... now I just use Google to store my bookmarks and use my brain to store the short keywords that matter.
Yes, I do that, too. I remember being surprised when one day I realized that I could find many sites with Google faster than I could with my own bookmark set-up, however well organized it was.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work with everything, so I have my default page set to a nicely laid out menu of links I use a lot but cannot look up quickly. There are only 12 of these (mostly bank & credit card sites).
That leaves the third category: miscellaneous crap that's both hard to find and little used. I just cram all that into my hideously disorganized bookmark file. But now, the fact that my bookmarks are not well organized is not a significant problem.
A key fact here is that it is basically impossible for anyone to come up with a bookmark organization system that improves my life at all. Because any organizational system requires effort on my part (however small) to get things in the proper place. Currently, the only time I apply any effort is when I encounter a new hard-to-find site that I want to use a lot. And that only happens once or twice a year.
I see someone didn't bother to actually RTFA
Link for idiots that can't RTFA
Well, O Anonymous Coward, I did read the article. You pointed me to another one. I hadn't read it yet. Nor have I read thousands of other articles that were not linked to by the original post. How about that?
In any case, thanks for the interesting info. May I suggest you consider being more polite about how you present such things in the future.
Software "manufacturing" is dirt cheap. The hard part is development. If that can be outsourced, then there really isn't much of a problem.
If you want to do business with the Chinese government, just create a little Chinese subsidiary, develop whereever you want, and sell to the Chinese government through yourself.
If you need something boxed up or printed, just pay someone in China to do it.
Doesn't sound hard, plus you can write off lots of trips to China as business expenses.
Simpler yet, get together with 100 friends, and start a single "Chinese" company to act as front-end for all of you.
Microsoft's first priority should be to close the holes in its products that let viruses, spyware, spambots, mushrooms, toadstools, or whatever grow in their customers' computers.
Tell that to your Aunt Mabel, who has her retirement fund invested in Microsoft stock. She thinks that Microsoft's first priority should be to increase shareholder value.
That's done by making new products that generate revenue, not working on old things to improve them.
Sure, I wish Microsoft had the priorities you say they ought to have. But don't blame Bill; it's your Aunt Mabel's fault.
To anyone who hasn't witnessed an aurora, take the time to travel someplace that you can view them. It is totally worth the trip.
Absolutely!
Sadly, however, aside from occasional blips like this one, solar activity is in decline. The big spectacles follow an 11-year cycle, with the next peak in 2011, give or take.
Another caveat: In high lattitudes it never gets very dark in the summer. Much better viewing in the fall.
The social security system is set up where the working class have a portion of their pay given to the government's social security program.
100% agreement, except for the "'s social security program" part. It's a tax. The government gets the money. The nonsense about "we put your money in this account and wait and then give it back" was written to pull the wool over the eyes of people who wouldn't stand for a new tax.
It depends on what is meant by "experimental".
If we mean "further research is needed before we have a complete understanding", then, of course, you are absolutely right.
However, there are different levels of confidence based on past experimental evidence and results of real world usage. Using these, we can and do divide drugs into discrete categories. In ordinary usage, "experimental" normally refers to one of the lower ones.
Ultimately, nobody gives a damn what OS is running.... People buy computers because of applications, not operating systems.
I think there is something to what you are saying, but you are missing a key point: back in the early 1980's, IBM had a solid reputation as a "serious" computer manufacturer. The old trite phrase, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." was reality. Apples and Commodores and Ataris were "toys" no matter what their spec's were.
That was the reason for the initial success of the IBM PC, at a time when the Apple II was the clear leader in applications.
Of course, within a couple of years, we had 1-2-3 and Wordstar, and cheap IBM clones with ever-faster processors. Meanwhile Apple piddled around with a 1 MHz 6502 on the II line, the Lisa and Mac were too radical for business types, Commodore and Atari couldn't understand anything but games, and Visicalc experienced death by lawsuit.
And then your line of reasoning took over.
Hey, that's an easy one! Copyright laws should be used to encourage creativity, not stifle it.... Mickey Mouse should have died and been replaced a LONG time ago.
I agree with what you are saying, but let's note that you are not addressing the question that was asked.
The original question was about fair use exceptions. It looks like you are arguing for old style limitations on the term of copyright.
So let's emphasize this: A good copyright law keeps the term of copyright SHORT!
