[OT] 7 Ruby Programming ebook

Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 12:27 +0900, Patrick Aljord wrote:
>> Ok so because leaders are incompetent I should just wait for democracy
>> to come one day and stay ignorant in the meantime? That's weird.
>>     
> You are dealing with people, Patrick, who build up a huge head of 
> righteous indignation while forgetting that the USA, at the turn of 
> the 20th century, didn't respect foreign copyright.  "Intellectual 
> property protection" only started becoming an issue in the USA when 
> they had some worth protecting.  Now they don't want any other 
> countries to use the same techniques they did to bootstrap.
>
> But really, copyright is off-topic I would suspect.  We should 
> probably continue this discussion off-list.
Yes it is, but I can't resist the temptation anymore. You can draw a 
parallel with programming here.
Most of us working in non-web, coprorate environments find that getting 
Ruby accepted in projects is usually a very hard cause. Some of us 
actualy ignore tool/development guidelines and get the job done - 
usually being 3 times faster and achieving milestones within time and 
budget constraints exonarates my sins.
It's (r)evolution from the inside. I've been working and talking about 
Ruby within my own company for over 5 years now. At first I was deemed 
graphical and I am still the target of puns and diggs, but suddenly I am 
only one of very few (like 3 in 300) who didn't fall asleep during the 
long dictatorship of statically typed languages at work.

So while I will not condone pirating  books for anyone having access to 
them (and by that meaning having the money or not being prevented to buy 
them), I can also cannot hide the fact that when I was a penniless 
student in the backwaters of Greece in the early 90s  I pirated like 
crazy (think xerox copies not PDFs): It's what's enabled me to pay for 
books now.

Knowledge is a very powerful thing. You keep it from people and their 
ignorance makes them selfish, irresponsible and greedy. Educated people 
won't usually in good conscience pirate a book (music and movies are a 
different thing I imagine - mostly to do with the tyranny of 
distribution networks). They will come back and pay for it (yes, yes, 
generic labeling and aphorisms here). So I say educate them and 
yourself, and when anybody wants to prevent you (by setting development 
guidelines, ridiculous import taxes or outright banning deviant texts) 
go around them any way you can.

V.-

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