Posts by doublelayer 9378 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
So your preference is that, if you don't prevent someone copying the data without permission, they should be allowed to? Does the same philosophy apply to every other thing the law says you're not supposed to do? What about if it happens to you? Whether or not I like the person the actions affected, or for that matter the person carrying them out, should not affect whether those actions are legal or not.
Several of these things are the downsides I was referring to. Copyright was not intended to and does not give the people who own it a right to abuse customers. Several of the things you list or that I would add are already illegal, but the responsible bodies are not enforcing those laws. Some of them are not, and I'd like them to be. For example, if you're licensing something for a short time after which the seller is within their rights to cancel it, I think they should be forced to state that unambiguously at the point of sale rather than burying it in a contract. However, that has nothing to do with copyright; I could bury something in any other contract equally legally, and I should be prevented from doing so with equal vehemence.
That is not what our old friend Captain Silver was on about. I'm sure they would be happy to complain about those things and would do so to convince people, but they would also complain about completely normal uses of these things because they believe that all intellectual work should be free of restrictions and of charge. They either do not understand or do not care what effect that would have on people who created it.
The fact that you think patents' only value is assigning credit speaks volumes for why you're constantly making bad points about patents and copyright. Both exist to make it possible for someone to do the substantial work behind them and benefit from having done so, enabling people who don't have independent wealth to do this. Until you recognize that, you're never going to prove why they're bad or suggest improvements. Both systems have a lot of downsides, but while you continue to campaign for them to be shut down and worry only about credit, you will always be arguing against something you don't understand and making this obvious to most of those you're trying to convince.
My choice to remove some of the content before I read it is not the same as expecting to receive free copies of anything I like. For similar reasons, it is allowed if sites choose to detect my use of an ad blocker and refuse to send me the page. I won't be happy, but they can do it. My use of an ad blocker is also directly related to the advertising frequently being malicious in a way that harms me and the site on which the ads appear. These are not the same, and the argument is frequently misused by two groups of people, those who want to treat tracking as legally binding even when it may itself break the law, and people who wish all copyright infringement to be legal, to defend their incorrect points.
The other smaller projects you're talking about nearly universally take an existing thing, sometimes the modern version, and build around it. That takes less money because the expensive stuff is already being done by the deep-pocketed. Often, that works out fine enough, the same reason why there's dozens of distros that wrap around Debian or Ubuntu to provide a preconfiguration, only a few distros at Debian's level that assemble all the components, and even fewer kernels.
Nobody's stopping someone from making a new browser engine from scratch, but few people are trying. Those that try generally don't have a lot of success because a lot of browser users want a little more than just rendering HTML and CSS. If Firefox died, I'd expect that plenty of people would continue to work around the codebase, but it would decay with few people working on boring but necessary maintenance. That would more likely be a slow loss of function rather than an immediate death. However, a lot of nontechnical people who find one thing that doesn't work, install Chrome and it does work, and don't find Chrome to be broken will continue to use Chrome.
Your utopian idea of how you could make open source more successful if you could custom-make laws for it has two major problems. One is obvious, that you can't actually design them so aggressively and nobody outside the world of open source, and not everybody inside it, would support you. Your other one, though, is also a problem and it's what your comment talks about.
Your vision where everything is a subscription, so users don't learn it, so they don't want to use it, so everyone uses an open source alternative, is not what happens. For example, a lot of Adobe software is on a subscription. Not all of it, and I think some of them has a pay once and get support for several years until they make you upgrade option, but quite a lot of it is primarily subscription based. Has this meant that open source alternatives are surging in use among the young? No. In fact, it's the opposite. When they sell these things as a subscription, people who want to get a job using this can afford to buy it and can justify doing so. Just in case, Adobe has special lower subscription prices for students, just to make sure that more people are learning to use their software and will use it at a place where they have to buy the more expensive corporate subscription. It's not limited to those people willing to find a pirated copy. Meanwhile, any company who wanted could just say they'll use the open source version and any student who wanted could learn to use it, both for free. Their choice not to means the problem is more complicated than "expensive software you can't pirate means free alternative is used". Maybe they have tried it and the software isn't as good, in which case our problem is in our feature set. Maybe they haven't tried it and it would work great in which case our problem is marketing. Maybe they are worried about it because they want ongoing work on it and they think the proprietary version will have that, in which case we have a great opportunity because we've found someone who is willing to pay us to work on this, but we have to actually find a way to do that and not run into any of the other problems that can create. Maybe it's all three of those things, in which case it's all of the problems and opportunities together.
