In my own daily life, I avoid, to the best of my ability, transactions with people and entities I consider evil and unethical.
Stallman is considered by some to be a pure saint. People think he lives his life without compromises. Yet, he simultaneously holds the position that proprietary software is evil, and that people who write GPLed software won't do so unless they are incented by the ability to sell non-GPLed copies of that software to evil people who are going to merge it with their proprietary software and sell it for a profit.
If I believed that someone was evil, I wouldn't have anything to do with them, and if I merely thought they were misguided, I wouldn't use that term -- it is very heavily loaded. I would almost go so far as to say Stallman is evil for using it. (See how that works?) Personally, I believe that Stallman has done some good things, but also has some stuff to answer for, and calling me evil is one of those things he will eventually have to answer for. He and his followers are not yet as single-mindedly obsessed as the Taliban or the anti-abortionists, but they are getting there.
If I understand him right, it seems that RMS doesn't have a problem with companies selling their software, he has a problem with companies that sell software and refuse to tell people how it works. Or maybe I'm just giving him too much credit.
You have to step back and think a little bit harder about this one. What is the purpose of dual licensing? To make money off non-GPL customers to support your GPL activities. Why would anybody buy a non-GPL version of the software if the GPL one is there free for the taking? Why to link with their other non-GPL software, of course, to keep their stuff private.
So according to Stallman, (a) proprietary software is evil and shouldn't make any money, and (b) GPL software development requires the ability to sell non-GPL licenses of the GPL software to evil people who want to use it to speed up their own development of evil proprietary solutions.
There probably is a certain amount of logic there, but any ethicist will tell you that if you believe somebody is doing something evil and unethical with the goods you supply them, you should probably stop. Also, the final outcome of this scenario, enabling the evil proprietary company to bring software to market faster (by not having to write a proprietary equivalent of the embedded GPLed software) doesn't really square with Stallman's stated objective of removing the profit motive from proprietary software, unless he just meant that the programmer who wasn't hired to write the equivalent of the GPLed module is the one who shouldn't profit, but it's fine for the businessmen to profit.
Maybe a strict literal reading says the software is evil, but:
That's unethical, they shouldn't be making any money.
is a quote directly addressing the proprietary software businesses. (Read the question.)
Since, for at least part of my life, I was a sole proprietor delivering proprietary software solutions, then, according to Stallman, I was acting unethically.
I also believe that he said I was evil. I will grant you that, in parsing English grammar properly, he might have said the software was acting evilly, and not me, but at the same time, I will have to assert that IMHO you are, deliberately or not, being obtuse about what he really meant.
I mean, it's pretty fucking obvious to me that he called me evil and unethical. YMMV.
Audience member: [...] in this new World, and you're talking about GPL going over to the next version, how do you see proprietary software businesses making a profit?
Richard Stallman: That's unethical, they shouldn't be making any money. I hope to see all proprietary software wiped out. That's what I aim for. That would be a World in which our freedom is respected. A proprietary program is a program that is not free. That is to say, a program that does respect the user's essential rights. That's evil. A proprietary program is part of a predatory scheme where people who don't value their freedom are drawn into giving it up in order to gain some kind of practical convenience. And then once they're there, it's harder and harder to get out. Our goal is to rescue people from this.
So, I'm an unethical evil person because I make money writing proprietary software. However, it's a requirement that MySQL be sold to a different big evil corporation that doesn't already have a database offering and that can make money off it, else they might not support it.
Sorry, my brain isn't big enough to hold the cognitive dissonance that is Stallman -- he gives me a headache.
I realized that wasn't the right article -- here is the one I was looking for. He probably even debunked them earlier, but this was just the first time I saw it.
over 6 years ago.
Oddly enough, I read it here first. I don't think anything has changed.
Now, it may be that micropayments work at a level between the retailer and the wholesaler. For example, google could pay micropayments to useful sources, or I could subscribe to a news source or listen to a radio station. The author/band/whoever gets paid via aggregated micropayments, but I don't actually make a micropayment. That is, historically, a sound business model, but making people decide on an article-by-article basis whether they want to read the whole thing for a penny is nuts.
