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Conversely, a GPL'd program is the author's work, and if some other developer submits it to the app store, the author is perfectly within his rights to waste Apple's time and demand either GPL compliance or removal.

> Little developers don't have much leverage.

Except when they do; such as when Alice submits Bob's GPL'd program to the App Store. If Bob cares more about enforcing his rights than having his program in Apple's virtual toy store, he's got plenty of leverage.

And if Apple has to spend time and money taking down apps as a cost of maintaining its own bizarre and finicky rules (which cost 3rd-party developers plenty of time and money), then it's exactly what Apple deserves. Poetic justice, even.

> That's life. BFD. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal.

In the grand scheme of things, humans are a tiny dot in an infinite cosmos. In the human scheme of things, it may matter a great deal whether we end up with neutered app dongles instead of real computers in our pockets.

> If the worst thing that happens in your life this year is that your app falls afoul of some persnickety little Apple rule, you're still living better than the vast majority of the humans on the planet who would LOVE to be so afflicted.

There are (at least!) two fallacies in your argument: Apple's bad behavior is justified (1) because there are worse things; (2) because the harm it does to anyone is not sufficient to reduce them to desperate, third-world, dollar-a-day, tapeworms,-warlords,-and-cholera-level poverty.

I maintain that Apple's behavior is not justified, and I choose to forgo their iOS platform and its attendant riches. So far, I've been able to subsist on more than a dollar a day, cholera-free!

And how would those nasty developers like it if Apple suddenly introduced all kinds of idiosyncratic hoops to the app submission process for the developers to jump through?

Why, they'd have no grounds to complain, that's for sure!

A good candidate does that during any job interview. Two-way filtering helps all parties find better matches faster.

You could minimize the damage done by "the current system" (control group) by making the majority of schools into testing grounds for various competing educational theories, and see which one produces the best results.

Much better companies than your current one are starved for good developers. You're not helping anyone by remaining underemployed.

(Be sure to have a job offer in writing before you quit, however. :)

antirez's readership probably overlaps significantly with his userbase.

For purely selfish reasons, I wholeheartedly commend and encourage his goal of spending less time writing blog posts. :)

  ~/i     # internal (stuff I made)
  ~/x     # external (stuff I downloaded, etc.)

  # exceptions to the above:
  ~/i/collab
  ~/i/mashup

  ~/bin
  ~/tmp

I also really like the (new?) trend of programs keeping their dotfiles in ~/.config/program-name/foorc

Or devise some novel features that would allow this marvelous invention to interoperate with existing software!

Then patent the combination and fuck them with it. >:D

I was considering doing some sort of curve-fitting to (lossily) compress the drawing commands. Sending a couple points to describe a quadratic or Bézier curve is a lot nicer than hundreds of points to describe tiny line segments.

And, as luck would have it, <canvas> draws both natively! :)

My heavily-unoptimized wire protocol used uncompressed JSON objects sent at each mousemove event on the canvas while drawing, which means it's great fun on the LAN, but would choke any affordable Internet link.

It appears that this one solves the problem by limiting the rate at which you can draw—drag the mouse too fast, and it lifts the pencil.

On the other hand, you could create css classes like

  .someImage { background: url(...) no-repeat; }

I quit playing all Facebook games when I realized why they are so bad for me: so many of them are glorified work simulators (virtual farms, restaurants, crime empires, etc.) that falsely satisfy that part of the brain that wants to get some work done!

OR

Or perhaps this is a grim answer to Fermi's Paradox: the galaxy is quiet because someone preemptively wiped out the competition a long time ago.

Some encoders might not create the index properly, and some players might have tricks to seek (offline?) even without one.

To repair these files, see: http://muzso.hu/2008/12/18/fixing-flash-videos-flv-for-use-w...

But property, as a concept and related body of law, exists for the benefit of society—we tacitly agree not to take each other's stuff because lacking that rule would suck for (most of) us.

Intellectual property as a concept is a recent attempt to recast things like copyrights, trademarks, and patents—government granted monopolies intended to serve specific purposes, and tolerated for the benefit of society—as some sort of Lockean natural right.

However, if you are trying to reconcile the two concepts, you must face the fact that intellectual property restricts each of us from full enjoyment of our actual property.

(For instance, I can't lawfully use my own computer to copy someone else's copyrighted book, my garage-full of parts to implement someone else's patented invention, or even my own pens and paper to market products under someone else's registered trademark.)

"Manag[ing] it contractually", as you put it, would prevent this from being a problem. (Whether an opt-in scheme would be very effective is another story). However, this position relies on the right to contract, not any inherent right to intellectual property, contrary to what your earlier post implied.

If not for the benefit of society, then please explain your theory of why society should tolerate or enforce intellectual property.

Nah, they just gave Metacritic a B-minus. It's not Ars's fault that Metacritic interprets that as a 67 out of 100.

When you visit their site, do you think of rain forests or Xena?

The Buddhist sutras take the position that "objects of mind" are just leaky abstractions created by our limited minds, which struggle to make sense of the world. The greatest fallacy, in this view, is conflating the "objects of mind" with the real objects (+) they supposedly represent.

(+) Buddhist philosophers in India developed a concept of atomism, which leads to existential riddles like, "If I look at this pile of atoms, and see a chair, is the chair inside my mind, or outside?" (If you answer either way, you're wrong! ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_atomism

http://deoxy.org/koan/76

"On the contrary, my dear. Look at Section 4, Paragraph 3:

We can be entirely free of this contract if I donate all my worldly possessions to charity!"