Orthodox Christianity also forbids things like money lending for a profit (usury), most christians seem to have forgotten about this particular bit of sin though. Modern Christianity is so far away from what Christ actually intended he must be whirling in his grave even if he still has the cross attached.

I don't believe in endless copyright either but I do believe that in the initial period (say 10 or 20 years) that copyright should be enforceable. The problem I have is with the great many privileged young folk, still living off the back of mum and dad while they are at university advocating the abolition of copyright law just so they can watch some crappy film without paying.

Usually when people carp on about abolishing copyright it is simply because all they do is consume digital content without actually creating any of their own. This makes them net gainers if they never had to pay anything for that which they create.

So you actively fought in a war to support the capitalist way of life (Desert Storm was a war to ensure Saddam did not gain possession of Kuwaiti oil, not about democracy as Kuwait was very far from a democracy to begin with), you are obviously proud of your child doing the same (Afghanistan is also about securing oil supplies) but neglect to understand that a key part of capitalism is that it also applies to digital works as well as physical goods?

Most of the US GDP now comes from the creation of copyrightable works rather than by physical production, without international consensus on copyright the US would be even more bankrupt than it already is as exporting copyrighted digital works is one of the few things that helps the countries balance of payments. Copyright, is a necessary part of capitalism. Without it, the system will fail. This was clearly understood by economists pretty much as soon as the printing press was invented.

Nothing has changed with the advent of the digital world in this regard yet as we still lack the ability to endlessly copy food and shelter which are the greatest human needs. In order to encourage people to enter the creative arts they need to be able to exchange their services for money in order to buy those essentials.

People always spout stuff like that until they have a family to feed. Once you have no other source of income other than that which you earn by creating stuff you look at the world very differently. In my part of the world you need to earn a very good wage in order to afford enough space for a family with 2 kids, that only comes from earning roughly twice what most people earn or by having a mummy and daddy with lots of cash.

Since I come from a single parent family and my mother has sod all I have to earn every penny I ever expect to need in life for myself. That includes any money to send my kids to college, and hopefully one day for them to be as privileged as you sound.

Your right in that money doesn't buy happiness, but if you have ever tried to live and bring up kids without any and with the bailiffs constantly knocking at your door you realise pretty quick that it can certainly stave off misery.

The Japanese mastered that years ago, you do not get much more efficient cooking than eating it raw :)

There is no "your" data or "there" data. There is only dropbox data. It seems at the point you upload a file they check it to see if they already have a copy and of they do they just add a pointer to the existing file rather than store a fresh copy.

By the sounds of it they must actually do a direct file compare rather than use a hash. They probably use some kind of hash to narrow down the options of stuff to compare it with but in the fallback case of a hash collision, and both files being exactly the same size they must have to do an exact comparison. That probably does not happen very often though and it sounds like this is process is only done once at the point a file is stored.

You obviously didn't bother to read the article.

The truth is that they always scan every single file uploaded to make sure they do not already have a copy of that file stored on their network. If they do, they throw your copy in the bin and just add an extra link to that stored copy in your account. That keeps their data usage lower as it means they never store duplicate copies of the same file, even if they are uploaded by completely different people.

So there is no crawling involved, this was done at the point of upload. They found that the same file had already been uploaded by someone else, shared, and that user got the shared copy of that file DMCA'd. Once a file has been DMCA'd in their system it seems it is blocked from being shared so only people uploaded that file also get to download it.

This whole issue can be summarized as:

1) User wants to ignore copyright law and share something they have no legal right to via a public service
2) Public service being used has no idea how many people will want to access the shared resource but they do know it is copyrighted as they auto match everything uploaded so they can avoid keeping to separate copies of identical files and save storage space and had a DMCA take down request for that same file previously.
3) Public service errs on the side of not getting their arse sued off by the various content owner conglomerates legal attack dogs and refuses to allow the file to be shared even though the person who uploaded it can still see it.

All in all seems pretty reasonable. Until copyright law is changed (like that is ever going to happen) dropbox have to follow it to the letter. I suppose they could have avoided the whole thing by storing more data and then not doing the duplicate file scan thing but even that is no guarantee it would prevent them from being sued to oblivion.

The only safe option for them that would also keep things private would be to use encryption keys that were only kept in the client. That way if you needed to share a particular folder you selected to store that under a different encryption key, and gave that key to other person / people who needed to access it.

The big problem with this is that it then becomes more awkward to provide web access to the files. People are comfortable remembering a username and password, they are not so comfortable remembering a bunch of encryption keys. If you store the encryption keys on a server at your end anywhere then you can access the files so you therefore get the legal responsibility to make sure your system is not being used to flout copyright law. The only legal way to run this sort of service and not be liable for it's misuse is to design it in such a way that you cannot see what is being stored at all.

You would be entirely right were it not for one incredibly important detail: His entire business is based around people working for him for free on an open source product that could be forked. If you are in that position you have to be slightly more concious of how the people you represent feel than if you are actually paying them. Mozilla is basically a charity, not a commercial corporation in the normal profit making, shareholder's holding the real power sense so it is bound by different rules even if it might actually have corporate legal status.

