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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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  • Well, to get the letter from Tim's lawyers, you'd have to excerpt from the essay and not just the copyright notice. You'd have to quote something like "The fact that it’s thousands of pages long really isn’t that much of a usability problem", then have some sort of transformative effect like saying "Tim is deluded if he thinks thousands of pages is a usability problem, since I know that I can't get most people to read a 300 page book on learning Perl". You might also qu

    • I think Tim Bray’s “I’ll pull out the lawyers” is lame.

      But at the same time, the spirit in which he meant the threat (“it’s abuse to cherry-pick this to serve your agenda if you prevent your readers from getting the full picture”) seems obvious and reasonable to me. So all the people skreaking and bouncing like chimps at the mere mention of lawyers look equally lame to me.

      • I expect readers to have brains and go looking for context if it matters to them. If it doesn't, I'm not abusive if they are idiots.

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers

        • That’s the point: he wants readers to have the link, so he’s threatening writers/journalists who quote selectively without linking. His threat is toothless, of course, but I certainly understand what compelled him to include it, considering how highly political the subject matter is.

          Pointing out that he’s wrong merely makes you somewhat of a lawyeristic nitpicker (which won’t make me think less of you than I think of him for posturing with lawsuit threats); actually disrespecting h

          • What I said wasn't intended to sound mocking. I just don't think like he thinks at all. He and I see the burden of making people understand as falling in such completely different places that his request seems absolutely unreasonable and completely unworthy of respect to me.

            --
            J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
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