For every fifty guys who want to program professionally in ruby there exists less than one job... whereas for perl, it's probably the other way around.
That's quite an exaggeration. There is currently a shortage of Ruby programmers right now. I know, because I am one, and I have been having to fight off job offers with a stick. (Many of them would give me a significant raise, too, but I don't particularly feel like living in San Francisco, or Palo Alto, or Dallas, or Chicago.)
There ARE lots of Perl jobs. Why? For the simple reason that Perl has been around for a long time. Guess what? When everybody who wanted to move forward was learning to program in C++ or one of the Microsoft languages, there were still a lot of COBOL jobs around, too. So what?
I'm not slamming Perl. You may be aware that a lot of Ruby is based on Perl. BUT, in my opinion, significantly improved.
I like it. And I think it is a good starting langauge.
I like it too, and I use it a lot, but I think it is a terrible "starting" language. For a number of reasons.
First, Ruby doesn't teach you theory worth a damn. Its syntax, typing, and certain other features are far too loose.
I strongly suggest that someone's "starting" language should be one that enforces rules: strict static typing, etc.
A schoolmate of mine once said (after a Ruby class): "This is cool! Why didn't we just jump straight to this? Why did we have to waste our time going through all that other crap like Java, and so on?"
My answer was: because those other languages teach you what the rules are. Ruby doesn't. It's easy to break the rules and do something wrong using Ruby. But if you already KNOW what not to do, it's a lot safer to use a language that lets you do things you're not supposed to. And you'll be a lot better at using it.
I started out on BASIC, Fortran, PASCAL, and assembler many years ago. I have experience with most of the more popular languages: C, C++, Delphi, Visual BASIC,.NET, Java, etc. etc. etc. And even PHP. Yuck.
I like Ruby. I intend to keep using it. But I didn't just pick it up and start using it from zero. I know the rules.
Do you actually have hard evidence for this, or is this prejudice?
I don't have a citation on hand, but I have read past studies on this.
I just did a quick Google search and didn't find it... but that's simple because everything I searched for was drowned out by references to "predictors of academic performance" rather than academic performance as a predictor. But even where an article is about the latter, it doesn't necessarily refer to what I was saying about 4.0 students.
In any case, I will summarize:
First, there is in general a strong correlation between adolescent academic performance and later lifetime achievement. But there are 2 things to note about this: (A) that applies to adolescence, not post-secondary school, and (B) the general correlation does not necessarily hold at the extremes.
A number of studies have shown that 4.0 students often do not perform as well later in life as others who got good, but not quite stellar, grades. The reasons for this are not entirely clear.
Just as, for example, those of genius IQ do not necessarily achieve greatness. Nobody is entirely sure why. Some might be inept socially. Some might have little but contempt for the "stupid" people around them. Who knows?
If you have enough applicants and only a few positions, you're better off taking the best performers who also got a 4.0. In the extremely competitive internships and fellowships, you can afford (stats-wise) to target only the best tail of the distribution and the outliers.
You missed the point.
You don't know who the best performers are, in advance. (Remember the context here is taking people right out of school.) You only know what the grades are.
Statistically, those who got 4.0 are not the best performers in later life. Some may be, but most of them aren't. And you don't know which ones those are.
A smart employer will hire the people who give him the best statistical chances of getting the best performers. That means hiring the A- and B students.
This is the inherent problems with all such schemes so far (and probably for the foreseeable future).
I could put this in terms of false positives, true negatives, etc. but that takes up too much space. Suffice it to say:
In just about all of these "safe gun" systems that have been built to date, the part about rejecting unauthorized users -- the whole point of the system -- has been shown to be at acceptable levels. Maybe after a little design tweaking, but that's to be expected.
The problem is NOT that they don't reject unauthorized users reliably. That's the easy part. The problem is that in order to do that part properly, they reject authorized users at far too high a level. When they make that part reliable the other part becomes unreliable, and vice versa.
The real problem here is that an effective self-defense or military arm has to be reliable at the 99.999% level. (Yes, I know some people will balk at that figure but there are solid and genuine statistical reasons behind it.)
