Copyright is misnamed. It's not a right granted to an individual, it's a restriction placed on everyone else. It may make sense to restrict 5,999,999,999 people for the benefit of one person for a limited time. But, using your stellar logic, why force anyone to do something they don't want to do? The author chose to create something, everyone else is being forced. No need to force anyone, right?

False dichotomy: Allowing a child to play with a gadget does not require parental abandonment any more than allowing them to play with a stuffed animal does. Any inconsistency or deviation between my two posts was only possible with the application of creative editing which is why I re-quoted the full context. I'm sorry if the real world doesn't match up with your sound-bite sized, pseudo-elite notions of "good" parental practices.

Of course, unless you're just a troll, then shame on me for biting.

At what point did I advocate forgetting about them for hours on end?

Was it here:

Holy crap! It looks like I said the exact opposite.

Again with the context:

Strange, it's almost as if you keep taking things out of context on purpose. Either that or you're saying only a bad parent stays with their child, keeps them safe and encourages them to try many activities? Hmm... Strange either way.

Some day I hope you become aware of the fact that children are, at all ages, actually human beings who need to learn both through exploration as well as guidance and not be placed in a cage with "approved content." But, hey, worst case, you'll only be messing up your own kids so it's not really a problem for me if you don't.

Just like every other poster on /. thinks that they are better parents than everyone else.

See, the thing is, you can't just power off a baby when the park closes or it's raining or snowing outside. Yes, you shouldn't have your child fixate on blinky things for hours on end. You know what else you don't do? Plop a six month old child in snow bank for 8 hours.

You allow them to explore, see what they want to see, play with what they want to play with (with the exception of knives and guns) and stick with them to make sure they're safe and have someone to turn to when *they* want social time. After a little time with activity X you encourage them to move on to something else.

Of course, you would be aware of all this if you were an actual parent instead of a self-appointed child development expert.

As to the original post: It doesn't matter. Leave it on the lock screen and let her play with the unlock widget.. and make sure it's clean because it'll end up in her mouth anyway (and tablets are pretty nasty). Take it away after a few minutes and don't give it back until the next day. There'll be crying involved but it's okay: you're the boss.

Here's a question for you: Name one security technique that doesn't rely on obscurity in some form. Everything I can think that has actually implemented depends on large numeric search spaces, large physical search spaces (brass keys for example), a one time pad (needs to be hidden), steganography, etc. Security and obscurity go hand-in-hand. It is simply unfortunate that obscurity got a bad name along the way for some reason.

But, ultimately, I'm advocating not throwing away security just because it isn't perfect. You may not need the baby, but the bathwater might still be useful.

Isn't what you just said proof that patents don't work? Who other than the entrenched have the resources to identify the 2-100 arbitrary patents that apply to any given product? How is this environment supposed to move innovation forward when it is set up in favor of those who are already sitting in the innovation-limiting "cash cow" stage of their respective businesses?

I dunno.. Maybe people who understand the concepts of first to market, trade secrets, quality of implementation and brand value and don't just hide behind naive assumptions about the need for legal protection of basic ideas?

Nice troll but you can't really do that without some level of fear if you can't afford a patent attorney. In this environment every Open Source / PD developer is sitting on a huge legal risk even if they were first to develop and are going to be backed by no one except maybe the EFF if the trolls come knocking.

Are the odds great that you'll be sued into oblivion? Not necessarily. Is it unreasonable that someone who is altruistically donating their time to the greater good should fear reprisals from greedy IP barons sitting on piles of obvious patents? Yes, absolutely.

The system is broken. You don't like it? Maybe you should contribute something yourself instead of posting bullshit on /.

That is not an excuse not to encrypt. Encrypting data and putting the key in a file called encryption.key would be sufficient to stop casual perusal of the data. Each additional level of obscurity beyond that raises the time and knowledge required to locate, understand and decrypt the data. Most people are out for a quick win and are not interested in reverse engineering your architecture.

