It does look like a good step in the right direction, but then again it looks like they could have saved a whole lot of trouble by investing in WindowMaker and GNUStep from the start instead of trying to reïnvent it too.
Re:For those wondering how to stop reading
on
Hacking Vim 7.2
·
· Score: 1
^:q!
The mnemonic is "ESCape this COLON thingy - Quit and do !RETurn
Seriously, though, emacs vs. vi jokes aside, either one is a decent editor, and pretty much nothing else comes close.
An unintended side-effect of this would be that people could simply avoid making money directly from patent licensing, and thus preserve their power to pick and choose who they would permit to use their 'invention' and how indefinitely. Who would do such a thing? Not an individual inventor who needed the money, no, but well-heeled corporations who keep patent attorneys on staff and dont mind to throw a million here and a million there to prevent competition would be perfectly situated to exploit this.
Patents are not real property. They are monopoly privileges *created* by the state, and in fact they represent "expropriation" to begin with. Understanding this fact is critical.
The proposal in this article is backwards for exactly that reason. We have a problem created by state interference in the economy, and rather than propose that the state simply *quit creating the problem* we propose even more interference.
Entirely backwards. The solution here is the opposite of the proposal. Simply abolish patents instead.
"Rockoon" already said most of what comes to my mind in reply, but I'll add a little more.
Climate change is a given. The only constant is change, in fact. Sea levels rise, sea levels fall. Temperatures rise, temperatures fall. So much of what we are being sold on the AGW front appears to assume some kind of baseline fallacy - that somehow, the near-optimum climate we have enjoyed for most of recorded human history is a reliable baseline - or rather would be absent our screwing it up. But this is simply and completely untrue.
Over the long term, earths climate swings between the glacial and the hothouse ranges, with each varying periodically within non-overlapping ranges. During hothouse periods we see crocodiles and palm trees in London. During glacial periods we have ice caps which expand and contract. The climate we want to see as a perpetual baseline is the climate that has characterised recorded history but recorded history is a blink of an eye in geological terms. In the longer term view that climate is just one particular point in a glacial cycle that has never held stable.
You're worried about a rise of a degree or two in temperature? Would it be better if temperature went down by a degree or two? Can you say with any certainty what the climate would be like with no anthropogenic input at all? If you think it would continue indefinitely at a climate optimum you need to spend some time on the paleoclimate record.
I am not too worried about a swing of a degree or two either way. Yes, change is uncomfortable, but it's also inevitable. But if you think a change of one or two degrees is a big deal, think about what a change of ~+20 degrees would be like. Then take a look at the long-term climate record again and that hot-house/glacial cycle...
It's interesting, of course some do, but not so many. Corporations nowadays are pretty myopically focused on short-term payback. Funding basic research doesnt rate very highly there. To make it worse, they generally assume that funding that is the governments job, and even lobby heavily at times for government to fund basic research that they hope to commercialise later, and it's become sort of assumed that is how it is supposed to work.
Furthermore, when scientists work for corporations they tend to be looked down upon both by their peers and the public. It is obvious to everyone that, for instance, when a construction company is mandated to hire an archaeologist to survey before they tear it apart, there is a possibility he may feel influenced to do a less than thorough job of looking for something that might cost the construction company a great deal of money. (Probably this is overestimated, even - every archaeologist I know would rather have a good find than a steady job regardless, but certainly there is a potential for conflict of interest there.) On the other hand, when your work is government funded, many people seem to be oblivious to the fact that, just like a corporation, the government also has its own interests and there is no less potential for conflict of interest. But it is no less true. And the power of the government is superior by orders of magnitude, particularly if your field isnt one where there is a lot of private employment available. Getting a bad review by a government agency can not only close off chances of getting support from the major funding sources, but also from the minor, corporate ones as well, because it is effectively a much blacker stain on your reputation than a disagreement with a corporate employer would be.
I don't know what office you're looking at... back in 94 we had low resolution, non wysiwyg, simple documents.
