Of course building codes are inherently arbitrary, and there is much humor to be found in looking closely at them. I have seen sturdy walls that didnt meet code ripped out and replaced with much less sturdy walls that do, for instance. Supposedly the requirement is to prevent walls with insufficient strength. In some areas code sets a maximum percentage of surface area that can be glassed. Supposedly this is to improve energy efficiency. Yet the code minimum wall is considerably less efficient here than many glass options, so it's perfectly possible to be required to make the home less energy efficient in order to comply with the code.
The state has plenty of power, that is true, the thirst for power is for many insatiable, and rules become an end in themselves.
While that is to a certain extent true; the real value of regulation is limiting competition by requiring licensure and often educational requirements to get and maintain a license.
The real purpose of regulation is so your fucking house doesn't burn down because someone who wasn't trained installed the wiring.
How naive can you be? If you really want to make sure your house wont burn down because of faulty wiring you have the wiring inspected. But dont rely on the state inspection - because the state inspector is going to fail things that wont burn your house down, and approve things that might - his job isnt to keep your house from burning down, it's just to make sure that code is followed. Regulation increases state power and is thus it's own end. If it makes you slightly safer than some unlikely hypothetical that's going to be claimed as a benefit, of course. That's just marketing.
The trouble is it's setup so it costs inordinate sums of money to even attempt to 'prove' something that is trivially demonstrable, and even then the courts usually find a way to ignore it and rule against you if you try. Ergo, invalid patents that are effectively enforceable. It's a completely broken system.
"Seriously what about it is supposed yo be the difficult part, the file or the downloading?"
I went to school far enough back in the last century that we were taught a bunch of stuff about patents that seems to have been somehow lost along the way. That they were intended for cases where a proble had been obvious for a long time but people were stumped on solution. Then someone got an 'ahah' and found a nice solution that people had been overlooking. In return for publishing not just that 'ahah' moment itself, but also a workable, practical demonstration of 'the trick' the inventor then got a limited time monopoly.
These days, patents dont seem to have to include any of that. The first person that thinks about the problem and implements the obvious solution is apparently intended to have a monopoly on that solution and anything similar, simply for being first, without even being required to publish anything useful (or comprehensible) in return.
"It is not as "pure" as the ideas behind the GPL, but it does work a lot better for the corprorate/capitalistic point of view. "
From a "corprorate" pov perhaps but certainly not from a capitalist point of view.
The reluctance to release the code to GPU stuff has to do with artificial market distortion caused by lawfare (fear of patent lawsuits in particular) and with mystical attitudes of non-creative business types towards their precious lines of code, nothing to do with capitalism and nothing to do with the license per se. The GPL is actually more capitalist friendly, since (in the absence of the extraneous factors mentioned above) it allows a company to release their code without giving competitors a license to embrace extend extenguish it for them.
"For example, a Microsoft engineer could read over the code for the BSD TCP/IP stack and then implement one for Windows using those ideas as a reference. That would never happen with GPL'd code because the license is more restrictive (again, not necessarily a bad thing)."
You are wrong. Anyone that wants to is free to read any GPL code they want and then implement those ideas themselves, using that code as reference. The GPL very explicitly limits itself to copyright law here (which does not prohibit anyone from reading, adapting and applying ideas using a document as a reference.) That is not restricted in any way.
What is restricted, for *proprietary* implementations (not as others have claimed 'commercial' implemenations) is simply copying the code outright. That is prohibited by copyright law when not allowed by license, and the GPL will only allow it if the resulting code is free. Unfree code must be written rather than simply copied. Either free or unfree code may be and is used commercially.
P.S. Agree with you on Wordpress. The interesting side of the BSDs for me is entirely technical. There were several forks in the road where the BSDs took the path I would prefer, and Linux did not. However licensing is not one of them. If you can be against the GPL without being simply wrong about what it does and requires, then fine, but you would be a first.
There is a little bit of truth hiding behind your words but your statement is still very misleading.
