Since I live in Alaska, I was about to argue with our Canadian friend until I looked at Google Maps. Canada doesn't have much population located farther north than Anchorage or Fairbanks, but they've got a boatload of land further north than us Alaskans. Go take a look at the Northwest Passage. They're waaaay north of Prudhoe Bay, which is about as far north as we get over here on the west side of the continent. <shrug>
At forty, I'm not exactly young anymore, and I *do* have a family. Nevertheless, I am still very much an idealist, who believes that cause and principle are very, very important. To some degree, cause and principle are so important to me *because* I have a family. I don't want my daughter to grow up living in a tyrannical police state, and consequently, I work to create change. Wasn't it John Adams who said, "I study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy and that their children may study painting, poetry and music."?
That's a terrible idea. All you've done is add several middle-men to the equation, but in the end, the subscriber still has to prove that (s)he is innocent. We're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. While that's obviously not what's happening now, your proposal doesn't do anything to solve the problem, and quite possibly makes it even worse. I see it playing out like this:
**AA sues ${Random_ISP}. ${Random_ISP} either has the money to fight the suit (thus potentially creating an even higher bill that they try to pawn off on the subscriber, who almost certainly doesn't have the money to fight ${Random_ISP}) or they simply settle to avoid the costs of the suit (because they are, again, just going to pawn off the bill on their customer -- my money is on this option). The subscriber then gets the bill from their ISP. Since they are using an unsecured wireless router, their MAC address matches the ISP logs. Their router almost certainly doesn't -- or at least, isn't set to -- log the MAC address of all computers connected to it at any given time, so they have NOTHING to offer as proof that someone else was infringing, nor any way to even begin the investigation. The fact that there is no infringing content upon any computer currently in the house, no P2P software installed, no copies of the infringing content, etc. is irrelevant since, under your proposal, they have to prove that someone else is responsible. In the end, they get left holding the bag for more money than they can possibly afford, so after losing their house, their car and all of their possessions, they declare bankruptcy and have no credit for seven years (or more)...all because someone else was leaching off their WEP-encrypted wireless router. Sucks to be them, huh?
First, as others have mentioned, this is supposed to be a summary -- a brief, concise overview. I wasn't aware that/. summaries were intended to be used as blog posts that reference other articles, but perhaps I missed that. Consequently, I read part of the, ahem, "summary", got annoyed and dropped down to the comments.
Second, Haselton is quite mistaken to say, in essence, "I am not an expert in this field, but if the logic doesn't make sense to me, it doesn't make sense." C'mon, how often do we tech types get annoyed when a user says, "That doesn't make sense; you must be wrong." because they don't understand the technology in question? That's pretty much what Haselton is doing here.
Third, Haselton makes some non-sequiturs of his own in his monologue above. For example, IT departments frequently can NOT trace an infringing IP address back to the user responsible, at least in my experience. In my network, we are NAT'd through our corporate firewall, so all you would get is the external, public IP address for the firewall, not the RFC-1918 address all PCs in the office use on the inside (if the individual PC IP addresses were logged rather than the external, public IP address, you couldn't even trace it back to the corporate firewall, since RFC-1918 addresses aren't valid on the public Internet).
However, as much as it pains me to say it, from my non-lawyer, non-expert OPINION I think he is correct (at least to the point where I stopped reading) to say that the judge screwed up in this case. A subpoena is not a guilty verdict for the defendant; a subpoena provides the only way for the copyright holder to begin the investigation. If a copyright holder becomes aware that infringing content is being offered for upload from a particular IP address, their only recourse is to subpoena the owner (ISP, for example) of that IP address for subscriber information, and then look for additional proof that the subscriber was, in fact, responsible for uploading the copyrighted content. The problem with the copyright situation we have isn't that a copyright holder can subpoena an ISP for subscriber information to conduct an investigation; the problem is the way that the courts, the **AA thugs and the various LEOs presume that an implicated subscriber is guilty from the start, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince them otherwise.
And when an ambulance chaser uses a loophole contained in the plain-English document that didn't exist in the very specific legal language document to sue the company providing the service, what happens? As I said above:
...when you simplify things, something inevitably gets lost in the translation...
Just for grins, let's take this a step farther. How far down the scale of least common denominator do you have to go? Not everyone in the U.S. graduated from high school. There are probably people in the country who never even made it out of primary school. Should I have to translate my legal contract into Dr. Seuss or "Dick and Jane" so that even the least literate person in the country can understand the document? How about pictograms?
