I'm unclear on what you think I don't get. I do understand infinite sets, and set theory in general is a bit of a hobby for me. I was referencing Russell's paradox, and perhaps should have punned something about Peano math lacking a couple of keys rather than reaching for a political reference.
You don't say what you want to do, long term. If you want to do interesting things in programming, then certainly, pile up the math, and don't shy from hard courses - you want to be pushed here.
Something to keep in mind, however, is that coding isn't all about 'l33t algorithm skills. Rather a lot of it is using other people's APIs, and if you're good, creating the same. This, fundamentally, is a communications problem, not a coding problem. It has been my experience that the best coders are also very solid communicators, and I don't believe this is coincidental. Even if you think you write well now, learn to be better at it. This is also future-proofing; even after the Singularity, metahumans will still communicate, and in the mean-time, you may find that you don't want to code for the rest of your life. People mock English majors a lot, but working your writing skills is something that is very, very broadly applicable.
We're getting perilously close to tort law here, and this discussion is way past prime.
However, ethics don't stop at the choice to act. (Torts are insanely messy and counterintuitive. $legalreference like West is your friend, if you have it, etc.)
By taking posession of the car, in your hypothetical, you are taking responsibility for it. That you have a minimal goal in mind is a mitigating circumstance (you mean well), but not a reason to abdicate responsibility for what you've chosen to do.
I realize I'm mixing law and ethics. That's what humans do. But if you want to play a pure ethics argument, consider how the 'save a fella on broken ice' hypothetical works out. It doesn't come out in your favor. I'm not asserting this is the proper way to think about ethics questions (I don't think it is), but you're grabbing the wrong straw there.
You win the award for completely missing the point, and doubling down on explaining basic math to an audience that mostly can be expected to know that. (I know, I'm being too generous.)
Hey, did you ever notice that a set of things that don't contain themselves looks a little funny? Someone should write congress!
Or maybe Glenn Beck.
What they should have done is hijacked the botnet using the fall back domains, and either run a self destruct if there is one, or uploaded a new "version" that effects an uninstall. Of course, that would make their business, selling security appliances, less necessary.
Funny you concentrate on a claimed conflict of commercial interest.
It also would have opened them up to a potentially huge legal problem. No matter how carefully coded an uninstaller, the likelihood of some number of machines having problems after being infected by a remover, when talking about.25M machines, is high. Such an action also is criminal computer intrusion in its own right.
No person in their right mind would do such a thing.
That is true. And the logic runs counter to searching cell phones.
At least, I've never heard of a cop injured by a phone number.
I also like that this should become a bright-line rule against cops deleting people's cell-phone pictures because some Member of the Public took a picture the cop doesn't want seen. On the down-side, it might lead to more phones that are accidentally broken when a photographer, ahem, disturbs the peace. (Of course, my phone locks automatically, and I've never been under the impression that being detained would require me to provide the password.)
Monty is a liar, Groklaw caught him in the lie and he shouldn't be trusted.
As a techie who built a RDBMS competing with Oracle, I would pay anytime Monty much more attention than some over-religious zealots over at Groklaw.
If you're going to attempt to argue from authority and trash Groklaw, you'd better have a better argument than 'cause I said so'.
I say this as someone who used to work for an also-ran Oracle competitor./snark.
Groklaw has made some very specific claims that point to the conclusion that Monty, in fact, is a liar. Others (including me) have come to that conclusion as well, while noting facts about his self-dealing that lead one (well, at least me) to consider him in an even more negative light than Groklaw is willing to paint. Trashing Moglen, for instance, is an absolute dick move. Call it "business is business, not black and white" if you like, but that doesn't protect anyone, Monty or otherwise, from being called a dick for doing it, nor for being remembered as doing it next time he reaches out for help from "the community". People remember things.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to start.
Monty is not beloved - anyone who has been paying attention should be aware that lots of people have lots of problems with him. He isn't an open source hero, but a rather self-serving whiner who has had to have it both ways for a long time.
With the Oracle thing, he's now wrapping himself in the flag of community to argue against the GPL in order to make it easier for him to attempt to take back mindshare on the very product he "sold" to Sun to become wealthy.
