swhipple

Right, I don't mean to imply that there can never be any nuance or discretion within the system.

But in the author's case the rules were bent for him (officers rewriting his confession, having 'the' lenient judge; "It seems like she might actually let him off," said the prosecutor) and seems that he was either a) given special treatment, possibly influenced by US citizenship or education; or b) that the prosecution being baffled by the results is common. The author suggests that because of the officer camaraderie and that he received what he believes a reasonable punishment, it's an example of a better (more humane) system.

Cultures with different values will have differing punishments for transgressions, but an ideal justice system should aim to reduce bias and codify procedure, so that no one is left scratching their head at the end of the day.

I don't have the story around, but if I recall correctly, the minor procedural errors were forgetting to read Miranda rights. In the US, conviction can be based on possession without that form of evidence. Let's say for the sake of the argument that social status was an important factor here.

If going by-the-book is overly harsh, then the book needs to be amended. Bending the rules is not really praiseworthy, though it may end up with an good result in a particular case. It's not what I prefer in a justice system.

It may be too easy to look at this and be appreciative of the humanity and 'wiggle room' if one should be the person to benefit from it. Would a local be afforded the same wiggle room?

Recently, I read an anecdote about someone in the US arrested for drug possession. The family was well-known in the community. Charges were dropped due to minor procedural errors. Other cases with potential procedural errors are pursued and the accused are often recommended to take plea deals.

> What more can one expect?

Someone may find it great that the rules were bent for a not-so-bad infraction. Someone else may want a system that is evenly applied and by-the-book in all situations.

"Gtk4 API will not be stable at Gtk4.0" or the original title would be better. 'Discouraging portable Gtk apps' isn't mentioned in the original article or LWN.

Even the text of some are pretty much as expected. It seems that they have a patent on single page applications (SPAs) to-a-T [1], elaborating that an application may use mechanisms like XHR and append an identifier to the fragment portion of the URL to keep history.

Even if I subscribed to the idea that this was without prior art on the web in 2009, equivalent functionality already existed in desktop applications. To claim that it is a novel invention because it now works on a web page is disheartening. It's exactly this kind of behavior--claiming new ownership based on each abstraction--that leads to restrictions in some countries on patents which can only exist in software.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US20110055314

The link in the original post was about strong vs weak retaliation clauses in an explicit license, but the parent is also talking about implicit patent licenses, which do have some case law and opinions surrounding them in the United States [1].

The theory behind implicit patent licenses is that the licensee (often the buyer) will have some idea about which rights they have to the thing they are licensing, absent any other agreement. For a software license like the 3-clause BSD, this means that if they are licensing the software from the holder of the patent, they can reasonably expect to not subsequently be sued for infringing on the patent while following the terms of the license.

Omitting any kind of patent mention from your product's license, and later claiming infringement for reasonably expected use, would look subversive and generally be unconvincing.

[1] http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Implicit_patent_licence#USA

Emacs core requires FSF copyright assignment. Most of the configurations in Spacemacs use third party extensions which don't have the assignment.

But being non-core is not really a barrier to installation in my opinion. In many ways it is a plus, allowing for out-of-cycle releases and to experiment / break compatibility at their own pace.

If I recall correctly, there are some alive patents in the U.S. until 2017 when dealing with MP3 encoders, requiring purchasing a license per copy distributed.

The workaround that the parent is talking about is usually "get LAME from a different distributor", which is still done by Audacity and others.

It depends on how the license was intended to be applied.

If you're the sole owner and declare the entire repository contents under XYZ, the previous commits would be available under the license, regardless of the actual commit that adds the license file. If you declare a specific revision under XYZ, then only that revision is under the license.

A different example is the case of a repository with many copyright holders changing the license, and not being able to drag all the previous code into the newly licensed version. You wouldn't be able to take all the commits in history under the terms of the new license.

Are you familiar with DFeed [1] used by the D-Lang forum [2]? It is, in my opinion, one of the most usable web frontends for mailing lists (as well as a few other sources).

[1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

[2] http://forum.dlang.org/

On FreeBSD it is the other way around: /dev/random will never block once seeded. /dev/urandom as a symlink will give the same behavior.

I haven't tried OS X, but given that it also uses a PRNG (Yarrow) for /dev/random, I would expect it to behave similarly. Are you able to reproduce the described behavior?

Not the parent, but I also prefer shell to ansi-term for my daily usage.

My 99% use-case is running programs that don't need terminal emulator support, but I do commonly use Emacs keybindings for navigating around the buffer -- which requires switching between char and line modes when using ansi-term.

