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Comment Re:Commerce as speech (Score 1) 172

Yep, there are a few transformative angles you can take.

First thing to note, is that it is unlikely that Richard Prince would sue. I guess that for the price tag, each print is unique. Why would he print twice the same thing when it takes him all of 10 minutes to find a decent image, screenshot it, print it and sign it (apparently for the Instagram copies, his comment is the signature, he doesn't even bother to sign) ? There is no loss of sales for him, and he's able to find suckers for his "unique" prints. Why would he risk losing a case ?

But in the hypothetical case... the courts say that an use is transformative (Firefox's spell checker doesn't like that word...) when it is "altering the original with new expression, meaning, or message".

About the expression, given that Suicide Girls have the original image, they could "reinterpret" the print by enhancing it with the original quality instead of the screenshot quality, and argue how it's adding depth, or adding contrast with the surrounding low-res text or whatever.

Or if it is about the context changing its meaning, at first it was an Instagram post, then it was a part of an art exhibition, then it is a re-appropriation for a charity. Hence I'm arguing that Mark Meyer's comment on how "While Prince’s use of Mooney’s photos adds new and significant context, Mooney is simply selling copies of Prince’s work with no additional contextual commentary" is wrong. In the end, the "context" is only about your capacity to convince that, really, "it isn't what it looks like". And Richard Prince is much more seasoned at that game than Mooney ever will.

About the message, I was thinking along the same line as you did. Something like, this is the actual message (the $90,000 / $90 poster), and the sold prints are only parts of the overall artwork, as so many parts of the message. With both Prince and Mooney, it's the same relation between the individual print and the "meaningful context" (art exhibition / re-appropriation for a charity).

However, I agree with Mark Meyer on that point, the "we added the "suicide girl true art" message" is probably not going to cut it.

Comment My experience with IPv6 (Score 2) 390

I can do IPv6 from my ISP since last November. My issues so far have been:

  • The ISP ADSL router hasn't been extensively tested for IPv6. Its caching DNS server tends to die after approximately 10 days, and the IPv6 connection itself is at times unavailable (probably not an up-link issue as rebooting the ADSL router fixes the issue. Temporarily.)
  • Some web sites have registered a DNS entry for IPv6, but don't have a properly configured IPv6 HTTP server. I could ask the DNS resolver to try IPv4 first, but then when would I actually be using IPv6 ?
  • I can't even experience the non-NAT'ed network, as I don't have IPv6 access from the work place.

On the other hand, IPv6 was doing fine 12 years ago, on the IPv6 backbone from the university.

Comment Re:Tabs vs Spaces (Score 2, Insightful) 428

I guess that there are multiple reasons.

The most common one is ignorance: most people don't know how tabs are supposed to be used as indentation and indentation ONLY, and how to set up an editor appropriately (and the shell, by the way) (see the other responses to your comment for proof).

The second is lazyness / non-confrontational behaviour: If you settle on tabs, you will have to educate all users about the correct usage, and have to bear with people that just insist on using tabs differently (see point 1). If you settle on space usage, that's about it.

The third reason is that some editors are stupid, because the implementation doesn't know that tabs are supposed to be used as indentation and indentation ONLY, and will (for example) insist on aligning multi-line arguments to a function just after the parenthesis using a liberal amount of tabs.

And then there are some language requirements that like to mess things up, like Makefile requiring tabs and other scripting languages pursuing a vendetta against tabs (like Python).

That being said, I will gladly educate people about tab usage, their ignorance is no excuse for using inferior solutions.

Submission + - Dice declares bankruptcy, sells Slashdot to Reddit (reddit.com)

chadenright writes: In a surprise move on 1 April, reddit Inc declared that Dice.com would going out of business and reddit Inc would acquire their asset, Slashdot.org. "Free tinfoil hats were passed out at the meeting," stated an anonymous source.

Comment Re:Reminds of of something at a past job (Score 1) 765

hungHi = (word & 0xFFFF0000) >> 16;

FYI, this is pretty bad. It does exactly the same as:
hungHi = word >> 16;
It is not safe if for some reason word is signed (compiler bug on an exotic platform or some programmer resolving some signed/unsigned warning by doing the wrong thing):
((unsigned)0x80000000) >> 16 = 0x00008000
((signed)0x80000000) >> 16 = 0xFFFF8000

Instead, you should use:
hungHi = (word >> 16) & 0xFFFF;

Comment Let's see... (Score 2) 177

Functional

Preferred to dysfunctional, checked.

Imperative

Preferred to submissive, checked.

Logic

Preferred to illogic, checked.

Object-Oriented

Mmh, Notion-Oriented seems appealing, I'm torn on this one.

Other (List in comments)

If you want lists (and parenthesis) you want LISP and no other, period.

Whichever is right for the job

Preferred to whatever is wrong for the job, checked.

No preference

I prefer to have preferences.

Uh.. what did my old graphing calculator use?

BASIC-like says wikipedia, but I wouldn't want to use that for something serious.

Comment Crystal ball ? (Score 2) 214

can tell fads from technologies that actually endure

And are therefore defined in hindsight.

Critical thinking, not buying anything some software vendor is willing to sell you, is one thing, and betting on the right horse every time is quite another.
At some point, you can't miss the latter by being conservative and only adopting "new" technologies when they're already mature (now, if you had some sort of almanac...). Also to note, "better" does not always mean "successful".

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