I agree with you until last paragraph. As I said in another reply, I think that this law is based on economical protection of the two main political parties.
The lack of knowledge of foreign languages is clearly a issue. I think that our country is solving this making B1 mandatory to get you graduated and enforcing bilingual basic education on the capital. Not so much, but it seems to start giving some results.
We have to watch doubbed films when we're in groups because this problem. I know people that prefer original versions, but you can not exclude your friends when social watching.
Same here, had no idea about this. News are just a diversion (basically just 30 minutes of sports) to keep people "busy" while they (politicians) keep doing whatever the hell they want.
Oh, I think I also went through something similar.
At 15, my parents denied me every kind of interaction with computers except for talking with my girlfriend.
I created a MSN Messenger fake with various recorded videos for different days that replayed some of our text conversations. That gave me a lot of time to code my backdoors and others silly projects at age.
At one point my father became suspicious because I spent more time on others windows that on chat one, but the fake was reasonably credible.
A few years ago my father and me shared some laughs when I told him about two things: The one that I have just told and that the worm that made us reinstall the OS was me collecting the beautiful icons in "system32" folder.
Feedback: It is a little bit frustrating being able to see only 10 per page. It makes me think about scrapping the site for the keywords that I am interested.
Good job. Some cool domains there, added to tools bookmark.
I don't know why, but I was expecting a place to get in touch to other programmers to do Pair Programming (i.e. for small katas or side projects). Does it exists?
If it doesn't, does anyone wants to have a bit of fun doing Pair Programming to create it together? :)
There are a few projects around the web, but Floobits doesn't do this right now. We plan on implementing more social features once we've ironed out some usability issues.
My girlfriend brother is Asperger too: Bad grades, excellent knowledges about grammar and strange words, obsessed with League of Legends (a videogame), reading and sometimes astrology.
I am sorry, watson, because I have no magic pills.
I understand your worry in making him able to live without depending on someone else resources. We are too trying to achieve the same that you, but we are doing it slowly because we are sure that if he knows what we are planning he will never perceive it as interesting.
At the moment, we have been able to make him somewhat interested about the technical part of computers doing him a demo of "security pentesting": We (I, with him at my side making jokes and enjoing the process and asking) did some arp and dns spoofing, also played with sslstrip and he loved to know about the mechanics.
Advancing from there it's not being easy. Web development seems a good path for us too because you can easily see the results. The problem is making him interested enough to do it by himself.
I'm adding this thread to bookmarks. Please, tell about any progress that you did and ask if you think that there is something we can share with you.
There are really 2 types of piracy. Non-destructive and destructive. I believe the majority is non-destructive. People download things which they either do not have access to or do not value enough to pay for. If the option wasn't there to download it they wouldn't pay for it anyway.
Downloading content which you would otherwise pay for is destructive. It is like what the OP describes above. He was downloading things he would otherwise have paid for. Money wasn't going to game makers. He was effectively stealing and its damaging to people making the games.
Film / Music industry people think the majority of piracy is destructive. I think they are wrong. I have spent thousands of pounds on things I discovered through piracy. However, if you are downloading things you know you would otherwise buy then really it is difficult to deny you are not stealing or at least conning content owners out of money they are owed.
>People download things which they either do not have access to or do not value enough to pay for
Yes, THIS!
I think this is the crux of the entire argument that is completely ignored by nearly every content producer. People value things differently for a huge number of reasons. With things with a personal appeal like music, or maybe TV/Film but I imagine less so, some people will pay more for their favourite band, others won't. That means the band is undervaluing their product to their greatest fans (good for the fans) and over valuing for their lesser fans.
Normally, when I download things, it's because I don't value the product at the price it's being sold, but I do still value it!
Film is a great example of this. I'll happily pay $5 to rent a great film like Django unchained, or Avatar, etc. But am I going to pay the same amount for the (boringly bad) Bourne Legacy? No. But I would still pay something to see it.. perhaps $1, maybe $2. But I can't because there is no option to do this. So instead, I would consider downloading it.
So what have the film company lost when I chose to pirate instead of purchase? Not $5 because I wouldn't have paid this in the first place. So they've lost $2. And what have I lost? I've had to spend some of my time hunting down and waiting for the film to download (A minor inconvenience) but that's it. So seems like the only loser is the film company.
For evidence, look at the most highly downloaded film of 2012 'Project X'. IMDB gives it a 6.6 rating and it sounds a bit lame but fun. Exactly the sort of film that isn't worth full price rental.
"it is difficult to deny you are not stealing or at least conning content owners out of money they are owed."
I'll do my best... :)
Distribution used to be very valuable. So much so that we see CDs as products.
Before CDs, street performers were happy and paid if street patrons were happy and entertained. Simply put: creative businesses are charities; they always have been and they always will be because 1) their fruits are not material and can be "held"/understood by more than one person at a time, with impunity, and 2) they are non-essential, compared to food and water and shelter and clothes (and if they were essential, due to their non-exclusivity, it would be immoral to restrict them).
Somewhere along the line distribution got all wrapped up in cellophane and people working in publishing formats (cds, books, video game cartridges, etc, etc) started feeling entitled to creative monopolies. And authors', reasonably, wanted more of the distributor's pie. We went from truly prohibitive distribution (manual transcription), to commercial/industrial distribution, to today: instant and autonomous distribution -- if it is worth seeing, hearing, or knowing, the copying is implied. So, if you are charging for distribution today (including "selling copies"), you are in the wrong business.
But that hasn't destroyed/stolen anyone's value either, as you have proposed. We have simply come full circle.