He's saying some profoundly laughable things about Eblen Moglen and the GPL in general to do this.
Additionally, paying 20 coders $50k/year != spending $1M/year. Not by a long, long shot.
Also, also, I hardly think doing so would constitute a challenge that "could quickly bring Oracle back to a bargaining table to perhaps concede all those demands he has". I mean, what? That's profoundly silly thinking that, even putting aside the particular ways that Oracle the company operates, is very unrealistic when looking at what the hypothetical Monty the DB Slayer firm could realistically do in, say, a year, and also ignoring what a company the size of Oracle can do in a year. Think about it.
It also assumes that folks in the community will ever want to work with the jerk again. He's burning a lot of bridges, and it may well be that your hypothetical cheap young programmers with know knowledge of the past will be the only folks who would want to work with him. Problem is, green coders are not exactly the type of folk you want thinking about database problems, which tend towards the seriously demanding on all of the reliability, performance and complexity axes.
Well, take whatever you want away from it; no skin off my nose. However, you once again fail at argumentation, by way of either not understanding what ad-hominem means, or being incapable of correctly identifying it, while also completely ignoring they rest of what I had to say.
An example of ad-hominem is something like this: "For some reason, scratching almost any "environmental activist" one can find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath."
In other words, this comment attempts to tar environmental activists as supporters of a murderous socialist, while making no argument at all about the virtues of environmental activism, the merits of their actions the factual correctness of their beliefs, or even what, arguendo assuming you were stating a fact, that would have to do with any of the above. Instead, you imply impure motives with no evidence, and springboard from that onto some completely unsupported assumptions about the True Goals of These People, which is apparently to bring down capitalism and perhaps introduce foreign substances into your precious bodily fluids.
That, my friend, is ad-hominem. (Additionally, I threw in a little dig that trends personal-attackish at the end there, partially as an object lesson, but also because it is funny to me. See how that works?)
My commentary on your logic and rhetoric was just that; commentary. I'm not shouting, I'm asserting that you lack argumentation skills to a degree that makes you even less good at it than your average AGW denier, and thus are terrifically unpersuasive. Perhaps I'm wrong about this. You offer no evidence to convince me; in fact, you offer the opposite, having completely misdiagnosed my state of mind (I'm laughing at you, not being angry) and taking a critique as confirmation of the opposite.
What I see instead is a large number of credulous people who believe whatever certain pundits tell them is the best way to screw with liberals.
Exactly the point! For some reason, scratching almost any "environmental activist" one can find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath. Why is it? Are the liberals noticeably more green-conscientious? No, they aren't...
It must be, then, that a substantial body of the Illiberal crowd sees "global warming" as a pre-text for destroying (or, at least, shackling) Capitalism. Indeed, regardless of whether the Global Warming (renamed recently to a less odious "Climate Change") is a) a threat and b) a man-made phenomenon, it is useful just because it can be used to hurt Capitalism...
Your argument is that environmentalists are dirty socialist hippies, therefore environmentalists want to destroy capitalism. Talk about taking absurdist A=A arguments far too far...
There are plenty of serious capitalists on board with environmentalism, who correctly believe that AGW is a fact, and wish to do something about it. It is inherently a collective action problem, just like any other (law contract and property law, for instance). This has implications.
Simply blindly asserting that only dirty fucking hippies who idolize socialist killers does not make it so, any more than attempting to shackle AGW to a silly thought experiment (while slyly imputing a religious belief to the hippies) reduces risk mitigation analysis in the face of uncertainty to a blind leap of faith.
Not only is your factometer hopelessly crushed by the weight of your ideology, but also our logic and rhetorical skills suck.
So I can stick my tabbedwindows in a tabbed window? Great! But it would be better if, instead of multiple desktops, I could have a tabbed desktop, because tabs rock! And then VNC should support tabs for the different machines I use.
Eclipse doesn't work for me, and I haven't used VS, so I can't comment. Still a gvim guy.
On the command line, I generally type things out. I use tab expansion when sitting in directories full of evilly named files (although if that is bad enough, I resort to copy/paste, because the lost speed isn't worth the lost accuracy when starting at a thousand files named things like 200911061654230001.log).
