Thank you for taking the time to contact me with your concerns regarding the ongoing negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. I appreciate hearing from all Pennsylvanians about the issues that matter most to them.
"I will pretend to listen to you because I like votes."
The protection of intellectual property rights is important to the U.S. economy. Every year industries that rely on these rules, such as pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and high technology, contribute to 40% of all private sector growth, which amounts to almost 20% of Gross Domestic Product. The infringement on intellectual property rights is estimated to cost over $200 billion and around 750,000 high-paying jobs every year. In our current economy, these are worrying figures.
"The protection of intellectual property rights is important to my campaign contributors. Here are some bogus, scary-sounding statistics to cover up my blatant pandering."
The protection of intellectual property rights must strike a balance between necessary safeguards against abuses and policies that promote the free exchange of information so important to innovation.
"We will keep upping the penalties on intellectual property violations until people won't stand for it any more."
Congress has delegated the power to negotiate trade agreements to the Executive Office of the President, and these negotiations have historically been kept private in the initial stages. Despite the deference to the executive branch, Congress must be kept informed about the negotiations. I, too, am concerned about the lack of transparency in recent talks concerning the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement. I am hopeful that the Obama Administration will increase transparency in these discussions.
"I will now pass the buck on the secrecy issue so that no one can hold me responsible."
Please be assured that I will keep your concerns in mind as I continue to follow the progress of the agreement.
"I have already forgotten what you wrote."
Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future about this or any other matter of importance to you.
"Please keep voting for me."
If you have access to the Internet, I encourage you to visit my web site, http://casey.senate.gov./ I invite you to use this online office as a comprehensive resource to stay up-to-date on my work in Washington, request assistance from my office or share with me your thoughts on the issues that matter most to you and to Pennsylvania.
"I will try to show that I am up on technology and the internet by mentioning my website."
I was under the impression that EC2 starts and stops new instances of your system, up to whatever limit you specify, based on load.
Actually, you're essentially right: while basic EC2 doesn't do this for you, Amazon CloudWatch does provide Auto Scaling. CloudWatch is an extra service you can purchase for each instance; I had forgotten about it since we don't use it. I don't know the details about Auto Scaling, but I'm sure you can get them from the link above.
It sure sounded like you were under the impression that EC2 does more than provide dumb virtual machines:
I'm also not quite sure on how they decide to use more or fewer instances. Our service fluctuates greatly in demand -- upon a user request, demand can spike tremendously for 10 seconds or so, then drop to nearly nothing until the next user request comes in. I assume they always keep at least once instance running so that the service stays alive, right?
If "they" here refers to Amazon/EC2, that's what I was talking about: EC2 doesn't do any kind of scaling for you. If not, then who does it refer to?
As for persistent storage, you have three options:
Bake the data directly into your AMI, if it's small and doesn't change often.
Store the data on an EBS volume (basically a NAS unit): decent performance and transparent to your apps, but can potentially fail and so should be backed up regularly to S3. Can only be attached to one running instance at a time, though of course you can run an NFS server on top of it if you want.
Store the data on S3 directly: slow and requires special tools to access, but you can just throw data on there and forget it, as well as access it from all your instances.
I am a bit confused about how disk space works with the Amazon EC2 cloud. They advertise how much local storage there is per instance... but then later they mention that this isn't persistent. Anyone know how persistent storage works with them? I'm also not quite sure on how they decide to use more or fewer instances. Our service fluctuates greatly in demand -- upon a user request, demand can spike tremendously for 10 seconds or so, then drop to nearly nothing until the next user request comes in. I assume they always keep at least once instance running so that the service stays alive, right? What about running a database -- our app queries a postgres DB. We certainly wouldn't want multiple copies running and going up and down. So I'm still a big vague on some of these things.
EC2 doesn't run your services for you; it simply gives you "dumb", unmanaged virtual machines to do whatever you want with. You must administer your servers yourself, and implement your own service-level infrastructure (including scaling and redundancy).
There are third-party services like RightScale that sit on top of EC2 and are supposed do much of that work for you, but I'm not too familiar with them.
It's large when all 30-40k lines are in a single Perl file, with gobs of cut-n-paste code, dozens of global variables referenced from everywhere with no special naming convention, functions sometimes thousands of lines long, helpful function names like "p7e_2b_show", and only incredibly obvious comments like "#print output". Oh, and almost every one of about a thousand database statements, many of which involve user input, uses string interpolation instead of bound variables. No test suite or design documentation, either, so in many cases you have to guess at what the code is even supposed to be doing in the first place.