They are randomly blocking whole netblocks without having any clue about what is really going on.
No, of course they are not random.
SPEWS lists IP addresses whose owners, in the opinion of the SPEWS folks, do not take proper responsibility for preventing spammers from using their systems.
You said, "the ISPs here are incompetent". Exactly. SPEWS is not random. SPEWS lists addresses managed by irresponsible ISPs. If you do not want your traffic blocked by others using SPEWS, then you must use a responsible ISP. Evidently you have become your own, a very reasonable response. If enough companies do that, then responsible ISPs will be able to make more money than irresponsible ones, and the bad ones will either change their ways or go out of business.
In the mean time, it's tough going for many of us, but I think we must admit that SPEWS has a good goal, and an effective (if sometimes draconian) means of helping to achieve it.
To interject a worthless, pedantic comment into this otherwise very worthwhile thread:
"When a society starts requiring ID cards, it's time to move to another planet." (probably paraphrased, credits to Heinlein)
Geez, Google isn't that hard to use, is it?
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
-- from "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long", in Time Enough for Love by R. A. Heinlein
Security through obscurity is one of those strange concepts.... That's the problem with security by obscurity. Sure it lowers the chances of being hit. But it's not really security at all.
Is it?
Security rarely (never?) means 100% secure against all possible attacks. Rather, we consider what attackers are likely to do, what they are motivated to do, what they are capable of doing.
If someone out there decides I, personally, need to die, and they are motivated and capable of putting serious effort into achieving their goal, then I am dead. I live my life based on the idea that this is not going to happen. (Some people don't, e.g., the President of the U.S., and they need much better security than I do.)
Instead, I consider probabilities. No one is going to try to kill me just because I am me, but they might decide to kill someone and grab their money, or break into someone's house, etc. How can I reduce the probability of this happening to me?
One way is to make myself just a bit harder to attack than the next guy. Good door locks are in this category. Anyone who really wants to can get into my house, but they have to really want to.
Another way is to bury myself in a crowd: security by obscurity.
So: Yes, S.B.O. is security. No, it does not do anything to deal with deliberate attacks against me. But it does reduce the chances of being chosen to be attacked. S.B.O. is useless for the President. But for me, it might significantly reduce the probability of harm, which is what security is all about.
Prizes are not the answer (Nor is a $100 laptpop for developing nations). I don't know what is.
Heartily agree. But I do know what the answer is: if you want to get people to do good work in a field, then make knowledge and study and research in that field a respected and valued and encouraged thing in the culture.
Of course, getting to that situation is tough, but I think I should be able to get us there in a couple of weeks.
do they actually use the phrase "morally straight?"
Yup. Although the words didn't have quite the specific connotations when they were written as they typically do today. Probably the writer was thinking of the "straight and narrow" allusion to Jesus's "strait is the gate and narrow is the way" saying (although there, "strait" actually means "narrow", not "straight").
In any case, "morally straight", then and now, would include refraining from homosexual behavior.
Blogging was nice while it lasted. Corporations are quickly going to flood the channel with paid content.
Of course they are, but it doesn't matter. Read the good ones. Link to the good ones. Link to the ones that link to the good ones.
The net has always been full of crap. Blogs are no exception. The Next Big Thing (tm) will not be an exception either. But we get to choose what we pay attention to, and we get to point others to quality as well.
So why complain? If people want to waste their time reading average quality blogs and saying how lousy they are, I suppose they can do that. But I don't. I read blogs that are worth reading.
No offence, but designating "algorithms" as being a something only CS departments are interested in is risible.
... and it's also risible to expect most/. readers to know the word "risible". I didn't (risible, isn't it?). But, hey, I now know all about "risible", and now I find all those poor saps who don't know about "risible" to be utterly risible. What a great word. Risible, risible, risible. Thanks for the vocab hint.
No offence, but designating "algorithms" as being a something only CS departments are interested in is risible.
Yes, that was poorly stated. What I was trying to say was that CS programs and CS department research tends to emphasize what people call "mainstream" applications development, methodologies, algorithms, etc. I mean databases, web development, security, graphics, user interface, operating systems, etc. This is not Matlab stuff. Matlab and Fortran are used for computation.
And if some CS departments have their finger in the computational science pie, well good for them, but I have yet to see one (recently) that has this as a major emphasis.