Perhaps your office was primitive, but mine was not. Whether WYSIWYG is a good thing or not is very arguable, but a moot point for current purposes since WordPerfect 6 released in 1994 had it, and frankly did a better job of it than anything else for years. Low resolution? Screen space was more expensive, to be sure, but we had a couple of very large tubes for purposes that required them. Simple documents? One of our people did some things with WP that would probably shock you, though yes there were a few annoying difficulties when you got up around 1200 pages IIRC, they were far from insoluble (I know, because on one occasion right about 1994 I had to solve them for her - as I recall the problem was brought to me at about 10:30 and I had solved it and documented the procedure so everyone else could do it before end of day - without skipping my lunch hour.) Personally I disliked WordPerfect and the entire word processing paradigm, and I was the one that did the really big projects - with a program called Ventura Publisher. And again, it's true that the minimum 486sx machine I mentioned in the previous post struggled a bit with large projects in that - eventually I managed to get a slightly more capable machine and it flew. The modern equivalent, I am sure, would be a little sluggish today on a baseline office machine as well.)
Today it's multimedia presentations, web browsing, streaming media, etc.
We had web browsers back then too, you know. For the most part they did the same job then as now, and they did it with a lot fewer CPU cycles and a lot less memory and storage. In 1997 Opera 3 came out - a full featured web browser that absolutely flew and I could and did keep on a single *floppy disk* to run on any computer I sat down at. Today you need a gigabyte flash drive to do the same thing. I grant Opera 3 isnt very useful with the web as it is today, and I will grant that a handful of sites actually do things that use the newer capabilities - but 99% of the web does not. It is simply more bloated. Today I use a browser called firefox which is many times the size, requires far more horsepower to run more slowly, and then I use 'add-ons' to disable all the new stuff that Opera 3 would choke on anyway, with a very narrow white-list of exceptions, just to make the web usable.
I wont dispute that certain elements are a bit improved today - but only after a large step backwards. Video in particular - after Windows was forced on the world it took quite a bit of time for performance to become acceptable again. I did testing, a *386* machine I had at home, running DOS, surpassed every windows machine at the office at MPEG1 performance until the first third generation Pentium came in, many years later. What forced it from service was actually not performance, but simply that eventually we got to the point where newer codecs were in use and the necessary software was not released for DOS - it was still at that point outperforming the much newer and more powerful machines, it would play videos flawlessly when the windows boxes would drop half the frames and garble the audio on the same file. How to explain that except for code bloat?
Anticipating the obvious argument that Windows did more than DOS - I have some objections. We are talking about Windows 3.1 here, first off, it didnt really do that much more. Secondly most of the time I worked in a multitasking DOS shell that, in point of fact, actually did MORE than Windows 3.1. Lastly even if this argument were otherwise valid, in Windows I could not in any meaningful sense drop back out of it when I wanted to maximise performance on a single task - yes you could still 'exit to DOS' but the programs would no longer run when you did that. Whereas on the DOS machine I had the option to exit my multitasking shell and give the entire machine over to
When I was in Uni only a couple of obviously subpar professors ever took attendance. The rest would laugh at them and make cruel jokes at their expense - that is one thing that is supposed to end when you graduate high school. In a college environment, you pay for the lecture, the professor gives the lecture, if you didnt show up that is your loss, sucker! At least that was what I was told then. Has our tertiary education culture really become so infantalised that the expectation has reversed?
Algorithms won over brute force a long time ago. We're using brute force on the good algorithms!
This is completely contradictory to my own observations.
A typical office machine today is doing the same thing that the typical office machine was doing in 1994, with exponentially larger resource requirements (objective fact) and even poorer user interface (my own judgement, that part I freely admit is arguable) with roughly the same level of apparent "speed" or responsiveness. We are talking about a 486SX chip @33MHz with a meg or two of ram versus a dual core cpu with lots of technical advances running at over a gigahertz with at gigabyte of ram, doing the same job and doing it no better (arguably worse.) Storage capacities and requirements have increased along roughly the same scale too. If this doesnt represent code bloat and inefficient programming what would you attribute it to?