I touch type. My typing isn't "school typing", being self taught (I reach for the 'y', for instance), but when not writing Perl and writing things that don't require much thought I do between 75-90 words/minute. Three cheers for clicky keyboards!
"Use autocomplete to avoid carpal tunnel and use long names" is not a fix for vague or misleading variable names.
In some cases, it makes the vagueness problem worse, because a programmer namedSomethingDescriptivelyButIncomepletely or namedSomethingElseSomethingThatItIsNoLongerUsedFor, or JustNamedItPoorly. True, these are programmer errors, but that doesn't mean they go away just with the magic of long variables. At least with variables like 'erating', you have a signal that you should pay attention. Which of the super long variables in this legacy codebase you're coming up to speed on are correctly descriptive and which aren't?
And don't get me started on halfassedly refactored Hungarian notation...
"Well, use long variables perfectly" isn't a viable response, because it will never happen all the time.
As far using autocomplete, I've tried to make peace with it. It just doesn't really work for me. Breaking the mental flow to futz with tab expansion or popup menus of options, well, is a break from the mental flow, and causes me to fall into futz with the UI mode, which is is a transition. Not a huge one, but it is annoying and non-helpful. I can work in noisy environments, but I don't like it, and it effects productivity. IDE "helpfulness" like this falls into the noise category, at least for me.
There are always outlier situations, but a defense attorney that promotes jury nullification in just about any court in the country isn't going to be practicing for long. There aren't many judges that like the idea at all, any you don't stay employed as a defense attorney by pissing off judges in front of whom you bring cases.
I think this illustrates the key point about Linux documentation.
Facts:
- Yes, documentation sucks. This is because there are very few people who are both knowledgeable about what "the code" (meaning currently packaged distributions; bleeding edge stuff is a different kettle of monkeys) does and also like writing documentation. (Put aside being good at tech writing for the time being.)
- Things constantly change. As an example, Ubuntu's 6 month window leaves non-techy people breathless at the rapid rate of change, but at least it sets expectations. The tech publishing industry simply isn't capable, right now, of releasing books that fast, even if you assume the can opener of someone competent, willing, and able to write a book targeting the next release. I'm as quick to joke about M$ or Apple's release schedule, but the Missing Manual types at least have a target to hang a book release cycle on.
- Googlicous search is hit or miss, and humans have a cognitive bias emphasizing miss. The seven times you find exactly what you need to know (score!) are mentally outweighed by the one time you couldn't get your new video card to work.
Which all leads me to: the best way to run Linux is to be involved in the community. Folks in the know are much more willing to help you on a message board, IRC or whatever than to spend a week or six writing documentation. The payoff is much greater: someone happy at your interactive investment of two hours of partial attention. Contrast with the investment of a couple of weeks writing docs to see email from someone with weird hardware and poor attention to detail flaming you for "causing" them to lose their term paper.
Not everyone who wishes to run Linux wants to engage geeks on IRC. There is a mismatch there. But I don't see that changing.
There may well be an opportunity emerging for knowledgeable communicators - a $10 service targeted at narrow niches for people like my grandmother's new boyfriend - a non-geek who runs Ubuntu and manages his own website, but is generally clueless about what to do in the face of a problem. The niche is narrow; it has to target the impedance between wanting a fix now and waiting for me to be able to provide family tech support, and it has to actually work for his particular problem. And I think it looks more like tech support than publishing. Anyone who's read Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge might see the model of 411 service here.
solutions to the growing problem of distracted or inattentive drivers
Is there any evidence that this problem is, in fact, growing?
An article linked from that article said,
New research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that nearly 6,000 people died in vehicle crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver in 2008, LaHood said, about one-sixth of the 37,000 vehicle deaths reported last year.
But that doesn't tell us what the first derivative is doing.
And that's before I bitch about the specific requirements and creeping TOA/BB/SS/Whatever you want to call it.
Gah, I typoed, so I'll expand that before someone complains. I meant "T_I_A", as in Total Information Awareness, dead but now undead via a CDC plan. BB, as in the chant. and then Selective Screening.
