I think the challenge includes documents that were blown up during a battle. The adversary might not have enough time to burn or shred a document when the tanks are rolling in, but the fight itself could have the effect of shredding.
It turns out that sex offenders have some of the lowest recidivism rates of any category of crime. We let far more dangerous criminals out of prison all the time, and we do not require them to wear the scarlet letter. The whole sex offender registry concept was a knee-jerk reaction to an exceedingly rare event.
Or do loads of people have friends who are sex offenders?
This may not be so far-fetched, considering how easily someone may be added to the sex offender list. We are told by the media that the people on the sex offender list are people who rape little children, but there is a whole spectrum: a 19 year old who had sex with a 16 year old, a guy whose computer stored child abuse photos/videos, someone who had sex with a drunk woman, someone who urinated in public, etc. It is like asking if there are large numbers of people whose friends were convicted of drug offenses.
Indeed, and it is worth mentioning that capitalism is a democratic system of determining what will be produced -- popular items are produced in greater quantities and unpopular items are produced in lesser quantities. As with democracy, if the participants in a capitalist system are uneducated and oblivious to what is happening the system tends to produce less-than-optimal results. Those who are in power now know this, and I suspect that one reason why education always seems to be on the back burner in America is that becoming more democratic is not a priority for the people in charge.
If you are trying to market yourself with buzzword technologies and languages, then yes, your marketability decreases over time. On the other hand, if you are marketing yourself for less trendy technical work, maybe not. There are still a lot of COBOL and FORTRAN programmers out there, and they command some pretty competitive salaries. There are a lot of systems that were installed over decade ago that work just fine and just need people to support and maintain them, along with occasionally adding an interface for some newer system.
Governments do not have the same incentive to sue. P&G would sue because their investors hold their accountable for their actions, and if P&G failed to show that they exercised their due diligence they would be in a lot of trouble. In theory, a democratic government is similarly accountable to its citizens, but in practice most people are oblivious to what their government is doing.
Keep in mind that both Kosher and Halal inspections are fueled by strong demand to maintain dietary restrictions that date back centuries. The majority of Americans do not actually demand food safety inspections, and a private system would probably fail. Food safety inspections are necessary for public health and welfare, but I would not expect most people to understand that or the need for it. I would also be concerned about cheaper food not having been inspected, and people not checking for certification.
If we lived in a country that was not filled with clueless, distracted citizens, a private food inspection system would work great.
Correction: the trackers coordinate the transfer of the data among the peers. It is reasonable to argue that the tracker is complicit in copyright infringement, so the point is somewhat moot.
Except that the torrent file is just a collection of links to trackers, which have the actual data. If those trackers go down, the torrent file gives you squat. Really, the last step in the chain is the torrent file itself, not the search engines that provide it to you (and before you say, "but TPB hosts that file," remember that general purpose search engines often keep cached copies of the pages they index; thus implicating a website for having a copy of a file with links in it would implicate many search engines).
Do you think, given the nature of the internet, that the courts should be able to be crippled and circumvented by a simple change in domain registration costing $8 a pop?
If the judge had ruled that people are not allow to say the word, "Fuck," would you say that the police should also arrest people for saying "Feck," "Duck," "Deck," "Flarg," "Fail," or any number of other variations, or any word said where "Fuck" would normally have been said?
Which is not something they can reasonably be expected to do, given how easily those illegal files can be spread over the network. What this really says is that BT is expected to police the Internet.
No, they are selling a map to places that sell stolen cars, intentionally.
Only if you believe that making of a copy of something is theft. Most people do not believe that, because it is one of the worst abuses of the word "theft."
If I steal your car, you no longer have the car. If I copy your car, you still have your car. The difference is as clear as day to people who have not been thoroughly brainwashed by certain corporations.
More like the courts will hold you liable for allowing someone who tells people where they can find copies of legally acquired cars to stand in your parking lot.
What common sense is involved here? BT is being told that it is their responsibility to keep track of some other organization's IP addresses, because that organization maintains an index of potentially copyright-infringing Usenet posts. Common sense went out the window a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong, I like downloading copyrighted stuff for free as much as the next guy, but I find it peculiar that otherwise smart people try to argue that what The Pirate Bay or Newzbin or whoever is doing is just offering up "indexes" or "text files" or what have you. You know damn good and well their intent is to aid you in downloading stuff you would otherwise have to pay for, for free.
