The great thing about the Haskell signature is that if you understand functional programming at all, it's fairly easy to understand, at least in my opinion. Scala's method signature requires knowledge of Scala's brand of functional programming, including mixins and implicits.
I can't help but feel that the original list skews a little "nerdy" and aren't really a draw for most people. Some of the arguments are just specious and/or dubious. Privacy & trust? Facebook's privacy controls are actually more fine grained than Google+'s and Google's track record with respect to privacy is just as mottled as Facebook's and includes some higher profile incidents as well. Did we all forget about the Buzz release? Google ecosystem and a "blended experience"? There is absolutely no evidence that there is demand for that and my gut feeling is that there isn't.
The rest of the arguments are just as spurious and the article is, in my opinion, representative of the tech world's flawed and narrow take on Google+. It seems like most commentators have let their analyses be skewed by either an irrational dislike of Facebook or a love of new technology. Neither of these will drive people away from Facebook or towards Google+. Furthermore, a lot of these arguments seem, sometimes implicitly, predicated on the idea that Facebook is just going to stand by and let themselves be steam-rolled by Google. Google is the underdog here, they have a lot of failures under their belt in this area and at the end of the day, despite the novelty involved in binning friends into circles, Google+ is just a Facebook clone.
"Facebook's privacy controls are actually more fine grained than Google+'s"
> But confusing and convoluted to the point where most users have no clue what is being shared vs not. Circles makes it so much easier. Facebook lists were supposed to do that - but they were hidden away and not very easy to use - so very few users used them.
I think one of the reasons that RoR might seem bigger is because RoR is a much bigger part of the "Ruby experience" than Django is for Python. Rails had a huge hand in making Ruby what it is today and I think you'd have a hard time finding a Ruby dev that wasn't introduced through Rails.
This isn't true of Python, though. Most people are Python coders first, web framework users second. Their level of experience with Python has a part in dictating what they're looking for in a web framework and many experienced Python devs are more attracted to small or micro-frameworks like Bottle, Flask, web.py, etc. Django has never been the "one true web framework" for Python the way Rails is for Ruby. Personally I have never touched Django, just Flask and web.py.
Also, if you are going to base your framework usage on its popularity in comparison to Rails you're going to have a tough time ever being satisfied. When has any framework (web or otherwise) generated the same level of cult following as Rails? The Rails community is an absolute outlier in the open source software world (and I mean that in a positive way).
Was it really a scare tactic in this case, though? The copyright holder felt that his copyright had been infringed, so he sent a cease and desist, backed up with the threat of legal action. What should the copyright holder have done instead? Sent a polite note? Threaten violence? Like it or not the court is where Fair Use is decided. Just because the threat of a lawsuit is scary doesn't always mean it's being used as a scare tactic.
The real, real story here is, as the author asks, where do you draw the line? Personally I don't think the author had much of a leg to stand on given that the image was being used to sell an album and was easily recognizable as a simulacrum of the original work.
$32k is an awful lot of money to have handed over for something like this, on the scare of it being potentially a lot more. That's what I mean; on an arguable point, the cost of defending the lawsuit and facing costs - let alone the potential damages - meant that the smaller party simply rolled over. That's the scare tactic.
Yes, but that's not specific to copyright law, it's a problem with tort law in the US in general (although, admittedly, its abuse is pretty prevalent when it comes to copyrights).
For the record: the pixelated image was hand drawn by a pixel art artist. But actually, I don't care about that: lets assume it was a computer-pixelated version that anyone could make with Photoshop. Then Maisel is still wrong.
This tiny project doesn't threaten his firmly established reputation or commercial interests in any way. The audience is severely limited and the pixelated image has only appeared on the cover of an even smaller number of physical CD's and otherwise was simply displayed on the website as the visual representation of the music. For which it was incredibly appropriate. It wasn't used to 'sell the music': you couldn't even buy that pixelated image.