Yes, it's "just" a CAFC panel, which is bad enough (making it the law of the land absent Supreme Court review), but naturally Duke, having deep pockets, appealed. Cert denied. I know that's not as compelling as if the Supreme Court had written volumes on the case, but still, until something radically changes in Congress or in the Supreme Court, Madey v Duke is not a case you would want your opposition citing.
And, yes, it's bad for me, but it's also bad for a lot of other people, and I think you should point out to others that your previous unqualified statement (in bold) that "If you're a scientist doing research in a laboratory, you're not infringing a patent." is really not necessarily true. I mean, you being a lawyer and all, they might think it was legal advice or something...
It's particularly telling that, in that same post, you went out of your way to castigate other comments: "Like most of the anti-IP comments on here, your post is far less insightful than the +5 would indicate."
They made "experimental use" so narrow that they killed it for practical purposes. And I mean that literally. The left it alone for impractical purposes. but removed the exemption for activities done "in furtherance of the alleged infringer's legitimate business."
Dunno what you think most of us do in labs, but I gotta tell you that my employer certainly hopes it is in furtherance of their business.
If you're a scientist doing research in a laboratory, you're not infringing a patent.
I thought you were a patent attorney!!?! In Madey v. Duke University, the Supremes pretty much eviscerated the idea that just working in a lab was protection.
No, it's big companies and their lawyers (presumably like you) who (with patents, as with copyrights) try to make the government-granted monopoly stretch farther than it really does according to the patent or copyright, with carefully crafted contracts. They get slapped back on a regular basis for patent misuse, but that doesn't keep them from trying. See, for example Quanta v LG Electronics, where some smarty-pants LG lawyer thought they could have their cake and eat it too, by having Intel manufacture stuff that motherboard manufacturers couldn't use unless the motherboard manufacturers also paid a fealty to LG. The US Supreme court ruled that, even though LG's contract with Intel was written to exclude its customers, heck, even though Intel had to tell it's customers they needed a patent license, the contract was meaningless in that respect, because
So, I feel pretty safe in saying that, if I buy a properly licensed resistor, I can do whatever I want with it, and can't be sued on the basis of the patent claim(s) which were the subject of the license. (Obviously, I can infringe some other patent claims, depending on the circuit I make.)
Of course, there will always be other cases where companies and their lawyers get clever and figure out how, for awhile at least, to double-dip and extract value for their patent from multiple places on the food chain, but for the most part, the public and the Supreme Court frown upon this.
Well, I'm not the one who mentioned "first sale" -- that was kanweg. But I immediately knew what he was talking about, and if you and theaetetus would look up from your law books and think about what it is and what it means, and just maybe what a few non-lawyer types might call it, and be slightly less pedantic and condescending, you just might learn how to communicate without pissing people off. But don't take my word for it that "first sale" is a relatively good euphemism for "exhaustion": according to wikipedia "Under the exhaustion doctrine, doctrine of exhaustion, or first sale doctrine, the first unrestricted sale of a patented item exhausts the patentee's control over that particular item."
Maybe I didn't read your museum/resistor example carefully enough (an unusually constructed scenario in any case), but where the "claptrap" comment came in (and where I just stopped reading) was when you wrote:
"Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook. "
I think most people/companies who have spent on lawyers for Markman hearings would dispute this assertion. In fact, the very concept of a Markman hearing is based on the idea that claims are legalese, not "technical writings", and that, in fact, engineers are not qualified to read claims and determine if their device infringes. Sadly, this lunacy has evolved to the point where this is quite true -- at the point where three different judges would give you three different answers about infringement, it is impossible to know whether you are safe or not. So a lot of patent licensing revenue is based on bluff and bluster. I can see where this helps employ more lawyers, but cannot for the life of me fathom how it increases innovation in other fields.
The "exhaustion doctrine" is also sometimes known as the "first sale doctrine". While not identical to copyright first sale, it is analogous.
As far as State Street goes, have most of the software improvements since then been patented? No? Have some that would have happened anyway been patented in a bogus overbroad way by non-implementers? When I watch true innovators like RIM get their pants sued off by people who didn't do anything except sit around brainstorming 5 second ideas with their patent attorneys, I think it's pretty obvious the system is broken.
