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I guess this is the point at which I go from left-leaning to right-leaning.

Stop fucking spending my money on bullshit and you won't have to create new taxes.

kubrickon What copyright holders don't get about consumers and BitTorrent

So the law is within the bounds of common sense when it defines the copyright period as the life of the author plus 99 years? The constitution says a copyright is granted for a limited time to encourage artists to create. How is Walt Disney going to be encouraged to create another Mickey Mouse when he's been dead for 40 years?

kubrickon What copyright holders don't get about consumers and BitTorrent

I would like to tell the Pirate Bay the same thing everybody has told us for the past 10 years. They should go out and find a new business model, one that doesn’t involve profiting from stolen property…What everybody who steals music should realize is that e-looting is not a victimless crime. Everyone who does it is hurting themselves. They are killing the music.

I wish the author of the article had addressed this quote more directly. "E-looting" is in no way "killing the music". It's not a crime, anymore than singing a familiar melody (that's under copyright) is an e-looting crime.

At least in the US, copyright law is unconstitutional. Read the copyright clause: there's no mention of treating the intangible as "property", nor is there granted the right to transfer "ownership". Far from it. Read Jefferson's letters on the subject, and you'd find he was very much on the side of the "pirates".

Just because you wrote a song doesn't mean I can't sing it. I can't imagine who died and told these guys that they deserved big cash for songs, but it's not true.

kubrickon Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don't tell you

Unclear what I'm presuming. But are you actually saying:

1- the world needs more people who write like arrogant assholes (even if they're not actually assholes)

2- it's better to be pompous than to actually have a conversation

Because that's what you're up-voting. In case it's not clear.

kubrickon Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don't tell you

I agree: caveats can be distracting. I'm not at all suggesting that, for instance, the 37 Signals boys start adding cavaets.

I'm suggesting that they stop constantly posting articles that say, in essence, "Hey, world, you're doing it all wrong and we know how to do it right and you should take your cue from us. There's only one Right Way and we have a lock on it." You know, like when they cap on startups because "building a business" is The Better Way. As opposed to a different pursuit altogether.

kubrickon Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don't tell you

You're right, they're not equal. But sounding arrogant -- on purpose -- is still kind of a dickly thing to do. It's I'm-making-up-for-a-small-penis behavior, and the world needs less of it.

kubrickon Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don't tell you

I'm gonna get dinged for this, and I don't care.

Admitting that you like sounding arrogant doesn't make it OK. Just a little more honest.

kubrickon Oracle to buy Sun

... or, as My Little Pony prefers to phrase it, Sun is reverse-acquiring Oracle.

kubrickon Making Yourself Likable

"Trait Transfer" is an interesting idea, one that had not particurly occured to me in my 45 years on Earth. I'm gonna work on that one.

kubrickon Where SSDs Don't Make Sense in Server Applications

Shouldn't he wait until the cost comes down and settles a bit before he bothers writing a whole screed about the expense? It's like decrying the HDTV as not worth the money -- they're over $10,000 each! Or, they were, a few years ago.

kubrickon 50 years of bad grammar advice

The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. You can't split infinitives in Latin (or most of its descendents). "To sleep" in Latin is dormire. That includes the concept of "to", so there's no way to say "to soundly sleep". You'd have to put it as "to sleep soundly," and so automatically, that's the "correct" form in English, too. English is an inferior language to Latin, right?

Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad.

The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art.

Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.

kubrickon 50 years of bad grammar advice

You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather than 3.14.

Judgement call. "Too" informative? Perhaps for people who prefer brief sentences. For god's sake, stay the hell away from Faulkner.

kubrickon Blogs for Online Entrepreneurs

I slowed when I got to Guy Kawasaki (interested in startups but with no direct experience, contrary to popular belief) and cringed when I saw Scobleizer (same story as Guy), and stopped flat when I got to Seth Godin. Seth's got interesting things to say on occasion, but to real startup work, he's all but useless.

