> Maybe I don’t know much about Markdown, but my understanding is that the whole point of it is to provide a syntax where the most common HTML tags for prose can be replaced by simple punctuation characters that are meant to be visible to the writer.
The deadpan was so good there I had to stop and double check the origins of Markdown just to make sure my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. Hard to believe it’s been twenty years!
I bet, if I would take your copyrighted work, create a deritative work, have the gall to call it "Standard YourCopyrightedWork", and then go back and forth if it is a derivative work or not, you would certainly not consider me friendly either.
As someone who contributed a bit to the early CommonMark spec I think some of us were really doing it the shitty way towards Gruber.
How would the Rust people react if we created a "Standard Rust" language?
>Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license.
John Gruber's markdown is unmaintained (last updated in 2004), free software, which many people have contributed to to fix oversights and extend its capabilities. This is exactly how fsf is supposed to work.
You are unfortunately making the same incorrect conclusion many of us did back then.
It was about the _Name_ , never about the syntax/implementation.
Gruber was very clear with his license and regular words that he did not allow the usage of the name in a manner which would cause people to be confused or suggest that it was an official implementation.
Huh. Good point, I did miss that. That, however, seems to primarily be an issue of trademark, not copyright. And once we enter the domain of trademark [law], genericization becomes a salient point, especially with the "anyone can use it however they want" reality of FSF.
The usage of the word "copyright" made me wonder... can you even copyright Markdown? I don't think you can, can you? You can copyright the spec (if any) or the reference implementation, but you cannot copyright the concept or syntax itself.
You could maybe patent Markdown (given the amount of trash software patents I've seen I wouldn't be surprised) but (1) it's not patented AFAIK and (2) it's become so common (mark, heh) that I don't think it could be patented anymore.
You could say Markdown is covered as a trademark even if not officially registered maybe? I don't know the specifics though, could anyone chime in? (this is complicated further by the different jurisdictions). But my understanding of the general idea is that if your trademark becomes common (which I guess happened?) or you don't actively defend it (which is what Gruber was trying to do fighting Standard Markdown), you lose it.
So, to summarize, I think he was right to be angry (in a moral way) but that's possibly the only right he had in the literal sense. Which is more than enough of course.
How I see it as well. Gruber really wanted the project to use a name which did not imply any kind of “official” status, support, or such relationship with regards to him and Markdown.
What if someone went to the effort of congregating around making a standard out of my weekend (? I dunno) Perl script? I would be elated. But maybe my standards are low because I’m not already “famous”.
If the crucial part here is the fact that he apparently already copyrighted the name then that seems kind of like begging the question. I wouldn’t copyright a bland name like that which has no connection to my own person. (Maybe I would copyright something like keybord-lang though...)
If they're going to push to arrest peaceful marijuana users and ruin their lives with a drug charge then the people involved in this raid should see the inside of a cell at least as long as someone up on possession because what the raid plotters have done is more corrosive to a free society than anyone smoking weed at a concert.
Crap. I used to think being alive was better than being dead. But come to think of it, the only ones complaining are the ones who are still alive. I’m conflicted now.
Capitalism has _everything_ to do with this as while the _amount_ of land may not be growing, the economic system does _nothing_ to cap the price of this essential commodity. The only cap on the price of land is the amount someone is willing to pay for it.
To say that the advantages of location are not capital (or equivalent to capital) is just ignorant. There are plenty of pieces of land that act just like capital - access to natural resources, access to a coastline, fertile for farming, or in a location where a toll road or similar could be employed.
It becomes very difficult for someone to build and own a sapphire mine if they don't have the capital to buy the land that has the sapphires in it!
I think point of gp is that land is _not_ a commodity. It thus cannot be treated as capital, the way it is more traditionally understood. Supply/demand dynamics in a market does not make something capitalism.
That's exactly right. Land is not a commodity, in fact it is the absolute furthest thing from a commodity. Plots of land are different, and command different valuations based on location. It is not produced by anyone and has an unchanging supply. To call it a commodity is so completely backwards.
There are supply and demand dynamics in the land market. However much excess value you get from occupying a certain location on Earth, is how much people will be willing to pay for that. The demand will always be high as long as the value from the location is higher than the cost to occupy. This cost will soak up any advancements in society, which is why despite everything we have done to progress the state of man there is still a class of renters giving everything extra they make due to societal advancements to landowners.
As the romantic partner of someone going through a degenerative disorder and as someone who watched my grandmother be consumed by dementia I can say that it's something most people develop over time instead of being born good at.
If a hang nail is bad enough to make you withdraw then that means you don't have a lot of experience of getting sick to the point where you had to push through as it hasn't happened a lot. Over the course of the 14 years I've had with my partner (started year 15 last month!) I've seen how she's had to adapt to remain involved and communicative - and a lot of days, that's a struggle for her that she puts herself through to stay connected to the people she loves.
tl;dr: It's an adaptation, and I'm glad that you've not had to build that adaptation.
Fully agree. I live with cronic pain and people ask me if I'm in pain, I say yes, then they want to stop whatever we're doing and I say no, if I stop living because of this, I have nothing else left but the pain. So yeah, you get used to doing things with it. Some days it's impossible and I indeed do nothing but most days, meh.. Screw it, I have stuff I actually want to do.
Obama gave an answer in his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee episode that stuck with me.
Seinfeld asked something like 'How do you deal with constant annoyances, all the time, when you're president?'
And Obama replied 'I expect it's similar to what you do -- you fall in love with the work. Sure, sometimes it's painful, annoying, backwards, foolish, etc. But in the end you fall in love with the work, and it saves you.'
That defined purpose in a way I'd never thought about it, and probably undergirds every religion.
It also made me try to open my heart more to people dealing with chronic pain or mental health issues, in terms of their subjective effort. Objectively, it may look like they're just doing {normal thing}, but subjectively that may be requiring 10x or 100x effort from them. And that effort (the work) deserves its own respect, independent of outome.
Time is subjective. They had a couple, in fact. On the last fall 24 batch (don’t remember the century), one group (“startup” doesn’t make much sense in a post-scarcity post-human society) came up with a viable (for a Kardashev type 2) way to do time travel and this one was done on a dare.
Every time one of these cases comes up, everyone wants to blame "bad apples in the legal department", but newsflash, the legal department aren't a bunch of cowboys that just run wild and do whatever they want - they often require the approval of someone higher up in the company to commence action.
Stop this. Stop letting companies you like off the hook by compartmentalizing the things you don't like to "the guys in the legal department".
haha. I wish. I play 4s with my little bro and a couple of my friends and my little bro thought it would be funny to hot mic a hitler speech. We all got banned. lol
In the 1980s, it was typically things away from the computer - renting videos or video games from Blockbuster and things like that. Not to mention all of the actually interesting things on cable.
The local video store would run a deal over the summers when I was a kid where you paid $30 and got three, two night rentals (new releases excluded) a week for the summer school break. Being able to grab a new game or movie every other day (since you were already there to return the previous one on time) was great.
Cracking up at this quote