Most of the rest of your comment is pure claptrap as well. For example, if I buy a properly licensed special resistor, under the exhaustion doctrine I can pretty much do what I want with it, and the original licensor can't come back and get me for any infringement under the licensed patent.
The civil courts can help when the perpetrator has enough resources to fund two sets of lawyers and still have some left over for the victim.
But, even so, that's reparation, not revenge. As humans and their societies evolve, perhaps eventually that will be sufficient.
Learned jurists argue about what place revenge/vengeance has in the system; but I think every learned jurist and historian understands that, historically, one of the purposes of government-enforced laws was to make the revenge/vengeance more predictable and more proportional to the crime. And if the government is truly only interested in deterrence, what is the point of, for example, sentencing Bernie Madoff to 150 years? Obviously, 10 years (maybe even 2) would keep Bernie from doing it again; 30 years would keep anybody else who looked at the risk/reward ratio from wanting to follow in his footsteps; and 150 years is, any way you look at it, overkill.
So, the government is definitely interested in the perception that they will impose a huge penalty for egregious behavior, above and beyond the penalty which might help to deter similar behavior. Why is that? Could it be because the sensibilities of a large part of their public demand it?
In fact, if the government was smart, maybe they would keep Madoff's rotting corpse in the jail cell for the full 150 years, so that the victims and their descendants could go by occasionally and have a look if they wanted to. Is that really too much to ask?
"If the main purpose of the justice system really is to carry out vengeance,"
I think you're missing some subtlety here. For one thing, I never argued that was the main purpose, just one of the legitimate purposes, and that it will remain a legitimate purpose until humanity evolves a bit.
"After all, mob justice is usually fairly swift and costs very little resources; our existing justice system is quite expensive and monolithic in comparison."
I couldn't disagree with this more. The human and societal costs of unmitigated revenge killings are easy to see at various places throughout the world. The high economic cost of our justice system is more than justified, in economic terms alone if it keeps us from slaughtering each other back into the stone age.
"And, in a way, mob justice/vigilantism is a very democratic means of establishing order in a society. The community as a whole decides what they will and will not tolerate in their community, and what kind of punishment to dispense."
Umm, no. The people who participate in the mob are not necessarily "the community as a whole" and are almost never "the community as a whole" when it is thinking calmly and rationally.
"Also, you claim that a justice system which considers motives rather than results ignores the real-world issues,"
I never claimed such a thing. You talk about "conflating" vengeance and justice, but that is nothing compared to you turning my "actions" into your "motives." And, I never even argued that actions should not be considered; just that results should be as well.
"but then you turn around and support feel-good legislation which focuses on punishment rather legislation that is geared towards obtaining real-world results."
The legislation may not be sufficient; may not go far enough in punishing people who don't kill people. But I think it is certainly necessary to send a message that texting can be lethal and that society will not tolerate lethal texting. Call that "Feel good" if you want; I call it pragmatic, in the political sense that it is the minimum that needs to be done, and might be the maximum that a legislative consensus could be reached on.
"I just don't agree with sentencing based on chance consequences."
Sorry, but that's life. Whether you go to jail or not is based on a huge, incalculable series of probabilities. The trick is to try to set the probabilities correctly so that, in general, "bad" people go to jail, and in general, "good" people don't. But this is a very difficult, imprecise science.
"A reckless texter who gets in an accident, but happens to have not killed anyone this time, is just as dangerous as a texter who gets in an accident but isn't so lucky. So it makes no sense to lock one up but not the other."
I haven't covered this, but I've seen the same argument applied to drunks, and I have to disagree. There is no question that some people will drive better when drunk than others will. They have made a bad choice, but they might make other mitigating choices, by altering their speed, their route, the time of day they travel, etc. The same thing with texting -- I am sure that there are people who are better at doing it while driving than others, by choosing when they look down, etc.
Having said that, I personally have no problem with punishing either non-lethal drunks or non-lethal texters, because I think both are risks that shouldn't be taken. But, I still think the punishment ought to be harsher for the ones who kill. In short, I never argued that we should not look at actions (and never mentioned "motives"), but did argue that outcomes need to be considered as well. (And in my book, the outcome of a non-fatal wreck is very serious, not to the extent of a fatal wreck, but much more egregious than when there is no accident.)
