skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I realize that it can't happen any time soon due to the current businesses that rely on copyright protection, there have been alternatives proposed that work without it, like The Digital Art Auction ( http://tdaa.digitalproductions.co.uk/history/essay.htm ) and Street Performer Protocol ( http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html , blacked out due to SOPA as of writing). Vastly simplified, they describe a system in which an artist describes a work they would create, and the money they would like to raise to release such a work. People bid on how much they would pay to see the work released. This bid is either collected into an escrow account up front or otherwise "pledged" in some binding way (perhaps a credit card auth). Once the threshold of pledges is reached, the money is released to the artist and the art is released to the public.

These threshold pledge systems all have the weakness that the work must be paid for up front, after which (since one assumes a lack of copyright) the work is public domain. In some ways this may not actually be a weakness, though; it transforms users into investors, making them say, "I would like something that does / has X and Y, and I would be willing to pay $Z to get it." Of course, this system does not entail any per-copy price... however, nowadays the cost to create a copy of something is approaching zero anyway. Does it really make sense to continue to charge a per-copy fee? Charging a subscription fee, however, would still be possible in many circumstances, if a service was actually being offered.

What are your thoughts on such systems?
GNU.org also on blackout
Brave of them to black-out even the ads...
You've confused physical property with intellectual property. Depriving someone of the physical immediately victimizes them, copying their intellectual property doesn't, it's not the same thing.
I don't get people with this line of thought. This is about survival, not about fighting worthy causes, even though saving whales is a noble cause and I wouldn't mind if Wikipedia fought for it.
Closures behave the same way in either case. The closure semantics in C#5 will be unchanged.

The difference is that the for loop's variable is scoped to the entire loop, whereas the foreach loop's variable is only scoped to the embedded statement (i.e., an iteration through the loop). That difference is perfectly justifiable.

In the semantics of a for loop, the loop variable is very clearly (and necessarily) a persistent value which can be changed according to rules described in the loop statement, by code within its embedded statement, or both.

In the semantics of a foreach loop, on the other hand, the implication is that you're successively retrieving otherwise independent values from a collection and operating on each one in succession. There is no reason to need or expect that the variable will have a scope that extends outside the embedded statement. It is simply replaced on each iteration through the loop. The loop statement doesn't offer any opportunity to perform any logic on the variable in between iterations, since all you can do between the parentheses is bind a variable. You cannot use a varaible from the outer scope as the loop variable, and the loop variable goes out of scope as soon as the loop exits.

In fact, there is really only one place where this scoping difference is visible: When the loop contains a closure. In that case, the semantics that C#5 will use are indisputably superior. Even in cases where that sort of behavior is desired (which is exceedingly rare), it is much better to require that the behavior be accomplished by using a variable from the outer scope, for the sake of readability. Being a language in which it is easy to write obfuscated code was never high in C#'s priority list.

If the cost of doing it this way is that there is a(nother) difference between the semantics of the for-loop and the foreach-loop, I have no problem with that. I can see no demonstrable need for consistency there; it is a foolish consistency.
Non-blacked out wikipedia entry:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
Well put. Ditto, say, a game developer. "Find another way" is great and all for games, if you want a bunch of Facebook monstrosities welded into an always-online authentication framework (or equivalent systems). "But you can sell a version with physical stuff that people want" is similarly silly - I'm not a model-maker or a map-maker, I write software and I'm not going to write software if the only way to make a living off of it is to sell tchotchkes. (And, without meaningful copyright, it's easy to duplicate whatever that thing is and sell it as if it were 'official' anyway.)

I'm trying very hard to avoid an ad-hominem, but I wonder how many people who espouse this "everything should be free" mindset actually create stuff and hurt themselves with this argument. Even software developers who strictly write software for other people benefit from copyright in a work-for-hire arrangement.
This guy deserves to skip the first round.
Good point, I fixed the title.
TheOatmeal Blacks Out Against SOPA, for Goats, Koalas & Love
Most (all?) people are productive every waking hour. I imagine the people who need 10 hours each night are getting those extra hours from time they would have normally been watching TV or some other daily entertainment and not from their working day.
Not a coincidence. Simple to implement != simple to explain to your boss (`it's standard industry practice'). The name is meant to sell the standard to non-techies.
hahaha, exactly.
Zogby: 57% of public at least somewhat aware of SOPA. 68% of the aware oppose
I helped make the video, and let me say it's super hard to get the tone of your pitch right.

We probably should get people who have experience doing voiceovers, but then again, this was a post about how to do this on the cheap.

Could you explain what you mean when you say "make it sound more appealing"? Were we not excited enough =P
The bytecode myth: Why JavaScript and ActionScript are not Worthy Competitors

Use Native Client. You'll get as close to machine code as you'll ever get, while running in a sandbox. The only way to go faster is to fully trust the code on your machine.

