Gas stations could get "backup" generators -- 1mw is affordable for a station. It would also allow individual stations to deploy when they want to, and EV drivers would get more choice over time.
Using a bog-standard BSD/GPL license addresses liability, it just doesn't fix the fear of managers and lawyers inexperienced with releasing software. The poster could try writing a short email linking Google licenses, the FSF, the EFF and others.
The real problem will be support: I can't fix a SharePoint package if it doesn't install right, so you have to release all the code, and if you want it to succeed, you'll also need to write documentation and answer email/forum questions. Does your employer want you doing that?
The disturbing thing is how his comments are reproduced verbatim by the big shots of the tech-news industry like ZDNet, PC Magazine etc, but also mainstream sources which are normally known as the last bastions of real journalism like the BBC, LA Times, Reuters etc.
This is business-as-usual for manipulating the media ^H^H^H uhm... marketing, PR and advocacy. Money makes people available to the media, along with quotes, theories, photos, videos, statistics, etc... The media love this system because it's a ready-made source of material, easy to access, and the people are (or pretend to be) experts who are dispassionately explaining an issue.
If you're really disturbed by Florian Muellers success, I've got some bad news for you about "Think Tanks" and lot's of other organizations.
Everyone has biases, as long as we know what they are and why they are we're able to make informed decisions...
Sorry but 'knowing' biases doesn't work like that. Biases aren't binary on-or-off, they're not well defined or all consuming. People are blind or misunderstand their own biases and and poorly communicate them even when trying to open and honest. Moreover, people are able to compensate for different biases in different situations better or worse.
Florian Mueller doesn't think his biases influenced his 'reporting' (em. mine):
My long-standing views on this matter are well-documented. As an independent analyst and blogger, I will express only my own opinions, which cannot be attributed to any one of my diversity of clients. I often say things none of them would agree with.
Thank you. The idea that we would compare copyright infringement with terrorism and CP (like the OP did) is just crazy. What's Slashdot coming to that the OP is scored Insightful?
The core issue is that an IP does not identify more than the bill payer -- the good cause standard therefore is not met because the actual infringer is not identified.
That would depend on the terms of service.
No, it doesn't have to do with any ToS: the courts decide liability, not private companies. Why would you think otherwise? Including language that 'the subscriber is solely responsible...' or that 'sharing connections is forbidden', are only rules made by companies. They aren't laws, and they don't guarantee anything about how a subscription is used.
Ads are fine when labeled. What I'd really like is product reviews and/or advertisements to learn what other slashdoterers think and recommend. That seems like a way Slashdot could collect money from vendors, and be interesting to readers.
There has to be some separation between the ads and the content. No one is going to visit a site explicitly to see ads. And if the content becomes the advertising, users will leave.
Slashdot should try this (if they must mix advertising with content): Create clearly labeled 'discussions' about a product (like RHEL6) or type of product (like SMB databases or CRMs) and sell companies video/text space in that discussion, and give them 'official' accounts to comment with. Open source advocates or lead developers could also contribute.
Let the community talk about what works and what sucks, what the open source alternatives are, etc... It would be like product reviews, but technically focused and including competing products. Slashdot users would get the insight of their peers. Companies would get honest feedback from their users.
Finally, this system would encourage technical discussions. The more technical the topic, the more narrowly focused, the better and more useful the discussion. If the editors make a generic 'discussion' of "Windows vs. Linux", it'll be vacuous and useless. But if the 'discussion' is "Postgres or SQL Server for a new public forum website?" we'll get people talking about character encodings and replication options.
Plus, this company has just missed the ongoing paradigm shift (hate that phrase - someone have a better one?). End users should have full control over their (untrusted) endpoints, becuase we won't be storing anything important there, and any incoming files will be handled with appropriate suspicion.
This is still backwards: The end users files are what's valuable! Almost all security today (accounts + ACLs) is focused on protecting the OS and isolating software. In practice, anything running under a users account can do anything to a users documents, even though security should be the focused on protecting those documents, since they're why the user has a computer in the first place. The cloud idea, where the computer is just a browser or thin-client, might become reality, but it isn't today and history shows the opposite trend: smart phones and tablets are not replacing computers at work.
AppArmor and UAC are both attempts to restrain software in an automated way, and both are hard to use for the end user. We should be empowering the user to protect their documents (I don't have that answer), instead of moving the information in those documents to a new location and thinking the new place is somehow safer; store information in the cloud and viruses will start using the cloud apis.
Fixing code costs money. Sticking with IE is free.
Not fixing anything is cheaper then fixing it (in terms of immediate cash expense). Doesn't mean sticking with IE is the right decision, or a reasonable decision, or even that someone made a decision instead of ignoring the problem.