When the probability of incorrectly detecting an unauthorized user (or failure to detect an authorized user) are too high, the weapon is useless for its primary purpose. When those numbers are too low, the "safety" system is useless for ITS primary purpose.
So far, nobody has some close to getting an acceptable balance, making these safety mechanisms work while still maintaining sufficient reliability. And I don't see that changing any time soon. It may be that the entire concept is little more than tilting at windmills.
Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair. Clinton was impeached for pressuring a subordinate intern for sexual favors, lying in court, and pressuring witnesses to lie in court.
2 out of 3 isn't bad.
It was very clearly and convincingly shown that Monica Lewinsky had worked long and hard to get in the President's pants, not the other way around.
But CO2 is toxic to humans (volcanos have killed entire villages with CO2 clouds) We don't need more C02 in the atmosphere.
That's not toxicity, it's simply suffocation. There is a rather large difference.
... and theres the greenhouse problem, which we are now feeling the effects of.
We have been feeling less "greenhouse problem", every year that passes. Simple observation (and mounting strong scientific evidence) suggest that it may not be a "problem" at all. More likely it was a political agenda.
Good luck with that. (Not really... I hope you have no luck with that at all.)
The moment you start "certifying" programmers is the moment you start watering down the quality of the workers.
Industries will start building around the "certification" process, just like they did with MCSE for example. They'll start charging ridiculous rate for shitty schools that promise to get you your "certificate". Then companies will hire the "certified" at inflated rates that don't reflect the "certified" person's actual lack of skill and background.
Certification programs for things, especially in fast-moving industries, have seldom done any good and have often done LOTS of harm. (While, admittedly, a few people and companies who exploit the process may get rich.)
sick of dumbass kids who don't understand pointers and other basic freshmen year level shit. even a community college grad is better than some ruby bro from a bootcamp.
Stereotype much?
The program at a local Community College for my particular (technical) field is better than those at most 4-year colleges across the country. I know, because I had to research it for some work I was doing.
Second: they teach Ruby because that's what's in demand today.
Having said that: I have not yet seen a "Boot Camp" I would send anybody to. I grant that they will likely not come out with sufficient background to do real professional work.
Hiring by big companies for internships and recruiting for new college hires are usually filtered by GPA before any engineer or manager sees the stack or resumes.
That's a really dumb thing to do, since in most fields the majority of the best performers were not the ones with the highest grades in school, and vice versa.
Statistically you're usually better off taking the B or A- student than the one who got a 4.0.
Chip-n-pin isn't secure, but it's more secure than visible numbers. The Europeans reduced their fraud by something like 95%.
Card "swiping" (I hate that word) doesn't require visible numbers. True, the cheap cards they have tended to use can be vulnerable even without the visible numbers, but there are ways to improve that.
The problem is trying to do it electronically, without physical contact. Which is inherently a dead end. Anything that uses the electromagnetic spectrum is vulnerable, unless the actual data exchange is strictly secure from third parties.
The same researcher who showed that passport RFIDs can be read from a moving car 30 feet away (Christopher something), also showed how "secure" data could be snarfed from NFC-equipped phones from several feet away with a $200 DIY rig... even when they weren't being used for transactions. (The NFC did have to be turned on, though.) And that was before NFC was even in most phones. A big enough antenna could do the same thing from behind a wall 10 feet away.
So I caution people about using electronics. If it's something that doesn't require physical contact, beware. Your RF can be picked up, and if the protocol isn't 100% secure, then it will be broken. Probably very quickly.
What about copying and downloading trade secret data from a private company? still not theft?
This is a broad and rather irrelevant question. The answer would be: it depends.
What I was referring to above was the fact that most copyright infractions (such as downloading a copyrighted work for your own use, but not resale) is not legally a crime at all, much less the crime of theft. And that is where much of the difference lies.
Theft (in a legal sense) more-or-less means that you have deprived someone of something. If you steal money, you have deprived that person of their money. If you steal a car, you have deprived the owner of their car.
