Ha, interesting, troll and funny. I'd have modded you insightful. I'll probably have to stay off /. for a few days to avoid the responses I'm going to get but what the heck.

I've started using slackware at home for hobby stuff, slackware at work where simple is enough and OpenBSD where I need security. I have a few Debian 7 boxes around still but they are all due to be phased out and replaced by OpenBSD. I love slackware and will continue to use it as long as I can, it always was closer to BSD than a lot of other distros so that helps. But for anything serious I'm *BSD all the way. And you know what? I wish I'd done it years ago, I find that I really do prefer Unix over Linux.

So long Debian, I grew up on you while my son grew up on Toy Story but it's time for both of us to move on.

It's in TFS...

You can extrapolate whatever you want from the article and argue that's where this is all heading, we probably agree on a number of points. But you quoted the EU rep out of context to support your point. You don't have to do that, you have a point to make and can do so without willfully ignoring the content of the article.

AC already beat me too it but to add - it's right there in the summary:

Nowhere in her quote is their a suggestion that they are doing this out of some need to assuage western guilt as your comment implies.

IMO this isn't really as newsworthy as people are making it out to be. While I don't agree with them European countries have had hate speech laws on their books since the end of WW II. If some American companies want to pander to these laws in order to grow their market or avoid some other regulatory oversight by being a "team player" than it's their prerogative.

I believe it will only make them look bad in the long run as they won't have the resources to follow through and they will invariably make mistakes that will upset people. But again, I don't own those companies (and try to avoid using their products) so it's up to them, they certainly don't care what I think!

No, no, no. It's obvious this is a victory for vi users everywhere, er, in Europe!

Meep!

Happy Towel Day!

http://www.towelday.org/

My understanding is that they didn't even get a DMCA notice from Fox. Content ID is to blame IIUC. I haven't been able to find anything definite but this quote seems to suggest that and I've seen other comments about this story that seem to back that up...

Lyon referring to Jeff Lyon, the CTO of Fight for the Future.

Is anyone really sure that Fox issued a notice and that this isn't just another example of Content ID failing miserably?

Dude, that's beautiful!

Well, again Perl, I read as much of Larry Wall''s writing as I could over the years. The three virtues of programming he espouses are hubris, laziness and impatience.

I think this one falls under the laziness category. Don't spend time solving problems others have already solved. Modern Perl and CPAN really emphasize too. And of course it translates well to other languages and even everyday things that may not even be related to programming.

On the other hand I believe this oversimplifies things a bit. If a library is getting long in the tooth or has some functionality that is still relevant but a lot of legacy baggage that is obsolete then a rewrite is not necessarily a bad thing. Case in point - OpenSSL -> (LibreSSL | Boring SSL)

This is how I learned a lot about Perl, C, C++ and to a much lesser extent JavaScript. I wrote (crappy) web frameworks in Perl, front ends for MySQL in C and even tried reinventing concepts from the STL in C++. Not one of my pet projects ended up in production systems for very long, if ever. I simply did them to scratch an itch and help myself understand the underlying principles. My understanding of Perl and PHP frameworks improved immensely and I learned it wasn't nearly as hard as I thought to get under the hood and learn when something wasn't behaving the way I expected it too. Implementing STL dupes help me actually be able to parse Bjarne Stroustrup's books on C++ and in general gave me a much deeper understanding of programming in various languages. Was I able to make better tools than a team of experts working on something together for years? Hell no! Just improved my ability to understand and use their work.

It's like learning assembly to understand how computers work, you're probably not going to do much of it in the real world but it will help you more than you think when you develop that level of understanding.

This is explicitly incorrect. You cannot and will never get permission.

The DMCA and other laws need to enable security testing by security professionals if it's not causing harm (as opposed to negligence). I do recall there are already laws on the books for this.