Upon browsing a few of these threads tonight, I've realized there is no worse reading than a bunch of tech enthusiasts armchairing about geopolitics. I'm out!
But JSON doesn't support comments which are pretty nice in a config file. You can do the ugly comment as property stuff, or strip them out, but you're getting away from the One True Format.
Consider Sendmail as a cautionary tale. One more than one occasion I have seen a busy sysadmin manually edit a .cf file and forget to backport the edit to the .mc file. The next time someone regenerates the .cf from the .mc you have a vanishing edit.
Yes, the sysadmin was clearly at fault. No, this is not a deal breaker, as seen by the longevity of Sendmail. But a config file that gets pushed through a preprocessor has a more complicated life cycle than a "static" equivalent.
If your organization has comprehensively embraced ansible/chef/puppet/etc this may be a non-issue, because all of your configs might be generated. Just food for thought.
> Yes, the sysadmin was clearly at fault. No, this is not a deal breaker, as seen by the longevity of Sendmail. But a config file that gets pushed through a preprocessor has a more complicated life cycle than a "static" equivalent.
Er, only if the application doesn't run the preprocessor itself.
One of the best, if not the best part of Uber is the payment. No tipping, no haggling, and no getting screwed, whether you are the driver of passenger. Don't need to worry about getting stiffed because it's already paid for.
Maybe with UberPool(sharing rides with other people on the same route) they'll have more access ? and if you combine that with Uber's SUV service, which enables sharing rides between up to 6 people, you'll get to something more accessible to poor people.
Uber drivers aren't invisible. It wouldn't take much effort to use the app to flag one down, note the license plate, and give them a nice little talking to. I doubt many part-timers would stick with it if they thought there was a chance for trouble.
If you're ever in Mountain View and walk by the Google campus around 4-4:30p, you can witness the vast network of Google buses picking up their colonist cargo ready for dispersal throughout the Bay Area. It's not just one or two buses, the road is literally backed up with them, each with a little LCD display to let you know what town or neighborhood they're going to. It really is a sight to behold. I can understand why locals view them as an invading army.
If you're ever near Sindelfingen (Germany), take a look at the buses at shift changes.
More than twenty bus companies are shuttling workers to and from the factory.
And it's no big deal. Of course you curse them when you happen to be in traffic right behind several of those, but they evoke no hatred in the populace, but even some kind of pride.
But, of course, there's not much jealousy involved when it comes to Daimler. Everyone knows someone working there. And the workers there don't generally carry the stigma of being filthy rich.
Google is more elite, I guess.
But the problem is certainly not the buses or the traffic per se.
> I can understand why locals view them as an invading army.
I can't. The comparisons to colonialism are laughable, at best. Tech employees are predominantly Americans who chose to live in Silicon Valley. So apparently moving within your own country and establishing a lasting presence (including friends and family) in your home is colonialism and military invasion now?
What exactly makes tech workers not locals? Many tech workers have lived in the Valley for over a decade. I surely hope that's long enough to establish that they are, in fact, locals.
So I'm waiting behind a soon-to-be (or not-so-soon) leaving car and some other jerk with an app pulls up and claims it's his spot because he "paid" for it? And I'm supposed to recognize this transaction and carry on? Yeah, right. Fuck both these guys, he'll have to pay me 20 bucks not to break his taillight.
Presumably the people creating this app have thought of this, seeing as it's like one of the critical parts of completing a transaction. With a few seconds of thought you can come up with a quick way to make sure it all works.
What might happen though is that if a car is about to leave and a non-paying car pulls up to get in, the leaving car might decide to stay a bit longer until a paying car gets first into queue.
They might have thought of it, but there is actually no solution to it because the non-paying person waiting for the spot isn't a player in the system they are constructing and thus can't be relied upon to react in a predictable manner.
"What might happen though is that if a car is about to leave and a non-paying car pulls up to get in, the leaving car might decide to stay a bit longer until a paying car gets first into queue."
Yeah good luck with that. I've seen near brawls break out when two or more people thought they had "dibs" on an opening spot based merely on proximity and some ill-defined rules. Introduce a money component into this and that just raises the stakes on the rage response.
If I arrived at a spot where it was clear someone was ready to leave and realized he was waiting longer for a "paying" replacement to arrive to take the public parking spot, unless I absolutely had to be somewhere immediately I would queue up behind the leaving guy and block out the paying party and wait them out just out of spite for the whole concept of this model.
No, the GPLv3 grants the user more freedoms than a license like MIT - they can demand the source from someone who has provided them the binary. It grants potential distributors fewer freedoms - they must provide sources and cannot distribute under incompatible licenses.
When I said "user" I meant "developer". Most of my open source code is licensed under the MIT license because it grants developers more freedoms than a GPL-like license would.
Also, I believe that by allowing distributors to use your code without forcing them to release their code you don't restrict potential users' freedoms - if a company wanted to use your library in their project and your license is not compatible with it they will just find another project or write a similar one themselves. The result for the user is the same: they will not get access to the code.
For "developer" it is substantially more true than it is for "user", to be sure. In principle, the power to demand the source gives me more freedom as a developer too - where with an MIT licensed executable I might not be able to find the code - but I'll readily admit that that aspect of it, when the author means the code to be distributed, is not terribly likely to be important when stuff lives on GitHub or even SourceForge or whatever.
As a developer, though, I'd rather have more code I can read and learn from and tweak and borrow than yet another proprietary product that I'll probably ignore - even if you're giving me 10x more of the latter.
The "freedom" that GPL gives is qualitatively no different than the notion of "freedom" in a free country. Freedom in a free country does not legally allow me to take away the freedom and rights enjoyed by another citizen. I can still do so, but that comes with legal consequences. GPL is likewise.
No I don't ... because the GNU GPLv3 guarantees, more than any other license, user freedom. The only other license that might guarantee more user freedom in this case is the the GNU AGPLv3. Sorry, but the MIT license does little more than protect a developer from being liable, it does almost nothing to promote freedom.
Well, frequently components intended to be used so broadly, and which become more valuable with more users (because more people speak the language) get weaker licenses. There are pros and cons to this from most perspectives, but it's a (weak) surprise.
And now thanks to Mr. Greenwald's reporting, citizens & elected officials, policy wonks & pundits, scholars & laymen alike, can all discuss actual facts instead of relying on grkvit's assumptions about how government spy programs operate.