I'll grant that you've had that experience. Maybe even most people have. I had the exact opposite the one time I forgot ID. (I'm a mid-thirties, white, business attire type who flys quite a bit these days.) It screwed up some important plans.
The point is that certainty is missing, that secret law governs what happens, and that there is no recourse. Unlike any other transport service, I can't count on being allowed to fly, even with a contract for that service in place. Calling the airlines private at this point is silly - they are all but nationalized - bailouts whenever needed, security all but outsourced, and plenty of congresscritters to buy them the legislation they want.
And that's before I bitch about the specific requirements and creeping TOA/BB/SS/Whatever you want to call it.
Truly, we are approaching a situation in which certainty of contract and basic privacy is reserved for those wealthy enough to use blinds, have a share of a plane, the money to create a trust for private finance, etc. And the cost is going up.
How? I suppose one could try to guess them, but adding, say, a 64 bit random element (or just run the original message through a hashing function and append) is trivial, and would make guessing completely pointless to even try.
Fair Use has a historic common law component. It was formerly known as "fair abridgment", and grew over time from court cases after the Statute of Anne, which created something like the modern notion of copyright in England in the early 1700's, which in turn replaced the Company of Stationers, a printing monopoly.
In modern, U.S. law, it didn't actually grow out of Betamax (you're thinking of the time-shifting finding) - it gained a statutory definition in the Copyright Act of 1976, and was recognized common law (interpreted varyingly, to be sure) before that.
So if I write a really awesome song and exclusively distribute it with unbreakable DRM that limits your play to one computer... what happens when it falls out of copyright?
Assuming the existence of unbreakable DRM, what happens is that you, as the former copyright holder, can choose to make a non-restricted copy available at that time, or not. This is what I was getting at with my comment that a lot of works are already lost, even though they are now legally public domain. That, to me, is a tragedy.
IMHO, you have legal permission to engage in Fair Use, but (unless I missed something) you don't have the explicit right to do it. IE you can't force a copyright holder to provide you a DRMless file that you can sample from.
That's more or less correct. To be more precise, fair use is an affirmative defense, which is not a right, and not really "legal permission", depending on how you think about that phrase. Without getting overly legalistic, basically, when accused of copyright infringement, the defendant says, yes, I did that, but my actions are justified, and here's why. For fair use, there's a fairly specific 4 part test defined in the Copyright Act of 1976 that attempts to specify what fair use looks like. The burden is on the defendant to show that their actions qualify as fair use.
And of course you're correct that, absent a contract, there's no way anyone can force anyone to provide data in any particular format - that would be silly.
Other people have made these points, but just allow me to summarize.
DRM does not ensure that copyrighted works will never be released to the public domain.
True, as far as it goes. But even without DRM, many recordings that are technically public domain (both audio and visual) are now simply unavailable, due to copy restrictions that didn't allow wide distribution the originals before they became commercially unviable. What will happen in 100 years, with intentional software barriers? Keep in mind how quickly formats, media and transmission mechanisms have changed over the last 25 years.
1. DRM has not been around long enough to be tested in court to determine the legalities surrounding DRMed public domain material.
This is a nonsequiter. Who cares if someone DRMs public domain material? Other people will have it. Or are you talking about cases where copyright has expired, but only the original owner still has a copy? I guess I'm not following, if this is sensical.
2. Just because material can enter the public domain in 100 years, doesn't necessarily mean that anyone has to give it to you in a format that allows Fair-Use now.
You're misapprehending fair use. Fair use is an affirmative defense used to justify actions when accused of infringement. If I can view it, I can use it , in some (possibly degraded) form - it is as simple as that. Now, if I use it and do so in some way, and the copyright holder has an issue with that, I can fall back on fair use (put aside DMCA issues, for now), assuming I hit a certain formula that maps onto prior judicial expectations for what "fair use" looks like. The copyright holder cannot restrict fair use (modulo DMCA, which I'm not getting in to here) - they can make a complaint, and I can argue fair use as a defence. It is important to understand the difference between rights and arguments.
[...]
To put it in perspective
Which is worse:
A) Life + 90 years of copyright
B) Easily bypassed CSS/iTunes encryption
Um, puppies?
