It's all nice and all, but if $FOO really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Counterexamples:
PC vs. Mac vs. Amiga
Win32 vs. POSIX
Intel vs. M68k
VHS vs. Betamax
MP3 vs. Vorbis
X.509 vs. PKI
PEM vs. OpenPGP
DES vs. IDEA
EAX vs. OCB
SHA256 vs. MD5
Universal v.Reimerdes
Sometimes the technically-superior option wins, sometimes it does not. Law, marketing, economics and other "soft" factors are sometimes more relevant than the particular technology.
Personally, I want an open infrastructure to win so that the technically-superior applications developed in the future can win, rather than getting killed by patents or whatnot.
2(d) "False information" means data that misrepresents the identity of the caller to the recipient of a call or to the network itself; however, when a person making an authorized call on behalf of another person inserts the name, telephone number or name and telephone number of the person on whose behalf the call is being made, such information shall not be deemed false information.
and also:
3(1) A person may not enter or cause to be entered false information into a telephone caller identification system with the intent to deceive, defraud or mislead the recipient of a call. (2) A person may not place a call knowing that false information was entered into the telephone caller identification system with the intent to deceive, defraud or mislead the recipient of the call.
So it's "with intent". I don't see anything wrong with the law as it stands.
1) The study was fairly short term. That doesn't tell you anything. All kinds of changes can happen in the short term with a child, and are not meaningful in the long run. You need to evaluate development over a period of years, not over four months. If you look in to the literature on child development you find that many things that taken in a small context that look worrying don't matter in the long run. A child will start talking or reading 6-12 months later than peers, and yet have normal language skills at graduation, for example.
2) It only dealt with kids who got a new toy, not with ones who had it. Even in adults, when we get something new we are more enamored with it and want to spend more time using it. That dies down after a little while. There is no reason to believe that videogames are any different. As such if you believe they are, you need to test that. There needs to be controls with kids that have had videogame systems for long periods of time.
TFA basically says that. Whoever posted this to Slashdot, of course, didn't.
Yes, that's the theory. The concern that many people are expressing is that the theory doesn't account for the experimental evidence.
The patent system is supposed to provide a financial incentive for people to assume the risks associated with developing new technology. In the real world, however, there are so many patents that system tends to increase the cost of significant innovation by a large and unpredictable amount. Because of this, it's become far safer to just do the same thing everyone else does than to do something genuinely new. The minefield analogy is very apt.
Like another poster mentioned, it's effectively a probabilistic tax on new innovation used to fund old innovation, where the amount of tax you will owe is impossible to determine beforehand.
The probability of contracted autism has been shown to be lower than the probability of catching the disease being vaccinated against, so I'll guard against the higher probability risk.
Also, they may kill other, innocent random people who *did* get vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. That's why there's so much talk about herd immunity.
CSS is a bit inflexible, and its attribute names are a bit arbitrary (CSS selectors are good, though). That would have been a valid complaint.
Making things look good (or work at all) in MSIE is a real pain. That's also a valid complaint.
Most properly-designed web apps are stateless, except for authentication and maybe a language preference. Everything else should be in your server-side data model, or in your request. If you're writing a web application that keeps a lot of session-specific data, then you're doing it wrong anyway. Session variables in web development are effectively global variables. They can't be bookmarked, they break when people open multiple tabs/windows, and when they timeout unexpectedly, people lose data.
You have a sessionless protocol trying to do sessions. Amusingly enough written on top of a connection based protocol (so you have a session built in- the TCP connection)
I'd love to know what you propose would do better and still scale to tens of thousands of page requests per second, and can deal with malicious network nodes and nodes dropping off the network without notice. You do realize that TCP is also doing sessions on top of a sessionless protocol, right? Is TCP poorly designed?
You have a text markup language based on the idea of the client choosing how to display data being used to display pixel perfect displays.
If the web was designed to be pixel-perfect, browsers would be as messy as Win32, trying to maintain backward compatibility with all sorts of different displays. Either that, or everything would be monochrome at low resolution.
You have a language that they had so much faith in they decided to name it after another popular language in hopes people would confuse them.
Yeah, the name "JavaScript" was stupid. So what?
And that language has no built in method for transfering data to/from the server or doing RPCs,
The only language I can think of that has arbitrary functions like RPC built-in is PHP. If you think PHP is the epitome of language design, then we have nothing more to discuss. Most good languages separate the language itself from the standard library.
you have the whole AJAX hack thrown in on top to do that.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
There's nothing about the whole stack that's well designed for modern uses.
Sure, on the whole, it's not the best that we could do, but if you think nothing about it is well-designed, well, what would you propose? Flash?
But its universal, so we're stuck with it unless Mozilla and MS work together to push out something new.
The last thing anyone needs is Microsoft reinventing the web.
If those jackass Women's Libbers had just sat on their hands, the political process would have worked though, a consensus would have been reached, and the Republicans wouldn't have had such an effective wedge issue for 20 years.
And then just ignore the attempts. fail2ban can sometimes be ok, but be aware that it creates a denial-of-service vulnerability that is exploitable by attackers who can can spoof source addresses.
.even if you thought, our laws were wrong, that wouldn't mean it would reflect well on you to, say, murder someone and keep quiet about it for 100 years hoping that the law would be changed in the meantime...
I'm pretty sure there's a corollary to Godwin's Law about comparing copyright infringement to physical violence.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you comparing to '94 Linux?
Amiga? Macintosh? OS/2?
Where were you in '94?
It's all nice and all, but if $FOO really wants to win, they have to be technically better. There is no other way.
Counterexamples:
Sometimes the technically-superior option wins, sometimes it does not. Law, marketing, economics and other "soft" factors are sometimes more relevant than the particular technology.