GPL is much more 'truly open' precisely because no 'proprietary' implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation will be able to simply lift the code (legally.) *Proprietary* being the keyword here - you said commercial, and that is simply false. You can make a commercial implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation, and furthermore you can simply copy that reference implementation to do it!
Proprietary != commercial. Slackware, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. are all commercial. GPL is perfectly fine with commercial. It's only proprietary that it objects to (and for good reason!)
A predictable problem I would have expected the *BSDs to avoid. Pre-compiled packages have never been ideal. We used to rely on them simply because our systems were so slow that compiling took so long. With a modern computer you should be able to compile an entire system in about 20 minutes so why on earth would you want to invite problems by using someone elses binaries?
"I think working full time for the first 10 years or so of your career (to master your trade) and then part time thereafter would be a much better model for society (and for business - two professionals who work 25 hours a week are usually far more productive than one working 50)."
I agree and would love to see this more accepted/accomodated.
To add a little, in accordance with our biology, it would probably work better for women to (usually) reproduce first, then get the careers going after the children need less care, while men continue to (usually) try to get a decent start in their career before reproducing.
It's not a perfect pattern, and like any pattern, it should be voluntarily followed by those that wish to follow it, not imposed from the top down.
But it would be nice if this pattern (essentially the same one that has been typical of our species for around a quarter of a million years) were not actively obstructed.
Like another reply, I *mostly* agree with you, but find a very serious nit to pick:
"Part of it is having better child care so women can attend events or carry on working."
You dont get "better child care" by paying strangers to watch your kids. Not even if you get someone else to pay for it. You get better child care by both parents actually having time for their children.
What typically happens is that women put off having children initially to get through school, then for this, then for that... normally career related reasons. At some point, whether sooner or later, they realise they are running out of time. They drop out of their profession, more or less, for a few months, this sets them back, and this produces a statistical signature that can be fudged to look like discrimination.
And there may be some discrimination reflected, but these days, it's very unlikely to amount to simple anti-female bias. The inability of men to get the same level of leave to deal with a new child winds up hurting the woman here, as even if the father is perfectly ok with taking a hit to HIS career to help her here, he may not be able to.
And different people take different strategies. A woman is perfectly free to try to reproduce first, THEN go to school. I know several that have and thought that this worked better. It's a later start but that means that at the end of your career your initial training will be somewhat less out of date, and you avoid the difficulty of leaving work and coming back.
I worked for several years in a field of science that is female dominated. (They do exist.) I can assure you that if I had presented demands to the organisers of the conferences I attended that they somehow do more to encourage male participation, that wouldnt have gone anywhere. Nor should it have. Women, and men, should be free to pursue whatever field they wish without such nannyism to help or hinder them.
Show me a real bias interfering with people's chosen careers and I will be concerned. Show me a statistical 'imbalance' easily explained by peoples choices freely made as if this is a problem, and I will tell you to get a job.
"No, sounds like the now typical politically correct use of simple statistics to prove whatever you want."
Actually this is spot on - applied to *your* post, not the one you were replying to.
"If "agency X" doesn't have equal numbers of male and female Y, then agency X is discriminating against women. It doesn't matter why the numbers aren't the same."
Politically correct mind-rot gone rampant. The poor 'female' here that you demand must be equally represented in each and every industry and 'agency' is actually a sentient, autonomous being of her own, who is capable of making her own decisions and developing and pursuing her own goals. She is not simply a number whose only purpose is appearing in the correct place on your spreadsheet.
Women are massively under-represented in many professions which feature high risk of injury or death, social hazards, and relatively low pay. How will you choose which women are going to swell the ranks of sanitations workers and firemen? Because they just arent signing up in sufficient numbers on their own you know...
"Linux is no better - it just assumes a standard DPI display, and X is just.. horrible to deal with. Yeah, I can have a huge terminal window, but that's relatively useless to me because I want nice crisp text."
Linux has nothing whatsoever to do with this. It's a correctable issue with your settings in X and most likely your GTK and/or KDE settings, depending on what software you are running on top of linux.
I am sorry but simply publishing a spec does not make your interface a standard. Multiple independent implementations in widespread use make it a standard. MiniDP is not there yet. It might be years from now, but it is not now. If you want to plug into a monitor you need a different port or an adapter.