So where do you think the line should be drawn? How many layers of linking or indexing are required before we stop considering it to be illegal? If I post a link to a TPB page, which links to a torrent, is that a crime? What if I post a link to that link?
if computing were still split between IBM mainframes and 'cheap' $120,000 PDPs, software licenses would be basically irrelevant to almost everybody because they couldn't afford hardware
Actually, software licenses would still be relevant to the majority of people:
Before the development of the personal computer, the plan was to put a computer terminal in everyone's homes, and to charge people for the amount of CPU time and memory that they used. People would have been expected to abide by software licenses, since they could theoretically buy and use software on whatever mainframe they were using. It is likely that licenses would be enforced by the computation utility companies, which might have even been mandated by law.
It is not anachronistic in other fields. The problem with patents on software is not the length of time that the patent is valid, it is the fact that people are being granted patents on mathematics and pictures. Software is already covered by copyright law; why should it also be covered by patent law?
I don't however find anything detailing why LISP was chosen for any of the projects, was it because LISP have some inherent advantage for the specific applications, or because the projects were started during a time when everyone was told that LISP was the holy grail of programming and it was just the obvious thing to do?
Well, there are a few reasons that come to mind:
AI projects often involve AI researchers, and Lisp was a popular language in AI research.
Lisp macros have the full power of the language -- this allows programmers to do a lot of interesting things with macros, like extending the syntax and lexicon of the language to meet arbitrary needs.
Until recently, Lisp had features that were very rare in more commonly taught programming languages: lambda expressions, lexical closures, multiple dispatch, etc. This is beginning to change now (even C++ has lexical closures), but some of the projects I pointed out were written years ago when that was not the case. Although the need for some of those features is pretty rare -- I do not commonly need multiple dispatch -- when those features are needed, they can really help programmers express what they want the program to do.
Lisp developed environments were years ahead of other IDEs for a long time. For large projects like DART, I suspect that made a significant difference.
Extensibility -- I mentioned that Lisp macros can be used to extend the language, but it is also the case that compiled Lisp programs often include a Lisp interpreter, so Lisp can be used as a Lisp program's own extension language. This gives the users all the power that the programmers had (see above about features and macros). These days, this seems less impressive, since plenty of languages support this.
Now, to be fair, there were a lot of broken promises made by Lisp vendors in the 80s, back when AI was supposed to be the future of computing. It is likely that at least some projects were written in Lisp with the hope that some advanced AI would swoop in and do all sorts of magic. Still, Lisp can stand on its own merits, without anyone pushing snake oil on developers.
Probably because they were all young and fit when the first programming languages were (invented|discovered|[A-Za-z0-9]+) in the 1950s. That was a long time ago, and people do not live forever. Also, if you are wondering why so many pioneers are dying, it is because the field was new back then; soon programming languages researchers and [A-Za-z0-9]+s will be dying left and right but nobody will care, because the most well-known work happened decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the challenge includes documents that were blown up during a battle. The adversary might not have enough time to burn or shred a document when the tanks are rolling in, but the fight itself could have the effect of shredding.
It turns out that sex offenders have some of the lowest recidivism rates of any category of crime. We let far more dangerous criminals out of prison all the time, and we do not require them to wear the scarlet letter. The whole sex offender registry concept was a knee-jerk reaction to an exceedingly rare event.
While I may think sex offenders are some of the most mentally sick and twisted people to walk the earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_urination
Actually, sex offenders have some of the lowest recidivism rates of any crime.
Or do loads of people have friends who are sex offenders?
This may not be so far-fetched, considering how easily someone may be added to the sex offender list. We are told by the media that the people on the sex offender list are people who rape little children, but there is a whole spectrum: a 19 year old who had sex with a 16 year old, a guy whose computer stored child abuse photos/videos, someone who had sex with a drunk woman, someone who urinated in public, etc. It is like asking if there are large numbers of people whose friends were convicted of drug offenses.
Indeed, and it is worth mentioning that capitalism is a democratic system of determining what will be produced -- popular items are produced in greater quantities and unpopular items are produced in lesser quantities. As with democracy, if the participants in a capitalist system are uneducated and oblivious to what is happening the system tends to produce less-than-optimal results. Those who are in power now know this, and I suspect that one reason why education always seems to be on the back burner in America is that becoming more democratic is not a priority for the people in charge.
If you are trying to market yourself with buzzword technologies and languages, then yes, your marketability decreases over time. On the other hand, if you are marketing yourself for less trendy technical work, maybe not. There are still a lot of COBOL and FORTRAN programmers out there, and they command some pretty competitive salaries. There are a lot of systems that were installed over decade ago that work just fine and just need people to support and maintain them, along with occasionally adding an interface for some newer system.
Governments do not have the same incentive to sue. P&G would sue because their investors hold their accountable for their actions, and if P&G failed to show that they exercised their due diligence they would be in a lot of trouble. In theory, a democratic government is similarly accountable to its citizens, but in practice most people are oblivious to what their government is doing.
