Apparently the new logic is that kids are to be cut loose, that you're not supposed to leave anything for them, but rather give 'em the boot, and anything you've saved or produced should not benefit them at all.
Actually, that's pretty old logic at this point. The idea is to avoid having a permanent hereditary aristocracy and to require people to achieve success (or not) through their own merits and achievements.
That's really neither here nor there where copyright is concerned. The original goal of the American copyright system (as opposed to the British, which was government control of the press) was to encourage authors to produce more work by giving them a temporary monopoly. Since dead authors are incapable of producing more work, the purpose of the law is not served if their copyrights survive them.
That said, I have no objection to striking a balance between the interests of the public domain and the author's dependents, if he/she had any, by allowing the copyrights to endure a little beyond the lifetime of the author, but seventy years is absurd.
Ah I see, so if you made a million bucks, you wouldn't try to take care of your kids?
If I made a million bucks, approximately half would be consumed by taxes. An average of $300k would be consumed by nursing home and terminal care. That would leave $200k, which is equivalent to about four years' post-tax income for me.
In other words, if my kid is going to see any of that, I'd better get hit by a bus in the very near future.
I really wish people would figure out the difference between an actual fortune and merely more money than they've ever held in their hands at once.
This is an extremely unwise move for Project Gutenberg. While I am certainly opposed to the overly-long copyright terms we have today, and somewhat sympathetic to testing the boundaries of the often unclear copyright status of some works, PG is not the group to do it. They are nowhere near funded well enough to risk a legal confrontation with the major publishing houses or their star authors, and by taking that risk, they are endangering the good and unambiguously legal work they have been doing for so many years.
I don't know Greg Bear personally, but I am familiar with his position on copyrights generally, and he has always seemed to me to be one of the more reasonable authors in this area. Even if he's wrong on this point, Project Gutenberg should leave the grey areas for better-suited groups to explore. While it is deplorable that it is often prohibitively expensive to secure justice in the courts even when one is entirely in the right, that's the reality PG has to deal with if it wants to venture into this area, and it should not be done carelessly.
I'm a good free market conservative, but I do believe in responsible behavior on the part of those companies that enjoy the benefits of it. If someone were to open a large manufacturing plant in Central Alabama, we'd welcome the jobs ..... but we would NOT welcome them cutting corners and poisoning the streams, for example.
And there's the nut of the issue when it comes to the market and regulation. You don't need regulation where you can count on people's self-interest to do the right thing. You do need it where you can count on their short-sightedness and greed to overwhelm even their self-interest.
Don't waste your breath. The remark you're quibbling about is embedded in an entire paragraph that argues against worrying about the international laws of civilized warfare. Just be grateful that the little thug mastered basic literacy and hope he enjoys his TSA handjob over the holidays.
This is like the.xxx TLD. It's exactly backwards. We don't make the entire physical world child-friendly; we build playgrounds and schools and other kid-specific places for them so they can enjoy themselves safely, and adults can do the wide variety of things that adults do everywhere else that eight-year-olds probably shouldn't.
The prudes and their kids should be pushing for a TLD that is "family friendly", whatever that means to them, and let everyone else go about their business. It could be.kid, or something else --.beige,.vanilla,.whitebread,.boring,.babyjesus, and.uptight come readily to mind. They configure their machines to access only that domain, and filtering software providers could focus their efforts on making sure.lame domain registrants host only incredibly dull content instead of blocking access to breast cancer awareness sites in the net at large.
The long-term [question] is, how do we get out of this having to have an ever-increasing security apparatus because of terrorists and a terrorist attack?
By not being fucking cowards, that's how. The motive of terrorism is terror; killing people is just the means. As long as we are contorting ourselves in fear -- and programs that border on institutionalized sexual assault to secure airplanes are definitely contortions -- we are encouraging, not discouraging, terrorism.
I always thought that paying punitive damages to the plaintiff was just asking for the system to be abused.
I've often thought the same thing, but I'm even more certain that if municipal governments will rig traffic lights to guarantee an increase in tickets for running red lights, inviting them to line up behind the firehose of civil punitive damages is probably even more likely to result in abuse.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but in general surely we'd see a fraction of the number of frivolous claims if they weren't a potential ticket to lifelong financial security.