"I think the justice system should have more ways to deal with the consequences of a crime than just heavier or lighter sentencing. Repar
I don't think that I said anything which would indicate that I don't think that vigilantism isn't a crime or should be appeased, but one of the reasons that we have the luxury of thinking this way is that, in fact, our government is supposed to (and, often enough, does) punish people so we don't have to do it ourselves. This "disinterested third party" is supposed to mete out justice proportional to the crime in a less personal way than the victim might, but don't for a minute think that society would stand for the punishment being solely related to the action and completely disconnected from the outcome. Drunken driving is a punishable offense, but the punishment for killing somebody while driving drunk is always worse than if you didn't kill somebody. That is how it is and how it needs to be, at least until we evolve, and that is how it needs to be for texting as well.
We have ceded to the government the right to mete out both justice and vengeance.
As part of this bargain (which is intended to stop vigilante committees, among other things), the government is required to mete out enough vengeance to keep the populace happy.
As a disinterested third party observer, it may be easy enough for you to say that a texter (or a drunk, for that matter) should be punished for the action and not the result, but that completely ignores other real-world issues.
The family of the victim is often out for revenge, and as part of the bargain, it is up to the state to provide it. Maybe not to the same extent as if the perpetrator were simply handed over to the family, but something more than a slap on the wrist.
So this conflation of vengeance and justice is not accidental, not wrong, and should not be changed, at least until a huge majority of the populace would be just fine with someone who killed their kid getting off with a very light sentence. Otherwise, those victims who feel that their justice was denied will realize that the bargain has been broken, the state has failed them, and will feel justified in taking matters into their own hands.
He wrangled himself an invitation to the White House for a beer.
This was his idea, suggested to Obama -- he's not going to apologize, but he says "we should all get together over a beer." He KNOWS that it will be really hard for Gates to proceed with the lawsuit without looking like a douchebag, after sitting down with him. This is a better non-apology apology than Obama's, from someone who really ought to be apologizing.
He got his union to pay for the trip.
He'll probably do very well on the right-wing travel circuit, because unlike Joe the non-plumber plumber, he is, in fact, a real cop.
So, basically, he was as much of an asshole as he ever was, he got the cops to all get together and sing the hymn about how he was a fine, upstanding asshole, and he probably keeps to get doing it, with everybody now KNOWING not to mess with him, or any other cop in Cambridge.
When I try to look at it from his purely personal, Machiavellian perspective, I'm not seeing the screwup yet.
But you said you need a separate parallel cable for programming the JTAG flash, if I read it right. Andy Ross's project has Fx2 code to do this over USB. That is what I suggested you could combine with your project, to dispense with the need for a separate JTAG cable. Is your code available?
Slashdot Mirror
Stallman is considered by some to be a pure saint. People think he lives his life without compromises. Yet, he simultaneously holds the position that proprietary software is evil, and that people who write GPLed software won't do so unless they are incented by the ability to sell non-GPLed copies of that software to evil people who are going to merge it with their proprietary software and sell it for a profit.
If I believed that someone was evil, I wouldn't have anything to do with them, and if I merely thought they were misguided, I wouldn't use that term -- it is very heavily loaded. I would almost go so far as to say Stallman is evil for using it. (See how that works?) Personally, I believe that Stallman has done some good things, but also has some stuff to answer for, and calling me evil is one of those things he will eventually have to answer for. He and his followers are not yet as single-mindedly obsessed as the Taliban or the anti-abortionists, but they are getting there.
You have to step back and think a little bit harder about this one. What is the purpose of dual licensing? To make money off non-GPL customers to support your GPL activities. Why would anybody buy a non-GPL version of the software if the GPL one is there free for the taking? Why to link with their other non-GPL software, of course, to keep their stuff private.
So according to Stallman, (a) proprietary software is evil and shouldn't make any money, and (b) GPL software development requires the ability to sell non-GPL licenses of the GPL software to evil people who want to use it to speed up their own development of evil proprietary solutions.