On the other point, you could write your law so specifically that open source, presumably the ones using licenses you approve of, is exempted and nobody else is. It would be a bad law in my opinion, but I suppose it's always possible. Most alternative laws would cause more problems for those writing open source than they do for proprietary vendors, since those projects operate with much smaller and more voluntary resources, both financial and labor. Therefore, I retract my complaint about what it would do to open source authors since we're working in idealist rules and we're excluding those effects by definition. I caution you that trying to implement this is likely to have different effects if you ever get the ability to draft it.
And, if that ever makes it into Android that we can use on our devices, the situation might change. Right now, that's a prerelease feature which may never get released and it doesn't matter if it does because it's the same as you can get by using one of a few apps that let you run a virtual machine, which appears to be all this is as well. As this article says, there's one of those for iOS too.
In both cases, you don't have access to the environment of the underlying operating system. If something runs in the VM, great*, if it doesn't, you're out of luck. That means if you want to use GPU acceleration and it doesn't pass that through, then it's not happening unless you build something native that's designed for the OS. More importantly for my uses, if you create something in one app and you want to use it in your VM, then pass it back to the app, you get to play the lottery of seeing whether that app saves the file to a place where that's convenient or whether you have to export it somehow, import it into your VM, get it out of the VM and re-imported in the app, and delete the old file from the app so you only have one copy again.
* There is still the problem that the interface was mostly not designed for this use. I've run VMs on Android, and they work, but you quickly learn how not designed for this Android is. If that's all you have, it will probably work, but when you have a better tool, you end up wondering why you're playing with this when you could get something done with the things you have next to you.
In fact, I think the ease I had when using that was a result of having touch typed for quite a long time. I was younger when using them, as you'd have guessed from it being a netbook which nobody really makes anymore, but I'm not sure that made my hands much smaller than they are nowadays. I still prefer a somewhat larger keyboard, but not so much that it's going to produce much change in my laptop size preferences. For instance, I doubt that everyone who appreciated devices with even smaller keyboards (the Psion devices seem to have a lot of fans and people used Blackberry keyboards and are still building them into things today), had homunculus-derived hands. Maybe they just found the portability justified learning to use something smaller and had the dexterity to make use of it. I also have a feeling that you could learn to use those keyboards too, but your difficulty using them is due to not having a reason to build the muscle memory. I had a reason: the netbook was the computer I had, so I used it and soon enough I used it quickly.
I do wonder why you wanted to make a generational thing out of this. Most of the people here are going to type a lot, and thus they will, by education or by evolution, be relatively good at it. This doesn't really depend on how old they are. However, if we must make everything generational, the younger generation are those taught and expected to turn in work by typing it on a keyboard, whereas older people studied at a time when writing it down on paper was the way to complete most of their work. Which one would we expect to have a higher proportion of those trained to type quickly? We could also try to assess how many people were offered and received typing-specific courses, but that would be difficult to calculate because you'd need to collect a lot of information from individual schools (I say you as I'm definitely not going to collect it) and it wouldn't tell you anything about the number of people who didn't receive that education but learned to touch type on their own because it really helps with the efficiency of entering text that way.
Yes, they still make touch typists. I can also touch type, or at least I have, on tiny netbook keyboards that fit next to a 9-inch screen. The layout was annoying because some punctuation got bumped and I need all the weird punctuation eventually, but I was able to type normal text on it just fine. Maybe your touch typing education was too limited to adapt to different shapes?
"Microsoft also orphaned millions of computers with capricious hardware requirements, far more egregiously than Apple."
Is that so? Let's check the details. Your iMac from 2014, what would its support lifetime have been?
Mac OS, please step forward. When did you drop support for the venerable iMac from 2014? Well, there were two of them released that year, but the answer for both of them is as of the release of Mac OS 12. To put a date on that, October of 2021, for 7-7.3 years depending on model.
Windows, your turn. When did you drop support for the iMac from 2014? That's correct, the answer is... not yet. True, it's coming up, and it's helpfully also in October, making it a convenient exactly four years later regardless of model.