"The legality of such action is unknown, since Brazilian laws prohibit this kind of wiretapping."
This caught my eye too. Poster needs to make up his mind. If Brazilian laws prohibit this then the legality is not "unknown" it's illegal. I have no idea what the relevant Brazilian law says, and I am guessing the submitter doesnt either.
"I bough cheap mini display port to display port, DVI, and VGA adapters and I can thus hook my MBP to any display I care to. And it saves needing some huge ass ports making the notebook thicker and bulkier."
And my point which obviously went right over your head is that those adapters you are carting around add much more bulk to your kit than simply having a regular port in the laptop to begin with.
"And just what are you toting around that you need multiple USB and Ethernet cables plugged into it to be useful?"
Ethernet should be self explanatory, hello? Then practically every gadget one might want to use these days is USB, so whatever you are doing, if you are doing more than trying to look stylish, you will use those ports.
You cant tell me these things make it too heavy when the adapters you are carrying around just so you can use a monitor and a network jack are going to weigh more and be waaay more bulky. My old EeePC has two USB ports in addition to ethernet, sd card slot, replaceable batteries, and a standard monitor port. And it's tougher and lighter to boot.
The Mozilla folks dont seem tohave their head in the game at all on the computer, and frankly I am not sure they ever did. When really basic stuff like this goes untouched for well over 10 years while the developers busy themselves adding 'features' no one wants or needs and redesigning the UI over and over again, you have to wonder what is going on. Apparently, what Mozilla really wanted to do all this time is make a toy OS for smart phones so all their 'designers' can keep themselves busy dragging bitmaps around all day without being expected to code.
So if that is where their head is at then I guess this is for the best. But it leaves a real need for someone else to step up and make a decent web browser.
"Why on earth would you want to use a Samsung Linux distro?"
First reason - to be sure you have all the drivers. (Better way to ensure that is simply to donate the drivers and specs to the kernel team for maint but people still think this way.)
Second reason - a fantasy that Samsung would actually clean up the UI and make a more polished OS. (Doubtful, the last time I saw a company try this it was Asus and their Linux version was exactly the opposite of polished. And I mean it was bloody awful. It was clear that it was made by someone who had no clue about linux, and I expect Samsung would do little better.)
Thunderbolt is proprietary (although it isnt *Apples*) as is the 'mini display port' which is the only way to attach an external monitor.
The larger issue in my mind is the lack of standard ports. A notebook that has only one USB port, NO ethernet (the option to add it is with a dongle that will then occupy that single USB port,) and NO standard display port on it is pure fail, without even considering the lack of a replaceable battery. It's small and light which is wonderful, but in order to actually USE it one would have to first buy and then carry a second case full of dongles, adapters, USB hubs, and quickchargers, and at that point you might as well just buy a real laptop - the total package will be lighter and less bulky as well as less expensive.
"And we still are no better off due to sloppy code. Back in the old days you *HAD* to do it right, but not now..."
Eh, I remember a lot of stuff done very wrong in the old days. But yes, there were more limits on it. You couldnt require 2gb for hello world when top of the line computers only had 2mb.
The trend since then is to every higher level developer languages, ever cheaper "programmers" trained ever more quickly to string together libraries they dont understand into applications they cannot debug to run on machines they will never understand.
I'll second this only as an old fogey, I admit that I would be tempted by a good offer in the field. Got no PDP-11 experience, and havent programmed at all in years really, I used to enjoy assembler/machine language a lot, but high level languages turned me off so I found more interesting things to do. I'm still sharp and if there was a good chance to get hired doing it I am sure I could learn it quick.
You can certainly get separate ones, there are tons of models available. Why do people think they have to use what the ISP provides? The ISP shouldnt be providing anything past provisioning the modem, they dont want to be, and when customers demand otherwise they get the cheapest box to setup and administer that the ISP can possibly find. If you are remotely technical you should just buy yourself a decent modem and router and set them up and administer them yourself. All you need the ISP to do is provision the modem.