Keep in mind that both Kosher and Halal inspections are fueled by strong demand to maintain dietary restrictions that date back centuries. The majority of Americans do not actually demand food safety inspections, and a private system would probably fail. Food safety inspections are necessary for public health and welfare, but I would not expect most people to understand that or the need for it. I would also be concerned about cheaper food not having been inspected, and people not checking for certification.
If we lived in a country that was not filled with clueless, distracted citizens, a private food inspection system would work great.
Correction: the trackers coordinate the transfer of the data among the peers. It is reasonable to argue that the tracker is complicit in copyright infringement, so the point is somewhat moot.
Except that the torrent file is just a collection of links to trackers, which have the actual data. If those trackers go down, the torrent file gives you squat. Really, the last step in the chain is the torrent file itself, not the search engines that provide it to you (and before you say, "but TPB hosts that file," remember that general purpose search engines often keep cached copies of the pages they index; thus implicating a website for having a copy of a file with links in it would implicate many search engines).
Do you think, given the nature of the internet, that the courts should be able to be crippled and circumvented by a simple change in domain registration costing $8 a pop?
If the judge had ruled that people are not allow to say the word, "Fuck," would you say that the police should also arrest people for saying "Feck," "Duck," "Deck," "Flarg," "Fail," or any number of other variations, or any word said where "Fuck" would normally have been said?
Which is not something they can reasonably be expected to do, given how easily those illegal files can be spread over the network. What this really says is that BT is expected to police the Internet.
No, they are selling a map to places that sell stolen cars, intentionally.
Only if you believe that making of a copy of something is theft. Most people do not believe that, because it is one of the worst abuses of the word "theft."
If I steal your car, you no longer have the car. If I copy your car, you still have your car. The difference is as clear as day to people who have not been thoroughly brainwashed by certain corporations.
More like the courts will hold you liable for allowing someone who tells people where they can find copies of legally acquired cars to stand in your parking lot.
What common sense is involved here? BT is being told that it is their responsibility to keep track of some other organization's IP addresses, because that organization maintains an index of potentially copyright-infringing Usenet posts. Common sense went out the window a long time ago.
Don't get me wrong, I like downloading copyrighted stuff for free as much as the next guy, but I find it peculiar that otherwise smart people try to argue that what The Pirate Bay or Newzbin or whoever is doing is just offering up "indexes" or "text files" or what have you. You know damn good and well their intent is to aid you in downloading stuff you would otherwise have to pay for, for free.
So where do you think the line should be drawn? How many layers of linking or indexing are required before we stop considering it to be illegal? If I post a link to a TPB page, which links to a torrent, is that a crime? What if I post a link to that link?
if apple would not have shown an other way
if computing were still split between IBM mainframes and 'cheap' $120,000 PDPs, software licenses would be basically irrelevant to almost everybody because they couldn't afford hardware
Actually, software licenses would still be relevant to the majority of people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing
Before the development of the personal computer, the plan was to put a computer terminal in everyone's homes, and to charge people for the amount of CPU time and memory that they used. People would have been expected to abide by software licenses, since they could theoretically buy and use software on whatever mainframe they were using. It is likely that licenses would be enforced by the computation utility companies, which might have even been mandated by law.
It is not anachronistic in other fields. The problem with patents on software is not the length of time that the patent is valid, it is the fact that people are being granted patents on mathematics and pictures. Software is already covered by copyright law; why should it also be covered by patent law?
I think there might be some prior "art" on that one...
* Lisp development environments.
I don't however find anything detailing why LISP was chosen for any of the projects, was it because LISP have some inherent advantage for the specific applications, or because the projects were started during a time when everyone was told that LISP was the holy grail of programming and it was just the obvious thing to do?
Well, there are a few reasons that come to mind:
Now, to be fair, there were a lot of broken promises made by Lisp vendors in the 80s, back when AI was supposed to be the future of computing. It is likely that at least some projects were written in Lisp with the hope that some advanced AI would swoop in and do all sorts of magic. Still, Lisp can stand on its own merits, without anyone pushing snake oil on developers.
Probably because they were all young and fit when the first programming languages were (invented|discovered|[A-Za-z0-9]+) in the 1950s. That was a long time ago, and people do not live forever. Also, if you are wondering why so many pioneers are dying, it is because the field was new back then; soon programming languages researchers and [A-Za-z0-9]+s will be dying left and right but nobody will care, because the most well-known work happened decades ago.
So if I change the lexical analyzer, I invent a new language? I am going to be up to me neck in patents!