You really should have left that last sentence out, as it is untrue and serves no purpose other than the one you disclaimed.
but the two are analogous to Evolution Theory and Creationism Theory.
To the contrary, creationism is unfalsifiable, explains nothing, and has driven absolutely zero research and improved understanding of absolutely nothing. It is not a scientific theory.
Phlogiston theory was falsifiable (and ultimately, was falsified,) drove chemistry research forward for at least a century, and fuelled new understandings of chemical phenomena up to and including the point where the research it drove falsified the theory and created the demand for a new theory to replace it. It was therefore a scientific theory.
Also in regards to alchemists and their supposedly 4 element theory - a similar argument applies. Without alchemy modern chemistry would never have developed. They may not have been fully scientific in the modern sense, but they deserve quite a bit of the credit for creating what we know as science today. Even their commonly maligned 4 element theory isnt so out of date as you imply - yes, we know many elements now, and none of them match the lists an alchemist would give you. But what has changed is the definition of element. Today we speak of their 'elements' of earth, water, air and fire but call them 'states of matter' rather than elements - they are solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma.
First point, those particular mental-state inferences are *relatively* amenable to evidence. If I spend months obtaining different chemicals, using fake names to do so, then finally mix those up to make a bomb to kill someone, we may fairly infer that I planned the killing. In the context of 'hate crime' laws the scenarios tend to be much less clear-cut. Many people (in all probability the majority of people) tell tasteless jokes or make crude comments that I perceive as racist. If one of those people later commits a crime, and the victim of the crime happens to be of a different colour/ethnic group than the perpetrator, is this really evidence of hatred? Remember that many people make such comments but dont commit any crimes. Remember that others make these comments then commit crimes against people of their own group. Remember that if they randomly target, they will sometimes choose targets from another group. If they target based on some non-protected criteria that may skew the chances of them choosing a target which is a member of a protected group, even though the selection was driven by entirely different criteria. Give me a few thousand cases and some time to do the math and I could tell you with a fair degree of certainty that *some* of the cases must have been driven by the prohibited forms of discrimination (or not) but in any individual case? It's often going to be completely unknowable. And given the dynamics of the justice system, this can only lead to constant pressure to erode standards of proof in order to give the law application.
Furthermore in the case of premeditated vs. spontaneous murder the dichotomy is fairly good. You cant really have it both ways, either you planned it and took concrete steps beforehand or you did not, there is precious little middle ground there. Distinguishing motive, however, is more fuzzy, because it is normal for people to act based on not a single, but multiple coinciding motivations. Someone may dislike you based on your skin colour, yet mug you primarily because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time flashing a lot of cash. That person would certainly have mugged you if your skin colour had been different, let us say, but perhaps would have hesitated a moment before doing it anyway in that case. Hate crime or not? The closer you look at these issues the murkier they get, the more room there is for the prejudice and motivations of the court officers themselves to decide cases rather than any objective facts.
Now beyond the fact that the two cases (discriminating planned vs. spontaneous crimes as opposed to discriminating crimes motivated by hatred of a protected group from crimes motivated by other factors) are actually quite different, I think that a good case can be made that we should NOT be discriminating between premeditated and spontaneous murder as we do anyway. The murder victim is just as dead either way, the relatives are harmed just as much, why should it make so much difference in sentencing? What is the underlying message this teaches? That it is better to be hot-headed and dangerous than cold-blooded and dangerous? I am not at all certain that is a beneficial message. If we must distinguish two classes, the medieval icelandic system seems to me more logical and beneficial - in that system it was trying to conceal your crime that elevated a murder from the second to the first degree. That distinction, at least, serves a clear and beneficial purpose - it taught people to take responsibility for their actions, and punished those that made it more difficult to enforce the law.
