iOS devices aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things. [...] Firefox alone has 400+ million users.
How much does Firefox cost again? How much does an iOS device cost?
If you had the choice of marketing to 160 million people who are demonstrably willing to spend a premium on technology, or marketing to 400 million people whose reason for choosing the browser was "It's like, free, and more secure than IE," which would you go to more lengths to target? I bet you'd be surprised at how lucrative the "only 160 million person" demographic actually is for a lot of marketers.
The side effect is you are at the wims of mpegla who may increase the fees to use thair format in the future.
Yep, MPEG-LA will raise the royalty by no more than 10% in every 5-year licensing period. This gives you a very easy-to-budget number.
There are no license fees on using the format but perhaps a risk on getting sued by mepgla
I'd say it's almost a guarantee that MPEG-LA will be pursuing legal action if WebM looks like it's going to actually take off. Whether or not they can win remains to be seen, but expect years of back-and-forth in court all the same.
And if I'm a video producer, what do I do in the meantime? Pay my H.264 royalty fees, and wrap that video in Flash for the browsers that can't support H.264 via the HTML5 video tag.
The only site that will transcode its video to WebM is YouTube. And they may drag their feet on it for a while if they get slapped with a lawsuit, as well.
If google released it to the public domain, then their implementation would be prior art, invalidating any subsequent attempt to patent the technology.
My concern with the patents on WebM boil down to the simple fact that Google won't indemnify users. They're flogging their pet standard, but it seems they're not confident enough in it to say, "and we'll help you if anybody comes after you." If they're not confident enough in their patent status to say that... why should anybody else be? It's a pretty huge risk they're asking everybody else to take.
I may have to pay for H.264, but at least I can *plan and budget* for that expenditure. WebM is free today, but if I somebody brings a suit against me tomorrow, I may have to spend way more than I ever would have spent on H.264 royalties to defend myself.
There are no free software implementations of the complete specification, and certainly none which are legally licensed.
You mean, except x264, which is by most accounts, one of the most *full-featured* H.264 implementations available... right?
Flash is far from a paragon of openness
That's understatement by a mile. Flash is a closed, proprietary standard. There is nothing "open" about it.
When it comes down to it, the internet doesn't need that much of a push to get off flash, it's going to happen naturally.
That's correct - Apple's refusal to put Flash on iOS devices signalled the end of Flash as the ubiquitous video playback wrapper on the web. Google's refusal to continue supporting H.264 has simply prolonged Flash's lifespan by a few years.
Let's be very clear here: H.264 is an "open standard" - anyone may get a copy of the spec and implement it, and expect that their encoder/decoder will interoperate well with any other piece of software or hardware that implements the H.264 standard. What H.264 is *not* is a "free standard" - it's got patents, and royalty fees required for some uses of the standard- basically, if you're making money off of H.264, you need to pay a fee to the MPEG-LA consortium. There is nothing preventing Google from allowing its browser to support both types of video for playback via an HTML5 video tag, but only providing WebM-encoded videos on their hosting services. You can't say that you're dropping H.264 support in the interests of "freedom" while continuing to embed & support Flash - at least, not with a straight face.
So what happens if you devise a means of payment where you don't need to show id and the cashier is just waiting for the machine to go "beep" or the green light to turn on?
Just a round number guess, but I think what happens is that 95+% of transactions that go through this way are faster, easier, and more convenient for customers.
I'm not sure why you see more risk with this than there is with a credit card. When I go to the store and use a credit card today, the clerk just waits for the machine to go beep and the green light turns on. They rarely-if-ever compare signatures, and it's not like they're trained in handwriting analysis anyway. When's the last time that a cashier compared the signature on the back of the card with the signature you put on the receipt? Or asked for an ID if you didn't have a signature on the back of your card? I can't even remember the last time I was asked for an ID - part of this is apathy on the part of the cashier, and part of this is the fact that we tend to go to the same places repeatedly, and the cashiers get to know their customers by name & by sight.
it is you who has the comprehension problem. you or i would need a license to export a solitaire game for free to iran. this is a separate license from that required to do business with and exchange money with iranian companies.
And how do you think Google makes money? They're not selling a product intended for consumption by Iranian companies. They're distributing a free product, intended to generate them advertising revenue by driving more people to their sites, resulting in more pageviews and thus more ad impressions and thus more income for Google.