Personally, I want an open infrastructure to win so that the technically-superior applications developed in the future can win, rather than getting killed by patents or whatnot.
Any customer with a phone switch or PBX is now in violation of this law.
RTFL. It's very short. Quoting it:
2(d) "False information" means data that misrepresents the identity of the caller to the recipient of a call or to the network itself; however, when a person making an authorized call on behalf of another person inserts the name, telephone number or name and telephone number of the person on whose behalf the call is being made, such information shall not be deemed false information.
and also:
3(1) A person may not enter or cause to be entered false information into a telephone caller identification system with the intent to deceive, defraud or mislead the recipient of a call.
(2) A person may not place a call knowing that false information was entered into the telephone caller identification system with the intent to deceive, defraud or mislead the recipient of the call.
So it's "with intent". I don't see anything wrong with the law as it stands.
Think of this feature as a form of NAT for phone lines.
It's more like the "From:" or "Reply-To:" headers of an email message: it indicates where you want follow-ups to go to.
1) The study was fairly short term. That doesn't tell you anything. All kinds of changes can happen in the short term with a child, and are not meaningful in the long run. You need to evaluate development over a period of years, not over four months. If you look in to the literature on child development you find that many things that taken in a small context that look worrying don't matter in the long run. A child will start talking or reading 6-12 months later than peers, and yet have normal language skills at graduation, for example.
2) It only dealt with kids who got a new toy, not with ones who had it. Even in adults, when we get something new we are more enamored with it and want to spend more time using it. That dies down after a little while. There is no reason to believe that videogames are any different. As such if you believe they are, you need to test that. There needs to be controls with kids that have had videogame systems for long periods of time.
TFA basically says that. Whoever posted this to Slashdot, of course, didn't.
These days, costs of development and deployment, not runtime memory usage, are the limiting factors in software development.
Yes, that's the theory. The concern that many people are expressing is that the theory doesn't account for the experimental evidence.
The patent system is supposed to provide a financial incentive for people to assume the risks associated with developing new technology. In the real world, however, there are so many patents that system tends to increase the cost of significant innovation by a large and unpredictable amount. Because of this, it's become far safer to just do the same thing everyone else does than to do something genuinely new. The minefield analogy is very apt.
Like another poster mentioned, it's effectively a probabilistic tax on new innovation used to fund old innovation, where the amount of tax you will owe is impossible to determine beforehand.
Japan is no stranger to bizarre phone fads but the popularity of the ringtones is perhaps surprising given the flimsiness of the science behind them.
How about "Anti-HIV properties of... bananas?". And it's written by ERV, not some quack.
No, it isn't. What else have you used?
The probability of contracted autism has been shown to be lower than the probability of catching the disease being vaccinated against, so I'll guard against the higher probability risk.
Also, they may kill other, innocent random people who *did* get vaccinated. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. That's why there's so much talk about herd immunity.
I always laugh when someone thinks they're going to influence Microsoft, rather than the other way around. Ain't gonna happen.
Crypto's not the weak link in security anymore
When I read other people's crypto code, I still find they get it wrong the majority of the time.
You have a sessionless protocol trying to do sessions. Amusingly enough written on top of a connection based protocol (so you have a session built in- the TCP connection)
I'd love to know what you propose would do better and still scale to tens of thousands of page requests per second, and can deal with malicious network nodes and nodes dropping off the network without notice. You do realize that TCP is also doing sessions on top of a sessionless protocol, right? Is TCP poorly designed?
You have a text markup language based on the idea of the client choosing how to display data being used to display pixel perfect displays.
If the web was designed to be pixel-perfect, browsers would be as messy as Win32, trying to maintain backward compatibility with all sorts of different displays. Either that, or everything would be monochrome at low resolution.
You have a language that they had so much faith in they decided to name it after another popular language in hopes people would confuse them.
Yeah, the name "JavaScript" was stupid. So what?
And that language has no built in method for transfering data to/from the server or doing RPCs,
The only language I can think of that has arbitrary functions like RPC built-in is PHP. If you think PHP is the epitome of language design, then we have nothing more to discuss. Most good languages separate the language itself from the standard library.
you have the whole AJAX hack thrown in on top to do that.
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
There's nothing about the whole stack that's well designed for modern uses.
Sure, on the whole, it's not the best that we could do, but if you think nothing about it is well-designed, well, what would you propose? Flash?
But its universal, so we're stuck with it unless Mozilla and MS work together to push out something new.
The last thing anyone needs is Microsoft reinventing the web.
I hope for the sake of her son that she finds some compassion and spiritual enlightenment.
She has. You just disagree.
God knows she needs it.
How do you know that? Is it possible in your worldview for your God to disagree with you?
"ought" != "is"
If those jackass Women's Libbers had just sat on their hands, the political process would have worked though, a consensus would have been reached, and the Republicans wouldn't have had such an effective wedge issue for 20 years.
What? What makes you think that would work?
Plausibility FAIL.
Get in the sack!
And then just ignore the attempts. fail2ban can sometimes be ok, but be aware that it creates a denial-of-service vulnerability that is exploitable by attackers who can can spoof source addresses.
.even if you thought, our laws were wrong, that wouldn't mean it would reflect well on you to, say, murder someone and keep quiet about it for 100 years hoping that the law would be changed in the meantime...
I'm pretty sure there's a corollary to Godwin's Law about comparing copyright infringement to physical violence.
My guess is fsync()
Whenever people say that Microsoft products are easy to use, they are conveniently ignoring stuff like this.
And geeks wonder why normal people are intimidated by computers...
Randall Munroe
How many people were wrongfully dissuaded from creating competing lids?
The damages might be more than you think: How many people paid more for lids due to a lack of competition?
Is it still "piracy" when it's not illegal?