Checkmate.

See, I can write the word checkmate, too. How many more times can we come up with a slightly better argument, using only one train of thought about what is actually a very complicated issue involving multiple vendors, multiple platforms, multiple standards committees, ease of use, ease of deployment, different memory, bandwidth, and cpu constraints, and then just say 'checkmate' as though everyone else is being completely ridiculous?

Several, I bet.
PIPA is the Senate version of the bill and Rubio is a Senator. He does not have a vote on SOPA. If both passed then they would need to be reconciled into a single bill.
So... Adobe is arguing that nobody will ever figure out how to put a better compiler in front of JavaScript under any circumstances, so we have to pack it in now?

I realize current JIT sucks in many ways, but seriously... claiming that "we can put this compiler in front of our stuff and since the other guys can never, never figure out how to compile first, we will win forever" isn't just stupid. It seems willfully stupid.

Like, what about the second and successive times you run a given page's JavaScript, like if the page were in cache. Are they certain that open source's brain trust can never figure out how to compile that ahead of time?

Really?
I've always thought that RIAA and MPAA hate the public domain, but this makes it official.
As a software developer and general technologist, I can safely say that the average person knows far more about piracy than I do.

I constantly hear my non-techincal peers, who otherwise claim to know nothing about computers, always talking about the latest program they've installed to get free media. It's all over my head, but they get along just fine.

The same would happen under SOPA. The non-technical folks will just install "DNS Extender Pro" to get their media fix, and full DNS access is restored. They won't know how or why it works, but that doesn't matter.
Shows. Performances.
McCoy: You know, if we give him the formula, we'll be altering the future.
Scotty: Why? how do you know he didn't invent the thing!
Why I Won’t Teach You To Track Terrorists Online
Well, the problem (one problem) is that Javascript has no typing system. This makes running valid javascript code super, super slow at times. You can't promise to a javascript interpreter that you will always and only use the variable i_am_only_ever_an_integer as an 8 bit integer. This makes lots of things super slow.
I guess this is the project page, also contains the papers and some benchmarks:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/netmit/sFFT
REST in peace, SOAP.
REST Pagination in Spring
Pagination in a RESTful service - a Spring implementation
> The best change I made to my sleeping patterns is getting rid of an alarm clock. Get as much sleep as you need and then just wake up.

I highly second that sentiment. I haven't used an alarm clock for workdays for years. (I will for exceptions like an early flight or doctor appointment or something.) About once a week, I won't wake up until 45 to 60 minutes past the usual time. If that happens, it was necessary, and a blaring alarm clock would have left me zombied for most of the day.

I do have a fairly flexible work schedule, arriving any time up to about 10:30 is okay, and my manager does the same. This is by design not luck, I wouldn't take a job where that was not true.

Biphasic sleeping seems to be my most natural schedule too, on weekends and the last time I was between jobs. Problem is that I end up taking a 3-4 hour nap in addition to the usual 7-8 hours at night, which really cuts down on available conscious hours. I'm undecided whether that's my most productive schedule, or whether it's best to avoid the urge to nap.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fgooglepleaseh...
In Which I Designed a Part for My Truck, and Got It Built From Scratch
> What "physical manifestation" are you talking about?

However your creation manifests itself. A live performance or the physical media of a recording, for example.

> Because as soon as I make a record I have to "guard that physical manifestation" ... how?

The same way you guard your other possessions: with a lock and a door.

> you make the creation "other people's property"

The physical manifestation. The matter, as it were.

> If I think of something you did not this robs me of rights and automatically gives entitlement to you?

If you come up with an idea, it is yours to guard. If you communicate this idea, then you cannot ethically use force to prevent others from acting upon it. I do not believe I am robbing you of any right, because I do not believe that information can be property - only the physical manifestation of information (the media) can be property.
So true. Amen!
AWS Announces DynamoDB
Apple wants to "own your very own sole"
Mars attacks Morocco pelted with rocks from the Red Planet
Free API to add relevant news from topics into your apps
Symantec 'fesses up: 'Code theft worse than we thought'
For me, one late night (3-5hours sleep) followed by an early night (8+ hours) works really well.

I love the productivity of the late nights and I love waking up feeling fully rested.

It's great to fall into bed and really be ready to sleep every night.

As for the morning where I get up with little sleep I'm actually more productive for that whole day too. No groggy over-slept feeling.