Any time a libertarian argues againt taxation is a fine example. Without taxes, and the social security they help fund, the poorer amongst us are little more than indentured servants - if they get lucky, that is; if not, they'll be starving beggars.
To be clear, what precisely is the "fundamental freedom" you're referring to here?
Libertarian theory concentrates entirely on liberty - the legal permission to act - and refuses to acknowledge that this is not synonymous with freedom, which requires the further condition that one also has the ability to act.
You are basically right, though you use the word "freedom" strangely. Libertarians believe it is each man's responsibility to secure the means to his ends, and no one else's.
At some point, the libertarian movement became obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism, and began to see it as an end in itself - and a silver bullet at that - rather than a means to an end.
The market, as a concept, is neither a means nor an end. It simply "is"-- it's what you get when a bunch of people start voluntarily exchanging goods and services with each other. What libertarians assert is that attempts to "fix" the market coercively are (a) generally ineffective, often with disastrous side-effects; and (b) must necessarily impinge on individuals' freedom to engage in these voluntary exchanges.
Since the difference between me and a typical libertarian is about core values - I value freedom, and derive property rights from that, and a libertarian values property and derives any freedoms from that - that's the most that we can say.
This has been one of the most civil discussions on this topic I've ever had on Slashdot. Thank you.
On a more serious note, it's a good example of just how twisted libertarian viewpoint really is: it sees everything in the terms of property, and treats even fundamental freedoms as merely byproducts, which in turn implies that they might take a second seat when they come into conflict with someone else's (actual) property rights.
I'd be very interested to hear some examples in which you believe libertarian theory would demand "fundamental freedoms" to "take a second seat" to property rights.
And that's precisely why we rest of us don't want to be associated with libertarians.
Please don't pretend to represent everyone else; it doesn't bolster your case.
I argue for personal liberty, not economical liberty - the latter is a subset, not superset, of the former.
As you offer no supporting arguments, I can only say "I disagree".
Of course the fact that removing regulation pretty much caused the current depression doesn't help either.
I protest you using "libertarian" to describe someone believing in freedom of speech. "Libertarian" nowadays means completely unregulated capitalism. It has nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes.
You understand that one's body is a form of property, and therefore property rights encompass freedom of speech, don't you? To say that libertarianism has "nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes" is meaningless because to a libertarian, property rights are the basis for all rights and freedoms.
You're taking my comments too personally. I don't mean to suggest that you are engaging in it, although I'd argue that basically everything that happens on slashdot amounts to that or less. This is not a criticism of you, but of the medium that we're discussing in. So don't bother with the dick-measuring about how much time you or I have spent researching this.
You can't just toss out a phrase like "knee-jerk handwaving" in a response to a particular comment and not expect it to be taken as an indirect insult. Please choose your words more carefully next time.
Look, I'm not interested in debating the merits of art and entertainment here, and that was not something necessary to my original statement.
No, it is central to your claim that "content producers and providers do need channels to make money".
Furthermore, if you're going to pick away at my use of "need" and then "we" rather than focusing on what I'm actually saying, I don't think I'm going to bother reading further replies.
You apparently think my focus on the actual words you're using is some kind of trivial nit-picking. On the contrary, I singled out those words to force you to be more clear and precise about what claim you were actually making, as I cannot properly respond to vague claims.
If you really believe in making arguments based on justice in ignorance of the practical consequences of your ideas, then I'll thank you to stay out of policy-making please.
Do you think the argument "it's not practical to give up slavery" should ever have carried any weight?
Justice is a fine concept, but you can't abstract practical concerns from its pursuit in any practical political or economic system. I'm not even talking about fine-tuning issues, you simply need to understand the system in order to make intelligent statements about it. How can you possibly consider whether restrictions on copying are just without some sense of what impact those restrictions have on other rights?
You seem to have a very different understanding of the word "justice" from mine.
I thought this was fairly obvious, but "need" meaning that if we want these art forms to survive in the modern high-quality, high-production values state, somehow the expensive equipment, labor, and training need to be paid for.
Who is "we"? Clearly you and I have differing opinions on this. And you still need to support your claim that our current level of entertainment production is preferable to what you think we would have without copyright, or even what criteria "we" should use to make this judgment.
Yes, I think it's a bad thing if this goes away. I think we benefit not only from having art and entertainment, available, but from having high quality art and entertainment available.