What if you could copy the car and drive away in the copy? Would you be guilty of a crime against the original car owner?
What if the original owner was the designer or the manufacturer of the car? If you copied the car, but did not sell your copy and just drove it around yourself, would that be "stealing" from the original designer? If so, why? You didn't "deprive" them of the design, or try to eat into their profit from sales.
What if your neighbor designed his own house, and you liked it so much, you built one for yourself just like it. Did you "steal" your neighbor's house?
A movie is not a trade secret. If you copy a movie, you have not deprived the original owner of that movie. Therefore it cannot be "theft" (and legally it is not).
Now: let's say you copy that movie, and then make a bunch of new copies, and sell them. Is that a crime? Yes. (In fact, that is what copyright "piracy" actually means.) It still technically isn't "theft", because you didn't "steal" the movie. But you deprived the original maker of the ability to make those sales herself, therefore you have (theoretically) "deprived" her of some profit from her work.
If you "steal" a trade secret (and put it to use), have you committed a crime? Probably, because you are unfairly competing with whoever came up with that trade secret. You didn't invent it yourself but you're "selling" it, in a sense.
Now let's take downloading for personal use again. Is it "theft"? No, because you haven't deprived anyone of the movie. Did you deprive the movie maker of profit? No. (Probably not... because studies have consistently shown that in something like 80%-90% of the cases no sale would have occurred anyway, for various reasons.) Is it a "crime" (i.e., is it "piracy")? No. Because you are not making a profit on someone else's bulk loss.
Further, even in the few cases where there would have been a sale, a download is not "depriving" the copyright holder of the retail price of the copyrighted work... only the profit they would have made if it had sold or rented. Which for a typical DVD is maybe 8 to ten cents per rental.
Incidentally, I know your opinions and ethics differ from mine, but I'm not interested in arguing.
Okay, let me amend what I wrote above. You may not have been arguing, but it appeared to me that you were making societal value judgments based on (A) an inaccurate interpretation of the law and the ethics of downloading, and (B) on the side of people who have themselves notoriously worked to skew the law in favor of their greedy corporate agenda, despite the societal havoc that behavior has demonstrably caused.
That is what you seemed to be saying, from my point of view. I could be wrong.
I may end up on the losing side of this debate - but I'm not so sure it'll be the wrong one.
I am pretty confident that it is.
Unlike some people, I am not one of those who thinks that corporate copyright abuses are an excuse to abolish copyrights. But I think it is extremely clear that copyright and patent law has been abused, to the detriment of society at large, and also on whose part the far larger measure of abuse has been.
The rhetoric of "If you don't vote for D or R you are wasting your vote." has been part of mass media for decades. Your point is correct, but propaganda has power.
Yes, it certainly does. Just for example, a lot of people who wanted to get rid of Bush very badly would not vote independent or Libertarian, because they perceived that they would be "wasting their vote". I know, I talked to a great many of them at the time.
And so, what did they end up doing? Voting for Obama. Which achieved the goal of getting rid of Bush... very badly.
Meanwhile in Finland, everything and everybody has a wireless payment terminal. I once even saw a street musician with one for tips...
Not so fast.
Chip-and-pin is not a panacea. Every major chip-and-pin system in the world has known security flaws that haven't been fixed in years.
I would far rather have them fix the security flaws that already exist BEFORE adopting a new system with just more security flaws. It's an unnecessary expense and rather self-defeating.
Back in those days I was an undergrad in engineering, which meant I didn't often get to use the computer, except in the required Computer Science classes. In the theory classes we actually turned in things like hand-coded PASCAL programs; the teachers (or rather, graduate students) then "compiled" them in their heads and issued a grade.
Passwords obtained from notebooks by looking over other students' shoulders were a precious commodity. Computer time was carefully rationed, but access to the keypunch machines and cards was not, so you could write all the Fortran programs on cards you wanted. You just could not normally run them.