Or did you really think that Google could only make income from Iranian customers by taking money from Iranian companies?
Yes, I've called you a name: dipshit. And as far as I'm concerned, if the shoe fits, wear it. Having a "debate" with you would require you to have read the summary at least, and ideally, the entire article. It's clear you haven't, so it's probably for the best that you just give up trying to flog your tired preconceived notions about Google being a white knight.
1. by allowing them to see countries other than their own.
They can do that already without Google Earth, Chrome and Picasa. So the answer is, these products provide no benefit to the Iranian people other than giving them another option to Flickr or Facebook. A mighty blow for freedom, eh?
i think that you should answer your own bonus question given that it is illegal for american companies to do business with and receive money from iran. since there is no apparent monetary reward to google, maybe they're actually trying to not be evil. i know. it's a strange concept.
Did you even read the fucking summary? Google has received approval to allow downloads of their products in Iran, because they have satisfied embargo requirements that the US government put in place.
If they are being ALLOWED BY THE GOVERNMENT to distribute their products to Iranian customers, what part of the answer to "does google have such an exemption to do business there?" is unclear to you?
If "attention and credit" are the things you want, and you're claiming that they never happen to people in IT, then you're either an incompetent, surrounded by incompetents, or you work for the most evil company ever known to man.
Be better at your job, or get a better job. IT people get plenty of "credit" and "attention" and "appreciation" - if you're not one of the people getting that treatment, then perhaps you don't deserve it.
This is the nature of the job. If you work in IT, you are in a support role. If you are in a support role, then you are... supporting the business. When you don't support the business, and things break down, you get yelled at for not doing your job well. Why would you expect to be treated to free beer, hookers and blow for keeping some computer systems running?
There are billions of people out there working across countless companies and industries. How many of them are treated like rock stars just for getting their jobs done? (Hint: Not many, aside from the *literal* rock stars.)
When's the last time you had your car towed to your mechanic's place and then demanded that he interrupt his entire schedule of work to fix your car as soon as possible, and probably got a little pissy because he didn't have anybody free to look at it until the next day? I bet that happened a lot more recently than the last time you decided to send him a couple hundred bucks, or a thank you card, "just for keeping things running smoothly!"
These days, of course, doctors are rare and therefore expensive, so people can't afford to have a family doctor and you no longer have any idea how well this system used to work.
These are known as General Practitioners, or Primary Care Physicians, and suggesting that nobody has them or can afford them is just patently false. And for the record, I've had exactly 3 primary care physicians in my life: the first I moved away from after college, the second retired, and the third is the one I see currently. How did I choose them? Well the first was a choice made by my parents; The second was based on... wait for it... recommendations. The third was based on... wait for it... recommendations from the second! The key thing is, along with those recommendations, I knew that there was a certain minimum level of capability each doctor had to have in order to hang a shingle and practice medicine. Beyond that minimum, I was able to make choices based on the recommendations of family, friends, and co-workers. It's amazing how a reputation-based system can coexist with minimum licensing standards!
Any doctor who has an MD and has passed their boards today can sew up a stab wound, I'm not sure what your point is there. They all receive a minimum level of training, and that minimum level of training DOES include a surgical rotation and an internal medicine rotation in medical school. They're called clerkships, or clinical rotations. These are enough that - at a bare minimum, the doctor can certainly keep you going until you can receive more appropriate care from a specialist after being transported to them.
The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery.
Oh no, that would never do - then they're imposing THEIR choices on ME. That's not freedom!
But you're definitely right though - I'd rather have a couple of EMTs who are probably 2-year community-college graduates deciding on an appropriate standard of care for me, rather than a group licensed physicians who have been through medical school and internships and passed their licensing boards. That makes MUCH more sense than having a minimum standard of education, training and licensing that ANYBODY must pass in order to be a physician, guaranteeing a minimum standard of quality in the care you receive.
You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that.
I'll turn that around: You believe you can trust a bunch of people with zero medical expertise in your community to set standards for medical practices and care. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you're just naturally foolish.
A community can get together and agree on a set of building codes, and as a member of this community you would have a say in it.
Who do you trust more to create a building code outlining a minimum set of standards and practices for construction? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of people who build apartment buildings by trade?
Who do you trust more to define standards of care for medical professionals? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of doctors and nurses who have studied the outcomes of hundreds of cases?