You're comparing a statutory definition of the terms of copyright ownership with a data format. I think I know what you're getting at, but... that's not an argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Blah, sorry, I was being grumpy. Apologies.
I'm unclear on what you think I don't get. I do understand infinite sets, and set theory in general is a bit of a hobby for me. I was referencing Russell's paradox, and perhaps should have punned something about Peano math lacking a couple of keys rather than reaching for a political reference.
You don't say what you want to do, long term. If you want to do interesting things in programming, then certainly, pile up the math, and don't shy from hard courses - you want to be pushed here.
Something to keep in mind, however, is that coding isn't all about 'l33t algorithm skills. Rather a lot of it is using other people's APIs, and if you're good, creating the same. This, fundamentally, is a communications problem, not a coding problem. It has been my experience that the best coders are also very solid communicators, and I don't believe this is coincidental. Even if you think you write well now, learn to be better at it. This is also future-proofing; even after the Singularity, metahumans will still communicate, and in the mean-time, you may find that you don't want to code for the rest of your life. People mock English majors a lot, but working your writing skills is something that is very, very broadly applicable.
We're getting perilously close to tort law here, and this discussion is way past prime.
However, ethics don't stop at the choice to act. (Torts are insanely messy and counterintuitive. $legalreference like West is your friend, if you have it, etc.)
By taking posession of the car, in your hypothetical, you are taking responsibility for it. That you have a minimal goal in mind is a mitigating circumstance (you mean well), but not a reason to abdicate responsibility for what you've chosen to do.
I realize I'm mixing law and ethics. That's what humans do. But if you want to play a pure ethics argument, consider how the 'save a fella on broken ice' hypothetical works out. It doesn't come out in your favor. I'm not asserting this is the proper way to think about ethics questions (I don't think it is), but you're grabbing the wrong straw there.
You win the award for completely missing the point, and doubling down on explaining basic math to an audience that mostly can be expected to know that. (I know, I'm being too generous.) Hey, did you ever notice that a set of things that don't contain themselves looks a little funny? Someone should write congress! Or maybe Glenn Beck.
What they should have done is hijacked the botnet using the fall back domains, and either run a self destruct if there is one, or uploaded a new "version" that effects an uninstall. Of course, that would make their business, selling security appliances, less necessary.
Funny you concentrate on a claimed conflict of commercial interest.
It also would have opened them up to a potentially huge legal problem. No matter how carefully coded an uninstaller, the likelihood of some number of machines having problems after being infected by a remover, when talking about .25M machines, is high. Such an action also is criminal computer intrusion in its own right.
No person in their right mind would do such a thing.
That is true. And the logic runs counter to searching cell phones.
At least, I've never heard of a cop injured by a phone number.
I also like that this should become a bright-line rule against cops deleting people's cell-phone pictures because some Member of the Public took a picture the cop doesn't want seen. On the down-side, it might lead to more phones that are accidentally broken when a photographer, ahem, disturbs the peace. (Of course, my phone locks automatically, and I've never been under the impression that being detained would require me to provide the password.)
and violating the GNU
Don't do that. They've got pointy horns and know how to use them.
Monty is a liar, Groklaw caught him in the lie and he shouldn't be trusted.
As a techie who built a RDBMS competing with Oracle, I would pay anytime Monty much more attention than some over-religious zealots over at Groklaw.
If you're going to attempt to argue from authority and trash Groklaw, you'd better have a better argument than 'cause I said so'.
I say this as someone who used to work for an also-ran Oracle competitor. /snark.
Groklaw has made some very specific claims that point to the conclusion that Monty, in fact, is a liar. Others (including me) have come to that conclusion as well, while noting facts about his self-dealing that lead one (well, at least me) to consider him in an even more negative light than Groklaw is willing to paint. Trashing Moglen, for instance, is an absolute dick move. Call it "business is business, not black and white" if you like, but that doesn't protect anyone, Monty or otherwise, from being called a dick for doing it, nor for being remembered as doing it next time he reaches out for help from "the community". People remember things.
This is so wrong I don't even know where to start.