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Of course building codes are inherently arbitrary, and there is much humor to be found in looking closely at them. I have seen sturdy walls that didnt meet code ripped out and replaced with much less sturdy walls that do, for instance. Supposedly the requirement is to prevent walls with insufficient strength. In some areas code sets a maximum percentage of surface area that can be glassed. Supposedly this is to improve energy efficiency. Yet the code minimum wall is considerably less efficient here than many glass options, so it's perfectly possible to be required to make the home less energy efficient in order to comply with the code.
The state has plenty of power, that is true, the thirst for power is for many insatiable, and rules become an end in themselves.
How naive can you be? If you really want to make sure your house wont burn down because of faulty wiring you have the wiring inspected. But dont rely on the state inspection - because the state inspector is going to fail things that wont burn your house down, and approve things that might - his job isnt to keep your house from burning down, it's just to make sure that code is followed. Regulation increases state power and is thus it's own end. If it makes you slightly safer than some unlikely hypothetical that's going to be claimed as a benefit, of course. That's just marketing.
The trouble is it's setup so it costs inordinate sums of money to even attempt to 'prove' something that is trivially demonstrable, and even then the courts usually find a way to ignore it and rule against you if you try. Ergo, invalid patents that are effectively enforceable. It's a completely broken system.
"Seriously what about it is supposed yo be the difficult part, the file or the downloading?"
I went to school far enough back in the last century that we were taught a bunch of stuff about patents that seems to have been somehow lost along the way. That they were intended for cases where a proble had been obvious for a long time but people were stumped on solution. Then someone got an 'ahah' and found a nice solution that people had been overlooking. In return for publishing not just that 'ahah' moment itself, but also a workable, practical demonstration of 'the trick' the inventor then got a limited time monopoly.
These days, patents dont seem to have to include any of that. The first person that thinks about the problem and implements the obvious solution is apparently intended to have a monopoly on that solution and anything similar, simply for being first, without even being required to publish anything useful (or comprehensible) in return.
"It is not as "pure" as the ideas behind the GPL, but it does work a lot better for the corprorate/capitalistic point of view. "
From a "corprorate" pov perhaps but certainly not from a capitalist point of view.
The reluctance to release the code to GPU stuff has to do with artificial market distortion caused by lawfare (fear of patent lawsuits in particular) and with mystical attitudes of non-creative business types towards their precious lines of code, nothing to do with capitalism and nothing to do with the license per se. The GPL is actually more capitalist friendly, since (in the absence of the extraneous factors mentioned above) it allows a company to release their code without giving competitors a license to embrace extend extenguish it for them.
That's not copyright law, that's a confused and perverted reading of "IP" instead.
"For example, a Microsoft engineer could read over the code for the BSD TCP/IP stack and then implement one for Windows using those ideas as a reference. That would never happen with GPL'd code because the license is more restrictive (again, not necessarily a bad thing)."
You are wrong. Anyone that wants to is free to read any GPL code they want and then implement those ideas themselves, using that code as reference. The GPL very explicitly limits itself to copyright law here (which does not prohibit anyone from reading, adapting and applying ideas using a document as a reference.) That is not restricted in any way.
What is restricted, for *proprietary* implementations (not as others have claimed 'commercial' implemenations) is simply copying the code outright. That is prohibited by copyright law when not allowed by license, and the GPL will only allow it if the resulting code is free. Unfree code must be written rather than simply copied. Either free or unfree code may be and is used commercially.
P.S. Agree with you on Wordpress. The interesting side of the BSDs for me is entirely technical. There were several forks in the road where the BSDs took the path I would prefer, and Linux did not. However licensing is not one of them. If you can be against the GPL without being simply wrong about what it does and requires, then fine, but you would be a first.
There is a little bit of truth hiding behind your words but your statement is still very misleading.
GPL is much more 'truly open' precisely because no 'proprietary' implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation will be able to simply lift the code (legally.) *Proprietary* being the keyword here - you said commercial, and that is simply false. You can make a commercial implementation of a standard with a GPL reference implementation, and furthermore you can simply copy that reference implementation to do it!