We don't actually see many frivolous claims. We see one newsworthy extreme case every month or two -- out of the tens of thousands of cases that flow through the system without absurd extremes. It's like being afraid of air crashes because they're dramatic and kill a bunch of people at once, even though air travel is actually much safer than driving to the corner store.
And $1.9 million is not a ticket to lifelong financial security unless you're already pretty old, in superb health, and lucky enough to die of something that kills you quickly.
...saying that dogs are smarter than cats is still a bit like arguing over the sprinting abilities of different species of garden snails. Depending on your personal preferences, both dogs and cats can be enjoyable pets, but no one gets either one for intellectual companionship.
...if you had read the very first sentence of my post as carefully as the rest that you so carefully dissected...
Seriously. I never had one --
...you'd have noted that I didn't have one, so my knowledge was second-hand. Again, I stand corrected.
The rich variety you mention was a setback, actually. It meant wildly different codebases for game companies for the same games, wildly different graphics, wildly different music. GUI applications had to deal with totally different UI concepts and capabilities. Software companies back then had to actually choose one of the platforms to develop on, as they were wildly different. Creating the same game for different platforms meant that you had to give all your data to a third party that was specialized in developing programs for the other platform. Writing code meant assembly. There were no fancy IDEs, C compilers, garbage collection and all that jazz and hand holding we have today.
This is typical of a programmer-centric view of things. I'm not without sympathy to that view, having spent the last twenty years as a programmer, but it entirely misses the point of computers, which do not exist for the benefit of programmers. Computers exist for the benefit of users, as do programmers. During the 8-bit era, there was a lot of competition and lots of choices for users, and that was a good thing... for users. Now, we have only one major PC hardware platform -- Intel and its clones -- and three major operating systems -- Windows, Mac OS, and Linux and its derivatives -- that really don't differ much from the POV of the average user. There aren't enough competitors at any level to give users real choices or to prevent abusive behavior from vendors, and what could have been a compensating factor, the open source "movement", is dominated by self-serving narcissists who think that the point of hardware advances is to allow them to be ever less efficient.
And yes, some of it is just the simple nostalgia effect, but there are some very real respects in which things turned out for the worse.
You've proved your point - the US is far from perfect.
Where "far from perfect" equals "war criminals". But this is really illustrative of the ultimate futility of what Wikileaks is doing. Most Americans don't give a shit if the military is committing atrocities, either out of sheer apathy or because they actually approve of murdering civilians who are the wrong color and religion. And of those who do care and disapprove, there are people like you, who are tired of being bothered by unpleasant facts.
At the end of the day, if it involves fewer than six million Jews, hardly anyone gives a shit. And quite likely no one would give a shit about those six million Jews if the survivors and their descendants didn't work overtime to make sure that people remembered. Do you know who the other half to two-thirds of the victims of the Holocaust were? Or that they even existed?
The fundamental misconception that Julian Assange and his supporters -- including, to some extent, myself -- have about the world is the same belief that Anne Frank might have been disabused of when she was murdered in the camps: that despite everything, people are basically good. The truth is that, despite everything, hardly anyone can be bothered to pay attention unless it's painfully obvious that it affects them. And people being murdered on the other side of the planet seldom falls into that category.
The next leak is going to be seven times as large? Great. It's still going to be outweighed by public apathy by several orders of magnitude.
I prefer language to be understandable in both its written and spoken forms.
It is, but that's why we have separate dialects for speech and for writing. There's no need to compensate for the weaknesses of one in the dialect used for the other.
Bullshit - As a C64 and Atari ST veteran, twenty-five years later it's painful to remember the extraordinary effort it took to lose to windows. I had better graphics playing Neuromancer on the C64 than windows managed for a decade, and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Seriously. I never had one -- I was an Apple II fanatic for reasons (obviously) unrelated to its graphics capabilities -- but the Atari ST was an amazing piece of hardware, way ahead of its time, and in retrospect, I can see that it was clearly the best of the 8-bit era. This was a machine with three microprocessors: one general purpose CPU and separate processors for both sound and video. And it was cheaper than most of its competitors. It probably would have been vastly successful if the Atari name hadn't been so firmly associated with games.