Monty is not beloved - anyone who has been paying attention should be aware that lots of people have lots of problems with him. He isn't an open source hero, but a rather self-serving whiner who has had to have it both ways for a long time.
With the Oracle thing, he's now wrapping himself in the flag of community to argue against the GPL in order to make it easier for him to attempt to take back mindshare on the very product he "sold" to Sun to become wealthy.
He's saying some profoundly laughable things about Eblen Moglen and the GPL in general to do this.
Additionally, paying 20 coders $50k/year != spending $1M/year. Not by a long, long shot.
Also, also, I hardly think doing so would constitute a challenge that "could quickly bring Oracle back to a bargaining table to perhaps concede all those demands he has". I mean, what? That's profoundly silly thinking that, even putting aside the particular ways that Oracle the company operates, is very unrealistic when looking at what the hypothetical Monty the DB Slayer firm could realistically do in, say, a year, and also ignoring what a company the size of Oracle can do in a year. Think about it.
It also assumes that folks in the community will ever want to work with the jerk again. He's burning a lot of bridges, and it may well be that your hypothetical cheap young programmers with know knowledge of the past will be the only folks who would want to work with him. Problem is, green coders are not exactly the type of folk you want thinking about database problems, which tend towards the seriously demanding on all of the reliability, performance and complexity axes.
Well, take whatever you want away from it; no skin off my nose. However, you once again fail at argumentation, by way of either not understanding what ad-hominem means, or being incapable of correctly identifying it, while also completely ignoring they rest of what I had to say.
An example of ad-hominem is something like this: "For some reason, scratching almost any "environmental activist" one can find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath."
In other words, this comment attempts to tar environmental activists as supporters of a murderous socialist, while making no argument at all about the virtues of environmental activism, the merits of their actions the factual correctness of their beliefs, or even what, arguendo assuming you were stating a fact, that would have to do with any of the above. Instead, you imply impure motives with no evidence, and springboard from that onto some completely unsupported assumptions about the True Goals of These People, which is apparently to bring down capitalism and perhaps introduce foreign substances into your precious bodily fluids.
That, my friend, is ad-hominem. (Additionally, I threw in a little dig that trends personal-attackish at the end there, partially as an object lesson, but also because it is funny to me. See how that works?)
My commentary on your logic and rhetoric was just that; commentary. I'm not shouting, I'm asserting that you lack argumentation skills to a degree that makes you even less good at it than your average AGW denier, and thus are terrifically unpersuasive. Perhaps I'm wrong about this. You offer no evidence to convince me; in fact, you offer the opposite, having completely misdiagnosed my state of mind (I'm laughing at you, not being angry) and taking a critique as confirmation of the opposite.
But hey, whatever gets you off.
Exactly the point! For some reason, scratching almost any "environmental activist" one can find a worn-out Che Guevara T-shirt underneath. Why is it? Are the liberals noticeably more green-conscientious? No, they aren't...
It must be, then, that a substantial body of the Illiberal crowd sees "global warming" as a pre-text for destroying (or, at least, shackling) Capitalism. Indeed, regardless of whether the Global Warming (renamed recently to a less odious "Climate Change") is a) a threat and b) a man-made phenomenon, it is useful just because it can be used to hurt Capitalism...
Your argument is that environmentalists are dirty socialist hippies, therefore environmentalists want to destroy capitalism. Talk about taking absurdist A=A arguments far too far...
There are plenty of serious capitalists on board with environmentalism, who correctly believe that AGW is a fact, and wish to do something about it. It is inherently a collective action problem, just like any other (law contract and property law, for instance). This has implications.
Simply blindly asserting that only dirty fucking hippies who idolize socialist killers does not make it so, any more than attempting to shackle AGW to a silly thought experiment (while slyly imputing a religious belief to the hippies) reduces risk mitigation analysis in the face of uncertainty to a blind leap of faith.
Not only is your factometer hopelessly crushed by the weight of your ideology, but also our logic and rhetorical skills suck.
How old do you think Python is? Look it up ... ... ...
It's 18 years old. In fact, it's only 4 years younger than Python.
I take it then that it is some sort of 4-dimensional Oroboros?