What should Mozilla do? Clearly they should focus on security. What should your "average corporation" do? Also care about security! But if they aren't going to and they want their software to stay static and unchanging, there are any number of solutions including: Go to "about:config" and change "app.update.auto" to false.
I don't know why all the fuss is about breaking our version scheme so the Enterprise has a harder time planning appropriate upgrades to their work stations. And now we decided to break compatibility with your legacy Java systems.... The enterprise doesn't stick with IE because they think it is a good browser they know how much it sucks. They stick with it because it can be maintained and managed properly in an enterprise environment.
Large/Enterprise organizations value version stability more than security? That's poor judgment. What does "maintained and managed properly" mean if it doesn't include security? It means two things: IT can cover their asses and blame problems on Microsoft, and IT can keep using vulnerable software rather then upgrading when there's security issues. Using vulnerable software is convenient for IT, but a poor solution to keeping production running.
You theorize that IE is used because it's broke but version stable. I think it's dumb inertia combined with sentiments like 'nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft' and 'you touch it, you own it', rather then a considered and reasoned decision to use IE. Your post echoes complaints about upgrades that many others have made, but they always sound like IT complaining about having to do their job, and I can tell you from experience that the upgrade cycle never ends, and the desktop issues are nothing compared to server-side systems. IT needs to get over it and fix the problem in a way that's either (relatively) long term or easy to replicate.
Finally, here are two alternatives to IE: They could use Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release and get both security and stability. Or they could disable Java in the browser and use Java Web Start for their important Java apps.
Extortion for money doesn't require shaming someone; the RIAA did extort people, it just wasn't called extortion until the judges were dealing with the p0rn industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion
Most federal judges are not impressed with this "settlement extortion" legal strategy, and aren't letting porn companies (and similar plaintiffs) get away with this on the cheap.
It's not the legal strategy that judges have a problem with -- it was allowed for years when the RIAA started doing it. It's only after the p0rn industry started using the same strategy that judges viewed it as extortion.
Now if we could just get some really obnoxious patent trolls, maybe we could get some legal bias against patents.
Politics is the issue, not any vagueness in the DMCA. The FBI and Justice Department could be going after the RIAA/MPAA for collusion, price fixing, fraud or any number of things, but politics says they go after Kim Dotcom and try to equate bit-torrent with terrorism.
The only way to actually stop piracy would be by passing new laws so draconian that I'd rather just see the entire copyright-driven industry destroyed than sacrifice that much freedom or hand so much power to those who can afford lawyers.
Wish more people saw it this way. Hollywood cannot survive as it is today; it has to adjust to the Internet like every other company.
Ghost users will solve the problem of unregistered users not being able to participate... because G+ doesn't let unregistered users participate? Seems to me they had the same problem with Google Docs -- unregistered users couldn't see or edit a spreadsheet -- but they resolved that by making 'sharing' options.
This codifies the fact that Google (and Facebook, et al.) create a "profile" for every visit to their websites/services, and they don't know the names to go with those profiles.
First, Go has an FFI system like every other language. You can directly compile C code into your binary, and make wrappers with "cgo" for C and C++ libraries. Second, you should read this about dynamic linking -- I don't know if it's perfectly accurate but it's definitely interesting: What does dynamic linking and communism have got in common?
Re:It lacks a lot of things that you would expect
on
Go Version 1 Released
·
· Score: 2
Go does not provide the typical, type-driven notion of subclassing, but it does have the ability to “borrow” pieces of an implementation by embedding types within a struct or interface.
The style, or your preference for a particular style, is not important in the least. What's important is the consistency. Really... *nobody* cares what style *you* prefer.
Go has "gofmt" which reformats code to a sensible standard and is also used by editors, so basically all code in Go is formatted consistently. There really isn't any discussion on formatting; everyone has taken the attitude of 'whatever gofmt does is fine, and that's the standard we'll use.'
It's a little late, but I have two thoughts. One was a band that discovered something like 80% of their tickets had been bought by scalpers, who were demanding 10X the ticket price. Their solution? They held 3 more shows. The first, originally scheduled, show was practically empty - the other 3 were packed.
Solution type: Increase supply.
Another option is to hold a 'dutch auction' for the tickets. Easy enough for shows with one seating category, but only a touch more difficult with multiple to handle people who are willing to pay $X for 'good' seats, but $Y for 'normal' seats only if they don't get good ones. The tickets then go for the minimum price that 'just' sells all tickets. Yes, this means that only the richest and/or most dedicated fo fans get to go, but at least the money ends up in the hands of the artist's company, not scalpers. If the artists feel that the price has risen too much, add shows.