Once you got to 200-level classes, you could actually get some computer time, strictly for those classes. CPU time was still rationed, but not as closely. They figured you were a n00b so you'd probably run a few infinite loops from time to time. But if you had left-over CPU time for your class, you could run some of the "fun" card stacks you did in your spare time (if you didn't tell anybody). And especially if you had a "borrowed" account password from an upperclassman.
Punching cards was a real PITA. Especially if you got a "dumb" keypunch. Click the "load" button, wait for the card to load, then type your cards one character at a time... oops! Hit "reject", hit "load" again, retype your card. If you were lucky you got on one of the "verifier" keypunches, which had some simplified error-checking, and if you made a mistake you could hold down "copy" up to the place where you made the error, then it would discard the old card and you continued with the new one.
As OP says: input was punch cards. One "line" per card, and the first 7 columns of each card was reserved. (Because Fortran.) Output was paper! Only! You went to the window in the computer lab the next day and if you were lucky they ran your batch and you got your output. So you were VERY careful to punch correct code.
Dropping a stack of cards was a major disaster. And if somebody was mad about something, one way they would get back at them was to mix up their cards. Even one card out of place would ruin a compile. So everybody learned these tricks very quickly: (1) you keep your card stacks firmly wrapped in both directions with rubber bands. And (2) you draw (anything with diagonal lines, like your name) on the side of your stack with a Sharpie, so that you can detect tampering at a glance.
The problem with terms like these is that they make it seem as if the parties aren't filled with these scumbags, but they are; the parties themselves are evil. This isn't just a few people; it's the entire parties.
Despite what they teach kids in Elementary School, The United States is not a "2-Party System". It wasn't created that way and hasn't been that way since. There have always been more than 2 active parties, and while there have usually been 2 "main" parties, they haven't always been the same 2 parties.
Political parties, for the most part, are bullshit. They're little more than gangs made large. While most democracies may have them, I have yet to see any argument that they've actually, in the long run, benefitted anybody.
As a Representative of her constituents, mind telling me just what in the FUCK she thinks she's doing?
I would like to know too. But let me ask you: when was the last time your elected representatives actually represented you?
I am in contact with my Senator and Congresspeople regularly. Usually (especially in the case of the Democrats) in response I get a form letter telling me thanks for my interest but this is why they're going to do whatever the hell they want to do anyway.
I strongly suggest starting at the bottom and working up. Your State legislature is much more likely to listen to reason. Once you get them whipped into shape, start working on the Federal.
(Actually, work on them both. But concentrate on the bottom first, because that's the way it's going to change.)
While I completely agree that probably lots of invertebrates have stereoscopic vision, I'm not aware of any *proof* that they do, for any species other than mantids.
Thank you for clarifying this.
No, I'm not aware of any actual proof. I have read comments that certain hunting spiders (Wolf Spiders for example) have 2 of their 8 eyes enlarged and forward-facing for "stereoscopic vision" while chasing prey, but since you mention it I am not aware of any research substantiating that claim.
On the other hand, it seems reasonable to accept that content distribution, and internet/TV service providing, are natural monopolies, and we may as well turn it over to a single company with tight consumer-interest regulation.
In other words, turn them into a tightly-regulated Title II Common Carrier. Which is what ISPs should have been from the very beginning, but Congress gave them a pass.
The problem is precisely the issue that Common Carriers are forbidden to be in the content business. They are content carriers, not content creators or providers. And there are extremely good reasons for that separation.
Slashdot Mirror
For every fifty guys who want to program professionally in ruby there exists less than one job... whereas for perl, it's probably the other way around.
That's quite an exaggeration. There is currently a shortage of Ruby programmers right now. I know, because I am one, and I have been having to fight off job offers with a stick. (Many of them would give me a significant raise, too, but I don't particularly feel like living in San Francisco, or Palo Alto, or Dallas, or Chicago.)
There ARE lots of Perl jobs. Why? For the simple reason that Perl has been around for a long time. Guess what? When everybody who wanted to move forward was learning to program in C++ or one of the Microsoft languages, there were still a lot of COBOL jobs around, too. So what?