Your fancy logic is no use here, this is politics. You have to disprove Cuccinelli's belief that "homosexuality is wrong" and his apparent reinforcement that it moves him up the voting chain so the populace agrees.
A very large percentage of the population around the world happens to agree with him. (I dont, personally, but they are clearly the majority around the world.)
However you do NOT have to convince them otherwise in order to convince them that gays should not be legally persecuted. You just have to convince them that the entire subject is outside of the proper purvue of the government to begin with, generally a much easier argument.
Of course, if what you want is not to simply put gay people on an even playing field legally, but you really want to give them special privileges instead, no argument is going to work with these people. Or with me either, for that matter. "Hate crime" legislation is dangerous nonsense. If violent crimes are not being dealt with properly, that is an issue to be dealt with across the board, but we should never have a law that imposes a heavier penalty for assaulting a member of a 'protected class' differently than an assault on any other citizen, and we also should insofar as at all possible avoid defining crimes by ultimately unknowable mental states of the aggressors, rather than simply by their actions.
You, sir, are the one that doesnt understand what an open standard is. An open standard is one that everyone can implement.
Only people with the express permission of the patent holders can implement H.264 legally. That is the diametric opposite of open however you look at it.
You're legally prohibited from implementing H.264 except with permission of the people who own it. That's about as proprietary as something can possibly get.
If there was a codec with no documentation whatsoever, just binary-only implementations - that could still be more open than H.264, because the only obstacle to implementing it would be one's ability to reverse engineer the binaries, rather than one's ability to fight off the police.
This is truly insightful. I dont often mod ACs up, but I would mod this one up if I had em. Just quoting it because a lot of people dont even see AC posts, and this one deserves to be read.
If you have mod points, please use them on the parent, not me.
It doesnt matter that they dont own it as long as it raises the cost of entry it will benefit them.
And it doesnt matter that the barrier is low, in this case, since their main competition is free software. Even a nominal entrance fee is sufficient to exclude free from the party.
Because Apple and Microsoft are pushing patented, unfree "standards" as a way of raising the barrier to entry to the market. You see, in a free market, the price of goods approaches the cost of their production, which means profit margins tend towards the minimum. Both companies seek to avoid this by raising the barrier to entry to exclude competition. Since the main competition they fear is from free software, they dont even need to raise it very high in monetary terms to lock out their competition and wallow in monopoly rents. Even nominal royalties lock out the competition, which is why they are indeed desperate to get patented technologies adopted as standards in every field possible.
A friend of mine has a house that backs onto a small nature preserve. On the other side of that woodland area is an ampitheatre, at which a great many concerts are held. He can sit out back and hear the concerts from his patio, or he can pack a picnic basket and take his wife and kids on a short walk through the woodland to a point directly overlooking the ampitheatre and hear it much better - in fact at that range the volume level is just perfect. They can take binoculars and see the concert as well, almost as if they were in the front row, without suffering from hearing loss and without paying for (very expensive) tickets.
Unless the source can be compiled from scratch and used in place of the pre-compiled versions, including flashing of firmware, creation of installable ROM images or OS installs, having source code guaranteed by analysis to be exploit-free gains the user nothing. There could still be spyware in the final product. Short of self-installing, I guess creation of bit-equivalent or checksum-equivalent binaries would be good enough as a verification mechanism.
It should be common sense that you have to verify that the source code you were given actually compiles to a bit-identical executable in order for the exercise to mean anything at all.
I think you meant to say, copyright infringement is not theft. Stealing is not limited to physical property; plagiarism is considered stealing (the credit for) words, for example. Legal definition of 'steal' is irrelevant, if U.S. law defines stealing at all. It does define 'theft'.
Stealing and theft are synonyms. See stealing: S: (n) larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing (the act of taking something from someone unlawfully.