Now how is Microsoft more egregious than Apple here? Neither is great, but Apple cut it off quite a bit faster, and their lifetime of seven years is shorter than the minimum amount of time a computer that shipped with Windows 10 could receive non-extended Windows 10 support (8-9 years). Remember that whatever complaints you have about OCLP stem from the fact that some hackers are having to do what Apple could quite easily have done for those who spent at least $2,500 (US price is what's listed) on their hardware. I have used OCLP to extend the OS lifetime on one of my machines, and I've had a much nicer experience that you have, with Safari and all the rest of the applications working happily, though I have not yet attempted to update from Mac OS 14 to 15. If Apple wasn't blazing the trail that Microsoft chose to take, neither of us would have to do that.
That's going to kill open source developers who try to make any money out of their product, because the only people who have any chance of providing forever support are those who charge massive amounts for it. Or, more importantly, it will turn all the proprietary software makers into companies that use a subscription model because you'll always get the latest version, you'll always pay for the latest version, and if you stop paying, they no longer have to worry about what updates you get because you don't get to use the software at all. Was that what you had in mind? If not, maybe consider whether your absolutist stance is going to get you what you want.
It just means that it automatically downloads them and asks for you to update or schedule it. They probably decided that they didn't need the reaction that people had when Windows 10 did real automatic updates which wasn't well-received and still isn't in these forums. I don't like truly automatic updates because they can easily interrupt things, but I've also had to clean up after people who never installed any updates, so I'm secretly content for machines that aren't mine. Don't tell those who get free support from me; I said it's a secret.
"It is possible to SSH into Android FWIW."
Not by default it's not, although you can easily use ADB over a network to get a shell. But you could add an SSH server and get into the shell that way too. The main problem is that, once you've done that, there's not a lot you can do from that shell. Access your app files? Sorry, you're the shell user. You don't have permission. You can see your files if you get root on your device, which depending on your device is probably actively resisted. And once you do go to the effort to get root and it doesn't break anything, you are still in an environment that wasn't designed for you to be there. You can see and modify everything, but you can't make it work in the way most Linux systems would because all the apps are expecting to work in an Android-like environment and they stick to those restrictions.
As ever, what works for one may not work for another. The stuff I want to run mostly runs on Linux, and what doesn't usually runs in a VM. Most importantly, I can typically expect to run most or all of the software I need on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, and it comes down to a preference, but try to run it on iOS or Android and it stops working either at all or functionally. The author mentioned wanting to run PyTorch, which isn't going to run well or at all on a tablet, so they need a laptop. They should have known that before buying a tablet, and by choosing to do so anyway, they are making the wrong choice for them. In this case, they aren't happy because the processor in that tablet is powerful enough to run their software, but that is not the only relevant factor. Sometimes, the OS being capable of running the thing is the bigger stumbling block, and sometimes, it's environment is the problem. People who don't want to run things that an iPad won't run may be just fine with the iPad.
Yes, there is. They tell you how to on their website. Also, is there a reason you'd expect Microsoft to have locked that down, since they have had lots of chances to do so and have consistently not, unlike other companies who have had lots of chances to do so (Apple, pretty much every Android OEM) and have often chosen to?
Most of these criticisms leave out lots of details. I'm about to defend all the big companies, but if we truly think they're worthy of reproach, it is helpful to be honest in our complaints. They're guilty of a lot of things, but that doesn't make them guilty of everything.
First, in defense of Apple, your complaints against the iPad are no shell, no root, and no Python. You knew all of those things were missing when you bought it. If you don't like things where you don't get root, iOS has always been that. It would make a lot of sense if you refused to buy one and cited that as the reason. It's certainly one reason why I won't get an iPad, though I have grudgingly accepted it on an iPhone. Buying an expensive iPad and complaining that it runs the OS it always has seems a little confusing. Even without that, you've pointed out that you can, in fact, get a Python REPL and a shell, restricted though they are. For some people, that might be enough. If they are not enough for you, maybe it would have made more sense not to buy the iPad and spend that money on a computer where you can have the tools you need. If everyone thought that way, it would demonstrate what Apple needs to change to get people buying iPads. As it is now, they're going to keep making their locked down iOS environment because it seems to be fine for enough buyers, you included.
To compare this with an old Surface is not a fair comparison. Yes, Microsoft shouldn't be cutting off the hardware they are. They have no good technical reason. However, unlike Apple, you have three choices you can make freely with that Surface. You can bypass the hardware checks and install Windows 11 anyway, and it works, you can install Linux on it, with pretty good driver support, or you can install any other OS that is compatible with the processor. This is the benefit of having an open and standard architecture, and it is something that Windows machines have, Intel Macs had, ARM Macs don't really have but they are at least open, and iPads have never and will never have. It shouldn't be junk if you are willing to spend a little time on making it work, and if you can make productive use of PyTorch, you have enough skill to accomplish it. Oddly, I'm much happier to blame Microsoft for this than Apple (Microsoft at least did something bad recently to it whereas Apple didn't change anything), and yet, I'd still rather have that old Surface than the new iPad.