The value of design is in its applications. The most useful ideas are the most valuable, as it should be. It's (obviously) not enough to simply produce a movie and sell the pattern for $5... One pattern is enough for the whole world. You can't recoup the production costs by pretending distribution is hard. It has to actually be worth $5. The reality of this return to the original model is that you will be rewarded according to your contribution, but you're not the one to set the price either because creativity isn't a product. We were just confused for about 100 years. Patronage is different (and scary to Western concepts of "mine"), but it's time-tested and perfectly sustainable (and being seen more and more, for example via Kickstarter). R&D, for example, is sponsored and would be worthwhile even (especially) without patents...
The requirement that creativity, design, and research, be worthwhile, is not a burden on society. Monopolies are. People can only reward you after they have benefited from an idea, namely from "the progress of Science and the useful arts."
Maybe not in a "he stole my bike" manner but certainly in a "we sell copies of this and he took one without paying" sense, which is really the point. I won't make assumptions about your position, but the argument you are making is a pedantic and irrelevant attempt to justify behavior that is clearly a violation of someone else's rights.
I'm not saying the current media cartels are right. Not at all. But people taking this approach only hurts more reasonable arguments that might actually be constructive.
>people taking this approach only hurts more reasonable arguments //
Theft is a crime. Copyright infringement is [usually] a tort.
Theft deprives an owner of their right to use their work. Copyright infringement is no detriment to an owner's ability to enjoy their work.
Theft forms part of what most people would consider to be an obvious moral obligation not to deprive others of their property. Copyright is a right that extends unnaturally from ownership, being a democratically granted monopoly, and I warrant is by no means central to the majority of the people's understanding of common law.
It is a very important distinction.
To equate theft and tortuous infringement is quite insidious, copyright infringement is by no means similar to common thievery.
The big players in media production have attempted to screw the populus out of their side of the copyright deal - the falling in to public ownership of works in good time. All legal changes in the last decade or two appear to have been to the benefit of the rich lobbyists representing media organisation and to the detriment of the public.
In view of this failure to keep with the spirit of the contract that copyright establishes it's not surprising that the public should act as if big media had nullified the contract.
I thought the same. If this is true (it finds <a> elements then looks for the id), I've been writing a lot of poor-performing selectors.
Edit: I found that it does work this way, and the reason is because browsers process content and apply CSS top to bottom as it renders, they do not first load all the content and then apply CSS rules.
If you have a rule like body div#content p { color: #003366; } then for every element—as it gets rendered to the page—it'll first ask if it's a paragraph element. If it is, it'll work its way up the DOM and ask if it's a div with an ID of content. If it finds what it's looking for, it'll continue its way up the DOM until it reaches the body.
That bit certainly surprised me. It seems like a simple optimization to scan a selector for the most efficient parts and use that as your starting point (with ids being a no-brainer).
Obviously given the selector "div #foo a {}" (obviously a dumb selector, but...) it would be smarter to look for #foo and verify it was inside a div than get every div and search for a #foo. And by extension "div .foo a {}" (assuming .foo really is way more efficient than div, which again I find hard to believe given there's native support for getElementsByTagType).
It seems to me that the effectiveness of using classes probably stems from browsers optimizing against use cases like "OMG folks are using Dijit and hanging twelve classes off every div". There's no reason I can see why class selectors ought to be especially efficient, especially if -- say -- your markup has lots of classes and relatively few attributes (and isn't that more common these days?).
We should also probably differentiate between CSS selectors as affects page rendering and CSS selectors as affects grabbing a bag of nodes using jQuery $() or document.querySelectorAll().
Maybe other people does not appreciate your work, but my girlfriend (who study marketing) and me have gained some insight about Twitter users and countries with Internet access [1].
Great work and thank you!
[1] I know this last is arguable: In some countries, Twitter is not the main microblogging service.
In my country there is no problem in sharing copyrighted content as long as do not receive economical profit. Also, I have found the example very practical as introduction.
"In my country there is no problem in sharing copyrighted ..."
I guess that means that each e-book only has to be sold once in your country? The U.S. laws might be overly protective of IP, but that's an interesting problem for publishers who in theory need to earn a profit if they're going to continue as entities as well as for authors who need to feed their families.
This obviously wasn't a problem when the books were printed on dead trees, because you'd only share copies that had been purchased, and if you're friend was reading your book you no longer had access to it. Curiously, I could rent my copy of a book to you in the U.S. without violating copyright laws.
"I guess that means that each e-book only has to be sold once in your country?"
No.
It means that you can read a book and, if you really like it, you can buy it. It means that you can discover new authors, topics and so without a huge investment.
This can sound demagogic: I have never had enough money to buy the books I wanted, nor to waste it trying to discover new books and topics. But with downloaded books I learned about tech and other fields. Eventually, I bough more books (a lot from U.S) than if I had not discovered these topics.
Allowing private sharing (as long as there are not profit) and supporting authors are not in direct confrontation. In my humble opinion and personal experience, they are correlated.
I was not passing judgement on either you or your country's laws ... And I think the ability to try a book out before you buy it is important to the market. I think there are a lot of us who spend time in bookstores simply for this reason.
"Private sharing" and especially recommendations are also my favorite ways to find worthwhile books.
No problem, smoyer. I take it to first person because I thought that my personal experience could be a interesting answer.
Recommendations are great once you both have some favorites books in common. Because of that, I always check the Amazon's "Other people also bough" section.
The lack of knowledge of foreign languages is clearly a issue. I think that our country is solving this making B1 mandatory to get you graduated and enforcing bilingual basic education on the capital. Not so much, but it seems to start giving some results.
We have to watch doubbed films when we're in groups because this problem. I know people that prefer original versions, but you can not exclude your friends when social watching.