Copyright is a statutory construction. Unlike nearly any other form of 'property', intellectual property is purely a legal tradition created as an indulgence, basically in response to what we now call lobbying.
Theft, on the other hand, is a universally recognized and deterred thing. Our notions of theft are from common law, but the legal recognition of theft is as old as anything we can consider law.
The most important aspect of the definition of theft is that it is about the deprivation of a rival good. If I steal a car from you, you are deprived of that car. That's how the word works, that's how the law works.
Infringement is a different thing. In plain language, in law, and in simple intuitive sense, at least to most people, when they think about it. I can no more steal the informational payload of your book than I can steal your soul. I could steal a physical book from you, or a thumb drive with a copy of a book. That would be theft.
They are just different things. By all means, you can continue to be wrong - I fully support everyone's right to be wrong. But you then shouldn't be surprised when people want to correct you, and perhaps wonder why you are trying to smuggle a bit of an emotional appeal ('you're depriving me of money that is rightfully mine") to what is actually a factual discussion. Blue is not red, and copyright infringement is not theft.
If you want to change the world such that copyright does, in fact, equal theft, I suggest starting a law career and look for a way to get an invitation to join the American Law Institute - they produce the Model Penal Code, which drives a fair amount of criminal law. Get them to recommend a change, and you have a chance (not much of one, but you'll do better there than whining here about it).
PDFs tend to bloat for at least two reasons - one is the inclusion of tons of rasters and other embedded objects, and that's a problem between chair and keyboard - the resultant documents are just was was asked for. The other is that PDF is (a superset of) a subset of Postscript. Some combinations of software and the drivers that generate PDFs, can do insanely redundant things that cause massive documents. One neat workflow I saw several years ago was placing raster images into Illustrator objects, then through a DTP program to be rendered to PDF. That particular software stack/combination of transformations managed add something like 400x bloat compared to the same document produced in a different way.
Generating non-insane Postscript used to be a solved problem, but it appears to come back every so often.
Also, changes in the PDF happened some time back that had big size advantages. Documents generated by old PDF renderers are going to tend to be larger than those generated by newer ones. (I don't really recall the details, but some of it was how embedded objects are stored.)
That this will work about as well as the various "let's unite Unix" corporate drum circles from the 80s and 90s.
They did eventually get things to a point where a subset that wasn't entirely useless could usually compile pretty cleanly, most of the time, sort of, in most places. So long as the code wasn't concerned with whatever the market was concerned with five years prior.
Linus did more to unite Unix than any of the cross-company bodies.
To be more fair, moving the compatibility bar forward, even slowly, is not a bad thing. I just don't think it will do much to shape things in any meaningful way for quite some time.
It's trivial to turn off the "location" service on your phone. Ditto the GPS info.
Not on an iPhone. I may move to Android when my contract is up, haven't decided yet.
Spoofing another location seems a bit self-defeating, because now you'll be spammed from a place you aren't even in.
I don't think so. There are many, many reasons why people might want to. Think about the times when you have used fake email addresses, and extrapolate. I'm not even thinking of dodgy uses like tricking Mom, although I don't believe that that sort of thing should be forbidden by a phone vendor, either.
But you'll never be able to lie about what cell you're in to the cell-tower operator.
Yes, I'm very well aware of that - see the last para of my comment. What I'm talking about is essentially having the equivalent of/dev/fakegps, that will, in the most primitive case, replay a.gpx file.
We really, really need phones to make it easy to lie about location. For your average person in the U.S., it is becoming increasingly untenable to not carry a cell phone with them most of the time. Which means we all have the equivalent of a parole ankle bracelet on us at all times. This is more than a little dangerous.
I don't care if FourSquare's business model depends on phones being honest - that's thier problem. I want an easy to use app that will report the location *I* want to indicate. Bonus points for feeding in GPS tracks. It is *my* phone, not the phone company's, not the government's, not FourSquare's.
I do realize that tower triangulation and whatnot get in the way of successful lying, and that's fine. I can control that aspect of phone reporting. As of now, I know of no good way to control the GPS.
The problem with saying that GPL is not viral in that you just don't have to use it, is missing the point. The issue here is that it is hard to tell when one has violated the GPL.
Well, no, it isn't missing the point. It _is_ the point. If it is so difficult for you to understand if you're violating the license, simply don't go near GPL code. This makes it extremely simple to know you are not violating it.
The issue here is that it is hard to tell when one has violated the GPL. In your own discussion, you say that without specifics, you can't tell whether a violation occurred. In my opinion, the OP presented a reasonably generalized story.