That's absurd. If the cellular carrier mucks with my phone so that location services are turned on, then the cellular carrier is the one who wronged me, not Google.
Suing Google because the carrier screwed with my privacy settings would be like the new owner of my car/house (in your analogy) suing me because I still retain the title to the car or house even after they paid for it, and then having me sue you to recover what I had to pay to the person who thought (s)he bought my car or house. Do you SERIOUSLY think that's how it should work? IMHO, both the end user AND Google should sue the carrier. The end user, because the carrier bound the end user to a contract without the end user's knowledge or consent, and Google, for having their reputation shot because of the carrier's actions.
However, even that is academic because shortly after I bought my Android phone, Google e-mailed me not just once, but twice to inform me that location services were turned on, and here's how to disable them if that's not what I wanted, etc., etc. So even IF the carrier set up location services without my knowledge, Google still had a means to inform me of what was being collected and what to do if that's not what I wanted. In other words, even if the carrier set up your phone for you, you'd still have to be brain dead not to know what data was being collected.
Agreed. I turned location data off on my Android phone and tablet. That lasted about a week before I decided to turn it back on. In my estimation, the privacy I was giving up was negligible and the services I was receiving in exchange was valuable. Maybe I'm missing something, but nothing I've seen about this issue seems like that much of a big deal to me.
When writing a document that will be read by their users (most of whom are not legal experts) that explains the legal relationship that user has with aspects of the company policy, they choose to write it in a language which they know will not be understood by those same non-legal expert users.
I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet. However, even to this techie-type, it seems to me that writing a document explaining "the LEGAL relationship the user has with aspects of the company policy" (emphasis mine) in anything other than legal language has BAD IDEA stamped all over it. I would think that such a document could be construed as being a legally binding document, and that's a really big problem to lawyers. We tech types use very specific words to convey very specific meanings. A layman might not understand the difference between bits and bytes, Ethernet and TCP/IP, an Android or an iPad, a netbook or a laptop. To us tech-types, however, each of these words has a specific meaning, and they are NOT interchangeable. Likewise, to a lawyer, legal contracts are written in a specific jargon because the words used have very specific meanings and clearly delineate rights and responsibilities of the two parties in a contract. Just as all of us have cringed when marketing departments or sales staff butcher beyond all recognition the technical description of a piece of tech, lawyers cringe when legal concepts are described in layman's terms. Why? Because when you simplify things, something inevitably gets lost in the translation, and in legal matters, that can easily mean more liability than intended...which often translates to financial liability.
While I don't doubt that lawyers and corporate legal departments see an advantage to writing "in a language which they know will not be understood by those same non-legal expert users" I don't think that is the primary motivating factor for writing legal documents in legal language; rather it is the fact that legal language is the best language to use for writing legal documents.
I just start playing with AppInventor this week, and right off the cuff...it's got a lot of potential, but I haven't used it enough yet to know if it's really a serious tool.
The Cons: I tend to be kind of a linear, procedural thinker -- I cut my teeth on BASIC, learned COBOL in high school, learned Pascal and Perl in college, and now use mostly Perl and a little Python -- so AppInventor requires me to approach writing programs a little differently. For example, in Perl, if I want to compare two strings, I think it out the way the line is typed on the console; AppInventor, on the other hand, seems kind of like programming in Reverse Polish Notation:) That's just a minor quibble, however, and while I'm enjoying learning how to create Android apps, I do have a few concerns about the language. First, the language itself is completely obscured. There may be a way to bypass the GUI and see the code AppInventor is generating, but if so, I haven't found it yet. Having spent way more time than I like cleaning up the horrible HTML that both Front Page and Dream Weaver generate when my family members who couldn't (or wouldn't) learn HTML came to me for help -- and at some point, they always came to me to fix their HTML when FP and DW didn't get it right -- I tend to distrust visual coding tools. I would also love to see a comparison between execution times for two identical Android programs, one written in AppInventor and the other coded by hand. I'm curious how AppInventor optimizes the code. Also, I find that the programs get a little hard to follow by the time you get a page full of code blocks on the Block Editor. It may be just another case of the way I think hindering my adoption of the tool, but I seem to have an easier time keeping the code in my head when I type it out by hand rather than when I snap puzzle pieces together on a GUI. Finally, my last concern about AppInventor is that the "command" reference is somewhat lacking. It took me pretty much a full day, and numerous Google searches, to figure out how to use the TinyDB to store persistent data in AppInventor. In the end, the procedure I was using to store data in TinyDB was never running because I was getting an error in the routine that pulls data from the TinyDB because the way to tell if there is any data stored in the database is not exactly intuitive and is completely omitted in the documentation.