I'm not slamming Perl. You may be aware that a lot of Ruby is based on Perl. BUT, in my opinion, significantly improved.
I like it. And I think it is a good starting langauge.
I like it too, and I use it a lot, but I think it is a terrible "starting" language. For a number of reasons.
.NET, Java, etc. etc. etc. And even PHP. Yuck.
First, Ruby doesn't teach you theory worth a damn. Its syntax, typing, and certain other features are far too loose.
I strongly suggest that someone's "starting" language should be one that enforces rules: strict static typing, etc.
A schoolmate of mine once said (after a Ruby class): "This is cool! Why didn't we just jump straight to this? Why did we have to waste our time going through all that other crap like Java, and so on?"
My answer was: because those other languages teach you what the rules are. Ruby doesn't. It's easy to break the rules and do something wrong using Ruby. But if you already KNOW what not to do, it's a lot safer to use a language that lets you do things you're not supposed to. And you'll be a lot better at using it.
I started out on BASIC, Fortran, PASCAL, and assembler many years ago. I have experience with most of the more popular languages: C, C++, Delphi, Visual BASIC,
I like Ruby. I intend to keep using it. But I didn't just pick it up and start using it from zero. I know the rules.
Do you actually have hard evidence for this, or is this prejudice?
I don't have a citation on hand, but I have read past studies on this.
I just did a quick Google search and didn't find it... but that's simple because everything I searched for was drowned out by references to "predictors of academic performance" rather than academic performance as a predictor. But even where an article is about the latter, it doesn't necessarily refer to what I was saying about 4.0 students.
In any case, I will summarize:
First, there is in general a strong correlation between adolescent academic performance and later lifetime achievement. But there are 2 things to note about this: (A) that applies to adolescence, not post-secondary school, and (B) the general correlation does not necessarily hold at the extremes.
A number of studies have shown that 4.0 students often do not perform as well later in life as others who got good, but not quite stellar, grades. The reasons for this are not entirely clear.
Just as, for example, those of genius IQ do not necessarily achieve greatness. Nobody is entirely sure why. Some might be inept socially. Some might have little but contempt for the "stupid" people around them. Who knows?
If you have enough applicants and only a few positions, you're better off taking the best performers who also got a 4.0. In the extremely competitive internships and fellowships, you can afford (stats-wise) to target only the best tail of the distribution and the outliers.
You missed the point.
You don't know who the best performers are, in advance. (Remember the context here is taking people right out of school.) You only know what the grades are.
Statistically, those who got 4.0 are not the best performers in later life. Some may be, but most of them aren't. And you don't know which ones those are.
A smart employer will hire the people who give him the best statistical chances of getting the best performers. That means hiring the A- and B students.
This is the inherent problems with all such schemes so far (and probably for the foreseeable future).
I could put this in terms of false positives, true negatives, etc. but that takes up too much space. Suffice it to say:
In just about all of these "safe gun" systems that have been built to date, the part about rejecting unauthorized users -- the whole point of the system -- has been shown to be at acceptable levels. Maybe after a little design tweaking, but that's to be expected.
The problem is NOT that they don't reject unauthorized users reliably. That's the easy part. The problem is that in order to do that part properly, they reject authorized users at far too high a level. When they make that part reliable the other part becomes unreliable, and vice versa.
The real problem here is that an effective self-defense or military arm has to be reliable at the 99.999% level. (Yes, I know some people will balk at that figure but there are solid and genuine statistical reasons behind it.)
When the probability of incorrectly detecting an unauthorized user (or failure to detect an authorized user) are too high, the weapon is useless for its primary purpose. When those numbers are too low, the "safety" system is useless for ITS primary purpose.
So far, nobody has some close to getting an acceptable balance, making these safety mechanisms work while still maintaining sufficient reliability. And I don't see that changing any time soon. It may be that the entire concept is little more than tilting at windmills.
Clinton wasn't impeached for having an affair. Clinton was impeached for pressuring a subordinate intern for sexual favors, lying in court, and pressuring witnesses to lie in court.
2 out of 3 isn't bad.