Proprietary != commercial. Slackware, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc. are all commercial. GPL is perfectly fine with commercial. It's only proprietary that it objects to (and for good reason!)
A predictable problem I would have expected the *BSDs to avoid. Pre-compiled packages have never been ideal. We used to rely on them simply because our systems were so slow that compiling took so long. With a modern computer you should be able to compile an entire system in about 20 minutes so why on earth would you want to invite problems by using someone elses binaries?
"I think working full time for the first 10 years or so of your career (to master your trade) and then part time thereafter would be a much better model for society (and for business - two professionals who work 25 hours a week are usually far more productive than one working 50)."
I agree and would love to see this more accepted/accomodated.
To add a little, in accordance with our biology, it would probably work better for women to (usually) reproduce first, then get the careers going after the children need less care, while men continue to (usually) try to get a decent start in their career before reproducing.
It's not a perfect pattern, and like any pattern, it should be voluntarily followed by those that wish to follow it, not imposed from the top down.
But it would be nice if this pattern (essentially the same one that has been typical of our species for around a quarter of a million years) were not actively obstructed.
Like another reply, I *mostly* agree with you, but find a very serious nit to pick:
"Part of it is having better child care so women can attend events or carry on working."
You dont get "better child care" by paying strangers to watch your kids. Not even if you get someone else to pay for it. You get better child care by both parents actually having time for their children.
What typically happens is that women put off having children initially to get through school, then for this, then for that... normally career related reasons. At some point, whether sooner or later, they realise they are running out of time. They drop out of their profession, more or less, for a few months, this sets them back, and this produces a statistical signature that can be fudged to look like discrimination.
And there may be some discrimination reflected, but these days, it's very unlikely to amount to simple anti-female bias. The inability of men to get the same level of leave to deal with a new child winds up hurting the woman here, as even if the father is perfectly ok with taking a hit to HIS career to help her here, he may not be able to.
And different people take different strategies. A woman is perfectly free to try to reproduce first, THEN go to school. I know several that have and thought that this worked better. It's a later start but that means that at the end of your career your initial training will be somewhat less out of date, and you avoid the difficulty of leaving work and coming back.
Indeed.
I worked for several years in a field of science that is female dominated. (They do exist.) I can assure you that if I had presented demands to the organisers of the conferences I attended that they somehow do more to encourage male participation, that wouldnt have gone anywhere. Nor should it have. Women, and men, should be free to pursue whatever field they wish without such nannyism to help or hinder them.
Show me a real bias interfering with people's chosen careers and I will be concerned. Show me a statistical 'imbalance' easily explained by peoples choices freely made as if this is a problem, and I will tell you to get a job.
"No, sounds like the now typical politically correct use of simple statistics to prove whatever you want."
Actually this is spot on - applied to *your* post, not the one you were replying to.
"If "agency X" doesn't have equal numbers of male and female Y, then agency X is discriminating against women. It doesn't matter why the numbers aren't the same."
Politically correct mind-rot gone rampant. The poor 'female' here that you demand must be equally represented in each and every industry and 'agency' is actually a sentient, autonomous being of her own, who is capable of making her own decisions and developing and pursuing her own goals. She is not simply a number whose only purpose is appearing in the correct place on your spreadsheet.
Women are massively under-represented in many professions which feature high risk of injury or death, social hazards, and relatively low pay. How will you choose which women are going to swell the ranks of sanitations workers and firemen? Because they just arent signing up in sufficient numbers on their own you know...
"Linux is no better - it just assumes a standard DPI display, and X is just.. horrible to deal with. Yeah, I can have a huge terminal window, but that's relatively useless to me because I want nice crisp text."
Linux has nothing whatsoever to do with this. It's a correctable issue with your settings in X and most likely your GTK and/or KDE settings, depending on what software you are running on top of linux.
I am sorry but simply publishing a spec does not make your interface a standard. Multiple independent implementations in widespread use make it a standard. MiniDP is not there yet. It might be years from now, but it is not now. If you want to plug into a monitor you need a different port or an adapter.