No, but they do for some of the services. You can make them clean on command without a connection, for example, but to schedule them to do this automatically, you do need a connection. If the company folds and nobody buys the remnants to operate the servers, the vacuums will become dumber, but they won't be bricked entirely.
Before you try passing all the responsibility, consider how many admins you know, including those who post here, who are not advocating updating things. I don't see many comments saying "I would upgrade, but I didn't get permission". It's undoubtedly one of the causes, but it is not the only cause. Sometimes, we are in fact the organ-grinders, because if we decide that updating that server can wait and never asked for permission, that decision is on us. If we take responsibility for that choice, we can better decide whether it is the right decision or not.
Counterpoint, how many people have experienced a problem because something wasn't updated? Maybe it stopped working with other things. Maybe it was impractical to maintain. Maybe it got broken into. I have seen a lot of people stick with not updating it because there were no problems until there were problems, and at that point it was a lot harder to maintain it. Occasionally, I've had to rewrite things from scratch to respond to it, and since I didn't write the first versions, you don't even get the benefits that generally come with a ground-up rewrite but you still get all the downsides like having to retest everything and it taking a while to plan, design, and implement.
We have many stereotypes of people who ignore things because they're not a problem now until it blows up in their face. It can be useful to consider whether we are doing the same thing but telling ourselves that it's different this time.
If the student goes to the library which has legal copies, then copyright infringement is out. If they cite their sources and quote appropriately, then plagiarism is out. On the other hand, someone who wants to cheat and plagiarize without citation can do that just fine from the library, though it's not as fast as doing it online. An LLM can throw you into the plagiarism camp even if you didn't want to because it frequently quotes without citation. That makes it hard to choose it if you want to be sure you're not going to plagiarize.
As for cheating, it's cheating whether you have a program write you an essay or if you pay your friend who actually studied to write one for you. It was as possible and as well-defined manually as it now is automatically. No, reading it later and correcting a few details doesn't make it not cheating.
I can see how that would be useful to spammers, but it's not much different now other than that the spammers need to buy the mail service separately. I found it useful because, if I or someone started up a small group or open source project, you could have a domain name and an email in one purchase which prevented the all too common use of projectname@gmail.com for communication.
I no longer recommend them after what they did with the email service*, but they were good before and all the domain registrar services are still as I renewed for a while. While I'll probably leave them when my domains need renewing, I haven't yet decided whether to do so.
* Gandi used to advertise a basic free email service included with the purchase of domains. This was very useful in my experience for small projects that didn't need a full mailserver but wanted to have some domain-based mail. In 2023, they canceled this service without reducing the price, which is annoying but I could understand it, but where they annoyed me is that they also canceled it for domains purchased before, thus removing the service from people who had already paid for it. While I'm otherwise satisfied with Gandi's services, I kind of feel that I should leave them for what I view as an underhanded practice, changing the terms during the previously-arranged time.
Maybe to demonstrate what happens when you do it? A lot of people have been trying to put AI of various types in charge of things where complicated decisions are necessary, from criminal sentencing to job candidate evaluation. Maybe this serves as an example of what happens when you ask a program to make a subjective judgement without being able to give it good acceptance criteria or check it afterward. Sometimes, research is good at telling you what not to do.
Otherwise, it is just the normal kind of thing that researchers do. Try something and tell you the results. It doesn't mean they would advocate doing it in practice, but knowing the results can advance other research or provide more questions.
I think they already have algorithmic recipient matching to some extent. This AI proposal just tries to deal with one of the edge cases of step number 3 in the chart: what do you do when your database searches for "who can use this kidney" gives you multiple people. Since you can only help one of them, it makes sense to have some way of choosing one over another, but given the short time to do this, there isn't time to do a lot of work to do that. At least some systems I'm aware of are just a queue, whereas others are very basic algorithms.
I think AI is a bad solution to any of this because, without us deciding what factors should count, the AI has no way to judge whether its answers are valid. Any AI can give answers, but only by testing its answers against known ones and running again can we improve them. There's no real way to train an AI without having some way of assessing its answers. Discussing the possible weights would be an interesting philosophic exercise, but it would probably remain there because I have a feeling we are not going to get consensus answers to some of the challenges raised by other posters, such as does having children count as a bonus point or does being a prisoner earn a demerit. If we somehow did arrive at answers to these questions, we probably wouldn't need any complex algorithm when a simple decision tree could add up the scores and sort the available candidates.