That way I can keep working late nights and still be sociable the following evening.
The anti-SOPA email I just sent to my friends and family
WiFi - WTF is... 802.11ac?
Best coolest gadgets at CES 2012 | World New Electronics
It's not that simple because you have to properly handle stuff like "blah,blah" which is supposed to be treated as one block (but blindly using awk -F, will give you two separate fields)
I'm a little disappointed that I don't see Amazon doing anything about it. They clearly would have much to lose from SOPA/PIPA too.
I just saw it on MSNBC. This is the first coverage I've seen.
I've been a Flash developer first before coming to JavaScript. In many ways, ActionScript just may be the superior language. A language's performance is really subjective to its implementation. So lets not argue that. But IMHO, a language's "usability" depends a large part on its community almost like a slippery slope. The larger and active the community, the more tools and libraries are available, the more popular the language get.
A lot of sites these days seem to be skipping right over the "interesting" part and going straight to the static/dynamic distinction.
Actually, it is the freedom of speech clause in the First Amendment that gives fair use rights, as interpreted by the courts. It could even be argued by a future court that the First Amendment invalidates copyright altogether; it wouldn't be the first time a court had changed direction like that.

That is a less extreme change than that from Plessy vs Ferguson to Brown vs the Board of Education, for example. And a good case can be made for freedom of speech trumping copyright; the Constitutional argument for copyright is a practical one for "encouraging" the advance of arts and sciences; eternal copyright has already undercut that argument.
It's good to keep a log of sites IP addresses, but hardcoding them in the hosts file is a pretty bad practise. What if a site decides to change its IP address?
Facebook No.
Google+ No.
Yahoo No.
Twitter No.
Youtube No.
Having a baby has forced me to become more efficient than I have ever been in my life. It makes me wonder how much I might get done in a few years when his immediate needs (ie middle of the night soothings) settle down, if I can keep this level of efficiency. I miss my younger body, but I have enjoyed growing older for the perspectives I have gained. I can see myself being highly productive for a long long time.
I confess it would be interesting to see what happens were SOPA/PIPA to pass: As companies fold left and right and unemployment skyrockets... Would SOPA/PIPA supporters still claim they've done good for the economy?
I have never argued that "no-one" encountered those ideas, and your repeated exaggeration of my position is frustrating.

Nobody in the Agile movement claimed novelty for individual pieces. What was different was the way the pieces went together, and the shift in values and cultural norms that they required. That wasn't purely novel either; the fact that several people invented similar processes at the same time suggests that, as with most inventions, change was in the air. But what the Agile people undeniably did was to define and promote that difference in a way that gave people something to rally around. At the time, waterfall and a waterfall-ish RUP were the big processes people were discussing, and the notion that one would focus on people over process, or working code over documentation was heretical.

Also, I'm having a hard time taking your approach to evidence seriously. Rapid Development was a major survey of current software project management and a catalog of best practices put out by a large tech publisher. Splosky was also writing clearly about current practices. Your counter-evidence is the (unnamed) projects you've (anonymously) been on. Plus that one of them wrote a different book that you can pick nits on.

And honestly, I don't get why you're arguing the nits and ignoring my main points. You clearly have some big issue with your version of Agile and it's imagined history. But I honestly don't care what process you follow as long as it doesn't suck for you, so arguing it with me isn't really helping anybody.
Not really if you pay attention to the set of NoSQL DB's available already. They are just hosting their own now.
TheOatmeal's SOPA blackout
Chocolate Light Switch
Duplicating CDs (or DVDs or books) for private use is indeed legal in France (even if the original comes from a library). The "taxe sur la copie privée" is intended to compensate for the fact that fewer copies are sold because of such private copy. It has nothing to do with piracy.
If piracy takes root as something that people 'should' do, then B) in your piracy example leads to the same outcome as B) in your restaurant example.

It deprives them of any income, and removes the incentive and ability for them to produce further content as a means of living in the future.

That deprives all of their future contributions and damages the commons. In summation, at scale, the outcome for both B) scenarios IS the same, and if it is at scale, then there must be an effect not at scale, whether or not you refuse to accept it.
Ignition Leads $20M Round In Cloud Security And Identity Company Symplified
> I read with interest Steve Yegge's mistakenly-leaked email about the oppressive conditions for engineers at Amazon. It's hard to reconcile with the sort of innovation they consistently show.

My take on Steve's rant (as an engineer at Amazon) is that a lot of the issues he pointed out are legitimate, but at an entirely different scale than he was pitching them at.

Day to day I work on a product with another couple dozen or so engineers. We build what makes sense for our product, and for the most part we build it in a way that makes sense for us. Sometimes we are under pressure to leverage other parts of the platform, and sometimes that does entail a lot more work. Most of the time, though, it ends up reducing our operational load (because the systems we depend on support products much larger than ours :) and giving us someone we can page when things go pear-shaped.