It was very clearly and convincingly shown that Monica Lewinsky had worked long and hard to get in the President's pants, not the other way around.
But CO2 is toxic to humans (volcanos have killed entire villages with CO2 clouds) We don't need more C02 in the atmosphere.
That's not toxicity, it's simply suffocation. There is a rather large difference.
... and theres the greenhouse problem, which we are now feeling the effects of.
We have been feeling less "greenhouse problem", every year that passes. Simple observation (and mounting strong scientific evidence) suggest that it may not be a "problem" at all. More likely it was a political agenda.
Here is an example of your 'ethics' about law...
What the hell does that have to do with law? That's just a bunch of fuckups fucking up. It has nothing whatever to do with the law and how it's made.
Get back to me when you even know what you're arguing about.
Good luck with that. (Not really... I hope you have no luck with that at all.)
The moment you start "certifying" programmers is the moment you start watering down the quality of the workers.
Industries will start building around the "certification" process, just like they did with MCSE for example. They'll start charging ridiculous rate for shitty schools that promise to get you your "certificate". Then companies will hire the "certified" at inflated rates that don't reflect the "certified" person's actual lack of skill and background.
Certification programs for things, especially in fast-moving industries, have seldom done any good and have often done LOTS of harm. (While, admittedly, a few people and companies who exploit the process may get rich.)
sick of dumbass kids who don't understand pointers and other basic freshmen year level shit. even a community college grad is better than some ruby bro from a bootcamp.
Stereotype much?
The program at a local Community College for my particular (technical) field is better than those at most 4-year colleges across the country. I know, because I had to research it for some work I was doing.
Second: they teach Ruby because that's what's in demand today.
Having said that: I have not yet seen a "Boot Camp" I would send anybody to. I grant that they will likely not come out with sufficient background to do real professional work.
Hiring by big companies for internships and recruiting for new college hires are usually filtered by GPA before any engineer or manager sees the stack or resumes.
That's a really dumb thing to do, since in most fields the majority of the best performers were not the ones with the highest grades in school, and vice versa.
Statistically you're usually better off taking the B or A- student than the one who got a 4.0.
Smart card uses challenge response technique, based on cryptographic protocols, implemented on a processor on teh card.
No shit? Well, guess what? So was OpenSSL!
Its not like magstripes where fucking assholes can just copy the shit and scam.
Correct.
Fucking tired of the god damn FUD
And I'm pretty tired of people telling me I'm feeding them FUD when it's not FUD. Try reading about it a little.
Chip-n-pin isn't secure, but it's more secure than visible numbers. The Europeans reduced their fraud by something like 95%.
Card "swiping" (I hate that word) doesn't require visible numbers. True, the cheap cards they have tended to use can be vulnerable even without the visible numbers, but there are ways to improve that.
The problem is trying to do it electronically, without physical contact. Which is inherently a dead end. Anything that uses the electromagnetic spectrum is vulnerable, unless the actual data exchange is strictly secure from third parties.
The same researcher who showed that passport RFIDs can be read from a moving car 30 feet away (Christopher something), also showed how "secure" data could be snarfed from NFC-equipped phones from several feet away with a $200 DIY rig... even when they weren't being used for transactions. (The NFC did have to be turned on, though.) And that was before NFC was even in most phones. A big enough antenna could do the same thing from behind a wall 10 feet away.
So I caution people about using electronics. If it's something that doesn't require physical contact, beware. Your RF can be picked up, and if the protocol isn't 100% secure, then it will be broken. Probably very quickly.
Wow are you wrong! Sharing, copying, stealing... Symantecs when you are talking about a digital file. It's all perspective and opinion.
No, it isn't. It's a matter of law. And law is not about mere semantics. (Or it's not supposed to be, anyway.)
It is also a matter of ethics, and it is ethics that are supposed to drive law, not the other way around.
What about copying and downloading trade secret data from a private company? still not theft?
This is a broad and rather irrelevant question. The answer would be: it depends.