So I can stick my tabbed windows in a tabbed window? Great! But it would be better if, instead of multiple desktops, I could have a tabbed desktop, because tabs rock! And then VNC should support tabs for the different machines I use.
On the command line, I generally type things out. I use tab expansion when sitting in directories full of evilly named files (although if that is bad enough, I resort to copy/paste, because the lost speed isn't worth the lost accuracy when starting at a thousand files named things like 200911061654230001.log).
I touch type. My typing isn't "school typing", being self taught (I reach for the 'y', for instance), but when not writing Perl and writing things that don't require much thought I do between 75-90 words/minute. Three cheers for clicky keyboards!
In some cases, it makes the vagueness problem worse, because a programmer namedSomethingDescriptivelyButIncomepletely or namedSomethingElseSomethingThatItIsNoLongerUsedFor, or JustNamedItPoorly. True, these are programmer errors, but that doesn't mean they go away just with the magic of long variables. At least with variables like 'erating', you have a signal that you should pay attention. Which of the super long variables in this legacy codebase you're coming up to speed on are correctly descriptive and which aren't?
And don't get me started on halfassedly refactored Hungarian notation...
"Well, use long variables perfectly" isn't a viable response, because it will never happen all the time.
As far using autocomplete, I've tried to make peace with it. It just doesn't really work for me. Breaking the mental flow to futz with tab expansion or popup menus of options, well, is a break from the mental flow, and causes me to fall into futz with the UI mode, which is is a transition. Not a huge one, but it is annoying and non-helpful. I can work in noisy environments, but I don't like it, and it effects productivity. IDE "helpfulness" like this falls into the noise category, at least for me.
There are always outlier situations, but a defense attorney that promotes jury nullification in just about any court in the country isn't going to be practicing for long. There aren't many judges that like the idea at all, any you don't stay employed as a defense attorney by pissing off judges in front of whom you bring cases.
Facts:
- Yes, documentation sucks. This is because there are very few people who are both knowledgeable about what "the code" (meaning currently packaged distributions; bleeding edge stuff is a different kettle of monkeys) does and also like writing documentation. (Put aside being good at tech writing for the time being.)
- Things constantly change. As an example, Ubuntu's 6 month window leaves non-techy people breathless at the rapid rate of change, but at least it sets expectations. The tech publishing industry simply isn't capable, right now, of releasing books that fast, even if you assume the can opener of someone competent, willing, and able to write a book targeting the next release. I'm as quick to joke about M$ or Apple's release schedule, but the Missing Manual types at least have a target to hang a book release cycle on.
- Googlicous search is hit or miss, and humans have a cognitive bias emphasizing miss. The seven times you find exactly what you need to know (score!) are mentally outweighed by the one time you couldn't get your new video card to work.
Which all leads me to: the best way to run Linux is to be involved in the community. Folks in the know are much more willing to help you on a message board, IRC or whatever than to spend a week or six writing documentation. The payoff is much greater: someone happy at your interactive investment of two hours of partial attention. Contrast with the investment of a couple of weeks writing docs to see email from someone with weird hardware and poor attention to detail flaming you for "causing" them to lose their term paper.
Not everyone who wishes to run Linux wants to engage geeks on IRC. There is a mismatch there. But I don't see that changing.
There may well be an opportunity emerging for knowledgeable communicators - a $10 service targeted at narrow niches for people like my grandmother's new boyfriend - a non-geek who runs Ubuntu and manages his own website, but is generally clueless about what to do in the face of a problem. The niche is narrow; it has to target the impedance between wanting a fix now and waiting for me to be able to provide family tech support, and it has to actually work for his particular problem. And I think it looks more like tech support than publishing. Anyone who's read Rainbow's End by Vernor Vinge might see the model of 411 service here.
solutions to the growing problem of distracted or inattentive drivers Is there any evidence that this problem is, in fact, growing? An article linked from that article said, New research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that nearly 6,000 people died in vehicle crashes involving a distracted or inattentive driver in 2008, LaHood said, about one-sixth of the 37,000 vehicle deaths reported last year. But that doesn't tell us what the first derivative is doing.