The Pros: I am quite impressed with the ease with which I started using AppInventor. When I first started using Python, it was very easy for me to read someone else's scripts and comprehend what they were doing. Writing Python, on the other hand, was a bigger hurdle. To be fair, a lot of that was because I've been writing Perl for so long, that I try to do things the Perl way (okay...ONE of the many Perl ways ) and then have to search Google to find the way it's supposed to be done in Python. AppInventor, on the other hand, is just a matter of snapping puzzle pieces together. If you try to do something that would be a syntax error in a traditional language, AppInventor immediately pops up an error telling you why you can't do whatever it is you are trying to do -- and the error messages are pretty intuitive. Procedural errors are a whole other story -- see the caveat above about using TinyDB.
Experienced programmers may turn up their nose at tools like AppInventor since it lowers the barrier of entry so much, but IMHO, tools that make it easy for people to learn programming concepts are a Good Thing. Will people churn out crappy code in AppInventor? Yep. Do people already churn out crap code in Perl, Java, C/C++/C#? Yep. Will skilled programmers make well-designed apps in AppInventor? I don't see why not. I imagine the quality of the code will probably depend upon some of the concerns I described above, but the *design* will be a reflection upon the skill and experience of the developer. I don't see any reason why a good developer will suddenly be reduced to creating crappy apps with tools like A
I'm not saying that I think ISPs *should* make that leap; I'm saying that I can easily imagine them making that jump even though they probably *shouldn't*.
ISP's don't give two shits what you do with your bandwidth, as it's not a server.
Uh, yeah they do care, because they are overselling it to an absurd degree. Anything you do that makes it more likely that you are actually using the bandwidth that you purchased puts stress on their network. One of the major providers where I live is trying to build a system by which they can bill by usage, rather than by max download speed just to get around this problem. Keep in mind, most ISPs are loss-leaders for the more profitable services in a telco or cable company. The ISP typically loses money every month on Internet accounts, but since it is part of a bundled service, the parent company makes up the difference in residential, long-distance, and/or cellular telephone services; or cable TV, PPV, VoD, etc. Consequently, they have incentive not to build a better network than they have to, and the more you use that network, the fatter the pipes they have to build.
Furthermore, some ISPs have in their AUPs a provision that says you can't run a server on anything but a business account (since business accounts are typically quite a bit more expensive than residential accounts). The other major provider in my area, for whom I used to work as a sys admin, was such an ISP. While most of the ISP admins didn't really care, the provision was in our policies, and I was aware of a couple of instances where we terminated peoples' accounts for reselling services off of residential Internet accounts. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see an ISP interpret sharing an open WiFi access point as "reselling" a service (i.e., payment is in goodwill and/or karma rather than cash).
What good does that do? Unless your troll is coming from a business or other site that has a static IP, you only end up banning the next hapless schmuck that got assigned the IP address the troll was using when he pissed you off, and the troll has reconnected on another IP address and is still happily trolling away on your site.
Granted, the "next hapless schmuck" may not even visit your web site, but if you ban enough IP addresses -- and/or your site is popular enough -- you will eventually end up temporarily banning innocent bystanders.
Get over yourself, dude. I spent a year on public assistance due to health problems, but I *never once* made excuses or accepted the notion that I was powerless or a victim. I have been blessed, yes, but I *worked* to get where I am.
Furthermore, let me clue YOU in on something: the poorest people in the United States -- or most of western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. -- are richer than ninety-something percent of the world's population. Have you ever left you middle-class suburban world to see what it's like elsewhere? I have, and quite frankly, most westerners have no idea how well off they are. The fact that you have access to a computer to tell me how privileged I am and how downtrodden you are is ample proof that you, whether you believe it or not, live a life of luxury compared to most people in the rest of the world. So if you want to wallow in self pity because you aren't one of the "powerful" people, knock yourself out. But don't expect me to have pity for you because you have adopted that mindset, instead of looking for ways to improve your situation.
Similarly, telling people to "work for someone else" doesn't solve the problem either - they *all* do this, you have no bargaining power at all, they have all the money.
Ummm...start your own business, then? My wife has done it twice in the last decade. It's a lot of work, and there are no guarantees that you will break even, much less earn the salary you earn as a cubicle drone in the tech sector, but if you don't like the terms of employment for anyone that's hiring, it IS an option. <shrug> I'm just not a big believer in the "I have no power at all" victim mentality.