The GPL is one of the easier licenses out there to understand, and there are reams of discussion about what it means. Try to understand the license that, say, Oracle grants you without a copyright lawyer at your elbow.
With other software, you can just buy the software, and know that since you paid money you have a reasonable right to use it.
Try arguing that with the BSA if they show up for an audit. Seriously.
More generally, the problem here, at least I think, is between chair and keyboard. Just because you think the license is weird does not make it so. If copyright law in general is complex and nonintuitive (and it is), that has nothing to do with the GPL.
If you're just dinking around with code and manage to make a mistake in how you release it, nobody is going to come after you with guns blazing and daggers flying - they'll point out the mistake and let you correct it. And even if they did (possible, I just don't think it would happen), you can stop distributing the code. If you're commercially distributing your code in hardware, you likely have an IP lawyer on retainer anyway who can explain it to you. The problem comes in for shops that either (a) base a business model on exploiting GPLed code with no intention of complying, or (b) are being intentionally careless, like these vendors.
and, I can't resist:
Look at the diversity of opinion on this very slashdot page as proof of my point.
Your median/. poster's grasp of IP law is similar to Sarah Palin's understanding of foreign policy. That they both can see the respective objects from home just makes them aggressively stupid in their analysis. (And at least, as a politician, Palin has an excuse.)
Sure you become more vulnerable to cascade effects, but you also get plenty of benefits like significantly increased liquidity.
Except that the much ballyhooed liquidity vanishes exactly when it is needed, as we saw on May 6th. Accenture would never have hit $.01 in a liquid market.
So, HFT adds liquidity where not needed by imposing a tax on essentially every transaction, and shits the bed when weird things happen in the market, making things worse. Care to try to defend it again?
There's a reason why "X provides liquidity" is a considered a bit of an inside joke by professional traders.
You didn't mind when it seemed to have restrictive notions of where the data would go.
Now, maybe it has real conequences, and that sucks.
What business a company has prying into your personal life when deciding whether to hire you I don't know but Facebook did nothing to stop it.
Little help, that's the business FB is in. They monetize the people you talk to, the things you show interest in, the way you spend money. They don't stop it, because that would stop money from finding them.
What. The. Fucking. Fuck.
Why do people assume that anything FB does is anything different than, say, MS in the heyday of hating on them? FB is orders of magnitude worse. And they have the data to do it better.
IMHO, any felon should be stripped of their MCSE, or any other IT or engineering certification, and not allowed to get another for at least 10 years after release... 10 years of scraping sidewalks on the outside!
And you'll ensure that people who offend will go on to reoffend, and your precious tax dollars will go to keeping them locked up and and a net cost to everyone (instead of using that MCSE to stay out of jail, pay taxes and make the world a better place).
The single worst thing you can do to encourage someone to go straight is to remove hope that they can improve their lot. Hey, if you just got out and your lot was to scrape sidewalks while also dealing with the stress of caring for yourself with no hope of improving things, why the hell not reoffend. If you don't get away with it, your job doesn't suck any less and you don't have to worry about rent, and your life is already ruined, so fuck it.
It boggles the mind that some folks are so completely stupid about things like this the minute the word 'criminal' is uttered. And that's before we get to all of the inequities of our criminal justice system and the institutionalized perverse incentives _not_ having to do with Skapare's apparent personal interest in wasting human capital, increasing misery and wasting their tax money in order to keep people from earning an honest living.
Why should I need to bother with Apple's infastructure?
You don't have to.
Apple gets to take credit for every little piddly download of stuff like winzip and putty and all of those apps that do nothing but make up for the fact that Safari is a crap browser.
What the hell are you talking about?
If I understand you correctly through all the non-sequitur gumbo and silly browser bashing, you're still wrong. It isn't about "tak[ing] credit", it is about maintaining something close to exclusive control of (a) user experience and (b) the software sales channel.
Go for it. Seriously. Do it. The Apple Zipline Attack Ninjas aren't going to come through your window if you figure out how to get Flash apps running on your iPhone.
Neither will they do so if you distribute the result through Cydia.
What's that? You want to use Apple's infrastructure to distribute your code? Doesn't Apple have the right to control their servers?
Aren't you really bitching about the entire ecosystem Apple set up? In which case, isn't the proper answer, "don't buy it?"
Code generation in general is usually a sign of things going wrong, especially if used as scaffolding.
Exactly.
More generally, this applies quite well to other things other than "simple business forms". Writing software to write code to enable the writing of software against other code is a sign that you're doing it wrong.