Every resource spent creating art and entertainment must necessarily not be spent creating something else. You must show that the resulting art and entertainment is preferable to what we would have otherwise, starting by showing that there is a sensible way of defining "preferable" in the first place.
It's completely fair, and I encourage everyone, to question whether copyright (and patent) laws are sensible and lead to sensible outcomes. However, you need to do a real educated analysis, and go beyond knee-jerk handwaving and really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products.
I resent your suggestion that I am engaging in "knee-jerk handwaving". I would bet you an ounce of gold that I have spent more time than you have thinking about and researching copyright, patents, and related issues.
Furthermore, one doesn't necessarily need to "really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products" if one's argument against those laws is based on justice, not utilitarianism. I have not made that argument here, but it is in my opinion the strongest argument to be made against copyright and patents.
The content producers and providers do need channels to make money...
"Need" meaning what, exactly? The human race did manage to survive without movies or TV shows for quite some time, if I recall my history correctly.
Besides, given the creative drive many people have, it's clear that some movies and TV shows would still get made even without a government-supported business model-- just maybe not as many, and maybe not with multimillion-dollar budgets. Your argument implicitly assumes that to be a bad thing, but is it? I'm not convinced.
Companies must tell you if a food they sell contains grapes, raisins or hemlock, but if a food contains corn, they're not forced to tell you if it's "natural" or GM.
Then buy products that do specify whether they contain GM components. If there's a product you want that isn't so labeled, try looking online or calling the company. If they won't say, chances are there's GM stuff in the product.
Yeah, that's a pain, but stop pretending that there's no way to avoid consuming something you don't want to consume just because producers aren't required by law to put it on the label. The nice thing about the market is that the more people become concerned about GM stuff, the more companies will start putting that info on their labels, even without being required to.
The fact that you had to qualify your statement with the word "standard" supports my point. And what "standard" are you referring to, anyway?
I have seen some people argue (like you) that sticking exclusively to TABs for indentation and using them for nothing else means a guy with 8-TABs can cooperate with 3, 4 and 5-TAB people, but I suspect that it would break down in practice.
Why do you suspect this? It sounds like you haven't actually tried it. I can and do sometimes view the same file with different tab widths, depending on which section I'm working with. There are no problems as long as you use only tabs for indentation, and spaces for all other formatting. And it's easy to fix when someone does the wrong thing.
It would also be hell for anyone who uses standard 8-TABs but finds an 8-space indentation intolerably deep -- i.e. for most people.
But if tabs are used only for indentation as I suggested, then these people can set the tab width to whatever they want without impacting anything besides indentation.
Then put a comment at the top saying how many "spaces" your tab is (or where your tab stops are)...
There's no reason to even do this unless you're aligning tabs with other characters, which you should never do precisely because tabs widths vary. Use tabs only at the beginning of a line for indentation, and not to create "columns" in variable declarations, hash maps, etc. (Personally, I can't stand that layout style anyway.)
By making lines 160 characters long you force everyone to have to code the same way you do.
Did you know that there are editors that can wrap text for you? Truly, we are living in the future!
What is lost to you by breaking a line at 80 characters...
I don't know, how about the ability to use lines longer than 80 characters? There's also the manual reformatting you have to do when you edit a line of text, which is a complete waste of time.
Now, I'm not saying you should never break up statements into multiple lines. But do so only to elucidate the structure of the statement, not to conform to some arbitrary column width to accommodate back-asswards coders who can't be arsed to use a modern editor.
So the idea piece of code would just be a collection of function definitions, and then a series of calls to those functions.
Perhaps. I tend to do that only at the highest level of an algorithm, because below a certain point it gets annoying to jump around from function to function so much. It's also usually not just a simple set of sequential, no-argument function calls like in my example; I was just trying to give some examples of the kinds of one-use functions I would write.
Functions allow you to give a piece of code a name; good names make code far easier to read. They also let you read algorithms at a higher level, ignoring implementation details until you need them. Which is easier to grasp quickly: several hundred lines of code in multiple blocks, or something like the following?
Readability is important even if you don't expect anyone else to ever have to maintain your code. It helps you spot bugs more easily, and makes it much easier to jump back in after not having touched the code for a year or so.
BUYING it (through cash or barter) should also be illegal as it finances production of more material.
What if it is hosted on an ad-supported site? Are you not "bartering" your time and attention in that case? That alone would be a big enough loophole for the feds to nail almost anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for taking the time to contact me with your concerns regarding the ongoing negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. I appreciate hearing from all Pennsylvanians about the issues that matter most to them.