I wonder how old the author of TFA is. It's not hard to remember life before Windows at all. I remember life before DOS, back when the first pull-down menus were implemented in WordStar -- a text editor by today's standards -- solely as an aid to learning the key commands.
Hardware and software have come a long way since then, but it came at the expense of losing the rich variety of the early personal computer era, to the point that people now have passionate arguments about the barely perceptible differences between Mac and PC GUIs.
Hm, if I'm not mistaken, this is where I should tell someone to get off my lawn.;)
In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
Political parties do much the same thing. The so-called base voters who would never consider voting for the other party (or staying home) can be and generally are ignored by candidates because they know their votes are secure.
Loyalty is a terrible position for a customer (or voter) to take. If you want results, insist on getting them up front, before you fork over the cash (or votes, or, in our political system, both).
...but I don't think most businesses (or most people, generally) have anything to object to here. What's likely to make people anxious about changes to the ADA is uncertainty over what those changes will involve.
As a web developer, my main concern is just knowing what I'll have to do or do differently. It would be helpful if articles like this -- or their summaries -- provided links to the proposed guidelines. Personally, I'd prefer to get a head start on this so that my clients and I don't end up rushing to implement changes as the last moment.
I've actually found there is often as much money at the trailing edge of technologies as at the leading edge. Sometimes there is big money on integrating, modifying or maintaining those old systems.
That's often true. I picked up a 12-month contract once to build web interfaces for a bunch of AS-400 apps that were used by a metropolitan school system. And my mother (who started programming with punchcards) supplements her retirement savings by taking surprisingly lucrative short-term contracts to do work in COBOL and RPG, mostly related to ancient billing systems whose owners are not interested in replacing outright -- and IBM makes it very easy to avoid replacing legacy software that is, at least in part, often decades old.
There's definitely life outside of the cutting edge and its endless and often pointless churn.
Poster obviously has no desire to be employed either. Love it or Hate it C# is pretty much the only langauge in demand by big business these days in the UK unless he's perfectly happy doing small freelance jobs etc which PHP is fine.
I've seen people make remarks like this -- apparently in all sincerity -- for the last twenty years, and they're generally wrong, usually because they're generalizing from personal experience, which is almost always narrower than you think.
The fact is that if you aren't too picky, there are always openings for programmers in about a dozen languages. The proportions vary from time to time and by industry and company size, but no language commands more than a modest plurality at present. There are still openings for people to write new code in COBOL and RPG if you know where to look.
The key is not being too picky. If your main concern is making as much money as you can, your choice of languages and platforms is going to be constrained by that requirement. If you're content with making a comfortable but not fantastic middle-class income, you can count on finding a job coding in all but the most obscure languages. It will just take longer to find and probably pay less than the latest high-demand stuff. On the bright side, there will be less competition for the job.
In the end, it just depends on what matters most to you.
This kind of thing would be handy to have for ordinary software, especially code that depends on floating point performance and routines that can optionally take advantage of processor-specific features (or route around misfeatures). The interface would still have to deal with the local OS, but the underlying libraries could be written without recourse to platform-specific code to identify the hardware -- especially since some operating systems either don't make that information available to apps or do so incorrectly.
This woman shared some music over the internet, and they want to financially crucify her. $54,000 thousand would take a lot of people a long time to pay off, let alone $1.5 million. That amount would effectively end her financial life.
It's an egregious decision, but let's not overstate things. She can declare bankruptcy, and in seven years, it will be as if none of this happened. It's still gross overkill, but it's not a "financial crucifixion", whatever that is.
Are the "Jury of your peers" seriously that gullible that they feel they have to institute massive punitive damages on an individual?
Yes.
You couldn't pay me to have a jury trial unless the judge was notoriously biased in favor of plaintiffs. With a judge, I have the advantage of having the case decided by someone who knows the law and who is educated and at least passingly familiar with logic. With a randomly selected jury, I get a dozen laymen with no legal knowledge and, statistically, half of them are going to be of below average intelligence.
Juries can theoretically be a good defense against injustice, but in practice, they're usually just some random idiots off the street.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently the new logic is that kids are to be cut loose, that you're not supposed to leave anything for them, but rather give 'em the boot, and anything you've saved or produced should not benefit them at all.
Actually, that's pretty old logic at this point. The idea is to avoid having a permanent hereditary aristocracy and to require people to achieve success (or not) through their own merits and achievements.