There is such a thing as professional expertise. It is called "expertise" because it is not something that the average person has. It is, in fact, an "above average" understanding of a particular topic or area of study, which then qualifies the person who possesses it to issue a much more authoritative statement about that particular topic or area of study.
Please explain how Picasa, Google Earth, and Chrome will "make things better" (or in fact, make things different in the slightest) for the Iranian citizen?
We're not talking about milk and baby food, you dipshit. Last I checked, those products don't have built in TOR functionality, or any other super-secret "make me totally anonymous and let me get unfiltered news and data from the outside world" features.
So answer two questions: 1) How will these products benefit the Iranian people? 2) How will NOT having these products harm the Iranian people?
Bonus question: How will people using these products in Iran fatten Google's bottom line?
Your own argument, that the US Government and the EFF "developed and exported TOR to countries with oppressive governments" simply bolsters my point that an assertion that places the US government's "bad behavior" in the same league as the Iranian government's "bad behavior" is slipshod moral relativism at it's finest.
Now, if you'll explain how Chrome, Picasa, and Google Earth function to "keep oppressed people more informed" in Iran, I'll gladly hear about how Google is fighting the good fight for freedom. But I think you're going to have an awful hard time demonstrating that "picture sharing" and "browsing the web" or "looking at maps" is making the people of Iran "more free". Chrome certainly doesn't have TOR built into it just for the Iranian market.
So no, nothing Google is doing is helping the people of Iran be "more informed and interact with the outside world with less chance of reprisal." I do think it's helping Google make money, though!
Then the google guys also need to reconcile the Iranian government's known repressive behavior with their "don't be evil" slogan.
Or have we already forgotten the crackdowns after the last "elections" there?
But then the google guys also found a way to justify censoring results in china in order to keep doing business there! I guess the slogan should be, "Don't be evil (unless it's really profitable for us to be)!"
Your argument that the US is "just as bad" is morally relativistic bullshit. I'm sure it'll garner you a +5 Insightful here, too.
Professional licensing can still remain in a free market.
But that's not what the post I initially responded to suggested. The suggestion was - and I quote - "It would have been much better if all this licensing nonsense disappeared and we could rely on the traditional reputation system that the free market uses to maintain quality."
There's a difference between "no legislatively-mandated licensing requirement" and "no licensing requirements at all."
Fair enough. I just had to ask because TFA describes them as an "extortion racket," and it strikes me that if that's what they do, it doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
I can understand why the BSA would be antithetical to FOSS types, but what you described doesn't sound like particularly vicious tactics.
Why would anybody want to work in INDUSTRY? If you do your job correctly, then everything runs smoothly, and you don't get any attention (or credit) at all. But as soon as something goes wrong, it's obviously because YOU FUCKED UP, and you get LOTS of attention! Other than money, can anyone cite an upside to working in INDUSTRY?
This statement remains equally true when replacing "INDUSTRY" with any line of work you care to name.
They're still a "customer" of Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or wherever they bought the book. They're also still a pirate violating the author's copyright. And for the violation of the copyright, yes, the person whose rights are being violated should still sue.
Suing ExampleCorp in that instance is, in fact, suing your customer. Of course, what the BSA prefers to do is to instead demand that ExampleCorp buy licences from them to cover the other thousand boxes, using the threat of a lawsuit to make them comply.
You're not suggesting that this is an unreasonable course of action are you?
If you're audited, and found to have 500 legal copies of the software running on 1500 systems, demanding that the person who is in violation of the license terms pay for the other 1000 copies they're using seems pretty reasonable to me.
Off the top of my head, I'd say the skill set that gets your project started next Monday, landing you the lucrative 3-month contract, rather than the one that says "Give me 3 months to learn that new tech," and letting the contract go to a competitor.
Because for them to call themselves "doctors" and be hired by a hospital in that capacity (or practice medicine in their own practice) they must be certified and licensed to practice medicine.
The GGP poster was suggesting we do away with "licensing nonsense," and rely on a market-based "reputation system" for professions.
The reason you don't have to "know and/or care," is precisely because of those licensing requirements. I assure you, if we did away with things like professional licensing requirements and medical boards, you would certainly need to know, and you would care very much about what sort of certifications the man or woman about to perform emergency thoracic surgery on you possesses.