"Stealing credit" makes sense. It's a more metaphorical application, but you are still *taking* something. "Stealing copyright" could be used similarly, but it would refer to what SCO/Caldera is attempting to do in court, not to some kid downloading a song. He is not taking anything from anyone, at most he is violating a statute that granted someone else a monopoly on reproducion of a particular pattern.
Once again, copyright infringement is NOT stealing. Nor is copying copyrighted data necessarily and always copyright infringement. Finally, it's better to be on the right side for the wrong reasons than to be on the wrong side entirely.
He's a tortured artist
Used to be in the Eagles
Now he whines
Like a wounded beagle
Poet of despair!
Pumped up with hot air!
He's serious, pretentious
And I just don't care
Slashdot Mirror
It does look like a good step in the right direction, but then again it looks like they could have saved a whole lot of trouble by investing in WindowMaker and GNUStep from the start instead of trying to reïnvent it too.
^:q!
The mnemonic is "ESCape this COLON thingy - Quit and do !RETurn
Seriously, though, emacs vs. vi jokes aside, either one is a decent editor, and pretty much nothing else comes close.
An unintended side-effect of this would be that people could simply avoid making money directly from patent licensing, and thus preserve their power to pick and choose who they would permit to use their 'invention' and how indefinitely. Who would do such a thing? Not an individual inventor who needed the money, no, but well-heeled corporations who keep patent attorneys on staff and dont mind to throw a million here and a million there to prevent competition would be perfectly situated to exploit this.
No, actually it doesnt.
Patents are not real property. They are monopoly privileges *created* by the state, and in fact they represent "expropriation" to begin with. Understanding this fact is critical.
The proposal in this article is backwards for exactly that reason. We have a problem created by state interference in the economy, and rather than propose that the state simply *quit creating the problem* we propose even more interference.
Entirely backwards. The solution here is the opposite of the proposal. Simply abolish patents instead.
"Rockoon" already said most of what comes to my mind in reply, but I'll add a little more.
Climate change is a given. The only constant is change, in fact. Sea levels rise, sea levels fall. Temperatures rise, temperatures fall. So much of what we are being sold on the AGW front appears to assume some kind of baseline fallacy - that somehow, the near-optimum climate we have enjoyed for most of recorded human history is a reliable baseline - or rather would be absent our screwing it up. But this is simply and completely untrue.
Over the long term, earths climate swings between the glacial and the hothouse ranges, with each varying periodically within non-overlapping ranges. During hothouse periods we see crocodiles and palm trees in London. During glacial periods we have ice caps which expand and contract. The climate we want to see as a perpetual baseline is the climate that has characterised recorded history but recorded history is a blink of an eye in geological terms. In the longer term view that climate is just one particular point in a glacial cycle that has never held stable.
You're worried about a rise of a degree or two in temperature? Would it be better if temperature went down by a degree or two? Can you say with any certainty what the climate would be like with no anthropogenic input at all? If you think it would continue indefinitely at a climate optimum you need to spend some time on the paleoclimate record.
I am not too worried about a swing of a degree or two either way. Yes, change is uncomfortable, but it's also inevitable. But if you think a change of one or two degrees is a big deal, think about what a change of ~+20 degrees would be like. Then take a look at the long-term climate record again and that hot-house/glacial cycle...
It's interesting, of course some do, but not so many. Corporations nowadays are pretty myopically focused on short-term payback. Funding basic research doesnt rate very highly there. To make it worse, they generally assume that funding that is the governments job, and even lobby heavily at times for government to fund basic research that they hope to commercialise later, and it's become sort of assumed that is how it is supposed to work.