And then -- ValleyWag? Seriously?

kubrickon Paul Graham: The 10 Secrets of Selling Online (1997)

One reason: they've pulled some of the links out of the current page. The wayback machine has the original links to the other archived sites.

kubrickon FBI seizes entire data center, won't say why

Very good points, although it's worth pointing out that the system can be rigged. Meaning -- just speculating -- a guy like Rupert Murdoch can use his influence with a judge to get a warrant. It's also worth mentioning that the author claims to have been in Phoenix while the raid was in Dallas, so he had no direct access to the warrant. And no one is forcing the FBI to obey the law these days -- read the news.

kubrickon Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

It's slightly more nuanced than you're making it sound. For one thing, Twitter may very well be more reliable than your email system (YMMV). For another, email doesn't generally beep loudly and alert you.

The idea that an additional part automatically weakens a system is reductive. It doesn't necessarily weaken it at all.

kubrickon Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

Twitter hasn't had any serious downtime for months.

kubrickon Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

You could probably pair this advice with http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ in your is-it-down script, so that you really get a good idea about how widespread your outage is. Just a thought.

kubrickon Using Twitter to Send Alerts When Your Site Goes Down

YMMV, but in my experience twitter would be prompter than the typical SMS service from a big carrier. More reliable, too.

kubrickon "But how will Google ever make money? There's the rub."

I love how HN is full of reflexive down-voters. What, you're pundit fans?

kubrickon "But how will Google ever make money? There's the rub."

ROFLcopter. Really funny to see punditry fail epically.

kubrickon Rails won

Sometimes I, as a Rails developer, forget which is supposed to be pluralized, the model or the table. (Gah!)

Still, Rails' pluralization algorithm is savvy enough to know when it can't just add an 's'. Most of the time, it works.

If you don't like it -- like most things in Rails -- you can just turn it off with one option.

It's the fact that you're allowed to dislike features like that, and make them go away, that makes me wonder how people can hate on it. It's opinionated, but it's not dogmatic.

kubrickon Rails won

The Railiens make a big fuss about favoring convention over configuration, and of course they picked the most bone-headed, moronic conventions imaginable, like coupling data objects to the database, using pluralized table names

He's entitled to his opinion, as is DHH. But for my money: why are Rails' conventions "moronic"? What the heck is wrong with coupling data objects to a db?? He'd prefer something more awkward and arcane?

kubrickon Where did all the wealth go? To our kids.

It is grossly irresponsible for the baby boom generation to expect Generations X and Y to be saddled with our national debt, our trade debt, and our infrastructure debt -- and the retirement debt created by baby boomers enjoying long retirements supported by future tax increases on their children.

That's one of the most responsible things I've ever heard a member of that generation say.

kubrickon Dreamhost St. Patrick's 92% off

To wit, here is my current status:

Total Bandwidth Provided: 13128 GB ($0.1/GB over) Total Used So Far: 1.362 GB Estimated Usage For Cycle: 2.484 GB Estimated Overage Charges: $0.00

Obviously that's not the "unlimited" plan.

kubrickon Dreamhost St. Patrick's 92% off

Uh, actually I don't. Maybe I signed up at the wrong time or something. Big enough, but definitely not unlimited.

kubrickon Dreamhost St. Patrick's 92% off

Who's removing domains? I was thinking strictly about unlimited bandwidth and storage.

kubrickon Dreamhost St. Patrick's 92% off

Is there any reason you couldn't just sign up for another account? Different credit card? Not the same as getting another year for $10, but you'd have unlimited bandwidth and disk for a year for ... $10.

kubrickon Grand Central To (Finally) Launch As Google Voice. It’s Very, Very Good.

I think this is why God made proxy servers.

Actually, that's really surprising. Why on Earth would you not be allowed to get to those services? Canada, of all countries? The 51st state? ;-)

kubrickon DHH: Fuck the Real World

I think the world needs contrarians like this, but that the world also needs to know not to take them entirely seriously.