Solution type: Increase the price so that demand equals supply.
How about Google consider who they want in the audience, and make a strategy to get tickets to those people? They aren't trying to sell the most tickets or make the most money, but promote their technology. They could do simple things like: scatter pre-registration codes through tech channels months before, or have tech questions tied to the registration system, or make people identify their 3 main areas of interest and restrict tickets to those events, etc...
CYA is part of it, but in academia the teachers and administrators have all the power, and they want the new shiny that'll put them on the cutting edge of 'education'. A home grown system doesn't have any cachet and is usually reviled for any errors. IT also has to go with it because otherwise "you're interfering with teaching!". It's ironic, but academics are the only ones allowed to have an opinion on teaching while ignoring ITs opinion on software.
A few other efforts — including even a middle-school science-fair project last year — have attempted 3-D arrangements of solar cells. But, Grossman says, “our study is different in nature, since it is the first to approach the problem with a systematic and predictive analysis.”
Facebook cannot sell your [identified] private information to anyone
LOL. As if. Laws only apply to little people not corporations.
One interesting way around releasing my private data would be word hit lists: "Given the combination of our standard business word list, and your corporate word list, the top 5 words used by vlm are: linux, debian. pr0n, floozie, and warez. The top 5 words used by vlm's friends such as Anonymous Coward are goatse, pr0n, the F word, firearms, and more pr0n."
Another fun one would be categorized percentages. 0% of vlm's posts contain drug and alcohol references (beer, weed, 420, etc), 5% of vlm's posts contain pr0n references (goatse, etc), 10% of vlm's posts contain linux related references (debian, gpl, etc), and 25% of vlm's posts contain linux pr0n related references (nude RMS, etc)
Heck, they could just sell access to your "Facebook Score" like a Credit Score and not tell anyone what the formula is.
This word, "donations", I do not think it means what you think it means.
I agree. Will the government create a fair system that protects the life of the donor first and foremost? Will the system let doctors make the decisions, and ensure that all incentives encourage saving the patient, not harvesting organs? Will the rich and powerful be treated equally with the poor?
IMO we haven't accomplished this in the west, and I have less faith in China doing the right thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Gas stations could get "backup" generators -- 1mw is affordable for a station. It would also allow individual stations to deploy when they want to, and EV drivers would get more choice over time.
Using a bog-standard BSD/GPL license addresses liability, it just doesn't fix the fear of managers and lawyers inexperienced with releasing software. The poster could try writing a short email linking Google licenses, the FSF, the EFF and others.
The real problem will be support: I can't fix a SharePoint package if it doesn't install right, so you have to release all the code, and if you want it to succeed, you'll also need to write documentation and answer email/forum questions. Does your employer want you doing that?
The disturbing thing is how his comments are reproduced verbatim by the big shots of the tech-news industry like ZDNet, PC Magazine etc, but also mainstream sources which are normally known as the last bastions of real journalism like the BBC, LA Times, Reuters etc.
This is business-as-usual for manipulating the media ^H^H^H uhm... marketing, PR and advocacy. Money makes people available to the media, along with quotes, theories, photos, videos, statistics, etc... The media love this system because it's a ready-made source of material, easy to access, and the people are (or pretend to be) experts who are dispassionately explaining an issue.
If you're really disturbed by Florian Muellers success, I've got some bad news for you about "Think Tanks" and lot's of other organizations.
Everyone has biases, as long as we know what they are and why they are we're able to make informed decisions ...
Sorry but 'knowing' biases doesn't work like that. Biases aren't binary on-or-off, they're not well defined or all consuming. People are blind or misunderstand their own biases and and poorly communicate them even when trying to open and honest. Moreover, people are able to compensate for different biases in different situations better or worse.
Florian Mueller doesn't think his biases influenced his 'reporting' (em. mine):
My long-standing views on this matter are well-documented. As an independent analyst and blogger, I will express only my own opinions, which cannot be attributed to any one of my diversity of clients. I often say things none of them would agree with.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
good cause is a relative standard.
Thank you. The idea that we would compare copyright infringement with terrorism and CP (like the OP did) is just crazy. What's Slashdot coming to that the OP is scored Insightful?
The core issue is that an IP does not identify more than the bill payer -- the good cause standard therefore is not met because the actual infringer is not identified.
That would depend on the terms of service.
No, it doesn't have to do with any ToS: the courts decide liability, not private companies. Why would you think otherwise? Including language that 'the subscriber is solely responsible ...' or that 'sharing connections is forbidden', are only rules made by companies. They aren't laws, and they don't guarantee anything about how a subscription is used.