That's really neither here nor there where copyright is concerned. The original goal of the American copyright system (as opposed to the British, which was government control of the press) was to encourage authors to produce more work by giving them a temporary monopoly. Since dead authors are incapable of producing more work, the purpose of the law is not served if their copyrights survive them.
That said, I have no objection to striking a balance between the interests of the public domain and the author's dependents, if he/she had any, by allowing the copyrights to endure a little beyond the lifetime of the author, but seventy years is absurd.
Ah I see, so if you made a million bucks, you wouldn't try to take care of your kids?
If I made a million bucks, approximately half would be consumed by taxes. An average of $300k would be consumed by nursing home and terminal care. That would leave $200k, which is equivalent to about four years' post-tax income for me.
In other words, if my kid is going to see any of that, I'd better get hit by a bus in the very near future.
I really wish people would figure out the difference between an actual fortune and merely more money than they've ever held in their hands at once.
This is an extremely unwise move for Project Gutenberg. While I am certainly opposed to the overly-long copyright terms we have today, and somewhat sympathetic to testing the boundaries of the often unclear copyright status of some works, PG is not the group to do it. They are nowhere near funded well enough to risk a legal confrontation with the major publishing houses or their star authors, and by taking that risk, they are endangering the good and unambiguously legal work they have been doing for so many years.
I don't know Greg Bear personally, but I am familiar with his position on copyrights generally, and he has always seemed to me to be one of the more reasonable authors in this area. Even if he's wrong on this point, Project Gutenberg should leave the grey areas for better-suited groups to explore. While it is deplorable that it is often prohibitively expensive to secure justice in the courts even when one is entirely in the right, that's the reality PG has to deal with if it wants to venture into this area, and it should not be done carelessly.
I'm a good free market conservative, but I do believe in responsible behavior on the part of those companies that enjoy the benefits of it. If someone were to open a large manufacturing plant in Central Alabama, we'd welcome the jobs . .. .. but we would NOT welcome them cutting corners and poisoning the streams, for example.
And there's the nut of the issue when it comes to the market and regulation. You don't need regulation where you can count on people's self-interest to do the right thing. You do need it where you can count on their short-sightedness and greed to overwhelm even their self-interest.
Don't waste your breath. The remark you're quibbling about is embedded in an entire paragraph that argues against worrying about the international laws of civilized warfare. Just be grateful that the little thug mastered basic literacy and hope he enjoys his TSA handjob over the holidays.
This is like the .xxx TLD. It's exactly backwards. We don't make the entire physical world child-friendly; we build playgrounds and schools and other kid-specific places for them so they can enjoy themselves safely, and adults can do the wide variety of things that adults do everywhere else that eight-year-olds probably shouldn't.
The prudes and their kids should be pushing for a TLD that is "family friendly", whatever that means to them, and let everyone else go about their business. It could be .kid, or something else -- .beige, .vanilla, .whitebread, .boring, .babyjesus, and .uptight come readily to mind. They configure their machines to access only that domain, and filtering software providers could focus their efforts on making sure .lame domain registrants host only incredibly dull content instead of blocking access to breast cancer awareness sites in the net at large.
CountenanceCodex has a more ominous ring to it, anyway.
The long-term [question] is, how do we get out of this having to have an ever-increasing security apparatus because of terrorists and a terrorist attack?
By not being fucking cowards, that's how. The motive of terrorism is terror; killing people is just the means. As long as we are contorting ourselves in fear -- and programs that border on institutionalized sexual assault to secure airplanes are definitely contortions -- we are encouraging, not discouraging, terrorism.
I always thought that paying punitive damages to the plaintiff was just asking for the system to be abused.
I've often thought the same thing, but I'm even more certain that if municipal governments will rig traffic lights to guarantee an increase in tickets for running red lights, inviting them to line up behind the firehose of civil punitive damages is probably even more likely to result in abuse.
I'm not saying that's the case here, but in general surely we'd see a fraction of the number of frivolous claims if they weren't a potential ticket to lifelong financial security.
We don't actually see many frivolous claims. We see one newsworthy extreme case every month or two -- out of the tens of thousands of cases that flow through the system without absurd extremes. It's like being afraid of air crashes because they're dramatic and kill a bunch of people at once, even though air travel is actually much safer than driving to the corner store.