Amazon isn't the perfect place to work, but it's generally not bad (other than the frugality thing; that sucks as an employee no matter which way you slice it).
Not at all. He feels that he has the right, as a lawful paying customer, not to be threatened and preached to. Imagine if you sat down at a restaurant, and the server lectured you about dining-and-dashing before serving you. It's his right to be pissed off about sanctimonious bullshit from the MPAA
I'm not going to set my own behaviour up as an example here, which is something that I think invalidates the OP's point, at least partially, and certainly obscures it, but I have a couple of points:

- It is unreasonable on the whole to expect people to refrain from piracy when it's just so easy. It's kind of like putting candy in front of a child and not expecting him to eat it, compounded by the fact that there is at least the illusion of anonymity on the internet.
- It is unreasonable to expect artists to use the internet by themselves to distribute their content, although some do. Most of them are probably not that technically inclined. There needs to be someone there to take that pain away from them.
- It is just that people who create content get paid for doing so.

So it's really a market problem. We need a system that allows people to just download as easily as pirating, but allows the content creators to live off their creation. If the traditional content distributors (who are not the creators) cannot supply a service which does this, then I cannot see why they should be pitied.

I think something along the lines of Deezer et al is ok : a service that would allow you to consume music, no questions asked. The problem is that deezer is getting all its content from the distributors, so in effect there is a double middle man. But a subscription-based "deezer" which paid artists directly according to how much their tracks were listened to would work, IMHO. I believe such services already exist, in fact.

Also, you'd only need the big distributors to realize this, and build their own versions, and suddenly there's a proper market for tunes, films, etc. These new distributors would each have a catalogue of films and music on download, but they could also open the catalogue to cinemas, tv channels and so on. The only thing they couldn't do is restrict access, under pain of piracy.

I'm just hypothesising here, but as far as I can see the content distributors are being the artisans of their own downfall by not doing this themselves.
Mobile Payments Company BilltoMobile Launches One-Click Checkout
Open Science And The Econoblogosphere
I've read both of the links you provide at various times, and I remain skeptical. It seems like an awesome way to put a hard ceiling on what creative works actually get made, because the likelihood of anyone actually funding a project of magnitude is extremely small. I look at it from a game development point of view, and I have to ask--who's going to pony up the cash for the next Half-Life (not the next Valve game, but the next product on that level) up-front when dealing with nobodies? And there's no reason for somebody to sink their own money into such a project because of the lack of payoff.

Today, I can self-bootstrap by making smaller games and building up cash reserves, if I want. Or I can put away some money in my day job, like I am now, to actually build what I want to build and what I think will be well-received and make more value back for me than the money and time I'll need to sink into it to create it. Why would I risk my own money, and that much time, in a system where I'll get nothing back for it? (Subscription services are not a solution; not every game is World of Warcraft, and I'd argue that none should be.)

"I'm going to need $100,000 (or, for something where you'd actually have to hire multiple people, $X,000,000) to make a video game."

"Yeah, right. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

While I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, every rebuttal to this I've ever seen requires a lot of handwaving and an assumption of active and knowledgeable participation on the part of end consumers. To be honest, I don't expect investor-level behavior out of consumers; I expect a lot of yelling about how something is X when they "already paid for" something very slightly but to them critically different than X, but not much in the way of useful, constructive development-centric criticism. It's not their bag.
For your argument to be believable, you shouldn't make unsubstantiated and prima facie bogus claims. Your post would've have the same message without that claim, but by putting it in it sticks out like a sore thumb and makes the rest of your argument moot for debating purposes.
The T80 Spotting Scope Olivion | shop gadgets online
Usually 6-7 all week, my baby doesn't let me get more hours on weekend, less than that my brain gets lazy
http://theoatmeal.com/
Everybody I know... They download in bulk and sift through it looking for things they like.

And without exception, all of those "pirates" that I know have much larger legal bluray and record collections than I do.
Instead of posting "site X is blacked out today" just put a comment here.
Let's keep the front page clean.

If you find a site that is blacked out, make a comment here, and then folks can discuss it by replying to you.
I used one (pangolin) for two years. The laptop itself was great, but the battery life was terrible. In two years of watching the System76 forums on ubuntuforums, that seemed like the most common complaint. I got about an hour and a half battery life on a 15" laptop, which dropped to about 45 minutes the second year. If it weren't for that, I would highly recommend System76.
Android 4.0 on tablets: better but still needs work
http://thedailywtf.com/
The Green Button project launches to unleash energy data
Slow it Down: Simulate slow/bad connections in Lion
Very interesting that there's no mention of the CAP theorem here, despite Amazon's heavy reliance on it in the past when marketing their non-relational stuff.