"The legality of such action is unknown, since Brazilian laws prohibit this kind of wiretapping."
This caught my eye too. Poster needs to make up his mind. If Brazilian laws prohibit this then the legality is not "unknown" it's illegal. I have no idea what the relevant Brazilian law says, and I am guessing the submitter doesnt either.
"I bough cheap mini display port to display port, DVI, and VGA adapters and I can thus hook my MBP to any display I care to. And it saves needing some huge ass ports making the notebook thicker and bulkier."
And my point which obviously went right over your head is that those adapters you are carting around add much more bulk to your kit than simply having a regular port in the laptop to begin with.
"And just what are you toting around that you need multiple USB and Ethernet cables plugged into it to be useful?"
Ethernet should be self explanatory, hello? Then practically every gadget one might want to use these days is USB, so whatever you are doing, if you are doing more than trying to look stylish, you will use those ports.
You cant tell me these things make it too heavy when the adapters you are carrying around just so you can use a monitor and a network jack are going to weigh more and be waaay more bulky. My old EeePC has two USB ports in addition to ethernet, sd card slot, replaceable batteries, and a standard monitor port. And it's tougher and lighter to boot.
The Mozilla folks dont seem tohave their head in the game at all on the computer, and frankly I am not sure they ever did. When really basic stuff like this goes untouched for well over 10 years while the developers busy themselves adding 'features' no one wants or needs and redesigning the UI over and over again, you have to wonder what is going on. Apparently, what Mozilla really wanted to do all this time is make a toy OS for smart phones so all their 'designers' can keep themselves busy dragging bitmaps around all day without being expected to code.
So if that is where their head is at then I guess this is for the best. But it leaves a real need for someone else to step up and make a decent web browser.
"Why on earth would you want to use a Samsung Linux distro?"
First reason - to be sure you have all the drivers. (Better way to ensure that is simply to donate the drivers and specs to the kernel team for maint but people still think this way.)
Second reason - a fantasy that Samsung would actually clean up the UI and make a more polished OS. (Doubtful, the last time I saw a company try this it was Asus and their Linux version was exactly the opposite of polished. And I mean it was bloody awful. It was clear that it was made by someone who had no clue about linux, and I expect Samsung would do little better.)
Thunderbolt is proprietary (although it isnt *Apples*) as is the 'mini display port' which is the only way to attach an external monitor.
The larger issue in my mind is the lack of standard ports. A notebook that has only one USB port, NO ethernet (the option to add it is with a dongle that will then occupy that single USB port,) and NO standard display port on it is pure fail, without even considering the lack of a replaceable battery. It's small and light which is wonderful, but in order to actually USE it one would have to first buy and then carry a second case full of dongles, adapters, USB hubs, and quickchargers, and at that point you might as well just buy a real laptop - the total package will be lighter and less bulky as well as less expensive.
That's a common convention on 32bit Unix. These machines are not 32bit and they do not run Unix.
"And we still are no better off due to sloppy code. Back in the old days you *HAD* to do it right, but not now..."
Eh, I remember a lot of stuff done very wrong in the old days. But yes, there were more limits on it. You couldnt require 2gb for hello world when top of the line computers only had 2mb.
The trend since then is to every higher level developer languages, ever cheaper "programmers" trained ever more quickly to string together libraries they dont understand into applications they cannot debug to run on machines they will never understand.
I'll second this only as an old fogey, I admit that I would be tempted by a good offer in the field. Got no PDP-11 experience, and havent programmed at all in years really, I used to enjoy assembler/machine language a lot, but high level languages turned me off so I found more interesting things to do. I'm still sharp and if there was a good chance to get hired doing it I am sure I could learn it quick.
You can certainly get separate ones, there are tons of models available. Why do people think they have to use what the ISP provides? The ISP shouldnt be providing anything past provisioning the modem, they dont want to be, and when customers demand otherwise they get the cheapest box to setup and administer that the ISP can possibly find. If you are remotely technical you should just buy yourself a decent modem and router and set them up and administer them yourself. All you need the ISP to do is provision the modem.