rickmb

I find the notion that the SOPA protest woke up us previously apathetic Europeans somewhat insultingly US-centric.

Prior to SOPA, resistance against increasingly insane copyright legislation was considerably more widespread than it was in the US, partially triggered by events like the trial against the Pirate Bay, Sarkozy's three strikes sell-out etcetera.

There's a reason why we're the ones with the Pirate parties. We didn't need major corporations like Google campaigning to wake us up. Yeah, the defeat of SOPA was a major encouragement and inspiration, but the fight was already on.

Cultural? With the same excuse you could call keeping black people as slaves or treating women as second rate citizens "cultural".

Excluding gay people from marriage is about discrimination, hatred and bigotry.

It's not about changing other cultures, it's about allowing those who do not conform said culture to live their lives in freedom and equality.

This is the typical bullshit argument used against gay marriage: that it somehow negatively affects the existing cultural traditions. It doesn't.

Although I agree with that in principle, I think an exception can be made for anti-discrimination efforts, especially if said discrimination directly affects many company employees and shareholders.

Straight, simple and to the point. Nice.

Missing test and QA tools though. Probably an oversight, since the author does suggest following Derick Rethans and Sebastian Bergmann.

And another one: read up on the SPL library before you start re-inventing that wheel.

Probably because the number of people with "software architect" on their business cards greatly outnumber the number of "enterprise software systems that span multiple divisions and locations of an enterprise with 30,000+ people in 100 countries".

It's the 95% of useless bureaucrats that can't tell good working software from a print out of a diagram most developers have a problem with.

"more influence" isn't good enough in a democracy. These are supposed to be the people's representatives. Calling the treaty a "constitution" without it guaranteeing civil rights and true democracy was an insult to the people, and quite rightly buried by those that were allowed to vote on it.

The EP is a joke, a political instrument played by the same people that supported ACTA, and is now being used as a way to get out of it.

Which in all makes it more significant. In reality, it isn't so much that the EP stopped ACTA, but the people who first supported it (people with actual power) that have changed their minds, even though most of them can't admit so directly because of international (read "US") relations. In the long term, that (changing minds) is the bigger victory.

As expected.

Even most pro-ACTA parties voted against to save their countries leaders from having to find another way out of this mess now that public opinion turned against it. Blaming the EU parliament is a relatively cheap and easy way to nullify their previous commitment (and signatures!), and one that won't result in US sanctions against individual member states.

It's basically a get-out-of-jail card for those countries that did a 180 and would no longer ratify ACTA despite signing it.

"you end up stuffing too much code into your controllers, because you don't know where else to put it"

And that wouldn't happen to have anything to do with the fact that "you" either don't know any other patterns or solutions besides MVC, or are under the impression that using MVC somehow forbids you to use other patterns?

Not to mention the fact that the definition of MVC that the author uses is false (in a way that describes MVC as more simplistic and limited than it truly is), but after so many years I'm not even going to argue with that any more. Just fucking Google it.

tl;dr: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Don't take it personally, but I've seen a lot of confirmation bias from ex-PHP developers.

Often from developers who may, thanks to language Y, write more elegant code on the line / function level, but still create the same architectural mess as they did before in PHP. (Rails doesn't save you from creating a mess, neither does the broad separation of concerns of any MVC framework.).

There are thousands of ex-PHP developers out there that think they are now better programmers because they now use Ruby or Python, building thousands projects that proof otherwise.

Five to ten years from now, people will be bitching on HN about legacy RoR software like there's no tomorrow. And they'll probably be blaming the language and/or the framework.

Those pictures do not properly reflect the dramatic difference in design. And I suspect you picked those deliberately.

But more importantly, the next generation of Nano's looked a lot more like the original mini, including the metal and the colors.

So this "bold move" seems like a mistake Apple quickly corrected.

If we ever build computers smart enough for that, they'll probably also be smart enough to tell us to go f* ourselves. Even more probable if by that time we are still preoccupied with social networking trivialities.

On some days, most of HN seems like satire to me.

Wow, that is a ridiculously suggestive hit piece you're linking to, but even that doesn't justify your claim, since even in that piece neither Assange (who isn't even quoted in it) nor his lawyer says anything of the kind.

It's merely his lawyer quoting the accusations, and the author trying to twist this into an admission of guilt because of, OMG, "the tone". And then there's you piling it on claiming it was Assange who said it, which is a complete fabrication, at least if you take that link as "evidence".

If you want to know where the skepticism is coming from: it comes from these kind of filthy propaganda tactics.

Seems to me Assange isn't so much afraid of being extradited to US (there is a truckload of ways to fight that if it ever comes to that) but of actually being convicted in Sweden.

The Piratebay trials have shown how corrupted the Swedish justice system can be, with both police, prosecution and judges having proven private connections with the copyright industry (which in itself is not only organized and financed by the US, but also actively backed up by the US government).

Being extradited to the US would make him a martyr, but being convicted for rape in Sweden would damage his reputation beyond repair. I doubt if the US even wants to deal with the whole circus of getting Assange extradited if there's an easier way to take him out of play.

And neither of them are theft.

Calling it "stealing" is political propaganda as part of an agenda aimed at poisoning any constructive debate about the future of copyright in the information age.

Language matters, especially in this context, where people go to jail for doing no harm whatsoever.