Completely aside from being trapped by tools, crappy syntax, trapdoor edits that bite you in the ass a point release later, etc., it is a sign that whoever thought up the interface that requires a code generator was solving the wrong problem.
And no, @synthesize and friends are not reasonable solution. (I realize I'm not talking about Java anymore.)
Especially now that we have the technology to end pregnancy, the belief is growing that sex can become purely non-consequential.
I knew someone would do this. It is exactly what I'm talking about - fortyonejb believes that their conception of morality must trump what others can do with their bodies. (I'll also not that the comment about technology betrays an ignorance of history - abortion predates the bible. This is about sexual autonomy vs. authoritarians who worry about what other people get up to when the curtains are closed.)
I do not believe it my place to control someones sexuality. I also believe that the existence of abortion should not be a free pass against the very possible result of sex should it occur.
You either support sexual autonomy or you support placing restrictions on sexual autonomy. Using the coercive power of the state to attempt to force women to be unwilling incubators is a serious imposition of your morality on them. Which was my point to begin with - doing so doesn't stop abortion. It limits access to it, mostly to wealthier women, and makes it less safe, leading naturally to (1) more unwanted children growing up in bad circumstances, (2) more dead women from botched abortions, and (3) a huge invasion of personal freedom. These entirely predictable outcomes are the natural result - inevitable consequences - of a moral framework that holds that it is right and proper to create consequences for fucking by denying access to alternatives.
You advance the moral argument, you should be prepared to own the outcomes - unhappy kids, serious loss of personal autonomy, preventable deaths.
You are building a massive straw man by lumping in a bunch of opinions into one, single person you can knock down.
I don't know if you're just looking for an argument or simply suffer from reading comprehension issues, but you apparently missed phrases like "at least some anti-sex-ed types" and "There are some, probably".
You also are apparently incapable of distinguishing between a private medical decision for your 9 year old and the desire of some to make that decision for everyone's 9 year old.
But, that kind of subtlety is probably lost on someone like yourself.
I'm pretty sure it is illegal for 11 year old Cheesers to intentionally injure each other as well. Could scissor safety, conflict resolution and whatnot also be construed as promoting assault against one another?
At what age can kids be taught gun safety?
I'm not (just) being a smart ass. Safety education and promotion are things people are very capable of distinguishing from one another, except, apparently, when when the topic becomes sex of drugs, when suddenly lying becomes not just appropriate, but apparently a legal imperative.
Kids are going to have sex. That's the long and short of it. Would you rather that they do it not knowing how to be safe and responsible?
Well, that is the problem, isn't it?
And you don't have to look far to see that at least some anti-sex-ed types want people to suffer for having sex. Not all of them, but some do. Multiple prominent people fight HPV vaccination because they see it as enabling premarital sex without the "consequences" they find appropriate. Even though any rational person has to know that some percentage (in the case of HPV, a disturbingly large one) of kids are going to have sex and contract it anyway. To the people making this argument, that is an appropriate "consequence" of fucking before marriage. You hear similar things from some anti-abortion types who also tend to talk about "consequences". The people who think this way especially give themselves away when they oppose birth control, as in this case, which reduces the incidence of abortion. They are more concerned with controlling people's sexuality than they are about reducing incidence of disease or abortion.
A lot of times, they'll cluck about that not being the intent, but you simply have to look at their actions - are they supporting the reduction of preventable disease and death? There are some, probably, who are sufficiently clueless as to not understand the consequences of what they support, but if they're that clueless, they shouldn't be listened to, anyway. And what can be said about people who prefer disease and death to sexual freedom?
This is a classic jilted lover, fretting that he couldn't change her evil ways.
The country song of Open Source.
But I mean, seriously, he was lashing out at anyone who pointed out that a promise from Microsoft, even if sincere at the time, is still only a promise until it no longer seems in their own interest. And now, more in anger than sorrow, he's learned his lesson.
I'm thinking he'll need to re-learn it at least once before he'll have earned a VP title. Business is almost never for the idealistic.
Using a gun properly would mean that there are no accidental injuries
Well, sure. And using a car properly means not accidentally hitting running down grannys.
There is, however, this little problem with human fallibility, which leads to improper use, which leads to cars, guns and table saws causing death and injury. (That's before you get to cars or guns being "used properly" in persuit of crime-facillitating goals. Which are frequently cause injuries in a categorically separate way.)