Exactly. I get disappointed if I do not get at least one cheating accusation per few hours online play, it means I am having a bad day.

The problem is just the way I play FPS games where I generally charge round the map, taking slightly obscure routes and firing in very short bursts without reloading until I need to (I roughly count the number of shots I fire in my head). This only works because I generally have pretty quick reactions and am good at recognising where enemies are most likely to come from based on sounds, my own team spawn points, and other clues. I generally sidestep around alot too, especially if I hear gunshots close by.

I also take long range pot shots at people where if I see someone on the horizon they get a few rounds fired at them, then I immediately withdraw behind cover and look for a flanking route to that position (usually their team will be close by even if my pot shot killed them). All it takes is a few of those pot shots to actually get a kill halfway across the map and people cry hacker left right and centre.

On top of all this I play as nohax so I get accused a hell of a lot, but I have used this name online for about 10 years now so don't want to change it.

Interesting idea. I used to be in a clan with a player (here's looking at you "reporter") who would literally fire off hundreds of cheat reports (I have submitted 2 or 3 in my life). Every time he lost a match badly he would end up reporting 2 or 3 players on the other team, and since he was a pathetic camper this happened a lot. The things is I reckon Valve must have just added him to some sort of ignore list or at least weighted his accusations to not mean anything based on the number he submitted. I tried talking to him about this but he really did believe that these players were cheating even though I could kill them just as much as they killed me (he probably thought I was a cheat too).

That is the only way this would work though, if you also included the persons rep as a factor in any up and down votes somehow and included some sort of meta system like slashdot use but I have no idea how this would work in terms of games where you have a ton of angst ridden angry teens playing.

In my experience having a can-do attitude and a willingness to learn can set you apart in IT. I recently got a job where I think the best thing I did was openly ask the technical lead to mentor me and do my best to convince them that although I may not know much, I am very capable of learning quickly.

There are too many people in our field who are possessed with an obscene level of arrogance and complete lack of social skills. Unlearning those habits is far harder than teaching someone who is bright and passionate how to program, especially if they already have some basic development experience in a language such as Java (btw, I hate Java so I am not a fan but still see lots of value in learning it)

Then you have people who seem to have an in built hatred of change, see the AC post below where some carps on about how awful Agile-Scrum is. This smarts of someone who can't function unless they are given a spec to work from that dictates everything or fellow technical type to explain the problem rather than being able to figure out the business need by actually talking to the non-technical people who will have to use the system. Coming from a support background can be a big advantage as it means you should be used to dealing with non-techies.

Often the people I see who left university with CS degrees and want to be developers have grown so used to being ahead of the curve as the rest of class were way behind them in terms of technical ability. Then they join the wonderful world of work and suddenly find that the people around them are serious professionals who have often spent years honing their craft. They may well also find that at least some of the people on their team expected to mentor them have not academic background in CS and instead chose to study subjects like pure maths that are actually a ton harder than CS.

Nope, in my book being able and willing to learn, adapt and and improve yourself often is the things that sets you apart if you really do examine your own actions from that perspective constantly and also learn to love constructive criticism from anyone and everyone as well.

Nah, the staff are just being redeployed as moving targets :)

Resume's tell you nothing about fit. They tell you about experience, and give you a starting point but many people confound expectations when it comes to how they work as part of a team.

I was referring more to C++ really and the way OO stuff has been bolted on top of an existing language, but your right I haven't used it in years. I moved from C to PHP and was very comfortably straight away due to the familiarity with many of the functions.

With regard to the magic everything most have that has gone from PHP nowadys. The only thing left is it being untyped and that is what Hack is designed to change.

Maybe you have reading problems, but I never said PHP was the only language anybody ever wrote anything worthwhile in. I said it was the most widely used, that does not mean nobody uses anything else.

Every developer I know bitches about the tools we use, that doesn't mean we don't think they are useful.

People always moan about how horrible PHP is, and I always assume that the people moaning are trying to learn the language without having a basis in C because they have come straight from Ruby or some other perfectly designed load of academic twaddle nobody uses.

The reality is that PHP is like C, an amazingly flexible and well used tool. Yes, it has tons of quirks due to its slow evolution where they maintain backwards compatibility, but that is it's strength in the real world since nobody wants to rewrite their entire system just to use a new version of a language.

There are tons of things better than PHP, but PHP is more well used than all of them because the purist developers who like to create perfect systems generally do not create much. The people who do are the armchair warriors who throw together something like Facebook then realise they have created a horrible puddle of code with a ton of technical debt that just happens to be a popular product that actually makes money. The purists have a habit of getting bogged down in producing wonderful code that takes ages, never makes any money and so get consigned to the scrap heap when the company folds.

What they have done is layer a statically typed language on top of PHP so that they can still run their existing PHP code as they slowly convert it to a typed language. Maybe their end game is to move away from PHP, but maybe they will stay with Hack to they can carry on recruiting PHP developers who then have an easy transition. This is another reason why PHP is so popular with companies: commercially experienced PHP developers are much easier to find than commercially experienced Ruby developers, or even Python.