Furthermore, when scientists work for corporations they tend to be looked down upon both by their peers and the public. It is obvious to everyone that, for instance, when a construction company is mandated to hire an archaeologist to survey before they tear it apart, there is a possibility he may feel influenced to do a less than thorough job of looking for something that might cost the construction company a great deal of money. (Probably this is overestimated, even - every archaeologist I know would rather have a good find than a steady job regardless, but certainly there is a potential for conflict of interest there.) On the other hand, when your work is government funded, many people seem to be oblivious to the fact that, just like a corporation, the government also has its own interests and there is no less potential for conflict of interest. But it is no less true. And the power of the government is superior by orders of magnitude, particularly if your field isnt one where there is a lot of private employment available. Getting a bad review by a government agency can not only close off chances of getting support from the major funding sources, but also from the minor, corporate ones as well, because it is effectively a much blacker stain on your reputation than a disagreement with a corporate employer would be.
Perhaps your office was primitive, but mine was not. Whether WYSIWYG is a good thing or not is very arguable, but a moot point for current purposes since WordPerfect 6 released in 1994 had it, and frankly did a better job of it than anything else for years. Low resolution? Screen space was more expensive, to be sure, but we had a couple of very large tubes for purposes that required them. Simple documents? One of our people did some things with WP that would probably shock you, though yes there were a few annoying difficulties when you got up around 1200 pages IIRC, they were far from insoluble (I know, because on one occasion right about 1994 I had to solve them for her - as I recall the problem was brought to me at about 10:30 and I had solved it and documented the procedure so everyone else could do it before end of day - without skipping my lunch hour.) Personally I disliked WordPerfect and the entire word processing paradigm, and I was the one that did the really big projects - with a program called Ventura Publisher. And again, it's true that the minimum 486sx machine I mentioned in the previous post struggled a bit with large projects in that - eventually I managed to get a slightly more capable machine and it flew. The modern equivalent, I am sure, would be a little sluggish today on a baseline office machine as well.)
We had web browsers back then too, you know. For the most part they did the same job then as now, and they did it with a lot fewer CPU cycles and a lot less memory and storage. In 1997 Opera 3 came out - a full featured web browser that absolutely flew and I could and did keep on a single *floppy disk* to run on any computer I sat down at. Today you need a gigabyte flash drive to do the same thing. I grant Opera 3 isnt very useful with the web as it is today, and I will grant that a handful of sites actually do things that use the newer capabilities - but 99% of the web does not. It is simply more bloated. Today I use a browser called firefox which is many times the size, requires far more horsepower to run more slowly, and then I use 'add-ons' to disable all the new stuff that Opera 3 would choke on anyway, with a very narrow white-list of exceptions, just to make the web usable.
I wont dispute that certain elements are a bit improved today - but only after a large step backwards. Video in particular - after Windows was forced on the world it took quite a bit of time for performance to become acceptable again. I did testing, a *386* machine I had at home, running DOS, surpassed every windows machine at the office at MPEG1 performance until the first third generation Pentium came in, many years later. What forced it from service was actually not performance, but simply that eventually we got to the point where newer codecs were in use and the necessary software was not released for DOS - it was still at that point outperforming the much newer and more powerful machines, it would play videos flawlessly when the windows boxes would drop half the frames and garble the audio on the same file. How to explain that except for code bloat?
Anticipating the obvious argument that Windows did more than DOS - I have some objections. We are talking about Windows 3.1 here, first off, it didnt really do that much more. Secondly most of the time I worked in a multitasking DOS shell that, in point of fact, actually did MORE than Windows 3.1. Lastly even if this argument were otherwise valid, in Windows I could not in any meaningful sense drop back out of it when I wanted to maximise performance on a single task - yes you could still 'exit to DOS' but the programs would no longer run when you did that. Whereas on the DOS machine I had the option to exit my multitasking shell and give the entire machine over to
When I was in Uni only a couple of obviously subpar professors ever took attendance. The rest would laugh at them and make cruel jokes at their expense - that is one thing that is supposed to end when you graduate high school. In a college environment, you pay for the lecture, the professor gives the lecture, if you didnt show up that is your loss, sucker! At least that was what I was told then. Has our tertiary education culture really become so infantalised that the expectation has reversed?
This is completely contradictory to my own observations.