Except that AI was not tasked here, nor will it be tasked elsewhere for now, with preventing errors like that. That could be improved with better procedures, but the closest I could get to AI doing it is to install AI vision systems in every operating room tasked with looking for problems and calling out warnings. While that sounds great, and it will be when we have systems capable of better-than-human vision, interpretation of vision, and memory, we don't have those things yet and the companies most interested in building models don't seem to mind much when their impressive models imitate having those but make up the answers from time to time.
This AI, on the other hand, is not even tangentially related to that other than that a hospital is involved in both. This one is trying to find the answers to moral questions, and we don't have the answers to those ourselves, so it is hard to do anything useful with those. You can't check that it got it right if you don't know what right is, and with the opaqueness of the process, you can't just run the model and decide at the end whether the thing it suggests is a good idea because you only know its answers to specific cases, not a new AI-generated philosophy of who is more deserving. The AI will also only decide these things based on predefined variables. For example, my initial philosophy, which is still somewhat alluring due to its simplicity, is that we prefer the most years of life. Maybe we should consider how that life will be lived, but if we do, there are a lot more variables than these models or the humans got for deciding whose life is more deserving, and I feel nervous even being asked to answer that question.
Oh, some of them were, but that doesn't fix your problem. For example, it was obvious that you would need to charge a transfer fee, but this leaves you in an uncomfortable dichotomy. Depending on how large the fee is, you end up in one of the following positions:
1. The fee is low. If, for example, it's a 2% fee and the money expires after a year, then a criminal can exchange it over and over and has a long time to spend it. Eroding it to nothing would take far more than a lifetime, and although they might be a little annoyed that they won't get full value, unless they're the type of criminal that spends their ill-gotten cash immediately, criminals have dealt with worse.
2. The fee is high. This means that everyone has to live with, not just the fact that all their money expires if they don't do something about it, but that every transaction costs them a lot more than the transactions they used to make before. Many transfers are cheaper than this and even the most expensive credit card transactions don't have as high a fee as you'll need to prevent account-to-account transfers from being feasible.
Your initial proposal seemed to be designed to promote spending, but by charging large fees and eroding savings every time someone does spend, you're reducing it again. In some ways, that's an advantage, because there won't be as much immediate spending from people who are about to be robbed of their savings. The inflation problem is just going to get worse though, and the unpopularity would be even higher.
Of course, another set of rules you haven't clarified is how this works with investments. I've been speaking of this from the perspective of people who put all their money in a bank account and leave it there until they want to spend it. I know some people who do that. It doesn't explain what would happen to someone who invests their savings in a variety of funds or securities. Do those expire too, or is this an acceptable form of saving? If it works as it does today, your solution is broken because it just eliminates a long-term bank account but everyone can still save as before after learning about low-risk investment options. If it expires, it is not broken but several new things are because those investments did a lot of things that you will now need to replace.
And one further problem is that you haven't explained very much why this is a good thing. Why is saving a problem that we need to eliminate by changing how money works? How do we deal with the problem of someone who would have saved for a necessity, they followed the spirit of your proposal and spent it before expiration instead of finding a loophole, and now they have a problem and no money to use to solve it? It's not just that you have a lot of loopholes to close for your proposal to work, but that the stated purpose of it will break some other things which, if you want anyone to agree to it, you will have to fix.
No, the executive order just means "don't sell them without getting explicit approval to do so". It is theoretically possible to make Bitcoin un-sellable by transferring them into a wallet and intentionally destroying the keys to that wallet, but that would be a bad goal and it would not allow them to be a reserve asset, so they're not going to do that. That means that, if they do later want to sell them, they can.
Absolutely, but if you're comparing it to definitely losing all of it, you can excuse the fee. Everyone paying the fee will get a reminder every time they do it why they hate the person who came up with this idea, because they're being forced to pay to maintain access to their money and if they ever forget, they'll lose it. People hate bank fees which are charged automatically, and making them manual will just make the idea less popular.