What I was referring to above was the fact that most copyright infractions (such as downloading a copyrighted work for your own use, but not resale) is not legally a crime at all, much less the crime of theft. And that is where much of the difference lies.
Theft (in a legal sense) more-or-less means that you have deprived someone of something. If you steal money, you have deprived that person of their money. If you steal a car, you have deprived the owner of their car.
What if you could copy the car and drive away in the copy? Would you be guilty of a crime against the original car owner?
What if the original owner was the designer or the manufacturer of the car? If you copied the car, but did not sell your copy and just drove it around yourself, would that be "stealing" from the original designer? If so, why? You didn't "deprive" them of the design, or try to eat into their profit from sales.
What if your neighbor designed his own house, and you liked it so much, you built one for yourself just like it. Did you "steal" your neighbor's house?
A movie is not a trade secret. If you copy a movie, you have not deprived the original owner of that movie. Therefore it cannot be "theft" (and legally it is not).
Now: let's say you copy that movie, and then make a bunch of new copies, and sell them. Is that a crime? Yes. (In fact, that is what copyright "piracy" actually means.) It still technically isn't "theft", because you didn't "steal" the movie. But you deprived the original maker of the ability to make those sales herself, therefore you have (theoretically) "deprived" her of some profit from her work.
If you "steal" a trade secret (and put it to use), have you committed a crime? Probably, because you are unfairly competing with whoever came up with that trade secret. You didn't invent it yourself but you're "selling" it, in a sense.
Now let's take downloading for personal use again. Is it "theft"? No, because you haven't deprived anyone of the movie. Did you deprive the movie maker of profit? No. (Probably not... because studies have consistently shown that in something like 80%-90% of the cases no sale would have occurred anyway, for various reasons.) Is it a "crime" (i.e., is it "piracy")? No. Because you are not making a profit on someone else's bulk loss.
Further, even in the few cases where there would have been a sale, a download is not "depriving" the copyright holder of the retail price of the copyrighted work... only the profit they would have made if it had sold or rented. Which for a typical DVD is maybe 8 to ten cents per rental.
Incidentally, I know your opinions and ethics differ from mine, but I'm not interested in arguing.
Okay, let me amend what I wrote above. You may not have been arguing, but it appeared to me that you were making societal value judgments based on (A) an inaccurate interpretation of the law and the ethics of downloading, and (B) on the side of people who have themselves notoriously worked to skew the law in favor of their greedy corporate agenda, despite the societal havoc that behavior has demonstrably caused.
That is what you seemed to be saying, from my point of view. I could be wrong.
I may end up on the losing side of this debate - but I'm not so sure it'll be the wrong one.
I am pretty confident that it is.
Unlike some people, I am not one of those who thinks that corporate copyright abuses are an excuse to abolish copyrights. But I think it is extremely clear that copyright and patent law has been abused, to the detriment of society at large, and also on whose part the far larger measure of abuse has been.
The rhetoric of "If you don't vote for D or R you are wasting your vote." has been part of mass media for decades. Your point is correct, but propaganda has power.
Yes, it certainly does. Just for example, a lot of people who wanted to get rid of Bush very badly would not vote independent or Libertarian, because they perceived that they would be "wasting their vote". I know, I talked to a great many of them at the time.
And so, what did they end up doing? Voting for Obama. Which achieved the goal of getting rid of Bush... very badly.
Meanwhile in Finland, everything and everybody has a wireless payment terminal. I once even saw a street musician with one for tips...
Not so fast.
Chip-and-pin is not a panacea. Every major chip-and-pin system in the world has known security flaws that haven't been fixed in years.
I would far rather have them fix the security flaws that already exist BEFORE adopting a new system with just more security flaws. It's an unnecessary expense and rather self-defeating.
Back in those days I was an undergrad in engineering, which meant I didn't often get to use the computer, except in the required Computer Science classes. In the theory classes we actually turned in things like hand-coded PASCAL programs; the teachers (or rather, graduate students) then "compiled" them in their heads and issued a grade.