The point being, of course, that it is perfectly valid to think about the actual effects of gun ownership, in spite of the fact that there exists estabilished protocol for dealing with them safely. Additionally, we can observe the comparitave harms the real world generates with things like table saws, guns, pet alligators, and cars. Real-world data, I believe, shows gun ownership to be much safer than lots of people seem think, true, but "They were doing it wrong" isn't the trump argument you seem to think it is.
And I have no idea how pet alligators compare, so please don't ask.
You need only look at the new browser ballet in Europe and subsequent uptake of both Opera and Firefox.
That is a direct response to a legally mandated finding that MFST was a monopoly. You want to claim this as some sort of proo that they promote an open marketplace? You're funny. Not convincing, and actually, not that funny.
Please, discuss how MSFT was shanked, and wossent reeally a monopoly, or that monomopoies are good. It isn't like we've not had that discussion before.
The funny thing about your post is that you claim the market keeps Windows alive (which, you might note, I do not dispute), and also claim that Apple boxes somehow don't.
Here's the thing: Apple in increasing market share at the moment.
I sort of agree with you in one way - Windows describes a baseline. Being better than a crappy Walmart box means you can charge for it.
I also agree that Apple behaves poorly. I said this up-front. What you, or anyone else, have failed to describe is how Microsoft is improving the landscape. Google gives to open source. Apple gives to open source. MSFT? I can think of one situation, mandated by a legal decision that forced them.
Please educate me: how many other times has Microsoft done so? Willingly? Providing examples is good, here.
I'm not claiming that open source is the only way to make the world beter. I am claiming that MSFT has consistently, for a long time, worked to make themselves richer by way of attempting to stop other people from making the world better., and I have noted examples. I have no idea what your friend's mishap with his phone should tell me about Microsoft, and I have my own annoyance with ATT, and I intend to get an Android phone when my contract is up, partially because I want to write software for it. But other than that, you make perfect sense.
So, support your theory. Give examples of MSFT supporting standards, doing more than the legally required baseline of removing barriers to competition, or in some other way doing anything other than attempting to make MSFT a requirement for using a computer.
Saying, "that's what companies do" is true, but not sufficient. Some companies are engaged in pernicious efforts. Whatever else you can say about Google, they are promoting open source, which is a categorical net benefit to humanity. (To argue otherwise, please demonstrate how removing open source would make people's lives better.)
I'm not asserting that GOOG gets a free ride, but comparing a quid pro quo Google gets in return for funding an open source browser to Microsoft's long and consistent legal attack on open source is simply laughable.
Calling me a grumpy old man is not data. Put up, already.
MSFT continually attempts to promote vendor lock-in. That they've moved from attempting to disrupt standards via software development to attempting to disrupt standards via legal wrangling is not a positive development.
They still attempt to trot out the argument that Linux is infringing a pile of patents, but the fact that they never quite mention which, specifically, they are referring to makes even credulous typists in the IT industry press think that it is bullshit.
If you would like to argue in the alternative, please explain how fucking with the attempts at standardizing a file format for government use via building in a standards exception for their own software bug, waving patent claims all the time, and attempting to subvert government decsion-making processes in order to sell a few more copys of Word are a "weak attempt".
MSFT is a corporate structure who is incompatible with current use patterns in software, which is death in this industry, true. That doesn't make them the cute old man on the corner, yelling at clouds, to be politely tolerated. I think they're still more dangerous that Apple, although I think it is reasonable to disagree with me on that one.
The model of proprietary OS is basically done. Apple gets away with it because they consistently make a kick-ass system and use the hardware/software split as a distinguishing upsell, but it is BSD underneath the lickable chrome. Google is now threatening this model, and Apple is responding the same way Microsoft has been doing for years: obstruction, patent attacks, etc. One difference is that Apple actually makes products people want, which might lead to this taking longer to sort out, but I don't think it ends and differently.
And full disclosure, I'm typing this on a MBP, and have an iPhone, although the latter will go away with the contract, now that Android is viable. Buying the best products even when you dislike the company's tactics might make RMS dislike me, but I have to type on this thing all day for a living, and prefer to type on a system designed for actual use - lickable on the outside, my favorite Unix underneath. I don't think this disqualifies me from critiquing the behavior of the folks who sell it.
Except for the fact that, you know, 3K phones were infected. I don't like Apple's game, but denying that it keeps this sort of shit out of the ecosystem is silly. You make yourself look like a fool.
Slashdot Mirror
You're declaring up is down.
Copyright is a statutory construction. Unlike nearly any other form of 'property', intellectual property is purely a legal tradition created as an indulgence, basically in response to what we now call lobbying.