I do believe we're looking at an ad hominem fallacy!
"Your point about Facebook's sloppy engineering practices is false because YOU never did anything important[1] like writing the code to Facebook."
[1] for some definitions of 'important'.
I'd also like to submit a fallacy of my own: "Facebook is very popular, therefore Facebook's engineering practices MUST be excellent." Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong, can they?
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard
ITU-T, IETF, and ISO definitions - all of which permit royalties.
If you want to use a different definition, you really need to specify which definition you're using.
How much does Firefox cost again? How much does an iOS device cost?
If you had the choice of marketing to 160 million people who are demonstrably willing to spend a premium on technology, or marketing to 400 million people whose reason for choosing the browser was "It's like, free, and more secure than IE," which would you go to more lengths to target? I bet you'd be surprised at how lucrative the "only 160 million person" demographic actually is for a lot of marketers.
Yep, MPEG-LA will raise the royalty by no more than 10% in every 5-year licensing period. This gives you a very easy-to-budget number.
I'd say it's almost a guarantee that MPEG-LA will be pursuing legal action if WebM looks like it's going to actually take off. Whether or not they can win remains to be seen, but expect years of back-and-forth in court all the same.
And if I'm a video producer, what do I do in the meantime? Pay my H.264 royalty fees, and wrap that video in Flash for the browsers that can't support H.264 via the HTML5 video tag.
The only site that will transcode its video to WebM is YouTube. And they may drag their feet on it for a while if they get slapped with a lawsuit, as well.
If google released it to the public domain, then their implementation would be prior art, invalidating any subsequent attempt to patent the technology.
My concern with the patents on WebM boil down to the simple fact that Google won't indemnify users. They're flogging their pet standard, but it seems they're not confident enough in it to say, "and we'll help you if anybody comes after you." If they're not confident enough in their patent status to say that... why should anybody else be? It's a pretty huge risk they're asking everybody else to take.
I may have to pay for H.264, but at least I can *plan and budget* for that expenditure. WebM is free today, but if I somebody brings a suit against me tomorrow, I may have to spend way more than I ever would have spent on H.264 royalties to defend myself.
You mean, except x264, which is by most accounts, one of the most *full-featured* H.264 implementations available... right?
That's understatement by a mile. Flash is a closed, proprietary standard. There is nothing "open" about it.
That's correct - Apple's refusal to put Flash on iOS devices signalled the end of Flash as the ubiquitous video playback wrapper on the web. Google's refusal to continue supporting H.264 has simply prolonged Flash's lifespan by a few years.
Let's be very clear here: H.264 is an "open standard" - anyone may get a copy of the spec and implement it, and expect that their encoder/decoder will interoperate well with any other piece of software or hardware that implements the H.264 standard. What H.264 is *not* is a "free standard" - it's got patents, and royalty fees required for some uses of the standard- basically, if you're making money off of H.264, you need to pay a fee to the MPEG-LA consortium. There is nothing preventing Google from allowing its browser to support both types of video for playback via an HTML5 video tag, but only providing WebM-encoded videos on their hosting services. You can't say that you're dropping H.264 support in the interests of "freedom" while continuing to embed & support Flash - at least, not with a straight face.
Just a round number guess, but I think what happens is that 95+% of transactions that go through this way are faster, easier, and more convenient for customers.
I'm not sure why you see more risk with this than there is with a credit card. When I go to the store and use a credit card today, the clerk just waits for the machine to go beep and the green light turns on. They rarely-if-ever compare signatures, and it's not like they're trained in handwriting analysis anyway. When's the last time that a cashier compared the signature on the back of the card with the signature you put on the receipt? Or asked for an ID if you didn't have a signature on the back of your card? I can't even remember the last time I was asked for an ID - part of this is apathy on the part of the cashier, and part of this is the fact that we tend to go to the same places repeatedly, and the cashiers get to know their customers by name & by sight.
And how do you think Google makes money? They're not selling a product intended for consumption by Iranian companies. They're distributing a free product, intended to generate them advertising revenue by driving more people to their sites, resulting in more pageviews and thus more ad impressions and thus more income for Google.
Or did you really think that Google could only make income from Iranian customers by taking money from Iranian companies?