Passwords obtained from notebooks by looking over other students' shoulders were a precious commodity. Computer time was carefully rationed, but access to the keypunch machines and cards was not, so you could write all the Fortran programs on cards you wanted. You just could not normally run them.
Once you got to 200-level classes, you could actually get some computer time, strictly for those classes. CPU time was still rationed, but not as closely. They figured you were a n00b so you'd probably run a few infinite loops from time to time. But if you had left-over CPU time for your class, you could run some of the "fun" card stacks you did in your spare time (if you didn't tell anybody). And especially if you had a "borrowed" account password from an upperclassman.
Punching cards was a real PITA. Especially if you got a "dumb" keypunch. Click the "load" button, wait for the card to load, then type your cards one character at a time... oops! Hit "reject", hit "load" again, retype your card. If you were lucky you got on one of the "verifier" keypunches, which had some simplified error-checking, and if you made a mistake you could hold down "copy" up to the place where you made the error, then it would discard the old card and you continued with the new one.
As OP says: input was punch cards. One "line" per card, and the first 7 columns of each card was reserved. (Because Fortran.) Output was paper! Only! You went to the window in the computer lab the next day and if you were lucky they ran your batch and you got your output. So you were VERY careful to punch correct code.
Dropping a stack of cards was a major disaster. And if somebody was mad about something, one way they would get back at them was to mix up their cards. Even one card out of place would ruin a compile. So everybody learned these tricks very quickly: (1) you keep your card stacks firmly wrapped in both directions with rubber bands. And (2) you draw (anything with diagonal lines, like your name) on the side of your stack with a Sharpie, so that you can detect tampering at a glance.
"... yet to see any argument" should have been "... yet to see any convincing argument."
The problem with terms like these is that they make it seem as if the parties aren't filled with these scumbags, but they are; the parties themselves are evil. This isn't just a few people; it's the entire parties.
Read George Washington's Farewell Address.
Despite what they teach kids in Elementary School, The United States is not a "2-Party System". It wasn't created that way and hasn't been that way since. There have always been more than 2 active parties, and while there have usually been 2 "main" parties, they haven't always been the same 2 parties.
Political parties, for the most part, are bullshit. They're little more than gangs made large. While most democracies may have them, I have yet to see any argument that they've actually, in the long run, benefitted anybody.
As a Representative of her constituents, mind telling me just what in the FUCK she thinks she's doing?
I would like to know too. But let me ask you: when was the last time your elected representatives actually represented you?
I am in contact with my Senator and Congresspeople regularly. Usually (especially in the case of the Democrats) in response I get a form letter telling me thanks for my interest but this is why they're going to do whatever the hell they want to do anyway.
I strongly suggest starting at the bottom and working up. Your State legislature is much more likely to listen to reason. Once you get them whipped into shape, start working on the Federal.
(Actually, work on them both. But concentrate on the bottom first, because that's the way it's going to change.)
I don't steal mp3's, I share them. Not saying it's right, just that it's so.
No, it isn't.
Copying and downloading have NEVER been "theft", according to U.S. law.
Further, you want to see how the copyright owners treat the content creators?
Before you start making arguments about ethics and karma, maybe you should make sure you're on the right side of said argument.
While I completely agree that probably lots of invertebrates have stereoscopic vision, I'm not aware of any *proof* that they do, for any species other than mantids.
Thank you for clarifying this.
No, I'm not aware of any actual proof. I have read comments that certain hunting spiders (Wolf Spiders for example) have 2 of their 8 eyes enlarged and forward-facing for "stereoscopic vision" while chasing prey, but since you mention it I am not aware of any research substantiating that claim.
On the other hand, it seems reasonable to accept that content distribution, and internet/TV service providing, are natural monopolies, and we may as well turn it over to a single company with tight consumer-interest regulation.
In other words, turn them into a tightly-regulated Title II Common Carrier. Which is what ISPs should have been from the very beginning, but Congress gave them a pass.
The problem is precisely the issue that Common Carriers are forbidden to be in the content business. They are content carriers, not content creators or providers. And there are extremely good reasons for that separation.