Maisel should allow a thousand of these tiny suns to bloom, even if that requires a thousand of his photographs to be pixelated and use in tiny projects that make a few people happy. All analogies are off, specifically because Maisel is in a supreme position to ignore all commercial and legal interests. That makes his legal action petty and unartistic and makes the world a worse place.
What should the copyright holder have done instead? Sent a polite note?
Yes. What's wrong with starting off with a polite note? Are you really backing the plaintiff's starting demands for $150,000 per use as a reasonable request?
It's really, really hard to take an article seriously when it takes an "impulsive" five year old and has him committing statutory rape as an adult. Kind of an unnecessary example, no?
Actually your example seems like a better one. Most men would read his example about rape and say (truthfully) "I would never do that!"
Neglecting to use a condom in the heat of the moment? I imagine the line becomes grayer. It's not longer this abhorrent thing where the consequences are binary (did or did not rape), but instead more of a risk/reward thing where judging the consequences requires more fuzzy logic.
Interesting. Are you saying that "statutory rape" is generally considered abhorrent in the US?
I'm not from US, and in my country the roughly equivalent (but different) crime is called "seduction". It's not nearly as bad as "rape", either legally or socially. A rapist might get lynched in prison, while nobody besides a 17yo girl's parents would care about a "seducer" nowadays.
Moral issues aside, unprotected sex with an adult would be much riskier than protected sex with a minor.
Would most American young men really say that they would never have consensual sex with a minor? Even if the guy is 18 and the girl is 17? My understanding is that most guys wouldn't do it in situations like a one-night-stand, when the perceived risky of being caught/charged is higher. But if the girl is their girlfriend I believe most guys would do it.
I have friends who fell into the gray area. Forgetting a condom can be easy in the heat of the moment, especially if there was a long 'wait' before hand. However, my friends had good self control... until we got one excessively drunk and sent her home. She ended up at her boyfriends who'd been out at a party himself. 9 months later they had a kid, literally from a 1 time mistake.
I've always had strong self-control. Even when I'm excessively drunk (and I tolerate alcohol well) I am in control. I've never behaved far from the norm when intoxicated, I've had the piece of mind to ensure my wife takes her birth control pill when I've been acting like the ball in a game of pong whilst going down a corridor.
Self-control is certainly a strong factor in the gray areas. I would bet money that most rapists don't have a problem with self-control, I would say the ability to wait until an opportune time shows a high degree of self-control; a self-control issue would be an old man on a train squeezing a school girls ass. I would say rapists have an impulse-control disorder, they're willing to gamble a minor short-term gain for a huge long-term loss. Someone with self-control issue tends to gamble a small short-term gain with an normal long-term loss.
Having children isn't a life-ending consequence of having sex. In fact, it's down right average. Going to jail is a life-ending consequence for the majority of people.
A 15 year old having unprotected sex is more an impulse control disorder than a 25 year old. A 25 year old having unprotected sex and having a child is normal, if not expected in the majority of circumstances.
It would not have been a better example, because it is at least equally the womans fault (arguably more, since she has more options for birth control than he does) - statutory rape is not.
That really is a much better example. The first example implies some sort of correlation between impulsiveness or lack of self control and a willingness to perform criminal behavior.
This was roughly my thought too. A social network that will only ever be available to a small niche (iTunes users that purchase music on the ITMS) is hardly social. Last.fm is available to anyone regardless of their platform or where they got their music, with the obvious caveat that they need a plugin for their music player.
Is it really that inconvenient to clean a carrot? Just peel it and eat it. I can peel a carrot quicker than most people can even decide what to have at a vending machine.
You're leaving out the bit where you find a knife and a cutting board, and then you wash the knife and the cutting board, and the bit where you throw away all the peel you cut off, and the bit where some of the peel winds up on the floor so you have to bend over and pick it up, and... wait, can't you just buy packaged prepeeled babby carrots anyway? They sell 'em at my local supermarket.
I can't tell if this is tongue-in-cheek or not, but I'll reply seriously anyway:
When I want a carrot I grab one out of the fridge, grab the peeler off of the counter, pull my compost box out from under the sink and peel it directly into the compost. Why would you need a cutting board?!