Yes, I've called you a name: dipshit. And as far as I'm concerned, if the shoe fits, wear it. Having a "debate" with you would require you to have read the summary at least, and ideally, the entire article. It's clear you haven't, so it's probably for the best that you just give up trying to flog your tired preconceived notions about Google being a white knight.
They can do that already without Google Earth, Chrome and Picasa. So the answer is, these products provide no benefit to the Iranian people other than giving them another option to Flickr or Facebook. A mighty blow for freedom, eh?
Did you even read the fucking summary? Google has received approval to allow downloads of their products in Iran, because they have satisfied embargo requirements that the US government put in place.
If they are being ALLOWED BY THE GOVERNMENT to distribute their products to Iranian customers, what part of the answer to "does google have such an exemption to do business there?" is unclear to you?
If "attention and credit" are the things you want, and you're claiming that they never happen to people in IT, then you're either an incompetent, surrounded by incompetents, or you work for the most evil company ever known to man.
Be better at your job, or get a better job. IT people get plenty of "credit" and "attention" and "appreciation" - if you're not one of the people getting that treatment, then perhaps you don't deserve it.
This is the nature of the job. If you work in IT, you are in a support role. If you are in a support role, then you are... supporting the business. When you don't support the business, and things break down, you get yelled at for not doing your job well. Why would you expect to be treated to free beer, hookers and blow for keeping some computer systems running?
There are billions of people out there working across countless companies and industries. How many of them are treated like rock stars just for getting their jobs done? (Hint: Not many, aside from the *literal* rock stars.)
When's the last time you had your car towed to your mechanic's place and then demanded that he interrupt his entire schedule of work to fix your car as soon as possible, and probably got a little pissy because he didn't have anybody free to look at it until the next day? I bet that happened a lot more recently than the last time you decided to send him a couple hundred bucks, or a thank you card, "just for keeping things running smoothly!"
Actually it works just fine. Go survey a significant portion of salespeople, and tell me how rewarded, valued and loved they feel in their jobs.
Then come back and tell me that people are treated like rock stars for doing their fucking jobs in every other profession but IT.
These are known as General Practitioners, or Primary Care Physicians, and suggesting that nobody has them or can afford them is just patently false. And for the record, I've had exactly 3 primary care physicians in my life: the first I moved away from after college, the second retired, and the third is the one I see currently. How did I choose them? Well the first was a choice made by my parents; The second was based on... wait for it... recommendations. The third was based on... wait for it... recommendations from the second! The key thing is, along with those recommendations, I knew that there was a certain minimum level of capability each doctor had to have in order to hang a shingle and practice medicine. Beyond that minimum, I was able to make choices based on the recommendations of family, friends, and co-workers. It's amazing how a reputation-based system can coexist with minimum licensing standards!
Any doctor who has an MD and has passed their boards today can sew up a stab wound, I'm not sure what your point is there. They all receive a minimum level of training, and that minimum level of training DOES include a surgical rotation and an internal medicine rotation in medical school. They're called clerkships, or clinical rotations. These are enough that - at a bare minimum, the doctor can certainly keep you going until you can receive more appropriate care from a specialist after being transported to them.
Oh no, that would never do - then they're imposing THEIR choices on ME. That's not freedom!
But you're definitely right though - I'd rather have a couple of EMTs who are probably 2-year community-college graduates deciding on an appropriate standard of care for me, rather than a group licensed physicians who have been through medical school and internships and passed their licensing boards. That makes MUCH more sense than having a minimum standard of education, training and licensing that ANYBODY must pass in order to be a physician, guaranteeing a minimum standard of quality in the care you receive.
I'll turn that around: You believe you can trust a bunch of people with zero medical expertise in your community to set standards for medical practices and care. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you're just naturally foolish.
Who do you trust more to create a building code outlining a minimum set of standards and practices for construction? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of people who build apartment buildings by trade?
Who do you trust more to define standards of care for medical professionals? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of doctors and nurses who have studied the outcomes of hundreds of cases?
There is such a thing as professional expertise. It is called "expertise" because it is not something that the average person has. It is, in fact, an "above average" understanding of a particular topic or area of study, which then qualifies the person who possesses it to issue a much more authoritative statement about that particular topic or area of study.
Please explain how Picasa, Google Earth, and Chrome will "make things better" (or in fact, make things different in the slightest) for the Iranian citizen?