Theoretically, there are several possible benefits. In practice, many of them don't actually work. For example, transferring that money to a different country is slow with paper money, and depending on the quality of the postal service, it may disappear before arriving. Transferring it from account to account might work depending on the countries involved, but there are often delays, fees, restrictions, and other things that can get in the way. Cryptocurrency could, and sometimes does, make it faster to send value anywhere, although some of the more popular ones do so more slowly or expensively than was originally advertised. This feature is also useful to criminals who hope to avoid controls, but that doesn't mean they're the only one who would like it. Cryptocurrency's other deficiencies mean that this benefit is not used as often as the less convenient transfer mechanisms that function with the money people have on them.
It's been proposed. It's a stupid idea for many obvious reasons, but it's also easily defeated by exchanging all my money before it's going to expire with others whose money is also going to expire. It just happens that we did similar amounts of work for one another around that time which we feel deserve similar amounts of repayment. Clock reset. It also doesn't do a thing to prevent criminals from using it; criminals want to spend their gains too, so how does preventing saving do anything against them? Of course, you could build in lots of extra features to make it harder for criminals to use it, most of which would be detrimental to and detested by law-abiding users.
A lot of effort has gone into encouraging people to save money because people who have money available when they need it tend to do better than people who spent all of it. Forcing people who want to save to spend it anyway kind of breaks all of that, generating exactly the opposite of the benefits from it. You'd also get some fun bonus problems from people who didn't need to be convinced to save and now face a use or lose situation. You also get two groups of angry people who might want to attack you because either you took away their money, or to avoid you taking away their money, they invested it in something that doesn't expire but wasn't a good choice. True, that second one normally isn't your fault, but since they had to invest or you would have confiscated it through automatic expiration, they'll ascribe any downstream negative consequences to you. Meanwhile, I see no positives whatsoever.
Everyone has their own opinion. In this case, the closest I can get while sticking religiously to your naming options is CheckDLInAD (Verb+noun+preposition+noun). For hiding what he was doing, that name is just so slightly better, but for readability, I prefer his. I do not see a reason to mandate that function names always be imperative phrases. Most of my imperative functions do, but this was not an imperative function.
Perhaps the bigger problem was admitting it. If you're planning to plead not guilty with the hope of not getting convicted, a provable confession is not a helpful thing to have. Of course, it could have been that he thought he would get a better sentence after trial than from pleading guilty, but, although it happens, it's not the most common outcome. There is one thing he did get, though, a long delay between confession and sentence. Maybe that was worth it.
Those would be some of the downsides I was talking about. Most of the time, tariffs have a bunch of those and don't do very much on the three supposed benefits. Often, one or more of those benefits aren't actually benefits. For example, if Trump puts tariffs on TSMC, that will hurt TSMC, a little, but A) it will hurt the US a lot more just by existing, B) it will not much help any US competitor, C) it won't drive semiconductor manufacturing to the US in the time he has, and D) there is no good reason to want to hurt TSMC anyway, so the one intended thing it does do is also bad. This leaves only one possible benefit of the tariff, the government revenues collected from all the people who still need chips made by TSMC and buy them with the tariff in place. That revenue is not worth the pain inflicted on all parties, and nor do I think he really cares about that measly revenue when he can just keep borrowing as much money as he wants. However, he doesn't understand points A through D, so he still thinks it will work.
Other tariffs occasionally have different cost-to-benefit ratios. In general, blanket tariffs will have a lot more downsides than targeted ones, and ones passed after consideration will make more sense than ones instated or canceled based on how you're feeling today. Sometimes, tariffs can be a useful tool, but like a lot of tools, you need to know what situation they're useful in and using them in most other situations is more likely to break things.
Trump thinks tariffs are more powerful than they are. He sees them as triads of success because they hurt a foreign business, promote a domestic business, and earn money for the government. To give him his due, they do all of those things. However, they don't do all of those things equally, they don't last very long even if you keep them in place, and they come with some massive downsides which may outweigh all of the benefits if you use them on a whim. He uses them on a whim.
In this case, he seems to think that putting a tariff on imported chips will be enough to promote local production, and he would be wrong. The manufacturing can't be built anywhere near fast enough for that to be feasible. All he'll get is inflation on anything with a chip in it and anger and concern from Taiwan. There is no cheap way to make your country have a lot more semiconductor manufacturing capacity than it already does. As for loans, I don't know how well they would work. TSMC could already decide to build a fab in the US; they have or could get the cash, but they aren't choosing to for various other reasons. Your loan needs to have enough value to convince them to build the thing despite having another place they think would be more profitable to build it. That means you might have to give them a larger loan than a grant since it's not just about getting access to the capital. Basically the same problem, there is no cheap way to quickly make your country have a lot more semiconductor manufacturing capacity than it already does.
