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whichdoktaon Why do many programmers defend/support intellectual property theft?

I'm sorry you feel that your poetry isn't any good yet.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who said that everyone has about a million words of garbage in them they have to get out before they can write well.

whichdoktaon Why do many programmers defend/support intellectual property theft?

I'm sorry people copy your stuff.

I'm not one to tell someone else how to run their business but could it be that relying on fragile concepts such as "Intellectual Property" are not a good method for gaining the ability to control and profit from your labors?

Personally I've always relied largely on the reputation I've built up for being able to solve the problems of my clients but your mileage may vary.

I hope you find a solution to your problems, it's not fair if you work really hard at something and get nothing back for your effort.

whichdoktaon Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (November 2010 Edition)

You may find this is the case with a lot of topics commonly considered 'black magic' - the real determinant IMO is whether you enjoy work that requires a high attention to detail! :)

whichdoktaon For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

Us middle class white folk who didn't understand what all the fuss was really about till years later.

whichdoktaon For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance

Cue fond personal memories of living in South Africa in the 80s...

Used to be so bad you made sure to not wear jeans&t-shirt if you were going to fly just so you didn't get pulled off the line by the Uzi wielding thugs and miss your flight.

Then they freed the great terrorist Nelson.

Yeah, that's right... Here in .za we felt exactly the same way about him as you yanks do about the great terrorist Osama.

Fast forward sixteen years later and guns are rarely visible in the airport, check-in is smooth as silk (though we seem to have inherited the idiocy with the water bottles from you) and the last time anything got blown up here was when I forgot an aubergine in the oven for too long.

They're having y'all on. The thing with tyranny is that until someone says "no thank you" it grinds on relentlessly becoming more and more expensive to stop with each passing year.

whichdoktaon Canonical, Ltd. On Record: Seeking Open Core

The danger of individuals with vast pools of funding is that they can afford to cause havoc in the community & their bank accounts for years before finally giving up on ideas that are simply unsustainable inside the ecosystem we have grown&cared for for so long.

Something to be said for a profit-imperative to keep conversations honest & feet on the ground.

Canonical has grown a strong brand in huge swathes of previously Microsoft territory.

They would do well to follow RedHat's example and trade on a reputation for competence&quality rather than trying to place their faith in various recipes of secret herbs&spice.

whichdoktaon Censorship of the Internet Takes Center Stage in "Online Infringement" Bill

That point which I am making.

You are not getting it.

If we had followed up on proposals in the 90's for distributed DNS this article would never have needed to be written.

Is this so hard to grok?^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H

Edit:

<singin'> Good night sweetheart... time to go... </singin'>

whichdoktaon Censorship of the Internet Takes Center Stage in "Online Infringement" Bill

So HN downvoters prefer the current centralized model of Internet name services which are vulnerable to a denial of service attack from technologically illiterate politicians?

I just don't understand the world anymore.

Takes all kinds I tell you.

whichdoktaon Censorship of the Internet Takes Center Stage in "Online Infringement" Bill

DNS is long overdue for a replacement anyway.

whichdoktaon Ask PG: Why do you think Africa cannot produce global scale start ups?

If we want to routinely produce global scale startups in Africa we need to concentrate first on gaining sufficient skill to routinely produce continental scale startups.

whichdoktaon Ask HN: If you can change one thing in the educational system, what would it be?

close the feedback loop between the obstacles of the teachers and the policies of the pencil pushers.

whichdoktaon Tribalism is the enemy within

Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

One practice is to be more conscious of when we're not getting what we want and pay extra special attention to how we're reacting to others as a result.

Greg says he wants Canonical to contribute more to upstream.

Mark probably wanted Greg to not badmouth Canonical.

Now neither party are getting what they want so the question is can everyone pay enough attention to their reactions to avoid a full-blown civil war?

Oy vey.

whichdoktaon Tribalism is the enemy within

If Greg had started his post with a question along the lines of:

  "Dear Mark, what can GNOME do to help 
   Canonical integrate your  work & devs 
   with upstream?"

Rather than:

  "*omfgroflcopter* you Canonical dudes 
   are all like soooo lame and have never
   done anything for GNOME"

...then maybe his post would have translated to a measurable improvement in my reality.

As it stands all he's created is a distraction from getting code written.

sigh

whichdoktaon Too many laws, too many prisoners

Certainly observed by this African watching both continents.

whichdoktaon Steve Jobs Responds To The Antenna Issue: Hold It Different Or Use A Case

It's a shame you feel that way, but down-voting the truth is not going to fix your economy, un-pollute your oceans nor end your wars.

Feel free to shout once you've had enough and want the beatings to stop.

:-)

whichdoktaon Steve Jobs Responds To The Antenna Issue: Hold It Different Or Use A Case

> Apple has investors like any other company. This move is good for the investors.

Any move that is bad for the customers won't be good for investors.

There is no short term vs long term thinking once you reached profitability and have cash reserves. The short term will inevitably become the long term.

The _responsible_ thing to do for your investors is to solve problems before they get any more expensive to solve. i.e. solve your problems _now_

You have to simultaneously satisfy customers, investors, employees and the community you operate within. If you cannot wrap your head around that you cannot be trusted by anyone because you will always be sacrificing one for the other to save your incompetent ass.

Sheesh. This is not rocket science.

whichdoktaon Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?

>> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

> Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible.

So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?

> I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.

Often yes I agree with you. Although that is not an absolute. Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem so the extinction of a species not directly used by humans may cause difficulties if it is necessary for the continued survival of another species which IS directly used by humans.

> Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up.

Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!

>> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .

> That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling?

My bad, I completely misread you.

