phyller

I disagree. This entire line of thought is just ridiculous prejudice. If you think the US film industry is entirely represented by the 20 or so big blockbusters that come out each year, and that somehow the hundreds of smaller and independent movies don't count, that's your problem. Just because you haven't heard of them doesn't mean they don't exist.

The author of this article is a genius, able to express the problem so clearly. These types of regulation that have been coming through the EU are good for the biggest of businesses. Complex and difficult to follow regulation allows the big companies to build a big moat, they have the money to build systems to satisfy the regulations, even to game the regulations. And no new companies will be able to disrupt them. Who's going to risk $60 million dollars on your startup before they get anywhere, just so they can comply with regulations?

EU, get ready for Google, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Coca-Cola to choose what services and products you get, and how much you pay for them.

In the US, there are spanish streaming services available and Chinese streaming services available. You can find movies from every country. It's a free market, and services from other countries are allowed. If they did what you said, it would be difficult for foreign streaming services, and even small American services to exist. And it would just concentrate the industry further in a few big companies.

Something to think about, if Netflix comes in with their brand recognition and cash and buys the digital rights (more money for exclusive rights of course) to the local movies, this regulation basically locks up the market for them. As long as they have the bigger user base, they can pay more for any new local content, and effectively shut down any competitors. Amazon Prime might not be able to compete, forget about Hulu or whatever. So instead of a few big American companies and some local start ups in the market, you get just one big American company.

So? Walk onto a set and I bet you'll find people from every continent except Antarctica there. People born on those continents too, not just descendants.

What is going to happen is reverse of what you say you want. The big Hollywood blockbusters will be just as available as before, what you are losing is the long tail of smaller independent films that may be more thought provoking or diverse.

If some streaming service has to cut 80% of its offerings, they will keep the Transformers and Marvel movies and cut the smaller ones.

Even if they made more specific regulation to remove those blockbusters, which will annoy the general population, almost all regulation benefits the large incumbents in the long run. They have the resources to figure out how to game the system.

The US is incredibly culturally diverse, it's a nation of immigrants from all over the world. It's just not delineated by state. There are geographic pockets of one culture or another, but frequently a single geographical area has many different cultures in it, so it isn't as easy to draw a line around your culture and make laws to protect it. A culture lives and dies on its own efforts and merits.

> The proposals will require that streaming services give over at least 30% of their on-demand catalogues to original productions made in each EU country where a service is provided (individual EU Member States could choose to set the content bar even higher, at 40%)

30% for each country seems really high to me. As usual for regulation, there will likely be high unintended consequences. While in the US and elsewhere there will be thousands of movies available, if Netflix can only get the rights to 90 Belgian films, they aren't going to pay through the nose to create or purchase many more movies. They will just trim down the available movies in Belgium to 300. After all, no competition will be able to do any better.

Worst case scenario, someone may corner the market on digital rights to some country's movies, then they will be the only ones that can provide any sort of streaming service. That country will only have access to an expensive service with a limited selection.

In those cases, the locals will just continue to pirate movies as the only way to reasonable access them online, and the local film industry will be no better off than before as their consumers will be accustomed to getting their movies for free.

Imagine if every state in the US did this, what Netflix would look like. 30% of movies in Indiana need to be created in Indiana. Netflix would suck, ha.

The flip side would be more money available for the institutions that actually create new medicines. I'm not saying it's a better tradeoff, just that it's not so single dimensional.

Actual conservative sentiment would be, once you marry her, sleep with her. Worked for me!

Here's my reasoning. If you are expecting someone else to make you happy, you're in for disappointment. It's just human nature, one or both of you is going to disappoint the other. My apparently contrarian take on relationships is when you are ready to become selfless and start concerning yourself with making other people happy instead of yourself a) congratulations, you are now an adult human b) you can find someone that you can decide is worth the effort, and then stick to it.

And you may be surprised to find that selflessness and happiness are highly correlated. That's also human nature, IMO how we are hardwired to live as social beings. There's some great ancient literature on the subject, and I don't think it is a principle which changes much over time and culture.

Ha, I didn't know about him before. Sounds really interesting. Reminds me a lot of Socrates. I have recently been reading the classics about Socrates and was surprised to realize that

a) his main mission seemed to be to show people they didn't know as much as they thought

b) he was basically a huge troll, even if he was usually correct

c) he was such a huge troll that the Athenians actually put him to death for it via a public trial

If our culture didn't have certain moral qualms that the Athenians didn't have too much trouble brushing aside, I imagine Karl's career would have been cut a lot shorter, along with quite a few other philosophers.

This argument has been repeated so much, I'm going to try to explain. I'm not a lawyer, but this is what I learned in school in the US. There are numerous examples of voluntarily giving up your right to free speech. In the United States there are criminal and civil suits. You won't be criminally charged by the government for your free speech about CPU benchmarks, but if you actually agreed as part of a contract to not disclose benchmarks in order to get something, then you can be successfully sued by an organization or individual in a civil suit. They can't throw you in jail but they can take your money.