Theft, on the other hand, is a universally recognized and deterred thing. Our notions of theft are from common law, but the legal recognition of theft is as old as anything we can consider law.
The most important aspect of the definition of theft is that it is about the deprivation of a rival good. If I steal a car from you, you are deprived of that car. That's how the word works, that's how the law works.
Infringement is a different thing. In plain language, in law, and in simple intuitive sense, at least to most people, when they think about it. I can no more steal the informational payload of your book than I can steal your soul. I could steal a physical book from you, or a thumb drive with a copy of a book. That would be theft.
They are just different things. By all means, you can continue to be wrong - I fully support everyone's right to be wrong. But you then shouldn't be surprised when people want to correct you, and perhaps wonder why you are trying to smuggle a bit of an emotional appeal ('you're depriving me of money that is rightfully mine") to what is actually a factual discussion. Blue is not red, and copyright infringement is not theft.
If you want to change the world such that copyright does, in fact, equal theft, I suggest starting a law career and look for a way to get an invitation to join the American Law Institute - they produce the Model Penal Code, which drives a fair amount of criminal law. Get them to recommend a change, and you have a chance (not much of one, but you'll do better there than whining here about it).
If you invest in individual stocks, it always pays to watch the insiders. As they say, watch the hands, don't listen to the mouth.
Remember when Case sold AOL?
Gates is pretty clearly a different story, but I suspect he decided it was time to move on at something close to what he saw as the peak.
A big one to watch: 10Ks for now, but pay attention when Larry Ellison changes roles.
Ahem.
PDFs tend to bloat for at least two reasons - one is the inclusion of tons of rasters and other embedded objects, and that's a problem between chair and keyboard - the resultant documents are just was was asked for. The other is that PDF is (a superset of) a subset of Postscript. Some combinations of software and the drivers that generate PDFs, can do insanely redundant things that cause massive documents. One neat workflow I saw several years ago was placing raster images into Illustrator objects, then through a DTP program to be rendered to PDF. That particular software stack/combination of transformations managed add something like 400x bloat compared to the same document produced in a different way.
Generating non-insane Postscript used to be a solved problem, but it appears to come back every so often.
Also, changes in the PDF happened some time back that had big size advantages. Documents generated by old PDF renderers are going to tend to be larger than those generated by newer ones. (I don't really recall the details, but some of it was how embedded objects are stored.)
That this will work about as well as the various "let's unite Unix" corporate drum circles from the 80s and 90s.
They did eventually get things to a point where a subset that wasn't entirely useless could usually compile pretty cleanly, most of the time, sort of, in most places. So long as the code wasn't concerned with whatever the market was concerned with five years prior.
Linus did more to unite Unix than any of the cross-company bodies.
To be more fair, moving the compatibility bar forward, even slowly, is not a bad thing. I just don't think it will do much to shape things in any meaningful way for quite some time.
It's trivial to turn off the "location" service on your phone. Ditto the GPS info.
Not on an iPhone. I may move to Android when my contract is up, haven't decided yet.
Spoofing another location seems a bit self-defeating, because now you'll be spammed from a place you aren't even in.
I don't think so. There are many, many reasons why people might want to. Think about the times when you have used fake email addresses, and extrapolate. I'm not even thinking of dodgy uses like tricking Mom, although I don't believe that that sort of thing should be forbidden by a phone vendor, either.
But you'll never be able to lie about what cell you're in to the cell-tower operator.
Yes, I'm very well aware of that - see the last para of my comment. What I'm talking about is essentially having the equivalent of /dev/fakegps, that will, in the most primitive case, replay a .gpx file.
We really, really need phones to make it easy to lie about location. For your average person in the U.S., it is becoming increasingly untenable to not carry a cell phone with them most of the time. Which means we all have the equivalent of a parole ankle bracelet on us at all times. This is more than a little dangerous.
I don't care if FourSquare's business model depends on phones being honest - that's thier problem. I want an easy to use app that will report the location *I* want to indicate. Bonus points for feeding in GPS tracks. It is *my* phone, not the phone company's, not the government's, not FourSquare's.
I do realize that tower triangulation and whatnot get in the way of successful lying, and that's fine. I can control that aspect of phone reporting. As of now, I know of no good way to control the GPS.
The problem with saying that GPL is not viral in that you just don't have to use it, is missing the point. The issue here is that it is hard to tell when one has violated the GPL.
Well, no, it isn't missing the point. It _is_ the point. If it is so difficult for you to understand if you're violating the license, simply don't go near GPL code. This makes it extremely simple to know you are not violating it.