And $1.9 million is not a ticket to lifelong financial security unless you're already pretty old, in superb health, and lucky enough to die of something that kills you quickly.
...saying that dogs are smarter than cats is still a bit like arguing over the sprinting abilities of different species of garden snails. Depending on your personal preferences, both dogs and cats can be enjoyable pets, but no one gets either one for intellectual companionship.
I stand corrected, but...
I wonder if you really had an Atari ST.
...if you had read the very first sentence of my post as carefully as the rest that you so carefully dissected...
Seriously. I never had one --
...you'd have noted that I didn't have one, so my knowledge was second-hand. Again, I stand corrected.
The rich variety you mention was a setback, actually. It meant wildly different codebases for game companies for the same games, wildly different graphics, wildly different music. GUI applications had to deal with totally different UI concepts and capabilities. Software companies back then had to actually choose one of the platforms to develop on, as they were wildly different. Creating the same game for different platforms meant that you had to give all your data to a third party that was specialized in developing programs for the other platform. Writing code meant assembly. There were no fancy IDEs, C compilers, garbage collection and all that jazz and hand holding we have today.
This is typical of a programmer-centric view of things. I'm not without sympathy to that view, having spent the last twenty years as a programmer, but it entirely misses the point of computers, which do not exist for the benefit of programmers. Computers exist for the benefit of users, as do programmers. During the 8-bit era, there was a lot of competition and lots of choices for users, and that was a good thing... for users. Now, we have only one major PC hardware platform -- Intel and its clones -- and three major operating systems -- Windows, Mac OS, and Linux and its derivatives -- that really don't differ much from the POV of the average user. There aren't enough competitors at any level to give users real choices or to prevent abusive behavior from vendors, and what could have been a compensating factor, the open source "movement", is dominated by self-serving narcissists who think that the point of hardware advances is to allow them to be ever less efficient.
And yes, some of it is just the simple nostalgia effect, but there are some very real respects in which things turned out for the worse.
You've proved your point - the US is far from perfect.
Where "far from perfect" equals "war criminals". But this is really illustrative of the ultimate futility of what Wikileaks is doing. Most Americans don't give a shit if the military is committing atrocities, either out of sheer apathy or because they actually approve of murdering civilians who are the wrong color and religion. And of those who do care and disapprove, there are people like you, who are tired of being bothered by unpleasant facts.
At the end of the day, if it involves fewer than six million Jews, hardly anyone gives a shit. And quite likely no one would give a shit about those six million Jews if the survivors and their descendants didn't work overtime to make sure that people remembered. Do you know who the other half to two-thirds of the victims of the Holocaust were? Or that they even existed?
The fundamental misconception that Julian Assange and his supporters -- including, to some extent, myself -- have about the world is the same belief that Anne Frank might have been disabused of when she was murdered in the camps: that despite everything, people are basically good. The truth is that, despite everything, hardly anyone can be bothered to pay attention unless it's painfully obvious that it affects them. And people being murdered on the other side of the planet seldom falls into that category.
The next leak is going to be seven times as large? Great. It's still going to be outweighed by public apathy by several orders of magnitude.
I prefer language to be understandable in both its written and spoken forms.
It is, but that's why we have separate dialects for speech and for writing. There's no need to compensate for the weaknesses of one in the dialect used for the other.
Bullshit - As a C64 and Atari ST veteran, twenty-five years later it's painful to remember the extraordinary effort it took to lose to windows. I had better graphics playing Neuromancer on the C64 than windows managed for a decade, and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Seriously. I never had one -- I was an Apple II fanatic for reasons (obviously) unrelated to its graphics capabilities -- but the Atari ST was an amazing piece of hardware, way ahead of its time, and in retrospect, I can see that it was clearly the best of the 8-bit era. This was a machine with three microprocessors: one general purpose CPU and separate processors for both sound and video. And it was cheaper than most of its competitors. It probably would have been vastly successful if the Atari name hadn't been so firmly associated with games.
I wonder how old the author of TFA is. It's not hard to remember life before Windows at all. I remember life before DOS, back when the first pull-down menus were implemented in WordStar -- a text editor by today's standards -- solely as an aid to learning the key commands.