Gah, I typoed, so I'll expand that before someone complains. I meant "T_I_A", as in Total Information Awareness, dead but now undead via a CDC plan. BB, as in the chant. and then Selective Screening.
The point is that certainty is missing, that secret law governs what happens, and that there is no recourse. Unlike any other transport service, I can't count on being allowed to fly, even with a contract for that service in place. Calling the airlines private at this point is silly - they are all but nationalized - bailouts whenever needed, security all but outsourced, and plenty of congresscritters to buy them the legislation they want.
And that's before I bitch about the specific requirements and creeping TOA/BB/SS/Whatever you want to call it.
For them wot care, take a look at a different view of how airline regulation, secret law, and the airline cartel's cozy relationship with government is working out.
Truly, we are approaching a situation in which certainty of contract and basic privacy is reserved for those wealthy enough to use blinds, have a share of a plane, the money to create a trust for private finance, etc. And the cost is going up.
If you feel protected, you're deluding yourself.
There have been some attacks and changes, I think; I haven't really been following this.
How? I suppose one could try to guess them, but adding, say, a 64 bit random element (or just run the original message through a hashing function and append) is trivial, and would make guessing completely pointless to even try.
In modern, U.S. law, it didn't actually grow out of Betamax (you're thinking of the time-shifting finding) - it gained a statutory definition in the Copyright Act of 1976, and was recognized common law (interpreted varyingly, to be sure) before that.
Assuming the existence of unbreakable DRM, what happens is that you, as the former copyright holder, can choose to make a non-restricted copy available at that time, or not. This is what I was getting at with my comment that a lot of works are already lost, even though they are now legally public domain. That, to me, is a tragedy.
IMHO, you have legal permission to engage in Fair Use, but (unless I missed something) you don't have the explicit right to do it. IE you can't force a copyright holder to provide you a DRMless file that you can sample from.
That's more or less correct. To be more precise, fair use is an affirmative defense, which is not a right, and not really "legal permission", depending on how you think about that phrase. Without getting overly legalistic, basically, when accused of copyright infringement, the defendant says, yes, I did that, but my actions are justified, and here's why. For fair use, there's a fairly specific 4 part test defined in the Copyright Act of 1976 that attempts to specify what fair use looks like. The burden is on the defendant to show that their actions qualify as fair use.
And of course you're correct that, absent a contract, there's no way anyone can force anyone to provide data in any particular format - that would be silly.
As always, IANAL, this is not legal advice, etc.
DRM does not ensure that copyrighted works will never be released to the public domain.
True, as far as it goes. But even without DRM, many recordings that are technically public domain (both audio and visual) are now simply unavailable, due to copy restrictions that didn't allow wide distribution the originals before they became commercially unviable. What will happen in 100 years, with intentional software barriers? Keep in mind how quickly formats, media and transmission mechanisms have changed over the last 25 years.
1. DRM has not been around long enough to be tested in court to determine the legalities surrounding DRMed public domain material.
This is a nonsequiter. Who cares if someone DRMs public domain material? Other people will have it. Or are you talking about cases where copyright has expired, but only the original owner still has a copy? I guess I'm not following, if this is sensical.
2. Just because material can enter the public domain in 100 years, doesn't necessarily mean that anyone has to give it to you in a format that allows Fair-Use now.
You're misapprehending fair use. Fair use is an affirmative defense used to justify actions when accused of infringement. If I can view it, I can use it , in some (possibly degraded) form - it is as simple as that. Now, if I use it and do so in some way, and the copyright holder has an issue with that, I can fall back on fair use (put aside DMCA issues, for now), assuming I hit a certain formula that maps onto prior judicial expectations for what "fair use" looks like. The copyright holder cannot restrict fair use (modulo DMCA, which I'm not getting in to here) - they can make a complaint, and I can argue fair use as a defence. It is important to understand the difference between rights and arguments. [...]
To put it in perspective Which is worse:
A) Life + 90 years of copyright
B) Easily bypassed CSS/iTunes encryption
Um, puppies?
You're comparing a statutory definition of the terms of copyright ownership with a data format. I think I know what you're getting at, but... that's not an argument.