There probably is a certain amount of logic there, but any ethicist will tell you that if you believe somebody is doing something evil and unethical with the goods you supply them, you should probably stop. Also, the final outcome of this scenario, enabling the evil proprietary company to bring software to market faster (by not having to write a proprietary equivalent of the embedded GPLed software) doesn't really square with Stallman's stated objective of removing the profit motive from proprietary software, unless he just meant that the programmer who wasn't hired to write the equivalent of the GPLed module is the one who shouldn't profit, but it's fine for the businessmen to profit.
is a quote directly addressing the proprietary software businesses. (Read the question.)
Since, for at least part of my life, I was a sole proprietor delivering proprietary software solutions, then, according to Stallman, I was acting unethically.
I also believe that he said I was evil. I will grant you that, in parsing English grammar properly, he might have said the software was acting evilly, and not me, but at the same time, I will have to assert that IMHO you are, deliberately or not, being obtuse about what he really meant.
I mean, it's pretty fucking obvious to me that he called me evil and unethical. YMMV.
Yes, and the MySQL licensing exception already allows you to link it with GPL v3 stuff. But that sticks in Stallman's craw, because it's not pure v3.
So, I'm an unethical evil person because I make money writing proprietary software. However, it's a requirement that MySQL be sold to a different big evil corporation that doesn't already have a database offering and that can make money off it, else they might not support it.
Sorry, my brain isn't big enough to hold the cognitive dissonance that is Stallman -- he gives me a headache.
Doesn't seem very cool to me, in any commonly used temperature scale!
The article clearly states that it was (almost) all U.S. births during a certain time-frame, data courtesy of the CDC.
Oops -- let me try one more time to get the link right: micropayments.html Need to learn to hit "preview"
I realized that wasn't the right article -- here is the one I was looking for. He probably even debunked them earlier, but this was just the first time I saw it.
Now, it may be that micropayments work at a level between the retailer and the wholesaler. For example, google could pay micropayments to useful sources, or I could subscribe to a news source or listen to a radio station. The author/band/whoever gets paid via aggregated micropayments, but I don't actually make a micropayment. That is, historically, a sound business model, but making people decide on an article-by-article basis whether they want to read the whole thing for a penny is nuts.
Dunno. We may have to see if John Yoo is dumb enough to ever go to Spain before we find out.
Anybody who knows about computers has to be kept away from them, else they might cast spells on the rest of us.
And, yes, it's bad for me, but it's also bad for a lot of other people, and I think you should point out to others that your previous unqualified statement (in bold) that "If you're a scientist doing research in a laboratory, you're not infringing a patent." is really not necessarily true. I mean, you being a lawyer and all, they might think it was legal advice or something...
It's particularly telling that, in that same post, you went out of your way to castigate other comments: "Like most of the anti-IP comments on here, your post is far less insightful than the +5 would indicate."
Dunno what you think most of us do in labs, but I gotta tell you that my employer certainly hopes it is in furtherance of their business.
I thought you were a patent attorney!!?! In Madey v. Duke University, the Supremes pretty much eviscerated the idea that just working in a lab was protection.
No, it's big companies and their lawyers (presumably like you) who (with patents, as with copyrights) try to make the government-granted monopoly stretch farther than it really does according to the patent or copyright, with carefully crafted contracts. They get slapped back on a regular basis for patent misuse, but that doesn't keep them from trying. See, for example Quanta v LG Electronics, where some smarty-pants LG lawyer thought they could have their cake and eat it too, by having Intel manufacture stuff that motherboard manufacturers couldn't use unless the motherboard manufacturers also paid a fealty to LG. The US Supreme court ruled that, even though LG's contract with Intel was written to exclude its customers, heck, even though Intel had to tell it's customers they needed a patent license, the contract was meaningless in that respect, because So, I feel pretty safe in saying that, if I buy a properly licensed resistor, I can do whatever I want with it, and can't be sued on the basis of the patent claim(s) which were the subject of the license. (Obviously, I can infringe some other patent claims, depending on the circuit I make.) Of course, there will always be other cases where companies and their lawyers get clever and figure out how, for awhile at least, to double-dip and extract value for their patent from multiple places on the food chain, but for the most part, the public and the Supreme Court frown upon this.