The Netherlands, but I think the same goes for most of Western Europe, especially the Northern half. Which unfortunately for HBO is also the primary potential market outside North America, both in terms of disposable income and the kind of audience that watches their shows.

HBO is actually now starting to enter the local cable market. Great offering: "pay a premium price to see shows your friends talked about 6 months ago at an inconvenient time". I suppose there's still a market for it, just like there's still a market for getting yesterdays news printed on dead trees...

You have to remember that the practice of pirating TV shows started about ten years ago now. That's a whole generation that grew up watching their favorite shows that way. Any time, anywhere, and for free. Try selling those people premium cable subscriptions that offer no practical advantages whatsoever.

It's ironic that the amount in the form is in US dollars.

In much the rest of the world, it's already pretty much game over. A whole generation has learned to "pirate" these shows because it's the only available option.

This is the reality in 2012 outside the US: ordinary people in offices and on schoolyards are discussing TV shows that aren't legally available in those countries. It's not considered anything special anymore, it's no longer just a small "secret" club of geeks. It has become so common it's hard to imagine "legal" services will ever get a foot in the door after over a decade of neglecting these markets.

You're conflating three separate concepts. There's nothing inherently wrong with quoting the part you're reacting to, and it can be done without resorting to flaming or Fisking.

Does his comment contribute something? I think it does. Does yours? I don't think so.

So which one you think lowers the standards of HN?

questioned <> charged

> I find it unlikely that there is a big conspiracy involving America though.

Because there is absolutely no recent history of the US conspiring with friendly governments to circumvent the rule of law and illegally transporting, imprisoning and even torturing people that were considered a threat to the US, right?

And surely there is also absolutely no documented recent history of the US pressuring European authorities, especially the Swedish, to prosecuted people for crimes against US interests... cough piracy cough.

You're right about one thing, if the US were behind it, it would be no "big conspiracy". It would be business as usual.

> an extra impediment for future reforms of copyright law

This is the really important part (ACTA was almost dead anyway). The continued push for ever more draconian copyright enforcement measures is slowly creating a backlash that puts copyright reform on the political agenda.

Once copyright reform is seriously on the agenda, all ACTA-like initiatives that enhance copyright enforcement are likely to be shelved indefinitely, and we finally get some breathing room for a real debate on copyright.

That "strong oversight" has been hampered by a refusal to publish details (we have absolutely no clue why there are so many wiretaps, and it's been hard enough to get the authorities to publish the raw numbers), and the oversight fails when it comes to storing and providing access to the collected data.

The latter is particularly worrying, because we already know that in other areas, police access to private data collection is seriously being abused, and very badly organized.

The oversight basically starts and ends with granting the permission to wiretap. Everything else is murky as hell.

People that want to get stuff done don't waste their time hating on other people's tools.

Almost everyone on this site, including devoted PHP devs, recognizes the fact that PHP isn't exactly an elegant and well-designed language.

The pointless "hate" however only comes from a small group of people for reasons really only known to them. But if you look outside the world of programming languages to the kind of people that loudly proclaim to hate something, I think you'll get a pretty good idea of the kind of people we're talking about.

These are not the majority of users of HN. They just feel safe here, like hooligans feel safe in a stadium filled with supporters of the same team.

Paid news is unsustainable.

News has always been free. The newspaper was a package deal, largely paid for by advertising, and consumers only forked over a little bit of money for the convenience.

And now that raw news has been disintermediated, there's even less reason to pay for "news".

Newspapers have already lost other things of value in their "package deal" (personal ads etcetera) because they couldn't be bothered to really go online. And most of them have completely sacrificed their credibility as watchdogs for political and commercial gain.

News has zero market value. News happens.

Newspapers are an outdated concept, and it's valuable parts have already been monetized by others.

Opting out of a privacy violation that should not take place to begin with is insane.

Also, way too little way too late.

Ten years ago this might have been seen as constructive contribution towards industry self-regulation. Now it's just a sick joke that won't do anything to change the fact that tracking without explicit permission will be illegal in many parts of the world.

Nobody with any relevant industry experience would overstate the important of language design.

I've used many languages in my 25+ years in software development, and I've seen very little relation between language and either overall quality or simply getting stuff done.

I have however observed a strong negative relationship between that and people bitching about their and other people's tools.

Seriously. You're suggesting the EU just abandon its citizens right to privacy and making it an "opt-out" thing?

What's next? donotrob.us to opt-out of burglaries?

Tracking without permission is an illegal violation of privacy. You do not "opt-out" of crime with the criminals.

Once again, this is non-news, only made into news because of the ongoing anti-EU FUD.

The basis of the EU directive is sound. Actually turning it into (enforceable) legislation is the hard part. Most regulatory bodies in the EU consider it an iterative process to be figured out in cooperation with the industry, and nobody is planning to start doling out fines in the near future.

However, the industry's arrogant attitude of doing fuck-all until the law comes down on them is not going to help. Lack of self-regulation and blatantly ignoring the principles of existing privacy laws is what triggered EU intervention in the first place.

Basically this whole scare mongering about bureaucratic "anti-cookie" laws is just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Besides that, most of the delay in this story was not caused by process but by human error and sloppy work by the OP.

There are some hints of organizational dysfunctions along the way, but those were not what caused the major delays.

Without those screw ups, it would have been 2 to 3 days from decision to production. That's pretty decent for any company larger than a 10 people start up.