I think you will be sympathetic to my mistake given that cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms are so commonly used to justify ideas that would still be bad no matter how good the numbers looked.

whichdoktaon Is the BP Gusher Unstoppable?

>> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster >Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner.

But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?

That said, by allowing for a dollar cost thaumaturgy was not holding the debate hostage. In fact, he accepted your challenge to debate him in the frame of reference YOU set up. A frame of reference which, btw, is not the only one in common use to decide such questions.

What you need to respond with now to keep your credibility is whether the 'true' dollar cost is:

a) The cost to mitigate every single effect from the disaster.

b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells then perhaps we should explore them rather than drilling.

whichdoktaon Middle school evacuated because of a science project

'kay. HN just turned into Slashdot. I'm outtahere. Cheers, It's been fun while it lasted.

whichdoktaon Middle school evacuated because of a science project

Insurance concerns -> If the existing policies don't already cover it they can easily be extended to cover parental involvement.

Teacher unions -> They are welcome to complain but fortunately they don't set school policy.

Complaining about how impossible the situation is may make you feel better but fixing it will make you feel good.

whichdoktaon Middle school evacuated because of a science project

In times of economic woe money may be scarce but time tends to be cheaper.

Mayhap this is a good time for getting back into the habit of parent involvement with schooling?

I somehow doubt any school with a hacker club run by a couple of science&engineering orientated dads would have these kinds of problems.

Wait for the school system to catch a wake-up and we'll be waiting forever.

whichdoktaon The West Is Choked by Fear

"In the name of the great FSM (oh great and merciful one) I hereby declare thumb war upon you and call upon all my followers on hte twitters to hunt you down and dislocate both your opposable appendages for the great blasphemy you have committed in your public and offensive denials that trolls are also sacred to the sacrosanct principle of freedom of speech and thought."

Do you like that now punk?

Thought not.

You see, it stops mattering that they're puerile and reprehensible prats the moment you start to threaten physical violence.

By saying: "I will make you stop saying that even if I have to use force" you have guaranteed two outcomes:

  1) They will _definitely_ not stop saying the thing which is making you so mad.

  2) Any responsible person hearing this would start dialing 911 before you do something you will regret for the rest of your life.

The point of the original article was not to defend the trolls but rather to point out the fact that civil society is becoming increasingly tolerant of violent threats when they are made by members of fundamentalist religious movements.

Given that these threats, in recent years, are all to often starting to turn to action it becomes quite important to ask how much of this behavior we can tolerate before our society too ceases to be civil?

whichdoktaon You've Gotta Fight for Your Right to... OLPC

Let me see if I have you right:

  Proposition: We do not have universal 'x'

  Proposition: 'y' depends on 'x'

  Conclusion:  We should not work on 'y' until everyone has 'x'

You, dear sir, fail.

whichdoktaon Ask HN: How can a Web Developer get into Bioinformatics?

http://www.tcoffee.org/Courses/Exercises/index.html

http://www.larrygonick.com/html/pub/books/sci3.html

Don't laugh, excellent books!

whichdoktaon The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk

A strange game.

The only winning move is not to play.

How about a nice game of chess?

whichdoktaon Unit testing in Coders at Work

When testing helps, test. When testing hinders, stop testing.

This business of "must" and "always" anything ?

Not so much.

Unless your business is a lucrative hourly rate telling those who believe in "must" and "always" what they should be doing instead of thinking for themselves.

whichdoktaon The Male Programmer Privilege Checklist

I think that in a healthy society the point of someone talking about things that make them feel uncomfortable is that you have an opportunity to spend some time thinking about how what they are saying applies to that society rather than telling them the one hundred ways how what they just said can't possibly be true.

If we don't take those opportunities to think about what makes someone else uncomfortable (maybe because it makes us uncomfortable ourselves?) then, over time, the people with the willingness to speak out about something which could be improved simply leave and an opportunity to improve that society vanishes with them.

Which is a great sadness because I think we've all got our own stories about things we don't like about the software biz and I think many of us feel a little bit hopeless about ever being able to change some of that...

...but discouraging folk willing to talk about things that can improve, even if it's not something we find important ourselves, means that it's a little less likely that any other conversation about improvement is going to get a hearing either.

For the record, I'd like to see more women and other types of human than white&male&alpha in software myself because over fifteen years of doing this I have found that the most toxic development environments (high levels of stress, distrust, dishonesty, coercion etc.) have also been the environments with the lowest human diversity.

It is not difficult to scare away people who are different from you or people who you expect to silently put up with problems caused by your point of view.

But the problem is, as that happens, without differences your society slowly stops having anything to communicate about and without communication it becomes dumber and without intelligence it eventually becomes a target for attack and takeover by some other failed community with an eye to your resources. (Sun / Oracle anyone ? ;-D)

whichdoktaon Ask HN: How to make smalltalk?

As a musician you get this all the time as well... the songs you're most proud of play to deafening silence while the songs that could never be said to have been inspired leave the house on their feet, shedding tears and yodeling.

People in groups may feel warm&fuzzy&nice but until we can get the same kind of bandwidth between our respective heads as we can inside our heads all group consciousness will remain anathema for excellence.

For intelligence I go to be by myself or seek out the company of other specialists.

whichdoktaon Ask HN: How to make smalltalk?

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/smalltalk/smalltalk-3.1.tar.gz

tar xzvf smalltalk-3.1.tar.gz

cd smalltalk-3.1

./configure

make

whichdoktaon Total US Debt so far: $301 Trillion dollars. $1.5M per person

The use of the word "only" in front of the description "an obligation" is what is really misleading.

Another way of saying "we don't know who's holding the debt and who owes it" is to say:

  "I don't have the cash on hand to pay you what I owe you but I promise you that the cheque will be in the mail any day now."