The issue here is that it is hard to tell when one has violated the GPL. In your own discussion, you say that without specifics, you can't tell whether a violation occurred. In my opinion, the OP presented a reasonably generalized story.
The GPL is one of the easier licenses out there to understand, and there are reams of discussion about what it means. Try to understand the license that, say, Oracle grants you without a copyright lawyer at your elbow.
With other software, you can just buy the software, and know that since you paid money you have a reasonable right to use it.
Try arguing that with the BSA if they show up for an audit. Seriously.
More generally, the problem here, at least I think, is between chair and keyboard. Just because you think the license is weird does not make it so. If copyright law in general is complex and nonintuitive (and it is), that has nothing to do with the GPL.
If you're just dinking around with code and manage to make a mistake in how you release it, nobody is going to come after you with guns blazing and daggers flying - they'll point out the mistake and let you correct it. And even if they did (possible, I just don't think it would happen), you can stop distributing the code. If you're commercially distributing your code in hardware, you likely have an IP lawyer on retainer anyway who can explain it to you. The problem comes in for shops that either (a) base a business model on exploiting GPLed code with no intention of complying, or (b) are being intentionally careless, like these vendors.
and, I can't resist:
Look at the diversity of opinion on this very slashdot page as proof of my point.
Your median /. poster's grasp of IP law is similar to Sarah Palin's understanding of foreign policy. That they both can see the respective objects from home just makes them aggressively stupid in their analysis. (And at least, as a politician, Palin has an excuse.)
Sure you become more vulnerable to cascade effects, but you also get plenty of benefits like significantly increased liquidity.
Except that the much ballyhooed liquidity vanishes exactly when it is needed, as we saw on May 6th. Accenture would never have hit $.01 in a liquid market.
So, HFT adds liquidity where not needed by imposing a tax on essentially every transaction, and shits the bed when weird things happen in the market, making things worse. Care to try to defend it again?
There's a reason why "X provides liquidity" is a considered a bit of an inside joke by professional traders.
You didn't mind when it seemed to have restrictive notions of where the data would go.
Now, maybe it has real conequences, and that sucks.
What business a company has prying into your personal life when deciding whether to hire you I don't know but Facebook did nothing to stop it.
Little help, that's the business FB is in. They monetize the people you talk to, the things you show interest in, the way you spend money. They don't stop it, because that would stop money from finding them.
What. The. Fucking. Fuck.
Why do people assume that anything FB does is anything different than, say, MS in the heyday of hating on them? FB is orders of magnitude worse. And they have the data to do it better.
Don't think you're special.
IMHO, any felon should be stripped of their MCSE, or any other IT or engineering certification, and not allowed to get another for at least 10 years after release ... 10 years of scraping sidewalks on the outside!
And you'll ensure that people who offend will go on to reoffend, and your precious tax dollars will go to keeping them locked up and and a net cost to everyone (instead of using that MCSE to stay out of jail, pay taxes and make the world a better place).
The single worst thing you can do to encourage someone to go straight is to remove hope that they can improve their lot. Hey, if you just got out and your lot was to scrape sidewalks while also dealing with the stress of caring for yourself with no hope of improving things, why the hell not reoffend. If you don't get away with it, your job doesn't suck any less and you don't have to worry about rent, and your life is already ruined, so fuck it.
It boggles the mind that some folks are so completely stupid about things like this the minute the word 'criminal' is uttered. And that's before we get to all of the inequities of our criminal justice system and the institutionalized perverse incentives _not_ having to do with Skapare's apparent personal interest in wasting human capital, increasing misery and wasting their tax money in order to keep people from earning an honest living.
Why should I need to bother with Apple's infastructure?
You don't have to.
Apple gets to take credit for every little piddly download of stuff like winzip and putty and all of those apps that do nothing but make up for the fact that Safari is a crap browser.
What the hell are you talking about?
If I understand you correctly through all the non-sequitur gumbo and silly browser bashing, you're still wrong. It isn't about "tak[ing] credit", it is about maintaining something close to exclusive control of (a) user experience and (b) the software sales channel.
Go for it. Seriously. Do it. The Apple Zipline Attack Ninjas aren't going to come through your window if you figure out how to get Flash apps running on your iPhone.
Neither will they do so if you distribute the result through Cydia.
What's that? You want to use Apple's infrastructure to distribute your code? Doesn't Apple have the right to control their servers?
Aren't you really bitching about the entire ecosystem Apple set up? In which case, isn't the proper answer, "don't buy it?"