Hardware and software have come a long way since then, but it came at the expense of losing the rich variety of the early personal computer era, to the point that people now have passionate arguments about the barely perceptible differences between Mac and PC GUIs.
Hm, if I'm not mistaken, this is where I should tell someone to get off my lawn. ;)
In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
Political parties do much the same thing. The so-called base voters who would never consider voting for the other party (or staying home) can be and generally are ignored by candidates because they know their votes are secure.
Loyalty is a terrible position for a customer (or voter) to take. If you want results, insist on getting them up front, before you fork over the cash (or votes, or, in our political system, both).
I certainly hope most of the students who use these services are going into management, where they'll never be required to use any skills.
...but I don't think most businesses (or most people, generally) have anything to object to here. What's likely to make people anxious about changes to the ADA is uncertainty over what those changes will involve.
As a web developer, my main concern is just knowing what I'll have to do or do differently. It would be helpful if articles like this -- or their summaries -- provided links to the proposed guidelines. Personally, I'd prefer to get a head start on this so that my clients and I don't end up rushing to implement changes as the last moment.
I've actually found there is often as much money at the trailing edge of technologies as at the leading edge. Sometimes there is big money on integrating, modifying or maintaining those old systems.
That's often true. I picked up a 12-month contract once to build web interfaces for a bunch of AS-400 apps that were used by a metropolitan school system. And my mother (who started programming with punchcards) supplements her retirement savings by taking surprisingly lucrative short-term contracts to do work in COBOL and RPG, mostly related to ancient billing systems whose owners are not interested in replacing outright -- and IBM makes it very easy to avoid replacing legacy software that is, at least in part, often decades old.
There's definitely life outside of the cutting edge and its endless and often pointless churn.
Poster obviously has no desire to be employed either. Love it or Hate it C# is pretty much the only langauge in demand by big business these days in the UK unless he's perfectly happy doing small freelance jobs etc which PHP is fine.
I've seen people make remarks like this -- apparently in all sincerity -- for the last twenty years, and they're generally wrong, usually because they're generalizing from personal experience, which is almost always narrower than you think.
The fact is that if you aren't too picky, there are always openings for programmers in about a dozen languages. The proportions vary from time to time and by industry and company size, but no language commands more than a modest plurality at present. There are still openings for people to write new code in COBOL and RPG if you know where to look.
The key is not being too picky. If your main concern is making as much money as you can, your choice of languages and platforms is going to be constrained by that requirement. If you're content with making a comfortable but not fantastic middle-class income, you can count on finding a job coding in all but the most obscure languages. It will just take longer to find and probably pay less than the latest high-demand stuff. On the bright side, there will be less competition for the job.
In the end, it just depends on what matters most to you.
This kind of thing would be handy to have for ordinary software, especially code that depends on floating point performance and routines that can optionally take advantage of processor-specific features (or route around misfeatures). The interface would still have to deal with the local OS, but the underlying libraries could be written without recourse to platform-specific code to identify the hardware -- especially since some operating systems either don't make that information available to apps or do so incorrectly.
There's an old saying that's just on the tip of my tongue. Now what is it?
Oh yeah, a fool and his money are soon parted.
But most users won't understand the distinction.
Outside of some very specialized applications, that sentence could apply to almost any software.
This woman shared some music over the internet, and they want to financially crucify her. $54,000 thousand would take a lot of people a long time to pay off, let alone $1.5 million. That amount would effectively end her financial life.
It's an egregious decision, but let's not overstate things. She can declare bankruptcy, and in seven years, it will be as if none of this happened. It's still gross overkill, but it's not a "financial crucifixion", whatever that is.
Are the "Jury of your peers" seriously that gullible that they feel they have to institute massive punitive damages on an individual?
Yes.
You couldn't pay me to have a jury trial unless the judge was notoriously biased in favor of plaintiffs. With a judge, I have the advantage of having the case decided by someone who knows the law and who is educated and at least passingly familiar with logic. With a randomly selected jury, I get a dozen laymen with no legal knowledge and, statistically, half of them are going to be of below average intelligence.
Juries can theoretically be a good defense against injustice, but in practice, they're usually just some random idiots off the street.
This is why I love science as much as I do: if not for science, we wouldn't have learned that real virgin birth happens in serpents.