"I will pretend to listen to you because I like votes."
The protection of intellectual property rights is important to the U.S. economy. Every year industries that rely on these rules, such as pharmaceuticals, entertainment, and high technology, contribute to 40% of all private sector growth, which amounts to almost 20% of Gross Domestic Product. The infringement on intellectual property rights is estimated to cost over $200 billion and around 750,000 high-paying jobs every year. In our current economy, these are worrying figures.
"The protection of intellectual property rights is important to my campaign contributors. Here are some bogus, scary-sounding statistics to cover up my blatant pandering."
The protection of intellectual property rights must strike a balance between necessary safeguards against abuses and policies that promote the free exchange of information so important to innovation.
"We will keep upping the penalties on intellectual property violations until people won't stand for it any more."
Congress has delegated the power to negotiate trade agreements to the Executive Office of the President, and these negotiations have historically been kept private in the initial stages. Despite the deference to the executive branch, Congress must be kept informed about the negotiations. I, too, am concerned about the lack of transparency in recent talks concerning the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement. I am hopeful that the Obama Administration will increase transparency in these discussions.
"I will now pass the buck on the secrecy issue so that no one can hold me responsible."
Please be assured that I will keep your concerns in mind as I continue to follow the progress of the agreement.
"I have already forgotten what you wrote."
Again, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. Please do not hesitate to contact me in the future about this or any other matter of importance to you.
"Please keep voting for me."
If you have access to the Internet, I encourage you to visit my web site, http://casey.senate.gov./ I invite you to use this online office as a comprehensive resource to stay up-to-date on my work in Washington, request assistance from my office or share with me your thoughts on the issues that matter most to you and to Pennsylvania.
"I will try to show that I am up on technology and the internet by mentioning my website."
Sincerely,
Bob Casey
United States Senator
"Sincerely,
Bob Casey
Professional Liar"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
"Waaah, this new standard is different and sounds funny. I'm going to keep misusing SI prefixes instead, because I can't handle change."
I was under the impression that EC2 starts and stops new instances of your system, up to whatever limit you specify, based on load.
Actually, you're essentially right: while basic EC2 doesn't do this for you, Amazon CloudWatch does provide Auto Scaling. CloudWatch is an extra service you can purchase for each instance; I had forgotten about it since we don't use it. I don't know the details about Auto Scaling, but I'm sure you can get them from the link above.
I'm also not quite sure on how they decide to use more or fewer instances. Our service fluctuates greatly in demand -- upon a user request, demand can spike tremendously for 10 seconds or so, then drop to nearly nothing until the next user request comes in. I assume they always keep at least once instance running so that the service stays alive, right?
If "they" here refers to Amazon/EC2, that's what I was talking about: EC2 doesn't do any kind of scaling for you. If not, then who does it refer to?
As for persistent storage, you have three options:
I am a bit confused about how disk space works with the Amazon EC2 cloud. They advertise how much local storage there is per instance... but then later they mention that this isn't persistent. Anyone know how persistent storage works with them? I'm also not quite sure on how they decide to use more or fewer instances. Our service fluctuates greatly in demand -- upon a user request, demand can spike tremendously for 10 seconds or so, then drop to nearly nothing until the next user request comes in. I assume they always keep at least once instance running so that the service stays alive, right? What about running a database -- our app queries a postgres DB. We certainly wouldn't want multiple copies running and going up and down. So I'm still a big vague on some of these things.
EC2 doesn't run your services for you; it simply gives you "dumb", unmanaged virtual machines to do whatever you want with. You must administer your servers yourself, and implement your own service-level infrastructure (including scaling and redundancy).
There are third-party services like RightScale that sit on top of EC2 and are supposed do much of that work for you, but I'm not too familiar with them.
It's large when all 30-40k lines are in a single Perl file, with gobs of cut-n-paste code, dozens of global variables referenced from everywhere with no special naming convention, functions sometimes thousands of lines long, helpful function names like "p7e_2b_show", and only incredibly obvious comments like "#print output". Oh, and almost every one of about a thousand database statements, many of which involve user input, uses string interpolation instead of bound variables. No test suite or design documentation, either, so in many cases you have to guess at what the code is even supposed to be doing in the first place.
Just hypothetically speaking, of course...
Any time a libertarian argues againt taxation is a fine example. Without taxes, and the social security they help fund, the poorer amongst us are little more than indentured servants - if they get lucky, that is; if not, they'll be starving beggars.
To be clear, what precisely is the "fundamental freedom" you're referring to here?
