DISQUS

Bibble,

What you said is true but irrelevant. People aren't writing insecure code intentionally, they're writing it because they don't know how these things work!

The solution isn't to rant and rave about idiot engineers, it's to design systems and libraries that are easy to understand and do the right thing, and make up the difference by educating people.

That's exactly what Joe is doing.

How do you get 34,000%?

Jesse Farmer's last blog post..When in Rome: Newcomers on Facebook

@Bryan:

Hey, I'm Jesse, the guy who created Adonomics. Since I sold the site the data is no longer reliable -- the people who purchased it don't really maintain it. It makes me sad to say this, but I wouldn't trust it.

That said, Circle of Moms has 839,131 monthly active users. You can see there right here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id...

Additionally, Facebook reports through its API that they have had 177,176 weekly active users. Hope that clears things up.

Cheers,
Jesse

offo,

Sorry for making you work so hard. Do you have any examples of good graphs?

Help me learn — don't just berate me.

Chris,

That's a nice video. I wonder what software they were using?

Tordek,

The sentence is awkward, but I think it's correct.

P(O | H₀) ≤ 0.05 means that if the null hypothesis is correct then there's only a 5% chance of observing what you did.

Angsuman,

Cool. I'll check it out.

As for the ORM stuff, I know, but I don't care that much. My interests skew towards large, denormalized data storage, anyhow. Building the next great Rails app ain't my thing.

Frank,

Give GWO a try, it might do what you need. I usually write my own.

Olivier,

It's somewhere in the docs, which are admittedly terrible. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Horst,

Thanks. I wrote this like a year and a half ago — I'm surprised nobody has caught that yet.

Jack,

I'm using a Ruby graphing library called Gruff.

Prakash,

Google has the Google Website Optimizer, which supports both A/B and multivariate testing, but it's fairly limited. It only measures "conversion" events.

You can't, say, segment Google Analytics reports based on GWO experiments.

Douglas,

Thanks for the kind words. Will do!

My phone interview question at YouTube was "How would you build a thread scheduler?"

A stupid question for a phone interview (and the interviewer was entirely too please with himself), but I'm interested in seeing the answer from someone who knows what they're talking about, i.e., not me.

The masses demand action! Blogging action!

Jonathan,

I don't think it's overblown. I volunteered for the campaign during the primaries as a precinct campaign and software engineer. It's disorganized, but there's a conscious awareness of the internet and what it means.

Yes, the technology is like five years behind the times, but in a campaign you're moving at light-speed with a bunch of people with a wide range of skills and competencies, all the while trying to physically organize people across 3.8 million square miles.

Also, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook, is responsible for a large part of Obama's social media strategy.

Right, they're "just" semantic differences, even though the difference between a tort and a crime means difference burdens of proof, different measures of justice, and different court systems.

*shrug*

If you don't want to make a nuanced argument that's ok by me. These distinctions matter economically, legally, and philosophically, though.

Alex,

The economics of copyright infringement and theft are totally different. Conflating them leads to bad arguments and worse policy.

And, for what it's worth, most copyright infringement isn't a crime. Learn the difference between a crime and a tort and then we can talk.

Kyle,

I'm using geshi with an Erlang syntax plugin I wrote myself.

Gleb,

Good catch. And thanks for pointing to proplists, I didn't know about them.

website,

I'm not sure if you're a real person or a spam bot, but by "a la PHP, Ruby, or Python" I meant as a first-order construct. I'll reword it so it's less ambiguous.

Mr. Design,

What can I say? Everyone's a critic.

This tutorial was aimed at people who don't know Erlang that well. It took me a good two or three days to suss out how to use gen_server properly. The current documentation is extremely dense.

Also, I'm going to be following up with more "interesting" (read: complex) examples, so keep your eyes peeled.

Eli,

Yep.

Eli,

You've just restated your original point. It's still circular, though. Your argument really seems to be not that copyright infringement is wrong because it's a kind of theft but that copyright infringement is wrong because it's breaking the law. That's fine, but there's plenty of laws whose breach people don't find "wrong" in the sense that they find theft wrong, e.g., jaywalking, speeding, etc.

So, fine, copyright infringement is wrong in the sense that it's breaking the law, but it definitely occupies a different moral sphere in society than theft.

Moreover, the origin of copyright law doesn't rest in its potential analogy to theft, but in its own economic and political considerations.

Also, you're not going to be able to sneak in "theft" through the back door by saying intellectual property is a kind of property and therefore copying it is a kind of theft.

First, theft covers intentional deprivation of a thing, not copying the thing without permission. It's a different rule. Theft always requires mens rea, for example, whereas civil copyright violations do not.

Second, "intellectual property" as a term is relatively modern. Its consistent use didn't come about until the mid-20th century and its earliest use is about 150 years after the Statute of Anne.

Using it in that way is a dirty kind of equivocation.

You're also equivocating about what "law" means, now. If you were using a specific definition of "against the law" that is not what people usually mean then you should have stated it up front.

I don't really have the time to play this game with you, so this'll be my last reply.

Cheers,
Jesse

Eli,

Your argument is circular.

You say that copyright infringement is morally equivalent to theft because there is an expectation that the government will protect the author of a creative work. That is, it is morally equivalent to theft because they are protected by copyright.

So what is the basis for copyright to begin with? It can't be because it is morally equivalent to theft.

Also, things are crimes independent of whether or not they are enforced, i.e., whether there is the expectation of protection by the government. If there were only one police officer in Chicago you'd have lots of unprosecuted murder cases, but they'd be crimes nonetheless, for example.

Graeme got it right: the only similarity between theft and copyright infringement is that they're against the law.