I highly suspect the same thing is true in most first world countries, otherwise a lot of companies wouldn't be able to do business because it would be illegal to keep trade secrets. What did they tell you in school?

Imad Sousou - "We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here: http://bit.ly/2w9RjtM . As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community. #IAmIntel"

https://twitter.com/imadsousou/status/1032680311753072640

That makes sense, and like I said, I don't have a problem with what they are doing. It's what they said and how it was presented and how it has been defended. Like evil BigCorp has been stealing from them.

Just a "Hey what we are doing now isn't working, for our business model we need to make more money and we need to make some of our code around Redis proprietary so we can sell it. Don't worry, Redis itself will remain open source, free to use for everyone."

Instead it was "today’s cloud providers have repeatedly violated this ethos by taking advantage of successful open source projects and repackaging them into competitive, proprietary service offerings". It was open source, they could do that. If you want to make them pay in the future, that's fine. But they aren't the bad guys for using OSS.

Anyway, I hope it works out well for RedisLabs, but I also hope that the licensing of OSS software is simple and open.

Normally I'd give people the benefit of the doubt, but in this case I think Intel has already shown that they have no credibility in anything anymore. They only ever spin everything, the last time anyone said something truthful (former CEO mentioned they needed to try to limit AMD to 20% server share, up from less than 1%), he was not only fired but publicly humiliated.

NDA's are legal right? This is like a permanent NDA. I wonder if people can refuse to download the microcode because of the license, and then sue Intel for the vulnerability. I'm thinking probably not.

Might want to get your next chips from AMD.

The article goes out of its way to not describe certain parts of the context. My understanding is the SEALs left him for dead, and he wasn't dead. It seems there's a growing bitterness against SEALs in the military community, always the heroes in movies, and then trying to push stuff like this under the rug.

https://www.newsweek.com/2018/05/18/navy-seals-seal-team-6-l...

> we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.

This way of thinking is, in my opinion, destructively pessimistic. Everything is not always a zero sum gain. We can all benefit more than we contribute and it can still be sustainable. For example, 10 people can spend 10% of their time on a project, and get something out of it that is worth 50% of their time. They took the equivalent of 1 persons work and made it worth 5 people's work. I think most popular OSS projects are orders of magnitude more effective than that at creating benefit. Thousands of people contributing code, a few times a year, makes a project that supports all their careers and provides software that benefits society as a whole.

I get that the problem is the undue burden on the relatively few people who organize this work for really big projects. I've noticed that some of these people are employed by large corporations who encourage their OSS work, because the result, and the thousands of contributions from others they harness are very valuable to these organizations.

I wouldn't be surprised if the large corporations that were listed as the ones using Redis software without paying for it would be willing to sponsor a few employees to represent their interests in the OSS projects. That works for the individual engineers, but that doesn't exactly work for RedisLabs to make $$. So I still don't see RediLabs as a beleaguered crusader trying to save OSS.

> This is an ignorant response, because it places on the librarian’s shoulders the responsibility for solving a problem that concerns all of us - because we all benefit from open-source more than we contribute to it. That’s not sustainable.

I don't understand this. It seems the argument is "I can't keep giving away software for free unless you pay for it". Then it isn't free software, right? Nothing wrong with that, most of us write proprietary software and sell it. If it's worth more to the people who buy it than what it cost, everyone still benefits.

We use open source software to do our work more effectively. There are all sorts of OSS projects, many entirely run by unpaid volunteers. Many people, myself included, sometimes contribute code to the OSS projects, to benefit myself and anyone else who happens to use it. I don't expect anything else.

But you can't feel entitled for people to pay you for work that we all agreed was volunteer. It's not worth it to do OSS anymore? It's ok to stop doing it. There are enough of us that are rewarded by just being able to contribute, we'll have our own projects. So, it's ok for Redislabs to make their code proprietary and make money off it, if they can. There's nothing wrong with that. But the rhetoric that boils down to "people have been stealing from us by using our code and not paying for it", "it's not fair that they are using our code and making money and not giving us any" is wrong. You gave the code away for free. That was the understanding before you wrote the code, and after it was written. That was one of the reasons people were even using the code. It's not an injustice.

When someone gives you a nice gift, they deserve your gratitude. But if they turn around and say "you never paid me for that", then it wasn't really a gift was it?

I don't understand this entire argument. Someone developed open source, free to use software, then didn't understand why people should expect to use it without paying for it. It's totally fine to make proprietary software, just call it that. If you expected to get paid, sell it, fine. And make it clear that it is not free. That's what is happening here, good. But wrapping it in a rhetoric of protecting open source code doesn't make sense. Maybe the common perception of what open source code is wrong in the general public. I'm definitely not a lawyer, I do respect licenses, but I guess I thought open source meant free to use, when maybe it can be interpreted, "free to see, maybe pay to use". With a free trial version for students and hobbyists.