Libertarian theory concentrates entirely on liberty - the legal permission to act - and refuses to acknowledge that this is not synonymous with freedom, which requires the further condition that one also has the ability to act.
You are basically right, though you use the word "freedom" strangely. Libertarians believe it is each man's responsibility to secure the means to his ends, and no one else's.
At some point, the libertarian movement became obsessed with laissez-faire capitalism, and began to see it as an end in itself - and a silver bullet at that - rather than a means to an end.
The market, as a concept, is neither a means nor an end. It simply "is"-- it's what you get when a bunch of people start voluntarily exchanging goods and services with each other. What libertarians assert is that attempts to "fix" the market coercively are (a) generally ineffective, often with disastrous side-effects; and (b) must necessarily impinge on individuals' freedom to engage in these voluntary exchanges.
Since the difference between me and a typical libertarian is about core values - I value freedom, and derive property rights from that, and a libertarian values property and derives any freedoms from that - that's the most that we can say.
This has been one of the most civil discussions on this topic I've ever had on Slashdot. Thank you.
On a more serious note, it's a good example of just how twisted libertarian viewpoint really is: it sees everything in the terms of property, and treats even fundamental freedoms as merely byproducts, which in turn implies that they might take a second seat when they come into conflict with someone else's (actual) property rights.
I'd be very interested to hear some examples in which you believe libertarian theory would demand "fundamental freedoms" to "take a second seat" to property rights.
And that's precisely why we rest of us don't want to be associated with libertarians.
Please don't pretend to represent everyone else; it doesn't bolster your case.
I argue for personal liberty, not economical liberty - the latter is a subset, not superset, of the former.
As you offer no supporting arguments, I can only say "I disagree".
Of course the fact that removing regulation pretty much caused the current depression doesn't help either.
Ditto.
I protest you using "libertarian" to describe someone believing in freedom of speech. "Libertarian" nowadays means completely unregulated capitalism. It has nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes.
You understand that one's body is a form of property, and therefore property rights encompass freedom of speech, don't you? To say that libertarianism has "nothing to do with rights or freedoms, except property rights and the freedom from taxes" is meaningless because to a libertarian, property rights are the basis for all rights and freedoms.
You're taking my comments too personally. I don't mean to suggest that you are engaging in it, although I'd argue that basically everything that happens on slashdot amounts to that or less. This is not a criticism of you, but of the medium that we're discussing in. So don't bother with the dick-measuring about how much time you or I have spent researching this.
You can't just toss out a phrase like "knee-jerk handwaving" in a response to a particular comment and not expect it to be taken as an indirect insult. Please choose your words more carefully next time.
Look, I'm not interested in debating the merits of art and entertainment here, and that was not something necessary to my original statement.
No, it is central to your claim that "content producers and providers do need channels to make money".
Furthermore, if you're going to pick away at my use of "need" and then "we" rather than focusing on what I'm actually saying, I don't think I'm going to bother reading further replies.
You apparently think my focus on the actual words you're using is some kind of trivial nit-picking. On the contrary, I singled out those words to force you to be more clear and precise about what claim you were actually making, as I cannot properly respond to vague claims.
If you really believe in making arguments based on justice in ignorance of the practical consequences of your ideas, then I'll thank you to stay out of policy-making please.
Do you think the argument "it's not practical to give up slavery" should ever have carried any weight?
Justice is a fine concept, but you can't abstract practical concerns from its pursuit in any practical political or economic system. I'm not even talking about fine-tuning issues, you simply need to understand the system in order to make intelligent statements about it. How can you possibly consider whether restrictions on copying are just without some sense of what impact those restrictions have on other rights?
You seem to have a very different understanding of the word "justice" from mine.
I thought this was fairly obvious, but "need" meaning that if we want these art forms to survive in the modern high-quality, high-production values state, somehow the expensive equipment, labor, and training need to be paid for.
Who is "we"? Clearly you and I have differing opinions on this. And you still need to support your claim that our current level of entertainment production is preferable to what you think we would have without copyright, or even what criteria "we" should use to make this judgment.
Yes, I think it's a bad thing if this goes away. I think we benefit not only from having art and entertainment, available, but from having high quality art and entertainment available.
Every resource spent creating art and entertainment must necessarily not be spent creating something else. You must show that the resulting art and entertainment is preferable to what we would have otherwise, starting by showing that there is a sensible way of defining "preferable" in the first place.