May I suggest you reread the comment? The "lot of things" statement was not a statement on the quality of those things. It was a statement on the quantity of them. In fact, if you dislike those things, the quantity of them would be a negative and you'd hope, in the absence of getting things you did like, to have a person who was not capable of doing a lot of bad things. Their broader point was comparing the quantity of things accomplished to the last time that Trump tried to accomplish things and making predictions on the number of suggestions he makes which will be implemented rather than ignored. This is a relevant prediction if you think he does wonderful new things or if you think the actions he takes are likely to lead to disaster, because it predicts how much improvement or destruction you're going to get.
I have frequently compared the productivity of dictators. In most cases, the ones that are capable of doing a lot of things are the most dangerous ones. It isn't a positive thing if the things are bad.
Since you're comparing a 2024 processor to a 2013 one, that's not much of a surprise. If, instead, we use the Mac Pro tower from 2019, the difference isn't so big. It's faster and uses less power, as you'd expect with a six-year difference, but they receive somewhat similar benchmarks, with the main difference being that the 2019 Xeons achieve them through lots of cores while the M4 has much nicer single-thread ratings.
Of course, that isn't relevant to their complaint, which wasn't about processor speed but upgradability.
It sounds like we agree about the important parts here, but to clarify those where my statement wasn't clear enough:
"Neo4j did not create their own license": They did. They stuck some legal terms together and said "this is the license". They didn't do it well, and they might have done it so not well that their license doesn't let them do what they intended, but they did make a license document.
"they did not ‘have the power’ to add terms while masquerading as AGPL. Note - they kept the AGPL name, FSF copyright, and preamble - that clearly states the AGPL has to be verbatim."
This is where it is unclear. For one thing, they didn't masquerade it as the AGPL. Before any text, they state what they think the license is:
The software ("Software") is developed and owned by Neo4j Sweden AB
(referred to in this notice as “Neo4j”) and is subject to the terms
of the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 3, with the Commons Clause as follows:
Are they allowed to do that? It is unclear, and the FSF don't want them to, and when the FSF told them not to, they complied. However, that is not the same as masquerading since the modification was stated up front. Neither is it clear whether they can be challenged by the FSF on the verbatim part, since they do include the AGPL verbatim, then tack their clause at the end. As I said in another comment, if I write an introduction to a book but do not modify the content of the original book, you wouldn't say I had edited it, so it isn't clear whether the FSF can or has chosen to exert control over anything else that appears.
In addition, these details only are relevant to a case, which has not been filed, where the FSF sues Neo4J over misuse of their trademark and/or violation of the license to their license. It does not answer what that potentially misused license means. Even if the FSF is correct about all of this, all it means is that they could make Neo4J change it, which they have done voluntarily. It wouldn't necessarily mean that you can apply other terms to the software. Whether you can apply those terms is a different issue, and the chance that maybe you can only exists because Neo4J did not stick their license together well and ended up with something contradictory.
A license does not restrict the actions of the copyright holder. If I license version 1 of my software under the AGPL, then license version 2 as my proprietary no rights allowed license, I am allowed to do this. If I include in my version code that you wrote, licensed under the AGPL, then I have a problem. If it's all code that I created or to which I have obtained copyright ownership, I am allowed to relicense as I wish. This is, has been, and will be central to all free software or open source licenses as long as copyright exists in its current form, and as all of those licenses draw all their authority from copyright, it is important to know this.
I have read both of them, and while both briefs focus on this, and while a lot of motions have talked about this, it is not very relevant to the actual case. Neo4J is absolutely not saying that they used the AGPL, but they interpret it differently so what they think is what it means Humpty Dumpty style. Neo4J added some terms to their license, and those terms are very clear what they mean. In your framing they're now the creators of the license with their extra terms and they can tell you what the intent is.
The legal question is not what the AGPL3 intends. The question is whether you can stick on some extra terms, tell people you have done so, and enforce the terms when part of the AGPL says you can't, when you do have the power to set the terms you want. Is your power to decide your license stronger or weaker than a contradictory term in a contract? This is why it's a complicated legal issue. If they had used the unmodified AGPL, the court case could have been ended in about half an hour (Neo4J trying to enforce terms not in the license, loses). If they had changed a few more lines in the case, it also would have ended in half an hour (PureThink tried to use terms that only apply to previous version's license, loses). It's only because Neo4J screwed up their license so badly that there's any question at all.
