US Software patents are pathological because the only novel part of most interesting software is the mathematics. So the only things that are patentable are dumb and obvious systems built on top of the actual contribution. Crypto is the epitome of this pattern because all of the Turing-award-level mathematics was not patentable but "that meth but with blockchain" or "that math but with more bytes" is patentable. It's dumb and the opposite of innovation.
Dijkstra's algorithm is another good example of the main innovation never being patented but a bunch of obvious stuff built on top of it receiving patent protection.
We did something similar for a browser-based RPG game 15ish years ago.
Shadow banning is way more effective. IP bans don't work because even tech illiterate users can figure out what's going on and get a proxy working.
We ended up going with normal account-level banning after experimenting with IP-based shadow banning. The game was popular with kids, who would tell their siblings/school friends about it. So lots of IPs were associated, and at the time teasing apart different traffic streams from the same IP was sci-fi level stuff.
But, we did learn that normal banning was way less effective. If it weren't for the collateral damage, we would've kept shadow banning with IP account association.
Liars who make money on their lies are fraudsters, and fraud needs to have criminal repercussions
Yes, LOTS of people lie to make money. Yes, all those people are doing something wrong. And yes, that wrong thing is bad enough for society that we should punish it.
"Everything" is not fraud. Telling lies to make money is the definition of fraud. If you think that describes "everything" that happens in the economy... Well, stop telling lies.
And yes, lots of fraud is impossible to prove because the actors know the law. Patent trolling comes to mind.
And yes, lots of powerful people commit fraud throughout their career in impunity. Fraud is normal.
However, the normalcy of fraud and of getting away with deviancy does not make fraud acceptable.
I'm routinely astounded by how surprised people are to learn that telling lies to make money is illegal.
Tech in particular needs to do something about the fact fraud has reached meme status in our industry ('fake it till you make it').
I don't think people are surprised that it is fraud, just that there isn't a better way to prosecute it. If ExxonMobil's board hired a hitman to kill a competitor's CEO, I think people would hope that the response is to prosecute the board for murder and not merely for fraudulently claiming their company is valuable when they were actually relying on destabilizing their competitor. No one's defending the fraud, it just doesn't seem like the most important problem here.
The United States at the time of the drafting of the Constitution restricted the vote to white male property owners. Even after the constitution, some states restricted voting to white male property owners (about 6% of the population). Even in colonial times, enfranchised citizens were typically at least literate and often well-educated.
> Even as recently as 1945, the median American only had a 10th grade education.
Again, high school diplomas were more common among the enfranchised population.
> But there's no reasonable definition of the term, whereby you can honestly make a case that the America of 1789 was somehow more educated than the the America of 2019.
I would be completely unsurprised if voters in 1789 -- white male property owners -- were far more likely to have studied the enlightenment philosophers.
Imagine a very large mostly volunteer-run event that only runs once a year or so and where some fraction of the volunteers are running the event for the first time.
At the end of the day all the important equipment gets packed up, shipped somewhere, and unpacked.
But sometimes -- rarely, but sometimes -- some really important piece of equipment gets left behind at the event site or unpacked incorrectly at its new location.
I just described marathons, carnivals, and... voting.
In Germany, we also have paper based voting and yet, we do not have the issue that ballot boxes disappear. Everything and I mean literally everything is accounted for and if the numbers do not match up (e.g. less boxes of ballot boxes than before, or n(valid votes)+n(invalid votes)!=n(total votes) there is an immediate recount. No one leaves until shit is done, and if it gets too late everything is packed up, sealed and boxes counted.
The horror stories of the US are a failure of their system, not of paper voting.
Nobody denies property rights to CF and Voxility. At the same time, both companies went into the contract with the site in question. Did said site violate the contract? From my reading of the situation, no. "Contract obligations for me but not for thee?"
And to be clear: I do think that companies have capacity to terminate contracts, however, there either should be clear violation of ToS, or court's decision behind that. Neither seem to have had happened in this case.
I'm not aware of any consumer-accessible supplier who provides ToS that require abuse. In particular, CS doesn't:
"we may at our sole discretion terminate your user account or suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all. We also reserve the right to modify or discontinue the Service at any time (including, without limitation, by limiting or discontinuing certain features of the Service) without notice to you. We will have no liability whatsoever on account of any change to the Service or any suspension or termination of your access to or use of the Service. You may terminate your account at any time through the Service’s account dashboard."
And there was certainly meeting of the minds on this term. CF has booted sites in the past due to political backlash. Those boots were high-profile and well-covered in the news. And even without those high-profile boots, any reasonable person will expect someone using CF and running a site like 8chan to know what CF's terms say about terms for continuing service with any/no reason.
If you want your site to stay up even in the event of one of your customers committing a mass murder while your other customers cheer him on, then don't use CF.
It's true that finding another provider might be hard unless you have $$$ because the market for that product is really small -- not even 8chan's original founder is in that target market.
Oh well. I want $0.001 diapers for my kid and a lower grocery bill. The market doesn't provide those either. But if universal access to cheap diapers and high-quality food aren't fundamental human rights, I don't see why cheap anything-goes top-of-the-line DDoS protection services should be.
I thought it was ironic, because it starts out almost like a children's story and is very approachable. I'd rather read this than a textbook, that's for sure.
I much prefer the Perl way for writing short disposable stuff and much the Python way if any other person (including me in more than 1-2 weeks) is going to use/modify/read the code.
The gap between perl and python seems cleaner than the gap between python and anything-statically-typed, at least.
I guess I don't understand the need for this contract in the first place.
Is it normal in the private sector for companies to spend $1B/yr on cloud services? I feel like at that price point you're better off building out your own infra for most stuff, and using the cloud only for the remaining $10M - $100M fraction where you really do need dynamic scaling.
I was there. No it wasn't.
E.g., here's a slashdot article from 1999 with a bunch of comments complaining about it: https://slashdot.org/story/99/10/12/1826242/amazoncom-receiv.... And Japan rejected the patent as obvious in 2001.
US Software patents are pathological because the only novel part of most interesting software is the mathematics. So the only things that are patentable are dumb and obvious systems built on top of the actual contribution. Crypto is the epitome of this pattern because all of the Turing-award-level mathematics was not patentable but "that meth but with blockchain" or "that math but with more bytes" is patentable. It's dumb and the opposite of innovation.
Dijkstra's algorithm is another good example of the main innovation never being patented but a bunch of obvious stuff built on top of it receiving patent protection.