It's completely fair, and I encourage everyone, to question whether copyright (and patent) laws are sensible and lead to sensible outcomes. However, you need to do a real educated analysis, and go beyond knee-jerk handwaving and really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products.
I resent your suggestion that I am engaging in "knee-jerk handwaving". I would bet you an ounce of gold that I have spent more time than you have thinking about and researching copyright, patents, and related issues.
Furthermore, one doesn't necessarily need to "really understand the economy that is built on the current laws and how our society depends on the products" if one's argument against those laws is based on justice, not utilitarianism. I have not made that argument here, but it is in my opinion the strongest argument to be made against copyright and patents.
The content producers and providers do need channels to make money...
"Need" meaning what, exactly? The human race did manage to survive without movies or TV shows for quite some time, if I recall my history correctly.
Besides, given the creative drive many people have, it's clear that some movies and TV shows would still get made even without a government-supported business model-- just maybe not as many, and maybe not with multimillion-dollar budgets. Your argument implicitly assumes that to be a bad thing, but is it? I'm not convinced.
That is the traditional "rule", yes, but it's a stupid one. Punctuation should go inside quotation marks if and only if it's part of the quote.
Companies must tell you if a food they sell contains grapes, raisins or hemlock, but if a food contains corn, they're not forced to tell you if it's "natural" or GM.
Then buy products that do specify whether they contain GM components. If there's a product you want that isn't so labeled, try looking online or calling the company. If they won't say, chances are there's GM stuff in the product.
Yeah, that's a pain, but stop pretending that there's no way to avoid consuming something you don't want to consume just because producers aren't required by law to put it on the label. The nice thing about the market is that the more people become concerned about GM stuff, the more companies will start putting that info on their labels, even without being required to.
No they don't. The standard TAB width is 8.
The fact that you had to qualify your statement with the word "standard" supports my point. And what "standard" are you referring to, anyway?
I have seen some people argue (like you) that sticking exclusively to TABs for indentation and using them for nothing else means a guy with 8-TABs can cooperate with 3, 4 and 5-TAB people, but I suspect that it would break down in practice.
Why do you suspect this? It sounds like you haven't actually tried it. I can and do sometimes view the same file with different tab widths, depending on which section I'm working with. There are no problems as long as you use only tabs for indentation, and spaces for all other formatting. And it's easy to fix when someone does the wrong thing.
It would also be hell for anyone who uses standard 8-TABs but finds an 8-space indentation intolerably deep -- i.e. for most people.
But if tabs are used only for indentation as I suggested, then these people can set the tab width to whatever they want without impacting anything besides indentation.
Then put a comment at the top saying how many "spaces" your tab is (or where your tab stops are)...
There's no reason to even do this unless you're aligning tabs with other characters, which you should never do precisely because tabs widths vary. Use tabs only at the beginning of a line for indentation, and not to create "columns" in variable declarations, hash maps, etc. (Personally, I can't stand that layout style anyway.)
By making lines 160 characters long you force everyone to have to code the same way you do.
Did you know that there are editors that can wrap text for you? Truly, we are living in the future!
What is lost to you by breaking a line at 80 characters...
I don't know, how about the ability to use lines longer than 80 characters? There's also the manual reformatting you have to do when you edit a line of text, which is a complete waste of time.
Now, I'm not saying you should never break up statements into multiple lines. But do so only to elucidate the structure of the statement, not to conform to some arbitrary column width to accommodate back-asswards coders who can't be arsed to use a modern editor.
Boy have I got a tale of woah for you...
Keanu, is that you?
So the idea piece of code would just be a collection of function definitions, and then a series of calls to those functions.
Perhaps. I tend to do that only at the highest level of an algorithm, because below a certain point it gets annoying to jump around from function to function so much. It's also usually not just a simple set of sequential, no-argument function calls like in my example; I was just trying to give some examples of the kinds of one-use functions I would write.
Readability is important even if you don't expect anyone else to ever have to maintain your code. It helps you spot bugs more easily, and makes it much easier to jump back in after not having touched the code for a year or so.
BUYING it (through cash or barter) should also be illegal as it finances production of more material.
What if it is hosted on an ad-supported site? Are you not "bartering" your time and attention in that case? That alone would be a big enough loophole for the feds to nail almost anyone.
In what way do you feel that Google's services (Google Public DNS in particular) are not "equitable"?
Also, that blog post is pure PR bullshit and FUD.
Ng yrnfg EBG13 rkvfgf!
I think the absurd list of requirements (bzip3?) was supposed to tip you off that it was a joke post.