or a media file, slap a proprietary license on it and you had every right to do that. As people reuse it and modify it, if it goes to trial, the government has to hunt down the entire chain back to the original content in order to respect due process rights."
In other words, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that intellectual property rights in general are not bought and sold and pass through tons of hands. Witness the entire orphan-work problem. Liberal licenses like CC make it easier to manage these problems, because the entire issue of ownership from the point of the CC license is very straightforward. (It is likely easier backwards as well, because, contrary to the fever dreams of grabby middlemen, there are not, in fact, hordes of eyepatched 14 year olds slapping CC licenses on Elvis mp3.)
Also, I don't know how this works in the Czech Republic, but in the U.S. the government's cost is court time. In civil suits, the litigating parties pays for their own discovery (subject, of course, to outcomes and sometimes other rules). I don't see how the state's costs go up because a license is CC.
Why? Even if some sort of statute of limitations prevents you from learning new things, the rest of the world suffers no such malady.
The main reason isn't technical. Mindshare matters. Programmers are as fashion-conscious as any group of teens, and, for various good and not-so-good reasons, are far more herd-like. Sad to say, I think if they changed the name it would have a better chance of getting a chance. As is, people are playing with a new batch of languages, young programmers will mostly only run into Perl when they brush against system administration or legacy systems, and the name typically elicits a (frequently uninformed) "Yuck!" from a lot of people.
All of which I find sad - I love Perl. I still write most of my personal stuff in it, because it scales so insanely well from one-liners to complex apps. And it was a great, if only partial, counterpoint to the bondage-and-discipline bullshit Java got way too many people used to. But so i goes.
And you could do to learn how to behave like a grownup. I'm not going to dickwave about it, but have written rather a lot of code against the relevant specs; if you're working in this space, you're probably using some of my code.
I think we're suffering from a difference of semantics. I wouldn't call PDF Postscript. Because it isn't. Once upon a time, one could be forgiven for confusing the two, and there were even PoC valid-PDF documents that you could pipe to a printer, but they're quite divergent how. Similarly, I don't think that, because they share imperatives, calling Canvas the same as SVG is right, because they are different things and will become more different over time.
I think the answer is, you don't, without a schema that tells you what to expect, at least if you want to do it right.
More generally, you can guess how people embed it, and probably even be right a lot. But considering what a clusterfuck "XML" and things-that-look-like-XML-but-aren't, and things-that-don't-even-come-close-except-for-containing->-and-<, I'd hate to try for any general purpose use that anyone cared about.
I think life would be better for everyone if they stopped thinking about XML as something like a format, and instead looked at is more as a convention. Sometimes, life is good and SAX can parse it. Other times, some ca. 1998 system is emitting something that the marketing literature buried in a filing cabinet somewhere called something that ended in 'ML', and it doesn't have '|' or '::' in it.
SVG is one displayable object type within a canvas.
SVG is something that I wish had taken off, but I think it is doomed. It is a wonderful format - I've written a few SVG generators for various purposes, and it is clean, easy and beautiful. I think it was missing a champion - Adobe dabbled with it, but it seems like it was a hedged bet for them - they always prefer things over which they have more control, which I guess should be expected behavior by now.
Or maybe the problem is that it is too general-purpose, so support has been diffuse, with no clear niche to really win in.
Or both. But this has happened before - a great technology that through historic accident and/or failing to have a compelling story to carry it doesn't quite get the combination of attention and demand that drives adoption. It is too bad - the combination of SVG and JS are really quite elegant for a broad class of neato things. (Which might be the problem- it see like the rule is when given the option, always use elegant for yourself, but bet against it. Enjoy the sushi, but put your money in fast food.)
I get the complaint. And I do realize that hypochondriacs and their less obsessive "I feel bad, give me a pill" types eat an unfortunate amount of medical resources. But there is a pathological strain (excuse me) of thought in the medical community that holds that patients should stay completely medically ignorant, else they complicate the healing process. Some take this way too far (I'm sure many folks here have had an experience with a doctor that should really have become a vet), and turn it in to a weird combination of guild behavior information hoarding and personal ego trip. That really needs to be stamped out.
Again, I'm not an anarchist on these things, but denying people the ability to investigate their own bodies because they didn't apprentice in the trade is wrong.
What gives US the right to seize domains of companies based in other countries and force their laws, views and things like ACTA and banning of internet casinos to citizens of other countries?
That would be 'might'.
Not the way I would prefer things to be run, but nobody's asking me.
Think of it as last-stage empire overreach. The U.S. (where I live), as I see it, has just about jumped the shark, and your kids (I'm assuming you're not a USian), or maybe grandkids, will get to chuckle about the hubris. But it is likely to be ugly in the meantime - historically, empires don't die quietly, and the U.S. has a particularly hard case of entitlement, because it hasn't really ever had a serious setback. Yet. (Vietnam doesn't count, as these things go - ask an older German what it is like to lose a war that actually entailed risks for the loser.)
It seems like the lesson has to be relearned periodically.
This same debate reappears like sunspots. Full Disclosure v. Responsible Disclosure. Black/Gray/White hats.
The funny part here is that Microsoft itself seems to have forgotten how the script goes.
MS, Sun, Oracle, Cisco, HP, they've all been through this cycle. You'd think they'd figure out that mission critical software requires a responsive, competent security response team. And they do figure it out. It just seems that the lesson has to be relearned every so often - prying the PRarnicles off the hull, so to speak.
Yes, they produced an edited video that demonstrated a point of view. Quelle horreur! That's completely unlike the Washington Post, the IHT, the Economist, the NYT... Ahem.
In fact, what is completely unlike them, Wikileaks published the unedited video at the same time. Unlike establishment journalism, Wikileaks offered source material from which you can form your own opinions.
Given the choice between an organization that offers an opinion and also the unedited information from which they formed that opinion, and one that only offers the opinion while withholding the unedited information, which one do you want to call a "propaganda group"?
You (and just about everyone who makes this argument) keep missing the forest for the trees.
Read my post again. Nowhere am I asserting that there is no potential revenue impact due to infringement.
I am simply asserting, correctly, that the mantra "infringement == theft" is factually incorrect.
Just doing my part to unmuddle the sort of fuzzy thinking that makes it impossible to have a reasonable discussion about the issue. (And leads to being eaten.)