The company I work for had similar language in the contract I signed. However, before signing that contract, I negotiated slightly different terms with the HR person. Bottom line, I agreed that all software or inventions I created *on company time or with company resources* would belong to the company; however, any software or inventions I created *on my own time* were mine. I also agreed that I wouldn't use my "insider knowledge" of the company to create a tool that I knew the company needed on my own time so that I could license it back to the company, nor would I create products or services in my off time to compete with the company I work for.
So, yeah...the terms you mention are pretty much typical in the tech industry, but you can sometimes negotiate terms that will alleviate your employer's ethics or competition concerns while still allowing you to create and own things that are unrelated to the company's business interest.
And Jonner gave multiple examples of why your arguments failed by pointing out parallel cases in other technologies that we all pretty much understand to be useful. Your claim seems to be that torrents are not a useful protocol/technology because the predominant use of that technology is illicit. Jonner points out several other protocols/technologies that ALSO have (or at least, at some point in time, HAD) a predominately illicit use, but which are generally accepted. Consequently, pointing out that a protocol/technology is predominately (ab)used for illicit purposes is NOT a valid measure of whether or not the protocol or technology is "good" or "bad".
I would take the argument a step further and say that a protocol or technology CANNOT be inherently "good" or "bad" but rather only the uses one make of it are "good" or "bad". Even if only 1% of bittorrent traffic is used for legitimate purposes like Linux or other FOSS, that proves that bittorrent has a legitimate use and consequently should not be restricted.
I don't think it's accurate to say, "Nobody does this anymore." I've been a member on a number of on-line Internet forums where people would share knowledge about working on various cars and motorcycles. There was a very active community for people who owned DSM's (Diamond-Star Motors, i.e., Mitsubishi Eclipse/Eagle Talon/Plymouth Laser). Likewise the Honda Goldwing Forum (SFW, despite the name), the Honda Nighthawk Forum and Suzuki V-Strom Forum have been essential in helping me work on the various motorcycles I have owned. You'll find people there who have done everything from simple oil changes to completely rebuilding engines. As for me, I have never taken a car to a shop to have a light bulb replaced, I almost always change my own oil and filters, I installed crash bars and luggage carriers on my V-Strom -- and rigged up my own mounting system for the Pelican cases I hung off the luggage carriers. I even replaced the clutch in my Talon with a new one, installed stiffer engine mounts and started rebuilding the engine on my Goldwing project (but ended up selling that project before I finished it). It may not be as common for people to do their own maintenance on their cars, but it's far from dead.
Slightly off-topic, but kind of a funny story: I needed the oil changed in my Talon one time and for whatever reason, I couldn't do it myself this time so I took it to one of the 20-minute lube shops in town. I tell the guys all I want done is oil and oil filter. Ten minutes or so later, the mechanic walks in with a very dirty OEM air filter and tells me that it looks like I need a new air filter. I raise an eyebrow and ask the guy, "That's off of my car?" He says yes. I ask him, "Are you sure?"
"Yes," he says.
"The black Eagle Talon?"
"Yes."
"That's funny," I reply, "because my Talon has a K&N cone-type air filter attached to an aluminum intake pipe. That filter is off of a stock Talon with the factory airbox. There is no airbox on my car, so there is no way that air filter could even be attached to my car."
"Let me go double-check," the mechanic says.
Because I knew my car, I knew the shop was trying to charge me for work they weren't really going to perform. It pays to have technical knowledge sometimes.
The times where citizens could rise up against a tyrant in the civilized world is long gone; it cannot happen and will not happen...there is no way a rebellion could ever succeed in current times.
Current events in the mid-East would prove otherwise. Libya and Syria are still to be determined, but unrest in Egypt and Tunisia, for example, have already toppled dictatorships.
While I think running a wireless router with no security is just asking for trouble -- and therefore, shipping routers with password requirements would help alleviate that particular issue -- I still have a bit of a problem with that. For example, I recently needed to set up an access point that would serve a host that could do WEP only and another host that could do WPA only. My solution was to remove all encryption and lock down the router to only allow specified MAC addresses. This wasn't a perfect solution, since someone sufficiently inclined could sniff the network and clone one of my authorized MAC addresses. However, it did at least keep me from being the lowest-hanging fruit for anyone looking to leach WiFi access.