Well, I'm not the one who mentioned "first sale" -- that was kanweg. But I immediately knew what he was talking about, and if you and theaetetus would look up from your law books and think about what it is and what it means, and just maybe what a few non-lawyer types might call it, and be slightly less pedantic and condescending, you just might learn how to communicate without pissing people off. But don't take my word for it that "first sale" is a relatively good euphemism for "exhaustion": according to wikipedia "Under the exhaustion doctrine, doctrine of exhaustion, or first sale doctrine, the first unrestricted sale of a patented item exhausts the patentee's control over that particular item."
I think most people/companies who have spent on lawyers for Markman hearings would dispute this assertion. In fact, the very concept of a Markman hearing is based on the idea that claims are legalese, not "technical writings", and that, in fact, engineers are not qualified to read claims and determine if their device infringes. Sadly, this lunacy has evolved to the point where this is quite true -- at the point where three different judges would give you three different answers about infringement, it is impossible to know whether you are safe or not. So a lot of patent licensing revenue is based on bluff and bluster. I can see where this helps employ more lawyers, but cannot for the life of me fathom how it increases innovation in other fields.
The "exhaustion doctrine" is also sometimes known as the "first sale doctrine". While not identical to copyright first sale, it is analogous.
As far as State Street goes, have most of the software improvements since then been patented? No? Have some that would have happened anyway been patented in a bogus overbroad way by non-implementers? When I watch true innovators like RIM get their pants sued off by people who didn't do anything except sit around brainstorming 5 second ideas with their patent attorneys, I think it's pretty obvious the system is broken.
Most of the rest of your comment is pure claptrap as well. For example, if I buy a properly licensed special resistor, under the exhaustion doctrine I can pretty much do what I want with it, and the original licensor can't come back and get me for any infringement under the licensed patent.
But, even so, that's reparation, not revenge. As humans and their societies evolve, perhaps eventually that will be sufficient.
Learned jurists argue about what place revenge/vengeance has in the system; but I think every learned jurist and historian understands that, historically, one of the purposes of government-enforced laws was to make the revenge/vengeance more predictable and more proportional to the crime. And if the government is truly only interested in deterrence, what is the point of, for example, sentencing Bernie Madoff to 150 years? Obviously, 10 years (maybe even 2) would keep Bernie from doing it again; 30 years would keep anybody else who looked at the risk/reward ratio from wanting to follow in his footsteps; and 150 years is, any way you look at it, overkill.
So, the government is definitely interested in the perception that they will impose a huge penalty for egregious behavior, above and beyond the penalty which might help to deter similar behavior. Why is that? Could it be because the sensibilities of a large part of their public demand it?
In fact, if the government was smart, maybe they would keep Madoff's rotting corpse in the jail cell for the full 150 years, so that the victims and their descendants could go by occasionally and have a look if they wanted to. Is that really too much to ask?
I think you're missing some subtlety here. For one thing, I never argued that was the main purpose, just one of the legitimate purposes, and that it will remain a legitimate purpose until humanity evolves a bit.
"After all, mob justice is usually fairly swift and costs very little resources; our existing justice system is quite expensive and monolithic in comparison."
I couldn't disagree with this more. The human and societal costs of unmitigated revenge killings are easy to see at various places throughout the world. The high economic cost of our justice system is more than justified, in economic terms alone if it keeps us from slaughtering each other back into the stone age.
"And, in a way, mob justice/vigilantism is a very democratic means of establishing order in a society. The community as a whole decides what they will and will not tolerate in their community, and what kind of punishment to dispense."
Umm, no. The people who participate in the mob are not necessarily "the community as a whole" and are almost never "the community as a whole" when it is thinking calmly and rationally.
"Also, you claim that a justice system which considers motives rather than results ignores the real-world issues,"
I never claimed such a thing. You talk about "conflating" vengeance and justice, but that is nothing compared to you turning my "actions" into your "motives." And, I never even argued that actions should not be considered; just that results should be as well.
"but then you turn around and support feel-good legislation which focuses on punishment rather legislation that is geared towards obtaining real-world results."