It's also "please ignore the fact that 3.5 is a descendent of 3.4, which was AGPL only, and whose licence unambiguously transmits all its conditions to descendent forks."
No, it doesn't. The writer of new code is allowed, if they control the copyright to the codebase, to relicense it. Anyone can fork the old version and use it under the terms of the AGPL, but new code can stop using that code, and the existing code it links to can be relicensed to work with that. That would only be prevented if Neo4J doesn't own all the code to the original version and didn't remove the parts they don't own. An open source license can't transmit its conditions to any code written by someone who once used it, especially when that person deliberately chooses to change it. This is also not what Suhy is arguing. Suhy is arguing that Neo4J's choice to refer to their license as, essentially, "AGPL plus this other stuff" means it can be reset to the AGPL with no other stuff. He has a point, because the license specifically says that you can reset it, but it is unclear, because their additions say you can't. If they hadn't done this, the fact that it used to be aGPL would not prevent them from making subsequent versions something else.
That is why all the open source bait and switch companies can get away with license switches. They own the copyright, usually through CLAs collecting it for all contributed code, and that means they can change the terms. I dislike these switches, so if there were some way to prevent it from happening, I'd like to try it. Hoping that a license will do it for you is going to fail because existing licenses don't and new licenses basically can't, but knowing that at least means we can focus on CLAs and the various mechanisms we can use to prevent it from happening elsewhere.
"From what I understand, the legal precedent would be that the court would consider the software creator's interpretation of what the open source license terms mean instead of the interpretation of the writer of the open source license. That is crazy - who could ever trust any open source license if the software creator who adopted it could interpret the meaning differently - even if the writer of open source license clearly explains the reasoning behind each term in the license?"
The reason it doesn't make sense is that there's a step missing. This is not Neo4J deciding that they want the AGPL to mean something different, so now it does. This is them wanting something different, so they added extra words. The extra words are not at all ambiguous about what they want, but what is less clear is whether they get to add them and whether someone else can remove them. The precedent that is currently applicable says that you can add extra terms when you choose the license to use. Anyone considering doing the same should write their own license, taking whatever pieces they want, but not using the same names. If you do that, you don't end up in this legal morass in the first place, since that has always been legal.
They donated code to that, but I see no evidence that it was this code, and it seems quite unlikely that it was because Windows already has an NTFS driver. The Partition Manager software that this appears to be part of is a distinct product. If this had been, for example, Paragon's NTFS for Mac OS software, then I'd be more worried that a similar bug could affect Linux, although even then the most sensitive code would likely be OS-specific.
How is pointing out a possible problem equivalent to saying it's too difficult so we should give up? What they suggested was a reason that it might not be worth doing so you would choose not to even though you could, same as mine, not a reason why you could never do it.
That said, I don't think theirs is a very good reason. Undersea cables do get tampered with, but I don't see a reason why many countries would want to cut the ones going to New Zealand. New Zealand isn't in a war zone, nor do its neighbors plan on invading it as far as I know (I'm watching you, Australia). Hotspots for intentional cable cuts are the Baltic, around Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the red sea, all of which are more sensitive than the waters around New Zealand. Nor would damage to those cables cause too many problems for the average New Zealander. Anything on those servers intended for the local market would still be available to people in New Zealand. The people would have reduced or no access would be people in other countries that wanted to run their workloads on those servers. I still think latency will be a problem, but I wouldn't worry much about someone trying to break those cables.
This is valid, the typical trusting trust problem. However, I think the more concerning one is the Underhanded C problem. There is a lot of code that nobody is reading, and there's code that people aren't successfully reading. Not all vulnerabilities are obvious, whether that hidden-ness is deliberate or accidental. If you have the ability to read code, you almost certainly know this from experience, because we've all written bugs that should be simple to fix but you can't see the problem for the life of you.
Just because they don't build it doesn't mean there's a conspiracy not to let the market decide. If they thought people would buy a lot of those, they'd make them. They probably aren't because they don't think people will want them, and if that's what they are thinking, I understand why.
Why would someone want that? Other than being easy to hold, is there any advantage at all? What interfaces are going to adapt well to a landscape portion and a portrait one, but not a full rectangle? You could spin it around and put the keyboard on the landscape section and a message list on the portrait one, and then you'd have more room for both, or you could have two apps open a la Surface Duo, but otherwise, it seems gimmicky and not very easy to convince people to buy for the increased price that any hinged, multi-screen device tends to cost.
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