Hmm, I wasn't considering labels that might be on the items -- that's a good point.

If a derivative of the label were, for example, being used on another wine bottle without licensing, it would unambiguously be copyright infringement.

However, a painting which includes the label in the described way, could be considered fair use, namely that it is transformative and does not diminish the market of the original work. Commercialization of the derivative work as well as other context may also affect the claim of fair use. Trademark also has a fair use defense in the US, which might be relevant here.

I do use 'fair use' in the US sense; there are similar concepts in some other countries, but not always 1:1 with the concept to which I'm referring.

Those items (cheese, wine) are not covered by copyright, as they have no literary or artistic value themselves. The composition and painting would be the artist's creative work.

For other cases, fair use also plays a role depending on the circumstance. It isn't entirely binary. I support expanding fair use in ways that benefit the public while not hindering artists.

But the article mentions selling a derivation of a company's creative work, and I don't think the rationale is particularly better than liking the work and wanting money by using a popular brand. They are, more or less, directly competing with the original author. I think the societal benefits are questionable.

> I tried to make the point that this game is itself a derivative of other things, without which it couldn't exist.

Being a derivative in the sense of borrowing game mechanics [1] or drawing influence [2] isn't nearly the same as copying (or deriving from) the content. Many artists put hard work into developing their content, and it cannot be right to say "Hmm, that's popular, I should use it to market my product" without getting proper licensing. Even if it happens to be a corporation in ownership of the content.

I do agree that there might be some benefits to copyright reform, especially relating to culture and literary value. The latter part of your article hints at some interesting alternatives, but I not sure I believe them to be 'absolutely' better.

[1] http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

[2] Copyright is only applicable to fixed expression.

Just to add to your post, the reason that there are multiple ways to "center something" is because tables and flexboxes have different behaviors, especially for multiple children, and the third case of arbitrary translation, but all can be made to give the same visual effect here -- the specific case of aligning and valigning a single child to the center of the parent.

In my experience though, the flexbox model is the only example of DWIM in the majority of cases (the only surprise I've had was some situation with an overflowed child inside of a flexbox and requiring an explicit min-height: 0 [1]... something that seemed unintuitive, but modern browsers are beginning to support uniformly).

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=506893

I'm not really convinced S-exprs are particularly good examples of representing trees and graphs to humans while expecting them to be as easily readable and writable as the graphical forms.

You lose spatial intuition with this representation. You could make up for it on small trees somewhat with indentation and vertical spacing, but you'd lose it again for larger trees and graphs. We don't pictorially represent our trees like this [1], for instance, which is roughly how the S-exprs visually appear.

When I author graphs in LaTeX, it is often easier to run through a compilation cycle to see what the result looks like and which edits are needed, rather than mentally reasoning about the edges by looking at the code.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/43Dc8YB.png

You can do it yourself as well -- EasyList and some others have patterns that they check for on the page path and individual elements, not only known hosts.

Time shifting means copying for the purpose of listening to the recording at a better time, whereas space shifting is relevant here because the intended purpose is to allow the audio to be played in a different environment (i.e. not the YouTube player or app).

The more important thing is that space shifting to different media (digital, personal computer hard drive in this case) is legally treated differently. Though, to be honest, I'm not convinced that any personal recording protections would or should apply to the YouTube situation. It's just one way that the two differ.

One problem is that you're not only time shifting but space shifting to digital media as well. And the laws as written are very specific as to what is permitted.

Example: In the US, the AHRA that makes personal space shifting digital audio legal (relevant to the submission) is fairly limited in the media that can be used for copying. Though I agree that they're being used for basically the same thing, computer hard drives aren't covered.

A relevant quote from Wikipedia [1] that sums up why I think this act falls short of its purpose: "In each case, the principal distinction between what is and is not covered by the AHRA is determined by whether or not the device is marketed or designed (or in the case of media, commonly used by consumers) to make audio recordings, not the device's capabilities."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act#Digit...

Just curious, was erlang.mk around and did you use the bootstrapped release / cowboy_http template [1] when creating your first application? Based on some things you mention, it makes it sound like you were writing from scratch while referencing the docs. :-)

I also got started from the cowboy user guide (with prior Erlang experience), but found it relatively easier, as I used the template, then cross-referenced the idiomatic template with the docs as I worked through them (tweaking 'knobs' as I went along), which worked well in helping me understand the design.

Along with the Erlang mailing list you've mentioned, I would also like to mention #ninenines (and #erlang for more general questions) on freenode. Very helpful communities!

[1] This page describes the setup: http://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/HEAD/guide/getting_starte...