Slashdot Mirror
Since I live in Alaska, I was about to argue with our Canadian friend until I looked at Google Maps. Canada doesn't have much population located farther north than Anchorage or Fairbanks, but they've got a boatload of land further north than us Alaskans. Go take a look at the Northwest Passage. They're waaaay north of Prudhoe Bay, which is about as far north as we get over here on the west side of the continent. <shrug>
At forty, I'm not exactly young anymore, and I *do* have a family. Nevertheless, I am still very much an idealist, who believes that cause and principle are very, very important. To some degree, cause and principle are so important to me *because* I have a family. I don't want my daughter to grow up living in a tyrannical police state, and consequently, I work to create change. Wasn't it John Adams who said, "I study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy and that their children may study painting, poetry and music."?
That's a terrible idea. All you've done is add several middle-men to the equation, but in the end, the subscriber still has to prove that (s)he is innocent. We're supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. While that's obviously not what's happening now, your proposal doesn't do anything to solve the problem, and quite possibly makes it even worse. I see it playing out like this:
**AA sues ${Random_ISP}. ${Random_ISP} either has the money to fight the suit (thus potentially creating an even higher bill that they try to pawn off on the subscriber, who almost certainly doesn't have the money to fight ${Random_ISP}) or they simply settle to avoid the costs of the suit (because they are, again, just going to pawn off the bill on their customer -- my money is on this option). The subscriber then gets the bill from their ISP. Since they are using an unsecured wireless router, their MAC address matches the ISP logs. Their router almost certainly doesn't -- or at least, isn't set to -- log the MAC address of all computers connected to it at any given time, so they have NOTHING to offer as proof that someone else was infringing, nor any way to even begin the investigation. The fact that there is no infringing content upon any computer currently in the house, no P2P software installed, no copies of the infringing content, etc. is irrelevant since, under your proposal, they have to prove that someone else is responsible. In the end, they get left holding the bag for more money than they can possibly afford, so after losing their house, their car and all of their possessions, they declare bankruptcy and have no credit for seven years (or more)...all because someone else was leaching off their WEP-encrypted wireless router. Sucks to be them, huh?
First, as others have mentioned, this is supposed to be a summary -- a brief, concise overview. I wasn't aware that /. summaries were intended to be used as blog posts that reference other articles, but perhaps I missed that. Consequently, I read part of the, ahem, "summary", got annoyed and dropped down to the comments.
Second, Haselton is quite mistaken to say, in essence, "I am not an expert in this field, but if the logic doesn't make sense to me, it doesn't make sense." C'mon, how often do we tech types get annoyed when a user says, "That doesn't make sense; you must be wrong." because they don't understand the technology in question? That's pretty much what Haselton is doing here.
Third, Haselton makes some non-sequiturs of his own in his monologue above. For example, IT departments frequently can NOT trace an infringing IP address back to the user responsible, at least in my experience. In my network, we are NAT'd through our corporate firewall, so all you would get is the external, public IP address for the firewall, not the RFC-1918 address all PCs in the office use on the inside (if the individual PC IP addresses were logged rather than the external, public IP address, you couldn't even trace it back to the corporate firewall, since RFC-1918 addresses aren't valid on the public Internet).
However, as much as it pains me to say it, from my non-lawyer, non-expert OPINION I think he is correct (at least to the point where I stopped reading) to say that the judge screwed up in this case. A subpoena is not a guilty verdict for the defendant; a subpoena provides the only way for the copyright holder to begin the investigation. If a copyright holder becomes aware that infringing content is being offered for upload from a particular IP address, their only recourse is to subpoena the owner (ISP, for example) of that IP address for subscriber information, and then look for additional proof that the subscriber was, in fact, responsible for uploading the copyrighted content. The problem with the copyright situation we have isn't that a copyright holder can subpoena an ISP for subscriber information to conduct an investigation; the problem is the way that the courts, the **AA thugs and the various LEOs presume that an implicated subscriber is guilty from the start, and no amount of evidence to the contrary will convince them otherwise.
CDMA phones don't use sim cards.
...when you simplify things, something inevitably gets lost in the translation...
Just for grins, let's take this a step farther. How far down the scale of least common denominator do you have to go? Not everyone in the U.S. graduated from high school. There are probably people in the country who never even made it out of primary school. Should I have to translate my legal contract into Dr. Seuss or "Dick and Jane" so that even the least literate person in the country can understand the document? How about pictograms?
That's absurd. If the cellular carrier mucks with my phone so that location services are turned on, then the cellular carrier is the one who wronged me, not Google.