Well, it seems to me that 90% of scientific computation today is done with Matlab and similar languages/environments (well, mostly Matlab).
True (or nearly so -- I don't know any percentages). However the vast majority of high-performance scientific computing (i.e., large numerical model, supercomputer stuff) is done in Fortran.
Based upon my experiences, within universities, ONLY in CS departments Matlab is NOT (yet ?) the de facto standard....
CS departments don't, as a rule, do scientific computing. Science departments do. CS departments
do software development/engineering, algorithms, etc. In the real (non-university) world, exactly 0% of that is in Matlab.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I do that, too. I remember being surprised when one day I realized that I could find many sites with Google faster than I could with my own bookmark set-up, however well organized it was.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work with everything, so I have my default page set to a nicely laid out menu of links I use a lot but cannot look up quickly. There are only 12 of these (mostly bank & credit card sites).
That leaves the third category: miscellaneous crap that's both hard to find and little used. I just cram all that into my hideously disorganized bookmark file. But now, the fact that my bookmarks are not well organized is not a significant problem.
A key fact here is that it is basically impossible for anyone to come up with a bookmark organization system that improves my life at all. Because any organizational system requires effort on my part (however small) to get things in the proper place. Currently, the only time I apply any effort is when I encounter a new hard-to-find site that I want to use a lot. And that only happens once or twice a year.
Link for idiots that can't RTFA
Well, O Anonymous Coward, I did read the article. You pointed me to another one. I hadn't read it yet. Nor have I read thousands of other articles that were not linked to by the original post. How about that?
In any case, thanks for the interesting info. May I suggest you consider being more polite about how you present such things in the future.
If you want to do business with the Chinese government, just create a little Chinese subsidiary, develop whereever you want, and sell to the Chinese government through yourself. If you need something boxed up or printed, just pay someone in China to do it. Doesn't sound hard, plus you can write off lots of trips to China as business expenses.
Simpler yet, get together with 100 friends, and start a single "Chinese" company to act as front-end for all of you.
Tell that to your Aunt Mabel, who has her retirement fund invested in Microsoft stock. She thinks that Microsoft's first priority should be to increase shareholder value. That's done by making new products that generate revenue, not working on old things to improve them.
Sure, I wish Microsoft had the priorities you say they ought to have. But don't blame Bill; it's your Aunt Mabel's fault.
s/wait/pay/
Absolutely!
Sadly, however, aside from occasional blips like this one, solar activity is in decline. The big spectacles follow an 11-year cycle, with the next peak in 2011, give or take.
Another caveat: In high lattitudes it never gets very dark in the summer. Much better viewing in the fall.
100% agreement, except for the "'s social security program" part. It's a tax. The government gets the money. The nonsense about "we put your money in this account and wait and then give it back" was written to pull the wool over the eyes of people who wouldn't stand for a new tax.
It depends on what is meant by "experimental". If we mean "further research is needed before we have a complete understanding", then, of course, you are absolutely right.
However, there are different levels of confidence based on past experimental evidence and results of real world usage. Using these, we can and do divide drugs into discrete categories. In ordinary usage, "experimental" normally refers to one of the lower ones.
I think there is something to what you are saying, but you are missing a key point: back in the early 1980's, IBM had a solid reputation as a "serious" computer manufacturer. The old trite phrase, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." was reality. Apples and Commodores and Ataris were "toys" no matter what their spec's were.
That was the reason for the initial success of the IBM PC, at a time when the Apple II was the clear leader in applications.
Of course, within a couple of years, we had 1-2-3 and Wordstar, and cheap IBM clones with ever-faster processors. Meanwhile Apple piddled around with a 1 MHz 6502 on the II line, the Lisa and Mac were too radical for business types, Commodore and Atari couldn't understand anything but games, and Visicalc experienced death by lawsuit. And then your line of reasoning took over.
Um ... people who want to get paid?
Haven't done much stargazing away from city lights, have you?
Yes, the fair use clause is very sensible. However, U.S. copyright law, as a whole, still has plenty of problems:
- Excessively long preservation of creators' rights (used to be 14 years, with a possible extension to a max of 28).
- An opt-out system, so that anything anyone writes down is automatically not in the public domain, unless they explicitly place it there.