Have you seen [1]? I found it very useful when getting starting with cowboy, though I had prior experience with Erlang.

It walks through a simple "Hello world" application starting with creation from template (erlang.mk), and discusses static files, SSL, websocket.. A very good first guide in my opinion. Though it doesn't really cover other techniques like how to architect your application or interact with a database.

[1] http://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/1.0/guide/

Most of those types of things can be used for fingerprinting currently with JavaScript w/o need for screenshot rendering. Anything that injects into the page DOM can be detected and some timing attacks are possible.

The main issues that I think are important to consider are revealing browser history (visited links) and cross-frame information (like <iframe>). Modern browsers already have protection in these areas.

> if you had a language, which uses { and }, would you call it a C, if it is 100% incompatible to any line of C written out there?

No, but nobody else would either. For Lisp and Forth dialects, people seem to accept that they are not all backwards compatible with a specific implementation or spec, but are the same family of languages. [1]

Clojure's and Racket's official docs both refer to the languages as Lisp dialects (Racket) or Lisps (Clojure). Other reputable sources also consider them to be dialects of Lisp.

If it doesn't meet your own prescriptive criteria for being called a Lisp, that's fine, but the parent is only being pragmatic in using the same sense that is widely used and accepted.

[1] FWIW, I've always read "is a Lisp"/"Lisps" as "is a Lisp dialect"/"Lisp dialects" and think that most others do as well. Not necessarily married to implementation details or compatibility.

> On stealing "ideas," do you have some advice here? Smule has never specified what ideas they think we stole.

In their initial complaint filing [1] they mention "Synch Technology" (automated video/audio synchronization) several times.

"[...] specifically including the development of Smule's proprietary artificial intelligence technology that analyzes audio and video files and through the use of algorithms, automatically synchronizes video footage to audio files in a manner that results in a pleasing and and appropriate matching of the action and the music"

"[Shred] which purports to have developed a product that detects and segments key points of unstructured video and algorithmically synchronizes these videos to music in the same or similar manner as Smule's Synch Technology."

Some of the quotes and actions by your former boss leave a bad taste in my mouth, but if the AV synchronization is indeed similar to their own or developed using their resources, they will have a strong case that you've breached your contract.

[1] Found here, thanks to codingdave: http://webaccess.sftc.org/Scripts/Magic94/mgrqispi94.dll?APP...

It isn't "de facto" legal if the owner decides to pursue it or not.

The problem is the lack of knowledge of rights associated with intellectual property.

Many people make their bulletin board flyers by searching a related term on Google Images and pasting it into their document, without any thought to the licensing or knowledge that they might need a license. Despite that they are not likely to face legal consequences, it doesn't erase the copyright holders' rights to their image -- even if the image is very popular and many people unwittingly infringe on the copyright every day.

TW's claim was invalid here because they did not own the full rights to "Happy Birthday to You", not because of the popularity of the song.

They're definitely still being used today, though in my experience, we weren't docked points for syntax errors where the intent was obvious, except in the introductory classes where the syntax was one of the criteria being tested. In the algorithms and math programming courses, legible pseudo-code was often considered fine.

Pen and paper definitely make it easier for the test administrators to prevent cheating with resources saved on the computer or using the internet. In one of the introductory engineering programming courses, which was electronically submitted in class and auto-graded, there was an issue one semester with students using TeamViewer during class and having others take the test for them.

> What amazed me the most during this journey is that most platforms have actually very similar low level building blocks but unfortunately slightly incompatible in many ways.

I've been looking at porting a React application to React Native, and was somewhat concerned about this myself. I have several custom components that make up the UI, which might not have a 1:1 translation between HTML/CSS to native components or may behave slightly differently across platforms. A different route I've considered is using Crosswalk as a shell around the application and exposing Android/iOS APIs through JavaScript with Crosswalk extensions. It may not feel perfectly native but it would be more consistent across platforms.

I'm a novice in this area, so I'm curious if anyone else has looked into the different approaches and the conclusions they've drawn.

I use the magit interface for most operations, but for blame I usually fall back to vc-annotate, as I find it easier to read (commits on the left rather than as headers, coloring, customizable).

I haven't used tig, but from the blame view screenshot [1], they may be similar.

[1] http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/screenshots/blame-view.html

> Do we abandon copyright because of scale?

This is an interesting question. I wonder if, due the number of items in the training set and the minimal impact of each individual creative work, it would be considered fair use.

If your training set significantly consists of images from someone else's training set in the same domain, you might have a conflict. But for arbitrary images, it may be analogous to search engines indexing (and learning from) copyrighted material, which is generally protected.