Basically full stack web developer, probably a lot of these issues are particularly bad in this field

I've seen it stated several times here on hacker news that the visas should be available for the highest salaries. And that's it. No lottery. If you want them, pay them. That makes tons of sense to me on a lot of levels, it is going to naturally destroy abuse, recruit the best and brightest to come to the US, and not cause unfair discrimination against American workers.

1,600 visa workers for Cisco seems really low though. Anecdata, but my company hired a VP from Cisco and from that point until they left we made a lot of hires, but not a single American that I am aware of.

To be honest, it would have been better to explain how they do the spectroscopy than to just say "you don't understand" and downvote. I should have raised a question instead of making a statement, the response should have been an explanation, instead of basically "you're an idiot" (which still no one has done as of this time). They are making the same error I did. The article posted didn't explain, the paper costs $9 to read. I wouldn't call this a productive discussion at this point.

Edit: someone just attempted to explain the technology behind it, thanks amluto

I applaud that your company promotes from within and encourages professional development. I think that is more likely to happen when a company can rely on most employees sticking around for a while, which they probably will because of the opportunities provided inside the company. A virtuous cycle.

However, it also sounds extremely expensive to run a business with everything you described. It might only be possible because you appear to work in the group of large corporations that exist off of a government contracting system that has been criticized as being fundamentally broken. Projects cost way too much, take too long, and are frequently late and over budget anyway. I've heard a lot of that has to do with the government constantly asking for changes and asking for too much, but whatever way you slice it the only reason it works is because it is basically non-competitive. Does your company create successful consumer products?

Spacex is aerospace too, but they are disrupting their industry. I wonder if all the engineers there get their own offices and stay in the same roles for years, with the same technology.

I don't have enough experience to know which works best, letting engineers become professionals in their niche, making the business not very adaptable but having some deep strengths, or moving fast and breaking things, being adaptable and fast moving, but have some crappy code gluing things together that will need replacing in a few years.

I should apologize, I am probably, hopefully wrong. I'm still skeptical but clearly more work has been put into this than I realized and I shouldn't have been so quick to condemn it.

Ha, you're right about web engineering. But how available are jobs like yours? Because the guys that were doing them 20 years ago are still doing them today.

I call BS. I'm not saying the planet doesn't have iron or titanium, just that I don't think their data shows it.

The researchers supposed that this planet might have iron and titanium in the atmosphere, they have an image of the star with a slight dimming from the passing of the planet across it, and they find the spectral signature of iron and titanium.

The percentage of the light collected that was emitted by iron and titanium, if it existed in the atmosphere, would be so mind-boggling minuscule compared to the light of the star itself, I would think that the iron and titanium signatures would come from elements trapped in or around the star.

I think if they looked hard enough they could find whatever elements they want.

I think the root issue is that there is just simply too much to know and too little time to know it. Everything is completely reinvented every 3 years now it seems, so many of the successful young engineers I know tend to develop a herd mentality, just do what everyone else is doing. You don't need to understand it, just pick your favorite thought leaders, emulate them, and things will usually work out well enough.

Wow, I wish I was an engineer in that era. 25 years at the same company, 3 languages over 13 years. And when he needed to learn a new language he actually went to school for it.

I just started a new position, I have to learn at least 2 new languages (on my own time) which I need to be proficient in basically immediately. My very first project was, fix something in this new project which uses a new language, you have 3 days. And I felt lucky to have been given 3 days instead of 1 so I could learn the language. And then dozens of new frameworks and complex tools, complex and evolving architecture. In 2 months I will have my first week as being the point person to fix anything that goes wrong in production. And I feel like this is ok, this is normal.

I wonder if most engineers now are just permanent amateurs hopping around between tools and projects, learning just enough to make it work without breaking, but not knowing how to build things properly. How many years would it take to really become expert in that language? Even if you focused all your time on that, by the time you have mastered it another language will have come along to replace it, or the language itself will have been transformed into something new.

If you stay still and become an expert in something you run the risk of losing your relevance and not being able to get another job in just a few short years. 25 years? Will the company you work for even be around in 25 years? Doubtful.

Then again, back then they didn't have Stackoverflow and all the resources we have now that make it possible to learn so much so quickly.

He worked on planes, it may have been an important factor for fitting into some space, and working in remote desolate places with a small crew of other people. Basically, you could probably send this guy to a dry lake bed in the desert for testing for a couple weeks if you needed to, and he could hop in and out of a cockpit to do some work, or sit for hours in a truck with equipment inside it because he wasn't 6'8".

Or else he hasn't written a resume in 25 years because he's worked for the same company and just wrote it like the last time he did coming out of the military :D