Suing Google because the carrier screwed with my privacy settings would be like the new owner of my car/house (in your analogy) suing me because I still retain the title to the car or house even after they paid for it, and then having me sue you to recover what I had to pay to the person who thought (s)he bought my car or house. Do you SERIOUSLY think that's how it should work? IMHO, both the end user AND Google should sue the carrier. The end user, because the carrier bound the end user to a contract without the end user's knowledge or consent, and Google, for having their reputation shot because of the carrier's actions.
However, even that is academic because shortly after I bought my Android phone, Google e-mailed me not just once, but twice to inform me that location services were turned on, and here's how to disable them if that's not what I wanted, etc., etc. So even IF the carrier set up location services without my knowledge, Google still had a means to inform me of what was being collected and what to do if that's not what I wanted. In other words, even if the carrier set up your phone for you, you'd still have to be brain dead not to know what data was being collected.
Agreed. I turned location data off on my Android phone and tablet. That lasted about a week before I decided to turn it back on. In my estimation, the privacy I was giving up was negligible and the services I was receiving in exchange was valuable. Maybe I'm missing something, but nothing I've seen about this issue seems like that much of a big deal to me.
When writing a document that will be read by their users (most of whom are not legal experts) that explains the legal relationship that user has with aspects of the company policy, they choose to write it in a language which they know will not be understood by those same non-legal expert users.
I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet. However, even to this techie-type, it seems to me that writing a document explaining "the LEGAL relationship the user has with aspects of the company policy" (emphasis mine) in anything other than legal language has BAD IDEA stamped all over it. I would think that such a document could be construed as being a legally binding document, and that's a really big problem to lawyers. We tech types use very specific words to convey very specific meanings. A layman might not understand the difference between bits and bytes, Ethernet and TCP/IP, an Android or an iPad, a netbook or a laptop. To us tech-types, however, each of these words has a specific meaning, and they are NOT interchangeable. Likewise, to a lawyer, legal contracts are written in a specific jargon because the words used have very specific meanings and clearly delineate rights and responsibilities of the two parties in a contract. Just as all of us have cringed when marketing departments or sales staff butcher beyond all recognition the technical description of a piece of tech, lawyers cringe when legal concepts are described in layman's terms. Why? Because when you simplify things, something inevitably gets lost in the translation, and in legal matters, that can easily mean more liability than intended...which often translates to financial liability.
While I don't doubt that lawyers and corporate legal departments see an advantage to writing "in a language which they know will not be understood by those same non-legal expert users" I don't think that is the primary motivating factor for writing legal documents in legal language; rather it is the fact that legal language is the best language to use for writing legal documents.
I just start playing with AppInventor this week, and right off the cuff...it's got a lot of potential, but I haven't used it enough yet to know if it's really a serious tool.
:) That's just a minor quibble, however, and while I'm enjoying learning how to create Android apps, I do have a few concerns about the language. First, the language itself is completely obscured. There may be a way to bypass the GUI and see the code AppInventor is generating, but if so, I haven't found it yet. Having spent way more time than I like cleaning up the horrible HTML that both Front Page and Dream Weaver generate when my family members who couldn't (or wouldn't) learn HTML came to me for help -- and at some point, they always came to me to fix their HTML when FP and DW didn't get it right -- I tend to distrust visual coding tools. I would also love to see a comparison between execution times for two identical Android programs, one written in AppInventor and the other coded by hand. I'm curious how AppInventor optimizes the code. Also, I find that the programs get a little hard to follow by the time you get a page full of code blocks on the Block Editor. It may be just another case of the way I think hindering my adoption of the tool, but I seem to have an easier time keeping the code in my head when I type it out by hand rather than when I snap puzzle pieces together on a GUI. Finally, my last concern about AppInventor is that the "command" reference is somewhat lacking. It took me pretty much a full day, and numerous Google searches, to figure out how to use the TinyDB to store persistent data in AppInventor. In the end, the procedure I was using to store data in TinyDB was never running because I was getting an error in the routine that pulls data from the TinyDB because the way to tell if there is any data stored in the database is not exactly intuitive and is completely omitted in the documentation.