Ads are fine when labeled. What I'd really like is product reviews and/or advertisements to learn what other slashdoterers think and recommend. That seems like a way Slashdot could collect money from vendors, and be interesting to readers.
There has to be some separation between the ads and the content. No one is going to visit a site explicitly to see ads. And if the content becomes the advertising, users will leave.
Slashdot should try this (if they must mix advertising with content): Create clearly labeled 'discussions' about a product (like RHEL6) or type of product (like SMB databases or CRMs) and sell companies video/text space in that discussion, and give them 'official' accounts to comment with. Open source advocates or lead developers could also contribute.
Let the community talk about what works and what sucks, what the open source alternatives are, etc... It would be like product reviews, but technically focused and including competing products. Slashdot users would get the insight of their peers. Companies would get honest feedback from their users.
Finally, this system would encourage technical discussions. The more technical the topic, the more narrowly focused, the better and more useful the discussion. If the editors make a generic 'discussion' of "Windows vs. Linux", it'll be vacuous and useless. But if the 'discussion' is "Postgres or SQL Server for a new public forum website?" we'll get people talking about character encodings and replication options.
Plus, this company has just missed the ongoing paradigm shift (hate that phrase - someone have a better one?). End users should have full control over their (untrusted) endpoints, becuase we won't be storing anything important there, and any incoming files will be handled with appropriate suspicion.
This is still backwards: The end users files are what's valuable! Almost all security today (accounts + ACLs) is focused on protecting the OS and isolating software. In practice, anything running under a users account can do anything to a users documents, even though security should be the focused on protecting those documents, since they're why the user has a computer in the first place. The cloud idea, where the computer is just a browser or thin-client, might become reality, but it isn't today and history shows the opposite trend: smart phones and tablets are not replacing computers at work.
AppArmor and UAC are both attempts to restrain software in an automated way, and both are hard to use for the end user. We should be empowering the user to protect their documents (I don't have that answer), instead of moving the information in those documents to a new location and thinking the new place is somehow safer; store information in the cloud and viruses will start using the cloud apis.
Also, FUCK THESE SLASHVERTISMENTS!
Fixing code costs money. Sticking with IE is free.
Not fixing anything is cheaper then fixing it (in terms of immediate cash expense). Doesn't mean sticking with IE is the right decision, or a reasonable decision, or even that someone made a decision instead of ignoring the problem.
What should Mozilla do? Clearly they should focus on security. What should your "average corporation" do? Also care about security! But if they aren't going to and they want their software to stay static and unchanging, there are any number of solutions including: Go to "about:config" and change "app.update.auto" to false.
I don't know why all the fuss is about breaking our version scheme so the Enterprise has a harder time planning appropriate upgrades to their work stations. And now we decided to break compatibility with your legacy Java systems. ... The enterprise doesn't stick with IE because they think it is a good browser they know how much it sucks. They stick with it because it can be maintained and managed properly in an enterprise environment.
Large/Enterprise organizations value version stability more than security? That's poor judgment. What does "maintained and managed properly" mean if it doesn't include security? It means two things: IT can cover their asses and blame problems on Microsoft, and IT can keep using vulnerable software rather then upgrading when there's security issues. Using vulnerable software is convenient for IT, but a poor solution to keeping production running.
You theorize that IE is used because it's broke but version stable. I think it's dumb inertia combined with sentiments like 'nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft' and 'you touch it, you own it', rather then a considered and reasoned decision to use IE. Your post echoes complaints about upgrades that many others have made, but they always sound like IT complaining about having to do their job, and I can tell you from experience that the upgrade cycle never ends, and the desktop issues are nothing compared to server-side systems. IT needs to get over it and fix the problem in a way that's either (relatively) long term or easy to replicate.
Finally, here are two alternatives to IE: They could use Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release and get both security and stability. Or they could disable Java in the browser and use Java Web Start for their important Java apps.
Extortion for money doesn't require shaming someone; the RIAA did extort people, it just wasn't called extortion until the judges were dealing with the p0rn industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion
Most federal judges are not impressed with this "settlement extortion" legal strategy, and aren't letting porn companies (and similar plaintiffs) get away with this on the cheap.
It's not the legal strategy that judges have a problem with -- it was allowed for years when the RIAA started doing it. It's only after the p0rn industry started using the same strategy that judges viewed it as extortion.
Now if we could just get some really obnoxious patent trolls, maybe we could get some legal bias against patents.
It's vague enough for lawyers to argue over.