We're not talking about milk and baby food, you dipshit. Last I checked, those products don't have built in TOR functionality, or any other super-secret "make me totally anonymous and let me get unfiltered news and data from the outside world" features.
So answer two questions:
1) How will these products benefit the Iranian people?
2) How will NOT having these products harm the Iranian people?
Bonus question: How will people using these products in Iran fatten Google's bottom line?
Please explain how my logic is extremely flawed?
Your own argument, that the US Government and the EFF "developed and exported TOR to countries with oppressive governments" simply bolsters my point that an assertion that places the US government's "bad behavior" in the same league as the Iranian government's "bad behavior" is slipshod moral relativism at it's finest.
Now, if you'll explain how Chrome, Picasa, and Google Earth function to "keep oppressed people more informed" in Iran, I'll gladly hear about how Google is fighting the good fight for freedom. But I think you're going to have an awful hard time demonstrating that "picture sharing" and "browsing the web" or "looking at maps" is making the people of Iran "more free". Chrome certainly doesn't have TOR built into it just for the Iranian market.
So no, nothing Google is doing is helping the people of Iran be "more informed and interact with the outside world with less chance of reprisal." I do think it's helping Google make money, though!
Then the google guys also need to reconcile the Iranian government's known repressive behavior with their "don't be evil" slogan.
Or have we already forgotten the crackdowns after the last "elections" there?
But then the google guys also found a way to justify censoring results in china in order to keep doing business there! I guess the slogan should be, "Don't be evil (unless it's really profitable for us to be)!"
Your argument that the US is "just as bad" is morally relativistic bullshit. I'm sure it'll garner you a +5 Insightful here, too.
But that's not what the post I initially responded to suggested. The suggestion was - and I quote - "It would have been much better if all this licensing nonsense disappeared and we could rely on the traditional reputation system that the free market uses to maintain quality."
There's a difference between "no legislatively-mandated licensing requirement" and "no licensing requirements at all."
Fair enough. I just had to ask because TFA describes them as an "extortion racket," and it strikes me that if that's what they do, it doesn't seem all that unreasonable.
I can understand why the BSA would be antithetical to FOSS types, but what you described doesn't sound like particularly vicious tactics.
Why would anybody want to work in INDUSTRY? If you do your job correctly, then everything runs smoothly, and you don't get any attention (or credit) at all. But as soon as something goes wrong, it's obviously because YOU FUCKED UP, and you get LOTS of attention! Other than money, can anyone cite an upside to working in INDUSTRY?
This statement remains equally true when replacing "INDUSTRY" with any line of work you care to name.
Why does this appear to be a revelation to you?
They're still a "customer" of Barnes & Noble, or Amazon, or wherever they bought the book. They're also still a pirate violating the author's copyright. And for the violation of the copyright, yes, the person whose rights are being violated should still sue.
You're not suggesting that this is an unreasonable course of action are you?
If you're audited, and found to have 500 legal copies of the software running on 1500 systems, demanding that the person who is in violation of the license terms pay for the other 1000 copies they're using seems pretty reasonable to me.
Off the top of my head, I'd say the skill set that gets your project started next Monday, landing you the lucrative 3-month contract, rather than the one that says "Give me 3 months to learn that new tech," and letting the contract go to a competitor.
Because for them to call themselves "doctors" and be hired by a hospital in that capacity (or practice medicine in their own practice) they must be certified and licensed to practice medicine.
The GGP poster was suggesting we do away with "licensing nonsense," and rely on a market-based "reputation system" for professions.
The reason you don't have to "know and/or care," is precisely because of those licensing requirements. I assure you, if we did away with things like professional licensing requirements and medical boards, you would certainly need to know, and you would care very much about what sort of certifications the man or woman about to perform emergency thoracic surgery on you possesses.
So your objection is about the lack of a professional licensing process and body providing oversight?
That's a fair objection, perhaps you should try stating it as such.
You know, rather than taking swipes at people because of the programming language they're using, which just makes you look like a fucking retard.
I do believe we're looking at an ad hominem fallacy!
"Your point about Facebook's sloppy engineering practices is false because YOU never did anything important[1] like writing the code to Facebook."
[1] for some definitions of 'important'.
I'd also like to submit a fallacy of my own: "Facebook is very popular, therefore Facebook's engineering practices MUST be excellent." Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong, can they?