A typical office machine today is doing the same thing that the typical office machine was doing in 1994, with exponentially larger resource requirements (objective fact) and even poorer user interface (my own judgement, that part I freely admit is arguable) with roughly the same level of apparent "speed" or responsiveness. We are talking about a 486SX chip @33MHz with a meg or two of ram versus a dual core cpu with lots of technical advances running at over a gigahertz with at gigabyte of ram, doing the same job and doing it no better (arguably worse.) Storage capacities and requirements have increased along roughly the same scale too. If this doesnt represent code bloat and inefficient programming what would you attribute it to?
You really should have left that last sentence out, as it is untrue and serves no purpose other than the one you disclaimed.
To the contrary, creationism is unfalsifiable, explains nothing, and has driven absolutely zero research and improved understanding of absolutely nothing. It is not a scientific theory.
Phlogiston theory was falsifiable (and ultimately, was falsified,) drove chemistry research forward for at least a century, and fuelled new understandings of chemical phenomena up to and including the point where the research it drove falsified the theory and created the demand for a new theory to replace it. It was therefore a scientific theory.
Also in regards to alchemists and their supposedly 4 element theory - a similar argument applies. Without alchemy modern chemistry would never have developed. They may not have been fully scientific in the modern sense, but they deserve quite a bit of the credit for creating what we know as science today. Even their commonly maligned 4 element theory isnt so out of date as you imply - yes, we know many elements now, and none of them match the lists an alchemist would give you. But what has changed is the definition of element. Today we speak of their 'elements' of earth, water, air and fire but call them 'states of matter' rather than elements - they are solid, liquid, gaseous and plasma.
First point, those particular mental-state inferences are *relatively* amenable to evidence. If I spend months obtaining different chemicals, using fake names to do so, then finally mix those up to make a bomb to kill someone, we may fairly infer that I planned the killing. In the context of 'hate crime' laws the scenarios tend to be much less clear-cut. Many people (in all probability the majority of people) tell tasteless jokes or make crude comments that I perceive as racist. If one of those people later commits a crime, and the victim of the crime happens to be of a different colour/ethnic group than the perpetrator, is this really evidence of hatred? Remember that many people make such comments but dont commit any crimes. Remember that others make these comments then commit crimes against people of their own group. Remember that if they randomly target, they will sometimes choose targets from another group. If they target based on some non-protected criteria that may skew the chances of them choosing a target which is a member of a protected group, even though the selection was driven by entirely different criteria. Give me a few thousand cases and some time to do the math and I could tell you with a fair degree of certainty that *some* of the cases must have been driven by the prohibited forms of discrimination (or not) but in any individual case? It's often going to be completely unknowable. And given the dynamics of the justice system, this can only lead to constant pressure to erode standards of proof in order to give the law application.
Furthermore in the case of premeditated vs. spontaneous murder the dichotomy is fairly good. You cant really have it both ways, either you planned it and took concrete steps beforehand or you did not, there is precious little middle ground there. Distinguishing motive, however, is more fuzzy, because it is normal for people to act based on not a single, but multiple coinciding motivations. Someone may dislike you based on your skin colour, yet mug you primarily because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time flashing a lot of cash. That person would certainly have mugged you if your skin colour had been different, let us say, but perhaps would have hesitated a moment before doing it anyway in that case. Hate crime or not? The closer you look at these issues the murkier they get, the more room there is for the prejudice and motivations of the court officers themselves to decide cases rather than any objective facts.
Now beyond the fact that the two cases (discriminating planned vs. spontaneous crimes as opposed to discriminating crimes motivated by hatred of a protected group from crimes motivated by other factors) are actually quite different, I think that a good case can be made that we should NOT be discriminating between premeditated and spontaneous murder as we do anyway. The murder victim is just as dead either way, the relatives are harmed just as much, why should it make so much difference in sentencing? What is the underlying message this teaches? That it is better to be hot-headed and dangerous than cold-blooded and dangerous? I am not at all certain that is a beneficial message. If we must distinguish two classes, the medieval icelandic system seems to me more logical and beneficial - in that system it was trying to conceal your crime that elevated a murder from the second to the first degree. That distinction, at least, serves a clear and beneficial purpose - it taught people to take responsibility for their actions, and punished those that made it more difficult to enforce the law.