Politics is the issue, not any vagueness in the DMCA. The FBI and Justice Department could be going after the RIAA/MPAA for collusion, price fixing, fraud or any number of things, but politics says they go after Kim Dotcom and try to equate bit-torrent with terrorism.
The only way to actually stop piracy would be by passing new laws so draconian that I'd rather just see the entire copyright-driven industry destroyed than sacrifice that much freedom or hand so much power to those who can afford lawyers.
Wish more people saw it this way. Hollywood cannot survive as it is today; it has to adjust to the Internet like every other company.
Ghost users will solve the problem of unregistered users not being able to participate ... because G+ doesn't let unregistered users participate? Seems to me they had the same problem with Google Docs -- unregistered users couldn't see or edit a spreadsheet -- but they resolved that by making 'sharing' options.
This codifies the fact that Google (and Facebook, et al.) create a "profile" for every visit to their websites/services, and they don't know the names to go with those profiles.
First, Go has an FFI system like every other language. You can directly compile C code into your binary, and make wrappers with "cgo" for C and C++ libraries. Second, you should read this about dynamic linking -- I don't know if it's perfectly accurate but it's definitely interesting: What does dynamic linking and communism have got in common?
Take a look at type embedding: http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#embedding
Go does not provide the typical, type-driven notion of subclassing, but it does have the ability to “borrow” pieces of an implementation by embedding types within a struct or interface.
You can use Go on Google App Engine: https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/go/
The style, or your preference for a particular style, is not important in the least. What's important is the consistency. Really... *nobody* cares what style *you* prefer.
Go has "gofmt" which reformats code to a sensible standard and is also used by editors, so basically all code in Go is formatted consistently. There really isn't any discussion on formatting; everyone has taken the attitude of 'whatever gofmt does is fine, and that's the standard we'll use.'
It's a little late, but I have two thoughts. One was a band that discovered something like 80% of their tickets had been bought by scalpers, who were demanding 10X the ticket price. Their solution? They held 3 more shows. The first, originally scheduled, show was practically empty - the other 3 were packed.
Solution type: Increase supply.
Another option is to hold a 'dutch auction' for the tickets. Easy enough for shows with one seating category, but only a touch more difficult with multiple to handle people who are willing to pay $X for 'good' seats, but $Y for 'normal' seats only if they don't get good ones. The tickets then go for the minimum price that 'just' sells all tickets. Yes, this means that only the richest and/or most dedicated fo fans get to go, but at least the money ends up in the hands of the artist's company, not scalpers. If the artists feel that the price has risen too much, add shows.
Solution type: Increase the price so that demand equals supply.
How about Google consider who they want in the audience, and make a strategy to get tickets to those people? They aren't trying to sell the most tickets or make the most money, but promote their technology. They could do simple things like: scatter pre-registration codes through tech channels months before, or have tech questions tied to the registration system, or make people identify their 3 main areas of interest and restrict tickets to those events, etc...
Solution type: Innovative
CYA is part of it, but in academia the teachers and administrators have all the power, and they want the new shiny that'll put them on the cutting edge of 'education'. A home grown system doesn't have any cachet and is usually reviled for any errors. IT also has to go with it because otherwise "you're interfering with teaching!". It's ironic, but academics are the only ones allowed to have an opinion on teaching while ignoring ITs opinion on software.
FTA:
A few other efforts — including even a middle-school science-fair project last year — have attempted 3-D arrangements of solar cells. But, Grossman says, “our study is different in nature, since it is the first to approach the problem with a systematic and predictive analysis.”
Facebook cannot sell your [identified] private information to anyone
LOL. As if. Laws only apply to little people not corporations.
One interesting way around releasing my private data would be word hit lists:
"Given the combination of our standard business word list, and your corporate word list, the top 5 words used by vlm are: linux, debian. pr0n, floozie, and warez. The top 5 words used by vlm's friends such as Anonymous Coward are goatse, pr0n, the F word, firearms, and more pr0n."
Another fun one would be categorized percentages. 0% of vlm's posts contain drug and alcohol references (beer, weed, 420, etc), 5% of vlm's posts contain pr0n references (goatse, etc), 10% of vlm's posts contain linux related references (debian, gpl, etc), and 25% of vlm's posts contain linux pr0n related references (nude RMS, etc)
Heck, they could just sell access to your "Facebook Score" like a Credit Score and not tell anyone what the formula is.
This word, "donations", I do not think it means what you think it means.
I agree. Will the government create a fair system that protects the life of the donor first and foremost? Will the system let doctors make the decisions, and ensure that all incentives encourage saving the patient, not harvesting organs? Will the rich and powerful be treated equally with the poor?
IMO we haven't accomplished this in the west, and I have less faith in China doing the right thing.