Code generation in general is usually a sign of things going wrong, especially if used as scaffolding.
Exactly.
More generally, this applies quite well to other things other than "simple business forms". Writing software to write code to enable the writing of software against other code is a sign that you're doing it wrong.
Completely aside from being trapped by tools, crappy syntax, trapdoor edits that bite you in the ass a point release later, etc., it is a sign that whoever thought up the interface that requires a code generator was solving the wrong problem.
And no, @synthesize and friends are not reasonable solution. (I realize I'm not talking about Java anymore.)
Especially now that we have the technology to end pregnancy, the belief is growing that sex can become purely non-consequential.
I knew someone would do this. It is exactly what I'm talking about - fortyonejb believes that their conception of morality must trump what others can do with their bodies. (I'll also not that the comment about technology betrays an ignorance of history - abortion predates the bible. This is about sexual autonomy vs. authoritarians who worry about what other people get up to when the curtains are closed.)
I do not believe it my place to control someones sexuality. I also believe that the existence of abortion should not be a free pass against the very possible result of sex should it occur.
You either support sexual autonomy or you support placing restrictions on sexual autonomy. Using the coercive power of the state to attempt to force women to be unwilling incubators is a serious imposition of your morality on them. Which was my point to begin with - doing so doesn't stop abortion. It limits access to it, mostly to wealthier women, and makes it less safe, leading naturally to (1) more unwanted children growing up in bad circumstances, (2) more dead women from botched abortions, and (3) a huge invasion of personal freedom. These entirely predictable outcomes are the natural result - inevitable consequences - of a moral framework that holds that it is right and proper to create consequences for fucking by denying access to alternatives.
You advance the moral argument, you should be prepared to own the outcomes - unhappy kids, serious loss of personal autonomy, preventable deaths.
You are building a massive straw man by lumping in a bunch of opinions into one, single person you can knock down.
I don't know if you're just looking for an argument or simply suffer from reading comprehension issues, but you apparently missed phrases like "at least some anti-sex-ed types" and "There are some, probably".
You also are apparently incapable of distinguishing between a private medical decision for your 9 year old and the desire of some to make that decision for everyone's 9 year old.
But, that kind of subtlety is probably lost on someone like yourself.
Do they make mirrors wherever you burrow?
I'm pretty sure it is illegal for 11 year old Cheesers to intentionally injure each other as well. Could scissor safety, conflict resolution and whatnot also be construed as promoting assault against one another?
At what age can kids be taught gun safety?
I'm not (just) being a smart ass. Safety education and promotion are things people are very capable of distinguishing from one another, except, apparently, when when the topic becomes sex of drugs, when suddenly lying becomes not just appropriate, but apparently a legal imperative.
Kids are going to have sex. That's the long and short of it. Would you rather that they do it not knowing how to be safe and responsible?
Well, that is the problem, isn't it?
And you don't have to look far to see that at least some anti-sex-ed types want people to suffer for having sex. Not all of them, but some do. Multiple prominent people fight HPV vaccination because they see it as enabling premarital sex without the "consequences" they find appropriate. Even though any rational person has to know that some percentage (in the case of HPV, a disturbingly large one) of kids are going to have sex and contract it anyway. To the people making this argument, that is an appropriate "consequence" of fucking before marriage. You hear similar things from some anti-abortion types who also tend to talk about "consequences". The people who think this way especially give themselves away when they oppose birth control, as in this case, which reduces the incidence of abortion. They are more concerned with controlling people's sexuality than they are about reducing incidence of disease or abortion.
A lot of times, they'll cluck about that not being the intent, but you simply have to look at their actions - are they supporting the reduction of preventable disease and death? There are some, probably, who are sufficiently clueless as to not understand the consequences of what they support, but if they're that clueless, they shouldn't be listened to, anyway. And what can be said about people who prefer disease and death to sexual freedom?
This is a classic jilted lover, fretting that he couldn't change her evil ways.
The country song of Open Source.
But I mean, seriously, he was lashing out at anyone who pointed out that a promise from Microsoft, even if sincere at the time, is still only a promise until it no longer seems in their own interest. And now, more in anger than sorrow, he's learned his lesson.
I'm thinking he'll need to re-learn it at least once before he'll have earned a VP title. Business is almost never for the idealistic.
Using a gun properly would mean that there are no accidental injuries
Well, sure. And using a car properly means not accidentally hitting running down grannys.
There is, however, this little problem with human fallibility, which leads to improper use, which leads to cars, guns and table saws causing death and injury. (That's before you get to cars or guns being "used properly" in persuit of crime-facillitating goals. Which are frequently cause injuries in a categorically separate way.)