- Crap like the DMCA, which, as you noted, works against fair use rights in practice.
So let's work on fixing these. Fair use, as defined in the U.S., is fine.I agree with what you are saying, but let's note that you are not addressing the question that was asked. The original question was about fair use exceptions. It looks like you are arguing for old style limitations on the term of copyright.
So let's emphasize this: A good copyright law keeps the term of copyright SHORT!
No, of course they are not random. SPEWS lists IP addresses whose owners, in the opinion of the SPEWS folks, do not take proper responsibility for preventing spammers from using their systems.
You said, "the ISPs here are incompetent". Exactly. SPEWS is not random. SPEWS lists addresses managed by irresponsible ISPs. If you do not want your traffic blocked by others using SPEWS, then you must use a responsible ISP. Evidently you have become your own, a very reasonable response. If enough companies do that, then responsible ISPs will be able to make more money than irresponsible ones, and the bad ones will either change their ways or go out of business.
In the mean time, it's tough going for many of us, but I think we must admit that SPEWS has a good goal, and an effective (if sometimes draconian) means of helping to achieve it.
"When a society starts requiring ID cards, it's time to move to another planet." (probably paraphrased, credits to Heinlein)
Geez, Google isn't that hard to use, is it?
Security rarely (never?) means 100% secure against all possible attacks. Rather, we consider what attackers are likely to do, what they are motivated to do, what they are capable of doing.
If someone out there decides I, personally, need to die, and they are motivated and capable of putting serious effort into achieving their goal, then I am dead. I live my life based on the idea that this is not going to happen. (Some people don't, e.g., the President of the U.S., and they need much better security than I do.)
Instead, I consider probabilities. No one is going to try to kill me just because I am me, but they might decide to kill someone and grab their money, or break into someone's house, etc. How can I reduce the probability of this happening to me?
One way is to make myself just a bit harder to attack than the next guy. Good door locks are in this category. Anyone who really wants to can get into my house, but they have to really want to.
Another way is to bury myself in a crowd: security by obscurity.
So: Yes, S.B.O. is security. No, it does not do anything to deal with deliberate attacks against me. But it does reduce the chances of being chosen to be attacked. S.B.O. is useless for the President. But for me, it might significantly reduce the probability of harm, which is what security is all about.
I was assuming you were talking to someone articulating the official position of the Boy Scouts (specifically, the Boy Scouts of America).
Heartily agree. But I do know what the answer is: if you want to get people to do good work in a field, then make knowledge and study and research in that field a respected and valued and encouraged thing in the culture.
Of course, getting to that situation is tough, but I think I should be able to get us there in a couple of weeks.
Yup. Although the words didn't have quite the specific connotations when they were written as they typically do today. Probably the writer was thinking of the "straight and narrow" allusion to Jesus's "strait is the gate and narrow is the way" saying (although there, "strait" actually means "narrow", not "straight").
In any case, "morally straight", then and now, would include refraining from homosexual behavior.
Of course they are, but it doesn't matter. Read the good ones. Link to the good ones. Link to the ones that link to the good ones.
The net has always been full of crap. Blogs are no exception. The Next Big Thing (tm) will not be an exception either. But we get to choose what we pay attention to, and we get to point others to quality as well.
So why complain? If people want to waste their time reading average quality blogs and saying how lousy they are, I suppose they can do that. But I don't. I read blogs that are worth reading.
How about a really tall giraffe?
Yes, that was poorly stated. What I was trying to say was that CS programs and CS department research tends to emphasize what people call "mainstream" applications development, methodologies, algorithms, etc. I mean databases, web development, security, graphics, user interface, operating systems, etc. This is not Matlab stuff. Matlab and Fortran are used for computation.
And if some CS departments have their finger in the computational science pie, well good for them, but I have yet to see one (recently) that has this as a major emphasis.
True (or nearly so -- I don't know any percentages). However the vast majority of high-performance scientific computing (i.e., large numerical model, supercomputer stuff) is done in Fortran.
Based upon my experiences, within universities, ONLY in CS departments Matlab is NOT (yet ?) the de facto standard ....
CS departments don't, as a rule, do scientific computing. Science departments do. CS departments do software development/engineering, algorithms, etc. In the real (non-university) world, exactly 0% of that is in Matlab.
28 days late.
-- Your friendly neighborhood pedant