Conversely, if someone knows what they want, where it is and what is necessary to get it then you've got a problem that goes week beyond key management.

2,437,163 died in 2009 alone simply because they were alive.

Heart disease: 599,413
Cancer: 567,628
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
Alzheimer's disease: 79,003
Diabetes: 68,705
Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 36,909

Shit, it almost seems like we should focus on physical and mental health care instead of dumping time, energy and money into everyone's pet "crisis" du jour.

What about the people who worked tirelessly for RIM, Nokia, Diamond, Pets.com, Silicon Graphics (the real version), the HP calculator team, Commodore / Amiga, SEGA and Atari (again, the real version)? Who was or is looking out for them? Absolutely no one. At least if a founder gets bought out some jobs will transfer, some will move on to the next start-up with the same guy and the rest simply share the same fate as countless people who have poured their souls into ventures of many sizes and then have been left with nothing but a final paycheck.

One of many reasons that older employees don't constantly invest 18 hours a day for an 8 hour paycheck is because they have seen the result of not being an equity holder of the effort when the payday comes. If you're working a job as a wage earner and you think the 2 year "sprint" is going to pay off -- think again.

If you don't want to sell your baby.. Don't.

At least they didn't die of pertussis. Unless that's your goal -- eliminate autism by letting more children die? Do you hate autistic children only, or all children?

I am 100% certain the vaccines are safer than the diseases they prevent. That's all that is required of them.

I don't know. Maybe because vaccines aren't medicines? Is your assertion even true? Who knows.. Go ask a scientist. It's strange that you seem to think your ignorance is a valid argument against science. What was that meme?... "Fucking magnets, how do they work?"

No. Do you really think their goal is to spread autism?

What you've said is true but not for the snarky reasons you think it is. As a development manager it is my job to make sure the developers can create the best software possible. If that means I need to guide them toward an incremental approach because of time constraints or I need to help them find the best solution for a bad situation so be it. If I fail to do this and they implement something they are not proud of then it is my fault, not theirs.

Also, there really are two groups: programmers that are great and programmers that suck. The great programmers group only has one member: you, right now. The group that sucks is everyone else and you from every point in the past. Thinking in this way will help a developer admit mistakes and will also encourage thinking in terms of "what would my future self think of this."

No snark necessary.

I'm doing this right now. I left a high paying job because I was more than a little tired of it and I'd knew I'd never be able to stop spending my spare time on "putting in the extra effort" instead of job seeking. At this point, I'm just looking for something interesting in an new location -- pretty open ended job search criteria. Unfortunately, I'm currently getting more recruiter calls than actual interested party call backs but I'm confident my choice to force myself to move on will pay dividends in the long run.

Should not be tolerated or not be given consideration as though it were an informed position?

I ask because one of those statements can and will eventually be enforced with guns. The other is simply the responsibility of the other participants of the discussion and no one else.

I think the GP is close, but in some cases may slightly off. E.g., the speech is often that of the user of the software, not the author of the software. Imagine a word processor with a working grammar auto-correct feature. The auto-corrected text is not the text entered by the user but surely it's not the speech of the person who wrote the word processor. His speech is the software itself. Instead, the resulting document seems clearly to be the speech of the user.

To sue for libel the content must have been published somewhere and therefore there must be a publisher involved, even if it's just Joe from Joe's Blog fame. If I write a cron job to execute "fortune > index.html" every hour I am still the publisher of that content and am taking on risk of bad ju-ju occurring if the author of fortune slipped in something that could be considered libelous.

Of course this seems to break down for the purposes of the actual article. Using the above Google would be the publisher and the author would be the person actually providing the search query and interacting with the system. That seems a bit off to me. I suppose the trickiness of it all is why there's a debate in the first place.

Is the difficulty in neatly placing generated content into a predefined constitutional cubby hole a sufficient reason to encroach on the right of free speech? It should not be a matter of asking why generated content should be protected, rather, there needs to be a compelling reason why it should not be. Because once that right is gone we're not getting it back.