The point being, of course, that it is perfectly valid to think about the actual effects of gun ownership, in spite of the fact that there exists estabilished protocol for dealing with them safely. Additionally, we can observe the comparitave harms the real world generates with things like table saws, guns, pet alligators, and cars. Real-world data, I believe, shows gun ownership to be much safer than lots of people seem think, true, but "They were doing it wrong" isn't the trump argument you seem to think it is.
And I have no idea how pet alligators compare, so please don't ask.
You need only look at the new browser ballet in Europe and subsequent uptake of both Opera and Firefox.
That is a direct response to a legally mandated finding that MFST was a monopoly. You want to claim this as some sort of proo that they promote an open marketplace? You're funny. Not convincing, and actually, not that funny.
Please, discuss how MSFT was shanked, and wossent reeally a monopoly, or that monomopoies are good. It isn't like we've not had that discussion before.
The funny thing about your post is that you claim the market keeps Windows alive (which, you might note, I do not dispute), and also claim that Apple boxes somehow don't.
Here's the thing: Apple in increasing market share at the moment.
I sort of agree with you in one way - Windows describes a baseline. Being better than a crappy Walmart box means you can charge for it.
I also agree that Apple behaves poorly. I said this up-front. What you, or anyone else, have failed to describe is how Microsoft is improving the landscape. Google gives to open source. Apple gives to open source. MSFT? I can think of one situation, mandated by a legal decision that forced them.
Please educate me: how many other times has Microsoft done so? Willingly? Providing examples is good, here.
I'm not claiming that open source is the only way to make the world beter. I am claiming that MSFT has consistently, for a long time, worked to make themselves richer by way of attempting to stop other people from making the world better., and I have noted examples. I have no idea what your friend's mishap with his phone should tell me about Microsoft, and I have my own annoyance with ATT, and I intend to get an Android phone when my contract is up, partially because I want to write software for it. But other than that, you make perfect sense.
So, support your theory. Give examples of MSFT supporting standards, doing more than the legally required baseline of removing barriers to competition, or in some other way doing anything other than attempting to make MSFT a requirement for using a computer.
Saying, "that's what companies do" is true, but not sufficient. Some companies are engaged in pernicious efforts. Whatever else you can say about Google, they are promoting open source, which is a categorical net benefit to humanity. (To argue otherwise, please demonstrate how removing open source would make people's lives better.)
I'm not asserting that GOOG gets a free ride, but comparing a quid pro quo Google gets in return for funding an open source browser to Microsoft's long and consistent legal attack on open source is simply laughable.
Calling me a grumpy old man is not data. Put up, already.
MSFT continually attempts to promote vendor lock-in. That they've moved from attempting to disrupt standards via software development to attempting to disrupt standards via legal wrangling is not a positive development.
They still attempt to trot out the argument that Linux is infringing a pile of patents, but the fact that they never quite mention which, specifically, they are referring to makes even credulous typists in the IT industry press think that it is bullshit.
If you would like to argue in the alternative, please explain how fucking with the attempts at standardizing a file format for government use via building in a standards exception for their own software bug, waving patent claims all the time, and attempting to subvert government decsion-making processes in order to sell a few more copys of Word are a "weak attempt".
MSFT is a corporate structure who is incompatible with current use patterns in software, which is death in this industry, true. That doesn't make them the cute old man on the corner, yelling at clouds, to be politely tolerated. I think they're still more dangerous that Apple, although I think it is reasonable to disagree with me on that one.
The model of proprietary OS is basically done. Apple gets away with it because they consistently make a kick-ass system and use the hardware/software split as a distinguishing upsell, but it is BSD underneath the lickable chrome. Google is now threatening this model, and Apple is responding the same way Microsoft has been doing for years: obstruction, patent attacks, etc. One difference is that Apple actually makes products people want, which might lead to this taking longer to sort out, but I don't think it ends and differently.
And full disclosure, I'm typing this on a MBP, and have an iPhone, although the latter will go away with the contract, now that Android is viable. Buying the best products even when you dislike the company's tactics might make RMS dislike me, but I have to type on this thing all day for a living, and prefer to type on a system designed for actual use - lickable on the outside, my favorite Unix underneath. I don't think this disqualifies me from critiquing the behavior of the folks who sell it.
Except for the fact that, you know, 3K phones were infected. I don't like Apple's game, but denying that it keeps this sort of shit out of the ecosystem is silly. You make yourself look like a fool.