The Cons: I tend to be kind of a linear, procedural thinker -- I cut my teeth on BASIC, learned COBOL in high school, learned Pascal and Perl in college, and now use mostly Perl and a little Python -- so AppInventor requires me to approach writing programs a little differently. For example, in Perl, if I want to compare two strings, I think it out the way the line is typed on the console; AppInventor, on the other hand, seems kind of like programming in Reverse Polish Notation
The Pros: I am quite impressed with the ease with which I started using AppInventor. When I first started using Python, it was very easy for me to read someone else's scripts and comprehend what they were doing. Writing Python, on the other hand, was a bigger hurdle. To be fair, a lot of that was because I've been writing Perl for so long, that I try to do things the Perl way (okay...ONE of the many Perl ways ) and then have to search Google to find the way it's supposed to be done in Python. AppInventor, on the other hand, is just a matter of snapping puzzle pieces together. If you try to do something that would be a syntax error in a traditional language, AppInventor immediately pops up an error telling you why you can't do whatever it is you are trying to do -- and the error messages are pretty intuitive. Procedural errors are a whole other story -- see the caveat above about using TinyDB.
Experienced programmers may turn up their nose at tools like AppInventor since it lowers the barrier of entry so much, but IMHO, tools that make it easy for people to learn programming concepts are a Good Thing. Will people churn out crappy code in AppInventor? Yep. Do people already churn out crap code in Perl, Java, C/C++/C#? Yep. Will skilled programmers make well-designed apps in AppInventor? I don't see why not. I imagine the quality of the code will probably depend upon some of the concerns I described above, but the *design* will be a reflection upon the skill and experience of the developer. I don't see any reason why a good developer will suddenly be reduced to creating crappy apps with tools like A
I'm not saying that I think ISPs *should* make that leap; I'm saying that I can easily imagine them making that jump even though they probably *shouldn't*.
ISP's don't give two shits what you do with your bandwidth, as it's not a server.
Uh, yeah they do care, because they are overselling it to an absurd degree. Anything you do that makes it more likely that you are actually using the bandwidth that you purchased puts stress on their network. One of the major providers where I live is trying to build a system by which they can bill by usage, rather than by max download speed just to get around this problem. Keep in mind, most ISPs are loss-leaders for the more profitable services in a telco or cable company. The ISP typically loses money every month on Internet accounts, but since it is part of a bundled service, the parent company makes up the difference in residential, long-distance, and/or cellular telephone services; or cable TV, PPV, VoD, etc. Consequently, they have incentive not to build a better network than they have to, and the more you use that network, the fatter the pipes they have to build.
Furthermore, some ISPs have in their AUPs a provision that says you can't run a server on anything but a business account (since business accounts are typically quite a bit more expensive than residential accounts). The other major provider in my area, for whom I used to work as a sys admin, was such an ISP. While most of the ISP admins didn't really care, the provision was in our policies, and I was aware of a couple of instances where we terminated peoples' accounts for reselling services off of residential Internet accounts. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see an ISP interpret sharing an open WiFi access point as "reselling" a service (i.e., payment is in goodwill and/or karma rather than cash).
Do you always end your posts with "you're an idiot"? Just wondering...
Eliza, is that you?
What good does that do? Unless your troll is coming from a business or other site that has a static IP, you only end up banning the next hapless schmuck that got assigned the IP address the troll was using when he pissed you off, and the troll has reconnected on another IP address and is still happily trolling away on your site.
Granted, the "next hapless schmuck" may not even visit your web site, but if you ban enough IP addresses -- and/or your site is popular enough -- you will eventually end up temporarily banning innocent bystanders.
Don't forget Rouge / Rogue
Get over yourself, dude. I spent a year on public assistance due to health problems, but I *never once* made excuses or accepted the notion that I was powerless or a victim. I have been blessed, yes, but I *worked* to get where I am.
Furthermore, let me clue YOU in on something: the poorest people in the United States -- or most of western Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, etc. -- are richer than ninety-something percent of the world's population. Have you ever left you middle-class suburban world to see what it's like elsewhere? I have, and quite frankly, most westerners have no idea how well off they are. The fact that you have access to a computer to tell me how privileged I am and how downtrodden you are is ample proof that you, whether you believe it or not, live a life of luxury compared to most people in the rest of the world. So if you want to wallow in self pity because you aren't one of the "powerful" people, knock yourself out. But don't expect me to have pity for you because you have adopted that mindset, instead of looking for ways to improve your situation.
So you are saying we need college professors and grad-students to unionize?
Similarly, telling people to "work for someone else" doesn't solve the problem either - they *all* do this, you have no bargaining power at all, they have all the money.
Ummm...start your own business, then? My wife has done it twice in the last decade. It's a lot of work, and there are no guarantees that you will break even, much less earn the salary you earn as a cubicle drone in the tech sector, but if you don't like the terms of employment for anyone that's hiring, it IS an option. <shrug> I'm just not a big believer in the "I have no power at all" victim mentality.