A very large percentage of the population around the world happens to agree with him. (I dont, personally, but they are clearly the majority around the world.)
However you do NOT have to convince them otherwise in order to convince them that gays should not be legally persecuted. You just have to convince them that the entire subject is outside of the proper purvue of the government to begin with, generally a much easier argument.
Of course, if what you want is not to simply put gay people on an even playing field legally, but you really want to give them special privileges instead, no argument is going to work with these people. Or with me either, for that matter. "Hate crime" legislation is dangerous nonsense. If violent crimes are not being dealt with properly, that is an issue to be dealt with across the board, but we should never have a law that imposes a heavier penalty for assaulting a member of a 'protected class' differently than an assault on any other citizen, and we also should insofar as at all possible avoid defining crimes by ultimately unknowable mental states of the aggressors, rather than simply by their actions.
You, sir, are the one that doesnt understand what an open standard is. An open standard is one that everyone can implement.
Only people with the express permission of the patent holders can implement H.264 legally. That is the diametric opposite of open however you look at it.
H.264 is NOT an "open standard."
This is truly insightful. I dont often mod ACs up, but I would mod this one up if I had em. Just quoting it because a lot of people dont even see AC posts, and this one deserves to be read.
If you have mod points, please use them on the parent, not me.
Did you even read my post?
It doesnt matter that they dont own it as long as it raises the cost of entry it will benefit them.
And it doesnt matter that the barrier is low, in this case, since their main competition is free software. Even a nominal entrance fee is sufficient to exclude free from the party.
Because Apple and Microsoft are pushing patented, unfree "standards" as a way of raising the barrier to entry to the market. You see, in a free market, the price of goods approaches the cost of their production, which means profit margins tend towards the minimum. Both companies seek to avoid this by raising the barrier to entry to exclude competition. Since the main competition they fear is from free software, they dont even need to raise it very high in monetary terms to lock out their competition and wallow in monopoly rents. Even nominal royalties lock out the competition, which is why they are indeed desperate to get patented technologies adopted as standards in every field possible.
Last time I checked T-Mobile was indeed the only option. And yes, their coverage sucked, and so did everything else about the "service." :(
A friend of mine has a house that backs onto a small nature preserve. On the other side of that woodland area is an ampitheatre, at which a great many concerts are held. He can sit out back and hear the concerts from his patio, or he can pack a picnic basket and take his wife and kids on a short walk through the woodland to a point directly overlooking the ampitheatre and hear it much better - in fact at that range the volume level is just perfect. They can take binoculars and see the concert as well, almost as if they were in the front row, without suffering from hearing loss and without paying for (very expensive) tickets.
Do you think he is stealing too?
As long as it's not deliberately obfuscated it would not be difficult to account for that.
Au contraire, when it comes to security, everyone wins when no one trusts each other.
The chinese move, at least, is long overdue. No one should ever trust a device whose source code is secret.
It should be common sense that you have to verify that the source code you were given actually compiles to a bit-identical executable in order for the exercise to mean anything at all.
Stealing and theft are synonyms. See stealing: S: (n) larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing (the act of taking something from someone unlawfully.
"Stealing credit" makes sense. It's a more metaphorical application, but you are still *taking* something. "Stealing copyright" could be used similarly, but it would refer to what SCO/Caldera is attempting to do in court, not to some kid downloading a song. He is not taking anything from anyone, at most he is violating a statute that granted someone else a monopoly on reproducion of a particular pattern.
Once again, copyright infringement is NOT stealing. Nor is copying copyrighted data necessarily and always copyright infringement. Finally, it's better to be on the right side for the wrong reasons than to be on the wrong side entirely.
No really!