The legislation may not be sufficient; may not go far enough in punishing people who don't kill people. But I think it is certainly necessary to send a message that texting can be lethal and that society will not tolerate lethal texting. Call that "Feel good" if you want; I call it pragmatic, in the political sense that it is the minimum that needs to be done, and might be the maximum that a legislative consensus could be reached on.
"I just don't agree with sentencing based on chance consequences."
Sorry, but that's life. Whether you go to jail or not is based on a huge, incalculable series of probabilities. The trick is to try to set the probabilities correctly so that, in general, "bad" people go to jail, and in general, "good" people don't. But this is a very difficult, imprecise science.
"A reckless texter who gets in an accident, but happens to have not killed anyone this time, is just as dangerous as a texter who gets in an accident but isn't so lucky. So it makes no sense to lock one up but not the other."
I haven't covered this, but I've seen the same argument applied to drunks, and I have to disagree. There is no question that some people will drive better when drunk than others will. They have made a bad choice, but they might make other mitigating choices, by altering their speed, their route, the time of day they travel, etc. The same thing with texting -- I am sure that there are people who are better at doing it while driving than others, by choosing when they look down, etc.
Having said that, I personally have no problem with punishing either non-lethal drunks or non-lethal texters, because I think both are risks that shouldn't be taken. But, I still think the punishment ought to be harsher for the ones who kill. In short, I never argued that we should not look at actions (and never mentioned "motives"), but did argue that outcomes need to be considered as well. (And in my book, the outcome of a non-fatal wreck is very serious, not to the extent of a fatal wreck, but much more egregious than when there is no accident.)
"I think the justice system should have more ways to deal with the consequences of a crime than just heavier or lighter sentencing. Repar
I don't think that I said anything which would indicate that I don't think that vigilantism isn't a crime or should be appeased, but one of the reasons that we have the luxury of thinking this way is that, in fact, our government is supposed to (and, often enough, does) punish people so we don't have to do it ourselves. This "disinterested third party" is supposed to mete out justice proportional to the crime in a less personal way than the victim might, but don't for a minute think that society would stand for the punishment being solely related to the action and completely disconnected from the outcome. Drunken driving is a punishable offense, but the punishment for killing somebody while driving drunk is always worse than if you didn't kill somebody. That is how it is and how it needs to be, at least until we evolve, and that is how it needs to be for texting as well.
As part of this bargain (which is intended to stop vigilante committees, among other things), the government is required to mete out enough vengeance to keep the populace happy.
As a disinterested third party observer, it may be easy enough for you to say that a texter (or a drunk, for that matter) should be punished for the action and not the result, but that completely ignores other real-world issues.
The family of the victim is often out for revenge, and as part of the bargain, it is up to the state to provide it. Maybe not to the same extent as if the perpetrator were simply handed over to the family, but something more than a slap on the wrist.
So this conflation of vengeance and justice is not accidental, not wrong, and should not be changed, at least until a huge majority of the populace would be just fine with someone who killed their kid getting off with a very light sentence. Otherwise, those victims who feel that their justice was denied will realize that the bargain has been broken, the state has failed them, and will feel justified in taking matters into their own hands.
I know this is off-topic, but:
He wrangled himself an invitation to the White House for a beer.
This was his idea, suggested to Obama -- he's not going to apologize, but he says "we should all get together over a beer." He KNOWS that it will be really hard for Gates to proceed with the lawsuit without looking like a douchebag, after sitting down with him. This is a better non-apology apology than Obama's, from someone who really ought to be apologizing.
He got his union to pay for the trip.
He'll probably do very well on the right-wing travel circuit, because unlike Joe the non-plumber plumber, he is, in fact, a real cop.
So, basically, he was as much of an asshole as he ever was, he got the cops to all get together and sing the hymn about how he was a fine, upstanding asshole, and he probably keeps to get doing it, with everybody now KNOWING not to mess with him, or any other cop in Cambridge.
When I try to look at it from his purely personal, Machiavellian perspective, I'm not seeing the screwup yet.
But you said you need a separate parallel cable for programming the JTAG flash, if I read it right. Andy Ross's project has Fx2 code to do this over USB. That is what I suggested you could combine with your project, to dispense with the need for a separate JTAG cable. Is your code available?