The company I work for had similar language in the contract I signed. However, before signing that contract, I negotiated slightly different terms with the HR person. Bottom line, I agreed that all software or inventions I created *on company time or with company resources* would belong to the company; however, any software or inventions I created *on my own time* were mine. I also agreed that I wouldn't use my "insider knowledge" of the company to create a tool that I knew the company needed on my own time so that I could license it back to the company, nor would I create products or services in my off time to compete with the company I work for.
So, yeah...the terms you mention are pretty much typical in the tech industry, but you can sometimes negotiate terms that will alleviate your employer's ethics or competition concerns while still allowing you to create and own things that are unrelated to the company's business interest.
And Jonner gave multiple examples of why your arguments failed by pointing out parallel cases in other technologies that we all pretty much understand to be useful. Your claim seems to be that torrents are not a useful protocol/technology because the predominant use of that technology is illicit. Jonner points out several other protocols/technologies that ALSO have (or at least, at some point in time, HAD) a predominately illicit use, but which are generally accepted. Consequently, pointing out that a protocol/technology is predominately (ab)used for illicit purposes is NOT a valid measure of whether or not the protocol or technology is "good" or "bad".
I would take the argument a step further and say that a protocol or technology CANNOT be inherently "good" or "bad" but rather only the uses one make of it are "good" or "bad". Even if only 1% of bittorrent traffic is used for legitimate purposes like Linux or other FOSS, that proves that bittorrent has a legitimate use and consequently should not be restricted.
Baseball bats have lots of illegal uses, no one fights the sales of those.
Yet...
I don't think it's accurate to say, "Nobody does this anymore." I've been a member on a number of on-line Internet forums where people would share knowledge about working on various cars and motorcycles. There was a very active community for people who owned DSM's (Diamond-Star Motors, i.e., Mitsubishi Eclipse/Eagle Talon/Plymouth Laser). Likewise the Honda Goldwing Forum (SFW, despite the name), the Honda Nighthawk Forum and Suzuki V-Strom Forum have been essential in helping me work on the various motorcycles I have owned. You'll find people there who have done everything from simple oil changes to completely rebuilding engines. As for me, I have never taken a car to a shop to have a light bulb replaced, I almost always change my own oil and filters, I installed crash bars and luggage carriers on my V-Strom -- and rigged up my own mounting system for the Pelican cases I hung off the luggage carriers. I even replaced the clutch in my Talon with a new one, installed stiffer engine mounts and started rebuilding the engine on my Goldwing project (but ended up selling that project before I finished it). It may not be as common for people to do their own maintenance on their cars, but it's far from dead.
Slightly off-topic, but kind of a funny story: I needed the oil changed in my Talon one time and for whatever reason, I couldn't do it myself this time so I took it to one of the 20-minute lube shops in town. I tell the guys all I want done is oil and oil filter. Ten minutes or so later, the mechanic walks in with a very dirty OEM air filter and tells me that it looks like I need a new air filter. I raise an eyebrow and ask the guy, "That's off of my car?" He says yes. I ask him, "Are you sure?"
"Yes," he says.
"The black Eagle Talon?"
"Yes."
"That's funny," I reply, "because my Talon has a K&N cone-type air filter attached to an aluminum intake pipe. That filter is off of a stock Talon with the factory airbox. There is no airbox on my car, so there is no way that air filter could even be attached to my car."
"Let me go double-check," the mechanic says.
Because I knew my car, I knew the shop was trying to charge me for work they weren't really going to perform. It pays to have technical knowledge sometimes.
The times where citizens could rise up against a tyrant in the civilized world is long gone; it cannot happen and will not happen...there is no way a rebellion could ever succeed in current times.
Current events in the mid-East would prove otherwise. Libya and Syria are still to be determined, but unrest in Egypt and Tunisia, for example, have already toppled dictatorships.
While I think running a wireless router with no security is just asking for trouble -- and therefore, shipping routers with password requirements would help alleviate that particular issue -- I still have a bit of a problem with that. For example, I recently needed to set up an access point that would serve a host that could do WEP only and another host that could do WPA only. My solution was to remove all encryption and lock down the router to only allow specified MAC addresses. This wasn't a perfect solution, since someone sufficiently inclined could sniff the network and clone one of my authorized MAC addresses. However, it did at least keep me from being the lowest-hanging fruit for anyone looking to leach WiFi access.